{"id": "ny0125215", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2012/08/28", "title": "Jack Sock Picks Up Where He Left Off at Last Year\u2019s U.S. Open", "abstract": "When we last saw Jack Sock at the United States Open , a year ago September, he was holding a trophy over his head and \u2014 not yet 19 and a newly declared professional \u2014 being hailed a Grand Slam champion. Granted, as major titles go, mixed doubles (with Melanie Oudin) was akin to a serving of cheese and crackers, with the steak, or singles title, still lodged in the freezer. But as Sock had the previous year also won the junior boys title in Flushing Meadows and, with legend holding that he had never lost a high school match, it was natural \u2014 at least hopeful \u2014 to think he might have a healthy share of winning genes to go with his booming serve. And his name, for goodness sakes, is Jack Sock; of Lincoln, Neb., a proud Cornhusker. Does it get any more wholesome and hearty for a country in a continuous search for its next men\u2019s star in this athletically enhanced smash-mouth era? So after Sock introduced himself to Florian Mayer, a German seeded 22nd, with a sizzling ace down the T and held serve to begin a first-round match Monday on the grandstand court, fans responded with a chant of \u201cLet\u2019s Go Sock!\u201d Forgetting for the moment that New York is a Yankees town, it was better than one alternative \u2014 Sock it to him \u2014 and completely understandable as Sock was in the process of feeding America\u2019s slam its first helping of nationalistic fervor by overpowering Mayer, who retired while trailing, 6-3, 6-2, 3-2. One or two more performances like this and we can expect a slew of word play headlines, beginning with Sock and Awe. It doesn\u2019t take much to fire up the Next Great American news media machine, not that Sock is lacking in confidence or ambition. \u201cI feel like my game is right on the verge of going to the next level,\u201d he said after winning his fourth tour match of 2012 against six losses. To explain what he meant of taking his game to the \u201cnext level,\u201d put it this way: from his current ranking, 243, there are many stops to make on the ride to the dizzying heights where Roger Federer and elite company reside \u2014 beginning with leaping into position near another young and hopeful Yank, Ryan Harrison, currently No. 61. On the scale of youthful and potential men\u2019s tour heirs, the 21-year-old Milos Raonic of Canada is the closest to a major breakthrough, though it is also difficult to define what even that means when three players \u2014 Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic \u2014 have won 29 of the last 30 slam titles and show little inclination of easing their chokehold. Compared with what the more promising newbies face these days, the emergent superstars of yore practically took their Grand Slam treats by merely growing tall enough to reach into the cookie jar. Boris Becker won Wimbledon as a 17-year-old mop-haired redhead. John McEnroe and Pete Sampras broke through in New York at 20 and 19. Into the 21st century, Nadal began his domination of the French Open at 19, Djokovic won the Australian Open at 21 and Federer sank to his knees at Wimbledon weeks before turning 22. These days, it is unfathomable to think of a skinny and moon-balling Michael Chang winning the French Open at 17, as he did in 1989, or a teenager winning any of the slams. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to be the case any time soon because this game is so physical now and people need to grow into their body,\u201d said John Isner, who at 27 has reason to believe that his best results, whatever they may be, are still ahead of him. At 31, Federer, who absurdly has not missed a Grand Slam tournament in 13 years, may be the best-conditioned of all. Andy Murray, at 25, is thought to be on the verge of his prime. It is mind-boggling to think that Bjorn Borg, McEnroe, Becker and others were playing on fumes, their best matches behind them, by their mid-20s. A no-kidding adult\u2019s tour that provides longevity and personal context is so much richer than the alternative. But given such dramatic career clock changes, patience may be a most valuable virtue for players like Raonic, Harrison and Bernard Tomic of Australia. \u201cThose guys, it might take them a little while to see their very, very best results, but they\u2019re certainly not doing so bad right now,\u201d said Isner, who didn\u2019t hesitate to include Sock, calling him \u201ca very good player.\u201d Sock is a strapping \u2019Husker, 6 feet 1 inch, 180 pounds, but he was set back physically in March by surgery to repair a torn abdominal muscle. In a brilliant stroke, he has been working in Las Vegas with the trainer Gil Reyes, who whipped the once-profligate Andre Agassi into shape. He has hired the former Swedish player, Joakim Nystrom, to help him play a more patient game. On today\u2019s altered career time clock, there is no choice but to wait one\u2019s turn and see what happens. In a microcosm of that strategy, Sock fell behind, 0-40, while serving at 4-2 in the first set, rallied to deuce, kept his cool as Mayer challenged two line calls and won both, and wound up winning the long game with the help of his own challenge of an out call. He was never threatened after that, cranking his first serve as high as 134 miles per hour, winning 17 of 25 second-service points and shrugging off the question of when the Next Great American will arrive as easily as he did Mayer. \u201cUntil the results are there, until the rankings and everything is there, not a different answer to give,\u201d he said. Give him time, in other words. By today\u2019s standards, he\u2019s got a few years before we have to stop asking.", "keyword": "Tennis;United States Open (Tennis);Sock Jack"}
{"id": "ny0164463", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2006/11/13", "title": "Two Long-Established Marketers Loosen Up", "abstract": "Two big advertisers known for the traditional ways they marketed products are expanding their efforts to become a little less conventional. Both, coincidentally, share the same creative and media agencies, which are also trying to demonstrate their eagerness to explore the brave world of new media. The advertisers are the General Electric Company and the Pepsi-Cola North America unit of PepsiCo. The agencies are both part of the Omnicom Group: BBDO Worldwide in New York for the creative parts of the campaigns and OMD for the media elements. G.E., which in May experimented with new media like digital video recorders in a campaign called G.E. One Second Theater, is introducing today an initiative called G.E.\u2019s Imagination Theater. There are four short films, live-action and animated, which are intended to illustrate in humorous fashion the idea that imaginative approaches can solve challenging problems. Everyone on Madison Avenue \u201cis looking to push the envelope, find what is going to be the next big thing,\u201d said Jennifer Gordineer, group director for national investment on the PepsiCo account at OMD in New York. The shorts can be watched free on the video-on-demand service available to customers of Time Warner Cable systems in cities including Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee and New York. After each short is released on cable, it will go up on a section of the G.E. Web site (ge.com/imaginationtheater) as well as on sites like myspace.com, video.google.com and youtube.com. And for the Mountain Dew MDX soft drink, Pepsi-Cola North America begins today to present offbeat commercials online (staysharp.tv) and on television. The spots feature video clips created by consumers, which have appeared on Web sites like YouTube, as well as excerpts from popular TV series that include \u201cFuturama.\u201d \u201cYou want to focus first on who you are trying to reach\u201d with an ad, Ms. Gordineer said, rather than on the kind of media in which the ad will appear, and then strive to \u201ccapture their attention in a way that has not been done before.\u201d At General Electric, said Judy L. Hu, global executive director for advertising and branding, \u201cwe\u2019re always challenging our agencies to come up with new ways of reaching people in a world where they\u2019re increasingly in control of what they watch and when.\u201d The One Second Theater experiment \u201cperformed really well,\u201d Ms. Hu said, citing data from TiVo showing that \u201cviewers spent three and a half times longer with the commercials than other commercials\u201d not part of the campaign. The experiment offered owners of TiVos and other DVRs the chance to pause the spots and watch additional material frame by frame that had been inserted specifically for played-back viewing. Viewers who watched the commercials live glimpsed only a blur that lasted for, yes, one second. The \u201cImagination Theater\u201d shorts will be available on the Movie Trailers on Demand channels of the cable systems, alongside previews of theatrical films. After the first short, \u201cThe Crossing,\u201d begins today, the others will start running next Monday (\u201cCubicle\u201d), Dec. 4 (\u201cBirth\u201d) and Dec. 18 (\u201cSamurai\u201d). The shorts will follow a similarly staggered schedule as they go up on the G.E. Web site; BBDO and OMD are working with the online agency for G.E., Blitz. Promotions for Imagination Theater include teaser spots to run on the cable systems, ads in Entertainment Weekly magazine and signs resembling movie posters pasted up at construction sites. The four shorts were produced from 159 scripts submitted by \u201cthe 100 creative people of the entire agency, not just those who work on the G.E. account,\u201d said David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer for the BBDO North American operations. \u201cWe were trained here to do things a certain kind of way,\u201d Mr. Lubars said of the BBDO New York creative staff and its legendary devotion to expensive TV commercials replete with celebrities and special effects. Now, \u201cwe can get things done in guerrilla ways,\u201d he added. A principal difference between then and now, said Bill Bruce, the chief creative officer at the BBDO New York office who oversaw the MDX campaign, is that \u201cthe lines between creative and media are blurred.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ll be seeing more and more of this from BBDO,\u201d Mr. Bruce said. The MDX campaign will appear on the staysharp.tv Web site as well as TV shows on MTV, Spike TV and Adult Swim, the late-night programming block on Cartoon Network. The commercials will present quizzes intended as brain teasers, to make the point that MDX helps its target consumers \u2014 males ages 12 to 34 \u2014 to \u201cstay sharp.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s becoming more and more apparent that you have to go beyond the traditional 30-second spot,\u201d said Frank Cooper, vice president for marketing the flavored soft drinks sold by Pepsi-Cola North America, because \u201cviewers have become extremely sophisticated at avoiding them.\u201d Some MDX commercials will present the video clips created by consumers, selected from among the fare on youtube.com and other video-sharing Web sites that are popular with younger consumers. The clips include an acrobatic dance by clay figurines, a deliberately bad spoof song called \u201cElektronic Supersonik,\u201d and daily snapshots of the life of Ben Popik, a young comedian. The commercials conclude with questions about the contents of the clips. To learn the answers, viewers are directed to staysharp.tv \u2014 where presumably they will linger to discover more about the product. Other MDX commercials, in a postmodern touch, will refer directly to the programs they are interrupting. For instance, a block of commercials during \u201cFuturama\u201d on Adult Swim will begin with a five-second spot for MDX, asking a question about a newspaper that a character was reading in the show. Then, viewers will see several commercials from other advertisers. MDX will return in the final 10 seconds of the commercial block with a spot answering the question and asking viewers to visit staysharp.tv. After that, the episode of \u201cFuturama\u201d resumes. \u201cIt requires a lot of manpower, collaboration and coordination\u201d to create, produce and schedule the commercials that refer to the shows in which they appear, Ms. Gordineer of OMD says. But \u201cwe want to keep a viewer engaged during the commercial break in a way that says, \u2018Wow, MDX is talking to me,\u2019 \u201d she added. By coincidence, grouper.com, a video-sharing Web site, introduced last week a channel named Screen Bites where visitors can watch clips from movies and TV shows produced by Columbia Pictures, which like grouper.com is owned by Sony. Among the clips: the scene from the 1976 film \u201cTaxi Driver\u201d in which Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) asks, \u201cYou talkin\u2019 to me?\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;General Electric Co;PepsiCo Inc;Computers and the Internet;Television"}
{"id": "ny0225732", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/10/17", "title": "Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened", "abstract": "OSAKA, Japan \u2014 Like many members of Japan \u2019s middle class, Masato Y. enjoyed a level of affluence two decades ago that was the envy of the world. Masato, a small-business owner, bought a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes. But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan\u2019s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo \u2014 for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago. \u201cJapan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,\u201d said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage. Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West. But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation , in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy. Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression . Many economists remain confident that the United States will avoid the stagnation of Japan, largely because of the greater responsiveness of the American political system and Americans\u2019 greater tolerance for capitalism\u2019s creative destruction. Japanese leaders at first denied the severity of their nation\u2019s problems and then spent heavily on job-creating public works projects that only postponed painful but necessary structural changes, economists say. \u201cWe\u2019re not Japan,\u201d said Robert E. Hall, a professor of economics at Stanford. \u201cIn America, the bet is still that we will somehow find ways to get people spending and investing again.\u201d Still, as political pressure builds to reduce federal spending and budget deficits, other economists are now warning of \u201cJapanification\u201d \u2014 of falling into the same deflationary trap of collapsed demand that occurs when consumers refuse to consume, corporations hold back on investments and banks sit on cash. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: as prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans. \u201cThe U.S., the U.K., Spain, Ireland, they all are going through what Japan went through a decade or so ago,\u201d said Richard Koo, chief economist at Nomura Securities who recently wrote a book about Japan\u2019s lessons for the world. \u201cMillions of individuals and companies see their balance sheets going underwater, so they are using their cash to pay down debt instead of borrowing and spending.\u201d Just as inflation scarred a generation of Americans, deflation has left a deep imprint on the Japanese, breeding generational tensions and a culture of pessimism, fatalism and reduced expectations. While Japan remains in many ways a prosperous society, it faces an increasingly grim situation, particularly outside the relative economic vibrancy of Tokyo, and its situation provides a possible glimpse into the future for the United States and Europe, should the most dire forecasts come to pass. Scaled-Back Ambitions The downsizing of Japan\u2019s ambitions can be seen on the streets of Tokyo, where concrete \u201cmicrohouses\u201d have become popular among younger Japanese who cannot afford even the famously cramped housing of their parents, or lack the job security to take out a traditional multidecade loan. These matchbox-size homes stand on plots of land barely large enough to park a sport utility vehicle, yet have three stories of closet-size bedrooms, suitcase-size closets and a tiny kitchen that properly belongs on a submarine. \u201cThis is how to own a house even when you are uneasy about the future,\u201d said Kimiyo Kondo, general manager at Zaus, a Tokyo-based company that builds microhouses. For many people under 40, it is hard to grasp just how far this is from the 1980s, when a mighty \u2014 and threatening \u2014 \u201cJapan Inc.\u201d seemed ready to obliterate whole American industries, from automakers to supercomputers. With the Japanese stock market quadrupling and the yen rising to unimagined heights, Japan\u2019s companies dominated global business, gobbling up trophy properties like Hollywood movie studios (Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures), famous golf courses (Pebble Beach) and iconic real estate (Rockefeller Center). In 1991, economists were predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world\u2019s largest economy by 2010. In fact, Japan\u2019s economy remains the same size it was then: a gross domestic product of $5.7 trillion at current exchange rates. During the same period, the United States economy doubled in size to $14.7 trillion, and this year China overtook Japan to become the world\u2019s No. 2 economy. China has so thoroughly eclipsed Japan that few American intellectuals seem to bother with Japan now, and once crowded Japanese-language classes at American universities have emptied. Even Clyde V. Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade negotiator whose writings in the 1980s about Japan\u2019s threat to the United States once stirred alarm in Washington, said he was now studying Chinese. \u201cI hardly go to Japan anymore,\u201d Mr. Prestowitz said. The decline has been painful for the Japanese, with companies and individuals like Masato having lost the equivalent of trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is now just a quarter of its value in 1989, and in real estate, where the average price of a home is the same as it was in 1983. And the future looks even bleaker, as Japan faces the world\u2019s largest government debt \u2014 around 200 percent of gross domestic product \u2014 a shrinking population and rising rates of poverty and suicide. But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan\u2019s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage. Its once voracious manufacturers now seem prepared to surrender industry after industry to hungry South Korean and Chinese rivals. Japanese consumers, who once flew by the planeload on flashy shopping trips to Manhattan and Paris, stay home more often now, saving their money for an uncertain future or setting new trends in frugality with discount brands like Uniqlo. As living standards in this still wealthy nation slowly erode, a new frugality is apparent among a generation of young Japanese, who have known nothing but economic stagnation and deflation. They refuse to buy big-ticket items like cars or televisions, and fewer choose to study abroad in America. Japan\u2019s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as \u201cherbivores\u201d for lacking their elders\u2019 willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country\u2019s shrinking birthrate. \u201cThe Japanese used to be called economic animals,\u201d said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. \u201cBut somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.\u201d When asked in dozens of interviews about their nation\u2019s decline, Japanese, from policy makers and corporate chieftains to shoppers on the street, repeatedly mention this startling loss of vitality. While Japan suffers from many problems, most prominently the rapid graying of its society, it is this decline of a once wealthy and dynamic nation into a deep social and cultural rut that is perhaps Japan\u2019s most ominous lesson for the world today. The classic explanation of the evils of deflation is that it makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. But in Japan, nearly a generation of deflation has had a much deeper effect, subconsciously coloring how the Japanese view the world. It has bred a deep pessimism about the future and a fear of taking risks that make people instinctively reluctant to spend or invest, driving down demand \u2014 and prices \u2014 even further. \u201cA new common sense appears, in which consumers see it as irrational or even foolish to buy or borrow,\u201d said Kazuhisa Takemura, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who has studied the psychology of deflation. A Deflated City While the effects are felt across Japan\u2019s economy, they are more apparent in regions like Osaka, the third-largest city, than in relatively prosperous Tokyo. In this proudly commercial city, merchants have gone to extremes to coax shell-shocked shoppers into spending again. But this often takes the shape of price wars that end up only feeding Japan\u2019s deflationary spiral. There are vending machines that sell canned drinks for 10 yen, or 12 cents; restaurants with 50-yen beer; apartments with the first month\u2019s rent of just 100 yen, about $1.22. Even marriage ceremonies are on sale, with discount wedding halls offering weddings for $600 \u2014 less than a tenth of what ceremonies typically cost here just a decade ago. On Senbayashi, an Osaka shopping street, merchants recently held a 100-yen day, offering much of their merchandise for that price. Even then, they said, the results were disappointing. \u201cIt\u2019s like Japanese have even lost the desire to look good,\u201d said Akiko Oka, 63, who works part time in a small apparel shop, a job she has held since her own clothing store went bankrupt in 2002. This loss of vigor is sometimes felt in unusual places. Kitashinchi is Osaka\u2019s premier entertainment district, a three-centuries-old playground where the night is filled with neon signs and hostesses in tight dresses, where just taking a seat at a top club can cost $500. But in the past 15 years, the number of fashionable clubs and lounges has shrunk to 480 from 1,200, replaced by discount bars and chain restaurants. Bartenders say the clientele these days is too cost-conscious to show the studied disregard for money that was long considered the height of refinement. \u201cA special culture might be vanishing,\u201d said Takao Oda, who mixes perfectly crafted cocktails behind the glittering gold countertop at his Bar Oda. After years of complacency, Japan appears to be waking up to its problems, as seen last year when disgruntled voters ended the virtual postwar monopoly on power of the Liberal Democratic Party. However, for many Japanese, it may be too late. Japan has already created an entire generation of young people who say they have given up on believing that they can ever enjoy the job stability or rising living standards that were once considered a birthright here. Yukari Higaki, 24, said the only economic conditions she had ever known were ones in which prices and salaries seemed to be in permanent decline. She saves as much money as she can by buying her clothes at discount stores, making her own lunches and forgoing travel abroad. She said that while her generation still lived comfortably, she and her peers were always in a defensive crouch, ready for the worst. \u201cWe are the survival generation,\u201d said Ms. Higaki, who works part time at a furniture store. Hisakazu Matsuda, president of Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute, who has written several books on Japanese consumers, has a different name for Japanese in their 20s; he calls them the consumption-haters. He estimates that by the time this generation hits their 60s, their habits of frugality will have cost the Japanese economy $420 billion in lost consumption. \u201cThere is no other generation like this in the world,\u201d Mr. Matsuda said. \u201cThese guys think it\u2019s stupid to spend.\u201d Deflation has also affected businesspeople by forcing them to invent new ways to survive in an economy where prices and profits only go down, not up. Yoshinori Kaiami was a real estate agent in Osaka, where, like the rest of Japan, land prices have been falling for most of the past 19 years. Mr. Kaiami said business was tough. There were few buyers in a market that was virtually guaranteed to produce losses, and few sellers, because most homeowners were saddled with loans that were worth more than their homes. Some years ago, he came up with an idea to break the gridlock. He created a company that guides homeowners through an elaborate legal subterfuge in which they erase the original loan by declaring personal bankruptcy , but continue to live in their home by \u201cselling\u201d it to a relative, who takes out a smaller loan to pay its greatly reduced price. \u201cIf we only had inflation again, this sort of business would not be necessary,\u201d said Mr. Kaiami, referring to the rising prices that are the opposite of deflation. \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve been waiting for 20 years for inflation to come back.\u201d One of his customers was Masato, the small-business owner, who sold his four-bedroom condo to a relative for about $185,000, 15 years after buying it for a bit more than $500,000. He said he was still deliberating about whether to expunge the $110,000 he still owed his bank by declaring personal bankruptcy. Economists said one reason deflation became self-perpetuating was that it pushed companies and people like Masato to survive by cutting costs and selling what they already owned, instead of buying new goods or investing. \u201cDeflation destroys the risk-taking that capitalist economies need in order to grow,\u201d said Shumpei Takemori, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo. \u201cCreative destruction is replaced with what is just destructive destruction.\u201d", "keyword": "Japan;Deflation (Economics);Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0044192", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2014/05/22", "title": "EBay Urges New Passwords After Breach", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 In the latest prominent breach of a company\u2019s computer network, hackers have infiltrated the online marketplace eBay, gaining access to the personal data of 145 million customers, the company said on Wednesday. The hackers broke into an eBay database containing names, email addresses, birth dates, encrypted passwords, physical addresses and phone numbers. There was no indication that the attackers obtained financial information such as credit and debit card numbers or gained access to customer accounts at PayPal, which is owned by eBay, said Amanda Miller, a company spokeswoman. The company has not seen evidence of fraudulent activity that could be linked to the breach, she said. Still, hackers could use the stolen data for identity theft. Personal information \u2014 such as email addresses, passwords and birth dates \u2014 is regularly sold to criminals who use it for phishing or identity theft. Security experts warned that the stolen information would make eBay customers easy targets for phishing attacks, in which criminals send emails that bait victims into clicking on malicious links or direct them to fake log-in screens where they are asked to enter more valuable information like a password or a Social Security number. \u201cExpect an uptick in phishing. Do not click links in email or discuss anything over the phone,\u201d warned Trey Ford, a strategist at Rapid7, a security firm in Boston. EBay discovered the breach this month when the company\u2019s internal security team noticed that some of its employees were engaged in unusual activity on its corporate network, said Mark Carges, the company\u2019s chief technology officer. EBay contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation\u2019s San Francisco office as well as an outside computer forensics firm. Working together, they found that hackers had been inside eBay\u2019s corporate network since late February. By studying computer logs, eBay discovered that hackers had stolen the credentials of several of its employees and gained unauthorized access to eBay\u2019s corporate network. Once inside, they were able to copy a database containing information on all 145 million of the company\u2019s customers, according to Alan Marks, eBay\u2019s senior vice president of global communications. Mr. Marks said eBay stored its financial data separately. Still, the company advised users with the same password for eBay and PayPal to change their passwords immediately. Though notification laws differ, most states require that companies notify customers of a breach only if their names are compromised in combination with other information like a credit card or a Social Security number. But there are exceptions for encrypted information. In eBay\u2019s case, the company stored users\u2019 names, email and physical addresses and birth dates in plain text but encrypted their passwords. Most states would not have required eBay to disclose the breach. But one state, North Dakota, requires companies to disclose a breach in cases where a customer\u2019s name is compromised in conjunction with a birth date. Mr. Carges said eBay camouflaged customers\u2019 passwords with encryption, using a process known as hashing, in which passwords are mashed up with a mathematical algorithm and stored only in encoded or \u201chashed\u201d form. To make cracking more difficult, Mr. Carges said, eBay also appended several random digits to customer passwords \u2014 a process known as salting \u2014 before encrypting the passwords. Salting makes cracking them more difficult, although not impossible. Mr. Marks said that on Wednesday the company would begin prompting users to change their passwords and alerting customers to the breach. Peter D. Lee, a spokesman for the F.B.I.\u2019s San Francisco field office, said the F.B.I. was working closely with eBay to investigate the breach and that he believed that arrests would be made soon. The breach at eBay is one of several recent hacking episodes at prominent companies. One that struck Target in December has cost the retailer $87 million in breach-related expenses, according to securities filings.", "keyword": "eBay;Hacker (computer security)"}
{"id": "ny0079517", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2015/02/17", "title": "Honduras: Police at U.S. Embassy Are Suspended Over Missing Money", "abstract": "Twenty-one police officers assigned to the United States Embassy in Honduras have been suspended pending an investigation into whether they skimmed part of $12.5 million seized in a drug cartel raid, a government spokesman said Monday. After the raid in October, $1.3 million vanished. It was later found buried in a mountainous region in western Honduras during an operation that led to the capture of Miguel Valle Valle. The head of the powerful Valle Valle cartel, he was extradited to the United States in December. The police force in Honduras, which has the world\u2019s highest murder rate, is widely seen as corrupt and has been accused of extrajudicial killings.", "keyword": "Drug cartel;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Honduras;Diplomats Embassies and Consulates;Miguel Valle Valle;Drug Abuse;Corruption;Police;Extradition"}
{"id": "ny0260043", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/06/02", "title": "Coordinating Events and Parties for Children", "abstract": "As a teenager, Kristy Shelberg, stoked by \u201cSeinfeld\u201d and \u201cFriends\u201d and subscriptions to Vogue and Elle, plotted her escape from Creve Coeur, Mo., for New York City and a job in fashion or photography. She graduated in 2010 with a B.A. in marketing from LIM College in Midtown Manhattan, became Kristy Whitwell when she married her hometown sweetheart in July, and was hired last August as the event and party coordinator at the Scholastic Store in SoHo. Ms. Whitwell, 24, lives on Roosevelt Island with her husband, David, a classical trombonist attending the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music . Young fashionista: My dream was to move to New York. From third grade, I remember how seriously I took my outfits. I loved all the fashion magazines. But Cosmo was out. My mom wouldn\u2019t let me get it. Shutterbug: My dad had an old Canon 35-millimeter and he let me use it. After I came to New York for college, I did a lot of baby-sitting, and used my connections to start a small business doing children\u2019s portraits. It\u2019s called Petit Chat ; it\u2019s on a lot of \u201cmommy blogs.\u201d College of choice: When I was 15 we had a college fair at my high school, and I found LIM, a college for the business of fashion, exactly what I was looking for. I went home and told my parents and they laughed at me and said no way was I going to New York. I worked on them for two years. I applied to other schools, like Saint Louis University , and got in, but we all knew that when the time came, I was going to LIM. The h otel life: My freshman year, I lived at the New Yorker Hotel ; my school has dorms there. I actually stayed there on a trip to New York City when I was 13, so I took this as a sign. Internships: In 2007 I interned at Oscar de la Renta for two months in marketing and accessories sales. In my senior year I did a six-month internship at Seventeen in the photo department. It confirmed my love for production work, but by the time I left, the department had been cut in half. Surfing for a job: Last summer I had this routine where the first thing I did when I woke up was check my school\u2019s career service site, check the Time Inc. site and Hearst and Cond\u00e9 Nast : there were internships, but I felt like now that I had a degree, I wanted an adult job. One day I went to the Scholastic Web site and saw an opening for an event and party coordinator. It was a job I hadn\u2019t thought of, but I figured, why not, I love children and organizing events. Party time: We do up to six birthday parties each weekend, and every Saturday there\u2019s an event at the SoHo store; the scavenger hunt for 30 teams is the most elaborate event I\u2019ve done so far. I just finished a birthday party for a 5-year-old boy. The theme was superheroes, and everybody designed their own mask and cape. Tantrum du jour: One time our 3-year-old birthday girl began crying during story time and nobody knew why. Then we realized she was having a tantrum because she wanted to turn the pages. Now we always let the birthday child turn the pages: a 3-year-old set policy! Down the road: I see myself getting into marketing and growing with the company. This is definitely a world I could get used to. I don\u2019t miss fashion; all my friends are in fashion, and I\u2019ve got my Bloomingdale\u2019s one subway stop from home. Plus one in SoHo!", "keyword": "Parties (Social);SoHo (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0176668", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/09/04", "title": "In Rail Link, Angelenos See a Door to Prosperity", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES, Sept. 3 \u2014 While Carlos Sanchez, a guitarist, waits in front of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights to be picked up for his next job, he likes to look at a mural behind the plaza\u2019s kiosk on First Street. The mural, with colorful squares and spheres and scenes of local flavor, is reminiscent of the work of Mexican muralists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, but it is functional, too. It hides construction of a light-rail link that supporters in Boyle Heights and neighboring East Los Angeles say will change the face of their communities. Boyle Heights, part of the City of Los Angeles, and East Los Angeles, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, have long been home to thousands of Latinos. Both communities are cut off geographically from the city\u2019s beach districts and central business areas. The light-rail train, set to begin running in 2009, will allow passengers to get to areas throughout the county. For many low-income residents, like Mr. Sanchez, 38, who do not own cars, the train will replace bicycles, unreliable buses and costly taxis. \u201cI\u2019ll be using the train because it\u2019s going to be more convenient and a faster way to get to where you want to go,\u201d said Mr. Sanchez, who often car-pools to jobs with fellow musicians. The train, named after Edward R. Roybal, who in 1949 became the first Mexican-American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, will travel six miles from the Little Tokyo/Arts District in downtown through Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. It will link to the Los Angeles subway system on the Gold Line, which runs south from Pasadena. A one-way trip now costs $1.25. Diana Tarango, who is on an advisory committee for the project, said the light-rail link had been in the works for 12 years. \u201cThe Gold Line is a method of transportation that is very much needed in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights because we\u2019re so transit dependent,\u201d she said. \u201cSo many of our people do go out to work in houses in West L.A.,\u201d she said. \u201cIn order to get there, why shouldn\u2019t they have the luxury of something comfortable, fast and running on schedule?\u201d Community advocates see the train as a possible gateway to improving East Los Angeles and bringing economic vitality to the area, the oldest Mexican-American community in the county. Standing before Mariachi Plaza, so named because Mexican musicians gather there to wait for work, Jos\u00e9 Huizar, a Los Angeles city councilman, spoke of plans to transform the intersection at First and Boyle Streets, which is a jumble of construction sites and small businesses. \u201cThe potential here is tremendous,\u201d said Mr. Huizar, who grew up in Boyle Heights. \u201cMy vision for this area is to have restaurants and a commercial center here. We\u2019re going to have a lot of people from downtown coming up here during lunchtime. They\u2019ll be on the subway in five minutes and get here and listen to mariachi music during the day and evening.\u201d The area\u2019s county supervisor, Gloria Molina, said the light rail was part of what she called the renaissance of East Los Angeles. \u201cThe first thing you do is upgrade the area,\u201d Ms. Molina said, \u201cand that will attract private investment.\u201d She said a Starbucks opened in East Los Angeles in March, and a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and a Quiznos sandwich shop opened three years ago. But there are no major stores like Target in the area. The storefronts that line major streets are small businesses like clothing stores and restaurants trying to keep a foothold as local shoppers head to stores and malls in nearby cities. The makeup of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles has changed little since the late 1960s. Both areas are known for their large Latino populations and for Mexican-themed murals on convenience stores, schools and public buildings. But that has not always been the case, said George Sanchez, a history professor at the University of Southern California. At one time, Boyle Heights had significant Jewish and Japanese communities. Other ethnic groups, including Russians and Italians, also called the area home. \u201cBoyle Heights from the 1920s to the 1950s was the most diverse suburb in both the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County,\u201d said Mr. Sanchez. Evidence of the region\u2019s past cultural diversity also extends to East Los Angeles, where Jewish, Serbian and Chinese cemeteries can be found. Proof that Chinese residents worked on the railroads in the 1800s was unearthed in the form of grave markers and bones during the construction of the light-rail project. \u201cThe one thing you can say about East L.A. is that it\u2019s never had an identity crisis,\u201d said Oscar Gonzales, president of the East Los Angeles Residents Association. \u201cIt\u2019s always known of its history and, more important, its future.\u201d That future, with the rail line, may be gentrification, Ms. Molina and others say. \u201cIt should change for the better,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see more businesses along the transit lines.\u201d", "keyword": "Los Angeles (Calif);Transit Systems;Railroads;Hispanic-Americans"}
{"id": "ny0124974", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/08/29", "title": "How the Media Adapt at the Republican National Convention", "abstract": "TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Strange things are happening inside the media workspaces at the Republican National Convention. The Washington Post has built a miniature television set in its offices, complete with a comfy sofa and coffee table reminiscent of \u201cThe Oprah Winfrey Show.\u201d The Huffington Post , that emblem of new media\u2019s speed and vigor, is putting out a magazine with the slogan \u201cEmbrace the Slow News Movement.\u201d And Diane Sawyer is pulling double duty: anchoring \u201cABC World News\u201d and taping videos for Yahoo . Media organizations have turned the political parties\u2019 quadrennial gatherings this year into laboratories of innovation and experimentation, straying from their traditional areas of expertise as they search for new ways to engage readers and audiences. So far, it seems, the new media has decided that it wants to be the old media, and the old media has decided that it wants to be the new media. \u201cEverybody is trying to be in everybody else\u2019s space,\u201d said Marcus W. Brauchli, executive editor of The Washington Post. \u201cThere are so many people covering politics now, and everybody competes on every platform. So in order to demonstrate your commitment and authority, it\u2019s important to be present in every medium. And we are.\u201d Convention coverage has come a long way from the days when the \u201cboys on the bus\u201d \u2014 the pack of A-list print reporters like R. W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times, David S. Broder of The Washington Post and Walter R. Mears of The Associated Press \u2014 set the pace for political reporting more than a generation ago armed with little more than a pen, a pad and a wicked hangover. Back then, conventions were less scripted and generated more surprises, while today\u2019s media labor to enliven coverage of what typically are endless hours of preordained events. Now, Mr. Mears\u2019s Associated Press occupies a skybox at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the site of the convention, where it shoots and broadcasts high-definition video. This year, the one accessory most newspapers cannot seem to do without is a set with cameras and television lights. The New York Times has its own skybox as well, and for the first time is providing live-streamed coverage of a convention. The Washington Post records several hours a day of webcasts from its pop-up set inside the convention center here. It has also partnered with a start-up company called Socialcam that allows it to post video vignettes of conventiongoers that are recorded on iPhones by a team of interns. ABC News has partnered with Yahoo and is streaming 30 hours of coverage with an anchor online. NBC News and CBS News will both stream the convention live from gavel to gavel on their Web sites. CNN and Fox News, evidently not content with their round-the-clock platforms on cable, are also offering extensive streaming coverage. Even \u201cPBS NewsHour\u201d is offering 24-hour Web streaming. As more traditional media like newspapers and television explore new media possibilities, new media outlets are going in the opposite direction. The Huffington Post has started producing a magazine for the iPad that focuses on the kind of long-form journalism that it is best known for aggregating from other publications. Arianna Huffington, for whom The Post is named, said in an interview that she came to realize that people like a break from the rapid-fire news cycle, which can overload readers. \u201cWe are all recognizing that we are paying a heavy price for hyper-connectivity,\u201d she said. Politico, which upended the conventional political news cycle as a start-up five years ago, has partnered with no less a hallmark of eat-your-vegetables journalism than C-Span to simulcast its live Web coverage. And its print articles during the Republican convention are appearing in The Tampa Bay Times. John F. Harris, Politico\u2019s editor in chief, explained these rather incongruous partnerships as a way of remaining relevant in a media environment that is rapidly evolving. \u201cYou can never be complacent about where you find your audience and how you connect with your audience,\u201d he said. No one seems quite sure where these experiments will end up. Privately, they concede that their streaming Web videos draw extremely low traffic compared with their articles \u2014 for smaller organizations, sometimes only a few hundred viewers at a time. News Web sites see tremendous potential in digital video advertising, which commands far higher rates than traditional Web display ads. But so far, the video investments have yet to reap significant rewards. Mr. Harris described Politico\u2019s Web video as \u201ckind of groping cheerfully with a sense of fun and experimentation \u2014 and we\u2019re not sure what it becomes.\u201d If the conventions fail to produce much in the way of news these days, the one thing they do generate for news outlets is an unparalleled opportunity to raise their profiles. Bloomberg, which is going beyond its digital roots and publishing a daily print magazine during the convention, has spent more than $1 million to construct an airy, sleek office space here. Caterers serve Nicoise salad with seared tuna, and visitors lounge on white leather couches as New Age music pulses through overhead speakers. \u201cThe convention around the convention is the story,\u201d said Kevin Sheekey, chairman of Bloomberg Government, a news service sold to lobbyists and Capitol Hill offices for thousands of dollars a year.", "keyword": "Republican National Convention;News and News Media;Presidential Election of 2012;Huffington Post;Washington Post;ABC News;Yahoo! Inc"}
{"id": "ny0090490", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/09/23", "title": "Scott Walker\u2019s Dismal Finish Is a Fitting Result, Old Foes Say", "abstract": "MILWAUKEE \u2014 For the last 25 years, Representative Gwen Moore has sought to relinquish her claim to being the only politician ever to defeat Scott Walker. On Monday she learned that her wait would continue, as Mr. Walker, the Wisconsin governor, ended his presidential campaign, bowing to plummeting poll numbers and a Republican electorate that seems to vastly prefer explosive outsiders to a lifelong political operative. Ms. Moore, a Democrat from Milwaukee, was fine with that. \u201cI\u2019m great,\u201d she said. Old political adversaries of Mr. Walker greeted his dour denouement as a fitting result for a politician who they say began and furthered his career here with a divisive style, a penchant for turning out conservative supporters rather than working with opponents, and tacit racial appeals in one of the nation\u2019s most segregated cities. But the irony is that Mr. Walker was eclipsed by candidates who have ignited the Republican base with more overtly nativist and, their critics argue, racist appeals. Mr. Walker first registered on the radar of African-American voters here in September 1990, when The Milwaukee Star, a black newspaper, reported that Ms. Moore, the first African-American woman to hold the Seventh District Assembly seat, was \u201cexpected to face formidable opposition in the general election\u201d from Mr. Walker, \u201cwho is said to have well-financed and organized support.\u201d That was an overstatement. Mr. Walker was 23, a Marquette University dropout. He had limited funds and enjoyed the help of only a couple of fellow college Republicans. But as he ran for Wisconsin office for the first time by mostly appealing to white college students at Marquette and wealthier white residents near the suburbs, he also advertised in papers catering to the district\u2019s heavily black population. Image Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, defeated Mr. Walker for a State Assembly seat in 1990. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times \u201cTired of the violence?\u201d read an ad in the Nov. 3 Milwaukee Courier. \u201cScott Walker has a plan.\u201d Mr. Walker had left Marquette as a student that spring, only to return to the campus dorm room of John Hiller, a friend who became his campaign treasurer. They and Mike Anani, another student who was running for the State Senate, developed a tough-on-crime platform. The issue was a no-brainer: The college paper, The Marquette Tribune, read like a crime blotter. \u201cMU Student Killed in Random Shooting,\u201d ran an August headline; \u201cSexual Assault, Robberies During Weekend\u201d ran one that September. A series debated whether the school\u2019s public safety officers should carry weapons. Racial tensions, meanwhile, surfaced on its editorial pages: \u201cBlack Power Threatens Society\u201d read one essay, alongside \u201cAfrican American Students Outraged by Racist Opinions.\u201d Steve Loucks, a former Republican Assemblyman in a neighboring district, who as a Marquette alumnus had kept track of the college Republicans, recalled Mr. Walker as unusually ambitious for his age. As it happened, Mr. Loucks and Ms. Moore, who had no car, drove to Madison, the state capital, together each week. Ms. Moore recalled that she learned on those drives that Mr. Walker was someone to keep an eye on, that he polished his speeches in front of a mirror, and that he intended to \u201cpersuade white Democrats to just vote color.\u201d Mr. Loucks said he did not recall the substance of those conversations, but said Mr. Walker\u2019s candidacy was seen by state Republicans as a way for him to \u201cbuild his chops.\u201d Mr. Hiller, meanwhile, described Mr. Walker\u2019s campaign as a ploy to distract Ms. Moore from working on behalf of other Democrats. They acquired lists of likely voters and knocked on doors. Some people did not appreciate the fliers they handed out. Image An ad placed by Mr. Walker's 1990 campaign in The Milwaukee Courier. \u201cI vividly remember the picture of a revolver pointed right at the reader,\u201d said Dale Dulberger, who lived in the district and later ran for and lost a state legislative seat to Mr. Walker. \u201cIt was shocking.\u201d Ms. Moore said she believed that Mr. Walker was making a tacit racial appeal to her constituents, and it had worried her. \u201cI was scared that the white people would listen to him,\u201d she said. Mr. Walker\u2019s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the 1990 election, about which accusations of race baiting have been raised in the past. But Mr. Hiller said there was no racial overtone to the flier, and suggested that Ms. Moore was exaggerating. \u201cIf there was a gun, there was a gun,\u201d said Mr. Hiller, but he said there was no racial undertone to the flyer. Ms. Moore, he said, was \u201cmaking it sound like some racial thing \u2014 her memory of it now is just over the top.\u201d Mr. Walker returned to the Marquette campus the day before Halloween for a sparsely attended candidate forum about campus safety. In The Marquette Tribune, which incorrectly identified him as a graduate, he called for more affordable housing, saying \u201cthe problems of abandoned and run-down housing leads to drug trafficking and crime in neighborhoods.\u201d But the district\u2019s voters, a majority of them white liberals, roundly rejected Mr. Walker\u2019s ideas. On election night, Mr. Hiller picked him up and drove to Gov. Tommy Thompson\u2019s re-election party in Madison. On the road, a radio announcer mistakenly said Mr. Walker had won, prompting the two to pull over in a state of shock. Then the announcer said he had transposed the results and that Mr. Walker had lost badly. At Mr. Thompson\u2019s party, Mr. Hiller recalled, people kept coming up to Mr. Walker and congratulating him on a tough race, saying he had \u201chelped the cause.\u201d \u201cIt gave him some credibility and inroads into the party apparatus,\u201d Mr. Hiller said. \u201cIt opened doors with various people and power players.\u201d Those connections paid off as Mr. Walker moved to the suburbs of Milwaukee. From his overwhelmingly white and Republican politician base in Wauwatosa, he sought and won seats in the Assembly and as county executive. In 2006, he ran for governor before bowing out with little support. But he ran again and won in 2010, and then beat Milwaukee\u2019s mayor, Tom Barrett, in a recall election in which Mr. Walker\u2019s old adversaries found his tactics familiar: running against Milwaukee as a murderous, crime-ridden place that should not infect the rest of the state. In his office last week, Mr. Barrett, a Democrat who has been mayor since 2004, grew upbeat at the mention of Mr. Walker\u2019s in the polls. \u201cI\u2019ve really enjoyed my summer reading,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Scott Walker;2016 Presidential Election;Race and Ethnicity;Milwaukee"}
{"id": "ny0254773", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/07/13", "title": "Jury Is Set for Clemens\u2019s Perjury Trial in Washington", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Without even a twinge of the intensity he once showed on the mound, Roger Clemens sat in a federal courtroom Tuesday, calmly watching the jurors assigned to his perjury trial slowly and silently take their seats in the jury box. Clemens showed no emotion from the defense table as he looked at the panel \u2014 10 women and 2 men, and 4 alternates \u2014 which was chosen from a whittled-down pool of 36 after four long days of questioning. Among the jurors is a woman whose cousin is Al Bumbry, a former Baltimore Orioles outfielder who coached Clemens with the Boston Red Sox; a vegetarian lawyer who considers drug laws in the United States to be \u201ca bit heavy-handed\u201d; and a Philadelphia Eagles fan who thought Michael Vick \u201cwas done wrong\u201d when he was convicted for his involvement in a dogfighting ring. The jury also overwhelmingly consists of people who know little about baseball \u2014 and even less about Clemens. One of the jurors said during jury selection that she would not recognize Clemens if he was sitting right in front of her. Opening arguments are expected to begin Wednesday, and the estimated length of the trial is four to six weeks. Judge Reggie Walton of United States District Court warned the jurors about the high-profile nature of the case. He told the jurors he would not sequester them, but he is having them meet at an undisclosed site away from the courthouse, so they can be shuttled to the trial in private. They would also be provided daily meals, so they do not have to eat in the courthouse cafeteria \u2014 where members of news media and Clemens often eat \u2014 or in the surrounding neighborhood where he said people could be nosy. Already, the trial is much different from that of the former Giants slugger Barry Bonds, whose federal perjury trial in San Francisco ended in April with his conviction for obstruction of justice. It took less than one day for a jury to be seated in that trial. For the entire trial, those jurors then arrived at the courthouse on their own through public entrances and often ate in the building\u2019s cafeteria. Philip K. Anthony, the chief executive of DecisionQuest, a nationwide jury-consulting firm, said that Clemens, in many ways, would have it easier than Bonds, at least when it comes to the jury deciding his fate. He said it was to Clemens\u2019s advantage that he had never lived in Washington nor played for a team there. \u201cA jury in someone\u2019s hometown feels a duty to punish that person for bad behavior,\u201d said Anthony, who added, \u201cI think his jury will be more open in evaluating the evidence because they don\u2019t have an ax to grind one way or the other.\u201d The jurors will begin hearing the details of the case Wednesday about a half-mile from the House of Representatives office building in which Clemens testified in 2008 during hearings about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. He is charged with perjury, making false statements and obstruction of Congress in connection with his testimony, when he said he never used steroids or human growth hormone. On Tuesday, Clemens\u2019s defense team revealed one of its tactics that it hopes will crush the heart of the prosecution\u2019s case. Michael Attanasio, one of Clemens\u2019s lawyers, questioned the basis of the charges against Clemens, saying Congress had no right to investigate performance-enhancing drugs in baseball in the first place. He said the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform should not have held hearings because they had no legislative purpose. The hearings instead focused on a \u201che-said, he-said debate\u201d between Clemens and his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, Attanasio said. McNamee, who will be a star witness in the case, told Congress that he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone. He also said that he saw Clemens and Jose Canseco, Clemens\u2019s former teammate, talking at a pool party at Canseco\u2019s Miami home in 1998 and that shortly afterward, Clemens asked McNamee to inject him with drugs for the first time. Clemens testified he never used performance-enhancing drugs and was not at Canseco\u2019s house because he was golfing. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a minitrial on whether Roger Clemens went swimming,\u201d Attanasio said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a trial in U.S. District Court? Congress is going to have a hearing on these things?\u201d The prosecution argued that the House had the right to investigate the issue of steroids in baseball, particularly because legislation regulating steroid use had precipitated the Mitchell report . That report, by former Senator George J. Mitchell, was a result of an investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Clemens questioned that report, in which his name is prominently mentioned. The judge has initially taken the prosecution\u2019s side, saying that if Clemens, \u201cone of the icons of baseball,\u201d was criticizing the report, then, \u201cit seems to me that Congress has the authority to hold hearings to determine which view is correct.\u201d", "keyword": "Clemens Roger;Perjury;Steroids;Human Growth Hormone;Doping (Sports);Baseball;Jury System"}
{"id": "ny0099624", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/06/14", "title": "First Mediator, Then Decision Maker", "abstract": "IRVING, Tex. \u2014 Stephen Jones chuckles at the memory of being a mediator between his father, Jerry Jones, the Cowboys\u2019 owner, and Bill Parcells, the headstrong former coach. \u201cIt was tough, tough, tough,\u201d said Stephen Jones, the No. 2 executive in the Dallas front office. \u201cBut it was worth it.\u201d Jones said it helped shape him into what he is today, the person perceived by some to be calling the shots for the Cowboys as the team\u2019s chief operating officer, executive vice president and director of player personnel. The Cowboys have picked foundation over flash in recent drafts and decided not to stress the salary cap with a big contract for DeMarco Murray after he led the N.F.L. in rushing. Stephen Jones was a key part of in those decisions. Jones, 50, said he believed little had changed in the 26 years that Jerry Jones had been the owner, general manager and ultimate arbiter of the Cowboys, for better or worse. But he did not completely dismiss the notion of an evolving philosophy. \u201cI think probably the biggest way things have changed is that he probably has more confidence in me,\u201d he said, referring to his father. \u201cAlthough he might not want to say that he didn\u2019t have confidence in me 20 years ago, because I think he did. I think he listened to me a lot. But did he listen as much? Maybe not.\u201d The younger Jones was a 24-year-old chemical engineering graduate of the University of Arkansas, where both he and his father had played football, when Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989, fired Coach Tom Landry and brought attention to a family that had quietly made its fortune in oil and gas. Admittedly \u201cgreen behind the ears\u201d as he found himself making decisions alongside Jimmy Johnson, who became the coach in 1989, Stephen Jones was confident in his football background. Looking back, Jones said he figured a healthy part of his growth came in the four years Parcells was with the Cowboys, from 2003 to 2006. Jones\u2019s flamboyant father and Parcells, a Super Bowl-winning coach who had clashed with front offices on personnel issues elsewhere, did not want any \u201cconfrontational disagreement,\u201d as the younger Jones put it. So he got to play middleman. \u201cIt helped me in a lot of ways,\u201d Jones said. \u201cBecause I had to have some real heated, heated visits with both Jerry and Bill.\u201d And he was not afraid of them, said Jeff Ireland, who was then the Cowboys\u2019 director of scouting. Ireland said he remembered that the Cowboys had decided to do something different in the draft room and needed to tell Parcells, who Stephen Jones said was the architect of several changes that made Dallas better. \u201cStephen didn\u2019t wait for his dad,\u201d Ireland said. \u201cHe said, \u2018Hey, look, Jeff, we\u2019re going to go and do this, and it\u2019s not going to be a real happy time for us.\u2019 He knows how to handle people. And he knows how to do it without disrespecting them, either.\u201d Jones said his father still had the final decision. That was the case last year when Jerry Jones resisted his headline-grabbing urge during the draft and passed on Johnny Manziel for Zack Martin, a quiet workhorse offensive lineman who became the club\u2019s first rookie All-Pro since Calvin Hill in 1969. The more relevant draft-room drama, Stephen Jones said, is the buildup to each pick. Jones has tried to make his voice heard when his father grows anxious about moving up. \u201cIt\u2019s a little fun dynamic in there when he and I are visiting,\u201d Stephen Jones said, smiling. \u201cBut he\u2019s a good listener. And I mean he listens more.\u201d Jerry Jones said as much before this year\u2019s draft, when the Cowboys pushed aside their needs at running back and chose Connecticut cornerback Byron Jones in the first round. \u201cBottom line, without getting into it a lot, Stephen has absolute, tremendous influence on these decisions that are ultimately made in this organization and everything we do,\u201d Jerry Jones said, also noting the input of Coach Jason Garrett. After winning three Super Bowls in the 1990s, the Cowboys worked to maintain the core of those teams, which had players like Emmitt Smith, and had plenty of draft busts. But Morris Claiborne (2012) is the only first-round pick from 2010 to 2014 who has not made a Pro Bowl. And the Cowboys left this year\u2019s draft feeling as if they had three first-rounders in Byron Jones, defensive end Randy Gregory and lineman La\u2019el Collins. Stephen Jones believes the Cowboys are benefiting from the continuity of five-plus years with Garrett as coach. They have not had that since Johnson left in a messy split with Jerry Jones after winning a second straight championship in 1993. Through all the coaching changes, Jerry Jones, 72, had one constant at the top: his son. \u201cI know he looks and treats the franchise as a legacy,\u201d Stephen Jones said. \u201cThe big joy comes in working with him and working as a family.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Sports Drafts and Recruits;Dallas Cowboys;Stephen Jones"}
{"id": "ny0021510", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/09/16", "title": "Q. and A. With Stuart Elliott", "abstract": "Stuart Elliott, the advertising columnist, answers questions from readers each week. Questions can be sent to stuarte@nytimes.com . Q. Recently, dear readers, I asked whether anyone had compiled a list of brand epithets based on brand names. The catalyst was a comment on an article I wrote about a new campaign for the high-priced Tumi brand, which puckishly suggested that Tumi stood for \u201cTell u my income.\u201d I soon received several examples of such brand epithets, which I share below: A. The service man who came to repair my G.E. refrigerator \u2013 and G.E. stove and G.E. dishwasher \u2013 told me that to him, G.E. stood for \u201cGuaranteed Employment.\u201d Image My favorite is for El Al, \u201cEvery Landing Always Late.\u201d I heard it 25 years ago and have never forgotten it. Ford inspired a bunch for me. \u201cFound on road dead\u201d and \u201cFound on Russian dump.\u201d Here\u2019s one for Dial soap: \u201cDeficient in any lather.\u201d I\u2019m not sure this qualifies, but I\u2019m reminded of when I bought my first car, in Toronto, half a century ago. One of my father\u2019s friends said my well-worn English Ford Zephyr reminded him of another British import, the Rolls-Canardly. He said it rolls down one hill and can hardly make it up the next. Thanks, dear readers, and please send other examples you may have.", "keyword": "Trademarks;advertising,marketing"}
{"id": "ny0196113", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2009/10/29", "title": "Commissioner Criticized Over N.F.L.\u2019s Handling of Players\u2019 Brain Injuries", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The commissioner of the N.F.L. faced heated criticism Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, with lawmakers, former players and even a former team executive accusing the league of neglect in its handling of active and retired players with brain injuries. With evidence mounting of a link between playing professional football and cognitive impairment in later life, and news reports of poor medical treatment for some former players with dementia and other signs of mental decline, the committee repeatedly challenged the commissioner, Roger Goodell , to defend the league\u2019s policies and research. \u201cThe N.F.L. sort of has this blanket denial or minimizing of the fact that there may be this link,\u201d Representative Linda T. S\u00e1nchez, Democrat of California, said to Mr. Goodell during the daylong hearing. \u201cAnd it sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-\u201990s when they kept saying, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s no link between smoking and damage to your health.\u2019 \u201d When pressed, Mr. Goodell would not say whether he thought there was a link between football and cognitive decline among N.F.L. players. He did say, \u201cI can think of no issue to which I\u2019ve devoted more time and attention than the health and well-being of our players, and particularly retired players.\u201d \u201cWe are changing the culture of our game for the better,\u201d he later added. In his opening statement, the committee chairman, Representative John Conyers Jr. said the issue of brain injuries in football warranted federal scrutiny because \u201cthe N.F.L. is a monopoly whose existence was legislatively sanctioned,\u201d referring to the antitrust exemption for broadcasting that has helped the league grow into a multibillion-dollar operation. The league is also arguing a case before the Supreme Court hoping to expand its antitrust privileges. \u201cI say this not simply because of the impact of these injuries on the 2,000 current players and more than 10,000 retirees associated with the N.F.L. and their families,\u201d said Mr. Conyers, Democrat of Michigan. \u201cI say it because of the effect on the millions of players at the college, high school and youth levels.\u201d Several Republican members of the committee said that Congress should have no role in regulating football on either the professional or youth levels. \u201cWe cannot legislate the elimination of injuries from the games without eliminating the games themselves,\u201d said Representative Lamar S. Smith, Republican of Texas. The hearing included testimony from Mr. Goodell and the players union\u2019s executive director, DeMaurice Smith; doctors from the league\u2019s committee on concussions; and researchers who have found brain damage commonly associated with boxers in 10 deceased N.F.L. players, most of them younger than 55. Tiki Barber, Merrill Hoge and George Martin, all former players, and Gay Culverhouse, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers team president, gave inside views of league medical trends. Family members of injured players also testified: Eleanor Perfetto, whose husband, Ralph Wenzel, is now is institutionalized with dementia at age 66; and Dick Benson, whose teenage son died of a brain hemorrhage in 2002 after repeated concussions playing high school football. Missing from the two panels of witnesses was Dr. Ira Casson, the co-chairman of the N.F.L.\u2019s committee, who has been criticized for discrediting outside research and for his role in the league\u2019s study of brain injuries in retired players. Independent experts have said the study is flawed by conflicts of interest, statistical and sampling problems. None of the three primary authors of the committee\u2019s research \u2014 Dr. Casson and the co-chairman David Viano of Wayne State University, and Dr. Elliot Pellman, the Jets\u2019 team physician \u2014 were present. When asked why Dr. Casson was not present to testify, Mr. Goodell said the committee did not request him. Mr. Conyers disputed that, and an aide for Mr. Goodell handed him a note that led Mr. Goodell to say he would get back to the committee to clarify his answer. Ms. S\u00e1nchez and Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, criticized the N.F.L. committee\u2019s continuing brain study of retired players. Independent experts have warned that the study could have negative effects on youth sports if conclusions of few risks are improperly derived. Mr. Weiner said, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be perhaps most wise to put the brakes\u201d on the study, and \u201cstart from scratch to try to get this right?\u201d \u201cThis is a worker safety thing \u2014 no different than if someone was coming off the assembly line at a production plant and 20 years later, they all had arthritis in their right knee,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019d look at it the exact same way.\u201d Mr. Goodell responded: \u201cWe want you to have confidence in the study. That\u2019s one of the reasons for 15 years we\u2019ve been involved in this issue. We have published every piece of data in the N.F.L. We have published it publicly, we have given it to medical journals, it has been part of peer review. We don\u2019t control those doctors. They are medical professionals. They\u2019re scientists. They do this for a living.\u201d Mr. Smith, of the players union, was also criticized for its sluggishness in addressing the issue of concussion risks years ago and for not better educating its players. \u201cWe will do better,\u201d Mr. Smith said. He and Mr. Goodell were warned not to allow players\u2019 health care to become embroiled in contract negotiations. Mr. Conyers repeatedly pressed Mr. Smith and Mr. Goodell to turn over all medical records to Congress for independent review, and they agreed to do so. However, in an interview after his testimony, Mr. Goodell said he had agreed to turn over league studies and research that had already been released, not player medical records. Turning over such records, he said, could cause confidentiality conflicts, and \u201cthere\u2019s going to be a lot of issues.\u201d \u201cWhatever the committee asks \u2014 that we can do \u2014 we will,\u201d he said. Ms. S\u00e1nchez, in a subsequent interview, said: \u201cUnfortunately, I didn\u2019t find him to be a very helpful witness. He was really vague on certain things and didn\u2019t know the answers to certain things. The committee had requested that Dr. Casson be there to be able to answer questions like that, and obviously he was a no-show.\u201d Although the hearing\u2019s most contentious portions involved the N.F.L., a consensus emerged that how the N.F.L. and its players handle the issue of brain-injury management will, however indirectly, influence behavior on the youth and high school level. Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, said the N.F.L. and its media partners had to discourage the celebration of overly violent play. Representative Mike Quigley, Democrat of Illinois, said that although Congress focused mostly on N.F.L. policies on Wednesday, \u201cthe norms of the N.F.L., for better or worse, become the norms of high school football players.\u201d", "keyword": "Dementia;Football;Goodell Roger;House Committee on the Judiciary;Concussions;National Football League;Conyers John Jr"}
{"id": "ny0296189", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/12/08", "title": "Worried Auto Industry Braces for Change Under Trump", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 First the Obama administration bailed out much of the American auto industry, pulling it out of a tailspin. Then it reshaped the business, with regulations and policies intended to increase fuel economy, improve safety and add jobs. Now, under President-elect Donald J. Trump, the industry is bracing for another wholesale makeover. Perhaps no industry could be affected in more ways by the new administration than the auto business. That became all the more apparent this week, with Mr. Trump\u2019s selection of Scott Pruitt \u2014 the Oklahoma attorney general who is a climate-change skeptic and close ally of the oil and gas industry \u2014 to run the Environmental Protection Agency . The changes under the Trump administration could include possible tariffs that will raise prices on imported vehicles and parts, fewer subsidies for electric cars and policies that discourage automakers from moving products from American factories to Mexico. And any scaling back of fuel-economy goals by the Trump administration, if Mr. Pruitt\u2019s climate change skepticism and embrace of fossil fuels translates to policy, could also influence the types of vehicles the industry plans to build in coming years \u2014 and where it builds them. Bigger models like sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks are less fuel-efficient than cars but more profitable for automakers. And their steeper price tags can help pay for the higher labor costs of making them in the United States. In a move that underscored the new psychology since Mr. Trump\u2019s election, Ford Motor \u2014 which had been a target of his criticism \u2014 in mid-November decided to keep building a Lincoln S.U.V. in Kentucky rather than Mexico. And yet, for a capital-intensive industry that routinely makes billion dollar bets on new factories and products, the uncertainty is unnerving. \u201cOur membership is just perplexed right now,\u201d said Gloria Bergquist, vice president for public affairs for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents a dozen carmakers, including General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota, on safety and environmental issues. \u201cThis is all uncharted territory.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign was studded with promises that could upend the status quo, including some to relax policies intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has yet to detail any coming changes. But pursuing policies similar to those he promoted in his campaign could change the entire manufacturing industry by penalizing companies for investing overseas or by stifling free-flowing global trade. Mr. Trump has yet to specify changes he might make to Nafta or other industrial policies. But his cabinet appointments, particularly the selection for commerce secretary of the billionaire investor Wilbur L. Ross Jr. , who has suggested that he is receptive to some of the antitrade views favored by Mr. Trump, indicate that the incoming president may take an aggressive approach to modifying trade deals and other tenets of the outgoing Obama administration. One industry analyst, Ron Harbour of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, said many voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio backed Mr. Trump primarily because of his promises to restore manufacturing jobs in the United States. \u201cSo there probably will be pressure to do something,\u201d Mr. Harbour said. \u201cAnd if he doesn\u2019t do anything, they probably are not going to be too thrilled.\u201d Mr. Trump will inherit an auto industry that is far healthier than when President Obama took office and industry officials could push back strongly on disruptive changes. But auto executives generally support Mr. Trump\u2019s choice of a former labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration, Elaine Chao \u2014 who is also the wife of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell \u2014 to head the Transportation Department. The department oversees fuel-economy and safety rules that affect the types of vehicles that automakers produce. \u201cWe all have a common interest, and that is to maximize the rate of innovation in the technologies that save lives, avoid crashes and improve fuel economy,\u201d the auto alliance said in response to Ms. Chao\u2019s appointment. No change would be more consequential to the auto industry than applying steep tariffs on imports from Mexico and elsewhere. Companies could be forced to radically change how and where they get commodity parts, the production of which has been migrating to low-wage nations for decades. Consumers could see a change in the types of cars available. Despite Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign rhetoric, the American automotive industry and auto jobs have been buoyant since the Obama administration\u2019s bailout. Since 2010, vehicle production has doubled in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of workers have been hired. Last year, a record 17.4 million cars and trucks were sold in the United States, and analysts forecast strong demand for several years. \u201cYou have record levels of production and record levels of demand,\u201d said Mike Jackson of the research firm IHS Markit. \u201cThere is every reason for the industry to emphasize that it\u2019s in a very strong position.\u201d Still, the industry is anticipating changes from Mr. Trump. Ford, the nation\u2019s second-largest automaker after General Motors, uncharacteristically made public a decision to keep production of the Lincoln S.U.V. in Kentucky, after Mr. Trump had singled out the company for its growing investments in Mexico. Ford, like G.M., Fiat Chrysler and nearly every foreign automaker, has a huge stake in protecting the interlocking network of factories and parts suppliers made possible by Nafta. Plants in Mexico are crucial to meeting surging demand for new vehicles in the United States. Beyond that, automakers have already committed big investments to new plants in Mexico to take advantage of its cheaper labor and export-friendly trade agreements. While Mr. Trump has yet to specify how he would renegotiate Nafta, his emphasis has been on increasing American jobs and discouraging automakers from using foreign plants to supply the American market. His proposal to put tariffs of as much as 35 percent on vehicles imported from Mexico has stunned auto executives who have built their business models on open borders for cars, trucks and the thousands of parts in them. \u201cA tariff like that would be imposed on the entire auto sector, and that could have a huge impact on the U.S. economy,\u201d said Mark Fields, chief executive of Ford. Imported vehicles are an integral part of the American market and account for more than 40 percent of its annual volume. Last year, about eight million cars, trucks and sport utilities sold in the United States were built elsewhere, primarily in Mexico, Canada, Japan and Korea. Nearly all of them enter the market free of tariffs that would increase sticker prices significantly. Increasing the price of an imported vehicle with tariffs could reduce overall vehicle sales and exert economic pressure on manufacturers as well as on freight haulers, dealerships and independent service centers. And if Mr. Trump chooses to impose tariffs on auto parts produced abroad and shipped to plants in the United States, the impact will spread further. Last year, auto parts worth $143 billion were imported into the United States, about 35 percent of them from Mexico, compared with $81 billion in parts that were exported, according to the Commerce Department. Many big suppliers, however, are global and make parts in every region of the world. The parts industry\u2019s largest American trade group, the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, said its member companies employed more than 734,000 workers in the United States, and generated another 2.9 million jobs in related businesses. The industry is acutely sensitive to changes in trade policies that could have a ripple effect on its ability to ship parts in and out of the country. And like automakers, parts manufacturers are anxious to know what Mr. Trump has in store for them. \u201cNow that the election is over, we can begin to explore what to expect in the months to come,\u201d the trade group\u2019s president, Steve Handschuh, wrote in a letter to its members, adding that he was eager \u201cto express our priorities\u201d to the Trump transition team. In addition to Mr. Trump\u2019s focus on trade issues, the industry is expecting policies that diverge from the Obama administration\u2019s enthusiastic support of electric cars, including the $7,500 tax credits that encouraged consumers to buy them, and for the testing and development of self-driving vehicles. In a Nov. 10 letter to the Trump transition team, the auto alliance asked for clarity on policy changes as soon as possible. \u201cAuto manufacturing is a highly capital-intensive business, and because of that we rely on long-term certainty,\u201d Ms. Bergquist wrote. Yet the industry has proved to be adaptable to shifts in government, whether by building more fuel-efficient vehicles to meet new regulations, or increasing investments in Mexico because of Nafta. It is also more focused on self-interest than politics. In its eight-page letter, the auto alliance laid out several goals \u2014 including repeating its position that the government re-evaluate its timetable for automakers to achieve fleetwide fuel economy of 54.5 miles a gallon. But while the letter was perceived as tailored to Mr. Trump\u2019s agenda, Ms. Bergquist said it was composed before the election and would have been sent to an incoming Clinton administration had the outcome been different. \u201cOur position was the same, no matter who won,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Cars;Manufacturing;International trade;Donald Trump;Tariff;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0105499", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2012/03/25", "title": "Mali Coup Leaders Struggle to Assert Control", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 Residents of Bamako, the capital of Mali , waited in tension and uncertainty on Saturday for the outcome of a military coup d\u2019\u00e9tat that overthrew the country\u2019s elected government last week, ending more than 20 years of democracy in the nation. Regional analysts and residents said little appeared to be resolved as junta leaders struggled to maintain control amid increasing international isolation and persistent rumors of an imminent countercoup. State television, seized early on by the coup leaders, went off the air for an hour on Friday night as soldiers set up barricades around the downtown building housing it. Later, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo, the coup leader who had received military training in the United States, appeared briefly to assure viewers of his \u201cgood health,\u201d followed by repeated declarations of support for the junta from young people and other backers, many using the same language. Speaking of the countercoup rumors, a military spokesman, Col. Idrissa Traore, said Saturday that there was \u201cnothing serious in all that.\u201d Yet the announcement that the junta remained in control was hardly seen as definitive by observers. \u201cThe situation is very fluid,\u201d said Dr. Abdel Fatau Musah, a senior official with the regional grouping of West African states, Ecowas , who left Bamako on Saturday morning. \u201cNobody knows what is going to happen.\u201d Ecowas, which has condemned the coup, scheduled an emergency meeting of regional leaders for Tuesday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The whereabouts of Mali\u2019s elected president, Amadou Toumani Tour\u00e9, remained unknown. \u201cThere is a lot of insecurity,\u201d Dr. Musah said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be very difficult to see how this junta is going to survive. \u201cThe country has run out of resources.\u201d Mali\u2019s air and land borders have been sealed since late Wednesday; food, fuel and cash are all running low; banks are closed, as are many stores.\u201d Dr. Musah added: \u201cThe junta is made up of very young officers, very inexperienced. Ecowas wants them to quickly surrender.\u201d Opposition politicians in Mali continued to criticize the coup. \u201cWith just weeks before an election in which the Malian people were getting ready to freely and democratically decide their future, nobody has the right to substitute themselves by force to popular will,\u201d Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, said in a statement. Mali, heavily dependent on aid, risks a near-total cutoff of foreign assistance. \u201cAny U.S. assistance to the government of Mali beyond what we give for humanitarian purposes is at risk,\u201d Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said Friday. That point was relayed directly to Captain Sanogo by an official at the American Embassy in Bamako, the State Department said.", "keyword": "Mali;Coups D'Etat and Attempted Coups D'Etat;Politics and Government;Toure Amadou Toumani;Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0122166", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/09/11", "title": "North Korea Is Ready to Discuss Aid From Seoul", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 North Korea said on Monday that it was ready to discuss humanitarian aid from the South to alleviate damage caused by flooding and typhoons. The South Korean Red Cross Society first offered aid a week ago. On Monday, its North Korean counterpart said it wanted to know what the South planned to offer and how much, the South\u2019s Unification Ministry said in a statement. South Korea\u2019s offer and the North\u2019s response raised the possibility of the two governments resuming dialogue after years of tension. The North has repeatedly refused contact with President Lee Myung-bak\u2019s government in the South. The relations between the two Koreas have been chilly since Mr. Lee came to power in 2008 and cut off large shipments of aid unless North Korea took concrete steps toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program. Ties were further strained after North Korea shelled a South Korean island in 2010. In the same year, the North was also accused of sinking a South Korean Navy ship, killing 46 sailors. When South Korea offered aid for North Korean children worth 5 billion won ($4.4 million) last year, the North called the proposal too small. It demanded a large shipment of cement, grain and construction equipment, and the talks broke down. The South Korean government said on Monday that it would continue to exchange letters with the North to see if it was willing to negotiate a formal aid agreement. More than 200 North Koreans have been killed and large tracts of farmland have been destroyed by flooding and typhoons since June, according to North Korean media. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes. In June, the United Nations appealed for $198 million in humanitarian aid for North Korea, saying that two-thirds of the country\u2019s 22 million people continued to suffer from chronic food shortages. The North\u2019s nuclear and missile programs and its military provocations have helped scuttle aid shipments from potential donor countries, including South Korea.", "keyword": "South Korea;North Korea;International Relations;Humanitarian Aid"}
{"id": "ny0266938", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2016/03/09", "title": "Justine Henin and Marat Safin Elected to Hall of Fame", "abstract": "Justine Henin, who won seven Grand Slam singles titles and an Olympic gold medal, and Marat Safin, a two-time major winner, were elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Safin was the first Russian to be elected.", "keyword": "Tennis;International Tennis Hall of Fame;Justine Henin;Marat Safin"}
{"id": "ny0283842", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/07/15", "title": "Google Faces New Round of Antitrust Charges in Europe", "abstract": "When it comes to Europe\u2019s lengthy investigations into Google, Margrethe Vestager, the region\u2019s competition chief, is hoping that the third time\u2019s a charm. Ms. Vestager announced on Thursday a new round of antitrust charges against the company \u2014 the third set since early 2015 \u2014 claiming that some of the company\u2019s advertising products had restricted consumer choice. The efforts are part of her continuing push to rein in Google\u2019s activities in the European Union, where the Silicon Valley company has captured roughly 90 percent of the region\u2019s online search market. \u201cGoogle\u2019s conduct, based on our evidence, is harmful to consumers,\u201d Ms. Vestager told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. \u201cGoogle\u2019s magnificent innovations don\u2019t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate.\u201d The announcement represents a setback for Google, which vigorously denied any wrongdoing in two previous European antitrust charges linked to Android , its popular mobile operating system, and some of its dominant online search services . It also comes at a difficult time for Europe\u2019s competition authorities, which have been unable to land a knockout punch against Google\u2019s perceived abusive activities in the region, despite investigations that date back to 2010. The stakes are high. Google could face fines of up to 10 percent, or about $7 billion, of its global annual revenue if it is found to have broken Europe\u2019s tough competition rules. For months, both sides have been jockeying for position, with Google already filing lengthy legal arguments about why it believes its European activities are lawful. Ms. Vestager\u2019s antitrust charges are just one of a number of regulatory challenges to Google\u2019s activities in Europe, ranging from tax investigations in France and Spain to concerns that Google does not fully protect people\u2019s online privacy rights. The company denies any wrongdoing. Other Silicon Valley technology companies, including Amazon, Apple and Facebook, have also faced regulatory investigations in Europe, raising questions over whether the region\u2019s lawmakers are specifically focusing on these American giants , which have come to dominate much of the digital world. European officials deny any such bias. Google said in a statement on Thursday that it would provide a detailed response to Europe\u2019s latest charges, but it added, \u201cWe believe our innovations and product improvements have increased choice for E.U. consumers and promote competition.\u201d The company has until the fall to respond. How Europe Is Going After Apple, Google and Other U.S. Tech Giants The biggest American tech companies face intensifying scrutiny by European regulators, with \u2014 pressure that could potentially curb their sizable profits in the region and affect how they operate around the world. American competition officials have also reviewed claims that Google abused its market position to favor its services over those of rivals, though the Federal Trade Commission has yet to find any violations. Europe\u2019s new antitrust charges represent a further ratcheting up of the region\u2019s often frosty relationship with Google. In particular, European antitrust officials are taking aim at some of the company\u2019s online advertising tools \u2014 the main engine for Google\u2019s $75 billion in annual revenue. They say that the company may have abused its dominant market position when offering some of its search products on third-party companies\u2019 websites. These businesses \u2014 including publishers and online retailers \u2014 can use Google\u2019s search engine on their sites so that people can find information like newspaper articles or promotions. Such agreements with third-party companies, which date to 2006, also include showing paid-for advertising next to search results, often provided by Google. Ms. Vestager said on Thursday that the technology company may have abused its dominance \u2014 it holds roughly an 80 percent market share in this type of niche on-site search \u2014 by forcing companies to sign onerous contracts that limited competition and reduced consumer choice. Since 2009, Google has made it easier for advertising rivals to show their offerings alongside its services. But Europe\u2019s competition chief said that Google still required third-party companies to show a minimum number of Google-provided ads on their site. The Silicon Valley company also requires businesses using the service to ask for approval on where some rivals\u2019 ads may be shown on their websites. \u201cAll these restrictions allowed Google to protect its market share and stifle competition,\u201d Ms. Vestager said. Europe\u2019s antitrust authorities have also doubled down on a previous competition charge, announced last year, which claimed that Google had diverted traffic from competitors in favor of its own comparison-shopping site. On Thursday, Ms. Vestager said her team had found new evidence to buttress their claims, adding that because of Google\u2019s actions, European consumers may not have access to the most relevant search results when looking online for goods and services. Yet when asked about the failure of European antitrust authorities to order fines or changes to the way Google does business, despite several years of investigations, Ms. Vestager said she aimed to ensure the charges against the company stood up in European courts. \u201cSpeed is of the essence,\u201d but \u201cthe other side of that coin is quality,\u201d Ms. Vestager said on Thursday. \u201cSometimes that kind of quality comes at the cost of speed.\u201d", "keyword": "Google;EU;Competition law;Online advertising;Search Engines;Margrethe Vestager"}
{"id": "ny0206085", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/01/12", "title": "Gas Deal in Europe Is Undone and Redone", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 A European Union-brokered deal between Russia and Ukraine to restore the flow of heating fuel to the Continent seemed to be falling apart Sunday evening, less than a day after it had been signed, with Moscow objecting to conditions that Ukraine attached to the agreement after Russia had already signed it. In what appeared to be a first step toward resolving a dispute that has cut off about one-fifth of the natural gas used in Europe, at the peak of the winter heating season, the governments of Russia and Ukraine and the European Union agreed to establish independent monitors of pipelines that carry Russian gas to the west. The protocol was a precondition set by Russian energy officials to turn on the gas flow again. Russia shut off the valves on Tuesday after an extended dispute with Ukraine over pricing and accusations of stealing gas from the export pipelines. In a flurry of shuttle diplomacy over the weekend, the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, secured the signature of Russia\u2019s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow and then flew to Kiev, where Ukraine\u2019s prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, also signed the agreement. Yet by late Sunday, the off-again-on-again deal appeared to be off again. Russia\u2019s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying he would not honor the pact. At issue was a handwritten phrase that Ms. Tymoshenko wrote beside her signature early Sunday morning, after the document had already been signed by Mr. Putin. In English, she wrote, \u201cwith declaration attached.\u201d Ms. Tymoshenko\u2019s declaration, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, said that Ukraine had not been guilty of stealing gas from the export pipelines, a statement essentially asking Moscow to backpedal on the allegation that had underpinned its justification for halting shipments to Europe. Heading into Monday, the prospects for a deal were marked by confusion and uncertainty. Bloomberg News reported that a European Union official had said that Ukraine had agreed to sign a new version of the accord to authorize the monitoring of the pipelines, paving the way to resume gas shipments. The report said that the new deal came after a phone call between Mr. Putin and the European Commission president, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso, and would be separate from Ms. Tymoshenko\u2019s declaration. \u201cBarroso has spoken to Tymoshenko, and they have agreed to separate the two documents,\u201d Ferran Tarradellas Espuny, a commission spokesman, said in Brussels, according to the report. \u201cOn one side the declaration, and on the other side the terms of reference.\u201d The declaration from Ms. Tymoshenko also demanded that Russia, if it wanted to export gas to Europe across Ukraine, provide fuel to operate pumping stations along the pipeline route. Russia has refused to do that, saying it is Ukraine\u2019s obligation as the country responsible for transit. The Russian authorities quickly said this rendered the agreement void. Mr. Medvedev blamed Ukraine for collapsing the deal and sharply criticized the Ukrainian addendum. \u201cI instruct the government not to use the document that was signed yesterday,\u201d he said. \u201cThese clauses and annexes are a mockery of common sense and an offense against the agreements that were reached earlier,\u201d Mr. Medvedev said in comments published by the Interfax news agency. \u201cThese actions are seeking to destroy the existing agreements on the control over the gas transit; they have an expressed provocative and destructive nature.\u201d Mr. Putin, in a phone call on Sunday to Mr. Barroso, said Russia would not accept conditions added after he had signed the protocol, Interfax reported. Seeking to sooth Russian concerns, Mr. Topolanek called Mr. Putin to say that Ms. Tymoshenko\u2019s declaration was not binding. Later Sunday, Mr. Barroso said Ms. Tymoshenko had agreed to address Russian concerns over her statement with the goal of restoring gas flows to Europe, Reuters reported. A spokesman for Gazprom , the Russian gas monopoly, said the company\u2019s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, would fly to Brussels on Monday to continue negotiations. Even once an agreement is in place, it may be days before relief comes to European countries down the line from Ukraine, especially Poland and Bulgaria, which have suffered greatly without heating fuel in the bitter winter weather. If Russia immediately turned on the flow, it would take about three days to repressurize the European natural gas pipeline system and restore full service, experts said. And the underlying price dispute has still not been resolved. The Russian authorities maintain that Ukraine began siphoning from pipelines some of the Russian natural gas intended for export to Europe and has been using it to meet internal demand since Russia halted supplies to Ukraine on Jan. 1 because of a dispute over pricing.", "keyword": "Russia;Natural Gas;Ukraine;Heating;Gazprom"}
{"id": "ny0259225", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/01/15", "title": "Kentucky Oaks Purse Doubles to $ 1 Million", "abstract": "Churchill Downs said the purse for the 2011 Kentucky Oaks will be $1 million, double last year\u2019s. The race for fillies has forged an identity of its own in recent years behind the superstar performances of the 2009 Horse of the Year Rachel Alexandra and the 2007 Belmont Stakes winner Rags to Riches.", "keyword": "Horse Racing;Churchill Downs Incorporated;Kentucky Oaks"}
{"id": "ny0231382", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/09/24", "title": "Moscow Mayor Pokes Kremlin. (Cue Hornets.)", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Of all the high priests of Russian officialdom, few have become more deeply entrenched in power than Moscow\u2019s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov . He has ruled this city often like a fief for nearly two decades, transforming it from a Soviet wreck into a shimmering metropolis. Barrel-chested and bald, with a proletarian\u2019s peaked cap, he has seemingly been above reproach for years, despite numerous allegations of corruption even as his wife, a real estate developer, has become Russia\u2019s richest woman. But a slight jab at President, Dmitri A. Medvedev could now bring the mayor\u2019s once inviolable authority to ruin. In a recent article, Mr. Luzhkov appeared to criticize the president for indecisiveness, while seeming to call for his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, now prime minister, to return to the presidency. The article touched off the biggest political quarrel Russia has seen in nearly a decade, raising new speculation about the relationship between Russia\u2019s two leaders. It has also prompted an all-out attack by the Kremlin-controlled news media against the mayor, which many analysts here say could presage the end of his 18-year reign. \u201cHe intended to try to push a wedge between Medvedev and Putin,\u201d said Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a political consultant who advises the Kremlin. \u201cThis is already an intolerable situation for the federal center, so I think Luzhkov will have to leave.\u201d It is an unexpected battle in a country that has long appeared drained of public political life, pitting Russia\u2019s young president \u2014 an avid blogger with a fondness for gadgets \u2014 against a man who has been a part of the political elite of Moscow since it was still the capital of the Soviet Union. The fight has at turns resembled an old-time Politburo power struggle and an election for student government. This week, Russian political pundits scrambled over the news that Mr. Medvedev, 45, had snubbed Mr. Luzhkov, offering no public congratulations to the mayor on the occasion of his 74th birthday. It could have been the latest sign that the mayor was on his way out. But who knows? Mr. Putin praised him in a birthday telegram as a \u201ccompetent and experienced professional.\u201d This is Russian politics, a game of interpreting winks and gestures, of listening for murmurs in the dark corridors of power. It is an art that today differs little from the days when Kremlinologists guessed the fortune or failure of a Soviet leader by his place at the May Day parade. What is more or less certain is that Mr. Medvedev wants Mr. Luzhkov gone. When asked about the mayor in a closed meeting with Russian newspaper editors this summer, Mr. Medvedev shocked attendees by referring to the mayor with a vulgarism, a person at the meeting said. Since becoming president in 2008, Mr. Medvedev has eliminated most of the old regional bosses, usually by offering them other jobs or retirement deals, but Mr. Luzhkov is different. \u201cHere, we do not fire anyone, we simply buy them off,\u201d said Georgi A. Satarov, the president of the Indem Foundation, a policy research group focusing on corruption. \u201cBut it is hard to buy off Luzhkov because he is very expensive.\u201d Whatever has gone on behind closed doors over the past few weeks, if there was an attempt to make Mr. Luzhkov walk away quietly, experts say, it seems to have failed. In Mr. Luzhkov\u2019s article , published in the official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the mayor criticized Mr. Medvedev\u2019s rare decision to bow to public pressure to halt construction of a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, suggesting that such hesitation to press ahead with development projects undermined trust in the government. He called for the return of \u201ctrue meaning and authority to the Russian government.\u201d The response was swift and brutal. Days after the article was published, the government-owned NTV television station broadcast \u201cThe Cap Affair,\u201d named for the mayor\u2019s trademark peaked hat. The film, crudely produced and set to ominous-sounding music, was extraordinary by the typically bland standards of official television here, raising uncomfortable questions about Moscow\u2019s crumbling transportation infrastructure and the astounding wealth of Mr. Luzhkov\u2019s billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina. It also criticized Mr. Luzhkov for taking a vacation in Austria this summer as Muscovites choked on noxious fumes from peat bog fires during a record heat wave, and said the mayor, an avid beekeeper, returned to Moscow only to save his hives. The documentary was followed by programs on other government channels, which accused Mr. Luzhkov of, among other things, complicity in the evictions of Muscovites from their homes to make way for his wife\u2019s development projects. The accusations are nothing new. For years, opposition groups have made the same claims \u2014 and have faced lawsuits and even brief prison sentences for doing so. Mr. Luzhkov, who left for Austria once again this week, has vowed to file lawsuits against the government channels responsible for the recent documentaries and has refused to respond to allegations made in them. \u201cTo make justifications is the wrong way to defend yourself in Russia,\u201d he told REN-TV television, a quasi-independent channel, last week. \u201cIf a person starts to justify himself it appears that he is nevertheless guilty.\u201d Guilty or not, few here believe that corruption or other misdeeds prompted the recent attacks. None of the documentaries mention that Mr. Luzhkov is a leading member of Mr. Putin\u2019s party or that the mayor serves at the pleasure of the president, who has the power to appoint and remove regional leaders at will. \u201cIn a democratic country there would just be elections,\u201d said Viktor A. Shenderovich, a satirical political writer, who has criticized the mayor for years. \u201cBut all this is happening not in a democratic country, but in Byzantium. Luzhkov is being removed not because he stole or was corrupt, but because he has gotten caught between two clans.\u201d Ms. Baturina, the mayor\u2019s wife, explained the campaign against her husband as part of a conflict about whether Mr. Medvedev or Mr. Putin would run for president in elections scheduled for 2012. \u201cAs the elections approach, there are people in the presidential administration who are afraid that the mayor will support not President Medvedev, but Prime Minister Putin,\u201d she said in an interview with the Russian news magazine, The New Times, published this week. There is little evidence to suggest any conflict between Russia\u2019s two leaders, and both have consistently brushed aside questions about their plans for 2012. Even the conflict over the mayor has elicited nary a public word from the nation\u2019s top two leaders. Mr. Medvedev has only hinted at his displeasure with Mr. Luzhkov, leaving anonymous Kremlin sources to whisper confirmation of the mayor\u2019s impending demise in the ears of reporters.", "keyword": "Luzhkov Yuri M;Moscow (Russia);Politics and Government;Medvedev Dmitri A"}
{"id": "ny0063378", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/01/15", "title": "No Bluster as Christie Moves From Scandal to His Agenda", "abstract": "Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, scrambling to regain his political footing, delivered a high-stakes State of the State address on Tuesday that mixed arms-length expressions of contrition, a defiant assertion that his troubles are no excuse for inaction and a jarringly timed demand for bipartisanship. But there was little sign that his administration\u2019s widening scandal over lane closings at the George Washington Bridge was abating. Two new legislative committees readied plans to issue a fresh batch of subpoenas for Mr. Christie\u2019s aides, a photo surfaced showing that the governor had been in close contact with an appointee at the center of the controversy, and state Democratic Party officials mocked him with a new video that asked: \u201cThe State of the State? Embarrassed.\u201d The closely watched speech was a stark break, in content, tone and reaction, from the powerful and brash figure to which Trenton is accustomed. Just one year ago, Mr. Christie, a Republican, basked in adulation and gratitude for soothing residents of New Jersey\u2019s hurricane-battered shoreline \u2014 even fist-bumping the Democratic State Senate president on his way in to the chamber. This time, Mr. Christie, known for his firm command over the state\u2019s politics and an unrivaled agility on stage, seemed somewhat diminished. The applause was shorter and less rapturous. His boastful style was tamped down. And instead of marveling, over and over, at how the country was looking to New Jersey, he emphasized a long list of local meat-and-potato policy plans: improving schools, reducing crime and cutting pension costs. There was no fist-bumping. (Mr. Christie instead shook the Senate president\u2019s hand.) State Senator Linda R. Greenstein, a Democrat, said afterward that she had detected a \u201clack of confidence, which you could never see before.\u201d She called his performance \u201cnot as bold as usual.\u201d Mr. Christie, 51, tackled the lane closing controversy in the first moments of his speech , falling back on a careful and familiar-sounding phrase, \u201cmistakes were clearly made.\u201d But he sought to assure state residents that, despite the many revelations of the past week, the conduct of those close to him \u201cdoes not define us or our state.\u201d The governor, whose resounding electoral victories in a largely Democratic state have made him a potential White House contender, repeatedly invoked a favored theme: the necessity of reaching across the political aisle to find legislative compromise. Image Gov. Chris Christie walked the aisles after he delivered his State of the State address in Trenton on Tuesday. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times His voice rising, he ticked off a list of his accomplishments that had hinged on significant support from Democratic lawmakers (four balanced budgets, pension reform, private-sector job growth), affixing a favored slogan at the end of each. \u201cPassed with bipartisan support,\u201d he kept saying. \u201cWe acted, and we acted together,\u201d Mr. Christie said. The governor, who has been teased for uttering the word I, or a variation of it, more than 800 times during a largely lauded news conference last Thursday, took pains to revise his self-referential vocabulary. In his State of the State address, he used the word \u201cwe\u201d or \u201cwe\u2019ve\u201d 97 times. He called upon the Legislature to push for wide-ranging changes to the state\u2019s education system, crime-fighting strategy and budgeting process, most in keeping with his moderate brand of Northeast Republicanism. He proposed longer school days and school years, proposals whose popularity has grown in urban school districts. \u201cLife in 2014 demands something more for our students,\u201d he said. In the kind of gesture that has long distinguished him from peers in his party, Mr. Christie pointedly reached out to two of the state\u2019s most troubled cities, Newark and Camden, both bastions of Democratic politics. He reserved his greatest outrage for the poor showing among Camden\u2019s high school seniors, bemoaning that, across the entire city, only three students graduated \u201ccollege ready\u201d last year. \u201cThat is obscene,\u201d he said, \u201cand a breaching of the faith between those families and every level of government responsible for their education.\u201d Mr. Christie at times cast himself as a law-and-order governor. Evoking a deadly carjacking a few weeks ago at the Mall at Short Hills in Millburn, N.J., he called for the Legislature to revise laws so that criminals who are deemed a threat to the public safety can be held without bail, as is allowed in the federal system. But in a 45-minute speech that expounded on his plans for a second term, which starts next week, Mr. Christie devoted just a few minutes to the investigation that is buffeting his administration and increasingly complicating his role as a national Republican leader. Image During his speech, Mr. Christie hugged Craig Hanlon, a former teenage drug addict who got treatment and went on to receive a law degree before working for Mr. Christie when he was United States attorney. Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press On Tuesday, questions arose about a photo, published by The Wall Street Journal , that captured Mr. Christie standing with David Wildstein, a Christie loyalist and a key figure in the bridge scandal, on the third day of the lane closings that snarled traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., for four days in September. Mr. Christie, when previously asked about his relationship with Mr. Wildstein, said the two were rarely in contact. On Tuesday night, Mr. Christie\u2019s office said the picture was from a Sept. 11 ceremony that Mr. Christie has attended each year since he took office. \u201cThey were all there for one reason \u2014 to pay tribute to the heroes of 9/11,\u201d said Colin Reed, a spokesman for the governor. In the State House, there were growing signs of a changed political landscape. The two Democratic lawmakers who have heavily criticized the administration\u2019s handling of the lane closings, Senator Loretta Weinberg and Assemblyman John Wisniewski, reveled in their newfound fame, posing for photographs before the State of the State speech. And as Mr. Christie spoke, the room was less than rapt at times: A few lawmakers took out their iPhones and BlackBerrys, apparently to check email, as he talked. Several in the audience took note of what they said was Mr. Christie\u2019s chastened language, observing his mentions of rehabilitation, recovery and making choices, and wondering if they contained a double meaning for him and his staff. Mr. Christie may not have projected his usual swagger, but he did manage to deliver the kind of raw emotion that has defined his public life. Toward the end of his speech, as he laid out a plan for a new drug rehabilitation program, he asked a man in the audience to stand up. It was a former teenage addict who, after receiving treatment, sobered up, received a law degree and landed a job working for Mr. Christie when he was United States attorney for New Jersey. As the man, Craig Hanlon, rose, and Mr. Christie left the podium to embrace him, the crowd offered its biggest and fullest ovation of the afternoon. Mr. Christie concluded with a philosophical quotation about the future \u2014 his state\u2019s, as well, it seemed, as his own. \u201c \u2018Choice, not chance, determines your destiny,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cOur future is not set \u2014 it, too, is the product of the choices we make from this day forward. So let us choose wisely.\u201d", "keyword": "Chris Christie;NJ State of the State;Fort Lee NJ;New Jersey;George Washington Bridge"}
{"id": "ny0239028", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/12/20", "title": "Online Stores Are Weaning Shoppers Off Sales", "abstract": "This holiday season, online sales are zooming, even as online retailers offer fewer discounts and turn picky about who shops at their sites. After two years of relative malaise, online sales grew 12 percent in the first 47 days of the holiday season, according to comScore , to $27.5 billion. That significantly outpaces the growth rate of retail sales over all, which analysts expect to rise 3 to 4 percent this holiday season. But online retailers are now protecting their margins with careful offers, dispensing with the promotions of the last two holiday seasons that were meant to drive sales and get rid of extra inventory. Gone are the coupons that give shoppers 40 percent off all purchases. Instead, offers go to selected customers, and are specialized: a discount on wool jackets, free hoop earrings when people spend $100, a \u201cmystery\u201d discount amount that is revealed only at checkout. The promotions try to get customers to behave in a certain way. A coupon may seem straightforward, like Drugstore.com offering $5 off a $30 purchase. In fact, it is encouraging one-time customers to browse through several pages of a site and get to know what a retailer offers as they decide what to buy. \u201cThe reason there\u2019s these different promotions and not just the straight dollar-off or percent-off promotions all the time is there are different incentives,\u201d said David Lonczak, chief marketing officer of Drugstore.com. \u201cYou may just need a sale, you may have a product you\u2019re long on and you need to get rid of it, or you may be looking to acquire customers with a higher basket,\u201d he said, referring to the transaction price. \u201cYou have to be thoughtful.\u201d Discounting has declined; in November, retailers\u2019 e-commerce revenue from sales of full-price items rose 52 percent versus November 2009, according to MyBuys , which works on personalization offers for retailers. But less discounting has not tamped down online sales. On Thanksgiving weekend , more than one-third of purchases were made online, versus about 28.5 percent last year, according to the National Retail Federation. That is because even staunch in-store shoppers are now comfortable buying online, said Fiona Dias, executive vice president for strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce, which provides e-commerce technology to retailers like Toys \u201cR\u201d Us. And the high demand means that online retailers do not have to slash prices to get customers. \u201cIf anything, we\u2019re running tight on inventory because everyone has sold a lot more than they expected to,\u201d Ms. Dias said of the sites she works with. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re not seeing 50-percent-off promotions.\u201d Given their strong position, retailers are trying to get customers out of the price-wars mind-set that they adopted during the recession. \u201cAt some point, we have to stop and try to go back to where we were because if everyone continues to offer 20 percent, 50 percent off, it\u2019s going to change the market on a long-term scale that it would be too hard to get back from,\u201d said Melissa Joy Manning, who runs an online jewelry store bearing her name. She has stopped discounting, but is giving a pair of silver hoop earrings to customers who spend $100 or more. \u201cWe don\u2019t have unlimited resources, so we do try to be as creative with them as we can,\u201d she said. Like Ms. Manning, other retailers are getting creative with unusually specific offers. \u201cIt\u2019s about margins,\u201d said Andy Dunn, the chief executive and co-founder of Bonobos, a men\u2019s clothing site. While last December, about a third of his revenue came from promotions, this year it\u2019s down to about a quarter, even as he expects his revenue to nearly triple for the month. \u201cThere\u2019s less of a need to be highly promotional,\u201d he said. \u201cAt the same time, we feel we need to get better at the laser-beam promoting.\u201d So he is whittling down offers, sending, for instance, a 20 percent offer on suit elements to people who have bought wool pants but not a jacket. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to treat everyone the same,\u201d he said. Drugstore.com also changes its approach depending on the customer. That offer for $5 off any purchase over $30 may prompt people to explore the site. \u201cSo if a new Drugstore.com customer doesn\u2019t know I sell toys and games, would you think I\u2019d sell a Razor scooter?\u201d he said. \u201cI have to incent you to shop around.\u201d He would use a percent-off coupon, he said, when he wants to drive overall sales. And he tends to avoid offers like \u201c$10 off your purchase,\u201d because \u201cI would get a whole bunch of people coming in, they would find the product that was 10 dollars and one cent, they would get it and I would never see them again,\u201d he said. Other retailers are trying to stand out in crowded in-boxes. Bloomingdales.com had a \u201cmystery savings\u201d event last week, in which customers on its e-mail list were sent a code that called up discounts of between 10 and 40 percent at checkout. \u201cPeople are going, \u2018Well, maybe I\u2019m going to be the one who hits the jackpot,\u2019 \u201d said Bruce Berman, president of Bloomingdales.com and chief financial officer of Bloomingdale\u2019s. \u201cSo they open it at a higher rate.\u201d The tactic helped the store stand out, he said. The day after the Bloomingdale\u2019s e-mail went out, Saks Fifth Avenue also sent one promoting a \u201cmystery sale\u201d online. Saks declined to comment on the promotion. For Bloomingdale\u2019s, Mr. Berman said, \u201cIt worked out to our advantage because whoever shops both will say, \u2018I already did that.\u2019 \u201d Sometimes, a retailer can be too successful with an online sale, and have to shift tactics on the fly to keep profit up. At the Gap Inc. sites, which include Banana Republic and Old Navy, the plan was to do heavy discounts on the four days after Thanksgiving . But Friday sales \u201cexceeded our forecast \u2014 it was too hot, it was too strong,\u201d said Toby Lenk, the president of Gap Inc. Direct. \u201cSo we pulled back on our promotions for Cyber Monday.\u201d And other retailers have had to devise new tactics after vendors instructed them to stop offering discounts on their brands. \u201cWith the discounting in the last years, the perception from our vendors is that we were discounting their products,\u201d said Pete LaBore, director of customer retention at Backcountry.com . So the company came up with a new offer \u2014 \u201con our dime,\u201d Mr. LaBore said \u2014 that gave $20 off on the site. \u201cIt\u2019s totally free money,\u201d the offer said. But customers did not seem to believe it, and Backcountry.com sent another e-mail two days later with the subject line, \u201cSeriously \u2014 It\u2019s Free.\u201d The offer went only to people who had bought, in the past, certain brands or categories in which Backcountry.com now had too much stock, or to people who usually spent enough that \u201cwe weren\u2019t just going to have somebody coming in buying a three-dollar pair of socks,\u201d Mr. LaBore said. It seemed a smart approach; so far, the offer has been profitable, with most people spending much more than $20, Mr. LaBore said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get away from the \u2018sale, sale, sale\u2019 message, and this is a different way to do that,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "E-Commerce;Discount Selling;Sales;Drugstore.com;Bloomingdale's;Gap Inc"}
{"id": "ny0011628", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/02/22", "title": "Otto Beisheim, German Retailing Pioneer, Dead at 89", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 Otto Beisheim, who revolutionized retailing in postwar Germany by introducing the concept of selling wholesale goods directly to customers and the builder of the country\u2019s largest retailer, Metro, was found dead on Monday at his home in Bavaria. He was 89. Mr. Beisheim, who had been suffering from an incurable illness, committed suicide, his foundation, the Otto-Beisheim Group, said. Mr. Beisheim, who was said to have amassed a fortune of $3.3 billion, was intensely private and rarely in the public eye. Even at his company\u2019s shareholders\u2019 meetings, he was reported to have shown up on occasion masquerading under the name M\u00fcller. Mr. Beisheim founded Metro in 1964 and continued to hold a 10 percent stake. It is now the third-largest retailer in Europe, behind Carrefour of France and Tesco of Britain. Like Sam\u2019s Clubs and Costco in the United States, Metro stores sell only to members. But Metro members are mostly businesses or professionals. The son of a caretaker, Mr. Beisheim was born on Jan 3, 1924, near Essen, Germany. His family was too poor to pay for him to attend high school, so he became a leather tradesman. As a wealthy man, he later donated widely to schools and universities. The best known of these, a business school near Koblenz, carries his name: the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management. Image Otto Beisheim in 2004. Credit Tim Brakemeier/DPA, via Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images During World War II Mr. Beisheim was a radio controller in the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the Nazi Party. His military service became known publicly only in 2006, and some said a wish to hide his past may have contributed to his desire for privacy. After the war, Mr. Beisheim worked as an electronics wholesaler. While traveling in the United States he observed how goods were sold from warehouses to customers for cash. The idea differed from the German practice of placing orders on credit and having goods delivered to retailers or other institutional buyers. Returning to Germany, he founded Metro, the country\u2019s first cash-and-carry retailer, in 1964 at M\u00fclheim an der Ruhr, in West Germany\u2019s industrial heartland. He later joined with the Haniel and Schmidt-Ruthenbeck families and expanded the company into Austria and France. It later moved into Denmark and Italy as well. The Metro Group, which today includes the Metro cash-and-carry stores, the electronics stores Saturn and Media Markt, Real hypermarkets and the Kaufhof line of department stores across Europe and Asia, was formed through a merger of several companies in 1996. One of Mr. Beisheim\u2019s main accomplishments at Metro was the purchase in 2006 of 85 Walmart stores by the group\u2019s Real division. Walmart had decided to withdraw from Germany after losing billions of dollars over a decade; the stores now operate under the name Real. Mr. Beisheim\u2019s wife of nearly 50 years, Inge, died in 1999. They had no children. He is leaving his fortune to two foundations that carry his name, one in Munich and the other in Baar, Switzerland.", "keyword": "Otto Beisheim;Metro;Obituary;Retail;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0289508", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/01/20", "title": "Ex-Red Army Faction Members Sought in Robbery in Germany", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The German police have intensified their decades-long search for three members of the Red Army Faction, believed to be on the run since their far-left guerrilla group disbanded in 1998, after prosecutors said on Tuesday that they had linked them to at least one botched robbery last year. For more than two decades, federal prosecutors have had an arrest warrant out for Ernst-Volker Staub, 61, Burkhard Garweg, 47, and Daniela Marie-Luise Klette, 57, on suspicion of involvement in actions by the Red Army Faction, or R.A.F. These include the 1993 bombing of a prison in Weiterstadt, near Frankfurt. The group emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s when its members terrorized West Germany through a series of kidnappings, bombings and killings. Its members killed 34 people in an attempt to overthrow the capitalist government and fight what they saw as American imperialism. The last convicted R.A.F. member to have served time in jail, Birgit Hogefeld, was released in 2011 after serving 18 years of a life sentence for murder. Prosecutors in Verden, near the northern city of Bremen, said on Tuesday that they had begun a fresh investigation of the three fugitives on suspicion of attempted murder and robbery in conjunction with a bungled attempt in June to storm an armored security van stocked with cash. The group may also have been involved in another failed robbery of a similarly cash-laden transporter in December in Wolfsburg, also in northern Germany , but the authorities said evidence was still being evaluated. Marie-Louise Tartz, a spokeswoman for state prosecutors in Verden, said the group had been identified by analyzing DNA traces secured from two vehicles in the crime. Ms. Tartz said the forensic research could take several months in many cases, based on the quality of the evidence available. Federal and state prosecutors said that they did not believe the three suspects had been driven by terrorist motives, and that it appeared they had sought to carry out the robberies for purely financial reasons. \u201cIt is to be presumed that the crime was intended to finance a life lived underground,\u201d state prosecutors in Verden said in a statement. The police used helicopters to search for the fugitives after they fled the scene of the attempted robbery in June, but found nothing. According to witnesses, the suspects, armed with automatic rifles, used a white Volkswagen van to block the armored carrier and opened fire, but failed to open the doors of the vehicle. No one was injured. The Red Army Faction, originally called the Baader-Meinhof gang, followed a Marxist-Leninist ideology and initially targeted American interests in West Germany. These included the United States Embassy in Bad Godesberg in 1991 and a bomb attack on an administrative building of the Deutsche Bank in 1990. Ms. Klette has been sought in both of those crimes. In 1999, more than a year after the group disbanded, Ms. Klette, Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg threatened the driver of an armored vehicle with an automatic rifle and a rocket-propelled grenade. That time they made off with more than one million German marks.", "keyword": "Fugitive;Robbery;Murders and Homicides;Red Army Faction;Burkhard Garweg;Ernst-Volker Staub;Daniela Marie-Luise Klette;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0159669", "categories": ["nyregion", "long-island"], "date": "2008/12/14", "title": "To Tulane, for English and Altruism", "abstract": "Brightwaters A LONG ISLANDER to the core, or so he thought, Dave Cahill never intended to become pathologically \u2014 well, almost \u2014 fond of New Orleans. So fond that, after Hurricane Katrina pulverized the poorer, less mythical city quadrants, he found himself mired, with a handful of fellow students from Tulane University, knee deep in muck in the Ninth Ward, wielding a shovel and a crowbar and gutting the moldy innards of ruined houses until only their skeletons remained. That\u2019s what passed for neighborhood recovery in the early going. Putrid work, being a human wrecking ball incongruously in pursuit, during school hours, of a well-regarded degree in English and history. The digging was occasionally gruesome. One day, as part of Student Advocacy for Equitable Recovery, or Safer, he and a few other volunteers were dismantling a house in hard-hit St. Bernard Parish when a displaced occupant happened by and shared an anecdote: He told them that when the waters that fed an adjacent swamp swelled and crested, he and his family watched their grandmother\u2019s roof, with the attic still attached, float by before submerging. And how was he certain it was his grandmother\u2019s attic, the students, na\u00efvely and nosily, wanted to know? Because her corpse was inside, he informed them, shrugging off the macabre aspects of such a discovery. \u201cHe told us, \u2018Hey, life is hard here; people live and people die,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Cahill said. \u201cWe were freaked out; he wasn\u2019t. But mostly when I\u2019m working on a house, it isn\u2019t a sad thing anymore because it\u2019s more like the first step to coming home for the family that lived there.\u201d Not a life lesson Mr. Cahill encountered in the classroom. His commitment to the New Orleans rebuilding effort led him to join AmeriCorps and, with some original Safer volunteers, establish the Phoenix of New Orleans , or Pnola, a nonprofit neighborhood recovery association focused on the Lower Mid-City area. Mr. Cahill, now 23 and a 2008 Tulane graduate, had never intended to apply to Tulane, an older sister\u2019s alma mater. But when Tulane mailed him an application, he blithely filled in the essays (as a winner of the Ethnic Pen writing contest sponsored by Bay Shore High School and a participant in the mock United Nations program, his communications skill set was rote), sent it back and was surprised by the size of the scholarship the university dangled in front of him. It would have been rude to refuse it; not to mention it would have caused undeserved aggravation for his progressive parents \u2014 his father, Michael Cahill, is an environmental lawyer with a 1-0 record before the United States Supreme Court; his mother, Peggy Lambert, is a dean at St. George\u2019s University School of Medicine in Grenada. So off he went and proceeded to be miserable until he experienced a life-shifting conversion that was meteorological, not religious, in nature. \u201cI eventually changed my attitude on account of a giant hurricane that destroyed the heart of a city I hadn\u2019t even known because it and our campus were like separate worlds,\u201d he reflected last weekend, back on Long Island to organize his second Pnola fund-raiser; the first, in 2006, yielded $20,000 that translated, thanks to free student labor, to $750,000 worth of rebuilt homes. \u201cWe built three houses before the fund-raiser up here,\u201d he said, mentioning an off-campus beer pong party as a major if irreverent revenue source, \u201cand we\u2019ve finished another 12 rebuilds since. Not bad for a little nonprofit company. It\u2019s a tough sell, raising funds for a cause that dropped out of everyone\u2019s consciousness three years ago.\u201d Like many conversions, Mr. Cahill\u2019s took time. It also required some strong-arming from a college friend, Jim Coningsby, the creator of Safer in 2005 and, coincidentally, another Bay Shore native, albeit one who relocated to Virginia in boyhood. \u201cHe told me that if I didn\u2019t come back down there and find out how the gutting world works, I\u2019d regret it,\u201d Mr. Cahill said. \u201cJimmy, by the way, still hasn\u2019t graduated. I can understand it; I mean, how can you sit around reading a book when you know there are people out there who really need help?\u201d Freshman year had not endeared Mr. Cahill, who expects to attend law school after his second AmeriCorps term ends (\u201cPnola can use a lawyer\u201d), to Tulane. He was homesick for Bay Shore, pondering an East Coast transfer, and didn\u2019t hurry back for the opening day of sophomore semester. When Katrina encroached and Tulane shut down, he was still safe at home; then he was \u201crelocated\u201d for a semester to Boston University, which temporarily took in displaced Tulane students. \u201cMy friends had horror stories to tell, but all I lost was a semester of school,\u201d he said in the midst of jazzing up his parents\u2019 stately colonial-style home in Brightwaters for the fund-raiser. \u201cBut they say that if you stay in New Orleans more than five years, you\u2019re never going to leave.\u201d When the overload of blinking pink flamingo garlands, twinkling holiday lights and red-hot chili pepper lanterns blew a fuse, Mr. Cahill scurried down to the basement to restore full illumination. Also on his to-do roster: a side trip to the living room to patch an unsightly damp spot on the ceiling caused by a balky upstairs toilet; not a repair he would have been capable of making before his immersion in New Orleans-style gut-and-revive artisanship. But now? \u201cA snap.\u201d Charity begins at home. At least it did last weekend, but only until Monday morning, when Mr. Cahill made a beeline back to New Orleans. Five uninhabitable but remediable houses, and five anxious families, were waiting for him and his team to work some nonprofit magic by Christmas. The benefit raised $11,000. In Pnola arithmetic, that\u2019s about $375,000. In other words, welcome home, folks.", "keyword": "Hurricane Katrina;New Orleans (La);Volunteers"}
{"id": "ny0088974", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/09/29", "title": "Liberal Feminists Ponder Friends, Foes and Carly Fiorina", "abstract": "When the novelist Jennifer Weiner watched the second Republican presidential debate with her two daughters on Sept. 16, she felt a sense of pride at seeing the lone woman on stage, Carly Fiorina , hold her own against Donald J. Trump. Then Mrs. Fiorina denounced abortion and Planned Parenthood in a graphic monologue that thrilled many conservative Republican voters but left Ms. Weiner appalled. \u201cIt\u2019s so weird \u2014 she looks like one of us, but she\u2019s not,\u201d said Ms. Weiner, who in addition to being a best-selling author is an influential feminist with a large social-media following. \u201cYou\u2019re on the bus with her until she starts talking about Planned Parenthood.\u201d As Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s presidential campaign gains traction \u2014 and as the focus on her statements about Planned Parenthood intensifies \u2014 liberal women across the web are expressing conflicted feelings about her candidacy. At times, there is gratification at watching a woman forcefully take on Mr. Trump; at other times, horror at Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s conservative policy positions, which these women see as anathema to the feminist cause. \u201cCan you love a campaign but hate a candidate\u2019s policies?\u201d read the subtitle of Robin Marty\u2019s Sept. 18 essay on Cosmopolitan.com titled \u201cCarly Fiorina Is the Candidate I Wanted Hillary Clinton to Be.\u201d Mrs. Fiorina has encouraged feminists to take her seriously. After Mr. Trump\u2019s remarks about her looks \u2014 \u201cLook at that face! Would anyone vote for that?\u201d he told Rolling Stone magazine \u2014 her \u201c super PAC ,\u201d Carly for America, released a video advertisement called \u201cFaces,\u201d in which she turned the insult to her advantage. In the ad, as the faces of women flash across the screen \u2014 young and old, black and white, all of them beaming \u2014 Mrs. Fiorina tells a heavily female audience: \u201cWe are not a special-interest group. We are the majority of the nation.\u201d (It is a line she repeated in the Republican debate.) \u201cThis is the face of a 61-year-old woman,\u201d she says later in the ad, as the audience whoops and whistles its approval. \u201cI am proud of every year and every wrinkle.\u201d Such shows of defiance and forcefulness by Mrs. Fiorina have impressed many liberal women. Tracy Clark-Flory, a senior staff writer for Vocativ.com who has written about sex and relationships for Salon and other outlets, said Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s debate turn was a powerful moment that created some dissonance given her stands on the issues. \u201cI think even as a lot of feminists cheered her on during that performance, we were loathing her actual policies,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s an excitement and a horror that those two can kind of coexist.\u201d Left-leaning feminists have not been so conflicted by other Republican candidates for national office in recent years. Both Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2008, and Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman who ran for the Republican nomination in 2012, went out of their way to attack traditional feminism. Mrs. Fiorina has spoken critically of traditional feminism, too: In June, when she still barely registered in national presidential polls, she declared in a speech that the liberal \u201cversion of feminism isn\u2019t working\u201d and said her definition of \u201ca feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses.\u201d That differs from the definition that Mrs. Clinton gave in an interview with the actress and writer Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO series \u201cGirls,\u201d for a website Ms. Dunham is starting. When Ms. Dunham asked Mrs. Clinton if she considered herself a feminist, she replied, \u201cYes, absolutely,\u201d and expressed puzzlement at women who did not. \u201cA feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights,\u201d she said. Still, Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s background as a former chief executive at Hewlett-Packard and her role in calling out Mr. Trump, whose remarks have offended women in both parties, have captured the attention of many writers, activists and other influential figures in the feminist movement, as reflected on social media and in news outlets targeted at young women. It was an irony first pointed out by the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. \u201cCarly Fiorina is an ice-cold shade queen debate princess and I\u2019m in love with and terrified of her,\u201d Erin Gloria Ryan, managing editor of the feminist blog Jezebel , wrote on Twitter on Sept. 16. In an interview, Ms. Ryan said that as a feminist she was of two minds about Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s candidacy, at times drawn to her and at times repulsed by her positions and what many critics say were her exaggerated statements about a Planned Parenthood video. In addition to opposing abortion, Mrs. Fiorina opposes raising the minimum wage, federally mandated paid maternity leave and the Affordable Care Act, policies that disproportionately affect women. \u201cI am constantly pivoting mentally with her,\u201d Ms. Ryan said, adding that she had not at all been torn about opposing Mrs. Palin or Mrs. Bachmann. Mrs. Fiorina, she said, is \u201ccontrary to the conservative female narrative, the way she looks, the way she presents herself, the no-nonsense businesswoman thing.\u201d In an interview, Ms. Marty, the Cosmopolitan writer, said she had been disappointed by the caution of Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign so far and was intrigued by Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s brassy candor and fearlessness. Still, she said that under no circumstance could she ever vote for someone who opposed abortion rights. Ms. Marty said that for liberal feminists, cheering on Mrs. Fiorina was like eating at McDonald\u2019s. \u201cYou know, inherently, it\u2019s not something you should be eating,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when there\u2019s nothing else around, it\u2019s what you go and take.\u201d Who\u2019s Winning the Presidential Campaign? History suggests that each party\u2019s eventual nominee will emerge from 2015 in one of the top two or three positions, as measured by endorsements, fund-raising and polling. Republican women say the feminist head-scratching about Mrs. Fiorina has brought to light a hypocritical aspect of the women\u2019s movement. \u201cThey\u2019re not really looking for equal representation \u2014 they\u2019re looking for more Democratic women representation,\u201d said Katie Packer, a Republican strategist. Yet the more that liberal feminist writers and activists \u2014 many of whom view abortion rights as the ultimate litmus test \u2014 hear from Mrs. Fiorina, the less conflicted they may become. In particular, Mrs. Fiorina is standing by her assertion in the Sept. 16 debate that she had viewed a video about Planned Parenthood showing \u201ca fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, \u2018We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.\u2019\u201d Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights advocacy groups have called Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s assertion \u201ccompletely false,\u201d and many news organizations have concluded that she was describing a video that did not exist. On Thursday, Mrs. Fiorina visited an anti-abortion pregnancy center in Spartanburg, S.C., where she took journalists into an examination room as she observed an expectant mother\u2019s ultrasound and remarked upon the fetal heartbeat and developing spine. \u201cLiberals and progressives will spend inordinate amounts of time and money protecting fish, frogs and flies,\u201d Mrs. Fiorina said outside afterward. \u201cThey do not think a 17-week-old, a 20-week-old, a 24-week-old is worth saving.\u201d On Saturday, women wearing pink, some of whom were affiliated with Planned Parenthood, protested Mrs. Fiorina at a campaign appearance in Iowa, throwing condoms and chanting, \u201cWomen are watching, and we vote.\u201d On Sunday, in an interview on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d Mrs. Fiorina insisted that the scene in the video she had described \u201cabsolutely does exist,\u201d but offered no evidence to back up her contention. Anna Holmes, who founded Jezebel and now writes for Fusion.net , said Mrs. Fiorina had lied in her depiction of the video. \u201cShe\u2019s tough and she\u2019s very well spoken, but I just don\u2019t think she speaks the truth,\u201d she said. Acknowledging the early interest among some feminists in Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s candidacy, none other than Gloria Steinem weighed in, calling Mrs. Fiorina\u2019s claims about Planned Parenthood \u201ca 100 percent lie.\u201d \u201cTrump\u2019s greatest damage to women,\u201d Ms. Steinem said in a Facebook post , \u201cwas to raise sympathy for Carly Fiorina by attacking her appearance.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Carleton Fiorina,Carly Fiorina;Abortion;Planned Parenthood;Birth control;Women's rights,Feminism;Jezebel Blog;The Politico"}
{"id": "ny0112175", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/02/09", "title": "5 European Nations Agree to Help U.S. Crack Down on Tax Evasion", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Washington won important backing Wednesday for an effort to identify offshore accounts held by Americans, as key European allies agreed to help. In a joint statement, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain said they wanted \u201cto intensify their cooperation in combating international tax evasion.\u201d In return, Washington has agreed to \u201creciprocate in collecting and exchanging\u201d information about U.S. accounts held by residents of those countries. The agreement concerns the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, known as Fatca, which became law as part of a 2010 jobs bill . Fatca is meant to help the U.S. Internal Revenue Service identify hidden accounts and other assets held overseas by Americans, but the law has caused an outcry among foreign financial institutions that fear the cost of compliance as well as what they have said are unrealistically tight implementation deadlines. There were also concerns that Fatca \u2014 which will require that virtually every financial institution in the world report any accounts held by Americans, with a withholding penalty for noncompliance \u2014 would put banks into a position of violating national secrecy laws to comply. The United States and the five European countries said Wednesday that they would get around the secrecy problem by having financial institutions share data with their own governments, which would then share with Washington. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, welcomed the government-to-government approach, saying it would greatly reduce \u201cthe administrative burden, compliance costs and legal difficulties.\u201d The U.S. Congress estimated that Fatca would raise up to $1 billion a year for 10 years after implementation, a cost that banks have argued will be dwarfed by the cost of compliance, which has been estimated at up to $100 million for each multinational bank, according to the European Commission. Algirdas Semeta, the E.U. tax commissioner, said he was confident that the information-sharing deal would help to accomplish the common goal of addressing international tax evasion \u201cin a business-friendly manner.\u201d U.S. Treasury officials say privately that they hope other countries that have raised objections to Fatca, including Canada, Switzerland, China and Japan, will see the benefits of the approach announced Wednesday and that the agreement is almost certain to expand. They say discussions with other countries are continuing. The necessity of getting China on board for any such global deal is evident, as evidenced by Beijing\u2019s announcement this week that it had forbidden its airlines to participate in an E.U. carbon tax program. Li Xinghao, a spokesman for the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said last month of Fatca that \u201cunless the law is modified, the China Banking Regulatory Commission has no right to mandate Chinese banks to disclose account information of U.S. clients to the U.S. taxing authorities.\u201d The agreements with the European countries will not provide an exemption from Fatca for any jurisdiction, but if a country were to oblige all of its financial institutions to automatically hand over all account data related to Americans, then it could obtain blanket exemption for its banks to transfer funds between themselves without being subject to the so-called pass-through payment withholding requirement for transactions with noncompliant institutions. The pass-through payment measure has been one of the elements most hotly contested by the financial industry. The announcement Wednesday came as the I.R.S. proposed rules to implement the law in a 388-page document that addressed some of the criticisms. Douglas H. Shulman, the I.R.S. commissioner, acknowledged in a statement that compliance \u201ccreates a significant undertaking for financial institutions,\u201d and said the proposed regulations \u201creflect our commitment to take into account the implementation challenges of affected financial institutions while allowing for a smooth and timely rollout of the law.\u201d Denise Hintzke, head of the global tax compliance initiative at Deloitte in New York, said the rules included extending some compliance deadlines and allowing greater use of computerized searches of existing accounts for signs of American connections. Fatca has also been criticized by American expatriates because it imposes new reporting requirements. Some have said it makes Americans less attractive as clients for financial institutions, raising the cost of doing business overseas. Those criticisms were not addressed in the proposed rules. Brian Knowlton reported from Washington. Mia Li contributed from Beijing.", "keyword": "Tax Evasion;Europe;United States;Internal Revenue Service;France;Italy;Germany;Great Britain;Spain"}
{"id": "ny0240552", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/12/24", "title": "Two Losses Put Illinois\u2019s Dedication in Question", "abstract": "Steam seemed to be rising from Coach Bruce Weber\u2019s head as he assessed the unthinkable: a 57-54 beating his University of Illinois basketball team had just taken from its outmanned in-state rival Illinois-Chicago last Saturday at the United Center. Flaunting a 10-1 record, a seven-game winning streak and a No. 12 national ranking coming in, the Illini appeared listless and bored against the struggling Flames (4-7), a Horizon League midmajor under a first-year coach, Howard Moore, and lost to them for the first time in 20 years. \u201cWe froze down the stretch and didn\u2019t make plays,\u201d Weber said, visibly irritated. \u201cWe played like we were worried about losing rather than taking the game to them.\u201d The effort, Weber conceded, just wasn\u2019t there, and that was an affront to him. The Big Ten, regardless of what it calls its divisions in a planned realignment, is a grown-up\u2019s league. Weber has logged 25 years in it, the first 18 as an assistant under gruff Gene Keady at blue-collar Purdue. He believes teams succeed by grinding down opponents, outworking, outthinking and outhustling them. \u201cOur approach to practice finally caught up with us,\u201d Weber said. Jerrance Howard, an assistant coach, had a more extreme reaction. \u201cThe most embarrassing loss in the history of Illinois basketball,\u201d he declared . A tough opponent in a high-energy building provided an intriguing setting for a bounce-back game four nights later, but it proved less than ideal. Illinois took another step in the wrong direction Wednesday, falling to Missouri, 75-64, before a divided house of 21,906 at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis. So with a week off before the start of Big Ten play, Illinois finds itself with a 10-3 record, a two-game losing streak, and some doubt as to its capabilities. Weber was less critical of the Illini\u2019s effort against Missouri than he was of a strange call that set up a six-point possession for the Tigers: An intentional foul against Mike Tisdale rewarded Lawrence Bowers with two free throws, plus the layup he made despite Tisdale\u2019s half-hearted effort to impede him. Missouri retained possession, and Marcus Denmon converted a layup on the inbounds play. Weber then drew a technical foul as he continued to fume over the call on Tisdale. Denmon made two free throws to complete an eight-point, 14-second flurry that decided what had been a back-and-forth game. \u201cBeing a top 10 team by Christmas was one of our goals,\u201d Weber said. \u201cThat\u2019s obviously not going to happen. Leadership is always tested when things go bad.\u201d Leadership should not be an issue for the Illini \u2014 seniors Demetri McCamey, Mike Davis and Tisdale are experienced hands who have appeared in 353 games and made 261 starts at Illinois. Weber has rounded out his roster with some of the biggest names from the Illinois high school ranks, dispelling talk-show grousing that he can\u2019t recruit top-level homegrown talent. Derrick Rose, Jon Scheyer, Sherron Collins, Jacob Pullen and other Chicago-area prep stars made their college bones elsewhere, true. But current sophomore D. J. Richardson, from Peoria, and freshman Jereme Richmond, of Waukegan, were high school All-Americans. Richmond, the consensus player of the year in Illinois last season, committed to the Illini as a ninth-grader. Michael Shaw, a skilled power forward from Chicago\u2019s De La Salle Institute, headlines a flashy incoming class for 2011-12. But young stars who have been fawned over, catered to and offered scholarships since adolescence don\u2019t always function as role players. A sense of entitlement sometimes blinds them to the need to bring maximum effort every night in an environment as competitive as the Big Ten. McCamey, with his tendency to drift in and out of a dominant role at point guard, embodies the state of the team. Against Missouri, 8 of his 14 points came during a fast-paced second-half sequence that featured the most entertaining basketball of the night. Down the stretch he managed just two quiet points as the Tigers closed out the game with a 23-7 run. \u201cWe\u2019ve lost our sense of urgency,\u201d McCamey said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t been pushing each other. We\u2019ve been relaxed, a little soft. The seniors have to get it back on track. With the Big Ten season coming, we\u2019ve got to get back to being hard-nosed.\u201d Weber is a smart coach who always seemed at his best with tough-minded overachievers who competed every night, played hard and regarded losing as unacceptable. A star-packed roster is a departure for him. But missing the N.C.A.A. tournament will change a man\u2019s thinking. It has happened to Illinois in two of the last three years. Illinois has beaten Gonzaga, Maryland and North Carolina while compiling 10 wins against a nonconference schedule that will look good on a tournament r\u00e9sum\u00e9. In the Big Ten, only Ohio State has separated itself from the pack, but there are enough teams at or close to Illinois\u2019 level that it could finish anywhere from second to eighth. \u201cWe have talent, there\u2019s no doubt,\u201d Weber said. \u201cBut are we going to be a good team? It\u2019s up to them. They\u2019ve got to want it. If I want it more than they do, we\u2019re in trouble.\u201d", "keyword": "Weber Bruce (1956- );College Athletics;Basketball;NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);University of Illinois;Chicago (Ill)"}
{"id": "ny0238042", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/06/23", "title": "Panel Throws Out Suit by Man Who Fell on Track", "abstract": "A jury said he deserved $2.3 million, but an appeals court panel on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit filed by a man who lost part of his leg after he fell into the path of a subway train while drunk. The jurors did not have enough evidence to conclude that the motorman could have stopped the train before it hit the man, Dustin Dibble, in April 2006, a state Appellate Division panel said. Mr. Dibble, 26, lost part of his right leg in the accident at Union Square station. He had been out with friends watching ice hockey at a bar, according to his lawyer, and said he was too drunk to remember how he ended up on the tracks or anything about the accident. Jurors last year found that Mr. Dibble bore some responsibility for his injury, but they put most of the blame on New York City Transit, which runs the city\u2019s buses and subways. \u201cThe jury\u2019s determination that the accident could have been avoided was based on nothing more than a series of estimated stopping distances,\u201d the judges wrote in the ruling on Tuesday. The motorman died before the trial but had testified that he initially saw a lump that \u201clooked like garbage,\u201d and did not immediately stop because debris is common on the tracks. He said he stopped a few seconds later after seeing the object move. Mr. Dibble\u2019s lawyer, Andrew Smiley, said the appeals court had intruded on a question it should have left to the jury. \u201cThe issue was whether or not he should have stopped upon seeing a mass on the tracks,\u201d Mr. Smiley said. \u201cThat was an issue for the jury to decide, and they decided he shouldn\u2019t have been mistaken for a piece of garbage.\u201d He said that Mr. Dibble intended to appeal. The transit agency said it was pleased with the ruling. It said in a statement that the public should not have to compensate people who \u201cplace themselves in positions of obvious danger through their own reckless conduct.\u201d", "keyword": "Accidents and Safety;Subways;Decisions and Verdicts;Union Square (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0005523", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/04/12", "title": "GTT \u2605", "abstract": "Our quirky, discerning picks for the most interesting things to do around the state this week. LLANO Keep On Truckin\u2019 In the mid 1990s, S. R. Bindler was at home in Longview during his summer break from film school in New York. After leaving a bar late one night, he stumbled upon a curious scene at the local Nissan dealership. People were crowded around a pickup truck, one hand pressed to its body, trying to maintain contact despite the exhaustion of having already stood there for a couple of days \u2014 yes, days. The scene became the basis of Mr. Bindler\u2019s 1997 documentary \u201cHands on a Hardbody,\u201d which follows 24 colorful Piney Woods contestants competing to win the truck in an endurance test to see who can keep his or her hand on the vehicle the longest. (The winner in his film lasted 77 hours.) \u201cSome wanted the truck for the truck,\u201d Mr. Bindler, known as Robb, said. \u201cSome wanted the truck for what the truck could bring to them: just raw dollars. Some wanted to sell the truck and buy a different truck. And some wanted to sell the truck to pay bills.\u201d The movie has spawned similar oddball contests and even a stage adaptation that recently opened on Broadway. To commemorate the release of a new DVD featuring 86 additional minutes of interviews with the contestants, a restored version of the film will be screened in various Texas cities. \u201cThe irony of the contest is that it concerns the American dream, win something for nothing,\u201d Mr. Bindler said. \u201cAnd yet it\u2019s a Japanese truck.\u201d Lantex Theater, April 12, 7 p.m., handsonahard bodythemovie.com . GRAND PRAIRIE Out of the Gates The Kentucky Derby, the first installment in the Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing, is just three weeks away. People know that the thing to do is dress in preppy springtime clothes and sip mint juleps, the Derby\u2019s official drink. But many people know little to nothing about racing. Now they can get acquainted with the relationship between the horses and their jockeys at Lone Star Park, where the spring thoroughbred season opens this weekend with Texas-bred 3-year-olds and older. Learn racing terms like furlong and trifecta, and do it from the newly renovated dining terraces. . Outlandish hats optional. Lone Star Park, April 12-July 6, lonestarpark.com . DALLAS Preserve the Reserve A lot of people take water for granted. Unless the utility bill goes unpaid, there\u2019s no reason to think that it won\u2019t flow freely from your faucet. But the supply of this precious resource is dwindling as demand increases. While state leaders are proposing legislation to address water conservation and to allocate financing to build new reservoirs, individuals are being asked to scale back their personal use. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in a drought for so long and entertaining a perpetual drought that could put us back in something like the Dust Bowl,\u201d said Sahar Sea of the Trinity River Audubon Center, the host of \u201cWater in Texas,\u201d a town hall presentation featuring speakers from the Texas Conservation Alliance and Dallas Water Utilities. It will try to get to the bottom of Ms. Sea\u2019s $64,000 question, \u201cIn 20 years, where\u2019s the water going to come from?\u201d Trinity River Audubon Center, April 18, 7 p.m., trinityriver audubon.org. AUSTIN Like Family The Old Settler\u2019s Music Festival, four days of Americana bands including the Gourds, Son Volt and Carolina Chocolate Drops, fosters a community spirit hard to find in the era of megafestivals. When Sarah Jarosz, a singer and multi-instrumentalist from Wimberley, was just 10 and part of the band Spurs of the Moment, a spellbound audience embraced her. And she went on to become a Grammy-nominated solo act. Meanwhile, marquee musicians have been known to unlock the hidden musical talents of festivalgoers; Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead engaged in late-night jam sessions with his fans in the campgrounds. And one couple who met at Old Settler\u2019s later returned to get married in front of 2,000 people. The Salt Lick BBQ Pavilion & Camp Ben McCulloch, April 18-21, oldsettlersmusicfest.org . IRVING Daddy\u2019s Girl When Kelly Carlin, daughter of the comic George Carlin, goes onstage for \u201cA Carlin Home Companion\u201d and explains her complicated relationship with her outspoken father, she will draw on her insight as a Jungian psychotherapist to delve into her childhood memories. Irving Arts Center, April 18, 7:30 p.m., thekellycarlinsite.com . AUSTIN Capital C for Country Wayne Hancock, the Denton honky-tonk musician, will return to Austin, his former home, in support of \u201cRide,\u201d a new album that glues together the old and new country (ripped apart recently by Blake Shelton), with rocking electric guitar to update a voice often compared to Hank Williams Sr.\u2019s. The White Horse, April 13, 9 p.m., waynehancock.com .", "keyword": "Rock music;Documentaries;Horse racing;National Audubon Society;Kelly Carlin;George Carlin;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0029881", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/06/27", "title": "9 Points, 4 Goals and Looking Ahead", "abstract": "What a month. It\u2019s truly hard to put into words how exciting and memorable June has been for me. The obvious thrill came three times over when my United States teammates and I pulled off huge victories against Jamaica, Panama and Honduras in World Cup qualifying. Getting those nine points and earning a spot alone atop the Hex was huge in our quest to make that coveted trip to Brazil next year. I think it\u2019s safe to say \u2014 and obvious for those watching us \u2014 that we\u2019ve really continued to develop a chemistry with one another and grown as a team with each match. I know I see and feel it, so hopefully the fans and soccer pundits have noticed the improvement from the start of camp to where we are currently as a team. It won\u2019t be for another few months or so that we come together again, so hopefully we pick up where we left off in Utah and remember what helped us get such positive results. Personally, it goes without saying those games were extremely important. Scoring for my country in all three qualifiers, as well in the US Soccer Centennial friendly against Germany, was simply great and showed how well we are clicking as an offensive unit. At that level of play, we aren\u2019t going to get an abundant amount of quality scoring opportunities. So finding the back of the next was satisfying and hopefully made the fans proud. As I finish this latest blog entry back home in Florida, I\u2019m getting ready for my trip to New York City for a bunch of appearances, interviews and other events. I was set to participate in a special event, highlighted by a charity auction, at the Astor Center, which was held Wednesday, where athletes and some of the country\u2019s most decorated chefs joined forces with the Partnership at Drugfree.org to raise awareness for the organization. I put together a great package for the auction with my New York Red Bulls family, so I\u2019m excited to see how much money we can raise for the organization. On Thursday, I am doing something I truly love and that\u2019s meeting fans. I will be at Upper 90 soccer store for an autograph-signing session from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at its Upper West Side location. There will be a suggested donation for items being signed, with all the money raised going toward projects with the Jozy Altidore Foundation. Until then, it\u2019s back to packing and getting in that \u201cEmpire State of Mind\u201d (cue Jay-Z and Alicia Keys). As always, thank you for the continued support for me and my teammates. Our fans and supporters are truly amazing. I can\u2019t wait to get back on the field later this summer wearing the red, white and blue. Striker Jozy Altidore scored more than 30 goals last season for AZ in the Netherlands. Follow him on Twitter .", "keyword": "United States Soccer Federation;2014 World Cup;Philanthropy"}
{"id": "ny0158213", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/12/29", "title": "Spain Offers Citizenship to Exiles\u2019 Kin", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 The descendants of those exiled from Spain during the Spanish Civil War and the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco may claim Spanish citizenship under legislation that went into effect over the weekend. The Spanish government expects half a million people, many of them in Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, to file for citizenship under the new measure, the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds reported. A government spokesman was not immediately able to confirm the figure on Sunday. The citizenship law covers the period from July 18, 1936, to Dec. 31, 1955, which includes the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 and the first decades of the fascist dictatorship, which ended with Franco\u2019s death in 1975. The act is part of the \u201claw of historical memory,\u201d a landmark and controversial piece of legislation passed last year by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Jos\u00e9 Luis Rodr\u00edguez Zapatero aimed at encouraging Spain to resolve issues from its bloody 20th-century history. The law also provides public financing to unearth the mass graves in which thousands of Spaniards were buried during the war. It also requires the removal of many symbols from the Franco dictatorship from state buildings and public spaces. Those applying for citizenship must present proof of their parents\u2019 or grandparents\u2019 place and date of birth, according to the Web site of the Spanish Justice Ministry . The government plans to accept applications until December 2010. Those deemed eligible would not have to renounce their other citizenship.", "keyword": "Spain;Spanish Civil War (1936-39);Citizenship;Franco Francisco"}
{"id": "ny0152571", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/08/15", "title": "Back-to-School Discounts Are Deeper, More Creative", "abstract": "Parents shopping for back-to-school gear could be forgiven for walking into a store nowadays and thinking they have gone through a time warp. With 1930s prices for pens, glue, notebooks and even T-shirts, the season seems more \u201cBack to the Future\u201d than back to school. A penny these days buys eight No. 2 pencils at Staples or a wooden ruler at OfficeMax. Fifty cents buys a watercolor set at Target. A box of 24 Crayola crayons is the cost of a gumball \u2014 25 cents. Or, as Sharon Hartley, vice president for United States marketing and sales for Crayola, put it: \u201cSixteen boxes of a 24-pack equals a gallon of gas.\u201d Such pocket-change bargains, known as loss leaders, are not a novel strategy for retailers, of course. But in the first back-to-school season since the economy weakened considerably, the discounts are earlier, deeper and more creative than in previous years. Staples, for instance, has offered one-cent deals before, though this is the first year the retailer is giving away products, like Elmer\u2019s glue. Thrift is the theme this back-to-school year: people are spending less, consolidating shopping trips, forgoing discretionary items and going without new wardrobes and backpacks. And stores are trying to play to the public mood. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a much higher prevalence of those types of big attention-grabber promotions this season,\u201d said Stacy Janiak, an analyst with Deloitte. \u201cThe one-cent deals, the bundling of products or three-for-two deals. I\u2019ve seen a lot of that, much more than in the past.\u201d Loss leaders are called that because by selling items at a loss or even giving them away, stores can lure in shoppers who will buy other, more profitable items. Drawn by the prospect of free glue, Laura Janowski, 23, stocked up on school supplies for her siblings, 12 and 14, at a Staples store in Rolling Meadows, Ill., this week. \u201cNow, I just need to find the 9-cent filler paper and 33-cent index cards,\u201d she said. Even as consumers visit stores like Staples, lured in by the penny deals, they are doing much of their shopping at discount and off-price retailers. There they can buy everything from sneakers to paperclips, and prices are low throughout the store, not just on a few select items. \u201cWith the high price of gas and food this summer, it is absolutely necessary for me to try to save money on back-to-school shopping,\u201d said Jennifer Lee, a mother of three, ages 9, 12 and 15, as she loaded her minivan with bags of folders and binders from a Wal-Mart in Rolling Meadows, Ill. \u201cThat means reusing last year\u2019s scissors and markers, and even the old spiral notebooks that have only a few pages used.\u201d Ms. Janiak of Deloitte said 71 percent of households would cut their spending on back-to-school items this year, with 48 percent planning to reduce spending by more than $100. Deborah Weinswig, an analyst with Citigroup, said 75 percent of consumers planned to spend less than $400 on back-to-school shopping, up from 45 percent last year. \u201cEveryone is just much more price focused,\u201d Ms. Weinswig said. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Wal-Mart on Thursday announced record earnings for the three months ending in July and raised its full-year earnings forecast to $3.43 to $3.50 a share, up from $3.30 to $3.43. The bargain retailer\u2019s profit rose to $3.4 billion, or 87 cents a share, up from $2.9 billion, or 72 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales at American stores open at least a year, known as same-store sales and a measure of retail health, rose to 4.5 percent (not including fuel) for the quarter, up from 1.9 percent last year. \u201cTheir sweet spot within the customer framework are items below $10 and items that customers are familiar with,\u201d said Bill Dreher, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities. \u201cIt\u2019s working.\u201d Wal-Mart has been offering back-to-school deals like a week\u2019s worth of children\u2019s outfits (five tops and five bottoms) for $60, though it too is selling school supplies for pennies. \u201cYou have a series of wow items,\u201d John Simley, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said this week. \u201cPeople are coming in expecting to buy a notebook. But 5 cents for a notebook? You can get 20 for a buck.\u201d Andrew Schneider, director of global brand management for Staples, said compelling penny offers bring customers into stores. \u201cAnd they then will discover the wide range of products we have,\u201d he said. Analysts agree that in an economic downturn penny deals help retailers retain, if not gain, customers. More important, the eye-popping deals can keep a retailer at the top of consumers\u2019 minds. \u201cCan you afford to sell something for a penny?,\u201d said Marshal Cohen, NPD Group\u2019s chief industry analyst. \u201cThe answer is, you can\u2019t afford not to.\u201d In addition to price, a big appeal of discounters is that they offer one-stop shopping, saving consumers fuel. \u201cI think everybody thinks twice about heading out,\u201d said Debbie Pinciotto as she led a gaggle of teenage girls on a scavenger hunt through Westfield Sunrise mall in Massapequa, N.Y. She plans to do the bulk of her back-to-school clothing shopping in a few weeks, after her older daughter receives her birthday presents. \u201cWhen she gets the gift cards, we\u2019ll go,\u201d Ms. Pinciotto said. Many consumers, not content with bargain school supplies, are planning to use discount cards being mailed out by the likes of Kohl\u2019s and J. C. Penney, which this week announced a rewards a program that allows customers to earn points from purchases and receive members-only benefits. Analysts said apparel sales would suffer this season as parents send children back to school in last year\u2019s clothes. Those that do buy new gear will use rewards cards and coupons in September, even October, when the weather cools and their children have determined what fashions are in vogue. Two department stores on Thursday released earnings reports for the three months ending Aug. 2, illustrating the disparity between discount retailers and department stores. Nordstrom, the luxury chain, reported a 21 percent decline in profit to $143 million, or 65 cents a share, down from $180 million, or 71 cents a share, a year earlier. Same-store sales decreased 6 percent for the quarter. The company\u2019s lower-priced Nordstrom Rack stores fared well with same-store sales increasing 6.3 percent for the quarter. Its full-price stores struggled, however, with same-stores sales decreasing 9 percent in the quarter. Kohl\u2019s profit decreased 12 percent to $236 million, or 77 cents a share, down from $269 million, or 83 cents a share, a year earlier. Same store sales for the quarter decreased 4.6 percent. In a conference call with investors, Wes McDonald, Kohl\u2019s chief financial officer, said that of all the marketing areas the company was concentrating on, the most important was \u201cemphasizing value in all our advertising.\u201d While it is unlikely back-to-school clothes will be sold for pocket change, consumers should expect to see more sales and rewards programs as summer turns to fall. \u201cThe consumer knows they\u2019re in the driver\u2019s seat,\u201d said Mr. Cohen of NPD Group. \u201cThe retailer\u2019s going to blink first.\u201d", "keyword": "Retail Stores and Trade;Consumer Behavior;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)"}
{"id": "ny0255735", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/09/13", "title": "Couple Who Ran Emperor\u2019s Club VIP, Tied to Spitzer, Have New Venture", "abstract": "An untold number of customers were willing to pay $5,000 an hour for an escort from Emperor\u2019s Club VIP , the Internet prostitution ring run by a 62-year-old former Israeli tax official and his bubbly 20-something girlfriend that in 2008 helped end the political career of Eliot Spitzer, also known then as Client No. 9. But as yet it is unclear whether business will be as brisk for the latest Internet venture that this unusual couple \u2014 now both out of prison and married last summer \u2014 have undertaken: an empowerment seminar for which they will be asking $35,000 a person. The course and the book at its center, \u201cThe Science of Activating Your Supreme Power,\u201d are written by Mark Brener and Cecil Suwal \u2014 once Internet procurers, then, in relatively short order, federal defendants, federal inmates, man and wife and now empowerment entrepreneurs. Their One World Initiative , billed as \u201cthe perspective that unifies the world\u2019s diverse religions and beliefs,\u201d is nothing if not ambitious. Its Web site's headings include \u201cSupercharge Key Relationships,\u201d \u201cRise Above the Competition,\u201d \u201cBe Rich Forever\u201d and \u201cLook and Feel Half your Age.\u201d The book, published last month by CBN Media, according to Amazon, offers even more. \u201cTransform your relationships into oases of bliss, love and emotional support,\u201d the promotional copy on the Web site says. \u201cGenerate additional millions and billions in financial wealth; and have the mind-set that allows you to fully enjoy it.\u201d Indeed, it seems there is little that the book does not offer, if you read the promotional copy. \u201cBecome immortal and adore every minute of it,\u201d it continues. \u201cLive the life of your dreams.\u201d Ms. Suwal, who has a seemingly irrepressible giggle, acknowledged in a telephone interview on Monday night that some people might find it surprising that she and Mr. Brener, who were married in August 2010, had undertaken this new venture. \u201cIt may seem that way,\u201d she said, \u201cbut like anyone else, Mark and I have many facets to our personalities, and this is something we\u2019ve been into for years.\u201d She pointed to the old Emperor\u2019s VIP Web site, which she said even then reflected a measure of their philosophy, and quoted from some of the marketing copy that graced the gauzy photographs of women in lingerie: \u201cOur goal is to make life more peaceful, balanced, beautiful and meaningful.\u201d Mr. Brener, to whom she eventually passed the phone, said he did not expect to offer the empowerment seminar for six months or so, by which time, he said, he expected the book would be widely read and \u201cpeople who can afford it will definitely contact us.\u201d The underlying ideas, he said, were refined in prison \u2014 he was released in May 2010 and she in November 2009 \u2014 where he read a great deal, including meditations by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson and the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl . \u201cI was thinking about, basically, there is a pattern in this world if we start thinking about crossing the desert or being in the wilderness and we found ourselves \u2014 right? \u2014 in very similar situation, we were under enormous pressure,\u201d he said. \u201cAnxiety, depression, for a number of months, and after that we found ourselves time that we can think, analyze and basically the outcome from our perspective, it\u2019s very positive,\u201d he continued. \u201cI would say it was like \u2014 because I was reading a lot when I was in prison \u2014 it is like diamonds; they\u2019ve always been created under pressure and fire and heat.\u201d Asked about the cost of the seminar, which appears to include a provision that participants will give 3 percent of the first $1 million they earn as a result of having taken the course to Ms. Suwal and Mr. Brener, Ms. Suwal said, \u201cWell you know, it\u2019s not really that far from a lot of industry standards.\u201d", "keyword": "Brener Mark;Suwal Cecil;Emperor's Club VIP;Computers and the Internet;Science of Activating Your Supreme Power The (Book)"}
{"id": "ny0076762", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/05/26", "title": "Cleveland Reaches Settlement With Justice Department Over Police Conduct", "abstract": "CLEVELAND \u2014 Cleveland has reached a settlement with the Justice Department over what federal authorities said was a pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive use of force, people briefed on the case said Monday. The settlement, which could be announced as early as Tuesday, comes days after a judge declared a Cleveland police officer not guilty of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a car\u2019s two unarmed occupants, both of them black. The verdict prompted a day and night of protests and reignited discussions about how police officers treat the city\u2019s African-American residents. The details of the settlement were not immediately clear, but in similar talks in recent years, the Justice Department has required cities to allow independent monitors to oversee changes in police departments. Settlements are typically backed by court orders and often call for improved training and revised policies for the use of force. A spokeswoman for the Cleveland Division of Police referred questions to the mayor\u2019s office, which would not comment on Monday. Dena Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also had no comment. The Justice Department opened an inquiry into the Cleveland police force months after the 2012 shooting of the unarmed occupants in a car, and issued its report in December. Cleveland is among several cities, including Ferguson, Mo., New York and Baltimore, that have become focal points of a national debate over policing and race. On Saturday, demonstrators spent hours marching through Cleveland after a judge acquitted Officer Michael Brelo of manslaughter for his role in the 2012 shooting, which began with a police chase of the car. While several officers fired a combined 137 shots, Officer Brelo was singled out for manslaughter charges because he climbed onto the hood of the car after the pursuit ended and fired 15 shots into the vehicle. Video A Cleveland police officer who climbed onto the hood of a car after a chase and fired repeatedly at its unarmed occupants in 2012 was acquitted of manslaughter on Saturday by an Ohio judge. Credit Credit Tony Dejak/Associated Press The occupants, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, died from gunshot wounds. The judge ruled that the actions of Officer Brelo, who is white, were lawful. Cleveland\u2019s streets have stayed calm since Saturday, when the police reported 71 arrests, some on felony charges. Dozens of protesters appeared in court here Monday on misdemeanor charges. Some still wore T-shirts with messages like \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe,\u201d a reference to Eric Garner, who died after being put in a police chokehold in Staten Island last year, and \u201cBlack Lives Matter.\u201d For Cleveland, a settlement with the Justice Department averts a long and costly court fight and the appearance that city leaders are resisting change. Mayor Frank Jackson faces a recall petition from city activists who say, among other grievances, that he has not done enough to prevent police abuses. The Justice Department has called Mr. Jackson a full partner in its effort to improve the police force. The Justice Department has opened nearly two dozen investigations into police departments under the Obama administration. Federal investigators found patterns of unconstitutional policing in cities including Seattle, Newark, Albuquerque and Ferguson. Federal authorities recently announced they would investigate the Baltimore police after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died of injuries he suffered while in custody. In Seattle, the federal inquiry led local officials to overhaul training and focus on how officers can calm tense situations without using force. In Albuquerque, city officials agreed to change the way the police are trained, outfit officers with body cameras and improve how the department investigates officer-involved shootings. Officials in Ferguson are negotiating a possible settlement over accusations that officers routinely violated the Constitution. The Justice Department\u2019s report on the Cleveland police was among its most scathing, finding that they engaged in a pattern of \u201cunreasonable and unnecessary use of force.\u201d Image Mayor Frank Jackson and Police Chief Calvin Williams held a news conference Sunday after Officer Michael Brelo\u2019s acquittal. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times Investigators said officers unnecessarily used deadly force; used excessive force against mentally ill people; and inappropriately resorted to stun guns , chemical sprays and punches. It detailed tactical blunders, and said officers too often imperiled bystanders when they used force. The Justice Department also criticized a \u201cstructurally flawed\u201d discipline policy that it said made it too hard to punish officers for improperly using force. The report highlighted one case in which officers kicked an African-American man in the head while he was handcuffed and on the ground, then did not report having used force during the arrest. \u201cSupervisors throughout the chain of command endorse questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers,\u201d Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department\u2019s top civil rights prosecutor, said in December. \u201cOfficers are not provided with adequate training, policy guidance and supervision to do their jobs safely and effectively.\u201d The report was compiled too early to cover the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a replica gun in a Cleveland park in November when the police shot him. Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to charge officers in his death or in the case of Tanisha Anderson, 37, who died after she was restrained in a prone position on the pavement. Most of the protesters arraigned Monday were charged with refusal to disperse, and 35 pleaded no contest to an amended charge of disorderly conduct, which carries no jail time. Twenty people pleaded not guilty and will contest the charges. More protesters are expected to appear in court on Tuesday. Talis Gage, 31, a Cleveland native now living in a different part of Ohio, was among those who pleaded no contest and was released Monday morning. As with others who pleaded no contest, he was sentenced to time served and was not issued a fine. Mr. Gage said he joined the Saturday protest because he believed that Officer Brelo was guilty of a crime. \u201cWhat happened was not justice,\u201d Mr. Gage said outside the courthouse shortly after his release. \u201cIt was unfair for this man to walk away with no jail time at all.\u201d", "keyword": "Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Michael Brelo;Cleveland;Justice Department;Civil Unrest"}
{"id": "ny0270439", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2016/04/06", "title": "Flashes of Cards and of Brilliance as Su\u00e1rez\u2019s Barcelona Edges Torres\u2019s Atl\u00e9tico", "abstract": "BARCELONA Once upon a time, there was a mercurial forward who played for Liverpool. The forward, Fernando Torres, a Spanish scorer, arrived at that Merseyside club in 2007. He proceeded to score plenty of goals, help Liverpool get agonizingly close to glory and, also, prove to be maddeningly inconsistent from game to game. He left the club in 2011, and not long after, he found himself playing in Spain. Once upon (another) time, there was another mercurial forward who played for Liverpool. The forward, Luis Su\u00e1rez, a Uruguayan scorer, arrived at the Merseyside club in 2011. He proceeded to score plenty of goals, help Liverpool get agonizingly close \u2014 really, really close \u2014 to glory and, also, prove to be maddeningly unpredictable in how he behaved on the field. He left the club in 2014, and not long after, he found himself playing in Spain. On Tuesday, in a remarkable display of soccer as mini-biography, Torres and Su\u00e1rez offered compressed career compilations during the Champions League quarterfinal first leg between Barcelona and Atl\u00e9tico Madrid. First, there was Torres, who managed to look lethargic, brilliant and foolish in the space of just 10 minutes as he slumbered into the game, scored the opening goal and then was sent off well before halftime for a second yellow card. Then there was Su\u00e1rez, who appeared petulant, threatening, opportunistic, petulant (again) and lethal throughout the match \u2014 all while somehow avoiding a red card of his own \u2014 before scoring both of his team\u2019s goals as Barcelona beat Atl\u00e9tico, 2-1, at Camp Nou. The return leg is next week in Madrid, though Torres will not take part after he picked up yellow cards for two ill-advised fouls that left the German referee Felix Brych with little choice but to send him walking. English fans (of Liverpool, and Chelsea, too) will forever remember Torres\u2019s fits of brilliance mixed with spells of invisibility, but his performance Tuesday was particularly bizarre: \u25a0 20th minute: Torres looks largely uninterested, failing to complete several passes and plodding around the field. \u25a0 25th minute: Torres runs on to a beautiful through pass from Koke and rifles a shot through the legs of Barcelona\u2019s goalkeeper to give Atl\u00e9tico a surprise lead on the road. \u25a0 29th minute: Torres catches Neymar with his arm, largely unnecessarily, and draws a yellow card. \u25a0 32nd minute: Torres plays a great pass to Antoine Griezmann that nearly results in a second Atl\u00e9tico goal. \u25a0 35th minute: Torres runs through the back of Sergio Busquets, who is facing his own goal at the time, and is given a second yellow card and ejected. His departure forces Atl\u00e9tico to play nearly an hour down a man. Diego Simeone, the Atl\u00e9tico manager, was not especially subtle in defending Torres after the match \u2014 he hinted in his news conference that Brych had missed many other important decisions \u2014 but it was difficult to believe he didn\u2019t understand why Torres was sent off. \u201cI am not saying all that I could say,\u201d Simeone said. Regardless, Torres left early and the game tipped toward Barcelona. Many in the crowd were surely hoping for a different home star to score a meaningful goal; Lionel Messi arrived at the match with 499 career goals for club and country and nearly scored No. 500 with a brilliant overhead kick in the second half. But instead the fans saw a vintage Su\u00e1rez performance that showcased all of the striker\u2019s risks and rewards. No, there was no biting; Su\u00e1rez has not trod that path since his third such incident, at the World Cup in Brazil , led to a lengthy suspension. But there were, all the same, flashes of Su\u00e1rez\u2019s moodiness: He appeared to blatantly kick one Atl\u00e9tico player in the first half, and he put his hands on another in the second period with clear malice. On another night, with another referee, Su\u00e1rez might have followed Torres up the tunnel early. Instead, he stayed on the field and produced two important goals as Barcelona seeks to become the first club to win consecutive Champions League trophies. In the 63rd minute, Su\u00e1rez diverted Jordi Alba\u2019s blasted volley \u2014 which was going wide \u2014 into the net from close range, then raced after the ball and carried it back to the center circle in an effort to get the game restarted as quickly as possible. Nine minutes later, his teammate Dani Alves curled in a sharp cross that Su\u00e1rez headed powerfully and straight, the ball flying past goalkeeper Jan Oblak and giving Barcelona a deserved victory. \u201cWe knew there would be a little space, so I stayed close to the area to convert what I could,\u201d Su\u00e1rez said afterward. Then, referring to Torres\u2019s red card, he said: \u201cIt\u2019s a pity. I would have liked to come back against 11.\u201d Barcelona pushed for another goal \u2014 much of the second half resembled a one-sided practice drill, with everyone clustered in front of Atl\u00e9tico\u2019s net \u2014 but Simeone\u2019s players held firm as best they could. After Tuesday\u2019s result, they need only win by 1-0 at home next week to advance on the away-goals rule. That was why, at the final whistle, Barcelona\u2019s players did not celebrate. They have the advantage, to be sure, but Atl\u00e9tico is far from beaten. Messi and Neymar pulled up at the final whistle, exhaling before slapping hands and heading toward the locker room. Su\u00e1rez did the same, clapping toward the Barcelona fans along the way. Even after 90 minutes, he looked primed and focused, as if already thinking about what he might do in the return. Torres, of course, need not bother.", "keyword": "Soccer;Luis Suarez;Fernando Torres;Barcelona Soccer Team;Atletico Madrid Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0166176", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2006/08/28", "title": "Purple, the Color of a Legal Conniption", "abstract": "UNTIL last week, the urge to punch purple dinosaurs in the face was entirely pass\u00e9 \u2014 sort of like wanting to punt Cabbage Patch Dolls or step on Tickle Me Elmo\u2019s windpipe. Such urges, after all, are excusable only when marketing is at its most shrill. (Let it go, man.) But the owners of the Barney character have only themselves to blame if Barney-bashing experiences a renaissance \u2014 particularly among denizens of the Internet, for whom the character has been an object of gleefully malevolent parody, off and on, since the early days of the Web. On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco, filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in New York against Lyons Partnership of Allen, Tex., which owns the Barney brand. The group\u2019s aim is to bring an end to what it characterizes as the partnership\u2019s relentless harassment of Web site owners who parody the Barney character, chiefly through threatening cease-and-desist letters from Lyons\u2019s law firm in New York, Gibney, Anthony & Flaherty. In this case, the foundation, along with the Aiken Gump law firm, is representing Stuart Frankel, a musicologist and freelance computer repair technician in New York who maintains a crude, obscure and inarguably minimalist site claiming that Barney is \u201cthe enemy\u201d ( dustyfeet.com/evil/enemy.html ). There are, in sum, about 200 cryptic words on the entire page, and two small pictures: one of Barney as he normally appears, and another of Barney defaced, amateurishly, with scribbled-on horns and sharp teeth. \u2022The site has been up, more or less unchanged, Mr. Frankel said, since 1998. And yet, Mr. Frankel has received at least four cease-and-desist notices \u2014 with intimations that his Internet service provider might be contacted, or that further \u201clegal remedies\u201d awaited if he did not remove the images \u2014 from one of the Gibney lawyers, Matthew W. Carlin, since 2002. The most recent letter came in June. The foundation has answered those letters on Mr. Frankel\u2019s behalf, pointing out in one response to Mr. Carlin in 2002 that parody is \u201cprotected expression under the First Amendment and a recognized exception to both copyright and trademark law.\u201d The group also suggested that \u201cmaking baseless legal threats\u201d was a no-no. A spokesman from Hit Entertainment, the parent company of Lyons Partnership, would say only that the company would not comment on pending litigation. But it\u2019s clear that somewhere in the company\u2019s chain of command, there is a failure to grasp the cultural tides that brought Barney and the Web together in the first place. After all, for all of its success \u2014 either as instructive idol or potent child opiate, depending on your point of view \u2014 the purple dinosaur exploded onto the American landscape around the same time that the Internet was beginning to permit unprecedented sorts of expression. So as Barney\u2019s signature song \u201cI love you, you love me\u201d (itself, many critics have pointed out, blatantly ripping off the tune to the children\u2019s standard \u201cThis Old Man\u201d) reached an unnerving cultural crescendo, there was on hand a brand new medium in which to indulge the reaction \u2014 one that permitted crafty sorts to include not just words but defaced images, mocked-up songs, crude interactive games and other fare. Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, maintains a useful history of anti-Barney Internet humor \u2014 from the \u201cJihad to Destroy Barney,\u201d which has evolved into a role-playing game, to fictionalized stories and images documenting Barney\u2019s womanizing and crack habit. Of course, the Web was also channeling animosity toward Barney in the offline culture, too. There was heated debate over whether the dinosaur was doling out sound values or peddling a glassy-eyed catechism that merely sedated children. And those without offspring often found the character at best treacly and at worst enraging. In a Massachusetts district court in Worcester in 1994, Deborah McRoy testified that she was wearing a Barney costume outside a local pharmacy when Derrick McMahan suddenly tackled her, knocked her giant dinosaur head off and punched her. The Boston Herald reported that when Ms. McRoy asked him why, she said he replied simply, \u201cBecause I hate Barney.\u201d When the San Diego Chicken \u2014 another costumed creature \u2014 introduced a Barney-like character that he would pummel as part of his routine at sporting events, the Lyons company apparently decided that it had had enough, and sued for trademark violation. In 1998, however, a federal court called the routine a clear parody \u2014 and therefore, not only a protected form of speech, but one unlikely to confuse anyone into thinking this was the \u201creal\u201d trademarked Barney. Not long after this decision, Lyons appeared to turn its attention to Web sites that were making unflattering use of Barney\u2019s likeness \u2014 once going so far as to send threatening letters to the Electronic Frontier Foundation itself for playing host to some Barney parodies. For his part, Mr. Frankel is unsure if it was the San Diego Chicken or news of some other random assault on Barney that spurred him to create his own Web page, but he insists that he has no malice toward the character \u2014 which only adds to the absurdity of the situation. \u201cI was just practicing HTML coding,\u201d Mr. Frankel said, referring to the computer scripting used to create Web pages. He was just learning at the time, he said, back in the late 1990\u2019s, and he thought the reaction to Barney was funny. So he made his little page. By the time Mr. Carlin\u2019s legal letters began arriving several years later, the hostility toward Barney had mostly vanished to the very fringes of the culture \u2014 and the Web \u2014 and Mr. Frankel said he hadn\u2019t even visited his own site for a very long time. \u2022Odds are, no one else had either. There wouldn\u2019t have been much reason to go there. Now, should a court uphold Mr. Frankel\u2019s rights to parody, the site will be forever enshrined as a victory for free speech, and Lyons will have cast a white hot spotlight onto this demon Barney \u2014 and what would otherwise have been a forgotten corner of Internet history \u2014 all by itself. Mr. Frankel said that if the company had simply asked nicely in the beginning, he would have just taken the site down. Instead, he suggested, they came at him like a bully. And Mr. Frankel, who said he was among many citizens beaten by overzealous police officers in New York City\u2019s infamous Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988, said he was not about to be pushed around now by Barney\u2019s bullies. \u201cBarney teaches you to ask nicely,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they don\u2019t follow Barney\u2019s rules.\u201d", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Freedom of Speech and Expression;Suits and Litigation;Electronic Frontier Foundation;Trademarks and Trade Names;Copyrights"}
{"id": "ny0213085", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/03/05", "title": "In Ads From Zappos and Others, the Employee Is Getting the Limelight", "abstract": "A POPULAR new reality series on CBS, \u201cUndercover Boss,\u201d shows senior managers working incognito as everyday employees. As for employees who are not secretly C.E.O.\u2019s, they have champions, too, in marketers that are devoting ad campaigns to workers. The latest marketer to join the trend is Zappos, the online retailer that was recently bought by Amazon. In a campaign scheduled to begin on Monday, Zappos will celebrate its customer service representatives, whom the company refers to as the customer loyalty team. The intent is to demonstrate to potential customers \u2014 and remind current ones \u2014 how the employees make it easy to order or return merchandise, either on Zappos.com or by calling a toll-free number. The campaign, by Mullen in Boston, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies , has a budget estimated at $7 million. The ads reiterate themes that have appeared in previous Zappos campaigns, which include \u201cPowered by service\u201d and \u201cHappy to help. 24/7.\u201d There will be television commercials, print advertisements and video and display ads on Web sites, along with a presence in social media like Facebook and YouTube and on Zappos.com . The ads will also appear in an unusual place where Zappos is already advertising: on the bottoms of plastic bins in airport security lines, reflecting the origins of Zappos as a seller of shoes. The campaign is centered on the interaction during phone calls between Zappos employees and customers. The employees are represented by puppetlike characters who are based on and styled after actual Zappos workers. The characters, called Zappets, resemble Muppets who have been to the theater several times to see \u201cAvenue Q.\u201d The idea is to evoke the offbeat company culture for which Zappos has become known. \u2022 The genesis of the campaign was in observations by Mullen executives who, while competing last year in a review for the Zappos account, visited the company\u2019s headquarters in Henderson, Nev., to spend time with the customer service representatives. \u201cWe sat with them, and we had headphones on, and we listened to the calls and heard how much of the company\u2019s culture seeped through,\u201d said one of those visitors, Alex Leikikh, managing partner and director for account services at Mullen. Another visitor, Mark Wenneker, managing partner and executive creative director at Mullen, said of the employees: \u201cThey would stay on the line for as long as you wanted to talk. They would talk about anything.\u201d According to Aaron Magness, director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, the approach reflects that \u201cour customer loyalty team is not scripted and is not measured on time of calls.\u201d \u201cThe goal is when you see the ads, in TV, print or digital, you\u2019ll say, \u2018That\u2019s the Zappos I know,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Magness said, \u201cor, \u2018That\u2019s a company I want to do business with.\u2019 \u201d Some of the commercials use recordings of calls made to Zappos employees, whose voices are heard in the spots. The words \u201cActual call with Zappos\u201d appear onscreen. The customer service representatives were not aware that the calls were potential fodder for an ad campaign. The calls heard in those commercials were made by actors or Mullen employees posing as customers, asking tough questions or making unusual requests. For instance, in one commercial, a caller tells a customer service representative that she wants to exchange the Nike workout clothes she previously ordered for another Zappos item. The employee looks up the item and says in a neutral, unruffled voice, \u201cThat\u2019s a nice deep fryer.\u201d In another commercial, a caller tells a customer service representative that the dress she ordered the day before has already arrived but that she is \u201cnot really emotionally ready for it yet\u201d and has hidden it in the garage under a tarpaulin. When the caller asks if she can return the dress, the employee says yes, then adds gently, \u201cYou will have to touch the box, though.\u201d Two other commercials feature the voices of actors playing Zappos employees. In both kinds of commercials, the Zappets onscreen are modeled after actual Zappos customer service representatives. The puppets were built by Randy Carfagno and designed by Lizzi Akana and Aaron Duffy. Mr. Duffy also directed the commercials for a production company in New York, Special Guest. Among the other marketers with employee-centric campaigns are Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, Lowe\u2019s, Nationwide Insurance, Toyota Motor Sales USA and Verizon. In some instances, like the campaigns for Lowe\u2019s and Nationwide, the employees are portrayed by actors. Some, like Zappos, use a mix of employees and actors. Others use only real workers. \u2022 The review for the Zappos account, which ended in September when the company hired Mullen, was one of the strangest that Madison Avenue has witnessed recently. It began with 16 agencies, but after word leaked out about the review, \u201cwe ended up getting 190\u201d requests to take part, Mr. Magness said. Of those agencies, 103 submitted material, he added, and about 20 made presentations. Mullen, which was among the 16 original participants, emerged the winner because \u201cwe felt a strong connection to Mullen,\u201d Mr. Magness said. As for the scrumlike aspects of the review, Mr. Wenneker said: \u201cThe fact there were so many agencies inspired us and made us say, \u2018What do we have to do to get this?\u2019 It inspired us to go there, to Henderson.\u201d", "keyword": "Zappos;Advertising and Marketing;Customer Relations;Puppets;Interpublic Group of Companies Incorporated"}
{"id": "ny0241688", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/03/20", "title": "At the L.P.G.A. Founders Cup, Tour\u2019s Past Meets Present", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 After her second shot on the first hole bounced on the fringe of the green and stopped rolling within a foot of the cup, Shirley Spork seemed pleased. \u201cI still have the short game,\u201d she said. Spork , 83, has more than just a short game. Last May on her birthday, she shot her age. Spork is one of the 13 original members of the L.P.G.A. On Thursday, she played in the pro-am of this weekend\u2019s Founders Cup , partnered with Mike Whan, the L.P.G.A. commissioner, at the Wildfire Golf Club. The tournament honors the organization\u2019s beginnings and features appearances by Spork and the two of the other four surviving founders, Louise Suggs and Marilynn Smith. The others, Marlene Bauer and Bettye Danoff, are not attending. \u201cI want to show the women coming up that all this just didn\u2019t happen at once,\u201d Spork said. \u201cI have to give them the history of how we got here.\u201d The Founders Cup is unique among official L.P.G.A. tournaments, and a vast majority of other professional sporting events, in that the entire $1 million purse will go not to the players but to charity: $500,000 to the organization\u2019s program for girls and the rest to charities selected by the top 10 finishers. Golfers will still earn rankings points, and the results will be reflected in the money list. The tournament will also donate $100 for each birdie and $500 for each eagle made on the last four holes to the U.S. Fund for Unicef\u2019s Japan relief efforts. A few players expressed skepticism about the format early on, Whan said, but he added, \u201cNo one has ever questioned the idea of playing for charity.\u201d Cristie Kerr, who is ranked No. 5 in the world, said, \u201cI think the players just wanted more details and wanted to find out where the money is going.\u201d For Spork, every tee box is a reminder of the beginnings of the L.P.G.A. Thirteen of the course\u2019s holes are named for the founders, and on each is a large and white black-and-white photograph of the player. The banners offered Spork a teaching opportunity. On the Patty Berg-designated second hole, she pulled aside M. J. Hur, another of her pro-am playing partners, to tell her about Berg\u2019s life and golf swing. \u201cShe has so many good stories,\u201d Hur, 21, said, smiling. \u201cWhen I see her, I\u2019m viewing the history of the L.P.G.A.\u201d Spork, who finished second in the L.P.G.A. Championship in 1962, has teed up for thousands of rounds of golf in her 71 years of playing. At 11, she bought her first club, a putter, for $1. She caddied at courses in Detroit, her hometown, and later became a master teacher and landed in the L.P.G.A. Teachers Hall of Fame. Spork turned professional in 1950 with the help of Babe Didrikson Zaharias , a pioneering athlete in women\u2019s golf, basketball and track and field. Spork recalled asking Didrikson Zaharias how to move beyond her amateur status. She said Didrikson Zaharias leaned over, tapped Spork on the head and said, \u201cThere, kid, you\u2019re a pro.\u201d Spork has had knee and hip replacements in recent years. She pointed to body parts during Thursday\u2019s round, giving a timeline for each procedure. \u201cThat knee, eight years ago,\u201d she said. \u201cThis hip, that was six years ago.\u201d If there were an L.P.G.A. Mount Rushmore, Spork and her fellow founder Smith would be chiseled on it. They were instrumental in the birth of the organization in 1950. In those days a small band of women barnstormed in caravans from tournament to tournament, the cars crammed with clothes and clubs. Riders in the lead car used colored table tennis paddles to signal those behind. When a certain colored paddle was held out a window, it was time to stop for gas; another meant a stop to eat; yet another, a bathroom break. The women did their own promotions. One night in 1951, Spork and Smith attended a boxing match in Landover, Md., to promote the National Open being held there. Smith was scheduled to address the audience between bouts, but she never made it into the ring. \u201cWe had front row seats and the sweat was flying and blood was squirting out,\u201d Spork said. \u201cMarilynn got woozy from seeing the blood and couldn\u2019t go on. I climbed through the ropes, grabbed the microphone and told them about the L.P.G.A. and come on out and see us play. We didn\u2019t get booed, and I think some came out to see us.\u201d Another promotion involved showing up at small-town minor league baseball games. Standing near home plate, the women arched 9-iron shots into center field. \u201cWe had an item to sell, which was ourselves and our talent,\u201d Spork said. Rolling into a town, they asked business owners to place posters in their windows to advertise a tournament. They popped in on Lions Club and Kiwanis meetings. There was no television coverage then, and only the occasional radio interview. When a tournament concluded, one player was designated to call in scores to the newspapers before the caravan left for the next event. As Spork watched Hur drive a ball down the center of the fairway, she recalled a time when the women adjusted their skirts and hit the ball as far as they could \u2014 though rarely as far as Hur\u2019s drives. \u201cThese young ladies are hitting from the men\u2019s tees and most are hitting 6-irons and wedges for their second shots,\u201d Spork said. \u201cWe were never in that position. If we had their equipment and their trainers and time to build our energy, we would have been able to hit the ball that way.\u201d After the round, Whan said the best part of his day was listening to Spork pass along her knowledge of the organization\u2019s early years. \u201cSometimes we go from tournament to tournament forgetting how it all started,\u201d he said. With the golf over, Spork melted into her second favorite sport: storytelling. Between sips of lemonade and iced tea, she recalled becoming the first female club pro at the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where she gave lessons to a number of luminaries, including Harpo Marx, Danny Kaye, Nat King Cole and Walter Annenberg, the media tycoon and philanthropist. \u201cHe was left-handed and looped the club at the top of his swing,\u201d Spork said of Annenberg. \u201cEvery time I saw him I\u2019d say, \u2018Hey there, Zorro!\u2019 \u201d Spork moved to another tale about another player. \u201cAnd then there\u2019s the one of the golfer who was on a tee, sneezed and both her contacts popped out!\u201d STANFORD LEADS BY THREE Angela Stanford opened a three-stroke lead over Brittany Lincicome in the Founders Cup, shooting her second straight six-under 66. (AP)", "keyword": "Ladies Professional Golf Assn;Golf;Women and Girls;Spork Shirley;Founders Cup (Golf)"}
{"id": "ny0253651", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/10/23", "title": "At First, Fireworks Over the Umpiring", "abstract": "ARLINGTON, Tex. The ball bounced to Elvis Andrus so neatly that Albert Pujols, the runner at first base, peeled off halfway to second. This was as routine as a double-play ball can be. Until it wasn\u2019t. Ian Kinsler, the Texas Rangers second baseman who had earlier made his second error of the World Series, threw high to first baseman Mike Napoli. Matt Holliday, who had hit the ball for the St. Louis Cardinals , could have slid into first to avoid the tag. But he stayed upright, allowing Napoli to whirl and tag him on the shoulder, a step before he crossed the base. Yet Holliday was ruled safe, and he went on to score the first run of a four-run rally in the fourth inning of the Cardinals\u2019 rollicking 16-7 victory in Game 3 at Rangers Ballpark. Pujols made himself the story, tying single-game World Series records for hits, homers and runs batted in. But the blown call at first was a discouraging reminder that baseball can, and should, make the game better. It took a few seconds for people to notice that the first-base umpire, Ron Kulpa, is a St. Louis native. Before the inning was over, someone had updated Kulpa\u2019s Wikipedia page to note that he had made \u201cthe worst call in Major League Baseball history.\u201d Well, about that. Kulpa is the same umpire who did a terrific job in Game 2 when he accurately called Kinsler safe at second on a critical steal in the ninth inning. No Cardinals bias there. And it was not Kulpa \u2014 and certainly not an incoming base runner, either \u2014 who caused Kinsler\u2019s bad throw. After watching a replay, Kulpa acknowledged that he made the wrong call. \u201cI had him on the base at the time of his tag,\u201d he said. \u201cI had a tag, but I had him on the base.\u201d Still, this was not even the most egregious call at first base in a Cardinals World Series game. In the ninth inning of Game 6 in 1985, with St. Louis trying to close out a championship in Kansas City, the umpire Don Denkinger called Jorge Orta safe at first. The Royals capitalized on that mistake, and subsequent blunders by the Cardinals, to win the game and then the series. Denkinger has lived in infamy for that call, never mind his work behind the plate six years later, in Jack Morris\u2019s Game 7 masterpiece. History recalls Denkinger as the goat, just like Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan who interfered with a foul ball in Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. Bartman had nothing to do with the Cubs\u2019 wretched play that immediately followed, but he wears the horns. We do not know if the Rangers will recover to win the World Series and make Kulpa a footnote. Whatever happens, he deserves no blame. The Rangers\u2019 pitching crumbled and the Cardinals\u2019 offense rumbled. Napoli made a two-run throwing error in the top of the fourth, and with a better slide in the bottom of the inning, he might have scored on Kinsler\u2019s fly out to left. This loss was squarely on the Rangers, but Kulpa\u2019s mistake highlights a problem baseball faces every postseason. Missed calls are part of every game, all season long. But they are magnified with increased coverage and viewership. Umpires take a bruising in October, especially with virtual strike zones shown on the screen throughout some playoff games. Commissioner Bud Selig has said he supports that kind of technology, which is to his credit, because it enhances the viewer\u2019s experience. Yet Selig has proceeded too cautiously with instant replay. Since late in the 2008 season, baseball has used instant replay only for boundary calls associated with home runs. Plays on the bases are exempt, even though they, too, could be reviewed the same way. Selig and Joe Torre, baseball\u2019s executive vice president for on-field operations, have said that more instant replay could make games even longer, a legitimate concern. But there has to be a way. Maybe, for the postseason, an umpiring supervisor could be stationed in the press box \u2014 or, better yet, the broadcast truck, with instant access to every camera angle. If a call on the bases is clearly wrong, the supervisor could communicate with the plate umpire before the next at-bat begins. The game deserves better, especially in the postseason, with so much at stake. The umpires deserve better, too. A mistake by a player cannot be reversed by technology. A mistake by an umpire can, if baseball would allow it. In any case, a team that allows 16 runs has no business winning, and in the warm air of their bandbox ballpark, the Rangers were helpless against the best offense in the National League. The Rangers have worked to reverse the stereotype in their DNA as a franchise that must slug its way to win. They won with defense, pitching and heady base running in Game 2 at Busch Stadium, but this was the kind of game they played a decade ago: lots of runs for the Rangers, but lots more for the opposition. As a result of that, not of a bad call by Kulpa, the Rangers find themselves in the same spot as they were against the San Francisco Giants a year ago. They are trailing in the World Series, two games to one, with two more games at home. They lost them both last season and watched the Giants celebrate at their park.", "keyword": "Baseball;World Series;Officiating (Sports);Kulpa Ron;Texas Rangers;St Louis Cardinals;Napoli Mike;Holliday Matt"}
{"id": "ny0192779", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2009/02/24", "title": "Genentech Urges Its Shareholders to Rebuff Roche", "abstract": "Genentech urged its shareholders on Monday to reject a hostile takeover offer from the company\u2019s majority owner, Roche. In a letter to shareholders, a committee of Genentech\u2019s directors said that Roche\u2019s offer of $86.50 a share substantially undervalued the company, given its track record of developing new biotechnology drugs. And the committee accused Roche of being \u201cconsistently dismissive\u201d of efforts to negotiate a deal. The action was expected because the same board committee had rejected an offer of $89 a share that Roche made last July for the 44 percent of Genentech it does not own. Roche early this month began a tender offer at the lower price of $86.50 a share in cash, saying it was dissatisfied with the pace of negotiations since the rejection last summer. The new offer is worth about $42.1 billion in total, down from $43.7 billion for the original offer. In a statement issued Monday, Roche said it would now be up to the shareholders to decide on its tender offer. The offer is scheduled to end March 12, although Roche can extend it. It might be a hard deal to pull off at $86.50. In a survey of 59 Genentech shareholders by Citigroup this month, 92 percent said they would not tender shares at that price. Citigroup said investors appeared willing to accept an offer of $97 a share. The dynamic is expected to change in mid-April, when results are supposed to be available from a clinical trial testing Genentech\u2019s cancer drug Avastin for a new use \u2014 as a treatment for colorectal cancer after surgical removal of the tumor. If the trial is successful, analysts say, Genentech\u2019s stock, which closed Monday at $84.55, might rise to $100 and put a deal out of reach for Roche. If the test fails, analysts say the stock might drop below $70 and Roche\u2019s offer would be much more attractive. Roche recently sold $16 billion in bonds to help finance the transaction. In a lengthy filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, Genentech gave its side of the negotiations with Roche since July. The two companies have argued over whether Genentech\u2019s long-term forecast of its business success was too optimistic. That forecast projects Genentech\u2019s revenue rising to $38.8 billion in 2024, from about $14 billion expected this year. Based on that projection, Genentech\u2019s special board committee, consisting of the three directors who are not employees of either Genentech or Roche, proposed a price of $112 a share. Genentech will meet with investors in New York next Monday to discuss its prospects. \u201cOver the past seven months, the special committee persistently attempted to work constructively with Roche and we were consistent in our stated willingness to negotiate toward a price that recognizes the full value of Genentech,\u201d the committee said in its letter to shareholders. The filing also revealed that Roche began preparing for an acquisition after Genentech had rebuffed its request to amend the relationship between the two companies to make it easier for Roche to increase its stake in Genentech by buying Genentech shares in the open market.", "keyword": "Genentech Inc;Roche Holding Ltd;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures"}
{"id": "ny0142329", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/11/07", "title": "Giants\u2019 Tuck Is Fined for Hit on Cowboys\u2019 Bollinger", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 Justin Tuck was fined $7,500 by the N.F.L. for his roughing-the-passer penalty last Sunday on Brooks Bollinger. \u201cOur job description is basically to destroy a quarterback, but you\u2019ve got to pick and choose how to do it,\u201d said Tuck, who said he would appeal the fine. Tuck was penalized in the third quarter of a 35-14 victory against the Dallas Cowboys for tackling Bollinger as Bollinger threw an incompletion. \u201cYou can\u2019t hit him in the head, you can\u2019t hit him below the knees,\u201d Tuck said. \u201cObviously, you can\u2019t hit him hard, either.\u201d Tuck was penalized for landing on Bollinger with the full force of his 274 pounds. According to Randall Liu, information manager for the National Football Conference, Tuck was fined because \u201che unnecessarily drove the opposing quarterback to the ground.\u201d He said Tuck\u2019s actions violated Rule 12, Section 2, Article 12(2) of the N.F.L.\u2019s official rules. In an e-mail message, Liu said the fine was issued by Gene Washington, the league\u2019s director of football operations. The league has emphasized protection of quarterbacks against rough play to prevent injury, but Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said he did not think the play was worth calling a penalty. \u201cNo, it was not,\u201d Coughlin said Monday. \u201cOn the spot, the official thought it was. The guy was attacking the quarterback. He doesn\u2019t have a checklist that he goes through. It is foolish to continue dialogue about this because it doesn\u2019t settle anything.\u201d EXTRA POINTS James Butler, the Giants strong safety who has a knee injury, practiced on a limited basis Thursday. \u201cHe did some work,\u201d Coach Tom Coughlin said, \u201cbut not a whole lot, to be honest with you.\u201d Sammy Knight is listed as Butler\u2019s backup.", "keyword": "New York Giants;Football;Tuck Justin;Bollinger Brooks;Dallas Cowboys"}
{"id": "ny0278707", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/11/24", "title": "House-Hunting in Hong Kong With the App That Sees Dead People", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 Ship Street is quintessentially Hong Kong, even serving as the backdrop to several local movies. There is a well-preserved three-story building from the 1920s, now a cigar lounge. Next door is a towering glass-and-steel apartment complex. There is a New York-style pizzeria, a pastry shop and a mom-and-pop hardware store. But when viewed through a smartphone camera, Ship Street can look downright creepy. Building on the success of Pok\u00e9mon Go , a local company has created a smartphone app that superimposes property listings on street views. Point your phone at a building and the units for rent or sale pop up, complete with prices. But on occasion, cartoon ghosts appear next to an apartment tower, representing an unnatural or unexplained death that took place there. In Hong Kong, this is a big deal. Many people believe that living in a place where someone committed suicide or, worse, was murdered, brings all sorts of bad fortune. Those units, even years after such a death occurred, are discounted around 20 percent, sometimes 50 percent if the death was particularly gruesome. Real estate is a topic that dominates dinner conversations, newspaper headlines and career choices here. Asif Ghafoor, a transplant from London whose company, Spacious , created the search tool, said Hong Kongers looking for a place to live asked the same questions as people anywhere: Is it near the subway? How is the view? Is there a gym? The app has filters for all of those things. But there is one other question that Mr. Ghafoor found to be just as important, if not more so: Is it haunted? On and around Ship Street, in the Wan Chai neighborhood of Hong Kong, terse captions under the ghosts tell a sad tale. In one complex, \u201ca man in his 60s jumped off the building.\u201d At another: \u201cSingle male burnt charcoal,\u201d referring to carbon monoxide poisoning, a common method of suicide here. Mr. Ghafoor said the captions mirrored, as closely as possible, deaths that had been reported in local newspapers or by the police. Most of the ghosts seem to refer to suicides; Hong Kong has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. But Ship Street is also where the city\u2019s highest-profile murders occurred in recent years: the killings of two Indonesian women by a British banker in the fall of 2014, on the 31st floor of the glass-and-steel J Residence . Mr. Ghafoor said that, on average, 1 to 2 percent of apartments for sale have had an \u201cincident,\u201d and that as a result, they sell at a discount of up to 20 percent. For Jin Peh , a feng shui teacher and the author of \u201c Feng Shui: A Hong Kong Perspective ,\u201d a property below market price is a bad sign rather than a bargain. He recommends avoiding living where an unnatural death has occurred. In general, the principles of feng shui relate to the flow of energies in nature. An unnatural death can cause excess negative energy, Mr. Peh said in a telephone interview. The consequences of this depend on your personal beliefs, he said, but for traditional Chinese, the worst-case scenario is becoming \u201cpossessed\u201d by the spirit or ghost. He recalled friends of friends who started hearing voices shortly after moving into an apartment. The voices told them to jump from the building \u2014 which is how the previous occupant ended his life. \u201cMaybe they are just being delusional,\u201d Mr. Peh said, \u201cbut they hear voices trying to persuade them to repeat the same mistake.\u201d In less extreme cases, the tenants\u2019 well-being will suffer: They will become more prone to emotional issues, mood swings and depression, he said. Sometimes, the circumstances surrounding a death are so grim that it affects the value of entire floors or buildings. For 13 years, the site of Hong Kong\u2019s gruesome \u201cHello Kitty\u201d murder remained abandoned. In 1999, Fan Man-yee, a nightclub hostess, was kidnapped by three men and held hostage in an apartment in a multistory building. The men tortured her for more than a month until she died. Her body was dismembered, and her skull was found inside a giant Hello Kitty doll. Image The Spacious app shows J Residence as haunted. The perpetrators were sentenced to life in prison . The apartment was vacant for years. No one would rent it. No one would buy it. They said it was haunted . In 2012, the entire building was finally demolished. Mr. Ghafoor said that while there was no hard and fast rule that real estate agents must tell prospective buyers or renters about unnatural deaths, the local regulator has a code of conduct that says agents must serve their clients with \u201chonesty, fidelity and integrity.\u201d Real estate companies keep close tabs on supposedly haunted properties. One site, Squarefoot.com, maintains a macabre list . Banks are reluctant to provide mortgages for such properties, meaning sellers have to find buyers willing to pay cash. That makes the discount almost self-fulfilling: All-cash transactions command a discount here because of the small number of people who don\u2019t need a mortgage. For those who are not superstitious \u2014 real estate agents point to expatriates and young people \u2014 moving into a \u201chaunted\u201d home can take some of the sting out of buying or renting in Hong Kong, the city with the least affordable housing in the world . \u201cI\u2019ve started looking and found it\u2019s insanely expensive in this city,\u201d says Harry Edwards, 27, a lawyer who recently moved to Hong Kong from Australia. On a recent day, he was wandering around the trendy neighborhood of Sheung Wan, trying out the Spacious app. He said he didn\u2019t subscribe to superstitions \u201cwhatsoever.\u201d \u201cI actually think it would be great to say, \u2018I live in a haunted house,\u2019 \u201d he said. There are many to choose from. A quick wave of the app in Hong Kong\u2019s North Point neighborhood reveals a world of tragedy. The little white ghosts pop up next to many of the area\u2019s towering apartment complexes. In one, a part-time tennis trainer \u201ckilled and stabbed his wife after an argument, jumped off the building.\u201d In another: \u201cFemale drowned herself in bathtub.\u201d Next door: \u201cOld male jumped off the building.\u201d Even some people who might benefit from higher home prices acknowledge the power of superstition here. After more than 30 years in the real estate business, Lily Wong, a local agent, knows that most Chinese clients are not interested in even looking at haunted apartments. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t rent, they wouldn\u2019t buy,\u201d she said. She counts herself among that group. \u201cI can\u2019t stay in a flat that they said is haunted,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s so creepy.\u201d", "keyword": "Hong Kong;Real Estate; Housing;Superstition;Haunted house;Rent;Murders and Homicides;Suicide;Death"}
{"id": "ny0046317", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/02/22", "title": "Surgery for Red Wings\u2019 Zetterberg", "abstract": "Detroit Red Wings center Henrik Zetterberg had surgery for a herniated disk in his back, and the team expects him to be re-evaluated in about eight weeks. Zetterberg played one game for Sweden at the Sochi Olympics before leaving. \u25a0 The Rangers said Mats Zuccarello, who leads the team with 43 points, would be out three to four weeks after he broke his left hand playing for Norway at the Olympics. (NYT)", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Red Wings;Henrik Zetterberg"}
{"id": "ny0145154", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/10/01", "title": "Oil Prices Bounce Back After a $10 Decline", "abstract": "Oil prices swung higher Tuesday, recovering from the previous day\u2019s plunge as edgy investors trickled back into the market on hopes that Congress would resurrect a failed financial bailout plan . Light, sweet crude for November delivery rose $4.27, or 4.4 percent, to settle at $100.64 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Monday, prices fell $10.52, to settle at $96.37 \u2014 the second-largest drop ever in dollar terms \u2014 after House legislators rejected the $700 billion bailout, stunning investors and raising fears of a long economic crisis that could sharply curb global energy demand. Crude has fallen about $25, or 20 percent, in the last seven days. Some recovery was to be expected after Monday\u2019s fall, and analysts said prices would probably remain in a holding pattern until the fate of the financial rescue plan was determined. Lawmakers were expected to reconvene in Washington on Thursday, though it was unclear if they would try another vote on the bailout. Whether or not there is any agreement on a United States bailout, oil market watchers say global financial tremors have already forced consumers and businesses to scale back energy consumption, a trend that could take prices lower in coming weeks. \u201dOil is going to have a tough time getting back over $100 and staying there,\u201d said Matt Zeman, head commodities trader at LaSalle Futures in Chicago. \u201dEven if the bailout gets done, it\u2019s not going to solve everything immediately. The slowdown will have to work itself out for demand to take off again.\u201d Weaker demand for fuel continues to weigh on prices at the pump. A gallon of regular shed a penny overnight to a new average of $3.633 in the United States, according to the auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express. Prices hit a record average of $4.114 a gallon on July 17.", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008)"}
{"id": "ny0234279", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/01/20", "title": "Lawyers Use Humor to Plead Case", "abstract": "THE adage about encountering the scene of a car accident \u2014 you don\u2019t want to look, but can\u2019t look away \u2014 may also apply to commercials for lawyers who represent victims of those accidents. YouTube users have posted many disturbingly riveting lawyer ads from recent history, like those from the 1990s featuring Jim \u201cThe Hammer\u201d Shapiro, a personal injury lawyer in Rochester, N.Y., who, as video of vehicles exploding and other mayhem played on the screen, balled up a fist and shouted: \u201cHurt? I cannot rip out the hearts of those who hurt you! I cannot hand you their severed heads! But I can hunt them down and settle the score!\u201d While few lawyer ads are as overstated as Mr. Shapiro\u2019s, which have attracted more than 100,000 views on YouTube, many share their modest production values, wooden delivery and the incongruity of bookish litigators trying to channel Chuck Norris. Other common approaches feature lawyers speaking more conversationally in front of shelves of law books, or former clients describing horrific accidents and how legal judgments brought them justice. One thing that the ads do not generally feature, at least not intentionally, is an element of humor, which is what makes new television commercials for the New York law firm of Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman noteworthy. In one ad, by the Levinson Tractenberg Group, an independent agency in Manhattan, an actress in her 30s sitting at a kitchen table says, \u201cThe pain was excruciating: It\u2019s like I had this huge, really sharp machete chopping down on me every time I tried to move.\u201d She continues, \u201cIt was the worst paper cut I ever had \u2014 they made that paper way too sharp.\u201d Raising a hand to reveal a bandage on her index finger, she concludes, \u201cSomeone has to pay.\u201d The tagline, \u201cThere are some cases even we can\u2019t win,\u201d appears on the screen, and a voiceover concludes, \u201cIf you\u2019ve been injured, call us, but keep in mind: you really need to be injured.\u201d In another spot, an actor, also in his 30s, describes being in the middle of the best video game of his life when, here tears begin streaming down his cheeks, the power went off. \u201cMy game was lost,\u201d he says. \u201cI never thought the power company would do this to me. I have pain and suffering.\u201d As he sobs, the tagline appears, \u201cThere are some cases even we can\u2019t win.\u201d Joel Levinson, a partner in the Levinson Tractenberg Group, said he and partner Joel Tractenberg told the lawyers at the outset that they wanted to deviate from the norm. \u201cWe said if you\u2019re looking to be in the ads, and they\u2019d taken that approach before, then we\u2019re not interested,\u201d Mr. Levinson said. \u201cBut if you want to go beyond the traditional spokesperson type of ad, we said, you have an opportunity to break through the clutter.\u201d As a lawyer, Mr. Lichtman said he was pleased to be the source of a joke rather than the butt of one. \u201cThe approach recognizes that there is this quote-unquote skepticism associated with litigation in general,\u201d Mr. Lichtman said. \u201cIt\u2019s saying to the public that we understand that we\u2019re a litigious society, No. 1, and, No. 2, we understand that litigiousness is food for a joke. But we also recognize there\u2019s an importance to having access to the court system if there has been an injustice.\u201d Unlike previous spots for the firm, which tended to appear at night, the new ads appear on New York stations in daytime shows like \u201cGood Morning America\u201d and \u201cThe Ellen DeGeneres Show.\u201d New print ads in New York subways and on buses are more serious, yet also avoid clich\u00e9 images like gavels and scales of justice. One says, \u201cWhen you get hit by a car your whole family feels the impact,\u201d and another, \u201cWe have yet to find a cane that can support a family of five.\u201d Ads for lawyers, including those in the Yellow Pages, are a relatively modern phenomenon. Both the national and state bar associations prohibited the practice until 1977, when the Supreme Court ruled that such advertising was entitled to First Amendment protection. Bar associations feared that ads would demean the legal profession, a fear borne out by ads in which lawyers promised they would not charge a dime until you won your money. \u201cThey just do not scream professionalism,\u201d said Kevin Underhill, a San Francisco lawyer who publishes Lowering the Bar ( loweringthebar.net ), a legal humor blog. \u201cIt\u2019s desperate aggression that you see in those late-night ads. They are cheaply made and poorly edited.\u201d Mr. Underhill says he derives perverse pleasure from ads that test the boundaries of taste, like print ads where Alison B. Margolin, a Los Angeles lawyer, proclaims she is \u201cL.A.\u2019s Dopest Attorney\u201d for those who \u201cwant to smoke pot on probation,\u201d and a Chicago billboard sponsored by Fetman, Garland & Associates, which specializes in divorce cases, that read: \u201cLife\u2019s short. Get a divorce.\u201d Allan Ripp, a New York publicist who represents many law firms, viewed the Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman ads and was asked to comment on them. \u201cThey\u2019re ads that seem at first like they could have been written by a tort reform group that goes after the plaintiff\u2019s bar for pursuing trivial or unsound cases,\u201d Mr. Ripp said. \u201cBut what they\u2019re really doing is poking fun at the rest of the firms that go after frivolous cases and saying, \u2018But we\u2019re selective and meritorious.\u2019 It\u2019s very clever, and a real departure from traditional lawyer advertising, and it deserves to be emulated.\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Legal Profession"}
{"id": "ny0135299", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2008/04/26", "title": "For Many, Thrift Shops Are a Wardrobe Essential", "abstract": "SHEENA MASSIE, dragged by her mother to garage and estate sales as a child, once cringed at the sight of used goods. \u201cThe very thought of being caught by my peers buying other people\u2019s junk was mortifying,\u201d said Ms. Massie, a 25-year-old waitress in Canal Winchester, Ohio, near Columbus. \u201cIf someone else didn\u2019t want it, why would I?\u201d But, like Ms. Massie, who with her mother is opening a thrift shop, more consumers are concluding that brand new is not necessarily better. According to the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops, the industry is growing at a rate of 5 percent a year. And as the prices of gasoline and groceries edge higher and debt \u2014 be it mortgage or credit card \u2014 weighs more heavily, saving money on clothes, shoes and household goods has become increasingly essential for many people. \u201cWith the economy in its current condition, I think people will begin turning to more thrifty ways of shopping,\u201d said Ms. Massie, whose store, Thrift on the Canal, opens next month. \u201cWe want everyone that shops with us to enjoy the same thrill we do when we go thrifting.\u201d The thrift shop association estimates that there are 25,000 such stores in the United States. Britt Beemer, the founder and chief executive of America\u2019s Research Group, a consumer behavior research firm, said surveys have found that 16 to 18 percent of Americans shop in thrift stores, while 12 to 15 percent visit consignment stores. \u201cThrift shops are not on the radar screen for many shoppers,\u201d Mr. Beemer said. He predicted that more would turn to them, especially for back-to-school clothing. TheThriftShopper.com , a two-year-old Web site, is viewed 70,000 times a day, mostly by women age 30 to 50, said Mike Gold, who runs the site with his wife, Julie. Mr. Gold said he discovered that thrift shop fans are everywhere when he met the auctioneers and experts of \u201cThe Antiques Roadshow,\u201d a popular PBS series. \u201cEvery single one of them was an avid thrift shopper,\u201d he said. Ms. Gold added, \u201cOne said she even buys her clothes there.\u201d Kara Lake, a 34-year-old mother in Braintree, Vt., who is home-schooling her five children, ages 8, 7, 6, 3 and 6 months, said she was one of those fans, particularly since a tight budget is normal. She said she grew up in rural Vermont wearing thrift shop clothing and \u201ccan count on two hands when I\u2019ve bought something new.\u201d Because many families have only one or two children, she said, the clothing is only gently used. \u201cWe can still give our kids the best things.\u201d Ms. Lake said she easily found clothes with labels like Old Navy, the Gap and Banana Republic. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make any sense to me to buy anything brand new if the clothes are well taken care of.\u201d She also finds clothes for herself from midpriced labels like Ann Taylor and J. Jill, shopping twice a month and spending, in all, $15 to $20 for an armful of clothing for herself and several of her children. Consignment shops, which typically have higher prices but offer higher-end or designer merchandise, have their fans as well. Clothing must be washed or dry cleaned before sale, and the selection in such shops tends to be more carefully edited. Mason Bechtel, a retired administrative assistant for a major financial services firm in Houston, grew up choosing between having several new dresses each season from Loehmann\u2019s, a discount store, or just one from Bonwit Teller. \u201cI realized that shopping at the best shops, I felt stupid,\u201d she said. \u201cWhy pay $120 for a dress I could find in a resale shop?\u201d Ms. Bechtel, whose mother ran a Lilly Pulitzer shop in Westport, Conn., admits to having expensive, if classic taste. \u201cI still wear the same clothes from the same shops \u2014 but I usually pay nothing more than $20.\u201d Thrift and consignment shoppers love getting a bargain. For Ms. Bechtel, it was a $25 Black Watch plaid blazer with a black velvet collar and $25 for a St. John knit suit \u2014 new, typically costing four figures. Julie Gold, a co-owner of TheThriftShopper.com, said buying used clothing takes more diligence than simply rifling the racks at a local retailer. \u201cIn a thrift store, you really have to dig,\u201d she said. \u201cIt takes a lot of time, energy and patience.\u201d But, thrift shoppers say, the time demanded is repaid with single-digit price tags and a wide variety of styles in one place. Two national chains, Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads Trading Company, allow shoppers to bring in clothes they no longer want for cash or to trade for clothes in the store. Both promote their fashionable offerings, in an attempt to appeal to younger shoppers. And both offer a combination of new and what they term \u201crecycled\u201d clothes. \u201cA lot of the neighborhood men who shop in our store are very style-conscious,\u201d said Mary Dalton, the manager of a Crossroads store near the Castro district in San Francisco. \u201cThey can recycle their clothing and not wear it into the ground. Sustainable businesses are becoming more trendy, so people are more open to it.\u201d Prices, she said, range from $6 to $75, and popular jeans like Diesel or G Star cost $50 to $65 a pair compared with a regular retail price that can be double or triple that. \u201cPeople will get three or four garments for the price of one,\u201d she said. \u201cWe get all kinds of customers, from an attorney who needs work clothes to the college-age hipster. The age range is very, very wide.\u201d Consumers can also make money by selling or donating clothing or household goods to thrift and consignment shops. Donations can offer a tax deduction, while selling items that are worth more than you paid, can make consigning lucrative, Ms. Massie said. \u201cI once found a vintage Carlton Ware money box for $2.50 and made a $45 profit and a pair of Ruehl jeans for $9.99 that I sold for $60. I know of a lady who bought a necklace for $3.50, and it was a diamond over one carat worth over $8,000. \u201cThat\u2019s why I shop in thrift stores.\u201d", "keyword": "Discount Selling;Apparel;Retail Stores and Trade;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)"}
{"id": "ny0029375", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/06/05", "title": "After Bear Is Caught in Montclair, Students Are Allowed Outside", "abstract": "The warning sent by school officials on Tuesday morning seemed more suited for the Alaskan wild than the bustling suburb of Montclair, N.J.: All outdoor activities were suspended because a black bear was lurking about. Throughout Monday and into Tuesday, reports about the bear\u2019s activities were posted online and reported to the police. The bear was in a backyard, looking bored. It was up a tree, looking reflective. It was in the street, looking sad. The animal even made it near a Whole Foods market, where he was spotted looking confused. State officials were called in to help, and when the bear was seen near an elementary school on Monday afternoon, the word went out to keep those children inside. The warning was later expanded to include children from the entire district. \u201cThe Montclair Police Department has notified us that there have been bear citings in Montclair: yesterday near the Montclair Art Museum and this morning, near Edgemont School,\u201d Penny MacCormack, the school superintendent, said in a note sent out Tuesday morning, which included the misused \u201ccitings.\u201d \u201cAs a precaution, we are suspending all outside activities at all of our elementary and middle schools.\u201d After each reported sighting, police and wildlife officials rushed to the scene to blare air horns and make other loud noises in an attempt to drive the bear in the direction of the Mills Reservation on the northern edge of town. \u201cHe was never in a confrontational mode,\u201d said Lt. Angel Roman Jr. of the Montclair Police Department. The plan to coerce the bear to take refuge in the unpopulated nature reserve failed, but on Tuesday morning, the animal was spotted in a tree in Watchung Park and quickly cornered by the authorities. \u201cWe kept him up in the tree by making noise,\u201d Lieutenant Roman said. The police sealed off the park with yellow tape to keep a crowd of residents with cameras from getting too close to the bear. Monica Minore, who has an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old in a local elementary school, said she had been organizing an outdoor run for children to raise money to build a roof for a school in Africa when the notice went out that all outdoor activities had been canceled. Image A police lieutenant said the young black bear was probably hungry, lost and just as scared as the people who spotted it. Credit Selma Avdicevic/ baristanet.com \u201cThe bear story has taken over town,\u201d she said. \u201cI have been getting all these e-mails from mothers talking about it.\u201d She saw the bear shortly after the notice, watching as the police tried to keep it in the tree. \u201cThe poor bear was just sitting in the tree with like a hundred people looking at him,\u201d she said. \u201cThe police were banging on the tree with clubs until animal control got there.\u201d There was a helicopter circling overhead, orange cones and police tape strung up, she said, and a general carnival atmosphere. \u201cHe was just hanging out on the branch looking a little concerned,\u201d she said of the bear, which was not very far off the ground. Around 9 a.m., two hours after the bear was first spotted, officials from the Division of Fish and Wildlife arrived and shot it with a tranquilizer gun, officials said. The black bear, estimated to be 18 months old, weighed 158 pounds. The bear was tagged and tattooed for identification, and will be released on state land, officials said. Lieutenant Roman said that in his 21 years with the department, he did not recall a time when children had been kept indoors because of a bear threat. He noted that the bear \u2014 young, hungry and most likely lost \u2014 was probably just as scared as the people who spotted it. After the situation was resolved, school officials said children would be allowed to go play outside again. \u201cWe are happy to report that the bear sighted this morning has been caught,\u201d Ms. MacCormack wrote. \u201cAll students and staff are safe to resume regular outdoor activities.\u201d Ms. MacCormack said that \u201cin our haste to get the bear emergency e-mail out to the public this morning,\u201d they made a grammatical error, misusing the word citing for sighting. \u201cWe regret this error,\u201d she said, \u201cand trust that it did not overshadow the importance of the communication.\u201d", "keyword": "Bear;Montclair NJ"}
{"id": "ny0228160", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/07/29", "title": "Mets Fight Back From a Dismal Outing , but Fall in 13", "abstract": "For much of the season, Johan Santana has been an effective pitcher punished by a lack of hitting support. But on Wednesday, when Santana had one of the worst performances of his career, the Mets rallied to erase an early six-run deficit against the St. Louis Cardinals . They pushed the game into extra innings, but the Cardinals got a run-scoring single from Albert Pujols off Pedro Feliciano in the 13th and beat the Mets, 8-7, at Citi Field. Carlos Beltran hit a solo home run, and Angel Pagan had a two-run blast. Mike Hessman had a two-run double in the first inning, and Ike Davis had a two-run single as a pinch-hitter in the eighth to tie the score at 7-7. Santana, who had been 3-0 in July, allowed six runs and eight hits in the first inning, each total the worst in his career for a first inning. The 13 hits were also a career worst in a game for Santana, who left with two outs in the sixth. The first two Cardinals runs came on a two-out home run to left by Matt Holliday. The Mets cut the lead to 6-2 in the bottom of the inning on a bases-loaded double by Hessman off Jaime Garcia. The Mets pulled within four runs again in the sixth inning when Beltran hit his first home run of the season, to left field, to make the score, 7-3. In the four-run eighth, Pagan\u2019s two-run home run cut the lead to 7-5 before Davis singled home two runs to tie the game. Despite the disappointing defeat, many Mets stressed the spirit of the comeback. \u201cIt was a great, great comeback by the whole team,\u201d Beltran said. \u201cBut we fell short.\u201d Several players and Manager Jerry Manuel mentioned how Santana settled down and gave the team four scoreless innings after the disastrous first. \u201cMy mind-set was stay aggressive, stay in the game,\u201d Santana said. \u201cI had to go as deep as I could.\u201d But David Wright expressed the bittersweet aftertaste. \u201cWe kind of ran out of steam, out of gas,\u201d Wright said. \u201cMoral victories don\u2019t count in the standings. We couldn\u2019t get that one hit to put us over the top.\u201d Hessman was a curious echo of another Met, Fernando Tatis, a veteran major-leaguer who once hit two grand slam home runs in the same inning off the same pitcher, Chan Ho Park. Tatis, a part-time first baseman, is now on the disabled list. Hessman, another part-time first baseman, also holds a quirky statistic. On Sept. 8, 2008, while playing with the Detroit Tigers, Hessman was hit twice in the same inning by pitches thrown by the same pitcher, Oakland\u2019s Gio Gonzalez. Later in that game, Hessman hit a home run off a different pitcher, Jeff Gray, one of 13 home runs Hessman had hit in 78 previous major league games with three teams since 2003 (including his debut as a Met as a pinch-hitter in Tuesday\u2019s 8-2 victory). Hessman had a better recollection of a pitch that hit him this season when he played for Class AAA Buffalo; it broke his right hand and idled him for six weeks. Despite the layoff, Hessman hit 18 home runs with Buffalo. At age 32, Hessman is the leader in minor league home runs among active players with 329. Because he has power and because the Mets need some, Hessman was used as a replacement for Davis at first base. Manuel said he hoped to use Hessman at third base soon to give David Wright a day of rest. But his new home park can discourage even established home-run hitters. One of them is Jason Bay, the left fielder, who has hit only six home runs and was out again for the second day with post-concussion symptoms. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to pick and choose when you can get aggressive,\u201d Hessman said. \u201cThis looks like a stadium where you try to stay line-drive conscious and hit balls into the gaps, and hopefully you get your homers on the road.\u201d Hessman\u2019s first-inning double, on an 0-2 pitch from Garcia, hit the left-field wall. He missed a grand slam by only a few feet. Because Hessman has played since 1996 in mostly minor league towns, he is sometimes compared to Crash Davis, the fictional and world-weary minor-league veteran in \u201cBull Durham.\u201d The comparison amused catcher Josh Thole and the utility man Chris Carter, both of whom played this season in Buffalo with Hessman. \u201cJust because he\u2019s a veteran guy and knows the ropes of the International League, I don\u2019t think that makes him Crash Davis,\u201d Thole said. Carter said Hessman is similar to the movie character in one respect: \u201cHe\u2019s Crash Davis because he hits home runs, but he\u2019s not anything like Crash Davis off the field,\u201d adding that Hessman hits to all fields and hits well in the clutch. \u201cHe\u2019s a guy that scares pitchers,\u201d Carter said. Sometimes, players like Hessman are characterized as \u201c4-A players,\u201d too good for Class AAA but not quite good enough to stick with a major league team. \u201cI\u2019m sure people have probably labeled me that,\u201d Hessman said. \u201cI\u2019ve had a couple brief little stints up in the major leagues, but no regular playing time. It\u2019s a blessing just to be up here.\u201d INSIDE PITCH R.A. Dickey will pitch Thursday afternoon against St. Louis and Mike Pelfrey on Friday night against Arizona. Jerry Manuel said this was in part because Pelfrey pitches poorly in daylight. \u201cMaybe his clock is a little off,\u201d Manuel said. Dickey, a knuckleballer, will be working on three days rest and coming off a leg injury.", "keyword": "New York Mets;St Louis Cardinals;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0008540", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/05/15", "title": "Brazilian Court Council Removes a Barrier to Same-Sex Marriage", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 The council overseeing Brazil\u2019s judiciary ruled on Tuesday that notary publics cannot refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, a decision that opens the way for gay couples across Latin America\u2019s largest country to marry. The move by the National Council of Justice, a 15-member panel led by Joaquim Barbosa, the chief justice of the nation\u2019s high court, effectively legalizes gay marriage throughout Brazil, legal scholars here said. The decision follows legislation in two neighboring countries, Argentina and Uruguay, where lawmakers have managed to pass bills authorizing same-sex marriage nationwide in recent years. Still, there is some room for judicial appeals of the Brazilian decision, potentially within the high court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal, and resistance may emerge in Congress, where gay-marriage legislation has faced opposition from an influential bloc of evangelical Christian lawmakers. Even so, supporters of same-sex marriage described the council\u2019s decision as pioneering. \u201cThis resolution will end the resistance of some courts, judges and notary publics,\u201d said Maria Berenice Dias, the vice president of the Brazilian Institute of Family Law, a nonprofit organization that has sought for years to extend marriage benefits to gay couples. The National Council of Justice, which includes prominent judges, prosecutors and lawyers, voted 14 to 1 in favor of the measure. Under the council\u2019s decision, notary publics will also be required to convert same-sex civil unions into marriages, if couples wish to do so. In 2011, the high court ruled by a comfortable margin that same-sex civil unions should be allowed. But while such unions provide couples in Brazil with access to benefits like health insurance and the division of assets in cases of separation, the council\u2019s decision provides same-sex couples who marry with the same standing as heterosexuals, allowing them, for instance, to take each other\u2019s surnames and adopt children more easily. In certain ways, the decision broadens what has already unfolded in different of parts of Brazil, where legislatures in more than 10 states have legalized same-sex marriage. But even with such laws, many notary publics \u2014 who not only certify but also carry out marriage ceremonies in Brazil \u2014 have refused to comply for gay couples, a resistance that has been backed by some of the regional judges who oversee them. \u201cThe Supreme Federal Tribunal had already shown that it was supporting minority rights by supporting gay unions,\u201d said Thiago Bottino, a law professor at Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Get\u00falio Vargas, a top university. \u201cThe council\u2019s decision is logical, since it would not make sense to deprive people of their rights because some notary publics and judges saw things differently.\u201d Brazil\u2019s courts generally hew to the decisions of the National Council of Justice, which was created in 2004 and has functioned largely as a disciplinary body for the judiciary. But Congress could be another matter, as tensions simmer between Brazil\u2019s legislative and judicial branches over the high court\u2019s conviction of legislators involved in a vast vote-buying scandal. Moreover, legislators who oppose same-sex marriage have recently grown more vocal in Congress. Marco Feliciano, a conservative evangelical preacher who now leads the lower house\u2019s commission for human rights and minorities, has drawn criticism for comments that gay-rights activists call homophobic, but he has resisted pressure to step down from the post.", "keyword": "Brazil;Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage;Decisions and Verdicts;Joaquim Barbosa;National Council of Justice Brazil"}
{"id": "ny0230515", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2010/09/17", "title": "Rangers Plan to Limit Henrik Lundqvist\u2019s Playing Time", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 The Rangers may not know what to expect this season, but they do know one thing: their workhorse goalie, Henrik Lundqvist , will be playing less. Then again, they said that last year. Both Lundqvist, in an interview this week, and Coach John Tortorella, speaking on Thursday on the eve of training camp, said Lundqvist\u2019s workload would be reduced. \u201cWhat did we play him last year, 73 games?\u201d said Tortorella, noting that no Stanley Cup-winning goalie in the last six years had played more than 62 regular-season games. \u201cThat\u2019s ridiculous \u2014 it\u2019s just too much.\u201d Lundqvist said: \u201cI think that\u2019s the plan \u2014 it\u2019s been the plan the last couple of years. It just didn\u2019t turn out that way.\u201d Last year, Tortorella said he expected Steve Valiquette, then the backup goalie, to fill in more often, but he played poorly and was demoted to Hartford. The Rangers found themselves in a season-long struggle to make the playoffs, forcing Lundqvist to play almost every game. He played superbly the whole way, including the season finale, a 46-save shootout loss to Philadelphia, 2-1, that cost the Rangers a playoff berth. \u201cI was ready for the playoffs,\u201d Lundqvist said. \u201cOn the other hand, that was mid-April. If your goal is to play in June, it might be better to rest a couple more games.\u201d Over the summer, the Rangers signed Martin Biron, a reliable 33-year-old backup who has played for the Islanders, the Flyers and the Sabres. \u201cWe\u2019re excited about Biron being here to take some of the load off Hank,\u201d Tortorella said. Very little else about the Rangers is definite \u2014 the team\u2019s outlook is \u201cclouded,\u201d as Tortorella put it. Almost every position is in flux. Right wing Marian Gaborik, whose 42 goals last season were 23 more than the next highest Ranger, remains the primary offensive threat. He will be paired on the first line with another new signing, left wing Alexander Frolov, who averaged 24 goals in seven seasons with Los Angeles. But who their center will be is unclear. The newly re-signed Marc Staal remains a top defenseman, but Tortorella said he was not sure who would be Staal\u2019s partner. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to give me some time till I see what this team is,\u201d Tortorella said. \u201cThere are so many new guys in camp.\u201d Among the new faces will be three veterans skating on a tryout basis. Wing Ruslan Fedotenko won a Stanley Cup under Tortorella with Tampa Bay in 2004. In fact, Fedotenko scored both goals in the 2-1 Game 7 victory that clinched the Cup. He won the Cup again in 2009 with Pittsburgh. Defenseman Alexei Semenov is back in camp after being offered a roster spot last season before leaving suddenly to play for Dinamo Moscow. General Manager Glen Sather told reporters Semenov left because his wife wanted to return home, but Semenov said it was because the Dinamo contract paid more. Todd White is a 35-year-old center who broke the 20-goal plateau twice with Ottawa and once with Atlanta. But he is not the No. 1 center the Rangers need. The problem for the Rangers \u2014 as it is for so many other teams \u2014 is how to fit new players under the salary cap. Staal\u2019s new five-year contract counts as a $3.975 million cap hit, putting the Rangers $4 million over the limit. One solution could be to send the much-maligned veteran defenseman Wade Redden and his $6.5 million cap hit to Hartford. But \u201cwe\u2019re not going to single out Wade Redden,\u201d Tortorella said. \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s weighing on him a little bit,\u201d Tortorella said. \u201cWe need to let this play out. A lot of different things can happen.\u201d ISLANDERS STAY CLOSE The Islanders open training camp Friday in Syosset on Long Island, a long way from China, where they first planned to hold camp. Last February, the team\u2019s owner, Charles Wang, announced an ambitious plan to stage the camp and exhibition games in Beijing, Harbin and Qiqihar. But in May, Wang canceled the trip. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s good you don\u2019t have to do that travel,\u201d the young star John Tavares said this week. \u201cBut in other ways you\u2019re kind of disappointed because it would have been special to see a whole different country, culture and lifestyle. It would have been cool to see.\u201d DEVILS PREPARE FOR CUTS The Devils open camp in Newark, with physicals on Friday, under the new coach John MacLean. The team needs to cut players whose salaries total at least $3 million to make room under the salary cap for Ilya Kovalchuk. \u201cWe don\u2019t exactly know who, but we have to get back under the cap,\u201d Zach Parise said. \u201cAll we know is that we\u2019re going to lose two pretty good, important players. It\u2019s no secret that we have to get rid of some money.\u201d", "keyword": "Lundqvist Henrik;Hockey Ice;New York Rangers;Tortorella John"}
{"id": "ny0005072", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/04/01", "title": "News From the Advertising Industry", "abstract": "Accounts \u00b6PopSugar Inc., San Francisco, which operates the popsugar.com Web site and a daily streaming show , \u201cPopSugar Live,\u201d named Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group, as its first global advertising agency of record. Billings were not disclosed. People \u00b6Thomas L. Harrison, chairman at the Diversified Agency Services division of the Omnicom Group, New York, was named chairman emeritus, a new post in which he will serve as an adviser. Dale A. Adams remains president and chief executive. \u00b6Tom Morton joined the new New York office of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group, as head of strategy. He had been chief strategy officer at Havas Worldwide New York, part of the Havas Worldwide division of Havas, as well as joint chief strategy officer for North America at Havas Worldwide. \u00b6Beth Wade, chief client officer at VML, Kansas City, Mo., part of WPP, was named the agency\u2019s first chief marketing officer. \u00b6Fred Burt, director for European clients at the London office of Interbrand, part of the Omnicom Group, was named managing director for global clients at Interbrand, a new post, reporting to Jez Frampton, global chairman and chief executive. Mr. Burt will continue to be based in London. Miscellany \u00b6Chermayeff & Geismar, New York, a brand identity and graphic design agency, was renamed Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, to reflect the contributions of Sagi Haviv, partner. It is the first time an executive\u2019s name is being added to the agency\u2019s name since its founding in 1957. \u00b6Dentsu, Tokyo, completed its acquisition of the Aegis Group, London, which was announced in July, for about $5 billion. Dentsu has formed a unit based in London, Dentsu Aegis Network, to oversee its agencies outside Japan, which operate under the Dentsu Network umbrella, and the Aegis media operations around the world, under the Aegis Media banner. Tim Andree, senior vice president at Dentsu and chief executive at Dentsu Network, will also be executive chairman at Dentsu Aegis Network. Jerry Buhlmann, who continues as chief executive at Aegis Media, will be chief executive at Dentsu Aegis Network. \u00b6Worldwide spending on Internet advertising reached $99 billion last year, up 16.2 percent from 2011, according to a report from London and New York executives at the GroupM unit of WPP, and accounted for 19.5 percent of all worldwide measured ad spending. The report forecast that spending for Internet ads this year would total $113.5 billion, up 14.6 percent from 2012, which would represent more than 21 percent of all worldwide measured ad spending. \u00b6Advertising revenue from online sources continues to grow faster for the radio industry than does ad revenue from traditional, over-the-air sources, according to a quarterly report from BIA/Kelsey, Chantilly, Va. Over-the-air ad revenue rose 1.5 percent last year compared with 2011, the report said, while online ad revenue increased 3.6 percent last year compared with 2011. \u00b6Bart Simpson, the cartoon character who appeared in popular ads for Butterfinger candy from 1988 through 2001, is returning in ads that are to begin appearing on Monday. The ads, created by Dailey, West Hollywood, Calif., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, reprise the \u201cNobody better lay a finger\u201d theme of previous ads. The character is being licensed to Nestl\u00e9, which sells Butterfinger, by the 20th Century Fox Consumer Products unit of News Corporation.", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;Appointments and Executive Changes"}
{"id": "ny0267160", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/03/08", "title": "No-Contest Plea in Connecticut Killing Tied to Rebuffed Prom Invitation", "abstract": "MILFORD, Conn. \u2014 A teenager accused of fatally stabbing a classmate at their high school for rejecting his invitation to the junior prom pleaded no contest to murder on Monday, and prosecutors said they would seek a 25-year prison sentence. The teenager, Christopher Plaskon, 18, accepted a plea bargain during a brief appearance in court here. Sentencing was set for June 6. Mr. Plaskon was charged with killing Maren Sanchez , 16, at Jonathan Law High School in Milford on April 25, 2014. His family and friends said he became upset that Ms. Sanchez had turned down his prom invitation. Mr. Plaskon was held at a psychiatric hospital after the stabbing. His lawyers said that he had shown signs of psychosis and that they were considering an insanity defense. Image Ms. Sanchez was 16. The attack happened in a first-floor hallway around 7:15 a.m. on the day of the junior prom. Students described an emotional scene where people were crying as police officers and paramedics swarmed the school. A witness tried to pull Mr. Plaskon off Ms. Sanchez during the attack, and another saw Mr. Plaskon discard a bloody knife, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Mr. Plaskon was taken to the principal\u2019s office in bloody clothing and told the police, \u201cI did it; just arrest me,\u201d according to the affidavit. Ms. Sanchez was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly afterward. The medical examiner\u2019s office said she had been stabbed in the torso and neck. Ms. Sanchez, a member of the National Honor Society who was active in drama and other school activities, had been focused on the prom in the days before she was killed. She had posted on Facebook a photograph of herself wearing a blue prom dress and was looking forward to attending with a new boyfriend. A friend of Mr. Plaskon\u2019s told the police that Mr. Plaskon had thought about hurting Ms. Sanchez because he wanted to be more than friends with her. According to the friend, Mr. Plaskon said he would not mind if Ms. Sanchez \u201cwas dead or hit by a bus.\u201d", "keyword": "Murders and Homicides;Chris Plaskon;Maren Sanchez;Jonathan Law High School;Milford CT"}
{"id": "ny0094515", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2015/01/27", "title": "Makarova Races Past Halep and Into Australian Open Semifinals", "abstract": "MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Ekaterina Makarova raced to a 3-0 lead in nine minutes and beat third-seeded Simona Halep, 6-4, 6-0, on Tuesday in the first women\u2019s quarterfinal match at the Australian Open. With her victory, which took just 68 minutes under cool, sunny skies at Melbourne Park, Makarova advanced to a semifinal against her fellow Russian Maria Sharapova, who beat Eugenie Bouchard, 6-3, 6-2, in the next match at Rod Laver Arena. Makarova will be playing in her second consecutive Grand Slam semifinal. Her first was at last year\u2019s United States Open, in which she lost to Serena Williams after beating Bouchard in the fourth round. Halep, a Romanian who was last year\u2019s French Open runner-up, was under pressure from Makarova\u2019s array of strong forehand shots to all areas of the court. Serving at 5-3 in the first set, Halep saved two set points, but Makarova clinched the opener on the third when Halep netted a backhand. Makarova broke Halep\u2019s serve to open the second set, helped by a double fault. Makarova saved three break points in the next game to lead by 2-0 and then broke Halep again before shutting her out the rest of the way. Makarova, 26, has had her best Grand Slam results at Melbourne Park, advancing to the quarterfinals in two of the past four years and to the fourth round in the other two. Last year, she lost to the eventual champion Li Na in the fourth round, and both quarterfinal losses were to Sharapova. \u201cI love this court \u2014 I\u2019m so happy I came through,\u201d Makarova said. \u201cBefore in the quarterfinals, was never sure about the semis, but now I\u2019m there.\u201d Two men\u2019s quarterfinals were set for later Tuesday. Rafael Nadal was scheduled to take on Tomas Berdych, and Andy Murray was to play the local favorite Nick Kyrgios. Kyrgios, 19, beat then-No. 1 Nadal in the fourth round at Wimbledon last year. In the fourth round this year, Kyrgios defeated Andreas Seppi, who had knocked Roger Federer out of the tournament. Kyrgios is the first male player since Federer in 2001 to have reached two Grand Slam quarterfinals as a teenager.", "keyword": "Tennis;Ekaterina Makarova;Simona Halep;Australian Open"}
{"id": "ny0133358", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/03/04", "title": "Fresh Start as Yanks for Former Astros", "abstract": "KISSIMMEE, Fla. \u2014 The entrance to Osceola County Stadium still proclaims the Houston Astros the 2005 National League Champions, a crown they clinched when a fly ball settled into Jason Lane\u2019s glove in right field in St. Louis that October. Lane asked a club official to hold the ball while he celebrated, but he never got it back. The Astros said it belonged to the team, not the player. The next year, the Astros took away Lane\u2019s playing time, and last September they dumped him altogether, shipping him to the San Diego Padres in the final week of the season. There he found a familiar face \u2014 Morgan Ensberg, his former teammate in Houston and at the University of Southern California. Now Lane and Ensberg are teammates again, as nonroster invitees to Yankees spring training. They are auditioning for what might be one open spot among position players, and it only figures. \u201cWe get on base, we drive guys in,\u201d Ensberg said Monday, as the Yankees were finishing a 7-6 victory over Houston. \u201cWe\u2019re very similar players.\u201d There are differences, too. Ensberg plays third base. Lane is an outfielder, but he once moonlighted as a pitcher and earned the victory for U.S.C. in the championship game of the 1998 College World Series. They are strong defensive players who are learning first base and have similar hitting profiles. Ensberg and Lane draw walks and put up solid power numbers, but do not always hit for a high average. The Yankees may have room for only one of them. \u201cI don\u2019t really subscribe to the idea that there\u2019s not enough room,\u201d Ensberg said. \u201cMaybe there is. I think if you play well, you\u2019ll play. I\u2019m sure Lane has the same idea \u2014 if we\u2019re both playing in that lineup, I think we\u2019re going to help the team.\u201d Dressing at a locker just a few feet away, Lane said, \u201cI simply came over here with the intention of, if I play well, there\u2019s a spot for me on the team.\u201d Lane homered on Sunday but went 0 for 4 on Monday. Ensberg had two hits, including a double, in his first game at first base. He made an error when a sharp grounder by Lance Berkman took a bad hop over his left shoulder. Ensberg, 32, has played one game at first in his seven-year career and is trying to learn how the ball spins to that side of the infield. Berkman, his former teammate, said Ensberg would adapt to the position and could thrive in a new setting. \u201cOnce an organization gets a stereotype on you, it\u2019s tough to overcome that unless you go to another organization,\u201d Berkman said. \u201cNobody has any limitations on what they expect from you, and I can imagine for him it\u2019s a nice feeling to have a fresh start.\u201d Ensberg placed fourth in the N.L. Most Valuable Player voting in 2005, when he hit .283 with 36 homers and 101 runs batted in for the Astros. He had 17 homers through the end of May the next season, but jammed his right shoulder diving for a bunt and struggled to play through pain. \u201cHe just never got a good streak going,\u201d Astros Manager Cecil Cooper said. \u201cHe was constantly searching, and sometimes when you search, it\u2019s hard to just get down to baseball and react instead of playing the mind game so much with yourself. Sometimes you get in those kinds of funks and it\u2019s hard to get out.\u201d Last season, Ensberg lost his job in Houston to Mike Lamb. He hit two homers in his first start for San Diego, then slumped down the stretch as Kevin Kouzmanoff surged. Ensberg said he turned down guaranteed roster spots with other teams to take a minor league deal with the Yankees. \u201cThis job had the least amount of security, but I think I do well in a fight,\u201d Ensberg said. \u201cI enjoy competing, because I think that\u2019s how it should be. And maybe I didn\u2019t do as well preparing myself in the past because there wasn\u2019t anybody to compete with. Hopefully the fight prepares you.\u201d Ensberg\u2019s average the last two seasons was .233, but he hit 35 homers and drove in 97 runs in 669 at-bats. Lane fell into a platoon in those seasons, managing 23 homers and 72 R.B.I. in 459 at-bats. But he hit .192. \u201cThe batting average looks really bad, but as far as production and defense, I feel like I helped the team,\u201d said Lane, who had 26 homers and a .267 average in 2005. \u201cI just never could get in there consistently. When I was getting hits, they were productive hits. It was frustrating for me. They couldn\u2019t get past the average and let me really play.\u201d Lane is 31, and he expects to keep hitting for a long time. But the Yankees are looking for a left-handed reliever, and he guessed that he might still be able to throw 90 miles an hour. If he took the mound again, Lane would be pitching on 10 years\u2019 rest. \u201cYou never know,\u201d he said, smiling. \u201cI\u2019ve saved some bullets.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Baseball;Ensberg Morgan;Lane Jason;Houston Astros"}
{"id": "ny0116147", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/10/02", "title": "Wi-Fi Is Increasingly Essential for Airline Travelers", "abstract": "Tony Drockton, who owns a luxury handbag company in Southern California, used to take the overnight flight to New York, rather than waste business hours out of touch. But now, his flight time is his work time as airlines increasingly offer Wi-Fi connections on their planes. \u201cI need to stay connected so people don\u2019t realize where I am,\u201d said Mr. Drockton, who now travels with a laptop, smartphone and over-the-ears headphones. \u201cIt allows me to fly during business hours and not miss any day.\u201d As to those travelers who enjoyed a few hours of being out of touch with the office, those days may be ending. Before Wi-Fi, \u201cyou had an excuse not to be in touch if you didn\u2019t want to be,\u201d said Henry H. Harteveldt, co-founder of Atmosphere Research Group, an airline and travel industry analyst in San Francisco. \u201cThe one last bastion of being off the grid has been taken away.\u201d And as airlines race to create connectivity on international flights through satellite Wi-Fi, the ability to stay online in the skies will only increase, experts say. \u201cPassengers have an expectation of ubiquitous connectivity in their lives, especially younger travelers,\u201d Mr. Harteveldt said. \u201cWalking on the street, in coffee shops, and it frustrates them when they get on a plane and they are told they\u2019re offline. The traveler wants to have control over when they go online.\u201d Others echoed his analysis. \u201cPeople want to be connected 24/7,\u201d said Jonathan Kletzel, a transportation and logistics analyst at PWC. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of whether airlines are getting ahead of the curve or not.\u201d For now, technology use in the sky remains lower than on other modes of transportation, said Joseph P. Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University. Even so, Wi-Fi Internet access has expanded to 153 million passengers in 2011 from 153,000 in 2009, according to Gogo Wireless, a Wi-Fi provider for airlines. According to a report this year from the Chaddick Institute , the percentage of air travelers using technology at \u201crandom selected points\u201d on a flight was 28.4 percent in 2011, up from 23.2 percent in 2010 and 17.6 percent in 2009. The report found that more travelers were bringing their own devices, including tablets and e-readers, with them on planes. One in 12 airline passengers is now using a tablet, and that number continues to grow. Tablets account for almost 30 percent of all technology use on commercial flights, and that share is also likely to grow. The use of tablets and technology, in general, tends to be \u201csignificantly higher on business-oriented flights,\u201d the report said. This leaves more than 70 percent of passengers who are not using a device, and may be using the airlines\u2019 in-flight entertainment options, Dr. Schwieterman said. Wi-Fi stretches back commercially four to five years. Now, nine commercial airlines have Wi-Fi air-to-ground service on all or some of their domestic flights. The fees depend on the length of the flight, and tend to range from $1.95 to $19 or more, according to Gogo. Travelers are using the connection to do more than send e-mail. What travelers want, especially business travelers, is a myriad methods to stay productive and entertained while en route to their destination, airline experts said. They may use their own laptops or tablets as well as the in-flight entertainment system. Mr. Drockton, for example, said he used e-mail, air-to-ground videoconferencing, the airline\u2019s instant messenger system and the entertainment system in the seat back in front of him when he was flying. He said he relied on the power outlet under his seat to keep his laptop charged. \u201cI plug in before they even close the door,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m already working before they take off.\u201d Until a few years ago, the airlines were a \u201ctechnology wasteland,\u201d Dr. Schwieterman said. Now, most major airlines, even those that were late to Wi-Fi, have committed to teaming up with one of the four major Wi-Fi providers. The airlines \u201cwant you to know that Wi-Fi is on the flight,\u201d he said. \u201cThey know they need it for brand positioning.\u201d Still, Internet connectivity in flight has its shortcomings, though Mr. Harteveldt and other frequent fliers said they expected it to improve in its next generation. \u201cIf the Wi-Fi system is maxed out, it slows down,\u201d Mr. Harteveldt said. \u201cYou can log off and not be able to get back on, or be booted off the system.\u201d Typically, the bandwidth of the Wi-Fi on a single-aisle plane like a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320 can handle 25 users at a time. If one traveler begins to download a large file, \u201cthe system slows to a crawl,\u201d he said. Kevin P. Nichols, 39, director of content strategy for SapientNitro, said that had been his experience. \u201cIt\u2019s inconsistent, and you never know if it\u2019s going to work or not,\u201d he said. Mr. Nichols said Wi-Fi and in-flight entertainment provided by the airlines were among the factors travelers now considered. \u201cThere are a lot of drivers in selecting an airline,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s people having access to what they want. We continually want to be plugged in.\u201d As for the future of in-flight technology, Mr. Harteveldt said it depended on technological developments, travelers\u2019 preferences and airlines\u2019 budgets. The airlines tend to update cabins every five years. Mr. Harteveldt predicted that within 10 years, flights would be a \u201cB.Y.O. entertainment\u201d environment \u2014 that is, bring your own. Until then, travelers who want to stay productive and entertained en route to their business meetings are dependent on Wi-Fi. Or, as Mr. Drockton put it: \u201cIt\u2019s just about convenience and connectivity. I need it to work.\u201d", "keyword": "Wireless Communications;Airlines and Airplanes;Computers and the Internet;Travel and Vacations;Business Travel"}
{"id": "ny0034118", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/12/01", "title": "In Search of the Perfect Holiday Drink", "abstract": "Whether you\u2019re expecting a handful of holiday drop-ins or hosting a spirited party, a well-made cocktail can set the tone. As restaurants around the county are raising their mixology standards, consider enhancing your home efforts with this advice from behind-the-bar pros. All agree that balance is the key to cocktail goodness. Alcohol, sweet and acid must work in harmony, so the unpracticed are advised to start with reliable recipes, then bump up the quality of the ingredients, starting with spirits. Clark Moore, beverage director at Harper\u2019s in Dobbs Ferry , recommends this strategy for drop-in guests or dinner parties: \u201cStock fewer bottles of worthwhile spirits rather than a greater variety of cheaper stuff. For example, have one good gin, one rye or bourbon and one Cognac, and make sure they\u2019re brands that you\u2019d want to drink even without a mixer.\u201d Vodka and tequila are popular choices to round out the home bar. Secondary spirits, like fruit- or herb-based liqueurs, can add the sweet element and expand the cocktail possibilities. In general, triple secs (orange-flavored liqueurs like Cointreau) are versatile, as are high-quality vermouths. Mr. Moore\u2019s favorites are Carpano Antica Formula and Dolin Vermouth de Chamb\u00e9ry Rouge. \u201cAdd either of these to rye or Cognac for a delicious manhattan,\u201d Mr. Moore said. \u201cStir one with gin, and you have a beautiful Martinez. Or add a few rocks and a lemon or orange twist for a lovely aperitif or digestif.\u201d Note that vermouth is actually a fortified wine, so refrigerate after opening to ensure optimum shelf life. Image Bottles of bitters at Harper's. Clark Moore, beverage director at Harper's, recommends stocking up home bars with a few bottles of fine spirits instead of a variety of cheaper brands. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times For a conversation starter, try an indigenous spirit or two instead of one of the major brands. \u201cThere are a lot of finely crafted local options now, like Black Dirt Bourbon, which is distilled in Warwick,\u201c says Paul Bratone, co-owner and beverage director at Bistro Rollin in Pelham. \u201cUse American Fruits Black Currant Cordial as you would cr\u00e8me de cassis. Sugar Wash Moonshine\u201d\u2014 a neutral spirit distilled in Pine Plains from Demerara sugar \u2014 \u201ccan be used instead of cacha\u00e7a in a New York State riff on the Brazilian caipirinha.\u201d While you might spend more on your spirits, save on simple syrup when the drink requires it. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason it\u2019s called \u2018simple\u2019 syrup,\u201d Mr. Moore says. \u201cJust bring equal parts sugar and water to a boil, and let it cool. It\u2019s actually quicker to make than it is to shop for it, and homemade is far less expensive.\u201d For infused simple syrup, add the desired flavoring ingredients (fresh herbs, spices, ginger root, citrus peel) to the warm syrup and let it sit for a couple of hours, tasting periodically. When the flavor is to your desired strength, strain. Stored in a covered jar in the refrigerator, the syrup will keep through the holidays. Lemon or lime juice plays an acidic role in many recipes, and the pros agree that cocktails are vastly improved when you squeeze your own. (Note that these juices will turn, so they should be used or refrigerated immediately.) And don\u2019t skip the bitters when they\u2019re called for. These intense tinctures of herbs, spices, fruits and roots add dimension to a cocktail. The Beacon-based Drink More Good website carries a wide variety of bitters and other artisanal mixology ingredients. After you\u2019ve upgraded your ingredients, tweak your technique and presentation. \u201cAlways use jiggers,\u201d advises the bartending veteran Jeremy McClellan, now general manager of the Tapp in Tarrytown and the Mill in Hastings. \u201cImprecise measuring can ruin a great cocktail recipe.\u201d Stir cocktails that rely solely on spirits, and use a shaker for cocktails that incorporate juices or sugars to blend the flavors and give it the proper chill. For restaurant-worthy serving appeal, get ice trays that make perfectly square cubes. Smaller cubes are good for serving tall mixed drinks; for spirits-forward or spirits-only cocktails, Moore prefers one extra-large cube, which won\u2019t melt as fast and won\u2019t dilute a drink as quickly. And don\u2019t mistake the appropriate garnish (twisted citrus peel, fruit slices, olives) for just another pretty finish \u2014 it adds flavor too. For larger gatherings, skip the shaker and choose a punch, a mulled wine or a mulled cider for serving simplicity. As Mr. McClellan puts it, \u201cNobody wants to wait 20 minutes for their cocktail, and you don\u2019t want to spend the entire party mixing drinks.\u201d But he cautions against making it too sugary, a common amateur mistake. \u201cBalance is critical to the punch bowl, too,\u201d he said. For an easy-serving alternative, Mr. Moore suggests a drink that can be mixed at least partly ahead of time. Simple, festive sparkling cocktails, like kir royales or poinsettias, can be made assembly-line style. It\u2019s wasteful to use expensive Champagne to mix with other ingredients, but for balance, be sure to use a dry sparkling wine. Mr. McClellan serves prosecco; Mr. Bratone favors Gruet, a sparkling wine that is made in New Mexico.", "keyword": "Alcohol;Cocktail;The Tap Tarrytown NY Bar;Bistro Rollin Pelham NY Restaurant;Westchester"}
{"id": "ny0187630", "categories": ["nyregion", "westchester"], "date": "2009/04/19", "title": "Economy Forces White Plains Performing Arts Center to Cancel a Show", "abstract": "WHITE PLAINS GOING to the theater has always been one of Joe and Theresa Arlotta\u2019s greatest pleasures. But after Mr. Arlotta had a stroke, they stopped going to Broadway shows in the city. Then they discovered the White Plains Performing Arts Center . They became subscribers two years ago when the theater began staging its own shows under a new artistic director. The theater\u2019s proximity to New York City has made it easy to attract Broadway actors who can work in White Plains and live at home. \u201cI miss Manhattan, but this is really as close as you can get for the value and the quality,\u201d said Ms. Arlotta, 70, a legal secretary here. Her favorite show this season was \u201cCamelot\u201d in September; last season it was \u201cHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.\u201d The Arlottas are looking forward to the final show of this season \u2014 \u201cHello, Dolly!\u201d \u2014 which was scheduled to open on April 30 \u2014 but they are likely to be disappointed. The theater\u2019s management has not made an official announcement yet, but because of uncertainty about finances, it is delaying \u201cHello Dolly\u201d indefinitely and recently laid off a company manager, said Jack W. Batman, the center\u2019s executive producer. It is a bitter turn of events. Staging well-known musicals, starring Tony-winning actors, the White Plains Performing Arts Center had an audience of 35,000 this season \u2014 1,200 of whom became subscribers during the past two years. Now, with municipal and corporate money disappearing, the theater is deciding where to cut back. \u201cSo far we have had no commitments for sponsorships or grants,\u201d said Mr. Batman, a 40-year veteran of professional theater management who normally would have budgeted in April for the 2009-10 season that begins in the fall. \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say we are struggling.\u201d The City of White Plains, which holds the lease on the theater\u2019s space on the third floor of the City Center, an entertainment and retail complex downtown, announced on April 6 that it had cut all funding to the theater from its proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1. The city has contributed $100,000 annually to the arts center \u2014 which has a $1.7 million budget \u2014 since its founding in 2003. \u201cWhen our financial report was issued in January, we fell off a cliff,\u201d said Mayor Joseph M. Delfino, a Republican who recently announced he will step down after overseeing a resurgence in development here during 11 years in office. A booster of the theater who never missed an opening night, Mr. Delfino said he had to fill an $11.7 million gap in next year\u2019s $160 million city budget. To make up the shortfall, 40 city staff positions were left vacant this year and 65 part-time employees were let go. In addition to cutting money for the theater, the budget proposes eliminating backyard refuse pickup and mounted police units, as well as giving the library less support, Mr. Delfino said. Louis R. Cappelli, the developer who redrew the city\u2019s skyline when he built the 44-story Ritz-Carlton hotel and apartment complex downtown, gave the arts center $250,000 in 2006. This year, he will give money to the theater only if the city does, said Geoff Thompson, a spokesman for Cappelli Enterprises. James F. Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, another large donor last year, said the company would reduce its contribution but had not decided how much. \u201cThe budgetary pressures we are feeling has to translate into our contributions changing,\u201d he said. The theater\u2019s other largest corporate donor last year, Bank of America, did not return calls seeking comment. Corporate financing plays a bigger role in the White Plains Performing Arts Center\u2019s budget than for other regional theaters, said Will Maitland Weiss, executive director of the Arts & Business Council of New York , a nonprofit organization based in New York City that advises arts groups and corporations. \u201cThe typical regional theater would get half its income from the box office, 30 percent from individual contributions and the remaining 20 percent from foundations, government and corporations, with the corporations being the smallest part,\u201d he said. Last year the White Plains center made half of its budget from ticket sales; 4 percent from individual donations; and 46 percent from grants from foundations, government and, mostly, corporations, according to the theater. Arts organizations that depend largely on government support are in dire straits in New York because of significant drops in tax revenue, Mr. Weiss said. \u201cI feel there is more potential to rescue and sustain a company like the White Plains Performing Arts Center from the private sector than to go back to the public sector and try to depend on handouts,\u201d said Mr. Weiss, who has managed nonprofit arts organizations for 25 years, including a five-year stint at an Off Broadway theater. Even though there is no show in rehearsal on the performing arts center\u2019s stage, it is not silent. Its plush movie-theater-style seats, donated by National Amusements in Boston, are filled half the time with audiences for college and school events, corporate seminars, church concerts and programs for the White Plains Youth Bureau . Mr. Batman said he was confident that despite the center\u2019s uncertain financial future, he would be able to put a season together for next season. \u201cThe theater will survive this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has survived since the time of the Greeks, it always goes on.\u201d", "keyword": "White Plains Performing Arts Center;Budgets and Budgeting;Theater;White Plains (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0004595", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2013/04/21", "title": "Florida Sues BP Over Gulf Oil Spill", "abstract": "TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 The state of Florida filed a lawsuit Saturday against the oil company BP and the cement contractor Halliburton over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, becoming the fourth state to seek damages for the 2010 disaster. The suit, among other things, faults BP for not changing the batteries on the rig\u2019s blowout preventer. It also accuses Halliburton of installing faulty cement barriers. The complaint by the Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, was filed in United States District Court in Panama City. The federal court has jurisdiction under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Florida is the fourth state to sue over the spill; Mississippi sued on Friday, joining Alabama and Louisiana, which are part of a federal trial in New Orleans against BP and its contractors. A BP spokesman declined to comment and press officers from Halliburton could not be reached.", "keyword": "Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill;Lawsuits;BP;Florida;Halliburton"}
{"id": "ny0288536", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/08/24", "title": "Daily Report: A New Android for a New Tech World", "abstract": "With little notice, Google just told us a lot about our world. On Monday, the company announced the general availability of its newest Android smartphone operating system. Looking at how it got here and what is inside the new OS reveals much about how different tech works now, when compared with just a few years ago. Google first talked about the new OS, called Nougat, last March, and gave people the opportunity to download an early version of the software. Google appears to have used that feedback heavily in the final version. Send Us Your Favorite Money Question What\u2019s the single best question about money that anyone has ever asked you \u2014 or that you\u2019ve asked of a spouse, family member or loved one? And what was the conversation that ensued? Not so long ago, a new computer OS was a huge deal, developed in secret and released with a marketing thunderclap. That was when personal computers were the rule, or PC-type thinking dominated phone marketing. Now speed, feedback and continuous upgrades are the rule. Nougat will appear as an update on a handful of Nexus phones over the next few weeks, and later on a new phone. It is said to have 250 new features, but is unlikely to require a lot of new learning, unlike new versions of Windows on a PC. People don\u2019t have time for that now; if things aren\u2019t more intuitive, they are discarded. Personalization is also a big feature of these mass-market devices, so the phone can do things like provide polyglots with search results in multiple languages, ways to reconfigure Quick Settings controls or 1,500 different emoji for nonverbal communication. Image Besides feedback and customization, speed is another design principle that has become paramount. Apps can run side by side, notifications can open apps directly and previously used apps can be easily reopened. If saving seconds sounds like a big deal, it is: Google long ago discovered that even a 200-millisecond delay can make a search seem too slow. That impatience is now a consumer norm. So much for the present state of tech design. Nougat also has a couple of indications about what\u2019s next, in the form of augmented reality and virtual reality functions. A lot of that will be dormant for now, until new games, and hardware like headphones and game controllers, become available. It\u2019s O.K. if you start getting impatient for that stuff. After all, by the time you read this, Nougat will have been out for an entire day or more.", "keyword": "Android;Google"}
{"id": "ny0192141", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2009/02/19", "title": "India Opens High-Level Inquiry in Fraud Case", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014India\u2019s highest-level investigative agency agreed Wednesday to open an inquiry into the software outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services , a move that might complicate a quick sale of the company. The Central Bureau of Investigation, analogous to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States, will take over from the police in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where Satyam is headquartered, and a patchwork of ministries, regulators and agencies that are looking into the vast fraud at the outsourcing company. B. Ramalinga Raju, the founder of Satyam, confessed in January to padding the books and said he had fabricated holdings of some $1 billion in cash. The C.B.I., as the agency is known, \u201cproposes to undertake an all-encompassing investigation into the scam,\u201d it said in a statement. The bureau is establishing a \u201cmultidisciplinary investigation team\u201d in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, and will be consulting daily with market regulators, the national Department of Revenue, the state government and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Meanwhile, Satyam is pulling hundreds of employees out of the United States as business slows, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday. The spokeswoman, Archana Muthappa, said several hundred employees had been moved back to India, where they continued to work for the company. She said local newspaper reports that 1,500 employees had been relocated were false, but would not specify how many employees had been moved. The employee shift comes as Satyam, under a new, government-appointed board, is cutting costs wherever possible. It has hired Goldman Sachs to help it find a buyer. The new investigation does not automatically mean that buyers will stay away, analysts said. \u201cThe important thing is whether the company was making profits or not,\u201d said Hitesh Kuvelkar, associate director at First Global, a research firm with offices in Mumbai, London and New York. \u201cIf they have margins and turnover, there will be a taker for this company.\u201d Investors have filed several suits against Satyam and the company\u2019s auditor, which could also complicate a sale. Mr. Raju and his brother, B. Rama Raju, a former Satyam director, are in jail in Hyderabad. A local court on Wednesday dismissed their petitions for bail, the Press Trust of India reported. The court will allow the Securities and Exchange Board of India to question S. Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas, former partners for Price Waterhouse, Satyam\u2019s former auditor. The firm is the Indian arm of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. Satyam was the most actively traded stock on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Wednesday, where its shares fell 3.3 percent. Executives from several Indian companies, even those unrelated to the software business, have said publicly in recent days that they would be interested in buying all or part of Satyam.", "keyword": "Frauds and Swindling;Satyam Computer Services Ltd"}
{"id": "ny0004981", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/04/08", "title": "Accounts and People of Note in the Advertising Industry", "abstract": "David Beck, vice president for strategic initiatives in the office of the chief executive at Univision Communications, New York, was promoted to a new post, senior vice president for social media. Jeff Brecker joined R/GA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, as vice president and managing director for the Chicago office. He succeeds Sean McCarthy, who left in November. Mr. Brecker had been managing director for the Chicago office of Digital Kitchen. Digital Kitchen is hiring Dave Trifiletti to serve as managing director for its Chicago and Seattle offices; in addition to assuming what had been Mr. Brecker\u2019s duties in Chicago, Mr. Trifiletti will also assume the duties of Eric Oldrin, who had been managing director for the Seattle office before leaving Digital Kitchen. Julian Cole, a strategy director at the New York office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, part of the Publicis Groupe, was promoted to a new post, communications planning department head, and will continue to be in charge of the agency\u2019s work as the lead creative agency on the Sony PlayStation account. \u201cThe Dog Strikes Back,\u201d the Volkswagen Beetle commercial that Volkswagen of America ran during Super Bowl XLVI in February 2012, was named the Ad of the Year by Nielsen as part of the seventh annual Nielsen Automotive Advertising Awards. The awards, presented during the 2013 New York International Auto Show, honor automotive television commercials for effectiveness. The commercial was created by Deutsch L.A., which is the Marina del Rey, Calif., office of Deutsch, part of the Lowe & Partners division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Kerryann Driscoll and Patrick LaCroix, group account directors at Blitz Media, Boston, were promoted to new posts. Ms. Driscoll becomes director for marketing and Mr. LaCroix becomes director for innovation. Vin Farrell joined Havas Worldwide, New York, part of the Havas Creative unit of Havas, in a new post, global chief content officer. He had been senior vice president for creative operations at R/GA, New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Hudson Valley Tourism, which seeks to draw visitors and businesses to Columbia, Orange, Putnam, Rensselaer and six other counties north of New York City, selected Co-Communications as its agency of record, working with Harquin Graphics, Pelham, N.Y., a branding agency. Billings have not been determined. Co-Communications, which has offices in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn., is taking over the account from the First Brain Media Group, Wyckoff, N.J. Jon Krevolin joined 360i, New York, part of Dentsu, as a group creative director. He had most recently been a senior vice president and senior creative director at BBDO New York, part of the BBDO North America division of BBDO Worldwide, which is part of the Omnicom Group. Tim Letscher joined Colle & McVoy, Minneapolis, part of MDC Partners, in a new post, director for digital strategy and analytics. He had most recently been senior strategist for brand activation at Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Clive Maclean joined Cenergy, East Aurora, N.Y., in a new post, executive vice president. He had most recently been chief executive at Havas 4D, Chicago, part of the Havas Worldwide division of Havas Creative, which is owned by Havas. Nic Owen joined the Amsterdam office of 72andSunny, part of MDC Partners, in a new post, managing director. He had been head of account management at Anomaly New York, part of the Anomaly unit of MDC. Christian Parkes joined Myspace, Los Angeles, in a new post, vice president for global marketing. He had been global senior director for marketing at Levi Strauss & Company, San Francisco. Ryan Peck and Scott O\u2019Leary joined Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, as creative directors. They had been creative directors at Fallon Worldwide, Minneapolis, part of the Publicis Groupe. Nicole Phillips joined Switch, St. Louis, in a new post, director for strategic planning and business development. She had most recently been senior vice president for branding and insights at Fleishman-Hillard, part of the Omnicom Group. Fraser Riddell, global chief business development officer at MediaCom Worldwide, New York, part of the GroupM unit of WPP, was named global chief client officer, leading a new division, named MediaCom Beyond Borders, that will specialize in working for international advertisers based in the United States. Toby Jenner, chief operating officer for the MediaCom Asia-Pacific region, based in Singapore, will move to New York and succeed Mr. Riddell as global chief business development officer. Rosetta, Princeton, N.J., part of the Publicis Groupe, hired four partners for its technology and telecommunications practice. They are Frank Garavaglia, who will be based in the agency\u2019s San Francisco office; Bill Melton, based in the Los Angeles office; Mike Norris, based in the San Jose, Calif., office; and Rachel Rapaport, also based in San Francisco. Zach Servideo joined the Mix Agency, San Francisco, as a principal, responsible for day-to-day operations with Vanessa Camones, chief executive, and leading the agency\u2019s expansion into Southern California with the opening of an office in Los Angeles. Mr. Servideo had most recently been a consultant and before that worked for public relations agencies like Shift Communications. Mark Simmons joined Ignited, El Segundo, Calif., in a new post, senior vice president for strategy and brand development. He had most recently run his own consultancy, Mark Simmons Inc. Matthew Sweeney joined Crisp Media, New York, in a new post, senior vice president and managing director. He has previously worked at companies that include Pixalate, Geeknet and Ziff-Davis. Webster Bank, Waterbury, Conn., expanded its relationship with SapientNitro, Boston, part of Sapient, by naming SapientNitro as its marketing agency of record. Billings were not disclosed. The assignment had previously been handled by Kelliher Samets Volk. Webster Bank already works with SapientNitro on tasks that include integrated interactive marketing and digital strategy.", "keyword": "Appointments and Executive Changes;advertising,marketing;Public relations;Job Recruiting and Hiring"}
{"id": "ny0253444", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/10/31", "title": "Obama Succeeds Globally, With Little Reward", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The foreign policy successes of President Barack Obama \u2014 most recently, the toppling of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi \u2014 are of only marginal value to his re-election struggle. The corollary is that Republican hopes earlier this year of a one-two punch against Mr. Obama \u2014 a soft economy and softness on national security, which were determinant in unseating another Democratic incumbent in 1980 \u2014 are diminishing. This time, they can only count on a one-punch, the economy. The administration\u2019s stepped-up drone strikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden , Anwar al-Awlaki and a host of lesser Qaeda operatives makes an \u201ceasy on terrorism\u201d charge a tough sell. Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s demise after a U.S.-backed air campaign ties the bow on that campaign issue. Moreover, most of the Republican presidential candidates, apart from the libertarian Ron Paul and the former Utah governor, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., are in the camp of the neoconservatives, the architects of the Iraq war. These advocates of an aggressive and expensive foreign policy are out of sync with U.S. political opinion and economic realities. The Republican foreign policy traditionalists on the model of Henry A. Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and James A. Baker III seem absent. Witness the reaction to the president\u2019s decision to withdraw all forces from Iraq by year\u2019s end. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, called it \u201can astonishing failure\u201d that risked all the gains of the past decade; Governor Rick Perry of Texas accused Mr. Obama of putting political expediency ahead of sound military security and \u201cjudgment.\u201d Herman Cain simply said it was \u201cdumb.\u201d They all insist on keeping a residual force. The reality is the troop withdrawal timetable was crafted by President George W. Bush three years ago. As a candidate, in 2007, then-Senator Obama vowed to carry out the plan more rapidly. Americans, by overwhelming margins, want to get out of a war that has cost more than $800 billion and 4,500 American lives, while arguably strengthening the position of Iran, now a greater threat to the United States than Iraq ever was. Further, while the administration may not have negotiated very well, the Iraqis were adamant that any small remaining U.S. force wouldn\u2019t be immune from local laws or prosecution as are U.S. troops stationed elsewhere. Imagine the reactions of politicians who worry about any U.S. forces being under control of a U.N. command if an army private fighting 10,000 miles away were to be prosecuted by an Islamic court. The neocons argue that a presence in Iraq is essential and that modern history shows that such a commitment must be long term. Otherwise, they say, Iran threatens to dominate the region. This argument was challenged by Robert W. Merry, the editor of National Interest, a foreign policy journal. \u201cThe threat of growing Iranian dominance over Iraq is real,\u201d Mr. Merry said in a recent article. The neocons, he said, \u201cshould have considered it before they beat the drums for an Iraq invasion that would inevitably upend the centuries-long balance of power between the Persians and the Mesopotamians.\u201d The notion that greater Iranian influence could be checked with a residual force of 5,000 U.S. troops \u201cborders on the ludicrous,\u201d he says. The next drumbeat will be to oppose a significant drawdown in Afghanistan, which is clearly designated as \u201cObama\u2019s war.\u201d There is some Republican division: Mr. Paul and Mr. Huntsman have called for a speedy withdrawal, while Mr. Romney has been, at various times, both more dovish and more hawkish than Mr. Obama. Most neoconservatives envision a larger and longer-term U.S. presence. The declining public support for such an endeavor is likely to accelerate after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, recently let slip that in any conflict with the United States, he would side with Pakistan. This wasn\u2019t a throw-away line. It was made days after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A., on a visit to Islamabad, warned Pakistan that if it didn\u2019t take action against terrorists, the United States would act on its own. Mr. Karzai then sought out a Pakistani television network to deliver this broadside. Similarly, the neoconservatives proudly claim that the Arab Spring resulted from Mr. Bush\u2019s aggressive push for democracy in the Middle East; they are less than pleased, however, when that outcome produces more Islamic, anti-Israel regimes. As welcome as Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s overthrow is to most Americans of all political persuasions, the new regime\u2019s vow to implement Shariah, or Islamic law, is unsettling. By focusing on the need for a more aggressive foreign policy \u2014 one that won\u2019t command popular support \u2014 Republicans may be muddying other, credible criticisms of Mr. Obama\u2019s efforts in the international arena. It would be fair to say that the White House is usually reactive and that its foreign policy team, more than most previous administrations, considers any action first for its political and personal effect on Mr. Obama; the discussion of the merits of a policy tend to come second. Protracted decisions are depicted by the White House as a result of thoughtful deliberations. To outsiders, they seem to reflect more this political cost-benefit analysis. Afghanistan is a prime example, as captured in Bob Woodward\u2019s best seller, \u201cObama\u2019s Wars.\u201d There are specific policies that are open to legitimate criticism; a case can be made the administration dropped the ball on the Middle East, squandering any possibilities of a breakthrough on the Israeli-Palestinian front. None of this will much matter to the electorate 53 weeks from now. As noted by Richard N. Haass, an assistant secretary of state under Colin L. Powell and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine more than a handful of voters pulling the lever on the basis of foreign policy.\u201d Yet, he adds, the lack of voter interest in foreign affairs will have important implications, because the next president will face real national security challenges. \u201cWe\u2019re going to elect a governor in chief,\u201d Mr. Haass says, \u201crather than a commander in chief.\u201d", "keyword": "Obama Barack;Qaddafi Muammar el-;Presidential Election of 2012;bin Laden Osama;Awlaki Anwar al-"}
{"id": "ny0290401", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/01/19", "title": "Stabbing of Israeli Woman in West Bank Suggests Shift in Violence", "abstract": "TEKOA, West Bank \u2014 In a charity store packed with used clothing on the edge of Tekoa, a Jewish settlement in the beige hills of the southern West Bank, Michal Froman, 30 and pregnant, was shopping on Monday when a Palestinian teenager walked in. He hesitantly picked up a piece of clothing and asked the price. Ms. Froman asked if she could help him, but he suddenly pulled out a knife, stabbing and wounding her, according to a local resident who arrived seconds later. The attack took place as a funeral convoy was making its way to Jerusalem for the burial of Dafna Meir, 38, a mother of six who was fatally stabbed on Sunday at the entrance to her home in Otniel, a settlement to the south. The attacks in Tekoa and Otniel suggest a shift in the recent surge of violence, during which Palestinians have attacked Israeli soldiers, police officers and civilians, usually using knives, cars and guns as weapons. Most of the previous attacks took place on the streets of Jerusalem, in cities around Israel, or along roads and at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank. Now, it appears that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are also targets. Since Oct. 1, Palestinian assailants have killed more than 20 Israelis, an American student and a Palestinian bystander. More than 150 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, many of them after they attacked or tried to attack Jews, and others during protests and clashes with the Israeli security forces. The assaults inside the settlements also recalled a shocking attack in 2011 when two Palestinian teenagers stabbed five members of the Fogel family to death in their beds in the northern settlement of Itamar. Most of the world considers the settlements illegal and an obstacle to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israel says their fate should be decided in negotiations with the Palestinians, but the peace process has long been stalled. Many Palestinians have cited a July arson attack that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents in the West Bank village of Duma as a factor contributing to the recent wave of violence. Two young Jewish extremists who were living in West Bank settlement outposts have been charged in that attack. The United States ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, praised the progress made in the Duma case on Monday, but harshly criticized the Israel\u2019s settlement policy and what he described as its lax enforcement policy in the West Bank, saying that \u201ctoo much vigilantism\u201d by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank \u201cgoes unchecked,\u201d he said, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz . Speaking at a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Mr. Shapiro added, \u201cAt times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.\u201d Amid the fraught tangle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tekoa, a mixed community of Orthodox and secular Jews perched on the edge of the Judean desert a few miles from Bethlehem, has an unusual reputation for tolerance. Following the vision of its chief rabbi, Menachem Froman , who counted Yasir Arafat as a friend and who died in 2013 , many of Tekoa\u2019s residents say they seek to live in peaceful coexistence with their Palestinian neighbors. Ms. Froman, who was injured on Monday, is married to one of the rabbi\u2019s sons. Image The body of an Israeli woman who was fatally stabbed a day earlier at the entrance to her West Bank home in the Jewish settlement of Otniel, during her funeral on Monday. Credit Ronen Zvulun/Reuters Eviatar Kanotopsky, 36, had just arrived at his yoga studio, opposite the secondhand clothing store in Tekoa\u2019s small industrial zone, when he heard Ms. Froman and two other women running out, screaming. \u201cMichal had blood on her shoulder,\u201d he recalled a few hours later, sitting in his studio in a sheepskin coat, his head wrapped in a turban. He described Tekoa as \u201ca spiritual place.\u201d \u201cI am not afraid. It\u2019s a matter of personality. My wife is afraid,\u201d Mr. Kanotopsky said. \u201cOn the other hand, I say to myself, the stabber was a young kid. It\u2019s not that all the villages around here attacked us. But fear has an effect, like in the rest of the country.\u201d Amichai Solomon, 40, a preschool teacher here, said: \u201cPersonally I find it quite ironic that Rabbi Menachem Froman\u2019s family has to endure this sort of random act of violence against innocents. It is a family that is all about peace and dialogue and living together.\u201d Ms. Froman\u2019s husband, Shivi Froman, told the Israeli news site Ynet what his wife had told him about the boy who stabbed her. \u201cShe felt that more than he wanted to kill her, he wanted to die,\u201d he said. \u201cThey must be taught life, and we must fight without confusion against the envoys of death and the culture of death.\u201d In another case that shocked Israelis, two schoolboys from Tekoa, Koby Mandell, a son of immigrants from the United States, and his friend Yosef Ishran were bludgeoned to death with stones in a cave near the settlement in 2001, during the second Palestinian intifada. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, condemned \u201cin the strongest possible terms the terrorist attacks over the past two days against Israeli civilians.\u201d Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel rejected Mr. Shapiro\u2019s remarks, calling them \u201cunacceptable and incorrect,\u201d and accused the Palestinian Authority of inciting violence in the West Bank. Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, which sits in opposition in the Israeli Parliament, excoriated Mr. Netanyahu for the deterioration in security for Israelis, saying: \u201cIn Israel there is no functioning prime minister. There is a prime minister only interested in surviving.\u201d Mr. Lieberman, who lives in the neighboring settlement of Nokdim, was speaking in front of the shop where the attack took place on Monday, and said he had come as a concerned resident of the area. The assailant in the Tekoa attack on Monday was about 15, according to Israeli news reports, and had entered the settlement through a hole in its perimeter fence. He was shot and wounded by security personnel, the military said, and taken to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, where he is under arrest. Ms. Meir, who was buried in Jerusalem, was a hospital nurse and a mother of six, including two foster children. At least three of her children were in the house at the time of the attack, but they were unharmed. The search for her killer continues. Ms. Meir\u2019s oldest daughter, Renana, 17, who witnessed the fatal stabbing, eulogized her mother. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe we will not laugh anymore,\u201d she said. \u201cWe won\u2019t argue anymore. We won\u2019t sit and have tea together at midnight. It\u2019s hard to believe you won\u2019t escort me to the wedding canopy, or to the army induction center, or to the maternity ward.\u201d", "keyword": "Palestinians;West Bank;Israeli settlement;Murders and Homicides"}
{"id": "ny0249275", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/05/14", "title": "Lawyer for Officer Moreno Makes Closing Arguments in Rape Case", "abstract": "Consciousness. A foggy memory. The lack of physical evidence. Those were the three main points reiterated on Friday by the lawyer for a police officer accused of raping a drunken woman he had been called to help. In nearly four hours of closing arguments in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, urged jurors to acquit his client, Police Officer Kenneth Moreno , because the case was littered with doubt. He emphasized that the woman was conscious, walking on her own and talking, as seen on surveillance footage showing Officer Moreno and his partner, Franklin Mata , escorting her into her East Village apartment building. The prosecution\u2019s theory of rape is that the woman was physically unable to consent because she was too drunk. \u201cIf she\u2019s not unconscious, not physically unable to communicate, you can stop,\u201d Mr. Tacopina told the jurors, referring to his belief that there was no need to deliberate beyond that point and reach Officer Moreno\u2019s testimony that there was no sex between the two. \u201cThe fact of the matter is she wasn\u2019t physically helpless at all.\u201d Prosecutors accused Officer Moreno of raping the woman while she lay face-down and dazed on her bed, while Officer Mata, also charged with rape, stood guard. But then Mr. Tacopina turned to the no-sex argument. The prosecution failed to present physical evidence, offering not so much as a hair of Officer Moreno\u2019s, left behind in the woman\u2019s bed, he said. That \u201cthey don\u2019t find one hair is impossible\u201d if the woman\u2019s story were true, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible.\u201d Semen or lubricant also were not found in the woman or on her bed, Mr. Tacopina said. \u201cThe lack of DNA in this case is death,\u201d he said. \u201cNo semen and no lubricant and no injuries means no sex.\u201d Mr. Tacopina also tried to show jurors that the certainty the woman portrayed on the witness stand belied the uncertainty of statements she made in the days after she said the attack occurred in December 2008. A few days after she said she was attacked, he said, the woman told an investigator that on the night in question, a taxi driver assisted her out of his car. That turned out to be untrue, Mr. Tacopina said. \u201cShe\u2019s actually creating things in her mind that weren\u2019t accurate, that are not true,\u201d he said. Mr. Tacopina also emphasized investigators\u2019 notes in which the woman\u2019s friends said she told them she \u201cbelieved\u201d or \u201cthinks\u201d she was raped. \u201cHer memories from that morning were vague and piecemeal,\u201d Mr. Tacopina said. \u201cWhatever limited, skewed memories she had, she tries to connect the dots.\u201d That led her to solidify in her mind an inaccurate narrative, he said. Mr. Tacopina did not address Officer Moreno\u2019s account on the witness stand that the woman came on to him and that he resisted her advances. \u201cTo me, it was something that speaks for itself,\u201d he said outside the courthouse. He did, however, tell the jury that his client was sincere despite aggressive cross-examination from a prosecutor. He said that Officer Moreno\u2019s comment on cross-examination that he does not \u201ckiss and tell\u201d was a sign that he was an ordinary person. \u201cHe\u2019s not a very sophisticated guy,\u201d Mr. Tacopina said, adding that his client was \u201cmaybe a bit of a simpleton.\u201d Closing arguments are scheduled to continue on Monday with Officer Mata\u2019s lawyer and then the prosecution.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Police Brutality and Misconduct;Moreno Kenneth;Mata Franklin L;Tacopina Joseph;Police Department (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0205819", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/01/06", "title": "Andy Pettitte Rejects Yankees\u2019 Offer, Making Return Uncertain", "abstract": "In some ways, Andy Pettitte is no different from the dozens of other free agents to start the new year without a team. Players all over baseball are waiting for better offers, and teams are searching for bargains. But Pettitte is not like other players, and the Yankees are not like other teams. Pettitte has pledged his loyalty to the Yankees, and the Yankees have spent lavishly this winter at a time when many clubs are scaling back. A reunion seemed inevitable at the start of the off-season, but now it is uncertain. Pettitte has rejected the Yankees\u2019 one-year, $10 million offer, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations, and there is no standing offer for now. Pettitte could return because some in the Yankees\u2019 hierarchy want him back. But in a winter of aggressive activity, the Yankees have been unwilling to bend for Pettitte. As an eight-year, $180 million deal for first baseman Mark Teixeira becomes official with a news conference Tuesday, the awkward Pettitte drama plays out in the background. The offer to Pettitte represented a 37.5 percent decrease from his $16 million salary last season. Pettitte considered the offer for weeks, then met with General Manager Brian Cashman in Texas after the winter meetings last month. Pettitte might wonder why the Yankees offered a pay cut at a time when they spent a combined $243.5 million on C. C. Sabathia and A. J. Burnett. If he is, though, Pettitte has not said so. Reached by The New York Times on Dec. 3, he said he wanted to return but was leaving the matter to his agent, Randy Hendricks, who did not respond to e-mail messages Monday. Derek Lowe is still available in free agency, and after the Yankees\u2019 stealth pursuit of Teixeira, anything seems possible. The fifth spot in the rotation probably belongs to Phil Hughes for now, but the easiest answer is to retain Pettitte. He led the team in innings despite pitching with shoulder pain, going 14-14 with a 4.54 earned run average. At 36 and a father of four, Pettitte has taken a year-to-year approach to his career. The Yankees let him take his time in deciding whether to exercise a one-year option after the 2007 season, and he waited until early December, just before the release of the Mitchell report . Pettitte did not tell the Yankees that he might be included in the report, which said he had used human growth hormone. Pettitte admitted his use and the Yankees supported him publicly. But his performance suffered in the second half of the season, when he usually gets stronger, and he admitted his distracting off-season might have been a factor. In a way, though, such honesty has always been part of Pettitte\u2019s appeal; his sincerity and earnestness have made him a fan favorite. In an interview in September, Pettitte forecast a quick negotiation, even though he knew it might not be wise to do so. \u201cObviously anyone else would say, \u2018I\u2019ll go wherever I want to,\u2019 because people want to try to get the most money,\u201d Pettitte said before a Yankees-Angels game in Anaheim, Calif. \u201cBut, I mean, I\u2019m not going anywhere, you know what I\u2019m saying? The Yankees know me enough, it\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to hold out. I guess if I had spent all my money or whatever, it might be different. But it\u2019s not about that, really, anymore.\u201d Pettitte also said he would discuss his future with his family, so the possibility exists that he will simply retire. Yet those who have talked to Pettitte, including Manager Joe Girardi, have been under the impression that he wants to play for the Yankees. \u201cHe\u2019s still excited about coming back,\u201d Girardi said on Dec. 18, adding that Pettitte was enthusiastic about the Yankees\u2019 roster moves. For Pettitte to be part of the team again, though, one stubborn party must back down.", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Pettitte Andy;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0040227", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/04/01", "title": "Behind the Scenes at \u2018Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs\u2019", "abstract": "In a brightly lit production studio at the American Museum of Natural History in February, 12 artists were hard at work, heads down, eyes focused. In one corner, a sculptor was shaping clay to create a cat-size flying reptile, a rhamphorhynchus , using a tracing of the animal\u2019s footprints that had been captured in a stone trackway excavated in Utah. In a back room, in hazmat suits and respirators, a team of three was building another kind of a pterosaur, as the flying reptiles are known: a nine-foot-long tropeognathus from foam, fiberglass and epoxy around an aluminum frame. But in the center of it all was the big daddy \u2014 the 28-foot-long quetzalcoatlus , with a wingspan as wide as a fighter jet and a crested head the size of a canoe. As the star of the museum\u2019s latest show, \u201cPterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs\u201d opening on April 5, he has had four artists assigned to him full time since December. Hannah Rawe , a sculptor, was seated next to the foam-filled animal, scratching what were supposed to be tiny hairs into its huge shoulder. At one point, she stopped to ask her boss where the hairs should end and smooth skin should begin. They emailed Alexander Kellner , one of the two curators of the show, a paleontologist at the Museu Nacional in Brazil. Stop at the wrist, he instructed them. And so Ms. Rawe did. Since the fall, Ms. Rawe and all 55 members of the museum\u2019s exhibitions team have been working closely with curators, paleontologists and scientific consultants to get their creations \u2014 down to a hair \u2014 as close to reality as possible. In addition to painters and sculptors, there are computer animators, graphic designers and filmmakers. These three floors in this part of the museum complex \u2014 the Power House, where the coal fires were once stoked to heat the entire museum \u2014 are where art meets science. Where theory becomes reality. Image Building Pterosaurs Down to Their Hairs, William Henry Harrison\u2019s Killer, Medical Device Loopholes A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History will feature great reptiles that soared over 60 million years ago; historians may be dead wrong about what killed the shortest-tenured American president; how safe are the medical devices in use in hospitals and doctors\u2019 offices? <br><a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/science-times/id120316173?mt=2\">Subscribe to the Podcast \u00bb</a> With each changing exhibition, including \u201cDarwin,\u201d \u201cWhales: Giants of the Deep\u201d and \u201cThe Power of Poison\u201d and now this pterosaurs show, scientists translate their concepts for the visual realm. And artists patiently tease out the minutiae of science from experts in the field. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like the Santa\u2019s workshop of the museum,\u201d said the museum\u2019s spokesman, Roberto Lebron, about the fifth-floor exhibitions studio. \u201cThese are the people who put it all together.\u201d For the past 90 years, artists and sculptors \u2014 known as museum preparators \u2014 have labored in this room. The taxidermy for the museum\u2019s famous displays and dioramas were done here in the 1930s. Hanging high on the studio walls are antlers, fish and casts of animal faces from old specimens, as well as one black-and-white photo of workers scraping an elephant hide for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals . From Idea to Exhibit Those animals still fill the museum\u2019s halls, frozen in time. But these days, the beehive of activity inside the studio never seems to end. There are usually two special exhibitions each year, with work on one starting just as work on another is ending. The creation of each show begins in much the same way, with executive-level museum administrators learning from, and hashing out ideas with, the curators of each exhibition \u2014 this time, Dr. Kellner and Mark A. Norell , head of paleontology for the museum, who has curated more shows than anyone else on staff. Dr. Norell, one of the stars of the paleontology world, spends half his time traveling the globe, acquiring fossils in places like China and Romania, and the other half explaining to the staff what to do with them. Early on, the curators decide which animals they want to include. An architectural model is made of the show to figure out what will go where. \u201cThe process is kind of like making a film,\u201d said Dr. Norell, seated in his rounded office in one of the museum\u2019s brownstone turrets overlooking Central Park West near West 77th Street. \u201cYou have an idea, then the smaller pitch, then the shooting script, deciding how everything\u2019s laid out, what objects and artifacts to use, what the look and feel of the show is going to be; then you start building your models.\u201d Dr. Norell and his fellow scientists work closely with the artists to come up with drawings for each specimen. Together they decide what the creature will look like, based on fossils and research materials, then what position it will be in: soaring, flapping, mouth open, mouth closed. The color of a long-extinct animal can sometimes be determined by melanosomes \u2014 intercellular bodies that might be preserved in the fossils. Minute amounts of chemical residue that hint at color are also sometimes present. Based on discussions and research, the artists make their sketches, which Dr. Norell must approve, usually with some back and forth. Then the team starts building. Image From left, Hannah Rawe, Jack Cesareo and Tom Doncourt prepared a model for the exhibit. Credit Roderick Mickens/AMNH A few exhibitions staff members have biology backgrounds and do much of their own research. Jason Brougham , who is working on a diorama for the coming show, researched the pterosaurs and fish that would be included, as well as the plant life from the early Cretaceous period . He helped advise many of the other artists on anatomy. While most of the staff was still working on the \u201cPower of Poison\u201d exhibition this summer, Mr. Brougham was already immersed in prehistoric flying reptiles and their environment. He worked closely with John Maisey , a paleontologist on staff, who has dug in Brazil\u2019s fossil-rich Romualdo Formation. Mr. Brougham studied biology as an undergraduate, switched to scientific illustration, then got his master\u2019s in fine art, studying painting. At the museum his past creations include replicas of the human brain and twisting brass models of genome protein folds. \u201cI came to New York to be a big-shot painter,\u201d Mr. Brougham said. \u201cBut I took a day job here and totally fell in love with scientific art, reconstructing extinct animals. I really found my calling. It\u2019s great at cocktail parties: a billionaire hedge-fund manager and a 5-year-old both want to talk to you with equal interest.\u201d For the diorama, Mr. Brougham also worked closely with Dr. Kellner, using a thalassodromeus skull fossil from which they extrapolated what the rest of the animal might have looked like. They examined a similar pterosaur specimen, tupuxuara, to piece together the body. \u201cMost of the questions that we actually get from artists, the answer is, \u2018I don\u2019t know,\u2019 \u201d Dr. Kellner said. But the more research that\u2019s done, the closer their guess can be on an animal that\u2019s been extinct for 66 million years. \u201cIn art you can do whatever you want,\u201d Dr. Kellner said. \u201cYou have an expression of how you feel about a certain subject. But in paleo art, you don\u2019t have that liberty. You must try to present the reconstruction of those animals the best way that you can based on true scientific evidence.\u201d Image Rebecca Meah, principal preparator, added finishing touches to a tropeognathus model. Credit Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times Together, he and Mr. Brougham reconstructed the muscle groups, then placed the eye and soft tissue, including a crest and big gullet, where they should be. The artists at the museum use not only fossils to determine what the animal might have looked like, but also anything and everything else that might help. In the quetzalcoatlus work space, there were photographs of modern birds \u2014 a Marabou stork and a crane \u2014 and even a photo of a raw chicken cut and splayed open to help envision the musculature. The curators watch the process closely, touring the work space every few days or, if they\u2019re away, receiving photos of the progress and offering tweaks and suggestions. There is a weekly meeting to discuss the show\u2019s progress. A Moving Target Sometimes, changes in science happen so quickly that an artist\u2019s creation must be considerably altered. For instance, Michael Habib , a consulting scientist who specializes in the aeronautics of pterosaurs, was about to publish a new paper, and he suggested all the bodies of the models be slimmed down. The feet of Quetzalcoatlus underwent major changes as well: Five toes per foot were edited down to four; they were shortened and the toenails removed. Changes on the fifth floor were then communicated to the multimedia artists two floors down so that their work \u2014 which included an interactive digital flying pterosaur \u2014 would match. Rather than being frustrated by the constant changes to their creations, most of the artists seem proud to be working to get things exactly right. Tom Doncourt, an artist and a former cabinetmaker who made the original sketch of the quetzalcoatlus for the show based on a skeleton already in the museum, said that the challenge of fast-changing information was not unique to prehistoric reptile science. The Hall of Human Origins, built in the 1990s, was quickly made out of date by anthropological discoveries, he said. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s obsolete the minute we finish it,\u201d said Mr. Doncourt, now a senior principal preparator at the museum. The \u201c Dark Universe \u201d show in the planetarium had to be adjusted as well. Midway through production last year, a higher-resolution map of the cosmic microwave background was released. The new data was integrated into the show. Image Claws for a model. The exhibitions team has worked with paleontologists on details for months. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times \u201cOccasionally,\u201d said Dr. Kellner, \u201conce you have it done, everything is fine, everyone is happy. But then a year later someone makes a new discovery. This is why we paleontologists are never going to be out of a job.\u201d Mick Ellison , who has worked with Dr. Norell for 24 years, photographing fossils and reconstructing animals from them, said he did not like relying on previous drawings because there was no telling how accurate they are. Mistakes, he said, can be passed down from artist to artist, year after year. For the \u201cWhales\u201d exhibition last year, Mr. Ellison, a senior principal artist, used a jawbone to recreate an entire Andrewsarchus , a long-extinct land-dwelling relative of the whale. \u201cIt was this big hairy beast that had always looked this certain way that was completely inaccurate if you looked at the fossil,\u201d Mr. Ellison said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t look anything like this image. But everybody copied this image. Discovery Channel, all these dinosaur movies.\u201d So Mr. Ellison tries not to take anything for granted. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty satisfying if you can get close to something that\u2019s true,\u201d he said. Mr. Ellison, who studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and worked as a medical illustrator, has taken anatomy classes to help him recreate creatures great and small. For the quetzalcoatlus wing he created for the show, Mr. Ellison used an old-school trick to get it just right: the grid method, which dates back to the Renaissance. He placed the huge wing bone model on a giant piece of graph paper and numbered each square so that the finished product \u2014 the filled-in wing \u2014 would fit the bone exactly. He then went new-school and composed the drawing on the computer. But the wing and the matching computer file were so large that the computer kept freezing. So he broke the file in two. Most people, he said, think art and science are two different worlds. \u201cI used to think they were very separate, but they\u2019re actually very similar. You have to be creative and you have to be observant.\u201d", "keyword": "Pterosaur;American Museum of Natural History;Paleontology;Mark A Norell;Replicas;Hannah Rawe;Jason Brougham;Alexander W.A. Kellner"}
{"id": "ny0136162", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/04/12", "title": "Iran Fighting Proxy War in Iraq, U.S. Envoy Says", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Iran is engaging in a proxy war with the United States in Iraq , adopting tactics similar to those it has used to back fighters in Lebanon, the United States ambassador to Iraq said Friday. The remarks by the ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker , reflected the sharper criticism of Iran by President Bush and his top deputies over the past week, as administration officials have sought to trace many of their troubles in Iraq to Iran. Mr. Crocker said in an interview that there had been no substantive change in Iranian behavior in Iraq, despite more than a year of talks between the Bush administration and Iran over how to calm Shiite-Sunni tensions in Iraq. He said that the paramilitary branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps was continuing to direct attacks by Shiite militias against American and Iraqi targets, although he offered no direct evidence. Asked if the United States and Iran were engaged in a proxy war in Iraq, Mr. Crocker said, \u201cI don\u2019t think a proxy war is being waged from an American point of view.\u201d But, he added, \u201cWhen you look at what the Iranians are doing and how they\u2019re doing it, it could well be that.\u201d While Bush administration officials have long denounced what they have described as Iran\u2019s meddling in Iraq, Mr. Crocker\u2019s language was unusually strong, reflecting fresh concern about what he described in Congressional testimony this week as Iran\u2019s role in supplying militias with training and weapons, including rockets used in recent attacks on the Green Zone, in Baghdad. The Bush administration is trying to exploit any crack it can find between the largely Shiite, pro-Iranian government of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and Iran\u2019s Shiite government. On Friday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that Iran\u2019s role in supporting radical Shiite militias in recent clashes with Iraqi security forces had been an \u201ceye-opener\u201d for the central government in Baghdad. \u201cI think that there is some sense of an increased level of supply of weapons and support to these groups,\u201d Mr. Gates said. \u201cI would say one of the salutary effects of what Prime Minister Maliki did in Basra is that I think the Iraqi government now has a clearer view of the malign impact of Iran\u2019s activities inside Iraq.\u201d From Mr. Bush down, administration officials this week have been turning up the volume on Iran. Administration officials said that Iranian support for Shiite militias became increasingly evident late last month during the indecisive Iraqi operation to wrest control of Basra from Shiite militias, in addition to the rocket attacks on the Green Zone. Administration officials have long accused Iran of supporting Shiite militias in attacks on American forces in Iraq. The difference now is that administration officials are trying to convince the Iraqi government that Iran may not be the ally it thought, and is behind attacks against Iraqi government forces. That is a harder sell, given that Iran has supported Iraq\u2019s government. Mr. Bush this week accused Iran of arming, financing and training what he called \u201cillegal militant groups.\u201d He said that Iran had a choice, and hinted that the United States would try to sow distrust between the governments of Iran and Iraq, if Iran did not stop backing the attacks. \u201cIf Iran makes the right choice, America will encourage a peaceful relationship between Iran and Iraq,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cIf Iran makes the wrong choice, America will act to protect our interests and our troops and our Iraqi partners.\u201d Mr. Gates, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, said that Iraqi officials were starting to pay heed. \u201cThey have had what I would call a growing understanding of that negative Iranian role, but I think what they encountered in Basra was a real eye-opener for them.\u201d Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed the assessment that Basra offered evidence to counter statements that Iran was decreasing its efforts in Iraq. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, this action in Basra was very convincing that indeed they haven\u2019t,\u201d the admiral said. In addition, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, told reporters on Friday that while the Iraqi police and army troops had established security through most of Basra, \u201cseveral significant neighborhoods are not under control of the Iraqi security forces.\u201d Combating the Shiite militias in those enclaves of Basra, Iraq\u2019s second-largest city, will be \u201ca months-long operation,\u201d he said. Iran remains one of the Bush administration\u2019s stickiest foreign policy issues, and Washington is battling Iran on multiple fronts, as administration officials struggle to find a carrot-and-stick approach for influencing Iranian behavior. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the United States would consider new incentives or sanctions as part of its battle to get Iran to rein in its nuclear ambitions. She said she did not anticipate a new push just yet, but said that \u201cwe will always continue to consider refreshing both tracks,\u201d referring to the administration\u2019s two-track approach of sanctions if Iran continues to enrich uranium and incentives if it stops. Russia and China have been urging major powers to sweeten the incentives package, but thus far the United States has balked. During the interview, Mr. Crocker accused Iran of meddling in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, in addition to Iraq. He also faulted Iraq\u2019s Arab neighbors for refusing to help, noting that a promised Saudi Arabian Embassy had yet to materialize. \u201cThe Arabs are basically missing in action,\u201d Mr. Crocker said. He said that while Saudi Arabia had helped in American attempts to rein in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, Sunni governments in the Middle East needed to establish more of a diplomatic presence in Iraq, which Bush officials believe would further legitimize the American-backed Iraqi government. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things that have been in process for a long time,\u201d Mr. Crocker said of the promised Saudi Embassy. \u201cThey\u2019ve sent a delegation to scout out property. But somehow it never quite gets done.\u201d", "keyword": "Iran;United States International Relations;United States Armament and Defense;Iraq;Crocker Ryan C;Shiite Muslims"}
{"id": "ny0257805", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/01/16", "title": "2010 Long Island Weather Set Stage for Fine 2011 White Wines", "abstract": "Mother Nature made it nearly impossible to produce disappointing Long Island wines last year. The outstanding vintage set the stage for especially rewarding white-wine drinking this year, when the 2010s will be released. Reds will mature in oak barrels for two or more years. The rising quality of dry and off-dry whites (as well as cabernet franc, a red) has challenged the hoary notion that the East End is chiefly merlot country. Ambitious sparkling wines are also catching on, and alluring French-style ros\u00e9s, which flatter maritime cuisine, are proliferating. Local vintners are striving to create signature wines by defining and transmitting their terroirs: the mix of soils, topography and climate that gives wines particular characters. Chardonnays, sauvignon blancs and rieslings that experience minimal intervention in winemaking and are reared in steel tanks and neutral barrels can express terroir nicely. New oak can mask it. Top-notch wineries like Bedell Cellars , Channing Daughters , Macari Vineyards , Shinn Estate Vineyards and W\u00f6lffer Estate Vineyard seem particularly attuned to the specifics of terroir. Their cellar methods seem to be adjusting to those specifics. There is a tier of less prominent producers whose 2010 wines are also likely to be inviting. It includes Anthony Nappa Wines , Bouk\u00e9 Wines , Clovis Point Wines , Comtesse Th\u00e9r\u00e8se , Diliberto Winery , Jason\u2019s Vineyard , Mattebella Vineyards , McCall Wines , Onabay Vineyards , Roanoke Vineyards , Suhru Wines and Waters Crest Winery. The new year brings the industry a potential downside. State budget constraints may prevent the New York Wine and Grape Foundation , a trade association, from subsidizing the Long Island Wine Council , a trade group, at the current level of almost $24,000. That kind of cutback would force vintners to spend more of their own money on marketing, raising the prospect of higher prices.", "keyword": "Wines;Long Island (NY);Bedell Cellars;Channing Daughters Winery;Macari Vineyards;New York Wine and Grape Foundation;Long Island Wine Council"}
{"id": "ny0156365", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/06/19", "title": "Sanyo\u2019s Xacti HD1010 Video Camera", "abstract": "Sanyo\u2019s Xacti HD1000 was one of the first compact cameras to shoot high-definition video. The latest in the line, the HD1010, includes a slow-motion mode and a slick face-tracking feature. This $799 camera, due next month, weighs nine ounces and is a little bigger than a cellphone. It has a 2.7-inch display and 10X optical zoom lens, and can record video directly to an SD or SDHC memory card; it can record up to 87 minutes of video on a single eight-gigabyte card. When video is not so crucial, the camera takes four-megapixel still images as well. The HD1010 can take 300-frames-a-second video for better slow-motion playback. Its \u201cface chase\u201d technology allows users to track a field of 12 faces at a time, ensuring that the entire party stays in focus. Image stabilization adds security for those with shaky hands. A docking station, included, can link the camera directly to a high-definition TV or computer through various cables. Best of all, there\u2019s a \u201csimple\u201d mode that allows anyone \u2014 even toddlers and the unsteady \u2014 to get a good shot. JOHN BIGGS", "keyword": "Cameras;Recordings and Downloads (Video);Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0262313", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/06/14", "title": "Once Again, .500 Slips From Mets\u2019 Grasp", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 The final step to reaching the podium of mediocrity has been fleeting for the Mets . For the third time in less than a week, the Mets sought to reach the elusive .500 mark, only to be thrust backward. A pair of base-running mistakes led to the Mets\u2019 demise this time, enabling the Pittsburgh Pirates to beat the Mets on Monday night, 3-1 , as the teams split a four-game series at PNC Park. But while they played even during this series, the Mets have found it more challenging to level their overall record. Since April 9, the Mets (32-34) have spent all of 24 hours at .500. They have not been at .500 since May 20, when they were 22-22 , and five times this year, they have attempted to reach that mark from a game behind, only to go 1-4. \u201cIt\u2019s important,\u201d Jose Reyes said. \u201cWe want to play .500 or better. When you play below .500, it means you don\u2019t play too good. So we want to get to the .500 mark, and even better. We\u2019ve had a couple opportunities to get there and let it get away.\u201d Manager Terry Collins said he was not concerned about the team creating a self-imposed mental hurdle about the .500 mark. He explained that if his players had simply executed better, especially on the basepaths, they might have had a different result. \u201cWe had two base-running mistakes, and it ended up costing us perhaps the ballgame,\u201d Collins said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t execute, and that\u2019s ultimately what it will take.\u201d In fact, much of the outcome of this game was determined by plays in the dirt. In the first inning, Jose Tabata, the Pirates \u2019 left fielder, was allowed to stay on third base after he was tagged out because the second-base umpire Jerry Layne ruled that Reyes had interfered with him after he rounded second base. Mike Pelfrey, who was backing up third at the time, said he thought it was the right call, but Collins argued it. Nevertheless, Tabata stayed put, briefly, then scored on a single by Neil Walker. With the Mets trailing in the fifth, 1-0, Daniel Murphy was picked off second base when Pelfrey failed to make contact on a bunt attempt. Murphy broke for third too early and could not scramble back. It was the second time on the trip a pitcher failed to get down a bunt attempt and a base runner was caught. In the first game of this series, Josh Thole was caught in a rundown after Dillon Gee failed to get down the bunt. Then, in the bottom of the fifth, Brandon Wood hit a home run off Pelfrey (3-5), who allowed two runs and four hits in seven strong innings. Pelfrey, however, was outpitched by Paul Maholm, who allowed three hits and two walks in seven shutout innings. The score remained 2-0 as the game moved to the eighth, when the Mets ran themselves into more trouble. This time, it was the rookie Lucas Duda who made the mistake. After Ruben Tejada led off with a walk and Duda singled to right, the Mets had runners at first and third and nobody out. Reyes hit a sinking line drive to left field that Tabata appeared to trap off the turf. Duda had broken all the way to second, and when Tabata came up with the ball and it was ruled a catch, Duda did not have time to get back to first and was doubled up. Duda\u2019s base-running mistake was not mimicked by Tejada, who tagged up and scored easily. Trailing by 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth, the Mets allowed an insurance run. Manny Acosta loaded the bases by allowing three singles, and Tim Byrdak walked Walker to make it a two-run game. INSIDE PITCH The Mets announced that Johan Santana, who is recovering from shoulder surgery, felt soreness in his left shoulder June 3 and has not thrown off the mound since then. General Manager Sandy Alderson said Santana was still not at the place where a pitcher would be at the beginning of a spring training, so his return would not come until at least August. Santana is expected to get back on the mound at the end of this week, and if he can throw two or three times without feeling pain, he would begin a process that should mirror a typical six-week spring training. But Alderson and Terry Collins both said that Santana would dictate his own pace, and that there is no guarantee he would come back at all this season. \u201cUltimately, when he feels right, he\u2019ll pitch,\u201d Collins said. \u201cWe can only hope that it comes in July maybe, or August or September. But we hope he comes back. And if not, if he\u2019s ready next spring, we\u2019re going into spring training with a pretty good pitcher on our team.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;New York Mets;Pittsburgh Pirates;Pelfrey Mike;Reyes Jose"}
{"id": "ny0142777", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2008/11/06", "title": "Player Sees Tour Finale as Golden Opportunity", "abstract": "ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 Not long ago, the last official money event on the PGA Tour was known as the Fear and Loathing Open by touring pros trying to secure playing status for the next year by finishing in the top 125 in earnings. The nickname now seems quaint and a bit overwrought. In an era when a tour player who finishes inside 150 on the list will probably earn $500,000 and get in 15 Tour events and however many Nationwide Tour events he can play in the next year, the fear factor is not what it used to be. And while this year\u2019s season finale includes the usual battle for players on the bubble, it also has a subplot of genuine hope real enough to move all but the most hardened cynic. Playing here in the Children\u2019s Miracle Network Classic at Disney World is Erik Compton, the 28-year-old pro who five months ago received his second heart transplant and whose recent play has been almost, well, fictional. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s a very fitting event, the Children\u2019s Miracle Network,\u201d Compton said of the sponsor organization that funds a network of 170 children\u2019s hospitals in North America with private donations from individuals and corporations. \u201cConsidering everything that I\u2019ve been through, I kind of know what the kids are going through because I\u2019ve been there.\u201d Two weeks ago Compton squeaked through the first stage of the tour\u2019s qualifying school by shooting a final-round 68 to make up seven strokes and advance with the rest of the top 23 from Crandon Park Golf Course near Miami to next week\u2019s second of three stages. Then, in a tune-up for this event, he shot a course-record 65 at Old Palm Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., a regular haunt of prominent tour regulars. Those efforts attracted the attention of PGA Tour tournament directors like Kevin Weickel of the Children\u2019s Miracle Network, who offered Compton an exemption this week, and network news reporters like ABC\u2019s Jeffrey Kofman, who interviewed Compton last week. His competitors and friends on the tour also took note. One of his pals, Brad Adamonis, is 120th on the money list and battling to maintain the tour playing privileges he earned for the first time this year. \u201cIt\u2019s unbelievable,\u201d Adamonis said, smiling and shaking his head. \u201cThird heart. It\u2019s amazing. I think being able to use a golf cart certainly helps him out. He probably wouldn\u2019t be able to play if he didn\u2019t have a golf cart, and, you know, I don\u2019t know if he feels 100 percent yet. But here he is. It\u2019s pretty unbelievable.\u201d It seems unbelievable to everyone except Compton. He was granted an exemption by the PGA Tour to use a golf cart until March, \u201cwhich hopefully will change in the next few months as I get stronger,\u201d he said. He said he already felt strong enough to talk some trash on the practice range with his fellow University of Georgia graduate Bubba Watson, the tour\u2019s longest hitter, about who can hit the ball farther. After getting a new driver from a manufacturer\u2019s representative on Monday, Compton was going back and forth with Adamonis about how he was now hitting the ball 20 yards farther than his friend. Smiling slyly, Compton said, \u201cYou know, because I\u2019ve got some weight back on and don\u2019t really look like I\u2019ve had any kind of problem, I find myself having to apologize to guys, you know, like, \u2018Dude, I\u2019m sorry I\u2019m hitting it past you, but I really did have a heart transplant five months ago.\u2019 \u201d Not that he is trying to incite anyone. It is just that Compton has never lacked confidence. As he begins to feel better each day, he is buoyed by the exhilaration of simply being alive. And he wants to make the most of every minute. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m just dumb enough to think that I could win the tournament,\u201d he said, laughing again. \u201cI thought going into Q school, I should win that tournament. I feel like I have a really good golf swing. I feel like I can putt the ball just as good as anybody. If my stamina is good and I can control my emotions, I just don\u2019t see why not.\u201d Adamonis said he does not doubt it. He was playing with Compton in a Nationwide Tour event last year in Boise, Idaho, when Compton inexplicably made a quintuple-bogey 9 on a hole to miss the cut by a stroke. At the time, Adamonis said he thought, \u201cWhat an idiot.\u201d Compton went home and had a heart attack two days later. Had the attack occurred while he was playing in Idaho, he might not have made it to the hospital as quickly as he did in Miami. On Tuesday, six months after the transplant, Compton allowed himself a flight of fancy. \u201cI mean, if I won this week, what would the headline be?\u201d he said. It may have the word miracle in it somewhere.", "keyword": "Compton Erik;Golf;PGA Tour Inc"}
{"id": "ny0021172", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/09/18", "title": "Cuban Slugger Brings Promise and Risk to the Plate", "abstract": "During this year\u2019s World Baseball Classic, Cuba\u2019s Jose Dariel Abreu hit a grand slam against China that was positively jaw-dropping. Abreu, a powerfully built right-handed hitter, loaded up on his back leg, waited on a curveball and hit a towering drive halfway up the outfield stands. Thirty major league front offices were surely paying attention. Last month, Abreu defected from Cuba, the latest player to leave the nation to pursue a major league career. Yasiel Puig\u2019s electric summer in Los Angeles for the Dodgers and Yoenis Cespedes\u2019s success with the Oakland Athletics the past two seasons have helped to fuel the hype surrounding Abreu\u2019s imminent arrival in the majors. It is possible that when Abreu does sign, his deal will be the richest of any Cuban defector, topping Puig\u2019s $42 million. \u201cThere is more and more interest in the Cuban players all the time,\u201d said the agent Jaime Torres, who represents Puig. \u201cLook how well they are doing.\u201d Still, Abreu is a player who has spent his career hidden from most major league scouts and has essentially been competing against hard-to-evaluate opponents. He could be the next great Cuban star, or merely the beneficiary of a bull market for Cuban players. There is little certainty either way. Abreu, 26, stands 6 feet 3 inches and weighs 250 pounds. He is a first baseman with ample power, but also a sharp batting eye and the ability to hit for a high average. The numbers he put up in Cuba\u2019s Serie Nacional are staggering. Image Abreu is expected to sign a lucrative contract though it is unclear if he can successfully adapt to the majors like the Athletics\u2019 Yoenis Cespedes. Credit Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images In the 2009-10 season, Abreu rose to stardom when he hit .399 with 30 home runs, 76 runs batted in and a .555 on-base percentage. The next year he had one of the best seasons in the history of the Cuban league, batting .453 with 33 home runs and 93 R.B.I. in only 66 games (he missed 23 with bursitis in his shoulder). His past two seasons have been similarly prodigious. At the World Baseball Classic this year, he was 9 for 25 with 3 home runs in 6 games. Abreu is often called a four-tool player, missing only the speed of his countrymen Puig and Cespedes. Scouts have compared him to Ryan Howard because of his size and easy power. Peter Bjarkman, who covers the Cuban league for baseballdecuba.com, said Abreu had the look of a young Mark McGwire. Adding to his value, Abreu will be part of a relatively thin free-agent class in the major leagues. So far, the San Francisco Giants have expressed interest, as have the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Baltimore Orioles. The Mets, still looking for an impact hitter at first base, would also make an intriguing landing spot. Ike Davis, once thought to be the Mets\u2019 first baseman of the future, spent time at Class AAA Las Vegas this season and was recently shelved with an oblique injury. Neither of his replacements, Lucas Duda and Josh Satin, inspires much confidence as a long-term solution. Abreu could be a quick \u2014 albeit expensive \u2014 fix should General Manager Sandy Alderson decide he is up for a somewhat risky bidding war. But Abreu is hardly a guarantee at the major league level. An international scout for one major league team said that Alfredo Despaigne and Frederich Cepeda, outfielders on the Cuban national team, were more dangerous hitters. An international scout for another team said that major league clubs could not afford to make a mistake when spending big on a first baseman, since it is a traditional power position filled by players who bat in the middle of the lineup. In other words, the scout said, the same money that could be used to sign Abreu might be better spent in the acquisition of one of the many established first basemen \u201cyou already know can hit big league pitching.\u201d Image It is possible that when Abreu does sign, his deal will be the richest of any Cuban defector, topping the Dodgers\u2019 Yasiel Puig\u2019s $42 million. Credit Stephen Dunn/Getty Images Neither scout wanted to be quoted by name discussing a player his team might end up bidding on. Bjarkman noted that Abreu\u2019s prodigious numbers came in a league that is leaking talent, as more and more players leave the country. Some pitchers in Cuba, he said, throw between 80 and 85 miles per hour, which is almost akin to batting practice in the majors. \u201cHis numbers in the Cuban league are great, but they came against some very mediocre pitching,\u201d Bjarkman said. \u201cFor the national team, he dropped off a bit. If there is a question, it\u2019s whether he can adjust as quickly to the better pitching as the Cuban players who have been so good in the majors.\u201d Sigfredo Barros, a baseball writer for the Cuban newspaper Granma, said: \u201cSometimes it can be very hard to tell with the Cuban players. Not everyone can be Puig.\u201d Right now, Abreu is working to establish residency in Haiti so he can legally work in the United States. If he came directly he could work immediately, but he would have been subject to the amateur draft and deprived of his lucrative free agency. In addition, Major League Baseball\u2019s new interpretation of regulations from the Treasury Department\u2019s Office of Foreign Assets Control means Abreu will face a longer wait before he is cleared. In the past, Cuban defectors needed only to prove permanent residency in a country outside Cuba. Now baseball requires players to petition the Foreign Assets office, a process that can take several months. Praver Shapiro Sports Management, which has handled other Cubans like pitcher Livan Hernandez, will represent Abreu. Last summer, the agency negotiated a nine-year, $30 million contract for another Cuban client, Jorge Soler, who signed with the Chicago Cubs. Abreu is expected to have a showcase for scouts in the Dominican Republic this month, at which point the hype will probably grow. Where it leads remains to be seen.", "keyword": "Jose Dariel Abreu;Baseball;Cuba"}
{"id": "ny0220542", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/02/11", "title": "Scores Die in Avalanches on Afghan Mountain Pass", "abstract": "SALANG PASS, Afghanistan \u2014 Rescuers atop this treacherous mountain pass dug through piles of snow on Wednesday to extract more bodies from cars, buses and trucks buried in snow as the death toll from possibly the worst series of avalanches in Afghanistan \u2019s history climbed to 166. Officials are predicting that they will find more victims. On just one stretch of the buried highway, at a place known as Pul-i-Khaki, the authorities had dug out 150 bodies, frozen in their final agonies. The rescue teams piled the bodies five to a police pickup truck and took them down to a makeshift helipad to be flown out. The director of the Afghan National Disaster Management Authority, Abdul Matin Adrak, said that 300 injured people had been recovered and that 67 were in critical condition. But even in this snowy roadside graveyard, there were tales of improbable survival, like that of a 31-year-old taxi driver named Sher Muhammad. A storm had already begun on Monday when Mr. Muhammad started up this pass over the Hindu Kush mountain range in his maroon Toyota sedan, with four paying passengers. The heavy rains and ferocious winds loosened mountainfuls of snow, setting off 17 avalanches along a nine-mile-long stretch of the highway. By 9 p.m. Monday, Mr. Muhammad had reached a point just 1,000 feet below the tunnel at the top of the 12,000-foot pass, and it would prove to be the worst place of all. There was a noise like thunder and what felt like a blast, and Mr. Muhammad later told his brother that he remembered only clutching the steering wheel as the car rolled down the mountain and landed on its roof, snow piling over it. The heavily traveled highway, which links Kabul to northern Afghanistan, had been packed with traffic, and officials estimated that 100 or more vehicles had been buried on this one stretch, some of them after tumbling 500 yards down the slope. Within an hour, Mr. Muhammad\u2019s family knew he had not made it over the pass, and they began calling his cellphone, only to get an out-of-service message. Mr. Muhammad was alive and conscious in the darkness of his buried Toyota; one of his passengers had been thrown out, and three others were injured. It took him until 3 a.m. Tuesday to find his cellphone, turn it on and call home. As he and hundreds of others lay buried, rescuers began arriving by helicopter and on foot. \u201cWe\u2019ve had many avalanches here,\u201d said the Parwan Province police chief, Maulana Sayedkhili. \u201cThis is the worst one ever.\u201d Rescuers from the nearest village found a bus that had been buried, with just the rear bumper sticking out, according to one of the villagers, Azizullah (who, like many Afghans, has only one name). They started digging and found 14 people still alive, those in the back of the bus, closest to the surface. Piled beneath them were 40 dead passengers. In another car, officials found a dead woman and her seven children, all still alive. At least four other children were reported to have lost their parents in the avalanches. The governor of Parwan Province, Basir Salangi, estimated Wednesday that 50 vehicles remained buried. \u201cThere are still a lot of cars under the snow,\u201d he said. He stamped his foot. Then he stamped it again. \u201cIt sounds hollow, there\u2019s probably one here, too.\u201d Rescue workers began digging there with shovels, the only tools they had, and not many of them; there were at least five workers for every shovel. They soon struck the metal of a roof. It was Wednesday afternoon, two full days after the avalanches began, before heavy equipment finally reached this point. Mr. Muhammad\u2019s brother, Baryalai, 24, reached the pass on Tuesday. He had been on the phone all night as his buried brother tried to guide him and other family members to where he was. The car was 100 yards from the entombed bus. Just a single wheel of his taxi protruded from the snow. \u201cThe snow was blowing so hard we couldn\u2019t even see it,\u201d Mr. Baryalai said. \u201cHe was saying exactly where he was, he knows this road really well.\u201d Hours passed before they found the car, and Mr. Muhammad wanted to say farewell to his family, his wife and 6-year-old son, but Mr. Baryalai said he would not allow it. \u201cI said, \u2018We\u2019re going to get you out of here,\u2019 \u201d he said. Mr. Baryalai dug out a door and pulled his brother and two survivors out. One of the passengers had already died. It was 10 a.m. on Tuesday, 13 hours after the car had been swept off the road. Mr. Muhammad was paralyzed from the waist down, apparently from frostbite. \u201cAt least he\u2019s alive,\u201d his brother said.", "keyword": "Avalanches;Afghanistan"}
{"id": "ny0057164", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/09/09", "title": "New V.A. Secretary Says Hiring Spree Is Needed to Meet Patient Demand", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The new secretary of Veterans Affairs said Monday that the department needed to hire \u201ctens of thousands of new doctors, new nurses, new clinicians\u201d \u2014 emphasizing the significance of a shortage of employees who are directly involved in treating patients, a factor many experts said was a main driver in the waiting-list scandal that rocked the agency this year. Yet the new secretary, Robert A. McDonald, a former chief executive of Procter & Gamble, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate six weeks ago after the resignation of Eric Shinseki in May , acknowledged that it would be difficult to fill many of those slots. \u201cI am worried about our ability to recruit and retain talent,\u201d Mr. McDonald said at his first news conference at the department\u2019s office in Washington. \u201cThe issue now is, we have to find the people.\u201d Mr. McDonald broadly outlined other plans to fix the department\u2019s problems, but he did not offer many specifics or go much beyond remedies that had already been outlined by the deputy secretary, Sloan D. Gibson, in the weeks after Mr. Shinseki\u2019s departure. In addition to hiring more doctors and nurses, Mr. McDonald pledged to flatten the department\u2019s hierarchical structure; to continue to eliminate benchmarks that had created unintended incentives to manipulate waiting-time data; to transform what some officials called a vindictive and retaliatory management culture so that it \u201cembraces constructive dissents and welcomes critical feedback\u201d; and to take steps to make it easier for veterans to receive care. In response to a question, Mr. McDonald even gave a room full of journalists his cellphone number. All that may prove less difficult than finding the new doctors and nurses the department needs to handle the demand from service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as from aging veterans of Vietnam and previous wars. At the same time, the department must still fill both existing vacancies and new positions created by a $17-billion plan approved by Congress this summer to stabilize the agency. The precise number of clinician slots the department already has the money to fill is not clear. In July, the department told Congress that it had almost 36,000 \u201cclinical provider vacancies\u201d \u2014 including more than 9,000 registered nurse vacancies and almost 4,000 physician vacancies. Over all, there were almost 46,000 vacancies across the entire veterans health care system, a vacancy rate of 15.5 percent. In some parts of the country, the shortage of doctors and nurses has been acute, and the department will have to compete in a tough job market to recruit talent. In Phoenix, for example, where a waiting-list scandal at a department medical center exploded into a national controversy, a whistle-blower, Dr. Sam Foote, has attributed long wait times to a doctor shortage. As recently as two years ago, Dr. Foote has said, as many as 15,000 veterans in Phoenix were waiting to be assigned to a primary care doctor because theirs had left or they were new to the system.", "keyword": "Veteran Affairs;Robert A. McDonald;Veteran;Hospital;Doctor;Nursing;Job Recruiting and Hiring;Health Insurance;Sloan Gibson;Phoenix"}
{"id": "ny0067807", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/12/11", "title": "Before Accusations, Uber Was a Boon for Indian Women", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 There is never a bad time to state a plain fact. Uber is a greater friend of urban women in India than the government ever was. Over the past several months, women have taken to the smartphone app with enthusiasm. They grade the drivers and convey to Uber their compliments \u2014 and their complaints about bad manners and body odor. Many rate the Uber experience higher than sitting in their own chauffeur-driven cars because the relationship between the driver in front and the female employer in back is often filled with the chauffeur\u2019s melancholic stories about the health of his children, which lead to requests for loans and time off from work. And there is the issue of his judgmental gaze at her clothes and ways. Also, as he spends most of his day playing cards with other drivers, he passes on a considerable amount of information about his employer \u2014 information that is sometimes tapped by the neighbors. Uber\u2019s drivers, on the other hand, are transient and have no incentive to whine. And, until Friday night, they were considered very safe. An Uber driver told me that they were considered so safe that boyfriends \u201ccould drink and dance with\u201d their girlfriends \u201call night and didn\u2019t have to drop them home \u2014 they just put them in Uber.\u201d All that changed on Friday night. A young woman in New Delhi has alleged that she was raped by an Uber driver. After her complaint, the police could not figure out how to contact a human from Uber until an officer downloaded the app and used it to hail a car. He asked the driver to take him to Uber\u2019s office. It would be hours before the police got any useful information. The man accused of rape was eventually detained. It turned out that he had been accused of the same crime at least twice before, but was acquitted in one case and granted bail in the other. Most of Uber\u2019s cabs in India are run through third-party contractors who own and manage fleets of cars. They are required by Uber to check their drivers\u2019 backgrounds, a process that mostly involves procuring a certificate from the police stating that the person in question has no criminal record \u2014 a largely meaningless exercise because such certification is routinely obtained through bribes of less than $10. I spoke to several Uber drivers who said their \u201cpolice verification\u201d was bought in this manner. Some said their backgrounds were not checked at all. Video In January, The New York Times interviewed Uber\u2019s C.E.O., Travis Kalanick, about the ride-sharing company\u2019s business practices, including liability in accidents. Credit Credit Jack Atley for The New York Times The driver accused of rape had a police certificate that said he was \u201cnot involved in any criminal offense as per the records of\u201d one police station in New Delhi. The police have said that the certificate was forged. Even if it were genuine it would not surprise anyone in India. A rapist\u2019s best ally is the corrupt government official. The government may be complicit in this alleged crime, but it has pretended that the problem is an app. On Monday, the Delhi region\u2019s Transport Department banned Uber and its Indian clones and declared their operations in the National Capital Region illegal on various grounds. But I have been riding in Uber cabs since the ban was announced, and even as I write this column on Tuesday the cars are available. One driver showed me a text message on his mobile phone that he said was from Uber. The message asked him not to lose faith in the service \u201cin these difficult times\u201d and said Uber would continue to operate. Uber is staying put, and by making it illicit, the government has probably relieved it of the pressure to ensure the safety of its users. India\u2019s best-known economics writer, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar, told me that Uber \u201cis a company that does not have a moral compass, but it does serve the society.\u201d For many years, until the recent arrival of radio cabs, taking a taxi or an auto-rickshaw in India was an act of accepting defeat. The customer was often cheated and the drivers were unruly. So in India, unlike in some American and European cities, Uber does not have to contend with nostalgia. It has been, in a way, a liberator. Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel \u201cThe Illicit Happiness of Other People,\u201d on Facebook .", "keyword": "Uber;Taxis;Chauffeurs and Drivers;Delhi India"}
{"id": "ny0262223", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/06/13", "title": "Former Cowboy Dies", "abstract": "The former Dallas Cowboys linebacker Godfrey Myles died after having a stroke. He was 42. Myles\u2019s cousin Requel Gibson said that Myles died Friday morning. Myles, a Miami native, played for the University of Florida from 1987 to 1990. He was a team captain and made the all-Southeastern Conference team his senior year. He was selected by the Cowboys in the third round of the 1991 draft. He played six years with the team, earning three Super Bowl rings. He retired after the 1996 season.", "keyword": "Football;Dallas Cowboys;Deaths (Fatalities);Myles Godfrey"}
{"id": "ny0158615", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/12/26", "title": "Solar Meets Polar as Winter Curbs Clean Energy", "abstract": "Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend of renewable energy. This time of year, wind turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals in tanks and solar panels produce less power because there is not as much sun. And perhaps most irritating to the people who own them, the panels become covered with snow, rendering them useless even in bright winter sunshine. So in regions where homeowners have long rolled their eyes at shoveling driveways, add another cold-weather chore: cleaning off the solar panels. \u201cAt least I can get to them with a long pole and a squeegee,\u201d said Alan Stankevitz, a homeowner in southeast Minnesota. As concern has grown about global warming , many utilities and homeowners have been trying to shrink their emissions of carbon dioxide \u2014 their carbon footprints \u2014 by installing solar panels, wind turbines and even generators powered by tides or rivers. But for the moment, at least, the planet is still cold enough to deal nasty winter blows to some of this green machinery. In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.) The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. \u201cWe can\u2019t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,\u201d Mr. Jones said. Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate. \u201cIt\u2019s like you throw a plate out there and that plate breaks,\u201d said Ralph Brokaw, a cattle rancher in southeast Wyoming who has 69 wind turbines on his property. When his turbines ice up, he stays out of the way. The wind industry admits that turbines can drop ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure. To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are painted black to absorb sunlight and melt the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert on small wind turbines at the American Wind Energy Association, denies that the whirling blades tend to hurl icy javelins. Large turbines turn off automatically as ice builds up, and small turbines will slow and stop because the ice prevents them from spinning \u2014 \u201cjust like a plane\u2019s wing needs to be de-iced to fly,\u201d Mr. Stimmel said. Mr. Brokaw says that his turbines do turn off when they are too icy, but the danger sometimes comes right before the turbines shut down, after a wet, warm snow causes ice buildup. From the standpoint of generating power, winter is actually good for wind turbines, because it is generally windier than summer. In Vermont, for example, Green Mountain Power, which operates a small wind farm in the southeastern part of the state, gets more than twice the monthly production in winter as in August. The opposite is true, however, for solar power . Days are shorter and the sun is lower in the sky during the winter, ensuring less power production. Even in northern California, with mild winters and little snow, solar panels can generate about half as much as in the summer, depending on how much they are tilted, according to Rob Erlichman, chief executive of Sunlight Electric, a San Francisco solar company. Operators of the electrical grid do not worry much about the seasonal swings, because the percentage of production from renewable energy is still so low \u2014 around 1 percent of the country\u2019s power comes from wind, and less from solar panels. In addition, Americans use slightly less electricity in the winter than in the summer because air conditioners are not running. This is especially true in sunny areas, so solar panels\u2019 peak production matches the spikes in demand. But as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the nation\u2019s power mix, the seasonable variability could become more of a problem. Already, power developers are learning that they must make careful plans to avoid the worst impacts of ice and snow. Trey Taylor, the president of Verdant Power, which has put small turbines in the tidal East River in New York City and plans more for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, said that ice chunks could slide over one another \u201clike a deck of cards,\u201d pushing ice below and harming turbines. That may rule out parts of otherwise promising sites like the Yukon River in Alaska, he said. Kevin Devlin, the vice president for operations of Iberdrola Renewables, a wind developer, said that winter was probably the hardest time of year to maintain turbines, because workers must go out in snow and ice. Occasionally, he said, the turbines will shut down or set off alarms if it is too cold, and workers must brave the elements to fix them. For homeowners, the upkeep of their power sources can also be a bother. Mr. Stankevitz keeps his panels tilted 40 degrees or higher, but they still become covered with snow \u2014 and experts say that if even one cell in a panel is covered, the panel will not produce power. On the other hand, the panels can get extra power from sunlight reflected off nearby snow. And like other electronic gear, solar panels work better when cold. Mr. Stankevitz said that on some rare winter days, when the Minnesota sky is clear, the weather is freezing and the sun is shining brightly, his panels can briefly churn out more electricity than they were designed to produce, more than on the balmiest days of summer.", "keyword": "Environment;Energy and Power;Weather;Solar Energy;Snow and Snowstorms;Biofuels;Wind"}
{"id": "ny0275534", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2016/02/26", "title": "U.S. Plans to Put Advisers on Front Lines of Nigeria\u2019s War on Boko Haram", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 The Pentagon is poised to send dozens of Special Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria\u2019s fight against the West African militant group Boko Haram, according to military officials, the latest deployment in conflicts with the Islamic State and its allies. Their deployment would push American troops hundreds of miles closer to the battle that Nigerian forces are waging against an insurgency that has killed thousands of civilians in the country\u2019s northeast as well as in neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon. By some measures, Boko Haram is the world\u2019s deadliest terrorist group. The deployment is a main recommendation of a recent confidential assessment by the top United States Special Operations commander for Africa, Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc. If it is approved, as expected, by the Defense and State Departments, the Americans would serve only in noncombat advisory roles, military officials said. Even as President Obama has drawn down the large American armies sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, he has relied heavily on Special Operations forces to train and advise local troops fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and to carry out clandestine counterterrorism missions. Already, about 50 American commandos are advising fighters battling the Islamic State in eastern Syria. Scores more in a new, secret kill-or-capture unit are hunting Islamic State militants in Iraq. The Pentagon has offered to send American advisers with Iraqi brigades on the battlefield instead of restricting them to bases inside Iraq. Dozens of American commandos are conducting surveillance missions in Libya and counterterrorism missions in Somalia. \u201cRather than entangle U.S. combat forces on the ground, help build the capacity of regional forces to tackle their countries\u2019 security challenges,\u201d said Jennifer G. Cooke, Africa director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who visited Nigeria last month. \u201cTraining and advising and perhaps imparting the lessons we learned the hard way is a good thing.\u201d Since taking office last year, Nigeria\u2019s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has vowed to pursue a military campaign against Boko Haram more vigorously than his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. His shake-up of the military high command and new cooperation with neighboring countries has proved effective. Mr. Buhari, a former general, has boasted of the military\u2019s successes in wresting control of a huge portion of terrain from the group, declaring a \u201ctechnical\u201d victory late last year. But while the military has killed or captured thousands of militants and put an end to raids of villages by dozens or more fighters, the group has still carried out suicide attacks at a relentless pace in Nigeria and neighboring countries. \u201cDespite losing territory in 2015, Boko Haram will probably remain a threat to Nigeria throughout 2016 and will continue its terror campaign within the country and in neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad,\u201d James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the House Intelligence Committee in Washington on Thursday. To help combat this threat, Mr. Buhari has embraced American assistance, ending several years of tense relations that sank to new lows in 2014 when the United States blocked the sale of American-made Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria from Israel, amid concerns about Nigeria\u2019s protection of civilians when conducting military operations. Groups like Human Rights Watch say the Nigerian military has at times burned hundreds of homes and committed other abuses as it battled Boko Haram and its presumed supporters. Image A Nigerian Army soldier in Lagos last year. Credit Stefan Heunis/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Nigeria\u2019s ambassador to the United States responded sharply at the time, accusing Washington of hampering the country\u2019s effort to defeat Boko Haram. American officials also expressed hesitancy about sharing intelligence with the Nigerian military, fearing their ranks had been infiltrated by Boko Haram, an accusation that further infuriated Nigerian leaders. In December 2014, Nigeria canceled the last stage of American training of a new Nigerian Army battalion that was to take the lead in fighting terrorists. Those days now seem over. This month Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the State Department\u2019s top diplomat for Africa, announced that the suspended training for the Nigerian infantry battalion would resume soon. Nigeria will provide the ammunition. Two weeks ago, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the head of the Pentagon\u2019s Africa Command, hosted Nigeria\u2019s chief of defense staff, Gen. Abayomi Gabriel Olonisakin, at the American headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. \u201cTo contain Boko Haram, working together is a priority,\u201d General Rodriguez told his visitor. About 250 American service members have deployed to a military base in Garoua, Cameroon, where United States surveillance drones flying over northeastern Nigeria are sending imagery to African troops. Drone photos recently helped the Nigerian Army avoid a major Boko Haram ambush, according to a senior American intelligence officer. Another breakthrough occurred late last year when General Bolduc, a Green Beret with multiple Special Forces tours in Afghanistan, visited Nigeria. When officials there asked for assistance, General Bolduc quickly sent an assessment team to conduct a 30-day review. Among the team\u2019s main recommendations was to position \u201csmall dozens\u201d of Special Forces in Maiduguri, a major city in the northeast on the edge of the conflict, to help Nigerian military planners carry out a more effective counterterrorism campaign. British special forces are already assisting in the city. (The American military now maintains only a tiny intelligence cell in Abuja, Nigeria\u2019s capital.) Nigerian military officials have embraced the recommendations and are drawing up detailed requests, American officials said. Just last fall, life seemed to be turning back to normal in the areas near Maiduguri, which for years had been the epicenter of Boko Haram\u2019s activities. But after a major military operation uprooted the militants from nearby villages they had seized, many fighters have returned to Maiduguri to launch repeated suicide bombing operations in the city or in villages on the outskirts that have caused dozens of deaths. At the end of last year, fighters attacked the city with rocket-propelled grenades and several suicide bombs. Residents say they eye one another with suspicion, especially women wearing religious gowns, fearful that explosives may be hidden underneath. These relentless attacks have put more pressure on Nigeria and its neighbors to marshal their forces against a common enemy. After taking office last year, Mr. Buhari began forging relationships with the presidents of neighboring countries to establish information-sharing and to build trust between his nation and Niger, Cameroon and Chad. But grouping the four nations together to share information and untangling decades of mistrust among them have proved harder. A regional task force established by the countries last year has largely stalled amid lingering distrust and differing views about the threat. Less than half of the task force\u2019s $700 million budget has been raised, and sinking oil prices have hurt the economies of Chad and Nigeria, Ms. Cooke said in congressional testimony this week. Still, working together has yielded victories. Earlier this month, the Cameroonians teamed up with the Nigerian military as part of a joint operation on Nigerian soil just across the border in the far north, killing more than 160 Boko Haram fighters, dismantling a logistics hub for the fighters and destroying explosive devices, according to officials there.", "keyword": "Boko Haram;Nigeria;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;US Foreign Policy;Terrorism;US Military;Muhammadu Buhari;US Special Operations Command;Donald C. Bolduc"}
{"id": "ny0172227", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2007/11/07", "title": "Pope Benedict Meets Saudi King at Vatican", "abstract": "ROME, Nov. 6 \u2014 Pope Benedict XVI and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia clasped hands at the Vatican on Tuesday in the first official meeting between a pope and a Saudi monarch, who is entrusted to protect Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad and the center of the Islamic world. The two met for half an hour, speaking through interpreters, in a conversation that a Vatican news release said had been cordial and had covered the \u201cvalue of collaboration between Christians, Muslims and Jews for promoting peace\u201d and \u201cthe necessity of finding a just solution\u201d to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other themes. Marco Politi, the Vatican correspondent for the Italian daily La Repubblica and a biographer of Pope John Paul II, said, \u201cI think it is extraordinarily important that an official communiqu\u00e9 from the Vatican and an important Islamic state like Saudi Arabia mentions \u2018cooperation\u2019 between Christians Muslims and Jews \u2014 not dialogue but cooperation.\u201d The meeting, presaged by an upbeat front-page article in L\u2019Osservatore Romano, the Vatican\u2019s newspaper, was also a clear attempt by the Vatican to repair damage done by the pope\u2019s 2006 statement on Islam, which the Arab world had seen as insensitive if not incendiary. In a speech in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006, Benedict quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who called Islam \u201cevil and inhuman.\u201d The comment led to protests in Islamic nations, and prompted some Islamic states to recall their Vatican ambassadors. Firebombers attacked churches in the West Bank and Gaza, gunmen killed an Italian nun in Somalia, and the pope was threatened. The Vatican expressed \u201cdeepest regrets\u201d but said the remark had been misinterpreted in a way that \u201cabsolutely did not correspond\u201d to the pope\u2019s intentions. The article in the Vatican newspaper seemed to open the door for a diplomatic initiative toward Islam and the Middle East. It said the meeting with Abdullah was \u201cof great importance.\u201d \u201cIn a world where the boundaries have become day by day more open, dialogue is not a choice but a necessity,\u201d it said. The article also acknowledged that some weeks ago Pope Benedict had received a letter from 138 Islamic religious leaders from 43 nations, appealing for more dialogue between Christians and Muslims. As the weeks went by with no response, some scholars here had complained that the pope seemed slow to address an important appeal. The Vatican allayed those fears on Tuesday. The meeting represents a triumph of sorts for Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, and especially for Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Cardinal Tauran, who previously served the church in Lebanon and Syria, is familiar with the Middle East and has promoted greater contact with Islamic states. But official statements issued Tuesday did not mention establishing diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, and it was not clear that the topic was even discussed. In May, the United Arab Emirates became the latest Islamic country to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican, the Vatican newspaper said. One reason the Vatican wants to forge diplomatic relations in the Middle East, or at least increase its diplomatic influence there, is the presence of significant Roman Catholic populations in predominantly Muslim countries. Almost all are guest workers from elsewhere. The Vatican noted that 1.5 million Christians are in Saudi Arabia, the majority of them Catholics from the Philippines. The State Department has criticized Saudi Arabia for religious intolerance and persecution of non-Muslims. \u201cCharges of harassment, abuse and even killings at the hands of the Muttawa (religious police) continue to surface,\u201d the department said in a report issued this year. But little sign of tension was evident Tuesday. The pope gave the king a 16th-century engraving of the Vatican and a gold medal with his seal. The king gave the pope a sword, telling him it was \u201cmade of gold and precious stones.\u201d In 1999, long before becoming king, Abdullah met Benedict\u2019s predecessor, John Paul II, who also met other prominent Muslim leaders, including, in 1999, Mohammad Khatami, a moderate cleric who was president of Iran.", "keyword": "Rome (Italy);Benedict XVI;Abdullah;Roman Catholic Church;Cardinals (Roman Catholic Prelates);Islam"}
{"id": "ny0210980", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2017/01/20", "title": "Inaugural Balls: The Trumps\u2019 First Dance", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump and his wife, Melania , made stops at three official inaugural balls on Friday night, after an Inauguration Day full of celebrations \u2014 and protests . The divisiveness of the campaign, however, was an afterthought inside the galas. Two of the balls, the Freedom Ball and the Liberty Ball , were attended by supporters who donated to the inauguration or purchased tickets. They were held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center . Image The president and first lady, with, at left, Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, and at right, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times The third ball was the hotter ticket: A Salute to Our Armed Services , at the National Building Museum , featured active duty and reserve military members, wounded veterans, emergency medical workers and Medal of Honor recipients. Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, attended all three events. We party-hopped to provide a look at the festivities. Answers to the big questions of the night: What did the Trumps choose as their first dance as president and first lady? (\u201cMy Way.\u201d) And what did Melania wear? (A collaboration between herself and Herv\u00e9 Pierre.) First things first: Who\u2019s performing? 6:05 p.m.: Mr. Trump and his inauguration team have had trouble locking in A-list celebrities for the festivities, and have made it a point to say they didn\u2019t want them to attend in the first place. Performers include Sam Moore, one half of the \u201960s R&B and soul duo Sam & Dave, and The Piano Guys. Both acts performed at a welcome concert for Mr. Trump on Thursday. The armed services ball will feature a performance by the singer Tony Orlando and the Texas musician Josh Weathers. If you thought getting a ticket was tough ... 6:55 p.m.: The idea of an inaugural ball might sound fun, but let\u2019s talk about how hard it is to actually get into these events. Guests have to walk several blocks through a labyrinth of security fences, road barriers and a human wall of police officers dressed in riot gear in front of the convention center. (Several women are cursing their decision to wear high heels.) Empty city buses and garbage trucks are establishing a loose perimeter around the convention center. They are likely parked here to safeguard against bomb blasts. At the end of the long lines, a set of metal detectors await. It\u2019s hard to keep a festive mood with the sounds of helicopters flying low overhead and the sight of the occasional protester with signs that read \u201cresist extermination,\u201d but these revelers are managing to do it somehow. \u201cTrump\u2019s going to be here, it\u2019s a great day, let\u2019s enjoy it,\u201d a woman said as she joined the line of people waiting to get into the Freedom Ball. Freedom isn\u2019t free, and neither are the drinks 7:51 p.m.: Things are in full swing at the Freedom Ball, where the festivities were supposed to begin around 8 p.m. Attendees are enjoying a buffet of pasta and rolls. After a $20 glass of champagne (cash bar), we\u2019re ready to mingle. If there\u2019s one big fashion theme emerging, it\u2019s that these revelers enjoy their sequins. One ballgoer, 26-year-old Ashley Walukevich, chose a dress with silver sequins and embellishments down the sleeves after searching for a week for the right look. She posed with a friend, Lauren Hodge, who chose a dress made of black velvet and lace. Aside from trying to hail an Uber driver who got trapped by protesters, Ms. Walukevich said the protests around Washington haven\u2019t bothered her. \u201cI wanted to come out to celebrate our country coming together,\u201d she said, \u201cand to celebrate our new president.\u201d Into the swing of things 8 p.m.: The concert at the Freedom Ball has started. The singer Tim Rushlow, who performed as part of the Frontmen of Country at the \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d concert on Thursday, appeared with His Big Band to the convention center. He opened the show by heralding a \u201clandslide victory and an amazing time for our president.\u201d (Mr. Trump has also called his victory a landslide, despite losing the popular vote.) The swing jazz group opened with Frank Sinatra\u2019s \u201cThat\u2019s Life,\u201d a melancholy hit about persevering though life\u2019s ups and downs. As Sinatra said, \u201cI\u2019ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.\u201d Mr. Trump would disagree . Dueling pianos 8:23 p.m.: With two balls in one building, and with guests at one ball separated from guests at the other, acts were performing both on stage and on large screens. At the Freedom Ball, The Piano Guys, introduced as \u201cfour musical dads from Utah,\u201d played covers of pop music songs, including Rachel Platten\u2019s \u201cFight Song.\u201d \u2014 which Hillary Clinton used as an anthem during the campaign. While The Piano Guys played on stage, a squad of 18 Rockettes danced on screen (with the sound muted), dressed in gold-sequined outfits and glittery tights. Image The Rockettes performing at the Liberty Ball on Friday evening. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times This company of women had been at the center of a media firestorm since December when the Madison Square Garden Co., the group that manages them, committed the dancers to perform at the inauguration, even though some members dissented. At the ball, however, the women performed with their trademark precision. Their smiles, of course, were huge. The people\u2019s parties 8:35 p.m.: Instead of focusing on A-list artists \u2014 which the inauguration committee struggled to book anyway \u2014 the entertainment here is centered on what might be called \u201cclassic American\u201d music. In other words: lots of Frank Sinatra covers. It also turns out the performers are alternating between the two stages at the convention center. It\u2019s a little disorienting, but the guests don\u2019t seem to mind. Image People waiting for President Trump and his wife, Melania, at the Freedom Ball on Friday. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times The Rockettes are at the Freedom Ball now, in Uncle Sam outfits. Despite the celebrity snafus, the Trump team wants to make one thing clear: The Freedom and Liberty balls are about the people. Tickets were $50 each, according to the Presidential Inaugural Committee, much lower than the cost of other balls happening around town this weekend. The committee raised more than $100 million for the inauguration over all. Where\u2019s the President? 9 p.m.: This ball shuts down in two hours and the president and vice president are still no-shows. That didn\u2019t bother Trump supporters like Tye Hill, a Republican from Indiana, who stood in a plum-colored gown as she waited for the night\u2019s headliners to arrive. \u201cRight off the bat, when I heard Trump, I knew he spoke for me,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s conservative. He\u2019s promised jobs, he\u2019s promised immigration reform.\u201d She added: \u201cAnd I\u2019m going to hold him to it.\u201d Their first dance as first couple 9:36 p.m. : President and Mrs. Trump emerged at the Liberty Ball shortly after 9:30, and Mr. Trump sounded familiar themes from his postelection speeches when he addressed the crowd. \u201cThey said we \u2014 and me \u2014 we didn\u2019t have a chance, but we knew we were going to win, and we won,\u201d the president said. \u201cToday we had a great day,\u201d he continued. \u201cPeople that weren\u2019t so nice to me were saying that we did a really good job today. They hated to do it, but they did it.\u201d Though it had appeared to begin raining just as Mr. Trump was sworn in at noon, he apparently did not notice. The rain held off until the dignitaries had moved inside, Mr. Trump said. \u201cIt was like God was looking down on us, I will tell you,\u201d he added. Meanwhile, a crowd formed near video screens at the Freedom Ball to watch Mr. Trump dance with the new first lady, who wore an architectural off-the-shoulder white sheath with a high slit, a thin burgundy bow belt, and a silk organza wave curving from one dropped sleeve to the opposite hip, and then down the skirt. The video was muted as ballgoers watched the couple sway to a cover of \u201cMy Way\u201d (Sinatra again!). Image President Trump and his wife, Melania, danced for the first time after the inauguration to \u201cMy Way.\u201d Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Despite dancing to a song about the bittersweet struggle and ultimate reward of individuality, this president apparently likes to double date. Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, were invited to the stage. And then, of course, the whole Trump clan joined in. The scene was a flurry of nude-toned dresses and very slow swaying. Mr. Trump\u2019s daughter Ivanka wore a champagne-colored fairy princess gown covered in sparkles by Carolina Herrera. At the end, the families bowed and beamed, signaling the end of the show. For this ball, at least. A dress makes waves 10:08 p.m.: Our fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, reports that Mrs. Trump\u2019s dress is a collaboration between herself and Herv\u00e9 Pierre, a former chief designer for Carolina Herrera who also worked at Oscar de la Renta. Image President Trump and his wife, Melania, making their entrance at the Freedom Ball. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times The first lady\u2019s choice to wear a powder-blue Ralph Lauren to the swearing-in ceremony both nodded to the American establishment and referenced history. Her look was reminiscent of Jacqueline Kennedy , a first lady whose clothing choices became synonymous with classic American style. Having it \u2018My Way\u2019 10:19 p.m.: Mr. Trump arrived at the Freedom Ball and greeted the crowd with \u201cHowdy folks\u201d and a few more well-worn remarks. His supporters, it seems, think he should keep his personal Twitter account. \u201cShould I keep the Twitter going or not?\u201d the president asked. The crowd said yes. \u201cThe enemies keep saying, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s terrible,\u2019\u201d Mr. Trump said, \u201cbut it\u2019s a way of bypassing dishonest media, right? If the opening dance at the Freedom Ball looked a lot like what happened at the Liberty Ball, that\u2019s because it was about exactly the same. After what seemed like a momentary audio glitch, \u201cMy Way\u201d was back on the sound system. The Trumps were once again joined by the Pences and \u2014 all together now! \u2014 the rest of the Trump clan. Now it\u2019s time to head to the National Building Museum, where Mr. Trump and the gang will attend the Armed Services Ball. On to the final ball 10:54 p.m.: After a leisurely walk though several blocks of security barricades and a screening by a few friendly Secret Service agents and police officers, we have arrived to catch the tail end of the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball, where Mr. Trump is expected to speak. This black-tie affair was the harder ticket to get, and about half of the guests here are members of the military in full dress. Unlike the last one, this ball is open bar. There is no music right now and the crowd is lingering to hear Mr. Trump speak. The new commander-in-chief 11:15 p.m.: Arriving at around 11, Mr. Trump greeted supporters at the armed services ball by praising law enforcement and the military. \u201cI like you for a lot of reasons. Also I like the fact that you all voted for me,\u201d Mr. Trump told the crowd. They laughed and cheered. Image The first couple dancing at the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A live feed of troops in Afghanistan was projected on the screen. \u201cHow is it over there? How\u2019s it going?\u201d asked the new commander-in-chief. \u201cI like them much better than I like the media,\u201d he said of the troops. \u201cThese are much nicer people, finer people.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t be like these people \u2014 don\u2019t be too tough on me,\u201d Mr. Trump told them, gesturing toward the news media corralled in the stands. (This reporter somehow managed to skirt the entrance and found a spot somewhere near the open bar.) Image President Trump and Melania Trump speaking with members of the military at the National Building Museum. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Mrs. Trump then spoke publicly for the first time on Inauguration Day. \u201cThank you all for your service,\u201d she told the attendees. \u201cI\u2019m honored to be your first lady. We will fight, we will win, we will make America great again.\u201d The couple chose a different song to dance to this time, a cover of \u201cI Will Always Love You.\u201d Signing off 11:22 p.m.: After dancing alongside each other for the third time tonight, the president and vice president together used a saber to cut through a giant red, white and blue cake. Image President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cutting a cake at the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times And with that, it\u2019s time to sign off. Thanks for trailing along tonight. The next stop for me is covering the Women\u2019s March on Washington , where I will be wearing flats.", "keyword": "Inauguration;Donald Trump;Washington DC"}
{"id": "ny0231693", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2010/09/14", "title": "Discovering Concavenator Corcovatus, the Dinosaur With a Hump", "abstract": "Researchers have discovered the most complete fossil of a meat-eating dinosaur from Europe in Las Hoyas, Spain. Curiously, it is humpbacked. The study appears in the journal Nature . Named Concavenator corcovatus, the dinosaur belongs to the theropod family. In most ways, the dinosaur is not unusual, and it shares many characteristics with other medium-size theropods. But the humplike structure on the 20-foot creature has previously never been seen in a dinosaur. \u201cWe have no idea if this hump had flesh tissues; if so it could have been a fatlike deposit,\u201d said Francisco Ortega, a biologist at the Universidad Nacional de Educaci\u00f3n a Distancia and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cOr if it was decoration, it was used as a display.\u201d The hump probably looked similar to that seen on some cows today, he said. The fossil also suggests that the dinosaur had bony bumps on its limbs, possibly structures from which feathers protruded. The dinosaur lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago. Earlier dinosaur fossils have shown evidence of feathers, and birds are now generally considered to be dinosaur descendants. He and his colleagues uncovered the dinosaur in a 2003 dig, but the assembly and analysis took seven years. The complete fossil can be seen at the Museum of Science in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.", "keyword": "Dinosaurs;Paleontology;Fossils;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0194391", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/11/26", "title": "Alaska\u2019s Rural Schools Fight Extinction", "abstract": "NIKOLSKI, Alaska \u2014 This distant dot in the Aleutian Islands needed just 10 students for its school to dodge a fatal cut from the state budget. It reached across Alaska and beyond but could find only nine. Built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1939, the little Nikolski School will not be the last in Alaska to close. Four others have closed this fall and at least 30 more are at risk because of dwindling enrollment; one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising on Craigslist for families with school-aged children. \u201cWe lose one or two every year,\u201d said Eddy Jeans, the director of school finance for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. As Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood amid new political prominence and urban aspirations, it is confronting a legacy of loss in rural communities that are unlike any others in the United States . Some of these communities, like Nikolski, are linked to the earliest human settlements in North America , yet are now buckling beneath the accumulated conflict of old versus new. Alaska Natives are increasingly leaving villages for cities. Young women, in particular, have departed, and birth rates, once disproportionately higher in villages, have dropped. Jobs for the young people who remain are declining. Village elders have fewer peers who share their dialects. Heating fuel, gasoline and groceries can be expensive and medical services minimal. The annual statewide student counting period, completed last month, is a census of the exodus. After several decades of growth, the overall rural population has declined about 4 percent since 2000 and much more in many regions. In the Aleutians, the population is down 19 percent, to about 4,500. About 20 percent of Alaska\u2019s 680,000 people live in rural areas. Rural school districts, desperate to make the cut, are known to move students between schools to prop up enrollment during the counting period, while some have sought out families willing to relocate from other states. \u201cWe were desperate,\u201d said Gordon Chew, whose wife runs the school in Tenakee Springs, where two families with a total of six children relocated earlier this year in response to an advertisement on Craigslist. \u201cThat saved us.\u201dThe decline of rural schools is at the heart of a broader debate in Alaska over the treatment of native communities, which dominate the state\u2019s rural population. Here in the Aleutians, native Unangans, or Aleuts, are linked to people who traveled the Bering land bridge from Asia more than 10,000 years ago. They survived off the sea, making skiffs from seal skin and building houses from sod for shelter against the endless ocean gales. They endured violence and religious conversion by Russian explorers and, during World War II, forced evacuation by the American military. Now they face budget cuts and the pressures of modern Alaska. \u201cIf you put it in the calculus we use today to determine public policy, places like Nikolski probably have a difficult time measuring up,\u201d said Byron Mallott, a Tlingit leader who has advised several Alaska governors on native issues. \u201cBut look at Nikolski in the context of Alaska, look at it in the context of America. These are the native homelands, and we ought to recognize that and not forget that.\u201d Concerns over the cost and quality of education in rural areas have long generated tension: can preserving village life be balanced with preparing students for a broader world? A court settlement in the 1970s required the state to build high schools in most villages, prompting an expensive construction boom. But by 1998, with oil revenues no longer soaring, the State Legislature decided that schools with fewer than 10 students would face severe cuts in financing. With some parents leaving villages in pursuit of better education anyway, some lawmakers said saving schools was missing the point. \u201cSchools may close, but the fact of the matter is, we\u2019re in the education business,\u201d said Gary Wilken, a former Republican state senator from Fairbanks who pushed for the higher enrollment requirement. \u201cOur state has to provide a quality education to all, and sometimes you can do it better through the Internet with home school programs or in regional boarding schools.\u201d For some, more recent standardized tests showing relatively poor performance among rural and native students have confirmed skepticism over investing in declining schools. Others have pressed more aggressively than ever for schools to nurture fading native cultures and languages, once banished in the name of education. Georgianna Lincoln, 66, a former Democratic state senator who lived in the village of Rampart, northwest of Fairbanks, until she was 9, was among the lawmakers who fought raising the financing threshold to 10 students. The school in Rampart closed shortly after the new requirement was imposed. After the vote, Ms. Lincoln recalled: \u201cI told everybody, \u2018I don\u2019t care if you import your cousins or your friends. Do not allow the school to close because that\u2019s the death of the community.\u2019 \u201d Larry LeDoux, Alaska\u2019s commissioner of the Department of Education and Early Development, noted that the state had just filled a new position, director of rural education, but he also said that did not mean the state would try to save village schools. Nikolski , nearly 1,000 miles southwest of Anchorage, is the last of what once were more than 20 native villages on Umnak Island. A few decades ago, the village had 80 people; it is now down to about 30. Enrollment here fell below 10 last year, but the Aleutian Region School District stretched its budget and kept the school open. To run the school with 10 students for one year costs $400,000 to $500,000. By last spring, enrollment had fallen further but there was new optimism: Yuki and Maria Iaulualu, natives of American Samoa , agreed to move here from Seattle with their five school-age children. Joe Beckford, the district superintendent, arranged for the district to pay several thousand dollars for the Iaulualus\u2019 airfare. Yet Mr. Iaulualu soon lost his job working for the village, and it became clear that even his family\u2019s arrival would not raise enrollment to 10. Now, Mr. Iaulualu said, \u201cwe\u2019re out of here.\u201d Grace Oomittuk, the village health aide, and her two school-aged children came from the state\u2019s north coast two years ago. Consulting with Mr. Beckford, she timed their initial visit to coincide with the student counting period. Now, Ms. Oomittuk said, her family will most likely move to her mother\u2019s home in Palmer, about 40 miles northeast of Anchorage . Another student, Ivan Krukoff, 18, whose father lives in Nikolski, has moved back in with his mother on a neighboring island. If only his cousin, Darin Krukoff, 17, had been open to Mr. Beckford\u2019s efforts to \u201centice him,\u201d as the superintendent put it, to move to Nikolski. That would have made 10. But Darin likes the neighboring island, where the school has a basketball team and other attractions, including girls his age. \u201cYou have to live your life,\u201d Darin said. That gets to Eric Willhite. He is 13 . Nobody had to ask him to prop up ancient Alaska. He is from here, a descendant of generations of seal hunters and salmon fishermen. The Black Eyed Peas thump through his iPod . His hoodie helps cut the wind that roars across the Bering Sea. He longs for middle school cool at the edge of America. \u201cI don\u2019t want to leave,\u201d he said. After moving to Missouri with his parents several years ago, Eric decided he preferred life in the village and returned after a year to live with his aunt and uncle. He has heard the stories of how his grandfather was punished in school for speaking Unangan. He says he understands that he is now the only child left in Nikolski with a direct connection to the native bones and artifacts anthropologists have taken from its tundra. While he says this is home, flight is his obsession. He simulates takeoffs on a computer and makes jets out of Legos. His goal is to follow his older brother, Daniel, 19, to a vocational boarding school in interior Alaska. \u201cHe could fly pilot,\u201d Eric said, \u201cand I\u2019ll fly co-pilot.\u201d First he needs to pass the eighth grade. After spending several weeks this fall uncertain whether the Nikolski School would remain open, he is now in a home-school program. \u201cThis is a crucial year for Eric, and things aren\u2019t going well,\u201d said Scott Kerr, Eric\u2019s uncle and legal guardian. Mr. Kerr is not native, but he is largely responsible for perpetuating native traditions in Eric\u2019s life, from hunting and fishing for food to finding peace in Umnak\u2019s isolation. \u201cI\u2019ve told him, \u2018If you have nothing else in this world, you are Unangan, you are Aleut,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Kerr said. \u201cThat\u2019s something to be proud of.\u201d The few people who remain here still gather in the evening on the rocky beach of Nikolski Bay to fish for dinner or something to salt for winter. Volcanoes loom, one dormant, one not. Eagles coast. Sea otters float. Cattle wander the hills, wild descendants of a long-ago ranch and, now, a particularly good meal. Foxes poke through the small landfill. At one end of the village, elders recently reburied bones of their ancestors, reclaimed from various collections. At the other, the shell of an old Reeve Aleutian airliner sits beside the gravel runway, wreckage from a 1965 flight caught in crosswinds. The school is in the middle, the newest relic. \u201cThat school,\u201d said Arnold Dushkin, president of the Nikolski village council, \u201cis our major reason for the village to be going.\u201d", "keyword": "Alaska;null;Rural area;Population;Indigenous peoples;Aleutian Islands"}
{"id": "ny0016215", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/10/07", "title": "Federal Reserve to Unveil a Redesigned $100 Bill", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Reserve will begin circulating a new $100 bill on Tuesday with some modern and colorful anti-counterfeiting features, after overcoming problems that postponed its debut for more than two and a half years. In addition to traditional safeguards like a paper blend that would be difficult to duplicate, the redesigned note will have two new features: a three-dimensional blue strip with images that appear to move when the note is tilted, and an image of a copper inkwell containing a holographic bell whose color changes when tilted. The note is the last United States currency denomination to undergo the \u201c New Color of Money \u201d face-lift that started with the $20 note in 2003, introducing subtle hues and other security features to paper currency as part of efforts to stay ahead of counterfeiters. Image The new type of $100 note, the most counterfeited currency outside America, arrives Tuesday. Credit Bureau of Engraving and Printing \u201cIt only takes a few seconds for people \u2014 if they know what they\u2019re looking for \u2014 to know what they\u2019re looking at is genuine,\u201d said Michael J. Lambert, associate director of the Federal Reserve. The $100 bill is an especially hot item on the global stage: The Federal Reserve estimates that one-half to two-thirds of $100 notes in circulation are abroad at any given time, making them one of the nation\u2019s largest exports. As a result, the $100 bill is the most commonly counterfeited note outside the United States. Mr. Lambert said officials at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the Secret Service had devoted extra time to redesigning it and spreading the word \u2014 including on newmoney.gov , which is available in 23 languages \u2014 with that in mind. The note took more than a decade to develop. It was originally scheduled for release in February 2011, but about four months before its debut the Federal Reserve said that an unanticipated printing problem had caused some notes to be creased and thus unfit for circulation. Investigating and resolving the issue meant there would not have been enough bills ready by February. Another printing problem caused ink to smear. The inspector general\u2019s office at the Treasury Department released a report in 2012 attributing the delay to \u201ca production failure that potentially could have been avoided and has already resulted in increased costs.\u201d Image The Federal Reserve will begin circulating a new $100 bill on Tuesday with some modern and colorful anti-counterfeiting features. Experts say the efforts appear to have paid off. \u201cI would say it\u2019s absolutely worthwhile to do whatever it takes to make sure that we have the best currency that we can,\u201d said Benjamin Mazzotta of Tufts University, an expert on the cost of currency. \u201cThat\u2019s something that\u2019s not going to be able to be reproduced on a photocopy machine, that\u2019s for sure, or even on the computer,\u201d said Dennis Forgue, a currency expert in Chicago. But the transition may not be seamless everywhere. When the United States issued a new $100 note in 1996, for instance, Russians \u2014 accustomed to a system in which old currency becomes worthless \u2014 worried that there would not be enough bills to meet demand. While older United States currency retains its value, Mr. Forgue said that overseas, especially in Eastern European countries, people may demand the newest bills as the only acceptable form of payment. \u201cThey\u2019re afraid of getting stuck with something that\u2019s not good because they\u2019ve gone through so many changes like that,\u201d he said. Mr. Lambert said the Federal Reserve was prepared. \u201cWe stand ready to get them the notes that they need, and obviously our goal and our objective is to meet the demand,\u201d he said. \u201cWhether that\u2019s international or domestic, it doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d", "keyword": "Counterfeit money;Currency;Treasury Department;Federal Reserve"}
{"id": "ny0091915", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/08/29", "title": "Queens as a Tourist Destination? Readers React", "abstract": "An article Wednesday on the rising number of tourists visiting Queens \u2014 attributed to the Lonely Planet guidebook\u2019s designating the borough to be the No. 1 travel destination in the country this year \u2014 attracted reader responses from along the No. 7 train line and beyond. Some could not believe what they read. \u201cI believe the end-time prophecy of the Book of Revelation calls for the appearance of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the 7th Seal, and the Beast, all to be followed by Queens and Staten Island becoming hip,\u201d said EDG of New York . \u201cWe\u2019re apparently up to Queens.\u201d Many Queens residents, present and former, wondered why The New York Times blew open their secret. \u201cThe reason why Queens was so great was because there were no tourists. And now, it will be ruined,\u201d said TJ of New York . \u201cKeep tourists out of Queens please! And stop giving them tips on places to visit! Whenever I have out-of-town guests I literally make them swear on their mother\u2019s grave that they will not under any circumstances tell anyone about my \u2018secret\u2019 places,\u201d said Betti of New York . \u201cDoes Queens really need a bunch of tourists going to Roosevelt Avenue and gawking at all the brown, yellow and black people? It\u2019s not a zoo, you know,\u201d said a Queens native, Admiral Halsey . Others expressed a common fear of that great arbiter of gentrification, artisanal mayonnaise, once the word gets out. \u201cAnd with the tourists, let\u2019s welcome the developers that will try, no doubt, to create the next Brooklyn in Queens. Let\u2019s thank Lonely Planet in five years for giving the kiss of death to all the cultural diversity and mom and pop shops that they put out once they jack up the prices and build a bunch of boutique hotels, microbreweries, and artisanal mayonnaise shops to appease the masses,\u201d said Layla of Queens . \u201cRIP Queens, you were good while you lasted.\u201d \u201cWe enjoy fairly reasonable rents (compared to Brooklyn and Manhattan), we have small businesses that are practical and usable (butchers, bakeries, fish mongers) and there\u2019s not an artisanal mayonnaise shop or gluten free anything in the bunch,\u201d said Zazie of New York . \u201cWe love living in Queens and would gladly leave it untouched as a \u2018destination.\u2019\u201d But a few influential Queens business people said they welcomed the influx of tourists. The founder of Sweetleaf, a Long Island City cafe mentioned in the article, wrote in to express his excitement that Parisian tourists, among others, had heard of his store. \u201cThere is so much more food, art, cultures to be explored. We are the world\u2019s greatest melting pot!\u201d said Alfred Arundel of Costa Rica and Queens . Image Journalists from Mexico were among the tourists who visited the Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens last month. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Ellen Kodadek of Queens, said , \u201cWhile Times Square may be known as the Crossroads of the World, Queens has become the Crossroads of our City!\u201d Ms. Kodadek is the executive and artistic director of Flushing Town Hall, a Queens performing arts center. Tourists themselves chimed in with praise. \u201cI visit Queens for a week every year \u2014 for the US Open. And although most of my time is spent watching tennis, we love to visit Jackson Heights, Flushing, and other neighborhoods. We stay out in Bayside and are welcomed every year by the waitress at the Italian restaurant on Bell Blvd; when we walk into the Vietnamese place for a late dinner, the owner gets up and switches the TV to tennis for us. He recognizes us, too. Not to mention the friendly and helpful bus drivers. Not an Onion parody at all. Queens is real,\u201d said jw of Boston . Mr. B from Buffalo said , \u201cMuseum of the Moving Image in Astoria. Fantastic! And the Beer Garden around the corner.\u201d \u201cCan\u2019t believe you fail to mention Rockaway Beach, an absolute jewel,\u201d said Seano from Pennsylvania .\u201d Well, not all tourists had praise. Porter of Sarasota, Fla., said: \u201cThis is truly beyond all understanding. Yes, some stretches of coast are appealing, but overall Queens is dirty, gritty, unkempt, and seriously in need of investment on its roads, bridges and in its public parks and spaces. And a good sand-blasting for most of its buildings. Visit it on vacation? You\u2019re out of your mind.\u201d Undaunted, Queens residents who did not mind giving away their secrets wrote in with their own travel advice for visitors. \u201cIf you\u2019d like a little wilderness mixed into your urban vacation, try the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. If you want a little beach time, visit the revamped Rockaways,\u201d said Ecce Homo of Queens , who also plugged the culinary delights of his neighborhood, Jackson Heights. \u201cFood critics have long recognized Queens as the home to truly excellent restaurants of all descriptions \u2026 The chefs tend to be recent immigrants, so the food is the real thing.\u201d \u201cOh, and our hotels/motels are mostly more affordable and much more parkable than Manhattan offerings,\u201d said Carol Goldstein of New York . \u201cMost are near subway lines that will get you into Manhattan in no more time than it takes to go from midtown to the Battery.\u201d \u201cAnd don\u2019t forget the Queens Farm Museum, the aviary at the zoo, the botanical garden,\u201d said Anthony N. of New York . \u201cRide the 7 train and see the world,\u201d Larry ULURP of New York wrote, apparently testing a new tourism slogan that many Queens natives hope never catches on.", "keyword": "Queens;Travel,Tourism"}
{"id": "ny0216513", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/04/09", "title": "Running Out of Time in Greece", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 As interest rates on Greek debt spiral upward again, the question facing Europe is no longer whether Athens has the political will to cut spending and raise taxes to curb its gaping budget deficit, but whether Greece will run out of money before it gets the chance to do so. With the rate on 10-year Greek bonds reaching as high as 7.5 percent on Thursday, up from 6.5 just three days ago, the cost of insuring against a Greek default hit a record high. The message from the market could not be clearer: artfully worded communiqu\u00e9s from Brussels will no longer suffice. To avoid bankruptcy, analysts said, Greece needs a bailout from Europe, and fast. \u201cThis is no longer about liquidity; it\u2019s a solvency issue,\u201d said Stephen Jen, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund who is now a strategist at BlueGold Capital Management in London. But with European officials consumed with a debate over whether loans to Greece should be offered at rates consistent with a typical I.M.F. bailout or punitive ones closer to current market levels, the risk is that while Brussels fiddles, Greece is burning. At a press conference on Thursday, Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, sought to break the fever in the markets by saying that the aid program proposed by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union was a \u201cvery, very serious commitment.\u201d The statement helped bring yields on 10-year Greek government bonds down from their peak for the day, to 7.35 percent, but it was not enough to turn around the mood of pessimism that contributed to a further fall in Greek and other European stocks. \u201cTime is running out,\u201d said a senior official in the Greek government who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. \u201cThe market is testing Europe\u2019s resolve.\u201d To a large extent, this latest bout of Euro-stasis is a function of Germany\u2019s view that it is not the market contagion from the Greek drama that presents the greatest risk to Europe. Instead, Berlin is far more worried, as Mr. Jen puts it, about the supposed \u201ccontagion of bad behavior\u201d in other countries like Portugal and Spain that might follow if Greece were to become the beneficiary of a bailout on relatively generous terms. \u201cThis should be easy to do; Greece is only 3 percent of Europe\u2019s G.D.P.,\u201d said Paul De Grauwe, an economist based in Brussels who advises the president of the European Commission, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso. \u201cBut this is no longer a financial issue. It is about politics and nationalism, and it is a real setback for those who believed in a united Europe.\u201d There are unmistakable signs that individuals and corporations are withdrawing funds from Greek banks, although the sums involved do not yet constitute a bank run. Still, weakened Greek banks, increasingly shut out of the capital markets, have become largely dependent on the European Central Bank and have turned to the Greek government to release more money from a previously established rescue fund. The Greek government is coming close to giving up on private investors as well. While Athens said it would go ahead with its short-term borrowing auctions this week, the planned fund-raising trip this month by Greece\u2019s finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, to tap Wall Street investors is unlikely to happen as long as Greek borrowing costs remain high, said a person who was briefed on his plans. Greece\u2019s hope is that it will be able to borrow as much as 30 billion euros ($40 billion) from Europe and the I.M.F. at a rate of about 4 percent or so, which is consistent with the terms offered by the fund to other indebted countries. Such a view, however, assumes that the I.M.F. would be the lead actor in the rescue, as it was in countries like Hungary and Latvia that are not in the euro zone. In all the vagueness of the European Union\u2019s agreement with the I.M.F. on Greece, the one point of clarity was that Brussels rather than the I.M.F. should dictate terms, even if a team of I.M.F. experts was already in Athens advising the government. As a result, European officials, pressed hard on this point by Germany, are now saying that Greece must not receive the carrot of concessional interest rates available to those who agree to accept the stick of an I.M.F.-style austerity package. Greece\u2019s interest payments on its net debt, as a percentage of its gross domestic product, are already the highest among developed nations, according to recent research by Deutsche Bank. And as the economy withers further in the face of spending cuts and tax increases, its ability to generate the revenue to pay these sums decreases. \u201cIf you look at Greece\u2019s G.D.P. potential and its borrowing costs,\u201d Mr. Jen said, \u201cthere is a gigantic gap.\u201d The sharp rise in rates has spurred increased talk of some form a debt restructuring. In such a situation, analysts said, holders of Greek debt could perhaps be forced to accept a loss of 20 percent or more on their bonds. That would be similar to what happened after Argentina defaulted on $93 billion in debt in 2001. Like Argentina, Greece has suffered from a fixed currency, fiscal deficits and a growing lack of industrial competitiveness. Still it seems unlikely that Europe \u2014 which through German and French banks owns over 100 billion euros in Greek bonds \u2014 could countenance such a solution. \u201cIf you do a restructuring, people would not lend any further money to Greece,\u201d said Yannis Stournaras, an economist and an adviser to previous Socialist governments. \u201cThat would be a huge mistake,\u201d he added. \u201cGreece has the mechanism. It just has to ask for the money.\u201d", "keyword": "Greece;Economic Conditions and Trends;Bankruptcies;Credit;International Monetary Fund;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0102621", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/13", "title": "George Steinmetz\u2019s Aerial Photography of New York", "abstract": "New York has stories it doesn\u2019t reveal to the people walking its surfaces; you have to get up high to see them. This is where the photographer George Steinmetz works: in a lightweight one-person paraglider, in a tiny two-person helicopter, sometimes on a high floor in a tall building. In his 30 years of taking aerial photographs, Mr. Steinmetz, 58, has aimed his camera at animal migrations in sub-Saharan Africa and the sculpted sands of the world\u2019s deserts. More recently, he has plied the airspace above the city. You see things up there, he said. You see a rooftop pool designed with an Andy Warhol filmstrip \u2014 \u201cWho knew there were all these swimming pools?\u201d he said \u2014 or townhouse blocks in Brooklyn that could be toy sets as interpreted by early Modernist painters. One morning, flying around the Frank Gehry-designed building at 8 Spruce Street in downtown Manhattan, Mr. Steinmetz\u2019s camera captured a man wandering naked through his apartment. \u201cYou see lives inside very expensive pigeonholes in the sky,\u201d he said. These days the city skies are getting crowded \u2014 not just with new skyscrapers but also with drones , whose numbers are likely to multiply on the morning of Dec. 25. \u201cDrones are revolutionizing aerial photography,\u201d Mr. Steinmetz said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing what the iPhone did for still photography, putting it within everyone\u2019s grasp.\u201d The catch for Mr. Steinmetz is that it is currently against the law to take drone photographs for commercial purposes. \u201cSo my son can use my drone to take all the pictures he wants,\u201d he said, \u201cbut if I do it, it\u2019s illegal.\u201d The images here are collected in a new book, \u201cNew York Air\u201d (Abrams), and are part of an exhibition at Anastasia Photo on the Lower East Side through Jan. 31. The gallery prints tell yet another story about the city. The dots become people. \u201cYou really have to see the big prints,\u201d Mr. Steinmetz said. \u201cWhen they\u2019re small, you see the patterns. Up close you see the people and the life in the city.\u201d", "keyword": "Photography;George Steinmetz;Books;NYC;Drones;Manhattan;Anastasia Photo"}
{"id": "ny0046291", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2014/02/22", "title": "In Struggles of Artist With His Work, Hints of Mexico\u2019s Own", "abstract": "MEXICO CITY \u2014 DAMI\u00c1N ORTEGA\u2019S completed installation outside the new Museo Jumex here looks, at first, like a workaday kitchen filmed in space. A teapot, plates, bowls and utensils slowly spin above an unassuming wooden table. A chair, then another, seem to be balancing on one leg. Gradually, deeper meanings emerge. First, complexity lies below. The piece includes five concentric circles of floor, each spinning slowly. Second, Mr. Ortega\u2019s domesticity is a quiet rebuke to its surroundings, lying between Mexico\u2019s newest icons of wealth: the billionaire Carlos Slim Hel\u00fa\u2019s shimmering new Soumaya Museum and the Jumex, the new home for the widely admired art collection of Eugenio L\u00f3pez Alonso, the Jumex juice heir. Mr. Ortega\u2019s piece, in short, is a rebellious interloper, a playful whirligig combining simplicity, beauty and a surprisingly anticorporate message. \u201cIt\u2019s a monument to everyday life,\u201d Mr. Ortega said. \u201cI thought it would be interesting to have a public plaza with something intimate and individual.\u201d Mr. Ortega is certainly not the first Mexican artist to be concerned with class or the quotidian, but his interest in re-examination \u2014 in taking old things apart and putting them back together in new ways \u2014 makes him well matched to the moment. Mexico is in the middle of a perception crisis. Optimists who insist the country should be portrayed as rapidly modernizing are constantly arguing with those who see a society stuck in place, with metastasizing violence, continuing corruption and poverty that may or may not be receding, depending on the data set. In the midst of this confusion (compounded by a lack of government transparency), Mr. Ortega\u2019s art seems to offer a comforting sense of agency and connection. Even before his piece was finished, people walking by touched its familiar items. \u201cPeople want it to move,\u201d said Rosario Nadal, the curator who oversaw the commission for the piece. \u201cThey go up to the table and move things around.\u201d Mr. Ortega, 45, with longish hair and a voice that moves quickly from soft to firm, welcomed the interactivity. The son of an actor and a teacher at an alternative school housed in a former stable, Mr. Ortega came to art through play. He fondly recalls a boyhood shaped by seeing his father practice comedic roles in front of the mirror, putting on mustaches or wigs, and hanging around set designers for movies and theater. Mr. Ortega said he was also strongly influenced by watching the area where he grew up \u2014 Tlalpan, on the southern edge of Mexico City \u2014 go from mostly rural to densely urban. There was little planning or forethought, he said, just lots of activity. \u201cMexico is a country that\u2019s very productive,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a lot of making and fixing things. It\u2019s a very rich culture of resolving things and finding solutions to problems, alternative solutions.\u201d That turned out to be exactly what Mr. Ortega needed for \u201cCosmologia Dom\u00e9stica,\u201d his piece outside the Museo Jumex. It was his first installation with a large international team: Designers in Europe drew computerized markups of the complicated mechanism that would move the floor, with Mexican construction firms assigned to build and assemble it. Mr. Ortega and two art coordinators he met a decade ago at the Venice Biennale would supervise. BUT putting it all together turned out to be far harder than expected. Despite promises of precise measurement from Mexican producers, the metal rings meant to turn the floor were not perfect circles; they would move a bit, then get stuck, like a warped bicycle tire caught by the brakes. Video The Times\u2019s Damien Cave tracks the delayed debut of Dami\u00e1n Ortega\u2019s modern art installation outside the new Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Then the teams meant to construct the piece kept delaying. With just a few days before art collectors from all over the world were to arrive for the Museo Jumex opening in November, Mr. Ortega\u2019s piece looked like an open maw full of steel, wood and workers. Wearing a plaid shirt and trying to sound upbeat five days before the official debut, Mr. Ortega described it as a culture clash between rigidity and flexibility. The steel gears below the floor represented European engineering, but when combined with improvisational Mexican production, movement proved to be a challenge, he said. Mr. Ortega bent down with some of the workers and tried to explain his vision of a floating system of motion, with some larger gears allowed to move back and forth within the flawed circle. It did not work. A day later, he tried ropes and pulleys. That failed, too. Then he and his team went even simpler, with rubber wheels spinning the larger metal rings. This seemed to succeed, but only after what would become a major overhaul: The circles would have to be cut and welded again to make them round enough for easy movement. Each new day produced minimal progress. It was a race of stress and physics, and a reminder that art does not spring from the mind fully formed and ready for Sotheby\u2019s. Contemporary art today, much of it at least, is less effete than industrial, a battle of calloused hands and computers fighting the limits of resistant materials, in a mad search for beauty or provocation. When he was in a good mood, Mr. Ortega compared the process to a Mexican carnival, with the grizzled mechanics who make the rides go despite rust, bent steel and lost screws. In darker moments, he compared his experience to the famed disaster of filming \u201cApocalypse Now .\u201d Or constructing a crypt. \u201cI\u2019m like the last slave building a tomb,\u201d he said the night before the official opening, drilling long after dark. \u201cI\u2019m going to be here all night. Definitely.\u201d AND he was. The following morning, as foreign visitors sipped Champagne and toured the museum with curators and the building\u2019s architect, David Chipperfield, work continued on Mr. Ortega\u2019s piece. He had missed the deadline and the elaborate parties, losing out on a chance to hobnob with the global art elite and old friends like the artist Gabriel Orozco, with whom he had shared a studio roughly a decade ago as they both sought greater acclaim. It was frustrating, he said, depressing. Unintentionally, though, he had also become a monument to the routine of most Mexican workers: long days, little guarantee of a clear payoff. \u201cWith him, it\u2019s like going back to the original,\u201d said Grazia Cattaneo, 43, an art coordinator from Italy whom Mr. Ortega hired to help oversee construction. \u201cHe is always trying for simple solutions that work. He has a very poetic vision.\u201d Museum officials stood by him as well. Patrick Charpenel, the director of the Museo Jumex, insisted that the museum would always be \u201ccommitted to following local artists.\u201d \u201cWe stick with them,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful piece.\u201d And eventually, he was right. Two months \u2014 yes, months \u2014 after the official opening, Mr. Ortega\u2019s installation was finally finished. With everything orbiting as planned, it was understated on the surface, with deep complications down below. Mr. Ortega resisted describing the piece as a metaphor for Mexico, but at a second opening the museum held on his behalf on Feb. 3, he said he was relieved and thrilled to see the piece completed. Asked what kind of project he planned to take on next, he did not hesitate: \u201cA painting,\u201d he said. \u201cA very small painting.\u201d", "keyword": "Art;Museum;Mexico City;Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0155807", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/06/18", "title": "New Florida Rules Return More Than 115,000 Ex-Offenders to Voting Rolls", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 Gov. Charlie Crist announced on Tuesday that 115,232 Florida felons had regained their voting rights since new rules took effect last April, but 80 percent of the state\u2019s disenfranchised ex-offenders remain off the rolls. The governor \u2014 a Republican who had initially pushed for a broader clemency program \u2014 said he was proud of the progress and hoped the number of those regaining voting rights would increase. \u201cOnce somebody has truly paid their debt to society, we should recognize it, and we should honor it and we should welcome them back into society and give them that second chance,\u201d Mr. Crist told a crowd of law enforcement officials and advocates for prisoners\u2019 rights in Tallahassee. \u201cThat could make an enormous difference in November,\u201d he said. Indeed, the new figures arrive during a hotly contested presidential race \u2014 and as Florida has come under increased scrutiny for erecting barriers to voting. Since 2000, Florida has passed some of the strictest voter registration rules in the country. It is also the most populous of three states (the others are Kentucky and Virginia) whose constitutions require withdrawal of voting rights from all felons. So while ex-inmates in 47 states typically have their civil rights restored automatically, in Florida until April, most felons who finished prison and probation had to endure a lengthy review by state officials. About 7,000 each year were cleared to vote, to serve on juries and to get jobs that require state licenses, like a nurse or barber. The newer rules create a three-tiered system for ex-convicts, based on the severity of their crimes. Those who have completed sentences and probation for the least violent, Level 1 offenses since April can have their rights restored without having to fill out paperwork, after the state confirms payment of restitution. Of the 115,232 who have regained their rights, the vast majority are older cases that preceded the law. But most of the state\u2019s estimated 950,000 felons must request reinstatement. It is not clear how many more people are eligible. \u201cThere is a large demand for this,\u201d said Muslima Lewis, director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida. \u201cAnd it is a lot higher this year with the election.\u201d Ms. Lewis said Mr. Crist deserved credit for changing the rules. But, she said: \u201cIt does need to be seen in context. There is a lot more that needs to be done.\u201d The issue of voting rights here has long been intertwined with race. The ban on voting by felons became part of the state Constitution in 1868, when many Southern states found ways to suppress black votes in the wake of the Civil War. More recently, liberal groups have accused the state\u2019s Republican-controlled government of retaining the policy in an effort to keep blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, from registering. Some Republicans have argued that felons of all races forfeit their rights when they commit crimes. Mr. Crist, in turn, has emphasized the Christian value of redemption. And yet, for those who are looking to have their rights restored, voting is just part of the appeal. Gregory L. James was released from jail in March after serving 12 years on a federal drug conspiracy conviction. A talkative 46-year-old who founded a nonprofit organization that mentors former prisoners, Mr. James said he hoped to have his rights restored over the next few years. He sees it as a way to finally move beyond prison. \u201cBeing whole again means that I have my rights again,\u201d Mr. James said. \u201cWithout my rights, it\u2019s like I\u2019m still doing time all over again.\u201d", "keyword": "Voter Registration and Requirements;Florida;Crist Charlie;Presidential Election of 2008"}
{"id": "ny0048307", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/11/30", "title": "Blue Jackets Make a Series of Moves", "abstract": "The Columbus Blue Jackets have recalled center Michael Chaput and left wing Kerby Rychel from their American Hockey League affiliate in Springfield, Mass. Chaput had two assists in 18 games with the Blue Jackets this season and had a goal and four assists in five games with the Springfield Falcons. Rychel, the club\u2019s second first-round pick, 19th over all, in the 2013 draft, had six goals and seven assists in 22 games with Springfield.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Blue Jackets"}
{"id": "ny0073033", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/03/14", "title": "Mets\u2019 Bolstered Rotation Is Again in Doubt", "abstract": "PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. \u2014 The Mets decided years ago to build their team around elite young pitching, a strategy that carried some inherent risk. Strong and vibrant pitchers are lost to arm injuries every year , so general managers almost have to walk around with their fingers crossed, hoping for the best. The Mets are no exception. They essentially passed on the 2014 season when Matt Harvey sat out after Tommy John surgery. This year, his comeback is the biggest story of their spring training, but three other pitchers have injuries that will cause Mets fans to hold their breath. Zack Wheeler, whom the Mets consider nearly as important as Harvey, will miss his next start because of elbow tenderness and a blister on his index finger. Josh Edgin, the team\u2019s top left-handed reliever, is considering Tommy John surgery. Vic Black, one of the team\u2019s top setup men, is having his right shoulder examined. The Mets announced the news about Wheeler on Friday, and General Manager Sandy Alderson insisted that the injury was not serious. He said that Wheeler experienced the same thing at times last season, managed the problem, then had it examined over the off-season. The Mets seemed satisfied with the results, because Wheeler started the spring with no public restrictions. Alderson pointed out that Wheeler was spectacular in the second half of the 2014 season. Over his last 15 starts, he compiled a 2.80 E.R.A. and averaged more than a strikeout an inning. His fastball was among the fastest in the National League. \u201cWe don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious because it\u2019s something that he\u2019s experienced before,\u201d Alderson said. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of an intermittent issue that he has to manage. At this point, we don\u2019t expect it\u2019s going to be a major issue.\u201d Alderson expected Wheeler to miss just one start. Black was sent Friday to have a magnetic resonance imaging test on his right shoulder. But Alderson did not seem too concerned about him, either, calling the test precautionary. Alderson indicated that the problem was tendinitis. Edgin\u2019s injury appeared to be the most serious. The Mets previously said he had a stretched elbow ligament and was given a choice: Have Tommy John surgery and miss the season, or try to rehabilitate the injury. Before Edgin decides, he will get a second opinion from Dr. James Andrews, an orthopedic surgeon.", "keyword": "Baseball;Zack Wheeler;Vic Black;Josh Edgin;Texas Rangers;Yu Darvish;Surgery;Mets"}
{"id": "ny0115362", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2012/11/15", "title": "Courting a Crowning Moment in Prague", "abstract": "After more than 10 nomadic months, Tomas Berdych\u2019s A.T.P. Tour season ended last week in London and the weary Czech, eliminated from the World Tour Finals after a loss to Novak Djokovic, was asked to share his best moment of the year. \u201cI hope that the best moment is still to come,\u201d Berdych said with a grin. Berdych, for all his fearsome ability to pound a tennis ball into submission, has yet to win a Grand Slam singles title and may never do so in the age of Roger Federer, Djokovic, et al. But Berdych still has a chance to achieve closure this year by winning the Davis Cup with the Czech Republic. Berdych and his longtime teammate and doubles partner, Radek Stepanek, have been on essentially a two-man quest since 2007. And, after losing to Rafael Nadal and Spain in the final on indoor clay in 2009 in Barcelona, they now get the chance to play the final at home against Spain without Nadal in the equation on a much (much) quicker indoor hardcourt. Hopes are understandably high even if David Ferrer, who is playing this week for Spain, has won just as many tournaments this year on indoor hardcourts (two) as the more powerful Berdych. It has been 32 years since Czechoslovakia won its first and only Davis Cup title and even though the Czechs and Slovaks split amicably in 1993, it is difficult not to see the Davis Cup final this week through the lens of that 1980 final, which was also staged in Prague. The Czechs kept Czechoslovakia\u2019s place in the elite 16-team World Group after the country\u2019s division, while the Slovaks had to start again in the event\u2019s minor leagues and work their way back up, which they did quite impressively, reaching the 2005 final, which they lost to Croatia. But while the Slovaks have had their stars, including Miloslav Mecir and, more recently, Dominik Hrbaty, Karol Kucera and Daniela Hantuchova, it is the Czechs who have provided the bulk of the champions through the years. The women include Martina Navratilova, Helena Sukova, Hana Mandlikova , Jana Novotna and the potential masterwork in progress, Petra Kvitova. The men include Jaroslav Drobny, Jan Kodes and Ivan Lendl. Lendl and Kodes were on the 1980 team that defeated Italy, 4-1, in Prague, but the Czechs were, like Berdych and Stepanek, essentially a two-man band, with Lendl and Tomas Smid the only Czechs to play in the final. Lendl was just 20 then, not yet the obsessively rigorous player who would rise to world No.1 and win eight Grand Slam singles titles. But he and Smid squeezed the suspense out of the final, with Smid beating Adriano Panatta in five sets, Lendl beating Corrado Barazzutti in four and then the two Czechs clinching the victory by beating Panatta and Paolo Bertolucci in five sets in doubles. Lendl later said that winning the final was not as big a highlight for him as his victories on the road in the semifinal over the Argentine stars Guillermo Vilas and Jos\u00e9 Luis Clerc. But the final was definitely the bigger highlight for his country, which he later left \u2014 like Navratilova \u2014 for exile in the United States. Czechoslovakia was the first Communist country to win the Davis Cup since the competition began in 1900. But capitalism and the naming rights that accompany it are now firmly entrenched and this final will take place in the O2 Arena, with a capacity of 13,800, which sold out on the same day that tickets were released to the general public in October. That is a reflection of the passion the Cup can still generate as the Czechs and Spaniards prepare to play the 100th final in the event\u2019s history. But the Cup final has also become more a local than a global occasion, with interest often building to a peak in the two finalist nations but with less resonance in the wider world. More star power would not hurt, but it is not as if the game\u2019s biggest draws have not taken their swings at the title. In 2010, Djokovic led Serbia to victory, using it as a springboard to winning three Grand Slam singles titles and finishing No.1 in 2011. Nadal has been part of four Cup-winning efforts for Spain, including the victory last year over Argentina in Seville. Although Federer is uncertain to play the Cup next year, he had every hope of finally winning it this year, but he and the Swiss were upset in the first round by John Isner, Mardy Fish and the Americans in Switzerland. This final still has heft. Ferrer and Berdych are both ranked in the top six. Spain\u2019s second singles player, Nicolas Almagro, is 11th. The doubles rubber is expected to match Spain\u2019s Marc L\u00f3pez and Marcel Granollers, who won the title at the World Tour Finals, against Berdych and Stepanek, who have a remarkable 11-1 record in Davis Cup together. Their only loss came against Spain in the 2009 final, when Feliciano L\u00f3pez and Fernando Verdasco beat them in straight sets. The Spanish, with Ferrer and Nadal in the singles, went on to sweep that final 5-0. But a rout looks unlikely this time around. Berdych might play his most persuasive tennis on fast surfaces: See his run to the final on the slick, blue clay in Madrid this year. But Spain has the deeper team even without Nadal and its new captain, the former leading player Alex Corretja, has ably managed the tricky task of following on the work of his friend Albert Costa, who won two titles in his three-year run as captain. \u201cThe year has been very good but we want it to be excellent,\u201d Corretja said. \u201cNobody on this team is satisfied with the possibility of losing. We will give it our all.\u201d Corretja and Costa were on the team that won Spain the Cup for the first time, in 2000. The Spanish have since been the competition\u2019s dominant force, winning again in 2004, 2008, 2009 and 2011. Berdych, Stepanek and the Czechs would be delighted to do it just once.", "keyword": "Davis Cup;Tennis;Czech Republic;Spain;Prague (Czech Republic)"}
{"id": "ny0088855", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/09/11", "title": "Police Release Sketch of Suspect in Shooting of Cuomo Administration Lawyer", "abstract": "New York police officials have released a sketch of a man who they say is being sought for questioning in connection with the shooting of a Cuomo administration lawyer in Brooklyn early on Monday. The lawyer, Carey W. Gabay, 43, was shot in the head during a predawn celebration in the Crown Heights neighborhood before the West Indian American Day Parade. A friend of the family said he remained in critical condition on Thursday morning. Mr. Gabay was a bystander caught in a shootout that is believed to have been between gangs, the police said. He was taken to Kings County Hospital Center , where he has been in a coma. His family and friends have been keeping vigil at the hospital since Monday. The man sought for questioning has been described as a black man, 19 or 20 years old, who was wearing a white T-shirt and black pants, and had a Jamaican flag around his neck. The officials have not specified whether the man is suspected of being the gunman or a witness. Image Mr. Gabay Credit Judy Sanders/Office of the New York Governor, via Associated Press The New York Police Department has also offered a $12,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the gunman. Mr. Gabay, the son of Jamaican immigrants, grew up in the Boston Secor Houses , a public-housing project in the Bronx, and graduated at the top of his class at Truman High School . He studied government at Harvard, where he was elected president of the undergraduate council, the main body of student government, in his senior year. Later, he attended Harvard Law School. Mr. Gabay worked at several firms in New York, specializing in corporate finance law before turning to public service. In 2011, he became an assistant counsel for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. In January, he was appointed first deputy counsel for the Empire State Development Corporation, the state\u2019s main economic development agency. Mr. Gabay and his wife, Trenelle, a hair and makeup artist, live in an apartment in the Clinton Hill neighborhood. Mr. Gabay celebrated his Jamaican heritage by going every year to J\u2019ouvert , a predawn festival where bands play West Indian music and revelers dance in the streets. Early Monday, he was walking home with his younger brother and several friends when nearly 30 bullets sprayed the crowd around 3:40 a.m. near the corner of Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, about two blocks from the east side of Prospect Park, the police said. Mr. Gabay ducked behind a car, but was struck by a bullet in the top of his head.", "keyword": "Carey Gabay;West Indian American Day;Assault;Brooklyn;Gang;Crown Heights Brooklyn;NYPD;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0015568", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/10/16", "title": "Racing to See Banksy Graffiti, While It Can Still Be Seen", "abstract": "Ilyssa Fuchs, a lawyer whose office is just below City Hall, logged onto Facebook at lunchtime on Tuesday and immediately bolted from her desk. She asked two other lawyers in her suite if they were interested in joining her on a six-tenths-of-a-mile dash, and not to get to some emergency hearing in court. \u201cI said, \u2018You like art?\u2019 \u201c she explained. \u201cThey said no. I said, \u2018You like graffiti?\u2019 They said not really. To be fair, they are prepping for a trial. So I said, \u2018I\u2019m running up there,\u2019 and my heart was going the whole time. Was it still there?\u201d \u201cIt\u201d was a silhouette of the twin towers looming over the Lower Manhattan landscape, with a burnt-orange chrysanthemum dangling where one of the hijacked jets struck on 9/11. And it was apparently the latest work by the elusive British street artist Banksy, who is halfway through a monthlong \u201cresidency\u201d in New York. It may or may not be one of his more provocative installations, but it drew a crowd alerted by a photo on Instagram , then a post from his Twitter account: \u201cTime to step it up.\u201d He did not elaborate. He rarely does. He is famously anonymous, putting up his distinctively playful stencils unnoticed, and there was no response on Tuesday to an e-mail to a London publicist who represents him. He did not even say exactly where the twin towers silhouette was, but others soon pinpointed the location, again on Instagram and Twitter. That made things easy for Jane Viera, a publicist from Los Angeles who is on vacation in Manhattan. \u201cThey said \u2018Jay and Staple,\u2019 and we were like, \u2018We\u2019re there,\u2019 \u201d she said, referring to the location of the silhouette, on the Staple Street side of the building at 9 Jay Street, about half a mile from where the World Trade Center stood. Some in the crowd discussed blog posts about other Banksy works that have appeared in recent days. They wondered how long this one would last before being tagged over, or damaged. They said they had heard stories of locals who commandeered a site, covering the Banksy and making visitors pay to see it . That did not happen at midday on Staple Street. The crowd took photos of the twin towers silhouette, some with cellphones, some with digital cameras. Some trained their eyes on others in the crowd \u2014 and up, at the windows of surrounding buildings \u2014 because they figured Banksy was somewhere nearby. They said true artists attend their own shows. Oscar Salguero, who designs children\u2019s products, wondered whether the flower was Banksy\u2019s, or had been put there by someone else. Either way, he said, the flower \u201clooks like flames.\u201d \u201cBut the connotation is so different, it\u2019s beautiful,\u201d he said. His Web site said he set up a table in Central Park last Saturday and sold signed canvases for $60 apiece , far less than they would otherwise sell for. A sign on the table advertised the work simply as, \u201cSpray art.\u201d The buyers, if they knew Banksy\u2019s work, apparently did not realize they had bought originals, not knockoffs. But he did not part with many. The Web site said his total for the day was $420. \u201cI\u2019m amazed at the publicity this guy gets,\u201d said Robert Janz, who said that he had painted several images on the Staple Street wall before the Banksy silhouette appeared. (\u201cI am not a graffiti artist,\u201d Mr. Janz said. \u201cI draw on top of graffiti.\u201d He pointed to a buffalo he had painted inside someone else\u2019s graffiti.) As for whether he admired Banksy, Mr. Janz said, \u201cI admire him for putting up a piece right under one of mine.\u201d", "keyword": "Banksy;Graffiti;Art;NYC;World Trade Center;Social Media;Instagram"}
{"id": "ny0137130", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/05/11", "title": "That Must Be Bob. I Hear His New Hip Squeaking.", "abstract": "The first time John L. Johnson\u2019s artificial hip squeaked, he was bending down to pick up a pine cone in his yard in Thomasville, Ga. Mr. Johnson looked up, expecting to find an animal nearby. Susan O\u2019Toole, a nutritionist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who first squeaked going up stairs after getting home from her hip-replacement surgery in 2005, said she thought the banister she was gripping needed repair. And Edward Heary, an apprentice appraiser in Hatboro, Pa., said clients sometimes look with embarrassment or concern at their floorboards when he walks though their homes. As all three patients \u2014 and hundreds of others \u2014 discovered once they pinpointed the source of the noises, they had become guinea pigs in an unfolding medical mystery. Their artificial hips are made of ceramic materials that were promoted as being much more durable than older models. But for reasons not yet fully understood, their hips started to squeak, raising questions about whether the noises herald more serious malfunctions. \u201cThere is something amiss here,\u201d said Dr. Douglas E. Padgett, chief of adult reconstructive and joint replacement service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. More than 250,000 Americans get total hip implants each year, a procedure that generally costs close to $45,000. Hip replacements have a success rate of more than 90 percent, based on patients\u2019 achieving relatively pain-free mobility after recovery periods that range from a few months to a year. Any artificial hip can occasionally make a variety of noises. But until Stryker, a medical products company, began marketing highly durable ceramic hips in the United States in 2003, squeaking was extremely rare. Now, tens of thousands of ceramic hips later \u2014 from Stryker and other makers that entered the field \u2014 many patients say their squeaking hips are interfering with daily life. One study in the Journal of Arthroplasty found that 10 patients of 143 who received ceramic hips from 2003 to 2005, or 7 percent, developed squeaking. Meanwhile, no squeaks occurred among a control group of 48 patients who received hips made of metal and plastic. \u201cIt can interrupt sex when my wife starts laughing,\u201d said one man, who discussed the matter on the condition that he not be named. Beyond annoyance and embarrassment, many patients and their surgeons fear that the squeaky ceramic hips may signal that the joints are wearing out prematurely. That could force patients to undergo the very operation \u2014 a second replacement of the same hip joint \u2014 they had hoped to avoid by choosing ceramics. Already, dozens of patients have elected to endure subsequent surgeries to replace the noisy hips. Some have sued Stryker, the pioneer and market leader, which some doctors say has been slow to take their patients\u2019 concerns seriously. Last fall, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to Stryker, saying it had failed to take the steps needed to prevent squeaking and other problems. Clouding things further, Stryker last year recalled ceramic hip parts made at its factory in Cork, Ireland, after determining that some did not meet its sterility specifications. Stryker says that none of the problems underlying the recall or the warning letter from the F.D.A. reflect problems that cause squeaking, which it contends occurs in less than 1 percent of implants. Whatever the actual frequency, some investigators who have looked at the problem say the squeaking seems to be associated with extreme flexing of the ceramic implants, but exactly how is unclear. In X-rays, many of the squeaking hips appear to be perfectly aligned. Nor is there a clear relationship between squeaking and hip pain or other conditions some patients say they have encountered, like the sensation that the hip disengages slightly when a patient walks. Some patients squeak even they are walking normally, like Ms. O\u2019Toole or Michael Mueller, a software executive in Scottsdale, Ariz. Mr. Mueller is so frustrated with squeaks, pain and popping noises for which he blames his ceramic hip that he has displayed his problem on YouTube. While there have been no reported cases of serious mishaps, some surgeons fear that the ceramic material might shatter at some point, leaving a patient with so many inflammatory shards in the hip that a doctor could never find them all. \u201cCatastrophic failure has been a concern in the past, with older ceramic components,\u201d said Dr. James M. Bried, a surgeon in Poway, Calif. Ceramic materials have been used since the 1960s. Dr. Bried, who implanted Mr. Mueller\u2019s hip last year, said he was concerned that squeaking might be \u201ca harbinger of something similar.\u201d Mr. Mueller said Dr. Bried had told him to consider getting the hip replaced \u201csooner rather than later.\u201d Stryker says such fears are overblown. \u201cIt is important to keep this in perspective,\u201d said Aaron R. Kwittken, a spokesman for Stryker. \u201cPublished research shows squeaking is rare compared with other total-hip-related risks like infection, dislocation and leaving patients with uneven leg length.\u201d But plaintiffs lawyers, who have already filed scores of lawsuits on behalf of ceramic hip patients, are gearing up to argue that squeaking is not a minor problem for many who experience it. \u201cWe\u2019re in the infancy of this,\u201d said Douglass A. Kreis, a personal injury lawyer in Pensacola, Fla., whose clients include Ms. O\u2019Toole and Mr. Johnson, who has had his ceramic hip replaced. Most artificial hips, whatever material they are made of, share a basic design: a socket implanted in the pelvis, into which a spherical head is fitted. The head is attached to a spike that is driven into the femur, or thigh bone, to anchor it. Durability is paramount with artificial hips. Patients worry that they will outlive their artificial hips and require a second, more extensive and even more expensive procedure at an age when their bodies may be less able to cope with the trauma. Ceramic hips were promoted as lasting much longer than the 15 years or so for conventional artificial joints made of steel and plastic. Now that the squeaking has raised caution flags, researchers are weighing the noted durability of ceramic-on-ceramic hip joints like Stryker\u2019s Trident model against products with other combinations of materials. Each combination has known or suspected drawbacks. Metal-on-metal devices, for instance, slowly shed tiny ionized particles that some researchers say might promote cancer . And even the newest plastics are still not as durable as other materials, raising the risks of fragments that can lead to bone-destroying inflammations. For patients who have already received ceramic hips that have started to squeak, many orthopedic surgeons advise nothing more than watchful waiting unless there are also signs that the hip is slipping out of place or that ceramic particles are breaking loose from the head or the socket. Doctors who have removed ceramic hips say they find dark stripes that indicate accelerated wear on the ceramic heads. But durability tests have suggested that even those extracted hips would have outlasted conventional metal-and-plastic replacement joints, according to researchers. \u201cThere is no evidence that the wear associated with squeaking would lead systems to fail,\u201d said Dr. James A. D\u2019Antonio, an orthopedic surgeon outside Pittsburgh, who was a chief investigator on the clinical trials that led to regulatory approval for Stryker\u2019s Trident. Dr. D\u2019Antonio, whose longstanding role in Stryker\u2019s product development efforts earned him $1.1 million in consulting payments from the company last year, said he had implanted 400 Tridents since the clinical trials began in 1996. He said that only four of his patients had noticed squeaks and that none of them were able to reproduce them in his office. But Dr. Fabio Orozco, a surgeon at the Rothman Institute, a major orthopedics group in Philadelphia, said that a recently completed review of about 1,500 Rothman patients with ceramic hips had found that the squeaking condition occurred in 49 of them, or about 3 percent. \u201cI\u2019m very hesitant to use ceramic-on-ceramic now,\u201d Dr. Orozco said, \u201cunless we are talking about somebody very young.\u201d", "keyword": "Hips;Implants;Medicine and Health;Stryker Corp"}
{"id": "ny0092540", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/08/21", "title": "Migrants in Kos Inspire Both Hospitality and Anger in Greeks", "abstract": "KOS, Greece \u2014 Dawn was breaking over a beach near Kos harbor, and the first swimmers threaded their way between orange beach umbrellas into the sea. Suddenly, a black rubber dinghy burst out of the grayness. It tacked rapidly toward the beach, and the life-jacketed young men on board began ululating with joy. Migrants, they had made it across the narrow stretch of water from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos, and what they hope will be a safer and more prosperous life in the European Union . One punctured the boat. Most of the others scrabbled onto the sand, dropped their life jackets and quickly vanished into the nearby alleyways. Two young friends, Shady Khilel and Akram Dakdk, both 21, stopped for just a moment to take a selfie. In their Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, with beards and tousled hair, they could have passed for tourists. Only Mr. Khilel\u2019s scratched and swollen feet hinted that they had had to hike through thorny underbrush on the other side of the channel to get to their boat. After taking the photo, Mr. Khilel made three phone calls. \u201cAllahu akbar,\u201d he crowed to the first person. \u201cMama,\u201d he explained, laughing joyfully. The next call was to his best friend. The third was to a friend in Kos, who had made the same journey by boat from the Bodrum peninsula in Turkey a few days earlier \u2014 Ayman Almotlak, a teacher of Arabic. Mr. Almotlak instructed the two young men to meet him at a cafe near the medieval fortress, less than a mile from where they had washed up. Image One migrant helping another shave early Thursday on the island of Kos, Greece, as they wait to be registered at a police station. Credit Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press At the cafe, another friend, Nour Hamad, a veterinarian, explained why they had made the journey. \u201cWe lost everything in Syria ,\u201d Mr. Hamad said. Mr. Khilel said something, and Mr. Almotlak translated: \u201cMy friend says he lost his humanity.\u201d On Wednesday, five days after he reached the beach, Mr. Khilel sent a reporter two photographs and a brief voice message. It said, \u201cI am in Macedonia.\u201d His timing may have been lucky. On Thursday, Macedonia declared a state of emergency and said it was tightening security on its normally porous border with Greece, stranding thousands of migrants who are trying to move north to more prosperous European countries. Traveling With Dignity On Kos, the clean white tables and chairs of a seaside cafe overlook a small yachting marina, and a few miles away across the blue Aegean waters, the whitewashed houses of Bodrum can be seen sparkling in the sun. In between are a new addition to the scene this summer: the tents, clotheslines and playing children belonging to thousands of refugees who have fled destitution and war. A group of elderly Greek men in crisp shirts sipping coffee at the cafe could be overheard saying that the Greeks, too, were once refugees. \u201cBut we always traveled with dignity,\u201d one added. Dignity, or axioprepeia in Greek, is the word of the hour in Greece. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, frequently used it as a battle cry against the austerity demands of eurozone creditors. But it seems to have a special resonance here, where the promise and the reality of modern Europe meet. Salvage Operations A peculiar industry has sprung up on the island: salvaging the migrant boats. Every morning, a small group of enterprising Greek men cruise the beaches in jeeps, picking up the punctured dinghies, the abandoned motors, the discarded inner tubes and life jackets. Video Over 1,000 migrants mainly fleeing the Syrian war are being held in the area as the police try to contain the influx of people arriving. Credit Credit Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters One of them is Grigoris, 72, who rides barefoot across the beaches at 5 a.m. in his open jeep. He specializes in life jackets, and every morning he collects a pile of them, as hundreds more migrants arrive in Kos. The jackets generally do not meet European Union standards, so they cannot be legally reused in Greece, he said; instead, he removes the foam from them and turns them into reflective vests, which he sells or gives away. \u201cI do this just to keep busy,\u201d Grigoris said. \u201cAnything illegal, I like.\u201d In his youth he was an itinerant acrobat, he says, traveling as far as Brazil to perform. Now his bare feet are hard enough to walk on glass, he says. He lives on the produce he grows in his garden, while collecting antiques, and now life jackets. He is proud of his cunning. \u201cPeople like me, we are not educated,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we are more intelligent than many educated people.\u201d Common Ground Dealing with the onslaught of migrants has forced the Greeks, who could be excused for being consumed with their own country\u2019s never-ending economic crisis , into a strange kind of double-think. On the one hand, their fundamental hospitality comes out, and they want to help. On the other, they see the flood of migrants as detrimental to tourism and their own economic interests. In public they express compassion; in private, they are very often angry and resentful. In this resentment, Turks and Greeks, enemies for centuries, find common ground. In Bodrum on the Turkish side of the channel, a tour guide and a restaurant waiter ask a visitor whether Kos is overrun with migrants. Yes, they are told, the influx already exceeds 20 percent of the island\u2019s population of about 33,000. That is nothing, the Turks reply. Turkey has nearly two million refugees on its hands just from the Syrian civil war, more than any other country. Priority for Syrians Last Friday, three days after a near riot in a stadium on Kos where migrants were being held , a giant ferry that once cruised between Athens and Crete docked at the island. The ferry was pressed into service as a floating processing center, dormitory and refectory. The hope is that it will take some of the migrants off the streets and beaches of Kos, where they have been camping out while waiting for papers that would allow them to move legally inside Greece . The Global Refugee Crisis, Region by Region In the latest crisis, tens of thousands are racing to Hungary before a border fence is finished. Mayor George Kiritsis of Kos announced that Syrian migrants would be given first priority. Syrians receive preferential treatment in many ways, because the Greeks consider them most likely to be actual war refugees rather than economic migrants. Migrants were told to assemble at midnight Saturday to board the boat. Several hundred men, women and children milled anxiously at the dock. A man brought a feverish baby to the Coast Guard officers providing security for the ferry, and was told to take the child to a hospital instead. The Syrians in the crowd began complaining that many of those assembled at the boat were not Syrian. \u201cPassports!\u201d the Greek authorities demanded, in English. When most of the crowd did not seem to understand, they called for refugees who understood English and Arabic to step forward and translate for the rest. Christian Salloum, a Syrian in a new blue and white souvenir Kos cap, volunteered. Mr. Salloum, who said he had worked as a journalist before fleeing Syria, organized the waiting Syrians into two lines, one for those who had already registered with the authorities and the other for those who had not. A group of men suddenly started jumping up and down, chanting and clapping in protest that they were not being allowed onto the ferry. \u201cThey are saying, \u2018We are Iraqis,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Salloum explained. The disturbance passed, and the Syrians began boarding the ship. Asked about his hat, Mr. Salloum said he had gotten it to remember Kos. \u201cIt\u2019s a nice place, but we don\u2019t have the heart to enjoy it,\u201d he said. \u201cFor us, it\u2019s a road. I hope someday to come here not being a refugee.\u201d", "keyword": "Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis;Kos;Syria;Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Greece;Immigration;Bodrum;EU;Boats"}
{"id": "ny0201484", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2009/09/01", "title": "Clijsters and Federer Win First-Round U.S. Open Matches", "abstract": "Kim Clijsters , once the world\u2019s No. 1 player, does not favor the word comeback to describe her return to professional tennis after a two-year absence. She considers what she is doing now as tackling a second career, mixing tennis with motherhood to create for herself a fresh start in a sport that once wore her down with injuries. Roger Federer , the men\u2019s No. 1 player, has mixed in fatherhood without missing a practice session. He laughs at the idea that this year is any sort of comeback because in 2008 he fell all the way \u2014 gasp \u2014 to No. 2. Clijsters and Federer brought their vastly different experiences to Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday but had similarly easy first-round matches at the United States Open. Clijsters looked rejuvenated in a 6-1, 6-1 victory over Viktoriya Kutuzova of Ukraine, and Federer only barely ruffled in a 6-1, 6-3, 7-5 victory over the 18-year-old American Devin Britton. \u201cIt was a good start to the tournament for me,\u201d Federer said. \u201cIt was a tricky match for me, playing a guy who\u2019s got absolutely nothing to lose. I\u2019m here as a five-time defending champion.\u201d But as Federer rolls into what must feel like home at the National Tennis Center, where he has not lost a match since 2003, Clijsters came in trying to unravel the mystery of how she will do after a two-year absence. She retired in 2007, nagged by chronic injuries and the desire to start a family with her husband, Brian Lynch. Now that their daughter, Jada, is 18 months old, Clijsters decided a few months ago it was time for another try. Federer arrived here coming off victories in the last two Grand Slam events, the French Open and Wimbledon, and with new twin daughters in tow. They were born in late July, with his wife, Mirka, doing the hard part and Federer playing the support role. He talks glowingly about combining fatherhood with his career, which did not miss a beat. Britton took a service game off Federer in the second and third sets, but Federer broke back immediately both times and turned the challenge into something only a little more than a nuisance. The last time Federer was beaten in the Open was by David Nalbandian in a fourth-round match in 2003. Britton was unlikely to be the next one to do it. He won the N.C.A.A. singles title in the spring as an unseeded freshman at the University of Mississippi. He signed a pro contract this summer. \u201cMy goal was not to get crushed, and make it interesting for a little while out there,\u201d Britton said. \u201cIt was fun for a little while.\u201d Now 26, Clijsters, who is from Belgium, has many supporters here, and Open officials were eager to give her a wild card. She was the 2005 champion, a well-liked personality in a women\u2019s game that has been wanting for more of those since she stepped away. And she gives the tournament a comeback story to follow, whether she considers it one or not. \u201cLittle more nervous than usual,\u201d Clijsters said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very special court to me, but I really enjoyed it. I felt really good out there.\u201d Her match was the first of the day, and of the tournament, and Clijsters was greeted by a crowd of 2,000 or so when she stepped onto the court into swirling breezes. The crowd grew as she dominated the match, which took 58 minutes, as did her confidence. She said the experience brought back a flood of good memories of her \u201cfirst\u201d career here, where she won her only Grand Slam title. \u201cObviously, the situation was a lot different then, but you kind of get the whole feeling for it again,\u201d Clijsters said. \u201cI remember just driving up here this morning, just seeing the court and everything. The same memories come back. But it\u2019s nice. I mean, I\u2019m glad that I have those memories.\u201d Clijsters beat four top-20 players in the two tournaments she entered this summer, and her two losses came to No. 1 Dinara Safina and to No. 4 Jelena Jankovic. Because she is a wild card, she is unseeded. Up next is 14th-seeded Marion Bartoli of France, whom Clijsters beat in straight sets in the first round of the Cincinnati Open in early August. Perhaps the most entertaining match of the day came in Louis Armstrong Stadium when John Isner outlasted Victor Hanescu of Romania, the No. 28 seed, 6-1, 7-6 (14), 7-6 (5). Isner, a big-serving American, made a splash here two years ago when he was just out of college, advancing to the third round and taking a set from Federer with the Ashe Stadium crowd cheering wildly for him. This match was nowhere near that magnitude, but was a challenge for Isner nonetheless. He is bouncing back from a bout with mononucleosis. He was taxed by the 30-point tie breaker but fought off 10 set points by Hanescu to win it on an excellent serve-and-volley play. Serena Williams, the No. 2 seed, made quick work of her first-round match against her fellow American Alexa Glatch in a 6-4, 6-1 victory on the Ashe Stadium court. The men\u2019s No. 12 seed, Robin Soderling of Sweden, a French Open finalist this year, needed four sets to beat Albert Monta\u00f1\u00e9s of Spain, 6-1, 3-6, 6-1, 6-4. The No. 8 seed, Nikolay Davydenko of Russia, won, 6-3, 6-4, 7-5, over Dieter Kindlmann of Germany.", "keyword": "Clijsters Kim;Tennis;United States Open (Tennis);Federer Roger"}
{"id": "ny0042902", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/05/09", "title": "Politics Seen in Cuban Accusations of Military Plot by Miami Men", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 There was a time not all that long ago that Santiago Alvarez, a Miami developer, fantasized about swinging an automatic weapon over his shoulder and heading back to Cuba to incite an uprising. His criminal record shows he did a bit more than daydream. A 30-month federal prison stint for illegally possessing a cache of weapons behind him, the 72-year-old Mr. Alvarez is among a small group of older Cuban exile activists who the Castro government believes are still plotting its demise. He and six other Miami men were accused by Cuban officials Wednesday of plotting a violent attack on military installations in Cuba with the hopes of toppling the Communist government. Mr. Alvarez denies any involvement in the alleged plot. Some others here raised questions about how much the case is about crime and how much is about politics. Four of the men are in custody in Havana in connection with an episode that to Mr. Alvarez and others has the feel of something more from the past than the present. \u201cI wish I could get a rifle and fight the dictatorship, but that is not realistic,\u201d he said on Thursday. \u201cWe cannot live in the past.\u201d Fifty-five years after Fidel Castro won an armed rebellion of his own and a week after Washington again kept Cuba on its short list of state sponsors of terrorism , the Cuban government publicly announced that violent plots persist. Cuba-watchers said the case was hard to separate from political theater, particularly because the announcement came on the heels of a visit by four members of Congress to see Alan Gross, an American imprisoned for illegally taking satellite gear to Cuba. With his case on the diplomatic forefront and Cuba still pushing for the release of three Cuban agents jailed in the United States, experts say Havana is likely to use the latest arrests for its diplomatic benefit. Although Miami was long the birthplace of conspiracies to overthrow the Castros, experts say most aging exiles have embraced nonviolent avenues toward democracy. \u201cI just don\u2019t see it,\u201d said Andy S. Gomez, a Cuba expert, who retired last year from the University of Miami and who voiced skepticism about the charges. \u201cThere are some old-timers that believe the only way to topple the regime is by doing these activities, but over the years those numbers have decreased to really nothing.\u201d A statement from the Interior Ministry published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma on Wednesday said that on April 26 four Miami residents \u201cof Cuban origin\u201d were arrested on terrorism-related charges. The men, whom the statement identified as Jos\u00e9 Ortega Amador, Obdulio Rodr\u00edguez Gonz\u00e1lez, Raibel Pacheco Santos and F\u00e9lix Monz\u00f3n \u00c1lvarez, reportedly admitted that they had planned to attack military installations and \u201cpromote violent actions.\u201d The men sought to break into a military unit and kill soldiers and officers, according to Juventud Rebelde, another state-run newspaper. \u201cToward this end, three of the individuals had made several trips to the island, since mid-2013, to study and practice the execution of their plans,\u201d the statement from the Interior Ministry said. The suspects in custody said Santiago Alvarez and two other men in their 70s had helped hatch the plan, the government statement reported. Also implicated were Dr. Manuel Alzugaray, an orthopedist who runs an international medical humanitarian organization in Miami, and Osvaldo Mitat, Mr. Alvarez\u2019s co-defendant in a 2006 weapons-possession case . \u201cOsvaldo and I meet every once and a while and drink coffee, but there has been no conspiracy going on between us for years,\u201d Mr. Alvarez said, adding that he had never met the men arrested in Havana. \u201cSome people are saying these guys are infiltrators. To me, these people are real. I think they either got misguided or wrong advice or they came up with the wrong idea.\u201d Little is known about the men who were arrested. Florida corporate records show that in 2009, Mr. Pacheco, 31, founded an organization called the Cuban Liberation Force. \u201cThe purpose of this corporation, under the Human Rights Act, is to help the people in Cuba to reconquer their democracy and lost liberties,\u201d the founders wrote by hand in the state records. Attempts to reach their families were unsuccessful. The State Department declined to comment. \u201cI don\u2019t know these people,\u201d Dr. Alzugaray said. \u201cThe Cuban government writes something in a controlled Communist fashion, and it resonates around the world. They have done tremendous propaganda here.\u201d Dr. Alzugaray is the founder of the Miami Medical Team, an organization that provides medical assistance internationally. In the 1980s, the group went to Nicaragua to help those wounded fighting the leftist Sandinista government. The Cuban government has accused Mr. Alvarez of terrorist activities before. Mr. Alvarez is known as a benefactor of Luis Posada Carriles, a former C.I.A. operative linked to both the downing of a Venezuelan airliner and a string of hotel bombings in Havana in the 1990s. Mr. Posada was arrested in Panama 14 years ago on allegations that he planned to assassinate Fidel Castro at a presidential summit meeting, and the Cuban government said at the time that Mr. Alvarez was a mastermind of the operation. The Cuban government later released recordings of him talking to an informant discussing placing a bomb in the famed Tropicana nightclub. In 2005, federal agents raided an apartment of his and found five machine guns and a grenade launcher. Mr. Alvarez said the weapons were C.I.A. relics, but were not going to be used in the plots he had hatched with senior Cuban military officers who planned to conspire against the government.", "keyword": "Cuba;Santiago Alvarez;Miami"}
{"id": "ny0034549", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/12/15", "title": "Manchester City\u2019s 6 Goals Defeat Arsenal", "abstract": "Arsenal felt the full force of Manchester City\u2019s attack in a 6-3 loss Saturday that cut its lead over Chelsea in England\u2019s Premier League to 2 points. Chelsea pounced on Arsenal\u2019s loss at Etihad Stadium by edging Crystal Palace, 2-1, at home, with Ramires scoring the winner to lift Chelsea provisionally into second place. What had been the tightest defense in the league was dismantled in City\u2019s eighth straight home win, which featured goals by Fernandinho (two), Sergio Aguero, Alvaro Negredo, David Silva and Yaya Toure. City, which is a point behind Chelsea in third, has scored 35 goals in eight home matches. In other games, Everton brushed past Fulham, 4-1; Newcastle drew, 1-1, with Southampton; Cardiff beat West Bromwich Albion, 1-0; and there were 0-0 draws for West Ham-Sunderland and Hull-Stoke. BAYERN EXTENDS STREAK Bayern Munich stretched its unbeaten Bundesliga run to 41 games with a 3-1 home win over Hamburg SV to ensure it goes into the winter break as league leaders. Bayern last lost in the Bundesliga in October 2012. Bayern clinched the unofficial autumn championship at the season\u2019s halfway mark to move to 7 points ahead with 44 points from 16 matches, having won 14 and drawn two, and yielded only 8 goals while scoring 42. (REUTERS) TIE FOR REAL MADRID Ten-man Real Madrid fought back to draw, 2-2, at 10-man Osasuna. Osasuna\u2019s Oriol Riera headed in two goals, and Real Madrid\u2019s Isco Alarcon scored before halftime and passed for Pepe to head one home in the 80th minute. (AP) PARIS ST.-GERMAIN WINS Paris St.-Germain defeated Rennes, 3-1, to consolidate its top spot in the French league. Thiago Motta scored the opening goal in the 19th minute before Zlatan Ibrahimovic recorded his 14th league goal by converting a penalty in the 52nd. (AP) CHINESE TEAM ADVANCES Guangzhou Evergrande of China beat the Egyptian team Al-Ahly, 2-0, in the Club World Cup in Agadir, Morocco, to set up a semifinal match against tournament favored Bayern Munich. Guangzhou, the winner of the Asian Champions League, will play the European champion Bayern on Tuesday. (AP) FIFTH WORKER DIES A construction worker died after falling off the roof of the Arena Amaz\u00f4nia in Manaus, Brazil, FIFA and the World Cup organizing committee said. The worker, Marcleudo de Melo Ferreira, was the fifth to die in the construction of Brazil\u2019s 12 World Cup stadiums. His death heightened concerns about worker safety. Six stadiums are to be completed by April, and some are behind schedule. (REUTERS)", "keyword": "Premier League;Manchester City Soccer Team;Chelsea Soccer Team;Soccer;Arsenal Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0277301", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/11/20", "title": "With Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey, Braves Look to Contend Now", "abstract": "ATLANTA \u2014 R. A. Dickey chuckled at the idea of not being the Atlanta Braves\u2019 oldest starting pitcher next season. Dickey, 42, must concede that distinction to Bartolo Colon, 43. \u201cI gave myself the nickname \u2018Little Ugly,\u2019\u201d Dickey said Friday, playing off Colon\u2019s nickname. \u201cBig Sexy and Little Ugly are going to be leading it on.\u201d Colon and Dickey recently agreed to one-year contracts, each with a team option for 2018. The Braves insist their unorthodox moves show how serious they are about contending again for a postseason spot. The major target of their rebuilding plan was the starting rotation. That\u2019s where Colon and Dickey come in, giving the Braves two players who can eat up innings and mentor younger pitchers without requiring the sort of long-term commitment that might block the path of several top prospects. \u201cThese aren\u2019t four- or five-year deals,\u201d General Manager John Coppolella said. \u201cThese won\u2019t, theoretically, block any of our kids. It will just give them a little more time. Guys that may have been force-fed up here now have a little more time to get their sea legs under them as they turn into really good big-league pitchers.\u201d In a way, the signings of Dickey and Colon show that the Braves\u2019 timetable for a return to contention has been pushed up a bit. The acceleration in the approach coincides neatly with a move from Turner Field to SunTrust Park, a $622 million suburban stadium nearing completion that will anchor a complex of shops, restaurants, office space, residential areas and a hotel. Dickey was introduced at a news conference in an eighth-floor suite that provided an ideal view of SunTrust Park and the furious construction activity going on below. This is a franchise that has undergone a major overhaul, on and off the field. \u201cIt\u2019s a real honor for me to be a part of a very storied franchise that looks like it\u2019s on its way to becoming what it once was,\u201d Dickey said. \u201cI\u2019m happy to be a part of that growth and hoping that I can add to what they did at the end of the year.\u201d Despite a second straight year of more than 90 losses, Atlanta finished strong, indicating that better times may not be far off. A trade for the slugger Matt Kemp and the emergence of players such as Dansby Swanson, Ender Inciarte and Adonis Garcia helped the Braves win 50 of their last 97 games, and they closed the season with a 12-2 spurt. \u201cOur starting eight is really good,\u201d Manager Brian Snitker said. \u201cEverybody feels very confident in what we\u2019ve got going on, and rightly so.\u201d The Braves are still in talks to add another pitcher, perhaps even a top-of-the-rotation starter such as Chris Sale of the Chicago White Sox. But for now, Colon and Dickey provide an aging insurance policy. Colon is coming off an All-Star season with the Mets. He had a record of 15-8 with a 3.43 earned-run average and became the oldest player to hit his first career homer. Dickey, with a 10-15 record and a 4.46 E.R.A., is more of a gamble. He slumped down the stretch with the Toronto Blue Jays and was dropped from the starting rotation. \u201cWe didn\u2019t give up any players,\u201d Coppolella said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t cost us a draft pick. We\u2019ve been in trade talks for players \u2014 pitcher and nonpitchers \u2014 but the price of doing business is really expensive right now. So for us to be able to add somebody where it\u2019s only money is really important.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Braves;Bartolo Colon;R A Dickey"}
{"id": "ny0172839", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/15", "title": "Rumors, Merger Talk and Denial by Airlines", "abstract": "Long-simmering talk of an inevitable round of airline industry mergers heated up again yesterday. By the end of the day, after a spike in their share prices, the central players in any merger talks, dismissed the rumors as just that. Many airline executives have said they are in favor of consolidation, in theory, to help reduce costs and improve historically meager profits. And they were given a push by Pardus Capital Management \u2014 a New York hedge fund that holds big stakes in UAL, parent of United Airlines, and in Delta Air Lines \u2014 which sent Delta a letter Tuesday night suggesting that the two carriers merge soon. \u201cWe believe it is imperative that you seek to enter into a merger transaction,\u201d Karim Samii, president of Pardus, wrote to Richard Anderson, chief executive of Delta. The topic line of the letter said: \u201cTime is of the essence to announce a transaction with UAL.\u201d Pardus hopes that a merger of the second- and third-largest airlines would capture more business travelers and help the carriers navigate the fuel prices that threaten to snuff out the industry\u2019s nascent recovery. Delta promptly responded that it was, indeed, in favor of industry consolidation, but that it was not involved in merger discussions with United. Delta said the airline\u2019s board had previously appointed a special committee to evaluate, among other strategic options, merger possibilities and that it had retained financial and legal advisers. Thus, after the companies\u2019 shares briefly rallied when an Associated Press report said United and Delta had actually been discussing a combination \u2014 a report subsequently denied by both companies \u2014 the shares showed only modest gains yesterday. Shares of Delta rose 77 cents, to $19.77. Shares of United rose 67 cents, to $44.17. Both companies are valued at approximately $5 billion. A stock-for-stock deal, with no premium, as Pardus proposed, would create a company with a roughly $10 billion market capitalization, depending on investors\u2019 reaction to the combination. Although most executives acknowledge the need for mergers to reduce costs, the reality of doing so gives them pause. The industry has a long history of difficult mergers. The most recent example is US Airways, the product of a merger two years ago with America West Airlines. There, pilots are battling over how to reconcile union seniority lists, a sticking point that is holding up the company\u2019s ability to operate as a single airline. Combining computer systems has led to severe service disruptions. Shares of US Airways have plunged from their 12-month high of $63.27, reached around the time it made an unsuccessful $10 billion bid for Delta a year ago, to $23.48 late yesterday. Workers at Delta and United would most likely be skittish about any combination that reduced employment or job security, having just made huge pay and benefit concessions to survive separate bankruptcies. To be sure, since the initial US Airways bid for Delta a year ago, big airlines have had tentative discussions with one another about merging. Delta talked to Northwest Airlines at one point. United talked to Continental Airlines. But nothing concrete came of those talks. Pardus said in its letter that it owns 7 million Delta shares, or about 2.6 percent. And Securities and Exchange Commission filings indicate it owns 5.6 million shares in UAL, or about 4.8 percent. The industry has been modestly profitable last year and this year and was building a cash cushion until fuel prices soared in recent weeks. Pardus said in its letter that the rise in fuel costs could hurt Delta\u2019s financial prospects next year. Airlines are trying to raise fares to make up for the higher cost of fuel, which accounts for about one-third of expenses, but with only limited success. Pardus said in its letter that it had consulted with Gordon M. Bethune, a former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and with consultants at Simat, Helliesen & Eichner to conclude that United was the best merger partner for Delta. Combined costs could be reduced by $585 million a year, it said. And the airlines\u2019 complementary strengths would give it the breadth to capture more business travelers. United, after all, has a big presence on Asia routes, in the western United States and at Heathrow Airport, serving London. Delta is strong in the southern United States, at Kennedy International Airport in New York and in Europe and Latin America. A combination of Delta and Northwest Airlines would allow more cost-cutting \u2014 $1.5 billion a year because of enormous overlap in domestic hubs \u2014 but provide less international breadth, Pardus said. The US Airways takeover proposal for Delta was also mostly aimed at reducing domestic costs and ran into opposition from labor groups and from some politicians, fearful that service would have been reduced in some cities. Pardus mentioned that \u201cthe current regulatory environment,\u201d meaning the Bush administration as opposed to a possible Democratic president, is favorable and thus a merger ought to happen soon.", "keyword": "United Airlines;Delta Air Lines Incorporated;Airlines and Airplanes;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Pardus Capital Management"}
{"id": "ny0158700", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/12/21", "title": "Extended Benefits Are a Lifeline for Many Unemployed", "abstract": "HUDSON, Fla. \u2014 Rick E. Rockwell plopped his large frame down in front of his laptop on Thursday morning, next to a foot-wide sheaf of unpaid bills still in their envelopes, lined up like an accordion on his desk. He logged into his bank account to see if his unemployment check had been deposited yet. His balance, however, remained stuck at $57.17. \u201cThat\u2019s amazing to me,\u201d Mr. Rockwell said. \u201cIt still hasn\u2019t posted yet.\u201d So Mr. Rockwell began another day as a man of the middle class who is now living on an economic precipice. Mr. Rockwell, 56, who estimates he has sent out more than 400 job applications over the last year and gone to just four interviews, is one of the more than 5.4 million people across the country receiving unemployment benefits. And Mr. Rockwell is part of arguably the hardest-luck group of all \u2014 those who have been out of work for so long that they are depending on a second emergency extension of unemployment insurance that Congress passed and President Bush signed last month. In the 21 states and the District of Columbia currently with three-month average unemployment rates above 6 percent that means 20 more weeks of what has become an economic lifeline for many in the midst of one of the deepest recessions in the past century. Florida \u2019s rate for November was 7.3 percent. (The other states get seven additional weeks.) For Mr. Rockwell, who lost his job in January as a sales manager at a computer store that he and his brother owned, the weekly checks of $275 \u2014 the maximum allowed him under Florida law and a little less than half his former take-home pay \u2014 have become like a crucial piece in the game Jenga, in which players construct a tower of blocks by removing one at a time from the bottom and moving it to the top. Mr. Rockwell is playing a balancing act so he can keep the edifice of his former life from crumbling, paying off certain bills and letting others lapse, so he can stay just ahead of his creditors. Mr. Rockwell has been without benefits for more than a month after he exhausted the first federal extension, which lasted 13 weeks, on top of the 26 weeks he had received from the State of Florida, back in October. After supporters were unable to get the legislation through Congress before the election, Mr. Bush signed the second extension in late November. Florida, like other states, has been rushing to get checks to so-called gap people like Mr. Rockwell whose benefits had expired. Advocates estimate there are about 800,000 of them nationwide. \u201cStates are really overwhelmed in terms of responding to claims,\u201d said Andrew Stettner of the National Employment Law Project. \u201cThey were pushed beyond the brink in terms of doing the second extension.\u201d Florida added 50 staff members to its unemployment insurance division in recent weeks, bringing its total to around 870. It also recently added 345 lines to its phone system for a total of just over 1,000, and has extended its call-in hours. There are, of course, people who are much worse off than Mr. Rockwell; but there are also many who have had much more of a financial cushion to get through this crisis. Last year, he was making $31,200 a year as sales manager of a small computer store that he had started 15 years ago with his brother, Rodney. But the rise of big-box stores like Best Buy, along with the recession, combined to drive their store, Comp-U-Save, into the ground. \u201cAll of a sudden, the floor came out from underneath it,\u201d said Rodney Rockwell, who closed his old store in October and re-opened under a new name. The brothers agreed that Rick would leave in January because the store, by that point, was depending mostly on its repair business, which was Rodney\u2019s specialty. They also figured that because Rick was younger and had some background managing restaurants, he would be able to find a job relatively easily. He had a little over $5,000 in his bank account, mostly what was left over from a $40,000 second mortgage he took out on his home four years ago for home repairs that never materialized. But Mr. Rockwell has been succumbing to a slow economic death, which accelerated significantly in the last month as his unemployment benefits lapsed. His mortgage lender has begun foreclosure proceedings on his modest two-bedroom home, which he bought in 1998 and still owes $117,000 on. He has begun packing to move into his 84-year-old mother\u2019s two-bedroom condominium nearby. He is in danger of losing his red 2005 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder convertible, a prized possession that he keeps gleaming in his garage, because he is behind in his payments. He has listed for sale both that car and a 1996 Toyota RAV4, which he owns outright and keeps in the driveway, but he is hoping to keep the Spyder. The only reason he can still drive it at all is because his mother, who is mostly living just on Social Security, paid his car insurance for this month. He is two months behind on his electric bill. A partial payment by a local church that he went to recently for help helped him stave off losing his power. His water bill is in arrears as well. Mr. Rockwell was settling into his love seat two weeks ago to watch the teenage drama \u201cOne Tree Hill\u201d \u2014 an afternoon pleasure he developed while sitting around out of work \u2014 when he found his cable had been cut off. Last Wednesday, after returning home from dinner with a reporter, Mr. Rockwell found a note on his door from his neighbor that someone had been looking for him. It turned out to be a collection agency for one of his credit cards. Mr. Rockwell has racked up about $15,000 in bills on various cards, reaching his limit on all but one. In a final indignity, Mr. Rockwell wakes up most mornings flat on his back on the ground because the air mattress he now sleeps on, after his waterbed sprang a leak earlier this year, has a hole in it. Mr. Rockwell now spends most of his days hunched in front of his laptop. He spends several hours going through new job postings in the morning and then devotes himself to several Internet marketing schemes promising riches that he has stumbled upon. Keeping in mind the criticism of those who say expanded unemployment benefits keep people from working, Mr. Rockwell conceded he might appear to be too picky in the jobs he would accept. He has mostly ruled out commuting to Tampa, a much larger city an hour away, because of the distance. He has also tried to confine himself to looking for management-level restaurant jobs. \u201cI\u2019m not going to clean grills, take out the garbage,\u201d Mr. Rockwell said. \u201cI\u2019ve done that before, but I feel I\u2019m beyond that.\u201d His home is overflowing with sports memorabilia \u2014 autographed posters, baseballs and cards of every sort that he has collected. He has sold off some but is reluctant to part with others at fire-sale prices. On Thursday, Mr. Rockwell spent several hours plowing through job listings and wound up applying \u2014 or re-applying, actually \u2014 to just two, one for a restaurant manager at an Arby\u2019s in nearby New Port Richey and one for a shift supervisor job at a Wendy\u2019s in Tampa. He logged into his bank account again the next day and found to his surprise that his unemployment check had finally been deposited. It is a small reprieve for now.", "keyword": "Unemployment Insurance;Unemployment;United States Economy;Foreclosures;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0258546", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/01/09", "title": "A Digital Library Race, and Playing Catch-Up", "abstract": "AMERICA stood at the forefront of the public library movement in 1731, when Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia , our first successful lending library. Looking back on the project decades later, Franklin wrote in his autobiography that the growth of lending libraries had played a role not only in educating but also in democratizing American society. \u201cThese Libraries,\u201d he wrote, \u201chave improv\u2019d the general Conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed to some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges.\u201d Lending libraries may have been the newfangled democratizing factor of their day. Centuries later, though, the United States finds itself trailing Europe and Japan in creating the modern equivalent: a national digital library that would serve as an electronic repository for the nation\u2019s cultural heritage. In other words, there\u2019s a real digital library divide. In contrast to the United States, the National Library of Norway has been a global early adopter. In 2005, it announced a goal of digitizing its entire collection; by now it has scanned some 170,000 books, 250,000 newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of TV and 500,000 photographs. And, last year, the National Library of the Netherlands said it planned to scan all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 onward. The libraries of the nearly 50 member states in the Council of Europe, meanwhile, have banded together in a single search engine, theeuropeanlibrary.org . And the European Commission has sponsored Europeana , a portal for digital copies of art, music film and books held by the cultural institutions of member countries. It currently contains scans of about 15 million artifacts. Until recently, however, many American institutions and academic centers have concentrated on making scans of their own special treasures, or collaborating with one another on themed projects, rather than combining their electronic resources into a single online access point. A national digital library is clearly a bigger challenge for the United States, with its vast and disparate library holdings, than for European countries with smaller populations and land masses. But the Library of Congress was already working on the effort in the 1990s when it created a digital collection called \u201cAmerican Memory\u201d; it contains scans of 16 million books, maps, movies, manuscripts and pieces of music. Even so, the library still has more than 100 million other artifacts that are not yet scanned, says James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. And even though the American Memory project also carries the name \u201cnational digital library,\u201d it is not formally connected, for example, to many of the country\u2019s public libraries. \u201cThere\u2019s tremendous local activity and national collaboration around specific topics,\u201d says David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States . \u201cBut there has been no national coordination of all the wonderful disparate projects around the country.\u201d Some of those individual efforts, however, are now beginning to dovetail. Last month, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard said it would coordinate a planning program for public and private groups interested in creating a \u201cdigital public library of America.\u201d The idea, says Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and one of the project\u2019s originators , is to link the electronic resources of participating university libraries and cultural institutions like the Library of Congress and make them accessible through a single portal. The hope is to create \u201ca gigantic digital library that would make the cultural heritage of the country available to everyone,\u201d he says. The project would also widen the audience for the kind of historical out-of-print books, manuscripts, letters, images, films and audio clips that have typically been the province of scholars. Of course, practical matters \u2014 like cost, copyright issues and technology \u2014 would need to be resolved first. \u201cThe crucial question in many ways is, \u2018How do you find a common technical infrastructure that yields interoperability for the scholar, the casual inquirer or the K-12 student?\u2019\u201d Dr. Billington says. The idea for an American digital public library was prompted in part by the work of Google. In 2004, the company started a digitization project, Google Books, that has since scanned more than 15 million books. Many of these are out-of-print books lent by institutions like Harvard, Cornell and the University of Michigan. \u201cGoogle came along and woke everyone up and showed the world what could be done in a short period of time,\u201d says Maura Marx, a fellow at the Berkman Center. People can read out-of-print items at no cost on Google Books, if those works are no longer subject to copyright protection. But if a judge approves a settlement between Google and copyright holders, subscription fees to access scans of out-of-print books still covered by copyright will have to be paid by universities and other institutions. An American digital public library would serve as a nonprofit institutional alternative to Google Books, Professor Darnton says. \u201cThere\u2019s a conflict between the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of Google, which is to make money for its shareholders,\u201d he says, \u201cand libraries whose goal is to make books available to readers.\u201d But such a digital public library would have a better chance of success, he says, if it included out-of-copyright books owned by member libraries that Google had digitized. That is already happening in Europe, where the national libraries of the Netherlands and Austria have signed agreements with Google in which their sites can host digital copies of out-of-copyright books in their own holdings that have been scanned by the company. The libraries also have the right to make those scans available on public educational sites like Europeana. A SPOKESWOMAN for Google says the company would be happy to participate in the proposed American project. \u201cMaking the world\u2019s books accessible online is something that requires public and private initiatives,\u201d says Annabella Weisl, a Google Book Search executive in Germany, \u201cand so we welcome new efforts in this direction.\u201d But Jill Cousins, the executive director of Europeana, says that the great American research libraries could do much more than simply increase access to scans of scholarly material. \u201cWhat\u2019s sort of missing is digitization of the accessible literature,\u201d like the popular novels and biographies readers seek at brick-and-mortar public libraries, she says. A few institutions, like the National Library of Norway, are already venturing into this area, via novel arrangements with copyright holders. \u201cIt would be nice to conceive of something bigger that has more to do with the public good than with the academic side of the equation,\u201d Ms. Cousins says.", "keyword": "Libraries and Librarians;Computers and the Internet;Books and Literature;Google Book Search;Library of Congress;Research"}
{"id": "ny0143336", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/11/25", "title": "Geithner, Rescue-Team Veteran, Has Head Start in Seizing Reins", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 For the last year, Timothy F. Geithner has been at the very heart of dealing with the financial crisis , the junior partner with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Together, they scrambled to save Bear Stearns, American International Group and Citigroup, while letting Lehman Brothers fail. Now Mr. Geithner, youthful president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and President-elect Barack Obama \u2019s choice for Treasury secretary, will be thrust from go-between to the head of the table. He will graduate from team player to team captain, steering the new administration\u2019s economic policies and its plan to rescue the financial system. The two-month wait until Mr. Obama takes office could be awkward, so much so that people who know Mr. Geithner say he may step down from the New York Fed within a few weeks. That would give him an early start in developing a stimulus plan , which Mr. Obama\u2019s aides say they are coordinating with Democratic leaders in Congress and hope to pass before the inauguration. Mr. Geithner\u2019s immersion in the critical events of the crisis and his close ties to Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke, both appointees of President Bush, will provide a vital sense of continuity for the rescue effort, Mr. Obama indicated on Monday in Chicago. \u201cTim will waste no time getting up to speed,\u201d Mr. Obama said in announcing his intention to nominate Mr. Geithner. \u201cHe will start his first day on the job with a unique insight into the failures of today\u2019s markets and a clear vision of the steps we must take to revive them.\u201d Experts said Mr. Geithner would have to make a series of difficult decisions, in quick succession, about how to proceed with a rescue effort that has been marked by political tension, reversals and a growing sense of confusion, as Mr. Paulson appears to be hostage to events. And he will have to do this in the vortex of a deepening economic crisis, at home and abroad, that could limit his options. Though Mr. Geithner, 47, cut his teeth in past crises, most overseas, economists who know him say little could have prepared him for the magnitude of responsibility he is assuming. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to think of a moment in history where a new Treasury secretary has started in this position,\u201d said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. \u201cIt\u2019s a position of incredible responsibility. He really has to reshape the financial system, on the run.\u201d While the weekend rescue of Citigroup calmed the financial markets, Mr. Rogoff described it as merely a \u201ctemporizing measure\u201d that would have to be followed by other steps. Indeed, there were reports Monday of a vast new loan-purchase initiative being readied by the Fed and the Treasury. As the rescue plan has mutated from asset purchases to direct injections of capital, Mr. Geithner has worked hard to maintain a public alliance with Mr. Paulson, who on Monday welcomed his nomination and noted that Mr. Geithner had been \u201ccritical to designing and implementing\u201d the financial industry\u2019s rescue. But people familiar with his thinking say Mr. Geithner has had significant differences with Mr. Paulson over how the bailout should proceed. Mr. Geithner has expressed support for the idea of modifying large numbers of loans held by subprime borrowers, a move Mr. Paulson has largely avoided. Such modifications would create a psychological lift for the nation, Mr. Geithner has told others, and would help resolve uncertainty in the financial markets by creating support for home prices. Mr. Geithner has also voiced private support for purchasing distressed assets from banks, which was originally the focus of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Mr. Paulson abandoned that strategy this month in favor of direct capital injections into the banks. Asset purchases, Mr. Geithner has told associates, would revive investor confidence in many banks, whereas announcing plans to abandon those purchases introduced more uncertainty, as Citigroup discovered last week. Lobbyists for the financial industry who favor asset purchases are hopeful that Mr. Geithner will move the program back in that direction. The bailout of Citigroup was a positive step, they say, although what the government has agreed to do is absorb most of the losses on $306 billion in home and commercial real estate assets on Citigroup\u2019s balance sheet rather than buying those assets outright. \u201cIt\u2019s getting closer to the piece we think is necessary, but it doesn\u2019t quite get us there,\u201d said Timothy Ryan, chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Mr. Ryan, who helped direct the government\u2019s rescue of the savings and loan industry in the 1990s, said Mr. Geithner\u2019s involvement in the current rescue effort would give him an invaluable head start. \u201cHe\u2019s one of a core group of government executives who\u2019s been part of every decision,\u201d Mr. Ryan said. Robert S. Nichols, president of the Financial Services Forum, which represents large institutions, said the transition from Mr. Paulson to Mr. Geithner was like \u201cdelicate surgery,\u201d adding, \u201cIf you have to switch doctors, you don\u2019t want to bring in someone who hasn\u2019t even watched the surgery.\u201d If there is a mystery about Mr. Geithner, industry executives said, it is his views on tax matters. Having spent his career in international economics before becoming a central banker, he has said almost nothing about his views on issues like capital gains taxes and dividends. Whatever substantive change Mr. Geithner makes could well reflect a personal style that is different from Mr. Paulson\u2019s. The current Treasury secretary for decades was a Wall Street deal maker, accustomed to short-term, trigger-quick decisions \u2014 and reversals. Some say that accounts for the rescue program\u2019s constant evolution and its stop-and-start tendencies. \u201cGeithner has had a very different upbringing: a much more studious, and sober, professional training,\u201d said a former Treasury official and Wall Street executive who knows both men. Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama\u2019s press secretary, said that the president-elect spoke with Mr. Bernanke on Monday morning and that the Fed chairman asked that Mr. Geithner remain at the New York Fed until he could be replaced, \u201cto ensure a smooth transition.\u201d Mr. Obama agreed, Mr. Gibbs added. Once Mr. Geithner steps down, it is expected that he will join Lawrence H. Summers, the incoming director of the National Economic Council, in drafting the two-year economic stimulus package of spending and tax cuts Mr. Obama has called for. In addition, he will have to organize his Treasury staff, prepare for his Senate confirmation hearing and continue to oversee the rescue effort. Though Mr. Geithner is expected to be easily confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate, he will face questions about the bailout effort at his hearing, before the Senate Finance Committee, given unhappiness in both parties about the way that program has been operated. As secretary, Mr. Geithner will have to juggle his oversight of the financial rescue program, the process of enacting and carrying out the economic stimulus package and the development of annual budgets. Given that, people who know both Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers see potential for tension between them, should Mr. Summers, given his proximity to the Oval Office and his aggressive style dominate the internal budget and tax debates.", "keyword": "Geithner Timothy F;United States Economy;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008);Obama Barack;Paulson Henry M Jr"}
{"id": "ny0042418", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/05/10", "title": "Like-Minded Russians Visit Occupy Wall Street Inmate at Rikers Island", "abstract": "Most people disappear from the headlines into the gray anonymity of Rikers Island after they are found guilty in state court in Manhattan. But for Cecily McMillan, the 25-year-old Occupy Wall Street organizer convicted on Monday of assaulting a police officer, her incarceration has served only to heighten her profile. As her admirers have taken to Twitter in droves to criticize the judge and the district attorney for their handling of the case, Ms. McMillan has gotten sympathetic treatment on \u201cThe Daily Show With Jon Stewart\u201d and friendly coverage from left-leaning media outlets like Democracy Now! , The Guardian, The Nation and The Village Voice. That trend reached a peak on Friday, when two members of Pussy Riot, the Russian protest group that was incarcerated for staging a political performance against President Vladimir V. Putin, trooped out to Rikers Island in the drizzle to visit Ms. McMillan in a show of support. \u201cIt was a very bad decision to put her in jail,\u201d said one member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, as she came through the jail\u2019s hurricane fence, which is topped with razor wire, and lit a cigarette. \u201cShe\u2019s a professional revolutionary.\u201d Her colleague Maria Alyokhina, 25, urged Justice Ronald A. Zweibel to sentence Ms. McMillan to probation and community service rather than prison. She said a harsh sentence would lead to unflattering comparisons to Russia, where they served 21 months for playing a raucous protest song in Moscow\u2019s main cathedral. \u201cSociety must organize to save Cecily because she\u2019s really a hero,\u201d Ms. Alyokhina said. \u201cShe is very similar to us. We also did time and went to prison for our beliefs. We see a lot of parallels.\u201d The groundswell of support for Ms. McMillan includes some of the jurors who convicted her in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. On Thursday, a juror who said he spoke for nine members of the panel took the highly unusual step of writing a letter to Justice Zweibel, asking that he show leniency. \u201cWe feel that the felony mark on Cecily\u2019s record is punishment enough for this case and that it serves no purpose to Cecily or to society to incarcerate her for any amount of time,\u201d the juror, Charles Woodard, wrote, according to a defense lawyer, Martin R. Stolar. Juries have no say over sentencing in criminal cases. Justice Zweibel could sentence Ms. McMillan, who was convicted of second-degree assault, to as little as a stint of community service or as much as seven years in prison. The judge remanded her to jail after the conviction until a sentencing hearing on May 19. The jury found that Ms. McMillan had deliberately elbowed a police officer, Grantley Bovell, in the face as he led her out of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan during a protest on St. Patrick\u2019s Day in 2012. That protest had started as a way to mark six months since the founding of Occupy Wall Street. Though she had taken part in many other protests, Ms. McMillan testified that she had not joined in the civil disobedience that night. She had been out drinking beer with a college friend and went to the park only to pick up another acquaintance, she said. She testified that she did not recall hitting the police officer, though she said she did remember throwing her elbow instinctively when she thought someone had grabbed her right breast, which was bruised during the arrest. A grainy videotape from an onlooker appeared to support the officer\u2019s version of events, showing her hitting him in the eye, then running a few steps before he tackled her. Since their release from prison in December, the members of the Russian protest group have started a nonprofit, Zona Prava, whose mission is to improve conditions in Russian prisons. They have also used their status as global symbols of political freedom to promote feminism, gay rights and more transparency in Russian politics. Earlier this week, they met with senators in Washington to discuss what they view as Russian human-rights abuses, including the long incarceration of several protesters arrested during a May 2012 opposition rally in Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. They were contacted by Ms. McMillan\u2019s supporters on Thursday and then agreed to go to Rikers. Ms. Alyokhina and Ms. Tolokonnikova, who were accompanied by Petya Verzilov, a member of their arts collective, said Ms. McMillan had appeared to be upbeat and thriving, though she said she missed her cigarettes. Ms. Tolokonnikova said Ms. McMillan had kept busy organizing other female inmates to write letters on her behalf to the judge. A Russophile, Ms. McMillan impressed her visitors with her knowledge of Soviet history and poetry, discussing the absurdist poet Daniil Kharms. \u201cIt\u2019s really incredible to see someone that positive in prison,\u201d said Mr. Verzilov, who served as a translator. Ms. Alyokhina said Ms. McMillan had talked at length about how she now wanted to start a social revolution in America. \u201cShe told us about the revolution maybe 20 times,\u201d her visitor said. \u201cIt\u2019s really very important to her.\u201d", "keyword": "Pussy Riot;Occupy Wall Street;Prison;Attacks on Police;Rikers;Grantley Bovell;Cecily McMillan;Russia;Music"}
{"id": "ny0272838", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/05/09", "title": "Together on a Park Bench", "abstract": "Dear Diary: They say that routine is the death of a relationship. I\u2019m not sure that is entirely true, but I am also not certain it isn\u2019t. He gets up every morning with the sun and comes home beat because hard work is hard. I stay home trying to keep an energetic baby entertained and happy while searching job sites hoping that something will stick. We enjoy our times alone \u2014 it is our time to unwind, to remember that we love each other outside the smile of our son. On a seasonably spring night, we walked through Union Square Park, just the two of us. Having ravenously stuffed our bellies with seafood from a quaint restaurant nearby, we sat on benches. Our bench was placed among a row of others, housing other couples and singles talking about their lives and also enjoying the serene landscape in the busy city. \u201cI don\u2019t want to sit here for long,\u201d I said, uncomfortably shifting and feeling full. \u201cI want to spend time with you,\u201d he said. Without skipping a beat, I replied with a twinge of sarcasm: \u201cWe always spend time together. I see you every day!\u201d He took another breath of his cigarette and exhaled. \u201cI just want to spend time with you.\u201d At that moment he put his arm around me and we sat in silence, taking in the view and separating ourselves from the bustling city around us. We were disconnected from our worries, problems and cellphones. It was a moment I didn\u2019t appreciate then, but it was one that I will work (not routinely) to create again.", "keyword": "Union Square Manhattan;Dating"}
{"id": "ny0289484", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2016/01/20", "title": "Univision Buys a Stake in The Onion to Reach Millennials", "abstract": "The Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications announced Tuesday that it had acquired a large stake in The Onion, the comedy and satirical digital media group, as part of the company\u2019s efforts to extend its digital reach and strengthen its portfolio of comedy outlets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction was said to be for a 40 percent stake, valued at less than $200 million, according to one person briefed on the deal. \u201cComedy is playing an expanding role in our culture as a vehicle for audiences to explore, debate and understand the important ideas of our time,\u201d said Isaac Lee, chief news and digital officer of Univision. \u201cIt has also proven to be an incredibly engaging format for millennial audiences and is expected to play a key part in the 2016 presidential election process via our robust content offerings in Spanish and English.\u201d Univision\u2019s digital portfolio is undergoing a flurry of changes, part of an effort to build its footprint and reach as diverse a group of millennials as possible. News emerged last month that Univision was in talks with the Walt Disney Company to take full control of their joint venture Fusion, the English-language digital news service and cable channel. In November, Univision named Mr. Lee to a new position with responsibility for overseeing digital functions, leading multicultural efforts and creating a music strategy. He also is chief executive of Fusion. Image The Onion\u2019s home page on Tuesday. At the same time, Univision\u2019s plans for a public offering of stock have been delayed after broader fears about the future of the television business sent the share prices for major media companies on a downward spiral. Univision executives saw The Onion as a complement to Fusion and its other properties, with comedy filling a vital role in culture, political discourse and the discussion of current events, according to the person briefed on the deal. They also saw the deal as helping Univision develop new comedy and satirical offerings in Spanish and English and collaborate with up-and-coming talent. The two groups also could create and distribute new TV programs based on The Onion. The deal gives Univision an immediate expansion of its online presence. In December, Univision\u2019s digital sites attracted 19.5 million unique United States visitors, while Onion sites drew 19.3 million unique United States visitors, according to the media measurement firm comScore. The Onion describes its start \u2014 with a wink \u2014 as rising from \u201chumble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1765\u201d and now attracting a daily readership of 4.3 trillion as \u201cthe single most powerful and influential organization in human history.\u201d The company actually began in 1988 as a weekly publication in Madison, Wis. The Onion Inc. portfolio of sites now includes the satire news publication The Onion; the pop-culture site The A.V. Club; the buzzy ClickHole; a gossip site called StarWipe; and Onion Studios, a digital video network. In a memo to employees, Mike McAvoy, the president and chief executive of Onion Inc., said the deal came after the company had searched for a partner during the last year to help the company grow. He said that after acquiring a \u201cgood chunk\u201d of Onion Inc., Univision could acquire the remainder of the company in the future. \u201cAs an independent media company, we\u2019ve always been forced to run a tight financial ship, which has made us smart and lean, but not always ready to invest in the great new ideas that we come up with,\u201d Mr. McAvoy said in the memo. \u201cI\u2019m excited to see what we can do with Univision behind us.\u201d", "keyword": "Univision;The Onion;Mergers and Acquisitions"}
{"id": "ny0255067", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/09/18", "title": "Oddly, Tigers, Yankees and Arizona All Like a 2009 Deal", "abstract": "Max Scherzer was drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the first round in 2006. When they traded him after three years, it changed his outlook on his profession. \u201cThat\u2019s just the business side of the game,\u201d Scherzer said last month, by his locker in the Detroit Tigers \u2019 clubhouse. \u201cTrades happen, you never know. Heck, I could get traded next.\u201d Not likely. Scherzer has 14 victories for the Tigers, who are going to the playoffs for the first time in five years. Like the other participants in a three-team, seven-player deal on Dec. 8, 2009, the Tigers would not change a thing. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen this way that often, but it has worked out well for all clubs, which is good,\u201d said Dave Dombrowski, the Tigers\u2019 president and general manager. \u201cWe achieved what we needed to, the Yankees did and so did Arizona.\u201d The Yankees acquired center fielder Curtis Granderson from Detroit. The Diamondbacks acquired two starting pitchers: Edwin Jackson from the Tigers and Ian Kennedy from the Yankees. The Tigers acquired center fielder Austin Jackson and reliever Phil Coke from the Yankees, and Scherzer and reliever Daniel Schlereth from the Diamondbacks. Now all three teams are likely to be in the playoffs, with each player in the deal making an important contribution. Even Edwin Jackson has left his mark; after throwing a no-hitter for Arizona last season, he was traded to the White Sox for Daniel Hudson , who has become a solid No. 2 starter behind Kennedy, the first National League pitcher to 19 victories this season. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely unusual,\u201d said Josh Byrnes, the Arizona general manager in 2009. \u201cA couple of years out, all the teams are successful, and each team would not undo the deal.\u201d The Yankees were reshaping their outfield after winning a championship. They moved Brett Gardner to left, replacing Johnny Damon, and aimed for Granderson, who was coming off a down year but was under contractual control through 2013. In Dombrowski, Cashman found another veteran general manager with his sensibilities. \u201cWith the new generation of G.M.\u2019s, a lot of them are in the mode of \u2018I\u2019ll give nothing but I\u2019ll ask for a lot,\u2019 \u201d Cashman said. \u201cThe guys like Dombrowski, Theo Epstein, Kenny Williams, Kevin Towers, those guys are out there willing to give to get. We give a lot, but it\u2019s in the hopes of getting a lot. The newbies don\u2019t want to deal with the negative publicity.\u201d While Cashman and Dombrowski discussed Granderson, Byrnes was pursuing Edwin Jackson, who was coming off an All-Star season. He was also intrigued by Kennedy, who had spent most of 2009 dealing with an aneurysm under his right armpit but looked sharp in the Arizona Fall League. Byrnes introduced the three-way concept as a way to satisfy all parties. He and Cashman knew the Tigers wanted younger versions of the players they would be trading \u2014 and then some. Austin Jackson gave Detroit a younger center fielder than Granderson, and Scherzer a younger starter than Edwin Jackson. Cashman also parted with Coke, a left-hander who could start or relieve, and Byrnes included Schlereth, another lefty, who had been a first-round pick. Because Byrnes was trading Scherzer, too, he needed another young starter in return. So the Yankees gave up Kennedy, a fly-ball pitcher who seemed to be a better fit for the National League West than the American League East. \u201cAs much as we liked Scherzer and Schlereth,\u201d Byrnes said, \u201cthe notion of getting two starters back was pretty compelling.\u201d Dombrowski tried to pry another left-hander, the Yankees\u2019 Michael Dunn, but Cashman resisted. The general managers met in Cashman\u2019s suite at the winter meetings in Indianapolis and finished the deal without Dunn, who soon went to Atlanta in a deal for Javier Vazquez and Boone Logan. Cashman had reservations about Granderson, who slumped in 2009, hitting just .183 against left-handers and who had no mechanical flaw the Yankees could spot on video. Cashman said he warned his boss, Hal Steinbrenner, that in the worst-case scenario, Granderson would have to sit against lefties, and that he expected Jackson to hit for a higher average. But Granderson had much more power, and Jackson, at the time, had never played in the majors. The hitting coach Kevin Long worked with Granderson, encouraging him to keep both hands on the bat throughout his swing, and Granderson carried over a strong finish to 2010 to emerge as a top candidate for the A.L. Most Valuable Player award. \u201cWe didn\u2019t think we were trading for a potential M.V.P.-caliber player,\u201d Cashman said. \u201cWe just felt we were trading for one of the best everyday center fielders in the game, and that\u2019s what we got.\u201d Likewise, Byrnes said that as much as he wanted Kennedy, he pictured him fitting into the middle of the Diamondbacks\u2019 rotation, not the front. The Tigers\u2019 haul has not greatly exceeded expectations, but one major concern \u2014 Scherzer\u2019s health \u2014 has not been an issue, and Jackson has skillfully roamed the vast center field in Detroit while giving the Tigers their only real stolen-base threat. The volume the Tigers received in the deal has helped stock their deepest roster, and their best team, in years. At some point next month, Detroit could face the Yankees, and perhaps, the Diamondbacks, for a close-up look at the deal that worked all around. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but notice what those other guys are doing, man,\u201d Austin Jackson said. \u201cThose guys are doing well for the other clubs. It definitely worked out well for everybody.\u201d ", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Detroit Tigers;Arizona Diamondbacks;Baseball;Jackson Austin;Granderson Curtis"}
{"id": "ny0154996", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/01/23", "title": "Congo\u2019s Death Rate Unchanged Since War Ended", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 Five years after Congo\u2019s catastrophic war officially ended, the rate at which people are dying in the country remains virtually unchanged, according to a new survey, despite the efforts of the world\u2019s largest peacekeeping force, billions of dollars in international aid and a historic election that revived democracy after decades of violence and despotism. The survey, released Tuesday, estimated that 45,000 people continue to die every month, about the same pace as in 2004, when the international push to rebuild the country had scarcely begun. Almost all the deaths come from hunger and disease, signs that the country is still grappling with the aftermath of a war that gutted its infrastructure, forced millions to flee and flattened its economy. In all, more than 5.4 million people have died in Congo since the war began in 1998, according to the most recent survey\u2019s estimate, the latest in a series completed by the International Rescue Committee, an American aid organization. Nearly half of the dead were children younger than 5 years old. Perhaps most alarming, while the death rate has slightly decreased in eastern Congo, the last festering node of conflict, it has actually increased in some parts of central Congo, though the area has not seen combat in several years. The study\u2019s authors and other aid organizations said the focus of aid dollars on the east and neglect of the region by government were the most likely explanations for the changes. These surprising findings demonstrate the depth and complexity of Congo\u2019s continuing crisis, said Richard Brennan, health director for the International Rescue Committee and one of the survey\u2019s authors. \u201cThe Congo is still enduring a crisis of huge proportions,\u201d Dr. Brennan said. \u201cProtracted elevations of mortality more than four years after the end of the war demonstrates that recovery from this kind of crisis is itself a protracted process. The international engagement has to be sustained and committed for years to come.\u201d The survey was based on a sample of 14,000 households surveyed in 700 villages and towns across Congo from January 2006 to April 2007. Its authors emphasized that the figures in the report are estimates, based on widely accepted statistical methods for estimating death tolls in disasters, but the cumulative figure for how many have died since the war began has a wide margin of error given the difficulty of the terrain in Congo and the lack of precision in basic demographic information, like the prewar mortality rate or even Congo\u2019s current population. Still, improvements in security since 2004, when the last survey was completed, meant that researchers were able to visit many areas that were off limits last time, and as a result, its authors said, the current survey provides the most complete picture yet of the toll of Congo\u2019s slide into despair. That picture is not encouraging. The mortality rate in Congo is 57 percent higher than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the survey found. Particularly hard hit were young children, who are especially susceptible to diseases like malaria , measles , dysentery and typhoid , which can kill when medicine is not available. In one village in North Kivu Province, a hot spot of continued fighting, three women of the 20 households surveyed had lost two children each in the 16 months covered by the survey period, Dr. Brennan said. Less than half a percentage point of the deaths were caused by violence, illustrating how the aftermath of war can be more deadly than combat itself. Much of the emergency aid is focused on the eastern part of the country, where militia battles with Congolese troops have chased nearly half a million people from their homes in the last year. A peace agreement to end that conflict was reached Monday. But the increased mortality in areas outside of the volatile east is particularly worrying because it points to longer-term problems that endure long after the bullets have stopped flying. \u201cGiven the nature of this country, the vast differences in terrain, the broken infrastructure, I am not surprised,\u201d said Alan Doss, the newly appointed chief of the United Nations \u2019 vast peace operation in Congo. \u201cThis will take a long time to turn around.\u201d The Congolese government spends just $15 per person each year on health care, according to the World Health Organization , less than half of what is recommended to provide the most basic but lifesaving care, like immunizations, malaria-fighting mosquito nets and hydration salts. \u201cThe past two years, we can say the health situation has not improved at all,\u201d said Brice de le Vingne, operations coordinator for the region that includes Congo for the aid group Doctors Without Borders. \u201cThe only thing that improved a bit is mobile phone coverage. We now are in contact with more people to know that the situation is not good.\u201d Mortality surveys are crucial tools for aid agencies, United Nations peacekeepers and even historians, but the methods used to compile them have come under attack. For example, a 2006 survey by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that concluded that 600,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American invasion \u2014 far above the estimates given by the Iraqi government and other sources \u2014 was attacked as \u201cnot credible\u201d by President Bush and the Pentagon, and criticized by other scientists as well. For the current survey, teams of workers fanned out across Congo, a nation as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, but with rivers instead of roads, canoes and bicycles instead of airplanes and cars. Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, a research institution in Belgium, said that the Congo survey was methodologically sound. Still, extrapolating from clusters of data over an area as vast and with as many unknowns as Congo presents particular problems, she said. \u201cThe fact is that you have a high mortality rate in Congo altogether by any standard,\u201d Dr. Guha-Sapir said. \u201cOf which some is the result of conflict, some is governance, some is that no heath services are available in many areas, some is just pure poverty and the horrible legacy of what colonialism and Western greed did to Congo.\u201d A number of variables make the survey results inevitably imprecise, particularly when trying to turn an abstract death rate into a number of actual deaths. The population of Congo, for example, is essentially unknown: the United Nations estimated it to be 56.8 million; the Congolese Ministry of Health says it is 69.9 million. If the United Nations figure is right, for example, the actual number of deaths in the most recent survey period would be 522,000, but if the government figures are right, the figure would be 1.05 million, the study found. The number of deaths attributed to the conflict and its aftermath is based on how many people would be expected to die under normal circumstances. Because Congo\u2019s prewar mortality rate is disputed by different sources, it is also a source of imprecision. According to various United Nations estimates, the prewar rate was below that of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, but the survey\u2019s authors said they chose to use the higher rate of the continent to be conservative. Still, even the death rate for sub-Saharan Africa could be a problematic baseline, said Dr. Guha-Sapir, because in many countries the most basic kinds of censuses are carried out rarely, and not always with precision. Ultimately, using the most conservative and least conservative assumptions, the data show with 95 percent certainty that 3.5 to 7.8 million people have died since 1998, according to the survey\u2019s authors. An earlier survey by the International Rescue Committee, completed in 2004, was published in 2006 in The Lancet, a British medical journal, but the most recent survey was declined for publication by The Lancet. Other experts said such a rejection did not necessarily undercut the scientific validity of the findings. Dr. Brennan said that despite inevitable imprecision, the data point to a vast crisis. \u201cIs it possible that as few as five million people died?\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s much more likely that 5.4 million died. But the exact number isn\u2019t as critical. These data can help us understand the scale of the problem and target our solutions to save lives.\u201d", "keyword": "Medicine and Health;Congo (Formerly Zaire);Foreign Aid;Food Contamination and Poisoning;World Health Organization;United Nations;Brennan Richard"}
{"id": "ny0181059", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/25", "title": "A Second Day, a Second Massing of Grief for a Lost Firefighter", "abstract": "Amid the somber majesty of St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, thousands of firefighters, friends and relatives paid tribute yesterday to Robert Beddia, a 23-year veteran of the New York Fire Department, evoking his professionalism and the simple pleasures in his life, from poker and paddle ball to the many nieces and nephews he doted on. It was the second time in two days that firefighters gathered to mourn a colleague. On Thursday, a funeral was held in Brooklyn for Joseph Graffagnino, 33, who, along with Firefighter Beddia, 53, was assigned to Engine 24 and Ladder 5, based in a firehouse in SoHo. They were among scores of firefighters who helped fight the blaze last Saturday at the former Deutsche Bank building at ground zero. On Thursday, two more firefighters were injured at the building, at 130 Liberty Street, when a worker lost control of a small forklift on the 23rd floor and it plummeted 200 feet to the ground. Yesterday, as the ceremony went on inside the cathedral, outside along Fifth Avenue thousands of firefighters stood in formation, their rows of white and black caps visible for blocks as American flags moved softly in a slight breeze. The handling of the fire in the empty contaminant-ridden tower, which was damaged on 9/11 and was finally being dismantled, has come under scrutiny, as officials investigate the two deaths and the problems the firefighters encountered, chiefly the broken standpipe that left them without enough water. There were expressions of anger yesterday in the eulogies and among onlookers outside, but the service did not let the events of last week\u2019s fire overshadow the memory of Firefighter Beddia\u2019s life. Standing before the flag-draped coffin and framed by the cathedral\u2019s soaring bronze altar canopy, Msgr. John Delendick, a Fire Department chaplain, acknowledged the tensions that have emerged over the logistics at the fire. \u201cThere\u2019s been an awful lot of finger-pointing,\u201d he said, and added, \u201cA lot of people have been laying blame all over the place, but I\u2019m not here to talk about that.\u201d He and others, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a firefighter and a sister, went on to describe Firefighter Beddia\u2019s contributions to the city and, as the middle of five siblings, to his large family. \u201cHe was the senior man,\u201d Monsignor Delendick said of Firefighter Beddia\u2019s role in the firehouse. \u201cYoung guys talked about how good of a teacher he was, how he was patient and never got angry at them.\u201d Together, the eulogies portrayed a man who was a fixture in SoHo and Greenwich Village, who was equal parts humble and hip, who knew by heart the interiors of many of the buildings in the neighborhood and who, as a bartender, had presided over Chumley\u2019s, an old and popular Village tavern. Though he was divorced and never had children of his own, Firefighter Beddia was close to his 16 nieces and nephews, teaching some of them how to swim and drive, and others how to play poker. \u201cHe always gravitated towards the kids in the family,\u201d Monsignor Delendick said. Mayor Bloomberg called him a \u201cquiet hero\u201d who had turned down offers to recommend him for department honors. \u201cHe was a man of few words, but when he spoke, others listened,\u201d he said. An avid golfer and the proud owner of an Alfa Romeo, Firefighter Beddia came across in the eulogies as a man\u2019s man. His friend and colleague, Lt. Raymond O\u2019Hanlon, caused ripples of laughter by describing what he called Firefighter Beddia\u2019s sixth sense: the ability to \u201cspot a beautiful woman 1,000 yards out in a fog at night.\u201d The two would be relaxing outside on the street at night, Lieutenant O\u2019Hanlon recalled, when out of nowhere Firefighter Beddia would say, \u20182 o\u2019clock,\u2019 and I\u2019d look at my watch and say, \u2018What are you talking about? It\u2019s 11:30.\u2019 \u201d Firefighter Beddia would nod toward the approaching woman who, by then, was \u201cat 3:30,\u201d Lieutenant O\u2019Hanlon said. Mr. Bloomberg contributed his own anecdote, relating a story he had been told about the time Firefighter Beddia traveled to Italy and decided to buy a car because it was somehow cheaper than renting one. When he pulled into the airport at the end of the trip, he simply left the car behind, the keys still in the ignition. \u201cHe exuded the kind of cool that eludes most of us,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said. There were solemn moments. Governor Spitzer, whose more formal eulogy quoted from Theodore Roosevelt and Shakespeare, vowed to uncover the \u201ctruth about what happened on Aug. 18.\u201d Nicholas Scoppetta, the fire commissioner, promised an \u201caggressive, comprehensive investigation.\u201d As others did, Mr. Scoppetta spoke about the firehouse\u2019s painful past, which included the loss of three firefighters in 1994 after they became trapped in a burning empty apartment building, and then 11 more fatalities on Sept. 11. \u201cYou have paid an astonishingly high price, more than any house should have to bear,\u201d he said. Firefighter Beddia\u2019s sister, Susan Beddia Olson, closed the service with the most personal eulogy of all, calling on one memory after another and bringing many in the congregation to tears. \u201cDear Bobby,\u201d she began in a soft voice. \u201cDo you remember when you and Jimmy bought me my first nine-inch TV for my bedroom, and it was so cool?\u201d She went on to ask if he remembered taking her to the Jersey Shore, making wine with Uncle Mike, rescuing her in the pool, vacationing with their family in Myrtle Beach, playing badminton in the backyard, teaching her how to drive, going to the Who concert with her when she was 16 and walking her down the aisle at her wedding. Hundreds of firefighters and mourners continued on to Moravian Cemetery in the New Dorp section of Staten Island. There, an honor guard gently carried the mahogany coffin. Not 100 yards from where the mourners were gathered, a light wind rustled a cluster of Mylar balloons atop the grave of Russel Timoshenko, the New York City police officer who was shot last month when he and his partner stopped a suspicious vehicle in Brooklyn. In a show of solidarity with the Beddia family, Officer Timoshenko\u2019s parents had attended Firefighter Beddia\u2019s wake two nights earlier. A Fire Department chaplain read Scripture, and then the assembled firefighters passed by Firefighter Beddia\u2019s grave in formation, pausing to salute in pairs. At the end of the graveside service, each mourner placed a red rose on the coffin. Earlier, at the wake, relatives had put a golf club and a paddle ball racquet in the coffin.", "keyword": "Fires and Firefighters;Deutsche Bank Building (NYC);Brooklyn (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0246752", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/05/03", "title": "Nur Khan's Party at the Hiro Ballroom", "abstract": "Here\u2019s the funny thing about inviting a nightlife columnist to write about your party: She\u2019s there to write about your party. So when we received a special invitation from a publicist to cover Nur Khan and Harry Josh\u2019s private shindig at Hiro Ballroom in the meatpacking district on Saturday night, the e-mail splashed with the names of interesting guests, we eagerly R.S.V.P.\u2019d. We looked forward to spending a long night interviewing guests like Gisele B\u00fcndchen, Tom Brady, Helena Christensen and more. Thanks for coming to cover this celebrity-packed party, organizers told us when we got to the event, a pre-party for the Costume Institute gala on Monday night. Just don\u2019t talk to any celebrities. The celebrities \u201cthought this was a private party,\u201d said Mr. Josh, who organized the event. Revised orders: Talk if you must (We must; funny that, it\u2019s only our job) \u2014 just not to anyone too famous. We were very upset. But who better to comfort us than a familiar face? Hi, Leonardo DiCaprio! our correspondent ventured, we\u2019re not allowed to talk to anyone famous! Mr. DiCaprio proceeded to laugh so hard that we were afraid his drink might come out of his nose. We continued bemoaning our fate, conscious suddenly of a publicist who, we feared, was encircling us the way a hyena might a celebrity-bothering impala that he wanted to rip limb from limb. \u201cHave a drink,\u201d Mr. DiCaprio said. We would have preferred a Kevlar vest. \u201cHave fun tonight.\u201d Right. Across the dance floor we spotted a Furby-fluffy coat. Maybe we would buy it tomorrow to console ourselves for failing to do our job. Who is the designer? We couldn\u2019t hear Ashley Olsen\u2019s response over the loud music as she fielded bear hugs (appropriate given her hirsute outfit) from people who either had a pass from the publicists \u2014 or a death wish. All this not talking to celebrities, our spirits sagged. Are you going to dance, Mickey Rourke? \u201cNot when I\u2019m this exhausted,\u201d he said, describing the workout he had just had for his new rugby movie. Also, he\u2019s a house music guy, he said amid blasting hip-hop. As we spoke, Mr. DiCaprio waved goodbye to him, and, we think, us. Strong-Arming At a party celebrating National Football League rookies on Wall Street earlier that same night, two arcade games were set up at the two ends of Cipriani, inviting guests like top rookies Nick Fairley, Blaine Gabbert and Mark Ingram to toss minifootballs into holes for points. Though the event was in their honor, when we tried the game (and missed \u2014 a lot), our dismal score insulted more than our throwing arm: \u201cRookie,\u201d flashed across the screen. But the rookies had to be thick-skinned. \u201cI was hazed,\u201d said Felix Jones, the Dallas Cowboys running back. \u201cThese guys did me good. I want to get back at the guys who got me.\u201d The rookies were safe. \u201cI\u2019m looking at veterans \u2014 but not tonight.\u201d Rima Fakih, Miss U.S.A. 2010, arrived in a bright pink minidress and, of course, her sash. We wondered if she was at the wrong event, since the boyfriend on her arm was Ricky Romero, a Toronto Blue Jay. That\u2019s baseball. \u201cIn high school, I tried to start a girls\u2019 football team,\u201d Miss Fakih said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t work out very well because none of the girls wanted to play football.\u201d There was a happy ending. \u201cI played with the boys.\u201d Fraternizing Miss Fakih and Mr. Romero seemed similarly out of place the next night at the hall of fame induction ceremony for The Players club, a sort of actors fraternity on Gramercy Park. New stars, like Jimmy Fallon, were being added to the celestial portrait gallery that hangs around the club, many painted by Everett Raymond Kinstler. (Katharine Hepburn, he said, was \u201cdifficult.\u201d) \u201cIn a couple of minutes, my friend from high school will be here,\u201d said Mr. Kinstler. \u201cOnly back then, his name was Anthony Benedetto.\u201d Tony Bennett, who attended Manhattan\u2019s High School of Industrial Art with him, soon arrived. Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who have been married for 56 years, posed for photos. \u201cOur marriage probably ended 35, 36 times,\u201d Mr. Stiller joked. \u201cBut somewhere along the line, we said, \u2018This is it.\u2019 We never ran off with anyone \u2014 though we wanted to.\u201d We told his wife what he said. \u201cHe lives in another reality,\u201d said Ms. Meara, who is currently starring in the play \u201cLove, Loss and What I Wore.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve been in therapy for 30 years,\u201d she added. And their son, Ben Stiller, is he so devoted? \u201cHe lives at home,\u201d Mr. Stiller cracked. \u201cWe still give him his allowance.\u201d", "keyword": "Celebrities;Parties (Social);Hiro Ballroom;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0279760", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/10/27", "title": "A Deadly Car\u2019s Winding Road", "abstract": "The Honda Civic whose airbag killed Delia Robles was resold three times at used-car auctions before it was bought by her son. JANUARY 2001 The 2001 Honda Civic that will eventually kill Ms. Robles is sold new. JANUARY 2006 The car is resold for the first time at a used-car auction. JUNE 2007 The car rear-ends another vehicle; its airbags do not deploy. NOVEMBER 2008 Honda recalls the car, saying its driver-side airbag is defective and can rupture. MAY 2010 The car is resold for the second time at a used-car auction. AUGUST 2012 A mechanical issue is reported; the car is towed. MAY 2015 The car is resold for the third time at a used-car auction, then sold yet again to Delia Robles\u2019s son, who registers it in her name. SEPTEMBER 2016 Ms. Robles is killed when her airbag explodes; her son says he did not know the car had defective airbags.", "keyword": "Automobile safety;Car Crash;Used Cars;Auction;Honda;Recalls and Bans;Takata"}
{"id": "ny0278860", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2016/11/15", "title": "A Cold and Flu Risk That\u2019s a Real Eye-Opener", "abstract": "Q. As I commute by train and subway during the cold and flu season, can I cut my risk of infections by breathing through my mouth rather than through my nose? A. Just possibly, but only if you can figure out a way to travel with your eyes closed as well, and if you wash your hands frequently, too . A small but frequently cited 1981 study in the journal Infection and Immunity, published by the American Society for Microbiology, compared the risks of contracting a respiratory infection by way of transferring it to the nose, eye or mouth. The results suggested that the eyes and the nose were equally sensitive to infection, while the mouth was comparatively insensitive. Viruses like the common cold and influenza can take different routes to the next victim. They are spread by sneezes and coughs, which produce medium-size droplets that can be carried though the air to the nose and pharynx of nearby people. Protective masks can help cut off such transfers. The droplets can also land on hands, which can transfer them to sensitive mucus membranes, or on inanimate objects, from which they can be picked up by hands and once again transferred to the membranes of the eyes, nose or mouth. Diligent handwashing and avoidance of touching the target membranes can help head off such transfers. Even smaller and lighter virus-contaminated droplets, called droplet nuclei, can travel by air from room to room and even go around the edges of standard paper masks. They can be inhaled, causing lung infections. A frequently recommended precaution is avoiding crowds of possibly infected people during the cold and flu season. question@nytimes.com", "keyword": "Hygiene;Flu;American Society for Microbiology;Common cold"}
{"id": "ny0180744", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/08/12", "title": "The Writing\u2019s on the Wall. (The Writing\u2019s Off the Wall.)", "abstract": "A FEW minutes into the opening reception for an exhibit on the intersection of design and technology at the Chelsea Art Museum, one of the pieces caught fire. The installation, called \u201cSaws,\u201d accidentally ignited when one of the work\u2019s three chainsaws became caught on a stripped extension cord that dangled over a metal sheet on the floor. Propelled by smoke and dust, the crowd emptied out onto West 22nd Street, where they were met with another curious sight. An oversize tricycle was rounding the corner, weighed down with a video camera, a laptop computer, a digital projector and, attached to its frame with bungee cords, two loudspeakers playing \u201cDoobie Ashtray\u201d by the Houston rapper Devin the Dude. The cyclist was a 30-year-old robotics engineer named James Powderly, who, among other projects, once helped develop a remote-controlled arm for NASA\u2019s Mars rover program. Alongside the cycle walked Evan Roth, a 28-year-old artist whose graduate thesis at Parsons the New School for Design analyzed graffiti tags as a source of mathematical data. In the fall of 2005, the two formed an entity called the Graffiti Research Lab, a nonprofit design studio with the mission of producing tools for urban communication. The cycle is their latest invention, and its appearance in Chelsea was its official New York debut. As Mr. Powderly neared the museum\u2019s entrance, he jumped off the cycle and pointed it toward a bare stretch on a garage door across the street. Mr. Roth pulled a laser pointer from his pocket, and as he moved the laser\u2019s green dot across the wall, a line of what looked like thick, drippy paint lit up its surface, roughly following the motion of his hand. But what seemed like an illegal tag was in fact a projection, an ephemeral splash of digital graffiti that would vanish with a flick of a switch on the cycle\u2019s gas-powered generator. \u201cYou want to try?\u201d Mr. Roth asked the growing crowd behind him. He handed the laser pointer to a young woman standing nearby. She nodded, hesitant but curious. The cycle is designed to be an accessible, almost playful simulacrum of street tagging, giving passers-by a whiff of the thrill of posting a message in places they\u2019re not supposed to. It is what its creators call a gateway graffiti experience. The idea is to put the tools for unfiltered, unsanctioned public expression in the hands of those who might otherwise shy away from grabbing a spray can or a paint marker. By night\u2019s end, several dozen people had used the laser to scribble personal messages, squealing with amazement each time the projected beam of light appeared on the wall. The first request to use the bike came a week later from Critical Mass, the bicycle activist group, which wanted to use the device for one of its rides through Brooklyn. On a Friday night in spring, Mr. Powderly found himself pedaling the hulking cycle across the Williamsburg Bridge and onto South Fifth Street, to the Williamsburg park where the biking group starts its monthly ride. Joining the crowd of cyclists, Mr. Powderly followed them as they moved through the honking streets of Brooklyn. In search of a spot to project their graffiti, they settled on the handball courts of McCarren Park in Greenpoint. Mr. Powderly positioned the cycle to face the court\u2019s gray concrete wall. Within a few minutes, someone had drawn a detailed sketch of a bicycle, and another person had traced an outline of an American flag. \u201cThese people really get it,\u201d Mr. Powderly said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about getting a message up \u2014 there are plenty of ways to do that. This is really about getting a community together.\u201d In the months since, Mr. Powderly and Mr. Roth have used the tricycle to write graffiti for a hip-hop music video and handed it over for a night to an organization that is calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have also gone out with people from the New York graffiti collective All City Crew, several of whose members have been arrested in recent months on charges of criminal trespassing and vandalism. Last Sunday, Mr. Powderly and Mr. Roth took the cycle to the Brooklyn Bridge, where 2esae, a member of All City Crew who is facing trial in the fall, used the laser to write on the base of the bridge for several hours. Many of the cycle\u2019s projecting missions are documented in videos posted on the Graffiti Research Lab Web site. At the end of the video from the Critical Mass ride, a typed message flashes brightly across the screen. \u201cDo you need to say something really big and really loud?\u201d it asks in bold, all-capital letters. \u201cThen borrow my bike.\u201d", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Art;Graffiti"}
{"id": "ny0099648", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/06/22", "title": "Sheldon Silver, Unbowed by Charges, Adjusts to Life After the Speakership", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 The last five months have not been kind to Sheldon Silver . Arrested in January, indicted in February and forced out as Assembly speaker in between, Mr. Silver has seen his influence in the Capitol wane. Some luxuries have been lost, like the office just off the Assembly floor. He now sits in the chamber, next to a freshman Democrat who was 14 years old when Mr. Silver was first elected to the Assembly. Yet in many ways, Mr. Silver remains a presence unbowed, tackling favored causes and displaying no obvious reluctance about appearing in public at the Capitol or elsewhere. At the Celebrate Israel parade in Manhattan last month, for instance, he marched up Fifth Avenue wearing a blue sash and holding up an Israeli flag. Outside City Hall in March, he voiced support for making the Lunar New Year a school holiday. At an April meeting of a task force he formed to address the issue of school overcrowding, those on hand greeted him with applause. \u201cThese are my friends,\u201d Mr. Silver said last week, recalling the warm reception. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this with them for 30 years. As far as they\u2019re concerned, nothing\u2019s changed.\u201d He is even taking small, principled stands, voting against bills that strike him as unwise \u2014 including a proposal to allow dogs within the outdoor dining areas of restaurants. Last week, Mr. Silver mounted a campaign against a move to hold New York\u2019s 2016 presidential primary on a date that falls during Passover , recruiting colleagues to sign a letter to the Democratic National Committee stating their opposition. \u201cI\u2019m here doing my work,\u201d he said. \u201cMy constituents elected me to do a job, and I\u2019m going to do that job as long as I\u2019m representing them. And if I wasn\u2019t going to do that job, then I would leave.\u201d Mr. Silver, 71, began the year as the most powerful Democrat in the State Legislature and one of Albany\u2019s \u201cthree men in a room.\u201d But after his arrest , his fellow Democrats decided he could no longer continue as the speaker. Mr. Silver stepped down , ending a reign as leader that spanned more than two decades. \u201cHe\u2019s no longer a man in power, but in terms of his demeanor, there doesn\u2019t appear to be any major anger or bitterness,\u201d said Assemblyman James F. Brennan, a Brooklyn Democrat. \u201cI\u2019m sure he would rather be speaker, but his demeanor is not a disgruntled, embittered man.\u201d Mr. Silver, who is charged with obtaining illicit payments disguised as legitimate income from working as a lawyer, maintains his innocence and is scheduled to go on trial in November. \u201cI\u2019ve hired lawyers, paid them, and they will do their job,\u201d Mr. Silver said. \u201cThey, as I, am pretty convinced I\u2019ll be vindicated at the end of the process. And in the interim, I am doing my job. And if they need me, they call me.\u201d Mr. Silver still must contend with the inevitable stares and snickers when he walks through the Capitol. Like other politicians indicted before him, he has become an Albany punch line: This year, at the annual satire show staged by the Capitol press corps, Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBeat It\u201d was given a Silver-themed rewrite (with lyrics including \u201cI\u2019ll plead it, plead it, bet your tuchis I will plead it\u201d). There is also this simple fact of life: Some people, especially politicians loath to be associated with scandal, do not enjoy being in the presence of, or photographed with, a person under federal indictment. Mr. Silver did offer one upside to his exile from leadership: The news media, he said, no longer seeks to scrutinize his every move. \u201cI\u2019m glad not to be in the headlines,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the one thing I don\u2019t miss.\u201d The awkwardness arising from the charges against him has not driven Mr. Silver to stay out of sight. When the Assembly worked late into the night to approve the state budget, he gamely chatted with reporters at the side of the chamber. He even turned up in the background of photos of Sawyer Fredericks, a winner of NBC\u2019s \u201cThe Voice\u201d who was honored by the Assembly this month. \u201cI see him at more receptions during the session as a regular member than he was as speaker,\u201d Assemblyman David I. Weprin, a Queens Democrat, said. \u201cHe comes to everything.\u201d Mr. Weprin, whose father, Saul, preceded Mr. Silver as speaker, said Mr. Silver had been a useful sounding board for members. \u201cMost people would just say, after being speaker, \u2018I\u2019m just going to give up,\u2019\u201d he said. Assemblywoman Rebecca A. Seawright of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the freshman member who sits next to Mr. Silver, said he had helped her find her bearings. \u201cFew know process and procedure better,\u201d she said. \u201cI have many questions and he has much patience.\u201d As speaker, Mr. Silver was notoriously hard to read. As former speaker, that has not changed, including when it comes to his feelings about his diminished position. \u201cI don\u2019t see him going on \u2018Oprah\u2019 and talking about it, let\u2019s put it that way,\u201d Assemblywoman Catherine T. Nolan, a Queens Democrat, said. Mr. Silver has good reason to remain active, especially in his Lower Manhattan district. If convicted, he would lose his seat; if acquitted, he would be up for re-election next year, and face the prospect of a primary challenge. Mr. Silver said he planned to seek another term. Since stepping down as speaker, he has become a member of the Assembly\u2019s Education Committee. He introduced a bill to provide a tax credit to families that pay private school tuition , and fielded questions on the Assembly floor about another bill he sponsored that would require food-inspection violations to be posted on a state website . The Assembly approved the legislation. As speaker, Mr. Silver controlled which bills the Assembly considered, so there was never a question about where he stood on those that came before it. Now, as a rank-and-file member, Mr. Silver must decide how to vote. He has developed a bit of a contrarian streak in a chamber where bills usually pass overwhelmingly. He voted, for instance, against allowing the extension of temporary increases to some local sales tax rates, calling the sales tax regressive. He voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would allow legislators and other officials convicted on corruption charges to be stripped of their pensions . He abstained from voting on a bill to temporarily extend rent regulations and a housing program that gives tax breaks to developers; he said he did so because the tax-break program figured in the criminal case against him. Of his opposition to the so-called dining with dogs bill , Mr. Silver said he had deferred to the concerns of the city\u2019s health department, but he also cited personal experience. \u201cI have a grandson who\u2019s petrified of dogs,\u201d he explained, while noting that some children are bitten by dogs at young ages and are fearful of them as a result. \u201cTo put them in that position of having to confront a dog, even though the dog lies quietly on the floor, I don\u2019t think is appropriate,\u201d he said, suggesting, perhaps, that dogs be restricted to only a portion of outdoor dining areas. In two interviews last week, Mr. Silver seemed more at ease discussing legislative matters than his own circumstances. Asked if he thought he had been treated fairly since his arrest, he responded: \u201cDo I really think so? No. But that\u2019s O.K.\u201d He offered a positive but terse assessment of the performance of his successor, Carl E. Heastie, a Bronx Democrat: \u201cI think he\u2019s done a great job.\u201d Mr. Silver acknowledged that his life was different these days. When he was speaker, he said he was well aware that many of his friends would fade away once he was no longer among the state\u2019s most powerful politicians. \u201cI\u2019ve even said it to Carl,\u201d he said. \u201cYou come into this job with 10 friends. Maybe you\u2019ll leave with 11.\u201d \u201cBut while you\u2019re in the job,\u201d he continued, \u201cyou\u2019ll have 500.\u201d", "keyword": "Sheldon Silver;New York;Corruption;State legislature"}
{"id": "ny0210162", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/12/24", "title": "Vatican Defends Move Toward Sainthood for Wartime Pope", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 In an effort to calm growing tensions with Jewish groups, the Vatican said Wednesday that Pope Benedict XVI \u2019s decision moving the wartime pope Pius XII closer to sainthood was not a \u201chostile act\u201d against those who believe Pius did not do enough to stop the Holocaust. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement saying that the beatification process evaluated the \u201cChristian life\u201d of Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, and not \u201cthe historical impact of all his operative decisions.\u201d Moving Pius toward sainthood \u201cis in no way to be read as a hostile act towards the Jewish people, and it is to be hoped that it will not be considered as an obstacle on the path of dialogue between Judaism and the Catholic Church,\u201d Father Lombardi wrote. Benedict confirmed the \u201cheroic virtues\u201d of Pius \u2014 along with those of John Paul II \u2014 on Saturday, opening the door to beatification once a miracle is attributed to each. A second miracle would be required for sainthood. The move created anger among many Jewish groups, which have argued that Pius did not speak out vocally enough against the Nazis or intervene to save Jews during World War II, and that the Vatican helped many former Nazis escape to South America after World War II. The decision by Benedict \u2014 a German who was an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth \u2014 to move Pius closer to sainthood was the latest in a series of controversies. It came less than a year after he revoked the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who had denied the scope of the Holocaust, an act that caused the pope and the Vatican to issue a series of extensive clarifications. Benedict also upset many Jews when he did not directly mention the Nazis or Germany during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel in May, as John Paul II had done, although Benedict has denounced the Holocaust on many other occasions. Even as the Vatican sought to separate the religious aspects of the beatification process from Pius\u2019s historical record, observers said that Benedict\u2019s decision to move Pius toward sainthood sent a strong message, effectively endorsing his actions. Jewish groups had asked Benedict to delay Pius\u2019s beatification process until the Vatican opened the archives from his papacy to scholarly scrutiny . Father Lombardi said that the Vatican \u201cunderstood\u201d the request to open the archives, and that the copious number of documents from Pius\u2019s papacy were expected to take several more years to process. Defenders of Pius, who was the Vatican secretary of state in the 1930s, say that his reticence was sound diplomacy, and that speaking out more directly against the Nazis would have caused more deaths in Rome and beyond. Benedict has said that Pius worked \u201csecretly and silently\u201d to save Jews. In his statement, Father Lombardi said that confirming Pius\u2019s \u201cheroic virtues\u201d was not intended \u201cto limit discussion concerning the concrete choices made by Pius XII in the situation in which he lived.\u201d He added that the Vatican hoped the pope\u2019s expected visit to the Rome synagogue next month would reaffirm ties between Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church. After days of tension, Roman Jewish leaders said that the visit was still expected to take place. The legacy of Pius is particularly sensitive for the Jewish community in Rome. More than 1,000 of its members were rounded up in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. Documents in the Vatican archives indicate that Pius knew of the deportation and did not act to stop it. In a statement, the chief rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, said he welcomed the Vatican\u2019s statement. \u201cCertainly the historical evaluation remains open and controversial,\u201d Rabbi Di Segni said. \u201cBut the Vatican\u2019s understanding of requests to open all paths to research is significant.\u201d", "keyword": "Pius XII;Roman Catholic Church;Holocaust and the Nazi Era;Benedict XVI;Beatifications and Canonizations"}
{"id": "ny0187742", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/04/26", "title": "I.M.F. Planning to Sell Bonds to Finance New Loans", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Hoping to raise money quickly for a new $500 billion emergency loan program, the International Monetary Fund is in the advanced stages of a plan to sell bonds for the first time in its history, officials for the group said Saturday. The bonds\u2019 buyers are expected to be the governments of fast-growing emerging economic powers like China, Russia, Brazil and India. Though the fund has been authorized for decades to raise cash by selling bonds, officials have never done so because they wanted to avoid what amounts to short-term borrowing. But the new plan is a response to the growing political clout of countries like China and Brazil, which have become important economic powers and potentially major contributors to the fund, but which are frustrated by their small share of voting power. As the United States and the European Union have pushed to raise money for the $500 billion lending program to help countries weather the global financial crisis, the big emerging-market countries have demanded that they obtain a bigger voting stake in the fund in exchange for big new financial contributions. The United States has generally supported an overhaul of the organization\u2019s voting structure, but many European countries oppose a dramatic shift, because it would dilute their own voting power. To get around the roadblock, fund officials said they are close to agreeing on a plan to sell bonds to countries including China, Russia, Brazil and India. The bonds would have to be repaid after one or two years, so they would not increase the fund\u2019s permanent resources. But they would provide the fund with a way to raise the entire $500 billion quickly enough to help countries trapped in cash squeezes because of the frozen credit markets. \u201cThere was a lot of discussion that the fund would use the possibility to issue notes that could be bought by central banks, which could be a vehicle for some countries to provide resources to the fund,\u201d said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.M.F.\u2019s managing director, after a meeting with officials from member countries here on Saturday. Other officials said the plans were serious and in an advanced stage, though they stopped short of saying that a bond offering was ready to be started. \u201cWhat this signifies is that the emerging markets are drawing a line in the sand,\u201d said Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University and a former senior economist for the I.M.F. \u201cFrom the perspective of the key emerging countries, they are being asked to contribute a very substantial amount of resources in exchange for a very uncertain promise of reform.\u201d China, for example, has only 3.78 percent of the voting power at the I.M.F. But the United States and other wealthy nations are hoping that it contributes $40 billion, or 8 percent, of the new emergency fund. American officials said they supported the proposed bond issue, adding that the most important priority was to raise the necessary money as quickly as possible. The United States, Europe and Japan have each pledged to contribute $100 billion to the new lending facility. Though finance ministers attending the I.M.F.\u2019s annual meeting here have expressed increased optimism that the global financial crisis is easing, American officials and fund officials have also warned that a recovery is still months away and that it will be even longer before unemployment stops climbing and begins to recede. The idea for the new lending program is to provide flexible credit lines to poorer countries that found themselves blindsided by the sudden inability to borrow in global capital markets. Poland, Mexico and Colombia have signed up to borrow from the program, and more countries are expected to do so as well.", "keyword": "International Monetary Fund;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0182116", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/12/18", "title": "Investigation of Spitzer Heats Up", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Gov. Eliot Spitzer \u2019s administration has received a second subpoena from the Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, reflecting what appears to be a more aggressive approach in his investigation of the administration. The subpoena, issued last week, seeks both public and private e-mail records from the administration. The subpoena was reported on Monday by The Daily News and was confirmed by the governor during a testy appearance at the Capitol on Monday. Mr. Soares\u2019s investigation is his second in the wake of a damaging July report from Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo\u2019s office, which found that members of the Democratic administration had misused the State Police in an effort to discredit Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican Senate majority leader. Mr. Soares\u2019s first investigation, completed in September, backed up Mr. Cuomo\u2019s finding that no laws had been broken, but was criticized because administration officials, including the governor, had not been interviewed under oath. Unlike Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Soares has the jurisdiction to issue subpoenas and compel sworn testimony in this particular case. Mr. Soares began a new investigation last month after the Commission on Public Integrity, a state ethics panel conducting its own inquiry, referred a potential perjury case to his office relating to testimony offered to the commission by Darren Dopp, the governor\u2019s former communications director. In recent weeks he issued a subpoena seeking notes kept by Mr. Dopp. But Mr. Soares held off on bringing charges against Mr. Dopp amid complications in that case earlier this month; the latest subpoena suggests that he is broadening his inquiry. His office declined to comment. The governor made a rare appearance at the Capitol to discuss the recommendations of a commission on higher education \u2014 he has been mostly absent from Albany since the Cuomo report was issued \u2014 but he became tense when questions turned to the latest developments in the lingering case. \u201cI\u2019ve answered all these questions at length, and obviously we have cooperated fully, take it very seriously, wish it were getting to a conclusion quickly, so we could move on,\u201d the governor said when asked if he had hired a personal lawyer. \u201cWe just sit and wait,\u201d he added. \u201cIt is their job to do what they have to do. It is our job, and my job to cooperate, which is exactly what I\u2019ve done. I\u2019ve answered all the questions over and over.\u201d Asked whether he had received a subpoena, he said yes, but declined to say what it sought, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not sure what the rules are with respect to that.\u201d A reporter pointed out that the governor, a former prosecutor, did in fact know the rules, adding, \u201cYou can disclose whatever you want to disclose.\u201d Responding to the broad subpoena will probably take time, further drawing out what has already been a spate of investigations lasting more than five months. In addition to Mr. Soares and the integrity commission, a Republican-led Senate committee is investigating the matter and currently battling the administration in court for documents and e-mail messages. \u201cHe has the chutzpah to say he\u2019s cooperated fully when his lawyer is fighting me tooth and nail on every subpoena,\u201d said Senator George H. Winner Jr., an upstate Republican leading the Senate inquiry, when asked about the governor\u2019s comments on Monday. Republicans have been skeptical of Mr. Soares, a Democrat, like the governor, because he did not conduct interviews under oath in his first inquiry. \u201cHe has tried to make it look like he was doing something and did nothing,\u201d Mr. Winner said of Mr. Soares. \u201cI\u2019m hopeful that\u2019s not still the case.\u201d Heather Orth, a spokeswoman for Mr. Soares, said, \u201cAs with all cases involving public integrity, we cannot comment.\u201d", "keyword": "Spitzer Eliot L;Ethics;Soares P David;United States Politics and Government;District Attorneys"}
{"id": "ny0051797", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/10/24", "title": "Race Tests Democrats\u2019 Viability in West Virginia", "abstract": "PRINCETON, W. Va. \u2014 \u201cPro-jobs. Pro-coal. Pro-life. Vote Republican!!!\u201d reads a prominent sign coming into town. And that ought to be the end of the story here in southern West Virginia, with its beleaguered mining industry and largely white population that fills the pews of evangelical churches on a Wednesday night as readily as on Sunday morning. The region voted overwhelmingly Republican in the presidential contest two years ago, part of the historic defection of West Virginia Democrats, who hold a 2-to-1 registration advantage, from the national party over social issues like abortion and, more recently, opposition to environmental regulation. And yet a Democratic congressman, Nick J. Rahall II, has defiantly held onto his seat here in the sparsely populated Third District, which runs from the rugged Appalachian coal fields in the west to the famed white-water rafting of the New River Gorge. First elected in 1976, Mr. Rahall has had his campaign for a 20th term, against the Republican candidate, Evan Jenkins, become one of the most ferocious House races in the country. There is a torrent of outside money, blistering ads from conservative groups supported by the billionaire Koch brothers and a contest that after nearly $14 million in spending has come down, two weeks before voting, to a tossup. While the race will not affect partisan control of the House, considered safely in Republican hands, it will make a statement about whether Democrats can survive in southern border states. The millions of dollars coursing through the inexpensive television markets of the state in Mr. Rahill\u2019s contest are far more than in the race for West Virginia\u2019s open Senate seat, where a Republican, Shelley Moore Capito, has taken a comfortable lead. If Mr. Rahall hangs on, it will be because his ties to voters cemented over four decades \u2014 what supporters call his \u201cbrand\u201d \u2014 overcome the antipathy of West Virginians to President Obama, and especially White House energy policy that many blame for hard times in coal country. \u201cRepublicans have really turned the anger at Obama and the coal issue into an organizing principle,\u201d Mr. Rahall said on Saturday during the Mercer County Democratic Party bean dinner in Princeton. \u201cI probably have the most anti-Obama district represented by a Democrat in the nation.\u201d The race is clouded with distortions from both sides. Mr. Rahall says that Mr. Jenkins would take away miners\u2019 black lung benefits. Mr. Jenkins accuses Mr. Rahall of supporting a carbon tax that raised electric rates. Fact-checkers have been busy debunking both claims . Some of the antipathy of West Virginians to the White House would seem to defy economic self-interest. Mr. Rahall\u2019s district includes some of the poorest counties in the state, where reliance on food stamps, Medicaid and other federal benefits is high. All would be rolled back under budgets passed by the House\u2019s Republican majority. The coal industry\u2019s long decline is economically complex. When Alpha Natural Resources, one of West Virginia\u2019s largest coal operators, warned 1,100 employees of potential layoffs in July, it blamed a worldwide glut of coal, competition from cheaper natural gas and lower-cost coal from western basins \u2014 as well as Environmental Protection Agency regulations. But in the charged political arena, complexities fade and both sides identify a sole culprit for the industry\u2019s struggles: the administration\u2019s anti-coal regulations. \u201cEveryone knows Obama declared a war on coal. Nick Rahall stands with him,\u201d says a television ad running this month by Freedom Partners Action Fund, a group supported by Charles G. and David H. Koch. Image Evan Jenkins, the Republican nominee. Democrats hold an advantage in registration, but voters have defected over social issues and environmental regulation. Credit Ryan Stone for The New York Times Mr. Rahall and his supporters have tried to turn the tables by attacking Mr. Jenkins\u2019 wealthy backers. \u201cThe Koch brothers coming in here from New York, spending millions trying to elect Evan Jenkins. They\u2019re not welcome, they don\u2019t belong,\u201d a miner says in an ad run by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In a debate last week, Mr. Rahall boasted of \u201cstanding up to my party to stop the overreaching, overzealous, job-killing E.P.A. agenda.\u201d It is a tough argument to win, however, given the president\u2019s desire to leave an environmental legacy of lower carbon emissions from power plants, as proposed by the E.P.A. this year. Mr. Rahall has struggled to explain his vote in 2013 for a budget proposal by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which included a $25 per ton carbon tax. He has said that he does not support a carbon tax and that he voted for the liberal budget blueprint, which badly failed in the House, to make a statement against Representative Paul D. Ryan\u2019s Republican budget, with its many cuts to social programs. That plan passed the House but not the Senate. Mr. Jenkins, who served in the State Legislature as a Democrat before switching parties last year , does not buy it. \u201cThis president has written off West Virginia,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s written off coal, and unfortunately, we\u2019ve got a congressman who has helped him every step of the way.\u201d The air blitz against Mr. Rahall, 65, began nearly a year ago, almost unheard-of so early, when Republican-leaning national groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity \u2014 also supported by the Kochs \u2014 began attacking his vote for the Affordable Care Act. Democratic groups sensed trouble and jumped in to counter the attacks. \u201cWe were effective in at least fighting back,\u201d said Matt Thornton, a spokesman for the House Majority PAC, citing private polls that showed Mr. Rahall rebounding in the spring. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which considers Mr. Rahall one of its top three House targets this year, has pumped more than $2 million into the race. \u201cI think this is the first time people are starting to say maybe we like Nick Rahall but we don\u2019t like what he\u2019s doing in Washington anymore,\u201d said Ian Prior, a spokesman for the Republican campaign committee. Neither side is confident of victory and ads are booked through Election Day, for a total of $13.8 million for the cycle, according to a Democratic group that tracks ad spending. On Saturday, Mr. Jenkins, 54, greeted voters at a celebration of the New River Gorge Bridge, where thousands walked across the impressive structure and watched parachutists drop 876 feet to the riverbed. \u201cI\u2019m Evan Jenkins, running for Congress, hoping for your vote,\u201d the candidate told Nindo Punturi, who was working at one of many vendor booths. \u201cYou\u2019ll probably get it,\u201d Mr. Punturi replied. Kathy McGaha, a retiree, also offered support, saying she did not like Mr. Rahall. \u201cHe voted for everything with O-bummer,\u201d she said. Bernard Meadows, who worked in a coal mine in Mercer County for two decades \u201cuntil they shut it down\u201d in the 1980s, said he knew Mr. Rahall but was leaning in a different direction. \u201cI just think it\u2019s time for a change,\u201d he said. But when Mr. Jenkins approached Charles Treadway, he heard a different opinion. \u201cI\u2019ve been with Rahall for years, and I\u2019ve got to stick with Nick,\u201d said Mr. Treadway, a laid-off miner. He said Mr. Rahall was being blamed unfairly for the troubles of the coal industry. \u201cI put it simply: All you\u2019ve got to do is follow the money,\u201d he said, adding that cheap natural gas prices were the reason many miners were out of work.", "keyword": "West Virginia;Nick J Rahall II;Evan Jenkins;Coal;EPA;2014 Midterm Elections;House races;Congressional elections;US"}
{"id": "ny0123424", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/09/06", "title": "Brother Shoots Brother, Then Kills Himself in Brooklyn", "abstract": "The discord among the three Athanasatos brothers was nearly four decades deep, and it centered on the family\u2019s two-story brick house in Borough Park, Brooklyn. This week, the fraternal discord turned violent, the police said, when one of the brothers, Thomas, 74, turned a homemade firearm on his 63-year-old brother, James, shooting him in the face during a midnight meeting in front of the house. But from there, any resemblance to the story of Cain and Abel fell away. For the Athanasatos family, violence between brothers was not the end of the misfortune, but only the beginning. When an ambulance appeared shortly after 12:35 a.m. on Wednesday, James was sitting on the curb alone, bleeding profusely. Thomas was gone, retiring to the basement unit of the home where he had been living, supported by his family, since 1974. After daybreak, the third Athanasatos brother, George, 58, visited James in the hospital. From James\u2019s lips, George said, he learned that Thomas was the perpetrator. James told George, \u201cThere was no fight; he just shot me,\u201d George recalled in an interview in a hallway at the Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn. With the police in tow Wednesday morning, George went to the home, at 1449 43rd Street, in search of Thomas. George said he had believed Thomas was long gone. \u201cI thought he was on a Greyhound bus headed to Wyoming,\u201d George recalled. Instead, George and the police found him dead in his bed. The Police Department\u2019s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said it appeared Thomas had shot himself in the head with a homemade gun. No note was found, but the reason is hardly beyond the imagination. \u201cThe detectives are working under the premise that Thomas believed he had killed his younger brother,\u201d Mr. Browne said, \u201cand then committed suicide.\u201d The police said they did not know of any previous violence among the brothers. James is likely to lose an eye but is expected to survive, George said. \u201cThe gun was like something from the pilgrim days, like a musket,\u201d George said. \u201cA pipe with a trigger.\u201d The enmity among the brothers runs deep, at least as far back as 1974, George said, when Thomas moved back in with his parents after a failed marriage. During the interview at the hospital, George avoided using his eldest brother\u2019s name, instead calling him \u201cthe bum\u201d or \u201cthe guy in the basement.\u201d \u201cThis guy was mooching off my mother and father for 40 years,\u201d George said. Since 1974, he added, their mother \u201cwas ironing his clothes, taking care of him, giving him an allowance.\u201d Asked whether he felt bad for his deceased brother, George sidestepped the question. \u201cI\u2019m brokenhearted for my brother here,\u201d George said, referring not to Thomas, but to James, who was in the intensive care unit. \u201cJames is the one who feels bad.\u201d But George readily acknowledged that James had a softer heart when it came to Thomas. By 8 p.m. Wednesday, James still did not know that Thomas had committed suicide, George said. And when detectives interviewed James about the shooting, James \u201ctold the detectives he doesn\u2019t know who shot him,\u201d George said, describing James\u2019s effort to shield his brother. \u201cCan you believe this?\u201d The discord between the brothers grew after their mother died in 2009, 11 years after their father. The house now belonged to all three of them, George said. Thomas continued to live in the basement, and his two brothers together continued to pay him a $600 monthly allowance, just as his mother had in her life, George said. The second-story apartment where the mother lived remained just as it was before she died. The first floor and part of the second floor were rented to several tenants, and it was not long before the brothers began to bicker over how Thomas was handling the rent money he collected from them, George said. And Thomas, although he had lived there for decades, was eager to sell the home, while James, a Staten Island real estate agent, felt differently, George said. On Tuesday, Thomas had invited James to the home to discuss their differences, George said. But when James arrived around 11:30 p.m., there was no rehashing of an old argument. \u201cI think he got sick of waiting\u201d for James to sell the house, George said of Thomas. \u201cMaybe he thought enough is enough.\u201d", "keyword": "Athanasatos James;Athanasatos Thomas;Borough Park (NYC);Suicides and Suicide Attempts;Murders and Attempted Murders;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0142784", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2008/11/06", "title": "Apprentice Hopes to Return Utah to B.C.S. Glory", "abstract": "Brian Johnson went to the University of Utah from Houston as a 17-year-old in 2004. He spent the summer before his freshman year sleeping on a couch in the dingy off-campus apartment of Alex Smith, then the Utes\u2019 starting quarterback. Johnson received simple but specific instructions from Dan Mullen, the Utes\u2019 quarterbacks coach at the time: \u201cFollow Alex, and do everything that he does.\u201d Five years later, Johnson is still trying to follow Mullen\u2019s advice. Johnson has led No. 10 Utah to a 9-0 record, and if the Utes beat No. 11 Texas Christian on Thursday, they would be on the cusp of a berth in a Bowl Championship Series game. Johnson said this year\u2019s team is similar to the 2004 Utes, who ran through the Mountain West and crushed Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl in what became a model for teams outside the six major conferences on how to crash through college football\u2019s glass B.C.S. ceiling. \u201cIt\u2019s a great opportunity for my career to come full circle,\u201d Johnson said. Though his career has been pockmarked by injuries, Johnson\u2019s senior season has been hallmarked by his efficiency and his leadership. He has 14 touchdowns and has completed a career-best 66.7 percent of his passes. Much has changed from 2004. Coach Urban Meyer and Mullen left for Florida and Smith exited to become the No. 1 pick in the 2005 N.F.L. draft. But some things are the same. Kyle Whittingham, the defensive coordinator of the 2004 team, is the coach, some of the strategies are similar, and the Utes are led by a poised and intellectual quarterback. \u201cHe\u2019s our team leader and is having a big year for us, much like Alex Smith was our team leader in 2004,\u201d Whittingham said. Johnson\u2019s recruiting has similarly humble roots to Smith, who was so lightly regarded as a football prospect that his mother begged him to attend an Ivy League university. When Mullen, now Florida\u2019s offensive coordinator, went to Houston to recruit Johnson at Robert E. Lee High, he came back and told Meyer he found their future quarterback. \u201cGreat,\u201d Meyer said. \u201cShow me the film.\u201d There was one problem. Johnson did not have film. In the previous three seasons, he had been the seldom-used backup to Drew Tate, who went on to a successful career at Iowa. But Mullen liked enough of what he saw of Johnson in a spring practice that he promised to come back in September to see a game. Mullen watched Johnson coolly orchestrate the offense, make good decisions and efficient throws. A scholarship offer soon followed. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t that highly recruited,\u201d Meyer said. \u201cDan Mullen did a good job finding him. He\u2019s not that big or that fast. He\u2019s just a heady player that\u2019s a winner.\u201d By the time programs like Illinois, Mississippi State and Louisiana Tech began recruiting him, he was a Ute. Mullen laughed when recalling the story. \u201cHe was committed to us before anyone knew who he was,\u201d he said. So a week after he graduated from high school and three months after his 17th birthday, Johnson arrived in Salt Lake City for his apprenticeship. He calls that time one of the highlights of his college career, as Smith guided him through off-season workouts and helped teach him the nuances of studying film. \u201cI was just trying to do everything that he did,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cCome in and be like a sponge.\u201d When Johnson made his official visit to Utah, he was just 16, and Smith joked that he felt like a baby sitter. Despite the age gap, the two became fast friends, and they still talk every week. But Johnson said there were some bumps once he arrived that first summer. Once, he borrowed Smith\u2019s car, a beat-up Suzuki, and the alarm started blaring as he arrived at work. \u201cEveryone thought I was robbing the car,\u201d Johnson recalled with a laugh. \u201cIt was loud and obnoxious and went off for a really long time. I finally got Alex on the phone and he told me reach under the steering wheel and jiggle some wires. It was complex, it was crazy.\u201d Johnson has also endured tough moments on the field. He won the starting job as a sophomore in 2005 and ended up as the second-team all-Mountain West quarterback. But a knee injury that November against New Mexico knocked him out for the rest of the season and forced him to redshirt in 2006. \u201cWe could have played him, but he was vulnerable to another injury\u201d said the Utah offensive coordinator, Andy Ludwig. \u201cA big part was talking about how good this group would be his senior year. He handled it with class and got bigger and stronger.\u201d When Johnson returned in 2007, he separated his shoulder in the opener and missed the next two games. He came back to be named the most valuable offensive player in a Poinsettia Bowl victory against Navy. This season, the Utes are aiming higher. They beat Michigan in Ann Arbor to open the season, and Johnson led them to an epic comeback against Oregon State. Ludwig, who calls Johnson the smartest quarterback he has coached, recalled talking to Johnson via headset in the waning minutes of the Oregon State game, with the Utes trailing by 11. Johnson became annoyed when he saw fans headed for the exit. \u201cWhere are they going?\u201d he asked Ludwig. \u201cThey\u2019re going to miss us come back and win.\u201d Sure enough, Johnson hit Bradon Godfrey on a 25-yard touchdown pass and ran in the 2-point conversion to tie the score. The Utah defense held Oregon State to a three-and-out and Johnson got Utah in position to set up Louie Sakoda\u2019s 37-yard field goal as time expired. \u201cI think that\u2019s been a strong point of my individual game for a long time,\u201d Johnson said, \u201cbeing poised in tough situations.\u201d He will be in another tough situation Thursday, as T.C.U.\u2019s defense ranks second nationally, behind Southern California, yielding an average of 214.5 yards a game. After T.C.U., Utah has games left at San Diego State and at home against No. 17 Brigham Young to complete the season. Three victories separate Johnson from ending his career in perfect symmetry. \u201cJust to see him out there and leading the team is great,\u201d Smith said. \u201cHopefully they can finish it out. I\u2019m happy that he\u2019s been able to finish off his college career right.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Utah;Football;College Athletics;Johnson Brian"}
{"id": "ny0152254", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/01", "title": "The Secret Curse of Expert Archers", "abstract": "There is an affliction so feared by elite archers that many in the sport refuse to even say its name. Archery coaches who specialize in treating the problem are sworn not to reveal the identities of archers in its grip, even though they estimate that 90 percent of high-level competitors will fall victim at least once in their careers. Target panic, as the condition is known, causes crack shots to suddenly lose control of their bows and their composure. Mysteriously, sufferers start releasing the bow the instant they see the target, sabotaging any chance of a gold-medal shot. Others freeze up and cannot release at all. Target panic is akin to the yips in baseball and golf, when accomplished athletes can no longer make a simple throw to first base or stroke an easy putt. The results can be mortifying, and archery is filled with tales of those who have caught the curse, never to shoot again. The problem has spawned a cottage industry of coaches, books and specialized accessories that claim to cure target panic. \u201cIt\u2019s devastating,\u201d said Terry Wunderle, a professional archery coach whose son, Vic, is an archer on this year\u2019s United States Olympic team. \u201cFor someone who has a good case of target panic, I could offer them a thousand dollars if they would just pull the bow back and let the pin float over the bull\u2019s-eye,\u201d Wunderle said, referring to the way archers let their arrows gently bob as they wait for the perfect shot. \u201cI guarantee you, I would not lose the thousand dollars. They can\u2019t do it.\u201d Few admit to being sufferers themselves. \u201cMost shooters will deny that they have it,\u201d said Len Cardinale, an archery coach who said he had treated \u201chundreds and hundreds\u201d of cases of target panic since the 1970s. \u201cIt\u2019s more convenient to say they need a new bow, they have to switch arrows or stand differently.\u201d Wunderle, who himself admitted to battling target panic from time to time, would not reveal whether any of the Olympic archers he coached had faced target panic. \u201cI would not say it if I knew it,\u201d said Wunderle, who also did not want his son interviewed on the subject with the Beijing Olympics a week away. \u201cIt\u2019s like being an alcoholic. They don\u2019t say much about it. They don\u2019t fess up to it.\u201d Although few academic studies have been conducted on target panic, several sports psychologists said the condition was nearly identical to the much-analyzed yips in golf and other sports. Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino were notorious sufferers; so was Chuck Knoblauch, the former Yankees second baseman who discovered he could no longer throw to first base. Some say Shaquille O\u2019Neal\u2019s dismal free-throw record is due to a case of the yips. While nearly everyone agrees that the problem is primarily psychological, the latest research suggests that, in some cases, the problem might also be neurological. Sufferers might actually have a disorder known as focal dystonia, a common affliction of musicians caused when the neurons that guide a particular movement \u2014 be it aiming a bow or sinking a putt \u2014 become worn from overuse. \u201cIt\u2019s like a hiccup in the wrist,\u201d said Aynsley M. Smith, research director of the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center, which has conducted three studies on the yips in golf since 2000. Her research, as well as that of a team from New Zealand, has concluded that there are two types of yips \u2014 one that is purely psychological and another that is primarily neurological. In both cases, two opposing muscle groups contract at the same time, leading to what Smith and other sport scientists call a \u201cdouble pull.\u201d Even those with a neurological disorder can develop anxiety that makes the problem worse, said Robert Bell, a sports psychologist at Ball State University who specializes in golf. \u201cIt kind of gets into the mind that this could happen, and that\u2019s where the anxiety and the stress come in,\u201d he said. One of the worst cases of target panic that Wunderle treated was in 16-year-old Joey Hunt. Hunt, who has been shooting archery \u201cjust about my whole life,\u201d competes with a compound bow, which uses pulleys and levers to flex the bow back compared with the recurve bow used in the Olympics. When Hunt was 9 or 10, he discovered he had lost his preternatural ability to send arrows thunking into the target\u2019s gold center. \u201cI would start to bring the bow down, and as soon as it got anywhere near the target, I would click it right off, right then and there,\u201d said Hunt, who lives in Minot, Me. \u201cIt just takes over your mind, and it\u2019s hard to concentrate on other parts of shooting.\u201d Target panic, also known as gold fever because sufferers become obsessed with hitting the gold center, is rich in lore, and online message boards are filled with cautionary testimonials from those who have had the disease. \u201cI could draw the bow without the arrow and had no trouble holding on the dot at all,\u201d wrote a victim on the message board at archerytalk.com , referring to aiming at the center of the target. \u201cBut put an arrow on the string and Satan himself was holding it off ... strange stuff some of us endure to play this game!\u201d Lanny Bassham, a former Olympic rifle shooter and mental coach whose clients include the Olympic archer Brady Ellison, said the archery community had a peculiar obsession with target panic, which he noted had a horrifying ring. \u201cThe words target panic have induced an unnecessary amount of severity and concern about this condition among archers,\u201d he said. \u201cI think if they had a better word for it, they\u2019d have a lot less problem trying to cure it.\u201d Many archers and their coaches refuse to say target panic. Those words are forbidden around the Nichols household, which is home to the Olympic archer Jennifer Nichols and her younger sister, Amanda, also a world-class competitor. \u201cWe try to stay away from the labels that are put on things by people in the archery industry because once you feel you\u2019ve got that label, it\u2019s hard to stay away from it,\u201d said their father, Brent Nichols. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to hear those things.\u201d Theories vary on how to cure target panic. Some switch their shooting hand, or change their grip slightly \u2014 techniques that have also proved successful in golf. Others use visualization techniques and positive reinforcement. Wunderle advises his clients to imagine seeing and feeling what a good shot is, without focusing on aiming the arrow. \u201cDo not focus on results,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you focus on results, it builds anxiety. And anxiety is the kiss of death.\u201d One of the most popular cures is to entirely remove the target. Sufferers instead practice shooting at a blank target, sometimes for weeks at a time, to retrain the mind. \u201cThe empty bale restores your confidence in your subconscious,\u201d said Bernie Pellerite, author of the book \u201cIdiot Proof Archery\u201d and a self-described expert on target panic. \u201cNobody flinches or punches or chokes on an empty bale.\u201d Hunt spent weeks shooting at blank targets, but he also purchased a special release for his bow, which helped retrain him when to shoot. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to engrave in your head when you should shoot,\u201d he said. \u201cYou just pull it back, let the safety off, and pull it until it decides to go. Then you get used to every shot being perfect.\u201d Hunt placed second in his age group at the Junior Olympic Archery Development national championships in Oklahoma City earlier this month. His target panic, he said, had been cured. For now.", "keyword": "Archery;Olympic Games;Sports Medicine Center;Mayo Clinic;Thomas Katie;United States;Olympic Games (2008)"}
{"id": "ny0290432", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2016/01/19", "title": "Swansea Moves Out of Danger", "abstract": "With Francesco Guidolin newly appointed as its coach, Swansea moved out of the relegation zone with a 1-0 home win over Watford in the Premier League. Guidolin, 60, whose hiring was confirmed earlier Monday and who was in the stands at Liberty Stadium, will work alongside Alan Curtis, who took over as interim manager after Garry Monk was fired last month. \u25a0 Alessandria came from behind to win at second-division Spezia, 2-1, in an unlikely Italian Cup quarterfinal. Alessandria, the first third-division club to reach the last four since Bari in 1984, will face A.C. Milan. \u25a0 The Nigerian team Enyimba said that players and officials had been robbed at gunpoint on their way to a preseason tournament but that no one had been hurt. (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)", "keyword": "Soccer;Coaches;Swansea City Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0071880", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2015/03/09", "title": "\u2018Not There\u2019 Campaign Removes Women From Ads for International Women\u2019s Day", "abstract": "Women across New York had vanished. Rosie the Riveter disappeared from her iconic poster in a bus shelter. Serena Williams faded from a giant Beats billboard in Times Square. Gone was Scarlett Johansson from the March cover of Cond\u00e9 Nast\u2019s W magazine. On Sunday, the Clinton Foundation co-opted some 40 existing advertisements, posters and other media, cutting out the women as part of a campaign to call attention to gender inequality. The stunt, the work of the advertising agency Droga5, was intended to drive online traffic to a report by the foundation\u2019s No Ceilings initiative on the status of women and girls across the globe. \u201cThis is about putting a really important issue in front of people,\u201d said Katie Dowd, director of digital strategy at the Clinton Foundation. \u201cWe\u2019re really trying to create a moment that feels meaningful.\u201d The campaign and the release of the No Ceilings reports coincided with International Women\u2019s Day, observed annually on March 8. The project also marked the 20 years since Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke on women\u2019s rights at a United Nations conference in Beijing. The Clinton Foundation, founded by former President Bill Clinton, is also using online video, radio and social media to represent the idea that women are \u201cnot there\u201d yet in terms of gender equality. Female celebrities, including Cameron Diaz and Amy Poehler, star in a video on the campaign\u2019s website, Not-There.org, that explains the effort. The media company iHeartMedia removed women\u2019s voices from well-known songs on 186 of its radio stations nationwide. The foundation also put up short videos on the photo-messaging app Snapchat and encouraged users of social media to change their profile pictures to a woman\u2019s blank silhouette. Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea Clinton blacked out their Twitter profile photos as part of the campaign. The sweeping strategy reflects pressure in the advertising industry to create big, in-your-face campaigns in the hopes of slicing through the barrage of media clutter. To make an impact, marketers are willing to go to extremes to reach a consumer base that already contends with a constant flood of content. \u201cWe want to create content that people actually want to engage with,\u201d said Susie Nam, general manager of Droga5. \u201cWe don\u2019t want this to be transient.\u201d Along with Cond\u00e9 Nast and Beats, several other companies gave the foundation permission to replace their existing ads with modified ones, including the consumer-products giant Unilever, which owns the Dove and Tresemm\u00e9 brands, and Under Armour, a Droga5 client. The media space for the stunt was donated or provided at a discount. The foundation covered the cost of printing the altered material. So-called purpose-driven marketing campaigns have taken off in recent years, as companies look for new ways to connect with their consumers, said Jim Stengel, a business consultant who previously worked as chief marketing officer at Procter & Gamble. And gender equality is certainly a hot topic. Just last week, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of the book \u201cLean In,\u201d introduced a new campaign with the National Basketball Association called Lean In Together that encourages men to stand alongside women to promote gender equality. \u201cEverybody is trying to understand how to lead with a sense of an inspiring purpose at the heart of their brand,\u201d Mr. Stengel said. The Not There campaign \u201cis a great example of a client and these brands looking for a really big idea that breaks through.\u201d For Unilever, whose Dove brand in particular has had a number of successful ad campaigns directed at women , deciding to help the Clinton Foundation spread its message was easy, said Gina Boswell, the executive vice president for personal care for Unilever North America. \u201cIt really comes from a responsibility to take action, honestly,\u201d Ms. Boswell said, adding that she hoped adopting the campaign\u2019s message would reflect well on the company itself, whose customers are largely women. By Sunday evening, the Not There website had been viewed at least 104,680 times, according to the foundation. McNally Jackson Books, an independent bookstore in Lower Manhattan, had set up a window display of Cond\u00e9 Nast magazines, including Vogue, Glamour and Allure, with women erased from their covers. The afternoon light glinted off the glass, making the Not There web address somewhat difficult to see. Inside, a small stack of modified magazines sat on a table in the cafe area. None were for sale.", "keyword": "Clinton Foundation;Droga5;Women's rights,Feminism;Outdoor Advertising;advertising,marketing;Women and Girls;2016 Presidential Election"}
{"id": "ny0203392", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2009/08/31", "title": "Sam Zell, Who Led Tribune Into Bankruptcy, May Remain", "abstract": "The Tribune Company could well emerge from bankruptcy this fall with much of its current top management intact, according to people briefed on restructuring plans, but it remains unclear whether that might include the top dog himself, Samuel Zell , the chairman and chief executive who took the company private. From the day Tribune filed for bankruptcy in December, it has been clear that Mr. Zell\u2019s $315 million investment and warrants to buy a large share of the company would almost certainly be wiped out. He is being sued on multiple fronts over the $8.2 billion deal that took the company private in December 2007; he has called it a mistake and \u201cthe deal from hell\u201d; and some people familiar with the plans are guessing that, when the dust settles, he will be out. But other people close to the restructuring talks, speaking anonymously because the discussions were supposed to remain private, caution that the major creditors have not yet given a clear indication whether they want Mr. Zell to leave or remain in some capacity. Nor has Mr. Zell said clearly whether he wants to go, though he is used to being the man in charge, and his authority would be diminished under new owners. \u201cI think the jury is out on Sam,\u201d one of them said. \u201cThat is going to be a point of discussion.\u201d Mr. Zell, 67, made billions in real estate by buying depressed assets where others saw more risk than value, and knowing when to sell them. But that touch faltered when, with the Tribune deal, he moved into an unfamiliar field. Mr. Zell is not granting interviews, according to Tribune, one of the nation\u2019s largest media companies. Its properties include some two dozen television stations and a string of some of the most important newspapers in the country, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. People briefed on the talks say that the company and leading creditors could agree by September or October on a restructuring plan that would wipe out more than $12 billion of the company\u2019s roughly $13 billion in debt. Such a plan would need the approval of the bankruptcy court in Delaware. In 2007, a group of major banks lent Tribune about $8 billion to go private, but they have since sold much of that debt to other banks and investment firms. Under the anticipated restructuring plan, it is the holders of that senior secured debt \u2014 first in line for some repayment \u2014 who would end up owning the bulk of the company. That, too, was considered the likely outcome from the start \u2014 in fact, the bankruptcy filing last December was in part an attempt to protect the interest of those lenders as Tribune\u2019s cash reserves dwindled. Mr. Zell told senior secured creditors then that, in essence, the company was in their hands, and that making a scheduled payment on junior debt would leave less for them, and asked what they wanted to do. They endorsed bankruptcy. Randy Michaels, the chief operating officer installed by Mr. Zell, recently sent a memo to employees saying that for the most part, management and the lenders agreed on how to run the company. \u201cWhile the ownership structure of the company is likely to change, current operating management is committed, and intends to remain in place during and after the restructuring,\u201d he wrote. That may have contained an element of bravado, but people briefed on the matter said the major creditors were not unhappy with the current team. \u201cThey\u2019re pretty pleased with the way things are running,\u201d one said. For a few more months, at least, Tribune will remain in the limbo of bankruptcy, unable to make any major moves without court approval and uncertain about who its future leader will be. Having stopped payment on its long-term debt, Tribune has continued to cut costs, reached a tentative deal to sell the Chicago Cubs baseball team for $845 million, and built its cash cushion from $317 million when it filed for bankruptcy last December to $743 million by the end of June. But Mr. Zell\u2019s maneuvering also contributed to more than a year of delays in selling the Cubs and, according to some analysts, may have resulted in a lower price than Tribune would have gotten when the economy was stronger. He sought to sell the team and its home, Wrigley Field, separately \u2014 the Cubs to a private buyer, the stadium to a government agency and possibly the naming rights to the stadium to a third buyer. But that strategy ran into trouble, and Tribune eventually reverted to an earlier, simpler plan to sell them as a package. It was also Mr. Zell who engineered the complex deal to take the company private, which nearly tripled the company\u2019s debt and left it with too little free cash flow to weather a sharp drop in advertising. A group of employees sued in September 2008, saying that the deal was certain to fail. Last week, a group of Tribune bondholders did the same. Whether either suit can upend the sort of restructuring plan sought by Tribune and its major lenders, or lower Mr. Zell\u2019s chance of remaining in charge, remains to be seen. A spate of high-dollar, high-leverage deals in 2006 and 2007 put hundreds of American newspapers, including many of the biggest, under new ownership \u2014 and in most cases put the new owners in financial jeopardy. Mr. Zell\u2019s Tribune takeover was the biggest of those deals, it was one of the last, and it was the first to land in bankruptcy. Since then, Philadelphia Newspapers, owner of that city\u2019s Inquirer and Daily News; The Minneapolis Star Tribune; and others have filed for bankruptcy, while some other publishers have had to restructure their debts to remain solvent.", "keyword": "Zell Samuel;Tribune Co;Bankruptcies;Newspapers;Executives and Management"}
{"id": "ny0183952", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/12/13", "title": "From a Critic of Tribunals to Top Judge", "abstract": "Back in 2002, a master\u2019s degree candidate at the Naval War College wrote a paper on the Bush administration\u2019s plan to use military commissions to try Guant\u00e1namo suspects, concluding that \u201ceven a good military tribunal is a bad idea.\u201d It drew little notice at the time, but the paper has gained a second life because of its author\u2019s big promotion: Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann of the Marines is now the chief judge of the military commissions at the naval base in Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba. The system, Judge Kohlmann wrote in 2002, would face criticism for the \u201capparent lack of independence\u201d of military judges and would have \u201ccredibility problems,\u201d the very argument made by Guant\u00e1namo\u2019s critics. He said it would be better to try terrorism suspects in federal courts in the United States. \u201cUnnecessary use of military tribunals in the face of reasonable international criticism,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis an ill-advised move.\u201d The paper is becoming a reference work of sorts in the curious history of Guant\u00e1namo, which includes a number of former officials who have become outspoken critics, including several former intelligence officers and a former chief military prosecutor. Judge Kohlmann may be the only one who has switched the order, first delivering a fervent attack on Guant\u00e1namo and later becoming one of its officials. The existence of his paper, written as an independent study project, has been noted occasionally in court in Guant\u00e1namo and elsewhere, though detainees\u2019 advocates say it has become more noteworthy since his appointment as chief judge in March. But the details of his arguments escaped wide public notice until a few weeks ago, when David Glazier, an associate professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, came across the paper in a mass of newly released documents from a case Judge Kohlmann handled in March. The documents showed that defense lawyers had asked Judge Kohlmann about the paper in written questions. \u201cI chose the topic because it was in the news at the time,\u201d he explained. This week, Mr. Glazier said he had been fascinated. \u201cMy reaction was, this is pretty amazing, that even the chief judge of the commissions has recognized the horrendous problems of the commission process,\u201d he said. A few weeks ago, Professor Glazier sent an e-mail message to a group of human rights advocates. He included a link to the Pentagon Web site where the paper could be found in the newly released records of the war crimes prosecution of a former detainee, David Hicks. Soon there were new readers for Judge Kohlmann\u2019s five-year-old paper. \u201cIt seemed ironic in the extreme,\u201d said David H. Remes, a detainees\u2019 lawyer, who said he learned of the paper from Mr. Glazier\u2019s message. Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who has been an observer at Guant\u00e1namo commission proceedings, read the paper at the request of a reporter and said it was \u201cperplexing\u201d that someone who seemed to agree with much that the critics have said about the Guant\u00e1namo legal system was now helping to run it. As to the judge\u2019s arguments, Mr. Jaffer said, \u201cHe was absolutely right.\u201d Pentagon officials declined to discuss Judge Kohlmann\u2019s paper this week, but in the past they have said the commissions give detainees many important protections, including the right to be represented by a lawyer. Pentagon spokesmen said Judge Kohlmann declined to comment, and they said the telephone number for his chambers could not be revealed for security reasons. Judge Kohlmann, a 49-year-old New Jersey native, is a decorated career officer with a down-to-business demeanor. He was a military judge in the first military commission system before it was struck down by the Supreme Court last year. He was appointed the chief judge in March by the Pentagon, after Congress created a new military commission system to replace the old. Questioned about his paper by defense lawyers in March, he said he could not recall whether he had received a grade. Mr. Jaffer said he would have given the judge an A. The paper was prickly at times, referring to Bush administration \u201cspinmeisters\u201d and dismissing the argument that the new challenges of fighting terrorism meant that civilian judges and juries would be endangered by federal trials. Prior terrorism and organized crime cases, he wrote, showed that \u201cthe existing United States criminal justice system does not have to be put aside simply because the potential defendants have scary friends.\u201d Judge Kohlmann has not disavowed the paper. But the documents show that in March, perhaps illustrating the pressures of responsibility, he told defense lawyers for Mr. Hicks that he wanted to correct a misstatement in his paper. He had been incorrect, he said, when he wrote that President Bush\u2019s original order establishing military commissions \u201cessentially states\u201d that fundamental fairness would not be a part of commission trials. \u201cThat I now believe to be incorrect,\u201d he said. One of Mr. Hicks\u2019s lawyers, Joshua L. Dratel, said this week that Judge Kohlmann had seemingly reconciled his past as a critic of the system with his new role as one of its managers. \u201cHe seemed to me,\u201d Mr. Dratel said, \u201clike a guy who was given a mandate to make the system work, and he was not going to let anyone interfere with it.\u201d", "keyword": "Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba);Kohlmann Ralph H.;Courts;Defense Department"}
{"id": "ny0167491", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/01/07", "title": "Days of Rising Interest Rates May Be Numbered", "abstract": "RARELY do new years and significant changes coincide as they did this week. The year was less than a week old when it emerged that the Federal Reserve appeared to be easing off the brakes on the economy, the airline industry might be poised for revival and traditional company pensions took a significant step closer to extinction. RATE SHIFT? Federal Reserve policy makers may be close to ending 18 months of raising interest rates, according to minutes of a meeting last month of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. The suggestion spurred a rally in the stock market and sent the dollar lower against European and Asian currencies. The minutes said \"most members\" of the committee agreed that \"given the information now in hand, the number of additional firming steps required probably would not be large.\" Firming steps are rate increases. The Fed has raised its main short-term rate in increments of one quarter of a percentage point at each of its last 13 meetings, increasing it to 4.25 percent from 1 percent. Committee members noted that wages have risen modestly despite strong economic growth, and that last year's spike in energy prices had only a \"muted\" effect on prices over all. The change came as the Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, neared the end of an 18-year tenure. Ben S. Bernanke is scheduled to become chairman on Feb. 1, assuming the Senate confirms him this month. GAINING ALTITUDE -- Less than two years after it started low-fare service from its base at Dulles International Airport near Washington, Independence Air stopped flying Thursday and took steps to liquidate. The airline filed for bankruptcy protection in November, but it was unable to line up fresh financing that would let it cope with higher fuel costs and increased competition. While that is bad news for the airline's 2,600 employees, it may be good news for other domestic carriers. Fewer planes in the air could ease the pressure on airlines to sell seats at a loss, analysts said, just as fuel costs are easing. That combination could help the airlines move back into the black after four years of losses that total about $30 billion. Analysts expect five airlines to return to profit this year: American, Continental, Alaska, JetBlue and AirTran. Profit at Southwest, which remained profitable through the slump, is likely to increase 15 percent this year, analysts said. PENSION OVERBOARD -- In a move that could prompt still more big companies to abandon traditional defined-benefit pension plans, I.B.M. said it would freeze pension benefits for its American employees in 2008 and offer them only a 401(k) retirement plan after then. With the announcement, I.B.M. joined a growing number of big employers -- including Verizon Communications, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and Sears -- that have frozen their pension plans. In doing so, the companies no longer let their employees build up retirement benefits to reflect higher pay and additional years of employment. Benefits already earned are unaffected. At I.B.M., the change will affect 117,000 employees in the United States. It will not cut the benefits being paid to 125,000 American retirees. I.B.M. projected that it would save $2.5 billion to $3 billion over the next five years as it carries out the change worldwide. MEDIA MAKEOVER -- Dow Jones & Company, which has been struggling financially since the bursting of the dot-com bubble began to bleed advertising from its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, chose its chief operating officer, Richard F. Zannino, as its next chief executive. He will succeed Peter R. Kann, who is expected to continue as chairman of the board until the annual meeting in April 2007, the year in which he turns 65 and faces mandatory retirement. His wife, Karen Elliott House, the publisher of The Journal, was considered the other leading candidate to succeed him. After not being chosen, Ms. House said she would leave the company. Dow Jones's profit fell 16 percent in the third quarter after The Journal's new weekend edition increased costs, although the company said its fourth-quarter earnings would be better than expected. The Journal's managing editor, Paul E. Steiger, is also facing retirement; with the changes, it is not clear who will choose his successor. HEALTHSOUTH HANGOVER -- Richard M. Scrushy, the former chief executive of the HealthSouth Corporation, was acquitted of fraud charges in a federal trial last year, but a state judge in Alabama said he must repay $47.8 million in bonuses that HealthSouth awarded him for achieving revenue goals; some of the sales used to compute revenue later turned out to be false. The ruling by Judge Allwin E. Horn III came in a shareholder lawsuit filed in 2002, before Mr. Scrushy was found not guilty on charges that he directed a $2.7 billion accounting fraud at HealthSouth, a nationwide chain of rehabilitation hospitals and clinics. Mr. Scrushy, who said he planned to appeal Judge Horn's decision, faces unrelated federal charges that he bribed former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama. He pleaded not guilty to that charge. TAKEOVER FIGHT -- In a rare hostile takeover by a European company in the United States, BASF, the German chemicals maker, offered $4.9 billion for the Engelhard Company of Iselin, N.J., which developed the catalytic converter and specializes in manufacturing pollution-control systems. Engelhard rebuffed the $37-a-share offer, which represented almost a 23 percent premium over its year-end stock price. Still, Engelhard shares jumped to $38, suggesting that investors think someone will take over the company. BASF said that if it was successful in buying Engelhard, it did not anticipate big job cuts. MOST VIEWED -- Following are the most-viewed business news articles on nytimes.com from Dec. 31, 2005, through Jan. 6, 2006: 1. At 150 Edgars Lane, Changing the Idea of Home 2. Credit Cards With Rewards Are Worth a Look 3. David Pogue: A Marriage Not Made in Heaven 4. A Bit of Doodling About a Tax-Cut Danger 5. Google and Yahoo Aim at Another Screen Links are at nytimes.com/business.", "keyword": "UNITED STATES ECONOMY;STOCKS AND BONDS"}
{"id": "ny0239898", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/12/07", "title": "Population Up 25 Million or So", "abstract": "The government estimated Monday that the country\u2019s population grew to somewhere between roughly 306 million and 313 million over the last decade, acknowledging uncertainty due to rapid shifts in immigration . In 2000, the official census count was 281.4 million. Hispanics accounted for all the growth in the youth population in the last decade. In 2000, Hispanics made up 17 percent of the population under age 20. They now represent 22 percent to 25 percent of that age group. Without Hispanics, the number of young people in the United States would have declined between 2000 and 2010. Based on the estimates, the non-Hispanic youth population declined between 1.25 million and 2.9 million.", "keyword": "Census;Population;Hispanic-Americans;Immigration and Emigration;United States"}
{"id": "ny0212426", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2017/01/23", "title": "Quandary in South Sudan: Should It Lose Its Hard-Won Independence?", "abstract": "NAIROBI, Kenya \u2014 Tens of thousands of civilians dead, countless children on the verge of starvation, millions of dollars stolen by officials, oil wells blown up, food aid hijacked and as many as 70 percent of women sheltering in camps raped \u2014 mostly by the nation\u2019s soldiers and police officers. Just a few years ago, South Sudan accomplished what seemed impossible: independence . Of all the quixotic rebel armies fighting for freedom in Africa, the South Sudanese actually won. Global powers, including the United States , rallied to their side, helping to create the world\u2019s newest country in 2011, a supposed solution to decades of conflict and suffering. Now, with millions of its people hungry or displaced by civil war , a radical question has emerged: Should South Sudan lose its independence? Image South Sudanese celebrated at a ceremony marking the independence of their country in Juba in 2011. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times As international frustrations and worries grow, some momentum is growing for a proposal for outside powers to take over South Sudan and run it as a trusteeship until things calm down. Several academics and prominent opposition figures support the idea , citing East Timor, Kosovo and Bosnia as places where, they say, it has worked, though of course there are plenty of cautionary tales where outside intervention failed, like Somalia and Iraq. The Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani recently floated a plan in which the African Union would take the lead in setting up a transitional government for South Sudan. Ideally, Mr. Mamdani said, none of the current South Sudanese politicians who have helped drag their nation into civil war would be able to participate, and the trusteeship would last around six years, requiring United Nations support. Image Independence ceremony celebrations. Global powers, including the United States, rallied to South Sudan\u2019s side, helping to create the world\u2019s newest country in 2011, a supposed solution to decades of conflict and suffering. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times \u201cThe response to the crisis will need to be as extraordinary as the crisis,\u201d he said. But there is one not-so-little problem. Many South Sudanese might not go for it. According to James Solomon Padiet, a lecturer at Juba University, most members of the nation\u2019s largest ethnic group \u2014 the Dinka, who include South Sudan\u2019s embattled president, Salva Kiir \u2014 are adamantly set against an international takeover. While smaller ethnic groups would welcome it, he said, the powerful Dinka see it as an affront to their sovereignty. For that matter, so does Mr. Padiet, a soft-spoken scholar who is not a Dinka. He called trusteeship \u201coffensive\u201d because South Sudan has a potential crop of good leaders waiting in the wings who haven\u2019t had a chance to rule. Still, Mr. Padiet conceded, the country desperately needs help. Image Friends and relatives buried a Nuer soldier fighting on the side of the South Sudan government after a battle with opposition forces in 2014. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times \u201cAs we speak now,\u201d he said, \u201cSouth Sudan is at crossroads of disintegration or total fragility.\u201d Clashes have spread to new areas of the country, and ethnic-based militias are mobilizing in the bush. It\u2019s all a staggering plunge from the country\u2019s birth. I, along with hundreds of other journalists, was standing in a crowd that felt like a million people on July 9, 2011, the insanely hot day when South Sudan broke off from Sudan . The sense of pride, sacrifice, hope and jubilation will be hard to forget. For decades, South Sudanese rebels had battled the better-armed, Arab-dominated central government of Sudan. They fought in malarial swamps and on sweltering savannas, incredibly hostile environments where it\u2019s hard to survive, let alone wage a guerrilla war on a shoestring. The South Sudanese had absorbed bombings and massacres. The Arabs stole their children and turned them into slaves. As a result, many South Sudanese were scattered across the four corners of the earth \u2014 the famous Lost Boys, but also many Lost Girls, ripped from their families and forced to flee to cold foreign places that they had never envisioned. Image Soldiers with the Sudanese People\u2019s Liberation Army marching toward the town of Bentiu in 2014 in an effort to retake the town from rebel forces loyal to Riek Marchar. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times On independence day, South Sudan\u2019s capital, Juba, partied until dawn. Lost Boys swigged White Bull (the local beer) next to hardened guerrillas bobbing their heads to reggae rap. All around us, there seemed to be a real appreciation of what had been achieved and what lay ahead. Most important, there was unity. That crumbled quickly , undermined by old political rivalries , ethnic tension and a greed for South Sudan\u2019s one main export: oil. The fault line was the most predictable one, the Dinka versus the Nuer. The two biggest ethnic groups had alternated between allies and enemies throughout South Sudan\u2019s liberation wars. Starting in December 2013, after a breakdown between their political leaders, who not so long ago had been hailed as heroes, Nuer and Dinka militias began killing each other and civilians across the country, especially in ethnically mixed areas. Image A billboard with pictures of President Salva Kiir of South Sudan, left, and the opposition leader, Riek Machar, in Juba in 2016. Credit Albert Gonzalez Farran/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Women were raped. Children were burned to death. Some people were even forced at gunpoint to eat the flesh of their dead relatives. The horror has been meticulously documented. Still, it goes on. For years, the United Nations has stationed thousands of peacekeepers in the country, but often they have not intervened. In 2012, shortly after independence, I rushed to a remote town, Pibor, where hundreds had just been massacred by an ethnic militia. I saw one woman who was literally holding her arm together \u2014 she had been blasted by a Kalashnikov \u2014 as she sat in a medical tent that smelled of decaying flesh. She stared at the wall, not making a murmur. I interviewed peacekeepers who told me how they had watched civilians get shot right in front of them, yet the peacekeepers felt too scared to raise their rifles. Image United Nations peacekeeping troops outside a civilian protection site in Juba in 2016. Credit Albert Gonzalez Farran/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images United Nations officials in Juba have been excoriated for failing to spring into action and effectively step between Mr. Kiir and Riek Machar, the former vice president and the most influential Nuer, as their rivalry intensified and grew into nationwide bloodshed. This is a big reason some people think an international trusteeship will never work. \u201cHaving completely failed in the international state-building project, now we\u2019re going to move to an international takeover? With what army?\u201d asked John Prendergast, who has been working on South Sudan for 30 years and co-founded the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. \u201cWould the same international bureaucrats that undertook massive state-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan come to Juba to lead another failed political intervention?\u201d he added. \u201cIt all seems fantastical, doomed and extremely unlikely.\u201d Image A malnourished South Sudanese mother sitting with her son, who was being treated for severe malnourishment and other complications at a tent hospital in Malakal in 2014. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times Other scholars take a middle view. Amir Idris , chairman of Fordham\u2019s African and African-American studies department and a frequent writer on South Sudan, said an international trusteeship should be considered \u2014 but only as a last resort. He says the most important issue is that a new government be built with new people, including academics and technocrats. \u201cSouth Sudan has no chance of transitioning itself to a functioning state unless the edifice of the current leadership is brought down,\u201d he said. Bronwyn Bruton, the deputy director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, called South Sudan\u2019s leaders \u201csuch a disaster.\u201d She said Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar were \u201ccorrupt,\u201d \u201cself-interested\u201d and \u201cwilling to stoke ethnic conflict and commit horrible violence in pursuit of power.\u201d \u201cGenocide is beginning to look inevitable,\u201d she said. \u201cThe situation could hardly be more hopeless.\u201d But she worries that no country has the appetite to spearhead a meaningful intervention. The Obama administration considered several ways to help usher in a political transition, a former administration official said, but eventually concluded it was not feasible. It\u2019s not as if Mr. Kiir or Mr. Machar or their inner circles, who are widely believed to continue to profit from oil and conflict , are going to volunteer to step aside. Thousands of armed men are intensely loyal to them, and even a few friends left in Western capitals make the case that the South Sudanese government has stabilized Juba in recent months, has become more inclusive and should be allowed to stay. One glimmer of hope comes from across the continent. In the last few days, troops from several West African countries banded together to eject Gambia\u2019s president , who tried to stay in power illegally. If such resolve was demonstrated in this part of Africa, then maybe, the interventionists argue, South Sudan\u2019s leaders could be pushed aside and the country would be allowed to breathe.", "keyword": "South Sudan;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;Civilian casualties;Juba South Sudan;Africa;Salva Kiir Mayardit;Riek Machar;UN;African Union"}
{"id": "ny0189308", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2009/05/18", "title": "Cellphone Makers Hope for a Blockbuster Summer", "abstract": "The hype machine started months ago. Opening weekends are upon us. High up in executive suites, the hope is that this summer\u2019s new releases will cause lines to snake around the block. The cellphone industry looks a lot like the movie industry nowadays. Some highly anticipated phones \u2014 including the Palm Pre, an updated iPhone and new phones using the Android operating system from Google \u2014 have focused the industry\u2019s efforts on the crucial months between Memorial Day and Labor Day . In the past, \u201cnobody gave a darn about mobile phones \u2014 they weren\u2019t headline grabbers,\u201d said Charles Wolf, a cellphone industry analyst with Needham & Company. \u201cThis summer will be really interesting. It could be potentially the most exciting time in this market.\u201d The season\u2019s releases began last week, when T-Mobile announced the introduction of the Sidekick LX and AT& T unveiled the Samsung Jack, ballyhooing it as \u201canother hit crossover smartphone in the tradition of the Blackjack and Blackjack II.\u201d But the season\u2019s most compelling phone drama will start the first week in June, when Sprint will begin selling the Palm Pre, people briefed on the company\u2019s plans said. Palm, a once-iconic device maker that has fallen on hard times, has been hyping the Pre for months as an iPhone killer, but the company has given few peeks to analysts and reviewers. Analysts say the stakes are high for Sprint Nextel, which has exclusive rights to the phone in the United States, but even higher for Palm, which is based in Silicon Valley. \u201cThis is make or break for Palm,\u201d said Mr. Wolf, noting that Palm, also the maker of Treo and Centro phones, lost about $98 million in the last quarter, consistent with losses in other recent quarters. \u201cIt\u2019s not make or break for Sprint, but clearly Sprint is in trouble, too, and needs a hit.\u201d Lynn Fox, a spokeswoman for Palm, played down the importance of the Pre itself, saying it was the first \u201cin a long line\u201d of devices that will use Palm\u2019s new mobile operating system. \u201cThe Pre isn\u2019t a bet-the-company device,\u201d Ms. Fox said. Because the smartphone market still has room to grow (according to Google, it is estimated that out of the four billion mobile devices in the world, only 100 million are smartphones), manufacturers hope there is room for more than one winner. How is success measured for cellphones? A flop will sell fewer than 100,000 units, a hit at least one million, and a runaway success five times that or more, analysts say. In July 2007, the iPhone\u2019s first month on the market, 80,000 people bought one. Apple went on to sell iPhones, including the 3G version, to more than five million Americans, according to comScore. Big phone releases happen year-round, but there is a concentration in the summer. That way, phone carriers and manufacturers can take advantage of two crucial selling seasons: back to school and the holidays, said Mark Donovan, an analyst with comScore. As soon as June 8, just a few days after the expected release of the Pre, Apple may introduce a third version of its iPhone at the company\u2019s annual conference for software developers. The phone could become available a month later, though analysts and Apple rumormongers say it might also come later in the summer. Analysts generally agree that the phone will have an upgraded camera, a faster processor and better location services. Apple, of course, has less risk than other phone makers; its iPhone is already a blockbuster. That said, if the company fails to keep innovating, it risks losing its buzz. Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment on the company\u2019s plans for a new phone. Also in June, Samsung has said, it plans to release the i7500, its first phone based on the Android operating system, but it has not said when that phone will come to the United States. HTC recently released the Android-equipped Magic in Europe. And Motorola says it plans to start selling several Android phones this summer, phones the company is counting on, given its desperate need for a hit. Trickling into the market \u2014 though release dates are uncertain \u2014 are a host of phones using a new mobile operating system from Microsoft. Microsoft\u2019s current mobile platform has not met expectations. The hope is that a new operating system, Windows Mobile 7, will reboot the franchise. Mr. Wolf of Needham said that the concept of sexy phones equaling or superseding network quality as a selling point for consumers started in earnest in 2006. By then, carriers realized, most adults already had cellphone service and needed to be inspired to buy new phones or seduced into switching carriers. An early example came in July 2006, when Verizon Communications introduced the LG Chocolate, which was preceded by a teaser advertising campaign that promoted a release date. In November 2007, Verizon began another big campaign, called \u201cNext phones now,\u201d that included the LG Voyager, LG Venus, Blackberry Pearl and Samsung Juke (not to be confused with the Jake, or the Jack). Brenda Raney, a spokeswoman for Verizon, argued that blockbuster phones cannot exist without a great network. \u201cConsumers know if you don\u2019t have a good wireless experience, what good is the phone?\u201d Mr. Donovan of comScore disagreed. \u201cNo one\u2019s out there saying the Palm Pre is going to be a hit because the call quality is magnificent,\u201d he said. Consumers are increasingly focused on the latest devices, he said, and manufacturers have only a short time to draw consumers\u2019 attention. \u201cPhones don\u2019t stand the test of time,\u201d Mr. Donovan said. \u201cI look at my personal handset museum, and the coolest thing I had in my pocket eight years ago is laughable.\u201d When it comes to phones, he added, \u201cthere are no \u2018Citizen Kanes\u2019 out there.\u201d", "keyword": "Cellular Telephones;Smartphones;iPhone;Palm Inc;Apple Inc;Samsung Group;Google Phone"}
{"id": "ny0240498", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/12/06", "title": "WikiLeaks Mirror Sites Appear by the Hundreds", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The battle lines between supporters of the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks and its detractors began to form on Sunday, as supporters erected numerous copies of the site on the Internet and the United States put pressure on Switzerland not to offer a haven to the site\u2019s founder, Julian Assange. Since several major Internet companies cut off services to WikiLeaks in recent days, activists have created hundreds of mirror sites , Web sites that host exact copies of another site\u2019s content, making censorship difficult. The collective Anonymous , an informal but notorious group of hackers and activists, also declared war on Sunday against enemies of Mr. Assange, calling on supporters to attack companies that do not support WikiLeaks and to spread the leaked material online. Meanwhile, the American ambassador to Switzerland, Donald S. Beyer Jr., responded to signs that Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks might seek refuge in that country, warning in the weekly magazine NZZ am Sonntag that the Swiss \u201cshould very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law.\u201d Since the release of classified diplomatic cables a week ago, from a batch of more than 250,000 obtained by WikiLeaks, the Web site has been bombarded by cyberattacks and abandoned by Internet companies like PayPal , an online payment service that had accepted donations for the site, and Amazon , which had rented it server space. WikiLeaks said that PayPal had \u201csurrendered to U.S. government pressure,\u201d but the government has not acknowledged involvement in efforts to try to disable the site. On Friday, WikiLeaks sought refuge in a diffuse web of financial and Internet infrastructure spread across Europe, particularly in Switzerland. It moved to wikileaks.ch , a domain registered to the Swiss Pirate Party, a political organization that shares many of Mr. Assange\u2019s aims. A Swiss-Icelandic company, Datacell, will process donations instead of PayPal, and the WikiLeaks site shows that Mr. Assange is accepting direct donations into a Swiss bank account held with the financial arm of the Swiss postal service. But that solace may be short lived: a spokesman for the financial arm of Swiss Post, Marc Andrey, also told NZZ am Sonntag on Sunday that it was \u201creviewing\u201d its relationship with Mr. Assange subject to proof that he has Swiss residency, owns property or does business in the country. A message seeking comment from Mr. Assange\u2019s British lawyer was not immediately returned. The Internet group Anonymous, which in the past has taken on targets as diverse as the Church of Scientology and Iran, disseminated a seven-point manifesto via Twitter and other social networking sites pledging to \u201ckick back for Julian.\u201d Gregg Housh, who has previously worked on such campaigns with Anonymous, said by telephone from Boston that he had noticed an orchestrated effort under way to attack companies that have refused to support WikiLeaks and to post multiple copies of the leaked material. The Anonymous manifesto singled out PayPal, which cut off ties with WikiLeaks for \u201ca violation\u201d of its policy on promoting illegal activities, a company statement said. \u201cThe reason is amazingly simple,\u201d Mr. Housh said of the campaign. \u201cWe all believe that information should be free, and the Internet should be free.\u201d By late Sunday, there were at least 208 WikiLeaks mirror sites up and running. \u201cCut us down,\u201d said a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed on Sunday, \u201cand the stronger we become.\u201d", "keyword": "Assange Julian;Classified Information and State Secrets;United States International Relations;Computers and the Internet;Wikileaks;Switzerland;Anonymous (Internet Group)"}
{"id": "ny0156882", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/06/01", "title": "Da Vinci, Retrofitted for the Modern Age", "abstract": "WHEN Thomas Alva Edison was starting in business, his first patent was for an automated vote-tallying machine to let legislators know instantly which measures had passed and which had been voted down. He sold not a one. It seems that legislators, accustomed to schmoozing and politicking right through a vote\u2019s tally, didn\u2019t want to speed the process. But with the resilience he would show throughout his life, Edison refused to view that episode as a failure. Instead, he used it to set the stage for future decisions: He would pursue only those innovations that had a verifiable market from the beginning. He went on to earn 1,092 more patents and to become a symbol of American ingenuity. Ancient history, right? Not so fast. True, Edison has long been revered for changing the face of modern civilization. But beyond the material aspects of his success, he demonstrated that creativity and innovation could result from a set of identifiable and repeatable processes. Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Edison kept extensive notebooks detailing every idea he ever had and every experiment he ever tried. He established the world\u2019s first modern research and development laboratory, hiring teams of experts in things as diverse as model-making and chemical engineering. Not only did he invent the incandescent light bulb, Edison also created the electric power industry required for the bulb to light up millions of homes and businesses. As entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives alike seek creative solutions to 21st-century business problems, the triumphs of Edison and a number of other historical figures are being revisited for the innovation lessons they can teach. \u201cI use historical figures as models to talk about leadership and innovation,\u201d explains Alan Axelrod, author of a new book, \u201cEdison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond,\u201d as well as the earlier \u201cElizabeth I CEO,\u201d \u201cPatton on Leadership\u201d and \u201cEisenhower on Leadership.\u201d Before video games and 24-hour television, Mr. Axelrod says, youngsters grew up reading biographies of famous people so they could learn from their lives and emulate them. \u201cWe should turn more to these historical figures today,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause why not model ourselves on the very best examples we can find?\u201d Michael J. Gelb, a corporate consultant, is co-author with Edison\u2019s great-grandniece Sarah Miller Caldicott of \u201cInnovate Like Edison, \u201d a 2007 book. Mr. Gelb began his research of historical figures by turning to da Vinci, a childhood hero. \u201cHis was a balanced brain in that he used the left and right hemisphere of his cerebral cortex equally and to their fullest, something I\u2019ve tried to get people from DuPont and Microsoft and Merck to do over the last 30 years,\u201d Mr. Gelb says. \u201cCorporate executives today tend to be overly linear, logical, analytical. I\u2019m trying to help them use their intuition and artistic capabilities. If you want to compete in the challenging world of international business, you can\u2019t just rely on half a brain.\u201d In his 1998 book \u201cHow to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci,\u201d Mr. Gelb outlines seven principles that he believes define da Vinci\u2019s work: \u0095 Curiosit\u00e0, or curiosity, marking his insatiable quest for knowledge and continuous improvement. \u0095 Dimostrazione, or demonstration, through which he learned by personal experience rather than taking others\u2019 reports for granted. \u0095 Sensazione, or sensation, using the senses to sharpen observation and response. \u0095 Sfumato, a painting technique employed by da Vinci to create an ethereal quality in his work, showing his ability to embrace ambiguity and change. \u0095 Arte/scienza, or the science of art, which he demonstrated in his whole-brain thinking. \u0095 Corporalit\u00e0, or \u201cof the body,\u201d representing his belief that a healthy mind requires a healthy body. \u0095 Connessione, or connection, for his habit of weaving together multiple disciplines around a single idea. That last principle has been popularized by the educational consultant Tony Buzan as \u201cmind mapping,\u201d or nonlinear, radial diagramming of words and ideas around a main concept. Mr. Buzan studied the notebooks of both da Vinci and Edison while developing mind mapping, and it\u2019s a tool that Mr. Gelb often uses with his corporate clients. Mr. Gelb says that one man, a chemist at DuPont, reported to him that he was reaching impasses on four seemingly unrelated projects and wasn\u2019t sure how to proceed. Mr. Gelb suggested that the chemist create a mind map of the projects side-by-side on a single, enormous sheet of paper. The man later wrote to him in a letter: \u201cThe moment I finished the map and I surveyed the whole thing, a solution literally popped off the page. I saw a connection that I never would have made otherwise.\u201d The chemist later received a patent for the innovation. \u201cPeople think I\u2019m a genius because I\u2019m helping people without knowing anything about their particular industry,\u201d Mr. Gelb said. Asked to name other historical figures who offer lessons on innovation, both Mr. Gelb and Mr. Axelrod rattled off lists including George S. Patton and Queen Elizabeth I. (Mr. Axelrod added Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.) Each of these personalities responded innovatively to the rapid changes taking place around them, drawing on the expertise of advisers while continuing to build on earlier successes. Like Edison, who built new innovations on top of previous inventions, innovative leaders never declare an invention \u201cdone,\u201d Mr. Axelrod says. \u201cEverything ultimately became the source of something new later,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like the difference between a rich person and a wealthy person. A rich person has a lot of money and buys things. A wealthy person invests in things that make more money. It\u2019s creating ongoing wealth out of your intellectual capital.\u201d", "keyword": "Books and Literature;Inventions and Patents;Edison Thomas A;da Vinci Leonardo"}
{"id": "ny0170549", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/02/28", "title": "DreamWorks Posts Loss", "abstract": "GLENDALE, Calif., Feb. 27 (AP) \u2014 DreamWorks Animation SKG, the studio behind animated movies like \u201cShrek\u201d and \u201cMadagascar,\u201d said Tuesday that it swung to a fourth-quarter loss on costs to write off \u201cFlushed Away,\u201d which performed poorly at the box office. The company lost $21.3 million, or 20 cents a share, in contrast to year-earlier earnings of $63.2 million, or 61 cents a share, which included a tax benefit and strong performance from the \u201cMadagascar\u201d DVD, which was released into the home video market in the 2005 quarter. DreamWorks said the recent quarter\u2019s was hurt by a charge of 80 cents a share related to the write-off of some costs for \u201cFlushed Away.\u201d Revenue grew 18 percent to $204.3 million from $172.9 million in the year-earlier period, with about half of sales driven by the home video release of \u201cOver the Hedge.\u201d But costs associated with sales \u2014 including the write-off \u2014 more than doubled to $219.9 million.", "keyword": "DreamWorks SKG;Company Reports;Animated Films"}
{"id": "ny0156831", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2008/06/01", "title": "Entrepreneur\u2019s Act of Faith Bred on the Gridiron", "abstract": "Newark ALONG a chain-link stretch of Frelinghuysen Avenue, in the shadow of an old red-brick housing project in a far corner of the South Ward, the brightest, freshest block is a new strip mall of the familiar variety that would hardly draw a second glance in many other places: a dollar store, a coin laundry and a Subway owned by a man everybody seems to know, even if they don\u2019t. \u201cEverything\u2019s beautiful,\u201d Altarik White said on a recent rainy evening to one more customer who hailed him by name. \u201cNo problems, no problems.\u201d Mr. White\u2019s name has been widely known across the city for more than two decades, ever since he was a star running back for Malcolm X Shabazz High School who once scored five touchdowns in a single game and was, as he said, \u201cbigger, stronger and faster than everyone else.\u201d He set school records for rushing and scoring at William Paterson University, packed away his pro dreams after separating his shoulder at the Miami Dolphins\u2019 training camp, and then came back home to teach and coach football. In 2006 he led the Weequahic High School team to the state championship in its group, a jolt of good news at a school that had endured too much bad. \u201cWhen I had a football in my hand, there was nothing that could stop me from reaching the end zone,\u201d said Mr. White, 37, as the old-school soul he favors over rap played in the background. \u201cInstead of running over linebackers, I\u2019m tackling business now.\u201d When Mayor Cory A. Booker gave his State of the City speech in February, some of the loudest applause came when he announced something far less dramatic than the drop in the number of murders: a loan to Mr. White from the Brick City Development Corporation that would allow him to open the Subway he had long been planning. Not downtown, where there were already several others, but in a neighborhood where national chains, and foods that haven\u2019t been fried, were in short supply. Mr. White\u2019s Subway opened in April, an act of faith in his city as much as of entrepreneurship. \u201cIn our community, there\u2019s not a lot of healthy places to go \u2014 no Whole Foods, no Stop & Shop, just a bunch of Chinese stores, hamburger joints and fried chicken places,\u201d said Mr. White, whose Subway is on the other side of Weequahic Park from the school where he coaches and works as a substance awareness counselor. Next door is Seth Boyden Terrace, a public housing project where a triple shooting took place last year. \u201cWho\u2019s to say that people, because they live in Seth Boyden, that they don\u2019t deserve good food at an affordable price,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I say to people who say, \u2018That\u2019s a tough place,\u2019 is, \u2018Yeah, well, guess what \u2014 it\u2019s a tough world we live in.\u2019 \u201d He knows just how tough it is: his father was absent for much of his youth and his mother died when he was in high school. \u201cSo will we all just close our doors and act like it\u2019s not happening?\u201d he asked. Opportunities beyond Newark have beckoned, including coaching in the National Football League, he said, but he has resisted. \u201cI\u2019m not ready for players to tell me what they ain\u2019t going to do, and that\u2019s what happens when you get there, because you\u2019re just the coach,\u201d he said. \u201cNow when I bark a command, five or six people pop their heads up and they\u2019re ready to do it.\u201d His voice travels far in the store, too. \u201cKeep it wrapped up until she gets back,\u201d he told Shakia Standifer, 18, who had just made a roast beef sub for a customer who needed a quick cash-machine visit to pay for it. \u201cHe treats you how life\u2019s going to treat you,\u201d said Ms. Standifer, 18, a Weequahic senior and the football team statistician, one of four students among his 10 employees. She is headed to Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison in the fall to study forensic psychology. The last year has been tough on Mr. White: His younger brother, Shahib, 29, who played football at Rutgers and was an assistant coach at Weequahic, committed suicide last summer, and the school\u2019s beloved principal, Ronald G. Stone, died of a heart attack last fall. He has lived for the past three years in Piscataway, to be closer to his young daughter from a previous marriage, but he has grown restless counting squirrels and watching deer from his backyard. He owns three houses in the South Ward and hopes to move back soon. He has begun to read the business section of the newspaper more carefully, discovering just how much coaching has in common with selling. \u201cI could sell white gloves to a nun eating barbecue ribs,\u201d he said. When he was playing football he studied the films of the opposing teams, analyzing the defenses they would try to stop him with, and then lie in bed the night before kickoff, playing the game in his head, making his moves and seeing the yards pile up. What he sees in his head now are mounting sales figures, new stores \u2014 he has plans to open two more \u2014 and the difference one sandwich shop can make in a neighborhood that never had one. One afternoon earlier in the week, some neighborhood boys drifted over and, as often happens when Mr. White is around, a football appeared. The parking lot became a gridiron. \u201cI don\u2019t run anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m the spot quarterback\u201d \u2014 the guy who stands in one place and throws passes, hoping somebody catches them.", "keyword": "Entrepreneurship;Newark (NJ);Football"}
{"id": "ny0215653", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/04/27", "title": "Franklin Mieuli, Offbeat N.B.A. Owner, Dies at 89", "abstract": "Franklin Mieuli, the unconventional and popular owner of the Golden State Warriors for nearly a quarter century who in 1975 brought the franchise its only National Basketball Association championship in 48 years on the West Coast, died Sunday. He was 89. The death was announced by the Warriors, who said he died of natural causes in the Bay Area. A local boy who made good, Mr. Mieuli (pronounced MEW-lee), grew up in San Jose and ran a successful radio production company. He bought a partial stake in the Warriors when the team moved to the Bay Area from Philadelphia in 1962 (taking with them the star center Wilt Chamberlain) and became a majority shareholder shortly thereafter. Though it played its home games in several arenas throughout the Bay Area \u2014 most frequently at the Cow Palace , in Daly City \u2014 the team was called the San Francisco Warriors throughout the 1960s. Mr. Mieuli moved the team to Oakland in 1971 and changed its name to the Golden State Warriors; he sold the team in 1986. Often referred to as eccentric, Mr. Mieuli eschewed business dress and grooming; heavily bearded, he favored jeans, Hawaiian shirts and a deerstalker cap, \u00e0 la Sherlock Holmes. When events became too complicated and he needed time to think or to avoid the press, he would simply disappear for a few days. He kept a number of motorcycles, his preferred mode of transportation, and occasionally forgot where he left them. \u201cI had too many motorcycles and too short a memory,\u201d he recalled in a 2008 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. He was, however, cagey and self-aware. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d Hank Greenwald, a former Warriors radio announcer, said in a 1971 Sports Illustrated article about Mr. Mieuli, \u201cFranklin is the one man in the world who works hard at having people underestimate him.\u201d He was not an owner with especially deep pockets, and his stewardship of the Warriors sometimes appeared quixotic. With the team in a financial bind in 1965, he traded Chamberlain back to Philadelphia, where the Syracuse Nationals had moved and become the 76ers. \u201cI don\u2019t mean that I personally dislike him,\u201d Mr. Mieuli said of Chamberlain after the trade. \u201cHe\u2019s a good friend of mine. But the fans in San Francisco never learned to love him. I guess most fans are for the little man and the underdog, and Wilt is neither. He\u2019s easy to hate, and we were the best draw in the N.B.A. on the road, when people came to see him lose.\" Mr. Mieuli opposed league expansion and opposed the merger of the N.B.A. with its rival league, the American Basketball Association. (After years of negotiations, the merger took place in 1976.) He opposed the 3-point shot. He pursued the star forward Rick Barry as if he were a long-lost son, signing him out of college in 1965, losing him to the A.B.A. two years later and re-signing him in 1972. Barry went on to lead the Warriors\u2019 1975 championship team in scoring with an average of 30.6 points per game. Mr. Mieuli, a son of Italian immigrants, was born on Sept. 14, 1920, in San Jose, Calif., where his father was a gardener who eventually started a successful nursery. He attended the University of Oregon and served in the Navy during World War II. He worked in marketing for a local brewery, sponsor of radio broadcasts of San Francisco 49ers football games. In 1954, according to the team, he produced the first telecast of a 49ers game. He subsequently bought a small share of the team, and a few years later, having entered the radio and television production business himself, he landed the rights to produce not only their games but also those of the newly arrived major league baseball franchise, the San Francisco Giants. At his death, he retained a 5 percent interest in the 49ers. Mr. Mieuli\u2019s marriage ended in divorce, and he had a long partnership with Blake Green. His survivors include Ms. Green, three children and seven grandchildren.", "keyword": "Mieuli Franklin;Basketball;Golden State Warriors;Deaths (Obituaries);Franchises;National Basketball Assn"}
{"id": "ny0119213", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/07/18", "title": "Romney and Obama Resume Economic Attacks", "abstract": "IRWIN, Pa. \u2014 The argument between Mitt Romney and President Obama over who is better suited to help American workers get back on their feet got personal again on Tuesday, with Mr. Romney saying he was \u201cashamed\u201d of Mr. Obama for giving government loans to well-connected donors. The overarching dispute is which candidate\u2019s view of government might lift a struggling economy: Mr. Romney\u2019s belief in lower taxes and fewer regulations, or Mr. Obama\u2019s vision of a vital role for government. But the policy debate has descended into an angry tit for tat, with accusations of twists and distortions, ever since Mr. Obama began accusing Mr. Romney of shipping American jobs overseas while in the private sector \u2014 a message that appears to be resonating among some swing-state voters. Mr. Romney, after a long weekend off the campaign trail, came roaring back by accusing the president of \u201ccrony capitalism.\u201d He cited Fisker Automotive, which received up to $529 million in federal loan guarantees in 2009 to develop hybrid electric cars , some of which were made in Finland, although the Obama administration says the federal money did not go overseas. Among the company\u2019s investors is a venture-capital firm whose partners include John Doerr, a major donor to the president. \u201cI\u2019m ashamed to say we\u2019re seeing our president hand out money to the businesses of campaign contributors,\u201d Mr. Romney said here in Irwin. But the impact of Mr. Romney\u2019s attack was somewhat blunted by distractions from prominent Republicans. First, Representative Ron Paul of Texas called on Mr. Romney to release more of his tax returns, an appeal echoed by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and National Review , the prominent conservative publication. More troublesome, John H. Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and a stalwart surrogate for Mr. Romney, had to retract a comment after saying Tuesday, \u201cI wish this president would learn how to be an American.\u201d Mr. Sununu, speaking during a press call, recognized the gaffe and rephrased his remark during the same call: \u201cWhat I thought I said, but what I didn\u2019t say, is the president has to learn the American formula for creating business.\u201d He apologized later on CNN, saying: \u201cFrankly, I made a mistake. I shouldn\u2019t have used those words.\u201d The off-message moments blew a bit of fog over what the Romney campaign had intended to be a coordinated series of sharp attacks on Mr. Obama over free enterprise. Mr. Romney returned to the trail in Pennsylvania with his campaign struggling to regain its footing after several days of withering attacks from the Obama camp about his tenure at Bain Capital and demands that he release more tax returns to illuminate the extent of his investments in offshore accounts. At a company that provides services to oil and gas drillers here, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Obama for suggesting that entrepreneurs owe their success partly to government investments in education and infrastructure. \u201cThe idea to say that Steve Jobs didn\u2019t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn\u2019t build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn\u2019t build Papa John\u2019s Pizza,\u201d he said, \u201cit is not just foolishness. It\u2019s insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it\u2019s wrong.\u201d \u201cI find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States,\u201d he added. While Mr. Romney was in Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama was in Texas, where he found himself laying out contrasting economic philosophies with another Republican, former President George W. Bush . Mr. Obama had flown to Mr. Bush\u2019s home state to headline four campaign fund-raisers and, in the process, warn the country against returning to the policies of his predecessor. Mr. Bush separately unveiled a book outlining ideas for reinvigorating an economy that has sputtered along under his successor. The divergent messages were more an accident of geography and happenstance than a result of planning. Aides to each man said his schedule had been set without knowledge of the other\u2019s. But the proximity and timing brought into sharp relief the choices facing the country in this fall\u2019s election on polarizing issues like taxes, jobs, growth, regulation and free enterprise. At the first of four fund-raisers in San Antonio and Austin, Mr. Obama told 1,200 supporters that Republicans, led by Mr. Romney, wanted to return to policies that had led to the economic troubles confronting his presidency. \u201cWe spent almost a decade doing what they prescribed,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cAnd how did it turn out? We didn\u2019t see greater job growth. We didn\u2019t see middle-class security. We saw the opposite. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes, precisely because there were no regulations that were adequate to the kinds of recklessness that was being carried out.\u201d He added: \u201cI don\u2019t know how you guys operate in your life. But my general rule is if I do something and it doesn\u2019t work, I don\u2019t go back to doing it.\u201d The message was similar to one in most of his campaign speeches, but delivering it in Texas highlighted the person he blames. Hours later, Mr. Bush released \u201cThe 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs,\u201d a book of essays by economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, offering free-market ideas to spur the economy. \u201cWe\u2019ll never fix the deficit without growing the private sector,\u201d he told a crowd of supporters before some of the economists presented their ideas. Mr. Bush wrote the foreword and offered no assessment of Mr. Obama\u2019s record, in keeping with his post-White House practice of not commenting on his successor. The underlying thrust of the book, though, is the notion that the economy has not been repaired in the three and a half years since Mr. Obama took over, and that more robust actions are needed. The former president proposed a goal of sustained 4 percent annual growth, which would be ambitious for a country whose growth has averaged just over 3 percent a year since 1948 and is currently below 2 percent. \u201cWe\u2019re an economy in transition,\u201d Brendan Miniter, who edited Mr. Bush\u2019s book, said in an interview earlier in the day. \u201cIf we don\u2019t set the target higher, if we just continue to stumble along, ultimately we\u2019re going to pay a pretty stark price.\u201d", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2012;United States Economy;Obama Barack;Romney Mitt;Sununu John H;Bush George W"}
{"id": "ny0118029", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/10/24", "title": "Tennessee: Five Deaths Under Investigation", "abstract": "The deaths of three women and a toddler in southern Tennessee may be related to a body found just across the state line in Alabama, the authorities said Tuesday. On Monday, three women and an 18-month-old boy were found dead at two homes in Lincoln County, about 100 miles south of Nashville. A body found in Alabama on Tuesday may be that of Warren V. Crutcher, who had been sought for questioning, said Craig Whisenant, the Madison County coroner. Mr. Whisenant said the man did not commit suicide. Sheriff Murray Blackwelder of Lincoln County said two children survived the attacks, and he identified one of them as Mr. Crutcher\u2019s 3-year-old son. The cause of the deaths has not been released, and the bodies were sent for autopsies. The investigation began when the 3-year-old called relatives saying he could not wake up anyone at his house, said his godmother, Constance Winston. Found dead in the home were his mother, Chabreya Campbell, 22; and her son Rico Ragland, 18 months; and Amber McCaulley, 21. Hours later, the body of Jessica Brown, 21, was found in her home in Fayetteville, Tenn. Her 2-month-old child was found in the home unharmed.", "keyword": "Deaths (Fatalities);Tennessee;Alabama;Crutcher Warren V;Campbell Chabreya;McCaulley Amber;Brown Jessica"}
{"id": "ny0289962", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/01/16", "title": "Chipotle Will Close Stores for Food Safety Meetings After Outbreaks", "abstract": "As Chipotle Mexican Grill tries to recover from a series of contaminations that have caused some customers and investors to flee, it said it would shut all its stores for several hours on Feb. 8 to hold food safety meetings with employees. \u201cWe are hosting a national team meeting to thank our employees for their hard work through this difficult time, discuss some of the food safety changes we are implementing, and answer questions from employees,\u201d Chris Arnold, a Chipotle spokesman, said in an email. The stores will open at 3 p.m., later than the usual start time of about 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., skipping the lunch hour rush on a Monday. The restaurant chain, which has more than 2,000 locations and has created an identity based largely on using locally grown, fresh ingredients, has been contending with a series of E. coli outbreaks . Five customers in Seattle became ill with the bacteria in July, and there have been at least six outbreaks in the last six months. Chipotle indicated last week that the federal authorities were pursuing a criminal case . The company said it had received a grand jury subpoena related to a norovirus outbreak that sickened 234 people in Simi Valley, Calif., in August. Chipotle has said that outbreak and another in Boston that affected at least 136 customers in December were caused by sick employees who ignored company policies that prohibited them from working. More than 500 people are estimated to have become ill after eating in Chipotle restaurants in the second half of 2015. The company said in December that it may never know what caused an E. coli outbreak in November linked to two restaurants in Kansas and Oklahoma. \u201cIf there\u2019s a silver lining in this, it is that by not knowing for sure what the cause is, it\u2019s prompted us to look at every ingredient we use with an eye to improving our practices,\u201d Mr. Arnold said this week . \u201cWe did a really comprehensive review of food safety practices from farm to restaurants,\u201d he added. \u201cFrom that assessment we developed a food safety plan, which we hope will establish Chipotle as a leader in food safety.\u201d Chipotle\u2019s same-store sales dropped by 14.6 percent in the last quarter.", "keyword": "Food Safety;Food;Restaurant;E Coli;Chipotle Mexican Grill"}
{"id": "ny0046757", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/11/02", "title": "Events in Westchester for Nov. 2-8, 2014", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events in the Hudson Valley. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to westweek@nytimes.com. Comedy PELHAM Rockwells Andy Hendrickson and Sean Donnelly. Nov. 8 at 9 p.m. $10. Rockwells, 105 Wolfs Lane. 914-738-5881; rockwellsusa.net. WEST NYACK Levity Live Rick Gutierrez. Through Nov. 2. $17 and $20. Joe Matarese. Nov. 5 at 8 p.m. $15. Shawn and Marlon Wayans, sketch comedy. Nov. 7 through 9. $40 to $50. Levity Live, 4210 Palisades Center Drive. 845-353-5400; levitylive.com. Film BRONX Bronx Museum of the Arts \u201cMy Old Neighborhood Remembered: A Memoir,\u201d screening and discussion with the novelist Avery Corman. Nov. 8, noon to 1:30 p.m. $10; members, free. Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse. bronxmuseum.org; 718-681-6000. HUDSON Time & Space Limited \u201cNational Theater Live: \u2018Of Mice and Men,\u2019 \u201d screening of the Broadway production featuring James Franco and Chris O\u2019Dowd. Nov. 6 and 8 at 7 p.m. $15 and $22. Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street. timeandspace.org; 518-822-8448. NYACK The Rivertown Film Society \u201cThe New Black,\u201d documentary by Yoruba Richen. Nov. 5 at 8 p.m. $8 to $11. The Rivertown Film Society, 58 Depew Avenue. 845-353-2568; rivertownfilm.org. PLEASANTVILLE Jacob Burns Film Center \u201cGlobal Watch: Crisis, Culture, and Human Rights,\u201d series. Nov. 6 through 26. $7.50 to $15 per screening. Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Road. 914-747-5555; burnsfilmcenter.org. ROSENDALE Rosendale Theater \u201cMy Old Lady,\u201d directed by Israel Horovitz. Through Nov. 6. $5 and $7. \u201cBorn to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity,\u201d documentary by Catherine Gund. Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. $6 to $10. Rosendale Theater, 408 Main Street. rosendaletheatre.org; 845-658-8989. For Children BETHEL Bethel Woods Center for the Arts Christopher Agostino\u2019s \u201cStoryFaces,\u201d face painting and storytelling. Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. Free. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 200 Hurd Road. bethelwoodscenter.org; 866-781-2922. BRONX Wave Hill \u201cFamily Art Project: Buildings and Land,\u201d craft activities. Nov. 8 and 9, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free with admission to the grounds. $2 to $8; members and children under 6, free. Admission is free until noon on Saturdays. Wave Hill, 675 West 252nd Street. 718-549-3200; wavehill.org. CROTON-ON-HUDSON Van Cortlandt Manor \u201cThe Great Jack-o\u2019-Lantern Blaze,\u201d more than 5,000 jack-o\u2019-lanterns in various shapes and patterns. Through Nov. 16. $16 to $25; members and children under 3, free. Van Cortlandt Manor, 525 South Riverside Avenue. 914-366-6900; hudsonvalley.org. OSSINING Teatown Lake Reservation \u201cNuts About Squirrels,\u201d outdoor and educational activities. Nov. 9 at 10 a.m. $7; members, free. Teatown Lake Reservation, 1600 Spring Valley Road. teatown.org; 914-762-2912. PLEASANTVILLE Richard G. Rosenthal Jewish Community Center \u201cSmelly Feet,\u201d musical by Dean Friedman. Nov. 8 and 12 at 2 and 4 p.m. $10. Richard G. Rosenthal Jewish Community Center, 600 Bear Ridge Road. 914-879-0310. PURCHASE Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College \u201cFamily Second Saturdays: Portraiture,\u201d storytelling and art activities. Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. Free. Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6100; neuberger.org. VALHALLA Academic Arts Theater \u201cThe Toy Box,\u201d Salzburg Marionette Theater. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. $16 to $22. Academic Arts Theater, 75 Grasslands Road. 914-606-6262; sunywcc.edu/smartarts. WEST NYACK Levity Live Mark Calabrese, comedy and magic. Nov. 2 at 2 p.m. $14. Levity Live, 4210 Palisades Center Drive. 845-353-5400; levitylive.com. YONKERS Hudson River Museum \u201cLittle Pea,\u201d musical. Nov. 9, 16 and 23 at 1 and 3 p.m. Free with museum admission. $3 to $6; members, free. Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue. 914-963-4550; hrm.org. Music and Dance BEACON Howland Cultural Center Trio Cavatina, classical. Nov. 9 at 4 p.m. $10 and $30. Howland Cultural Center, 477 Main Street. 845-297-9243; howlandmusic.org. BEACON Towne Crier Cafe Tommy Castro and the Painkillers, blues and rock. Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. $25 and $30. Joanna Mosca, country. Nov. 7 at 8:30 p.m. $25 and $30. Suzanne Vega, folk and pop. Nov. 8 at 8:30 p.m. $50 and $55. Melissa Ferrick, alternative country. Nov. 9 at 7:30 p.m. $20 and $25. Towne Crier Cafe, 379 Main Street. 845-855-1300; townecrier.com. BRONX Bronx Museum of the Arts Carnegie Hall\u2019s Neighborhood Concerts: Manuel Valera\u2019s Cuban Express, with Sofia Rei. Nov. 7, 6 to 10 p.m. Donations accepted. Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse. bronxmuseum.org; 718-681-6000. BRONX Lehman College Music Building Recital Hall Mimi, Sakiko and Harumi Furuya, piano trio. Nov. 6 at 12:30 p.m. $25 to $40. Lehman College Music Building Recital Hall, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West. 914-200-3622; furuyasisters.com. CHAPPAQUA Chappaqua Library Auditorium Eric Drucker and Friends, classical. Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. Free. Chappaqua Library Auditorium, 195 South Greeley Avenue. 914-238-4779; chappaqualibrary.org. HARTSDALE Frank and Camille\u2019s West Mimi, Sakiko and Harumi Furuya, piano trio. Nov. 8 at 6:30 p.m. $35 and $40. Frank and Camille\u2019s West, 112 South Central Avenue. 914-200-3622; furuyasisters.com. Image NEW PALTZ \u201cDon\u2019t Throw Pearls to Swine\u201d (2014), oil painting by Carolyn H. Edlund, is in \u201cA Different Point of View,\u201d an exhibition of works by Vince Natale and Ms. Edlund, through Nov. 22 at the Mark Gruber Gallery, 17 New Paltz Plaza. For further information: 845-255-1241 or markgrubergallery.com . Credit Al Nowak KATONAH Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts Edward Arron and Friends, classical. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $15 to $55. Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, 149 Girdle Ridge Road. 914-232-1252; caramoor.org. MAMARONECK Emelin Theater \u201cAnd the Tony Award Goes to ...\u201d Martin Charnin, Shelly Burch and John Treacy Egan. Nov. 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. Emelin Theater, 153 Library Lane. emelin.org; 914-698-0098. MARLBORO The Falcon Jack Grace Band, country. Nov. 2, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Maria Muldaur, pop. Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. Lindsey Webster, R & B. Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. Doug Weiss, jazz. Nov. 6 at 7 p.m. James Maddock, blues and rock. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. The Paul Green Rock Academy. Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. Cory Henry, R & B. Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. Bernstein Bard Quartet, swing. Nov. 9, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Donations accepted. The Falcon, 1348 Route 9W. 845-236-7970; liveatthefalcon.com. NEW ROCHELLE Christopher J. Murphy Auditorium, Iona College The Symphony of Westchester All-Beethoven Concert. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $15 to $50. Christopher J. Murphy Auditorium, Iona College, 715 North Avenue. 914-654-4926; thesymphonyofwestchester.org. PEEKSKILL 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar JP Patrick and Friends, R & B. Nov. 6 at 8:30 p.m. No cover. SugarBad, funk and soul. Nov. 7 at 9:30 p.m. $5. The Dave Fields Band, blues. Nov. 8 at 9:30 p.m. $5 and $10. Greg Westhoff\u2019s Westchester Swing Band, jazz. Nov. 9 at 5:30 p.m. $5. 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar, 12 North Division Street. 914-737-6624; 12grapes.com. PEEKSKILL Bean Runner Cafe The Five Creations, a cappella. Nov. 2 at 5 p.m. $10. Los Mas Valientes, salsa. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. $10. Valerie Capers Quartet, jazz. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $15. Bean Runner Cafe, 201 South Division Street. 914-737-1701; beanrunnercafe.com. PEEKSKILL Paramount Hudson Valley Todd Rundgren, rock. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. $59.50 and $79.50. Paramount Hudson Valley, 1008 Brown Street. paramounthudsonvalley.com; 914-739-0039. PIERMONT Pier 701 Restaurant and Bar \u201cMy Way: A Tribute to the Songs of Frank Sinatra,\u201d Scott Coulter. Nov. 8 at 6 p.m. $95 for dinner and show. Pier 701 Restaurant and Bar, 701 Piermont Avenue. 845-848-2550; pier701ny.com. PIERMONT The Turning Point Doc Richmond\u2019s Jazz Jam. Nov. 3 at 8 p.m. $5. Peppino D\u2019Agostino, guitar. Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. $20. John Primer Band, blues. Nov. 7 at 9 p.m. $20. Shemekia Copeland Band, blues. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $47.50. Sarah Bonsignore, pop and jazz. Nov. 9 at 4 p.m. $15. The Turning Point, 468 Piermont Avenue. turningpointcafe.com; 845-359-1089. PORT CHESTER The Capitol Theater Phil Lesh and Friends, jam band. Oct. 31, Nov. 1, 7, 14 and 15 at 8 p.m. $59.50 to $179.50. The String Cheese Incident, progressive bluegrass. Nov. 11 and 12 at 8 p.m. $49.50 and $75. The Capitol Theater, 149 Westchester Avenue. 914-937-4126; thecapitoltheatre.com. POUGHKEEPSIE Bardavon Opera House \u201cLincoln\u2019s New World,\u201d Hudson Valley Philharmonic, Jay Ungar, Molly Mason and narration by David Strathairn. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $20 to $54. Bardavon Opera House, 35 Market Street. 845-473-2072; bardavon.org. PURCHASE The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College Suzanne Vega, folk and pop. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. $27.50 to $52.50. The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6200; artscenter.org. SAUGERTIES Saugerties Pro Musica, Saugerties United Methodist Church Gabriel Baeza, violin. Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. $10 and $12; students, free. Saugerties Pro Musica, Saugerties United Methodist Church, Washington Avenue and Post Street. 845-246-5021; saugertiespromusica.org. TARRYTOWN Tarrytown Music Hall Justin Hayward, pop and rock. Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. $38 to $90. David Bromberg Big Band, blues and jazz. Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. $39 to $65. The Machine, Pink Floyd tribute band. Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. $30 to $48. \u201cThe Garden of Hope,\u201d the Westchester Symphonic Winds. Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. $15 and $20. Tarrytown Music Hall, 13 Main Street. tarrytownmusichall.org; 877-840-0457. WHITE PLAINS Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse at Memorial United Methodist Church Garnet Rogers, folk. Sing along at 6:45 p.m. Nov. 8 at 7:30 p.m. $18 to $23. Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse at Memorial United Methodist Church, 250 Bryant Avenue. walkaboutclearwater.org; 914-946-1625. WOODSTOCK Bearsville Theater Patti Rothberg, rock. Nov. 8 at 9 p.m. $10. \u201cLadies of the Valley,\u201d Simi Stone, Elizabeth Mitchell, Amy Helm, Sarah Fimm, Donna Lewis and others. Nov. 9 at 7 p.m. $35 to $75. Bearsville Theater, 291 Tinker Street. bearsvilletheater.com; 845-679-4406. Outdoors BRONX The New York Botanical Garden Fall Forest Weekends, guided walks, birds of prey demonstrations and more. Nov. 1, 2, 8 and 9, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. $8 to $20; children under 2, free. The New York Botanical Garden, Southern Boulevard. 718-817-8700; nybg.org. BRONX Wave Hill Garden Highlights Walk, guided tour. Sundays at 2 p.m. Fall Foliage Walk. Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. Free with admission to the grounds. $2 to $8; members and children under 6, free. Wave Hill, 675 West 252nd Street. 718-549-3200; wavehill.org. CROTON-ON-HUDSON Brinton Brook Sanctuary Saw Mill River Audubon Second Saturday Walk. Nov. 8 at 9 a.m. Free. Brinton Brook Sanctuary, Route 9A. 914-666-6503; sawmillriveraudubon.org. Spoken Word DOBBS FERRY Dobbs Ferry Public Library \u201cAmazing History of the Bronx,\u201d lecture by Angel Hernandez. Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. Free. Dobbs Ferry Public Library, 55 Main Street. 914-693-6614; dobbsferrylibrary.org. HYDE PARK The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Karen Chase discusses her book \u201cPolio Boulevard: A Memoir.\u201d Nov. 6 at 7 p.m. Free. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 4079 Albany Post Road. 845-486-7745; fdrlibrary.marist.edu. TUCKAHOE Westchester Italian Cultural Center A discussion with the playwright Mario Fratti. Nov. 6 at 7 p.m. $20 and $25. Westchester Italian Cultural Center, 1 Generoso Pope Place. 914-771-8700; wiccny.org. WHITE PLAINS Purdy House \u201cImages of the Past: Jews and the Civil War,\u201d discussion. Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Purdy House, 60 Park Avenue. 914-949-4679; civilwarny150.org. Image PORT CHESTER \u201cHonest Abe\u201d (2012), ceramics, slips, underglaze, glaze, encaustic and wax by Thaddeus Erdahl, is on view in the group exhibition \u201cLineage: The Art of Mentorship\u201d through Nov. 15 at the Clay Art Center, 40 Beech Street. For further information: 914-937-2047 or clayartcenter.org . Credit Thaddeaus Eardahl Theater BRONX Riverdale Repertory Company, at Riverdale YM-YWHA \u201cHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,\u201d musical by Frank Loesser and book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert. Through Nov. 16. $10 to $20. Riverdale Repertory Company, at Riverdale YM-YWHA, 5625 Arlington Avenue. riverdalerisingstars.com; 800-838-3006. CROTON FALLS Schoolhouse Theater \u201cFreud\u2019s Last Session,\u201d drama by Mark St. Germain. Through Nov. 23. $20 to $38. Schoolhouse Theater, 3 Owens Road. 914-277-8477; schoolhousetheater.org. CROTON-ON-HUDSON YCP TheaterWorks, at the Cortlandt School of Performing Arts \u201cDividing the Estate,\u201d comedy by Horton Foote. Nov. 7 through 16. $18. YCP TheaterWorks, at the Cortlandt School of Performing Arts, 24 Old Albany Post Road. 914-245-2184; ycptw.org. ELMSFORD Westchester Broadway Theater \u201cSouth Pacific,\u201d musical by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan. Through Nov. 30 and Dec. 31 through Jan. 25. $54 to $80 for meal and show. Westchester Broadway Theater, 1 Broadway Plaza. broadwaytheatre.com; 914-592-2222. HYDE PARK Half Moon Theater, at the Culinary Institute of America \u201cThe World Goes \u2019Round,\u201d musical revue. Through Nov. 16. $35 to $45. Half Moon Theater, at the Culinary Institute of America, 1946 Campus Drive. 800-838-3006; halfmoontheatre.org. IRVINGTON Irvington Town Hall Theater \u201cMiss Saigon,\u201d Clocktower Players. Nov. 8 through 16. $20 to $32. Irvington Town Hall Theater, 85 Main Street. irvingtontheater.com; 914-591-6602. KINGSTON Ulster Performing Arts Center \u201cMenopause the Musical,\u201d by Jeanie Linders. Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. $34.50 and $44.50. Ulster Performing Arts Center, 601 Broadway. 845-339-6088; upac.org. PLEASANTVILLE Axial Theater, at St. John\u2019s Episcopal Church Community House \u201cThe Seagull,\u201d drama by Anton Chekhov. Nov. 7 through Nov. 23. $20 and $25. Axial Theater, at St. John\u2019s Episcopal Church Community House, 8 Sunnyside Avenue. axialtheatre.org; 914-286-7680. WEST POINT Eisenhower Hall Theater \u201cAnything Goes,\u201d musical by Cole Porter, Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Nov. 9 at 1 p.m. $40 and $42. Eisenhower Hall Theater, 655 Pitcher Road. ikehall.com; 845-938-4159. Museums and Galleries BEACON Beacon Artist Union \u201cAmalgam,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 2. Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Beacon Artist Union, 506 Main Street. 845-440-7584; baugallery.com. BEACON Theo Ganz Studio \u201cExtrication,\u201d abstract paintings by Sunok Chun. Through Nov. 2. \u201cCamino,\u201d photographs by Howard Goodman. Nov. 8 through Dec. 7. Fridays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment. Theo Ganz Studio, 149 Main Street. 917-318-2239; theoganzstudio.com. BEARSVILLE Galerie BMG \u201cUnlocking Whimsy,\u201d photographs by Leah Macdonald. Through Jan. 4. Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment. Galerie BMG, 17 Cricket Ridge Road. 845-679-0027; galeriebmg.com. BETHEL Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts \u201cSpeak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 31. Thursdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 200 Hurd Road. 866-781-2922; bethelwoodscenter.org. BRONX Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum \u201cGrandes Dames and Grand Plans: 100 Years of History at Bartow-Pell.\u201d Through Nov. 16. $3 and $5; members and children, free. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, 895 Shore Road. 718-885-1461; bpmm.org. BRONX Bronx Museum of the Arts \u201cDennis Oppenheim: S-T-A-B-.\u201d Through Nov. 23. \u201cIn Print/Imprint: Works From the Permanent Collection.\u201d \u201cHere I Am: Photographs by Lisa Leone.\u201d \u201cBeyond the Supersquare,\u201d group show. \u201cRethinking the Garden Casita.\u201d Through Jan. 11. Thursdays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse. bronxmuseum.org; 718-681-6000. BRONXVILLE OSilas Gallery \u201cLegacies, Landmarks and Achievements: Celebrating 350 Years \u2014 Eastchester, Tuckahoe, Bronxville.\u201d Through Nov. 9. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, noon to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, noon to 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 5 p.m. OSilas Gallery, 171 White Plains Road. 914-395-4520; osilasgallery.org. CATSKILL The Thomas Cole National Historic Site \u201cMaster, Mentor, Master: Thomas Cole and Frederic Church.\u201d Through Nov. 2. $9 and $10; children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street. thomascole.org; 518-943-7465. CHAPPAQUA Westorchard School The 46th Annual Chappaqua Antiques Show, jewelry, furniture, memorabilia and more. Nov. 1 and 2, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. $7 and $8. Westorchard School, 25 Granite Road. 914-238-4666; newcastlehs.org. COLD SPRING Buster Levi Gallery Mixed media paintings by Barbara Smith Gioia. Nov. 7 through 30. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Buster Levi Gallery, 121 Main Street. busterlevigallery.com; 845-809-5810. COLD SPRING Gallery 66NY \u201cIt\u2019s Only Natural,\u201d Carla Goldberg and Cynthia McCusker. Through Nov. 2. \u201cLayers Upon Layers,\u201d Anita Jacobson and Rebecca Darlington. Nov. 7 through 30. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Gallery 66NY, 66 Main Street. 845-809-5838; gallery66ny.com. COLD SPRING Open Concept Gallery Manya and Roumen jewelry show. Through Dec. 31. Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6 p.m. Open Concept Gallery, 125 Main Street. openconceptgallery.com; 845-260-0141. GARRISON Boscobel House and Gardens \u201cThe Hudson River Portfolio: A Beginning for the Hudson River School.\u201d Through Nov. 30. $8 to $17; members and children under 6, free. Wednesdays through Mondays, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Boscobel House and Gardens, 1601 Route 9D. 845-265-3638; boscobel.org. GARRISON Garrison Art Center Mixed-media prints and drawings by Judy Pfaff. Through Nov. 9. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Garrison Art Center, 23 Garrison\u2019s Landing. 845-424-3960; garrisonartcenter.org. Image ROSENDALE The documentary film \u201cBorn to Fly: Elizabeth Streb Vs. Gravity,\u201d featuring the dancer Leo Giron, will be shown on Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. at the Rosendale Theater, 408 Main Street. Tickets are $6 to $10. Information: 845-658-8989 or rosendaletheatre.org . Credit Aubin Pictures GARRISON Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center \u201cPalmas,\u201d sound installation by Melissa McGill. Through Nov. 10. Tours, Fridays through Mondays, 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center, 584 Route 9D. russelwrightcenter.org; 845-424-3812. HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON Upstream Gallery \u201cEvent Horizon,\u201d Dora Tomulic. Paintings and sculptures by Louise Cadoux. Through Nov. 2. Shirley Glasser and Paul Greco. Nov. 6 through 30. Thursdays through Sundays, 12:30 to 5:30 p.m., and by appointment. Upstream Gallery, 8 Main Street. 914-674-8548; upstreamgallery.com. HUDSON 510 Warren Street Gallery \u201cKate Knapp: The Manhattan Paintings.\u201d Through Nov. 30. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. 510 Warren Street Gallery, 510 Warren Street. 510warrenstgallery.com; 518-822-0510. HUDSON Carrie Haddad Gallery Linda Cross, William Clutz, Allyson Levy and Joshua Brehse. Through Nov. 2. \u201cLandscapes and Bodyscapes,\u201d Jane Bloodgood-Abrams, Bruce Sargeant and Dan Rupe. Nov. 5 through Dec. 14. Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Carrie Haddad Gallery, 622 Warren Street. carriehaddadgallery.com; 518-828-1915. HUDSON John Davis Gallery Judy Glantzman. Through Nov. 2. Theodore Roszak. Nov. 6 through 30. Thursdays through Mondays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment. John Davis Gallery, 362 1/2 Warren Street. johndavisgallery.com; 518-828-5907. HUDSON NOBO Gallery \u201cUnframed,\u201d group photography show. Through Nov. 9. Thursdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. NOBO Gallery, 558 Warren Street. 518-671-6777; nobogallery.com. HUDSON Olana \u201cAll the Raj: Frederic Church and Lockwood de Forest; Painting, Decorating and Collecting at Olana.\u201d Through Nov. 2. $5 to $12. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Olana, 5720 Route 9G. 518-828-0135; olana.org. HYDE PARK The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum \u201cRead My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection.\u201d Through Nov. 2. $6 and $9; children under 15, free. Daily, 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 4079 Albany Post Road. fdrlibrary.marist.edu; 845-486-7745. IRVINGTON Irvington Public Library \u201cSewn: New Work,\u201d Kit Demirdelen. Through Nov. 29. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Irvington Public Library, 12 South Astor Street. irvingtonlibrary.org; 914-591-7840. KATONAH Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts \u201cIn the Garden of Sonic Delights,\u201d sound art. Also presented at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Jacob Burns Film Center, Lyndhurst, the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Through Nov. 2. $10; children, free. Thursdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, 149 Girdle Ridge Road. 914-232-5035; caramoor.org. KATONAH Katonah Museum of Art \u201cLethal Beauty: Samurai Weapons and Armor.\u201d Through Jan. 4. $5 and $10; members and children under 12, free. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay Street. 914-232-9555; katonahmuseum.org. LARCHMONT Kenise Barnes Fine Art \u201cKevin Paulsen: A Splendid Vision.\u201d \u201cBest of 2014,\u201d group show. Nov. 8 through Dec. 23. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and by appointment. Kenise Barnes Fine Art, 1947 Palmer Avenue. kenisebarnesfineart.com; 914-834-8077. LARCHMONT Mamaroneck Artists Guild \u201cThe Flow of Her Life and Work,\u201d Hilda Green Demsky. Through Nov. 15. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment. Mamaroneck Artists Guild, 126 Larchmont Avenue. mamaroneckartistsguild.org; 914-834-1117. LIVINGSTON MANOR Catskill Art Society \u201cRiver and Biota,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 16. Mondays, and Thursdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Catskill Art Society, 48 Main Street. catskillartsociety.org; 845-436-4227. MAMARONECK Koslowe Gallery, Westchester Jewish Center \u201cGo Forth: Ancient Maps of the Holy Land.\u201d Through Dec. 1. Daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment. Koslowe Gallery, Westchester Jewish Center, 175 Rockland Avenue. 914-968-2960. MOUNTAINVILLE Storm King Art Center \u201cZhang Huan: Evoking Tradition.\u201d Through Nov. 9. $8 to $12; members and children under 5, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Storm King Art Center, Old Pleasant Hill Road. 845-534-3115; stormkingartcenter.org. NEW PALTZ Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, at the State University of New York at New Paltz \u201cWorlds of Wonder: Hudson Valley Artists 2014,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 9. \u201cDick Polich: Transforming Metal Into Art.\u201d \u201cRace, Love, and Labor: New Work from the Center for Photography at Woodstock\u2019s Artist-in-Residency Program.\u201d Through Dec. 14. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, at the State University of New York at New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive. 845-257-3844; newpaltz.edu/museum. NEW PALTZ The Mark Gruber Gallery \u201cA Different Point of View,\u201d Vince Natale and Carolyn H. Edlund. Through Nov. 22. Mondays, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, by appointment. The Mark Gruber Gallery, New Paltz Plaza. 845-255-1241; markgrubergallery.com. NEW PALTZ Unison Arts Center \u201cRhythm in Color,\u201d John Laurenzi and Herb Rogoff. Through Nov. 30. Weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Unison Arts Center, 68 Mountain Rest Road. unisonarts.org; 845-255-1559. NORTH SALEM Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden \u201cVisions Revealed,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 15. $4 and $5; members and children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m., and by appointment. Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden, 28 Deveau Road. 914-669-5033; hammondmuseum.org. NYACK Edward Hopper House Art Center \u201cViviane Silvera: On My Way.\u201d Through Nov. 2. \u201cSmall Matters of Great Importance: En Route,\u201d group show. Through Jan. 4. \u201cWendell Minor: Original Illustrations from \u2018Edward Hopper Paints His World\u2019 .\u201d Nov. 7 through Jan. 4. $2 to $7; members and children under 16, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment. Edward Hopper House Art Center, 82 North Broadway. hopperhouse.org; 845-358-0774. PEEKSKILL Bean Runner Cafe \u201cWho Does She Think She Is,\u201d digitally manipulated photographs by Marcy B. Freedman. Through Dec. 13. Sundays through Wednesdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Bean Runner Cafe, 201 South Division Street. beanrunnercafe.com; 914-737-1701. PEEKSKILL Field Library \u201cLarry D\u2019 Amico: Themes and Variations on a River.\u201d Through Dec. 8. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Field Library, 4 Nelson Avenue. 914-737-1212; peekskill.org. Image TARRYTOWN The rock musician Justin Hayward will perform on Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. at the Tarrytown Music Hall, 13 Main Street. Tickets are $38 to $90. For more information: 877-840-0457 or tarrytownmusichall.org . Credit Cory Schwartz/Getty Images PEEKSKILL Flat Iron Gallery \u201cThe Right Time and Place,\u201d photographs by Bob Pliskin. Through Nov. 30. Fridays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Flat Iron Gallery, 105 South Division Street. 914-734-1894; flatiron.qpg.com. PEEKSKILL Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art \u201cThe Women\u2019s Room: Female Perspectives on Men, Women, Family and Nation,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 7. $2 to $5; members and children under 8, free. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.; and by appointment. Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, 1701 Main Street. 914-788-0100; hvcca.org. PEEKSKILL Paramount Hudson Valley \u201cBrains, Boobs and Backbones: Women Artists/Women\u2019s Issues,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 31. Tuesdays through Sundays, 1 to 6 p.m. Paramount Hudson Valley, 1008 Brown Street. 914-739-0039; paramounthudsonvalley.com. PELHAM Pelham Art Center \u201cStuffscapes,\u201d group outdoor exhibition. Daily, 24 hours. Through Dec. 19. Pelham Art Center, 155 Fifth Avenue. pelhamartcenter.org; 914-738-2525. PORT CHESTER Clay Art Center \u201cLineage: The Art of Mentorship,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 15. Mondays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by appointment. Clay Art Center, 40 Beech Street. clayartcenter.org; 914-937-2047. POUGHKEEPSIE Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center \u201cImperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475-1540.\u201d Through Dec. 14. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 124 Raymond Avenue. fllac.vassar.edu; 845-437-5632. POUND RIDGE Pound Ridge Public Library \u201cRecent Works,\u201d Pound Ridge Art Guild. Through Nov. 22. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pound Ridge Public Library, 271 Westchester Avenue. poundridgelibrary.org; 914-764-5085. POUND RIDGE The Lionheart Gallery Paintings and works on paper by Claudia Mengel. Through Dec. 14. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 4 p.m.; and by appointment. The Lionheart Gallery, 27 Westchester Avenue. 914-764-8689; thelionheartgallery.com. PURCHASE Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College \u201cWhen Modern Was Contemporary: The Roy R. Neuberger Collection.\u201d Through Dec. 25. \u201cThis Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections From the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection.\u201d \u201cKey Frames: Contemporary Artists\u2019 Animation,\u201d group show. Through Jan. 11. \u201cBecoming Disfarmer,\u201d photographs by Mike Disfarmer. Nov. 9 through March 22. $3 to $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6100; neuberger.org. PURCHASE The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College Crafts at Purchase, fine crafts show. Nov. 1, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Nov. 2, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. $5 to $10; children 15 and under, free. The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 845-331-7900; artrider.com. RHINEBECK Betsy Jacaruso Studio and Gallery \u201cHarvest of Light,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 30. Thursdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and by appointment. Betsy Jacaruso Studio and Gallery, 43 East Market Street. betsyjacarusoartist.com; 845-516-4435. RHINEBECK Montgomery Row Second Level \u201cIntegrating Shapes and Shadows,\u201d photographs by Yoram Gelman. Through Nov. 23. Daily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Montgomery Row Second Level, 6423 Montgomery Street. 845-876-0543; montgomeryrow.com. RYE Rye Arts Center \u201cIrving Harper: A Mid-Century Mind at Play.\u201d Through Nov. 8. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Rye Arts Center, 51 Milton Road. 914-967-0700; ryeartscenter.org. SAUGERTIES Cross Contemporary Art \u201cRaw Cuts,\u201d prints by Richard Bosman. Through Nov. 3. Daily, noon to 6 p.m. Cross Contemporary Art, 81 Partition Street. 845-399-9751; crosscontemporaryart.com. SLEEPY HOLLOW Philipsburg Manor Tours of Kykuit, the Rockefeller family estate, including the house, sculptures, gardens and landscape. Through Nov. 9. $23 to $40. Philipsburg Manor, 381 North Broadway. hudsonvalley.org; 914-631-8200. SPARKILL Elizabeth V. Sullivan Gallery \u201cLandscapes, Still Lifes, New Paintings,\u201d Peter Homitzky. Through Nov. 16. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Elizabeth V. Sullivan Gallery, 241 Kings Highway. 845-359-1263; theartstudentsleague.org. TARRYTOWN Canfin Gallery \u201cMeditations on Light,\u201d Ira Barkoff. Through Nov. 2. New works by Jylian Gustlin. Nov. 8 through 30. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; and by appointment. Canfin Gallery, 39 Main Street. canfingallery.com; 914-332-4554. TUCKAHOE Westchester Italian Cultural Center \u201cArt and Perception,\u201d group show. Through Nov. 14. $5 and $10, suggested donation. Mondays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Fridays, 2 to 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to noon. Westchester Italian Cultural Center, 1 Generoso Pope Place. 914-771-8700; wiccny.org. WEST NYACK Rockland Center for the Arts \u201cDiorama: The Original Virtual Reality,\u201d group show. \u201cPortraits,\u201d Noah Becker. \u201cUrban Playgrounds,\u201d Patrick Binns. \u201cTether Me Not,\u201d Zachary Fabri. Through Dec. 21. Weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; weekends, 1 to 4 p.m. Rockland Center for the Arts, 27 South Greenbush Road. rocklandartcenter.org; 845-358-0877. WHITE PLAINS ArtsWestchester \u201cWays of Seeing,\u201d Westchester Sound Shore Communities. Through Nov. 8. \u201cDrawing Line Into Form: Works on Paper by Sculptors From the Collection of BNY Mellon.\u201d Through Dec. 6. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Avenue. artswestchester.org; 914-428-4220. WOODSTOCK Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts \u201cJailbirds and Flowers,\u201d Henrietta Mantooth. Through Nov. 23. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street. 845-679-2079; woodstockguild.org. WOODSTOCK WFG Gallery \u201c50/50,\u201d Heather Hutchison and Mark Thomas Kanter. Through Nov. 30. Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. WFG Gallery, 31 Mill Hill Road. wfggallery.com; 845-679-6003. WOODSTOCK Woodstock Artists Association and Museum \u201cGeorges Malkine: Perfect Surrealist Behavior.\u201d Through Jan. 4. Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m. Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, 28 Tinker Street. 845-679-2940; woodstockart.org. YONKERS Blue Door Gallery \u201cArt With a Story,\u201d John Nieman. Through Nov. 15. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Blue Door Gallery, 13 Riverdale Avenue. bluedoorartcenter.org; 914-375-5100. YONKERS Hudson River Museum \u201cStrut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art.\u201d Through Jan. 18 $3 to $6; members, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue. 914-963-4550; hrm.org.", "keyword": "Art;The arts;Westchester"}
{"id": "ny0217960", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/05/18", "title": "Bail Denied in Case of Giving Software to Qaeda", "abstract": "A federal magistrate judge in Manhattan refused on Monday to grant bail to a former Brooklyn resident charged with conspiring to provide Al Qaeda with computer advice and other assistance, finding that the man was dangerous and might flee. The ruling came after prosecutors said the defendant, Sabirhan Hasanoff, a dual citizen of the United States and Australia, had sworn an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda and conspired to provide the group with money and software for encrypted communications over the Internet. Mr. Hasanoff, who had recently worked in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, had also tried unsuccessfully to travel to Iraq \u201choping to be able to fight in the jihad,\u201d a federal prosecutor, John P. Cronan, told the judge. \u201cHe knew full well of the objectives of Al Qaeda,\u201d Mr. Cronan said. \u201cHe embraced its extremist ideology and radical goals. And when given the opportunity, he jumped at the chance of joining the organization.\u201d When the charges against Mr. Hasanoff and a co-defendant were announced last month, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the two men had \u201cconspired to modernize Al Qaeda\u201d with computer systems expertise and other services. On Monday, the prosecutor, Mr. Cronan, cited what he called the men\u2019s technological sophistication, wealth and \u201cability to move money easily\u201d as some of the \u201cmany reasons why these two individuals were so attractive to Al Qaeda.\u201d He noted that Mr. Hasanoff owned a house worth about $750,000. Mr. Hasanoff has an accounting degree from Baruch College, and most recently worked as a group chief financial officer for a company in Dubai, his lawyer, Anthony L. Ricco, said in court. Mr. Cronan, said the evidence against Mr. Hasanoff included a government witness \u201cwho can tell the entire story\u201d and significant corroboration. Mr. Hasanoff pleaded not guilty; if convicted, he could face a prison sentence of 15 years. His lawyer, Mr. Ricco, asked the judge, James C. Francis IV, to release his client on $2 million bond and a condition of home detention. \u201cWhatever value for the sake of argument that he is to Al Qaeda because he can travel and because he has financial resources, that no longer exists,\u201d Mr. Ricco said. He said 15 people, all professionals, were willing to sign the bond on his client\u2019s behalf. But Judge Francis refused to release Mr. Hasanoff, citing his computer skills and financial acumen. He also said that Mr. Hasanoff \u201cmay be motivated by strong ideological considerations,\u201d which might give him incentive to flee. \u201cThe evidence against the defendant appears to be relatively strong,\u201d the judge said. After the proceeding, Mr. Ricco said he planned to appeal the ruling to a federal district judge. \u201cThis was not unexpected,\u201d he said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen a defendant like him in the Southern District before, charged with providing material assistance. He\u2019s a successful businessman.\u201d Both Mr. Hasanoff and his co-defendant, whom prosecutors identified as Wesam El-Hanafi, were arrested in Dubai last month and brought back to the United States to face charges.", "keyword": "Hasanoff Sabirhan;Al Qaeda;Bail;Computers and the Internet;Francis James C IV;El-Hanafi Wesam"}
{"id": "ny0216780", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/04/01", "title": "Critics Exploit T\u00e9l\u00e9com Suicides, Ex-Executive Says", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Outsiders have taken advantage of the wave of suicides at France T\u00e9l\u00e9com to push their own agenda, a former top executive at the company said in an interview posted Wednesday on a Web site. At least 46 France T\u00e9l\u00e9com employees have committed suicide since January 2008, according to the company, including 11 this year. Unions have pointed to relentless reorganizations and cost-cutting as the cause. \u201cThat somebody ends his life is really something which makes me feel very, very bad,\u201d Louis-Pierre Wenes, France T\u00e9l\u00e9com\u2019s former deputy chief executive, said in the interview, his first since he stepped down under pressure last fall. But looking in isolation at the suicide rate in recent years gives \u201ca biased view of the situation,\u201d Mr. Wenes added. The rate was actually higher in 2000, he said, \u201cand moreover, the rate was absolutely similar to the overall French corresponding population.\u201d The World Health Organization estimated the suicide rate in France in 2005 at 26.4 per 100,000 for men and 9.2 for women. \u2014 France T\u00e9l\u00e9com employs about 102,000 people in France. In the interview, conducted in English and posted on MeetTheBoss.TV, Mr. Wenes said the employee suicides had seized public attention \u201cbecause a certain number of external stakeholders had their personal agenda, and it\u2019s always very easy to play on the emotion of the people.\u201d Mr. Wenes did not identify the \u201cexternal stakeholders\u201d and could not immediately be reached for comment. In addition to causing a wave of bad publicity last fall, the suicides prompted President Nicolas Sarkozy\u2019s government to intervene. Mr. Wenes, a principal architect of the company\u2019s reorganization efforts and a lightning rod for criticism, was shuffled out in October to make room for St\u00e9phane Richard. Employees greeted news of the departure of Mr. Wenes with satisfaction, with the newsmagazine Le Point quoting one union official, S\u00e9bastien Crozier, as saying at the time that it was an \u201cindispensable element of the restructuring of France T\u00e9l\u00e9com.\u201d Mr. Richard rose to chief executive on March 1, taking over from Didier Lombard at the former state monopoly, in which civil servants with lifetime job guarantees make up a majority of the work force. Mr. Richard is now working to restore order and morale while remaining focused on the rapidly changing telecommunications market. The government retains a stake of about 27 percent in the company. Technologia, a human resources consulting firm hired to help advise France T\u00e9l\u00e9com on the suicides, recommended in early March that the company halt reorganizations, closely monitor psychosocial risk factors and create an internal network of mediators to improve communication. The company has already begun to act on some of those recommendations. Worse could still be ahead for the company. On March 17, Jean-Christophe Vaulot-Pfister, a deputy prosecutor in Besan\u00e7on, in eastern France, said he had ordered a judge to look into the suicide of a young employee of the company, who had apparently been distraught about his job, to decide whether France T\u00e9l\u00e9com should be charged with manslaughter. Mr. Vaulot-Pfister declined on Wednesday to comment on the investigation. Jean-Bernard Orsoni, a France T\u00e9l\u00e9com spokesman, also declined to comment on the investigation, or on the interview with Mr. Wenes. As for the company\u2019s efforts to improve morale, he said, \u201cwe\u2019re in a rebuilding phase right now.\u201d", "keyword": "Suicides and Suicide Attempts;France Telecom SA;France;Wenes Louis-Pierre"}
{"id": "ny0000903", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/03/16", "title": "Cancellation Clears Path for Hirscher", "abstract": "LENZERHEIDE, SWITZERLAND \u2014 What first looked to be a thrilling down-to-the-wire finale this weekend in alpine ski racing will mostly be a victory salute for Marcel Hirscher, the 24-year-old Austrian who will receive his second consecutive large crystal globe as overall World Cup champion after the season-ending slalom Sunday. Hirscher entered the weekend technical races at the World Cup finals with a 149-point advantage over his nearest challenger, Aksel Lund Svindal. That margin became insurmountable when the Norwegian announced that he would forgo the slalom after cancellation of downhill and super-G races Wednesday and Thursday because of adverse weather conditions. Svindal garnered the downhill and super-G titles after a cancellation Wednesday because of thick fog and then a controversial race Thursday that culminated in the crash of the Austrian skier Klaus Kr\u00f6ll. The crash occurred in gusting winds and questionable racing conditions and resulted in the cancellation of the rest of the races Thursday. That cost Svindal an opportunity to gain valuable points, because the rules state that in World Cup finals, races are not re-scheduled. \u201cIt\u2019s mixed emotions, because on one side it\u2019s been a great year and I\u2019m very happy, but on the other side, I would have liked to give Hirscher a fight to the end,\u201d Svindal said after the super-G was canceled. \u201cI see no point in competing in the slalom now,\u201d said Svindal, whose best career finish in the discipline is sixth. \u201cIt might have been a consideration, had the two last races not been canceled.\u201d Svindal, who won overall titles in 2007 and 2009 and became the first Norwegian downhill cup champion since Lasse Kjus in 1999, praised Hirscher. \u201cMarcel Hirscher fully deserves his second big cup. He has achieved an amazing season,\u201d Svindal said. \u201cI am also very pleased with my own winter. I\u2019ve reached a lot with my gold medal at Schladming and my two crystal globes in the speed events,\u201d he said referring to his downhill world championship in Austria in February, and his downhill and super-G titles. Hirscher, who wrapped up the slalom title last weekend in Slovenia, has seven victories this season having finished among the top three in 16 of 18 races. He will join fellow Austrian ski legends Karl Schranz and Stephan Eberharter with two overall World Cup titles. Following the cancellation of men\u2019s and women\u2019s speed events Wednesday and Thursday, an improved weather forecast was expected for giant slalom and slalom races Saturday and Sunday. In just one of the four remaining races \u2014 the women\u2019s slalom Saturday \u2014 is a season title yet to be determined. The Slovenian Tina Maze \u2014 who clinched her first overall title February 24 in M\u00e9ribel, France \u2014 can add a slalom title to her dominant season if she maintains a seven-point lead over the American Mikaela Shiffrin in a slalom Saturday. Maze, 29, regained the slalom lead over Shiffrin, who celebrated her 18th birthday Wednesday, with a victory in Ofterschwang, Germany last Sunday. On Feb. 16, Shiffrin became the youngest women\u2019s world slalom champion in 39 years. If Shiffrin can either win the slalom or overcome the seven-point deficit, she will be the first American to win a slalom title since Tamara McKinney in 1984. \u201cI\u2019ll just go as hard as I can and see if I can get it back,\u201d Shiffrin said, referring to relinquishing the slalom points lead. \u201cIf not, I\u2019ve still had an amazing season, so I can\u2019t be disappointed. Yeah, I want the globe, but we\u2019ll see if it works out that way. Tina has had an amazing season and she just keeps going, so that\u2019s really cool and inspiring.\u201d Maze has accumulated an unprecedented 2,254 World Cup points this season and can increase that total Saturday and Sunday. She also has 22 podium finishes this season and will pass the Austrian Hermann Maier, who accomplished the feat in 1999-2000, if she finishes among the top three in either race this weekend. If Maze hangs on to her slalom points advantage, she will earn her fourth crystal globe this season: the overall and three discipline titles. Maze also took the combined title, with two victories in two races, although a crystal globe is no longer awarded in the discipline. As a result of the tumultuous week of fog, occasional heavy snowfall and high winds in Lenzerheide, Maze locked up the super-G title Thursday when the women\u2019s race was wiped out. However she lost a chance at the downhill crown \u2014 she trailed the injured American Lindsey Vonn by only one point \u2014 with the forfeiture of the downhill Wednesday. \u201cI don\u2019t really like these kind of days when you don\u2019t get the chance to show your skills on the slope,\u201d said Maze, after the super-G cancellation Thursday. \u201cBut in the end, today is a good day for me, while yesterday wasn\u2019t. Of course, I\u2019m happy to secure the super-G title. I\u2019m really proud of my season.\u201d Maze, who captured the giant slalom title in late January, will be the favorite in the final women\u2019s G.S. race of the season Sunday. Ted Ligety, who won his fourth giant slalom globe this season, has been nearly unbeatable and will seek his seventh victory in nine races Saturday. The U.S. racer is also on track to finish third in the overall standings behind Hirscher and Svindal. On Sunday, Hirscher will attempt to finish in style, trying for his ninth consecutive slalom podium. Much like two years ago, when four important races were also canceled because of poor weather in Lenzerheide \u2014 and Maria H\u00f6fl-Riesch was handed the overall title after finishing three points ahead of Vonn \u2014 it has been another troublesome week at the Swiss resort for International Ski Federation race organizers. With the bottom of the Silvano Beltrametti racecourse shrouded in fog, start times for the men\u2019s and women\u2019s downhill Wednesday were pushed back eight times during nearly five hours of delays before the cancellations. On Thursday, the men\u2019s super-G began more than three hours late, and after nine racers battled through persistent crosswinds on the mountain, Kr\u00f6ll lost control and crashed into the safety netting. The 2012 downhill champion was flown by helicopter to a nearby hospital. He was said to have had surgery to set a fractured left arm. Both men\u2019s and women\u2019s races were canceled about forty minutes after the incident.", "keyword": "Skiing;World Cup Skiing;Alpine skiing"}
{"id": "ny0009027", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/05/25", "title": "Mexican Official Defends Accuracy of Data on Organized Crime", "abstract": "MEXICO CITY \u2014 Rejecting concerns that the government\u2019s statistics were foggier than ever, Mexico\u2019s top security official argued Friday that real progress was being made in reducing organized crime killings and that the number of people previously reported missing was inflated. The official, Interior Secretary Miguel Osorio Chong, summoned foreign reporters for a briefing and, while discussing several topics, pushed back against suggestions that the administration was more focused on controlling its message than on the truth when it released statistics. \u201cWe are never going to link security to politics,\u201d he said. In the nearly six months since President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto took office, Mr. Osorio Chong said, the smarter use of intelligence and efforts to avoid violent confrontations between federal forces and criminal gangs have led to a nearly 20 percent drop in organized crime killings. So far this year, the average number of such killings has been 34 a day, compared with 41 a day last year, according to a document he let reporters see but not copy or photograph because the numbers were preliminary. Regarding disappearances, he said further investigation would show that a database begun in the previous administration and consisting of 26,000 missing-person cases in the past six years would shrink, because many of the cases involved people who had migrated to other places or left home for reasons unrelated to organized crime or drug activity. Image Interior Minister Miguel Osorio Chong, left, with Attorney General Jes\u00fas Murillo Karam, stood by official statistics. Credit Henry Romero/Reuters Family members of the disappeared in recent weeks have stepped up their calls for the government to investigate the cases. Tracking progress in the drug war has always proved difficult, with large numbers of crimes that go unreported, uninvestigated and unsolved. Independent analysts in recent weeks have questioned the government\u2019s collection methods and complained that little effort is being made to strengthen the local and state police agencies charged with doing the bulk of investigating and that they are still falling short. Writing for the Insight Crime blog, Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and a former Mexican intelligence officer, called into question efforts to classify cases as related to organized crime, since little investigation is done to prove such motives and the criteria are subjective and open to manipulation. Mr. Hope noted that the overall number of homicides had increased in the first months of the administration. \u201cMurders \u2018unrelated\u2019 to drug trafficking went up in the first four months of the current administration, according to Mexican government figures \u2014 but does this really mean that the narcos are killing less, while all other forms of violence are growing?\u201d he asked. This week the newsweekly ZETA released its own analysis surveying state authorities and other data and found the number of organized crime homicides far higher than what the government had reported. It also found that other crimes, like kidnappings, were on the rise. The previous government under Felipe Calder\u00f3n abandoned the practice of releasing statistics related to organized crime, with officials saying that the tallies were imprecise and difficult to verify.", "keyword": "Mexico;Organized crime;Crime statistics;Missing person;Murders;Miguel Osorio Chong"}
{"id": "ny0180847", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/08/13", "title": "Importing Chiefs, Detroit Reflects on Its \u2018Car Guys\u2019", "abstract": "DETROIT, Aug. 12 \u2014 Where have all the car guys gone? With the surprise appointment last week of Robert L. Nardelli, the former Home Depot chief executive, to run Chrysler, Detroit has completed a new-model changeover of the executive suite. It is no longer a requirement to have \u201cmotor oil in your veins,\u201d as they are fond of saying in this city, to run a car company. None of the chiefs now leading the three American car companies can be credited for inspiring or developing anything on the roads today \u2014 the unofficial definition of what makes a Detroit chief executive a true \u201ccar guy.\u201d Only one of them, Rick Wagoner at General Motors , has more than a year of experience in the industry. Moreover, very few of their highest-ranking colleagues have come up through the design, engineering or marketing side of the business so vital to Detroit\u2019s existence. It is a sharp break from a tradition stretching back to the industry\u2019s infancy, when car builders became chiefs of the companies that bore their names. As recently as last decade, all three chief executives could brag about cars they had helped develop. Ford \u2019s chief at the time, Donald E. Petersen, oversaw the Ford Taurus and earlier Fords. At G.M., Robert C. Stempel engineered several vehicles, including the Oldsmobile Toronado. And the most famous car guy of the time, Lee A. Iacocca, was credited with the success of Chrysler\u2019s K-cars and its minivan (and the Mustang from a previous stint at Ford). As a marketing expert, though, he admittedly had others doing the actual development work. But people in some quarters now argue that an outsider\u2019s pragmatic eye may be worth more than the gut instincts that come from bringing a car to life. Given that the Detroit automakers have lost billions of dollars, and market share, to Japanese competitors in recent years, the evidence may be on their side. Though car guys were responsible for Detroit\u2019s triumphs, they also steered the companies into trouble with errors in judgment that included relying too heavily on big sport-utility vehicles. \u201cThis is a business that needs to be run as a business,\u201d Alan R. Mulally, Ford\u2019s chief executive, said at an industry conference last week near Traverse City, Mich. Even the now-retired Mr. Petersen, in a rare interview, agreed with that. \u201cI think the concept\u2019s been overdone,\u201d he said last week of the car-guy mystique. By insisting that only homegrown talent be promoted, Mr. Petersen added, \u201cit\u2019s undervaluing the inherent knowledge that you get about how things do in fact work in a very complex industrial setting.\u201d The appointment a year ago of Mr. Mulally, a former president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, marked the first time an outsider had been appointed to run an auto company in Detroit, where lengthy careers at a single company are still the norm. Mr. Wagoner, for example, joined G.M. 30 years ago, and rose to chief financial officer in 1992 at age 39. By contrast, Mr. Nardelli has barely finished his first week as an automobile executive. His appointment has led to a kind of town hall discussion in the industry \u2014 in union halls, on Internet message boards and at an industry conference last week in northern Michigan \u2014 about who is best equipped to lead the industry out of its current troubles. The Detroit News asked readers to share their thoughts at its Web site after Mr. Nardelli\u2019s appointment, and they had wide-ranging opinions about Chrysler\u2019s future under its new owner, Cerberus Capital Management. \u201cThe whole industry has to stop pointing fingers at the rest of the world and instead decide what they can do,\u201d said another reader from Troy, Mich. \u201cIt\u2019s their industry. If they don\u2019t fix it, it\u2019s their jobs that go away.\u201d Another was less confident in the new boss: \u201cI\u2019m terrified by what Nardelli and Cerberus could do to Chrysler.\u201d Mr. Nardelli hoped to win over some skeptics about his background when he stressed his love for Chrysler products last Monday at a news conference \u2014 he said his garage included a Jeep, a Plymouth Prowler and a PT Cruiser. But Edward Lapham, executive editor of Automotive News, a trade publication, wrote on Wednesday that it would be a mistake for Mr. Nardelli \u201cto assume that just because he likes cars, he\u2019s a car guy.\u201d Arturo Reyes, the president of United Automobile Workers Local 651 in Flint, Mich., said he was skeptical of Mr. Nardelli. \u201cI get more excited about the prospect of a company when we\u2019re talking about a car guy who has seen the manufacturing process, who knows the design team, who can talk about quality and everything else,\u201d Mr. Reyes said. To be sure, there is not a car guy in charge at the world\u2019s biggest car company, Toyota Motor, which passed G.M. earlier this year to take the No. 1 spot. In fact, it is difficult to name a traditional car guy at Toyota beyond the company\u2019s founder, Kiichiro Toyoda, who acknowledged copying a Chevrolet design for Toyota\u2019s first car, the AA, in 1936. Toyota\u2019s top executives typically have a broad background, not a single expertise. Its current chief executive, Katsuaki Watanabe, is an economist and purchasing expert. The company\u2019s emphasis on consensus also means an expert\u2019s voice is only one of many when decisions are made, said James Lentz, an executive vice president at Toyota Motor Sales USA. \u201cThe days of just a car guy running with their gut feeling probably are, today, pretty difficult to do,\u201d Mr. Lentz said. Robert A. Lutz, vice chairman of G.M., is perhaps the Detroit executive best known for a \u201cgolden gut\u201d that led him to direct the development of vehicles like the 10-cylinder Dodge Viper sports car. He said last week that he was not opposed to the idea of industry outsiders at the top. \u201cWhat you need is a well-balanced individual who has a lot of experience in the business, who has a brilliant business mind and knows what he or she doesn\u2019t know,\u201d he said at the automotive conference. \u201cIf a person from the outside incorporates all those things, then there\u2019s no reason why he or she wouldn\u2019t do well.\u201d But Mr. Lutz cautioned that Mr. Nardelli, reportedly hired to speed Chrysler\u2019s turnaround from $1.5 billion in losses last year, should not expect quick results. \u201cIf anyone thinks they\u2019re going to get all that solved in three months, I wish them a lot of luck,\u201d he said. A car guy\u2019s background is invaluable in one sense, Mr. Petersen said. In an industry so focused on trying to predict trends, executives benefit from having both their own knowledge about the industry and experience in reading what other car guys are telling them. \u201cUnless you know the business, you won\u2019t know what can and can\u2019t be done,\u201d Mr. Petersen said. With a car background, \u201cyou have the basic ability to be able to challenge.\u201d To Mr. Petersen, the debate over non-car guys reminds him of an earlier trend, when companies scurried to elevate their chief financial officers, believing that familiarity with Wall Street trumped operating know-how. For Detroit, Mr. Nardelli\u2019s appointment will be \u201ca very interesting experiment,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Automobiles;Appointments and Executive Changes;General Motors Corp;Ford Motor Co;Detroit (Mich)"}
{"id": "ny0147039", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/07/09", "title": "Paradise in a Pit Stop for Cabbies in Queens", "abstract": "In a corner of Long Island City known for beat-up auto repair shops and street-side chicken vendors, the newly renovated building that is home to Queens Medallion Brokerage looms like a checkered-yellow palace. At its simplest, it is a taxi garage where drivers come to pay their weekly medallion dues and rant about the afternoon\u2019s snooty tourists. But step away from the teller\u2019s line and cabbies enter \u2014 by garage standards, anyway \u2014 a luxury suite: plasma TVs hanging from the walls, private showers next to the mechanics\u2019 floor and soon (the bosses promise), a trio of massage chairs for the lounge. \u201cYou\u2019ll never see anything like this,\u201d said Tony Georgiton, a former cabdriver and vice president of the medallion company, as he led a tour of the building on a recent weekday. \u201cNowhere else.\u201d Mr. Georgiton and the company\u2019s president, Basil Messados, were used to shabby, single-bathroom garages where grease lined the walls and drivers had to step over transmission parts just to talk to one another. Now, they have created a taxi driver\u2019s paradise, a refuge totally unlike the grimy, disheveled hangouts popularized on screen. On a shelf in Mr. Messados\u2019s office, next to photos of his wife and father, sits a portrait of a huffing-and-puffing Robert De Niro from the classic movie \u201cTaxi Driver.\u201d Mr. Messados said that he understood the plight of the hack. In the 1980s, he drove a cab from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. for a weekly income of $152. Since then, he has traded in his yellow Ford LTD for a white Mercedes roadster. But he has not forgotten the long and erratic hours, the constant compliance checks from the city, and the sometimes ill-mannered customers. (Don\u2019t get him started on the customers.) The 32,000-square-foot building in Queens, which opened in April, is intended to alleviate some of those pressures, he said, and add a bit of comfort to what can be a grueling way of life. \u201cA driver needs an island, an oasis, where he can get away and feel like a human,\u201d Mr. Messados said, putting out a cigarette in an ashtray painted to look like an old-fashioned Checker cab. \u201cI think it\u2019s a big shock when you tell them they can take a shower.\u201d Mr. Georgiton, 50, and Mr. Messados, 41, both Greek immigrants, retain a youthful energy that fuels off-color jokes and threats to tear the replica Greek sword off the wall for a lunchtime duel. The two have been business partners for nearly two decades, having set up shop in 1991 with a nine-cab brokerage in Queens. They currently lease medallions for about 400 cabs, with two or three drivers using each car. Each driver pays about $800 a week to use the medallion, and some pay more for insurance or to finance their cabs if they do not own them. The garage operates in a 91-year-old former factory that was bought in March for $6.5 million. An additional $1.5 million was spent to turn it into a sparkling, mustard-colored headquarters. It was a decided upgrade from the company\u2019s old building a few blocks away. \u201cSomeone told me once that you die without pockets \u2014 you can\u2019t take anything with you,\u201d Mr. Georgiton said. \u201cWe cut down on our profits a little, but you feel good about yourself.\u201d Many drivers seem to feel pretty good about the new place, too \u2014 when they can make use of it. Queens Medallion has not yet secured permission from the city to run a taxi stand, so cabbies can usually enjoy five or 10 minutes in the lunchroom before parking tickets start to hit windshields in the no-parking zone outside. Drivers stream in and out all day, staying long enough to grab a Coke from the vending machine or catch a few minutes of a soccer game broadcast in high definition. While the lunchroom is popular, the showers rarely flow. Last week, drivers were in and out at lightning speed. Sheik Musa Samory dashed into the lunchroom and spread out his maroon prayer mat. Mr. Musa Samory, who used to pray in a cramped room in the old location, said that when he first saw the new facilities, \u201cit was like we were on the moon.\u201d He said the renovations reflected the caring attitude of the owners, who are known to organize weekly soccer matches and chat amiably with drivers in the lounge. \u201cThis is the way a business place should be,\u201d said Mr. Musa Samory, a native of Ghana and a cabdriver since 1979. \u201cNot just for money, but concern for health and to help you be happy.\u201d But in a time of dreary economic forecasts, others are not so pleased. Chantal Goin questioned the need for fancy facilities when many taxi drivers are struggling to earn enough to pay for expensive gas. \u201cWhy put a shower in?\u201d Ms. Goin shouted on the way to her cab. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make a difference. All I do is come in here and pay and leave.\u201d Hamidou Barry, an immigrant from Mali, said he would have preferred that the money used for renovations go instead toward reducing fees for taxi drivers, like the charge drivers must pay to share a cab. Mr. Barry said he was considering leaving the brokerage because it was getting too expensive. \u201cThis place is good, but they\u2019re doing something that\u2019s not right,\u201d he said. \u201cCharge, charge, charge, charge, charge.\u201d Mr. Messados defended the costs, explaining that having multiple drivers share one cab required extra insurance fees. And amid all the frills, there are those who miss the filth. \u201cIt\u2019s very nice, said Rashad Javaid, 29, from Pakistan. \u201cAlmost too nice.\u201d Mementos of a not-so-luxurious past have not totally vanished. Wander past the TV screens, up the granite staircase, and through the stately bathroom doors. A sign above the shimmering new toilets gently reminds drivers: \u201cPlease Flush Toilet by Hand Only. Do Not Kick to Flush!!!\u201d", "keyword": "Taxicabs and Taxicab Drivers;Queens (NYC);Taxi and Limousine Commission"}
{"id": "ny0282255", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2016/07/11", "title": "South Korea\u2019s Golf Dominance Leaves Some of the World\u2019s Best Out of the Olympics", "abstract": "SAN MARTIN, Calif. \u2014 They have been tracking results week after week as compulsively as players in a fantasy league do. In South Korea, where people are passionate about women\u2019s golf and the Olympics, the composition of the team that the country will send to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next month has drawn intense scrutiny. \u201cEvery single week we talk about who is going to be playing, how they\u2019re going to prepare and they talk about the gold medal,\u201d said Se Ri Pak, who will serve as the captain of the South Korean women\u2019s Olympic squad. She added, \u201cOur country is taking it really, really seriously.\u201d Image Amy Yang, ranked No. 9 in the world, finished in a tie for third at the United States Women\u2019s Open. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated Press In women\u2019s golf, South Korea is like a cribbage player who has to slough off cards from a strong hand. In the current world rankings, the country boasts seven of the top 14 players, and 10 of the top 20. The Olympic qualification standards dictate that every player in the top 15 is eligible to compete but no country can have more than four representatives in the 60-player field. The women representing South Korea will be a Dream Team, with a group so formidable there likely will be no place for Ha-na Jang, who began the week ranked 10th in the world. Monday is the cutoff for qualification, which turned the United States Women\u2019s Open at CordeValle Golf Club into a last-ditch effort to qualify for the Olympics for a group of South Koreans that included Jang, ninth-ranked Amy Yang, 11th-ranked So Yeon Ryu, 14th-ranked Bo-mee Lee and 18th-ranked Sung-hyun Park. Sung-hyun Park insinuated herself into the race by holding at least a share of the lead on the back nine Sunday. A victory would have moved Park, 22, to 10th in the world rankings, bumping her compatriot, Jang, for the first-alternate spot for the Olympics. Imagine the pressure of trying to become the seventh South Korean in the past nine years to win the United States Women\u2019s Open while also simultaneously trying to nail down a possible spot in golf\u2019s return to the Olympics after a 112-year absence. It was too much for Park, who played the last seven holes in two-over to finish tied for third. \u201cTo be honest it\u2019s definitely stressful,\u201d said Ryu, the 2011 United States Women\u2019s Open champion who tried and failed on both fronts. She closed with a 69, her best score of the week, to finish tied for 10th, not high enough to earn a berth to Rio. Image So Yeon Ryu\u2019s No. 11 ranking made her only the sixth-best South Korean golfer. Credit Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images \u201cYou don\u2019t really want to predict something in the future, you just want to focus on the present,\u201d Ryu said. \u201cBut when people keep saying, \u2018Oh, So Yeon, you\u2019re so close,\u2019 when people keep saying that I cannot focus on my game. That was really the tough part.\u201d The top-ranked South Korean, Inbee Park, who is No. 3 overall, did not compete this week because of a lingering left thumb injury. If she is unable to play in Rio, Jang will take her place. But Ryu does not believe the injury will sideline her good friend. Asked if she expects Park to play in Rio, Ryu replied, \u201cYeah, for sure, it\u2019s such an honor.\u201d The Olympic team picture became more blurred as the week wore on. Another player, In-gee Chun, who has five top 3 finishes this year, including a runner-up at the ANA Inspiration, was the third-ranked South Korean, at sixth overall. But she missed the cut here, cracking the door open for those behind them in the rankings to slip through. Image Sung-hyun Park joined Amy Yang in a tie for third place at the United States Women\u2019s Open. Credit Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images Lurking near the lead on Sunday, as has become her custom in the majors, was Yang, the fourth-ranked Korean who recorded her 14th career top-10 finish in a major, a tie for third. Earlier in the year, Yang said she was constantly being asked about her Olympic prospects. Her play suffered, she explained, because the questions took her focus off the present. \u201cSo I quit thinking about it,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I get a chance, it\u2019d be great. If I don\u2019t, I get some time off.\u201d The challenge of blocking out the Olympics came into clearer focus after Yang posted a 73 on Saturday to sit two strokes out of the 54-hole lead. One of the first questions she fielded was about the Olympics. Yang was asked which would mean more to her: a United States Open victory or an Olympic gold medal. Image Bo-mee Lee was one of several South Korean golfers trying to earn a spot on the country\u2019s Olympic team by winning the United States Women\u2019s Open. Credit Atsushi Tomura/Getty Images \u201cIt\u2019s hard to decide,\u201d she said. On Sunday, after finishing tied for third at four under, Yang celebrated her consolation prize: a trip to Rio. \u201cThat\u2019s amazing,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cI told everyone I\u2019m relaxing about making the team but one side of me was fighting it, like \u2018I want it\u2019 and another side was saying \u2018let it go.\u2019\u201d It\u2019s hard to explain an Olympic qualification system that leaves out the Nos. 11, 14 and 18 in the world but includes the Indian teenager, Aditi Ashok, who is ranked 441st. But that is the scenario the South Koreans were left to digest. And it could have been grimmer for the South Koreans if the world No. 1, Lydia Ko, who was born in Seoul, had not moved with her family to New Zealand when she was young. Ko, 19, was an interested bystander to the jockeying among the players from the country of her birth. \u201cIt\u2019s so close,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to choose which player deserves to be going because at the end of the day they all deserve to be representing their country.\u201d With the finalization on Monday of the Olympic golf team rosters, the scrutiny of the South Korean women will shift to the possibility of a podium sweep. \u201cA lot of Korean people for sure think we\u2019re going to make the gold medal and all the medals,\u201d Ryu said, adding, \u201cBut you cannot predict anything about golf.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;2016 Summer Olympics;South Korea;Se Ri Pak;Sung Hyun Park"}
{"id": "ny0078885", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/02/02", "title": "Late Seahawks Drive Ends With a Screeching Halt After a Risky Call", "abstract": "GLENDALE, Ariz. \u2014 On the same field where a receiver named David Tyree had improbably caught a desperation throw to propel the Giants to Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots seven years earlier, the Seattle Seahawks had a potentially historic acrobatic catch of their own to remember and treasure. The difference in the falling reception by Jermaine Kearse, however, is that the Seahawks did not complete the drive into the end zone. The highlight was almost immediately trumped by a highly questionable play call, an interception at the goal line and a brawl, all more unbelievable than the catch that had preceded them. \u201cA very, very hard lesson,\u201d Seattle Coach Pete Carroll said, noting that his team had been on the verge of another championship. \u201cI hate to learn the hard way, but there\u2019s no other way to look at it right now.\u201d Seattle had blown a 10-point fourth-quarter lead but found itself at New England\u2019s 38-yard line with 1 minute 14 seconds left. Trailing by 28-24, quarterback Russell Wilson lobbed a pass down the right side to receiver Kearse, who was blanketed by the backup cornerback Malcolm Butler. Both men leapt over the 10-yard line, falling backward like high-jumpers over a bar, as the ball was volleyed into the air while they skidded backward on the grass. The ball dropped into the arms of Kearse, who cradled it for a catch as dramatic as any in Super Bowl history. Image Tom Brady throwing during the first half of Super Bowl XLIX at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. Brady won his fourth Super Bowl. 1 / 24 The Seahawks had a first down at the 5-yard line and used the second of their three timeouts with 1:06 left. Wilson handed off to the bruising back Marshawn Lynch, who gained 4 yards, nearly dragging defenders into the end zone. Carroll, his usual state of calm lost in emotion that seemed balanced between anger and disappointment, said after the game that he had not wanted to \u201cwaste\u201d a running play and thought a quick pass would be the game-winner. The offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell, made the play call, but Carroll gave it the go-ahead without debate. \u201cIt\u2019s not the right matchup for us to run the football, so on second down, we throw the ball, really to kind of waste that play,\u201d Carroll said. \u201cIf we score, we do. If we don\u2019t, then we\u2019ll run it on third and fourth down.\u201d He said he had looked at Wilson, his third-year quarterback, before the play to make sure that Wilson understood the gravity of the moment. He did. With the clock ticking, on second-and-goal at the 1-yard line, Wilson took the snap from the shotgun position. He threw immediately to the goal line, toward receiver Ricardo Lockette. But Butler and the ball arrived at the same time, and Butler snagged the prize: a game-clinching interception. \u201cI put the blame on me,\u201d said Wilson, who did not question the call when he received it. \u201cI\u2019m the one who threw it.\u201d The interception immediately set off a debate over Seattle\u2019s play-calling and, shortly after, a fight that escalated momentarily out of control in the end zone. The Seahawks had one timeout remaining and Lynch \u2014 the league\u2019s leading bulldozer, with more rushing yards and touchdowns than anyone over the past four seasons \u2014 ready to plunge in for the winning score. Video The Seattle Seahawks coach spoke about the interception that cost his team the game. Credit Credit Matt York/Associated Press Instead of Kearse becoming the hero, it was the little-known Butler, who had been the foil to Kearse moments before he saved the game for New England with an interception. \u201cI\u2019ve worked so hard in practice, and I just wanted to play so bad and help my team out,\u201d Butler said afterward. \u201cI got out there and did exactly what I needed to do to help my team win.\u201d With the expected Seahawks victory ripped away unexpectedly, Seattle\u2019s emotions came unhinged. The New England offense took the field for the final snaps. With 20 seconds left, after Seattle had been penalized five yards for encroachment, New England quarterback Tom Brady took a knee. A fight broke out, centered around Seattle linebacker Bruce Irvin, who rampaged through the end zone looking for Patriots to engage. For a few seconds, as officials tried to gain control, it looked as if the fighting might spread. \u201cIt was just frustration between two teams,\u201d said Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who had been in the middle of the scrum. \u201cIt\u2019s football.\u201d Irvin was ejected, Brady took another knee, and the clock expired in a cloud of confetti that fell on both teams. For those tantalizing few moments, it looked as if it would be the Seahawks who prevailed, and as if Kearse would be the hero \u2014 not unlike Tyree had been for the Giants in a come-from-behind victory over the Patriots in 2008. \u201cThe goal is to win the game,\u201d Kearse said. \u201cAnd right now that catch doesn\u2019t mean anything to me.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Pete Carroll;Russell Wilson;Tom Brady;Marshawn Lynch;Patriots;Seahawks;Super Bowl"}
{"id": "ny0166631", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2006/01/03", "title": "Provider of TV Movie Channels Looks to Expand to PC's and Video Players", "abstract": "Starz Entertainment Group is introducing a $9.95-a-month subscription service that will allow people to download movies from the Internet and watch them on their computers, portable video players and television sets. The new offering, called Vongo, comes at a time when movie studios and television networks are rapidly expanding their efforts to distribute their content over the Internet, experimenting with both paid and advertiser-supported models. \"We see a market out there of people who are saying, 'I want to choose what I want to watch, control how I watch it and watch it wherever I am,' \" said Robert Greene, a senior vice president at Starz, which operates pay movie channels under the Starz or Encore name and is owned by Liberty Media, the company controlled by John C. Malone, the cable entrepreneur. Since 2004, Starz has offered a movie download subscription service, called Starz Ticket, using technology from RealNetworks. But the RealNetworks software does not allow movies to be downloaded to hand-held devices. With Vongo, Starz will shift to technology from Microsoft that will allow movies to be downloaded and watched on portable video players using Microsoft's software. Until now, portable players have been costly and have found few buyers. But that is starting to change. Lower-priced players are expected to be introduced later this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And of course, interest in portable video has soared with the Apple Computer video iPod, and the popularity of $1.99 episodes of TV shows sold at the iTunes online store. Microsoft will promote the Vongo service in a coming release of its Media Player software. Separately, Starz will also offer Vongo through Sony's Connect download service. Until now, Connect has mainly sold music, but executives involved with Sony's plans say that this week the company will announce an expansion to video downloads as well. Starz, which is offering a test version of the service at Vongo.com, has so far not been able to work out an arrangement for Vongo to run on iPods. This is a significant problem, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. The Microsoft Portable Media Center devices \"have not done particularly well so far,\" he said. \"They don't have the momentum that the iPod does.\" He said there would be a modest market for Vongo, mainly among people who want to watch movies on their computers, or more likely on laptops while traveling. Apple is expected to offer some sort of expanded video offering at the MacWorld conference in San Francisco next week. While Apple is closed-mouthed about its plans, there is considerable speculation among industry analysts that Apple will introduce a device that will let people watch video from the Internet on their TV sets. So far, however, Apple has not offered any subscription services for digital content (subscription services use technology that disables the music or video files on users' PC's and devices if they stop paying their monthly subscription bill). Indeed, Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, has been outspoken in his belief that consumers want to own rather than rent what they listen to and watch. As a subscription service, Vongo will allow users to download as many movies as they want for $9.95 a month. They will be able to choose from an ever-changing roster of about 800 movies, including about 300 films in rotation on the Starz cable channel (mainly movies released in theaters one to three years earlier) and 500 older titles. Several years ago, when Starz renewed its long-term contracts with studios, including those owned by Sony and the Walt Disney Company, to put movies on its cable channels, it bought the rights to use them on the Internet as well. This means that other digital services cannot offer these movies in rental or subscription services during the period covered by the Starz contract. Most of the other studios sell their subscription rights to HBO or Showtime, which have been less active in digital distribution than Starz. How much interest consumers have in downloading movies remains to be seen. The legal online offerings so far -- Starz's subscription service and pay-per-view downloads from MovieLink and CinemaNow -- have attracted relatively few customers. (The pay services have to compete with illegal free trading in movie and television files over the Internet.) Some argue that most Internet users are interested only in short video clips, like news reports and the humorous video oddities that ricochet across the Web. Yet Apple's early success in selling downloads of hourlong television programs, a service that began by offering the hit series \"Lost\" and \"Desperate Housewives\" for the video iPod, is changing that perception. Mr. Greene argued that Starz had learned from its earlier experience and thought that it now had the formula to attract more customers to download movies. Vongo will be cheaper than Starz Ticket, which costs $12.95 a month and offers only about 300 movies. Vongo will also be adding some shorter original content, like music concerts and sports coverage. Starz will continue to offer the Starz Ticket service through RealNetworks, but will put all its promotional effort into Vongo. Mr. Greene said that the new Microsoft-based service was easier for consumers to use and that the company's deal with Microsoft was more economically advantageous than its deal with RealNetworks, although he declined to be specific about the terms.", "keyword": "CABLE TELEVISION;TELEVISION;COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET"}
{"id": "ny0205413", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/01/09", "title": "Nat Hentoff Writes His Last for The Village Voice", "abstract": "When he was young, Nat Hentoff said, he was lucky enough to have Duke Ellington as a mentor. This was, of course, quite some time ago, when Mr. Hentoff was writing principally about jazz and \u201cDuke Ellington\u201d had yet to become another way to say \u201cWest 106th Street.\u201d He learned a lot from jazzmen, Mr. Hentoff said. Ellington taught him the perils of being pigeonholed. \u201cHe said, \u2018Never get caught up in categories. That\u2019ll imprison you,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Hentoff recalled. \u201cDuke was talking about music,\u201d he said. But the same words could easily apply to Nat Hentoff, who \u2014 \u201cThank goodness,\u201d he said \u2014 has defied categories since he began putting pen to paper more than six decades ago. In a simplistic age that likes convenient labels, you can try slapping one on him. But you\u2019re bound to go wrong. Across his 83 years, his three dozen books and his countless newspaper columns and magazine articles, Mr. Hentoff has championed free speech and opposed censorship of any kind, whether by liberals or conservatives. Few have more assiduously and consistently defended the right of people to express their views, no matter how objectionable. In that vein, he opposes hate-crime laws as wrongly \u2014 no, make that dangerously \u2014 punishing thought. He is unalterably opposed to abortion, but he cares about life beyond the womb, so he is against capital punishment. He supported going to war in Iraq, but denounces the Bush administration\u2019s resorting to interrogation methods regarded by much of the world as torture. He also has his doubts about President-elect Barack Obama, who, for all the adulation that we hear, \u201cneeds watching \u2014 like everybody.\u201d He has plenty of quarrels with the American Civil Liberties Union and its New York cousin. But he also shares the civil libertarians\u2019 displeasure with school safety agents in New York City schools who, the critics say, abuse students with City Hall\u2019s blessing. \u201cTeaching fear of the police is part of the curriculum,\u201d Mr. Hentoff said. The thing is that, agree with him or not, Nat Hentoff offers no opinion that isn\u2019t supported by facts, diligently gathered. One is tempted to say that facts are holy to him, but that is probably not the right word for someone who calls himself \u201ca member of the Proud and Ancient Order of Stiff-Necked Jewish Atheists.\u201d The purpose here is to note what New York is losing now that Mr. Hentoff has been laid off \u2014 we prefer to say fired \u2014 by The Village Voice after having worked there for 50 years. The weekly, financially struggling like many other newspapers, cut him loose last week. A lot of staff members have been let go since New Times Media, based in Phoenix, took over The Voice in 2005. (The company then recast itself as Village Voice Media. It seems to like the paper\u2019s name more than the people.) But Mr. Hentoff is in a league of his own. Do not mistake this for an obituary. It\u2019s not even close to one. Mr. Hentoff may not hear as well as he once did, or stand quite as straight. But he will not fade to silence. Citing the late journalists George Seldes and I.F. Stone as his muses, he promised in a farewell Voice column to continue \u201cputting on my skunk suit at other garden parties.\u201d He will write for the United Media syndicate and Jewish World Review , and also reflect on jazz, his lifelong passion, in The Wall Street Journal. He will keep pecking away on his IBM Selectric III in the Greenwich Village apartment that he turned into an office, a space that may be described most charitably as cluttered. Martha Stewart would probably freak out if she saw it. Clinging to his typewriter does not make Mr. Hentoff a Luddite. Like most of us, he relies on the Internet for research. But there is a price to be paid for that ocean of data, he cautioned, quoting a line from T. S. Eliot: \u201cWhere is the knowledge we have lost in information?\u201d So much information brings \u201cmore confusion,\u201d Mr. Hentoff said. \u201cYou can\u2019t stop the spread of the Internet, the bloggers and all that,\u201d he said, but the problem is that people tend to visit sites that only reinforce their preconceptions. \u201cAnd since there\u2019s not very much fact-checking on the Internet \u2014 although sometimes you find out a lot \u2014 the confusion continues,\u201d he said. IN his view, nothing less than democracy is on the line, especially with \u201cthe shrinking of reporters and editors in the print media.\u201d \u201cI think we\u2019re in a perilous state in that, to paraphrase Mr. Madison, the way to keep this republic is to have an informed electorate,\u201d Mr. Hentoff said. But what we have is \u201cConstitutional illiteracy, which is rampant.\u201d \u201cIf you ask the first 100,000 students or adults what\u2019s in the Fourth Amendment or what\u2019s the separation of powers, I think you\u2019d have some puzzlement,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s, if I can use the word, dangerous.\u201d At least we will still have Nat Hentoff on the ramparts warning of the danger, even if not in The Voice and even, he said, if he has to go it alone. That, too, is a lesson learned from an old jazzman, Ben Webster, who played tenor sax. \u201cHe said to me, \u2018Listen, kid, when the rhythm section ain\u2019t making it, go for yourself,\u2019 \u201d \u201cI\u2019ve tried that with editors all the time,\u201d Mr. Hentoff said. \u201cThat\u2019s the fun of all this. You keep surprising people. \u201cAnd angering them, I might say.\u201d", "keyword": "Village Voice;Hentoff Nat;Newspapers;Books and Literature;Freedom of Speech and Expression;Writing and Writers;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0075289", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/04/22", "title": "Congress Passes Bipartisan Bill to Improve Energy Efficiency", "abstract": "Congress on Tuesday passed a bill focused on improving energy efficiency in buildings and water heaters, a move celebrated by both parties for breaking longstanding partisan gridlock. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign into law this week, is a modest one. But its authors, Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who had worked together for years on more ambitious energy-saving legislation, called it a significant victory. \u201cOn the bill\u2019s merits \u2014 creating jobs, saving consumers money and reducing pollution \u2014 it was never a hard sell,\u201d Ms. Shaheen said. \u201cThe tough part was convincing Washington to not play politics with a good idea.\u201d Mr. Portman said, \u201cOur targeted energy efficiency bill has garnered widespread support because of a simple fact: It is good for the economy and good for the environment.\u201d The two senators have been working together since 2011 on their broader energy efficiency measure. That bill, which also has bipartisan support, would create incentives for federal mortgage writers to incorporate energy-efficient heating and cooling systems into the value of a home, establish training programs in energy-efficiency construction, create programs to increase the energy efficiency of manufacturing supply chains, and direct the Energy Department to work with manufacturers on energy-efficient technology. But efforts to bring the bill to the Senate floor have been thwarted by partisan debates over issues like climate change and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. This year, the senators introduced a bill that incorporated a few elements of the broader measure. The narrower bill would create a voluntary program for landlords and tenants to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings, mandate that large electric water heaters be run in a highly energy-efficient manner and require federal agencies to perform energy-use assessments on commercial buildings that they lease. That measure was passed by a voice vote at 4 a.m. on March 27, at the end of an all-night voting session on amendments to a budget bill. The House then passed a companion bill on Tuesday, also by a voice vote.", "keyword": "Energy Efficiency;US Politics;Legislation;House of Representatives;Congress;Senate;Congress"}
{"id": "ny0243115", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/03/30", "title": "Japan Weighs Nationalizing Stricken Utility", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 Japanese lawmakers publicly debated nationalizing the Tokyo Electric Power Company on Tuesday, as there seemed no end in sight to the problems at the company\u2019s crippled nuclear power plant. The prime minister\u2019s office said the government was not considering a takeover of Tokyo Electric \u201cat the moment.\u201d But the plunging stock price indicated investors were abandoning hope that the company could cope with the cost of its rebuilding and the potential liabilities from its nuclear disaster. The share price plunged an additional 19 percent Tuesday with virtually no buyers, and trading was suspended by an automatic stop. The closing price of 566 yen ($6.86) was the stock\u2019s lowest close since at least 1974. The day before the March 11 earthquake, the shares closed at 2,153 yen (about $26). On Wednesday morning, its shares fell another 12.7 percent. The stock collapse has already erased more than 2.5 trillion yen ($30.3 billion) in market value. Also Wednesday, the president of Tokyo Electric, Masataka Shimizu, 66, was hospitalized after suffering from high blood pressure. His duties were taken over by the company\u2019s 71-year-old chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, Bloomberg News reported. \u201cThere\u2019s room for debate on the future of Tokyo Electric,\u201d Koichiro Gemba, a member of the lower house of Parliament, said at a news conference. Mr. Gemba represents Fukushima Prefecture, home to Tokyo Electric\u2019s damaged plant, Fukushima Daiichi. He is also the national strategy minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Naoto Kan. Mr. Gemba spoke not long after the country\u2019s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, cited unidentified people as saying the government was considering a plan to temporarily acquire a majority stake in the company, help it shoulder the liabilities that are likely to be incurred, and then eventually take it private again. But fearing that a debate about the future of the company could create a divisive and costly distraction at a time of crisis, Mr. Kan and his chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, sought to tamp down the speculation. \u201cAt the moment, the government is not considering\u201d nationalization, Mr. Edano said Tuesday in a televised news conference. He added: \u201cThe first priority is the accident response. Then it needs to help those who\u2019ve been affected.\u201d If the government were to acquire a majority stake, Tepco \u2014 as the company is known \u2014 would presumably issue new stock to the state, diluting existing shareholders. The utility\u2019s image has been hurt by the rolling blackouts it has imposed to cope with the loss of generating capacity after the earthquake and by the fact that its president, Masataka Shimizu, was not seen for several days after the quake. Tepco said Monday that Mr. Shimizu had been sick but has since returned to work. Taxpayers outside the greater Tokyo area that the company serves are likely to balk at the cost of what could be seen as a bailout. But with no end in sight to its nuclear problem, Tokyo Electric will have to lean on the state for support, analysts say. \u201cIf you were the government, would you let it go bust?\u201d said Paul J. Scalise, a former financial analyst who is writing a book on Japan\u2019s electric power system. \u201cI think the answer is no. The effect on the larger economy at a critical time would be too great.\u201d Estimates in the Japanese news media had already put the damage from the radiation leak to local homes, businesses and farms in the trillions of yen, even without knowing if anyone would suffer health damage. But it is impossible to calculate what the ultimate cost to the company will be. That is partly because the crisis appears to be far from over, and partly because it is not clear how much of the liability will actually be Tepco\u2019s to bear. Mr. Scalise said that under Japanese law governing compensation for nuclear damage, companies were liable for the cost of all nuclear accidents resulting from reactor operations except when the accidents were provoked by a \u201cgrave natural disaster of an exceptional nature or by an insurrection.\u201d The company might plausibly seek to avoid liability altogether within that definition, he said. Nicholas Benes, a former investment banker who is head of the Board Director Training Institute of Japan, an executive training group, said Tepco\u2019s legal liability related to the Fukushima Daiichi plant would be covered by private and government insurance up to 120 billion yen, and even over that amount the government had wide latitude to provide financial assistance. \u201cI just don\u2019t see the case for nationalization at this point,\u201d Mr. Benes said. \u201cUnless it\u2019s for safety reasons \u2014 for example, if you think the company is utterly incapable of managing itself. But even then you\u2019d have to assume that a bunch of nuclear engineers put together hodgepodge by the government would do a better job than the company\u2019s own management. I don\u2019t think the bureaucrats possibly believe that, or would want the responsibility.\u201d He and others said that Mr. Kan might also prefer to keep the company at arm\u2019s length to avoid having it serve as a lightning rod for criticism of his administration. Kazuma Ogino and Toshihiro Uomoto, credit analysts at Nomura Securities, suggested in a report that what was under discussion might best be described as \u201ca virtual nationalization,\u201d in which the state would provide the company \u201cwith the means of paying compensation on almost all fronts.\u201d The decline in the stock does not immediately endanger Tepco\u2019s survival, although its cost of capital is tied to its share price. Tepco is in negotiations for loans of as much as 2 trillion yen ($24.25 billion), a person close to potential lenders said last week.", "keyword": "Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan);Nationalization of Industry;Tokyo (Japan)"}
{"id": "ny0034305", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/12/24", "title": "Bratton Gives Revolving Door One More Spin", "abstract": "As a private consultant in 2002, William J. Bratton advised a federal monitor for the troubled Los Angeles Police Department. A few months later, Mr. Bratton was appointed the city\u2019s police chief, binding him to practices that he had helped shape and placing him under the supervision of the monitor, Michael G. Cherkasky, his friend and former boss at the consulting firm. When Mr. Bratton stepped down as police chief in 2009, he went to work with Mr. Cherkasky again, back in the world of private security consulting. A revolving door between government service and the corporate world has long been a feature of politics, and police officials often pursue second careers after hanging up their uniforms. But few have done so with Mr. Bratton\u2019s breadth and fluidity. Equally comfortable with boardroom jargon and precinct slang, he parlayed his national reputation for wrestling down crime in New York in the 1990s into an international brand. Now, his return to New York City for a second tour as police commissioner may create an awkward situation for Mr. Bratton, who sits on the boards of two companies who hope to do business with the city, and is a senior adviser to a third. One of them is ShotSpotter, which uses a system of outdoor microphones to pinpoint the locations of gunshots. Mr. Bratton is resigning from all three positions \u2014 forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay \u2014 in an effort to head off any potential conflicts of interest. \u201cI don\u2019t see any issues at all going forward,\u201d he said in an interview on Friday, his first since being named commissioner. \u201cAnd if there is an issue that comes up, then I\u2019ll just recuse myself from any part of the decision making on it.\u201d In all, Mr. Bratton, 66, spent a decade doling out advice to police departments from Birmingham, Ala., to Oakland, Calif., and giving speeches about the importance of collaboration. Earlier this year, he unveiled BlueLine , a social media network for law enforcement officers. Mayors have hired his consulting company, the Bratton Group , and corporations as varied as the drugstore chain Rite Aid and Smart Cop Inc., a security software business based in Florida, have had him on their boards. A leader who relishes straddling worlds, whether dining with the powerful or patrolling the streets, Mr. Bratton bounded up the corporate ladder just as he had through police ranks. But his private career was not always a clear success. At times, he ran up against the limits of his influence, he said, finding that officials listened less to a consultant than to a commander. His time as chairman of the global risk management firm Kroll ended unceremoniously. \u201cYou soon discover that consulting is not commanding,\u201d said John Timoney, a first deputy commissioner under Mr. Bratton in New York who now advises Bahrain on policing. \u201cYou\u2019re not in charge.\u201d Mr. Bratton, echoing that sentiment, said, \u201cIt\u2019s not as, quite frankly, fun as making decisions.\u201d Over the years, he has become associated with several prominent companies that do business \u2014 or want to do business \u2014 with the city and its Police Department. Motorola, which put Mr. Bratton on its board and paid him about $240,000 in cash and stock awards in 2012, has made at least $63 million from city contracts since 2010, mostly for telecommunications technology, according to public records. (That figure may be higher; the Police Department does not make all of its contracts publicly available, citing security concerns.) Kroll has earned roughly $1.8 million from city contracts since 2010. A spokesman for the firm\u2019s holding company, Altegrity, where Mr. Bratton was also a chairman, would not discuss his pay at the privately held company. In May, Mr. Bratton joined the board of ShotSpotter, a private company. The company lobbied the city in 2009 but was not selected for testing in New York City. The Police Department said it later tested gunshot detection technology from Safety Dynamics, a competitor, and found too many false positives. However, ShotSpotter\u2019s fortunes appear likely to improve under Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who said on his campaign website that he \u201cwill invest\u201d in the company\u2019s technology for high-crime areas. Before then, Mr. Bratton will resign from the board, said Ralph A. Clark, the chief executive of ShotSpotter, which is based in Newark, Calif.; he would not comment on Mr. Bratton\u2019s pay for the position. Mr. Bratton said he and Mr. de Blasio \u201cnever had a conversation about ShotSpotter,\u201d adding that \u201cif the city were to go forward on whatever proposal that company might make, that\u2019s an example of something I\u2019d have to recuse myself from.\u201d Video Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio announced William J. Bratton as his choice for commissioner of the New York City Police Department. Credit Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Mr. Bratton said he was also stepping down from the board of Motorola. He added that he would not give paid speeches or consult with outside governments while police commissioner, and was working with the city\u2019s Conflicts of Interest Board to comply with city law on his other business engagements. As commissioner in the 1990s, Mr. Bratton courted executives like Jack Welch of General Electric to talk to commanders at Police Headquarters, and flew on the private jets of his friends. (He later reimbursed his friends \u2014 paying nearly $12,000 \u2014 after the flights and stays at their homes came to the public\u2019s attention.) Outside government, Mr. Bratton mixed easily with powerful business leaders, who saw him both as a strategic thinker and as a personality who lent credibility to their endeavors and opened avenues into public sector work. He transformed his data-driven approach to crime into a lucrative career as a global management consultant for the police. Chuck Wexler, the director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, said Mr. Bratton\u2019s rise coincided with the thinking two decades ago about the impact of good police leadership on crime. \u201cAnd if you think about it,\u201d he said, \u201cthere are not a lot of people who can speak to it at the level of Bratton.\u201d The Bratton Group, a private company founded in 1999, has one employee \u2014 Mr. Bratton \u2014 but brings together teams of former law enforcement officials to consult police departments in places like Baltimore, Detroit and Mamaroneck, N.Y. Almost immediately after leaving the New York Police Department, Mr. Bratton found himself scooped up by a private security firm based in Boston. By 1997, he was back on patrol \u2014 in the favelas of the Brazilian coastal city of Fortaleza, where he found officers eager for his counsel. But while Mr. Bratton found receptive partners in Brazil, he also bumped up against the realities of life as a consultant on the other side of the blue wall. Despite a rousing welcome in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2001, complete with a police band rendition of \u201cNew York, New York,\u201d Mr. Bratton faced political realities beyond his control. The city\u2019s mayor, Alfredo Pe\u00f1a, and the country\u2019s president, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, were at odds; the police became political; and an American\u2019s advice was suddenly suspect. Soon, graffiti appeared on the streets: \u201cBratton Go Home.\u201d Around 1999, Mr. Cherkasky, the federal monitor in Los Angeles and president of Kroll at the time, brought Mr. Bratton to the private security firm. \u201cBrand, brand, brand,\u201d said Mr. Cherkasky, describing his reasons for hiring him that first time and then again in 2009, at Altegrity. Mr. Bratton, he said, could attract business by reputation alone. \u201cHe\u2019s getting calls from the prime minister of the United Kingdom,\u201d Mr. Cherkasky said. Mr. Bratton announced his departure from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2009, a month after a federal judge began phasing out oversight by the federal monitor, Mr. Cherkasky, who had recommended the judge do so. Critics complained that that resolution appeared to be curiously well timed, since Mr. Bratton returned to work for Mr. Cherkasky right after. \u201cIt raises the obvious question of whether the consent decree was really comprehensive and thoroughgoing, or if Cherkasky and Bratton were in a hurry to move on,\u201d said Tom Hayden, a former California state senator. Mr. Bratton\u2019s time as chairman at Altegrity turned rocky, according to several former employees of the company, who requested anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss internal dealings. \u201cThere were a lot of departures,\u201d a former managing partner said. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got a smoothly running operation, people tend not to jump ship.\u201d Mr. Cherkasky said that after he left Altegrity in 2011, \u201cit did not go great\u201d for Mr. Bratton, who had become a nonexecutive chairman at Kroll after Altegrity purchased the company. Mr. Bratton did not have a role in the day-to-day operations or management of the company, he said, adding that his position \u201cwas not particularly stimulating or satisfying to me.\u201d He would not comment on whether problems arose while he was employed there, and said he left when his three-year contract ended. A spokesman for Altegrity, which is owned by Providence Equity Partners, a private equity firm, would not discuss the details of Mr. Bratton\u2019s tenure or make any employees available for an interview. Mr. Bratton kept a corner office at Kroll\u2019s Manhattan headquarters and remained a senior adviser after leaving his post as chairman last year. On the fourth floor, near Mr. Bratton\u2019s office, a champagne toast this month signaled an end to his ties there. \u201cBill will be stepping down,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cWe wish him all the best in his new role.\u201d", "keyword": "William J Bratton;NYPD;Conflict of interest;NYC;Motorola;Kroll Associates;Altegrity"}
{"id": "ny0119339", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/07/27", "title": "Members of Al Qaeda in Iraq Clash With Government Troops", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 Insurgents from Al Qaeda in Iraq clashed with the country\u2019s security forces on Thursday, the second attack this week in what the insurgent group\u2019s leader has depicted as a new offensive aimed at recapturing lost ground. The attack came as Syrian refugees tried to flee across the Iraqi border, joining migrations to Turkey and Lebanon over the past week. At a border crossing near Al Qaim, Iraq , where the Syrian side of the border was under rebel control, more than 2,000 Syrian refugees arrived in recent days, said Saadoun Shallan, head of the Anbar Provincial Council. At least 12 people were killed in an attack in Diyala Province, including five Iraqi policemen and seven militants, a police official said. The Associated Press reported that an Iraqi helicopter was shot down, but Iraqi officials said it had only been damaged. The fighting began Wednesday night in Hadid, a town about six miles northwest of Baquba. The area was once an insurgent stronghold. \u201cIt was fierce fighting and lasted several hours between the security forces and Al Qaeda fighters,\u201d said Blaer Hassan, a provincial security official in Diyala. \u201cThis is a setback because we are worried about the capacity of Iraqi forces in the face of the growing strength of Al Qaeda,\u201d he added. On Sunday, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who uses the pseudonym Abu Bakir al-Baghdadi, announced in an unusual audio recording, posted on a jihadi Web site, that an offensive was about to begin in which the insurgents would seek to regain ground they had held in Iraq before American forces helped oust them. The next day, the group began a coordinated series of at least 40 attacks that killed more than 100 people throughout Iraq. Al Qaeda has also announced its intention to join the conflict in Syria on the side of the popular uprising there, although opposition leaders have disavowed any connection with extremist groups.", "keyword": "Iraq;Al Qaeda;Iraq War (2003-11)"}
{"id": "ny0023944", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/08/18", "title": "Christie\u2019s Re-election Engine Gets in Gear for a Bigger Race", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 He has hired specialists in microtargeting who worked for the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. He has built a sprawling, 50-state fund-raising network, including major Republican players like Harold Simmons, the billionaire backer of a Karl Rove-led \u201csuper PAC\u201d that spent $105 million in the 2012 race. And he is pouring resources into an effort to attract blacks, Hispanics and women to prove that he is a new kind of Republican. As Gov. Chris Christie heads for what is expected to be an easy re-election, he is also quietly building a sophisticated political operation that could become the basis for a national campaign. His advisers, while saying the governor is focused on New Jersey, are aiming to run up a huge margin against his Democratic opponent and position Mr. Christie as a formidable figure among Republicans ahead of the next presidential primary. At the Republican National Committee summer meeting in Boston last week, Mr. Christie and his aides repeatedly made the case that his re-election effort in heavily Democratic New Jersey this fall would offer a model for Republicans in the years ahead. And despite their claims to be focused only on 2013, his aides have also signaled to Republicans that the governor, if re-elected as expected, plans to begin visiting other states immediately after November. Mr. Christie\u2019s appearance at the twice-annual gathering of Republican state officials was significant. In addition to courting the conservative-leaning party activists, he met privately with two Republicans who could be helpful in a presidential race: Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney\u2019s well-connected chief fund-raiser, and Scott P. Brown, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts who is considering a Senate run in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary. Already, Mr. Christie is assembling the kind of national fund-raising network that would be essential to a presidential campaign; some 35 percent of the $9 million he has raised for his re-election is from out of state, and he has held fund-raisers around the country, both in donor-rich enclaves like Palm Beach, Fla., and McLean, Va., and in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago and throughout California. Thanks to his prominence, and the fact that New Jersey is one of only two states with contests for governor this year, Mr. Christie has been able to cultivate big donors around the country. \u201cUnder the guise of his re-election, he\u2019s able to meet these folks and say, \u2018I need your help,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Rove said. The governor has tapped some boldface contributors like the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But more important for his future ambitions are the checks he has gathered from loyal Republican givers like Mr. Simmons, the deep-pocketed Dallas political patron, and lesser-known local power players like Dax R. Swatek, an Alabama lobbyist. \u201cI wrote him a check because, first, I think, as a Republican in New Jersey doing what he\u2019s been able to do is pretty damn impressive,\u201d said Mr. Swatek, who is close to many of his state\u2019s leading Republicans. \u201cSecondly, looking at it long-term, the way the presidential map is, it is going to be very difficult for Republicans to win without going into some states that are purple and blue. To me, the guy can do it.\u201d Not all of Mr. Christie\u2019s donors this year can be counted on to support him if he runs for president in 2016. But winning the backing of people like Mr. Swatek, who can raise money from a wide variety of sources, helps the governor reach potential presidential donors in other state capitals and business communities across the country. Mike DuHaime, Mr. Christie\u2019s chief strategist, has also reached out to Mercer Reynolds, a Cincinnati executive who is one of the Republican Party\u2019s top contributors and was Mr. Bush\u2019s finance chair in 2000. Earlier this month, Mr. Christie held a fund-raiser at a Las Vegas hotel owned by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Mr. Adelson and his wife, two of the biggest contributors to Republicans last year, were listed as co-hosts and each gave Mr. Christie the maximum contribution of $3,800. Of course, the governor has a long way to go to prove to Republicans nationally that he can be the party standard-bearer, and some conservative activists are still smarting over his embrace of President Obama in the days after Hurricane Sandy. And New Jersey voters may resent what they see as his exploiting state issues to appeal to the conservative wing of the national party. The governor recently vetoed $7.5 million in family planning spending and Friday vetoed three gun-control measures. Barbara Buono, his opponent in the governor\u2019s race, frequently says he \u201cwould rather be campaigning in the cornfields of Iowa.\u201d According to an analysis by Democrats, since last August Mr. Christie was outside of New Jersey for all or part of 91 days, or roughly 24 percent of the time. Mr. Christie emphasized that much of that out-of-state travel was for nonpolitical trips. Senior Republicans who are familiar with Mr. Christie\u2019s strategy say it is most closely modeled after Mr. Bush\u2019s bid in 1998 for re-election as governor of Texas. The parallels are clear. Mr. Bush was considered a shoo-in for re-election to the governor\u2019s office, but he and Mr. Rove became determined to win over Hispanic and black voters to demonstrate the governor\u2019s broad appeal to a national audience. Mr. Bush won that race, with 68 percent of the vote, which included more than a third of the Hispanic vote, offering him a powerful credential when he ran for president two years later as \u201ca different kind of Republican.\u201d This summer, Mr. Christie established a bilingual campaign office in Paterson, N.J., and spent $275,000 on a Spanish-language television ad. He has also announced a Hispanics for Christie coalition and is now running even among Hispanic voters against Ms. Buono, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released 10 days ago. \u201cHe\u2019s going to emphasize first trying to win a big re-election with a diverse coalition behind him,\u201d Mr. Rove said. Despite his lead, Mr. Christie is spending expansively to enhance his targeting of voters this year. While his core team is filled with fixtures of presidential politics \u2014 including Mr. DuHaime, the ad man Russell J. Schriefer, the communications director Maria Comella and the campaign chairman, William J. Palatucci \u2014 he has brought aboard a new Republican firm, Deep Root Analytics. The group includes strategists from Mr. Bush\u2019s 2004 campaign and the consultants who ran Mr. Romney\u2019s data effort last year, and is helping Mr. Christie direct his advertising more precisely by determining what voters are watching on TV, and from that, deciding what ads to air and when. (Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign used the same technology in 2012.) \u201cThe unspoken element in the room is that this could potentially be a test of what works and what doesn\u2019t\u201d for a presidential contest, said a Republican with knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing Mr. Christie\u2019s circle. The timing gives Mr. Christie distinct advantages: If he prevails in November, he will be handed a big national platform \u2014 the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association. The position will give him a reason, and ample time, to travel the country, meet with activists and candidates, and raise unlimited money for the association, freed from federal and state regulations that limit him as governor from seeking contributions from those that do business with the state. Early primary states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, are holding governors\u2019 races next year, so Mr. Christie will surely visit. And he will ultimately get to play the role of political Santa Claus inside the Republican Party, distributing millions in campaign cash to grateful governors and would-be governors. Even if Mr. Christie is well-positioned, however, skepticism toward him within the Republican base is still real. And, despite the warm reception he received in Boston, some resistance was apparent. \u201cI just really had a little bit of a problem with him embracing Obama,\u201d explained Paul Reynolds, the national Republican committeeman from Alabama, after Mr. Christie spoke. \u201cI\u2019ve got to get over that.\u201d The broader challenge for Mr. Christie regarding party activists is that he is not seen as sufficiently tough on a president the Republican base loathes, and is too quick to throw an elbow at other Republicans, as he did with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on national security issues last month. William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard who recently met privately with Mr. Christie over pizza, said the governor must avoid being seen as the Republican who likes to beat up on his own party. \u201cThe party hates that and they will not forgive it,\u201d Mr. Kristol said. \u201cA Republican who simply comes from a different part of the country, has a few differences on issues but respects the actual Republican primary voter worldview \u2014 that\u2019s a different story. That\u2019s the line Christie needs to walk. He doesn\u2019t have to be a red state Republican, but he needs to respect red state Republicans.\u201d", "keyword": "Chris Christie;Gubernatorial races;New Jersey;2016 Presidential Election;Republicans"}
{"id": "ny0263582", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/12/10", "title": "Mavericks Begin With Roster in Flux and a Focus on Repeating", "abstract": "DALLAS \u2014 Even as they spoke of repeating as champions, the Dallas Mavericks were not sure exactly who would embark on the defense of their title on Christmas Day here against the Miami Heat. Depleted by free agency, Dallas opened training camp Friday with 10 players at its American Airlines Center practice facility, including the newly signed forward Brandan Wright. As the Los Angeles Lakers, the New Orleans Hornets and the Houston Rockets jousted with the league over the blockbuster Chris Paul trade, the Mavericks clearly have been cast as an afterthought in the Western Conference, a role Jason Kidd likened to last season\u2019s low expectations. \u201cPeople thought we were a team that wouldn\u2019t even get out of the first round,\u201d Kidd said. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s the same label. For us, it\u2019s something that we learned last year. You\u2019ve just got to go out there and play and see what happens.\u201d Forward Shawn Marion said: \u201cWe\u2019ve been proving doubters wrong all the time. We\u2019re good at that. We\u2019re probably going to have some more pieces here, but for the most part we\u2019re ready to go.\u201d Tyson Chandler\u2019s expected departure to the Knicks created the biggest void, and Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle officially announced Brendan Haywood as the new starting center. Beyond that, the Mavericks figure to scramble. Caron Butler, injured most of last season, left for the Clippers. Guard J. J. Barea, who played a pivotal role in their title run, is reportedly in discussions with at least six teams and is not expected back. DeShawn Stevenson is also not likely to return. Peja Stojakovic and Brian Cardinal were pondering their free-agent options and were not at the first practice. \u201cI\u2019m anxious to see what are roster is going to end up looking like because it\u2019s obviously not complete yet,\u201d Carlisle said. \u201cWe had some guys that did some great things for us here that probably aren\u2019t going to be back,\u201d Carlisle said. \u201cBut that\u2019s part of the circle of life in the N.B.A. We\u2019re all going to adjust. Guys are going to step up into some opportunistic situations. We plan on defending our crown with a lot of pride.\u201d All optimism centers on the aging nucleus of Kidd, who turns 39 in March; Dirk Nowitzki , 33; Jason Terry, 34, and Marion, 33. Kidd, entering his 18th season, said he wanted to play another three years and hoped to end his career with the Mavericks. \u201cHopefully, my talent will stay at a respectable level where I can help a team out,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d love to stay here and finish it out. I\u2019d like to get to 20 years.\u201d Kidd said he even told Nowitzki he wanted to keep playing so that the two could retire together. A joke, perhaps, but he and the older Mavericks clearly do not want to let go of their late-career success. \u201cThe makeup of the team is probably going to be a little different, but that\u2019s just the business of basketball,\u201d Kidd said. \u201cThat happens. But we still believe we can win. We\u2019re going to take pride in trying to protect our championship.\u201d The Mavericks steered away from any comments about the Lakers and the trade controversy surrounding Paul and the N.B.A. Carlisle insisted he was only concerned about who was in camp, even if it was only 10 players for the first practice. \u201cThe N.B.A. will take care of whatever that situation is,\u201d Kidd said. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s trying to figure out here what we have to do to win.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;Dallas Mavericks;Carlisle Rick;Nowitzki Dirk;Kidd Jason;Haywood Brendan;Chandler Tyson"}
{"id": "ny0064574", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/06/27", "title": "Exploring Anarchism in a Play at the Library", "abstract": "In spite of an emphatically bourgeois background, the Miser, as a youngster, fancied himself enough of an anarchist to scrawl the famous symbol of a capital A enclosed in a circle on his denim jacket in indelible black ink. Subsequent efforts actually to understand anarchism revealed its philosophical depth and long history. Two of the more remarkable figures in that history are Emma Goldman, the Lithuanian-born anarchist writer, theorist and orator, and Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of the proto-anarchist philosopher William Godwin and author of the seminal feminist text \u201cA Vindication of the Rights of Woman.\u201d Had they met, Wollstonecraft and Goldman, born nearly 100 years apart, probably would have had much to talk about. That tantalizing thought drives \u201c Emma Meets Mary ,\u201d a play by the New York performer and playwright Lorna Lable. You can see it free this Saturday at the New York Public Library\u2019s Bloomingdale branch on the Upper West Side. Set in a sort of heaven for radicals, the show is a lighthearted take on a fictional duel between two serious and influential minds. (Saturday at 2 p.m., 150 West 100th Street, Manhattan; 212-222-8030, nypl.org.) COMFORT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Around the time Goldman emigrated to New York, in the mid-1880s, a young woman living on Staten Island was taking her first photographs with a camera given to her by an uncle. The woman, Alice Austen, would eventually be recognized as a pioneering female photographer whose subjects ranged from pastoral scenes and documentary work to more experimental tableaus, as well as daily life at her family\u2019s home, a waterfront estate on Hylan Boulevard known as Clear Comfort. The house, declared a landmark by the city in 1971 and now a museum known simply as the Alice Austen House, has recently undergone a substantial restoration and is hosting a Community Open House this Saturday. The free afternoon-long affair includes tours of the house and garden and live performances organized by Deep Tanks Studio . (Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., 2 Hylan Boulevard, near Edgewater Street, Rosebank; 718-816-4506, aliceausten.org.)", "keyword": "Theater;NYPL;Emma Meets Mary;Lorna Lable;Alice Austen;Alice Austen House Museum;Historic preservation;Staten Island"}
{"id": "ny0285398", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/09/26", "title": "Talking Parades With the Police", "abstract": "Dear Diary: On my first Halloween in Gotham City, an old boyfriend and I retreated to the warmth of a deli on 50th Street. We had tried to go to the parade, but I was too cold in my flowy, black, not-meant-for-New-York-autumn skirt. We were dressed as Batman and Batwoman. I had spent hours perfecting a Batwoman mask painted onto my forehead and cheeks. When I was two bites into my deli cheeseburger, three police officers approached the section where we were seated. One of the officers nonchalantly invited himself to our table, pulling up a chair. He asked us what seemed like 20,000 questions: how old we were, how we met, our plans for the night and so on. I felt confused, nervous and slightly ridiculous in my costume. The officer\u2019s female partner, sitting a few tables away, laughed. She eventually yelled at him to leave us alone. The tension broken, we talked with the three officers for a while. We asked if they knew the best spot if we wanted to try another parade come Thanksgiving. They got a call on their radios and had to rush away. Just when I thought I had survived my first New York Police Department questioning, the woman officer pulled out her notebook and asked for names and phone numbers. My heart skipped a beat. Were we being given a ticket? Detained? For what? She smiled and said they would give us a call if they had any leads on good viewing spots for Thanksgiving morning. We never heard back, and left the Macy\u2019s parade early because of the cold, too.", "keyword": "Halloween;Thanksgiving;NYPD;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0033801", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/12/09", "title": "Young Jets Safety Emulates Veteran Teammate With Pivotal Play", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 The genesis of Antonio Allen\u2019s blocked punt and touchdown in the second quarter Sunday can be traced back to last Monday, when the Jets\u2019 special-teams coordinator, Ben Kotwica, told Allen to line up just off the center, rather than off the edge. Allen did not really know why. He said Kotwica had noticed something with Oakland\u2019s long snapper, or maybe it was the tackle. Fighting for playing time, trying to establish himself as a playmaker, Allen was not about to question the move. Newly positioned, he burst through the middle of the line so smoothly it was as if he were being hoisted by pulleys. He could have blocked Marquette King\u2019s punt with his sternum. \u201cHe put me in the perfect place to make the play,\u201d Allen said of Kotwica. Allen fell on the ball in the end zone and braced himself for a pileup. But there was not a Raiders player within 10 yards. \u201cIt felt weird \u2014 they just let me loose,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI was surprised. I thought that the tackle was going to give me some kind of push, but he didn\u2019t even touch me. He just let me go right through.\u201d The score gave the Jets a 20-3 lead with 3 minutes 55 seconds left in the half. They were not exactly struggling to move the ball, but with the inconsistency of the offense this season, and their difficulties stopping Oakland, the early cushion was welcomed. \u201cSometimes you need special teams to pick up the defense,\u201d Coach Rex Ryan said. \u201cThat\u2019s the mark of a team.\u201d On the sideline, Ed Reed congratulated Allen, a fellow safety, on his play, a game-changing score that might have reminded Reed a little bit of himself. An interesting dynamic has developed between the two players \u2014 one at the beginning of his career, the other in his professional twilight \u2014 since Reed arrived four weeks earlier and supplanted Allen in the starting lineup. At the time, it was viewed as a deferential move to a nine-time Pro Bowl selection and the N.F.L.\u2019s active leader in interceptions with 62. The Jets hoped Reed, 35, would find comfort in Ryan\u2019s system and turn back the clock to their days together in Baltimore. Of course, things did not exactly go that way, and Reed\u2019s quiet first three games with the Jets opened him up to criticism. Questions were raised about his age and ability, and some wondered what role would be left for Allen. Allen, 25 and in his second season, wondered a bit about that himself. He said Sunday that he had been satisfied with his performance and progress for the first nine games of the season, before Reed arrived. \u201cI thought I was having a pretty productive season,\u201d he said. \u201cI was thinking coming into the season, this was going to be my breakout year.\u201d But what could have been a combative relationship has instead become a congenial one. Allen said he had benefited from Reed\u2019s arrival and his mentorship on the practice field and in the locker room. \u201cHe gives me little tips to pick up on,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI try to follow him.\u201d And so there Allen had been, on the sideline, congratulating Reed after his first interception of the season, which set the Jets up for a field goal on the series just before Allen\u2019s blocked punt. \u201cNobody\u2019s perfect playing this game,\u201d Reed said. \u201cI welcome anybody who wants to watch film with me. There\u2019s a reason why I\u2019m on this side of the fence.\u201d Reed remained the starter Sunday, but Allen generally played on third downs and when Oakland\u2019s mobile quarterback, Terrell Pryor, was in the game. Reed also appeared to have injured his right knee on a miscommunication with cornerback Antonio Cromartie, a midfield collision that resulted in a 48-yard Raiders touchdown. But he stayed in the game. \u201cEd had a nice pick and did a nice job of communicating things,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to take advantage of the talent that we have. We knew it would be a physical game, so we tried to put some of the youngsters in there to take some of the heat.\u201d Afterward, one of those young players seemed like the happiest in the locker room. \u201cIt feels good to make a play on special teams,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to make plays with whatever happens with my playing time. It\u2019s big for me and big for the team.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Jets;Antonio Allen"}
{"id": "ny0094851", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/01/28", "title": "New York\u2019s Sanitation Commissioner Faced First Major Test", "abstract": "Kathryn Garcia stopped by Sanitation Department garages to check on her workers. She stood with Mayor Bill de Blasio to take questions about storm preparations. And she prepared herself for the snow that was threatening New York and would be the first big test of her tenure as the city\u2019s sanitation commissioner. But she had started her day on Monday with an email from John J. Doherty , who preceded her as commissioner and who had risen to the top job after starting as a trash collector more than 50 years ago. The storm would turn out to be far less damaging than feared. But on Monday morning, with attention on the city and the Sanitation Department, and few people understood better what Ms. Garcia was facing than Mr. Doherty. He had worked for the department under eight mayoral administrations and he had heard every manner of snow-related sanitation complaint, not least last winter when a succession of storms battered the city and the new administration of Mr. de Blasio, which had asked Mr. Doherty to stay on through last winter. Image Mr. Garcia's predecessor as commissioner, John Doherty, sent an email with encouragement to her as the storm headed toward the New York region. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times So it was that he emailed Ms. Garcia, with something of a digital pep talk. She had an experienced and effective work force, he reminded her. \u201cDon\u2019t worry; they\u2019re going to do great,\u201d Ms. Garcia recalled Mr. Doherty\u2019s telling her. In an interview, Mr. Doherty said: \u201cI just wanted to encourage her. I wanted to thank her as an old commissioner. I took some blows over the years.\u201d Before departing last spring, Mr. Doherty had passed along some advice. \u201cHe gave me his secret list, as he likes to call it,\u201d Ms. Garcia said. Mr. Doherty said it was a double-spaced, two-page checklist that included making sure to notify City Hall and reviewing alternate-side parking. Ms. Garcia, 44, however, had some experience of her own in big municipal crises. Before being named to lead the Sanitation Department, she was the chief operating officer of the Department of Environmental Protection , and on Monday, the mayor praised Ms. Garcia\u2019s leadership in restoring operations at a wastewater treatment plant and 42 pumping stations within days of Hurricane Sandy . It was not her only big event at the environmental department, and more than once she had spent the night in her office at the agency. Late on Monday and early on Tuesday, she was again sleeping in an office, this time at the building on Worth Street that is the headquarters for the Sanitation Department\u2019s operations.", "keyword": "Waste management;Hurricane Sandy;Sanitation Department NYC;Bill de Blasio"}
{"id": "ny0253428", "categories": ["business", "mutfund"], "date": "2011/10/09", "title": "Municipal Bonds Are on a Tear, but for How Long?", "abstract": "DESPITE warnings of defaults near the start of this year, municipal bond funds have turned in a Cinderella performance so far, even as many stock funds lost ground. Total returns for some muni funds were in the 10 percent range for the calendar year, although their 12-month returns were generally lower. Analysts and fund managers see continued good performance for intermediate and long-term muni funds, along with periods of high volatility. Miriam Sjoblom, lead bond fund analyst at Morningstar, said, \u201cMuni bonds have had a great year, but yields across all levels are near all-time lows.\u201d As a result, she said, \u201cyields are likely to rise, so prices could fall.\u201d Many fund shareholders have been \u201cbuying and selling at the wrong time,\u201d Ms. Sjoblom said. There was a surge of sales last November, December and January, she added, amid fears that state and city fiscal woes could lead to waves of defaults. That hasn\u2019t happened, and, she said, the funds have turned in \u201ca great performance since then.\u201d Still, muni bond funds had a net outflow of $1.01 billion in August, the Investment Company Institute said late last month. In Ms. Sjoblom\u2019s opinion, the funds are appropriate for anyone seeking tax-exempt income in a regular account, not a retirement account. Investors should be prepared to hold them at least a year, or preferably several years. Given today\u2019s low-yield environment, she said, investors should focus on no-load funds with low expenses, like those from Fidelity, Vanguard and T. Rowe Price. Investors should be aware of three other considerations when choosing a muni fund: \u0095 Interest paid by state and local governments and agencies is generally tax-exempt for in-state residents, but when people own bonds from another state \u2014 say, a Californian who invests in Texas bonds \u2014 their home states often tax the out-of-state interest. So many fund groups offer state-specific funds. \u0095 Capital gains that are incurred either when a portfolio manager trades holdings \u2014 or when an individual shareholder sells \u2014 are taxable. \u0095 Some municipal bonds, while exempt from regular taxes, are not exempt from alternative minimum taxes, so investors who face a perennial A.M.T. obligation should select funds with little or no A.M.T. exposure. Regina Shafer, who manages three municipal bond funds \u2014 short-term, intermediate-term and New York \u2014 for USAA in San Antonio , another no-load, low-expense organization, said, \u201cOur goal is to provide as much tax-free income as possible and to try to be very tax-efficient and avoid taxable capital gains.\u201d The market has changed greatly since 2008, she said. Before that disastrous year, she said, muni bond insurers guaranteed bonds\u2019 triple-A ratings, \u201cso an investor didn\u2019t have to think\u201d much about individual holdings. Now credit research is important, she said, and there is more interest-rate volatility, which brings opportunity. Ms. Shafer called muni bonds \u201ca safe asset class\u201d over all, pointing out that municipalities have taxing authority, unlike corporate issuers. Yields on munis in the 10- to 20-year range are actually higher than those of comparable Treasuries, which are taxable, making many munis very attractive right now, she said. In a similar vein, Jason T. Thomas, chief investment officer of Aspiriant, a national fee-only wealth management firm, said, \u201cBy almost every measure, municipal bonds are priced attractively relative to U.S. Treasuries and U.S. corporate bonds.\u201d He contends that concerns about munis are overblown. The market is diverse, he said, and defaults have historically been rare, with 10-year cumulative default rates for all municipals of less than one-tenth of 1 percent. Aspiriant uses short-, intermediate- and long-term municipal funds from Vanguard and a commingled separate account for clients. In the high-yield part of the market, research and active management are crucial, he said, and his firm uses the Nuveen High Yield Municipal Bond fund, which Morningstar says had a total return of 10.05 percent for the first nine months of this year. The 10-year cumulative default rate for high-yield munis is just over one-half of 1 percent, he said, citing studies that have found that muni defaults often share these characteristics: They are issued by smaller entities for risky or nonessential projects like a municipal golf course, are not rated, or are rated by only one rating agency and are nongeneral obligation bonds. On the other hand, he said, these factors reduced the risk of defaults: a low current cost of debt service, opportunities for increased revenue like raising property taxes, efforts by governments to cut expenses, and the relatively high security of states\u2019 general obligation bonds. And while states\u2019 costly obligations for their pension plans are often cited as a worry, he said those obligations are long term in nature, giving plan sponsors time to make needed adjustments. Barnet Sherman, portfolio manager of the TIAA-CREF Tax-Exempt Bond fund, called munis \u201ca tremendous value, a core part of a fixed-income portfolio.\u201d His fund holds only investment-grade issues, no junk. The best returns come from long-term investments, he said, adding that munis are desirable because they finance schools, ports, hospitals \u2014 \u201cthe fabric of a community.\u201d", "keyword": "Municipal Bonds;Local Government;Mutual Funds"}
{"id": "ny0092616", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/08/07", "title": "Tougher Standards Set for U.S. Visa Waivers, Citing Militant Threat", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Department of Homeland Security has toughened air travel requirements on foreign governments in response to what it believes is the growing threat from fighters who have gone to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State and other groups, senior American officials said Thursday. The changes will be applied to the so-called visa waiver program that the United States has with 38 countries. The program allows citizens of those countries to enter the United States on visits of fewer than 90 days without being interviewed for visas at American consulates and embassies. Countries participating in the program will now be required to allow more American air marshals on flights to the United States. They also must use passports that rely on biometric identifiers, like fingerprints, and have electronic chips that contain a photograph of the holder. Older passports typically do not have these features. A small percentage of travelers who entered the United States last year through the visa waiver program had the older passports. The countries will have to use computer programs and databases that automate the sharing of travel records and other information with the United States and that track lost and stolen passports. Many European countries \u2014 including Britain, Belgium, Germany and France \u2014 that have a large number of citizens who have traveled to Iraq and Syria are part of the waiver program. The Obama administration fears that these citizens might have received training while they were in Iraq or Syria and could then use the new expertise to wage attacks in the United States or on American airliners, the officials said. Last September, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution that called for countries to share more information about travelers in an effort to identify foreign fighters. While American intelligence agencies say they can track these combatants, some administration officials believe that other countries could be doing more. Where ISIS Has Directed and Inspired Attacks Around the World More than a dozen countries have had attacks since the Islamic State, or ISIS, began to pursue a global strategy in the summer of 2014. \u201cAs I have said a number of times now, the current global threat environment requires that we know more about those who travel to the United States,\u201d Jeh Johnson, the secretary for homeland security, said in a written statement. \u201cThis includes those from countries for which we do not require a visa.\u201d The Department of Homeland Security will also conduct a review of all the countries participating in the waiver program to determine whether they are following its requirements. Those findings will probably lead to additional scrutiny at border crossings for travelers from countries that the department has determined have weaknesses in their screening processes. The visa waiver program was created in 1988 to expedite travel between the United States and its allies. Participating countries are required to meet certain standards for aviation and border security. They are also expected to have strong laws and safeguards to prevent counterfeiting of passports. Instead of applying for a visa, travelers using the waiver program have to fill out a special form and receive approval from Customs and Border Protection before boarding a flight to the United States. Last fall, the department added new questions to its visa waiver applications. Six months ago, it began a review of the program to determine whether it could be exploited by foreign fighters. \u201cD.H.S. is also considering options available to encourage compliance, beyond utilizing the most stringent option of removing a country from the program, measures that are designed to achieve greater global security,\u201d according to a department document. The department will not make any changes to the United States\u2019 programs with other countries \u201cwithout first consulting with the affected country,\u201d the document said. The United States believes that at least 18,000 foreign combatants, including more than 3,000 Europeans, have made their way to Syria since the conflict began there in 2011. Roughly 500 of them have returned to European countries. The \u201csecurity enhancements\u201d announced on Thursday, Mr. Johnson said, \u201care part of this department\u2019s continuing assessments of our homeland security in the face of evolving threats and challenges, and our determination to stay one step ahead of those threats and challenges.\u201d He added that the changes would not \u201chinder lawful trade and travel with our partners in the visa waiver program.\u201d", "keyword": "Airport security;Homeland Security;ID;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Visas;Europe;Iraq;Syria"}
{"id": "ny0190616", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/05/06", "title": "Pakistani Army Poised for New Push Into Swat", "abstract": "PESHAWAR, Pakistan \u2014 Residents flooded out of the Swat Valley by the thousands on Tuesday as the government prepared to mount a new military campaign against Taliban militants and as a much-criticized peace accord with the insurgents fell apart. People crammed into cars and buses and headed south after the local government told residents to leave Swat before a government military offensive. On Sunday, black-turbaned Taliban fighters seized control of Mingora, Swat\u2019s capital. Since then, Taliban and government forces have accused each other of scuttling the peace accord, and they traded gun and mortar fire. The Taliban had dug in and laid mines in the streets, girding for battle, residents said. President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with President Obama in Washington, where American officials have sharply criticized the peace accord and urged the government to fight the Taliban. Two weeks ago, the Taliban used the territory all but ceded to them under the accord to push into another district, Buner , just 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad, prompting American calls for tougher action. A new operation in Swat may signal the harder stance American officials have been looking for. But the question remains whether the Pakistani military has the will and ability to sustain its operations against the insurgents, the vast majority of whom are Pakistani. The American special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Tuesday that the situation in Pakistan was fragile, but he welcomed the turn toward wider military action. \u201cUntil yesterday, the momentum did not appear to be in the right hands,\u201d he told Congress. \u201cThe army has now begun a major offensive. We\u2019ll have to wait and see how it goes.\u201d The Pakistani military has battled the militants reluctantly in the past, but it is now engaged in heavy fighting with the Taliban in two other districts, Buner and Dir, that border Swat in the North-West Frontier Province. Those campaigns are daunting enough. But the task in Swat remains hugely difficult, not least because the military had already failed to drive out the Taliban in two years of fighting before it finally conceded to the February truce and agreed to allow Islamic law to be imposed in the valley. But public opinion in Pakistan has undergone an important shift against the Taliban since the deal, and it has now apparently given the military more confidence to move with full force. A recent video showing the Taliban in Swat flogging a young woman as the militants enforced their version of Islamic law shocked the nation. The government has taken great pains to show its efforts to make the Swat peace deal work, going as far as agreeing to appoint judges trained in Islamic law, or Shariah. Finally, the Taliban incursion into Buner solidified a growing consensus that the Taliban had gone too far and that the military needed to stop them. The media, politicians and even religious leaders are now speaking out against Maulana Sufi Muhammad, the main negotiator of the Swat deal, and Mullah Fazlullah, his son-in-law, who has links to the Qaeda-backed Taliban movement based in Pakistan\u2019s tribal areas. Leaders of the Awami National Party, which governs the North-West Frontier Province, continue to stand by the deal, which they say is critical in winning people away from the militants. The deal was popular among the people of Swat, who were desperate for peace. An estimated half million people have been displaced by the fighting in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province over the past two years. Those fleeing Buner and Swat, many of whom will now stay in camps or with relatives in cities like Mardan or Peshawar, have criticized the military operations as heavy handed. But the Taliban have revealed in the past three months that they have no intention of ending their insurgency inside Pakistan proper. It has also become apparent, the politicians say, that Maulana Muhammad is not able to control the militants. \u201cNow we have the upper hand,\u201d said Saqib Chamkani, a member of the provincial assembly for the Awami National Party. \u201cWe have exposed that this fight does not have anything to do with courts and Shariah.\u201d Yet the military remains divided in its resolve, the United States remains deeply unpopular and some religious parties still sympathize with the Taliban. Anees Jillani, a lawyer who works at the Supreme Court and who visited Swat recently, said some in the military had sympathy for the Islamists and were not willing to fight. \u201cWhen you ask them why are you not defeating them, they ask: \u2018Why should we?\u2019 And you ask about Sufi Muhammad, they say: \u2018What\u2019s wrong with him?\u2019 \u201d he said. Maulana Yousuf Shah, general secretary of the Jamiat-u-Ulama-i-Islam-S, a political party that is close to the Taliban, blamed the government for failing to keep its side of the February truce. Maulana Muhammad was therefore unable to convince the younger Taliban fighters to keep the peace, he said. \u201cFor 20 years these people have been struggling peacefully for Shariah, but it was no use,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is a natural thing when democratic avenues are not working to take up arms.\u201d At the same time, though, there has been a significant change in the military and paramilitary forces facing against the Taliban. Under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, an energetic and determined commander, the Frontier Corps, a local Pashtun paramilitary force, has become better armed and equipped, with the help of the United States. Supported by army units, the Frontier Corps has proven itself better able to push back the Taliban, first in the tribal areas in Bajaur last year, and now in Buner, though at a considerable cost to civilians caught up in the operations. In Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province, antiterrorist police units have killed 88 people suspected of being militants in the past four months, cracking down on kidnapping and general lawlessness, a senior police official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. \u201cIt is a manageable problem,\u201d he said, when asked whether Pakistan can contain the militant threat. American support has been important, he said, and the police are hoping for the same help, he said. \u201cIf Uncle Sam shows the same generosity to our force, I don\u2019t see why we cannot be a good supporting force,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Taliban;Swat (Pakistan);Khan Tariq;Terrorism;Buner District (Pakistan);North-West Frontier Province (Pakistan);Frontier Corps"}
{"id": "ny0106770", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/04/21", "title": "Spain Stings Argentina Over Nationalization of Repsol YPF", "abstract": "MADRID \u2014 Spain said Friday that it would seek to restrict imports of biodiesel fuel from Argentina, its first retaliatory measure after the government in Buenos Aires decided to seize control of the assets there of Repsol YPF , the largest Spanish oil company. Soraya S\u00e1enz de Santamar\u00eda, the deputy prime minister, said Spain would seek to use Spanish and European biofuel instead of that of Argentina, which is the biggest exporter of biofuel to Spain. Madrid imports almost three-quarters of all its biofuel, with shipments from Argentina worth about \u20ac750 million, or $991 million, last year. Still, the measure fell short of the kind of hard-hitting sanctions that had been threatened by Spain. Several government ministers warned in recent days that Argentina\u2019s decision was an act of aggression against Spain and would not go unpunished. Following a cabinet meeting in Madrid, Ms. S\u00e1enz de Santamar\u00eda would not comment on what further actions might be taken by Madrid, nor even detail how the biofuel restrictions would be applied. The diplomatic tussle follows last Monday\u2019s announcement by President Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner that Argentina would take back majority control of YPF, now 57 percent owned by Repsol. Even before the response from Madrid on Friday, her government played down the impact that such sanctions could have on Argentina. Repsol is planning to challenge the Argentine government before the international courts and seek at least $10.5 billion in compensation for the expropriation in what promises to be a lengthy legal battle. Matthew Parish, a Geneva-based international arbitration partner at the law firm Holman Fenwick Willan, noted that Argentina was already the world\u2019s biggest defaulter on investment arbitration awards. The Spanish government has been studying what sanctions it could impose under the terms of a bilateral investment treaty signed with Argentina in 1991. However, trade lawyers have warned that Spain needed to consider the risks that any escalation in the conflict would present to the significant assets of other Spanish corporations operating in Argentina \u2014 a further reason to opt instead for sanctions at the European Union level. The Union is Argentina\u2019s second-biggest export market after Brazil. The Union could, for instance, freeze ongoing talks about forming a free trade area with Argentina or suspend some trade concessions granted to the country. On Friday, lawmakers from the European Parliament approved a resolution urging the European Commission to remove such concessions on Argentine exports.", "keyword": "Repsol YPF S.A;Kirchner Cristina Fernandez de;Nationalization of Industry;Spain;Argentina;Biodiesel Fuel"}
{"id": "ny0104926", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/03/23", "title": "Witnesses Testify Espada Paid Own Expenses With Nonprofit\u2019s Funds", "abstract": "A videographer who was hired by former State Senator Pedro Espada Jr. to film a private birthday party testified on Thursday that she had been pressured by Mr. Espada\u2019s assistant to lie about the work she performed and claim in an invoice that she had actually filmed a public event. The videographer, Evelyn Lopez, said in the federal trial of Mr. Espada, who is accused of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from a nonprofit health care network on his private expenses, that she filmed the birthday party of Mr. Espada\u2019s 1-year-old grandson in May 2007 and submitted an invoice to Mr. Espada that indicated as much. She later received an e-mail from Mr. Espada\u2019s assistant at the time, Norma Ortiz. \u201cThe invoice sent needs revision,\u201d said the e-mail from Ms. Ortiz, which Ms. Lopez read aloud from the stand. \u201cPlease correct and e-mail to me a.s.a.p.\u201d In the e-mail, Ms. Ortiz asked that Ms. Lopez revise the invoice to indicate that Ms. Lopez had filmed a \u201cchildren\u2019s community outreach\u201d event, not a birthday party. Ms. Lopez replied to that e-mail: \u201cThe invoice is correct. The event was in a private home.\u201d Ms. Lopez\u2019s e-mail continued, \u201cSo as you can see, I cannot change the invoice (it would be dishonest).\u201d Ms. Lopez was one of more than a dozen witnesses who testified on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn that Mr. Espada paid them for personal services with business checks from Community Expansion Development Corporation, which prosecutors said was a subsidiary of the health care network, Soundview Health Care Network in the Bronx. According to the indictment against Mr. Espada and his son, Pedro Gautier Espada, who is also on trial, the Community Expansion Development Corporation , a for-profit janitorial services company incorporated by Mr. Espada, became a full subsidiary of Soundview in 2006. The indictment charged that Mr. Espada and his son continued to operate the company as if it still belonged to the elder Mr. Espada, operating solely for the benefit of him and his family. An administrator at Preston High School, an all-girls\u2019 Catholic school in the Bronx, testified that Mr. Espada paid the tuition for Angelita Gonzalez, who prosecutors said was Mr. Espada\u2019s niece, with a check from Community Expansion. The chief financial officer of Huntington Learning Center, an after-school tutoring program, said his company received payment from the same corporation. An administrator at St. John\u2019s University, a lawyer who defended Mr. Espada in a libel case, an antique dealer and the ghostwriter who was to write Mr. Espada\u2019s memoir all testified that they had been paid with the corporation\u2019s checks. Lawyers for the Espadas have said that they were entitled to make the purchases and that they did not steal from Soundview. Donald MacLaren, the ghostwriter, said in an interview outside the courtroom that Mr. Espada had been motivated to write the memoir by a brewing rivalry with Eliot Spitzer, who was then the state attorney general. \u201cHe was afraid Spitzer was going to turn against him and it would turn into the same thing this is now,\u201d Mr. MacLaren said, referring to the criminal trial.", "keyword": "Espada Pedro Jr;Soundview Health Care Network;Espada Pedro Gautier;Frauds and Swindling;Bronx (NYC);Nonprofit Organizations;New York State;Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0134499", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/04/02", "title": "Tar Heels\u2019 Walk-On Has Taken His Lumps", "abstract": "No one knows Tyler Hansbrough\u2019s moves, or his temper, better than a mostly anonymous North Carolina teammate who has spent the past three years as his personal punching bag. Surry Wood has the cuts, bruises, stitches and concussion to prove it. But he has no complaints about a role that few will see, yet many envy. He is one of a handful of walk-ons on the North Carolina roster who spend each day being pounded by the regulars in practice and each night on the Tar Heels\u2019 bench hoping for a blowout so he can spend a minute or two on the court. Wood and the rest of the so-called blue squad of walk-ons will have a front-row seat when the Tar Heels meet Kansas in the N.C.A.A. tournament semifinals Saturday night in San Antonio. And if all goes well, he may actually earn a line in the box score. But either way, he is content to have contributed to a team that may win a national championship. \u201cI definitely feel like I\u2019m a part of it,\u201d Wood, a senior, said Tuesday as he sat in a chair on the sideline at Dean Smith Center. \u201cGetting to prepare these guys every day, you definitely know you\u2019re part of the program when you get to run out, put the jersey on.\u201d That is the easy part. But it is not so easy in practice. Apparently, Hansbrough, a consensus all-American forward, does not have an off switch there, either. \u201cSurry\u2019s definitely taken his beatings,\u201d Hansbrough said. \u201cEvery once in a while he\u2019ll come to practice, we\u2019re like, \u2018Man, where\u2019d you get that bruise, Surry?\u2019 He goes: \u2018It\u2019s from you. The elbow you gave me the other day.\u2019 But it\u2019s Surry\u2019s job. He\u2019s there pushing us every day.\u201d Wood is not allowed to hit back, though. He once received a stern warning when he accidentally elbowed Danny Green. No fouling Hansbrough, either. But Wood happily recalls the broken finger Hansbrough sustained while trying to guard him awhile back. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019ll ever be able to wear a ring,\u201d Wood said. \u201cI got him pretty good. He\u2019ll always remember that.\u201d Wood, who grew up in nearby Raleigh as a Tar Heels fan, played Division III basketball at Hampden-Sydney in Virginia for a season before transferring to North Carolina in 2004. Through tryouts against other students, he won a job on the junior-varsity squad four years ago and earned a spot on the varsity team in 2005-6. He has played 78 minutes in his career. But Wood has been rewarded for his efforts. Williams inserted him into the starting lineup on Senior Night in March \u2014 the only start of his career. SEAN SUTTON RESIGNS Oklahoma State Coach Sean Sutton resigned after a 17-16 season. Sutton served as an assistant under his father, Eddie, before taking the top job. (AP) OLSON DISMISSES O\u2019NEILL Arizona\u2019s Lute Olson, who took a personal leave of absence this season, said the assistant coach Kevin O\u2019Neill would not remain on his staff. O\u2019Neill had been named as Olson\u2019s successor when he retires. \u201cWhen he said he\u2019s coming back, or that he\u2019s going to fulfill the terms of his contract, he won\u2019t be on the staff,\u201d Olson said. (AP) FORMER PLAYER DIES The former Kentucky and Louisville player Marvin Stone died Tuesday after collapsing during halftime of a game in Saudi Arabia. He was 26. The Louisville spokesman Kenny Klein said Stone apparently had a heart attack. Stone signed a contract with Ittihad Jeddah earlier in the week and was playing in the team\u2019s Elite Cup semifinal game when he fell ill. (AP) GRIER AND OREGON STATE MEET Bill Grier, who led San Diego to the N.C.A.A. tournament in his first season coaching there, said he interviewed for the vacant Oregon State job. (AP)", "keyword": "NCAA Basketball Tournament;University of North Carolina"}
{"id": "ny0127346", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2012/01/19", "title": "To Keep or Kill? Lowly Leap Second Focus of World Debate", "abstract": "On Thursday, the world will go to battle over a second. In Geneva, 700 delegates from about 70 nations attending a meeting of a United Nations telecommunications agency will decide whether to abolish the leap second. Unlike the better-known leap year, which adds a day to February in a familiar four-year cycle (with a few well-defined exceptions), the leap second is tacked on once every few years to synchronize atomic clocks \u2014 the world\u2019s scientific timekeepers \u2014 with Earth \u2019s rotational cycle, which, sadly, does not run quite like clockwork. The next one is scheduled for June 30 (do not bother to adjust your watch). The United States is the primary proponent for doing away with the leap second, arguing that the sporadic adjustments, if botched or overlooked, could lead to major foul-ups if electronic systems that depend on the precise time \u2014 including computer and cellphone networks, air traffic control and financial trading markets \u2014 do not agree on the time. Abolishing the leap second \u201cremoves one potential source of catastrophic failure for the world\u2019s computer networks,\u201d said Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the United States Naval Observatory, the nation\u2019s primary timekeeper. \u201cThat one second becomes a problem if you don\u2019t take it into account.\u201d But Britain, along with Canada and China, would like to keep the current keeping system, arguing that, in the 40 years that leap seconds have been gracefully inserted in our midst \u2014 most recently in 2008 \u2014 there have been no problems to speak of, and the worriers have greatly exaggerated the potential for havoc. Remember Y2K? \u201cIt\u2019s the devil we know,\u201d said Robert Seaman, a software engineer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. While he is an American, he is also a member of another group leery of the change: astronomers. If a software-guided telescope is not pointed in the right direction, it may not capture the right image, and updating software could be a sizable task. Defenders of the leap second would like to retain the quaint notion that the definition of a day has something to do with the rising and setting of the sun. Since the 1950s, the world has run on two sets of clocks. One is the ticking of atomic clocks, defined by the precise frequency that electrons jump around in atoms. The other is based on the traditional notion of a spinning Earth. If the leap second is stamped out, the astronomical definition of time will diverge from what is dictated by the atomic clocks, about a couple of thousandths of a second a day, growing to a minute over the course of a century, and someday \u2014 thousands of years from now \u2014 noon will strike at sunrise instead of when the sun is overhead. The problem is a distinctly modern one. Only a few centuries ago, people set their watches by the clock in the town square, and the time in each town was different from the next. That mattered little, since there was no need or ability to communicate with anyone elsewhere in the world. Railroads changed the situation, creating the need to set cross-country schedules. This in turn led to the creation of time zones, synchronizing time across large swaths. But the length of a day and a second remained tied to the rotation of Earth. In 1967, the nations of the world changed things around, creating a new definition of a second based on atomic clocks and pegged to the length of an astronomical day in 1900. But Earth, like any spinning top, has slowed down since 1900, and the time between sunrise and sunset has grown longer. Atomic clocks now run slightly ahead of what is defined in the sky, and, starting in 1972, leap seconds have been added to keep the two sets of clocks synchronized. A panel of experts at the International Telecommunication Union, an arm of the United Nations, began discussions eight years ago, but could not come to a consensus to keep or get rid of them. The United States and Britain have been butting heads over the issue over most of that time. \u201cWhat it decided was to give the baby to the higher levels,\u201d said Fran\u00e7ois Rancy, director of the union\u2019s radio communication bureau. Discussions are continuing between the United States and Britain, and Mr. Rancy said he hoped the two could finally come to a consensus in the hours before that agenda item is reached. But if necessary, the proposal to eliminate leap seconds would be put to a vote of the delegates. In a poll conducted by the union last year, only 16 nations expressed an opinion. Thirteen would abolish leap seconds. Three wanted to keep them. If approved, the recommendation would still have to be ratified by a larger meeting next month. Regardless, there will be one extra second to enjoy this summer. The change would not take effect until 2018.", "keyword": "Time;Watches and Clocks;Astronomy and Astrophysics;International Relations;United Nations"}
{"id": "ny0285906", "categories": ["world", "what-in-the-world"], "date": "2016/09/08", "title": "The Dog That\u2019s Stealing Asians\u2019 Hearts", "abstract": "In the cramped metropolises of East Asia, brown toy poodles have become the latest must-have accessory. They amble down Chinese streets in sweaters, bow ties and dinosaur costumes. They are so popular in Tottori, Japan, that the police force has added two female toy poodles, Fuga and Karin , to its ranks. In China, the pets are known as \u201ctaidi,\u201d a riff on the English word \u201cteddy.\u201d So, why toy poodles? And why brown? Chinese poodle-lovers described the breed as smart, easygoing and humanlike in personality. They said the coffee-colored coats set these pups apart from other poodles and made it easy to conceal grime from the street. In the hygiene-obsessed cities of East Asia, there is another perk: Toy poodles are known for shedding very little hair. \u201cI regard her as one of my family,\u201d said Xu Chen, 25, a flight attendant from Beijing whose poodle, Ceicei, is clean, cuddly and low maintenance. \u201cShe\u2019s very beautiful and smart.\u201d Dogs were once dismissed as a bourgeois luxury in China, and large pets are still banned in parts of some major cities . That has led to a boom in the market for small dogs, with toy poodles selling for several hundred dollars each. Of the roughly 950,000 dogs in Beijing last year, more than 13 percent, or about 125,000, were toy poodles, according to the Beijing Kennel Club. They outnumbered other breeds like the bichon fris\u00e9, the golden retriever and the Welsh corgi. Shen Ruihong, who leads the kennel club, said demand for toy poodles in China surged several years ago after a craze in Japan. Toy poodles started showing up on popular television programs, and soon \u201cthey went viral,\u201d he said, especially among the young women who fuel so many fads. \u201cThe more people who raised them, the more people who wanted them,\u201d he said. \u201cNow we have too many.\u201d", "keyword": "Dog;China;Japan;Taiwan"}
{"id": "ny0004750", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2013/04/07", "title": "Henrik Lundqvist Has 48 Saves in Rangers\u2019 4-1 Win Over Carolina", "abstract": "RALEIGH, N.C. \u2014 If the Rangers needed a breather after back-to-back games against Eastern Conference-leading Pittsburgh and before two critical meetings with Toronto this week, the schedule offered this kindness on Saturday night: a trip to Carolina. The fading Hurricanes had lost 10 of their last 11 games and had to play without the injured Alexander Semin, their second-leading scorer. With every point crucial in their battle with the Islanders and the Devils for the final two playoff berths in the East, these were 2 points the Rangers needed to bank. And they did, with a 4-1 victory over a Carolina team that turned out to be far from a pushover. Henrik Lundqvist saved the Rangers, stopping a season-high 48 shots, and a three-goal burst in the second period allowed them to come away with their third victory in four games. Derek Stepan, Ryan Callahan and Rick Nash scored in the decisive second period, with Brian Boyle adding an empty-net goal in the final second of the game. The Rangers and the Islanders remained tied in points in the race for the final two playoff spots. They each have 42 points, but the Rangers are in seventh because they hold a tiebreaker. The Islanders defeated Tampa Bay, 4-2, on Saturday. The Devils fell 3 points back after a 2-1 loss to Toronto. Lundqvist had 14 saves for the Rangers in what could have been a disastrous first period, and he kept the Hurricanes from coming back in the third with 20 more saves. He has allowed two goals or fewer in each of the last 10 games. \u201cThat\u2019s the best I\u2019ve seen him play since I\u2019ve been here,\u201d Rangers Coach John Tortorella said. \u201cHe stole us one. I thought we had a good second period, but first and third we were nowhere to be found.\u201d Perhaps, but the Rangers seem to have found their game of late. That is at least in part because of the recent additions of Ryane Clowe, Derick Brassard, Mats Zuccarello and John Moore. \u201cIt\u2019s a different atmosphere in the room,\u201d Lundqvist said. \u201cNot only did we get some really skilled players, but it changed the dynamic in the room where you get the new guys.\u201d He added, \u201cIt\u2019s just a lot better feeling in here.\u201d The Rangers scored twice in 31 seconds early in the second period to pull away. Brad Richards set up Stepan in the slot, and he broke a scoreless tie with a power-play goal two minutes into the period. Moments later, Carolina goalie Dan Ellis was caught out of the net trying to play the puck along the end boards. Nash poked it away, sending it to Callahan in front for an easy goal into the open net. Nash added a power-play goal at 11 minutes 19 seconds when he stickhandled through the slot, turned around and wristed a low shot past Ellis. The Rangers were 2 of 5 on the power play. \u201cWe knew they were coming and we didn\u2019t weather it too well in the first, but we did create some chances, too,\u201d Richards said. \u201cThe second, it was important to bury some goals and we did, and then Hank took us home.\u201d Lundqvist lost his shutout bid when Zac Dalpe buried a one-timer from the slot at 9:27 of the third. It was the only blemish on a busy, busy night. \u201cI\u2019m just so tired I don\u2019t know what to say right now,\u201d Lundqvist said. \u201cI\u2019m exhausted.\u201d Slap Shots Hurricanes centers Eric and Jordan Staal are now wearing visors on their helmets after the injury to their brother Marc Staal, the Rangers defenseman who has been out since March 5 after a puck hit him near the right eye. The Staals had resisted wearing visors, but put them on for the first time March 26 against Winnipeg. ... The Hurricanes\u2019 Alexander Semin was out with an upper-body injury. ... Rangers defenseman Michael Del Zotto did not face league discipline for what he called an inadvertent elbow to the jaw of Pittsburgh wing James Neal on Friday in the Penguins\u2019 2-1 shootout victory. Neal was dazed by the blow and did not return to the game. Del Zotto said Saturday morning that he had not been contacted by the N.H.L. for a disciplinary hearing, and he was in the lineup Saturday night.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Rangers;Carolina Hurricanes;Henrik Lundqvist"}
{"id": "ny0141926", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/11/17", "title": "From the Valley Comes a Warning", "abstract": "From the Valley Comes a Warning Maybe it was the tombstone that did it. Even as Wall Street burned, Silicon Valley seemed strangely sanguine. Then a PowerPoint presentation from Sequoia Capital prophesying Armageddon \u2014 featuring an \u201cR.I.P. Good Times\u201d headstone \u2014 made the rounds. A month later, venture capital firms are slashing investments and counseling portfolio companies to cut jobs. Sequoia\u2019s warning may reflect the technology industry\u2019s woes, but it\u2019s more notable for what it says about venture capital. Maybe it\u2019s because venture capital\u2019s traditional gravy train \u2014 initial public offerings of fast-growing start-ups \u2014 had slowed. That, coupled with the severity of the 2000 dot-com crash, gave the industry a false sense of immunity to financial hard times. Then came the Sequoia document. The firm \u2014 which had financed Apple, Google and Yahoo \u2014 showed its portfolio companies a presentation on why this financial crisis could be the worst yet and advised survival tactics like layoffs. The presentation burned across Silicon Valley like wildfire. When one of the most successful firms moves in a club known for herdlike behavior, everyone takes notice. Other investors, like Benchmark Capital, advised their companies to conserve cash. Layoffs began en masse. Sequoia-backed LinkedIn and Zappos both chopped their staffs, as have big public companies like Yahoo and Sun Microsystems. Since the Sequoia presentation in October, there have been nearly 50,000 layoffs in the technology sector, according to a running counter on the blog TechCrunch. Sequoia\u2019s viral hit underscores the precariousness of the venture capital business. Venture-backed exits have fallen 54 percent so far this year. And with the I.P.O. market shut, that has left mergers and acquisitions as the primary value driver. Yet with financing near impossible, even the historical safety of being swallowed by a Cisco or Google has disappeared. Like Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private equity, the venture capital industry got too fat. Firms currently manage $260 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association, 14 percent more than during the bubble, and the industry now raises more money than it creates. A shakeout was inevitable. It\u2019s just odd that it took Sequoia\u2019s PowerPoint to get it under way. A Pension Portfolio No wonder private equity, hedge fund and venture capital fund managers are biting their fingernails. As the stock market holdings of some of their big pension fund investors have plunged, the proportion that these so-called alternative investments comprise as a portion of their overall portfolios has ballooned. That\u2019s a problem. Take the California Public Employees\u2019 Retirement System \u2014 the biggest pension fund. Calpers, which will discuss its asset allocation at an investment meeting on Monday, had its portfolio thrown out of whack by the global equity mess. The fund aims to have about 56 percent of its $200 billion in equities, and 9.5 percent in alternative investments. The rest goes to bonds, real estate, inflation-linked assets and cash. But because equities slid so drastically in the past month, Calpers is now overinvested in these riskier and less liquid alternative assets. Today they account for 14 percent of the portfolio. Since private equity and venture capital firms typically collect money over several years from pension funds \u2014 which make commitments upfront to various funds \u2014 the weighting is likely to increase even further. Calpers can hope that equity markets will rebound before it is asked to follow its capital commitments. That\u2019s no sure thing. Calpers could try to turn down future fund raisings \u2014 but it would surely be penalized by the fund managers for doing so. It could sell other assets to cough up the cash, but that might force it to take big losses. Barring any of these options, for Calpers to follow its money and realign its allocation model, it will need to pass the hat back around to the state workers it serves \u2014 and ask for more money. This puts the pressure further down the chain, particularly if it forces the fund's working members to raise their contributions. In theory, asset allocation models are meant to mitigate risk through diversification. If one bucket, say equities, falls, then the fixed-income or private equity investments should offset the decline. But when markets fall more or less in tandem, the model not only fails but also puts other assets at risk of the capital needs of others. So much for theory. JEFF SEGAL, LAUREN SILVA LAUGHLIN and ROB COX", "keyword": "Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Sequoia Capital;California Public Employees Retirement System;Asset Allocation (Personal Finances)"}
{"id": "ny0087439", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/07/24", "title": "U.S. Jets to Use Turkish Bases in War on ISIS", "abstract": "ISTANBUL \u2014 Turkey plunged into the fight against the Islamic State on Thursday, rushing forces into the first direct combat with its militants on the Syrian border and granting permission for American warplanes to use two Turkish air bases for bombarding the group in Syria . The developments ended a longstanding reluctance by Turkey, a NATO member and an ally of the United States, to play a more aggressive part in halting the Islamic State\u2019s expanding reach in the Middle East. American officials said it carried the potential to strike Islamic State targets with far greater effect because of Turkey\u2019s proximity, which will allow more numerous and frequent bombings and surveillance missions. Turkey, a vital conduit for the Islamic State\u2019s power base in Syria, had come under increased criticism for its inability \u2014 or unwillingness \u2014 to halt the flow of foreign fighters and supplies across its 500-mile border. Up to now, Turkey has placed a priority on dealing with its own restive Kurdish population, which straddles the Syrian border in the southeast, and in the toppling of Syria\u2019s president, Bashar al-Assad, whom the Turks blame for creating the conditions in his war-ravaged country for the rise of Islamic extremism. But now that extremism has increasingly menaced Turkey, where 1.5 million Syrian war refugees have also been straining the country. A series of Islamic State attacks on Turks, including a devastating suicide bombing a few days ago that officials have linked to the extremist group, may also have helped accelerate the shift in Turkey\u2019s position. Turkish internal security officials had signaled their growing concern about the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, with a series of large-scale raids in the past few weeks, detaining hundreds of suspected ISIS members and sympathizers. Taking the fight to the Islamic State in Syria, however, represents a huge leap. \u201cThe terrorist organization represents a national security threat to Turkey, and we are working closely with our allies, including the United States, to combat terrorism,\u201d said a senior official in the prime minister\u2019s office. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of government protocol restrictions, also emphasized that Turkey had not changed its position regarding Mr. Assad in Syria. In what Turkish officials described as the first direct cross-border confrontation with the Islamic State, Turkish jets scrambled as tanks and artillery of its Fifth Armored Brigade shelled militants across the border. And early Friday, Turkish fighter jets hit four Islamic State targets within Syria, across the border from Kilis Province, without crossing into Syria, a Turkish security official said, according to Reuters. Obama administration officials, who have been negotiating with Turkey for months, said Thursday that they had reached an agreement for manned and unmanned American warplanes to carry out aerial attacks on Islamic State positions from air bases at Incirlik and Diyarbakir. The agreement was described by one senior administration official as a \u201cgame changer.\u201d How ISIS Expands The Islamic State aims to build a broad colonial empire across many countries. The agreement was sealed on Wednesday with a phone call between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Obama, another administration official said. Turkey had allowed unarmed surveillance flights from Incirlik but had thus far balked at anything more muscular. Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon said they were hesitant to talk about the pact until the Turkish government acknowledged it publicly. Turkish officials declined to comment on the pact Thursday night. The United States and Turkey \u201chave decided to further deepen our cooperation in the fight against ISIL,\u201d the State Department\u2019s spokesman, John Kirby, said in a statement. He said that \u201cdue to operational security I don\u2019t have further details to share at this time.\u201d The clash between Turkey\u2019s armed forces and the Islamic State came after gunmen identified by the Turkish military as Islamic State fighters fired on a Turkish border outpost in the Kilis region, killing one Turkish soldier and wounding five. The Turkish military said in a statement that its border shelling was a response, and that at least one militant was killed. Turkish news media said a number of Islamic State vehicles were obliterated in the shelling. The clash came three days after a suicide bomber with suspected ties to the Islamic State struck a cultural center in the Turkish border town of Suruc, killing 32 people. Obama administration officials said the United States had agreed to work with European allies, including Germany, France and Britain, to do more to control their end of the flow of foreign fighters crossing Turkey to reach Syria. Acknowledging that commitment to Turkey, Mr. Kirby said the United States recognized that \u201cthe foreign fighter problem is not Turkey\u2019s alone.\u201d It was unclear what other concessions might have been made by the United States to conclude the deal, but a NATO official said on Thursday that \u201cthe Turks always drive a hard bargain.\u201d The breakthrough came after recent talks between Gen. John R. Allen, a retired Marine who is Mr. Obama\u2019s special envoy for the fight against the Islamic State, and Turkish counterparts. General Allen\u2019s trip was preceded by a telephone call from Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. Erdogan, administration officials said. Obama's Evolution on ISIS Some of President Obama\u2019s statements about the American strategy to confront ISIS and its effectiveness. A senior Defense Department official said recent Islamic State attacks on Turkish targets had played an important role in Turkey\u2019s decision to join the fight against the militant group directly. \u201cAttacks in Turkey are part of the catalyst for them to think about how they get in the game,\u201d the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. For the Pentagon, the Turkish decision is huge because the two air bases are much closer to the Syrian border than Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and the Persian Gulf, where strikes had been launched. The agreement will significantly increase the amount of time that American spy planes can hover over Syria. In addition, it will accelerate the response time for manned flights acting on intelligence information. But even as they were lauding the agreement, American military officials were cautious because they felt that they had been burned by Turkey before. In 2003, Defense Department officials believed that they had an agreement with the Turks to send the Army\u2019s Fourth Infantry Division into northern Iraq from Turkey as part of the invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. But the Turkish Parliament refused to grant permission and the division\u2019s equipment remained offshore on ships. While the United States shares Turkey\u2019s antipathy for Mr. Assad, the Turks had previously insisted on a no-fly zone in northern Syria, near the border with Turkey, in exchange for allowing the United States to use their bases. A no-fly zone would create a safe area to arm and train moderate rebels fighting Mr. Assad and allow an opposition government to take root. The United States has largely opposed this because it would broaden Mr. Obama\u2019s stated objective of focusing only on the destruction of the Islamic State; however, some within the government, especially at the State Department, believe the idea should be given serious consideration. Asked on Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado whether a no-fly zone was part of the deal with Turkey, General Allen said: \u201cNo. It was not part of the discussion.\u201d He referred all other questions about the agreement to officials in Washington. Other administration officials said the growing Islamic State threat to Turkey as well as Mr. Assad\u2019s shrinking control over territory in Syria had prompted the Turks to drop the condition \u2014 at least for now. \u201cThe agreement seems a watershed moment in terms of airstrikes,\u201d said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Arab politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But for the Turkish government, Mr. Tabler said: \u201cISIS is just one manifestation of state collapse in Syria. Solving it is getting Assad out of Damascus.\u201d", "keyword": "Turkey;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;US Military;Syria;Kurdish;Diyarbakir Air Base;Incirlik Air Base"}
{"id": "ny0107979", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/05/03", "title": "Impassively, Knicks\u2019 Amar\u2019e Stoudemire Describes His Accident", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 To Amar\u2019e Stoudemire it was all an accident, a momentary swipe of his left hand in the frustrating wake of a dispiriting defeat. In his words, he meant to \u201cmake some noise,\u201d not summon paramedics and several days of censure. As his Knicks teammates practiced Wednesday, Stoudemire contended that Monday night\u2019s self-inflicted hand injury \u2014 caused when he broke the glass partly enclosing a fire extinguisher \u2014 was a case of bad timing. It was an unfortunate mishap, with blood and screaming headlines to follow. \u201cI didn\u2019t, in a million years, expect to hurt myself,\u201d said Stoudemire, who will not play Thursday in Game 3 against the Miami Heat. \u201cWho would want to hurt himself in the playoffs?\u201d With his left hand wrapped in a thick, soft bandage, Stoudemire seemed neither embarrassed nor distraught. He addressed reporters in a matter-of-fact tone that was a mix of unsupported hopefulness \u2014 he said he had a great chance to play in Sunday\u2019s Game 4 \u2014 and detached bewilderment. It all happened, Stoudemire said, so fast. \u201cI was walking down the corridor frustrated that we were down, 0-2, and I swung my arm at the wall,\u201d Stoudemire said, describing the episode. \u201cThe fire extinguisher door was 85 percent metal and 2 percent glass, or whatever. I didn\u2019t see the glass. I swung my arm backward. It wasn\u2019t like I had a closed fist and punched the glass. I was letting off a little frustration \u2014 trying to make some noise, not injure myself. \u201cWhen I saw that I my hand was cut, I was like, what? I was very upset and upset with myself. But never in a million years did I think I would cut my hand.\u201d Stoudemire was disappointed that he would not be able to help his teammates Thursday \u2014 he said he had let them down \u2014 but added that he believed he could play in Sunday\u2019s game. The Knicks list him as doubtful for Game 4. \u201cI\u2019m expecting to heal up fast,\u201d Stoudemire said. \u201cI think there\u2019s a great chance I can play Sunday.\u201d Knicks Coach Mike Woodson, however, was not planning on Stoudemire\u2019s return. \u201cI wait until the doctors tell me who\u2019s ready,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something I can undo. You don\u2019t expect something like this to happen, but over the years, I\u2019ve seen players do strange things.\u201d Woodson added that Stoudemire was apologetic, although according to his teammates, there was no formal apology to the team. Nor was one sought. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t have to apologize to me,\u201d Steve Novak said after an unusually long practice session. \u201cI know Amar\u2019e wouldn\u2019t do anything to hurt the team.\u201d Carmelo Anthony said he talked on the telephone with Stoudemire on Tuesday, the day after the incident. \u201cHe feels bad and we talked about it,\u201d Anthony said. \u201cRight now, all I care about is him getting healthy.\u201d At times Wednesday, Stoudemire appeared to be rationalizing the injury, as if to say he was an unlucky victim. \u201cEverybody gets upset at times,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople knock over ice coolers or kick a chair or a table. It was accidental that I struck the glass. I just swung my arm backward.\u201d Asked about fan reaction to the incident and criticism he has received, Stoudemire said: \u201cI understand the fans are frustrated, and I am, too. But they have the wrong perception of what happened. I wasn\u2019t trying to hurt myself and I didn\u2019t punch a glass window. It was nothing like that.\u201d After Stoudemire left the Knicks\u2019 practice, and after his teammates and coaches faced 20 minutes of questioning about the chaotic Monday night postgame scene, the mood around the team suddenly changed to something a little more uplifting. In an elaborate ceremony broadcast nationally by the N.B.A., center Tyson Chandler was named the league\u2019s defensive player of the year \u2014 the first Knick to win the award. Chandler, signed as a free agent before this season, said he was especially happy to be recognized because he is not among the top players in either blocked shots or steals. \u201cI play defense by being in the right position and in many other fundamental and not always flashy ways,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I\u2019m glad that was recognized. I\u2019ve always wanted to be considered one of the top defensive players in the league. But the defensive player of the year often goes to a big name. It\u2019s just a dream for it to come my way.\u201d The defensive work of Chandler and his teammates will have to be at its best Thursday against Miami. Much of the Knicks\u2019 lineup is in flux. Woodson said Anthony would shift to power forward, where he played recently, and sometimes thrived, when Stoudemire was sidelined with a back injury, but was undecided about whom to start at small forward. \u201cWhoever plays, we\u2019re going to need a big push from everyone on the court,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cBut I\u2019m not unnerved by this situation. We\u2019ve got a legitimate chance on our home court. We\u2019ll see what we\u2019re made of.\u201d REBOUNDS Point guard Jeremy Lin participated in a full-court three-on-three pickup game after practice. Wearing a brace on his surgically repaired left knee, Lin looked fluid and ran without a limp. \u201cThis is the first time he\u2019s been able to run up and down,\u201d Mike Woodson said. \u201cThe question is: Can he defend? Can he cut on the knee? We\u2019ll wait and see how he feels. He\u2019s talked about wanting to play but it\u2019s up to a decision by the doctors.\u201d ... The Knicks announced that Iman Shumpert had knee surgery and would need six to eight months to recover.", "keyword": "Stoudemire Amar'e;New York Knicks;Basketball"}
{"id": "ny0167613", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2006/01/31", "title": "Ex-Chief of Viacom Joins the Time Warner Dissidents", "abstract": "Carl C. Icahn said yesterday that he had recruited Frank J. Biondi Jr., the former chief executive of Viacom and Universal Studios, to become Time Warner's chairman and chief executive if Mr. Icahn prevailed in a planned proxy fight for control of the media giant. Mr. Icahn, the billionaire financier, has been staging a battle to replace the board of Time Warner, where his fund and various others own about 3 percent of the stock. He has told other funds that he believes Time Warner's stock could be worth about $27 a share. Time Warner rose 26 cents yesterday to close at $17.55 a share. But Mr. Icahn's push has met with relatively little reaction on Wall Street, where his proposals to split off Time Warner's cable unit, replace top management, trim expenses and increase the share repurchase program have failed to generate much investor excitement. \"Desperate men do desperate things,\" said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, of Mr. Icahn's decision to bring Mr. Biondi on board. \"Despite Mr. Icahn's investment, we don't see $27 or $28 a share of value at Time Warner unless the company is broken up in its entirety, and that does not appear to be imminent.\" A spokesman for Time Warner, Edward I. Adler, said that \"our management, Dick Parsons and Jeff Bewkes, has restored the company to health and put it on a growth track,\" referring to the company's chief executive and its president. \"Beyond that, we do not have a comment on Mr. Biondi.\" In a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Icahn said that Mr. Biondi would be paid at least $6 million if the Icahn slate failed to win and at least $10 million if the slate was elected. In the filing Mr. Icahn also responded to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal that was critical of his efforts at Time Warner. Mr. Icahn wrote that his efforts had already resulted in the company's going forward with a $12 billion stock repurchase plan. He also reiterated criticism of Mr. Parsons's management, which he said had failed to maximize shareholder value. Mr. Biondi, 61, is a well-known and well-liked figure in the media industry, though his career has had setbacks. In 1998, he was ousted by Seagram's chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., in part because Universal Studios, the company's film division, had fared poorly. Two years earlier, he was pushed out as chief executive of Viacom. At that time, associates said that Sumner M. Redstone, Viacom's controlling shareholder, was unhappy because in his view Mr. Biondi had not managed the company aggressively enough. Other company executives said that Mr. Redstone simply wanted to take more direct control over the company. \"This seems an odd choice,\" said Leo J. Hindery Jr., managing partner of InterMedia Partners, a media private equity firm. \"One of the reasons that Mr. Redstone let him go was because he was not an aggressive enough manager, and Mr. Icahn has stated that that is precisely what he is looking for.\" Mr. Biondi did not quite see it that way. \"If you want someone to get up and shout and scream, that is not me,\" Mr. Biondi said in a telephone interview yesterday. \"If you want someone who knows the businesses and knows what can be done with them, that is me.\" Since Mr. Biondi left Universal in 1998, he has been one of the partners in WaterView Advisors, a $150 million private equity firm that specializes in the media. He is also on the board of the Cablevision Systems Corporation. Mr. Biondi was brought into the Time Warner fight by his brother, Michael J. Biondi, head of investment banking at Lazard, which is working with Mr. Icahn to draw up a plan for reshaping the company. Mr. Icahn is expected to unveil those plans early next week. Frank Biondi said he had signed on because of \"the chance to work with Mike and with Carl, and it is a fairly worthy case. It is a referendum on a business strategy that has not increased shareholder value. It will correspondingly be a referendum on our proposal to increase it.\" Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research, an independent research firm, said, \"There is now a face to the Icahn push.\" But he added: \"Mr. Biondi has been largely on the sidelines of the entertainment business for the last seven years. He is being positioned to implement the plan now being drawn up by Mr. Icahn and his bankers at Lazard Freres. The plan is far more important than Frank Biondi. The question is whether the plan will have enough meat to generate investor support.\"", "keyword": "TIME WARNER CORP;TIME WARNER INC;ICAHN CARL C;BIONDI FRANK J JR;MERGERS ACQUISITIONS AND DIVESTITURES;BOARDS OF DIRECTORS"}
{"id": "ny0285597", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/09/07", "title": "Whistle-Blowing Insiders: \u2018Game Changer\u2019 for the S.E.C.", "abstract": "Although there have been many complaints about the Dodd-Frank Act, one area generally hailed as a success is the whistle-blowing program at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since the program\u2019s creation in 2011, the S.E.C. has received more than 14,000 tips, including almost 4,000 last year. That number falls well short of the original estimate of 30,000 submissions each year, but quality is far more important than quantity. Not surprisingly, agency officials heap praise on the program. Mary Jo White, the S.E.C. chairwoman, called it \u201ca game changer for the agency,\u201d while the director of the enforcement division, Andrew J. Ceresney, said that whistle-blowers \u201chad a transformative impact.\u201d Figuring out how well a program is doing is always difficult because the sponsor has every reason to claim success. As the scandal caused by Bernard L. Madoff\u2019s Ponzi scheme shows, it is as much a matter of taking whistle-blowers seriously as it is getting them in the door. Five years into the program, it is clear that some of the best information comes from corporate insiders. They can give the S.E.C. a map to how a firm operates and where to look for wrongdoing. A $22 million award to an internal whistle-blower at Monsanto announced last week is a good example of the impact an internal whistle-blower can have in showing the S.E.C. where there may be problems inside a company. Monsanto in February settled charges of violating accounting rules related to the recording of the costs of a rebate program for Roundup, one of its leading consumer products. The company offered rebates to its distributors to increase sales but shifted those costs into the next fiscal year. By not recognizing the expenses right away, it was able to push up its revenue while delaying the reduction caused by recognizing the costs, something that investors would certainly want to know in evaluating how a company is doing. Accounting shenanigans are notoriously difficult to uncover, especially for a company like Monsanto, which has annual sales of more than $10 billion and multiple product lines. The amount of the rebates was comparatively small, less than $100 million over two years, so it is unlikely it would have been noticed by the S.E.C. without a whistle-blower saying where to look. The agency knows well that accounting problems at a company usually start small and then can grow to take on a life of their own, so catching a violation early on is the best way to keep a business from veering into bigger problems. In announcing the $22 million award , which is one of the largest given by the commission, the head of the whistle-blower office, Jane A. Norberg, said that \u201cwithout this whistle-blower\u2019s courage, information and assistance, it would have been extremely difficult for law enforcement to discover this securities fraud on its own.\u201d When the rules for the whistle-blower program were first announced, companies objected that there was no requirement for an employee to report wrongdoing internally before providing information to the agency. Internal whistle-blowers account for nearly half of those receiving awards, and the S.E.C.\u2019s most recent annual report to Congress on the program notes that 80 percent of them either reported their concerns to management or said that the corporate compliance office was aware of the issue. The internal whistle-blower presents a real threat to a company, not only from the S.E.C., but also from the Justice Department, because any violation of the securities law can result in a criminal prosecution. The winding-down of Visium Asset Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund, shows how a disgruntled former employee who goes to the government can wreak havoc on a firm. Stefan Lumiere, a former portfolio manager at Visium, was charged in June with a scheme to mismark securities held in a credit fund that he helped manage, which invested in the debt securities of health care companies. He is accused of inflating the value of the investments and not identifying how some were highly illiquid. His boss, Christopher Plaford, has already pleaded guilty to securities fraud and insider trading charges, and is cooperating in the case. A major feature of the government\u2019s case against Mr. Lumiere are recordings made by a junior trader at the firm of more than 125 conversations with colleagues, totaling almost 200 hours, after agreeing to cooperate in the investigation. Visium itself has not been charged with any wrongdoing. The indictment calls the trader \u201cCC-1,\u201d the typical nomenclature for a cooperating co-conspirator, who Bloomberg News reported is Jason Thorell. According to an affidavit filed by a F.B.I. agent, Mr. Thorell received immunity from prosecution and the case \u201ccould indirectly result in a financial benefit\u201d to him. The S.E.C. filed a parallel lawsuit against Mr. Lumiere and Mr. Plaford, so the financial benefit is likely to come from a whistle-blower claim Mr. Thorell might have for providing information that led to the cases. The prerequisite to receiving a whistle-blower award is that the S.E.C. will recover more than $1 million from enforcement actions based on the information provided, so any payment will have to await the resolution of the cases. At the Justice Department\u2019s request, the S.E.C. lawsuit against Mr. Lumiere has been delayed until the criminal charges are resolved. One factor that could increase an award, which can range from 10 to 30 percent of any monetary sanctions recovered, is whether the case involves an area that is an agency priority, such as misconduct involving a regulated entity or an industrywide practice. That certainly applies to this case, because the S.E.C. has been focusing its attention recently on how hedge funds value illiquid investments, and Visium was an investment adviser that owed a fiduciary duty to its clients. Any claim Mr. Thorell makes as a whistle-blower raises the interesting question about whether someone who participates in wrongdoing can receive an award. Mr. Thorell, according to Bloomberg, helped obtain sham quotes used to inflate the price of the securities in the Visium credit fund that were an important part of the mismarking, so he was in the middle of any violations. The answer is that even a violator can receive an award, but it may be reduced or denied based on the person\u2019s level of involvement in the violations. Under the S.E.C. rules , a whistle-blower\u2019s \u201crole in the securities violations\u201d and whether the person financially benefited from the conduct can be taken into consideration in the final decision. As is often the case, the best information comes from someone involved in the misconduct who left the company and may hope to cash in by turning over information to the government. The S.E.C. may be willing to overlook the acts of a lower-level trader in deciding how much it might give if the recovery exceeds $1 million. The S.E.C. no doubt hopes that large awards will draw the attention of corporate employees who can provide information; for some, the awards are almost like winning the lottery. The $22 million payment to the Monsanto employee is the second-largest in the history of the program, after a $30 million award in September 2014. But much like buying a Powerball ticket, the chances of scoring a big whistle-blower award appear to be quite low, at least when one considers the number of tips the agency receives and the likelihood that it will lead the S.E.C. to obtain a significant recovery from a company. Just as important, not every internal whistle-blower is in it for the money. Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk manager at Deutsche Bank, turned down an $8.25 million award for information he provided about how the bank inflated the value of its credit derivatives portfolio during the financial crisis that resulted in the payment of a $55 million penalty in May 2015. In an op-ed article in The Financial Times on Aug. 19, he said that the bank and its shareholders were the victims of the misconduct by having to pay the fine while \u201ctop executives retired with multimillion-dollar bonuses based on the misrepresentation of the bank\u2019s balance sheet.\u201d Mr. Ben-Artzi\u2019s refusal signals that whistle-blowing has truly come of age when someone shows that it is more than just the potential reward that motivates the revelation of misconduct. That sends a signal to companies that wrongdoing in the ranks will not go unnoticed for long, with the S.E.C.\u2019s awards an additional motivation.", "keyword": "Whistleblower;SEC;Monsanto;Eric Ben-Artzi"}
{"id": "ny0129316", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/06/07", "title": "Justice Department to Counter Sex Crimes on Indian Reservations", "abstract": "The Justice Department announced a pilot program on Wednesday to curb high rates of sexual assault on Indian reservations by setting up specialized response teams for rapes and other abuse. The joint federal and tribal teams will be established on six Montana reservations over the next six months. Federal statistics indicate that Indian women are raped at a higher rate than any other race. The teams will be made up of federal and tribal prosecutors, victims\u2019 advocates, health care providers, law enforcement officials and others.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Justice Department;Native Americans"}
{"id": "ny0091392", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/08/05", "title": "Iraq: Funding Shortfall Deprives Uprooted Iraqis of Health Services", "abstract": "Faced with a shortage of funds, international aid agencies have been forced to suspend 84 percent of their health programs in 10 Iraqi provinces, depriving almost three million people of basic medical care, World Health Organization officials said Tuesday. The aid agencies, including the W.H.O., need $60.9 million to operate their health care centers in Iraq but have received only $5.1 million from donors. More than 184 centers serving refugees and other people displaced by violence in Iraq have suspended their operations, the W.H.O. said . The centers were the only health care providers in many parts of Iraq. \u201cThis is a country ravaged by conflict,\u201d said Dr. Syed Jaffar Hussain, the W.H.O. representative in Iraq. \u201cNot only do we have innocent civilians being caught in the violence, with so many people fleeing the fighting and living in temporary housing, people are at much higher risk from communicable diseases. Unless additional funding is received, millions more will be deprived of health services they urgently need.\u201d The W.H.O. said it was appealing to international donors and seeking alternative sources of funding.", "keyword": "Iraq;WHO;Foreign Aid;Health Insurance"}
{"id": "ny0022976", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/09/15", "title": "Not to Be, Um, Trifled With, Texas Guards Its Slogans", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 Don\u2019t mess with Texas. In fact, don\u2019t even mess with \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas.\u201d The trademarked slogan started out nearly 30 years ago as the clarion call of a campaign to reduce highway littering. But over the years it has become something far bigger: an identity statement, a declaration of Texas swagger \u2014 from barrooms to sports arenas to political conventions. And Texas is touchy about who uses it and how. In July, a Montana company that makes Western-themed accessories stopped selling a \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas\u201d belt buckle after the Texas Department of Transportation, which owns the federally registered trademark on the phrase, threatened legal action and told the firm to ship the offending merchandise to Austin. The author of a romance novel titled \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas,\u201d \u201ca thrill ride of hunky heroes, hilarious high jinks and heartwarming romance,\u201d found herself in a legal battle with the state after it filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Austin alleging trademark infringement. Days before the book was to be released, the state\u2019s lawyers asked a judge to prohibit it from being sold while the case was under way. The judge denied the state\u2019s request, but Texas ultimately won a dispute that dragged for nearly nine months. The suit was settled last year, and the author, Christie Craig, agreed to pay Texas $2,500 and change the book\u2019s title. \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas\u201d became \u201cOnly in Texas.\u201d Image The slogan \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas\u201d began as part of a campaign to curb highway littering. Credit Michael Stravato for The New York Times In a state whose governor likes to point out that Houston was the first word spoken on the moon, it should come as no surprise that Texas not only invented its most famous catchphrase, but that it also fights to ensure that catchphrase is used to the state\u2019s satisfaction. Texas officials say they want to prevent \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas\u201d from losing its original antilittering message and protect the authorized use of its trademark. But others say that the state has been overzealous and that it is seeking to control a phrase so popular and well worn that people now associate it more with tough Texans than with litterbugs. It is used wherever and whenever Texans want to claim superiority or victory or simply boast of a Texan\u2019s Texasness. Federal prosecutors say it at news conferences after announcing a big indictment. The Navy made it the motto of the U.S.S. Texas submarine at Pearl Harbor. Since 2000, Texas transportation officials have contacted more than 100 companies, organizations and individuals about the unauthorized use of the phrase, often in the form of strongly worded cease-and-desist letters that warn violators to either stop using the slogan or obtain licensing for it for a fee. (New York, of course, with its often-imitated \u201cI \u2665 NY\u201d logo, has threatened hundreds more, sending out roughly 350 cease-and-desist letters since 2008.) But Texas has been just as protective of another popular phrase: \u201cRemember the Alamo.\u201d The state and its General Land Office , which oversees the historic site in San Antonio, registered \u201cthe Alamo\u201d as a trademark, and it has claimed common-law rights, a more limited type of trademark protection that does not require federal registration, on \u201cRemember the Alamo.\u201d Last year, a San Antonio bar owner tried to register the phrase \u201cI Can\u2019t Remember the Alamo,\u201d hoping to plaster it on T-shirts, mugs and even underwear. Image The state\u2019s Transportation Department is protective of its trademark. Credit TxDOT Texas opposed the bar owner\u2019s trademark application, arguing that it would lead consumers to believe it was sponsored by the General Land Office and that it tarnished the state \u201cby communicating that the heroism and sacrifice undertaken by its forebears is not worthy of memory or esteem,\u201d the agency wrote to the trademark appeals board. Texas won that fight, too: \u201cI Can\u2019t Remember the Alamo\u201d underwear was never sold because the bar owner, Christopher Erck, abandoned the trademark application. \u201cIt got fairly heated, I will say that,\u201d Mark Dallas Loeffler, the communications director for the General Land Office, said of the dispute. \u201cIn the end, I think he realized it was probably more trouble than it was worth just to sell a shirt. In our opinion, it was a victory for the State of Texas. The people of Texas should have the right to protect the phrases that are iconic to Texas.\u201d To protect \u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas,\u201d state transportation officials and lawyers monitor what they call \u201cthe usage of the brand.\u201d The slogan was coined in 1985 by Tim McClure, a native Texan and a founder of GSD&M , an advertising agency based in Austin and hired by the state to help its antilittering campaign reach the worst highway offenders \u2014 men under 25. The phrase gave rise to a state-sponsored Web site, a book (\u201cDon\u2019t Mess With Texas: The Story Behind the Legend\u201d), a Twitter account , television advertisements, bumper stickers and trash cans, all of which, if you look carefully enough, are emblazoned with the tiny encircled \u201cR\u201d that signifies a registered trademark. \u201cThe phrase is known around the world, and it is important for everyone to recognize that \u2018Don\u2019t Mess With Texas\u00ae\u2019 means \u2018Don\u2019t litter,\u2019 \u201d Veronica Beyer, a Transportation Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. \u201cWhen an alleged infringement is discovered, the department quickly seeks the appropriate legal remedy, which is usually a cease-and-desist demand of the unauthorized use and all future uses thereof. In the majority of such cases, our request for the violator to cease and desist has been all the action required.\u201d One group should not worry about using the phrase, however. The state\u2019s politicians never tire of dropping it into speeches. As governor, George W. Bush used it in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, and the state\u2019s attorney general, Greg Abbott, recently used it when campaigning for governor. State and federal law allow for trademarked phrases to be used in political speech, said Megan M. Carpenter, the director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at the Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth. Gov. Rick Perry traveled to New York in June to try to lure businesses to Texas. A television ad tied to his trip that criticized New York as a high-tax, high-regulation state \u2014 paid for by the marketing group TexasOne , which also paid for the governor\u2019s trip \u2014 tweaked the trademarked \u201cI \u2665 NY\u201d logo to read \u201cNY \u2665 regulations.\u201d New York, so far, has let it slide.", "keyword": "Texas;Trademarks;Slogans and Mottoes;Rick Perry"}
{"id": "ny0246641", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2011/04/22", "title": "In Syria, Protesters and Government Mobilize for Friday", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon \u2014 Syria deployed police officers, soldiers and military vehicles in two of the country\u2019s three largest cities on Thursday ahead of a call for nationwide protests that will test the popular reception of reforms decreed by President Bashar al-Assad as well as the momentum that organizers have sought to bring to a five-week uprising. Residents described a mobilization in the capital, Damascus, and, in more pronounced fashion, in the restive city of Homs, where a government crackdown this week dispersed one of the largest gatherings since demonstrations began last month. For days, organizers have looked to Friday as a potential show of strength for a movement that has yet to build the critical mass reached in Egypt and Tunisia . \u201cTogether toward freedom,\u201d read a Facebook page that has served as a pulpit of the uprising, the words posed over symbols of Christianity and Islam. \u201cOne heart, one hand, one goal.\u201d The aim of both sides is the same: to prove they have the upper hand in the biggest challenge yet to the 40-year rule of the Assad family. While organizers were reluctant to call Friday a decisive moment, they acknowledged that it would signal their degree of support in a country that remained divided, with the government still claiming bastions of support among minorities, loyalists of the Baath Party and wealthier segments of the population. \u201cPeople are still hesitant,\u201d said Wissam Tarif, the executive director of Insan, a human rights group. But he added, \u201cIf it\u2019s not this Friday, it will be the coming Friday.\u201d Residents of Damascus said police officers were seen heading from a headquarters on the outskirts in Zabadani toward the capital, where military security officers had reportedly turned out in greater numbers. The security presence was more pronounced in Homs, residents said, as scores of military vehicles loaded with soldiers and equipment were seen on the highway from Damascus. Police officers in plain clothes had gathered at the New Clock Square, where thousands of protesters had tried to stage an Egyptian-style sit-in on Monday night. Cellphones were hard to reach, and some land lines had been cut. In Homs, an organizer, Abu Kamel al-Dimashki, said the city was \u201clike a ghost town and we are still mourning our martyrs, so everything is closed.\u201d He said, \u201cThings are a little scary.\u201d In a sign of the anxiety, some protesters were already predicting violence. \u201cWe know if we\u2019re asking for freedom, we will lose people,\u201d said Salem Abu al-Saud, a protester who fled Homs this week but has remained in contact with people there. \u201cAt least in Homs, people are more determined than ever to participate, without fear.\u201d The government has maintained that the uprising is led by militant Islamists, and organizers acknowledge that organized religious forces like the banned Muslim Brotherhood have forcefully taken part. The government has also accused foreign countries of supporting the protests. And, indeed, some of the largest have occurred in cities near Syria\u2019s borders: Dara\u2019a, a poor town in southwestern Syria near Jordan , and Homs, the country\u2019s third largest city and an industrial center near conservative northern Lebanon . But so far, the government has sought to hew to a policy of crackdown and compromise. On Thursday, Mr. Assad signed decrees that repealed harsh emergency rule, in place since 1963, abolished draconian security courts and granted citizens the right to protest peacefully, though they still need government permission to gather. The orders had already been handed down to his government on Tuesday, making his endorsement a formality; its timing seemed aimed in part at blunting Friday\u2019s protests. He also appointed a new governor in Homs. Two weeks ago, the previous governor, Mohammed Iyad Ghazzal, was dismissed. He had been in power since 2004 and was widely despised. \u201cHoms wasn\u2019t happy with the old governor, but a new one isn\u2019t the urgent issue,\u201d said a government employee who gave his name as Khalid. \u201cWe want to change the mentality of how the country is run, not change a governor or his administration.\u201d Sporadic protests erupted again Thursday, though their numbers were not as large as in past demonstrations, and they seemed confined to Kurdish areas. Organizers said about 300 people protested at a university in Hasakah, a city near the Turkish and Iraqi borders, and a larger demonstration occurred in Ayn al-Arab, east of Aleppo. Between 5,000 and 8,000 people marched there, though Mr. Tarif said it seemed more spontaneous than organized. He said the Kurdish leadership in the region had yet to endorse bigger turnouts, debating whether they could instead extract more concessions from a government that has already granted citizenship to as many as 300,000 stateless Kurds. The debate is a microcosm of a larger one taking place in Syria, where many fear the prospect of chaos or score-settling in the event of the government\u2019s collapse. Many activists said the reforms so far were too little and too late; in the words of Haitham Maleh, an oft-imprisoned activist and former judge, \u201cthe mentality of the regime has to change.\u201d But some worry about the combustibility of a society that is shadowed by sectarian resentments fostered by the government. And many identify that government almost entirely with the Alawite minority, a heterodox Muslim sect that accounts for 10 percent of Syria\u2019s population. \u201cLet\u2019s be realistic, let\u2019s not destroy the country,\u201d said Camille Otrakji, a Damascus-born political blogger in Montreal . \u201cWhy do you think there aren\u2019t millions in the street demonstrating against Bashar? It\u2019s not because they\u2019re afraid of the security forces. It\u2019s because they\u2019re afraid of what would replace Assad.\u201d", "keyword": "Arab Spring;null"}
{"id": "ny0205587", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2009/01/30", "title": "Financial Crisis Dims Hopes for Giant Cross-Border Banks in Europe", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 Only a few years ago, the future of European banking was said to belong to European champions, big border-straddling banks that would compete with the American giants. Instead, European integration has been replaced by Balkanization. Because of the financial crisis, banks are retrenching and refocusing on their home markets, all but abandoning ambitions of banking on a Continental scale \u2014 or bigger. Strings-attached government rescue plans and basic business logic are driving the change. So instead of strategies for global conquest, Martin Blessing, the chief executive of Commerzbank, is concentrating on ways to keep credit flowing to the small and medium-size businesses that form the backbone of the German economy. \u201cWe will see a domestic refocusing of banking but not because everyone is turning nationalist or because one or the other governments take stakes,\u201d he said during a recent interview at his office in the bank\u2019s stunning Norman Foster-designed office tower here. \u201cBanks are going to look at where their franchise is strongest.\u201d These new realities could end up hurting Eastern Europe most. After communism, privatization led to an extended gold rush for Western bankers. Now those investors are having to decide whether to continue lending at home \u2014 in France or Austria \u2014 or in Poland, the Czech Republic or Hungary. In the global financial crisis, with the health of many banks dependent on the good will of their home governments, the choice is not hard. The thinking at the heart of cross-border expansion in Europe was always straightforward: Europe needed banks that could achieve economies of scale and have the global reach, global clients and global influence to compete with American titans. Operating on that basis, a handful of European banks moved to grow and consolidate. In 2004, Banco Santander of Spain bought Abbey National of Britain. A year later, Italy\u2019s UniCredit swallowed the bank HVB Group of Germany. In early 2007, Royal Bank of Scotland led a consortium that snapped up ABN Amro of the Netherlands for 70 billion euros, or $92 billion at current exchange rates. That deal is already coming undone, with the implosion last year of Fortis, one of Royal Bank\u2019s partners. More broadly, nationalist impulses are on the move across the Continent, with many politicians arguing \u2014 as some Democrats are in the United States \u2014 that if the government is going to bail out banks, then taxpayers should get some ownership and some say in how they operate. For example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has said he wants to stay out of the operating side of the banks Britain has bailed out. But his government is under heavy pressure to help small businesses at home, and the documents that created the new British vehicle for investing in banks, United Kingdom Financial Investments, cite domestic lending as its priority. French and German governments have also injected cash into their banks, both with the goal of keeping money flowing to businesses inside their borders. Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, called the developments the Balkanization of European finance. \u201cWhenever governments get into the share capital of banks, even in a small way, of course they think nationally,\u201d Mr. Gros said. For instance, few banks expanded more rapidly in Germany over the last decade than Royal Bank of Scotland. The British financier muscled onto Continental turf with attractive financing packages for German manufacturers. Today, Royal Bank is majority-owned by the British government after losses in 2008 from \u00a37 billion to \u00a38 billion, or $9.2 billion to $10.5 billion. According to two senior German executives, Royal Bank is now playing tough with German clients, calling in loans as the bank retrenches in favor of its British business. The executives, who asked not to be identified, because they were not authorized to publicly discuss confidential negotiations, said Royal Bank had demanded that its clients on the Continent sell assets, despite the catastrophic state of financial markets, so the bank could recover its cash quickly, perhaps to lend in Britain. Most recently, Royal Bank was a major creditor of Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who killed himself when it became clear the banks \u2014 with Royal Bank in the lead, the executives said \u2014 would insist on the sale of his prized possession, the generic drug maker Ratiopharm. Christine Kortyka, a Royal Bank spokeswoman in Germany, denied the bank was retrenching. \u201cWe are an international bank with international clients and we will continue to serve them where they need us,\u201d she said. Mr. Blessing, who took over at Commerzbank just in time to sell a 25 percent stake to the German government to stabilize its finances and complete a major acquisition, does not dispute that governments are angling for national advantage. Commerzbank styles itself the bank of Germany\u2019s Mittelstand, as this country\u2019s small and midsize companies are known. Mr. Blessing says he is comfortable with focusing on serving the Mittelstand, because that has always been the bank\u2019s core mission. . As part of the deal for a cash infusion, the German government received the right to veto major decisions by the bank. That means it can ward off any acquisition from abroad \u2014 or any effort at a European expansion.", "keyword": "Europe;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Banks and Banking"}
{"id": "ny0046446", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/11/03", "title": "Montana Judicial Race Joins Big-Money Fray", "abstract": "HELENA, Mont. \u2014 In a coffee shop on Last Chance Gulch, a woman approached Mike Wheat to say she was planning to knock on doors for him. \u201cIt\u2019s getting pretty brutal out there,\u201d she said. Mr. Wheat, a State Supreme Court justice running in the most expensive judicial race on record in Montana, nodded. In a parade of menacing television ads paid for by conservative groups, he has been attacked for \u201ca history of supporting extreme partisan measures\u201d (voting to raise fees on hunting licenses), and for allowing convicted criminals to use legal \u201cloopholes\u201d to go free. On the other side, unions and trial lawyers have accused his opponent, Lawrence VanDyke, of being \u201cin the pocket\u201d of out-of-state \u201cspecial interests.\u201d When Justice Wheat, 66, decided to run for another eight-year term on the court, he said, \u201cI never really anticipated that I would end up with a race like this. I never thought it would turn into this gigantic money battle.\u201d But judicial races have been evolving into another political battleground for big money. A last-minute surge of spending brought the total spent on television commercials to $12.1 million in 10 states, according to two groups that track judicial campaign spending. This election cycle, the spending race has been fueled by the Republican State Leadership Committee , which pledged to spend $5 million on a \u201cjudicial fairness initiative,\u201d and contributed $400,000 in North Carolina last week. In the one election that has already taken place, in August, conservative efforts were unsuccessful. Despite spending more than $500,000 to unseat three justices, Tennessee voters retained them. Image Lawrence VanDyke, center, and his wife, Cheryl, on Saturday at the University of Montana in Missoula. Credit Lauren Grabelle for The New York Times In Montana, independent conservative groups have spent about $640,000 \u2014 $469,000 by a political action committee financed by the Republican State Leadership Committee and $170,000 by Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group backed by the brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch, according to figures provided by the Brennan Center for Justice in New York and Americans for Prosperity . In response, a political action committee financed largely by Montana trial lawyers and unions has spent $475,000. The money dwarfs what the candidates have raised under Montana\u2019s strict individual contribution limit of $320: $132,000 for Mr. VanDyke and $143,000 for Justice Wheat, according to the most recent campaign filings. \u201cIt\u2019s becoming one more log on the fire of the growth in big-money pressure politics,\u201d said Bert Brandenburg, the executive director of Justice at Stake , which advocates judicial election reform. \u201cWhat\u2019s different is, of course, we want judges to be different. We pay legislators to make a promise and keep a promise; we pay judges to decide a case one at a time and ignore outside pressure. If money affects a legislator\u2019s vote, it stinks. If money affects a judge\u2019s decision, you\u2019ve just violated the Constitution.\u201d Justice Wheat, a trial lawyer, grew up in Montana, served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam and began practicing law in 1978. He was elected to the State Legislature as a Democrat and ran unsuccessfully for attorney general before being appointed to the Supreme Court, the state\u2019s highest court, in 2010 by a Democratic governor. The next election he was subjected, as all appointed justices are, to a retention vote, and won. He has participated in hundreds of cases , voting to require a wealthy landowner to allow access to a public waterways and to allow same-sex couples to receive benefits, and dissenting from the court when it allowed new gas wells to be drilled \u2014 because, he said, the required environmental impact studies had not been conducted. In criminal cases, he has sided with both the accused and the prosecution. He is friendly to plaintiffs and trial lawyers, voting to allow a bat manufacturer to be held liable for the death of a teenager hit in the head by a baseball, and dissenting in a case in which the court denied a $1.2 million fee arrangement for lawyers. Nonetheless, he has been endorsed by former justices and Republican officeholders, who say they resent out-of-state interference and what they view as an injection of partisanship. \u201cTo take a little sliver of my record and bend it to a political message that they\u2019re trying to get across, it\u2019s wrong, it\u2019s disingenuous and it\u2019s misleading to the voters,\u201d Justice Wheat said. His challenger, Mr. VanDyke, 41, grew up in Montana and worked for his father\u2019s construction company, earning an engineering degree before winning a scholarship to Harvard Law School. As an editor on the Law Review, he defended a book that argued that it was constitutional to teach intelligent design in public school. After graduating, he worked in Washington and Dallas for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the large corporate law firm that has given rise to prominent conservatives like Kenneth Starr. He came back to Montana when Tim Fox, a Republican, was elected attorney general in 2012 and appointed Mr. VanDyke to the post of solicitor general. There, Mr. VanDyke placed a special emphasis on writing amicus briefs supporting gun rights and anti-abortion laws. In one brief he wrote with Mr. Fox, they argued that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision preserving a woman\u2019s right to an abortion, should be reconsidered in the light of \u201crecent, compelling evidence of fetal pain.\u201d But he quit in May after conflicts with colleagues. Asked about critics who say he has tried to hide the extent of his conservatism from voters, he said, \u201cI am running on the platform that I am going to follow the law regardless of my personal preferences.\u201d Image Mike Wheat, left, with Llevando Fisher on Friday in Lame Deer. Credit Kristina Barker for The New York Times Corporate interests, who say they are trying to preserve jobs and create growth, and trial lawyers, who say they represent the voiceless against the wealthy and powerful, have long gone head to head in judicial elections. As in any arms race, both sides say they are just trying to defend against the other. \u201cRight-of-center interests have been long outspent by left-of-center interests on judicial races,\u201d said Matt Walter, the executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee. \u201cSo we feel like we\u2019ve provided some measure of balance for voters to make an educated choice.\u201d Alicia Bannon, a lawyer at the Brennan Center, said there have been some races where business groups have been vastly outspent. But \u201cnationally,\u201d she continued, \u201cconservatives have been the bigger spenders.\u201d According to her analysis: \u201cAmong the top 10 spenders on Supreme Court races from 2000 to 2009, 69 percent of spending came from business interests and conservative groups. In 2009 to 2010, the figure was 70 percent. In 2011-12, things were more evenly divided: Among the top 10 spenders in 2011-12, 52 percent of spending came from business interests and conservative groups.\u201d Mr. VanDyke said courts in Montana had long been controlled by trial lawyers who funded election campaigns in a \u201cpay-to-play\u201d scheme, pointing to a 2004 race in which the Montana Trial Lawyers Association contributed $326,000 to retain a justice, James C. Nelson. \u201cThere is no way that I could have a chance against the trial lawyer money machine without independent expenditures coming in and helping me,\u201d Mr. VanDyke said. Al Smith, the executive director of the trial lawyers group, said lawyers were trying to ensure that candidates were credible and had experience with Montana law. In 2004, he said, the challenger was inexperienced and the group anticipated a large amount of spending from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that never materialized. \u201cIn 2006, 2008, \u201910, \u201912, we didn\u2019t spend anything \u2014 nothing, zero,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea that we\u2019ve been spending all this money for decades is absolutely false.\u201d", "keyword": "2014 Midterm Elections;Campaign finance;Montana;Mike Wheat;Lawrence VanDyke;Judicial Elections;State supreme court"}
{"id": "ny0031585", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/06/15", "title": "Airbus Unveils Jet and Broadens Rivalry With Boeing", "abstract": "TOULOUSE, France \u2014 The A350 XWB, the first all-new commercial jet from Airbus in more than six years, took wing into partly cloudy skies here on Friday. There was a lot more riding on it than the multinational crew of two test pilots and four engineers. The new aircraft carries the burden of dispelling Airbus\u2019s reputation for cross-cultural and industrial dysfunction, which caused costly delays in the introduction of the company\u2019s previous plane, the A380 superjumbo. And in the wake of last year\u2019s failed merger of the plane maker\u2019s parent, European Aeronautic Defense and Space, and the British military contractor BAE Systems, Airbus is betting its future more heavily on the success of commercial jets like the A350. It is no coincidence that Airbus showed off the A350 \u2014 a twin-engine wide-body jet meant to compete with Boeing\u2019s 787 Dreamliner and 777 \u2014 as the global aviation industry assembled for the biennial Paris Air Show, scheduled to open Monday at Le Bourget Airport north of the French capital. As always at the show, which is the world\u2019s largest aerospace bazaar, any announcements by other industry players will be undercard matches compared with the main event of Airbus vs. Boeing. While both aircraft makers are going into the show with order books for commercial airliners fat enough to keep their assembly lines humming for much of the next decade, military budgets are shrinking in the United States and Europe, the two biggest spenders on military planes. Few, if any, major announcements for military orders are expected at the show, and belt-tightening at the Pentagon means that the turnout of American military contractors will be among the lowest in recent memory. Northrop Grumman, for example, will be absent, and the delegations from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing\u2019s defense and security division, among others, will be much smaller than in years past. And this year\u2019s show may be relatively subdued in terms of new commercial jet order announcements as well, given the uncertain near-term outlook for airline profits and economic growth, particularly in emerging markets. But on Friday the spotlight was on Toulouse-Blagnac Airport, about a 90-minute flight south of Paris, where, precisely at 10 a.m., the A350 lifted effortlessly from the sun-dappled runway. The purr of the plane\u2019s two Rolls-Royce engines was momentarily drowned out by the cheers and whistles of a throng of Airbus employees, well-wishers and members of the news media who had gathered \u2014 camera phones at the ready \u2014 to capture the moment. Image Fabrice Br\u00e9gier, chief executive of Airbus, with the test flight\u2019s crew. The A350 is the company\u2019s first new jetliner in more than six years. Credit Bob Edme/Associated Press The distinctive curled tips of the carbon-fiber wings glinted briefly before the jet slipped into the clouds. Judith Lindner, a 36-year-old quality control technician from an Airbus factory in Stade, Germany, whooped as the jet sailed past, jabbing her thumb in the air. \u201cWhat a tremendous thrill \u2014 fantastic,\u201d Ms. Lindner said, adding that she had helped inspect the vertical stabilizer on the plane\u2019s tail. \u201cI feel such a mix of pride and relief.\u201d Analysts said the value of a well-timed and well-executed A350 debut could not be overestimated. Some said they still expected Airbus to try to maintain the public relations momentum by staging an A350 flyby sometime during the weeklong show in Paris. It would be hard for Airbus to find a bigger stage. Show organizers said they expected the chalets and exhibition halls of the air show to be filled with more than 2,200 companies from more than 40 countries. As many as 350,000 visitors from the aerospace industry, as well as the public, are expected over the course of the week. Even Boeing executives acknowledged that the timing of the A350 flight was likely to steal much of the American company\u2019s thunder at the event. \u201cI know they work hard to keep the home fans entertained,\u201d Randy Tinseth, Boeing\u2019s head of marketing, said at a briefing on Tuesday in Paris. Not so long ago, Airbus\u2019s prospects did not look nearly as bright. It was struggling to roll out its last big-bet plane: the twin-deck A380. Miscommunication in the design, manufacturing and installation of electrical cables resulted in a series of missteps in the mid-2000s that delayed the A380\u2019s first delivery by three years. The debacle prompted a management reshuffle in 2006 and more than $6 billion in losses. Airbus executives say they are determined not to repeat the experience. For the new A350, the company has changed its internal design systems and decision-making, even involving major suppliers in the process from the start. While in the past Airbus engineers in France and Germany operated independently, in some cases using incompatible tools and software, they now collaborate on shared digital blueprints. So far, analysts said, Airbus has managed to keep the A350\u2019s development hiccups to a relative minimum. Friday\u2019s flight took place about a year later than the company had envisioned when it began marketing the plane in 2007 \u2014 not all that significant a delay in aerospace terms. Image Airbus showed off its A350, a jet intended to compete with Boeing\u2019s Dreamliner, just days before the opening of the Paris Air Show. Credit Eric Cabanis/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Airbus, of course, is not the only jet maker that has had trouble with new products. Boeing rolled out its 787 Dreamliner three years late, and early this year was forced to ground the plane for three months after its lightweight but volatile lithium-ion batteries proved prone to overheating. \u201cThis is quickly coming down to a battle of credibility\u201d between Airbus and Boeing, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va. \u201cSignaling that you are a reliable provider sends a great message.\u201d That is especially crucial because orders for commercial jets have slowed after several years of record purchases. This month, the International Air Transport Association, a trade group based in Geneva and Montreal, predicted that its 240 member airlines would report a combined profit of $12.7 billion in 2013, up from $7.6 billion last year. But those expected gains are largely the result of falling fuel prices and efforts to pack more customers onto fewer planes, rather than a jump in travel demand. While new jet sales may be slowing, there is still a big backlog of plane orders. Both Boeing and Airbus, as well as smaller jet makers like Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil, have been steadily increasing output. That has increased short-term demand for components, posing a quandary for parts suppliers. Many are reluctant to invest too heavily in new production capacity for fear that they will later be saddled with redundant plants and equipment \u2014 and debt. \u201cI hear concerns everywhere in commercial markets about the reliability and resilience of the supply chain when they are increasing production everywhere,\u201d said Damien Lasou, a managing director and aerospace analyst at Accenture in Paris. \u201cIt is a big distraction to management, particularly in terms of capital investment.\u201d In recent years, the battle for commercial jet sales has focused on shorter-range, single-aisle models like the Airbus A320 and the Boeing 737, particularly after the two companies introduced new versions of those planes with more fuel-efficient engines. But airlines have also begun to show renewed interest in the latest wide-body jets, which can offer significantly greater range and more seats than previous models \u2014 promising bigger profit margins on long-distance routes. Several flag carriers, including Ethiopian Airlines, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa of Germany and Malaysia Airlines, say they are considering multibillion-dollar orders for the larger jets, including the A350 and the 787. Despite the battery hazards that were revealed on the 787 this year, airlines remain keenly interested in the plane, which is built extensively from lightweight composite materials. \u201cThe shelf life of new jetliner controversy is slightly less than fresh oysters,\u201d Mr. Aboulafia of Teal Group said of the Boeing 787\u2019s troubles. \u201cIt goes away incredibly fast.\u201d", "keyword": "Airbus;Airlines,airplanes;Paris Air Show;Air Shows,Air Racing;Boeing"}
{"id": "ny0020267", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/07/13", "title": "Ohio: More Charges in Abductions", "abstract": "The man accused of holding three women captive in his Cleveland home for a decade was charged Friday with hundreds of added counts. The 977-count indictment against Ariel Castro, 53, includes charges of rape and kidnapping and two counts of aggravated murder on accusations that he starved and punched one of the women while she was pregnant until she miscarried. It covers the period from August 2002, when the first victim disappeared, to May, when the women were rescued. The first indictment covered August 2002 to February 2007.", "keyword": "Ohio;Ariel Castro;Kidnapping;Rape;Murders;Cleveland"}
{"id": "ny0054737", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/07/23", "title": "New York City Police Study Use of Force; May Issue More Tasers", "abstract": "Days after the death of a man who was subdued by police officers on Staten Island, the Police Department is undertaking a sweeping review of its training and tactics, Commissioner William J. Bratton said on Tuesday. A senior police official said one change under discussion was the expanded use of Taser stun guns , which are available to a small number of New York officers but have been controversial here and elsewhere because of the risk they can pose to people with heart problems and other medical issues. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said stun guns could be a way to provide officers with more options for subduing people who were resisting arrest and avoiding the close contact that can lead to serious, even fatal, injuries to officers and suspects. Speaking to reporters at Police Headquarters, Mr. Bratton said the goal of the review was \u201cto develop state-of-the-art use-of-force policies.\u201d The remarks came as he addressed investigations into the death of the man on Staten Island, Eric Garner, 43. Mr. Garner died on Thursday after officers who had been trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes forced him to the ground. In a widely viewed video of the encounter, one of the officers appeared to use a chokehold \u2014 banned by the Police Department \u2014 to subdue Mr. Garner, who was heard repeatedly saying, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe.\u201d Other video taken later appears to show Mr. Garner unconscious and unresponsive to police officers and emergency medical workers. The medical examiner\u2019s office is conducting an autopsy to determine what caused the death of Mr. Garner, who weighed 350 pounds and had health problems including asthma. Pathologists will seek to determine whether the chokehold contributed to his death. The Staten Island district attorney\u2019s office is investigating Mr. Garner\u2019s death, and the Police Department\u2019s Internal Affairs Bureau is examining the conduct of the officers. The officer who appeared to use a chokehold has been stripped of his badge and gun, and an officer who helped hold down Mr. Garner has been placed on desk duty. Image William J. Bratton Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times At the news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Bratton said he had met with F.B.I. officials in New York \u201cto discuss their monitoring of this matter.\u201d Mr. Bratton added that he expected the episode would ultimately be reviewed by federal prosecutors. Mr. Bratton said that next week he would visit the Police Academy to see the presentations that officers receive on how to \u201ctake people down\u201d and \u201ctake them into custody.\u201d During his remarks, Mr. Bratton did not mention Tasers, and it was not clear whether internal discussions about expanding the use of Tasers predated the episode on Staten Island or were in response to it. \u201cThere have been conversations, but nothing definitive,\u201d said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal policy debates. The Police Department has been warier of Tasers than have many departments elsewhere. Stun guns have a scandal-tainted history in New York. In the 1980s, an early-model stun gun was used to force drug suspects to confess. Emergency Service Unit officers, who are highly trained and handle many of the department\u2019s emergency calls regarding emotionally disturbed people, began carrying Tasers shortly after the 1984 death of Eleanor Bumpurs, a disturbed woman who was shot to death by the police after she threatened officers with a knife. As the use of stun guns grew around the country, the Police Department modestly expanded their use. In 2008, the department instructed some sergeants to wear Tasers on their gun belts instead of storing them in the trunks of police cruisers, as had been the practice. The move stemmed in part from a study the department commissioned in 2007 after an unarmed Queens man, Sean Bell, was shot dead by officers. Among the recommendations in the study, conducted by the RAND Corporation, was that the Police Department consider making Tasers more widely available to officers. But months after the police began to expand the use of Tasers, an emotionally disturbed man in Brooklyn fell to his death after the police shot him with a Taser. In that September 2008 episode, the man, Iman Morales, had engaged in a 30-minute standoff with the police, waving a fluorescent light bulb from a building ledge. A lieutenant on the scene ordered another officer with the Emergency Service Unit to fire a Taser at Mr. Morales, who fell headfirst to the sidewalk. Within days, the lieutenant, Michael W. Pigott, killed himself .", "keyword": "NYPD;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;William J Bratton;Stun Guns;Eric Garner;Staten Island;Fatalities,casualties"}
{"id": "ny0295652", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/12/19", "title": "Chinese, Spending Freely, Become Ever-Larger Tourism Force in New York", "abstract": "New York City\u2019s tourism officials have solved the riddle of how to attract the Chinese. The challenge now may lie in impressing them once they arrive. Chinese tourists, who have been flocking to New York in rising numbers for a decade, accounted for nearly one million of the record 60.3 million visitors to the city in 2016, city officials said. But some, like Li Chen, a retired bureaucrat from Beijing, are far from awed by the scale of America\u2019s biggest city. Mr. Chen said he and the five friends he was sightseeing with on Friday expected New York to have taller buildings and wider streets. They were also disappointed that they could not get a look inside the New York Stock Exchange. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to just see the door,\u201d Mr. Chen said through an interpreter while sipping hot tea on a cruise of New York Harbor operated by Hornblower New York . \u201cClosing the door is like closing the door to prosperity.\u201d Hornblower bills the tour as international, but the narration piped through the speakers is only in English and Mandarin. Visitors from China are easily the largest group of foreign tourists on Hornblower\u2019s tours, said Zichao Xie, the company\u2019s international sightseeing manager. Ms. Xie said the company carried about 300,000 Chinese passengers this year, accounting for about one-quarter of its revenue. The Chinese surpassed Brazilians and Canadians in the ranks of tourists to the city this year and will overtake the British by 2022, said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company , the city\u2019s tourism marketer. He said the city had more than 950,000 visitors from China this year, a sevenfold increase since 2007. Back then, more than 15 countries, including Switzerland and Israel, sent more tourists to New York than China did, according to NYC & Company\u2019s statistics. In 2016, only visitors from Britain outnumbered the Chinese \u2014 and their total of about 1.2 million has not grown since 2007. The Chinese still travel mostly in groups, moving around on chartered buses and often staying in hotels outside the city , Ms. Xie said. But Mr. Dixon said his organization had begun to focus on attracting more Chinese tourists traveling on their own or in small groups like Mr. Chen\u2019s. Those men flew from Shanghai with a larger group but broke off from it and were staying in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. They planned to go uptown to shop on Fifth Avenue, then head on Saturday to the Woodbury Common outlet mall , one of the most popular excursions for Chinese tourists, about 50 miles north of the city. Image Tourists on a cruise of New York Harbor on Friday. Their numbers in the city surpassed those of Brazilians and Canadians this year. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times \u201cThat individual travel market is the biggest opportunity,\u201d Mr. Dixon said. \u201cThat\u2019s the future of the Chinese market.\u201d Emily Rafferty, chairwoman of NYC & Company, said she had recently attended a conference in Shenzhen, China, and met a group of local university students. \u201cThey were all wanting to come over to America,\u201d Ms. Rafferty said. \u201cThe number of people under the age of 35 there is huge.\u201d At the Museum of Chinese in America , on Centre Street in Manhattan, the boom in Chinese tourism has not really paid off yet. The president of the museum, Nancy Yao Maasbach, said the tourists tended to stick to the best-known destinations. \u201cOur strategy has actually been that the more popular we become in the U.S., the more popular we will become to Chinese tourists,\u201d Ms. Maasbach said. Mr. Dixon said the Chinese were still spending freely, while visitors from Europe were cutting back as the dollar strengthened and reduced the buying power of the euro and other currencies. He said NYC & Company had begun emphasizing value and bargains in some of its advertising to the British and other Europeans, including a campaign this winter called \u201c See It for Yourself ,\u201d in partnership with British Airways. Those audiences might be easier to impress, judging by the reactions of Tony Neville and James Hopkinson, two first-time visitors from Yorkshire, England, who fit in some sightseeing on Friday after completing a work project. Mr. Neville, 36, said New York was bigger than he had imagined. \u201cThis just blows London out of the water, to me,\u201d he said. Mr. Hopkinson said they had been surprised by how friendly, well mannered and courteous the local people they encountered had been. They even liked the American beers they had found, he said, sipping from a can of Brooklyn Lager. Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor responsible for economic development, said Mayor Bill de Blasio\u2019s administration wanted to diversify the city\u2019s tourist base so that it could weather economic downturns in Europe. Toward that end, the city increased its contribution to NYC & Company\u2019s budget this year by $3.5 million, to about $21 million, she said. Promoting tourism is an investment aimed at attracting visitors to spend money and at creating jobs, especially for less-skilled workers, Ms. Glen said. She said she tried to help out last week when she was on a plane full of Chileans flying to New York from South America. Ms. Glen said that the Chileans had been excited to visit the new Whitney Museum of American Art and to walk on the High Line in Manhattan, but that she had tried to persuade them to try the Brooklyn Museum, too. \u201cThey used to go to Miami all the time,\u201d she said of Chileans. \u201cBut Miami is so over.\u201d", "keyword": "NYC;Travel,Tourism;China;Bill de Blasio;Museum of Chinese in America"}
{"id": "ny0035210", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/03/04", "title": "Fox Sees Chemistry in New Baseball Booth", "abstract": "A game with three announcers in a booth can be overly wordy. It can be filled with smart opinions from two analysts who come from sharply divergent backgrounds. Or it can sound out of balance if one analyst dominates the airspace. Fox Sports will learn this season which description fits its new lead baseball announcing team of Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci. Reynolds and Verducci are replacing Tim McCarver, who spent 18 seasons working with Buck and left after the 2013 season. \u201cWe didn\u2019t take this decision lightly,\u201d John Entz, the executive producer of Fox Sports, said Monday in a conference call with reporters. \u201cWhen you have someone taking the mantle from Tim McCarver, we felt an extreme level of pressure.\u201d Entz said he felt strongly enough about Reynolds and Verducci\u2019s potential that he brought them to St. Louis last summer to rehearse a game with Buck, off the air, at Busch Stadium. \u201cWithin five minutes, I knew this would be the combination, if my opinion had anything to do with it,\u201d Buck said. Verducci said, \u201cI came away in the first minute and thought it was fun.\u201d He also sensed a rhythm in which he, Reynolds and Buck gave one another room to speak, rather than stepping on one another\u2019s words. The three subsequently got together once more to rehearse with a taped game on a television monitor. Reynolds and Verducci have worked together at the MLB Network for a few years and generated a personal chemistry that Entz said he believed would transfer to games. Verducci is a less traditional choice for a game analyst than Reynolds, a former second baseman for the Seattle Mariners. Verducci never played for a Major League Baseball team but has written about the sport for more than 30 years, most recently as a senior staff writer for Sports Illustrated. And he has called some games in recent years for MLB Network and Fox. The Buck-Reynolds-Verducci team will not be together every week of the season, which is the first under a new contract for Fox in which fewer games will be carried on the Fox broadcast network and many will be carried, for the first time, on Fox Sports 1. At the least, the new team will call eight prime-time games on the Fox broadcast network between May 24 and July 12, along with the All-Star Game and the postseason. Buck seemed to toll a small warning bell on the reception his new partners might receive, based on criticism that he and McCarver endured. \u201cI don\u2019t think there is any more criticized or picked-apart role in major television sports than doing a World Series on network television,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Baseball;TV;Fox Sports;Joe Buck;Tom Verducci;Harold Reynolds;Tim McCarver"}
{"id": "ny0234826", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2010/01/17", "title": "6 Major Powers Move Closer to Considering More Iran Sanctions", "abstract": "UNITED NATIONS \u2014 Six major powers agreed Saturday that the Iranian response to proposals to altering its nuclear development program had been inadequate and that it warranted consideration of further measures by the United Nations Security Council . China , however, which sent a low-level diplomat to the meeting, maintained its position that it opposed new sanctions now. The five permanent members of the Security Council \u2014 the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France \u2014 along with Germany have been pursuing a \u201cdual track\u201d policy under which they would seek a negotiated settlement, but if that effort stalled, further sanctions would be imposed. \u201cWe talked mostly about the second track, but it doesn\u2019t mean we should abandon the first one,\u201d said Sergei Ryabkov, Russia\u2019s representative. \u201cIt is inconclusive in the sense that we didn\u2019t make any decisions right away.\u201d Western officials tried to cast a positive light on the meeting by suggesting that all six were at least moving in the same direction, even if it was unclear that China remained committed to the idea of a second track. \u201cThe credible threat of further pressure does create some leverage over the Iranian system,\u201d said one Western diplomat engaged in the talks. The senior diplomats agreed to consult again by telephone before the end of the month on the next step. Most countries were represented on the level of senior diplomats, the \u201cpolitical directors\u201d of their foreign ministries, but China virtually snubbed the gathering by dispatching a counselor from its United Nations mission. He Yafei, the former vice minister of foreign affairs, has now been appointed the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and it is unclear who will eventually replace him in the talks. The meeting Saturday was held in the New York offices of the European Union, whose representative said that there was at least \u201cconsensus\u201d among the six nations to focus on the next step. \u201cWe will continue to seek a negotiated solution, but consideration of appropriate further measures has also begun,\u201d said Robert Cooper, a senior European Union official. Both China and Russia voted in the Security Council for three previous rounds of sanctions, but only China has been outspoken in its recent opposition. Russia was upset that its offer to further enrich Iranian uranium at its facilities was rebuffed and that the Iranians did not seem serious about entering negotiations. The Obama administration has also been dismayed that Iran has been dismissive of a yearlong effort to engage it. Iran maintains that its desire to enrich uranium is only for peaceful civilian purposes, but Western powers accuse it of using that as a smokescreen to develop nuclear weapons . There is a sense of urgency about the matter, as there are concerns that Iran will develop the capacity to enrich uranium at the levels required for weapons, while negotiations drag on. In addition, the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is due for a review conference in May, and the Western powers want any new sanctions against Iran to be in place so as not to complicate any talks over the future of the treaty.", "keyword": "Iran;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions;United Nations;Security Council (UN);China;Nuclear Weapons"}
{"id": "ny0181407", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/06/26", "title": "Hartford: Bridge Inspections to Be Cut Back", "abstract": "The State Transportation Department plans to scale back inspections of most Connecticut bridges in an effort to save money. Judd Everhart, a department spokesman, said that the department planned to inspect bridges in fair condition or better every four years instead of every two, The Hartford Courant reported. That means the inspections will occur half as often as the federal government recommends.", "keyword": "Hartford (Conn);Transportation Department"}
{"id": "ny0204817", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/01/29", "title": "Blagojevich to End Boycott of His Own Trial", "abstract": "SPRINGFIELD, Ill. \u2014 After boycotting his impeachment trial for three days, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich announced Wednesday that he wanted to address the State Senate on Thursday before legislators begin deliberations on whether to remove him from office. \u201cHe wants to make a closing argument,\u201d said Lucio Guerrero, the governor\u2019s spokesman. Mr. Guerrero said he was uncertain when or precisely why Mr. Blagojevich had chosen now to attend the trial, which he has repeatedly denounced as unfair and fixed. The governor will not give sworn testimony or be subject to cross-examination by prosecutors or legislators. Rather, he will address the Senate only to respond to the prosecution\u2019s closing argument. Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s announcement, which came about an hour before the prosecution rested its case, brought negative reactions from lawmakers. Many had previously lamented the governor\u2019s absence from the proceedings and had repeatedly requested he testify. \u201cIt\u2019s somewhat cowardly that he won\u2019t take questions,\u201d said Senator Dan Cronin, a Republican. \u201cIf he had something to say, he should have come down here like a man and faced the music.\u201d Since he will not be giving testimony, senators said his appearance would not be included as evidence in their deliberations. \u201cAll the testimony was heard, so the things that we will consider, all that has taken place,\u201d said Senator James F. Clayborne Jr., a Democrat. \u201cI\u2019m waiting to hear the closing argument tomorrow.\u201d During a publicity tour this week, Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who was arrested Dec. 9 on federal corruption charges, repeatedly professed his innocence, complaining bitterly that many of the damning statements attributed to him had been taken out of context and saying the impeachment trial was unfair. Senators here have denounced the publicity campaign. Earlier in the day, the Senate president, John Cullerton, a Democrat, challenged Mr. Blagojevich to appear. \u201cIf he wants to come down here, instead of hiding out in New York and having Larry King asking questions instead of the senators \u2014 I think he\u2019s making a mistake.\u201d Still, Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s charges seemed to rattle some senators, who worried the trial might appear politically motivated after the prosecution announced that it wanted to avoid redundant testimony and would call only 6 of its 13 scheduled witnesses. \u201cIf you eliminate half the witnesses and you speed up the process, does that send the wrong signal?\u201d asked Senator Dave Syverson, a Republican. \u201cEverything is being done very much above board, in fact, we\u2019re going overboard to make sure everything is done fair. It\u2019s just the perception.\u201d Other senators said that even if the additional testimony was redundant, they would rather hear it out of an abundance of caution. \u201cI don\u2019t know who has a cruise or vacation to go to, but we ought to take our time,\u201d Senator Kirk Dillard, a Republican, told a crush of reporters in an early morning break from the trial. \u201cI\u2019ll sit here on Super Bowl Sunday if I have to.\u201d Amid the tumult of the proceedings on Wednesday, prosecutors painstakingly presented their final witness, William Holland, the state\u2019s auditor general. He testified that starting in 2004 the Blagojevich administration endeavored to buy roughly 773,000 doses of a European flu vaccine that the Food and Drug Administration had prohibited. \u201cThe drugs were never going to come in to the U.S. because they\u2019d been prohibited by the F.D.A.,\u201d Mr. Holland said under questioning. \u201cThe vaccines were shipped to Pakistan, where the last we heard they were destroyed.\u201d With the prosecution at rest, senators have only to hear closing arguments before casting votes on two issues. The first will be whether to remove the governor from office. The second will be to determine whether Mr. Blagojevich should be barred from holding office in the future. While many senators said they were still waiting to hear the closing arguments before making their final decision, it seemed unlikely that Mr. Blagojevich, who is scheduled to speak for 90 minutes after arriving here on Thursday morning by plane, would be able to sway many to his side. \u201cThis is typical of his style, the grand slam, the P.R. flourish,\u201d said Senator Christine Radogno, the Republican minority leader. \u201cIt\u2019s too bad he wasn\u2019t here earlier in the week, I wish he had been.\u201d She added, \u201cI hope he has a ride home.\u201d", "keyword": "Blagojevich Rod R;Illinois;Impeachment;Governors (US);Wiretapping and Other Eavesdropping Devices and Methods"}
{"id": "ny0150849", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/08/20", "title": "A Small Empire Built on Cuddly and Fuzzy Branches Out From the Web", "abstract": "CALENDARS and coffee table books filled with pictures of cute, cuddly kitties and sad-eyed puppies have been around for decades. So what explains the success of Cute Overload, a new page-a-day desk calendar that recently shot to the top of its category on Amazon.com and, more remarkably, to the upper ranks of the site\u2019s overall best-sellers list? Stranger still, the birth of Cute Overload was almost purely accidental. Meg Frost, a 36-year-old design manager at Apple, started cuteoverload.com three years ago to test Web software. Within months, it became an online institution, drawing about 88,000 unique visitors a day \u2014 about the same as the political gossip blog Wonkette. BoingBoing linked to Cute Overload, saying that viewing the site \u201cis like taking a happy pill.\u201d And in that warm feeling lies the reason for its popularity. Given all the nastiness on the Internet \u2014 blog trolls, flame wars, vicious gossip, pornography, snark and spam \u2014 what better antidote is there than looking at pictures of tiny ducklings waddling in a line or kittens splayed on their backs, paw pads in the air? The most famous cute-animal Web sites are presented with a touch of self-mockery. The site I Can Has Cheezburger? ( icanhascheezburger.com ) features cat pictures with ungrammatical captions, Stuff on My Cat ( stuffonmycat.com ) displays photos of objects stacked on sleeping cats, and Kittenwars.com pits pairs of cat photos in a cuteness showdown. Like those sites, Cute Overload is \u201ccute, but not cutesy,\u201d says Ms. Frost. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely an edge.\u201d Ms. Frost has not given up her day job at Apple. \u201cI actually love doing both, though it\u2019s pretty crazy,\u201d she said. Viewers send her about 100 submissions a day, and in doing so, grant her full republishing rights, she said. Ms. Frost is free to reuse the photos as she pleases. The calendar\u2019s success may be just the beginning. She hints at other projects, possibly including a video channel. She is astounded at the calendar\u2019s success. That it did so well on Amazon last week \u2014 and sold out in a day \u2014 \u201cis totally ridiculous,\u201d she said. Ms. Frost will not talk about how much money she has made from the site, although it is enough money that she recently hired two part-time assistants. Nor will she say how many calendars have been sold. But the calendar\u2019s top ranking in its category \u2014 accessories \u2014 and its reaching as high as No. 21 last week on the overall category \u2014 books \u2014 are indications of its success. The site\u2019s ads are placed by Blogads, which handles advertising for about 1,500 blogs, including the gossip site PerezHilton.com and the political site Daily Kos. On Blogads.com , advertisers can view traffic numbers for each site and the cost of various types of ads. According to Blogads, a \u201cpremium\u201d ad on Cute Overload costs about $2,000 a week, with an estimated 808,000 page views. Hartz Mountain currently has a premium spot for its UltraGuard line of flea and tick repellents, as does American Apparel for its Essential X 3 line of underwear three-packs. The site also offers \u201cstandard\u201d ads for $500 a week. Those are taken up mostly by small companies serving what might be called the \u201ccute market.\u201d Sublime Stitching, for example, sells \u201ccute embroidery patterns,\u201d like \u201cForest Friends,\u201d while Shanalogic offers clothing and accessories emblazoned with cute imagery. According to Blogads, there are nine \u201cstandard\u201d ads currently running on Cute Overload. That\u2019s good money for a niche site. By comparison, Daily Kos is running one \u201csecond slot\u201d ad for $7,500 a week and three standard ads for $4,650 each, according to Blogads, which says the site offers nearly 8 million ad impressions a week, about 10 times as many as Cute Overload. (Daily Kos\u2019s \u201cpremium\u201d slot, offered at $15,000, was unsold as of Tuesday.) It is all about niches and demographics, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. The audience is overwhelmingly female and between 18 and 34. \u201cFor these women,\u201d he said, \u201crecently graduated from college and sitting in grim corporate America, Cute puts them in touch with their nonwork selves. It\u2019s escapism.\u201d", "keyword": "Pets;Computers and the Internet;Blogs and Blogging (Internet);Cats;Online Advertising"}
{"id": "ny0225812", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/10/10", "title": "Convicted Editor of Indonesian Playboy Surrenders", "abstract": "DENPASAR, Indonesia \u2014 The editor of Indonesia \u2019s defunct version of Playboy magazine surrendered himself to authorities on Saturday to serve a two-year jail term for indecency. Erwin Arnada was taken into custody by dozens of police on arrival from Bali to Jakarta\u2019s Soekarno-Hatta airport, the local news media reported, after nearly two months of avoiding summonses and hiding from Islamist vigilantes who had vowed to arrest him. A third and final summons for Mr. Arnada to hand himself in expired on Friday. \u201cI\u2019ve been treated like a criminal, put in a prison car,\u201d Mr. Arnada said by BlackBerry message after being taken. \u201cI don\u2019t yet believe there\u2019s democracy in Indonesia; at least my case makes me think that,\u201d he said. \u201cIf there was democracy in Indonesia, then freedom of the press would be guaranteed and valued. The press and journalists shouldn\u2019t be criminalized as I have.\u201d Mr. Arnada edited the Indonesian edition of Playboy \u2014 which contained no nudity and was far less risqu\u00e9 than many other titles legally on sale in Indonesia \u2014 from its debut in 2006 until 2007, when it was closed after riots by Islamist groups, including the Islamic Defenders Front, or F.P.I., had forced the magazine to move to Bali. Political pressure from Islamists was also widely believed to be behind indecency charges brought against Mr. Arnada, which were successfully defeated in two lower courts. In 2009, in an unpublicized decision, the Supreme Court convicted Mr. Arnada, but neither he nor his conservative adversaries were aware of it until prosecutors received a copy of the verdict in August. The FPI said it would hunt Mr. Arnada to hand him in to serve his sentence. Mr. Arnada\u2019s lawyers are seeking a case review in the Supreme Court. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono did not reply to a request from lawyers and Indonesia\u2019s Press Council to intervene to stop Mr. Arnada\u2019s detention while the review was pending. The apparently arbitrary nature of Mr. Arnada\u2019s conviction has been widely seen as a victory for Islamic conservatives intent on imposing their vision on Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country long known for its religious tolerance. President Yudhoyono and authorities have come under criticism for repeatedly bowing to pressure from groups such as the FPI, which has been blamed for a string of violent protests and inciting attacks against religious minorities and secularists.", "keyword": "Indonesia;Indecency Obscenity and Profanity;Playboy Enterprises Inc"}
{"id": "ny0271150", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2016/04/22", "title": "Philadelphia Shows Its Love for an Owner Who Loved His Flyers", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 Ed Snider once kicked Donald J. Trump out of a suite during a playoff game. No, not because Snider, a noted Ayn Rand disciple, may have had differing political views from Trump. The offense \u2014 Trump would not stop talking. Snider never wanted an interruption when he watched his beloved Philadelphia Flyers, the team he founded and owned until his death last week. He was remembered Thursday for his love of the Flyers, the fans and family at a public tribute at the Wells Fargo Center. Bobby Clarke, the Hall of Famer center and perhaps the greatest Flyer, had one wish for when he died. \u201cI really hope I get one more chance to play a game in the orange and black for Mr. Snider\u2019s Philadelphia Flyers,\u201d he said. Snider would cringe when he was called Mr. Snider. He told everybody he knew \u2014 employees, the news media, players \u2014 to simply call him Ed. They rarely complied. He had earned immense respect as perhaps the most influential executive in Philadelphia sports history. Stanley Cup championship banners from 1974 and 1975 flanked the stage, the Flyers kept center ice cold and the logo shone bright on the floor inside the darkened arena. \u201cEMS\u201d \u2014 the initials for Edward Malcolm Snider \u2014 was painted on a banner and enveloped by a wreath. Snider died April 11 after a two-year battle with bladder cancer. He was 83. \u201cIt really hurt and it\u2019s going to hurt us for a long time,\u201d Clarke said at the memorial, which was open to the public. The current and former Philadelphia sports executives Billy King, Dave Montgomery, Scott O\u2019Neil and Peter Luukko were among the mourners. Snider\u2019s children remembered him as a father who warned them not to feed stray cats at the old Spectrum: \u201cThey\u2019re here to catch the rats.\u201d Michael Milken, the junk bond king of the 1980s, credited Snider for his \u201ccommitment and willingness to explore new medical treatments.\u201d Commissioner Gary Bettman said Snider was a friend and confidant who helped shape the N.H.L. Bettman made a final visit in January to Snider\u2019s California home for lunch. Bettman said Snider was in considerable pain, but he felt worse that a gloomy day had left them unable to see the mountains and the gorgeous view. Snider told Bettman that he loved him. \u201cI love him, too,\u201d Bettman said. \u201cWe all do. His impact on all of us is permanent. The fire in his eyes is now an eternal flame.\u201d Bettman noted that Snider had many homes, \u201cbut Wells Fargo Center is the center of where Ed Snider lived.\u201d Snider developed the arena, which opened as the new home of the Flyers and the 76ers in 1996. He was chairman of the 76ers, was once a part owner of the Eagles and had a hand in founding both Comcast\u2019s local sports channel and the city\u2019s largest sports-talk radio station. Snider, chairman of the Flyers\u2019 parent company, Comcast-Spectacor, was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1988. He founded the Flyers in 1966, and in the 1970s, when they were known as the Broad Street Bullies, they became the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup. But it was a 1972 postseason series defeat that would shape the Bullies, and Snider\u2019s locker room pep talk still resonated with Clarke. \u201c \u2018Boys, don\u2019t worry about it,\u2019 \u201d Clarke recalled him saying. \u201c \u2018We\u2019re going to be stronger because of it.\u2019 Two years later, we won the Stanley Cup.\u201d Snider always wanted to be remembered for more than hockey. He started the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation in 2005. The foundation promotes life skills and hockey through after-school, recreational and other educational activities. Snider hockey programs are provided at no cost, and focus on underserved Philadelphia boys and girls who otherwise would not have the opportunity to play. Children wrote letters and drew pictures about Snider\u2019s impact on them, and they were stationed around the arena\u2019s concourse. \u201cTo me, Mr. Snider meant a new opportunity, a new opportunity to do something great,\u201d one child wrote. \u201cIf I could say anything to him, it would be, thanks for letting me play a game I now love.\u201d For all that Snider meant to the city, he was always full of gratitude for what Philadelphia and the Flyers gave to him. \u201cThe last full sentence he ever spoke to me, and this is what he said, not just for me or the family,\u201d his son Jay Snider said, choking on his words. \u201cHe told me so I would tell you. And I quote, \u2018I can\u2019t thank the Flyers enough for everything they\u2019ve given to me and my family. Thank you.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Edward M Snider;Flyers"}
{"id": "ny0015317", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/10/27", "title": "Egyptian Satirist Returns to TV With Careful Barbs", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 As his popular television show returned to Egypt\u2019s airwaves on Friday after a long hiatus, Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist, took a swipe at the country\u2019s new military leadership in perhaps the only manner such criticism remains possible: with great care. After playing a recently leaked video clip of Egypt\u2019s defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, talking to colleagues about influencing the news media, Mr. Youssef responded with mock indignation. \u201cNobody can tell us what to say or not to say,\u201d he said, as a disembodied arm appeared from beneath his desk, stole his script and replaced it with a new text. \u201cWe want freedom,\u201d Mr. Youssef added, as the arm, a stand-in for Egypt\u2019s powerful security agencies, slapped him in the face. It was Mr. Youssef\u2019s first show since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi in July, casting Egypt into a kind of fevered dream of violence and polarization. As the country\u2019s Islamists were brutally swept from power by Egypt\u2019s new leaders, television channels were also purged of dissent, cheering on the military-backed government and a mood of resurgent nationalism. That climate fed restless anticipation here for the return of Mr. Youssef\u2019s show, called \u201cThe Program,\u201d a weekly skewering of Egypt\u2019s political class and the news media. Would he lampoon the new leadership as mercilessly as he had Mr. Morsi? While his fans hoped for the return of an independent voice to counter the conformity on the airwaves, the revived show was also a test of what the military-led government was prepared to allow. Mr. Youssef, a heart surgeon who modeled his program on Jon Stewart\u2019s \u201cDaily Show,\u201d has attracted the ire of the authorities before. In March, prosecutors summoned him for questioning on charges that he had insulted Mr. Morsi. The administration denied that it was behind the questioning, but it was part of a pattern of similar charges leveled by Mr. Morsi\u2019s sympathizers that chilled dissent against the Islamist government. Since Mr. Morsi\u2019s ouster, the room for dissent has become far more restricted. The authorities have killed or imprisoned thousands of his Islamist supporters. Egyptian and foreign journalists have been harassed or arrested. In a deeply divided nation where it has become normal to be asked about one\u2019s political loyalties, much of the stifling atmosphere seems self-imposed. As his program began Friday night, Mr. Youssef seemed more intent on advocating a third way in Egyptian politics, between loyalty to the military and loyalty to Islamist parties, than on provoking a confrontation with the new leaders. He did not speak in detail about the most incendiary news of the last few months \u2014 the mass killings of Morsi supporters by the authorities \u2014 but he said he stood against violence, whether by the state or against it. He explicitly poked fun at Egypt\u2019s interim president, noting that many Egyptians seemed not even to know his name. (It\u2019s Adly Mansour.) His jabs at General Sisi, widely seen as Egypt\u2019s de facto leader, were more oblique. It seemed funnier, and perhaps safer, to make fun of the cult of personality the general had inspired. In a rapid-fire monologue, Mr. Youssef ran through the subjects that touch off Egypt\u2019s daily arguments. It was an exhausting list that included the names of places where people had been killed and the justifications used to excuse such acts \u2014 a history of the latest tortured phase in Egypt\u2019s transition since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. \u201cEnough,\u201d Mr. Youssef concluded. \u201cShh.\u201d Despite his apparent attempts to calm the arguments, there was predictable outrage. On Twitter, Ahmed Sarhan, a former spokesman for Mr. Morsi\u2019s rival in the presidential race, wrote, \u201cThe leader of the army shouldn\u2019t be criticized or ridiculed as long as he\u2019s wearing the uniform of the military.\u201d On the opposite side, an Islamist supporter wrote that Mr. Youssef had provided \u201cpropaganda for the coup.\u201d Dina Samak, a journalist, saw something hopeful even in the satirist\u2019s cautious approach. \u201cBassem Youssef didn\u2019t explicitly say that the king is naked,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut advised people to look at his clothes.\u201d", "keyword": "Egypt;TV;Bassem Youssef;Mohamed Morsi;Politics;Military;Comedy"}
{"id": "ny0167996", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2006/01/15", "title": "High-Tech, Lowered Profile", "abstract": "TRENTON - FOR years, New Jersey has had this understanding: We are rich. We have great jobs. We are the medicine cabinet and the telecommunications nerve center of the world. We have hatched ideas and industries since Edison was recording sound onto tin-foil cylinders in Menlo Park. But just as a new governor steps up, with visions of a state growing its way out of fiscal distress, comes some disquieting news: We are not as rich as we used to be. The highest-paying industries are expanding in other states and countries, while in New Jersey some are actually shrinking. The state's fastest-growing sectors employ motel clerks and nursing home aides. The warnings come from many sources, but the loudest come from two academics at Rutgers, James W. Hughes and Joseph J. Seneca, who have regularly advised the governor and the Legislature on the state's economy. At the State House on Thursday, they drew a dismal picture of job trends. They had already sent out alarms in a report two months ago about a \"startling erosion\" in technology-based industries. That report, written for the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, documented a decline in the state's share of total national employment in every one of 10 technology-based industry groups. For example, New Jersey had 20 percent of the nation's jobs in the pharmaceutical industry in 1990, yet slipped to 14 percent in 2004. What's more, the state's share of jobs in Internet service and data processing was cut nearly in half. In all, in the five highest-paying sectors -- which include financial activities and federal government jobs, in addition to high-tech businesses -- New Jersey lost 44,000 jobs from 1990 to 2004. Given these numbers, it was perhaps not surprising that in census data released last month, New Jersey had lost its No. 1 rank in median household income, slipping behind Connecticut. Any erosion of New Jersey's brain-based economy is worrisome to a state that in the past had claimed \"genius factories,\" in Mr. Hughes's phrase, like the Bell and the RCA laboratories. And while their shrinkage in a global tech upsurge is well known, many technology experts are taken aback by the bigger picture. \"We've known that this is happening for a while, but now we have real numbers,\" said Sherrie Preische, the director of the science and technology commission, a state agency. \"We certainly didn't know we were below 1990 levels.\" \"Look at where a lot of technology is growing,\" Dr. Preische added. \"A lot of it's in Massachusetts and California. These are not low-cost places.\" As if to drive home the point that other states are eating New Jersey's lunch, at a legislative hearing this month on the fledgling nanotechnology industry, Harch Gill, the general manager of Princeton Nanotech, arrived late with an explanation for his tardiness: he was just returning from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where he had gone to confer informally with academic researchers. There, he said, he was met by a committee that offered grants, loans and other inducements to move to Pennsylvania. \"These stories are repeated over and over,\" Dr. Preische said. New Jersey is not going the way of Alabama or Arkansas, as Mr. Hughes and Professor Seneca make clear; it is simply edging toward average. The state enjoys per-capita income that is 25 percent higher than the national average, down from 29 percent five years ago, for example. In the long term, economic forecasters say, all states are becoming more average. \"New Jersey should perform just below the average over the long term,\" said Mark Zandi, who is the chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, based in West Chester, Pa. \"The wealthier economies will get a little less wealthy, and the poorer economies will get a little wealthier.\" But 2006 is an especially bad time to become more average, since New Jersey's budget gap of about $6 billion is expected to be one of the worst of any state in the nation. It is no time, politically speaking, to be giving grants, tax breaks and seed money. So a question heard with increasing frequency is this: What is Jon S. Corzine, the governor-elect who spent a professional lifetime in the business of allocating capital, going to do? Mr. Corzine is well aware of the slippage, to judge from statements he issued during his campaign, although the governor-elect's transition team did not respond to several requests for an interview. Mr. Corzine has proposed a venture capital fund, called the Edison Innovation Fund, to be financed initially by bonds and used to aid high-tech enterprises. Mr. Corzine also has the larger job of shoring up the financial industry, salvaging manufacturing jobs and encouraging corporate investment. \"Look, he's a business guy,\" said Anthony Shorris, the director of the Policy Research Institute for the Region at Princeton University. \"He comes out of the environment of the people we're talking about, the world of information technology and financial services. He knows what they need and what it takes to get them to move and stay.\" Mr. Shorris, among others, noted that high-tech enterprises everywhere took a beating starting in 2000 and 2001, and were only recovering now. Adding Up the Pluses Yet the state treasurer, John E. McCormac, saw the state's economy far differently, saying that the overall recovery was filling the state's treasury faster than expected. \"Our corporate tax is way over target,\" Mr. McCormac said in an interview, shrugging dramatically. \"If there's really a problem, why do we keep beating our targets?\" Mr. McCormac pointed out that the Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation was expanding its headquarters in East Hanover, Pfizer was building a new research center in Morris Plains and Sanofi-Aventis, the French pharmaceutical giant, was putting its United States headquarters in Bridgewater. And New Jersey -- going so far as to send Mr. McCormac and Gov. Richard J. Codey to Verizon Communications' headquarters in Manhattan about a year ago -- persuaded the company to take over the former AT&T campus in Basking Ridge rather than move to Virginia. In addition, Mr. McCormac said, a Wall Street surge has fed the state treasury with personal taxes paid on unearned income. \"Those revenues for '04 were great, for '05 were better and for '06 look even better,\" he said. Mr. Hughes replies that Wall Street money is masking losses in the state's economic core. Moreover, jobs in the securities and brokerage firms in New Jersey declined from 2000 to 2004, after a decade in which many companies moved support services across the Hudson. The Hughes-Seneca report said: \"With back-office functions now as easily carried out in low-cost Asia as in Jersey City, the state's recently gained role as a significant national financial center may very well be in jeopardy.\" And sooner rather than later, record-level corporate profits will recede, cutting income tax receipts from the state's wealthiest residents, said Mr. Hughes, who is the dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. While people who bring home big paychecks from Manhattan pay income taxes to New York State, they pay taxes on their unearned income to New Jersey. Mr. Hughes, just like many Republican legislators, contends that the \"millionaire's tax\" adopted in 2004 -- raising taxes on income over $500,000 -- is a highly unreliable source of revenue. Mr. Hughes and Professor Seneca found an overall decline since 2000 in the highest-paying economic sectors, including the corporate management jobs and financial-industry jobs that were largely responsible for the state's high-end housing boom, which is an economic engine in itself. The average pay for what they label \"Wall Street-type jobs\" in 2004 was $131,422. Where the Growth Is At the same time, the highest job gains were in local government, education and health services, and leisure and hospitality --a sector that paid an average of $20,065 a year in 2004. A new state analysis of income tax returns, from its 2003 tax year, yielded a puzzling statistic: The average wage reported was $58,546, which was $13 below the average reported in 2000. There is little disagreement that the state needs to shore up its high-tech supports. \"Other places have caught up,\" said Richard Goldberg, a member of the state's science and technology commission and a vice president of DRS Technologies in Parsippany, which produces electronics systems for the military. Most of the states viewed as competitors for high-tech business lost science and technology jobs in 2001 and 2002. But most lost fewer than New Jersey did, and several have done much better. In scientific research and development services, for example, New Jersey lost more than 4,000 of its 32,000 jobs from 1990 to 2004. The state was leapfrogged during that period by Massachusetts and Maryland, while Virginia and New York rapidly added jobs as well. New Jersey was the first state to commit funds to stem cell research, which helped spur California to adopt a $3 billion initiative. Now, New Jersey has started to spend the money -- which California has not -- announcing $5 million in grants last month. Still, New Jersey remains overshadowed by California and pursued by other states. Other States' Gains Mr. Zandi noted that New Jersey's technology sector had been dominated by very large corporations, especially the pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications giants like AT&T. \"In the case of Maryland or California, a lot of the growth was in biotech, medical instrumentation, in small and midsize companies,\" he said. \"Big companies generally are not experiencing the same kinds of growth rates and hiring in the same way.\" He then raised and answered his own question: \"Why is it that New Jersey hasn't been able to attract small biotech companies? That may be because the state has underinvested in its university facilities. California, Maryland, Virginia are extraordinarily aggressive in bringing these companies to their states.\" To stem the tide, Mr. Goldberg advocates more technology incubators -- state-financed facilities that offer laboratory space -- for start-up companies. \"Pennsylvania and New York have over 50 incubators each, and New Jersey has 8,\" he said. \"We've done a poor job of growing that system because it costs money.\" Professor Seneca and Dean Hughes met with Mr. Corzine on Thursday, before their presentation at the State House, and found him, as Professor Seneca said, \"very sharp in his understanding and penetrating with the questions.\" The science and technology commission, in preparing recommendations for Mr. Corzine, is urging a $300 million commitment for the Edison fund and $20 million to $50 million a year for more short-term programs. One model is New York State's new research center at the State University at Albany, which focuses on nanotechnology. The state has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into its development and has attracted billions in private investment from companies like IBM and International Sematech. New Jersey has given only scattered grants to nanotechnology companies, although it is one of the handful of fields that the science commission wants to emphasize. The Value of Education No high-tech company, of course, can do without a highly educated labor pool, even if it is in a high-cost state -- and it usually is. \"The fundamental things don't turn around quickly, and New Jersey is coming at this from a very good position,\" Mr. Shorris said. \"They're not putting Pfizer research labs in North Dakota or Mississippi.\" For recruiting purposes, he added, it would be nice to have Boston or Chicago in the middle of the state. But New Jersey is blessed, he said, by its nearness to two very attractive metro areas. And Mr. Hughes said it had never been hard to persuade people to live in Princeton or Short Hills or to commute from Manhattan. In fact, New Jersey probably has a harder time recruiting and keeping other types of businesses. In a survey of members of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association last fall, more than 90 percent said New Jersey had higher taxes and fees, health-care costs and government spending than other states. Another report released last month by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce said relocation consultants who work around the nation reported that their clients rarely even considered the state. Some had lukewarm compliments for the state's Business Employment Incentive Program, which is intended to persuade employers to create new jobs in New Jersey by giving to them a portion of the state income taxes paid by each newly hired employee. The state's business-growth programs are now scattered in more than a dozen departments and agencies, and Mr. Corzine has said he wants to bring them all under the Economic Development Authority, the independent agency that handles the larger employment incentive program. To help achieve this, the governor-elect has appointed an advisory panel on economic development, which has been meeting throughout the transition period. One member, John Galandak, the president of the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey, said Mr. Corzine spent two and a half hours with the committee at its last meeting, although he said he could not give details of the discussions. \"With the incoming administration facing a $6 billion budget gap, there's not going to be a lot of latitude or political will to give grants or more money,\" Mr. Galandak said. The incentives, he said, would have to come in the form of an easier tax and regulatory burden. The Chamber of Commerce report did cite New Jersey's competitive advantages, including the quality of its work force, as identified in interviews with corporate executives and consultants. Advantage No. 1: It is not New York City.", "keyword": "NEW JERSEY;LABOR;ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND TRENDS"}
{"id": "ny0258655", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/01/31", "title": "Timofey Mozgov Comes Off Bench to Lead Knicks", "abstract": "The long, frequently frustrating search for a productive, skilled big man led the Knicks to a dozen dead ends before ending, finally, back where it began: in the Russian-speaking quarter of the locker room. Necessity called, and Timofey Mozgov \u2014 his English and his game improving in lockstep \u2014 provided a bold reminder of why the Knicks found him so intriguing in the first place. He ran hard, dunked harder and took care of all the loose ends Sunday night, leading the depleted Knicks to a 124-106 rout of the Detroit Pistons at Madison Square Garden. For Mozgov, a soft-spoken rookie, there was quiet satisfaction as he posted career highs in points (23), rebounds (14) and minutes (40). For the fans, there was happy delirium, and chants of \u201cMoz-gov!\u201d after he scored his final points on a 19-foot jumper. For the Knicks (25-22) , there was relief. They needed this victory over the woebegone Pistons (17-31). And they need an imposing, hustling, rebounding 7-footer to fill out this rotation if they hope to make any noise in the postseason. Mozgov, 23, had not played in the previous 10 games, and hardly at all since mid-November, when he lost the starting center job. There is no keeping him out now. \u201cTwenty-three and 14?\u201d Coach Mike D\u2019Antoni said, chuckling. \u201cI think I\u2019ll try it again.\u201d The opportunity came Sunday because of injury (Wilson Chandler\u2019s sore calf), suspension (Shawne Williams) and foul trouble (Ronny Turiaf). Chandler and Williams are both expected back for Wednesday\u2019s game against the Dallas Mavericks, but the rotation will need another adjustment. Mozgov is the Knicks\u2019 only 7-footer and earned an opening night start after a strong training camp. He struggled in the season\u2019s opening weeks and soon fell out of the rotation. \u201cBut we always liked him,\u201d D\u2019Antoni said. \u201cThat\u2019s why he started the year. We thought he had that potential.\u201d The difference now? \u201cHe just wasn\u2019t flustered,\u201d D\u2019Antoni said. \u201cIt just seemed like he was going way too fast earlier.\u201d The Knicks needed everything Mozgov provided to hold off Detroit and the hot-shooting Ben Gordon (35 points). The Pistons shot 50.6 percent and led by 8 in the third quarter, but the Knicks held them to 15 points in the fourth quarter. Amar\u2019e Stoudemire led the Knicks with 33 points. Danilo Gallinari added 29 points, making 7 of 12 field goals and all 11 of his free throws. For the second straight game, Stoudemire spent a few disturbing moments wincing on the court, this time after bumping his left knee in the fourth quarter. He limped and hopped a bit but stayed in the game. Stoudemire was already coping with a sprained right knee, an injury he sustained Friday in Atlanta. Stoudemire started anyway and played effectively, if not always with his usual verve. He grabbed only six rebounds in 39 minutes. Stoudemire conceded that he was \u201ctrying to save my legs a little bit\u201d in the first half but said that his knees were fine \u2014 \u201cNo worries.\u201d Mozgov alleviated any other concerns, by cleaning up all the missed shots. \u201cHe played great,\u201d Stoudemire said. \u201cHe\u2019s one of those players where he keeps working, and keeps trying to improve as a young player.\u201d Anthony Randolph also rejoined the rotation Sunday, but with more modest results: five rebounds, one block and no points in 8 minutes 30 seconds. He is likely to return to the bench when Chandler and Williams return. Mozgov showed much more poise than he did in November. After missing his first three attempts Sunday \u2014 nervously flinging two shots long \u2014 he settled down and found a rhythm. He slammed through two putbacks and dunked a lob from Toney Douglas. \u201cI just breathed a little bit,\u201d Mozgov said, exhaling loudly for effect, \u201cand tried to play aggressive, that\u2019s it.\u201d In Russia, the fans used to chant his full name. But he appreciated the enthusiastic chants of his last name. \u201cI feel really, really excited,\u201d he said. \u201cThank you, the fans.\u201d REBOUNDS Mark Warkentien, a veteran N.B.A. executive, will soon be hired as a Knicks front-office consultant, reporting to the team president Donnie Walsh, a person briefed on the matter confirmed. Yahoo Sports first reported the news Sunday. The highly regarded Warkentien was let go as the Denver Nuggets\u2019 general manager last summer. He shares an agent with Walsh and has long been rumored as a possible right-hand man and, perhaps, eventual successor. Warkentien\u2019s ties to the Nuggets could in theory help the Knicks\u2019 in their pursuit of Carmelo Anthony. Walsh declined to comment on the Warkentien news, saying, \u201cI have nothing to report.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Knicks;Mozgov Timofey;Detroit Pistons;Basketball;Stoudemire Amare"}
{"id": "ny0012988", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/11/19", "title": "In \u2018Love & Math,\u2019 Fighting Discrimination Through Numbers", "abstract": "In 1984, when he was 16, Edward Frenkel was subjected to a malicious interrogation. Already a brilliant budding mathematician, he had applied for admission to \u201cMekh-Mat\u201d at Moscow State University, the top mathematics program in the Soviet Union. But when he attended the critical oral entrance exam, his dream of becoming a professional mathematician came crashing down. He quickly solved the problems presented to him, but the examiners studiously ignored him, paying attention to the other students. Finally, an hour into the exam, his special inquisitors arrived and began hammering him with questions. Each correct answer was parsed and questioned in minute detail, and new problems, far beyond the required level, were presented in rapid succession. Dr. Frenkel fought on, but didn\u2019t stand a chance: in 1984, no Jewish student, no matter how gifted, could be admitted to Mekh-Mat. Mathematical brilliance was no match for institutional anti-Semitism. In many ways \u201cLove & Math\u201d is his response to that moment. For Dr. Frenkel, as he recounts in the autobiographical chapters of the book, did not give up. He continued his studies in a less prestigious (and less anti-Semitic) applied mathematics program, but his true education took place elsewhere. He tapped an informal network of mathematicians, many of them Jewish, who were denied employment in their field but kept up their work at the highest level. With their guidance, Dr. Frenkel was soon conducting groundbreaking research. When the government finally relaxed its restrictions on international travel, he was invited to Harvard on a short-term fellowship that later turned into a permanent appointment. A few years after being denied admission to the undergraduate program at Mekh-Mat, he was a rising international star in the world of mathematics. The story of his professional triumph against heavy odds is deeply satisfying, especially when he is given the opportunity to confront his former tormentors during a seminar at M.I.T. But his true answer to the bigotry he encountered in his youth lies in his passion for mathematics \u2014 the \u201clove\u201d of the book\u2019s title. Image Love & Math The Heart of Hidden Reality. By Edward Frenkel.Basic Books. 292 pages. $27.99. The truths of mathematics, as he explains, are objective, eternal and unchanging, residing in a perfect Platonic universe where prejudice and vindictiveness hold no sway. In the Orwellian world of the Soviet state, mathematics offered a haven in which truth stood for itself, free from ideological orthodoxy or the whims of the powerful. The anti-Semites at Mekh-Mat might have crushed young Edward\u2019s dreams of an academic career, but against the truths of mathematics, they were helpless. Now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Frenkel specializes in the Langlands program , an ambitious effort to unify the disparate areas of research in modern mathematics. The world of math, to use one of his favorite metaphors, is made up of different continents, seemingly isolated from one another: Number theory is about the properties of numbers, harmonic analysis is concerned with the properties of wave functions, the study of Riemann surfaces deals with the geometries of two-dimensional manifolds, and so on. The Langlands program draws connections among several of these \u201ccontinents\u201d by revealing startling similarities in their structures. To Dr. Frenkel, these unexpected analogies suggest that the different fields are just the visible manifestations of a deep mathematical truth that remains hidden beneath the surface. His quest is to reveal this universal structure. He does his best to explain the substance of his work to the lay reader, but this, he admits, is no easy task. Galois groups , Kac-Moody algebras, Hitchin moduli spaces, A-branes, automorphic sheaves and other concepts that are the tools of his trade are bound to challenge even the most dedicated nonmathematician. Impressively, he does not give up. Believing that mathematics is a common human possession, he explains each concept in nontechnical terms, relying heavily on analogies from daily life. In the end, lay readers will probably acquire no more than a superficial sense of all this technical work. But far more important, they will gain an understanding of what modern mathematics is about \u2014 its ambition, its beauty and its power to enthrall. Is mathematics truly as universal, eternal and unchanging as Dr. Frenkel believes? The history of the field suggests that it may not be, that mathematics could, in fact, be quite different in different times and places. The idea that different geometries can describe spaces different from our own, for example, is self-evident to a modern mathematician, but would have seemed sheer nonsense to any practitioner before the 19th century. Conversely, the fast and loose methods of the early pioneers of the calculus would be completely unacceptable in the modern field. And Dr. Frenkel\u2019s own experience in the Soviet Union makes it clear that mathematics is not entirely insulated from the political pressures of its day. But this matters little. \u201cLove & Math\u201d is not a detached philosophical overview of mathematics but a report from the trenches by a practicing mathematician at the forefront of the field. And as such it is powerful, passionate and inspiring. In 2010, Dr. Frenkel appeared in a short film he wrote, \u201cRites of Love and Math,\u201d in which a mathematician tattoos the \u201cformula of love\u201d on the body of his beloved, to save it and prevent it from falling into evil hands. It is perhaps Dr. Frenkel\u2019s ultimate answer to the trauma of his youth. The truths of mathematics cannot be erased; they live on, safe from the malignant designs of humans. In the world of mathematics the bullies of Mekh-Mat wouldn\u2019t stand a chance.", "keyword": "Mathematics;Antisemitism;Soviet Union;Books"}
{"id": "ny0273241", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/05/06", "title": "Australian Ends Attempt to Prove He Founded Bitcoin", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The mystery behind who created the online currency Bitcoin deepened on Thursday. Craig Steven Wright, an Australian entrepreneur and computer programmer who earlier this week said he was that person, on Thursday withdrew an offer to prove his assertion, removing the contents of his blog and replacing it with a post simply titled, \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d \u201cI believed that I could do this,\u201d Mr. Wright wrote on his blog. \u201cI believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.\u201d Mr. Wright was first identified as Bitcoin\u2019s founder in December 2015 by Wired magazine and the technology website Gizmodo, but he did not come forward then. This week that changed, and he said in interviews with the BBC, The Economist and GQ that he was the digital currency\u2019s creator , known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Almost as soon as Mr. Wright announced he was the creator of Bitcoin on Monday, skepticism surfaced in the Bitcoin community about the authenticity of his claims. In a news release on Monday, Mr. Wright said that he had decided to make his identity public to \u201cdispel any negative myths and fears about Bitcoin.\u201d \u201cI cannot allow the misinformation that has been spread to impact the future of Bitcoin\u201d and the blockchain, the currency\u2019s communal digital ledger, he said at the time. \u201cI\u2019m now able to build on what I have previously completed by releasing my research and academic work and help people understand just how powerful this can really be.\u201d Outside Organization, a public relations company that distributed his release on Monday, verified that the comments on the blog were from Mr. Wright and did not provide any additional comment on Thursday. Bitcoin was founded as a digital competitor to existing currencies, and it has gained traction as financial institutions and others have begun researching how they can use the blockchain technology to improve transactions. The currency is created by people using computers to solve complex math problems, and it can then be traded digitally. Each coin is associated with its owner by a digital key. The mysterious identity of its founder created an aura around the digital currency since it surfaced in 2009 and fueled a parlor game of speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto\u2019s identify. Satoshi Nakamoto communicated only by electronic message and never revealed his or her true identity before ending all communication in 2011. To verify his assertions this week, the BBC said, Mr. Wright provided digitally signed messages using cryptographic keys inextricably linked to Bitcoins generated by Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Wright also posted evidence on his blog, including a technical walk-through of how to verify cryptographic keys. All of that information was wiped from his blog on Thursday. \u201cWhen the rumors began, my qualifications and character were attacked,\u201d Mr. Wright said on his blog on Thursday. \u201cWhen those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this.\u201d In his post on Thursday, Mr. Wright apologized to Jon Matonis, one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, who succeeded Satoshi Nakamoto as the lead Bitcoin developer. Both men said on Monday that, after reviewing evidence provided by Mr. Wright, they believed that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. \u201cI can only hope that their honor and credibility is not irreparably tainted by my actions,\u201d Mr. Wright said on his blog. \u201cThey were not deceived, but I know that the world will never believe that now. I can only say I\u2019m sorry.\u201d After the Wired and Gizmodo articles last year, Australian Federal Police raided Mr. Wright\u2019s home in a suburb of Sydney in connection with a tax investigation. Tax authorities in Australia said at the time that they had determined that Mr. Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto. On Thursday, Mr. Wright seemed determined to return to the shadows, ending his post with the words, \u201cAnd goodbye.\u201d", "keyword": "Bitcoin;Craig Steven Wright;Jon Matonis"}
{"id": "ny0258288", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/01/26", "title": "River search finds body, may be Reed brother", "abstract": "Searchers recovered a body from the Mississippi River near where Brian Reed, the brother of Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed, jumped into the water after being confronted by a deputy sheriff earlier this month in St. Rose, La. Tim Miller of Texas EquuSearch told WWL-TV that although searchers could not confirm anything until after an autopsy, they believe it is Reed\u2019s body. \u00b6New England Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker said he regretted comments he made referring to foot-fetish reports involving Jets Coach Rex Ryan. \u201cYeah, sure I do,\u201d he told The Boston Herald. At a news conference Jan. 13, three days before the Jets beat the Patriots, 28-21, in a playoff game, Welker made about a dozen references to toes and feet, a not-so-subtle dig at Ryan. Coach Bill Belichick benched Welker for the game\u2019s first offensive series. welker \u00b6Green Bay linebacker Nick Barnett and tight end Jermichael Finley posted complaints on their Twitter accounts after learning that players on injured reserve, as they are, will not be in the team picture taken at the Super Bowl . Jeff Blumb, a Packers spokesman, said the decision \u201cwas based primarily on the sheer number of players we have on injured reserve\u201d \u2014 16. packers \u00b6Michael Vick has signed his first endorsement contract since his release from prison in 2009. Vick, the Philadelphia Eagles\u2019 Pro Bowl quarterback, signed a two-year contract with Unequal Technologies, a provider of the football pads Vick wore most of last season. The deal will be announced Thursday. vick (AP) \u00b6Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco suggested at the end of an interview with ESPN that he was planning to change his name back to Johnson. He did not give a specific reason, other than saying he\u2019s \u201cdone enough with the Ocho thing.\u201d Ochocinco", "keyword": "Baltimore Ravens;Reed Brian;Football"}
{"id": "ny0221234", "categories": ["technology", "internet"], "date": "2010/02/08", "title": "The Fight over Prices on the Internet", "abstract": "Where\u2019s the price? On some pages of e-commerce sites selling products like televisions, digital cameras and jewelry, a critical piece of information is conspicuously missing: the price tag. To see how much these items cost, shoppers must add the merchandise to their shopping carts \u2014 in effect, taking it up to the virtual register for a price check. The missing prices are part of a larger battle sweeping the world of e-commerce. Wary of the Internet\u2019s tendency to relentlessly drive down prices, major brands and manufacturers \u2014 and now, book publishers \u2014 are striking back, deploying a variety of tactics and tools to control how their products are presented and priced online. \u201cYou are seeing firms of all types test the waters\u201d with strategies to control online pricing, said Christopher Sprigman, associate professor of intellectual property at the University of Virginia School of Law and a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department. \u201cThey feel they have more freedom to do it now.\u201d In many cases that freedom stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS. The ruling gave manufacturers considerably more leeway to dictate retail prices, once considered a violation of antitrust law, and it set a high legal hurdle for retailers to prove that this is bad for consumers. Ever since that decision, retailers say manufacturers have become increasingly aggressive with one tool in particular: forbidding retailers from advertising their products for anything less than a certain price. For offline retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Best Buy, that means not dropping below those prices in the circulars and ads in newspapers. But online retailers have a greater burden. Manufacturers consider the product pages on sites like eBay and Amazon.com to be ads, and they complain whenever e-commerce sites set prices below the minimum price. This leads the sites to replace prices with notes that say things like \u201cTo see our price, add this item to your cart.\u201d One day last week, prices were missing on Amazon.com for an array of products like the Milwaukee Sub-Compact Driver drill kit, a Movado men\u2019s Esperanza watch and an Onkyo 7.2-channel home theater receiver. As a result, those prices also did not show up on search sites like Google Product Search and PriceGrabber.com . The trend has arguably weakened one of the implicit promises of e-commerce: that quick searches and visits to comparison shopping sites will yield the best deals. Most online retailers complain that the missing prices confuse consumers and give an advantage to big chains like Wal-Mart, which do not bear the same burden in their stores. They also say the practice of enforcing minimum advertised prices has gradually spread from the consumer electronics business to companies in other industries like sporting goods and jewelry, which are also trying to stem the downward pressure of prices online. Amazon declined to comment on the issue, but the company\u2019s feelings on the matter are public. \u201cRetailers like Amazon have the legal right to set their own prices independently, but some manufacturers place restrictions on how those prices may be communicated,\u201d reads an explanation on Amazon product pages that lack prices. \u201cWe realize that this is an inconvenience and are regularly working to educate manufacturers on how their policies impact our customers.\u201d A few online retailers, like Buy.com, say advertising restrictions have not measurably affected sales. But most other e-commerce companies volubly protest. \u201cWe think consumers are best served when the retail marketplace is open and transparent and retailers have an opportunity to offer the best prices and services, and are not controlled from above by manufacturers,\u201d said Brian Bieron, eBay\u2019s senior director for domestic government relations. Manufacturers, of course, have a different view. They say the competitiveness of the Internet has unlocked a race to the bottom \u2014 with everyone from large corporations to garage-based sellers ravenously discounting products, and even selling them at a loss, in an effort to capture market share and attention from search engines and comparison shopping sites. They also worry that their largest retail partners may be unwilling to match the online price cuts and could stop carrying their products altogether. \u201cIf there isn\u2019t that back-and-forth between manufacturer and retailer, it\u2019s just a natural tendency to drive the price down to nothing,\u201d said Wes Shepherd, chief of Channel Velocity, which sells software that allows companies to scour the Web looking for violations of pricing agreements. Southern Audio Services, based in Baton Rouge, La., sets a suggested retail price of $80 for its Woodees Inner-Ear Stereo Earphones, while their minimum advertised price is $50. Most online retailers sell them for around $50, but Amazon sells them for $48.40, keeping the price off the product page. \u201cAt the end of the day, it will become a race to zero if you don\u2019t do anything to manage the issue,\u201d said Jon C. Jordan, chief executive of Southern Audio Services. \u201cThen you\u2019ve devalued your product to the point where it\u2019s difficult to get distribution and consumers lose interest in it.\u201d The battle may shift back to Washington. Companies like eBay and Amazon are asking Congress to override aspects of the Leegin ruling. One bill that would repeal provisions of the ruling is now being considered in the House. In October, 41 state attorneys general wrote a letter to members of the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that the court\u2019s decision had resulted in higher prices for shoppers. Just like other product makers, book publishers have also been emboldened by the Leegin decision. In their case, they want to prevent low prices on electronic books from cannibalizing their more profitable hardcover sales. Instead of selling e-books wholesale to retailers like Amazon.com, the publishers want to sell them directly, setting prices and having the retailer act as an agent, taking a fixed 30 percent commission. Macmillan recently struck such an agreement with Amazon.com after a protracted dispute that led Amazon to remove, briefly, Macmillan\u2019s electronic and physical books from its site. Deals with the other major publishers will most likely follow. Book publishers \u201care using a different set of levers, and a different vocabulary, to get what they want,\u201d said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which helps companies sell online. \u201cBut it\u2019s the same outcome. Manufacturers are effectively controlling the price that the consumer sees on the Web.\u201d", "keyword": "E-Commerce;Shopping and Retail;Computers and the Internet;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Online Advertising;Book Trade;Amazon.com Inc;Buy.com Inc;Google Inc;Barnes & Noble Incorporated"}
{"id": "ny0066060", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/06/06", "title": "Tense Search, Chilling Note and an Arrest in Brooklyn Stabbings", "abstract": "Around 8 p.m. Wednesday, a man paused at a corner in Ozone Park, Queens, and scrawled letters and symbols on a stop sign: $Killzz I will BK At the bottom he drew a smiley face, one eye winking. A moment later, two detectives stepped up and called the man by name: Daniel St. Hubert. He was placed under arrest, and the police now believe he committed a string of shocking crimes between Friday and Wednesday morning. He was carrying a brown-handled knife in his waistband and a cellphone in his pocket, said Stephen Davis, the Police Department\u2019s chief spokesman. The words on that stop sign \u2014 since removed \u2014 were the last traces that the police found of Mr. St. Hubert, 27, as they tracked him from the scene of one slashing to the next: an 18-year-old woman, killed in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Friday night as she was going to meet her friends after band practice. A short distance away on Sunday afternoon, two children set upon as they rode the elevator on their way to get a treat \u2014 a 6-year-old boy knifed to death and a 7-year-old girl slashed within an inch of her life. And near dawn Wednesday, a 53-year-old homeless man on a subway platform in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, stabbed and slashed as he slept on a bench. As of late Thursday, Mr. St. Hubert had been charged with the attacks on the children. At nearly every step in three boroughs, the authorities said, Mr. St. Hubert left digital and physical evidence, all of which began to be unlocked midday Wednesday in an eight-hour avalanche of revelations. Around noon, a laboratory report on the knife used in the Sunday elevator attack came back with Mr. St. Hubert\u2019s DNA profile, which was in a state database. It was the first time detectives had a name for their suspect. They obtained the number of a cellphone that he was using, and tracked its beacon signal as he moved around the city Wednesday afternoon and evening. Early on, it showed that he was on Queens Boulevard, but the signal disappeared. Assuming that he had gone into the subway system, the chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, ordered investigators to scramble to stations along the E line, hoping to see Mr. St. Hubert as he emerged, but the next sign of his whereabouts came when his phone signal was detected on a street in Queens, several blocks from the subway. Investigators rushed to the neighborhood, but again saw no sign of him. As they were speaking with people on the street, they noticed a camera outside a store, Mr. Davis said. Its hard drive showed that a few minutes earlier, Mr. St. Hubert had walked right past. \u201cI was very excited, because now we have a real-time picture of him, how he looks, and what he is wearing,\u201d Mr. Davis said. That included black sneakers, a gray shirt and blue shorts \u2014 fitting the description of clothing worn by a man seen fleeing the housing project where the children were stabbed on Sunday. It also showed he had a tattoo of a ram\u2019s head and the word Aries. The video was obtained while Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton were giving a news conference to publicize the hunt. Moments later, the two detectives arrested Mr. St. Hubert after seeing him write on the stop sign. \u201cOrdinarily, you would call for backup, but they did not want to wait and take any chances with him,\u201d Mr. Davis said. \u201cHe was cooperative.\u201d Mr. St. Hubert\u2019s MetroCard showed him entering a subway station in Chelsea around the time of the slashing. In the case of the 18-year-old woman who was stabbed in Brooklyn, lab tests have found physical evidence that was consistent with Mr. St. Hubert\u2019s DNA, but it has not been linked to him with certainty. Investigators believe signals from his phone place him in the vicinity of the crime. There are only grainy video images of that assault, but they show that after a few initial thrusts with the knife, the man continued with multiple shallow stabs. That is similar to the pattern of attacks in the elevator and the subway, authorities said. Mr. St. Hubert has spent much of his time in custody sleeping. During his waking hours, his conversation has rambled, with references to Satan, but has also been coherent at times, one investigator said. Five years ago, Mr. St. Hubert\u2019s mother, Marie Bauzile, told prosecutors in Queens that she did not want them to proceed with a criminal case against her son after he wrapped an electric cord around her neck, took $1,000 and stole her Toyota. He was 22 years old and she already had an order of protection against him. Her son needed psychiatric care, not prison, Ms. Bauzile told an assistant district attorney, according to Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney\u2019s office. Nevertheless, he was charged with attempted murder, and because the crime was so violent, the case was not sent to a special mental health court, Mr. Ryan said. It would be three years before the charges were resolved. On three separate occasions, Mr. St. Hubert was committed to a state psychiatric hospital because he was found to be unfit to stand trial. In June 2012, he pleaded guilty to attempted murder and an assault on a corrections officer. Because of that conviction, he had to provide a sample of his DNA. In late May, he was released from prison. Less than two weeks later, a trace of evidence on a knife led to his DNA profile in the state database.", "keyword": "Murders;NYPD;Daniel St Hubert;NYC;East New York Brooklyn"}
{"id": "ny0246363", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/04/12", "title": "For Rhesus Macaques, to Know Her May Mean to Love Her", "abstract": "Among rhesus macaques, a female\u2019s face becomes darker when she ovulates, and males can pick up the signal \u2014 but some males get the message more clearly than others. Researchers writing online Wednesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B have found experimental evidence that males are much better at picking up signals from females they already know than from those they are unfamiliar with. The scientists tested free-ranging male macaques in Puerto Rico by presenting them with images of females\u2019 faces during fertile and infertile periods. Males who already knew the females gazed longer at the darker faces of the fertile period, suggesting that they were getting the point. Those who were from other groups, and therefore unfamiliar with the females, showed no more interest in the fertile than in the nonfertile. The researchers speculate that it is not a darker face alone that attracts a male, but how comparatively dark a familiar female\u2019s face gets as she becomes fertile. To make that judgment, the male must already know the female. The lead author of the study, Dr. James P. Higham, who was with the University of Chicago when the research was done but is now at the German Primate Center in G\u00f6ttingen, said that humans seem to face the same problem in interpreting nonverbal communication. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know the range of signals an individual gives off, it\u2019s hard to know what they mean,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think these things have been studied in humans, but it\u2019s the sort of effect that seems intuitive.\u201d", "keyword": "Monkeys and Apes;Science and Technology;Puerto Rico"}
{"id": "ny0179662", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/08/19", "title": "Mariners and Top Pick Are Thinking Big", "abstract": "Phillippe Aumont is big \u2014 6-foot-7 big. He talks big, beyond his 18 years. And based on his potential, on how much the Mariners are gushing over him and on Seattle\u2019s most recent history with its top draft choice, Aumont should be thinking big, too. It is not a stretch to think that Aumont, an 18-year-old Canadian and the 11th overall selection in June\u2019s draft, may join Brandon Morrow, the Mariners\u2019 top pick last year, and the 21-year-old ace F\u00e9lix Hern\u00e1ndez as part of a flame-throwing rotation in Seattle soon. Why? \u201cI\u2019ll start with: 6-foot-7, 225 pounds,\u201d said Wayne Norton, the Mariners\u2019 scouting supervisor for Canada, drawing a room full of laughs as Aumont was being introduced Friday after signing a contract with a $1.9 million signing bonus. \u201cThen, he throws in the mid-90s.\u201d So does Morrow, selected fifth over all out of the University of California 14 months ago. Morrow, 23, pitched one game at Class A last fall before finding himself in the Mariners\u2019 bullpen this season. Seattle is expected to put him in its rotation to begin next season. Aumont noticed. \u201cIt\u2019s a fun thing to know that a pitcher they drafted in the first round last year ended up playing in the big leagues right away,\u201d said Aumont, the highest Canadian selected in the major league draft since 2002, when Baltimore chose Adam Loewen fourth over all and Colorado took Jeff Francis ninth. \u201cThe thing is, he\u2019s a college guy, so he\u2019s older,\u201d Aumont said of Morrow. \u201cI can probably do it, too. But I don\u2019t want to rush things.\u201d The temptation could be there for the Mariners. Aumont, a native of Gatineau, Qu\u00e9bec, throws his fastball up to 97 miles an hour. His sinking two-seam fastball routinely zooms at 93 or 94. \u201cHow many guys can hit that velocity now in the major leagues?\u201d said Dan Lawson, Aumont\u2019s agent. \u201cOne per staff, maybe.\u201d But Aumont began playing baseball only four years ago. He did not begin considering a career in professional baseball until early last year \u2014 about the time he refused an invitation to join a top all-star team of high school basketball players in Qu\u00e9bec to concentrate on being a pitcher. The Mariners equate Aumont\u2019s experience pitching for the Canadian junior team, which he will rejoin for tournaments in Illinois and Mexico through Sept. 1, to a player with community college or rookie-level minor league experience in the United States. So he has some developing \u2014 and proving \u2014 to do before he reaches Seattle. Next month, he will join Mariners instructional league prospects in Arizona. Then in February, the Mariners will invite him to their spring training camp, as they do each spring after signing their top pick. They extended the same opportunity to Morrow as a nonroster invitee this spring \u2014 and he blew them and the Cactus League away to win a roster spot. \u201cThere\u2019s more to come,\u201d Norton said of Aumont. \u201cI think he\u2019s obviously going to get bigger, stronger.\u201d Norton projected Aumont to be a front-of-the-rotation power pitcher. Norton said he had scouted some of Canada\u2019s best, going back to Loewen and Francis, \u201cwho are doing quite well right now. This guy doesn\u2019t take a back seat to those two gentlemen. \u201cI want to take the opportunity to thank him. Guys like him make scouting easy.\u201d", "keyword": "Seattle Mariners;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0053619", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/07/10", "title": "3 Rikers Officials Charged in Brutal Beating of Inmate", "abstract": "Two New York City correction officers and a captain were arrested Wednesday on charges that they handcuffed and beat an inmate unconscious with a baton at Rikers Island and then falsified documents to cover it up, the authorities said. The arrests were part of a monthslong inquiry by the city\u2019s Investigation Department into \u201ca pattern of lawless conduct at Rikers that must be brought under control,\u201d Mark G. Peters, the department commissioner, said in a statement. \u201cThe victims here were not simply the injured inmate but the justice system itself, which cannot properly function when sworn law enforcement officers falsify documents to cover up crimes,\u201d Mr. Peters said. The captain, Moises Simancas, 43, who has nearly 17 years\u2019 experience, and the two correction officers, April Jackson, 34, and Tyrone Wint, 28, who were both hired in 2008, were each charged with attempted first-degree assault, which carries a maximum of 15 years in prison. They were also charged with falsifying business records, among other offenses. They were arraigned on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in the Bronx and released on $50,000 bail each. All three were removed from contact with inmates after the beating and were suspended after their arrests. The beating occurred on Oct. 30, 2012, just after Hurricane Sandy. Tensions were high after the storm, according to a statement by the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson. Rikers was short-staffed and inmates had been locked in their cells for much longer than usual because of the storm. At the George R. Vierno Center, one of the 10 jails at Rikers, an inmate named Gabino Genao became verbally abusive to one of the defendants, officials said. In response, the defendants went into Mr. Genao\u2019s cell, handcuffed him from behind and led him to a vestibule, \u201cwhere one of the officers allegedly threw the first punch, but missed when the inmate ducked,\u201d Mr. Johnson said. The officers then pushed Mr. Genao to the floor, and all three began to punch and kick him in the head, neck and torso, officials said. At one point, one of the officers grabbed a baton and hit him multiple times. He then lost consciousness. Mr. Genao, now 27, suffered multiple contusions that officials said were consistent with the imprint of a standard-issue baton used by the Correction Department. He had been incarcerated for a parole violation. After the beating, officers submitted reports that omitted the use of the baton and were \u201cinconsistent with both the assault of the inmate and the injuries he sustained,\u201d the Investigation Department said. The beating was part of a pattern of brutality, neglect and corruption among correction officers and supervisors that officials say is rampant at Rikers Island. Several recent deaths, including a homeless veteran who died in an overheated cell in February, have prompted fresh scrutiny of the city\u2019s jails. Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed reforms, particularly to treatment of inmates with mental illnesses, who have surged into Rikers in recent years and suffer abuse disproportionally. Jail beatings rarely result in prosecution, but there are exceptions. In June last year, the Bronx district attorney\u2019s office charged 10 jail officers and supervisors, including a former Rikers security chief, with savagely beating an inmate and then conspiring to cover up the attack. The inmate, Jahmal Lightfoot, suffered two fractured eye sockets and a broken nose. After the beating, officers then accused Mr. Lightfoot \u2014 wrongfully, according to prosecutors \u2014 of slashing one of the officers with a makeshift razor. The three arrested on Wednesday are among at least 12 correction workers referred for prosecution as part of an Investigation Department inquiry into contraband smuggling, brutality and corruption at Rikers Island. Last month, 22 people were arrested, including two correction officers, in a contraband sweep . The Investigation Department said Wednesday that more arrests were expected.", "keyword": "Rikers;Moises Simancas;April Jackson;Tyrone Wint;Prison;Security guard;Assault;NYC;Correction Department NYC;Gabino Genao"}
{"id": "ny0017717", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/10/25", "title": "This Time, Error Benefits Cardinals", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 The St. Louis Cardinals returned to playing the brand of baseball they cherish: clean and crisp, coolheaded and clutch. And it still was not working. Still they trailed by a run in the seventh inning, thanks to a go-ahead home run by the irksome Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, sinking toward a two-games-to-none deficit in the World Series. So they took a chance \u2014 a double steal, with one out, putting two runners in scoring position and pressuring the Red Sox\u2019 defense. And in a redemptive twist, Boston proceeded to throw away its lead Thursday, one night after the Cardinals\u2019 defensive miscues were the focus in Game 1. The result was a 4-2 victory for St. Louis at Fenway Park, evening this World Series at one game apiece and affirming that, yes, the Cardinals can loosen up in the spotlight and, yes, the Red Sox can be beaten on this stage. It had not happened since October 1986, Game 7 against the Mets \u2014 a streak of nine consecutive Boston victories in the World Series \u2014 but St. Louis had seen and heard just about enough of all that. \u201cThe guys stayed aggressive,\u201d Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny said. \u201cThat\u2019s the difference between yesterday and today. You saw the aggressiveness offensively.\u201d It was to be expected that the Cardinals, considered among the soundest teams in baseball with 97 regular-season wins, would regroup after Wednesday\u2019s defensive collapse: three errors that ushered in three unearned runs during the Cardinals\u2019 unsightly 8-1 loss. Matheny called it a wake-up call and said his players were embarrassed by their lackluster Series debut. For good measure, he replaced the struggling shortstop Pete Kozma, who committed two errors, and center fielder Shane Robinson, who bobbled a ball, in the Cardinals\u2019 lineup. Image Pete Kozma scored in the seventh, with Jarrod Saltalamacchia unable to corral the ball. Then came a throwing error. Credit Jared Wickerham/Getty Images The result was a near-flawless defensive effort, and a plucky offensive performance that did not wilt after the homer by Ortiz in the sixth tarnished another sensational Michael Wacha performance. In the seventh, the Cardinals put two runners aboard with one out against Boston reliever Craig Breslow, with Kozma pinch-running for David Freese at second base. On a 2-2 pitch to Daniel Descalso, Kozma broke for third (with Jon Jay trailing him to second) and both players reached without a throw after Boston catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia bobbled the pitch. Jay said the steal call was not something issued from the dugout; Kozma read the situation on his own, and Jay alertly followed. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those situations where I know he might take a chance and go for it,\u201d Jay said. After Descalso walked, Matt Carpenter hit a fly ball deep enough to left field to score Kozma on a sacrifice fly, as the throw from Jonny Gomes skittered a bit up the first-base line. But after backing up the throw, Breslow tried to nab Jay, who was advancing to third. His throw sailed into the photographers\u2019 pen along the left-field line, allowing Jay to jog in with the go-ahead run while Descalso moved to third. Carlos Beltran, back in the lineup after a bruised rib knocked him out of Game 1, drove in the third run in the inning with a single to right. It was the second time in the game that St. Louis held a lead \u2014 noteworthy, considering that in 2004, the Cardinals trailed Boston in every inning of the four-game sweep that ended the Red Sox\u2019 86-year title drought. The Cardinals did not have Wacha then \u2014 he was 13 years old \u2014 but the rookie right-hander continued his dominating postseason run on Thursday, limiting the Red Sox to two hits in his first five innings. Only one player on the Red Sox had faced Wacha before, and that was Will Middlebrooks, in high school in Texarkana, Tex. At one point they were teammates on an American Legion squad. Whatever scouting report Middlebrooks could have provided from those memories served little use on Thursday. Wacha, now 22, with his own deep and dark playoff beard, seemed as comfortable as he might have looked on those playing fields of East Texas. Image The Cardinals rookie Michael Wacha had another sensational performance, although his 20-inning scoreless streak was snapped in the sixth. Credit Jared Wickerham/Getty Images His fastball seemed to explode off the top of his 6-foot-6 frame, mixed with a changeup that died off his fingertips. The potent Boston offense that bombarded St. Louis for eight runs on Wednesday was muzzled early. Wacha, only the 11th player age 22 or younger to start a World Series game, struggled with his command at times, and the Red Sox\u2019 patience soon became a factor. Boston\u2019s hitters drew four walks, including Dustin Pedroia with one out in the sixth. The next batter, Ortiz, worked the count full before homering over the Green Monster in left, on a changeup, Wacha\u2019s 103rd pitch. \u201cI made a mistake,\u201d Wacha said, \u201cand he made me pay.\u201d That snapped a 20-inning scoreless streak for Wacha, a postseason record for a rookie, dating to the solo homer he surrendered to Pittsburgh\u2019s Pedro Alvarez in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the National League division series. It also halted Wacha\u2019s bid to match Jon Lester\u2019s shutdown performance the night before, a start that drew additional scrutiny Thursday after speculation flickered on social media outlets that Lester had doctored his pitches. The hubbub began when a Cardinals minor leaguer posted a screen shot on his Twitter account that showed what appeared to be a greenish substance inside Lester\u2019s glove. Red Sox Manager John Farrell wound up addressing the matter along with Lester, who said the discoloration was caused by resin, which helps pitchers maintain their grip on a ball. Matheny said the Cardinals never instigated the matter or questioned anything about Lester\u2019s glove or uniform. \u201cWe don\u2019t deny that some things have been acknowledged,\u201d Matheny said before the game. \u201cAnd if that\u2019s what he claims, then that\u2019s what it is. That\u2019s all there is to it. And right now, it\u2019s pretty much a dead issue.\u201d The matter receded quickly once the game \u2014 a tense and taut affair throughout \u2014 got under way. The Red Sox threatened a final time in the eighth. With Jacoby Ellsbury on first, the Cardinals left in the right-hander Carlos Martinez to pitch to Ortiz, who singled to center. The next batter, Mike Napoli, popped out to shortstop to end the inning. The night before, that ball might have dropped safely or been bobbled or botched by Cardinals players who continually tripped themselves up. Instead, they realigned the series with a reminder of how they reached this point. \u201cWe\u2019re just worried about playing our kind of baseball,\u201d Jay said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we did today.\u201d s.", "keyword": "World Series;Red Sox;St. Louis Cardinals;Michael Wacha;Baseball;Carlos Beltran;John Lackey"}
{"id": "ny0159010", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/12/31", "title": "Unable to Match Success of Elway Era, Shanahan Is Fired by Broncos", "abstract": "Broncos Coach Mike Shanahan spent a decade trying to duplicate the championships he brought to Denver with John Elway as his quarterback. Winning only one playoff game since Elway retired, and knocked out of the playoff hunt again with a season-closing three-game losing streak, Shanahan was fired on Tuesday by Pat Bowlen, the team owner. Shanahan had the second-longest tenure among N.F.L. coaches, behind Jeff Fisher of Tennessee. His dismissal further rocks a rapidly spinning coaching carousel, where four coaches have been fired and several more anxiously await word of their fate. Shanahan should find plenty of suitors if he decides to step immediately into another job. His Super Bowl rings, his reputation as an offensive innovator and his relatively young age (56) make him an attractive candidate to the Jets, the Browns and the Lions. A turn in college football is not out of the question, either. Shanahan seriously considered becoming the coach at Florida in 2002, a job that ultimately went to Ron Zook. Shanahan\u2019s spot in the Colorado landscape was long considered as secure as that of Pikes Peak. Revered for lifting the Broncos and Elway from perennial contender to Super Bowl champions after the 1997 and 1998 seasons, Shanahan earned enough good will for Bowlen to say, a few years ago, that he could coach the Broncos as long as he wished. He had three years left on a contract that was to pay him about $20 million, The Associated Press reported. Last spring, Shanahan and his wife, Peggy, sold their suburban mansion for $16 million, according to The Rocky Mountain News, and began building a 35,000-square-foot home. Then the Broncos became the first team since divisional play began in 1967 to blow a three-game lead with three games remaining. On Sunday, with the American Football Conference West division title at stake, the Broncos lost to the San Diego Chargers, 52-21, to finish 8-8. They missed the playoffs for the third year in a row, the franchise\u2019s longest drought since 1980-82. \u201cAfter giving this careful consideration, I have concluded that a change in our football operations is in the best interests of the Denver Broncos,\u201d Bowlen said in a statement. \u201cThis is certainly a difficult decision, but one that I feel must be made and which will ultimately be in the best interests of all concerned.\u201d Shanahan spent 21 seasons in Denver, initially as a quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator under Dan Reeves, who led the Broncos to three Super Bowls in the 1980s \u2014 all defeats. After a 20-game stint coaching the Raiders (Al Davis fired Shanahan four games into the 1989 season, and the two have feuded since over money that Shanahan says he is still owed) and two more seasons as a Broncos assistant, Shanahan became the offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers. Working under Coach George Seifert and tutoring quarterback Steve Young, Shanahan helped the high-octane 49ers to a championship in 1994. Bowlen brought Shanahan back to Denver as the coach in 1995, as Elway\u2019s career was winding down and his legacy seemed saddled by those three Super Bowl losses. The Broncos went 13-3 in 1996, losing to Tom Coughlin\u2019s Jacksonville Jaguars in a playoff upset. But the Broncos went 12-4 and 14-2 the next two seasons, capped by Super Bowl victories that bestowed heroic status on Shanahan and Elway in the Mountain Time Zone. Shanahan could not find another quarterback to mold into a champion. He invested four seasons with Brian Griese, four with Jake Plummer and the past two with Jay Cutler. Although Cutler gave the Broncos hope for the future, Shanahan was ultimately undone by an increasingly leaky defense, something a revolving door of defensive coordinators could not seal, and a string of questionable draft picks and free-agent signings that Shanahan made as the team\u2019s executive vice president for football operations. In Shanahan\u2019s absence, the Broncos are in the market for a general manager as well. The Broncos\u2019 defense was ranked among the league\u2019s top seven in seven of the nine seasons beginning in 1997. In the last four years, however, the defense plunged to middle-of-the-pack status, then to No. 29 in 2008.In 16 seasons as an N.F.L. head coach, Shanahan compiled a 146-98 record. His teams were 8-5 in the playoffs, but 1-4 in the decade since Elway retired after Super Bowl XXXIII.", "keyword": "Football;Denver Broncos;Shanahan Mike"}
{"id": "ny0191616", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/02/18", "title": "P.C. Richard Takes On the New Jersey Turnpike", "abstract": "CARTERET, N.J. \u2014 Turning old industrial land into a sprightly new retail area is rarely easy, even in the best of times, but the task can seem especially daunting when the land in question sits next to a highway that is not a natural retail draw to begin with. Unlike certain highways in the state, the 148-mile New Jersey Turnpike, with widely dispersed interchanges and a paucity of retail sites, has long held more appeal for distribution companies and truckers than for shoppers. Still, that is not stopping one longstanding New York area retailer, P. C. Richard & Son of Farmingdale, N.Y., from pursuing a 15-acre development project that fronts the turnpike in this still heavily industrialized borough. The company, a regional seller of consumer electronics and appliances, is banking on the project to help it expand to the west and north of New York City and Long Island and improve its distribution operations. While few electronics retailers across the country are expanding and Circuit City is shuttering all of its 567 stores nationally, P. C. Richard, which in 2008 had sales of $1.5 billion, is still increasing its store numbers and its reach. It opened a store last fall, for instance, in Nanuet, N.Y., giving the company its first outlet in Rockland County. Founded by the Dutch immigrant Peter Christiaan Richard, who opened a hardware store in Brooklyn in 1909, the company now has 51 stores in New York and New Jersey. Until recently, P. C. Richard operated both a one-million-square-foot warehouse in Farmingdale and a 158,000-square-foot distribution center in Whippany, N.J., which it had leased for 10 years. Served by 50 to 75 trucks a day, the Whippany center was also home to a large employee training center. In early January, the company moved its Whippany distribution and employee training operations to a renovated 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Carteret that was once used by the Herman\u2019s sporting goods chain, now defunct, and then by a variety of shorter-term tenants. It sits on a development site in western Carteret that directly fronts the turnpike at Exit 12. This is in a rundown section of the borough, but it has been tagged for retail redevelopment, partly because it is connected by Roosevelt Avenue, one of the borough\u2019s main thoroughfares, with heavily trafficked Route 1, one of the busiest retail corridors in the state. Last year, P. C. Richard signed a four-year lease for the warehouse, with a commitment to buy it, at a price it would not disclose. Elsewhere on the site, the company bought a 64,370-square-foot building, which is still occupied by an automotive parts company, but which is to be remade within a year into a large P. C. Richard store and clearance center. The company already has a 55,000-square-foot center in Deer Park, N.Y. \u201cWe think our new facility puts us in an enviable position for our next round of growth in the state,\u201d said Gregg Richard, the president of the company, which is now run by fourth-generation family members. Mr. Richard said the larger distribution center in Carteret would enable the company to more efficiently serve customers who now live as far west as Pennsylvania, as well as the growing number of buyers who ask the company to both deliver and install products like flat-screen television sets. He said P. C. Richard offered next-day delivery seven days a week on any product in stock. Thomas R. Carragher, branch manager for the northern New Jersey office at Studley, a real estate firm that specializes in representing tenants, said that P. C. Richard first began looking for a larger New Jersey warehouse and training facility about five years ago, and that the search eventually extended to some half-dozen counties. \u201cWe wanted to find the needle in the haystack \u2014 a modern distribution building that would give them highway signage, retail potential, and that could also be purchased,\u201d said Gregg K. Najarian, a Studley managing director who worked with Mr. Carragher to find the site in Carteret, which is in Middlesex County. Still, borough officials, as well as some local real estate owners, are clearly hoping that P. C. Richard will eventually help to put Carteret on the retail map. One factor that is expected to improve Carteret\u2019s prospects for attracting a broader business base is an overhaul now under way at Exit 12, where ramps, toll gates and toll lanes are being redesigned to alleviate truck traffic on local streets like Roosevelt Avenue and allow for easier turnpike access. Until recently, the interchange was a chronic source of congestion for motorists and for the many distribution companies, even though they generally liked Carteret\u2019s proximity to New York and to the New Jersey port area and Newark Liberty International Airport . The exit overhaul is still only about two-thirds finished, but Frank V. Caccavo Jr., an executive vice president for Cushman & Wakefield of New Jersey, said it had already led to a positive change in how distribution and warehouse companies look at the borough. William Sitar Jr., a vice president at the Sitar Company, a real estate services company in Iselin, noted that it was already easier for motorists to get to some of the retail businesses in the eastern part of the borough. Like many towns in New Jersey, Carteret\u2019s fortunes were once closely tied to the chemical industry, with companies including DuPont, Mobil and Agrico, and more recently to warehouse and distribution companies. While the borough still has sizable brownfields, it now also has 17 areas, including some former polluted sites, that have been designated for development. Some of the borough\u2019s old industrial pockets have already gone to new residential development, like the 288-unit Bristol Station, a gated luxury apartment project that opened in 2007 in an area near the waterfront. But so far retailers have been slow in moving to the 4.4-mile-square borough, even though its population is growing, unlike many towns in New Jersey. One problem is location: Sitting opposite Staten Island on the Arthur Kill Waterway, with the Rahway River to its north, the almost peninsula-shaped borough is often bypassed for nearby towns like Woodbridge and Linden, which are easier to reach. \u201cP. C. Richard is one of the most dynamic retailers here so far,\u201d said Kathaleen R. Shaw, the borough\u2019s director of economic development.", "keyword": "Office Buildings and Commercial Properties;Area Planning and Renewal;Retail Stores and Trade;Richard P C & Son;Roads and Traffic;New Jersey;Relocation of Business"}
{"id": "ny0286913", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2016/08/04", "title": "Redskins Try to Dazzle Without Putting on a Show", "abstract": "RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 Chris Thompson saw his friend and former teammate Robert Griffin III at the airport before camp. They chatted and went their separate ways. Their early October meeting was still a long way away. With Griffin now in Cleveland and the Redskins\u2019 starting quarterback job firmly in the hands of Kirk Cousins, the Washington Redskins\u2019 training camp has lacked the buzz and the drama of past years. At this year\u2019s camp, the only remnants of Griffin\u2019s tumultuous tenure with the team are the No. 10 jerseys worn by a few fans. Welcome to Camp Boring \u2014 which was exactly what Coach Jay Gruden wanted. \u201cWell, we don\u2019t want a three-ring circus out here,\u201d Gruden said Tuesday. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s been like that in the past, probably when I first got here, but our goal is to coach football and play football. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get the best out of our guys. We\u2019re not trying to do any crazy stunts off the field. We just want to focus in on our job at hand, and that\u2019s to get better every day.\u201d The sense of calm around the Redskins was unusual for an organization that has had a chaotic recent past. The team made an off-season splash by signing the All-Pro cornerback Josh Norman. He has been notable in camp so far by going up against the star receiver DeSean Jackson during drills and kicking a soccer ball around afterward to build camaraderie with his teammates. The biggest question regards receiver Josh Doctson, the first-round pick with the nagging Achilles\u2019 tendon injury. He has been wearing a walking boot on his left foot. General Manager Scot McCloughan has been walking around with his left hand wrapped, reportedly the result of hitting something in anger after learning that Doctson was expected to remain out for weeks. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to work him hard one day and then let him rest the next day, and keeping him in the boot is the best option we feel like right now,\u201d Gruden said. Doctson has no time frame for joining practice, let alone being ready for games. But if that is the biggest cause of consternation around the Redskins, they will take it. \u201cThere\u2019s no drama; there\u2019s no distractions,\u201d said Thompson, the Redskins\u2019 second-string running back. \u201cIt\u2019s just come to work and get better,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s boring in a good way. We\u2019re just all here to work, and that\u2019s just the goal. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve been wanting to do for the longest \u2014 just get all the drama out and play football. Now we\u2019re able to do that.\u201d Smaller crowds than previous years will not make Richmond officials happy, but there have been plenty of fans during workouts. Veterans who have been through plenty of camps brushed off the idea of boredom but conceded that this was not like any other year. They were not being asked about Griffin, the team\u2019s nickname or any other issues. \u201cIt is good because you don\u2019t have the frenzy of the reporters, and what we\u2019re talking about is football and talking about football can only make you better, especially when you\u2019ve got the right guys in the locker room,\u201d said defensive lineman Kedric Golston, who is entering his 11th season with Washington. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to talk about it or waste an ounce of energy on things that\u2019s not going to help us win.\u201d Coming off an improbable N.F.C. East title, the Redskins say that having Cousins as their quarterback, Matt Jones as their featured running back and Norman as their No. 1 cornerback will bolster their record. The signings of tight end Vernon Davis and safety David Bruton Jr., who both won the Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos, have added to the depth and have provided competition in camp. The fiercest competition might be Bruton vs. Duke Ihenacho for the starting strong safety job. Perry Riley vs. Mason Foster at inside linebacker and Spencer Long vs. Shawn Lauvao at left guard also bear watching. Told that his camp was calm and almost boring, Gruden laughed and said, \u201cThanks.\u201d He would like to keep it that way. \u201cWe have a long ways to go, but all the off-the-field stuff and the entertainment value that people are looking for, hopefully they don\u2019t find it here,\u201d Gruden said, adding, \u201cWe\u2019re very businesslike in our approach, and we\u2019re trying to rebound from last year\u2019s loss to the Packers and repeat as N.F.C. East champions and go a little bit further.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Redskins;Kirk Cousins;Robert Griffin III"}
{"id": "ny0225235", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/10/27", "title": "Schwarzenegger, Brown and Whitman Finally Share a Stage", "abstract": "LONG BEACH, Calif. \u2014 With less than a week until Election Day, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has become a chunk of kryptonite that the candidates to succeed him lob at each other. But even as the candidates, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, scrambled to distance themselves from the governor, they shared a stage with him on Tuesday for the first time this election cycle. The event was a panel discussion, titled \u201cWho We Are, Where Are We Going\u201d and moderated by Matt Lauer of NBC\u2019s \u201cToday\u201d show, that was the centerpiece of an annual women\u2019s conference organized by Maria Shriver, Mr. Schwarzenegger\u2019s wife. The governor entered to a swell of music after a short video that extolled his time in office. Ms. Whitman \u2014 who, like Mr. Schwarzenegger, is a Republican \u2014 and Mr. Brown, the Democratic nominee, followed. After perfunctory handshakes, they flanked Mr. Schwarzenegger around a small table. Mr. Schwarzenegger has not endorsed either candidate, but his image has loomed large in recent days. The Brown campaign introduced an advertisement featuring sound bites from Mr. Schwarzenegger spliced with clips of Ms. Whitman making nearly identical remarks. In response, Ms. Whitman said Mr. Brown\u2019s tax strategies and environmental ideas augured more of what the Schwarzenegger administration had been dishing up. The conference program also included speeches by Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, as well as talks about \u201cwork-life balance\u201d and weight loss. When Mr. Lauer pressed the candidates to \u201cpull all negative ads and replace them with positive ads\u201d in the remaining days of the race, Mr. Schwarzenegger sat back as Mr. Brown pledged to comply and Ms. Whitman smiled at the cheering audience. \u201cI will say,\u201d Ms. Whitman said after a pause, \u201cthe things I have been called in this campaign, it\u2019s not fair to the voters of California.\u201d Mr. Lauer asked for a handshake, a verbal pledge, any clear agreement to his challenge before time ran out on the panel. Mr. Schwarzenegger leaned forward and assumed the role of referee. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s hard to come to an agreement now, in front of an audience,\u201d he said. \u201cI can already see the political spin masters in the back saying, \u2018Why did you do that?\u2019 \u201d The three then stood for a photograph, posing with hands stiffly at their sides for several seconds, to a soundtrack of frantic drumming. Mr. Schwarzenegger reached up and gripped Mr. Brown\u2019s and Ms. Whitman\u2019s shoulders, pulling their heads close to his big grin.", "keyword": "Whitman Margaret C;Brown Jerry;Schwarzenegger Arnold;California;Lauer Matt"}
{"id": "ny0106949", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/04/30", "title": "Accretive Denies Claims It Pressured Patients to Pay", "abstract": "Accretive Health , one of the nation\u2019s largest collectors of medical bills, took issue on Sunday with a report by the Minnesota attorney general\u2019s office that it puts bedside pressure on patients to pay their bills. The allegations \u201cgrossly distort and mischaracterize\u201d the company\u2019s revenue cycle services, it said in a statement. The suggestion that Accretive puts bedside pressure on patients to pay their bills out of pocket is a \u201cflagrant distortion of fact,\u201d the company said. It said it was working with its advisers to address those allegations. Accretive shares plunged nearly 42 percent on Wednesday after Attorney General Lori Swanson of Minnesota issued a report contending that Accretive violated federal and state patient-privacy and debt-collection laws. She said that in some cases patients at Fairview Health Services, a Minnesota hospital chain, were pressured for payment before they received care and that Accretive\u2019s debt collectors did not properly disclose their role. Accretive said in its statement that it did not deny access to patient care and that the allegations were \u201cflatly untrue.\u201d Ms. Swanson said last week that employees at Fairview, a nonprofit chain of seven hospitals based in Minneapolis, were required to use a system to track whether patients paid their bills. Accretive said late Friday that Fairview had canceled its contract with the company.", "keyword": "Accretive Health Inc;Swanson Lori;Minnesota;Hospitals;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0108744", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/05/29", "title": "Tibet Self-Immolations Moves to Lhasa", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 One man died and another was seriously injured when they set themselves on fire outside Tibetan Buddhism\u2019s holiest temple in the center of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. It was the first time that such protests against Chinese rule have occurred in the city. The self-immolations occurred on Sunday afternoon outside the Jokhang Temple during the holy month of Saga Dawa, when followers of Tibetan Buddhism celebrate the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha. They were the most significant act of protest in Lhasa since an uprising in 2008 that was crushed by Chinese security forces. The authorities stepped up security in Lhasa after the uprising, particularly in the central market area known as the Barkhor. The Jokhang Temple, which is a pilgrimage destination, is in the heart of the area. That two men set themselves on fire in Lhasa, far from the sites of earlier self-immolations in eastern Tibet and under tight security since 2008, underscores the widening discontent over Chinese rule. At least 36 people in the Tibetan regions of China have set themselves on fire since March 2011, when a monk named Phuntsog from the Kirti Monastery set himself on fire in Ngaba, a town in a Tibetan area of Sichuan Province. Xinhua identified the two protesters on Sunday as Dargye, from Aba County, the Chinese name for Ngaba, and Tobgye Tseten, from Xiahe County, or Labrang in Tibetan, the seat of the famous Labrang Monastery and a center of protests against Chinese rule. Both counties are in the region of eastern Tibet that is traditionally known as Amdo and where the worlds of the ethnic Tibetans and ethnic Hans have overlapped. The Han rule China, and many Tibetans resent Beijing\u2019s policies in Tibet and the Han who migrate into Tibetan regions for work and business opportunities. Tobgye Tseten died in the fire he set, Xinhua said, but Dargye survived. He was seriously injured, the news agency said, but was in stable condition and able to talk. Harriet Beaumont, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Free Tibet, identified the man who died as Dorjee Tseten, 19, from Bhora in Labrang County. She said the two men shouted three times outside the temple before setting themselves on fire, but it was not immediately clear what they said. Afterward, she said, security officers began detaining Tibetans, especially those from Ngaba County. A man who answered the telephone at the Yarlung Tsangpo Hotel in Lhasa said security in the city had been tightened and additional security forces sent in. The man, who gave his name as Mr. Liu, said it was unclear whether the new forces were made up of regular police officers or were units of the People\u2019s Armed Police, a paramilitary force that is usually called out to quell riots and maintain security in the restive ethnic regions of western China. Robert J. Barnett, a scholar of modern Tibet at Columbia University, said a Tibetan in Lhasa had told him the city was in a \u201cboiling situation\u201d after the self-immolations. \u201cWe\u2019re now seeing self-immolations that seem to be political expressions that are in sympathy with the core incidents that happened earlier,\u201d Mr. Barnett said. \u201cThe Chinese officials are really worried,\u201d he said, because the latest protests seem to be \u201cdriven by an idea, a political goal.\u201d By contrast, he said, the earlier self-immolations in Ngaba were largely in reaction to security clampdowns at the Kirti Monastery after the 2008 uprising. Ngaba has been the center of the self-immolations, but Tibetans have now set themselves on fire in areas across the vast Tibetan plateau. Most have been members of the clergy. Before the self-immolations in Lhasa, there had been just one such protest in the Tibet Autonomous Region, by a layman in the eastern area known as Chamdo. The self-immolations on Sunday were first reported by Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, which have contact with Tibetans in western China. Voice of America reported that the two men worked at a restaurant in Lhasa called Nyima Ling. Radio Free Asia said the two were monks who were taken away in security vehicles within 15 minutes of setting themselves on fire. In March, President Hu Jintao of China told the Tibet delegates to the National People\u2019s Congress in Beijing that they must exert a \u201ccontinuous effort in sustaining social harmony and stability.\u201d Official news reports say Chen Quanguo, the current party chief of Tibet, repeated Mr. Hu\u2019s words in public meetings and said officials would \u201cpersist in the thought that stability overrides all.\u201d", "keyword": "Immolation;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Buddhism;Dalai Lama;Tibet;China"}
{"id": "ny0215163", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/04/03", "title": "Vatican Priest Likens Criticism Over Abuse to Anti-Semitism", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world\u2019s outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews, prompting angry responses from victims\u2019 advocates and consternation from Jewish groups. The Vatican spokesman quickly distanced the Vatican from the remarks, which came on the day Christians mark the Crucifixion. They underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and from criticism over how it has handled charges of child molesting against priests in the past. The pope and his bishops have denounced abuses in the church, but many prelates and Vatican officials have lashed back at news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of the Vatican\u2019s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Vatican has denied that he was at fault, and Vatican officials have variously described the reports as \u201cdeceitful,\u201d an effort to undermine the church and a \u201cdefamatory campaign.\u201d Speaking in St. Peter\u2019s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews. \u201cThey know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,\u201d said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household. Then he quoted from what he said was a letter from a Jewish friend he did not identify. \u201cI am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,\u201d he said the friend wrote. \u201cThe use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.\u201d Good Friday has traditionally been a fraught day in Catholic-Jewish relations. Until the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic liturgy included a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, and Catholic teaching held Jews responsible for the Crucifixion. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, stressed that Father Cantalamessa\u2019s sermon represented his own thoughts and was not an official Vatican statement. Father Lombardi said the remarks should not be construed as equating recent criticism of the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s an appropriate comparison,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why the letter should be read as a letter of solidarity by a Jew.\u201d Yet the official Vatican newspaper, L\u2019Osservatore Romano, published the remarks in its Saturday edition, which appeared online on Friday evening. Even as the priest spoke out against attacks on the church, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, head of the German Bishops Conference, said Friday that sexual abuse victims were not helped enough \u201cout of a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church.\u201d The church, he said, was shaken by \u201cthe suffering inflicted on the victims, who often for decades could not put their injuries into words.\u201d Bishops around Europe have been offering similar remarks in recent days, following a major statement by the pope on molesting in the Irish church. Father Cantalamessa\u2019s comments about the Jews came toward the end of a long talk about Scripture, the nature of violence and the sacrifice of Jesus. He also spoke at length about violence against women, but gave only slight mention of the children and adolescents who had been molested by priests. \u201cI am not speaking here of violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained; of that there is sufficient talk outside of here,\u201d he said. Disclosures about hundreds of such cases have emerged in recent months in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria and France, after a previous round of scandal in the United States. A leading advocate for sexual abuse victims in the United States, David Clohessy, called comparing criticism of the church to persecution of the Jews \u201cbreathtakingly callous and misguided.\u201d \u201cMen who deliberately and consistently hide child sex crime are in no way victims,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd to conflate public scrutiny with horrific violence is about as wrong as wrong can be.\u201d Another American victims\u2019 advocate rejected the Vatican\u2019s statement distancing itself from the remarks. \u201cFather Cantalamessa chose to equate calumny against the Jewish people as the same as criticism of Pope Benedict,\u201d said Kristine Ward, a spokeswoman for the National Survivor Advocates Coalition. \u201cIt is incomprehensible that Father Cantalamessa did this and that Pope Benedict, the ultimate authority in this church who presided at the service, did not stand during the service to disavow this connection to anti-Semitism.\u201d The comments also ruffled Vatican-Jewish relations, which have often been tense during Benedict\u2019s papacy. Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, who was host to Benedict at the Rome synagogue in January on a visit that helped calm waters after a year of tensions, laughed in seeming disbelief when asked about Father Cantalamessa\u2019s remarks. \u201cWith a minimum of irony, I will say that today is Good Friday, when they pray that the Lord illuminate our hearts so we recognize Jesus,\u201d Rabbi Di Segni said, referring to a prayer in the traditional Catholic liturgy calling for the conversion of the Jews. \u201cWe also pray that the Lord illuminate theirs.\u201d Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, attributed the remarks to ignorance, not malice. \u201cYou would think that a senior priest in the church would have a better understanding of anti-Semitism than to make this hideous comparison,\u201d he said. Benedict caused friction with Jewish groups in 2007 when he issued a ruling making it easier to use the Latin Mass , including that Good Friday prayer. In January 2009, he stirred outrage when he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom turned out to have denied the scope of the Holocaust. Father Cantalamessa\u2019s remarks come after weeks of intense scrutiny of Benedict, which some in the Italian news media have seen in conspiratorial terms. Last week, the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica wrote , without attribution, that \u201ccertain Catholic circles\u201d believed the criticism of the church stemmed from \u201ca New York \u2018Jewish lobby.\u201d Father Cantalamessa is a longtime fixture in the papal household, having been appointed its official preacher by Pope John Paul II in 1980. The apostolic preacher, as he also is called, gives meditations \u2014 especially during Advent and Lent \u2014 for the pope and Vatican hierarchy. The role was established by Pope Paul IV in the middle of the 16th century, and the job was later reserved for a member of the Franciscan Order of Capuchin Friars Minor. Father Cantalamessa was also tasked to deliver a meditation on the problems facing the church and need for careful consideration to the college of cardinals shortly after the death of John Paul II, as they prepared to elect his successor. Their choice was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.", "keyword": "Benedict XVI;Roman Catholic Church;Cantalamessa Raniero;Child Abuse and Neglect;Anti-Semitism;Sex Crimes"}
{"id": "ny0035618", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/03/18", "title": "Magic Sign a Center", "abstract": "The Orlando Magic signed center Dewayne Dedmon for the remainder of the regular season. Dedmon, who signed the first of two 10-day contracts on Feb. 25, is averaging 2.3 points and 1.0 rebound per game for Orlando.", "keyword": "Basketball;Orlando Magic"}
{"id": "ny0235219", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/01/07", "title": "Advocate Faults I.R.S. on Collecting Delinquent Taxes", "abstract": "The Internal Revenue Service \u2019s collection of delinquent taxes from 2005 to 2007 was substantially less than initially reported, an agency watchdog said Wednesday. The I.R.S. collected only about $86 billion in delinquent taxes over the 2005-7 fiscal years \u2014 about 27 percent less than the $118 billion it originally reported as having taken in, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the oversight arm of the I.R.S., said Wednesday in its annual report . \u201cThere is an astonishing lack of transparency as to what is included in these revenue figures and how they are computed,\u201d wrote Nina E. Olson, the report\u2019s author and the national taxpayer advocate. She added that \u201ca thorough assessment of the effectiveness of I.R.S. collection practices\u201d was \u201cimpossible.\u201d The report, which is required by law, criticized the I.R.S. for burying the lower figure in a footnote and for not explaining how either number was calculated. In addition to the collection information, the report singled out poor customer service at the agency, saying that the single biggest problem at the agency was getting an I.R.S. representative to pick up the phone when a taxpayer called with questions. Only six out of 10 callers now get through, after an average waiting time of 12 minutes, compared with eight out of 10 three years ago. The report called the I.R.S.\u2019s customer service \u2014 a focus of the agency \u2014 \u201cunacceptable.\u201d In a response to the report, the I.R.S. said that the \u201cresources available to deliver telephone services are finite and staffing allocations must be made in light of competing demands necessary to meet other customer needs and preferences.\u201d The report criticized the I.R.S. for what it called its excessive use of liens, which are claims levied on property or income to secure a taxpayer\u2019s unpaid tax bills. The liens, it said, which are processed by computer, not by people, are increasingly filed against taxpayers with little or no property. In its response, the I.R.S. said that claims filed against property or future income increased the odds that taxpayers would eventually pay their overdue tax bills. The report also criticized an I.R.S. initiative that would increase monitoring of tax preparers, a largely unregulated industry used by many of America\u2019s more than 131 million tax filers. The rules do not cover so-called back-room tax preparers \u2014 the majority of actual preparers \u2014 who fill in the returns and then hand them to a superior for signature.", "keyword": "Internal Revenue Service;Federal Taxes (US);Customer Relations"}
{"id": "ny0269221", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/04/28", "title": "Target Steps Out in Front of Bathroom Choice Debate", "abstract": "A new policy over bathroom choice has thrust the retailer Target into the center of a nationwide debate over gender identity, civil rights and privacy. Last week, Target announced on its website that it would allow transgender employees and customers to choose the restroom and fitting room that corresponded with their gender identities. About a month earlier, North Carolina passed a law restricting bathroom access to transgender people, a bill that set off a national debate that has even extended to the presidential campaign. The company\u2019s announcement \u2014 the most prominent position taken by a national retailer \u2014 was greeted by cheers from supporters of transgender rights. It has since also made Target the intense focus of conservative activists, lawmakers and consumers, who oppose the company\u2019s stance, highlighting the potential risks when a company takes a position on a hotly debated social issue. Some groups have used Target\u2019s announcement as a rallying cry, arguing that Target\u2019s policy threatens the public\u2019s safety. An online petition started by one group, the American Family Association, calling for a boycott of Target stores, has been signed by more than 900,000 people. On Tuesday, the City Council in Oxford, Ala., passed an ordinance forbidding people to use a bathroom that does not match the gender assigned to them at birth. Target has a store in the city. \u201cI will no longer be shopping at your store and neither will any of my family members and friends,\u201d one person commented on Target\u2019s Facebook page. \u201cYou have all lost your minds.\u201d Equipped with a growing arsenal of digital tools to organize boycotts, spread poor reviews and otherwise negatively impact sales, consumers are increasingly putting pressure on companies to address their concerns. Policies on gender and sexuality have repeatedly become points of contention, putting some businesses on the front lines of battles over social issues. Last year, for example, a number of companies vocally opposed so-called religious freedom laws intended to give businesses legal cover to deny services to gays and lesbians. Walmart, the nation\u2019s largest retailer, was among the most prominent voices, and its influence was widely credited with pushing the governor in its home state of Arkansas to sign an amended version of the state\u2019s religious freedom bill. And the head of Chick-fil-A, the restaurant chain, took a position against gay marriage in 2012 only to back off two years later and say that he had not meant to alienate customers. \u201cGenerally speaking, as you saw in the gay marriage debate, the big corporations tend to be out in front of Congress and most of the states in implementing anti-discrimination policies,\u201d said William Eskridge, a professor at Yale Law School and a co-author of \u201cSexuality, Gender and the Law.\u201d \u201cThe policies generally do not cost the corporations anything or very much, and they create some degree of good will,\u201d he said. The ordinance in Oxford would make it a misdemeanor for people to use bathrooms that do not correspond to the gender on their birth certificates. Target\u2019s liability in such a situation is unclear. A company spokeswoman, Molly Snyder, said Target would comply with all local laws. But she also said, \u201cOur belief in and commitment to inclusivity has not changed.\u201d Ms. Snyder said the company\u2019s policy had applied to employees for years, though it had not been as widely distributed. She referred to the original announcement, which said that Target \u201cregularly\u201d assesses issues that could affect business, guests and employees, and \u201cgiven the specific questions\u201d raised by recent legislative proposals, \u201cwe felt it was important to state our position.\u201d Target may be betting on a more progressive shift in national attitudes on gender and sexuality. Many states have updated their statutes barring employers from discriminating based on sexual identity to include gender identity, too. \u201cMaking these progressive value statements is a new form of advertising,\u201d said Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. There may also be more practical benefits than just netting good will: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, has made it clear that blocking workers from using bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities violates federal law . \u201cAny employer that has a rule to the contrary is going to find itself in very hot water,\u201d said Jillian T. Weiss, a professor of law and society at Ramapo College who has worked on a number of cases involving transgender workplace issues. \u201cCompanies have got to be aware that federal law essentially prohibits them from having rules like the one passed in Alabama.\u201d Other companies, including Barnes & Noble and Hudson\u2019s Bay Company, also have policies explicitly allowing transgender people to use a bathroom that does not correspond to their birth certificate gender. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that other corporations will see that there is a price to pay, potentially at least, for pushing this L.G.B.T. agenda too far,\u201d said Tim Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association. \u201cWe just think this is a bridge too far.\u201d", "keyword": "Target;Bathrooms;Transgender,Gender Dysphoria;Discrimination;Boycott;American Family Assn"}
{"id": "ny0075048", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/04/15", "title": "Germany and Greece Locked in a Mutual Obsession", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 Lest Greeks forget, the Germans are watching. Closely. When the leftist Syriza-led government was elected in Greece on Jan. 25, public broadcasters broke into Germany\u2019s favorite crime series to announce the result. Television stations went live to Athens several times that night. Years of crisis over Greece\u2019s finances have often pitted Europe\u2019s weakest economy against Europe\u2019s economic powerhouse. German admiration for ancient Greece \u2014 dating back at least to Goethe \u2014 has given way to hard-nosed pragmatism, even in the face of increasing hardship in Greece. Having contributed the largest share of the 240 billion euros, or $255 billion, of credits extended to Athens, Germany believes that it has done the most to keep Greece solvent and in the eurozone. And Germans keep tabs on their money. Journalists and politicians here fret daily about Athens\u2019 willingness to keep agreements with international creditors, or, by accident or design, leaving the eurozone. Complex graphs on Greek debt are a staple of newscasts that veer from patronizing to panicky. Less seriously, they ponder whether Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, 40, will ever wear a tie. For weeks, the countries\u2019 finance ministers sparred almost daily. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Mr. Tsipras called a halt when the Greek leader came to Berlin and was received with full honors. But tempers were not assuaged for long. As Mr. Tsipras headed to Moscow last week, his deputy finance minister declared that Germany owed Greece \u20ac287 billion in reparations for the Nazi occupation in World War II. That argument over compensation for tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and repayment of a forced loan, has endured for decades. Ms. Merkel\u2019s government insists that the matter is closed, while recognizing continued \u201cmoral responsibility\u201d for war crimes. Some opposition figures in Germany are open to new payments to Greece. But the latest demand tested even Ms. Merkel\u2019s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the center-left Social Democrats. \u201cHonestly, I find it stupid,\u201d Mr. Gabriel said. \u201cThe Greeks have an interest in opening up space for a changed policy. That has nothing at all to do with World War II, or reparations.\u201d Predictably, in the Greek echo chamber, Mr. Gabriel was presented as branding all Greeks as \u201cdumb.\u201d German politicians, meanwhile, backed by a Brussels chorus, worried that Greece would break ranks on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. The visit to Moscow was \u201ca threatening gesture,\u201d thundered Elmar Brok, a Merkel party ally and veteran of European politics. Martin Schulz, the German who heads the European Parliament, warned Greece not to seek \u201csolidarity\u201d in Moscow and to remember which government (Europe, Germany) had shown the most \u201csolidarity\u201d to date. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and Greeks living in each other\u2019s country feel squeezed. Jens Bastian, a German economist in Greece for 16 years, was on morning television in Germany last week, pleading for calm. \u201cI am often surprised and frustrated\u201d by the German news media, he said by telephone afterward. \u201cTone it down,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t get hysterical.\u201d Meanwhile, he says, the Greek news media seizes on almost any utterance about Greece for at least 10 minutes of any evening\u2019s hourlong newscasts. That attitude compounds what he calls two mistakes of the Greek government. First, it won a mandate not for change in Europe, but for \u201ca change \u2014 or at least attempting one \u2014 in Greece.\u201d Second, \u201cyou cannot take a confrontational approach to Germany,\u201d a main creditor and trade and political partner. \u201cYou need to have Germany on side, not off.\u201d Pigi Mourmouri, 67, a retired social worker from Greece who has lived in Berlin for over 40 years, resents some of what she sees here. \u201cI have felt bad, because I had to justify myself,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd that is not a good feeling.\u201d Besides, the \u201carrogance and superiority\u201d of some German news outlets is hard to miss. Instead of advancing European unity, as the euro was supposed to do, she said, people are thrown back on themselves. \u201cYou feel it in small ways,\u201d she said, citing a carnival two years ago. The host welcomed her and a friend warmly but ignored them once he realized that they were Greek. From both Germany and Greece, she said, \u201cI try to take the best. That is a luxury I still have.\u201d", "keyword": "Europe;Greece;Germany;Euro Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0262152", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/06/12", "title": "The Mets\u2019 Bat Whisperer", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 Whenever he receives a new box of bats, Carlos Beltran takes each bat out, holds it to his ear and raps it, gently but convincingly, with the base of his hand, his head cocked, one eye shut, concentrating like a virtuoso tuning his violin. Mark Fidrych was once considered an eccentric for talking to baseballs. Carlos Beltran listens to his bats. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this since my second year in the big leagues,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s part of me, part of feeling comfortable. As a player, you know what is best for you. This doesn\u2019t make me the hitter I am, but maybe it gives me a little edge.\u201d Hitting a baseball is first and foremost about seeing a pitch, but for Beltran, it\u2019s about hearing a pitch, too: the sound a bat makes when struck with his hand. When Beltran hears the right pitch vibrate from a 32-ounce piece of lumber, it produces a tone that for him is as sweet as music. Ever since he was taught by one of the great hitters in the game to appreciate the melody that each bat inherently produces, Beltran has followed the practice religiously. The higher the pitch tone, the harder and more dense the wood, Beltran said. The harder the wood, the farther the ball is expected to travel. \u201cThe higher the pitch, the better,\u201d he said, referring to the tone. \u201cBetter means stronger and harder, more compressed.\u201d Beltran, who leads the Mets in home runs with 9 and runs batted in with 37, and is tied for the lead in the National League with 20 doubles, learned the auditory technique from Edgar Martinez, the Seattle Mariners designated hitter, who used his high-pitched bats to rap 2,247 career hits. In Beltran\u2019s second full year with the Kansas City Royals in 2000, he was chatting with Martinez at the batting cage at Safeco Field about their bats. Beltran was using a Louisville Slugger C243 at the time, and Martinez had an M356, which is similar but has a thinner handle. Known for meticulously weighing each bat, Martinez asked Beltran how much his weighed, and Beltran said they were usually 31.5 to 32 ounces. Martinez took one, held it close to his ear and banged it with his hand as he listened. Beltran was immediately curious. \u201cI said, \u2018What are you doing?\u2019 \u201d Beltran recalled. \u201cHe said, \u2018I just like to hear the pitch of the sound of the bat.\u2019 I said, \u2018For what reason?\u2019 And he said, \u2018The higher the pitch, the better the wood.\u2019 \u201d For Beltran, those became words to hit by. When Beltran sifts through a box of new bats, he places them into three categories: best, medium and batting practice. He said that in a typical box of a dozen new Marucci maple bats \u2014 model CB15 \u2014 his preferred brand the past five years, he might find five or six with a high enough pitch to use in a game. Then he labels each one in tiny print with a pen on the handle butt. \u201cI separate them in three classes,\u201d he said. \u201cGood, so-so and batting practice. I put BP on those, and on the other ones I put 1 and 2. A 1 means it\u2019s the best. Sometimes, when I run out of bats, I might take a 2 for a game. Nobody has really asked me about it, so I haven\u2019t really shared it with anyone. It\u2019s just something I do myself. I don\u2019t even think about it. I just get my bats and listen to them and separate them.\u201d Jack Marucci, the founder and president of the company bearing his name, called Beltran a master technician, and said his listening technique reflected more scientific density measurements his company did on its wood, from trees grown in central Pennsylvania and shipped to the factory in Louisiana. But Marucci, not wanting to tip off the competition, would not reveal what those measurements entail. Like Martinez before him, Beltran also carefully weighs his bats, using a digital scale in the Mets\u2019 clubhouse, and will keep track of even one-tenth of an ounce difference. On days when he is feeling tired and is about to face a closer throwing 98 miles per hour, he might drop down in weight from 31.5 ounces to 31.1. Or, if he is feeling strong, he might leave behind the 32-ouncer and upgrade to 32.2. \u201cI try to make sure that I know my weights, because every day you feel different,\u201d he said. Some players are oblivious to the method of listening to the bats\u2019 vibrations, but others are at least familiar with it. That includes Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, who has used the same model and size bat since he was 18. He said that he was aware that some players listened to their bats, but that he didn\u2019t practice it himself. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t even know what to listen for,\u201d Jeter said. Every player listens to the sound the ball makes when it makes contact with a bat. Beltran says the dulcet tones he hears when he tests the bat with his hands often reflect the sound he hears when the bat cracks the ball in play, and the results. \u201cThe sound off a good bat is different than the sound of a bad bat,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe the ball will come out of the bat a little harder. No one has told me that, and I can\u2019t prove it. But sometimes, I bring two bats to batting practice, a good one and the other ones, and for sure when you hit the ball, a good bat always has a better sound, a higher-pitch sound.\u201d For most of a career in which he had pounded out 1,824 hits, 371 doubles and 289 home runs, that has been something to hear. ", "keyword": "Beltran Carlos;Baseball;New York Mets"}
{"id": "ny0059534", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/08/19", "title": "New Vaccine Shows Promise Against Mosquito-Borne Virus", "abstract": "A new vaccine in its first human trials may offer protection against the chikungunya virus , a mosquito-borne infection that causes fever and severe joint pain, researchers reported Thursday in The Lancet . As of June 13, there were an estimated 166,000 suspected cases in the Caribbean and South America. Last month, the first cases in the United States were reported in Florida. The first phase of the trial \u2014 to test for safety and immune response \u2014 involved 25 participants and found no serious side effects. All participants developed antibodies that lasted at least six months after the last of three injections, suggesting the vaccine might provide long-term protection. \u201cThe exciting finding in this trial is both the fact the vaccine was so well tolerated and we measured impressive antibody levels in the recipients\u201d that were similar to levels in people who had recently recovered from chikungunya, said Dr. Julie E. Ledgerwood , the senior author of the study and chief of the clinical trials program at the Vaccine Research Center, part of the National Institutes of Health. That similarity is important, she said, because \u201cpeople who make a robust response after recovering appear to be protected from future infections.\u201d The vaccine uses particles that contain the outer structural proteins of the virus, but because they don\u2019t contain the virus\u2019s genetic material, they cannot cause infection. The trial\u2019s next phase will test for efficacy in a larger, more diverse group of participants. Predicting a disease\u2019s spread can help nations plan, but it\u2019s tricky. And it\u2019s usually based on historical data. On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a cash-prize challenge for a model that can most accurately predict the chikungunya virus\u2019s spread in the Americas and the Caribbean over a six-month period starting in September. The aim is to interest meteorologists, entomologists and financial forecasters to work with new data sets to address this public-health need.", "keyword": "Vaccines Immunization;Mosquito;Virus;The Lancet;Caribbean;South America"}
{"id": "ny0147517", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/07/24", "title": "ConocoPhillips Earnings Set Record, but Lag Forecast", "abstract": "ConocoPhillips posted its highest quarterly earnings ever on Wednesday as crude prices topped out above $140 a barrel, but it still lagged analyst expectations as expensive oil sapped results at its refining business. The oil company said that profit rose 13 percent from last year, excluding a $4.5 billion charge taken in the year-earlier quarter related to Venezuela\u2019s takeover of Conoco\u2019s operations there. Net income in the quarter rose to $5.44 billion, or $3.50 a share, from $301 million, or 18 cents a share, last year. Excluding the charge from Venezuela, ConocoPhillips earned about $4.81 billion in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts, on average, had expected the company to earn $3.53 a share in the quarter, according to Reuters Estimates. Revenue in the quarter rose more than 50 percent, to $71.4 billion. Oil companies have been reporting record or near record earnings for the last several years as oil prices have surged nearly fivefold. Prices have moderated in the last two weeks, dropping back to around $125 a barrel. Shares of ConocoPhillips fell $2.48, or 2.9 percent, to $81.83 as lower oil prices weighed on the whole sector. Although oil prices in the United States in the second quarter were nearly double those of a year earlier, gasoline prices rose only 25 percent in the same period. That resulted in weak product margins for companies like ConocoPhillips that not only produce oil, but also refine it to make gasoline and other products. Production fell to the equivalent of 2.2 million barrels of oil a day, from 2.38 million barrels last year, mostly because of the loss of production in Venezuela. ConocoPhillips expects third-quarter production in line with second-quarter levels.", "keyword": "ConocoPhillips Inc;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0180064", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/31", "title": "Brooklyn: Sentence Imposed for Norman", "abstract": "Former State Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr. , left, was returned to State Supreme Court in Brooklyn yesterday from the Oneida Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., for imposition of another sentence of one to three years in prison, prosecutors said. That sentence had been stayed while Mr. Norman appealed a lower court decision, but was imposed after the appeal was denied, prosecutors said. Mr. Norman, who is now sentenced to serve three to nine years, has been imprisoned on two other charges since June. He was convicted in February of extorting money from judicial candidates.", "keyword": "Norman Clarence Jr;Frauds and Swindling"}
{"id": "ny0239880", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/12/07", "title": "Clergy and New York Burger Co. Team to Fight Jinx", "abstract": "The three holy men made their pilgrimages to Chelsea, braving snow and frigid winds, from as far away as New Jersey and the Bronx. But they had not come on Monday to tend to the sick or minister to the poor. They had come bearing the prayers and totems of their various faiths \u2014 Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist \u2014 to cleanse any lurking evil from that most hallowed of American institutions: a burger joint. There was to be a private Native American ceremony at some point; an Episcopalian minister, running late, would officiate later in the day. \u201cThis is the first time I blessed hamburger,\u201d said the Rev. Ed Sombilon of Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Fort Lee, N.J. \u201cBut God works in mysterious ways, even crooked ways.\u201d The operators of a new outpost of New York Burger Company, scheduled to open next week at 470 West 23rd Street, cooked up the ceremony along with their publicist in the hopes that the blessings \u2014 or at least the media attention they would draw \u2014 would help the restaurant succeed in a spot where so many had failed. The location, at the southeast corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue, is a place where restaurant dreams are made and dashed, sometimes within a single year. Four restaurants have come and gone from the corner in the last dozen years. \u201cWe believed that the location, the proximity of the High Line , all these things were great assets for our business,\u201d said Jonathan Moldovan, a partner in the franchise along with his twin brothers, Petrous and Brice, and sister, Elisabeth Dufeu. \u201cWe figured we might as well get as much blessing as we could.\u201d In most neighborhoods, there is at least one jinxed location where \u2014 despite ostensible ingredients for success like foot traffic, decent food and even a successful place next door \u2014 no one can seem to make a go of it. The dining blog Eater.com even published a list this year of 11 locations it deemed the most cursed, including the Chelsea corner, a spot at Fifth Avenue and President Street in Brooklyn that turned over four times in about three years, and a space on Avenue of the Americas in TriBeCa where three different restaurants operated in little more than a year and a half. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s the landlord or the infrastructure in the building,\u201d Robert W. Walsh , commissioner of the city\u2019s Department of Small Business Services, said. \u201cIn some cases it\u2019s the accessibility or ability to get there from primary routes.\u201d Mr. Walsh, who directed the Union Square business improvement district, recalled that when Danny Meyer was looking to expand from Union Square Cafe , Mr. Meyer insisted on a place that his clientele, traveling from Midtown, could reach with a left turn from Fifth Avenue. In the case of 470 West 23rd Street, the reason for the failures is not entirely clear \u2014 even to its veterans. \u201cAhhhh,\u201d cried Robert Arbor, who opened Le Solex there in 1998, after the spot had sat empty for five years. He was also the founder of the successful minichain of Le Gamin bistros. \u201cIt is the Bermuda Triangle, the evil nest, my downfall, my only failure,\u201d he said. Mr. Arbor said his restaurant worked for a bit in the beginning and then just stopped. He said that the only downside to the space was that its enclosed sidewalk cafe made it \u201cfreezing in the winter but like a greenhouse in the summer,\u201d but that it should have worked nonetheless. He eventually sold to Jerry Joseph of the successful Jerry\u2019s restaurants, who could not make it work either. Outside the restaurant, residents did not have a unified theory on why the spot was so troubled. Eve S. Rosahn, 59, a public defender, said that although the location\u2019s last restaurant, Il Bordello, had not appealed to her \u2014 \u201cI wasn\u2019t particularly looking for another Italian restaurant,\u201d she said \u2014 she had liked Jerry\u2019s and did not understand why it had closed. But since the new owners have replaced the old drafty windows, she said, \u201cI\u2019m probably going to eat way too many burgers now.\u201d Whether the blessings \u2014 which included the installation of a mezuza in the doorway by Rabbi Dennis Tobin of Temple Beth-El in Co-op City and the sprinkling of water in four directions by the Rev. Robert Chodo Campbell, a Buddhist priest \u2014 can help remains to be seen. Edward Kirkland, chairman of the community board\u2019s landmarks committee, who has fought to get the sidewalk cafe removed because he believes it does not fit in with the brownstones, said the burgers might prove a hit. \u201cIn the early days it was a little isolated and there weren\u2019t many restaurants there,\u201d he said, adding that as the waterfront area built up and become more fashionable, it was possible that the restaurant would be successful. But that, he said, \u201cis a thing of this world rather than the next.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Burger Company;Restaurants;Chelsea (NYC);Hamburgers"}
{"id": "ny0192549", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2009/02/08", "title": "U.C.L.A. Sends Notre Dame to Seventh Straight Loss, 89-63", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 Early in the morning or late at night, the U.C.L.A. Bruins are mowing down opponents at any hour. Alfred Aboya scored 19 points and grabbed 7 rebounds Saturday in No. 15 U.C.L.A.\u2019s 89-63 rout of Notre Dame . The Fighting Irish lost their seventh consecutive game for the first time since the 1992-93 season. It was the fourth straight blowout victory for the Bruins (19-4), who have won those games by an average of 22.7 points since an 86-75 loss at Washington on Jan. 24. Since then, they have outscored their opponents by a combined 58 points in the first half. \u201cIt\u2019s obvious we\u2019ve been performing at a new level and just improving as a team,\u201d said U.C.L.A. Coach Ben Howland, who won his 145th game in his sixth season, tying him for fourth on the program\u2019s career victory list. \u201cIt was a good statement for our team and our conference to play them like this.\u201d Darren Collison added 17 points, and Nikola Dragovic and the freshman Jermine Anderson had 10 points each for U.C.L.A. The Bruins have forced 74 turnovers during their four-game winning streak, including 11 on Saturday. \u201cIt\u2019s our intensity,\u201d Collison said. \u201cWe raised the level a notch on the defensive end and guys started playing their role harder. When our intensity is at a high level, we\u2019re hard to beat.\u201d Tory Jackson scored 17 and Kyle McAlarney 16 for the Irish (12-10), who dropped to 2-7 against ranked opponents. This losing streak, their worst under Coach Mike Brey, matched the seven in a row Notre Dame lost to end the 1992-93 season. \u201cWe\u2019re searching for a win,\u201d Brey said. \u201cWe can\u2019t feel sorry for ourselves. This is the biggest challenge in the history of the program, but I think our kids will respond.\u201d Playing for the first time since 2005, the teams tipped off at 10 a.m. local time because of the national telecast. The Bruins sure did not look groggy. U.C.L.A.\u2019s trapping defense shut down an Irish team that came in averaging 79.4 points. The Irish had just 30 at the break. Aboya and U.C.L.A.\u2019s double teams forced the Fighting Irish star Luke Harangody into his worst performance of the season. He was held to 5 points and a rebound \u2014 all in the first half. It was the first time in 15 games Harangody did not lead the Irish in scoring. \u201cI had a hard time getting it out of the post and made some mistakes early,\u201d said Harangody, who played only seven minutes in the second half. \u201cWe didn\u2019t fight at all. They threw a couple punches and we just seemed to back down.\u201d Aboya saw the frustration in Harangody\u2019s body language. \u201cEvery time he missed a shot he was upset with himself,\u201d Aboya said. \u201cThe double team was really efficient. He had a good taste of it. He had an off day and I\u2019m glad it was against me.\u201d The Bruins took command from the opening tip, running out to leads of 14-2 and 20-7 while fans were still filling empty seats. Josh Shipp\u2019s one-handed fast-break dunk off a lob from Collison and Dragovic\u2019s stuff that sent Harangody sprawling to the floor highlighted the fast start. \u201cThey got off to such a great start,\u201d Brey said. \u201cWe had some great looks early and you got to knock down a few more of those. We had some key turnovers that turned into easy baskets.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Notre Dame;University of California Los Angeles;Basketball;College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0011320", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/02/12", "title": "Using Silly Cat Videos to Sell Litter-Box Products", "abstract": "WATCHING cat videos is so popular that it has become shorthand for being unproductive, whether or not someone being distracted by the Internet is actually watching a cat riding a robotic vacuum or playing the piano. Now a cat product that was introduced in 2012, Litter Genie, is being featured in a series of promotional videos on YouTube. Introduced in March by Playtex, the division of Energizer Holdings that makes Diaper Genie, an odor-eliminating diaper pail, Litter Genie has a similar design, with a replaceable cartridge of plastic liners that are cinched closed to lock in odors. But Litter Genie is a receptacle for clumps of waste scooped from the litter box. A Litter Genie video that is to be introduced on Tuesday uses the form of a music video, complete with opening credits in the lower left corner that include the name of the song, \u201cMe Luvz Mahselfz,\u201d and the artist, Walter and the Lap Cats. In the video, set in what is meant to resemble a well-appointed bachelor pad and with music sung in a rhythm and blues style, cats wear gold chains and gem-studded collars. \u201cWe\u2019re filling you with five layered bags,\u201d sings a vocalist, \u201cblocking odor so no one gags.\u201d The video, by JWT New York, part of WPP, directed by Keith Schofield and produced by Caviar in Los Angeles, is the third in a series featuring cats for the brand. One introduced in September is in the style of psychedelic 1960s music (\u201cI Haz a Catnip in Mah Head\u201d) and has 1.3 million views on YouTube; another released a month later in the style of punk rock (\u201cI Haz a Pie Row Tek Nik\u201d) has more than 1.1 million views. Claire Capeci, global business director at JWT New York, said one challenge with making videos promoting the product was that its function is hardly glamorous. \u201cAt the end of the day, we\u2019re talking about a disposal system for cat poop,\u201d said Ms. Capeci. The cat music videos, Ms. Capeci said, were inspired by the popularity not only of cat videos but also of so-called lolcats, the online photographs of cats with grammatically idiosyncratic captions, like \u201cI Can Has Cheezburger,\u201d which is also the name of a popular Web site that features lolcats. Because the product \u2014 and the broader category of odor-reducing litter pails \u2014 is relatively new, the videos needed to convey how the Litter Genie functioned. \u201cYou can either say it in a voice-over and be terribly boring or say it in a song and have fun with it,\u201d said Billy Faraut, a creative director at JWT. A cat, Walter, is featured in all three videos and a television commercial for Litter Genie , by Grey New York that was introduced in September. The videos and commercial are both aimed at women ages 25 to 54. Cats live in 38.9 million households in the United States, according the American Pet Products Association, a trade group. That is second only to dogs, which are in 46.3 million households. But because cat owners are more likely to have more than one, cats as pets outnumber dogs, with 86.4 million, compared with 78.2 million dogs. Diaper Genie has an 85.4 percent share of the market for diaper disposal systems, according to Nielsen data cited by the brand. Chikako Harada, the senior brand manager for Litter Genie, is a former brand manager at Diaper Genie. She said that while the products serve a similar function, the tone of marketing for the cat product was more irreverent. \u201cCat culture is very fun, and people dress up their cats, and it allows us to poke fun a little bit,\u201d said Ms. Harada. \u201cBut on the baby side, it\u2019s more \u2018oohs\u2019 and cuddles.\u201d Like Schick, the razor brand, also owned by Energizer, the company makes more money from the replacement cartridges than from the devices. At PetSmart, the device has a retail price of $18, while cartridge refills, which last about two months, cost $12. Ms. Harada said the base unit was priced relatively low to entice people to at least try it out. \u201cAnd we know that the product satisfaction is so high and that people really loved it when they tried it, so we could be a little more profitable with the refills.\u201d Julie Klausner, a comedy writer and performer, interviews celebrities on her podcast, How Was Your Week? But she also frequently mentions Internet cat phenomena and her own cat, Jimmy Jazz. Ms. Klausner said her favorite YouTube cat video stars include Maru, whose amusing habits include getting his head stuck in boxes, with more than 194 million views on his YouTube channel; two cats playing patty-cake, with more than 16 million views of a single video; and Henri, a cat to whom a sense of ennui is ascribed in four short videos in the style of French noir films, with more than 11 million views collectively. Ms. Klausner acknowledged that the Litter Genie videos were well produced, but she said she found the elaborate sets less compelling than cats behaving in inherently amusing ways in living rooms. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot funnier to see Maru jump into a box,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s advertising funny,\u201d said Ms. Klausner of the music videos. \u201cBut comedy funny is actually funny, and advertising funny is just funny for advertising.\u201d", "keyword": "Cat;Online advertising;Video;Web television;Energizer Holdings;advertising,marketing"}
{"id": "ny0133351", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/03/04", "title": "Former Player Helps Purdue Return to Prominence", "abstract": "In 2004, Matt Painter completed a 25-win season with Southern Illinois and then signed on as the head-coach-in-waiting at his alma mater, Purdue, as Gene Keady took one last victory lap before retirement. But instead of chasing a Big Ten title with Keady, Painter endured a 7-21 season, Purdue\u2019s worst since 1953. Southern Illinois, meanwhile, finished 27-8. \u201cIt was difficult,\u201d Painter said in a telephone interview. \u201cSouthern Illinois was winning every game they played while we were getting our doors blown off. But you have to look at the big picture.\u201d The big picture is considerably brighter now at Purdue, where Painter has led the Boilermakers to a 23-6 record, a No. 15 ranking and a tie with Wisconsin for the Big Ten lead going into Tuesday\u2019s game at Ohio State. Purdue\u2019s state rival, Indiana, seems to be getting more attention this season, following an N.C.A.A. investigation and the mid-season resignation of Coach Kelvin Sampson. Painter, meanwhile, has quietly nurtured a defensive-minded team dominated by freshmen and sophomores and reignited interest in a program that has not won a Big Ten title since 1996. Attendance is up. Students have been camping out all night for tickets. And they stormed the court on Jan. 26 for the first time in 16 years after the Boilermakers beat Wisconsin, then ranked No. 11. \u201cThe student body, they\u2019re really just loving the experience,\u201d said Chris Kramer, a sophomore guard and the team captain. \u201cPeople are camping out. They\u2019re in line all day. They\u2019re skipping class.\u201d Purdue officials banned the overnight camping after winter weather turned bitterly cold. But Painter, who grew up in Muncie, Ind., has endeared himself to the students waiting in line by bringing them doughnuts and chicken wings. Painter, 37, played guard at Purdue from 1989 to 1993, a span in which the Boilermakers made three trips to the N.C.A.A. tournament. He was an outspoken player who served as captain as a senior and sometimes butted heads with Keady. \u201cAt the time, he was trying to help me as a player and I was trying to coach the team,\u201d Painter said. \u201cI had the roles reversed a little bit.\u201d After bouncing around as an assistant following his graduation, Painter took a job at Southern Illinois in 1998. His boss was Bruce Weber, who had been an assistant at Purdue when Painter played there. When Weber was hired by Illinois in 2003, Painter was promoted to coach. A year later, he headed back to Purdue. He started recruiting almost immediately, focusing on high school sophomores with whom he could establish early relationships, even if it took several years before they paid off. At the time, he could not promise a run at a Big Ten title. But he dangled something almost as valuable. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to recruit when you\u2019re losing,\u201d Painter said. \u201cBut the one thing you can always sell is that they can come in here and play.\u201d That was what attracted Kramer, who played at Huntington North High School in northeastern Indiana. He had offers from Purdue, Iowa and some smaller colleges. But he committed early to the Boilermakers, hopeful that he would play as a freshman and confident that Painter could turn things around. \u201cThat 7-21 season, I didn\u2019t think it would happen again,\u201d Kramer said. The Boilermakers finished 9-19, and last in the Big Ten, in Painter\u2019s first season as coach. But last season, Purdue was 22-12 and lost to Florida, the eventual champion, in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. The seniors David Teague and Carl Landry combined to average more than 33 points a game. This season, the freshmen E\u2019Twaun Moore (12.1) and Robbie Hummel (11.7) lead Purdue in scoring. Keady expresses paternal pride in Painter, his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, adding that Painter\u2019s success is due, in part, to recruiting and improved team chemistry. \u201cHe got better players that are on the same page,\u201d said Keady, now an analyst for the Big Ten Network. \u201cThey\u2019re locked in and together, like we used to have. They\u2019re not N.B.A. players yet. But they\u2019re players who can win.\u201d Painter said he was not so sure before the season. He knew he had a talented team, but he did not know if they could build a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 good enough to return to N.C.A.A. tournament. \u201cYou know they can play,\u201d Painter said. \u201cYou just don\u2019t know what to expect. It\u2019s hard to be good.\u201d Now, though, he knows what to expect.", "keyword": "Purdue University;Basketball;College Athletics;Painter Matt"}
{"id": "ny0247041", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/05/05", "title": "Mavericks Prevail and Send Lakers Into Panic Mode", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 The Lakers celebrated last June on the Staples Center court in gold glitter when Kobe Bryant persevered, Pau Gasol dominated and Ron Artest chipped in. They had outlasted the Boston Celtics and cemented another championship. On the same court Wednesday, the Dallas Mavericks left the Lakers dizzy. The Lakers were booed at several intervals and stunned in what could be their final game there this season and Phil Jackson \u2019s last as their coach. Bryant\u2019s scoring had little impact, Gasol was ineffective and Artest was ejected. The result was a 93-81 loss to the Mavericks and the burden of digging from a 2-0 crater as the Western Conference semifinals shifts to Dallas. With balanced scoring, a choking defense and a steady diet of Dirk Nowitzki jumpers, the Mavericks came here and seized two games\u2014 a feat that perhaps only those in their locker room believed could be accomplished. The Mavericks can gain entrance to the conference finals without having to visit Los Angeles again this postseason. \u201cIt\u2019s one of 16 that we need, and right now we\u2019ve got 10 more wins to get to our goal,\u201d Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle said. Only 18 teams before Wednesday had entered a series with homecourt advantage and lost the first two games of a playoff series. The Lakers (1969), the Rockets (1994) and the Mavericks (2005) are the only teams that came back to win the series. The last time the Lakers trailed, 2-0, in a playoff series was in the 2008 finals when they lost to the Celtics. In the next two seasons, the Lakers claimed championships. \u201cIt\u2019s a challenge, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d Jackson said. The loss arrived after the Lakers collapsed in the series opener and fumbled away a 16-point lead. It also revealed deeper cracks in the Lakers\u2019 championship fa\u00e7ade. \u201cI think all 13 of our guys have trust issues right now,\u201d said center Andrew Bynum, who had 18 points and 13 rebounds after having little impact in the first game. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s quite obvious to anyone watching the game: hesitation on passes, defensively, not being there for your teammate because he wasn\u2019t there for you before. Stuff like that.\u201d Artest was ejected late in the game when he received his second technical foul for clotheslining Jose Barea, who was efficient in driving past the taller Lakers interior players throughout the game. The league will probably review the play, and it may warrant further penalty. \u201cIt was uncalled for,\u201d Jackson said. \u201cThere\u2019s a good chance he\u2019ll be suspended. I hope not.\u201d Artest left without talking to the news media. Nowitzki had 24 points and 7 rebounds after he had 28 and 14 in the series opener. The Lakers even tried Artest, who is smaller but stronger, on Nowitzki. Nowitzki simply rose and shot over him. \u201cDirk\u2019s one of the hardest guys to guard in the history of basketball,\u201d Carlisle said. \u201cIt\u2019s not tonight. It\u2019s ever night.\u201d Nowitzki is doing his part to shed a label that each of the Mavericks carry. In 2006, Miami rallied from a 2-0 series deficit to win the N.B.A. finals against Dallas. The next season, when Nowitzki won the M.V.P., Dallas was bounded in the first round. Ever since, Dallas has been regarded as a superior regular-season team that wilts in the playoffs. \u201cWe talked about it and this series is far from over,\u201d Nowitzki said. \u201cI\u2019ve been around a long time. I\u2019ve been up, 2-0, before and ended up losing the series. And I\u2019ve been down, 2-0, lost both games to Houston a couple years ago, and came back and won Game 7. So we\u2019ve seen a lot of things happen in this league.\u201d Barea\u2019s layup early in the fourth quarter stretched Dallas\u2019s lead to 75-65. The lead ballooned to 15 points before Bryant hit a 3-pointer, the only one of the five 3-point attempts he made. Bryant scored 14 of his 23 points in the first half, when the Lakers stayed in the game. The Lakers scored only 32 points in the second half, shot only 41 percent for the game and missed 18 of their 20 3-pointers. \u201cDesperate is a strong word,\u201d Bryant said of the team\u2019s mood. \u201cI think, when you play desperate, you don\u2019t play your best basketball. What we need to do is relax, we need to focus on what we\u2019re doing wrong and the mistakes that we\u2019re making, and we have plenty to review.\u201d The Lakers normally excel as playoff series evolve. They lost the first-round series opener to the Chris Paul-fueled New Orleans Hornets. But Gasol (13 points and 10 rebounds on Wednesday) and Bynum are playing unevenly and the Laker bench managed only 12 points on 23 shots. Lamar Odom, awarded this season\u2019s sixth man of the year award, missed 9 of his 12 shots. Jackson is intent on retiring after the season, and before the game he admitted that the opening loss against Dallas was more severe than the first-round setback against New Orleans. \u201cWe\u2019re worried now,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a good team. We know that they have the same record we have. They have a lot of options in scoring, and we\u2019ve got to play a lot better to overcome this team in the course of the series. Our strength is we\u2019ve always become better and better against teams in series. We hope to do that.\u201d Still, after the game, and another loss, Jackson tried to keep his sense of humor. When asked what he would do to jump-start the Lakers at Thursday\u2019s practice, Jackson said, \u201cI plan on flogging them tomorrow.\u201d REBOUNDS The Lakers received clarification on the substitution glitch that Phil Jackson contested with the league office, Jackson said. In the closing moments of Game 1, he attempted to remove Andrew Bynum after Dallas went to a smaller lineup after a timeout with 20.3 seconds remaining. But no time had lapsed after Bynum had been originally inserted and he had to remain in for at least one play, in accordance with league rules. \u201cThey wanted to clarify that, fine, you can substitute anybody back in, but Bynum had to stay in,\u201d Jackson said.", "keyword": "Basketball;Playoff Games;Dallas Mavericks;Los Angeles Lakers;Jackson Phil"}
{"id": "ny0019148", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/07/26", "title": "Touring Slum in Rio, Pope Urges Young to Fight Against Corruption", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 Pope Francis on Thursday delivered some of his most politically provocative remarks since his papacy began this year , hopping from his popemobile to walk through a slum in this city before urging young people to fight against corruption, a leading grievance behind the huge street protests that shook dozens of Brazilian cities in June. \u201cDo not grow accustomed to evil, but defeat it,\u201d Francis said at the favela, or slum, of Varginha, in an area that has commonly been known here as the Gaza Strip for its gun battles and drug trafficking in the past. \u201cDo not lose trust, do not allow your hope to be extinguished,\u201d he added, acknowledging that it was common for some to \u201cgrow disillusioned with news of corruption.\u201d By singling out corruption in a folksy visit to a Brazilian favela on his first trip abroad as pope, Francis, an Argentine-born Jesuit, emphasized his aim to refocus the Roman Catholic Church on the neglected margins of society, especially in Brazil and other parts of Latin America where the popularity of evangelical churches has surged among the poor in recent decades. In a nod to the Brazilian political authorities who have warmly welcomed him, Francis also praised the government\u2019s antipoverty programs and did not specifically mention the anti-establishment protests in Brazil. But he did critique Rio de Janeiro\u2019s so-called pacification project in the city\u2019s slums, in which security forces assert control over lawless areas. \u201cNo amount of pacification will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself,\u201d the pope said in Varginha, a slum that has recently been subjected to pacification. In a remark that could resonate in Latin America and in the United States, which is also grappling with the widening disparity between the haves and the have-nots, Francis said that a society \u201cimpoverishes itself\u201d by perpetuating such inequality. Care for the poor and marginalized is an integral part of Catholic teaching, and a concern of many popes and encyclicals, including those by Francis\u2019 predecessor, Benedict XVI. But Francis has made it a hallmark of his young papacy, telling journalists in Rome days after his election, \u201cHow I would like a church that is poor and for the poor.\u201d He has demonstrated that ideal by living relatively humbly as pope: in a communal guesthouse rather than the opulent papal apartment, wearing a pectoral cross of iron instead of gold, flying commercial. He recently told priests that they should not drive fancy cars, and he has traveled around Rio this week in a compact Fiat. \u201cHe is helping to wake people up,\u201d said Natalia Morais, 21, a nursing student from Minas Gerais State who traveled to Rio to see the pope as part of World Youth Day, a conference attended by hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth. \u201cWhen the pope talks, political leaders listen, and that\u2019s what\u2019s needed in Brazil, where our protests are about their corruption,\u201d Ms. Morais said. Reaching beyond Brazil, Francis told Argentines who came here for the conference that \u201cthe church must be taken into the streets\u201d in a struggle against complacency. \u201cStir things up, cause confounding, but do not diminish faith in Jesus Christ,\u201d he said in Spanish. Not all Brazilians are thrilled with Francis\u2019 visit, which the local news media has covered in detail. Some evangelical Christians, who account for about 22 percent of the country\u2019s population, have pointed out that the Catholic Church enjoys many privileges in Brazil, including millions of dollars of government spending for the pope\u2019s trip. \u201cThe Catholic Church has always had lots of money and support from the government,\u201d said Elizeu Sousa Teixeira, 31, a security guard at an evangelical church in Bras\u00edlia, the capital. \u201cIt\u2019s political.\u201d In each of Francis\u2019 public appearances, he has been accorded a rock-star reception. On an uncommonly cold and rainy morning, hundreds of residents lined the narrow, muddy sidewalks of the Varginha favela to glimpse the first pope from the Americas, who obliged by stopping often to touch and bless people. Many onlookers had made their own shirts to commemorate the event, with a photo of Francis. Others draped themselves in Brazilian flags and waved banners bearing his image. Residents darted in and out of their homes, checking their televisions and radios to learn the pope\u2019s whereabouts and calling the information out to their neighbors standing on wet rooftops to get a better view. S\u00f4nia Curato, 48, a manicurist, said the pope\u2019s visit was different from that of other leaders. \u201cPoliticians come all the time. They make promises and leave,\u201d she said. \u201cHe is a very simple person. You can tell that. He has charisma. He speaks to the people, doesn\u2019t like going around in an armored car.\u201d Others were more focused on the opportunities the visit presented. Josenil Guedes da Silva, 36, had driven down to the favela from his home in Recife to sell souvenirs, including a mug with the pope\u2019s photo for about $5. With 600 mugs and 1,000 key chains, he said, \u201cI came to do business.\u201d", "keyword": "Pope Francis;Brazil;Corruption;Youth;Catholic Church;Rio de Janeiro"}
{"id": "ny0253001", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/10/18", "title": "When One Farm Subsidy Ends, Another May Rise to Replace It", "abstract": "It seems a rare act of civic sacrifice: in the name of deficit reduction, lawmakers from both parties are calling for the end of a longstanding agricultural subsidy that puts about $5 billion a year in the pockets of their farmer constituents. Even major farm groups are accepting the move, saying that with farmers poised to reap bumper profits, they must do their part. But in the same breath, the lawmakers and their farm lobby allies are seeking to send most of that money \u2014 under a new name \u2014 straight back to the same farmers, with most of the benefits going to large farms that grow commodity crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton. In essence, lawmakers would replace one subsidy with a new one. \u201cWe are very much aware of the budgetary constraints of the federal government,\u201d said Garry Niemeyer, an Illinois farmer who is president of the National Corn Growers Association . \u201cWe want to do our part as corn growers to help resolve those issues, but we only want to do our proportional part. We don\u2019t want to have everything taken out on us.\u201d But Vincent H. Smith, a professor of farm economics at Montana State University, called the maneuver a bait and switch. \u201cThere\u2019s a persistent story that farming is on the edge of catastrophe in America and that\u2019s why they need safety nets that other people don\u2019t get,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the reality is that it\u2019s really a very healthy industry.\u201d The subsidy swap is gaining momentum as lawmakers seek to influence the cuts in farm programs that are expected to be made by a special Congressional panel charged with slashing $1.2 trillion from future budgets. On Monday, leaders of the House and Senate agriculture committees said they were preparing recommendations for $23 billion in unspecified cuts over 10 years, far less than some other proposals. Lawmakers\u2019 reluctance to simply eliminate a subsidy without adding another in its place demonstrates how difficult it is for Washington to trim the federal largess that flows to any powerful interest group. Indeed, the $5 billion program that lawmakers are willing to throw under the tractor, known as the direct payment program , was created in 1996 as a way to wean farmers off all such supports \u2014 and instead was made permanent a few years later. The new subsidy is being championed by Senator Sherrod Brown , Democrat of Ohio , and Senator John Thune , Republican of South Dakota . Mr. Thune, a leading voice in favor of deficit reduction, received at least $80,000 in campaign contributions since 2007 from political action committees associated with commodity agriculture, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Mr. Brown has received $5,500 in PAC contributions from such groups in that period. It is unclear how much support a new subsidy would garner, since many lawmakers view farm programs as a likely source of budget savings. Critics say that farm subsidies today have little to do with helping struggling family farmers. Instead, they go predominantly to well-financed operations with large landholdings. All told, the subsidies amount to about $18 billion a year \u2014 about half of 1 percent of the federal budget . An analysis of federal data by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that tracks farm subsidies , showed that the top 10 percent of direct-payment recipients in 2010 received 59 percent of the money under the program. Those 88,000 people, including farmers, their spouses and absentee landowners, got an average of $29,598. In lean times, such support might seem vital, but in recent years commodity farmers have done well. The Agriculture Department forecasts that farm profits this year, measured on a cash basis, will total $115 billion, 24 percent higher than last year, thanks to soaring crop prices. Adjusted for inflation, profits are expected to be at their highest level since 1974. The average income for farm households has been higher than general household incomes every year since 1996. The average household income was $87,780 for all farms in 2010, and $201,465 for families living on large farms. \u201cHow do you justify this kind of money going to a sector of the economy that\u2019s booming while other folks in the country are suffering?\u201d Craig Cox, a senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group, said of the subsidies. Lobbyists and farm-state lawmakers have long argued that farmers face risks, like bad weather, pests and volatile markets, that merit special treatment. Direct payments have come under fire, however, because farmers get them whether markets are high or low. The new subsidy, called shallow-loss protection, would act as a free insurance policy to cover commodity farmers against small drops in revenue. Most commodity farmers already buy crop insurance to protect themselves against major losses caused by large drops in prices or damage to crops. Those policies typically guarantee 75 to 85 percent of a farmer\u2019s revenue, with the federal government spending $6 billion a year to pay more than half the cost of farmers\u2019 premiums. The proposed new subsidy would add another layer of protection to guarantee 10 to 15 percent of a farmer\u2019s revenue, paying out not only in years of heavy losses, but also when revenue dipped less severely. The shallow-loss plan getting the most attention is in a bill introduced last month by Senators Brown and Thune that would simplify and expand an existing program. Gary D. Schnitkey, a professor of farm management at the University of Illinois , said the Brown-Thune plan would help protect farmers during longer periods of depressed prices. Without such a program, he said, \u201cwe would see financial stress and we would see farmers go out of business.\u201d It is unclear how much the proposal would cost taxpayers. Dr. Schnitkey said the plan could pay farmers $40 billion over 10 years . That would be $20 billion less than the programs it replaced, including direct payments and some smaller subsidies. But Dr. Smith, the Montana State economist, said the cost could be much greater because the plan used recent high crop prices as its benchmark. \u201cIf farm prices move back towards what are widely viewed as more normal levels than their current levels, farmers will be compensated for going back to business as usual,\u201d he said. In a statement Senator Thune said the proposal in the bill \u201ccorrects inefficiencies in several farm programs with a streamlined and cheaper approach.\u201d Representative Marlin A. Stutzman, an Indiana Republican, said that a shallow-loss plan would give farmers more flexibility in managing risk. \u201cFarmers shouldn\u2019t have to pay the brunt of the deficit problem,\u201d he said. Mr. Stutzman and Senator Richard Lugar, also an Indiana Republican, included the Brown-Thune plan in matching farm bills they introduced this month. Congress is due to write a new five-year farm bill next year, but some lawmakers want to use the deficit-cutting process to revamp farm spending. President Obama has proposed cutting $33 billion from farm programs over 10 years, including ending direct payments without adding a shallow-loss program. Mr. Stutzman\u2019s bill would slice $40 billion, with more than half coming from programs like food stamps and soil and water conservation.", "keyword": "Agriculture;Crop Subsidies;Federal Aid;Federal Budget;Lobbying"}
{"id": "ny0291097", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2016/01/30", "title": "Transfer Bans Suspended", "abstract": "The transfer bans imposed on Real Madrid and Atl\u00e9tico Madrid have been suspended until the appeals process is completed, according to FIFA, soccer\u2019s world governing body. Both clubs were barred from registering players for two transfer windows for breaches of rules involving underage players. \u25a0 Manchester United scored a 3-1 win over second-tier Derby in the F.A. Cup.", "keyword": "Soccer;Real Madrid;Atletico Madrid Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0089440", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2015/09/10", "title": "Saudi Diplomat in India Is Accused of Rape", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 The Indian police are investigating allegations that a Saudi diplomat imprisoned and repeatedly raped two Nepali maids who worked in his home. The Saudi Embassy has denied the allegations. As a diplomat, the Saudi man, who has not been identified publicly, has immunity from criminal prosecution, but may be expelled if the Indian government finds the allegations substantiated. Navdeep Singh Virk, the top police official in Gurgaon, where the diplomat lives, said Wednesday that the police had delivered a report on their investigation to the Ministry of External Affairs. The case brings together two issues that have drawn wide public attention in recent years: the problems that India\u2019s police have had in dealing with rape, and the mistreatment of domestic workers in many parts of Asia and the Middle East. Acting on a tip from an advocacy group, the Indian police removed the two women from the diplomat\u2019s apartment on Monday. In a statement on Wednesday, the police said an investigation of rape and illegal confinement had been opened based on what the women told them, that \u201cthey were beaten up, raped, abused and threatened by the family and their guests.\u201d Rajesh Kumar, a police official, said the women, who have not been publicly identified, were 50 and 25 years old. In a televised interview wth the ANI news agency, one of the women, her face covered by a scarf, said the two had been confined in a room in the apartment and were repeatedly raped, sometimes by as many as five or six men. The Saudi Embassy in New Delhi said Wednesday in a statement that it \u201cstrongly stresses that these allegations are false and have not been proven,\u201d the Press Trust of India reported. The embassy also objected to \u201cunwarranted media briefings before investigations are complete,\u201d and had formally protested the police intrusion into the diplomat\u2019s home, the news service reported. In the televised interview, one of the women said they were employed through a Delhi agent. They were hired several months ago and were taken to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, for a time before returning to India, they told the police, according to Wednesday\u2019s statement. A third maid who worked for the diplomat and his family until August went to Maiti India, a group that aids victims of human trafficking, and told the group that she was compelled to work to the point of exhaustion, denied pay and given too little to eat, adding that the other two women were suffering poor conditions as well. The Maiti India group then approached the police. The third maid, who spoke on condition that her name not be published, said in an interview that while she was in the Saudi family\u2019s employ, she never witnessed any sexual assault or heard complaints about it from other maids. Mr. Kumar said a medical examination of the two women found that they had indeed been raped. Mr. Virk, the commissioner of police in Gurgaon, said the examinations were only preliminary and declined to give any specifics.", "keyword": "India;Saudi Arabia;Rape;Diplomats Embassies and Consulates;Nepal;Maiti India"}
{"id": "ny0118720", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/10/25", "title": "Court in France Upholds Trader\u2019s Sentence and Fine", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 A French appeals court on Wednesday upheld the 2010 conviction of J\u00e9r\u00f4me Kerviel , a former Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale trader whose rogue dealings brought the French bank to the brink of collapse almost five years ago. In her ruling, the appellate judge, Mireille Filippini, also upheld Mr. Kerviel\u2019s original prison sentence of five years, with two suspended, and the trial court\u2019s order that he pay 4.9 billion euros, or $6.4 billion, in restitution to Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale \u2014 equivalent to the amount the bank lost in the course of unwinding his fictitious trades in early 2008. Mr. Kerviel, 35, was found guilty by a lower court two years ago of breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized use of computer systems. The former trader, dressed in a dark suit and tie, listened impassively on Wednesday as Judge Filippini read the verdict to a wood-paneled courtroom packed with journalists. He was not ordered into immediate custody. Addressing reporters after the hearing, Mr. Kerviel\u2019s lawyer, David Koubbi, called the judge\u2019s decision a \u201clamentable injustice.\u201d Mr. Kerviel left the courtroom through a side door without speaking to reporters. But in an interview with the RTL radio station later Wednesday, he said the verdict had left him \u201ctotally shattered\u201d and vowed to appeal it to France\u2019s highest court, the Cour de Cassation. The unwinding of an estimated 50 billion euros in unauthorized open positions on Mr. Kerviel\u2019s trading book in January 2008 cost Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale 4.9 billion euros, the equivalent of about $7 billion at the time. Mr. Kerviel acknowledged at his original trial that he had falsified documents and entered fake trades to hide his activities, but said he had never profited personally from those transactions. He maintained that his bosses had deliberately turned a blind eye to what he was doing and had tacitly encouraged him as long as it was profitable. The bank has consistently denied those assertions, calling Mr. Kerviel an \u201cevil genius\u201d who acted entirely on his own. The judge\u2019s 105-page ruling was unrelenting in its affirmation of the three charges against Mr. Kerviel and of the lower court\u2019s calculation of the fine. \u201cTo the extent that Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale was perhaps negligent or maybe didn\u2019t read all the warning signs, that didn\u2019t serve to reduce the amount of damages or amount of prison time given to him,\u201d said Christopher Mesnooh, a specialist in international business law with Field Fisher Waterhouse in Paris. \u201cIt is a lesson in personal responsibility in the extreme. This decision really is about J\u00e9r\u00f4me Kerviel and nobody else.\u201d Jean Veil, a lawyer for the 148-year-old bank, said he was \u201cvery satisfied\u201d with the court\u2019s ruling but acknowledged that Mr. Kerviel, who is unemployed, was unlikely ever to repay the bank the full sum it was awarded. \u201cWe will look at the dossier with realism,\u201d Mr. Veil said. But he vowed to pursue royalty payments linked to a memoir Mr. Kerviel published in 2010 and to any future film deals. Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale has admitted to management failures and weaknesses in its risk control systems, which it claimed Mr. Kerviel exploited to mask his unauthorized bets. An internal audit published in May 2008 described Mr. Kerviel\u2019s immediate supervisors as \u201cdeficient\u201d and acknowledged that the bank had failed to follow through on at least 74 internal alerts about his trading activities dating to mid-2006. The French Banking Commission later fined Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale 4 million euros. The bank dismissed two of Mr. Kerviel\u2019s supervisors, and a handful of senior executives ultimately resigned, including Daniel Bouton, who had been Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale\u2019s chairman and chief executive. Auditors found that Mr. Kerviel had been placing bets outside his trading limit for more than two years. Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale confirmed that it booked 1.4 billion euros in profit in the fourth quarter of 2007 from his unauthorized dealings. But when the market turned against him, eight large transactions entered into the bank\u2019s computers in mid-December 2007 exposed the bank to 50 billion euros in risk \u2014 more than the market value of the bank. His last and, by far, biggest gamble was discovered Jan. 18, 2008. It was the unwinding of those trades, from Jan. 21 to Jan. 23, that led to the loss of 4.9 billion euros. In the aftermath of the scandal, Mr. Kerviel spent five weeks in pretrial detention and became something of a French folk hero. Much was made of the fact that someone from such a modest background \u2014 his mother was a hairdresser, his late father a metal-shop teacher \u2014 could dupe so many of his bosses, many of them well-bred graduates of the best French schools. The Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale scandal was one of the first fractures in the facade of what was then broadly perceived as an aggressive but essentially self-regulating financial system, giving rise to early calls against excessive risk-taking and lavish bonuses that have grown steadily louder since. It came not long after the first indications of the subprime mortgage crisis surfaced in the United States in August 2007 and was followed in March and September of 2008 by the demise of two flagship investment banks, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.", "keyword": "Kerviel Jerome;Societe Generale;Banking and Financial Institutions;Frauds and Swindling;France"}
{"id": "ny0005578", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/04/12", "title": "Six Months After Sandy, Jersey Shore Is Ready to Run", "abstract": "When Joe Gigas, the executive director of the New Jersey Marathon, returned to his home in Long Branch after evacuating for Hurricane Sandy, he found that the ocean had ripped off one side of his house and sucked out the contents of four rooms. Still, only a week after the storm, he announced on the races\u2019 Facebook page that the New Jersey Marathon and the Long Branch Half Marathon would be contested in 2013, although he did not know how, or where. Unlike the New York City Marathon, which was scheduled for Nov. 4, less than a week after the storm, the New Jersey races had the benefit of time. Gigas had six months to meet with eight Monmouth County municipalities, rework the courses so they avoided damaged roads and broken boardwalks, haggle with USA Track & Field over differences in maps \u2014 the national organization\u2019s map showed the marathon course to be 200 meters short of 26.2 miles \u2014 and then have the races certified, all by May 5. USA Track & Field measured and certified the courses Thursday. Without certification, runners would not be able to use their race times to qualify for elite races like the Boston Marathon. \u201cIt\u2019s still raw,\u201d Gigas said last month. \u201cHomeowners are not back in their houses yet. I\u2019m not back in my house yet.\u201d (Gigas said he was living in a rental.) When he approached town officials about the marathon this year, their reaction, he said, was not no but whether it would be safe. All eight towns eventually signed off on it. The two races start at the Monmouth Park racetrack in Oceanport, and the first miles wind through Oceanport and Monmouth Beach, which were flooded by Sandy. More than half of Oceanport\u2019s 2,400 homes were damaged. In Monmouth Beach, the course will pass many houses that look fine on the outside but have Dumpsters and storage units in the driveway, because of the work that needs to be done on them. Some houses will be on jacks, as they are being raised to meet new elevation requirements set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For Adam Schneider, the mayor of Long Branch, there was no question the races would be run. He said they would uplift residents, many of whom have parties along the racecourse. Then there is the economic benefit, which is especially needed this year. The half marathon and the full marathon end in Long Branch, and Schneider estimated that 15,000 people line the final miles to the finish. \u201cIt\u2019s a relatively early spring day, and if we didn\u2019t have a race, there would be very few people in town,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead, we\u2019re busting from the seams.\u201d He said he would be a part of it, too, running the Long Branch Half for the fourth time. Ninety percent of the two courses will remain the same, but rerouting the other 10 percent was tricky. The half marathon runs through three towns, the full marathon through eight. Gigas had to obtain approval of the new routes from each police department and town government before submitting them to USA Track & Field. Some landmark features of the marathon had to be sacrificed. In Asbury Park, it is typically run on the boardwalk, through the Grand Arcade of Convention Hall , where Bruce Springsteen has often rehearsed before touring, and the vestibule of the Casino , a former concert and amusement hall razed several years ago. Boardwalk repairs are scheduled to be completed by the end of April, but that did not leave enough time for the new course to be certified. Instead, runners will go down Kingsley Street and make the cross into Ocean Grove over a narrow pedestrian bridge. Because of that detour, there will be no wheelchair race in the full marathon this year. Gigas said the bridge was not the only factor making this year\u2019s course less than ideal. The route also requires an abrupt turn around at a cone in Ocean Grove, which can throw off runners\u2019 pace and cadence. Among them will be Oz Pearlman , a New York City magician and two-time winner who set the course record in 2011 with a time of 2 hours 28 minutes 19 seconds. Jen Matz, who spent her childhood summers at the Jersey Shore, will be running the Long Branch Half for the first time. She ran the Seaside Half Marathon two weeks before Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed a family member\u2019s home in Lavallette, farther south on the Jersey Shore. Matz, who grew up in Monmouth County, but now lives in South Carolina, is running to promote the shore area. She said she would write about it on her blog at runnerstrials.com. \u201cMaybe things don\u2019t look exactly like they did, but the Jersey Shore is still a great place to go and race,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to draw attention to that.\u201d So far, registrations for the half marathon are slightly down from last year, but those for the full marathon are up 15 percent. Gigas expects about 3,500 people to run the marathon, the most in its 17-year history. \u201cI never really got that phrase Jersey Strong,\u201d said Gigas, who grew up in New Hampshire. \u201cBut watching these municipalities deal with this, and then there\u2019s me asking, \u2018Can I run through your town?\u2019 No one said no. It\u2019s that Jersey can-do attitude.\u201d", "keyword": "Marathon;Hurricane Sandy;New Jersey"}
{"id": "ny0112223", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/02/08", "title": "Manhattan Prosecutors Won\u2019t Charge Police Commissioner\u2019s Son in Rape Accusation", "abstract": "Manhattan prosecutors have decided not to file rape charges against a son of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly after a two-week investigation of a woman\u2019s accusation that he had attacked her late last year inside the Lower Manhattan law office where she worked, prosecutors said in a letter on Tuesday. The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. , concluded its inquiry into the accusation leveled against Mr. Kelly\u2019s son Greg Kelly, a local television anchor, concluding that \u201cthe facts established during our investigation do not fit the definition of sexual assault crimes,\u201d according to a brief letter to Mr. Kelly\u2019s lawyer, Andrew M. Lankler. \u201cTherefore, no criminal charges are appropriate.\u201d A spokeswoman for the district attorney\u2019s office said it had conducted a \u201cthorough investigation,\u201d interviewing witnesses and analyzing evidence including security logs, text messages, receipts and phone records. The letter , from the chief of the district attorney\u2019s Sex Crimes Unit, Martha Bashford, the assistant district attorney assigned to handle the case, said the witnesses included the accuser and Mr. Kelly, \u201cboth of whom were cooperative and were interviewed in the first days of the investigation.\u201d In a statement, Mr. Kelly said, \u201cI am thankful that the investigation established what I\u2019ve known all along, that I am innocent of the allegations that were waged against me.\u201d He thanked his friends and family, \u201cwhose support for me never wavered.\u201d The accusations came to light after the woman, who is in her late 20s or early 30s and whose name was not released, walked into the 13th Precinct station house on Jan. 24. She told the police that she had met Mr. Kelly, 43, on the street and had gone for drinks with him at the South Street Seaport a few days later, on Oct. 8. Afterward, she said, they returned to her office and he raped her. Police detectives initially interviewed the woman in the hours after she walked into the station house last month, law enforcement officials said at the time. But within hours, the Police Department had turned the investigation over to Mr. Vance\u2019s office because of the conflict presented by the department\u2019s looking into a sexual assault accusation against the commissioner\u2019s son, who from the outset denied the accusations through Mr. Lankler. After the allegations became public, Mr. Kelly, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves, took a leave from his position as an anchor of \u201cGood Day New York\u201d on the Fox station WNYW (Channel 5). While the woman told the police that Mr. Kelly had raped her after they returned to her office, she told them that the two continued to have contact by phone and text message after the encounter. According to her account, when her boyfriend later learned about the night, he became angry and approached the police commissioner at a public event and told him that the younger Mr. Kelly had sexually assaulted his girlfriend. The commissioner told him to write a letter, according to the woman\u2019s account, but it did not appear that he did so. Commissioner Kelly\u2019s account of his encounter with the boyfriend was similar, though according to his spokesman, Paul J. Browne, the man told the commissioner that his son had \u201cruined my girlfriend\u2019s life\u201d but declined to discuss it there. So the commissioner suggested that he write the letter.", "keyword": "Greg Kelly;NYPD;Raymond W Kelly;Cyrus R Vance Jr;Rape"}
{"id": "ny0079120", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2015/02/27", "title": "F.C.C. Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Classifying Broadband Internet Service as a Utility", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to regulate broadband Internet service as a public utility, a milestone in regulating high-speed Internet service into American homes. Tom Wheeler, the commission chairman, said the F.C.C. was using \u201call the tools in our toolbox to protect innovators and consumers\u201d and preserve the Internet\u2019s role as a \u201ccore of free expression and democratic principles.\u201d The new rules, approved 3 to 2 along party lines, are intended to ensure that no content is blocked and that the Internet is not divided into pay-to-play fast lanes for Internet and media companies that can afford it and slow lanes for everyone else. Those prohibitions are hallmarks of the net neutrality concept. Explaining the reason for the regulation, Mr. Wheeler, a Democrat, said that Internet access was \u201ctoo important to let broadband providers be the ones making the rules.\u201d Mobile data service for smartphones and tablets, in addition to wired lines, is being placed under the new rules. The order also includes provisions to protect consumer privacy and to ensure that Internet service is available to people with disabilities and in remote areas. Before the vote, each of the five commissioners spoke and the Republicans delivered a scathing critique of the order as overly broad, vague and unnecessary. Ajit Pai, a Republican commissioner, said the rules were government meddling in a vibrant, competitive market and were likely to deter investment, undermine innovation and ultimately harm consumers. \u201cThe Internet is not broken,\u201d Mr. Pai said. \u201cThere is no problem to solve.\u201d The impact of the new rules will hinge partly on details that are not yet known. The rules will not be published for at least a couple of days, and will not take effect for probably at least a couple of months. Lawsuits to challenge the commission\u2019s order are widely expected. The F.C.C. is taking this big regulatory step by reclassifying high-speed Internet service as a telecommunications service, instead of an information service, under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. The Title II classification comes from the phone company era, treating service as a public utility. But the new rules are an \u00e0 la carte version of Title II, adopting some provisions and shunning others. The F.C.C. will not get involved in pricing decisions or the engineering decisions companies make in managing their networks. Mr. Wheeler, who gave a forceful defense of the rules just ahead of the vote, said the tailored approach was anything but old-style utility regulation. \u201cThese are a 21st-century set of rules for a 21st-century industry,\u201d he said. Opponents of the new rules, led by cable television and telecommunications companies, say adopting the Title II approach opens the door to bureaucratic interference with business decisions that, if let stand, would reduce incentives to invest and thus raise prices and hurt consumers. \u201cToday, the F.C.C. took one of the most regulatory steps in its history,\u201d Michael Powell, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and a chairman of the F.C.C. in the Bush administration, said in a statement. \u201cThe commission has breathed new life into the decayed telephone regulatory model and applied it to the most dynamic, freewheeling and innovative platform in history.\u201d Supporters of the Title II model include many major Internet companies, start-ups and public interest groups. In a statement, Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association, which includes Google, Facebook and smaller online companies, called the F.C.C. vote \u201ca welcome step in our effort to create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules.\u201d The F.C.C.\u2019s yearlong path to issuing rules to ensure an open Internet precipitated an extraordinary level of political involvement, from grass-roots populism to the White House, for a regulatory ruling. The F.C.C. received four million comments, about a quarter of them generated through a campaign organized by groups including Fight for the Future, an advocacy nonprofit. Evan Greer, campaign director for Fight for the Future, said, \u201cThis shows that the Internet has changed the rules of what can be accomplished in Washington.\u201d Image Supporters of net neutrality rallied on Thursday outside the F.C.C. building. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times An overwhelming majority of the comments supported common-carrier style rules, like those in the order the commission approved on Thursday. In the public meeting, Mr. Wheeler began his remarks by noting the flood of public comments. \u201cWe listened and we learned,\u201d he said. In November, President Obama took the unusual step of urging the F.C.C., an independent agency, to adopt the \u201cstrongest possible rules\u201d on net neutrality. Mr. Obama specifically called on the commission to classify high-speed broadband service as a utility under Title II. His rationale: \u201cFor most Americans, the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life.\u201d Republicans in Congress were slow to react, and initially misread the public mood. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas portrayed the F.C.C. rule-making process as a heavy-handed liberal initiative, \u201cObamacare for the Internet.\u201d In January, Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, began circulating legislation that embraced the principles of net neutrality, banning both paid-for priority lanes and the blocking or throttling of any web content. But it would also prohibit the F.C.C. from issuing regulations to achieve those goals. This week, the Republicans pulled back , with too little support to move quickly. Also at the Thursday meeting, the F.C.C. approved an order to pre-empt state laws that limit the build-out of municipal broadband Internet services. The order focuses on laws in two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, but it would create a policy framework for other states. About 20 states, by the F.C.C.\u2019s count, have laws that restrict the activities of community broadband services. The state laws unfairly restrict municipal competition with cable and telecommunications broadband providers, the F.C.C. said. This order, too, will surely be challenged in court.", "keyword": "Net Neutrality;FCC;Regulation and Deregulation;Tom Wheeler;Legislation"}
{"id": "ny0031011", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/06/30", "title": "Stealth Wear Aims to Make a Tech Statement", "abstract": "THE term \u201cstealth wear\u201d sounded cool, if a bit extreme, when I first heard it early this year. It\u2019s a catchy description for clothing and accessories designed to protect the wearer from detection and surveillance. I was amused. It seemed like an updated version of a tinfoil hat, albeit a stylish one. Fast-forward a few months. Flying surveillance cameras, also known as drones, are increasingly in the news. So are advances in facial-recognition technology. And wearable devices like Google Glass \u2014 which can be used to take photographs and videos and upload them to the Internet within seconds \u2014 are adding to the fervor. Then there are the disclosures of Edward Snowden, the fugitive former government contractor, about clandestine government surveillance. It\u2019s enough to make countersurveillance fashion as timely and pertinent as any seasonal trend, like midriff tops or wedge sneakers. Adam Harvey , an artist and design professor at the School of Visual Arts and an early creator of stealth wear, acknowledges that countersurveillance clothing sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel. \u201cThe science-fiction part has become a reality,\u201d he said, \u201cand there\u2019s a growing need for products that offer privacy.\u201d Image The CV Dazzle hairstyling and makeup program aims to camouflage a person\u2019s face. Credit Adam Harvey and DIF Magazine Mr. Harvey exhibited a number of his stealth-wear designs and prototypes in an art show this year in London. His work includes a series of hoodies and cloaks that use reflective, metallic fabric \u2014 like the kind used in protective gear for firefighters \u2014 that he has repurposed to reduce a person\u2019s thermal footprint . In theory, this limits one\u2019s visibility to aerial surveillance vehicles employing heat-imaging cameras to track people on the ground. He also developed a purse with extra-bright LEDs that can be activated when someone is taking unwanted pictures; the effect is to reduce an intrusive photograph to a washed-out blur. In addition, he created a guide for hairstyling and makeup application that might keep a camera from recognizing the person beneath the elaborate get-up. The technique is called CV Dazzle \u2014 a riff on \u201ccomputer vision\u201d and \u201cdazzle,\u201d a type of camouflage used during World War II to make it hard to detect the size and shape of warships. Mr. Harvey isn\u2019t the only one working on such products. The National Institute of Informatics in Japan has developed a visor outfitted with LEDs whose light isn\u2019t visible to the wearer \u2014 but that would blind some camera sensors and blur the details of a wearer\u2019s nose and eyes more effectively than a pair of sunglasses. And Todd Blatt , a mechanical engineer in New York, is working on a lens-cap accessory for people who don\u2019t want to be recorded while talking with someone who is wearing Google Glass. Instead of asking that the computer glasses be removed entirely, they could instead hand the wearer the lens covering. Presto. No taping or photographing would occur during the conversation. Mr. Harvey likened his work and that of others to the invention of the rivet in denim jeans. \u201cThat was a practical way of making them more durable,\u201d he said. Stealth wear, he said, is an \u201cupdated way of thinking about making your clothes more resistant to your environment and adapting them to protect you a little bit more.\u201d But these designers face a challenge: although technology has inspired some new fabrics and materials, high-tech fashion of any kind has yet to really take off. Image A purse fitted with an electronic device reacts to a camera\u2019s flash with lights so bright that the subject\u2019s face is obscured. Credit Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com There simply isn\u2019t much of a market for tech-savvy haute couture, said Becky Stern, an artist and the director of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries , a company in New York that sells do-it-yourself electronics kits. Ms. Stern noted that a few years ago, clothing embedded with illuminated lights was relatively popular, but that interest later \u201ckind of fell off.\u201d Some of the most exciting experimentation is in the world of sports, she said, where athletic wear is being developed that can monitor a player\u2019s vital signs. Such products are commercially viable, she said, and the technology could eventually migrate to clothing designed specifically to protect the privacy of its owner. Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design , says he sees tremendous potential for an eventual stealth-wear market. He described current prototypes as \u201cprovocations,\u201d saying they raise \u201cissues that are impacting our cities and public spaces that need more discussion and debate.\u201d Mr. Harvey\u2019s items have not yet been thoroughly tested by intelligence firms or security experts. Most are still concepts, not ready for mass production. But he said he hoped that awareness of his designs might \u201cempower you to control your identity a little more.\u201d AND the mere fact that such designs are attracting attention online could pave the way for development of a mass market, said Joanne McNeil, a writer who covers Internet culture. On her blog \u201c Internet of Dreams ,\u201d Ms. McNeil says that videos and mock-ups of not-yet-developed products, whether clothing or futuristic smartphones, are often popular online and may reflect the desires of a populace that larger corporations haven\u2019t tapped. \u201cDreams outpace physical realities,\u201d she said. In other words, even if stealth wear never becomes a viable or commercial reality, the newfound intrusiveness it responds to is genuine enough.", "keyword": "Innovation;Fashion;Privacy;School of Visual Arts;Adafruit Industries;Government Surveillance;Wearable Computing"}
{"id": "ny0141242", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/11/04", "title": "Petraeus, in Pakistan, Hears Complaints About Missile Strikes", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 In his new position as head of the United States Central Command , Gen. David H. Petraeus met top Pakistani officials on Monday for the first time and heard one message wherever he turned: American airstrikes against militants in the tribal areas are unhelpful. General Petraeus, the former commander of American forces in Iraq, arrived in Pakistan as missile strikes from drone aircraft against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan\u2019s tribal areas had escalated. There were two separate missile attacks by American drones on Saturday. In retaliation, a suicide bomber killed eight Pakistani paramilitary soldiers in South Waziristan on Sunday. After the meeting with General Petraeus, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan said in a statement: \u201cContinuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap.\u201d There was no comment or public appearance by General Petraeus, and it was not clear how he responded to the complaints. Messages left with his press aides were not immediately returned. General Petraeus, who has been consulting in recent weeks with a wide range of people on the efforts by the Pakistani military to quell the insurgency in the tribal areas and on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, on Friday took over the Central Command, putting him in overall charge of the American-led military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. His visit comes as the Pentagon and the White House are completing reviews on policies toward Afghanistan, and as Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, has made clear that Pakistan and Afghanistan would be more of a foreign policy focus if he were to win the election. In an interview on CNN broadcast this past weekend, Mr. Obama said he believed it was necessary to convince Pakistan that the main threat to its security came from the militants, and not India, its historical enemy. During his round of calls on Monday, General Petraeus met with the commander of the Pakistani military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar. The American missile attacks in the tribal areas were generating \u201canti-American sentiments\u201d and creating \u201coutrage and uproar among the people,\u201d Mr. Mukhtar said in a statement. A senior Pakistani military official said the army wanted to \u201cbring home the point that the missile strikes are counterproductive, and that this is driving a wedge between the government and the tribal people.\u201d Pakistani officials have consistently complained about the airstrikes that have been aimed at Arab fighters and Pakistani militants connected to Al Qaeda. But the statements against the airstrikes have been couched in less dramatic language than General Kayani\u2019s declaration after an American ground raid in September in which he said Pakistan would defend its borders at \u201call costs.\u201d There have been no known ground raids in the tribal areas since. On a more positive note, the senior Pakistani military official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the United States had started \u201clistening to us\u201d and had moved toward sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Bajaur area. The Pakistani Army is fighting Taliban militants in Bajaur and has criticized the United States for what it says is the failure of American troops in Afghanistan to stop Afghan militants from crossing into Bajaur and joining the battle. The Americans moved some of their forces to the east of the Kunar River last week, and this helped curb the flow of militants into Bajaur, the Pakistani military official said. \u201cIt is bearing positive results,\u201d he said. In an effort to show General Petraeus the hard terrain that the Pakistani forces face against the insurgents in the tribal areas, the military planned to fly him over some of the terrain on Tuesday, the military official said. That way, the general would get an idea of the long, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. \u201cWe will let him see where the roads end and where the mountains start,\u201d the official said. \u201cIt will be a glimpse of the Tora Bora from the other side,\u201d he said, referring to the area in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border from where Osama bin Laden is believed to have escaped from American troops in late 2001. In a visit Tuesday to Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, General Petraeus planned to meet with Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, the new leader of the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force that is fighting in Bajaur. After a long delay, American and British trainers began instructing Pakistani officers last month, who in turn will train the Frontier Corps in an effort to turn the paramilitary force into a more effective group of indigenous counterinsurgency fighters. The Pakistani military officials planned to ask General Petraeus for help in increasing the army\u2019s \u201coperational capabilities,\u201d meaning equipment. But the army was reluctant to accept training. \u201cWhy should they get into our areas?\u201d the senior military official asked.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Petraeus David H;Zardari Asif Ali;Afghanistan War (2001- );United States Armament and Defense;Pashtun (Ethnic Group);Missiles and Missile Defense Systems"}
{"id": "ny0098741", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/06/30", "title": "Hillary Clinton Faces a More Liberal Democratic Fund-Raising Landscape", "abstract": "Hillary Rodham Clinton will seek out donors to her presidential campaign from a Democratic fund-raising landscape vastly altered since her first presidential bid and far more ideologically aligned with the party\u2019s liberal activists. Democrats now get far less money from Wall Street, military contractors, health care companies and other industries that for decades ladled out cash more evenly to both parties, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group. And the party now relies far more on constituencies that have achieved new clout in the era of \u201csuper PACs\u201d and carefully targeted digital fund-raising. As many as one-fifth of elite Democratic \u201cbundlers\u201d \u2014 volunteers who raise money from friends and business associates \u2014 are active in gay-rights causes or are themselves gay or lesbian. Outside Democratic groups rely heavily on wealthy environmentalists, such as the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael R. Bloomberg, and on labor unions, whose financial might has been magnified by the Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens United decision in 2010 even as their membership rolls decline. Female donors and bundlers have become both a bigger source of funding and a more organized financial force in party affairs: Emily\u2019s List, a political group dedicated to electing female Democrats, now has five times as many members and twice as many donors as it did when Mrs. Clinton ran for president in 2008. And Democrats now rely far more on grass-roots donors to be financially competitive with Republicans. Democratic Party committees raised $200 million from donors giving $200 or less in 2014, according to Federal Election Commission records, twice as much as in 2008. The shift in the party\u2019s donor base is being driven, in part, by the same polarizing demographic and political trends that have made the Democratic Party more ideologically liberal and have aligned business more closely with Republicans. Industry Money Shifts to Republicans Over the last three election cycles, several major industries have shifted their political donations to Republicans from Democrats. \u201cHistorically, business was very pragmatic and played both sides,\u201d said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a left-leaning think tank with ties to business leaders in Washington. \u201cNow, business had thrown its lot in with the Republicans. It means that the traditional arguments of business are losing their grip on Democrats, in part because business isn\u2019t any longer investing in Democrats.\u201d The transformation is already reflected in Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign and speeches. She sided with House Democrats and labor unions during the intraparty battle over a new Pacific trade deal, risking a significant rupture with her former boss, President Obama . And she criticized \u201chedge fund managers\u201d in her campaign kickoff event in New York City, the sort of rhetorical flourish she carefully avoided in the past. Her stump speech sharply attacks Republicans on issues that, Democratic strategists have learned, can loosen floods of money from grass-roots donors, such as reproductive rights, gay rights and equal pay for women. \u201cShe was always talking about these issues, but not with the same rhetoric,\u201d said Howard Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman and governor of Vermont. \u201cAnd that\u2019s because her base has moved left and the country has moved the left. I think she can be more of who she is.\u201d Mrs. Clinton\u2019s rivals for the nomination are already benefiting from the shift. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist running for the Democratic nomination, is not yet the favored candidate of deep-pocketed Democratic donors. But he has already raised at least $8.3 million in online contributions through ActBlue , a fund-raising committee that serves as a conduit for Democratic campaigns. What Hillary Clinton Would Need to Do to Win Mrs. Clinton can expect little if any opposition in the Democratic primaries. But she was similarly well positioned when she declared her candidacy in 2007. At the same time, industries that wooed Democrats with a significant share of their political donations have steadily shifted more of their giving to Republicans, reflecting not only the country\u2019s broader polarization but also years of bruising battles with the Obama administration and Democrats over issues like financial regulation, the Keystone XL oil pipeline and nutrition guidelines. Agribusiness and mining and oil interests, along with the financial services and health care industries, have shifted substantially more money to Republicans over the last three two-year election cycles, according to the Times analysis. That shift was exacerbated, some longtime Democratic fund-raisers said, by Mr. Obama\u2019s decision not to accept contributions to his presidential campaigns from political action committees. While PACs account for a relatively small slice of money in presidential campaigns, their fund-raising historically acted as a bridge between Democratic politicians or lobbyists and businesses that were more Republican in outlook. \u201cThe fund-raising world in 2015 has changed dramatically from the fund-raising world in 2012 \u2014 which was a dramatic change from 2008,\u201d said Representative Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and the former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which now raises half its cash from small donors online. \u201cIt\u2019s new rules, it\u2019s new tools, it\u2019s new technologies, and it\u2019s new donors.\u201d At the same time, older constituencies have become bigger players in Democratic fund-raising. More grass-roots fund-raising and bundling by groups like Emily\u2019s List, for example, have created a financial constituency for issues such as equal pay. Who Is Running for President? Donald J. Trump officially accepted the Republican party's nomination on July 22. Hillary Clinton was officially nominated on July 26 at the Democratic Convention. \u201cWe\u2019re not the full funders of any candidate,\u201d said Stephanie Schriock , the president of Emily\u2019s List and a close ally of Mrs. Clinton\u2019s. \u201cBut we\u2019re the extra bit that allows them more time to do what they need to do and the ability to speak on behalf of all women and families.\u201d Stung by the defeat of Mr. Obama\u2019s climate-change legislation in 2009, environmental groups have set up new bundler networks to raise \u201cgreen-branded\u201d dollars for candidates. They have also emerged as big spenders on election-themed political advertising. In 2014, the League of Conservation Voters and Mr. Steyer\u2019s NextGen Climate Action, a super PAC, spent more on independent election advertising than any other Democratic-aligned issue groups. Climate change is also a top issue among the party\u2019s super PAC donors, particularly Mr. Steyer. This month, Mr. Steyer issued a statement pointedly praising one of Mrs. Clinton\u2019s Democratic rivals, Martin O\u2019Malley , for \u201cpresenting real, concrete solutions to climate change.\u201d For Mrs. Clinton, the party\u2019s shifting financial fortunes may be a double-edged sword. They could liberate her to more forcefully or directly address issues that are important to the party\u2019s base, especially on issues of wealth inequality, taxation and regulation. \u201cWhat it does allow \u2014 and I think this is a particularly good thing in this year, when the biggest issue is fairness for working people \u2014 it does allow people to vote their consciences more easily,\u201d Mr. Dean said. He added: \u201cThere\u2019s no particular reason why Democrats even have to think about people on Wall Street. And they won\u2019t.\u201d But Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign is particularly sensitive to criticisms that she is moving left or tailoring her message to the party\u2019s liberal base. (A spokesman declined to comment for this article.) And there are signs that Mrs. Clinton, whose husband, former President Bill Clinton, became a successful fund-raiser by rebranding the Democrats as business-friendly, will seek more of an equilibrium. Unlike Mr. Obama, her campaign is aggressively raising money from business PACs, according to two Clinton fund-raisers. And Mrs. Clinton, like the Republicans who wish to run against her, has not yet pledged to voluntarily disclose the names of her bundlers. Mrs. Clinton\u2019s most delicate dance may be with Wall Street. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs have for years been a source of personal, political and philanthropic wealth for the Clinton family. But the industry is now closely allied with Speaker John A. Boehner and congressional Republicans seeking to roll back or repeal elements of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. Almost two-thirds of money from investment banks and three-quarters of donations from credit card companies and lenders now flow to Republicans, and donations from hedge fund and private equity executives were a significant source of cash for Republican super PACs during the 2012 election cycle. Mrs. Clinton backed the Dodd-Frank bill and other financial reforms, including elimination of the \u201ccarried interest\u201d loophole used by private equity executives to lower their tax rate. But several Democratic donors and bundlers with Wall Street ties said they believed shewould be well positioned to repair that relationship; many financial executives, they said, viewed her more barbed language in recent weeks as necessary posturing. \u201cThe Clinton operation would like to have everybody in, and everybody giving,\u201d said one longtime Clinton fund-raiser, who asked for anonymity so as not to damage his relationship with Mrs. Clinton\u2019s team. \u201cThey usually try to find a way to have everyone on board.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Campaign finance;Liberalism US;PACs;Democrats"}
{"id": "ny0084562", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2015/10/15", "title": "Restoring Sound to Windows 10", "abstract": "Q. I upgraded my PC laptop to Windows 10 and ever since my computer doesn\u2019t have any sound. How do I get my audio back? A. Upgrading a computer from an older version of Windows can sometimes damage the system\u2019s device drivers, including the one for the sound card. To grab a new copy of the driver software, go to the Start menu\u2019s search box, enter Device Manager and open it when it pops up in the results list. Next, in the \u201cSound, video and game controllers\u201d area, look for the name of your computer\u2019s sound card. Depending on your model, you may see hardware from Creative Labs , Intel or another company listed. Click the Driver tab there and choose Update Driver. Windows should look around and install a new version of the driver. If the system reports that it cannot find a driver for your sound card, go to the support area of the company\u2019s website and see if there is an updated driver there to download. Uninstalling the driver \u2014 and then having Windows 10 reinstall it for you \u2014 is another option. Go back to the Device Manager box, right-click the audio driver and choose Uninstall; if you have a touch-screen device, press and hold the driver to get the Uninstall option from the menu. Restart your computer, and Windows will try to reinstall it for you. If that maneuver fails as well, Microsoft suggests installing the generic High Definition Audio Device driver, which you can choose in the Device Manager when you use the Update Driver option. Instead of letting Windows look for the driver, choose the path that lets you search the computer and pick a driver from a list. Sound problems in Windows 10 are not uncommon, and Microsoft has prepared a page of resources that includes a series of video tutorials and troubleshooting tools . You can find it all at windows.microsoft.com/support . Speaking to Siri Q. I thought Siri on the iPhone was supposed to just answer if you said, \u201cHey Siri,\u201d but I still have to press the button. Why? A. Siri , Apple\u2019s virtual assistant software, will respond without you having to hold down the Home button \u2014 under certain conditions. If you do not have one of the newest models, (the iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus), you need to have the phone plugged into a power source to summon Siri solely by voice. The \u201cHey Siri\u201d option also needs to be enabled on your iPhone. To check in iOS 9, open the Settings icon on the Home screen. On the Settings screen, tap General, then Siri and flip the switch next to allow \u201cHey Siri.\u201d After a short \u201cHey Siri\u201d training session, you should be ready to go. TIP OF THE WEEK The convenience of an e-reader has helped many people fit more books into their lives. For planning purposes, Amazon\u2019s Kindle software can often provide an estimated time it takes to read a particular title. With the book (or sample chapter) open on the screen, select the Menu button and then choose About This Book to see the typical amount of time needed to read the entire thing. The About This Book option is available on Amazon\u2019s e-reader apps for other mobile devices such as some of its newer Kindle hardware like the Paperwhite model. When you are reading a Kindle book on a touch-screen device, you can tap the screen to cycle through several progress indicators at the bottom of the page, including the percentage of the book read, the number of pages left, the estimated time still needed to finish the chapter or to complete the whole book.", "keyword": "Microsoft Windows;EBooks EReaders;Kindle;iPhone;Software;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Apple;Microsoft;Audio Speakers"}
{"id": "ny0229305", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/07/12", "title": "A Voice That Stayed Above the Fray", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 Bob Sheppard liked the air of mystery about his age. It was funny watching such a solid person, based in faith and education, grow a trifle coy about the year of his birth. But he was always specific about being born on Oct. 20. It was also Mickey Mantle\u2019s birthday, but Bob did not live off that coincidence of two Yankees legends sharing a birthday. Bob had an ego, liked being the voice echoing around Yankee Stadium, saying, \u201cNo. 2, Derek Jee-tah,\u201d but he did not need to be around the players. They did what they did out on the field, and he did what he did up on the booth. Here\u2019s a little secret: between plays, Bob read books, hardcover books from home or the library. He was a voice, not a ballpark celebrity. How strange it is to be missing a chance to see Nelson Mandela, 91, circle the field in a golf cart in order to write about another man I admired, but from up close. Bob was more than 99 when he died Sunday after the illnesses that diminished him in the past few years. He was vague about them, too. I\u2019ve known him since 1960, when I covered my first Yankee games as a young reporter. That summer, my wife and I, just married, would see him at Jones Beach strolling along the tide line with his wife, Mary. They were newlyweds, too; Bob\u2019s first wife had died, but I did not know that at the time. They were a handsome couple. I reminded him of that recently, how I used to see him at the beach. He liked that, the memory of being a former St. John\u2019s quarterback, tall, young and strolling the beach with his new wife. In recent years, when he was temporarily not going to Yankee Stadium \u2014 but definitely not retired \u2014 I would go see him; he was a little weaker each time. Recently I called, and he slowly let me know that he had fallen and was not going downstairs these days. He was as strong in his Roman Catholic faith as anybody I knew. He hated to admit he could no longer serve as a lector. His faith never wavered in the trying days. His daughter is a nun. He referred to Mary as \u201cmy archangel,\u201d meaning she saved his life, day by day. Better to think of him younger, wearing tweedy professorial jackets, a note of class in the press dining room. He had his own little table in the corner at the old Yankee Stadium. The conversation went round and round, rarely about baseball. He did not need the reflected glory. The only time I would see him on the field was when he checked out the pronunciation of a new player\u2019s name. In an earlier time, when baseball was not yet comfortable with Latino players, he made sure to give Minnie Mi\u00f1oso his tilde. Later, he delighted in getting the pronunciation right for Shigetoshi Hasegawa . But he was not a fan. That is what people missed about Bob. He did not have gossip about players, insights into managers, theories about strategy. In the past few years, I would casually ask if he followed the Yankees or their broadcasters or even how his successors were doing with their own echoes in Yankee Stadium, and he seemed a bit vague. The last time I called, I noted that he had a special birthday coming up. It was the first time he had ever allowed me to refer, however obliquely, to his actual age. I don\u2019t think he was anticipating a 100th birthday celebration. He was as secure about that as he was about everything else.", "keyword": "Sheppard Bob;New York Yankees;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0228581", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/07/07", "title": "Day 77: The Latest on the Oil Spill", "abstract": "Capture and Containment Efforts Continue BP reported Tuesday that its capture systems at the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico collected or burned off 24,980 barrels of oil on Monday. Mark Proegler, a BP spokesman, said preparations continued for hooking a third vessel, the Helix Producer, up to the systems, which would increase the capture capacity from 28,000 barrels a day to 53,000 barrels. Skimming operations across the gulf have scooped up about 23.5 million gallons of oiled water so far. Oil Spotted in Lake Pontchartrain Oil sheen and tar balls from the spill have been spotted in Lake Pontchartrain, which forms the northern boundary of New Orleans and was rescued in the 1990s from rampant pollution, according to the unified command for the spill. Response crews placed a combined 600 feet of hard and soft boom in the Rigolets strait to prevent more oil from getting through to the lake. Nineteen manual skimming vessels and four decontamination vessels based out of Orleans and St. Tammany Parishes were dispatched to the oiled areas. An interactive map tracking the spill and where it has made landfall, live video of the leak, a guide to online spill resources and additional updates: nytimes.com/national .", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Offshore Drilling and Exploration;Accidents and Safety;BP Plc;Gulf of Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0190537", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/05/01", "title": "Italian Technology Is Chrysler\u2019s Hope for Revival", "abstract": "Fiat quietly ended its effort to market cars in the United States a quarter-century ago when the last of its vehicles to carry the Fiat nameplate, the 1983 Brava sedan, drove off a dealer lot. They had stylish exteriors and responsive handling, but Fiats were notoriously unreliable. This time around, the Italian automaker is hoping to make a more favorable and lasting impression on American consumers, with much-improved, fuel-efficient cars that could roll off the assembly lines of its new partner, Chrysler , in as little as 18 months. Fiat technology \u2014 which President Obama praised on Thursday at a news conference at the White House \u2014 will go into new Chryslers, broadening Chrysler\u2019s lineup to include small and midsize cars. At the same time, the Fiat Group will introduce a few of its own cars, including Alfa Romeos, that are available only in Europe now. It is a remarkable turnabout for Fiat, which has ridden a wild roller coaster of successes and failures throughout its history, just as its new partner, Chrysler, has. Fiat withdrew from the United States in the 1980s \u2014 its Alfa Romeo franchise hung on for another decade until it too gave up \u2014 after drivers nicknamed the company Fix It Again Tony because its cars seemed to spend more time at the garage than on the highway. \u201cThe cars now are a world away from what they sold in the 1970s, or even six or seven years ago,\u201d said Garel Rhys, head of the Center for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales. Fiat was among the last of the big auto companies to join what Mr. Rhys calls \u201cthe quality revolution,\u201d finally focusing on quality after Sergio Marchionne became chief executive in 2004. Mr. Marchionne spearheaded the deal for Chrysler and is also exploring a bid for the European and Latin American operations of General Motors. Now both Fiat and Alfa Romeo will return to showrooms among Chrysler\u2019s United States dealerships, but drivers who remember Fiat\u2019s boxy styles from the 1970s won\u2019t recognize today\u2019s models. The first Fiat car to arrive will be the 500, known as the Cinquecento, an update of the Italian classic from the 1960s that has earned comparisons to the more expensive Mini Cooper and has been a big hit since its introduction in Europe two years ago. Before that happens, the new Fiat Group offerings will have to be re-engineered to conform to United States crash-test standards. With the 500, Fiat hopes to attract younger, urban drivers, and it plans to sell it in Chrysler dealerships on both coasts beginning in 2011, manufacturing it at Chrysler factories in Mexico. In Europe, the Fiat 500 sells for roughly 9,000 euros, or $12,000, on average. The Mini, made by BMW, sells on average for $25,600 in the United States. Alfa Romeo will return with the MiTo, a compact now on sale in Europe, and the Milano, reviving a name from the 1980s and 1990s. When Chrysler emerges from bankruptcy, Fiat will initially have a 20 percent stake in the company, as well as three seats on the new company\u2019s nine-member board. In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Marchionne said, \u201cWe look forward to delivering on the vast potential this alliance holds and reintroducing to North American customers some of our most popular brands.\u201d But Fiat executives say the first priority will be building and selling the Chrysler models with Fiat technology. \u201cSelling Fiats won\u2019t turn Chrysler around,\u201d said one executive who insisted on anonymity because of Fiat company policy. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see a new range of Chrysler cars, based on our engineering, our platforms and our engines with a shape exclusively their own.\u201d The midsize Chrysler Sebring, made in Sterling Heights, Mich., is among the models that Fiat engineers will redesign using technology from the Milano. Fiat also sees opportunities in selling Chrysler\u2019s Jeep brand in markets like Brazil, Russia and India, along with Dodge Ram trucks. Fiat does not produce full-size S.U.V.\u2019s or one-ton trucks, so American-made Jeeps and Dodge trucks could be a valuable addition to its product line if fuel prices remain low and global demand for bigger vehicles rebounds. Still, the return of Fiats to the United States, as well as new Chryslers built around Fiat technology, poses a marketing challenge. Despite praise for Fiat\u2019s technological prowess and its fuel-efficient cars from the likes of President Obama, \u201cnobody below 40 knows what on earth this vehicle is,\u201d Mr. Rhys said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost a new entry in the car market.\u201d Fiat officials say that\u2019s an exaggeration, adding that Fiat opened its first showroom in New York in 1904, five years after the company was founded in Turin. It also opened an assembly plant in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., before World War I. And CNH, its farm equipment division that sells the brands Case and New Holland, has long been a major player in the American agricultural market, with headquarters in Chicago. The Fiat Group\u2019s ultra-high-end sports cars, Maserati and Ferrari, are available in the United States, as well. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we\u2019re arriving at Ellis Island,\u201d said Richard Gadeselli, a Fiat spokesman. Alfa Romeo, he added, \u201cstill has a huge reservoir of brand loyalty. The U.S. has the largest number of Alfa Romeo owners\u2019 clubs in the world.\u201d Then again, some older drivers may remember Fiat for its quality problems, thinking of it in the same light as other failed European offerings, like Renault\u2019s Le Car and the Yugo. \u201cIt\u2019s a giant challenge,\u201d said John Casesa of the Casesa Shapiro Group, an independent auto advisory firm in New York. \u201cIt will be very difficult to sell older, domestically oriented buyers on Fiat. They don\u2019t buy small cars and don\u2019t have good memories of Fiat\u2019s last foray into the U.S.\u201d Even the Chrysler models with the latest Fiat technology could face skepticism, Mr. Casesa added, saying that when it comes to reliability, drivers\u2019 perceptions can take years, even decades to evolve. He says the Pontiac Vibe made by G.M. is virtually identical to the Toyota Matrix, but lags far behind in sales, despite G.M.\u2019s improved quality over the last 25 years. \u201cFiat has a lot to overcome,\u201d he said. \u201cThey will have to be patient to win people over.\u201d", "keyword": "Automobiles;Chrysler LLC;Fiat SpA;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0208998", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2009/12/27", "title": "From Woods: Moony Eyes, Lilting Voice, Then a Bombshell", "abstract": "The golfers lamenting Tiger Woods \u2019s indefinite leave from the PGA Tour because he is their cash cow are out of bounds. Only two people are truly dependent on Woods, and earlier this year, he could not stop smiling when he talked about them. His 2-year-old daughter, Sam, and 10-month-old son, Charlie, brought out Woods\u2019s softer side in interviews. When I covered Woods early in his career, the only warmth he exuded in news conferences came from the vibrant reds of his signature Sunday shirts. This year was different. Returning to competitive golf in late February after a nine-month injury-induced absence, Woods drew me in with a smile that started in his eyes when he talked about his children. When he was asked about the birth of Charlie or how he occupied himself while recovering from knee surgery, his eyes grew moony and his voice was lilting \u2014 a marked departure from his monotone. He talked about cutting practice short to spend time with Charlie. He expressed delight in the rapid development of Sam. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize how much I loved being home,\u201d he said. This melting glacier of a golfer was so much more interesting, and likable, than the ice man who had won 14 major titles. Woods\u2019s global warming required further examination, so I tracked him around the course in a kind of scavenger hunt in the first months of his six-win campaign. I was searching for more clues to flesh out the Clark Kent alter ego of golf\u2019s Superman, and I collected enough material to write two articles. After a late-night accident last month and Woods\u2019s subsequent admission of infidelity, the headlines of those articles read like punch lines: \u201cThe Family Guy Is Back on the Course\u201d and \u201cAll Eyes Are on Tiger, the Father.\u201d Woods\u2019s parenting role model was his father, Earl, who was committed to rearing him after having two sons and a daughter in a failed first marriage. Earl, a retired Army officer, attributed the divorce to military obligations that took him away from the family. Asked how he would manage to be there for his children when golf takes him away from home so much, Woods told me, \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a lot more difficult, there\u2019s no doubt.\u201d Maybe it is impossible. Perhaps Woods was destined to be like his father, only not in the way he had hoped. Over lunch on the veranda at the Masters one year, Earl Woods said, \u201cI\u2019ve told Tiger that marriage is unnecessary in a mobile society like ours.\u201d The way Woods talked about his children, I was sure he was going to prove his father wrong.", "keyword": "Woods Earl;Woods Tiger;Golf"}
{"id": "ny0175558", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/10/13", "title": "Some Are Denied Emergency Shelter Under New Policy", "abstract": "At least two families seeking a place to sleep last night were denied beds at a homeless shelter as the city started enforcing a tougher new policy on emergency sheltering, according to advocates for the homeless and the families themselves. City officials acknowledged that some families were turned away from its main intake center in the Bronx but said they were unable to provide specific numbers. The families were turned down in accordance with a new policy that forbids them from being granted last-minute emergency shelter if they have been ruled ineligible for benefits. In the past, families who were initially denied a place to stay could still get emergency shelter if they reapplied after 5 p.m. But the city stopped allowing that because it said the loophole was being abused by a small number of families. Last night, some homeless families who had received notices that they would be denied shelter nonetheless showed up at the intake center. Most were provided beds. \u201cPeople working inside the shelter told me that because of the media attention, people are getting placed,\u201d said Patrick Markee, a representative of the Coalition for the Homeless. But at least two families were not. One family was headed by Don Keith Allen, 40, who said he had been seeking emergency housing since Sept. 6, showed up with his sons \u2014 John Keith Allen Jr., 11, and John Keith Hamilton, 20 \u2014 and was turned away. Outside the shelter, a group of nuns from nearby St. Ann\u2019s Episcopal Church showed up to help. They offered Mr. Allen and his sons a place to sleep for the night, and they accepted.", "keyword": "Homeless Persons;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0139561", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/02/28", "title": "Cash-Rich, Publicity-Shy, Abu Dhabi Fund Draws Scrutiny", "abstract": "Abu Dhabi has about 9 percent of the world\u2019s oil and 0.02 percent of its population. The result is a surfeit of petrodollars, much of which is funneled into a secretive, government-controlled investment fund that is helping to shift the balance of power in the financial world. After decades in the shadows, the fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is turning heads on Wall Street and in Washington by making high-profile investments in the United States and elsewhere. Known as ADIA (pronounced ah-DEE-ah), the fund recently formed a small team that is now buying big stakes in Western companies. This unit masterminded ADIA\u2019s $7.5 billion investment in Citigroup , the nation\u2019s largest bank, in November. It has also taken a large position in Toll Brothers, one of the country\u2019s biggest home builders. \u201cThere is an idea that Abu Dhabi should not be the underdog of the map,\u201d said Frauke Heard-Bey, a historian who has written a book about the political emergence of the United Arab Emirates. \u201cThey have the money to buy companies that are ailing, and why should they not? Why not make a mark?\u201d ADIA is the largest of the world\u2019s sovereign wealth funds , giant pools of money controlled by cash-rich governments, particularly in Asia and Middle East. But Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven Arab emirates, says little about its fund. Few outsiders know for sure where ADIA invests \u2014 or even how much money it controls. And secrecy breeds hyperbole; some estimates of the fund\u2019s size surpass $1 trillion. Before long, ADIA will certainly reach that mark. But for now bankers, former employees and analysts familiar with the fund peg it at $650 billion to $700 billion \u2014 an amount that is still over 15 times the size of the Fidelity Magellan Fund. In all, sovereign wealth funds in countries like the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Singapore, China and Russia control more than $2 trillion, a figure that could approach $12 trillion by 2015, analysts say. Such riches, coupled with the more aggressive stance being taken by ADIA and other sovereign funds, has raised concern that these investors will wield their wealth for political as well as financial reasons. ADIA\u2019s secrecy is also drawing scrutiny. The fund has no internal communications department, although it says it is in the process of setting one up. When sovereign fund leaders from around the world descended on Davos, Switzerland, last month for the World Economic Forum, no one from ADIA saw fit to show up. Executives at ADIA declined to comment for this article. Last week Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee on security and international trade and finance, who has raised concerns about sovereign fund transparency, traveled to Abu Dhabi to meet with senior ADIA executives. Also last week, a delegation led by Clay Lowery, a top Treasury official, met with ADIA executives as part of a move to formalize investment guidelines for sovereign funds. In many ways the tension between ADIA\u2019s elephantine size \u2014 the fund is twice as big as Norway\u2019s, the second-largest sovereign fund \u2014 and its demure aspect is underscored by its investment in Citigroup. Since ADIA\u2019s genesis in 1976, the fund has followed a conservative investment approach. It has farmed out its assets to foreign money managers and taken stakes in companies based upon their weighting in benchmark stock indexes like the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500. ADIA is also one of the largest institutional investors in hedge funds and private equity funds. This approach has served ADIA well and reflects the strongly felt notion that the fund\u2019s ultimate purpose is to serve as a financial reserve for Abu Dhabi in times when oil revenues are less robust. Nevertheless, guided by the advice of a stream of foreign bankers who worked at ADIA in the 1970s and 1980s, the fund has allocated a large portion of its assets to equities. It now has about 65 percent of assets, or about $450 billion, invested in stocks, according to bankers. Currently, the fund averages a yearly return of 10 to 20 percent, say people who have been briefed on the fund\u2019s investment strategy. With oil about $100 a barrel, bankers and analysts estimate Abu Dhabi produces a surplus of at least $50 billion a year. Given the emirate\u2019s small population, 80 percent of which is foreign born, even the most expansive investment and welfare policies make it hard to put a dent in such a sum. The United States is not a big buyer of Abu Dhabi\u2019s oil, most of which goes to Asia, but the surplus is a vivid reminder of the American economy\u2019s own fiscal imbalance, to say nothing of its diminishing global stature, a theme that underpins much of the political worry surrounding sovereign fund investments. \u201cIn the short run, that they are investing here is good,\u201d Senator Bayh said. \u201cBut in the long run it is unsustainable. Our power and authority is eroding because of the amounts we are sending abroad for energy and consumer goods.\u201d In the past, much of Abu Dhabi\u2019s cash surplus has gone to ADIA, although the formation two years ago of a smaller sister fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, has resulted in a lesser amount flowing to ADIA, analysts say. But ADIA\u2019s new strategic investment group represents the clearest sign that the fund is taking steps to leverage its size and influence. The division was set up in the summer of 2006 and is overseen by Saeed Mubarek Rashid al-Hajiri, a young Western-educated portfolio manager who also heads the fund\u2019s considerable investments in emerging market economies. In addition to Citigroup and Toll Brothers, in which ADIA took a 4.5 percent position last summer, other companies in the group\u2019s portfolio include EFG Hermes, one of the leading investment banks in the Arab world, and Banque de Tunisie et des Emirats, a Tunisian bank. Instead of passively tracking indexes, this unit actively picks investments in hopes of generating market-beating returns. It is a method of stock picking practiced by most hedge funds and asset management companies, and the Citigroup investment, with its size and attendant risk, is a good example of this approach. Compared with the overall fund, the assets within this group are small at about $30 billion, according to people who have been briefed on ADIA\u2019s strategy. As with all its investments, ADIA adopts a long-term, passive approach and does not seek board seats. These people say that outsiders still manage 80 percent of ADIA\u2019s assets, proof that the fund\u2019s commitment to making direct investments is only in its early stages. This hesitation partly reflects the lack of a strong individual within the organization who has the combination of investment experience, trust of the royal family and a bit of international swagger to assume a larger public presence. The fund\u2019s chairman is Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Abu Dhabi. He has a cautious and reserved disposition and does not take an active role in ADIA. When Citigroup\u2019s chairman, Robert E. Rubin, traveled to Abu Dhabi last November, his courtesy call was made to Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the point person for the United States-Abu Dhabi relationship. The fund\u2019s managing director is Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a half-brother of Sheik Khalifa who maintains a full-floor office in ADIA\u2019s sleek 40-story headquarters. People familiar with ADIA management, however, say the sheik, who has worked at ADIA for 10 years, delegates significant authority to Jean-Paul Villain, a publicity-shy French money manager who directs investment strategy and asset allocation. Mr. Villain, the most senior foreign-born executive at the fund, joined ADIA in the early 1980s from the French bank Paribas. While other expatriates have come and gone, Mr. Villain has stayed, except for a brief period in the mid-1980s. More so than the other foreigners, Mr. Villain, whose wife is Syrian-born, has gained the royal family\u2019s trust. One view is that ADIA\u2019s penchant for secrecy stems from its experience during the scandal at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the early 1990s, during which ADIA is said to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The al-Nahyan family became embroiled in regulatory investigations, although no charges were ever brought against them. But people who worked at ADIA from its earliest days in the late 1970s and 1980s say that the fund\u2019s reticence dates to its formation. Some see this as a reflection of Abu Dhabi\u2019s small size, insular culture and geographical vulnerability, a sense that the less that is known about the specifics of ADIA\u2019s hoard, the better. \u201cADIA does not answer to a wide public at home,\u201d said David L. Mack, a former United States ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. \u201cThey are a small country in an area with some nasty countries like Iran that can make trouble for them. They don\u2019t like to advertise.\u201d", "keyword": "Abu Dhabi;Finances;Banks and Banking;Executives and Management;Public Relations and Publicity;Abu Dhabi Investment Authority;Citigroup Incorporated"}
{"id": "ny0195083", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2009/11/15", "title": "No. 11 Butler Looks Sluggish in Win Against Davidson", "abstract": "Gordon Hayward scored 17 points and Willie Veasley added 15 to lead No. 11 Butler to a 73-62 win on Saturday against visiting Davidson. The Bulldogs (1-0) rallied twice from 10-point deficits in the first half, then used a late run to seal their win. Though Butler protected its highest preseason ranking in program history, it did not play its usual style. In the first half, the Bulldogs were in foul trouble, committed seven turnovers and made only 7 of their first 22 field-goal attempts. OKLAHOMA 95, MOUNT ST. MARY\u2019S 71 Steven Pledger scored 21 points and his fellow freshman Tiny Gallon had 18 points and 15 rebounds as No. 17 Oklahoma won at home. MICHIGAN 97, NORTHERN MICHIGAN 50 Manny Harris had 18 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists, only the second triple-double in program history, and No. 15 Michigan defeated N.C.A.A. Division II Northern Michigan at home. RUTGERS 74, MARIST 67 Mike Rosario scored 17 points and Gregory Echenique had 13 points and 10 rebounds for host Rutgers in the season opener for both teams. CORNELL 71, ALABAMA 67 Ryan Wittman scored 23 points and made 5 of 8 3-pointers for visiting Cornell. Cornell (1-0) opened the second half with 9 straight points, building a 35-20 lead on consecutive 3-pointers by Chris Wroblewski and Wittman. Alabama turned up its full-court press and whittled the margin to 53-52 with 6 minutes 16 seconds left. But Cornell, the two-time defending Ivy League champion, never gave up the lead. PRINCETON 71, CENTRAL MICHIGAN 68 Douglas Davis scored 16 points, including the last 4 of the game, for visiting Princeton. Central Michigan led by 68-67 with 45 seconds to play. Davis scored on the next possession to give the Tigers (1-0) the lead, then blocked a shot, was fouled and made two free throws to seal the win. BINGHAMTON 54, BLOOMSBURG 49 Moussa Camara had a career-high 16 points, and the newcomer Greer Wright added 15 points and 10 rebounds for host Binghamton, which opened a new era in its program with a victory over Division II Bloomsburg. Binghamton has only three returning players \u2014 six were dismissed in the off-season after the arrest of the star guard Emanuel Mayben on drug charges. Women CONNECTICUT 105, NORTHEASTERN 35 Top-ranked Connecticut scored the game\u2019s first 28 points and was never challenged. Connecticut extended its winning streak to 40 games.", "keyword": "Basketball;College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0238923", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/12/02", "title": "Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama Calls for Ethics Overhaul", "abstract": "Less than two months after a federal corruption investigation led to the arrest of four state senators, Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama announced Wednesday that he was calling a special session of the Legislature this month and urged lawmakers to pass an aggressive ethics overhaul package. The proposal that the governor unveiled would address several loopholes in state ethics laws, some of which are at the root of recent corruption indictments. \u201cThe opportunity to enact real reforms has never been better, and the need has never been greater,\u201d the governor said in a statement. Mr. Riley, a Republican who will leave office in January and is prevented by term limits from running again, called for the special session to begin next Wednesday. Efforts at an ethics overhaul have for the most part faltered in Alabama since the nationwide wave of state ethics initiatives that followed the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Some rules were strengthened in the mid-1990s, but large gaps have remained. \u201cI think it\u2019s just been institutional resistance,\u201d said James L. Sumner, the director of the Alabama Ethics Commission. \u201cYou could never actually single out a person or a group that was opposed to ethics reform. It was essentially death by a thousand cuts.\u201d Law enforcement has stepped in where ethics rules fell short. One governor, Guy Hunt, resigned after a felony conviction on charges that included theft. Another, Don Siegelman, is appealing a bribery conviction. Two wide-ranging federal corruption investigations in the last few years have led to the arrest, conviction or guilty pleas of numerous state officials. As recently as October, 11 people were arrested, including four lawmakers and three lobbyists, on charges related to what the authorities called a scheme by casino operators to buy votes for legislation favorable to gambling. This drumbeat of scandal has made the prospects for a substantial ethics overhaul as good as they have been in years. The state government is also firmly in the control of the Republicans for the first time in more than a century, giving the party\u2019s legislators an incentive to act on a broadly popular issue. The most significant proposal in the ethics package, in Mr. Sumner\u2019s estimation, involves the state\u2019s campaign finance laws, which have gained a national reputation for looseness due largely to the presence of so-called P.A.C.-to-P.A.C. transfers. Currently, a donation to one political action committee can be bundled with other donations and given to another committee, and then to another, a process that essentially launders campaign donations and renders their origins untraceable. The ethics package would ban such transfers. Other proposals are aimed at curtailing the influence of lobbyists, one of the core issues of the federal vote-buying inquiry. Currently, lobbyists, or anyone for that matter, can more or less spend as much as they want on hospitality, meals, travel, tickets and other gifts for public officials. Spending that adds up to less than $250 a day does not even have to be disclosed. The proposed overhaul would, with some exceptions, put a $25 limit on gifts to a public official on any one occasion, and a $100 limit on gifts to an official from one source per year. All spending would have to be disclosed. The package would also give the state ethics commission the power of subpoena for the first time, a shortcoming that has severely hampered state ethics inquiries, leaving investigators dependent on local district attorneys who were often themselves politically compromised.", "keyword": "Alabama;State Legislatures;Politics and Government;Riley Bob;Ethics"}
{"id": "ny0163216", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2006/02/07", "title": "Making a Leap to the Big Time, Ready or Not", "abstract": "Just before the start of the second half of a game late last month between the New Jersey Institute of Technology and visiting Bloomfield College, the N.J.I.T. cheerleading squad broke a huddle -- and walked out of the gymnasium. The sudden departure of team spirit was not lost upon Jim Casciano, the men's basketball coach at N.J.I.T., a university in Newark with an undergraduate enrollment of 5,366, give or take a dozen cheerleaders. \"Where are the cheerleaders going?\" Casciano said to Tim Camp, the assistant athletic director. \"Did someone tell them that the game was over?\" All Camp could do was smile and shrug his shoulders. \"Sorry, Coach,\" he said. \"I guess it's another kink in the system that we need to straighten out.\" Casciano and his Highlanders, an N.C.A.A. Division II squad playing in the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference, had better get the kinks out soon. Next season, they will begin playing in Division I as an independent. Ready or not, here come St. John's, Richmond, Columbia and Lafayette, four teams tentatively scheduled for N.J.I.T.'s first tour at college athletics' highest level. \"Going into Division I is a great opportunity for us,\" said Casciano, a head coach for 20 seasons. \"I just hope that people understand that what they see next year is not a finished product, but a process that is going to take some time to complete.\" During the Bloomfield game, there were signs everywhere that the process, which includes everything from improving N.J.I.T.'s on-court talent to creating a big-time atmosphere at the mom-and-pop Fleisher Athletic Center, would indeed take time. The Highlanders have no player taller than Henry White, a 6-foot-7 senior who plays forward and center. Dan Stonkus, a 6-9, 240-pound freshman, is being redshirted. But the Highlanders (7-15) may not currently have the speed and the two-way tenacity to compete in Division I. Clayton Barker is a 5-10 junior point guard with good court vision, a dependable pull-up jumper and stutter-step moves to the basket. He is averaging 20.6 points a game, but he is N.J.I.T.'s only consistent scoring threat. \"Next year's schedule is our recruiting tool,\" said Casciano, sitting behind his desk in a dark suit and a matching mood after his team lost to Bloomfield, 81-75. \"Right now, we're recruiting legitimate Division I players, although we do not have a lot to sell them other than having a chance to be a part of something special, to maybe get some good playing time against some of the best competition in the country, and of course, to benefit from playing at an excellent academic school.\" In addition to adding talent, N.J.I.T. will have to begin shedding the rest of its Division II wardrobe. The game against Bloomfield drew about 150 fans -- about the capacity of two busloads of Syracuse fans. The bleachers were built to accommodate about 1,000 spectators. Barker, from Passaic High School in New Jersey, said that playing before large crowds on the road next season would not be an easy adjustment. \"Executing our game plan with thousands of people screaming at us is going to be a tall order, but it's an exciting transition that we are all looking forward to,\" he said. \"Personally, I feel blessed that this has happened to us.\" N.J.I.T. has a lot of work to do before it happens. The team's public-address system is a laptop computer that pumps songs through a single speaker hanging on a wall behind the scorer's table. There is no news media room, because there is no news media coverage, and no television timeouts, because there is no television contract. But if a university filled with future architects and engineers cannot figure out a way to design and build a winning basketball program, who can? Lenny Kaplan, the athletic director, said there would be a big increase in the budget, \"probably fourfold.\" \"At the Division II level, everything is regionally based, but in Division I, recruiting and travel is done nationally, and that becomes a lot more expensive,\" he said. Kaplan added that N.J.I.T. had raised $2.5 million in a $5 million fund-raising campaign to offset the costs of moving to Division I. Robert A. Altenkirch, the N.J.I.T. president, said: \"Our first objective for next season is to be able to play an opponent at the Division I level and not come away from the game feeling embarrassed. If we can just hang in there for minutes at a time and not pay attention to wins and losses, that would be pretty good, and maybe, over the course of three or four years, we might begin to see some improvement.\" The N.J.I.T. men's soccer team began playing in Division I in 2004. By the fall, all of the university's sports teams -- N.J.I.T. does not have a football program -- will be competing in Division I. \"This is all about visibility,\" Altenkirch said when asked why N.J.I.T. applied to the National Collegiate Athletic Association for reclassification to Division I. \"We are a nationally ranked research university, so why not line up with some of our peers and be a nationally recognized athletic program?\" Altenkirch said that N.J.I.T. had been in discussions with the Devils about the possibility of playing host to basketball games against major Division I opponents at the Devils' new hockey arena, which is being built along Newark's waterfront and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2007. Altenkirch said that after this season, N.J.I.T. would install a new court at the Fleisher Athletic Center and increase the seating capacity to at least 2,000. \"If you think about Newark, and the renaissance that is going on here, well, the city deserves a Division I basketball program,\" he said. \"And we're the only game in town.\"", "keyword": "NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY;COLLEGE ATHLETICS;BASKETBALL"}
{"id": "ny0206602", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/06/05", "title": "Latvia Stands By Its Currency Peg", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Latvia, the European Union member country worst hit by the economic crisis, sought Thursday to convince investors that it would stand by its currency peg as speculation of a devaluation mounted and the country awaited additional aid. In December, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund , the World Bank and the Nordic countries backed Latvia\u2019s recovery policies with financing worth 7.5 billion euros ($10.6 billion). The I.M.F. agreed to put up 1.7 billion euros of that total, while the European Union offered 3.1 billion euros. But the disbursal of the latest installment of 1 billion euros has been held up as the Latvian government seeks to carry out painful cuts in public sector wages. European Union and I.M.F. officials are in Riga, the capital, to discuss it. Fears of a crisis rose Wednesday after Latvia was unable to sell short-term debt and the currency strained the lower end of the band in which the Latvian central bank allows it to trade against the euro . Investors who expected a devaluation would be unlikely to buy debt denominated in the national currency, the lat. One euro currently trades at about 1.41 lats. The band was set in anticipation of the country\u2019s joining the euro zone, which is expected in 2012 at the earliest. \u201cA breakdown in the relationship with the I.M.F. and E.U. would leave Latvia facing a substantial budget and external financing gap,\u201d Fitch Ratings said Thursday in a report, adding that \u201csuch a situation would be likely to precipitate a devaluation of the lat.\u201d Martins Gravitis, a spokesman for the central bank, said Latvia was committed to the peg \u201cuntil the lat is replaced by the euro.\u201d Latvia, a Baltic country of 2.2 million people, had a gross domestic product of about $34 billion last year. But output plunged in the first quarter and was expected to contract by about 17 percent for the year. The government is struggling to reduce its budget deficit, which is estimated at about 9.2 percent of gross domestic product. The I.M.F. had agreed to a revised budget deficit of 7 percent from the original 5 percent, and meeting the current target would not be possible without further budget cuts. Mr. Gravitis said public sector salaries would have to fall about 30 percent, returning them to 2006-7 levels, to make the budget. The private sector, he said, would find its own equilibrium. In Washington, Caroline Atkinson, a spokeswoman for the I.M.F., said at a news briefing that the situation in Latvia was \u201cchallenging,\u201d and that \u201cthe authorities have stressed the importance of controlling the government debt and deficits and maintaining the peg.\u201d Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis must tread a fine line, balancing international lenders\u2019 demands with the knowledge that poverty is increasing and social unrest is rising. Riots in January brought down his predecessor. Latvians go to the polls this weekend for municipal elections, and officials said political concerns might have affected the timing of the government\u2019s new budget announcements.", "keyword": "Latvia;Currency;International Monetary Fund;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0049921", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2014/10/20", "title": "4 SEC West Teams Are in Top 5", "abstract": "With Alabama moving to No. 4 and Auburn to No. 5, the Southeastern Conference became the first league to place four teams in the top five of The Associated Press\u2019s poll. All four, including No. 1 Mississippi State and No. 3 Mississippi, are from the SEC\u2019s West division.", "keyword": "College football;Southeastern Conference;AP;University of Alabama;Auburn"}
{"id": "ny0174482", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/10/10", "title": "Yankees to Debate on Future of Torre", "abstract": "In his news conference late Monday night, Joe Torre tried to dissect another Yankees playoff loss and explain what it meant for his future. Watching on a television in the manager\u2019s office as Torre choked up, the coaches struggled with what they were seeing. \u201cJoe treats everybody with respect, whether you\u2019re a batboy, a coach or a trainer,\u201d said Larry Bowa, the third-base coach. \u201cHe does everything the right way. What he has to go through, after all that he\u2019s done, it doesn\u2019t seem right. But we\u2019ve all been in baseball for a long time. That\u2019s the process.\u201d The painful process of parting with a manager was enough to make Bowa and the others teary on Monday. A day later, as the coaches and some players packed up their lockers at Yankee Stadium, Torre was a no-show and George Steinbrenner , the principal owner, was silent. His only statement came through his publicist, Howard Rubenstein, who said Steinbrenner was flying home to Tampa, Fla., and had nothing to say for now. Steinbrenner will seek opinions on whether to offer Torre a new contract, but his public decree before Game 3 of the division series \u2014 that Torre would lose his job if the Yankees lost the series to Cleveland \u2014 resonates. If Steinbrenner lets Torre go, as expected, most people around the team believe the front-runner to succeed him is the bench coach, Don Mattingly . Others believe Joe Girardi has a chance, and Tony La Russa \u2014 like Lou Piniella last year \u2014 is the biggest name on the managerial free-agent market. Mattingly yesterday would not directly address whether he would want Torre\u2019s job, but he said he had always made it clear that he would like a chance to manage. Yet he knows that replacing Torre, his close friend who won four World Series, would be an extraordinary challenge. \u201cI would think it\u2019s like following John Wooden or somebody,\u201d Mattingly said yesterday. \u201cThe guy\u2019s won championship after championship, and he\u2019s in the playoffs every year. It\u2019s pretty much a no-win situation for someone to come in here and be able to experience what he\u2019s done. It\u2019s not going to happen. So as far as coming in here and taking on that job, it\u2019s not necessarily a great situation.\u201d Girardi was Torre\u2019s bench coach in 2005 before taking over the Florida Marlins and winning the National League Manager of the Year award. He clashed with management and was fired, but he is still widely respected, especially by General Manager Brian Cashman. When Steinbrenner wanted to fire Torre last fall, Cashman interceded and saved Torre\u2019s job. Torre had a year remaining on his contract then, but the deal is up now, and Cashman would not say if he would still recommend Torre. \u201cI\u2019m not going to comment, in fairness to the process, until I have a chance to sit down with ownership,\u201d Cashman said yesterday, adding later of Steinbrenner: \u201cHe\u2019s always picked the manager here. Obviously, I had a great deal of input in last year\u2019s process, so we\u2019ll see. You can\u2019t get ahead of the process.\u201d The Yankees are planning their annual organizational meetings, and before he left for Tampa, Steinbrenner\u2019s son Hank, a senior vice president, told The Associated Press that no decisions had been made. \u201cI really do like Joe a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cI have a lot of admiration for him.\u201d Torre stayed at his home in Westchester County yesterday, speaking by phone with Cashman, Mattingly and others. Torre contacted the Yankees\u2019 media relations director, Jason Zillo, because photographers were camped on his lawn, even though he had pleaded for privacy in his news conference. The idea of La Russa replacing Torre would seem to appeal more to the vintage Steinbrenner, who craved the biggest name, than the Steinbrenner of today. La Russa\u2019s contract with the St. Louis Cardinals is also expiring, and the Cardinals are without a general manager. \u201cYou know how rumors are; anyone can start one,\u201d said outfielder Shelley Duncan, whose father, Dave, is La Russa\u2019s pitching coach. \u201cEven my dad would tell you there is nothing substantial until action starts to take place. None of that has happened. Joe is our manager.\u201d Steinbrenner, 77, has a warm spot for ex-Yankees and has always held Mattingly, a former Yankees captain, in high regard. Four years ago, he called Mattingly at his farm in Evansville, Ind., making a personal appeal for him to coach the Yankees\u2019 hitters after eight years of retirement. When Mattingly was given the bench coach job last October, after Lee Mazzilli was dismissed, he was seen as the clear heir to Torre. Players believe Mattingly would have a similar style. \u201cHe\u2019s got a great baseball mind,\u201d first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz said. \u201cHe and Joe were both great players. Sometimes you lose how hard this game really is, but Joe and Donnie didn\u2019t lose that. Usually, the longer it is since you played, the better player you were and the easier the game was to you. But with those guys, they never make you feel like they\u2019re talking down to you.\u201d Mientkiewicz and the other players who showed up yesterday expressed support for Torre, praising him for steering the Yankees to the postseason after a 21-29 start. Mientkiewicz revealed that Torre \u201clet us have it\u201d during a team meeting in Toronto in May, just before the turnaround began, and another first baseman, Andy Phillips, said he could not contemplate the Yankees without Torre. \u201cI refuse to think that way right now,\u201d Phillips said. \u201cI won\u2019t let that thought enter into my mind.\u201d Most important, of course, is how seriously that thought is bouncing around the brain of Steinbrenner, who must decide \u2014 officially \u2014 whether to part with the most popular and successful manager he has had. \u201cHis reign so far here has been terrific,\u201d Cashman said of Torre. \u201cYou\u2019d sign up for it right now, if you could find that. It\u2019s been magical and it\u2019s been incredible through \u201907. What goes on going forward, in \u201908 and beyond, is the discussion topic on the table.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Torre Joe;Mattingly Don;Steinbrenner George M 3d;Baseball;Girardi Joe"}
{"id": "ny0016225", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/10/07", "title": "Marketers Chase Evolving Consumer", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 THE senior executives who spoke at a major marketing conference here seemed to be auditioning for a reality show called \u201cExtreme Makeover: Corporate Edition.\u201d The executives, appearing during the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers , urged their peers to recognize that the pace and scope of technological and societal changes \u2014 described as \u201ccrazy\u201d in two presentations \u2014 required what one speaker called a \u201cconstant reinvention\u201d of marketing. The stakes are high enough, some suggested, that the need to make over marketing may be a matter of life and death \u2014 at least, perhaps, when it comes to careers. \u201cYou either innovate or die,\u201d said Roger Adams, the chief marketing officer at the United Services Automobile Association. John Costello, the president for global marketing and innovation at the Dunkin\u2019 Brands Group, advocated providing consumers with \u201ca real clear point of product differentiation\u201d by declaring, \u201cDifferentiate or die.\u201d And Stephen Quinn, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer at the Walmart U.S. division of Wal-Mart Stores, held up a copy of the current issue of ANA Magazine, which depicts on its cover a chameleon beside the headline, \u201cChange or Die.\u201d \u201cWe as marketers have never had to face this before,\u201d Mr. Quinn said, particularly against a backdrop of \u201can economy that\u2019s not that great.\u201d Marketers must acknowledge they are operating in \u201ca new era, a customer era,\u201d he added, one in which \u201cthe consumer is in control\u201d and decides what hits or misses. He referred to the huge popularity of the South Korean singer Psy \u2014 \u201cThere is not a marketer in this room good enough to engineer this\u201d \u2014 and the TV series \u201c Duck Dynasty \u201d \u2014 \u201cWe sell hundreds of millions of dollars of \u2018Duck Dynasty\u2019 merchandise.\u201d \u201cThis is a painful transition for us,\u201d Mr. Quinn said, \u201cbut it is going to make everyone in this room customer-centric.\u201d Joseph V. Tripodi, the executive vice president and chief marketing and commercial officer at the Coca-Cola Company, discussed how risk-taking must become second nature, citing the \u201cbig, hairy, audacious goal\u201d his company adopted in 2010, under the rubric of Vision 2020 , to more than double revenue in a decade. Among other recent risky business decisions, Mr. Tripodi listed the introduction in Argentina of a soft drink named Coca-Cola Life , which mixes sugar and stevia and is sold in a recyclable bottle, made with plant material, bearing a green label rather than the Coke brand\u2019s familiar red one. \u201cIt\u2019s like playing with the crown jewels,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we\u2019re encouraged by the results early on.\u201d Image \u201cWe talk around the world, \u2018We need to be bold, be disruptive,\u2019 \u201d said Joseph V. Tripodi, the marketing chief for Coca-Cola. Credit Kevin Keelan/Clarion Pictures With so many consumers engaging with companies, and one another, through social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, marketers should consider \u201cprovocations,\u201d which generate responses that are \u201cshared broadly,\u201d Mr. Tripodi said. \u201cWe talk around the world, \u2018We need to be bold, be disruptive,\u2019 \u201d he added, offering as examples an effort that encouraged Indians and Pakistanis to connect with one another through interactive Coca-Cola Small World vending machines and a commercial that explained why the company sponsored sporting events like the Olympics. Beth Comstock, the senior vice president and chief marketing officer at the General Electric Company, took a long-term perspective \u2014 portraying Thomas A. Edison, a founder of G.E., as \u201cthe Steve Jobs of his day\u201d \u2014 in offering \u201csome lessons learned as we try to navigate the change.\u201d \u201cKnow yourself,\u201d she advised, adding: \u201cAt G.E., we\u2019re not going to be Facebook. We\u2019re not going to be Apple. We\u2019re pretty cool with what we are.\u201d And what is that? \u201cWe have embraced our geeky side,\u201d Ms. Comstock said. \u201cWe\u2019re geeky, and we\u2019re proud of it.\u201d She provided examples of how \u201csci fi goes to sci real\u201d in social media that include Facebook , Instagram, Tumblr, Vine and YouTube through initiatives with names like \u201c Datalandia, the small town saved by Big Data ,\u201d \u201cfactory flyovers,\u201d \u201c140 things we made today\u201d and \u201c six-second science fairs .\u201d Mr. Costello of Dunkin\u2019 Brands warned that \u201cin the crazy, ever-changing world we face,\u201d where \u201cmarketing has become very, very complicated,\u201d it has become \u201ceasy to get caught up in trying to do everything.\u201d Rather, it is important to \u201cconfront reality,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cMarketers tend to be optimists, but you know, hope is not a strategy.\u201d For Dunkin\u2019 Donuts stores, Mr. Costello said, a decision was made to promote differentiation with a campaign, \u201c America runs on Dunkin\u2019 , \u201d that presents the brand\u2019s coffee products as \u201chow everyday folks who keep America running keep themselves running every day.\u201d Although \u201c \u2018 Time to make the donuts \u2019 was an iconic campaign\u201d for Dunkin\u2019 Donuts for decades, Mr. Costello said, executives realized that \u201ccoffee was the future.\u201d And reflecting how \u201cchange has become the norm,\u201d he added, the company plans to introduce new commercials on Monday with a social-media focus. The spots end with consumers proclaiming, \u201cHashtag my Dunkin\u2019,\u201d which appears on screen, in Twitter-friendly fashion, as \u201c#mydunkin.\u201d The conference, which began Thursday and ended on Sunday, drew a record attendance estimated at close to 2,200; the previous record, set last year , was about 1,850.", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;Social Media;Association of National Advertisers"}
{"id": "ny0183141", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/12/09", "title": "The Mystery of the Umbrellas", "abstract": "THE first time it happens, the neophyte will probably think it\u2019s an aberration, maybe one oddball\u2019s bizarre pathology. Then there will be another, and another, and it turns out everyone\u2019s doing it. What a funny bunch, these New Yorkers. Autumn has faded, the cold has descended, and then the first snowfall of the year arrives. The flakes start falling, and to the transplant from the snowy provinces, they will be a nostalgic reminder of home. Ah, the snow! So lovely, and what a hush and lulling contrast to the usual hustle and bustle. Then the transplant sees that first person walking down the street nonchalantly holding an umbrella overhead, as if such behavior were normal. Initially this image seems a hallucination. It\u2019s a surprise, to put it mildly, this ridiculous affectation, because as everyone knows, umbrellas are made to be used when it rains. The first few instances in which these umbrellas are sighted will be ascribed to the charitable guess that the people wielding them didn\u2019t notice that the temperature has dropped low enough for the rain to have turned into beautiful white fluffy snowflakes. Or maybe these natives are crazy, or at the very least a little eccentric. But no, these people are everywhere, shrouded by their mostly black umbrellas from the lovely snow. And after the first winter, the now-jaded, not-so-new New Yorker will come to accept this practice as normal and mundane, and he will stop gawking. Yet deep down in his soul, the transplant will hold on to the notion that umbrellas are to be used only as protection against the rain, which is wet and, when it drenches the clothes and skin, makes one uncomfortable. The neophyte, who has turned into a jaded New Yorker, will find out in time that people don\u2019t do this just in New York but in many other cities, too. It\u2019s the old rural-versus-urban divide, the difference between accepting and finding enjoyment in nature\u2019s arbitrary whims and refusing to find pleasure in this sort of thing. In New York, the sight of umbrellas raised aloft in the snow may be more common simply because the streets are filled with people wearing nice clothes and heading to and from work, and they will do anything to prevent melting snowflakes from ruining their outfits or God forbid mussing their hair. Even though this New Yorker will get used to the sight of those harried and hurried walkers warding off one of nature\u2019s most precious gifts, he will still carry with him the feeling that blocking out snow\u2019s charms borders on the insane, that a determined effort to not get touched by those wonderfully soft star-shaped flakes is patently absurd and always will be.", "keyword": "Weather;Snow and Snowstorms"}
{"id": "ny0065206", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/06/10", "title": "Best Selling Science Books", "abstract": "1 QUIET by Susan Cain. Crown. Introverts \u2014 one-third of the population \u2014 are undervalued in American society. (1) 2 THINKING, FAST AND SLOW by Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The winner of a Nobel Prize in economic science discusses how we make choices in business and personal life and when we can and cannot trust our intuitions. (2) 3 DAVID AND GOLIATH by Malcolm Gladwell. Little Brown. How disadvantages can work in our favor, from the author of \u201cThe Tipping Point\u201d and \u201cOutliers.\u201d (3) 4 THE POWER OF HABIT by Charles Duhigg. Random House. A New York Times reporter\u2019s account of the science behind forming habits, and breaking them. (4) 5 WHERE DOES IT HURT? by Jonathan Bush with Stephen Baker. Portfolio/Penguin. The chief executive of a health technology company calls for new business models in health care. 6 THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. Crown. The story of an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were extensively cultured without her permission in 1951. (10) 7 A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE by Nicholas Wade. Penguin Press. Genes, race and human history, from a longtime science writer for The Times. 8 THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY by Denise Kiernan. Simon & Schuster. Thousands of women took well-paying jobs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II, not knowing that the government project where they worked was enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. (7) 9 MADNESS by Marya Hornbacher. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A memoir that sheds light on bipolar disorder. 10 LIFE, ANIMATED by Ron Suskind. Hyperion/Kingswell. The parents of an autistic son successfully used animated heroes and sidekicks to achieve communication with him. (12) 11 GULP by Mary Roach. Norton. A science writer\u2019s pilgrimage down the digestive tract; by the author of \u201cStiff,\u201d \u201cSpook,\u201d \u201cBonk\u201d and \u201cPacking for Mars.\u201d (8) 12 THE FUTURE OF THE MIND by Michio Kaku. Doubleday. A theoretical physicist examines research at the intersection of neuroscience and physics that points to the day when science has a complete map of the brain, making telepathy, mind-controlled robots and uploading memories possible. (5) 13 INSIDE OF A DOG by Alexandra Horowitz. Scribner. The canine brain. What the world is like from a dog\u2019s point of view. (13) 14 THE KNOWLEDGE by Lewis Dartnell. Penguin. How civilization might theoretically be able to rebuild the world from scratch if the worst happened. (17) 15 THE SPORTS GENE by David Epstein. Current. A study of the science of elite athletic performance addresses questions about whether athletic skill is innate or can be learned. 16 THE SIXTH EXTINCTION by Elizabeth Kolbert. Holt. The New Yorker writer examines the role of human influences in the planet\u2019s current spasm of plant and animal loss. (9) 17 THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD by Amanda Ripley. Simon & Schuster. High-performing schools in Finland, South Korea and Poland, seen through the eyes of American high school students abroad. 18 THE SECOND MACHINE AGE by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Norton. How digital technologies will change our lives and the economy, and what we can do to prepare ourselves. (16) 19 BRAINSTORM by Daniel J. Siegel. Tarcher/Penguin. Understanding the adolescent mind. 20 THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS by Sam Kean. Little Brown. Tales of neurological curiosities and adaptations, ranging from phantom limbs to blind people who \u201csee\u201d through their tongues.", "keyword": "Books;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0207063", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/06/29", "title": "Unleashed at Last, Author Marty Appel Digs Deeper Into Thurman Munson\u2019s Life", "abstract": "Thirty-one years ago, Marty Appel wrote Thurman Munson \u2019s autobiography. Now, in an unusual literary leap, he has written a biography of Munson. \u201cI never felt like I let anybody down with the first book,\u201d Appel said last week in his Manhattan apartment. \u201cI fulfilled my responsibilities. But I knew there was always so much more to the story.\u201d Munson, the former Yankees captain and catcher, died 30 years ago when the private jet he was piloting crashed . Appel would not have pursued the new biography had Munson not been so reluctant to open up during 12 hours of interviews in 1977 and 1978. The autobiography was a routine look at a short career, unlike \u201c The Bronx Zoo ,\u201d Sparky Lyle\u2019s (and Peter Golenbock\u2019s) humorous, candid best-selling book about the Yankees\u2019 1978 season. Not surprisingly, Munson\u2019s memoir sold far better after his death. \u201cIt was Thurman\u2019s book,\u201d Appel said. \u201cHe was free to leave out whatever he wanted. He never said, \u2018I\u2019m not going there,\u2019 but my questions weren\u2019t Mike Wallace-like, either, because I was cooperating with him and telling the story he wanted to.\u201d Munson might not have agreed to the autobiography had he not trusted Appel, who left his job as the Yankees\u2019 public relations director in early 1977, shortly after Munson was named the 1976 American League most valuable player. Munson did not think much of writing a memoir \u2014 he was only 29 and thought it would be too personal an experience \u2014 until Appel reasoned that if someone else wrote a biography, Munson would hate it. The collaborator and biographer work at different ends of the life story spectrum. The former writes an as-told-to memoir controlled (but not always read) by the star. The biographer broadens the story in ways that may upset the star or his family. David Maraniss , the author of biographies of Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, said he would never collaborate on an autobiography that he could not report thoroughly or write a biography authorized by the subject or his family. \u201cHow do you collaborate and maintain complete authorial integrity?\u201d he wrote in an e-mail message in response to questions. \u201cI suppose it\u2019s possible, but not easy.\u201d Among the writers who have collaborated on their subjects\u2019 memoirs and wrote their biographies are O. B. Keeler and Al Stump . Keeler did it for a friend, the golfing great Bobby Jones . Stump wrote Ty Cobb\u2019s 1961 autobiography but returned 33 years later with a harrowing, warts-filled biography of Cobb, the Detroit Tigers Hall of Famer, that Stump called redemption for participating in what he called the earlier \u201ccover-up.\u201d \u201cIt felt good to lay it on the line,\u201d Stump said in 1994 after the release of the Ron Shelton film \u201cCobb ,\u201d which described Cobb\u2019s paranoid, unstable behavior. Appel did not have atonement for \u201cThurman Munson: An Autobiography\u201d in mind while he thought about writing \u201c Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain \u201d (Doubleday). Instead, it was a sense that Munson\u2019s reticence to discuss his upbringing in Canton, Ohio, or his emotional life warranted a biography. Also, his love of flying was an afterthought in the autobiography \u2014 and his death provided a tragic coda. The biography describes Munson\u2019s love-starved family life in Canton with a difficult, sometimes cruel father, Darrell, and Thurman\u2019s eager embrace by his teenage years of the family of his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Diana. Munson only hinted in the memoir about the turmoil at home that helped form his grumpy adult persona. But Appel\u2019s interviews with Munson\u2019s brother, Duane, and sister Darla describe the dysfunctional family life that turned him so inward. \u201cI didn\u2019t fully appreciate what was out there until I connected with his brother and sister,\u201d Appel said. \u201cThey were the key to the book. They were the missing family.\u201d In the autobiography, Munson described a tension-free scene with \u201chappy faces\u201d awaiting him at home in Canton when he signed his first Yankee contract in 1967. The new book had the Munson house \u201cbuzzing with excitement\u201d except for Darrell Munson, hollering to the assembled family and friends, \u201cHe ain\u2019t too good on pop fouls, you know!\u201d Munson\u2019s other sister, Janice, refused to speak to Appel. And while Diana Munson cooperated to a small degree, she declined to be interviewed. At her request, Appel removed a paragraph describing Munson\u2019s autopsy report. Diana Munson did not respond to a message seeking a comment on the book. Appel\u2019s interviews with Munson\u2019s friends, coaches and teammates stressed his athletic abilities and the sadness that turned into his deep estrangement from his family. \u201cHis high school coach said he would typically drop kids off at home after practice,\u201d Appel said. \u201cBut Thurman never wanted that because he didn\u2019t want to take a chance of his coach meeting a family member.\u201d Appel does not believe he has betrayed Munson by poking into family matters that he would not discuss in life. \u201cI think he\u2019d come to recognize that his story was an example to people that you can break the cycle,\u201d he said, \u201cthat you can live a wonderful family life even if everything in your background says you can\u2019t.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Munson Thurman Lee;New York Yankees;Appel Marty;Maraniss David;Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (Book)"}
{"id": "ny0175530", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2007/10/12", "title": "Party Power Struggle Enthralls South Africa", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 11 \u2014 A politically powerful industrialist is gunned down in an ambush linked to a reputed mobster. Investigators link the mobster to the national police commissioner. Prosecutors obtain a warrant for the commissioner\u2019s arrest. Then suddenly, the warrant vanishes \u2014 and the chief prosecutor who secured it is removed from his job. Not even South Africa \u2019s political insiders know for sure where this mystery leads, and the man who does know, President Thabo Mbeki , is not saying anything. But political and legal experts alike increasingly suspect the worst: that a brutal two-year battle for power in the governing African National Congress is spreading from party corridors into the government itself. With a convention to choose the party\u2019s next leader barely two months away, a bitter rivalry between the two major camps \u2014 that of Mr. Mbeki, who aspires to continue as the party president, and that of the populist politician Jacob Zuma, who wants to replace him \u2014 has become even more caustic. Mr. Mbeki fired Mr. Zuma as deputy president in 2005 after investigators tied Mr. Zuma to a bribery scandal involving a multibillion-dollar military contract. Mr. Zuma has regularly accused prosecutors, and by implication Mr. Mbeki, of manipulating the justice system for political ends. Many analysts dismissed that as sour grapes. Now the same issue has surfaced in the case of the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, a senior figure in the party who is broadly asserted to be an Mbeki supporter. And some analysts are no longer so certain. Marinus Wiechers, for one, says that that he fears that the temptation to use the government\u2019s powers for political ends has become irresistible. \u201cThe party-state is a thing that threatens all democracies, especially young democracies,\u201d Mr. Wiechers, a constitutional law expert and former university vice chancellor, said recently. \u201cIf you break down the separation of powers, you\u2019re certainly heading for a constitutional crisis.\u201d Were that true, it would \u2014 like Nixon\u2019s use of the Internal Revenue Service against his critics \u2014 be widely considered an affront to the nation\u2019s democratic values. In what has become known as the Selebi affair, however, neither Mr. Mbeki nor his aides have explained why they intervened in a legal proceeding to prevent Mr. Selebi\u2019s arrest. Rather, Mr. Mbeki has named a prominent member of the African National Congress to investigate the matter and broadly suggested that the full findings may not be made public for reasons of national security. Political commentators have already noted, acidly, that Nixon used that excuse to cover up his own transgressions. The basics of the Selebi affair are about the only things that remain clear. In September 2005, hit men pumped seven shots into a Johannesburg mining magnate, Brent Kebble. Investigators implicated a reputed organized-crime figure, Glenn Agliotti, known as the Landlord, who later said the Kebble murder was an \u201cassisted suicide\u201d that he helped arrange. Mr. Agliotti\u2019s cellphone records showed that he called Mr. Selebi \u2014 South Africa\u2019s police commissioner and the president of Interpol, the international police organization \u2014 from near the scene of the murder shortly after it occurred. In the ensuing outcry, Mr. Selebi denied any wrongdoing, called Mr. Agliotti a close friend and said he never discussed police business or criminal activity with him. Mr. Agliotti said he was only being a good citizen and reporting a crime to the police when he called Mr. Selebi. Mr. Mbeki declined to suspend or investigate Mr. Selebi, telling critics to have faith in his judgment. But investigators for South Africa\u2019s elite anti-corruption squad, the Scorpions, found evidence of crimes involving the two men. Last month, Vusi Pikoli, the head of the Scorpions and the nation\u2019s chief prosecutor, presented the secret evidence to two Johannesburg judges and secured warrants to arrest Mr. Selebi and to search his home and office. The warrants, however, were never executed. In late September, Mr. Mbeki\u2019s justice minister apparently learned of the warrants, demanded that Mr. Pikoli resign and then suspended him when he refused, according to local news reports. Mr. Pikoli\u2019s replacement then visited the two judges, asking them to rescind the warrants. The arrest warrant was canceled, the search warrant remains intact, Mr. Selebi remains in command \u2014 and to date, nobody has explained why. Mr. Mbeki has asked Mr. Pikoli\u2019s successor to review the evidence against Mr. Selebi and to recommend whether any action is needed. Mr. Pikoli, meanwhile, is under investigation by Mr. Mbeki\u2019s appointee, apparently for prosecutorial excesses. While the public version of the charges is not specific, it suggests that Mr. Pikoli is accused of giving immunity too liberally to organized-crime figures in return for incriminating evidence against Mr. Selebi, and of securing his arrest warrant without informing higher-ups. In South Africa\u2019s Parliament, the African National Congress, which controls 7 in 10 seats, has closed ranks, and calls by the opposition to investigate the affair have been rebuffed. News of the arrest warrant and its reversal, aired in newspapers and only grudgingly confirmed by the government in the past month, has set off outrage in the news media and among South Africa\u2019s minuscule political opposition. After nearly two weeks of daily headlines, Mr. Mbeki\u2019s only public comment on the issue has been to joke that the president does not issue arrest warrants. \u201cIt\u2019s a big mess,\u201d said one veteran criminologist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared losing work with the government, \u201cand it\u2019s a mess that comes from the uncertainty about the boundaries that separate the state from the ruling party.\u201d Bereft of facts, South Africa has been rife with speculation. The most damning version accuses Mr. Mbeki of protecting Mr. Selebi, a member of his party\u2019s executive committee with some influence in the debate over the party\u2019s next leader. Another version draws on the longstanding rivalry between the Scorpions and South Africa\u2019s national police, the nation\u2019s leading law enforcement organizations, and suggests that Mr. Pikoli overreached in an attempt to dispatch a rival. The Scorpions also broke the bribery case that led to Mr. Zuma\u2019s dismissal in 2005. Although his friend and financial adviser has been sent to prison in that case, Mr. Zuma so far has evaded prosecution \u2014 and some suggest that Mr. Mbeki has sidelined Mr. Pikoli because he has moved too slowly to eliminate Mr. Zuma as a political rival. Or it could mean nothing, with due process occurring behind the scenes. Mr. Mbeki is a famously distant politician, renowned not just for ignoring public opinion but for shunning it. \u201cThe failure to answer questions and inform the country of what he\u2019s doing is not a new feature of Mbeki\u2019s style,\u201d Steven Friedman, a longtime political analyst, noted drily.", "keyword": "South Africa;African National Congress;Mbeki Thabo;Zuma Jacob G;Selebi Jackie;Politics and Government;Murders and Attempted Murders"}
{"id": "ny0194378", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/26", "title": "Bridgeport Diocese Acknowledges 32 Abuse Accusations to Court", "abstract": "TRUMBULL, Conn. (AP) \u2014 The Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport has acknowledged in court papers that it documented 32 accusations of sexual abuse of children by priests associated with a parish here over 40 years. The diocese made the admission last week in contesting a lawsuit filed by the estate of Michael Powel, who died last year. Mr. Powel had claimed that he was sexually abused at St. Theresa\u2019s Parish in Trumbull between 1968, when he was 9, and 1972, when he was 13. The diocese is contesting a request from Mr. Powel\u2019s lawyers to turn over all documents regarding sexual abuse by priests at the parish. In its filing in Superior Court in Waterbury, the diocese said it had compiled 126 boxes of documents and files detailing 32 accusations of abuse by eight priests at St. Theresa\u2019s. Nine of the alleged encounters occurred before 1973, according to the court papers, and 18 accusations cover encounters that allegedly occurred from 1973 to 1983. Two accusations involve the period from 1984 to 1989, and three pertain to the years since 1990. The diocese is asking the court to allow it to withhold records on all allegations made after 1973, saying they are irrelevant to Mr. Powel\u2019s lawsuit. In its filing, the diocese said it should not have to spend thousand of dollars to review the documents \u201csimply because Michael Powel alleges he was abused one time for one minute in the winter of 1971.\u201d Mr. Powel\u2019s lawyers said that the motion by the diocese was a \u201cbait-and-switch\u201d to avoid producing documents by Wednesday, a date previously agreed upon to provide discovery materials. Mr. Powel, a former Florida resident, alleged that he was repeatedly abused by a longtime parish landscaping employee, Carlo Fabbozzi. Mr. Powel also accused Mr. Fabbozzi of introducing him to a priest, the Rev. Joseph Gorecki, whom Powel accused of molesting him once at St. Theresa\u2019s school in 1971. A diocesan spokesman, Joseph McAleer, said priests from the parish who were found to have abused children are no longer in ministry and that the diocese removes from ministry any priest who is found to have abused a child. The diocese has fought the release of abuse records in the past. This year, it unsuccessfully appealed to the United States Supreme Court in an attempt to block the release of more than 12,000 pages of documents generated by lawsuits against priests. Judges have ruled that the documents be made public next week.", "keyword": "Roman Catholic Church;Connecticut;Sex Crimes"}
{"id": "ny0071231", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/03/17", "title": "German Media Want Greek Finance Minister\u2019s Head Over \u2018Fingergate\u2019", "abstract": "Speaking to a small group of Croatian radicals in 2013, an obscure Greek economist suggested that Greece should have simply defaulted on its debts in 2010 and told the German government to deal with the consequences. For emphasis, he used a crude expression and extended his middle finger, in an ancient gesture considered obscene even in the days of Diogenes . Two years later, that economist is Greece\u2019s new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, and video of his gesture found on YouTube by the German news media has made him into a lightning rod for populist anger in Germany over the increasingly acrimonious debt negotiations between the countries. Mr. Varoufakis tried and failed to quell the uproar during an interview on German state television on Sunday when he was confronted with the video and claimed that the footage had been \u201cdoctored\u201d and that he had never made the gesture. Video professionals were called in and witnesses consulted as Bild, Germany\u2019s most popular tabloid, tried to prove that Mr. Varoufakis had been caught lying about \u201cFingergate.\u201d Mr. Varoufakis, who came to office after the triumph this year of the leftist Syriza party, suggested that it was \u201can honor\u201d to have made an enemy of Bild, a right-wing newspaper. The video recording of the talk was confirmed as authentic on Monday in a statement posted on Facebook by its Croatian organizers, who nonetheless attacked the German news media for distorting the context and meaning of the gesture made by Mr. Varoufakis. He was aiming his criticism not at the German people or state but the government in Berlin, the Croats said, \u201cwhich was at the time and today the main representative of disastrous austerity policies\u201d in the European Union. Late Monday night, Mr. Varoufakis seemed to change tack, posting a link on his Twitter feed to an interview with Srecko Horvat, the Croatian philosopher who arranged the economist\u2019s address to the Subversive Festival in Zagreb in 2013. Mr. Horvat argued that, while the gesture had been made, its meaning had been taken out of context. The finance minister followed suit by posting a link to the full video of the talk, and suggesting that by \u201cdoctored\u201d he simply meant the clip had been edited out of its original context. The incident suggested that Mr. Varoufakis \u2014 whose Twitter biography says that he was \u201cquietly writing obscure academic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe\u2019s inane handling of an inevitable crisis\u201d \u2014 is struggling with the intensity of the media glare coming from the rest of Europe. The attention has not been uniformly negative. Last month, the German satirist Jan B\u00f6hmermann scored a viral hit with the off-color song \u201c V for Varoufakis ,\u201d which turned on the premise that his nation was terrified by the primal sex appeal of the radical economist, known for wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle. Mr. Varoufakis even invited a Paris Match photographer into his home in Athens recently, a decision he said he regretted as soon as the images were released and critics accused him of living the high life at the foot of the Acropolis while pressing Europe to bail out Greece. After the Paris Match photographs were posted online, and Mr. Varoufakis was roundly mocked online, he walked out of an interview with CNBC when asked if the images had made him \u201ca liability\u201d for his government.", "keyword": "Yanis Varoufakis;Greece;Germany;Euro Crisis;Social Media"}
{"id": "ny0088100", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/07/25", "title": "Kerry Says Israel May Deepen Its Isolation by Opposing Iran Nuclear Accord", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the nuclear accord he negotiated with Iran was in Israel\u2019s interest and that the Israeli government\u2019s decision to oppose it could further its isolation. \u201cI fear that what could happen is if Congress were to overturn it, our friends in Israel could actually wind up being more isolated and more blamed,\u201d Mr. Kerry said in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. There was no immediate response from Israeli officials to Mr. Kerry\u2019s comments, which he made before meeting with American Jewish leaders in New York. But a number of foreign policy experts said that they risked aggravating the tense relations between the Obama administration and Israel. \u201cIt is the kind of statement that would be far more compelling to Israelis, or many in the Jewish community, if it came from an Israeli raising questions about the government\u2019s approach,\u201d said Dennis B. Ross, a former negotiator and senior adviser to President Obama on the Middle East. \u201cI am afraid it will have the opposite effect of what the secretary may have intended.\u201d As if to underscore Mr. Ross\u2019s point, Michael B. Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, assailed the comments. \u201cIf American legislators reject the nuclear deal, they will do so exclusively on the basis of U.S. interests,\u201d Mr. Oren said in an email to reporters. \u201cThe threat of the secretary of state who, in the past, warned that Israel was in danger of becoming an apartheid state, cannot deter us from fulfilling our national duty to oppose this dangerous deal.\u201d Republican lawmakers, and even some Democratic ones, have complained about the new nuclear accord, saying that core provisions limiting Iran\u2019s nuclear program will expire in 10 to 15 years and that Iran may use the billions of dollars gained from the lifting of sanctions to carry out a more aggressive policy in the Middle East. Who Got What They Wanted in the Iran Nuclear Deal Here is a look at what Iran and the United States wanted, and what they got. Mr. Kerry has argued that the accord presents the best chance to rein in Iran\u2019s nuclear program and that a rejection by Congress would lead to the very situation that the critics wish to avoid: the collapse of the international sanctions and a further expansion of Tehran\u2019s nuclear efforts. But the opposition of the Israeli government has also been a factor in the debate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sternly denounced the emerging agreement in a March appearance before Congress as a \u201cbad deal\u201d that would encourage Arab nations to pursue their own nuclear programs. Ron Dermer, Israel\u2019s ambassador to Washington, has continued to argue against it in meetings with lawmakers, according to news reports. Israel\u2019s opposition has resonated with some lawmakers who say that the Obama administration has turned a deaf ear to the concerns of a longtime ally to negotiate with Iranian leaders who still denounce the United States. In a congressional hearing on Thursday, Mr. Kerry sought to rebut that criticism by citing news reports that some former Israeli intelligence officials backed the agreement, and he highlighted his long record of supporting Israel when he was a senator. \u201cI had a 100 percent voting record for 29 years here on the subject of Israel,\u201d Mr. Kerry told the panel. \u201cThere\u2019s no debate in this administration whatsoever about our willingness to commit anything and everything necessary to be able to provide for the security of Israel.\u201d But Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations, said Israeli officials were likely to view Mr. Kerry\u2019s latest remarks in a different light. \u201cIt not only alienates the Israelis but fails to influence positively the very constituency the secretary presumably is trying to sway: Congress,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Israel;Iran;Nuclear weapon;John Kerry;Benjamin Netanyahu;US Foreign Policy"}
{"id": "ny0189657", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/05/28", "title": "Quarterly Earnings Fall at Staples, as Sales Grow 19%", "abstract": "Customers are still putting off big-ticket purchases from the office-supply chain Staples, but the company said it was beginning to see smaller declines in foot traffic and sales to small businesses. For the three months that ended May 2, Staples earned $143 million, or 20 cents a share, down from $212.3 million, or 30 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales, meanwhile, grew 19 percent, to $5.82 billion, from $4.88 billion, helped by the addition of Corporate Express, a Dutch office supply company Staples acquired last year. Stock in Staples fell 46 cents, to $19.93 a share.", "keyword": "Staples Inc;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0272642", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2016/05/26", "title": "Geno Smith Practices as Jets\u2019 Starter, With Ryan Fitzpatrick Unsigned", "abstract": "FLORHAM PARK, N.J. \u2014 For now, Geno Smith is the starting quarterback of a team that has been candid about wanting to displace him, and he dresses among prominent veterans who have lobbied for his successor to return. It is a bizarre little situation, sort of like being slugged in the face by a teammate over an unpaid debt . Smith absorbed such a punch last August, prompting the promotion of Ryan Fitzpatrick, whose revelatory season, in a way, created this opportunity \u2014 however temporary, perhaps \u2014 for Smith. \u201cEvery player in the N.F.L., I think, deserves a fair opportunity,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWhether or not that\u2019s the case, who knows? But I believe that I do have an opportunity here, and I\u2019ve just got to take advantage of it.\u201d On the surface, he has. Calling himself \u201cjust wiser\u201d as he enters his fourth season, Smith said he had a deeper understanding of the offense. The offensive coordinator Chan Gailey agreed, basing his observation, he said, on the questions Smith had been asking during film reviews and meetings. Armed with that knowledge, Smith took a majority of the first-team snaps Wednesday, when the Jets had their second voluntary workout of organized team activities. The longer Fitzpatrick\u2019s contract stalemate lasts, the more of those reps will go to Smith \u2014 even though the Jets hope he takes none for them this season. The Jets have been open about their desire to re-sign Fitzpatrick, who wants to be rewarded for leading them to 10 victories and setting a franchise record for touchdown passes in a season. Whether it happens next week, next month or before training camp, the expectation is that a deal will be reached. Fitzpatrick would reclaim his starting job, Coach Todd Bowles has said, pushing Smith into a backup role, ahead of two developmental quarterbacks, Bryce Petty and the rookie second-round pick Christian Hackenberg . In an otherwise peaceful 10-minute session with the news media, Smith bridled when asked if he wanted Fitzpatrick to re-sign. \u201cThat\u2019s up to the front office and Ryan Fitzpatrick,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWhy would I speak on that? Come on, man.\u201d Bowles hesitated to say he was confident that the Jets would reach an agreement with Fitzpatrick. \u201cYou\u2019re hopeful,\u201d Bowles said. That has been the Jets\u2019 sentiment since last season , expressed by General Manager Mike Maccagnan and teammates like receiver Brandon Marshall, one of Fitzpatrick\u2019s most ardent supporters; receiver Eric Decker; and center Nick Mangold, who attended a Rangers playoff game with Fitzpatrick last month. Marshall, Decker and Mangold were not present Wednesday for a second consecutive day, inviting speculation that they were staying away as a sign of solidarity with Fitzpatrick, but Bowles played down their absences. So did Smith. \u201cI think they\u2019ve always been supportive of myself as well,\u201d Smith said, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019ve said anything negative about me.\u201d Smith declined to say whether he envisioned himself starting the Sept. 11 season opener against Cincinnati, and it seemed a prudent decision. Bowles said he does not ask Maccagnan for updates on Fitzpatrick\u2019s contract talks. \u201cJust tell me when it\u2019s done,\u201d Bowles said.", "keyword": "Football;Geno Smith;Ryan Fitzpatrick;Jets"}
{"id": "ny0060110", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/08/30", "title": "Death Toll in Ukraine Conflict Exceeds 2,200, U.N. Says", "abstract": "GENEVA \u2014 The United Nations said on Friday that casualties in the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian rebels had doubled in the past month, with an average of 36 people killed every day. At least 1,200 people were killed and 3,250 injured in the period from July 16 to Aug. 17, according to a report released by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. The office described the toll as \u201cvery conservative\u201d and said it did not include the 298 passengers and crew who died when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17. \u201cThe trend is clear and alarming,\u201d Ivan Simonovic, the United Nations assistant secretary general for human rights, said in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, according to Reuters. \u201cThere is a significant increase in the death toll in the east.\u201d The upsurge in fighting concentrated around the rebel-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk brought the total number of people killed in the clashes since mid-April to at least 2,220, and the number of injured to at least 5,956, the United Nations said, citing the reports of a 39-man monitoring mission working out of Kiev and four other cities. Ukraine\u2019s military had to bear responsibility for \u201cat least some\u201d of the heavy loss of civilian life and for extensive damage to property resulting from the use of heavy weapons, including tanks and artillery, in densely populated areas, the report said. But armed rebels were faulted for positioning their heavy weapons in densely populated areas and for launching attacks from them, putting civilians at risk and violating international law. The rebel groups were \u201cnow professionally equipped and appear to benefit from a steady supply of sophisticated weapons and ammunition, enabling them to shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft such as helicopters, fighter jets and transport planes,\u201d the report said. Ukraine claims the separatists\u2019 weapons come from Russia. Moscow has consistently denied arming the rebels, even in the face of reports that Russian troops had crossed the border. On Thursday, NATO released satellite images that it said showed Russian forces operating on Ukrainian territory. Pro-Russian separatists had also committed a wide range of abuses including \u201ckillings, abductions, physical and psychological torture, ill treatment, executions, murder and other serious human rights abuses,\u201d the report said. It did not provide a figure for the number of people being held prisoner by separatists, but said that as of mid-August at least 498 people were believed to have been detained. More than half the residents of Luhansk and Donetsk have left to escape the fighting and harsh living conditions, but rebels have targeted and killed civilians trying to escape conflict zones, United Nations investigators reported, and have stopped residents from leaving by harassing and robbing them at checkpoints. The United Nations also accused Ukrainian Army units and pro-Kiev battalions of abuses, in particular forced disappearances and torture. More than 1,000 people in eastern Ukraine have been arrested for what the government said was \u201cirrefutable evidence of their participation in terrorist activities,\u201d the report said. It also cited accounts of ill-treatment during arrest and detention.", "keyword": "Ukraine;Russia;Fatalities,casualties;Civilian casualties;Luhansk;Donetsk Ukraine;UN"}
{"id": "ny0008920", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/05/22", "title": "Coalition Plays Down Afghan Reports of Major Battle in Helmand", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 The Taliban attacked Afghan police posts in a violent and long-contested corner of southern Afghanistan, setting off two days of clashes that left at least six police officers dead, Afghan officials said Tuesday, though the American-led coalition played down the violence as little more than \u201cdrive-by shootings.\u201d The Afghan government portrayed the fighting in the Sangin district of Helmand Province, which began Monday, as a major victory for its forces, with officials describing a massive Taliban effort to overrun the area. Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the provincial governor, put the number of attackers at 1,000 and said Arab and Chechen insurgents \u2014 that is, Al Qaeda members \u2014 were fighting alongside the Taliban. The Taliban also claimed to be engaged in a broad assault on Sangin, saying in a text message to reporters that insurgents had overrun three police posts and were close to taking more. The coalition, though, was far more circumspect about the scale of the fighting. It said the Taliban force totaled 80 to 100 fighters and managed to launch only sporadic attacks on outlying police posts in the district. Ten groups of between 8 and 10 Taliban fighters were \u201cdoing drive-by shootings against five police checkpoints,\u201d said Col. Thomas Collins, a coalition spokesman. \u201cNone of the checkpoints were overrun.\" Another coalition official added that American Marines, who still maintain a sizable presence in the district, would have joined the fight had the Taliban presented any significant threat, and coalition air power would probably have been called in had the Taliban massed in numbers as large as those described by Afghan officials. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly disagreeing with his Afghan counterparts. The Taliban have stepped up their attacks on the Afghan Army and police since the start of the annual fighting season. They say that a broad summer offensive that will expose the weakness of the Afghan security forces is now under way, and that they have managed to inflict significant casualties. At least six Afghan police officers were killed in the past two days in Sangin, for instance, according to Haji-Ghulam Ali Khan, the district police chief. But the most dramatic battles between the Taliban and the Afghan security forces seem to be those portrayed by their spokesmen for media consumption, with both sides claiming to have scored hard-fought victories over one another. This week\u2019s fighting in Sangin could well prove to be part of the intensifying propaganda war. The district was the scene of fierce fighting by British troops and United States Marines to root out the insurgents, and both the Taliban and the Afghan government would benefit from claiming a victory there. But if the Taliban\u2019s attack this week did consist mainly of sending small bands to harass police posts, as the coalition asserted, it would hardly count as a significant victory for either side. It would instead seem to indicate that the insurgents do not have the strength or the will to threaten the entire district with a head-on assault, and that the security forces there have yet to be tested by a big attack. Afghan officials, however, were adamant that their forces had repulsed a huge Taliban attack. \u201cThe Taliban were trying to show us their power but they have been repelled by Afghan forces,\u201d said Mr. Khan, the police chief. The fighting had begun early Monday, and Afghan soldiers were called in to help repulse the attacks, he added. Some police were still engaged in isolated firefights, but order had been restored in most of the district, he said, adding that the Marines were not needed at any point in the fighting. \u201cTaliban, with their great forces, attacked the boundary in which the security check posts surround the district center and some of the check posts are still under their constant firefighting,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly how many Taliban have been killed. I can say they are losing their men.\u201d", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Taliban;Helmand Province;Afghanistan War"}
{"id": "ny0047976", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2014/11/21", "title": "Nazi-Era Art Collection Appears to Find a Home", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 A collection of more than 1,000 artworks obtained by a Nazi-era art dealer and kept private for decades by his son is expected to be accepted by the Kunstmuseum Bern, a small museum in Switzerland , fulfilling the son\u2019s final wish. The discovery of the collection sent the art world into an uproar, renewing concerns about the fate of Nazi-looted art and the rights of the owners\u2019 descendants more than a half-century after the end of World War II . The dealer\u2019s son, Cornelius Gurlitt, threw the collection\u2019s fate into uncertainty with his decision to bequeath it to the Kunstmuseum Bern. After more than six months of deliberation, the museum and the German government said Thursday that they would release information about the future of the estate on Monday. Sources with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said it was likely that the board members would gather in Switzerland on Saturday to decide on Mr. Gurlitt\u2019s gift. Stuart E. Eizenstat , a former deputy Treasury secretary who is now special adviser on Holocaust issues to Secretary of State John Kerry, said Thursday that it was his understanding that the museum would accept the offer. Mr. Eizenstat, who helped to negotiate the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which entrenched the principle that governments and museums must take responsibility for the damage caused by the Nazi looting of Jewish art, applauded the museum for indicating that every item would be screened by experts to determine which have dubious provenance. \u201cThey\u2019re going to have international art experts go through the collection,\u201d Mr. Eizenstat said. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the museum intended to accept the collection, barring any last-minute legal hurdles. The Bern museum was stunned to learn after Mr. Gurlitt\u2019s death in May that it had been named the sole inheritor of the hotly disputed collection, which has since been determined to hold at least two works that were looted by the Nazis: a 1921 portrait by Henri Matisse and the Max Liebermann picture \u201cTwo Riders on the Beach.\u201d If the museum does not accept the gift, the collection would fall to several of Mr. Gurlitt\u2019s distant cousins and the husband of his only sister, who died childless in 2012. Although his relatives had agreed to honor his wishes, one of his second cousins recently suggested she would challenge Mr. Gurlitt\u2019s will. As of Thursday, she had not yet filed a petition with the Munich court handling the estate. Mr. Gurlitt lived a solitary life in a Munich apartment with the windows either papered over or heavily curtained even before the world\u2019s media camped out at his doorstep after a report of the collection\u2019s existence in the German newsmagazine Focus last year. Art lovers and descendants of Holocaust victims were outraged to learn that more than 1,000 paintings and drawings collected by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, had been in the possession of the German police for more than a year, seized as part of an investigation into possible tax evasion. Many works in the Gurlitt collection were plundered from German museums, but scores were suspected of having belonged to Jewish collectors who were forced to sell them at below-market prices, or had them confiscated as they fled the Nazis. Under pressure from Israel, the United States and Jewish organizations, Germany set up a special task force to investigate the provenance of the artworks, hundreds of which were listed in the government\u2019s online database in an effort to increase transparency and speed the identification of possible claimants to the works. Although small, the fine-arts museum in the Swiss capital has its own restoration departments for paintings and sketches, which make up a sizable share of the trove. Many of the works, especially those Mr. Gurlitt had stashed in a home he kept in Salzburg, were for years exposed to fluctuations of temperature and are badly in need of restoration. Daniel Spanke, the museum\u2019s curator, said that he had confidence in his staff\u2019s ability to cope with the responsibilities involved in accepting the collection. Mr. Gurlitt reached an agreement with the German authorities shortly before his death, binding his heirs to return any works determined to have been looted or stolen by the Nazis. One of the paintings, the Liebermann, has been determined to belong to David Toren, an 89-year-old descendant of the Jewish industrialist David Friedmann. Mr. Toren\u2019s attorney said he was confident the Kunstmuseum Bern would accept the collection and was certain that his client would finally receive the painting that he last saw hanging in his great-uncle\u2019s home. \u201cThe museum is incredibly fortunate for having this collection fall into its lap, and this presents a real opportunity for the museum to raise its international profile by doing the right thing with regard to the portion of the collection that was stolen by Nazis,\u201d said August Matteis, who represents Mr. Toren.", "keyword": "Arts and Antiquities Looting;Holocaust and Nazis;Kunstmuseum Bern;Switzerland;Cornelius Gurlitt;Collecting"}
{"id": "ny0089583", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/09/19", "title": "High School Football Inc.", "abstract": "BRADENTON, Fla. \u2014 The sun had not yet set last Friday on a field ringed by palm trees when, on the first play from scrimmage, Shea Patterson rolled to his left and threw a 69-yard touchdown pass for his high school, IMG Academy, a private, for-profit sports boarding school. On the academy\u2019s campus, a onetime tomato farm, the latest experiment in prep football is taking root and could produce, depending on one\u2019s view, bountiful harvests of talent or a blight of professionalism. Coaches and officials around the country are watching with curiosity and wariness. Patterson, who is considered the nation\u2019s top high school quarterback , threw the scoring pass to receiver Drake Davis, a national indoor sprinting champion. By halftime, Patterson had thrown four touchdown passes, including one to Isaac Nauta, who is rated as the country\u2019s No. 1 tight end prospect. IMG Academy throttled Cocoa High School, a public school, 49-7, in a contest that many had expected to be a taut battle between two national powers from Florida but was so lopsided that a mercy rule took effect in the second half and sped the game. \u201cWe\u2019re the best team in the country,\u201d said Patterson, 18, a senior who is 6 feet 2 inches and 192 pounds, has a quick release, and has thrown 104 career touchdown passes with eight interceptions at three high schools. Nauta, 18, who is 6-4 and 237 pounds, said: \u201cEvery day in practice is just a grind against our own guys. That\u2019s probably the best competition we\u2019re going to face all year.\u201d Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap high school football has made beyond traditional community teams. Those teams still exist. But convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival. Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another. Image IMG's offensive coordinator, Rich Bartel, with quarterback Shea Patterson, who has attended three high schools and thrown 104 career touchdown passes. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international. The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country. It offers high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on ESPN against some of the highest-rated teams. Though IMG Academy has fielded a varsity football team for only three seasons and, as an independent school, is ineligible to play for a Florida state championship, it is stocked with six of the nation\u2019s top 100 senior recruits. The roster has players from 21 states and six countries. This month, IMG flew to Texas for a game. On Saturday, it traveled to New Jersey and defeated another power, Bergen Catholic High School, 59-47. The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (from $3,750 to $4,500) to nothing. Team helmets are adorned not with a lion or a tiger but with IMG\u2019s corporate logo. The cheerleaders and the pep band come not from the school but are themselves all-star performers from the area. Even the team nickname, the Ascenders, suggests players are there with college in mind. The academy was founded in 1978 by Nick Bollettieri as a tennis boarding school on what he often says were 15 acres of repurposed tomato fields. Andre Agassi, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have trained there. IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player\u2019s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft. A Finishing School for Football Players 11 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Edward Linsmier for The New York Times IMG officials are upfront about their profit motive. And they have been backed financially by state lawmakers. They justify the assistance by citing the academy\u2019s economic impact to the region in training more than 12,000 athletes yearly from the youth level to the pros and in hosting numerous amateur and professional sports competitions. Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott . \u201cWe run a business,\u201d said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. \u201cWe call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We\u2019re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they\u2019re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You\u2019re not going to curtail that.\u201d McCarthy added: \u201cWith us, we\u2019re very honest about it. We recruit nationally, we don\u2019t recruit in Florida, and we\u2019re probably the only school in the country that admits it.\u201d Officials at IMG also freely say that the academy is not for everyone. Several highly regarded players have left, citing homesickness, a philosophical clash with coaches or a feeling of being overwhelmed by the collegelike commitment. Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams. \u201cI\u2019m 50-50 split,\u201d said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. \u201cThey\u2019re high school kids, just like us. We\u2019re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they\u2019re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.\u201d Image Left, the IMG locker room. Right, linebacker Rahshaun Smith at his locker before the game. Credit Photographs by Edward Linsmier for The New York Times Some Florida schools refuse to play IMG Academy. Some coaches from other states are upset that IMG has poached players whom they developed. And there are accusations \u2014 vehemently rebutted by IMG \u2014 that it is merely a football factory where \u201cstudent\u201d is a neglected companion in the term \u201cstudent-athlete.\u201d Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen. \u201cWe just wouldn\u2019t play them,\u201d George Smith, the athletic director at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, said of IMG Academy. He won six state championships and two national championships as the St. Thomas Aquinas football coach. \u201cThey\u2019re exactly like all these basketball schools, except they\u2019re a football school.\u201d Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent. \u201cIt sounds to me like they\u2019re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,\u201d McCarty said. Another view, of course, is held by IMG Academy. Criticism often seems to be uninformed and secondhand, said McCarthy, the academy\u2019s co-managing director. Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG\u2019s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management. \u201cIt is the best preparation for a high school kid to get to the next level quick,\u201d said Kevin Wright, IMG Academy\u2019s first-year head coach. A school guide describes a typical day for athletes: Breakfast from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. Three classes lasting 80 minutes each. Forty minutes of tutoring and preparation for standardized tests. Lunch. Training and conditioning from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. Dinner. Another hour of available tutoring and a mandatory 90-minute study hall. Football players said there was a curfew at 10:30 p.m. \u201cI came here assuming it was going to be easy, it\u2019s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,\u201d said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. \u201cThat really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it\u2019s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.\u201d To be admitted into the Florida High School Athletic Association, IMG Academy agreed not to recruit athletes from Florida schools. The association said that it had received accusations of recruiting in-state by IMG but that none had been substantiated. The National Federation of State High School Associations has not taken an official position on IMG Academy, said Bob Gardner, the association\u2019s executive director. But he added: \u201cAcademy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it\u2019s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.\u201d The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school. Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a professional decision,\u201d he said. Steve Walsh, IMG Academy\u2019s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or \u201cmind gym,\u201d to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured. Image Announcers and members of the news media watching the team warm up. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders\u2019 coach, said, \u201cWe\u2019re thinking, \u2018Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.\u2019 \u201d At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade. Apparel companies also exert considerable influence. Nike operates training camps for select players. Under Armour sponsors a postseason all-star football game and IMG Academy itself, where players are told not to wear gear made by other companies. \u201cIt\u2019s all driven by money, and you can\u2019t beat money,\u201d said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas. Bachman said he felt conflicted about Patterson\u2019s decision to transfer to IMG Academy. Parents should have the right to choose the best school for their children, he said. If he had a son of Patterson\u2019s skill, Bachman said, he would have considered the same move. \u201cI\u2019m a liar if I said I wouldn\u2019t have,\u201d Bachman said. Even so, he added, \u201cI don\u2019t think anything\u2019s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it\u2019s a family atmosphere and it\u2019s about the team and sacrifice and so on.\u201d Image IMG players after their 49-7 win over Cocoa. Credit Edward Linsmier for The New York Times Calvin Ashley, a top-rated junior tackle, left IMG Academy last spring and returned to his former school, Dr. Phillips High School, in Orlando, Fla. Rodney Wells, the football coach there, said that Ashley was homesick. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason kids go to college when they are 18 and not 15, 16 or 17,\u201d Wells said. \u201cCalvin is only 16. A college atmosphere, being away from home, living in a dorm, that\u2019s not an environment for a 16-year-old. You don\u2019t have your neighborhood buddy. You can\u2019t go home to your mom.\u201d But for others, like Patterson, who is 18, IMG has been a comfortable fit. His grandfather played for a season with the Detroit Pistons. His father and three older siblings played collegiate sports. He said that IMG Academy \u201cwas going to get me the most ready on the field and academically\u201d to play next season at Ole Miss. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more accountability,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cI\u2019ve got to be at class every day at 7:45. Can\u2019t skip a class. Can\u2019t skip a study hall.\u201d Sean Patterson Sr., Shea\u2019s father, said, \u201cIf your son\u2019s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,\u201d adding that for Shea, IMG Academy \u201cis the spot\u201d for polishing his football skills for college. \u201cSome kids don\u2019t want to leave that high school experience,\u201d Sean Patterson Sr. said, describing his son\u2019s transfer from Louisiana. \u201cIt\u2019s important for them to have pep rallies. Shea\u2019s already been through that. Sometimes you just know it\u2019s time to move on.\u201d Dressed in an Ole Miss shirt and hat, he added: \u201cWho knows what they\u2019re going to want him to do, but he\u2019s going to be ready. They open with Florida State next year.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;IMG Academy;School Sports;K-12 Education;Steve Walsh;Shea Patterson;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0258630", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/01/31", "title": "Losses at Kabul Bank, Afghanistan\u2019s Biggest, Could Be $900 Million", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 Fraud and mismanagement at Afghanistan \u2019s largest bank have resulted in potential losses of as much as $900 million \u2014 three times previous estimates \u2014 heightening concerns that the bank could collapse and trigger a broad financial panic in Afghanistan, according to American, European and Afghan officials. The extent of these losses make it clear that keeping the bank afloat \u2014 something the government has said it is determined to do \u2014 would require large infusions of cash from an already strained budget. Banking specialists, businessmen and government officials now fear that word of Kabul Bank \u2019s troubles could prompt a run on solvent banks, destroying the country\u2019s nascent banking system and shaking the confidence of Western donors already questioning the level of their commitment to Afghanistan. The scandal has severe political and security implications. Investigators and Afghan businessmen believe that much of the money has gone into the pockets of a small group of privileged and politically connected Afghans, preventing earlier scrutiny of the bank\u2019s dealings. The spotlight on how political and economic interests in Afghanistan are intertwined threatens to further undermine President Hamid Karzai\u2019s government. The bank is also the prime conduit for paying Afghan security forces, leaving the American military, which pays the majority of the salaries, looking for new banks to process the $1.5 billion payroll. As Afghan regulators struggle to find out where the money went, many officials and international monitors concede that the missing millions may never be recovered, raising questions of how the losses could be replaced to keep the bank from failing. Afghan officials and businessmen have said the money was invested in a real estate bubble that has since burst in Dubai, as well as in dubious projects and donations to politicians in Afghanistan. Millions of dollars have yet to be traced, and some of the money seems to have gone to front companies or individuals and then disappeared. The Afghan Central Bank and American officials are conducting their own parallel investigations, but the problems are so serious that the International Monetary Fund has not yet renewed an assistance program to Afghanistan that expired in September, threatening an essential pillar of support to a government reliant on international largess as it battles a nine-year insurgency. Many donor countries may have to delay aid to Afghanistan because of their own requirements that money go only to countries with I.M.F. programs in good standing, Western diplomats said. Several officials described the bank as \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d referring to its role in paying the salaries of hundreds of thousands of government employees. While Afghan and American officials depict a crisis far worse than has been made public, State Department cables released by WikiLeaks show that Afghan and Western regulators were aware of many of the problems, but were most focused on the problem of terrorist financing, rather than the fraud scheme that was the main problem at Kabul Bank. A stream of complaints about the bank\u2019s practices \u2014 many of them the problems that now threaten the bank\u2019s survival \u2014 are dutifully recorded in the cables, but diplomats, at least in 2009 and early 2010, seemed not to have realized the profound effect they could have on the financial system as a whole. Although other banks here have had questionable loan practices, so far it is only Kabul Bank \u2014 where what amounts to an enormous fraud scheme was conducted over a period of years \u2014 whose troubles are sending tremors through the Afghan business community and worrying Western donors. Deloitte, a top United States accounting firm that had staffers in the Central Bank under a United States government contract over the last several years, either did not know or did not mention to American authorities that it had any inkling of serious irregularities at Kabul Bank. Deloitte was not responsible for auditing the bank\u2019s books; a spokesman for Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview this weekend, Mahmoud Karzai , President Karzai\u2019s brother and a prominent investor in the Kabul Bank, said that the new president of Kabul Bank, Masood Musa Ghazi, told him in the last several days that there were approximately $800 million in loans still outstanding. These are potentially unrecoverable. Mr. Karzai said Mr. Ghazi told him that of that $800 million, the bank\u2019s new management has negotiated agreements for the repayment of about $300 million, but little has been repaid. Mr. Ghazi, who was appointed after the Central Bank forced a change in the bank\u2019s management last fall, did not respond to phone calls or e-mails seeking comment, nor did anyone at Afghanistan\u2019s Central Bank. Kabul Bank has extensive links to senior people in the Afghan government. In addition to Mahmoud Karzai, other shareholders included Haseen Fahim, the brother of the first vice president, and several associates of the family from the north of Afghanistan. Afghan officials said the bank poured millions into President Karzai\u2019s election campaign. It is the loans and personal grants made by the bank to powerful people, including government ministers, that could prove the most explosive, Western and Afghan officials said. \u201cIf people who are thought to be clean and who were held up as \u2018good\u2019 by Western countries suddenly are caught with their fingers in the till, it will cause questions from donors,\u201d said a Western official in Kabul. \u201cThey will say, \u2018Why are we here?\u2019 \u201d Mahmoud Karzai said that he believed the bank\u2019s former chairman, Sherkhan Farnood, was responsible for the problems at the bank, saying that he often moved large amounts of money out of the bank on his own, with no oversight. Mr. Farnood could not be reached for comment on Sunday, and has declined to comment in the past. Mr. Karzai and Mr. Farnood were previously business partners, but had a falling-out over the operation of Kabul Bank. While he was in charge, Mr. Farnood had total control over what loans were made and what money was moved out of Kabul Bank, Mr. Karzai said. He said he was told by the bank\u2019s managers that Mr. Farnood took about $98 million out of Kabul Bank to finance the purchase and subsequent operations of Pamir Airways, a small passenger airline in Afghanistan. In a cable from Sept. 26, 2009, posted by WikiLeaks, American diplomats said that competitor airlines complained that \u201cKabul Bank is using its deposit base to subsidize Pamir Air without its depositors\u2019 knowledge in an attempt to drive competitors out of business.\u201d Mr. Karzai said that Mr. Farnood had been given space at Kabul Bank, where he was supposed to be helping the new management find the bank\u2019s missing money. \u201cI think the bank is working with him to figure out what happened to the money, because he knows whom he lent it to and he knows where it is,\u201d Mr. Karzai said. A spokeswoman for the United States Treasury Department in Washington declined to comment on the American inquiry. \u201cThe situation of Kabul Bank is extremely serious,\u201d said a Western diplomat in Kabul. \u201cWhat you can observe is that the loans were either to fictive operators who did not exist or they were for investments outside the country.\u201d \u201cSome were loans or personal grants to people linked to one shareholder or another shareholder,\u201d the diplomat said. According to businessmen in Kabul, loans were made to people who were fronts for the real beneficiaries. \u201cSometimes they would bring a loan document to someone who was a gardener or a cleaner and just ask them to sign it, and they would pay him 500 Afghanis and the person could not read or write more than his name,\u201d said a prominent businessman here with ties to the banking community. \u201cThen, when the new bank managers go to look for the money, they go to the gardener\u2019s house and they look around and they see there is nothing worth $100, and they have no idea where the money went.\u201d Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Kabul, said that officials were working closely with the Afghan government, the I.M.F. and the World Bank. \u201cCorrective action in response to any instance of abuse, poor banking practices or fraud is essential for public and international confidence in Afghan financial institutions and the development of Afghanistan\u2019s financial sector,\u201d she said. In Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province , a Kabul bank branch has been shut down for a week because employees transferred $1.3 million to Mr. Farnood, who was removed last fall for mismanagement. In Kabul, the Ministry of Finance is putting out bids for a new bank to pay the salaries of the security forces, which previously had been paid exclusively through Kabul Bank, according to Col. John Ferrari, the head of training programs for NATO\u2019s training mission here. Military officials say that none of the $1.5 billion in payroll for the Afghan Army and the police has been reported missing. But concerns over the possibility that the bank could fail was one factor prompting the ministry to seek other banks to process payroll, Western officials said. A WikiLeaks cable from last February suggested that payments were often delayed so the bank could make money on the overnight interest rates. In a Feb. 13, 2010, cable, Kabul Bank is described as \u201cthe least liquid bank operating in Afghanistan\u201d and its difficulty in raising cash was so great that it took \u201cmore than two days to process withdrawals and has delayed paying government employee salaries by two weeks in order to place those funds in overnight accounts to collect interest.\u201d", "keyword": "Kabul Bank;Afghanistan;Banking and Financial Institutions;Karzai Mahmoud"}
{"id": "ny0208117", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2009/06/23", "title": "Science in the Quest to Ease Figure Skating's Strains", "abstract": "NEWARK, Del. \u2014 Melissa Bulanhagui is a highly ranked figure skater, but two years ago her right ankle failed her. She sprained it twice and tore a ligament, each time during one of her favorite jumps, the triple lutz. Other skaters have suffered similar injuries, and now science is studying why, aiming to help skaters meet the sport\u2019s physical challenges without sacrificing their health. For one study, Ms. Bulanhagui (pronounced BULL-en-hayg-ee), 18, and other skaters tape to their shins devices called tibial accelerometers, which measure the force of the impact when skaters land a jump. \u201cA lot of the impacts are really high, 90 to 100 G\u2019s,\u201d said Kat Arbour, a skater turned graduate researcher at the University of Delaware . \u201cIf you hit your head that hard, I don\u2019t think you\u2019d survive.\u201d But she said study results suggested that the issue was not jumping itself, but how well jumps were executed. \u201cIf someone is really proficient, they seem to be able to modify their technique to decrease the impact, use muscles differently to absorb that shock,\u201d she said. The accelerometer study is part of a flowering of research on safety and performance. And it is no coincidence that such research is growing at a time when figure skating, a year-round pursuit for competitive skaters, emphasizes athleticism and endurance more than ever before. Adjustments to international judging guidelines in 2003 made skating \u201cmuch more physically and mentally challenging,\u201d said Mitch Moyer, senior director of athlete high performance for United States Figure Skating, which is sponsoring the accelerometer study and others. Each skill in a performance now receives specific points, requiring more focus. And skaters no longer have an incentive to perform all jumps early in a program before they tire \u2014 now, jumps done later earn extra points. \u201cPeople said, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s an art,\u2019 but the reality is it\u2019s a very taxing sport,\u201d said Michelle Provost-Craig, associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Delaware. \u201cMany skaters end up with stress fractures, knee problems and hip problems at a fairly young age.\u201d Research could inspire new training recommendations concerning issues like off-ice conditioning and limiting repetitions of jumps during practice. United States Figure Skating now has a sport sciences and medicine director, who works with scientific researchers and helps coaches monitor skaters\u2019 health more closely and pace workouts. \u201cCoaches are paying a lot more attention to these things,\u201d said Mr. Moyer, who said some concerns were set off by a \u201ctrend of hip issues\u201d with skaters like the Olympic champion Tara Lipinski , whose hip injuries required surgery at 18. \u201cI hear a lot more buzz out there \u2014 \u2018you need to stop jumping, you\u2019ve done enough today.\u2019 \u201d Scientists are looking at skating from every angle \u2014 biomechanics, physics, muscle conditioning, body fat, oxygen consumption, exercise-induced asthma . Ms. Arbour, of the University of Delaware, has skaters, wearing swimsuits and nose clips, climb into the \u201cbod pod,\u201d an egglike capsule measuring fat and muscle composition. A \u201cbone densitometer\u201d analyzes bone density, which tends to increase with frequent impacts. \u201cIf it\u2019s low, they are at risk for stress fractures in the legs and lumbar spine,\u201d she said. \u201cIf it\u2019s too high, they are at risk for osteoarthritis because the cartilage is taking a lot of shock absorption.\u201d With Professor Provost-Craig, Ms. Arbour also outfits skaters with \u201ca crazy dungeon thing that goes over the mouth and nose,\u201d measuring oxygen and carbon dioxide in air skaters expel. Science is even filtering into recreational skating, with the development of synthetic ice, intended to broaden appeal and year-round interest. But most research concerns competitive skaters. Some researchers are interested, for example, in the sport\u2019s effects on younger skaters, said Mr. Moyer, because \u201ckids develop differently at different ages. If somebody\u2019s injured at 14, was it because of what they were doing at 9 or 10, or at 14?\u201d Professor Provost-Craig plans to study whether certain jumps generate such physical impact that younger skaters should delay learning them. \u201cA lutz might put more loading on a young skeletal developing frame than a toe loop,\u201d she said. \u201cThey may choose, especially during a growth spurt, not to teach a new jump with extensive loading characteristics.\u201d Some research focuses on training and equipment. James Richards, senior biomechanist for the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Delaware, designed a skate boot to provide flexibility for pointing toes and maneuvering feet. Current boots are stiff for support, \u201ccomparable to a cast,\u201d said Kelly Lockwood, an associate professor of physical education and kinesiology at Brock University in Ontario , preventing the ankle from absorbing enough impact. Professor Richards\u2019s boot, hinged around the ankle, allowed flexibility but fell apart after about a month, he said. And skaters and coaches thought it unattractive. \u201cPeople were willing to give it a try if it was helping in impact and injury,\u201d Mr. Moyer said. He said that Alissa Czisny, currently the national champion, wore the boots for a while, but that she and others \u201cbecame frustrated with some of the challenges.\u201d He hopes the accelerometer study will indicate whether \u201cone type of boot design or blade design could maybe reduce the stress load.\u201d Professor Lockwood has studied something more rudimentary: how skate blades are sharpened. A blade\u2019s bottom is not flat, but grooved to create two edges that grip the ice. A study with the National Hockey League of groin injuries found that \u201cmore than 50 percent of them are due to skate sharpening, way too deep a hollow\u201d in the blade\u2019s groove, which can give a player too much traction instead of allowing easy gliding, she said. Sharpening, it turns out, is hard to do well, and sharpeners who earn respect from skaters and coaches have become scientists of sorts, too. George Knakal, a 79-year-old retired cabinetmaker turned sharpener in Norwalk, Conn., pays zealous attention to several factors, including the concavity of the blade. \u201cFor a new skater, I make it nearly flat because a little kid is very awkward and you want to give them something that will slip so when they fall they don\u2019t get hurt,\u201d he said. Training when not on ice is another matter altogether, and theories differ about what off-ice conditioning is best. \u201cIt\u2019s a sport where you\u2019re doing contradictory things,\u201d said Deborah King, associate professor of exercise and sport sciences at Ithaca College. \u201cRunning or cycling or stair-stepping to improve aerobic capacity \u2014 does that translate really well on the ice, or is it better to do something more specific to skating? Do you need a lot of strength training in the gym or training to do the motion while rotating?\u201d Professor Provost-Craig said skaters should not \u201cbulk up\u201d from strength training because \u201cif they increase girth of shoulders, hips or thighs, that\u2019s going to decrease rotational spin.\u201d One recent invention for off-ice training is a block of wood topped with rubber, slanted to approximate angles of skaters\u2019 blades on ice. Wearing skates on the block, skaters assume different positions. \u201cIt will freeze-frame any on-ice technique and mimic as close as you possibly can the requirements for balance, that sensation of shifting your weight against momentum,\u201d said its creator, David Lipetz, a physical therapist who is trying to get coaches and skaters to use the device. Professor Provost-Craig\u2019s oxygen mask readings help gauge the aerobic conditioning skaters need, measuring their \u201cVO2 max,\u201d she said, \u201coxygen their muscles are consuming\u201d as they skate to increasingly fast music . More is better, improving endurance, for example, to do jumps later in performance. Professor King analyzed jumps in a different way. Studying Olympic skaters, she determined that on triple jumps, they went no higher than on double or single jumps \u2014 rather, they rotated faster by pulling in their arms, making their bodies compact. That guides one of Professor Richards\u2019s more elaborate projects. With sophisticated motion-capturing cameras and computer programs, he mimics skaters\u2019 positions during jumps and calibrates the effect of altering angles of the head, torso, arm and leg. Consider Emma Phibbs, a 22-year-old pairs skater looking to make a comeback after scaling back skating in college. Recently, researchers affixed 38 quarter-size stickers \u2014 made from golf ball markers, children\u2019s alphabet beads and reflective tape \u2014 all over Ms. Phibbs\u2019s body and sent her skating. Doing triple toe loops and double axels, she wobbled on some landings, occasionally falling. Rink-side, Professor Richards\u2019s computer displayed an outline of Ms. Phibbs, construed from the reflective stickers. \u201cHer left arm is higher than her right arm \u2014 she\u2019s got to lean to one side to compensate,\u201d he said. Breathless from jumping, Ms. Phibbs reviewed the computer images. \u201cWith my elbow and my trunk being off, my landing will be off and I\u2019ll two-foot it,\u201d she said. Then Tom Kepple, a researcher, displayed an animated avatar of Ms. Phibbs\u2019s jump attempts, calculating that she rotated only 314 degrees. With a few keystrokes, he tucked the left arm in. \u201cThat adds 40 degrees more of revolution,\u201d he said. \u201cIf she brought the left leg in a little straighter? You pick up 10 or 15 degrees rotation. But if she brings her leg in too much, the jump goes bad.\u201d Such analysis works \u201cnot just for technique, but also for injury prevention,\u201d Mr. Moyer said. \u201cYou can see what your result is going to be before you try it.\u201d That could make a difference for skaters who must train aggressively enough to master moves but not aggressively enough to hurt themselves. \u201cI always tell my athletes that they\u2019re going to be injured at some point in their career, so it\u2019s more about management of that and also trying to have a minor injury instead of a major injury,\u201d said Tom Zakrajsek, who coaches top skaters. \u201cI have certain jump limitations and restrictions \u2014 I always have to pull back my skaters from repetition of jumping.\u201d In Delaware , after the scientists opined on Ms. Phibbs\u2019s body position, she got back on the ice. \u201cI focused on keeping my elbow down, and my landings were a lot more solid,\u201d she said. \u201cIt definitely proved itself.\u201d", "keyword": "Figure skating;Sports medicine;University of Delaware;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0033777", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/12/09", "title": "The Gofer\u2019s Expanding Portfolio", "abstract": "Sergio Kletnoy was trapped in traffic and running behind schedule. As the executive assistant to Joanna Coles, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Mr. Kletnoy had spent the day scheduling a December lunch for Ms. Coles, booking her business trip to Boston and accompanying her to Chelsea, where she made a speech before an online financial group while he held her purse. In a free moment, he had interviewed the singer Betty Who for Cosmopolitan\u2019s blog and arranged for Ms. Coles to meet her as well. Now he was urging the driver to swiftly return them to Hearst\u2019s Midtown headquarters. The timetable was tight. Ms. Coles had to dive into the premiere of Rebel Wilson\u2019s new TV show \u201cSuper Fun Night\u201d while Mr. Kletnoy waited to interview the actress for the blog. In a few hours, Mr. Kletnoy would head out to see the singer Lorde perform before interviewing her the following day. \u201cIt feels like her Duracell battery will never, ever, ever stop,\u201d Mr. Kletnoy, 36, said of Ms. Coles. \u201cJoanna goes 150 miles an hour and sometimes it\u2019s hard to catch up.\u201d He paused, contemplating his own place in the fast-paced New York media world: \u201cA year from now,\u201d he said, \u201cthere may be a cooler executive assistant to take my spot. So I don\u2019t take it for granted.\u201d Mr. Kletnoy\u2019s experience reflects the evolving role of magazine assistants, who for years have been defined by the stinging indignities they endured at the hands of the industry\u2019s most imperious editors \u2014 famously brought to life in the 2003 book \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada\u201d and the subsequent film adaptation. Image Sergio Kletnoy performs tasks for Joanna Coles, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, but his job at Cosmopolitan goes well beyond the administrative. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times There are still bosses like Miranda Priestly in the magazine world, barking at minions to book tables at the Lambs Club or having them trail behind them carrying half-eaten tuna sandwiches. But as magazines deal with new financial challenges, including budget cuts that have trimmed the staff, few editors can afford to squander the employees they have left on tasks like hanging up their coats when they swoop into the office. True, fetching coffee may never completely disappear from the job description, but assistants like Mr. Kletnoy have been empowered in part because they are part of a more connected generation. The modern assistant has an understanding of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that time-stretched (and old school) magazine executives lack, and increasingly they are assuming responsibility for spreading the magazine\u2019s message, and brand, across social media. Richard David Story, the editor in chief of Departures, hired Lauren Weisberger after she worked as an assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue. He later encouraged Ms. Weisberger to write about her experiences at the magazine, which led to her best-selling book, \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada.\u201d Mr. Story said that when interviewing potential assistants, \u201cI ask the same, old-fashioned questions, I look at the same, old-fashioned qualities.\u201d But he nevertheless sees fundamental differences in the qualities he is looking for now as opposed to years ago. He might still ask job candidates how they would feel about picking up a vanilla skim latte, assuming he would do the same for them in return, but added, \u201cI need somebody completely up and running in the 21st-century style, with all the digital and social media bells and whistles.\u201d Image Mr. Kletnoy is Ms. Coles\u2019 blogging, tweeting assistant at Cosmo. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Mr. Kletnoy, who has worked for Ms. Coles since 2007, first at Marie Claire, seems to thrive in this role. At Cosmopolitan\u2019s 38th floor offices, he dutifully completes his administrative tasks while he blogs, tweets and poses for photographs with the celebrities who pass through. While Mr. Kletnoy humors Ms. Coles\u2019s love of Cyndi Lauper, he insisted she meet a more current performer, the pop singer Ellie Goulding, when she arrived in the United States for a tour and more recently with the 14-year-old singer Madison Beer. He also provided the music mix Jennifer Lopez listened to during her fashion shoot for the October cover. Ms. Coles can be tough and demanding, and Mr. Kletnoy says that managing her schedule of 15 to 20 appointments a day can be a nightmare. \u201cI book her so far in advance that when we actually reach that week, she\u2019ll say: \u2018You know what? This can be moved,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely the biggest part of being an executive assistant.\u201d Scheduling aside, Ms. Coles expresses disdain for the kind of mistreatment featured in \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada.\u201d She started her career in newspapers, where assistant positions were trimmed from budgets years ago. She never worked as an assistant and has clear ideas of what personal and professional demands are appropriate. In a pinch, she said, she has asked Mr. Kletnoy to babysit her sons, but paid him for it and doesn\u2019t consider that part of his job. \u201cInevitably personal life flows from work life,\u201d Ms. Coles said. \u201cI\u2019m not an abusive employer. It\u2019s something I find repulsive.\u201d Dominique Lemoine, the 27-year-old assistant to James Oseland, the editor of Saveur and a judge on \u201cTop Chef Masters,\u201d performs predictable tasks like cleaning the office refrigerator. But she also writes articles for Saveur\u2019s website and has written short pieces for the print magazine (she has one in the next January/February issue). She said that while she sometimes makes restaurant reservations for Mr. Oseland, he has never asked her to get coffee or pick up lunch. Image Mr. Kletnoy posing with the singer Madison Beer, 14. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times \u201cHe is very respectful,\u201d Ms. Lemoine said. She added that the only way she identifies with \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada\u201d is in \u201cyearning to write more.\u201d Mr. Oseland said he never wanted Ms. Lemoine to feel like he did when he was a young intern, working for the production team on the 1988 film \u201cDracula\u2019s Widow\u201d and performing menial tasks like buying cookies for the crew. \u201cIt\u2019s not only what goes around comes around,\u201d Mr. Oseland said. \u201cIt\u2019s also a simple business decision. I don\u2019t want to have somebody who is so essential to the basic functioning of my life feeling resentful.\u201d One assistant who ended up feeling resentful is Melanie Neuman, 32, who has a master\u2019s degree in bioengineering but wanted to transition into an industry with a stronger support network for women. In 2011 she began working for three senior executives at Cond\u00e9 Nast. She said that she was treated professionally by two of them, but the third was a different story. Ms. Neuman said that she could rarely leave her desk because her boss believed a caller should never have to leave a voice mail message. She said she was allowed to leave only to go to Starbucks to retrieve a \u201cquad soy venti wet cap\u201d or to the cafeteria to get her boss lunch. Image A scene from \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada.\u201d Credit Barry Wetcher/20th Century Fox She reached her breaking point, she said, when \u201cI wasn\u2019t able to go to the bathroom without screaming obscenities and yelling\u201d because of the possibility that important phone calls would be missed. She eventually reached an agreement to leave the company in May. A Cond\u00e9 Nast spokeswoman said in a statement: \u201cThe company does not comment on individual employee matters. Cond\u00e9 Nast has been an employer of choice throughout its history including being named recently as one of LinkedIn\u2019s 100 Most In-Demand Employers in the world.\u201d Mr. Kletnoy started in the music business \u2014 where assistants are possibly treated even worse than in magazines \u2014 and performed his own share of denigrating tasks. After emigrating to New York City in 1989 from Ukraine, he worked his way up through Motown Records, Sony, Arista and Virgin. But his career in music, he said, was marked by midnight phone calls asking him to change hotel rooms or to find a new chauffeur because a musician disliked the chauffeur. \u201cIn music, they feel like you\u2019re lucky to be here,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember getting thanked only two or three times over the years.\u201d In 2006, Mr. Kletnoy was \u201cso burned out dealing with musicians\u201d that even the film \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada\u201d couldn\u2019t scare him away from the magazine business. \u201cI like a challenge,\u201d he said. As he stood close to Ms. Coles at the Rebel Wilson premiere, he talked about how it might be fun someday to be an assistant to a fashion designer. It\u2019s a particular interest \u2014 he writes for the fashion blog Daily Front Row . For now, though, he is sticking with Ms. Coles. \u201cI\u2019ve never had a boss where I\u2019m respected like Joanna respects me,\u201d said Mr. Kletnoy. \u201cIn life, you have to do what feels right for you.\u201d", "keyword": "Magazine;Jobs;Sergio Kletnoy;Joanna Coles;Cosmopolitan;Careers and Professions;Social Media"}
{"id": "ny0154785", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2008/01/06", "title": "Art That Walks a Fine Line Between Reality and Illusion", "abstract": "In \u201cThe Republic,\u201d Plato uses an allegory of prisoners chained in a cave watching shadows on a wall to suggest that the things we believe are real are often only an illusion, a kind of puppet show of real life. To experience true reality we must escape from the cave of ignorance and into the clear light of day. \u201cShadow Show,\u201d at Real Art Ways in Hartford, picks up in various ways on this metaphor. The curators \u2014 Elizabeth Keithline, a Rhode Island artist who originated the idea, and Kristina Newman-Scott, director of visual arts at Real Art Ways \u2014 have assembled the work of 16 artists exploring shadows and concepts of shadowing in contemporary culture. Exhibits range from installations that use actual shadows for visual effect to video art and elaborate conceptual pieces concerned with issues of surveillance, memory, perception and truth. That the majority of the artwork is installed in the dark is, I suspect, more an accident of curatorial selection than any nod to Plato, but it nonetheless adds an overall, welcome air of mystery. Entering this exhibition you feel as if you are stepping into an alternate universe, a place where nothing is entirely as it seems. Or maybe for the first time we begin to see the delicate nature of reality. Using digital animation software, Rupert Nesbitt creates realistic-looking video landscapes that move. An occasional distortion of perspective reveals that the imagery has no basis in reality, and that these are purely imaginative spaces, but most of the time you think you are looking at a real environment. Shadowy government activities are the subject of William Allen\u2019s nine-panel text paintings examining the history, purpose and mythology around the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a United States government structure near Bluemont, Va. Here, beneath a FEMA training base, is an underground operation designed to house government officials in case of a nuclear emergency. Humor is lacking from this show, with the exception of William Lamson\u2019s one-minute animated video loop. It is made up of photographs of the artist lying face down in various suburban landscapes, that have been spliced together to make it seem as if his motionless body is sliding along the ground like some giant worm. Though it is sort of silly, the imagery is captivating. What I also like about this video is the way in which it plays with our willingness to respond positively toward that which we know isn\u2019t real. This is in some ways the opposite of what Plato was talking about, for it involves a knowing appreciation of something clearly artificial \u2014 as if we are heading back into Plato\u2019s cave just for the fun of it. Several artists in this show are interested in the idea of traces, evidence of things left behind in the landscape, or in the mind, or on the body. This is a popular theme in contemporary art but has a particular, even special relevance here. Perhaps most interesting among the works of this kind is a collaborative installation by an artist, Duncan Laurie, and an electrical engineer, Gordon Salisbury. It is installed in a darkened room off to one side of the exhibition. Inside the room is a rock hooked up to a device measuring energy waves, and a video of hallucinogenically pulsating signals that represent naturally occurring energy waves in plants and rocks. Whereas Mr. Laurie and Mr. Salisbury\u2019s installation is all about picturing hidden energy flows, Olu Oguibe\u2019s sculptural installation, \u201cBuggy Memorial to the Unknown Child,\u201d makes manifest complex human emotional states. This deeply personal work is all about the artist\u2019s feelings surrounding the pointless death of his brother, at the age of 4, from dehydration after a routine attack of measles. Things half-hidden are the subject of Sam Ekwurtzel\u2019s pair of video loops, a compilation of close-ups of photographs of television sets for sale on eBay. Mr. Ekwurtzel discovered that when the owners photographed their television sets to sell online, many inadvertently captured reflections of themselves and their living rooms on the reflective surface of the television screens. By cropping and blowing up these images the artist reveals a hidden world. There are many other interesting works here dealing with shadowy issues, ranging from street surveillance of random individuals in snapshot photographs by Erik Gould to the documentation of the noises and atmosphere of an airport lounge in an installation by Barbara Westermann. Like so many other artworks here, they zoom in on things that we look at but rarely see.", "keyword": "Art;Hartford (Conn)"}
{"id": "ny0250013", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/02/18", "title": "Combustible Conditions but No Unrest Yet in Uganda", "abstract": "KAMPALA, Uganda \u2014 Fresh from fighting in the bush, Uganda \u2019s president, Yoweri Museveni, a former rebel commander, electrified the crowd at his inaugural address in 1986 when he declared that \u201cthe problems of Africa, and Uganda in particular, are caused by leaders who overstay in power.\u201d He vowed never to be one of them. Now, after 25 years in office, he is running again. Voting began on Friday across the country in an election that could give Mr. Museveni, a close American ally whose relatively small nation gets hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, his fifth consecutive term as president. By all measures \u2014 polls, diplomatic analyses, even taxi-driver talk \u2014 he is expected to win. But while Uganda shares many of the same, combustible conditions that have fueled popular uprisings in the Arab world \u2014 grinding poverty, masses of jobless, students glued to Facebook and a leader who refuses to step down after more than two decades in power \u2014 few here expect widespread upheaval. In fact, the persistence of authoritarianism, whether through acceptance or a sense of helplessness to do much about it, seems to be the rule across much of sub-Saharan Africa, home to some of the most everlasting strongmen in the world: Jos\u00e9 Eduardo dos Santos in Angola, in power since 1979; Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, also since 1979; Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, since 1980; Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Sudan, since 1989. And the list goes on. \u201cThere are two main reasons why we\u2019re not seeing North Africa-style popular revolts in sub-Saharan African,\u201d said Phil Clark, a lecturer in international politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. First, he argued, many sub-Saharan African countries are more divided ethnically, and such divisions \u201cundermine the possibility of a mass social movement against the national leadership.\u201d Second, and partly connected, is the loyalty of the army, which is often built from the president\u2019s ethnic group and bolstered by corrupt spoils. \u201cMuseveni and Mugabe can rely on total commitment from the military,\u201d Dr. Clark said. \u201cThe fear of violent military crackdowns keeps many Ugandans and Zimbabweans off the streets.\u201d Many young urban Ugandans, who have been watching their Arab counterparts stage huge protests, seem to agree. \u201cUgandans have no unity,\u201d said Charles Rollins, a 21-year-old university student, speaking about ethnic divisions. \u201cThat is why we are different.\u201d Robert Lugolobi, executive director of Transparency International\u2019s Uganda chapter, argued: \u201cPeople here are too tribal. Uprisings happen, but they happen by tribe.\u201d In September 2009, dozens of young Ugandans were killed by the security forces in intense rioting in Kampala, the capital. They were members of the Baganda ethnic group and furious that Mr. Museveni\u2019s government was trying to curtail the powers of their traditional king. The government cracked down harshly, and few expect the Baganda to riot again like that anytime soon. Of course, ethnic divisions alone do not explain the notable lack of anti-authoritarian protests in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Yemen has long suffered serious tribal conflicts, but that has not stopped demonstrators there from demanding an end to the authoritarian rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In Egypt, protesters across religious, ideological and class lines all descended on Tahrir Square to oust President Hosni Mubarak. Here in Uganda, many young people support Mr. Museveni, who is credited with turning the country around. Over the past few days, they have packed shoulder to shoulder at rallies, waiting patiently under a punishing sun, some of them waving hilarious posters of the mzee, or old man, as the president calls himself, with his face superimposed on an Incredible Hulk-like body. \u201cMzee, our freedom fighter,\u201d the slogan goes. Mr. Museveni, who was born in 1944 \u2014 official documents do not provide an exact date \u2014 has tried to cultivate a folksy, avuncular image, often appearing at campaign rallies with his wife, Janet, and decked out in a wide-brimmed planter\u2019s hat. Even among detractors here and abroad, he is not usually spoken of in the same breath of, say, Mr. Mugabe, who is widely blamed for transforming a once prosperous country into one of the world\u2019s poorest . Uganda\u2019s agricultural-based economy stands in stark contrast to that, growing steadily over the past few years, by a respectable 6 or 7 percent. Oil is on its way, 200,000 barrels per day, starting as early as next year, which could increase growth much more. Mr. Museveni\u2019s message, printed on ubiquitous yellow T-shirts, is peace and security, and Uganda has come a long way on that front. In the 1970s, it was haunted by a dictator, Idi Amin, notorious for beating people to death with his own hands. In the 1980s and 1990s, the rebels of the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army terrorized the countryside, slicing off lips and hacking away at villagers. Today, Kampala is reasonably safe \u2014 definitely much safer than Nairobi, in neighboring Kenya \u2014 and the rebels have been pushed out of the country. This stability carries some costs, though. Mr. Museveni\u2019s opponents and Western analysts accuse him of running a vast and corrupt patronage system and abusing human rights. This month Human Rights Watch said the Ugandan police had rounded up civilians who complained about corruption . His government has threatened to execute gay people , though a bill in Parliament calling for that has yet to be resolved. Seven others are running for president, and the problem for Uganda\u2019s opposition, just like that in other African countries that are beginning to experiment with democracy, is that it is rudderless and divided. The stiffest competition Mr. Museveni faces is from his old comrade Kizza Besigye , a retired army colonel who has run twice before and lost, though he claimed fraud. Mr. Besigye, who seems to be a bit of a loose cannon on the campaign trail, predicted Egypt-style riots. (He has also intimated that Uganda was better off under Idi Amin.) He warned that Mr. Museveni\u2019s government had \u201ccreated these conditions of oppression and despondency, conditions of frustration, unemployment, that can lead to violence.\u201d Ugandan human rights groups say that the leading political parties have organized young people into militias, a troubling sign. Another worry is if the election is close and the government tries to rig the results to stay in power, then people could rise up. That seemed to be the case in Kenya in 2007, plunging that country into a violent crisis. The unrest in North Africa and the Middle East has sent a few tendrils to other parts of Africa, though the relatively small protests in Sudan, Djibouti and Gabon were quickly crushed. The Ugandan security forces are out in force. On Thursday, the day before the election, squads of officers prowled the streets, swinging batons and carrying guns. Protests are one fear; a terrorist attack is another. Uganda has thousands of peacekeepers in Somalia, and Somali terrorists bombed crowds in Kampala last summer, killing scores . That seems to be the biggest question \u2014 whether this election will pass incident-free, not so much who will win.", "keyword": "Uganda;Elections;Museveni Yoweri;Human Rights and Human Rights Violations;Politics and Government;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Arab World Unrest (2010- )"}
{"id": "ny0293292", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/06/10", "title": "Supreme Court Ruling Counters Pennsylvania Judge on Recusal", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A judge may not hear an appeal in a death penalty case that he worked on as a prosecutor, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-3 decision. The court also issued divided decisions in two other cases, ruling that Puerto Rico cannot try defendants in local courts for conduct already prosecuted in federal court, and that discharged juries may be called back in some cases to fix mistakes in their verdicts . Recusal The death penalty case concerned Ronald D. Castille, who was Philadelphia\u2019s district attorney in 1986 when he authorized the capital prosecution of Terrance Williams. Mr. Williams and a friend, both 18, were accused of killing Amos Norwood, 56, with a tire iron. \u201cApproved to proceed on the death penalty,\u201d Mr. Castille wrote on a subordinate\u2019s memorandum. Mr. Williams was convicted and sentenced to death. Later, when Mr. Castille was running for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he said he was reluctant to take a firm public position on the death penalty, fearing it would require his recusal from all capital cases. \u201cI can certainly say I sent 45 people to death row as district attorney of Philadelphia,\u201d he told a legal newspaper in 1993, adding that voters \u201csort of get the hint.\u201d Mr. Williams was the first of those 45. In 2012, as the court\u2019s chief justice, Mr. Castille denied a request from Mr. Williams\u2019s lawyers that he disqualify himself from hearing an appeal based on claims of prosecutorial misconduct by the office he had led. Although a lower court had accepted the claims, Mr. Castille, about two weeks before he retired at the end of 2014, joined a unanimous decision reinstating Mr. Williams\u2019s death sentence. In an interview , Mr. Castille said his role in the case as district attorney had been merely administrative. \u201cI didn\u2019t try the case,\u201d he said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t really involved in the case except as the leader of the office.\u201d On Thursday, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Mr. Castille\u2019s participation in the case required his recusal. \u201cChief Justice Castille\u2019s significant, personal involvement in a critical decision in Williams\u2019s case gave rise to an unacceptable risk of actual bias,\u201d Justice Kennedy wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority decision in the case, Williams v. Pennsylvania, No. 15-5040. The court ordered the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to rehear Mr. Williams\u2019s appeal. Justice Kennedy said the Constitution\u2019s due process clause guarantees that \u201cno man can be a judge in his own case.\u201d In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that \u201cthe majority opinion rests on proverb rather than precedent.\u201d \u201cThe due process clause did not prohibit Chief Justice Castille from hearing Williams\u2019s case,\u201d Chief Justice Roberts wrote. \u201cThat does not mean, however, that it was appropriate for him to do so,\u201d as recusal might have been required under state law and ethics rules. \u201cIt is up to state authorities \u2014 not this court \u2014 to determine whether recusal should be required,\u201d Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Chief Justice Roberts\u2019s dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate dissent, saying that \u201cthe specter of bias alone in a judicial proceeding is not a deprivation of due process.\u201d How a Vacancy on the Supreme Court Affected Cases in the 2015-16 Term The empty seat left by Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s death leaves the court with two basic options for cases left on the docket this term if the justices are deadlocked at 4 to 4. _____ Double Jeopardy In a narrow decision steeped in history, the court ruled, 6 to 2, that Puerto Rico is not a separate sovereign for purposes of the Constitution\u2019s double jeopardy clause, which forbids subsequent prosecutions for the same crimes. The Supreme Court has said that the federal government and the states are independent sovereigns, meaning that the same conduct can be prosecuted separately in state and federal courts. Puerto Rico lacks such authority, the court ruled on Thursday in Puerto Rico v. S\u00e1nchez Valle, No. 15-108, addressing a deeply contested matter of politics and pride. The case concerned Luis M. S\u00e1nchez Valle and G\u00f3mez V\u00e1zquez, who were prosecuted on gun charges in local and federal courts in Puerto Rico. They pleaded guilty to the federal charges and asserted that they could not be prosecuted for the same crimes in local courts under the Constitution\u2019s double jeopardy clause. Puerto Rico\u2019s Supreme Court agreed. \u201cPuerto Rico\u2019s authority to prosecute individuals is derived from its delegation by United States Congress and not by virtue of its own sovereignty,\u201d the court\u2019s majority said. In an opinion affirming that judgment on Thursday, Justice Kagan said Puerto Rico does as a contemporary matter have many important attributes of sovereignty. Since Puerto Rico became a territory in 1898, she wrote, \u201cthe United States and Puerto Rico have forged a unique political relationship, built on the island\u2019s evolution into a constitutional democracy exercising local self-rule.\u201d But she said the legal test for analyzing the double jeopardy question was a historical one and that the commonwealth failed it. \u201cFor purposes of the double jeopardy clause, the future is not what matters \u2014 and there is no getting away from the past,\u201d Justice Kagan wrote. \u201cBecause the ultimate source of Puerto Rico\u2019s prosecutorial power is the federal government \u2014 because when we trace that authority all the way back, we arrive at the doorstep of the U.S. Capitol \u2014 the commonwealth and the United States are not separate sovereigns.\u201d Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg and Alito joined the majority opinion, and Justice Thomas for the most part concurred in it. Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Sotomayor, dissented, saying that the majority\u2019s test was too narrow and mechanical, and that it failed to grapple with all of the historical evidence. _____ Discharged Juries The court also ruled, 6 to 2, that federal judges in civil cases may sometimes recall jurors they have discharged for further deliberations after discovering that their verdict did not make sense. The case, Dietz v. Bouldin, No. 15-458, arose from a car crash in Bozeman, Mont., in which all sides agreed that the plaintiff was owed at least $10,136. But the jury, apparently assuming that the sum had already been paid, awarded nothing. A few minutes after the jurors left the courtroom, the judge ordered them to come back for more deliberations, and they eventually awarded $15,000. Justice Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said that recalling the jurors had been permissible, though she cautioned that judges should be wary of long delays, ask whether jurors had spoken to outsiders, and not use the procedure if the verdict had given rise to \u201cgasps, crying, cheering\u201d and the like. In dissent, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Kennedy, said there should be a categorical rule against ever recalling discharged jurors. \u201cAfter discharge,\u201d Justice Thomas wrote, \u201cthe court has no power to impose restrictions on jurors, and jurors are no longer under oath to obey them.\u201d \u201cJurors may access their cellphones and get public information about the case,\u201d he said. \u201cThey may talk to counsel or the parties. They may overhear comments in the hallway as they leave the courtroom. And they may reflect on the case \u2014 away from the pressure of the jury room \u2014 in a way that could induce them to change their minds. The resulting prejudice can be hard to detect.\u201d", "keyword": "Capital punishment;Philadelphia;Ronald D Castille;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Terrance Williams;Double Jeopardy;US Constitution,United States Constitution;Jury"}
{"id": "ny0161599", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/04/12", "title": "2 Wall Street Employees Charged With Insider Trading", "abstract": "Ever since Michael Douglas declared that \"greed is good\" in the 1987 movie \"Wall Street,\" the character he played, Gordon Gekko, has been the face of insider trading on Wall Street. But it was $2 million in profits made by a 63-year-old retired seamstress in Croatia that tipped off the Securities and Exchange Commission about an ambitious and unusually creative insider trading ring, investigators say. That lead culminated in the arrests yesterday of two junior-level employees at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. The seamstress, Sonja Anticevic, made more than $2 million -- a seventeenfold return -- on a two-day investment in options on Reebok International after the company announced last August it would be acquired by Adidas-Salomon and the stock surged 30 percent. Regulators say it was her nephew, David Pajcin, a 29-year-old former Goldman Sachs bond research analyst, who made the trades. They said he was working with Stanislav Shpigelman, 23, an analyst in Merrill Lynch's mergers and acquisitions department, and Eugene Plotkin, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate who was an associate in the Goldman Sachs bond research department until he was suspended yesterday. The three engaged in a scheme that Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, described as \"one of the most extensive insider trading cases in this district in decades.\" Bail for Mr. Shpigelman and Mr. Plotkin was set at $3 million each; both remained in custody late yesterday. Mr. Pajcin was released on bail in November. Insider trading has long been a scourge of Wall Street. But, as described by prosecutors, the efforts by Mr. Plotkin, Mr. Pajcin and Mr. Shpigelman were notable for their brashness and far-reaching nature. One scheme was old-fashioned: Mr. Plotkin and Mr. Pajcin, who met as young bond researchers at Goldman, recruited Mr. Shpigelman to provide them with information about deals Merrill Lynch was working on. The three men also placed online ads and later recruited two employees who worked at a private printing plant in Hartford, Wis., where Business Week magazine is printed, according to investigators. According to the charges against two employees there, Juan Renteria, 20, of Milwaukee and Nickolaus Shuster, 24, now of Lexington, Tenn., stole advance copies of the magazine and gave Mr. Plotkin and Mr. Pajcin the names of stocks mentioned in the \"Inside Wall Street\" column, information which, if favorable, often sends the prices of those stocks up. Mr. Renteria was arrested yesterday; Mr. Shuster had been charged earlier. The defendants netted $6.4 million by trading on information about deals including Adidas-Salomon's acquisition of Reebok International and Proctor & Gamble's purchase of Gillette, the complaints say. The Business Week scheme was less profitable; the defendants made $345,000, the S.E.C said. Mark Schonfeld, director of the S.E.C.'s Northeast regional office, said the defendants contemplated other innovative ways to obtain insider information, including using exotic dancers to glean information from investment bankers. A dancer, Monika Vujovic, 23, of New York, allowed the defendants to set up an account for her in which illegal trades were made, according to the S.E.C. complaint, which charges her. Her lawyer, Mel A. Sachs, said he was confident that the accusations against his client would be favorably resolved in court. Mr. Plotkin and Mr. Pajcin met when the two worked together at Goldman Sachs in 2000. Mr. Pajcin left the firm five months after he started. In 2004, the two started to plot ways to obtain inside information, the complaint says. \"He's an intelligent person with a depth of character that makes you wonder about these charges,\" a lawyer for Mr. Plotkin, Martin L. Schmukler, said. Mr. Plotkin met Mr. Shpigelman, when Mr. Shpigelman was trying to get a job on Wall Street. In July 2004, Mr. Shpigelman became an analyst in Merrill's mergers and acquisitions department. Mr. Shpigelman seemed aware that information about deals was secret, according to an e-mail message cited in the S.E.C. complaint. In response to a question about whether a deal he had mentioned was public, he wrote, \"Yes, the offer is public. I would not be telling you, especially via e-mail, unless I wanted to chill with Martha in Connecticut for a little while,\" referring to Martha Stewart, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in an insider trading investigation. A lawyer for Mr. Shpigelman, Katherine L. Pringle, did not return calls for comment. Youth may have fueled the plotters' fearlessness. The three originally traded in their own accounts but later opened accounts in other people's names, simultaneously setting up a network of people around the world with whom they shared inside information in return for 50 percent of the profit. The S.E.C. named 13 of those people in its civil complaint, including Mikhail Plotkin, Mr. Plotkin's father. Even after the S.E.C. filed a complaint against Mr. Pajcin in August 2005, Mr. Plotkin continued to trade on illegal information from the Business Week printing plant. Both Mr. Pajcin and Mr. Plotkin also destroyed their computers and cellphones, but continued to talk about how to evade law enforcement efforts, according to the S.E.C. complaint. When, after fleeing to the Dominican Republic and Cuba, Mr. Pajcin returned to the United States to give a deposition, perhaps in an attempt to get his bank accounts unfrozen, he lied about his participation in both schemes, the S.E.C. complaint says. He was arrested soon afterward and charged with illegal insider trading. Mr. Pajcin's lawyer, Paul G. Lieber, did not return a call for comment. The case was first uncovered by the S.E.C. last year. Immediately after Adidas-Salomon announced it had a deal to acquire Reebok, sending Reebok's stock up 30 percent, the market surveillance department in Washington detected an unusual volume of trading in Reebok call options, which allow an investor to lock in a price to buy the stock. Within 24 hours, investigators traced the trading to Croatia and Ms. Anticevic. \"Ms. Anticevic, it seemed, was either the most successful investor in the history of Wall Street or part of something more nefarious,\" Mr. Schonfeld of the S.E.C. said. Jonathan Kaye, a lawyer for Ms. Anticevic, denied that any insider trading took place. \"This was done with research done from her nephew,\" he said. The investigation led to Ms. Anticevic's nephew, Mr. Pajcin, revealing the expansive efforts by Mr. Pajcin and Mr. Plotkin to find information and trade on it. Mr. Pajcin is cooperating with regulators. \"These allegations, if true, represent a serious breach of trust and violation of Merrill Lynch's fundamental principles,\" said a Merrill Lynch spokesman, Mark Herr. \"We do not tolerate or condone insider trading.\" A Goldman Sachs spokesman said the firm would continue to cooperate with the investigation. Neither firm is a target of investigators.", "keyword": "THE GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC;MERRILL LYNCH & CO INC;SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION;SECURITIES AND COMMODITIES VIOLATIONS"}
{"id": "ny0124381", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/08/04", "title": "Treasury to Cut Stake in A.I.G. in Share Sale", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (Reuters) \u2014 The Treasury Department said on Friday that it expected to raise $5 billion from a sale of shares in the American International Group , cutting the government\u2019s stake in the company to 55 percent. The insurer, which received multiple bailouts under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, intends to buy approximately $3 billion of the offering, which was priced by the Treasury at $30.50 a share, just below its closing price on Friday of $31.34 a share. The closing price was more than 9 percent above the $28.72 needed for the government to break even on its investment in A.I.G. The Obama administration has been unwinding its position in the politically unpopular bailout programs from the financial crisis. More than 300 small banks have yet to repay taxpayers. The Treasury Department said it would sell 163.9 million shares of A.I.G.\u2019s stock, reducing its holding to 55 percent from 61 percent. The government hired Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Securities and Morgan Stanley to coordinate the offering and said it expected to add other underwriters.", "keyword": "American International Group Inc;Stocks and Bonds;Treasury Department;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0127923", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/06/04", "title": "One Man Is Killed and 3 Others Are Injured in Harlem Shooting", "abstract": "A 25-year-old man was killed and three others were injured on Sunday afternoon in a shooting at a basketball court in Harlem, the authorities said. The four victims, whose names were not immediately released, were shot around 4:50 p.m. as they played a basketball game near 129th Street and Seventh Avenue, a police spokesman said. The 25-year-old was shot in the back and pronounced dead at Harlem Hospital Center. A 23-year-old man was struck in the head; another man, 20, was grazed in the head; and a third, 19, was hit in the leg. The three men were in stable condition at the same hospital. No arrests have been made, and the spokesman said the motivation for the shooting was unclear.", "keyword": "Deaths (Fatalities);Murders and Attempted Murders;Harlem (NYC);New York City"}
{"id": "ny0099146", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/06/24", "title": "Karachi Heat Wave Death Toll Tops 650 During Ramadan Fast", "abstract": "KARACHI, Pakistan \u2014 Karachi\u2019s poor learned long ago to cope with the many adversities that afflict Pakistan\u2019s most crowded and chaotic city, including flooding, street violence and political crises. But since a suffocating heat wave descended on Karachi three days ago, killing at least 650 people, they have found no respite and no escape. \u201cIt\u2019s so hot,\u201d said a security guard, Shamim ur-Rehman, 34, as he sat on a cot, looking beleaguered. \u201cThere is no fan, there is nothing. I can\u2019t sleep at night or during the day.\u201d Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared an emergency on Tuesday as the death toll from the heat wave soared, with overwhelmed hospitals struggling to treat a surge of casualties and morgues filling to capacity. The army set up emergency treatment centers in the streets and the provincial government closed schools and city offices. The Edhi Foundation , which runs an ambulance service and Karachi\u2019s largest morgue, said it had collected over 600 bodies in recent days. \u201cThe first to die were the people on the streets \u2014 heroin addicts, beggars, the homeless,\u201d said Anwar Kazmi, a spokesman for the service. \u201cThen it was the elderly, particularly those who didn\u2019t have anyone to take care of them.\u201d In many ways, the emergency is the product of a perfect storm of meteorological, political and religious factors in Karachi. Chronic shortages of water and electricity have exacerbated the impact of the heat wave, which has brought temperatures up to 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit, in a crowded city of 20 million people that is normally ventilated by a sea breeze. The health dangers are further exacerbated by the demands of the annual Ramadan fast, when most Muslims abstain from eating or drinking water during daylight hours. For most people, that means about 15 hours with no source of hydration \u2014 a factor that has particularly affected manual laborers and street vendors, who work outside under the sun. Dr. Seemin Jamali, head of Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center emergency wing, said 272 people had died there from heat-related conditions, including dehydration. The smaller Abbasi Shaheed Hospital said 56 bodies had been brought in since Monday night. Officials said a majority of the victims were men over the age of 50, especially day laborers from lower-income groups. Although Karachi residents are used to dealing with other emergencies \u2014 stockpiling groceries, for example, during bouts of street violence \u2014 they seemed at a loss for how to manage the extended heat wave. The electricity shortages are the product of decades-long mismanagement of Pakistan\u2019s national grid, and are often worse at dusk when many people are cooking in preparation for the end of the fast. Image En route to a hospital on Tuesday in Karachi, where extreme heat has killed hundreds. Credit Shakil Adil/Associated Press Not only do the power cuts make air-conditioning units and ceiling fans useless \u2014 they also reduce the water supply by shutting down pumps. Ice is in short supply and being sold for a premium in many neighborhoods. As the death toll rose over the weekend, many residents opted to stay indoors or to congregate at centrally air-conditioned malls. But that was not a choice for laborers, who make as little as $10 a day and try to keep themselves cool by wrapping wet towels around their heads to stave off the sun. Political anger over the crisis focused on the government of Mr. Sharif, who had pledged to reduce the energy crisis when he came to power two years ago. Syed Qaim Ali Shah, the chief minister of Sindh Province, which includes Karachi, blamed the federal government for failing to get better results from K-Electric, the private company that runs the city\u2019s electricity supply. Mr. Sharif\u2019s officials dismissed that criticism and tried to turn the blame back on Mr. Shah. Addressing Parliament in the capital, Islamabad, Khawaja Asif, the national minister for water and power, insisted he had no direct control over K-Electric. On the streets, people blamed politicians of all stripes. Over the past year, Mr. Sharif\u2019s government has frequently appeared impotent during moments of crisis. By contrast, the powerful military, led by Gen. Raheel Sharif, has become an increasingly assertive force in public life. Amid the political finger-pointing, some news media commentators called on politicians to voluntarily cut off their own electricity and experience the hardship endured by ordinary people. Some journalists fell victim to the heat, too, like a cameraman who fainted during an official news conference in Karachi on Tuesday afternoon. Image A man and his son at a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, on Tuesday. A heat wave, with temperatures reaching 113 degrees, has fallen during the Ramadan fast. Credit Akhtar Soomro/Reuters Most residents concentrated on escaping the suffocating heat. Television coverage showed residents fleeing their flats to seek shelter in the open streets. \u201cWe try and sit in the shade,\u201d said Mohammad Yusuf, 32, a laborer who works on a moving crew with a pickup truck. \u201cWe went all the way near the port today and sat under a tree for three hours.\u201d At Jinnah Hospital, Dr. Jamali said members of her staff had treated more than 5,000 patients from Saturday to Monday. The heat, not the fasting, was the principal factor in the deaths, she said. Although many continued to fast, others quietly allowed that they were unable to cope with the demands of their faith. Subah Sadiq, a fruit vendor and father of seven, said it was impossible to stand in the street all day without drinking. \u201cThis is the only way to survive,\u201d he said. Even for those not fasting, staying hydrated is a challenge: Under Pakistani law, in public places, eating and drinking are illegal during Ramadan, although some clerics said their followers could break the fast if their health was in danger. Mr. Rehman, the building watchman, was refusing to give up. \u201cAs long as I have some life in me, and strong intentions, I will fast,\u201d he said. One small glimmer of good news came from the weather service. Although hot weather is forecast to continue through this week, officials said, a small amount of rainfall was predicted for Karachi and surrounding cities for late Tuesday night.", "keyword": "Karachi;Weather;Fatalities,casualties;Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0120235", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2012/07/07", "title": "Rebels Chase Congo Troops, as Fighting Kills U.N. Peacekeeper", "abstract": "NAIROBI, Kenya \u2014 Hundreds of soldiers from the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo fled across the border into Uganda on Friday, in an embarrassing retreat from rebel forces. A United Nations peacekeeper was killed in the fighting, the latest instability to hit the war-wracked eastern Congo. Ugandan troops immediately stripped the approximately 600 Congolese soldiers of their guns and ammunition and the Ugandan government was trying to figure out what to do with them. \u201cThey have been disarmed, and they are with us,\u201d said Capt. Peter Mugisa of the Ugandan Army. \u201cWe will see how to handle that matter.\u201d The unusual cross-border retreat was a blow to Congo\u2019s troops, who have been bested several times in the past few weeks by a new rebel group called the March 23 Movement or M23. United Nations investigators and others have accused neighboring Rwanda of backing the M23 rebels , but Rwanda has vehemently denied this. Some diplomats in Nairobi said the connections were murky, and though Rwanda has supported Congolese rebels before, the evidence this time may not be so clear-cut. The M23 group emerged this spring when Congo\u2019s government decided to act on a longstanding arrest warrant for Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, a former rebel leader who had briefly been part of the Congolese Army and who stands accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The prospect of arrest set off a mutiny by General Ntaganda\u2019s followers within the army, and since then, the M23 has seized a string of small towns. On Thursday and Friday, Congo\u2019s Army clashed with the rebels around the town of Bunagana, on the Congo-Uganda border. By dawn on Friday, the rebels won and the soldiers from Congo retreated into Uganda along with several thousand refugees. During the exchange of fire, one Indian peacekeeper working for the United Nations in Bunagana was killed. Analysts say the M23 is not especially interested in trying to overthrow Congo\u2019s government, but want to carve out a sphere of influence in eastern Congo, which is teeming with minerals, and use their territorial gains as bargaining chips. Similar rebellions have plagued eastern Congo for more than a decade. The American military has been working more closely with some Congo Army units in recent years trying to make them more professional and battle-tough, but the latest episode is a sign of the lack of training within the ranks. On Friday, two Congolese Army spokesmen declined to discuss recent events. One of them said that he was under strict orders not to speak to foreign journalists.", "keyword": "Congo Democratic Republic of (Congo-Kinshasa);Uganda;March 23 Movement;Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare;United Nations"}
{"id": "ny0128384", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/06/27", "title": "Traditional Exchanges Duel With Newcomers Over Trade Transparency", "abstract": "While most people trading stocks at home imagine their orders zipping from their brokers onto one of the nation\u2019s stock exchanges, almost none of the trades go anywhere near those public markets. In reality, most trades placed through online brokers like TD Ameritrade and Scottrade are sold to Wall Street firms, which accumulate and trade against tens of millions of these shares a day, rather than send them to a regulated exchange like Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange . The Wall Street firms then quickly flip them and turn an easy profit because they have more resources and market knowledge than mom-and-pop investors. The trading, which takes place away from the gaze of regulators and the public in what are known as the dark markets, has taken off in recent years and steadily eaten into the portion of all stock trading that takes place on the public exchanges. Now, though, the exchanges are fighting back by looking to create dark markets of their own. NYSE Euronext , the company that owns the exchange, is asking regulators to approve a new platform that would attract orders from ordinary investors and then divert them away from the normal exchange with the aim of getting the investor a better price. Nasdaq and the exchange company Direct Edge said they have similar plans in the works. The proposal looks like a technical tweak to help ordinary investors. But it has become the front line in a battle over what the nation\u2019s stock markets should look like after nearly a decade of fragmentation has resulted in over a third of all stock trades occurring in the dark, up from 15 percent in 2008, according to Rosenblatt Securities, a brokerage firm. In the past, the exchanges have pushed regulators to force the dark markets to become better lit, but James Allen, the head of capital markets policy for the CFA Institute, said that with the new proposals the exchanges are acknowledging \u201cthat if you can\u2019t beat them, join them.\u201d In doing so, they are ready to take a turn away from the idea of stock exchanges as places where all investors come together in the open and on equal footing. \u201cIt could forever change what an exchange is and how it serves different factions of investors,\u201d said Christopher Nagy, the founder of KOR Trading, a firm that advises exchanges and brokers. \u201cThis proposal essentially says maybe not all people are equal.\u201d The regulators have until July 7 to decide on the New York Stock Exchange proposal, and it is far from certain that it will win approval. But industry insiders say that even if it is rejected, the plans are forcing regulators to decide how they will deal with the vast transformation of the nation\u2019s stock markets in the last few years. Since a crucial regulatory change was made in 2007, the nation has gone from having two major stock exchanges to having 13 public exchanges, as well as dozens of trading platforms where stocks are traded away from the public eye. Regulators have not stood in the way of these changes, but they have expressed their discomfort with the complex current market structure, and their uncertainty about how to deal with it. Duncan L. Niederauer, the chief executive of NYSE Euronext, said in a Congressional hearing last Wednesday that the operators of off-exchange trading platforms are under less stringent oversight than the exchanges. He said that regulators should either tighten the rules on dark trading platforms or let the exchanges look more like those platforms. The competition among platforms is credited with bringing down the cost of trading for investors of all types. But the fragmentation of the markets is also blamed for making the market infrastructure more prone to break down, as it did in the flash crash of May 2010, when stock prices plunged nearly 10 percent in 15 minutes. It happened again when the Nasdaq exchange botched the initial public offering of Facebook in May. The rise of the dark markets has also fed concerns about whether the prices of stocks can be manipulated more easily. The practice of diverting retail shares away from public markets and into financial firms is called \u201cinternalization.\u201d Bernard L. Madoff is credited with inventing the practice in the early 1990s through his legitimate trading firm, which was on a different floor from his Ponzi investment scheme. Mr. Madoff realized that his firm had better indications of which way stocks were moving than did the retail investors. If his traders could see that shares in a particular company were about to tick up, they could quickly buy shares from a retail trader offering the shares at a slightly lower price and then turn around and immediately sell them for the higher price. The profits made it worth it to pay retail brokers to get the orders. The practice took off after a series of regulatory changes over the last decade made it easier to trade off exchanges and more expensive to trade on exchanges. Today, four firms \u2014 Knight Capital Group, UBS, Citigroup and Citadel \u2014 have made a business out of paying for retail trades and trading against them. These firms generally pay retail brokers 15 cents for every 100 shares they are sent to trade against, industry experts say. The internalizers were caught in the Facebook initial public offering. They paid to trade against all retail investors clamoring for Facebook shares, but when the Nasdaq exchange broke down just as trading opened, they were left holding the shares. Knight Capital has said it lost around $35 million in the incident. Some critics say that internalization is a problem because the payments the brokers receive are not passed along to the customers. The internalizers also create an incentive for retail brokers to send orders to the place where they can get the biggest payment, rather than the trading platform providing the best price. The retail brokers contend that the internalizers allow them to get the quickest and best execution for their customers. Exchanges have struggled to compete with internalizers because they are not allowed to trade at any price other than the publicly listed price, which is what ordinary investors see when they look at stock prices online. Internalizing firms and other players in dark markets can offer to provide a better price, even if it is just a fraction of a penny. The internalizers will execute the trade only if their market intelligence tells them that the market is about to move in their favor, allowing them to quickly flip the trade. If the internalizers don\u2019t want to trade against the order themselves they usually circulate it to other brokers and dark pools. Only the hardest retail orders to handle \u2014 what the exchanges refer to as \u201ctoxic order flow\u201d \u2014 make it to the exchanges. The NYSE Euronext plan would offer to segment retail orders into a sequestered area where registered firms could offer to trade at a price slightly better than the listed price. The orders to buy and sell would not be visible to the public. Nasdaq has not unveiled its plan but people with direct knowledge said it would look somewhat similar and involve a mini-auction any time a retail order came in. Some internalizing firms have expressed opposition to the plans of the exchanges. But the proposals have also come under fire from market watchers who worry about the direction the industry is taking. Mr. Allen of the CFA Institute, which represents investors, said he understands that the exchanges need to be able to compete, but he does not want to see them accelerate the movement of markets into the dark. \u201cWe want whatever comes out of this to be more transparent rather than less transparent,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "New York Stock Exchange;NYSE Euronext;Stocks and Bonds;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry"}
{"id": "ny0139668", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/02/17", "title": "Syracuse Holds On to Early Lead and Beats Georgetown", "abstract": "SYRACUSE \u2014 With eight minutes remaining in Saturday\u2019s men\u2019s basketball game between Syracuse and Georgetown, the manager of the Carrier Dome came tapping on the shoulders of all the reporters on press row. \u201cIf Syracuse wins there\u2019s a very good chance the students are going to rush the court,\u201d he said. \u201cSo be ready for that.\u201d With two minutes left, the reporters packed up their laptops. And with less than one to go, the herd of students in orange and blue took over the tables, grinning at the court in front of them. As paint-covered bodies hurdled through the bleachers, the message was clear: All is well in Syracuse again. A loss Wednesday night to last-place South Florida seemed the lowest of lows \u2014 improbable if not impossible to bounce back from. But the Orange (17-9 over all, 7-6 Big East) learned quickly that beating No. 8 Georgetown (20-4, 10-3) could alleviate all that pain. Even as the Hoyas sliced a second-half deficit to 5 from 19, Syracuse held on strong for a 77-70 victory in front of 31,327, the largest on-campus crowd this season. The Orange came out fighting, playing body-to-body defense against some of the most physical players in the conference. Syracuse held Georgetown to a season-low 22 first-half points and was fueled by a balanced offense similar to what the Orange displayed in a victory at Villanova on Feb. 2. The Orange led by 38-22 at halftime, having forced 12 Georgetown turnovers. Even when offensive problems hit during the latter half, Syracuse\u2019s intensity never subsided. When the Hoyas cut the lead to 5, the Orange stormed back courtesy of a 3-pointer by the freshman forward Donte Greene. The sophomore guard Paul Harris led Syracuse with 22 points, sinking 7 of 8 free throws down the stretch. Greene added 18 and Jonny Flynn had 17. Jonathan Wallace led Georgetown with 26 points. MEMPHIS AIMS FOR PERFECTION Unless you have been living under a rock in the shape of a basketball, you know top-ranked Memphis is the lone unbeaten men\u2019s team left in N.C.A.A. Division I. Through Friday\u2019s games, there were still five teams that had yet to lose a conference game this season: Memphis in Conference USA, Duke in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Cornell in the Ivy League, Davidson in the Southern Conference and Oral Roberts in the Summit League. Memphis is looking for its second straight 16-0 season in Conference USA. The last team to have back-to-back unbeaten conference seasons was Princeton in the Ivy League in 1996-97 and 1997-98. Winthrop of the Big South was the only other college to go unbeaten in conference play last season. There have been at least two teams to run the conference table every season since 2001-2, when only Kansas of the Big 12 did it. The last time there were not any was 2000-1. On the negative side, there were five teams through Friday\u2019s games that had yet to win a conference game: North Florida in the Atlantic Sun, Northwestern in the Big Ten, Rice in Conference USA, Colorado State in the Mountain West and Oregon State in the Pacific-10. No team went winless in league play last season, although six managed only one conference victory. (AP) ROOM TO GROW U.C.L.A.\u2019s Kevin Love knows he is not fooling anyone with his listed height of 6 feet 10 inches. Love, the 271-pound freshman sensation, insists he has always claimed to be 6-9. But with his shoes off, he has been measured at 6-8 \u00bd. With shoes on, he is 6-9 \u00bd. \u201cThe whole height thing is really overrated,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen it comes down to it, can you play or can you not play? I think I play like I\u2019m 7 feet.\u201d Now 19, Love said doctors told him he would continue growing until he is 21. \u201cSometime, I could really be 6-10,\u201d he said. (AP)", "keyword": "Syracuse University;Basketball;College Athletics;Georgetown University"}
{"id": "ny0163572", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/02/23", "title": "Malone Had Plan for a Role as Icahn Moved on Time Warner", "abstract": "It turns out that John C. Malone was interested in capitalizing on Carl C. Icahn's planned proxy fight at Time Warner, as well. Mr. Malone, the media investor, applied to regulators to have a nonvoting 4 percent stake in Time Warner owned by his Liberty Media Corporation converted into voting shares a year ahead of schedule. In a news release, the company's incoming chief executive, Gregory B. Maffei, said the company was looking to \"participate actively in key shareholder votes and actions.\" But Mr. Malone had hoped to get voting control of his shares while the proxy challenge was still on. \"We did the filing before Icahn went away,\" said John Orr, a spokesman for Liberty. He would not say whether Liberty had any further proposals for Time Warner. The filing landed after last week's settlement between an investor group led by Mr. Icahn and Time Warner. In exchange for various concessions, including an increased share buyback and the appointment of two new independent directors, Mr. Icahn called off the planned proxy fight. Mr. Maffei said that the company was pleased with the steps taken by Time Warner, but looked forward to \"additional actions.\" A Time Warner spokesman said the deadline had now passed for shareholders to nominate board members for the company's annual meeting in May, as Mr. Icahn had threatened to do in pursuit of a plan to break up the company. Liberty said it had applied to the Federal Trade Commission for the right to convert the shares ahead of a prohibition barring them from voting status until February 2007. The restriction was put in place a decade ago as part of the approval for the acquisition of Turner Broadcasting Systems -- in which Mr. Malone was a large investor -- by Time Warner. At the time, Liberty was a subsidiary of Tele-Communications Inc., the nation's largest cable television operator. Because Time Warner also operates a large cable television business, approval of the deal was contingent on Mr. Malone's having no say over Time Warner's affairs for 10 years. Liberty could have made the same request of the trade commission at any point after the successor to TCI was sold to the Comcast Corporation in 2003 and Mr. Malone ceased to play a role in the company. One person close to Time Warner suggested that Mr. Malone might be seeking leverage over the company for a future transaction with Liberty, although a Time Warner spokesman said none had been proposed. The only direct commercial interest between the companies is a joint venture that owns the Court TV television network. Liberty, which has a range of media interests and investments, is pursuing a strategy of becoming more of an operating company. Mr. Malone's tactics with Time Warner are reminiscent of the approach he took toward the News Corporation, another large media company that Liberty invested in. Liberty had been a nonvoting shareholder in that company, but Mr. Malone swapped his shares for an 18 percent voting stake in November 2004, causing a rift with his sometimes partner Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, who controls 29.5 percent of the company's votes. That prompted Mr. Murdoch to put in place a poison pill takeover defense to keep Mr. Malone from raising his stake. That pill is being challenged by other shareholders in Delaware Chancery Court. At a 4 percent voting stake, Liberty would be among the largest individual shareholders of the widely held Time Warner. Mr. Icahn and three hedge funds allied with him hold 3.3 percent. Separately, Fitch Ratings downgraded Time Warner's bonds one notch, from BBB+ to BBB, because of the additional debt the company is expected to take on from its newly planned $20 billion share buyback and its acquistion of Adelphia Communications. \"Our actions really reflect the more aggressive financial tendencies of Time Warner and what we think is the heightened risk of further revisions to their capital allocation strategy,\" said Brendan Buckley, an analyst with Fitch.", "keyword": "TIME WARNER INC;LIBERTY MEDIA CORP;LIBERTY MEDIA CORP;MAFFEI GREGORY;ICAHN CARL C;MALONE JOHN C;MERGERS ACQUISITIONS AND DIVESTITURES"}
{"id": "ny0063671", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/01/14", "title": "After a Loss, Siblings Try to Reconnect", "abstract": "Silence has settled where animated banter and familial laughter were once the norm. The dynamic between Jasmine Morales, 25, and the two siblings who live with her has been thrown off kilter. In September 2012, the three of them lost their mother, Iris Roman, who developed sepsis after having surgery to remove kidney stones. Ms. Morales said she was in the process of consulting with a lawyer about a lawsuit. The more pressing order of business for Ms. Morales, her half-sister Desiree Roman, 22, and her half-brother Johantzen Valdez, 18, has been mustering the strength to weather the past year and a half. Their loss further hampers lives that were already marred by poverty and mental illness. At age 13, Desiree Roman received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She takes medication, but said it had nonetheless been difficult to balance her health and her grief. \u201cOne minute I\u2019m all happy and jolly, the next minute I\u2019m creeping people out,\u201d she said. \u201cI try to be brave, but it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d Her dual conditions have left her unable to work, she said. Ms. Roman had been collecting monthly Social Security disability payments, but those were stopped recently after doctors decided that she was no longer disabled; she said she was trying to get them back. Neither of the other siblings in the household work, either. Mr. Valdez is in his senior year of high school, with hopes of going to college and studying business. Ms. Morales said she had been looking for a job for months. She left Hostos Community College, where she had been pursuing a degree in early childhood education, to commit herself to the search. \u201cThe only people who want me or have contacted me are people who want money for training,\u201d she said. The family does not have the money to pay such costs. The family receives $499 in food stamps and $194 in cash each month. The monthly rent of $312 for their Bronx apartment is covered by public assistance. Their mother, with her own mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, had not worked, but had encouraged her children\u2019s sense of responsibility. \u201cShe didn\u2019t raise us to rely on others,\u201d Mr. Valdez said. \u201cShe kind of raised us to push forth and be yourself, by yourself.\u201d Circumstances have made it hard for the siblings to follow that advice. All three siblings receive psychological counseling from East Side House Settlement, a nonprofit organization with programs serving children and families. All three admit that their once-strong bond has been worn away by sorrow. \u201cSince my mom passed, we\u2019ve been separated from each other,\u201d Mr. Valdez said. They all agree that they prefer the solitude of separate rooms to communal gatherings, which remind them that something important is missing. However, brother and sisters do manage to come together on occasion, particularly on holidays and the anniversary of their mother\u2019s death. \u201cI want to feel more like a family and not roommates,\u201d Ms. Roman said. On a recent visit to the home, an East Side House caseworker noticed that the apartment was lacking in furniture, and that what was there was broken. The Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, provided the siblings with $1,700 from the fund for new beds and living room furniture. There are two older siblings whom the three see regularly, as well as other family members they are not close with. Ms. Morales, Ms. Roman and Mr. Valdez each concede that it often seems as if it is three of them against the new world. \u201cI fear us not being successful and relying on public assistance,\u201d Mr. Valdez said. \u201cI fear staying where we are and not becoming better.\u201d", "keyword": "Philanthropy;New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies"}
{"id": "ny0061200", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/01/03", "title": "A Tablet for Children That Comes With Its Own Penguins", "abstract": "GLENDALE, Calif. \u2014 DreamWorks Animation first captivated children in movie theaters. Then it branched into TV, piping cartoons based on hits like \u201cMadagascar\u201d and \u201cHow to Train Your Dragon\u201d into homes through outlets like Nickelodeon and Netflix. Now DreamWorks has partnered with a technology company, Fuhu, on an even more immediate way to reach itty-bitty eyeballs, a highly coveted audience: a tablet computer for children that the studio will be able to program much like a cable channel. \u201cWe could push out a new character moment every day of the year,\u201d said Jim Mainard, head of digital strategy and new business development for DreamWorks. DreamWorks and Fuhu, which makes the popular Nabi line of children\u2019s tablets, plan to introduce the product, called the DreamTab, at the International Consumer Electronics Show, which starts Tuesday in Las Vegas. The tablets will be sold with a range of DreamWorks-branded accessories, including headphones, protective bumpers and carrying cases. An eight-inch version of the DreamTab will arrive in stores in the spring. Pricing is still being determined but it will be under $300, a Fuhu spokesman said. A 12-inch version is also planned. The partnership is a convergence of two business trends. With children as young as 2 or 3 now routinely using their parents\u2019 iPads or smartphones \u2014 if the toddlers don\u2019t already have their own \u2014 technology companies are racing to introduce gadgets made for smaller and smaller hands. Fuhu itself sold more than two million Nabis in 2013, and its tablets, which are primarily designed for children 6 to 11, now collectively deliver more than 20 million video streams a week. Entertainment companies have been surprised at how speedily children have taken to tablets, sometimes forgoing TV sets altogether. As a result, DreamWorks, Disney and their competitors are searching for ways to make it easier for users to find their characters on portable devices. Fuhu\u2019s strategic goal with the DreamTab is differentiation \u2014 coming up with a way to persuade parents to buy its product over a competing one. DreamWorks is hoping to find a new way into the home, deepening its reputation as an innovative content creator and funneling more viewers to its programs and movies and selling more merchandise. \u201cBy teaming with DreamWorks to create a device that will have original content \u2014 original content that is automatically and frequently updated \u2014 we are not following consumers, we are getting ahead of them,\u201d said Jim Mitchell, Fuhu\u2019s chief executive. There are all sorts of branded tablets, of course. Fuhu in October introduced a special-edition Disney Nabi and Nickelodeon Nabi. But neither of those offered original and exclusive programming like the DreamTab will. Unlike some other tablets, the DreamTab will not lock children into a DreamWorks-only world. The studio\u2019s video content and games are the most prominent, but users can also stream shows from Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network. Nancy Bernstein, a movie producer who is in charge of creating what she calls \u201ccharacter moments\u201d for the DreamTab, insists that the effort is not simply an advertising opportunity for the studio. Turn on the tablet, for instance, and penguins from the \u201cMadagascar\u201d franchise might greet you with a silly dance. Depending on how parents have set the timing controls, \u201cShrek\u201d characters might appear in a skit to announce that it is time to power down. \u201cAll of this animation was custom-created,\u201d Ms. Bernstein said in a demonstration at DreamWorks\u2019s headquarters here. Some parents might disagree with her definition of advertising. Will dancing penguins make DreamTab users more interested in seeing \u201cThe Penguins of Madagascar\u201d when it arrives in theaters next year? The studio, led by Jeffrey Katzenberg, would be na\u00efve not to hope the answer is yes. The DreamTab will also have technology that allows it to communicate wirelessly with DreamWorks-made toys. For instance, a \u201cHow to Train Your Dragon\u201d action figure might be used to unlock games and educational experiences on the tablet. (The studio\u2019s \u201cHow to Train Your Dragon 2\u201d arrives in June.) The companies will try to woo parents by including educational elements. In addition to original animation, DreamWorks will supply what it calls \u201ceducational artistic experiences\u201d; some of the studio\u2019s top animators will appear in videos to teach users how to draw characters like Po the panda or Toothless the dragon. To allow children to draw on the screens, each DreamTab will come with the same stylus technology that DreamWorks artists use to make movies. \u201cWe want to transform the way kids play, learn and grow through technology,\u201d said Mr. Mitchell of Fuhu, which is based in El Segundo, Calif. The DreamTab\u2019s technology is quite hefty. The devices will enable children to send instant messages and emails to their parents\u2019 smartphones, for instance. Mr. Mitchell emphasized that his company had gone to \u201cincredible lengths\u201d to make the DreamTab compliant with the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act , a federal law that restricts the ways that companies collect information on children under 13. The DreamTab is not a toy. Switched into parent mode, it provides roughly the same computing power as an iPad, the companies said. \u201cIf you give a kid less, they will spot it immediately as less, and they won\u2019t like it,\u201d said Mr. Mainard of DreamWorks. \u201cWe wanted to give more.\u201d", "keyword": "Children;Tablet computer;DreamWorks Animation SKG;Fuhu"}
{"id": "ny0002159", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/03/06", "title": "News Corp. Has a Tablet for Schools", "abstract": "For nearly two years, Joel I. Klein helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation weather a phone-hacking scandal at the company\u2019s British tabloids with the promise that he would eventually be able to return to the role the company hired him for: to spearhead News Corporation\u2019s new venture into the public school market. That day has finally come. On Wednesday at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Tex., Mr. Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools and the current chief executive of Amplify, News Corporation\u2019s fledgling education division, will take the stage for a surprising announcement. Amplify will not sell just its curriculum on existing tablets, but will also offer the Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet for K-12 schoolchildren. In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will also provide schools with infrastructure to store students\u2019 data. \u201cWhen I left I was convinced of two things,\u201d Mr. Klein said of his tenure as chancellor of New York schools. \u201cIf we didn\u2019t see a dramatic technological change, we were not going to be able to move this country forward,\u201d and \u201csecond of all, that the private sector had to get much, much more involved.\u201d An early look at the Amplify tablet revealed a sleek touch screen with material floating against a simple background. If a child\u2019s attention wanders, a stern \u201ceyes on teacher\u201d prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help. \u201cWe wanted to use the language of the Web,\u201d said Stephen Smyth, president of Amplify Access, the division that produces the tablet, which is manufactured by Asus. At first, the tablet will be targeted at middle-school children. It uses what educators call a \u201cblended learning\u201d model that mixes technology with old-fashioned teaching. Amplify designed the tablet so that schools can provide each student with one to take home each night. Outside the classroom, children can use it to play games, like one in which Tom Sawyer battles the Bront\u00eb sisters. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge opportunity if you can get kids excited about educational games,\u201d Mr. Klein said. \u201cYou can change the learning curve.\u201d In November, Amplify began testing its tablet in hundreds of public schools nationwide, and in December it explained the venture to investors. The introduction on Wednesday began a full-court press by Amplify\u2019s sales force. A preloaded tablet, training and customer care (largely from former teachers) starts at $299, along with a two-year subscription for $99 a year. A higher-end Amplify Tablet Plus, for students who do not have wireless access at home, comes with a 4G data plan and costs $349. Amplify estimates that many school districts could use grants from the Education Department\u2019s Race to the Top program, which brings technology and personalized learning to schools. \u201cWe understand technology and we understand education,\u201d Mr. Klein said. \u201cA lot of people who understand technology don\u2019t understand education.\u201d In the eight years Mr. Klein served as chancellor of New York schools, he pushed educators to adopt new technology, often drawing accolades and controversy along the way. He remains a prominent voice in education reform, and Amplify carries with it both his friendships and clashes with educators. \u201cJoel was always talking about how to eliminate teachers and make it about a child in front of a computer screen,\u201d said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers. Image Joel Klein, a former New York City schools chancellor, leads a unit of News Corporation that makes this tablet for education. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times (\u201cDid textbooks lead to larger classrooms and fewer teachers? No,\u201d Mr. Klein says.) Now that he is in the private sector, some of Mr. Klein\u2019s advocacy work presents a conflict, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Last year Mr. Klein wrote, with Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations report that called the state of United States schools a \u201cgrave national security threat.\u201d He contributed $25,000 to a coalition that supported specific candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education elections held on Tuesday. (A News Corporation subsidiary also contributed to candidates.) \u201cYou can\u2019t at the same time go out and present yourself as a civic citizen talking about how public schools right now are horrible and then say, \u2018Oh, I have a product that is going to make it better,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Weingarten said. (She added that she saw \u201creal potential\u201d in devices designed specifically for schoolchildren.) Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Amplify, said, \u201cJoel has long been a big supporter of education reform efforts\u201d and \u201cwill continue to support candidates.\u201d In the private sector, Mr. Klein, who also serves as an executive vice president of News Corporation, faces the challenge of being a part of Mr. Murdoch\u2019s media conglomerate. The company still faces civil lawsuits related to phone hacking. Mr. Klein joined News Corporation in January 2011. In 2010, the company paid $360 million for a 90 percent stake in Wireless Generation, a Brooklyn-based company specializing in data and assessment tools for teachers. The crisis in Britain soon seeped into its new education business. In 2011, the New York State comptroller, citing \u201cthe significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corporation,\u201d rejected a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation. \u201cI\u2019m very concerned about them tracking children or using their data because they\u2019ve proven not to be very trustworthy on that,\u201d Mr. Mulgrew said. Mr. Klein says challenges exist when any \u201chigh-visibility company\u201d tries to work in the K-12 realm. \u201cThe company dealt with the phone-hacking thing with enormous praise from Lord Leveson,\u201d he said, referring to an inquiry into British press ethics led by Brian Leveson. The Amplify Tablet enters a market crowded with competitors trying to tap into K-12 classrooms, which spend around $3 billion a year on traditional textbooks, according to the Association of American Publishers. Comcast\u2019s NBCUniversal has a service called NBC Learn that uses material from NBC News. Apple has sold thousands of iPads to schools and analysts expect K-12 to become a larger piece of its business. Barnes & Noble and Amazon have both positioned their e-reader devices as options for schools. \u201cIn many ways Amplify is a start-up in this space,\u201d said Jonathan D. Harber, chief executive of Pearson\u2019s K-12 technology group. Pearson offers troves of digital curriculum but does not make its own tablet. This summer, when News Corporation splits into two separate publicly traded companies, Amplify will join the publishing division, which includes newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and HarperCollins, which will lend Amplify some of its content. Because of its investment in building the new business, the division will have an estimated $180 million in operational losses this year. Mr. Klein says he expects the Amplify tablets to eventually contribute 40 percent of the division\u2019s revenue. Amplify\u2019s curriculum, including video games as elaborate as anything played on an Xbox, is expected to contribute another 40 percent. \u201cThe ultimate goal of this is to turn students into readers,\u201d said Damien Yambo, a producer on the Tom Sawyer game and a former public-school teacher in Detroit. The games, he added, must also compete with Angry Birds.", "keyword": "Amplify Education;Tablet computer;K-12 Education;News Corp;Joel Klein"}
{"id": "ny0218096", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/05/27", "title": "Case Built in New York Against a Jamaican Kingpin", "abstract": "In October 2007, federal drug enforcement agents were questioning a man who had been arrested in the Bronx on gun and drug charges when he began to talk about someone he depicted as \u201cone of the most powerful men in all of Jamaica,\u201d records show. The man, Lloyd Reid, said he was referring to Christopher Coke , the notorious gang leader whose resistance to extradition to New York has led to violence and deaths this week in Jamaica as the authorities have hunted for him. In seeking Mr. Coke\u2019s extradition, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has charged that for more than a decade he has controlled an international drug ring from his neighborhood stronghold of Tivoli Gardens in Kingston. Prosecutors say Mr. Coke\u2019s operatives in New York send him part of their drug proceeds and buy guns that they ship to him. In Jamaica, he distributes the firearms, bolstering his authority and influence, a federal indictment charges. The prosecutor\u2019s office has not made public its extradition papers against Mr. Coke, but court records in New York show that investigators have been building a case against him through court-approved wiretaps and the questioning of people like Mr. Reid. The records offer a snapshot of how investigators believe Mr. Coke\u2019s influence extends to the streets of New York, and suggest how the drug dealing here may have helped fortify what the indictment calls Mr. Coke\u2019s garrison community in Jamaica, \u201ca barricaded neighborhood guarded by a group of armed gunmen.\u201d Prosecutors have said that Mr. Reid, who was convicted last year of conspiracy to distribute marijuana and is serving a five-year prison sentence, was an enforcer for Mr. Coke in New York. In talks with agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mr. Reid said he had a close relationship with Mr. Coke because his brother had once served as Mr. Coke\u2019s \u201cright-hand man\u201d in Jamaica before he was murdered, records show. But there was another reason, Mr. Reid told agents. He and Mr. Coke became close because they spent time together in the Bronx, where Mr. Coke once lived, according to testimony by Eric Baldus, one of the drug enforcement agents who interviewed Mr. Reid. That Mr. Coke lived in the United States is not widely known; officials say he was convicted in 1988 in North Carolina of possession of stolen property and deported the following year. Mr. Reid said he was often called upon to resolve disagreements among Mr. Coke\u2019s operatives because people knew of his relationship with Mr. Coke, the notes show. And when problems needed resolution by a higher authority, he indicated, he relayed information to Mr. Coke. \u201cCoke is the one who has the power to stop or settle all disputes,\u201d Mr. Reid stated, the notes show. Mr. Reid\u2019s lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, disputes the government\u2019s characterization of his client. Mr. Schneider noted that Mr. Reid was convicted in a conspiracy that involved less than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana. He was also convicted of robbery conspiracy but acquitted of using a firearm in a drug trafficking crime. \u201cHe was found guilty of being a low-level marijuana dealer,\u201d Mr. Schneider said. \u201cHe was clearly not a high-level operative representing Coke in the United States.\u201d He added that there was \u201ca previous familial relationship\u201d between Mr. Coke and his client\u2019s family. Prosecutors say that while guns and money were sent to Jamaica as part of Mr. Coke\u2019s operation, he and his organization, called the Shower Posse, also sent something back \u2014 they provided protection for their operatives in the United States. The relationship between the operatives and \u201csupporters in Jamaica was critical to the ability to traffic in marijuana here,\u201d Jocelyn Strauber, a federal prosecutor, said in a pretrial proceeding in Mr. Reid\u2019s case. Prosecutors have said in court papers that some of their evidence comes from court-authorized surveillance of what they call Mr. Coke\u2019s co-conspirators. A transcript of one call, which was introduced at Mr. Reid\u2019s trial last year in Federal District Court in Manhattan, shows him discussing Mr. Coke with a close associate. Mr. Reid quotes Mr. Coke as saying, \u201cYou represent me in America,\u201d the document shows. Mr. Reid also quotes Mr. Coke as saying: \u201cDon\u2019t you see our thing is a worldwide thing? Nobody will mess with us.\u201d Mr. Coke, 41, has been charged with conspiring to distribute marijuana and cocaine and to illegally traffic in firearms. If he is extradited and convicted, he could face a life sentence.", "keyword": "Coke Christopher;Jamaica (West Indies);Drug Abuse and Traffic;Jamaica (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0217904", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/05/20", "title": "Novartis Ordered to Pay $250 Million in Gender Bias Suit", "abstract": "The drug maker Novartis must pay $250 million in punitive damages for discriminating against thousands of female sales representatives over pay, promotion and pregnancy , a federal jury ruled on Wednesday. The decision was announced federal court in Manhattan by a jury of five women and four men who ruled Monday that the company\u2019s United States division, the Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, engaged in a pattern of discrimination against women. The $250 million in punitive damages is 2.6 percent of the company\u2019s $9.5 billion 2009 revenue. The women had sought from $190 million to $285 million. In the first part of its ruling, the jury awarded $3.3 million in compensatory damages to 12 of the women who testified. Novartis, which for the last 10 years has been declared one of the 100 best companies by Working Mother magazine, showed a pattern of discrimination against women employees from 2002 through 2007, the jury found after a five-week trial and four days of deliberation. The award to the 12 opens the door for 5,588 others who can also apply for compensatory damages. The damages will likely be determined on an individual basis by a court-appointed special master, said Katherine Kimpel, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. Judge Colleen McMahon of United States District Court will determine a lump sum for back pay, lost benefits and adjusted wages that will be distributed to plaintiffs, lawyers said. They said they were seeking $37 million to cover back pay. Novartis said after the verdict was returned on Monday that it would appeal. Carol Evans, president of Working Mother Media, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuit had not barred Novartis from repeatedly winning its 100 best companies award because the magazine had a different role than the court system. \u201cWe are disappointed that Novartis has engaged in discriminatory practices against women and mothers,\u201d Ms. Evans added. \u201cWe applaud the court system for effectively finding redress for this discrimination.\u201d She said the magazine\u2019s award was based on programs that Novartis had in place to support working mothers, like flextime, telecommuting and paid maternity leave. \u201cWe hope that Novartis will not appeal the ruling against them and instead turn their efforts to making sure that the company has no further incidences of discrimination,\u201d Ms. Evans said.", "keyword": "Novartis AG;Discrimination;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals);Suits and Litigation;Women and Girls"}
{"id": "ny0280147", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/10/17", "title": "A 600-Year-Old Oak Tree Finally Succumbs", "abstract": "BASKING RIDGE, N.J. \u2014 The locals say that George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette \u2014 the Frenchman who bankrolled the American patriots with cold, hard cash \u2014 picnicked in the shade it provided. Rank-and-file soldiers are said to have rested under it, gathering strength before going on to beat the redcoats. It is a huge oak tree, now estimated to be 600 years old. Arborists such as Rob Gillies consider it one of the oldest in North America. It is a local landmark, right there in the cemetery of the Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church . On Thursday, Mr. Gillies sliced into it with a chain saw. Not the trunk, rotund and rotted inside and long since shored up with cement, like a cavity in a bad tooth. Mr. Gillies, who is 52 and has long experience in teasing extra life out of old trees, took aim at the upper reaches. From his perch in the bucket of a cherry picker, he gave the tree a haircut, trimming away trouble spots \u2014 thick limbs that hung and could snap if tossed by winter winds or weighed down by snow. They could crash onto the street or slam into the church sanctuary, a relative youngster at only 177 years old, or an adjacent wing that is in its early 60s. Or the ancient headstones in the cemetery, the oldest of which is 280. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to even talk about this,\u201d Mr. Gillies said. \u201cI really wanted to save the tree.\u201d But a dead tree cannot be saved, and dead it is, Mr. Gillies said. It was declared unsavable last month after the latest round of soil tests and consultations with other experts. Image Rob Gillies, in the bucket of a cherry picker, pruning the 600-year-old oak tree. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to even talk about this,\u201d Mr. Gillies said. \u201cI really wanted to save the tree.\u201d Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times Still, it is not gone yet. The church is planning a communitywide celebration of the tree\u2019s life on Nov. 6. And while church officials say it will come down in 2017, by coincidence the congregation\u2019s 300th anniversary year, they have not decided what to do with the wood that will pile up. The suggestions are pouring in. The tree is a passionate subject in this little town about 40 miles from Times Square. The tree is a part of the identity of what the minister, the Rev. Dennis W. Jones, calls \u201ca Norman Rockwell-esque town.\u201d He himself wore a likeness of it on his sleeve when he was a police officer here, before divinity school and a career change. The church has photographs of what look like revival meetings, with the congregation seated under the tree. Mr. Jones said children climbed it after Sunday school when they were not supposed to, and couples had their wedding photos taken under it. He said he was surprised, after a television news report on the tree last month, to hear from people who had grown up here and moved away \u2014 but still cared about the tree. So did people driving by on Thursday. Many rolled down their car windows and asked if it was finally being felled. No, they were told, although some drove off without hearing the full explanation. \u201cWe want to clear the airspace above the sidewalk and the street\u201d before winter, said Jon Klippel, the chairman of the church\u2019s planning council. \u201cWe have some limbs that wandered a great distance.\u201d Indeed they have. The tree is wider than it is tall \u2014 it stretches more than 150 feet from side to side, while it was only about 100 feet tall before Mr. Gillies went to work. Image Jon Klippel, left, the chairman of the church\u2019s planning council, and the Rev. Dennis W. Jones, the church\u2019s minister, in front of the tree. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times Its very size is testimony to its age. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly been around longer than anyone that we can tell in our recorded history (except maybe the Lenni-Lenape Indians),\u201d the local historical society declared on its website . If the 600-year-old age estimates are correct, its youth coincided with Britain\u2019s defeat of the French in the Battle of Agincourt and Gutenberg\u2019s invention of movable type. And, of course, all of the voyages by explorers such as Christopher Columbus. Somehow \u2014 and this is one of the mysteries \u2014 the tree was not squeezed out before settlers arrived. Other faster-growing trees could have risen above it, blocking the sunlight before the first settlers arrived and the surrounding township was granted a royal charter in the mid-18th century. Somehow \u2014 and this is another mystery \u2014 it was left alone in cold winters if firewood ran short. By 1924, nine years after Joyce Kilmer wrote the famous poem \u201c Trees ,\u201d it was 75 feet tall and still growing. It was measured, tended and loved over the decades. Then came the summer of 2016. The old oak was done in, not by an April that was the cruelest month, but by a nasty August. \u201cOn Aug. 2, we saw some dark brown leaves,\u201d Mr. Klippel said. \u201cDay by day, there were more. Between Aug. 2 and Aug. 14, it all went brown, and it wasn\u2019t the usual variable range of autumnal colors coming on early.\u201d The church called in Mr. Gillies, who climbed the tree \u2014 with permission, and not when the children from Sunday school were around. Image Keith Keiling, left, and Cesar Guillen carrying a limb from the tree as it was being pruned. The work on Oct. 13 was meant to clear thick limbs that could snap if tossed by winter winds or weighed down by snow. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times The conclusion? \u201cThe tree was so old, it wasn\u2019t able to withstand the intensity of the heat we had,\u201d Mr. Klippel said. \u201cWe had these stretches of heat, and then a deluge.\u201d Mr. Gillies said the tree responded to the initial \u201cheat stress\u201d by closing off the pores in the rings deep inside, behind the bark. \u201cThese shut down, so it doesn\u2019t transpire,\u201d he said. \u201cThen it was inundated\u201d by almost 12 hours of heavy rain. \u201cThe roots were soaking because it couldn\u2019t process the water,\u201d he said. Mr. Jones said that some people wanted to keep the tree propped up for longer than next spring. \u201cBut it would be a dead tree, not a symbol of a living church,\u201d he said. Mr. Gillies said he was well aware that he was tackling a \u201cdelicate job.\u201d Mr. Klippel said the church was grateful he felt that way. \u201cThese guys are used to the typical tree pruning, not having to disassemble the tree,\u201d Mr. Klippel said. \u201cThey\u2019re used to buzz, buzz, drop, drop. Some of these graves are 250, 275 years old, and so are the tombstones.\u201d \u201cThis isn\u2019t like in someone\u2019s backyard,\u201d he said, \u201cwhere you can cut them off and say, \u2018Look out below.\u2019\u201d", "keyword": "Trees;Basking Ridge NJ;Historic preservation;Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church"}
{"id": "ny0083249", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/10/19", "title": "Israeli Soldier Is Killed in Attack by Palestinian", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 The wave of deadly attacks that has roiled Israel this month hit the southern desert city of Beersheba on Sunday, where a Palestinian armed with a pistol and a knife grabbed another weapon from a soldier, fatally shot him and wounded at least nine other people, including several police officers, according to the police. In the confusion as the attack unfolded, a migrant who was apparently mistaken for a second assailant was shot and seriously wounded by an Israeli security guard, then beaten by a mob. He later died of his wounds, according to Israeli news reports. Witnesses who said they knew the man identified him as an Eritrean asylum seeker. The Palestinian assailant was killed at the scene by police officers. After more than two weeks of almost daily attacks, mostly by young Palestinians armed with knives, there had been hope in Israel that Sunday would pass peacefully. But around 7:30 p.m., reports emerged of the shooting at the central bus station in Beersheba. Based on initial reports, some Israeli commentators considered this attack more sophisticated and requiring more planning than many of the past ones this month, most of which have been carried out in Jerusalem or the West Bank by Palestinians with no known links to militant organizations. The identity of the assailant in Beersheba was not immediately known, and no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. But officials from Hamas, the Islamic militant group that dominates Gaza, praised it. Hussam Badran, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement on its official website, \u201cWe bless this unique operation that comes as a natural response to the coldblooded executions carried out by the occupation army and its settlers,\u201d referring to Israel. \u201cThe intifada is ongoing and escalating to achieve its objectives to deter the occupier and get rid of it once and for all,\u201d he added. The Palestinians have accused Israeli security forces of using excessive force because at least 18 suspects have been killed at the scene of the nearly 30 attacks on Israelis this month. Eight Israelis have been killed in those attacks. In clashes with Israeli security forces this month, more than 20 Palestinians have also been fatally shot. In one attack more than a week ago in the southern town of Kiryat Gat, a young Palestinian from the West Bank snatched an assault rifle from a soldier on a bus and fled into a nearby apartment block, holing up there. The police arrived and fatally shot him; he was unable to fire the weapon he stole because he had taken it without a magazine. On Saturday there were five knife attacks against Israelis, mostly members of the security forces, in the West Bank city of Hebron, in Jerusalem and at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to the authorities. The Israelis escaped with minor injuries or unharmed. The assailants, including a young woman, were all fatally shot. Despite a security clampdown, Israel is struggling to prevent the attacks. The mayor of Beersheba, Ruvik Danilovich, told Army Radio on Sunday, \u201cFifty thousand people go through the central bus station on a daily basis, and the police have been doing their best to inspect people, but they cannot hermetically seal off this area against perpetrators.\u201d", "keyword": "Palestinians;Israel;Hamas;Murders and Homicides;Beersheba Israel"}
{"id": "ny0116635", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2012/10/29", "title": "Economic Reports for the Week of Oct. 29", "abstract": "ECONOMIC REPORTS Economic information to be released this week includes personal income and spending for September and the Chicago Federal Reserve Midwest manufacturing index (Monday); the Standard & Poor\u2019s/Case-Shiller home price index for August and consumer confidence for October (Tuesday); the Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index for October, construction spending for September, weekly jobless claims, retail sales for October and ADP employment for October (Thursday); and unemployment for October (Friday). CORPORATE EARNINGS Companies scheduled to release quarterly earnings reports include Burger King Worldwide (Monday); Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, UBS, Ford Motor, Chrysler, Pfizer and BP (Tuesday); Barclays and General Motors (Wednesday); Exxon Mobil, American International Group and Starbucks (Thursday); and Royal Bank of Scotland, Chevron, the Washington Post Company and Chesapeake Energy (Friday). IN THE UNITED STATES On Monday, the insider trading trial of Anthony Chiasson, formerly of the hedge fund Level Global, and Todd Newman, formerly of Diamondback Capital Management, begins with jury selection in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and the federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan will take up a deal under which Eastman Kodak would pay its retirees $7.5 million in cash and grant them $650 million in claims. On Tuesday, American Airlines\u2019 parent, AMR, will ask the bankruptcy court for permission to obtain up to $1.5 billion in new bond financing. On Thursday, automakers will report their North American sales for October. OVERSEAS On Monday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain is set to meet the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, in Madrid for talks on the economic crisis. On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for talks.", "keyword": "United States Economy;Company Reports;Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller Home Price Index"}
{"id": "ny0255690", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/09/15", "title": "Forecast Comes True: No Playoffs for the Mets", "abstract": "Minutes after being formally eliminated from playoff contention on Wednesday afternoon, the Mets did their best to escape the present and dwell on the past. They turned to an old reliable, the first-base coach Mookie Wilson, who unveiled a painting he and Bill Buckner commissioned of one of baseball\u2019s most famous moments \u2014 the dribbler that Wilson hit between Buckner\u2019s legs in the 1986 World Series, which the Mets captured against Boston in seven games. The painting will be displayed at Citi Field. That the two are cooperating in a for-profit venture 25 years after a World Series that left Wilson gleeful and Buckner in agony is intriguing in itself and \u2014 with the exception of Jose Reyes\u2019s quest to win a batting title \u2014 as interesting as anything going on with the current Mets as they slowly cross off their remaining games. Their elimination, which had been preordained for the last month, came when Atlanta beat Florida, 4-1, on Wednesday. Just to reinforce the point, the Mets lost, 2-0, to the Washington Nationals in a listless game Wednesday night. It was their fifth straight defeat. For the Mets, it will be the fifth consecutive season without a playoff appearance, although few predicted they would make it to October when the season began. \u201cObviously, we\u2019re very disappointed,\u201d said Manager Terry Collins, who, for most of the season, has managed to keep the Mets around .500. He did so despite numerous injuries, strategic decisions to unload Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran and disappointing seasons from veterans like Jason Bay, David Wright and Mike Pelfrey, who was Wednesday\u2019s losing pitcher. \u201cI left spring training with a very good baseball team,\u201d Collins said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t keep it together. That\u2019s the nature of the beast.\u201d The backdrop for this season has been an unusual one because of the financial issues consuming the team\u2019s owners, who, among other things, are being sued for $1 billion by the trustee for the victims of Bernard L. Madoff\u2019s Ponzi scheme . On the field, though, the Mets defied expectations after a 4-11 start. They received a lift from Reyes\u2019s remarkable season at the plate and from the surprise contributions of players like Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner, Lucas Duda and Dillon Gee. As recently as a week ago, the Mets were one victory from a .500 record again after R. A. Dickey beat the Marlins, 1-0. Since then, the Mets have lost seven of eight, and Collins has appeared increasingly frustrated, sensing that his players have started to wilt. For one thing, the Mets have not been putting together as many quality plate appearances, seeming to give away at-bats by swinging early in the count. On Wednesday, the Mets managed only two hits off the Nationals\u2019 23-year-old pitching prospect Brad Peacock, who threw five scoreless innings to earn his first big league win. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely easier to get up for games when you know you\u2019re playing for something,\u201d Gee acknowledged. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s harder to bear down and have the effort to be there. Mentally, I think it\u2019s a mental barrier. You think you\u2019re done.\u201d Nevertheless, several Mets, after learning they were eliminated, said they hoped to make a push to get the team back to .500 or better. The players also said they would try to relish the role of spoiler in their coming series against the Braves and the St. Louis Cardinals, who are still fighting over the wild card. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be some silver linings,\u201d Collins said. \u201cI\u2019m very, very proud of the way these guys played. They could have folded this up two months ago. \u201cIt was just one after another,\u201d he added about all the injuries and trades that subtracted important players for weeks, or months, or for good. With a .331 average after going 1 for 5 in Wednesday\u2019s game, Reyes had a small lead over Milwaukee\u2019s Ryan Braun (.329) in the batting race. If Reyes can hold on, he will become the first Met to be the N.L.\u2019s batting champion. That, in turn, would only enhance his value as he proceeds into free agency, with the Mets\u2019 chances to re-sign him not at all clear. But the Mets have the coming months to wrestle with that issue. For now, they have two weeks left in a season that has lost its verve. That has left them looking to the past, as a star from yesteryear did on Wednesday, in search of the happier moments as another long off-season looms.", "keyword": "Baseball;New York Mets;Playoff Games;Washington Nationals"}
{"id": "ny0270967", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/04/14", "title": "Bernie Sanders, in New York, Presses Fight Against \u2018Status Quo\u2019", "abstract": "Locked in a fierce fight with Hillary Clinton to win the New York primary, Senator Bernie Sanders took his plea for a political revolution to the heart of Greenwich Village on Wednesday and heaped particular scorn on Wall Street to the delight of several thousand jubilant supporters. Speaking on a cloudless night in Washington Square Park, the famed arch dramatically lit behind him, Mr. Sanders said he drew inspiration from the trade unions, gay rights activists and others fighting to \u201cchange the status quo.\u201d He repeatedly denounced \u201ccorporate greed and the rigged economy,\u201d taking aim at the big banks just to the south, and said that defending the interests of regular Americans was the abiding cause of his presidential campaign. \u201cIt is about creating a government that works for all of us, not just wealthy campaign contributors,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, one of several negative comments or insinuations that he lobbed in Mrs. Clinton\u2019s direction. \u201cThis campaign is sending a message to corporate America: You cannot have it all.\u201d Image In buildings along the park, New York University students and workers pressed against windows to watch Senator Bernie Sanders and the vast crowd below on the chilly night. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times With Sanders admirers waving placards reading \u201cDemocracy v Oligarchy, Humanity v Greed\u201d and \u2018\u2018Not Me \u2014 Us,\u201d the rally had the feel of some of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 and 2012, with the predominantly young crowd cheering Mr. Sanders every time he railed against major companies and executives and promised to impose higher taxes on Wall Street. People waited for hours in lines that stretched several blocks to get into the park, and they seemed spellbound at times as Mr. Sanders held forth against the wealthy and the powerful \u2014 in particular, Mrs. Clinton. \u201cYou can tell a lot about a candidate and the campaigns run by how they raise the money they need to run those campaigns,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, drawing a contrast between his historic success with low-dollar online donations and Mrs. Clinton\u2019s dependence on four-figure donations and \u201csuper PACs.\u201d And when he mentioned the $675,000 in speaking fees she received from Goldman Sachs, the crowd roared with boos. Sanders campaign aides said that about 27,000 people attended the rally, a striking number; Barack Obama also filled the park during a rally in 2007, but his campaign said only about 20,000 people had registered. But no matter the exact count, the rally was an event that went viral on social media and drew people who flew to New York specifically for the event. In buildings along the park, New York University students and workers pressed against windows to watch the senator and the vast crowd below on the chilly night. \u201cBernie is promising the change we need when we need it,\u201d said Terence Gardner, 25, a freelance film editor who lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Mr. Gardner cited climate change as the policy issue that worried him the most, and said he had great faith that Mr. Sanders would make environmental protection a top priority. Image Sanders campaign aides said that about 27,000 people attended Wednesday night\u2019s rally in Washington Square Park. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times \u201cClimate change affects everything in my life, from where I\u2019m going to live to whether I wanted to have kids,\u201d said Mr. Gardner, who added that he did not know many details about Mrs. Clinton\u2019s policy agenda. Before Mr. Sanders took the stage, several celebrity supporters addressed one of his biggest challenges in New York: He has been a far more popular vote-getter than Mrs. Clinton with independents, yet only registered Democrats are allowed to cast ballots in the primary. They urged the crowd to do everything they could to persuade more Democrats to support Mr. Sanders and help turn out the vote on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton, who will debate the senator on Thursday, has held a comfortable lead over him in recent opinion polls. But Sanders supporters at the rally said they thought the intensity of support for the senator could lead to an upset victory on Tuesday, similar to his win in Michigan last month. \u201cChange will not happen by choosing a candidate who is entirely entrenched in the dysfunction of the past,\u201d said the actor Tim Robbins, who recalled protesting in the park against the Vietnam War as a young man. Mr. Sanders told the crowd that \u201cit\u2019s going to be a tough primary for us\u201d because independents could not vote and young people, among others, could not register at polling places on Tuesday. But he said he was still hopeful. Image The rally had the feel of some of the Occupy Wall Street protests, with the predominantly young crowd cheering Mr. Sanders every time he railed against major companies. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times \u201cIf we have a large voter turnout on Tuesday, we\u2019re going to win this thing,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. The large crowd, and the senator\u2019s promises to change politics, had much in common with the 2007 rally for Mr. Obama in the park. Like Mr. Sanders, Mr. Obama was running an aggressive campaign against Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. Obama\u2019s visit to Washington Square Park was seen as a shot across her bow. Mr. Obama criticized Mrs. Clinton over Social Security reform, but mostly needled her, such as noting that she had refused to commit to root for the New York Yankees over the Chicago Cubs if the teams ever faced off in the World Series. At Wednesday\u2019s rally, Mr. Sanders was more aggressive against Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Obama had been, assailing her for supporting some free trade agreements in the past and voting to authorize the war in Iraq. He portrayed her judgment as faulty and her pledges to change America as unreliable, based on her ties with bank and corporate executives and major donors. \u201cWhat this campaign is profoundly about is that real change never occurs from the top on down \u2014 it\u2019s from the bottom up,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. Some people said they came out because they were still making up their mind between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. Lauri Owens, an undecided voter from Forest Hills, Queens, said she shared Mr. Sanders\u2019s concern that corporations had far too much influence, but was not sure if Mr. Sanders would be able to change anything as president. \u201cI\u2019d like to see someone who thinks about us again,\u201d she said. \u201cRegular people.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders;NYC;Democrats;Hillary Clinton;Washington Square Park Manhattan"}
{"id": "ny0075570", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/05/04", "title": "Quiet Bats and a Flub Send the Mets to Another Loss", "abstract": "A week and a half ago, the Mets were the hottest team in baseball, having won 11 straight games. Citi Field was shedding its longstanding reputation for being desolate for much of April, attracting boisterous fans who, having been roused from their hibernation, were championing the ballpark as the home of the best pitching staff in the major leagues. But after a four-game series with the Nationals in which the Mets lost three times, including a second consecutive 1-0 loss at home on Sunday, the road to the National League East pennant still appears likely to go through Washington. Although the defeat did not knock the Mets out of first place \u2014 they are three and a half games ahead of Atlanta and Miami and four ahead of Washington \u2014 they have lost five of their last six games. They have also dropped 17 of their last 19 home games against the Nationals, dating to 2013. \u201cAnytime you don\u2019t win in your division, it\u2019s missed opportunities,\u201d left fielder Michael Cuddyer said. \u201cBut at the same time, it\u2019s not like those guys are cakewalks over there. That\u2019s a good team, good pitching.\u201d The Mets\u2019 pitchers remain their best asset, and Sunday\u2019s starter, Dillon Gee, gave the team a chance to win even as his accuracy was off. The Mets\u2019 offense, however, was unable to solve Nationals starter Doug Fister, who allowed five hits in his six and a third innings, and the Mets finished the game 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position, with Lucas Duda and Cuddyer striking out swinging to strand runners on second and third in the eighth inning. Gee fell to 0-2, walking five and allowing six hits. He left the game after loading the bases with no outs in the sixth, but Alex Torres struck out the next three batters to keep the score at 1-0. \u201cI feel like almost from the first inning today, it was kind of like, this is going to be a battle,\u201d Gee said, adding that he did not feel as good as he had during his last start, when he allowed one run in seven and two-thirds innings against the Marlins. The Mets\u2019 recent struggles to drive in runs have been compounded by the continuation of a problem that arose in spring training: substandard middle- infield defense, particularly at shortstop. Ruben Tejada was given a second straight start at shortstop on Sunday to allow the usual starter, Wilmer Flores, to \u201cget his mind straight,\u201d Mets Manager Terry Collins said before the game. Tejada, while less of a threat offensively than Flores, is considered more sure-handed in the field. But a costly early miscue had Gee working from behind all afternoon. Image Mets starter Dillon Gee after he was removed with the bases loaded in the sixth inning of Sunday's game against the Nationals. Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press After Denard Span led off the game with a walk, Yunel Escobar hit a grounder to Mets second baseman Dilson Herrera, who made a clean throw to Tejada for the forceout. Tejada, though, did not cleanly transfer the ball from his glove, and his delayed throw to first base could not complete the double play. Escobar later scored on a broken-bat single by Ryan Zimmerman. Tejada said after the game that the ball stuck in his hand momentarily and he could not find a grip. Sunday\u2019s lineup change will not be permanent, Collins indicated. But with Flores having committed seven errors in his first 21 games of the season, including one in each of his last three starts, Collins felt Flores would benefit from some time off. (The Mets do not play Monday.) \u201cI\u2019m not just really thinking about anything,\u201d Flores said. \u201cI was just watching the game and trying to clear my mind.\u201d Cuddyer, who made a leaping grab at the left-field wall to rob Zimmerman of a home run in the fourth, said the day off would be beneficial for the entire team. \u201cEverybody can get recharged, refreshed,\u201d Cuddyer said, adding that players would also have a good opportunity to realize the Mets were \u201cstill on top of the division right now.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no reason to press,\u201d he said. Lately, though, in an effort to jump-start their offense, the Mets have been swinging at balls out of the strike zone, including pitches in the dirt with two strikes in the count. This series against Washington included little evidence that the team could consistently score on the Nationals\u2019 pitchers, who outpitched their Mets counterparts. The Mets tallied two runs on Thursday against Stephen Strasburg but could not score again. On Friday, they were clinging to a 1-0 lead in the late innings; Nationals left fielder Jayson Werth then misplayed a fly ball in the eighth that led to three runs and an eventual 4-0 Mets victory . \u201cThis isn\u2019t just one or two guys,\u201d Collins said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to put some better swings on the ball throughout the lineup.\u201d The Mets opened the season by taking two of three at Washington, which was missing three important position players: Werth, Danny Espinosa and Span. The Nationals\u2019 pitchers still gave up only four earned runs in that series (10 total runs). The Mets are trying not to let their recent disappointments linger even though the path to a division crown may not be as easy as it appeared a couple of weeks ago. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to beat them every single time you play them,\u201d Cuddyer said. \u201cThat\u2019s the nature of the business. The other side of it is, we only lost, 1-0, the last two days. So we were right there in the game. One big hit here, one big hit there, we win those games.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Washington Nationals"}
{"id": "ny0254278", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/07/10", "title": "After Making History, Jeter Makes the Yankees Winners", "abstract": "With one out in the third inning Saturday, space was at a premium on the rail of the Yankees \u2019 dugout. Players and staff members crowded shoulder to shoulder, jostling for what they hoped would be the best view of history. Manager Joe Girardi was at one end, arms draped over the railing in his familiar pose; second baseman Robinson Cano was at the other end, a towel across his shoulder and one leg raised on the steps. Jorge Posada was smack in the middle. Posada is Derek Jeter \u2019s best friend on the Yankees, a teammate since 1992, when they were playing Class A ball in Greensboro, N.C. Posada, the longtime Yankees catcher and current designated hitter, had seen so many of Jeter\u2019s 2,999 major league hits over the years that he was not going to miss this one. When Jeter swung, his shiny black bat meeting a full-count breaking ball from Tampa Bay Rays starter David Price, Posada shot his arms up. He knew, even before the ball had landed in the left-field bleachers, what had happened: Jeter had reached the coveted 3,000-hit mark, the first Yankee to do so, in the most thrilling of fashions. The Yankees poured onto the field, jumping joyously at home plate as Jeter rounded the bases. With his second hit of the day, in his second at-bat, Jeter \u2014 No. 2 \u2014 reached the milestone at 2 p.m. Posada pushed to the front of the mass of players, his smile wide as he wrapped Jeter in a fierce embrace. Mariano Rivera, the third remaining Yankee from the dynasty teams of the 1990s, was right behind Posada, and a receiving line of teammates was at the heart of an on-field celebration that lasted about four minutes. Even the relievers ran in from the bullpen. \u201cI told him I was proud of him,\u201d Posada said. \u201cIt was relief,\u201d Jeter said of his emotions. \u201cI was excited but, to be honest with you, I was just pretty relieved.\u201d The ovation from the Yankee Stadium crowd of 48,103 lingered, long and loud. Price walked off the mound to get a drink of water, and he waited by the Rays \u2019 dugout, where several players \u2014 led by the former Yankee Johnny Damon \u2014 stood and cheered for Jeter, too. Jeter turned to each corner of the stadium as he accepted the congratulations, also acknowledging Price and the Rays. He then raised a fist toward the luxury suite where his family and friends, including his father and his girlfriend, the actress Minka Kelly , were seated. Kelly appeared to be blinking back tears. When the cheers continued even longer, Jeter returned to the field for a curtain call but admitted he felt sheepish, wanting the game to continue. Finally, after Price had thrown a few warm-up pitches, it did. But Jeter was not done. He doubled in the fifth inning, singled in the sixth and drove in the go-ahead run with another single in the eighth, matching a career high by going 5 for 5 as the Yankees beat the Rays, 5-4 . \u201cIt would have been really, really awkward to be out there doing interviews and waving to the crowd if we would have lost,\u201d Jeter said. \u201cIf we didn\u2019t win, it definitely would have put a damper on things.\u201d On a different day, Jeter \u2014 ever the team player \u2014 might have tried to point to that single in the eighth as the biggest hit, but on this day even he conceded that completing his quest loomed larger. He reached 2,994 hits on June 13, then was sidelined for three weeks with a calf injury. He returned July 4, got three hits during a series in Cleveland, and then climbed to within two of the mark with a double on Thursday against the Rays. When Friday\u2019s game was rained out \u2014 decreasing his chance to get the 3,000th hit at home because the Yankees have a series in Toronto right after the All-Star break \u2014 Jeter was frustrated. \u201cI\u2019ve been lying to you guys for a long time, saying I wasn\u2019t nervous and there\u2019s no pressure,\u201d he said to reporters. \u201cThere was a lot of pressure to do it here.\u201d After his first at-bat, though, he was able to relax a bit. Jeter was patient early in the count in that first at-bat, but on a 3-2 pitch, Price \u201ccould have thrown it in the dugout and I was going to swing,\u201d Jeter said. Fortunately for the Yankees, Price threw a fastball that Jeter smacked to left field for hit No. 2,999. The crowd roared and Price, a left-hander, hung his head. Two innings later, he tried a different tack against Jeter, throwing a curveball on 3-2. Jeter, memorably, hit that one, too. \u201cI\u2019d rather not be the answer to that particular trivia question,\u201d Price said of his place in history. \u201cBut I am.\u201d The celebration continued throughout the game, as the Yankees played video tributes to Jeter between innings. Jeter then provided an almost perfect coda to the day with his eighth-inning single, although Rivera, who saved the game in the ninth, joked that he thought Jeter was going to hit a triple, which would have given him the cycle. Still, \u201cit was a storybook ending,\u201d said the rapper Jay-Z, who was among the crowd in the tunnel outside the Yankees\u2019 clubhouse after the game. \u201cHe\u2019s just a winner,\u201d Jay-Z said. \u201cThat\u2019s how it happens.\u201d Also in the throng was Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager who is an executive for Major League Baseball. Torre sat in the stands for the game, then met with Jeter afterward and put him on the phone with Commissioner Bud Selig, who wanted to offer congratulations. \u201cDerek is just amazing,\u201d Torre said. Perhaps no one has seen that as often as Posada and Rivera. The old friends met reporters wearing T-shirts commemorating Jeter\u2019s milestone, and the pride they took in his accomplishment was evident. \u201cHe deserves it,\u201d Rivera said. \u201cAnd I hope he has another thousand or two more.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Jeter Derek;Baseball;Tampa Bay Rays;Price David"}
{"id": "ny0162243", "categories": ["politics"], "date": "2006/02/03", "title": "Two Accounts on Jet Crash Seem to Vary", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 - Fifteen minutes before a charter jet crashed on takeoff in Colorado, killing three people including a son of the NBC Sports executive Dick Ebersol, the two pilots discussed the plane's wings and decided there was no ice on them, according to a transcript of the cockpit voice recording. But Mr. Ebersol, who along with another son survived the crash, told investigators in an interview two months afterward that \"chunks of slush\" slid from the roof and windows of the plane before takeoff, according to other documents, which, like the transcript, were among some 150 pages of reports on the accident released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board. The safety board has not yet established a probable cause of the accident, which occurred in Montrose, Colo., on Nov. 28, 2004, when the plane, a twin-engine Canadair Challenger, skidded off the runway, broke apart and caught fire. But a month after the interview with Mr. Ebersol, the board issued an alert warning pilots that particles of frost or ice \"the size of a grain of table salt and distributed as sparsely as one per square centimeter\" could reduce a wing's lift enough to prevent takeoff. The plane, bound from California to South Bend, Ind., had landed in Montrose, Colo., to drop off Mr. Ebersol's wife, the actress Susan Saint James, and another passenger. It was on the ground in light snow for about 45 minutes, Mr. Ebersol estimated, and was not de-iced. Mr. Ebersol's son Teddy was killed in the ensuing accident, as were the captain, Alberto Polanco, 50, and the flight attendant, Warren Richardson III, 36. According to the voice recorder transcript, before takeoff the captain asked, \"How do you see the wings?\" Seven seconds later, the first officer answered, \"Good,\" and the captain said, \"Looks clear to me.\"", "keyword": "NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD;EBERSOL DICK;ACCIDENTS AND SAFETY"}
{"id": "ny0159544", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/12/12", "title": "In a Contract Season, Jacobs Remains Confident", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 When the Giants had finished stampeding through the vaunted Baltimore Ravens defense last month, Brandon Jacobs strutted toward the locker room and shouted a message to no one in particular. \u201cBig money out there,\u201d he said. \u201cFree agency.\u201d When contract negotiations broke down during training camp, Jacobs set out to become an attractive find for a team seeking a top running back, and that meant banishing the impression that he was not a durable player who could withstand punishment an entire season. \u201cWell, my main goal this year is to play 16 games,\u201d Jacobs said in Albany last July. \u201cIf I play 16 games, everything is going to fall right into place for me.\u201d Jacobs is the leading rusher on the N.F.L.\u2019s best rushing team, pounding his way to 1,002 yards and 12 touchdowns. But he sat out his second straight practice Thursday with a sore left knee and his status for Sunday night\u2019s clash with the Cowboys is in doubt. If Jacobs does not play, Derrick Ward and Ahmad Bradshaw, who returned to full practice Thursday after a neck injury, will carry the load. Jacobs was first injured against Seattle on Oct. 5, was dinged against the Ravens and sat out the next week against the Cardinals. In the past two games he rushed for 123 yards on 31 carries. \u201cEverything comes down to the doctors,\u201d Jacobs said Wednesday. \u201cBut like I said, just the competitive nature in me, I want to be out there to play.\u201d Jacobs, 26, is in the final year of his rookie contract and earning $927,000. He repeated last summer that that figure has never weighed on his mind, suggesting that his performance on the field would do all the advertising he needed. But he had rushed for over 1,000 yards last season, as well, and that failed to prod the Giants enough to offer him a new deal. Teams looking at Jacobs this spring will have to decide whether his durability is still a concern and if they can handle the showman inside him. Last Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles, Jacobs broke off a 23-yard run that did not result in a touchdown but still warranted, in his opinion, a little look-at-me skip. It was innocuous enough then, but when he tried a highlight-reel hurdle against the Eagles in their previous meeting, two defenders sandwiched him and caused a fumble. Giants General Manager Jerry Reese declined to comment on Jacobs\u2019s impending unrestricted free agency in an e-mail message Thursday because the Giants never publicly discuss contract negotiations. \u201cI\u2019m fine with playing with what I\u2019m making this year,\u201d Jacobs said in July. \u201cI don\u2019t have a problem at all with playing with my salary and hitting the market.\u201d EXTRA POINTS Wide receiver Domenik Hixon (ankle/foot) missed a second consecutive day of practice. ... Defensive end Justin Tuck (lower leg) participated for only part of the session. Neither has yet been ruled out of playing on Sunday.", "keyword": "Jacobs Brandon;Free Agents (Sports);Football;New York Giants"}
{"id": "ny0224037", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/11/24", "title": "China Sets Tough Line in Climate Talks", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Senior Chinese officials said on Tuesday that next week\u2019s climate talks in Canc\u00fan, Mexico, would succeed only if the West agreed to transfer technology to developing countries like China and to take the lead in cutting emissions. The comments by one of China\u2019s senior officials in charge of climate issues, Xie Zhenhua of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, were mirrored by two other senior Chinese climate officials who earlier this week published a report saying China was willing to make concessions \u2014 if developed nations put money into a $30 billion fund aimed at helping poor nations cope with global warming . Western countries pledged to set up such a fund but details have yet to be worked out. Mr. Xie said it would be the key to securing a deal to the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which is due to expire in 2012. The positions reflect a long-standing view by developing countries, led by China, that they are largely not responsible for climate change \u2014 which they say was caused by decades of western pollution \u2014 and thus should not play a leading role in reversing it. Stated forcefully by China\u2019s chief climate officials, the comments reemphasized the challenge facing negotiators in Cancun as they try to reconcile the positions of the two camps. \u201cDeveloped countries need to take the lead in massively cutting their green house gas emission in order to give further development space to developing countries,\u201d Mr. Xie said. \u201cDeveloping countries in particular should be concerned about achieving tangible results with regard to funding and technology transfer issues.\u201d The United States, by contrast, wants developing countries to curb emissions and agree to international verification. Mr. Xie called on developed countries to cut emissions by up to 40 percent and emphasized that China has already made huge strides in cutting pollution, even though its 30-year program of economic reforms have vaulted it to the forefront of industrialized nations. \u201cNo single country or single block of countries has achieved that in history,\u201d Mr. Xie said. \u201cThis is our big contribution to the international community.\u201d Despite China\u2019s growth, Mr. Xie said it remains a developing country and couldn\u2019t be treated like the United States or European countries with respect to climate change. \u201cWe will never accept anything beyond our condition as a developing country,\u201d he said. Mr. Xie noted that China had made pollution cuts such a priority that some local governments had made last-ditch efforts to meet pollution-reduction targets. This year some factories closed as officials tried to meet targets for reducing China\u2019s \u201cenergy intensity\u201d \u2014 the amount of power consumer per unit of economic output.", "keyword": "China;Global Warming;Greenhouse Gas Emissions"}
{"id": "ny0097828", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/06/16", "title": "Men at Kansas City Release Center Worry as Prison Plans to Move In", "abstract": "KANSAS CITY, Mo. \u2014 When the Missouri Department of Corrections announced in February that it planned to open a minimum-security prison near this city\u2019s downtown, the response from civic leaders was one that might seem surprising: joy. But it is actually what the prison is replacing that has them pleased. For more than three-and-a-half decades, the West Bottoms, an old warehouse neighborhood on the edge of downtown, has been home to a center that holds hundreds of men on probation or parole who have been released from prison but do not have a suitable place to live. The men are generally free to leave during the day to work, find a job or get treatment. Yet some residents and business leaders have complained that many of the men simply roam the streets, cluster on corners and cause trouble. A prison would ease that problem, they say, because the men housed there would be inmates who would not be released into the neighborhood during the day. \u201cThe image of having a prison in the neighborhood is not good, and sometimes the people who go to visit the prisoners are not the best element in the neighborhood,\u201d said Bill Haw Sr., a developer and businessman in the West Bottoms . \u201cIt\u2019s not utopia yet. But it\u2019s an amazingly positive development compared to the work-release environment.\u201d Still, a looming question is what will happen to the 135 men now housed in the site, the Kansas City Community Release Center, which corrections officials hope to have converted to a prison by September. The move has left many of the men trying to figure out where they will live when the center closes. Several said that they had been told that if they did not come up with acceptable living arrangements on their own, they might be placed in a homeless shelter. \u201cIf they\u2019re going to send these guys to shelters, if that\u2019s the idea, that\u2019s that much worse,\u201d said R. Crosby Kemper III, the director of the Kansas City Public Library, which has become a gathering place for men from the center and other transient people in the area. \u201cThe shelters are not monitoring them during the day, which the community release center was supposed to be doing. The shelter\u2019s not making them sign in and out.\u201d But David Owen, a spokesman for the Corrections Department, wrote in an email that no residents would be sent to homeless shelters. Image The Kansas City Community Release Center in the West Bottoms, an old warehouse neighborhood on the edge of downtown. Credit Nick Schnelle for The New York Times \u201cThe department has been working with community partners that have possible alternative housing for offenders who cannot get approved home plans,\u201d Mr. Owen wrote. \u201cSome offenders may be placed in a contracted residential facility\u201d or at other corrections facilities, he added. Corrections officials said they were converting the release center, which has a capacity of 410, to a prison because of the state\u2019s increasing inmate population \u2014 up 1.5 percent since 2005 and currently 205 inmates over its limit. The site was originally intended to be a low-level prison, officials said, but was converted to a release center when inmate numbers were not as high. The release center in Kansas City is one of two in the state. The other is in St. Louis. In general, the centers take in people on parole or probation who do not have a feasible housing option. Typically, the Kansas City center takes former prisoners from the west side of the state, and St. Louis takes those from the east side. Business leaders in St. Louis have expressed concern that their city\u2019s center, with a capacity of 550, would have to take on more people because of the closing in Kansas City. A spokeswoman for Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, said the corrections commissioner had told city officials that the St. Louis release center, which houses 397 men, would not have to shoulder a greater share of the state\u2019s parolees and probationers. In Kansas City, several residents of the center said they were pleased to be moving on because staff members were rude and disrespectful. They also described the support services as lax. One time after he returned from his construction job at 10:30 p.m., Jamie Killian said, a staff member put him on overnight cleanup duty even though he had to go to work the next morning. Mr. Killian, who has been here since April off a 10-year sentence on multiple drug charges, said he expected to leave soon because his plan to live in an apartment in suburban Kansas City had been approved. \u201cWe\u2019re in a good mood all day long until we start walking down that bridge,\u201d he said, pointing toward a bend that leads to the release center. The corrections officers, he added, \u201ctalk to you like you\u2019re a piece of. \u2026\u201d He finished the sentence with an expletive, but then thought better of it, saying, \u201clike we\u2019re dirt.\u201d The prospect of getting sent to a homeless shelter actually seemed more appealing than remaining in the center, some said. \u201cThere\u2019s no guaranteeing that you\u2019re getting out each day,\u201d Jeffrey Cox, 47, said of the center where he has been housed for about two months after spending four years in prison for drunken driving. Image Tyre Winfrey, 23, waiting for the bus to attend orientation at his new job. Mr. Winfrey has been in the release center for about two months, and said that he was unsure of where he would go when the center is replaced by the prison. Credit Nick Schnelle for The New York Times \u201cEven at the shelter, I\u2019m not going to wake up worrying about whether they\u2019re going to let me out the door,\u201d he said. \u201cInside this place here, if they feel you\u2019ve done something wrong, if you\u2019ve had a disciplinary or you\u2019ve not completed one of their programs or something, they lock you in solitary or in the hole. It\u2019s a prison outside of prison is what it is.\u201d Corrections officials did not respond to a request for comment about the treatment. On a recent cloudy morning shortly after 9, Mr. Cox, lanky with a bony, red face, trudged out of the center to start what has been his daily ritual over the last month. Toting a plastic shopping bag with several essentials including his wallet and an umbrella, he was headed to the downtown library to check the weather on the Internet. He would then search for job openings, he said, and figure out which buses he needed to take to get to the sites. Mr. Kemper, the library director, said he understood concerns that the congregation of people from the center in and around the library might disturb other patrons. But, he added, the library had a \u201cgenuine civic obligation\u201d to help them. The library has adult literacy programs, high school equivalency diploma classes and computer training that residents of the center participate in, he said. \u201cWe\u2019re there to serve everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cSome people are more difficult to serve than others and, obviously, the community release center people, coming out of prison, are going to be among the toughest patrons that we\u2019ve got. In some ways that makes them even more important.\u201d The release center, with a tan facade and royal-blue roof, sits tucked beneath a highway in a sunken old warehouse district near the intersection of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. It is about a 10-minute walk from the downtown. As a prison, it will house inmates nearing release. \u201cIt gives us a great opportunity to start working with the people on their transition into the community before they are released,\u201d said Kathy Ficcadenti, the program manager for Catholic Charities of Kansas City-St. Joseph. The organization has been working with corrections officials to get the remaining residents of the release center into housing that could include community-based halfway houses, Ms. Ficcadenti said. Those could provide a better alternative to the release center, she said, because the men would be spread out throughout the community, making it easier for them to find jobs. Tyre Winfrey, who is from California and has been in the release center for about two months, said that he had no ties in Missouri and that officials had declined his petition to live back in his home state. \u201cThey tell us to get a job and ask some of these ministries to help us get places to live,\u201d said Mr. Winfrey, who served nearly two years for burglary and theft. \u201cI\u2019m concerned about it. Where do I get to go?\u201d", "keyword": "Kansas City MO;Prison;Ex Cons;Probation and Parole"}
{"id": "ny0245483", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/04/21", "title": "A Passion Play Endures in Florida", "abstract": "WAUCHULA, Fla. \u2014 With less than two hours until showtime, a man sits amid the backstage chaos and studies his image in a propped-up mirror. The eyes are grayish blue, the goatee trim, the long dark hair flecked with gray. Not there yet. He scoops another dab of makeup to continue the annual transformation of Mike Graham, now 58, into Jesus Christ, forever 33. An assistant hustles over with a sky-blue robe that an anxious Mr. Graham wriggles over his bare torso and summer shorts. \u201cToo little on me,\u201d he says apologetically, working his way out of it. Someone else asks him to assess a young girl\u2019s angel costume. \u201cI\u2019d like her to be glittered,\u201d he says, before asking whether the child has been warned how to behave around the camels. Then the man who plays Jesus for a living turns back to his imperfect reflection. For more than two decades, Mr. Graham, a preacher, has directed and assumed the lead role in a gritty Passion play, \u201cThe Story of Jesus,\u201d that unfolds 10 nights a year in the modest Cattleman\u2019s Arena, in rural Hardee County. Across its dirt-floor stage come chariots and sword fights, miracles and betrayals, exotic animals and a cast of hundreds. Over time, Mr. Graham\u2019s play has survived many trials, some natural, some economic and some, he suspects, the work of the devil. In 2004, the production weathered both the competition of the Mel Gibson movie \u201c The Passion of the Christ \u201d and the wrath of a hurricane that nearly swept Wauchula away but spared the play\u2019s many costumes and long-suffering donkey. Other challenges, he says, have included his divorce years ago, which alienated many followers; a decline in attendance, due in part to competition from the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando ; and other, curiously timed setbacks \u2014 a car accident, a sudden illness \u2014 that nearly prevented him from picking up his cross. Finally, Mr. Graham knows the folly of trying to slow time, although he has tried. For one thing, he has enlisted a 27-year-old bridge inspector to play Jesus in certain taxing scenes. \u201cHe handles the Trial, the Ascension, the Resurrection,\u201d Mr. Graham explains. \u201cI do all the miracles, basically. The adult life of Jesus, the Last Supper, the garden of Gethsemane scene, and the Crucifixion.\u201d Mr. Graham cuts his hair just once a year, and works out every morning in his home gym so that he is able to carry a heavy cross dozens of yards across the stage. Still, he has no desire to follow the great Josef Meier , who played Jesus in performances in South Dakota and in Lake Wales, just north of here, well into his 80s. A miracle in itself. For now, Mr. Graham must set aside these concerns, and focus. The first Passion play of the season is just 90 minutes away. Props, Paint and Petting Zoo Under the late-afternoon sun, white cast members take turns getting spray-painted a color called Sebring brown, a shade that Mr. Graham thinks approaches a Middle Eastern skin tone. A man in a \u201cSprayin\u2019 & Prayin\u2019 \u201d T-shirt dilutes the chocolate muck in plastic buckets, while another man, with a praying-hands tattoo on his left leg, paints a succession of outstretched arms, splayed legs and wincing faces. This ritual is one of many that have evolved over the last quarter-century, ever since Mr. Graham, as a guitar-wielding youth pastor from southern Illinois , staged a crucifixion scene at a church banquet with a few teenagers and a couple of props. Some of those here tonight have never been in a Passion play; others have never known a spring without one. They are united now by glistening coats of Sebring brown. Alongside the arena, clusters of ticketholders gather for some nonalcoholic tailgating, while a Roman centurion trots past on a horse. In a tent nearby, volunteers set out various souvenirs for sale, including cardboard license plates that say: The Story of Jesus \u2014 I Was There! \u2014 Wauchula, Florida . A kind of off-limits petting zoo has sprung up beyond the arena\u2019s back entrance, with pens containing ducks, sheep, horses, two oxen, a donkey and three camels, just arrived from Ocala. Their owner, Butch Rivers, 70, a former stunt rider who now uses a cane \u2014 \u201cYou pay for it,\u201d he says of certain passions \u2014 is excited to see the play again. \u201cThe first time I saw this play it put chills on me,\u201d Mr. Rivers says. An hour until showtime, and the Cattleman\u2019s Arena awaits its first-century bustle. The dirt has been raked and sprayed with water, to keep the dust down. All soda cans and other remnants of the future have been removed. The still-life setting is as serene as the blue-dyed river dug into the dirt, stage right. But just a few yards away, in an exhibit hall serving as backstage, a large industrial fan stirs the nervous air. Actors hunt through a long rack of costumes that runs beneath a portrait gallery of beauty queens, the \u201cCattlemen\u2019s Sweethearts\u201d of the near and distant past. Children wolf down treats and Gatorade before assuming the roles of angels and demons. Girding thespians reach for their fake spears and swords. Behind the Scenes Here is Joann Grantham, 56, volunteer prop master, who has done everything from scour discount stores for plastic fruit to retouch the throne of the child king. She has also helped to decide whether you\u2019re a shop owner, an apostle or a member of the Sanhedrin. (Mr. Graham, by the way, is aware of the history of anti-Semitic Passion plays, and takes pains not to traffic in stereotypes.) In the past, Ms. Grantham has often played a \u201cfalse witness\u201d who spits on Jesus. But she chose to remain behind the scenes this year, after undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for breast cancer . When she goes to Wal-Mart , she says, she wears a hat to cover her bald head, but tonight she feels at home, hatless and happy. Here, too, is Michelle Puma , 54, volunteer makeup artist, who has set up shop in the 4-H Club\u2019s concession booth. Everything is in its place: the long-haired wigs set on Styrofoam heads; the various jars of fake blood; the blue boxes of Jesus beards; the Ace Hardware bucket containing various props, including a crown of thorns. One of Ms. Puma\u2019s challenges is to make young people look older, which is the opposite of Mr. Graham\u2019s task, as he peers critically into a mirror leaning against a menu board. \u201cMy hair\u2019s just crazy tonight,\u201d he says. Mr. Graham\u2019s words seem rooted more in worry than vanity. Because he deeply believes that this play is how God wants him to spread the Word, his mind races with all the things that could distract from that message, and have: camels arriving a week late, a teenager texting on stage, a stray chicken flying out of Lazarus\u2019s tomb. How about the time a couple of camera-carrying tourists wandered into the John the Baptist crowd scene? He is also thinking of a shortfall. The production costs about $250,000 a year, which includes the modest salaries for Mr. Graham and his wife, Diane, who will play Mary Magdalene tonight, and various rentals, from the arena to the camels ($1,000 a night). And, of course, here he is again, trying to be 33. But Mr. Graham has a plan: to replace \u201cThe Story of Jesus,\u201d at least next year, with a new production, \u201cThe Story of Noah,\u201d featuring himself in the lead role of the biblical patriarch, who was said to have lived several hundred years. Maybe someday, if he raises enough money, he will be able to build an outdoor theater of his own. Fifteen minutes to showtime. Mr. Graham, now in full Jesus attire, climbs on top of a table, near a sign promoting beef (\u201cReal Food for Real People\u201d), and uses a microphone to deliver some last-minute reminders. No cellphones. No gum. No glasses. No watches. And if you\u2019re a teenage girl who is wondering, \u201cCan I hang out with the Sanhedrin?\u201d \u2014 the answer is no! Mr. Graham leads everyone in a short prayer and a rallying hymn, then releases his energized flock with: \u201cLet\u2019s go! Do it!\u201d A Happy Ending Showtime, and on a dirt stage in a darkened arena, the Story unfolds again. An innkeeper, played by a Sebring-brown student of Harley-Davidson mechanics, leads a couple to shelter. The baby Jesus, played by an infant named Angelina, is raised triumphantly into the air, while four white-robed angels, teenage girls strapped into harnesses, glide by pulley across the ceiling. Hear the wails of mothers whose baby boys have been slaughtered by Herod\u2019s soldiers. See the colorful scrum of early commerce. Breathe the dust kicked up by the scurry of sheep and the plodding of oxen. Marvel as Jesus raises a child from the dead, halts the stoning of an adulteress and, thanks to a concealed harness and a fog machine, walks on water. During the brief intermission, take in the orange-blossom air of the Florida night. Buy a \u201cStory of Jesus\u201d fan for $2. Enjoy some nachos, or a bowl of mini doughnuts slathered with whipped cream. Return, then, to brace for the bloody, violent passion. The scourging, the spitting, the echo of nails hammered into hands and feet. The death. But everyone in the aluminum bleachers knows: This is not how the play ends. Soon the resurrected Jesus returns to the stage in glory. His crown of gold glittering, his sword raised high, he races back and forth on a galloping steed, perfect in its whiteness. The applause and cheers of 1,400 ring through a rodeo arena in central Florida. When it is over, Mr. Graham, exhausted, 58, ready to do it again tomorrow, takes the microphone to thank the audience and ask for parting donations. And if anyone wants to be baptized, there are robes, towels and a manmade river dyed a deep blue.", "keyword": "Jesus Christ;Theater;Florida;Christianity"}
{"id": "ny0215351", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/04/02", "title": "J.F. terHorst, Ford Press Secretary, Dies at 87", "abstract": "J. F. terHorst, a reporter who in August 1974 was appointed White House press secretary by an old friend, President Gerald R. Ford , but who resigned less than a month later when Ford granted former President Richard M. Nixon an unconditional pardon in connection with the Watergate scandal, died Wednesday in Asheville, N.C. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Peter. Mr. terHorst\u2019s resignation was \u2014 and still is \u2014 considered a rare act of conscience by a high-ranking public official, and the circumstances in which it occurred were extraordinary. He was a veteran newsman, the Washington bureau chief of The Detroit News and a respected member of the White House press corps when he was named press secretary by Ford. He had known Ford since he covered his first Congressional race in 1948 for The Grand Rapids Press, and at the time he was writing his biography. For four weeks reporters credited Mr. terHorst (pronounced terHORST) \u2014 and the new president and his staff \u2014 with restoring openness and honesty to the White House after having dealt with a Nixon administration that they had often felt was deliberately misleading them. The Watergate affair \u2014 the break-in at the offices of the Democratic opposition by a White House team of burglars and the Nixon administration\u2019s attempts to cover up that crime \u2014 had its roots in this culture of suspicion and secretiveness that was fostered by the Nixon White House, and it was still being investigated by an independent prosecutor when Ford took office. Indeed, a number of top administration officials, including Attorney General John N. Mitchell; the White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman; and Nixon\u2019s top domestic policy adviser, John D. Ehrlichman; went to prison for Watergate-related crimes. In early September, however, Ford announced that he was pardoning Nixon, saying that to pursue criminal charges against the former president would be detrimental to the interests of the country. Mr. terHorst felt not only that the decision was wrong \u2014 the president should not be held to a different standard of justice than people of a lesser station, he said \u2014 but also that he had been kept in the dark about it, which he said had undermined his credibility. \u201cI cannot in good conscience support your decision to pardon former President Nixon even before he has been charged with the commission of any crime,\u201d Mr. terHorst wrote to Ford in his resignation letter on Sept. 8, 1974. \u201cAs your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes \u2014 and imprisoned \u2014 stemming from the same Watergate situation.\u201d Jerald Franklin terHorst was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., on July 11, 1922, the son of Dutch immigrants. He did not speak English until he was 5. He dropped out of high school at 15 to work on his uncle\u2019s farm but was eventually persuaded to resume his education by the high school principal. He went on to earn an agriculture scholarship to Michigan State University, where he worked on the school newspaper. Before finishing college, he joined the Marines and served in the Pacific at the end of World War II, then completed his college career at the University of Michigan. After graduating he took a job as a reporter for The Grand Rapids Press. His wife, the former Louise Roth, whom he had met at Michigan State and married in 1945, took a job at the rival paper, The Grand Rapids Herald. He subsequently worked for The Detroit News, first in its Lansing bureau, then in the city room and finally the Washington bureau. The paper granted him a leave of absence to take his White House job, and after his resignation he returned to the paper as a columnist. His book about Ford, \u201cGerald Ford and the Future of the Presidency,\u201d was published at the end of 1974, with an epilogue about Mr. terHorst\u2019s resignation. Ron Nessen, a correspondent for NBC News, succeeded him as White House press secretary. In 1981, Mr. terHorst left journalism to work for the Ford Motor Company as Washington public affairs director. Louise Roth terHorst died last year. In addition to his son, who lives in Asheville, Mr. terHorst is survived by three daughters, Karen Morris, of Decatur, Ga.; Margaret Robinson, of Alexandria, Va.; and Martha Lubin, of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and eight grandchildren. Shortly after his resignation, Mr. terHorst was asked by The New York Times to elaborate on his reasons. \u201cIf justice is to be even-handed and administered to the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful alike,\u201d he replied, \u201cthen mercy, I thought, when administered by a president who sets the tone for the country, also should be an act of similar kind.\u201d", "keyword": "Ford Gerald Rudolph Jr;Appointments and Executive Changes;Deaths (Obituaries);terHorst Jerald Franklin;Detroit News"}
{"id": "ny0266083", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/03/16", "title": "Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Are Winning Votes, but Not Hearts", "abstract": "The victories were lopsided. The celebrations were effusive. The delegates were piling up by the hundreds. But Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton\u2019s resounding triumphs on Tuesday masked a profound, historic and unusual reality: Most Americans still don\u2019t like him. Or her. Both major parties must now confront the depth of skepticism, resistance and distaste for their front-runners, a sentiment that would profoundly shape a potential general election showdown between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. Even as they watched the two candidates amass large margins on Tuesday, historians and strategists struggled to recall a time when more than half the country has held such stubbornly low opinions of the leading figures in the Democratic and Republican Parties. \u201cThere is no analogous election in the modern era where the two top candidates for the nomination are as divisive and weak,\u201d said Steve Schmidt, a top campaign adviser to George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. \u201cThere is no precedent for it.\u201d Mrs. Clinton\u2019s commanding wins in the swing states of Ohio, North Carolina and Florida seemed to hobble the once robust challenge of Senator Bernie Sanders. And Mr. Trump\u2019s dominance in Florida, North Carolina and Illinois knocked out Senator Marco Rubio and propelled Mr. Trump even closer to the Republican nomination. This would be the moment, under normal circumstances, when the de facto nominees, emerging victorious from the intramural skirmishes of their parties\u2019 nominating contests, would invite an eager national electorate to take their measure. And in their victory speeches, both tried their best, issuing broad appeals for Americans to unite behind them. But Mr. Trump has unnerved many Americans with his inflammatory oratory and radical-sounding proposals. And Mrs. Clinton, while viewed as a more seasoned and serious political figure, has struggled in her campaign to win the trust of the American electorate. And it is all but impossible for the country to take a fresh look at them. Image The Trump Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago before Donald J. Trump held an election night news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. The candidate has unnerved many Americans with his inflammatory oratory and radical-sounding proposals. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times America has lived with Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, in a remarkably intimate fashion, for decades, processing their controversies, achievements and setbacks, from impeachment to marital breakdowns, Senate victories to flashy skyscraper openings. Voters\u2019 impressions of them, with few exceptions, are largely formed and fixed. According to Gallup, 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Mrs. Clinton and 63 percent have such a view of Mr. Trump. \u201cYou are talking about two universally known figures here,\u201d said David Axelrod, the former Democratic strategist and former adviser in the Obama White House. \u201cThe strong feeling that each generates is unusual.\u201d The negative perceptions will be difficult to overcome. Fewer than half of Republican voters across five states on Tuesday said Mr. Trump was honest and trustworthy. Even in the states where he won, a majority of voters do not view him as truthful. And while majorities of Democratic voters viewed Mrs. Clinton as honest and trustworthy, she finished second to Mr. Sanders among those who said honesty mattered most in their decision. Video A look at the speeches from the presidential hopefuls after a day of crucial primaries. Credit Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times That reality is forcing the Trump and Clinton campaigns to prepare for all-out warfare against each other, an improbably brutal dynamic for a pair of New Yorkers whose paths have crossed, repeatedly, for years \u2014 even on the way down the wedding aisle. (Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, attended Mr. Trump\u2019s third wedding, in 2005.) They are devising appeals that are as much arguments that their all-but-certain opponent would be disastrous for the nation as they are messages trumpeting their own virtues or character. Aides to both predict that a Clinton-Trump contest would be an ugly and unrelenting slugfest, as she pounces on his business practices and personal integrity, portraying him as unscrupulous robber baron, and he lacerates her over ethical lapses and sudden riches, painting her as a conniving abuser of power certain to be indicted in a federal investigation. There is, both sides concede, plenty of material to mine, stretching back to 1980s Arkansas (for her) and 1970s New York (for him). Five States Go to Polls 12 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Voters are strikingly familiar with the candidates\u2019 biographical vulnerabilities and political liabilities, interviews show, and they express disapproval in vivid, sweeping terms. Kent Moore, 51, a Democrat from Charlotte, N.C., does not simply dislike Mrs. Clinton. He doubts her basic values.\u201cShe has no moral center,\u201d Mr. Moore said. He ticks off past sins: She favored free trade agreements that have killed American jobs, he said, and she supported the misbegotten 2003 war in Iraq. How, he wondered, could she beat Mr. Trump with a record like that? Even those who vote for Mrs. Clinton harbor reservations. Renee White, 31, a Democrat in Youngstown, Ohio, is not entirely convinced that Mrs. Clinton, her choice in Tuesday\u2019s primary, cares about people like her, she said. \u201cA lot of people,\u201d she said, \u201cjust don\u2019t trust her at all.\u201d The views of Mr. Trump from Republicans are almost equally uncharitable and unwavering. \u201cToo crude and rude,\u201d is how Nikki Heath, 59, a graphic artist from the Columbus, Ohio, area put it. She supports the state\u2019s low-key, genial governor, John Kasich. She has written off Mr. Trump and his antics as \u201can embarrassment.\u201d The distaste is so strong that voters speak of a radical transformation (or personality transplant) required for them to consider backing Mr. Trump. \u201cHe\u2019s going to have to be completely different,\u201d said Steve Rogers, an engineer in Ohio who will try to hold his nose and back him if he becomes the nominee. Those dim assessments are not isolated, which is why the commanding tallies that Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton have collected are pushing both parties into uncharted waters. Should they clinch the nomination, it would represent the first time in at least a quarter-century that majorities of Americans held negative views of both the Democratic and Republican candidates at the same time. The highest unfavorability rating for any nominee or front-runner was 57 percent, for the elder George Bush, in October 1992, as he emerged from a difficult first term in the White House. But his Democratic rival, Mr. Clinton, was widely liked: Just 38 percent viewed him unfavorably, according to Gallup. The unpopularity of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton is prompting Republicans and Democrats to weigh unusual considerations at the ballot box. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who sought the Republican nomination for president in 1980 and served as an independent governor of Connecticut in the 1990s, said he held Mrs. Clinton in low regard. But he holds Mr. Trump in even greater contempt. \u201cI don\u2019t like her,\u201d Mr. Weicker said, \u201cbut I am sure going to vote for her over Trump.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Donald Trump;Democrats;Republicans;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0057501", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/09/06", "title": "Texas Candidate Says She Ended Pregnancies", "abstract": "AUSTIN, Tex. \u2014 Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor, reveals in a new campaign memoir that she terminated two pregnancies for medical reasons in the 1990s, including one in which the fetus had developed a severe brain abnormality. Ms. Davis writes in \u201cForgetting to be Afraid\u201d that she had an abortion in 1996 after an examination revealed that the brain of the fetus had developed in complete separation on the right and left sides. She also describes ending an earlier ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. Ms. Davis disclosed the terminated pregnancies for the first time since her nearly 13-hour filibuster last year over a tough new Texas abortion law. Both pregnancies happened before Ms. Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, began her political career and after she was a mother to two young girls. She writes that the ectopic pregnancy happened in 1994 during her first trimester. Terminating the pregnancy was considered medically necessary. Such pregnancies generally are not considered viable, meaning the fetus cannot survive, and the mother\u2019s life could be in danger. But Ms. Davis wrote that in Texas, it is \u201ctechnically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such.\u201d Ms. Davis said she and her former husband, Jeff, wound up expecting another child in 1996 after they decided to stop birth-control measures. During her second trimester, Ms. Davis said she took a blood test that could determine chromosomal or neural defects, which doctors first told her did not warrant concern. After a later exam revealed the brain defect, Ms. Davis said she sought opinions from several doctors, who told her the baby would be deaf, blind and in a permanent vegetative state if she survived delivery. \u201cI could feel her little body tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her, and I knew then what I needed to do,\u201d Ms. Davis writes. \u201cShe was suffering.\u201d She wrote that an \u201cindescribable blackness followed\u201d the pregnancy and that the loss left her forever changed. Ms. Davis catapulted to national Democratic stardom after her filibuster temporarily delayed passage of sweeping new abortion restrictions. She is now running for governor against the Republican attorney general, Greg Abbott, who is a heavy favorite to replace Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican, next year. A spokesman for Ms. Davis, Zac Petkanas, called the book \u201ca bold and brave memoir that is less about politics than it is a stunningly frank personal story.\u201d Matt Hirsch, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott, did not return messages seeking comment. Anti-abortion groups, including those that have attacked Ms. Davis\u2019s candidacy, expressed sympathy for the tough choice she confronted with the second terminated pregnancy. \u201cThat\u2019s an incredibly difficult position for anyone to find themselves in,\u201d said Melissa Conway, a spokeswoman for Texans Right to Life. \u201cWhile our heart goes out for the decision she had to make, again, still the value of life is precious,\u201d The president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, daughter of former Gov. Ann Richards of Texas, said she was grateful that Ms. Davis shared her story, though \u201cno woman should have to justify her decision.\u201d Ms. Davis\u2019s filibuster in June 2013 set off a chaotic scene in the Texas Capitol that extended past midnight. Thousands of people watched it live online, with President Obama at one point posting on Twitter, \u201cSomething special is happening in Austin tonight.\u201d In the book, Ms. Davis recalls reading testimony during the filibuster about a woman who had had an abortion after learning her daughter would be born with a terminal illness. She said the story hit a little too close to home, and \u201ccould have been my story.\u201d The bill Ms. Davis was fighting to block required doctors who perform abortion to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, and mandated that clinics upgrade facilities to hospital-level operating standards. A federal judge in Austin last month blocked a portion of the law that would have left Texas with only seven abortion facilities statewide.", "keyword": "Wendy Davis;Abortion;Texas;Books;Pregnancy;Gubernatorial races;Forgetting to be Afraid"}
{"id": "ny0133891", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/03/08", "title": "Richard J. Durrell, First Publisher of People Magazine, Dies at 82", "abstract": "Richard J. Durrell, the founding publisher of People magazine, died on Friday at his home in Fairfield, Conn. He was 82. The cause was lung cancer, his son, Brad Durrell, said. Mr. Durrell\u2019s long career at the magazine publishing giant Time Inc. began in 1950 when he answered a newspaper ad for a circulation newsstand representative in Minneapolis. He later worked in advertising for both Time and Life magazines before being named publisher of People. A blend, then unique, of pictures, celebrity features and human-interest articles, People hit the streets in March 1974 with the actress Mia Farrow, who was starring in the movie \u201cThe Great Gatsby,\u201d gracing its first cover. While it was initially a bit of a bomb among critics, the magazine was an instant hit among readers. \u201cWe were all newsstand sales then \u2014 no subscriptions at all \u2014 and we promised we were going to sell a million copies of this magazine on the newsstand,\u201d recalled Richard B. Stolley, People\u2019s first managing editor. \u201cThat was unheard-of at the time. We had no idea what we were talking about. It was wonderful how na\u00efve we were.\u201d While the first few issues missed the million-sales mark, the magazine did hit its target in July that year. An issue with the actor Telly Savalas on the cover was the first to surpass one million in sales after Mr. Durrell created a distribution group inside Time to get enough copies of the magazine on newsstands each week, Mr. Stolley said. Persuading advertisers to place ads was another challenge, because People was such a departure from the other more male-oriented magazines published by Time Inc., including Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Slowly but surely, important advertisers at the time like Polaroid and Revlon were signed. Within 18 months of its introduction, People was turning a profit. \u201cFor Durrell and the business side of the publication, that was a great accomplishment,\u201d Mr. Stolley said. Mr. Durrell, who retired in 1983, was a baseball\u2019s throw away from an entirely different career. After graduating from high school in Minneapolis in 1942, he enlisted and served three years with the Marines and spent time in occupied Japan. Upon his return to the States, he was offered professional baseball contracts with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs. He chose, instead, to attend the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1948. He married Jacquelyn C. Dow in 1949. She is a former first selectman of Fairfield. In addition to his wife and son Brad, of Morris, Conn., Mr. Durrell is survived by another son, Alex, of Fairfield; three daughters, Piper Durrell, of Blacksburg, Va.; Robyn Geissler, of Mill Valley, Calif.; and Kerry Durrell, of San Diego; a sister, Lois Anne Anderson, of Sun Valley, Idaho; and seven grandchildren.", "keyword": "People;Magazines;Deaths (Obituaries);Durrell Richard J."}
{"id": "ny0050271", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/10/29", "title": "Hong Kong Lawmaker Pays Price for Breaking Ranks With Beijing", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 A Hong Kong lawmaker who broke ranks with his pro-Beijing allies by calling last week for the resignation of the city\u2019s top official faces expulsion from a prestigious Chinese government advisory panel as punishment for his disloyalty, his brother said Tuesday. The lawmaker, James Tien, the leader of the Liberal Party, is set to be expelled from the Chinese People\u2019s Political Consultative Conference for not supporting its resolutions, which include backing Hong Kong\u2019s government, Mr. Tien\u2019s brother, Michael, said in a telephone interview. The body\u2019s standing committee will meet Wednesday to vote on the issue, said Michael Tien, also a Hong Kong lawmaker. \u201cThe oath made when being appointed is that they would vow to uphold all the resolutions made by the standing committee of the C.P.P.C.C.,\u201d said Michael Tien, a delegate to China \u2019s legislature, the National People\u2019s Congress. \u201cSo they considered him as not honoring his oath.\u201d The swift response is a signal that Beijing backs Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong\u2019s chief executive, even as public support for him dwindles during student-led pro-democracy protests. Mr. Leung\u2019s handling of the demonstrations, which have occupied busy avenues of the city, has been heavily criticized by democracy advocates, many of whom are calling for his resignation. James Tien echoed that sentiment on Friday, saying in a radio interview that Mr. Leung\u2019s leadership had been poor. It was the first time a prominent member of the pro-business establishment had called for Mr. Leung to quit. Michael Tien said that there were \u201ccorridors of discontent\u201d in Beijing over Mr. Leung\u2019s performance, but that officials thought it was important to support him because if he were removed, it would be a contravention of the \u201cone country, two systems\u201d model promised to Hong Kong when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997 after more than 150 years as a British colony. Image James Tien, a pro-Beijing lawmaker, had called for Hong Kong\u2019s leader to resign. Credit Bobby Yip/Reuters \u201cThey are supporting C. Y. because they are supporting the system and structure,\u201d Michael Tien said, referring to Mr. Leung. A report in Sing Tao Daily, a local newspaper, also said the body\u2019s standing committee would meet Wednesday to vote on the expulsion. The body, which advises the National People\u2019s Congress, comprises over 2,000 delegates drawn from a broad range of society, including many billionaire executives but also Buddhist monks, professional athletes, scientists, soldiers and professors. Under China\u2019s Leninist system, they must share one trait: loyalty to the central government led by the Communist Party. Members serve five-year terms and can be reappointed. Hong Kong runs most of its internal affairs but still sends delegates to the Chinese People\u2019s Political Consultative Conference and the National People\u2019s Congress. Hong Kong\u2019s delegation represents the elite of the government\u2019s supporters. Michael Tien said that members of the body were free to voice their opposition to policies before a decision was made, but that afterward, they had to support the choice. \u201cWhether you think this is right or wrong, this is the oath that you made,\u201d he said. James Tien, 67, has a reputation as a maverick. In 2003, he withdrew the Liberal Party\u2019s support of a government-backed security bill, ensuring its defeat. Michael Tien said his brother might be able to keep his status as a member of the so-called pro-establishment camp in Hong Kong and not be viewed as a member of the opposition. James Tien did not return a phone call and an email seeking comment. Mr. Leung, 60, stirred a new controversy last week when he told The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times that allowing lower-income people equal representation in elections would lead to a \u201cnumbers game\u201d that would skew \u201cpolitics and policies\u201d in favor of lower-income groups. Those remarks have been pilloried by the pro-democracy demonstrators. On Tuesday, Mr. Leung said he regretted that his remarks had caused misunderstanding, The South China Morning Post reported.", "keyword": "Hong Kong;China;Leung Chun-ying;C.Y. Leung;James Tien"}
{"id": "ny0286692", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/09/25", "title": "Sufi Sect of Islam Draws \u2018Spiritual Vagabonds\u2019 in New York", "abstract": "On a leafy block of West 72nd Street, a Muslim Sufi order meets each Thursday evening, squeezing into Abdul Latif\u2019s three-bedroom apartment. You don\u2019t have to know Mr. Latif, born John Healy, to attend. Raised in the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he greeted his guests in Arabic with a thick New York accent, inviting them to sit on the floor. A group of about 10 beloveds, as they call one another, then stood and locked hands, forming a circle. Mr. Latif, 57, weaved around the ring, leading the chants in unison, including the 99 sacred names of God and prayers of adoration. The participants \u2014 mostly American-born converts to Islam \u2014 squeezed their eyes shut; some gently swayed, letting themselves be carried away by the rhythmic mantras. The pace of the chants quickened, one man stamped his feet, another wept silently, and after 30 minutes the beloveds were captivated and perspiring. Sufis call this practice zikr and see it as a way of connecting with God and elevating themselves through communal meditation. Worshipers frequently lose themselves in a spinning frenzy, as with the well-known whirling dervishes. Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam , has been cloaked in secrecy for most of its existence, having been forced underground by Ottoman rulers in the 13th century. Nowadays, however, many of these spiritual communities, like the beloveds in Mr. Latif\u2019s apartment, are in plain view around the city if you know where to look. Some can even be found through a simple Google search. The Murid order, for instance, meets in West Harlem and follows the teachings of its Senegalese founder, Ahmadu Bamba. The Tijaniyya group congregates on Fridays in a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The Naqshbandis meet on Saturday nights in a 19th-century church on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Ahmad Khan Rahami, the New Jersey man whom the authorities blame for the Sept. 17 bombing in Manhattan, which prosecutors have said injured 31 people, is believed to have been inspired by radical Islam . American Muslims\u2019 condemnations of the attack were immediate, but some were accompanied by concern that it could provoke anti-Muslim hysteria. Image Abdul Latif leading chanting by the Sufi group that meets in his apartment on the Upper West Side. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a civil liberties organization, issued a statement that said, \u201cOur nation is most secure when we remain united and reject the fear-mongering and guilt by association often utilized following such attacks.\u201d Annmarie Agosta, who grew up in an Italian-American family in Brooklyn and became a Sufi in 2009 after exploring Paganism, Wicca and Buddhism, seemed to agree with this statement. \u201cI feel a deep responsibility to stand for the true message of Islam, which is peace, tolerance, and compassion,\u201d Ms. Agosta said. \u201cThis is the message of Sufism.\u201d As a lesbian advocate for gay rights and a member of a congregation in TriBeCa, she led a service to honor those killed in the Orlando, Fla., massacre this summer. Many Americans anxious about domestic terrorism, however, are not interested in the nuances of various branches of Islam. And paradoxically, Sufis are often shunned by conservative Islam \u2014 the sect is dismissed as a diluted version of the faith, prioritizing the esoteric over the orthodox. \u201cSufism has never been embraced by mainstream Islam,\u201d said Daisy Khan, founder of the Women\u2019s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality and one-half of the couple who in 2010 sought to open a community center in Lower Manhattan, mislabeled the \u201cground zero mosque.\u201d For Ms. Khan, the ethereal buzz of Sufism is its great appeal, a faith that is \u201cbeyond the realm of this world,\u201d dealing with the \u201csupernatural, the magical and love.\u201d \u201cDespite bad press,\u201d she said, \u201cpeople are still becoming Muslim and Sufi.\u201d It is an interesting time to choose to become a Sufi. Before he became a beloved among Mr. Latif\u2019s group on the Upper West Side, Bjorn Bolinder had come to New York from Minnesota with dreams of performing on Broadway. His father was a Baptist minister, and his childhood consisted of regular church services and Sunday school. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel connected to the divine there,\u201d he said. \u201cI had no experience of joy or aliveness.\u201d He began seeking religion for himself in his mid-20s and came across Sufism through self-help spirituality books and a healing therapist. Mr. Bolinder, now 39, described an early spiritual moment as a downpour of light so bright that he had to open his eyes to double-check that the room lighting had not changed. \u201cI suddenly realized that maybe this is God, not whatever I learned in church,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt like a completely different person. It was just so beautiful.\u201d Image Chanting at the weekly gathering of a Sufi group led by Abdul Latif. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times Over the next few years, between auditions for acting roles, Mr. Bolinder continued his spiritual exploration, fasting, learning prayers and attending conventions. Most of Mr. Latif\u2019s Upper West Side group regularly attended a Sufi retreat in Pope Valley, Calif., where the beloveds would meet with their grand sheikh, Sidi Muhammad Al-Jamal, a Palestinian cleric who died in November at 80. This is where Mr. Bolinder and other members took their \u201cSufi promise,\u201d a pledge of allegiance to their teacher and God in a formal ceremony, in return receiving their Sufi names. Mr. Bolinder\u2019s is Abdullah. Tall and blond, Mr. Bolinder doesn\u2019t dress in a way that identifies him as a Sufi or a Muslim, although he occasionally thumbs his prayer beads on the subway. But having a Sufi name makes him part of a spiritual community. Five years after his \u201ccoming out as a Sufi,\u201d he said, his parents are supportive, and his father has even taken a Sufi course on Jesus, who appears as a prophet in the Quran. \u201cI feel sad for Muslims who don\u2019t acknowledge Sufism as part of the breadth of the divine,\u201d Mr. Bolinder said. \u201cWe are all one. They\u2019re missing out.\u201d Sufism cuts across all sects of the faith. \u201cYou can be a Shia or a Sunni or any type of Muslim and still be a Sufi,\u201d said James W. Morris, professor of Islamic thought and history at Boston College. Often caricatured as kumbaya hippies, Sufis seek divine love and connection, but their practices encompass strict worldly rules and commitments: long services, dawn and night prayers, rigorous meditation and frequent fasting \u2014 in addition to the common Islamic practices of five daily prayers, the hajj pilgrimage and abstention from alcohol. Sufis cluster into tarikas, or spiritual orders, that are headed by a grand sheikh who may live in Cairo, but are led day to day by a local sheikh who could live in Queens. While few reliable estimates exist of the number of Sufis in America, Islam over all is rapidly growing. The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2050, Muslims will become the second-largest religious group in the United States , after Christians, totaling over eight million people. Discussing that growth, Khalid Latif, chaplain of the Islamic Center at New York University, said that in the city, \u201cthere\u2019s an absence of spirituality and stillness,\u201d and that even in times of heightened anxiety in the West about Muslims, the center saw a steady stream of the curious. He said that for many Americans, Sufism was an appealing first step. Image Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrah, center in 2005, who became a Sufi in the 1970s and now leads the Nur Jerrahi order. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times Tourists and shoppers in TriBeCa could easily miss the discreet blue plaque on a three-story building on West Broadway between a tavern and a brasserie. It reads, \u201cDergah Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order.\u201d Inside is where New Yorkers are most likely to encounter whirling dervishes. Visitors, once they have removed their shoes, enter a prayer hall with a high ceiling and ornate green and gold Arabic calligraphy spelling out the Prophet Muhammad\u2019s name decorating the walls. Books and prayer rugs are strewed about, and a table is laden with sweet Turkish tea and dates. A woman\u2019s voice drifts across the hall, performing the public call to prayer \u2014 a role traditionally reserved for men. What makes the order most unusual is that its local sheikh is a woman: the former Philippa de Menil, 69, part of Texas oil aristocracy . She became a Sufi in the 1970s, and, now known as Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, has led the Nur Jerrahi order since its founder\u2019s death in 1995. Wearing a flowing white gown, her hair half-wrapped in a blue turban, Sheikha Fariha completes the call to prayer and summons the group\u2019s members to stand side by side, avoiding the more orthodox Islamic practice of positioning men up front. Sheikha Fariha gives few interviews, and she declined to speak to a reporter, but her longtime secretary, Abdul Rahim, answered questions about the congregation. A female sheikh shouldn\u2019t be viewed as unusual, said Mr. Rahim, who was born Thomas Rippe and grew up in Brooklyn. \u201cWe don\u2019t put an emphasis on women; we emphasize equality,\u201d he said. \u201cWe think of it as a certain kind of maturity.\u201d The order has no dress code and no rules on sexual orientation. Indeed, the order is so liberal that some members don\u2019t even label themselves as Muslims. This kind of unorthodox approach, said Marcia Hermansen, director of the Islamic world studies program at Loyola University Chicago, is both the root of Sufism\u2019s appeal and its weakness. Charismatic leaders like Sheikha Fariha have spurred Sufism\u2019s growth in America, she said, with New York in particular attracting \u201cloosey-goosey liberal Sufism.\u201d And yet for all its liberal trappings, Sufism cannot be detached from Islam. \u201cSufism isn\u2019t just a label you wear; it\u2019s a state of being,\u201d said John Andrew Morrow, an Islam scholar and author. \u201cYou can\u2019t pick and choose parts of Islam, and you can\u2019t mislead sincere people, drawing them into Sufism without telling them this is fundamentally linked to Islam.\u201d Image Mr. Latif holding prayer beads, called Misbahah. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times Part of this problem, he said, is the American tradition of \u201cspiritual vagabonds.\u201d \u201cThey bounce around from one spiritual tradition to another,\u201d he said, \u201clike going to a buffet.\u201d Like the Shadhili group on the Upper West Side, Jerrahi members participate in long zikr services; theirs last until the wee hours. During a recent session, members formed a sitting circle, perched on low wooden stools and placed their hands on their hearts, swaying as they sang a communal tune. One man lightly tapped out a beat on a Persian drum; another young woman passed around a hymnbook, in English, so that newcomers could sing along. A few late worshipers trickled in and joined the circle, hastily removing their shoes and respectfully bowing in the direction of Sheikha Fariha, who had the bearing of a slightly bossy school principal. During the service, one man discreetly made to leave the room. Her eyes tightly closed, legs crossed and back straight, Sheikha Fariha snapped, \u201cWhere are you going?\u201d The man jumped at being noticed and sheepishly replied, \u201cTo the restroom.\u201d She dismissed him with a wave of her hand without ever opening her eyes. Sitting on the floor of the main prayer hall was Juliet Rabia Gentile, 36, who has belonged to this order for more than a decade. \u201cI was always interested in Sufi culture: music, dance, art and the works of the Persian poets Rumi and Hafez,\u201d Ms. Gentile said. \u201cIt was definitely more of a cultural rather than spiritual interest at first.\u201d Her upbringing in New York City was Christian. \u201cInitially, my family thought I was experimenting and it would probably go away after a couple of years,\u201d she said. \u201cCertain friends were surprised I\u2019d become a Muslim, especially post-9/11.\u201d The group\u2019s female leadership was a lure for Ms. Gentile, who is proud that American Sufism has cultivated an atmosphere of acceptance. \u201cOur sheikha is an unusual product of American religious freedoms,\u201d she said. But she is also aware that Sufis are in a difficult position, both within Islam and within American culture. \u201cSufis nowadays are under attack and called heretics,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s ironic given all the Islamophobia, there\u2019s been a surge of growth of interest. People just want to understand.\u201d Ms. Gentile doesn\u2019t wear the headscarf outside the Dergah. \u201cI can sense that the vibe here is changing,\u201d she said. \u201cAmericans have reached heightened paranoia in the two years since ISIS emerged. People are becoming irrational.\u201d She said her fellow New Yorkers were less likely to be swayed by panic. But she is nonetheless wary. \u201cFear is a strong drug,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Sufism;Islam;NYC;Muslim Americans;Fariha al- Jerrahi"}
{"id": "ny0155407", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/01/25", "title": "Turkey to Alter Speech Law", "abstract": "IZMIR, Turkey \u2014 When Atilla Yayla, a maverick political science professor, offered a mild criticism of Turkey\u2019s first years as a country, his remarks unleashed a torrent of abuse. \u201cTraitor!\u201d a newspaper headline shouted. His college dismissed him. State prosecutors in this western city, where he spoke, opened a criminal case against him. His crime? Violating an obscure law against insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , Turkey\u2019s founder. \u201cI need thoughts to counter my ideas,\u201d Mr. Yayla said. \u201cInstead they attacked me.\u201d Turkey\u2019s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union . But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West \u2014 Orhan Pamuk , the Nobel Prize -winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 \u2014 it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code. While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton application of that law, the single most common statute used against critics of Turkey\u2019s official line, the government was unable to remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted. The reason goes to the heart of the state of Turkey today: Despite its booming economy, gay pride parades and ambitious European aspirations, a large part of Turkish society is deeply conservative. When it comes to free speech, many Turks support the limitations. As nationalism has been rising in Turkey in response to the broad changes sweeping society, so have the number of court cases against writers, publishers and academics. The European Union, in a report in November, said the number of such people prosecuted almost doubled in 2006 over the year before, and rose further in 2007. In all, about 39 articles limit free expression in Turkey, though only 13 are commonly used, said Zafer Gokdemir, a rights lawyer who has represented defendants in these cases since 1995. The laws are deeply damaging, liberals argue, because they block society\u2019s thinkers from asking the difficult questions needed to overcome a painful past. Turkey was born fighting for its life against European powers that were carving it up at the end of World War I. It was left defensive, with low self-esteem and weak institutions, and a deep-seated insecurity lingers. But unlike Russians who were cynical about the Soviet state, most Turks strongly believe in their system. Nationalist taboos on questioning official history are held in place as much by society as by Turkey\u2019s controlling state. The legal complaints, for that reason, emerge from the most insecure part of society: a nationalist, sometimes violent fringe, whose political backers are the staunchly secular old guard. With vast power, but limited public accountability, that old guard is not unlike senior Soviet apparatchiks. The heart of this class works in the military, an elite institution in Turkey, and in the judiciary. In Turkey\u2019s court system, any private citizen can file a complaint, requiring prosecutors to investigate, and a vast majority of the freedom of expression cases begin that way. An ultranationalist lawyer who started the case against Mr. Pamuk, Kemal Kerincsiz, said in an interview that he had gotten about 50 cases opened since 2005. Mr. Yayla\u2019s speech, in 2006 at a youth conference in Izmir, drew eight complaints, including one from the Izmir Bar Association, according to his lawyer, Nalan Erkem. Mr. Yayla\u2019s argument \u2014 that the early years of the republic were less democratic than the period after Turkey became a multiparty system, and that Ataturk\u2019s monopoly on public images would be perplexing to Europeans \u2014 \u201chad no basis in science,\u201d said Huseyin Durdu, a Turkish patriot lawyer and a complainant. Asked what would happen if the law were rescinded, Mr. Durdu looked stricken. \u201cPeople would be insulting each other,\u201d he said, in an immaculate office in downtown Izmir, a small bust of Ataturk on the wall behind him. \u201cIt would be conflict and chaos.\u201d Mr. Yayla, for his part, said he was simply trying to provoke a thoughtful discussion on the monopoly of political symbols. \u201cOf course we need to have Ataturk statues, but there are other people in Turkish history, and they deserve statues, too,\u201d he said by telephone. In a surprising twist, Turkey\u2019s class of religious Muslims \u2014 deeply despised by the secular old guard primarily because it is considered a serious threat to the old guard\u2019s power \u2014 has pushed to weaken the laws. President Abdullah Gul has said that Article 301 has been as damaging to Turkey\u2019s reputation as \u201cMidnight Express,\u201d a 1978 film about an American drug smuggler brutalized in a Turkish prison. The old guard, which professes to stand for Western values but in fact is deeply suspicious of the freedoms they would bring, deftly places obstacles in the path of the religious class by invoking the specter of extremism. Mr. Yayla, who cites John Stuart Mill and John Locke, is harder for the old guard to trip up. Indeed, Mr. Yayla\u2019s speech was so scholarly that the only thing his critics found to charge him with formally was referring to Ataturk as \u201cthis man.\u201d (For reference, in the Turkish Constitution, he is described as the \u201cimmortal leader and unrivaled hero.\u201d) The prosecutions result in suspended sentences, fines, closings of publishing houses, but rarely jail time. Even so, they have chilled free speech. Public trials go for months and draw leering ultranationalists. Last year one turned lethal when a nationalist teenage gunman killed Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist. Mr. Yayla is now in self-imposed exile in Britain, even though his job in Turkey was reinstated. Before leaving, he moved around with a bodyguard. The convictions that sometimes do carry jail time are often against Kurds. An arsenal of laws relating to the charge of terrorism is aimed at Kurdish writers, publishers and artists. \u201cWhen you use the word Kurd or Kurdistan, you are conducting terrorist propaganda, no matter what you are saying,\u201d said Ahmet Onal, a Kurdish publisher of 270 books, for which he has stood trial 27 times and served prison terms twice. The issue of Kurds is delicate because Turkey has been warring with a militant fringe of its Kurdish population since the 1980s, and the lines between expression and revolt are blurry. For years the old guard refused to acknowledge its Kurds as a distinct population. Many Turks say European countries should be more understanding of Turkey, a far younger state than many, with bigger problems. European democracy is a \u201cthornless garden,\u201d said Umit Kocasakal, a lawyer. Besides, he says, Europeans have similar laws restricting speech. Articles 90A and 90B in Germany prohibit disparaging the state, its symbols and constitutional institutions, and Article 290 of the Italian penal code prohibits vilifying the republic and its military. But application in Europe is extremely rare. In Italy the only punishment is a fine. The laws in Turkey may be frustratingly tenacious but besides the amendment, the government is fighting back in its own way. It detained more than 30 ultranationalists with shady ties to the old guard on Tuesday in an operation that thrilled liberals. Among those detained was Mr. Kerincsiz, who had opened the cases against Mr. Pamuk and Mr. Dink. Mr. Yayla spends his days reading in Britain. He says it feels good to pore over pages about the possibility of free societies in Muslim countries. Despite Turkish liberals\u2019 fight with the rigid, dying old guard, it is the new religious class that seems certain to determine the future of democracy in Turkey, and Mr. Yayla says he wants to be prepared. \u201cI am an individualist,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe in the value of human beings. I don\u2019t like insulting people. I can usually make my point without it.\u201d", "keyword": "Turkey;European Union;Ataturk Kemal;Pamuk Orhan"}
{"id": "ny0203565", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2009/08/08", "title": "Nautical Sprint Into Danger", "abstract": "It has been 30 years since the Fastnet sailing race turned deadly, just two years since it turned very dangerous. And on Sunday off Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Mike Slade plans to take the helm of ICAP Leopard, his 100-foot maxi with the canting keel, and steer with the peace of mind that comes with being aboard one of the biggest, most weatherproof yachts in the regatta. \u201cI\u2019ve nothing but admiration for those who do this race in small boats in bad conditions,\u201d Slade said. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t catch me doing that for all the tea in China. What can I tell you? I\u2019m not proud.\u201d But Slade, an ebullient 62-year-old property developer with a booming laugh that could cut through the fog of his home city of London, is very proud of what his imposing yacht managed to do in nasty weather during the last Fastnet, in 2007. With other yachts, including maxis, withdrawing from the race in droves because of high winds and big waves in the English Channel and beyond, Slade and his largely professional crew did much more than ride out the storm. Leopard shattered the race\u2019s speed record by nearly nine hours to take line honors in a time of one day, 20 hours and 18 minutes. \u201cI\u2019d be very surprised if we ever beat that,\u201d Slade said. \u201cWe were just lucky with the breeze and the angle and strength of the breeze at the time.\u201d The Fastnet, one of the world\u2019s traditional offshore challenges, once guaranteed its victors multiple nights at sea and an endurance test, but Slade\u2019s new-generation yacht transformed the 608-mile, or 980-kilometer, test into a nautical sprint. \u201cWe\u2019re getting even small boats now that are able to go very fast,\u201d said Eddie Warden-Owen, veteran sailor and chief executive of the Royal Ocean Racing Club, which organizes the event. \u201cThe race has changed and evolved over the years, but for me, it\u2019s still one of the classics. It has a toughness very different from Sydney-Hobart, because you have to go there and back. And you\u2019ve got headlands and strong tidal currents to deal with.\u201d The Fastnet is not quite there and back. It leaves from Cowes, rounds the Fastnet Rock off the southern coast of Ireland and then returns to the port of Plymouth, England. The race was the brainchild of a British sailor with the unsettling name of Weston Martyr. It was first staged in 1925 with seven starters, only four of whom finished the race. Over the decades, it has become the biennial, offshore exclamation point to the inshore festivities of Cowes Week. The Fastnet\u2019s overall winners \u2014 meaning winners on corrected time \u2014 have included the Frenchman \u00c9ric Tabarly in 1967, the Australian Syd Fischer in 1971 and the driven American entrepreneur Ted Turner in 1979. But for all Turner\u2019s celebrity, 1979 will always evoke much darker images, because of the disaster that left 15 competitors dead after an unexpected storm struck the fleet when many of the smaller yachts had already advanced well into the Celtic Sea. The repercussions would rumble through the sport for years, creating new standards for safety and boat design. Such moves surely saved lives but did not avert another disaster at the Sydney-Hobart race in 1998, when six more sailors died in the 80-knot winds and 18-meter, or 60-foot, waves generated by a storm off Australia. The irony is that both races grew in prominence because of the global attention focused on the tragedies. But the Fastnet, where light winds are more the rule, has happily not experienced anything nearly so devastating in 30 years, and its sensitivity to the possibility was underscored in 2007, when, for the first time, the start was postponed a day because of weather concerns. Slade considered it an unwelcome precedent. \u201cOnce they\u2019ve said to the outside world that they consider it\u2019s too dangerous to start one day, they are therefore implying it\u2019s not dangerous to start on the next day, and they\u2019ve got to be careful on those kinds of decisions,\u201d he said. \u201cI much prefer race committees to be clearly not obligated to do anything other than start a race and finish a race and leave it to the individual skippers and boats to make the decisions whether it\u2019s safe.\u201d Warden-Owen said the delay was warranted, even if only 60 of the 271 who did start were able to finish. \u201cBy delaying it 25 hours it meant they would hit the strong winds and have an opportunity to run for cover,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they started 25 hours earlier, they would have met the storm in the Irish Sea. It wouldn\u2019t have been that easy for them to suddenly turn around and run home.\u201d On Wednesday, a memorial service was held for those lost in 1979 at the Holy Trinity Church in Cowes. \u201cAll these safety measures are quite right, and the \u201979 issues shouldn\u2019t actually happen ever again, but you do get these storms at sea,\u201d Slade said. \u201cThe Irish Sea can be a very inhospitable place, and you are talking about Atlantic conditions as you go out to the left rather than going up under Ireland and bouncing down the coasts. So all these things are big in these guys\u2019 minds. The Fastnet race is probably the biggest race and the most dangerous race that the majority of the fleet will ever entertain.\u201d It is a varied fleet indeed, ranging from Slade\u2019s 100-footer to Wieslaw Krupski\u2019s 30-foot Polish entry, Four Winds. Neither the 2007 troubles nor the economic downturn has cut into the size of the entry list this year. Though Cowes Week had to go without a title sponsor, the Fastnet still has Rolex as its title sponsor and has not, according to Warden-Owen, been impacted significantly. Since 2007, the fleet has been limited to 300 yachts, and the Fastnet filled that quota by March of this year, although numerous yachts have since come off the waiting list as entrants failed to meet qualifying standards or withdrew. The crew mix throughout the fleet remains about 90 percent amateur and 10 percent professional, but the professionals include some of yachting\u2019s true elite. Torben Grael, the Brazilian Olympic champion and America\u2019s Cup regular with Luna Rossa, recently skippered Ericsson 4 to victory in the round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race but will be on board Luna Rossa\u2019s STP 65 during the Fastnet. \u201cI think it\u2019s one of those things where it shows you the obvious great respect he has for the Luna Rossa team,\u201d Warden-Owen said. \u201cHe\u2019s come away from one of the toughest ocean races he might ever have done, and suddenly they say, \u2018Can you come and join us for 600 miles?\u2019 He probably thought it was a nice day race.\u201d Two other America\u2019s Cup veterans from New Zealand, Gavin Brady and Ray Davies, will also take part, with Brady skippering Beau Geste, a new 80-footer from Hong Kong. Davies will call tactics for Slade, whose acquisitive eye is on another Fastnet victory but, above all, on winning Sydney-Hobart for the first time later this year. Big is not only safer but historically fast, and Slade makes no apologies. \u201cAlways you get the accusation that we\u2019re any good because we paid for a very expensive boat and because we paid for the technology,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I\u2019d be the first to put my hand up. When I get into a small Laser against a bunch of kids down in Cornwall, I\u2019m completely hopeless. I\u2019ve never pretended that I\u2019m a great sailor, but I do enjoy doing what I do, and I do take great pleasure out of doing it well.\u201d", "keyword": "Sailboats and Sailing;Fastnet;Isle of Wight"}
{"id": "ny0184316", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/03/03", "title": "Putin\u2019s Party Wins Regional Elections", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin \u2019s governing party has won handily in regional elections, Russia \u2019s Central Election Commission said Monday, in his first electoral test since the economy began to turn dire. Mr. Putin\u2019s party, United Russia, won the majority of seats in all nine regions where local parliamentary elections were held Sunday, and nearly swept smaller municipal elections. The Communist Party, which complained of widespread violations, came in a distant second. United Russia officials called the resounding victory evidence that Mr. Putin\u2019s response to the economic crisis, including supporting the ruble and selected bailouts, had spared many Russians the ill effects of a rapidly tumbling economy. \u201cThese elections show that the steps taken by the government and the legislature are correct and directed at preventing serious impacts of the global crisis on the economic situation in Russia,\u201d said Boris Gryzlov, the party chairman. But many independent analysts say that elections have become little more than technical exercises since Mr. Putin came to power as president in 2000 and offer only a haphazard indication of voter preference. Television and many other media outlets are largely tilted in favor of United Russia, and, out of four parties in the federal Parliament, only one, the Communist Party, offers real, if pliable, opposition to Mr. Putin\u2019s party. \u201cThis was just a small, uninteresting show,\u201d said Anton Orekh, a political commentator on Echo Moskvy radio. Public interest in elections, he said, has become \u201cslightly less than low.\u201d Still, Mr. Putin remains the country\u2019s most popular politician. But some analysts pointed to a slight slip of several percentage points by United Russia in some regions, compared with previous elections, as an indication that increasing unemployment and rising prices have begun to take a toll on the party. The Communist Party made small gains, despite what Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist leader, called major violations of election laws.", "keyword": "Russia;Elections;Putin Vladimir V;United Russia;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0216605", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2010/04/30", "title": "Slight Fall in New Jobless Claims", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (Reuters) \u2014 The number of workers submitting new claims for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week, implying only a gradual labor market improvement even as the economic recovery expands. While the data released Thursday did not change views, analysts were disappointed with how slowly claims were declining. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 448,000, the Labor Department said. That was slightly below market expectations that claims would drop to 445,000. \u201cSome companies are still struggling and believe they can meet any increase in demand with a smaller work force,\u201d said Paul Dales, who studies the American market for Capital Economics in Toronto. \u201cThe recovery in the labor market is probably going to be more modest than a lot of people are expecting.\u201d The Federal Reserve this week said the labor market was improving, but noted that employers remained reluctant to add to payrolls. As expected, the central bank left overnight benchmark lending rates near zero. Economists are concerned that claims remain above 400,000, a level they say is historically associated with steady job growth. Analysts expect data next week will show the unemployment rate was 9.7 percent in April, unchanged for the fourth consecutive month. The four-week moving average of new claims, seen as a more-reliable barometer of labor market trends, rose by 1,500 last week to 462,500, the department said. It was the fourth weekly increase in a row. The number of people still receiving benefits after an initial week of aid fell to 4.65 million in the week ended April 17, a touch above market expectations of 4.62 million.", "keyword": "Unemployment;United States Economy;Labor and Jobs"}
{"id": "ny0076505", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/05/17", "title": "Egyptian Court Sentences Ousted President Morsi to Death", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced to death the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, along with more than 100 others, for fleeing prison during the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak. Mr. Morsi\u2019s conviction is the latest sign of the undoing of the uprising that overthrew Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi, who was Egypt\u2019s first freely elected leader, now faces the death penalty for escaping extralegal detention \u2014 a form of detention that many Egyptians hoped would be eliminated by the revolution. If carried out, the sentence could make Mr. Morsi a martyr to millions of Islamists in Egypt and around the world. In a statement about the sentencing, Amr Darrag, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who was a cabinet minister under Mr. Morsi, said it was \u201cone of the darkest days of Egyptian history\u201d and a symbol \u201cof the dark shadow of authoritarianism that is now cast back over Egypt.\u201d Judge Shaaban el-Shami issued the ruling in a courtroom in a converted auditorium on the grounds of a police academy on the outskirts of Cairo. Mr. Morsi, wearing a blue prison uniform, stood inside a metal and glass cage built in the courtroom. Some of his co-defendants, including other senior Brotherhood leaders, also appeared in the cage. In a sonorous tone, the judge read a list, spanning three pages, of those sentenced to death. His pronouncement set off cries of \u201cAllahu akbar!\u201d (God is great) from the prisoners. As the session ended, the prisoners waved and chanted \u201cDown with military rule!\u201d Before they can be carried out, the death sentences must be approved by Egypt\u2019s top Sunni Muslim religious authority, the grand mufti, who is scheduled to make a ruling by June 2. The convictions are also subject to appeal through the court system. Hours after the verdict was issued, three Egyptian judges were killed by gunmen on a bus in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt has been shaken by an upsurge in attacks by insurgents in Sinai since Mr. Morsi was deposed by the military in 2013. It was not immediately clear whether Saturday\u2019s attack was connected to the verdict against Mr. Morsi. The case against Mr. Morsi centers on a prison break that took place at the peak of the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood officials had been detained, taken from their homes or from street protests, along with many other Egyptians swept up in the turmoil. Mr. Morsi had been held for two days at Wadi Natroun prison, on the highway between Cairo and Alexandria. The escape came on the night of Jan. 28, 2011, after a day of street battles between the police and protesters. In the chaos of the uprising, some of the guards at Wadi Natroun had abandoned their posts. Armed men overcame the prison\u2019s remaining guards, freeing thousands of inmates, including Mr. Morsi and other Islamist leaders. Mr. Morsi announced his escape in a call from a satellite phone to the news channel Al Jazeera. Neither before nor during his tenure as president did he face charges over the episode. Among those sentenced to death on Saturday were about 70 Palestinians, including many tried in absentia. Prosecutors in the case alleged that armed Palestinians had freed inmates from Egyptian prisons after entering the country via tunnels from the neighboring Gaza Strip. Also on Saturday, the judge sentenced 16 people to death in an espionage case in which Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders were accused of conspiring with foreign armed groups, including Hamas and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, to destabilize Egypt. Mr. Morsi was not among those condemned to death in that case. Among those referred to the mufti in the espionage case was Emad Shahin, an Egyptian political scientist now living in the United States. In the jailbreak case, the Brotherhood\u2019s top spiritual guide, Mohamed Badie, and a former Parliament speaker, Mohamed Saad el-Katatni, were also sentenced to death. Under Egyptian law, Mr. Shahin and the others convicted in absentia are entitled to a retrial if they enter Egypt. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who had cultivated strong ties with Mr. Morsi, denounced the sentence, calling it a return to \u201cancient Egypt,\u201d and he criticized Western nations for not doing enough to oppose the overthrow of Mr. Morsi. Mr. Morsi was removed from power by the military in July 2013 after protests that concluded a divisive year in office. He was held incommunicado at a secret location before reappearing during the opening of a trial months later. After Mr. Morsi\u2019s removal from power, the state began a vast crackdown on Islamists and other dissenting voices, killing more than a thousand and arresting tens of thousands. Mona el-Ghobashy, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, said Mr. Morsi\u2019s trial was part of the Egyptian authorities\u2019 offensive against the forces of the uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak. \u201cThe self-appointed permanent guardians of the state, judiciary and military are messaging that the revolution\u2019s political results (free elections, civilian president, right to protest) were unnatural, unreal and unsustainable,\u201d Ms. Ghobashy wrote in an email. \u201cThey\u2019re saying to Egyptians: This whole business of democracy and choosing your rulers is a fantasy. That\u2019s not the way power works here.\u201d Sahar Aziz, an associate professor at Texas A & M School of Law, said, \u201cIn light of the politically charged environment within which the Morsi prosecutions are taking place, the perception by some may be that these trials are more about political retaliation than bona fide criminal activity.\u201d Saturday\u2019s ruling was the second against Mr. Morsi in less than a month. In April, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of inciting violence and overseeing the illegal detention and torture of protesters while he was in office. That case centered on a deadly street brawl between Brotherhood supporters and opponents in Cairo in 2012. He faces separate trials over charges of leaking documents, fraud and insulting the judiciary.", "keyword": "Egypt;Capital punishment;Mohamed Morsi;Muslim Brotherhood Egypt;Hosni Mubarak;Criminal Sentence"}
{"id": "ny0264708", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/12/12", "title": "C.I.A. Leaves Pakistan Base Used for Drone Strikes", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 The Central Intelligence Agency has vacated an air base in western Pakistan that it had been using for drone strikes against militants in the country\u2019s tribal areas, the Pakistani military said on Sunday. Pakistan had ordered the C.I.A. to leave the Shamsi air base in protest over NATO airstrikes that killed at least 25 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan on Nov. 26. Pakistan has also blocked all NATO logistical supplies from crossing the border into Afghanistan since the clash. Pentagon and Obama administration officials declined to comment publicly on the departure from the Shamsi air base. But a senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the drone operations at Shamsi were classified, said that vacating the base would not end American counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. \u201cThe United States retains robust capabilities to fight Al Qaeda and its militant allies,\u201d the official said. \u201cOur operations will continue.\u201d Pakistani officials have repeatedly accused NATO forces of deliberately attacking the Pakistani soldiers at two military check posts; American officials have said the airstrikes were an unfortunate accident. In response to the attacks, Pakistan gave the C.I.A. 15 days to vacate the Shamsi base, which is about 200 miles southwest of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan Province. Inter Services Public Relations, the media wing of the Pakistani military, said the last flight carrying American personnel and equipment left the base on Sunday. \u201cThe base has been taken over by the army,\u201d the agency\u2019s statement said. While United States officials do not comment publicly on drone operations against militants who plan attacks on Afghanistan from havens in the Pakistani tribal areas, operations had been reduced at the Shamsi air base since May, when a Navy Seal commando raid killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad. The United States also carries out drone strikes from bases in Afghanistan. After the Bin Laden raid, Pakistan insisted that the C.I.A. shut down its operations at the Shamsi base, but it later relented, permitting scaled-down operations. The attacks on the Pakistani check points two weeks ago have stoked nationalist passions in the country, where anti-American sentiment was already running high. Angry demonstrations erupted after the airstrikes, and in an additional sign of protest, the Pakistani government decided not to attend an international conference on the future of Afghanistan held last week in Bonn, Germany. Although American officials have expressed hope that their working relationship with the Pakistanis will not break down, Pakistani officials have insisted on rewriting the rules of bilateral cooperation. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said Sunday in an interview with the BBC that Pakistan might continue to block NATO supply convoys from entering Afghanistan for several more weeks. \u201cThere is a credibility gap,\u201d Mr. Gilani told the BBC. \u201cWe are working together, and still we don\u2019t trust each other.\u201d To build confidence, Mr. Gilani said, Pakistan is creating what he called \u201cnew rules of engagement with the United States.\u201d \u201cThen I think we should trust each other better,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Military Bases and Installations;Central Intelligence Agency;Drones (Pilotless Planes);United States International Relations;United States Defense and Military Forces;Afghanistan;Afghanistan War (2001- );North Atlantic Treaty Organization"}
{"id": "ny0048689", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2014/11/24", "title": "Iran Grants Bail to Woman From Britain Held 5 Months", "abstract": "TEHRAN \u2014 A British-Iranian woman detained in Iran since June, whose case attracted international attention after her family said she had been arrested after trying to attend an all-male volleyball match, was released on bail on Sunday. The British Foreign Office confirmed the release of the woman, Ghoncheh Ghavami, but said the Iranian authorities would not allow her to return to Britain. Ms. Ghavami, 25, was released after paying bail of about $30,000, her mother, Susan Moshtaghian, told the Iranian Students\u2019 News Agency on Sunday. \u201cBased on the verdict handed down by the court, she was sentenced to one year imprisonment and banned for two years to leave the country,\u201d she said. The family is awaiting a decision by the Court of Appeal. Ms. Ghavami, a London law school graduate, had been in Iran only four months, after spending most of her life in Britain, when she was drawn into the world of Tehran\u2019s small and heavily monitored circle of activists. Two arrests, including one in front of a volleyball stadium, preceded her detention on June 30. Image Ghoncheh Ghavami Credit Press Association, via Associated Press Ms. Moshtaghian insisted that her daughter was innocent. \u201cShe has been defending herself and is innocent,\u201d she told the news agency. The charges against Ms. Ghavami have been unclear. Some websites say she has been accused of having contacts with opposition groups, but her former lawyer said she had been found guilty of spreading propaganda against Iran\u2019s political system. The British government and human rights groups like Amnesty International had called for her release. Prosecutors said she had been charged for taking part in opposition protests abroad, not for trying to watch the volleyball match. Ms. Ghavami was arrested a week after she attended a protest against the limits imposed on Iranian women, who are, among other things, barred from attending all-male volleyball matches. Iranian law does not recognize dual citizenship, so all those holding an Iranian passport are regarded as Iranian subjects. There is no British Embassy in Tehran. Another person with dual citizenship, the Iranian-American Jason Rezaian, who is a correspondent for The Washington Post, has been detained since July 22.", "keyword": "Iran;Great Britain;Ghoncheh Ghavami;Women and Girls;Islam"}
{"id": "ny0162579", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2006/02/27", "title": "Pick Up the Phone, Your Search Term Is Calling", "abstract": "GOOGLE is going 20th century. The company, whose empire is based on its ability to connect people and businesses through computers, is now connecting them the old-fashioned way -- over the phone. Starting late last year, the site began showing green phone icons next to selected advertisements that appear with search results. When the icon is clicked, the user is prompted to enter his or her phone number. The phone will then ring, with the business on the other end of the line (dial-up users would have to disconnect from the Internet first). Google is not charging marketers for the service yet, but analysts say it is a sure bet the company will, thereby ushering in the era of \"pay-per-call\" advertising in earnest. \"Google's entry into this market will popularize this whole space,\" said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Kelsey Group, a marketing consultancy. \"And given the sheer volume of advertisers, this could generate considerable revenue for them.\" The pay-per-call advertising market looks as if it may well evolve just as the pay-per-click market did. Google watched and waited while another company, Overture, demonstrated the viability of the business before releasing its own version of the service. Yahoo then bought Overture in 2003 for $1.6 billion, while Google built its own technology. Likewise, the pay-per-call market has largely been developed by a company called Ingenio, which is based in San Francisco, and has been offering advertisers the service since 2004. Google appears to be building its system (with the help of VoIP Inc., a Florida-based company), while Yahoo is testing a version of the service with Ingenio. Just as in pay-per-click advertising, pay-per-call marketers bid for the right to have their ads appear near the top results of search queries, and pay only when someone actually uses them. Consumers either choose the click-to-call option or simply dial the number in the ad. In either case, the number is a dedicated line that middleman companies like Ingenio or eStara, a company based in Reston, Va., have procured for each advertiser. Those companies connect and log the call, charge the advertisers and share the money with the site on which the ad appeared. Mr. Sterling predicted that there would be an eager market for pay-per-call services among small service-oriented businesses. About 70 percent of those businesses do not have Web sites, so pay-per-click advertising makes no sense for them. But even those who do have sites often lack the sophistication or the time to manage a pay-per-click campaign, which can require considerable tweaking to outbid competitors without spending too much. Pay-per-call advertisers must still manage campaigns, but the approach appears so effective that for many it is worth the effort. Judson Brady, the owner of Broad Street Flowers, an Atlanta-based floral service, said he paid Yahoo about $1.25 for each prospect who clicked on his search page advertisement, and 5 percent of those prospects ordered. By contrast, Mr. Brady said he paid Ingenio around $4.15 for each call from a prospect -- most of whom see the ads on AOL, which introduced its pay-per-call service last year. More than a third of the callers place an order. \"We're lucky to break even on the pay-per-clicks, but with pay-per-call we'll make $25 profit per order,\" he said. \"My only complaint is there's not more of it.\" Google would not comment on its pay-per-call test, much less confirm that it is considering a pay-per-call service. Yahoo likewise would not comment on its pay-per-call test. Marc Barach, Ingenio's chief marketing officer, said the company had signed up fewer than 10,000 advertisers in about 750 of the 1,300 business categories it had carved out in a Yellow Pages-type taxonomy. Advertisers have bid up the average price for a call by 50 cents a month since the company started, he said, with the average now at about $10. Advertisers and prospects typically talk for five minutes, Mr. Barach said, \"so we know lengthy conversations are taking place.\" In addition to AOL and, to a much more limited degree, Yahoo, Ingenio's pay-per-call advertisers appear on search results from Infospace's search sites, including DogPile, and on the pages of Web publishers like Depot.com, which uses search technology from Miva, based in Fort Myers, Fla. Verizon's Superpages.com, a Yellow Pages site, also features a pay-per-call system that it built in conjunction with eStara. Robyn Rose, vice president of Internet marketing for Superpages, would not say how many advertisers had signed up for the service. \"But we're one of the largest, if not the largest,\" she said. Superpages.com markets the service through its 3,000 advertising representatives, who call on the company's 1.1 million customers. Those representatives help clients create the ads and aim them toward a particular geographical area in exchange for a $20 monthly fee. Then the advertisers bid for the right to have the ads appear highest when Superpages.com visitors conduct a search. MSN visitors will also see those ads, because the company relies on Verizon to place ads on its local search service. While the big search sites and pay-per-call technology companies are eager to see this market build, some advertisers are sad to see the secret start to get out, said William Leake, chief executive of Leads, Customers, Growth, a marketing consultancy based in Austin, Tex. Mr. Leake said one of his clients, a health care company that spends $70 million annually in direct marketing, had been buying pay-per-call ads since last year, but asked him not to disclose their name. \"They've been Hoovering up leads and they don't want competitors to start piling in and bidding up the prices,\" Mr. Leake said. Advertisers who entered the pay-per-click fray early on were able to glean fairly inexpensive leads. Now that many businesses have begun buying clicks, though, there are fewer bargains to be found. \"The pay-per-call medium opens a new front that allows some small businesses to jump in there and make hay before the crazy elephants jump in and open their checkbooks,\" Mr. Leake said. \"So at least for a limited period of time, they can play the game.\"", "keyword": "GOOGLE INC;ADVERTISING AND MARKETING;TELEPHONES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS;COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET"}
{"id": "ny0149163", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/09/19", "title": "Investors, Hungry for Hope, Send Dow Up 410", "abstract": "A seesaw day on Wall Street ended with a rush of euphoria Thursday as investors raced back into beaten-down banking shares, heartened by signs that the government is taking more drastic steps to tamp down problems plaguing the financial markets. In a rally that came in the final hour of trading, the Dow Jones industrials surged to a 410-point gain, nearly erasing the 449-point loss sustained on Wednesday. But it was by no means a sign that the crisis on Wall Street had turned a corner. Fear and stress still abounded in the credit markets, where investors flocked to the safety of Treasury bills and banks charged each other higher loan rates, a reflection of lingering anxiety about the health of the financial industry. As investors grapple with the once-unthinkable developments that have rocked the world of finance in the last week, lending to consumers and some businesses has tightened, drying up an important lubricant of the economy even as growth continues to contract. \u201cWe are still in a flight-to-quality mode,\u201d said Jane Caron, chief economic strategist at Dwight Asset Management, a bond investment firm in Burlington , Vt. \u201cWhen I assess the mood on my trading desk, people are still very concerned that we have not seen the end of this crisis.\u201d The Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index closed up 4.33 percent, to 1,206.51, and the Dow Jones industrial average rose 3.86 percent, to 11,019.69 The Nasdaq composite jumped 4.78 percent. Analysts attributed the stock market rally not to a fundamental improvement in the financial environment, but rather to reports that the government might be planning to quarantine some of the worst assets held by major banks. Sentiment was also buoyed when regulators announced actions intended to blunt the impact of short sellers, investors who bet that a stock\u2019s price will drop. Some banks and government officials have blamed short sellers for the precipitous drops in shares of big banks over the last few months, including the decline that played a role in the downfall of Lehman Brothers this week. Shares of the last two independent investment banks standing, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs , seesawed a day after suffering steep losses. Investors worried that the banks could face fates similar to those of Lehman and Merrill Lynch , which sold itself Sunday to Bank of America to avert a deepening financial crisis. Morgan Stanley stock ended up 3.7 percent, but Goldman Sachs closed down, one of the few major financial companies to end the day in the red. Goldman shares lost 5.7 percent; earlier they were down as much as 25 percent, reflecting the uncertainty over the bank\u2019s future. Wachovia , the banking giant that is considering a possible merger with Morgan Stanley, jumped nearly 60 percent; Washington Mutual , the troubled savings and loan that has also been working on efforts to save itself, gained 49 percent. For the first time since Lehman collapsed and the American International Group was rescued, President Bush made a brief statement in Washington , saying the government would \u201cact to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence.\u201d Earlier, the Federal Reserve said it would extend an effort that allows central banks around the world to lend dollars in foreign economies. The Fed will provide an extra $180 billion under the program to grease the wheels of finance. Despite the surge in stocks, investors remained wary about lending to businesses and to one another. The cost to insure companies\u2019 debt, a measure of investors\u2019 confidence in the firms, remained at historically high levels, analysts said, although the cost declined slightly from Wednesday. Investors displayed a strong preference for safer and more tradable government securities than other short-term, private debt. The cost of several types of corporate and bank borrowing remained high and, in some cases, increased further. A gauge of fear \u2014 the Libor rate, which measures how much banks charge one another for overnight loans \u2014 remained elevated on Thursday. Treasury notes and bonds sold off in the afternoon but the price of short-term government debt remained elevated. The yield on the three-month Treasury bill, which falls when the price rises, was 0.076 percent, little changed from 0.061 percent on Wednesday. A week ago, the yield was 1.644 percent. The sharp move in the last few days suggests that some investors are willing to receive virtually no return to hold a Treasury bill, thought to be among the safest of all investments. By contrast, interest rates on three-month commercial paper, a competing form of private borrowing used by banks and corporations, jumped to 3.32 percent, from 3.17 percent on Wednesday and 2.86 percent a week earlier, according to Bloomberg data. If the tight conditions in the money market persist, economists and analysts say it could severely limit the availability of credit to businesses and consumers. Federal Reserve data released on Thursday showed that consumer and business borrowing slowed significantly, though it continued to grow, in the second quarter. Commercial paper outstanding fell by 2.87 percent for the seven days that ended Wednesday, according to the Federal Reserve, its biggest one-week decline since the summer of 2007. Back then, investors became concerned about certain kinds of commercial paper that was used to buy securities backed by mortgages and other consumer debts. \u201cThis is a breakdown in the system of trading bonds and a breakdown of extending credit,\u201d said James T. Swanson, chief investment officer at MFS Investments, a mutual fund company based in Boston . Mr. Swanson said that so far, the stress had not affected most nonfinancial corporations, many of which have large holdings of cash and do not have a pressing need to borrow money. But he said companies that his analysts talk to have said the credit squeeze could start to hurt if the commercial paper market remains shut down and bank lending remains as tight as it is now. Sectors like energy, pharmaceuticals and technology are more flush with cash and less vulnerable to troubles in the credit markets. But others, like retail stores, restaurants and airlines, could be hurt if tight conditions persist. Kurt von Emster, portfolio manager of the MPM BioEquities Fund, said he had advised companies to draw down on their bridge loans from banks, because of the turmoil in the credit market. \u201cThose will be not only hard to come by, but impossible to come by,\u201d he said about bridge loans. The benchmark 10-year Treasury note was down 1 3/32, at 103 25/32, and the yield, which moves in the opposite direction from the price, was at 3.54 percent, up from 3.41 percent late Wednesday. Following are the results of Thursday\u2019s Treasury auction of 20-day and 76-day cash management bills:", "keyword": "Dow Jones Industrial Average;Stocks and Bonds;Federal Reserve;European Central Bank;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0237283", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/06/10", "title": "Texas and Washington Clash Over Air Pollution Permits", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 For 16 years, a showdown has been brewing between Texas and federal environmental officials over the state\u2019s unique way of regulating industrial air pollution, which many critics complain is lax and has led to some of the dirtiest air in the country. Now, President Obama\u2019s new regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency in Dallas has forced the issue. The new environmental sheriff is Al Armendariz, a 40-year-old chemical engineer from El Paso, and two weeks ago, he took the unprecedented step of barring Texas from issuing an operating permit to a refinery in Corpus Christi. The state\u2019s rules for granting permits have long violated the Clean Air Act , Mr. Armendariz said, and he made it clear that the agency would do the same thing in about 39 other cases, among them several major refineries, unless Texas changed its system. \u201cThe State of Texas has to let me know if they can issue permits that are consistent with federal requirements, and if they can\u2019t, then we will,\u201d he said. Since Mr. Armendariz\u2019s announcement, a political donnybrook as broken out. Gov. Rick Perry , who has been in attack mode against all things Washington, warned that jobs would be lost. At a warehouse in Deer Park, just a few blocks from the string of refineries along the Houston shipping canal, a line of blue-collar workers recently stood stiffly behind Mr. Perry, a Republican seeking his third full term, as he accused federal environmental regulators of persecuting Texas. The governor suggested that the Obama administration must have political motives for cracking down on the state. \u201cWashington just isn\u2019t happy unless they have total control of everything,\u201d he said, playing a note that pleases his conservative constituents. \u201cThis administration seems to think it\u2019s their way or the highway.\u201d But, the Democratic nominee for governor, the former mayor of Houston, Bill White, has accused Mr. Perry of mismanaging the state environmental agency and of losing control of a vital authority. Environmentalists have also fired at the governor, charging that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has become a toothless lapdog of the industry it regulates. But beyond the finger-pointing and partisan posturing is a dispute between Texas and Washington over air quality that stretches back through the Bush and Clinton administrations. At issue is the state\u2019s practice of \u201cflexible permitting.\u201d The Clean Air Act requires polluters to limit emissions for several key pollutants from each smokestack, or other source inside a plant or refinery. But since 1994, Texas has instead given about 140 plants \u2014 among them the largest refineries in the state \u2014 a general ceiling for pollution from all sources inside a plant. Mr. Armendariz, in an interview, said the scheme made it extremely difficult for federal regulators to figure out if a plant was polluting or not. If they find one source of pollution at a refinery, for instance, they must balance it against hundreds of others. \u201cIt\u2019s an impossible situation,\u201d he said. \u201cThese permits are unenforceable.\u201d The system has other advantages for industrial polluters, he said. Many have managed to expand their plants without including the controls required on new sources of pollution by getting the state to raise the cap for the whole complex. There is also hard evidence that these plants produce more toxins for each barrel of oil or chemicals they process than similar refineries and factories in other states, he said. Other critics say a flexible permit means a single stack can be spewing a toxic chemical at illegal levels as long as the overall pollution cap is met. And if that source is close to the edge of a refinery, for instance, it can have devastating effects on people living nearby. Some environmentalists also argue that the overall pollutions limits in the permits are too high, making it easy for the industry to meet them and giving polluters room to exceed limits for certain pollutants on certain days without facing the consequences. \u201cThey never exceed the limits,\u201d said Jen Powis, a lawyer with the Lonestar chapter of The Sierra Club. \u201cThe T.C.E.Q. really gave them this inflated bubble for the entire site.\u201d No other state uses this system, which is beloved by many business leaders here, and the E.P.A. under three presidents has refused to sanction it. Even President George W. Bush\u2019s regional administrator, who was not known for being tough on the oil industry, challenged the permitting program in 2002, on similar grounds as Mr. Armendariz. State officials, however, point out that under their regimen, Texas has seen steep drops in air pollution, larger than the national average. Ozone levels have dropped 22 percent since 2000, and nitrogen oxide levels are down 46 percent, they say. \u201cThe proof is in the pudding,\u201d said Mark R. Vickery, the executive director of the environmental quality commission. \u201cThe air has gotten tremendously cleaner.\u201d No one disputes that the situation has improved in recent years, but environmentalists say the gains have come in spite of the state\u2019s loose regulation of industry, not as a result of state pressure. They say lawsuits brought by the federal government and environmental groups account for most of the gains, along with the national trend toward cleaner fuels and more energy-efficient cars. Besides, these critics argue, Texas started out with such high levels of pollution in the 1990s that it was not difficult to cut emissions significantly. \u201cBetter does not equal good,\u201d said Matthew Tejada, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, an environmental group. \u201cWe still do not have clean air in Texas.\u201d Elena M. Marks, a former director of health and environmental policy for the City of Houston, said the national emissions figures showed that the amount of carcinogens released into the air for each barrel of oil processed in Houston\u2019s refineries was higher than the average at refineries in other states, even within the same company. Ms. Marks, who now works for Mr. White\u2019s campaign, said Houston became so disenchanted with the state\u2019s monitoring that it bought its own mobile laboratory to test for pollutants. Simply by publicizing the illegal levels of emissions it found, the city shamed oil and chemical companies into halving benzene and butadiene emissions over the last six years, she said. Houston was not the only entity upset with the current system. Saying they needed more regulatory certainty, the Texas Oil and Gas Association sued the E.P.A. in 2008 in an effort to force the Bush administration to make a final decision on the flexible permits. Now, however, Mr. Armendariz has made it clear he intends to force the state\u2019s hand this summer. \u201cThe time for delay and for partnership and for compromise is very quickly coming to an end,\u201d he said, \u201cand we have to get the Clean Air Act implemented in the State of Texas.\u201d", "keyword": "Texas;Environment;Perry Rick;Environmental Protection Agency;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Refineries;Air Pollution;Clean Air Act;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Armendariz Al"}
{"id": "ny0105131", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/03/12", "title": "U.S. Sergeant Kills 16 Afghan Civilians, 9 of Them Children", "abstract": "PANJWAI, Afghanistan \u2014 Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said. Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. The man gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said. Coming after a period of deepening public outrage, spurred by the Koran burning by American personnel last month and an earlier video showing American Marines urinating on dead militants, the possibility of a violent reaction to the killings added to a feeling of siege here among Western personnel. Officials described growing concern over a cascade of missteps and offenses that has cast doubt on the ability of NATO personnel to carry out their mission and has left troops and trainers increasingly vulnerable to violence by Afghans seeking revenge. President Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks, calling them in a statement an \u201cinhuman and intentional act\u201d and demanding justice. Both President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called Mr. Karzai, expressing condolences and promising thorough investigations. \u201cThis incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan,\u201d Mr. Obama said in a statement. American officials in Kabul were scrambling to understand what had happened, and appealed for calm, at a moment when the United States and Afghanistan are in tense negotiations on the terms of the long-term American presence in the country. The officials said the suspect was an Army staff sergeant who acted alone and then surrendered. \u201cThe initial reporting that we have at this time indicates there was one shooter, and we have one man in custody,\u201d said Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a NATO spokesman. A senior American military official said Sunday evening that the sergeant was attached to a unit based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a major Army and Air Force installation near Tacoma , Wash., and that he had been part of what is called a village stabilization operation in Afghanistan. In those operations, teams of Green Berets, supported by other soldiers, try to develop close ties with village elders, organize local police units and track down Taliban leaders. The official said the sergeant was not a Green Beret himself. Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children. He had served three tours of duty in Iraq , this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December. Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years. In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the head, and saw burns on some of the children\u2019s legs and heads. \u201cAll the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned,\u201d said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. \u201cWe put out the fire.\u201d The villagers also brought some of the burned blankets on motorbikes to display at the base, Camp Belambay, in Kandahar, and show that the bodies had been set alight. Soon, more than 300 people had gathered outside to protest. At least five Afghans were wounded in the attacks, officials said, some of them seriously, indicating the death toll could rise. NATO said several casualties were being treated at a military hospital. One of the survivors from the attacks, Abdul Hadi, 40, said he was at home when a soldier broke down the door. \u201cMy father went out to find out what was happening, and he was killed,\u201d he said. \u201cI was trying to go out and find out about the shooting, but someone told me not to move, and I was covered by the women in my family in my room, so that is why I survived.\u201d Mr. Hadi said there was more than one soldier involved in the attacks, and at least five other villagers described seeing a number of soldiers, and also a helicopter and flares at the scene. But that claim was unconfirmed \u2014 other Afghan residents described seeing only one gunman \u2014 and it was unclear whether extra troops had been sent out to the village after the attack to catch the gunman. In a measure of the mounting mistrust between Afghans and the coalition, however, many Afghans, including lawmakers and other officials, said they believed the attacks had been planned, and were incredulous that one American soldier could have carried out such attacks without help. In his statement, Mr. Karzai said \u201cAmerican forces\u201d had entered the houses in Panjwai, but at another point he said the killings were the act of an individual soldier. Others called for calm. Abdul Hadi Arghandihwal, the minister of economy and the leader of Hezb-e-Islami, a major Afghan political party with Islamist leanings, said there would probably be new protests. But he said the killings should be seen as the act of an individual and not of the United States. \u201cIt is not the decision of the Army officer to order somebody to do something like this,\u201d he said. \u201cProbably there are going to be many demonstrations, but it will not change the decisions of our government about our relationship with the United States.\u201d Elsewhere, news of the killings was spreading only slowly. Other than the protest at the base in Kandahar, there were no immediate signs of the fury that fueled rioting across the country after the burning of Korans by American military personnel in February. Both the United States Embassy in Kabul, which immediately urged caution among Americans traveling or living in Afghanistan, and the military coalition rushed to head off any further outrage, deploring the attacks, offering condolences for the families and promising the soldier would be brought to justice. Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, the NATO spokesman, expressed his \u201cdeep sadness\u201d and said that while the motive was not yet clear, it looked like an isolated episode. \u201cI am not linking this to the recent incidents over the recent days and weeks,\u201d he said. \u201cIt looks very much like an individual act. We have to look into the background behind it.\u201d Adding to the sense of concern, the killings occurred two days after an episode in Kapisa Province, in eastern Afghanistan, in which NATO helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents instead fired on civilians, killing four and wounding three others, Afghan officials said. About 1,200 demonstrators marched in protest in Kapisa on Saturday. The rapid arrest on Sunday could help prevent a repeat of last month\u2019s unrest. The reaction to the Koran-burning case revealed a huge cultural gap between the Americans, who saw it as an unfortunate mistake, and the Afghans, who viewed it as a crime and wanted to see those responsible tried as criminals. The Afghans and Americans agreed on the severity of the killings on Sunday, though, and General Jacobson said the case would be aggressively pursued by American legal authorities. It was less clear how the attacks would affect the talks between Kabul and Washington , known as strategic partnership talks, which will define the American presence and role in the country after the withdrawal of combat troops. The upheaval prompted by the Koran burnings led to a near-breakdown in those talks, but they appeared tentatively back on track after a deal struck Friday for the Afghans to assume control of the main coalition prison in six months. The strategic partnership talks must still address differences over the American campaign of night raids on Afghan houses. The attack on Sunday may complicate that issue, because it bore some similarities to the night raids carried out by coalition forces in Afghanistan. The shootings also carried some echoes of an attack in March 2007 in eastern Afghanistan, when several Marines opened fire with automatic weapons, killing as many as 19 civilians after a suicide car bomb struck the Marines\u2019 convoy, wounding one Marine. Panjwai, a rural district near the city of Kandahar, was traditionally a Taliban stronghold. It was a focus of the United States military offensive in 2010 and was the scene of heavy fighting. Two American soldiers were killed by small-arms fire in Panjwai on March 1, and three died in a roadside bomb attack in February.", "keyword": "Afghanistan War;US Military;Afghanistan;Kandahar;Murders;Robert Bales"}
{"id": "ny0222277", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/11/02", "title": "Obama Univision Interview Shows Power of Spanish Media", "abstract": "As part of the Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign, President Obama gave an interview to a Spanish-language radio show that was broadcast last Monday \u2014 and just for good measure, his wife, Michelle, followed up a few days later. The Obamas\u2019 twin appearances on \u201cPiol\u00edn por la Ma\u00f1ana,\u201d heard across the country on Univision Radio, are a testament to the ballooning political power of the Spanish language news media, and in particular to the power of Univision, which owns the biggest Spanish-language television and radio outlets in the United States. Univision says it does not favor any political party. Regardless, analysts say that the company is exerting significant influence both on local elections and on the national debate about immigration \u2014 in part by encouraging Hispanics to cast a ballot. In commercials and on its Web site, Univision tells its audience, \u201cVota, es tu derecho,\u201d or \u201cVote, it is your right.\u201d Some of the commercials also promote a voter information phone line. Conversely, last month the network rejected an advertisement that urged Hispanics not to vote in the midterm elections. C\u00e9sar Conde, president of Univision Networks, said Spanish-language outlets had been focusing on the importance of voting because they had a responsibility to \u201cmake sure that our community in the U.S. maximizes its potential.\u201d Federico Subervi, a communications professor at Texas State University and the author of \u201cThe Mass Media and Latino Politics,\u201d said that Univision bulked up its election coverage in 2008 \u2014 that year, it sponsored two presidential primary debates \u2014 and again in 2010. Univision\u2019s chief (but much smaller) competitor, Telemundo, has done the same, with a get-out-the-vote campaign this year called \u201cTu Voto, Tu Futuro,\u201d or \u201cYour Vote, Your Future.\u201d Underscoring just how seriously it is taking the elections, Univision\u2019s coverage is titled \u201cDestino 2010,\u201d or \u201cDestiny 2010.\u201d On Tuesday, it will run news updates every half-hour starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time, when polls are still open across the country. English-language networks generally do not start election news updates until 8 p.m. Because there are relatively few Spanish-language outlets in the United States, Univision wields a more influential megaphone than its English-language counterparts. Merely by spending more time on its newscasts on campaign issues like immigration that are especially meaningful to its audience, Univision affects the debate on those issues, Mr. Subervi said. Univision has heavily promoted itself as being, as it once said in a news release, on the \u201cforefront of the national debate\u201d about reform, particularly after Arizona passed a stringent new law to police immigrants. In May, the network devoted half a day to live protest coverage, held a prime time debate about the law and brought its Sunday public affairs program \u201cAl Punto\u201d to Phoenix. On Univision, reporters never refer to \u201cillegal aliens,\u201d opting instead for \u201cundocumented immigrants.\u201d It is a matter of sensitivity, news executives say. \u201cWe pride ourselves on presenting all points of view on immigration,\u201d said Alina Falcon, the president of Univision News. \u201cThat said, we do look out for the interests of our community. We do provide a platform for the exposition of unique problems for our community.\u201d When Mr. Obama came on Univision Radio, the host Eddie Sotelo pretended to let him pick the first topic. The options he said, were \u201cA, immigration reform; B, immigration reform; C, immigration reform; or D, all of the above.\u201d The president chose D, and proceeded to say that Republicans were unwilling to \u201cstep up\u201d and help pass a comprehensive reform bill. Mr. Obama called on the Univision listeners to vote, and in the process, gave some fodder to critics. \u201cIf Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to punish our enemies and we\u2019re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,\u2019 if they don\u2019t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it\u2019s going to be harder\u201d to pass immigration reform, he said. Conservatives like Representative John A. Boehner, the House Republican leader who hopes to be the next speaker, pounced on the \u201cpunish our enemies\u201d line, and on Monday Mr. Obama said in an English-language radio interview that \u201cI probably should have used the word \u2018opponents\u2019 instead of \u2018enemies.\u2019 \u201d Immigration is just one part of Univision\u2019s news diet, and lately the network has been noticed for its campaign coverage. It has hosted the chairmen of both political parties on its Sunday morning public affairs program and sponsored news-making debates in the governors\u2019 races in Florida and California. Mr. Conde said a growing number of candidates had come to recognize that the Hispanic electorate \u201cis becoming a swing vote.\u201d Democrats of all stripes have granted Univision\u2019s interview requests, but so too have many Republicans, including Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona and Carly Fiorina, the California Senate candidate. Mr. Subervi noted that Univision had given extensive coverage to a wave of campaign ads casting immigrants in a negative light. One ad, by the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, Sharron Angle, showed men who appear to be Hispanic carrying guns, huddling against a wall and posing for mug shots. He said ads like Ms. Angle\u2019s are \u201cgaining the attention of Univision, Telemundo and other media, and infuriating Latinos enough to vote against that person.\u201d", "keyword": "Univision;Spanish Language;United States Politics and Government;Elections;Hispanic-Americans;News and News Media"}
{"id": "ny0188022", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/04/30", "title": "Records Seized in Illinois Town Accused of Water Irregularity", "abstract": "CRESTWOOD, Ill. \u2014Federal agents and the Illinois state police raided Village Hall here Wednesday morning, seizing Crestwood\u2019s drinking water records in a search for evidence of environmental crimes, officials said. The raid was prompted by recent accusations that for 21 years Crestwood officials supplemented the village\u2019s water supply, which comes from Lake Michigan, with water from a local well despite a warning in 1986 from state environmental officials that doing so was dangerous and illegal. \u201cThe village cooperated with the search, and they are going ahead with city business as usual,\u201d a spokeswoman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Rowan, said. The raid was the latest jolt to this working-class village of 11,000 residents since the accusations were first reported by The Chicago Tribune last week. A spokeswoman for the State Environmental Protection Agency said last week that agency officials had cited the village for violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act and knowingly providing false information about the source of the village\u2019s water. The spokeswoman, Maggie Carson, also said that the village\u2019s drinking water was safe, and that despite the elevated levels of some potentially harmful chemicals the public\u2019s health had never been at risk. Ms. Carson said that in 1986 \u201cwe did a spot check and had some concerns about the samples\u201d of water from the well. \u201cWe asked them to stop using it as a drinking water source,\u201d she said. Over the years, Crestwood officials reported that only water from Lake Michigan was feeding the local supply, Ms. Carson said. But in 2007, she said, another inspection found that 10 percent to 20 percent of the local water still came from the well. In a letter to residents and business owners, Mayor Robert Stranczek said that the well had not been used since it was shut off in September 2007 and that the safety of Crestwood\u2019s drinking water was never compromised. \u201cI can tell you the leaders of this community, including my father who served for four decades as mayor, have always put the safety and security of our residents first,\u201d Mr. Stranczek said in the letter. Not everyone was reassured. A lawsuit against the village has been filed on behalf of residents who contend their health was jeopardized by the well water. On Saturday night, a public meeting attracted an emotional crowd of 200, many of whom questioned whether illnesses like cancer could be linked to the village\u2019s drinking water. Still, some residents say that the uproar is misguided and that there is no scientific evidence linking the well water to health problems. \u201cWe\u2019ve lived in Crestwood for 38 years, and we trust that our mayor would not have us drinking water if it was harmful,\u201d said Val Canavan, 67, a retired teacher. \u201cOur family \u2014 my husband and I, three children, and 10 grandchildren \u2014 are very healthy,\u201d Ms. Canavan added. But another longtime resident, Yolanda Szymusiak, 54, said she now boiled tap water before adding it to the coffee maker, has stocked up on bottled water and shopped for filters for her faucets. \u201cI can\u2019t believe they would try to save some money by slowly poisoning us,\u201d Ms. Szymusiak said. \u201cIn Crestwood,\u201d she said, \u201cwe get a rebate back every year after we pay the second installment of our property taxes. But I\u2019d rather not get any money back and drink good water.\u201d State environmental agency officials say they planned to review current public notification and information laws to see whether any provisions needed tightening, but some residents said that if Crestwood\u2019s water supply was contaminated, the heightened vigilance had arrived too late. \u201cYou always hear that water is the best thing for you,\u201d said Mike Toscas, 22, a college student. \u201cBut for people living in Crestwood, it has turned out to be the worst thing. I would have been better off drinking pop all these years.\u201d", "keyword": "Illinois;Water;Search and Seizure;Environment"}
{"id": "ny0034152", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/12/01", "title": "Text of North Korean Statement on Detained American", "abstract": "Following is the text of a statement published by the Korean Central News Agency about the case of Merrill Newman, an American currently detained in North Korea: The Korean Central News Agency released the following report on Saturday: A relevant institution of the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea recently put in custody U.S. citizen Merrill Edward Newman who committed hostile acts against the DPRK after entering the country under the guise of a tourist. After entering the DPRK as a member of tourists\u2019 group in October he perpetrated acts of infringing upon the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK and slandering its socialist system, quite contrary to the purpose of tour. He also committed such crime as trying to look for spies and terrorists who conducted espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK in the area of Mt. Kuwol during the last Fatherland Liberation War as well as their families and descendants and connect them with the \u201cKuwol Partisan Comrades-in-Arms Association,\u201d an anti-DPRK plot-breeding organization of south Korea. According to the results of the investigation, he was active as adviser of \u201cKuwol Unit\u201d of the UN Korea 6th Partisan Regiment part of the Intelligence Bureau of the Command of the U.S. Forces in the Far East since early in 1953. He is a criminal as he masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People\u2019s Army and innocent civilians. The investigation clearly proved Newman\u2019s hostile acts against the DPRK and they were backed by evidence. He admitted all his crimes and made an apology for them.", "keyword": "North Korea;Korean Central News Agency;Merrill E Newman;Korean War"}
{"id": "ny0156436", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/06/26", "title": "California Sues Countrywide Over Lending", "abstract": "California joined Illinois on Wednesday in suing Countrywide Financial , claiming the company had practiced deceptive mortgage lending. The embattled company\u2019s shareholders, meanwhile, approved its takeover by Bank of America . The civil lawsuits, which also name Countrywide\u2019s chief executive, Angelo R. Mozilo, as a defendant, accuse the lender of engaging in unfair trade practices that encouraged homeowners to take out risky loans, regardless of whether they could repay them. The lender, based in Calabasas, Calif., became the company most closely associated with the American housing boom, in which mortgages with low teaser rates were seemingly handed out to anyone who asked, as well as the real estate market\u2019s subsequent collapse when mortgage rates rose and shaky borrowers lost their homes to foreclosure. \u201cCountrywide exploited the American dream of homeownership and then sold its mortgages for huge profits on the secondary market,\u201d California\u2019s attorney general, Jerry Brown, said in a statement. The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. It also names the company president, David Sambol, as a defendant. A Countrywide representative was not available to comment. Countrywide shareholders voted in a meeting Wednesday to approve the lender\u2019s takeover by Bank of America, a deal spurred by the company\u2019s mortgage market woes. The stock deal, first announced in January and now valued at about $2.8 billion, is expected to close by July 1. Holders of more than 69 percent of eligible Countrywide shares voted in favor of the deal, Countrywide said.", "keyword": "Countrywide Financial Corp;Suits and Litigation;Mortgages;Foreclosures;Bank of America Corp;Illinois;California"}
{"id": "ny0230307", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2010/09/16", "title": "N.H.L. Moves to Lessen Shootouts\u2019 Importance", "abstract": "The N.H.L. has taken a step away from the importance of shootouts by changing a rule that governs tie breakers in the standings. The Board of Governors approved a revision that would use a team\u2019s total number of victories in regulation and overtime \u2014 but exclude shootout wins \u2014 to break ties among teams with the same number of points at the conclusion of a season, the league announced Tuesday evening. Teams will continue to get two points in the standings for shootout victories. The N.H.L. had accorded shootout wins equal status with regulation and overtime victories since the league instituted shootouts in the 2005-6 season. But the shootout has been derided as a gimmick by commentators and some coaches, including the Rangers \u2019 John Tortorella. There is evidence that teams are playing for a regulation tie to get that guaranteed point, leading to more shootouts. The number of shootouts has risen consistently, from 145 in 2005-6 to 184 last season. \u201cWhen we put the shootout in, we never envisioned the unreasonable, disproportionate percentage of games that would be decided in a shootout,\u201d said Brian Burke, the Maple Leafs\u2019 general manager, who has called the shootout a wart in the rules. If the new tie-breaking rule had been in place in 2008-9, the Florida Panthers would have made the playoffs instead of the Montreal Canadiens. Both teams finished eighth in the Eastern Conference, with 93 points and 41 victories. Montreal received the final berth by having the better head-to-head record. But seven of the Canadiens\u2019 wins came in shootouts, as opposed to only three for the Panthers. RANGERS RE-SIGN STAAL The Rangers have re-signed Marc Staal, their top defenseman, to a five-year, $19.875 million contract. Staal, 23, played 82 games last season, registering a career-high eight goals and 19 assists, a plus-11 mark, and only 44 penalty minutes. Staal was due to become a restricted free agent at the end of the 2010-11 season.", "keyword": "National Hockey League;Hockey Ice;Stanley Cup;New York Rangers;Staal Marc"}
{"id": "ny0130381", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/06/14", "title": "Candidate Jerry Patterson Kicks a Spur Into Texas Politics", "abstract": "AUSTIN, Tex. \u2014 Jerry Patterson is an authentic Texas politician, at a time when Texas politicians rarely act like Texas politicians. State elected officials and those trying to unseat them sue and countersue, carefully watch what they say, and are quick to apologize when they fail to do so. And then there is Mr. Patterson, the state land commissioner and a former Marine fighter pilot who is quick-witted, loose-lipped and an opponent of anything resembling political correctness. He has tackled issues and made comments over the years that have riled his political opponents \u2014 he upset environmentalists by referring to the plan to add the dunes sagebrush lizard to the endangered species list as \u201creptile dysfunction\u201d \u2014 as well as his fellow Republicans, including those in Gov. Rick Perry\u2019s office. In 2009, Mr. Patterson got into a dispute with a Republican state lawmaker, Representative Wayne Christian , after Hurricane Ike destroyed Mr. Christian\u2019s beachfront home on the Bolivar Peninsula near Galveston a year earlier. So that he and his neighbors could rebuild their houses, Mr. Christian pushed to have the properties exempted from a state law that prohibits building at the water\u2019s edge on a public beach. Mr. Patterson told The Houston Chronicle that the Legislature would have to impeach him if it wanted such an exemption enforced, and he had no qualms about being quoted in one of the biggest newspapers in Texas using a PG-rated expletive in reference to Mr. Christian. After nine years as land commissioner, Mr. Patterson, 65, is running in the 2014 election for lieutenant governor, a job many consider the most influential in Austin because of its control over the Senate\u2019s agenda. He is regarded as the underdog \u2014 prominent Republicans have expressed interest or declared themselves candidates, including Susan Combs, the state comptroller, and Todd Staples, the agriculture commissioner \u2014 but in many ways, Mr. Patterson has become the underdog of the Texas political culture as a whole. He once broke a hand doing a cartwheel at the office. He issued a joke news release as land commissioner challenging his counterpart in New Mexico to a duel to settle a century-old land dispute between the states. (\u201cI think I\u2019ll just wing him,\u201d Mr. Patterson said in the announcement.) He hates being driven around by staff members. (\u201cWe tried to stick a travel aide on him at first, just to keep up with him, and he would constantly ditch the guy,\u201d said Jim Suydam, a spokesman.) And he advises newly elected legislators to stroll the Capitol. \u201cYou need to go over to the Capitol and look at all those pictures on the wall,\u201d he said. \u201cAll those people were elected and thought they were somebody, and you can walk through here and nobody knows who the hell they are. We\u2019re all just passing through.\u201d At a campaign fund-raiser at an Austin bar, Mr. Patterson could have pressed the crowd for more cash, but instead he spent a good part of the evening showing off the engine of his 1951 Ford pickup truck and sharing the microphone with the country singer Gary P. Nunn on \u201cYou Never Even Called Me by My Name,\u201d a beer in his hand and a .22-caliber, five-shot revolver in his boot. Flipping through the campaign finance reports of high-profile Texas Republicans, one finds $2,871 catering expenses, $15,000 consulting fees and $126 floral bills. Mr. Patterson\u2019s reports include a $5.57 meal at a Texaco station. \u201cI think in an era of kind of polished politicians, Jerry just comes across as completely unplugged,\u201d said Ted Delisi, a Republican strategist who was the national field director for Mr. Perry\u2019s presidential campaign. \u201cHe\u2019s really not like anybody else. In a state of blunt talk, Jerry stands out as the bluntest of the blunt.\u201d Though his office a few blocks from the Capitol in Austin is something of a man cave \u2014 antique firearms, a mounted mule deer he shot in Hudspeth County \u2014 Mr. Patterson is not the macho type. He resembles not the 6-foot-4 Lyndon B. Johnson, but maybe his 5-foot-10 bespectacled lawyer. For years, Mr. Patterson has carried the loaded revolver in a holster in his boot and a loaded .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol at the small of his back. Because he leads an agency with few security concerns \u2014 the General Land Office, which manages billions of dollars in state land, investments and mineral rights and is home to historic maps and documents \u2014 his reasons for arming himself daily are largely symbolic. As a state senator from the Houston area, Mr. Patterson wrote the law that gave Texans the right to carry concealed handguns. \u201cAm I afraid of a staff uprising?\u201d he asked. \u201cNo, not exactly. It\u2019s a liberty that if you don\u2019t exercise it, it becomes quaint. I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s the Second Amendment or the First or the Fifth or whatever, you have to test it. Like the Occupy movement. There\u2019s some folks with a screw loose. But I want them doing that, because they\u2019re testing the limits.\u201d Because few Texas political leaders are as frank as Mr. Patterson, he has earned the respect of politicians from both parties, including Hector Uribe, the former Democratic state senator who ran against him in 2010 and whom Mr. Patterson once joked about shooting. When Mr. Perry was preparing to debate the musician and humorist Kinky Friedman, who ran for governor in 2006 (one of his slogans was \u201cHow hard could it be?\u201d), Mr. Patterson went to the governor\u2019s aid, relying on his own quick wit to play the role of Mr. Friedman. Mr. Perry, Mr. Uribe and other Democrats and Republicans have split with Mr. Patterson on at least one issue, however. Last year, he sponsored a push by the Sons of Confederate Veterans for a Texas specialty license plate displaying the group\u2019s name and logo, which features the Confederate battle flag. Mr. Perry, while running for president, said he opposed the proposed plate. The state Department of Motor Vehicles\u2019 governing board voted against the plates. \u201cI think it\u2019s a pretty clear sign he doesn\u2019t either care what Texans think or that he is so ideologically and racially insensitive that he doesn\u2019t have the ability to really govern a diverse state like ours,\u201d said Matt Glazer, executive director of Progress Texas, a group that promotes liberal causes and fought against the license plate. Mr. Patterson, whose great-grandfather served in the Confederate Army, said that the motor vehicle board had run from controversy in the name of political correctness, and that he had sponsored the plate to honor his great-grandfather and Texas history, even though others might find that history offensive. \u201cOur history needs representation sometimes from those who want to make it fit into nice little cubes,\u201d he said. The day the board voted on the Confederate plate, it approved one honoring the Buffalo Soldiers, the black United States Army regiments from the late 1800s. Mr. Patterson sponsored that plate, too.", "keyword": "Texas;Republican Party;Elections;Patterson Jerry E"}
{"id": "ny0008969", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/05/25", "title": "Church Tithing Slips in Harlem Even as Neighborhood Improves", "abstract": "The tourists started lining up two hours before morning worship service on West 116th Street in Harlem. Most were dressed in everyday clothes, contrasting with the dark suits and prim dresses of the largely African-American congregation in the historic sanctuary of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ. The Rev. Roger Harris, an associate pastor, made his way from the back of the line in his pinstripe suit. \u201cGood to see you, glad you came,\u201d he said, offering grins and handshakes on a recent Sunday. The tourists were herded to the balcony until, as in several churches in Harlem, they packed the seats there. Down below, where the congregation has dwindled over the years, there were plenty of empty seats. The tourists often put offerings in the collection basket. But then they are gone. And so despite the draw, churches like Canaan are struggling. And at the heart of the struggle is a contradiction: As Harlem\u2019s fortunes rise, tithing \u2014 the traditional source of the churches\u2019 money \u2014 is fading away. Harlem\u2019s historical base of African-Americans has been dwindling. Those who remain have regularly tithed, setting apart 10 percent of their incomes for their church, in times good and bad. But now that has changed, too. \u201cYour tithers are your people who really keep your church going as a whole,\u201d said the Rev. Dr. Charles A. Curtis, the senior pastor at Mount Olivet Baptist Church and the chairman of Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement . \u201cWith the drop in population,\u201d he said, \u201cyou have less people to tithe.\u201d The Rev. Jesse T. Williams Jr., senior pastor at Convent Avenue Baptist Church , said, \u201cGiving is a form of worship, and an expression of thanking God for what God has given us.\u201d At his church, he said, tithes in recent years were down about 12 percent. Canaan, now with 1,000 members, has lost 500 since 2000, which increased the amount of room available for tourists. Without the tourists, Mr. Harris said, the senior pastor would be \u201cpreaching to an empty balcony.\u201d Image Canaan Baptist Church of Christ has lost 500 congregants since 2000, reflecting Harlem\u2019s dwindling black population. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times And tithes are down 20 percent, though other offerings at Canaan have been stable. It is not clear how much of that money comes from tourists. Some churches have experienced drops in tithing of as much as 50 percent, said Deborah C. Wright, the chief executive of Carver Federal Savings Bank, leading them to seek loans from her bank. \u201cClearly this is a transitional period,\u201d said Canaan\u2019s senior pastor, the Rev. Thomas D. Johnson Sr., who celebrated his seventh year at the church last month. \u201cI believe that Canaan and all of our strong churches in Harlem are determined not to become extinct. This institution must survive, not only for the congregation, but because of who we represent.\u201d The story of Canaan, and its current struggle, is shared by many of Harlem\u2019s churches. It was founded in 1932 in the spirit of what elders call a country church. Many early congregants were migrants from the South, sharecroppers under Jim Crow, steeped in a worship tradition. As more families came, the church grew. The previous pastor, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, led the church for almost 40 years, until he retired in 2004; he was an architect of the civil rights movement and an aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. \u201cHe was a fighter,\u201d said Mr. Harris, who has a goal of increasing church membership by at least 50 within the next year. In 1970, Mr. Walker once stood on the trunk of a car near the church and, through a bullhorn, preached a sermon about drug-dealing in the neighborhood. \u201cWe\u2019ve been living dangerously for a long time,\u201d he told his curbside congregation of 300, and whoever else was within earshot, \u201cand we\u2019re not afraid to name names.\u201d The black church, he often said, was the primary resource for the black community. \u201cIt is where black people have the ultimate decision-making power,\u201d he said in a 1979 newspaper interview. \u201cBlack folks will pay church dues before they pay their rent.\u201d Image At Convent Avenue Baptist Church, the senior pastor, the Rev. Jesse T. Williams Jr., recently greeted parishioners. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times Under Mr. Walker, whose black-and-white portrait hangs in Canaan\u2019s lobby, membership swelled to the point where ushers had to put chairs in the halls. The Canaan that Mr. Johnson inherited, however, looks remarkably different. So does the neighborhood. Where African-Americans once made up the bulk of Central Harlem\u2019s population, they are now less than half. Economically, million-dollar homes and trendy restaurants glimmer amid stubborn pockets of blight. Even in churches where membership has been steady, some pastors say, tithes have dipped. In recent years, food pantries have run bare, building problems have festered, and funds that help people make their rent, keep their electricity on or get a MetroCard to get to work dry up. Some community initiatives have been stalled. Church members always dig deep when pastors make pleas from the pulpit. But despite church holdings in real estate amid Harlem\u2019s rising property values, church operations are tied to the faithful. \u201cEverybody is affected one way or another,\u201d said Mr. Williams of Convent Avenue Baptist, located on 145th Street. \u201cPeople who have been here a long time, members who have owned their homes or brownstones 30, 40 years, have come up quite well. The other end of the spectrum being, we have members in the congregation who have lost their residences, lost their jobs.\u201d More and more, pastors say, church members bring their worries over layoffs and rent increases to them, and to the altar. \u201cThe misery index in Harlem is still high,\u201d Mr. Johnson, 56, said. \u201cIt\u2019s really something to walk through Harlem,\u201d he continued, \u201cand see people obviously struggling, and literally on the other side of the street see people walking toy dogs, and coming out of condos. We\u2019ve got to bring them together. I think that\u2019s the bridge we have to build.\u201d Last Sunday, Canaan celebrated its 81st anniversary. And as part of his legacy, Mr. Johnson has been rethinking its ministry. He has ushered in a church Web site and started a men\u2019s ministry, a women\u2019s ministry, a young adult ministry and a social policy institute. He also revived the evangelism ministry, which over the summer will, in part, target Harlem\u2019s growing diversity. \u201cA multilingual church in a multicultural community, that\u2019s where we live now. That\u2019s the kind of Canaan that we\u2019re starting to build,\u201d Mr. Johnson said. \u201cHarlem is going to continue to evolve,\u201d he added, \u201cbut we need to make sure we preserve the symbols. People aren\u2019t coming to look at the new condo that went up. They come for the Apollo, to walk down 125th Street and get a glimpse of what that looked like back in the day, and the churches where pastors like Walker preached.\u201d", "keyword": "Harlem;Canaan Baptist Church of Christ Harlem NY;Black People,African-Americans;Baptists;Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement;Mount Olivet Baptist Church Harlem NY"}
{"id": "ny0118863", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2012/07/03", "title": "Spain\u2019s Iniesta Named Euro 2012\u2019s Best Player", "abstract": "Andr\u00e9s Iniesta was honored as best player of the European Championships after helping Spain become the first nation to successfully defend the continental crown. Iniesta, a 28-year-old midfielder, started all six of Spain\u2019s matches, including Sunday\u2019s 4-0 victory over Italy in the final. He won the award despite not scoring a goal in the tournament.", "keyword": "UEFA European Football Championship;Soccer;Iniesta Andres"}
{"id": "ny0135529", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/04/09", "title": "Accounts of Violence Spread in Zimbabwe", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 Ten days after Zimbabwe voted and by most accounts rejected its long-serving, autocratic president, Robert Mugabe , the mood of the country grew more ominous on Tuesday. The opposition reported widespread attacks on its supporters, black youths drove white farmers off their land and election officials were accused of vote tampering and arrested. As Mr. Mugabe sought to cling to power beyond his 28th year in office, the High Court began to weigh the demand of the opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change, for the immediate release of the presidential election results. They have still not been announced, but the opposition says they will give it victory. With international pressure building on Mr. Mugabe\u2019s government to tell his nation who won, the police, part of his apparatus of power, arrested five election officials accused of tampering with the vote to the detriment of Mr. Mugabe\u2019s tally, the state-run newspaper The Herald reported Tuesday. The opposition party has pleaded for international intervention to resolve Zimbabwe\u2019s political stalemate, and at a news conference in Harare, Tendai Biti, its secretary general, protested what he called \u201cthe deafening silence\u201d from the African Union and a regional bloc of nations known as the Southern African Development Community, The Associated Press reported. \u201cI say to our brothers and sisters across the continent, don\u2019t wait for dead bodies in the streets of Harare,\u201d he said. Officials from human rights groups and trade union alliances said the arrests of election officials appeared to be a tactic to intimidate those counting the votes, while the delay seemed devised to buy ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe\u2019s governing party, time to figure out how to survive and perhaps to rig the outcome. \u201cThe fear is they\u2019re going to try to force these officials to falsify results in key constituencies where the votes might be enough to swing the national election,\u201d said Patrick Craven, a spokesman for the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which joined with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions on Tuesday to call for the immediate release of the outcome. Zimbabweans say their rising sense of foreboding grows out of ZANU-PF\u2019s past use of violence for political ends. In 2000, after the defeat of a referendum that would have given Mr. Mugabe greater powers, he blamed white farmers. In the years since, he has sanctioned the seizure of thousands of their farms, often by force. He said he did so to right the injustices of the colonial era, which concentrated farmland in the hands of whites, but much of the confiscated land was doled out as patronage to ZANU-PF\u2019s governing elite. In 2005, Mr. Mugabe\u2019s government demolished the homes of hundreds of thousands of poor people in urban neighborhoods that were strongholds of the political opposition. And last year, the police rounded up dozens of opposition figures, including the current presidential candidate of Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai , beating and arresting them. The opposition said this persecution was happening again in rural areas where there were no witnesses but the victims. Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the Movement for Democratic Change, said Tuesday that about 200 of its polling agents, campaign workers and supporters had been arrested, beaten or kidnapped since the election. ZANU-PF is organizing and arming youth militias, he said. \u201cPeople are facing serious retributive attacks,\u201d he said. The government\u2019s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, denied the charges, telling The Associated Press: \u201cThey are concocting things. It is peaceful.\u201d Trevor Gifford, president of the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe, said groups of as many as 200 young men, paid by ZANU-PF and chanting party slogans and shouting anti-white epithets, had invaded 60 farms and driven out their inhabitants. \u201cIt\u2019s ethnic cleansing happening,\u201d Mr. Gifford said in a telephone interview. \u201cWe can very quickly become extinct. People are losing their homes, businesses, lives. It\u2019s really desperate.\u201d The Herald reported Monday that Mr. Mugabe had called on blacks to hold onto the land and never let the whites reclaim it.", "keyword": "Zimbabwe;Election Results;Politics and Government;Tsvangirai Morgan;Mugabe Robert"}
{"id": "ny0045161", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2014/02/17", "title": "Just in Time, Game Between Barcelona and Manchester City Gets a New Dimension", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The intensity and joy are back with Barcelona. The intensity and belief are back with Manchester City. And there could be few better ways to welcome back the Champions League than when these two meet in Manchester on Tuesday night. If Bar\u00e7a is back on full throttle, that means Lionel Messi is over his injuries and scoring again at a rate that eclipses the greats. The little Argentine chipped in two goals, exquisite of course, in Barcelona\u2019s 6-0 obliteration of Rayo Vallecano on Saturday. Earlier that evening, City eliminated Chelsea from the F.A. Cup, scoring only twice in a performance so strong that Chelsea was not allowed a shot on goal in the 90 minutes. This, said City captain Vincent Kompany, was vengeance for Chelsea winning at the Etihad Stadium in the league two weeks ago. No it wasn\u2019t, City Coach Manuel Pellegrini said; it was the fact that his team did not want to lose twice in its stadium to the same opponent. The best sound of all at the postgame news conferences was the muted acceptance of Chelsea\u2019s coach, Jos\u00e9 Mourinho. \u201cSimple,\u201d Mourinho said. \u201cCity played much better than us, and when the best team wins, I think football is in peace.\u201d It is at peace when this particular man is not bad-mouthing his fellow managers, as Mourinho did so often when his path crossed Pellegrini\u2019s in Spanish and English soccer. The game has another dimension when Bar\u00e7a\u2019s stars are in good health. Two weeks ago, when Messi was tenderly feeling his way back after months of rest for his tired and torn hamstrings, a coach whose team took full advantage of Barcelona\u2019s wounds last season made a significant observation. \u201cWhen all your players are fit,\u201d Jupp Heynckes told a Barcelona board member, \u201cyou still have more talents than us.\u201d Heynckes retired after his Bayern Munich side cleaned out the Bundesliga, German Cup and Champions League last season. His acknowledgment that Bayern finished off a weakened Barcelona came two weeks ago, when he met Barcelona\u2019s vice president, Javier Faus. That is how sportsmen \u2014 with some exceptions \u2014 talk when the microphones are switched off. Heynckes left Munich in great shape, and Pep Guardiola, the former coach at Barcelona, has added talents to Bayern since replacing him. Meanwhile, not only has Messi needed a prolonged timeout, but the captain Carles Puyol, the dynamic inventor Andr\u00e9s Iniesta and the galvanic left back Jordi Alba have been nursed through strains and nagging pains. It hasn\u2019t always been appreciated, but Tata Martino, the coach in his first season after coming over from Argentina, has juggled maintaining results at the top while rotating and resting senior players. Some fluency was lost. Critics accused Martino of tampering with Bar\u00e7a\u2019s intrinsic \u201ctika-taka\u201d pass-and-move style by trying to persuade players to mix up their approach, to make long diagonal passes from time to time. The coach had one purpose. He sought to arrive at the business end of the European season with a team fit enough and fresh enough to take on the best in Europe. There might, as people have suggested, be another motive. Martino is Argentine. Messi and another Barcelona player, Javier Mascherano, are also Argentine. There is a World Cup coming, and Argentina wants to be a force in that, just as Spain and Brazil and Germany intend to be. Even if it is done subconsciously, players do hold something back through the long season to be ready to take on the World Cup. If anyone is to blame for that, it is FIFA and the clubs for filling out the now year-round calendar with ever more lucrative tournaments. How thrilling, then, it is to see Messi et al. discard their cautious winter coats and turn on their skills again. With his first goal, an audacious flick of the ball over the head of the on-rushing Vallecano keeper on Saturday, Messi tied Alfredo Di St\u00e9fano\u2019s career mark of 227 goals that he scored between 1953 and 1966. One great Argentine player eclipses the record of another. But Messi wasn\u2019t finished. He was involved in more of the goals, scored by Adriano, Alexis S\u00e1nchez and lastly by Neymar, the Brazilian returning from an ankle injury with a stunning run from the halfway line before he finished with his right foot. Messi, though, gave one more exhibition of his predatory art, his insatiable appetite for scoring, his joy. His second goal of Saturday night \u2014 a low, precise placement from the edge of the 18-yard box, typical for Messi \u2014 took him past Di St\u00e9fano\u2019s career total. There are other records on Messi\u2019s radar. He is now level with Ra\u00fal Gonz\u00e1lez, and Hugo S\u00e1nchez\u2019s mark of 234 is within reach. After that is the Athletic Bilbao legend Telmo Zarra, who scored 251 goals from 1940 to 1955. The difference is that those were career tallies, while Messi, who is 26, has plenty of time to add to his 337 total goals in 436 appearances in a Bar\u00e7a shirt. Moreover, in modern soccer not all players get to play 90 minutes every game. Martino did on Saturday what he has done before \u2014 he substituted the greatest player in the world to spare his legs and his energy for Tuesday in Manchester. City awaits him in better heart. The 2-0 victory over Chelsea was achieved without the midfield presence of Fernandinho and the scoring threat of Sergio Ag\u00fcero. Both are injured, and both make a big difference to City. However, David Silva was impishly creative on Saturday, and Pellegrini outfoxed Mourinho with his use of substitutions. The first goal was a delightfully quick and precise low cross shot from Stevan Jovetic, the Montenegrin who has had few opportunities to show his class in Manchester. The second was worked by Silva and scored by Samir Nasri within minutes of Nasri replacing Jovetic. Pellegrini did not crow. His side was in better shape than it was when it met Chelsea 12 days before. A refreshed Bar\u00e7a will be a different dimension altogether.", "keyword": "UEFA Champions League;Barcelona Soccer Team;Lionel Messi;Manchester City Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0132102", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/12/09", "title": "The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space Enshrines the East Village Struggle", "abstract": "FOUR days before the opening of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space on Avenue C, near 10th Street, Bill DiPaola told the volunteer staff about the suggestion box. Though the group was supposed to make all decisions collectively, on this he acted alone. \u201cI put the suggestion box up thinking everybody\u2019s going to be unhappy about everything,\u201d he said of the visitors he expected at the museum\u2019s opening, which was scheduled for Saturday. With a box, he told the staff members, if anyone became abusive, they could say: \u201cThat\u2019s awesome. Could you write it down and put it in the box?\u201d He paused for a response, then continued: \u201cAnything to let them leave here without cursing or spitting.\u201d Sheila Jamison, one of the volunteers, eyed him sideways. \u201cGood luck with that,\u201d she said. The museum, conceived by Mr. DiPaola and Laurie Mittelmann, who has studied squats in Denmark and Spain, is a shrine to the recent radical history of the East Village: the 1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park, the standoffs with the police and developers over community gardens, the formation of squats, the civil disobedience actions waged by bicyclists for more bike-friendly streets. Mr. DiPaola, who declined to give his age, lived through many of those battles; Ms. Mittelmann, 24, was, like most of the volunteers, too young. Around the room were photographs of demonstrations and a rack of zines with titles like Profiles of Provocateurs and Under Attack, along with pamphlets of the United States Constitution ($2 each). Blue wooden police barriers decorated the front desk, and a sticker on the telephone read, \u201cTHIS PHONE IS TAPPED.\u201d Entrance to the museum will be free, but people can request paid tours of community gardens and squats. It is a homey place, if people in your home use the words \u201csustainable\u201d and \u201ccommunity\u201d a lot. But for Mr. DiPaola, who is also the director of Time\u2019s Up! , an environmental activist group, the museum involves a battle of ideas. Much of the history has survived only in people\u2019s memories and photographs, each harboring its own version of the truth. How, he wondered, do you turn that into a museum exhibition with a single story line? \u201cWhat is history?\u201d he asked the group. \u201cThere\u2019s corporate history, and there\u2019s our history. Most history museums are history from the past. This isn\u2019t. There\u2019s people who got beat up by police in the park who are going to walk in here. They lost their gardens. They lost their homes. A lot of people didn\u2019t do too well during gentrification.\u201d Around the table, people drank blueberry herbal tea and ate Newman\u2019s Own Organics cookies. \u201cWe really like making tea for the meeting because it\u2019s the most communal way of drinking,\u201d Ms. Mittelmann said, sounding a theme for the evening. Later, when someone proposed asking visitors for a suggested donation of $5, Willa Jones, an urban planning intern, thought this was too high. \u201cThree makes it seem like we\u2019re more for the people,\u201d she said. The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space is an attempt to put this communal spirit and fractious history on display \u2014 a successor, of sorts, to the Tenement Museum , which enshrines an earlier piece of neighborhood history. The location, in the long-unused storefront of C-Squat (also See Squat) , is significant. C-Squat, home to numerous punk-rock bands and impromptu gigs, was the loudest and most notorious of the East Village squats. (In 2002, it was one of 11 illegally occupied apartment buildings that the city sold for $1 to a nonprofit organization , which is still in the process of turning the buildings over to the residents.) During Hurricane Sandy, when the East Village lost power, residents of C-Squat grilled food for the neighborhood and gave it out free. In the museum\u2019s lower level, one exhibit is a bicycle-powered generator, which was used to generate electricity during Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park. When the power went out after the storm, volunteers put the exhibit on the sidewalk as a neighborhood charging station for cellphones. The history chronicled here, to the extent it has reached the public record, has become mainly one of victories for the activists, visible in the community gardens that adorn every other block in the neighborhood and the squats that are now comfortable residences. But lost are the numerous setbacks and defeats along the way, Mr. DiPaola said \u2014 the gardens that were bulldozed for development, the squats whose residents were evicted, the bicycle demonstrations that ended only in mass arrests, not in bicycle lanes. As opening day approached, Mr. DiPaola fretted over tone. He asked that the word \u201cprotest\u201d be removed from photo displays. \u201cProtest is a little negative,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a celebration.\u201d At a photograph of El Jardin de la Esperanza on East Seventh Street, where the police forcibly removed protesters and brought in bulldozers in 2000, Mr. DiPaola objected to wording that suggested that a subsequent lawsuit by the state attorney general halted destruction of other gardens. \u201cIf you talk to people, they say Eliot Spitzer saved the gardens,\u201d Mr. DiPaola said. \u201cReally, it was the demonstrators who went to court and got a temporary restraining order that saved the gardens. So direct action saves the day, and Spitzer comes in later. \u201cSo many of the things I worked on \u2014 saving community gardens, getting better infrastructure for bicycling \u2014 the history of how it happened seems to get washed out. I have it on film; I was there. So we want to show the true history.\u201d As they do so, though, the museum itself risks becoming history. Start-up costs ran $50,000 to $70,000, much more than expected; rent to C-Squat is $1,681 a month. A campaign to raise $18,500 on the crowd-funding Web site Crowdrise stalled recently at $14,265, and two grant checks for $2,000 were momentarily lost because of problems with mail delivery. \u201cWe\u2019re down to our last $200,\u201d Ms. Mittelmann said on Wednesday. They had ideas. Mr. DiPaola said he wanted to sell copies of a T-shirt for a community garden that asked, \u201cWhat type of worm would you like to have in your neighborhood?\u201d with pictures of an earthworm and a real estate developer talking on a cellphone. The thought of the T-shirt buoyed his spirits. Ms. Mittelmann mentioned a tour they ran last year for a group of European academics studying squatting \u2014 the sweet spot of their target market, both said. \u201cWe talked about, one time, a protest fashion exhibit,\u201d Ms. Mittelmann said. But as a longtime community activist, Mr. DiPaola seemed reflexively to prefer to talk about adversity. The location was inconvenient for European tourists, he said, the neighbors fractious; visitors might steal T-shirts at the opening party. The heat \u2014 finally restored after damage from Hurricane Sandy \u2014 was too high. Mr. DiPaola said he was not really sure how the museum would meet its expenses. \u201cPeople can come into the museum for free,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll buy a T-shirt.\u201d He paused and looked around at all the work still to be done. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be tough to get people interested in history,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space;Squatters;East Village (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0245990", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/04/06", "title": "Mortgage Servicers to Revamp Foreclosure Process", "abstract": "The nation\u2019s top mortgage servicers are expected to sign legal agreements by the end of this week compelling them to change their foreclosure procedures, regulatory officials said Tuesday. The servicers, which violated state and local laws and regulations governing foreclosures, are agreeing to improve their methods in numerous ways. They will be required to have more layers of oversight and proper training of their foreclosure staff. The oversight will extend to third party groups, including the law firms that do much of the actual work of eviction. Under the new rules, every homeowner in default will have a single point of contact with the servicer. The servicers will end their practice of foreclosing while borrowers are pursuing loan modifications that might allow them to stay in their homes. One of the most significant measures in the consent agreement will require servicers to hire an independent consultant to review foreclosures done over the last two years. If owners were improperly foreclosed on or paid excessive fees, they will be compensated. The reforms were described by individuals who spoke on condition of anonymity because the consent agreements were not yet public. The banks either could not be reached or declined to comment. Bringing in a consultant to establish the amount of damages will give individuals who feel they were abused by their servicer some means of redress. While the servicers have acknowledged violating the laws they maintain that very few if any people lost their house who were not in severe default. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, addressed the issue Tuesday at a banking conference in Washington. \u201cSome of the mistakes were egregious, and they\u2019re embarrassing,\u201d he said, according to Bloomberg News. \u201cBut we made a mistake, and we\u2019re going to pay for that mistake.\u201d Many of the reforms that the servicers are agreeing to were also being sought by the state attorneys general, who began their own search for reform last fall. For several weeks in January, the regulators and the attorneys general attempted to work with officials from the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to produce one comprehensive settlement, but the attempt proved unwieldy. The attorneys general met face to face with the servicers for the first time last week at the Justice Department. A spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who is leading the effort, said more meetings are planned but declined to be specific. The attorneys general have larger goals than the regulators. They are seeking to make the banks to cut the debt of delinquent owners. The servicers are balking at this. As a result of the changes being imposed by the banking regulators, servicers will have two options: either hire more employees to give the millions of households in default closer attention, or slow the pace of foreclosures. Foreclosure is already a ponderous process, and has grown more so since the controversy over the servicers\u2019 procedures erupted last fall. The average household in foreclosure has been delinquent for more than 500 days. Regulators expect to issue their report on foreclosure practices at the top 14 servicers within the next few weeks. Preliminary consent agreements were sent to the servicers in February. The report, whose conclusions have been foreshadowed by regulators in Congressional testimony, derives from an investigation this winter by the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It will not name individual banks but rather describe their aggregate behavior. The investigators reviewed the policies and procedures, structure and staffing of the top servicers, as well as their use of law firms and other third parties. They examined 2,800 foreclosures in various stages. The banks examined were Bank of America, Citibank, GMAC, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and nine others. The examination found critical deficiencies and shortcomings in foreclosure preparation and oversight, resulting in violations of state and local foreclosure laws, regulations and rules. The servicers will probably be assessed fines at a later point.", "keyword": "Foreclosures;Mortgages;Banking and Financial Institutions;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry"}
{"id": "ny0177586", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/09/21", "title": "Oracle\u2019s Profit for Quarter Is Up 25%", "abstract": "BOSTON, Sept. 20 (Reuters) \u2014 Oracle reported a 25 percent rise in its fiscal first-quarter profit Thursday, helped by higher-than-expected sales of new software. The company\u2019s revenue and earnings per share excluding special items exceeded Wall Street expectations. \u201cWe continue to take applications market share from SAP,\u201d Oracle\u2019s president, Charles E. Phillips Jr., said in a statement, referring to the German maker of business software that is one of its main rivals. Oracle is the leader in database software, ahead of I.B.M., but it trails SAP in business applications. Net income increased to $840 million, or 16 cents a share, in the period, which ended Aug. 31, from $670 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier. Revenue rose 26 percent, to $4.53 billion, surpassing the analyst target of $4.36 billion, according to Reuters Estimates. Earnings, not counting items including stock-based compensation expenses and acquisition-related charges, were 22 cents a share, a penny above Wall Street expectations. The results were buoyed by the sales of products that were not in its lineup a year ago. Oracle added them after buying Hyperion Solutions, Stellent, MetaSolv and several other software makers over the last year. Revenue from new software licenses increased 35 percent from the period a year earlier, to $1.1 billion. Three months ago, Oracle told investors that it expected new-license revenue would increase by 20 to 30 percent from a year earlier. Oracle reported its results after the stock market closed. In Nasdaq trading Thursday, its shares rose 20 cents, to $21.04; after hours, they rose 11 cents more, to $21.15.", "keyword": "Oracle Corp;Company Reports;Software"}
{"id": "ny0156949", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/06/06", "title": "Ousted Executive Provides a Feminine Face to the McCain Campaign", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Three years ago, Carleton S. Fiorina was the celebrity C.E.O. who was spectacularly fired by the Hewlett-Packard board. She produced a best-selling memoir, \u201cTough Choices,\u201d but for the most part spent the years after her ouster in relative self-imposed exile from public life. No longer. Ms. Fiorina, universally known as Carly, is back, this time reincarnated as a telegenic, take-no-prisoners surrogate for Senator John McCain . On MSNBC on Thursday, Ms. Fiorina praised Mr. McCain\u2019s fund-raising prowess with the announcement that he had raised $21.5 million in May. Last month on the ABC program \u201cThis Week With George Stephanopoulos,\u201d she pushed Mr. McCain\u2019s proposal for a gasoline-tax holiday and brushed past the fact that she could not name a credible economist who supported it. In the months before that, Ms. Fiorina tirelessly promoted Mr. McCain\u2019s economic proposals in round tables and news media interviews across the country. \u201cWhen people were picking apart our tax cuts and saying, \u2018This will cost a gazillion dollars,\u2019 she\u2019s very good about saying, \u2018Come on, guys, let\u2019s get the numbers and push back,\u2019 \u201d said Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain\u2019s closest advisers. \u201cShe\u2019s a very smart woman.\u201d Ms. Fiorina\u2019s official title is chairwoman of the Republican National Committee\u2019s \u201cVictory \u201908\u201d committee dedicated to electing Mr. McCain as president, and she is typically described as an economic adviser to the candidate. To some extent, she is. But Mr. McCain\u2019s campaign advisers say her real role within their testosterone-heavy circle matters more: A high-profile female face for a candidate whose support among women lags substantially behind that of his Democratic rivals. \u201cShe has a great feeling for the economy, for technology and probably what women think about these things, and she\u2019s wired in,\u201d said Thomas J. Perkins, a pioneer venture capitalist and a leader on the Hewlett-Packard board in Ms. Fiorina\u2019s ouster. (In the past, Mr. Perkins acknowledged, \u201cwe\u2019ve had words and we\u2019ve sort of attacked each other in print.\u201d) In turn, a number of Republicans say Ms. Fiorina is using the McCain campaign to rebuild her image after her explosive tenure at Hewlett-Packard. They also say it is hard to see why a woman widely criticized for mismanaging one of Silicon Valley\u2019s legendary companies is advising and representing a candidate who acknowledged last year that he did not understand the economy as well as he should. \u201cWell, see, the good news about business is, results count,\u201d Ms. Fiorina, 53, responded briskly in a recent interview in her office at Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill. \u201cAnd the results have been very clear. The results have been crystal clear. From the day I was fired, every quarter, even before they had a new C.E.O., has been record after record. That doesn\u2019t happen unless the foundation\u2019s been built.\u201d Opinion is still split on whether Ms. Fiorina or her successor as chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, deserve credit for Hewlett\u2019s success after Ms. Fiorina drove through the company\u2019s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002. By many accounts, Ms. Fiorina was superb at marketing, mixed on strategy, bad at execution \u2014 and extraordinarily successful in unifying the board against what Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management calls her \u201cstreet bully\u201d leadership style. \u201cWhat a blind spot this is in the McCain campaign to have elevated her stature and centrality in this way,\u201d said Mr. Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean for executive programs at the management school and one of Ms. Fiorina\u2019s sharpest critics. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t pick a worse, non-imprisoned C.E.O. to be your standard-bearer.\u201d But Mr. McCain, as Ms. Fiorina put it, does \u201cclearly not\u201d share the views of her critics. To the contrary, he so proudly calls on Ms. Fiorina in her regular appearances with him on the campaign trail \u2014 he calls her an American success story \u201cwho began as a part-time secretary\u201d \u2014 that he seems to be suggesting that Ms. Fiorina, true or not, might have a role in a McCain cabinet. As a result, Ms. Fiorina has been buzzed about as a potential commerce or Treasury secretary or even as a McCain running mate, although some Republicans close to Mr. McCain swiftly dismiss the idea of her as vice president. But the view within the campaign is that it can only help Mr. McCain\u2019s standing among women to have Ms. Fiorina mentioned as a possibility for high-profile office in a McCain administration, particularly when he is trying to win over the supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the meantime, Ms. Fiorina has done little to tamp down speculation that she might run for office herself, including the California governorship in 2010. \u201cI would be disingenuous if I said it has never occurred to me,\u201d Ms. Fiorina said about running in general. \u201cAnd in part it occurs to me because people keep asking. When I give speeches, people raise their hand \u2014 \u2018run, run, run.\u2019 \u201d For now, she said, \u201cI\u2019m focused on getting McCain elected.\u201d Ms. Fiorina has been a regular at the campaign\u2019s Saturday policy sessions at headquarters in Arlington, Va. \u2014 she was part of a group, including the candidate, behind Mr. McCain\u2019s sharp pivot from warning against government intervention in the mortgage crisis to calling for government aid to people in danger of losing their homes \u2014 but she does not serve as a bridge for the candidate to the business or financial community, in large part because of her tenure at Hewlett-Packard. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to say that she is the unequivocal success figure that resonates with Wall Street,\u201d said A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst who tracks Hewlett-Packard for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company Ms. Fiorina, whose late father, Joseph T. Sneed 3rd, was a conservative federal appeals court judge and a member of the panel that appointed Kenneth W. Starr as a special prosecutor into the Clintons\u2019 Whitewater dealings, first met Mr. McCain after she testified on Capitol Hill in 2000. Mr. McCain had just abandoned his presidential run against George W. Bush and Ms. Fiorina, who asked to see the senator in his office, left impressed that he was savvy to technological innovation. \u201cHe just got it,\u201d she said. Ms. Fiorina, who is married to a former AT&T executive, Frank J. Fiorina, and has two stepdaughters, now divides her time between a condominium in Washington and a home in Silicon Valley. She received a severance package from Hewlett-Packard worth more than $42 million (Mr. McCain denounced excessive executive pay in an economic speech in Pittsburgh last month) and said in the interview that one of the biggest differences between her new life and her old is that \u201cI\u2019m not deciding.\u201d That was clear on a recent morning on the McCain campaign bus, when the candidate summoned Fortune\u2019s onetime \u201cmost powerful woman in business\u201d to sing to him and an audience of reporters in the back. The selection was \u201cWe\u2019re Strong for Toledo,\u201d which Mr. McCain had heard from Ms. Fiorina at an Ohio fund-raiser the night before. Ms. Fiorina, embarrassed but not at all shy, did as she was told. \u201cNow we know the secret of her success,\u201d Mr. McCain enthused when Ms. Fiorina was done with her serenade.", "keyword": "Fiorina Carleton S;McCain John;Women;Presidential Election of 2008"}
{"id": "ny0124559", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/08/02", "title": "A Day for Chicken Sandwiches as Proxy in a Cultural Debate", "abstract": "ATLANTA \u2014 The chicken sandwich culture wars are on, at least here in the city where Chick-fil-A began in 1946 as a diner feeding factory workers. All day long Wednesday, restaurants were packed largely with conservative Christians who showed up for a Chick-fil-A appreciation day, an event organized by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas after the company was targeted as being antigay. The founder, S. Truett Cathy, built the company on biblical principles, and he and his family have given millions of dollars to organizations trying to stop same-sex marriage . But recent comments by the company\u2019s president, Dan T. Cathy, about the biblical injunctions against homosexuality set up eating at the chain as a kind of cultural litmus test. For many, it comes down to this: Eating at Chick-fil-A supports heterosexual marriage and religious freedom. Refusing to eat there supports same-sex marriage and equality. Although the company has a deep Southern identity and a cultlike status among some people, it has grown into a national powerhouse. There are more than 1,600 restaurants in 39 states, and sales last year were $4.1 billion. On Wednesday, people aligned with the company\u2019s views piled into restaurants in several states. At some restaurants here, parking was a problem and a lunch that might have taken five minutes to pick up stretched into a half-hour wait. People in long drive-through lines bought food for the people in the cars behind them, who then did the same for the next car. \u201cIf you are serious about your relationship with Jesus Christ, you just can\u2019t be for same-sex marriage,\u201d said Corliss Carter, 44, who ate lunch at a Marietta, Ga., restaurant. \u201cChick-fil-A has always been a family-oriented business. We\u2019re just showing our support for them.\u201d Workers at the restaurant declined to comment, instead handing statements to members of the news media giving a little background on the company and reiterating its intention to treat every person in its restaurants with \u201chonor, dignity and respect,\u201d regardless of race, creed, gender or sexual orientation. For some, the issue was not as much about biblical principles or same-sex marriage as it was about freedom of speech. \u201cThis is America, and we\u2019re free to speak our minds,\u201d said Neil Greenlee, 49, of Atlanta. \u201cI feel like Chick-fil-A has been unfairly singled out.\u201d As a gesture of support, he planned to eat Chick-fil-A for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Of course, for every action there is a reaction. The company\u2019s positive perception among consumers has fallen sharply, said Ted Marzilli, managing director of the BrandIndex survey, which keeps a daily index of the popularity of 1,100 consumer brands, including all the major fast-food outlets. People who support same-sex marriage and oppose the company\u2019s position are organizing a kiss-in on Friday at the restaurants. Meanwhile, restaurants from Manhattan to Atlanta have taken to serving their own version of the company\u2019s signature fried chicken sandwich as a Chick-fil-A alternative. Cooks are taking things into their own hands, too. J. Kenji L\u00f3pez-Alt on the New York-based Web site Serious Eats reverse-engineered a sandwich and offered a recipe in his column, The Food Lab. That prompted Sarah Laskow, on the site Grist, to comment, \u201cIt\u2019s still possible to get your fried chicken sandwich fix and keep your moral principles intact.\u201d", "keyword": "Chick-fil-A;Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships;Homosexuality;Christians and Christianity;Restaurants;Georgia;Manhattan (NYC);Arkansas;Huckabee Mike;Cathy Dan T"}
{"id": "ny0262746", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/12/02", "title": "In Reborn Harlem, Liquor Store Draws Complaints", "abstract": "Many neighbors agree that their genteel enclave of brownstones in the heart of Harlem does need a shop where they can pick up, say, a good cabernet for a dinner party. But the liquor store seeking to open on Lenox Avenue near 119th Street is decidedly not what they have in mind. With its roll-down steel gate, its bulletproof plexiglass to guard against robbers and drunken vagrants, and its flamboyant red-and-yellow sign, the store is a throwback to the old crime-ridden, ramshackle Harlem, some neighbors say, not the reborn Harlem they have been advancing during the past decade. \u201cWe want to be Park Slope with charming little stores and become a destination for people,\u201d said Ruthann Richert, a 25-year resident who is treasurer of a local group, the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association . \u201cA store like that is going to attract the people hanging out, drinking wine, so if you\u2019re looking to buy a $30 bottle of wine, you\u2019re not going to go in there.\u201d Laurent Delly, a Haitian-born engineer and real estate agent who is the association\u2019s vice president, was especially unhappy with the sign. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t use the word ghetto, but I would say it\u2019s garish,\u201d he said. The association has gotten the city\u2019s Department of Buildings to stop construction work at the liquor store, mostly because the owner did not get permission from the Landmarks Preservation Commission to change the appearance of the building, in what is designated the Mount Morris Park Historic District . Berihu Mesfin, the owner of the liquor store, said his landlord had authorized the sign, which he said was similar to that of a beauty parlor that had been in the same space. He also said he had been advised to get plexiglass barriers for security. He said he was willing to make some changes to placate neighbors, but noted that he had already spent $3,500 on signage. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive,\u201d he said. \u201cI have to talk to management.\u201d The advent of the liquor store has crystallized the tensions that flow from a neighborhood in metamorphosis. Almost every brownstone that in the 1980s was abandoned or city-owned is now fetching a price of $3 million, with individual condominiums going for $1 million. Residents include the poet Maya Angelou and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. Cafes, cheerful flower and toy shops, and fine restaurants like Settepani , where former President Bill Clinton had a birthday party, are taking over once-forlorn spaces. Crime in the 28th Precinct, which includes the area, has dropped by 70 percent in less than two decades, with 6 murders in 2010, compared with 41 in 1990. The ambience is Bloomsbury-like, calm and demure. But what residents call the second Harlem Renaissance has made the neighborhood less congenial for poorer residents who may want a cheap liquor store, a bodega that accepts food stamps or a place to cash welfare checks. \u201cI don\u2019t see a problem with liquor,\u201d said Rooster Pickering, a 65-year-old unemployed construction worker who was idling with three other men on a stoop next to the liquor store. \u201cThe smaller people, they\u2019re trying to push them out.\u201d One woman who lives in a brownstone and who asked not to be identified said she worried that the campaign against the liquor store might take on an \u201celitist tone.\u201d Yet others argue that they have won the right to push for a more decorous neighborhood, having been pioneers when much of the area was in tatters and plagued by crack cocaine and violence. \u201cI feel I\u2019ve earned my stripes,\u201d said Leah Abraham, an Ethiopian immigrant who opened Settepani with her husband, Nino Settepani, 10 years ago and moved into a Harlem brownstone five years ago. \u201cI was held up at gunpoint twice. I strongly believe I\u2019m doing good in the community. Everybody wants the best.\u201d The struggle sometimes has a racial and class edge because gentrification has attracted an influx of white and black professionals and an outflow of poorer blacks. The historic district stretches over 16 blocks from West 118th Street to 124th Street, roughly taking in the west side of Lenox Avenue almost to Fifth Avenue. Its collection of Gilded Age town houses and Romanesque Revival churches is regarded as among the city\u2019s grandest. (The park itself was renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973 after the Jamaica-born black nationalist leader.) When Ms. Richert moved to Harlem in 1987, many of the buildings were boarded up, and she remembers kicking crack vials aside while walking with her two children. All that changed with increasing investments and the steady stream of newcomers glad to pick up handsome brownstones for $250,000. The invigorated Mount Morris Park neighborhood became a draw for sightseeing buses and movie locations. With its wide sidewalks, Lenox Avenue, also known as Malcolm X Boulevard, was once again thought of as \u201cour Champs-Elys\u00e9e,\u201d Mr. Delly said. Lenox Avenue still has ragged grocery stores, but members of the association view the liquor store as a brash newcomer that must obey the new unwritten rules. \u201cIt\u2019s not the business we disagree with, it\u2019s the aesthetics,\u201d Ms. Richert said. Ms. Abraham said the liquor store owner thought he was doing good in opening the store. \u201cI don\u2019t begrudge him that,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he didn\u2019t study the neighborhood. You could get away with this 20 years ago. You can\u2019t today.\u201d", "keyword": "Harlem (NYC);Gentrification;Liquor;Convenience Stores;Alcoholic Beverages;Shopping and Retail"}
{"id": "ny0225851", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2010/10/10", "title": "N.B.A.\u2019s Nets Pursuing Sponsors in Russia and Beyond", "abstract": "The Nets might be an odd choice to be the N.B.A. \u2019s ambassador overseas. With 12 wins last season, they are often a forgotten team even in New Jersey, where they fail to sell out their home games and live in the shadow of the cosmopolitan Knicks. Yet the Nets are among the most active teams in courting international companies. Last year, six Chinese companies, including the electronics giant Haier , paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for courtside signs at the Izod Center, where Yi Jianlian played for the Nets. Yi was traded in the off-season, so the Nets are now focused on Russia, the home of their new owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov , who took over the team in May. The Nets lack a Russian player, but team executives have met with dozens of companies in Russia hoping to convince a few of them that advertising with the team is a good way to reach American and Russian consumers. On Thursday, the Nets announced a five-year sponsorship deal with Stolichnaya, the Russian vodka producer. The agreement, which Prokhorov helped arrange, is worth about $2 million a year and will include sponsored bars at the Barclays Center , the Nets arena being built in Brooklyn. The Nets hope to complete more deals when they visit Moscow on Sunday on their way to China, where they will play two preseason games. In Moscow, the Nets will hold a clinic for 3,000 youngsters, attend a ribbon-cutting at an Adidas store that will feature Nets gear and schmooze with businesspeople at a reception. \u201cWe have been talking about the Nets being a global team, and it seems really fitting that, as the first foreign owner of an N.B.A. franchise, their first trip should be to my country,\u201d Prokhorov said in a statement. \u201cIt is my hope that the Nets will be the team the country roots for once the season gets under way.\u201d Are the Nets\u2019 efforts to court international companies a sign that they are having trouble attracting sponsors at home? Some sports marketing analysts say that the Nets are smart to piggyback on the N.B.A.\u2019s popularity overseas, where basketball is growing faster than in the United States. \u201cI don\u2019t believe it\u2019s a sign of weakness, but that sports business is global,\u201d said David Carter, who teaches sports business at the University of Southern California. \u201cIt\u2019s a chance for the team to build its overall brand, and big brands do well.\u201d The Nets are not the first team to make a push overseas. The Houston Rockets have become a brand name in China because of Yao Ming, their center. Thaddeus B. Brown, the Rockets\u2019 chief executive, said five Chinese companies had courtside signs, and Anheuser-Busch and HP have signs in Mandarin at the team\u2019s arena in Houston. About 65 Rockets games were broadcast in China last season; the league collects revenue from broadcast rights. Revenue from the sale of licensed merchandise is split equally by all 30 teams. The Knicks are getting into the act, too. This month, they played preseason games in Milan and Paris to showcase Danilo Gallinari, their Italian-born forward, and Mike D\u2019Antoni, their coach, who played in Italy. N.B.A. teams have played games overseas for at least two decades. In addition to sending teams to preseason games in China, France, Italy and Spain this year, the Nets will play two regular-season games against the Toronto Raptors in London in March. The league and its teams see the games as a foothold to sell jerseys, sponsorships and television deals in Europe and Asia, and potentially attract other foreign owners. The games also mirror the changing face of the league; 20 percent of the players in the N.B.A. were born overseas. \u201cOur goal is to grow the interest in the game and ultimately in the N.B.A. in markets throughout the world with the recognition that, over time, fans in those countries will want to watch our games on television or various forms of digital media,\u201d said Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner of the N.B.A. Russia, Silver acknowledged, is a relatively untapped market. Although N.B.A. games have been on television in Russia for more than a dozen years, basketball remains a distant third behind soccer and hockey in popularity. There are only a handful of Russian players in the N.B.A., most notably Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz and Timofey Mozgov of the Knicks. To increase its exposure in Russia, the league opened an office in Moscow this summer and has signed sponsorship deals with Adidas, EA, Nike and others. CSKA Moscow, a team once owned by Prokhorov, will play exhibition games against the Miami Heat, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Cleveland Cavaliers next week. Prokhorov plans to deepen ties further, not just because he is Russian, but because the Nets plan to move to Brooklyn, which has a large Russian-born population. In all, 250,000 people claim Russian ancestry in New York City, 75,000 of whom say they were born in Russia, according to census figures. The Nets are creating a Russian-language Web site to better reach them, and have replaced a marketing specialist who spoke Mandarin with someone fluent in Russian. Still, signing deals with Russian companies will be more of a chore than finding clients in China, where basketball has made deeper inroads with fans and companies. \u201cIf I can get three or four solid deals after my first year, I\u2019d be pleased,\u201d said Brett Yormark, the chief executive of the Nets. REBOUNDS Stephen Graham hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer and the host Nets rallied from a 7-point deficit in the final 15 seconds to defeat the Philadelphia 76ers, 90-89, on Saturday in a preseason game. Anthony Morrow cut the 76ers\u2019 88-81 lead to 4 points with a 3-pointer with a little less than 13 seconds to play, then the Nets took advantage of poor free-throw shooting by Philadelphia to get the improbable win. The 76ers missed three of four free-throw attempts in the final 12 seconds. ... Forward Troy Murphy may miss the season opener because of a lower back injury. Nets Coach Avery Johnson said that Murphy had a disk injury and would be sidelined indefinitely. (AP)", "keyword": "Basketball;National Basketball Assn;New Jersey Nets;Adidas AG;Barclays PLC;CSKA Moscow;Prokhorov Mikhail D"}
{"id": "ny0003875", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/04/29", "title": "Georgia Promises New Look at Freddie Woodruff Killing", "abstract": "STRASBOURG, France \u2014 The new government of Georgia is taking a new look at one of the unsolved mysteries left over from the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union: the shooting death of a C.I.A. officer, Freddie Woodruff, on a dusty road on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, 20 years ago. \u201cThe case has not been properly investigated,\u201d said Justice Minister Tea Tsulukiani, referring to the failure of previous governments to present a plausible explanation for the killing, which took place on Aug. 8, 1993, amid fierce jockeying for influence between Moscow and Washington in the newly independent nation. \u201cWe have some serious doubts about what really happened,\u201d she added in an interview during a visit to the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe along with Georgia\u2019s prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, an enigmatic billionaire who took office after parliamentary elections last October. Michael Pullara, a lawyer based in Houston who has studied the Woodruff murder case closely and lobbied for years for a new investigation, said he was \u201cabsolutely delighted\u201d by Georgia\u2019s apparent readiness to re-examine the murky saga. He added that despite the passage of so many years, \u201ca lot of the missing pieces have now been found and it is possible to know the truth.\u201d Georgia attributed Mr. Woodruff\u2019s death to a random shot fired by a drunken Georgian, a former Soviet soldier. The suspect, Anzor Sharmaidze, was swiftly convicted of murder in 1994 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, a term later extended to 18 and a half years. He was quietly released from jail in 2008 after witnesses recanted their testimony and said they had been tortured into implicating him. Ms. Tsulukiani said she had not examined the file closely. But she believes that Mr. Sharmaidze was jailed only because \u201cthey badly needed to find someone\u201d to take the blame for a killing that severely embarrassed Georgia\u2019s leader at the time, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, and raised concerns in Washington about his grip on the country. Georgia\u2019s justice system has long been tainted by political meddling, and a primary purpose of Mr. Ivanishvili\u2019s visit to Strasbourg last week was to assure European officials and legislators that his new government was committed to the rule of law. His political opponents, notably Mikheil Saakashvili, the country\u2019s pro-American president, accuse him of using the judiciary to settle political scores. A number of Mr. Saakashvili\u2019s allies have been placed under investigation and, according to Mr. Ivanishvili, there is a \u201chigh probability\u201d that the president, who last week started a visit to the United States, will be prosecuted for corruption and other misdeeds, including the use of violence by riot police officers against a Tbilisi protest in 2011. Giga Bokeria, President Saakashvili\u2019s national security adviser, said the prosecution of the president\u2019s supporters gave a \u201cclear picture of at best selective justice, or at worst outright political persecution.\u201d He said \u201cno credible evidence\u201d had been presented against Mr. Saakashvili, who has not been charged with any crime, and described the prime minister\u2019s remarks as \u201cjust another attempt to discredit a major political rival.\u201d Image Freddie Woodruff led a C.I.A. post in Georgia after the Soviet Union collapsed. He was killed in a car by a shot to the head. Mr. Pullara said in a telephone interview that getting to the bottom of Mr. Woodruff\u2019s death \u201cis a litmus test of the new government\u2019s commitment to justice.\u201d Though released from jail, Mr. Sharmaidze has not been formally cleared of murder. \u201cHis life has been destroyed,\u201d Mr. Pullara said. He described him as a victim of a \u201ccruel compromise for reasons of expediency\u201d \u2014 a fall guy who satisfied both Washington\u2019s desire for a culprit and Moscow\u2019s desire that Russia be kept distant from any hint of involvement in the murder. Rivalry between Russia and the United States has weighed heavily on Georgia since the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. In the turbulent years that followed, Washington moved quickly to establish a strong presence in the former Soviet republic, including the establishment of a C.I.A. post in the Georgian capital headed by Mr. Woodruff, who was the agency\u2019s director for the Caucasus region. Shortly before his death, he was the host of a visit to Tbilisi by Aldrich Ames, a senior C.I.A. official who was later jailed as a spy for Moscow. Mr. Woodruff was hit in the head by a single bullet while sitting in the back seat of a car driven by Eldar Gogoladze, a veteran Soviet security officer who was working at the time as the head of Mr. Shevardnadze\u2019s security detail. Washington and Moscow continue to spar over Georgia and are both watching closely how Mr. Ivanishvili handles relations between the two former cold war enemies. A wealthy businessman who made most of his money in Russia, Mr. Ivanishvili has sought to warm previously ice-cold relations with Moscow. But in an interview, he said his government intended to maintain Georgia\u2019s pro-Western orientation and would press ahead with efforts to join NATO, despite objections from Moscow. He said the Boston Marathon bombing showed that Russia, the United States and Georgia shared a common foe in Chechen militancy, and he pledged to end what he said was the previous government\u2019s tolerance of Chechen separatist fighters passing through Georgia. \u201cWe know that Georgia was used for years as a transit point for fighters,\u201d Mr. Ivanishvili said. \u201cWe will stop this by all means. This will not happen now.\u201d He added that an investigation was under way into suspicions that \u201cthe previous government was cooperating with the fighters.\u201d Describing Mr. Saakashvili as \u201ca professional liar,\u201d he said officials in Washington and Europe had been \u201cmisled\u201d about his own government\u2019s intentions by the charismatic, English-speaking president. \u201cThey now see his real face,\u201d said the prime minister. Mr. Bokeria, Mr. Saakashvili\u2019s national security adviser, dismissed the prime minister\u2019s comments as \u201cpolitically motivated accusations\u201d that had no basis in fact. \u201cThere has never been any credible evidence that Georgia under President Saakashvili has allowed any armed groups to cross into Russian territory,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are no credible facts to back these assertions because they are completely false.\u201d", "keyword": "Georgia country;Freddie Woodruff;CIA;Murders;International relations;Bidzina Ivanishvili;Tea Tsulukiani;Anzor Sharmaidze;Mikheil Saakashvili"}
{"id": "ny0168905", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2006/12/20", "title": "Oregon: Archdiocese to Pay $75 Million in Abuse Cases", "abstract": "The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland will pay $75 million to settle at least 170 claims of sexual abuse by its priests as part of a revised bankruptcy reorganization, according to legal documents. The plan, filed Monday in federal court, calls for 143 people who said they were abused to receive $40.7 million. About $13.75 million will be set aside for 26 people who may settle or sue the archdiocese; $20 million will cover future claims. Insurance companies will pay $51.75 million. The remainder is to come from archdiocesan holdings and loans. Before bankruptcy, the archdiocese had paid more than $50 million to settle 130 claims against priests.", "keyword": "Roman Catholic Church;Sex Crimes;Suits and Litigation"}
{"id": "ny0106824", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/04/07", "title": "Mixed Reviews on Program for Immigrants with Criminal Records", "abstract": "Senior Obama administration officials created major confusion for state and local authorities by providing inconsistent information about a high-profile federal program to identify illegal immigrants who committed crimes, according to a stinging report published Friday by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security . The mixed messages about the expansion of the program, known as Secure Communities, from officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement led directly to \u201copposition, criticism and resistance in some locations,\u201d the inspector general, Charles K. Edwards, found. But in a second report released on Friday, the inspector general\u2019s office found that despite the rocky start and continuing political disputes, Secure Communities has been effective at rapidly identifying more immigrants who committed serious crimes \u2014 and in many more places \u2014 than efforts in the past, and at a very low cost to states. The program is a centerpiece of the Obama administration\u2019s immigration enforcement policy, intended to increase the number of convicted criminals among about 400,000 immigrants deported each year. The second report found that enforcement officers had a good understanding of priorities set by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining and deporting immigrants identified under the program, making decisions in line with its priorities in 97 percent of 723 cases that auditors reviewed. The back-to-back reports brought both an embarrassing critique of the performance of officials at the immigration agency, known as ICE, as they extended the program across the country, but also an endorsement by the inspector general\u2019s office of its effectiveness in some aspects. Officials have said they plan to spread Secure Communities nationwide by next year. Amid conflicting statements from ICE officials about whether the program was mandatory, governors of several states \u2014 including Illinois, Massachusetts and New York \u2014 have sought to withdraw from Secure Communities. The program has drawn an outcry from many immigrant organizations, which contend that it has led to the separation of families and the deportation of many immigrants here illegally who did not actually have criminal records. Under Secure Communities, fingerprints of anyone arrested by the police are checked against both F.B.I. criminal databases, a routine procedure, and also against databases of the Department of Homeland Security, which hold records of all foreign-born people in the immigration system. As of last December, the program was operating in 44 states, covering 64 percent of local law enforcement jurisdictions. Under ICE\u2019s priorities, agents are instructed to accelerate deportations of serious offenders, but exercise prosecutorial discretion to suspend deportations of illegal immigrants who do not have criminal convictions. The inspector general \u201cdid not find evidence that ICE intentionally misled\u201d local officials or the public about Secure Communities. But the report includes a chronological roster of misstatements and conflicting documents issued by ICE officials \u2014 including the director, John Morton \u2014 about whether states could opt out of the program. While ICE indicated during 2009 and 2010 that the program was voluntary, officials eventually settled on the position that states could not withdraw. The report finds that the officials failed to set clear policies internally and \u201cmissed opportunities\u201d to clarify the situation. In a statement Friday, Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for ICE, said that the agency had taken \u201caggressive steps\u201d in the past year to provide clearer guidance about the program. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has acknowledged that her department fumbled communications about Secure Communities. Homeland Security officials said Friday that they were in the final stages of preparing new guidelines to govern the program, as the inspector general urged. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the ranking Democrat on the House immigration subcommittee, wrote a letter last year that prompted the inspector general\u2019s review. She said Friday that she was \u201cfrankly disappointed\u201d with the reports, saying they failed to answer several of her questions: \u201cDoes the program also ensnare victims and others with no criminal history? Is it susceptible to racial profiling?\u201d Immigrant advocates said the inspector general reports showed that the Secure Communities program should be canceled. \u201cIn an attempt to justify the program, the reports inadvertently admit that ICE has mutated S-Comm into an overreaching dragnet,\u201d said Sarahi Uribe, of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network , one of the most staunch opponents of the program.", "keyword": "Immigration and Customs Enforcement (US);Homeland Security Department;Illegal Immigrants;Deportation;Crime and Criminals;Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0074177", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/04/19", "title": "Things to Do in Westchester, April 19 to 25, 2015", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events in the Hudson Valley. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to westweek@nytimes.com. Comedy PELHAM Rockwells Joe DeVito, Brian Jian and Dennis Rooney. April 25 at 9 p.m. $10. Rockwells, 105 Wolfs Lane. 914-738-5881; rockwellsusa.net. WEST NYACK Levity Live Mark DeMayo. April 22 at 7:30 p.m. $15. Cristela Alonzo. April 23 at 7:30 p.m. $20. Jessimae Peluso. April 24, 25 and 26. $20. Levity Live, 4210 Palisades Center Drive. 845-353-5400; levitylive.com. Film HUDSON Time & Space Limited \u201cThe Sturgeon Queens,\u201d documentary by Julie Cohen. April 19 at 6 p.m. $6 and $8. Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street. 518-822-8448; timeandspace.org. IRVINGTON Irvington Town Hall Theater \u201cThe Yellow Ticket,\u201d 1918 silent film, with live accompaniment. April 19 at 4 p.m. $10 to $21. Irvington Town Hall Theater, 85 Main Street. 914-591-6602; irvingtontheater.com. KINGSTON Ulster Performing Arts Center \u201cThe Met Live in HD: Mascagni\u2019s \u2018Cavalleria Rusticana\u2019 and Leoncavallo\u2019s \u2018Pagliacci,\u2019 \u201c screening of the operas. April 25 at 12:30 p.m. $19 to $26. Ulster Performing Arts Center, 601 Broadway. 845-339-6088; upac.org. NYACK The Rivertown Film Society \u201cPride,\u201d directed by Matthew Warchus. April 22 at 8 p.m. $8 to $11. The Rivertown Film Society, 58 Depew Avenue. 845-353-2568; rivertownfilm.org. PLEASANTVILLE Jacob Burns Film Center The Westchester Jewish Film Festival 2015. Through April 30. $7 to $25. Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Road. 914-747-5555; burnsfilmcenter.org. PURCHASE The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College \u201cSing-a Long-a \u2018Sound of Music.\u2019 \u201d April 19 at 3 p.m. $12.50 and $17.50. The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. www.artscenter.org; 914-251-6200. ROSENDALE Rosendale Theater \u201cChappie,\u201d directed by Neill Blomkamp. Through April 22. \u201cThe Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,\u201d directed by John Madden. April 24 through 30. $5 and $7. \u201cGett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem,\u201d directed by Shlomi Elkabetz and Ronit Elkabetz. April 24 and 25 at 5 p.m. $5 and $7. Rosendale Theater, 408 Main Street. rosendaletheatre.org; 845-658-8989. For Children BETHEL Bethel Woods Center for the Arts \u201cSaturdays at the Woods,\u201d singing and drawing. Saturdays, through May 16, 9 a.m. to noon. $20 per session. $75 for the series. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 200 Hurd Road. bethelwoodscenter.org; 866-781-2922. BRONX Wave Hill \u201cFamily Art Project: Connect the Aquatic Dots.\u201d April 19, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. \u201cFamily Art Project: Buds, Buds, Buds.\u201d April 25 and 26, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free with admission to the grounds. $2 to $8; members and children under 6, free. Admission is free until noon on Saturdays. Wave Hill, 675 West 252nd Street. 718-549-3200; wavehill.org. IRVINGTON Irvington Town Hall Theater \u201cThe Music Man Jr.\u201d April 25 and 26. $15 to $22. Town Hall Theater, 85 Main Street. 914-591-6602; irvingtontheater.com. PEEKSKILL 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar Kids\u2019 open mike for musicians ages 6 to 17. April 19 at 6 p.m. Admission is free. 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar, 12 North Division Street. 914-737-6624; 12grapes.com. PELHAM The Picture House The New York International Children\u2019s Film Festival. Through April 26. $6 to $12. The Picture House, 175 Wolfs Lane. thepicturehouse.org; 914-738-3161. WEST NYACK Levity Live Mark Calabrese, comedy and magic. April 19 at 2 p.m. $14. Levity Live, 4210 Palisades Center Drive. 845-353-5400; levitylive.com. WHITE PLAINS Westchester County Center New York Metro Pet Reptile Expo. April 19, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. $5 and $10. Westchester County Center, 198 Central Avenue. 845-526-4845; reptileexpo.com. Music and Dance ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College American Symphony Orchestra, classical. April 24 and 25 at 8 p.m. $25 to $40. Brown University Orchestra, classical. April 26 at 3 p.m. Free. The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College. 845-758-7900. fishercenter.bard.edu. BEACON Towne Crier Cafe Martha Davis and the Motels, rock. April 19 at 7:30 p.m. $35 and $40. Kathy Mattea, country. April 23 at 7:30 p.m. $45 and $50. Robben Ford, rock and blues. April 24 at 8:30 p.m. $40 and $45. Vanessa Carlton, pop. April 25 at 8:30 p.m. $35 and $40. Bruce Molsky, bluegrass. April 26 at 7:30 p.m. $20 and $25. Towne Crier Cafe, 379 Main Street. 845-855-1300; townecrier.com. BRONX Church of the Mediator di.vi.sion piano trio, classical. April 19 at 5 p.m. $10 and $15 suggested donation. Church of the Mediator, 260 West 231st Street. 347-326-5846; division-artsandeducation.org. ELMSFORD Westchester Broadway Theater The Duprees, doo-wop. April 20 at 6:15 p.m. The British Invasion Tribute. April 21 at 6:15 p.m. $84 for meal and show. Westchester Broadway Theater, 1 Broadway Plaza. broadwaytheatre.com; 914-592-2222. KATONAH Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts The Horszowski Trio, classical. April 19 at 4 p.m. $15 to $55. Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, 149 Girdle Ridge Road. 914-232-1252; caramoor.org. KINGSTON Old Dutch Church \u201cBeyond Ellis Island,\u201d Northern Dutchess Symphony Orchestra. April 26 at 3 p.m. $5 to $20. Old Dutch Church, 272 Wall Street. 845-635-0877; ndsorchestra.org. MAMARONECK Emelin Theater Dance Off the Grid, contemporary dance. April 24 at 8 p.m. $25. Alexander String Quartet, classical. April 25 at 8 p.m. $42. Emelin Theater, 153 Library Lane. 914-698-0098; emelin.org. Image HUDSON The film \u201cHuman Capital,\u201d with Matilde Gioli, will be shown on April 26 at 5:15 p.m. at Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street. Tickets are $6 and $8. For further information: 518-822-8448 or timeandspace.org . Credit Film Movement MARLBORO The Falcon Alexis P. Suter and the Ministers of Sound, gospel. April 19, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Larry Moses\u2019 Latin Jazz Explosion. April 19 at 7 p.m. Willy Porter and Carmen Nickerson, indie folk. April 21 at 7 p.m. Leni Stern African Trio. April 22 at 7 p.m. Taylor Eigsti Trio, jazz. April 23 at 7 p.m. Jim Campilongo Trio, blues and country. April 24 at 7 p.m. Dan Bern, folk and country. April 25 at 7 p.m. The Blues Farm, blues. April 26, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Howie Day, folk. April 26 at 7 p.m. Donations accepted. The Falcon, 1348 Route 9W. 845-236-7970; liveatthefalcon.com. MOUNT KISCO Merestead \u201cI\u2019ve Got the Tune: On Stage With Marc Blitzstein and Kurt Weill.\u201d April 19 at 3 p.m. $10 to $25. Merestead, 455 Byram Lake Road. coplandhouse.org; 914-788-4659. MOUNT VERNON St. Paul\u2019s Church Glenn Alexander Jazz Duo. April 22 at 1 p.m. Free. St. Paul\u2019s Church, 897 South Columbus Avenue. 914-667-4116; nps.gov/sapa. NEW PALTZ Unison Arts Center The Claire Lynch Band, bluegrass. April 24 at 8 p.m. $24 to $26. Unison Arts Center, 68 Mountain Rest Road. unisonarts.org; 845-255-1559. NEW ROCHELLE Ossie Davis Theater, New Rochelle Public Library Soundview, jazz and classical. April 19 at 3 p.m. $2 suggested donation. Ossie Davis Theater, New Rochelle Public Library, 16 Lawton Street. 914-632-8254; nrpl.org. PAWLING Daryl\u2019s House Gedeon Luke and the People, soul. April 19 at 8 p.m. $10 and $15. The BoDeans, rock. April 22 at 8 p.m. $30 and $35. Leah Laurenti, singer-songwriter. April 23 at 8 p.m. $15 and $20. Caravan of Thieves, swing. April 24 at 9 p.m. $15 and $20. Red Molly, folk. April 25 at 9 p.m. $20 and $25. Daryl\u2019s House, 130 Route 22. darylshouseclub.com; 845-289-0185. PEEKSKILL 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar Choirgirl, cabaret. April 19 at 2 p.m. $15. Chris Raabe, folk and soul. April 22 at 8 p.m. No cover. Adam Falcon, funk and blues. April 24 at 9:30 p.m. $5. 12 Grapes Music and Wine Bar, 12 North Division Street. 914-737-6624; 12grapes.com. PEEKSKILL Bean Runner Cafe Dan Bern, folk and country. April 19 at 7:30 p.m. $20 and $25. The Levins and the Lords of Liechtenstein, folk. April 24 at 8 p.m. $10. Thunderhead Organ Trio, jazz. April 25 at 8 p.m. $10. Bean Runner Cafe, 201 South Division Street. 914-737-1701; beanrunnercafe.com. PEEKSKILL Paramount Hudson Valley Joanie Madden\u2019s Irish All Star Show. April 19 at 3 p.m. $25. America, classic rock. April 26 at 7 p.m. $62.50 to $105. Paramount Hudson Valley, 1008 Brown Street. paramounthudsonvalley.com; 914-739-0039. PIERMONT The Turning Point Cheryl Wheeler, folk. April 19 at 4 p.m. $30. Terry Reid and the Cosmic American Derelicts, rock. April 19 at 7:30 p.m. $30. Doc Richmond\u2019s Jazz Jam. April 20 at 8 p.m. $5. Chris Brown and the Bookends, rock. April 24 at 8:30 p.m. $15. Dan Bern, folk and country. April 25 at 3 p.m. $25. Michael Packer Blues Band. April 25 at 9 p.m. $20. Red Molly, folk. April 26 at 4 and 7 p.m. $25. The Turning Point, 468 Piermont Avenue. 845-359-1089; turningpointcafe.com. PORT CHESTER Ballet des Am\u00e9riques Evening of Dance in Port Chester. April 25 at 7 p.m. $20 suggested donation. Ballet des Am\u00e9riques, 16 King Street. 646-753-0457; balletdesameriques.company. PORT CHESTER The Capitol Theater Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt, folk and country. April 30 at 8 p.m. $35 to $95. The Capitol Theater, 149 Westchester Avenue. 914-937-4126; thecapitoltheatre.com. POUGHKEEPSIE Bardavon Opera House \u201cHarmony on the Hudson,\u201d Music at Marist. April 25 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 3 p.m. $10 and $15. Bardavon Opera House, 35 Market Street. bardavon.org; 845-473-2072. PURCHASE The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College The Westchester Philharmonic, classical. April 19 at 3 p.m. $30 to $97. westchesterphil.org; 914-682-3707. BBC Concert Orchestra, classical. April 25 at 8 p.m. $21.25 to $82.50. The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6200; artscenter.org. RHINEBECK Church of the Messiah The Enso String Quartet, classical. April 19 at 3 p.m. $5 and $25; children under 13, free. Church of the Messiah, 6436 Montgomery Street. rhinebeckchambermusic.org; 845-876-2870. SAUGERTIES Saugerties Pro Musica, Saugerties United Methodist Church Ashu, classical saxophone. April 19 at 3 p.m. $10 and $12; students, free. Saugerties Pro Musica, Saugerties United Methodist Church, Washington Avenue and Post Street. saugertiespromusica.org; 845-679-5733. SCARSDALE Scarsdale Synagogue Temples Tremont and Emanu-El Mama Doni Band, pop. April 26 at 10 a.m. Free. Scarsdale Synagogue Temples Tremont and Emanu-El, 2 Ogden Road. 914-725-5175; sstte.org. SCARSDALE Shaarei Tikvah \u201cYou and the Night and the Music,\u201d jazz. April 25 at 9 p.m. $20 and $36. Shaarei Tikvah, 46 Fox Meadow Road. shaareitikvah.org; 914-472-2013. SOUTH SALEM South Salem Presbyterian Church Anthony Newman, piano. April 19 at 3 p.m. $25 to $50. South Salem Presbyterian Church, 111 Spring Street. southsalempc.org; 914-763-9282. TARRYTOWN Tarrytown Music Hall Artistry Dance Project\u2019s Spring Gala. April 25 at 7 p.m. $30 and $40. Tarrytown Music Hall, 13 Main Street. 877-840-0457; tarrytownmusichall.org. VALHALLA Academic Arts Theater Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, contemporary. April 25 at 8 p.m. $18 to $24. Academic Arts Theater, 75 Grasslands Road. 914-606-6262; sunywcc.edu/smartarts. WHITE PLAINS Downtown Music, Grace Church Anna Han and Allan Yueh, classical. April 19 at 5 p.m. $10 to $25. Downtown Music, Grace Church, 33 Church Street. 914-248-1112; dtmusic.org. WHITE PLAINS White Plains High School New Westchester Symphony Orchestra Spring Concert. April 26 at 3 p.m. $10. White Plains High School, 550 North Street. 914-623-8075; newsymphony.org. WOODSTOCK Bearsville Theater Michael Hurley, jazz and blues. April 19 at 8 p.m. $15. Glass Hammer, progressive rock. April 24 at 8 p.m. $20 and $27. Conehead Buddha, salsa and ska. April 25 at 9 p.m. $15. Bearsville Theater, 291 Tinker Street. bearsvilletheater.com; 845-679-4406. Image KINGSTON The rock guitarist Jeff Beck will perform on April 21 at 8 p.m. at the Ulster Performing Arts Center, 601 Broadway. Tickets are $74 to $89. For further information: 845-339-6088 or upac.org . Credit Chad Batka for The New York Times YONKERS St. John\u2019s Church \u201cEarth Grooves,\u201d Abdoulaye Diabete, the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and Agua Clara Andean Ensemble. Proceeds to benefit Clearwater. April 25 at 7 p.m. $15 to $100. St. John\u2019s Church, 1 Hudson Street. clearwater.org/earthgrooves; 845-265-8080. YONKERS Yonkers Public Library, Grinton I. Will Branch Yonkers Pops Band, big band. April 19 at 2 p.m. Free. Yonkers Male Glee Club. April 26 at 3 p.m. Free. Yonkers Public Library, Grinton I. Will Branch, 1500 Central Park Avenue. ypl.org/grinton; 914-337-1500. Outdoors BRONX Wave Hill Tree TLC with Wayne Morris, Arbor Day walk and demonstration. April 24 at 1 p.m. Free with museum admission. $8 to $12; members and children under 12, free. Wave Hill, 675 West 252nd Street. 718-549-3200; wavehill.org. KATONAH Muscoot Farm Guided bird walk. April 26 at 7:30 a.m. Free. Muscoot Farm, 51 Route 100. muscootfarm.org; 914-864-7282. OSSINING Teatown Lake Reservation Signs of Spring Hike, guided walk and naturalist lessons. April 19 at 10 a.m. $7; members, free. Colors of Nature, guided walk. April 26 at 1 p.m. Free. Parking is $5. Teatown Lake Reservation, 1600 Spring Valley Road. 914-762-2912; teatown.org. SLEEPY HOLLOW Philipsburg Manor Sheep-to-Shawl Festival, sheep shearing, hands-on activities and an 18th-century fashion show. April 19, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. $8 to $16; children 3 and under, free. Philipsburg Manor, 381 North Broadway. 914-631-8200; hudsonvalley.org. YONKERS Untermyer Park and Gardens Tours of the Persian garden and estate restoration. Sunday at 2 p.m. through May 17. $10. $20 on May 3. Untermyer Park and Gardens, 945 North Broadway. 914-512-0436; untermyergardens.org. YORKTOWN HEIGHTS Hilltop Hanover Farm Lawn to Garden Workshop. April 19, 10 a.m. to noon. $35. Hilltop Hanover Farm, 1271 Hanover Street. hilltophanoverfarm.org; 914-962-2368. Spoken Word ARMONK North Castle Public Library James Frey discusses his new book, \u201cEndgame: The Calling.\u201d April 20 at 7:30 p.m. $10. North Castle Public Library, 19 Whippoorwill Road East. 914-273-3887; friendsncpl.org. BEDFORD Historic Court House William Abranowicz discusses his book \u201cA Year in the Mianus River Gorge.\u201d April 22 at 6:30 p.m. Free. Historic Court House, 615 Old Post Road. bedfordhistoricalsociety.org; 914-234-9751. DOBBS FERRY Greenburgh Hebrew Center \u201cAfter Equality: \u2018Queering\u2019 Jewish Theology,\u201d lecture by Jay Michaelson. April 20 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Greenburgh Hebrew Center, 515 Broadway. g-h-c.org; 914-693-4260. MARLBORO The Falcon \u201cAmplify Sound Concert Series,\u201d poetry readings and performances. April 20 at 7 p.m. Donations accepted. The Falcon, 1348 Route 9W. liveatthefalcon.com; 845-236-7970. PEEKSKILL Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art \u201cLove and Lust, Sin and Virtue as conceptualized in Native American Culture,\u201d lecture by Jeffrey Gibson. April 22 at 6 p.m. $15 to $25. Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, 1701 Main Street. 914-788-0100; hvcca.org. PURCHASE Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College \u201cEuropean Renaissance Art and the Dress of African Subjects,\u201d lecture by Paul Kaplan. April 23 at 4:30 p.m. $3 to $5. Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6100; www.neuberger.org. SLEEPY HOLLOW Hudson Valley Writers\u2019 Center Poetry readings by Ellen Bass. April 22 at 7:30 p.m. $5. Readings by Sergio Troncoso, Wayne L. Miller and Larry Wentz. April 24 at 7:30 p.m. $5. Readings by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and his students. April 26 at 4:30 p.m. $5. Hudson Valley Writers\u2019 Center, 300 Riverside Drive. 914-332-5953; writerscenter.org. TARRYTOWN Lyndhurst Estate A staged reading of Catherine Ladnier\u2019s \u201cDear Mom and Dad.\u201d April 26 at 3 p.m. $15. Lyndhurst Estate, 635 South Broadway. 914-366-7898; jcconthehudson.org. WHITE PLAINS Barnes & Noble Rabbi Joseph Polak discusses his book \u201cAfter the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring.\u201d April 21 at 7 p.m. Free. Barnes & Noble, 230 Main Street. hhrecny.org; 914-696-0738. YONKERS Hudson River Museum Ann Cefola reads from her book \u201cFurious Stardust: Poems of the Night Sky.\u201d April 26 at 3:30 p.m. $3 to $6. Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue. 914-963-4550; hrm.org. Theater ARMONK Hudson Stage Company, at Whippoorwill Hall, North Castle Public Library \u201cOutside Mullingar,\u201d drama by John Patrick Shanley. Through May 2. $30 and $35. Hudson Stage Company, at Whippoorwill Hall, North Castle Public Library, 19 Whippoorwill Road. hudsonstage.com; 914-271-2811. CROTON FALLS Schoolhouse Theater \u201cA Living Documentary,\u201d one-woman show by Cynthia Hopkins. April 24 through May 10. $35 and $38. Schoolhouse Theater, 3 Owens Road. schoolhousetheater.org; 914-277-8477. ELMSFORD Westchester Broadway Theater \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d musical by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. Through July 5. $54 to $84 for meal and show. Westchester Broadway Theater, 1 Broadway Plaza. 914-592-2222; broadwaytheatre.com. HYDE PARK Half Moon Theater, at the Culinary Institute of America \u201cThe Fantasticks,\u201d musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. April 24 through May 10. $25 to $40. Half Moon Theater, at the Culinary Institute of America, 1946 Campus Drive. halfmoontheatre.org; 800-838-3006. POUGHKEEPSIE Hudson Valley Community Center \u201cMacbeth,\u201d Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. April 19 at 3 p.m. $15 to $30. Hudson Valley Community Center, 110 South Grand Avenue. hvcommunitycenter.com; 845-471-0430. WHITE PLAINS White Plains Performing Arts Center \u201cCarrie the Musical,\u201d by Michael Gore, Dean Pitchford and Lawrence D. Cohen. April 24 through 26. $20 and $25. White Plains Performing Arts Center, 11 City Place. 914-328-1600; wppac.com. Image BRONX \u201cWrapped in Denim\u201d (2014), quilted fabric by Loretta Bennett, is on view in the group exhibition \u201cThe Gee\u2019s Bend Tradition\u201d through May 6 at the Lehman College Art Gallery, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West. For further information: lehman.edu/gallery or 718-960-8731. Credit Loretta Bennett YORKTOWN HEIGHTS Yorktown Stage \u201cGypsy,\u201d musical by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. April 24 through 26. $19 to $28. Yorktown Stage, 1974 Commerce Street. 914-962-0606; yorktownstage.org. Museums and Galleries BEACON Matteawan Gallery Works by Lilian Kreutzberger. Through May 3. Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Matteawan Gallery, 464 Main Street. 845-440-7901; matteawan.com. BEACON RiverWinds Gallery \u201cBirds in Flight,\u201d photographs by David Wong. Through May 3. Wednesdays through Mondays, noon to 6 p.m.; second Saturdays, noon to 9 p.m. RiverWinds Gallery, 172 Main Street. 845-838-2880; riverwindsgallery.com. BEACON The Lofts at Beacon Gallery \u201cRavenswind Midnight Masquerade,\u201d Barbara Doherty, Brenda Heady Krajchy, Patrick Hannagan and Nikki Rae. Through April 30. Weekdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Lofts at Beacon Gallery, 18 Front Street. 845-202-7211; loftsatbeacon.com. BEACON Theo Ganz Studio \u201cDispatches From Eternity,\u201d group show. Through May 3. Fridays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; and by appointment. Theo Ganz Studio, 149 Main Street. 917-318-2239; theoganzstudio.com. BETHEL Bethel Woods Center for the Arts \u201cPeace, Love, Unity, Respect: The Rise of Electronic Music Culture in America.\u201d Through May 31. $6 to $15; children under 3, free. Thursdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through April 29. Daily, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. from April 30 through Sept. 7. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 200 Hurd Road. 866-781-2922; bethelwoodscenter.org. BRONX Bronx Museum of the Arts \u201cEscape Route: Paintings and Drawings by Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave.\u201d Through May 31. \u201cThree Photographers From the Bronx: Jules Aarons, Morton Broffman and Joe Conzo.\u201d Through June 14. \u201cJaime Davidovich: Adventures of the Avant-Garde.\u201d Through June 14. \u201cCuba Libre!\u201d Group show. Through June 21. \u201cPlease Touch,\u201d installation by Raul Mour\u00e3o. Through June 21. Thursdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse. 718-681-6000; bronxmuseum.org. BRONX The New York Botanical Garden \u201cThe Orchid Show: Chandeliers,\u201d in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Through April 19. $8 to $25; children under 2, free. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The New York Botanical Garden, Southern Boulevard. 718-817-8700; nybg.org. GARRISON Garrison Art Center \u201cCrossing the Lines,\u201d group show. \u201cSuspended Carbon,\u201d Keiko Sono. Through May 3. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Garrison Art Center, 23 Garrison\u2019s Landing. garrisonartcenter.org; 845-424-3960. HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON Upstream Gallery Works by Jerry Vis and Arline Simon. Through April 19. Thursdays through Sundays, 12:30 to 5:30 p.m.; and by appointment. Upstream Gallery, 8 Main Street. upstreamgallery.com; 914-674-8548. HUDSON Carrie Haddad Gallery \u201cRichard Merkin: His Favorite Things,\u201d figurative paintings. Through April 19. \u201cCast of Characters and Heavy Metal,\u201d group show. April 22 through May 31. Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Carrie Haddad Gallery, 622 Warren Street. 518-828-1915; carriehaddadgallery.com. HUDSON Curatorium \u201cVeiled Actions,\u201d George Hildrew. \u201cEveryday Places,\u201d Cathryn Griffin. Through May 7. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; and by appointment. Curatorium, 60 South Front Street. 212-537-6029; curatoriumhudson.org. KATONAH Katonah Museum of Art \u201cChris Larson: The Katonah Relocation Project.\u201d \u201cA Home for Art: Edward Larrabee Barnes and the KMA.\u201d Through June 28. $5 and $10; members and children under 12, free. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay Street. katonahmuseum.org; 914-232-9555. NEW PALTZ Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, at the State University of New York at New Paltz \u201cVideofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television.\u201d \u201cGrace Hartigan: Myths and Malls.\u201d \u201cThe Maverick Festival at 100.\u201d Through July 12. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, at the State University of New York at New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive. newpaltz.edu/museum. 845-257-3844. NORTH SALEM Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden \u201cTouching Rain,\u201d paintings by Judith Kruger. \u201cShards,\u201d ceramics by Karen Ford. Through June 20. $4 and $5; members and children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m.; and by appointment. Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden, 28 Deveau Road. hammondmuseum.org; 914-669-5033. NYACK Edward Hopper House Art Center \u201cJordan Matter: Hopperesque Dancers Among Us,\u201d photographs. Through June 14. $2 to $7; members and children under 16, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; and by appointment. Edward Hopper House Art Center, 82 North Broadway. 845-358-0774; edwardhopperhouse.org. PEEKSKILL Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art \u201cLove: The First of the 7 Virtues,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 6. $2 to $5; members and children under 8, free. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.; and by appointment. Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, 1701 Main Street. hvcca.org; 914-788-0100. PELHAM Pelham Art Center \u201cIn the Courtyard: Fugitive Color by Kristen Rego,\u201d public art installation. On view 24 hours daily through June 12. Pelham Art Center, 155 Fifth Avenue. 914-738-2525; pelhamartcenter.org. PORT CHESTER Clay Art Center \u201cDivergent Currents: The Ripple Effect of Japan on American Ceramic Artists.\u201d Through May 9. Mondays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and by appointment. Clay Art Center, 40 Beech Street. clayartcenter.org; 914-937-2047. POUGHKEEPSIE The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge \u201cBridge Music,\u201d sound installation by Joseph Bertolozzi. Through Oct. 31. Dawn to dusk. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge. josephbertolozzi.com. POUGHKEEPSIE Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center \u201cThrough the Looking Glass: Daguerreotype Masterworks From the Dawn of Photography.\u201d Through June 14. \u201cEmbodying Compassion in Buddhist Art: Image, Pilgrimage, Practice.\u201d April 23 through June 28. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 124 Raymond Avenue. 845-437-5632; fllac.vassar.edu. PURCHASE Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College \u201cKuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space and Time.\u201d Through June 14. $3 to $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road. 914-251-6100; www.neuberger.org. TUCKAHOE Westchester Italian Cultural Center \u201cIdentity: Horizons and Colors, Campania and the Amalfi Coast.\u201d Through May 22. Suggested donation, $5 and $10. Weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Weekends, by appointment. Westchester Italian Cultural Center, 1 Generoso Pope Place. 914-771-8700; wiccny.org. WHITE PLAINS ArtsWestchester \u201cCrossing Borders: Memory and Heritage in a New America.\u201d Through May 2. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Avenue. artswestchester.org; 914-428-4220. WOODSTOCK Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts \u201cInfluence,\u201d group show. Through April 19. Fridays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.; and by appointment. Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street. woodstockguild.org; 845-679-2079. YONKERS Hudson River Museum \u201cFrohawk Two Feathers: Kill Your Best Ideas, The Battle for New York and Its Lifeline, the Hudson River.\u201d \u201cPromoting the President in Celebration of Washington\u2019s Birthday.\u201d Through May 17. $3 to $6; members, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue. 914-963-4550; hrm.org.", "keyword": "Art;The arts;Westchester"}
{"id": "ny0118799", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/07/03", "title": "Republican Governor of Florida Says State Won\u2019t Expand Medicaid", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In another sign of resistance to President Obama\u2019s health care overhaul , Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, said Monday that his state would not expand its Medicaid program. Florida is the largest state to say so firmly that it will take advantage of a new option granted by the Supreme Court decision on the health care law. The 2010 law calls for a sweeping expansion of Medicaid, to add 17 million people to the rolls, accounting for half of all the uninsured people expected to gain coverage nationwide. \u201cFlorida will opt out of spending approximately $1.9 billion more taxpayer dollars required to implement a massive entitlement expansion of the Medicaid program,\u201d said Mr. Scott, a former health care executive. More than one-fifth of Florida residents \u2014 roughly 4 million of 19 million people \u2014 lack health insurance. Mr. Scott also rejected another provision of the new federal law, saying Florida would not set up a health insurance exchange, or a regulated market where people can shop for coverage. The governor acknowledged that for three years, from 2014 to 2016, the federal government would pay all the costs of covering people newly eligible for Medicaid. But, he said, \u201cthe burden increasingly shifts to Florida taxpayers in future years.\u201d Mr. Scott said Medicaid was \u201cgrowing three and a half times as fast as Florida\u2019s general revenue\u201d and was gobbling up money needed for education. Obama administration officials said they were not worried by the rumblings among Republican officials in Florida and other states. Obama aides predicted that all states would eventually expand Medicaid and set up exchanges when they realized the benefits. \u201cThe vast majority of states will come in,\u201d Jacob J. Lew, the White House chief of staff, said Sunday on the ABC News program \u201cThis Week.\u201d \u201cFor those few that are slow to come in, they\u2019re going to have to answer to people why they\u2019re turning this down and why they\u2019re letting people go without coverage.\u201d Congress required states to expand Medicaid to cover nonelderly people with incomes less than or equal to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (up to $25,390 for a family of three). But the Supreme Court said that the change was optional, and that the federal government could not penalize recalcitrant states by withholding money they receive under the existing Medicaid program. Republicans in Congress are encouraging continued state opposition to the federal law, which was upheld last week by the Supreme Court . A group of Republican lawmakers \u2014 12 senators and 61 House members \u2014 said Monday that they had sent a letter to governors urging them not to set up insurance exchanges. It now appears that the federal government could be running the exchanges in one-third to half of all states in 2014, far more than lawmakers assumed when they passed the law. Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, a Republican, said Monday that she would not set up an exchange because \u201cstates have little meaningful flexibility under the Obama administration\u2019s concept of state-based exchanges.\u201d A Texas official welcomed the Supreme Court decision, saying it provided an opportunity for states to \u201cpush back against\u201d the expansion of Medicaid. \u201cMedicaid already consumes a quarter of the state budget in Texas, and enrollment and costs would mushroom under the Affordable Care Act,\u201d said the official, Thomas M. Suehs, the executive commissioner of health and human services. Miriam E. Harmatz, a lawyer at Florida Legal Services , said Mr. Scott\u2019s action was \u201ca terrible decision for our clients, who would have benefited from the expansion of Medicaid, and a shortsighted decision for the economy of the state,\u201d which would have benefited from an infusion of federal Medicaid money into the health care industry. Bruce Rueben, president of the Florida Hospital Association , said he hoped Mr. Scott would reconsider and reverse his decision on Medicaid. Deborah S. Bachrach, a former Medicaid director in New York, said, \u201cMany states will accept the Medicaid expansion, given that the federal government is paying all the costs in the short term and most of the costs in the long term.\u201d", "keyword": "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010);Florida;Medicaid;Health Insurance and Managed Care;Scott Richard L;Supreme Court"}
{"id": "ny0160809", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/03/25", "title": "Food Makers and Critics Break Bread", "abstract": "IF you want to get an earful about the sins of the food industry, spend a few hours with Kelly D. Brownell. Mr. Brownell, 54, is the chairman of the psychology department at Yale University. Early in his career, he conducted clinical trials aimed at treating obesity, and issues surrounding the obesity crisis -- nutrition, portion size, the prevalence of junk food, and so on -- have long been his primary focus. Not 10 minutes after I'd met him, Mr. Brownell was showing me the slide show he uses to accompany his standard speech about obesity. \"Can You Identify This Food?\" one slide asked, and listed 56 ingredients, most of them unpronounceable. The next slide showed the answer: a Kellogg's Pop-Tart. He has a slide picturing baby bottles with the logos of 7Up, Pepsi and Dr Pepper. \"This is where it starts,\" he said with visible disgust. \"This is exploitation of children. Joe Camel is off the billboards, but Ronald McDonald is fine.\" He has a series of United States maps that chart the startling increase in the percentage of overweight Americans, state by state, from 1985 to 2003. \"There is plenty of nutrition education done in this country,\" Mr. Brownell said. \"It is done by the food industry. It has convinced us that fruit roll-ups are healthy, and that a cereal that is half its weight in sugar is part of a nutritious diet.\" He added, \"The increasing prevalence of obesity is like a hundred-car freight train going downhill with no brakes. And our country's response has been to stand outside the tracks and ask it to slow down.\" A year ago, in an effort to do something more than simply agitate, Mr. Brownell founded the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Part of its mission is to fight \"weight bias\" -- that is, prejudice against overweight and obese people, which is the passion of Leslie Rudd, a California entrepreneur who gave Mr. Brownell $7.5 million to establish the center. But Mr. Brownell also wants to use the center to \"change the world's diet.\" He hopes the center will be a place where people can dream up wholly original -- even radical -- ideas that go beyond the tried and true. Back in 1994, Mr. Brownell showed that he was willing to broach such ideas when he proposed, in The New York Times, that unhealthy food be taxed as a way of helping people change their diets. (The food industry and its allies quickly derided his proposal as the \"Twinkie tax.\") He wants the center to do persuasive, unbiased studies, and to come up with public policy ideas that can truly change the way we eat. And here's something else the Rudd Center is doing. Mr. Brownell has begun a program called safe space, where public health advocates and food industry critics can meet privately with industry representatives, and where they can do something they don't do very often: talk. Not fight, not argue, not debate, but really talk. Listen to what the other side has to say. Search for common ground. Devise approaches and strategies that people on both sides can agree on. Now there's an out-of-the-box idea. WHENEVER a company or an industry finds itself under attack, its instinct is to attack right back. Think about the tobacco industry for much of its history, or General Electric dealing with the Hudson River pollution problem, or timber companies and environmentalists, or Wal-Mart and its critics. Initially, executives tend to view the critics as misguided naifs -- they don't understand the good the company does, or the complexity of the problem. As the criticism increases, these positions not only harden, they darken. The critics become the enemy. Of course, the same thing happens on the other side. Corporations become demonized, and the activists come to see themselves as people at war with an evil industry. Not long ago, for instance, I asked a tobacco control advocate what his ultimate goal was. To my surprise, the first words out of his mouth were not \"to get fewer people to smoke\"; they were \"to destroy the tobacco industry.\" Many rituals of American society only worsen the problem. Companies that concede they did something wrong will inevitably be buried in litigation. Just ask Merck, which thought it would be applauded for withdrawing Vioxx, but instead faces thousands of lawsuits. And then there's the media, which revels in conflict. \"When I'm on 'Nightline' with the head of the grocery lobby, it is going to be about debate and conflict,\" Mr. Brownell said. Nobody, of course, is talking about destroying the food industry. \"We need the food industry to feed us,\" said David S. Ludwig, the director for the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston. And the food industry is not as monolithic as other industries; there are many companies, starting with PepsiCo, that badly want to get out in front of the obesity problem. \"As recently as five years ago, there was a temptation on the part of industry to frame the issue in terms of personal responsibility, physical activity and choice,\" said Sylvia Rowe, a consultant who formerly ran the International Food Information Council, an industry-financed group that specializes in food science and nutrition. \"But now there is a genuine recognition that they have a role and a responsibility.\" And in those two basic facts -- that the activists don't want to drive the industry into the sea, and the industry realizes it has to engage with the problem -- Mr. Brownell saw opportunity. The point of his safe space idea was to give each side a place where it could put aside its talking points, speak with rare honesty, and not have to worry that anything it said might wind up haunting it in the courtroom or in the media. Mr. Brownell's first big safe space meeting was held last summer. \"We wanted to take on the toughest issue: soft drinks in schools,\" Mr. Brownell said. There were representatives from Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association, as well as scientists and public health advocates. The meeting was led by Mr. Brownell and a lawyer who represents the beverage industry. It was decided beforehand that neither side would talk to the media in detail about what happened, to help ensure that the space was, indeed, safe. \"From our point of view, we wanted to see if there were places where profitability and health might intersect,\" Mr. Brownell said. \"My goal is to have children drink healthier beverages. Their goal is to maximize profits. So one question I asked them was whether they were agnostic as to which beverages kids were drinking, so long as they were selling them. If they make as much on bottled water as on a soft drink, is that O.K.? We could ask that question and get an honest answer.\" The Pepsi representative at the meeting, Brock Leach, told Mr. Brownell that the answer to that question, from his company's point of view, was yes. In 2002, \"we made a commitment that half of our new products would be better for you,\" he told me. Last year, he added, two-thirds of the company's growth in North America came from its healthier products. \"There is clearly a business case for this,\" he said. On the other hand, Mr. Leach also said he felt that the food industry's critics spent too much time trying to restrict marketing, \"and not enough on putting out better food.\" \"That is going to be the solution. Our point is why don't you focus more on that end of the equation.\" He said that during the safe space meeting as well. Mr. Brownell, though a critic of much industry marketing, agrees with him. I should note that not every activist is as enthused about the safe space idea as Mr. Brownell is. \"My experience is that if you try for 35 years to talk to them and don't see much progress, you try other approaches,\" said Michael F. Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. His preferred method to change the industry is to threaten to sue. Recently, as a result of a threatened lawsuit, \"the makers of Aunt Jemima frozen blueberry waffles no longer pretend that their waffles are made with blueberries,\" he wrote in a recent issue of the center's newsletter. He is also now openly threatening to sue the beverage industry over soft drinks in schools. \"We have good discussions with industry,\" he said. \"They're called negotiations.\" Mr. Brownell concedes that what he is doing is an experiment that might not work. But I think it is worth the try. Litigation threats might force Aunt Jemima to come clean about its blueberry waffles, but the product itself hasn't become any healthier. And in any case, litigation is more a tool for punishing wrongdoing than changing public policy, where it usually fails. There is a chance that by bringing the parties together, and offering them a safe space, something bigger could be accomplished than changing a waffle label. Indeed, Mr. Brownell told me that by the end of the meeting with the beverage industry, they had come up with two projects they are now pursuing. But he wouldn't tell me what they were because that would violate the rules of engagement. When I put the question to Susan Neely, the president of the American Beverage Association, she declined as well. As a journalist, I would normally be miffed by this. But this one time, I'm not. It seems like progress.", "keyword": "RUDD CENTER FOR FOOD POLICY AND OBESITY;YALE UNIVERSITY;RUDD LESLIE;BROWNELL KELLY D;DIET AND NUTRITION;WEIGHT;OBESITY;FOOD"}
{"id": "ny0122480", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2012/09/28", "title": "N.F.L.\u2019s Replacement Referees Wake Up From a Dream", "abstract": "To many, they will be remembered as impostors, a band of striped, whistle-blowing charlatans who crept onto the biggest stage in sports for a few weeks of singular and unabated outrage. For the replacement officials themselves, though, the experience of working at the heart of the N.F.L. \u2019s most recent controversy was more nuanced: refereeing football\u2019s highest level of games will never be forgotten, of course, but neither will the frustration that came with becoming a punching bag for bloggers and broadcasters, players and coaches, television animators and late-night talk show hosts. \u201cMy daughter found the \u2018Call Me Maybe\u2019 video they did of us and showed it to me, and I had to laugh,\u201d said Jeff Sadorus, a former college official who worked as a field judge during the recent lockout of the N.F.L.\u2019s regular officials. \u201cHonestly, sometimes during this whole thing it felt like the national pastime in this country had changed from football to bashing replacement officials.\u201d He added: \u201cEveryone wanted perfection, but come on: the last guy who was perfect they nailed to a cross. And he wasn\u2019t even an official.\u201d While employed by the league, the replacements were bound by its standard media policy, meaning they could not do interviews even as consternation over their performance grew. With the regular officials returning to work Thursday night, however, Sadorus \u2014 who also returned to his job, at a food services company near Seattle \u2014 described the up-and-down nature of his N.F.L. tenure in an interview with The New York Times. Ultimately, he said, it was a dream \u2014 \u201csomething I had wanted to do forever and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity\u201d \u2014 but that does not mean it was without difficulty. Sadorus detailed a drama that played out over about four months and included clinics, camps, exhibitions and games, as well as nearly 25,000 miles of travel and the constant awareness that every decision he and his colleagues made was under \u201cunprecedented scrutiny,\u201d according to Commissioner Roger Goodell. For his work, Sadorus received a generous stipend \u2014 $3,000 per game \u2014 but had to take with it an unending barrage of criticism, as replacement-official ripping dominated the news media. The replacements were even satirized on the popular animated show \u201cSouth Park.\u201d \u201cIt was the only thing on TV; it was everywhere,\u201d Sadorus said, adding that now that the lockout is over, he and his colleagues might not even get to keep their league-issued officials shirts. \u201cI think in the contract we signed, it said we had to return the equipment,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s O.K. \u2014 I have a lot of stripes.\u201d As he watched the controversial conclusion to Monday night\u2019s game between Seattle and Green Bay \u2014 a disastrous sequence that many believe pushed the labor dispute toward its ultimate resolution \u2014 Sadorus felt for the officials involved because he had been in their situation. The night before, he was the official who ruled that a Ravens field goal that went over the top of an upright was good, giving Baltimore a victory over the New England Patriots. While that call was ultimately shown to be correct, it nonetheless prompted a visceral reaction from the Patriots, including Coach Bill Belichick, who grabbed one of Sadorus\u2019s crew mates as the official ran off the field. Belichick was fined $50,000 by the league. \u201cWorking these games was something I\u2019d wanted to do forever,\u201d Sadorus said, \u201cand there were some incredible moments. But there were also parts of this that I don\u2019t think anyone could have expected.\u201d The process began, Sadorus said, near the end of May, when he was sent an e-mail from an area scout who was gauging interest from potential replacements. Sadorus \u2014 who worked in the Pacific-10 Conference until 2010, occasionally officiated at Seattle Seahawks practices (which drew some attention when he became a replacement ), and still officiates high school games \u2014 immediately responded positively. Not long after, he attended a rules clinic and fitness test in Dallas where replacement hopefuls were put through a rigorous running exam \u2014 in searing heat \u2014 in an attempt to identify the best candidates. Sadorus, who was one of the more experienced officials, made it through the exams and was notified in a mid-July e-mail that he had been placed on a replacement crew. He also received a letter from Goodell, thanking him for his service. For a lifelong fan of officials, getting the assignment was heavenly. Sadorus\u2019s father was a college official, and even as a young boy, Sadorus said, he could flip on the TV and immediately identify whether an American Football League or N.F.L. game was on by the types of shirts the officials were wearing. Sadorus acknowledged that becoming a replacement was a complex professional choice \u2014 doing so probably hurt some officials\u2019 chances at working top college games in the future because many N.F.L. referees are also college supervisors \u2014 as well as a difficult ethical decision. Those replacements who were friendly with the regular N.F.L. officials beforehand may now have strained relationships. \u201cWe weren\u2019t there to take anyone\u2019s job; we were there to provide a service,\u201d Sadorus said. \u201cThe games were going to get done by someone. It\u2019s the old saying: without officials, it\u2019s just recess.\u201d After being notified of their selection, most of the replacements then spent time officiating at a team\u2019s preseason training camp (Sadorus was with San Francisco). But despite a crash course of instruction, the disparagement of the replacements began early on. Many of the fill-ins had far less experience than Sadorus \u2014 some had never worked higher than Division III college games \u2014 and it was clear that they were often overmatched by the speed of the N.F.L. Still, the league defended the replacements vigorously, and Sadorus said they were treated like the regular officials. They spent hours on weekly video review. They had conference calls with supervisors. They did refresher rules quizzes. In the end, though, they were still skewered, somewhat souring an experience that should have been something closer to a referee\u2019s pinnacle. \u201cWe worked very, very hard,\u201d Sadorus said. \u201cAs demonized as we were, I hope people remember that we are people, too.\u201d", "keyword": "Sadorus Jeff;Officiating (Sports);National Football League;Football"}
{"id": "ny0149757", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/09/01", "title": "Japanese Drug Maker to Pay $1.1 Billion for U.S. Rival", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 Shionogi & Company, the Japanese drug maker, plans to buy an American rival, Sciele Pharma for $1.1 billion, the fourth big overseas deals in nine months by a Japanese company eager to expand overseas. The bid, which follows acquisitions by Takeda Pharmaceutical, Daiichi Sankyo and the Eisai Company is aimed at building Shionogi\u2019s sales network in the United States. \u201cAs we have moved ahead on improving our product pipeline, we have been faced with increasingly imminent challenge of getting a hold of a sales network in the world\u2019s largest market,\u201d the president of Shionogi, Isao Teshirogi, said Monday. Sciele should also help Shionogi in gaining approvals for new drugs from American regulators. For Sciele Pharma, which specializes in branded prescription products focused on cardiovascular, diabetes, women\u2019s health and pediatrics, the deal comes as it faces a possible plunge in revenue because of generic competition for its No. 1 drug. Shionogi said it would offer $31 a share, a 61 percent premium to Sciele\u2019s close of $19.27 on Friday, costing $1.1 billion. Shionogi\u2019s total bill comes to $1.42 billion including $325 million to redeem senior convertible notes. The bidder said it would probably finance the purchase with 47 billion yen in cash and 110 billion yen in bridge loans. Shares of Shionogi, whose mainstay business is antibiotics, closed down 0.6 percent, at 2,460 yen ahead of the announcement. Eager to expand globally, Japanese pharmaceutical makers have been putting money made on top-selling drugs into acquisitions. Takeda, Japan\u2019s largest drug maker, bought the American biotechnology firm Millennium Pharmaceuticals in April for more than $8 billion. In June, Daiichi Sankyo bid up to $4.6 billion for control of India\u2019s Ranbaxy Laboratories, while Eisai snapped up cancer specialist MGI Pharma in December for $3.9 billion. The deal is also the latest in a string of overseas acquisitions by financially sound Japanese companies hunting for opportunities outside their home market. Already this year, announced outbound acquisitions from Japan total $42 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data, nearly double the figure for all of 2007. Sciele is rushing to promote newly approved forms of its blood-pressure drug, Sular, after ending sales of the older version earlier this month. The move could counter potential competition from low-cost generic versions of older Sular.", "keyword": "Sciele Pharma Incorporated;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)"}
{"id": "ny0268544", "categories": ["sports", "cricket"], "date": "2016/04/05", "title": "After Winning Title, West Indies Calls Out Its Cricket Board", "abstract": "West Indies stands atop the cricket world after its double triumph in the World Twenty20, when it became the first country to win the men\u2019s and women\u2019s titles in the same championship. But even as its players celebrated Sunday, there were reminders of the tensions that made their triumph a surprise. There was genuine joy as both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams danced on the field in Kolkata, India, after the presentation of the men\u2019s trophy. But there was also open anger from the West Indies men\u2019s captain, Darren Sammy, who used the platform of a live television interview to express his grievances with the West Indies Cricket Board. \u201cI really want to thank the heads of Caricom \u2014 throughout the tournament they have been supporting the team,\u201d he said, referring to a flow of messages from the nations and states in the West Indies region. \u201cAnd I\u2019m yet to hear from our own cricket board. That is very disappointing.\u201d Sammy reminded his audience that the participation of his team had been in doubt until a few weeks before the tournament started because of the latest in a long series of contractual disputes between the board and the players. At the same time, he said, the dispute had helped pull his team together. \u201cWe had a lot of issues. We felt disrespected by our board,\u201d he said, adding a reference by the former England player and television commentator, Mark Nicholas, who called West Indies a \u201cteam without brains.\u201d He continued: \u201cAll these things before the tournament just brought this team together.\u201d His comments came less than an hour after West Indies became the first men\u2019s team to win the World Twenty20 twice. Its victory over England had echoes of baseball\u2019s fabled \u201cShot Heard Round the World,\u201d the walk-off home run by Bobby Thomson that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants in 1951 over the Brooklyn Dodgers. This was four shots rather than one to win, but they were no less remarkable. West Indies needed 19 runs, usually considered an impossible target, from the final over to beat England, and batsman Carlos Brathwaite struck English bowler Ben Stokes over the boundaries for four consecutive sixes. Stokes was visibly devastated but was cleared of blame by his captain, Eoin Morgan, who said England\u2019s total of 155 had been well short of what was needed and that his bowlers had done brilliantly to put England in a position where it could win. Each team\u2019s innings followed a similar pattern, with the loss of three early wickets followed by determined comebacks. As the game went on, England looked as if it had an increasing stranglehold on West Indies, despite the resistance of Marlon Samuels, whose 85 not out is the highest ever individual score in a World Twenty20 final. But then came Brathwaite\u2019s barrage to win it for West Indies. Samuels was named Man of the Match, while the Indian star Virat Kohli was named the tournament\u2019s best player. The victory by the West Indies women was perhaps even more joyful for the players, as they won the title for the first time, beating the three-time defending champion Australia. \u201cI don\u2019t think it has sunk in yet,\u201d West Indies captain Stafanie Taylor, the tournament\u2019s top player, told reporters. \u201cWhen we wake up in the morning, it\u2019s going to be like, \u2018Is this the real trophy?\u2019 I will ask myself, \u2018Is this real?\u2019 When we touch down in the Caribbean, that\u2019s when it is going to hit you.\u201d Taylor also had a message for the West Indian cricket authorities. \u201cWe have to move on from there, not just enjoy, look at it as a steppingstone. We don\u2019t want to be stuck here. We definitely need some infrastructure, like in England and Australia.\u201d Australia had looked set for an unbeatable total when its captain, Meg Lanning, and Elyse Villani played hard-hitting innings of 52, but it lost the momentum when Deandra Dottin held Australia to a single run in its final over and its total to just below 150. Taylor and Hayley Matthews \u2014 at 18 the youngest woman to play in a World Twenty20 final \u2014 started slowly but soon caught up. They scored 120 before Matthews was dismissed for 66. Taylor fell for 59 just before the final runs were scored on a wild throw by an Australian fielder. It was a slightly anticlimactic end, but none of the West Indian players and coaches who surged onto the field \u2014 or the men\u2019s squad, who joined the celebrations before heading to the locker room before their own match \u2014 complained about the result. There is plenty, as Sammy\u2019s comments show, to put right in West Indian cricket, but its happiest day in 20 years was not a bad place to start.", "keyword": "Cricket;West Indies;Ben Stokes"}
{"id": "ny0284392", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/09/03", "title": "Merkel Feels Political Pressure in Germany as Europe Is in Flux", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 A year after Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open the doors to hundreds of thousands of migrants, that fateful move is haunting her politically, opening her to a strong electoral challenge from the far right this weekend and complicating efforts to forge a united response to Britain\u2019s decision to leave the European Union . Ms. Merkel, chancellor since fall 2005 and Europe\u2019s longest serving leader, has found herself on the defensive in a round of interviews on both the anniversary of the refugee influx and the effective start of campaigning for next year\u2019s national elections. \u201cGermany will remain Germany, with all that is dear to us,\u201d she insisted in an interview this week with the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung, a leading newspaper. With everything in flux in Europe after the stunning British vote to exit the European Union, and elections also in France and the Netherlands next year, Ms. Merkel has come under increasing fire at home. Her approval rating in a widely regarded monthly poll for the public broadcaster ARD slipped to 47 percent in August, compared with 75 percent in April 2015, before the refugee challenge. If national elections were held now, her conservative bloc would get 33 percent of the vote, according to a Forsa Institute poll of 2,503 selected respondents published on Wednesday. That compares with just over 41 percent in the last national vote in 2013. An early indication of the political troubles ahead could arrive on Sunday, when the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has risen largely on popular fears of the mostly Muslim newcomers, threatens to overtake Ms. Merkel\u2019s Christian Democratic Union in elections in her political home state. Such an outcome would be a stinging rebuke of her migrant policies. Opinion polls show the two parties neck and neck, hovering just over 20 percent in a statistical dead heat in the state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one of Germany\u2019s poorest regions in the former East. \u201cThe failed policy of the chancellor is a stroke of luck for our party,\u201d said Alexander Gauland, a leader of Alternative for Germany. \u201cIt drives voters towards us.\u201d Image Protesters in Berlin called for Ms. Merkel\u2019s ouster in July. Credit Axel Schmidt/Reuters By opening Germany\u2019s borders to all last year without consulting even one member of Parliament, he added, Ms. Merkel behaved like a dictator. \u201cIt is regarded by just about every European leader as an act of madness,\u201d he said. In tacit acknowledgment of critics who say she consulted nobody on the refugee move, Ms. Merkel has embarked on a listening tour of Europe to try to repair relations. In Tallinn, the Estonian prime minister effusively thanked her for her leadership. But it was plain in Warsaw, where she met the four Central European leaders who have flatly refused to take in refugees, that she was not among friends. A host of other demands \u2014 from Italy and France for looser purse strings, from Scandinavian and Dutch leaders to beware of fading support for Europe in their countries \u2014 are tugging at Ms. Merkel as she and President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande of France consult the Continent\u2019s leaders. They will succeed, at least on paper, in sketching some grand goals for Europe to be announced at a meeting of 27 nations \u2014 all of the bloc\u2019s members save Britain \u2014 in mid-September. But no one has so far explained how Europe is likely this time, for example, to reduce youth unemployment, a goal voiced for years and reiterated since Britain voted on June 23 to leave the union. Missing goals again is not likely to enhance Europeans\u2019 faith in the bloc. \u201cThe chief concern should be for the attractiveness of the union,\u201d said Guntram B. Wolff, director of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. Security, both internal and external, may be one area of action after terrorist attacks in Belgium , France and Germany this year. The French and German interior ministers have announced enhanced security measures that are likely to be adopted across the Continent. With Britain, one of Europe\u2019s two nuclear powers, looking for the exit, it is no longer in a position to hamper moves toward what France, Germany and Poland defined this week as \u201ca European civil and military planning and command capacity.\u201d That will also require \u201cdevelopment of a strong and competitive defense economy in Europe,\u201d the foreign ministers of the three countries declared. Even Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and Ms. Merkel\u2019s most implacable opponent on refugees, seems to agree. In Warsaw, he bluntly said that Europe had failed to master economic challenges and that \u201cwe have no answers to the migrant crisis.\u201d But, he added, \u201csecurity takes first place.\u201d \u201cWe want to build up a shared European army, common European forces,\u201d he continued. How far any such plans progress is as uncertain as Ms. Merkel\u2019s political future. Analysts and politicians across the board see no serious challenger to Ms. Merkel, who has coyly said only that she will announce \u201cat the given time\u201d whether she will seek a fourth term next year. Jacqueline Boysen wrote a 2001 biography of Ms. Merkel, whom she got to know in the 1990s in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the chancellor has her parliamentary constituency. She doubted that Ms. Merkel would leave her giant refugee task half-finished, or her party in the lurch, by declining to run. \u201cIt would be unlike her to leave the party in a mess,\u201d said Ms. Boysen, now a journalist in Berlin. \u201cShe is very much aware of duty.\u201d She also emphasized that Ms. Merkel, a trained physicist who entered politics only as Germany unified in 1990, had constantly been underestimated. \u201cShe was not taken seriously,\u201d Ms. Boysen recalled in an interview. \u201cThe subtext was always, \u2018She can\u2019t do it.\u2019 \u201d In defense of her decision last year, Ms. Merkel trumpets her success in forging a European Union pact with Turkey to stanch the flow of refugees into the Balkans. But Turkey has proved a difficult partner, purging thousands of judges, teachers, journalists and human rights campaigners after a failed coup in July . Still, in an interview with ARD this week, Ms. Merkel could not resist a little smile as she noted that NATO began a mission to save refugees in the Aegean in just five days in the spring, and that the pact with Turkey was negotiated within months. \u201cMany people said, \u2018We can\u2019t do this,\u2019 and then it got done,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Germany;Angela Merkel;Election;Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Alternative for Germany;EU;Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0052162", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/10/12", "title": "U.S. Reaches Final of Women\u2019s Volleyball World Championship", "abstract": "The United States shut out top-ranked Brazil, 3-0, to make the final of the women\u2019s volleyball world championship in Milan. The Americans rallied in the second set on their way to a 25-18, 29-27, 25-20 win. In Sunday\u2019s final, the Americans will face either host Italy or China. Brazil, the Olympic champion, went undefeated in group play, including a victory over the United States, but it was never in control in Saturday\u2019s match. Brazil committed 19 unforced errors. The Americans enter the final with a 10-2 record.", "keyword": "Volleyball;Brazil"}
{"id": "ny0129545", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2012/06/30", "title": "BP to Pay $5.4. Million on Gender Bias Complaints", "abstract": "The oil company BP and its contractors have agreed to pay up to $5.4 million to resolve complaints that some women weren\u2019t considered for temporary jobs responding to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill because of their gender. The agreement announced late Thursday ends an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission without filing a lawsuit. The commission says it has not determined that BP violated any antidiscrimination laws. BP denies it engaged in any wrongdoing. An undetermined number of women from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida who applied for BP spill response jobs will be eligible for shares of the money.", "keyword": "BP Plc;Suits and Litigation;Discrimination;Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010);Women and Girls"}
{"id": "ny0142969", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/11/15", "title": "Longstanding Obama Adviser Gets Senior Role at the White House", "abstract": "Nearly two decades ago, Valerie Jarrett hired a young lawyer named Michelle Obama for a job at City Hall in Chicago. Now President-elect Barack Obama is hiring Ms. Jarrett for a senior role in the White House. Ms. Jarrett\u2019s role and title are threefold: White House senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental relations and public liaison. A longstanding member of his tiny core of top advisers, Ms. Jarrett will continue providing him with counsel on a wide-ranging set of issues, she said Friday evening. She will help Mr. Obama manage his relationship with the rest of government, serving as the White House\u2019s point person for state and local officials. Finally, she will supervise the Office of Public Liaison, which she hopes to turn into an active channel for government-citizen collaboration. \u201cThe level of the engagement in the campaign was tremendous, and we want people to understand this will be their White House,\u201d she said in an interview. Mr. Obama \u201cwas so committed to a grass-roots campaign and wanted to keep that energy galvanized in a positive direction,\u201d she continued, explaining his thinking for the Public Liaison role. Ms. Jarrett is a lawyer who rose to the top of Chicago city government under the tutelage of Mayor Richard M. Daley, serving as his planning commissioner, and then as chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority. In 1995, Ms. Jarrett joined the Habitat Company, a Chicago real estate company that develops and runs real estate projects from luxury high rises to public housing units; she is now the company\u2019s chief executive. When Mr. Obama began his political career, he was a relative newcomer to Chicago, and Ms. Jarrett, whose roots there run deep, served as tutor and emissary, introducing him to many of the wealthy businesspeople whose donations seeded his rise. In his presidential campaign, Ms. Jarrett gave personal counsel to both Obamas, consulting on major decisions, and acting as diplomat to the outside world. Her White House role reflects her specialty in managing relationships. In particular, Ms. Jarrett soothed the fears of the African-American community, nervous about the first black presidential nominee of a major party, and helped broker peace with supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Shortly after his victory, Mr. Obama named Ms. Jarrett as one of three co-leaders of his transition team . Ms. Jarrett will be a historically rare sight in the White House: a high-ranking official who is African-American and female. But friends and Obama advisers say she is far more than an old chum of Mr. Obama\u2019s or an ambassador to the black community: she is an expert in housing, transportation and health care, and a specialist in negotiation and conflict resolution. A petite, soft-spoken woman, she shares Mr. Obama\u2019s calm, deliberative style, and is widely described as one of the few people who can speak for the president-elect with accuracy and authority. Ms. Jarrett turned 52 years old on Friday. \u201cMy birthday present from the president-elect,\u201d she joked that evening.", "keyword": "Jarrett Valerie;Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0277372", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2016/11/18", "title": "Avocados Imperil Monarch Butterflies\u2019 Winter Home in Mexico", "abstract": "AP\u00daTZIO DE JU\u00c1REZ, Mexico \u2014 The green volcanic hills that tower above Ap\u00fatzio de Ju\u00e1rez have begun to fill with swarms of monarch butterflies, which return each year for the winter stretch of their celebrated \u2014 and imperiled \u2014 migration. But downhill from the monarchs\u2019 mountain roost, in the oak and pine forests that border this small farming town, there lurks a new threat to their winter habitat: a lust to grow the lucrative avocados that are being consumed at record rates in the United States. Spurred by soaring demand for the creamy fruit, farmers here in the western state of Michoac\u00e1n are clearing land to make room for avocado orchards, cutting oak and pine trees that form a vital buffer around the mountain forests where the monarchs nest. \u201cIt\u2019s scandalous what people are doing now to grow avocado,\u201d said Arturo Espinosa Maceda, who has for years grown avocados, peaches and strelizia flowers at a farm some 12 miles north of Ap\u00fatzio. \u201cBut it\u2019s mega-business.\u201d Ap\u00fatzio sits on the western edge of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a 135,000-acre protected area where the butterflies rest on oyamel, or native fir, trees. The butterflies\u2019 numbers have dwindled sharply in recent years, as milkweed declined in the United States and deforestation affected their Mexican habitat. Each year environmentalists hold their breath to see how many butterflies will arrive in Mexico. Image Avocado trees in Zit\u00e1cuaro, in the state of Michoacan. The state doubled its avocado exports over the past seven years to 770,000 tons \u2014 worth roughly $1.5 billion. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times Omar Vidal, director general of the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico, said that conserving the winter sanctuary was \u201cfundamental to the survival of the migration.\u201d Deforestation \u201chas to be reduced to zero,\u201d he said. But the avocado boom could complicate that goal. Americans ate a record seven pounds of avocado per capita in 2015, twice as much as in 2008, according to the Department of Agriculture. Nearly 80 percent of those avocados came from Michoac\u00e1n, the only Mexican state authorized to export the fruit to the United States by the department, which bans avocados from other Mexican regions over fear of pests. Michoac\u00e1n doubled its avocado exports over the last seven years to 770,000 tons \u2014 worth roughly $1.5 billion. The bonanza has been brutal for Michoac\u00e1n\u2019s oak and pine forests, which grow at 5,000 to 7,000 feet \u2014 the same altitude as avocados. Between 1974 and 2011, about 110,000 acres of forest across Michoac\u00e1n\u2019s central highlands were turned into avocado orchards, according to a study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And deforestation is accelerating, experts said. Jaime Nav\u00eda, president of GIRA, a nonprofit organization based in Michoac\u00e1n that promotes sustainable rural development, estimated that 65,000 acres \u2014 most of it forest \u2014 had been converted to avocado growing since that study. \u201cThe damage is irreversible,\u201d he said. Officials have blamed producers looking for a pretext to turn land over to avocado orchards for a spike in the number of forest fires in Michoac\u00e1n this year. But forestry experts and farmers said that Mexico\u2019s environmental watchdog, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection, often turned a blind eye to abuses. Officials are fearful of powerful interests, they said, especially given that organized crime has links to the industry, or bribes make the officials pliant. Image Cutting leaves from avocado trees in an orchard in Zit\u00e1cuaro. Workers make about $7.50 per day to tend the orchards, and twice that during harvests. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times \u201cThe authorities need to control this,\u201d said Armando L\u00f3pez Ordu\u00f1a, general director of the Mexican Avocado Producers and Packer-Exporters Association. To offset deforestation, the association has planted a half-million trees since 2009 and hopes to plant another half-million by 2018, he said. Around Ap\u00fatzio de Juarez, a town of 1,100 people surrounded by fields of guava and corn, scars on the hillsides and patches of young avocado trees signal the crop\u2019s advance. Some here have farmed avocado for decades. But now, growers from other areas are buying land. Dav\u00edd Romero Hern\u00e1ndez, a stocky farmer who was trimming grass in his new avocado orchard on the edge of Ap\u00fatzio one morning in October, said that the land had been covered with oak and pine. But the owner felled the trees a year ago and sold it to him. Mr. Romero, 51, pointed to a shorn hill above his plot. That, too, was also covered in forest until a few months ago, he said. Then a farmer from another village bought it. Image Land cleared for avocado growth in Ap\u00fatzio. Deforestation is accelerating in the state, experts say. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times \u201cIt\u2019s the ambition of avocado,\u201d he said. That ambition could soon increase. Zit\u00e1cuaro, the municipality surrounding Ap\u00fatzio, is in the process of seeking certification to export avocados to the United States \u2014 a fact that is on the lips of every farmer. Certification is awarded municipality by municipality, and not all of Michoac\u00e1n can export avocados. As it stands, some of Ap\u00fatzio\u2019s avocados are sold to buyers from Uruapan \u2014 a town 100 miles west that is the heart of the industry \u2014 who pass them off as having been grown there. Deforestation in Ap\u00fatzio is a recent problem and far less extensive than in other areas of Michoac\u00e1n, experts said. But \u201cit is becoming a significant problem,\u201d given the area\u2019s proximity to the monarchs\u2019 habitat, said Edgar Gonz\u00e1lez Godoy, director in Mexico of the New York-based Rainforest Alliance. Efforts to fight deforestation in the reserve focus on about 34,000 acres around where the butterflies roost. Programs run by the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations have helped cut logging from hundreds of acres each year to just 28 so far this year, said the fund\u2019s Mr. Vidal. But the trees in the reserve\u2019s outer ring play an important role, said Manuel Sarmiento, a biologist and member of the Alliance for the Conservation of Forests, Land and Water, a group of local farmers, environmental activists and residents. Image Ap\u00fatzio de Ju\u00e1rez, a town of 1,100, gets its water from springs fed by the hills east of town. Pine and oak help water filter through the earth and into the spring; avocado, on the other hand, has shallow roots and consumes a lot of that water. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times For example, the trees cool the air from Michoac\u00e1n\u2019s warm western plains as it rises toward the oyamel forests in the center. If the temperature at the heart of the reserve, about seven miles from Ap\u00fatzio, were to rise, the oyamel could suffer, and thus the butterflies would suffer, too, he said. Mr. Gonz\u00e1lez worries that the lure of avocado will only grow if Mexico succeeds in opening new markets. He noted that deforestation is growing in Jalisco State, another area that hopes it will soon be able to export its crop to the United States. \u201cJust imagine what would happen if the Chinese started eating avocado,\u201d he said. In town, residents said avocado had put money into empty pockets. Workers make about $7.50 per day to tend the orchards, and twice that during harvests. A resident can sell an acre to an avocado farmer for about $4,300 \u2014 more than that seller would typically make in a year. \u201cPeople have more to spend and that lifts us all,\u201d said Fernando Bernal, a butcher, as he hacked slabs of pork from a loin. But like others in Ap\u00fatzio, Mr. Bernal worries about water. Ap\u00fatzio\u2019s supply comes from springs fed by the hills east of town. Pine and oak help water filter through the earth and into the spring; avocado, on the other hand, has shallow roots and consumes a lot of that water. If people keep cutting down the forest, \u201cwe\u2019ll run out,\u201d Mr. Bernal said. And Ap\u00fatzio isn\u2019t the only community with much at stake. The hills that stretch north east of here collect water for the massive Cutzamala water system that supplies the thirsty Mexican capital, Mexico City, 100 miles away. Even Mr. Romero, happily tending his avocado bushes on land once filled with mighty trees, is saddened by the loss of forest. He said that his village, Zicata de Morelos, depends on water that comes from the hills near Ap\u00fatzio. \u201cSo we\u2019re all affected,\u201d Mr. Romero said. \u201cBut people don\u2019t think about the future.\u201d", "keyword": "Avocado;Aputzio de Juarez;Butterflies and Moths;Agriculture;Forests;Conservation of Resources;Mexico;International trade"}
{"id": "ny0171215", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/18", "title": "Pirro, a Former District Attorney, and Her Husband Have Separated", "abstract": "After standing by her man as he served a federal prison sentence, admitted fathering a child with another woman and embarrassed her political campaign by telling the press she was not giving him enough attention, Jeanine F. Pirro is separating from her husband, a family spokesman said yesterday. The split comes a year after Ms. Pirro lost her bid to become state attorney general, in a campaign that was hounded by personal concerns as the couple\u2019s marriage troubles made headlines and Ms. Pirro acknowledged that she was under federal investigation for plotting to record her husband, Albert J. Pirro , to catch him in a suspected affair. \u201cWe have agreed to amicably separate,\u201d the couple, who have been married for more than three decades, said in a statement released by the spokesman, Michael McKeon. \u201cAs always, our priority remains our two wonderful children. We ask that people respect our privacy,\u201d said the couple, who declined to comment further. Ms. Pirro, a Republican, ran for the United States Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, but abandoned the bid after failing to attract much attention or money in four months. On the first day of that campaign, she was left stumbling for words for 32 seconds when a page of her announcement speech was missing. As Ms. Pirro, a former Westchester County district attorney, turned her attention to the attorney general seat, she repeatedly fielded questions about her husband, a lawyer, lobbyist and Republican fund-raiser. He served a federal prison sentence for tax fraud and admitted that while he was married to Ms. Pirro, he fathered a child with another woman. In a New York magazine article last year, Mr. Pirro denied having a new affair, but said he sought the company of other women because he felt he was not getting enough attention from his wife, who once made People magazine\u2019s Most Beautiful People list. \u201cYou need to have someone tell you that you\u2019re smart or you\u2019re good-looking or you made a good business decision,\u201d he told the magazine. \u201cDo I think that I would like to have more attention at home? Yeah, and, you know, if you\u2019re not going to get attention at home, I think you really need to make some decisions about your future.\u201d He said he believed his wife\u2019s political career had hurt him financially and legally. Jeanine Pirro told the magazine she had no plans to seek a divorce, insisting she had loved her husband from the day they met. Albert Pirro, however, did not rule out a split. Mr. Pirro was reinstated as a lawyer in January, more than six years after he was disbarred for a tax fraud conviction. By February, the pair had put their homes in Harrison, N.Y., and Florida up for sale for a total of more than $5 million, according to Internet property listings at the time.", "keyword": "Pirro Jeanine;Pirro Albert J;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0047649", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/11/10", "title": "With \u2018High Maintenance,\u2019 Vimeo Invests in Original Content", "abstract": "\u201c High Maintenance ,\u201d a web series on Vimeo about the many customers of a Brooklyn marijuana dealer, has won a devoted following and plenty of critical acclaim. Each of its first 13 episodes has been watched hundreds of thousands of times. The New Yorker raved that the show, \u201cfreed of the constraints\u201d of formulas imposed by television schedules, radiates \u201cnew ideas about storytelling.\u201d But will viewers pay to watch it? Vimeo, the video-sharing web service owned by IAC, will release three new episodes of \u201cHigh Maintenance\u201d on Tuesday. The new episodes \u2014 each less than 20 minutes long \u2014 are $2 apiece, or $8 for a set that includes three more that will be released in January. This is the first time that Vimeo has funded the series directly, and represents the company\u2019s first push into original content, following a recent trend among larger digital companies such as Yahoo, Netflix and Amazon. While Vimeo\u2019s chief executive, Kerry Trainor, is betting that viewers will pay up, he says his ambitions go beyond generating a new source of revenue. He sees \u201cHigh Maintenance\u201d as the perfect show to be a foundation for a prestige television brand, and compares his site\u2019s developing identity to that of premium cable in the 1970s, an analogy in which YouTube plays advertising-powered network television to Vimeo\u2019s HBO. \u201cWe really feel like Vimeo is in the world to find a higher-quality creator, delivering a different experience than what you\u2019d typically find on YouTube,\u201d Mr. Trainor said. \u201cNot to say that YouTube is bad, but Vimeo on the whole has much more of a premium cable and even a film sensibility. That\u2019s what tends to do well on the platform.\u201d Vimeo\u2019s website is built to appeal to fans who favor the work of auteurs. The language of its on-demand platform promotes the people behind the films almost as vociferously as the projects themselves. One prominent button, indicated by a smiley face, exhorts users to \u201csupport creativity,\u201d explaining that \u201cmost of the cash goes to the maker.\u201d The push into original programming is one of several developments intended to reshape Vimeo\u2019s revenue model. The service, which had 33 percent growth in both unique users and subscribers this quarter, recently announced that it would introduce a viewer subscription service next year. (Current subscribers pay for the right to use the production tools offered on Vimeo Plus and Vimeo Pro .) The site\u2019s on-demand platform, introduced in March 2013, has almost 14,000 titles available for purchase, and its gross revenue has nearly doubled since last quarter. Jessica Casano-Antonellis, Vimeo\u2019s director of communications, compared the on-demand portion of the site to iTunes \u201cin that Vimeo is an open platform\u201d where \u201canyone can upload and sell content directly.\u201d Image Ben Sinclair, left, and Avery Monsen in the web series \"High Maintenance.\" Credit Janky Clown Productions For the creators of \u201cHigh Maintenance,\u201d the biggest fear may be that the show\u2019s audience will not be willing to pay for what they used to get free. \u201cThe psychology behind it is what\u2019s become interesting to us,\u201d said Katja Blichfeld, who writes and directs the show with her husband, Ben Sinclair. \u201cWe haven\u2019t experienced pushback yet, but there have been murmurings of people complaining about having to pay now.\u201d For Ms. Blichfeld and Mr. Sinclair, the partnership with Vimeo is an experiment that could help pioneer a way for short-form independent filmmakers to make money from their work. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have some goliath managing your content and distributing it for you,\u201d Mr. Sinclair said. \u201cYou can get rid of all those middlemen and just get a direct conversation between the artist and the audience.\u201d Apart from helping write, direct and edit the show, Mr. Sinclair plays the marijuana dealer. For the most part, his presence is the only element that links individual episodes; otherwise, each focuses on a separate set of characters and tells a stand-alone story. Episodes can vary sharply in tone. The short, comedic \u201cOlivia\u201d tells the story of two thieving gossips who come across as some of the very worst people in New York; a more meditative episode called \u201cBrad Pitts\u201d is a window into the life of a woman with stomach cancer. On the show, drugs are rarely glamorized or used as a form of cheap titillation; Cheech and Chong this is not. Ms. Blichfeld and Mr. Sinclair have each used marijuana for \u201c10 years plus,\u201d and their comfort with the drug is reflected in their characters. Mr. Sinclair\u2019s character, known simply as \u201cthe guy,\u201d is not, for most viewers, a scuzzy criminal, but rather a humane, if somewhat dopey, evolution of the bartender \u2014 a 21st-century version of Sam Malone from \u201cCheers.\u201d Though its creators insist that nothing about their approach has changed with the Vimeo partnership (other than their ability to finally pay collaborators what they deserve), faithful viewers will note an increased sophistication in the new episodes. At its core though, the show remains the same. At a screening last week, a fan asked Mr. Sinclair what he and Ms. Blichfeld had been doing with \u201call that Vimeo money.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s what we\u2019ve been doing, plus,\u201d Mr. Sinclair replied. \u201cIt\u2019s not a new thing. And it\u2019s been very comforting to be at Vimeo for that.\u201d", "keyword": "Web television;Vimeo;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Price;High Maintenance"}
{"id": "ny0109517", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/05/09", "title": "Lugar Loses Primary Challenge in Indiana", "abstract": "INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Richard G. Lugar , one of the Senate\u2019s longest-serving members, a collegial moderate who personified a gentler political era, was turned out of office on Tuesday, ending a career that had spanned the terms of half a dozen presidents. Mr. Lugar, a six-term senator from Indiana who had won most of his recent elections with more than 60 percent of the vote, only received 39.4 percent of the vote on Tuesday, losing a hard-fought Republican primary to Richard E. Mourdock, the state treasurer. Mr. Mourdock\u2019s campaign was fueled by Tea Party groups and national conservative organizations that deemed Mr. Lugar too willing to compromise and poured millions of dollars into the campaign to defeat him. Mr. Lugar, 80, had not faced a challenge from within his own party since his first election to the Senate in 1976, and his defeat seemed to serve as a caution to moderates on both sides of the aisle. In February, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican, decided not to run for re-election, citing polarization in Washington. Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota, a Democratic fiscal centrist, and Jim Webb of Virginia, a moderate Democrat, are retiring. Two other moderate Democrats, Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana, face tough re-election races. Tea Party organizers and conservative leaders held the Indiana outcome as evidence of a broader national demand for Republicans with unshakable stances on fiscal reform and conservative values, as well as proof of the continuing power of the Tea Party movement. \u201cRichard Mourdock\u2019s victory truly sends a message to the liberals in the Republican Party ,\u201c said Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth. \u201cVoters are rejecting the policies that led to record debt and diminished economic freedom.\u201d For a number of Mr. Lugar\u2019s supporters, the results were a sorry arc \u2014 not just for a man who has served for 35 years in Washington and as mayor of Indianapolis before that, but for a larger notion of trying to work across party lines in Washington. Prominent Democrats, including President Obama, issued statements of appreciation on Tuesday night for Mr. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and for his work, particularly on the nation\u2019s foreign affairs. \u201cWhile Dick and I didn\u2019t always agree on everything,\u201d Mr. Obama said, \u201cI found during my time in the Senate that he was often willing to reach across the aisle and get things done.\u201d Still, some Democrats, eager to hold onto the Senate, also seemed buoyed by the results here. With Mr. Lugar\u2019s defeat, they see the glimmer of an opportunity to claim a Senate seat that the party had considered out of reach as long as he was in the running. The Democratic candidate, Representative Joe Donnelly, is thought to have a better chance with independents and moderate Republicans in November against Mr. Mourdock. Almost immediately, Democrats began emphasizing Mr. Mourdock\u2019s conservative views. \u201cHoosiers deserve real leadership that will reach across the aisle in Richard Lugar\u2019s successor, not Richard Mourdock\u2019s Tea Party extremism,\u201d said Dan Parker, the chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party. For months, the campaign here had been intense, expensive and, by Indiana standards, mean. National groups including the Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, which helped build the Tea Party movement, had viewed Mr. Lugar as a ripe and overdue target, and they poured millions of dollars into the state. Mr. Lugar \u2014 who may be best known for his 1990s effort, along with Sam Nunn, a Democratic senator from Georgia, for a disarmament program in the former Soviet Union \u2014 was criticized throughout the campaign for what critics described as his tendency to cooperate with Democrats. He shifted to the right in 2011, after the threat to his re-election became clear. Mr. Mourdock, meanwhile, has said that bipartisanship has led the nation to the brink of bankruptcy, and that the nation\u2019s current circumstances call for a time of confrontation, not collegiality. After his victory, he acknowledged his opponent. \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to lose \u2014 it\u2019s not fun,\u201d Mr. Mourdock told The Associated Press. \u201cAnd especially after he\u2019s given that 36 years in the Senate. I know he has to feel terrible tonight, and I truly feel badly for him.\u201d Some of Mr. Lugar\u2019s critics accused him of being Mr. Obama\u2019s closest Republican friend \u2014 a claim Mr. Lugar scoffed at, but also took questions about right up until Tuesday afternoon. They also railed against positions he took at various times in favor of Mr. Obama\u2019s Supreme Court nominees, the Dream Act, the bank bailout, the nuclear arms control treaty and more. Mr. Lugar\u2019s supporters countered that he had maintained a conservative agenda over the years, for less government spending, a balanced-budget amendment and fewer regulations that harmed businesses. For his part, Mr. Lugar sounded unbowed on Tuesday afternoon, arguing that most Americans were fed up with partisan battling and saying his race had evolved into a \u201cplayground\u201d for outside interest groups. If it felt peculiar to be entering an election day as an underdog \u2014 Democrats did not even field an opponent six years ago \u2014 Mr. Lugar did not show it. \u201cThis morning, I woke up after a good night\u2019s sleep, just as before, ready with vim and vigor to make certain that we do the Lord\u2019s fight today, and we\u2019re going to do the best we can,\u201d he said. But for some here, Mr. Lugar\u2019s troubles reached beyond questions of partisan loyalty. He was required this year to change his voter registration to the farm his family has owned for years rather than the Indianapolis house he sold in 1977 \u2014 an episode that underscored how long he had been in Washington and, in the view of some, how tenuous his ties to Indiana now felt. \u201cEverybody\u2019s time comes,\u201d said Ed Budd, who described himself as a Tea Party supporter and handed out Mourdock leaflets outside a polling place in Fairland on Tuesday when Mr. Lugar walked up looking, in Mr. Budd\u2019s words, \u201cdiminished some\u201d from the familiar image he had seen on television for so many years. Throughout the day, voters for and against Mr. Lugar confided quietly that they felt sadness and discomfort as they witnessed the unfolding scene. \u201cThis is all really painful to watch,\u201d said Larry MacIntyre, a supporter of Mr. Lugar\u2019s. Many in a ballroom here on Tuesday night were crying as Mr. Lugar stepped onto a stage smiling and said he hoped Mr. Mourdock would prevail in the fall. \u201cWe are experiencing deep political divisions in our society right now,\u201d Mr. Lugar said as tears welled in the eyes of the family members lined up behind him. \u201cThese divisions have stalemated progress in critical areas. But these divisions are not insurmountable, and I believe that people of good will regardless of party can work together for the benefit of our country.\u201d", "keyword": "Tea Party Movement;Primaries and Caucuses;Center for Responsive Politics;Republican Party;Lugar Richard G;Indiana;Mourdock Richard E;Senate"}
{"id": "ny0146835", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2008/07/19", "title": "Echo of the Past, Norman Storms the British Open", "abstract": "SOUTHPORT, England \u2014 As curtain calls go, the scene unfolding amid the ancient dunes at Royal Birkdale on Friday surely would rank among the most compelling golf has seen in a long time. With a misty sheet of rain wrapped like a shroud around the northwest coast of Merseyside, a golfer given up for dead walked up the 18th fairway to a standing ovation, waving and smiling, his hat doffed to reveal the still ample and familiar shock of blond hair with a touch of gray. Greg Norman , newly wed and on his honeymoon with the tennis great Chris Evert, was in the lead in the 137th British Open. With two rounds of par 70, he had withstood the vicious combination of wind and rain that had buffeted the coast for two days and \u2014 until K. J. Choi passed him by one stroke just before nightfall \u2014 was the only golfer to win the battle against the tough, old links course. Norman will be in the final pairing with Choi on Saturday, one stroke ahead of 26-year-old Camilo Villegas, the promising Colombian player who had eight birdies, including five straight to close out his round of 65. At two-over-par 142 is a group of seven that includes the three co-leaders from the first round \u2014 Rocco Mediate , Graeme McDowell and Robert Allenby, each of whom shot 73 Friday \u2014 and the also-resurrected David Duval, the former world No. 1 who had slipped into a tie for No. 1,087. Duval shot 69. With all these subplots battling for attention, Norman, a 53-year-old who spends more time playing tennis with his wife than competitive golf, stole the spotlight. He has not won an official professional event in 10 years, but as he moved toward the 18th green with his impossibly white teeth glistening, looking slowly left and right to acknowledge the deafening cheers, there was no doubt what was happening. Here was the reappearance of the Great White Shark, swimming in ever-tightening circles around the Open, as if he and the old caddie Linn Strickler had gone through a time portal to the 1980s. \u201cH. G. Wells,\u201d said Strickler, his craggy face brightening into a smile. \u201cYeah, of course you feel like you\u2019re stepping back in time,\u201d said Norman, who was No. 1 for a total of 331 weeks between September 1986 and January 1998. \u201cMy expectations were almost nil coming in, to tell you the truth. I hadn\u2019t played a lot of golf. Expectations are still realistically low, and I have to be that way, too, because I can\u2019t sit here and say, \u2018O.K., it\u2019s great, I\u2019m playing well and I\u2019m doing it.\u2019 \u201cWell, I am playing well, I am doing it, but I still haven\u2019t been there for a long time.\u201d A very long time. His last real shot at a major championship was in 1996, when he went into the final round of the Masters with a six-stroke lead, shot 78, and lost by five strokes to Nick Faldo, who shot 67. There are those who remember him almost exclusively for that. He is also the only golfer to have lost a playoff in each of the four majors \u2014 the 1984 United States Open, the 1987 Masters, the 1990 British Open and the 1993 P.G.A. Championship. Others remember him for that. Larger than life, win or lose, Norman has always known how to command golf\u2019s stage. It is not just his formidable physical presence \u2014 which Evert describes by outlining a V with her hands in the air, starting with the broad shoulders down the narrow hips. His aura also comes from movement, a walk that consumes distance with unhurried strides, a golf swing that flashes with power, even still. Whether windblown and victorious at Turnberry in \u201986, or bent and broken at Augusta National in \u201996, he overwhelms the occasion and owns the moment. He could do the same at Royal Birkdale, where inexplicably, and simultaneously, he has found his game and peace of mind. \u201cMy life is great,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got a wonderful wife, and my whole being that\u2019s going on around here is just beautiful, to tell you the truth. So obviously it makes you feel more relaxed, makes you feel more comfortable about what you\u2019re doing and where you are.\u201d He added: \u201cThere is obviously less pressure on me than most because obviously there will be more pressure tomorrow and Sunday. But honestly, there\u2019s probably less pressure on me than anybody out here because even though I\u2019m in the position I am in, I\u2019m going to go out there and just say, \u2018Hey, just go have fun with it.\u2019 \u201d That is a change from the full-bore, all-out-attack approach Norman once brought to his golf. But it is working so far. Norman played steadily and systematically, putted well and immediately offset a double bogey at the brutally tough sixth hole with birdies at Nos. 7 and 8, making putts of 25 and 15 feet to make the turn in one under par. He demonstrated his fitness and flexibility at the 16th hole when, unable to get a stance inside the bunker, he straddled the edge, taking a spread-legged, deep crouch position. Maintaining it throughout his swing, he popped the ball on to the putting surface 12 feet from the hole, then made the putt. Moves like that impress the youngsters. \u201cHe\u2019s got the body of a 25-year-old and the head of a 53-year-old,\u201d said Justin Rose, 27. \u201cIt\u2019s not a bad combination. But it\u2019s superb, I guess, just to find the determination to go out there and really believe he can do it, I suppose.\u201d But is it feasible to think a 53-year-old could win a major on the regular circuit? Or is it like asking John McEnroe to get off the couch and make it into the fourth round at Wimbledon? Jack Nicklaus, on the grounds at Birkdale on Friday in a corporate role for the Royal Bank of Scotland, thought about it for a just a second. \u201cGreg has played very little golf,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing I can relate it to is when I won the Masters back in \u201986. I hadn\u2019t played any golf, I\u2019d been playing a little bit, played a few tournaments. But I remembered how to play when I needed to down the stretch. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s the position he\u2019ll find himself in come the weekend. I mean, I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll remember how to play and remember how to win a golf tournament, when he gets himself in position to do so \u2014 when and if. We\u2019ve got a long way to go. Even if he doesn\u2019t, I think that will inspire him to go and play a little bit more.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Norman Greg;Villegas Camilo;Mediate Rocco"}
{"id": "ny0018742", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/07/28", "title": "Putin in Ukraine to Celebrate a Christian Anniversary", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 In an apparent attempt to use shared history to make a case for closer ties, President Vladimir V. Putin attended religious ceremonies in the Ukrainian capital on Saturday to commemorate the 1,025th anniversary of events that brought Christianity to Ukraine and Russia. At a reception in Kiev, the capital, Mr. Putin spoke of the primacy of the two countries\u2019 spiritual and historical bonds, regardless of political decisions that often divide them. Relations have been rocky in part because of attempts by Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, to formalize its political and economic ties with the European Union. \u201cWe are all spiritual heirs of what happened here 1,025 years ago,\u201d Mr. Putin told church hierarchs at the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, one of the holiest sites of Orthodoxy, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. \u201cAnd in this sense we are, without a doubt, one people.\u201d Mr. Putin\u2019s trip was also the latest sign of the deepening ties and common agenda of the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. The events last week commemorated Prince Vladimir of Kiev\u2019s decision to convert to Christianity and baptize his subjects in 988, an event known as the Baptism of Rus, the founding of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose adherents include those beyond Russia\u2019s modern borders. The anniversary has been the subject of lavish political and news media attention in Russia, where Saturday\u2019s events were broadcast, reflecting the Kremlin\u2019s embrace of the church and its spiritual leader, Patriarch Kirill I. The attention has also lent apparent endorsement to church criticism of Western democracy and secular culture, particularly homosexuality. The patriarch presided over prayers on Saturday after arriving in Kiev on Friday accompanied by representatives of all of the world\u2019s Orthodox churches and bearing fragments of a cross on which the Apostle Andrew is believed to have been crucified. On Thursday, Patriarch Kirill and the other church leaders met with Mr. Putin in the Kremlin, where they discussed the fate of Christians in the Middle East. The cross, on loan from Patras, Greece, has already been venerated by hundreds of thousands on a tour across Russia sponsored by Vladimir Yakunin, the powerful head of the Russian Railways, who is close to Mr. Putin and the church. Patriarch Kirill invoked the concept of the Holy Rus, referring to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as a unified spiritual expanse united under the faith. Ukraine\u2019s religious landscape has been divided for centuries, not least after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by tensions over allegiance to Moscow. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is one of the largest parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, but other groups in Ukraine planned their own commemorations. Image President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kiev, Ukraine, on Saturday. Credit Sergei Chuzavkov/Associated Press The patriarch has sought to unify the faithful with warnings of the encroachment of secular values. He recently warned that legislative efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in Europe posed a grave threat to Russia. \u201cThis is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything so that sin is never validated by the laws of the state in the lands of Holy Rus, because this would mean that the people are starting on the path of self-destruction,\u201d he said at a Moscow cathedral, according to the Web site of the Moscow Patriarchate. He previously said that such \u201cblasphemous laws\u201d could prove as dangerous to believers as the executioners of the Great Terror during the government of Stalin. The church\u2019s views have increasing resonance in the political debate in Russia, where Parliament adopted laws in June banning \u201cgay propaganda\u201d and the adoption of children by foreign same-sex couples. In a film called \u201cThe Second Baptism of Rus,\u201d shown recently on Russian state television, Mr. Putin credited Prince Vladimir\u2019s choice of religion with \u201cbuilding a centralized Russian state,\u201d something he sees as a cornerstone of his leadership. Mr. Putin recalled the story of his mother having him baptized in secret after his birth in 1952 because of Soviet repression of the church. He described Communism as \u201cjust a simplified version of the religious principles shared by practically all the world\u2019s traditional religions\u201d and said that today\u2019s turn to religion was \u201ca spontaneous movement from the people themselves to turn back to their roots\u201d in response to the ideological vacuum after the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse in 1991. Ukraine\u2019s president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, appeared beside Mr. Putin during the service on Saturday, though relations between Moscow and Kiev have continued to be marred by battles over gas pipelines and other disputes despite a widely held view in Russia that Mr. Yanukovich would be more solidly aligned with Russia. Ukraine is scheduled to sign an association agreement with the European Union in November. While insisting that choices of international relations were Ukraine\u2019s to make, Mr. Putin argued Saturday that Ukraine would fare better by deepening its political and economic ties with Russia. On Saturday, Femen , the Ukrainian feminist group known for its bare-breasted protests, said three of its activists and a photojournalist were beaten and taken away by an \u201corganized group of people\u201d on the way to a protest of the celebrations. On its Web site, Femen accused the spy agencies of Ukraine and Russia of being behind the attack, though it did not provide evidence. The Kiev police said they had detained three women for \u201cpetty hooliganism\u201d after they refused to cover up when they were spotted naked on the street. The police Web site said a photographer who was accompanying them was detained for disobeying police orders. It did not talk about beatings. Femen later reported that its leader, Anna Hutsol, was beaten up while in a cafe on Saturday night and her laptop was taken.", "keyword": "Ukraine;Vladimir Putin;Russia;International relations;Russian Orthodox Church"}
{"id": "ny0172340", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/30", "title": "Pushing for Livability Amid Downtown\u2019s Chaos", "abstract": "Sure, urban lobbyists are made, not born. But if the force field emanating from Elizabeth H. Berger, the excitable, fancifully attired (she swears by quirky designer finds from her neighbor, the Century 21 store) new president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, is a reliable signifier, once a lobbyist, always a lobbyist. \u201cLobbying is about giving voice to the people,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can do it with integrity, or you can do it without integrity, but I\u2019m proud of my list.\u201d At the top of the list is the New York Dance and Performance \u201cBessie\u201d Award she got in 2004 for her contribution to government arts advocacy: \u201cI think I\u2019m the first lobbyist to win a Bessie.\u201d Now as the new head of the alliance, a government-regulated nonprofit agency that manages the largest business improvement district in the nation and promotes the financial district as a world-class destination, she foresees a unique convergence of business, commerce, and culture despite the continuing construction chaos. \u201cOur philosophy,\u201d she says, \u201cis that the best way to support business is through building a 24/7 community.\u201d She should know: she lives there. Ms. Berger, 47, has lobbied for a livelier, round-the-clock vibe \u2014 grocery stores headed her wish list \u2014 in the financial district since arriving in 1982. In high school she moved with her family to Providence, R.I., where she won a Congressional internship and met her first political hero, the flamboyant revisionist mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who later went to prison for corruption. After graduating from Yale, where she fashioned her own urban studies major, Ms. Berger joined the cadre of urban residential pioneers here. \u201cI can remember having to take an R train to Bay Ridge if you wanted to buy underwear on a weekend, because back then Century 21 wasn\u2019t open on weekends,\u201d she says. \u201cI remember when we got our first all-night greengrocer; it was 1986!\u201d Why would a woman who grew up on Gramercy Park want to live so far downtown? She needed to be able to walk to City Hall, where she started out as a New York City Urban Fellow and mayoral aide to Edward I. Koch. She ultimately served as assistant mayoral representative (his lobbyist) before the City Council. She still walks to work. And she can still twist arms, ostensibly in the direction of checkbooks, simply by moving her lips. Just ask the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which recently forked over the $1.5 million grant that is bankrolling the first phase of \u201cRe:Construction,\u201d a counterintuitive collaboration between the alliance and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council that recasts downtown construction sites as public canvases for innovative art and architecture. \u201cThis is a program that makes a silk purse out of a sow\u2019s ear,\u201d Ms. Berger asserts, tongue in cheek, in regard to the three projects \u2014 \u201cBest Pedestrian Route\u201d on John Street, \u201cFulton Fence,\u201d and \u201cConcrete Jungle\u201d on Broadway between Ann and John Streets \u2014 that have successfully applied a dose of colorful camouflage to concrete barricades and other eyesores. She anticipates that 60 public sites and 20 privately owned sites will participate. \u201cI don\u2019t see it as decorating the mess that is downtown during rebuilding; it\u2019s more that we\u2019re naming it and owning it in the interim,\u201d she says, speaking like the daughter of a psychotherapist (her mother has a practice in Rhode Island) and an artist (her father also ran nonprofit community agencies). Think of it as an intervention in the midst of an urban renewal. \u201cSo much of what we\u2019ve done downtown since 9/11 has been aimed at making a bad thing less bad, but this is an effort to put some whimsy and cheer back into the daily lives of the 350,000 people who live and work here,\u201d says Ms. Berger, who lives near ground zero with her husband, Frederick Kaufman, a writer and CUNY journalism professor, and their two young children. HER family was displaced for four months after 9/11, but not returning to their apartment was never an option. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like when people renew their marriage vows,\u201d she says of her devotion to downtown. \u201cMake daily life better now, that\u2019s my first goal at the alliance. Goal two, figure out how to continue to attract and retain businesses. Goal three is the vision thing: when there are no more potential canvases for reconstruction, what do we want Lower Manhattan to look like and be like? I\u2019m here for the duration.\u201d Ms. Berger left city government for law school at the University of Southern California, but lasted just 11 weeks. She returned to New York City, acquired a mentor in Gordon Davis, a lawyer who served as parks commissioner during the Koch administration, and created a niche for herself as a government relations adviser for several law firms. And she performed her civic duty: She served on Community Boards 1 and 5, was a member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation\u2019s residents\u2019 advisory council, and joined the board of the alliance in 1998. Persuasion is an art she mastered early on. And then there\u2019s that politically indispensable quality she so admired in Mr. Cianci and Mr. Koch and admires in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: the vision thing. She\u2019s got it, too. By age 7, she had decided that rather than pursuing her original ambition of becoming the first woman to be president of the United States, it made sense to set her sights on becoming the president of United States Steel. This did not, Ms. Berger notes with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, make her an eccentric child: \u201cI\u2019d just call it a 7-year-old\u2019s exploration of where the power was.\u201d", "keyword": "Berger Elizabeth H;New York City;Lobbying and Lobbyists"}
{"id": "ny0225238", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2010/10/27", "title": "I.B.M. Plans to Buy Another $10 Billion of Its Shares", "abstract": "ARMONK, N.Y. (AP) \u2014 I.B.M. said on Tuesday that its board had approved an additional $10 billion in stock buybacks, representing nearly 6 percent of its outstanding shares. International Business Machines said the new buyback authorization added to $2.3 billion remaining from a previous $8 billion authorization, issued in April. The company said it also planned to request permission to buy even more shares at its next April board meeting. I.B.M. shares rose 0.52 percent.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;International Business Machines Corporation"}
{"id": "ny0177266", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/09/16", "title": "Pipeline Accident Kills Worker", "abstract": "A construction worker building an underground natural gas pipeline in Harriman State Park was killed yesterday after the pipe-laying machine he was operating rolled down a steep hill, then ejected and crushed him, the authorities said. The accident occurred about 9:30 a.m. in a wooded area of the park, which spans Rockland and Orange Counties and is about 30 miles north of New York City. Work on the 182-mile, $650 million pipeline began in June. A lieutenant with the New York State Park Police said an investigation was continuing. The worker, identified as Pat McCaffrey, 67, of Lebanon, N.J., was operating a crane-like machine called a side boom. \u201cThis is a terrible tragedy,\u201d said Michael Armiak, a spokesman for Millennium Pipeline Company, which is overseeing the building of the pipeline. He said Mr. McCaffrey worked for a contractor, Precision Pipeline, based in Wisconsin. The pipeline, scheduled to be completed by November 2008, is to stretch across the Southern Tier and Lower Hudson Valley.", "keyword": "Accidents and Safety;Parks and Other Recreation Areas;New York City;Millennium Pipeline;Pipelines"}
{"id": "ny0117064", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/10/10", "title": "With Cameras Rolling, Knicks Keep the Ball Moving", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 The Knicks let cameras into their training center Tuesday, and for fans and members of the news media, it was an opportunity to see Coach Mike Woodson direct his team through a full practice (most N.B.A. teams allow the news media to see the last 30 minutes of practice). MSG televised the event live, which it has done the past three years. Woodson\u2019s focus was on ball movement. He pointed to different areas on the floor while his players watched and listened. He instructed them on how to come off screens at the top of the paint and how to feed the ball into the post from a number of different spots on the court. Then the Knicks went in motion, passing the ball several times before putting up a shot. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be the key to our success,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cWe have to be able to move the basketball. I\u2019m anxious to see if they pick it up and carry it into a game. Good teams are not going to allow you to play on one side of the floor.\u201d The Knicks were criticized last season for allowing the ball to stop in the halfcourt. Woodson, who ran a number of isolation sets for Carmelo Anthony and others, plans to have the team run more pick-and-rolls and get the ball inside. Anthony seemed more interested in passing rather than shooting Tuesday. While he took some shots in transition, he made sure to get the ball into Amar\u2019e Stoudemire\u2019s hands in the post. Stoudemire worked to improve his scoring in the low post this summer by training with the Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon. \u201cHe\u2019s getting better at that each day,\u201d Anthony said of Stoudemire. \u201cWe\u2019re trying our best right now to get the ball to him down there so he can get comfortable. That\u2019s the most important thing, because if you\u2019re not comfortable down there, it\u2019s not going to work.\u201d Stoudemire showed patience and strength in the post. He used spin moves to his left and his right to score over Chris Copeland and Henry Sims. He also scored with hook shots from the middle of the paint. \u201cAmar\u2019e is a player that should be able to post the ball some,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to mix it up a little for him so that he\u2019s not just picking and popping out for a shot all the time.\u201d Woodson said he had not decided who would start at shooting guard. Iman Shumpert and Ronnie Brewer, who both are rehabilitating from knee surgery, were doing individual workouts Tuesday. James White, who had been practicing with the starting unit, was on the sideline with a sore right hamstring that could keep him out of Thursday\u2019s preseason opener at Washington. Woodson kept J. R. Smith in his usual role of playing with the second team. Last week, Smith said he wanted to be a starter and that he entered camp hoping to accomplish that goal. \u201cEverybody can\u2019t start,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cI have to have some offense coming off the bench, and I told J. R. he could be the best player coming off the bench in this league.\u201d REBOUNDS Chris Smith missed his third straight practice with a sore left knee. ... Marcus Camby did not practice because of a strained left calf. ... Rasheed Wallace participated in the Knicks\u2019 early walk-through, but continued to work on his conditioning when the team scrimmaged. Wallace said he felt good about his cross-training workouts and that he did not know when he would join the team for a full practice. \u201cIt\u2019s not up to me; it\u2019s up to Coach Woodson,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cI\u2019m not one to complain. If it\u2019s not until mid-November, it\u2019s mid-November. I can\u2019t control that, I just have to be ready either way.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;New York Knicks;Woodson Mike"}
{"id": "ny0056199", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/09/11", "title": "Israel, Facing Criticism, to Investigate Possible Military Misconduct in Gaza", "abstract": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel on Wednesday announced it had begun criminal investigations into five instances of possible military misconduct in the 50-day Gaza war, an implicit acknowledgment of sensitivity to the widespread criticism, even among allies like the United States, that Israeli forces had used excessive firepower in a number of highly publicized assaults in the Palestinian territory. The announcement, conveyed at a briefing by the Israeli military, came only two weeks after a cease-fire in the conflict, an unusually speedy response. But critics, including human rights advocates in Israel, said it remained to be seen whether the investigations would yield significant criminal indictments and punishments. Some said the timing of the inquiries appeared to be an attempt by the Israeli government to pre-empt the impact of international investigations into allegations of possible Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza. They also pointed out that the cases, opened by Israel\u2019s Military Advocate General Corps, included obvious episodes that had already drawn condemnation. One prominent Israeli human rights group, B\u2019Tselem, refused to participate in the investigations and said history showed that the Israeli military could not possibly conduct a credible prosecution of itself. \u201cBased on past experience, we can only regretfully say that Israeli law enforcement authorities are unable and unwilling to investigate allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law committed during fighting in Gaza,\u201d the organization said in a statement. \u201cShould the existing whitewashing mechanism be replaced with an independent investigative body, we would gladly cooperate with it.\u201d On the Ground in Israel and Gaza Two photographers captured scenes from the most recent outbreak of war. Even so, Israel\u2019s inquiries into possible criminal misconduct by its own soldiers stood in sharp contrast to what has happened in Gaza, where Hamas, the dominant militant force, has no such judicial process and has been widely criticized for summarily executing suspected Palestinian collaborators with Israel. The most prominent of the five military cases have already been the subject of international censure: an Israeli strike that resulted in the death of 16 civilians sheltering at a United Nations school in Beit Hanoun and the killing of four boys on a Gaza beach . The three other cases, as conveyed by an Israeli military official giving the briefing, involve a Palestinian teenager, Ahmed Abu Raida, who said he was mistreated while in detention and forced to guide Israeli soldiers, with the decision to investigate largely based on the youth\u2019s allegations as reported in The New York Times; a Palestinian woman who was shot to death after she had informed Israeli forces of her movements and received their consent; and a soldier who is alleged to have stolen money from a private home. Of 44 cases initially referred to army fact-finding teams for preliminary examination, seven have been closed, including one involving the death of eight members of a family when their home was struck on July 8, the first day of the Israeli air campaign, and others are pending. A further 55 episodes are to be referred to the fact-finding teams next week, according to a senior Israeli official, who briefed reporters at military headquarters here and spoke on the condition of anonymity under the Israeli military protocol. The swiftness of the self-investigation by the military and the publicity about it appeared partly intended to get ahead of an investigation commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council into allegations of possible war crimes. The Israeli government has said it will not cooperate with the United Nations mission, asserting that its mandate is biased against Israel. Image Relatives of a boy killed on July 24 in an airstrike that hit a United Nations school in Beit Hanoun grieved over his body at a hospital. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times The investigation process may also be intended to counter threats by the Palestinian leadership to join the International Criminal Court for the purpose of holding Israel accountable for its actions as an occupying power. The court generally only investigates cases where the country involved is unwilling or unable to investigate itself. More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli air and ground operation, up to three-quarters of them civilians, according to the United Nations and other monitoring groups. The Israeli authorities assert that up to half the casualties were probably combatants. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and six civilians were killed. Israel said its campaign was aimed at halting rocket fire from the Palestinian coastal territory, which is dominated by Hamas, and at destroying a network of tunnels, more than a dozen of them leading into Israeli territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government has rejected criticism of its military\u2019s self-accountability and asserted that justice and due process are built into Israel\u2019s democratic system. He has repeatedly accused Hamas of committing a \u201cdouble war crime\u201d for indiscriminately firing thousands of rockets against Israeli towns and cities, and for operating from within heavily populated areas of Gaza, using its own civilians, in Mr. Netanyahu\u2019s words, as a \u201chuman shield.\u201d Still, the Israeli Army\u2019s legal counselors have acknowledged the international scrutiny on Israel\u2019s military behavior. They say they have become more involved in recent years in operational activity before and during military attacks on Gaza, as well as in the aftermath. The counselors have trained commanders, reviewed planned targets and deployed to the Gaza border to work with commanders at the division level during the recent conflict. Assessing the Damage and Destruction in Gaza The damage to Gaza\u2019s infrastructure from the current conflict is already more severe than the destruction caused by either of the last two Gaza wars. The recently established military committee of fact-finding teams, independent of the military\u2019s chain of command and made up largely of reservists, began investigating certain \u201cexceptional\u201d cases. Previous experience appears to have shown, in Israel\u2019s view, the importance of speedy investigations. A Human Rights Council inquiry into the 2008-9 war in Gaza led to the Goldstone Report. Named for Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who led that inquiry, the report found evidence of potential war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas. It accused Israel of intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza as a matter of policy. Mr. Goldstone later sought to retract that accusation, writing in The Washington Post, after Israeli investigators presented contradictory evidence, \u201cIf I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.\u201d Other members of the Goldstone panel stood by the report. An Israeli public commission that examined the mechanisms for dealing with claims of violations of the laws of armed conflict, led by a retired Supreme Court judge, concluded last year that the Israeli military\u2019s system generally complied with international law. But it recommended expediting the process of deciding when to open criminal investigations. Some circumstances, like the mistreatment of detainees, \u201crequires immediate examination,\u201d the military official told reporters on Wednesday. Critics have called into question the military\u2019s ability to investigate itself. B\u2019Tselem and another Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, described the military law enforcement system as \u201ca complete failure\u201d in a statement this week. After the 2008-9 war in Gaza, in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, more than 50 cases out of 400 that were examined were referred to the military police for criminal investigation. Three investigations ended with indictments, according to the military. B\u2019Tselem noted that the harshest sentence was given to a soldier who had stolen a credit card.", "keyword": "Israel;Gaza Strip;Palestinians;Hamas;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity"}
{"id": "ny0192629", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/02/01", "title": "Pointing to a New Era, U.S. Pulls Back as Iraqis Vote", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 Iraqis across the country voted Saturday in provincial elections that will help shape their future, but regardless of the outcome it is clear that the Americans are already drifting offstage \u2014 and that most Iraqis are ready to see them go. The signs of mutual disengagement are everywhere. In the days leading up to the elections, it was possible to drive safely from near the Turkish border in the north to Baghdad and on south to Basra, just a few miles from the Persian Gulf \u2014 without seeing an American convoy. In the Green Zone \u2014 once host to the American occupation government, and now the seat of the Iraqi government \u2014 the primary PX is set to close, and the Americans have retreated to their vast, garrisoned new embassy compound. Iraqi soldiers now handle all Green Zone checkpoints. American helicopters and drones may be in the sky, but Iraqi boots are on the ground. The Americans are already worried about securing the road to Kuwait because soon they will have to start hauling out much of the infrastructure they have built on bases across Iraq . The end of an era comes not in a single moment, but looking back it has become evident that the mood has changed, power has shifted, the world is not the same. In the United States, many Americans view the war as already over, even though more than 140,000 American soldiers remain on Iraqi soil. President Obama has made it plain that Iraq is not his war; he wants to focus on Afghanistan. In an economic crisis, there is simply not enough money for the country to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day in Iraq. Any arguments that remain in Washington about the shape and timing of the troop withdrawal this year seem almost moot here, given how much Iraqis want to show they can govern on their own and how much Americans want to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis so they can meet withdrawal deadlines. This is not to suggest that the war is over. In two provinces, Nineveh and Diyala, counterinsurgency operations are still under way, and the military is tracking signs of activity by Sunni extremist groups in the troubled areas surrounding Baghdad. For now, the rest of the country is mostly calm. The provincial elections will test political stability: whether Iraqis can begin to resolve still festering sectarian and ethnic tensions through the ballot box. The formal process of disengagement started in earnest in November, when the Iraqi Parliament approved a new security agreement with the Americans that sealed the date of departure, by the end of 2011, and almost immediately changed the balance of power. The outlook of Iraqi citizens has changed as well. They are more confident that their problems are their own, and that the Americans cannot fix them and often have only made matters worse. \u201cThe American military presence brought nothing to our streets but destruction and chaos,\u201d said Omar al-Dulaimi, 57, a government employee who lives near the Um al-Khoura mosque, one of the largest Sunni places of worship in the capital. \u201cWe had nothing from them but tension and confusion. It\u2019s much better for us and for them if they stay in their bases now.\u201d That resentment of the American presence boiled over in 2007 after Blackwater Security guards opened fire on Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, killing 17 of them and wounding more than 30. That episode, which was widely publicized in Iraq and abroad, crystallized Iraqi loathing and resentment of what they saw as Americans\u2019 casual disregard for Iraqi lives \u2014 and their own powerlessness to hold the Americans to account. Such anger helped embolden Iraqis to drive a tough bargain on the security agreement, which cemented their sense that they were, at last, seizing control of their own destiny. The Iraqi resolve surprised the Americans, who in the end were forced to accept a hard deadline for departure, give up immunity for contractors like Blackwater and give Iraqis explicit authority over all military operations in the country. Now, for both sides there is the feeling that something has changed and that whatever happens next, Iraq will not return to the way it was. \u201cWe\u2019re going through transition in Iraq at the same time we\u2019re going through transition in our forces here,\u201d said Gen. Ray Odierno, the commanding general for Iraq. \u201cThey will elect new provincial governments. I believe 75 percent to 80 percent of the provincial governments will change, and oh, by the way, we\u2019ll begin to reduce our troops\u2019 size.\u201d The shifts are subtle, often unspoken. The American military role now has less to do with protecting Iraqis and more with giving them the psychological reassurance that they can handle what comes their way. The Americans no longer tell the Iraqis what to do, and the Iraqis, especially Iraqi Army officers, no longer look to the Americans for approval. At least that is the case in areas where the fighting has stopped; less so in areas like Mosul where American military might is still required to keep violence at bay. When General Odierno stopped to inspect a polling center in rural Medaen, south of Baghdad, on Wednesday, his conversation with the Iraqi Army general who oversees the area was respectful, a little formal: two military men exchanging information. It was not exactly a conversation between equals; each knew that the other was from a different world, each knew the Americans have superior arms and training, and each offered the other his observations. \u201cI see less Sunni-Shia issues than I do a lot of other issues here,\u201d General Odierno said. Gen. Qassim al-Maliki nodded. \u201cWe have a lot of Shia voting this time,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a lot in the last election,\u201d he said. As the American military slowly steps back, the diplomats and the civilians are emerging from the wings. Certainly, this is far from a normal diplomatic relationship. Iraqis entering any area close to the Americans are still subject to multiple humiliating searches and interminable waits. American diplomats cannot yet leave the embassy; they live like virtual prisoners, every movement beyond its gates an armed undertaking. But it is possible for Americans and Iraqis to talk about issues other than sheer survival. Iraqis, too, are beginning to explore a different kind of relationship, one that no longer looks to the Americans only for protection. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has agreed to finance a substantial scholarship program to send Iraqis to the United States and British Commonwealth countries for study, in an effort to create a better educated professional class. Still, the American era in Iraq is nowhere near a final act. If this were an opera, it would be just past midway in the libretto. While both sides are disconnecting, neither can let go entirely. The Iraqis need the Americans not just to dampen terrorist activities within the country but to protect them from predatory neighbors. Syria and Iran have interfered here since the invasion, and while the Iraqis are often uncomfortable with how the Americans have reined in these powers, they are reluctant to stop them because they fear their neighbors more. When American forces pursued insurgents over the Iraqi border into Syria in late October, it was an international incident. Iraq was embarrassed in front of the Arab world. Such incidents are likely to recur and could become much more fraught. For the United States, Iraq remains a strategic prize close to the Middle East flash points of Israel, Lebanon and Syria as well as Iran and the oil-rich Persian Gulf countries. It is not by chance that the Central Intelligence Agency has its largest station in the world in Baghdad. It is inescapable that the United States exerts more influence here than in any other oil-producing country \u2014 and will be intent on continuing to do so. Iraq will be eager to demonstrate its independence; the United States will have to rely on levers other than a huge and continuing military presence. This promises considerable tension as each side redefines its relationship. The elections on Saturday were a step toward a peaceful approach to settling disagreements among factions about the shape of the country. If new governments are seated from north to south and east to west, the United States and Iraq can begin the next act in earnest. If all goes well, \u201cThe United States will not need big troops here,\u201d said Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister, a secular Shiite. \u201cThe Americans need to look at something besides security. Iraq needs America to start a new chapter.\u201d", "keyword": "Iraq;Elections;Iraq War (2003- );United States Armament and Defense"}
{"id": "ny0087591", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/07/15", "title": "Illinois: Lawyer for Hastert Will Seek to Have Charges Dismissed", "abstract": "A lawyer for J. Dennis Hastert, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, told a federal judge in Chicago on Tuesday that he would seek to have the charges against Mr. Hastert dismissed. Mr. Hastert, Republican of Illinois, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. and structuring bank withdrawals to cover up payments for past misconduct. Though the indictment did not specify the misconduct, it has been widely reported that it involved sexual acts with a male student while Mr. Hastert was a high school teacher and coach in Yorkville. Thomas C. Green, a lawyer for Mr. Hastert, blamed the federal government for apparent leaks about the misconduct that he called an \u201c800-pound gorilla\u201d in the case. The case is due back in federal court in October.", "keyword": "J Dennis Hastert;US Politics;Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance;House of Representatives;Congress;Chicago"}
{"id": "ny0081165", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/11/03", "title": "Justices Hear Debate on Suing Companies for Seemingly Harmless Falsehoods", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A case about false information on the Internet gave rise to a vivid and occasionally personal argument on Monday at the Supreme Court . The question in the case was whether companies that say false but seemingly benign things about consumers may be sued under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that many sorts of apparently harmless misinformation could cause damage. She said, by way of example, that she knew single people who searched the Internet to find out if prospective dates were married or not. \u201cSo if you\u2019re not married and there\u2019s a report out there saying you are, that\u2019s a potential injury,\u201d Justice Sotomayor said. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that the ubiquity of questionable information in the digital age may require a fresh approach. \u201cOn the Internet, in this cyber-age that we have where all this information is out, there has to be some real injury\u201d caused by misinformation, he said, suggesting that mass dissemination of falsehoods may warrant different treatment than neighborhood gossip. The case concerned Spokeo, a company that sells personal data online. It distributed a profile of Thomas Robins that was riddled with errors. The profile said he had a graduate degree, though he did not; that he was employed and in good shape financially, though he was out of work; and that he was married and had children, though neither was true. The profile included a photograph of a different man. \u201cThese are not unimportant details,\u201d Justice Elena Kagan said. \u201cThey basically got everything wrong about him. You know, they got his marital status wrong. They got his income wrong. They got his education wrong. They basically portrayed a different person.\u201d Mr. Robins sued under a part of the credit law that provides damages of up to $1,000 without proof of direct harm, and he sought to represent a class of people with similar claims. Spokeo responded that Congress did not have the power to create a legal right to sue for plaintiffs who have suffered no direct and concrete injuries. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last year disagreed . \u201cA plaintiff can suffer a violation of the statutory right without suffering actual damages,\u201d a unanimous three-judge panel ruled. Justice Kagan said that false statements may be damage enough. \u201cWhy isn\u2019t the dissemination of false information about you in a credit report,\u201d she asked, \u201cperfectly sufficient if Congress says that\u2019s a concrete injury?\u201d Andrew J. Pincus, a lawyer for Spokeo, said suits should be allowed only if plaintiffs can show the concrete injury generally required to establish standing to sue. He gave two examples: harm to credit or a missed job opportunity. Justice Kagan responded that people almost never know why a bank or potential employer turned them down. \u201cI mean,\u201d she said, \u201cit\u2019s actually the quintessential kind of injury that you will never be able to detect and surely not to prove.\u201d But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked, \u201cIs there anything here to indicate that anybody other than Mr. Robins ever did a search for him\u201d on the Spokeo site? William S. Consovoy, a lawyer for Mr. Robins, said there was nothing in court records to show that. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave examples of what he said were harmless falsehoods. He asked, for instance, whether someone with an unlisted phone number could sue Spokeo for giving an inaccurate one. Mr. Consovoy said Congress could allow suits over that misinformation. Malcolm L. Stewart, a lawyer for the Obama administration, argued in support of Mr. Robins, a stance that seemed to surprise Chief Justice Roberts. \u201cI would have thought that the president would be concerned about Congress being able to create its own enforcement mechanism,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought that you would be concerned that that would interfere with the executive\u2019s prerogative.\u201d Mr. Stewart said he could imagine a law presenting that problem. The credit law, however, was appropriate and valuable, he said. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the lurking issue in the case, Spokeo Inc. v. Robins , No. 13-1339, was the possibility of a class action involving \u201cmillions of plaintiffs and billions of dollars.\u201d But both she and Justice Kagan suggested that class certification might not be appropriate for claims under the credit law like the one pressed by Mr. Robins.", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Spokeo;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Thomas Robins;Lawsuits"}
{"id": "ny0127013", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2012/01/04", "title": "RIM\u2019s Delay Caused by Poor Performance, Analysts Say", "abstract": "OTTAWA \u2014 When Research in Motion said in December that a new line of BlackBerry phones would not appear until the end of 2012, the announcement provoked equal parts of shock and disbelief from analysts. Shock because even RIM acknowledges that the new phones are vital to reversing its rapid loss of market share in North America. At the same time, analysts were skeptical about the company\u2019s explanation that the delay stemmed from its decision to wait for a new, improved microprocessor. Instead, many analysts say that both the new phones and RIM\u2019s new operating system, BlackBerry 10, may have significant performance problems and are delaying the project. \u201cThey can\u2019t get the infrastructure and the operating system ready in time,\u201d said Peter Misek, an analyst with Jefferies & Company. Alkesh Shah, an analyst at Evercore Partners, agreed. \u201cWaiting for the chipset is a contributing factor in a number of factors that led to the delay,\u201d he said. \u201cCreating the ecosystem for the phones is the bigger problem.\u201d Mr. Shah and several other analysts said that delays in the development of BlackBerry 10 and poor battery performance in prototype versions of the new phones were behind the decision to further delay production until faster, smaller and more power-efficient chips became available in late 2012. Those delays made it impossible for RIM to begin selling the new phones early in 2012, as it first promised. \u201cOne of the problems is the delay in the BB 10 software and that may have led to the selection of chips that caused the most recent delay,\u201d said Rod Hall, an analyst with JPMorgan Chase. While the analysts\u2019 skepticism is partly based on speculation, it has also been fueled by RIM\u2019s general loss of credibility with them. For more than a year, the company has been forced to repeatedly restate financial forecasts and failed to deliver some critical, new products on time. \u201cThey don\u2019t have a firm grasp of the issues and realities of bringing these phones to market,\u201d said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. \u201cThere are not many believers right now,\u201d RIM has declined to identify the new chip. RIM also declined to comment directly about development problems with BlackBerry 10 or the battery life of the new phones. It reiterated the earlier remarks of its co-chief executives, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, that the delay was simply the result of its decision to wait for an improved chipset. \u201cRIM made a strategic decision to launch BlackBerry 10 devices with a new, LTE-based dual core chipset architecture,\u201d the company said, referring to a chip that supports a high-speed wireless service known as LTE that is now available in some parts of the United States. \u201cAs explained on our earnings call, the broad engineering impact of this decision and certain other factors significantly influenced the anticipated timing for the BlackBerry 10 devices.\u201d But it is no secret that RIM has been struggling with its new operating system, which is based on technology from QNX Software Systems, a company based in Ottawa that RIM acquired in 2010.The BlackBerry PlayBook , RIM\u2019s money-losing tablet computer , was the company\u2019s first product to use a QNX operating system. Despite the BlackBerry brand\u2019s strong association with e-mail, it arrived in April 2011 without e-mail software or the ability to directly synchronize users\u2019 address books and calendars. Software that was supposed to remedy those issues and others has been delayed and is now promised for February. Mr. Misek, said that RIM initially tried to merge, or thread, some of its current operating system with QNX to speed up the development timetable. But that proved unsuccessful, forcing RIM to create more software code from scratch than it initially anticipated. Michael Morgan, the senior analyst for mobile devices at ABI Research, said that many problems with BlackBerry 10 came from making it work on RIM\u2019s network, which moves all BlackBerry data, giving corporate e-mail a high level of security and all users lower wireless data bills. To accommodate people with both BlackBerry phones and PlayBook tablets, RIM had to redesign security features on its network, which currently allow only one hand-held device access to any given user\u2019s account, Mr. Morgan said. \u201cWhen you change something that low level in an operating system, it has ramifications which affect every function,\u201d Mr. Morgan said. Like many analysts, Mr. Morgan also says he thinks that RIM is struggling to bring the long battery life that has been a hallmark of BlackBerrys to the new phones. While the QNX operating system has a reputation for reliability, he said, it has been mainly used in situations where power consumption is not a significant concern. Many touch-screen navigation and control systems in cars, for example, use QNX. But automobiles carry large batteries and alternators that recharge them. When ABI\u2019s researchers disassembled PlayBook tablets, Mr. Morgan said, they found several systems to reduce power consumption. He said, however, that those measures might not be enough for phones that will have much smaller batteries than the PlayBook. \u201cQNX is being applied now in a place it hasn\u2019t been before,\u201d he said. Adding to the problem is RIM\u2019s decision to make the new phones operate on LTE networks. Most current chips that operate on those high-speed networks have a reputation for quickly draining batteries. While LTE networks are relatively scarce today, they are likely to be an important selling point for new phones a year from now.", "keyword": "Blackberry (Handheld Device);Research In Motion Ltd;New Models Design and Products;Wireless Communications"}
{"id": "ny0176381", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/07/06", "title": "California: Contractors Arrested in Fire Sting", "abstract": "Five men were arrested in South Lake Tahoe as part of a sting intended to catch unlicensed contractors preying on victims of the recent wildfires in the area. The arrests, announced by the state insurance commissioner, occurred Wednesday; all five men were charged with misdemeanors. The fires, which began on June 24 after an illegal campfire was left unattended, burned 3,100 acres and destroyed more than 250 homes. Damage estimates are more than $150 million.", "keyword": "Forest and Brush Fires;California"}
{"id": "ny0118084", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/10/24", "title": "Snacking at the Roman Colosseum? Prepare to Pay a Fine", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 Dapper as always in their bleached white shirts and matching caps, members of Rome\u2019s municipal police force were out on the Spanish Steps one warm autumn day, trolling for offenders. \u201cStefano, look! There\u2019s another eater,\u201d one officer said to another before sauntering over to a baffled couple who had begun munching on an inoffensive-looking meal while sitting on the steps. The culprits, a couple of foreign tourists, had settled down on the landmark, one of Rome\u2019s most famous. In their hands were the offending items: sandwiches. The officers pounced, and after much waving of hands, the couple wrapped up the sandwiches and slouched away, looking sheepish. They were in violation \u2014 unwittingly, in all probability \u2014 of a municipal ordinance that went into force this month. The measure outlaws eating and drinking in areas of \u201cparticular historic, artistic, architectonic and cultural value\u201d in Rome\u2019s center, to better protect the city\u2019s monuments, which include landmarks like the Colosseum , the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps . Fines range all the way up to $650 for culinary recidivists. Italian cities, Rome included, have long enacted ordinances and regulations to protect monuments from ill-mannered tourists (and residents). But after a recent stroll through the city center, where he saw several people making themselves at home, literally, Rome\u2019s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, decided the rules needed toughening. Antonio Gazzellone, the municipal council member responsible for tourism, noting that alcohol may have been involved, said, \u201cThere were people camped out, and we weren\u2019t able to move them.\u201d The new ordinance, which also outlaws camping or \u201csetting up makeshift beds,\u201d will \u201cgive monuments back their proper decorum,\u201d he said. \u201cRome needs to be protected, its beauty respected.\u201d But there has already been some grumbling around town. Recently, a salesclerk named Massimo strode off with his lunch after a police officer sharply blew her whistle until he stopped eating a sandwich on the Spanish Steps. \u201cIt seems to me that the municipal police have more important things to deal with than people eating sandwiches,\u201d said Massimo, who asked that his last name not be used because, after all, he had just broken the law. Others fretted that the ordinance is too broad. \u201cFrom now on, a tourist walking around the Colosseum with an ice cream cone will be fined,\u201d said Angelo Bonelli, a member of Italy \u2019s Green Party, who flagrantly challenged the ban by eating a sandwich in front of the Pantheon while taunting a municipal police officer. Rome has passed any number of bans during the past five years, against prostitutes, homeless people and men taking their shirts off in parks to sunbathe, Mr. Bonelli noted, often to little effect. \u201cYou can\u2019t govern with bans,\u201d he said of Mayor Alemanno. \u201cIt\u2019s a sign of his inability to control the city.\u201d Many Romans agree. One recent Saturday, a few hundred protesters gathered in a flash mob on the steps leading to City Hall, chomping on pizza and panini as police officers registered the offenders. \u201cPanino is not a crime,\u201d one attendee wrote on his Facebook page. Other Italian cities, where tourists and residents coexist in a delicate balance, have also taken measures to promote civility and good manners. For years it has been illegal in Venice to eat bag lunches while sitting on the steps around St. Mark\u2019s Square, where 25 million tourists converge each year, said Marco Agostini, the city\u2019s director general. \u201cIt\u2019s the one place in Venice that all visitors want to see,\u201d he said, \u201cand we can\u2019t have a situation where you have to climb over people eating salami sandwiches.\u201d This summer, Venice \u2014 along with the square\u2019s business association \u2014 hired eight people to act as \u201cguardians\u201d of St. Mark\u2019s, answering sundry questions, like \u201cWhere do I find the Colosseum?\u201d Mr. Agostini said, and not only politely informing tourists that the Colosseum is in Rome but also directing them to the gardens just around the corner, where munching outdoors is legal. In Florence , too, rope cordons went up this summer around the steps of the city\u2019s cathedral, where visitors were asked not to sit. Custodians kept watch from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, \u201cbut in fact, after hours, people went back to sitting there,\u201d said Ambra Nepi, the spokeswoman for the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore , which oversees the cathedral and nearby religious monuments. Ms. Nepi said she understood that Florence could be expensive for some tourists, hence the bag lunches, and that there was a distinct lack of benches in the city center. But some visitors \u201cabused the situation\u201d and sprawled on the cathedral steps to suntan or nap, she said. \u201cPeople need to know that after all this is a church,\u201d she added. \u201cIt\u2019s a way of educating visitors, and it\u2019s not as though we went out with guns.\u201d Mr. Gazzellone, Rome\u2019s head of tourism, dismissed concerns that visitors strolling with ice cream or slices of pizza would be fined, \u201cas long as they throw any waste in the trash bins.\u201d It\u2019s more a question of civility, he said: \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t eat a pizza and drop tomato sauce all over the steps of the White House in Washington .\u201d The ban must be renewed at the end of the year, he said, but that is considered pro forma. \u201cWe\u2019ll see what the results are,\u201d he said of the new law. \u201cPersonally, I hope it is never applied \u2014 because it means that citizens and guests to Rome have understood how to behave. I hope we don\u2019t make a penny \u2014 because it means the city is being respected in its beauty.\u201d", "keyword": "Food;Historic preservation;Rome;Fines;Colosseum"}
{"id": "ny0295825", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/12/21", "title": "On Patrol With Police as Philippines Battles Drugs", "abstract": "MANILA \u2014 Officer Kathlyn Domingo walked through a maze of narrow alleys, ducking under jumbles of electrical wires and hanging laundry to the open doorway of a flimsy two-story house made of found wood and rusty nails. Tough, earnest and carrying a .45-caliber pistol with a pink grip, Officer Domingo, 30, patrols one of Manila\u2019s most destitute slums, Santa Ana. Last month, I spent a night on patrol with her and some colleagues, to see, from their perspective, the Philippines\u2019s deadly crackdown on drug dealers and users. More than 2,000 people have been killed by the police \u2014 and at least an additional 1,000 by vigilantes \u2014 since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in July and promised to rid the country of the drug scourge. Officer Domingo prefers to focus not on the violent nature of Mr. Duterte\u2019s campaign , but on the 750,000 people who have surrendered to the police and presumably given up a life of drugs and crime. She called through the doorway to one of them, Roberto Elsis. Officer Domingo said Mr. Elsis was holding down a job. He told me he had not used drugs since 2007, so I asked him why he was surrendering now. Image Roberto Elsis came to the door at the beckoning of Officer Kathlyn Domingo. Credit Aurora Almendral \u201cI was on the watch list,\u201d Mr. Elsis explained, referring to the list of names drawn up by government officials. \u201cI had no choice.\u201d Neighborhood leaders and police and drug enforcement officers compile lists of those suspected of using or dealing methamphetamine, and then officers go door to door to find them. Those who do not agree to turn themselves in can end up dead . As we walked back to the car, a woman stopped us. It was Mr. Elsis\u2019s mother, who had heard that the police had gone to her son\u2019s door. \u201cI was scared,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought they were going to kill him.\u201d I saw no killings on my shift, but I saw plenty of fear. Residents of Santa Ana and other slums told me that armed, masked police officers roam their streets at night threatening young men who worry about being shot dead or swept into overcrowded jails. One woman, who did not want to give her name for fear of reprisal, said life was easier when she only had to avoid drug dealers. Now, she said, the enemy is the police. But the officers say Mr. Duterte has ushered in a new era of safety and order. The streets have been cleaned up, there is less crime and drug dealers have gone into hiding. The police say people are grateful, a sentiment backed up by polls showing Mr. Duterte\u2019s job approval rating has remained steadily high at 77 percent. Image Col. Robert Domingo, a onetime commander of the Santa Ana station, is among those who believe the Philippines is under a new era of safety and order. Credit Aurora Almendral \u201cThe community trusts us,\u201d said Col. Robert Domingo, who was commander of the Santa Ana station, but has since been reassigned. He said Mr. Duterte had bolstered officers\u2019 morale and inverted the relationship between the police and criminals: \u201cWe\u2019re the ones hunting them down now, when before they used to hunt us.\u201d As part of the antidrug campaign, the Santa Ana force swelled to 250 officers from 149, part of Mr. Duterte\u2019s effort to expand the national police by thousands of officers. \u201cThis is not business as usual in the Philippine National Police,\u201d Colonel Domingo said. \u201cThis is a war. This is the golden age of the Philippine police.\u201d When I arrived at the Santa Ana station at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, I was immediately confronted with a steaming tangle of limbs and shirtless bodies. The station\u2019s jail \u2014 a single cell, about 12 feet wide by 20 feet deep \u2014 held 48 men, some of whom said they had been there for more than a month. Men crouched on the floor, leaned against one another, hung from the rafters in hammocks. They share one toilet inside the cell. The air was rank with sweat. Image The jail at the station in Santa Ana, whose officers patrol one of Manila\u2019s most destitute slums. Credit Aurora Almendral I headed out for patrol with three polite young officers. Mark Casta\u00f1eda, 25, ran through the typical cases he might encounter on patrol: busted manhole covers, fights between neighbors. He joked that the cruelest call he had ever responded to was for cat abuse. When we turned a corner into Dagonoy, a slum crammed with makeshift houses, Officer Casta\u00f1eda said: \u201cNow we\u2019re entering the war zone.\u201d Video Our reporter, Aurora Almendral, spoke to a police officer, Mark Casta\u00f1eda, in the Philippines about vigilante killings prompted by President Rodrigo Duterte's campaign against drugs. Drugs are openly dealt and used in Dagonoy, but \u201cwar zone\u201d felt like an exaggeration. Families were sitting outside, children playing in the street. As we drove through with police lights spinning, teenagers stopped their basketball game to glare at us. I asked Mr. Casta\u00f1eda about the vigilante killings, and he assumed I was referring to the widespread belief in the slums that the police were involved, backed up by a growing body of anecdotal evidence collected by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights that supports that assumption. He does not believe the police are involved but says that many people do because \u201cwe\u2019re the only ones with the capacity\u201d to kill. At the 8 p.m. shift change, Mr. Casta\u00f1eda dropped me off at the Dagonoy police substation, where a sign taped to the wall reads: \u201cDagonoy PCP observed human rights.\u201d Image The police substation in Dagonoy, a slum in Santa Ana where drugs are openly dealt and used. Credit Aurora Almendral Dave Abarra, the station\u2019s captain, said he posted the sign to remind officers not to abuse suspects. When I asked him about the rights of the suspects killed without trial, Captain Abarra said, \u201cHuman rights activists defend the rights of the drug addicts and users, not the rights of their victims.\u201d Then I met Officer Domingo, who was preparing for a night of visiting drug suspects. She proudly showed me a three-inch-thick file of signed papers of surrender, and we flipped through her cellphone photos of users. Image Officer Domingo showing photos of drug users who have surrendered. Credit Aurora Almendral She tapped the face of a man she encountered on a previous door-to-door operation. \u201cHe surrendered to me and promised to stop,\u201d she said. The next time she saw him, he was in the Santa Ana jail, having being swept up by other officers. \u201cIt was so annoying,\u201d she said. \u201cHe even tried to hide from me.\u201d During the shift, Officer Domingo met with Bernardita Enales, chairwoman of the Barangay 775 neighborhood, who had called for drug suspects to come to her office to surrender. Image Bernardita Enales, center, the chairwoman of the Barangay 775 neighborhood, in her office with a couple seeking to surrender. Credit Aurora Almendral Ms. Enales was dozing in her chair when we arrived. No one had shown up. \u201cThey\u2019re afraid of getting killed!\u201d Ms. Enales said, laughing. Officer Domingo laughed politely, and added that maybe they were afraid of getting caught, or put in jail. A watchman eventually rounded up a husband and wife. The man admitted to using drugs; the woman said she had never tried them. Officer Domingo filled out the surrender papers for both. The effectiveness of the antidrug campaign depends on the cooperation of neighborhood officials like Ms. Enales, but she has produced only seven surrenders in the five months since the start of the campaign, according to police records. Image At the end of the night of patrolling, the police car sat outside the Dagonoy police substation. Credit Aurora Almendral We spent the rest of the night making rounds. Captain Abarra joined us, and pointed out an empty alley where he said drug dealers used to hang out, until three of them were killed the week before. \u201cIt\u2019s true that fear has an effect,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re gentle with the right hand, you have to be hard with the left.\u201d", "keyword": "Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Philippines;Murders and Homicides;Vigilante;Rodrigo Duterte;Drug Abuse"}
{"id": "ny0088512", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/09/02", "title": "French Publisher Won\u2019t Print Book on Moroccan King After Authors\u2019 Arrest", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 A major French publishing house has decided not to publish a book critical of King Mohammed VI of Morocco after its two authors were arrested last week in Paris and charged with blackmail and extortion on accusations they demanded 2 million euros, or about $2.3 million, to keep the book unpublished. The latest developments in the affair have been likened by the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, to a \u201cbad movie.\u201d The scandal, which raised questions of journalistic ethics here, has nonetheless erupted less than a year after relations between Morocco and France were mended following a long diplomatic row. Lawyers on both sides are now fighting a media battle to paint the authors either as devious journalists interested only in leveraging their work to make money or as respected but fallible professionals who fell into a financially tempting trap laid before them by the Moroccan leadership. The \u00c9ditions du Seuil publishing house said in a statement on Monday that its \u201crelationship of trust\u201d with the authors, Catherine Graciet and Eric Laurent, had been \u201cdissolved\u201d and that publication of their book, initially planned for early 2016, could not go ahead. Mr. Laurent has said that he will try to publish the book elsewhere. The two authors were arrested last week during a police sting operation after a meeting with a representative from the Moroccan royalty in a luxury hotel in Paris. The Moroccan authorities had filed a complaint of blackmail after a first meeting between Mr. Laurent and the royal representative, which led to the opening of a formal investigation in Paris. The Journal du Dimanche newspaper, which said it had obtained audio recordings made by the representative at the meetings and a document signed by the two journalists, reported on Sunday that Mr. Laurent and Ms. Graciet had agreed to never write about Morocco again in exchange for 2 million euros. They left the hotel with a cash advance of 40,000 euros, or about $45,000, each, the newspaper reported. The police, who were monitoring the meeting, then swooped in to arrest them. Lawyers for Mr. Laurent and Ms. Graciet confirmed in telephone interviews that their clients had signed the document and received the cash advance, but said that the Journal du Dimanche had published truncated and misleading excerpts from the audio recordings made during the meetings. Both lawyers questioned the legal grounds of the sting operation and said they would try to have the case thrown out. Mr. Laurent and Ms. Graciet are currently free under court supervision and have been barred from speaking with each other. Neither has denied that they accepted a financial transaction. But both assert that it was Mohammed VI\u2019s representative, not them, who first made the offer to pay to keep the book under wraps, rejecting accusations that they were attempting to blackmail the king and describing the deal instead as a \u201ctrap\u201d that they fell into. Mr. Laurent, in a phone interview from his lawyer\u2019s office, said that the idea of paying not to publish had first been put forward by the Moroccan representative, a lawyer named Hicham Naciri, whom he first met in Paris on Aug. 11. The meeting, the first of three, was set up after Mr. Laurent called the king\u2019s office in late July for comment on the two journalists\u2019 reporting. Mr. Laurent said he ended up accepting the deal, mainly for personal reasons \u2014 his wife has cancer, he said. \u201cI was tempted,\u201d Mr. Laurent said. \u201cDo I regret it? Yes, probably. But I\u2019ve been doing this job for over 35 years, I don\u2019t have anything to hide, and I work on the assumption that what was offered to us was a private transaction related to my work.\u201d \u201cI took risks to investigate, to discover a certain number of things, to acquire a certain number of documents,\u201d Mr. Laurent added. \u201cAfter that, it\u2019s my right to publish a book or not to publish a book.\u201d Ms. Graciet trod a similarly fine line between journalistic integrity and criminal liability in her defense, acknowledging that the deal was ethically wrong but arguing that it was a private transaction consented to by both parties, and that it broke no laws. She told Le Parisien, a newspaper, that Mr. Laurent had told her about the Moroccan representative\u2019s offer but that she was incredulous about it, and agreed to attend the last meeting at Mr. Naciri\u2019s insistence to learn more \u2014 only to be tempted by the offer as well. \u201cI had a moment of weakness,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s human, no? Everyone wonders what one could do with their life with 2 million euros. Try to imagine the situation. And it was to forgo publication of a book, not to kill someone.\u201d Still, the news that Ms. Graciet and Mr. Laurent had consented to pull their book project in exchange for money was all the more shocking in France and Morocco because they had established a reputation in both countries as fierce critics of the Moroccan leadership. In 2012 they published a book that depicted Mohammed VI as a \u201cpredator king\u201d who had carved up Morocco\u2019s economy to increase his personal wealth. Ms. Graciet also wrote a book with Nicolas Beau in 2009 that criticized Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the former Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali , and in 1993 Mr. Laurent had published a more positive book made up of interviews with Hassan II, Mohammed VI\u2019s father and predecessor. Eric Dupond-Moretti, the Moroccan king\u2019s lawyer in France, speaking to the i-T\u00e9l\u00e9 news channel on Monday, said that Mr. Laurent was the \u201cfirst to mention money\u201d and maintained accusations that the journalists had blackmailed the Moroccan king by suggesting that the book would contain information that might destabilize the monarchy. Without offering specifics, Mr. Laurent did not deny that he and Ms. Graciet were working on information that was compromising for the king, saying that the book had the potential to \u201crattle\u201d the monarchy. He said Mr. Naciri insisted that they reveal the sources of their reporting for the book, which they refused to do. France and Morocco recently resumed judicial cooperation after an extended diplomatic spat , but Mr. Fabius, the foreign minister, brushed aside any suggestions that their relationship might sour once more over the affair. \u201cIt\u2019s a bad movie,\u201d Mr. Fabius said on French radio and television on Sunday. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t shake up relations between our two countries.\u201d", "keyword": "Catherine Graciet;Eric Laurent;Mohammed VI;Editions du Seuil;Publishing;Extortion and Blackmail;Books;Morocco;France"}
{"id": "ny0254429", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/07/09", "title": "Family Battles U.S. Over 10 Double Eagle Coins Worth Millions", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 Who owns 10 exceedingly rare American gold coins from 1933? Is it the family of a local gold dealer who died 21 years ago? Or is it the United States government, which produced a half million of the coins before melting all of them \u2014 well, almost all of them \u2014 down? Family members, who say they found the coins in a safe deposit box in 2003, argue they are the rightful owners of the exquisite \u201cdouble eagle\u201d $20 coins, each now worth millions of dollars. The government argues that the coins, never officially released, belong to the United States, and not the heirs of Israel Switt, the gold dealer. And so to court. In a case that began on Thursday, jurors are getting an unusual lesson in Depression-era history, and will ultimately decide whether Mr. Switt was merely \u201ccolorful,\u201d as a lawyer for the family described him, or a thief. Each side explained in opening arguments that, for all of the history and complexities of 1930s Mint procedures and records to come, the case is quite simple. They disagreed, however, about what the simple point of the case was. Assistant United States Attorney Jacqueline Romero, presenting the government\u2019s case, told jurors, \u201cYou are going to hear a remarkable and intriguing story about gold coins that were stolen from the U.S. Mint.\u201d \u201cIsrael Switt was somehow involved\u201d in the theft, she said, probably with the help of a corrupt cashier at the Philadelphia Mint. The government had linked Mr. Switt to every double eagle that had emerged over the decades, she said, including 10 tracked down in the 1940s and one sold with the agreement of the government by a dealer, Stephen Fenton, in 2002 for $7.6 million. That sale was based on a government mistake, she said; these coins would not get the same dispensation. The government will prove, she pledged, that the heirs knew that the goods were not legitimately theirs, and so the jury should return the coins \u201cto their rightful owner, the people of the United States of America.\u201d Barry Berke, a lawyer arguing on behalf of Mr. Switt\u2019s heirs, the Langbord family, told the jury that the case was, simply, about power and government overreach. Washington should not be able to seize property from citizens \u201cunless it can prove it is entitled to \u2014 and not just powerful enough to take it,\u201d he said. He called the government\u2019s case an attempt to \u201crewrite history,\u201d and promised to present alternate explanations for treasured coins coming legitimately into the Langbords\u2019 hands: the mint commonly exchanged coins for gold, he said, and the cashier of the mint kept an \u201copen bag\u201d of 1933 double eagles near his desk. How did the coins get out? Gloriously designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the 1933 double eagles were never officially distributed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to stop a bank panic and to stem hoarding, issued an executive order that made owning large amounts of gold bullion and coins illegal. So while nearly a half million were made, all but two, sent to the Smithsonian, were supposed to have been reduced to bullion. But in 2004, Joan Langbord, Mr. Switt\u2019s daughter, and her sons contacted the United States Mint to say they had discovered the 10 coins tucked away in a safe deposit box, within a folded Wanamaker\u2019s department store bag, and asked for help in authenticating them. Instead, the government seized the double eagles \u2014 an eagle was a $10 piece, a half eagle a $5 \u2014 saying that since they had never been circulated, they must have been stolen. The Langbords sued to get them back. In 2009, Judge Legrome D. Davis of Federal District Court, said that the government could not simply assume the coins were government property, and would have the burden of proving the facts in court. While the government has the burden of proof, this is not a criminal case in which guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. It must convince jurors only that a preponderance of the evidence supports its case. In a tough pair of detailed orders issued just before trial, Judge Davis stated flatly that some of the evidence could allow jurors to infer that the coins were stolen and that the family knew it and concealed them. He noted somewhat acerbically in a footnote that the safe deposit box in which Ms. Langbord \u201cclaims to have discovered\u201d the coins had been opened by her in 2002, \u201cthe day before the Fenton coin was sold at auction.\u201d Even if the jury decides in favor of the Langbords, Judge Davis could still declare the government the rightful owner. That possibility worries coin collectors, said Armen Vartian, a lawyer who filed briefs in the case on behalf of the Professional Numismatics Guild. \u201cThe government cannot just go around saying, \u2018You have this. We think it\u2019s ours. Give it back,\u2019 \u201d he said. Having looked at the evidence against the Langbords, he said, \u201cAt best, it\u2019s inconclusive,\u201d and added, \u201cYou would think that the government has better things to do.\u201d In the courtroom, jury selection took much of the first day. The process, as usual, was grindingly slow, but had its moments. Judge Davis, a large man with a sonorous voice who tips back so far in his chair that sometimes only his head is visible over the desk, asked a potential juror whether the fact that her husband collected coins would influence her. Did she share his hobby? \u201cI don\u2019t collect coins,\u201d she said. \u201cI spend them.\u201d She was seated.", "keyword": "Numismatics;United States Mint;Switt Israel"}
{"id": "ny0119465", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/07/11", "title": "Liberty Lose in Indianapolis", "abstract": "Tamika Catchings scored 23 points, including the winning free throws with eight seconds left, to give the Indiana Fever an 84-82 win over the visiting Liberty. Cappie Pondexter scored a season-high 33 points and Essence Carson added 14 for the Liberty (6-11). The Liberty were playing their seventh straight game without their No. 2 scorer and rebounder, Plenette Pierson. \u00b6 The Knicks and the Toronto Raptors will play a preseason game on Oct. 19 in Montreal.", "keyword": "New York Liberty;Indiana Fever;Basketball"}
{"id": "ny0082547", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/10/27", "title": "N.B.A.\u2019s Great East-West Divide Remains, but Styles of Play Evolve", "abstract": "Another N.B.A. season is scheduled to begin Tuesday night, but not much has changed from the last one. The Western Conference is again loaded with up-tempo, star-laden teams. Superficially at least, the East is about the luminary named LeBron James and his quest for a sixth straight league finals appearance. One longstanding mystery of the N.B.A. universe is the freewheeling style that took root in the West while the East embraced a more methodical brand of ball. Along conference lines, the geographical word association would be: Out West \u2014 Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix and Golden State. Back East \u2014 Boston, Detroit, New York and (pre-LeBron) Miami. There have been exceptions, but by reputation the West has traditionally elevated the game as a more aesthetically pleasing form of entertainment while the East has prided itself as survival of the brawniest. Ask Rod Thorn, who has been around the pro game since 1963, why that is, and he says, playfully, \u201cWell, you know, the Western part of the country is more about open spaces, and the East has the congested, more urban cities.\u201d Seriously, he doubted that athletic art had been imitating life. More likely, he said, \u201cit has to do with the makeup of the coaches.\u201d Then again, Mike D\u2019Antoni was an innovating celebrity with his precision fire drill of an offense in Phoenix but a failure with it in New York. And Pat Riley coached Magic Johnson and the Showtime Lakers to four championships in Los Angeles, but when he moved into Madison Square Garden with the Knicks and later to Miami, his teams nearly qualified for the Olympics in Greco-Roman wrestling. The East-West divide probably originated in the early 1980s with the league\u2019s ultimate rivalry: those Johnson-and-Riley Lakers \u2014 whose architect was the aptly named Jerry West \u2014 and Larry Bird\u2019s lunch-pail Celtics. Those franchises were already the most historically successful, and as Thorn said, \u201cthis has always been a copycat league.\u201d He added that after Golden State won the championship in June, led by Stephen Curry\u2019s single-season record barrage of 3-pointers and with a high-voltage pace that had N.B.A. advocates in full-throated cheer, we should expect the game to continue trending in the direction that credentialed old-school folks like Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich generally loathe. But to cling stubbornly to the past is to fade away with it. In an effort to eradicate the image of them as so 1990s, the Knicks say they are planning to play a faster version of Jackson\u2019s beloved triangle offense this season. Popovich years ago recalibrated his once-plodding offense to feature the pace-pushing skills of Tony Parker. In winning the 2014 finals over Miami, the Spurs launched more 3-pointers (averaging 23.6 per game) than any title-winning team in history \u2014 until Curry and the Warriors fired them up at a clip of 31 a game in disposing of James and his Cleveland Cavaliers last June. \u201cWe all know if you don\u2019t shoot the 3, you\u2019re probably not going to win,\u201d Popovich said last spring. \u201cEverybody in the league shoots the 3-point shot well and knows the importance. I still hate it.\u201d Image From left, Grizzlies forward Jeff Green, Oklahoma City Thunder center Steven Adams, Grizzlies guard Lazeric Jones and Thunder guard Andre Roberson scrambled for the ball in a preseason game on Oct. 16. Credit Brandon Dill/Associated Press Shooting the 3 at last season\u2019s rate \u2014 an average of 22.5 per game \u2014 does not require a commitment to a speedball game, as teams increasingly space the floor in their halfcourt offenses and use drive-and-kick penetration to free up long-range marksmen. But Thorn said the spread of up-tempo play around the East was inevitable. \u201cIt used to be that no matter how fast teams played in the regular season, the feeling was that the game would slow down in the playoffs,\u201d Thorn said. \u201cWith Golden State playing the way they did, I\u2019m not so sure people are thinking that anymore.\u201d He knows that Jason Kidd isn\u2019t buying into any old East-West divergence as he begins his second season as the coach in Milwaukee. The Bucks are blessed with one of the game\u2019s best young end-to-end athletes in Giannis Antetokounmpo, along with Jabari Parker, expected back soon after knee surgery last winter, and point guard Michael Carter-Williams. With the addition of Greg Monroe to score and pass from the post, Kidd\u2019s team, which opens its season at home Wednesday night against the Knicks, could pose an intriguing challenge to James and the Cavaliers, along with last season\u2019s contenders Chicago, Washington, Atlanta and Toronto. Thorn will be in Milwaukee for the opener. After retiring from the N.B.A.\u2019s executive office last spring at 74, he thought he was out until Kidd pulled him back in, hiring him as a consultant. Kidd was part of Thorn\u2019s second-most-impactful player transaction as a team front-office executive (next to drafting Michael Jordan in Chicago) when Thorn brought Kidd \u2014 a pass-first point guard \u2014 to the Nets in 2001 from Phoenix in a trade for Stephon Marbury. With the ball in Kidd\u2019s hands, the Nets made two consecutive finals, mixing a quicker pace with a version of the Princeton halfcourt offense. Curry and the Warriors may be the rage, but none of their four playoff opponents last season were at full strength, and Thorn is old and wise enough to know that embracing one style does not, or should not, necessarily negate another. Before the playoffs began, West, now a Warriors consultant, told Thorn that the one team he feared was the Spurs. \u201cJerry thought they had the size and ability to control pace in a way the other teams couldn\u2019t,\u201d Thorn said. To that end, the Spurs are stronger inside with the additions of LaMarcus Aldridge and David West. In Oklahoma City, what restores the Thunder as a serious threat, beyond the presumed health of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, is the front-line athleticism provided by Serge Ibaka, Steven Adams and Enes Kanter, the kind of low-post scorer the team has lacked. Even by old East-West standards, Thorn noted, the truly great teams are those not easily typecast, as demonstrated by Jackson\u2019s six title teams in Chicago and five with the Lakers. \u201cGo back to those Bird teams \u2014 they didn\u2019t have fast guys, but they knew how to run a pretty good fast break,\u201d Thorn said. And the Showtime Lakers, he added, could always \u201cslow the game down and throw it inside.\u201d He referred to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the league\u2019s career leading scorer.", "keyword": "Basketball;NBA;Golden State Warriors;Spurs;Earvin Johnson"}
{"id": "ny0068942", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/12/30", "title": "Croatian Presidential Election Heads for January Runoff", "abstract": "After a close first round in the Croatian presidential election, the center-left incumbent, Ivo Josipovic, will face his conservative opponent, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, in a runoff election on Jan. 11, the electoral commission said on Monday. With 99.98 percent of ballots counted, Mr. Josipovic of the Social Democratic Party won 38.5 percent in the first round of voting on Sunday, compared with 37 percent for Ms. Grabar-Kitarovic, the electoral commission said. Two other candidates finished with significantly smaller shares of the vote. Candidates needed more than 50 percent in the first round to avoid a runoff. The presidency in Croatia is a largely ceremonial position, but the vote was considered an important test for the main political parties before parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. Croatia, which joined the European Union in 2013 , has one of the weakest economies in the bloc and an unemployment rate of nearly 20 percent. The Social Democratic Party, the largest group in the center-left government that has been blamed for the continuing economic crisis, backed Mr. Josipovic, a law expert and composer. \u201cWe won the first round, we will win the second,\u201d Mr. Josipovic, the third president of the former Yugoslav republic, told supporters at his party\u2019s election headquarters late on Sunday. Ms. Grabar-Kitarovic, a former foreign minister and former assistant secretary general of NATO , has vowed to lead the country \u201ctoward prosperity.\u201d She is the candidate of the main opposition party, the center-right Croatian Democratic Union. She also served as the Croatian ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011. Turnout in the elections was 47 percent, a showing attributed to bad weather, as most of the country was hit by a blizzard overnight.", "keyword": "Ivo Josipovic;Croatia;Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic;Election"}
{"id": "ny0142365", "categories": ["nyregion", "long-island"], "date": "2008/11/09", "title": "Veterans\u2019 Cemetery on Long Island Opens a Memorial Garden", "abstract": "Farmingdale WHEN Norma Burlone visits her nephew\u2019s grave at Long Island National Cemetery, she usually spends only 10 minutes. Ms. Burlone, the aunt of Cpl. Julien Alberto Ramon, a marine who died two years ago in Iraq, said she cannot bend or kneel easily and needs frequent rests after leg surgery four years ago. A brick shelter nearby houses makeshift seats, but they are uncomfortable and crowded, she said. \u201cNow I will have more time,\u201d she said, pointing to four new benches where throngs of people were attending a service behind her last Sunday. \u201cI can sit over there and talk to him.\u201d Ms. Burlone, 56, of Flushing, Queens, came on a clear, cool afternoon, not knowing a ceremony was under way to unveil the cemetery\u2019s new 40-foot by 40-foot memorial garden. About 250,000 military veterans are buried there, said Bill Rhoades, the cemetery director. More than 125 veterans and relatives came for the event, some wearing dog tags or McCain campaign buttons. Others carried flowers. Some arrived in uniform. Many with bowed heads had tears in their eyes. \u201cWe are today mindful of the past, yet we keep an eye toward the future,\u201d said Dorothy Oxendine, one of the leaders of the memorial effort. \u201cToday we express our commitment to our nation and the message of patriotism and sacrifice as we dedicate this Long Island National Cemetery Memorial Garden in memory of all veterans.\u201d Mrs. Oxendine is past president of the Long Island National Cemetery Memorial Organization and past national president of American Gold Star Mothers, which offers support to and represents mothers of those killed while in the military. Mrs. Oxendine, 82, wanted to create the memorial garden to help those who lost loved ones, she said. And she seemed a fitting choice. She was born on Memorial Street in Middle Village, Queens, and lost her son Pfc. Willie Oxendine III, a marine, on Memorial Day in 1968, when he was killed in Vietnam. Both Mrs. Oxendine\u2019s son and husband, Willie Oxendine Jr., are buried here. It took three years for the memorial garden to become reality, with money coming from the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the United States Submarine Veterans of WWII and Farmingdale\u2019s Rotary Club, among others. The memorial at the 365-acre cemetery contains 118 shrubs, 1,228 bulbs, a Japanese maple tree and four stone benches in the center. Cheryl Anne Lombardo, 49, a horticulturist who lives in Bay Shore, designed the garden. \u201cI came down here and it spoke to me,\u201d she said at the event. Emily Toro, who was celebrating her 49th birthday, said she would use the garden when she visits the grave site of her son Isaac Cortes, an Army private buried nearby. Since he died at the age of 26 in Iraq last November, Ms. Toro said she had come only about four times. \u201cIt\u2019s hard,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to come, but I plan to come more often.\u201d Jeanin Urbina, 21, came with her niece, Cydney, 9, and her father, Agustin, 56, to pay respects to her brother, Specialist Wilfredo Urbina, of the Long Island National Guard\u2019s 69th Infantry unit, and to see the memorial garden. Specialist Urbina, of Baldwin, was 29 when he died four years ago in Baghdad. \u201cI think it\u2019s nice to have a place to sit,\u201d Ms. Urbina said. \u201cIt gives you perspective.\u201d Ms. Burlone and her family watched with others as the color guard marched around the memorial. They listened as the pledge of allegiance was said, prayers were led and the national anthem sung. American flags flapped in the breeze as a salute was fired by members of the American Legion in Babylon, and taps was played. \u201cTo me it\u2019s the perfect setting,\u201d Mr. Rhoades, the cemetery director, said after the event, pointing to rows of white marble headstones of soldiers killed in action, buried to the left and right of the garden memorial. Before she left, Ms. Burlone said she would return the next weekend to spend more than 10 minutes \u2014 maybe an hour \u2014 visiting her nephew, Corporal Ramon, who was a sniper in Iraq. She said he died at age 22 in 2006 on July 20 \u2014 Independence Day in Colombia, which he left when he was 5. He seemed certain he would not return after his second tour of duty, Ms. Burlone said. \u201cBut I know he\u2019s around,\u201d she said with swollen eyes. \u201cHe\u2019s always around.\u201d", "keyword": "Veterans;Monuments and Memorials;Tombs and Tombstones;Long Island (NY);Long Island National Cemetery"}
{"id": "ny0076227", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/05/29", "title": "Dalai Lama Urges Aung San Suu Kyi to Help Myanmar\u2019s Rohingya", "abstract": "BANGKOK \u2014 When they embraced democracy and vowed to leave behind their repressive and dictatorial past, the leaders of Myanmar enjoyed a honeymoon of praise and admiration from luminaries across the globe. But the country\u2019s harsh treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority, setting off an exodus of people by boat across Southeast Asia, has unleashed a barrage of criticism in recent days aimed not only at the country\u2019s former generals but also at the leader of Myanmar\u2019s democracy movement, the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi . The Dalai Lama , the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and a fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, was quoted on Thursday in an Australian newspaper as saying that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi should be helping to address the plight of the Rohingya, who number more than a million but are not recognized as citizens of Myanmar, are restricted in their travels and suffer persecution and deprivation. \u201cI met her two times, first in London and then the Czech Republic,\u201d the Dalai Lama told The Australian. \u201cI mentioned about this problem and she told me she found some difficulties, that things were not simple but very complicated.\u201d \u201cBut in spite of that I feel she can do something,\u201d he added. The Rohingya are widely reviled in Myanmar, which is overwhelmingly Buddhist and has an influential radical Buddhist political movement. Speaking out for the Rohingya is seen as a form of political kryptonite for any Buddhist politician like Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. Understanding Southeast Asia\u2019s Migrant Crisis About 25,000 migrants left Myanmar and Bangladesh on rickety smugglers\u2019 boats in the first three months of 2015, according to a United Nations estimate. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has offered various explanations in recent years for her reluctance to speak out for the Rohingya, saying at one point that a public airing of her views could further stoke the fires of radical Buddhists, who have ransacked Rohingya villages, displacing more than 100,000 Rohingya. Jonah Fisher, a BBC correspondent in Yangon, said in a Twitter post on Thursday that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s latest statement on the Rohingya was that it was the government\u2019s duty to solve the issue. Her critics have said that someone of her enormous moral authority in Myanmar should take a stronger stance. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, another winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said in a recorded message aired this week that aid donors, including the European Union, should make their funding for the impoverished country \u201cconditional on the restoration of citizenship, nationality and basic human rights to the Rohingya.\u201d \u201cA country that is not at peace with itself, that fails to acknowledge and protect the dignity and worth of all its people, is not a free country,\u201d Archbishop Tutu said in remarks that were broadcast at a conference on the Rohingya in Oslo this week. He said he agreed with those who say a \u201cslow genocide\u201d was being committed against the Rohingya. At the same conference, George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who for more than two decades has been active in promoting democracy, sent a videotaped speech in which he said he was \u201cgrowing discouraged\u201d by developments in Myanmar. \u201cThe most immediate threat to Burma\u2019s transition is the rising anti-Muslim sentiment and officially condoned abuse of the Rohingya people,\u201d he said. How Myanmar and Its Neighbors Are Responding to the Rohingya Crisis Myanmar and its neighbors see the people of the Rohingya ethnic group and the seaborne trafficking of migrants in the region very differently, complicating the refugees\u2019 plight. Mr. Soros said he visited a Rohingya settlement in January and saw parallels to his youth as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. \u201cYou see, in 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I too was a Rohingya,\u201d he said. The Rohingya settlement was a ghetto, he said, an \u201cinvoluntary home to thousands of families who once had access to health care, education and employment.\u201d \u201cNow, they are forced to remain segregated in a state of abject deprivation. The parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming.\u201d Myanmar officials are scheduled to meet with their counterparts from other Asian countries in Bangkok on Friday for a meeting to address migrants, chief among them the Rohingya, who have been fleeing Myanmar by the thousands. Myanmar, which changed its name from Burma during the previous military dictatorship and lashes out at governments that continue to refer to the country as Burma, refuses to recognize the term Rohingya and calls the people Bengali instead, suggesting that they come from neighboring Bangladesh. Officials in Myanmar said they would not attend the government meeting in Thailand if the term Rohingya were used. Thailand, which has been reluctant to anger its neighbor, agreed to Myanmar\u2019s demands and titled the conference Special Meeting on Irregular Migration in the Indian Ocean.", "keyword": "Rohingya;Myanmar,Burma;Aung San Suu Kyi;Dalai Lama;Islam"}
{"id": "ny0194824", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/06", "title": "With Council Win, Diana Reyna Completes Break With Vito Lopez", "abstract": "Diana Reyna was in her late 20s when she first won a seat on the City Council , backed by her powerful patron, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the Brooklyn Democratic leader. Inexperienced and seen as serving an ambitious mentor, her opponents dubbed her \u201cVito Lopez\u2019s Vanna White .\u201d But she distanced herself from Mr. Lopez, and by her second term in office, their fights had broken out into the open. On Thursday, two days after Ms. Reyna won a third term on the Council, soundly beating a challenger backed by Mr. Lopez, her allies said Ms. Reyna\u2019s rebellion meant she would be seen as a true independent, another milestone in her political journey. Ms. Reyna, 35, reflected on the bitter contest, her voice still hoarse from shouting. \u201cMy battle representing my community is now made public,\u201d she said. In fact, the subtext of the race for City Council the 34th District drew notice long ago, and it read like this: Assemblyman Lopez, motivated in part by his long-running feud with Ms. Reyna, threw his influence behind Maritza Davila, a Democratic district leader. The quarrel seeped into zoning fights and churches: In an unusually forward venture into politics by a religious leader, Nicholas A. DiMarzio, the Roman Catholic bishop of Brooklyn, urged voters, via robocalls, to support Mr. Lopez . But the assemblyman\u2019s pull was apparently not enough: Ms. Reyna narrowly beat Ms. Davila in the Democratic primary, and she did it again on Tuesday, beating her opponent, who ran on the Working Families Party line, by 25 percentage points. Martin S. Needleman, who has known Ms. Reyna for more than a decade, said, \u201cShe\u2019s grown into a significant player, and she\u2019s clearly no longer waiting for Vito to come back.\u201d Whether the nature of her victory has real implications for her work on the City Council \u2014 or her future \u2014 remains to be seen. Ms. Reyna says she is now better equipped for housing battles with the Bloomberg administration. But others said they doubted that it would have a real impact on her power, and wondered where Ms. Reyna would go after her four-year term was up. The real winners may have been Ms. Reyna\u2019s supporters, who engineered a victory without Mr. Lopez. Many of those supporters are now counting on her help opposing a planned rezoning of the Broadway Triangle, a 31-acre parcel of land that is the subject of a housing dispute in Williamsburg. They face an uphill battle: The City Council is set to decide the matter this month. The plan was a central front in the campaign. In an interview, Mr. Lopez said Ms. Reyna\u2019s opposition to the project was another example of her \u201cundercutting some of the things I do.\u201d Mr. Lopez said the race had not dented his influence in Brooklyn Democratic politics, noting the strong showing there for the Democratic mayoral candidate, William C. Thompson Jr. \u201cI\u2019m proud of my role as county leader,\u201d Mr. Lopez said. But Ms. Reyna\u2019s supporters saw her victory as proof that Mr. Lopez was not invincible. Representative Nydia M. Vel\u00e1zquez , who has her own long feud with Mr. Lopez and who campaigned for Ms. Reyna, said: \u201cIt exposed his vulnerability. He challenged these activists to take destiny into their own hands.\u201d Jo Anne Simon, who ran for City Council in a neighboring district but lost the primary to a candidate backed by Mr. Lopez, said Ms. Reyna\u2019s contest had implications for Brooklyn\u2019s already fractured Democrats. \u201cThis was a very divisive season,\u201d she said, citing a \u201cmean-spirited\u201d campaign, and the fact that Mr. Lopez backed a Working Families candidate. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t build cohesiveness in the party,\u201d said Ms. Simon, who campaigned for Ms. Reyna. The divisions were captured in a video featured prominently on Ms. Davila\u2019s Web site. In it, Ms. Davila stands next to Mr. Lopez on the steps of City Hall, the two of them flanked by politicians from Brooklyn. They all work together, Mr. Lopez says. \u201cThere\u2019s one link that\u2019s missing,\u201d he adds, referring to Ms. Reyna. For her part, Ms. Reyna saw no reason for Brooklyn Democrats on the Council to be at odds. \u201cThe assemblyman is not a Council member,\u201d she said. \u201cI look forward to working with my colleagues.\u201d", "keyword": "Reyna Diana;City Council (New York City);Elections;Lopez Vito J;Davila Maritza;DiMarzio Nicholas A;Velazquez Nydia M;Simon Jo Anne;Democratic Party"}
{"id": "ny0087282", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/07/01", "title": "Horse Trainer Faces Labor Case", "abstract": "Steve Asmussen, a leading thoroughbred trainer, is being sued by the Labor Department, which said his stable had not paid overtime since at least 2012 to grooms and hot walkers who worked more than 40 hours in a week. The federal lawsuit seeks back wages. Asmussen\u2019s lawyer, Clark Brewster, said his client is confident the regulations were met.", "keyword": "Horse racing;Steve Asmussen;Wages and salaries;Labor Department"}
{"id": "ny0175552", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/10/13", "title": "More Details Provided in Death of Immigrant", "abstract": "In court documents filed this week, prosecutors in Westchester County provided more details about the death of a homeless Guatemalan man in Mount Kisco in April, saying that the village police officer who drove him to a remote spot and abandoned him also delivered the blow to the abdomen that ultimately proved fatal. The officer, George Bubaris, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of the man, Rene Perez. Officer Bubaris, who is originally from Queens, was also charged with one count of unlawful imprisonment and two counts of official misconduct. He has pleaded not guilty. The county district attorney, Janet DiFiore, had previously said only that Officer Bubaris \u201crestrained Rene Perez and exposed him to a risk of serious physical injury.\u201d But the court documents show that Mr. Perez, an illegal immigrant, had frequent run-ins with the authorities and had been arrested at least 59 times on charges including indecent exposure and petty larceny. He had been drinking heavily that night, and police officers in the neighboring town of Bedford drove him to Mount Kisco after complaints that he was bothering customers at a department store. Sometime before 11 p.m., Mr. Perez called 911 from a coin laundry in Mount Kisco and asked for a ride to a hospital, according to police records. Officer Bubaris was the first of three officers who responded. In the court documents, filed in Westchester County Superior Court on Thursday, prosecutors said Mr. Perez was \u201chighly and visibly intoxicated\u201d and asserted that Officer Bubaris, at some point during his encounter with Mr. Perez, \u201cinflicted blunt force trauma to Perez\u2019s abdomen\u201d and left him on Byram Lake Road. The prosecutors added, \u201cThe defendant then abandoned the helpless and severely injured Perez in this remote area knowing that he could not extricate himself from his predicament nor protect himself from the elements or other potential dangers or avail himself of any assistance.\u201d \u201cAll of the above,\u201d prosecutors wrote, \u201cresulted in Perez\u2019s death.\u201d According to other court documents, Officer Bubaris told a fellow officer that he had picked up Mr. Perez and taken him to Byram Lake Road. A day later, Officer Bubaris told the same officer, \u201cYou\u2019re the only one who knows, bro\u2019.\u201d Eddie Hayes, Officer Bubaris\u2019s lawyer, said of the prosecutors\u2019 statements, \u201cThey have nothing to support this allegation.\u201d He added: \u201cThere were faint contusions on the guy\u2019s abdomen. That fact that his insides rotted out shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone, since he\u2019s been abusing himself for decades.\u201d A wrongful-death lawsuit seeking damages was filed this week on behalf of Mr. Perez\u2019s estate, according to Jonathan Lovett, a lawyer representing Mr. Perez\u2019s family. The suit claims that Officer Bubaris struck Mr. Perez multiple times with a metal baton or a police club, according to Mr. Lovett, who said that claim was based on the autopsy report. The suit, filed in Federal District Court in White Plains, also faults the Village of Mount Kisco and the Town of Bedford for what Mr. Lovett called \u201cborder dumping,\u201d or the practice by police officers of escorting troublemakers out of town.", "keyword": "Immigration and Refugees;Westchester County (NY);Murders and Attempted Murders;Homeless Persons"}
{"id": "ny0002642", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/03/13", "title": "Obama to Appeal Ruling Curbing Recess Appointments", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Obama administration has decided that it will appeal to the Supreme Court a sweeping ruling by an appeals court in January that President Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate in making three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board last year. While the dispute grew out of a narrow and novel legal question \u2014 whether brief \u201cpro forma\u201d sessions by the Senate could prevent the president from making recess appointments during a lengthy winter break by lawmakers \u2014 the appeals court blew past that issue and called into question nearly two centuries of recess appointments by presidents of both parties. The three-judge panel of the appeals court in Washington ruled that presidents may bypass the confirmation process only during the sort of recess that occurs between formal sessions of Congress, rather than other breaks throughout the year. The gaps between formal sessions generally arise just once a year and sometimes \u2014 as in 2012, when the Senate had not formally adjourned before the next session began \u2014 are skipped entirely. Two of the three judges on the panel also ruled that presidents may fill only vacancies that arise during that same recess. Together, the reasoning would virtually eliminate the recess appointment power for future presidents at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to obtain up-or-down Senate votes on nominees. Partisan views on the issue are volatile. In the fairly recent past, Democrats have argued against the validity of appointments in the middle of a session, and Republicans have supported them. In 1993, after President George Bush made a recess appointment just before leaving office, the Senate legal counsel developed a friend-of-the-court brief for a legal challenge to the appointment, arguing that it was invalid because it did not come between sessions. The Senate majority leader at the time, George Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, wanted to file the brief in the lawsuit on behalf of the Senate, but the minority leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, blocked him from doing so. The case was later resolved on different grounds. Image Terence F. Flynn\u2019s appointment to the National Labor Relations Board is among those at issue. Credit NLRB And in 2004, after President George W. Bush, during a weeklong break in the midst of a Senate session, made a recess appointment of William H. Pryor Jr. to be an appeals court judge, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, filed briefs in several court cases challenging the appointment. Mr. Kennedy also sent letters to each of the judge\u2019s fellow jurists warning them that any ruling they might make with him on the bench could be invalid. The Bush administration and conservative groups defended Judge Pryor\u2019s appointment, and the appeals court on which he served later upheld its validity even though the appointment was not made between sessions. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Three lawyers who helped work on legal challenges to Judge Pryor\u2019s appointment \u2014 Laurence H. Tribe, Martin Lederman and Ronald Weich \u2014 later became officials in the Justice Department during Mr. Obama\u2019s first term. Now, however, it is the Obama administration that is arguing for those same recess appointments in the face of a ruling celebrated by conservatives. An official familiar with the deliberations said that lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department, including the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, and Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., had been meeting to discuss strategy with the labor board lawyers. One option was to petition the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rehear the case, hoping that at least one of the judges might write a dissenting opinion that could put more formal analysis before the Supreme Court to counter the ruling. In the end, however, the officials decided that such a move would only delay a resolution that both businesses and labor unions are anxious to have. The current dispute traces back to the end of the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats in the Senate, seeking to prevent recess appointments over its breaks, developed the tactic of sending a senator into the nearly empty chamber every three days to bang the gavel. That act was deemed a pro forma session that carved the longer adjournment into a series of short ones, considered too brief for recess appointments. Then, in 2011, after Republicans took over the House, they used their power under the Constitution to refuse to let the Democratic-controlled Senate adjourn for more than three days. But in January 2012, Mr. Obama challenged the tactic, calling the pro forma sessions a sham and appointing the three members of the labor board, Sharon Block, Terence F. Flynn and Richard Griffin, as well as Richard Cordray to be the director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mr. Obama has made fewer recess appointments than recent predecessors. But his pronouncement that a president got to decide whether the Senate was in session led many conservatives and some liberals to accuse him of an unconstitutional power grab.", "keyword": "Supreme Court;Barack Obama;Appointments and Executive Changes;NLRB;Senate;Congress;President of the United States;Decisions and Verdicts"}
{"id": "ny0252395", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/11/21", "title": "John G. Smale, Procter & Gamble Chief, Dies at 84", "abstract": "John G. Smale, who as chief executive led Procter & Gamble through a period of extraordinary growth, and then helped engineer a turnaround of General Motors as its chairman, died on Saturday at his home in Cincinnati. He was 84. The cause was complications of pulmonary fibrosis, a Procter & Gamble spokesman said. Mr. Smale ran Procter & Gamble from 1981 until 1990. During his tenure the company strengthened its position internationally, pushing aggressively into Eastern Europe and Asia. He also oversaw a series of major acquisitions, including the $1.2 billion purchase of Richardson-Vicks in 1985. The largest deal in Procter & Gamble\u2019s history at the time, it brought the company well-known brands including Vicks cold medicine, Olay skin care products and Pantene shampoo. He joined the company in 1952 after responding to an advertisement in a Chicago newspaper looking for brand managers. Starting in what was then called the toilet goods division, Mr. Smale earned his stripes managing Procter & Gamble\u2019s new Crest toothpaste brand. He persuaded the American Dental Association to endorse the toothpaste, a pioneering agreement at the time. There were missteps, including a failed push into soft drinks and orange juice. But over his nine-year tenure, Procter & Gamble\u2019s overall revenue doubled to more than $24 billion and profits doubled to $1.6 billion. In 1982, while Mr. Smale was still chief executive at Procter & Gamble, General Motors named him to its board. Ten years later, Mr. Smale and the G.M. board led a coup, ousting Robert C. Stempel as chairman and chief executive. Mr. Smale became chairman, and John F. Smith Jr. the chief executive. During his tenure as G.M.\u2019s chairman, which lasted until his retirement in 1995, Mr. Smale helped rescue the automaker from the brink of bankruptcy and returned it to profitability. He also put in place management techniques from Procter & Gamble, streamlining G.M.\u2019s balkanized management structure and pushing for more forceful marketing of its brands. Mr. Smale also served on several other corporate boards, including those of J. P. Morgan and Eastman Kodak. John Gray Smale and his twin sister, Joy, were born in Listowel, Ontario, on Aug. 1, 1927, and grew up in Elmhurst, Ill. Their father was a traveling salesman for the Marshall Field\u2019s department store chain. He graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1949. While there, he helped pay for his education by writing two how-to books \u2014 \u201cParty \u2019Em Up\u201d and \u201cParty \u2019Em Up Some More\u201d \u2014 that he sold to fraternities and sororities around the country, according to a 2009 interview in the school alumni magazine. His wife of 56 years, the former Phyllis Weaver, died in 2006. His twin sister died in 2000. He is survived by four children, John Gray Jr., Peter, Catherine Anne Caldemeyer and Lisa Smale Corbett; and five grandchildren. An avid fisherman, Mr. Smale had homes in Marathon, Fla., and at McGregor Bay in Ontario. He also kept an apartment in Cincinnati. Mr. Smale was a major figure in Cincinnati\u2019s civic and philanthropic circles. This year he made a $20 million donation to the city in his wife\u2019s memory for construction of the Cincinnati Riverfront Park, which was renamed the Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park. He also remained committed to Procter & Gamble after leaving the company. Robert A. McDonald, the current chief executive, said that just before he assumed the top post, he flew to London with Mr. Smale for a company event. Mr. Smale pulled out seven pages of typed notes in midflight and said that he wanted to discuss the future of the company and what it should concentrate on. In capital letters across the front page, Mr. McDonald said, was \u201cINNOVATION, INNOVATION, INNOVATION.\u201d Each year the John G. Smale Innovation Award, a prize financed personally by Mr. Smale, recognizes young scientists at the company. \u201cHe represented the soul of P.& G.,\u201d Mr. McDonald said. A. G. Lafley, who preceded Mr. McDonald as chief executive, said that last year Mr. Smale spoke at a meeting of Procter & Gamble leaders. His health failing, Mr. Smale took the stage carrying a machine to help him breathe. He spoke about the importance of having a long-term focus for the 174-year-old company. \u201cHe said, we don\u2019t want to think in quarters or even years but in terms of decades and centuries,\u201d Mr. Lafley said. \u201cI learned that from John.\u201d", "keyword": "Smale John G;Procter & Gamble Company;Deaths (Obituaries);General Motors"}
{"id": "ny0077542", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/05/01", "title": "Pakistan Sentences 10 to Life Terms Over 2012 Attack on Malala Yousafzai", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 A Pakistani court on Thursday sentenced 10 men to life in prison for their role in the 2012 shooting of Malala Yousafzai , the teenage Nobel laureate who defied the Taliban with her calls for girls\u2019 education and won worldwide acclaim for her courage. The sentences were handed down by an antiterrorism court in Swat, the picturesque northern valley that was once a stronghold of the Taliban until a military offensive in 2009 broke their hold. Ms. Yousafzai, who is now 17, was shot in the head in October 2012 when she was returning home from school with her classmates on a bus. After a brief stay in a military hospital in Rawalpindi, she was airlifted for treatment to Britain, where she is now studying and living with her exiled family. In September 2014, the Pakistani military announced the arrest of 10 men it accused of being involved in the attack. Officials said the gunmen took orders from Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the main Pakistani Taliban branch who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, when they attacked Ms. Yousafzai and the other students. The militants held sway in the Swat Valley until 2009, terrorizing the population with their brutal reign, marked by public killings and the lashing of their opponents. Ms. Yousafzai rose to prominence after her blog chronicled life in the valley under Taliban rule and the ambitions of a young girl yearning for an education. Guided by her father, Ziauddin, an advocate for education, she became a symbol against Taliban oppression. Her fame and relentless campaigning rankled the Taliban, who threatened to kill her. Ms. Yousafzai has won several awards for her bravery and was the joint winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize along with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner for the rights of children.", "keyword": "Malala Yousafzai;Pakistan;Taliban;Criminal Sentence"}
{"id": "ny0247887", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/05/10", "title": "New Carbon Dating Suggests Neanderthals and Early Humans Didn\u2019t Mingle Much", "abstract": "An improvement in the dating of fossils suggests that the Neanderthals, a heavily muscled, thick-boned human species adapted to living in ice age Europe, perished almost immediately on contact with the modern humans who started to enter Europe from the Near East about 44,000 years ago. Until now bones from several Neanderthal sites have been dated to as young as 29,000 years ago, suggesting there was extensive overlap between the two human species. This raised the question of whether there had been interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, an issue that is still not resolved. But researchers report that tests using an improved method of radiocarbon dating, based on a new way to exclude contaminants, show that most, and maybe all, Neanderthal bones in Europe are or will be found to be at least 39,000 years old. Thomas F. G. Higham, a specialist in radiocarbon dating at Oxford University, and Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland, have dated the bones of a Neanderthal child less than 2 years old whose remains were found in the Mezmaiskaya Cave in the northern Caucasus Mountains. A second Neanderthal baby, found in a lower layer in the cave, was previously dated back 29,000 years. The first baby, since its bones were retrieved from a higher layer, must be even younger, but in fact it turns out to be 39,000 years old when an improved version of the radiocarbon dating technique is used, Dr. Higham and Dr. Pinhasi reported Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Radiocarbon dating depends on measuring the radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon 14, which is ingested during a person\u2019s lifetime and steadily decays after death. Very little carbon 14 remains in specimens more than 30,000 years old, and even tiny amounts of contaminating carbon 14 can make a sample seem much younger than it is. Dr. Higham has developed a method of ultrafiltration that removes contaminants and leaves whole molecules of collagen recovered from fossil bone. Reviewing other Neanderthal dates ascertained with the new ultrafiltration method, Dr. Higham sees an emerging pattern that no European Neanderthal site can reliably be dated to less than 39,000 years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s only with reliable techniques that we can interpret the archaeological past,\u201d he said. He is re-dating Neanderthal sites across Europe and so far sees no evidence for any extensive overlap between Neanderthals and modern humans. \u201cThere was a degree of contemporaneity, but it may not have been very long,\u201d he said. A short period of contact would point to the extinction of the Neanderthals at the hands of modern humans. \u201cIt\u2019s very unlikely for Neanderthals to go extinct without some agency from modern humans,\u201d Dr. Higham said. Paul Mellars, an expert on Neanderthals at Cambridge University in England, said that the quality of the dates from Dr. Higham\u2019s laboratory was superb and that samples of bone re-dated by the lab\u2019s method were almost always found to be several thousand years older than previously measured. The picture supported by the new dates is that the interaction between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe was brief in each region, lasting perhaps a few hundred years, Dr. Mellars said, until the modern humans overwhelmed their competitors through better technology and greater numbers. Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said Dr. Higham\u2019s re-dating was \u201ccompelling\u201d and fit with his own view that \u201cmodern humans were technologically and intellectually far superior to the Neanderthals.\u201d This, he said, \u201cwould have allowed them to spread very rapidly and to precipitate the extinction of the Neanderthals almost immediately on contact.\u201d The new radiocarbon findings show little evidence that the two species peacefully coexisted within Europe. But geneticists who have decoded the Neanderthal genome reported last year that some 2.5 percent of the modern human genome is derived from Neanderthals. The interbreeding, they postulate, occurred not in Europe 40,000 years ago but in an earlier encounter 100,000 years ago. They believe that this encounter must have been in the Near East. Modern humans and Neanderthals occupied the same sites in what is now Israel, but it is not clear that the populations overlapped. The Neanderthals seem to have occupied the sites during cold periods and the modern humans during spells of warmer weather. The presence of modern humans in Israel 100,000 years ago was long assumed to have been a failed attempt to leave Africa, since there is no archaeological evidence of modern humans outside Africa until some 44,000 years ago. But geneticists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology argue that this earlier attempt was in fact successful, and that modern humans commingled with Neanderthals in the Near East before going on to occupy Europe and Asia. This would explain, they say, why Neanderthal genes are found in Europeans and Asians but not in Africans. Dr. Klein said interbreeding between the two species was perfectly possible in principle, \u201cbut it\u2019s kind of anti-archaeological because there is no evidence that they overlapped\u201d in the Near East. \u201cI would be more convinced if it were in fact postulated for the extensive, if brief, contact between Neanderthals and modern humans after 50,000 years ago,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Neanderthal Man;Archaeology and Anthropology;Carbon Dating;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0164380", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2006/11/24", "title": "Microsoft Gives Europe Antitrust Documents", "abstract": "BRUSSELS, Nov. 23 \u2014 Microsoft submitted a new batch of technical information about its Windows operating system to the European Commission on Thursday, meeting the latest deadline to provide information on whether it is complying with a 2004 antitrust ruling. \u201cThis is an important milestone,\u201d Microsoft said in a statement. Final edits and technical review of the information already submitted in July have now been completed, it added, insisting that it had not broken the summer deadline. The commission, which fined Microsoft $357 million in July for failing to comply with the antitrust order, disagrees. Last week, the European competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, expressed growing impatience with Microsoft when she imposed the latest deadline. She described the dossier submitted in July as incomplete and warned Microsoft that it faced daily fines of 3 million euros ($3.9 million) if it did not hand over all the technical information about Windows that the commission had requested. Her department welcomed the company\u2019s submission. \u201cNow the dossier from Microsoft is worth testing,\u201d her spokesman, Jonathan Todd, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. \u201cPotential licensees of the technical information will be invited to Microsoft\u2019s headquarters in Redmond to look at it.\u201d In the meantime, the commission and the trustee chosen by Microsoft to oversee the process of compliance with the 2004 ruling will examine the newly submitted information, Mr. Todd said. In 2004, Microsoft was found guilty of abusing the dominant strength of Windows to muscle in on other separate software markets, including the market for server operating systems. The 2004 ruling ordered Microsoft to disclose enough information about Windows to allow rival server software manufacturers, including Sun Microsystems and open-source companies like Red Hat, to design server operating systems that worked as well with computers that run Windows as Microsoft\u2019s own server operating system. If the information provided by Microsoft does not satisfy the order, the company will face a fine of 3 million euros a day, backdated to July, Mr. Todd said. Microsoft said Thursday that it had met the July deadline. \u201cThe trustee and Microsoft have now completed the technical review and edits to the more than 100 documents, totaling 8,500 pages, that we submitted in July of this year, in accordance with the deadline established by the commission,\u201d it said. It described the submission of technical documentation in July, and the revision process since then, as \u201can unprecedented undertaking involving over 300 engineers and technical writers at Microsoft.\u201d Even if the information submitted Thursday is satisfactory, Microsoft may still face fines for the period between the July deadline and Thursday. \u201cWe\u2019ll take a decision about this period of time in due course,\u201d Mr. Todd said.", "keyword": "Microsoft Corp;European Commission;Antitrust Actions and Laws;Computer Software"}
{"id": "ny0190364", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2009/05/31", "title": "Red Wings Begin Finals in Same Way Last Season\u2019s Ended", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury felt as if he had some extra company after allowing two weird goals in a 3-1 Red Wings victory that opened the Stanley Cup finals Saturday night. \u201cIt felt like a full moon was over my end of the ice,\u201d he said. Both of Fleury\u2019s gaffes were the result of caroms off Joe Louis Arena\u2019s famously lively end boards. His first faux pas came when Brad Stuart\u2019s routine slap shot from the blue line caromed off those end boards, struck him in the rear end and dribbled into the net 13 minutes 38 seconds into the game to give Detroit a 1-0 lead. With a minute left in the second period and the score tied 1-1, embarrassing misfortune struck Fleury once more, again courtesy of the arena\u2019s supercharged end boards. Brian Rafalski\u2019s long shot sprang off the dashers to Johan Franzen at the side of the net, who centered the puck just as Fleury was diving headfirst back into position. The puck hit Fleury\u2019s trailing leg, ricocheted 60 degrees into the net, and it was 2-1 for Detroit. \u201cYes, the boards here are quick \u2014 I\u2019ll cogitate and see if I can do something about it,\u201d said Fleury, whose first language is French. Fleury has not had the best of luck at this building. When he charged onto the ice before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals last year, he stumbled comically and fell \u2014 a bad omen, it turned out, as the Red Wings won the opener and the series in six games. Fleury made it onto the ice without mishap for this year\u2019s Game 1, and he played well over all, making 27 saves. Still, the rear-end-assisted goal he allowed to Stuart looked a lot like one he gave up to the Red Wings in last year\u2019s finals. Asked Saturday about that full moon, Fleury smiled and said, \u201cHopefully, tomorrow it\u2019ll be over the other end of the ice.\u201d Penguins Coach Dan Bylsma said the Penguins knew about the lively boards and practiced for it. \u201cThat\u2019s just the situation in this building,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the shooting lanes are blocked, you try to shoot a little wide and hope that the rebound from the back boards comes out.\u201d This was the first Stanley Cup finals rematch in 25 years. And except for the two odd goals, the Penguins had the edge in play, at least through the first 40 minutes. The Penguins scored their first goal at 18:37 of the first period when Detroit goalie Chris Osgood let the rebound of a Evgeni Malkin slap shot trickle away for Ruslan Fedotenko to bury, making it 1-1. The play started when the normally dependable defenseman Niklas Kronwall gave the puck away to Malkin in the Detroit zone. That was an encouraging sign for the Penguins, who were shut out in the first two games here last year. Osgood made some very good saves throughout the game, finishing with 31 over all. Early in the second period, he robbed Malkin on a 120-foot breakaway after Malkin got away with tripping Kronwall and stole the puck from him. Later in the period, he stopped Sidney Crosby, who shot a backhander after making a nifty spin move. He was also lucky, as when a Crosby shot in the third period hit the goalpost and landed on his back. Saves like those kept Detroit in the game until the Wings were able to break it open on the rookie Justin Abdelkader\u2019s first career playoff goal in the third minute of the third period. That goal, from the line of Abdelkader, Ville Leino and Darren Helm, highlighted Detroit\u2019s depth. They were playing because of the absence of Pavel Datsyuk, the Wings\u2019 finalist for the Most Valuable Player award, who is out with a foot injury, and Kris Draper, their top face-off man, who is sidelined with a groin injury. Nicklas Lidstrom, the Wings\u2019 talismanic defenseman and captain, was back in the lineup after missing the first two playoff games of his 17-season career and led all players with 24 minutes of ice time. Detroit also had defenseman Jonathan Ericsson back after he missed one game because of an emergency appendectomy on Wednesday. Despite the three small incisions in his abdomen, he played nearly 17 minutes. The game was chippy, as befits a Cup finals rematch. Crosby went out of his way to throw an open-ice shoulder check into Henrik Zetterberg, Detroit\u2019s indefatigable two-way center who usually plays opposite him. Brooks Orpik jarred Marian Hossa, who left the Penguins after last season to play for Detroit because the Wings, Hossa said at the time, had a better chance of winning the Cup. On Thursday, Orpik said he wished Hossa was still with Pittsburgh, but that did not stop him from nailing him in open ice.", "keyword": "Hockey Ice;Detroit Red Wings;Pittsburgh Penguins"}
{"id": "ny0071026", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/03/16", "title": "Corey Kluber, Indians\u2019 Ace, Rises as Precisely as His Two-Seam Fastball Dips", "abstract": "GOODYEAR, Ariz. \u2014 As the actor Will Ferrell skipped merrily from camp to camp last Thursday in a madcap Cactus League odyssey, the best pitcher in the American League worked stoically on a back field at the Cleveland Indians\u2019 training complex. No numbers on the scoreboard, no paying customers, not even an umpire. Corey Kluber might smile if he watched Ferrell\u2019s slapstick comedy. Kluber, his teammates insist, is a witty prankster. Last May, he wore a chicken costume in the outfield during batting practice. \u201cOh, he\u2019s very sneaky,\u201d Indians pitcher Zach McAllister said. \u201cIf there\u2019s something going on, he\u2019s probably got his hand in it somehow.\u201d But after Thursday\u2019s simulated game \u2014 a controlled setting to build innings, without the stress of competition \u2014 Kluber revealed nothing. He wore no expression. He looked neither happy nor irritated, speaking to a few reporters in monotone, the personification of the nickname some teammates wear on a T-shirt: Klubot. Kluber, 28, earned the A.L. Cy Young Award last season with robotic, methodical efficiency. A right-hander, he finished 18-9 with a 2.44 earned run average, 269 strikeouts and better advanced metrics than the runner-up, Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners. He got the award at a banquet in New York in January. \u201cIt\u2019s just sitting on a desk in my office,\u201d Kluber said. \u201cI haven\u2019t found a good spot for it.\u201d Yet Kluber has reason to be proud. He became the third Cleveland pitcher to post a season of at least 18 victories and 260 strikeouts and an E.R.A. below 2.50. The others were Bob Feller and Luis Tiant. That is impressive company for any pitcher, especially one in his first full major league season who was not even ranked as a top-10 prospect in the San Diego farm system in 2010. That was when the Indians acquired him in a three-way trade that sent pitcher Jake Westbrook to St. Louis. \u201cI don\u2019t worry about what people predicted my career path to be,\u201d said Kluber, who was drafted in the fourth round from Stetson University. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of a waste to do that. I think it\u2019s better off to just focus on what you can do now to improve in the future. I don\u2019t think looking back makes much sense.\u201d Looking forward did not interest him much, either, beyond generalities, but the Indians do not pay Kluber to talk. They pay him \u2014 not very much, actually \u2014 to pitch, and they thought he was intriguing enough to pluck from the Padres\u2019 Class AA team for Westbrook. (San Diego got outfielder Ryan Ludwick from the Cardinals.) \u201cWhat we try to do is identify those attributes that we think have a chance to lead to success,\u201d said Chris Antonetti, the Indians\u2019 general manager. \u201cIn Corey\u2019s case, he\u2019s a big, physical starting pitcher with good stuff, had a track record of success in terms of missing bats \u2014 he was leading the league in strikeouts at the time \u2014 and our reports were really good on his makeup and work ethic.\u201d Kluber, who is listed as 6 feet 4 inches, advanced to Class AAA soon after the trade but struggled there the next season, with a 5.56 E.R.A. and more than four walks per nine innings. He relieved three times for Cleveland in September 2011, but he began the next two seasons in the minors. Kluber refined his skills on the farm, working diligently on a sinking two-seam fastball that one day would devastate major league hitters and make his cutter and curveball even more effective. But mastering the pitch took time. \u201cGuys are in the minor leagues for a reason, and his was fastball command,\u201d said Mickey Callaway, the Indians\u2019 pitching coach and their former minor league coordinator. \u201cAnd with stuff like that and throwing the ball over the plate, you don\u2019t know when that\u2019s going to come. It could be four years. It could never come.\u201d Success came for Kluber midway through the 2013 season. He went 8-1 in his final 16 starts, and last spring Manager Terry Francona predicted a breakthrough. Kluber had gotten on a roll, and Francona believed his competitive drive would sustain it. As last season went on, Francona said, Kluber rarely shook off a sign from catcher Yan Gomes. He had total trust in the two-seamer. \u201cWhen you have that good stuff and you throw it with conviction, even if it may not be the right pitch, it probably is,\u201d Francona said. \u201cHe went one outing where Gomer wanted to establish his fastball, and he was locating it. I don\u2019t think he threw an off-speed pitch until the ninth hitter of the game. And he just said: \u2018I never really thought anything. Gomer put it down, so I threw it.\u2019 \u201d Francona said he was pleased to see a younger Indians starter, Trevor Bauer, finding a similar rhythm with Gomes this spring and pouring strikes into the zone. Bauer is one of several starters in the Indians\u2019 boom-or-bust rotation who could be poised to blossom, and he is using Kluber\u2019s two-seamer as a template. At one point last season, Bauer asked Kluber if he could stand behind him in the bullpen and film his practice session. Kluber agreed, and Bauer \u2014 who chose his angle to best view Kluber\u2019s release point \u2014 said he captured his teammate in 240, 480 and 1,000 frames per second. Bauer watched the film, and other clips he collected of Toronto\u2019s Marcus Stroman, who has a similar two-seamer, and studied the footage as part of his off-season routine, watching it on a loop three out of every five days once he started throwing on Nov. 1. Bauer said Kluber\u2019s two-seamer, which averages 93 miles an hour, veered eight inches down and in to a righty, and he spotted it with such precision that it perfectly set up his curveball, if hitters got that far. \u201cHe puts a lot of pressure on the hitter to swing the bat,\u201d Bauer said, \u201cbecause I noticed toward the end of the year, a lot of guys were going up there and swinging really early in the count, almost like they were in defensive mode from the beginning. There was an intimidation factor you could see.\u201d Bauer said his own version was a work in progress \u2014 inconsistent, but coming along. For years, that also described Kluber\u2019s career, and his late development has kept him from cashing in on his Cy Young Award. Kluber was not eligible for salary arbitration this season and will make only $601,000 on a one-year deal. The Indians traded their last two Cy Young winners \u2014 C. C. Sabathia and Cliff Lee \u2014 before they reached free agency, getting outfielder Michael Brantley for Sabathia and starter Carlos Carrasco for Lee. They are in no rush to move Kluber, who cannot be a free agent until after the 2018 season. \u201cI\u2019m not talking about that,\u201d Kluber said when asked about the possibility of a long-term contract, and the answer was predictable. The Klubot is not programmed to discuss such matters, or to elaborate on much of anything. He is programmed, simply, to dominate. It was a long-running script, but it is finally up and running.", "keyword": "Baseball;Corey Kluber;Zach McAllister;Terry Francona;Cleveland Indians"}
{"id": "ny0126988", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2012/01/03", "title": "Reaching Back 2,000 Years to Unravel a Curse", "abstract": "A vegetable seller named Babylas was the target of an alarming curse nearly 2,000 years ago. Written on a lead tablet found in Antioch, one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, the curse calls on the gods to tie up the hapless greengrocer, then \u201cdrown and chill\u201d his soul. The curse is described in the German journal Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Papyrologie und Epigraphik by Alexander Hollmann, a classicist at the University of Washington who studies Greek and Roman magic. The curse was written on both sides of the tablet. One side calls upon the god Iao to bind Babylas; the other side addresses multiple gods and calls for the tablet to be thrown down and \u201ckilled\u201d in a well \u2014 followed, in the same way, by Babylas. \u201cIt also shows where he lives,\u201d Dr. Hollmann said. \u201cIt\u2019s all sort of designed so the gods know exactly where to find him.\u201d Although the author of the curse is not mentioned in the writing, Dr. Hollmann speculates that it may have been a rival businessman. \u201cThis is a pretty serious curse,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we have other evidence that these kinds of practices went on.\u201d The tablet was found in a well in the 1930s, presumably the same one it was dropped in. Since then, along with many other items excavated from Antioch, which lies near Turkey\u2019s Syrian border, the tablet has been at the Princeton University Art Museum. Curse tablets like this one have shown up in Rome, in Carthage in Africa and throughout the ancient Mediterranean region, said Dr. Hollmann, who has deciphered one other such tablet from Antioch and is working on six others. \u201cThey are so similar, because professionals were using magic books that circulated,\u201d he said. \u201cThese had templates that were used for hundreds of years.\u201d", "keyword": "Museums;University of Washington;Archaeology;Roman Civilization;Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik (Journal);Hollmann Alexander"}
{"id": "ny0141363", "categories": ["nyregion", "new-jersey"], "date": "2008/11/02", "title": "1922 Theater Reopens to a Rock Beat", "abstract": "MONTCLAIR AS the headliner reopening the Wellmont Theater here on Tuesday night, the rock band Counting Crows displayed their usual laid-back style. But the process of turning the old Art Deco theater into a performance venue in the heart of Montclair\u2019s congested downtown was not without its hectic moments. Take opening night, originally scheduled for last Monday. Hours before the curtain was to go up, promoters sent out the word, by e-mail, on line and on the radio, that the show had been postponed by a day, explaining that Counting Crows\u2019 lead singer, Adam Duritz, was ill. The concert went off mostly without a hitch the next day; the opening act, Wild Sweet Orange, played a couple of extra numbers, and Counting Crows were a bit late taking the stage. But more than 1,300 people eventually pumped their fists to favorites like \u201cRound Here\u201d and the opening number, \u201cA Long December.\u201d An hour before show time, a battalion of security officers was directing a convoy of concertgoers in S.U.V.\u2019s, and traffic was flowing smoothly in an area known to wear down would-be diners and moviegoers seeking a coveted parking space. Back in September, Joseph Hartnett, chief executive of the municipality, said, \u201cKeeping all of these people moving is going to be a challenge in an already parking-challenged town.\u201d As it turned out, concertgoers said parking was less an issue than other factors, at least on a Tuesday evening when the theater was not filled to capacity. \u201cThere\u2019s ample parking on the street \u2014 I had no problem at all,\u201d said Chris Kunstadter, 53, of Bloomfield. Mr. Kunstadter received e-mail notification of the postponement in time to avoid heading out on Monday, but when he made it inside on Tuesday, he had a different concern. \u201cThey should have seating on the lower level,\u201d he said, referring to the capacious open space near the main stage, where clumps of concertgoers convened. For this concert, seats were available only on the Wellmont\u2019s upper tier. \u201cOn the Web site, it shows a seating plan\u201d for the lower level, Mr. Kunstadter said. The theater\u2019s managers say they will be bringing in seats for certain shows. Shawn Savage, 26, of Wanaque, complained that the Wellmont\u2019s three bars were charging \u201cManhattan prices\u201d for beer: \u201cThey could bring it down a buck or two,\u201d he said. Nancy Livingston, 39, of Bloomfield, called the theater\u2019s interior \u201cindustrial and unfinished-looking.\u201d Most recently a movie triplex, the Wellmont dates to 1922. In comments on the Web site Baristanet, some other concertgoers complained that it was chilly inside. The theater, which accommodates up to 2,500, secured 800 parking spots in three lots several days before the opening. The deal was struck by Andy Feltz, 50, of Montclair Entertainment LLC, a new concert promotion company in partnership with the Bowery Presents, a New York-based group that owns the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge. Mr. Feltz ran the Beacon Theater in Manhattan from 1986 to 2006 and is currently presiding over shows at the United Palace Theater, also in Manhattan. \u201cMy kids go to school here,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to do anything to upset the town.\u201d The Wellmont\u2019s lineup of boldface names on the way already includes Al Green, Steely Dan, Brian Wilson and John Legend. \u201cI think it\u2019s unreal that we\u2019re getting this kind of venue in Montclair, which is mostly just a town of restaurants and stores,\u201d said Chris Castellani, 33, a Montclair resident and operator of the blog MusicSnobbery. \u201cProbably a lot of people are going to discover that Montclair is a cool place to come and hang out.\u201d The Wellmont\u2019s booker, Anthony Makes, 40, who used to secure bands for the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, said anyone who thinks that he will be bringing in staid acts for an audience of stiff suburbanites should reconsider the surroundings. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty hip around here,\u201d Mr. Makes said, noting that ticket sales for more under-the-radar bands like the Decemberists were already brisk. \u201cThis is an audience that knows music.\u201d", "keyword": "Rock Music;Parking;Montclair (NJ);Duritz Adam"}
{"id": "ny0286461", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/09/13", "title": "Starboard Value, Taking Stake in Perrigo, Looks to Make Another Big Investment Pay", "abstract": "The hedge fund that helped prod Yahoo into selling its core business has found a new target for its brand of shareholder activism: the drug maker Perrigo. The fund, Starboard Value, has taken a 4.6 percent stake in the pharmaceutical company and has urged it to take steps to bolster its sagging stock price, according to a letter sent to Perrigo\u2019s board. In the letter , Starboard pointed out the steep drop in Perrigo shares since the drug maker rebuffed a takeover bid last year by a fellow pharmaceutical company, Mylan. That bid was valued around $205 a share at the time. Shares of Perrigo have fallen more than 50 percent during the last 12 months, closing on Friday at $88.71. According to Starboard, Perrigo has mismanaged its core business of generic over-the-counter medicine and has failed to deliver on promises it made during its defense against the bid from Mylan. Starboard also complained about bonuses that Perrigo executives received after successfully fending off Mylan. \u201cWe believe that Perrigo trades at a significant discount to fair value and that there is substantial value to be created at Perrigo for the benefit of all its shareholders,\u201d Jeffrey C. Smith, Starboard\u2019s chief executive, wrote in the letter. \u201cHowever, these are challenging times for Perrigo, and we strongly believe that material change is necessary.\u201d In a statement on Monday, Perrigo said that it \u201cwill review the letter carefully and looks forward to a constructive and productive dialogue with Starboard \u2014 as we do with all of our shareholders \u2014 while we execute on a number of strategic and operational initiatives.\u201d Perrigo\u2019s case will be led in part by its chief executive of only a few months, John Hendrickson. His predecessor and the architect of the defense against Mylan, Joseph C. Papa, left for the drug maker Valiant Pharmaceuticals International this year. Since assuming his post, Mr. Hendrickson has criticized Mr. Papa\u2019s tenure at Perrigo, arguing that the company\u2019s \u201crecent track record of performance against our own expectations is unacceptable.\u201d Starboard\u2019s 4.6 percent stake makes it the company\u2019s third-biggest shareholder, behind the mutual fund giants Vanguard and Capital Research, according to regulatory filings.", "keyword": "Perrigo;Starboard Value;Pharmaceuticals;Shareholder Rights"}
{"id": "ny0258654", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/01/31", "title": "Pierce Helps Celtics Beat Lakers in Finals Rematch", "abstract": "Paul Pierce scored 32 points, Kevin Garnett had 18 points and 13 rebounds while playing with a large bandage on his head, and the Boston Celtics won an N.B.A. finals rematch with the Lakers in Los Angeles on Sunday, overcoming 41 points by Kobe Bryant in a 109-96 victory. \u201cIt\u2019s another game, but it was definitely an emotional game, especially because we lost Game 7 here,\u201d Pierce said. Bryant became the youngest to pass 27,000 career points but could not spark the Lakers, who have lost four of seven. \u201cIs it the playoffs yet?\u201d Lakers Coach Phil Jackson said. \u201cNo.\u201d Boston, which has won 8 of 10, showed off a complete offensive game, outrebounding the Lakers by 43-30, hitting nine 3-pointers and getting 34 assists. \u201cWe knew we could run on L.A.,\u201d Rajon Rondo said. \u201cL.A., given the personnel that we have, we thought we could outrun them.\u201d Garnett was cut near his left temple in the second quarter after Pau Gasol swiped his hand at him. HEAT 108, THUNDER 103 Eddie House made a go-ahead 3-pointer with 22.2 seconds left, then added two free throws to seal the victory for visiting Miami, whose All-Star threesome \u2014 Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh \u2014 played together for the first time in nearly three weeks. Wade scored 32 points, James added 23 points and 13 rebounds and Bosh had 20 points. Kevin Durant scored 33 points for Oklahoma City but missed a shot with 15 seconds left that would have tied the score. SUNS 104, HORNETS 102 The backup center Marcin Gortat scored 25 points for host Phoenix. New Orleans nearly erased an 8-point deficit in the final 18 seconds, but Grant Hill blocked an inside attempt by Marcus Thornton with 3.9 seconds left and a 3-point attempt by the Hornets\u2019 Chris Paul missed at the buzzer. MAGIC 103, CAVALIERS 87 Dwight Howard had 20 points and 20 rebounds in three quarters of work, and Ryan Anderson added 23 points and 16 rebounds for host Orlando. Howard had his 36th double-double of the season by halftime. Cleveland has lost 30 of 31, including 20 in a row. 76ERS 110, NUGGETS 99 Andre Iguodala scored 24 points and Thaddeus Young had 21 for host Philadelphia. Chauncey Billups led Denver with 27 points. FINE FOR RIVERS Celtics Coach Doc Rivers was fined $15,000 for leaving the court too slowly after being ejected from a loss Friday night in Phoenix. PACERS FIRE O\u2019BRIEN The Indiana Pacers fired Coach Jim O\u2019Brien. The Pacers were 121-169 in O\u2019Brien\u2019s three and a half seasons, including 17-27 this season. The assistant Frank Vogel was named the interim coach.", "keyword": "Basketball;Boston Celtics;Los Angeles Lakers;Pierce Paul (1977- )"}
{"id": "ny0237357", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2010/06/10", "title": "W.N.B.A.\u2019s Liberty Receiving Little Face Time on MSG", "abstract": "The Liberty is fading from television. Two years ago, the MSG Network carried 26 Liberty games. Last year, it televised 14. This season the Liberty, 3-4 and last in the W.N.B.A.\u2019s Eastern Conference, have appeared once. The next four or five Liberty games on MSG will be televised as a part, which is unspecified by the Garden, of the team\u2019s new Foxwoods casino sponsorship. MSG has not yet scheduled dates for the games. This shift in priorities at a media company like Madison Square Garden is astonishing. The Garden owns the MSG Network and the Liberty. The network has needed spring and summer programming since the Mets left to start SNY after the 2005 season. But even as the presence of the Liberty, whose games are lower rated than the Mets\u2019 were, has decreased, MSG is carrying 22 Red Bulls soccer games. That\u2019s 22 games of a team the Garden does not own versus five or six of a team it does own. And it\u2019s not as if the Red Bulls are a drastically bigger draw than the Liberty or that MSG is paying a big rights fee to carry the games. In a Red Bulls-Liberty rating comparison, we see a difference between tiny and teensy-weensy. MSG\u2019s eight Red Bulls this season have averaged a 0.14 rating, or 10,490 households; the Liberty\u2019s 14 games last year on MSG averaged a 0.1 rating, or 7,493 households. Scott O\u2019Neil, the president of Madison Square Garden Sports, conceded that the company was saving money by carrying fewer Liberty games. He said it was better to reach Liberty fans by streaming its games, using a technology that is cheaper than the $35,000 to $50,000 price tag for a traditional game broadcast. O\u2019Neil said, \u201cW.N.B.A. fans tell us, \u2018We want access where we want it and how we want it,\u2019 and the most prudent way to reach the most fans is with WNBA Live Access,\u201d the league\u2019s year-old streaming service. Let\u2019s dispense with the Garden needing to save money by slashing TV access to the Liberty (unless it is looking to sell the team). The Garden had earnings of $27.7 million in 2009 and $17.4 million in the first quarter this year. No one expects the Garden to be profligate. But shareholders of this newly spun-off public company should wonder why MSG paid to produce all those clearing-the-salary-cap Knicks games the last two seasons, which should have been relegated to streaming. And who needed to see those Isiah Thomas-coached seasons in high definition? Streaming sports is increasingly common and is becoming increasingly important as an option for laptop and mobile users who do not want to be tethered to their televisions. Understood. It is a great and viable screen alternative to the stationary television. But it is not yet the mass medium television is. O\u2019Neil, who called WNBA Live Access spectacular, said that \u201cthe most important thing for us is to make sure the game is accessible to our fans.\u201d But slashing TV coverage does not achieve that goal regardless of the technical sophistication of Liberty fans. \u201cWe want to reach the most fans in the most efficient way,\u201d he added. He subverted his argument by saying streaming brings in \u201cdifferent fans than TV.\u201d If that is true, MSG should augment a streaming strategy with one that restores a majority of the home games to MSG. The Garden is bucking a trend in the W.N.B.A. Last year, 61 of the league\u2019s games were carried locally by the 13 teams\u2019 television outlets, Donna Orender, the W.N.B.A. president, said. This season, the figure is 130 games despite the Garden\u2019s cuts. (Forty-one of those games are simulcast on NBA TV.) Another 18 games are carried nationally on ESPN2. \u201cWe\u2019ve made it a real focus to broaden our local TV exposure,\u201d Orender said. \u201cThere are 20-plus games in Chicago. Eighteen to 20 in Atlanta. This is good for our fans.\u201d She praised the Garden\u2019s efforts to improve the Liberty and declined to criticize MSG\u2019s reduction of the team\u2019s telecasts directly. \u201cAs a league, we\u2019re focusing on maximizing our exposure in every delivery option we can,\u201d she said. Rebecca Lobo , a former Liberty star, said that when MSG carried 26 of her team\u2019s games, \u201cit was unheard of; most teams had five, six or seven.\u201d She added, \u201cIt was great for fans and you would like to see them continue to carry them.\u201d Lobo, now a W.N.B.A. and college basketball analyst at ESPN, said, \u201cThe positive is you can watch the games streamed on WNBA.com , with fairly good quality.\u201d But, she said, an ESPN or MSG broadcast is better. The concept that the Garden would deny one of its own teams broad TV exposure seems bewildering. But not to O\u2019Neil. \u201cWe\u2019re fully aligned\u201d at the Garden, he said. \u201cWe\u2019re making the best decisions. This decision went through a healthy debate, and one of the waves of the future is online growth.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Liberty;Basketball;MSG Network;Television"}
{"id": "ny0276195", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/02/24", "title": "Britain: Setback for Nurse With Ebola", "abstract": "The Royal Free Hospital in London has admitted a Scottish nurse who has already recovered from Ebola twice before for another \u201clate complication\u201d from her last infection with the lethal virus. In a statement on Tuesday, the hospital said that the nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, would now be treated by its infectious diseases team. Last December, Ms. Cafferkey was treated for meningitis that developed from lingering Ebola virus in her system. She was first infected in 2014 while working in Sierra Leone.", "keyword": "Ebola;Pauline Cafferkey;Great Britain;Royal Free Hospital"}
{"id": "ny0252257", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2011/11/28", "title": "Just Asking About J.Lo, \u2018Chicago\u2019 and Manning Up", "abstract": "IT is time again to ask 20 questions about advertising, marketing, the media and popular culture. \u00b6 Now that the Chrysler Group has twice had trouble with ads for the Fiat 500 featuring Jennifer Lopez \u2014 the first was called \u201cquite possibly the worst automotive spot of the last decade, hands down,\u201d and the second was mocked after a blogger revealed that a body double was in scenes in her old Bronx neighborhood \u2014 is it time for Chrysler to give up before it has as many problematic Lopez ads as she has had marriages? \u00b6 Why do the employees of the Stage and Screen channel at the Music Choice cable music service believe that the slides on screen when Bebe Neuwirth performs \u201cAll That Jazz\u201d from the musical \u201cChicago\u201d ought to include photographs of and facts about the band Chicago? \u00b6 Did anyone involved in the decision to buy a commercial for Chevrolet trucks during the NBC sitcom \u201c30 Rock\u201d stop to think that there are probably, oh, 30 zillion other programs that are likely to have more truck buyers in the viewing audience than a series set in Manhattan about the female head writer of a television show? \u00b6 Would Murad be advertising in Teen Vogue magazine a facial scrub from its Clean Scene skin-care line if the product were not named Gaga for Glow? \u00b6 Will consumers want to buy a line of sandwich meat from Hormel Foods called Hormel Natural Choice after they remember that Hormel also sells the quintessential meat-in-a-can, Spam? \u00b6 Did it surprise the BET cable channel to find that it had promoted a new season of its series \u201cThe Game\u201d in an ad supplement that was wrapped around an issue of the AM New York newspaper carrying the front-page headline \u201cNYC Ain\u2019t Got Game\u201d? \u00b6 How many English teachers have blown a gasket over ads for the Honda Civic, intended to celebrate the different types of people who adore the car, that carry the headline \u201cTo each their own\u201d? \u00b6 And how many English teachers have fallen ill over ads for the BlueCross BlueShield Association that show three photographs of different families with the surname \u201cWilliams,\u201d each labeled \u201cMeet the Williams\u201d rather than \u201cMeet the Williamses\u201d or \u201cMeet the Williams family\u201d? \u00b6 Did readers of magazines like Whole Living who saw advertorials for the Secret Natural Mineral antiperspirant sold by Procter & Gamble, which carried the headline \u201cThe nose knows,\u201d recall how the comedian Jimmy Durante loved to use that line, including in commercials for Chock full o\u2019Nuts coffee? \u00b6 Is it a bad omen for the Paul Mitchell hair care brand that ads for its new Mitch line of men\u2019s grooming products, which carry headlines like \u201cMan Up\u201d and \u201cMan Up for the Holidays,\u201d are appearing in magazines around the time that ABC decided to stop production of a new sitcom, \u201cMan Up,\u201d and remove it from the prime-time schedule? \u00b6 Was J. C. Penney chagrined that it ran an ad in New York subways that carried the headline \u201cWe make style the perfect price. You budget better than Albany \u201d after the State Legislature passed a budget described as \u201cone of the leanest budgets in recent years,\u201d which was also the first on-time budget in five years? \u00b6 Will consumers with long memories respond to ads from the Kellogg Company for its new Kellogg\u2019s Frosted Mini-Wheats Touch of Fruit in the Middle cereal \u2014 which carry the headline \u201cFruit in the middle? Thought you\u2019d never ask\u201d \u2014 by declaring: \u201cOh, but we did ask. And you once gave us Kellogg\u2019s Raisin Squares cereal with a jingle that proclaimed \u2018Raisin in the middle.\u2019 But then you stopped making it.\u201d? \u00b6 Wouldn\u2019t a television commercial for Carnival Cruise Lines in which an announcer declared, \u201cTell us what you\u2019ve always wanted to do, on Facebook,\u201d have been clearer if the announcer had said, \u201cTell us, on Facebook, what you\u2019ve always wanted to do\u201d? \u00b6 After RedLaser, a bar code-scanning mobile app from eBay, participated in a promotion with the rapper Lupe Fiasco, were executives able to answer reporters who asked, \u201cWas Fiasco a success?\u201d without sounding like the \u201cWho\u2019s on First?\u201d routine from Abbott and Costello? \u00b6 Was it a coincidence that a biography of the actor Eric McCormack distributed by the cable channel TNT after it approved the production of \u201cPerception,\u201d a new series featuring him and Rachel Leigh Cook, omitted from his credits the TNT series \u201cTrust Me,\u201d which the channel canceled after its first season? \u00b6 Does an ad for the Pepperidge Farm Milano chocolate cookies sold by the Campbell Soup Company, which runs in women\u2019s magazines and carries the headline \u201cSome relationships are meant to be,\u201d reinforce stereotypes about lonely women who substitute chocolate cookies for human interaction? \u00b6 Have the executives at the Sofitel chain of luxury hotels heard of a brand of toilet tissue, made by Royal Paper Converting and sold at Dollar Tree stores, that is named Sofitelle? \u00b6Will consumers seeking a cold drink confuse the Coke Zero soft drink sold by the Coca-Cola Company and the Caf\u00e9 Zero coffee-based ice cream drink sold by Unilever? \u00b6 Does a line of kitchen appliances named after Better Homes and Gardens magazine, which is sold at Wal-Mart stores under the BHG brand, run the risk of being dissed or dismissed by shoppers who will utter three initials that sound like \u201cBHG\u201d but cannot be printed in a family newspaper? \u00b6 Would a singer, whose difficulties as a star of automotive ads are likely to cost her the chance to be nicknamed Jenny From the Engine Block, tell a reporter, \u201cYou ask a lot of questions for someone from Brooklyn\u201d?", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;News and News Media"}
{"id": "ny0072661", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2015/03/15", "title": "Sierra Leone Official Seeks Asylum in United States", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana of Sierra Leone said Saturday that he had requested asylum at the United States Embassy in his country after soldiers surrounded his home in the wake of his expulsion from the governing party this month. Mr. Sam-Sumana was expelled from the All People\u2019s Congress party, led by President Ernest Bai Koroma, after an investigation accused him of creating his own rival political movement in his home district, Kono, in the country\u2019s Eastern Province. The accusation raised doubts about whether he could continue as vice president. \u201cI have fled my house and am with my wife in a place I cannot disclose, waiting to hear from the U.S. ambassador, whom I have asked for asylum,\u201d Mr. Sam-Sumana said. A government spokesman, Abdulai Bayraytay, who said he was traveling with Mr. Bai Koroma in northern Sierra Leone, declined to comment. In late February, Mr. Sam-Sumana said that he was placing himself in a 21-day quarantine after one of his bodyguards died of Ebola. The virus has killed more than 10,000 people in three West African nations, including Sierra Leone.", "keyword": "Sierra Leone;Ernest Bai Koroma;Samuel Sam-Sumana;Right of asylum;US"}
{"id": "ny0166825", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/01/20", "title": "Guidant Debated Device Peril", "abstract": "Six months before the Guidant Corporation publicly disclosed short circuits in its heart devices, a debate may have been going on within the company over whether to alert doctors about such failures, internal company documents released yesterday suggest. The documents appear to indicate that some Guidant executives recommended in January 2005 that the company find a way to tell doctors about the failures posed by a device known as the Contak Renewal, an advanced heart defibrillator. The records, which were disclosed yesterday as part of a court proceeding in Texas, include handwritten notes said to have been composed by a top Guidant executive. Guidant started receiving a small but growing number of reports of short circuits in Contak Renewals in late 2004, more than two years after it discovered a similar problem in another defibrillator, the Prizm 2 DR. The Guidant records suggest that company executives came close to alerting doctors about the Contak Renewal last January, but that some officers opposed the idea. The company also conducted tests on the device. One executive later reported that the unit's failure rate was not as bad as first feared, the documents show. Because the records are handwritten notes, it is not clear whether the \"recommendation\" in them refers directly to the Contak Renewal, though that appears to be the case. Asked specifically about the issue, Guidant declined to comment or explain. In a statement, the company said, \"As the documents reflect, the company took responsible action during an ongoing investigation of Renewal and Renewal 2.\" It also noted it had \"aggressively evaluated product performance and communication thresholds.\" Guidant publicly disclosed problems with the Prizm 2 DR and the Contak Renewal last spring after it came under scrutiny. Seven people are known to have died in connection with short circuits in the devices; five deaths have involved a Contak Renewal or a related model known as the Contak Renewal 2. But the number of deaths is probably higher because physicians only recently became aware of the problem. Defibrillators electrically interrupt potentially lethal heart rhythms, and short circuits can render them useless. Guidant has said the number of reports it received did not warrant an earlier physician alert. At a minimum, the disclosure of the new Guidant documents is likely to fuel efforts to develop industrywide standards about when and how doctors and patients should be informed by heart device makers about malfunctions. A report by a committee formed by Guidant is due out in March, and a medical group, the Heart Rhythm Association, plans to issue recommendations in May. The documents released yesterday also include a slide presentation, which is hand-dated Oct. 20, 2004. It contains a projection, apparently made at that time, indicating that as many as 55 Contak Renewal units could short-circuit by November 2005. \"If we would communicate, what would it be?\" a handwritten note on the slide states. \"Start thinking and working on it now (Contingency).\" But the records could also mean more legal problems for Guidant, which is the subject of a takeover battle between Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson. Guidant is also under investigation by the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department. The records released in Texas yesterday are among hundreds of documents provided by Guidant to plaintiffs' lawyers in connection with a product liability lawsuit filed against it in a state court. The records were initially produced under seal, but yesterday the case's presiding judge, Judge Jack Hunter of State District Court, citing a Texas state law barring the sealing of court records related to safety issues, ordered a few pages of internal Guidant records released. He also set the stage for the potential release of more documents; late yesterday, Guidant received a stay of that ruling pending an appeal. On Wednesday, The New York Times had filed a motion in the case seeking the release of any records related to public health and safety. Guidant first told doctors last May about short circuits in the Prizm 2 after it learned that The Times was about to publish a report on the device. In June, it recalled the Prizm 2 DR, the Contak Renewal and the Contak Renewal 2. The records ordered released in Texas by Judge Hunter yesterday consist of three pages of handwritten notes and seven other pages that reproduce the slide presentation. Bob Hilliard, a plaintiff lawyer in Corpus Christi who is suing Guidant on behalf of two patients, said in an interview that the handwritten notes and slides were recently given to him at the end of a pretrial deposition of J. Frederick McCoy Jr., the head of Guidant's cardiac device unit. Mr. Hilliard said that the handwriting in the notes resembled handwriting that Mr. McCoy identified during the deposition as his own. It could not be determined yesterday if Mr. McCoy had written the notes. The notes, dated June 22, 2005, appear to be an annotated timeline that reconstructs company events and decisions involving several issues, including the Contak Renewal, over the course of about two years. In an entry dated Jan. 7, 2005, the chronology notes a \"recommendation,\" which followed several reports of electrical failures. \"If we can a find a way to communicate on this trend in such a way that it would help physicians manage patients and does not result in patient harm via undue concern, then we should communicate,\" the entry reads. The same entry noted that at least one executive was \"not on board with this recommendation.\" In the wake of Guidant's disclosures last year, many heart specialists have said that they want to know about significant device failure so they, rather than manufacturers, can decide whether the units need to be replaced. Apart from its statement, Guidant declined to comment on any aspect on the documents. In a recent update to doctors in December, the company projected, based on laboratory testing, that 35 Contak Renewals had short-circuited. The slide presentation also contains descriptions of the electrical problem, photographs and a chart comparing the Contak Renewal failure to that of the Prizm 2 DR.", "keyword": "GUIDANT CORP;DEFIBRILLATORS;LIABILITY FOR PRODUCTS"}
{"id": "ny0254765", "categories": ["science", "earth"], "date": "2011/07/13", "title": "Task Force Recommends Improvements for Nuclear Plants", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns show that it is time for \u201credefining the level of protection that is regarded as adequate\u201d at American nuclear plants, a special task force of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded. The task force recommendations were to be released Wednesday, but a copy of the summary was obtained Tuesday evening by The New York Times. It lays out numerous areas for improvement, based on the experience in Japan after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. American plants need to plan for simultaneous accidents at adjacent reactors, something they have never done, the task force said. They also need to make sure that the \u201chardened vents\u201d added to reactors over the years to prevent hydrogen explosions would actually work in an emergency, the report said, and determine where hydrogen, which is produced by overheated fuel, might flow. Japanese operators had trouble using the vents, resulting in the explosions in the secondary containments. Some of the improvements the industry voluntarily adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks have not been regularly inspected or maintained, the report said. Those should be inspected using the more \u201cformal\u201d procedures that are in place for the plants\u2019 original safety equipment, the task force recommended. And plants should have a better way to add water to spent fuel pools and monitor conditions in those pools, the task force said. Fukushima focused new attention on spent fuel pools, which usually have more radioactive materials in them than the reactors do. In desperation, the Japanese used water cannons to refill them. Even now, the task force wrote, there was uncertainty about what happened at Fukushima, and information was \u201cunavailable, unreliable or ambiguous because of damage to equipment at the site and because the Japanese response continues to focus on actions to stop the ongoing radioactive release.\u201d The five-member commission is scheduled to meet next week to consider the work of the task force, which it considers a quick, first look at the Fukushima disaster\u2019s relevance to reactors in the United States.", "keyword": "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan);Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Nuclear Energy;Nuclear Regulatory Commission"}
{"id": "ny0148658", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/09/11", "title": "Mayor Seeks to Disband Lower Manhattan Panel", "abstract": "In a forcefully worded critique of ground zero redevelopment, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg demanded on Wednesday that the state complete the 9/11 memorial by September 2011, totally redesign a major transit hub nearby and disband the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation . In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bloomberg wrote, \u201cProgress on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center has been frustratingly slow, owing in large part to a multilayered governance structure that has undermined accountability from the get-go.\u201d But while Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s piece took the state to task for the delays, his remedies were not strikingly different from what officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have already publicly advocated, including speeding up construction of the memorial and simplifying the $2.5 billion transportation center and PATH train terminal. The Port Authority, which is overseeing the redevelopment plan, is expected to make those recommendations and others in a report to be released on Sept. 29. The authority is not, however, likely to propose disbanding the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation as Mr. Bloomberg has demanded. The Bloomberg administration, through Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, has been involved with the committee working on that report, which will lay out a new budget and timetable for the reconstruction. Last week, Mr. Lieber praised the work of the development corporation at a meeting of its board. Reactions to Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s article differed sharply. Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1, which includes ground zero, applauded the mayor\u2019s demand that the memorial be completed by Sept. 11, 2011. But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district includes Lower Manhattan, said that he opposed the mayor\u2019s call for eliminating the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, because it helped coordinate the city, state and federal agencies involved in reconstruction. \u201cI\u2019m glad the mayor understands finally how important it is to get this rebuilding effort off the ground,\u201d Mr. Silver said in an interview. Reactions from Gov. David A. Paterson and the Port Authority were more muted. In a statement released on Wednesday, the governor said, \u201cThe mayor and I share a sense of disappointment and frustration at the unacceptable pace of the ground zero rebuilding, which has never had a realistic timetable or budget \u2014 an absolute necessity for undertaking construction of this scale.\u201d The Port Authority, which owns the 16-acre site and is responsible for building the transit hub and the Freedom Tower, also declined to comment on the mayor\u2019s recommendations. Stephen Sigmund, an authority spokesman, said, \u201cThe point of the report we are doing is to make decisions on exactly these tough issues and move on to getting every project on the site completed as quickly as possible.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s criticisms, which came on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the attack, are hardly novel; he and others have made many of them before. And Governor Paterson earlier this year ordered the authority to devise more realistic timetables for the rebuilding effort. At that time, state, city and Port Authority officials already had a thick internal report indicating that rebuilding was hopelessly off schedule and over budget. In June, Christopher Ward, the Port Authority\u2019s executive director, said that the memorial\u2019s plaza, tree-lined park, waterfalls and below-ground spaces would be completed by the 10th anniversary. But he said it was unlikely that the museum would be completed by then or that the public would have full access, because the surrounding area would still be a construction site. The authority for some time has also been hinting that it would simplify the transportation center, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The center\u2019s mezzanine lies directly under part of the memorial plaza, so its framework must be completed nearly to street level by July 2010 to guarantee that the memorial opens on Sept. 11, 2011, said Joseph C. Daniels, president of the memorial and museum. Many officials have repeatedly articulated one of Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s central complaints: that the rebuilding effort has been plagued by a thick web of competing bureaucracies. There are 19 public agencies, two private developers, 101 construction contractors and 33 designers, architects and consulting firms involved in the process. Gov. George E. Pataki created the development corporation in late 2001 to oversee the rebuilding of ground zero. Although Mr. Bloomberg has appointed half its board, he has viewed it as a state agency that often fails to act in the city\u2019s best interest. His concerns led to the joint creation, with Governor Pataki, of another agency, the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center. The command center was initially supposed to coordinate all construction activity in Lower Manhattan. James A. Parrott, deputy director of the nonprofit Fiscal Policy Institute, was part of a coalition of labor union and community organization officials who called for the abolition of the development corporation in 2003. But they were rebuffed by the mayor, he said. In remarks to reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg defended his demands, saying, \u201cI would assume that everybody at the state level would try to do exactly what\u2019s right: this is a sacred site, this is part of NYC, this is part of America.\u201d", "keyword": "World Trade Center (NYC);Lower Manhattan Development Corp;Monuments and Memorials;September 11 (2001);Bloomberg Michael R"}
{"id": "ny0287286", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/08/27", "title": "Residents Abandon Daraya as Government Seizes a Symbol of Syria\u2019s Rebellion", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon \u2014 Hundreds of rebel fighters and their families left a long-besieged suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Friday, under an agreement with the government that amounted to an opposition surrender of territory and a symbolic defeat. Carrying their belongings in suitcases and overstuffed plastic bags, residents filed out from between rows of destroyed buildings to board buses that would take them from the town of Daraya to rebel-held Idlib Province, a place about 200 miles north that few of them have ever seen. Thousands more civilians are to leave for other government-held suburbs of Damascus in the coming days under the deal that hands the town to the government. Few of Daraya\u2019s residents hold out any hope of returning. As they prepared to evacuate Friday, residents kissed the ground and visited the graves of relatives for the last time. The scene was reminiscent of the evacuation of rebels and civilians from the old city of Homs two years ago, an area that remains largely deserted today. Daraya, like Homs, has been a symbol of revolt since the earliest peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011: Leaders of the civilian opposition hailed from Daraya, and many of them were imprisoned, with some tortured to death while in custody. The ultimate fall of the rebellious town now symbolizes the failure of the moderate opposition rooted there and those affiliated with the early civilian protests to firmly unite fractured rebel groups. Isolated by government blockades for four years and bombarded relentlessly, Daraya stood out as a place where the main rebel groups remained under local control and not affiliated with extremist factions. Because it lies close to a military airport and is less than two miles from downtown Damascus \u2014 and also perhaps because it represented an alternative to government authority and the rule of extremists affiliated with the Islamic State or Al Qaeda \u2014 government forces had been determined to take the town. Its fall will free up hundreds of pro-government fighters for other battles. Image Many Daraya residents were taken by bus on to Idlib Province, a rebel-held area about 200 miles north. Credit Associated Press \u201cThe regime will keep Daraya empty, dead land, as a graveyard,\u201d said Abu Mohammad, 60, who left Daraya four years ago for the government-held suburb of Sahnaya, and asked to use his nickname for fear his family in Daraya would be subject to reprisals. On Friday, he and his wife sat glued to their television set watching coverage of the evacuation, hoping for a glimpse of four of their children, whom they have not seen since the couple fled Daraya. Their children \u2014 two sons fighting with the local rebels and two daughters married to fighters \u2014 are leaving for Idlib, where hard-line Islamist groups wield power and government and Russian warplanes strike daily. A few blocks away in Sahnaya, a pro-government fighter who uses the nom de guerre Abu Odai exulted in the victory, saying that many young men from Sahnaya had died in the battles and that until now he had been afraid that fighters from Daraya would harm his family. Still, he asked that his real name not be used out of fear his family would be harmed and because he was speaking without authorization from his commanders. \u201cThe government told the armed groups in Daraya for years to hand over their arms and stay peacefully in their towns, but they refused and called for freedom,\u201d he said. \u201cToday they got their freedom by going to Idlib.\u201d The United Nations, which closely monitored the evacuation of Homs in 2014, was not able to oversee the exodus from Daraya. U.N. officials said on Friday that they had only been informed overnight of the plans to allow residents to leave. \u201cIt is tragic that repeated appeals to lift the siege of Daraya, besieged since November 2012, and cease the fighting, have never been heeded,\u201d the United Nations\u2019 special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said in a statement. \u201cIt is imperative that people of Daraya are protected in any evacuation that takes place, and that this takes place voluntarily.\u201d But local council members in Daraya said that government negotiators had given them no real choice, instead offering an ultimatum as the rebels ran out of ammunition: Leave or be wiped out. The evacuation came as Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, met in Geneva in what officials described as a renewed effort between the United States, which backs parts of the opposition, and Russia, which backs the Syrian government, to map out a political transition that could end the war. After a long day of talks in a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, Mr. Kerry told reporters that he and Mr. Lavrov had \u201cachieved clarity on the path forward\u201d and agreed on the \u201cvast majority\u201d of technical issues holding up progress toward ceasing hostilities and creating the space needed to restart talks on a political solution. But the two diplomats said their discussions still left unresolved a number of issues that they declined to detail. American and Russian experts would continue negotiations in Geneva in the coming week in an effort to produce a deal that could help kick-start deliveries of humanitarian aid and pave the way for a resumption of political transition talks. That did not mean the Assad government would halt its airstrikes, Mr. Lavrov made clear, but it would make them \u201cmore efficient\u201d in targeting terrorist groups. But the Syrian government has long sought to undermine the transition process, preferring a \u201cstarve or kneel\u201d strategy \u2014 named for slogans scrawled by pro-government militiamen outside besieged areas \u2014 and negotiating individual surrender deals with rebel groups rather than pursuing an overall settlement. The government strategy has yielded mixed results: fighting has quieted in many areas but other agreements have fallen apart, leading to renewed clashes. The failure to end the widespread and debilitating conflict has also been abetted by the inability or unwillingness of opposition groups \u2014 and their international backers \u2014 to unite, politically or militarily, firmly against Mr. Assad. The attention of some rebel groups and their United States backers have shifted to battling the Islamic State group. Image Syrian soldiers in Daraya on Friday. The fall of Daraya will free up hundreds of pro-government troops for other battles. Credit Youssef Badawi/European Pressphoto Agency There were angry recriminations on Friday from some rebels against American-backed opposition commanders in southern Syria who, following their backers\u2019 instructions, have refrained from major offensives against pro-government forces in recent months. That decision has freed the government and allied militias to focus on dislodging rebels from the suburbs around Damascus, such as Daraya. For years, the town was under siege, receiving just two small international aid deliveries permitted by the Syrian government while undergoing near-daily bombardments. Residents of Daraya held out after a massacre of hundreds of people by pro-government militias four years ago, on August 25, 2012, and suffered the effects of one of the government\u2019s deadly sarin attacks in August 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people in several Damascus suburbs. The United States had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a \u201cred line\u201d in the conflict, but rather than retaliate, Washington instead struck a deal with Russia to remove the government\u2019s chemical weapons. Since that decision, an emboldened Syrian government has stepped up attacks on residential areas, and a confidential United Nations report found that the government continued to carry out chemical attacks with chlorine. Around 8,000 of the 80,000 people who lived in Daraya before the war remain. Evacuation buses Friday were escorted by volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Rebels were allowed to take their personal weapons. Civilian activists said they, too, were choosing to go to Idlib because they feared anyone who had taken part in protests against Mr. Assad would be subject to arrest in government areas. In Sahnaya on Friday, where residents have become used to the reverberations of bombardments on Daraya, there was an unfamiliar quiet. Abu Mohammad, who had farmed grapes and vegetables on the outskirts of Daraya when he lived there, teared up as he watched on television as his former neighbors abandoned what was left of their homes. His wife leaned forward, her face draped in a long white head scarf, close to the screen. \u201cThis is my daughter,\u201d she said, then corrected herself. \u201cNo, she is not \u2014 someone who looks like her. All Daraya\u2019s families are related, and they look alike.\u201d She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. \u201cOh God,\u201d she said, \u201clet me meet with my sons and daughters for one hour and then die, to be buried in Daraya\u2019s soil.\u201d", "keyword": "Daraya;Damascus;Bashar al-Assad;Evacuation;Syria"}
{"id": "ny0162933", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2006/02/10", "title": "It's a Whole New Ballgame in Ireland, and a Movie, Too", "abstract": "The plucky crusade to introduce baseball to Ireland ignited because of a bumper sticker. Mike Kindle, an American who moved to Ireland in 1990, saw an Irish Softball Association sticker on a car and begged the driver to tell him where he could find the group. He prayed it was no joke. Kindle found the co-ed softball players tossing high-arc pitches on a mushy field. Softball was obviously a recreational activity, like flipping a Frisbee. The discovery still motivated Kindle, who preferred the more serious style of hardball that he had left behind in San Diego. So Kindle persistently pushed the sport of baseball on a country without a single baseball diamond at the time. Eventually, there were about 30 regulars, some taking awkward swings, some making tortured throws and most, they said, falling in love with baseball and the notion of possibly playing it for Ireland. \"We decided we should try and form an international team,\" Kindle said. \"We said, 'Let's get some uniforms and funding and go play.' We were sitting in the boozer over a couple of pints. Over a couple of pints, it sounded good.\" The story of the recent birth of baseball in Ireland, its growth and its baby steps in international competition is told in \"The Emerald Diamond,\" a film by John J. Fitzgerald. The film will be shown in 20 cities and towns throughout the United States, starting Feb. 25 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, N.Y. Fitzgerald's movie is a charming look at how baseball captivated some dedicated Irishmen. Those young men, supplemented by American-born players who had a parent or grandparent born in Ireland, transformed themselves from bumbling weekend warriors into respected competitors. Think of Rudy, the Notre Dame walk-on, and multiply it by about a dozen. \"I found out about them and I said, 'This is amazing,' \" Fitzgerald said. \"I had no idea Ireland had a national team.\" The Irish are still minor players on the international scene and are not one of the 16 federations competing in the inaugural World Baseball Classic next month. While Ireland won the bronze medal in the B Pool of the 2004 European Championships, the 10-year-old Irish team remains a baseball neophyte. But Fitzgerald said some players dreamily speak about qualifying for the next classic or the one after that. The team has playfully wondered if the Yankees' Derek Jeter, who has Irish roots on his mother's side, could be coaxed into playing for Ireland. That dream of Jeter wearing green would be impossible, though, since Jeter's grandmother was born in New Jersey. Before Fitzgerald decided to do a documentary on the Irish, he wanted to be on the team. Fitzgerald played one year of college baseball and thought he was eligible because his grandmother is a dual citizen. After four months of workouts, Fitzgerald found out that he was ineligible because his grandmother was born in New York, not Ireland. By then, Fitzgerald had communicated with the coaches of Baseball Ireland and heard about their humble start, their endless obstacles and their snippets of success. If Fitzgerald, a 28-year old from Valhalla, N.Y., could not play for Ireland, he wanted to follow the team with a camera and recount an intriguing, and mostly unknown, tale. \"Even now, when I talk to people from Ireland about the baseball team, they think I'm talking about hurling or an Irish-American team from the U.S.,\" Fitzgerald said. \"Outside of Dublin, no one has ever heard of it.\" Cormac Eklof, a pitcher who has a tattoo of Nomar Garciaparra, added, \"Nobody knows who we are.\" When Kindle, Eklof, Sean Mitchell, John Dillon, Darran O'Connor and some other originals initially played in Ireland, they trudged across rugby or soccer fields. There were no mounds, so the pitchers dug foot holes, and no backstops, so they hammered beams into the ground and attached netting. Rain was almost as predictable as the ball being white. They did have bases, which Eklof said were swiped from the softball team. The film shows scenes of players with choppy swings and players fielding balls as if they were catching shot-puts. The Irish were learning on the fly. Dillon, a strong rugby player, was 25 when he made his baseball debut, an age when many Americans have stopped playing. He has now been the starting center fielder for a decade, combining grit with grace. Ireland debuted in the 1996 European Championships and lost to the Czech Republic, 23-2, but the proud players were content because they had succeeded in at least competing. Losses to Norway (19-1), Poland (20-10) and Lithuania (15-5) followed, and exasperation bubbled. Could they be that terrible? The answer was no. Ireland stopped Yugoslavia, 8-6, in the final game, and the team was ecstatic and relieved. Still, to continue growing, the Irish needed a real place to play. Peter O'Malley, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, helped make that a reality by donating$140,000 to build adult and youth fields that sit side by side in West Dublin. Some locals who did not know a double from a double play had to be reminded not to tear up the infield while practicing golf shots. The diamond gave Irish baseball a home and an identity. Ireland won two games in the 1998 European Championships and one in the 2000 tournament. By 2002, the Irish, who had followed the practice of other European teams by adding a few American-born college players who possessed dual citizenship, thought they were threats to win the title. They finished fourth. But, in 2004, with the additions of Joe Kealty, who hit .337 at Boston College; Chris Gannon, who was 11-4 for the same university; and Brendan Bergerson, an intimidating left-hander from the University of West Virginia, Ireland had its best team ever. The Irish beat Serbia-Montenegro to win a bronze medal. \"It feels like we've been on a good trip,\" said Chris Foy, who is from Seaford, N.Y., and moved to Dublin and joined the team in 2000. \"It took guts for the guys who were playing softball to pick up baseballs and say, 'Let's give this a try.' \" One of the greatest challenges for Ireland has been developing pitchers because the popular Irish sports, like hurling, soccer, rugby and Gaelic football, do not involve throwing balls. When Ireland adds talent from America, the focus is on pitchers. The Irish are also wary of keeping their team from becoming what Eklof called \"a bunch of ringers\" who could ruin team chemistry. So the roster is limited to one-third American-born players. As important as the national team is to the future, the current players are also concerned about having successors. Rory Murphy, a sturdy catcher, hit .538 as a 16-year old in the 2004 championships and is considered the premier prospect in Ireland. In a country where 300 children play baseball, that Murphy favors the new sport over rugby is a coup. \"We need to keep the kids coming,\" said Will Beglane, the youth director. \"If we don't do that, the national team will end.\" Several players will be in New York to see \"The Emerald Diamond\" before returning to prepare for the 2006 European Championships in August. The two top teams from the B Pool advance to A, and keener competition in 2007 against the likes of Italy and the Netherlands. If Ireland can indeed rumble into the A Pool after only a decade of international play, Kindle, the pioneer who spied the softball bumper sticker that helped inspire it all, thinks it would be time for Fitzgerald toplan a sequel. \"Even if I wasn't involved, I'd think it was a great story,\" Kindle said. \"You've got a bunch of knuckleheads running around playing in the rain because they love baseball. It's a writer's dream.\"", "keyword": "IRELAND;FITZGERALD JOHN J;BASEBALL;MOTION PICTURES;EMERALD DIAMOND THE (MOVIE)"}
{"id": "ny0208378", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/06/14", "title": "Reverberations as Door Slams on Hope of Change", "abstract": "TEHRAN \u2014 It is impossible to know for sure how much the ostensible re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the preference of an essentially conservative Iranian public and how much, as opposition voters passionately believe, it is the imposed verdict of a fundamentally authoritarian regime. But for those who dreamed of a gentler Iran , Saturday was a day of smoldering anger, crushed hopes and punctured illusions, from the streets of Tehran to the policy centers of Western capitals. Iranians who hoped for a bit more freedom, a better managed economy and a less reviled image in the world wavered between protest and despair on Saturday. On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi , riot police officers dressed in RoboCop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who had gathered to share rumors and dismay. \u201cAnother four years of dictatorship,\u201d a voter muttered. \u201cThis is a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat,\u201d several others agreed. Some women wept openly. Some talked of \u201cmutiny.\u201d Others were more cynical. \u201cIt was just a movie,\u201d said Hussein Gharibi, a 54-year-old juice vendor, scoffing at those who had gotten their hopes up. \u201cThey were all just players in a movie.\u201d Far off, President Obama and other Western leaders who had seen a better relationship with Iran as potentially helpful in resolving the problems of Afghanistan , Iraq and nuclear proliferation faced the prospect of doing business with a man who, in addition to being a Holocaust-denying hard-liner, now stands suspected in a sham election. There were some important constituencies that took satisfaction from the outcome. Domestically, Mr. Ahmadinejad appealed to the fears of the more pious and poor who had found change unsettling. This included those alarmed by the days of political street carnival preceding the election and those (not just men) put off by Mr. Moussavi\u2019s attention to the traditional, second-class role of women in this paternalistic quasi-theocracy. They were joined by the civil servants, police officers and pensioners who all enjoyed the incumbent\u2019s oil-financed generosity to his base, by those who relished his name-naming attack on corruption and by those who took pride in his defiance of the West. Outside Iran, the result was comforting to hawks in Israel and some Western capitals who had feared that a more congenial Iranian president would cause the world to let down its guard against a country galloping toward nuclear weapons capability. (Mr. Moussavi, while promising a more conciliatory foreign policy, did not disavow the country\u2019s nuclear-processing project, which Iran insists is for civilian ends alone.) \u201cIn fact, Moussavi will be more difficult to deal with, because he will be nicer,\u201d one skeptical Western diplomat said on the eve of the vote. Among downcast Iranian journalists and academics, the chatter focused on why the interlocking leadership of clerics, military officers and politicians, without whose acquiescence little of importance happens, decided to stick with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Did they panic at the unexpected passion for change that arose in the closing weeks of the Moussavi campaign? Did Mr. Moussavi go too far in his promises of women\u2019s rights, civil freedom and a more conciliatory approach to the West? Or was the surge an illusion after all, the product of wishful thinking? The optimists in Iran and abroad have to ask themselves whether the joyful ruckus that filled the streets represented a new popular force or just an opportunity to let off steam. While Iran is not quite the closed society many imagine \u2014 it is a nation of text messagers and Facebook users, with access to Persian-language BBC broadcasts and other independent voices \u2014 it is still a controlled society. On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory. One version (from somebody\u2019s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: \u201cMake that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.\u201d Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad. One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country. \u201cThey didn\u2019t rig the vote,\u201d claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. \u201cThey didn\u2019t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.\u201d The government on Saturday insisted that the election was aboveboard and made it ominously clear that it would have little patience with anyone who questioned the purity of Iranian democracy. It was far from clear what recourse the opposition had left. Mr. Moussavi, who disappeared amid rumors that he was under house arrest or worse, sent word that there would be no turning back, but he did not say how he or his followers should challenge the outcome. The text messaging that is the nervous system of the opposition was shut down, along with universities, Web sites and newspapers the government regarded as hostile. Mr. Moussavi was not allowed a platform on Saturday and barely managed to get out a communiqu\u00e9 calling the election \u201ca magic show.\u201d Although there were bursts of defiance that were forcibly subdued, there was also a palpable fear; on Saturday, unlike on Friday, few opposition voters would let their names be used. \u201cBy the evening, people will pour into the streets,\u201d predicted one young woman, from inside the hood of her black chador. \u201cBut Ahmadinejad will become president by force.\u201d", "keyword": "Iran;Election;Mahmoud Ahmadinejad;Mir Hussein Moussavi"}
{"id": "ny0081957", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2015/10/04", "title": "Frantic Search for Survivors in Guatemala After Mudslide Kills 69", "abstract": "GUATEMALA CITY \u2014 Dulce del Carmen Lavarenzo Pu had just returned from church when the ground shook and she heard a terrible noise. A wave of mud slid from the nearby mountainside and buried everything just 150 feet from her house. \u201cEverything went black, because the lights went out,\u201d said Ms. Lavarenzo Pu, a 28-year-old homemaker, speaking of the mudslide that struck Thursday night in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Guatemala City. \u201cAsh and dust were falling, so we left the house. You couldn\u2019t see anything.\u201d The rain-sodden hillside about 300 feet high had collapsed onto her neighborhood, killing at least 69 people, including a cousin of Ms. Lavarenzo Pu. She burst into tears upon seeing the body of her cousin brought into the morgue on Friday. At least 36 other people have been reported injured. The number of dead was expected to rise with family members reporting hundreds of people missing. The number of missing could be as high as 600 based on at least 100 homes in the area of the slide, said Alejandro Maldonado, executive secretary of Conred, Guatemala\u2019s emergency disaster agency. Search efforts resumed at dawn on Saturday. Julio S\u00e1nchez, spokesman for Guatemala\u2019s volunteer firefighters, said that workers had recovered four more bodies in the early morning, raising the death toll to 30. Hundreds of rescue workers used shovels, pickaxes, dogs and backhoes in a frantic bid to reach survivors on Friday, pulling one man alive from the rubble of his collapsed home more than 15 hours after the landslide hit. They had to call off the search late Friday until Saturday morning for workers\u2019 security because they were getting tired and it was starting to rain, the authorities said. Mr. S\u00e1nchez said Friday that the dead, including two babies, were carried to an improvised morgue where weeping relatives identified the bodies of their loved ones. The dead included Quani Bonilla, 18, who played on the national squash team, he said. Also among the bodies, rescuers found a mother embracing her two girls, said Carlos Turcios, a doctor who saw them when he came to help the rescue. The hill that towers over Cambray, a neighborhood in the suburb of Santa Catarina Pinula, about 10 miles east of Guatemala City, partly collapsed onto a 200-foot stretch of the hamlet just before midnight, burying an estimated 68 homes. Raul Rodas, an assistant village mayor, said about 150 families had lived in the area where the mudslide occurred. Some of the untouched homes in Cambray, which sits on the edge of a small river, were abandoned by their owners for fear of further mudslides. Early in the day, Marleni Pu, 25, stood at the edge of the mudslide, her face swollen with weeping. \u201cMy uncles, my cousins, my nieces and nephews are all there,\u201d she said, looking across the field of debris where about two dozen relatives had lived. \u201cSix houses where my relatives lived are all under the hillside now.\u201d", "keyword": "Landslides,Mudslides;Guatemala;Guatemala"}
{"id": "ny0098691", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2015/06/09", "title": "John Derr, Golf Reporter at 62 Masters Tournaments, Dies at 97", "abstract": "John Derr, who reported from the Masters golf tournament 62 times and was part of the CBS team when the event was televised for the first time, in 1956, died on Saturday at his home in Pinehurst, N.C. He was 97. His daughter, Cricket Gentry, said he apparently died of a heart attack while watching the Belmont Stakes on television. She went to his house after the race, in which American Pharoah captured the Triple Crown, and found him in his chair in front of the TV. \u201cIt was like he had stood up and said, \u2018Hooray!\u2019 and then fell over,\u201d said Ms. Gentry, who is a paramedic. Mr. Derr covered the Masters for CBS from 1956 to 1982. According to Golf Digest, he was a 17-year-old reporter for The Gaston Gazette in North Carolina when he went to a college football game and sat next to the sportswriter O. B. Keeler, who suggested he attend a new spring tournament at Augusta National Golf Club hosted by Bobby Jones. Mr. Derr went to the second Masters, in 1935, the year Gene Sarazen shot a 2 on the par-5 15th hole, helping to put the Masters on the map. Along the way, Mr. Derr forged relationships with some of golf\u2019s giants, including Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson. He wrote about his encounters in his third book, \u201cMy Place at the Table: Stories of Golf and Life\u201d (2010). In an interview with Golf Digest, Mr. Derr told of seeing Albert Einstein taking his daily walk along the golf course at Princeton. He asked Einstein if he had ever played the game, he recalled, and Einstein replied: \u201cI tried once. Too complicated.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Masters Golf,Masters;Obituary;John Derr"}
{"id": "ny0042815", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/05/07", "title": "Whole Foods Once Again Reduces Its Profit Forecast", "abstract": "Whole Foods cut its profit outlook for the third time in recent months on Tuesday, signaling the intensifying competition the grocery chain is facing in the market for organic and natural foods. Whole Foods now expects to earn $1.52 to $1.56 a share this year, down from its previous forecast of $1.58 to $1.65 a share. The company reported that profit in its latest quarter was unchanged from the year earlier at $142 million, or 38 cents a share. Analysts had expected earnings of 41 cents a share. Revenue rose to $3.32 billion, but fell short of the $3.34 billion Wall Street had expected, according to FactSet. Sales at established locations are expected to rise by 5 to 5.5 percent, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 to 6.2 percent.", "keyword": "Supermarkets;Whole Foods;Earnings Reports"}
{"id": "ny0259239", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/01/15", "title": "Lawyers for Barry Bonds Try to Exclude More Evidence", "abstract": "With Barry Bonds \u2019s trial on federal perjury charges nearly two months away, his lawyers are making a renewed effort to exclude more of the government\u2019s evidence from the case against him. Those efforts, set forth in court filings in San Francisco federal court about a week ago, could set up prosecutors for another significant setback to their longstanding effort to convict Bonds . He was indicted in 2008 on charges of lying to a grand jury in 2003 by denying he ever knowingly used steroids. \u201cThe government\u2019s case has already been severely damaged by the court\u2019s prior decision to exclude evidence,\u201d said Mathew Rosengart, a partner at the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm and a former federal prosecutor. \u201cIf the judge rules to exclude even more evidence, it could be another major blow, so the upcoming decision is crucial.\u201d United States District Court Judge Susan Illston is expected to hear arguments next Friday and in early February regarding potential evidence that will be used in the trial, which is scheduled to start on March 21. Already, Illston has barred the prosecution from introducing several pieces of evidence against Bonds because his former trainer, Greg Anderson, has refused to testify before a grand jury or in court. According to Illston, that evidence \u2014 including two positive steroids tests that the prosecutors contend were Bonds\u2019s and a log sheet from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative that listed the positive results under Bonds\u2019s name \u2014 is unusable at the trial unless Anderson testifies and establishes its authenticity. An appeals court subsequently agreed with her decision. Anderson and four other men pleaded guilty to illegal drug distribution in the Balco case, which involved dozens of professional and Olympic athletes. Anderson spent more than a year in jail for refusing to testify, and Bonds\u2019s lawyers are taking full advantage of his resolve. In their recent filings, Bonds\u2019s lawyers are trying to chip away at the government\u2019s use of Anderson, this time asking Illston to exclude from the trial any mention of Anderson\u2019s refusal to testify. They also have asked, yet again, for the judge to dismiss what is said to be a tape recording of a clubhouse conversation between Steve Hoskins, Bonds\u2019s former business manager, and Anderson, in which Anderson acknowledged injecting Bonds. The judge has thrown out part of that conversation, but the defense wants it excluded completely. Allen Ruby, Bonds\u2019s lead lawyer, declined to comment on the strategy. But Mark Geragos, Anderson\u2019s lawyer, lauded the defense for being so aggressive in attacking the prosecution\u2019s case. \u201cIt\u2019s at that point where I think they won\u2019t be able to get any of the documentary evidence in that mentions Greg Anderson, and I don\u2019t think they could continue to try the case,\u201d Geragos said, adding that the hearing next week would be a \u201cpotential make or break moment\u201d for the government. \u201cIt looks to me that the case is fatally flawed from the prosecution standpoint and, at some point, I think they will pick up their gloves and bats and go home.\u201d Some legal experts said it was unlikely prosecutors would move to dismiss the case, no matter how the judge rules on the evidence. The prosecutors, who declined to comment, have invested too much time and money in the case to turn away from it now, the experts said. Peter Keane, a professor at Golden Gate University School of Law, said the prosecutors would be reluctant to drop the case because of how such an abandonment would look to the public. \u201cThere is motivation to move forward when you have charges against someone like Bonds, who is such a big fish,\u201d Keane said. \u201cIf prosecution just says we move to dismiss, a lot of people would get the idea that lying to a grand jury is something you can get away with.\u201d Since Bonds testified before the grand jury more than seven years ago, four United States attorneys have overseen the matter. But the arrival of yet another top federal prosecutor in San Francisco \u2014 Melinda Haag, who was confirmed last August \u2014 will not deter the government\u2019s case, experts said. Keane said Haag was unlikely to tell the prosecutors to give up on Bonds\u2019s case because of how new she is to the job. \u201cShe actually has more invested in the case than the old U.S. attorney because one of the things she needs to do is maintain the respect of her line prosecutors, and that includes the ones who have been working on this case for years and years,\u201d Keane said. \u201cIf she made the decision to walk away, that would damage her credibility with the people she relies on every day in the courts and would be terrible for the morale of that office.\u201d In next week\u2019s hearing, the prosecutors will argue why their evidence, particularly relating to Anderson, is important. They will try to persuade her to rule against Bonds\u2019s lawyers in their effort to strike about a quarter of Bonds\u2019s grand jury testimony, erasing all allusions to the evidence that Illston has already ruled inadmissible. They will also try to persuade Illston to allow testimony from athletes \u2014 six former and current Major League Baseball players and one former N.F.L. player \u2014 who have said they obtained steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs from Anderson. The government\u2019s plan is to have those athletes describe how thorough Anderson was in helping them use performance-enhancing drugs. He gave them the drugs, instructed them on how to use them, discussed their effectiveness and advised them to keep calendars regarding their drug use, the prosecutors say. Bonds\u2019s lawyers have asked Illston to bar those athletes from testifying.", "keyword": "Bonds Barry;Steroids;Decisions and Verdicts;Baseball;Major League Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0197599", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/10/22", "title": "S.E.C. Proposes Tighter Limits on Private Trading System", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Federal regulators are proposing tighter oversight for so-called dark pools, trading systems that do not publicly provide price quotes and compete with major stock exchanges. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to propose new rules that would require more stock quotes in the dark pool systems to be publicly displayed. The changes could be adopted sometime after a 90-day public comment period. The alternative trading systems, private networks that match buyers and sellers of large blocks of stocks, have grown explosively in recent years and now account for an estimated 7.2 percent of all share volume. S.E.C. officials have identified them as a potential emerging risk to markets and investors. The initiative is the latest action by the agency seeking to bring tighter oversight to the markets amid questions about transparency and fairness on Wall Street. The agency has floated a proposal restricting short-selling \u2014 or betting against a stock \u2014 in down markets. Last month, the agency proposed banning \u201cflash orders,\u201d which give traders a split-second edge in buying or selling stocks. A flash order refers to certain members of exchanges \u2014 often large institutions \u2014 buying and selling information about stock trades milliseconds before that information is made public. Institutional investors like pension funds may use dark pools to sell big blocks of stock away from the public scrutiny of an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq that could drive the share price lower. \u201cGiven the growth of dark pools, this lack of transparency could create a two-tiered market that deprives the public of information about stock prices,\u201d the chairwoman of the S.E.C., Mary L. Schapiro, said before the vote at the agency\u2019s meeting. Two Republican commissioners, Kathleen Casey and Troy A. Paredes, while voting to put out the proposed rules for public comment, cautioned against rushing to overly broad regulation that could have a negative impact on market innovation and competition. Dark pools might decide to maintain stock trading at levels below those that activate the required public display under the proposed rules, Mr. Paredes said. \u201cDarker dark pools\u201d could be worse than the current situation, he suggested. When investors place an order to buy or sell a stock on an exchange, the order is normally displayed for the public to view. With some dark pools, investors can signal their interest in buying or selling a stock, but that indication of interest is communicated only to a group of market participants. That means investors who operate within the dark pool have access to information about potential trades that other investors, using public quotes, do not, the S.E.C. says. The proposal would require indications of interest to be treated like other stock quotes and subject to the same disclosure rules. A 1999 S.E.C. rule established a separate set of regulations for alternative trading systems, which have grown to 29, from 10 in 2002. Among the pools are Credit Suisse Group\u2019s CrossFinder, Knight Link, Goldman Sachs Group\u2019s Sigma X, Getco and LeveL, according to the TABB Group, an analytical firm based in Westborough, Mass.", "keyword": "Securities and Exchange Commission;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry"}
{"id": "ny0159517", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/12/12", "title": "International Energy Agency Sees Oil Use Falling", "abstract": "Global oil consumption will drop this year for the first time since 1983, as an economic downturn in the West and slower growth in China cut fuel demand, according to the world\u2019s main energy forecaster. The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized nations, said on Thursday that it projects worldwide demand to fall by 200,000 barrels a day, to 85.8 million barrels a day, in 2008. The new forecast is 350,000 barrels a day less than the agency\u2019s last monthly report, which is widely read among energy experts. Oil demand may recover somewhat next year, although at a much slower pace, as the global economy turns the corner in the second half of 2009, according to the energy agency. It sees consumption growing by 0.5 percent, or 400,000 barrels a day. That is still 260,000 barrels a day less than was expected last month. \u201cClearly, if we are now heading for a prolonged and global outright recession, then the 0.5 percent global oil demand growth we now envisage for next year may not materialize,\u201d according to the report. Many other energy forecasts have painted a far bleaker picture of the oil markets for the next 12 months. Many analysts had already predicted lower consumption this year, and some also expect demand to drop next year. The Energy Department said earlier this week that global consumption would probably fall by 450,000 barrels a day in 2009, the first time in more than 30 years that demand will decline for two consecutive years. As a result of the global recession, the price of oil has fallen more than 70 percent since its peak this summer as demand dropped in the United States and other industrialized countries. Oil fell to $40 a barrel last week, after rising as high as $147 a barrel in intraday trading in July. On Thursday, oil futures in New York surged $4.46 to $47.98 a barrel, after the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said that his country had cut its production to 8.5 million barrels a day, down more than 1.2 million barrels a day from its August peak. The agency\u2019s report could add grist to the view that producers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries must reduce their output to prevent a complete price collapse. The oil cartel is meeting next week in Algeria to consider reducing its output and stem the price drop. The world\u2019s idle production capacity has risen to its highest level in six years, and now stands at nearly five million barrels a day. Tight spare capacity, which had fallen to a low of a million barrels a day, was a big factor in the price surge in recent years. OPEC\u2019s efforts to stabilize prices may be getting some assistance from other producers. Russia suggested on Wednesday that it would coordinate a possible production cut with the cartel, while President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia said on Thursday that the country could not rule out joining OPEC, according to local news agencies. Other producers that have cooperated with OPEC in the past, like Norway or Mexico, have so far ruled out cutting production. Oil demand in the United States has been particularly hard-hit this year, especially when gasoline prices exceeded $4 a gallon nationwide over the summer. Consumption is expected to fall by 6.3 percent this year compared with 2007, to 19.4 million barrels a day, and again by 1.4 percent in 2009, the energy agency said. But as gasoline prices have fallen back to a nationwide average of $1.66 a gallon, there are preliminary signs that consumption may be picking up again. Last week, gasoline demand rose for the first time in 33 weeks, according to a survey of national sales conducted by MasterCard.", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;International Energy Agency"}
{"id": "ny0012828", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2013/11/17", "title": "U.S.C. Erases Stanford From the National Title Picture", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 As it turns out, a loss to Utah, once the lone blemish on Stanford\u2019s sterling r\u00e9sum\u00e9, will have little effect on sorting out the Bowl Championship Series title contenders over the final weeks of the regular season. Nine days after thrusting themselves back into the national championship chase with a dominating victory over Oregon on national television, the fourth-ranked Cardinal fell with a thud Saturday night, when Andre Heidari\u2019s 47-yard field goal with 19 seconds lifted Southern California to 20-17 victory in a Pacific-12 Conference matchup. Stanford looked sluggish at the start, and even after reasserting control, the Cardinal squandered several scoring opportunities in the fourth quarter. Quarterback Kevin Hogan, who had not been needed to throw against Oregon, threw two costly interceptions in the fourth quarter. One killed a drive inside U.S.C.\u2019s 10-yard line. The other, a regrettable throw while Hogan was in the grasp of linebacker Hayes Pullard, set up the Trojans\u2019 winning drive. \u201cIt was Kevin trying to do too much,\u201d Stanford Coach David Shaw said. \u201cHe was trying to get rid of the ball, but he threw the ball in bounds. He should have just taken a sack and played it smart.\u201d That failed gambit led to a successful one \u2014 by the Trojans interim coach Ed Orgeron, who kept his offense on the field facing fourth-and-2 at the Stanford 48 with 1 minute 23 seconds to play. \u201cI knew I was taking a chance,\u201d Orgeron said, adding that he knew by looking at his players that they wanted to go for it. \u201cI wanted to take the best shot to give them what they wanted.\u201d From there, it was left to two Trojans who had been having disappointing seasons to rescue their teammates. Marqise Lee, the Biletnikoff Award winner a year ago, has been bothered by knee and hamstring injuries as well as increased defensive attention. After catching one pass in a rout of California last week, Lee joked that he would file for unemployment benefits. But Lee, who had hobbled off the field moments earlier with an injured shin, told quarterback Cody Kessler he had one more play in him. Kessler hit him on a slant for 13 yards. That set up the field goal by Heidari, who had missed two attempts in a 10-7 loss to Washington State and two more in a 14-10 loss to Notre Dame. He also had missed an extra-point attempt earlier Saturday. But before his kick had even sailed through the uprights in the final seconds, Heidari\u2019 had sprinted to the opposite end zone in celebration as the sold-out Coliseum shook. Moments later, students and fans poured onto the field, as the Trojans continued their resurgence since the firing of Lane Kiffin as coach last month. The Trojans have begun to resemble a different team since Kiffin was summoned off the team bus in the middle of the night and fired as they returned from a blowout loss at Arizona State. Their only blemish in six games under Orgeron was the defeat at Notre Dame. The Trojans (8-3, 5-2 in the Pac-12 South) kept their Rose Bowl hopes alive. The victory also gave considerable momentum to Orgeron\u2019s candidacy to stay on as coach beyond this season. Last week, Athletic Director Pat Haden said Orgeron would be considered. The loss not only ended Stanford\u2019s national title hopes but also severely dented its Rose Bowl hopes. The Cardinal (8-2, 6-2) now trail Oregon by a game in the North Division, although they hold the tiebreaker. \u201cIt\u2019s not a good feeling,\u201d Stanford running back Tyler Gaffney said. \u201cIt\u2019s the first time I\u2019ve lost to them and I think it\u2019s the first time anyone on this team has lost to them. It\u2019s a tough thing to swallow.\u201d Stanford did not waste time giving life to the idea that it would be ripe for a letdown. Although the Cardinal had won five of its last six games against U.S.C., the last three were by a total of 17 points, and they had played so brilliantly against Oregon. Before the game was three plays old, the Cardinal was whistled for a false start and had to use two timeouts. When they finally ran a play, Ty Montgomery, who had raced past the U.S.C. defense, watched a long pass slip through his hands. The Cardinal fell into a 17-7 hole but began to assert themselves late in the first half. When they drew even on Gaffney\u2019s 18-yard run with 8:22 left in the third quarter, their physical offensive line had begun to wear on a U.S.C. defense that because of injuries had used only two substitutes. For an offense seemingly built for tight spaces, the Cardinal struggled in the red zone \u2014 which had to bring back unpleasant memories of its only defeat, a 27-21 loss to Utah that ended when Stanford was stopped on down in the final seconds inside the Utah 10-yard line. On Saturday night, the Cardinal managed only 17 points on five trips inside the red zone. Conrad Ukropina\u2019s 30-yard field goal, which would have put Stanford ahead, was blocked midway through the third, and Hogan was intercepted by Dion Bailey at the Trojans\u2019 7-yard line with just under 11 minutes left. But that mistake was not as costly as his final one, which the freshman Su\u2019a Cravens picked off at the Trojans\u2019 44. It almost certainly ended Stanford\u2019s hopes for a trip to the national title game.", "keyword": "College football;Stanford;USC"}
{"id": "ny0257851", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/01/16", "title": "Maruyama Has Two-Shot Lead at Sony Open", "abstract": "HONOLULU (AP) \u2014 Shigeki Maruyama had another five-under-par 65 and found himself atop the leader board in the Sony Open on Saturday, allowing him to look ahead to the final round. He is more concerned about stamina than nerves. Maruyama, winless on the PGA Tour since 2003, hit a bunker shot that banged into the pin and dropped for birdie on the par-3 seventh to break out of a tie, and a two-putt birdie on the short par-5 ninth gave him a two-shot advantage over the early starters. Stuart Appleby, the 18-hole leader, was among those who played Waialae in the afternoon. Because the opening round was washed out by rain, the Sony Open is to be decided by a 36-hole final round Sunday. Maruyama, 41, looked at his shoes and said with a laugh: \u201cMy feet. It\u2019s a problem.\u201d Maruyama, who was at 10-under 130, added, \u201cI\u2019m getting older, and 36 holes is going to be a struggle.\u201d He was two shots clear of Steve Marino (67) and Roland Thatcher (65), whose runner-up finish at Disney in the final PGA Tour event last year enabled him to keep his card and book a trip to Hawaii. Matt Kuchar, coming off a PGA Tour money title and the Vardon Trophy, had a 67 and was at 133. The group at 134 includes Boo Weekley (66) and Chris DiMarco (67), who are looking to turn their fortunes around. Anthony Kim had the best score of the morning group, a 64 that put him back in the picture. Maruyama, playing on a sponsor exemption, is popular at this tournament with several Japanese in the gallery and a Japanese sponsor. He has not been heard from much since going three straight seasons with a PGA Tour victory a decade ago. But he is well aware the tournament is only half over. \u201cI haven\u2019t gotten that far yet to think about winning,\u201d he said through an interpreter. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s just been about really trying to play good golf and entertain the Japanese tourists.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Sony Corporation;Maruyama Shigeki"}
{"id": "ny0225114", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/10/20", "title": "Matt Cain Pitches the Giants Past the Phillies", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Just about every time he had faced the Philadelphia Phillies , Matt Cain had been treated like a pi\u00f1ata. So when Cain, a soft-spoken right-hander, took the mound Tuesday afternoon, he made it clear with a couple of well-placed fastballs \u2014 one under the chin of Cole Hamels and the other in the ribs of Shane Victorino \u2014 that he would not be batted around this time. Cain was dominant, allowing two hits over seven innings, and the Cody Ross-fueled offense continued to be just enough as the Giants beat the Phillies, 3-0 , to take a 2-1 lead in the National League Championship Series. \u201cNo question, there\u2019s a sense of confidence when you\u2019re going against such a great team and outstanding pitching,\u201d said Giants Manager Bruce Bochy, who will send Madison Bumgarner against Joe Blanton on Wednesday in Game 4. \u201cYou find a way to win ballgames, it does a lot for them.\u201d This was nothing like the Cain the Phillies had seen before. He had never beaten them, and he had a 6.23 earned run average in five career starts . But Cain struck out five, walked three and hit two, and he capped his day by retiring Victorino with two runners on to end the seventh inning. Javier Lopez and Brian Wilson pitched the final two innings. \u201cFrom what I\u2019ve seen of him in the past, he would get kind of aggressive with his fastball,\u201d Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel said. \u201cToday, he used all his pitches and his command was better. He pitched a super game.\u201d It was a near-perfect day in San Francisco, and it was that way from start to finish for the Giants. Barry Bonds made a rare appearance at AT&T Park, bouncing up the dugout steps to throw a ceremonial first pitch, and waving his arms to a loud ovation. Bonds might have a place in this lineup, as much as it struggles to score, but with the pitching the Giants continue to receive, it was again enough. San Francisco won its fourth playoff game in which it has scored three runs or fewer. And again, Ross was at the center of it, his run-scoring single with two outs sparking a two-run fourth inning. \u201cFor the most part, it\u2019s about confidence, going up there and knowing you\u2019re going to get the job done or do something to help your team,\u201d said Ross, who has hit three home runs in the series. If the Giants\u2019 confidence soared after they took a 2-0 lead, it is not without reason. The Giants were 63-19 in the regular season and are 4-1 in the playoffs when they score first. \u201cIt\u2019s important for us to get runs early to take the pressure off them,\u201d Giants second baseman Freddy Sanchez said. \u201cI think it\u2019s difficult for any pitching staff when it\u2019s 0-0, or 1-0.\u201d Though Tim Lincecum has turned in the Giants\u2019 signature pitching performance of the playoffs \u2014 a 2-hit, 14-strikeout shutout of Atlanta \u2014 and Jonathan Sanchez has won key games down the stretch, Cain has been quietly effective in the playoffs. In 13 2/3 innings, he has not allowed an earned run. \u201cThis has got to be the top one, really,\u201d Cain said. \u201cTo be able to pitch in the postseason is great, and to be able to go out there and throw the ball well and help your team win is a great feeling.\u201d The Phillies put the ball in play against Cain, but rarely did they do so with any authority. He allowed only singles by Carlos Ruiz and Ryan Howard. \u201cWhat he does best is he\u2019s able to throw all his pitches for strikes and he keeps those guys off balance, and when you have a team with as much firepower as Philadelphia has, you have to do that,\u201d said center fielder Aaron Rowand, a former Phillie. \u201cIf you\u2019re not throwing strikes with certain pitches, they\u2019re going to recognize that and then they\u2019re going to sit on the other ones and make you pay.\u201d The hardest-hit ball may have been Raul Ibanez\u2019s line drive at first baseman Aubrey Huff in the seventh. Cain then hit Ruiz and walked pinch-hitter Ross Gload, but after a visit from Bochy, he retired Victorino on a groundout to second. For Chase Utley, the Phillies\u2019 star second baseman, it was not a good day in the field. He has had problems throwing the ball in recent playoffs, and he did little to help with his glove Tuesday. Huff\u2019s two-out roller into the hole escaped under his glove, bringing in the second run in the fourth. And the Giants added another in the fifth when Utley misread Sanchez\u2019s soft liner. Instead of taking two steps in to catch it, Utley played the ball on a short hop, and it caromed off his chest and into center field. The play, ruled a hit, allowed Rowand to score from second. At the center of each Giants rally were Rowand and Edgar Renteria, a couple of playoff-tested veterans who lost their starting jobs in the second half. They were put into the lineup because the Giants had struggled to score any runs that were not produced by Ross. Center fielder Andres Torres and third baseman Mike Fontenot, who were a combined 5 for 37 in the postseason, were benched, and Juan Uribe, who has a sore wrist, was shifted to third to create a spot for Renteria at shortstop. The Phillies are searching for a similar spark. \u201cThere\u2019s not enough time to analyze situations,\u201d Victorino said. \u201cLet\u2019s go out there and worry about tomorrow.\u201d Nearby, Howard, with a host of reporters waiting at his locker to speak with him, excused himself to spit out some mouthwash. Washing away the taste of this defeat, though, had to wait another day.", "keyword": "Cain Matt;Baseball;Playoff Games;San Francisco Giants;Philadelphia Phillies;National League"}
{"id": "ny0073160", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/03/25", "title": "Police Shooting Victim in Georgia Tried to Follow \u2018Sensible\u2019 Path", "abstract": "MONCKS CORNER, S.C. \u2014 Long before two bullets from a police officer\u2019s handgun tore through Anthony Hill\u2019s chest, he had tattooed it with the words of advice that his grandfather regularly imparted to him in this small Southern city: \u201cBe sensible.\u201d Last week, Mr. Hill\u2019s relatives buried him in Moncks Corner. On their shirts and lapels, they had pinned photos of him, smiling and sharp, in his Air Force uniform. It was a wordless rebuke to the TV news images that had shown Mr. Hill as he wandered in his last moments \u2014 naked, unarmed and acting in a way that alarmed neighbors \u2014 through his suburban Atlanta apartment complex. It was March 9, a Monday afternoon. A DeKalb County police officer, Robert Olsen, arrived on the scene, responding to a 911 call. Witnesses said that Mr. Hill, an African-American, approached the officer, who is white, with his hands either up or at his sides, but that he did not heed the policeman\u2019s order to stop. Officer Olsen fired. And Mr. Hill would become another hashtag for a roiling movement of Americans who questioned the value that police officers place on black lives. For those closest to Mr. Hill, the pain has been amplified by the fact that he had, until that last day, largely heeded his grandfather\u2019s counsel. He had no criminal record. He had served in the war in Afghanistan. And before his death, Mr. Hill, 26, had been trying, like many other Americans, to make sense of the complex questions of race and law enforcement that have emerged since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Image Anthony Hill with his parents. In a Twitter post on Dec. 24, Mr. Hill challenged protesters not to reflexively condemn all police officers. \u201cIf 99 of 100 officers\u201d were on the streets \u201ckilling black men like its hunting season,\u201d he wrote , \u201cthat still leaves 1 just doing his job. Stop w/ the generalizations.\u201d A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, doctors told Mr. Hill that he had bipolar disorder after he returned from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting \u2014 in which he removed his clothes and clambered down from a second-floor balcony \u2014 were symptoms of his illness. In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better. \u201cTo come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who\u2019s supposed to protect you \u2014 that I don\u2019t understand,\u201d said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill\u2019s brother. His father, also named Anthony, said, \u201cWhy would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?\u201d Image Anthony Hill\u2019s mother, Carolyn Giummo, and his grandmother Theola Baylor, who helped raise him, in Moncks Corner, S.C. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times Mr. Hill\u2019s mother, Carolyn Giummo, said that she did not hate Officer Olsen, who has been placed on administrative leave pending the inquiry by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. \u201cI\u2019m very disappointed in him,\u201d she said. Ms. Giummo, 54, raised her son with the help of her parents, Theola and William Baylor, in Moncks Corner, a Lowcountry city of 7,900 where residents take pride in a certain racial harmony. The public high school, from which Mr. Hill graduated in 2006, is racially mixed, and students tend to segregate by areas of interest, not skin color. Over the years, Mr. Hill\u2019s extended family came to include a number of nonblack members. \u201cI never thought to tell my son, \u2018You\u2019re black, you\u2019d better look out,\u2019 \u201d said Ms. Giummo, who is African-American. Armed instead with \u201cBe sensible\u201d \u2014 his grandfather\u2019s counsel nearly every time he left the house \u2014 Mr. Hill came of age in a world that revolved around school, family and the weekly rhythms set by the Moncks Corner African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang in the youth choir and was captivated, early on, by the power of music. In high school, he played the male lead, Danny Zuko, in a production of \u201cGrease.\u201d The summer after graduation, his mother said, he worked as an intern with a local law enforcement agency. He tried his hand at college, but eventually dropped out to enlist, in 2008, in the Air Force. Two years later, Mr. Hill was deployed to Afghanistan. His father said he had been responsible for loading ordnance into aircraft in Kandahar Province. Image Pallbearers carried the flag-draped coffin of Anthony Hill for his funeral service at the Berkeley High School auditorium in Moncks Corner, S.C. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times His Atlanta roommate, Kailien Alexander, a 23-year-old college student, said that Mr. Hill had told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had seen children killed in Afghanistan. \u201cIt just didn\u2019t sit right with him,\u201d Mr. Alexander said. After doctors diagnosed the disorder, his mother said, he was \u201cmedically retired\u201d from the Air Force. Later, Mr. Hill moved to Atlanta, in hopes of breaking into the music business. He worked as an intern at a recording studio, and took odd jobs while constructing R&B tracks at home, sometimes recording in his closet with Mr. Alexander\u2019s help. He was open about his mental illness, even commenting about it on Twitter. The illness, his family members said, seemed to mostly manifest itself in bursts of hourslong phone conversations. But before March 9, no one had seen him fully lose control. Mr. Alexander said he and Mr. Hill were poor but happy, and eager to make friends in an apartment complex mostly filled by families. One hot afternoon, Mr. Alexander recalled, the pair spent some of their last money on ice pops for the children in the neighborhood. They also followed the national conversation about minorities and the police prompted by the shooting in Ferguson. Mr. Alexander said Mr. Hill was troubled by examples of overaggressive policing. But on social media, he challenged those who would dismiss all police officers as evil, and those who sought simple definitions of heroes and villains. \u201cSome of us black folks have to start actually living like #blacklivesmatter but I\u2019ll probably get called a house slave for saying so,\u201d he wrote on March 6. Image Mr. Hill was raised with the help of his grandmother Theola W. Baylor, who wore a pin that showed him in his Air Force uniform. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times At the same time, Mr. Hill was struggling with the medication he had been given by doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bridget Anderson, 22, Mr. Hill\u2019s girlfriend, said he had stopped taking his medicine about 10 days before he was shot. On the morning of March 9, Mr. Hill made his final Facebook post : \u201cWhere i once saw death i only see life.\u201d Mr. Alexander said that before he left for class that morning, Mr. Hill seemed upbeat. DeKalb police officials said Officer Olsen had a Taser with him at the time of the shooting. They also said the officer had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill. This week, the department announced that it would increase its training requirements for \u201ccritical incidents,\u201d which include encounters with the mentally ill, but Capt. Steven R. Fore said the change was unrelated to the shooting. In an interview last week, Mr. Hill\u2019s family blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to properly treat Mr. Hill, arguing that he should have had better guidance after he learned of his mental illness and retired. Officials said they could not comment on an individual case. Ms. Giummo said she did not think her son\u2019s story had much to do with race. \u201cThere is a \u2018black and white\u2019 issue\u201d in the country, she said, \u201cbut our main concern is we want to know what happened.\u201d \u201cAnd if he was a black officer, we\u2019d still feel the same way,\u201d she added. At Mr. Hill\u2019s funeral last week in the public high school, the P.A. system played Sam Cooke\u2019s \u201cA Change Is Gonna Come\u201d \u2014 Mr. Hill\u2019s favorite song. Sandy W. Drayton, the former pastor at Moncks Corner A.M.E. Church, referred to the officer as \u201cthe betrayer who misunderstood,\u201d and asked God to forgive him. Mr. Drayton described death as the door that leads away from this world \u2014 away from \u201cthe racial stuff\u201d and \u201cthe ethnocentrism\u201d \u2014 and into \u201ca new heaven, a new earth, a New Jerusalem.\u201d", "keyword": "Anthony Hill;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Black People,African-Americans;Chamblee"}
{"id": "ny0242340", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/03/17", "title": "Corporate Tax Plan Unveiled in European Union", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 A new effort to coordinate corporate tax policy in the European Union introduced on Wednesday has increased tensions between some member states and Ireland, which said it was skeptical about the process. The initiative would develop a common basis for calculating corporate taxes across the bloc and allow companies to opt in to the system. The European Commission , which made the proposal, estimated that the plan could save businesses 700 million euros ($973 million) a year in reduced compliance costs and an additional 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion) in tax benefits. The commission has been trying for years to coordinate the bloc\u2019s corporate tax policy. Previous efforts have come to nothing because changes in tax policy require the agreement of all 27 European Union member states. But this time the politics have changed and \u2014 crucially \u2014 this plan could work with a smaller group of countries, because some think that those who adopt the proposal could reap competitive advantages rather than lose out. The new plan is a contentious topic within the union, where some countries regard the right to set their own tax rate as a cornerstone of national sovereignty. While the proposals outlined by the commission cover only the tax base, rather than rates, some nations worry that the proposals could be a stepping stone to further coordination of tax policy. If there is no consensus this time, France and Germany are expected to press for an accord among the 17 members of the euro zone. Ireland, which has already come under pressure over its low corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, struck a noncommittal tone on Wednesday. \u201cWe remain skeptical about many aspects,\u201d the Irish Finance Ministry said in a statement. But, it said it would work with member states on the issue. Last week, Ireland failed to secure a reduction in the interest it is paying on its 85 billion euro bailout from the union because it refused to promise to work constructively on tax coordination. In talks among the European Union members, Ireland has always had a powerful ally in Britain. But Britain is not a member of the euro zone, theoretically putting Ireland in a weaker bargaining position. Moreover, if any group of countries goes ahead with the proposals, those that stay outside might, potentially, lose out if large multinational companies moved some of their operations to a nation that took part. A British government spokesman, who asked not to be named, said the plan would be considered on its merits. \u201cWe would want to ensure that we are constructively engaged in discussions,\u201d the spokesman said. \u201cHowever, we will not agree to a proposal that might threaten or limit our ability to shape our own tax policy.\u201d \u201cObstacles to cross-border activity in the field of corporate taxation hamper business development and the growth potential of the single market,\u201d said Philippe de Buck, director general of Businesseurope, a lobbying group. \u201cThe proposal to develop a common consolidated corporate tax base could help and is welcome under the condition that it remains a competitive option for companies and excludes any form of tax rate harmonization.\u201d", "keyword": "European Union;Taxation;Corporations;European Commission;Ireland"}
{"id": "ny0269895", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2016/04/07", "title": "Tiger Woods Is Missing, but So Is Dominance in Golf", "abstract": "AUGUSTA, Ga. \u2014 Four of the six amateurs in the Masters field this week were born after Tiger Woods made his Augusta National debut in 1995. They grew up in a world in which Woods\u2019s contending in a major was a given, like spring following winter. In 75 combined appearances in the four majors, not counting an injury withdrawal during the first round of the 1995 United States Open , Woods missed the cut eight times while recording 37 top-10 finishes. He has 14 major championships. Rory McIlroy, the world No. 2, who can become the first player since Woods to complete a career Grand Slam with a victory this week, has missed the cut four times in 28 major starts while posting 12 top-10s. He has four major titles. Woods, who is missing the Masters for only the second time in 22 years as he recovers from his most recent back surgeries, spent 683 weeks as the world No. 1, including 281 consecutive weeks from June 2005 to October 2010. Led by McIlroy, the 10 players in this year\u2019s field who have ascended to No. 1 have spent a combined 262 weeks at the top. \u201cIt is much different than the years Tiger dominated,\u201d McIlroy said, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t know if we\u2019re going to see a 10-year stretch of golf like that in our lifetime. What he did in that time span was amazing.\u201d Adam Scott, who spent 11 weeks at No. 1, also marveled at Woods\u2019s sustained excellence. \u201cWhat\u2019s hard to imagine is the confidence he must have had going to the golf course to play over that period of time,\u201d said Scott, who won back-to-back starts in late February and early March. \u201cI thought I felt pretty confident rolling around Florida there a couple of weeks ago, but that\u2019s how he felt for 10 years.\u201d Scott, the 2013 Masters champion, added: \u201cIt was so good the way he played for such a long period of time. Just getting it done; the more you win, the more you believe in yourself, the more you go for a shot, the more you pull off a shot when it counts. That\u2019s what it was like watching him for that period.\u201d Woods, whose last competitive start was in August, attended the champions dinner Tuesday night. According to one of the attendees, he looked fit. \u201cYou know, he\u2019s encouraged,\u201d said Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National. \u201cI could tell the fire is building back up in his belly, and I suspect Tiger\u2019s going to be back fairly quickly, and I\u2019m looking forward to it.\u201d NO. 13 MAY BE LONGER The iconic 13th hole at Augusta National features more than 1,500 azaleas, and it could soon gain several yards in length. The club has acquired land from Augusta Country Club bordering Augusta National\u2019s 12th green and 13th tee, affording it the option of adding roughly 50 yards to the hole, a 510-yard par-5 dogleg-left. A new tee was added in 2002 as part of the club\u2019s so-called Tiger-proofing of the course. Led by Woods, the longer players were hitting short-iron second shots. During the 2014 tournament, the long-hitting Bubba Watson found the green with his second shot using a wedge. \u201cThirteen is one of the holes we\u2019re studying,\u201d Payne said. \u201cWe have made no decision whatsoever.\u201d Jack Nicklaus, a six-time Masters champion, said he thought the hole could benefit from some lengthening. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question about that,\u201d he said. \u201cGuys now take it over the top of the trees. I used to be able to do that, too, but the trees were about half the size.\u201d He added: \u201cI think with the way the guys hit the ball today, it\u2019s a little easier than it needs to be. It\u2019s not really a par 5 the way it is.\u201d WATSON\u2019S SWAN SONG Tom Watson, 66, is bowing out of the Masters after this year. In his competitive swan song at Augusta National, he will be paired Thursday with Charley Hoffman and Lee Westwood, whose 18 combined Masters appearances are 24 fewer than those by Watson, who is making his 43rd start. \u201cWhen you see these kids play out here and see them carry the ball 280 and 290 yards off the tee, it\u2019s time to say I can\u2019t compete with them,\u201d Watson, a two-time champion, said. Watson, who last made the 36-hole cut in 2010, added, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to take up another spot and shoot scores and just not even sniff making the cut.\u201d PALMER TO JOIN CEREMONIAL STARTERS Arnold Palmer, 86, will accompany the other ceremonial starters, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, to the first tee Thursday, though he is not expected to hit a shot. Palmer, who is in frail health, had a diminished presence last month at the PGA Tour event that he hosts in Orlando, Fla. \u201cHe\u2019s a hero,\u201d Billy Payne said. \u201cHe\u2019s my hero who needs no club in his hands to receive the recognition and the love that he so richly deserves.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Masters Golf,Masters;Augusta National Golf Club;Tiger Woods;Arnold Palmer;Tom Watson"}
{"id": "ny0050799", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/10/19", "title": "Giants (3-3) at Cowboys (5-1)", "abstract": "4:25 p.m., Fox Matchup to watch: Cowboys\u2019 Tyron Smith vs. Giants\u2019 Jason Pierre-Paul The Dallas offensive line has been the strength of the team, and Smith, a left tackle, has been the unit\u2019s most dominant player. Defensive end Pierre-Paul has just one and a half sacks this season, but he has been fearsome against the run and has disrupted many passing plays by forcing the quarterback out of the pocket. Pierre-Paul could be the key to taking the Cowboys\u2019 offense out of its rhythm. But if Smith wins most of the battles with Pierre-Paul, the Giants\u2019 defense is in trouble. Even Perry Fewell, the Giants\u2019 defensive coordinator, was excited about watching the matchup. \u201cSmith is the linchpin of their offense,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve got our best guy on him. I think it will be a heavyweight battle.\u201d Number to watch: 6 100-yard rushing games by DeMarco Murray for the Cowboys this season. Murray leads the N.F.L. in rushing. The last Cowboy to lead the league in rushing was Emmitt Smith in 1995. Quotation of the Week \u2018We have all known Tony Romo to get out of the pocket and be very dangerous out of the pocket and throw one up and hope. It is not hope anymore; they are connecting.\u2019 PERRY FEWELL, on the Cowboys\u2019 quarterback.", "keyword": "Football;Dallas Cowboys;Giants;Tony Romo;Jason Pierre-Paul"}
{"id": "ny0113454", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/11/20", "title": "New Communist Party Chief in China Denounces Corruption in Speech", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 In his first speech to the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s elite Politburo, Xi Jinping , the new party chief, denounced the prevalence of corruption and said officials needed to guard against its spread or it would \u201cdoom the party and the state.\u201d The blunt remarks by Mr. Xi were made Saturday at a meeting of the 25-person Politburo, which announced a turnover of 15 members last week during the change in leadership at the close of the 18th Party Congress, the state news media reported on Monday. Mr. Xi\u2019s admonitions suggested that he wanted to take a populist tack in shaping his image, but they were also consistent with warnings that Chinese leaders have delivered in recent years and echoed points he made in his inaugural speech on Thursday. Corruption is one of the issues of greatest concern to Chinese, and Mr. Xi even obliquely referred to the problem in Arab countries and the revolutions there. \u201cIn recent years, the long pent-up problems in some countries have led to the venting of public outrage, to social turmoil and to the fall of governments, and corruption and graft have been an important reason,\u201d Mr. Xi said, according to a version of the speech posted online. \u201cA mass of facts tells us that if corruption becomes increasingly serious, it will inevitably doom the party and the state. We must be vigilant. In recent years, there have been cases of grave violations of disciplinary rules and laws within the party that have been extremely malign in nature and utterly destructive politically, shocking people to the core.\u201d Mr. Xi used a Chinese aphorism \u2014 \u201cworms come only after matter decays\u201d \u2014 to stress his point. The phrase is often attributed to Su Shi, a scholar of the Northern Song dynasty, and it was cited on several recent occasions by Bo Xilai, the disgraced former party chief of Chongqing, who was felled last spring by a murder scandal and is expected to stand trial soon on criminal charges related to abuse of power. When Mr. Bo used the phrase in speeches, it was also in the context of denouncing corruption and enhancing his populist image. Ironically, Mr. Xi\u2019s allusion to recent \u201cgrave violations\u201d of party discipline appeared to refer in part to Mr. Bo. Both Mr. Xi and Mr. Bo are sons of powerful Communist leaders, and Mr. Bo, a former Politburo member, was seen as a rival to Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi also took the occasion on Saturday to underscore the need to remain true to the party\u2019s founding ideology, and warned that some officials appeared to be heading down a wayward path in this area, too. \u201cFaith in Marxism and a belief in socialism and communism is the political soul of a Communist and the spiritual pillar that allows a Communist to withstand any test,\u201d Mr. Xi said. \u201cTo put it more vividly, ideals and convictions are the spiritual calcium of Communists, and if these ideals and convictions are missing or irresolute, then there is a lack of spiritual calcium that leads to soft bones.\u201d A series of scandals and revelations this year have undermined confidence in China \u2019s leaders and cast greater scrutiny on the prevalence of nepotism and patronage at the top ranks of the party. All that comes at a time when influential voices are rising inside China calling for fundamental changes to the political and economic systems. The Bo Xilai scandal attracted widespread attention last spring inside China and abroad. Then Bloomberg News reported that the relatives of Mr. Xi held investments and assets worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars, and The New York Times published the results of a yearlong investigation that found the family of Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, held investments and assets worth at least $2.7 billion. The Web sites of both news organizations were blocked in China around the time the articles were published. Pu Zhiqiang, a rights lawyer, said in an interview on Monday that \u201cevery generation of leaders has mentioned\u201d corruption upon taking office. \u201cNo one would neglect paying attention to the problem of corruption,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s common sense. The crux of the matter is how to implement anti-corruption measures.\u201d On Thursday, the party announced that the new head of its anti-corruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, would be Wang Qishan, a former vice premier with deep experience in the finance sector. Mr. Wang is now the sixth-ranking party official and is on the seven-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. (In other important appointments, the party announced Monday that Meng Jianzhu, a Politburo member, will take charge of the party\u2019s Central Politics and Law Commission, which oversees security and the courts and was previously run by a Standing Committee member, the much-disliked Zhou Yongkang; and Zhao Leji, also on the Politburo, will be the head of the Organization Department, which oversees personnel issues.) There are those who say that relying on the anti-corruption commission and a nontransparent process to ferret out and punish offending officials is not the right way to set the party straight. At a seminar in Beijing on Friday that was attended by liberal scholars and intellectuals, Chen Youxi, a prominent lawyer and former official, emphasized that point. \u201cOur present approach to fighting corruption basically has increasingly relied on turning the legal authorities into party authorities, strengthening the Central Discipline Inspection Commission and using party oversight against corruption,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think this is a dead end. The more powerful the Discipline Inspection Commission has become, the more serious corruption has become, because if you depend on secretively fighting corruption, you only encourage more corruption.\u201d", "keyword": "Xi Jinping;Communist Party of China;Corruption (Institutional);China"}
{"id": "ny0121583", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/09/04", "title": "Moody\u2019s Reduces Its Outlook for Europe\u2019s Credit Rating", "abstract": "Moody\u2019s Investors Service cut the European Union \u2019s credit outlook to negative on Monday, reflecting the risks to Germany, France, Britain and the Netherlands, the four countries in the group with AAA ratings, which account for about 45 percent of the group\u2019s budget revenue. Moody\u2019s lowered the outlook on the union\u2019s AAA long-term bond rating from stable, according to a statement released late Monday in Frankfurt. It also changed to negative from stable its outlook on the provisional AAA rating for the European Union\u2019s medium-term note program. The change \u201creflects the negative outlook on the AAA ratings of the member states with large contributions to the E.U. budget,\u201d Moody\u2019s said. \u201cThe creditworthiness of these member states is highly correlated, as they are all exposed, albeit to varying degrees, to the euro area debt crisis .\u201d Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told a crowd of beer drinkers in Bavaria on Monday that Germany must show solidarity with Europe, and indicated that she would back a more active role for the European Central Bank to fight the debt crisis. Her nation shoulders the largest cost of bailing out weaker governments. Risks of a downgrade to the European Union\u2019s sovereign debt rating come from a \u201cdeterioration in the creditworthiness of E.U. member states,\u201d Moody\u2019s said. \u201cAdditionally, a weakening of the commitment of the member states to the E.U. and changes to the E.U.\u2019s fiscal framework that led to less conservative budget management would be credit negative.\u201d Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, told officials on Monday that he would be comfortable buying three-year government bonds to bring down borrowing costs for nations in financial distress. European leaders are stepping up shuttle diplomacy this week as they brace for Mr. Draghi\u2019s plan to defend the euro from bond market turmoil. Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Union, is traveling to Berlin for talks with Ms. Merkel on Tuesday as Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy welcomes President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande of Italy to Rome. The yield on Italian 10-year bonds declined 8 basis points yesterday to 5.77 percent. That was still 439 basis points more than the yield on similar maturity German bunds. Spain\u2019s 10-year bonds were yielding 6.85 percent, near the 7 percent level that compelled Greece, Portugal and Ireland to seek bailouts. \u201cThe outlook for the E.U.\u2019s ratings could return to stable if the outlooks on the ratings of the key AAA countries with contributions to the E.U. budget also returned to stable,\u201d Moody\u2019s said of the 27-member group.", "keyword": "Credit Ratings and Credit Rating Agencies;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );Europe;Moody's Corporation;Moody's Investors Service Inc;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0224918", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/10/05", "title": "In Bosnia, Doubts About Vote, and About Future", "abstract": "PRAGUE \u2014 The potential for achieving unity in Bosnia appeared in doubt on Monday after preliminary election results showed deep divisions in the ethnically divided country and election officials said they would investigate accusations of voting fraud. Suad Arnautovic, an election commission member, said the commission would begin an inquiry after 10 percent of the ballots in the race for the Serb presidency, one element of the country\u2019s three-member presidency, were voided. The election was being closely watched as a test case of whether Bosnia can overcome deadlock and undertake changes needed to advance the country\u2019s goals of becoming a member of the European Union and NATO. Under a 1995 accord brokered by the United States, what was once a single entity, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was split into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serbian Republic. But the decentralized institutional structure that emerged, coupled with strong residual nationalism among the country\u2019s disparate ethnic groups, has made it extremely difficult for Bosnia to move forward. The preliminary election results underlined the risks, with Muslims and Croats favoring leaders advocating national unity and Bosnian Serbs choosing candidates who called for the country\u2019s breakup. Bakir Izetbegovic, the son of Bosnia\u2019s wartime Muslim leader and a proponent of dialogue among the ethnic groups, appeared poised to win the race for the Muslim presidency, ousting the incumbent Haris Silajdzic, whose vociferous opposition to the Serbian Republic has contributed to national deadlock. The current Croat member of the presidency, Zeljko Komsic, a moderate who comes from a multiethnic party, also won another four-year term. However, analysts said that Bosnia\u2019s already fragile cohesion remained under serious threat because of the strong showing of Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader, who was elected president of the Serbian Republic and has repeatedly threatened secession. The leading contender to be the Serb representative on the country\u2019s presidency, Nebojsa Radmanovic, also wants Bosnian Serbs to seek independence. Srecko Latal, a Balkan analyst with the International Crisis Group in Sarajevo, said that the moderate inclination of Bosnian Muslims would either isolate Mr. Dodik or magnify his intransigence. If Bosnia\u2019s Muslims \u201cextend a hand to Dodik and he rejects them, then that will pull him out into the open,\u201d he said. He added, \u201cDodik will have no excuse for his attempts to rip the country apart.\u201d", "keyword": "Bosnia and Herzegovina;Elections"}
{"id": "ny0243395", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/03/06", "title": "Sublime Serves Up Big Flavors and Portions - Review", "abstract": "WHEN Scott Howlett, a veteran chef for hire, finally opened his own first restaurant in June 2009, he didn\u2019t want to feel locked in to a particular kind of cuisine. So the name he chose \u2014 Sublime \u2014 deliberately offered few culinary clues, though it did set expectations high. Mr. Howlett\u2019s menu is dotted with the influences of a career spent cooking Japanese, pan-Asian and, to a lesser extent, Latin American and Mediterranean dishes. But that isn\u2019t anything to apologize for. Asian accents, in particular, pop up all over the menu at Sublime, a bustling place sleekly done up in blues and browns \u2014 with the odd pair of longhorns nodding to Mr. Howlett\u2019s favorite college football team \u2014 in a nondescript building near the Gladstone train station. Mr. Howlett\u2019s own accent is that of Bayonne, and it\u2019s slightly unexpected in horse country; indeed, he confesses to missing being \u201ccloser to civilization.\u201d But it\u2019s Somerset County\u2019s good fortune that this 6-foot-2-inch, 250-pound former linebacker chose to serve up his he-man-size portions here. Take his scallops: Mr. Howlett starts with five big diver scallops weighing at least 1.6 ounces apiece, pan-sears them in butter, cooks them through in the oven, then finishes them in the pan with fresh butter to make a glaze worth savoring. He embeds them in a mountain of creamy, buttery mashed potatoes, laced with chives and truffle oil, accompanied by creamed fresh corn with saffron, onions and garlic. The filet is just as generous (if pricey at $38) and just as dangerous: nine ounces of Black Angus, grilled after being wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon, and served with mashed potatoes \u2014 this time spiced with chipotle peppers \u2014 sweet hush puppies and a syrupy maple-and-cider vinegar gastrique. Mr. Howlett delicately balances flavors and takes pains to ensure that his food looks as fresh as it tastes. So the beef tartare is made to order and chopped by hand, not ground. (Grinding, he says, partially cooks the fatty meat, changing its bright red color and turning it to paste.) He mixes in a house-made garlic-ginger-sake ketchup, fresh chives and a hint of Szechuan pepper; sits it atop a toasted brioche; tops the beef with a raw quail egg; and dresses the plate with a mayonnaise made with Thai sweet chili. The mussels, which one of my companions said were the best she had ever tasted, have their roots in a nine-week trip Mr. Howlett made to Japan, where he learned to make a sauce of red Thai curry paste, garlic and ginger, onions, sake, apples and bananas for sweetness, and seasonings including thyme and kaffir lime leaves. Dishes like that make Sublime\u2019s appetizers its strong suit. The baked brie, for another, is uplifted by basil-infused orange-blossom honey and the chopped macadamia nuts baked along with it. The crab and avocado salad grabs one\u2019s attention with its heavily applied tangy dressing of garlic, shallot, thyme, honey and lemon. Yet, while the first courses made good on the promise of the restaurant\u2019s name, entrees did not always deliver the way the scallops and the filet did. The braised short ribs struck me as bland, and they were dry on my first visit (though tender on the second). The mahi mahi and couscous of dashi kombu \u2014 Japanese dried fish-and-kelp stock \u2014 seemed better on the page than on the plate. But the tuna katsu \u2014 breaded, twice fried and surrounded by a flavorful potato hash and that Thai curry sauce \u2014 worked nicely. Desserts were plentiful \u2014 unnecessarily so, given what had preceded them \u2014 but mostly unmemorable. The plate of six house-made truffles stood out, with flavor combinations of exotic teas and fruits. At his best, Mr. Howlett offers zesty, high-spirited cooking, matched by generous portions, in a lively but intimate setting. Sublime? Maybe not. Satisfying? Without a doubt. \u2022 Sublime 12 Lackawanna Avenue Gladstone (908) 781-1888 sublimenj.com WORTH IT THE SPACE Seating for 88 in two sleek dining rooms, and 14 seats at the bar; patio for 20 in good weather. Wheelchair accessible. THE CROWD Old-money locals and younger couples from farther away, casually dressed and unperturbed by the loudness. Servers are knowledgeable and prompt. THE BAR Full bar, including specialty cocktails. List of 45 wines by the bottle, $25 to $180, and 10 by the glass, $8 to $12. More than 50 beers, from $5 to $22 for a 750-milliliter bottle of Allagash Curieux . THE BILL A bit steep (though portions are big). Salads and appetizers, $10 to $16; entrees, $18 to $38. Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover accepted. WHAT WE LIKED Mussels, beef tartare, baked brie, crab and avocado salad , tuna katsu, filet mignon, scallops, truffles. IF YOU GO Open Tuesday to Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m. (Bar is open later.) Closed Mondays. Reservations recommended. Ample parking in the back. RATINGS Don\u2019t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don\u2019t Bother.", "keyword": "Cooking and Cookbooks;Restaurants;New Jersey"}
{"id": "ny0113563", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2012/11/18", "title": "Miguel \u00c1ngel Jim\u00e9nez Tied for Lead at 10 Under at Hong Kong", "abstract": "Miguel \u00c1ngel Jim\u00e9nez of Spain shot a two-under-par 68 to share the third-round lead with New Zealand\u2019s Michael Campbell at the Hong Kong Open on Saturday. Campbell, looking for his first win in seven years, made a 15-foot par putt on the last hole to complete a round of 69 that put him at 10-under 200. Jim\u00e9nez is trying to win the event for a third time in nine years. Campbell, ranked 339th in the world, has won 15 tournaments in his career but none since the 2005 HSBC World Match Play Championship in England. \u00b6 Henrik Stenson of Sweden closed in on a first European Tour win in three years, taking a three-shot lead into the final round of the South African Open in Johannesburg despite George Coetzee\u2019s shooting a course-record 63. Stenson had six birdies and three bogeys in a 69 for a 16-under total of 200. Coetzee and Magnus Carlsson were three shots back. Stenson is looking for his first title since the Players Championship in 2009. Coetzee, a South African, had nine birdies and an eagle to break the course record. \u00b6 Rory McIlroy, the world\u2019s top-ranked golfer, who four-putted the final green Friday and missed the cut at the Hong Kong Open, has vowed to cut back his competitive schedule next year. McIlroy said he had learned a lesson and would spend the coming weeks working out where he will compete in 2013. Counting next week\u2019s European Tour closing event, McIlroy will have played in 24 tournaments this season as well as the Ryder Cup and two exhibition tournaments.", "keyword": "Golf;Jimenez Miguel Angel;Campbell Michael"}
{"id": "ny0197909", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/07/02", "title": "Former Workers\u2019 Compensation Judge Appointed to Lead System", "abstract": "Gov. David A. Paterson has appointed Robert E. Beloten, a longtime workers\u2019 compensation judge, as the chairman of the New York State Workers\u2019 Compensation Board, a spokesman for the governor said on Wednesday. Mr. Beloten, 56, was named one of the board\u2019s 12 commissioners in May, after having been a workers\u2019 compensation judge from 1988 to 1996 and from 2000 until he became a commissioner. As a judge, he worked mostly in the system\u2019s office in Jamaica, Queens. He will succeed Zachary S. Weiss, who has resigned to become a judge in the Social Security system. Mr. Weiss was appointed as the chairman less than two years ago with a mandate to bring sweeping change to a system long criticized for its delays and ineffectiveness. Mr. Beloten, who was a law student with Mr. Paterson at Hofstra University, will lead a $5.5 billion-a-year system that has 1,500 employees and handles about 140,000 new cases each year. Mr. Beloten said he would like to continue the changes begun by Eliot Spitzer when he was governor and furthered by Mr. Paterson and Mr. Weiss. \u201cI think all systems have room for improvement,\u201d Mr. Beloten said in a telephone interview. \u201cI think we\u2019ve made substantial strides.\u201d He said his priority would be to shorten the amount of time it took for claimants to receive benefits. \u201cThis is an opportunity where you can really touch people and their lives,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can help people rise again after they\u2019ve been injured. You can help increase their self-esteem. You deal with the two most important issues that affect these people: medical care and replacement wages when they\u2019re disabled.\u201d Mr. Beloten will assume the chairmanship on July 15, state officials said. Since Mr. Beloten is already on the compensation board, his appointment does not require Senate confirmation. During the four years between his stints as a compensation judge, Mr. Beloten worked for Keating & Klein, a law firm on Long Island that specializes in health care law. From 1985 to 1988, he was an assistant counsel for the New York State Racing and Wagering Board. He has lectured extensively on workers\u2019 compensation and medical law. Three months ago, The New York Times published a series that detailed the shortcomings of the state\u2019s compensation system. The series found that cases dragged on needlessly for months or years, that doctors\u2019 opinions were frequently skewed and that businesses often retaliated against employees who filed claims. Even though the system was conceived as a no-fault process, it has produced workplaces plagued by mistrust. \u201cIt\u2019s an area where you can try to make people as whole as possible, to try to put them in the same position they had before they were injured,\u201d Mr. Beloten said.", "keyword": "Workers' Compensation Board (NYS);Appointments and Executive Changes;Beloten Robert E;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0084211", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/10/06", "title": "Texas: Recommendation Made on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl Who Left Post", "abstract": "An Army officer\u2019s recommendation on whether Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl should face a court-martial for leaving his post in Afghanistan six years ago will remain secret for now. Lt. Col. Mark Visger presided over last month\u2019s Article 32 hearing in Texas that reviewed evidence against Sergeant Bergdahl. Colonel Visger submitted a report with his recommendation on Monday, but the Army has not said what he recommended. Sergeant Bergdahl is charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. Gen. Robert Abrams, the commanding general of the Army Forces Command, will ultimately decide whether the case should be referred to a court-martial. Sergeant Bergdahl\u2019s lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, says Colonel Visger\u2019s report should be made public. An Army Forces Command spokesman declined to comment on the report. No timeline has been given for a decision from General Abrams.", "keyword": "Bowe Bergdahl;Desertion;Court-martial;Afghanistan War;US Military"}
{"id": "ny0267214", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/03/08", "title": "Dow-DuPont Deal Seems Impermeable to a Bid by BASF", "abstract": "DuPont\u2019s planned union with Dow Chemical, both American companies, looks like a tough nut for interlopers to crack. The German chemical giant BASF is considering a counterbid for DuPont, its rival, according to Bloomberg . But tax benefits alone make the American conglomerates\u2019 merger and expected breakup pretty close to ironclad. Dow and DuPont agreed in December to a multipart transaction in which they would combine, cut costs and then split into three listed companies. The companies\u2019 nearly equal market values and overlapping shareholders allowed them to structure the deal in a way that should avoid taxes on capital gains \u2014 a feat that BASF could struggle to match. The tax savings were not quantified but might far exceed the American companies\u2019 target of $3 billion of annual cost savings, according to Reuters sources. Derailing the merger would probably require BASF to offer a significant premium for DuPont \u2014 after covering the $1.9 billion breakup fee and any tax savings the Dow deal would have produced. The German conglomerate could struggle to pull all that off without destroying value for its own shareholders. BASF\u2019s strength in pesticides and other kinds of crop protection would complement DuPont\u2019s valuable seeds business. The companies\u2019 otherwise-limited overlap, however, suggests the synergies from any deal between them would fall short of what a Dow-DuPont transaction could produce, according to Bernstein analysts. The potential synergies of a BASF merger with DuPont would be up to $1.1 billion a year, the analysts estimate, while a Dow-DuPont union would, conservatively, produce $1.7 billion. Tax the BASF deal on a blend of the companies\u2019 tax rates, apply a multiple of 10 and subtract $1.9 billion for the breakup fee, and the German company might struggle to justify paying 11 percent above DuPont\u2019s market value before the Dow deal was announced. If BASF is looking for a transaction that stacks up on the raw numbers, it\u2019s unlikely to get there. The better option could be to wait until after Dow and DuPont merge and then bid for the agricultural chemicals business they plan to spin off. There might be complications, though. The spinoff could lose its tax-free status if the Internal Revenue Service concluded that a deal with BASF was discussed in advance. Closing the transaction at hand, rather than taking that risk, still seems the safest bet.", "keyword": "BASF;DuPont;Dow Chemical;Mergers and Acquisitions;Corporate tax"}
{"id": "ny0109931", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2012/05/01", "title": "New Studies of Permian Extinction Shed Light on the \u2018Great Dying\u2019", "abstract": "It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction \u2014 252 million years ago \u2014 was by far the most catastrophic of the planet\u2019s five known paroxysms of species loss. No wonder it is called the Great Dying: Scientists calculate that about 95 percent of marine species, and an uncountable but probably comparable percentage of land species, went extinct in a geological heartbeat. The cause or causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery. Among the hypotheses are a devastating asteroid strike, as in the Cretaceous extinction; a catastrophic volcanic eruption; and a welling-up of oxygen-depleted water from the depths of the oceans. Now, painstaking analyses of fossils from the period point to a different way to think about the problem. And at the same time, they are providing startling new clues to the behavior of modern marine life and its future. In two recent papers, scientists from Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz, adopted a cellular approach to what they called the \u201ckilling mechanism\u201d: not what might have happened to the entire planet, but what happened within the cells of the animals to finish them off. Their study of nearly 50,000 marine invertebrate fossils in 8,900 collections from the Permian period has allowed them to peer into the inner workings of the ancient creatures, giving them the ability to describe precisely how some died while others lived. \u201cBefore, scientists were all over the map,\u201d said one of the authors, Matthew E. Clapham, an earth scientist at Santa Cruz. \u201cWe thought maybe lots of things were going on.\u201d Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear. Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate. Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others. That led to a wholesale change in the ocean\u2019s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said. Among the hardest hit were corals; many types, including the horn-shaped bottom-dwellers known as rugose corals, disappeared altogether. Sea sponges were also devastated, along with the shelled creatures that commanded the Permian reefs and sea. Every single species of the once common trilobites, with their helmetlike front shells, vanished for good. No major group of marine invertebrates or protists, a group of mainly one-celled microorganisms, went unscathed. Instead, gastropods like snails and bivalves like clams and scallops became the dominant creatures after the Permian. And that shift led directly to the assemblage of life in today\u2019s oceans. \u201cModern marine ecology is shaped by the extinction spasms of the past,\u201d Dr. Clapham said. So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a \u201cperturbation of the global carbon cycle,\u201d the scientists\u2019 second paper concluded \u2014 a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean. But neither an asteroid strike nor an upwelling of oxygen-deprived deep-ocean water would explain the selective pattern of death. Instead, the scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years \u2014 the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water. The surprise to Dr. Clapham was how closely the findings from the Great Dying matched today\u2019s trends in ocean chemistry. High concentrations of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere are leading to warming, rapid acidification and low-oxygen dead zones in the oceans. The idea that changes in ocean chemistry, particularly acidification, could be a factor in a mass extinction is a relatively new idea, said Andrew H. Knoll, a Harvard geologist who wrote a seminal paper in 1996 exploring the consequences of a rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the physiology of organisms. \u201cIn terms of the overall pattern of change, what we\u2019re seeing now and what is predicted in the next two centuries is riding a parallel track to what we think happened in the past,\u201d he said. Dr. Clapham noted that Permian and modern similarities are not exact. The Permian ocean was easier to acidify than today\u2019s ocean because it had less deep-water calcium carbonate, which offsets the acid. But he said that corals are the most vulnerable creatures in the modern ocean for the same reason they were during the Permian extinction. They have little ability to govern their internal chemistry and they rely on calcium carbonate to build their reefs. Chris Langdon, a University of Miami biologist who is a pioneer in ocean acidification research, said corals are undoubtedly in danger across the globe. \u201cCorals, I think, are going to take it on the chin,\u201d he said. In a recent study , Dr. Langdon examined the effects of naturally high acidification on coral reefs in Papua New Guinea. They showed drastic declines in coral cover at acidity levels likely to be present in the ocean by the end of this century, especially among branching corals that shelter fish. Hans P\u00f6rtner, an animal ecophysiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, said his work showed that a warmer ocean with less dissolved oxygen and greater acidity had an array of negative physiological effects on modern marine animals. The Permian extinction provides an archive of effects suggesting how modern marine creatures will fare as the carbon load in the atmosphere increases, he said. Like Dr. Clapham, he cautioned that the trends between the two periods were not exactly comparable. Back in the Permian, the planet had a single supercontinent, Pangea, and ocean currents were different. And he and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, \u201cToday, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.\u201d", "keyword": "Paleontology;Fish and Other Marine Life;Oceans and Seas;Coral;Greenhouse Gas Emissions;Global Warming;Endangered and Extinct Species"}
{"id": "ny0004571", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/04/21", "title": "Old Carriages on Display in Renovated Galleries at Long Island Museum", "abstract": "STONY BROOK, N.Y. \u2014 A fire seems to be blazing inside a wooden row house. Flames crackle and alarmed voices cry out as visitors enter a newly refurbished gallery on the lower level of the carriage museum, part of the Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages in Stony Brook. It is one of two renovated spaces that complete a decade-long refurbishment, in stages, of the entire carriage museum. The galleries, housing vehicles that were mostly elsewhere in the museum or in storage, will be unveiled beginning Thursday. As visitors approach the house, a motion sensor sets off sound and lighting effects and what appear to be rippling flames, which are actually fabric strips blown by a hidden fan behind shattered windows, said Joshua Ruff, curator of the carriage and history collections. They create a dramatic backdrop for a display of three 19th-century firefighting vehicles. Image The Tally-Ho. Credit Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times \u201cYou want to try to have an exciting entry, to kind of wake people up, pull them into the gallery and immerse them into a different world,\u201d Mr. Ruff said. The gallery, which shows off 23 other vehicles in other settings, is called The Streets of New York. The adjacent gallery, called Driving for Sport and Pleasure, holds 20 more vehicles, including sleighs, a stagecoach and a recently acquired 19th-century English carriage named the Tally-Ho that launched a driving craze among wealthy Americans. Before visitors reach the Tally-Ho, in a room formerly used for storage, they pass the fire scene. \u201cThis is our showstopper,\u201d said Sam Morse, who designed and installed the exhibitions with his Brooklyn company, Southside Design and Building , which makes museum shows. \u201cWe wanted that theatrical punch.\u201d Each sequence of sound, light and movement lasts two minutes, he said, and changes slightly over time so that people lingering in the gallery won\u2019t see and hear the same things over and over. (There are also short breaks.) Image A phaeton. Credit Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times The firefighting equipment looks quaint by today\u2019s standards: an 1870 hose cart that was used by the Patchogue fire department until 1904 and was pulled by firemen, not horses, as an accompanying photograph shows; an 1807 gooseneck pumper, which could emit a pressurized stream of water and was used in Manhattan and Queens; and a more advanced 1874 steam pumper, which, weighing 9,000 pounds and standing 10 feet tall, proved too big for the narrow streets of New Orleans and was sent back to be used in New Hampshire, where it had been made. Beyond the fire scene, visitors enter a Manhattan streetscape of the late 1800s and early 1900s lined with replicas of old-fashioned lampposts and a variety of original vehicles, from a 1900 Standard Oil delivery wagon to a 1907 popcorn wagon that, according to signs painted on its sides, sold freshly popped corn and roasted peanuts at 5 cents a serving. Popcorn, an explanatory panel notes, was a brand-new snack food when it was introduced at the World\u2019s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Behind the stream of wagons, buggies and carts are large blowups, stretching from the floor nearly to the ceiling, of period photographs showing the streets of New York during those turn-of-the-century years. At several audio stations, visitors can punch a button to hear recorded descriptions of the era, like a reminiscence drawn from the memoir of a \u201ccartman,\u201d who made pickups and deliveries. Image An 1870 hose wagon. Credit Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times That one is near a hand-pulled cart used by a painter to carry his supplies, which is parked in front of a large photograph showing a similar cart piled with produce, and other vendors peddling their wares, on a crowded street in Lower Manhattan. The refurbishing of all eight carriage galleries, Mr. Ruff said, was meant to provide \u201ca new, fresh and innovative stage for people to appreciate the collection, to bring in social history and compelling people stories, and to put the vehicles into a context, a setting, so that people can see them as a link to that era of transportation that served America before the automobile.\u201d One elegant small carriage that appears in the street scene is a coup\u00e9 made about 1860. As one of the exhibition\u2019s informative panels explains, it was used in the funeral procession for President Abraham Lincoln in New York on April 25, 1865, which was attended by more than 75,000 mourners. Image A 1900 oil wagon. Credit Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times It stands near what is called a gypsy wagon from around 1870, decorated with landscapes, seascapes and other paintings. A panel says it belonged to Phoebe Stanley, sometimes referred to as Gypsy Queen Phoebe, from West Natick, Mass. Vehicles used for public transportation, including a hansom cab from around 1895 and an omnibus from around 1890, are grouped in the middle of the gallery. In the Driving for Sport and Pleasure gallery, the vehicle in the center of the room is the yellow and black Tally-Ho, America\u2019s first sporting coach, made in London in 1875 and brought to the United States by Col. DeLancey Astor Kane. It sparked a new pastime, popular among the wealthy, called road coaching. Image A gypsy wagon. Credit Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times Across the aisle is the 1867 Crawford House coach, a large stagecoach that brought well-to-do summer visitors from a train station to the Crawford House, a resort in New Hampshire\u2019s White Mountains. A period photograph shows about 20 passengers perched precariously in and atop the coach, which had an early shock absorber system that allowed it to sway with the terrain. A vehicle made on Long Island, the East Williston cart, designed and patented by Henry Willis, a farmer, carriage maker and inventor, stands nearby. It had a spring and shafts that reduced road shock and made for a smoother ride, according to the information panel. Willis manufactured about 1,000 of them, but the Valentine Company in Hempstead made this one around 1895. Next to it is a phaeton made in Albany around 1780 and first owned by the Revolutionary War hero Peter Gansevoort. Herman Melville , who was Gansevoort\u2019s grandson, described the phaeton in his 1852 novel \u201cPierre.\u201d Seeing a real carriage is increasingly rare, Mr. Ruff said. Young people, including students who visit the museum for educational programs, \u201cmay be encountering a carriage for the very first time,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are more of those as we move forward in time,\u201d he said, \u201cmany people who have encountered a carriage only in a movie and have no idea that this physical artifact still exists and is important to treasure.\u201d", "keyword": "Museum;Stony Brook NY;Long Island Museum of American Art; History and Carriages;Cars;NYC;Carriage"}
{"id": "ny0072000", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/03/31", "title": "Ehud Olmert, Israeli Ex-Premier, Is Convicted of Fraud", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who was forced from office under a cloud of corruption, was convicted on Monday of fraud and breach of trust in a retrial of a case involving an American businessman, whose sensational testimony in a Jerusalem court in 2008 was instrumental in Mr. Olmert\u2019s downfall. This was Mr. Olmert\u2019s third conviction on corruption charges since 2012, and he is already facing jail time. The American businessman, Morris Talansky , said at the time of his testimony that he had provided Mr. Olmert with about $150,000 over 13 years, mostly in cash stuffed into envelopes, an assertion Mr. Olmert vehemently denied. Mr. Talansky, known as Moshe, had said that much of the money was earmarked for election campaigns but that some was for Mr. Olmert\u2019s personal expenses. The prosecution said then that the money had been funneled to Mr. Olmert from 1992, when he first ran for mayor of Jerusalem, to late 2005, when he was minister of industry and trade. He became prime minister in early 2006, and his three-year tenure of that office was dogged by police investigations. Court documents subsequently said that Mr. Talansky had transferred a total of about $600,000 to Mr. Olmert, including a small amount in donations from Mr. Talansky\u2019s relatives. \u201cThe battle against corruption is long and stubborn,\u201d a lawyer for the prosecution, Uri Korb, told reporters outside the courtroom after the verdict on Monday. \u201cIt takes a long time, but, at long last, justice prevails.\u201d He added, \u201cSeven years after Moshe Talansky\u2019s testimony, the court determined that Olmert certainly got envelopes of money and that his behavior was breach of trust and damaged public trust and is true corruption.\u201d Eyal Rosovsky, a lawyer for Mr. Olmert, said the defense team was \u201cvery disappointed\u201d with the ruling and would decide whether to appeal after studying the verdict. Mr. Olmert left the court building without making any statement. He is due to be sentenced in May. The court said that the maximum prison term for fraud under aggravating circumstances, which Mr. Olmert was found guilty of, is five years. Monday\u2019s conviction in the Jerusalem District Court came a year after Mr. Olmert was convicted of taking bribes in another case involving the construction of a huge housing complex in Jerusalem. A judge sentenced Mr. Olmert to six years in prison in that case, dashing any hopes the former prime minister might have had of a political comeback. The start of that sentence has been postponed pending an appeal. Mr. Olmert was acquitted in July 2012 of corruption charges in the Talansky case and in another case involving travel expenses. At the time, a panel of three judges ruled unanimously that the evidence did not prove beyond doubt that Mr. Olmert had acted with criminal intent in the Talansky case. They said that Mr. Talansky was a problematic witness whose testimony proved correct in part while also containing statements that were \u201cincorrect and even false.\u201d Mr. Olmert was convicted of breach of trust in a separate matter in 2012, but it was the least serious of the charges he faced at the time, and he was not sentenced to prison. The retrial in the Talansky case came after Shula Zaken, Mr. Olmert\u2019s longtime aide and confidante, became a state witness and testified against him, providing the police with her diaries and tapes she had made of apparently incriminating conversations she had had with Mr. Olmert. According to the latest court documents, Mr. Talansky provided $153,950 from 2003 to 2005 for a fund run by another Olmert aide while Mr. Olmert was serving as minister of industry and trade. Twice during that period, money from the fund was used to supplement Ms. Zaken\u2019s salary. \u201cTalansky and others gave Olmert money for years as a political contribution,\u201d the court documents said, adding, \u201cOlmert made private and even forbidden use of it\u201d by giving Ms. Zaken, his office manager and a public servant, \u201ctens of thousands of dollars.\u201d Mr. Olmert came to a verbal agreement with Ms. Zaken under which she would receive money annually from the fund in return for continuing to work for Mr. Olmert. Eli Zohar, a high-profile lawyer who represented Mr. Olmert in this case and previous ones, told reporters outside the courtroom on Monday that Ms. Zaken\u2019s tape recordings were \u201cselective\u201d and that many parts of the conversations were missing. When Mr. Talansky testified against Mr. Olmert in 2008, he said, among other things, that the money he gave Mr. Olmert included at least $25,000 meant for a vacation in Italy and almost $5,000 to cover Mr. Olmert\u2019s bill at a Washington hotel because Mr. Olmert\u2019s own credit card was \u201cmaxed out.\u201d Mr. Talansky added that some of the money was intended as a loan but was never repaid.", "keyword": "Ehud Olmert;Bribery and Kickbacks;Israel;Fraud;Morris Talansky;Judiciary;Politics;Corruption"}
{"id": "ny0008206", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/05/06", "title": "Eleanor R. Adair, Microwave Safety Researcher, Dies at 86", "abstract": "Eleanor R. Adair, a scientist who spent decades exposing monkeys and eventually people (including herself) to microwave radiation to determine whether it posed serious health risks \u2014 she concluded, emphatically and somewhat controversially, that it did not \u2014 died on April 20 in Hamden, Conn. She was 86. The cause was complications of a stroke, her daughter, Margaret Adair Quinn, said. In the early 1970s, Dr. Adair, who had done her doctoral work in sensory psychology, was pursuing an interesting but not necessarily provocative topic: how people and animals react physiologically to external heat sources. Yet over the next three decades \u2014 after her research led her to study heat generated through microwave radiation, which is used in microwave ovens and emitted at low levels by things like cellphones and electrical transmission lines \u2014 Dr. Adair became an increasingly prominent and firm voice of assurance that microwave radiation posed no health risk. \u201cAll the emphasis that we need more research on power line fields, cellphones, police radar \u2014 this involves billions of dollars that could be much better spent on other health problems,\u201d Dr. Adair said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. \u201cBecause there is really nothing there.\u201d For some people close to the issue, those were fighting words. Even as numerous studies have found that microwave ovens are safe and many scientists say there is no evidence that cellphones cause cancer or other health problems, the rising use of cellphones, wireless Internet signals and some medical and military devices has continued to raise questions about their risk. Last year, a panel of the World Health Organization listed microwave radiation as \u201cpossibly carcinogenic.\u201d In March, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would review its standards for cellphone use for the first time since 1996. Some scientists do not use the term microwave radiation because they are concerned it is misleading and scares people unnecessarily. Microwave radiation is far weaker than the radiation in X-rays or gamma rays. Advocates for more research count Dr. Adair in to a camp that focuses too much on heat or thermal effects from microwaves and is too quick to dismiss other ways microwaves might affect health. \u201cThere\u2019s something going on, and the question is what that is and whether it\u2019s dangerous,\u201d said Louis Slesin, the editor of Microwave News , a Web site that is often skeptical of the role industry and the military play in influencing health standards related to the issue. \u201cDon\u2019t let anyone tell you they know the answer to that question.\u201d Although Dr. Adair said she did not receive money from cellphone makers or industries whose products released microwave radiation, she served for five years late in her career as a senior scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory in San Antonio. The Air Force uses radar that emits microwaves. Dr. Adair was indisputably an innovator in studying microwave radiation, work she began in the mid-1970s while a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven. First with squirrel monkeys and then with human volunteers, she placed subjects in a chamber into which she released relatively high levels of microwaves for about 45 minutes, followed by a cool-down period. She focused on what impact the heat generated by microwaves might have \u2014 and she said she never found much more than perspiration. She said the monkeys and the people mostly enjoyed the experience. \u201cParticularly if the environment is cool, they love it when the field comes on,\u201d she told The Times. She said: \u201cIt is very easy to sense it and it feels good. If they are in a warm environment, and the field is strong they may start to sweat and they may feel quite uncomfortable. They always have an option of getting out of the chamber at any time, saying, \u2018I\u2019ve had enough.\u2019 \u201d Richard A. Tell, who consults for cellular companies and other industries and who served with Dr. Adair on a committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that helps set standards for permissible microwave levels, said she \u201cdid the first and only studies that have ever been done so far in which humans were studied under controlled conditions.\u201d Eleanor Campbell Reed was born on Nov. 28, 1926, in Arlington, Mass. Her father owned a Dodge dealership near Boston and her mother worked as a fashion illustrator before she married. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1955. In 1952 she married Robert K. Adair, who would later become a prominent physicist at Yale. Mr. Adair became involved in his wife\u2019s work in her later years and sometimes appeared with her at conferences. Besides her daughter, survivors include her husband; her son, Douglas; two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. \u201cShe would always be the first human subject in all of her experiments,\u201d including those involving exposure to microwaves, her daughter said. \u201cShe said it was absolutely the most comfortable heat that she ever experienced. She described it once as like having the sun come out \u2014 you just suddenly feel all warm and cozy. You\u2019re warm on the inside, not overly hot on the outside.\u201d", "keyword": "Microwaves;Radiation;Obituary"}
{"id": "ny0294699", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/06/22", "title": "Donald Trump Asks for Evangelicals\u2019 Support and Questions Hillary Clinton\u2019s Faith", "abstract": "Donald J. Trump met privately with evangelicals on Tuesday in New York, asking for their support and questioning Hillary Clinton\u2019s faith. Before meeting with a larger group, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, spoke to a small number of evangelical leaders from around the country, and, according to video posted to Twitter by a minister in attendance, Mr. Trump said that \u201cwe don\u2019t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion. Now, she\u2019s been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there\u2019s no \u2014 there\u2019s nothing out there.\u201d In response to Mr. Trump\u2019s comment, the Clinton campaign released a statement from Deborah Fikes, who had been an executive adviser to the World Evangelical Alliance. \u201cMr. Trump\u2019s proposals are not just un-Christian \u2014 they\u2019re un-American and at odds with the values our country holds dearest,\u201d her statement read. Ms. Fikes also stated that Mrs. Clinton, whom she said was known as Sister Hillary by organizations she worked with, \u201cis embraced by many evangelical sister churches as a trustworthy and respected political leader because she lives the Golden Rule in her private life and in her public policies.\u201d In response to whether Mr. Trump was questioning Mrs. Clinton\u2019s faith, Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump\u2019s spokeswoman, said there was \u201cno intention\u201d of doing so. Instead, Ms. Hicks said, Mr. Trump \u201cshould be praised\u201d for responding to a question about Mrs. Clinton\u2019s faith by saying that he was not aware of Mrs. Clinton\u2019s ties to religion. Mrs. Clinton, a Methodist, has rarely talked about her faith on the campaign trail, but at a rally in January in Iowa, she offered a lengthy reply to a question about her Christianity. \u201cMy study of the Bible, my many conversations with people of faith, has led me to believe the most important commandment is to love the Lord with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that is what I think we are commanded by Christ to do,\u201d she said. Her support of Planned Parenthood and of abortion rights, however, clashes with the views of many socially conservative Christians. It was on these issues that many of the evangelicals sought assurances from Mr. Trump, telling him that they wanted to see him choose a socially conservative running mate with a good relationship to the Christian community, eight members of the group said at a news conference after the meeting. Mr. Trump has seemed to struggle at times in his attempts to court the evangelical vote. In November, Mr. Trump scheduled a news conference saying that a large group of black pastors would endorse him, but the group replied that although they were willing to listen to him, they were not ready to endorse. Mr. Trump canceled the news conference for a private meeting instead, then called an impromptu news conference after the meeting, where none of the pastors offered a formal endorsement. On Tuesday, one attendee, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said she was impressed by three commitments Mr. Trump said he would make if he were elected president. She said he promised to defund Planned Parenthood, to pass H.R. 36, or the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, and to appoint a \u201cpro-life Supreme Court justice.\u201d Attendees were quick to acknowledge that Mr. Trump had not completely bridged a gap with social conservatives and evangelicals. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said that conservatives \u201cdon\u2019t completely understand him because he comes a little bit from a different world, but they identify with him.\u201d Mark Gonzales, a pastor and founder of the Hispanic Action Network, said Mr. Trump also might find it difficult to reach out to Hispanics. Mr. Gonzales said he had discussed immigration with Mr. Trump, but concluded that the \u201cconversation will continue.\u201d \u201cThe verdict is still out as he continues to try to create that narrative that we hope will be more welcoming, and won\u2019t be as harsh,\u201d Mr. Gonzales said. During the news conference, a reporter asked which of the eight attendees were ready to endorse Mr. Trump. None raised a hand.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Evangelical;Donald Trump;Hillary Clinton"}
{"id": "ny0127629", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2012/01/24", "title": "Paterno\u2019s Testimony No Longer Admissible", "abstract": "STATE COLLEGE, Pa. \u2014 The death of Joe Paterno on Sunday will partly weaken the state\u2019s prosecution of two former university officials who have been charged in connection with the child sexual abuse case involving Jerry Sandusky. Paterno was expected to testify at the trials of Tim Curley, the former Penn State athletic director, and Gary Schultz, the university\u2019s former senior vice president for finance and business. However, it is unclear how much of an effect the lack of that testimony will have on the state\u2019s case against Curley and Schultz. Paterno testified before a grand jury in January that he met with Curley and Schultz about Sandusky. Paterno told Curley and Schultz that Mike McQueary, a former graduate assistant, reported to him that he had witnessed a sexual assault involving Sandusky and a boy, known as Victim 2, in the shower of Penn State\u2019s athletic facility in 2002. In a separate meeting, McQueary testified, he told Curley and Schultz about the graphic sexual nature of what he had witnessed. Curley and Schultz were charged for failing to report to the authorities what they knew about the incident. Curley is on administrative leave; Schultz has retired. \u201cNow that Paterno is deceased, this charge will have to stand only on the report by McQueary,\u201d said Geoff Moulton, a former federal prosecutor and an associate professor at Widener School of Law. \u201cWith respect to Victim 2 and the charges against Curley and Schultz, McQueary\u2019s testimony, which has always been critical, is even more so.\u201d Paterno\u2019s grand jury testimony is inadmissible, according to several lawyers, because he was not cross-examined in that proceeding. The Sixth Amendment\u2019s confrontation clause guarantees criminal defendants the right to confront the witnesses against them. Wick Sollers, who was Paterno\u2019s lawyer, said in an e-mail that Paterno\u2019s statements before the grand jury constituted his only under-oath testimony in the case. With Paterno\u2019s death, the lawyers for Curley and Schultz no longer have the opportunity to challenge his credibility. Curley and Schultz were also charged with lying to the grand jury, but it appears from the grand jury report that those charges stem only from their account that McQueary did not tell them that the incident was sexual in nature. That would mean Paterno\u2019s inability to take the stand is perhaps not as critical in prosecuting the perjury charges. But his absence could have some effect. \u201cWhy would he have told it to Paterno and not told them?\u201d said Howard Bruce Klein, a former federal prosecutor who is a criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia. \u201cMcQueary becomes more credible when you hear Paterno tell his version of it. On the perjury charge, I would say Paterno would be a corroborating witness.\u201d It is unknown whether the Pennsylvania attorney general has uncovered additional evidence that would bolster the case against Curley and Schultz. A spokesman for the attorney general\u2019s office said that there would be no comment about the case. Sandusky, a former Penn State defensive coordinator, has been charged with more than 50 counts of sexual abuse against boys. Paterno\u2019s failure to report to the authorities what he knew about the 2002 incident contributed to the Board of Trustees\u2019 decision to fire him Nov. 9, in his 46th season as the coach. He was not charged in the case. There will be public viewings of Paterno, who died of lung cancer, on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, to which he and his wife made a significant financial contribution in 1998. He will be buried Wednesday, and there will be a public memorial service Thursday at Penn State\u2019s 16,000-seat Bryce Jordan Center.", "keyword": "Paterno Joe;Curley Tim;Schultz Gary;Sandusky Jerry;McQueary Mike;Pennsylvania State University;Child Abuse and Neglect;Sex Crimes;Football (College)"}
{"id": "ny0195988", "categories": ["business", "mutfund"], "date": "2009/10/11", "title": "For Emerging-Markets Investors, a Stronger Comeback", "abstract": "UNTIL recently, emerging-markets funds have looked a lot like commodity funds. When the prices for raw goods tumbled last fall, emerging-markets funds fell on a nearly identical trajectory. When commodity prices picked up this spring, these funds rose along with them. But in the third quarter, emerging-markets funds made a stronger comeback than either natural resources funds, which own stocks, or commodity funds, which use futures contracts to bet on rising commodity prices. Many developing economies like Brazil are based on commodity exports, and rapidly growing countries like China and India are stoking the global demand for steel, coal and soybeans. Investment strategists point out, though, that many emerging markets benefit whenever there is demand for their manufactured products \u2014 while commodity investors make money only when the prices for raw materials rise. \u201cEmerging-markets funds are closely aligned with commodities, but they do have some additional exposure, certainly to technology and manufacturing,\u201d said Jeff Tjornehoj, a senior research analyst at Lipper, the fund tracker. He said that there was a lot of overlap between these types of funds, though, and that some investors who owned both might have less portfolio diversification than they thought. To be sure, all three categories have regained ground since the global markets hit bottom in March. But only the emerging-markets fund category finished the third quarter higher than it had been a year earlier. An investor who put $1,000 into an emerging-markets fund on Sept. 30, 2008, would have had $1,167, on average, a year later, according to Lipper. But a $1,000 investment in a typical commodities fund a year ago would have been worth around $900 at the end of September. And a similar investment in a natural resources stock fund would have been worth $828. Edward E. Yardeni, an independent investment strategist, said that China had kick-started the global economic recovery when it created a huge public works program last fall, and that he thought developing countries would continue to lead the way. \u201cThat\u2019s very positive for commodities,\u201d he added, \u201cbecause these emerging economies spend a great deal on roads and bridges and airports, and their consumers are spending more on homes and cars.\u201d Mr. Yardeni said that with commodity prices already driven up, he would rather own emerging-markets stocks at this point. Most commodity prices, he said, accurately reflect current supply and demand \u2014 except for oil, which he said was more expensive than it should be because of concerns about geopolitical risks. He added that current prices would allow both commodity exporters like Brazil and importers like China to prosper. But Mr. Yardeni did not object to the idea of an individual investor owning both a commodity fund and an emerging-markets fund in the same portfolio, \u201cas long as you know that you\u2019re doubling down on the same fundamental trade.\u201d Gonzalo Pangaro, the manager of the T. Rowe Price Emerging Markets Stock fund, predicted that the gap between the growth rates of the developed world and the developing world would widen over the next decade. \u201cI think it will take the developed world some time to deleverage,\u201d he said. Mr. Pangaro, who previously managed the T. Rowe Price Latin America fund, has put a strong emphasis on Latin America, which makes up 28 percent of the emerging-markets fund, and particularly on Brazil, at 18 percent of the portfolio. Petrobras, the Brazilian state-run oil company, at 6.2 percent of the portfolio, is the fund\u2019s largest holding. \u201cWe\u2019ve owned Petrobras for a very long time,\u201d Mr. Pangaro said, \u201cbut in the energy and materials sector, we generally focus on midcaps and small caps.\u201d The portfolio does not hedge the currencies of countries in which it invests. So investors will be exposed to fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, including those for the Brazilian real and the Mexican peso. The fund rose 21.7 percent in the third quarter and returned 12.5 percent in the 12 months through September. The Van Eck Emerging Markets fund also does not hedge for currency risk, and it tilts toward small and midsize companies rather than the large, formerly state-owned companies that dominate the stock markets in many developing countries. David Semple, the portfolio manager, said that small companies were more likely to benefit from rising consumption in their local markets, which should bolster demand for commodities, \u201cwhether it\u2019s steel for cars or crocodile skin for Gucci shoes.\u201d In the energy and basic materials sectors, this has led Mr. Semple to focus on some stocks that would not be on the radar screen of many natural resources funds, which tend to own larger energy companies. For example, the second-largest holding in the Van Eck fund, recently at 2.2 percent of the portfolio, is KazMunaiGas Exploration Production, which is majority owned by the government of Kazakhstan. \u201cIt has decent assets, and cash in the bank,\u201d Mr. Semple said. But he said the key attraction was its relationship with the government, which gives it preferential rights for oil and gas drilling in Kazakhstan, a central Asian country with vast energy reserves. Another large holding is the KNM Group, which is based in Malaysia and works on refinery projects for major oil and gas producers worldwide. Its shares trade only on the Malaysian stock exchange. Van Eck Emerging Markets rose 25.1 percent in third quarter and 23.45 percent during the last 12 months. THE similarities between emerging markets and commodities are also apparent in the world of exchange-traded funds , said Paul Justice, the E.T.F. strategist at Morningstar, the fund tracker. Among E.T.F.\u2019s owing emerging-markets stocks, Mr. Justice says, he likes the Vanguard Emerging Markets E.T.F. because of its diverse portfolio and low cost. It rose 21.2 percent in the third quarter and charges 0.2 percent in annual expenses. If investors already own one or two emerging-markets funds, he said, they might consider an E.T.F. focused on small-cap stocks, like WisdomTree Emerging Markets Small-Cap Dividend. It was up 22.9 percent in the quarter. But after six months of robust returns, Mr. Justice cautioned investors not to expect emerging markets to continue to grow by leaps and bounds. \u201cI\u2019m not saying that it\u2019s going to go negative,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m not predicting anything like the returns that it\u2019s had this year.\u201d", "keyword": "Futures and Options Trading;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Commodities;Stocks and Bonds;Third World and Developing Countries"}
{"id": "ny0137770", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/05/09", "title": "To Reduce Costs, Warner Brothers Closing 2 Film Divisions", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Warner Brothers announced Thursday that it would shut two troubled film divisions, a cost-cutting move rooted in the changing economics of the specialty film business. Picturehouse, known for art films like \u201cPan\u2019s Labyrinth,\u201d and Warner Independent Pictures, which distributed \u201cMarch of the Penguins,\u201d will cease operations in the coming weeks, Warner Brothers said. About 70 people will lose their jobs. What will happen to the projects in development at the two companies must still be decided, said Alan F. Horn, the studio\u2019s president. \u201cThis reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies,\u201d Warner said in a statement. Together, Picturehouse and Warner Independent released 12 films in 2007. Mr. Horn said that Warner would release \u201coverall fewer movies\u201d but declined to specify a goal. The two labels were intended to tap a growing market for cerebral, low-budget films \u2014 and to make Warner competitive at the Oscars. But the company was late to the game. By the time Warner Independent was founded in 2003, every other major studio had already established a specialty division. Warner Independent never found a niche and suffered from executive infighting. Meanwhile, a glut of movies in the marketplace \u2014 about 600 films were released in 2007, up from 450 in 2002 \u2014 has dented the profitability and reliability of specialty divisions. No longer can these units produce films on the cheap, apply a little marketing and watch the cash roll in. As competition has increased, advertising costs have soared. Recent flops by Warner Independent include \u201cIn the Valley of Elah,\u201d which took in a scant $6.7 million at the box office. Picturehouse managed to squeeze two Oscars out of \u201cLa Vie en Rose\u201d in February, but the picture sold only about $10 million in tickets in North America. In an interview, Mr. Horn said that Warner, part of Time Warner, remained committed to making specialty films, though he would not say how many. \u201cWe are not abandoning the independent marketplace,\u201d he said. The closures come after Time Warner\u2019s recent decision to fold its New Line studio into Warner Brothers, eliminating 500 jobs. Under this configuration, New Line will use the main studio\u2019s infrastructure to release about six films a year. Warner will release the last pictures from the two labels over the next six months. Picturehouse, created in 2005 after Time Warner acquired Newmarket Films, the company behind \u201cThe Passion of the Christ,\u201d is set to release a remake of \u201cThe Women\u201d in September. Warner Independent\u2019s releases include \u201cTowelhead,\u201d about a Lebanese teenager growing up in Texas.", "keyword": "Warner Brothers;Warner Independent Films;Layoffs and Job Reductions"}
{"id": "ny0178730", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2007/08/05", "title": "Maine Loses His Composure and the Mets Lose a Game in Chicago", "abstract": "CHICAGO, Aug. 4 \u2014 There were still six innings of baseball to be played Saturday when the Mets lost. Their afternoon unraveled in the time it took for John Maine to pound his glove against his hip, a visceral reaction to what would have been an inning-ending call at first base that instead went against his team. Maine faced five more batters. He did not retire any of them, and the Cubs rolled to a six-run third inning that fueled their 6-2 victory at Wrigley Field. When Maine was replaced by Aaron Sele, after Jacque Jones lined his 44th pitch of the inning for a run-scoring single, he walked slowly toward the dugout. He stared at the ground, cap pulled low on his head, as if he knew he had done something wrong. On a certain level, Maine could tolerate six runs, four hits, three walks and a hit batsman. But he could not handle what he viewed as lapses in concentration: after the close call at first, and during the previous at-bat, when Alfonso Soriano hit a comebacker that Maine did not field cleanly, costing him a chance for a double play. \u201cI hurt myself,\u201d Maine said. For all of Maine\u2019s numerous accomplishments \u2014 a team-leading 12 victories and a 2.92 earned run average entering Saturday, for starters \u2014 every once in a while he supplies a reminder that he is pitching in only his second full major league season. He has, for the most part, maintained his focus throughout his starts, a problem that plagued him last season. Manager Willie Randolph said, \u201cWhen you do it for a while and then get away from it, you have to get back to it.\u201d Maine\u2019s counterpart on the mound, the left-hander Ted Lilly, stymied the Mets over seven and two-thirds innings, allowing two runs and seven hits and striking out eight before leaving to a standing ovation. Lilly had spent all but his rookie season in the American League, and the Mets\u2019 starting lineup had a combined 24 at-bats against him. Moises Alou made the only lasting impression on Lilly, slamming two bases-empty home runs to double his season output. Even with Sele, Jorge Sosa and Scott Schoeneweis combining to hold the Cubs scoreless the rest of the game, the Mets could not bail out Maine. Shortly after the game, Maine sat engrossed in a conversation with the pitching coach Rick Peterson. When that ended, Maine stood in front of his locker, arms folded across his chest, and did not much care to re-create how the miserable third inning unfolded. \u201cI couldn\u2019t find it,\u201d Maine said. \u201cI kept trying to find it, but it wasn\u2019t there.\u201d The first two Cubs reached base in the third, but Maine recovered to retire the next two hitters. Up came the No. 2 hitter, Ryan Theriot, who tapped a slow grounder toward Jos\u00e9 Reyes. The league\u2019s other shortstops surely would have gotten to the ball, but Reyes is among a few with an arm strong enough to make a play on Theriot. The first-base umpire, Marty Foster, called Theriot safe, although slow-motion television replays appeared to show that Reyes\u2019s throw arrived a half-step ahead. \u201cThe boys in here were saying we had him, but at the moment I couldn\u2019t tell,\u201d first baseman Carlos Delgado said. Standing on the edge of the mound, Maine recoiled when the call was made, but it was only one run, and he had two outs. But Maine walked Derrek Lee on four pitches to load the bases. He walked Aramis Ram\u00edrez to force in a run. He hit Cliff Floyd on the right knee to force in another. Singles by Mark DeRosa and Jones doubled the Cubs\u2019 lead to 6-0 and knocked out Maine after his shortest start of 37 as a Met. \u201cThat was the first time all year in a key situation with runners on when I couldn\u2019t help myself and get out of it,\u201d Maine said. \u201cI know that tomorrow I\u2019m going to wake up and think about it.\u201d INSIDE PITCH The longer Paul Lo Duca sits, the more he wonders why. But Lo Duca, who missed his sixth consecutive game Saturday while recovering from a right hamstring injury, does not make the decision. The man who does, Willie Randolph, said Lo Duca would be re-evaluated in New York on Tuesday; thus he will miss another chance to catch Tom Glavine\u2019s potential 300th victory Sunday night. \u201cI appreciate him wanting to play,\u201d Randolph said. \u201cBut I\u2019m the manager. I have to be smart enough not to react to the will of the player.\u201d... Damion Easley said his head still hurt a few hours after he fell backward against the brick wall in right field to catch a fly ball hit by Aramis Ram\u00edrez in the second inning. ... Randolph scrawled the initials \u201cB.R.\u201d on the left side of his cap to honor Bill Robinson, the hitting coach of the 1986 Mets and a mentor of Randolph\u2019s, who was buried Saturday morning in Washington Township, N.J.", "keyword": "New York Mets;Chicago Cubs;Maine John;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0067977", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/12/16", "title": "A Desert War on ISIS, Fought From a Floating City", "abstract": "ABOARD THE U.S.S. CARL VINSON, in the Persian Gulf \u2014 More than a dozen Navy F/A-18 warplanes roar off this aircraft carrier every day to attack Islamic State targets in support of Iraqi troops battling to regain ground lost to the militants in June. These Navy pilots face an array of lethal risks during their six-hour round-trip missions. Surface-to-air missiles and other enemy fire lurk below, as the downing of an Iraqi military helicopter late Friday underscored. About 60 percent of the aircrews are still learning the ropes on their first combat tours. The United States-led coalition improvises how the Iraqis call in airstrikes: Iraqi troops talk by radio to American controllers at Iraqi command centers, who in turn talk to the Navy pilots to help pinpoint what to hit. Senior commanders have said that placing American spotters with the Iraqi troops would be more effective, but they have yet to recommend that step knowing that President Obama opposes it. In the initial weeks of an air campaign that started in August, Iraq\u2019s troops were tentative. Fighters from the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, quickly learned not to move in large numbers to avoid being struck. Three out of every four missions still return with their bombs for lack of approved targets. But in recent days, the Iraqis have been advancing, forcing ISIS to fight more in the open. The airstrikes are severing the militants\u2019 supply lines, killing some top leaders and crimping their ability to pump and ship the oil that they control. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t going so well there for a while, but the momentum seems to have reversed,\u201d said Cmdr. Eric Doyle, a 41-year-old F/A-18 Hornet pilot from Houston who also flew combat missions in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About one quarter of the 1,200 total airstrikes in Iraq and Syria so far have been flown off a carrier \u2014 the other missions began from bases around the gulf \u2014 an enduring symbol of American power in the Middle East. After ISIS fighters rolled south into Mosul six months ago and threatened Baghdad, the Pentagon rushed the carrier George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf from the coast of Pakistan, where it was flying missions in support of American troops in Afghanistan. Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. Within two days, the carrier was sending surveillance and reconnaissance flights over Iraq and Syria. It was weeks before the United States ironed out arrangements with regional allies to allow land-based planes to carry out strikes. The Vinson relieved the Bush in mid-October, and will stay until next spring. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to ask anybody for permission to use a carrier,\u201d said Vice Adm. John W. Miller, commander of the Navy\u2019s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. \u201cIt\u2019s five acres of sovereign U.S. territory.\u201d This ship has an unusual place in the annals of the campaign against terrorism. Some of the first airstrikes of the Afghan war in October 2001 were by jets from the Vinson; nearly a decade later, it was here that Navy SEALs brought Osama bin Laden\u2019s body after the raid in Pakistan, and buried it at sea after religious rites on the lower hangar deck. The flight deck is the bustling hub of this nuclear-powered behemoth, which is home to 5,200 sailors and officers for nearly 10 months at a time. Sailors in light helmets and goggles, mostly in their early 20s, scurry about in vests and long-sleeve shirts color-coded to their jobs \u2014 red shirts handle bombs, purple shirts handle fuel, yellow shirts handle the flights. Racks of bombs and missiles rise from elevators below deck amid the din. MH-60 Seahawk search-and-rescue helicopters buzz overhead on their way out to sea. It is like a crowded suburban parking lot, except these are $57 million jets taxiing for takeoff with 500-pound laser-guided bombs tucked under their wings. The slightest misstep around these high-performance jets and turboprop planes could be fatal. \u201cBeware of Jet Blast, Propellers and Rotors\u201d is emblazoned in large yellow letters on the ship\u2019s superstructure, lest anyone forget. It is a dangerous business, even when the ship is not at war. In September, while training in the western Pacific, two F/A-18s from the Vinson collided in midair soon after takeoff. One pilot was rescued in the accident, but the other was killed. His body was never found in waters nearly three miles deep. About 20 percent of the 100 daily flights are strike missions into Iraq and Syria. The others are a mix of training, supply, reconnaissance and other flights, usually between 10:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. About an hour before takeoff, fighter pilots in flight suits stride to their planes for a final inspection. Tiny black bombs are stenciled below the cockpit for each weapon dropped from that aircraft. A giant steam-powered catapult then hurls the jets off the ship, from a dead start to more than 125 miles an hour in less than three seconds. Video How has ISIS, a 21st-century terrorist organization with a retrograde religious philosophy, spread from Iraq to Syria, Libya and beyond? By then, the pilots have studied their routes, the weather and the targets assigned by an American air command center in Qatar, a tiny gulf state. Targeting specialists have selected bombs big enough to do the job but mindful of the risk to civilians. The allied jets are operating under some of the strictest rules intended to prevent civilian casualties in modern warfare. \u201cIf there\u2019s any doubt, we do not drop ordnance,\u201d said Capt. Matt Leahey, a 44-year-old Naval Academy graduate from Lewiston, Me., who commands the 2,100 personnel and 63 aircraft in the carrier\u2019s air wing. The Vinson has steamed to the northern part of the gulf to shorten flight times as much as possible, but it is still 450 miles to Baghdad and much farther to Syria. The F/A-18s burn 5,700 gallons of fuel on a typical mission, and pilots must refuel in midair three or four times. The jets fly well above 20,000 feet, out of the range of most antiaircraft guns. ISIS has surface-to-air missiles and has downed a few Iraqi helicopters, so pilots cannot fly as low as they would like to get the best look at their targets. \u201cManpads are a real threat,\u201d said Commander Doyle, referring to Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. In some cases, pilots are striking specific, planned targets such as headquarters buildings. But most of the Vinson\u2019s missions are targets of opportunity while safeguarding Iraqi troops below. Pilots fly over designated grid areas, typically 60 miles square, searching for fighters, artillery and other signs of the enemy. An aerial armada of surveillance planes with names like Joint Stars and Rivet Joint track militant movements on the ground and intercept their electronic communications, feeding a steady stream of information to pilots. \u201cIt can be pretty boring, then all of sudden it gets heated and you\u2019ve got a whole lot of work to do in 120 seconds,\u201d said Commander Doyle, who has flown eight strike missions so far. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to find things and kill them.\u201d Working with the American air controllers in the Iraqi command centers \u2014 special operations troops in contact with Iraqi or Kurdish ground troops \u2014 pilots say they are aiming to weaken ISIS\u2019 war machine in a fight they caution could take months or even years. \u201cWe\u2019re taking away the enemy\u2019s ability to reinforce and resupply,\u201d said Lt. Adam Bryan, 31, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot from northwestern Connecticut. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty dynamic situation.\u201d", "keyword": "Military aircraft;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Iraq;Syria;Aircraft carrier;US Military"}
{"id": "ny0289282", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2016/01/05", "title": "Getting Your Gmail Just the Way You Like It", "abstract": "Q. What exactly is the difference between Gmail and Inbox? I have both apps on my phone and am not sure which one to use. A. Gmail, initially released as an invitation-only service in 2004 , is Google\u2019s official web-based email service and a competitor to Microsoft\u2019s Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail.com), Yahoo Mail and Apple\u2019s iCloud mail service, among others. Inbox, first released as an invitation-only service in 2014 , is a program that attempts to sort and organize your Gmail messages into logical groupings so they are easier to manage \u2014 especially on a mobile device. You do not need an invitation to use either service anymore, but you need to have a Gmail address to use Inbox. Google makes both a Gmail app and an Inbox app for devices running Android and iOS. If you like the way Inbox organizes your messages, you can also use it with your desktop web browser after you have set it up on your mobile gadget; point your Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser to inbox.google.com to use it there. If you have both apps installed and set up, your messages (and the actions you take with them) are synced between Gmail and Inbox . Messages you archive, delete, create or mark as spam are handled the same way in both apps, no matter which one you are using at the time. Some features appear in only one app, though. You need to create your vacation response messages and certain filters in Gmail, while Inbox Reminders are not visible in Gmail. People who like the traditional approach to dealing with email may prefer Gmail\u2019s more straightforward message view. However, those who like anything that saves time \u2014 or automatically organizes information for quick perusal on the go \u2014 may favor Inbox. If you want to get to know the newer app a little better, Google has created an Inbox Help Center online and has a brief demo video on YouTube .", "keyword": "Email;Google"}
{"id": "ny0008249", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2013/05/06", "title": "Switzerland Stuns Canada in Hockey World Championships", "abstract": "Switzerland stunned Canada in a penalty shootout to win, 3-2, at the hockey world championships in Stockholm. Switzerland is 2-0 after upsetting Sweden in its opener. Ilya Kovalchuk\u2019s three goals led Russia to a 4-1 victory over Germany in Helsinki, Finland. Also in Helsinki, the United States beat Latvia, 4-1, to improve to 2-0.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Ilya Kovalchuk;Switzerland;Canada;Russia;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0230101", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/09/11", "title": "Raising Ghosts Long Thought to Be Laid to Rest", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The air filled with noise, and the aircraft\u2019s payload spiraled downward, sometimes black against a clear blue sky, sometimes catching a glint of sunlight. The moment was meant to revive modern Europe\u2019s fading memories not simply of war, but of conflict so enormous that entire cities were razed by aerial bombardment in the rush for conquest or the slide to defeat before peace in 1945. But here, on a late August evening in 2010, the airplane was not an American B-17 or a British Lancaster or a Soviet Ilyushin \u2014 airplanes from the three air forces that bombed the German capital at various stages in World War II. And the payload was not hostile, either. Coinciding with a regular all-night opening of the city\u2019s museums, the \u201cbombing\u201d was an airdrop from a helicopter of 100,000 poems by 80 writers printed on silvery bookmarks \u2014 replicating similar rains of verse over cities once shattered from the air, Guernica, Spain, and Warsaw among them. Conceived by Chilean and German artists, it was a kind of street theater designed to inspire musing on what has really changed in the 65 years since the end of World War II and what has simply been transplanted to other arenas of conflict. Berlin is a good place for such rumination. The city\u2019s very architecture \u2014 rebuilt apartment houses interspersed with the ponderous, imperial baroque of an older Germany \u2014 offers testimony to the postwar ruin presided over by those who inherited a divided city in 1945. Indeed, the sight of the cards fluttering across the ornate facade of the Berliner Dom, the Berlin Cathedral, had a particular poignancy: The building\u2019s grand cupola was destroyed by Allied firebombing in 1944, only to be rebuilt in the postwar era. The city, though, is not always so eager to resuscitate its history. Barely seen amid the frenetic construction since the end of communism, traces of the Berlin Wall \u2014 the very emblem of the Cold War in a divided Europe \u2014 linger in the rebuilt city center like chimera, strips of sometimes anonymous cobblestone along its erstwhile route. Was this the cusp of East and West? Was this the concrete enforcer of global division with its death strip, enfiladed by machine guns in the watchtowers before the wall came down in 1989 and a reunified Germany began burying its memory under a forest of glittery high-rises? Only a fraction of its 105-kilometer, or 65-mile, length remains, some as an open-air art gallery. \u201cThey should have kept a whole stretch of the Wall, 500 meters, so people would see what it was like,\u201d said Harry Hampel, a photojournalist who has chronicled Berlin\u2019s before and after in black and white and sells his work from the taxi cab he drives to fund the enterprise. Then, finally, there is the new Berlin rubbing shoulders with the old. As nations have made the voyage from world war to cold war to a war of hearts and faiths, so Berlin has moved into a new century, seeking the self-confidence to cease apologizing so frequently for a past that will not fully release it. Last month, the defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, announced plans for a military overhaul including the abolition of the draft \u2014 an acknowledgement of NATO\u2019s changed landscape since the end of the Cold War. No longer do military strategists contemplate tank battles across the north German plain or massed infantry maneuvers along the Iron Curtain. Instead, the effort to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda has supplanted the Cold War as the existential fight propelling a new generation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (although its seeds were sown much earlier). Germany itself has sent 4,500 soldiers to Afghanistan \u2014 an unpopular deployment that set the needs of the U.S.-led coalition ahead of the nation\u2019s profound aversion to the militarism of its past. And that remote conflict mirrors divisions closer to home. Just as jihadists depict Western soldiers as unholy warriors, so, too, in the West, suspicion of Islam seems often to trump government protestations of evenhandedness toward the Muslim minorities that have become part of Europe\u2019s social fabric. President Barack Obama has signaled a drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in mid-2011 after formally ending the U.S. combat role in Iraq. But it seems unlikely that Western leaders will find a way anytime soon to unlock a riddle as baffling and enduring as the Kremlinology of the past: How do affluent Western societies counter the gravitational pull of radical Islam that stirs not only in distant Muslim societies but also among their own citizens? Only this month, a German newspaper reported that a German citizen was arrested by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, accused of belonging to a group of Islamists from Hamburg who had traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area in 2009 to train as militants. Just a few days earlier, Thilo Sarrazin, a board member at the German central bank, ignited a fury over an assertion that Germans could become \u201cstrangers in their own land\u201d as the land\u2019s large Turkish minority expands. Those might have seemed familiar words in the vocabulary of fear generated by Europe\u2019s unresolved debate over immigration \u2014 the common strand linking such disparate phenomena as the expulsion of Roma from France or Britain\u2019s resistance to the undocumented arrival of fugitives from Afghanistan or Iraq. But, in a new book, Mr. Sarrazin, who has since quit the bank under intense political pressure, also argued that all Jews share a common gene differentiating them from other people. Berlin, of course, is a city of monuments to a past that struck fear within and far beyond its frontiers. So dropping poems among those symbols the other day betokened a newer striving for a kind of normalcy \u2014 for fun, even. As the cards fell from the sky, children scrambled to catch them in midflight or retrieve them from the cobblestones while older citizens looked on with benign and sometimes inscrutable expressions. One poem by Timo Berger, called \u201cWhat Comes From Above,\u201d described the cards of verse sailing \u201cinto your hand, with a smile.\u201d It was not ever thus.", "keyword": "Germany;Berlin (Germany);World War II (1939-45);Islam"}
{"id": "ny0068873", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2014/12/31", "title": "Nigeria: Militants Attack Town", "abstract": "Gunmen opened fire in a town in northeast Nigeria, killing at least 15 people, witnesses and a security source said. The attack by men believed to be Islamist militants targeted Kautikari, near the Cameroon border, on Monday night. It is just six miles from the village of Chibok, where more than 200 schoolgirls were abducted in April. Most remain captives. Boko Haram militants, who are fighting to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria, have killed 10,340 people this year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.", "keyword": "Nigeria;Boko Haram;Africa;Islam;Murders and Homicides"}
{"id": "ny0216371", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2010/04/21", "title": "For French and Italian Soccer, Dark Days Could Lie Ahead", "abstract": "The four-year cycle of a World Cup is almost run. Italy and France, who contested an unedifying final in Berlin in 2006, appear to be preparing some of the same old cast, with more bad odor along the way. Zin\u00e9dine Zidane, the most marvellous player of his generation until he chose to end his career with that infamous head butt in Berlin, is retired. But Franck Rib\u00e9ry, the man who would be the new Zidane, is among the players being questioned by the police investigating a prostitution racket involving underage girls. That, so far, is simply a story of suspicion, but the leak comes at the worst imaginable time. Raymond Domenech, the same France national coach as four years ago, is about to set up camp for South Africa 2010 with, reportedly, four of his squad liable to be wanted for further police questioning. Italy, meanwhile, is truly back in the old routine. It won the last World Cup even as the Calciopoli, the investigation into referee tampering, was running through leading clubs like Juventus and AC Milan. Italy won the World Cup with two-thirds of its players coming from clubs implicated in those trials. And it won at a time when spectator violence, including murders, threatened to close down some of Italy\u2019s stadiums. Roll on four years, and Calciopoli is back in front of magistrates with yet more claims of corruption, yet more evidence from tapped telephone calls leaked to the media and about to be heard in court. And, as the derby Sunday in Rome showed, the crowd violence has not gone away. This could hardly be more ill-timed. Marcello Lippi has been restored as the national coach of Italy and is intent on taking many of his 2006 World Cup winners to the next tournament, implying that few younger Italians have impressed him in the four intervening years. There has been change in Italy because Juventus has not totally recovered from being dumped down a division and made to work its way back up. AC Milan, Silvio Berlusconi\u2019s club, has run short on cash and sold its brightest star, Kak\u00e1, to Real Madrid. There is a fresh challenger for Serie A. Inter, whose team is predominantly Argentine and Brazilian, has been eased off the top by Roma, which achieved a remarkable comeback to beat its neighbor Lazio, 2-1, in the stadium they share in Rome. There was, once again, serious violence. One fan had his throat slit, others suffered knife wounds, a few were under arrest. Players fought and scrapped, tempers were lost \u2014 a normal day in the Olympic stadium, Rome\u2019s modern day Coliseum. Even Inter Milan, the club that benefited from the Calciopoli trial, is under suspicion. Its accuser, it has to be said, is Luciano Moggi, the man branded as the biggest manipulator for Juventus. Moggi tells the media, and now the Naples court, that Inter was as involved as all the rest in making the irregular calls to match referees. Oh, what a web of Machiavellian intrigue the Italians make of soccer. Last weekend did provide one moment of absolute purity. It came through a goal of sweet Brazilian magic, by Inter\u2019s right back Maicon as he scored against Juventus and Italy\u2019s No. 1 goalkeeper, Gigi Buffon. We might all need to cling to Maicon\u2019s artistry to retain any sense that the sport is worth the notoriety that sometimes it attracts. Maybe it is the pervasive nature of 24/7 media using, and being used by, the police and rumor mongers. It isn\u2019t just soccer that has changed through easy money and overblown idolatry. Only in make-believe can we imagine ourselves still to be in the era of Arnie Palmer and Jack Nicklaus rather than Tiger Woods. The world has changed, and with it the methods of communication that sometimes blur the lines between fact and fiction around sporting icons. There is substance, but as yet very little fact to the French scandal involving Rib\u00e9ry et al. His legal representative, Sophie Bottai, sought to put press speculation into perspective on Monday through a statement that read: \u201cPersonalities including Franck Rib\u00e9ry and other players of international fame count among their relationships a person close to the leader of a girls escort network. It is only because of that relationship that they have been, or will be, heard by police investigating this case. \u201cMy client was called as a witness, but had no other part in the matter. The matter stops there,\u201d she said. No, it does not, not even in France where a privacy law protects politicians, sports figures and anyone else in the spotlight from media intrusion. On Wednesday, Rib\u00e9ry is due to play for Bayern Munich against Lyon in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal. He hopes to be at the top of his game, which is a rare occurrence given his perpetual injury breaks \u2014 and he might come face to face with Sidney Govou, his fellow striker on the France national team. Govou, too, was named in the investigation into the nightclub near the Champs-Elys\u00e9es that the police claim was being used as a brothel. Lyon, and Govou\u2019s lawyer, deny he is involved. Rib\u00e9ry, 27, has two young daughters and converted to Islam when he married their mother. Govou is single, with a 5-year-old daughter. But there are other, younger, French national squad players being named on French Web sites and in print. One of those, currently employed outside of France, is reported to have admitted that he had sex with a prostitute but did not know she was under 18. Jean-Pierre Escalettes, the president of the French soccer federation, told the media: \u201cAn investigation is under way. There is nothing else to say at the moment.\u201d He might think that suffices, but in today\u2019s environment, and with the French about to start World Cup camp, it might be easier to cap the outpouring of an Icelandic volcano than put a lid on this story.", "keyword": "Italy;Rome (Italy);France;Paris (France);Sex Crimes;Soccer;World Cup (Soccer);Zidane Zinedine"}
{"id": "ny0102050", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/06", "title": "At the Rye Arts Center, Learning New Ways of Creating", "abstract": "Julian Clemente sits at a laptop in a 3-D printing class at the Rye Arts Center, using the track pad to design a geometric container. A freckled 10-year-old with a mop of red hair, he stretches the squat cylinder with a virtual dragging tool, making it taller on the digital graphing paper. Now it resembles a vase. He spins the on-screen design, then flips it upside down to see if all the sides are even. Later, his art teacher, Nicole Zahour, will print the object in plastic on the classroom\u2019s 3-D printer, which during a recent visit was abuzz producing a bracelet made with paper-thin plastic layers. By next week, Julian will hold his vase-like invention in his hands. Forget the days when art classes were strictly about drawing, painting and sculpting. In the last two years, the Rye Arts Center, located in a classic, gray-shingled colonial house in the village of Rye, N.Y., has added classes for children as young as 8 in coding, 3-D printing, computer animation, robotics and even Minecraft, the building game that some parents write off as just another video game. Here, the digital arts are given the same weight as watercolors and clay-making. Image Manipulating a 3-D design. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times \u201cThere\u2019s always going to be a need for traditional arts,\u201d Meg Rodriguez, the executive director of the Rye Arts Center, said. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to change that. But we do want to introduce children to the modern tools for creativity.\u201d Rye isn\u2019t the only art school that has retooled its course offerings in recent years. The Rhode Island School of Design led the charge several years ago when John Maeda, then its president, championed a movement to inject the arts into STEM curriculums (science, technology, engineering and math), arguing that design was a critical component of innovation. A new acronym, Steam, has since caught on, with supporters including members of Congress, the National Science Foundation, school districts around the country and the Department of Education. Many educators maintain that classes that combine technology, engineering and art help students learn how to solve problems and, perhaps more important, think creatively. The Katonah Art Center offers two Steam classes for younger children, as does the Digital Arts Experience in White Plains, which offers several 3-D design and coding classes for youngsters. At the Rye Arts Center, 25 percent of the budget for traditional art programs is now reserved for Steam course offerings. Last year, the center\u2019s darkroom, which was abandoned when digital photography classes became popular several years ago, was transformed into what the school calls its \u201cMakerSpace\u201d: a brightly lit classroom with a high square table at the center covered with a dozen laptops and surrounded by citrine and royal blue metal stools. A large flat-screen TV hangs at the center of the room for teacher demonstrations, and three 3-D printers sit in a row on a back shelf. Also on the shelves are the students\u2019 creations: a robotic dog that was programmed to move; a charming pair of owls printed on the 3-D printer. In a coding class here, the young children weren\u2019t sitting in rows plugging numbers into a computer \u2014 they were learning how to build rockets and space stations in Minecraft, a game that is like a digital version of Lego. Sometimes those projects lead to offline discoveries. One 8-year-old student, Ben Fritsche, was taking his space station design from coding class and building it out of cardboard and mirrored tiles in another class called Creative Building. Image A product of the class, which is offered to students as young as 8. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times Said Ben of his space station: \u201cI thought it would be cool to make it for real.\u201d In Creative Building, children are inspired to think up their dream structure, build it with found materials and often power it with electricity using basic circuitry. One 9-year-old girl, Sydney Ruthazer, is making a fashion house with a runway and pendant lights with beaded drum shades, while another boy is building a copy of his little sister\u2019s nursery school, complete with beeping smoke alarms. The teacher of both the Minecraft and Creative Building classes, Gary McLoughlin, whom the children call Mr. Mack, has developed a bit of a following over the last few years; creative-minded children take his Steam classes at Discover Camp in Hawthorne in the summer and then at the Rye Arts Center during the school year. One Friday in November, he was in the MakerSpace with six boys no older than 10. All were building in Minecraft. A boy named Manuel Marchand had created an underground secret base in the game, and the other boys were trying to find it. When asked how they would use the code they were learning here in class, one boy shrugged, \u201cBuild an app.\u201d Mr. McLoughlin said he had heard naysayers over the years assert that digital art was not art at all. All of us, he argued, need to re-examine our ideas about what counts as creativity. \u201cWhy does art have to be a framed watercolor hanging in a museum?\u201d Mr. McLoughlin asked. Besides, he added, the art world is already experimenting with the same digital tools as the children in Rye. Case in point: A dress made with a 3-D printer is now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. \u201cA kid might say he\u2019s not an artist because he can\u2019t draw or paint,\u201d Mr. McLoughlin said. \u201cBut if you go into a 3-D world and manipulate structures and print them out, or if you build a rocket in a virtual world and make it take off, it\u2019s still your creation. It\u2019s still your idea. And it\u2019s still art.\u201d", "keyword": "Art;Rye Arts Center;Children;Rye NY;3-D Printers;K-12 Education"}
{"id": "ny0067881", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/12/29", "title": "Scores Are Stranded as Ferry Catches Fire Off Greek Coast", "abstract": "VERBANIA, Italy \u2014 Italian, Greek and Albanian vessels battled gale-force winds and rough seas early Monday as they struggled to rescue hundreds of passengers stranded on a ferry that caught fire on Sunday off the northwestern coast of Greece en route to Italy. Italian news media reported that the fire broke out on the car deck of the ferry, which was heading to the Italian port of Ancona. The ship was carrying 422 passengers and 56 crew members, according to the Greek Merchant Marine Ministry. The ministry said that 234 of the passengers were Greek and that the ship was also carrying passengers from Albania, Austria, Belgium, France, Georgia, Italy, Switzerland, Syria, Turkey and other countries. Italian officials said that one passenger had died while trying to get off the ship, and a spokeswoman for the Greek Merchant Marine Ministry confirmed that a Greek man had died during the rescue effort. Image Passengers from the Norman Atlantic on Sunday in the harbor of Otranto, Italy. The fire is said to have started on the car deck. Credit Biagio Claudio Longo/European Pressphoto Agency Nearly 200 people remained stranded on the ferry as dawn broke on Monday, while helicopters continued to airlift exhausted passengers to waiting merchant vessels nearby. Some were taken directly to Italian hospitals to be treated for hypothermia. Difficult weather conditions continued to hamper the rescue efforts, which had gone on through the night. Helicopters redoubled their efforts after a navy ship with a helipad reached the ferry on Sunday evening. Another naval vessel was heading to the scene on Monday. An Italian Coast Guard official, Giovanni de Tullio, said on Italian television that stormy weather had been forecast. A container ship carrying 49 passengers from the ferry arrived in the Italian port of Bari on Monday morning. Shortly before 8 a.m., the Italian Navy said that 290 people had been saved, and that another 188 were still on board. \u201cThe water is choppy, and it is very cold,\u201d Capt. Riccardo Rizzotto of the Italian Navy said on RAI News, an Italian national broadcaster. \u201cCertainly they\u2019re suffering.\u201d Image Photographs taken from video show the burning ferry adrift off Albania. Credit Italian Navy Throughout the day, ships and helicopters departed from several Italian ports to reach the stricken boat. The ferry, the Norman Atlantic, sails under an Italian flag but was chartered by a Greek company, ANEK Lines. It caught fire about 35 miles north of the Greek island of Corfu after leaving the Greek port of Igoumenitsa early Sunday morning, the charter company said in a statement. It did not say what had caused the fire. A distress call was issued shortly before 5 a.m. on Sunday, requesting that all ships in the channel off Otranto in the Puglia region of Italy assist with the rescue efforts. Italian news media broadcast images of the ship enveloped in smoke. Greece\u2019s merchant marine minister, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, described the rescue operations as \u201cparticularly difficult and complicated,\u201d and the Italian Navy said Sunday evening that the smoke was hampering rescue efforts. Passengers found refuge on the top deck of the ship, according to the navy. But a Greek woman, who gave her name only as Athina, told a Greek television station that she and about 40 other passengers could feel the heat from the fire on the deck before boarding a lifeboat. \u201cThe deck was hot; it was burning our feet,\u201d she said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t believe what was happening.\u201d Image The ferry caught fire with 422 passengers and 56 crew members on board. Credit Italian Navy Navy helicopters were used to begin carrying some passengers to safety, and by late Sunday afternoon, the ship was attached to a towboat. Although other ships were responding to the distress call, rescuers warned that it was still a hazardous situation. \u201cThe severe weather conditions are still making it difficult for ships to get close, and it\u2019s beginning to be dark,\u201d said an Italian Defense Ministry spokesman, who asked not to be identified according to Italian institutional practices. But by Sunday evening, 10 merchant ships had managed to reach the ferry, and they were taking on passengers, the Greek Merchant Marine Ministry said. Another Greek passenger, Nikos Papatheodosiou, told Greek television that \u201cthe wind is pushing us from one side to the other, and we can\u2019t breathe in the smoke.\u201d \u201cDo something to save us,\u201d he begged. \u201cWe\u2019ll drown like mice.\u201d In a separate accident in the region, a Turkish cargo ship collided with another merchant vessel and sank off the coast of Italy in the northern Adriatic on Sunday, killing two crew members and leaving four others missing, officials said, according to The Associated Press.", "keyword": "Boat Accidents;Ferry;Greece;Italy"}
{"id": "ny0257207", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/01/05", "title": "Rockies Give Carlos Gonzalez 7-Year, $80 Million Extension", "abstract": "No team has spent more money this off-season than the Colorado Rockies . Most of it has gone toward re-signing their core players, and the latest beneficiary is the star outfielder Carlos Gonzalez, who has agreed to a seven-year, $80 million extension. The deal, confirmed Tuesday by a person in baseball with knowledge of the contract, is pending a physical. Gonzalez starred for the Rockies in 2010, his first full season, batting a National League-best .336 with 34 home runs and 117 runs batted in . He won a Gold Glove and finished third in the balloting for most valuable player, two slots ahead of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who signed a seven-year, $134.5 million extension with Colorado in late November and is under contract through 2020. Gonzalez was not eligible for free agency until after the 2014 season, but Colorado was betting that his value, if he continued to perform, would only escalate. Gonzalez has already been traded twice, including as part of a package Colorado acquired from Oakland for Matt Holliday in 2008, and he seemed to value the stability of a long-term deal. With Gonzalez, 25, on board through 2017 \u2014 taking him through his first three years of free agency \u2014 the Rockies have two of baseball\u2019s best all-around players locked up at reasonable contracts. The Rockies, who also re-signed the left-hander Jorge De La Rosa and added the utility player Ty Wigginton, have committed about $250 million this winter. TRAINER ARRESTED FOR FRAUD A high-profile baseball trainer in the Dominican Republic who negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts with major league teams for teenage prospects has been arrested there on charges he falsified documents about players\u2019 identities, the Dominican authorities said Tuesday. The arrest is seen as a significant victory for baseball, which has invested millions of dollars in trying to clean up its operations in the Dominican Republic and has urged the government to crack down on the trainers. Baseball officials believe the trainers help falsify prospects\u2019 identities to make them appear younger and more appealing to teams, and are also a source of steroids for prospects. The trainer, Victor Baez, has been on the radar of baseball officials for several years. In 2009, he said in an interview with The New York Times that he routinely injected his teenage players with vitamin B12 because he could not afford to feed them meat. In 2010, Baez had 5 of the top 40 prospects who were eligible to sign with teams after July 2, and all five tested positive for steroids as part of their registration with Major League Baseball. Baez said the positive results were because of a tainted protein shake he had given his players. Baez\u2019s arrest stemmed from an investigation by Major League Baseball, which uncovered that he had falsified documents. Baseball officials turned the investigation over to the Dominican government, which further pursued the matter. \u201cWe have been working very hard to implement reforms that will improve the environment for conducting the business of baseball in the Dominican Republic,\u201d Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball\u2019s executive vice president for labor relations, said in a statement. \u201cToday\u2019s action by the Dominican authorities is a positive step that the commissioner\u2019s office truly appreciates.\u201d MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT BUCKNER RETURNS Bill Buckner, the Boston Red Sox player long associated with the team\u2019s former curse, will try to work some managerial magic in Massachusetts. The Brockton Rox of the independent Can-Am League announced Tuesday that Buckner would manage the team this summer. Buckner had 2,715 career hits, but he is most remembered for an error that cost the Red Sox Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. In a statement, Buckner said he was excited to return to Massachusetts. The Rox\u2019s chief executive, Chris Carminucci, praised Buckner\u2019s vast baseball knowledge and called it a \u201cgreat day\u201d for the Rox. (AP)", "keyword": "Baseball;Colorado Rockies;Gonzalez Carlos"}
{"id": "ny0144635", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/10/07", "title": "Fireplace in a Brooklyn Church Is Drawing Scholars\u2019 Interest", "abstract": "A mystery involving a fireplace in Brooklyn has set off a scholarly stir. At the Greenpoint Reformed Church on Milton Street, a grand 19th-century pillared building that the congregation has owned since 1943, half a dozen historians have visited over the past few months to scrutinize old tiles along the back wall of a fireplace in the parlor. It was not until this year that anyone recognized their historical significance. Two white porcelain plaques depict a pair of gentlemen wearing waistcoats, a model of a primitive paddle-wheel boat and a snub-nosed object that resembles a miniature submarine or perhaps a torpedo. The bas-relief porcelain is detailed down to fingernails, hair strands, buttonholes and boot tassels \u2014 even the upholstery tacks on one man\u2019s chair are visible. \u201cOf course I\u2019d seen many, many fireplace tiles over the years, but never anything like this,\u201d said Andrew S. Dolkart, director of the historic preservation program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Mr. Dolkart said he stumbled on the parlor and the tiled fireplace by accident. He had gone to the Greenpoint church while researching sites for walking tours he conducts for the American Guild of Organists, and happened to take a close look at the parlor fireplace. \u201cI realized these pieces were important and rare, and out of my field of expertise,\u201d Mr. Dolkart said. So he started assembling a team, which has included Susan Tunick, president of the Friends of Terra Cotta, a preservation group in New York, and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the lead curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What they have determined about the porcelain scenes is that the nattily dressed standing figure is Robert Fulton, who pioneered designs for paddle-wheel steamboats, submarines and torpedoes in the early 1800s. The seated gentleman is the politician Robert Livingston, Fulton\u2019s business partner. The plaques were probably made in the late 1870s at the Union Porcelain Works, a factory in Greenpoint that was in operation from the 1860s to the 1920s, Ms. Frelinghuysen said. The factory\u2019s owner, a major real-estate developer named Thomas C. Smith, built and lived in the bay-fronted building that now houses the Greenpoint church. In the 1940s, the congregation converted some central rooms into a sanctuary with stained glass and an organ, but much of Smith\u2019s d\u00e9cor was left intact, including honey-colored carved woodwork and elaborate plaster moldings. Union Porcelain Works was known for producing some zealously realistic images of historic figures. But Ms. Frelinghuysen said she had never seen a Fulton portrait made by the company. Did Smith commission the scenes? Who installed them in the Greenpoint fireplace alongside tiny 1890s tiles patterned in blue and white griffins and flowers, and why? \u201cWas there just some bin of extra stuff at the factory that these were all pulled from at some point, or was there some actual connection between Smith and Fulton?\u201d asked Ms. Frelinghuysen, who has gamely crawled around the sooty fireplace with a flashlight and magnifying glass. \u201cIt\u2019s really wonderful how well preserved these are, as a puzzle for us to explore.\u201d The leaders of the church, Pastor Ann Kansfield and the Rev. Jennifer Aull, find the academics\u2019 enthusiasm somewhat perplexing. \u201cI feel like such a philistine \u2014 why is everyone so excited about these?\u201d Ms. Kansfield said. \u201cBut I do wonder why they were made, and how they ended up here. I hope someone figures it out.\u201d", "keyword": "Fireplaces;History;Brick and Tile;Greenpoint (NYC);Greenpoint Reformed Church"}
{"id": "ny0190842", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2009/05/15", "title": "Mar\u00eda Elena Ibarra Mart\u00edn, Cuban Marine Biologist, Dies at 76", "abstract": "Mar\u00eda Elena Ibarra Mart\u00edn, director of the Center for Marine Research at the University of Havana , a co-founder of the Cuban Society for the Protection of the Environment and a leader in Caribbean marine ecology, died on May 5 in Cuba . She was 76. Her death was confirmed by Orlando Rey Santos, director of the environment directorate at Cuba\u2019s Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment. Dr. Ibarra was born on Dec. 27, 1932, in Santiago de Cuba. She joined the faculty of the University of Havana in 1964 and eventually rose to become dean of biology. After early research on plankton and related marine organisms, she turned her attention to crocodiles, manatees and especially the turtles of the Caribbean, and to measures to protect them. \u201cShe was the quintessential scientist-activist,\u201d said Oliver Houck, a professor at Tulane University Law School who went to Cuba in the 1990s to help draft environmental legislation. \u201cShe did not back down.\u201d The World Wildlife Fund describes Cuba\u2019s marine habitats as well preserved, in what it calls \u201cdramatic contrast\u201d to its Caribbean neighbors. Researchers who study its marine ecology attribute its relative health at least in part to Dr. Ibarra. Working at the marine center with very limited resources, Dr. Ibarra and her colleagues \u201ccreated a hell of an agency out of nothing,\u201d Professor Houck said.", "keyword": "Ibarra Mart\u00edn Mar\u00eda Elena;Cuba;Deaths (Obituaries)"}
{"id": "ny0031665", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/06/12", "title": "Alabama: Suit Is Filed to Block Abortion Clinic Law", "abstract": "Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday to block a new Alabama law that would force three of the state\u2019s five abortion clinics to shut down. The law, like measures passed in Mississippi and North Dakota that are under challenge, would require doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Proponents say it will protect patients in emergencies, but the clinics and prominent medical groups call it medically unnecessary and an unconstitutional effort to force the closing of the clinics in Birmingham, Mobile and Montgomery, which rely on visiting doctors.", "keyword": "Alabama;Abortion;Lawsuits;ACLU;Planned Parenthood"}
{"id": "ny0227591", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/07/03", "title": "Thailand: Insurgents Kill 8 Soldiers", "abstract": "Suspected Muslim insurgents ambushed security forces in southern Thailand on Thursday night, killing five members of a patrol, an officer said. On Friday, three soldiers were killed in a similar attack by a roadside bomb blast, another army officer said, ratcheting up violence in a low-level insurgency that has gone on for about six years in the southern part of the country. Muslims dominate the deep southern section of Thailand, a mainly Buddhist nation. The spike in attacks is a worry for the government of southeast Asia\u2019s second biggest economy, which is also experiencing fierce, sometimes violent rivalries among political factions.", "keyword": "Thailand;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0260541", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/06/29", "title": "Tiger Woods Seems Doubtful for British Open", "abstract": "NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 Tiger Woods did not rule out playing in the British Open. But the bulk of his remarks Tuesday indicated that his ailing left knee and left Achilles\u2019 tendon would not be healed in time for him to make the tournament, the season\u2019s third major championship, at Royal St. George\u2019s in two weeks. Woods, who is here at the AT&T National this week in his role as the nonplaying tournament host, said that other than some putts, he had not hit any golf balls since he withdrew from the Players Championship after nine holes almost seven weeks ago. He said he exacerbated the strains to his left lateral collateral ligament and Achilles\u2019, which he originally injured at the Masters in April. \u201cProbably in retrospect, it was a borderline call whether I should have played the Players,\u201d Woods said. He added: \u201cI pushed it too hard and hurt myself. Now this time around, it\u2019s different. I\u2019m setting no timetable.\u201d By not making a call on whether he will be ready for the British Open, he leaves open the possibility that he could play if he improves drastically in the next two weeks. But based on previous training regimens he has used when preparing to return to competition after an injury, the chances of a return appear virtually nil. Relaxed, joking at times and wearing an almost full beard, Woods looked as if he has been on summer vacation. That is hardly the case, he said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the gym every day, most of the time two times, sometimes three times a day,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the leg; it\u2019s the whole body. Got to keep everything going. And obviously soft tissue, getting that worked on. So it\u2019s been arduous, but then again, I\u2019ve done this before.\u201d Woods said surgery had not been discussed and was not required. And he dismissed the notion that his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus\u2019s record of 18 major championship victories \u2014 which Nicklaus capped by winning the 1986 Masters \u2014 had been set back by missing the recent United States Open and, possibly, the British Open. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d said Woods, 35. \u201cHe won when he was 46, right? I\u2019ve still got some time. And on top of that, we\u2019re about the same pace, I believe, years on tour and majors won. So I feel pretty confident of what my future holds and very excited about it. \u201cI\u2019m excited about coming out here and being ready to go instead of trying to kind of patch it, which I\u2019ve been for a while.\u201d", "keyword": "Woods Tiger;British Open (Golf);Golf"}
{"id": "ny0275245", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/02/10", "title": "New York City Police Reorganizing to Focus More on Gangs", "abstract": "The New York Police Department announced on Tuesday that it was reorganizing its investigative operations, a move that senior officials said would allow for an increased focus on gang activity. Under the new structure, nearly all of the department\u2019s investigative units will be brought under the supervision of the Detective Bureau, James P. O\u2019Neill, chief of department, said. An investigative chief will be assigned to each of the department\u2019s eight patrol borough commands and will report directly to the chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, Chief O\u2019Neill said. The changes, which are to take effect next month, are the latest in a series of moves by the department as it tries to adapt its crime-fighting methods to new technology and trends. Under the plan announced on Tuesday, the Organized Crime Control Bureau will be eliminated, and its chief, Thomas P. Purtell, will be assigned a broader role as chief of a citywide operations bureau. In that role, he will oversee units conducting a range of tasks, from special operations to homeless outreach. The new strategy resurrects a style of policing that was employed in New York City decades ago and is now being revived by Commissioner William J. Bratton. The recent initiative began as a pilot program in Queens that was meant to increase efficiency by giving local commanders direct access to resources in the department\u2019s specialized units, including detectives and officers assigned to divisions focused on gangs, guns and drugs. \u201cIt\u2019s going to improve the coordination and focus of our investigations,\u201d Chief O\u2019Neill said. \u201cSo it will help us more quickly identify targets and patterns.\u201d The Internal Affairs Bureau, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, and the Intelligence Division and Counterterrorism Bureau are not part of the reorganization. Chief Boyce said officials hoped to further drive down crime by targeting gangs and crews, whose members were responsible for more than half of the nonfatal shootings in the city last year. Chief O\u2019Neill said: \u201cIt\u2019s just an evolution of the way we do business. I think it\u2019s important that if we\u2019re going to keep pushing homicides and shootings down, we have to keep up with the trends, and this is where the trends are leading us.\u201d", "keyword": "NYPD;Gang;James P O'Neill;NYC;William J Bratton"}
{"id": "ny0146893", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/07/26", "title": "Hole in Fuselage Forces Qantas 747 to Land", "abstract": "The Australian authorities opened an investigation on Friday into what caused a section of the fuselage of a Qantas airliner to burst open en route from Hong Kong to Melbourne , Australia , forcing the Boeing 747-400 to make an emergency landing in Manila . The jumbo jet, which carried 346 passengers and 19 crew members, landed safely on Friday and those on board left without injury. As a piece of fuselage the size of a sedan ripped from the plane, the jet, Qantas Flight 30, had been forced to descend steeply to 10,000 feet from 29,000 feet. Passengers described hearing a loud bang and seeing debris fly into the cabin. As the plane depressurized, oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and cabin crew members shouted to passengers to put them on. \u201cThere was a terrific boom and bits of wood and debris just flew forward\u201d into the first-class area, a passenger, Dr. June Kane, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from Manila, the capital of the Philippines . Another passenger, Phill Restall, of Chippenham, England , said that he was awakened by the sound of what the authorities said may have been an explosive decompression, but that there was no panic. \u201cIt dawned on a lot of people that this was a major incident,\u201d he told the British Broadcasting Corporation. \u201cThere was no screaming. It wasn\u2019t your typical television movie.\u201d He said some passengers were shaking afterward, while, according to The Associated Press, others vomited. Aviation experts said the hole might have appeared when a part of the plane meant to reduce wind resistance pulled away from the fuselage, although they cautioned it was too soon to draw conclusions. Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States said Friday that they were sending teams to aid in an investigation by the Australian Air Transport Safety Bureau. Under international treaty, the United States, as the country where the plane was built, will be an official participant in the investigation. The plane had recently undergone a major overhaul, in which engineers discovered a great deal of corrosion inside the cargo hold, The Daily Telegraph of Australia reported in its Saturday issue. As the plane lost pressure, oxygen masks descended from the ceiling, and passengers reported seeing mist and debris in the cabin. Video, apparently taken on a passenger\u2019s cellphone and released by Reuters , showed passengers sitting calmly, wearing their yellow masks and watching the seat-back screens showing the plane\u2019s altitude as the aircraft descended. \u201cNobody had any idea what was going on,\u201d George Kierans, of Drogheda, Ireland , told the BBC. \u201cI think most people were in a state of shock.\u201d Many of those on board only realized how serious the situation was after they got off. Photographs and video of the plane, which went into service in 1991, showed a gaping hole in the underside of the aircraft, just in front of its right wing. In Washington , a senior counterterrorism official said there was no indication of terrorism in the incident. The accident was a blemish for Qantas, which has one of the world\u2019s best safety records and prides itself on never having lost a jet in a major crash. Qantas gave no information on the probable cause of the accident but praised crew members for their calm handling of the emergency. The hole appeared to encompass a part of the plane called a fairing, which is meant to smooth out the surface of the fuselage and reduce wind drag. Many airplanes are subject to cracking as they age as a result of the repeated stress of pressurization and depressurization, but a 747 typically flies for many hours between landings and has far fewer pressurization cycles. Although metal fatigue has been blamed for similar emergencies in the past, fairings, which are installed on various parts of an aircraft, do not normally have that problem, said Robert W. Mann Jr., an industry consultant based in Port Washington, N.Y. That raised the question of whether the aircraft might have been damaged on the ground or from inside the cargo compartment, possibly when bags were being loaded, Mr. Mann said. He said passengers were not in danger from the depressurization because aircraft that fly above 10,000 feet are generally required to carry oxygen systems. The atmosphere is thin above that altitude, and people can function for only a few minutes without oxygen before becoming groggy and losing consciousness. Pilots are trained to bring a plane down swiftly to 10,000 feet, where passengers and crew can breathe without assistance. Given that the Qantas jet was at 29,000 feet, the plane dropped roughly a mile a minute, \u201cnot the kind of descent you would normally subject passengers to,\u201d Mr. Mann said. The landing in Manila came only about 630 miles into the journey, a little over an hour after the plane took off. Qantas has decades of experience flying the Boeing 747, a model it first ordered in the 1960s. It has more than 50 of the planes in its fleet, although it was also one of the first customers for the rival Airbus A380 jumbo jet. At one point in the 1980s, Qantas\u2019s entire jet fleet was made up of 747s, which are ideal for the long-haul flights in which the airline specializes. Qantas has promoted its safety record, and in the 1988 movie \u201cRain Man,\u201d the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman , declared he would feel safe flying on Qantas because its planes \u201cnever crashed.\u201d However, the airline suffered fatalities in its early years in business, when it flew propeller planes and flying boats, which take off and land on water. Qantas has also had some close calls. In 1999, a Qantas jet ran off a runway in Bangkok while landing in heavy rain. There were no reports of serious injuries. More recently, a Qantas-operated Boeing 717 was damaged in February when it sustained a hard landing at Darwin, Australia. The landing gear, tires and fuselage of the plane, flown by QantasLink, the airline\u2019s regional carrier, were damaged. In 1988, a gash opened in a Boeing 737 belonging to Aloha Airlines at 24,000 feet on a flight from Hilo to Honolulu , Hawaii . A chunk of the plane\u2019s roof and the cockpit door were blown out. One flight attendant was killed when she was swept out of the plane, and 65 passengers and crew members were hurt. Federal investigators said the accident was caused by metal fatigue, exacerbated by corrosion caused by salt water.", "keyword": "Airlines;Australia;Accidents and Safety"}
{"id": "ny0196542", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/10/21", "title": "California Sues State Street Bank for Fraud", "abstract": "The California attorney general\u2019s office has charged the State Street Corporation with fraud, accusing the company of cheating the state\u2019s two largest pension funds of at least $56.6 million by overcharging them for a series of foreign exchange trades. The lawsuit , unsealed on Tuesday by a Sacramento Superior Court judge, contends that State Street currency traders consistently overcharged the two state pension funds, Calpers and Calstrs, for the costs of managing their accounts since 2001, and then concealed the charges. The California attorney general is seeking to recover $200 million in overcharges and penalties. \u201cState Street bankers committed unconscionable fraud by misappropriating millions of dollars that rightfully belonged to California\u2019s public pension funds,\u201d said Jerry Brown, the California attorney general. \u201cThis is just the latest example of how clever financial traders violate laws and rip off the public trust.\u201d Carolyn Cichon, a spokeswoman for State Street, which is based in Boston, said the bank categorically denied any allegations of wrongdoing and would defend itself against any litigation. The lawsuit is the latest in a string of recent legal headaches for State Street, a bank that has long flown under the radar of ordinary investors but plays a crucial role in the global financial system in booking trades, lending securities and providing other services to hedge funds, pension funds and investment firms. Federal regulators considered it one of 19 too-big-to-fail banks in the recent stress tests . State Street has faced multiple regulatory investigations and shareholder lawsuits over whether it misled investors about the risk in certain bond fund, derivatives , and subprime mortgage-related investments. One lawsuit was filed in April on behalf of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It also comes as State Street is struggling to regain its financial footing. After passing the stress tests this spring, federal officials put them alongside JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and eight other large banks that were among the first to repay their taxpayer investments. State Street announced on Tuesday a $516 million profit in the third quarter, but its shares fell 8.4 percent, its biggest drop in five months, on the news of the lawsuit and a sobering earnings forecast. Ronald E. Logue, State Street\u2019s chief executive, said the bank expected earnings to decrease by about 16 percent, worse than the 12 percent decline projected earlier this year. Bank of New York Mellon, another big custodial bank, reported a $2.46 billion third-quarter loss on Tuesday, but its shares rose 6.1 percent. Still, the lawsuit raises troubling questions about the bank\u2019s practices and controls. It grew out of an inquiry by California state investigators who were looking into claims made against State Street by unidentified whistle-blowers that accused the bank of adding a secret and substantial markup to the price of their currency trades. The whistleblowers alleged that the scheme cost State Street clients about $400 million annually and dated back to 1998. According to the California Attorney General, State Street executed about $35.2 billion in currency trades for Calpers, the California Public Employees\u2019 Retirement System, and Calstrs, the California State Teachers\u2019 Retirement System, from 2001 to this fall. State Street tellingly referred to the state pension funds as \u201cdumb\u201d clients since they allowed the bank to handle foreign exchange transactions for them, according to a complaint filed by the whistleblowers. Smart clients, it said, traded directly with the bank and obtained better rates. The lawsuit contends that State Street concealed fraudulent pricing practices by entering false exchange rates into electronic trading databases and reporting false prices in the account statements that it provided Calpers and Calstrs. The lawsuit also accuses State Street of deliberately failing to include time stamp data in its reports so that the pension funds could not verify the actual cost of the trade. If the California attorney general is successful, the whistle-blowers who filed the original sealed lawsuit could receive a share of any money recovered.", "keyword": "Banks and Banking;Frauds and Swindling;State Street Corporation;California;Suits and Litigation;Attorneys General;Pensions and Retirement Plans"}
{"id": "ny0093256", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/08/24", "title": "Al Qaeda Fighters Try to Seize Yemeni Military Base in Aden", "abstract": "MAHRA, Yemen \u2014 Dozens of fighters belonging to Al Qaeda \u2019s Yemeni affiliate briefly tried to seize control of a military base and the presidential palace in the port city of Aden before suddenly withdrawing on Sunday, according to local fighters and a senior military official in the city. By Sunday afternoon, there were no signs of Qaeda militants in Tawahi, the neighborhood surrounding the palace. But their appearance, however fleeting, was an embarrassing setback for the exiled government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which had described its success in securing Aden as a major victory in its war with the Houthi rebels. The government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia , was driven from power this year as the Houthis, a northern group, captured territory across Yemen, including parts of Aden in the south. A Saudi-led military coalition began an air offensive against the Houthis in March to restore Mr. Hadi. Al Qaeda\u2019s Yemeni branch, which fiercely opposes the Houthis, has been able to capitalize on the disorder by seizing territory, including Mukalla, the country\u2019s fifth largest city. At the same time, the militants have faced no opposition from the Saudi-led coalition as warplanes have carried out thousands of airstrikes against the Houthis and their allies. Officials in Mr. Hadi\u2019s government have been reluctant to admit that small numbers of Qaeda militants have been fighting as part of a broad anti-Houthi coalition that includes southern separatists, Yemeni soldiers trained in the Persian Gulf as well as troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. On Saturday, local officials denied that Al Qaeda was present in Tawahi \u2014 even as local news accounts said that the militants had raised their black flag in the area and were telling residents that they controlled the neighborhood. On Sunday, a senior military official aligned with the anti-Houthi forces acknowledged the entrance of about 100 Qaeda fighters into Tawahi and said they had been the subject of a local security committee meeting. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists. It was unclear whether the Qaeda fighters left because of an agreement with local commanders, or because they were trying to avoid an armed confrontation. On Sunday, local southern separatists took total control of Tawahi, said Abdul Wahab Al-Boujah, a local fighter who was guarding a checkpoint there.", "keyword": "Yemen;Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula;Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi;Houthis;Al Qaeda;Aden;Saudi Arabia;Military Bases"}
{"id": "ny0146890", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/07/26", "title": "Power Rising, Taliban Besiege Pakistani Shiites", "abstract": "PESHAWAR, Pakistan \u2014 It was once known as the Parrot\u2019s Beak, a strategic jut of Pakistan that the American-backed mujahedeen used to carry out raids on the Russians just over the border into Afghanistan . That was during the cold war. Now the area, around the town of Parachinar, is near the center of the new kind of struggle. The Taliban have inflamed and exploited a long-running sectarian conflict that has left the town under siege. The Taliban, which have solidified control across Pakistan\u2019s tribal zone and are seeking new staging grounds to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan, have sided with fellow Sunni Muslims against an enclave of Shiites settled in Parachinar for centuries. The population of about 55,000 is short of food. The fruit crop is rotting, residents say, and the cost of a 66-pound bag of flour has skyrocketed to $100. And, in a mini-conflict that yet again demonstrates the growing influence of the Taliban and the Pakistan government\u2019s lack of control over this highly sensitive border area, young and old, wounded and able-bodied, have become refugees in their own land. Thousands of displaced Shiites from Parachinar are scattered among relatives in Peshawar, capital of North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the tribal areas, and in hotels and shelters where images of Iranian religious leaders decorate the halls. Last month, a Pakistani government relief convoy loaded with food and medicines that had been sent to break the siege was attacked by the Taliban at the village of Pir Qayyum. Many of the 22 vehicles were burned and 12 drivers were killed by the Taliban, according to government officials here and Shiites. And little seems to be hindering the Taliban since the army, six months ago, agreed to a peace deal with the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, and has remained in its barracks. Groups of Taliban affiliated with Mr. Mehsud, who according to the Bush administration is supported by Al Qaeda, now control wide swaths of the tribal areas, from Waziristan in the south to Bajur in the north. From some parts of the tribal areas, like Waziristan and Mohmand, the Taliban have stepped up their operations into Afghanistan against NATO and American soldiers, cross-border attacks that have resulted in rising casualties for coalition forces over the last two months, the Bush administration said. In Kurram, the general area where Parachinar is located, the Taliban are a relatively new phenomenon, exploiting the generations-old sectarian conflict as a way of keeping the government out of the strategically important piece of territory, the senior government official in Kurram, Azam Khan, who serves as the political agent and who organized the June convoy, said in an interview. But Shiites say the Taliban are doing more than just keeping the government at bay. The Shiites say that because they are stopping the militants from entering Afghanistan, the Taliban are attacking them. The situation has attracted the attention of the leading Shiite figure of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has encouraged all Shiites in Pakistan to do what they can to help their brethren in Parachinar, said Sheik Mohammed Shifah Alnajafi, the deputy representative of Ayatollah Sistani in Pakistan, and the vice principal of a Shiite seminary in the capital, Islamabad. About 80 percent of Pakistan\u2019s overwhelmingly Muslim population is Sunni, and about 20 percent Shiite. In Kurram as a whole, the two sects are almost evenly divided, with Parachinar almost entirely Shiite, according to figures from the secretariat of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the body that loosely oversees the tribal region. The origins of the siege reach back to April 2007, when sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis flared over provocative remarks made by a Sunni of Wahhabi beliefs against historical Shiite figures, said Muhammad Amin Shaheedi, the director of the Islamic Research Council in Islamabad, and a leader of the Shiite community in Pakistan. But unlike previous bouts of sectarian violence that were settled by mediation after a few days, the tensions mounted, exacerbated by the Taliban, who sided with some of the Sunni, he said. Then, last Nov. 16, the tensions exploded in a day of extraordinary violence in Parachinar and surrounding villages, including mortar fire between Sunni mosques and Shiite mosques, said M. B. Bangash, a Shiite businessman from Parachinar who has taken refuge in Peshawar. In contrast to other parts of the tribal areas, the Pakistani Army has had a garrison in Parachinar for decades, but it failed to stop the violence, he said. \u201cThe government is indifferent,\u201d Mr. Bangash said. Some of the moderate Sunni families in Parachinar, who had often helped Shiites in conflicts, were attacked in the November fighting by extremist Shiites and were forced to flee, according to Mr. Khan, a well-regarded political agent who was appointed last month to the area in an effort by the government to reduce tensions. This left the general Shiite population feeling more vulnerable to the Taliban, he said. But the ambush of the convoy last month proved the power of the Taliban, the displaced Shiites in Peshawar said. A driver of one of the trucks who survived, Asif Hussain, described being captured at Pir Qayyum, taken to a Taliban training camp in the village of Shasho, interrogated and then released after convincing his captors that he was not Shiite, but Sunni. \u201cAt the camp, the Taliban killed eight other drivers because they were Shia,\u201d said Mr. Hussain, 33, in a telephone interview from Parachinar. An official of the Pakistan Peoples Party from Parachinar, Mirza Jihadi, confirmed the existence of the Shasho camp, which, he said, is at a place where Afghan refugees used to live and is now controlled by loyalists of Mr. Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban. The displaced in Peshawar told stories of growing hardship at home, and they complained bitterly of the failure of the government to help. \u201cI want to go home but the government does not provide any transportation,\u201d said Mohib Ali, 45, at a hotel here, as he nursed a bandaged right arm that was wounded, he said, in fighting. He had spent the previous day at the Peshawar airport hoping to board a military helicopter that he had been told would take civilians back to Parachinar. But instead, he said, it filled up with soldiers returning after leave, and a few favored others with good contacts. The army garrison in the town had done little to help, and had failed to organize major food supplies, said Haji Gulab Hussain, a retired government official who leads a Shiite tribal council. \u201cThe lower-ranking soldiers are ready for any action,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the army is supporting the Taliban. There are no orders.\u201d During the November violence, he said, \u201cThe army did nothing.\u201d Parachinar has prided itself on the best education in the tribal areas since the British colonial era, so the closing of schools since the violence began is a special blow, some of the displaced said. Teachers were too afraid to travel, they said. The one hospital in Parachinar was left with only a few nurses. Basic medicines, including anesthesia equipment and oxygen, were depleted, according to a medic reached by telephone. Killings have demoralized the population. In the village of Bilyamin, 22 miles south of Parachinar, two students walking to their matriculation exams were shot dead by the Taliban, Mr. Bangash said. Some solace was coming from Afghanistan, the refugees said. A schoolboy, Ashfaq Hussain, 12, arrived in Peshawar on Tuesday after a two-day journey by car through Afghanistan to enroll at Islamia Collegiate School, a prestigious school here. \u201cWe can go through Afghanistan without a visa, it\u2019s a help,\u201d said his father, Sabir Hussain. But his son\u2019s travel to Peshawar by car via Afghanistan cost the equivalent of $50 over two days, instead of the usual $3 by bus in about five hours, he said. Much of the vegetable crop of potatoes and tomatoes that is normally sold to markets in the heart of Pakistan was now being sent to Kabul, Mr. Bangash said. More perishable fruits were wasted. After the disaster of the June convoy, Mr. Khan, the political agent, said he had a new plan to try to persuade moderate tribesmen, both Sunni and Shiite, who were now weary of the violence, to allow the opening of the 45-mile road that runs from the town of Thal along a deep, wide valley up to Parachinar. \u201cIt\u2019s been an intense year of warfare,\u201d he said. \u201cBoth sides are fed up.\u201d In Islamabad, Mr. Jihadi said the Interior Ministry had promised on Wednesday to resume flights by the government airline, Pakistan International Airways, to the airstrip in Parachinar, which had been abandoned long ago. To try to quash the Taliban, the ministry would urge the local tribes to form small armies, known as lashkar, he said. The ministry was also offering local people financial rewards, he said, if they killed a Taliban leader. But whether the army would take a role in the efforts to find a solution appeared to remain an open question.", "keyword": "Peshawar (Pakistan);Taliban;Shiite Muslims;Politics and Government;Afghanistan;Sunni Muslims;Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0270818", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/04/12", "title": "Pirates Beat Tigers as Justin Verlander Is Shelled", "abstract": "Justin Verlander has never been a big fan of April. That is why it was surprising when he took a no-hitter into the sixth inning of his season-opening start last week in Miami. On Monday, though, things got back to normal. Gregory Polanco had two of Pittsburgh\u2019s six doubles, and the Pirates chased Verlander in the fifth inning on the way to a 7-4 win over the host Detroit Tigers. Verlander (0-1) allowed seven runs and 10 hits \u2014 five of them doubles \u2014 in four and a third innings. Jon Niese (1-0) gave up four runs \u2014 three earned \u2014 and five hits in six innings. Mark Melancon pitched a one-hit ninth for his third save. ORIOLES 9, RED SOX 7 Chris Davis hit a tiebreaking, three-run homer off the new Boston closer Craig Kimbrel in the ninth inning and drove in five runs, carrying Baltimore over the Red Sox in David Ortiz\u2019s final home opener. Kimbrel (0-1), the All-Star reliever acquired in an off-season trade from San Diego, entered with the score tied at 6-6. He walked Caleb Joseph with one out and Manny Machado with two outs, then gave up Davis\u2019s home run to center. PADRES 4, PHILLIES 3 Alexi Amarista\u2019s safety squeeze in the seventh scored the go-ahead run as San Diego spoiled Philadelphia\u2019s home opener. Kevin Quackenbush (1-0) struck out the only batter he faced to earn the win after starter Andrew Cashner allowed three runs in five-plus innings. CARDINALS 10, BREWERS 1 Michael Wacha allowed four hits in six scoreless innings, and St. Louis had 10 extra-base hits while routing Milwaukee in the Cardinals\u2019 home opener. Jeremy Hazelbaker was 4 for 4 with a triple, double and sacrifice fly, lifting his average to .526, and his fellow rookie Aledmys Diaz had two doubles. WHITE SOX 4, TWINS 1 Austin Jackson hit a two-run, two-out single in the fourth inning, one pitch after just missing a grand slam, and Minnesota dropped to 0-7 with a loss in its home opener. Jose Quintana (1-0) completed six smooth innings with one run allowed for the White Sox, who have won five of their first seven. NATIONALS 6, BRAVES 4 Falling to 0-6 for the first time in nearly 30 years, Atlanta lost to host Washington, which overcame a shaky start by Max Scherzer. The Nationals\u2019 Wilson Ramos helped out with four singles and two R.B.I. Scherzer (1-0), who went six innings, won despite allowing two-run doubles to A. J. Pierzynski and Nick Markakis in the first two innings.", "keyword": "Baseball;Justin Verlander;Detroit Tigers;Pittsburgh Pirates"}
{"id": "ny0210758", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2017/01/04", "title": "Macy\u2019s Will Cut 10,000 Jobs After Poor Holiday Sales", "abstract": "Struggling with sagging sales over another crucial holiday shopping season, Macy\u2019s announced on Wednesday that it was eliminating more than 10,000 jobs as part of a continuing plan to cut costs and close 100 stores. Macy\u2019s, the country\u2019s largest department store chain, said sales at its stores had fallen 2.1 percent in November and December compared with the same period in 2015. Terry J. Lundgren, the company\u2019s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement that while the trend was \u201cconsistent with the lower end of our guidance, we had anticipated sales would be stronger.\u201d He attributed the decline to \u201cbroader challenges\u201d facing much of the retail industry. Consumers, who endured a long recession, have turned to low-cost chains like T. J. Maxx and shifted their spending away from brick-and-mortar stores for the convenience of online shopping with the retail giant Amazon. The announcement on Wednesday continued a trend for Macy\u2019s, which announced last January that it was eliminating about 4,500 jobs in a major restructuring. Then, too, it said slumping holiday season sales had hurt its bottom line. The company, which now has 730 stores, announced in August that it would close 100 of them. On Wednesday, it identified 68 stores to be closed. The 158,000-square-foot store in the Douglaston neighborhood of Queens, which opened in 1981, will close. Stores at the Marketplace Mall in Rochester; at the Oakdale Mall in Johnson City, N.Y., near Binghamton; and at the Preakness Shopping Center in Wayne, N.J., will close, the company said. Of the 68, three were closed by the middle of 2016, 63 will close in the spring and two will be closed by the middle of 2017. Three other locations were sold or are to be sold. The company said it planned to close about 30 other stores over the next few years. Some employees may be offered positions at nearby stores, but Macy\u2019s estimated that 3,900 workers would be affected by the closings. It also said it planned to restructure parts of its business, leading to a reduction of an additional 6,200 jobs. Over all, the job cuts represent about 7 percent of its work force. The company estimated that the changes would save about $550 million a year, starting in 2017. Mr. Lundgren said the company was closing stores that were \u201cunproductive or are no longer robust shopping destinations because of changes in the local retail shopping landscape.\u201d Other sites were being targeted for closing to take advantage of their highly valued real estate. The company, which owns the Macy\u2019s and Bloomingdale\u2019s brands, has been struggling with declining traffic in its stores, where the bulk of its business is still conducted. It plans to invest some of its savings in expanding its digital business. Macy\u2019s said it now expected to earn $2.95 to $3.10 per share on an adjusted basis for its 2016 fiscal year, compared with its prior forecast of $3.15 to $3.40 per share. Shares in Macy\u2019s fell nearly 10 percent to $32.30 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.", "keyword": "Layoffs;Retail;Closings;Macy's"}
{"id": "ny0116589", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2012/10/11", "title": "Sanchez Is the Starter for the Jets, Until He Isn\u2019t", "abstract": "FLORHAM PARK, N.J. \u2014 Mark Sanchez , who seems to be everyone\u2019s favorite target, took a spot in front of his locker, as he usually does on Wednesdays. He did not look, or sound, like a guy who was having a bad day, or month. \u201cStart winning, and we\u2019ll be all right,\u201d he said with his customary cheerfulness. Sanchez had taken subtle public hits within hours from not only Woody Johnson, the Jets \u2019 owner, but also his coach and staunchest defender, Rex Ryan , who had made a lukewarm pronouncement: Sanchez is the team\u2019s starter. This week. Barring injury. \u201cAnd things happen,\u201d Ryan said. Ryan did not elaborate on what that meant. But with the Jets at 2-3 and Sanchez not completing half his passes, Ryan was much less enthusiastic about Sanchez\u2019s future than he was last Nov. 18, after a loss to the Denver Broncos (and Tim Tebow ). That day, Ryan said of Sanchez, \u201cHe\u2019s going to be our quarterback for as long as I\u2019m here, which I hope is a long, long time.\u201d Ryan sounded a lot less sure about that Wednesday. His news conference started as it usually does, with an overview of the next opponent, the Indianapolis Colts, but then evolved into a discussion over semantics. At one point, a reporter pointed out to Ryan that if he did not want to make a similar pronouncement to last year\u2019s, he would have to answer questions every week about Sanchez\u2019s status. \u201cI got no problems answering questions each week,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cYou guys know me.\u201d Another reporter said, \u201cBut you\u2019ve gone from saying, \u2018he\u2019s our starter,\u2019 to, \u2018he\u2019s our starter this week,\u2019 \u2019 \u201cHe\u2019s our starter. What do you want me to say?\u201d Ryan said. \u201cIf he\u2019s our starter this week, he\u2019s our starter. You can go Answer A and Answer B and come up with C, I guess.\u201d On Tuesday, the day after the Jets lost to the Houston Texans, Ryan said there was no question that Sanchez was the starter. But that was a day before Johnson said in an interview with CNBC that he wanted to keep Tebow on the team through the 2014 season, when his contract expires. Johnson, who appeared on the cable channel to talk primarily about Mitt Romney\u2019s presidential campaign, said of Tebow, \u201cI think he\u2019s going to be a real valuable asset in terms of helping us win games.\u201d Johnson was also supportive of Sanchez, saying that he also had the ability to help the Jets win games. But when asked if that meant Sanchez would never be benched, Johnson replied, \u201cNever is a long, long time period.\u201d But there was some good news. Nick Mangold, the all-pro center who injured his right ankle in the third quarter of Monday\u2019s loss, said he was \u201chopeful\u201d \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m always hopeful,\u201d he said \u2014 that he would be able to play Sunday. Dustin Keller, the tight end who has been Sanchez\u2019s favorite receiver, is expected to return Sunday after missing the last four games with a hamstring injury. Stephen Hill, the rookie wide receiver, is also expected to return from a similar injury. Keller said of Sanchez, \u201cJust because of the time Mark and I have spent together, we kind of have that communication that makes it so much easier.\u201d Sanchez also did not seem bothered by answering a lot of questions about Ryan\u2019s tepid endorsement. Sanchez said of Ryan, \u201cHe has faith in me,\u201d and he added that he was not worried about losing his starting position. \u201cI\u2019m really not,\u201d he said. He has ways to block out the criticism. \u201cStick around the building, put blinders on, put earplugs in and keep playing,\u201d he said. There are more than sports channels to watch on television. \u201cThere\u2019s a power button,\u201d he added. Sanchez left the locker room, and shortly before it was closed to reporters, Tebow stepped in front of his locker and was surrounded by reporters. He said it meant a lot that Johnson had given him such a strong public endorsement. \u201cI\u2019m definitely someone who gets frustrated,\u201d Tebow said, \u201cbut I know my role here right now.\u201d But then, just a few minutes later, he said, \u201cYou never know what\u2019s going to happen in the future.\u201d EXTRA POINTS Matt Slauson, the Jets offensive lineman whose chop block Monday resulted in a season-ending knee injury to Houston linebacker Brian Cushing, said: \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate, but you know, it happens. I wasn\u2019t trying to hurt him, obviously. I must have caught him by surprise. Things like that happen.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Jets;Sanchez Mark;Johnson Woody;Ryan Rex;Tebow Tim;Football;Denver Broncos"}
{"id": "ny0052100", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/10/12", "title": "A Westchester School for Those Who Want to Train in the Circus Arts", "abstract": "Jenna Kavalchuk is a cardiac sonographer with the VA Hudson Valley Health Care System in Castle Point. She is also a daredevil, whose aerial feats inspire strangers to stop and shoot videos of her on their iPhones. They did so at the September installment of downtown Tarrytown\u2019s Third Friday Street Fair , where Ms. Kavalchuk, dressed in a purple leotard and black tights, hung upside-down from a sky-high rig hung with yards of purple silk. To the rhythms of Rose McGowan\u2019s version of \u201cYou Belong to Me,\u201d Ms. Kavalchuk glided, aloft, through a series of gymnastic tumbles. When she dismounted onto a small black mat on the Washington Street asphalt, she was met with applause and wolf whistles. It was her first time performing an aerial show. \u201cI was actually very nervous before I got up there,\u201d said Ms. Kavulchuk, 28, of Suffern, after her two-minute routine for an audience of about 100, made up mostly of families with young children. \u201cBut I think I did really well. I concentrated and I didn\u2019t make any mistakes, like getting caught in the fabric. By the time I got up there, I wasn\u2019t nervous at all. It felt great.\u201d Her sense of triumph, she said, was made possible by Westchester Circus Arts , a 2-year-old Tarrytown school offering instruction on everything found under the classic big top, from tightrope walking to the trapeze. Ms. Kavalchuk got the idea to try aerial performing after watching traditional burlesque shows in Manhattan. She has been taking aerial performing classes since March. \u201cI love it. I\u2019ve gotten very fit very quickly,\u201d she said. Westchester Circus Arts, operating in the gymnasium at the Y Early Learning Center, part of the Family Y.M.C.A. at Tarrytown , was formed in 2012 by Hilary Sweeney, 33, of Nyack, a former ballerina. She started dancing at age 5 in her hometown, Oxford, Mass., but discovered while in a pre-professional training program with the Boston Ballet that her body was ill-suited for such a career. Image Mikayla Nolan is a performer from Westchester Circus Arts. Credit Richard Getler \u201cSpecifically, it was my hips. I was born with my hips turned in, and I had to have both my legs broken and reset at birth to get me to walk straight,\u201d she said. \u201cBallet is an art form that requires perfect turnout. Even though I was yearning to do it professionally, I never really could.\u201d Then, in her early 20s, she saw a Cirque du Soleil performance. \u201cIt was ballet in the air. For me, it was transformational,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the circus, you didn\u2019t have to fit a mold. You could make your own mold.\u201d Ms. Sweeney did not run away and join the circus after that inspirational show. Instead, she graduated with a degree in neuroscience from Manhattanville College in Purchase in 2003, and went to work as a flavor chemist for PepsiCo in Valhalla. She developed her aerial skills through private training with professionals in Manhattan, Montreal and San Francisco and performed in shows such as Cirque Le Masque\u2019s \u201cCarnivale,\u201d and an Off Broadway production of \u201cAbove the Belt.\u201d In 2008 she began moonlighting as an aerial instructor at the Family Y.M.C.A. at Tarrytown. \u201cI was doing so much teaching and aerial performing on the side that it sort of took over my life,\u201d she said. \u201cI made a decision to leave the cubicle, which I was very wary of doing because there are so many unknowns. And a job with Pepsi is like a golden handcuff. But it was the best decision I ever made.\u201d The community\u2019s response to the classes, which are geared to everyone from kindergartners hoping to master juggling to adults who want to learn aerial skills, has been enthusiastic. Image Ms. Nolan in Tarrytown on Sept. 19. Credit Richard Getler \u201cThis was my second year doing summer camps, and both years we were full,\u201d with 40 campers, ages 5 to 18, per session, some traveling from as far away as Connecticut and Peekskill. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t been a hard sell,\u201d said Ms. Sweeney, who runs the school with a co-director, Carlo Pellegrini, also of Nyack. Mr. Pellegrini, 62, is a former ringmaster with the Big Apple Circus and the director and co-founder of Amazing Grace Circus , a nonprofit Tarrytown circus specializing in youth outreach. Both he and Ms. Sweeney teach at Westchester Circus Arts. Ms. Sweeney teaches aerial silks, which she said is the most popular class among adults. Mr. Pellegrini leads classes for children and teenagers, including \u201ccircus gym,\u201d a program with clowning and acrobatics for children five to eight, and \u201cvariety arts,\u201d including juggling, unicycle, stilts and other on-the-ground-tricks for children nine through 12. Four more instructors lead classes in trapeze, acrobatics and lyra , which involves a suspended spinning hoop used in aerial shows. Both Ms. Sweeney and Mr. Pellegrini offer private lessons; Ms. Sweeney in aerial arts and Mr. Pellegrini in juggling, clowning, vaudeville and human pyramid-making. Classes, though, are not the only way to experience Westchester Circus Arts. \u201cNevermore,\u201d a circus-theater show created by Ms. Sweeney and based on Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cThe Raven,\u201d will have its premiere in Sleepy Hollow, in a tent on Horan\u2019s Landing, Oct. 25 and 26. At the recent Tarrytown street festival, Mr. Pellegrini assembled and monitored the aerial rig, an A-shaped structure that looks like a swing set without the swings, while Ms. Sweeney played M.C. In addition to Ms. Kavalchuk, a handful of students from the school\u2019s \u201cteen troupe\u201d performed routines using the silks and lyra. Image Carlo Pellegrini, a former ringmaster with the Big Apple Circus, teaches at Westchester Circus Arts. Credit Richard Getler Among them was Tess Weitzner, 19, of Sleepy Hollow, whose feats of acrobatic derring-do using the lengths of purple silk left Jenny Mirchandani wide-eyed. Jenny, a 7-year-old from Cortlandt Manor, watched from the sidewalk with her mother, Tina. \u201cThis is the coolest gymnastics I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Jenny said. \u201cI mean ballet.\u201d Her reaction was a familiar one to Ms. Weitzner, who has performed with Westchester Circus Arts at several Third Fridays events. \u201cWhat I love about aerial is that it combines creativity with athleticism. It\u2019s graceful, and to me it\u2019s more creative than gymnastics,\u201d she said. Since she was in seventh grade, Ms. Weitzner has been training with Ms. Sweeney, but her fascination with the circus dates to a circus summer camp she attended at Purchase College as a 7-year-old. \u201cI\u2019ve just always loved the idea of it,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the circus is an incredibly tight-knit community. No one is hopeless in the circus. Even if you can\u2019t do a split on the silks, you can still learn to juggle or learn a clown act.\u201d Ms. Sweeney puts the allure of it in another way: \u201cThere\u2019s a sense of doing the impossible that\u2019s innate to the circus. A sense of amazement. Everybody wants that feeling, and we want to provide it.\u201d", "keyword": "Westchester Circus Arts;Acrobats;Circus;Tarrytown NY;Art;Westchester;Hilary Sweeney"}
{"id": "ny0126679", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/08/13", "title": "Nook Prices Cut as Barnes & Noble Expects New Kindle Fire From Amazon", "abstract": "Barnes & Noble cut prices on three models of its Nook e-reader and tablet devices on Sunday, ahead of the peak of back-to-school shopping and amid speculation that its rival, Amazon.com, was preparing to introduce a new version of its Kindle Fire tablet. Barnes & Noble, the largest American bookstore chain, said it had reduced the retail price of its Nook tablet with 16 gigabytes of memory to $199, from $249. The company also shaved $20 off its eight-gigabyte model, to $179. And Barnes & Noble lowered the price of its Nook Color by $20, to $149. The new prices went into effect on Sunday. The Nook has given the chain 27 percent of the American market for e-books, Barnes & Noble has said. Amazon is the market leader with about 60 percent of e-book and e-reader sales. Despite the popularity of the Nook devices, Barnes & Noble has had to cut prices a number of times to compete with Amazon. Earlier price reductions ate into Barnes & Noble\u2019s earnings. The company, which has bet its future on e-books, reported lower-than-expected revenue in its fourth fiscal quarter and said Nook revenue fell 10.5 percent. Signs at one Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan already reflected the new prices on Sunday.", "keyword": "Barnes & Noble Nook;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);E-Books and Readers"}
{"id": "ny0241798", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/03/18", "title": "Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them", "abstract": "One of the largest private organizations in the world dedicated to caring for former racehorses has been so slow or delinquent in paying for the upkeep of the more than 1,000 horses under its care that scores have wound up starved and neglected, some fatally, according to interviews and inspection reports. The group, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, is based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., just miles from the famous racetrack that annually hosts one of thoroughbred racing\u2019s premier meets. For years, it has received millions in donations from some pillars of the industry. But over the past two years, according to the foundation\u2019s financial disclosure documents, it has been operating at a deficit, and as a result has not reliably been paying the 25 farms it contracts with to oversee the retired horses. For example, at the 4-H Farm in Oklahoma, inspectors last month could find only 47 of the 63 retired horses that had been assigned to it. Many of those were starving. The rest had died, probably of neglect, inspectors concluded. Last week, at a Kentucky farm that is also supposed to receive money from the foundation, 34 horses were found in \u201cpoor\u201d or \u201cemaciated\u201d condition, inspectors found. One horse had to be euthanized because of malnutrition. It is unclear how many members of the foundation\u2019s blue-chip board of trustees might have been aware of the deteriorating quality of care the horses were receiving. But the foundation\u2019s biggest benefactor \u2014 the estate of the breeder and owner Paul Mellon \u2014 in recent years had become concerned about the growth of the foundation\u2019s herd after hearing the complaints of caretakers, and it investigated. The estate, which in 2001 established a $5 million endowment for the foundation and subsequently contributed $2 million more, last December requested that Stacey Huntington, a veterinarian based in Springfield, Mo., evaluate the foundation\u2019s herd. So far, Dr. Huntington, along with a local veterinarian in each location, has examined more than 700 horses at more than a dozen farms from Oklahoma to Kentucky and South Carolina. She found many examples of neglect and lack of support from the T.R.F. in her visits to the farms. \u201cWe have dug ourselves a big hole financially, and we\u2019re still behind,\u201d the foundation\u2019s president, George Grayson, said. \u201cIt\u2019s been a struggle to keep up with the costs associated with a large and aging horse population, at a time when the economy and giving is down. Everybody on the board takes any allegation seriously, and anything less than positive circumstances for the horses are unacceptable. When we\u2019ve been made aware of issues, we have responded quickly, and we will on this.\u201d The cases of neglect, while noteworthy because of the prominence of the organization overseeing the horses, are only the latest embarrassment for an industry that remains vexed by one of its most fundamental challenges: how to humanely look out for horses that no longer have any value at the racetrack or in the breeding shed. The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation was founded in 1984 to save racehorses no longer able to compete on the racetrack \u201cfrom possible neglect, abuse and slaughter,\u201d its mission statement says. It has been embraced by some of the biggest forces in the sport: the Jockey Club has given the foundation nearly $250,000 over the past two years, and individual owners \u2014 like Mike Repole, the co-founder of Glaceau water and the owner of the current Kentucky Derby favorite, Uncle Mo \u2014 have given sizable contributions as well. Over the years, the foundation\u2019s board has included some of the sport\u2019s most influential owners, and the farms it contracts with have been homes to many of the horses those owners have bred and campaigned. Beam Us Up, an accomplished racehorse bred by Richard Santulli, the former chief executive of NetJets, was recently removed from one of the contract farms because of neglect. Santulli\u2019s wife, Peggy, is on the T.R.F. board. The findings of the veterinarian hired by the Mellon estate, Dr. Huntington, moved the estate\u2019s trustees to send the farms money for things as basic as food. She found that some 25 percent of the horses have required some kind of urgent care, which the Mellon estate has provided, costing it \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of dollars, said Ted Terry, one of its trustees. Dr. Huntington found that the foundation\u2019s education of the caretakers and oversight of their farms had been poor. At one farm, Dr. Huntington said, the horses were being fed cattle feed that contained a toxic element. \u201cThe horses are getting the short end of the stick from this group that advertises itself as advocates of horses,\u201d Dr. Huntington said. The most dramatic instance of neglect discovered so far, she said, was at the 4-H Farm in Okmulgee, Okla., where the owners, Alan and Janice Hudgins, would not let Dr. Huntington onto their property to inspect T.R.F. horses until the foundation gave them $20,000, a partial payment of what was owed them for taking care of 63 horses since 2005. They also forced the foundation to sign a pledge not to prosecute them for the condition of the horses. When the horses were released, the 47 survivors were in such poor condition that Dr. Huntington filed a report with the Okmulgee County sheriff\u2019s office. Her report included photographs of the malnourished horses, three of them considered starving. Nearly all of them needed urgent care. Ms. Hudgins said her farm had kept horses for the foundation since 2005, but in recent years it fell into a pattern of falling behind in payments. In a tough economy with rising fuel and feed costs, Ms. Hudgins said her family got tired of having to settle for less than they were owed by the foundation. She said they had done the best they could with the horses, and had informed the T.R.F. that some older horses had died. The foundation ran a $1.2 million deficit in 2009, according to its most recent tax filings with the federal government, three times the total in its previous filing. Its inability to pay the agreed costs for the care of its horses severed a number of relationships with farms, including Claybank Farm in Lexington, Ky., which cared for up to 80 horses. Interviews with farm owners, as well as e-mail correspondence they provided, showed the foundation was aware of its deepening financial straits \u2014 occasionally taking horses from farms where they had been well cared for and placing them elsewhere on the cheap. Last September, the T.R.F. owed Out2Pasture Farms in Jamestown, Mo., more than $43,000, The farm, run by two University of Missouri professors, Zachary and Robin Hurst-March, is one of the nation\u2019s most highly regarded sanctuaries for thoroughbreds. When the couple pressed for payment, the T.R.F. asked them to reduce their per diem to $3 a day and eventually removed 13 of their horses. \u201cI was being emotionally blackmailed to lower my per diem, and was the subject of retribution because I questioned the care of the horses,\u201d said Mrs. Hurst-Marsh, who is owed $10,000. When Gayle England, whose farm in Stroud, Okla., is also highly regarded as a special-care facility, complained not only of the chronic slow pay but the general lack of regard for the farms and the horses, 26 T.R.F. horses were taken from her. Last month, some of the horses in the worst shape were taken from other foundation farms and returned to the Hurst-Marsh farm and Ms. England. In fact, one of the 14 horses moved to England\u2019s farm with the help and funding of the Mellon Estate had to be put down. \u201cThey were making their administrative payroll this whole time, but the horses they were suffering,\u201d Ms. England said. \u201cThey need to be held accountable.\u201d Mr. Terry, a Mellon estate trustee, said he still does not know what went wrong. \u201cWe don\u2019t know if it was bad judgment, taking on too many horses or bad decisions made internally,\u201d he said. \u201cEventually, we\u2019re going to have to ask ourselves if we are throwing good money after bad.\u201d", "keyword": "Horse Racing;Philanthropy;Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation;Cruelty to Animals;Malnutrition"}
{"id": "ny0032681", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/12/18", "title": "Tech Leaders and Obama Find Shared Problem: Fading Public Trust", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama met with top technology industry executives on Tuesday to discuss two seemingly distinct controversies: a faulty health care website, and the digital surveillance practices of the National Security Agency. The meeting started with an announcement by Mr. Obama that he was reaching into the ranks of Microsoft, the software giant, to select Kurt DelBene as the next person to run HealthCare.gov. But the focus quickly turned from the health care site to the concerns of Apple, Microsoft, Google and other technology companies about the spying efforts, the latest illustration of the strained relationship between an industry and a White House that had long been close. For months, leading technology companies have been buffeted by revelations about government spying on their customers\u2019 data, which they believe are undermining confidence in their services. The Obama administration has been blasted for the botched rollout of the health site, which prevented many people from signing up for health insurance in the first weeks of the site\u2019s introduction, but seem to have been largely repaired since then. The meeting on Tuesday brought those two issues together into a common forum, and at least partly in the public eye. \u201cBoth sides are saying, \u2018My biggest issue right now is trust,\u2019 \u201d said Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of CloudFlare, an Internet start-up. \u201cIf you\u2019re on the White House side, the issue is they\u2019re getting beaten up because they\u2019re seen as technically incompetent. On the other side, the tech industry needs the White House right now to give a stern rebuke to the N.S.A. and put in real procedures to rein in a program that feels like it\u2019s out of control.\u201d The meeting of Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and 15 executives from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo came a week after those companies and other giants, usually archrivals, united in a public campaign calling for reform in government surveillance practices. On Monday, a federal district judge ruled that the N.S.A. sweep of data from all Americans\u2019 phone calls was unconstitutional , a ruling that added import to the discussions. \u201cWe appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform,\u201d the executives said in a statement afterward. The chief executives invited to the White House included Timothy D. Cook of Apple, Dick Costolo of Twitter, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Eric E. Schmidt of Google, Brian L. Roberts of Comcast, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Randall Stephenson of AT&T and Reed Hastings of Netflix. Also there were Bradford L. Smith, executive vice president and general counsel of Microsoft, and Erika Rottenberg, vice president and general counsel of LinkedIn. The exchange, which both the White House and attendees from the technology industry said was cordial, lasted about two hours, more than twice as long as scheduled. Image Kurt DelBene, a longtime Microsoft executive, was appointed Tuesday to run HealthCare.gov. Credit Paul Sakuma/Associated Press But even before the meeting, there were some differences about where the discussion would be headed, especially as the White House indicated that the top item on the agenda for discussion be improvements to HealthCare.gov. \u201cFrom our perspective, this was all about the N.S.A.,\u201d said one person from the tech industry briefed on the meeting who wasn\u2019t authorized to speak publicly about it. \u201cWe all want Healthcare.gov to succeed, but it is not key to our business.\u201d But Mr. Obama was also there to name Mr. DelBene, a longtime Microsoft executive, as the new fix-it manager of Healthcare.gov. Mr. DelBene, who joined Microsoft in 1992, was president of the company\u2019s lucrative Office division for nearly three years. Mr. DelBene announced his retirement from Microsoft earlier this year, and his last day at the company was Monday. He starts his new job Wednesday, succeeding the initial manager, Jeffrey D. Zients. In February, a month later than initially planned, Mr. Zients will shift to his previously announced job as Mr. Obama\u2019s chief White House economic adviser, the director of the National Economic Council. Mr. DelBene will stay at least through the first half of 2014; his wife, Suzan DelBene, also was a Microsoft executive but was elected in 2012 to Congress as a Democrat representing the Washington State district where Microsoft has its headquarters. The discussion on Tuesday quickly turned to the controversy over the N.S.A.\u2019s intelligence-gathering, which has mounted since leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden began emerging last summer. More recent revelations that the N.S.A. is accessing data from Google and Yahoo services without their knowledge was also discussed, according to technology executives briefed on the meeting who asked not to be named. The technology companies raised some specific concerns about that the government\u2019s spying efforts. Several executives, including Ms. Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, expressed concerned that foreign countries may now decide to prevent all the user data generated by users in a foreign country from flowing to the United States, the people said. One such law has been proposed in Brazil. The executives said these laws would significantly hurt their businesses and America\u2019s start-up economy. The administration listened to executives\u2019 concerns, but made no commitments, these people said. The one topic the administration seemed most sympathetic to was the web companies\u2019 call for greater transparency around government surveillance requests, according to these people. It was the one issue nearly everyone in the room seemed most aligned on. The administration told executives that government action related to N.S.A. surveillance would happen in the new year, but there was no indication of what that meant and more precisely when it would occur. \u201cThis was an opportunity for the president to hear from C.E.O.\u2019s directly,\u201d the White House said in a statement about the meeting, adding, \u201cThe president made clear his belief in an open, free and innovative Internet and listened to the group\u2019s concerns and recommendations, and made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs.\u201d The meeting reflected a shift in the tech sector\u2019s once-close relationship with Mr. Obama, whose 2008 election many industry executives generously supported. After the troubled start of the health care site, the Obama administration tapped a small group of engineers, who took leave from various technology companies to help with the effort. That group included Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google who had also worked on Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign. \u201cThe government really needs the tech industry to achieve its policy goals,\u201d said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. \u201cThey tried on their own with the Washington version of tech and we saw what happened.\u201d", "keyword": "Government Surveillance;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Barack Obama;NSA;Kurt D DelBene;HealthCare.gov"}
{"id": "ny0100745", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2015/12/29", "title": "Predators Send Rangers to Fourth Loss in Five Games", "abstract": "James Neal scored twice, Mike Ribeiro had three assists and the Predators held off the Rangers, 5-3, in Nashville on Monday night. Filip Forsberg, Craig Smith and Ryan Ellis also scored for the Predators, who won for the third time in four games. Roman Josi added two assists, and Pekka Rinne had 26 saves. Jesper Fast, Rick Nash and J. T. Miller had goals for the Rangers, who lost for the fourth time in five games. Forsberg scored the first goal with 1 minute 4 seconds left in the first period. With Nashville on a power play, Josi sent a pass from the right boards to Forsberg on the left face-off dot, where he sent a one-timer by goaltender Henrik Lundqvist on the stick side. Fast tied the game at 6:59 of the second. Standing in the low slot, he deflected Dan Girardi\u2019s shot from the right point between Rinne\u2019s pads. Girardi returned to the Rangers\u2019 lineup after missing five games with a small crack in his right kneecap. Nashville regained the lead at 13:48 of the second on Neal\u2019s 14th of the season. From the high slot, he beat Lundqvist with a wrist shot that glanced off the left post. Smith gave Nashville a two-goal lead at 7:34 of the third when he tipped home Josi\u2019s shot from the high slot. That goal came just 2:16 after Forsberg appeared to make it 3-1 at 5:18 with a shot from behind the Rangers\u2019 net, but the goal was overturned when the Rangers challenged and it was ruled that Smith had interfered with Lundqvist. Ellis scored at 9:52 of the third on Nashville\u2019s second power-play goal of the night. Neal scored his second of the game at 11:13. Lundqvist was relieved by Antti Raanta following Neal\u2019s second goal. Lundqvist made 30 saves on 35 shots against. Nash scored an unassisted goal at 13:20, and Miller added a goal at 16:02. Rangers defenseman Kevin Klein, a former Predator, returned to the lineup after missing 11 games with an oblique injury. CAPITALS 2, SABRES 0 Braden Holtby made 31 saves, and Alex Ovechkin scored his 18th goal to lead visiting Washington over Buffalo for its eighth straight win. The Capitals, who lead the Eastern Conference, improved to 27-6-2, the best start in franchise history. Sabres forward Evander Kane played for the first time since The Buffalo News reported that the Buffalo police were investigating a sex-crime allegation against him. Kane spoke to reporters at a morning skate Monday for about 30 seconds, saying that he had done nothing wrong and was looking forward to having his name cleared. CANADIENS 4, LIGHTNING 3 Max Pacioretty delivered in the third round of a shootout as Montreal ended a six-game losing streak with a victory over host Tampa Bay. Brian Flynn also scored in the shootout for the Canadiens, who got goals from Tomas Plekanec, Alex Galchenyuk and Dale Weise. WILD 3, RED WINGS 1 Mikko Koivu scored twice, Devan Dubnyk made 28 saves in a surprise appearance, and Minnesota beat visiting Detroit. Dubnyk sustained a cut on his arm in practice Sunday and required stitches. He was expected to sit, but Darcy Kuemper was scratched with an upper-body injury about an hour before the game.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Alex Ovechkin;Washington Capitals;Rangers;Nashville Predators"}
{"id": "ny0109486", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/05/07", "title": "Knicks\u2019 Playoff Slump Finally Ends", "abstract": "For all the baggage inherited and hauled around, all the mishaps endured or missteps taken, the Knicks deserved one. If for no other reason that they showed up battered and bandaged, they merited an endgame buzzer that put a bounce in their steps and teeth in their smiles. They earned the streamers that fell from the Madison Square Garden rafters, a spontaneous celebration of sheer \u2014 and mere \u2014 survival. \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to be a winner in the playoffs \u2014 I can finally say that,\u201d the second-year Knick Landry Fields said after Miami\u2019s Dwyane Wade misfired on what would have been a series-ending 3-pointer from the right corner and the Knicks broke their 11-year playoff victory drought, 89-87. \u201cIt feels good.\u201d It also seems almost inconceivable that a big-market franchise that spends as much money as the Knicks have from year to year could go so long without winning a measly postseason game. In the N.B.A. only the Charlotte Bobcats have failed to notch a playoff victory in that time and they have had the excuse of not existing before 2004 and more recently being run on a shoestring tied to Michael Jordan\u2019s Nikes. The Knicks had last outscored a playoff opponent \u2014 the Toronto Raptors \u2014 on April 29, 2001. They had lost 13 straight until the Heat , leading the Eastern Conference series 3-0, contributed 11 missed free throws and 41 percent shooting to a philanthropic cause known as the long-suffering Knicks fan. Think about it: that last Knicks playoff victory came before 9/11, before the start of the war in Afghanistan. The drought easily exceeded America\u2019s other marathon military action in Iraq. It consumed the better part of three presidential terms. It preceded Apple\u2019s unveiling of the iPod in October 2001 and extended beyond the invention of the iPad . The Los Angeles Lakers won four championships between Knicks playoff victories and the San Antonio Spurs claimed three. The New England Patriots\u2019 three-title dynasty in the N.F.L. happened and Eli Manning arrived in New Jersey in 2004 and won two titles for the Giants. Alex Rodriguez began a three-year run with the Texas Rangers the same month of the Knicks\u2019 previous playoff triumph and has since played what feels like a lifetime \u2014 this being his ninth season \u2014 with the Yankees. And through all of the head-spinning events that spanned the globe, through so much dysfunction that enveloped the Knicks from regimes fronted by Scott Layden, then Isiah Thomas, then Donnie Walsh, Knicks fans kept showing up, filling the building. They have dealt with continuing change, embarrassing behavioral episodes, outrageous ticket price increases and other miseries foisted on them by the Family Dolan while waiting for something good to happen, for the streamers to come down. Yes, of course, fans had championship aspirations more in mind. But considering the alternatives, they took what they could get early Sunday night. They watched Carmelo Anthony finally finish his one-man show with a flourish and with 41 points that sent the Knicks off to Miami for Game 5 on Wednesday night, more crippled than ever but contemplating a miracle. Easy to please, the fans forgave Amar\u2019e Stoudemire\u2019s attempted smackdown of a fire extinguisher casing after Game 2 in Miami and roared for his 20 points and 10 rebounds as at least partial redemption. They chanted \u201cBaron Davis\u201d as the team\u2019s latest casualty \u2014 a Knick for all of four months and change \u2014 was carried off on a stretcher and out of the series with a dislocated kneecap. Down to Mike Bibby, who delivered a clutch 3-pointer late in the game, at the point, the fans readied themselves for the next news cycle preoccupation, a possible return of Jeremy Lin, or Linsanity itself, to take more heat to South Beach. \u201cHe seems to be moving well, real well,\u201d Fields said of Lin\u2019s recent workouts, already stoking the story. \u201cI hope so, although it\u2019s up to the doctors and him.\u201d Knicks fans will wait three days with bated breath. They will interpret Wade\u2019s inability to exploit the defensive switch that left the vulnerable Stoudemire on him \u2014 \u201cI lost control of the ball and had to take it out for 3,\u201d Wade said \u2014 as a sign of something, anything, that might bring them back to the Garden on Friday night. Maybe the Heat will start to hear footsteps or have a player go down; that seems to be in the air this playoff season. Wade, for one, had his ankles in ice after Sunday\u2019s game. Bottom line: don\u2019t tell Knicks fans \u2014 that ever loyal band of wishful thinkers and Anthony worshipers \u2014 that no N.B.A. team has ever recovered from a 0-3 playoff deficit. Not after they finally left a playoff game without having to curse the fates while finding the rationalization to still care. \u201cIt was a great win for us and our fans to get over the hump,\u201d Stoudemire said. \u201cTo finally get over the hump now and win a game today is great.\u201d It was now or not until next year for the Knicks, several of whom won\u2019t be back, and their fans, most of whom certainly will return just as they have season after deflating season. They all earned the win Sunday. But all things considered, the paying sufferers in the stands deserved it more.", "keyword": "Basketball;New York Knicks;Playoff Games;Stoudemire Amar'e;Anthony Carmelo;Miami Heat"}
{"id": "ny0031608", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/06/15", "title": "Court in Venezuela Orders Release of a Judge Once Scorned and Jailed by Ch\u00e1vez", "abstract": "During the three and a half years that she was held in prison or under house arrest, Judge Lourdes Afiuni became a symbol of political persecution for many in Venezuela under President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. On Friday, a court in Caracas, acting at the government\u2019s request, ordered Ms. Afiuni to be set free in the latest sign of a shifting political landscape in post-Ch\u00e1vez Venezuela. Ms. Afiuni was jailed in December 2009 after issuing a court ruling that infuriated Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, who went on television and demanded that she be sentenced to 30 years in prison. For years Mr. Ch\u00e1vez ignored international appeals for her release, including from the American leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky. Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, a charismatic socialist, died in March, leaving a bitterly divided country. His handpicked successor, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, was elected by a slim margin in April and since then has confronted political turmoil and serious economic difficulties that have tested his nascent leadership skills. As Mr. Maduro lurches from one crisis to the next, the quality he seems to have honed most is delivering mixed messages at top volume. He branded President Obama \u201cthe big boss of the devils\u201d and then sent his foreign minister to shake hands with Secretary of State John Kerry and call for warmer relations. He assailed capitalists for causing soaring inflation and rampant product shortages and then sat down with the head of the country\u2019s biggest private company to discuss the economy. And while he has relentlessly vilified the political opposition and the man he edged out in the election, Henrique Capriles Radonski, as traitors and coup plotters, his government has made some moves that could be seen as concessions to longstanding grievances of the opposition, which has been demanding Ms. Afiuni\u2019s release. \u201cThere are lots of mixed signals,\u201d said Elsa Cardozo, a professor of political science at the Central University of Venezuela. \u201cIt is clear the government of President Maduro is in a situation that is forcing it to make some changes in direction. What we don\u2019t know is if they are permanent changes or tactical changes.\u201d But while government opponents have long called for Ms. Afiuni\u2019s release, the action may actually be intended to counter an opposition campaign to take its message abroad, with leaders visiting countries around the world to make the case that Mr. Maduro was unfairly declared the winner of a flawed election and that his government is repressive. The opposition routinely points to Ms. Afiuni as the most prominent among a group of what it calls political prisoners, who it says were jailed arbitrarily or were convicted in politically motivated trials. \u201cI view it as a sign from the government to the outside world, the international community, that it is trying to show that it is respectful of human rights,\u201d Jos\u00e9 Vicente Haro, a constitutional law expert, said of Ms. Afiuni\u2019s release. Ms. Afiuni was arrested after she ordered a jailed businessman accused of evading currency controls freed while awaiting trial. She has said that the man had been held in custody for longer than Venezuelan law generally permitted under the circumstances and that her ruling complied with a recommendation by United Nations human rights monitors. Her lawyer, Jos\u00e9 Amalio Graterol, confirmed reports last year that she was raped while in prison, became pregnant and had an abortion, which led to other health problems. She was moved to house arrest in Caracas in 2011. Ms. Afiuni\u2019s trial began last November and is continuing, although she has refused to attend it. Last week the national prosecutor\u2019s office made a surprise announcement that it had asked a court to release Ms. Afiuni from house arrest, citing her need for medical treatment. The prosecutor asked the court to require her to report to the authorities every 15 days and to bar her from leaving the country and speaking to the news media. \u201cA judge never should have been imprisoned for three years and six months for issuing a decision in accordance with the law,\u201d Ms. Afiuni\u2019s lawyer, Mr. Graterol, said Friday, adding that her case had intimidated other judges who feared defying the government.", "keyword": "Lourdes Afiuni;Caracas;Nicolas Maduro;Hugo Chavez;Political prisoner;Venezuela"}
{"id": "ny0169861", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2007/04/14", "title": "Republican Candidates Set Fast Pace for Spending", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, April 13 \u2014 Mitt Romney , whose presidential campaign leads the Republican primary field in fund-raising, spent nearly 60 percent of the $20.7 million he raised in the first quarter, setting a breakneck pace for the start of the 2008 race. Rudolph W. Giuliani , the runner-up in fund-raising among the Republicans , spent more than 40 percent of the $13.8 million his campaign brought in, leaving both candidates with roughly the same amount in the bank as of the beginning of April. Their expenses, disclosed Friday in first-quarter financial reports filed with the Federal Election Commission , underscore the heavy costs that each candidate has incurred to bring in their contributions and, in Mr. Romney\u2019s case, raise his profile among voters. Mr. Romney, for his part, spent more than any candidate had even raised during this stage of the 2004 presidential race. He spent $11.6 million during the quarter. The reports also indicate the relatively narrow base of big donors behind each of the Republican primary\u2019s two fund-raising leaders. Mr. Romney raised about $9.2 million, nearly half his first-quarter total, from about 4,000 contributors who gave the maximum $2,300 allowed under campaign finance laws. Mr. Giuliani\u2019s primary campaign raised about $7.6 million, more than half its total, from about 3,300 donors who paid the maximum. About 430 gave an additional $2,300 to Mr. Giuliani\u2019s general election fund, as well. With 32,000 donors, Mr. Romney\u2019s average contribution was about $650. With about 28,000 donors, Mr. Giuliani\u2019s average contribution was over $500. In contrast, the campaign of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, had 50,000 donors. The campaign of Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, had more than 100,000. Both had average contributions of about $250 a donor, based on their disclosures so far. The first-quarter reports are the first look at the scramble for money behind the 2008 presidential race. For the first time since the advent of public financing of presidential campaigns in the aftermath of Watergate, all the leading candidates are planning to reject public matching funds to spend without limits for the primary and the general election. Unlike the case before public financing, election laws now cap individual contributions \u2014 this year at $2,300 each for the primary and the general election \u2014 placing special importance on so-called bundlers who collect $2,300 checks from rich friends and associates. Candidates are required to file their reports by Sunday. Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani\u2019s campaigns chose to file two days ahead of that deadline. Mr. Giuliani\u2019s campaign filed in the morning, presumably to maximize attention to the amount of cash he has on hand. Dependence on a relatively small number of donors who have already contributed the maximum to the campaign could be a potential liability in part because it could make it hard for candidates to sustain their fund-raising pace. Candidates with a larger number of smaller contributors can go back to them again for more cash, and they can also cite their donor rolls as evidence of popular support. The Romney and Giuliani campaign reports provide snapshots of their respective candidacies. Mr. Romney began the campaign little known outside of Massachusetts, where he was governor; Michigan, where his father was governor; and Utah, where he was chief executive of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. And as he stepped forward to introduce himself to Republican primary voters, he came under fire from the right for past liberal stances on social issues like abortion (he says his views evolved). Mr. Romney had substantial financial resources. He is the multimillionaire founder of a major private equity firm, and his personal wealth gives his campaign a reserve if needed. (To jump-start his fund-raising, he lent the campaign $2.35 million.) His family is among the best-known in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, enabling him to tap networks of rich Mormons, as well as Wall Street financiers. He raised about $2.8 million in Utah, $2.3 million in Massachusetts and $1 million in Michigan \u2014 about 30 percent of his total. He raised more than $140,000 from executives of his former companies, Bain consulting and Bain Capital. Mr. Romney used his war chest to spend nearly $2 million on television advertising in selected states, much more than any of his primary rivals, to introduce himself to voters on his own terms before others could characterize him. He also spent heavily on fund-raising consultants in 16 states, for example paying more than $200,000 to buy a list of potential donors from a Virginia direct mail firm. Mr. Giuliani\u2019s greatest asset, in contrast, is the fame he acquired as the mayor of New York after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In a conference call to discuss the fund-raising report, Mr. Giuliani\u2019s aides noted that they had raised most of their campaign contributions, about $10 million, in the last month of the quarter. They acknowledged a late start in spending and fund-raising, but said the big March demonstrated their momentum. Mr. Giuliani\u2019s first-quarter report did little to address the question of whether he can extend his reputation for strength under fire into deeper support from Republican primary voters in other parts of the country, where his liberal views on social issues are not yet well known. Mr. Giuliani raised more than 30 percent of his first-quarter contributions from three states, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with about $4.5 million coming from the New York area and $1.3 million from Los Angeles. Employees of Mr. Giuliani\u2019s law and consulting firms gave about $77,000. The rest of the presidential candidates are expected to file their reports over the weekend. In anticipation of new scrutiny, Mr. Obama, who raised $25 million during the first quarter, disclosed Friday that his campaign had returned 49 political contributions totaling $50,566 from registered lobbyists. Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign has promised to refuse contributions from registered lobbyists. Accepting such donations is legal, and the Obama campaign has sought contributions from the clients of lobbyists or other interest parties. But the campaign has declared the ban on lobbyists\u2019 money to burnish Mr. Obama\u2019s image as a candidate intent on changing the business of Washington. The campaign said the checks were accepted inadvertently. \u201cGiving back these donations is part of our best efforts to ensure we stay true to our commitment to not take money from federal lobbyists,\u201d Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman, said. \u201cAs we\u2019ve said and as this illustrates, this policy isn\u2019t a perfect solution to the problem of money and politics and special interest sway in Washington.\u201d", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2008;Romney Mitt;Giuliani Rudolph W;Republican Party;Federal Election Commission"}
{"id": "ny0243506", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2011/03/24", "title": "Google\u2019s Next Stop May Be in Congress", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Now that a judge has curtailed Google \u2019s ambitions to create a giant digital bookstore and library, the company is left with few appealing options. Google and groups representing publishers and authors were assessing their options Wednesday, trying to figure out whether they would remain allies or become enemies again. The two sides seemed unlikely to agree on a new settlement. Their original settlement, which would have let Google scan and make available every book ever published, was rejected by a federal judge Tuesday, the latest twist in a seven-year legal process. Instead, Google may take the battle from the courtroom to Congress, to promote a law that would make orphan works \u2014 books that are still under copyright but whose author or copyright owner can\u2019t be found \u2014 widely available. \u201cThe publishers have said, \u2018We want to settle,\u2019 but Google\u2019s motivation to settle is quite a bit lower,\u201d said Pamela Samuelson, an expert in digital copyright law at the University of California, Berkeley, who has opposed the settlement. Still, she said, Google, which has already scanned 15 million books, is unlikely to give up. \u201cThe next thing to do is think about going to Congress and getting legislation that would make particularly orphan works available to the public,\u201d she said. Aside from appealing the decision of the judge, Denny Chin , publishers and authors have several choices. They could drop or revive their original copyright lawsuit against Google, which claimed that even Google\u2019s more modest initial plan to scan books and show snippets of their text was illegal. Those issues have never been litigated. Dropping the suit seems unlikely given the amount of money and time the publishers have already invested in the fight, said people briefed on the negotiations but who were not authorized to discuss them publicly because they were confidential. Several analysts said the publishers would like to avoid going to court. Another option, which publishers and authors said Wednesday was attractive to them, would be to reach a new settlement with Google that requires each author or copyright owner to opt in and permit Google to digitize their works. Judge Chin said that many of his concerns would be ameliorated if the parties came to this agreement. \u201cWe\u2019d love to sit down with our negotiating partners and arrive at a very quick solution,\u201d said Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, which was a party to the original settlement. \u201cBut given the complexity of this, the Cubs might win the World Series before this is resolved.\u201d Google, which declined to discuss the case on Wednesday, has called the opt-in solution unworkable. Google would not be interested in such an agreement because it already allows publishers to join with Google to show more of their digitized works, and the point of the original settlement was to automatically opt in vast quantities of books, said people briefed on the settlement who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. The settlement also would have given Google exclusive access to millions of orphan works. By agreeing to an opt-in arrangement, Google would lose those books because there are no clear copyright owners to opt in. Scholars estimate that half of all books may be orphans. These range from privately published autobiographies to books that are vital for academics and researchers and are stored in university libraries. Congress has twice considered legislation to address orphan works, spurred on by a 2006 report by the United States Copyright Office that recommended free use of orphan works if there had been a diligent search for the owner. But the legislation was stymied because policy makers were waiting for the outcome of the Google Books settlement, Professor Samuelson said. Judge Chin pointed to such efforts in his ruling , saying that \u201cthe establishment of a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books is a matter more suited for Congress than this court.\u201d Advocates of open access to orphan works cheered the rejection of the settlement, saying it could pave the way for legislation that would let anyone \u2014 not just Google \u2014 use the books.. \u201cIf Congress can wake up to the importance of this issue, there\u2019s a good chance they will pass orphan books legislation, and they will do so in the interest of the general public, not favoring any enterprise,\u201d said Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, who is helping to lead a project to create a nonprofit digital library. Google has endorsed such legislation in the past, and people briefed on the negotiations said they expected Google to now aggressively pursue it in Congress. That might be the only thing all sides agree on, said Hadrian R. Katz, a lawyer who argued against Google on behalf of his client, the Internet Archive. \u201cI think there\u2019d be a renewed effort to get that kind of legislation, which would probably be in everybody\u2019s interest,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Google Book Search;Chin Denny;Book Trade and Publishing;Copyrights and Copyright Violations;Google Inc;Law and Legislation"}
{"id": "ny0189050", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/05/04", "title": "Banks Are Prevailing in a Tug of War", "abstract": "Informed debate is a crucial part of public policy development. But the behind-the-scenes tug of war between banks and the government over the results of their recent stress tests strains the already tenuous credibility of the exercise. It also shows that banks have become too powerful. How so? First, banks and their regulators run stress tests all the time, on individual products, divisions and the institutions as a whole. Without them, it would be very difficult to manage risk or allocate capital among business lines. The current crisis proved these tests were inadequate \u2014 or in some cases, ignored by bank managers. But that\u2019s largely because of management incentives to take excessive risks, and the failure of the tests to use sufficiently grim projections. So it\u2019s curious that regulators have put so much stock in the tests they announced in February. The release of their results has been delayed while banks ask for clemency. Since the results will determine which institutions will be forced to raise private capital or take further government infusions, the stakes are high. But like the banks\u2019 earlier and insufficiently stressful stress tests, the government\u2019s worst-case outlooks aren\u2019t all that far-fetched. They also use banks\u2019 own estimates, meaning unscrupulous managers could tweak them to get a better grade. And bankers say they\u2019ll produce very little information that regulators don\u2019t already have. Because of this, bank risk managers (not the most credible group these days) tend to view these tests as a public relations stunt that regulators will use to force their institutions to toe Uncle Sam\u2019s line. That, in itself, is worrying. Regulators shouldn\u2019t have to invent justifications for regulating properly. The right response by a bank when its overseer says jump is, \u201cHow high?\u201d That regulators are wrangling with banks over the results of these tests shows that they are not confident in their ability to understand the institutions. That gives banks too much power because regulators are forced to rely on many of their assertions about, say, complex products\u2019 values. It would be better for watchdogs to demand that they reduce their complexity to comprehensible levels. Otherwise the banks will retain the upper hand and no amount of testing will be sufficient to diagnose their problems. May Day\u2019s Softer Side \u201cWhat the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.\u201d Stirring words, but they won\u2019t be on the lips of the union protesters clogging the streets of big European cities on Monday, the May Day bank holiday. If the marchers want a rallying cry relevant to the current crisis of capitalism, they won\u2019t find it in the grim conclusion to Marx\u2019s Communist Manifesto. The worst recession in decades might have been expected to spawn more widespread violence than it has. European unemployment is up sharply, to 8.9 percent in the euro zone and 17.4 percent in Spain. There are now 14 million nonworkers in the euro zone. But these seemingly alarming rates of unemployment aren\u2019t exceptional by the standards of the last two decades. And while unemployment can be hard on those it affects, Europe\u2019s jobless don\u2019t seem to be suffering enough to do much more than moan. Unemployment benefits are generous, health care is widely available, homelessness is minimal. Unemployment has lost it stigma as well as its sting. The jobless include many with a socially acceptable reason for being out of work \u2014 early retirement, extended education, widening definitions of disability, or just taking a break. That may explain why governments have to prod hard to get people back to work. But the complacency of nonworkers cuts both ways. It is frustrating, in that their return to the labor force would help restore economic balance by lowering wages and reducing the burden on government. But the relative lack of violence is also a sign of economic success. In precapitalist days, a downturn meant famine. Industrial workers were often destitute in Marx\u2019s time. If this crisis is the worst that modern capitalism can manage, then bosses, workers and nonworkers should really unite on May Day to celebrate. DWIGHT CASS and EDWARD HADAS", "keyword": "Banks and Banking;Obama Financial Stability Plan;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0031366", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2013/06/06", "title": "France Dares to Dream as Tsonga Defeats Federer", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga\u2019s surprisingly straightforward 7-5, 6-3, 6-3 quarterfinal victory over Roger Federer on Tuesday at the French Open could be seen through two different lenses. It could be seen through the lens of a Federer analyst, who now has more confirmation than ever of a great and classy champion\u2019s slow fade from Grand Slam power. There were hints aplenty under pressure in the brilliant Paris sunshine: shots off the frame; leaps that did not appear to leave as much space between the red clay and Federer\u2019s sneakers as usual; missed opportunities off short balls; and even \u2014 gasp \u2014 missed overheads. \u201cMissing smashes goes hand in hand with missing so many other things,\u201d said Federer, sounding more melancholy than devastated. But there was also the much more rose-colored lens available to Tsonga observers, of which there will now be millions more than usual in France after this performance. Tsonga, a 28-year-old who professes to prefer the quiet life of the Swiss countryside to the Parisian party scene, does not yet have a Grand Slam title. But he undeniably has charisma, just like France\u2019s last men\u2019s singles champion at Roland Garros \u2014 Yannick Noah, who won here with brio in 1983 and remains one of France\u2019s most popular men 30 years later. It still seems early to start talking about history repeating itself. The pretournament favorites \u2014 the seven-time champion Rafael Nadal and the top-ranked Novak Djokovic \u2014 are still in contention in the other half of the draw and on course for a semifinal showdown. But the sixth-seeded Tsonga does have an opening in his half, with a semifinal on Friday against David Ferrer of Spain rather than a bona-fide member of the game\u2019s Big Four. Ferrer, 31, unlike Tsonga, has never reached a major final. But the bad news for those boarding the French bandwagon is that the fourth-seeded Ferrer, like Tsonga, has yet to drop a set in Paris this year and was in relentless, energy-conserving form again Tuesday as he overwhelmed his compatriot Tommy Robredo, 6-2, 6-1, 6-1, in 1 hour 26 minutes. Image Roger Federer, the 17-time Grand Slam champion, lost to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, 7-5, 6-3, 6-3, on Tuesday. Credit Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters \u201cI wasn\u2019t 100 percent ready to fight that match and playing with a guy like David, who is a machine, it\u2019s very tough to be like that,\u201d said Robredo, who had reached the quarterfinals by coming back three times in a row from two sets down to win. No, it will not be easy for Tsonga, soaring confidence and all, to reach even the final in Paris this year, but the French are officially dreaming of another 1983 and another Noah. \u201cIt\u2019s not too early to think about it because they are both charismatic players; because it\u2019s been exactly 30 years and because they are both French guys of mixed race,\u201d said C\u00e9dric Pioline, the former French star and French Open semifinalist. \u201cThere are parallels that are there right in front of us, that are true and that we cannot ignore.\u201d \u201cThe atmosphere that was there today, you could almost feel like it was a final. The semifinal against Ferrer will be another note higher and if Jo does indeed manage to reach the final, I don\u2019t know who\u2019ll be across the net but it won\u2019t be a French player that\u2019s for sure, and the atmosphere behind him will be enormous, enormous. There will be so much energy and if he can put both his fingers right into the socket and feel all that power, it will be, wow, like triple turbo.\u201d Asked what kind of relationship he had with Noah, now a popular singer, Tsonga said: \u201cWell, when he sings, I dance. That\u2019s my relationship. When he says something to me, I listen to him.\u201d For now, France and Tsonga will have to settle for his victory over Federer, who had beaten him in 9 of their 12 previous matches, most recently at this year\u2019s Australian Open in a five-set crowd pleaser that seemed to predict a closer match Tuesday. Federer struck first, breaking Tsonga in the fifth game, and was soon up by 4-2. But he could not hold a 40-15 lead in his next service game and Tsonga never trailed again, dominating with his first serve and punching holes with surprising ease in Federer\u2019s defenses. Tsonga\u2019s weaknesses have long been clear: returns and a backhand that has lacked the pop of his world-class serve and forehand. But he did damage with it regularly Tuesday, perhaps the result made under new coach Roger Rasheed. Tsonga spent more than a season without an official coach trying to understand his game and motivations before hiring Rasheed this year. Rasheed, an Australian, was previously the taskmaster and innovator in chief with Lleyton Hewitt and Tsonga\u2019s compatriot Ga\u00ebl Monfils. \u201cI choose to take Roger, because I knew this guy was able to give me the passion for the game and to give me his passion for the game,\u201d Tsonga said. Image Sixth-seeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, left, defeated No. 2 Roger Federer in straight sets Tuesday as he bids to become the first Frenchman to win the French Open in 30 years. Credit Matthew Stockman/Getty Images While Federer had to settle for that lone break in the first set, Tsonga broke Federer eight times in all, winning 42 percent of the points on Federer\u2019s first serve and 58 percent of the points on Federer\u2019s second serve. Federer rebuffed any suggestion that he was suffering from a revival of the back problems that have affected him intermittently. \u201cNo, no issues,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have so much more energy here, the French guys, than maybe elsewhere,\u201d Federer said of Tsonga. \u201cI thought he played great today. He was in all areas better than me today. That\u2019s why the result was pretty clean.\u201d Federer, a 17-time Grand Slam singles champion, will now try to defend his Wimbledon title. Grass-court tennis has lifted him out of the doldrums in the past, but this season has been particularly disappointing by his standards. He has not won a tournament since Cincinnati last August, and although he reached the semifinals at the Australian Open, he has reached only one final this year. That was in Rome, where Nadal overwhelmed him, once again, on clay. Tsonga has spoiled major moments for Federer in the quarterfinals before. At Wimbledon in 2011, he became the first man to overcome a two-set deficit and beat Federer in a Grand Slam tournament. Tsonga, whose only appearance in a Grand Slam final came at the 2008 Australian Open, may also be less intimidated by Federer than ever. They spent considerable time together in the off-season in South America, with Tsonga playing second fiddle to Federer\u2019s Stradivarius on the Swiss superstar\u2019s lucrative tour of the continent. There is a genuine connection between them now, but that did not remove the sting of being upstaged on a court where Federer had only been beaten in straight sets in his prime by clay-court royalty like Nadal, Novak Djokovic and the former champion Gustavo Kuerten. At 3-3 in the third set Tuesday, with Federer facing yet another break point, he came forward and hit a deft half volley that dropped on Tsonga\u2019s side of the net. The Frenchman sprinted forward and ripped a low, lunging, two-handed backhand that grazed the net and left Federer twisting to get out of the way. The ball struck him in the upper back, giving Tsonga the last break he would require, and though he held up his hand to apologize, Federer never looked back. \u201cCome on, Roger!\u201d someone yelled from the stands, as so many have yelled from these stands through the years. But this was a different sort of day, no matter how you looked at it, and cheers of \u201cAllez Jo!\u201d were much more common down the stretch. Just imagine the sound effects if Tsonga keeps winning.", "keyword": "Roger Federer;Jo-Wilfried Tsonga;Tennis;French Open"}
{"id": "ny0105407", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/03/22", "title": "Xavier and Cincinnati Regrouped and Found Postseason Success", "abstract": "One player lay at midcourt, blood pouring off his face. Another was throwing punches at every opponent he could see. A third stood on the scorer\u2019s table, egging on a howling crowd at the Cintas Center in Cincinnati. Expletive-laced challenges were hurled back and forth. All the while, a national television audience watched as one of college basketball\u2019s fiercest rivalries exploded into chaos. The reputations of the two teams involved appeared to be in tatters. Yet now, little more than three months after a Dec. 10 brawl that was, for better or worse, one of the signature moments of college basketball\u2019s regular season, both Xavier and Cincinnati are among the 16 teams left in the N.C.A.A. tournament. And the wild brawl has become, if not forgotten, then certainly a secondary chapter to the teams\u2019 seasons. The Bearcats, seeded sixth in the East, will play No. 2 Ohio State in Boston on Thursday night. The 10th-seeded Musketeers will play No. 3 Baylor in a South Region game in Atlanta on Friday. \u201cWe disciplined the guys that did wrong, we apologized, and then we told them how much we loved them, what we expected of them, and moved on,\u201d Cincinnati Coach Mick Cronin said Wednesday. \u201cWe knew who we really are. We really focused on making sure we were having fun and not letting that define us.\u201d The tension that exists between Cincinnati \u2014 the large public university \u2014 and Xavier \u2014 the smaller, more affluent Jesuit university a few miles away \u2014 mounted a few days before their annual matchup in December. Bearcats guard Sean Kilpatrick needled Xavier\u2019s star guard Tu Holloway, saying that Holloway, the reigning Atlantic 10 player of the year, was not even good enough to start for Cincinnati, which plays in the Big East. The game was heated, with the teams exchanging words on the way to the locker room at halftime. But as Xavier pulled away to what would be a 76-53 victory, the trash talk became more intense. Holloway made a layup with 18 seconds left and yelled at the Cincinnati bench as he ran past on his way back up the court. As the final seconds ticked away, Holloway and the Cincinnati freshman guard Ge\u2019Lawn Guyn went nose to nose. Guyn pushed Holloway in the face, and Xavier\u2019s Dez Wells shoved Guyn to the floor in retaliation. Cincinnati center Yancy Gates then threw the ball at Holloway, causing a full-scale brawl to erupt. Gates then threw a punch at Xavier center Kenny Frease, who was looking elsewhere. The right cross opened up a nasty gash under Frease\u2019s left eye. The Bearcats\u2019 Cheikh Mbodj then kicked Frease after he fell to the floor following a hit by Gates. Frease managed to escape the melee and wander upcourt, bleeding profusely, before lying down and receiving treatment. The game was called with 9.4 seconds left, and the floor was cleared after several minutes. In the postgame news conference, Holloway, who had been up on the scorer\u2019s table during the brawl, said that the Musketeers were \u201cgrown men over here,\u201d adding: \u201cWe\u2019ve got a whole bunch of gangsters in the locker room \u2014 not thugs, but tough guys on the court. And we went out there and zipped them up,\u201d an apparent reference to putting the Bearcats in body bags. Cronin talked angrily after the game of physically removing the jerseys of his players, saying they needed to realize \u201chow lucky they are to even be here, let alone have a scholarship.\u201d \u201cMick Cronin did a remarkable job of dealing with that head-on in the postgame press conference and obviously in the locker room with his own team,\u201d Dan Gavitt, the associate commissioner of basketball for the Big East, said. \u201cThere\u2019s no preparation or script for an incident like that, and he stood up and said the right things and did the right things and in the long run his team benefitted from it.\u201d Xavier Coach Chris Mack sent out a Twitter message after the game that said: \u201cIf my players say they\u2019ve been taught to be tough their whole life, they mean ON THE FLOOR. Nothing else is condoned.\u201d Gates, Mbodj, and the Cincinnati freshman Octavius Ellis were given six-game suspensions, with Guyn suspended for a game. Gates tearfully apologized the day after the brawl, and his private apology to Frease was reportedly a factor in his not facing criminal charges. Xavier suspended four players, three of them starters, including Holloway, who missed the next game, a loss to Oral Roberts. The Musketeers, who had been 8-0 after beating Cincinnati, lost the two games after that as well. They struggled during Atlantic 10 conference play, and went 13-12 after the brawl. \u201cAfter that game our confidence was lost a little bit,\u201d Holloway said last week, \u201cand it took a couple of months to get it back.\u201d It was in the conference tournament in Atlantic City that Xavier righted itself, making the title game, where it lost to St. Bonaventure. Holloway then showed that he could start for any team in the country, scoring 25 points in Xavier\u2019s N.C.A.A. tournament opener against Notre Dame, including a high-arcing bank shot with 21.3 seconds to go that put Xavier ahead for good. He added 21 in the Musketeers\u2019 victory over Lehigh last Sunday, to go with Frease\u2019s 25 points and 12 rebounds. \u201cThe adversity we see in the N.C.A.A. tournament, we\u2019ve been through a lot more than that,\u201d Frease said before the Lehigh game. At the time of the brawl, Cincinnati was 5-3, but the fallout seemed to galvanize the team. The Bearcats won seven straight after the Xavier game, and went 12-6 in Big East play and made the conference tournament final, upsetting top-seeded Syracuse. Gates had a double-double in the opening tournament win over Texas, then played a rugged game against Florida State on Sunday night, battling larger players inside in a 62-56 win. And despite being a 60 percent free-throw shooter, Gates made three critical free throws in the final moments. Now Cincinnati finds itself in the Round of 16, just like its crosstown rival, Xavier. It is a long way from the ugliness of Dec. 10. \u201cWe\u2019ve been on a mission to define what Cincinnati basketball is all about, what our university and city is all about, and the kids have banded together to do that,\u201d Cronin said. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t been easy.\u201d", "keyword": "Xavier University of Ohio;University of Cincinnati;National Collegiate Athletic Assn;Basketball;College Athletics;Basketball (College);NCAA Basketball Championships (Men)"}
{"id": "ny0083813", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/10/31", "title": "Giants\u2019 Jason Pierre-Paul Makes First Comments Since Fireworks Accident", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 Alternately smiling and somber, Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul said Friday that he felt lucky to be alive after a Fourth of July fireworks accident caused the amputation of his right index finger and severely damaged his right thumb and middle finger. \u201cI\u2019m just very fortunate that I\u2019m alive,\u201d Pierre-Paul said in his first comments to the news media since the accident. \u201cI\u2019m just fortunate to have a hand.\u201d During the hospitalization for his injuries, he said, he was near others with Fourth of July-related wounds. \u201cI saw a kid die at the age of 12 years old,\u201d Pierre-Paul said. \u201cOne they had to cut off his whole finger.\u201d He added that \u201cthere were probably 12 people in that hospital\u201d with similar injuries and that his hand was \u201cthe best one.\u201d Pierre-Paul declined to be specific about his accident, although he said he had set off fireworks on the holiday for the past six or seven years for children around his South Florida neighborhood. \u201cThings happen, mistakes happen, incidents happen,\u201d he said. Asked for his initial reaction when the fireworks injured his hand, he replied: \u201cI wasn\u2019t worried at all. I wasn\u2019t in shock or nothing. I looked at my hand and my fianc\u00e9e was going crazy, but I kept calm through the whole situation.\u201d Pierre-Paul indicated there was more to the story, which he said he planned to tell at a later date. He said Friday was not the right time to be more revealing because he wanted to focus on helping the Giants win games. Asked if he was suggesting that the accident was not his fault, Pierre-Paul replied: \u201cNo, I\u2019m not saying that. By me buying the fireworks, it was my fault.\u201d He was aware that he had been harshly criticized and mocked nationwide for actions and decisions that have so far cost him millions in salary. But he did not agree with those sentiments. \u201cI wasn\u2019t embarrassed by nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople are going to have their own opinions. But I didn\u2019t care about none of that because I knew one way or another, I was going to return back to football. Just coming back to the Giants, I\u2019ve already won.\u201d Pierre-Paul, who rubbed his left hand across his surgically reconstructed right hand repeatedly as he spoke for 12 minutes with reporters at his locker, was making no predictions about how effective he would be as a football player. But he defiantly announced that he felt no different from before. He is expected to play next month. \u201cI am the Jason Pierre-Paul I was last year,\u201d he said. \u201cThe skill set is the same. It\u2019s not going to be a major adjustment. As far as like my hand goes, I\u2019ll get used to it.\u201d The Giants rank second to last in the N.F.L. in quarterback sacks this season. \u201cJust looking at the games, you can tell they needed a pass rusher,\u201d said Pierre-Paul, who will wear a special glove while playing. Laughing, he said: \u201cOf course, it\u2019s a special glove. I\u2019m missing an index finger.\u201d Pierre-Paul denied rebuffing Giants medical personnel who arrived at his hospital shortly after his accident. \u201cYou can\u2019t do nothing when you\u2019re on anesthesia, waking up, going in and out\u201d of consciousness, he said. \u201cI had no reason not to let them in. I just didn\u2019t know. \u201cI don\u2019t know who was making my decisions. It could\u2019ve been the doctors.\u201d When pressed on why he stayed out of touch with the Giants for months after the accident, Pierre-Paul responded, \u201cNext question.\u201d Later, he credited the Giants for being \u201ca very caring organization.\u201d \u201cThey did a great job handling it,\u201d he said. \u201cI thank them for giving me a second chance.\u201d Not surprisingly, Pierre-Paul added that his days exploding fireworks on the Fourth of July were over. \u201cAs far as fireworks, they\u2019re very dangerous,\u201d he said. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t play with them. Because it had been seven years I did it and it just went off. \u201cYou live and learn. People make mistakes. We\u2019re all human. We\u2019re all people.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Jason Pierre-Paul;Fireworks;Giants"}
{"id": "ny0094782", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/01/16", "title": "A 3-D Printed Car, Ready for the Road", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 TUCKED away among the gleaming steel machines on display at the North American International Auto Show this week, an Arizona start-up was trying something new: manufacturing a car from scratch right on the convention floor. Thanks to 3-D printing, a vehicle whose body, frame and interior were constructed from a carbon-polymer composite materialized as puzzled onlookers watched. After workers installed an electric motor, suspension and tires, the small car \u2014 which resembled a coupe crossed with a dune buggy \u2014 was ready to go. The idea was the brainchild of John B. Rogers Jr., the founder and chief executive of Local Motors, based in Phoenix. Mr. Rogers, who prefers to be called Jay, was an infantry commander in the Marines, has an M.B.A. from Harvard and is determined to simplify the way automobiles are produced. Mr. Rogers is no stranger to mobile machines: His grandfather ran the Indian Motorcycle Company and was also the first distributor of Cummins engines in the United States. He himself started a small custom rally-car business in Arizona in 2007, Local Motors. But two years ago, as he read about the auto industry\u2019s attempts to make lighter auto panels and parts, he had an epiphany. \u201cIt occurred to me that our enemy was the supply chain. There are just too many parts,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cThat was the genesis of all this.\u201d The question though, was what could be done about it. Cars need parts, thousands of them. Mr. Rogers said he started obsessing about the idea of making a vehicle from a few solid pieces, and began looking for a material. He talked to experts about hardened clay, but that went nowhere. Other options, deemed impractical, also fizzled out. Then a colleague attending a conference in Boston happened to cross paths with an engineer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who invited Mr. Rogers to visit the lab. Inside was an enormous device with a robot arm that emitted moldable plastic and made shapes \u2014 a 3-D printer. \u201cAs soon as I saw that, I said, \u2018That\u2019s my machine,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Rogers said. \u201cI asked, \u2018Can we make a car?\u2019 \u201d This week in Detroit, he showed off the answer \u2014 part of a road show in recent months as he has traveled the country with his creation, the Strati concept vehicle. Aside from a few dozen additional components, like the electric motor, wheels and suspension parts, the small concept car is made from 3-D printed carbon-polymer material. On Monday, Mr. Rogers announced bigger plans: Local Motors would build a production factory outside Washington, capable of making up to 3,000 3-D printed vehicles a year. The so-called microfactory, Local Motors\u2019 fourth, is set to be completed within a year and will sell cars to the public. The company has its original microfactory in Phoenix and another in Las Vegas. It is also building one in Oak Ridge, Tenn., near the national laboratory, its partner. Part retail store, part factory, the Washington plant will let consumers browse the designs, customize their cars, then have them created on one of the half-dozen industrial-grade 3-D printers on site and assembled in a matter of days. \u201cWe like to think of it as Build-A-Bear, mashed up with Ikea, mashed up with Formula One,\u201d Mr. Rogers said. But the cars may not be entirely street legal. Local Motors\u2019 first 3-D-printed car is categorized as a \u201cneighborhood electric vehicle ,\u201d much like a golf cart. Under federal regulations, it is legal on public roads at speeds up to 25 miles per hour, and some states allow certain road access up to 45 miles per hour. The company plans to offer a vehicle that can be driven on all roads in the United States by 2017, Mr. Rogers said. That would require passing safety requirements set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, including crash tests. Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com, said that while the market for customization of cars was blossoming, a 3-D-printed car remained \u201ca bit gimmicky at this point in time.\u201d Noting that the price begins at $18,000 and tops out at $30,000, she said most buyers would opt for a vehicle with more traditional amenities. \u201cI struggle to understand the value to the consumer besides having something cool and cutting-edge,\u201d she said. Terry Wohlers, president of the research firm Wohlers Associates, which tracks the 3-D printing industry, said while he did not anticipate the Fords or Toyotas of the world adopting 3-D-printed car bodies any time soon, the idea might work on a smaller scale. \u201cIf you\u2019re looking at low quantity, individualized kind of production, that could make sense,\u201d Mr. Wohlers said. \u201cBut right now, the cost is too prohibitive to use for large-scale production.\u201d And although Toyota may not use 3-D printing for its Camrys, the major automakers have already adopted the technology when it comes to designing their cars: building models quickly, and testing the form, fit and function of certain elements. \u201cThey\u2019re all using it in a big way,\u201d Mr. Wohlers said. Some high-end automakers are going even further, integrating select 3-D-printed parts into production models. Examples include Lamborghini, which uses the technology for part of a console component, and Bentley, where part of a dashboard panel was printed that way, he said. \u201cOver time, we will see more of them adopt this kind of technology, if not for whole cars, for certain hard-to-produce or complicated parts that 3-D printing can make easier,\u201d he said. The cost of 3-D printing machines is also likely to drop. Currently, plastics-based machines average around $75,000, and machines that can 3-D print metal, a relatively new invention, cost upward of $500,000 each. Mr. Rogers said Local Motors believed that a market existed for locally produced, individualized vehicles made with 3-D printing. \u201cThis is not just a science experiment, but is something that can be developed, brought forward safely and enjoyed by consumers around the world,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about allowing local communities, and people within those communities, to tailor vehicles to suit their individual needs.\u201d", "keyword": "Cars;North American International Auto Show;3-D Printers;Compact Cars Microcars;Local Motors"}
{"id": "ny0121853", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/09/20", "title": "California: 11 Are Hurt in Prison Riot", "abstract": "A riot at the California State Prison in Folsom on Wednesday left 11 inmates hospitalized, including one who was shot by officers, officials said. The disturbance, which broke out around 11 a.m. in a yard at the maximum-security prison, involved an unknown number of inmates, officials said. In addition to the inmate who was shot, at least 10 were either stabbed or slashed. Their conditions have not been released. It is at least the second known episode within a year at the prison, commonly known as New Folsom, 20 miles east of Sacramento.", "keyword": "Prisons and Prisoners;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;California State Prison;California"}
{"id": "ny0264214", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/12/08", "title": "Thailand: American Sentenced for Defaming King", "abstract": "A court in Thailand on Thursday sentenced an American citizen, Joe Gordon, to two and a half years in prison for defaming the country\u2019s royal family. Mr. Gordon, who was born in Thailand, had been accused of translating excerpts of a banned biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and then posting them online. Mr. Gordon, 55, pleaded guilty to the charges in October, and as a result a judge in Bangkok\u2019s criminal court reduced by half his proposed sentence of five years.", "keyword": "Gordon Joe;Bhumibol Adulyadej;Libel and Slander;Thailand;Sentences (Criminal);Royal Family"}
{"id": "ny0130709", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2012/12/03", "title": "A Cruel Beauty in Grudge Match of the Dons", "abstract": "MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND \u2014 The F.A. Cup, the oldest knockout tournament of them all, was founded on the belief that playing soccer could settle any score. But nothing in its 140 years could have been more of a grudge match than the one played Sunday between the Milton Keynes Dons and A.F.C. Wimbledon. The teams have a shared past, and that is the cause of their bitter dispute. Fans of the original Wimbledon F.C., the 1988 F.A. Cup winner, accuse Milton Keynes of being an illegitimate club \u2014 of stealing Wimbledon\u2019s name and its place in the English leagues almost a decade ago. What happened was that Wimbledon was going bankrupt when Milton Keynes, a new town with no team in the professional ranks, persuaded the Football Association to allow it to leapfrog the minor leagues and to \u201cmove\u201d Wimbledon 56 miles, or about 90 kilometers, north of its west London location. Hence the name MK Dons, as in Wimble-don. Resentment and rancor have existed ever since and have been the spur to a remarkable rise that took a newly formed, renamed A.F.C. Wimbledon, just nine years to go from volunteers on Wimbledon Common up through five promotions of the semiprofessional pyramid of English soccer until it reached the fourth tier of full-time competition. A.F.C. stands today just one division below Milton Keynes. As fate would have it, the Wimbledon team, still wholly run by a fans\u2019 trust, was drawn to play at Milton Keynes in the second round of the F.A. Cup on Sunday. On a bright and frosty morning, some 3,200 Wimbledon supporters made the hour and a half journey. Others, who had sworn never to set foot in Milton Keynes, gathered at their own club headquarters to watch the game on TV screens. Perhaps against the odds, the contest was even until the final moments of time added on for injuries and stoppages. Milton Keynes did most of the attacking, Wimbledon held on in robust defense and broke with defiant will. Even the Wimbledon hard-liners who had arrived at the stadium with face masks and full anticontamination suits were by this time under the thrall of the game. Soccer, as the founding fathers had envisaged, was engaging all minds, breaking down the bitterness. But then, as someone said, the cruel beauty of the F.A. Cup arrived. The man who said that, Lawrie Sanchez, had scored the only goal of the 1988 final when Wimbledon F.C., top dog of all the underdogs, defeated the mighty Liverpool to win the Cup at Wembley Stadium. The Sanchez side, known as the Crazy Gang, would do anything and everything, even bending the rules if they could get away with it, to win. The new Wimbledon is muscular, spirited and, as it showed Sunday, will do everything within the laws to stay in a contest. How they ran. How they stayed compact in defense. How they retaliated after Milton Keynes\u2019s Stephen Gleeson scored on the stroke of halftime with a wonderful shot. He struck it from 30 meters, or about 100 feet, and the trajectory left Wimbledon\u2019s 42-year-old veteran keeper groping at air as the ball swerved away into the top left corner of his net. Little by little, Wimbledon turned defense into attack. On the hour, midfielder Jack Midsun turned industrious running into gold. He passed the ball out wide to the winger Toby Ajala. And, bursting his lungs to keep on running, Midsun demanded the return pass, threw himself head first at the ball and guided it from right to left inside the far post. One-one, and a replay at Wimbledon \u2014 a second game in case of a draw worth upward of $150,000 in TV revenue \u2014 beckoned. A plane circling overhead in the blue sky trailed a banner \u201cWe are Wimbledon.\u201d Apparently it was hired by a fan of the original team who could not be there because he is a resident of West Virginia. That fan doubtless suffered the cruel beauty of the Cup in the closing minutes. Right on full time, Wimbledon broke into another counterattack. Steven Gregory found the power to burst past his opposing defender, but his low shot was diverted inches around the foot of a post by the fingertips of goalie David Martin. The sheer relief of Milton Keynes then turned into an eruption of sound seldom heard in the 30,000-seat stadium, built when the team acquired the status and identity of the doomed old Dons. It was MK\u2019s turn to break the length of the field and, from a corner that Wimbledon failed to clear, the home team\u2019s right back, Jon Otsemobor, did something he will never regret or forget. He nonchalantly stuck out his left leg to the bouncing ball. He caught it with a flick he might claim was intended, but few will believe him. It glanced off his shin and deceived everyone in the crowded goal mouth. It nestled in the net. Cruel beauty, indeed. The Cup tie was over, but the resentment may linger for generations. Milton Keynes\u2019s founder, the property developer and former musical entrepreneur Pete Winkelman, is the man who negotiated the land deal that allowed supermarket chains to pay enough to share it with a soccer club that at that time scarcely existed. Winkelman admits now that this transaction \u2014 akin to a franchise moving across states in the United States \u2014 may never happen again in England. But he refuses Wimbledon\u2019s requests to a least remove the word Dons from his club\u2019s title. He has a victory, but few admirers west of London.", "keyword": "Soccer;Football Association Cup (Soccer);England"}
{"id": "ny0259356", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/01/13", "title": "Palin Defends Political Speech; \u2018Blood Libel\u2019 Stirs Critics", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Sarah Palin broke her silence on Wednesday and delivered a forceful denunciation of her critics in a video message about the Arizona shootings , accusing commentators and journalists of \u201cblood libel\u201d in a frenzied rush to blame heated political speech for the violence. As she sought to defend herself and seize control of a debate that has been boiling for days, Ms. Palin awakened a new controversy by invoking a phrase fraught with religious symbolism about the false accusation used by anti-Semites of Jews murdering Christian children. It was unclear whether Ms. Palin was aware of the historical meaning of the phrase. \u201cActs of monstrous criminality stand on their own,\u201d Ms. Palin said. \u201cEspecially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.\u201d The video from Ms. Palin, running nearly eight minutes, was recorded in her home television studio in Alaska and released early Wednesday morning. Her words dominated the political landscape for nearly 12 hours before President Obama arrived in Tucson to speak at a memorial service honoring the six dead and 14 injured in the shootings. For Ms. Palin, a former Alaska governor, the video provided one of the clearest signs yet that she is carefully tending to her image as she decides whether to seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And it showed her continued determination to do so on her own terms and under her own control, without responding to questions or appearing in a public forum. She spoke in a somber tone, absent the witticisms often woven into her political speeches, as she sought to contain a debate that had linked her \u2014 unfairly, she argued \u2014 with the assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona. In the midterm elections last year, Ms. Palin used a map with cross hairs over several swing Congressional districts, which Ms. Giffords highlighted in a television interview at the time as an example of overheated political speech. In the video statement, Ms. Palin rejected criticism of the map, and sought to cast that criticism as a broader indictment of the basic rights to free speech exercised by people of all political persuasions. \u201cWe know violence isn\u2019t the answer,\u201d Ms. Palin said, sitting against a backdrop of a fireplace and an American flag. \u201cWhen we take up our arms, we\u2019re talking about our votes.\u201d The video stirred an emotional response from some Democratic lawmakers, Jewish groups and even some fellow Republicans, who said it was in poor taste for Ms. Palin to deliver her statement on a day that was devoted to remembering victims of last weekend\u2019s shooting. The video played throughout the day on cable television and on the Internet. Matthew Dowd, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush who has become a frequent critic of Republicans, said that the tone of Ms. Palin\u2019s message was not appropriate for the moment of national grief and that she had missed an opportunity to be seen as a leader. \u201cSarah Palin seems trapped in a world that is all about confrontation and bravado,\u201d Mr. Dowd said. \u201cWhen the country seeks comforting and consensus, she offers conflict and confrontation.\u201d Advisers to Ms. Palin did not respond to interview requests on Wednesday, and she did not cite any specific examples of what she considered to be unfair coverage or commentary. Ms. Palin offered her deep condolences for victims of the shooting, then went on to dismiss suggestions that political speech should be toned down. She did not mention the shooting suspect, Jared L. Loughner, by name, but said that the violence could not be blamed on talk radio or those who participated in political debate. \u201cThere are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged apparently apolitical criminal,\u201d Ms. Palin said. \u201cAnd they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated \u2014 back in those calm days when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?\u201d Ms. Palin also turned to the words of former President Ronald Reagan, saying that society should not be blamed for the acts of an individual. She said she had spent the last several days \u201cpraying for guidance,\u201d as she sorted out the lessons of the Arizona tragedy. \u201cWe must reject the idea that every time a law\u2019s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker,\u201d Ms. Palin said. \u201cIt is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.\u201d The video , which seemed to be aimed at appealing to her committed supporters rather than winning over her critics, contained several references to the country\u2019s \u201cfoundational freedoms\u201d and the intentions of the nation\u2019s founders. Twice, she called the United States \u201cexceptional,\u201d a frequent dig at Mr. Obama, whom conservatives accuse of not believing in the concept of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d The White House did not comment on Ms. Palin\u2019s statement, and the president did not mention her in his address on Wednesday evening. \u201cPresident Obama and I may not agree on everything,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process.\u201d", "keyword": "Palin Sarah;Tucson Shooting (2011);Speeches and Statements;Libel and Slander"}
{"id": "ny0002960", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/03/25", "title": "Violence Spurs Identity Crisis in Free-Spirited Santa Cruz", "abstract": "SANTA CRUZ, Calif. \u2014 Keep it weird? Or keep it safe and clean? \u201cKeep Santa Cruz Weird\u201d was the longstanding, if unofficial, motto for this small beachfront city proud of its tolerance and its offbeat vibe. People came for Santa Cruz\u2019s 1960s-imbued live-and-let-live attitude, its progressive politics, the great weather, the University of California campus, the hard-partying surfing scene and the freewheeling drug culture. But \u201cKeep Santa Cruz Safe and Clean\u201d began appearing on bumpers in recent years as the city was rattled by acts of violence, its streets and parks seemingly overwhelmed by homelessness and drugs. To hear the supporters of the new slogan, Santa Cruz\u2019s famous tolerance was guilty of enabling. The dueling slogans captured the fight over the city\u2019s politics and policies, as well as its spirit. The debate has only intensified since the recent killings of Sgt. Butch Baker and Officer Elizabeth Butler, the first two police officers to die on duty in the Santa Cruz Police Department\u2019s 157-year history. On Feb. 26, the two went to speak to Jeremy Goulet, 35, an Army veteran with a history of sexual assaults in the military and in civilian life. Mr. Goulet, who had been arrested after trying to attack a co-worker in her home here, gunned down the officers before being killed later in a shootout. He had run-ins with the law in Portland, Ore., and Berkeley, Calif., before moving to Santa Cruz late last year. Image An officer at the scene in Santa Cruz, Calif., where two colleagues were fatally shot in February. Credit Thomas Mendoza/Associated Press \u201cIt could have happened in any one of those communities \u2014 it happened here,\u201d Mayor Hilary Bryant said. \u201cIt\u2019s particularly difficult for us as a community to deal with that because it happened on top of a series of incidents of violence in a short period of time.\u201d Last month, a man was shot to death outside a popular bar, and a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was shot in the head during a robbery, though she survived. And last year, in a random killing that spoke to this city\u2019s growing unease with homelessness, a mentally disturbed transient man fatally stabbed a well-known local businesswoman on a downtown street just before noon. The violence has shaken Santa Cruz, a city of 62,000 residents, a place small enough that many know by name or face the 84 officers on the police force. \u201cThe kind of grieving that\u2019s going on and the sense of violation that folks are feeling around this shooting is very intimate, almost familial,\u201d said the Rev. Dave Grishaw-Jones, the senior minister of First Congregational Church. \u201cIt\u2019s not a big city.\u201d In churches, at City Council meetings and in the pages of The Santa Cruz Sentinel, the violence has focused heated debates on the city\u2019s policies toward drug abuse and homelessness. Did a needle exchange program \u2014 run with little oversight, as Mayor Bryant said \u2014 draw users here from other cities? Did overly generous services for the homeless attract outsiders, many of whom can be seen camping out in the city\u2019s parks and woods? Image Sgt. Butch Baker, who was killed while responding to a report of a sexual assault in February. Credit Santa Cruz Police Department, via Associated Press According to the Police Department\u2019s statistics, crime has been flat in recent years, except for an increase in property theft. But about 40 percent of calls to the police involve the homeless, and the homeless make up a third of total arrests, mostly on charges of drug abuse, property crime and burglaries, said Deputy Chief Steve Clark. Regina Henderson, a neighborhood organizer who first landed here 38 years ago while following the Grateful Dead to San Francisco, said, \u201cWe draw people from all over who are very unstable, and their aggressive behavior has infiltrated our little town.\u201d For Ms. Henderson, her view on crime changed five years ago when she stumbled upon a dead man lying along the levee near her home, a needle stuck in his arm. She formed a neighborhood watch group and joined Take Back Santa Cruz, an organization established by like-minded residents in 2009. Young families had also moved into neighborhoods, replacing longtime residents inured to the city\u2019s social problems. \u201cThey\u2019re not content to having a lot of dirty needles in the playgrounds,\u201d said Lisa Rose, who has lived here since 1968. \u201cI just shrug my shoulders and say, \u2018Oh, that was unpleasant,\u2019 when I\u2019m accosted on the street. I\u2019ve just grown to accept it, and maybe it shouldn\u2019t be accepted. You know that old story about putting a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water and how it won\u2019t jump out? That\u2019s me.\u201d Image Officer Elizabeth Butler was also fatally shot by the same gunman. Credit Santa Cruz Police Department, via Associated Press Take Back Santa Cruz \u2014 which has promoted the slogan \u201cKeep Santa Cruz Safe and Clean\u201d \u2014 quickly became an influential force in the city. One of its leaders, Pamela Comstock, was elected to the City Council in November. \u201cWe have a history of accepting unique and different behaviors, but at some point that became deviant behavior,\u201d Ms. Comstock said, adding that the city\u2019s open drug culture brings in both dealers and users from the outside. The city, Ms. Comstock said, should shift money and resources to programs for families and children and away from homeless services. Until a few years ago, the police felt hamstrung by a City Council and a community that, reflecting their roots from the 1960s, looked askance at authority. \u201cFor a lot of years, I felt we were seen as a necessary evil,\u201d said Deputy Chief Clark, a 28-year veteran. \u201cI would absolutely say that is not the current attitude of the City Council or the community. I think this community has realized what a mess we\u2019ve made.\u201d But other city leaders caution that in an overemotional response to the recent violence, Santa Cruz could lose what made it special in the first place. Image Jeremy Goulet, accused of shooting Sgt. Baker and Officer Butler, was later killed in a shootout with officers. Credit Santa Cruz Police Department, via Associated Press Don Lane, a city councilman who also sits on the board of two homeless organizations, said the killings of the police officers had nothing to do with the homeless. \u201cEverybody wants to say we really need to reflect on what\u2019s going on here and why it happened, and then very quickly they go to that issue: Is Santa Cruz too tolerant and welcoming?\u201d he said. \u201cPersonally, I\u2019m not sure how that connection is made.\u201d Neal Coonerty, a former mayor and current Santa Cruz County supervisor, also rejected suggestions that the killings of the police officers reflected deeper problems in the city. \u201cWe were more the victims in this situation than we are somehow enabling the violence to happen,\u201d he said. A decade ago, Mr. Coonerty\u2019s family-owned business, Bookshop Santa Cruz, began selling T-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers with the slogan \u201cKeep Santa Cruz Weird.\u201d It was meant, he said, to counter City Council efforts to restrict street performers downtown. \u201cSome people have interpreted that somehow it has something to do with being relaxed about drug use and violence,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the furthest thing. It had to deal with street performers. But people twisted its meaning and are implying that it had something to do with the terrible events that happened.\u201d", "keyword": "Santa Cruz CA;Crime statistics;Homelessness;Slogans and Mottoes;Drug Abuse;Attacks on Police"}
{"id": "ny0176739", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/09/05", "title": "William R. Hudgins, 100, Who Led Black-Owned Banks, Dies", "abstract": "William R. Hudgins, a former door-to-door salesman in Harlem who helped start the Carver Federal Savings Bank, now the largest black-owned bank in the nation, and was its president for 18 years, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. Mr. Hudgins, who along with Jackie Robinson later helped start the Freedom National Bank, was 100. The death was announced by his daughter, Jan Hudgins Riley. With seven other Harlem leaders, Mr. Hudgins founded what was originally known as the Carver Federal Savings and Loan Association in 1948, when blacks were facing what an article in The New York Times called \u201ca wall of bias\u201d in obtaining loans from major financial institutions. \u201cThere was always black homeownership and business ownership in Harlem in the \u201940s, \u201950s, \u201960s, but the question was who provided the loan money,\u201d Earl G. Graves Sr., the publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine, said yesterday. \u201cIt was usually family, friends, persons you knew in the church that you attended or, in the West Indian community, sou-sous, informal credit unions.\u201d \u201cBill Hudgins recognized the need,\u201d Mr. Graves said. The Carver bank, named for the botanist George Washington Carver, was started on a financial shoestring of $250,000 with $14,000 in cash and the rest in pledges from community residents. By 1962, it had lent more than $30 million to about 3,000 home buyers and maintained more than 32,000 savings accounts. Last year, with branches in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, Carver held assets of $648 million and deposits of $488 million, according to Black Enterprise Magazine. In 1966, Mr. Hudgins joined with another group of black leaders, including Mr. Robinson, who by then had retired as a baseball player, to form the Freedom National Bank. He was its president until 1971. Freedom National went out of business in 1990. William Randolph Hudgins was born in Petersburg, Va., on April 30, 1907. At the age of 2 he was adopted by William and Agnes Hudgins. His adoptive father was a carpenter and owned a delivery truck; his adoptive mother was a music teacher. A tall, thin young man, Mr. Hudgins came to Harlem in his early 20s. He first worked door to door as a Fuller Brush salesman, then took a job at a local dry-cleaning store that specialized in refurbishing costumes from Broadway shows. In 1943, he parlayed the value from several real estate investments to start Best Yet Hair Products, a mail-order business that sold high-quality wigs made from human hair. Because of his business success in the late 1940s, Mr. Hudgins became the first African-American chosen to join the merchants\u2019 division of the Uptown Chamber of Commerce in Manhattan, now called the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Hudgins married three times. His first marriage, to the former Martha Fitzgerald, ended in divorce. His second wife, Myrtle Patterson Hudgins, died in 1972. Besides his daughter, Jan, of Manhattan, Mr. Hudgins is survived by his third wife, the former Dorothy Carroll, whom he married in 1972; a son, Alvin, of Sarasota, Fla.; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Although Freedom National Bank was less successful than the Carver bank, a Time magazine article in 1966 offered a glimpse of the mission that Mr. Hudgins envisioned for his banking enterprises. \u201cAlmost like a small-town banker, Hudgins gets personally involved in many loan applications,\u201d the article said. \u201cDoubtfuls usually wind up in his second-floor office to plead their cases, and frequently get their loans after careful investigation.\u201d", "keyword": "Hudgins William R;Deaths (Obituaries);Banks and Banking;Blacks"}
{"id": "ny0145035", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/10/08", "title": "Climbers of Times Building Get Different Jury Treatment", "abstract": "Although they climbed the headquarters of The New York Times on the same day, June 5, Renaldo Clarke and Alain Robert \u2019s stunts were seen differently. Mr. Robert was something of a professional stuntman, known for climbing buildings around the world to promote the fight against global warming . He seemed to scale the building playfully. Mr. Clarke was unknown until his climb to promote the fight against malaria. He seemed to struggle at times during his ascent. Another difference: Mr. Clarke, who appeared in State Supreme Court in Manhattan for a hearing on Tuesday, was indicted on criminal charges, while Mr. Robert was not. In August, a grand jury voted to indict Mr. Clarke on three counts, the most serious of which was a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment, punishable by up to a year in prison. A different grand jury had voted in June to dismiss all criminal charges against Mr. Robert, leaving only a count of disorderly conduct, which is not a crime, but a violation akin to a parking ticket. The difference in the cases may come down to a simple element: Mr. Robert may have been more convincing before the grand jury than Mr. Clarke. (A third man, David Malone, who scaled several floors on July 9 before climbing down, was also indicted. After his stunt, The Times altered the building\u2019s facade.) \u201cIt\u2019s a little disappointing,\u201d said Gary A. Farrell, Mr. Clarke\u2019s lawyer. \u201cI guess they bought the first guy\u2019s claim that he\u2019s Mr. Experienced Climber. There\u2019s something to that. He\u2019s got a documented history of doing industrial climbs and Ray Clarke doesn\u2019t.\u201d Mr. Clarke has said that he had climbed other buildings including the Hearst Tower, at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue, but that he had done so unnoticed and had not been arrested. He also said he had been studying blueprints of the Times Building for two years and bought $130 climbing shoes on the day of the climb. On Tuesday, Mr. Farrell told Justice Charles H. Solomon that he would seek a plea deal in which Mr. Clarke could perform community service and have his misdemeanor conviction erased from his record. Daniel J. Castleman, the chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, declined to comment on why the grand jury had voted differently in the cases. But he said, \u201cWe treated both cases similarly in that we presented it to the grand jury, and they voted differently in both cases, which is their prerogative.\u201d", "keyword": "Clarke Renaldo;Robert Alain;Decisions and Verdicts;New York Times"}
{"id": "ny0143494", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/04", "title": "Wells Fargo Swoops In", "abstract": "The bold gambit that could reorder American banking began with the chirp of a cellphone in Charlotte, N.C. It was just after 9 p.m. on Thursday, and Robert K. Steel, the chief executive of the Wachovia Corporation , listened to startling news on his phone as he stepped off a plane from New York: Wells Fargo & Company was plotting to wrest his stricken bank from Citigroup . Only four days earlier, assisted by federal regulators, Mr. Steel had agreed to sell Wachovia to Citigroup for a fire-sale $1 a share. Wells Fargo had walked away, and Richard M. Kovacevich, its chairman, had called to wish Mr. Steel good luck. But now Mr. Kovacevich was on the line with a far sweeter deal, one worth about $15 billion \u2014 seven times what Citigroup was offering. The call set in motion another game of brinkmanship in a year of extraordinary Wall Street showdowns. At stake is the control of one of the nation\u2019s largest retail banking businesses \u2014 a prize that will transform the winner into one of the few giants to emerge from the wreckage of the industry. For Wells Fargo, which is based in San Francisco, Wachovia would expand its reach across the nation. Citigroup, which is based in New York, wants the bank for its large retail operations. The battle has also drawn in federal regulators, who had pushed the teetering Wachovia into the arms of Citigroup but are now seeking to limit taxpayer exposure. The reversal might make it more difficult for the government to broker future rescues. Citigroup is weighing a lawsuit that would claim a breach of contract. The cast of characters include some of the most powerful executives in the industry: Vikram S. Pandit at Citigroup; Mr. Steel, a former confidant of Henry M. Paulson Jr. at both the Treasury and Goldman Sachs; and Mr. Kovacevich, a legendary banker and former Citigroup executive who, until now, has largely shunned the empire-building practiced by his rivals. In the wings is Warren E. Buffett, the largest shareholder of Wells Fargo, who has emerged as the go-to financier for several prominent companies that have come under siege during the credit crisis . For Mr. Steel, the latest chapter began on Thursday night with the call from Mr. Kovacevich, who told him to consider the new offer or he would go public with it on Friday morning. About 10 minutes later, Mr. Steel\u2019s BlackBerry buzzed. It was a merger proposal from Wells Fargo, bearing the approval of that bank\u2019s board. Wachovia executives were stunned. They had not heard from Wells for days, and had been working nonstop alongside Citigroup bankers to close the deal and discuss operational details. Mr. Steel called one of his Wall Street advisers, who was at home watching the vice presidential debate . \u201cFasten your seat belt,\u201d Mr. Steel told him. At about 11:30 p.m., Mr. Steel convened an emergency meeting of Wachovia\u2019s board, where he described the new offer and a serious potential roadblock. Accepting might involve breaking an agreement with Citigroup that appeared to block a rival bid. After two hours of debate, the board concluded that Wells Fargo\u2019s offer was too good to pass up. Wells Fargo was offering to buy all of Wachovia, whereas Citigroup had proposed buying only part of it. Also, Wells, unlike Citigroup, was not seeking government support. And then there was the money. The board voted in favor of the offer, and, at approximately 2:15 a.m., Mr. Steel placed an awkward call to Mr. Pandit at Citigroup. The deal, he told him, was off. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Pandit alerted his lawyers and top lieutenants and summoned them to prepare for battle. They met at the law offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell. Groggy, one Citigroup executive forgot his corporate ID card. In the early hours of Friday morning, Wachovia executives learned that Sheila C. Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which had pressed for the Citigroup deal, would not stand in the way of the new agreement with Wells Fargo, as it would involve no risk to taxpayers. \u201cNeither Chairman Bair nor any person at the F.D.I.C. in any way initiated or solicited this bid from Wells Fargo,\u201d an F.D.I.C. spokesman said on Friday. \u201cWhen asked for our views, we said that we would not object\u201d because the agency does not have the authority. Other federal regulators said that they would not block Well Fargo\u2019s offer while they reviewed the proposal. By Friday morning the F.D.I.C. said it stood behind the original deal with Citigroup. Bankers working on the deal were mystified by the statement, and said they had assumed the government would ultimately back a deal that did not involve public money. News of the deal reached Wall Street trading desks at 7 a.m. A few hours later, Wells Fargo went public with its offer. Citigroup, its stock sinking, quickly fired back. The Wells-Wachovia deal is \u201cin clear breach\u201d of an exclusivity agreement between Citigroup and Wachovia, Citigroup said. Citigroup claimed it had been irreparably harmed and demanded that Wachovia and Wells Fargo halt their proposed transaction. Mr. Kovacevich told investors in a conference call Friday morning that he was confident the deal would go through. \u201cWe think this deal is solid,\u201d he said. When an analyst asked Mr. Steel if he could discuss whether Wachovia had a binding agreement with Citigroup, he replied with one word: No. But Mr. Buffett, in an interview on CNBC, endorsed the Wells Fargo bid on Friday afternoon, calling it superior to Citigroup\u2019s offer. Well Fargo\u2019s reversal came after a little-noticed move on Tuesday by the Internal Revenue Service, which restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. The rule had been viewed as a impediment to bank consolidation. With Wachovia, Wells Fargo estimates that it will absorb about $74 billion in losses. The marketplace passed swift judgment on Friday. As its hold on Wachovia appeared to slip away, Citigroup stumbled in the stock market. Its shares fell nearly 18.5 percent, while shares of Wells Fargo slipped just 1.7 percent. Wachovia was the big winner. Its shares soared nearly 59 percent.", "keyword": "Wells Fargo & Co;Wachovia Corp;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Citigroup Incorporated;Stocks and Bonds;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0104869", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/03/24", "title": "Opel Worker Representatives Deny Reports of Plant Closings in Europe", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 Worker representatives at General Motors \u2019 Opel unit said Friday there were no negotiations about closing factories in Europe, partly contradicting reports of impending shutdowns in Britain and Germany. \u201cSpeculation that local negotiations on savings are taking place is denied,\u201d the Opel/Vauxhall European Employee Forum said. Vauxhall is the brand name G.M. uses in Britain. In Europe, no shutdowns would be possible without prior negotiations with workers. The workers group was responding to numerous press reports that Opel\u2019s supervisory board will meet next week to consider closing factories in Bochum, Germany, and Ellesmere Port, Britain. A spokesman for Opel in Germany, Andreas Kr\u00f6mer, said he could not comment on the reports of factory closings. But he said, \u201cIt\u2019s clear that Opel must achieve sustainable profitability.\u201d A G.M. spokesman, Klaus-Peter Martin, said, \u201cWe have not announced anything. We are not commenting on speculation or speculative stories that are out there.\u201d Whether or not G.M. is planning to close any European factories soon, there is little doubt that painful measures lie ahead. Opel was largely responsible for a $747 million loss that G.M.\u2019s European unit reported for 2011. All of the makers of midprice cars in Europe suffer from overcapacity, and Opel\u2019s problems are among the most acute. Karl-Friedrich Stracke, the chief executive of Opel, said earlier this month that the company\u2019s factories were operating at only 80 percent capacity. Surplus capacity is deadly for carmakers, because they must continue to pay for upkeep and the salaries of unproductive workers. The pressure is only likely to get worse as the European economy slips into recession. Registrations of new cars in Europe were down 8.3 percent in Europe in January and February. During the same period Opel\u2019s market share in the European Union sank to 6.1 percent from 7 percent a year earlier. Other European brands including Renault, Fiat, Peugeot and Citro\u00ebn also lost ground. With the exception of Volkswagen and Ford of Europe, the midprice carmakers have been losing share to Bayerische Motoren Werke and Daimler, which are offering smaller, lower-priced models. In addition, the Hyundai-Kia alliance has been making inroads in Europe. The statement from Opel/Vauxhall workers Friday signaled the struggle that awaits G.M. as it tries to cut costs in the face of determined worker opposition. In return for earlier concessions, Opel had agreed not to close any plants or lay off any workers until at least 2014. The workers group argued that closing plants is itself expensive and will not solve Opel\u2019s problems. Instead, the company should stop importing some vehicles from outside Europe and try harder to develop export markets for the Opel brand. \u201cIt makes little sense to speculate on expensive plant closures,\u201d the workers group said. \u201cSuch costly closures will make sure it will take years for the company to return to profit.\u201d Workers complain that G.M. has put more emphasis on building sales in Europe for Chevrolet brand cars made primarily in South Korea. Chevrolet increased its market share in Europe to 1.7 percent in January and February from 1.2 percent a year earlier, according to data compiled by the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. The worker representatives issued a demand that G.M. management \u201cclearly reject the public speculation and agree to hold immediate constructive internal talks in order to prevent further damage to Opel/Vauxhall.\u201d Any actions that G.M. takes in Europe to reduce capacity would be far less severe than the cutbacks it made in North America before and during its 2009 bankruptcy. G.M. eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the United States and closed about a dozen plants. It negotiated buyout and early-retirement offers worth up to $140,000 with the United Automobile Workers union to persuade many employees to leave voluntarily. As a result, G.M. earned $7.2 billion last year in North America, by far its most profitable region, after losing more than $70 billion in North America from 2004 through 2008. Since its bankruptcy, G.M. has been increasing production as the market has rebounded, but mostly by adding jobs and shifts at existing plants. It agreed as part of last year\u2019s union contract negotiations to reopen a plant in Tennessee that halted operations in 2009 but otherwise has resisted restarting any shuttered plants to avoid increasing its fixed costs. Nick Bunkley contributed reporting from Detroit.", "keyword": "Opel Adam AG;General Motors"}
{"id": "ny0274820", "categories": ["business", "smallbusiness"], "date": "2016/02/11", "title": "Florist-Friendly Marketplaces Help Local Flower Shops Hang On", "abstract": "This weekend, florists across the country will send out millions of Valentine\u2019s Day bouquets filled with roses, carnations, tulips and other blooming symbols of love. And some will lose money on almost every single sale. The neighborhood flower store, once a retail staple, is rapidly disappearing. Nearly 40 percent of America\u2019s floral businesses have closed since 2000, with 14,000 remaining at last count, in 2013, according to census data. The number of paid employees in the field has been cut in half. A recent market report from IBISWorld put it bluntly: \u201cThe florists industry has entered the declining stage of its life cycle.\u201d The recession and shoppers\u2019 changing preferences have played a role: Fresh flowers are a luxury that tends to get scrapped when money is tight. But florists say one of their biggest challenges is a behind-the-scenes margin fight that plays out every time a buyer goes online to arrange a flower delivery. If a shopper goes directly to a florist\u2019s website, the store keeps most of the revenue from the sale. That calculation changes radically if buyers go through national merchants like 1-800-Flowers and FTD.com, or if they search for local sellers on Google and click the resulting ads, which are often placed by virtual companies with no inventory of their own. In all those cases, a big chunk of the transaction is captured by middlemen. That leaves the bricks-and-mortar merchants, to whom the orders are passed for fulfillment, typically collecting 70 percent or less of the sale price, fueling a sort of love-hate relationship with online merchants. While they can increase business for a florist, that business can come at a high price. \u201cIt\u2019s break-even at best on the vast majority,\u201d Bonnie Bank, the controller of Superior Florist , an 86-year-old flower shop in Manhattan, said of the orders placed with her shop by outside sellers. \u201cThe higher-dollar ones, maybe you can make a small margin.\u201d The dilemma has also created an opening for new entrants into the online market \u2014 like BloomNation , a start-up in Santa Monica, Calif., that bills itself as an Etsy for flowers, and GotFlowers , created by a software developer who is also based in California. The industry\u2019s current financial structure has its roots in a century-old practice. In 1910, a group of 15 American florists formed a cooperative, the Florists\u2019 Telegraph Delivery service, to exchange orders. A customer in Denver would, for example, be able to walk into a local flower shop and arrange a delivery to a friend in Boston. The originating florist transmitted the order through the florists\u2019 wire service and received a commission for the effort; the rest of the money was passed on to the fulfilling merchant. Two changes upended that genteel arrangement. First, technology made it easier for customers to shop with national retailers offering a standardized product catalog, a trend that the Internet rapidly accelerated. And around the same time, the wire services began competing more directly with their merchants to capture incoming sales. In 1994, the members of FTD, which had by then been renamed Florists\u2019 Transworld Delivery, privatized their co-op and sold it to an investment fund for $150 million . In a typical wire service transaction today, the originating merchant receives 20 percent of the sale price, and the wire service \u2014 FTD, 1-800-Flowers and Teleflora are the industry\u2019s big three \u2014 keeps 7 percent. If an order comes in directly through a wire\u2019s website, the service keeps the full 27 percent. Amplifying the problem for merchants is the rise of \u201corder gatherers\u201d that create elaborate virtual storefronts and advertise extensively on search engines. Their aim is to capture the 20 percent commission, plus service and delivery fees. The flower shops that receive those orders through their wire services say they are stuck with low-price, low-margin orders, and consumer websites are filled with scathing reviews from customers complaining about how little the delivered flowers look like the photos they saw. \u201cIt\u2019s really deceptive,\u201d said Mike Fiannaca, the president of Sparks Florist in Nevada, who created a YouTube video that demonstrates how order gatherers use his store\u2019s name in their ad links. \u201cWe want to give all our customers the best possible value, and the experience with these sites is often terrible.\u201d Irked by misleading orders and the wire services\u2019 fees, Rhoda Paurus, the owner of St. Cloud Floral in Minnesota, is considering dropping both of her services, FTD and Teleflora. She took the first step toward separation in May, when she switched her website\u2019s e-commerce system from Teleflora\u2019s to one run by BloomNation. BloomNation charges a flat 10 percent fee on the orders it processes, and it does not have a standardized product catalog. Merchants take and post photos of their own arrangements. Image Work orders are pasted on the wall in St. Cloud Floral in St. Cloud, Minn. Credit Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times That part particularly delights Ms. Paurus, who changes her photos daily. \u201cIf we get a double shipment of roses, within a few minutes, we can have a rose special on our website,\u201d she said. BloomNation\u2019s executives say 1,500 shops are using their marketplace. Farbod Shoraka, one of the founders, began working on the concept five years ago after hearing from his aunt, a florist, about her business\u2019s many pain points. \u201cThe consumer was frustrated, the business owner was frustrated, and the middleman was making all the money,\u201d Mr. Shoraka said. \u201cIt was a very clearly broken model, from a business standpoint.\u201d So why do florists stick with it? Some of them say they value the sales volume that the wire services bring in and have found ways to make the orders profitable. Others point to the industry\u2019s reliance on the vendors it has worked with for decades. \u201cA lot of florists still rely on the wire services to send their outgoing orders, including many florists we have worked with for years and years,\u201d Ms. Bank said. \u201cAlthough we try to talk them into paying us directly, many are resistant. That\u2019s why we will likely continue with Teleflora, to maintain those relationships.\u201d The wire services say they play a vital role in marketing florists\u2019 goods. \u201cI truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that if it weren\u2019t for people and organizations like ours, there would be no retail flower shops left,\u201d said Mark Nance, president of the 1-800-Flowers wire service BloomNet . \u201cThe retail shop can\u2019t compete on a worldwide scale. We\u2019re doing everything we can for those shops so they won\u2019t be displaced by something like Amazon.\u201d FTD noted that many florists gain new local customers from orders originated by FTD, and Teleflora said its fees were \u201cin line with the standards needed to successfully promote consumer awareness and orders in a competitive marketplace.\u201d Chris Drummond, a third-generation florist and the president of Plaza Flowers in Philadelphia and Norristown, Pa., agrees with that view. He advertises aggressively through a variety of channels, including online campaigns, search engine ads, direct mail, fliers and promotional deliveries to potential business clients. \u201cWe run analytics to quantify what it costs to acquire an order,\u201d he said. \u201cMy cost across all of the platforms usually ranges from 24 to 30 percent. In the end, no matter what I use, I have to figure out how to make money on about 73 percent of the sale.\u201d But as their industry shrinks, some flower shop owners are stepping up their efforts to change the way it operates. Real Local Florists , an advocacy group, began working several years ago with Sundaram Natarajan, a software developer,on an e-commerce system for florists\u2019 websites that would offer a less expensive alternative to the wire services\u2019 systems. Mr. Natarajan\u2019s software, GotFlowers, is now used by 50 shops nationwide. Recently the group requested a new feature, now in development, and it is one that sounds rather familiar. \u201cWe had the idea that we wanted to create our own florist-to-florist network,\u201d said Mr. Fiannaca, one of the group\u2019s founders. \u201cI can send an order to a member florist, and his or her products would populate on my web page.\u201d So a century later, Real Local Florists is essentially working to recreate the kind of co-op that FTD pioneered. When asked about the similarity, Mr. Fiannaca laughed. \u201cIt\u2019s a good model,\u201d he said. \u201cIt just has to be one that helps keep local florists in business.\u201d", "keyword": "Flowers and Plants;Florists;E Commerce;Valentine's Day;Retail;1-800-Flowerscom;FTD Group;Teleflora;BloomNation;GotFlowers"}
{"id": "ny0104790", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/03/06", "title": "Virgin Mobile Wants to Be a Friendlier Cellphone Brand", "abstract": "DECLARATIONS of love for cellphone companies are few and far between. Dropped calls, rising prices, spotty service and strict contracts make many customers want to throw their hands \u2014 and their phones \u2014 in the air. Virgin Mobile is hoping to tackle that antipathy head-on with an advertising campaign that starts this week. Allon Tatarka, a creative director at Mother New York, the agency that created the campaign, said many people\u2019s relationships with carriers ranged from lukewarm to vitriolic. \u201cYou either don\u2019t care or you hate them,\u201d Mr. Tatarka said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to inject love into that relationship.\u201d Virgin Mobile isn\u2019t a full cellphone company. Instead it\u2019s a brand that offers prepaid cellphones through Sprint in the United States. It hopes to solidify its position with its target market, 18- to 24-year-olds, with a campaign that includes a heavy dose of youth marketing strategies from social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook, as well as mobile applications. Ron Faris, the head of brand marketing for Virgin Mobile USA, said the campaign would \u201ctap into the Zuckerberg in all of us,\u201d a reference to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Banner ads will run on sites like YouTube, Gawker, Buzzfeed and Pandora and television ads will be broadcast on ABC, NBC and Fox during shows like \u201cModern Family,\u201d \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live\u201d and \u201cAmerica\u2019s Next Top Model.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re going to change the relationship you have with your cellphone company,\u201d Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, says in an online video manifesto for the campaign. \u201cWe answer to a higher calling,\u201d he adds, underscoring the tagline for the entire campaign. \u0095 Mr. Branson is the central character in the campaign\u2019s television ad. \u201cLong before Richard Branson created airlines and spaceships, he envisioned Virgin Mobile,\u201d says the narrator in the ad, which shows Mr. Branson growing up in 1960s London. Robert Passikoff, the president of Brand Keys in New York, a brand and customer-loyalty consulting company, played down Mr. Branson\u2019s celebrity role and said cellphone shoppers were looking for brand reputation, technological leadership and connectivity. The campaign is also emphasizing Virgin\u2019s data services. \u201cEverything has been commoditized to price,\u201d Mr. Faris said. Those in the target audience \u201cdon\u2019t need thousands of minutes, they need a ton of data,\u201d he said. After AT&T announced it would no longer offer users unlimited data, the timing could be opportune for Virgin to highlight its $35-a-month unlimited data plan. \u201cVoice talk just isn\u2019t the norm anymore,\u201d said Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. \u201cThis is the Facebook generation that cut its teeth on posting updates to a Web site as a way of communicating.\u201d Creating content for those cellphones is also a big part of the campaign. Virgin worked with Buzzfeed to create content published via social media sites like Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest and the newly revamped VirginMobileLive.com . \u201cIt\u2019s a decision we\u2019re making to move closer to newsroom marketing.\u201d Mr. Faris said. \u201cWe want to be a voice where pop culture meets technology.\u201d To hone their editorial skills, Virgin Mobile employees will be trained by the creative services team at Buzzfeed in how to spot news and create content for the sites. \u201cBrands have not yet figured out how to do real-time advertising or real-time content,\u201d said Jonah Peretti, founder and chief executive of Buzzfeed. \u201cThey tend to do things with huge lead time.\u201d Spotting and publishing an item about the latest cat video craze or celebrity gossip needs to happen quickly. \u201cIt\u2019s not how to make branded content for advertising, it\u2019s showing them how to make really interesting engaging content for their audience,\u201d Mr. Peretti said. Virgin Mobile will also feature weekly profiles of apps to help developers gain exposure. The company will reveal its first app profile at the South by Southwest conference on Friday. A network of 25 technology bloggers, called the VM 25, will help the company promote its contests and other announcements. \u201cWe want to be a more hyperaddicted version of your friend on Facebook who you share stuff with,\u201d Mr. Faris said. \u0095 Virgin Mobile is not alone in this prepaid market. Companies like MetroPCS have similar offerings for voice and data plans. But Virgin Mobile\u2019s biggest rival is T-Mobile, Mr. Passikoff said. \u201cBasically it\u2019s Sprint going after T-Mobile,\u201d he said. (Virgin Mobile is owned by Sprint in the United States.) Virgin Mobile has not been shy about its disdain for its rival. Carly, the T-Mobile spokeswoman who wears a pink dress while standing against a stark white background, was once a play on ads for Apple\u2019s Mac. Now, in a Virgin Mobile ad, she is parodied as being devoid of cool and is denied entry to a nightclub because of her pink dress. Virgin Mobile did not share the cost of the campaign, only to say the company tended \u201cto spend somewhere between 3 percent and 5 percent of what our competitors spend on paid media.\u201d According to data from Kantar Media, part of WPP, Virgin Mobile spent $20.1 million on advertising from January to September 2010 and $47.4 million for the same period in 2011. T-Mobile spent $425.1 million on advertising from January to September 2011 and MetroPCS spent $85.2 million in the same period.", "keyword": "Virgin Mobile;Cellular Telephones;Advertising and Marketing;Smartphones"}
{"id": "ny0295627", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/12/10", "title": "ISIS Close to Recapturing Palmyra From Syrian Forces", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon \u2014 Islamic State fighters appeared close to retaking Palmyra, Syria, on Saturday, just nine months after Syrian government forces drove them from the desert city, where they had terrorized residents and blown up irreplaceable ancient monuments. Residents said Islamic State militants were battling soldiers in the city\u2019s center, after retaking outlying oil fields and nearly encircling the city over the past week as the government and its allies were focused on a pivotal battle in Aleppo, further north. Losing Palmyra for a second time would be a major symbolic and military blow for the Syrian government, which touted its reconquest of the city in March, after 10 months of Islamic State rule. Russia, the government\u2019s main ally, which had helped with air support and advisers, flew an orchestra to play a victory concert in Palmyra\u2019s ancient amphitheater that month. The Russians also established a small base in the city, but residents said all Russian troops had pulled out in recent days as the militants approached. The setback in Palmyra comes as the government has been scoring its most important victories in years in Aleppo, once Syria\u2019s largest city. The army and allied militias there have retaken most of the eastern half of the city. East Aleppo has been held for four years by rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. Another battle, also unfolding on Saturday, may further complicate the government\u2019s war strategy. A rebel coalition backed by Turkey made advances against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in the city of Al Bab in northern Aleppo Province, an area that the Syrian government hoped to conquer from the group. Residents were in a state of fear and anxiety, according to activists from the Local Coordination Committee of Palmyra, a group that opposes both Mr. Assad\u2019s government and the Islamic State\u2019s self-described caliphate. The activist group said that residents were being abandoned by government forces, which had withdrawn from several areas. The events echoed those of spring 2015, when most government forces left the area, leaving residents and a few junior soldiers at the hands of the Islamic State. Many of those who remained were executed . On Saturday, pro-government social media accounts reported that Russian advisers and other \u201callies\u201d \u2014 possibly including militiamen from Iraq and the Lebanese group Hezbollah \u2014 had abandoned Palmyra as the Islamic State approached, leaving Syrian government troops to fend for themselves. Hezbollah played a major role in the battle to take back Palmyra nine months ago, a victory it sought to publicize in order to show that it, too, was battling terrorism and saving the ancient ruins from further destruction. On Thursday, 34 Syrian soldiers were reported killed in an Islamic State bombing at a location on the outskirts of Palmyra known as the Qatari castle. The Islamic State\u2019s advance came as state news media broadcast statements about the government\u2019s victory in East Aleppo. State television has painted a rosy picture, suggesting that reconstruction work in Aleppo could soon begin and some of the five million refugees outside Syria could start returning home. Mr. Assad, however, called the Aleppo siege a major victory, but said it would not end the war.", "keyword": "ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Palmyra Syria;Syria;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0244803", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/04/27", "title": "4 Killed in Bus Bombings in Karachi, Pakistan", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 At least four people were killed in the southern port city of Karachi on Tuesday in bombings that struck two buses carrying Pakistani naval employees, a senior naval official said. At least 56 people were wounded. The official, Commodore Irfan ul-Haq, identified the dead as a civilian doctor, a junior naval officer, and two low-ranking naval employees. No one claimed responsibility immediately, but Taliban insurgents and militant groups affiliated with the organization have repeatedly attacked civilians and military installations across the country. Karachi is the country\u2019s largest city and considered the financial and commercial capital. Both bombs struck during the early morning rush. The first was planted on a motorcycle that was idling by a main road in an upscale neighborhood, the police said; it exploded as the naval bus passed. The blast destroyed the bus, killing the junior naval officer and the doctor and wounding 37 other passengers. The windows of nearby houses were shattered. Minutes later, in a relatively impoverished neighborhood, a remote-controlled bomb hidden in roadside rubble exploded, the police said. That blast killed the two other naval employees and injured 19 others. On Saturday, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, claimed to in a speech before Afghan military cadets to have broken the back of militants in the country. The bombings were \u201ca powerful message by the militants,\u201d said Omar R. Quraishi, opinion pages editor of The Express Tribune, an English-language daily newspaper based in Karachi. \u201cThe message is that we may be on the run, but we can strike at will and choose targets of our choosing.\u201d", "keyword": "Pakistan;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0040980", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/04/14", "title": "Bruins Coach Eschews Negativity and Builds Winners", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 On the first Monday of April 2007, the Devils had a 47-24-8 record. They were in first place in the Atlantic Division with the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. They had won four of their past five games and appeared well positioned for a deep playoff run. That\u2019s what their coach thought. As Claude Julien prepared for a late-morning meeting with his boss, the Devils\u2019 president, Lou Lamoriello, he had playoffs on his mind. How would the Devils deal with certain personnel issues? What kind of travel contingencies did they need to address? Julien knew the ever-meticulous Lamoriello liked to have all his bases covered. What Julien did not know, nor could he reasonably have been expected to know, was that April 2, 2007, would be his last day as the coach of the Devils. Lamoriello abruptly fired Julien, saying he thought the team, despite its record, was nowhere near being ready for the playoffs. There were three games remaining in the regular season. The stunned coach called his wife, Karen, from his car on the way home. She noted the time and said she thought he was coming home unusually early. He told her the news. Not far away, many of his former players gathered for lunch, just as stunned. Zach Parise sent Julien a text message offering his best wishes. Julien also heard from the backup goalie Scott Clemmensen, who appeared in just six games that season. Jay Pandolfo, who later played briefly for Julien in Boston, said: \u201cThe whole thing was definitely crazy. With three games left?\u201d The encouraging words cheered Julien as he tried to digest what had just happened. Almost 15 months earlier, he had been fired as the coach of the Montreal Canadiens, his first N.H.L. coaching job, after three seasons. His second opportunity did not even last one full season. He was three weeks shy of his 47th birthday and asked himself, \u201cHow do I ever recover from this?\u201d \u201cI never saw either one of them coming,\u201d Julien said of the dismissals. \u201cMaybe I\u2019m na\u00efve, but I never did. And after the second firing, I was worried that it would take away any opportunity I might ever have to get back into the N.H.L.\u201d He added: \u201cThat\u2019s why this thing in Boston has been the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I feel like an established coach now in the N.H.L. It\u2019s a good fit, and it has overshadowed the negative things from back then.\u201d This \u201cthing\u201d in Boston is now ending its seventh year, as Julien, coaching the Bruins, leads them into the Stanley Cup playoffs with the league\u2019s best record. He has a Stanley Cup ring from the Bruins\u2019 championship in 2011 and an Olympic gold medal from Sochi as an assistant for Team Canada. He is now third in the N.H.L. in years of consecutive service with one team. The Devils have gone through four coaches since Julien was dismissed, not counting Lamoriello, who finished the 2006-7 season. The team he thought needed a playoff jolt with a new coach? It was eliminated in the second round. Less than three months later, in June 2007, Julien was announced as the coach of the Bruins. The man who hired him, General Manager Peter Chiarelli, had tried to give him the job the year before. Had he called Julien an hour sooner, Julien would have come to Boston a year earlier and the stint with the Devils would never have happened. Chiarelli and Julien had been friends for years, both growing up in the greater Ottawa area. In the spring of 2006, Chiarelli was still technically with Ottawa but had accepted the job as Boston\u2019s general manager. He had to go through league channels to receive permission to speak to Julien, and by the time the two connected, Julien had just agreed to coach the Devils. One more year was not going to change Chiarelli\u2019s mind, especially since there was a pervasive feeling that Lamoriello had been a micromanager, drawing on the success he had in 2000 when he fired Coach Robbie Ftorek with eight games left and the Devils went on to win the Cup. As the former Devils wing Jamie Langenbrunner put it when asked if the players had been surprised by Julien\u2019s firing: \u201cWe were surprised. Some of us were shocked. But in New Jersey, you learn not to be surprised by anything to do with coaches.\u201d Chiarelli said he received some criticism after the Julien hiring, adding, \u201cThat was fair, especially after he was let go twice in a short period of time.\u201d \u201cBut I felt he learned a lot from the two jobs,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I believed in him.\u201d Julien was appreciative. \u201cIt was nice to see that, no matter what happened to me, there were still people who believed I could do the job,\u201d he said, \u201cand Peter was one of those guys.\u201d Here is what else Julien, 53, could point to as a counterbalance to the firings: His teams win. His Montreal teams won 72 and lost 65, with 15 overtime losses and 10 ties. His first full season at Montreal resulted in 93 points and a first-round upset of the Bruins after trailing in the series, 3-1. His final Montreal team was in third place with a winning record when he was fired in January 2006. The Devils had 102 points when he was released. Only once, when he first joined the Canadiens in midseason, has Julien not had a winning record. This year\u2019s Bruins team, with 117 points, might be his best. \u201cThat\u2019s what his teams do, they win,\u201d said Jim Dowd, who played for Julien in Montreal and with the Devils. Julien often harks back to his days as a roofer in the family business as a character-building experience. He started when he was 14. He kept doing it while he bounced around the minor leagues and during the summer in the brief time (14 games) he played in the N.H.L. for the Quebec Nordiques. He even kept at it when he got his first real coaching job with the Hull Olympiques in 1994. \u201cI\u2019d drive the truck to the arena, take a shower to get the tar smell off of me and hop on the bus,\u201d he said. \u201cRoofing is probably one of the main reasons that I am what I am today. It is a real tough job and built the character I needed to do this job.\u201d Julien carries that attitude with him today just as surely as he carted shingles up ladders, raised pails of stones on a pulley and spread the pungent tar. The work was honest and humble, traits he instills in, and expects from, his players. \u201cI want our guys\u2019 actions to speak instead of their words, to make them see that they are one of the fortunate ones to make it to this level,\u201d he said. Seven years after hitting the professional bottom, and wondering how he would ever manage to recover, Julien has found a comfort level in Boston he once thought might be unattainable. \u201cI think I\u2019ve found a niche here,\u201d he said. \u201cI like the whole picture, from upper management to who I work with.\u201d Chiarelli said he and Julien had discussed many possible situations and contingencies for the playoffs. None involved replacing the successful coach. \u201cHe was at the top of my list when I got the Boston job,\u201d Chiarelli said. And he is still there.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Coaches;Bruins;Claude Julien;Peter Chiarelli;Lou Lamoriello;Devils"}
{"id": "ny0014054", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/11/15", "title": "Insurer Charged With Theft From a Charity", "abstract": "The owner of a Long Island insurance company has been charged with helping a longtime Jewish community leader loot more than $7 million from one of the city\u2019s most influential social service organizations and pocketing at least $1 million himself, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case. The insurance company owner, Joseph Ross, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with first-degree grand larceny and money laundering and other crimes for what the complaint said was his admitted role in the scheme, which spanned two decades and targeted the social service organization, the Metropolitan New York Council on Jewish Poverty. The community leader, William E. Rapfogel, who served as the group\u2019s executive director until the scheme was uncovered this summer and he was fired in August, was arrested on similar charges in September. The arrests are the result of an ongoing investigation by the offices of the state\u2019s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli. The insurance company, Century Coverage in Valley Stream, N.Y., has provided its services to the organization, known as Met Council, for more than two decades. Mr. Ross, 58, was arrested on Wednesday and arraigned before Acting State Supreme Court Justice Abraham Clott. He did not enter a plea and was released on his own recognizance. Mr. Ross\u2019s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, would not comment on the accusations. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s appropriate to discuss the substantive facts at this time, but Mr. Ross intends to address these issues in a very responsible fashion,\u201d Mr. Brafman said. The charges contained in the Sept. 24 complaint against Mr. Rapfogel and the one charging Mr. Ross are similar, as are the outlines of the scheme detailed in the two documents. Century sent Met Council inflated invoices and the two men and another conspirator split the excess money, according to the complaints. It appears that investigators have concluded that the amount of money stolen between the early 1990s and August 2013 was greater than they had believed. In the complaint charging Mr. Rapfogel, the total amount of the theft was listed as in excess of $5 million. But the complaint against Mr. Ross says the total amount of money stolen was in excess of $7 million. The complaint against Mr. Ross, which was sworn out by Gerard Matheson, an investigator with the attorney general\u2019s office, said that Mr. Rapfogel used some of the stolen money to provide political contributions to candidates for city, state and federal offices in the names of Century owners and employees. It said that Mr. Rapfogel instructed Mr. Ross to make contributions to various candidates and political organizations, and that Mr. Ross regularly delivered checks for the contributions to Mr. Rapfogel. The complaint said that more than $120,000 was provided to candidates for city offices, and tens of thousands of dollars more went to candidates for state and federal offices. Met Council, a nonprofit organization that receives tens of millions of dollars in city, state and federal financing, cannot legally make such contributions itself.", "keyword": "Joseph Ross;Fraud;Metropolitan New York Council on Jewish Poverty;William E Rapfogel;Century Coverage;Money laundering"}
{"id": "ny0043727", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/05/23", "title": "Struggling Mets Stand Up to an Ace", "abstract": "As Zack Greinke took the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday night, he did not look especially intimidating. He was not particularly tall. He was not overly muscular. His face looked boyish as he paced around the mound, kicked at the dirt, toed the rubber and stared down the first batter. But he was probably the last pitcher the Mets wanted to see. They had lost six of their last seven games, and Greinke had gone 21 consecutive starts allowing two earned runs or fewer, tying the modern record. The Mets could be excused if Greinke rolled over them, too. Instead, they stayed patient and got to Greinke for three runs, chasing him after five innings. Up and down the order, they showed moxie. Jon Niese pitched seven strong innings. David Wright and Curtis Granderson each had two hits. Juan Lagares drove in the decisive run. Eric Campbell made a diving catch. With the 5-3 victory at Citi Field, the Mets improved to 21-25 and salvaged some confidence. Mets Manager Terry Collins, hoping for a spark, had started three young players: Campbell, 27, in left field; Lagares, 25, in center; and Wilmer Flores, 22, at shortstop. Maybe Greinke would not intimidate them. Campbell, in particular, had seemed unfazed since he was called up about two weeks ago. In seven games, he had batted .438 and had driven in five runs, hitting his first career home run Wednesday. Before the game, Collins said he was riding the \u201chot horse\u201d by giving Campbell his first major league start in left. \u201cI\u2019m just kind of taking a shot in the dark,\u201d Collins said. Campbell helped. In the second inning, after Granderson doubled and went to third on an error by Dodgers center fielder Matt Kemp, Campbell drove him in with a sacrifice fly. Two batters later, with one out and a runner on first base, Flores sent a high fly ball to right-center. It appeared to be an extra-base hit, one that would easily score Lucas Duda, who was on first. But the Dodgers\u2019 Yasiel Puig broke into a full-out sprint, flung his body like a torpedo toward the ball and caught it backhanded at the last moment. \u201cThat was about a good a catch as I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Collins said. Greinke smiled as he retook the mound. The Mets had figured him out, to some degree, but he had faced similar situations over his previous 21 games. \u201cHe\u2019s just consistent,\u201d Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly said before the game. \u201cHis preparation; who he is. His stuff is pretty consistent. There are days, though, that he\u2019s not as good as others, and he still knows what he\u2019s doing enough to get through it.\u201d Undaunted, the Mets got to Greinke again in the fifth inning. Anthony Recker doubled, and Niese doubled him home. Then Niese scored, too, as third baseman Justin Turner, a former Met, failed to cleanly field a ground ball off the bat of Daniel Murphy. After the inning, as Greinke walked off, he chatted with his catcher, A. J. Ellis. The Mets had worked him for three runs but only one earned run, meaning his streak was still intact and, at 22 games, was the longest such run in the majors since at least 1914. Recker was again in the Mets\u2019 lineup as their regular catcher, Travis d\u2019Arnaud, sat out with a concussion. Before the game, nine days after he was hit by a backswing, d\u2019Arnaud said he had been cleared for baseball activities. He revealed that this was his third concussion and that he wanted to switch his catcher\u2019s helmet from a hockey-style mask to a more traditional skullcap-and-face-mask combination. This concussion, he said, felt like the others. His timetable to return, however, remained unclear. \u201cIt was just one of those things,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat can you do?\u201d Recker did a fine job navigating Niese through the Dodgers\u2019 order at the start. After allowing a run in the first inning, he gave up only one hit over the next five innings. Niese cruised until Turner hit a fastball to left for a game-tying, two-run homer in the seventh. Niese put his hands on his hips and shook his head. \u201cHe\u2019s welcome for that one,\u201d Niese said. Still undeterred, the three youngsters in the Mets\u2019 lineup essentially won them the game. Flores singled to lead off the seventh, Lagares singled him in for a 4-3 lead, and Campbell made a diving catch in the eighth to start a double play that ended the inning. The fans\u2019 cheers on that play sounded delayed, as if they wanted to make sure Campbell had actually made the catch. The whole game had been somewhat hard to believe.", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Dodgers;Zack Greinke;Jon Niese"}
{"id": "ny0127555", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/01/01", "title": "After a Job Loss, Living Without Power or Prescriptions", "abstract": "It came down to living by candlelight. When Ivonne Diaz went through her monthly bills last year to see which ones she could afford on her unemployment checks, she realized she would have to go without electricity. Having Con Edison turn off her lights is just one more obstacle she has faced since losing her job in December 2010. She has also juggled payments for rent and grocery bills while supporting her pregnant teenage daughter. \u201cWell, we can deal with candles,\u201d reasoned Ms. Diaz, 51, a single mother of two and a grandmother of three. So for about two weeks, she and her daughter Marisol Diaz, 18, spent their nights in flickering darkness in their one-bedroom apartment in south Yonkers. Ms. Diaz said the hardest part of having the power cut off was \u201cnot knowing when I was going to get it put back on.\u201d Such uncertainty has overshadowed her life ever since she lost her job at the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation, where she had worked since 1986, eventually becoming a branch office manager. \u201cI grew up in this company,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was all I knew.\u201d But that December, the roughly 1,000 employees in the city\u2019s off-track betting parlors received grim news: The operation was shutting down . \u201cWhat a feeling of being lost that was,\u201d Ms. Diaz said. Having worked for 24 years and 4 months, Ms. Diaz fell just short of the 25-year minimum required to collect a pension, she said. The loss of her job meant an end to health insurance for her and Marisol, who has a learning disability and is six months pregnant. It also meant that Ms. Diaz went without her prescription drugs. \u201cFrom April to September, I had no blood pressure medicine,\u201d Ms. Diaz said. \u201cI said, O.K., God, I won\u2019t eat things with salt,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI\u2019ll walk a little more; I\u2019ll take off some weight. But I felt sick. \u201cLet me tell you, that\u2019s the worst: to be on medication and not know where you were going to get it.\u201d Ms. Diaz had earned $77,000 a year as a branch office manager, but she ran through her savings and had to tap into money she had socked away, like cashing in her 457 deferred-compensation plan. But she was disappointed to learn that she had to pay taxes on that money, which left her with significantly less than she had hoped for. \u201cYou can avoid going to the dentist, but you can\u2019t avoid taxes,\u201d she said. With six months left until her $402-a-week unemployment benefits run out, Ms. Diaz worries about finding a job and fears she does not have the computer skills to compete with younger applicants because she had done her work entirely on paper at the betting parlor. \u201cIn the back office, everything was done by hand,\u201d she said, \u201cso we never had to use a computer or even type.\u201d Ms. Diaz got her security officer\u2019s license and attended computer classes at the Riverfront Library in Yonkers, and then a former co-worker told her about the Grace Institute . The institute was founded in 1897 as a tuition-free educational and vocational training program for disadvantaged women. It offers classes in areas like typing, writing and computer programs, and helps prepare students for a competitive job market. Ms. Diaz began the program in September and described her first days there as \u201cvery scary,\u201d but she quickly formed a bond with her classmates. \u201cIt\u2019s even like we\u2019re another family there,\u201d she said. She has come a long way. \u201cI\u2019m so impressed with myself that I can actually type,\u201d she said, beaming. \u201cAnd now I\u2019m sitting next to girls in my class that can\u2019t type as well as I can,\u201d she added playfully. But one day, Ms. Diaz was commuting to the East Side of Manhattan for her classes when she realized she did not have the subway fare to take the No. 1 train to get home later. \u201cIt broke my heart to have to go ask someone to help me,\u201d Ms. Diaz said. But she turned to Lauren Silberstein, a social worker at Grace Institute, an affiliate of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York . \u201cWhen she entered my office, she just started crying,\u201d Ms. Silberstein said. \u201cWe talked for a while about her situation and her finances.\u201d Ms. Diaz\u2019s rent is $1,200 a month, and she paid about $600 a month for utilities and other expenses, but had fallen behind on her electric bill. Ms. Silberstein gave her a MetroCard and a list of food pantries in the neighborhood. \u201cThen I told her about The New York Times Neediest Cases project,\u201d she said. Ms. Diaz contacted Catholic Charities, one of the seven agencies supported by the Neediest Cases Fund, and in November, she was given $310 from the fund to help pay her electric bill. Buoyed by the confidence the Grace Institute has given her, Ms. Diaz is eager for her first job interviews when she completes the program in March. Now, when her daughter worries, Ms. Diaz said, \u201cI reassure her that we will all be O.K.\u201d \u201cThere is a light at the end of the tunnel,\u201d she says.", "keyword": "New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;Philanthropy;Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York;Off-Track Betting Corp"}
{"id": "ny0067922", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/12/16", "title": "With Hospitals Under Stress, Tennessee\u2019s Governor Pursues Medicaid Expansion", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Under mounting pressure from financially strapped hospitals, Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee proposed on Monday an alternative plan for expanding Medicaid that he said would bring health coverage to tens of thousands more poor residents of his state without following traditional Medicaid rules. Mr. Haslam, a Republican, made clear that he still opposed President Obama\u2019s Affordable Care Act, which encourages states to expand Medicaid to everyone earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,105 for a single person. Nonetheless, he proposed using federal Medicaid funds available under the law to cover some 200,000 low-income residents through their employer\u2019s health insurance plan or the state\u2019s Medicaid program. Under the second option, some people would be charged co-payments that are not always required by Medicaid, along with premiums that are rarely required. But they could receive help paying those costs \u201cby making healthy choices,\u201d Mr. Haslam said in a news conference in Nashville, such as by getting preventive screenings. Mr. Haslam said the Obama administration had informally agreed to the plan last week after months of negotiations. But it still needs an official federal waiver and the approval of the Republican-controlled Legislature \u2014 a potentially steep hurdle in a state where many lawmakers are aligned with the Tea Party and where opposition to Medicaid expansion has been strong. Mr. Haslam said he would call a special session in January for lawmakers to consider the plan, adding, \u201cI believe something this important to Tennesseans should have a full discussion and its own focus.\u201d Katie Hill, a spokeswoman for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said it had had \u201cproductive discussions with Governor Haslam, and we look forward to the state submitting its plan.\u201d Ron Ramsey, a Republican who is the state\u2019s lieutenant governor and Senate speaker, and who in the past has adamantly opposed Medicaid expansion, suggested in a statement that he was open to the plan. \u201cGovernor Haslam has negotiated a deal which returns tax dollars back to Tennessee while using conservative principles to bring health insurance to more Tennesseans,\u201d Mr. Ramsey said. The state\u2019s two United States senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both Republicans, also issued supportive statements. If Mr. Haslam\u2019s plan receives the approval it needs, Tennessee will join 27 states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, including nine with Republican leadership. Several other Republican governors have pushed for alternative forms of Medicaid expansion in their states since the November elections, partly a reflection of how badly hospitals and local communities want the federal funds that come with it. \u201cWe now have several hospitals that have closed, and all the hospitals in the state are hurting to some extent,\u201d said Michele Johnson, the executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, an advocacy group. \u201cIt\u2019s creating more and more pressure, especially in some of those really rural, far-right Tea Party districts, to understand this in a different way.\u201d The tide may also be shifting in states like Utah and Wyoming, where Republican governors proposed their own versions of Medicaid expansion this fall, and in Idaho, where a group formed by Gov. C. L. (Butch) Otter is revising an expansion plan in hopes of winning legislative backing. The conservative governors of North Carolina and, most recently, Alabama, have expressed openness to expanding Medicaid programs if they can fashion their own approach. In perhaps the most unusual part of Mr. Haslam\u2019s plan, the Tennessee Hospital Association has agreed to pay expansion costs beyond what the federal government covers. The Affordable Care Act calls for the federal government to cover all costs through 2016, with a gradually decreasing share thereafter, though never less than 90 percent. Mr. Haslam described his proposal as a two-year pilot program that would need reauthorization. Ms. Johnson said that some of the nation\u2019s largest for-profit hospital chains, including Hospital Corporation of America and Community Health Systems, have headquarters in Tennessee and have watched the amount they spend on uncompensated care drop this year in states that expanded Medicaid while it has risen in states like Tennessee. \u201cWhen they run the numbers, it\u2019s dramatic,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Health Insurance;Medicaid;Bill Haslam;Tennessee;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;Federal Aid"}
{"id": "ny0187861", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/04/07", "title": "Police Officer Is Charged in Shooting of Texas Man", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 A Harris County grand jury indicted a police sergeant Monday in the shooting of a young man outside his home on New Year\u2019s Eve . The case has attracted widespread attention because the victim\u2019s family accused the police of racial profiling. Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, a 39-year-old veteran in the Bellaire Police Department, was charged with aggravated assault by a public servant in the shooting of Robert Tolan, a 23-year-old waiter. The sergeant is white, and Mr. Tolan is black. Mr. Tolan, who was shot in his driveway while his parents looked on, survived, though a bullet pierced his right lung and lodged in his liver. Just before the shooting, Sergeant Cotton and another officer had forced Mr. Tolan and his cousin to lie face down on the ground at gunpoint after they had gotten out of their car. The officers believed the car had been stolen, but it turned out to belong to Mr. Tolan, who is the son of Bobby Tolan , a former major league baseball player, and aspires to be a baseball player. \u201cThe Tolans are the only African-American family on the block,\u201d said a lawyer for the family, Geoffrey Berg. \u201cBellaire engages in racial profiling, and this is the logical result of that policy.\u201d The Bellaire city manager, Bernie Satterwhite, rejected that assertion. \u201cThere is nothing about the indictment or any investigation which even suggests that race played any role in the stop or Sergeant Cotton\u2019s actions when he arrived as a backup officer,\u201d Mr. Satterwhite said, reading a prepared statement . David Donahue, a member of Sergeant Cotton\u2019s legal team, said the officer had fired only after Mr. Tolan leaped up and attacked him. \u201cHe felt he was in immediate danger,\u201d he said. As the Tolan family recounts the story, Mr. Tolan and his cousin obeyed an order from the first officer on the scene, John Edwards, to lay on the ground. As Sergeant Cotton arrived in a second patrol car, Bobby Tolan and his wife, Marion, came out of the house in their pajamas. Mrs. Tolan tried to tell Sergeant Cotton that the police had made a mistake \u2014 that it was her son\u2019s car, Mr. Berg said. The sergeant grabbed her by the arm and threw her against a garage door, the family says. As Robbie Tolan tried to rise to defend his mother, Sergeant Cotton fired at least three times, hitting him once in the chest, Mr. Berg said.", "keyword": "Police;Texas;Discrimination;Assaults;Police Brutality and Misconduct"}
{"id": "ny0253176", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/10/28", "title": "Dropbox Aims to Solidify Its Place With Businesses", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Perhaps it should not have surprised corporate information technology departments that employees would use Dropbox, a service for easily sharing files among different devices by storing them in \u201cthe cloud.\u201d But that did not mean they loved the idea of confidential files on a service they could not control. Now Dropbox is trying to appease them by selling a service for businesses, Dropbox for Teams, introduced Thursday. Add Dropbox to the list of consumer technologies that have infiltrated the workplace , like iPhones, Gmail and Skype. \u201cWith the ability of people to get what they want to get done with stuff they pay for themselves, the whole role of I.T. changes,\u201d said Ted Schadler, a workplace analyst at Forrester Research. Still, the service has a way to go before large companies adopt it, Mr. Schadler said, \u201cbecause it doesn\u2019t have as much security and administration as they want.\u201d For Dropbox, one of the darlings of Silicon Valley with a reported $4 billion valuation from venture capitalists, its new service is a bid to buy paying customers and solidify its foothold in the growing file-sharing business .. It is competing with big companies like Google, Apple and Amazon.com, which offer increasingly sophisticated ways to store, share and sync files, and smaller ones like Box.net, YouSendIt and SugarSync. This month, Citrix Systems bought ShareFile and Research in Motion bought NewBay, both cloud storage services. Dropbox allows people to access files, like documents, photos and music, on any device wherever they are, without pesky zip files or hulking e-mail attachments. As people edit files, Dropbox updates them so a single file is available on all devices. Most people use it free and can pay for additional storage. Dropbox, which started in 2007, has 45 million users who save more than two billion files each week. But it has scared some people, too. In June, a security breach left Dropbox accounts accessible for several hours, and a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission says Dropbox misled users about privacy. Dropbox says it uses the same security measures as banks. Files are encrypted and Dropbox restricts its employees\u2019 access to files. But security is only as good as a user\u2019s password. Dropbox said it is working on two-step authentication, so people would enter a second password sent to their phone, for instance. \u201cThese are all things we take very, very seriously because our reputation and the confidence and trust people have in Dropbox is what we\u2019ll succeed by,\u201d said ChenLi Wang, team leader for business and sales. Millions already sign up with their work e-mail addresses and the company estimates that at least a million businesses use the service. Dropbox for Teams, which starts at $795 annually for five users, has 1,000 gigabytes of storage and phone customer support, and gives I.T. departments control over adding and removing users. SusieCakes, a California bakery chain, has been testing Dropbox for Teams to share petty cash reports in real time and to exchange documents with outside lawyers. The service is easier to use than options like Microsoft\u2019s file-sharing service, called Windows Live SkyDrive, said Houston Striggow, SusieCakes\u2019 co-founder. \u201cIt\u2019s really proven for us to be a powerful business tool that\u2019s made us a lot more efficient and productive,\u201d he said. But Mr. Schadler, the analyst, said that before it would get widespread business adoption, Dropbox needed features like security controls to automatically stop people from sharing confidential documents. Dropbox says it is working on new features, including extra security measures and collaboration tools. Of Dropbox\u2019s competitors, Box.net has made the most headway in businesses, Mr. Schadler said. Google is also going after businesses with tools like Google Docs, which lets employees collaborate on the same version of a document, and Chromebooks, laptops that store everything online so people can access it from any computer. Sujay Jaswa, Dropbox\u2019s vice president of business development and sales, said its service had an advantage over big companies because it enabled iPads, Android phones and PCs to work together. \u201cYou need a company like us that doesn\u2019t have a horse in the race to be there for consumers,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Dropbox Inc;Data Storage;Computers and the Internet;Computer Security;Cloud Computing"}
{"id": "ny0067397", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/12/02", "title": "Bitly Helps the Red Cross Get to Hope.ly", "abstract": "Following the phenomenal success this summer of the Ice Bucket Challenge for the A.L.S. Association, which seeks a cure for what is commonly known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, other charities have been longing for their own viral sensations. Now the American Red Cross is introducing a fund-raising effort that, rather than creating videos or spurring supporters to upload theirs, benefits from others\u2019 popular content. With Bitly, the six-year-old online tool that condenses long web addresses, the Red Cross is introducing Hope.ly , another URL shortener \u2014 with a twist. While the Web address for, say, AMC\u2019s \u201cMad Men,\u201d amctv.com/shows/mad-men, condenses to bit.ly/1vbqSOf, using the new tool shortens it to hope.ly/1yvAdjU. Clicking the Hope.ly link reveals what resembles a banner ad atop the page, proclaiming, \u201cSomeone wonderful shared this page \u2014 to help people in need through the American Red Cross,\u201d and encouraging donating online. The new tool will be announced on Tuesday as part of Giving Tuesday , a worldwide effort to encourage supporting charities during the holiday season that was introduced in 2012 by New York\u2019s 92nd Street Y in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. The promotion will run through December. Hope.ly is the brainchild of BBDO New York, part of the Omnicom Group, which is the agency of record for the Red Cross. \u201cCharities generally are trying to get large-scale social reach in the same way that the A.L.S. Ice Bucket Challenge did,\u201d said Tom Markham, the executive creative director of BBDO New York. \u201cThis idea is kind of in that space, but it\u2019s tied into the act of sharing, as opposed to us trying to come up with the content that is super shareable.\u201d Introduced in 2008, Bitly has grown rapidly because, along with shortening URLs for character-limited social media like Twitter, it helps users monitor how others subsequently share the links that they share. The company, based in New York, reports that it shortens 600 million links a month, and that those links are clicked on eight billion times. Laura Maiurano, senior director for digital marketing at Bitly, said the new project was unlike anything the service had done before. \u201cWhen BBDO and the Red Cross approached us with this effort, we just thought it was a really great initiative and something new and different and we were totally on board to support it,\u201d Ms. Maiurano said. A recent survey commissioned by the Red Cross found that among social media users, after seeing a friend\u2019s post about making a donation to a charity, almost 20 percent would also make a donation; 25 percent would donate to a charity if someone in their social network asked them by name to do so. \u201cThe social-media community shows this propensity to give,\u201d said Laura Howe, the vice president for public relations at the Red Cross, \u201cso that tells us it\u2019s a group of people that as an organization we definitely want to be in front of.\u201d Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, noted that unlike brands and charities that often ask consumers to upload photos, complete forms or send e-cards, the Hope.ly effort made participation simple. \u201cWhat I like about this is that they\u2019re sort of integrating their marketing campaign into what people are already doing online,\u201d Mr. Morrissey said. \u201cThe idea of converting URLs in a small way into messages of hope and charity during the holiday season is really smart and clever.\u201d But he added that the donation message, which takes up nearly half of the screen for a smartphone held vertically, and nearly one-third of a tablet held horizontally (and even more if the pages have existing banner ads across the top), may strike some publishers as obtrusive, since it will push off much of what they intended for their landing pages. \u201cPublishers spend a lot of time trying to get the user experience right because it takes a lot of testing and experimentation to get people to stick around on a website, and having someone else change all of that for the user is tough,\u201d Mr. Morrissey said. He added that publishers were unlikely to complain about this being done for a popular charity like the Red Cross, but would raise a fuss if Bitly tried to execute a similar program on behalf of brands. Bitly wrote in a response that \u201cwhile we can\u2019t say whether or not we\u2019ll do this with another partner\u201d in the future, \u201cwe certainly would be selective.\u201d In November, along with making a $25 million donation to fight Ebola, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg added a \u201cDonate\u201d button to the top of newsfeeds for users of the social network, and posted a video to Facebook about doing so. An online video introduces Hope.ly, and it will be promoted on the Bitly landing page and on the Red Cross\u2019s social channels, but BBDO, the ad agency that came up with the idea is not, ironically, making any ads for it. Mr. Markham of BBDO said that while the execution is not the sort of thing clients request in assignments known as creative briefs, it does exemplify one way that agencies should advocate for charities and brands. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to brief for an idea like this,\u201d said Mr. Markham of the Hope.ly effort. \u201cThe agency has to kind of love you as a client and spend time thinking of you outside of the normal briefs and come up with this sort of stuff.\u201d", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;Red Cross;Bitly"}
{"id": "ny0124837", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/08/27", "title": "Their Season Lost, Mets Search for Silver Linings", "abstract": "Here was their chance to interrogate a few of the men responsible for the Mets \u2019 latest collapse. The manager, Terry Collins, and general manager, Sandy Alderson, entertained questions from about 1,500 season-ticket holders for about an hour Sunday morning at Citi Field, as did Mike Baxter, Jon Niese and the third base coach Tim Teufel. There was much explaining to do, the Mets having won six games in three weeks, having plunged further into despair with poor showings this week against the Rockies and the Astros . Any remaining optimism could have been mistaken for delirium. Which superhero do you prefer, one woman asked: Batman, Superman or Spiderman? Another wanted the definition of a balk. One man inquired, in a less-than-demanding tone, about the futures of David Wright and R. A. Dickey, who both have team options for next season. \u201cI fully expect that David Wright and R. A. Dickey will be here, not only next year but longer term,\u201d Alderson said to applause that was hearty for midmorning. Later, the 25,071 fans here screamed and danced as Ike Davis rounded the bases for his game-winning home run, his second solo shot of the game, as the Mets won, 2-1 . The rookie starter Jeremy Hefner had shut out the Astros for eight innings. In the ninth, true to the Mets\u2019 form of late, Lucas Duda appeared to misplay a fly ball in left and the tying run scored. Duda, who returned Sunday for the first time since he was demoted July 24, gunned down the potential winning run at home two batters later, and many fans gave him a standing ovation. But louder than that was the one for Davis\u2019s home run. After the game, Collins said the Mets badly needed the victory. The win, merely a flickering candle in a dark, cavernous room, offered some light \u2014 not for the postseason, but for the next five weeks while the Mets audition to keep their fans coming and for Wright and Dickey to stay, too. So Alderson\u2019s pronouncement came as no surprise; he has the unenviable task of balancing the meek present of these Mets and developing their future. \u201cIt is not our intention to simply rely on those options and go into next season and deal with their free agency after 2013,\u201d Alderson told the gathering. \u201cWe\u2019re going to deal with it upfront while we still have a little bit of room to maneuver.\u201d His usual thoughtful self, Dickey indicated that he was open to signing a new deal with the Mets \u2014 \u201ca part of me enjoys being loyal to an organization that\u2019s given me a shot,\u201d he said \u2014 but had a few stipulations. In particular, he would want any negotiations resolved entering 2013, as he found them to be a distraction when they trickled into May this season. \u201cI do want to win, too, because I am at the place that I am in my career,\u201d Dickey, 37, said. But he added: \u201cI want to be part of that solution here, whatever that is going to be. I would like to know what direction they\u2019re going, and I think that\u2019s fair.\u201d Wright echoed those sentiments, but less heartily. Although Wright declined to discuss his contract situation in detail, he said he was happy with his deal, which includes a $16 million team option for next season, indicating he could play out his contract, then evaluate. In either case, Alderson has little time to show progress. The Mets\u2019 payroll is roughly $100 million this season. About next season, Alderson said, \u201cI\u2019m hopeful we\u2019ll be in the same range, if not somewhat higher.\u201d He added, \u201cWhat I\u2019m looking at is what our needs are and how we fill those needs, and there\u2019s no question that being able to add payroll is an important part of being able to address those.\u201d For another season, he will be handcuffed by Johan Santana\u2019s and Jason Bay\u2019s bloated contracts, creating curious timing. Santana and Bay are owed a combined $41.5 million in 2013, and buying out their team options would save the Mets $33.5 million in 2014, when Dickey and Wright could become free agents. Until then, Alderson has been asked to prepare for a range of payroll totals. He said he would know his limit in a few weeks. Dickey would stand to receive a raise, as his $5 million team option would significantly undercompensate a Cy Young Award candidate. With the time and money these Mets have devoted to pitching, they could reward Dickey or undervalue him, with young arms on the way. Collins mentioned Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Collin McHugh, Josh Edgin, and Davis and Duda as reasons for Wright and Dickey to sign on. \u201cMy hope is that you can see some payroll coming off the books in a couple of years,\u201d Dickey said, \u201cand you can see some things starting to take shape, some pieces starting to \u2014 the hope is that you\u2019re going to be able to do a lot of good with that and be competitive. But that\u2019s me speculating, almost as a fan.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;New York Mets;Houston Astros;Hefner Jeremy;Davis Ike"}
{"id": "ny0105046", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/03/15", "title": "China Passes New Safeguards for Criminal Suspects", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 China \u2019s national legislature enacted new safeguards for criminal suspects and defendants on Wednesday, but upheld the right of the police to hold certain suspects in secret residential locations for up to six months, ignoring a last-minute online campaign by critics to curb police authority. Nearly 8 percent of the delegates abstained or voted against the legislation, an unusual display of disagreement within the handpicked National People\u2019s Congress. The online effort to postpone the vote was blocked when censors erased messages from a microblogging site. Chen Guangzhong, an expert on criminal procedure and an adviser to the committee that drafted the amendments, said that the revised Criminal Procedure Law provides greater protection for suspects subjected to residential confinement, including requiring the police to notify a suspect\u2019s relatives within 24 hours of his detention. But the police will still be allowed to hold suspects in their homes for up to six months. And those suspected of threatening national security, terrorism or serious corruption can be held outside their homes for the same length of time without telling relatives the location or reason. \u201cThere are still shortcomings that need to be addressed in the future,\u201d Mr. Chen said. Human rights advocates, criminal defense lawyers and others argued that the police have used residential confinement to silence and punish a wide array of dissidents and government critics. They object to confinement in secret, isolated settings, arguing that suspects are more easily abused and tortured. Chen Youxi, a Beijing criminal lawyer, said that residential detention \u201cshould only and always be at the suspect\u2019s own home.\u201d Mr. Chen said that law enforcement authorities insisted that residential detention was a necessary option because the police needed more time to investigate certain cases. The law allows suspects to be held in formal detention centers for no more than 37 days without formal arrest. He said he had contended that the police should be required to notify suspects\u2019 relatives of the location and reason for residential confinement because, otherwise, suspects would not be able to exercise their rights to defense lawyers. But law enforcement officials said the requirement was too burdensome. Legal experts said the revised law explicitly forbids the use of evidence extracted by torture, allows defense lawyers to attend police interrogations and requires videotaped interrogations if the penalty for the crime is at least 10 years in prison. Divisions in the National People\u2019s Congress occur from time to time. Xiong Wei, a Beijing researcher who studies the legislative process, noted that in 1992, about a third of the delegates abstained or voted against the plan for the Three Gorges Dam. On Wednesday, of the 2,856 delegates, 160 voted against the Criminal Procedure Law revisions, and 57 abstained. Mr. Xiong began an online campaign to delay the vote, arguing that the delegates were presented with the final legislation after the legal deadline. His posting Monday on the microblogging service Sina Weibo was forwarded 18,000 times, he said, before a worker for the company called him, apologetically explaining that it had been deleted, being deemed \u201ctoo sensitive.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Sentences (Criminal);Police;National People's Congress (China);Detainees;Human Rights and Human Rights Violations;Crime and Criminals"}
{"id": "ny0074327", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/04/21", "title": "Halliburton Posts Net Loss Amid Energy Sector Downturn", "abstract": "Halliburton posted a net loss amid a steep fall in drilling in North America, the company\u2019s biggest market. Halliburton lost $641 million as it took charges of $823 million in asset write-downs and other items. It posted a $616 million profit in the year-ago quarter. Revenue, which fell 4 percent to $7.05 billion, beat analysts\u2019 expectation of $6.96 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S, helped by strength in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Adjusted income from continuing operations excluding the charges also beat analysts\u2019 expectations, coming in at 49 cents a share, surpassing forecasts for 37 cents. Besides coping with the slide in oil prices, Halliburton has been divesting businesses to get regulatory clearance for its planned $35 billion takeover of Baker Hughes. Halliburton also forecast a fall in current-quarter revenue in North America. The company, which has cut over 10 percent of its global head count in the last two quarters, said it would cut capital spending about 15 percent, to $2.8 billion this year.", "keyword": "Halliburton;Earnings Reports;Baker Hughes"}
{"id": "ny0138126", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/05/06", "title": "Bernanke Urges Flexibility in Mortgage Regulation", "abstract": "Ben S. Bernanke , the chairman of the Federal Reserve , urged Congress on Monday to allow federal agencies more leeway in overseeing the ailing mortgage industry, emphasizing that the causes of the current foreclosure crisis were more difficult to address than those in the past. \u201cRealistic public and private sector policies must take into account the fact that traditional foreclosure avoidance strategies may not always work well in the current environment,\u201d Mr. Bernanke said at a Columbia Business School event at the Waldorf-Astoria in Midtown Manhattan. In a 10-page speech, Mr. Bernanke said that some regions of the country \u2014 including California, Florida, Colorado and parts of the Midwest \u2014 have experienced sharp increases in the number of homeowners who are delinquent on their mortgages, despite data that does not reveal the classic causes of foreclosures, like higher unemployment rates. Instead, much of the problem can be attributed to a decline in home prices, which, Mr. Bernanke said, can \u201creduce the ability and incentive of homeowners, particularly those under financial stress for other reasons, to retain their homes.\u201d A high concentration of speculators and owners of second homes, who may have less incentive to hold onto their property, also contributes to more delinquencies, Mr. Bernanke said. The variety of factors leading to foreclosures makes it more difficult for mortgage lenders to help ailing homeowners, Mr. Bernanke said, noting that \u201clenders and services will have to develop new and flexible strategies to deal with this issue.\u201d In response, Mr. Bernanke recommended that government agencies take a more innovative approach to ensure that only qualified buyers take out loans. He urged Congress to provide the Federal Housing Administration, which insures mortgage loans, with \u201cgreater latitude\u201d in setting appropriate standards for owners seeking to refinance their mortgages, and to adjust interest rates according to the level of risk of the applicants. It was this system that went awry in the subprime mortgage crisis, the root of the current economic turmoil. In many cases, mortgages were given to owners who could not afford to repay them, resulting in a wave of foreclosures. Mr. Bernanke also called for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the big mortgage financiers supervised by the government, to raise more money to help assist homeowners at risk of foreclosure. He warned that the rising foreclosure rate, if left unchecked, would harm the broader economy. \u201cThe costs of foreclosure may extend well beyond those borne directly by the borrower and the lender,\u201d Mr. Bernanke said. He said that a rise in foreclosures adds to sagging inventories and can weigh down home prices, which hurts household worth and, ultimately, the health of Wall Street\u2019s biggest banks.", "keyword": "Federal Reserve System;Bernanke Ben S;Housing;Foreclosures;Mortgages;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Interest Rates;Banks and Banking;Home Equity Loans"}
{"id": "ny0278924", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/11/12", "title": "Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump\u2019s Former Campaign Manager, Leaves CNN", "abstract": "Donald J. Trump\u2019s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, resigned on Friday from his role as a CNN political commentator, ending a television deal that had attracted scrutiny and harsh criticism about the cable channel\u2019s journalistic ethics. Mr. Lewandowski, who joined CNN as a paid contributor days after being fired by Mr. Trump in June, has expressed interest in a senior adviser role in the White House, according to a person briefed on discussions within the Trump transition team. His name has also been mentioned as a potential chairman of the Republican National Committee, this person said. Mr. Lewandowski has been frequently spotted this week at Trump Tower in Manhattan, chatting with senior aides and attending meetings. Even as he defended Mr. Trump in front of millions of viewers on CNN talk shows, Mr. Lewandowski stayed in regular contact with the candidate and flew on the Trump campaign jet. He also received tens of thousands of dollars in severance from the Trump campaign, payments that were set to continue through the end of the year. The arrangement raised concerns about whether CNN was effectively paying a Trump campaign strategist to spin its viewers. Other networks, including MSNBC, regularly invite campaign representatives onto shows, but do not pay them. CNN and its president, Jeffrey A. Zucker, steadfastly defended Mr. Lewandowski\u2019s hiring, saying that the network wanted to regularly provide viewers with on-air voices representing both candidates. But CNN\u2019s critics saw in Mr. Lewandowski another sign of television news accommodating a candidate who was a ratings magnet. Because of a nondisclosure agreement, Mr. Lewandowski was limited in what he could discuss about Mr. Trump on the air. As recently as two weeks ago, Mr. Lewandowski traveled aboard the Trump campaign plane to his home state of New Hampshire. Onboard, Mr. Lewandowski discussed strategy with Mr. Trump and his top advisers, including Stephen K. Bannon, his campaign chief executive. After the flight was reported in The New York Times , a spokeswoman for CNN, Allison Gollust, said Mr. Lewandowski\u2019s status at the network remained unchanged. \u201cWe were aware of his trip and granted our permission,\u201d Ms. Gollust wrote in an email this week. Mr. Lewandowski, who last appeared on CNN on Wednesday morning, did not respond to a request for comment. On Friday, he was seen arriving at Trump Tower around 9:30 a.m.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;News media,journalism;CNN;Corey Lewandowski;Donald Trump"}
{"id": "ny0165625", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/09/28", "title": "Hispanic Jobless Rate Dips", "abstract": "Unemployment among Hispanics reached a record low of 5.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, while the difference in unemployment rates between Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers, at 0.6 percent, was also a record low, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The study found that Hispanic workers \u2014 mainly legal and illegal immigrants \u2014 accounted for about 40 percent of all the workers who joined the United States labor force in the last year, more than any other group. Much of the job growth for Hispanics came in the construction industry in the South and the Western states. While wages rose faster for Hispanics over the last year than for other workers, they continued to have the lowest median wage of any group. The findings are based on an annual analysis by the Pew center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, of data from the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which first began collecting data on Hispanics in 1973.", "keyword": "Unemployment;Hispanic-Americans;Labor;Building (Construction)"}
{"id": "ny0021206", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/09/27", "title": "Senators Push to Preserve N.S.A. Phone Surveillance", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to be moving toward swift passage of a bill that would \u201cchange but preserve\u201d the once-secret National Security Agency program that is keeping logs of every American\u2019s phone calls, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the panel, said Thursday. Ms. Feinstein, speaking at a rare public hearing of the committee, said she and the top Republican on the panel, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, are drafting a bill that would be marked up \u2014 meaning that lawmakers could propose amendments to it before voting it out of committee \u2014 as early as next week. After the existence of the program became public by leaks from the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, critics called for it to be dismantled. Ms. Feinstein said her bill would be aimed at increasing public confidence in the program, which she said she believed was lawful. The measure would require public reports of how often the N.S.A. had used the calling log database, she said. It would also reduce the number of years \u2014 currently five \u2014 that the domestic calling log data is kept before it is deleted. It would also require the N.S.A. to send lists of the phone numbers it searches, and its rationale for doing so, to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for review. By contrast, a rival bill drafted by skeptics of government surveillance, including two members of the committee, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, would ban the mass call log collection program. That more extensive step is unlikely to pass the committee. Ms. Feinstein contended that \u201ca majority of the committee\u201d believed that the call log program was \u201cnecessary for our nation\u2019s security.\u201d Ms. Feinstein said her bill with Mr. Chambliss would also require Senate confirmation of the N.S.A.\u2019s director. At the same time, it would expand the N.S.A.\u2019s powers to wiretap without warrants in the United States in one respect: when it is eavesdropping on a foreigner\u2019s cellphone, and that person travels to the United States, the N.S.A. would be allowed to keep wiretapping for up to a week while it seeks court permission. That step would remove the largest number of incidents in which the N.S.A. has deemed itself to have broken rules about surveillance in the United States. Those incidents were identified in a May 2012 audit leaked by Mr. Snowden . The rival proposals pushed by Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall would also ban the N.S.A. from warrantless searches of Americans\u2019 information in the vast databases of communications it collects by targeting noncitizens abroad. And it would prohibit, when terrorism is not suspected, systematic searches of the contents of Americans\u2019 international e-mails and text messages that are \u201cabout\u201d a target rather than to or from that person. Still, most of the senators on the Intelligence Committee, which had received briefings about the call log program and other surveillance even before Mr. Snowden\u2019s leaks, used the hearing on Thursday to largely defend the programs and criticize the disclosures. Mr. Chambliss suggested that people could die because of Mr. Snowden\u2019s disclosures, and he pressed Gen. Keith Alexander, the N.S.A. director, to describe the program\u2019s value. \u201cIn my opinion,\u201d General Alexander said, \u201cif we had had that prior to 9/11, we would have known about the plot.\u201d Officials have struggled to identify terrorist attacks that would have been prevented by the call log program, which has existed in its current form since 2006. The clearest breakthrough attributed to the program was a case involving several San Diego men who were prosecuted for donating several thousand dollars to a terrorist group in Somalia. Mr. Wyden pressed General Alexander about whether the N.S.A. had ever collected, or made plans to collect, bulk records about Americans\u2019 locations based on cellphone tower data. General Alexander replied that the N.S.A. is not doing so as part of the call log program, but that information pertinent to Mr. Wyden\u2019s question was classified.", "keyword": "Government Surveillance;NSA;Senate Intelligence Committee;US Politics;Legislation;Saxby Chambliss;Dianne Feinstein;Ron Wyden;Mark Udall;Edward Snowden"}
{"id": "ny0135052", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/04/28", "title": "Austria Says Man Jailed Daughter for 24 Years", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 Austrian police arrested a 73-year-old man who they say kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, three of whom never emerged into daylight from their prison until now. The woman, identified by the police as Elisabeth F., was released by her father, Josef F., after her eldest daughter, 19, became ill and was taken to a hospital. Doctors had appealed for her mother to come forward to share details of her medical history. The authorities said she was still in serious condition. The police referred to the family name by initial only as is standard procedure in criminal cases in Austria. In its macabre details, the case carries echoes of the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian schoolgirl who was held in a windowless basement cell for eight years before escaping in August 2006. This latest case, which unfolded in a nondescript, three-story apartment house in Amstetten, a town 80 miles west of Vienna, is, if possible, even harder to comprehend. Elisabeth, 42, told the police that in 1984, her father drugged, handcuffed and dragged her into a basement, accessible only through a hidden door with an electronic code. She said she spent close to the next quarter-century imprisoned there, a constant victim of sexual abuse and incest by her father. \u201cThis is not a mother abandoning her child, which then had to be admitted to the hospital,\u201d Franz Polzer, chief of the criminal investigations unit for the province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference on Sunday, according to Reuters. \u201cWe know that she herself has been kept imprisoned by her own father for 24 years in the basement,\u201d he said, \u201cand furthermore, she obviously was also subjected to sexual abuse.\u201d Elisabeth gave birth to seven children during that time, one of whom died shortly after birth, the police said. Her father ordered her to give up three of the children, who were then adopted or cared for as foster children by Josef and his wife, Rosemarie, the mother of Elisabeth. The police said Rosemarie apparently did not know of her daughter\u2019s ordeal, believing that she had left the children on her parents\u2019 doorstep because she was unable to care for them herself. When Elisabeth disappeared in 1984, her father claimed that she had written a letter asking her parents not to search for her. Three of the children born in the basement \u2014 now 19, 18 and 5 \u2014 never left it, the police said.. When Josef brought Elisabeth and the others out of confinement, he told his wife that their \u201cmissing\u201d daughter had returned. He is in police custody, charged with abduction and incest. Elisabeth told the police that she had been sexually abused by her father from the age of 11. The authorities said they would perform DNA tests to determine whether Josef is the father of the children. Also a mystery is how Josef, an electrical engineer, was able to conceal his daughter and her children for so long. Behind the door, for which only Josef had the access code, he built a dwelling capable of sustaining a family. \u201cThere is not only one, but a number of rooms: one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities,\u201d Mr. Polzer said in interview with the Austrian broadcaster ORF. Neighbors were flabbergasted. \u201cIt is so horrible,\u201d Corina Schmid said to ORF. \u201cI can see the house from my balcony and from my window, and when I think now of who was in there, I can simply not imagine that.\u201d", "keyword": "Incest;Sex Crimes"}
{"id": "ny0249408", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/05/22", "title": "Russia Seeks Pledge From NATO on Missile Defense", "abstract": "KALININGRAD, Russia \u2014 Russia is seeking assurances from NATO that any missile defense system the military alliance deploys in Europe will not be directed against the country. \u201cWe do not want any missiles aimed at Russia,\u201d the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said after talks in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad with his counterparts from Germany, Guido Westerwelle, and Poland, Radek Sikorski. The meeting in Kaliningrad was part of an effort by the three countries to work together over political, security, energy and visa issues. \u201cThis is about cooperation, not confrontation, about discussing concrete projects,\u201d Mr. Westerwelle told hundreds of students at Kant University who had gathered to question the three officials. Mr. Lavrov said Russia wanted \u201csome kind of written guarantees from NATO that the missiles will not threaten Russia.\u201d Russia has in the past threatened to place missiles in Kaliningrad \u2014 a small area with a population of nearly one million that is sandwiched between two European Union countries, Poland and Lithuania \u2014 in response to NATO\u2019s plans to deploy part of its missile shield in Eastern Europe. President Obama, who is to visit Poland next week, intends to deploy Patriot missiles there, but not the original missile shield system that the administration of President George W. Bush had promised to do. The Bush administration\u2019s plans to place parts of the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which were once part of the Soviet military alliance, led to a sharp deterioration of relations between Washington and Moscow. The Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has said that the deployments would undermine Russia\u2019s security. Mr. Obama\u2019s decision to shift strategy was not only because of the costs and the need to modify the scope of any missile defense system that would provide a much broader security umbrella over Europe. The administration said it also wanted to \u201creset\u201d its relations with Russia. During Saturday\u2019s discussions, the ministers agreed that their meeting could evolve into something more permanent \u2014 like the Weimar Triangle, which the French, German and Polish foreign ministers set up 20 years ago after the reunification of Germany. The Weimar Triangle helped to lead to reconciliation between Poland and Germany, ending decades of enmity and distrust. Mr. Lavrov acknowledged that Russia could not ignore Poland\u2019s new role on the Continent, now that it is a member of the European Union and it is scheduled to take over the rotating presidency on July 1. The three officials also discussed Belarus on Saturday. Poland and Germany, with support from France, want European foreign ministers to impose more sanctions against Belarus. The sanctions, already imposed on the top leadership, could be extended to some enterprise managers. At the same time, Poland and Germany intend to strengthen their ties to civil society and the democratic opposition. Russia, however, said it opposed more sanctions. \u201cThis will only lead to further isolation,\u201d Mr. Lavrov said. \u201cThat will do nothing to help the way towards direction.\u201d", "keyword": "Russia;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Missiles and Missile Defense Systems;Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0137798", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/05/31", "title": "Arizona Group to Sue Paterson Over Order on Gay Marriages", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 An Arizona-based conservative Christian group said on Friday that it planned to sue Gov. David A. Paterson to block his directive to state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside New York. Brian Raum, the senior legal counsel for the group, the Alliance Defense Fund, said that it would file a lawsuit next week claiming that Mr. Paterson\u2019s order sidestepped the Legislature. The Alliance, which was founded by James C. Dobson and others, has been active in efforts in other states to limit marriage to heterosexuals. \u201cThis is directly the province of the Legislature,\u201d Mr. Raum said. \u201cThe Court of Appeals said marriage in New York is one man, one woman. And if that\u2019s going to change, it has to come from the Legislature. What Paterson is doing is circumventing that process.\u201d Through his chief spokeswoman, Mr. Paterson declined comment. The governor said this week that his directive was intended to bring state agencies into compliance with an appellate court ruling in February that said New York must recognize same-sex marriages that have been performed outside the state. Also on Friday, Senate Republicans in Albany were trying to decide how to respond to the governor\u2019s directive. The majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican, said in a radio interview on Friday that he hoped to have an answer from his counsel by next week about whether they could take the governor to court. At the same time, Mr. Bruno conceded that any legislative action the Republican-led Senate might take would be largely symbolic because such a measure was almost certain to fail in the Assembly, which has supported same-sex marriage. Mr. Bruno ruled out moving a bill to make a political statement. \u201cWe\u2019re not committing because we\u2019re waiting to see how the rest of this plays out,\u201d he said. \u201cThe bottom line is, whatever we do, the Assembly won\u2019t join us. The Democrats control the Assembly.\u201d The Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill last summer to allow same-sex marriages, but Senate Republicans have refused to bring the bill to a vote. Mr. Bruno said the basis for any legal battle would be an argument that the governor\u2019s directive violated the doctrine on the separation of powers. The directive, written by the governor\u2019s legal counsel, David M. Nocenti, asked all state agencies to revise their policies to conform to the appeals court ruling and to report back to Mr. Nocenti by June 30. \u201cIt\u2019s the executive taking legislative powers away,\u201d Mr. Bruno said on WGDJ-AM (Talk 1300), a radio station in Albany. \u201cIf there\u2019s going to be a court battle, that\u2019s what it\u2019ll be over, not the issue itself.\u201d He said the Senate Republicans are not opposed to gay rights. \u201cI don\u2019t care whether they\u2019re gay, black, white, Oriental, whatever. Equal justice. That\u2019s what it\u2019s all about,\u201d Mr. Bruno said.", "keyword": "Paterson David A;Decisions and Verdicts;Homosexuality;Marriages;Albany (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0025438", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/08/01", "title": "Road Through Roman History Creates Colossal Headache", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 Via dei Fori Imperiali, a multilane artery running through the heart of Rome, is typically a frenzy of swerving Vespas, zipping Smart cars and honking Fiat taxis. But Mayor Ignazio Marino is seeking to transform the avenue to something calmer, where Gucci loafers and sensible sneakers would rule. Mr. Marino\u2019s plan to ban private traffic on the roadway, which bisects a vast archaeological site, from the central Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, has prompted grousing and histrionic debate over a project that conservators say would solidify the world\u2019s largest urban archaeological area. This being Rome, the first high-impact initiative of his seven-week-old administration, which goes into effect on Saturday, has provoked its share of unfavorable comparisons with the overweening ambitions of emperors past. \u201cThe mayor\u2019s job is not to pass into history, but to work for his citizens,\u201d said Luciano Canfora, a professor of classics at the University of Bari. \u201cWe already had Nero, that\u2019s more than enough.\u201d He predicted the plan would \u201ctorture\u201d other Romans with \u201ccatastrophic\u201d traffic jams. To the mayor, though, the project is the cornerstone of a bigger vision that plays on Rome\u2019s strengths and uniqueness to develop a strategy for the city based on environmental and cultural sustainability. \u201cI want to change what was a highly trafficked street into a walk into history,\u201d Mr. Marino, 58, said in an interview at his offices on the Capitoline Hill, which overlooks the Roman Forum. \u201cIt\u2019s part of a dream of giving back to Romans, Italians and people from around the world this incredible place where the history of the Western world developed.\u201d Image Mayor Ignazio Marino of Rome wants to ban private vehicles on the road. Credit Alessandro Penso for The International Herald Tribune Of course, modern Romans, and especially the neighborhood\u2019s residents, have more practical concerns. Most have to do with the anticipated spillover effect of closing a broad avenue used by as many as 1,600 motorists an hour during peak times of day, according to city statistics. Residents\u2019 associations and local shopkeepers fret about aggravating the traffic congestion that is already as quintessentially Roman as the city\u2019s famed cupolas, making their lives even more \u201cinvivibile,\u201d a common Italian expression used by those complaining about life in the capital. \u201cWe will block the streets, set up barricades,\u201d pledged Luciana Gasparini, the president of Via Merulana per L\u2019Esquilino, a neighborhood group that is organizing a protest against the project. (But, in Roman fashion, it will take place in September, once people have returned from their August holidays.) Franco Aldini, a tailor with a shop on Via Labicana, complained that his business had already dropped since street work began in preparation for the closing. Mr. Aldini said he was considering suing the city for damages if the situation dragged on. \u201cThe mayor can\u2019t decide from one day to the next to lock down a neighborhood,\u201d he said. But it seems that the mayor can, and did, forging ahead with a project that was a centerpiece of his campaign. In this first phase, the tract of Via dei Fori Imperiali closest to the Colosseum will be off limits to private vehicles, but not to buses and taxis. A rather optimistic simulation is visible on the city\u2019s transportation Web site. The final goal is to make the Via dei Fori Imperiali a pedestrian area from one end to the other, and to finance the project with subsidies from the European Union. \u201cI think Rome needed a kind of shock,\u201d said the mayor, a former transplant surgeon, using the analogy of a person receiving emergency treatment. \u201cThe city had been sleeping and needed to wake up. After the shock, you go on to live a long, productive life.\u201d Image Luciana Gasparini is planning a protest against the project. \u201cWe will block the streets,\u201d she said. Credit Alessandro Penso for The International Herald Tribune Mr. Marino spent nearly 20 years of his career as a doctor in the United States before returning to Rome in 2006, when he plunged into politics and was elected to the Senate with the center-left Democratic Party. This year, he decided not to run again at a national level but instead turned his sights on Rome, the city he \u201cloves most in the world,\u201d he said. Mr. Marino easily beat Gianni Alemanno, the incumbent, center-right mayor, in June. Mr. Marino cheerfully acknowledged that he would be \u201ccrucified\u201d by citizens in the short term, but said it was worth fighting for his \u201cvision of what I want this city to be in 30 years.\u201d He added, \u201cNo one will remember who the mayor was in 2013, but everyone will appreciate the pedestrian area.\u201d Via dei Fori Imperiali was built during the 1920s by Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, as a marching avenue for triumphant troops, linking his palace in Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, the most recognizable symbol of ancient Roman power. It was an ambitious project that destroyed a densely populated area of central Rome, and also separated the Roman Forum from the imperial forums of Trajan, Augustus, Caesar and Nerva. Conservators and municipal and state archaeology officials have long nurtured the wish to reconnect the forums. They have also been keen to limit the effect of traffic on the monuments, including vibrations and smog, \u201cwhich is eating away at the surface of the monuments, like those terrible photos showing how cigarettes eat away at one\u2019s lungs,\u201d said Rossella Rea, the culture ministry official responsible for the Colosseum. But in a city where history is as stratified as lasagna, some argue that the Via dei Fori Imperiali has its own notable, equally valid past and so should be preserved. \u201cIt is the result of an operation undertaken under Fascism that changed the face of the city, like the 19th-century boulevards that changed Paris,\u201d said Professor Canfora. \u201cNo one would dare to ask to turn back French history,\u201d he added, so why \u201cthink that you can return Rome to an archaeological site.\u201d Actually, the mayor said he hoped that the road closing would help modify Romans\u2019 driving habits, by encouraging more people to leave their vehicles at home. He said about 60 percent of Romans travel less than five kilometers a day \u2014 roughly three miles \u2014 to get to work. \u201cAs a scientist, I find that numbers give a more clear and precise picture,\u201d he said, and gave a few facts: 970 of 1,000 adult Romans have cars, compared with 340 in London, and the average speed of public transportation in Rome is less than 9 miles per hour. \u201cOne of the slowest in the Western world,\u201d he said. \u201cYou could run faster.\u201d", "keyword": "Rome;Ignazio Marino;Roads and Traffic;Colosseum;Archaeology"}
{"id": "ny0022660", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2013/09/01", "title": "Stephens and Williams to Face Off as Their Nascent Rivalry Heats Up", "abstract": "Serena Williams may have to settle for revenge being served eight months later. Williams, the top seed, takes on 15th-seeded Sloane Stephens in the fourth round of the United States Open on Sunday. That will be the third installment of what has become one of the most tantalizing rivalries in tennis, a pairing of the top two American women that has produced not only compelling tennis, but also copious drama off the court. Last year, before they had ever played each other, Williams, 31, and Stephens, 20, frequently discussed the closeness of their friendship, which grew tighter when they played together on the United States Fed Cup team early in 2012. \u201cOh, my God, I love her to death; she\u2019s amazing,\u201d Stephens said of Williams at the time. \u201cNow she\u2019s like an actual person, and I\u2019m like: \u2018Oh, hi. How is it going?\u2019 She\u2019s not like a hero anymore. She\u2019s just a friend.\u201d But the tenor of their relationship changed after they faced off for the first time, in January. In a fiercely competitive match, Williams defeated Stephens, 6-4, 6-3, in Brisbane, Australia. As Williams closed out the victory, Stephens was taken aback by the volume of Williams\u2019s self-exhortations, telling her coach, Troy Hahn, that they were \u201cdisrespectful.\u201d Stephens retaliated on a bigger stage three weeks later, upsetting Williams, 3-6, 7-5, 6-4, in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, keeping her composure as Williams visibly struggled with pain in her ankle and her back. It was the first time Williams had lost to a younger American. In her on-court interview after the victory, a stunned Stephens was reminded that she\u2019d had on her bedroom wall a poster of the woman she had just beaten. \u201cI think I\u2019ll put a poster of myself now,\u201d she said, smiling. Image Sloane Stephens, above, upset Serena Williams, 3-6, 7-5, 6-4, in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times Months later, in an interview with ESPN The Magazine, published in May, Stephens said that she had hung the poster even though Williams had snubbed her for an autograph when she was a child, but that she had since taken it down. There had been more apparent slights by Williams since the Australian Open: she unfollowed Stephens on Twitter, for instance, and deleted her as a contact on BlackBerry Messenger. Stephens\u2019s remarks in that article completed a 180-degree turnaround from her previous comments on their closeness. Before their first match in January, Stephens told ESPN, \u201cEveryone thinks she\u2019s so mean, but she\u2019s like the greatest person ever.\u201d In the article in May, though, Stephens said: \u201cPeople should know. They think she\u2019s so friendly, and she\u2019s so this and she\u2019s so that \u2014 no, that\u2019s not reality!\u201d Stephens later apologized to Williams, and she has insisted that the two have moved on. Still, on Friday, her characterization of her relationship with Williams had a sterile ring. \u201cWe\u2019re co-workers,\u201d Stephens said. \u201cWe\u2019re Fed Cup teammates. But other than that, everything else is private. It\u2019s fine.\u201d Williams has taken a different tack since the rift between the two became clear, showering Stephens with praise. After Williams lost in the fourth round at Wimbledon, she picked Stephens to win the title. (Stephens lost the next day in the quarterfinals.) Asked to name favorites for the United States Open title, Williams mentioned herself and then named Victoria Azarenka, the No. 2 seed, and Stephens. Image In January, in a fiercely competitive match, Serena Williams, above, defeated Sloane Stephens, 6-4, 6-3, in Brisbane, Australia. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times \u201cI think Sloane has had such a good year this year,\u201d Williams said in a news conference before the tournament. \u201cShe\u2019s done really well in the Grand Slams \u2014 two of the Grand Slams better than I have. She\u2019s such a good player, and she\u2019s so smooth. I always say she\u2019s just such a smooth player to watch. She just has this game and this confidence that, you know, that\u2019s not easy to get. It\u2019s so good to see her doing so well.\u201d Williams took it a step further when she was asked about Stephens in her next news conference, two days later. \u201cIt was so good to see so many Americans doing good \u2014 mainly Sloane,\u201d she said. \u201cShe\u2019s such an inspiration, I think, to a lot of people.\u201d Whether she has \u201cinspired\u201d is debatable, but after needing a third-set tiebreaker to survive the first round, Stephens has played some of her best tennis in her last two matches, dropping a combined six games against Urszula Radwanska and Jamie Hampton. Williams has hardly struggled herself, dropping just eight games total in her three matches. But after Williams had won in the early hours of Saturday, confirming that she would play Stephens in the fourth round, she played down her own chances. \u201cI definitely don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m going in there as a favorite because she\u2019s playing great, even though I\u2019m playing good, too,\u201d Williams said. \u201cShe really has nothing to lose, and she excels in situations like that.\u201d Stephens, who had seemed uncomfortable with Williams\u2019s declaration that she was the favorite at Wimbledon, acknowledged that Williams\u2019s continued praise was both a blessing and a curse. \u201cComing from one of the greatest players to ever play the game, that feels really good. I think it\u2019s awesome,\u201d Stephens said. \u201cBut other than that, if you don\u2019t really live up to it, it\u2019s a wash.\u201d", "keyword": "Tennis;US Open Tennis;Sloane Stephens;Serena Williams"}
{"id": "ny0226447", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/10/30", "title": "A Photographer Scales the City to Capture the View", "abstract": "Around 4 a.m., Luis D. Rosado began making his descent from the huge History Channel billboard in the South Bronx, 10 good shots of the city at night digitally stored on his camera. He climbed down from his perch about 100 feet in the air, made his way through the vacant building below and, before stepping out, peered through a hole in scaffolding he had climbed a few hours earlier. Bad timing. A police officer in a patrol car cruising past the building, on Bruckner Boulevard, shined his flashlight at the scaffolding. Mr. Rosado said he dived onto the scaffolding\u2019s wooden planks, but it was too late. The officer spotted movement and called for backup. Fifteen minutes later, three other police officers arrived to join in the search. \u201cMy skills were tested, and my reputation was on the line,\u201d said Mr. Rosado, recalling his nighttime adventure. \u201cI could not fail.\u201d He did not. After playing hide-and-seek with the police for more than an hour and a half, he said, he managed to make a dash to his apartment half a block away. What makes a man break the law, risk his life, climb great heights and hang out above the city in the middle of the night? The drive to capture a portrait of New York City from an unusual perspective. Mr. Rosado, 29, whose hobby is photography, has climbed 50 buildings, billboards and bridges in the Bronx, he said, some multiple times. He is not alone in his passion. Shane Perez, 27, who said he had been climbing and taking photos for four years, said he knew of about 10 night-climbing photographers in the city. Mr. Rosado said that in the last few years he has focused on his own neighborhood, finding beauty in its ruggedness, and both access and interesting subjects in its abandoned buildings and industrial blocks. \u201cThis is my playground,\u201d Mr. Rosado said one recent morning, pointing at the buildings in the South Bronx visible from the rooftop of his own, on Alexander Avenue. Mr. Rosado has a routine: after choosing a spot, he rides his gray mountain bike to it from his apartment to measure the distance. There he checks for barbed wire, security guards or dogs. He does this two or three times. Finally, dressed in black \u2014 shirt, pants, hoodie, gloves and climbing boots \u2014 Mr. Rosado makes his climb. From his vantage point above the city he aims his camera at various targets \u2014 billboards, buildings, roads. He claims a larger mission: to capture the urban landscape as it is now, before gentrification sets in and new buildings \u2014 \u201cmuch bigger, much worse-designed\u201d ones \u2014 take their place. \u201cPeople are not aware of what\u2019s going on in the neighborhood,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd from high up you see things in a way you wouldn\u2019t from lower points.\u201d These urban forages are thrilling, but not without risk. Mr. Rosado could be arrested or could fall. There are also security guards and dogs to dodge. So far he has escaped without harm. The Police Department said it did not keep records on people arrested for climbing buildings and bridges, partly because the instances were so few and far between. But capture can result in charges of criminal trespass and reckless endangerment. Mr. Rosado willingly takes the risk, likening himself to an urban ninja proficient in the art of climbing. He said he had always loved heights. While his missionary parents tried to convert indigenous people of Peru, Chile and Ecuador to Pentecostalism, a 3-year-old Luis climbed trees in the surrounding jungles. His family moved back to their native Puerto Rico when he turned 5, and there he found a stunning vantage point from the rooftop of the church. \u201cMy father owned the church, so I couldn\u2019t get in trouble,\u201d Mr. Rosado said. As his father, Angel L. Rosado, traveled, founding churches in New York and Colchester, Vt., Luis Rosado found new structures to climb. But in Vermont a new passion was born. At 18, he started taking photography classes at his high school. \u201cFor the first time I could express myself,\u201d Mr. Rosado said. \u201cThere was no limit to possibilities.\u201d Four years later he returned to New York, this time with an associate\u2019s degree in photography and graphic design. His two interests merged. \u201cNew York was free for the taking,\u201d Mr. Rosado said. \u201cI wanted to take my camera everywhere.\u201d His photography was on display this summer at the LDR Studio Gallery \u2014 his apartment, which he converted into living space three years ago, mainly to curate and display work by other artists. Called \u201cChanges in the Bronx,\u201d the show was a collaboration of photos and videos with Benton-C Bainbridge , 44, a video artist who has had exhibitions at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. \u201cLuis and I are kindred spirits,\u201d Mr. Bainbridge said. \u201cWe\u2019re capturing and looking to expose things that people don\u2019t see.\u201d To support his photography and gallery, Mr. Rosado works as a doorman on the Upper East Side. That job leaves him with enough time to hatch new plans. On a recent Sunday, Mr. Rosado enthusiastically spoke of the next spot he wanted to climb and shoot from. His brown eyes wide in amazement, he pointed up 65 feet to the top of the new Willis Avenue Bridge. Mr. Rosado said he did not fear another close encounter with the police. If it happened, there was always a good route for escape. \u201cI\u2019m a good swimmer,\u201d he said, smiling.", "keyword": "Photography;Rosado Luis;Bronx (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0233520", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/08/24", "title": "Equestrians\u2019 Latest Safety Option Is the Air Bag", "abstract": "Spectators gasped and expected the worst when the horse ridden by Karim Florent Laghouag somersaulted over a fence and fell on top of him at a prestigious equestrian competition last September in France. Laghouag had taken a so-called rotational fall, a dreaded spill in the Olympic sport of eventing. At least 13 riders in the past four years were killed and several others were seriously injured in such tumbles. But soon after his horse jumped to its feet, Laghouag stood up too. He had a dislocated elbow but no broken bones. He attributed his good fortune to an air bag vest, a simple safety innovation that was virtually unheard of in the equestrian world until last year and now is standard issue for the world\u2019s top riders. \u201cToday, I wear it all the time \u2014 even when I\u2019m training,\u201d Laghouag, 35, said in French during a recent telephone interview. Leaders in eventing \u2014 a three-phase competition involving dressage, show jumping and a cross-country obstacle course \u2014 have long expressed frustration over attempts to make the cross-country portion safer. They have tried imposing stricter rules on riders and building fences designed to break apart more easily on impact. But the arrival of the air bag vests has generated the most excitement, even though some caution that the technology is too new to be wholly embraced. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly the biggest step forward in the safety of our sport, ever,\u201d said Oliver Townend, a British rider who was wearing a vest in April when his horse tumbled on top of him at the Kentucky Three-Day Event in Lexington. Townend broke his sternum, four ribs, his collarbone and the tips of his shoulder bones \u2014 but he says he still believes in the vest. \u201cI walked out of hospital the next day, where otherwise I would be in a box or in America for a month,\u201d Townend said in a recent phone interview. Inflatable vests have been sold to motorcyclists for about a decade, but few equestrians used them until a British company, Point Two Air Jackets , adapted them for use on horses and began distributing them at top European competitions last year. Hit Air , a Japanese company that says it has been selling motorcycle vests since 1999, also sells an equestrian version. They each rely on similar technology. The two-pound vest is attached by a cord to a rider\u2019s saddle and is worn over a traditional protective vest made of high-density foam. When a rider is thrown from a horse, the cord is yanked, puncturing a cartridge of carbon dioxide and inflating the vest. The vest can be reused after the cartridge is replaced. Point Two said its vest inflates in one-tenth of a second; Hit Air said its average rate is one-quarter of a second. Despite their relatively high cost \u2014 from about $390 to $700 \u2014 the vests have sold well. About 6,000 eventing riders now wear the Point Two vests, according to the company, and Hit Air said it had sold about 10,000 vests for equestrian use worldwide. Lee Middleton, director of Point Two, said his product was worn by the top 40 American riders, and that several national teams, including the United States, would provide air bag vests to their riders at next month\u2019s World Equestrian Games in Kentucky. He provides some vests free to riders like Townend and Laghouag, who are not paid to be spokesmen. \u201cAnything like that, that can minimize the effects of an injury during a fall, is going to be great,\u201d said David O\u2019Connor, the president of the United States Equestrian Federation and an Olympic gold medalist. Until recently, he also headed the international federation\u2019s eventing safety subcommittee. \u201cI think they\u2019ve proven themselves already \u2014 and certainly with the people that have had falls with them \u2014 they swear by them.\u201d The eventing rider Doug Payne , who is sponsored by Hit Air, said he had fallen four times while wearing the vest. \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting thing,\u201d he said. \u201cAs you\u2019re falling, everything sort of slows down. You do notice a pop sound, and that\u2019s the canister. The next thing you realize, it\u2019s a significantly softer landing than you would ever expect.\u201d The vests have become so common on the competition circuit that it has become a common courtesy to warn other riders to unhook their cords before dismounting. \u201cWhen you arrive, everyone says: \u2018Your vest! Your vest!\u2019 \u201d Laghouag said. Inevitably, someone forgets. \u201cIt\u2019s always a source of amusement,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. \u201cYou hear a pop, and somebody\u2019s looking like a marshmallow.\u201d Giuseppe Della Chiesa, the chairman of the eventing committee for the international governing body for equestrian sports, known as F.E.I., said the group recommended using the vests but did not require them because so little safety data exists. \u201cIt is a step forward as it introduces a different proven technology from other industrial areas,\u201d Della Chiesa wrote in an e-mail. He added that the technology was passive \u2014 meant to limit the damage of accidents, rather than prevent them, which he said is at the core of the sport\u2019s safety mission. The Point Two jackets were independently tested by the Transport Research Laboratory, a nonprofit group in Britain, which found that the air bag improved protection of the spine by 69 percent when worn over a protective vest. The air bag vest also reduced the risk of rib fractures and underlying organ damage by as much as 20 percent, the laboratory found. Kenji Takeuchi, the president of Mugen Denko, which manufactures the Hit Air vest, said by e-mail that he had conducted testing at the nonprofit Japan Automobile Research Institute. In motorcycle racing, air bag technology is still met with caution. The racer Valentino Rossi has been testing an inflatable jacket, as have other top competitors. \u201cI would describe it as an emerging technology,\u201d said Peter terHorst, a spokesman for the American Motorcyclist Association. He noted motorcycle accidents occurred at far higher speeds \u2014 and under different conditions \u2014 than the typical equestrian fall. \u201cI think the best thing I could tell you is that it\u2019s something we\u2019re watching closely,\u201d he said. Point Two\u2019s Middleton said he had also spoken about the vests with representatives from the mountain bike and all-terrain-vehicle industry. Aside from being concerned about cost, some equestrian riders have expressed concern that the loud pop created when the vest is activated can spook horses. Others report feeling restricted after a fall, and worry about being able to roll to safety in an inflated vest. Some have raised questions about the effectiveness of the vests during rotational falls similar to those of Laghouag and Townend, in which the rider somersaults with the horse and frequently does not become separated from the horse until the last moment. According to statistics kept by the F.E.I. , about 25 percent of riders involved in rotational falls in international competitions from 2004 to 2009 were killed or seriously injured. Reed Ayers, an amateur eventing competitor who holds a doctorate in engineering, said he was skeptical about the benefit of the vests. He said he had heard of several riders whose vests failed to inflate in falls. \u201cThese vests can absorb some of the impact,\u201d said Ayers, who recently conducted a safety study examining horse speeds for the United States Eventing Association. But, he added: \u201cWhen you rely on a mechanical design, there\u2019s always a possibility that it won\u2019t work. That\u2019s why you can\u2019t rely on those vests as the sole protective component.\u201d But Laghouag and Townend consider the vests lifesavers, and Middleton said that even if they failed to inflate, they would cause no harm. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to remember they\u2019ve got what they\u2019ve got underneath, anyway,\u201d he said, referring to the stiff protective vest. \u201cThis is an added bonus.\u201d", "keyword": "Horsemanship and Equestrian Events;Accidents and Safety;Sports Injuries"}
{"id": "ny0174634", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/10/26", "title": "Who\u2019s Going to Take the Financial Weight?", "abstract": "The transfer of risk was supposed to be the great advance brought to the world by financial engineers. They developed exotic derivative products that enabled risks to be sliced and diced in all manner of ways. Central banks and bank regulators cheered on the process. The transfers of risk meant that those who were comfortable with a given risk would wind up with it. The apparent triumph of that process came after the technology stock bubble burst and the American economy went into recession in 2001. A lot of money was lost because of huge overinvestment in things like fiber optic cable, but the losses were dispersed. No significant banks failed or even got into trouble. The system worked, the regulators told themselves as they praised the financial advances brought on by the derivative revolution. Sometimes those regulators did wonder just where the risk was. If it was no longer the banks that would suffer when a financial crisis came around, who would? Could it be the insurance companies? Perhaps pension plans? Would hedge funds that gambled and lost be unable to meet their obligations and bring on a systemic failure? In this financial crisis, the one that started with subprime loans, we are learning the answer to that question. The risks that banks would have taken on under the old system \u2014 when banks made loans and profited only as they were paid back \u2014 had been transferred through a bewildering wilderness of options, swaps, swaptions, specialized investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations, variable interest entities and who knows how many other instruments. And when the whole daisy chain was through, a lot of the risk seems to have ended just where it used to end. With the banks. There were differences, of course. For one, the banks are ending up taking losses from loans that others made. A suit filed this week in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan sheds light on one way this happened. American Home Mortgage Holdings, a subprime lender that went broke in August, sued Bank of America, saying it reneged on a deal to bear losses if mortgages were sold for less than face value. The bank asserts that some of the loans shouldn\u2019t have been made at all, but American Home says that is irrelevant. Here\u2019s how it worked, in a simplified explanation that does not come close to capturing all the complexities that the financial engineers inserted: American made subprime loans and sold them to special purpose entities it set up. Those entities, in turn, financed themselves by borrowing, mostly through the short-term commercial paper market. To reassure investors, the special purpose entities entered into swap agreements with Bank of America and other big banks, in which the banks promised to make up the difference if the entities could not retain financing and therefore had to sell loans for less than par value. The chances of such a sale presumably seemed slight when the deal was made in 2004, but lots of unexpected things are cropping up these days. In late September, American auctioned off the loans. Note that these appear to be loans made in 2004 or earlier, before lending standards are supposed to have crumbled. We now have a market value for such loans. Packages of mortgages that were classified as performing \u2014 meaning the homeowner is mailing in a check every month \u2014 sold for as little as 80 percent of face value, and none went for more than 92 percent. The nonperforming loans sold in a range of 54 to 59 percent. American Home says it sent out bills to its swap partners, and all but Bank of America agreed to pay. The amount in dispute is just $25 million, an insignificant amount for the bank. But its refusal to pay may indicate an effort to find ways to shed what now seem to be foolish risks. The man in charge of that area of the bank was pushed out this week in a reorganization. The bank would not comment on the lawsuit. There are other ways that banks may come to lose a lot of money. Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg News points out that Citigroup has no legal obligation to make up losses in the specialized investment vehicles \u2014 SIVs \u2014 it set up, but some analysts think it will do so to avoid a hit to its reputation. If it does put up cash, that will call into question the accuracy of Citi\u2019s financial statements. If not, some of Citi\u2019s customers will be very upset. Not all the losses will end up with banks. Some will go to mutual funds and hedge funds and pension funds. Some will go to those who insured the value of securities, like Ambac Financial, which surprised Wall Street by posting its first quarterly loss this week. Still, it is remarkable that the financial engineers generated large commissions and fees by selling risk-transfer products that, in the end, moved a lot of the risk back to where it started.", "keyword": "Hedge Funds;Credit;Finances;Mortgages"}
{"id": "ny0179514", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/08/10", "title": "Video-Sharing Site Sues Universal Music", "abstract": "Veoh, an online video-sharing site, has pre-emptively sued the Universal Music Group, asking a federal judge to prevent the giant music company from filing its own copyright infringement action. Veoh Networks, based in San Diego, filed the federal lawsuit yesterday, asking a judge to declare that the company has no liability to Universal even if individuals upload videos to the Veoh site that may contain music, used without permission, from Universal artists. Veoh argued that it was entitled to protection under the safe harbor provision of United States copyright law because it does not encourage its users to infringe copyrights and goes beyond current legal requirements to investigate and remove infringing material when notified to do so. The company said it was notified in July by Universal that the music label was considering suing Veoh because it was \u201cmassively infringing\u201d its copyrights. The lawsuit claims Universal did not provide any details about the alleged infringement that would allow the company to investigate. \u201cIt is unfortunate that U.M.G. prefers to take actions that are designed to stifle innovation, shut down new markets and maintain the status quo instead of working to change and evolve models for today and the future,\u201d Veoh\u2019s chief executive, Steve Mitgang, said in a statement. Universal had previously threatened to sue the video-sharing site YouTube, which is owned by Google, but the two sides struck a licensing deal before any legal action was taken. \u201cUniversal Music Group is enthusiastic about using technology to build communities, as evidenced by our deal with YouTube,\u201d the company said yesterday. \u201cBut that\u2019s not what Veoh is all about. Rather, it\u2019s about trying to build a business on the backs of our artists and songwriters without fairly compensating them for the use of their works.\u201d", "keyword": "Universal Music Group;Veoh;Recordings and Downloads (Video);Suits and Litigation;Copyrights"}
{"id": "ny0030264", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/06/28", "title": "Arrest Dredges Up N.F.L.\u2019s Ugly History", "abstract": "When the North Attleborough, Mass., police chose the high-profile route of arresting Aaron Hernandez by dragging him out of his suburban oasis in handcuffs Wednesday, they did more than just trumpet their own case-cracking and give the world something to gawk at on 24-hour news channels. They were also pulling the N.F.L.'s biggest nightmare out of the closet for everyone to watch, slack-jawed, as another one of its athletes plunged into an unfathomable spot. As prosecutors then read the case to a judge, and by extension, the world, jaws slackened more. A tight end with a $40 million contract accused of murdering a friend in a plot straight out of a cheesy 1970s gangster movie? There was no sense to be made of this, just like there was no sense to be made of the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide last year in Kansas City, nor Ray Lewis\u2019s involvement in a murder case in 2000, nor Rae Carruth\u2019s contract hit on his pregnant girlfriend in 1999. This is why it was the N.F.L.'s nightmare rerun Wednesday, not because there is any real connection we can conclusively draw between the cases, but because Hernandez drags them all back out for us to poke over and wonder about the connection, as Mike Freeman writes on CBSSports.com . As Mark Bradley writes in The Boston Herald , this same scene plays itself out in all walks of life and not just football. But still, it\u2019s the image of football that took a beating, and as Les Carpenter writes on Yahoo.com , it is why the Patriots cut him so fast. It\u2019s the image the N.F.L. so desperately needs to protect, billions of dollars worth of image. The Patriots could not get the word \u201cformer\u201d in front of \u201cPatriots tight end\u201d fast enough. The details of the case will be played out in public for the 24-hour endless news crowd \u2014 Lester Munson of ESPN.com outlines some of the legal issues to get you started \u2014 but Wednesday was a day to stare at a seemingly emotionless Hernandez, as Dan Wetzel describes on Yahoo.com , and try to figure out how to think about it. The N.F.L. has kindly requested you forget how many times you have been here before. (It would also like you to ignore the news of Cleveland Browns linebacker Ausar Walcott\u2019s being arrested \u2014 he was released by his team, too \u2014 and charged with attempted murder in New Jersey after a bar fight. Yes, holy cow.) The other puzzling sports news of the day happened an ocean away and was thankfully confined to on-court happenings, but Wimbledon certainly did allow you to keep your head in that tilted-to-the-side position. That\u2019s because players slipped, slid, thudded and pirouetted out of the tournament in such a bizarre parade of injuries that the whole sport seemed to have gone crazy. And then Roger Federer lost a second-round match to someone you have probably never heard of (Sergiy Stakhovsky). At Wimbledon. The tournament he has won a gazillion times (O.K., seven). Before Federer lost, the howling about the dangerous state of the Wimbledon grass was reaching a peak, but, as Simon Briggs writes in The Telegraph , the blame is more aptly placed on the tour, whose season is too long and its grass portion too short. One of those doing some of the howling was the upset victim Maria Sharapova, which cost the tournament more drama because of her latest fight with Serena Williams, Greg Couch writes on Foxsports.com . In the end, though, it was hard not to fixate on Federer because, as Greg Garber writes on ESPN.com , it feels like an era ending. His loss was more shocking than Rafael Nadal\u2019s first-round face plant, Jon Wertheim argues on SI.com , and it does seem to be dwindling the Big Four down to the Big Two, as Paul Newman writes in The Independent . No one is happier about this right now than Andy Murray, who would love to win his home empire championship, and was one of the few to avoid any drama in his win Wednesday. College sports chipped in its own head scratcher to round out the day with the N.C.A.A. penalties levied against Oregon for its recruiting shenanigans, although they are more accurately described as a wrist tap . And while you could argue that the N.C.A.A. got this one largely right, as Andy Staples writes on SI.com , the problem is no one trusts anything the N.C.A.A. does these days. Dennis Dodd writes on CBSSports.com that the N.C.A.A. whiffed on an opportunity to take a stronger stand, and Pat Forde writes on Yahoo.com that Chip Kelly is the latest coach to skate out of a mess unscathed. In the admittedly professional ranks of sports, the N.B.A. offers up its draft Thursday night \u2014 you can check out the 10 burning questions courtesy of SI.com\u2019s Chris Mannix \u2014 and the N.H.L. prompts you to take stock of its staggering playoff injury toll. After learning the Bruins\u2019 Patrice Bergeron also had a punctured lung along with his broken rib and separated shoulder and heaven knows what else, Nicholas Cotsonika writes on Yahoo.com that perhaps we should all be examining the N.H.L.'s play-through-it ethos and stop glorifying it so much. The other side of glory often gets ugly. We have the N.F.L. to remind us of that. Repeatedly. Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt", "keyword": "Football;Maria Sharapova;Patrice Bergeron;Serena Williams;Chip Kelly;Rafael Nadal;Roger Federer;Hernandez; Aaron"}
{"id": "ny0242251", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/03/28", "title": "For Japanese Parts Not Yet Scarce, Fear of Shortages to Come", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Tremors from the strong Japanese earthquake continue to rattle American businesses, even those companies that have experienced no disruptions in parts or supplies. Businesses in a number of industries are trying to adapt to a new reality. No longer can they count on reliable access to critical supplies, a fact prompting frantic phone calls, contingency planning and product redesigns. For instance, film and television producers, along with the companies that support them, are scrambling to stock up on commercial-grade videotape. A major supplier, the Sony Corporation , closed its factories in Japan. Many studios say they face no shortage now, but there is a fear of a shortage \u2014 and that is all it takes to put companies on edge. \u201cFolks everywhere know there will be a shortage and are buying as much as they can,\u201d said Thomas Engdahl, chief executive of Advanced Digital Services, which archives Hollywood shows and is among the many companies frantically calling videotape distributors. \u201cIt\u2019s creating panic buying.\u201d Short of parts, automakers including General Motors have slowed or stopped production at some plants. Other manufacturers like Nokia, the Finnish cellphone maker, have said they expect disruptions. But even companies that have maintained relatively normal operations have had to hustle. In San Jose, Calif., just hours after the earthquake, employees of Echelon, which sells smart meters that monitor electricity consumption, held an emergency meeting to discuss the potential effect on their supply chain. Identifying every supplier from Japan was the top priority, said Russell Harris, Echelon\u2019s senior vice president for operations. Echelon and the contractor that builds its smart meters quickly came up with a list of 25 suppliers that were responsible for more than 50 components. Within a few days, they had contacted each one and found, to their relief, that none of those factories had been damaged. \u201cWe got lucky,\u201d Mr. Harris said. But that is no guarantee the luck will hold. Suppliers depend on basic materials to keep their factories running, and any disruption to that spigot \u2014 a particular chemical or tiny part that has become scarce, for example \u2014 could shut down the entire chain. Production delays would be painful for Echelon. Contracts with utilities often require it to pay financial penalties for late deliveries. Because of the high stakes, Echelon had never embraced the strategy of just-in-time manufacturing, whereby companies keep just a small amount of inventory on hand. Rather, Echelon usually keeps a few months of supplies \u2014 at least for components that are available from only one source. The approach, which had lost favor among speakers at management conferences and authors of business books, turned out to be a blessing after the earthquake, Mr. Harris said. Still, he got approval to buy even more components on the spot market to tide the company over through the summer. Meanwhile, Echelon started a search for alternate suppliers outside of Japan, just in case. For some components like microcontrollers, tiny microchip-like devices, there are no other options, Mr. Harris said. For now, Echelon\u2019s production is normal, as it tells customers who have been calling. But there remain many unknowns \u2014 how quickly Japan\u2019s factories come back online, when transportation is restored or when the danger of nuclear contamination is over \u2014 that could still affect the supply chain. \u201cThe particular impact from this disaster is still unfolding,\u201d Mr. Harris said. A number of companies that make circuit boards \u2014 the electronic nerve center inside computers \u2014 are also in upheaval. The earthquake caused a huge swath of Japan\u2019s semiconductor industry to close along with the factories that make a quarter of the world\u2019s silicon wafers, the raw material used in semiconductors, according to IHS iSuppli, a market research firm. Typically, manufacturers or distributors have stockpiled enough semiconductors and most other computer parts to feed production for several months. But to be safe, circuit board makers are starting to redesign their products so that they can more easily switch components if there is a shortage, said Paul J. Reilly, an executive vice president at Arrow Electronics, a technology supply chain company based in Melville, N.Y. \u201cWhile a replacement part may function similarly, it may not have the same shape,\u201d Mr. Reilly said. \u201cYou may not be able to squeeze it on the same computer board.\u201d Computer board makers may never put the redesigns into production, he said. But money spent coming up with new designs is minor compared with the potential cost of stopping the assembly line. \u201cEveryone is looking at their contingency plans,\u201d Mr. Reilly said. In Hollywood, companies that use and sell commercial-grade videotape for television and movies are also sweating. Whether there is a shortage or simply a lot of hoarding is unclear. Filming has not been disrupted. But Sony produced several formats of videotape used by Hollywood, primarily from its Sendai plant, which was closed because of damage after the quake. Word of the plant\u2019s problems immediately drew attention in the entertainment industry because Sony represents a big part of the market for commercial-grade videotape. Supplies of one commonly used format, HDCAM-SR, are particularly vulnerable because Sony is the only manufacturer. Buyers quickly tried to scoop up as much as possible for fear that the tape would be unavailable in the future. Fuji, Maxell and other companies also make videotape. But if a crew has to switch formats, it may need to buy new equipment or forgo some capabilities. David Cohen, chief executive of Edgewise Media, which sells film equipment to production companies involved in shooting reality shows, among others, said he had scoured the world for stock since the earthquake. To cover the extra shipping costs and mark-ups by suppliers, he has raised prices as much as 25 percent. \u201cWe\u2019re buying as much as we can \u2014 buying at a premium to take care of our customers,\u201d said Mr. Cohen, whose company is based in Orange, Calif. \u201cI can\u2019t have someone starting a show knowing that they are going to have to stop after six or seven episodes.\u201d Sales are limited to his regular customers, and then only for the short term, he said. People planning to resell the tape at a higher price would otherwise buy out everything he has. \u201cWe don\u2019t want people buying tape from us and sticking it on eBay and charging 10 times more for it,\u201d Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Engdahl, from the Hollywood archiving and postproduction company, proposed to his customers that they switch to his firm\u2019s digital archiving service instead of storing their shows on tape. After the panic dies down, he said his company could copy those clips onto tape. \u201cWe believe that with some folks going digital, we will be O.K.,\u201d Mr. Engdahl said. \u201cBut we are having to put a lot of effort into finding tape.\u201d", "keyword": "Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Shortages;Japan;International Trade and World Market;Sony Corporation"}
{"id": "ny0286118", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/09/24", "title": "Larry Sanders, Bernie\u2019s Brother, Is Running for David Cameron\u2019s Seat in Parliament", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Larry Sanders, the brother of Senator Bernie Sanders, is running to fill the seat being vacated by David Cameron, the former prime minister, in the British Parliament. Mr. Sanders, 82, was chosen on Thursday night by the Green Party as its nominee in an Oct. 20 special election in the constituency of Witney, about 67 miles west of London. Like his younger brother, Mr. Sanders grew up in New York City and attended James Madison High School and Brooklyn College. In 1969, after graduating from Harvard Law School, he moved to Oxford, England, where he has devoted his career to social work and the law and been an advocate in areas like mental health and education. The brothers are close and share progressive political views. At an emotional moment during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July, Larry Sanders, as a delegate representing Democrats who live abroad, cast a vote for his brother , saying their parents would have been \u201cimmensely proud\u201d of him. Larry Sanders \u2014 not to be confused with the fictional late-night television host played by Garry Shandling in an HBO comedy that ran from 1992 to 1998 \u2014 has already served in public office; he was elected in 2005 to a seat on the Oxfordshire County Council, and re-elected in 2009. He is nonetheless a long shot for Mr. Cameron\u2019s seat, which the Conservative Party has held nearly continuously since 1974; the Conservatives have chosen a 37-year-old lawyer, Robert Courts, as their candidate in what the party considers a safe seat. In interviews on Friday with Buzzfeed UK and with the radio program LBC , Mr. Sanders acknowledged that he was unlikely to win. \u201cThe underlying issues will be the one that Bernard raises, which is the fact that we\u2019ve had growing inequality for the last 30 or 40 years, which means the bulk of the wealth and income has gone to the very richest people,\u201d Larry Sanders told Buzzfeed UK. He added that he would also work against efforts to privatize parts of the country\u2019s much-loved National Health Service. Mr. Cameron, who led Britain for six years, stepped down as prime minister on June 24, the day after British voters decided to leave the European Union. He initially vowed to remain in Parliament, but on Sept. 12 he resigned his seat, saying he did not want to be a distraction for his successor as prime minister, Theresa May. The Conservative Party, now led by Mrs. May, controls 329 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, while the main opposition, the Labour Party, holds 230 seats. The Green Party holds one.", "keyword": "Great Britain;Election;House of Commons;Larry Sanders"}
{"id": "ny0195831", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/10/18", "title": "Los Angeles Prepares for Clash Over Marijuana", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 There are more marijuana stores here than public schools. Signs emblazoned with cannabis plants or green crosses sit next to dry cleaners, gas stations and restaurants. The dispensaries range from Hollywood-day-spa fabulous to shoddy-looking storefronts with hand-painted billboards. Absolute Herbal Pain Solutions, Grateful Meds, Farmacopeia Organica. Cannabis advocates claim that more than 800 dispensaries have sprouted here since 2002; some law enforcement officials say it is closer to 1,000. Whatever the real number, everyone agrees it is too high. And so this, too, is taken for granted: Crackdowns on cannabis clubs will soon come in this city, which has more dispensaries than any other. For the first time, law enforcement officials in Los Angeles have vowed to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries that turn a profit, with police officials saying they expect to conduct raids. Their efforts are widely seen as a campaign to sway the City Council into adopting strict regulations after two years of debate. It appears to be working. Carmen A. Trutanich, the newly elected city attorney, recently persuaded the Council to put aside a proposed ordinance negotiated with medical marijuana supporters for one drafted by his office. The new proposal calls for dispensaries to have renewable permits, submit to criminal record checks, register the names of members with the police and operate on a nonprofit basis. If enacted, it is likely to result in the closing of hundreds of marijuana dispensaries. Mr. Trutanich argued that state law permits the exchange of marijuana between growers and patients on a nonprofit and noncash basis only. Marijuana advocates say that interpretation would regulate dispensaries out of existence and thwart the will of voters who approved medical cannabis in 1996. Whatever happens here will be closely watched by law enforcement officials and marijuana advocates across the country who are threading their way through federal laws that still treat marijuana as an illegal drug and state laws that are increasingly allowing medicinal use. Thirteen states have laws supporting medical marijuana, and others are considering new legislation. No state has gone further than California, often described by drug enforcement agents as a \u201csource nation\u201d because of the vast quantities of marijuana grown here. And no city in the state has gone further than Los Angeles. This has alarmed local officials, who say that dispensary owners here took unfair advantage of vague state laws intended to create exceptions to marijuana prohibitions for a limited number of ill people. \u201cAbout 100 percent of dispensaries in Los Angeles County and the city are operating illegally,\u201d said Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, who is up for re-election in 2012. \u201cThe time is right to deal with this problem.\u201d Mr. Cooley, speaking last week at a training luncheon for regional narcotics officers titled \u201cThe Eradication of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County,\u201d said that state law did not allow dispensaries to be for-profit enterprises. Mr. Trutanich, the city attorney, went further, saying dispensaries were prohibited from accepting cash even to reimburse growers for labor and supplies. He said that a recent California Supreme Court decision, People v. Mentch, banned all over-the-counter sales of marijuana; other officials and marijuana advocates disagree. So far, prosecutions of marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles have been limited to about a dozen in the last year, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cooley. But Police Department officials said they were expecting to be called on soon to raid collectives. \u201cI don\u2019t think this is a law that we\u2019ll have to enforce 800 times,\u201d said one police official, who declined to speak on the record before the marijuana ordinance was completed. \u201cThis is just like anything else. You don\u2019t have to arrest everyone who is speeding to make people slow down.\u201d Don Duncan, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access , a leader in the medical marijuana movement, said that over-the-counter cash purchases should be permitted but that dispensaries should be nonprofit organizations. He also said marijuana collectives needed more regulation and a \u201cthinning of the herd.\u201d \u201cI am under no illusions that everyone out there is following the rules,\u201d said Mr. Duncan, who runs his own dispensary in West Hollywood. \u201cBut just because you accept money to reimburse collectives does not mean you\u2019re making profits.\u201d For marijuana advocates, Los Angeles represents a critical juncture \u2014 a symbol of the movement\u2019s greatest success, but also its vulnerability. More than 300,000 doctors\u2019 referrals for medical cannabis are on file, the bulk of them from Los Angeles, according to Americans for Safe Access. The movement has had a string of successes in the Legislature and at the ballot box. In the city of Garden Grove, marijuana advocates forced the Highway Patrol to return six grams of marijuana it had confiscated from an eligible user. About 40 cities and counties have medical marijuana ordinances. But there have also been setbacks. In June, a federal judge sentenced Charles C. Lynch, a dispensary owner north of Santa Barbara, to one year in prison for selling marijuana to a 17-year-old boy whose father had testified that they sought out medical marijuana for his son\u2019s chronic pain. The mayor and the chief of police testified on behalf of Mr. Lynch, who was released on bail pending appeal. And last month, San Diego police officers and sheriff\u2019s deputies, along with agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration , raided 14 marijuana dispensaries and arrested 31 people. In an interview, Bonnie Dumanis, the district attorney for San Diego County, said that state laws governing medical marijuana were unclear and that the city had not yet instituted new regulations. Ms. Dumanis said that she approved of medical marijuana clubs where patients grow and use their own marijuana, but that none of the 60 or so dispensaries in the county operated that way. \u201cThese guys are drug dealers,\u201d she said of the 14 that were raided. \u201cI said publicly, if anyone thinks we\u2019re casting too big a net and we get a legitimate patient or a lawful collective, then show us your taxes, your business license, your incorporation papers, your filings with the Department of Corporations.\u201d \u201cIf they had these things, we wouldn\u2019t prosecute,\u201d she said. Marijuana supporters worry that San Diego may provide a glimpse of the near future for Los Angeles if raids here become a reality. But many look to Harborside Health Center in Oakland as a model for how dispensaries could work. \u201cOur No. 1 task is to show that we are worthy of the public\u2019s trust in asking to distribute medical cannabis in a safe and secure manner,\u201d said Steve DeAngelo, the pig-tailed proprietor of Harborside, which has been in business for three years. Harborside is one of four licensed dispensaries in Oakland run as nonprofit organizations. It is the largest, with 74 employees and revenues of about $20 million. Last summer, the Oakland City Council passed an ordinance to collect taxes from the sale of marijuana, a measure that Mr. DeAngelo supported. Mr. DeAngelo designed Harborside to exude legitimacy, security and comfort. Visitors to the low-slung building are greeted by security guards who check the required physicians\u2019 recommendations. Inside, the dispensary looks like a bank, except that the floor is covered with hemp carpeting and the eight tellers stand behind identical displays of marijuana and hashish. There is a laboratory where technicians determine the potency of the marijuana and label it accordingly. (Harborside says it rejects 80 percent of the marijuana that arrives at its door for insufficient quality.) There is even a bank vault where the day\u2019s cash is stored along with reserves of premium cannabis. An armored truck picks up deposits every evening. City officials routinely audit the dispensary\u2019s books. Surplus cash is rolled back into the center to pay for free counseling sessions and yoga for patients. \u201cOakland issued licenses and regulations, and Los Angeles did nothing and they are still unregulated,\u201d Mr. DeAngelo said. \u201cCannabis is being distributed by inappropriate people.\u201d But even Oakland\u2019s regulations fall short of Mr. Trutanich\u2019s proposal that Los Angeles ban all cash sales. \u201cI don\u2019t know of any collective that operates in the way that is envisioned by this ordinance,\u201d said Mr. Duncan, of Americans for Safe Access. Christine Gasparac, a spokeswoman for State Attorney General Jerry Brown , said that after Mr. Trutanich\u2019s comments in Los Angeles, law enforcement officials and advocates from around the state had called seeking clarity on medical marijuana laws. Mr. Brown has issued legal guidelines that allow for nonprofit sales of medical marijuana, she said. But, she added, with laws being interpreted differently, \u201cthe final answer will eventually come from the courts.\u201d", "keyword": "Marijuana;Medical Marijuana;Drug Abuse and Traffic;Los Angeles (Calif);Drug Enforcement Administration;Cooley Steve;Lynch Charles C;Brown Edmund G Jr;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Lynch Charles C (1962- )"}
{"id": "ny0221782", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/02/22", "title": "Persistent Unemployment, Without Lingering Pain", "abstract": "C\u00c1DIZ, Spain \u2014 Beyond its pink-hued Atlantic light and the distinction of being the oldest city in Europe, this Andalusian outpost is best known for two things: its famous carnival , which wraps up Monday after two raucous weeks, and its chronic unemployment. Both were on vivid display on a rainy recent afternoon, as a group of roving musicians called \u201cI\u2019ll Start Monday\u201d belted out a \u201cchirigota,\u201d or satiric song. A crowd cheered, drinks in hand, as the group sang of an angel on the narrator\u2019s shoulder telling him to \u201cgrow up\u201d and get a job; while a devil on the other said: Why bother? Go have fun. The song explains a lot about the situation here in C\u00e1diz, in southern Spain just north of Gibraltar. Joblessness has climbed to 19 percent in Spain, the highest in the euro zone, after the collapse of a housing bubble. But here in C\u00e1diz, it is at a staggering 29 percent \u2014 and has been in double digits for decades. Elsewhere in Europe, such high numbers would lead to deep social unrest. Not so in C\u00e1diz. Here, as across the Mediterranean, life remains puzzlingly comfortable behind the dramatic figures, thanks to a complex safety net in which the underground economy, family support and government subsidies ensure a relatively high quality of life. \u201cThis is a place where you can live well, even when unemployed,\u201d said Pilar Casti\u00f1eira, 30, as she attended a performance of carnival skits in a downtown theater. \u201cLife is four days long,\u201d she added, recounting a Spanish saying. \u201cOn one you\u2019re born, on another you die, and in the two in between, you have to have fun.\u201d That was certainly the case during carnival. People walked around the city\u2019s colorful and cheerily shabby downtown, which has been used in movies as a stand-in for Havana, drinking, listening to the roving musicians dressed in outlandish costumes and eating fried fish out of paper cones. The party even continued for nearly a week after the start of Lent. Yet beyond the bar hopping, there were other realities. Over lunch in a restaurant with a view of the port, Miguel Cervera Garc\u00eda, a grizzled 47, explained how he made ends meet. He said he had picked olives and worked as a plumber, but never officially. \u201cI\u2019ve always worked, but without a contract,\u201d he said amiably. He added that jobs with contracts were better, \u201csince you get social security and paid sick days.\u201d Payroll taxes and unemployment benefits are high in Spain, and many people avoid them by hiring workers under the table or by offering them temporary contracts that avoid the high costs of hiring and firing. Always popular in the Mediterranean, tax fraud has grown during the economic crisis, to the point that many experts see it as the biggest reason why high unemployment has not translated into mass protests. Officials say that one-third of C\u00e1diz Province\u2019s 170,000 unemployed people are no longer receiving state unemployment subsidies, indicating that the underground economy and families must be taking care of the rest. Officials estimate that Spain\u2019s underground economy equals at least 20 percent of the official economy. In Andalusia, it is believed to be higher. Families remain a strong support network. Home ownership is highly valued, and even out-of-work Spaniards often live on the cheap in homes their families paid off long ago. \u201cIf one person in the family works, he\u2019s a net for the whole family,\u201d said Juan Bouza, Andalusia\u2019s point-person for employment in C\u00e1diz. Mr. Bouza reiterated a central tenet of Prime Minister Jos\u00e9 Luis Rodr\u00edguez Zapatero\u2019s approach to the crisis: extending unemployment benefits even as the state deficit is growing. \u201cWe don\u2019t think that people will find a job more easily if we remove help,\u201d Mr. Bouza said. \u201cWe think the weakest people need help.\u201d To some, the cultural acceptance of unemployment is part of the problem. \u201cFor most people here being unemployed and \u2014 while it lasts \u2014 living off state benefits is perfectly natural,\u201d said David Pantoja, 36, an out-of-work carpenter who founded an association for the unemployed in C\u00e1diz. \u201cIt\u2019s just a fact of life, like love or death.\u201d Indeed, for decades Andalusia has had the highest unemployment levels in Spain. The jobless rate here was 13 percent four years ago, when levels elsewhere in Spain were at a near-historic low. But there were signs of improvement. In early 2008 local politicians made campaign promises to bring full employment to Andalusia, but with the collapse of the housing bubble that is not looking likely, and joblessness in the region is now at 26 percent. History explains some of the problems. During the 36 years of Franco\u2019s dictatorship, Andalusia was Spain\u2019s breadbasket. After the transition to democracy in the 1970s, it never fully developed into an industrial region. In recent decades it has lost a lot of ship-building jobs to Asia. Today, it draws 40 percent of its revenue from tourism, especially on the popular Mediterranean coast around M\u00e1laga. C\u00e1diz is on the windier Atlantic side. In an office with a stunning ocean view, Mr. Bouza spoke of the region as a centerpiece in the government\u2019s plan to turn Spain into a hub for renewable energy projects. \u201cThis will be the Silicon Valley of renewable energy,\u201d he said. He added that 75 cents of every euro the region spends on unemployment is for courses to help train the workforce for its future in renewable energy. But not everyone is buying it. \u201cThey said that by 2012, C\u00e1diz would be a bedroom community\u201d for nearby industrial areas, said Esteban Vias Casais, 58, a retired factory worker who lives on a disability pension. But the city already is one, he added with a wink. \u201cHere, everyone sleeps, and no one works!\u201d Mr. Pantoja was not convinced by the courses, either. Sitting in a cafe after a children\u2019s carnival parade wrapped up nearby, he said he had taken courses on business management and computer literacy, but that new skills were not the issue. After two years without work, \u201cEnough training,\u201d he said, \u201cwe want jobs.\u201d", "keyword": "Unemployment;Spain;Cadiz (Spain)"}
{"id": "ny0172959", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/13", "title": "Containers Wall Off a Newark Housing Project", "abstract": "NEWARK , Nov. 7 \u2014 Tasha Solomon opened the grimy plastic blinds of her first floor-apartment in the Millard E. Terrell Homes, a housing project hard by the Passaic River. She need not have bothered. Although the river is only 100 yards from her apartment, Ms. Solomon, a 25-year-old mother of two, cannot see it from her window. Her view is a wall of rusty shipping containers that rises more than four stories, taller than any of the 12 buildings in the rundown housing complex. \u201cIs there a river over there?\u201d she asked one recent afternoon. Like drugs and gangs and poverty, the containers have simply become another unavoidable fact of life here, residents say. For decades the project, operated by the Newark Housing Authority, has been flanked by storage depots where thousands of corrugated, trailer-size containers \u2014 a byproduct of the brisk commerce at the port in Newark and Elizabeth \u2014 sit stacked one atop the other in the barren cityscape. There used to be some daylight. An expanse of concrete between Ms. Solomon\u2019s building and the murky river once served as the complex\u2019s recreation area. Older residents recall mother-daughter kickball tournaments, dance contests, and summer evenings spent watching the lights from downtown shimmer in the distance. \u201cThis is where we used to let it all hang out,\u201d said Valerie Hall, who moved to the project in the mid-1960s and is one of the few who remember life before the containers. \u201cWhen you\u2019d look at those lights, it was like you could go downtown, and all you had to do was stand here.\u201d But about 15 years ago the housing authority, a troubled agency that barely avoided a takeover by the federal government in 2005, leased the gritty three-acre recreation area to a private container storage company. What once was a baseball field is now an expanse littered with shards of glass. And a patch of open space that allowed residents to look out on the river now provides a view of ripped and rusted cargo containers. Keith Kinard was appointed executive director of the housing authority 16 months ago after a federal investigation called the agency \u201cabsolutely dysfunctional\u201d for much of its 70-year history. Initially, a spokesman for Mr. Kinard said there was no record of a lease or rent payments to allow containers to be stored on the premises, but two weeks later he said the agency had discovered an agreement in perpetuity in 1993 with the container storage company, Palmer Industries. The agreement allowed Palmer, which had stored containers on each side of the housing project, to let them spill over onto the baseball field for $650 a month, linking its properties together with rows of containers. Now Mr. Kinard says he intends to have the containers removed, although other problems must be addressed first. \u201cI want them off my property,\u201d he insisted. But residents are not ready to break out the barbecue grills just yet. \u201cThe city won\u2019t do anything about them,\u201d said Claire Johnson, 80 years old, who said the containers had been there for as long as she could remember. \u201cThey don\u2019t care. Besides, they get a lot of money to park them there.\u201d While the few dozen containers on agency property are only a tiny fraction of the more than 27,000 that tower over this hardscrabble section of Newark, they were enough to seal residents off from the river. Today, waist-high weeds stab upward through the concrete, and the homeless who make this neighborhood their home string clotheslines between broken container doors. One man, known by friends in the project as Florida, was found dead last month, the police said, locked inside a container in the depot alongside the homes. The death is still under investigation. High up in the stacks, a container overflowed with trash, evidence of someone\u2019s precarious third-story dwelling. Reaching the complex requires trekking through some of the most dense and polluted industrial corridors of urban America. Every several minutes, the roar of jets taking off from nearby Newark Liberty International Airport drowns out any hope of conversation. The rancid smell of garbage \u2014 perhaps from the Newark incinerator a mile away \u2014 permeates the air at the slightest gust of wind. Just down the road is a dioxin-tainted Superfund site, where about a million gallons of Agent Orange was produced during the Vietnam War. But with a price tag of $25 million to bring the deteriorated buildings \u2014 two of which have broken heating systems \u2014 along with their mildewed hallways and 1940s-era electrical system, up to safety and sanitation standards \u2014 $8 million more than the housing agency\u2019s maintenance budget for the entire city \u2014 containers are not high on Mr. Kinard\u2019s list of priorities. \u201cI\u2019ve got homeless people squatting inside the apartments themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cIf containers were my worst problem, this job would be a walk in the park.\u201d Last month, Mr. Kinard said, he asked the agency\u2019s legal department to find a way to terminate the agreement with Columbia Container Services, which took over Palmer\u2019s storage depots in 2003. He said negotiations would begin in the coming weeks. Two directors of Columbia Container, John Armstrong and Bruce A. Fenimore, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. One tenant, a 20-year-old bank teller, who declined to give his name for fear of being associated with the project, said he gave up looking out his window years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s an asbestos river anyway,\u201d he said. For Mayor Cory A. Booker, the plight of Terrell Homes is yet another test in the effort to revitalize this long-struggling city. As Newark begins to explore ways to develop its waterfront for recreational and residential uses, officials have to figure out what to do with thousands of containers that land at Port Newark-Elizabeth \u2014 the third largest port in the United States \u2014 and line long swaths of the Passaic. \u201cThe city can\u2019t come to us and ask for jobs with the port and then say it wants to take the land these businesses are located in and turn it into parks or condominiums,\u201d said Randy Brown, a spokesman for the New York Shipping Association, which represents Newark\u2019s three storage depots. The port and the network of trucks, warehouses, and storage lots that service it account for about 300,000 jobs, Mr. Brown said, one of the largest sources of employment in New Jersey. He said a vast majority of containers stayed in the region for only 12 days before being shipped out on barges. The abandoned ones sit in the depots until they are repurchased, increasingly for scrap metal, Mr. Brown said, although he acknowledged that the industry did not keep track of the number of derelict containers stacked along the river. But officials say the city, which recently began work on a public park along the waterfront from Newark Penn Station to the edge of the storage depots \u2014 including the Terrell Homes \u2014 is determined to find out just how many there are. Joel Sonkin, counsel to the deputy mayor for economic development, said the city had enlisted researchers from Rutgers and the New Jersey Institute of Technology to investigate the question. For now, residents of the Terrell Homes remain in their walled city. Older women chat away the afternoon, and teenage boys in bandannas cluster around the cars in the benchless complex, their voices smothered by the drone of planes. Children dare one another to scale the fence that separates them from the container-choked lot. \u201cIt looks like some kind of scrap yard or recycling plant,\u201d said Denise Suver, 46. \u201cThis is a place for people to live, not a garbage dump.\u201d", "keyword": "Public Housing;Newark (NJ)"}
{"id": "ny0124297", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/08/03", "title": "Growth of Indonesian Airlines Strains the Infrastructure", "abstract": "JAKARTA, Indonesia \u2014 Indonesian airlines are poised for rapid growth, but a lack of critical infrastructure and trained personnel may keep the industry from reaching anticipated heights, experts say. The total number of fliers is expected to double within five years, record growth for a nation with a history of poor safety standards. If improvements do not keep pace with demand, \u201cthis growth, which they could take advantage of, will come to a halt,\u201d said Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst at the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor\u2019s in Singapore. Last year, 60 million Indonesians took to the skies, a 15 percent increase from 2010, according to the Ministry of Transportation. International passenger traffic in the country grew 23 percent, to eight million. In 2001, the Ministry of Transportation loosened the rules for starting an airline, in part to help bolster the economy after the Asian financial crisis. The number of operating licenses rose sharply between then and 2004, when the ministry issued a second round of revisions. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, part of the ministry, the new rules required only two planes for an operator to start a commercial airline, reduced limitations on the type and age of those planes and allowed airlines to deviate from their business plans, encouraging them to explore the market. At that time, \u201cit\u2019s possible we concentrated more on developing the market and were not so focused on safety concerns,\u201d said Hemi Pamuraharjo, the deputy director for scheduled flight services at the Ministry of Transportation. Jakarta\u2019s main hub, Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, was built to handle 22 million passengers. Last year, it served more than 50 million, and it is the fastest-growing airport in the world, according to the Airports Council International. In some places music stations and phone calls interfere with radio frequencies used by airports and aircraft, causing communication breakdowns with the air traffic control authorities. \u201cThey have a very old system,\u201d said one pilot with Lion Air, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear that he would lose his job. Sometimes the air traffic control radar fails, as it did in Bali on July 15, creating delays and potentially dangerous confusion. \u201cThey know who you are, but they don\u2019t know where you are,\u201d the pilot said. He also said the increase in demand for air travel had created flight crew shortages. Last month he worked more than his allotted 110 airtime hours. \u201cNow, I am working always,\u201d he said. \u201cOur biggest concern is with airport facilities, crew and human resources,\u201d like air traffic controllers, Mr. Pamuraharjo said. There are now 18 airlines offering regularly scheduled flights, up from 13 in 2001. Garuda recently spun off Citilink, a low-cost subsidiary, and Lion Air is set to introduce a premium carrier, Batik Air, early next year. And the number of charter airlines has grown 33 percent in just four years. All are rapidly expanding to take advantage of a middle class that has grown rapidly in the last eight years, to 130 million from 80 million. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of perfect for the airline market, particularly the low-cost segment,\u201d said Brendan Sobie, a senior analyst for Southeast Asia at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a consulting firm. And in a country of 17,500 islands, flying looks a lot better than the alternatives. Away from the main island of Java, road and rail networks are underdeveloped. Ferry rides often involve dangerous sea crossings on dilapidated ships. Sinkings are common. Air travel\u2019s increasing popularity and accessibility seem to have emboldened airlines, despite infrastructure problems and overcrowding. \u201cIf my passengers complain about delays, I say, \u2018Go by bus, go by train,\u2019 \u201d said Rusdi Kirana, the chief executive of Lion Air, the low-cost Indonesian carrier. \u201cWe need them, and they need us.\u201d The Malaysian airline Air Asia is rapidly expanding in Indonesia and last month agreed to buy the Indonesian low-cost carrier Batavia Air for $80 million. \u201cIndonesia is like a planet,\u201d said Tony Fernandes, Air Asia\u2019s chief executive. \u201cThere is lots of room to grow.\u201d Garuda, which went public last year but is majority-owned by the government, plans to increase its fleet to 194 aircraft from 95 by the end of 2015. It had $88 million in profits last year, even as other major carriers in the Asia-Pacific region, like Qantas of Australia and Cathay Pacific of Hong Kong, had an earnings dip. The most notable growth has come at Lion Air, the largest private Indonesian carrier. It recently signed a record $22.4 billion order for 230 Boeing 737s. Unlike many carriers in the Asia-Pacific region, Indonesian airlines have concentrated on increasing their domestic share. Garuda says it will cut back on flights to Europe this year because of high costs for fuel and sagging demand but will expand its routes to serve more remote areas in Indonesia. \u201cFor now, there\u2019s a tremendous amount of opportunity to grow the domestic market,\u201d said Mr. Sobie of the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation. But many airlines face staff shortages, and some have started pushing pilots to fly the maximum allowable number of hours to increase flight frequencies. The Ministry of Transportation has also come under pressure as demand has outstripped the capacity of airports and airlines. In 2007, an aircraft flown by the low-cost operator Adam Air crashed into the sea off northern Sulawesi Island, killing all 102 aboard. An investigation of the plane\u2019s flight data recorder determined poor maintenance to have been a main cause. Months later, a Boeing 737-400 flown by Garuda overshot a runway in Central Java Province and burst into flames, killing 21 of the 140 on board. The pilot was later convicted of criminal negligence; the sentence was later overturned. Regulations were tightened in 2008 after a decision by the European Union to ban all Indonesian airlines from entering its airspace from 2007 to 2009 because of lax safety standards. The ban was lifted on only a handful of airlines, including Garuda. The Ministry of Transportation says it has made strides toward improving the safety record. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation is establishing runway safety teams to monitor airstrips for damage and obstructions. It plans to train as many as 180 new inspectors by the end of the year. \u201cBut implementation needs coordination with other ministries, and of course there is the budget limitation,\u201d said Arfiyanti Samad, a secretary at the directorate. Much of the ministry\u2019s budget of 6 trillion rupiah (more than $630 million) for 2012 will go toward improving airports, she said. But according to Mr. Yusof of S.& P., the country will need to invest as much as $5 billion in maintenance, repair and infrastructure before 2015, when the region\u2019s aviation sector will come under an \u201copen skies\u201d agreement among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. \u201cIndonesia as a whole has a lot to do to improve their culture of safety,\u201d he said. Gerry Soejatman, an airline analyst at Dini Nusa Kusuma, an information technology business that provides satellite service to Indonesia, said that intensifying competition within Indonesia would push local airlines to improve their service and safety records. \u201cThere will be a drive to provide a better experience,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd new technology will provide the edge.\u201d", "keyword": "Indonesia;Airlines and Airplanes;Accidents and Safety;Infrastructure (Public Works);Labor and Jobs"}
{"id": "ny0116331", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/10/18", "title": "California: Assessor Is Accused of Taking Bribes", "abstract": "The Los Angeles County assessor, John Noguez, and a top aide and a campaign contributor were arrested Wednesday in an investigation into influence peddling and slashing of property taxes for political allies. District Attorney Steve Cooley called it the most significant case of public corruption he had seen in four decades in the office. Mr. Noguez was arrested along with his chief appraiser, Mark McNeil, and an Arizona tax consultant, Ramin Salari, accused of conspiring to cut property values and save millions in taxes for clients of Mr. Salari, a campaign contributor. Mr. Cooley declined to comment on whether owners of the properties, primarily on the west side of Los Angeles, knew of the conspiracy. He said that there could be further arrests. Charges against Mr. Noguez include conspiracy, bribery and corruption. The complaint charged that he accepted $185,000 in bribes from Mr. Salari. The others were charged with conspiracy and misappropriation of public funds. A defense lawyer for Mr. Noguez said Mr. Cooley was engaged in a one-sided inquiry aimed at \u201cgetting\u201d Mr. Noguez.", "keyword": "Bribery and Kickbacks;Frauds and Swindling;California;Property Taxes;Los Angeles (Calif);Noguez John"}
{"id": "ny0238339", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/06/13", "title": "U.S. Intelligence Puts New Focus on Afghan Graft", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The military\u2019s intelligence network in Afghanistan , designed for identifying and tracking terrorists and insurgents, is increasingly focused on uncovering corruption that is rampant across Afghanistan\u2019s government, security forces and contractors, according to senior American officials. Military intelligence officers in Afghanistan are scouring seized documents and interrogating captured fighters and facilitators \u2014 but not just to learn about insurgent networks that plan attacks, plant roadside explosives and send out suicide bombers. They are also looking for insights on how to combat a widespread perversion of authority by Afghan power brokers, which senior officials describe as \u201ca plague\u201d on the American-backed effort to build an effective and competent government and win the support of the Afghan people. It is a remarkable but perilous military undertaking in a sovereign country, particularly in a place of conspiracy theories and constantly shifting alliances, where it is hard to know who can be trusted and where many people are historically skeptical of what they see as intrusiveness by outsiders, this time by the Americans. The United States and its NATO allies may find themselves following leads that point to the top levels of government, because even close family members of President Hamid Karzai have been accused of engaging in the drug trade and enriching themselves with lucrative business deals. American contractors are among those accused of wrongdoing, and some in the United States government have been known to look the other way rather than upset Mr. Karzai. The new military anti-corruption effort is a joint operation with Afghan law enforcement and judicial authorities. But on Saturday, The New York Times reported that some in Afghanistan, including one of Mr. Karzai\u2019s former top intelligence aides, complained that the Afghan president himself was increasingly mistrustful of the United States and had talked of cutting his own agreement with the Taliban. A central goal in the Obama administration\u2019s counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, which is commanded by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is to win over the country\u2019s population. That goal requires persuading the Afghan people to support the central government in Kabul and not shadow Taliban governments that exist in many provinces. To that end, anti-corruption efforts are every bit as important as killing or capturing militants, if not more so, according to senior officers involved in the effort. \u201cWhere once our whole network was to capture and kill Al Qaeda and the Taliban, now the information we\u2019re trying to get is the information for the networks of corruption and government and influence,\u201d said a senior American military officer in Afghanistan. \u201cThe intelligence we were focused on before was just to drive the next target we were going to get,\u201d he said. \u201cNow our targeting is much more focused on the government: How do you control for corruption? How does the process work for security contracts?\u201d Top NATO officials in Afghanistan drove the creation of a new anti-corruption task force last October, and it has already succeeded in forcing out a number of provincial security officials suspected of significant wrongdoing, many of whom have been brought to trial. The task force, whose senior NATO leader is Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the alliance\u2019s director of military intelligence in Afghanistan, gathered information that allowed Afghan officials to arrest, try and convict a border police commander who was pocketing salaries from ghost personnel on his payroll as well as stealing money meant for widows of officers killed in action. Other provincial-level police chiefs have been removed from their posts because they were involved in corrupt activities uncovered by the task force\u2019s intelligence operations, although they were not brought to trial because of a lack of the kind of evidence that could be presented in Afghan courts, officials said. These actions, while still limited in scope, have served as \u201ca shot across the bow\u201d of the security ministries, said another senior American military officer. \u201cThe word is out that we are going to continue to look at corrupt behavior in the police and that we have an effort under way,\u201d the officer said. \u201cIn a counterinsurgency fight, we cannot afford to have abusive behavior by police, and we cannot afford to have corrupt behavior by police.\u201d That officer, like other the others who discussed the effort, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of military intelligence operations. The military is focused on battling corruption at the local and provincial levels in ways that illustrate a commitment to good governance for the population to see in their day-to-day lives. Yet, Pentagon officials acknowledge that this localized effort must be supported by a more senior-level, political decision by the Obama administration on how to deal with corruption at the uppermost echelons of the Afghan government. American military officials have worked closely with Afghan law enforcement authorities and developed information that local prosecutors have used in newly established trials at the detention center for detainees accused of corruption or drug charges. Ultimately, this kind of information could also be used to help the Afghan government weed out corrupt governors. American officers are cognizant that some Afghans may make false accusations to use the anti-corruption effort to take down political opponents. The antidote for such abuse, officials say, is to demand multiple sources of information, with multiple sources of confirmation, before making taking action. \u201cIt\u2019s a lesson we learned from Iraq \u2014 to \u2018mass\u2019 intelligence against one individual,\u201d said the senior American officer. \u201cWe mass the analysts, we mass the interrogators and we mass the exploiters of the information before making a move.\u201d Weeding out corruption is not the only significant adjustment of military intelligence activities in Afghanistan as the Defense Department shifts the bulk of its attention from Iraq. In Iraq, a relatively well-educated and high-tech society with a similarly well-organized insurgency, American troops seized computer hard drives and cellphones that provided a trove of information about militant networks, including detailed accounting of foreign fighters flowing into the country. In Afghanistan, by contrast, there is a much lower level of technical sophistication with far fewer computers, hard drives and other communications equipment to exploit. In addition, insurgent networks in Afghanistan are far more fractured and decentralized than in Iraq. More than 90 percent of detainees from recent security sweeps in Afghanistan are from their local areas, and are not foreign fighters or insurgents from other districts within Afghanistan. Thus, they have little information about the broader insurgent network that can be exploited. Interrogations of these recent detainees yield a \u201cgood news, bad news\u201d version of events, officials said. According to senior American officers, many detainees expressed deep frustration at the Taliban leadership in exile inside Pakistan. These detainees \u2014 even the group aged 35 to 55 and who are in leadership ranks of the provincial insurgency \u2014 tell interrogators that they are short of money and tired of taking orders from leaders who remain at a safe distance from the fight. At the same time, these detainees still express a lack of confidence in the Kabul government, and remain unwilling to reintegrate and stop fighting, officials said. The troop increase ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama has brought with it increases in the intelligence-gathering and exploitation effort, as well. The American military operation in Afghanistan is operating with significantly increased numbers of sophisticated surveillance aircraft and a growing number of analysts to exploit the widening stream of information. The number of American military and civilian interrogators has doubled since last summer, to about 75 people, a senior military officer said. And \u201cfusion cells\u201d \u2014 teams of people who gather and assess information from the battlefield to quickly pinpoint a likely target for a follow-on raid \u2014 have been pushed from the large headquarters in Kabul out to military outposts across the country.", "keyword": "Afghanistan War (2001- );Politics and Government;Ethics;United States Defense and Military Forces;United States;Afghanistan"}
{"id": "ny0106591", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/04/19", "title": "Tesco to Spend $1.6 Billion to Revive U.K. Business", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The British supermarket chain Tesco announced a \u00a31 billion investment program Wednesday that it hopes will revive earnings in its home market by expanding its online business while adding fewer large stores. Tesco, the world\u2019s third-largest supermarket chain after Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour, is trying to reverse a decline in profit in Britain, where it had been growing for 20 years. The spending program, the equivalent of $1.6 billion, follows criticism from investors that Tesco neglected its base as it focused on expansion abroad, including in the United States, where it started the Fresh & Easy chain of grocery stores. Over the past two decades, Tesco grew into a retail behemoth and a darling of investors, with earnings increasing by at least 5 percent almost every year since 1994. But a recession in Britain, a costly expansion in the United States and China, and ventures into banking and selling used cars turned Tesco into the worst-performing stock on the FTSE 100 index this year. A shift in consumer behavior toward online shopping further hurt Tesco, which must maintain a network of large and costly stores. Traditional retailers are increasingly under pressure as online purchases erode their sales. Some, like Wal-Mart, have started buying small start-up companies or competing online retailers to better cope with the migration of customers to the Internet. Philip Clarke, Tesco\u2019s chief executive, said Wednesday that he planned to invest \u00a3200 million to add more products to the company\u2019s online stores while reducing the pace of expansion for its brick-and-mortar stores. Tesco would add about 38 percent less retail space in Britain in the 2012-13 fiscal year than in 2011-12, he said. The company will also slow its expansion in the United States, Europe and Asia, where it has already decided to exit the Japanese market. \u201cAs customers go more to convenience and online, we reduce our store expansion,\u201d Mr. Clarke said. \u201cThe plan makes sense,\u201d said Freddie George, an analyst at Seymour Pierce in London. \u201cOver the last couple of years they\u2019ve taken their eyes off the ball in the U.K.\u201d But some investors were not convinced and Tesco\u2019s shares fell 2.1 percent Wednesday in London. The retail environment in Europe remains difficult because of the continuing economic crisis and households are reluctant to spend, said Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers. Following in Amazon\u2019s footsteps, Tesco has started to allow other retailers to sell their products through Tesco\u2019s Web site. Tesco has started out by allowing two retailers \u2014 Crocus, which sells plants and gardening supplies and equipment, and Maplin, which sells batteries, electronics and electrical goods \u2014 to sell their wares through Tesco.com . The strategy is intended to drive more customer traffic to the site, and Tesco gets a cut from every sale. Tesco said it planned to add more retailers. The company said it planned to expand the products it sold online to 200,000 by the end of the year from 80,000 now. It also plans to increase the number of \u201cclick and collect points\u201d \u2014 locations where customers can collect purchases they have ordered online, rather than waiting for delivery \u2014 to 1,600 by the end of this year from 770 now. Although Tesco plans to slow its overseas expansion, Mr. Clarke said, the company is not giving up on its Fresh & Easy stores in the United States. Tesco now expects the business to break even about a year later than initially expected, but the company projects that Fresh & Easy will have some profitable months in 2013. \u201cThe U.S. is moving in the right direction but I\u2019d like it to move faster,\u201d Mr. Clarke said. \u201cI need to demonstrate to shareholders, who have been very patient with us, that we can do it.\u201d When Tesco started its Fresh & Easy brand, it saw a chance to fill what it saw as a need for convenient grocery stores in certain areas of the Western United States. But about five years later, only 30 of the 186 stores are making a profit. Mr. Clarke said losses at Fresh & Easy narrowed for the first time in fiscal 2012 but that Tesco would slow down the opening of new stores in the chain and be more cautious about how to expand the business. Instead, Tesco is remodeling the stores it has and will try to attract more customers with fresh flowers, wooden floors, closed refrigerator doors and in-store bakeries. \u201cThere\u2019s undoubtedly frustration about what is happening in the U.S.,\u201d said Clive Black, an analyst at Shore Capital. \u201cNot pressing on as aggressively with store openings is positive but patience is being tested.\u201d Tesco also plans to slow the pace of its expansion in China, where it said it is not immune to the impact of rising wages. It is also halting the expansion of Tesco Bank, which offers financial products like credit cards and insurance. The company has already announced it will close Tesco Cars, which sells second-hand automobiles and began just a year ago.", "keyword": "Tesco PLC;Shopping and Retail;Great Britain;Amazon.com Inc;Wal-Mart Stores Inc;Carrefour SA;Supermarkets and Grocery Stores"}
{"id": "ny0172754", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/23", "title": "In Reversal, Safe Is Risky, Risky Is Safe", "abstract": "For a long time, if there was a problem on Wall Street, Credit Suisse was not far away. From its high-flying mortgage desk that blew up in 1998 to its superstar technology team that promoted Internet stocks in the late 1990s, Credit Suisse could be counted on as an example of problems on Wall Street. UBS , its crosstown rival in Zurich, has typically taken a more conservative approach, avoiding seemingly risky markets like leveraged lending while relying instead on its huge wealth management unit. But when the markets fell apart this summer, it was UBS, not Credit Suisse, holding the bag. Some of the Street\u2019s safest institutions \u2014 or those that hoped to be perceived as safe \u2014 turned out not to be, while some perceived as risky are so far sailing through. And it was not the giant loans to buyout clients that so many Wall Street players had warned of that brought the party to an end. It was the subterranean world of mortgage-related debt \u2014 securities that were backed by the American dream of homeownership \u2014 that laid bare inadequate risk controls. Conventional wisdom, it turns out, has not been very reliable in the topsy-turvy world that has emerged from the credit market meltdown. Just as some investors were starting to believe that Wall Street could produce more consistent growth in profit, the banks there delivered a stark reminder of why they tend to trade on such low earnings multiples. Through the third quarter, UBS won the title as European market write-down leader, taking a $4.4 billion hit in mortgage-related products and an additional $400 million on leveraged loans. Analysts expect $7 billion more in mortgage-related write-downs for UBS. Credit Suisse paled in comparison, with a write-down of only $947 million on mortgage-related securities and $875 million on leveraged loans. Among the American firms, investors might have expected Merrill Lynch to weather the storm as a result of its huge and stable brokerage business. Citigroup, meanwhile, has a large retail bank and sufficient global diversification that could have provided a buffer. Instead, they\u2019ve both buckled under a business \u2014 mortgages \u2014 that accounted for a relatively small portion of profits. The two managed to write down an astonishing $20 billion or so, with the vast majority coming from mortgage-related products. Lehman Brothers, which investors might have expected to suffer because of its huge mortgage business, has so far taken one of the smallest losses on the Street. Goldman Sachs, with its hefty appetite for risk, could easily have ended up on the wrong side of wildly gyrating markets. Instead, it has generated record profits so far this year after it positioned itself against the collapse. The global tally of pain has been about $50 billion, according to a Merrill Lynch analyst, Guy Moszkowski, with more expected. No wonder financial stocks have been jettisoned. And while the agony has been concentrated among those who built and sold the financial fairy tale of structured credit products (creating low-risk investments from high-risk securities), virtually all the banks\u2019 shares have suffered. Warren E. Buffett, quoted by a Lehman analyst, Jon Peace, said it best: \u201cOne of the lessons that investors seem to have to learn over and over again, and will again in the future, is that not only can you not turn a toad into a prince by kissing it, but you cannot turn a toad into a prince by repackaging it.\u201d Alongside Goldman and Lehman, there were others who avoided the mess in subprime loans and collateralized debt obligations, known as C.D.O.\u2019s. JPMorgan wrote down a meager $339 million on C.D.O.\u2019s. It also made a modest profit on its subprime positions and seems to have avoided the problem with structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, which has racked Citigroup. JPMorgan\u2019s investment bank, a leader in leveraged lending, took a $1.3 billion hit on the value of leveraged loans, but almost all of the players in that business did also. Even Goldman wrote down $1.5 billion in leveraged loans. The trouble is, even the winners, few as they may be, can take little solace in the pain of their competitors. To the extent the mortgage debacle will slow overall economic growth, everyone will suffer. And the eye-popping write-downs prove what the skeptics have always said: that the attractive profits made by Wall Street\u2019s opaque trading businesses are unpredictable and worth much less when it comes to assigning price to earnings multiples at the investment banks. Goldman Sachs today trades at almost nine times trailing 12-month earnings. But shares of traditional asset managers like T. Rowe Price, which are less likely to risk billions of dollars to build expertise in an area riddled with acronyms (A.B.S., C.D.O., SIV), trade at more than 20 times earnings. That means that even though some firms have so far shown that they are good risk managers, others on the Street proved once again that you can never count too heavily on sophisticated systems, armies of Ph.D.\u2019s or confident managers who have it all under control (and appear to play a lot of bridge or golf). The failure of many means that none, not even the market leader, will be given the benefit of the doubt.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Banks and Banking;Brokers and Brokerage Firms;Credit Suisse Group;UBS AG"}
{"id": "ny0279421", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2016/10/05", "title": "Obama Hails Enforcement on Trade Deals to Win Support for T.P.P.", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Obama administration has used a flurry of tough-sounding trade enforcement announcements in recent weeks to counter complaints from the left and right that free trade is not fair trade \u2014 and to assist President Obama in the struggle to win approval of his trade pact with 11 Pacific Rim nations. As evidence that past trade agreements are being policed, Mr. Obama and his cabinet members have trumpeted new complaints filed against nations alleged to be cheating, as well as the administration\u2019s latest victories in previous cases taken to the World Trade Organization, the referee of global commerce. Days apart in September, for example, actions were taken against Chinese grain exports, India\u2019s barriers to solar-power parts, European subsidies for airliner manufacturing and foreign fishing subsidies. On Monday, the administration announced that it would press the W.T.O. for a special hearing demanding \u201cthe rapid enforcement\u201d of the organization\u2019s favorable rulings on exports of airliners and solar products. With each announcement, administration officials have added a good word for the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, arguing that it would raise trade standards and provide more tools to enforce them. Even opponents of trade agreements have said positive things about the administration\u2019s enforcement record, though they say they will not be won over to the Pacific pact. Whether fence-sitting lawmakers can be persuaded is the question. Yet it might never be answered if Mr. Obama cannot get Congress\u2019s Republican leaders \u2014 lashed by antitrade sentiment during this campaign season, especially from the party\u2019s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump \u2014 to hold a vote on the pact in a postelection lame duck session. Since Mr. Obama took office in 2009, his trade office has lodged 23 challenges at the World Trade Organization and won or settled favorably all 16 cases decided so far. Fourteen of the 23 cases have been against China, three against India and others have involved the European Union, Argentina, the Philippines and Indonesia. \u201cIn previous administrations, the enforcement record was basically miserable,\u201d Representative Sander M. Levin, a Michigan Democrat who opposes the Pacific pact, told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. \u201cNow I think there\u2019s been an improvement in enforcement,\u201d he added, \u201cexcept it isn\u2019t nearly enough.\u201d Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said she saw \u201ca mixed record.\u201d She praised administration efforts against maneuvers by other nations to underprice their manufacturers\u2019 exports, which have harmed American manufacturing. But she criticized the record on enforcing labor rights and on combating nations that hold down the value of their currencies to lower the cost of their exports. \u201cOn certain issues like antidumping and subsidies, and some of the issues dealing directly with China, the administration has done a good job, has been aggressive in bringing cases, winning cases and getting relief for workers and businesses that have been affected by unfair trade practices,\u201d Ms. Lee said. \u201cBut,\u201d she added, \u201cI think the failure to enforce has been egregious with respect to workers\u2019 rights and currency.\u201d In their first debate, Mr. Trump initially had Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, on the defensive about trade , as he questioned her sincerity in opposing the Pacific agreement. Mrs. Clinton restated her opposition and added a promise that as president she would name \u201ca special prosecutor\u201d for trade. \u201cWe\u2019re going to enforce the trade deals we have, and we\u2019re going to hold people accountable,\u201d she said. What Is TPP? Behind the Trade Deal That Died On his first full workday in office, President Trump delivered on a campaign promise by abandoning the enormous trade deal that had became a flashpoint in American politics. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., stumping for the agreement at the port of San Diego in July, said the administration had been enforcing trade pacts \u201cmore aggressively than any administration in the past.\u201d He added, however, \u201cOne of the reasons so many Americans are upset about trade is because we have not adequately enforced them\u201d over time. A desire for vigorous enforcement is perhaps the one thing that unites trade skeptics and pro-trade business groups. John G. Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said he often speaks to state and local chambers, \u201cand when I say that the agreements we sign aren\u2019t worth the paper they\u2019re written on if they aren\u2019t enforced, I regularly get applause.\u201d The administration has \u201ca strong record,\u201d Mr. Murphy said, and he criticized trade opponents who favor tough enforcement but oppose the trade agreements that established the policing regimes. In mid-September, the president took the unusual step of personally announcing the administration\u2019s newest complaint to the W.T.O. against China \u2014 the country Mr. Trump has excoriated most \u2014 rather than leaving it to his trade representative, Michael B. Froman. The United States alleged that China excessively subsidizes rice, wheat and corn, encouraging farmers to grow more and distorting world markets. \u201cWe have to ensure America plays a leading role in setting the highest standards for the rest of the world to follow,\u201d Mr. Obama said, before adding, \u201cThat\u2019s what the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or T.P.P., is all about.\u201d Image A man protesting the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T.T.I.P.), a trade deal being negotiated between the United States and the European Union, during a demonstration last month in Berlin. Credit Clemens Bilan/Getty Images As part of the promotion, Mr. Froman and Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, wrote a column for an Iowa newspaper last month. Mr. Vilsack is the state\u2019s former governor, and its congressional delegation includes Senator Charles E. Grassley, a senior Republican on the panel responsible for trade. The column\u2019s headline : \u201cProtecting Iowa\u2019s Access to International Markets.\u201d In the same week, the United States and a dozen other nations united in a campaign to ban government subsidies blamed for overfishing. China is considered a main culprit. That announcement, too, included a plug for the Pacific accord \u2014 for \u201cincluding the first enforceable prohibitions on harmful fishing subsidies\u201d in a trade pact and eliminating foreign taxes on American fish exports. The W.T.O. also handed the administration two victories that it was quick to broadcast. First, an appellate panel of the trade organization upheld a ruling that backed America\u2019s complaint against India\u2019s ban on imports of solar-power parts . The prohibition was blamed for a sharp drop in American exports of such products. The administration seized the moment to laud the potential benefits of the Pacific trade agreement for American exporters of clean energy products. In the second decision, the W.T.O. ruled against European nations\u2019 subsidies of Airbus , the aircraft manufacturer, finding that they had cost billions in sales for the American rival Boeing. Such actions against other countries\u2019 subsidies, dumping and market barriers, however, do not address two big concerns of trade skeptics: currency manipulation and workers\u2019 rights. Currency practices are tricky to police; other nations could counter with complaints about the monetary policies of the independent Federal Reserve, which affect the value of the dollar. Instead of writing mandates into the Pacific accord, negotiators attached a side agreement spelling out disclosure requirements and a consultation process for disputes between nations. On workers\u2019 rights, Ms. Lee of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. said, \u201cPeople\u2019s lives are at stake.\u201d The administration did require Colombia to change its labor practices before the United States-Colombia trade pact could be approved, but Ms. Lee said improvements have come slowly or not at all. In Guatemala, where union organizers have suffered violence and assassinations, she said a case filed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and local unions was ignored in the George W. Bush administration and, despite some attention, has languished under Mr. Obama. The Pacific agreement includes concessions from Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei on labor and human rights. But, Ms. Lee asked, \u201cCan we stop and figure out how to get that piece of it right before we take the leap of tying our economies together permanently?\u201d", "keyword": "International trade;Trans-Pacific Partnership;US Politics;World Trade Organization;Barack Obama"}
{"id": "ny0209642", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2009/12/07", "title": "Fair Play, It Turns Out, Isn't Dead", "abstract": "Sometimes, the solutions to the ills so manifest and so obvious in the global game lie completely within the players, big and small. The World Cup draw in Cape Town on Friday was stigmatized by the shrug of indifference by which the sport\u2019s overlords have implied that if a player gets away with cheating on the pitch, there is nothing officialdom can do about it. Adding irony to insult, FIFA\u2019s president, Sepp Blatter, pronounced that Ireland might be afforded \u201cmoral compensation\u201d for losing out in World Cup qualification to the blatant handball from Thierry Henry to set up the winning goal for France. But on Saturday, the players of Ascoli, a team struggling at the foot of the Italian second division, demonstrated fair play to a man. It led at 14 minutes, after a controversial goal that came directly from an injured opponent, Carlos Valdez of Reggina, trying to boot the ball out of play to receive treatment. Ascoli intercepted his clearance and scored its goal. In the heat of Reggina\u2019s protests, its defender Andrea Costa was red-carded by the referee. But when calm was restored, Ascoli\u2019s players did the right and proper thing. They stood aside and allowed Reggina to equalize, unopposed. That act, alone, is worth the FIFA so-called Fair Play Trophy at the end of this season. It may not get it because Ascoli Piceno is a mere Serie B club, off the radar of the headliners like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and, well, Thierry Henry. For what it\u2019s worth, this column salutes the team. Fair Play in soccer, however, might yet have repercussions for Ascoli. The equalizer led to a 3-1 home defeat, and the points lost Saturday could be critical when the relegation places are settled at the end. Way above Ascoli\u2019s pretensions, the Serie A title in Italy is warming toward a three-way contest. AC Milan, after its slow start under a new coach, Leonardo, won 3-0 on Saturday against Sampdoria \u2014 and we should take with a pinch of salt the obsequious suggestion by the club\u2019s vice president, Adriano Galliani, that the praise should go to his boss, and Italy\u2019s boss, Silvio Berlusconi. \u201cWe were a great Milan,\u201d Galliani said after the game. \u201cBerlusconi came to the dressing room at halftime. He told the players to keep the ball, and that\u2019s what they did. We never showed Samp the ball.\u201d But maybe the fact that Milan had killed off the game with goals from Marco Barriello, Clarence Seedorf and Alexandre Pato in the first 23 minutes had something to do with the victory. And there is no team in Italy more experienced or more adept at playing keep-ball than Milan. The victory takes it to within four points of the league leader, its neighbor Inter, which lost a fractious encounter against third-placed Juventus, 2-1, in Turin. The features of that match were an opening goal for Juve that was over the line off a defender; Inter\u2019s coach, Jos\u00e9 Mourinho, getting himself ordered to the stand for his petulance on the touchline; and an equalizer from Samuel Eto\u2019o. And then the pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance in the game winner. Claudio Marchiso, at 23, is young by Italian standards and showed wonderful composure and marvelous footwork just to stay on his feet as he danced through the Inter defense to steal the vital goal at 58 minutes. Serie A, seemingly the preserve of Inter ever since the 2006 match-fixing scandal demoted Juventus to Serie B and knocked points off AC Milan, is suddenly and refreshingly a real competition again. And whatever Mourinho thinks of that, he is keeping to himself. He not only ducked the postgame news conference, but his captain, Javier Zanetti, told reporters, \u201cHe didn\u2019t even speak to us.\u201d From Italy to England, where the Premiership also was revitalized by the top team\u2019s losing. Chelsea\u2019s progress under the former Milan trainer Carlo Ancelotti seemed imperious as it overpowered Arsenal a week ago and had also beaten Manchester United. But Chelsea fell at Manchester City, the new force empowered by money from the Abu Dhabi government. City\u2019s squad was a match for Chelsea in a tense, physical encounter, and its 2-1 triumph came despite Chelsea\u2019s taking a fortuitous early lead through an own-goal off Emmanuel Adebayor. The big Togo international knew nothing about the mishap as his goalie, Shay Given, pushed the ball into his back, but he was motivated to score at the other end, and then Carlos T\u00e9vez struck what turned out to be the decisive second goal. City won because it matched Chelsea\u2019s outstanding quality, its redoubtable team spirit. And it won because Given, the Irish keeper still traumatized by that dastardly Henry trick in Paris last month, brought off the first penalty save anyone has made against Frank Lampard in three seasons. So, in Italy and in England, the leagues opened up a little at the top this weekend. In Spain, not so. Real Madrid came from a goal down to overpower Almer\u00eda, 4-2, at the Bernab\u00e9u stadium on Saturday evening, but a couple of hours later the champion and still the league leader, Barcelona, showed even finer class in outplaying Deportivo la Coruna, 3-1, in Coruna\u2019s fortress, the Riazor. Those two games demonstrated something about the best player in the world in 2009. Cristiano Ronaldo, last year\u2019s leading man and this year\u2019s \u20ac100 million, or $148 million, purchase by Real Madrid, is being eclipsed at the moment by Bar\u00e7a\u2019s Messi. Messi has just been awarded France Football\u2019s Ballon d\u2019Or as the top player in the sport. Journalists from 93 countries voted him overwhelmingly their No. 1, and he is certain to win all the other global awards as the season of accolades begins. Ronaldo, just back from ankle injury, had a mixed match Saturday. He set up a goal, he scored one and he had a penalty saved. He received a yellow card for baring his chest to celebrate his goal, then was sent off for a rash kick at a defender who had cuffed the back of his head. Messi was on the pitch the whole 90 minutes. He scored twice \u2014 through marvelously quick movement of foot for the first goal and then with a leaping header. But Messi was a whole lot more, defending when he felt the need, constantly changing position, the star who sublimates himself to the team. And keeps his shirt on. Messi turned a difficult and fascinating game. \u201cThat,\u201d said Dani Alves, his Barcelona teammate, \u201cis why he\u2019s the Ballon d\u2019Or.\u201d", "keyword": "Soccer;Ethics;World Cup (Soccer)"}
{"id": "ny0283799", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/07/23", "title": "Risky Throw Allows the Yankees to Escape the Giants", "abstract": "The San Francisco Giants\u2019 decade of success has been largely defined by the devious pitching of their ace, Madison Bumgarner, and the nearly immaculate defense of Brandon Crawford at shortstop . For the Yankees this season, their best success has come when they hold a lead entering the seventh inning, giving them the ability to pass the game over to relievers Dellin Betances, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. On Friday night at Yankee Stadium, all of those pillars collapsed. With chaos mounting, the Yankees needed heads-up base running by Chase Headley to steal a 3-2 win over the Giants. After Betances and Miller each allowed a run in relief, relinquishing a 2-0 lead, Headley led off the eighth inning with an infield single, beating out a throw off a slow roller that was fielded by third baseman Ramiro Pena. Mark Teixeira, who entered the game in the seventh as a defensive replacement, walked. With a rally brewing, Austin Romine failed at two unsuccessful attempts at a bunt. Forced to swing, Romine grounded to shortstop, where Crawford did something quite rare: He made a questionable decision. Cleanly fielding the ball, Crawford took a difficult angle to second base instead of tossing the ball for a forceout. Teixeira was out at second, but Crawford had to turn his body awkwardly before throwing to first base. His throw sailed high, and Brandon Belt was unable to catch it. Headley alertly sprinted home, beating the throw and giving the Yankees the lead again. \u201cI just knew that the way that the ball was hit that it was going to be a close play,\u201d Headley said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t going to be an easy double play. Just trying to anticipate something going wrong, and it did.\u201d While Crawford misfired under pressure, Yankees starter Masahiro Tanaka thrived with his back against the ropes. That in itself was a slight quirk, given that Tanaka was pitching on four days\u2019 rest. After a five-pitch first inning, Tanaka put multiple runners on base in each of the next three innings. The most perilous situation came in the fourth, when the Giants loaded the bases with one out. But Ramiro Pena flew out in foul territory, and after falling behind on a 3-1 count to Gregor Blanco, Tanaka fought back for a strikeout. After firing a fastball past Blanco, Tanaka, in a rare display of emotion, turned around, flexed and yelled with exhilaration. The Yankees were relying on Tanaka\u2019s pitching even more than usual because Manager Joe Girardi decided to sit Teixeira, Brian McCann, Jacoby Ellsbury and Didi Gregorius. When asked why, Girardi replied, \u201cBumgarner.\u201d Bumgarner had particular trouble, however, against Starlin Castro, who doubled in Brett Gardner to put the Yankees ahead, 1-0, in the first inning. Castro finished 3 for 4 off Bumgarner, and now has 14 hits in 30 at-bats against him. Castro\u2019s .467 average against Bumgarner is the highest of any player with at least 20 at-bats against him. \u201cThat\u2019s what I was wondering: Is he hitting me like that before?\u201d Bumgarner said when asked about Castro\u2019s success against him. \u201cI don\u2019t know the numbers. Not a whole lot stuck out, but yeah, I mean, he swung the bat tonight for sure.\u201d The Yankees also received an unexpected contribution from the seldom-used reserve Ronald Torreyes. Starting in place of Gregorius at shortstop, Torreyes collected a single in his first career plate appearance against Bumgarner, and later scored the Yankees\u2019 second run. Girardi said that he especially wanted to rest Gregorius, even though Gregorius had a .366 average against left-handed pitchers, which led the major leagues among left-handed hitters, entering Friday\u2019s game. Resting a core of his lineup was not Girardi\u2019s only risky move. Throughout the week, he had to defend planning to start Tanaka on only four days\u2019 rest. This season, Tanaka has often struggled whenever he has pitched on four days\u2019 rest. Before Friday\u2019s game, Tanaka was 1-2 with a 5.33 E.R.A. on four days\u2019 rest, with eight home runs allowed and 10 walks in 49 innings pitched. He is 4-0 with a 1.05 E.R.A., one home run and five walks in 51\u2153 innings on five days\u2019 rest. \u201cIt\u2019s good to go out there and be able to perform, regardless of the days in between,\u201d Tanaka said through an interpreter. He seemed to put his troubles behind him after getting out of the fourth inning unscathed. During the next two innings, Tanaka retired the Giants in order. It was the final time Yankees pitchers could breathe easily against the Giants. After the game, although obviously pleased with the outcome, the Yankees were still trying to assess the atypical script that played out on Friday. \u201cYou don\u2019t see it very often, so when it happens, I think we\u2019re a little bit shocked, but I\u2019m going to bet on them every time,\u201d Girardi said of his bullpen losing a lead. Discussing the deciding run, Headley added: \u201cI\u2019ve played against Brandon Crawford for forever it seems like, and I don\u2019t remember seeing him throw any balls away. In my opinion, he\u2019s as good a defensive shortstop as there is in the game. It\u2019s just a strange game sometimes.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Yankees;San Francisco Giants;Brandon Crawford;Chase Headley"}
{"id": "ny0013715", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/11/01", "title": "Ron the Greek Is Out of Classic", "abstract": "Ron the Greek will not run in the $5 million Breeders\u2019 Cup Classic on Saturday because he has a hoof injury. The trainer Bill Mott said an abscess in the right front hoof was not a major problem, but the timing of it will keep the 6-year-old Ron the Greek from competing.", "keyword": "Horse racing;Breeders Cup"}
{"id": "ny0283430", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/07/08", "title": "Iraq Report Prompts More Defensiveness Than Regret From Tony Blair", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 His voice sometimes close to cracking, his expression strained and grim, former Prime Minister Tony Blair spent much of the past two days responding to the damning judgment of an inquiry into how he led Britain into the Iraq war, engaging in an extraordinary public mix of soul searching, regret and defensiveness. Judging by much of the media reaction, he would have done better to save his breath. \u201cA Monster of Delusion,\u201d read the headline over a picture of Mr. Blair in The Daily Mail on Thursday. The Sun, another British tabloid, described him as a \u201cWeapon of Mass Deception,\u201d a reference to the incorrect assertions by Mr. Blair and President George W. Bush before the invasion that Iraq had an arsenal of unconventional weapons. Nine years after stepping down from office, Mr. Blair \u2014 the most successful politician of his generation, who led the Labour Party to three consecutive general election victories with a centrist message \u2014 is widely loathed in Britain, his legacy defined overwhelmingly by the Iraq war and its bloody aftermath. He has few defenders, especially within his own party, which was split at the time by his support for the war and has since shifted leftward again, repudiating much of what he stood for. Mr. Blair is such a pariah on the left, said Steven Fielding, director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham, that \u201cif he says \u2018black,\u2019 almost everyone else will say \u2018white.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Fielding added, \u201cIn the party he once led, to be described as Blairite is the greatest insult that can be leveled.\u201d More broadly, Mr. Blair has failed to rehabilitate his image since leaving office, and in some ways has added to his problems. Though he set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, intended to counter religious conflict and extremism, its work has been overshadowed by his business interests. Mr. Blair\u2019s wealth, and his willingness to advise nations with poor human rights records such as Kazakhstan, has fueled another strand of criticism: that he was always too impressed by those with power and money. And his diplomatic work, trying to bring peace to the Middle East, ran up against the intractability of the conflicts in that region. Image A demonstration in London on Wednesday against Mr. Blair and his decision to go to war in Iraq. Credit Paul Hackett/Reuters \u201cThere will not be a day of my life where I do not relive and rethink what happened,\u201d Mr. Blair said, referring to the Iraq war. \u201cPeople ask me why I spend so much time in the Middle East today. This is why. This is why I work on Middle East peace, on the dialogue between faiths on how we can prevent young people growing up with hatred in their hearts towards those who look, think or believe differently from them.\u201d The 2.6-million-word report released on Wednesday was a savage indictment of Britain\u2019s involvement in Iraq, condemning it as ill prepared and poorly executed, and concluding that it was based on flawed and unchallenged intelligence. In confronting the charges against him, Mr. Blair spoke sometimes in confessional terms, acknowledging those failings with \u201cmore sorrow, regret and apology and in greater measure than you can know or may believe.\u201d But what he did not do was to accept the fundamental premise of many of his critics: that he had been wrong to sanction military action against Saddam Hussein. The view of many of the protesters who gathered on Wednesday waving placards reading \u201cBLIAR,\u201d and of relatives of some of those who died in the conflict, is that he is culpable for taking Britain into a disastrous war on false pretenses. There have been attempted citizens\u2019 arrests of him on war crimes charges. As one of his Labour Party critics, Diane Abbott, said on Thursday, Mr. Blair\u2019s reputation had \u201cbled to death in the sands of Iraq.\u201d Mr. Blair was always unpopular among the left of the party, who felt he had gone too far in abandoning core principles for the center ground while embracing central elements of Thatcherism. Even they would admit that he was good at winning elections: He scored his third victory in 2005, after the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Blair presided over a generally healthy economy and helped build peace in Northern Ireland. But many Britons found it inexplicable that he chose to go to war alongside Mr. Bush. In 2003, Mr. Bush was unpopular in Britain, and so was going to war in Iraq. Mr. Blair has sought to address his critics previously, but not at such length and with such public emotion as he has since the publication of the new report on Wednesday. The gist of his response was that his job as prime minister was to make tough decisions and that while he regretted many of the consequences of this one, he stood by it as the best available option at the time. \u201cThe world is better off without Saddam,\u201d Mr. Blair told reporters in London, adding that had the Iraqi leader been left alone, he would have remained a threat to peace. And, had Mr. Hussein survived until the Arab Spring of 2011, he would have clung to power \u201cwith the same deadly consequences as we see in the carnage of Syria,\u201d Mr. Blair suggested. \u201cI will never agree that those who died or who were injured made their sacrifice in vain,\u201d said Mr. Blair, while acknowledging that some of the families of those casualties \u201ccannot and do not accept this is so.\u201d In that he is correct. After the report\u2019s publication, Sarah O\u2019Connor, the relative of one victim, called Mr. Blair \u201cthe world\u2019s worst terrorist.\u201d Reg Keys, another victim\u2019s relative, described Mr. Blair as a \u201cconsummate actor\u201d and said that his long public statement resembled \u201cthe ramblings of a madman.\u201d While the report, seven years in the making, provides a damning indictment of sloppy decision-making, cataloging a host of policy and other failings, it does not accuse Mr. Blair of lying \u2014 a point to which the former prime minister returned frequently. Over the years, Mr. Blair has been accused by critics of deceiving Parliament and the public, and on Wednesday he said accusations of \u201cbad faith, of lying or deceit or deliberate misrepresentation\u201d should be laid to rest. \u201cI did not mislead this country,\u201d Mr. Blair said. \u201cI made the decision in good faith on the information that I had at the time.\u201d His unequivocal support for Mr. Bush was essential to prevent the United States from pursuing a unilateral foreign policy, Mr. Blair argued, rejecting the characterization of himself as the president\u2019s \u201cpoodle.\u201d He defended a message sent to Mr. Bush, before the decision to invade, including the phrase: \u201cI will be with you, whatever.\u201d That statement was, Mr. Blair said, \u201cnot a blank check.\u201d Yet 13 years after Mr. Blair ordered British troops into action, his response to the latest inquiry is unlikely to bring closure because he is not budging on one central point. \u201cWhat I cannot do and will not do,\u201d Mr. Blair said, \u201cis say we took the wrong decision.\u201d Mr. Fielding said history\u2019s judgment on Mr. Blair\u2019s premiership may be more positive, but that Mr. Blair has refused to do the one thing that might soften the damning verdict of his contemporaries. \u201cIf he was ever going to, this was the moment for him to apologize and say, \u2018We should not have done this,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Fielding said. \u201cIf he isn\u2019t going to say this now, he will take this to his grave.\u201d", "keyword": "Tony Blair;Iraq War;Great Britain;Labour Party Great Britain;George W Bush;US Foreign Policy"}
{"id": "ny0112826", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/02/14", "title": "House Republicans Yield on Extending Payroll Tax Cut", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Congressional Republicans backed down on Monday from a demand that a payroll tax rollback be paid for with reductions in other programs, clearing the way for an extension of the tax cut for 160 million Americans through 2012. After months of partisan confrontation that left the tax break hanging in the balance, Republicans suddenly offered to extend the two-percentage-point cut while continuing to haggle over added unemployment benefits and a measure to prevent a drop in fees paid to doctors by Medicare . The payroll tax holiday and jobless benefits expire at month\u2019s end, and doctors would face a 27 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursements. The decision, announced by House Republican leaders, was a surprise after weeks of Republicans\u2019 insistence that they would not accept extensions to any of the three benefits without offsetting the costs. But the move underscored the desire of many Republicans \u2014 eager to blunt Democratic accusations that they do not support tax cuts for middle-class Americans \u2014 to put the tax cut fight behind them in an election year. As the House-Senate committee charged with coming up with a plan to extend the benefits continued to negotiate, Republican leaders said they would introduce legislation this week to extend the payroll tax cut by itself, allowing the conference members to negotiate the unemployment proposal and the Medicare measure, known as the \u201cdoc fix.\u201d Accusing Senate Democrats and President Obama of stalling negotiations, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said in a statement with Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House whip, that \u201cHouse Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue regarding offsets, unemployment insurance and the \u2018doc fix.\u2019 \u201cIf Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith, Republicans may schedule this measure for House consideration later this week pending a conversation with our members,\u201d the statement said. By separating the payroll tax from jobless benefits, Republicans have somewhat boxed in Democrats, forcing them to decide whether to accept a stand-alone tax cut that touches nearly all working Americans \u2014 and is generally more popular than the additional unemployment insurance \u2014 or hold out for a package that covers all three programs, at a cost of about $160 billion. Democrats, who are also eager to extend unemployment pay, were reluctant to embrace the idea of resolving the payroll tax fight separately. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, one of the Democratic negotiators, said Monday that the payroll tax extension should \u201ctravel together\u201d with an extension of unemployment benefits and Medicare payment legislation. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, was more blunt, given that Democratic votes would likely to be needed to pass the bill since some Republicans oppose the payroll tax cut whether it is paid for or not. \u201cThe Republican plan to decouple the payroll tax jeopardizes both the ability of seniors to see their Medicare doctors and benefits for millions of Americans who lost their jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is no reason all three of these priorities cannot proceed at the same time as both the House and Senate agreed.\u201d Still, Republicans are betting that Democrats will now move to negotiate a fast package for all three items, avoiding a stand-alone vote on the payroll measure. Of course, should the House pass such a bill, Senate Democrats could well send it back amended, with an unemployment component that is also free of payment obligations. Even though some Republicans on the conference committee insisted last week that they were willing to let the tax break expire \u2014 something many in the party have advocated all along \u2014 the idea of an unpaid-for extension of the payroll tax cut had been discussed as an option for about a week among House Republican leaders and their staff. Leaders including the chairman of the negotiating committee, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, and Mr. Boehner decided late Sunday to announce the legislation on Monday, the same day Mr. Obama revealed his budget. In a statement, Mr. Camp said: \u201cI have spoken with my fellow House Republican conferees and we are committed to resolving the differences between the House and Senate. While we will continue our negotiations in good faith and remain hopeful that a deal will come together, we also recognize that the clock is ticking. As such, I fully support and think it is prudent for our leadership to take whatever action is necessary to ensure American workers are not hit with a tax increase on March 1.\u201d The fights not only center on how to pay for the benefits but also involve some policy components. Republicans are seeking numerous policy changes connected to unemployment benefits \u2014 like a mandatory high school equivalency program and possible drug testing for beneficiaries \u2014 and want to reduce the benefits to 59 weeks, far less than the 79 weeks sought by Mr. Obama and the 93 weeks proposed by Senate Democrats. Jay Carney, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, said Monday: \u201cLet\u2019s just see how this process plays out. Extending unemployment insurance as well as the so-called doc fix is equally important \u2014 certainly very important, and very important for our economy. So the president supports extending all of it, and doing it in a way that is easily achievable if folks put ideological and partisan positions aside and just get it done for the American people.\u201d", "keyword": "Payroll Tax;House of Representatives;Republican Party;United States Politics and Government;Democratic Party;Law and Legislation;Medicare;Unemployment Insurance;Federal Budget (US)"}
{"id": "ny0131477", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/12/16", "title": "Syrians Face a Bread Shortage in Aleppo and Elsewhere", "abstract": "GAZIANTEP, Turkey \u2014 Jalal al-Khanji, the closest thing the Syrian city of Aleppo has to a mayor, hopes to organize elections there within two weeks, but he fears that residents with empty stomachs are in no mood for an experiment in democracy. Since late November, bread has been scarce, with a lack of fuel and flour shutting most bakeries in Aleppo. \u201cWe cannot hold elections while people are hungry; we have to solve that problem first,\u201d he said in an interview in this southern Turkish city, where many leaders of Aleppo\u2019s civil society have sought refuge. \u201cPeople are angry, frustrated and depressed. They can understand how countries like France and Britain and the United States might hold back on the issue of weapons, but not on the issue of bread and diesel.\u201d The revolution that erupted across Syria in March 2011 only slowly engulfed Aleppo, Syria\u2019s commercial capital. Long after major cities were convulsed by demonstrations, Aleppo\u2019s residents still showed up in Gaziantep by the busload every weekend to scour the malls. The armed struggle for the city began in earnest last July. In August, the prominent doctors, engineers, pharmacists and businessmen sheltering here established the Aleppo Transitional Revolutionary Council, a kind of city government in exile for the liberated portions of the city. Mr. Khanji, 67, a civil engineer with a long history of opposing the Syrian government, serves as its president. Dividing their time between Gaziantep and Aleppo, council members found the chaos convulsing their city worrisome. What if all the competing militias on the ground, even if nominally part of the loosely allied Free Syrian Army, continued to fight for the spoils even after the government\u2019s forces were driven from the city? They decided the remedy was an elected council of about 250 members who would run both the city and the province of Aleppo, roughly one representative for every 20,000 people in the liberated areas. The council would choose a smaller group to actually govern the city. The idea is for the council to serve as a liaison between the military and the civilian populations. \u201cIf civilian life is not organized, if we cannot do anything, then the chaos will continue,\u201d said a 29-year-old businessman who is also on the transitional council. Several members of the council declined to give their names because they still travel to government-controlled areas. About 65 percent of the villages have already chosen their representatives, he said, but the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo forced a postponement of the choice of about 150 representatives from the city itself. The transitional council is in the process of establishing a 500-member police force and runs a few courts, but members view the bread crisis as their first big test. \u201cWe represent a civil government to some extent, so if we cannot solve this problem there will be a lack of trust in such rule in the future,\u201d said the businessman. There is also competition. While about 70 percent to 80 percent of the Free Syrian Army commanders in the province have agreed to support the elected council, election organizers said, opponents include jihadi groups hostile to the very idea of democratic elections. One such prominent group, Jibhat al-Nusra, which the United States sought to ostracize last week by labeling it a terrorist organization, has been distributing bread in and around Aleppo. \u201cThe so-called terrorists are the ones who have been giving us bread and distributing it fairly,\u201d said Tamam Hazem, a spokesman in Aleppo\u2019s news media center, reached via Skype. \u201cFree Syrian Army battalions have been trying to help, but they just don\u2019t have the same kind of experience.\u201d Council members pleaded for outside help to counter the jihadists\u2019 efforts. \u201cThey are offering bread to people to obtain their sympathy and respect,\u201d said Mr. Khanji, the council\u2019s president. \u201cProlonging the Syrian crisis will allow the extremist cells in Syria to grow and become more difficult to remove in the future.\u201d Before the revolution, the Syrian government scattered vast silo complexes around the country, enough to store a five-year strategic wheat supply. But the wheat in the silos that have not been destroyed has disappeared. Transitional council members said they suspected that it was seized by militant Islamist groups or government loyalists, particularly Alawites, the same sect as President Bashar al-Assad, who either sold it abroad or shipped it to the Alawite coastal hinterland in case the final battle for Syria became a siege against that powerful minority. About one-quarter of Syria\u2019s 23 million people live in Aleppo Province, with nearly 3 million in the city of Aleppo itself. The war has made exact statistics on the need for bread hard to assess, but the hundreds of people lining up for five hours and more for bread are testament to the shortage. The few bakeries still running produce enough to satisfy maybe one-quarter of the need, Mr. Khanji said. The price has shot up from 15 Syrian pounds, about 21 cents, for a bag of about eight flat, pitalike loaves to more than 200 pounds, nearly $3, fluctuating unpredictably \u201clike the stock market,\u201d as one resident put it. Affluent Syrians in Gaziantep, even if they could afford the price, said it was one reason they had fled. A Syrian dentist with a clinic in west Aleppo, still controlled by the government, said people rang his bell at least 10 times a day begging for bread or money. \u201cSome middle-class people are begging on the streets because their houses are destroyed and they have no work, so they have no money to buy food,\u201d said the dentist, declining to use her name because she fears for her safety if she decides to return home. It is not a problem only in Aleppo. Bread shortages have also been reported across Syria in Deir al-Zour, Raqqa, Idlib, Homs and even the suburbs of Damascus, with YouTube videos showing long lines in various towns. Razan S. Alsham, an organizer working in Antakya, Turkey, for the Washington-based Syrian Emergency Task Force, is trying to raise $10,000 to repair shelling damage to a 12-silo complex in Masakan, a city east of Aleppo, which she said still held enough wheat to feed 500,000 people for 200 days. A cartoon posted online shows Santa Claus reading a Christmas wish list from Syria that scrolls off into the distance. Every single request is \u201cbread.\u201d While governments and private organizations have donated tens of millions of dollars for food aid , officials said delivering it to northern Syria was enormously difficult, given both the danger and the scale involved. By United Nations estimates, some two and a half million Syrians inside the country need aid and that number could grow to four million next year. Members of the Aleppo transitional council said the scale required foreign governments to help because the task was too big for nongovernmental organizations. They are focused on two solutions for the bread crisis. Either ship the fuel and flour needed to run the bakeries (not to mention the hospitals and other institutions) to Aleppo or produce the bread in safer areas near Turkey and transport it south. Both solutions are cumbersome and expensive. Qatar gave $8 million to help create local councils, and Aleppo\u2019s share of that is $1 million. Much of it will be spent on finding a solution to the bread crisis, transitional council members said, as will half of a $5 million donation from private Syrian businessmen in the United Arab Emirates. Council members said the lack of tangible aid from the West, particularly after a string of visitors had promised to help, was fueling suspicions that Syrians were being deliberately starved. Maybe, they said, Western governments think that Syrians will be more amenable to some sort of compromise that would keep Mr. Assad in place, at least through a transitional period. \u201cThe regime is killing us with shelling,\u201d said a top aide to the council\u2019s president, declining to use his name because he still returns to government-controlled areas. \u201cWhile the rest of the world is killing us with hunger, disease and cold. The result is the same.\u201d", "keyword": "Aleppo (Syria);Bread;Shortages;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Syria"}
{"id": "ny0086591", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/07/21", "title": "New York Escalates Investigation Into Promontory Financial Group", "abstract": "When an executive at one of Wall Street\u2019s top consulting firms testified before Congress two years ago, he stressed the importance of independence in reviewing bank misdeeds, declaring, \u201cIf we merely told our clients what they want to hear, we would lose credibility.\u201d A long-running New York State investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the firm, Promontory Financial Group, is now calling some of that credibility into question, according to lawyers briefed on the matter. And in an escalation of the investigation, state authorities recently subpoenaed several of the firm\u2019s employees, including the executive who testified before Congress. The subpoenas from New York\u2019s financial regulator, the latest step in a two-year inquiry, require that at least six Promontory employees sit for depositions beginning on Tuesday, the lawyers said. The development signals that the investigation, which at times grew bitter as Promontory resisted the regulator\u2019s requests for documents, has reached its final stages and could soon yield a punishment. The scrutiny threatens the reputation of Promontory, a firm staffed with so many former federal officials that it is known as Wall Street\u2019s shadow regulator. The consultant, whose founder and chief executive, Eugene A. Ludwig, is a onetime banking regulator and a law school friend of Bill Clinton, occupies a position of trust on Wall Street, providing regulators with what is supposed to be an impartial window into misconduct like money laundering and sanctions violations. The New York investigation centers on one such assignment Promontory performed for the British bank Standard Chartered , which was suspected of processing billions of dollars on behalf of Iran. The bank hired Promontory to review its transactions with Iranian entities, as well as other sanctioned countries, and report the findings to regulators. After reviewing drafts of the report and internal emails, the New York regulator has questioned whether Promontory helped obscure some of the same misconduct it was supposed to unearth, according to lawyers briefed on the investigation. The regulator examined whether Promontory, under pressure from Standard Chartered and its lawyers, sanitized the report to play down the scope of the illicit transactions. As the investigation progressed, Promontory offered to have some executives meet with state investigators, an offer that led to the recent subpoenas. \u201cWe have sought for nearly two years to provide N.Y.D.F.S. with a complete understanding of the facts in this matter and, to that end, recently encouraged it to meet with our professionals,\u201d the firm said in a statement, referring to the New York Department of Financial Services. \u201cWe stand behind our work on this engagement and the integrity of the Promontory professionals who did that work, and share the department\u2019s commitment to consultant independence.\u201d Mr. Ludwig, the chief executive, is not being deposed and is not suspected of wrongdoing. Although the regulator expects to depose Konrad Alt, the firm\u2019s chief operating officer and the man who testified before Congress in 2013, Mr. Alt is not suspected of wrongdoing. Still, the investigation into Promontory is the latest threat to Wall Street\u2019s consulting industry, whose influence has come under the microscope after prominent missteps. The firm\u2019s rivals, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte, have already settled as a result of similar investigations by the New York regulator, paying fines and accepting temporary suspensions from certain assignments. Those settlements \u2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers paid $25 million, while Deloitte paid $10 million \u2014 could provide a template for a possible settlement with Promontory, although negotiations would not begin until after the depositions. The negotiations could ultimately break down, leading the New York regulator to file a legal action against the firm. The regulator need not prove a legal violation to punish the firm, only that it lacked the objectivity expected of consultants. Thanks to a quirk in an obscure state law dating to the end of the 19th century, the regulator has the authority to withhold documents that consultants need to advise a bank, effectively hamstringing their business. The crackdown on consultants \u2014 which began under Benjamin M. Lawsky , New York\u2019s former financial regulator, and is now being overseen by Anthony Albanese , his interim successor and previous chief of staff \u2014 stems from a concern that the industry\u2019s business model is rife with conflicts of interest. While consultants often claim that they provide an impartial assessment of a bank\u2019s problems, they are also handpicked and paid by those same banks. Despite those conflicts, regulators have leaned on consultants to conduct the sort of large-scale examinations the government cannot afford to undertake. But after recent concerns arose about PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte succumbing to pressure from banking clients, regulators began to reconsider that reliance, prompting them to release new guidelines for the use of consultants. Faced with criticism, the consulting industry has defended its work. Some firms also emphasized that, at least in certain cases, they do not claim to operate as \u201cindependent consultants.\u201d Even so, consultants typically promise government authorities that they adhere to industry standards requiring impartiality. Promontory has done just that. During his congressional testimony, Mr. Alt, Promontory\u2019s chief operating officer, stated that the firm\u2019s \u201cbusiness model requires us to bring a high level of independent judgment to all of our engagements, not just when we are formally designated as independent consultants.\u201d In the depositions this week, the New York regulator is expected to question Mr. Alt about those assertions, according to the lawyers briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulator will most likely contrast those statements with concerns about the objectivity of the firm\u2019s 2011 report regarding Standard Chartered, even though Mr. Alt was not involved in the report. The depositions represent an escalation of an investigation that was already hostile. When the New York regulator requested Promontory\u2019s correspondence with Standard Chartered, the firm balked, according to the lawyers briefed on the matter. Promontory contended that it was hired by the bank\u2019s lawyers, an arrangement that might have shielded those records under attorney-client privilege. That argument spurred an unusually contentious debate that threatened to stall, or even derail, the investigation. After the regulator threatened to take Promontory to court, Standard Chartered agreed to produce the documents for the sole purposes of the investigation into Promontory. The regulator\u2019s interactions with Standard Chartered have been even more difficult. In 2012, the bank agreed to pay $667 million to several agencies, including the New York regulator, the Justice Department and the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office. That did not end its problems. Two years later, the New York regulator took action once again, forcing the bank to pay a $300 million fine and suspend an important business activity because of its failure to weed out transactions prone to money laundering. The bank, which recently overhauled its top management, is now once again under criminal investigation. The Justice Department is examining whether it committed sanctions violations beyond those covered in the 2012 deal, which centered on what the bank called \u201cProject Gazelle,\u201d an effort to forge \u201cnew relationships with Iranian companies.\u201d", "keyword": "Promontory Financial Group;Standard Chartered Bank;New York;Money laundering;Iran;Banking and Finance;Conflict of interest;Anthony J. Albanese;Benjamin M Lawsky;Eugene A Ludwig"}
{"id": "ny0120710", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/07/06", "title": "Satmar Rift Complicates Politics of Brooklyn Hasidim", "abstract": "There is an enduring belief among some New York political aficionados that Hasidic Jews vote in a bloc. Capture the support of a chief rabbi and you capture the entire Hasidic sect. But the divisions in several Hasidic sects have made once-simple calculations far more complicated, as shown by the preliminary results in the recent Democratic primary for the Congressional seat held by Nydia M. Vel\u00e1zquez , a district that embraces Brooklyn\u2019s Hasidic enclave in Williamsburg. The Satmar are the largest Hasidic sect in the United States, with its stronghold in Williamsburg, but with the death of Moses Teitelbaum , the Satmar grand rabbi, in 2006, their ranks have been sundered by a dynastic battle between two of his sons, Aaron and Zalman. And politics has become a favored way for each side to demonstrate its ascendancy. Two days after Representative Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s triumph in the June 26 primary, the Aroynem, as Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum\u2019s followers are known in a transliteration from the Yiddish, issued a news release claiming that their \u201cpolitical muscle\u201d in marshaling 4,000 of her 16,000 votes spelled the difference in Ms. Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s victory over City Councilman Erik Martin Dilan. He had the backing of the Zaloynim, the followers of Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum. They also contended that their votes were crucial in two other Brooklyn elections in recent years, that of State Senator Daniel L. Squadron and Councilman David G. Greenfield. The Aroynem, based in Kiryas Joel, a village near Monroe, N.Y., even claimed they were fast rivaling the numbers of the Zaloynim in their base of Williamsburg. \u201cWilliamsburg is no longer under the complete control of the Zaloynim,\u201d Rabbi Moishe Indig, a leader of the Aroynem, said in a statement issued after the primary by the public relations firm George Arzt Communications. \u201cThe Aroynem have just as much power and influence.\u201d The claim \u2014 trumpeted in a banner headline in the Aroynem newspaper that said \u201cMazel Tov Williamsburg\u201d \u2014 was quickly disputed as an exaggeration by partisans for Zalman Teitelbaum. Rabbi David Niederman, chief executive of United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg , who is a supporter of Mr. Dilan but whose social service organization claims neutrality, contends that the Zaloynim, with allies from other Hasidic sects in Williamsburg, turned out more than 60 percent of the Hasidic vote for Mr. Dilan. Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the Brooklyn Democratic leader who is allied with the Zaloynim, made the same claim. The quarrel, which has little to do with any standard political issue like taxes or abortion, suggests that the succession disputes in Hasidic sects are starting to affect Hasidic power in politics at a time when there are dynastic conflicts within at least three of the largest sects, Satmar, Bobov and Viznitz. Some political professionals contend that the disputes have weakened the effectiveness of the Hasidim. Imagine, they say, if the warring Satmar factions had joined together on behalf of, say, Mr. Dilan. Then the bloc vote would be as powerful as the myth has made it seem. The Satmar number 150,000 worldwide, and Williamsburg, with perhaps 60,000 adherents, is its largest enclave. While he was still vigorous, Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum appointed Aaron, the older brother, leader in Kiryas Joel, which now has 23,000 Satmar Hasidim, the village\u2019s entire population, and from that perch Aaron Teitelbaum saw himself as the presumptive heir. But his brother was the father\u2019s deputy in Williamsburg, and when the father suffered the terminal decline of Alzheimer\u2019s, Zalman Teitelbaum and his organization assumed the reins of leadership there. In the aftermath, disputes have cropped up at every turn, over who owns which schools, synagogues, summer camps and real estate. (The two groups both agree that Israel should not have established itself as a state until the coming of the Messiah, a belief that defines the Satmar sect.) Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York who is writing a book on the succession battles in Hasidic dynasties, said it did not matter who the Congressional candidates were and their positions; the two sides, he said, would have ended up as adversaries. \u201cIt could have been Tweedledum and Tweedledee \u2014 the two sides would have opposed each other,\u201d said Professor Heilman, who compares the fights to dynastic battles in royal families. \u201cEach of them wants to say we speak for Satmar so they can look as if they were the deciding factor, an important bloc in the election. Then when that particular candidate needs to turn to the Satmar community, he or she will turn to that faction.\u201d One reason so many dynastic squabbles emerged in the past decade, Professor Heilman said, is that the grand rabbis are living longer, sometimes too long to have the vigor to conclusively determine whom their successors will be or so long that their increasingly entrenched institutional court refuses to cede power. In Hasidic Europe before World War II , a contender to the throne unhappy with a chosen successor could set up his seat in a neighboring village, Mr. Heilman said. But since the war, with the consolidation of Hasidim into relatively few sects, each sect\u2019s brand name has been enshrined so that successors want to become, say, the Satmar rebbe, not the Kiryas Joel rebbe. In Williamsburg, the Aroynem have set up parallel synagogues, yeshivas, ritual baths, matzo factories, Yiddish newspapers, social service organizations, meat markets and wedding halls, many of them created virtually overnight. There has also been a bitter dispute over who owns four summer camps in Ulster County, a quarrel in which Mr. Lopez personally intervened on behalf of the Zaloynim. A perennial dispute involves public housing. Both sides are eager for more to be developed in Williamsburg, where Hasidic leaders want more three- and four-bedroom apartments for their large families, while Hispanic leaders want a larger allocation of smaller apartments for their community. The Zaloynim contend Mr. Dilan has been more helpful in that dispute, while the Aroynem laud Ms. Vel\u00e1zquez. The issue is held up in the courts to determine whether current plans for the site would have a discriminatory effect. Whatever the basis of the dynastic quarrel, pragmatism often trumps ideology and sometimes produces strange bedfellows. When the Aroynem wanted a mikvah \u2014 a ritual bath \u2014 for their followers in Williamsburg, they needed zoning permits and, according to community leaders, sought out the political muscle of two councilmen close to Mr. Lopez, Stephen Levin and Mr. Dilan. With Rabbi Niederman\u2019s prodding, the two councilmen provided the needed help.", "keyword": "Kiryas Joel (NY);Williamsburg (NYC);Hasidism;Elections;Rabbis;United States Politics and Government;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0223652", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/11/30", "title": "Landlords Require Guarantors for Some Tenants", "abstract": "In New York City real estate, there are few titles more thankless than guarantor. But they are needed by many. People who do not make enough to afford their paycheck-devouring rents must find a wealthy relative, a benevolent family friend or perhaps a kidnapped and hypnotized multimillionaire to supply personal financial information and assume responsibility for their leases. Rachel Wagner, Emily Coit and Taylor Jewell, recent college graduates and childhood friends from Portland, Ore., discovered that finding such a guardian angel was almost as hard as finding an apartment. They had lined up a $3,400-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side, but could not meet the standard Manhattan landlord requirement that their combined salaries equal 40 times the monthly rent, or $136,000. So they would need a guarantor making 70 times the rent, $238,000. Many landlords prefer guarantors who live nearby, because it is much harder to pursue judgments from afar, said Jamie Heiberger, a lawyer who represents landlords. But in August, the landlord for the apartment the young women were trying to rent changed the building\u2019s policy requiring the guarantor to live in the region. The women made awkward calls to relatives and friends. Ms. Coit was going to ask an uncle from Buffalo who is in his 70s. But she ultimately did not, because his income would not qualify. She asked a family friend from Connecticut, who declined because he felt uncomfortable providing his tax returns, bank statements and Social Security number. Ms. Jewell\u2019s uncle, who has real estate investments here, also did not qualify under the income requirements. Blair Brandt, whose referral company, the Next Step Realty , helped these friends find their broker and guided them through the process, said many graduates arriving in Manhattan had been facing this problem. Ms. Heiberger said landlords were being extra careful because the recession had made the problem of unpaid rent so widespread. \u201cThere can be the hedge fund guy that\u2019s out of a job, or it could be the college student that can\u2019t find a job,\u201d she said. The friends\u2019 parents reached an agreement with the landlord by putting several months\u2019 rent in escrow; the friends recently moved in. But they still find the requirement strange. Ms. Jewell\u2019s father, Steve Jewell, who is a landlord in Portland, does not require his renters to have guarantors. \u201cIt\u2019s far beyond certainly anything that would be done in Portland,\u201d Mr. Jewell said. \u201cBut we understand it\u2019s a different market.\u201d \u2018Transitional\u2019 Nesting While it sometimes seems as if there is an endless stream of New Yorkers spending their Wall Street bonuses and inheritances on Classic Six co-ops and glassy condominiums, there are, of course, plenty of New Yorkers who want more than anything to buy, but simply cannot. As they wait for their fortunes to turn, some of them spruce up the homes in which they are, at least for now, stuck. After Linda La Porte and Anthony Torres married in August 2009, they settled into an apartment they rented from a friend in Astoria, Queens, while they saved for a down payment. But in June, their friend had to move back into his apartment. Then Mr. Torres received orders from the Air Force Reserve to head to flight school, leaving Ms. La Porte to move their belongings into a smaller, $1,900-a-month apartment nearby. To distract herself from missing her husband, Ms. La Porte attended a workshop held by the decorator Jill Vegas to pick up some ideas. She replaced the red curtains she had hastily put up, chose a photograph of a geisha to place over the couch and bought turquoise and cream throw pillows. She kept her husband updated with photographs. \u201cIt kind of helps me focus on something else,\u201d Ms. La Porte said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t expect him to be gone so long. That\u2019s been very, very hard to deal with.\u201d Ms. Vegas said she had seen uncertainty among many of the 150 students who attended her decorating classes this fall, with many \u201cwanting to snuggle in to what they have.\u201d One of her students, Virginia Foxton, wants to buy in the suburbs with her husband, Mark, and their 11-month-old daughter, Avery. But they had to wait, because they could not sell the condo they own in San Francisco, where they used to live; it had been tied up in a lawsuit, with the developer going bankrupt. In October, they moved to a new rental in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from the Upper West Side and tried to make the small space feel new by removing some clutter. They stored furniture and a barbecue and donated baby toys and a car seat to an expectant friend. Since the lawsuit has just settled, they hope to buy within a year. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a transitional place, but it feels new,\u201d Ms. Foxton said of the new apartment. \u201cThe focus is eventually on living in a space that we own.\u201d", "keyword": "Renting and Leasing;Housing and Real Estate;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0296410", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/12/24", "title": "A Joyful Bustle to Get Ready for Guests: Syrian Refugees", "abstract": "LANCASTER, Pa. \u2014 A dull gray house on a hillside has to become a home. Another Syrian family of refugees will be arriving soon, and this empty, echoing old place needs to be readied in welcome. The word has trickled down from the State Department\u2019s refugee resettlement program. A mother, a father, his brother and four children, the youngest just 10. Muslims, traveling from Turkey. Flying into New York in the next few days. Their imminent arrival explains all the commotion inside this slate-colored house in the small city of Lancaster, in south-central Pennsylvania. The state may have gone to Donald J. Trump, who likened the Syrian resettlement program to a \u201ca great Trojan horse\u201d for terrorists. But he isn\u2019t president yet. Image Cups and plates awaiting the family\u2019s arrival. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times That is why volunteers and staff members from the Church World Service, a nationwide nonprofit that helps the government take in refugees fleeing violence and persecution, are cleaning cabinets, carting furniture and doing their best to make things homey. Just not too homey. \u201cDoing too much can make a family feel like it\u2019s someone else\u2019s home,\u201d says Josh Digrugilliers, 26, the group\u2019s local housing specialist, whose crowded key chain jangles in reminder of all the refugees in need. He scours a government checklist of housing requirements for a resettlement, mindful that whatever he spends is deducted from a refugee\u2019s one-time government grant of no more than $1,125. A family\u2019s combined grants must cover its rent and other expenses until the nonprofit has helped the adults acquire Social Security numbers and jobs. Image Amer Alfayadh, a senior case manager, and Orion Hernandez carrying a dresser for the house. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times The used furniture being trundled in reflects the emphasis on economy. Some comes from the donations hoarded in a cluttered garage, where a \u201cWelcome Home\u201d sign in Arabic is on display. Other items were acquired cheap \u2014 chairs for $5, tables for $20 \u2014 at Root\u2019s Old Mill Flea Market. New paint and flooring give the house the smell of a fresh start, thanks to the landlord, John Liang, who came to Lancaster as a child, one of the \u201cboat people\u201d who fled Vietnam on dangerously overcrowded vessels after the war. He spent a year in a notoriously hellish refugee camp before coming to Lancaster, where he and his family delivered newspapers, shoveled snow, did sewing and assembly-line work. Anything. Now 45, Mr. Liang works overtime at a nearby Kellogg\u2019s cereal plant and manages several properties he owns, including this house, which he wants to be \u2014 just so. Image Ms. Garver checking for hot water during a final inspection. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times \u201cThere are other people living a lot harder, tougher, than what I went through,\u201d he says. A History of Acceptance Mr. Digrugilliers applies his checklist to the kitchen, where the counter is crowded with mismatched dinnerware, new appliances and clutches of flatware bound with rubber bands. Draped over the oven handle is a dish towel printed with a calendar for 1968, another tumultuous year. Then to the bedrooms upstairs. The children\u2019s twin beds, bought at discount from the Lancaster Mattress Company, are covered with the black G of the Georgia Bulldogs, the winged wheel of the Detroit Red Wings and other invitations to sleep in cocoons of American culture. Armed with a list of what he needs, he and a colleague, Orion Hernandez, climb into a beat-up van reeking of McDonald\u2019s. They head to Walmart, where Mr. Digrugilliers recognizes a thin man \u2014 a Nepalese refugee who resettled here two years ago \u2014 leaving as he is walking in. Image Luis Ma\u00f1uel Ortiz, a caseworker with the Church World Service, hanging blinds. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times \u201cHey, how are you?\u201d Mr. Digrugilliers calls out. \u201cHello,\u201d the man calls back. Such encounters happen often in Lancaster, whose rich history of acceptance is rooted, in part, in the influence of the Mennonites, Amish and other faiths. A glimpse of the local worldview came in January when a supportive rally of more than 200 people drowned out a much smaller anti-immigrant protest outside the Church World Service office here. Sheila Mastropietro, the group\u2019s longtime supervisor in Lancaster, took heart in the moment. It reflected a communal understanding of both the global refugee crisis and the rigorous screening process that refugees undergo before coming to the United States. Still, given a president-elect who seems averse to the country\u2019s modest commitment to refugee relocation, Ms. Mastropietro says, \u201cWe don\u2019t know what to expect.\u201d Image The landlord, John Liang, 45, fled Vietnam as a child. \u201cThere are other people living a lot harder, tougher, than what I went through,\u201d he said. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Last fiscal year, the Lancaster office of the Church World Service helped to resettle 407 of the 85,000 refugees admitted to this country; this fiscal year, its target is 550 of a hoped-for 110,000. \u201cWe are acting as if the numbers are going to be the same \u2014 until we hear something different,\u201d she says. Decades of resettlement work have transformed the Lancaster area into a medley of cultures so rich that Amer Alfayadh, 34, a senior case manager, struggles to name them all: \u201cSyrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Congolese, Ukrainians, Belorussians, people from Kazakhstan. Then, of course, Lebanese, Palestinians. Bhutanese, Nepalese, Burmese, Sri Lankans \u2026\u201d Image Segundo Triana, left, an interpreter from Cuba, working with recently arrived Cubans during a cultural orientation class sponsored by the Church World Service in Lancaster. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Mr. Alfayadh himself arrived from Iraq in 2010. Though trained as an engineer, he worked at a Lowe\u2019s \u2014 customer service, paint, lawn and garden \u2014 and as a substitute teacher before being hired to help other refugees. He is accustomed now to urgent late-night calls from fresh arrivals unfamiliar with, say, locks on doors. New clients are often at their breaking point, uncertain what to make of this exotic land called Pennsylvania. Knowing how difficult it can be for anyone in crisis to see ahead \u2014 to jobs, school, a future \u2014 Mr. Alfayadh says he tries to impart a simple message: \u201cO.K. Tomorrow will be better.\u201d At Walmart, Mr. Digrugilliers and Mr. Hernandez commandeer two shopping carts each and begin racing through the cavernous store like contestants on the old \u201cSupermarket Sweep\u201d game show, grabbing specific items, down to umbrellas and sanitary pads. His purchases complete, Mr. Digrugilliers mounts his cart and wheels it into the dusk like a skateboard, exuberant with hope that some refugee family\u2019s journey will be just as smooth. Image The home was prepared for a family of six: a father, a mother, three daughters and a boy. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times It is not. The Church World Service soon receives word that this particular family\u2019s resettlement has been delayed \u2014 a not-uncommon development that could be caused by something as simple as a spike in an asylum-seeker\u2019s blood pressure at the airport. But there is no shortage of tempest-tossed refugees. Mr. Alfayadh\u2019s supervisor, Valentina Ross, remembers that another Syrian family is arriving in a few days: a father, a mother, three daughters and a boy. They will need a home. Holiday Spirit Abounds Today is the day. A holiday spirit has taken hold in downtown Lancaster, with a colossal Christmas tree glittering in Penn Square and ancient brick houses swathed in festive lights. Image One of the beds. Other bedding included symbols of American culture: the logos of the Georgia Bulldogs and the Detroit Red Wings. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times A mile away, a Church World Service caseworker named Gaby Garver, a focused college graduate of 22, is collecting provisions for the new family at a food pantry. Signing some paperwork, she says, \u201cAnd no meat products for the family, please.\u201d As Ms. Garver prepares to leave with milk, vegetables and other items, a pantry volunteer asks: \u201cSince you didn\u2019t take any meat, would you like some extra rice?\u201d Yes, please. More food is needed. Ms. Garver guides her 1999 Pontiac through the cold rain to the Save-A-Lot supermarket, where many goods sit in cut-open cardboard cases. She leaves 10 minutes later with bread, fruit, beans, sugar, tea and a receipt for $26.58, to be deducted from the family\u2019s grant money. Image Members of a Syrian family that arrived earlier this year, and that made a meal for the newcomers. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Hunched against the weather, the slight young woman makes two trips carrying the food into the drab gray house. After stocking the refrigerator and cabinet, she conducts a last-minute inspection. The fridge is cold. The tap has hot water. The burners on the gas stove ignite. Everything upstairs is fine as well, with even more homey touches added. New pajamas and towels. New clothes hangers. New picture frames, showing stock photos of cheerful families, on the shelves. And on one twin bed, a child\u2019s soccer ball, still in its box. Hugs and Handshakes The rain has stopped, a slice of moon risen. Ms. Garver is driving now to the home of a Syrian family that arrived seven months ago. The mother has cooked a hot meal for the refugee family that is about to land any minute in New York, a good three-hour drive away. Image Light from a window beckoned the new occupants. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Inside, where five young children zip and waddle about, the prepared meal sits in expectation on the dining-room table: a large aluminum tray bountiful with chicken and rice and a huge bowl of salad. The oldest child, Mohamad, 14, helps Ms. Garver carry the food out to her vehicle, and she thanks him. He responds with the formality given to a new language being tried on for size. \u201cYou\u2019re welcome,\u201d the boy says, and smiles. Returning to the gray house, Ms. Garver fumbles in the dark to open the door while holding the tray of still-hot food. When she returns with the salad bowl, she stoops to collect a clump of junk mail, including a come-on addressed to \u201cOur Neighbor.\u201d Later tonight, Ms. Garver and Mr. Alfayadh will drive a Ford van to Lancaster Airport, where they will meet two representatives from the local Islamic Center. Soon after, another van will arrive from Kennedy International Airport. Hugs and handshakes will be exchanged in the December air. Luggage will be collected. And six Syrian refugees will be driven the 20 minutes to a warm home perfumed by warm food, in a city made radiant by the multicolored lights of the season.", "keyword": "Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Church World Service;Lancaster;Immigration;Real Estate; Housing;Syria"}
{"id": "ny0084400", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/10/24", "title": "Fantasy Football Week 7: Rankings and Matchup Analysis", "abstract": "Eddie Lacy\u2019s fantasy football owners finally received good news this week: The Packers have a bye for N.F.L. Week 7 . We have been down this road before, with Lacy getting off to a slow start in 2014, but things might be different this time. Last season, Lacy topped 10 fantasy points only two times in his first six games and averaged 3.5 per game in the other four games, but still finished as fantasy\u2019s sixth best back by averaging 17.5 F.P.P.G. the remainder of the season. This season, Lacy scored 15 fantasy points and rushed for his only touchdown in Week 1, and he has averaged four F.P.P.G. in the five games since. One big difference this season is that Lacy is dealing with an ankle injury, so in that regard, the bye week is a welcome break. But Packers Coach Mike McCarthy seems intent on continuing to have James Starks involved in the run game, and not in a minor way. \u201cWe want to be a one-two punch,\u201d McCarthy said this week. \u201cAt this point, I\u2019m not really interested in running one of my running backs 20, 25 times in a game.\u201d The coming schedule is more bad news for Lacy\u2019s productivity, with tough matchups with the Broncos, the Panthers and the Vikings in the next four weeks. So, enjoy the break, Lacy owners, and continue reading for analysis on the backs who are playing in Week 7. Be sure to check out our complete player rankings for N.F.L. Week 7. You can also find us on Twitter at @5thDownFantasy. Fantasy Football Rankings 2015 These player rankings from the Sablich brothers are for standard and PPR scoring formats and will be updated throughout the season. Bills (3-3) at Jaguars (1-5) 9:30 a.m. (London) Line: Bills by 5.5 Quarterback E.J. Manuel (BUF) \u2014 The Jaguars\u2019 22 nd ranked pass defense was just burned by Brian Hoyer for 293 yards and three touchdowns. They have allowed 279 yards per game and a 10-to-1 TD-to-INT ratio. Manuel could prove to be decent bye-week fill-in. Blake Bortles (JAX) \u2014 While Bortles has been inconsistent, he continues to produce QB1 fantasy numbers, ranking fifth over all among quarterbacks. The Bills have permitted 18 fantasy points per week to opposing quarterbacks, and another pass-heavy day could be in store if running back T.J. Yeldon is forced to sit again. Running Back LeSean McCoy (BUF) \u2014 The offense should run through McCoy with Tyrod Taylor and Sammy Watkins out. Jacksonville allows the sixth most fantasy points to the position, including big games to Arian Foster and Doug Martin in the past two weeks. Wide Receiver/Tight End Robert Woods (BUF) \u2014 With Watkins out, Woods will be Manuel\u2019s top receiver to target. Allen Robinson/Allen Hurns (JAX) \u2014 The Bills shut down A.J. Green last week, but over all, they have permitted the 10th most fantasy points to the position this year. You should feel fine starting both. Charles Clay (BUF) \u2014 Clay figures to be the focal point of the passing game with Watkins on the sideline. Jacksonville has served up more than 10 fantasy points to tight ends Coby Fleener and Rob Gronkowski. Image Andrew Luck returned to form last week against the Patriots. Credit Jeff Haynes/Associated Press Saints (2-4) at Colts (3-3) 1 p.m. Line: Colts by 4.5 Quarterback Drew Brees (NO) \u2014 The Colts\u2019 27 th ranked pass defense is allowing 298 passing yards per game and has mustered just eight sacks. Brees has thrown for at least 300 yards in four of five games. Oddsmakers are picking this matchup to be the highest scoring game of the week, which is always a plus for fantasy quarterbacks. Andrew Luck (IND) \u2014 He finally looked more like his old self with last week\u2019s 312-yard, three-touchdown performance. We are expecting another one as he faces a Saints defense allowing the second most fantasy points to the position (21 F.P.P.G.). Running Back Mark Ingram (NO) \u2014 A model of consistency, Ingram has reached double digit fantasy points in all but one of his six games. The Colts are serving up 19 F.P.P.G. and rank 20 th over all against the run. Frank Gore/Ahmad Bradshaw (IND) \u2014 The Saints are a top five matchup for opposing running backs, and have served up a jaw-dropping 433 rushing yards, 155 receiving yards and five total touchdowns to the position over the last three weeks. Wide Receiver Willie Snead/Brandin Cooks (NO) \u2014 This is an outstanding matchup for Saints receivers, as the Colts allow the third most fantasy points to the position. They have permitted a receiver to top 100 receiving yards in four of their six games played, and the second most passing touchdowns with nine. T.Y. Hilton/Donte Moncrief (IND) \u2014 The Saints are giving up 283 passing yards per game. You can feel safe starting both yet again this week. Image Chris Ivory is a must-start this week against the Patriots. Credit Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Jets (4-1) at Patriots (5-0) 1 p.m. Eastern. Line: Patriots by 9 Quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick (NYJ) \u2014 He has thrown for multiple touchdowns in all but one game this year, and is likely to throw a lot Sunday to keep up with Tom Brady. The Patriots are the ninth best fantasy matchup for quarterbacks. Tom Brady (NE) \u2014 The Jets have the top-ranked pass defense in the league, allowing 198 passing yards per game. While standard league owners can never bench Brady, daily league players may want to steer clear. The Darrelle Revis-less Jets held Brady to 182 yards, one touchdown and one interception the last time they played (Week 16, 2014). Running Back Chris Ivory (NYJ) \u2014 New York\u2019s bell cow is averaging the second most fantasy points per game among his peers (19), which is more than the likes of Le\u2019Veon Bell and Peterson. He\u2019s an automatic start against New England\u2019s 22 nd ranked run defense. Dion Lewis/LeGarrette Blount (NE) \u2014 Lewis played his worst game last week, perhaps because of an abdomen injury. He is the preferred RB play, if healthy, as the Jets\u2019 only real weakness on defense has been against pass-catching backs with similar skill sets. Wide Receiver/Tight End Brandon Marshall/Eric Decker (NYJ) \u2014 Both are locked-in starts against a Patriots unit allowing the eighth most fantasy points to the position this year. Julian Edelman (NE) \u2014 WR1s are averaging just 40 yards and have one touchdown in their last four games against the Jets. Rob Gronkowski (NE) \u2014 The Jets are likely to be his toughest matchup all year. But he has to start every week. Image Adrian Peterson has a great matchup and should be the focal point of the Vikings' offense in Week 7. Credit Ann Heisenfelt/Associated Press Vikings (3-2) at Lions (1-5) 1 p.m. Line: Vikings by 2 Quarterback Teddy Bridgewater (MIN) \u2014 Bridgewater\u2019s best fantasy day of the season came against the Lions in Week 2 (20 F.P.s), but he has averaged just 11 F.P.P.G. since. Adrian Peterson should be the focal point of this offense this week, but the Lions are permitting 281 yards a game through the air, if you\u2019re feeling lucky. Matthew Stafford (DET) \u2014 Minnesota has been stout against the pass the last three games, limiting quarterbacks Peyton Manning, Alex Smith and Philip Rivers to a 12-point fantasy average. Stafford threw for 286 yards and two touchdowns against the Vikings in Week 2 and did look better last week. Running Back Adrian Peterson (MIN) \u2014 Detroit ranks 26 th against the run and allows 120 rushing yards per game. Peterson went off for 192 total yards on 31 total touches in Week 2. Theo Riddick/Ameer Abdullah/Joique Bell (DET) \u2014 Abdullah managed just 9 rushing yards and 9 receiving yards on seven total touches in Week 2\u2019s meeting. Bell is likely to return this week, and Riddick has been seeing meaningful carries as well. Stay away from this messy situation in Week 7. Wide Receiver/Tight End Calvin Johnson/Golden Tate (DET) \u2014 Cornerback Xavier Rhodes has played well against Johnson in recent matchups, but Megatron got the best of him in Week 2 (10/83/1 TD). Tate also managed 80 yards on six receptions. Kyle Rudolph (MIN) \u2014 This is a plus matchup, as Detroit gives up the eighth most fantasy points to opposing tight ends. Rudolph had five receptions and a touchdown in Week 2. Image Devonta Freeman, the top fantasy running back this season, gets another great matchup in Week 7. Credit Bill Kostroun/Associated Press Falcons (5-1) at Titans (1-4) 1 p.m. Line: Falcons by 4.5 Quarterback Matt Ryan (ATL) \u2014 The Titans rank second in the league against the pass (204 Y.P.G.) and ninth in sacks and interceptions in five games played. Ryan is a low-end QB1 option this weekend. Running Back Devonta Freeman (ATL) \u2014 The Titans enter Week 7 play with the league\u2019s 28th-ranked run defense, and one that has yielded at least 17 fantasy points to backs Frank Gore and Lamar Miller over the last three weeks. Bishop Sankey/Antonio Andrews (TEN) \u2014 Atlanta permits the second most fantasy points on the ground, but this backfield is as uninspiring as they come. Andrews led the team in touches last week with 10, and would be the desperation play this weekend. Wide Receiver Julio Jones/Leonard Hankerson/Roddy White (ATL) \u2014 Tennessee ranks second against the pass, allowing 204 passing yards per game, but could be without cornerback Perrish Cox, who is nursing a hamstring injury. Kendall Wright (TEN) \u2014 Wright saw just five targets last week after complaining about his limited role in the passing game. His situation degrades even further if quarterback Marcus Mariota misses the game. Delanie Walker (TEN) \u2014 Atlanta is permitting 10 F.P.P.G. to the position, and was just shredded by the Saints\u2019 Benjamin Watson for 10 catches, 127 yards and a touchdown last week. Image Jeremy Maclin is expected to play this weekend. Credit Tim Umphrey/Associated Press Steelers (4-2) at Chiefs (1-5) 1 p.m. Line: Steelers by 2 Quarterback Alex Smith (KC) \u2014 While this is a plus matchup on paper, as the Steelers are 28 th against the pass, Smith hasn\u2019t cracked 20 fantasy points since Week 1. Smith remains a low-end QB2. Ben Roethlisberger (PIT) \u2014 This is an outstanding matchup if he can play, as K.C. surrenders the third most fantasy points to the position (20 F.P.P.G.), but it\u2019s not looking promising. Running Back Le\u2019Veon Bell (PIT) \u2014 The Chiefs did manage to bottle up Adrian Peterson last week (60 yards on 26 carries), but were burned badly by Matt Forte and Jeremy Hill in the previous two games. Charcandrick West/Knile Davis (KC) \u2014 The Steelers rank 7 th against the run and have permitted the third fewest fantasy points to the position in six games played. They have yet to allow a rushing score this season. Avoid if possible. Wide Receiver/Tight End Jeremy Maclin (KC) \u2014 He is expected to be cleared to play after dealing with a concussion and will face a Pittsburgh secondary that allowed 339 receiving yards and one touchdown to the Arizona receiving corps last week. Antonio Brown/Martavis Bryant (PIT) \u2014 Both receivers get a massive boost if Roethlisberger plays, as the Chiefs allow the most fantasy points to the position. Travis Kelce (KC) \u2014 The Steelers are the third best matchup a tight end can have, allowing 12 F.P.P.G. Image Todd Gurley has many fantasy experts and owners excited this week. Credit Jeff Haynes/Associated Press Browns (2-4) at Rams (2-3) 1 p.m. Line: Rams by 4 Quarterback Josh McCown (CLE) \u2014 The Rams are permitting just 13 F.P.P.G. to the position. In a week full of byes, we still would not consider McCown this week. Running Back Todd Gurley (STL) \u2014 Gurley takes on the league\u2019s worst run defense, as the Browns have allowed 149 yards per game to opposing backs. He is a consensus top-three running back play this week. Robert Turbin/Isaiah Crowell/Duke Johnson (CLE) \u2014 Turbin is now cutting into Crowell\u2019s early down workload, which makes this backfield even harder to predict. Johnson is the best bet here, but avoid this situation if possible. Wide Receiver/Tight End Travis Benjamin (CLE) \u2014 The Rams are tied for the sixth most fantasy points allowed to wide receivers. Benjamin, the seventh ranked fantasy receiver after six games, remains a must-start. Gary Barnidge (CLE) \u2014 This guy is bound to have a bad week at some point, right? This would be the week, as the Rams have been tough on the position, allowing just 5 F.P.P.G. Image DeAndre Hopkins has been one of the safest starts are receiver this season. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press Texans (2-4) at Dolphins (2-3) 1 p.m. Line: Dolphins by 4 Quarterback Ryan Tannehill (MIA) \u2014 Houston is the sixth best matchup for quarterbacks at 23 F.P.P.G. He is a decent low-end QB1 option this weekend. Running Back Lamar Miller (MIA) \u2014 Miller is fresh off his first real fantasy contribution of the year and has a good chance to keep rolling against Houston\u2019s 17th ranked run defense that is surrendering the 10 th most fantasy points to the position. Arian Foster (HOU) \u2014 A major mismatch in the making as Miami\u2019s disappointing front seven is permitting the second most rushing yards per game (141). Wide Receiver/Tight End DeAndre Hopkins (HOU) \u2014 Elite receiving options like Allen Robinson (6/155/2 TDS) and Brandon Marshall (7/128) have had their way with this middle-of-the-road matchup. Continue to start and expect big numbers. Jarvis Landry (MIA) \u2014 The Texans have allowed at least 10 fantasy points to a receiver in five straight weeks. Landry ranks 31 st over all in standard league settings, averaging 8.9 points per game. Jordan Cameron (MIA) \u2014 The Jaguars\u2019 Julius Thomas returned last week against the Texans and had seven receptions for 78 yards and a touchdown. The Texans are permitting the 11 th most fantasy points to the position. Image Doug Martin has the ninth most rushing yards this season. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press Buccaneers (2-3) at Redskins (2-4) 1 p.m. Line: Redskins by 3.5 Quarterback Jameis Winston (TB) \u2014 Washington\u2019s banged-up secondary has yielded 20-plus fantasy points to the position in two of their last three contests, but Winston (14 F.P.P.G.) has yet to put together a solid game this year, and would still require nerves of steel to take a chance on this weekend. Running Back Doug Martin (TB) \u2014 Freeman and Ivory each managed at least 25 fantasy points against this fading run defense over the last two weeks. Martin ranks ninth in rushing yards and fifth over all in fantasy points. Alfred Morris / Matt Jones (WAS) \u2014 The Bucs\u2019 25 th ranked run defense has permitted 120 yards per game to opposing backs, and the 12 th most fantasy points to the position. This would be a good time to get Morris going, but that will not be easy if the star tackle Trent Williams remains sidelined. Wide Receiver Mike Evans/Vincent Jackson (TB) \u2014 The Redskins are the 11 th best fantasy matchup for receivers and the Jets\u2019 Decker and Marshall had productive days against them last week. Start both. Image Eli Manning was having a great season until Monday night's game against the Eagles. Credit Al Bello/Getty Images Cowboys (2-3) at Giants (3-3) 4:25 p.m. Line: Giants by 4 Quarterback Eli Manning (NYG) \u2014 We\u2019re not sure what to expect after last Monday night\u2019s debacle. Manning typically plays well against the Cowboys, but he managed just 193 yards and no touchdowns against them in Week 1 and his offensive line remains a real concern. Treat him as a low-end QB1 and hope for the best. Running Back Joseph Randle/Christine Michael/Darren McFadden (DAL) \u2014 Word is that Christine Michael will take on a larger role this week, but Randle is still expected to remain the starter. This is a favorable matchup, as the Giants defense has allowed a double-digit fantasy performance to an opposing back in every game. We have Randle as a low-end RB2, and Michael as a flex to be on the safe side. Rashad Jennings/Shane Vereen (NYG) \u2014 The Giants have the 28 th ranked rushing offense. Dallas is allowing the fourth most fantasy points to the position has been taken for an absurd 211 rushing yards, 214 passing yards and three rushing touchdowns over their last three contests. That\u2019s your glimmer of hope for starting Jennings this week. Vereen has been an afterthought in recent weeks, averaging four carries a game despite Andre Williams\u2019s continued ineffectiveness. Wide Receiver/Tight End Terrance Williams (DAL) \u2014 The cornerback Prince Amukamara will sit out this one and cornerback Trumaine McBride could as well, but will Dallas quarterback Matt Cassel be able to capitalize? Williams hauled in five for 60 yards in Week 1. Jason Witten (DAL) \u2014 Giants linebacker Uani \u2018Unga did a fairly good job against Witten in the opener, limiting him to six receptions and 60 yards. But two of those catches went for touchdowns. Image Philip Rivers remains a strong start at quarterback this week. Credit Matt Ludtke/Associated Press Raiders (2-3) at Chargers (2-4) 4:05 p.m. Line: Chargers by 4 Quarterback Philip Rivers (SD) \u2014 Rivers is averaging 408 passing yards and has a 7-to-1 TD-to-INT ratio over his last three games. The Raiders have allowed a pair of passing scores in four of their five games. Rivers is an elite play at quarterback this weekend. Running Back Latavius Murray (OAK) \u2014 Murray has been benched is his last two games because of poor play and ball security issues. But against fantasy\u2019s most favorable running back matchup, it\u2019s almost impossible to keep him on your bench. Melvin Gordon / Danny Woodhead (SD) \u2014 Gordon is expected to play Sunday despite missing Wednesday\u2019s practice. His recent ball security issues and subpar play make him a risky start against the Raiders\u2019 third ranked run defense (83.5 Y.P.G.). Woodhead continues to be the preferred play in both standard and P.P.R. leagues. Wide Receiver Amari Cooper (OAK) \u2014 Cooper draws the third worst fantasy matchup for receivers but is too talented to sit in any given week. The Chargers are yielding the fourth fewest receiving yards (729) and the fourth fewest touchdowns (4). Keenan Allen/Stevie Johnson (SD) \u2014 Allen should find success against a struggling D.J. Hayden. Oakland has surrendered double-digit fantasy performances to an opposing receiver in four consecutive games. Image Cam Newton has been one of the best fantasy players this season. Credit Ryan Kang/Associated Press Eagles (3-3) at Panthers (5-0) 8:30 p.m. Line: Panthers by 3 Quarterback Sam Bradford (PHI) \u2014 Bradford is averaging 13 F.P.P.G. and ranks 28 th in the N.F.L. in passing. The Panthers are permitting 14 fantasy points per game, the fourth fewest in the league. Cam Newton (CAR) \u2014 The Eagles have yielded just one 20-point fantasy day to opposing quarterbacks, but they were allowing an average of 302 passing yards per game before Week 6. Newton has been matchup proof so far, and should be treated as a high-end QB1 option. Running Back DeMarco Murray (PHI) \u2014 Carolina ranks 12th against the run, but has permitted an average of 22 fantasy points per game to opposing RB1s over the last three weeks. Murray has finally gotten out of the gate and cannot be benched now. Jonathan Stewart (CAR) \u2014 Stewart performed admirably against Seattle\u2019s defense last week, but the sledding gets even tougher against an imposing Eagles front that has surrendered the second fewest fantasy points to the position . Wide Receiver Jordan Matthews (PHI) \u2014 The Panthers have held opposing WR1s Robinson, Hopkins and Evans to 112 scoreless total yards in previous weeks. Ted Ginn (CAR) \u2014 The Eagles are real bad at covering the position (sixth best WR matchup), which gives Ginn plenty of sleeper appeal this weekend. He has averaged just 4.3 targets per game over his last three, so do not expect the world. Image Steve Smith has a tough matchup with the Cardinals in Week 7. Credit Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press Ravens (1-5) at Cardinals (4-2) 8:30 p.m. (Monday) Line: Cardinals by 7.5 Quarterback Carson Palmer (ARI) \u2014 Fantasy\u2019s fifth best quarterback gets the woeful Ravens secondary that is permitting the most fantasy points to the position (22 F.P.P.G.). Running Back Justin Forsett (BAL) \u2014 The Cardinals managed to limit the Steelers\u2019 Bell to 88 yards on 24 carries last week and have permitted the sixth fewest fantasy points to the position. Chris Johnson (ARI) \u2014 The strength of the Ravens defense is their run stopping, which ranks ninth best in the league. Johnson is a low-end RB2 option once again in Week 7. Wide Receiver Steve Smith (BAL) \u2014 The ageless wonder continues to shine, but this is a tough matchup for anyone, as WR1s Brown, C. Johnson, Anquan Boldin and Cooks averaged just 39 receiving yards and 3.5 receptions against the Ravens earlier this season. Larry Fitzgerald/John Brown (ARI) \u2014 The Ravens\u2019 29 th ranked pass defense is allowing the second most fantasy points to opposing receivers. Brown is dealing with a hamstring issue, but played through it last week to the tune of 196 yards and 10 receptions.", "keyword": "Football;Fantasy sport"}
{"id": "ny0216526", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/04/09", "title": "Turnout Low at Sri Lanka Parliamentary Elections", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Three months after winning re-election in a landslide, Sri Lanka \u2019s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa , sought to solidify his party\u2019s hold on power by securing a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections held Thursday. Candidates and election monitors said that voter turnout appeared to be unusually low, especially given the circumstances: the country was holding its first parliamentary elections since the Tamil Tiger insurgency was defeated in May 2009. Mr. Rajapaksa was hoping to consolidate his presidential victory with a solid majority in Parliament. He has pledged to take firm steps to unite this ethnically divided and war-ravaged nation once the election is over. But opposition parties accuse him of seeking to turn Sri Lanka, one of South Asia\u2019s oldest democracies, into an effectively one-party state by using government resources to ensure that his party\u2019s candidates prevail. Mr. Rajapaksa\u2019s main opponent in the presidential contest, a retired army general, Sarath Fonseka, is under arrest and in the midst of a court martial, accused of using his military post to advance his political career. Government officials say that he was plotting a coup. General Fonseka\u2019s supporters say that the charges against him were brought to punish him for running against his onetime ally. Mr. Rajapaksa won the January election handily with 58 percent of the vote, against General Fonseka\u2019s 40 percent. The opposition parties that had united in an unwieldy coalition behind General Fonseka went their separate ways for the parliamentary elections, and most are in disarray. The best they could hope for, analysts said, was to prevent Mr. Rajapaksa\u2019s party from winning a sweeping majority that would allow it to rewrite the Constitution. \u201cIt is a low-turnout poll,\u201d said Ravi Karunanayake, a candidate of the main opposition party, the United National Party. \u201cLow turnout is likely to turn out to our advantage.\u201d Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, an independent public policy institute, said the low turnout was most likely a sign of voters\u2019 apathy. \u201cIt is a paradoxical election,\u201d Mr. Saravanamuttu said. \u201cThere are 7,600 candidates, but they don\u2019t seem to have enthused their fellow citizens.\u201d Mr. Rajapaksa, who was first elected in 2005 after promising to defeat the rebels, has pledged to use a large parliamentary majority to take measures to unify the country, which is split along religious and ethnic lines among the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, the minority Tamils, most of whom are Hindu, and a small Muslim population. The Tamil Tiger insurgency sought a separate homeland in northern Sri Lanka. After the Sri Lankan Army\u2019s decisive defeat of the rebel group, most Tamil parties in Sri Lanka have given up on that dream and hope instead for a measure of self-rule within a united country. But many Sinhalese hard-liners see autonomy as a precursor to independence and want to keep the highly centralized system of government intact. Election-monitoring groups reported sporadic violence in the days before the voting, but election day was largely peaceful, according to the Center for Monitoring Election Violence.", "keyword": "Sri Lanka;Elections;Rajapaksa Mahinda"}
{"id": "ny0111751", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/02/10", "title": "In Texas Border Town, Drawing a Line on Coal for Mexico", "abstract": "EAGLE PASS, Tex. \u2014 George Baxter knows how to fight. The East Coast native dodged bullets while serving in Vietnam. Later, as a United States Border Patrol agent, he guarded a vast swath of rough terrain just across from Mexico . But Mr. Baxter may be gearing up for his toughest battle yet, as he and a coalition of residents in his adopted town of Eagle Pass \u2014 across the border from Piedras Negras, Mexico \u2014 fight a coal partnership that they say is intent on destroying their peaceful way of life. The Dos Republicas Coal Partnership, which is owned by Mexican mining companies, has applied to renew a permit that would let its American partners mine about 6,300 acres of land in the border town. An existing permit already allows for mining, but officials said that work has not started because of several attempts to modify the permit to meet specifications, as well as supply-and-demand issues affecting potential customers. Residents worry that the mining will harm the environment and that they will lose land due to property damage. They are also concerned about having a Mexican company that is held to lower standards operate in Texas. Adding salt to their wounds is the fact that the coal, considered to be of too low quality to be burned in the United States, will be shipped to Mexico. A spokesman for Dos Republicas, which partners with North American Coal Corporation and a subsidiary, Camino Real Fuels, both based in Plano, said criticism of the partnership was unwarranted and the result of a misunderstanding. For now, the opposition is united. The Eagle Pass City Council and Maverick County Commissioners Court have approved resolutions opposing the project. The school and hospital districts, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, are also protesting the project. \u201cCoal that generates electric power has got to come from somewhere,\u201d Mr. Baxter said at a recent town hall meeting. \u201cBut the fact that we are going to suffer all the consequences and all the power goes to Mexico is really the sticking point in my mind.\u201d The permit application has set up the latest chapter in what the residents call a David-versus-Goliath battle against a corporation with deep pockets \u2014 deep enough to hire lawyers who could persuade the Texas Railroad Commission\u2019s three members to grant the permit. That would pave the way for the company to mine as much as 2.8 million tons of coal annually. Rudy Rodriguez, a partner with Rodriguez Industries and Operations, which handles public relations for Dos Republicas, said the firm\u2019s role in the proposed operation is overblown. The belief that \u201ca Mexican company is operating here is not the case,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are merely investors owning a permit.\u201d Mr. Rodriguez said that the onus to comply with state and federal regulations, which he said are vastly different from Mexican policies, is on the American companies, which would manage the daily mining operations. \u201cThe companies meet the regulations in Mexico and in the United States,\u201d he said. \u201cThe company, North American Coal, that comes over to operate this can\u2019t have a black eye on this permit because it impacts their whole operation in the United States.\u201d But people in Eagle Pass say that even if the regulations are met, the residents are in danger of being poisoned. They fear that the transport of low-quality coal will release particles into the air that will affect their breathing, and that discharge from mining operations will run off into the creek that feeds into the Rio Grande, the city\u2019s main water source. The blasting, which officials with the coal companies said is possible if needed, could disrupt the already fragile terrain that is vulnerable to sinkholes, a byproduct of mining in the area over the last century. \u201cWhat we want is for our voices to be heard because we feel like we are being discriminated against,\u201d said Martha Baxter, Mr. Baxter\u2019s wife. \u201cIs it because we\u2019re a poor community and don\u2019t have a lot of money and fancy lawyers?\u201d Mr. Rodriguez said that what the residents of Eagle Pass do not understand is that there is already coal moving through the city. Rail traffic that moves coal from sites farther north already passes through. \u201cThey are going to get it, whether it\u2019s from up north or right there,\u201d he said. \u201cSo right now you have no jobs and you are still having all that coal driven through that community.\u201d The Railroad Commission will ultimately decide whether to renew the company\u2019s permit. At a recent hearing in Austin, both sides began the painstaking process of pleading their cases to the hearing examiner, Marcy Spraggins, who will forward her recommendation to the commissioners. The hearing lasted a week, often stalling on minuscule details concerning endangered species, water runoff and vegetation. The process was mentally draining for all parties, including Ms. Spraggins. \u201cI am perfectly capable of ending the proceeding because counsel are not acting appropriately,\u201d she said to both sides. \u201cYou are not supposed to argue with the examiner, period. I am getting tired of hearing it.\u201d The hearing will resume again over the next two months, and then the examiner will have 60 to 90 days to make a recommendation to the commission. Ms. Spraggins agreed to allow videoconferencing to obtain statements from the border residents who could not travel to Austin, which was small consolation after they received a notice in October saying that \u201call requests/motions to hold the hearing on the merits in Eagle Pass are denied.\u201d During the hearing, mining officials testified that the expansion would create about 40 office positions and a workforce of 100 to 200 people. Hourly wages for mine workers could be as much as $24, they said. But opponents say that job creation is just a selling point to ensure that anyone who opposes the mine publicly can be labeled as opposing more opportunities for Eagle Pass. \u201cWhat everybody\u2019s fear or suspicion is, is that once the permit\u2019s granted, that the management of Camino Real Fuels will be taken over by the direct management from Mexico,\u201d Mr. Baxter said. He added that he thinks it includes bringing in workers from Mexico instead of hiring local residents. Mr. Baxter said he has collected more than 6,000 signatures on petitions from Maverick County residents who want Dos Republicas and its partners to leave town. But for E. K. Taylor, 83, who has lived in Eagle Pass all his life, including serving 38 years as a United States Customs agent, all of the fighting is too much to take. He is selling the house he lived in with his wife for 38 years. \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t for that coal company, I would have stayed here,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s no way I would do business with them.\u201d", "keyword": "Coal;Mines and Mining;Texas;Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0114308", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/11/19", "title": "Hundreds of Thousands Mourn Indian Politician Thackeray", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Mumbai on Sunday to mourn the death of one of the city\u2019s most powerful and controversial figures, the right-wing political leader Bal K. Thackeray. Mr. Thackeray, 86, who died on Saturday, was cremated Sunday in a ceremony at the city\u2019s Shivaji Park, which was attended by political leaders, movie stars and thousands of others. For years, Mr. Thackeray\u2019s party, Shiv Sena, has been a major force in Mumbai politics, and the police have remained on high alert to protect against riots and violence following his death. Crowds of his supporters paralyzed Mumbai, India \u2019s largest city, and many shopkeepers simply closed their stores after his death was announced. Mr. Thackeray built his career by championing Hindu causes in Mumbai and stoking grievances against Muslims and outsiders.", "keyword": "Mumbai (India);India;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0006428", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/05/20", "title": "Georgian Officials React Slowly to Anti-Gay Attack", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Georgian television captured clear images as a mob of more than 20,000 a ttacked a small gay rights march in downtown Tbilisi on Friday, sending at least 14 people to the hospital. Some of the priests leading the rock-throwing throngs who stormed past police cordons could be seen participating in the melee; one repeatedly slammed a stool into the windshield of one of several minibuses trying to carry the marchers to safety, while another punched marchers and tried to drag a driver out of a bus. Some gave their names in interviews. But as of Sunday, the Georgian police have made no arrests, and there are few signs that the investigation is moving forward. Instead, a bishop who helped to organize the mass turnout \u2014 ostensibly a counterprotest \u2014 said from the pulpit that while the violence was \u201cregrettable\u201d and those who committed it should be punished, the Georgian Orthodox Church was obligated to protest the gay rights rally and would \u201cnot allow anyone to humiliate us.\u201d \u201cWhen there are so many people, it is difficult to speak only about Christianity and morals,\u201d said the bishop, Iakob Iakobashvili, in his Sunday sermon in Tbilisi. \u201cMany were not able to overcome their nature and saw enemies in the others, said bad words and punched them. I was told clergymen were among them. I am not able to either condemn or justify them. They are also humans.\u201d Georgia\u2019s prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has benefited from the support of the church, which exercises enormous power in the country, though usually behind the scenes. His decision on whether to pursue prosecutions will serve as a test of that relationship. On Friday evening, with crowds of men still roaming downtown Tbilisi in search of gays, Mr. Ivanishvili promised a quick response to the violence. Yet on Sunday, at a parade for a local police force, he made no mention of either arrests or an investigation. Instead, his comments celebrated the role of the police in preventing worse injuries to the marchers. Several officers were among those hospitalized, including one with a broken leg; and a number of marchers and a journalist suffered head or chest injuries from being hit with rocks, according to Georgian news reports. \u201cWhen the question arose about saving the minority,\u201d Mr. Ivanishvili said, \u201cpolice bravely acted in their defense, and were able to lead them away from the raving masses.\u201d Zviad Koridze, a veteran local journalist at the Tbilisi-based Council of Ethics for Journalists, called the slow pace a reminder of the church\u2019s influence. \u201cThe government is acting very carefully, one could say ineffectively,\u201d said Mr. Koridze in a telephone interview. \u201cEveryone is simply waiting. Because in three days they should have made arrests and given some sort of answer to the events in Tbilisi.\u201d While the Georgian Orthodox Church usually wields its power discreetly, it has occasionally, and effectively, taken overt political or social action. In 2010, Orthodox activists began picketing a television station over \u201cNight with Shorena,\u201d a television show run by a former Georgian Playboy cover model who advocated sex before marriage. The show was closed down after several months. In 2011, the church protested a law granting minority religions legal standing. In 2012, the church joined protests over the torture of prison inmates. Ilia II, the Georgian Orthodox patriarch, has warned Georgians that placing their children in foreign schools would harm them morally. Ilia II is widely acknowledged to be the most popular figure in the country. He offered no sermon on Sunday, but on Friday, after the violence, he urged protesters to leave the streets and for both sides \u201cto pray for one another.\u201d \u201cWe do not accept violence,\u201d he said, according to Interfax. \u201cBut it\u2019s also unacceptable to give propaganda\u201d to homosexuality. A day earlier, he had urged the Georgian government to ban the gay rights march, writing that the majority of Georgians saw gay activism as \u201can insult.\u201d Outside of the Tbilisi church where Bishop Iakobashvili spoke Sunday, Elza Kurtanidze, 34, a former schoolteacher, said that she had spent the last days \u201chotly\u201d debating if those who attacked the marchers should be punished. \u201cWe have already gone too far by having gays and lesbians openly promoting their way of life,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is unacceptable! By allowing things like this, we let Georgia turn from the road of its traditional destiny.\u201d \u201cArrests will be too much; it will help to further excite the situation in Georgia,\u201d she added. Also outside the church was Leila Dzneladze, 16, who said that while she opposed the violence, she believed that the \u201ctruth was on the side of the church.\u201d \u201cNo one should be punished for this,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is for God to judge them, not us.\u201d", "keyword": "Georgia country;Georgian Orthodox Church;Homosexuality;Bidzina Ivanishvili;Iakob Iakobashvili"}
{"id": "ny0064137", "categories": ["sports", "cricket"], "date": "2014/06/04", "title": "Rarely Enforced Rule Dooms England", "abstract": "England batsman Jos Buttler was the victim of a rarely enforced rule when he was run out while leaving the crease at the nonstriker\u2019s end in a one-day game against Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka won the game for a 3-2 series victory.", "keyword": "Cricket;England;Sri Lanka"}
{"id": "ny0026348", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/01/03", "title": "Tinker to Evers to Chassis: A Baseball Story", "abstract": "BALTIMORE \u2014 Early each weekday morning, a 47-year-old man with graying hair takes a timecard and punches in at his job. He retreats to a room for a moment and emerges wearing a blue-gray uniform whose shirt bears his stitched surname: Tinker. The man seizes the tools of his trade and gets to work. In some respects, Christopher Tinker\u2019s routine as an automobile mechanic is similar to the one followed a century ago by his great-grandfather Joe Tinker, the Chicago Cubs shortstop who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1946. Each had to master the details of a physical craft and be precise in his measurements, whether gauging the speed of a fastball or calibrating the front-end alignment of a car. Indeed, as Christopher Tinker bends over engines, rotates wrenches and kicks tires, he can almost feel his ancestor\u2019s presence. Particularly because there, on Tinker\u2019s left forearm, is a tattoo of the 1911 baseball card of his great-grandfather, who is best remembered for being part of a famous baseball roll call: Tinker to Evers to Chance. Those three made up the double-play combination immortalized in a poem \u2014 \u201cBaseball\u2019s Sad Lexicon\u201d \u2014 that was written in 1910 by the New York Evening Mail columnist Franklin Pierce Adams in homage to their infield prowess. \u201cThese are the saddest of possible words: Tinker to Evers to Chance,\u201d wrote Adams, who, as the story goes, put the poem together on his way to the Polo Grounds to watch the Cubs play the Giants. From there, six lines followed: Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double, Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: Tinker to Evers to Chance. Or, all these years later, Tinker to Evers to Chance to the K&S Associates auto repair shop north of downtown Baltimore. Image Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance became forever linked after a newspaper article in 1910. Credit Associated Press Christopher Tinker had the tattoo put on his arm about seven years ago. In 1993, he paid $220 for one of the original baseball cards, which were issued by tobacco companies. But the card was eventually lost, and Tinker thought about how to replace it. One day he walked into a Baltimore tattoo parlor, and the idea hit him. Six hours and nearly $500 later, he had his great-grandfather\u2019s image engraved on his arm. \u201cI thought, What could be cooler to memorialize my great-grandfather than in ink on my skin?\u201d Tinker said in a recent interview at his shop, where he has worked for two decades. \u201cI thought it was a good conversation piece,\u201d he added. \u201cPeople would see it, ask about it, and I\u2019d get to talk about him and bring him back to life, in a way. It\u2019s amazing that 100 years later, people still remember Tinker to Evers to Chance. It seems that sports fans have a long memory.\u201d Evers was second baseman Johnny Evers; Chance was first baseman Frank Chance. Along with Tinker, they helped lead the Cubs to a 116-36 record in 1906 (no team has ever won more games in a regular season) and, more important, to the 1907 and 1908 World Series titles, which were the last times the Cubs were champions. In view of the century of Cubs futility that has followed, that achievement alone probably merits the inclusion of all three men in the Hall of Fame, where, indeed, they all have plaques. Tinker played 15 seasons in the major leagues, had a longstanding feud with Evers and, while having a career batting average of just .262, somehow hit nearly 30 points higher against the great Christy Mathewson. Tinker has a particularly big fan in Tim Wiles, the Hall of Fame\u2019s director of research, although unlike Christopher Tinker, he sports no tattoos. \u201cI\u2019m a Cubs fan; I\u2019m predisposed to Joe Tinker,\u201d Wiles said. \u201cMy great-grandfather played in the major leagues, so I perfectly understand why someone who\u2019s never met his great-grandfather would be strongly affected by him.\u201d Wiles was referring to Ben Caffyn, an outfielder for Cleveland in 1906. Christopher Tinker was born nearly two decades after his great-grandfather died, broke, in 1948, having lost nearly all of his savings to swindlers and poor investments, along with a leg to diabetes. His first wife, Ruby, shot herself to death on Christmas Day in 1923. Christopher remembers listening to Joe\u2019s son William describe the scene. Image Christopher Tinker\u2019s left forearm features a tattoo of the 1911 baseball card of his great-grandfather, Joe, a shortstop. Credit Steve Ruark for The New York Times Christopher\u2019s father, Jon Jay Tinker, did meet Joe Tinker, but on just a few occasions. In a recent interview at a coffee shop here, Jon Jay removed a silver pocket watch from a box. It was, he said, a watch that Joe Tinker\u2019s father, Steven, had given Joe when he left Kansas to begin his baseball career. The Tinker patriarch actually wanted his baseball-playing son to work in the family\u2019s wallpaper business, Jon Jay said. \u201cHe wanted his son to stay with him because he saw baseball as a waste of time \u2014 and I agree with him,\u201d Jon Jay said. \u201cWe hear about Brooks Robinson, but we don\u2019t hear about the thousands who fall by the wayside.\u201d Jon Jay said he received the watch as a child when his grandfather was being sued for involvement in land deals gone bad in Orlando, Fla., where Joe Tinker lived for much of his life after baseball. That city\u2019s Tinker Field served for years as the spring training home of the Washington Senators and their successor, the Minnesota Twins. Jon Jay, who was born and raised in Baltimore, also has a silver urn that the Lincoln Park, Ill., Chapter 177 of the Royal Arch Masons presented on Aug. 22, 1914, to Joe Tinker when he was a player-manager for the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League. A pastoral baseball scene is etched above the inscriptions. Memorabilia experts have urged him \u201cnot to polish it,\u201d Jon Jay said. He intends to bequeath the trophy to his son or donate it to the Hall of Fame. Back at the auto repair shop, a shiny, rust-colored 2008 Honda sat up on a lift. Christopher Tinker, who is 5 feet 2 inches and did not play much baseball growing up, strode easily under it and shined a pen-shaped flashlight onto its undercarriage. The constant-velocity boots on the front axle looked fine. The brake pads were not wearing down. The tires were nearly new. Tinker walked back out from under the chassis and pressed a button to lower the car. He opened the hood for another look. The engine sparkled in showroomlike glory. Image The Chicago Cubs of 1906, who included Joe Tinker, bottom right, had a 116-36 record in the regular season. The team won the World Series in 1907 and 1908. Credit Associated Press The customer who had brought in the 52,000-mile sport utility vehicle for an inspection would hear that everything looked fine, Tinker said, as he wrote \u201cO.K.\u201d next to the lines for rear shocks, ball joints and other parts on the shop\u2019s work order. This investment, he said, would be safe. Unlike his famous great-grandfather, Christopher Tinker is a lefty. And at 5-9, Joe Tinker stood a lot taller. \u201cI\u2019m not sure how we got shorter along the line,\u201d Christopher said. He is not the shop\u2019s only worker with a distinguished family story to tell. The father of Gary Alcarese, a fellow mechanic, was a tail gunner in a B-17 that was shot down by the Germans over Denmark during World War II. Alcarese\u2019s father was the only survivor on the plane and became a prisoner of war. Christopher Tinker, Alcarese said of his colleague, \u201cis a good guy, an honest guy.\u201d That description does not fit every mechanic, he added. On Christmas Eve a few years ago, a Volkswagen was towed in, Tinker recalled. The driver had left Richmond, Va., that morning and was bound for his home in New York when the clutch went out. To fix it was no small job. But by 4 that afternoon, the relieved driver was on his way. \u201cI got satisfaction in knowing that we got someone where they had to go,\u201d Tinker said. \u201cThat was a good day.\u201d He lowered his hand. As he did, his great-grandfather stared out from beneath a tilted, striped baseball cap. Repairing cars \u201cis a good living, an honest living, and you get to help people,\u201d Tinker said. \u201cSometimes, you are the hero of the day. That makes me feel good.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Joe Tinker;Johnny Evers;Chicago Cubs"}
{"id": "ny0056917", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/09/26", "title": "David Cameron to Apologize for Saying Queen \u2018Purred\u2019 Over Scottish Vote Result", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 By the arcane protocols governing monarchs and ministers, it was a moment that should never have happened. Caught by a television crew\u2019s microphone, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain was overheard during a visit to New York this week telling the former mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, that Queen Elizabeth II \u201cpurred\u201d when he called to inform her that Scottish voters had rejected independence in a referendum. \u201cThe definition of relief, if you are prime minister of the United Kingdom, is ringing up Her Majesty the Queen and saying \u2018Your Majesty, it is all right, it\u2019s O.K.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Cameron told Mr. Bloomberg. \u201cThat was something. She purred down the line.\u201d The language aside \u2014 purring on the phone is usually associated with a different kind of communication \u2014 Mr. Cameron\u2019s remarks were a kind of undiplomatic double whammy. As a constitutional monarch, the queen is not supposed to express political views, and the prime ministers who have regular contact with her \u2014 there have been 12, including Mr. Cameron, since her accession to the throne in 1952 \u2014 are not supposed to tell. Image Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, left, speaking on Tuesday with Michael R. Bloomberg at Bloomberg L.P. headquarters in New York. Credit Pool photo by Christopher Goodney \u201cThe queen has a special relationship with the prime minister, the senior political figure in the British government, regardless of their political party,\u201d the royal website explains . While the queen grants a weekly audience to the prime minister (her first such interlocutor was Winston Churchill), \u201cthese meetings, as with all communications between the queen and her government, remain strictly confidential,\u201d the website says. Mr. Cameron\u2019s call to Her Majesty last week was particularly momentous. Voters in Scotland had chosen to reject secession. The United Kingdom remained united. Arguably, she had good reason to purr. But now, Mr. Cameron has been obliged to apologize for what a Scottish lawmaker, Dennis Robertson, called his \u201ccrass and incompetent behavior.\u201d \u201cLook, I\u2019m very embarrassed by this,\u201d Mr. Cameron told reporters in New York. \u201cI\u2019m extremely sorry about it. It was a private conversation, but clearly a private conversation that I shouldn\u2019t have had and won\u2019t have again.\u201d His office has already expressed its regrets about the incident to the queen\u2019s office, he said. And he plans to offer her a personal apology at their next private audience. Details of that encounter will most likely not be divulged.", "keyword": "Great Britain;David Cameron;Elizabeth II,Queen Elizabeth;Scotland;Referendum;Politics;NYC;Mike Bloomberg;Etiquette;Constitution"}
{"id": "ny0263819", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2011/12/07", "title": "Web Site Offers Help Getting Deals on Electronics", "abstract": "IF only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car. There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer\u2019s lot, you couldn\u2019t escape the feeling that you hadn\u2019t gotten the best deal. Then something changed that made shopping for a car almost, well, fun, like shopping is supposed to be. That something was information. Much to the annoyance of the dealers, a car buyer could obtain reliable data on auto prices. For only a few dollars, Consumer Reports estimates what a dealer paid for the car and what, after a fair markup, the buyer should pay. A shopper often got enough information to know when it would be the best time to buy the car. Buying a camera or a smartphone isn\u2019t as easy because we lack information about prices. There is the illusion that the Internet has provided what we need to know about the prices, but that jumble of information makes any buying decision more confusing and anxiety producing. The fact of the matter is, the shopper is not on a level playing field with the retailers and the manufacturers. They know, thanks to the Internet, more about you and your intentions than you could ever know about theirs. Every time you look at a product on a site, every time you buy a product online, you are providing valuable signals. When companies scrape the Web and collect those billion of signals and sophisticated software collates the data and interprets it, you don\u2019t stand a chance. It is just too difficult and expensive for you to gather all the information. And in any case, you probably lack the degree in mathematics and computer science needed to parse the data. Yet nearly everything you spend money on is determined by the algorithms they create. The prices of your airline ticket and hotel room, even your rent, are determined this way. Electronics and other consumer goods are priced the same way. Over the last few years, price comparison sites like Pricegrabber.com and Bizrate.com have proliferated. Google and Bing have started providing similar information. That neatly solved the where-to-buy problem. Along came price tracking sites, like NexTag.com , that provide historical information. It is certainly useful to know where you can get a product for just a few dollars less, especially when those sites also calculate taxes and shipping costs for you. Price-alert sites like FreePriceAlerts.com inform you by e-mail when the price of a coveted item drops. That all these services are available on mobile devices that you can use in stores to determine the best price has certainly made shoppers a lot smarter. Perhaps the biggest consumer weapon arrived this year in the form of Decide.com . It is a Web site, and more recently an app for mobile devices , that collects and mines billions of transactions to determine what the best price is and whether there will be an even better price soon. \u201cIt\u2019s the first time when-to-buy is addressed,\u201d said Mike Fridgen, Decide\u2019s chief executive officer. For example, Decide.com said last week with 81 percent confidence that the Panasonic Viera 50-inch plasma TV (model TC-P50S30), a popular model, would drop within the next two weeks. It also predicted, with 62 percent confidence, that a new model would come along within three months. Scoff if you will, but a week before Thanksgiving , Decide.com was advising shoppers to hold off buying a 16-gigabyte iPad because it predicted a price drop. Apple did lower the price of that model by $41 on Black Friday , the big shopping day that follows Thanksgiving. Then again, it suggested you would be safe to buy the 64-gigabyte model before Thanksgiving, but Apple lopped $61 off the price on Black Friday. \u201cWe are not clairvoyants,\u201d said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor who co-founded Decide. \u201cWe give consumers visibility.\u201d Decide is run by many of the same people who built Farecast, a site that gave consumers a fighting chance against the airlines, which are constantly changing prices to match demand. \u201cConsumers have no access to big data,\u201d said Mr. Etzioni, who also founded Farecast. After he sold Farecast to Microsoft for $115 million \u2014 it is now part of the Bing search engine \u2014 Mr. Etzioni went looking for another consumer problem to solve. He discovered that there was also considerable price volatility in electronics. Certainly, over the long term, the prices of electronics steadily drop. But during the shelf life of a new product, prices rise and fall. And, to Mr. Etzioni\u2019s surprise, it was not random volatility. Companies were constantly changing prices to meet changing demand just like the airlines. That meant his company\u2019s computers could search the Web for prices of products \u2014 it looks at 10 billion of them in a 60-terabyte database \u2014 note changes and then look for patterns. It also searches for news reports and rumors in order to guess when new models may be coming out. Mr. Etzioni calls it \u201cscaling information extraction.\u201d He said that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, had recently stopped by his lab at the University of Washington and looked at Mr. Etzioni\u2019s research. \u201cHe was surprised by the degree of volatility in consumer electronic prices, which reminded me just how unaware even the most savvy people are of the prevalence of dynamic pricing in consumer electronics,\u201d he said. \u201cWe really feel the industry needs an honest broker,\u201d Mr. Etzioni said. The access to big data and analytics improves how we make decisions. That this information is available on mobile devices only enhances its utility. The increased information transparency coupled with the use of smartphones in stores is driving a consumer revolution, said Mr. Fridgen, because it provides shoppers the information they need when and where they need it. The balance of power has shifted, he says. Most retailers know that shoppers can easily find a better deal using their mobile devices. Almost half of American retailers have a policy allowing store personnel to negotiate prices, he says. As the software gets more refined, the power relationship between consumers and the retailers and makers will change, although, Mr. Etzioni concedes, it will never really be a level playing field. Guessing where prices are going is a big step forward. It was not easy, and it is still not complete. But Mr. Etzioni already has his eye on the next problem, which he says is even harder: a Web site that tells you what to buy. The decision-making process, it turns out, is remarkably complicated because he has to build an algorithm, a personalized \u201cvalue formula,\u201d that finds the sweet spot for each shopper. \u201cSome people value some things more than others,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we really see, and I am very excited by this, is the increased transparency,\u201d Mr. Etzioni said. \u201cThe inexorable trend is towards transparency.\u201d", "keyword": "Decide Inc;Shopping and Retail;Computers and the Internet;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Consumer Behavior;Electronics;Mobile Applications"}
{"id": "ny0166160", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/08/16", "title": "Market Share Gains Lift Profit at Staples\u2019", "abstract": "Staples, the office supplies retailer, said yesterday that its profit rose 19 percent in the second quarter, driven by market share gains in North America and strong back-to-school sales. Staples said its income rose to $161.2 million, or 22 cents a share, from $135.2 million, or 18 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales rose 12 percent, to $3.88 billion from $3.47 billion. Sales at North American stores open at least a year rose 4 percent, helped by strong sales of its mobile computing products, core office supplies, ink and toner products, and copying and printing services, along with an improved performance in office furniture. The company, which is trying to expand margins with private-label products, said it was on track to reach its goal of 20 percent of sales from Staples-brand products. Sales in the international unit rose 5 percent in local currency and 8 percent in dollars, Staples said. Shares were up 12 cents, or .05 percent, to $23.65.", "keyword": "Staples;Sales;North America;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0047202", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/11/11", "title": "As Federal Reserve Selects New Top Officials, Coalition Calls for Public Input", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A coalition of community groups and labor unions wants the Federal Reserve to change the way some Fed officials are appointed, criticizing the existing process as secretive, undemocratic and dominated by banks and other large corporations. In letters sent to Fed officials last week, the coalition called for the central bank to let the public participate in choosing new presidents for the regional reserve banks in Philadelphia and Dallas. The current heads of both banks plan to step down in the first half of 2015. The Fed\u2019s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, has agreed to meet on Friday with about three dozen representatives of the groups to hear their concerns. \u201cThe Federal Reserve has huge influence over the number of people who have jobs, over our wages, over the number of hours that we get to work, and yet we don\u2019t have discussion and engagement over what Fed policy should be,\u201d said Ady Barkan, a lawyer with the Center for Popular Democracy , a Brooklyn-based advocacy group that is orchestrating the campaigns. \u201cMore people\u2019s voices need to be heard.\u201d A spokeswoman for Ms. Yellen confirmed the meeting but declined to comment on the issues raised by the groups. The Philadelphia Fed said in an email that the institution \u201cis conducting a broad search for its next president and will consider a diverse group of candidates from inside and outside the Federal Reserve System.\u201d James Hoard, a spokesman for the Dallas Fed, said the bank\u2019s board would meet on Thursday to discuss the search process. The campaign is part of a broader increase in political pressure on the Fed, which is engaged in a long-running campaign to stimulate the economy that some liberals regard as insufficient and some conservatives see as both ineffective and dangerous. Mr. Barkan led a picket line in support of the Fed\u2019s efforts in August outside the annual monetary policy conference at Jackson Hole, Wyo. House Republicans, meanwhile, have passed legislation that seeks to reduce the Fed\u2019s flexibility in responding to economic downturns, arguing that such efforts are destabilizing. The Fed acts like a monolith, but it has a complicated skeleton. Most power rests with a board of governors in Washington, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But operations are conducted through 12 regional banks, each of which selects its own president. And those presidents rotate among themselves five of the 12 seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy. The two presidents who have said they plan to step down are, by coincidence, among the most outspoken internal critics of the Fed\u2019s campaign to stimulate the economy. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Fed since 2006, plans to retire on March 1. Richard W. Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed since 2005, is required to step down by the end of April, though he has not set a date. Image The regional Fed presidents Charles I. Plosser, left, of Philadelphia, and Richard W. Fisher of Dallas plan to retire next year. Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press and Jose Luis Magana/Reuters Their replacements will be selected by the board of each reserve bank. Each board has nine members, including three bankers, but under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, only the nonbank members can participate in the process. The banks in each reserve district, however, still elect three of those six nonbank members. The other three, including the chairman and vice chairman, are appointed by the Fed board in Washington. By law, the boards are supposed to represent a diverse set of viewpoints, including \u201clabor and consumers.\u201d But the 72 nonbank board members are predominantly corporate executives. Just eight are leaders of community groups; two more are leaders of labor groups. Corporate executives exclusively make up the boards of the St. Louis and Richmond regional banks. The Dallas Fed\u2019s board includes the presidents of the Houston Endowment \u2014 a charitable organization \u2014 and the University of Houston. The Philadelphia Fed has five executives and the president of the University of Delaware. \u201cI look at that list and it doesn\u2019t strike me that most of those folks are representing the public,\u201d Kati Sipp, director of Pennsylvania Working Families, a nonprofit advocacy group that is one of the signatories of the recent letter, said of the Philadelphia Fed\u2019s board. \u201cWe believe it is important for the people who are making economic policy to hear from the regular folks on the ground who are being affected by those decisions.\u201d The two dozen signatories also include the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, New Jersey Communities United and W. Wilson Goode Jr., a Philadelphia city councilman. The letter asks for the Fed to disclose basic information about the selection process, including the timetable, criteria and, eventually, names of candidates. It also seeks search committee seats and opportunities to question the candidates publicly. The selection process is secretive, but control has increasingly shifted from the regional banks to the board of governors. Beginning under the leadership of Alan Greenspan, a former Fed chairman, the central bank has sought presidents who can contribute to making monetary policy. The board provides informal guidance during the winnowing process, and candidates travel to Washington to meet with the governors. As a result of that trend, 10 of the 12 sitting presidents are former Fed staffers, economists or both. Mr. Fisher, a former investor, is one exception. The other is Dennis P. Lockhart, a former banker who leads the Atlanta Fed \u2014 and is the next president who will reach retirement age.", "keyword": "Federal Reserve;Appointments and Executive Changes;Richard Fisher;Charles I Plosser;Janet L Yellen;Banking and Finance"}
{"id": "ny0223990", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2010/11/06", "title": "Behind Dwight Howard, Magic Cruises Past Nets", "abstract": "Brook Lopez emerged in the Nets \u2019 locker room with a slight bruise under his right eye, a small memory from a night he would rather soon forget. Dwight Howard had 30 points and 16 rebounds and swarmed Lopez defensively, and the host Orlando Magic extended its recent dominance over the Nets with a 105-90 victory Friday night. Howard finished 9 for 13 from the field to power the Magic to its second straight win since it was routed by Miami last week. Howard, the N.B.A. \u2019s twice-reigning defensive player of the year, gave Brook Lopez fits in one of the worst offensive games of Lopez\u2019s brief career. \u201cIt didn\u2019t get there by itself,\u201d Lopez said, referring to the small bruise. Lopez missed his first 13 shots but finished with 10 points, most coming far too late to prevent the Nets\u2019 third straight loss. Orlando has beaten the Nets four consecutive times. Jameer Nelson scored 20 points, Vince Carter had 19, and the Magic went on a 17-4 run to go ahead by 20 points early in the fourth quarter to cruise to victory. It was the tightest game the Magic has had all season \u2014 including the preseason, in which the team won its seven games by an average of almost 25 points. Even its lone loss this season to the Heat was a 26-point rout that was never close. \u201cWe were winded,\u201d Howard said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t played that much since last season.\u201d BUCKS 94, PACERS 90 John Salmons scored 22 points to help Milwaukee beat host Indiana. Roy Hibbert had 14 points, 12 rebounds and 6 blocks, and he led the Pacers with four assists. But he shot 4 for 11 from the field and made six of Indiana\u2019s 19 turnovers. CAVALIERS 123, 76ERS 116 Anderson Varejao had 23 points and 12 rebounds, and Cleveland recovered in the fourth quarter, after blowing a 19-point lead, to win at Philadelphia. Philadelphia\u2019s Andre Iguodala left the game with a right Achilles\u2019 tendon strain and did not return. PISTONS 97, BOBCATS 90 Ben Gordon scored 20 points to lead Detroit to its first win of the season, over visiting Charlotte. HAWKS 113, TIMBERWOLVES 103 The reserve Jamal Crawford came back from a one-game absence because of a toe injury to score a season-high 22 points for Atlanta, which beat host Minnesota. CELTICS 110, BULLS 105 Kevin Garnett chased down Joakim Noah and tipped the ball away from behind with 14 seconds left as host Boston held on to beat Chicago in overtime. HORNETS 96, HEAT 93 Chis Paul had 13 points and 19 assists, and New Orleans remained unbeaten with a win over visiting Miami. Dwyane Wade gave up a 3-point attempt to tie and passed to Eddie House, whose shot rimmed out in the final seconds. JAMES\u2019S RESPONSE TO A RESPONSE A video apparently posted on YouTube by a Cleveland filmmaker remixes LeBron James\u2019s Nike commercial in which he asks, \u201cWhat should I do?\u201d The original ad was a response to the backlash from James\u2019s nationally televised announcement that he would sign with the Miami Heat after playing seven seasons in Cleveland. The YouTube video portrays Cleveland sports fans and their disgust with James, intercut with the commercial\u2019s original footage. Before tip-off against New Orleans, James said he had seen the video. \u201cIt was all right,\u201d he said. \u201cThey could have done a better job.\u201d FILL-IN COACH FOR GRIZZLIES Dave Joerger, a Memphis assistant, assumed head-coaching duties for the Grizzlies in their game against the Phoenix Suns. Coach Lionel Hollins and the assistant coach Johnny Davis were attending a private family service for their former teammate Maurice Lucas, who died Sunday.", "keyword": "Basketball;Orlando Magic;New Jersey Nets;National Basketball Assn"}
{"id": "ny0143438", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/10/03", "title": "Brainy Brand Names Where They\u2019re Least Expected", "abstract": "A FINANCIAL crisis, two wars, a presidential election. ... When there is so much for readers to think about, how do magazines aimed at thoughtful readers attract their attention? One such magazine, The Economist, is spoofing the game Twister, distributing pizza boxes that improbably bear its name and sponsoring a performance of political satire by the Second City theatrical troupe. Another such magazine, The Atlantic, plans to advertise on the muffin displays in bodegas, restaurant menu boards and the shampoo shelves of drugstores. The Atlantic is also producing video clips that show what happens when passers-by on city streets are invited to answer questions like \u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d and \u201cWhy do presidents lie?\u201d \u2014 questions that, to make them stand out, have also been reproduced as neon signs. In seeking readers and advertisers, publications like The Atlantic and The Economist, known as thought-leader magazines, have long tried to make up in cleverness what they lack in wallet power. Their ranks also include magazines like Harper\u2019s, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic and The New Yorker. The campaign for The Atlantic, with a budget estimated at $1.5 million, even evokes its identity as a thought-leader title; it carries the theme \u201cThink. Again.\u201d The campaign, which will also include a section of the magazine\u2019s Web site ( theatlantic.com/thinkagain ) is to begin on Monday. \u0095 The campaign for The Economist is arriving this week in Philadelphia after stopping in eight other markets, including Boston and Washington. The campaign, with a budget estimated at $5 million, carries the theme \u201cGet a world view.\u201d Both campaigns are indicative of the increasingly unusual efforts by the traditional media to catch the wandering eyes of younger readers as well as younger employees of media agencies who help decide where marketers buy ads. The theory is that they \u201cshould be jolted,\u201d said Justin Smith, president for consumer media at the Atlantic Media Company in Washington. \u201cWe felt there was a great opportunity, right now, to further inspire our readers and advertisers,\u201d he added. His counterpart at The Economist, Paul Rossi, who is based in New York, echoed Mr. Smith\u2019s decision to seize the moment, fraught as it might be with uncertainty. \u201cI think it\u2019s the best possible time\u201d for a campaign, said Mr. Rossi, executive vice president and managing director for the Americas at The Economist. \u201cWhat we have to say has never been more relevant,\u201d he added. \u201cWe write about the world, about connections between business and politics.\u201d The media company Pearson owns a 50 percent stake in The Economist through The Financial Times. The questions appearing in the campaign for The Atlantic are from articles published in the magazine. Some have stimulated newsstand sales, Mr. Smith said, citing the issue with the article about Google, which sold about 82,000 copies versus the recent average of 42,000. The circulation that The Atlantic guarantees to advertisers, known as a rate base, is 400,000 this year and is to be increased to 450,000 in 2009. That includes newsstand sales and subscriptions. The ads for The Atlantic in unexpected locales like bodegas are meant to reach media buyers where they eat, buy takeout food and shop. Those are \u201cplaces where people\u2019s brains are most at rest,\u201d said Michael Fanuele, managing director for strategy at the magazine\u2019s creative agency, Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York, part of Havas. The video clips, aimed at readers as well as advertisers, will be available on the Think Again section of The Atlantic Web site, and plans call for additional content to be added monthly. Previews of the clips offer a wide variety of responses from the passers-by. On the question \u201cWhy do presidents lie?,\u201d the replies ranged from \u201cWhy do we let them?\u201d to \u201cThere\u2019d be more problems if we told the truth.\u201d The neon signs, which also appear in print ads and posters, will decorate events sponsored by The Atlantic and eventually end up at the magazine\u2019s offices. \u201cWe hope to keep one or two for ourselves,\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Caba\u00e7o, chief creative officer for North America at Euro RSCG. Other agencies working on the campaign for The Atlantic are Cleverworks, for media buying, and the Rosen Group, for public relations. There are several agencies working on the campaign for The Economist: BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, for the creative content; PHD, also part of Omnicom, for media buying; Kinetic, a unit of the WPP Group, for outdoor ads; and Tentpole N.Y. for public relations and events like the Second City performance, part of a three-day program called Off the Page. \u201cIt\u2019s always a good time to read The Economist,\u201d said Andrew Robertson, chief executive at BBDO, \u201cbut if there ever was a good time to be reading The Economist, it\u2019s now.\u201d Originally, the ads run by The Economist in this country were adapted from a popular campaign for the magazine created in London by the Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO unit of BBDO. Headlines from that campaign \u2014 called the \u201cwhite-on-red campaign\u201d for its color scheme, borrowed from the logo of The Economist \u2014 include \u201cGreat minds like a think\u201d and Mr. Robertson\u2019s favorite, \u201cWould you like to sit next to you at dinner?\u201d \u0095 The idea behind the British campaign \u201cis that if you read it, you\u2019d be better informed, and therefore more successful,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich evolved into, you\u2019d be better informed, and therefore more interesting.\u201d The new ads with the Twister parody and the like are from the BBDO office in New York so they will more directly address American sensibilities, Mr. Robertson said, and provide \u201ca more specific explanation of what you\u2019ll get from reading The Economist.\u201d \u201cIf you look at some of the titles that compete with The Economist, their perspective is from the U.S. looking at the world,\u201d he added, \u201cwhereas with The Economist the focus is the world view.\u201d The rate base for The Economist in North America is 714,000. Its worldwide circulation \u2014 rate bases are not guaranteed outside North America \u2014 is almost 1.34 million.", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Economist The;Atlantic Monthly;Magazines;Online Advertising"}
{"id": "ny0200251", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/09/02", "title": "Fears of a Purge of Universities Grow in Iran", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 As Iran \u2019s universities prepare to start classes this month, there is growing concern within the academic community that the government will purge political and social science departments of professors and curriculums deemed \u201cun-Islamic,\u201d according to academics and political analysts inside and outside Iran. The fears have been stoked by speeches by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , and by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , as well as by confessions of political prisoners, that suggest that the study of secular topics and ideas has made universities incubators for the political unrest unleashed after the disputed presidential election in June. Ayatollah Khamenei said this week that the study of social sciences \u201cpromotes doubts and uncertainty.\u201d He urged \u201cardent defenders of Islam\u201d to review the human sciences that are taught in Iran\u2019s universities and that he said \u201cpromote secularism,\u201d according to Iranian news services. \u201cMany of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings,\u201d Ayatollah Khamenei said at a gathering of university students and professors on Sunday, according to IRNA, the state news agency. Teaching those \u201csciences leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.\u201d For years, the study of subjects like philosophy and sociology has been viewed suspiciously by Iranian conservatives. During the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution, the nation\u2019s leaders closed universities and tried to sanitize curriculums to fit their Islamic revolutionary ideology. The efforts ultimately failed under the weight of more pragmatic forces eager to engage with Western economies, and a student population hungry for contemporary ideas and contact with the West. But that failure never healed the ideological differences that have made it impossible for the nation and its hybrid elected and religious institutions to agree on one course, even one identity. In recent years, academics who attended conferences abroad, or took part in cultural exchange programs, were often vilified at home or viewed suspiciously. Some were arrested on charges of trying to organize a soft revolution. The recent speeches by the country\u2019s leaders suggest that they may no longer be willing to live with such ambiguity after months of unsuccessfully trying to extinguish the political and social crisis set off by the election. \u201cIran is going through a crisis of legitimacy for the regime, and the crisis is based on the regime\u2019s inability to respond to the demands for reform from the increasingly youthful population,\u201d said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London . \u201cThe only response it can think of is to stop teaching of the social sciences.\u201d Rasool Nafisi, an academic based in Virginia who is an expert on Iran, agreed: \u201cKhamenei\u2019s statement does not bode well for the Iranian universities.\u201d \u201cHe seems to try to pick up where the Islamic republic left off over two decades ago when the late Ayatollah Khomeini expressed similar aversion to \u2018Westoxicated learning\u2019 in the universities, and ordered dropping all but natural sciences from the university curricula,\u201d Mr. Nafisi said, referring to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini . The current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, called for \u201cthe promotion of a spiritual environment in universities\u201d and requested that the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad make this a \u201cserious concern,\u201d according to Iranian news services that reported on the comments the ayatollah made Sunday. During Mr. Ahmadinejad\u2019s first term in office, his administration forced out many professors and replaced them. \u201cI think that they don\u2019t like maybe new ideas to get to Iran,\u201d said an Iranian academic now living outside the country. \u201cThey don\u2019t like social and cultural figures in the Iranian society to become very popular. That is the aspect which makes problems for them.\u201d The state\u2019s renewed focus on education took center stage last week when the confession of a prominent reformer, Saeed Hajjarian, who had been the theoretician behind the reform movement, was broadcast on national television. The confession, dismissed by reform leaders as a reflection of the views of Mr. Hajjarian\u2019s jailers, provided a lengthy criticism of human sciences, especially sociology and political science. The confession also addressed Mr. Hajjarian\u2019s application of political theories to his own work, saying, \u201cFor these unworthy interpretations which became the cause of many immoral acts, I ask forgiveness of the Iranian people.\u201d In another development, Iran\u2019s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said that the government had prepared an updated nuclear proposal to give to the West, Iranian news services reported.", "keyword": "Iran;College;Politics"}
{"id": "ny0294084", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/06/01", "title": "Tested by Russia, NATO Struggles to Stay Credible", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 Six weeks before a critical summit meeting aimed at bolstering NATO\u2019s deterrence against a resurgent Russia, the alliance is facing a long list of challenges. The first is to find a country to lead the last of four military units to be deployed in Poland and the three Baltic nations. But that, analysts say, could be the least of its problems. Security concerns are as high now as they have been since the end of the Cold War. As the immigration crisis has strained relations within the Continent, anxieties have been heightened by Russian military offensives in Crimea and eastern Ukraine , and a bombing campaign in Syria that has demonstrated Moscow\u2019s rapidly increasing capabilities. Lately, Russia has talked openly about the utility of tactical nuclear weapons. Despite the growing threats, many European countries still resist strong measures to strengthen NATO . Many remain reluctant to increase military spending, despite past pledges. Some, like Italy, are cutting back. France is reverting to its traditional skepticism toward the alliance, which it sees as an instrument of American policy and an infringement on its sovereignty. And that is not to mention the declarations of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, that NATO is \u201cobsolete,\u201d that the allies are \u201cripping off\u201d the United States and that he would not really be concerned if the alliance broke up. While that may be campaign bluster, it does reflect a growing unwillingness in the United States to shoulder a disproportionate share of the NATO burden, militarily and financially. Image Georgian soldiers during a joint NATO military exercise with American and British service members at the Vaziani military base outside Tbilisi in May. Credit Zurab Kurtsikidze/European Pressphoto Agency The current concern, and a major element of what the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, calls \u201cthe biggest reinforcement of collective defense since the end of the Cold War,\u201d is the decision to put four combat battalions of up to 1,000 soldiers each in those front-line countries bordering Russia. While Britain, Germany and the United States have agreed to lead one battalion each, to be filled out with soldiers from other NATO allies to preserve the idea of multinational forces, leadership of the fourth is not yet in sight as the July 8-9 summit meeting in Warsaw rapidly approaches. The United States \u201cis not thinking about doing two,\u201d said its ambassador to NATO, Douglas E. Lute. \u201cWe\u2019re planning to do one and get our allies to step up\u201d for the other three. But other larger nations like Italy and France have declined. Italy cut military spending after pledging to increase it two years ago in Wales. Its leaders say it is already participating in a newly enlarged alliance rapid-reaction force. And France, which has reverted under the current Socialist government to a more mistrusting view of NATO and its American leadership, is stretched thin in its military campaigns in Mali, the Central African Republic and North Africa and Syria, let alone patrolling its own streets against terrorist attack. France is likely to contribute only about 150 soldiers to the new deployments, NATO officials say, after finally agreeing to the idea of forward deployments in Poland after initial opposition. Germany, which six months ago opposed these deployments, agreed in return for efforts at renewed dialogue with Russia. It also agreed to lead one battalion. So the search goes on for a fourth lead nation. Mr. Stoltenberg is confident it will be found by the summit meeting. The deployments are important, because these combat battalions are designed not to be simple tripwires, but to be large enough and sufficiently well equipped to do an invader real damage. Then they can be reinforced more quickly with the enhanced rapid-reaction force and \u2014 another NATO and American decision \u2013 to station another United States armored combat brigade of around 5,000 soldiers in Europe (for a total of three) and to pre-position its heavy equipment like tanks and artillery. Poland is demanding that some of that equipment be pre-positioned on its territory, but for the moment, most of it will go to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, which have storage and transport facilities dating from the Cold War. Only now, in fact, is NATO actually surveying the infrastructure \u2014 the bridges, roads and railways \u2014 of relatively newer member states in Central and Eastern Europe, not having judged it necessary before to plan how to quickly reinforce them in case of a Russian invasion. Pre-positioning in Eastern Europe would currently require large sums for capital investment to build special new warehouses and infrastructure, Mr. Lute said. Poland, eager to send messages to Moscow, did succeed in advancing groundbreaking for a ballistic missile defense site to coincide with the operational opening of one in Romania. While Mr. Stoltenberg and Washington insist that such missile defenses are not aimed at Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, Moscow is not convinced. Here, too, France has been skeptical, nervous that the reaction time of missile defense will circumvent the political oversight of the North Atlantic Council, the assembly of member states and their ambassadors that makes NATO decisions by consensus. For the same reason, France has been reluctant to allow the NATO supreme commander, who is always an American general, too much authority to act in a crisis, which others say is needed to respond quickly. But the initial missile defense program, combined with new forward deployments near Russia (to be rotated, to avoid calling them \u201cpermanent\u201d) and an enlarged rapid reaction force, supposedly ready to deploy in 48 hours, all are a measure of how much Russia\u2019s recent actions have changed NATO\u2019s calculations. NATO is trying to reassure vulnerable members like the Baltic States, Poland and even southern members, like Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey on the Black Sea, that the alliance intends to deliver on its promise of collective defense. Missile defense is part of the response, along with more naval exercises in the Black Sea and more consistent overflights by reconnaissance aircraft. Video Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said that troops needed to be placed in Poland to address growing international problems, citing Russia\u2019s aggression toward Ukraine and the refugee crisis. As Mr. Stoltenberg points out, the impact of Russian policy has finally pushed European members of NATO to at least halt the decades-long decline in military spending. This year, he said, estimates are that European allies will as a whole increase military spending, something Washington has been demanding, even though most are not yet spending the 2 percent of G.D.P. that is the NATO guideline. Some 16 of the 28 member states have increased military spending in real terms, with only Italy, Bulgaria and Croatia still cutting, although they insist that the cuts are temporary. \u201cI know the mood in Washington and I understand it: the Americans want to see the Europeans doing more, contributing more,\u201d Mr. Stoltenberg said. \u201cThis has been my main message in European capitals.\u201d Still, there is another troubling Russia-related issue for NATO \u2013 how to deal with a new Russian military doctrine that considers the utility of tactical nuclear weapons at the beginning of a conflict, as a deterrent against an adversary retaking territory, followed by what planners call \u201ca quick de-escalation.\u201d Some member nations believe that Russia already has nuclear weapons in the enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, where it publicly displayed nuclear warheads in a previous exercise. Russia has been unclear about whether they have been removed. While aware of public horror about using nuclear weapons, Mr. Stoltenberg, Mr. Lute and others emphasize that NATO \u201cremains a nuclear alliance\u201d and that its deterrence is meant to be \u201cseamless,\u201d ranging from responses to cyberattacks through conventional weapons and if necessary, nuclear weapons, too. NATO does not regard its nuclear arsenal as having any use other than political deterrence, Mr. Stoltenberg said. \u201cBut as long as nuclear weapons exist in the world,\u201d he said, \u201cwe have to remain a nuclear alliance.\u201d", "keyword": "NATO;Russia;US Foreign Policy;Military;Jens Stoltenberg;Douglas E Lute"}
{"id": "ny0180772", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2007/08/12", "title": "Far From the Reservation, but Still Sacred?", "abstract": "Yuma, Ariz. SQUINTING against the harsh desert sun, Mike Jackson, leader of the Quechan Indians, looks out past his tribe\u2019s casino and the modern sprawl of Yuma and points to the sandy flatlands and the rust-colored Gila mountain range shimmering in the distance. \u201cThey came this way,\u201d he says, describing how his ancestors followed the winding course of the Colorado River and ranged over hundreds of miles of what is now western Arizona and southeastern California. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of important history here, both for the Quechan and the U.S.\u201d And if it\u2019s up to him, that history will go a long way in determining the future of this corner of the West, one of the fastest-growing parts of the country and a place where developers are increasingly running up against newly powerful but tradition-minded American Indian leaders like Mr. Jackson. As president of the Quechans over the last decade, Mr. Jackson is leading a new kind of Indian war, this time in the courts. The battlegrounds are ancient sites like the religious circles, burial grounds and mountaintops across the West that Indians hold sacred and are protected by federal environmental and historic preservation laws. After successful smaller battles, Mr. Jackson is now challenging a bigger project, arguing that the construction of a planned $4 billion oil refinery in Arizona could destroy sites sacred to his tribe. What makes this case different from more traditional fights between Indians and developers is that the refinery isn\u2019t on the Quechan reservation or even next to it. In fact, the refinery is planned for a parcel of land some 40 miles to the east of the reservation, on the other side of Yuma and the Gila mountain range. But Mr. Jackson and the tribe\u2019s lawyers argue that before the land can be transferred to the company building the refinery, Arizona Clean Fuels, or construction can start, an exhaustive archaeological and cultural inventory must take place. The Quechans are not a large tribe. Also known as the Yuma Indians (they prefer the name Quechan, which means \u201cthose who descended\u201d), they number about 3,300 and their reservation on the California-Arizona border covers roughly 70 square miles. That is a small fraction of the size of lands the federal government set aside more than a century ago to better-known nations like the Apaches or Navajos. Mr. Jackson has already stopped two planned projects \u2014 a low-level nuclear dump and a $50 million gold mine on the California side of the border \u2014 both also well away from the Quechan reservation. This year, he helped defeat the nomination of a Bush administration official who favored the mine to a federal appellate court. LIKE the land itself, the fight over the refinery reflects a tangle of cultures and centuries of bitterness between Indians and newcomers. Mr. Jackson says it\u2019s about respect for Quechan culture, and a new willingness on the part of Indians to stand up to the local establishment after centuries of not having a say. Business and political leaders in Yuma argue that it\u2019s little more than a land grab by Mr. Jackson, a dubious attempt by the tribe to block much-needed development and assert claims to territory lost long ago. What\u2019s more, says Glenn McGinnis, chief executive of Arizona Clean Fuels, a preliminary inspection failed to turn up evidence of ruins near the site, which was privately owned for decades by local farmers but was later bought by the federal government to acquire water rights. In any case, Mr. McGinnis says he\u2019s committed to protecting any sacred remains that turn up once construction begins. But doing the more extensive survey sought by Mr. Jackson and the Quechans now would not only delay the project by months, it would also cost about $250,000, which Arizona Clean Fuels would be obligated to cover. The dispute is about more than money, though. It has also brought resentment of the tribe\u2019s newfound clout to the surface. David Treanor, vice president of Arizona Clean Fuels, calls the Quechans\u2019 stance \u201cpsychological imperialism\u201d and compares Mr. Jackson to Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, Venezuela\u2019s left-wing leader. Casey Prochaska, chairwoman of the Yuma County Board of Supervisors, adds: \u201cMy grandmother probably went across here in a covered wagon. This country didn\u2019t stop because they walked over this land.\u201d Indeed, the refinery isn\u2019t even the main issue for some business leaders. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of how far does their sphere of influence go,\u201d says Ken Rosevear, executive director of the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce. \u201cDoes it go clear to Phoenix? To Las Vegas? The whole West?\u201d Mr. Rosevear may be exaggerating, but his fear illustrates just what\u2019s at stake. If the Quechans\u2019 lawsuit succeeds, it would bolster the efforts of other, larger tribes to block development on territory where they also once lived and prayed. ALREADY, in northern Arizona, Navajos, Hopis and other Indians have effectively stopped plans to expand a ski resort roughly 50 miles from the nearest reservation, after convincing a federal appellate panel in March that using wastewater to make artificial snow would desecrate peaks long held sacred. Leaders of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, meanwhile, have been using similar arguments to block drilling for coal-bed methane near their reservation in Montana. Pumping water out of underground aquifers to extract natural gas will harm the spirits that inhabit the springs and streams where the Northern Cheyenne worship, says Gail Small, a Northern Cheyenne tribe member who heads Native Action, an environmental group she founded after graduating from law school. Adding weight to her argument is the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, passed by Congress in 1978, which acknowledges the link between native American religion and land both on and off the reservation. \u201cYou\u2019re seeing a real renaissance of tribes becoming aware of their cultural resources and heritage, and reclaiming that heritage even when it\u2019s off the reservation,\u201d says Robert A. Williams Jr., a law professor at the University of Arizona who has advised tribes on the legal issues surrounding off-reservation sacred sites. And, thanks to the rise of casino gambling on Indian reservations, many tribes now have the money to challenge natural resource companies, real estate interests and other wealthy players who have long held sway in the West. \u201cTribes no longer have to hope for or rely upon the efforts of outside environmental groups or pro bono law firms,\u201d says Joseph P. Kalt, director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. \u201cNot only are they much more sophisticated, but they have the money to fight for themselves.\u201d Mr. Jackson doesn\u2019t dispute that the opening of the popular Paradise Casino on his reservation in 1996 has shifted the balance of power in these parts. \u201cIt\u2019s made all the difference in the world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have the money to hire attorneys before; we didn\u2019t have the tools. We also learned how to play the political game in America that\u2019s been played against us in the past.\u201d During the winter months, when snowbirds fill local hotels, it\u2019s hard to find a spot in the Paradise Casino parking lot on some nights, and the casino generates an estimated $45 million a year in net revenue for the Quechans. Mr. Jackson isn\u2019t always against new development. The Quechans are considering building a second casino on the California side of the border, and he has faced protests of his own from tribal elders who argue that the $200 million project also happens to be on sacred ground. In June, the Quechan police force arrested tribe members protesting at the site of the new casino. Yuma officials like Ms. Prochaska call that hypocrisy, but Mr. Jackson says it\u2019s not up to them to decide what is sacred to Indians and what\u2019s not. The son and grandson of tribal leaders, Mr. Jackson, who is 60, says that in the past, \u201cthe government gave us funds just to survive and they didn\u2019t hear a word from our people.\u201d Now, he says, local leaders like Mr. Rosevear have to come to him. \u201cThey come, smile, and shake my hand, but they don\u2019t like it. Too bad. That is how the process is now.\u201d Glamis Gold, the Canadian mining company that sought to build the California mine, learned that the hard way several years ago. After investing $15 million, the company watched Mr. Jackson tie up the project with regulators. It was finally killed when Gray Davis, then the governor of California, issued an emergency order. Charles A. Jeannes, an executive at Glamis at the time, says the company tried to negotiate with Mr. Jackson. \u201cWe\u2019d told them we\u2019d discuss any number of kinds of compensation,\u201d says Mr. Jeannes, now executive vice president of Goldcorp, which acquired Glamis in 2006. \u201cBut we never got specific because they made it clear they wouldn\u2019t accept the mine.\u201d Mr. Jackson has a slightly different recollection. \u201cThey came and offered money, trucks and other things,\u201d he says. \u201cI told them I\u2019m not going to take one penny, and to get out of my office.\u201d In Quechan lore, dreams are sacred \u2014 they are a literal path to knowledge and power. So perhaps it\u2019s fitting that the refinery has been a business dream in Arizona for two decades, a long-talked-about project that if completed, would be the first new refinery constructed in the United States in more than 30 years. It\u2019s also a vision that could prove hugely profitable. Refining margins in the Southwest are among the healthiest in the country, while gasoline demand in Arizona, Nevada and California has been growing at twice the national average. And until Mr. Jackson and the Quechans challenged their plans, the 1,400-acre site seemed like the rare spot in America where a refinery might actually be welcomed. The last fruit orchard on the site died out decades ago, after the federal government acquired the land and bought up the water rights. The nearest homes are miles away. Now the silence is broken only by the sound of passing freight trains and the occasional rumble from the Army\u2019s Yuma Proving Ground. Earlier this year, the government transferred the land intended for the refinery to the local irrigation district, which in turn sold it to Arizona Clean Fuels for $15 million in March. It\u2019s this transfer that the Quechans are challenging in their suit, arguing that procedures required under federal law to protect Indian sites were not followed properly. Mr. McGinnis, a soft-spoken veteran refining executive who retains the accent of his native Toronto, says he is sensitive to the tribe\u2019s worries. And unlike other officials, he shies away from criticizing Mr. Jackson or the Quechans. \u201cBut there\u2019s not a whole lot here,\u201d he says, pointing to the furrowed ground and a few remaining tree stumps bleached white by the sun. \u201cThe probability of finding any relics is next to zero because the land has been disturbed and farmed for a long, long time. But we\u2019ll bring in surveyors to walk the site, and I committed to that two years ago.\u201d Bringing in experts once the project is under way isn\u2019t enough for Mr. Jackson. He says that he\u2019s not against the refinery but merely wants experts to survey 100 percent of the land now, before any land transfer is approved by the courts. Still, it\u2019s clear he\u2019s not happy that the government is selling land to private buyers like Arizona Clean Fuels. \u201cIf they have no use for it, give it back to us,\u201d he says of the federal government\u2019s move. \u201cWe know how to protect it; it\u2019s our ancestral land.\u201d FOR Arizona Clean Fuels and Mr. McGinnis, the Quechan lawsuit couldn\u2019t have come at a worse time. After years of negotiations, the company renewed its state emissions permit last September. Now, Arizona Clean Fuels, which is owned by individual investors in the Western United States, is seeking an outside institutional backer with deep-enough pockets to put up the initial $1.5 billion to start construction and eventually borrow an additional $2.5 billion to finish the refinery by 2011. Mr. McGinnis says he\u2019s negotiating with two investor groups over that crucial $1.5 billion initial investment. But the lawsuit is a distraction for him, and a worry for any potential financial backer. \u201cWe spend half our time dealing with our attorneys on this when we should be dealing with other things,\u201d he says. The tribe\u2019s effort to seek a preliminary injunction was rejected in federal district court in late June, but now the Quechans are appealing to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, a traditionally liberal panel that has been sympathetic to Indian claims in the past, including the suit over the ski resort. Both sides seem to be digging in, even though Mr. Jackson has never visited the refinery site, and Mr. McGinnis has never spoken directly to Mr. Jackson. \u201cWe\u2019ve had many doors slammed in our face in the past,\u201d says Mr. Jackson, sitting in the tribe\u2019s council chambers on the reservation. \u201cBut that\u2019s the old way. Today, my foot is in the door and I\u2019m going to kick it wide open for my people.\u201d Mr. McGinnis avoids responding to that challenge. Because of the lawsuit, he says he hasn\u2019t picked up the phone to call Mr. Jackson directly, but adds that \u201cour attorneys have requested meetings and I\u2019ll sit down with him anywhere and anytime he wants.\u201d That\u2019s not likely to happen soon, and Mr. Jackson says he is willing to take the suit to the Supreme Court if necessary. As was the case with the gold mine, he doesn\u2019t seem interested in a financial settlement with Arizona Clean Fuels but is focused on the land itself. \u201cWe\u2019re a tenacious people,\u201d he says, citing earlier fights of a different kind between the Quechans and the Spanish, the Mexicans and the United States cavalry. \u201cWe\u2019re still here. The cavalry is gone.\u201d", "keyword": "Indians American;Southwestern States (US);Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Mines and Mining"}
{"id": "ny0171214", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/18", "title": "With Parents Ill, Happiness Seems Worlds Away", "abstract": "\u201cAll my happiness was in Poughkeepsie,\u201d said Kajahda McKoy, 9, sitting on her bed. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she looked out her window in her family\u2019s three-bedroom basement apartment in the Bronx. \u201cBut all of that is gone,\u201d she said. \u201cSince I came out here, I\u2019ve been crying.\u201d She and her 15-year-old brother, Demeek, worry when their father, Danny McKoy, 45, stumbles. An accident at work in December crushed his legs. After three operations, a network of pins, rods and screws allows him to stand with a cane. But his body has begun rejecting the hardware. The incision in his right ankle is infected and will not heal. They also worry when their mother, Reggina McKoy, 37, is bent over in pain or nauseated. Surgery in 2004 did not rid her body of ovarian cancer, and she needs further treatment. But recently, her Medicaid coverage was suspended \u2014 Mrs. McKoy says it was a mistake \u2014 and without it, she has skipped some of her checkups. \u201cIf I lose my mother, I might freak out,\u201d Kajahda said. \u201cIf I lose them both, I\u2019m done for.\u201d On a recent afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. McKoy sat at a small kitchen table discussing their troubles. Kajahda joined them and fell into her father\u2019s arms. Demeek stood quietly in the doorway leading to the living room, which is furnished with plastic lawn chairs. \u201cIf I have to choose between me and getting something for my kids, I will choose my kids,\u201d Mrs. McKoy said. Kajahda and Demeek wish their parents did not have to make such decisions. They do what they can to help. Demeek got an after-school job at the local Y.M.C.A. to pay a few bills. Kajahda wishes she could work, too. At school, she expressed this desire in an essay, and Ms. McKoy received a call of concern from Kajahda\u2019s teacher. \u201cIt is hard to see your kids have to go through this,\u201d Mrs. McKoy said. \u201cThey should be kids, not having to worry about Con Edison, the rent; that should be my job.\u201d In Poughkeepsie, Mrs. McKoy earned a good living as a case worker, including, briefly, at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. It is one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund . The family had a four-bedroom house with a yard for a dog. Their troubles began with the diagnosis of cancer in 2003. Mrs. McKoy could not work full time. Credit cards and $30,000 in savings kept them afloat for a while. But by 2005, they were in debt and lost their home. The family had few choices. Mrs. McKoy\u2019s mother in the Bronx took them in for a time. Then, with the $2,500 a month Mr. McKoy was earning at his new job with a sanitation company, they got a run-down apartment for $1,625 a month in the Bronx. Soon after moving in, they began seeing mice. Rats followed. Heat and hot water worked sporadically. After Mr. McKoy\u2019s accident, they lived on the $1,600 in workers\u2019 compensation and the $848 in disability he received each month, but began falling behind in rent. In March, they went to housing court to fight eviction. Mrs. McKoy arrived with a dead rat from the apartment to show why it was unlivable. The judge ruled they were not required to pay any back rent but had three months, rent-free, to find a new home. Mrs. McKoy found a new apartment. It was cheaper, $1,300 a month, and ratless. But there was a problem: They needed a security deposit, money for moving costs and two months\u2019 rent, while they had only enough for one. The Jewish Council helped out with a month\u2019s rent. Then the McKoys\u2019 real estate agent paid the security deposit, and Mrs. McKoy\u2019s former employer, Catholic Charities, provided $643 for their move. The money from Catholic Charities was available through annual money donated by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. \u201cThat was the happiest day,\u201d Mrs. McKoy said. But the emotion was fleeting. \u201cWe used to be a family that laughed together. I don\u2019t hear my children laugh anymore.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;Medicine and Health;Medicaid;Bronx (NYC);Families and Family Life;New York State;Poughkeepsie (NY);Housing"}
{"id": "ny0247805", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/05/17", "title": "Japan: U.S. Agency to Stop Monitoring Nuclear Plant", "abstract": "The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday that its 24-hour operations center had stopped monitoring the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because the situation there had improved. \u201cThe conditions at the Japanese reactors are slowly stabilizing,\u201d said William Borchardt, the agency\u2019s chief staff official. \u201cAs conditions have continued to improve and the Japanese continue to implement their recovery plan, the N.R.C. has determined that it is time to adjust our response,\u201d he said. The agency still has a team of engineers in Tokyo, he said. Mr. Borchardt said last week that the condition of the reactors was \u201cstatic but not stable.\u201d", "keyword": "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan);Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Nuclear Regulatory Commission;Japan"}
{"id": "ny0254649", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/07/24", "title": "Red Sox\u2019 Rally Sends Mariners to Their 14th Straight Loss", "abstract": "Josh Beckett pitched seven strong innings, Jacoby Ellsbury hit a go-ahead two-run single in the seventh and the host Red Sox beat Seattle, 3-1, in Boston on Saturday night. The Mariners \u2019 loss was their 14th straight. Manager Terry Francona earned his 1,000th victory as Boston moved a season-high three games ahead of the Yankees for the lead in the American League East. Seattle\u2019s losing streak ties the franchise record, set in 1992. The Mariners loaded the bases in the eighth against reliever Daniel Bard, but he got out of the jam and has held teams scoreless in 24 straight innings across 23 outings, the longest active shutout streak in the majors. The only run allowed by Beckett (9-3) came in the seventh, on Mike Carp\u2019s second homer in two nights since he was recalled from Class AAA Tacoma. ROYALS 5, RAYS 4 After host Kansas City tied the score on Alex Gordon\u2019s double with two outs in the ninth, Eric Hosmer doubled home the winning run in the 10th. Tampa Bay now trails first-place Boston by nine and a half games, the Rays\u2019 largest deficit to date. The Rays loaded the bases in the 10th with none out but failed to score against Joakim Soria (5-3). Outfielder Desmond Jennings, in his season debut for Tampa Bay, tripled, doubled, scored twice, drove in a run and stole a base. RANGERS 5, BLUE JAYS 4 Michael Young drove in the winning run with a two-out single in the bottom of the ninth inning as Texas rallied for two runs against Toronto\u2019s bullpen for its 14th victory in 16 games. Mike Napoli scored the tying run on Elvis Andrus\u2019s squeeze bunt. TWINS 4, TIGERS 1 Scott Baker (8-5) pitched five scoreless innings in his first start since July 5 as host Minnesota beat Detroit for the first time in 12 tries. Joe Nathan finished for his seventh save. ORIOLES 3, ANGELS 2 Adam Jones homered and drove in two runs for host Baltimore. In his last eight games, he has four homers and nine runs batted in. REDS 11, BRAVES 2 Edgar Renteria replaced the injured shortstop Zack Cozart and drove in three runs, rallying host Cincinnati from a 2-1 deficit. Cozart, a rookie, hyperextended his left elbow while trying to make a tag in the fourth inning, and Renteria came off the bench. His two-run double off Derek Lowe (6-8) started a three-run rally in the sixth that put the Reds ahead. X-rays on Cozart\u2019s elbow were negative, and there was no immediate word on how long he would be out. PHILLIES 8, PADRES 6 Michael Martinez\u2019s three-run homer broke a 4-4 tie in the seventh for host Philadelphia, which beat San Diego for the ninth straight time. Chase Utley homered twice, and Ryan Howard started a five-run seventh with a pinch homer off Chad Qualls (4-5), tying the score. CARDINALS 9, PIRATES 1 Lance Berkman and Yadier Molina homered in a five-run fifth inning, and St. Louis beat host Pittsburgh for the second straight night. The Pirates dropped into third place behind the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cardinals in the National League Central. CUBS 5, ASTROS 1 Randy Wells pitched six strong innings for his first victory since April 4, and Geovany Soto hit a solo homer and a run-scoring single for host Chicago. Marlon Byrd also homered for the Cubs, who on Sunday will try to win a third straight game for the first time this season. After winning in his season debut against Arizona, Wells missed nearly two months with a right forearm strain, then went 0-3 with a 7.38 earned run average in nine starts. D\u2019BACKS 12, ROCKIES 3 Justin Upton drove in six runs, four on his second career grand slam, and Miguel Montero drove in five runs for host Arizona. Troy Tulowitzki hit his team-leading 19th home run for Colorado. GIANTS 4, BREWERS 2 Ryan Vogelsong (8-1) of host San Francisco allowed two runs, but his five innings allowed him to qualify again for the N.L. E.R.A. lead, at 2.10. RANGERS\u2019 BELTRE TO D.L. The Rangers placed the All-Star third baseman Adrian Beltre on the 15-day disabled list with a strained left hamstring, sustained Friday as he ran the bases. Beltre, who is hitting .276 with a team-high 76 R.B.I., is expected to miss two to three weeks. ... Orioles left fielder Luke Scott will miss the rest of the season with torn labrum in his right shoulder, an injury that sharply limited his swing. ... The Blue Jays designated the left-handed starter Jo-Jo Reyes for assignment, one day after he allowed eight runs in a 12-2 loss to Texas.", "keyword": "Baseball;Seattle Mariners;Boston Red Sox;Atlanta Braves;Cincinnati Reds;Renteria Edgar;Sports Injuries;Cowart Zack"}
{"id": "ny0155441", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/06/03", "title": "Documents Said to Be Seized From Crane Owner\u2019s Offices", "abstract": "Prosecutors investigating a fatal crane collapse on East 91st Street have taken away boxes of documents and computers from the offices of the crane\u2019s owner, New York Crane and Equipment, two people involved in the inquiry said on Monday. The investigation moved forward as insurers for the crane company acknowledged for the first time that the crane\u2019s turntable \u2014 the device that swivels at the top of the tower \u2014 was a rebuilt version of one removed from another construction project on the West Side last spring after a dangerous crack was discovered in a steel part. Bill J. Smith, president of claims and risk management for NationsBuilders Insurance Services, said that New York Crane had sent the damaged turntable to a welding company in New Jersey for repair after the crack was discovered in May 2007. The cracked part and other aging components were replaced, and the rebuilt turntable was welded back together, Mr. Smith said. Investigators now believe that an inadequate weld on the rebuilt turntable is the cause of last Friday\u2019s accident, in which the top of the crane broke away from the tower, killing two workers. Mr. Smith, who examined the turntable after the accident, said that a visual inspection of the weld suggested that it had not adequately penetrated the metal to \u201cmarry\u201d the two pieces of steel that it was supposed to hold together. But Mr. Smith also said that weld had been tested and inspected on two occasions by specialists and that each time it had been certified as having been properly done. He said investigators and specialists would have to determine what went wrong and why testing did not show a problem with the weld. He also said that the preliminary inspection was not conclusive, and that investigators would have to explore other possible causes, including that the crane may have been overloaded. He said that the 91st Street job was the first for the turntable since it was repaired. The crane went up there on April 20 and 21, according to Buildings Department records. \u201cMr. Lomma, based on industry standards, did his portion of what he should have done,\u201d Mr. Smith said, referring to the owner of New York Crane, James F. Lomma. \u201cHe had third-party certified welders do it, had an additional third party come in to certify the welds that were done. And he had another third party come to inspect the crane before it went back to work.\u201d He added, \u201cAll three companies moved the crane forward.\u201d NationsBuilders is 50 percent liable for any damages that Mr. Lomma might be forced to pay. Mr. Smith was unable to say whether the City Buildings Department knew that New York Crane was returning the repaired turntable to service or whether the city had authorized the company to do so. Friday\u2019s accident, in which the crane\u2019s cab and boom toppled and crashed into a 23-story apartment building across 91st Street, was the second fatal crane accident in the city in ten weeks. On March 15, a crane collapsed at a construction site on East 51st Street, falling onto nearby buildings and leaving seven dead. That crane was also owned by New York Crane. In that case, however, the investigation has focused on possible mistakes made when workers for a contractor operating the crane were adding sections to make the crane taller, a process known as jumping. But New York Crane has come in for increased scrutiny in the wake of the second accident. Within hours of the accident on Friday, investigators arrived with search warrants at three separate offices used by the company, two in Kearny, N.J., and one in Maspeth, Queens, according to one person familiar with the investigation. The accident, at East 91st Street and First Avenue, is being investigated by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, the city\u2019s Department of Investigation and Buildings Department, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Mr. Lomma has not returned repeated phone calls since Friday, and additional attempts to reach him on Monday were unsuccessful. His company is one of the most active of a small group of firms in the New York area that provide tower cranes for construction jobs. On high-rise projects in New York, the cranes are typically leased by a concrete contractor, which hires special crews to set up and operate the cranes. The crane that fell on Friday was built in 1984. It was a model known as a Kodiak, a favorite among concrete contractors, who think of it as a reliable workhorse, according to industry experts. Of the 25 tower cranes in use in the city on Friday, six were owned by New York Crane, according to the Buildings Department. The city has suspended the use of all Kodiak cranes until they can be inspected. Mr. Lomma is highly regarded in the crane industry, according to several people interviewed. Kevin J. Cunningham, an executive vice president of NationsBuilders, the insurance company, said that Mr. Lomma had played a leading role in industry associations since the mid-1990s to raise certification standards for crane operators. He also helped set new guidelines for contracts to increase protections for crane owners who rent out their equipment, in the event it is used improperly. \u201cIn the old days, the crane operator would sign anything to get the work,\u201d Mr. Cunningham said. \u201cWhen there is a serious accident, the crane owner\u2019s name is all over the equipment, and they get sued. But from our position, they are not the responsible party at all.\u201d Mr. Lomma may have reaped the rewards of those protections last year after the crack was discovered in the crane turntable on West 46th Street. The crane on that project was leased by Sorbara Construction, a concrete company, the same company that leased the crane at 91st Street. Mr. Smith said that Sorbara and its insurance company agreed to pay for the turntable repairs. There was no response to repeated telephone messages left for Sorbara officials. Mr. Lomma\u2019s companies, though, have had their share of issues. OSHA has issued three violations in the last several years, and Mr. Lomma\u2019s companies have paid $2,550 in penalties. Mr. Lomma has several companies, including New York Crane and J. F. Lomma, which rents and leases heavy construction equipment. Several dozen cranes of varying sizes are listed on J. F. Lomma\u2019s Web site, including some that can lift more than 400 tons. That list includes three types of Kodiak tower cranes.", "keyword": "Derricks and Cranes;Accidents and Safety;Upper East Side (NYC);New York Crane and Equipment;NationsBuilders Insurance Services;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0075593", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/05/05", "title": "Dean Skelos, Albany Senate Leader, Aided Son at All Costs, U.S. Says", "abstract": "Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son. He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son\u2019s commissions. He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more \u2014 or risk having the senator subvert the bid. The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure. The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two. The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son\u2019s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it. Adam Skelos took to using a \u201cburner\u201d phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times. At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not \u201cjust send smoke signals or a little pigeon\u201d carrying a message. The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to \u201cmonetize\u201d the senator\u2019s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son. The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos \u2014 nearly $220,000 in total \u2014 would influence his father\u2019s actions. Glenwood, one of the state\u2019s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm\u2019s parent company by Glenwood\u2019s founding family and a senior executive. The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause. Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance. Image Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, discussed the case involving Dean G. Skelos and his son, Adam. Credit Eduardo Munoz/Reuters After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.) Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son\u2019s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck. \u201cMazel tov,\u201d his father replied. Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy , the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.) The assistance paid off: With the senator\u2019s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business. But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials. Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. \u201cI tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,\u201d he said. Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. \u201cSomebody feels like they\u2019re just getting jerked around the last two years,\u201d the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as \u201ccoded language.\u201d The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. \u201cAll claims that are in will be taken care of,\u201d the senator said. AbTech\u2019s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would \u201close the ability to pay for things.\u201d Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling \u201cbecause that doesn\u2019t show up on the phone bill,\u201d as he told Mr. White. In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled. In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be \u201cvery, very vague\u201d on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. \u201cRight now we are in dangerous times, Adam,\u201d he told him. A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him \u201creal advice\u201d about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone. \u201cYou can\u2019t talk normally,\u201d he told his father, \u201cbecause it\u2019s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It\u2019s just [expletive] frustrating.\u201d \u201cIt is,\u201d his father agreed.", "keyword": "Adam Skelos;Dean G Skelos;New York;Corruption;Preet Bharara;Nassau County NY;State legislature"}
{"id": "ny0055130", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/07/14", "title": "Bergdahl Is Set to Resume Life on Active Duty", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Six weeks after being released from five years in Taliban captivity, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is expected to return to life as a regular Army soldier as early as Monday, Defense Department officials said late Sunday. Sergeant Bergdahl has finished undergoing therapy and counseling at an Army hospital in San Antonio, and will assume a job at the Army North headquarters at the same base, Fort Sam Houston, the officials said. He is also expected to meet with Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, the officer who is investigating the circumstances of Sergeant Bergdahl\u2019s disappearance from his outpost in Afghanistan in 2009. Sergeant Bergdahl\u2019s transfer from the therapy phase to a regular soldier\u2019s job is part of his reintegration into Army life, officials said. He will live in barracks and have two other soldiers help him readjust. The sergeant has been an outpatient at the hospital for about three weeks, during which time he continued to participate in debriefings about his time as a Taliban prisoner. He was released six weeks ago in exchange for five senior Taliban detainees. Last Thursday, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, released letters from each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supporting the repatriation of Sergeant Bergdahl, a rebuttal to critics who said the swap should not have been made.", "keyword": "Bowe Bergdahl;Afghanistan War;Prisoner of war;Taliban;Afghanistan;US Military;US Army"}
{"id": "ny0225547", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/10/16", "title": "France: Government to Alter laws on Roma Expulsions", "abstract": "The government is willing to alter some laws in response to European Commission complaints that followed France \u2019s expulsions of Gypsies, or Roma, to countries in Eastern Europe, officials said Friday. France has been locked in a standoff with the European Union \u2019s head office over its expulsion of some of Europe\u2019s poorest minorities, and the commission had given it until a deadline to comply with its directive on freedom of movement across the 27-nation union \u2014 or face legal action. The French Foreign Ministry said laws would be amended by the deadline to comply with European Union regulations, but it did not provide the exact changes to be made.", "keyword": "Romani People;France;European Commission;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0163926", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2006/02/22", "title": "Cohen Ends a Long Night by Edging Ahead of Slutskaya", "abstract": "TURIN, Italy, Feb. 21 - The stage could not have been any larger or come with any more pent-up anticipation, but Sasha Cohen charged into her Olympic short program with the kind of guts and nerve she had never mustered before. Given the cruel, pressure-packed position of performing last among 29 skaters Tuesday night, Cohen showed she could not only weather the occasion but rise to it. At the end of a nearly flawless performance, Cohen beamed and lingered on the ice at the Palavela, enjoying the best part of skating last -- she had to yield the ice to no one. She waved and curtsied and beamed some more, turning what had been a raucous pro-Italian crowd into a pro-Sasha one. \"When I was finished with my performance, I just wanted to soak it in,\" she said. \"Everyone's so quick to get off, but we work so hard for this, it's nice to spend two minutes or so to enjoy what you've accomplished.\" When she finally did skate off, she landed in the hug of her 76-year-old coach, John Nicks, who celebrated Cohen's scores by raising her right arm as if she were the winner of a prize fight. And that, essentially, is what she was. Cohen outdueled the favorite, Irina Slutskaya of Russia, by three-hundredths of a point, 66.73 to 66.70. The 27-year-old Slutskaya, the defending world champion, skated more than an hour and a half earlier than Cohen -- they were separated by 11 skaters and one Zamboni sweep -- but had left a door slightly open for Cohen. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan, the 2004 world champion, was less than a point behind in third place, with 66.02. Their three-way battle will culminate with the long program Thursday night. For that, Slutskaya drew the nerve-rattling last position. Cohen will skate four slots earlier, second in the final group, made up of the top six finishers in the short program. Kimmie Meissner, a 16-year-old from the United States, will also be in that final group. She hit a triple-triple jump combination and landed in fifth place with a score of 59.40; Fumie Suguri of Japan was fourth (61.75). Cohen, 21, was refusing to look ahead in the minutes after the short program. She said that was what she had learned from her experience at the last Olympics -- not to get ahead of herself. In Salt Lake City in 2002, Cohen was third after a terrific short program, but she faltered in the free skate and dropped out of the medals to fourth. She said she was so focused on winning that she forgot about what it took to get there. \"Everybody really wants an Olympic gold medal, but it's what you are willing to put yourself through to get it,\" she said. \"I want it, but I definitely do not let it be my main focus here. I think about it every day, of course. I think, Wouldn't it be nice to take one of those home? But my job here is to enjoy the process, have fun with every moment. \"It's kind of what you have to follow to get there.\" Slutskaya was talking the same game after the short program, answering most questions with a variation on one theme. \"I skated great,\" she said. \"This was important for me.\" Slutskaya did not seem as strong on the ice Tuesday night as she had in winning last year's world championships. She wore a purple jumpsuit with sequins that lighted up like fireworks. Her jumps were strong, but she wobbled on her spirals and did not have her usual speed. Cohen's jumps, in contrast, were not quite as strong, but she glided easily through her trademark spiral sequence. As a result, Slutskaya had the highest technical scores of the night, but Cohen made up for it by earning the highest component, or artistic, scores. Cohen wore a bright turquoise dress and her usual glamour-girl makeup, but she showed far more substance under the surface. Nicks, the coach Cohen worked with when she was younger, then returned to just over a year ago, has always described the toughness he believed was under Cohen's porcelain doll exterior. But until now, Cohen remained notorious for wilting under pressure. \"Well, she's been very much more mature and training really hard,\" Nicks said. \"Tonight was a good start, a very good start, but it was only a start.\" The long program Thursday night will now carry double the pressure. Until then, Cohen will enjoy what she has already accomplished. She steps into the limelight after spending the past several weeks under nearly everyone's radar. She won her first national title in January, but the focus turned to Michelle Kwan and her successful petition onto the Olympic team. Then, just as Cohen arrived in Turin, Kwan pulled out. Once again, instead of the attention shifting to her, it went to Kwan's replacement, 17-year-old Emily Hughes. In the short program, Hughes's limited experience showed. She skated without mistakes and finished seventh. Hughes came with the built-in interest of being the younger sister of Sarah Hughes, the 2002 gold medalist, who was in the stands waving a giant \"Hughes\" banner. \"I was nervous tonight,\" Sarah said afterward. \"I was happy she skated well, but it was hard to watch.\" Much of the crowd had the same experience when it came time for its favorite, Carolina Kostner of Italy, to skate. Kostner, 19, finished third at last year's world championships and was third in the recent European championships, raising her country's hopes for a triumphant Olympics at home. But Kostner fell on the first jump of her planned triple-triple combination and slid to a dispiriting 11th place. She was the second-to-last to skate, right ahead of Cohen. \"It's been a long night,\" she said. \"To wait for so long is difficult.\" Cohen used to think that way, back when battling nerves was her biggest challenge. Now, she says, the waiting is all part of the process. And she is trying to enjoy every last minute of it. \"It was a really wonderful experience for me tonight,\" Cohen said. \"To be able to skate my best after all that at the end of the night was just wonderful. I had a great time out there. I'm happy with this moment.\" She had, after all, made it her own.", "keyword": "SLUTSKAYA IRINA;COHEN SASHA;ICE SKATING;OLYMPIC GAMES (2006);WINTER GAMES (OLYMPICS);OLYMPIC GAMES;FIGURE SKATING"}
{"id": "ny0010011", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/02/17", "title": "Dr. Wheelchair Keeps Things Rolling", "abstract": "On Roosevelt Island, Mike Acevedo, 54, is known as Dr. Wheelchair, because he has been keeping patients at the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility rolling since 1976. Most of the 1,300 patients require wheelchairs in this sprawling complex across the East River from Manhattan, the largest long-term care center run by the city\u2019s Health and Hospitals Corporation. \u201cThis is called the wheelchair diagnostic repair center, but it\u2019s basically a wheelchair pit-stop,\u201d the good doctor said in his basement shop on Tuesday where he leads a staff that builds, maintains and repairs a stock of more than 2,000 wheelchairs. \u201cThe wheelchair is their freedom, and my job is to keep them going,\u201d said Mr. Acevedo, who is divorced with two grown children. He turns 55 on Wednesday and will be eligible to retire. He has no plans to do so \u2014 at least until he cashes in on an invention he\u2019s developing on the side: a self-charging wheelchair. \u201cThis is my home \u2014 it\u2019s all I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d said Mr. Acevedo, who grew up in the Bronx and became fascinated by electronics. He tried studying prosthetics at New York University, he said, \u201cbut I realized I was allergic to the plaster of paris used for making the molds.\u201d So, still in his teens, he began working at the Coler-Goldwater shop, which dates to the opening of the hospital in 1939. In the early years, he said, veterans made chairs for amputees coming home from battle. When Mr. Acevedo first joined the shop, there were still some old wooden wheelchairs around. He trained under a group of Vietnam veterans who developed early motorized wheelchairs by installing motors under the seats of the big bulky Goldwater chairs and equipping them with steering columns, he recalled. The chairs were belt-driven, had big wheels and were tough to steer. But Mr. Acevedo kept innovating, adding joysticks and electronic controls that he stripped from remote control model airplanes. He found ways to mount ventilators on the chairs, for bronchial patients. \u201cNow with today\u2019s chairs,\u201d he said, walking past rows of brand-new motorized wheelchairs ready for calibration, \u201cpatients can control them with their foot, their toe, their chin, their breath \u2014 even their eyeballs.\u201d Some of his patients roll all over the city. \u201cOne guy, I fixed his chair, and then I see him out in it on Steinway Street buying a hot dog,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a woman who rides her chair the length of Queens Boulevard to Jamaica. Another woman takes her chair on the subway to visit her old neighborhood in the Bronx.\u201d For these patients, wheel changes are more frequent, he said, as he walked by bins full of wheels, rails, armrests, control modules, seat cushions, motors and rechargeable batteries. There were lightweight fold-up chairs and heavy-duty ones for heavy patients. \u201cThis can handle a 600-pound person,\u201d he said, patting one throne-on-wheels. Then there were the sleek, titanium road-racers, and the chairs used by the Goldwater Swipers basketball team, for which Mr. Acevedo served as team mechanic. He walked deeper into the cavernous storage areas, surveying hundreds of faded, bulkier units that make the shop something of a wheelchair museum. \u201cI just love this thing,\u201d he said stopping at a cylindrical unit resembling a household boiler. \u201cIt\u2019s an old iron lung.\u201d He stopped reverentially at a scooter adorned with miniature international flags. The chair, customized by Mr. Acevedo, belonged to a patient who was something of a mayor of the hospital but who died in December. \u201cSome chairs you just can\u2019t get rid of \u2014 this man was loved by everybody here,\u201d said Mr. Acevedo, a dapper dresser who likes his jewelry and keeps an inventory of flashy ties on a rack next to his desk. \u201cI have to get dirty sometimes, but this isn\u2019t a grease monkey operation anymore,\u201d he said, demonstrating a computer monitor that plugs into the newer chairs, to diagnose problems. In the shop, his workbench is crowded with tools and meters and oscilloscopes. A soft soundtrack of dance tunes throbbed from his office. \u201cThat\u2019s one of my mixes,\u201d said Mr. Acevedo, who on weekends works as a D.J. with the nickname DJ Riny-Q, an acronym for Roosevelt Island, New York and Queens \u2014 he has lived on the island for decades and been a fixture at Queens dance clubs. He said he had spun records at Studio 54, and even Plato\u2019s Retreat (\u201cClothes on,\u201d he emphasized). Sound systems are his thing. He has rigged them on wheelchairs with the woofer under the seat, and he installed a set of homemade speakers in his office. Then there was Robby, the robot he built years ago to entertain sick children. He used an old wheelchair and added ventilator hoses for arms and a globe for the head. He installed lights and a tape recorder for a voice. It was also a hit at the clubs, out on the dance floor. \u201cThe ladies loved it,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Hospital;Roosevelt Island Manhattan;Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital;Disability"}
{"id": "ny0031111", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/06/08", "title": "Australian Gold Miner Takes Big Hit as Price Slides", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 Rising operating costs and slumping commodity prices continue to create problems for global mining companies. The latest to come under pressure is Newcrest Mining, Australia\u2019s biggest gold miner, which said Friday it would write down assets worth 6 billion Australian dollars, or $5.7 billion, and scale back planned spending on exploration and new projects. Newcrest, which has gold mines in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Ivory Coast, said its moves were the result of \u2018'the current market environment and outlook, including a recent sharp deterioration in the gold price, the largest in 30 years.'\u2019 The company also blamed rising costs and the strong Australian dollar. Large miners of ore and other raw materials have been drastically scaling back spending and dropping plans for new projects in recent months. BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, two of the world\u2019s biggest mining companies, announced the departures of long-serving chief executives early this year after a number of financial setbacks. While revenue at the world\u2019s 40 biggest mining companies in 2012 was basically unchanged from the previous year at $731 billion, net profits fell 49 percent, to $68 billion, according to a report released Friday by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Forecast 2013 capital expenditure by the companies of $110 billion is 21 percent lower than spending for last year, the report said. \u2018'While longer-term demand fundamentals remain, mining companies need to handle rising costs, increasingly volatile commodity prices and other challenges such as resource nationalism, in order to regain investor confidence,'\u2019 Ken Su, the China mining practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a news release accompanying the report. Producers of a wide range of metal products are also struggling. On Wednesday, the Aluminum Corp. of China, known as Chalco, said that because of weak market conditions, it would impose a temporary shutdown of 420,000 tons of production capacity, equal to 9 percent of the company\u2019s output of primary aluminum products last year. Newcrest\u2019s problems are more directly tied to the dynamics of the global gold market. While demand from the two biggest consumers of gold, India and China, is expected to hold steady, the price of gold has been subject to high volatility in recent months. The price of gold has recovered some of the ground that was lost during a sudden, two-day rout in April, when the price fell 13 percent. But at $1,410 per ounce, the price is down 16 percent so far this year, and 21 percent since October, when the downtrend began. Shares in Newcrest closed down 7.6 percent Friday after it announced the plans to reduce capital expenditure in the financial year beginning in July to 1 billion dollars, down from a previous goal of 1.5 billion dollars. The company also said it would reduce outlays for exploration by about half, to 85 million dollars. Newcrest said it was aiming for gold production of 2 million to 2.3 million ounces in the coming financial year, an increase of 4 percent, based on the middle of the range. Australia was the world\u2019s second-biggest producer of gold after China last year, with output of 276 tons.", "keyword": "Gold;Australia;Commodity;Mining"}
{"id": "ny0083098", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/10/17", "title": "Browns\u2019 Johnny Manziel Avoids Charges After Dispute With Girlfriend", "abstract": "Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel was involved in a dispute with his girlfriend this week that the police said involved alcohol. Manziel was pulled over by the police in Avon, Ohio, after a witness said a person was trying to jump from his speeding vehicle. Manziel admitted having consumed alcohol before the incident. According to the police, Manziel was not charged, and his girlfriend, Colleen Crowley, said she did not want to press charges. Manziel, who was drafted by the Browns in the first round in 2014, spent 70 days in a Pennsylvania rehabilitation clinic earlier this year for an unspecified condition. It is not known if he was prohibited from drinking after leaving the program. Browns General Manager Ray Farmer released a statement Friday night. \u201cIt is a matter that we take seriously and have expressed our concerns to Johnny directly,\u201d Farmer said. \u201cThose conversations will remain private and we will refrain from further comment at this time.\u201d A team spokesman said that Manziel\u2019s status for the Browns\u2019 home game Sunday against Denver had not changed. Manziel could face discipline from the N.F.L. under its personal-conduct policy. Manziel, whose rough rookie season was followed by his checking himself into the treatment center, has been Josh McCown\u2019s backup for the last three games. He started for an injured McCown in Week 2 and led the Browns to a win over Tennessee. Shortly after the Browns issued their statement, Manziel posted an explanation on his Twitter account. \u201cColleen and I got into a dumb public argument on the way home Monday afternoon,\u201d Manziel wrote. \u201cIt probably looked more interesting than it was and I know I would stop and check if I saw a couple arguing on the side of the road. It was embarrassing but not serious and when we talked to the police and they realized everything was alright and I was sober, we went home together and everything is fine.\u201d SEAHAWKS\u2019 LYNCH TO RETURN After missing the last two games with a hamstring strain, Marshawn Lynch is expected to return to the Seattle\u2019s starting lineup for Sunday\u2019s game against the Carolina Panthers. Linebacker Bobby Wagner\u2019s status will be a game-time decision. Lynch did not start against the Chicago Bears in Week 3 because of a calf injury and then left the game for good in the second quarter after straining his hamstring. The two games Lynch missed were the first games in which he was inactive since being traded to Seattle in 2010. Lynch participated fully in practice on Thursday and Friday. \u201cHe looked really back to full health,\u201d Coach Pete Carroll said. \u201cHe made it out, looked good, and we\u2019re counting on him playing.\u201d Wagner\u2019s status is more uncertain. He suffered a strained pectoral last week against the Cincinnati Bengals. \u201cHe\u2019s tough enough to play with it,\u201d Carroll said. \u201cIt\u2019s just whether it\u2019s the right thing to do to get him back to health.\u201d BILLS\u2019 MCCOY LIKELY TO PLAY Buffalo running back LeSean McCoy expects to return from a hamstring injury and play Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals. The status of quarterback Tyrod Taylor and receiver Sammy Watkins is listed as questionable. McCoy has missed each of the last two weeks after a setback at practice. He originally hurt his left hamstring at training camp Aug. 18. He is listed as probable. \u201cI look forward to playing,\u201d McCoy said. \u201cWhen my number\u2019s called, I\u2019m going to be out there looking to make plays.\u201d Asked about McCoy\u2019s status, Coach Rex Ryan said: \u201cI feel pretty good. I guess sometimes the experts get it wrong.\u201d McCoy has yet to make a major impact after arriving in Buffalo in a blockbuster trade with the Philadelphia Eagles for linebacker Kiko Alonso. In three games, he has 146 yards on 43 carries. If Taylor is unable to play, E. J. Manuel will start in his place.", "keyword": "Football;Johnny Manziel;Browns"}
{"id": "ny0123671", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/09/23", "title": "Orioles\u2019 Sixth Straight Win Is Another in Extra Innings", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 At 3:30 a.m. Saturday, Mark Reedy and his son, Dan, put on their Nick Markakis throwback jerseys, climbed into a Jeep and left their Baltimore home for the seven-and-a-half-hour drive to Fenway Park. Once there, the Reedys saw many others also dressed in Orioles orange, including Mark Adams, who had made the trip from Singapore, with a detour to Florida for business. They were all standing, chanting, \u201cLet\u2019s go, O\u2019s,\u201d in the bottom of the 12th inning and watching Baltimore closer Jim Johnson nail down a 9-6 victory over the Red Sox . It was Baltimore\u2019s 16th consecutive extra-inning victory, the most since the Cleveland Indians won 17 in a row in 1949. The victory enabled the Orioles to remain a game behind the first-place Yankees in the American League East. The Yankees won an extra-inning game of their own Saturday, beating Oakland, 10-9, with a run in the 14th after rallying from four behind an inning earlier. \u201cUnbelievable,\u201d Mark Reedy said, leaving his field box seat with a smile on his face after his first game at Fenway Park. \u201cIt was more than I could have hoped for.\u201d Making such a trip at any point in the last 15 years would have been unthinkable for Reedy, Adams and most Orioles fans. It was always the Red Sox fans invading Camden Yards in Baltimore. For an Orioles fan, it was annoying. For an Orioles player, it was downright depressing. \u201cI\u2019ve heard it from Yankee fans; I\u2019ve heard it from Red Sox fans,\u201d said Baltimore center fielder Adam Jones, who started the game-winning, three-run 12th inning with a double. \u201cThey come into our ballpark and chant, \u2018Let\u2019s go, Yankees,\u2019 and, \u2018Let\u2019s go, Red Sox.\u2019 I\u2019ve called out our own fans because all they say in response is \u2018boo!\u2019 They should be saying, \u2018Let\u2019s go, Orioles.\u2019 \u201cToday was the very first time in my five years in Baltimore that I heard fans say, \u2018Let\u2019s go, Orioles,\u2019 \u201d Jones continued. \u201cAnd you know what the Red Sox fans did? They booed. I\u2019m there in center field in the bottom of the 12th with chills because that\u2019s the first time I had ever heard it on the road. I don\u2019t know how many Oriole fans were there, but I heard every last one of them. It was awesome.\u201d The Orioles, who have won a season-best six straight games, continued what has been one of the best stories in baseball. Of their 87 victories, 45 have come on the road, the most in the A.L. They are on their way to their first playoff appearance since 1997, an achievement that is not lost on their long-suffering fans. \u201cYou look at the lineup, you look at the numbers, you look at the talent, and you don\u2019t know how they\u2019re doing it,\u201d said Adams, who was seeing the Orioles at Fenway Park for the first time. \u201cBut then you look at the standings, and they are doing it. It\u2019s exciting. I just hope I don\u2019t wake up and find out that it\u2019s all a dream. It\u2019s been 15 years, a long time, a lot of suffering.\u201d Baltimore appeared to be in excellent shape to win without extra innings after Jones homered to lead off the seventh. That gave the Orioles a 6-3 lead, and they are 68-0 in games in which they lead after seven innings. Boston got two runs in the bottom of the seventh, but it was still 6-5. That also boded well for Baltimore, which is 52-21 in one-run games and had a streak of 13 victories in such games. Of course, the Orioles have also shown an affinity for extra innings. Saturday\u2019s game was their 18th extra-inning game of the season. They have had games of 18 innings, 17 and 15. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, they are the first team to win games in eight different extra innings. They do not seem to mind the extra work. \u201cWe\u2019ve had so much experience at it, there\u2019s not some sense of panic or finality, especially on the road, when you don\u2019t score in the top of your inning,\u201d Manager Buck Showalter said. Jones attributed the team\u2019s success to perseverance. \u201cWe\u2019re not quitting until that last out,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we have to go 13, 14, 15, up to 18 to do the job, that\u2019s what we have to do.\u201d Jones led off the 12th with a double and scored one out later when Jim Thome, who joined the Orioles on July 1 and had not played since July 27, bounced a double into the right-field stands. Endy Chavez and Manny Machado added two-out, run-scoring singles. Johnson yielded a one-out single in the bottom of the 12th but he struck out Danny Valencia to end the game, which took 4 hours 14 minutes. \u201cIt\u2019s about winning baseball games, whether it\u2019s nine innings or however many it was today,\u201d Showalter said. Asked about the extra-inning streak, he shrugged and said: \u201cIt\u2019s not a topic of conversation for us. It\u2019s one of those things when you get away from it in the off-season, you\u2019ll step back and say, Really?\u201d Reedy had originally hoped to attend Sunday\u2019s afternoon game, then fly back to Baltimore and attend the Ravens-Patriots game that night. \u201cThat would have been a little much,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t you think?\u201d", "keyword": "Boston Red Sox;Baltimore Orioles;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0098638", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/06/09", "title": "Smells Like Hawaii (and Benzyl Acetate): Revealing the Chemicals in Glade\u2019s Fragrances", "abstract": "SC Johnson, the maker of Glade air fresheners, has decided to tell consumers more about the chemicals they are breathing. On Monday, the company disclosed ingredients in the fragrances used in more than 200 of its air fresheners, candles and scented oils on its website . Companies have increasingly responded to safety concerns not from government regulators, but from customers who demand to know more about everyday products like moisturizers and cleaning products. Kelly Semrau, the SC Johnson senior vice president for global corporate affairs, said, \u201cWe just feel that transparency in this area is the right thing to do.\u201d Customers have already been able to see specific dyes, waxes and other ingredients used in Glade\u2019s various air fresheners and candles. But the chemicals behind scents like \u201c Aruba wave \u201d and \u201c Hawaiian breeze \u201d have largely been a mystery. Some of the ingredients for Aruba wave, for instance, include 2-t-butylcyclohexyl acetate, 2,6-dimethyl-7-octen-2-ol, allyl caproate, benzyl salicylate, ethyl 2,2-dimethyl hydrocinnamyl and ethyl hexanoate. \u201cFragrance disclosure is a really big deal and consumers have been asking for it for a really long time,\u201d said Janet Nudelman, the director of program and policy for the Breast Cancer Fund. Typically, a fragrance is listed simply as \u201cfragrance,\u201d even though each fragrance could contain hundreds of individual chemicals. SC Johnson buys its fragrances from fragrance houses, which are known for closely guarding the formulas of their scents. Fragrance ingredients also are often exempted from the disclosure requirements that apply to other chemicals, like those used in cosmetic products like perfumes and lipsticks. SC Johnson will disclose ingredients in two ways. When there are more than 20 chemicals in a fragrance, it will disclose the top 10, or it will disclose the highest concentrations down to 0.09 percent of the formula, \u201cwhichever provides the most information,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s a good first step but it doesn\u2019t go far enough,\u201d Ms. Nudelman said, saying that many of the chemicals her group is concerned about have effects at much lower doses than what SC Johnson is disclosing. A handful of Glade products are excluded from the new policy. Ms. Semrau said that those products\u2019 scents came from companies that SC Johnson no longer worked with and they would be phased out. The company said it planned to expand its fragrance disclosures to other brands, including Pledge, Windex, Shout and Scrubbing Bubbles.", "keyword": "SC Johnson & Son;Odor;Perfume;Chemicals"}
{"id": "ny0251029", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/02/08", "title": "Initiative Safeguards Sage Grouse Across Western United States", "abstract": "RYEGATE, Mont. \u2014 When permanent settlement began in the West some 16 million greater sage grouse lived on the steppes of the high plains. There may now be as few as 200,000 of these ground-dwelling birds, famous for their elaborate courtship dance, and they are on the decline, hit especially hard by oil and gas development. Their dwindling numbers warrant protection as an endangered species, federal officials say. Because other species need listing first, though, and because protections for endangered species are widely reviled in the West, a unique way of managing the birds is under way. The Sage Grouse Initiative , a project administered by the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, targets for protection three-quarters of the birds on about a quarter of total sage grouse habitat. Officials call it a triage approach to conservation \u2014 protecting land where habitat is mostly intact and ignoring much of the land that has been degraded by energy development and other things. \u201cWe\u2019re targeting like a laser beam those places where there are a lot of birds,\u201d said David E. Naugle, an associate professor of wildlife at the University of Montana and scientific adviser to the project. The effort is also unique because it covers so much land \u2014 some 56 million acres across 11 Western states. Nothing near this scale has been done with a species in trouble. The project received $18 million last year and $30 million this year from the conservation service. Last week, the conservation service announced the addition of $23 million to buy conservation easements on core habitat. \u201cThe federal government really stepped up in a meaningful way to keep sage grouse off the endangered species list,\u201d said Tom Remington, director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife, which is not involved in the effort. \u201cIt\u2019s mind-boggling that they did it so fast and it\u2019s as well funded as it is. And applying science in this way is unprecedented.\u201d Noah Greenwald, a biologist with the Center For Biological Diversity , which focuses on endangered species, thinks the plan is good, but doesn\u2019t go far enough. The sage grouse initiative \u201cis voluntary,\u201d Mr. Greenwald said. \u201cWe hope the promises are kept, but things can fall through the cracks.\u201d Neither, he said, does the plan protect sage grouse habitat on federal land damaged by energy development, and plans to protect the birds in those areas are not nearly as strong as an endangered designation would be. The group has sued to force listing of the bird so it receives full protection under the law. The effort began with the locations of the biggest, healthiest populations. In each state leks have been well tallied \u2014 a lek is like a sage grouse town square, a critical area where the birds carry out courtship rituals and mate. Counting birds on the lek in the spring gave biologists a solid estimate of numbers. The spring breeding rite of the sage grouse is one of the bird world\u2019s most dramatic courtships. For a month or so dozens of males, which are the largest grouse in North America and can weigh up to seven pounds, show up at the grassy lek and jockey for territory with displays \u2014 puffing up a huge collar of white chest feathers, fanning their tail feathers and making popping sounds by slapping together two small yellow air bladders on their chests. The birds clash and feathers fly, all in an effort to prove superiority and claim a few more square feet of ground than other birds. By April the females fly in, and some researchers joke that it\u2019s the wildlife equivalent of the bars during spring break in Florida. \u201cIt\u2019s chaos,\u201d said Dr. Naugle. As the air is filled with the popping of air bladders, \u201ceveryone starts displaying and strutting and trying to woo the females.\u201d The top male may mate with three-quarters of the females. Within the 56 million acres, the conservation service is concentrating on ranch land with the highest numbers of birds and best habitat, called core areas, and working to improve it. It\u2019s a last, large-scale effort to stem the bird\u2019s decline, and should it fail the bird will probably receive strict protection across its range. The program is part of the 2008 federal farm bill , and the lead agency is the conservation service, whose main mission is to provide financing and technical help to farmers and ranchers. An idea at the heart of the initiative, though, is that a better-managed ranch will also improve habitat for sage grouse, and a more profitable ranch means it\u2019s less likely to be sold for subdivisions. The project worked to improve habitat on 1,000 square miles last year and will work with ranchers on 3,000 square miles this year. The conservation service, said Dr. Naugle, is the key to doing so much in so short a time. \u201cThey have an army already in place to create these kind of outcomes,\u201d he said. The program, heavily based on research into the impact on grouse from such things as livestock grazing and barbed-wire fences, comes down to ranchers like Ben Lehfeldt. Mr. Lehfeldt runs sheep and cattle north of Billings, in a part of central Montana that is still rich in sage grouse. As he rides along a dirt road through his remote, wind-swept ranch across gentle sagebrush-studded swells, Mr. Lehfeldt points out plastic tags the size of playing cards affixed to miles of barbed-wire fence. Sage grouse fly low, just feet off the ground, and fences kill hundreds of birds a year. This marking of some fences and the removal of others, for a total of 180 miles of fence, should prevent 800 to 1,000 collisions annually, according to a study done at the University of Idaho. Ranchers have also put ramps in the tanks they use to water cattle to allow a bird that falls into a tank to climb out. Mr. Lehfeldt said he liked the approach. An endangered species designation would have meant restrictions and no financing. So it would have been a lot more contentious. \u201cIt would have made things a lot harder if they did,\u201d Mr. Lehfeldt said. The energy industry has also fought the designation. The forests of silver-green sagebrush are vital to every aspect of the grouse\u2019s life. The birds need heavy grass beneath the two- to three-foot-high sagebrush, for cover from predators during nesting and brood rearing, so eight new water tank locations will enable Mr. Lehfeldt to let his cattle and sheep range more widely in this dry country, which will allow prairie grasses to grow taller. Where land has been tilled, ranchers are paid to reseed to native prairie. The program began last year, and this spring biologists will begin monitoring to see what effect the changes have had. \u201cWe\u2019re expecting an 8 to 10 percent increase in nest success,\u201d based on these steps, Dr. Naugle said. \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t increase we\u2019ll tweak the habitat management to reach those benefits. It\u2019s adaptive management, and we monitor every step of the way.\u201d While the Endangered Species Act would protect the bird by law, this program is voluntary. It can have hefty incentives. Ranchers can receive a total from farm programs of up to $450,000 over 10 years, but have to match some of that. Still, it is enough for ranchers to make changes in management right away that may otherwise have taken years, or may never have been made. In some places, especially on federal land, efforts to protect the birds will not be made. Energy development has turned much of Wyoming\u2019s sagebrush steppes into a network of roads, power lines and other development. Because the birds don\u2019t tolerate disturbance, their numbers have suffered badly. A boom in wind power turbines and subdivisions are problems as well because of the roads and traffic associated with them. A wild card in this project is West Nile virus . Where Dr. Naugle has studied grouse, there is 25 percent mortality during outbreak years. Moreover, settling ponds that the energy industry uses to store water extracted with the gas breed mosquitoes, carrier of the virus, and the industry is searching for ways, including mosquito-eating fish, to cope with the problem. Canada\u2019s experience with sage grouse has been a dark lesson for biologists here. Western Canada once had flourishing populations. Primarily because of energy development there are now just 200 birds in Saskatchewan and fewer than a hundred in Alberta, and there are concerns the Alberta population will soon disappear. Because of their strong flavor, sage grouse are not a widely hunted game species. They are important as an umbrella species \u2014 if their diverse habitat is protected, it protects other prairie species, from migratory song sparrows to pygmy rabbits and mule deer. \u201cThis initiative is one of the most important I have seen in a decade, to preserve high-quality habitat,\u201d said Ben Deeble, sagebrush coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation in Missoula. \u201cThey are bringing in the best new science to analyze impacts.\u201d", "keyword": "Birds;Endangered and Extinct Species"}
{"id": "ny0191553", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2009/02/20", "title": "70% of Santander Clients Take Madoff Settlement", "abstract": "MIAMI (Reuters) \u2014 About 70 percent of Banco Santander \u2019s clients caught up in the Bernard L. Madoff case have signed compensation agreements with the Spanish bank, lawyers for the bank told a federal court in Miami on Thursday. The disclosure was made at a hearing on a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of people who lost money through their investments in a bank fund that had invested with Mr. Madoff. \u201cAbout 70 percent have already executed exchange agreements,\u201d a lawyer, Sam Danon, told Judge Paul Huck of Federal District Court. \u201cI believe somewhere in the area of 7 or 9 percent have rejected it. There\u2019s a percentage that are still considering the agreement.\u201d The two sides in the Miami lawsuit also told the court that they had agreed to send a notice to Santander clients that outlines details of the pending Miami class action. The final version of the notice, which explains that the lawsuit demands clients be made whole for their losses and that the compensation agreement releases all parties from further liability, should be ready in a week, lawyers said. The notice will go to the about 30 percent of clients who have not yet settled, the lawyers said. Santander offered to compensate all individual clients through the issuance of 1.38 billion euros ($1.75 billion) in preferential shares with an annual coupon of 2 percent. The offer would cost Santander, the euro zone\u2019s biggest bank, less than the 2.33 billion euros ($2.96 billion) it has acknowledged its clients may have lost to Mr. Madoff, lawyers for the plaintiffs have argued. The lawsuit asked the court to halt the compensation plan, saying the settlement was \u201ccoercive\u201d and fell far short of the compensation sought by the class-action suit. Judge Huck appeared to question his role in the litigation, repeatedly noting that most of Santander\u2019s clients were foreign residents. \u201dIt seems to me there is an issue of whether I have jurisdiction,\u201d Judge Huck said. The plaintiffs\u2019 lawyer, Michael Hanzman, said many of the potential class members have temporary residences in Miami and bank accounts with Santander\u2019s Miami offices. The issue of jurisdiction may be dealt with at a later hearing, lawyers said.", "keyword": "Madoff Bernard L;Ponzi Schemes;Banco Santander SA"}
{"id": "ny0138824", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2008/02/03", "title": "As Knicks Fall Again on Road, Robinson Loses in Hometown", "abstract": "SEATTLE \u2014 It took Nate Robinson two years to make it back to his hometown, to play in front of his friends and relatives and to strut through the arena the way he once did here in high school and college. Robinson, the Knicks \u2019 cocksure young guard, did indeed strut into KeyArena on Saturday night, to wild cheers from the stands. But he left the court with his No. 4 jersey stretched over his anguished face. The Knicks had sputtered again. And Robinson\u2019s homecoming had turned humiliating. He missed all nine of his shots, including a 3-point attempt that could have won the game in the final seconds. When the ball clanged off the rim, the Knicks were left with an 86-85 loss to the Seattle SuperSonics and an 0-5 trip. \u201cMy mom probably disowned me today,\u201d Robinson said. It was a typical finish for the Knicks (14-33), who played well enough to win every game of the trip but never found a way to close the deal. On Saturday, they battled through obvious fatigue and poor shooting and the continued absence of Eddy Curry. Jamal Crawford, the Knicks\u2019 other Seattle native, had 23 points to bounce back from a poor performance Friday. Zach Randolph scored 24 points. They outshot the Sonics from the field (44.4 percent to 39.5 percent). And still, the night ended in despair. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a team play that hard for five straight games and have a chance to win each game and come up short every time,\u201d Crawford said. Kevin Durant, the Sonics\u2019 rookie star, had 21 points to lead the rebuilding Sonics (12-35) to their first three-game winning streak of the season. The Knicks had a chance to win the game when Jared Jeffries poked the ball away from Durant with just under 25 seconds left. The Knicks called a timeout and designed a play for Randolph. But the Sonics threw a quick double-team at Randolph, forcing him to pass the ball out to the cold-shooting Robinson. For a second, it looked like Robinson would have his redemption. \u201cI was praying to God it was,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cI let my team down. I didn\u2019t make no shots. If I had just made one 3 or one bucket, we\u2019d have won the game.\u201d Robinson played the final minutes with a badly bruised left thigh, courtesy of a couple collisions with Seattle\u2019s Kurt Thomas, a former Knick. The greater problem, it seemed, was Robinson\u2019s own nerves. Robinson, who played locally at Rainier Beach High School and the University of Washington, missed last year\u2019s trip here while serving a 10-game suspension for instigating the Knicks\u2019 brawl with the Denver Nuggets. \u201cI psyched myself out before the game,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cI just kept telling myself, \u2018Just don\u2019t have a bad game, don\u2019t have a bad game.\u2019 So I was like, \u2018Oh man,\u2019 and then I end up having one.\u201d There was not much to accomplish here except to claim some sort of psychological edge before going home. There would be a meaningful difference, Thomas had said, between 0-5 and 1-4. \u201cIt\u2019d be a big boost, believe it or not,\u201d he said before the game. \u201cIf you come off this road trip without having won a game, you just dug yourself a bigger hole. Fortunately for us, everybody back home that we\u2019re trying to catch is losing also. So that helps.\u201d In a low-scoring and often low-energy game, the Knicks led by 38-34 at halftime and by 7 points in the third quarter. They fell behind by 6 points in the final quarter but \u2014 for the fifth time in five games \u2014 they reached the final minutes with a chance to win. David Lee\u2019s tip-in cut the deficit to 83-81, and Randolph tied the score with a 22-footer with 1 minute 20 seconds left. Durant answered immediately, hitting a 3-pointer with 54.5 seconds left. Crawford scored the Knicks\u2019 final basket with a runner in the lane. The fatigue was evident from the moment the Knicks took the court. They missed 15 of their first 22 shots and looked listless on the bench. Thomas pulled Crawford and Randolph seven minutes after tipoff. For the game, the Knicks were outrebounded by 55-34. They missed 10 of 26 free throws. \u201cThis has been a grueling road trip,\u201d a weary-sound Thomas said before the game had even begun. The Knicks were a little closer to whole. Quentin Richardson (11 points) was back in the lineup after sitting out the Portland game and most of the game in Utah because of flu-like symptoms. Curry remained ill and missed his second straight game. By their next game, the Knicks should be healthy, if not necessarily rested. They play host to the Los Angeles Clippers on Monday, about 38 hours after landing in New York. It will be the first of four games over six nights. \u201cIn effect it will be like another road game,\u201d Thomas lamented, \u201cbecause you\u2019re flying all night and you just get up and try to do it again.\u201d REBOUNDS Zach Randolph will not be fined for arriving nearly a half-hour late to Friday\u2019s game in Portland. Randolph stayed at his own house and drove separately from the team. \u201cWe talked about it,\u201d Coach Isiah Thomas said. \u201cI knew he was at home and I knew he had some stuff to do at home and he drove to the game. So there won\u2019t be any fine.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Knicks;Robinson Nate;Seattle SuperSonics;Basketball"}
{"id": "ny0288543", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/08/24", "title": "Trying to Turn Back the Clock on Deals Gone Sour", "abstract": "Lyondell Chemical and Basell AF completed their merger nearly nine years ago. Yet today, former shareholders of Lyondell face the possibility that a new court ruling could force them to pay back money \u2014 all $12.5 billion of it. Several such clawback cases over buyouts that were hammered out in the years before the financial crisis but later failed have resulted in thousands of shareholders now fighting to keep the money that was paid out to them. It had seemed so different at the time. In July 2007, with the merger market still a bit bubbly, the more than $20 billion leveraged buyout of Lyondell was announced. Basell borrowed the entire purchase price to create the third-largest chemical company in the world, paying $12.5 billion to shareholders and the rest in fees and debt refinancing. But the chemical industry soon spun into a decline, and in the financial crisis the combined company could simply not shoulder its debt. LyondellBasell entered bankruptcy in January 2009, only 13 months after the purchase was completed. With all that money at stake, the bankruptcy proceedings have been bitterly fought with the bankruptcy trustee \u2014 the person appointed to oversee the debtor\u2019s estate \u2014 pursuing everyone in sight. The big banks \u2014 Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch \u2014 were sued, accused of mistreating junior creditors. They settled for $450 million in cash and notes. Len Blavatnik, the Russian-born founder of Basell\u2019s owner who orchestrated the deal, was also sued . Not content with big fish, the bankruptcy trustee turned on Lyondell\u2019s old shareholders. In three lawsuits, the trustee argued that the sale of Lyondell was a fraudulent transfer. Dating to England in the 1500s, this is a principle that tries to prevent a debtor from simply transferring their assets to avoid payment of a debt. In its various forms, the doctrine voids transfers made with the intent to defraud creditors like the banks and others who lent over $20 billion to finance this debacle. The doctrine has had a rebirth in the wake of the financial crisis, with a particular vengeance for leveraged buyouts. In the years before the financial crisis, private equity was king, accounting for over 20 percent of takeovers. Debt was piled onto companies, as was the case with Lyondell, which was financed entirely with debt. This debt became an enormous dead weight in the wake of the financial crisis, dragging companies down as they struggled to keep up with payments. More than a few went bankrupt. In the bankruptcy cases that followed, claims of fraudulent transfer were sometimes brought, most prominently in the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company, which had been bought by Sam Zell in an $8.2 billion buyout. Such claims have come as a bombshell to the former shareholders of these companies. They thought the deal was long done. The money was paid out, and shareholders reinvested it in new stocks or perhaps a new kitchen. But like a ghost from the past, a bankruptcy trustee knocks on the door years later, demanding repayment. Even if the trustee does not succeed, the shareholders face legal costs to try and prevent repayment. In the Lyondell case, the trustee sued shareholders who received more than $100,000. He then included everyone, down to a grandparent in Florida who owned 10 shares. And in a lawsuit you need to hire a lawyer. So far, some of the larger shareholders have been paying for the defense. And the old Lyondell shareholders have had success in fighting off the bankruptcy trustee\u2019s charge. The trustee initially brought two claims . The first was a claim for constructive fraudulent transfer; the second for actual fraudulent conveyance. The difference between the two is intent. The first is the easier to bring since it allows the court to look at the surrounding circumstances, while an actual fraudulent conveyance needs a finding that the sellers \u2014 here Lyondell \u2014 had \u201cactual intent to hinder, delay or defraud\u201d creditors, a high standard . In a decision involving the Tribune case , the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out the constructive fraudulent conveyance claims on a technicality, holding that those claims were barred by another section of the bankruptcy code that prohibited suits against security holders. The case applied to the Lyondell case and other leveraged buyouts equally, at least those litigated in New York . This left Lyondell\u2019s former shareholders with hope that the actual fraudulent intent claim could be thrown out. Success was had in the bankruptcy court , but bankruptcy court rulings are subject to review in the district court, and that is where the Lyondell shareholders met Judge Denise L. Cote . The plaintiffs claimed that there was actual intent here as a result of the actions of Lyondell\u2019s chief executive at the time, Dan F. Smith. In the hasty negotiations of the Basell deal that unfolded in a week, Mr. Smith was accused of updating projections that the plaintiffs said were overly optimistic. But that is not enough \u2014 the plaintiffs had to show intent. Here the chief executive was harmed by some language he had used before the buyout. At a convention in Las Vegas two months before the deal with Basell, Mr. Smith said, \u201cIf you\u2019re a bondholder, I am not sure you get enriched\u201d in a buyout of Lyondell. He continued, \u201cIf you think you are going to have a down cycle in the chemical markets, don\u2019t think you want to add $8 billion, $10 billion debt to this and live through that.\u201d Oops. Judge Cote found that the facts alleged by the plaintiffs were enough to be \u201cbadges\u201d of actual intent sufficient to allow the claim to proceed against the thousands of old Lyondell shareholders. The shareholders have not given up, filing a motion last week for reconsideration or to have the Second Circuit hear the case. The shareholders\u2019 basis for reconsideration is that there is no \u201cactual\u201d intent to defraud here. Instead, it was the Lyondell board that had agreed to sell the company to Basell. The argument can be summed up to an \u201cOh, really?\u201d Or to put it another way, are you really going to hold innocent shareholders liable when it was another party that sold the company? And let\u2019s not forget all those sophisticated banks that willingly lent that money and have not claimed to be defrauded. It\u2019s unclear what should happen. The law seems to be on the defendants\u2019 side, but more so because Delaware law is rather clear that it is the board here that makes these decisions. In other words, we are down to technicalities on whether the shareholders should pay back the $12.5 billion paid to them. That should give you an answer on whether any of this makes sense. Does anyone really think that in these cases the board actually is defrauding everyone? What about the buyer here who knew exactly what they were doing? The banks here were also the most sophisticated of the sophisticated. To say that the innocent shareholders of Lyondell should repay the amount these banks lent is a bit absurd . And of course, this will affect future buyouts, possibly making it harder for private equity firms to buy companies. When a lawsuit doesn\u2019t make sense but the legalities are cited, one has to wonder: Is the law really right here?", "keyword": "Bankruptcy;Mergers and Acquisitions;LyondellBasell;Denise Cote;Lawsuits;Basell Holdings;Lyondell Chemical"}
{"id": "ny0235026", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/01/26", "title": "Big New York High Schools Fall Hard but Are Not Going Quietly", "abstract": "The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School , one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx . Columbus has had a \u201clong history of sustained academic failure\u201d and \u201cchronically poor performance and low demand,\u201d Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed. But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive an increasing share of the city\u2019s most demanding students \u2014 the very students that needed the most help. \u201cAnd now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,\u201d said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher. Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg \u2019s control of the school system . And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on \u201cschool turnaround\u201d policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top , for billions of dollars in federal education grants. Since 2002, the city has closed or is in the process of closing 91 schools , replacing them with smaller schools and charter schools , often several in the same building, with new leadership and teachers. This year, the city has proposed phasing out 20 schools, the most in any year. It is also the first year in which the city is required to hold public hearings at each school proposed for closing, as a result of a change in the mayoral control law that resulted from complaints about an insufficient role for parents. The hearings are unlikely to save any school from closing; on Tuesday, a panel controlled by mayoral appointees will vote on the proposals. But in auditorium after auditorium at schools on the closing list, like Columbus, Jamaica and Beach Channel High Schools in Queens , and William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn , the hearings have exposed a torrent of anger about how large high schools have fared in the Bloomberg years. The city\u2019s Education Department says that on the whole, the closings have been a success. The small high schools created in the shells of old large high schools have average graduation rates of 75 percent, 15 percent higher than in the city as a whole and far greater than those of the schools they replaced. \u201cObviously, closing schools is not something anyone enjoys,\u201d said Joel I. Klein , the schools chancellor. \u201cBy and large, what this is about is simply the fact that when you have many kids in a high-needs community, you find that the smaller schools, where they are highly personalized, where they have strong partnerships and involvement with various organizations, those things really have been a successful strategy for us.\u201d To education officials, the failures of Columbus, a 70-year-old school that graduated only 40 percent of its students on time last year and received a D on its most recent report card, are self-evident. And they say they make the closing process as painless as possible. For the closing school, it is a gradual death, with current students allowed to graduate if they do not fall behind, but no new classes admitted. As space opens up, the new schools come to life, adding a grade each year. A study last year by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School backed the chancellor\u2019s argument that students at the smaller schools \u2014 which are organized around themes like science or community service \u2014 fare better. But the study also found evidence of a domino effect at the large high schools. Because the new schools, at first, accepted relatively few special education and non-English-speaking students, those students began enrolling in greater numbers in the remaining large high schools. Overall enrollment increased at many large high schools, and attendance fell. \u201cWhile a few schools were successful in absorbing such students, most were not,\u201d the report said. From the classrooms of Columbus, the last seven years have felt like forging ahead though a snowstorm, said Karen Sherwood, an English teacher since 1993. In 2003, for example, its honors programs were peeled off and became separate small schools in its large brick building on Astor Avenue in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood. Three other small schools moved in. (One is now on the city\u2019s closing list for poor performance.) The result was severe overcrowding for Columbus\u2019s 3,400 students, who had classes on the auditorium stage and attended in split shifts between 7 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. As the Department of Education sent fewer students to Columbus, enrollment began to decline, but so did the academic level of its entering student body. By 2005, only 6 percent of the entering eighth graders were reading at grade level, and the proportion of special education students rose to nearly a quarter. Another reorganization led the school to create small clusters with names like \u201cEquality\u201d and \u201cJustice,\u201d and to form work-study and other structured programs that give students on the verge of dropping out a second chance. The school stabilized, but its four-year graduation rate remained stubbornly low, and struggles continued. As measured by the city\u2019s \u201cpeer index,\u201d which takes into account over-age and special education students and the academic level of its entering class, Columbus had the eighth-lowest ranking among 380 high schools in 2008-9. The Columbus student body is in constant flux. Because the school has unscreened admissions, it takes children expelled from charter schools, released from juvenile detention, and others on a near-daily basis: last year, 359 of its 1,400 students arrived between October and June. Even after the city proposed the school\u2019s closing in December, it received 27 more students. Lisa Fuentes, the Columbus principal since 2002, said she believed that her school was succeeding, considering its challenges. Her feeling is that city wants the space her school occupies, for small schools and charters. \u201cIt\u2019s something that they are going to do just to fulfill their next plan,\u201d Ms. Fuentes said, speaking in a low, calm tone on the day before the school hearing. The city does not dispute that Columbus has been dealt a tough hand, but it argues that other high schools with a similar population \u2014 26 percent are classified as special education and 18 percent are not fluent in English \u2014 have had better results. Columbus was also included on New York State \u2019s list of \u201cpersistently lowest performing\u201d schools last week, which requires the city to produce a plan either for closing or for staff changes and reorganization of the school. \u201cI\u2019m not going to say it is not a challenging situation; it is,\u201d said John White, the deputy chancellor for strategy. \u201cWe are not laying the blame for the challenges at the feet of anyone in particular. The question, is can you organize a school in different ways for greater success, and we have shown that we can.\u201d In November, the mayor said his goal was to shut down the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools over the next four years, doubling down on Washington\u2019s challenge to states to close or turn around the weakest 5 percent of schools. States get credit for effective turnaround strategies in their applications for $4 billion in Race to the Top funds, which were submitted last Tuesday. An additional $3.5 billion will go to states this spring to finance school transformations or closures. In Chicago , school officials closed 44 schools between 2001 and 2006 more abruptly than New York did: instead of phasing out schools by grade, the entire student body was dispersed at once. When the schools reopened the next year, there were new administrators, teachers and students. But the displaced students often went into other weak schools, adding little benefit for those students and sending those schools into tailspins. As chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools during that era, Arne Duncan , now the federal secretary of education, modified the policy to follow what he calls a \u201cturnaround model.\u201d In most cases, students now remain in the same building, while most or all of the staff is replaced. Mr. Duncan said the federal government did not have a preference for closing over other school-overhaul models. Race to the Top suggests a number of options, such as replacing the principal and having the staff reapply for their jobs, or converting a public school to charter management. \u201cWhat might work in one school might not work in a school two miles away,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is complicated, and it really has to be done by a case-by-case basis. There\u2019s no magic bullet.\u201d Mr. Klein\u2019s view is that large high schools are a poor setup for children who need special attention. And if a school is not organized properly for its population, it is likely to fail. As such, the closing proposals are \u201ccurative, not punitive,\u201d he said. But that is not what the closing schools want to hear. \u201cWe\u2019ll be O.K.; it\u2019s just very upsetting,\u201d said Ms. Fuentes, the Columbus principal. \u201cI\u2019m proud of my staff, even with my D. We worked very hard for that D.\u201d", "keyword": "null;NYC;Mike Bloomberg;Race to the Top Fund;NYC Department of Education;Economy;Teachers;Charter school;Closings"}
{"id": "ny0145272", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/10/24", "title": "Polls Show Obama Gaining Among Bush Voters", "abstract": "Senator Barack Obama is showing surprising strength among portions of the political coalition that returned George W. Bush to the White House four years ago, a cross section of support that, if it continues through Election Day, would exceed that of Bill Clinton in 1992, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls. Underscoring his increasing strength in the final phase of the campaign, Mr. Obama led Mr. McCain among groups that voted for President Bush four years ago: those with incomes greater than $50,000 a year; married women; suburbanites and white Catholics. He is also competitive among white men, a group that has not voted for a Democrat over a Republican since 1972, when pollsters began surveying people after they voted. Of potential concern for Mr. Obama\u2019s strategists, however, a third of voters surveyed say they know someone who does not support Mr. Obama because he is black. Voters were also closely divided about Mr. Obama\u2019s ability to handle a crisis, a finding that came as Republicans seized on remarks by his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware , that foreign leaders were likely to test him in the first months of his term if he is elected. Over all, however, the poll found that Mr. Obama would defeat Mr. McCain if the election were held now, with 52 percent of those identified as probable voters saying they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent saying they would vote for Mr. McCain. Among registered voters in the latest poll, the spread is almost identical, with 51 percent saying they would vote for Mr. Obama and 38 percent saying they would vote for Mr. McCain. A New York Times/CBS News poll taken a week ago showed a similar margin of victory for Mr. Obama. The latest nationwide telephone poll was conducted Sunday through Wednesday with 1,152 adults, of whom 1,046 said they were registered to vote. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points. To measure support for the candidates among specific voting blocs, The Times combined data from the latest poll with one conducted last week because some of the subgroups were too small to be statistically reliable when extracted from a single survey. Despite Mr. McCain\u2019s continued questioning of Mr. Obama\u2019s readiness, the number of voters surveyed who say Mr. Obama has prepared himself well enough for the presidency was at its highest yet in the newest poll, 56 percent. When The Times and CBS News first asked the question, more voters said they believed Mr. Obama was not ready, 49 percent, than believed he was, 44 percent. Mr. McCain still holds an advantage on that front, with 64 percent saying they believe he is prepared for the presidency. There was also fresh evidence that Mr. McCain\u2019s attacks on Mr. Obama\u2019s character and qualifications in commercials, mailings, speeches and automated telephone calls were, if anything, harming Mr. McCain. The percentage of people who view Mr. McCain unfavorably was at its highest level since The Times and CBS began asking the question in 1999. Forty-six percent said they held unfavorable views of him, with 39 percent saying they viewed him favorably. Mr. Obama was viewed favorably by 52 percent of those surveyed, and unfavorably by 31 percent. Voters were almost evenly split over Mr. Obama\u2019s ability to handle a crisis wisely: 49 percent said they were confident he could and 47 percent said they would be uneasy. Respondents showed less ease with Mr. McCain: 51 percent said they would be uneasy with his approach and 46 percent expressed confidence. Mr. Obama fared better than Mr. McCain on economic matters: 65 percent said they were somewhat confident or very confident in Mr. Obama\u2019s ability to handle the economy; 47 percent said the same thing about Mr. McCain. In spite of Mr. McCain\u2019s sustained attack on Mr. Obama\u2019s proposal to raise income taxes on households and businesses that earn more than $250,000 a year, Mr. Obama\u2019s plan received significant support in the new poll. When voters were asked whether they supported the tax increase to help provide health insurance for those who are not covered, 62 percent said it was a \u201cgood idea\u201d and 33 percent said it was a \u201cbad idea.\u201d Voters were evenly divided over Mr. McCain\u2019s plan to make permanent Mr. Bush\u2019s 2001 tax cuts. In another area where Mr. McCain could take heart, the last two polls offered fresh evidence that his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate had helped to excite two traditional bases of support for Republican presidential candidates. White voters who say they attend church every week preferred Mr. McCain over Mr. Obama by 61 percent to 29 percent, and voters who live in the South preferred him over Mr. Obama by 51 percent to 40 percent. But, over all, the percentage of those who view Ms. Palin unfavorably, 40 percent, was higher than those who view her favorably, 31 percent. Senior strategists of both parties have viewed the unpopularity of Mr. Bush and the Republican Party as major drags on Mr. McCain\u2019s chances. Favorability ratings for both are at all-time lows. Mr. Bush\u2019s approval rating of 22 percent is tied for its worst in the history of the Times/CBS poll, and opinions of the Republican Party are at their lowest since the poll first included questions about the political parties in 1985. Only 36 percent expressed a favorable opinion of Republicans, compared with 56 percent who expressed a favorable view of Democrats. That difference was reflected in comments from some respondents who said they had voted for Mr. Bush in 2004 but were planning to vote for Mr. Obama. \u201cI\u2019ve always been a Republican, but I\u2019ve switched in the last four years,\u201d said Helen Taylor, 63, of Los Fresnos, Tex., in a follow-up interview. \u201cI voted for Bush because I knew more about him than Kerry, and I stuck with the Republican stance on things at that time. But I became concerned about things Bush was doing, and now I\u2019m more in line with the Democratic platform. I also like Barack Obama because he has intelligence and class and the ability to think on his feet.\u201d Mr. Obama has a 16-point advantage over Mr. McCain among women in the combined data of the last two polls; Senator John Kerry outpolled Mr. Bush by three percentage points among women in 2004, according to exit polls. Mr. Obama is supported by 45 percent of white women, and Mr. McCain is preferred by 42 percent; Mr. Bush beat Mr. Kerry with 55 percent of the vote among white women, according to exit polls. Mr. Obama is tied with Mr. McCain among white men, a group that President Bush won with 61 percent of their vote. Mr. Bush\u2019s father, George Bush, was favored by more white men than those who preferred Mr. Clinton when he won the White House in 1992. Some voters ascribe racial motives to those opposing Mr. Obama. Among the 33 percent who said they knew someone who did not support him mainly because he is black was Robert Richter, a Democrat from Dunbar, Pa. \u201cSome people are prejudiced and don\u2019t want to vote for him, for one thing, because he\u2019s black and for another, because they feel he\u2019s a Muslim,\u201d said Mr. Richter, a gas station worker. \u201cI think for some people saying Obama is a Muslim is their way of getting around the black issue.\u201d Mr. Obama is a Christian, but e-mail has circulated falsely identifying him as a Muslim.", "keyword": "2008 Presidential Election;Barack Obama;John McCain;George W Bush"}
{"id": "ny0059097", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/08/29", "title": "Roger Goodell and N.F.L. Right a Wrong, but Only After Further Review", "abstract": "The most stunning aspect of the N.F.L.\u2019s new policy on domestic violence is that the league, through Commissioner Roger Goodell, admitted that it had made a mistake. The N.F.L. never admits it makes a mistake. Never. Not in labor negotiations when it locks out players, not in the face of abysmal performances by officials and not when it gives a star running back a love tap after evidence that he brutalized his fianc\u00e9e. In a letter to team owners released on Thursday, Goodell wrote: \u201cMy disciplinary decision led the public to question our sincerity, our commitment and whether we understood the toll that domestic violence inflicts on so many families. I take responsibility both for the decision and for ensuring that our actions in the future properly reflect our values. I didn\u2019t get it right. Simply put, we have to do better. And we will.\u201d Better late than never, I suppose. But why so late? Perhaps because the N.F.L.\u2019s moral high ground is so low. After issuing a two-game suspension to Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice , Goodell simultaneously played offense and defense, spinning rationale after rationale for allowing Rice to get back to running. In cases of racism, sexism and homophobia, we tend to argue for our limitations. Goodell was no exception. Speaking to reporters at the Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio, this month, Goodell insisted that he had made the right call. He said that the important thing was to be consistent with other penalties that had been issued. All the while, he seemed to ignore the disturbing footage of a star player dragging his unconscious fianc\u00e9e out of a casino elevator . \u201cWe have to remain consistent,\u201d Goodell said at the time. \u201cWe can\u2019t just make up the discipline. It has to be consistent with other cases, and it was in this matter.\u201d Goodell pointed out that Rice had never been in trouble before, ignoring that a first-time offense hadn\u2019t made Rice\u2019s fianc\u00e9e any less unconscious. Besides, Rice was remorseful. \u201cYou know, you have a lot of people voicing their opinions,\u201d Goodell said, \u201cbut I think it\u2019s important to understand that this is a young man who made a terrible mistake.\u201d He declared that Rice\u2019s actions had been \u201cinconsistent with what we\u2019re all about, and we\u2019ve dealt with it in a serious manner, and we\u2019re very confident that this young man understands where he is and what he needs to do going forward.\u201d The leader of any organization sets a tone of tolerance or intolerance. In issuing such a light reprimand in the form of a two-game suspension, and then stridently defending his decision, Goodell made the abuse of women in a male-dominated sport seem like a misdemeanor. He opened the door for less-than-enlightened commentators to suggest that the woman might have provoked her treatment . On Thursday, facing an undercurrent of outrage that showed no signs of subsiding, with the possibility of demonstrations and even boycotts, Goodell did an about-face. What\u2019s galling about his sudden turnabout is that we see the same intransigence in other areas. In the face of mounting criticism from American Indians and others, Goodell insists that there is nothing racist about the Washington team\u2019s nickname, that the majority of fans support it , and that he sides with the team\u2019s owner, Dan Snyder, on that issue. For all the lip service Goodell and the N.F.L. paid about the evils of bullying last season, the commissioner will allow Richie Incognito to wear an N.F.L. uniform this season. And while the league has agreed to settle with thousands of former players in concussion-related lawsuits, the league has yet to come clean \u2014 as the tobacco industry did \u2014 and admit that the violence of its game is at the root of short- and long-term debilitating injuries. Still, the N.F.L. finally admitted that it was wrong about something. On Thursday, Goodell, faced with sustained outrage, made the right call and said he had blundered. But just once it would be great to see this multibillion-dollar empire admit the truth without being backed into a corner.", "keyword": "Football;Domestic violence;NFL; Super Bowl; Super Bowl 2015;Roger Goodell;Ray Rice;Richie Incognito;Ravens"}
{"id": "ny0273768", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2016/05/14", "title": "Humans and Mastodons Coexisted in Florida, New Evidence Shows", "abstract": "Florida, it seems, has always been a popular destination. Even the first known Americans gravitated to the state. Of course, they probably went for the mastodons. Underwater archaeologists and other researchers have taken a second look at a sinkhole 30 feet deep in the Aucilla River in northern Florida that is rich with remnants of stone tools, as well as fossilized mastodon bones and dung. Although scientists had studied the location, known as the Page-Ladson site, for more than a decade and knew how old some of the material was, they could not come up with definitive evidence that humans and mastodons were there at the same time. Now, the researchers say, the discovery of an unmistakable human artifact, a stone knife fragment, embedded in sand and dung that allowed for exact dating, proves that paleoindians, as archaeologists call the first people to come to North America, colonized northern Florida by 14,550 years ago. Image A partially reassembled mastodon tusk from the Page-Ladson site. Credit DC Fisher/University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology David G. Anderson, an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who specializes in the early history of humans on the continent, and who was not involved in the research, called the new work, reported in the journal Science Advances , \u201csuperb archaeological scholarship.\u201d The Page-Ladson site \u2014 named for Buddy Page, a diver who first found it, and the Ladson family, which owns the land around it \u2014 is about 30 feet underwater in a sinkhole in the Aucilla River southeast of Tallahassee, about seven miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. It was painstakingly uncovered from the early 1980s until the late 1990s by James S. Dunbar, who joined in the new research, and S. David Webb, then a paleontologist at the University of Florida. Together they wrote \u201dFirst Floridians and Last Mastodons: The Page-Ladson Site in the Aucilla River .\u201d It is the oldest site with evidence of human activity in the Southeastern United States and one of only a handful of sites that show that humans were living in North and South America by about 14,500 years ago. Until recently, scientists thought that the first humans to come to America were big-game hunters who made stone tools in an identifiable style. They were called the Clovis people, after the location of the first discovery of such tools near Clovis, N.M. Researchers put the arrival of the Clovis people in the Americas at around 13,500 years ago. But discoveries in Monte Verde, Chile; Texas; Wisconsin; Oregon; and a few other spots suggested that humans were in the Americas earlier, well over 14,000 years ago, without the distinctive Clovis tools. And studies of modern and ancient DNA have suggested that the first humans to set foot in North America could have come much earlier, perhaps 16,000 or even 18,000 years ago. Michael R. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, who led the research with Jessi J. Halligan, who was doing postdoctoral research with him at the time and is now at Florida State, said the DNA studies suggested that the first humans in America came down the Pacific Coast. So far, no one knows how they got to Florida. When they arrived, however, they found a climate not much different from today, but the area was drier and more open, and the seas were much lower. The coast would have been about 125 miles from the site, which was then a spring-fed pond, in open, upland terrain, not part of any river. The pond was probably frequented by mastodons and other extinct mammals, like ancient bison and rhinoceroses. People and animals would have gone there to drink, Dr. Halligan said, \u201cand, if you were a mastodon, apparently wallow around and defecate a lot.\u201d Today the pond and its shore are deep in the Aucilla, known as a black water river because of its tea-colored, tannin-stained water, which posed an added challenge to the archaeologists. They used scuba gear and helmet-mounted caver\u2019s lights to cope. \u201cIt is, as my dad would say, as dark as the inside of a cow,\u201d Dr. Halligan said. The radiocarbon dating of plant material found in the mastodon dung, plus a discovery that the layer containing the tools was sealed off by another layer on top that was also older than 14,000 years, confirmed the age of the site. The age had been in doubt before in part because of less conclusive tool fragments and questions about whether the river may have churned up the sediments. There was also a mastodon tusk, with cuts that looked like they might have been made by humans. But that evidence was doubted, too, so Daniel C. Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, joined the recent investigation to reanalyze the tusk. He said the marks were made exactly where people would have had to cut through a tough ligament to remove the tusk from a carcass and could not have been made another way. Why would the first Floridians have worked so hard? Probably for a stone age delicacy: up to 15 pounds of fat-rich pulp at the deep, growing root of the tusk. It\u2019s a bit like bone marrow, available at fine restaurants in Miami.", "keyword": "Archaeology,Anthropology;Science Advances;Paleontology;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0248597", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/05/08", "title": "Seve Ballesteros, 54, Daring Golf Champion", "abstract": "Seve Ballesteros, the charismatic Spanish golfer who won the Masters twice and the British Open three times and helped propel Europe\u2019s rise in the Ryder Cup competition with the United States, died early Saturday at his home in northern Spain, where his struggle with brain cancer had gained wide attention in the sports world. He was 54. Ballesteros had surgery for a cancerous brain tumor in October 2008 and had been cared for at his home in the coastal town of Pedre\u00f1a, where he died early Saturday morning, his family said in a statement on his Web site. Ballesteros was only 19 and virtually unknown when he was thrust into the golf spotlight in July 1976. He was on the final hole of the British Open at Royal Birkdale, on England\u2019s western coast, when he hit a brilliant chip shot between two bunkers that landed four feet from the cup. He then sank his putt to tie Jack Nicklaus for second place behind Johnny Miller after having led for three rounds. That daring chip, and the shots before it that rescued him after wild drives into dunes and bushes, caught the golf world\u2019s attention and defined the kind of game that made Ballesteros one of the finest players of his era. With a passion for perfection, an uncommon intensity and a brilliant short game, Ballesteros won five major championships in a 10-year span. At Augusta National in 1980, he became the first European and, at 23, the youngest player to win the Masters. (Tiger Woods then became the youngest in 1997 when he won the Masters at 21.) Ballesteros won the Masters again in 1983, captured the British Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988, and won the World Match Play Championship five times. \u201cI think he comes as close to a complete player as anybody I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d his fellow golfer Ben Crenshaw told Sports Illustrated in 1985. \u201cHe can hit every shot in the bag and do it with the style and look of a champion.\u201d Ballesteros won 45 events on the European Tour, and he was its earnings leader six times. He was in the vanguard of world-class Spanish golfers, preceding Jos\u00e9 Maria Olaz\u00e1bal, Miguel \u00c1ngel Jim\u00e9nez and Sergio Garc\u00eda. But he saw limited action in the United States, winning four PGA Tour events in addition to his Masters triumphs. Told of Ballesteros\u2019s deteriorating condition, Olaz\u00e1bal and Jim\u00e9nez were visibly upset after finishing their second rounds at the Spanish Open in Terrassa on Friday and would not speak with reporters, The Associated Press reported. In Charlotte, N.C., at the Wells Fargo Championship, Phil Mickelson said Friday that beyond Ballesteros\u2019s impact on the game, \u201cthe greatest thing about Seve is his flair and his charisma.\u201d \u201cBecause of the way he played the game of golf, you were drawn to him,\u201d Mickelson added. \u201cYou wanted to go watch him play.\u201d Ballesteros was something of a golf magician. In addition to his miraculous recoveries from wild drives, he could balance three golf balls on top of one another, a favorite trick. Handsome with a swashbuckling style, he was a favorite of the television cameras, as Frank Hannigan, senior executive director of the United States Golf Association, remarked at the 1985 Masters. \u201cHe\u2019s made for this medium,\u201d Hannigan said. \u201cThey come in close for a shot, and they can\u2019t miss. You can see his thought processes. For me, he is more fun to watch than any player in the world.\u201d Severiano Ballesteros (pronounced buy-yuh-STAY-ros) was born in Pedre\u00f1a, where his father, a former Spanish-champion rower, was a farmer. His three older brothers, Baldomero, Manuel and Vicente, were golf pros, as was his uncle Ramon Sota. As a boy, he batted stones with a homemade golf club on the beaches near his family\u2019s stone farmhouse. When he was 8, his brother Manuel gave him a 3-iron, and he began to caddie at a prestigious golf club in Santander, near his home. He won the caddie championship there at age 12 with a 79, sneaked onto the course at night to practice his shots, quit school at 14 and turned pro at 16. Ballesteros won his first major when he captured the 1979 British Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes in England, and it was there, on the 16th hole of the final round, that he made one of his most storied shots. With his ball in a parking lot, he hit a sand wedge to the green, then sank a 20-foot putt for birdie and went on to win by three shots, besting Nicklaus. In this case, however, it wasn\u2019t a matter of Ballesteros\u2019s being out of control on a drive. He had deliberately hit to the parking lot to take advantage of the prevailing winds. Ballesteros led or was tied for the lead after each round in capturing the 1980 Masters, but he ran into trouble late on the final day, three-putting the 10th hole, hitting twice into Rae\u2019s Creek and sending his drive on the 17th hole onto the seventh green. At one point, he was only two shots ahead, but he won by four, a margin he reprised in winning the 1983 Masters. Apart from his individual achievements, Ballesteros was a leading force in Europe\u2019s emergence on the Ryder Cup scene after players from the continent were allowed to join with British and Irish players beginning in 1979. He played on eight Ryder Cup squads, including the 1987 team that achieved the Europeans\u2019 first triumph in America, at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio. He won 22 \u00bd points from his 37 matches over all. He was the nonplaying captain of Europe\u2019s team in 1997, when the Valderrama Golf Club on Spain\u2019s Costa del Sol played host to the event, the first time the Ryder Cup had been held on the continent. Ballesteros was a master of concentration. \u201cI\u2019m so deeply immersed in my game plan and my play that I\u2019m virtually oblivious to outside sights and sounds,\u201d he wrote in his 1991 book \u201cNatural Golf,\u201d written with John Andrisani. \u201cI never hear my playing partner\u2019s clubs rattling, and I rarely ever hear the gallery applauding. I\u2019m grinding as hard as I can inside my bubble.\u201d Ballesteros\u2019s last European Tour victory came at the Spanish Open in 1995; a chronic back problem curtailed his play after that. His biggest disappointment was his failure to win a United States Open championship, his often erratic play proving costly on the customarily narrow fairways and high roughs. Ballesteros was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1999 and retired in an emotional news conference at Carnoustie before the 2007 British Open. In recent years, he ran a golf-course design business. He learned he had a brain tumor after fainting at Madrid\u2019s international airport while waiting to board a flight to Germany on Oct. 6, 2008. The next March, in an interview with Marca, a Spanish sports newspaper, he spoke openly about his cancer and the 300,000 get-well cards he had received from around the world as he underwent chemotherapy. \u201cI\u2019m not called Seve Ballesteros,\u201d the paper quoted him as saying, \u201cI\u2019m called Seve Mulligan, because I\u2019ve had the luck to be given a mulligan, which in golf is a second chance.\u201d Ballesteros is survived by two sons and a daughter and his three brothers. His marriage to Carmen Bot\u00edn ended in divorce in 2004. In 1988, when he won a major for the last time, Ballesteros displayed the elements that had been his trademark: he was erratic but overwhelmingly brilliant. He had two bogeys in one 11-hole stretch of the final round of the British Open, but he also had six birdies and an eagle in that span, finishing with a 65 to beat Nick Price by two shots. On the 16th hole, he hit a 9-iron from 135 yards that stopped three inches from the cup. \u201cIt was the best round of my life so far,\u201d Ballesteros said. \u201cThat shot at 16 was one of my two best.\u201d The victory came at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, the site of that memorable approach shot in his first British Open nine years earlier. Holding the champion\u2019s silver cup aloft, Ballesteros said, \u201cThis time I didn\u2019t hit from the parking lot.\u201d", "keyword": "Ballesteros Seve;Golf;Deaths (Obituaries);Masters Golf Tournament;Ryder Cup (Golf);British Open (Golf);PGA Tour Inc"}
{"id": "ny0134004", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/03/23", "title": "One Site. Two Games. Four Underdogs.", "abstract": "TAMPA , Fla. \u2014 As the San Diego Toreros stood in the tunnel and soaked in the N.C.A.A. tournament scene here, they became riveted by the final minutes of Western Kentucky \u2019s dramatic overtime victory against Drake. Ty Rogers\u2019s last-second 3-point shot might have seemed like a tough act to follow Friday. The Toreros, though, were energized by the extra jolt of inspiration from their fellow underdog, an emotion that cascaded into four upsets in the West and Midwest Regions. \u201cIt definitely excited us,\u201d said De\u2019Jon Jackson, the San Diego guard who hit an overtime winner of his own to beat Connecticut . \u201cIt was like we were Western Kentucky fans for a moment there.\u201d All of which raises an interesting question: who\u2019s the underdog now? Will the fans at the St. Pete Times Forum root for Siena, a 13th seed, against 12th-seeded Villanova when they play on Sunday? Will they embrace No. 12 seed Western Kentucky, or 13th-seeded San Diego? This situation has never played out at a first-round regional site since the N.C.A.A. tournament began seeding teams in 1979. Coaches and players scrambled Saturday to reclaim the underdog role as if it were a loose ball in the final seconds. \u201cAccording to the rankings, we\u2019d have to be the underdog,\u201d said San Diego forward Gyno Pomare, grasping tightly to the Toreros\u2019 13th seed. Western Kentucky Coach Darrin Horn took a down-the-middle approach, putting the underdog label on his team and the Toreros. Villanova\u2019s Dwayne Anderson offered a similar line of thinking. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of confusion because of the number that\u2019s in front of your ranking,\u201d he said. \u201cThat means like you\u2019re basically a better team, which is not true, as you can see from the scores. Siena and ourselves, we were both underdogs coming into the tournament and we\u2019re still going to have the same approach on tomorrow\u2019s game.\u201d If only by default, Villanova may be viewed as the marquee team left in the games here \u2014 an odd twist given that the Wildcats were among the last teams to receive an at-large bid. They won 7 of their last 11 games, but they lost by 19 points to Georgetown in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament. Villanova appeared headed for an early exit Friday against Clemson after falling behind by 18 points late in the first half. Scottie Reynolds, who scored 14 of his 21 points in the second half, and Corey Fisher, who had 12 of his 17 points in the final 20 minutes, came to the rescue offensively. The Wildcats focused defensively, too, and held Clemson to 2-of-16 shooting on 3-pointers in the second half. Villanova also has a recent history of making strong runs in the N.C.A.A. tournament. Two years ago, the Wildcats reached the final eight. In 2005, they advanced to the Round of 16. Each time, they lost to the eventual national champions. Still, Villanova Coach Jay Wright rejects the idea of being at the head of this higher-seeded class. \u201cThe way our team has been all year, to hear us called the marquee team right now is funny,\u201d he said. \u201cSeriously,\u201d he added, \u201cyou can\u2019t say anything about favorites. What went on here in this first round is just the beauty of the N.C.A.A. tournament. It\u2019s incredible. We won\u2019t feel like the favorites tomorrow.\u201d Bill Grier, San Diego\u2019s first-year coach, learned how to play both sides of the fence as an assistant for 16 seasons at Gonzaga, the quintessential midmajor that for many years played down its chances against opponents with bigger reputations. Even after knocking off Connecticut, Grier soft-pedaled the Toreros\u2019 success and declared Western Kentucky the team to beat. \u201cI still think we\u2019re the underdog,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re 28-6. They had a heck of a year. They\u2019re a senior-dominated team for the most part.\u201d He added: \u201cThat\u2019s still the approach we\u2019re going to take. Also, the motivation of being 40 minutes away from something really special. I don\u2019t think it will be an issue to get these kids ready to play.\u201d Jackson, the Toreros\u2019 sophomore guard, considered all the talk as simply part of the game plan. \u201cEach team is going to come out and think they\u2019re the underdog because that\u2019s how they won,\u201d he said. \u201cIn their brackets, people might not put them down, but everybody likes the underdogs.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;NCAA;College Sports"}
{"id": "ny0175816", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/10/25", "title": "Suspect in Rape and Torture Is Found Fit to Stand Trial", "abstract": "An ex-convict accused of raping and torturing a Columbia University graduate student in April has been found mentally fit to stand trial. The ruling yesterday by Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court came after the lawyer for the defendant, Robert Williams, conceded that his own psychiatric expert believed Mr. Williams was able to meet the minimal legal standards of fitness to stand trial, including being able to understand the charges against him and to assist in his own defense. When a court-appointed psychiatrist in September found Mr. Williams mentally fit to stand trial, the lawyer, Arnold J. Levine, contested the finding and said he wanted a second expert to examine his client. But yesterday Mr. Levine said in court, \u201cAs of now I have no basis on which to contest the findings\u201d of the two court-appointed experts. Mr. Williams, 30, who served eight years for attempted murder in another case, has been indicted on charges including kidnapping, arson, attempted murder and rape in the attack on a 23-year-old student in Hamilton Heights. The police said at the time that he entered the elevator with the woman and forced his way into her apartment. Over the next 19 hours, the police said, he tied the woman to her bed with computer cables, taped her mouth closed, raped and sodomized her repeatedly, burned her with hot water and bleach, slit her eyelids with scissors and force-fed her an overdose of pain reliever. After withdrawing money using her A.T.M. card, the police said, the man set the woman\u2019s futon on fire and left her there unconscious, but she revived and was able to use the flames to loosen her bonds and escape. At the hearing yesterday, Mr. Levine said that \u201cinstinct\u201d had told him his client was not mentally competent to stand trial, but that his expert had not supported that instinct. He said Mr. Williams had a documented history of treatment for mental illness. He also said that correction officers had to use force to get his client to court yesterday. Mr. Williams, wearing an orange coverall, was brought to court with his wrists and legs shackled and with cloth mitts on his hands. The prosecutor, Ann Prunty, said that the court-appointed doctors had found Mr. Williams \u201ccoherent, responsive, alert, oriented.\u201d Justice Berkman said that the legal standard for fitness to stand trial \u201cdoesn\u2019t require that somebody be a model of mental health.\u201d She said that she was \u201cgoing to confirm the finding of fitness,\u201d but that Mr. Williams could present any new evidence of his mental state at a later date. Mr. Levine said afterward that he was still considering using mental illness as a defense.", "keyword": "Williams Robert;Sex Crimes;Torture"}
{"id": "ny0091833", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/08/11", "title": "They Helped Make Twitter Matter in Ferguson Protests", "abstract": "A year ago, these three activists were ordinary Americans: a teacher, a school administrator and a temporary government employee. Like many others, they found a voice on social media to comment on the news, describe their personal experiences and relate the everyday struggles of blacks in America. As their social media following soared during the Ferguson protests, so did their belief in the power of Twitter to dispute official statements that did not ring true. Eventually, they used Twitter and Tumblr to fund and mobilize protests and make demands on police departments and government officials. Their high-profile status also made some of them targets of intelligence monitoring and threats. Here, Johnetta Elzie , DeRay Mckesson and Zellie Imani read their tweets from the past year and discuss how social media boiled after the fatal shooting by a police officer of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., turning the nation\u2019s attention to race and police conduct, and in the process changing their lives. On Monday, officers with the Department of Homeland Security arrested Ms. Elzie and Mr. Mckesson during a civil disobedience protest at the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis. But on Aug. 8, 2014, the day before Mr. Brown was killed, Ms. Elzie was 25 and living in St. Louis. She had just finished a job as a phone interviewer for the United States Department of Agriculture and was considering going back to school. She had a community of friends and maybe 2,000 Twitter followers, and used social media to comment on topics like makeup, movies and sports. On the day Mr. Brown died, Ms. Elzie drove to Ferguson and started tweeting and posting photographs and videos to social media. She has not stopped. A year later, she has more than 57,000 followers on Twitter. She is now an organizing member of the group WeTheProtesters.org, along with Mr. Mckesson. Mr. Mckesson, 30, monitored Twitter during the first few days of last August\u2019s protests from his home in Minneapolis, where he worked as a school administrator and had 1,000 or so Twitter followers. But after watching protesters in Ferguson clash with a militarized police force, he packed his car and tweeted, \u201cEn route to Ferguson.\u201d In the months since, Mr. Mckesson has become a full-time protester and organizer, and a go-to source for reporters covering protests around the country. He has 200,000 Twitter followers. On Aug. 12, 2014, Mr. Imani, a 30-year-old math teacher in Paterson, N.J., posted a link to his GoFundMe account , hoping to raise money for a plane ticket to St. Louis to join the protesters in Ferguson. He already had a respectable social media following as a commentator on his blog, Black-Culture.com. Altogether, Mr. Imani has traveled to Ferguson five times, with three of the trips financed by crowdfunding. He now has nearly 50,000 Twitter followers and helps organize NJShutitdown, a group protesting police brutality on college campuses in New Jersey.", "keyword": "Johnetta Elzie;Deray Mckesson;Zellie Imani;Social Media;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Civil Unrest;Michael Brown;Ferguson"}
{"id": "ny0027339", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/01/17", "title": "Hong Kong Takes a Second Look at Changes to Corporate Database", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 The second-highest official in Hong Kong said Wednesday that the government was reviewing a proposed rule change that had prompted a groundswell of worry among global banks, accounting firms, investors and media companies who fear the loss of a powerful tool against corruption in China. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong\u2019s chief secretary and second-ranking official, said that the city\u2019s financial services regulators had begun holding discussions with its privacy commissioner about the proposed rule change. The change, contained in a bill that the administration began pushing through the legislature last month, calls for deleting the identity numbers and addresses of directors from Hong Kong\u2019s corporate registry starting next year. \u201cWe will continue to listen to public views,\u201d Mrs. Lam said. Many financial institutions around the world depend on Hong Kong\u2019s corporate registry for information about businesses here and in mainland China. They use it to check whether directors have ever been associated with fraud or corruption at other businesses, in Hong Kong or in mainland China. Banks consult the registry, which is available online and at a Hong Kong government office, before agreeing to help a company do an initial public offering on stock exchanges in Hong Kong or in mainland China. Hedge funds, private equity firms and other investors check the registry before buying large blocks of stock in companies. Journalists check the registry for purposes of investigative reporting. Including the identity numbers and addresses is what makes it possible to ascertain whether a director in a company is someone with a background of fraud and other corrupt dealings, or simply someone with a similar name. There has been a series of cases in mainland China in which an individual accused of having a shady background has maintained that he or she was being confused with someone else, only to be found out based on the registries. David Webb, a corporate governance activist in Hong Kong who maintains a database of directors of local companies, welcomed the government\u2019s willingness to review the draft rule. \u201cIt\u2019s encouraging if they\u2019re starting to think about it,\u201d Mr. Webb said. \u201cIt is important to be able to identify people uniquely.\u201d He noted that his database has 19 people named Chan Chikeung and 12 people named Chan Waikeung, who need to be distinguished by identity numbers. Mainland China also has corporate registries. But the Chinese government has restricted access to them by investors and other users over the past year, particularly in Beijing, after short-sellers from the United States used research in those registries to document widespread fraud and other abuses at Chinese companies listed on American stock exchanges. Lack of access to mainland registries has made the registry in Hong Kong, which Britain returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 but which retains a separate legal system, much more important in recent months. Mrs. Lam said that the Hong Kong administration and legislature had held discussions dating at least to 2009 before adopting a new ordinance on companies last summer. The ordinance had broadly worded provisions encouraging privacy in corporate records, and there was little discussion about what that privacy might mean for financial markets. The controversy began this winter when the government sent an implementing bill to the legislature with detailed changes to laws, including the deletion of data from the registry. China\u2019s incoming leader, Xi Jinping, has called for a crackdown on corruption but has been silent about the role of Hong Kong. The city is popular among mainland officials and their families as a safe place to park large sums of money beyond the reach of the Chinese police and tax collectors, and the city now has some of the world\u2019s highest real estate prices partly as a result, creating a housing problem.", "keyword": "Hong Kong;Regulation and Deregulation;Board of directors;Privacy"}
{"id": "ny0218680", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/05/21", "title": "Breaking Up Bottlenecks", "abstract": "A recent traffic analysis by the consulting company Inrix ranked the San Francisco Metropolitan Area as the seventh most congested region in the country. That study also found that commuters in the Bay Area spend 32 more hours in traffic a year than the average driver who spends 22 hours per year on the highway. From San Rafael to Menlo Park, Caltrans and local officials have tried to alleviate the problems. I-880 AND HIGHWAY 92 Commuters inching their way through construction at Interstate 880 and Highway 92 might wonder why it takes so long to build two flyover bridges and a couple of ramps where the San Mateo bridge empties its eastbound traffic. But Caltrans says the interchange is on schedule for completion next summer, and is within its $158 million budget. That interchange, like much of I-880, the Nimitz Freeway, was built in the 1950s, when the region\u2019s population was a third of today\u2019s. By 1991, when planning to accommodate heavier traffic began, the cloverleaf interchange had been overwhelmed. The fix involves welding 7 million pounds of steel and forming up 28,000 cubic yards of concrete on roadways traveled by 250,000 cars a day. JACQUELINE GINLEY HIGHWAY 101 IN MENLO PARK It has been 13 years since San Mateo County began the first of a series of auxiliary lane additions along Highway 101. After a decision by county officials earlier this month, South Bay commuters can expect this project to continue after the approval of improvement on more freeway segments. Construction will take place along three different locations from Marsh Road to Embarcadero Road and is expected to begin in the spring of 2011. Caltrans officials anticipate this phase of the project will be complete in late 2013. The project is expected to alleviate peak-hour traffic through an area full of drivers heading to jobs in the heart of Silicon Valley. Along a 1.2-mile stretch of highway from Willow Road to University Avenue, for example, Caltrans estimates that nearly 900 more cars per hour can be accommodated during peak morning hours after the project is done. The auxiliary lane project extends 26 miles from San Mateo County\u2019s northern to southern borders. Estimates indicate that auxiliary lanes can cut travel times by 9 minutes during peak hours, while reducing carbon emissions by 12 percent. RYAN MAC I-580 AND HIGHWAY 101 Two years ago, Inrix listed a stretch of Interstate 580 in Marin County as one of the Top 10 worst traffic bottlenecks in the country. Upstream from the notorious exit ramp between I-580 westbound and Highway 101 northbound, the one-lane thoroughfare was a logistical nightmare; congested 69 hours a week, with cars averaging a speed of 7.6 miles per hour along the 1.5-mile stretch during peak hours. A year later, simple restriping created a second lane on the ramp, improving traffic dramatically. Drivers experienced only 19 hours of congestion a week and averaged 14 m.p.h. during peak hours. But the project proved to be just a temporary fix. In April, Caltrans initiated a $10 million construction project to build a new exit ramp that is expected to be completed by October. RYAN MAC", "keyword": "Roads and Traffic;San Francisco Bay Area (Calif);Commuting;MAC"}
{"id": "ny0224871", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/10/05", "title": "Houston Ship Channel Blocked After Barge Crash", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 Oil tankers and cargo ships were lining up in the waters outside the Houston Ship Channel on Monday, as crews with a floating crane worked furiously to repair a damaged 300-foot-tall electrical tower that was blocking entry to one of the country\u2019s largest ports, the Coast Guard said. At 6 a.m. Sunday, a tug boat pushing three barges loaded with scrap metal went off course and crashed into the base of the metal tower, which sits on an island in the center of the channel near where it empties into Galveston Bay, Petty Officer Richard Brahm said. The first barge cut through part of the tower\u2019s base. The tower listed wildly to one side and ended up resting on the barge, its high-voltage lines sagging dangerously close to the water. The channel was effectively cut off to traffic. CenterPoint Energy, which owns the power lines, brought in a giant crane on another barge Monday. Crews of workmen were trying to hoist the wrecked tower up with the floating crane, known as Big John. The job may not be completed until late Tuesday, the company said. Thirty to 40 vessels use the channel daily to reach dozens of terminals at refineries, railheads and shipping companies that line the 25-mile-long waterway. The Coast Guard estimates that the channel handles about $322 million a day in freight. By late Monday afternoon, 19 ships were anchored outside the port, waiting for it to open, and at least 12 ships were trapped at piers. Still, it will be at least three days before the accident begins to take a economic toll, port officials said. Most of the refineries have at least a three-day supply of gasoline and distillates, because it is not uncommon for the channel to be closed for 48 hours due to bad weather or heavy fog. Pilots in the bay are well drilled on shepherding a backlog of ships into port once the closings are over. \u201cRight now, we don\u2019t expect anything to be lost,\u201d said Patrick Seeba, a project manager with the Greater Houston Port Bureau , a trade group. \u201cIt\u2019s like sitting in traffic on the way to the grocery and you decide to turn around and go back tomorrow. You are still going to go to the grocery store.\u201d Large refineries owned by Valero Energy, Royal Dutch Shell, Pasadena Refining System and other companies could be affected by a long delay. Mr. Seeba said the ships affected so far were carrying bulk loads, like grain, cement and steel, as well as oil. Much of the traffic in shipping containers was unhindered, since the biggest facilities for unloading containers are on Galveston Bay. The cause of the accident is under investigation, Petty Officer Brahm said. The captain of the tug boat, the Safety Quest, has been interviewed and tested for drugs and alcohol.", "keyword": "Texas;Accidents and Safety"}
{"id": "ny0098530", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/06/07", "title": "The Tale of the Red Queen, Communist Double Agent", "abstract": "Q. Wasn\u2019t there a woman early in the Cold War known as the Red Queen? A. You are probably thinking of Elizabeth T. Bentley , a Vassar graduate who had led a spy ring for the Soviet Union and then turned double agent in 1945. She helped start what became the Red Scare by being the first ex-Communist to testify before a congressional committee and name names. Some newspapers tried to titillate their readers by referring to the female ringleader as \u201ca shapely blonde\u201d in a \u201cform-fitting black dress.\u201d Liberal critics of the anti-Communist crusade called her a neurotic spinster. In fact, she was a plain-looking woman who had an active sex life and suffered from alcoholism. Her story is told in \u201cRed Spy Queen,\u201d by Kathryn S. Olmsted (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Ms. Bentley joined the Communist Party in 1935, fell in love with an important Communist spy, Jacob Golos, in 1938 and replaced him as a courier for a Washington spy ring in 1941 after he was convicted of failing to register as a Soviet agent. For four years, Ms. Bentley shuttled between New York, where she helped run a shipping company that was a Communist front, and Washington, collecting information, documents and the names of Communist contacts. But as World War II was winding down, the Soviet Union wanted to replace its American ringleaders with its own people. Irate at the impending loss of her friends, and fearful \u2014 justifiably, Ms. Olmsted writes \u2014 that the Soviets were out to kill her, she went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1945 with information about her contacts, including the names of 37 employees of government agencies or wartime boards who she said had given her information. She spoke to grand juries, reporters and House and Senate investigating committees. She later testified in the espionage conspiracy trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed. She wrote a book about her experiences, \u201cOut of Bondage,\u201d and lectured, but passed rapidly into obscurity. She died in December 1963 at the age of 55. Unlike the much more famous Whittaker Chambers, whose accusations against Alger Hiss helped launch Richard M. Nixon to national fame, Ms. Bentley kept no incriminating documents, although she corroborated some of the testimony of others. None of the 37 people she named were indicted on charges of spying. Because her defection to the F.B.I. had been tipped to the Soviets almost immediately, her contacts covered their tracks. Between her severe drinking and her desire to remain on the F.B.I. payroll by staying useful, she frequently changed her stories, magnifying her role and the importance of her information. She served the F.B.I.\u2019s political purposes, but she was increasingly regarded as unreliable. She converted to Catholicism and then abandoned it. Her last job was teaching at a girls\u2019 reform school. But her obituaries underestimated her importance, Ms. Olmsted observes. Ms. Bentley had controlled dozens of agents. Her defection shut down the Soviet espionage system in the United States for some time. She began a trail that led to the convictions of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, and she helped define the partisan political warfare of the early Cold War. Far from being na\u00efve and flighty, \u201cthe real Elizabeth Bentley had been a strong woman who defied limits, laws and traditions,\u201d Ms. Olmsted writes.", "keyword": "Elizabeth Bentley;Spying and Intelligence Agencies;Cold War;Communism"}
{"id": "ny0215614", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/04/27", "title": "Teaching Youngsters How to Read Advertising", "abstract": "A federal agency is undertaking an effort to school youngsters in the ways of Madison Avenue. The initiative seeks to educate children in grades four through six \u2014 tweens, in the parlance of marketing \u2014 about how advertising works so they can make better, more informed choices when they shop or when they ask parents to shop on their behalf. The centerpiece of the effort is a Web site called Admongo ( admongo.gov ), where visitors can get an \u201cad-ucation\u201d by playing a game featuring make-believe products closely modeled on real ones, among them Choco Crunch\u2019n Good cereal, Cleanology acne medication, Double Dunk sporting goods and the Smile Meals sold at Fast Chef restaurants. \u201cAdvertising is all around you,\u201d the home page declares in urging youngsters to always ask three questions: \u201cWho is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do?\u201d The initiative is being sponsored by the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission, which polices deceptive, fraudulent and unfair marketing and advertising practices. The bureau is enlisting Scholastic, the educational publishing company based in New York, to help distribute materials to teachers and classrooms. The idea that children need to better understand how commercial speech differs from other forms of communication is not a new one. Many schools have courses in what is called media literacy, intended to help students analyze various methods of persuasion, among them sponsored messages. The goal is generally \u201cto help kids start to understand the commercial world they live in and to be alert to, and think critically, of advertising,\u201d said David Vladeck, director of the bureau in Washington. The belief that youngsters ought to be given additional tools to assist them in deciphering sales pitches has been gaining support as the Internet, and social media in particular, are used more for marketing. \u201cWe\u2019ve had some consumer-directed ads, directed to children, on advertising,\u201d Mr. Vladeck said, \u201cbut nothing of the scope, depth and complexity\u201d of the new effort. As for the tone of the materials, they are meant to be \u201cnonjudgmental,\u201d Mr. Vladeck said, rather than presupposing there is nefarious purpose inherent in ads and that marketers continuously try to trick consumers into buying things they do not want or need. \u201cThe vast majority of marketers sell lawful products to people who can lawfully buy them,\u201d Mr. Vladeck said. \u201cThe game says advertising is pervasive and it\u2019s good to know what it is, it\u2019s good to think critically and think whether purchasing a product is in your best interest.\u201d \u2022 On the other side of the coin, the bureau was also careful in developing the materials, he added, to avoid giving anyone grounds to complain that the effort \u201cpromotes commercialism by teaching kids advertising techniques.\u201d That tack was praised by C. Lee Peeler, president and chief executive of the National Advertising Review Council, which is the ad industry\u2019s voluntary self-regulatory system. The council operates under the aegis of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, where Mr. Peeler is also an executive vice president. The bureau\u2019s effort will \u201cteach kids how to swim in the ocean of advertising,\u201d Mr. Peeler said, yet takes \u201ca straightforward approach that does not go a step further and demonize advertising.\u201d \u201cWe were pretty impressed by what we saw,\u201d he added, and the council intends to link to Admongo.gov from its own Web site ( narcpartners.org ). Fleishman-Hillard, a public relations agency owned by the Omnicom Group, helped the bureau in developing the Admongo Web site, the online game and the teaching materials. Asked if the participation of Fleishman-Hillard presents a conflict because the agency is part of the Madison Avenue marketing machine, Mr. Vladeck replied that persuasion is \u201cwhat Fleishman-Hillard does, and they do it well.\u201d \u201cThey also know the tricks of the trade,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019re tapping into their expertise.\u201d Likewise, the division of Scholastic that is handling the distribution of the materials to teachers and students works with corporations as well as government agencies and nonprofit organizations. For instance, the division, known as Scholastic In School, teamed up with the Lexus unit of Toyota Motor for the Lexus Eco Challenge, a curriculum meant to teach teenagers about the environment. \u2022 \u201cWe help teachers explain the world around them to the children,\u201d said Ann Amstutz Hayes, vice president at Scholastic In School. For the bureau, \u201cwe\u2019re informing the kids about advertising,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s so important they understand what it is and make informed decisions.\u201d The reason the curriculum is being aimed at students in the fourth through sixth grades is because that is when \u201cthey\u2019re at the stage they\u2019re developing their critical-thinking skills,\u201d Ms. Amstutz Hayes said. Mr. Vladeck said he hoped that with Scholastic\u2019s assistance the bureau would be able to \u201cget into a couple hundred thousand classrooms\u201d around the country. The effort is being financed by \u201ca little over $2 million,\u201d he added. The bureau is especially pleased with the online game, Mr. Vladeck said, adding that he has played it himself. \u201cI was not able to get past Level Two,\u201d he said, laughing. \u201cMy 12-year-old nephew, in 45 minutes, was already on Level Four.\u201d The bureau will announce the initiative on Wednesday at a news conference and on the \u201cToday\u201d show. Perhaps the effort comes not a moment too soon. Adweek devotes this week\u2019s issue to \u201cKids\u201d and \u201cHow the industry is striving to conquer this coveted market.\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Children and Youth;Education and Schools;Bureau of Consumer Protection;Federal Trade Commission;Admongo.gov"}
{"id": "ny0101647", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/12/31", "title": "Rail Industry Again Given More Time to Install Safety System", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 When Congress in October gave railroads extra time to install a badly needed speed-control system, officials at the Federal Railroad Administration vowed to move aggressively to make sure the safety technology would be in place by the end of 2018, the new deadline. This month, Congress struck again. Tucked into a 1,000-page transportation law signed Dec. 4 is new language that could effectively extend the deadline until the end of 2020. And positive train control , a technology that safety advocates say could have prevented the deadly Amtrak crash in Philadelphia in May, could stay on the shelf even longer. \u201cThis five-year extension of lifesaving technology is way too long, with way too little guarantee that P.T.C. implementation will get done,\u201d Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement. Mr. Blumenthal has long been critical of an extension for railroads to install the safety technology. The new delay is the latest pull in a tug of war between the railroad industry and federal regulators over the safety system. A firm deadline for installing it on all freight and commuter trains by 2015 was originally set under a law passed in the aftermath of a 2008 commuter rail crash in California that killed 25 and injured 135. But as the Dec. 31 deadline approached, the industry appealed to Congress, saying it needed an extension because the technology, which tracks the speed and movements of trains and can prevent collisions, was difficult to install. Without a reprieve, the railroads said, the nation\u2019s rail system would have to shut down. The Obama administration acquiesced, but in public statements and in letters just after the reprieve passed, Sarah Feinberg, the railroad agency\u2019s administrator, told industry leaders that she expected them to meet deadlines and requirements for installing the safety system by the new deadline or face civil penalties starting at $5,000 a day. Barely a month later, Congress said that Ms. Feinberg had misinterpreted the lawmakers\u2019 intent. Language in this month\u2019s five-year transportation law essentially gave the rail industry what critics called a blanket extension \u2014 until the end of 2020 \u2014 to fully install the technology. The National Transportation Safety Board says positive train control is the best way to prevent deadly train accidents. It says the technology could have prevented 145 of the rail accidents it has investigated since 1969; those accidents killed 288 people and injured 6,574. Efforts to have the technology installed on train tracks have dragged on because of bureaucratic hurdles and technical challenges. A Government Accountability Office report released in September said that several problems had contributed to delays, including the newness of the technology and its limited supply. The report said the government had also added to the delays. For example, railroads had to stop construction of radio poles, which relay the GPS signals, along tracks because environmental approvals were delayed by bureaucracy or understaffing. After lobbying from freight and commuter rail companies, lawmakers had considered giving railroads a five-year extension, but those efforts were roundly criticized after the Amtrak crash in Philadelphia, which killed eight and injured more than 200. Under the initial bill signed by President Obama in October, railroads were given until December 31, 2018, to install positive train control, with the option of requesting two additional years to work on the installation and testing. But that extension would be available only if the railroads submit plans for doing the work by Dec. 31, 2018. Each request would have to be approved individually by the secretary of transportation. Officials at the Federal Railroad Administration feared that some railroads might wait until the last minute and submit plans requesting the additional two years, essentially taking five years to complete the work without ever trying to do it in three. So Ms. Feinberg told rail executives not to bother submitting plans asking for extensions if they had not shown that they were making progress on the required schedule. Each revised implementation plan \u201cshould reflect the new December 31, 2018, deadline for all elements\u201d to implement positive train control, Ms. Feinberg wrote in a Nov. 19 letter. Congress was having none of it. \u201cThis bipartisan provision clarifies what Congress explicitly stated in the signed-into-law October legislation extending the P.T.C. deadline,\u201d said Fredrick Hill, a spokesman for the Senate Commerce Committee. \u201cThis clarification was necessary to prevent a misinterpretation.\u201d Federal railroad regulators declined to comment, but some lawmakers from the Northeast said the language in the transportation bill made the 2018 deadline a sham. The American Association of Railroads, the industry group for freight carriers, declined to discuss the specifics of the language in the transportation bill and said it had no role in requesting the provision. \u201cThe freight rail industry\u2019s focus is to get P.T.C. installed and implemented as quickly as possible,\u201d the association said in a statement. Amtrak announced last week that all of the tracks it owns between Washington and New York have the positive train control system installed and working.", "keyword": "Train wreck;Federal Railroad Administration;NTSB;Amtrak;Transportation;Legislation;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0251451", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/02/15", "title": "Europe Likely to Act to Cut Phone Roaming Costs", "abstract": "BARCELONA \u2014 The European telecommunications commissioner said on Monday that she probably would seek new regulations to end the high charges Europeans face when using data services on smartphones outside their home countries. Speaking here on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress, the industry\u2019s largest convention, the commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said that limits on the fees operators charge each other for mobile data roaming, which were enacted in 2007, had failed to significantly lower costs to consumers. Mobile data roaming involves uses like downloading e-mail or reading a newspaper on a phone, as opposed to simply making a voice telephone call. Prices for mobile data roaming across European borders can reach 2.60 euros, or about $3.50, a downloaded megabyte, compared with an average of 5 cents a megabyte paid at home, Mrs. Kroes said. \u201cI would love to be able to say to you today that the roaming market is competitive, that data roaming charges approach domestic prices, that bill shocks are a thing of the past, that prices for voice and SMS roaming are not clustered around the maximum levels permitted,\u201d she said. \u201cRegrettably, I cannot.\u201d European laws on mobile roaming charges set limits on how much consumers can be charged for voice services, but place only wholesale caps on data services. They are both set to expire in July 2012. Mrs. Kroes is studying whether to extend the caps, impose new ones or introduce other measures to improve competition. Her recommendation, expected by the end of June, would then be taken up by the European Parliament and national governments. Mobile operators, which lost a fight against the initial price caps in 2007, have said that the market for data roaming is not big enough to create true competition and that domestic prices are falling rapidly. Mrs. Kroes, a Dutch economist, acknowledged the argument in her speech but said operators were using market developments as an excuse to maintain unreasonably high charges. \u201cOf course incentives to compete on roaming prices are not as strong as the pressures on domestic prices,\u201d she said. \u201cBut that is not a justification for the current rip-offs.\u201d Mrs. Kroes opened a review of the market in December, soliciting comments from operators, consumers and others. During her speech, Mrs. Kroes said that high mobile data roaming prices were hindering the commission\u2019s broader goal of making fast broadband service, with download speeds of at least 30 megabits a second, available to all residents of the 27-member European Union by 2020. She outlined three options under consideration to reduce them. One would impose retail price caps on mobile data roaming charges similar to those on voice, which led to an increase in the use of cross-border mobile calling. Another would allow consumers to buy roaming packages from any operator, not just their own. A third would set lower wholesale price caps on data roaming and require operators to sell the service to low-cost virtual operators like Tele2 of Sweden, a specialist reseller of services on other operator\u2019s networks. Without saying which option she backed, she suggested that at the least, the current regulation would be extended beyond 2012. \u201cIt may be that no single approach will do the job on its own,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we cannot exclude that different approaches may need to be implemented for the first years following the expiry of the current regulation while laying the groundwork for more sustainable long-term solutions. \u201d The chief executives of the five largest mobile operators in Europe, Telef\u00f3nica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, France T\u00e9l\u00e9com and Telecom Italia, were scheduled to discuss roaming privately Monday in Barcelona.", "keyword": "Cellular Telephones;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;European Union;European Commission;Wireless Communications;Telephones and Telecommunications;European Parliament;Europe"}
{"id": "ny0162201", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/02/03", "title": "A Police Veteran, a Rookie and Fate: All Three Crossed Paths", "abstract": "One was a rookie still fired up over one of his first arrests. The other was a veteran who made his first arrest -- the first of more than 1,300 -- when the rookie was about 5 years old. Officer Eric Hernandez, 24, was just beginning his career; Officer Alfredo Toro, 43, was ending his, telling a friend that he planned to retire in July after 20 years on the force. They wore the same uniform for the New York Police Department, but the similarities virtually ended there. Officer Hernandez was a charismatic bachelor and recent college graduate, a fast-footed running back on the department's full-contact football team. His friends still called him by his high school nickname: E. Officer Toro was a suburban family man with a two-car garage who showed off his athletic skills not in packed stadiums but in his backyard, playing with his two children. Officer Hernandez's life moved at a fast clip, a business major one moment, in a patrol car the next. Officer Toro stayed put, policing the same small precinct his entire career and working in virtual anonymity, though he found himself connected to a scandal that rocked the department in the mid-1990's. The two men had one thing in common: both worked night shifts on the tough streets of the Bronx, reporting for duty at station houses not quite two miles apart. In this city, people live their whole lives separated by such short distances and never once cross paths. But early Saturday morning, a confluence of events -- fate and chance, a flash of violence in a fast-food restaurant, a 911 call for help -- brought the men together. Officer Hernandez, off duty and in street clothes, was shot three times as he aimed his gun at a man he believed had attacked him inside a White Castle at 1831 Webster Avenue. It was Officer Toro who pulled the trigger. Police officials say that a preliminary investigation indicated that the shooting was justified and that Officer Toro followed departmental rules. Witnesses said they heard Officer Toro and his partner identify themselves as police officers and order Officer Hernandez to drop his gun. Officer Hernandez, apparently intoxicated and injured from being beaten by a group of young men, did not identify himself as an officer. As investigators explore the circumstances of the shooting, as Officer Hernandez clings to life at St. Barnabas Hospital, his right leg amputated at the knee, relatives and friends of both men trade condolences, wait for answers and pray for miracles. \"We're very sorry for his family,\" Officer Toro's wife, Laura, said. Referring to her family, she added, \"This is a very difficult time for us.\" Officer Toro preferred working the overnight shift at the 46th Precinct, 1.32 square miles of gritty South Bronx real estate that includes the Mount Hope and Fordham neighborhoods. David Biondi, who worked the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift with Officer Toro for five years, said Officer Toro was focused, keeping the small talk to a minimum. \"Freddy Toro is one of the best cops that there is,\" Officer Biondi said. \"What he did he did by the book.\" On Tuesday, Officer Biondi went to Officer Toro's home in Washingtonville, N.Y., an old-fashioned village of about 6,000 an hour's drive north of the Bronx in Orange County. Officer Toro lives with his wife and two sons on Woodfield Drive. Neighbors said Officer Toro was generous with his time and his snow blower. One winter morning, he saw his neighbor's wife shoveling snow outside her house. By the time her husband came outside to pitch in, the driveway was cleared. \"He plowed my driveway thinking I wasn't there because he saw my wife shoveling snow,\" said the neighbor, Fernando Mora, 55. \"That's the kind of guy he is.\" Officer Toro's by-the-book life and career met once before with controversy. On Dec. 22, 1994, Anthony Baez, a 29-year-old security guard, died during a confrontation with the police in the Bronx. His death ignited a passionate debate about police brutality and led to a series of state, federal and departmental hearings and trials. Officer Toro was one of the officers on the scene. The officer who used a chokehold on Mr. Baez, Francis X. Livoti, was found guilty in 1998 of violating Mr. Baez's civil rights. In 2002, Officer Toro testified that a black man wearing a baseball cap helped Mr. Livoti hold the victim's feet down, according to a report in Newsday. Mr. Livoti's testimony about the unidentified civilian had earlier been denounced by a police administrative judge as \"contrived.\" One of the first suspects Officer Hernandez met on the job made a rather unwise decision: he tried to run away. In Manville, N.J., Eric Hernandez ran the football in high school, for the Manville Mustangs. In Fairfield, Conn., he ran the football for the Sacred Heart University Pioneers. In New York, he ran the football for the department's team, the Finest, a powerhouse squad that won a national championship in May against the Philadelphia Blue Flame. The score, 37-0. \"Running against E is not a smart thing,\" said Kenny Mathieu, a high school friend whom Officer Hernandez told about chasing the suspect on a domestic disturbance call. \"He caught the guy. That wasn't a surprise.\" Officer Hernandez moved to Manville, a working-class town of 10,000 in Somerset County, when he was a teenager. At the Alexander Batcho Intermediate School and at Manville High School, he was regarded by students, coaches and teachers as not so much a teenager but as a young adult, athletic and responsible. \"He was the guy you would pick to show a new student around the school, the guy who people looked to as a leader,\" said Paul Lenihan, Officer Hernandez's language arts teacher at the intermediate school. Tall, square-jawed and handsome, he had no problem making friends at the 420-student high school, often spending weekends with classmates along the banks of the Millstone Canal, fishing and swapping stories. Officer Hernandez was not given to boast, and his friends said he was more likely to listen to a good story than tell one himself. At Sacred Heart, Officer Hernandez played for the Pioneers when the team won a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I-AA championship in 2001. Friends and coaches say Officer Hernandez was not known as a drinker, and they are frustrated by the news coverage of the shooting, which has emphasized the fact that he was apparently intoxicated. \"I was kind of surprised that he'd even been out,\" said Gary Reho, the director of the university's health and recreation center and one of Officer Hernandez's former coaches. Some of Officer Hernandez's friends were surprised to learn he joined the force in July 2004. They had imagined him starting his own business. Mr. Mathieu, Officer Hernandez's high school classmate, was not surprised. He said his friend started talking about becoming an officer during his senior year. \"He has uncles on the force and thought it could be a good thing to do,\" he said. Timothy Dymond, who played football with Officer Hernandez at Sacred Heart, also became an officer, and both worked the same precinct, the 52nd. Mr. Mathieu was at the hospital on Tuesday when surgeons amputated part of the right leg of his friend, his friend who rushed for nearly 1,000 yards one year in high school. \"Knowing that he won't be able to play football again will be devastating,\" he said. \"That was his world.\" One day in April, Officer Hernandez, now living in White Plains, went back to his high school in Manville. He said hello to Stephen Venuto, the head football coach when Officer Hernandez was not badge No. 1872 but jersey No. 44 for the Mustangs. Mr. Venuto asked him what he was doing these days. He said he was a New York City police officer, working in the Bronx.", "keyword": "NEW YORK CITY;BRONX (NYC);HERNANDEZ ERIC;TORO ALFREDO;ATTACKS ON POLICE;MISTAKEN IDENTITY;POLICE"}
{"id": "ny0132637", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/12/24", "title": "John Miller of CBS, at Home on Both Sides of the Police Tape", "abstract": "On the day of the school shooting in Newtown , Conn., reporters were struggling and failing to get their arms around a story too horrible to fathom. At our house, we stared at the incremental television coverage and came to realize that no one really knew anything. Then, late in the evening, a reporter came on CBS in New York. He knew the number of casualties, the type of weapon used, and that the mother of the shooter was dead inside her home. \u201cWho is this guy?\u201d I asked my wife. John Miller isn\u2019t a psychic or a genius. He\u2019s a senior correspondent for CBS News who had spent the afternoon working his sources while helping anchor the network\u2019s special coverage. Mr. Miller, hired a little over a year ago by CBS, became a constant figure in the coverage in the days that followed, bringing a rare level of seriousness to a story that seemed to bring out the worst in television news. Low rated and often an also-ran, CBS News benefited greatly from Mr. Miller\u2019s work, which helped it become the first network to break into programming with news of the shooting and the first to report the level of carnage. Like many of his colleagues, he made some mistakes \u2014 \u201cI was first with the wrong name\u201d he pointed out ruefully \u2014 but everything he said on the air was based on actual reporting, not meaningless stand-ups at the scene that are full of drama but no information. If Mr. Miller, 54, seemed to know what happened inside Sandy Hook Elementary School as soon as the police officials did, that\u2019s because not that long ago, he was one of them. A police reporter in New York for 20 years for various television stations, he was hired by William Bratton, New York\u2019s police commissioner, in 1994 as a deputy commissioner. He went back to reporting at ABC in 1995 and became co-anchor of \u201c20/20,\u201d where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. He wrote a book on the Sept. 11 attacks and then went back to work for Mr. Bratton in 2003, this time in Los Angeles as head of the counterterrorism and criminal intelligence bureau, along with the major crimes division. Mr. Miller went on to the F.B.I. and the office of the director of national intelligence, where he worked as deputy director of the analysis division. But he found himself thinking about a return to reporting after Bin Laden was killed. \u201cMy wife said to me, \u2018Let me get this straight, you are going to leave a good, safe job in government and wander around New York in the worst economy in years looking for a job as a reporter? That\u2019s your plan?\u2019 \u201d he said. It was. He talked to Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d \u201cHe is the definition of a pure reporter,\u201d Mr. Fager said, \u201ca really great fit with what we are trying to do here. On the big stories, we don\u2019t want packages, we don\u2019t do graphics, we want information. I could listen to John Miller report a story all day.\u201d Journalists are taught to be suspect of those who have gone through the revolving door, but Mr. Miller\u2019s trip through that door left him uniquely suited for the Newtown story. He had run major investigations, supervised big crime scenes and handled the information flow for others. \u201cThe information is coming in raw and in real time,\u201d he explained in a phone call. \u201cForgive my grammar, but you have to filter into three questions: \u2018What do we know, what do we don\u2019t know, and when do we expect to know more?\u2019 Everything is preliminary, everything can change, but you can\u2019t just wait. You have to think through what you know and explain that.\u201d Mr. Miller said that when he was called to the anchor desk on Friday morning he protested, saying he should just report at his desk. But he ended up on the set with a laptop and a phone, working both when he wasn\u2019t on the air. \u201cWhen I first heard a number for victims, I thought it was wrong because it was so high,\u201d said Mr. Miller, who worked on the 1999 Columbine shooting while at ABC. \u201cAnd then word came from people I knew that we should prepare ourselves for the worst.\u201d \u201cThese people aren\u2019t my sources, they are my friends,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they couldn\u2019t tell me, they told me who could.\u201d Mr. Miller said he benefited enormously because he understood law enforcement hierarchy and was aware of the kinds of pressure brought to bear on the officials at the scene. \u201cThere is no one in law enforcement who won\u2019t take John\u2019s call,\u201d Mr. Bratton said. \u201cHe\u2019s careful and he knows his way around all aspects of law enforcement, which makes it easy to trust him and talk to him.\u201d There is another factor that explains Mr. Miller\u2019s success. He is a newsie by birth. His father, John J. Miller, was a syndicated gossip columnist for a variety of New York newspapers, and he often brought his son along on stories. \u201cI\u2019ve been going to crime scenes since I was 9 years old,\u201d Mr. Miller said. \u201cIt would not be unusual for me to see Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copacabana on Friday night and then be at the scene of a murder in Washington Square on Saturday night.\u201d Mr. Miller\u2019s credentials are further burnished by the fact that the Mafia boss Frank Costello was his godfather. By the time he was 14 he was getting his own assignments at Channel 5 News. He would skip gym at Montclair High in New Jersey and hop a bus to the station\u2019s headquarters in New York. While reporters were busy finishing editing, he would be sent out on late-breaking stories to do interviews. He covered collapsed buildings, murders and perp walks, and had his own N.Y.P.D. press pass saying \u201cJohn Miller is entitled to cross police and fire lines wherever formed.\u201d \u201cIt was like a golden ticket to the night,\u201d he said. Since he got back in the racket, Mr. Miller has been a frequent face on \u201cCBS This Morning,\u201d often talking about crime, national security and terrorism with Charlie Rose. \u201cHe is wired in a way that few reporters are and has a manner that puts people at ease,\u201d Mr. Rose said. \u201cJohn knows where the story is and how to go to it.\u201d Mr. Miller says that it\u2019s not always whispered backgrounders from police pals that offer insight. \u201cSometimes I just go quiet and watch the live feed,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I have been in the command post, I know what I am looking at.\u201d Still, when a major crime occurs, it creates a bit of conflict. \u201cWhen something big is going on and I am covering it,\u201d he said, \u201cI always really wish I was on the other side of the yellow tape, right in the middle of it.\u201d", "keyword": "Miller John;Newtown Conn Shooting (2012);Television;News and News Media;CBS News;Federal Bureau of Investigation;Police Department (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0291919", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/01/14", "title": "A Family Emerges Even Closer From Times of Darkness", "abstract": "Over the course of 10 months in the Negron household, starting in spring 2014, darkness became routine. With the family\u2019s electricity shut off because of nonpayment, the youngest child, Nelson, 13, used a battery-powered lantern on his short walk from the kitchen to the cluttered bedroom he shares with his two older brothers. An extension cord snaked from a neighbor\u2019s apartment to theirs, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, giving them just enough power to keep the refrigerator cold. Homework got finished before sundown, if it got finished at all, with the boys relying on candles to extend the light of winter days. So after the power came back on in February 2015, Nelson\u2019s oldest brother, Angel, 21, decided the family needed to do something to celebrate. They decided to buy a birthday gift for their father, Jesus: tickets for the family to a Legends of Wrestling event at Citi Field. It featured the biggest legend of all, as far as the Negrons were concerned: Bret Hart , a grizzled Canadian whose pecs once bulged from a magenta tank top. \u201cYou can actually feel his power,\u201d Nelson recalled of shaking Mr. Hart\u2019s hand during a meet and greet after the match. \u201cHe\u2019s just awesome. If things don\u2019t go his way, he manages to get what he wants.\u201d Financial problems had put the Negrons\u2019 daily needs out of reach during their 10 months without electricity. They were also on the verge of eviction. Mr. Negron, 40, lost his custodial job when the day care he worked for ran out of money, he said. His wife, Martha Torres, 40, worked in a hospital\u2019s medical billing department, but she did not earn enough to cover the Consolidated Edison bill in addition to rent and food for the boys, Nelson, Angel and Jesus Jr., 18. Nelson \u2014 serious beyond his years, with a round face that lights up when he talks about math class or his brothers \u2014 recalled students\u2019 bullying one another during his early years at public school. Making do without electricity only made him grow up faster, he said. The Neediest Cases The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund provides direct assistance to struggling New Yorkers. Tap for information about how to donate. His father, too, knew the rigors of getting by in Hunts Point, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Mr. Negron grew up without his father around and found an escape in watching wrestling matches with a brother who was around his age. \u201cHe was a mean drunk sometimes, and sometimes he was a happy drunk,\u201d Mr. Negron said of his father, adding, \u201cWrestling kind of became our escape \u2014 that was our bond.\u201d Mr. Negron had gone to the same public school that educated his older two sons but wanted a safer and more supportive environment for his youngest son. So the family pushed for Nelson to attend St. Ignatius School . The Jesuit school, which is affiliated with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York , paid Nelson\u2019s tuition in full. The school provides social services, after-school programs and summer camp. It tries to steer students to college by finding them scholarships to strong high schools outside Hunts Point and by offering counseling and college planning. Nelson\u2019s first year there was overshadowed by the family\u2019s financial problems, but the school helped by hiring Mr. Negron as a part-time custodian. In August, when a full-time position became available, Mr. Negron got the job. Catholic Charities , one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund , also gave the family $340 from the fund to help Nelson buy a laptop, a book bag and a school gym uniform. Angel, who works as a cashier at a Duane Reade, decided to use his salary to help carry on two family traditions \u2014 surprises and wrestling-themed gatherings \u2014 with the event at Citi Field. It signified the family\u2019s \u201ccoming back to life,\u201d Mr. Negron said. Still, the family has had trouble paying back rent from the months when Mr. Negron was unemployed. They were threatened with eviction this month, but Mr. Negron has been working with Catholic Charities to get help covering the shortfall. Now Mr. Negron and Nelson see each other in the hallways of St. Ignatius. Nelson does not shy away from saying hello, as some 13-year-olds may \u2014 an acknowledgment, his father said, of all they have been through together. \u201cHe says it loud and clear, gives me a smile,\u201d Mr. Negron said. \u201cWhen I see him, he lightens up.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Times Neediest Cases Fund;Catholic Charities;Philanthropy"}
{"id": "ny0046836", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/11/02", "title": "With Turbulent Season Looming for Lakers, Kobe Bryant Demonstrates an Early Calm", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 It was an unusual scene. Here was Kobe Bryant, casually comfortable in his hooded sweatshirt, calmly reflective late Friday after the Los Angeles Lakers lost their third consecutive game to start the season. Their 118-111 loss to their hallway rivals, the Clippers, was sealed when Bryant \u2014 the sneering, lip-biting closer supreme \u2014 missed a pair of shots late that might have been the difference between defeat and victory. \u201cI couldn\u2019t be more pleased in this loss, actually,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cI think we figured a lot of things out.\u201d There was no sarcasm, no seething. Bryant, once notorious for his hair-trigger impatience \u2014 with teammates, coaches, the front office and any sort of losing \u2014 was now wrapping his arms around a moral victory, prompting a question about the last time he had felt so good after a loss. \u201cProbably never,\u201d he said with a shrug. If this is a Zen-like transformation or merely some late-career pragmatism, it helps explain the current state of the union between Bryant, 36 and coming off two serious injuries, and the Lakers, with a roster of flotsam and jetsam surrounding him. It is going to take continued compromises. And that may be the only item of interest with the Lakers this season: Will this good soldier still be so at ease with his circumstance in February, or will his desire to win another championship prompt him to ask for a trade? Bryant\u2019s patience is being tested. He lost a kindred basketball mind with Steve Nash\u2019s season-ending injury and lost a promising young talent he might mold when Julius Randle broke his leg. And then he lined up again against Chris Paul, another reminder of the trade to the Lakers that David Stern nixed. \u201cI know him and I know he\u2019ll stay professional about it,\u201d Clippers forward Matt Barnes, who spent two seasons with the Lakers, said of Bryant. \u201cYou always want to see someone who\u2019s had a historical career go out in the right way, but it doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s going to happen that way. It\u2019s going to be a long season for him.\u201d Bryant can no longer carry a team, not the way he once might have been able to do over 82 games or even attempted to do when the Lakers lost by 18 to Houston and 20 to Phoenix to open the season. But on Friday, Bryant revealed how he can still influence a team \u2014 and a game. Image Bryant said he was pleased with how Jeremy Lin, left, has been decisive with the ball and more assertive with his direction. Credit Stephen Dunn/Getty Images He whipped passes out of double teams. He guarded Paul. He blew past Barnes for a reverse dunk and later sold him on a pump fake. He stole the ball from Blake Griffin in transition. He sank a fadeaway 3-pointer in the corner over the shot blocker DeAndre Jordan and suckered him with a highlight reel pass fake before banking in a layup. He threw in a reverse lay in. And he kicked a pass out to Wayne Ellington, whose 3-pointer tied the score for the last time. When Bryant did not have the ball in his hands, he was often pointing the direction he wanted to see it move. When he sat on the bench, he did not keep his observations to himself. \u201cThey still take his lead,\u201d Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said of Bryant, who had 21 points and 7 assists. \u201cHe gives that team toughness, he gives them resolve. I guarantee you, whether they play well or not, they\u2019re not going to be a team that gives in, because Kobe never gives in.\u201d What pleased Bryant the most was how Jeremy Lin, the point guard, played as if he were running the team \u2014 being decisive with the ball and more assertive with his direction. After the loss to Phoenix, Lin and Bryant shared text messages late into the night. On Thursday, Bryant initiated ones with Wesley Johnson. Soon, all the players were looped in. This was a different, more collegial, tact than he might have taken in the past, Bryant said. There were no death stares. \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot more teaching. A lot more communication as opposed to the players we had in the past. Here it\u2019s really kind of teaching, how to get things down, how to deal with the emotional roller coasters that take place throughout the course of games, the challenge of things and figuring things out.\u201d Midway through the fourth quarter, Bryant had Paul posted up on the block, and demanded the ball from Ronnie Price, the backup point guard who had the ball on the wing. But Price, sensing that Blake Griffin would be crashing down from the free-throw line to double-team Bryant, instead fed the ball to Griffin\u2019s man, Jordan Hill. He sank a long jumper, the last of his 23 points. A few minutes later, with the shot clock winding down, Lin waved off Bryant and hit an off-balance 3-pointer. What Bryant liked is having a teammate strong-minded enough to make his own decisions on the fly. \u201cYou have to be able to assert yourself, especially on a team I\u2019m playing on,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cI don\u2019t want chumps and I don\u2019t want pushovers. If you\u2019re a chump and you\u2019re a pushover, I will run over you. And so it\u2019s important for them to have that toughness and to say \u2018I believe in myself. I can step up and make these plays, I can perform.\u2019 I think that\u2019s very important.\u201d The Lakers, Bryant seemed to sense, will need much more of that this season if they are going to leave any kind of mark.", "keyword": "Basketball;Kobe Bryant;Jeremy Lin;Lakers;Clippers"}
{"id": "ny0233663", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/08/12", "title": "Islamic Center Ad Shows Limits of M.T.A. Powers", "abstract": "In 1904, New Yorkers nearly rioted when they learned that advertisements would be plastered on the tiled walls of the city\u2019s gleaming new subway system. \u201cCheap and nasty,\u201d one official scoffed. Today, advertisements on buses and trains are so ubiquitous that the average straphanger is quite likely to forget that they are there at all: the injury lawyers and Dr. Zizmors are only a blurry backdrop to the daily voyage. Until, that is, this week, when a debate over a provocative advertisement reinserted the Metropolitan Transportation Authority into a fierce public debate over what should be allowed in the transit system \u2014 and to what extent the authority has the right to decide that at all. At issue was an advertisement submitted by a group opposed to the construction of a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero. The advertisement includes a photograph of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, one tower aflame, the other moments away from being struck by an airplane. A headline asks, \u201cWhy There?\u201d And an arrow points to a rendering of the proposed center. The authority\u2019s advertising firm initially rejected the advertisement as unsuitable, repeatedly requesting changes to the photograph of the twin towers, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week by the advertisement\u2019s sponsor, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and its leader, the prominent right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who argued that her right to free speech had been infringed. On Monday, the authority relented, saying it would allow the advertisement to run in its original form . It is expected to appear next week on more than 20 city buses. The authority adopted rules in 1997 that allowed transit officials to reject advertising they considered obscene, deceptive or \u201cdirectly adverse to the commercial or administrative interests of the M.T.A.,\u201d among other reasons. (The guidelines were prompted in part by complaints about a racy Calvin Klein underwear advertisement.) But transit officials have faced legal challenges before, and in those challenges, the authority tended to lose. New York magazine successfully sued the authority in 1997 after transit officials removed advertisements poking fun at Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, at his request. (The Supreme Court rejected an appeal.) An advertisement submitted by riders\u2019 advocates in 2000, which compared the morning commute to a packed ride in a cattle car, was initially rejected because it might discourage people from riding the subway. Those objections were quickly dropped after the New York Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit claiming censorship. In June, the authority removed a Georgi Vodka advertisement featuring a swimsuit model from some city buses after Hasidic leaders in Brooklyn complained. \u201cWe try to limit more suggestive ads upon neighborhood request,\u201d the authority said in a statement. This week, the executives of Georgi Vodka said they wondered why the twin towers image made the cut and their company\u2019s bikini advertisement did not. \u201cWe didn\u2019t feel they came to bat for us,\u201d said Phyllis Valenti, executive vice president for Star Industries, which makes the vodka. But she said lawyers had advised the company not to sue. The Working Families Party also decided not to pursue legal action after the authority rejected an advertisement it submitted in March. The advertisement, which mimicked the format of an official service notice, criticized Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for staying silent as the authority cut service and prepared to raise fares. \u201cThey said it was confusing to train riders; people would think it was an actual announcement from the M.T.A.,\u201d said Dan Levitan, a party spokesman. He said the ensuing publicity made a legal appeal seem superfluous. \u201cWe decided to leave it at getting the ad out there online,\u201d he said. Ms. Geller\u2019s group paid the authority nearly $10,000 to run the advertisements. The group is also responsible for a publicity campaign aimed at converting Muslims that appeared on New York buses in May. Those advertisements were rejected in Detroit, where transit officials are now fighting a lawsuit filed by Ms. Geller\u2019s group, similar to the one brought last week in New York. That case remains unresolved, and the advertisements have not yet run. A lawyer representing Ms. Geller\u2019s group, Robert J. Muise, said the New York case was a victory for the Constitution. \u201cIt\u2019s a problem when the government picks and chooses which messages they think are suitable,\u201d Mr. Muise said. But the group\u2019s victory in New York was not universally acclaimed. \u201cThis ad crosses a line, and I can\u2019t believe the M.T.A. would allow it on its buses,\u201d the city\u2019s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, said. The Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced the advertisement\u2019s authors as \u201canti-Islam extremists.\u201d For its part, the authority acknowledged that some of its decisions on advertisements could be difficult. \u201cWe do the best we can within our guidelines, with the understanding that in a lot of cases, we\u2019ll have to put up ads that we may or may not agree with,\u201d said Jeremy Soffin, the authority\u2019s chief spokesman. \u201cThere will always be cases where people disagree.\u201d Transit officials acknowledged that the visibility their system provides can attract provocateurs \u2014 a situation the authority has to live with. \u201cYou have people who are purposely trying to be provocative,\u201d Mr. Soffin said, \u201cand sometimes, frankly, more interested in the publicity that comes with the conflict, as opposed to the benefit of actually running the ad.\u201d", "keyword": "Park51;Mosques;Metropolitan Transportation Authority;Geller Pamela;World Trade Center (NYC);Advertising and Marketing"}
{"id": "ny0241556", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2011/03/02", "title": "Credit Card Data Tells Mixed Story", "abstract": "American shoppers did not shed their reliance on credit cards over the year-end holidays. While the average debt on credit cards in December decreased by 4 percent compared with the same month a year before, Americans still carried an average of $4,284 on credit card statements in December 2010, according to data released this week by the credit monitoring company Experian. The data offers conflicting versions of the economy\u2019s already mixed picture. While some consumers spent more during the holidays because the economy was rebounding, others were still unable to cover expenses without leaning on their credit cards. And while holiday spending also appeared to have been more robust than in the last several years, even more recent data has shown a bit of a slowdown in consumption this year. \u201cYou\u2019ve got people who already had good credit and were pretty much managing their credit, and because of the risk, paid down their debt even more,\u201d said Maxine Sweet, vice president for public education at Experian. Then there were \u201cvery dramatic increases in debt by people who, mainly, lost jobs, but also had medical emergencies, and turned to credit cards to carry them through the hard times.\u201d The most recent consumer credit report from the Federal Reserve showed that revolving credit, which is mostly credit card debt, increased by 3.5 percent in December at an annual rate, the first such increase in 27 months. (That data included \u201ccharge-offs,\u201d or debt that the credit card companies considered essentially uncollectible, while the Experian data, since it was pulled from active credit files, did not.) Card spending (including credit, debit and electronic benefit-transfer cars) was up 6.5 percent in December compared with spending at the same stores a year earlier, according to First Data, which processes merchant transactions. Retailers tend to benefit from credit card spending, as it often means people are spending beyond their budgets. Holiday spending rose 5.5 percent in the 50 days before Christmas in 2010 compared with 2009, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse. Much of that was driven by increases in apparel, jewelry and luxury goods. While many shoppers had vowed to spend only with cash this holiday season, that was a budgeting trick that not everyone could use. The cash shoppers, Ms. Sweet suggested, \u201cwere the ones that were pretty much in control \u2014 they can say, \u2018I\u2019m going to be more conservative.\u2019 \u201d People under more difficult circumstances had to put certain debts on their credit cards, she said. In February, the retail analyst David Strasser issued a note to clients saying that the increase in credit spending was good news. Spending at Visa and MasterCard in the United States was up a combined 8.3 percent for the fourth quarter, Mr. Strasser noted, \u201ca hopeful sign that big-ticket spending is in recovery mode for 2011.\u201d \u201cWeak credit trends have clearly bottomed out,\u201d he wrote, and the increases in credit card spending \u201cwill disproportionately help big-ticket retailers that were hit hard during the downturn, as credit was curtailed and consumers lacked liquidity to purchase big-ticket products.\u201d The Experian data, which is broken down by metropolitan area, also gives a sense of how different cities may be recovering from the recession . The city with the highest card debt in December was San Antonio, with $5,177 due on average, 21 percent above the national average. (The figures include debts on regular credit cards and retail Visas and MasterCards, but not a retailer\u2019s own card \u2014 so a Gap-brand credit card would not be included, but a Gap Visa card would.) San Antonio was followed by Jacksonville, Fla., at $5,115, a city with one of the lowest average credit scores , suggesting that pure debt may have been piling up there. Dallas, which came in at fifth with $4,936, also has one of the lowest average credit scores in the country. Atlanta was third, with $4,960, and Honolulu, with $4,939, was fourth. In 2009, the list of cities with the most credit card debt was similar: Dallas, Atlanta, San Antonio, Jacksonville and the Waco, Tex., metropolitan area. Jeanie Wyatt, chief executive of the San-Antonio based advisory firm South Texas Money Management, said the economy in the city had been quite steady. \u201cOur unemployment rate is lower than the national average,\u201d she said, \u201cthe health care field has been fast-growing, and of course we still have a big military component, and tourism, and a growing energy component. People are feeling, I think, pretty good about their job security.\u201d She said San Antonians were largely living on working-class paychecks, which could explain some of the credit card debt. \u201cWhile San Antonio has a lower unemployment rate and a more stable economy, our wage earners are at that mid- to lower end,\u201d she said. \u201cI would presume that lower-income individuals tend to have a higher percentage of credit card debt.\u201d The cities that racked up the lowest credit card debt for December were Sioux Falls, S.D. ($3,446); the area in Tennessee and Virginia around Kingsport, Johnson City and Bristol ($3,449); Fort Wayne, Ind. ($3,476); Paducah, Ky.($3,515); and Davenport, Iowa ($3,515). In December 2009, the cities with the lowest credit card debt were Altoona, Pa.; Lafayette, La.; Evansville, Ind.; Davenport, Iowa; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. VantageScore, a credit rating produced by the three major reporting bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, gives a picture of whether the credit card spending came from economic confidence, or from desperation. Midwest and West Coast cities dominated the list of cities with the 25 highest VantageScores. Wisconsin had three cities on that list (Green Bay, at No. 1; Madison, at No. 2; and Milwaukee, at No. 21). Several states had two: California (San Francisco and Santa Barbara), Minnesota (Minneapolis and the Valley City-Fargo area, which crosses into North Dakota), Oregon (Eugene and Portland) and Iowa (Cedar Rapids and Des Moines). There were no Southern or Southwestern states on the list of the top credit scores. \u201cCities like Minneapolis, that always have great credit scores, actually have higher debt than other cities,\u201d Ms. Sweet said. \u201cBut it\u2019s offset by the fact that they never miss payments, and they always have high credit limits.\u201d The list of the 25 cities with the lowest VantageScores in December was heavily Southern. Texas had seven cities on the list (Harlingen, El Paso, Tyler, Waco, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston, going from lowest to highest credit scores). Other than two California cities (Bakersfield and Fresno) and Las Vegas, every other city on the list was from the South. \u201cPart of that is a lot just a lot of younger people moving in, and a larger migrant population \u2014 so by younger, meaning not just in age, but also less depth in their credit history, and we think that\u2019s one factor,\u201d Ms. Sweet said of the lower credit scores in Texas in particular. \u201cWhen you have these consumers who are in crisis with foreclosures and unemployment, that has to be driving up their credit card debt,\u201d Ms. Sweet said. Shoppers interviewed last December sounded quite cautious about their spending. Julianne Cantarella, 43, was at the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, N.J. (the New York metropolitan area is No. 42 on the Experian list of high credit card debt). Her house had finally sold over the summer after being on the market for a year and a half, she said, so she thought the economy was improving. \u201cBut I did cut down on the money I\u2019m spending and the amount of gifts I\u2019m buying,\u201d she said. In Columbus, Ohio (No. 12 on the Experian list), Dorothy Huggins, 54, was shopping with her granddaughter. \u201cEverybody in our family is fine \u2014 nobody\u2019s lost their jobs, but I have lots of friends and neighbors who have been hit,\u201d Ms. Huggins said. \u201cThat made us more conservative this year because we\u2019re wondering, are we next?\u201d \u201cThere are so many people hurting, through no fault of their own. And we\u2019re fortunate enough to be doing well,\u201d she said. \u201cSo we bought a lot less stuff this year.\u201d", "keyword": "United States Economy;Credit Cards;Consumer Behavior;Credit and Debt;Personal Finances"}
{"id": "ny0001208", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/03/10", "title": "In England, Wigan Athletic Ousts Everton in F.A. Cup", "abstract": "Wigan Athletic scored three times in four minutes on Saturday to stun host Everton, 3-0, at Goodison Park in Liverpool and reach the semifinals of England\u2019s F.A. Cup for the first time in the club\u2019s 81-year history. The visitors, facing a relegation battle in the Premier League and underdogs in the quarterfinal, saw Maynor Figueroa, Callum McManaman and Jordi Gomez all score in the first half. Defender Figueroa headed Wigan in front from a corner in the 30th minute. The former Everton schoolboy McManaman capitalized on Phil Neville\u2019s mistake to double the lead 90 seconds later, and Gomez made it three with an exquisite left-foot curler from 26 yards. In Premier League games, Queens Park Rangers and Aston Villa came from behind for critical wins that boosted their hopes of escaping relegation. Villa, behind the American goalkeeper Brad Guzan, who is likely to replace the injured Tim Howard in goal for the United States in coming World Cup qualifying matches, moved out of the relegation zone after goals from Christian Benteke and Gabriel Agbonlahor provided a 2-1 victory at Reading. Last-place Q.P.R. drew even on points and on goal difference with Reading after its 3-1 victory against visiting Sunderland. BAYERN MUNICH RALLIES FOR WIN Bayern Munich trailed twice but rallied beat Fortuna D\u00fcsseldorf, 3-2, and close in on the Bundesliga title in Germany as the defending champion Borussia Dortmund lost by 2-1 at Schalke. Dortmund trails Munich by 20 points. Jerome Boateng scored in the 86th minute to secure the victory for Bayern Munich, which needs only 7 points to clinch the title. Munich hosts Arsenal in the Champions League this week with a chance to become the third Bundesliga club in the tournament\u2019s final eight. (AP) M.L.S. GAME POSTPONED BY BLIZZARD In Major League Soccer, the Colorado Rapids\u2019 home opener Saturday against the Philadelphia Union was postponed until Sunday because of a blizzard. Originally, the Rapids had said the game would be played no matter the weather, but the snowstorm intensified and the game at Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City was pushed back a day by the league. A travel advisory was issued Saturday for Adams County, where up to 14 inches of snow and 40 mile-per-hour winds were expected. People were advised to travel only for an emergency. The storm is expected to move out late Saturday, and the game is scheduled to be played at 1 p.m. Mountain on Sunday. (AP) SURGERY SIDELINES SOLO Goalkeeper Hope Solo will be out for three to four months after an operation to repair torn cartilage in her left wrist. The United States Soccer Federation made the announcement Friday, a day after the operation. The federation said she was likely to miss at least the first half of the Seattle Reign\u2019s season in the National Women\u2019s Soccer League, which starts its first season next month. Solo, 31, who has 135 international appearances, is missing the Algarve Cup tournament in Portugal, where the United States has won its first two games. The No. 2 goalkeeper Jill Loyden broke a bone in her left hand during training Thursday. Nicole Barnhart was in goal for Friday\u2019s 5-0 rout of China. (AP) P.S.G. TO RETAIN TOP OFFICIALS Coach Carlo Ancelotti and the sports director Leonardo are doing well at Paris St.-Germain and will be there next season, the French club\u2019s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, said Saturday. News media reports have linked the Ligue 1 leaders to Real Madrid Coach Jos\u00e9 Mourinho for next season; however, Khelaifi said that Mourinho was not in his plans and that it would be up to Ancelotti to decide if he stays at P.S.G. \u201cHe will still be here if he wants to,\u201d Khelaifi told the daily Le Parisien, three days after Ancelotti led P.S.G. to the Champions League quarterfinals for the first time in 18 years. \u201cHe has done an excellent job,\u201d Khelaifi said. \u201cIt has been difficult from time to time because he has been under a lot of pressure, but he has done very well. Carlo is one of the best coaches in the world, if not the best. \u201cAs for Mourinho, I don\u2019t know what his situation at Madrid is, but it\u2019s none of my business.\u201d Khelaifi, who took over as president when Qatar Sports Investment bought P.S.G. almost two years ago, also dismissed reports Leonardo could leave the club and return to Italy, where he has worked for the two Milan clubs. \u201cHe is staying. I have a good relationship with him,\u201d Khelaifi said. \u201cI hear things like sources in Doha have said there\u2019s a problem with Leo. But people have to understand that I am Qatar\u2019s official voice here. Leo is doing a very good job.\u201d P.S.G. is in first place, 5 points ahead of Olympique Lyon, after Saturday\u2019s 2-1 victory against Nancy on two goals by Zlatan Ibrahimovic. (REUTERS)", "keyword": "Soccer;FA Cup;Everton Soccer Team;Wigan Athletic Soccer Team;Hope Solo"}
{"id": "ny0026122", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/08/22", "title": "County Clerk in New Mexico Issues Marriage Licenses to Same-Sex Couples", "abstract": "LAS CRUCES, N.M. \u2014 Saying he was upholding New Mexico\u2019s Constitution \u2014 amended four decades ago to guarantee equal rights to all \u2014 a county clerk here began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Wednesday, magnifying a fight that could become one of the key issues in next year\u2019s elections for governor. The clerk , Lynn Ellins, said he had exhausted his patience waiting for the courts to resolve the ambiguity between the state\u2019s definition of marriage, which makes no mention of gender, and the marriage applications used by county clerks, which require couples to list their names under \u201cbride\u201d and \u201cgroom.\u201d The issue was central to the lawsuits filed by same-sex couples in Albuquerque in March, and by Alexander Hanna and his partner, Yon Hudson, in Santa Fe in June. \u201cIf the court tells me to stop, I\u2019ll stop,\u201d Mr. Ellins said. \u201cBut until that happens, we\u2019re open for business.\u201d Mr. Ellins is the clerk of Do\u00f1a Ana County, the political stronghold of Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who has repeatedly expressed her opposition to same-sex marriage. Proponents are banking on the outcome of the court cases, pending before separate district courts, and on a statement by Gary King, the state\u2019s attorney general, in June saying the statutory framework that precludes same-sex marriage would be \u201cvulnerable to challenge.\u201d Image Alexander Hanna, left, and Yon Hudson filed a lawsuit in June over marriage applications they believe violate the state\u2019s guarantee of equal rights. Credit Mark Holm for The New York Times During a news conference in Albuquerque on Wednesday, Mr. King, a leading Democratic contender for governor, said he would not challenge Mr. Ellins or any other county clerk who decides to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He warned, however, that the licenses could be invalidated if the New Mexico Supreme Court eventually rules that same-sex marriage is not allowed in the state. In a terse decision last week, the state court denied a request on behalf of Mr. Hanna and Mr. Hudson to rule on the issue, a calculated maneuver the couple hoped would have allowed them to sidestep the lower courts and force a quicker resolution of the matter. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, two of the groups leading the push for the legalization of same-sex marriage across the country, increased the pressure. They filed an emergency request before the state\u2019s Second Judicial District Court, asking to permit a woman with terminal cancer, Jen Roper, to marry her longtime partner, Angelique Neuman, immediately so that Ms. Neuman and their three adopted children would be legally protected once Ms. Roper died. \u201cBecause of my illness, we do not have the luxury of waiting years for the courts to decide whether loving, committed same-sex couples can marry in New Mexico,\u201d Ms. Roper said in a statement. \u201cFor us, the time is now.\u201d There are also signs that the political tide may be shifting. Despite her long-professed opposition to same-sex marriage, Governor Martinez has softened her stance, saying voters should be the ones to decide whether to legalize it in New Mexico \u2014 \u201cnot a court, not politicians in Santa Fe, and not one random county clerk,\u201d as her spokesman, Enrique Knell, put it in a statement on Wednesday. Polls have indicated that the electorate is divided, though, with much of the resistance grounded in the strong Roman Catholic vein that runs through the state. Image Attorney General Gary King, a leading Democratic contender for governor of New Mexico, said he would not challenge any county clerk who decided to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Credit Russell Contreras/Associated Press At the Do\u00f1a Ana County clerk\u2019s office on Wednesday, staff members were issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples at a rate of four an hour, a record for an office that generally grants five marriage licenses a day. The deputy clerk, Mario O. Jimenez, said the phone had been \u201cringing nonstop,\u201d as couples from as far away as Lubbock, Tex., 350 miles to the east, called to tell they were on their way. Carrie Hamblen, 45, and her partner of seven years, Char Ullman, 51, arrived early, fearing that protesters or perhaps a court injunction might frustrate their marriage plans. Instead, said Ms. Hamblen, the chairwoman of the board of directors for Southern New Mexico Pride, they were greeted by cheers from county employees. Sarah Finke, 48, heard about the marriage licenses from a colleague at the elementary school where she works. During a fire drill, she called her partner of 10 years, Heather Oesterreich, also 48.why The women had decided long ago not to travel to another state to get married. Their pastor, Linda Mervine of the First Christian Church, married them under a palm tree in front of the county building here. Micah, their 6-year-old son, looked on approvingly. \u201cThis is our state,\u201d said Ms. Oesterreich. \u201cWe have wonderful family and friends, and a God and our church that we wanted to witness this.\u201d Do\u00f1a Ana County became the first county in New Mexico to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples since 2004, when a clerk in Sandoval County issued 64 licenses, but stopped it after the state\u2019s attorney general at the time, Patricia A. Madrid, issued an opinion saying the licenses were \u201cinvalid under state law.\u201d", "keyword": "New Mexico;Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage;Lawsuits;Alexander Hanna;Yon Hudson;Lynn Ellins"}
{"id": "ny0053006", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2014/07/20", "title": "British Open 2014: Byeong-Hun An Birdies Early and Bogeys Late", "abstract": "HOYLAKE, England \u2014 As Byeong-Hun An found out Saturday during the third round of the British Open, learning how to contend in the majors is like learning how to ride a bike. An was rolling along, not a care in the world, riding a streak of four birdies in his first six holes. At five under par for the tournament, An looked at the leader board, saw his name on the first page along with the names of some of the best players in the world, and grew wobbly. Shortly thereafter, at the par-3 ninth hole, he made the first of his two bogeys of the round. Only one of An\u2019s five birdies in his round of three-under 69 came on his second nine, but he could not grumble too much about his position. After 54 holes, he was tied for 19th at four-under 212. \u201cI was looking at the leader board every hole,\u201d An said, adding, \u201cThere were some cool names on the leader board.\u201d An, 22, a native of South Korea, was six strokes ahead of Tiger Woods, the 14-time major champion to whom he has been inexorably linked since becoming the youngest winner of the United States Amateur in 2009. At 17, An was a year younger than Woods was in 1994 when he won the tournament for the first time. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, for one year, An turned pro in 2011 and has been playing on the European Tour\u2019s satellite circuit. His long-range goals include playing on the PGA Tour and competing in the Olympics. He comes by his passion for the Olympics naturally; his parents were medalists in table tennis at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, where he was born three years later. Asked why he did not choose table tennis as his sport, An laughed and said: \u201cI wasn\u2019t good enough. I was really slow, and I was chubby.\u201d He was encouraged to play golf by his father, an avid player. \u201cTable tennis is too hard; you just can\u2019t play long enough compared to golf,\u201d An said. \u201cGolf, you can play until you\u2019re 60, if you look at Tom Watson.\u201d Watson, 64, a five-time British Open champion, became the oldest player to make the cut in this tournament and was five over par. An has a second-place finish this year on the Challenge Tour and has made five of six cuts in European Tour events. His progress has been slowed, he said, by the weight of the expectations he felt after winning the United States Amateur. \u201cI think I was putting too much pressure on myself,\u201d An said, adding, \u201cI think it\u2019s getting better.\u201d FRIENDLY RIVALRY No introductions were required among the players who were first off the No. 1 tee on Saturday. For the Americans Keegan Bradley, Jason Dufner and Phil Mickelson, the third round felt a lot like the money games they play at the start of tournament weeks. Bradley estimated that they had played \u201c50, maybe more\u201d practice rounds over the years. \u201cProbably the most relaxed atmosphere I\u2019ve ever had in a major, maybe in a tournament,\u201d said Bradley, who led the group with a 69, which left him at three under for the tournament. DECISION APPROACHING Tom Watson, the 2014 United States Ryder Cup captain, carded a 75 and was at five-over 221. That put him two strokes behind one of his possible discretionary picks, Tiger Woods. Watson has said he plans to select Woods. But with time running out for Woods to play himself into form during the FedEx Cup playoffs, for which he has yet to qualify, Watson\u2019s decision becomes trickier. Asked Saturday if he had spoken to Woods here, Watson said, \u201cI just said hello to him.\u201d So the Ryder Cup never came up in conversation? \u201cI just said hello,\u201d Watson repeated.", "keyword": "Golf;Byeong-Hun An;Tiger Woods;Phil Mickelson;British Open"}
{"id": "ny0173879", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/10/27", "title": "Sharing Is Never Easy", "abstract": "IN August, Comcast denied accusations that it was purposely disrupting file-sharing among its customers, but reports of stymied traffic \u2014 particularly from people using the popular BitTorrent protocol \u2014 have continued. Late last week, The Associated Press reported ( news.yahoo.com ) that Comcast \u201cactively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.\u201d Peter Svensson of The A.P. wrote that the practice was \u201cthe most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider.\u201d This week, the company told Brad Stone of The New York Times in a statement that it \u201cdoes not block access\u201d to any applications, but that it does \u201cuse the latest technologies to manage our network\u201d to ensure quality of service to its customers ( bits.blogs.nytimes.com ). But an anonymous Comcast executive admitted that in some cases peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic like that generated by BitTorrent, is delayed, though not blocked. But Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, is among those not persuaded. \u201cComcast has definitely been blocking BitTorrent in some circumstances,\u201d he wrote ( dslprime.com ). The A.P. confirmed the interference by conducting nationwide tests of Comcast\u2019s network. \u201cIf widely applied by other I.S.P.\u2019s,\u201d Mr. Svensson said, the practice could strike \u201ca crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks.\u201d BitTorrent, though still often used for illicit sharing of copyrighted material, is increasingly used by media companies to distribute legitimate files. But copyrights are not Comcast\u2019s concern in this case \u2014 bandwidth is. Its interference \u201cappears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers,\u201d Mr. Svensson wrote. The practice plays into the debate over \u201cnet neutrality\u201d \u2014 whether Internet service providers should be allowed to choose which traffic they carry. \u201cNot only does the company have a major P.R. disaster on its hands, but it has in a matter of days become the poster child for net neutrality,\u201d wrote Chris Soghoian of CNET ( cnet.com ). Lawyers \u201care circling the water,\u201d Mr. Soghoian wrote. \u201cThey can smell blood.\u201d ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS The blog VentureBeat has been following the venture capitalists scrounging for alternatives to technology investments as free-falling costs have drastically cut the need for outside financing. This week, Eric Eldon noted that Kleiner Perkins took part in a $50 million investment in YesPPG, a shirt factory in Shanghai ( venturebeat.com ). \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d Mr. Eldon wrote, \u201cKleiner Perkins, the paragon of tech venture capital \u2014 early investor in pathbreaking technology companies like Genentech, Sun, Netscape, Amazon and Google \u2014 is now investing in a mature Chinese shirt factory, churning close to $700,000 a day in revenue. OUT OF CONTROL \u201cFelice\u201d is a stay-at-home mother whose husband earns $5,000 to $6,000 a month. The family\u2019s expenses, mostly hers, far exceed that. She spends hundreds of dollars a month at a \u201cpopular coffee chain,\u201d according to the Web site of the Oprah Winfrey Show ( oprah.com ). The Web summary of her plea for help in an appearance on \u201cOprah\u201d gets worse with each paragraph: $5,000 in silk flowers; many thousands on clothes; thousands more on murals. This is while her children go without health insurance. Still, she generates some revenue. \u201cI sell their toys sometimes just because I don\u2019t like them,\u201d she said. Presumably, she means the toys. DAN MITCHELL", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Venture Capital;Comcast Corp;BitTorrent"}
{"id": "ny0090225", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/09/01", "title": "Toshiba Delays Report on Finances Once Again", "abstract": "Toshiba again delayed announcing its annual financial results on Monday as new accounting errors kept it from drawing a line under Japan\u2019s worst corporate scandal in four years. Toshiba, which was scheduled to post earnings for the business year ended in March, said newly discovered problems included incorrect impairment charges on fixed assets at several subsidiaries and improperly timed booking of loss provisions at a United States subsidiary. Toshiba had already delayed announcing results by about three months because an investigation found that it had overstated past results by around $1.2 billion over several years. It said that government regulators had accepted its request for an extension and that it planned to submit the results by Monday. Shares of Toshiba were down more than 4 percent in early trading Tuesday.", "keyword": "TOSHIBA;Earnings Reports;Accounting; Accountants"}
{"id": "ny0290682", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2016/01/21", "title": "Porzingis, Lured by Pump Fake, Learns Lesson as Knicks Prevail", "abstract": "It was late on Wednesday night, much later than usual, when Derek Fisher\u2019s postgame news conference finally wound down. Earlier, the Knicks were on the verge of beating the Utah Jazz at Madison Square Garden before Kristaps Porzingis, the team\u2019s precious big man, made a costly error, committing an injudicious foul on Gordon Hayward. Hayward calmly sank three free throws to tie the score with 2.5 seconds left to force overtime. \u201cIf Kris stays down and stands there like a light pole \u2014 he\u2019s 12 feet tall basically \u2014 we\u2019re out of here 40 minutes ago,\u201d Fisher said with a chuckle. Fisher could laugh because the Knicks, fighting fatigue and sore limbs and getting a multidimensionally dominant performance from Carmelo Anthony, scraped out a 118-111 victory over the Jazz to improve their record to 22-22. And Porzingis \u2014 who fouled out on the play and watched overtime on the bench \u2014 could digest an important lesson in the forgiving afterglow of a win. Porzingis and his teammates, who had trailed by as many as 13, were defending a 3-point lead with seconds left in regulation when Porzingis was seduced by a pump fake beyond the 3-point line by Hayward (27 points). Porzingis flung the entirety of his 7-foot-3 body into the air, and Hayward, seeing the rookie hurtling toward him, craftily fired up a 3-point shot to draw the referee\u2019s whistle. Image Derrick Williams, left, with Kristaps Porzingis after scoring during the fourth quarter. Credit Julie Jacobson/Associated Press \u201cHe gets the separation, but I\u2019ve got to stay on my feet and use my length and try to bother his shot,\u201d Porzingis said. \u201cI let my instincts play, and I just jumped up there on the pump fake and fell into him.\u201d It was a night that the Knicks would have appreciated finishing in four quarters. Before the game, Fisher said some players were battling soreness from the rigors of the season and a two-overtime win over the 76ers on Monday. Lance Thomas, one of the team\u2019s best perimeter defenders, missed the game with a sore left knee. Porzingis was dealing with a bruised right foot, and Anthony was still recovering from a sprained right ankle. But Anthony, who played a season-high 49 minutes on Monday, nevertheless carried the Knicks back into Wednesday\u2019s game, which the Jazz controlled for three quarters. He mixed impactful displays of unselfishness with his typically devastating one-on-one moves, finishing with 30 points, 9 assists and 7 rebounds. Anthony also reached 21,763 career points, moving him into 31st on the league\u2019s career scoring list, ahead of Larry Bird. \u201cKnowing what he did in his career, what he did for this league, for me to pass him on that list, I don\u2019t really know how to put that in words,\u201d Anthony said. But on a night when he reached a scoring milestone, Anthony continued to show the other sides of his game. A sequence of plays late in the fourth quarter, in particular, exhibited the unselfishness, team play and trust that Fisher has been trying to coax from him this season. With 1 minute 1 second left in a tense fourth quarter, the ball made its way to Anthony, standing just inside the sideline opposite the Knicks\u2019 bench. The entire Jazz defense shifted ever so slightly in his direction. Anthony did not hesitate with his next move, a powerful, two-handed, overhead pass back across the court to Arron Afflalo (14 points), who nailed an open 3-pointer to give the Knicks a 4-point lead. Twenty-five seconds later, after the Jazz had pulled to 2 points behind, Anthony did it again, bending the shape of the defense with his star power, firing another crosscourt pass, this time to Langston Galloway, who buried a 3-pointer. With about 15 seconds left, Anthony blew past Rudy Gobert for a powerful dunk, seemingly securing the game before the Jazz stormed back. \u201cI think the interesting thing for Melo is that there is this land of opportunity out there that he has not quite accessed yet, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re here to do alongside of him,\u201d Fisher said. Late in overtime, the crowd was loudly chanting the name of Derrick Williams, one of the unsung reserves on the Knicks\u2019 bench. With just over a minute left and the Knicks holding a 3-point lead, Williams put forth a display of extreme hustle \u2014 hopping up and down while battling for an offensive rebound, tipping the ball five separate times \u2014 before securing a rebound and burying a second-chance layup while absorbing a foul. The 3-point play put the Knicks up by 6 points, and a minute later Williams held the ball as the final seconds ticked off. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing,\u201d Williams said of the chants. \u201cAs a little kid, you dream about stuff like that.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;Derrick Williams;Utah Jazz;Knicks"}
{"id": "ny0056975", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/09/21", "title": "Two Goods Reasons to Visit NoHo", "abstract": "From the 1830s to the 1850s, East Fourth Street was a high-society Manhattan address with neighbors named Astor and Vanderbilt. Charles Dickens and Washington Irving sojourned in the area, which then was called Bond Street. The MERCHANT\u2019S HOUSE , at No. 29, built in 1832, stands as a testament to that period, seeming as unchanged and as fragile as Miss Havisham\u2019s wedding dress. It is also imperiled. In April, the city\u2019s Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead for an eight-story hotel to be built next door on the site of a one-story garage. That commission, at its inaugural meeting in 1965, acted to declare the Merchant\u2019s House, a four-story Greek Revival townhouse, a landmark. The fastidiously preserved Merchant\u2019s House had been a museum since 1936, in what is now called the NoHo Historic District. \u201cExtensive underground engineering studies have shown that if the house moves even one-quarter inch, it could destroy all the ornate plaster moldings and come tumbling down,\u201d said Dennis McAvena, an interior designer who moonlights at the museum as a guide. What may sound alarmist is not unfounded, Mr. McAvena told a group of Sunday visitors (the museum is open Thursdays to Mondays from noon to 5 p.m. for $10 general admission). A previous demolition of buildings on the other side of the house caused $1 million in damage. Margaret Halsey Gardiner, the museum\u2019s executive director, struck a conciliatory note. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to work with the developer and their engineers on protection plans that will ensure the safety of the house during demolition of the garage, excavation of the foundation and the construction of the hotel,\u201d said Ms. Gardiner, who is known as Pi. The three-brick-thick edifice, its mahogany furnishings, pianoforte and rare gas-fueled chandeliers have survived because of Gertrude Tredwell, who was born at home in 1840, lived there all her life and died there in 1933. She was the eighth child of Eliza and Seabury Tredwell (he was a rich hardware merchant and Mayflower descendant), outliving her siblings by decades and changing nary a pillowcase from the days when they received fashionable callers and danced the Virginia reel in evening slippers. No diaries or letters have surfaced that might shed light on why five of the Tredwell children never married, but there is a photo of Gertrude\u2019s onetime suitor Luis Walton, a handsome doctor who also remained single after they parted. Parallels have been drawn to Henry James\u2019s \u201cWashington Square,\u201d most popularly known by its stage adaptation (and later film), \u201c The Heiress .\u201d James did not base his story of the rejected heiress on Gertrude, but Hollywood set designers replicated the Tredwells\u2019 sumptuous parlor and grand staircase for the 1949 film starring Olivia de Havilland. When \u201cThe Heiress\u201d was revived on Broadway in 2012, the actors Jessica Chastain and Dan Stevens and the set designer Derek McLane spent time in the Merchant\u2019s House to absorb its pristine 19th-century character. By the 1860s the beau monde had moved north, and the neighborhood became a commercial, working-class district. Why the Tredwells stayed is a mystery. Seabury died in 1865, leaving each of his children $10,000 (roughly $150,000 today). They also inherited hundreds of acres of land in Rumson, N.J., and Brooklyn, which they gradually sold off as their money drained away. Gertrude died impoverished. Multiple paranormal experiences suggest the family still does not want to leave. \u201cI\u2019ve had enough sane people telling me about seeing Gertrude on the stairs or Seabury in his room in a brown suit that at some point you have to say there must be something going on,\u201d Ms. Gardiner said, suggesting that the candlelight ghost tour is more than a marketing ploy. \u201cIt can get spooky when I\u2019m here alone.\u201d Surprises can also materialize in the museum\u2019s gift shop, whose shelves bear donated, mismatched china, glassware and the occasional set of heirloom silver, all at thrift-store prices. The formal, brick-walled garden is another revelation, bordered by black-eyed Susans, columbine and vinca, some grown from heritage plants discovered during an excavation. Pre-emptive plaster repairs will perhaps secure the house from extensive damage, reported Michael Devonshire, the director of conservation at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, an architecture firm. \u201cBut there\u2019s no doubt an eight-story hotel will cast a shadow and completely change the microclimate for the plants,\u201d he said. \u201cThe house traditionally had support from houses of equal height on either side. Now it\u2019s standing alone.\u201d For the literary-minded, there is no smarter place to settle for the rest of the day than the SWIFT HIBERNIAN LOUNGE across the street at 34 East Fourth Street (212-260-3600). Open daily from noon on, the Irish pub is stocked with tattered books, a giant portrait of Jonathan Swift, wood detail rescued from Swift\u2019s parish in County Meath and a vast collection of Irish whiskey, Scotch and beer. Its bill of fare, simple yet superior to most pubs\u2019, includes a zesty, fat lamb sandwich, buttery and flaky sausage rolls and thin-crust pizza.", "keyword": "NoHo Manhattan;Merchant's House Museum;Swift Hibernian Lounge;bars,nightclubs;Historic preservation;The arts"}
{"id": "ny0166956", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/01/27", "title": "Rising Profit Forecasts Send Shares Sharply Higher", "abstract": "Stocks rose the most in three weeks as Caterpillar, Honeywell International and Lockheed Martin increased profit forecasts. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index had their biggest gains since fourth-quarter earnings reports began. A government report showing that orders for durable goods rose more than forecast contributed to their advance. Phone companies rallied as sales at AT&T and Verizon Communications beat analysts' estimates. The S.& P. 500 rallied 9.15 points, or 0.7 percent, to 1,273.83 for its biggest advance since Jan. 6 and third gain in the last four days. The Dow industrials climbed 99.73 points, or 0.9 percent, to 10,809.47, the biggest rise since Jan. 3. The Nasdaq composite index rose 22.35 points, or 1 percent, to 2,283. Some disappointing earnings reports pressured stocks earlier this month when the reporting period began, but that concern subsided this week as the picture began to brighten with reports from Dow members like United Technologies and McDonald's. Not all results yesterday were stellar. Stock in General Motors dropped after the company reported its first annual loss since 1992. Juniper Networks suffered its worst drop in five years after a sales forecast disappointed and analysts downgraded the shares. Caterpillar and Honeywell were the two biggest gainers in the Dow average. Caterpillar, the world's No. 1 maker of earth-moving equipment, rose $3.10, to $65.17. The company raised its 2006 per-share profit forecast to $4.65 to $5, from an earlier estimate of $4.52 to $4.91. Shares of Honeywell, the world's largest maker of aircraft cockpit controls, added $1.35, to $37.41, after the company said it expected 2006 per-share earnings of $2.40 to $2.50 on greater demand for commercial aircraft. It had previously forecast profit of $2.35 to $2.50 a share. Lockheed gained $1.98, to $66.99. The company increased its forecast for 2006 earnings to $4.50 to $4.75 a share, from $4 to $4.25. The Commerce Department said orders for durable goods, items made to last at least several years, increased 1.3 percent, to $228 billion, in December. Economists expected an increase of 1 percent. The results were led by the biggest increase in business equipment demand since August. AT&T, reporting its first results since the company was created by the combination of SBC Communications and AT&T, said revenue expanded 25 percent, to $21.6 billion, including its wireless unit. Net income more than doubled. AT&T added 30 cents, to $25.51, and Verizon climbed 30 cents, to $31.68. Microsoft said after the close that revenue this quarter would be $10.9 billion to $11.2 billion and per-share earnings would be 32 cents to 33 cents. Shares of Microsoft, which said fiscal second-quarter profit rose 5.5 percent, added as much as 40 cents, to $26.90, in extended trading. Chipotle surged to $44 from its offering price of $22. Chipotle and McDonald's together sold 7.88 million shares. Chipotle has 489 stores that sell burritos, tacos and salads and was acquired by McDonald's in 1998. McDonald's lost 22 cents, to $34.94. G.M. fell 80 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $23.05, the worst performance by companies in the Dow industrials. The company had a fourth-quarter loss of $4.78 billion and was unprofitable on an annual basis for the first time in 13 years amid rising health care costs and the lowest market share in the United States since 1925. Bond prices fell, with the 10-year Treasury bill falling 11/32, to 99 27/32, and the yield, which moves in the opposite direction from the price, rising to 4.52 percent, from 4.48 percent late Wednesday.", "keyword": "STOCKS AND BONDS;COMPANY REPORTS"}
{"id": "ny0132131", "categories": ["science", "earth"], "date": "2012/12/09", "title": "\u2018Famous\u2019 Wolf Is Killed Outside Yellowstone", "abstract": "Yellowstone National Park\u2019s best-known wolf, beloved by many tourists and valued by scientists who tracked its movements, was shot and killed on Thursday outside the park\u2019s boundaries, Wyoming wildlife officials reported. The wolf, known as 832F to researchers, was the alpha female of the park\u2019s highly visible Lamar Canyon pack and had become so well known that some wildlife watchers referred to her as a \u201crock star.\u201d The animal had been a tourist favorite for most of the past six years. The wolf was fitted with a $4,000 collar with GPS tracking technology, which is being returned, said Daniel Stahler , a project director for Yellowstone\u2019s wolf program. Based on data from the wolf\u2019s collar, researchers knew that her pack rarely ventured outside the park, and then only for brief periods, Dr. Stahler said. This year\u2019s hunting season in the northern Rockies has been especially controversial because of the high numbers of popular wolves and wolves fitted with research collars that have been killed just outside Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Wolf hunts, sanctioned by recent federal and state rules applying to the northern Rockies, have been fiercely debated in the region. The wolf population has rebounded since they were reintroduced in the mid-1990s to counter their extirpation a few years earlier. Many ranchers and hunters say the wolf hunts are a reasonable way to reduce attacks on livestock and protect big game populations. This fall, the first wolf hunts in decades were authorized in Wyoming. The wolf killed last week was the eighth collared by researchers that was shot this year after leaving the park\u2019s boundary. The deaths have dismayed scientists who track wolves to study their habits, population spread and threats to their survival. Still, some found 832F\u2019s death to be particularly disheartening. \u201cShe is the most famous wolf in the world,\u201d said Jimmy Jones, a wildlife photographer who lives in Los Angeles and whose portrait of 832F appears in the current issue of the magazine American Scientist. Wildlife advocates say that the wolf populations are not large enough to withstand state-sanctioned harvests and that the animals attract tourist money. Yellowstone\u2019s scenic Lamar Valley has been one of the most reliable places to view wolves in the northern Rockies, and it attracts scores of visitors every year.", "keyword": "Wolves;Hunting and Trapping;Yellowstone National Park;National Parks Monuments and Seashores"}
{"id": "ny0209641", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2009/12/07", "title": "Soccer in the Lower German Leagues, a Target for Bribery", "abstract": "BAMBERG, Germany \u2014 In this small stadium in Bavaria, most seats are not just empty \u2014 they are covered in slippery grass and moss. There are no television cameras. Among the sponsors advertised on the boarding is Delphi, a local Greek restaurant. At stake for the visiting soccer club from Ulm: moving to sixth place, from ninth, in one of Germany\u2019s three fourth-division leagues. Or, as even its manager, Markus L\u00f6sch, acknowledged, \u201cNothing at all.\u201d Two weeks ago, Ulm, a charming town on the Danube, was best known for having the tallest church spire in the world and for being the birthplace of Albert Einstein. Now Ulm, and a handful of other German towns, have become associated with the biggest betting scandal in European soccer history, a case that has laid bare the little-known, often-bankrupt underbelly of the world\u2019s most popular sport. For a few sweet hours on Saturday, none of that mattered. SSV Ulm beat F.C. Eintracht Bamberg, 3-1. The Ulmers dominated the game and loved every minute of it. Who cared that only 39 fans in Ulm\u2019s black-and-white colors made the trip to Bamberg, a journey of about 155 miles, or that the Neu-Ulmer Zeitung newspaper had not bothered to send a reporter? For those few hours, everyone could forget that three of Ulm\u2019s best players had recently been fired after they were accused of fixing matches. \u201cUlm players aren\u2019t bribable,\u201d the 39 fans chanted in spirited self-deprecation. \u201cToo bad you didn\u2019t cheat today,\u201d retorted a Bamberg fan across the two metal fences separating them. Of the 200 European soccer games under investigation by prosecutors, 32 took place in Germany, and more than half of those \u2014 18 \u2014 were in the fourth division, where experts did not seem surprised that betting rings appeared to have flourished. In the higher leagues, cheating is harder and less tempting. The scrutiny of television cameras means a deliberate hand ball or a missed penalty kick is less likely to go undetected. The ignominy of fixing a match stacks up poorly against the rewards of high pay and shares of hefty television fees. In the lower leagues, a poisonous combination of high expectations, meager success and astonishingly low pay makes the players in Germany\u2019s 33 standard regional division clubs targets for bribery. These players operate on the fault line between professional and amateur soccer, where youthful dreams of greatness live side by side with end-of-career cynicism and frustrated mediocrity. They play below the radar of public interest, and often below the poverty line. Regional players earn as little as 150 euros, about $225 \u2014 the legal minimum for a basic monthly salary, excluding match bonuses, in German Football Association guidelines. Five-figure salaries are very rare, the six- and seven-figure wages of top stars a mere dream. Some clubs are so poor that they are forced to lure players with promises of jobs with corporate sponsors or mileage payment for attending training. \u201cThe regional leagues want to play professionally, but they don\u2019t have the money the professional leagues have,\u201d said Theo Zwanziger, the president of the German Football Association, which governs German soccer. \u201cThat makes the players in those leagues generally the most susceptible.\u201d In his office underneath the grandstand of the local stadium, the Ulm coach, Ralf Becker, put it more bluntly, saying, \u201cThey are all potential offenders.\u201d \u201cWhen guys earn 500 euros to play soccer, you can\u2019t allow bets worth thousands of euros and expect that it won\u2019t have an impact,\u201d added Becker, who says all betting on fourth-division matches should be banned. The betting on fourth-division matches happens largely in private betting companies. \u201cThey have all the pressures of professional football: the fear of injuries, the weekly competition to be selected to play, the 90 minutes on the playing field on the weekend, the knowledge that your career is over at 35,\u201d said Becker, a former professional player who retired at 34 because of an ankle injury. \u201cBut Bundesliga players earn at least 10 or 20 times more,\u201d Becker added, referring to the top level of German soccer. The three fired players \u2014 Davor Kraljevic, 31; Dinko Radojevic, 31; and Marijo Marinovic, 26 \u2014 are a case in point. They are under investigation and suspected of rigging four matches last season and two matches this season for several thousand euros each. Earning $4,500 to $6,000 a month, they were among the best and highest-paid players on the team. But as one official familiar with the investigation explains, their choice was between $525 in taxable bonus payments if the team had won, and about $7,500 in cash per rigged match. \u201cTheir calculation was, get paid well to lose or get paid poorly to win,\u201d said the official, who declined to be identified because the investigation is continuing. The 163-year-old SSV Ulm club is in many ways a microcosm of the bittersweet world of German soccer, a blighted, little reported universe of shattered hopes, financial woes, low-level corruption and rarely realized dreams. In 1997, Ulm started on the long climb that resulted in the near impossible: it rose from third to second division and then \u2014 for one short exuberant season \u2014 into the Bundesliga. Holger Betz, 31, who was a substitute goalkeeper for the team then, recalled the thrill of playing in front of 85,000 people in the country\u2019s biggest stadiums. But the fall was as spectacular as the rise. By 2001, Ulm was back in the third division and insolvent, virtually bankrupted by the decision to retain its well-paid players. A former senior official of the club is under investigation for failing to pay payroll charges on players\u2019 salaries in the years after. Since then, the club has lived on $2.25 million a year and has been a typical fourth-division melting pot of would-be and former stars and a large group in the middle who are neither. Twenty-year-old players like Burak Tastan, with boyish ambitions to join the German national team, play side by side with former stars like Heiko Gerber, who spent 10 years with Bundesliga clubs and at 37 is winding down his career. And there are players like Betz, who spent virtually his entire career here. Now, no Ulm player earns more than about $5,500 a month before taxes. Players receive $225 for attending a match, and progressively more in the case of victory. \u201cNobody here drives a Porsche,\u201d Becker said. Tastan, whose parents emigrated from Turkey and who speaks German with a Bavarian accent, drives his father\u2019s car. He won\u2019t say what he earns but says it is enough to live on. Rigging a game for money? \u201cNever,\u201d he said. \u201cI could not do that to the fans.\u201d For all the frustrations, many here have an undiminished passion for the game. They are local heroes. Local children ask them for their autographs. They are, in many ways, living their boyhood dream. Tastan, for one, says he feels fortunate to be paid at all to do what he loves most. Maybe, he admits, some players earn the same as waiters or hairdressers. \u201cBut we get to play football all day,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Soccer;Gambling;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0159460", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2008/12/15", "title": "Annika Sorenstam Birdies, Then Walks Off Into Retirement", "abstract": "DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 Annika Sorenstam ended her Hall of Fame career with an eight-foot birdie on the 18th hole of the Dubai Ladies Masters on Sunday, completing a 1-under 71 that left her in seventh place, six shots behind the winner, Anja Monke. Sorenstam, who is retiring to focus on her family and business interests, led the tournament after the second round but shot a 75 on Saturday that torpedoed her hopes for a third straight title at the season-ending tournament on the Ladies European Tour. Still, Sorenstam managed to end on a positive note with her final birdie drawing a standing ovation from a packed gallery. She raised her putter to acknowledge the crowd before hugging her caddie, Terry McNamara. \u201cI have had many farewells since I announced my decision some five months back, but this one was special,\u201d Sorenstam, a Swede, said. \u201cI started my career with L.E.T., and it is fitting to end it with an L.E.T. event. \u201cI felt at peace. I really felt very content. I walked up to hit my third shot on the 18th, and I felt the breeze coming in, and it was just a really comfortable feeling. I saw some players standing behind the 18th green, that gave me a tear. I saw my parents and my family and that give me a tear.\u201d Monke of Germany shot a 68 to protect her overnight lead, finishing at 13-under 275. Veronica Zorzi of Italy was second, three strokes behind Monke, with the British veteran Laura Davies another shot back in third. \u201cI\u2019m feeling very happy,\u201d Monke said, adding that it was tough to focus on her game and not Sorenstam. \u201cOf course I heard the big applause when she was hitting her shot into the 18th green. I was on the 16th green at the time. And then we saw her actually finishing it off on 18. We hit our tee shots by that time and so I could at least see a little bit.\u201d Sorenstam said she was a little nervous Sunday morning and came to the course a bit earlier to stretch and reflect on the day. But once she hit her first shot, she said it was \u201cautomatic.\u201d \u201cI know the time is right, and therefore I feel very happy,\u201d Sorenstam said. \u201cIf you think about 15 years and all of the things I\u2019ve achieved, it\u2019s sad. But you close one door and you open another one. I\u2019m glad I have a chance to do that.\u201d", "keyword": "Sorenstam Annika;Masters Golf Tournament;Retirement;Golf"}
{"id": "ny0287829", "categories": ["world", "what-in-the-world"], "date": "2016/08/19", "title": "What\u2019s That on Your Bumper? A Hairy Kind of Car Insurance", "abstract": "In some parts of West Africa, ponytails aren\u2019t just hairdos. They dress up taxis, too. In Senegal and Gambia, for example, many cabs that cruise along the crowded highways or bounce down sandy streets are adorned with clumps of long, tied horse, sheep or cattle hair attached to the back bumper or muffler. Image A taxi in Dakar, Senegal. Credit Dionne Searcey/The New York Times These tails are seen as providing strength and good fortune to drivers who spend hours navigating often treacherous road conditions in countries where traffic accidents are a common cause of death and injury. For a small fee, a Muslim religious figure known as a marabout will bless the talisman. Some drivers also have miniature tails on their key chains, West Africa\u2019s version of a lucky rabbit\u2019s foot. Animal hair is just one way to dress up your ride. In Nigeria\u2019s major cities, images of Jesus and favorite Bible verses are common on bumper stickers and windshields. One vehicle spotted on a traffic-clogged highway in Lagos had a sign saying \u201cBlood of Jesus.\u201d In Dakar, Senegal\u2019s capital, buses, cabs and trucks often display photos of local Islamic clerics, a distinction from some more conservative Muslim societies where doing so would be taboo. Semi-trucks that might bear silvery silhouettes of shapely women in the United States are more likely, in West Africa, to carry religious decals along with their fuel, onions or other big loads. Images of marabouts hang from rearview mirrors, and a giant Jesus is sometimes painted on vehicles. Truckers also pay careful attention to their windshield wipers, which they wrap in long, colorful ribbons that blow in the wind as they rumble along the roadways. Dakar is home to the most tricked-out ride of all: the car rapide \u2014 multicolored minibuses that zip across the city with painted mud flaps, hubcaps and side mirrors. They are as notorious for their d\u00e9cor as they are for being overstuffed with precariously dangling passengers \u2014 and they are being phased out, for safety reasons.", "keyword": "Senegal;Gambia;Nigeria;Taxis;Luck;Superstition;Hair;Africa"}
{"id": "ny0112613", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/02/15", "title": "Tentative Deal Reached to Preserve Cut in Payroll Tax", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Members of a House-Senate committee charged with writing a measure to extend a payroll tax reduction and provide added unemployment benefits reached a tentative agreement Tuesday evening, with Republicans and Democrats claiming a degree of political victory in a fight with significant election-year implications. One day after House Republican leaders said they would offer a bill to extend the $100 billion payroll tax rollback for millions of working Americans without requiring spending cuts to pay for it, the Congressional negotiators struck a broader deal that would also extend unemployment benefits and prevent a large cut in reimbursements to doctors who accept Medicare . A vote on the measure would most likely happen by Friday, when Congress is set to recess for a week. But senior aides warned that negotiators still had to sign off formally on the agreement and that obstacles could surface given the long-running tensions over the measure. Democrats, elated after winning the Republican tax concession after months of clashes, said they had also been able to beat back new conditions that Republicans had wanted on jobless pay, like requiring beneficiaries to seek high school equivalency degrees, and had found middle ground on Republican attempts to significantly reduce the number of weeks in which the unemployed could draw benefits. Republicans did make Democrats pay for the added unemployment benefits through changes to federal pensions, aides said. More important, Republican leaders and their advisers said that they had removed an election-year hammer from the hands of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, depriving them of the ability to keep pounding on the idea that Republicans were resistant to tax cuts for the middle class. The deal also appeared to solidify Speaker John A. Boehner \u2019s shift in leadership strategy, signaled at the end of the last year when he forced a short-term payroll tax extension on his fractious rank and file. The agreement on Tuesday suggested that he would spend the balance of the year doing what he thought was best for his party and its chances of holding on to the House, and less time fretting over whether the most conservative corner of his members were with him. In fact, the plan emerging from the negotiating committee could require the acquiescence of House Democrats to secure the 218 votes it needs for passage. The tentative accord emerged after Mr. Obama earlier on Tuesday welcomed signs of progress in extending a payroll tax cut but urged Americans to continue to press their representatives to approve the tax break quickly, before it expires at the end of the month. \u201cAs you guys know, you can\u2019t take anything for granted here in Washington \u2014 until my signature is actually on it,\u201d the president said in an appearance in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. He was apparently referring to last December, when Senate Republicans initially agreed to a two-month payroll extension only to have House Republicans balk . The president ended up winning that fight after House Republicans buckled under political pressure and an onslaught of calls and e-mails from constituents. Republicans said that the House leadership decided to capitulate on paying for the tax cut because it appeared that Democrats were going to hold out in the talks and blame Republicans for the impasse if there were no resolution. \u201cI can understand why the House leadership, exasperated with the lack of progress in the conference, is looking around at other alternatives,\u201d Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky , the Republican leader, told reporters on Tuesday. While many rank-and-file members said they needed more time to study the agreement, and leaders in both parties preferred to stay mum until they were ready to make formal announcements, Democrats were privately crowing Tuesday night that the deal reflected far more of their priorities than those of their counterparts. Republicans, acknowledging that there were few substantive policy victories to claim, said they believed that it was worth it to avoid a protracted fight over benefits that together touch the lives of nearly every American. \u201cLeadership clearly has a positive desire to put this behind us,\u201d said Representative Bill Huizenga, Republican of Michigan , who left a meeting of House Republicans looking grim, \u201cand are not as open to listening to the rest of the conference to find out what the conference thinks.\u201d But he, like some other Republicans, seemed resigned to approval of the agreement. \u201cWe\u2019re going to get an extension of the middle-class tax cut,\u201d said Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania , shrugging slightly. It was also clear that there were many members who would not support the measure. \u201cI know enough to know I\u2019m not voting for it,\u201d said Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah . The highest priority for Democrats beside the payroll tax cut was to have a significant extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans wanted to move down from the maximum of 99 weeks to 59 weeks, while Senate Democrats proposed 93 weeks. In the tentative deal, the maximum number of weeks would be 73, a level that would be largely reserved for states with high unemployment. That extension will be paid for with the pension change for federal workers coupled with the sale of radio spectrum licenses and other smaller producers of revenue. The piece of the deal that would protect doctors from a huge cut in Medicare reimbursement fees would do so through cuts in the new prevention and public health fund established in the health care law , combined with reducing help for hospitals with bad debt and other health-care-related spending trims. The agreement was almost totally brokered by the two top tax writers in Congress, Senator Max Baucus , Democrat of Montana , and Representative Dave Camp , Republican of Michigan.", "keyword": "US Politics;Payroll tax;Unemployment benefits;Medicare;Democrats;Republicans;Federal Budget;Senate;House of Representatives"}
{"id": "ny0060514", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/08/24", "title": "Playing Under Protest Over Challenged Call, Rays Fall to Jays in 10", "abstract": "Jose Reyes singled home the winning run in the 10th inning, and the host Toronto Blue Jays beat Tampa Bay, 5-4, on Saturday in a game the Rays played under protest. Rays Manager Joe Maddon protested the game in the fourth after umpires granted Toronto a replay challenge. Tampa Bay designated hitter Wil Myers reached on a one-out single and was called safe by Bill Welke, the first-base umpire, on Mark Buehrle\u2019s pickoff throw. After Yunel Escobar stepped back into the batter\u2019s box and Buehrle returned to the rubber, Blue Jays Manager John Gibbons came out and asked to challenge Welke\u2019s call. Maddon came out to speak with Bob Davidson, the crew chief and third-base umpire, about the timing of the challenge. When Myers was called out after a video review, Maddon spoke to Davidson again and indicated that the Rays were playing the game under protest. Baseball\u2019s replay rules state that any challenge must be made before the next play or pitch, which is said to begin \u201cwhen the pitcher is on the rubber preparing to start his delivery and the batter has entered the batter\u2019s box.\u201d The rules also say, however, that the crew chief has \u201cthe final authority to determine whether a manager\u2019s challenge is timely.\u201d CUBS 7, ORIOLES 2 Chris Coghlan finally solved Bud Norris with a bases-loaded triple in a four-run second inning, leading Chicago to a victory over Baltimore at soggy Wrigley Field. Coghlan was 0 for 15 with six strikeouts against Norris before connecting for his fifth triple of the season. Chicago will try Sunday for its first series sweep since winning three straight at Boston from June 30 to July 2. Justin Grimm pitched three and a third hitless innings after a long rain delay as the last-place Cubs won their second straight against the Orioles, the American League East leaders. Before the game, the Orioles announced that third baseman Manny Machado would have season-ending surgery on his right knee. Dan Duquette, the vice president for baseball operations, said Machado told the team Friday that his knee was not healing well with rest. Duquette said Machado conferred with his doctors and felt that surgery was the best option. Machado had a similar injury to the other knee last year, when he missed the final week of the season. He then had surgery and did not play in a regular-season game this year until May 1. PIRATES 10, BREWERS 2 Pedro Alvarez homered twice to break out of a 5-for-34 slump, and visiting Pittsburgh beat Milwaukee. Alvarez hit a three-run shot in the fourth inning and a solo drive in the fifth against starter Wily Peralta. Russell Martin also connected for a three-run homer off the right-handed Peralta, who held the Pirates hitless for three and two-thirds innings but quickly fell apart and exited after five. ATHLETICS 2, ANGELS 1 Coco Crisp scored the go-ahead run on Joe Smith\u2019s wild pitch with two outs in the eighth inning, and host Oakland beat Los Angeles to move into a first-place tie in the American League West. TIGERS MANAGE A SPLIT Justin Verlander labored into the sixth inning, Nick Castellanos had two hits and two R.B.I., and visiting Detroit salvaged a doubleheader split by beating the Minnesota Twins, 8-6. Torii Hunter and J. D. Martinez each had three of Detroit\u2019s 17 hits, and Joe Nathan notched his 27th save in 32 attempts. Verlander improved to 5-0 in seven career starts at Target Field. Still, with their 12-4 loss in the afternoon, the Tigers dropped a season-worst three games behind first-place Kansas City in the A.L. Central. They also fell a game behind Seattle for the second wild-card spot. In the opener, the Twins rookie Kennys Vargas drove in five runs, and starter Yohan Pino struck out six in five innings. ROYALS 6, RANGERS 3 Jeremy Guthrie gave up a home run on his first pitch and not much else, pitching visiting Kansas City past Texas for its 24th win in 30 games. Alex Gordon had two hits, including a first-inning homer, and made a diving catch in left field for the A.L. Central-leading Royals. REDS 1, BRAVES 0 Mike Leake pitched into the seventh inning and gave Cincinnati\u2019s struggling offense a boost by hitting a double and scoring the game\u2019s only run, and the Reds ended a seven-game losing streak by beating visiting Atlanta. Leake gave up two hits and walked three, leaving with the bases loaded and two outs in the seventh. MARINERS 7, RED SOX 3 Dustin Ackley\u2019s three-run homer capped a seven-run fourth that carried Seattle to a win over host Boston, sending the Red Sox to their seventh straight loss. It was the ninth win in 12 games for the Mariners, who increased their lead over Detroit for the second A.L. wild-card spot. Boston designated hitter David Ortiz had his streak of reaching base four times in four straight games halted, but he walked and was hit by a pitch before leaving with a bruised left elbow. Before the game, Rusney Castillo, a Cuban defector, appeared at Fenway Park, wearing Red Sox shorts and a T-shirt. Castillo chatted with the Mariners\u2019 Robinson Cano on the field before the game, a day after news reports that the Red Sox had agreed with Castillo on a $72.5 million, seven-year contract. NATIONALS 6, GIANTS 2 Jordan Zimmermann pitched eight strong innings, Asdrubal Cabrera homered, and host Washington kept up its dominance of the two-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum, beating San Francisco. Jayson Werth added two run-scoring singles, and Denard Span had a triple and a single for the National League East-leading Nationals, one night after San Francisco ended Washington\u2019s 10-game winning streak. CARDINALS 6, PHILLIES 5 Matt Carpenter hit a sacrifice fly in the 12th inning, lifting visiting St. Louis over Philadelphia. The Cardinals have won eight of 10 and closed within a half-game of N.L. Central-leading Milwaukee. DIAMONDBACKS 5, PADRES 2 Arizona blew a lead in the top half of the eighth inning, but Didi Gregorius hit a three-run homer in the bottom half, lifting the host Diamondbacks past San Diego. INDIANS 3, ASTROS 2 The rookie Jose Ramirez\u2019s ninth-inning single lifted host Cleveland to a win over Houston. Pinch-hitter Tyler Holt started the inning with a single off Jake Buchanan. After Roberto Perez moved Holt to second with a sacrifice, Michael Bourn walked. Buchanan\u2019s wild pitch moved the runners to second and third before Ramirez lined a 3-2 pitch past third base for the win.", "keyword": "Baseball;Tampa Bay Rays;Blue Jays;Joe Maddon;Jose Reyes"}
{"id": "ny0060943", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/08/14", "title": "Pakistan Calls Modi\u2019s Remarks on Terrorism \u2018Unfortunate\u2019", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Pakistan responded swiftly on Wednesday to a tough speech by India\u2019s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, that accused Pakistan of conducting a \u201cproxy war\u201d against India. Pakistan called Mr. Modi\u2019s remarks \u201cunfortunate\u201d and said it sought good relations with its neighbor. During a visit on Tuesday to the town of Kargil in the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir, Mr. Modi said that Pakistan \u201chas lost the strength to fight a conventional war, but continues to engage in the proxy war through terrorism.\u201d Kargil, which is near the disputed Indian-Pakistani border known as the Line of Control, was the site of a 1999 conflict between the two countries. Mr. Modi\u2019s remarks reflected a toughening of his conciliatory initial approach toward Pakistan, which included inviting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in in May. Since then, however, cease-fire violations on the Line of Control have become more frequent. In a statement Wednesday , Pakistan\u2019s Foreign Ministry said that Mr. Modi\u2019s remarks were \u201cmost unfortunate, especially as the leadership of Pakistan wishes to establish good neighborly relations with India.\u201d The statement also said that Pakistan was the \u201cbiggest victim\u201d of terrorism, which it said had claimed 55,000 of its citizens\u2019 lives.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Narendra Modi;India;Kashmir and Jammu"}
{"id": "ny0098728", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/06/30", "title": "Supreme Court Allows Use of Execution Drug", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court ruled on Monday against three death row inmates who had sought to bar the use of an execution drug they said risked causing excruciating pain. In the process, two dissenting members of the court \u2014 Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg \u2014 came very close to announcing that they were ready to rule the death penalty unconstitutional. This gave rise to slashing debate with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas about the reliability and effectiveness of the punishment, a dispute that overshadowed the core issue in the case. The 5-to-4 decision on the execution drug broke along familiar lines, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court\u2019s more conservative members to allow its use. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the inmates had failed to identify an available and preferable method of execution and failed to make the case that the challenged drug entailed a substantial risk of severe pain. The drug, the sedative midazolam, played a part in three long and apparently painful executions last year. It was used in an effort to render inmates unconscious before they were injected with other drugs that cause severe pain. Video Demonstrators opposed to the death penalty expressed their disappointment over the Supreme Court\u2019s decision allowing the sedative midazolam to be used in executions. Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the other three members of the court\u2019s liberal wing, said, \u201cThe court\u2019s available-alternative requirement leads to patently absurd consequences.\u201d \u201cPetitioners contend that Oklahoma\u2019s current protocol is a barbarous method of punishment \u2014 the chemical equivalent of being burned alive,\u201d Justice Sotomayor wrote. \u201cBut under the court\u2019s new rule, it would not matter whether the state intended to use midazolam, or instead to have petitioners drawn and quartered, slowly tortured to death or actually burned at the stake.\u201d Justices Breyer, Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined Justice Sotomayor\u2019s dissent. In a second, more sweeping dissent, Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, said it was time to consider a larger issue. \u201cRather than try to patch up the death penalty\u2019s legal wounds one at a time,\u201d Justice Breyer wrote, \u201cI would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.\u201d In a 46-page dissent that included charts and maps, he said that \u201cit is highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment,\u201d which bars cruel and unusual punishments. He said that there was evidence that innocent people have been executed, that death row exonerations were frequent, that death sentences were imposed arbitrarily and that the capital justice system was warped by racial discrimination and politics. Justice Breyer added that there was scant reason to think that the death penalty deterred crime and that long delays between death sentences and executions might themselves violate the Eighth Amendment. He noted that most of the country did not use the death penalty and that the United States was an international outlier in embracing it. Justice Scalia responded to what he called \u201cJustice Breyer\u2019s plea for judicial abolition of the death penalty\u201d by calling it \u201cgobbledygook.\u201d The punishment is contemplated by the Constitution, Justice Scalia said, and disingenuously opposed on grounds created by its opponents. Criticizing the death penalty on the ground that it is not carried out fast enough, for instance, Justice Scalia said, \u201ccalls to mind the man sentenced to death for killing his parents, who pleads for mercy on the ground that he is an orphan.\u201d \u201cWe federal judges,\u201d Justice Scalia continued, \u201clive in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in placid suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door. We are not confronted with the threat of violence that is ever present in many Americans\u2019 everyday lives. The suggestion that the incremental deterrent effect of capital punishment does not seem \u2018significant\u2019 reflects, it seems to me, a let-them-eat-cake obliviousness to the needs of others. Let the people decide how much incremental deterrence is appropriate.\u201d In a second concurrence, Justice Thomas described several cases in which the Supreme Court had spared the lives of killers. Image The Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, where the botched execution of Clayton D. Lockett took place in April. Credit Nick Oxford for The New York Times \u201cWhatever one\u2019s views on the permissibility or wisdom of the death penalty,\u201d Justice Thomas wrote, \u201cI doubt anyone would disagree that each of these crimes was egregious enough to merit the severest condemnation that society has to offer. The only constitutional problem with the fact that these criminals were spared that condemnation, while others were not, is that their amnesty came in the form of unfounded claims. Arbitrariness has nothing to do with it.\u201d The challenge to the execution drug was brought by four condemned inmates in Oklahoma, who said it did not reliably render the person unconscious and so violated the Eighth Amendment. Lower courts disagreed. Oklahoma and several other states started to use midazolam in executions after manufacturers in Europe and the United States refused to sell them the barbiturates that were traditionally used to produce unconsciousness . Justice Alito suggested that condemned inmates should not benefit from the shortages, saying that \u201canti-death-penalty advocates pressured pharmaceutical companies to refuse to supply the drugs used to carry out death sentences.\u201d Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas joined the majority opinion. Key Questions in the Oklahoma Death Penalty Case What you need to know about the death penalty case that the Supreme Court is taking up. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor said the shortages had produced real risks. \u201cThe execution protocols states hurriedly devise as they scramble to locate new and untested drugs,\u201d she wrote, \u201care all the more likely to be cruel and unusual \u2014 presumably, these drugs would have been the states\u2019 first choice were they in fact more effective.\u201d Lawyers for the Oklahoma inmates, with the support of experts in pharmacology and anesthetics, said midazolam, even if properly administered, was unreliable. They pointed to three executions last year that seemed to go awry. In April 2014, Clayton D. Lockett regained consciousness during the execution procedure, writhing and moaning after the intravenous line was improperly placed . In Ohio in January 2014 and in Arizona in July, prisoners appeared to gasp and choke for extended periods. The Supreme Court last considered lethal injections in 2008, in Baze v. Rees , when it held that what was then the standard three-drug combination, using the barbiturate sodium thiopental as the first agent, did not violate the Eighth Amendment. The new case, Glossip v. Gross, No. 14-7955, originally included a fourth inmate, Charles F. Warner. But he was executed on Jan. 15 after the Supreme Court denied his request for a stay by a 5-to-4 vote. A little more than a week later, the court agreed to hear the remaining inmates\u2019 appeals, and a few days after that it stayed their executions . They are Richard E. Glossip, who was convicted of arranging the beating death of his employer; John M. Grant, who was convicted of stabbing a prison cafeteria worker to death; and Benjamin R. Cole Sr., who was convicted of breaking his 9-month-old daughter\u2019s spine, killing her. \u201cWhile most humans wish to die a painless death,\u201d Justice Alito wrote for the majority, \u201cmany do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.\u201d", "keyword": "Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Capital punishment;Pharmaceuticals;8th Amendment;Sedative;Benjamin Cole;Richard Glossip;John Grant;Clayton Darrell Lockett;Charles Frederick Warner"}
{"id": "ny0160083", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/03/29", "title": "And Yet, Petra, We Will Keep Asking", "abstract": "And Yet, Petra, We Will Keep On Asking MICHAEL DOUGLAS was in the green room at the Marriott Marquis, running his hands through his hair, touching his prodigious new beard, reading off a laptop the speech he was going to give later. We were backstage at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards and Mr. Douglas was there to present the award for best movie of the year for \"fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the issues that affect their lives.\" Movie. 2005. Gay. Issues that affect lives. The suspense was dreadful. \"I have always supported GLAAD,\" Mr. Douglas said to us. \"Done it before, from back when I did 'Basic Instinct.' \" Mr. Douglas was distracted by the appearance of MARLO THOMAS, as our young correspondent was distracted by the appearance of PETRA NEMCOVA. She gave him three kisses, which she said was \"a Hollandaise tradition.\" \"There are never enough kisses,\" she said. Indeed. What's going on with BRUCE WILLIS? \"We are not dating,\" Ms. Nemcova said, denying the rumors for the 3,403rd time. \"We are good friends.\" They are so not dating, in fact, that she said even she hadn't gone to see his movie \"16 Blocks.\" But, she said: \"I admire him. He is caring. Very mature.\" Soon it would be time for the fair gay portrayal movie of the year. But hold onto your potatoes because we must first bring you a report from the premiere of \"Basic Instinct 2,\" a movie which will surely be on next year's list of GLAAD nominations. Sharon Shimon Shimon Sharon SHARON STONE, wearing a shiny gold jacket over a sheer red dress and a Brinks truckload of jewels, spent much of the carpet outside the AMC on Broadway at 68th Street, talking about the movie (\"my character uses sexuality as a weapon\"), her outfit (\"JOHN GALLIANO for Dior\"), her recent world tour (\"I spoke to a mix of Israeli and Palestinian women\") and how she would respond if her initiative to combat malaria in Tanzania turned out to be successful (\"I'll be 'Like, whoa! My little thing did that?' \"). But amid all this questioning she passed us altogether. So we had to sweet-talk a publicist and wait through a photo shoot before finally reaching Ms. Stone's side as she stepped onto the escalator. As we rose together, we asked Ms. Stone -- who recently met SHIMON PERES and valiantly announced that she would kiss \"just about anybody\" for a solution to the Middle East conflict -- about the other Nobel laureates she has known. \"I think DESMOND TUTU won it, didn't he? I'm sure I've met a lot at conventions. I've met a lot of Nobel nominees, like BOB GELDOF and BONO.\" What were your feelings about Mr. Peres? \"I think he's just wonderful. He is so alert in his thinking, he is so sophisticated. It's very exciting to be with him when you sit with him and talk to him. He's on an agenda of world illumination.\" And for Best Portrayal Of Gays in a Movie \"Crash.\" Oh Sweet Zeus No Kidding. As ANG LEE walked onstage to receive the award for \"Brokeback Mountain,\" the crowd was borderline riotous. As soon as he went backstage afterward, an older woman who had been sitting in the crowd came bursting toward him. \"It's the most beautiful story ever told!\" she squealed. Mr. Lee seemed relieved. \"Last award,\" he said. \"I think someone in Taiwan was keeping track. I think it's 50 or something. I put more effort and try to give a different speech each time.\" What are you going to do with it? \"Put it somewhere on my desk.\"", "keyword": "GAY AND LESBIAN ALLIANCE AGAINST DEFAMATION;STONE SHARON;LEE ANG;DOUGLAS MICHAEL;MOTION PICTURES;AWARDS DECORATIONS AND HONORS;HOMOSEXUALITY;BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (MOVIE)"}
{"id": "ny0261073", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/06/26", "title": "Newegg and Best Buy Wrangle Over Ad Parody", "abstract": "ONE incompetent young salesman in a short-sleeved blue shirt. That\u2019s about all Newegg , an online retailer, needed to create a hilarious parody commercial . Best Buy , the consumer electronics giant, was not amused. In the parody, the salesman knows nothing at all about the computers on display in his department. A customer\u2019s voice asks, \u201cWhat\u2019s the difference between these two?\u201d The salesman leans down to read the information cards for two laptops, straightens up and looks bewildered: \u201cO.K. \u2014 I don\u2019t really...\u201d is all the guidance he can offer. Then the scene changes to a shot of three laptops under spotlights on a stage. A voiceover says: \u201c Newegg.com \u2014 come for the expert reviews; buy for the excellent prices.\u201d Newegg, of course, sells only online and offers those reviews in place of salespeople. The commercial ends with the company\u2019s pitch: \u201cTake it from a geek.\u201d Last month, Best Buy\u2019s lawyers sent a letter to Newegg, demanding that it stop showing that commercial and \u201cany other advertising purporting to show Best Buy employees.\u201d Best Buy, whose own salespeople also wear blue shirts, complained that the employee in the commercial was \u201cdepicted as being slovenly and uninformed about computer products.\u201d The letter also demanded that Newegg drop its \u201cGeek On\u201d marketing theme because, it said, the theme encroaches upon Best Buy\u2019s \u201cGeek Squad\u201d trademark. Newegg did not heed Best Buy\u2019s demands. Instead, it placed Best Buy\u2019s cease-and-desist letter on public display, on its Facebook fan page, and it continues to show the commercial on television. Helpfully, it also supplied a YouTube link to the parody. By last week, the commercial had been viewed on YouTube more than 556,000 times. Parodies that take aim at competitors are nothing new, and courts have upheld them as a legally protected form of free expression as long as there is no chance that viewers will fail to notice that they are indeed parodies and not mistake them for real commercials. In this case, could viewers possibly think that the appallingly ignorant person in the blue shirt bore a striking similarity to the sales rep they recently encountered in a Best Buy store? Could they somehow think that Best Buy had sponsored the commercial? Leslie J. Lott, a lawyer at Lott & Fischer, in Coral Gables, Fla., and a former director of the International Trademark Association, said: \u201cBest Buy is in a dilemma. If the awful customer service that is portrayed in the Newegg commercial is accurate, there\u2019s no parody. So it would be in a good legal position but in a horrible position from a public relations perspective. If, on the other hand, Best Buy\u2019s position is that their customer service is actually excellent, then that strengthens Newegg\u2019s parody defense.\u201d A spokeswoman for Best Buy said in an e-mail that \u201cwhen Newegg\u2019s commercial presents a Blue Shirt in a disparaging way, it damages our goodwill.\u201d So, Best Buy asserts, \u201cNewegg\u2019s commercial is not a parody\u201d because it \u201cridicules.\u201d A short-sleeved blue shirt isn\u2019t a registered Best Buy trademark. As for vexation over being the target of ridicule, that comes along with a parody, doesn\u2019t it? Newegg did back down a degree, however. Earlier this month it told Best Buy that it would add a disclaimer saying: \u201cThis advertisement photoplay is a work of fiction.\u201d The disclaimer, shown only online, says the ad was \u201csolely intended to parody and draw attention to any business establishments (but none in particular) that provide poor customer service.\u201d As of last week, one could find two versions of the commercial on YouTube: one with the disclaimer and one without . I asked Newegg why it did not assert its right to run a parody without a disclaimer. Bernard Luthi, Newegg\u2019s vice president for marketing, Web management and customer service, said in an e-mail that the company did stand behind its parody and would continue to run the commercial because \u201cwe do not believe that we portrayed any specific competitor in an offensive way.\u201d Instead of deploying sales reps, Newegg offers customer ratings, using a five-\u201cegg\u201d scale instead of five stars, along with detailed descriptions of pros and cons. Often, these are written by technically sophisticated customers. In one review , for example, an Asus laptop is praised for its \u201ccool design\u201d \u2014 and this was meant literally: \u201ccpu averages 35 and gpu averages around 42 degrees Celsius with general use.\u201d In another review , a customer says of a $1,500 MSI laptop: \u201cPros: Seriously? Just read the specs on this beast.\u201d The reviewer warned that the machine included bloatware, but that this was \u201cnothing I couldn\u2019t easily fix myself.\u201d But there are people, like my mother, who could not easily fix a bloatware problem. Newegg\u2019s tagline \u2014 \u201cGeek on. Everyone is passionate about something.\u201d \u2014 does not describe her relationship to her computer. And some shoppers don\u2019t want to read and compare spec sheets. They are, in fact, very similar to the customer in the Newegg ad who asks for a simple comparison of two laptops on display. They may well be more comfortable shopping at a store like Best Buy. Newegg proudly displays the exact number of product reviews that are available on its site \u2014 last week, the number was more than two million \u2014 but that is little help to the shopper who just wants a knowledgeable sales rep to say, \u201cI suggest this one right here.\u201d The techie jargon that riddles customer reviews at the Newegg Web site seems a pretty ripe target. Perhaps Best Buy should unleash a team of mischievous advertising professionals on Newegg and let its humorless lawyers pursue some other project. One satirical picture should be worth a thousands words of legalese.", "keyword": "Newegg;Best Buy Company Incorporated;Advertising and Marketing;E-Commerce;Shopping and Retail;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0100471", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/27", "title": "Things to Do on Long Island, Dec. 26 Through Jan. 3, 2016", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events on Long Island. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to lical@nytimes.com. Comedy LEVITTOWN Joe DeVito. Dec. 26 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. $17 to $47. Chris Monty. Dec. 31 at 7:30 and 10:15 p.m. $35 to $80. Mike Burton. Jan. 2 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. $17 to $47. Steve White. Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. and Jan 9 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. $15 to $47. Governor's Comedy Club, 90 Division Avenue. govs.com; 516-731-3358. PLAINVIEW Young Israel of Plainview Comedy Night. Jan. 9 at 8:30 p.m. $25 to $50. Young Israel of Plainview, 132 Southern Parkway. 516-433-4811; yiplainview.com. PORT JEFFERSON \u201cNew Year\u2019s Laughing Eve,\u201d a stand-up comedy special with Paul Anthony, Bryan McKenna, Chris Roach and Rob Falcone. Dec. 31 at 6 and 8 p.m. $45 to $55. Theater Three, 412 Main Street. 631-928-9100; theaterthree.com. PORT WASHINGTON Upright Citizens Brigade, improv comedy show. Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. $22 to $27. Landmark on Main Street, 232 Main Street. 516-767-6444; landmarkonmainstreet.org. RIVERHEAD \u201cNew Year\u2019s Laugh, Dine and Dance,\u201d comedy show, with music following and champagne toast at midnight. Dec. 31 at 8 p.m. $45. The Suffolk Theater, 118 East Main Street. 631-727-4343; suffolktheater.com. Film HUNTINGTON \u201cE.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial\u201d (1982). Dec. 26 at noon. \u201cDiary of a Deadbeat: The Story of Jim Vanbebber!\u201d (2015), directed by Victor Bonacore. Dec. 26 at 10 p.m. $7; members, $5. \u201cWilly Wonka & the Chocolate Factory\u201d (1971). Dec. 29 at noon. $12; seniors, $9; children 12 and under, free. \u201cGrease\u201d (1978). Dec. 30 at noon. \u201cHome Alone\u201d (1990). Dec. 28 at noon. New Year\u2019s Eve at the Cinema: screening of \u201cYouth\u201d (2015). Dec. 31 at 8:40 p.m. $35. New Year\u2019s Eve at the Cinema: screening of \u201cCarol\u201d (2015). Dec. 31 at 8:50 p.m. Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company: \u201cThe Winter\u2019s Tale\u201d (2015). Jan. 5 at 7 p.m. $25. \u201cTokyo Drifter\u201d (1966), Japanese action film by Seijun Suzuki. Jan. 6 at 7:30 p.m. $12; seniors and students, $9; children 12 and under, $5. \u201cThe Big Lebowski\u201d (1998). Jan. 9 at 10 p.m. $5; members, $4. Cinema Arts Center, 423 Park Avenue. 631-423-7611; cinemaartscentre.org. ROSLYN HARBOR \u201cParrish Blue: American Art History\u201d (1967), documentary on the works of the painter Maxfield Parrish. Through Feb. 28. Free with museum admission, $4 to $10; children under 4 and members, free. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. 516-484-9337; nassaumuseum.org. WATER MILL \u201cHeart of a Dog\u201d (2015), documentary. Jan. 8 at 6 p.m. $10 (includes museum admission). Free for Members, Children, and Students. Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway. 631-283-2118; parrishart.org. For Children COLD SPRING HARBOR \u201cNew Year\u2019s Bash for Kids!\u201d Dec. 31, 11 a.m. to noon. $8 for children; adults, regular admission. Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, 301 Main Street. cshwhalingmuseum.org; 631-367-3418. EAST ISLIP EAST ISLIP \u201cMrs. Claus Saves the Day!\u201d play. Dec. 27 at noon and Jan. 2 at 2 p.m.; $11. BayWay Arts Center, 265 East Main Street. 631-581-2700; broadhollow.org. ELMONT \u201cFrosty the Snowman,\u201d children\u2019s theater. Dec. 28 through Jan. 16. $11. BroadHollow Theater, 700 Hempstead Turnpike. 516-775-4420; broadhollow.org. GARDEN CITY Celebrating Kwanzaa. Dec. 27, 3 to 4:30 p.m. $3 with museum admission. \u201cPrincess Frog: A Musical Fairy Tale.\u201d Dec. 27 through 31 at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. $9 with museum admission ($7 LICM members), $12 theater only. \u201cCountdown to 12,\u201d a New Year's Eve party. Dec. 31 noon to 4 p.m. \u201cOnce Upon a Time \u2026 Exploring the World of Fairy Tales,\u201d bilingual exhibition. Through Jan. 3. Free with museum admission. Long Island Children\u2019s Museum, 11 Davis Avenue. licm.org; 516-224-5800. LINDENHURST \u201cA Joyful Toyful Holiday,\u201d children\u2019s Christmas show. Dec. 26 through Jan. 2. $10. Studio Theater, 141 South Wellwood Avenue. 631-226-8400; studiotheatreli.com. MERRICK \u201cAnnie.\u201d Saturdays at 2 p.m. Dec. 26. $10. Merrick Theater and Center for the Arts, 2222 Hewlett Avenue. merricktheatreandcenterforthearts.com; 516-868-6400. SAG HARBOR \u201cBadger Meets the Farieies,\u201d puppet show. Jan. 2 at 11 a.m. $15 to $25. Bay Street Theater, Main and Bay Streets. 631-725-9500; baystreet.org. Music and Dance AMAGANSETT Lilly-Anne Merat. Dec. 26 at 8 p.m. Little Head Thinks, rap and rock. Dec. 26 at 10 p.m. $10. The G. E. Smith Band, blues trio. Dec. 31 at 8 p.m. Nancy Atlas, singer-songwriter. Dec. 31 at 10 p.m. $30. Stephen Talkhouse, 161 Main Street. 631-267-3117; stephentalkhouse.com. BAY SHORE Devon Allman Band. Jan. 7 at 8 p.m. $35 to $40. \u201cPuddles Pity Party,\u201d musical clown band. Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. O-Town, pop boy band. Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. $30 to $35. Y.M.C.A. Boulton Center for the Performing Arts, 37 West Main Street. boultoncenter.org; 631-969-1101. BOHEMIA Jim Papa, classical ballads. Jan. 10 at 2 p.m. Free. Connetquot Public Library, 760 Ocean Avenue. connetquotlibrary.org; 631-567-5079. BROOKVILLE \u201cMy Fair Broadway,\u201d New Year\u2019s Eve performance by the Long Island Philharmonic. Dec. 31 at 7:30 p.m. $58 to $113. British Regiments, featuring the Band of the Royal Marines and the Pipes, Drums & Highland Dancers of the Scots Guards. Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. $25 to $80. Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, 720 Northern Boulevard. 516-299-3100; tillescenter.org. CENTERPORT Folk Music Society of Huntington presents Bob Westcott\u2019s New Year Gala, with three local artists. Jan. 2 at 7:30 p.m. $15 to $20. Congregational Church of Huntington, 30 Washington Drive. 631-423-4004; fmsh.org. GREENLAWN \u201cAround the World in 60 minutes on Violin and Piano,\u201d a concert by Karkowska Sisters Duo. Jan. 10 at 2:30 p.m. Free. Harborfields Public Library, 31 Broadway. harborfieldslibrary.org; 631-757-4200. HUNTINGTON \u201cThe Roots,\u201d hip-hop group. Dec. 26 at 8 p.m. $65 to $110. O.A.R., alternative rock. Dec. 27 at 8 p.m. $29.50 to $89.50. Jessie's Girls, pop and rock. Dec. 31 at 10 p.m. $25 to $55. \u201cCelebrating the Music of Billy Joel,\u201d a tribute show by Mike Delguidice & Big Shot. Jan. 2 at 8 p.m. $20 to $40. \u201cA Jim Morrison Celebration Featuring: Wild Child.\u201d Jan. 7 at 8 p.m. $15 to $25. \u201cFriday Night Fever: A Night of '70s Disco & Soul.\u201d Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. $10 to $40. The Paramount, 370 New York Avenue. 631-673-7300; paramountny.com. LONG BEACH Celebrating Carole King with Gail Storm. Dec. 27 at 2 p.m. Free. Long Beach Public Library, 111 West Park Avenue. 516-432-7201; nassaulibrary.org/longbeach. MANHASSET The Levins, harmony duo. Jan. 8 at 8:30 p.m. Free concert; dinner available before the show for $4. Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, 48 Shelter Rock Road. 516-627-6560; uucsr.org. PATCHOGUE \u201cLive in the Lobby Season 11,\u201d rock bands Mediacrime and Chupacabra Cabaret perform. Jan. 9 at 7:30 p.m. Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts, 71 East Main Street. patchoguetheatre.org; 631-207-1313. RIVERHEAD The Joe Roberts Trio, jazz. Dec. 27 at 1 p.m. Martha Clara Vineyards, 6025 Sound Avenue. marthaclaravineyards.com; 631-298-0075. ROCKVILLE CENTRE \u201cSinatra at the Sands,\u201d concert by the Swingtime Big Band. Dec. 31 at 7 p.m. $50. Madison Theater at Molloy College, 1000 Hempstead Avenue. 516-323-4444; madisontheatreny.org. SAG HARBOR Nancy Atlas, singer-songwriter, with Randi Fishenfeld. Jan. 2 at 8 p.m. Nancy Atlas, singer-songwriter, with Simon Kirke. Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. $25. Bay Street Theater, Main and Bay Streets. baystreet.org; 631-725-9500. SOUTHAMPTON Anne Tedesco, pianist. Jan. 10 at 3 p.m. Free. Rogers Memorial Library, 91 Coopers Farm Road. 631-283-0774, ext. 523; myrml.org. Seasonal LINDENHURST \u201cResolutions,\u201d New Year\u2019s Eve Broadway musical revue. Dec. 31 at 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. $50. Studio Theater, 141 South Wellwood Avenue. studiotheatreli.com; 631-226-8400. NORTHPORT \u201cMiracle on 34th Street: The Musical,\u201d music by Meredith Willson. Through Jan. 3. $69 to $74. \u201cFrosty.\u201d Through Jan. 3. $15. John W. Engeman Theater at Northport, 250 Main Street. 631-261-2900; engemantheater.com. OAKDALE \u201cMy Christmas Elf,\u201d the musical. Through Dec. 26. $12. \u201cA Christmas Carol: The Musical.\u201d Through Dec. 29. $20 to $29. CM Performing Arts Center, 931 Montauk Highway. 631-218-2810; cmpac.com. OYSTER BAY \u201c\u2019Twas the Night Before Christmas,\u201d toy soldiers and dolls. Through Jan. 5. $5; seniors and students, $3. Raynham Hall Museum, 20 West Main Street. 516-922-6808; raynhamhallmuseum.org. PORT JEFFERSON \u201cA Christmas Carol,\u201d adapted by Jeffrey E. Sanzel. Through Dec. 27. $15 to $30. Theater Three, 412 Main Street. 631-928-9100; theaterthree.com. ROCKVILLE CENTRE \u201cA Gospel According to Jazz Christmas,\u201d with the vocalist Shel\u00e9a and others. Dec. 26 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. $49 to $75. Madison Theater at Molloy College, 1000 Hempstead Avenue. 516-323-4444; madisontheatreny.org. WANTAGH Holiday Lights Spectacular, 2.5 miles of holiday lights and displays. Sundays through Thursdays, dusk to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, dusk to 11 p.m. Through Jan. 3. Mondays through Thursdays, $20; Fridays through Sundays and holidays, $25. Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, 1000 Ocean Parkway. 516-221-1000; jonesbeach.com. Spoken Word COLD SPRING HARBOR \u201cVisions of Utopia: Garden City and the Dawn of American Suburbia,\" examining the origins of the planned residential community. Jan. 10 at 3 p.m. $25 nonmembers; members, $20. Grace Auditorium at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road. 631-692-4664; cshl.edu. HUNTINGTON \"Champion Women: Storytelling Open Mic,\" with Lesley Goshko and Michele Carlo. Jan. 8 at 7 p.m. $5; members, free. Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue. 631-351-3250; heckscher.org. HUNTINGTON Photography lecture by the Huntington Camera Club. Jan. 5 at 7:30 p.m. Huntington Public Library, 338 Main Street. hpl.suffolk.lib.ny.us; 631-427-5165. PATCHOGUE \"Library in the Lobby,\" with Long Island University political philosophy professor Michael Soupios, author of the book \u201cThe Ten Golden Rules of Leadership: Classical Wisdom for Modern Leaders.\u201d Jan. 10 at 3 p.m. Free. Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts, 71 East Main Street. 631-207-1313; patchoguetheatre.org. ROSLYN HARBOR \u201cBrown Bag Lecture\u201d with Museum Docent Riva Ettus presents a talk on painter/illustrator Maxfield Parrish whose works are on view at the museum. Jan. 7 at 1 p.m. Reservations not needed, free with museum admission, $4-$10, children 4 and under and members free. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. 516-484-9337; nassaumuseum.org. Theater COLD SPRING HARBOR \u201cIn the Heart of the Sea,\u201d play. Dec. 27 at 7 p.m. $25; $45 for a couple. Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, 301 Main Street. cshwhalingmuseum.org; 631-367-3418. COMMACK \u201cNuts,\u201d drama. Jan. 9 and 10. $17 to $24. Star Playhouse, 74 Hauppauge Road. 631-462-9800; starplayhouse.com. EAST ISLIP \u201cDreamgirls,\u201d musical. Jan. 2 through 17. $22; seniors, $20. BayWay Arts Center, 265 East Main Street. broadhollow.org; 631-581-2700. ELMONT \u201cAssisted Living,\u201d musical. Jan. 9 through 24. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m. Sundays, 2:30 p.m. $23 to $25. BroadHollow Theater, 700 Hempstead Turnpike. broadhollow.org; 516-775-4420. LINDENHURST \u201cCooking With the Calamari Sisters,\u201d musical comedy. Dec. 26 and Dec. 27. $25. Studio Theater, 141 South Wellwood Avenue. studiotheatreli.com; 631-226-8400. MERRICK \u201cDaughters,\u201d dramatic comedy. Jan. 9 through Feb. 7. Merrick Theater and Center for the Arts, 2222 Hewlett Avenue. 516-868-6400; merricktheatreandcenterforthearts.com. PATCHOGUE \u201cA Rat Pack New Year,\u201d musical. Dec. 31 through Jan. 3. $54 to $120. \u201cCinderella,\u201d musical. Through Dec. 27. $27 to $89. Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts, 71 East Main Street. 631-207-1313; patchoguetheatre.org. PORT JEFFERSON \u201cMe and Jezebel,\u201d a play by Elizabeth L. Fuller. Jan. 9 through Feb. 6. Friday evenings, $25; Saturday evenings, $30; Wednesday matinees, $17; all other performances, $23; children 5 to 12, $15; children under 5 not permitted. Theater Three, 412 Main Street. 631-928-9100; theaterthree.com. SAG HARBOR \u201cFairy Circus,\u201d puppetry. Dec. 26 at 11 a.m. $15 to $25. Bay Street Theater, Main and Bay Streets. 631-725-9500; baystreet.org. Image Huntington O.A.R., the alternative rock band, will perform at The Paramount, 370 New York Avenue, on Dec. 27 at 8 p.m. Pictured, lead singer Marc Roberge. Tickets are $29.50 to $89.50. For further information: 631-673-7300; paramountny.com. Credit Chad Batka for The New York Times SMITHTOWN \u201cThe Little Mermaid,\u201d music by Alan Menken. Through Jan. 24. $35; children under 12, $20. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts, 2 East Main Street. smithtownpac.org; 631-724-3700. Museums and Galleries BRIDGEHAMPTON Kimberly Goff, Daniel Schoenheimer and Sally Breen, a group show. Through Dec. 27. Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; appointments available Monday and Tuesday. The White Room Gallery, 2415 Main Street. 631-237-1481; thewhiteroom.gallery. COLD SPRING HARBOR Marie Sheehy-Walker, pastel, oil and watercolor paintings. Jan. 4 through 29. Mondays through Thursdays 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Cold Spring Harbor Library, 95 Harbor Road. cshlibrary.org; 631-692-6820. CUTCHOGUE \u201cSmall Works,\u201d regional photographers. Through Feb. 15. Free. Alex Ferrone Photography Gallery, 25425 Main Road. 631-734-8545; alexferronegallery.com. EAST HAMPTON \u201cDancing With Truffaut,\u201d works by Stephanie Brody-Lederman. Through Jan. 3. \u201cA Sense of Place: Selections From the Permanent Collection.\u201d Through Jan. 3. Cornelia Foss, oil-on-canvas works. Through Jan. 3. Walter Weissman, photography. Through Feb. 21. Suggested donation: $7. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Guild Hall, 158 Main Street. 631-324-4050; guildhall.org. EAST HAMPTON The Winter Salon, contemporary works, 18th- and 19th-century drawings and watercolors. Through Jan. 31. Free. Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Drawing Room, 66 Newtown Lane. 631-324-5016; drawingroom-gallery.com. EAST ISLIP \u201cCompendium,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 27. Suggested donation, $5. Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Islip Art Museum, 50 Irish Lane. ; 631-224-5402; islipartmuseum.org. GLEN COVE \u201cWrap It Up!\u201d holiday benefit exhibition. Through Jan. 31. Free. Mondays to Fridays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Hersh Fine Art at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art. 516-590-4324; liafa.com. GLEN COVE \u201cGeorge Gach and the Art of the North Shore: History, Inspirations and Perspectives.\u201d Through Feb. 20. $5; members, free. Wednesdays, 2 to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. North Shore Historical Museum, 140 Glen Street. 516-801-1191; northshorehistoricalmuseum.org. GREENLAWN Frank Margiotta, photography. Through Dec. 29. Free. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Harborfields Public Library, 31 Broadway. 631-757-4200; harb.suffolk.lib.ny.us. HEMPSTEAD \u201cEnduring Images,\u201d group show. Through Jan. 31. Free. Daily, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. David Filderman Gallery, Hofstra University Museum, Hofstra University. 516-463-5672; hofstra.edu/museum. HEWLETT \u201cFine Feathered Friends,\u201d a photography exhibition focusing on birds found on Long Island. Through Jan. 5. Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway. nassaulibrary.org/hewlett; 516-374-1967. HUNTINGTON 11th Annual National Competition, works by Gloria DeFilipps Brush and others. Through Jan. 2. Free. Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; or by appointment. Fotofoto Gallery, 14 West Carver Street. fotofotogallery.org; 631-549-0448. HUNTINGTON \u201cMen at Work.\u201d Through March 27. \u201cYou Go Girl!\u201d celebrating female artists. Through April 3. \u201cStreet Life: Private Moments/Public Record,\u201d works that feature New York City. Through March 27. $4 to $8; children under 10, free. Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue. heckscher.org; 631-351-3250. HUNTINGTON Works on canvas by Susan Bird. Through Dec. 27. Free. Huntington Public Library, 338 Main Street. myhpl.org; 631-427-5165. HUNTINGTON STATION \u201cSubconscious Narrative,\u201d paintings by Janice Sztabnik. Jan. 9 through Feb. 3. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Wednesday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. South Huntington Public Library, 145 Pidgeon Hill Road. 631-549-4411; shpl.info. NORTHPORT \u201cMusic Box,\u201d artwork inspired by music lyrics, band names, song titles and more. Opening reception: Saturday, Jan. 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 9 through Feb. 14. Haven Gallery, 155 Main Street, Suite 4, Carriage House Square. havenartgallery.com; 631-757-0500. RIVERHEAD \u201cWinter Watercolor Scenes,\u201d paintings by Jeanne Rogers. Opening Reception: Jan. 9 at 1 p.m. Jan. 9 through Feb. 28. Free. Suffolk County Historical Society, 300 West Main Street. suffolkcountyhistoricalsociety.org; 631-727-2881. ROSLYN HARBOR \u201cMaxfield Parrish: Paintings and Prints From the National Museum of American Illustration,\u201d artworks and vintage magazine covers. \u201cChristopher Hart Chambers,\u201d painted sculptures. Through February 28. $4 to $10, children 4 and under and members free. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. nassaumuseum.org; 516-484-9337. SAG HARBOR Daniel Jones, photography. Dec. 26 through Jan. 30. Tulla Booth Gallery, 66 Main Street. tullaboothgallery.com; 631-725-3100. SAYVILLE \u201cHeart of the Warrior,\u201d photography honoring women who are fighting breast cancer, by Camile Grace. Jan. 9 through 31. Donation suggested. Saturdays and Sundays: 1 to 4 p.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Bay Area Friends of the Fine Arts Gallery, 47 Gillette Avenue. 631-589-7343; baffa.org. SOUTHAMPTON Robert Mehling, paintings. Through Dec. 28. \u201cWinter Light: East End Artists,\u201d group exhibition. Dec. 29 through Feb. 2. Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. or by appointment. Southampton Cultural Center, 25 Pond Lane. 631-287-4377; southamptonculturalcenter.org. ST. JAMES Member Artist Showcase, group show. Through Jan. 8. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Smithtown Township Arts Council, 660 Route 25A. 631-862-6575; stacarts.org. STONY BROOK \u201cOrigami Heaven,\u201d group show. Through Dec. 31. \u201cReality Override,\u201d Ren Zi, mixed media. Through Dec. 31. \u201cExplore History: Objects from Asia,\u201d Asian and Asian-American material culture. Through Dec. 31. \u201cEarth and Sky: Captured Movement,\u201d works by Sook Jin Jo. Through Dec. 31. Free. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; or by appointment. Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University. 631-632-4400; thewangcenter.org. STONY BROOK \u201cBeth Levine: The First Lady of Shoes,\u201d footwear, photographs and paintings. Through Jan. 3. \u201cYoung Island: William Sidney Mount\u2019s Scenes of Childhood.\u201d Through Jan. 3. \u201cThrough Our Eyes,\u201d highlighting National Alzheimer\u2019s Disease Awareness Month, Gillespie Meeting Room, Carriage Museum. Through Jan. 3. \u201cOne Square Foot,\u201d members\u2019 works. $3.50 to $9; members and children under 6, free. Thursdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, 1200 Route 25A. longislandmuseum.org; 631-751-0066. SYOSSET Photographs by Gino Domenico. Through Dec. 27. Free. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Syosset Public Library, 225 South Oyster Bay Road. syossetlibrary.org; 516-921-7161. WATER MILL \u201cJane Freilicher and Jane Wilson: Seen and Unseen,\u201d paintings and works on paper. \u201cEast End Field Drawings,\u201d works by Alexis Rockman. Through Jan. 18. \u201cConnections and Context,\" group show. \"Process of Discovery,\" works by James Brooks. Works by Jean-Luc Mylayne, French photographer. Through Oct. 30. $5 to 10; children under 18 free. Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway. 631-283-2118; parrishart.org.", "keyword": "Art;The arts;Theater;Long Island"}
{"id": "ny0109864", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2012/05/08", "title": "Colombia: Trafficking Suspect Is Said to Surrender to the U.S.", "abstract": "A major Colombian drug trafficking suspect surrendered to United States drug agents in Aruba and was flown to New York, where he faces criminal charges, the Colombian authorities said Monday. The suspect, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Calle, 43, was indicted in New York\u2019s Eastern District last year, accused of distributing 25 metric tons of cocaine, money laundering, racketeering and murder, according to the United States attorney\u2019s office. The deputy Colombian police director, Gen. Jos\u00e9 Roberto Leon, said Mr. Calle turned himself in to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration agents on Friday in Aruba, off the Caribbean coast of Colombia . The United States attorney\u2019s office in New York\u2019s Eastern District would not confirm whether Mr. Calle was flown to New York. The D.E.A. declined to comment.", "keyword": "Colombia;Drug Abuse and Traffic;Drug Enforcement Administration;Aruba;United States;Calle Jose Antonio"}
{"id": "ny0071017", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2015/03/16", "title": "Kentucky, No. 1 in Height, Too, Relishes the View From on High", "abstract": "Kentucky Coach John Calipari has adopted a somewhat caustic attitude toward the Division I men\u2019s basketball selection committee, which last season gave his team what he felt was an overly difficult road to the Final Four (it got there anyway). Asked last week which team he would prefer not to face in the N.C.A.A. tournament, he said sarcastically of the committee, \u201cThey called the Lakers, and they can\u2019t pull out of the N.B.A. right now.\u201d He went on: \u201cI think if we had to see Oklahoma City or Cleveland, those would be tough. I\u2019m not sure. And they tell me that Portland\u2019s as big as we are, so those would be teams I wouldn\u2019t want to see.\u201d Though his point was taken, on this specific nuance he was wrong: The N.B.A.\u2019s Trail Blazers are not as big as Kentucky. Nor are the Lakers, the Thunder or the Cavaliers. According to a calculation by The New York Times, counting players who played at least one quarter of a game\u2019s minutes on average, the Minnesota Timberwolves, after some midseason trades, were the only N.B.A. team taller than Kentucky, whose oldest regular player is 21. As the Wildcats (34-0, 18-0 Southeastern Conference) enter the tournament, they are not only, by consensus, the best team in Division I men\u2019s basketball (primarily thanks to their stellar defense), but they are also the tallest. Calipari would have it no other way. \u201cMy goal is to have a 6-9 point guard \u2014 I\u2019ll take a 6-8 \u2014 and a team that\u2019s 6-9 across the board,\u201d he said recently. (One of three high school players who have already committed verbally to Kentucky is the 6-foot-11 center Skal Labissiere.) He added, \u201cSo when you ask me what\u2019s the downside, well, we\u2019re big, and it\u2019s tough on the airplanes.\u201d Not even the freshman guard Tyler Ulis, who is 5-9 and plays about 23 minutes a game, drags Kentucky\u2019s height down to second place, which is occupied by Florida State. (Other tournament-bound teams that are very tall include Maryland, Wisconsin, Providence and Virginia.) \u201cIt helps me be able to play my game, get up on the ball,\u201d Ulis said of being surrounded by comparative giants. \u201cSometimes if I make a mistake, there\u2019s 7-footers in the lane \u2014 you can\u2019t really shoot over them.\u201d Though Kentucky is taller than average at all five positions, its advantage really shows up in the frontcourt, which at any given time is invariably occupied by two of five players \u2014 Marcus Lee, Trey Lyles, Karl-Anthony Towns, Dakari Johnson and Willie Cauley-Stein \u2014 who are 6-9, 6-10, 6-11, 7-0 and 7-0, although the assistant John Robic recently referred to Cauley-Stein as \u201c7 and a half-inch.\u201d All play substantial numbers of minutes, thanks to a modified platoon system that uses frequent substitutions. The statistics site KenPom.com attempts to quantify height further with a figure called \u201ceffective height,\u201d which adjusts team height by position. Here, too, Kentucky is tops in the college game at +6.9. Its height advantage shows up most starkly at power forward, and then at center. Only three teams since 2007 have had higher effective heights. As early as last year\u2019s N.C.A.A. tournament, some Internet commenters took to calling the Kentucky team Monstars, a reference to the gigantic alien dream team that takes on the ragtag bunch led by Michael Jordan in the 1996 film \u201cSpace Jam.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019ve tweeted pictures of it to us,\u201d Lyles said this month. \u201cIt\u2019s a funny thing that the fans do.\u201d Cauley-Stein added with a grimace \u2014 a sign, perhaps, that he knew that the Monstars in the film ultimately lose \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s good stuff.\u201d It might sound silly to say that having an abundance of tall players is a distinct advantage for a basketball team \u2014 sort of like asserting that an ability to project one\u2019s voice is an advantage for a public speaker. Yet, if anything, height might be underrated, according to David Epstein, author of the book \u201cThe Sports Gene.\u201d After crunching numbers, Epstein found that height and wingspan \u2014 a related measurement, of the arms from fingertip to fingertip \u2014 correlate strongly with total rebounds, offensive rebounds and blocks. \u201cEven in the N.B.A., which is restricting your data to the best people in the world, it still has some predictive value,\u201d Epstein said. In the case of Kentucky, height is crucial, but primarily as a starting point. According to analysts, opposing coaches and the players themselves, Kentucky\u2019s achievement, particularly on defense, is also the result of general athleticism and disciplined play. \u201cIt\u2019s not a complicated game if you\u2019ve got really good talent, that size, they play together, and are well-coached,\u201d the CBS analyst Clark Kellogg said. What Kentucky\u2019s tremendous height does is provide a sort of safety net, so that defenders can take a chance on the big play. This shows up in the fact that Kentucky\u2019s turnover percentage is among the country\u2019s best on both offense and defense. Sometimes that means perimeter players going for a steal. Other times, it is defenders staying on their men and trusting a driving player\u2019s defender to protect the rim \u2014 as Cauley-Stein has done several times this year in highlight-reel-worthy blocks. \u201cIt allows you to gamble more,\u201d Cauley-Stein said this month. He added, \u201cThey end up driving on you, someone\u2019s going to get it.\u201d Of course, more often than not, the person who is going to get the ball is Cauley-Stein, the Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year. Georgia Coach Mark Fox is among those in awe. He said: \u201cThey have, I think, the distinct advantage in that their big players, like Cauley-Stein, they can play defense away from the basket, and they\u2019re so mobile that they\u2019re just as effective defenders as their perimeter players are away from the basket. That\u2019s what makes them so hard to score on, because those guys can cover ground.\u201d Fox mentioned this before the SEC tournament semifinals, in which Calipari put Cauley-Stein on Auburn\u2019s best scorer, K. T. Harrell, even though Harrell is a 6-4 guard. Though he scored some points on free throws, Harrell ended the game 1 of 12 from the field. Still, as flexible as Kentucky is against teams that try to play small ball and draw Kentucky\u2019s power forwards and centers away from the rim, Florida Coach Billy Donovan said that teams with more traditional big men might as well abandon hope upon entering the court. Sounding a note of pity, Donovan said, \u201cI think the traditional post-up teams will have a really, really hard time, because even if you get a guy in foul trouble, they\u2019re going to have 25 fouls across the front line, you know what I mean?\u201d He paused, as if marveling, and added: \u201cEven if you foul a guy out. The total depth.\u201d It is difficult to say exactly where this year\u2019s Wildcats team ranks compared with those of past years, given that this is a down season for offenses. But this team is historically good on that side of the court, holding opposing teams to the fewest points per possession and the lowest field-goal percentage since 1975. Adjusting for opponents, Kentucky is the second-most defensively efficient team since at least 2002, according to KenPom.com. The one team even better on defense was the 2008-9 Memphis Tigers. They, too, were tall. And they, too, were coached by Calipari. For the record, he said Sunday, he is around 6 feet.", "keyword": "College basketball;Height;Basketball;John Calipari;University of Kentucky;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;Timberwolves"}
{"id": "ny0082898", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/10/16", "title": "Baseball Reaches a Flipping Point", "abstract": "Brace yourself, baseball fans, and behold the inexorable rise of the bat flip. Self-expression has long been a fraught issue in Major League Baseball, where impassivity \u2014 the ability to \u201cact like you have been there before\u201d \u2014 often feels as highly regarded as power hitting and foot speed. Yet times change, and signs today indicate that baseball stands poised to enter a golden age of celebratory antics. If so, bat flip buffs might one day look back upon this week\u2019s playoff games as a symbolic starting point. It began Monday. Upon pulverizing a three-run homer into the upper deck at Citi Field, Yoenis Cespedes of the Mets cradled his bat for a moment before flinging it skyward in celebration, like a bride blissfully tossing a bouquet. The crowd went berserk. But that majestic flip was reduced to a quaint memory two nights later, when Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays performed what might have been the most ostentatious bat flip in M.L.B. history. The moment came after Bautista smashed a late tiebreaking home run at Rogers Centre. Bautista watched the ball\u2019s flight, glared into the near distance like a professional wrestler and then, in a burst of pugnacious swagger, hurled his bat deep into foul territory. Anyone could have predicted how the Texas Rangers , who lost the game and the American League division series, would react. Image The Mets\u2019 Yoenis Cespedes launched a homer and his bat in Game 3 of the National League division series. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times \u201cHe\u2019s a huge role model for the younger generation that is coming up playing this game, and he\u2019s doing stuff kids do in whiffle ball games and backyard baseball,\u201d said Rangers reliever Sam Dyson, who helped incite the benches to clear when he voiced his objections on the field. \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be done.\u201d But Dyson\u2019s response came in sharp contrast to those of fans on social media, who celebrated Bautista\u2019s move with a torrent of Twitter posts, GIFs and Vine videos. The M.L.B. account on Twitter posted videos of Cespedes and Bautista side by side and asked, \u201cWho flipped it better?\u201d For bat flip aficionados, the speed, trajectory and distance of a toss are crucial details. Midair rotations add to the visual splendor. Dramatic posturing and histrionic facial expressions elevate things to the next level. Bautista\u2019s flip had it all. Until now, the subject of bat flips has generally left little room for a middle ground. People love them or hate them \u2014 there is an unmistakable generational divide \u2014 and they feel compelled to air their stances either way. To some, the maneuver symbolizes a break from the gentlemanly principles that have supposedly steered the game across generations. \u201cYou play so many games and fail so many times, so the game has a way of humbling you,\u201d said Kelly Johnson, 33, a Mets utility player, who guessed that players mostly objected when a young or unaccomplished player behaved arrogantly. \u201cThat\u2019s the message veteran players sometimes try to pass on to rookies, that their actions should try to reflect that.\u201d To others, the bat flip represents a breath of fresh air in a stuffy sport and reflects the game\u2019s increasingly diverse clubhouses, which feature more players from Latin America and Asia, where such celebrations tend to be more common . Image The practice is popular in Asia, helped by players like Choi Jun-seok of the Lotte Giants in South Korea. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times \u201cIn my opinion, after being in Asia and the United States and also seeing Latin American players for so many years, it seems like Americans need to lighten up,\u201d said Ryan Sadowski, a former major leaguer who works as a scout for the Lotte Giants of South Korea. \u201cThe fans clearly enjoy it.\u201d The debate will continue, but bat flips are unambiguously on the upswing. Some players are lightening up. Others are merely acquiescing. Inside the Yankees\u2019 clubhouse before a late-summer regular-season game, catcher Brian McCann let out a small sigh when asked for his position on celebratory bat flips. McCann has developed a reputation as one of the vigilante enforcers of baseball\u2019s traditional code. With the Atlanta Braves, he confronted players and caused fights on multiple occasions for what he perceived to be unseemly behavior after home runs. But, McCann said, sports evolve, and people change. \u201cIt\u2019s where the game is going, where the game is at, really,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s what guys are doing.\u201d McCann joked about hearing stories of days long past, when a batter might get a ball thrown at his head for simply swinging too hard. These days, he said, umpires are quick to issue warnings and ejections for even a vague hint of belligerence. That reduces the informal, internal policing among players \u2014 no one wants to be thrown out of a game \u2014 and opens the door for more flamboyant behavior. McCann said he still objected when batters made things personal or overly confrontational. \u201cI\u2019ll stick up for my pitcher every time,\u201d he said. \u201cI get fired up just like anybody else, if not more than most people, and do what comes natural.\u201d To the delight of some fans, more batters are feeling comfortable doing what comes natural. Late Wednesday night, after the game, Bautista was told that Dyson had called the bat flip celebration childish. Bautista was asked if he had any response to such criticism. He shrugged. \u201cNo,\u201d he said. And many others felt the same way.", "keyword": "Baseball;Jose Bautista;Playoffs;Texas Rangers;Blue Jays"}
{"id": "ny0094516", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2015/01/27", "title": "Madison Keys to Face Venus Williams in Australian Open Quarterfinal", "abstract": "MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Whatever the outcome, it will be a full-circle moment Wednesday when Venus Williams and Madison Keys meet in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. The particulars have fluctuated through the years, but what is clear is that Keys was 4 years old when she spotted Williams on television at Wimbledon wearing \u2014 what else? \u2014 a white dress. She wanted one of her own, and she wanted to swing like Williams, too, and so she was soon taking cuts with a racquetball racket at her family\u2019s home in Illinois. Fifteen years and plenty of sweat and family sacrifice later, Williams, 34, and Keys, 19, are about to meet for the first time in a Grand Slam tournament. \u201cI think all of us touch lives in ways that we never dreamed of growing up as kids,\u201d Williams, the No. 18 seed, said Monday night after beating sixth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska, 6-3, 2-6, 6-1, in the fourth round. \u201cYou just want to be No. 1 in the world. You want to win a major. You never think about the people you inspire from your efforts and your attitude.\u201d Other athletes might have thought about it sooner, but Williams and her younger sister Serena were raised to be champions outside the existing system, raised to believe that their story, gifts and burdens were very much their own. But after a halting start, they have ultimately been a bridge to the next generation of American players, including several African-American ones. There were African-American women succeeding as pros directly before the Williamses, including Chanda Rubin, the Wimbledon finalist Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil and Katrina Adams, the new president of the United States Tennis Association , who was sitting in the front row of the president\u2019s box in Rod Laver Arena on Monday night. Image Venus Williams in a fourth-round victory over Agnieszka Radwanska on Monday. Williams, 34, has not advanced this far in a major since Wimbledon in 2010. Credit Bernat Armangue/Associated Press But there are plenty more coming, including Sloane Stephens, Taylor Townsend and Keys, the biracial daughter of lawyers, who moved early to Florida to hone her game. Keys, who beat the unseeded American Madison Brengle, 6-2, 6-4, on Monday in the fourth round, had early exposure to greatness, getting advice and support from Chris Evert at Evert\u2019s academy in Boca Raton, Fla. She now has Lindsay Davenport , a former No. 1 and once one of the Williamses\u2019 great rivals, as her coach. But Venus has been an inspiration, too, and not just to the 4-year-old Keys. \u201cI think Venus has helped the sport, especially the women\u2019s side, with equal prize money,\u201d said Keys, referring to the fight for equal pay at Wimbledon . \u201cShe was a huge part of that. Just watching her is inspirational. She\u2019s had her health battles. She loves tennis. She\u2019s still out here, and she\u2019s doing it remarkably well. I think that\u2019s inspirational. However long I play, I hope I can be someone similar to that.\u201d What Keys did not say Monday is that her big game, like most big games in women\u2019s tennis, also owes a major debt to Venus and Serena, who took the power and aggression to a new level, amplifying the attack-on-any-stroke approach adopted by Monica Seles before them. \u201cThe revolution was when the Williamses started to play,\u201d said Sam Sumyk, Victoria Azarenka\u2019s coach. \u201cAnd since then \u2014 for 13 or 14 years \u2014 we\u2019ve all been playing catch-up, simple as that.\u201d The youngsters do appear to be gaining: See Serena\u2019s intense three-set tussle on Monday with Garbi\u00f1e Muguruza, 21, of Spain, who beat her at the French Open last year and hit winners Monday off serves and shots that Serena used to believe were safe. See Keys, as well. \u201cMadison\u2019s taking those big cuts consistently, and now it\u2019s just a matter of not taking them so often and finding the right time to go for the big one,\u201d said Mary Joe Fernandez, the United States Fed Cup captain. \u201cShe\u2019s such a great server, and her second serve might be her better serve. It kicks up high. I\u2019ll be curious to see mentally how she and Venus approach this match and who will execute with their big weapons first.\u201d It will be the inspiration against the inspired: the 34-year-old representing the past and present of American women\u2019s tennis against the 19-year-old who represents the future and quite possibly the present, too. Keys, who lost their only previous meeting in straight sets on the Charleston, S.C., clay in 2013, did not sound as ready as others to buy into the back story. \u201cIt really just matters to you guys,\u201d she said to reporters of the symbolism Monday. But it is clearly in the air. \u201cYou really feel like it\u2019s the changing of the guard,\u201d Fernandez said. \u201cIs Madison ready for that? Is she ready to take that mantle and take her idol\u2019s spot? It\u2019s a very fitting matchup.\u201d This will be Williams\u2019s 34th Grand Slam singles quarterfinal, and Keys\u2019s first. But circumstances will make it seem fresh for both of them. While Serena has racked up big titles and become a fixture at No. 1, Venus Williams has not reached this stage of a major tournament in singles since she made it to the semifinals of Wimbledon in 2010. She was found to have Sjogren\u2019s syndrome , an autoimmune disorder, in 2011 and has spent much of the last four years trying to come to grips with how to manage the disease as an elite athlete. She has played matches she certainly should not have played, looking gaunt, weak and overmatched at times and taking beatings from players who were not in her class. A champion of lesser character might have quietly said farewell and focused all of her limited energy on her design company or other fields where the deck was not stacked in her disfavor. But Williams, who long ago developed an ability to work her way pleasantly through news conferences without leaving much of a trace, usually has been easy to read when retirement has been broached. She is not ready, thank you very much. Not ready to be pushed on the topic either. And in typical Williams fashion, following the beat of her own drum is looking like the right approach. After nearly a year of solid tennis achievement, she has rebuilt a sturdier platform for her attack-minded game. She is hitting her forehand more squarely, even running around her two-handed backhand again. She looks fitter, more muscular and healthier and has come up with dietary approaches and cross-training methods \u2014 including dance \u2014 that work best. Image Williams has won seven Grand Slam singles titles. Credit Paul Crock/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images \u201cIt\u2019s clear she\u2019s much more in shape than she was a year or two ago,\u201d said Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams\u2019s coach. \u201cI can see in her training that she has a lot more energy. In the past, there were many matches she was not in a condition to play because she was too tired. I don\u2019t see that anymore, so she\u2019s getting back progressively to her former level.\u201d Having Serena as a benchmark is also helpful, although to Venus\u2019s considerable credit, she has never shown resentment, at least not publicly, as her sister passed her on the Grand Slam singles honor roll and then accelerated. Asked Monday to explain her inspiration, Venus did not hesitate. \u201cDefinitely my sister Serena,\u201d she said. \u201cShe\u2019s just the ultimate champion.\u201d Venus, with seven Grand Slam singles titles, will not be catching Serena, who has 18. Although it might seem overambitious, Venus still has every intent of adding to her total, which helps explain why her reaction to what was technically an upset victory Monday was not exactly the equal of Nick Kyrgios\u2019s falling on his back with relief and disbelief when he beat Andreas Seppi in the fourth round Sunday night. \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve been here before, so it\u2019s not like I\u2019m jumping up and down for joy,\u201d Williams said. She added: \u201cYes. I\u2019ve done this. This is what I\u2019m always going into each tournament thinking I want to do, even when I fall short.\u201d Intriguingly, Keys, the one who truly never has done this before, is also projecting a certain cool and has repeatedly mentioned that this is her \u201clast tournament as a teenager\u201d as if to emphasize that she wants to bid that phase goodbye with something big. \u201cI think it\u2019s a huge opportunity for me,\u201d Keys said. \u201cI haven\u2019t been in this situation before. I\u2019m going to make the most of it, but at the same time, no matter what, I\u2019m not really going to be satisfied with any win. I want to be at the end of the tournament holding the trophy up. That\u2019s my goal in the long run.\u201d It is a reasonable goal in light of her gifts and the work she has put into developing them. And it certainly does seem symbolic and a little bittersweet that the woman blocking her path in Melbourne is the same woman who opened her eyes to the sport.", "keyword": "Tennis;Madison Keys;Venus Williams;Serena Williams;Australian Open"}
{"id": "ny0264071", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/12/30", "title": "In Louisiana, Twist in Fight Over Texaco Drilling Lease", "abstract": "ERATH, La. \u2014 It began as a landlord-tenant dispute, Louisiana style. The tenant was Texaco; the landlord the Broussard family, heirs of a Cajun rancher, who claimed that Texaco\u2019s operation of a gas plant on its property had left the land contaminated. The lawsuit, of a kind not all that rare in these industry-heavy parts, had dragged on so long that 13 of the heirs had died. But it took a sudden and bitter turn in recent months, when another company \u2014 a company that, like Texaco, is a subsidiary of Chevron \u2014 sued to condemn most of the disputed land and expropriate it, arguing that it was acting in the national interest. The boundaries of the national interest are hard to draw in any place, but particularly so here in south Louisiana, where pipelines run under the bayous and refinery flares light the sky. As old leases get examined and environmental concerns become more publicized, neighborly disputes between residents and those drilling on their land are bound to get more heated. And few are more complicated than the fight between Chevron and the Broussards. The Chevron subsidiary that sued to take the land, Sabine Pipe Line, had quietly operated a pipeline hub across the road for nearly 60 years. In June, Sabine sent a letter to the family, saying the 14-year legal fight with Texaco was threatening the continued operation of one of the most important natural gas pipeline hubs in the country. The family could agree to sell the land, the letter said, or be forced to do so. The Broussards say the timing of the letter and the scope of the demand are more than a little curious. They contend that Sabine\u2019s actions are not to protect any pipeline, but are simply a pretext to shield Chevron from millions in environmental damages. \u201cIt was all collusion, no doubt in my mind,\u201d said Warren A. Perrin, who is leading the Broussard family in its legal fight. \u201cMy cousin just said, \u2018You don\u2019t seem to be behaving like good neighbors if you\u2019re taking away our property.\u2019 \u201d The Broussards, like most Cajun families, are no foes of the oil and gas industry. Some of them worked at the Texaco plant. Mr. Perrin himself was born in a little house a few hundred yards from the plant, and his first law office was in the back of a Texaco station. But pugnacity comes naturally to Mr. Perrin, a compact man who will talk about his Cajun ancestors and the injustices visited upon them as long as a person will let him. In the 1990s, he went to battle with the queen of England, pressing her to apologize for the expulsion of the Acadians, the forebears of today\u2019s Cajuns, from Canada in 1755. The queen issued a royal proclamation in 2003 acknowledging the \u201cdark chapter\u201d and calling for a day of commemoration. That proclamation hangs on the wall of Mr. Perrin\u2019s office like a trophy. Mr. Perrin is one of the 75 or so heirs of Aristide Broussard, who bought 3,000 acres here in Vermilion Parish at the end of the 19th century. The land was perfect for growing sugar cane, raising cattle and trapping alligators. That it was also perfect for drilling the Broussards found out four decades later, when the Texas Company discovered a big deposit underneath. The company bought the mineral rights, but it had bigger plans, and in 1942 asked to lease an 80-acre plot in one of Mr. Broussard\u2019s cow pastures. It was an easy decision after the lean days of the Depression: Mr. Broussard leased the land to the company for 75 years, at a rent of $1,600 annually (an amount later renegotiated to $110,000 a year). The company gave him a Cadillac and a lifetime supply of free gas, and it promised jobs for his grandsons. And it built an enormous gas recycling plant in his backyard. Even though some members of the family worked on the property \u2014 some still do \u2014 they have never entirely been aware of what went on there. They knew that there were some places in the pasture where grass did not grow, and that pipelines crossed their land so thickly that Texaco simply paid them not to graze cattle in certain areas. But it was not until a legal argument broke out between Texaco and another company working at the site that the family learned that one of the wells had blown out in 1997. As the fight intensified, the heirs of Aristide Broussard hired environmental experts, who found leaky saltwater pits on the property, countless aluminum pellets and radioactive material. In a lawsuit, the Broussards argued that the contamination was so bad that Texaco had breached the lease and that they would try to kick the company off the property unless it was cleaned to their standards. Less than a month later, the family received a surprise: Sabine, a company that seemed completely unrelated to the contamination suit, offered the Broussards a little under $1 million to buy most of the land in question. If the offer was not accepted, the letter said, Sabine would expropriate the land and pay the family the fair market value. That Sabine had been operating a pipeline across the street since 1964 the family knew. They knew that in 1990 Sabine began managing the so-called Henry Hub, an interchange of gas lines so crucial that it is where the prices are set for natural gas futures based on the traffic there. What the family did not know is that part of this hub had migrated onto their property. And they are still unsure of just how much of it is on their property. The Broussard family discussed the offer with Sabine, but they could not agree on a price. Assuring Sabine that they had no intention of disrupting its operation of the pipelines, the family members declined to sell. The day before Thanksgiving, Sabine sued to take over the property. \u201cSabine has tried, for the past several months, to secure the rights necessary to the operation of its facilities through good-faith negotiations,\u201d said a spokesman for Chevron in a statement, adding that the company had offered a price \u201csignificantly\u201d above fair market value. \u201cHaving been unable to reach a negotiated resolution of this matter,\u201d the statement continued, \u201cand in view of the Broussards\u2019 ongoing efforts to terminate these leasehold rights, Sabine has exercised its rights under the Natural Gas Act to acquire the property it needs to continue its operations.\u201d Disputes between pipeline operators and property owners over condemnation suits are not rare, and in most cases the pipeline owners are successful. But several eminent domain lawyers said they had never encountered a situation quite like this. \u201cThis,\u201d said Gideon Kanner, a professor emeritus at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, \u201cis what the lawyers call a sui generis case.\u201d", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Pipelines;Louisiana;Texaco Inc;Chevron Corporation;Land Use Policies;Natural Gas;Suits and Litigation;Eminent Domain"}
{"id": "ny0026644", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/01/20", "title": "Brotherhood Struggles to Exert Political Power in Egypt", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 When President Mohamed Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood pushed through a new constitution last month, liberals feared it would enable them to put an Islamist stamp on the Egyptian state, in part by purging nearly half the judges on the Supreme Constitutional Court. But those warnings are turning out to be premature, at the very least, as the court itself made clear last week at its opening session, its first meeting under the new charter. The president of the court sneered with disdain at a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood trying to address the reconfigured bench, stripped of 7 of its 18 members. \u201cAs if you left a court to be spoken of like this!\u201d Judge Maher el-Beheiry snapped. He had already declared that the court, perceived as an enemy of the Islamists, \u201ccan never forget\u201d the Brotherhood\u2019s protests against it during the constitutional debate. In the two years since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Morsi and the Islamists have trounced their political opposition again and again at the polls and have accumulated unrivaled political power. But Judge Beheiry\u2019s rebuke was a vivid reminder that their political victories have not yet translated into real power over the Egyptian bureaucracy. Mr. Morsi still appears to exercise little day-to-day authority over the judiciary, the police, the military and the state-run news media. \u201cIf you think of the main pillars of the bureaucracy, the Brotherhood has not gotten control of them yet, and I don\u2019t think they will completely,\u201d said Hani Shukrallah, 62, the left-leaning editor of an English-language state news Web site who was recently was asked to retire by its new management. \u201cThere are so many people who are very difficult to bring to heel,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we are in for several years of turbulence where state power is diffused.\u201d Although Mr. Morsi has the legitimacy of a democratic election, he has inherited the still-intact remnants of Mr. Mubarak\u2019s authoritarian state, built on fear, loyalty and patronage, and much of it permeated by a deep distrust of the Islamists. Mr. Morsi and his allies are now only beginning to attempt to exert some control over the body of the state that would allow him to put in effect a social, economic and political program. And his ultimate success, or failure, will help decide some of the most pivotal questions concerning Egypt\u2019s future, for better or worse. On the one hand, the bureaucracy\u2019s resistance could prevent the Islamists from consolidating their power, imposing their ideology, or, as some liberals say they fear, building a new dictatorship. But the failure to exert control could also prolong vexing social problems, like the collapse of public security because of the withdrawal of the police. The analysts say that Mr. Morsi is clearly working to install networks of allies over key parts of the state. He has named Brotherhood members as governors in 7 out of 28 provinces. In a recent cabinet shake-up, he named another Brotherhood member as minister of local development, who under the new Constitution could have new powers over day-to-day local government. His Islamist allies in the legislature named at least 11 fellow Islamists, including at least 3 ultraconservatives, to the 27 seats on the newly empowered National Council for Human Rights. The Constitution and other new rules give it the authority to regulate election observers, investigate human rights violations and act as a public ombudsman. Image Items from an office of the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s political party were burned in November. Credit Reuters But Mr. Morsi\u2019s attempts to consolidate his power have often yielded equivocal results. He finally persuaded Egypt\u2019s top generals to relinquish their authority over the civilian government last August. But in December, the Islamist-backed Constitution granted the generals broad immunity and autonomy from civilian control, in an apparent quid pro quo. Brotherhood leaders acknowledge they face deep resistance. When the president took office, the holdover staff was destroying his faxes and mail in small acts of sabotage, said one senior Brotherhood leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid further inflaming the tensions. In the Interior Ministry, which nominally reports to the president, rank-and-file officers remain all but openly antagonistic to Mr. Morsi and his party. During the contentious run-up to the constitutional vote late last year, the police failed to increase security outside Brotherhood offices as one after another were vandalized and often burned. And when protesters clashed with Islamists outside the presidential palace, the police effectively vanished from the scene. \u201cIt seemed like a clear mutiny,\u201d said Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. \u201cIt was as if the arm of the state was striking at its own head,\u201d the senior Brotherhood leader complained. The police say the lesson they learned from the revolution against Mr. Mubarak was not to stand against protesters on behalf of an individual president. \u201cIt fills me with pride that a police officer was the one who opened the improvised metal gate for protesters during the march to the presidential palace to allow them to continue,\u201d said Ahmed Mansour al-Helbawi, the head of a police union that claims to have 400,000 members. \u201cThe protesters carried him on their shoulders and chanted: \u2018The people and the police are one hand.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Helbawi said the officers were no longer willing to use force against demonstrators even outside the presidential palace. But he acknowledged that the police still show no such hesitation when protesters approach their own headquarters. As for the failure to protect the offices of the Brotherhood\u2019s Freedom and Justice Party, \u201cIf I protect the F.J.P., then I must also protect the Wafd Party and the Constitution Party and every other party there is!\u201d Mr. Helbawi said, adding that the police would never again \u201cturn into the ministry of just one political party,\u201d as it was under Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi has tried to extend control over the police and removed the interior minister, who presided over last month\u2019s debacle and was a Mubarak enforcer who had run the Cairo district during the brutal crackdown two years ago. But Mr. Morsi replaced him with another longtime Mubarak-era police official, Mohamed Ibrahim, in an apparent bid to avoid an even broader police insurrection. (Groups claiming to represent the police have still circulated anonymous calls for a police protest over the dismissal this week.) Mr. Morsi\u2019s allies have not fared much better in trying to gain control of the official state news media, one of the most visible bellwethers of their hold on the bureaucracy. The Islamist-controlled upper house of Parliament replaced the top officials, but state television still provides evidence that many of the tens of thousands who work in the state news media oppose the Brotherhood. The host Hala Fahmy, for example, opened a show by accusing the new government of selling out the \u201cmartyrs\u201d and theatrically holding up a shroud to show she was ready to join them. She is now off the air, pending an investigation of the outburst. \u201cThere are 40,000 people working in the building,\u201d said Ehab El Mergawi, a state television news producer who is also a member of the leftist April 6 group. \u201cAnd I think 35,000 out of those can\u2019t stand the Muslim Brotherhood.\u201d Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said that so far the Brotherhood takeover sometimes appears to be working in reverse. \u201cYou feel that the institutions are taking over Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,\u201d he said, \u201cnot the other way around.\u201d", "keyword": "Muslim Brotherhood Egypt;Mohamed Morsi;Politics;Egypt"}
{"id": "ny0126309", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/08/24", "title": "City Sets Up Nonprofit Corporation to Oversee Technology Projects", "abstract": "Scalded by scandal, cost overruns and embarrassments in some of its most ambitious computerization efforts, the Bloomberg administration has hit upon on a new remedy: outsourcing such projects to a new quasi-governmental entity that will operate free of the usual city procurement rules, salary limits and legislative oversight. The new entity, its proponents argue, will provide a bureaucratically powerful, highly skilled, centralized overseer for the kind of technology projects that have bedeviled this administration for years, and that have raised questions about one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg\u2019s perceived strengths as a billionaire who made his money through technological innovation. Deputy Mayor Caswell F. Holloway, who spearheaded a review of the city\u2019s technology woes, said the new entity could save taxpayers millions of dollars by reducing the city\u2019s reliance on highly paid outside contractors for project conception, development and execution. \u201cThere is no reason why every agency in the City of New York should be going out and getting that from consultants,\u201d he said. \u201cThe city should have an ability to do this.\u201d But veteran city technology managers and consultants expressed doubts, and veterans of city government pointed to a possible political motive. Harvey Robins, who was operations chief for Mayor David N. Dinkins and who reorganized several city agencies, said the immediate effect would be to distance Mayor Bloomberg from future technology problems. \u201cIt\u2019s a headache,\u201d Mr. Robins said, \u201cand he doesn\u2019t want the headache anymore.\u201d The new entity\u2019s main goal, according to a confidential document obtained by The New York Times as well as interviews with Mr. Holloway and other officials, is to solve one of the most vexing riddles of Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s tenure: how to grant those responsible for tech projects enough authority so they can compel agency commissioners to cooperate, make timely decisions and accept compromises that might require them to change the way they do business. Interagency tension hurt the development of the new 911 emergency dispatching system, as police and fire officials warred with one another, preserving fiefs and incompatible systems. It was a problem with CityTime , the city\u2019s new timekeeping system, which involved scores of agencies. And it was a constant headache in developing a new personnel system, Nycaps, as agencies sparred and consultants clamored for mayoral intervention. In each case, the results were confusion, years of delays, and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Under the new plan, control is decided by a simple test: if a project will cost more than $25 million, or more than $5 million and involves more than one agency, then a new \u201cNYC Technology Development Corporation\u201d will control the project from start to finish. The corporation will oversee design, vendors, installation and training. The new entity, which was set up as a nonprofit in July, is modeled after the city\u2019s Economic Development Corporation, which operates under contract with the city to make deals with businesses, landowners and vendors on the city\u2019s behalf without being subject to the same level of contracting rules and City Council oversight that apply to city agencies. Because the new entity will be able to bypass competitive bidding at times, the city hopes it will choose vendors more quickly. But several city technology experts, including a senior agency technology officer and an outside consultant, pointed to possible problems, including a potential brain drain if the new entity offered higher salaries to tech managers from city agencies. Interviewed on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ties to the administration, these experts said that the new entity was the latest in a series of attempts by the Bloomberg administration to address technology design and contracting. Previous efforts by a Technology Steering Committee and a Technology Governance Board did not succeed. The new entity would not replace the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications , but rather take on some of its portfolio. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s introducing another party to the already complex governance structure,\u201d one expert said. \u201cPerhaps a more competent party \u2014 but that\u2019s a best-case scenario.\u201d This expert also expressed concern that entrusting oversight to a corporation one step removed from City Hall could increase the risk of a runaway project, noting that the CityTime project was hurt by corruption that took root in the absence of \u201cmuch visibility into what was being spent.\u201d Peter Thorne, a spokesman for the city comptroller\u2019s office, said that it was \u201calways open to exploring ways to save city taxpayers money,\u201d but that it greeted the idea with \u201ca tremendous amount of skepticism\u201d given the administration\u2019s track record on CityTime and the 911 system. He said that problems at the Economic Development Corporation, which has been faulted by city auditors for hoarding tens of millions of dollars in city money and for failing to oversee its own contractors adequately, \u201ccall into question the entire operating model of using independent entities to conduct crucial city functions.\u201d Mr. Holloway said the new entity would be fully transparent, and would help prevent talented technology workers from leaving government. Rahul N. Merchant, the city\u2019s new top technology officer, who conceived of the new entity with Mr. Holloway, said he hoped it would be able to deliver, with no more than 20 employees, 6 to 10 projects before Mr. Bloomberg leaves office on Jan. 1, 2014. But experts questioned whether so much could be achieved in a short time. \u201cCreating a new agency is not easy to do, and all the effort for that time will be spent painting the walls,\u201d one said.", "keyword": "Outsourcing;Bloomberg Michael R;Science and Technology;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0260254", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2011/06/18", "title": "Mixed Data Show Tepid U.S. Economy, but Leading Indicators Rising", "abstract": "Consumer sentiment worsened this month on renewed concerns about the outlook for the economy as gloom about job and income prospects persisted, data released Friday showed. But a separate report suggested that the rate of the recovery could soon pick up after stalling in the first half of the year. Taking the unexpected soft patch into account, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for economic growth in the United States, warning Washington and debt-ridden European countries that they were \u201cplaying with fire\u201d unless they took immediate steps to reduce their budget deficits. While the I.M.F. thinks downside risks to growth have increased, it still expects the economy to gain speed next year. Consumer sentiment in the United States declined more than expected in June, the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey showed, as consumers remained pessimistic about stagnant incomes and job prospects. \u201cJob growth is, at best, anemic and the unemployment rate is high. If you\u2019ve been laid off, it\u2019s probably been for a long period of time,\u201d said Cary Leahey, economist and managing director at Decision Economics in New York. \u201cThat can\u2019t help but affect these sentiment figures.\u201d The preliminary reading showed the index at 71.8, down from 74.3 the month before. It was below the median forecast of 74.0 among economists polled by Reuters. Although the data contained little evidence that a new downturn was under way, the survey found that most consumers believed the recession had not yet ended. Consumers\u2019 view of rising prices was also mixed as the survey\u2019s one-year inflation expectation fell to its lowest since February, to 4.0 percent from 4.1 percent. But the five-to-10-year inflation outlook was at 3.0 percent, edging up from 2.9 percent. A separate report showed that a gauge of future economic activity rose more than expected in May, but high gasoline prices and a weak housing market are expected to keep growth moderate. The independent Conference Board said on Friday its Leading Economic Index increased 0.8 percent to a record high of 114.7, after a revised 0.4 percent fall in April. Economists had expected a rise of 0.2 percent. The rise in the economic indicators was an encouraging sign after recent sluggish data, and underscored releases on Thursday that showed a better-than-expected picture of the labor and housing markets, but a contraction in Mid-Atlantic factory activity in June. \u201cThis rebound in the leading indicators index is an encouraging sign that the recent slowdown in the economy may be short-lived,\u201d Nicholas Tenev, an economist at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note. In its report Friday, the I.M.F. forecast that the gross domestic product in the United States would grow a tepid 2.5 percent this year and 2.7 percent in 2012. In its forecast just two months ago, it had expected 2.8 percent growth in 2011, rising to 2.9 percent in 2012.", "keyword": "United States Economy;Economic Conditions and Trends;International Monetary Fund"}
{"id": "ny0171019", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/11/05", "title": "Big Executive of the Tiny Screen", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 When CBS Mobile introduced the Daily Delivery, a short video for cellphones highlighting fashionable shops in Los Angeles and cool gadgets, it was a disaster. CBS Mobile, a unit of the television network\u2019s interactive division charged with developing content for the new third screen, noticed, though, that interest spiked when celebrities were featured. So they scrapped the original concept and came back with a twice-daily show focused on celebrity gossip and off-the-wall news. It is now one of their most frequently watched original programs on the hand-held screen. \u201cWe are constantly forced to kill our own babies,\u201d said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president of CBS Mobile. Those words might seem harsh if the following two facts about Mr. Roeding weren\u2019t true. First, he was hired by CBS in 2005 to create a mobile entertainment division where researchers track within minutes whether a made-for-mobile show is a hit. Second, he is an unapologetic entrepreneur who has less in common with Hollywood big shots than with his peers in Silicon Valley, who are equally willing to dump a strategy that doesn\u2019t work. That puts Mr. Roeding at the vortex of Hollywood\u2019s new media revolution. Consumer attitudes toward viewing videos on the cellphone screen are changing. The debut of the Apple iPhone showed a wider, and older, audience that cellphones can be multimedia devices. And the software behind the Google phone is expected to enable more entertainment programming. As a result, companies including Walt Disney and NBC Universal are hungry to exploit new technology much the way they did when DVDs became popular in the 1990s. Swirling in that vortex of experimentation and deal-making is the question of how anyone makes money on the new platform. Studios and networks are under pressure to make money however they can. Actors, directors and writers want their cut, too. So much so that this week the Writers Guild of America is to go on strike against studios and networks demanding, in part, a stake in future earnings from online and mobile phone content. An additional factor that makes Mr. Roeding\u2019s job particularly hard is that the 34-year-old German-born mobile advertising executive must forge partnerships with phone companies that are hard-pressed to give up their financial grip on users of their networks. \u201cThe difficulty with Cyriac\u2019s job is getting successful but traditional companies to go down a path they wouldn\u2019t otherwise go down,\u201d said Ryan Hughes, vice president for digital media at Verizon Wireless. Mr. Roeding is responsible for the unit\u2019s overall strategy, negotiating complicated deals with CBS Mobile\u2019s two dozen partners like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, as well as overseeing mobile advertising and games. Take, for example, its broadcast version of \u201cBig Brother.\u201d In August, a made-for-mobile version of the CBS network program ran 24 hours a day on its own channel on Qualcomm\u2019s MediaFLO network showing on Verizon Wireless phones. Mr. Hughes from Verizon said he first met Mr. Roeding in San Diego in the summer of 2006, when Verizon was discussing what CBS shows would be carried on MediaFLO. Mr. Roeding was expected to present CBS\u2019s proposal, but when he walked into the meeting he explained he had not yet secured the necessary rights. \u201cWe knew it would be difficult,\u201d said Mr. Hughes. Six months later, though, after months of silence, Mr. Hughes got a text message from a CBS executive saying Mr. Roeding had secured the rights in time for MediaFLO\u2019s spring introduction. \u201cIt blew me away,\u201d Mr. Hughes said. Mr. Roeding acknowledges that the task is tricky. But he is pragmatic, too, seeking to apply the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur to a Hollywood culture marred by political infighting, one-upmanship and corporate backstabbing. Senior CBS executives are now required to attend his \u201cWireless 101\u201d presentation. He created a news division with mobile-specific alerts and news to appeal to young viewers. And Ashley Hartman, a 22-year-old Jessica Simpson look-alike who is the face of CBS Mobile entertainment, is gaining as much notice for her stint as CBS\u2019s \u201cMobile VJ\u201d as she did for her recurring role on the Fox hit \u201cThe O.C.\u201d Even recruits who were first put off at the idea of working at what some consider to be a musty network were struck by Mr. Roeding\u2019s approach. At the mention of CBS, \u201cI thought of \u2018Murder, She Wrote,\u2019\u201d said Randy Ahn, a director at CBS Sports Mobile, before meeting Mr. Roeding. \u201cCyriac, though, talked about new ideas.\u201d Indeed, Mr. Roeding is unorthodox in his recruiting, choosing to look beyond traditional media or wireless carriers for talent. He has brought in other entrepreneurs, including Jeff Sellinger, a founder of GoldPocket, a mobile marketing and content firm, who now oversees daily operations. And he is wooing top CBS talent. He has monthly dinners with Anthony Zuiker, executive producer of \u201cCSI: Crime Scene Investigation,\u201d to discuss mobile games, including the new \u201cCSI: Miami\u201d offering. (Mr. Zuiker, though, is a bit skeptical of the new medium, and so far views mobile games and other content as promotional. \u201cIt should drive people back to television,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t consume television on a cellphone, but I wouldn\u2019t want to stop anyone else either.\u201d) Mr. Roeding, a former McKinsey consultant who bears a striking resemblance to Cary Elwes in \u201cThe Princess Bride,\u201d is undeterred by the challenge, instead overwhelmed by the potential to reach consumers. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense to fight over a business that isn\u2019t there yet,\u201d he said. \u201cFirst let\u2019s create something that consumers want to see.\u201d To emphasize his point, he showed a photo of a young girl at the airport in San Jose, Calif. She was wearing a T-shirt with the phrase \u201cMe, my cell and I.\u201d \u201cThe relationship people have with their mobile phones is very personal,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can\u2019t ignore that. If we do, generations will pass us by.\u201d Or, as Quincy Smith, Mr. Roeding\u2019s boss and president of CBS Interactive, put it: \u201cWe need to evolve from being a content company to an audience company.\u201d Mr. Roeding was born in 1973 and raised in a small town outside Frankfurt, the younger of two children. He graduated from the University of Karlsruhe where he studied business and engineering. Mr. Roeding was a founder of 12snap Inc., a mobile marketing and entertainment firm started in 1999 whose clients include Coca-Cola and McDonald\u2019s. The firm won awards for innovative marketing, including a campaign where children sent their parents mobile messages encouraging them to buy a PlayStation 2 for Christmas. In 2004, though, Mr. Roeding grew restless and wanted to move to either Silicon Valley or Shanghai, where the markets for mobile media were emerging. A McKinsey alumnus offered to introduce him to Nancy Tellem, who oversees entertainment at the CBS network and production studios. At their first meeting Mr. Roeding took out his cellphone and showed her his personalized wallpaper and videos Europeans were already watching. \u201cMobile wasn\u2019t even on our radar,\u201d said Ms. Tellem, whose office is near his at CBS\u2019s Television City. \u201cBut there was a small group of us who thought something was there.\u201d Mr. Roeding was hired in 2005 and went about creating an autonomous unit with the same start-up feel he thrived on at 12snap. Mr. Roeding declined to discuss the unit\u2019s financials except to say it is profitable, making programs for a fraction of the cost their peers in TV do. \u201cIt\u2019s the Ikea model of content production,\u201d he said with a laugh. But industry executives say CBS Mobile, like ABC and NBC, gets a small percentage of its revenue from advertising; the rest is from deals and partnerships. That percentage is expected to shift, though, when advertising on phones becomes more accepted. Mr. Roeding\u2019s focus is on making the mobile shows as personalized as possible. One of Mr. Roeding\u2019s producers developed the animated series \u201cDanny Bonaduce: Life Coach,\u201d a twist on self-help talk shows that starts this month. His voice gravelly from too many Marlboros and hard-partying nights, Mr. Bonaduce said he agreed to the series because it seemed like fun. Mr. Roeding did not want viewers to have a passive experience. So, as part of the show, viewers will be able to text message Mr. Bonaduce, who will answer questions and give advice. \u201cAre you going to help celebrities?\u201d asked Mr. Roeding as Mr. Bonaduce settled into a chair before taping. The actor\u2019s face and broad shoulders were the color of rare meat. \u201cI have absolutely no interest in helping celebrities,\u201d said Mr. Bonaduce, laughing. \u201cI could go all day without helping celebrities.\u201d", "keyword": "Roeding Cyriac;CBS Corp;Cellular Telephones;Television;iPhone"}
{"id": "ny0189076", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2009/05/04", "title": "Rio de Janeiro Makes Its Pitch for the 2016 Olympics", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 Brazil made an original and emotional appeal over the weekend for this city to be the first in South America to host an Olympics Games. Officials from the International Olympic Committee \u2019s evaluation commission raced the mayor of Rio in a sprint, dribbled a soccer ball with Pel\u00e9 and toured the spectacular beach areas and lakes that Rio says it will showcase to the world if it were to win the bid for the 2016 Games. Questions about crime and transportation had been considered the main concerns with Rio\u2019s $14.4 billion bid. But Nawal el-Moutawakel, an I.O.C. member from Morocco who is the chairwoman of the evaluation commission, said Saturday that she saw no weakness in the bid. \u201cEverything we have seen so far is positive,\u201d she said. The inspectors left saying they were impressed by the commitment of political leaders at all levels to back the bid \u2014 including Brazil\u2019s president, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva. They said that Rio\u2019s hosting of the 2014 World Cup was a \u201cgood test event\u201d and a potential advantage over three other cities vying for the 2016 Games: Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo. The seven-day visit was the third for the 13-member evaluation commission, which headed to Madrid on Sunday for the final inspection before the I.O.C. makes its decision, which is scheduled to be announced Oct. 2. As the I.O.C. determines which city will be the most suitable along technical lines, the Rio organizers are promoting the city\u2019s youth, energy and diversity. They say their bid is the only one capable of taking the Olympic tradition in a new direction. Rio 2016 organizers seized on the idea of the city\u2019s being the first on the continent to host the Games. South America is a rapidly growing continent of nearly 400 million people, and Brazil has been among the fastest-growing major economies in the world over the past half-decade. Da Silva compared an Olympics in Rio to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara\u2019s tour of South America, depicted in the movie \u201cThe Motorcycle Diaries.\u201d \u201cImagine how many Latin Americans would come here by bicycle, on foot, by riverboat, by bus, by plane, in ways you cannot imagine,\u201d he later told reporters. In Chicago, area natives like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama, and even Michael Jordan, showed the I.O.C. inspectors their support through videotaped messages. Brazilian officials showed up in Rio in force last week to make personal pledges to the evaluation commission members. Da Silva was joined by his chief of staff, the president of the central bank and a handful of ministers. Da Silva guaranteed that Brazil would provide financial guarantees for the bid, an important pledge considering that the country is starting to feel the effects of the global economic downturn through production slowdowns and unemployment. Still, organizers said they planned to keep average ticket prices for events at $36. Beyond the emotion, Rio\u2019s chances are strong because it hosted the Pan-American Games just two years ago. Da Silva said that between the facilities built for the Pan-American Games and the planned investments for the World Cup, the city would be more than 75 percent prepared for the Olympics. Organizers see the Games as potentially transformative. \u201cWe are going to use the power of an Olympic and Paralympic Games to transform a city, a country and a continent,\u201d said Carlos Os\u00f3rio, the secretary general of the Brazilian Olympic bid committee. Moutawakel said the I.O.C. members \u201cwere impressed by how the Games fit perfectly in Brazil\u2019s long-term planning and support for the development of the country.\u201d She added, \u201cThere is a vision between now and many years yet to come, and these Olympic Games come right in the middle of that global vision.\u201d The inspectors said they were satisfied with the Rio 2016 organizers\u2019 plans to improve traffic flow and to provide enough lodging space. Rio organizers promised at least 49,000 rooms in a combination of hotels, anchored cruise ships and new media housing center. Security remains a paramount concern. The I.O.C. team spent several hours Saturday discussing security with Brazilian officials. Because of time restrictions, they did not make planned visits to favelas, or shantytowns, that ring the city and where drug violence is widespread. Rio is plagued by one of the highest murder rates in the world. The police negotiated temporary cease-fires with drug traffickers to contain violence during the Pan-American Games. \u201cWe have been given reassurance that all that can be done will be done to make Rio a safe city to organize the Games,\u201d Moutawakel said. Rio organizers plan to construct a one-million-square-meter park for extreme and adventure sports, and have committed to building an Olympic Training Center for 22 sports, regardless of whether Rio receives the 2016 bid. On Friday, the inspectors toured Rio\u2019s aquatic center and soccer stadium, and rode on Rio\u2019s metro. Moutawakel, who won a gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, raced Mayor Eduardo Paes of Rio in a photo-finish sprint. She later put some soccer moves on Pel\u00e9 at Rio\u2019s famed Maracan\u00e3 Stadium, the site of the 1950 World Cup final. \u201cThey were like kids in Maracan\u00e3,\u201d Pel\u00e9 later told reporters.", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2016);Rio de Janeiro (Brazil);International Olympic Committee"}
{"id": "ny0209748", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2009/12/31", "title": "Apps Promise Less-Costly Weight-Loss Resolutions", "abstract": "For most people who resolve to shed pounds after the holidays, the decision means shelling out cash \u2014 on packaged foods, books, health club memberships, a scale, liposuction consultations. Problem is, the only thing many people end up losing is money. But on a cost-per-pound basis, the newest class of weight-loss innovation could beat them all. Free and nearly free cellphone applications for dieters and aspiring hard bodies are proliferating in the various app stores for iPhones, Android handsets, BlackBerrys and others. In some cases it feels like the Internet, circa 1999, in that companies are giving away products that seem fairly valuable. Just as that early Internet practice screeched to a halt once everyone (well, almost everyone) came to their senses, this will too. So if you are thinking of shedding a few pounds, it might make sense to load a couple of these programs onto your phone before you devour your next pig in a blanket. I tested a handful of the most popular applications, including Lose It! (free, for the iPhone ), Calorie Counter (free, on Android and BlackBerry) and Calorie Tracker by Livestrong ($3 on iPhone, BlackBerry and Android). Lose It!, from FitNow, is the top choice of calorie counters, with 3.5 million downloads in the 14 months since it became available. But more noteworthy is that 190,000 people have bothered to rate the app, usually with high marks, which suggests that the software has some staying power. Based on a week or so of playing with it, the ratings are well-earned, and probably would be just as high if it cost a few dollars or more. At its core, Lose It! is a calorie counter and weight tracker, with tools for logging and watching your food intake. Enter a few personal metrics into the program along with your weight-loss goal and deadline, and Lose It! sets a budget for your calorie intake. The chief strength of the program is how nicely it balances simplicity and comprehensiveness. It includes nutritional information on more than 21,000 food items, including many that aren\u2019t listed in the Agriculture Department\u2019s database. If a turkey sandwich is on your lunch menu, you can search for variations, including those offered by major fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. Lose It! will put you down for 725 calories (Arby\u2019s), 230 calories (Lean Pockets) or 360 calories (home made, on whole wheat). Checking your progress is a pleasure, at least aesthetically; nicely designed graphics show where you are in relation to your caloric budget for the day or the week. You can also link your data to Loseit.com , where you can view detailed full-screen reports and use a new service to trade diet notes with friends (or even anonymous folks, if you don\u2019t want to tell friends when you gain 10 pounds). Progress can be posted on Twitter or Facebook as well. Since peer support can be so critical to dieting, it is somewhat surprising that this category of applications didn\u2019t include social networking features from the start. The programs I tested either recently added, or will soon include, similar functions. For the legion of people carrying Droids, myTouch 3G\u2019s and other Android devices, among the better choices is Calorie Counter, from the software developer FatSecret ( fatsecret.com ). Entering foods on Calorie Counter is, at times, slightly easier than with Lose It! Novice calorie counter that I am, I initially assumed Lose It! would add milk-related calories to my breakfast cereal. I searched for skim milk and added it just in case. When I clicked onto Calorie Counter, it eliminated my caloric confusion \u2014 and did away with a wasted step \u2014 by offering a \u201cFrequently Eaten With\u201d button near the cereal. Non-iPhone versions of Calorie Counter also have a bar code scanner that helps save a step when you are logging in frequently eaten foods. Sometimes, that is. The scanner often failed to lock onto a code, leaving me to manually type in the nutritional information for things like Marshmallow Fluff. Calorie Tracker is a more comprehensive alternative to Lose It!, but that blessing can also be a curse. The program, part of Lance Armstrong\u2019s Livestrong ( livestrong.com ) stable of brands, has millions of food items in its database, and the service\u2019s two million members add information on new foods daily. If Starbucks introduces a new flavored latte, Calorie Tracker\u2019s developers say, the calorie information will show up in the database within a few days. Still, all that information can be overwhelming, as when you are offered 1,700 different variations for a turkey sandwich. Once you\u2019ve found what you want, though, you can log your food preference to save time in the future. These nutrition-minded app developers know the yin and yang of fitness involves exercise more taxing than, say, texting. They also know that popular fitness programs like iFitness ($2 on the iPhone,) and Cardio Trainer (free on Android, with paid add-ons) are starting to include nutritional advice. As a result, the calorie-counting apps have begun adding their own fitness components. Calorie Tracker now allows users to account for calories burned during exercise. And relying on Mr. Armstrong\u2019s training team for pointers, the program will in coming months include more advanced workout tracking features. Lose It!, meanwhile, includes calorie-burning information for 102 exercises, while Calorie Counter has similar functions. Software developers are often guilty of fattening their applications with so many new features that they end up like digital couch potatoes; slow moving and impossible to work with. But so far, these apps are carrying the extra weight nicely. Quick Calls The Dragon Dictation app (free on iTunes) has been a big hit for its ability to turn spoken words into text. But some people objected to the program because it required users to upload their contact names to the service, for accuracy purposes. Responding to those objections, Dragon dropped that requirement last week. ... NPR fans with Android phones can now create playlists of their favorite programs. The free NPR News app also allows users to find stations by location, among other things. But unlike NPR\u2019s iPhone app, the Android app does not yet allow live streaming of broadcasts. ... Sprint\u2019s Palm Pre and Palm Pixi are improved devices this week, thanks to a software upgrade. The new Palm WebOS version 1.3.5 offers better integration with Google Maps and Sprint Navigation and, most important, better battery life in low-coverage areas.", "keyword": "Smartphones;Weight;Computers and the Internet;Medicine and Health;Software"}
{"id": "ny0200307", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/09/20", "title": "T-Mobile Uses a Stick to Push Paperless Billing", "abstract": "IN August, T-Mobile got serious about paperless billing. It started charging a $1.50 monthly fee on all accounts that continued to receive a paper bill. Large companies would love to use paperless billing rather than the mail: it reduces their costs and at the same time allows chest thumping about being green. But offering their customers positive sweeteners hasn\u2019t been very effective. T-Mobile tried another tack: a stick instead of a carrot. What woe it brought upon itself, however, when it told customers it was time to switch or pay up. Before this, T-Mobile promoted \u201cGreen Accounts\u201d and \u201cGreen Perks\u201d and offered to plant a tree for every customer who signed up for paperless billing, producing only modest results. Customers \u2014 including millions who had signed up for electronic bill payment \u2014 continued to receive a paper bill. T-Mobile had already begun last year to levy a $1.99 fee for a detailed printed version of the monthly bill (existing customers could choose to be grandfathered in without having to pay). Verizon Wireless has charged a similar fee, beginning with new customers in 2002 and expanding to existing customers two years later. But T-Mobile\u2019s new $1.50 fee was a separate, additional charge, applied to all paper bills, short and long, and it didn\u2019t provide an escape clause for existing customers. The new fee immediately produced an explosive increase in the rate at which customers converted to paperless billing. Before the August bills were mailed out, T-Mobile had an average of a little more than 1,000 customers sign up for paperless billing each day. When the $1.50 fee was added to the bills that went out in August, the number jumped to 33,000 a day, according to a spokesman. This was even before the charge really bit: for August, T-Mobile also added a matching $1.50 credit to every bill for the initial month, to give customers more time to decide whether to opt for paperless. The company sends out 16.5 million invoices each month, but the accelerated rate of signups in August made it possible to imagine converting the entire customer base to paperless in only 15 months \u2014 and fully realize the potential annual savings of 10.8 million pounds of paper, equivalent to 13,500 trees (T-Mobile will talk only of trees to be saved, not dollars). Companies can talk up the environmental aspects of paperless billing until they\u2019re green in the face, but to little avail. Verizon Communications, which says it could save \u201cmillions of dollars annually\u201d if it could switch entirely to paperless billing, is promoting its \u201cGet Your Green On\u201d sweepstakes, offering a Toyota Prius Hybrid as the grand prize. Customers who switch to paperless billing are entered in the contest. Angeline Depauw, the company\u2019s director of remittance processing, said about 6,100 customers weekly were signing up for paperless billing before the contest began in early August. Now the rate is 17,000 weekly. This is an exceedingly modest gain, considering that Verizon still sends out 20.5 million paper bills a month. T-Mobile had concluded that the \u201cvoluntary approach\u201d was \u201cnot something that would get the majority of our customers to paperless,\u201d said Glenn A. Zaccara, a T-Mobile spokesman. I spoke with Mr. Zaccara and David Beigie, the company\u2019s vice president for corporate communications, on Sept. 1, when enough time had elapsed for the company to see that the paper bill fee was having the desired effect of \u201cputting a spotlight on the costs of preparing paper bills.\u201d In defense of the customers who are reluctant to switch, many balk at absorbing the hidden cost of lost time: it\u2019s a lot easier to rip open an envelope and glance at a bill than to log on to a company Web site and navigate to it. One can also be skittish about missing e-mail and text messages about a new bill that is available online; these are easily pushed out of sight by the deluge of daily messages. When I asked if they had received negative reactions from customers, Mr. Beigie said, \u201cWe heard a full gamut of reactions, but we\u2019ve had many who say, \u2018It\u2019s about time we have a company moving in this direction.\u2019\u201d The voices of those customers who praised T-Mobile\u2019s policy seem to have been drowned out by others. Dennis McKinney and Mallory LaBoube stand out from the rest: they are the named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed on Sept. 5 against T-Mobile in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. The suit alleges that adding a fee in 2008 for the detailed paper bill and in August for all paper bills constituted \u201cmaterial modifications to the contracts by T-Mobile.\u201d Ten days after my conversation with the T-Mobile executives, and six days after the lawsuit was filed, I received an e-mail message from Mr. Beigie that announced an abrupt end to the paper bill fee. In a phone call, he said, \u201cAt the end of the day, we hope to continue our drive to paperless billing, but be thoughtful about all of the different opinions out there.\u201d To completely eliminate paper bills, T-Mobile now needs to summon considerable patience. If signups return to their earlier level, before T-Mobile\u2019s little experiment in behavioral economics began and ended, the conversion will take a little more than 41 years.", "keyword": "Cellular Telephones;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Customer Relations;Computers and the Internet;Environment;T-Mobile"}
{"id": "ny0218218", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/05/29", "title": "Radio Program About Faith Defies the Skeptics", "abstract": "ST. PAUL \u2014 Not yet 30 and a veteran of two lives already, Krista Tippett retreated in the summer of 1988 to a rented room on an island off Spain. There, perhaps, her next direction would make itself known. She had grown up in Oklahoma as a fundamentalist Christian, a preacher\u2019s granddaughter who sang solos in church, a homebody who had traveled beyond Texas only once. Then she won admission to Brown and recast herself as an unbeliever, taking up the study of German literature and history, and living in the same dorm as John F. Kennedy Jr. The trajectory carried her to Europe as a Fulbright scholar and soon into the diplomatic corps, working on arms-control issues along the cold war\u2019s front line in Berlin. All of which made her wonder why, with a fulsome r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and a social calendar to match, she felt \u201creally unsettled in ways I couldn\u2019t acknowledge or even explain.\u201d So it was odder still, as she moved onto Majorca, to stir with an old, unbidden sensation. She told herself at first that she just wanted to meditate. Then she admitted that what she was doing was praying, returning not to the fierce theology of her Southern Baptist upbringing but surely to the way it taught her how to call on God. In that pivotal moment 22 years ago, Ms. Tippett, now 49, began the route toward reconciling her intellectual and spiritual selves. The process culminated in her founding and hosting a public-radio show, \u201cSpeaking of Faith.\u201d By now, the weekly show, once met with skepticism in public-radio circles, qualifies as a phenomenon. Despite being broadcast in most markets in the God ghetto of 7 a.m. on Sunday, \u201cSpeaking of Faith\u201d draws nearly 600,000 listeners on 240 stations across the country, a sixfold increase in both measures since 2003. The show also gets 1.3 million downloads a month. With both a Peabody Award and a best-selling book to her name, Ms. Tippett has become identified with a particular public-radio program the way, say, Ira Glass is with \u201cThis American Life\u201d or Terry Gross with \u201cFresh Air.\u201d The Tippett style represents a fusion of all her parts \u2014 the child of small-town church comfortable in the pews; the product of Yale Divinity School able to parse text in Greek and theology in German; and, perhaps most of all, the diplomat seeking to resolve social divisions. \u201cMy background as a diplomat is as important for this subject as my training as a journalist,\u201d Ms. Tippett, who contributed reporting to The New York Times from Germany in the 1980s, said in an interview in her studio in St. Paul. \u201cReligion is a touchy subject. You\u2019re really getting at the core of people\u2019s identities, an intimate place. This religious sphere in our public life is very charged, and I want to disarm that.\u201d By design, Ms. Tippett avoids using religion as a proxy for politics \u2014 and she has been criticized at times on the blogosphere for a perceived timidity. She said she would not interview a proponent of intelligent design or a strident atheist , believing such guests would only polarize the discussion, though she has done shows about torture and the Sunni-Shiite divide within Islam. Most commonly over the years, she has shared her microphone with religious ethicists (modern interpreters of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr), textual scholars (Ellen F. Davis of Duke Divinity School), and scientists ruminating about the intersection of divinity and humanity (the physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne). \u201cIt is a carrier not only of danger but of some of the greatest gifts we have to give each other,\u201d Ms. Tippett said of religion as a topic for journalism in a guest sermon at Yale\u2019s Battell Chapel last year. \u201cThis is a part of life where we give ourselves over to essential, exacting, majestic questions that no other discipline quite presses in quite the same way: What does it mean to be human? What matters in a life? What matters in a death? How to love? How can we be of service to one another and the world?\u201d Posing such questions on the air, Ms. Tippett is the antithesis of the fire-and-brimstone stereotype of religious broadcasting. Speaking in dulcet tones, allowing her guests to silently struggle for words, she offers a gentle yet unapologetic kind of God-talk. For all its current prominence, \u201cSpeaking of Faith\u201d was far from certain of succeeding, or even existing. When Ms. Tippett first proposed a show about religion to Minnesota Public Radio in the late 1990s, \u201clet\u2019s just say there was a lot of skepticism,\u201d recalled William E. Buzenberg, who was then vice president of news there. \u201cIt\u2019ll never work as a show,\u201d Mr. Buzenberg remembered some of his colleagues saying. \u201cIt\u2019ll never work financially. Religion is too divisive. How can you do religion without being divisive?\u201d Having overseen religion coverage as a news executive at National Public Radio , Mr. Buzenberg disagreed. So he gave Ms. Tippett $500 to produce a pilot, distributed it to about 30 stations throughout Minnesota, and received vigorous, positive response. One listener rounded up donations from 40 friends to keep the show going. Its name notwithstanding, Minnesota Public Radio produces and distributes shows nationally, as a kind of half-partner, half-competitor to NPR. Mr. Buzenberg\u2019s next step was to persuade both MPR and NPR stations to carry \u201cSpeaking of Faith.\u201d \u201cThere were a number of program directors who told me, \u2018No way do we want religion on,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Buzenberg recalled. When WNYC in New York picked up \u201cSpeaking of Faith,\u201d though, other stations started to follow. \u201cSpeaking of Faith\u201d now has a $1.3 million annual budget and is produced and distributed by American Public Media, which also has \u201cA Prairie Home Companion\u201d and \u201cMarketplace\u201d in its portfolio. \u201cI get asked if I consider this show a ministry,\u201d Ms. Tippett said. \u201cI do like the word \u2018vocation,\u2019 a calling. If it is a ministry, it\u2019s a ministry of listening rather than talking.\u201d", "keyword": "Tippett Krista;Religion and Belief;Radio;Christians and Christianity;Minnesota Public Radio;National Public Radio;WNYC"}
{"id": "ny0123655", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/09/23", "title": "In-Box \u2014 A Cheer for Players Showing Courage on a Social Issue", "abstract": "To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cStanding Up at an Early Age,\u201d Sept. 15: It\u2019s refreshing to see N.F.L. players addressing social issues, especially gay issues, and it takes a certain amount of courage to do so. I was a proud Rangers fan when Sean Avery stated his support of gay marriage. The Baltimore Ravens\u2019 Brendon Ayanbadejo and the Minnesota Vikings\u2019 Chris Kluwe are now on the list of players that this Giants fan will be rooting for. J. Kevin Hannon Orange, Conn. Forever Brooklyn To the Sports Editor: \u201cThe Brooklyn Game Had Its Own Beat\u201d (Sept. 15) brought back wonderful memories of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and \u201960s: playing ball in the streets, schoolyards, Y\u2019s and \u201cthe J,\u201d going to the Garden and mixing it up with legendary characters. Brooklyn was a very special place to grow up in. It helped frame a generation of us to be who we are today: a bit zany, people-oriented, believers in equality and fair play. Norman Siegel New York Unfair to Harvard Athletes To the Sports Editor: \u201cCheating Scandal Dulls Pride in Athletics at Harvard,\u201d (Sept. 19) reignited my exasperation with the dumb jock stereotype. Despite the fact that only a small number of those embroiled in the cheating scandal were athletes, this article suggests that all athletes should, at the very least, be suspected of cheating their way through four years. This is equivalent to saying that because 125 students at Harvard appear to have cheated on this exam, all Harvard students probably cheat their way through college. Even I, biased by affiliation, know that this is far from the truth and unfair to those students who work extremely hard to honestly achieve their diplomas. Athletes should likewise be shielded from such vast generalizations. Margot Benedict New York The writer is a former captain of the Yale varsity women\u2019s sailing team. Ranking the Rankings To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cBarkley Struggles; Stanford Upsets U.S.C.,\u201d Sept. 16: Early on in the college football season, we find lower-ranked teams like Stanford beating high-ranked teams like Southern California. As the season goes on, the rankings shift based on teams\u2019 performances, yet these games are still referred to as upsets even if the team that won is subsequently ranked higher. It is a travesty that any college football team gets a ranking before it has played one game. I would argue that until each team has played at least six games, no team should be ranked. Frank Coutinho Middleboro, Mass. No Reward for Risk Averse To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cA Base-Stealing Sensation in an Era That Doesn\u2019t Value Steals,\u201d Sept. 16: In reading about Billy Hamilton\u2019s remarkable 155 stolen bases, I was reminded of Lou Brock burning up the basepaths for the St. Louis Cardinals. Benjamin Hoffman called today\u2019s baseball a \u201crisk-averse environment,\u201d as cautious major league managers choose not to run their teams into or out of big innings. But he neglected to point out \u2014 and calculating \u201cMoneyball\u201d managers may do well to recall \u2014 the debilitating effect skilled base stealers have on opposing pitchers. I saw Orlando Cepeda served up more than one fat fastball from pitchers distracted by Brock\u2019s lead off first base. Kevin Sharp Memphis The Team\u2019s Name: Browns To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cArt Modell, Influential N.F.L. Owner but Not Always Beloved One, Dies at 87,\u201d Sept. 7: The real disservice done to Cleveland by Art Modell was not the moving of the Browns but rather the firing of their founder, Paul Brown. The ramifications are still being felt throughout the team and the league. An N.F.L. franchise might have inevitably been founded in Cincinnati, but not with the network of connections it had in Brown. Modell\u2019s problem was the same as that of any other insecure owner: the inability to comprehend what success is and what it takes to achieve it and maintain it. Joe Bialek Cleveland", "keyword": "Harvard University;Cheating;Avery Sean"}
{"id": "ny0246722", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/04/25", "title": "Taliban Help Hundreds Tunnel Out of Prison\u2019s Political Wing", "abstract": "KANDAHAR, Afghanistan \u2014 The Taliban staged an audacious prison break here early Monday, freeing at least 476 political prisoners through a long tunnel, according to the warden, Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Mayar. He said that security authorities had discovered in the morning that the prisoners from the political wing of the building were gone, and that the authorities had just found the tunnel. \u201cWe do not know if the tunnel was dug from outside or inside the prison,\u201d he said. The Kandahar prison is the largest and most substantial prison in southern Afghanistan , and it houses Taliban who were captured in Zabul, Oruzgan and Kandahar, including some senior Taliban figures as well as many lower level Taliban, according to security officers working with the prison. It was the second time there has been a major prison break at the Sariposa prison in Kandahar. The Taliban orchestrated the freeing of 1,200 prisoners, of whom 350 were Taliban members, on June 13, 2008, staging an attack on the prison that killed 15 guards. The break comes at a critical moment in the Taliban\u2019s fight in southern Afghanistan. Pushed out of their strongholds in the rural areas outside the city and under pressure from a large number of NATO troops who have fanned out into the villages, they have been able to maintain a presence, but nothing close to the dominant role they had even a year ago. Bringing back a large cadre of experienced fighters, many of whom will have been able to refine their skills in prison, will give the Taliban leadership the flexibility and human resources to send fighters into new districts where there are fewer NATO troops and bolster their numbers in those closer to Kandahar. A Taliban spokesman for the south and west of the country, Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, said that a total of 541 prisoners had escaped and that among them were 106 Taliban commanders. \u201cNow they are all in safe havens,\u201d he said. In a deft propaganda ploy, the Taliban gave a gripping description of the prison break in a statement they sent out to the news media ahead of any comment from the security authorities who were just in the process of discovering the tunnel. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in the statement: \u201cWe have planned and worked on this for five months, and the tunnel is 360 meters long,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was very important for us; we were trying to not leave anyone behind, not even one sick or old political prisoner.\u201d \u201cOur mujahedeen worked in a very careful way\u201d so as not to be discovered, Mr. Mujahid said. The tunnel wound under security check posts outside the prison and under a main highway. At 11 p.m. Sunday, three Taliban prisoners, who he said were the only ones who knew, \u201cWent from cell to cell waking people and guiding each of them to the tunnel. More Taliban were on hand as the prisoners emerged from the dirt and dust of the tunnel to guide the dazed prisoners to waiting vehicles. Also on hand were Taliban fighters and suicide bombers in case the security forces woke up and there was a fight. \u201cLuckily we did not have to use them,\u201d Mr. Mujahid said. \u201cThe security forces did not know until sunrise.\u201d", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Taliban;Prisons and Prisoners;Prison Escapes"}
{"id": "ny0189049", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/05/04", "title": "Despite Obama\u2019s Talk, Little Bump for Chrysler Sales", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 Car salesman was probably not among the jobs that President Obama expected to assume during his first few months in the White House. And a slow weekend at many Chrysler dealerships around the country after the company filed for bankruptcy protection suggests that few consumers were moved by the president\u2019s plea on Thursday to help Detroit\u2019s automakers by buying an American car. The president\u2019s sales pitch was cheered in Michigan and among Chrysler\u2019s 3,200 dealers. And the company said his speech did help sell 11,400 cars on Thursday \u2014 although much of that could have been the inventory clearance that is typical for the last day of a month. But to the extent there was much action in Chrysler showrooms Saturday and Sunday, it often seemed to be shoppers hoping the company\u2019s plight might prompt dealers to offer give-away prices even lower than deep discounts the company has already been dangling. But sales managers do not have much remaining wiggle room. \u201cThey\u2019re ambulance chasers trying to take advantage\u201d said Doug Swaim, general manager of Star Chrysler-Jeep in Glendale, Calif. \u201cWe bite our tongues and say, can you be more realistic?\u201d Mr. Swaim said. \u201cA lot of people hear the word bankruptcy and think worst-case scenario. They think Circuit City. That\u2019s, of course, not the case here.\u201d Many consumers remain nervous about paying tens of thousands of dollars to a bankrupt company. \u201cI was just curious about how desperate they really are,\u201d Jerry Hubbard, a professional truck driver who stopped by Medved Chrysler-Jeep in the Denver suburb of Wheatridge, said on his way to shop for antiques on Saturday morning. Chrysler now plans to essentially sell its assets to the Italian carmaker Fiat , and it is closing all of its North American plants for the next one to two months, but hopes to emerge from bankruptcy later this summer. But it could be late next year before the first Fiats, retooled to meet American crash protection standards, reach Chrysler showrooms. And it is not expected to be until sometime in 2011 that the first Fiat-designed vehicles start rolling out of Chrysler\u2019s North American plants. Until then, Chryslers dealers are essentially buying time. \u201cThrough the restructuring process we will be business as usual with our dealers and our customers,\u201d Steven J. Landry, Chrysler\u2019s vice president of North American sales, said Friday. Although Chrysler is not going out of business, about 1,000 of its dealers soon could, according to its restructuring plan. Chrysler has about 3,200 dealers \u2014 nearly twice as many as Toyota, even though its market share is considerably less \u2014 and the company wants to thin out that network to improve its profit potential in the future. General Motors also is cutting dealerships \u2014 about 2,600 of them by the end of next year, according to that company\u2019s plan. That means buyers of either company\u2019s vehicles soon could find themselves having to drive further for service or parts. In the meantime, dealers are trying to survive while selling far fewer vehicles than in the past. Chrysler\u2019s sales fell 48 percent in April, and new-vehicle sales plunged across the industry in the final week of the month, as talk of G.M.\u2019s troubles and Chrysler\u2019s bankruptcy prospects intensified. Consequently, Vince Capatosta, the owner of All Star Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep in Bridgeton, Mo., was thrilled to make 17 sales Thursday, his best day so far this year. But traffic dwindled again on Friday and Saturday. Still, Mr. Capatosta said he believed customers will stick with him through Chrysler\u2019s bankruptcy. \u201cTheir relationship is with me and my staff, not with Chrysler, and they have faith in me, and I deliver,\u201d he said. \u201cThese guys are all 20- to 25-year veterans. So consumers come in and see these familiar faces, it gives a customer a sense of relief.\u201d There have been signs in recent weeks that American car shoppers do take Mr. Obama\u2019s messages to heart. In a speech on March 30, even though he was rejecting the restructuring plans submitted by G.M. and Chrysler at the time, the president said one G.M. brand, Buick, was \u201cthe most reliable car in the world.\u201d Buick sales were 21 percent higher in April than March. \u201cOur president is behind us 100 percent, and that\u2019s good for sales, service, the economy and the nation as a whole,\u201d said Wes Skidmore, the vehicle sales director at Mission Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge in San Antonio. On Saturday, his dealership ran a newspaper ad with an American flag and the headline \u201cBuy American.\u201d Such messages resonate with shoppers like Bryan Kohler, 29, who test-drove a Jeep in Glendale on Saturday. \u201cI didn\u2019t even think about looking at others, at foreign cars,\u201d Mr. Kohler said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to be patriotic, I guess.\u201d Mehdi Asghari, a Chrysler salesman at the Bay Bridge Auto Center in Oakland, Calif., who previously worked at G.M. and Ford dealerships, said he had highlighted the benefits of buying American-made vehicles for years. \u201cI always say to customers, \u2018Buy an American car and help the U.S. economy,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Asghari said. \u201c\u2019Plus, American cars have more cup holders. They have cup holders everywhere.\u2019 \u201d Still, the fact that foreign brands now account for more than half of auto sales in the United States indicates that a vehicle\u2019s origin has become less of a priority than styling and price. Fred Weaver, 57, browsing Saturday at South Point Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep in Austin, Tex., seemed to be balancing patriotism and his pocketbook. \u201cI prefer an American-made car,\u201d he said, \u201cif I can get a good deal on it.\u201d", "keyword": "Chrysler LLC;Bankruptcies;Automobiles;Sales;United States Economy;Shopping and Retail;Fiat SpA;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0116529", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/10/11", "title": "New Mexico: Another Try for Record-Seeking Jumper", "abstract": "If the winds cooperate, Felix Baumgartner will try again to make the highest jump in history and become the first sky diver to break the sound barrier. To reach an altitude of 120,000 feet in the stratosphere, he is using a helium balloon with a 550-foot-high gossamer plastic envelope that is most vulnerable when it is being inflated; the procedure can be done safely only when the winds at ground level are below 3 miles an hour. On Tuesday, a gust forced the launching to be tentatively rescheduled to Thursday and ruined the balloon, which cost several hundred thousand dollars. \u201cIt was, unfortunately, an extremely expensive dress rehearsal,\u201d Art Thompson, the technical director of the Red Bull Stratos project, said Wednesday. The team is aiming for another try with a backup balloon on the next calm morning.", "keyword": "Baumgartner Felix;Parachutes and Parachute Jumping;New Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0282577", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/07/17", "title": "A Grounded Plane and Anti-Clinton Passion: How Mike Pence Swayed the Trumps", "abstract": "When mechanical problems grounded Donald J. Trump\u2019s private plane on Tuesday night in Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence seized the opportunity. The jet-setting Mr. Trump had his three oldest children fly to meet him after he was unexpectedly stranded in Indianapolis, so Mr. Pence and his wife hosted the family for breakfast on Wednesday morning at the Tudor-style Governor\u2019s Mansion. The families were chatting politely over coffee when Mr. Pence, a mild-mannered Midwesterner, delivered an uncharacteristically impassioned monologue, according to people with direct knowledge of his remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the meeting. With the vice presidency potentially hanging in the balance, Mr. Pence described his personal distaste for Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, and spoke of feeling disgusted at what he called the corruption of the 1990s. The monologue appeared to be a success . Even Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump\u2019s son-in-law, a trusted adviser who had admired Newt Gingrich, came away swayed, believing that Mr. Pence could gel with the Trump team. Mr. Pence was not invited to join the Republican ticket that morning. But in a telephone call on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence a reassuring signal the job was his: \u201cYou\u2019re my guy,\u201d Mr. Trump told him, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Nonetheless, the courtship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence had all the caprices of a young romance. At first, Mr. Pence was standoffish and skeptical \u2014 only to become the suitor as the days wore on, fervently pursuing Mr. Trump and the No. 2 slot. And Mr. Trump\u2019s vice-presidential screening process was unusually public, leaving admirers of Mr. Pence worried that he could end up being spurned or even humiliated. Having beckoned Mr. Pence to New York on Thursday, Mr. Trump nevertheless engaged in a final round of hand-wringing conversations with aides about whether he was ready to become partners with such a new acquaintance. Yet it was the breakfast gathering \u2014 for which Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen, picked fresh flowers \u2014 that appeared to have sealed Mr. Trump\u2019s decision, capping a whirlwind three weeks that ended with the coupling of a thrice-married former reality television star known for vulgarity with an old-school Midwestern Republican of deeply conservative Christian faith. Video Donald J. Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announcing Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his vice-presidential running mate. Credit Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Mr. Pence has neither the \u00e9lan nor the bravado of Mr. Trump\u2019s other vice-presidential finalists, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mr. Gingrich. But Mr. Trump, a natural showman, has described Mr. Pence to associates as someone who looks the part, straight out of \u201ccentral casting\u201d with his clean-cut, silver-haired appearance. And Mr. Pence has admiringly called Mr. Trump \u201cthe people\u2019s choice.\u201d \u201cIt is fair to describe the relationship as fairly new and quickly flourishing,\u201d said Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence. Still, close associates of the candidates say they are not a natural pair. David Kensinger, a Republican strategist in Kansas who has advised Mr. Pence in the past, said the Indiana governor was a privately charming man with a strict filter on the public stage. \u201cHe tends to be very formal in public, and he had a reputation when he was in Congress of being a bit stiff,\u201d Mr. Kensinger said. \u201cPence is a man of 21st-century ideas and 19th-century manners.\u201d Only a few weeks ago, the partnership between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence might have come as a surprise to both men, who had no personal relationship. They have still met with each other only a handful of times. An early and uncomfortable introduction, in the fall of 2011, came as Mr. Pence was preparing to run for governor and visited Trump Tower to seek a financial contribution from Mr. Trump. At the time, Mr. Trump was fascinated by gossip surrounding the marriage of Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, whose wife had divorced him to be with another man, and then remarried Mr. Daniels several years later. Mr. Trump declared to Mr. Pence that he would never take back a wife who had been unfaithful, according to the account of a witness. A second person briefed on the meeting described it as an awkward encounter for the strait-laced Mr. Pence. Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who attended many of his talks with politicians that year, said he did not remember the meeting that way. \u201cNot only do I not recall this topic being discussed,\u201d Mr. Cohen said, \u201cit does not even sound like something Mr. Trump would ever say.\u201d Mr. Trump sent a check for $2,500 to Mr. Pence\u2019s campaign for governor, but no personal friendship blossomed. Indeed, when emissaries from the Trump campaign first reached out early this month to gauge Mr. Pence\u2019s interest in the vice presidency, the governor told his political allies that he would meet with Mr. Trump \u2014 but only as a courtesy. Close advisers to Mr. Trump, including Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, and Ms. Conway, the pollster for both men, were keen on the governor. Mr. Pence was less entranced by the idea. Donald Trump and Mike Pence: Highlights Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence appeared for the first time in public together since Mr. Pence was named as Mr. Trump\u2019s running mate. Here\u2019s how we analyzed it. But when the two men played a round of golf over the Fourth of July weekend at a Trump club in Bedminster, N.J., they began to warm to each other. Mr. Trump\u2019s wife, Melania, and Karen Pence came along. And the governor, seemingly sensitive to Mr. Trump\u2019s boastful athletic self-image, later told NBC News that Mr. Trump had \u201cbeat me like a drum.\u201d After golf, the two couples had dinner, and Mr. Trump learned that Charlotte Pence, the governor\u2019s 23-year-old daughter, had accompanied her parents on the trip to New Jersey. Mr. Trump insisted that the foursome have breakfast the next morning with Charlotte, whom he disarmingly peppered with questions about her life. \u201cThe thing I think both of these men have in common is their preferred leisure time is to spend their time with their families,\u201d Ms. Conway said. Mrs. Pence and Mrs. Trump, she added, \u201cconnected as mothers.\u201d Friends noticed a shift after the holiday weekend: Mr. Pence no longer described conversations with the Trump campaign as a pro forma affair. Instead, he advised his allies that a spot on the national ticket, if offered, would be a hard prize to turn down. There were other signs, too, that the two men might be able to forge a partnership. They met again in April, at the Indiana Governor\u2019s Mansion in advance of the state\u2019s primary contest. The goal for Mr. Trump was to keep Mr. Pence neutral, at minimum, before the vote. (In a cruel irony for Mr. Christie, it was the New Jersey governor, then an adviser to Mr. Trump who had yet to become a rival to Mr. Pence for the vice-presidential nomination, who brokered the meeting.) The conversation was perfunctory but pleasant, and Mr. Christie told associates afterward that Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence had hit it off. Mr. Pence ultimately endorsed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas shortly before the primary, but he did not lash out at Mr. Trump or question his qualifications for office \u2014 a significant point Pence allies would later make. Mr. Pence impressed in other ways. Mr. Trump and some of his family members were delighted that the governor\u2019s vetting check was completed quickly, with no red flags. For Mr. Trump, whose life has played out on the pages of New York\u2019s tabloids, Mr. Pence\u2019s lack of personal baggage came as a relief. And the other contenders had problems. The scandal over the shutdown of the George Washington Bridge was potentially hobbling to Mr. Christie; Mr. Gingrich, a self-described \u201cpirate,\u201d had a marital history equally colorful to Mr. Trump\u2019s; Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa was inexperienced and evoked unflattering comparisons to Sarah Palin; Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee had a rough audition with Mr. Trump; and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama would face scrutiny of his record on race. On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence campaigned together, and Mr. Trump\u2019s plane breakdown left him stranded in Indiana, the unlikely partners had an impromptu dinner at the Capital Grille. And at some point during the evening, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Pence if he would say yes, were Mr. Trump to offer him the No. 2 slot. \u201cIn a heartbeat,\u201d Mr. Pence replied.", "keyword": "Mike Pence;Donald Trump;2016 Presidential Election;Vice President US;US Politics;Chris Christie;Republicans"}
{"id": "ny0144125", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/16", "title": "Coca-Cola Beats Profit Forecast", "abstract": "Coca-Cola reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit on Wednesday as strong international demand offset falling volume at home Coca-Cola said net income for the third quarter, which ended on Sept. 26, rose to $1.89 billion, or 81 cents a share, from $1.65 billion, or 71 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 83 cents, topping the analysts\u2019 average forecast of 77 cents, according to Reuters Estimates. Revenue rose 9 percent to $8.39 billion as sales by volume increased 5 percent. Volume fell 2 percent in North America, but rose 7 percent internationally. Coke, which is based in Atlanta, said it was on track for its productivity initiatives to deliver $400 million to $500 million in annual savings by the end of 2011. The results from Coke come a day after its biggest rival, PepsiCo, posted a lower-than-expected quarterly profit on weak beverage sales and cut its full-year outlook because of a recent surge in the value of the dollar.", "keyword": "Coca-Cola Co;Company Reports;Soft Drinks"}
{"id": "ny0148548", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2008/09/18", "title": "A Maybe Planet, Orbiting Its Maybe Sun", "abstract": "Astronomers from the University of Toronto have published a picture of what they say might be the first image of a planet orbiting another Sunlike star. The planet, according to their observations, is 7 to 12 times as massive as Jupiter and is about 30 billion miles from a star known as 1RXS J160929.1-210524, about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The picture was taken last spring by the 270-inch diameter Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii\u2019s Mauna Kea, using so-called adaptive optics to reduce atmospheric blurring and thus sharpen the images of both star and planet. This is at least the third so-called exoplanet candidate that astronomers have photographed. In 2004, a group from the European Southern Observatory in Chile photographed a red speck about five times the mass of Jupiter orbiting a kind of failed star known as a brown dwarf in the constellation Hydra. In 2005, another group photographed an object that they estimated to be twice as massive as Jupiter orbiting the star GQ Lupi, but other astronomers said the object could be as much as 36 Jupiters in mass, making it not a planet but a brown dwarf. The Toronto astronomers say it will take several years to determine whether their planet is moving through space with the star and thus is really a planet. In the meantime, theorists can puzzle about how it could come to live 60 times farther from its star than Jupiter is from the Sun.", "keyword": "Stars and Galaxies;Space;Planets;Astronomy and Astrophysics"}
{"id": "ny0191399", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2009/02/05", "title": "Alcatel-Lucent Takes $5.1 Billion Write-Down", "abstract": "Alcatel-Lucent , the troubled French-American telecommunications equipment maker, took a 3.91 billion euro, or $5.1 billion, write-down on Wednesday, its biggest ever, an admission by its new chief executive of the company\u2019s shrunken value. The one-time charge pushed Alcatel-Lucent to a fourth-quarter loss of 3.89 billion euros, or about $5 billion, compared with a loss of 2.58 billion euros ($3.3 billion) a year earlier. The quarterly loss was the company\u2019s eighth consecutive since the $13.4 billion fusion in November 2006. \u201cThis charge sends a twofold message,\u201d said Richard Windsor, an analyst at Nomura Securities in London. \u201cOne is that the execution of the Alcatel-Lucent merger has been a disaster. The other is that Alcatel significantly overpaid for Lucent.\u201d Alcatel-Lucent\u2019s share price rose as much as 4 percent as some investors wagered the company, which has struggled to cut costs, might be poised for a turnaround. Alcatel-Lucent has lost about 9.4 billion euros ($12.1 billion) and has taken 7.9 billion euros ($10.1 billion) in charges since the merger. The company is reorganizing its 77,000 employees and trimming 750 million euros ($971 million) in operating expenses, including cutting 1,000 management jobs and 5,000 contractors. So far, the measures have slowed but not stopped the deterioration of Alcatel-Lucent\u2019s business. In the fourth quarter, Alcatel-Lucent\u2019s sales fell 5.3 percent, to 4.95 billion euros ($6.4 billion), from the period a year earlier. In the division that sells equipment to phone carriers, which makes up two-thirds of Alcatel-Lucent\u2019s business, sales fell 11.8 percent, to 3.3 billion euros ($4.3 billion). Ben Verwaayen, who took over in September after investors ousted the merger\u2019s architects, said the write-down was necessary to reflect an assessment of the company\u2019s true value. The charge was required because Alcatel-Lucent\u2019s market value had declined below the book value of assets on its balance sheet, Mr. Verwaayen said. Its stock has fallen about 85 percent since the merger. About two-thirds of the write-down stems from good will paid in the merger, Mr. Verwaayen said, with the rest reflecting lower values for outdated product lines. Despite the declines in profit and sales, Mr. Verwaayen said the new focus on technologies like Long Term Evolution, a super fast wireless broadband, would improve results.", "keyword": "Alcatel-Lucent;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0040122", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/04/08", "title": "Before the Silk Road, the Grain Road", "abstract": "Nomadic shepherds in the high plains of Central Asia used grain imported from China and southwestern Asia more than 5,000 years ago, according to a new study \u2014 perhaps to sprinkle over bodies in funeral rituals. The discovery came from a recent investigation of burial sites in Kazakhstan. The scientists, led by Michael Frachetti , an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, included a botanist and local archaeologists. Because what is now Kazakhstan was at a crossroads in the nomads\u2019 path, the findings , published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provide clues about the later emergence of the trade route known as the Silk Road . Early on, the nomads moved only by foot, spending winters in warmer valleys and summers in the mountains. Their seasonal moves broadened their interactions and helped disperse the grains, Dr. Frachetti said. \u201cThese folks were not traveling extremely long distances, but it spread fairly rapidly,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou can imagine a story where a person goes down in the valley, starts trading seeds and takes them back.\u201d The scientists also found evidence that by about 1500 B.C., the nomads were cultivating their own barley, wheat, millet and peas. Dr. Frachetti\u2019s graduate students found remnants of grains from the period in an ancient domestic oven, a storage vessel and a kiln. \u201cWe see the evolution,\u201d he said, \u201cfrom the introduction of seeds used for ritual purposes to something that has impact on the local economy.\u201d SINDYA N. BHANOO", "keyword": "Cereal;Archaeology;Silk Road;Central Asia;Proceedings of the Royal Society B"}
{"id": "ny0035993", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/03/16", "title": "Sentence Cut for Bin Laden Figure", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 A Pakistani official reduced by 10 years the 33-year sentence of a Pakistani medical doctor who had helped the C.I.A. track down Osama bin Laden, local news media reported Saturday. The doctor, Shakil Afridi, was arrested in 2011 after members of an American Navy SEAL unit killed Bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound. The raid caused the tumultuous relationship between United States and Pakistan to plummet to a new low as Pakistan called it a violation of the country\u2019s territorial sovereignty. In 2012, Dr. Afridi was convicted of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison. On Saturday, the judicial official, Munir Azam, the commissioner of Frontier Crimes Regulation in Peshawar, reduced Dr. Afridi\u2019s sentence to 23 years. Dr. Afridi earned the wrath of Pakistani officials after he helped pin down Bin Laden\u2019s location under the cover of a vaccination campaign in Abbottabad. But the charges against him in a tribal court accused him of aiding a banned militant group. Dr. Afridi denies the charges. Last August, Pakistani officials set aside the earlier conviction and ordered a retrial. But the decision on Saturday took the lawyers and family of Dr. Afridi by surprise. Samiullah Afridi, a lawyer for Dr. Afridi, was quoted by local news media outlets as saying that his client wanted a retrial and not a review of the earlier case. \u201cWe are not satisfied with the decision,\u201d the lawyer was quoted as saying. The arrest of Dr. Afridi was a point of contention between Pakistan and the United States, and Americans officials have repeatedly urged the Pakistanis to release him. While the Americans portray Dr. Afridi as a hero, Pakistani officials and much of the local media have portrayed him as a traitor.", "keyword": "Shakil Afridi;Osama bin Laden;Criminal Sentence;US Military;9/11,Sept 11;Pakistan;CIA"}
{"id": "ny0039177", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2014/04/16", "title": "A Taste of Asia in the Heart of Europe", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 It\u2019s the south bank of the Thames, not the Himalayas. But the view should be great, anyway. When the Shangri-La hotel opens next month on 18 floors of the tallest building in Western Europe, it will be an attempt to bring Asian-style accommodations to business travelers in a Western financial capital. A Shangri-La hotel lobby can verge on sensory overload, with chandeliers of softly chiming crystals, and carpets and tapestries that depict images reminiscent of the paradise described in the James Hilton\u2019s 1933 novel \u201cLost Horizon,\u201d from which the Asia-based hotel chain takes its name. Then there\u2019s the signature Shangri-La scent: a fresh, flowery essence at once clean, exotic and comforting. Those flourishes will be evident when the new London Shangri-La opens on May 6. As the chain heads deeper into Europe, after openings in Istanbul and Paris in recent years, Shangri-La is landing in London, but not in the affluent areas of Kensington or Hyde Park already flush with five-star hotels. Instead, it will be in the Shard skyscraper near London Bridge, making it the first five-star skyscraper hotel to open south of the Thames River \u2014 and the city\u2019s first skyscraper hotel. In fact, the hotel\u2019s presence in the Shard, a tower designed by the architect Renzo Piano, could prove to be the London Shangri-La\u2019s biggest selling point. The Shard, which opened last June, has offices below the hotel and apartments above it, and the building is topped by a public viewing deck that has become a major tourist attraction. Positioned on Floors 34 to 52 in of the 72-floor building, the London Shangri-La resembles many of the hotel\u2019s Asian properties. Founded in 1971 in Hong Kong and known across Asia as the ultimate homegrown luxury hotel brand \u2014 more than 50 locations in mainland China alone \u2014 many of its high-rise hotels are valued for their location above the urban clamor. \u201cIn the Middle East and Asia we are used to having hotels at the top or middle of a building, but this is the first luxury elevated hotel in Western Europe,\u201d Darren Gearing, the London hotel\u2019s general manager, said during a recent interview in the newly opened coffee shop on the ground floor. \u201cThe guest goes in at the ground level and is ushered into one of two elevators, and all of a sudden, 28 seconds later, they\u2019re 125 meters in the air and they\u2019ve got the London skyline.\u201d Shangri-La remains unknown to many Western business travelers. Its only properties in the Americas are in Vancouver and Toronto. The other 110 properties are scattered around Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, from Mongolia to Australia to Oman. The company plans to open 10 more hotels this year and about 20 more through 2017 throughout China and elsewhere in Asia, while expanding into countries like Ghana, Qatar and Sri Lanka. \u201cWhen we look at Shangri-La, it reminds me of when Four Seasons Hotels was created in Canada about 30 years ago,\u201d said Stefan Fraenkel, a professor of hospitality at the \u00c9cole h\u00f4teli\u00e8re de Lausanne, in Switzerland. At first, nobody outside Canada knew about Four Seasons, Mr. Fraenkel said. \u201cAs a North American company, it was like \u2018Go west, young man,\u2019 as the company focused on Europe and North America,\u201d he said. \u201cToday, with Shangri-La, it\u2019s \u2018Go east, young man.\u2019 And the two brands are very similar in that they\u2019re very focused on the individual. Image The hotel\u2019s presence in the Shard, a tower designed by the architect Renzo Piano, could prove to be the London Shangri-La\u2019s biggest selling point. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times \u201cShangri-La has a bit of the same DNA, in that it\u2019s trying to position itself into something in the industry we call \u2018the experience.\u2019 But it\u2019s more of an Asian experience.\u201d The London hotel\u2019s crown will be the 52nd-floor Gong, the highest bar in London, conceived by the Hong Kong-based interior designer Andre Fu. On the same level will be a swimming pool, also the city\u2019s highest, and 24-hour gym \u2014 although no spa, because of space limits. The hotel\u2019s one restaurant, Ting, will serve three meals a day. The T lounge, with a view of London over St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral and westward, will serve Asian dishes in a bar atmosphere. The hotel will be one of the only Shangri-La properties without a Chinese restaurant, again because of a lack of space, Mr. Gearing said. But Asian food of many kinds will be available via room service. \u201cIf someone has come in from Singapore and wants a bowl of wonton soup at midnight, they\u2019ve got it,\u201d Mr. Gearing said. Room sizes will range from just over 300 square feet to more than 2,000, or about 30 to 188 square meters; marble-clad bathrooms will have heated floors and mirrors with integrated television screens. Standard room rates will start at 450 pounds, or $745, a night, excluding breakfast. The Shangri-La suite, on the 39th floor and offering 180-degree views of the city, will go for \u00a319,000 a night. All business offerings \u2014 including video conferencing and the three conference rooms \u2014 will be available 24 hours, as will at least one staff member who speaks Mandarin, in addition to numerous other languages spoken by the 300-person staff. Tapping the London market is essential for Shangri-La, given that 10 percent of its clientele worldwide is British. The company is expecting that corporate travelers will make up 40 percent of its clientele at the London property. \u201cSince it\u2019s London, we know the leisure market will be strong, because our guests can walk to the Tower of London, the Tate Modern and Shakespeare\u2019s Globe,\u201d he said. The usual Shangri-La offerings will be on hand: a welcome cup of tea, butler service in the hotel\u2019s 17 suites, free Wi-Fi in all rooms. And then there\u2019s that ever-present fragrance \u2014 the Shangri-La Essence, which is piped into the ventilation system and is even bottled and sold on the company\u2019s website and in its gift shops. The company describes it as a mixture of vanilla, sandal, musk, bergamot and tea spiced with ginger. It\u2019s the fragrance that greets Shangri-La guests when they return from the humidity and heat of Bangkok or, with the new opening, the drizzle and crowds of London. Or the boulevards of Paris. On a recent sunny April day in the French capital, the Asian touches were all on display at the Shangri-La amid the quiet common areas of the Belle \u00c9poque former palace of the French imperial prince Roland Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon. \u201cFor me, the thing about Shangri-La that sells it every time is the size of the rooms and the little Asian touches that you can\u2019t find anywhere else,\u201d said Didit Ary Kurniawan, a resident of Jakarta, Indonesia, and a longtime Shangri-La customer who was visiting the Paris property for the third time. \u201cThe smell is the same everywhere you go, and it\u2019s relaxing and a little exotic,\u201d Mr. Kurniawan said. \u201cNo other hotel chain that I stay in has that sense of comfort that comes so easily.\u201d", "keyword": "London;Hotels;Travel,Tourism;Business travel;Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts;Shangri-La Hotel London"}
{"id": "ny0264062", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/12/30", "title": "Governor Can Improve Law and Justice, In One Stroke", "abstract": "In 2006, during a debate in the race for state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo criticized his opponent for having failed to give a DNA test to a man who was in prison for a murder that he turned out to have had nothing to do with. A few years before that, Mr. Cuomo spoke at a party for a book written by a man who had spent 12 years in prison for having handled $500 in a drug sting. When Mr. Cuomo became governor last year, he arrived with as strong a set of credentials in criminal justice as any New York governor since Thomas E. Dewey, who served from 1943 to 1954. He also arrived with knowledge that no governor before him could have had: the results of 20 years of DNA testing that had not only freed innocent people \u2014 New York is second or third in the nation in wrongful convictions , depending on how you do the counting \u2014 but had also provided an X-ray of the invisible, broken bones of criminal justice. DNA tests got innocent people out of jail and, just as important, showed how they got there in the first place, exposing the parade of mistaken eyewitnesses and the chorus of false confessions. But Mr. Cuomo made no promises about cashing in on the lessons of the DNA era for reforms during his first year, and didn\u2019t. The state was in the red, the health care system was financially decrepit, and his biggest legislative initiative involved marshaling votes for the legalization of same-sex marriage. He did not lay a glove on a world that he knows well. In addition, it now appears that he will end his first year as chief executive as many other governors and presidents of the last three decades have, by keeping his distance, at least publicly, from the granting of pardons and clemency. On both fronts, insiders say, that is likely to change. The governor\u2019s advisers are now conducting intensive reviews of requests for pardons or clemency from people serving severe sentences for drug offenses that are no longer punished so harshly, from immigrants who faced deportation over relatively minor crimes in their distant past, and from others who may have been justly convicted but who are serving prison terms that will hollow out their lives, at no benefit to society. For those able to get their cases before the governor\u2019s staff, his power to pardon and grant clemency can be a magical and restorative bullet. Mr. Cuomo does not intend to let that authority lie dormant, his chief spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said on Thursday. \u201cIt is a power that the governor will use practically and methodically to help ensure everyone is treated fairly under the law,\u201d Mr. Vlasto said. The power to pardon, which is a rare and absolute authority granted to the executive, has fallen into disuse since the early 1980s, the chief federal judge in New York, Dennis Jacobs , said in October in a speech at the New School. A turkey is granted presidential clemency at Thanksgiving. President Ronald Reagan used the power to pardon a stock car racer with an ancient conviction for moonshine-making. The first President George Bush erased the record of a man convicted of stealing six-packs of beer when he was a teenager. President Bill Clinton doled out a pardon to a wealthy man who had gone on the lam from tax evasion charges. In New York, the only pardon George E. Pataki granted during his 12 years in office was to the comedian Lenny Bruce, 37 years after his death, for his conviction on the use of obscenities in his nightclub act. The frittering away of such a mighty power, Judge Jacobs said, was a wasted opportunity to fix what the court system could not. \u201cWhat a shame that it should lie neglected or be put to trivial uses when it is the easiest way to improve law and justice decisively and at one stroke,\u201d he said. A pardon takes care of one person\u2019s problem but gets nowhere near the taproots of error from which injustice grows. For much of the last decade, the Legislature and various governors have been unable to agree on how to apply the lessons of the DNA era, like finding new ways to show suspects to eyewitnesses, and taping all interrogations of people in custody. Every time there\u2019s a wrongful conviction, the state loses a chance at a \u201crightful\u201d conviction. The guilty go free. The case that Mr. Cuomo talked about at that debate in 2006 is a prime example. While an innocent man was in prison for a murder that he falsely confessed to, the real criminal was on the street, and killed another young woman.", "keyword": "Governors (US);Politics and Government;New York State;Cuomo Andrew M;Amnesties Commutations and Pardons"}
{"id": "ny0017807", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2013/07/03", "title": "Nomination of Probst Indicates Thaw in U.S.O.C.-I.O.C. Relations", "abstract": "The chairman of the United States Olympic Committee has been nominated for membership to the International Olympic Committee, a potential boost for the United States, which is seeking to expand its Olympic footprint. Larry Probst, the chairman of the U.S.O.C., could become the fourth American with the I.O.C., but the first from the national organizing committee in more than a decade, signaling a thaw in the chilly relationship between the I.O.C. and the American committee. A formal vote will take place in September in Buenos Aires, and Probst is expected to win a seat on the I.O.C., along with eight other officials, hailing from Sweden to Kenya. \u201cI am truly honored to be nominated for membership in the I.O.C., and extremely grateful for the potential opportunity to serve the Olympic movement,\u201d Probst said in a statement Tuesday. Probst was the chief executive for Electronic Arts from 1991 to 2007 and is now its executive chairman. Image Larry Probst, left, with Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, in May, has been nominated to the I.O.C. Credit Pool photo by Mathieu Belanger Since Scott Blackmun took over as the chief executive of the U.S.O.C. in 2010, he and Probst have tried to improve relations with Olympics officials after a recent history of tensions. Their efforts have paid off in appointments; Probst serves on the I.O.C.\u2019s international relations commission, and Blackmun has joined the group\u2019s marketing commission. Last year, the I.O.C. and the U.S.O.C. reached an agreement that allowed the American committee to move forward with bids to host the Olympics. In February, the U.S.O.C. reached out to representatives from 35 American cities to gauge interest in bringing the Olympics to the United States for the first time since Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Games in 2002. The United States has not bid on the Games since Chicago lost out in hosting the 2016 Olympics. Three other Americans are on the I.O.C., but Probst could become the first official from the American Olympic group since Sandra Baldwin resigned in 2002 after she admitted to lying about her academic credentials. The three are Angela Ruggiero, a gold medalist in ice hockey; Jim Easton, a president of the World Archery Federation; and Anita DeFrantz, a bronze medalist in rowing. The United States still does not hold a spot on the I.O.C.\u2019s powerful executive committee, but that could change depending on the next I.O.C. president, who will be elected in September. The other eight proposed I.O.C. candidates are from Romania, Brazil, the Philippines, Russia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Netherlands and Sweden.", "keyword": "International Olympic Committee;US Olympic Committee;Larry Probst;Olympics"}
{"id": "ny0200903", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2009/09/10", "title": "The Times Co. Sees No Urgency in Selling The Globe", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 The New York Times Company still intends to sell The Boston Globe , but The Globe\u2019s finances have improved enough that the company does not need to sell it, top executives said Wednesday, in their first meetings with Globe employees since the company threatened to close the paper. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. , the company chairman, and Janet L. Robinson, the president and chief executive, said that if they selected a buyer, it would be based not only on price, but also on how the new owner would treat The Globe. The two sessions, each an hour long with hundreds of employees at The Globe\u2019s headquarters, was closed to outside journalists but was described by several people present \u2014 including some who spoke on the record and some who took notes \u2014 who gave nearly identical accounts. In a bitter episode last spring, the company said The Globe was on track to lose $85 million this year, and used the shutdown threat to wring major wage, benefit and job security concessions from labor unions, while also taking other steps to close the budget gap. After the largest union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, rejected an initial contract proposal, the company imposed a 23 percent pay cut, which was rescinded after the guild accepted a package of give-backs. On Wednesday, the company executives thanked employees for their sacrifices and Mr. Sulzberger said that as a result, \u201cour hand is not being forced. We are not in a situation where we must absolutely sell.\u201d But the executives would not say how much the paper was still losing, or whether it was now in the black. That drew a sharp comment from Brian Mooney, a reporter who was one of the most vocal opponents of the proposals put before the guild. He said the company had repeatedly fallen back on vague statements rather than providing hard numbers that would let employees make informed judgments. After the session, Mr. Mooney said, \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of damage done, and I don\u2019t think these kinds of meetings make a difference.\u201d In a question-and-answer session with the executives, Marty Callaghan, president of the pressmen\u2019s union, spoke for many people when he said, \u201cyou banged us around really good\u201d and said he feared more of the same from new owners. The tone of the exchanges was mostly polite, but there were a few flashes of anger. Jeanne Shimkus, who works in classified advertising sales, said she did not trust Mr. Sulzberger or believe what he said. According to those present, he replied that in that case, there was no point in their having a conversation. P. Steven Ainsley, the publisher of The Globe, acknowledged that he wants to start charging fees to online readers, but he said there were six approaches under consideration, each with potential pitfalls, calling it \u201ca conundrum within a riddle.\u201d During this year\u2019s labor dispute, Globe workers complained that Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Robinson had refused to talk to them directly, which they had not done since June 2008. Before taking questions on Wednesday, Mr. Sulzberger acknowledged that \u201creasonable men and women may disagree\u201d about whether they should have addressed the employees earlier.", "keyword": "Boston Globe;Newspapers;New York Times Co;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Labor and Jobs;Sulzberger Arthur Jr;Robinson Janet L"}
{"id": "ny0024164", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2013/08/11", "title": "Skillful Shots, and One Pants Pocket, Help a Swede Charge Into Contention", "abstract": "PITTSFORD, N.Y. \u2014 For Jonas Blixt, a 29-year-old Swede and a Florida State graduate, the third round of the P.G.A. Championship was a day of sound and unblemished golf. He did not have a bogey Saturday and played seamlessly as he charged into title contention entering the final round. But there was one blip for Blixt. On the 18th hole, he hit his tee shot into the back pocket of a retired doctor\u2019s slacks. But Blixt apparently knows something about playing by the seat of your pants. For starters, he knew the applicable rule. \u201cI didn\u2019t have to play it from there,\u201d he said. Blixt got a free drop near where the fan stood. With a 5-iron, he lofted a shot to the 18th hole\u2019s treacherous plateau green. The ball landed a bit short, but one odd bounce will often beget another, so Blixt\u2019s ball skipped forward and rolled within 3 feet of the hole. His birdie putt rolled directly in the hole \u2014 as opposed to toppling in the side pocket \u2014 and Blixt had a brilliant round of four-under-par 66. That put him at six under for the championship, three strokes behind the leader, Jim Furyk. \u201cI have never seen anything like that,\u201d Blixt said of a shot that was somehow wayward and accurate at the same time. \u201cI\u2019m very fortunate that the fan was standing where he was. It stopped the ball in a good place.\u201d That comment elicited giggles from reporters. Blixt guffawed as well. \u201cWell, where I had to drop I didn\u2019t have to deal with too many trees and stuff like that,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, thank you, hat\u2019s off to someone who did that to me.\u201d The fan, according to The Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester, was Muhammad Khokhar, who was watching the tournament with his son and two granddaughters. \u201cThe ball hit me in the back, and then the next thing I knew, it was in my pocket,\u201d Khokhar, 70, told the newspaper. Once Blixt made his way down the left side of the 18th hole, Khokhar, who did not appear injured, informed him where his drive had come to rest. Soon, Khokhar was holding the ball over his head as Blixt laughed and the surrounding crowd cheered and chuckled. The circumstances \u2014 the ball ending up in a fan\u2019s pocket and Blixt making a pivotal birdie on a taxing par 4 \u2014 left Oak Hill Country Club abuzz. Blixt\u2019s playing partner, Lee Westwood, was astonished. \u201cHow does that happen?\u201d Westwood said. \u201cI mean, these trousers I\u2019m wearing are a bit tight. I couldn\u2019t get a card and a pencil in my back pocket, never mind a golf ball. So that gentleman is doing well to catch that on the fly in his back pocket.\u201d Westwood, an Englishman mindful of American baseball and what state he was in, added, \u201cI think the Yankees ought to sign him up.\u201d The back-pocket birdie overshadowed a spectacular round of golf for Blixt, who had several top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour late in the 2012 season and broke through with his first tour victory at the Greenbrier Classic in July. Blixt, a former hockey player in Sweden whose favorite sports team is the Detroit Red Wings, made steady progress on the various minitours until this year, when he has slowly worked his way up the PGA Tour money list, where he ranks 35th. But he is new to the spotlight. When he had to step onto a small, raised platform to address reporters after his round Saturday, Blixt said: \u201cThis feels a little weird to be here. It feels like going back to college speech class. I hated that. Now it\u2019s even worse.\u201d He was engaging, though, saying that he drank some coffee before Saturday\u2019s round to give him an energy boost. But he said he drank too much coffee, which left him unsettled for the first three holes, even though he still played them in one under par. \u201cI calmed down after those three holes and things got better,\u201d he said. That is an understatement. As most of the golfers were beaten back as Oak Hill took revenge after exceedingly low scores Friday, Blixt charged up the leader board. He birdied the demanding fifth hole and the tricky ninth, then ran off eight consecutive pars. That kind of consistency was rare Saturday as Oak Hill\u2019s greens and fairways dried out and the wind swirled. Afterward, Blixt seemed surprised that a major championship was now in reach. He will be playing in the second-to-last pairing of the day. That may be a new experience, but Blixt was still making a few promises. \u201cNo coffee tomorrow,\u201d Blixt said. \u201cAbsolutely not. Nothing weird tomorrow.\u201d", "keyword": "Jonas Blixt;PGA Championship;Golf"}
{"id": "ny0257549", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/01/27", "title": "Wen Jiabao Encourages Chinese to Criticize Government", "abstract": "SHANGHAI \u2014 Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is known for his populist approach and near constant presence in Chinese headlines. He often races to the scene of natural disasters to comfort survivors. On state-run television, he can be seen eating with the poor in rural villages. Though often stage-managed by Chinese news media, his common touch has earned him the nickname \u201cGrandpa Wen.\u201d But this week, the 68-year-old prime minister made what many analysts consider a bolder statement: he appeared at the nation\u2019s top petition bureau in Beijing, where people go to file grievances, and encouraged citizens to criticize the government and press their cases for justice. \u201cWe are the people\u2019s government, and our power is vested upon us by the people,\u201d the prime minister said during the visit, according to state-run news media. \u201cWe should use the power in our hands to serve the interest of the people, helping them to tackle difficulties in a responsible way.\u201d The crucial factor was the setting. The national petition bureau is known as a lightning rod for anger about official corruption, illegal land seizures, labor disputes and complaints of all sort, the kind of problems that reveal China \u2019s continuing weakness on the rule of law. In a nation that fiercely snuffs out any sign of dissent or challenges to the ruling Communist Party, the government sometimes deems it appropriate to detain petitioners here or to forcibly send them back home. But on Wednesday, the state-run news media showed images of the prime minister meeting two days earlier with a small group of petitioners at the bureau, officially known as the State Bureau for Letters and Calls. The state-controlled media reports said he encouraged government workers to handle the petitioner cases properly. Mr. Wen also instructed officials to make it easier for citizens to criticize and monitor the government. The reports said it was the first time a prime minister had appeared at the bureau to meet petitioners since the founding of the Communist state in 1949. In recent months, Mr. Wen has appeared to press for political reform, though analysts are uncertain about whether he is pushing on his own or with the support of a broader segment of the nation\u2019s leadership. The media gave prominent display to articles about the visit on Wednesday, and blogs and Internet forums in China were buzzing with chatter about the visit. More than 6,000 postings about the visit appeared on the popular Web site Netease.com, many of them praising the prime minister. But there was also some criticism. On Sina.com\u2019s popular Chinese microblog, someone named Langzi wrote, \u201cShouldn\u2019t Wen be more concerned about how laws and rules are enforced?\u201d Another blogger added, \u201cChinese people are still dreaming that a lord will come and implement justice.\u201d Lu Yuegang, a journalist who writes about the plight of petitioners, called Mr. Wen\u2019s visit a positive move but said the petition system was flawed and that the government should abolish it and work on implementing the rule of law with judicial independence. \u201cThe petition system has almost zero effect,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cMost petitions received by the state bureau are sent back to the local governments, the place where the cases originate. The system is not a problem-solving system but a receiving-and-forwarding system. And it just recycles the cases. This is the core problem.\u201d And Phelim Kine, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that Mr. Wen had become adept at showing his concern for the poor but that the nation\u2019s legal system was still ineffective, the very reason so many petitioners travel to Beijing. \u201cPremier Wen consistently talks the talk on the crucial issues facing China,\u201d Mr. Kine said in a telephone interview. \u201cBut can the government really make the changes necessary to fix a broken system? \u201cThe court system doesn\u2019t work, and these people can\u2019t get legal redress.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Wen Jiabao;Politics and Government;Human Rights and Human Rights Violations;Communist Party of China"}
{"id": "ny0266785", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/03/07", "title": "Iraq Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens at Checkpoint Near Babylonian Ruins", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 At least 33 people were killed and 115 wounded in the Iraqi city of Hilla on Sunday when a fuel truck driven by a suicide bomber exploded at a checkpoint not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon. The Islamic State took responsibility for the fiery blast in a message on the Amaaq website, which is affiliated with the extremist group, and in a Twitter post. \u201cThe battle has just started and the coming will be worst,\u201d the Twitter post said. Ali al-Hamdani, who owns a restaurant less than 350 feet from the checkpoint, said, \u201cI felt an earthquake when the car exploded.\u201d He added, \u201cI immediately lay on the ground and saw flames all over the checkpoint.\u201d Mr. Hamdani, 54, said that he had then stood up \u201cto check on my friends who sell tea near the checkpoint,\u201d and that \u201cone of them was beheaded and others were killed.\u201d Um Zahra, 32, a teacher, had been on her way to work in a minibus when the attack occurred around 12:30 p.m. \u201cPeople were trying to evacuate injured people and burned bodies,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a very hard scene.\u201d ISIS\u2019 Territory Shrank in Syria and Iraq This Year The Islamic State has lost 14 percent of the territory it held in January, according to a new analysis. According to the authorities, the driver tried to enter Hilla \u2014 the capital of Babylon Province, about 70 miles south of Baghdad \u2014 but was stopped at the checkpoint. He then drove forward and detonated his explosives, which shredded the truck and engulfed other vehicles at the checkpoint in flames. The dead included many of the security officers who operated the checkpoint, the authorities said. \u201cWe have had information about it, but the security forces at the checkpoint weren\u2019t qualified enough to deal with it properly,\u201d said Falah Abdul Kareem, the head of the security and defense committee in Babylon Province. In 2014, a similar attack killed more than 70 people and injured 150 at the checkpoint, known as the Artifacts Checkpoint. The checkpoint was renovated with concrete barriers after that attack and provided with sonar devices to better detect hidden explosives. Some of the security personnel were trained to spot possible insurgents. Gen. Ali al-Zughaibi, the provincial police commander, said that the staff members at the checkpoint had become suspicious of the driver, but that he had started driving again, aiming for a crowd and moving too fast for the officers to stop him. As it has suffered defeats at the hands of Iraq \u2019s armed forces, the Islamic State has struck in supposedly safe civilian areas. On Saturday, Brett McGurk, President Obama\u2019s envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, said at a news conference in Baghdad that the Islamic State was losing the battle with forces aligned against it in both Iraq and Syria, and that the coalition\u2019s focus would turn to stabilizing cities seized from the group.", "keyword": "Bombs;Iraq;Terrorism;Hilla Iraq;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Civilian casualties"}
{"id": "ny0155006", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2008/01/23", "title": "Versus Extends Contract With N.H.L.", "abstract": "Buoyed by higher ratings this season, Versus has agreed to carry N.H.L. games through the 2010-11 season. The cable network, which is paying $72.5 million for the league\u2019s rights this season, will pay inflationary increases over the next three years. \u201cWe\u2019ve really benefited from our relationship with the N.H.L.,\u201d said Gavin Harvey, the president of Versus. \u201cIt was a game-changer for us. We certainly feel we\u2019ve seen great growth, but there\u2019s major growth ahead. We feel positive momentum.\u201d Versus, called the Outdoor Life Network at the time, made its first deal with the N.H.L. in August 2005, shortly before the league restarted after the 2004-5 lockout. The network exercised its option to extend its contract last month, but made public its decision Tuesday. \u201cYou don\u2019t renew at these levels unless you feel you have a property that\u2019s reached the objectives you\u2019ve set,\u201d said Bill Daly, the N.H.L.\u2019s deputy commissioner. \u201cVersus exercising its option tells you a lot about how they value the league.\u201d Through 29 games, Versus\u2019s 0.3 rating is modest, but it is 50 percent higher than the 0.2 average at the same time last season. In that period, viewership swelled to an average of 261,760 a game from an average of 195,666 a game last season. During the 2006-7 season, Versus\u2019s N.H.L. rating stayed flat at a 0.2, but because of the overall growth of subscribers, viewership rose 31 percent to 212,366. Harvey said the deal was turning a profit. \u201cWithout the N.H.L., we\u2019d be in a more difficult pickle,\u201d he said. Since the Comcast-owned Versus acquired the rights to the N.H.L. \u2014 after ESPN vowed to drastically reduce its rights payment to the league \u2014 the network has grown by about 10 million subscribers to 74 million, more than 22 million fewer than ESPN or ESPN2. It has also increased its subscriber fee to about 26 cents a month, from less than 20 cents. Versus also carries the Tour de France, college sports, boxing and mixed martial arts, but Harvey views the N.H.L. as its marquee property. \u201cIf you\u2019re into hockey, you\u2019ll stay for World Extreme Cagefighting,\u201d he said, \u201cand maybe even for hunting and fishing.\u201d He added: \u201cIt\u2019s all coming together because sports fans are finding something new. It\u2019s not replacing anything. We never said we\u2019d replace ESPN or Turner.\u201d", "keyword": "Versus;National Hockey League;Hockey Ice;Television"}
{"id": "ny0107332", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2012/04/24", "title": "Player-for-Player Trades Remain N.F.L. Rarity", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 Last October, cornerback Asante Samuel accused the management of the Philadelphia Eagles of \u201cplaying fantasy football.\u201d Samuel\u2019s remark was seemingly intended as an insult, but the Eagles do have something in common with fantasy football owners beyond simply collecting big-name talent: a propensity for making player trades, especially when compared with most of the other teams in the N.F.L. Since Howie Roseman became the general manager in January 2010, the Eagles have completed 25 trades, 15 of which included players and not just the exchange of draft picks. Roseman has made two such deals this off-season, acquiring the Pro Bowl linebacker DeMeco Ryans from Houston and sending the former starting offensive tackle Winston Justice to Indianapolis. \u201cI think it is organizational, and that starts from our owner, and that\u2019s about being aggressive,\u201d Roseman said. \u201cWe understand there are going to be mistakes made. But we\u2019re going to learn from the mistakes, and that\u2019s not going to stop us from being aggressive and try to make things happen.\u201d The Eagles\u2019 15 player trades tie the Seattle Seahawks for most in the N.F.L. since the beginning of the 2010 off-season. No other team has made more than 10 player trades, and most hover around five. The teams in last season\u2019s conference title games \u2014 the Giants, the San Francisco 49ers, the New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens \u2014 made between two and six player trades during that period. Although there will probably be picks exchanged during this week\u2019s draft, player trades remain a rarity in the N.F.L., especially compared with other sports. Executives and agents say the primary factor is the challenge of plugging a player into a specific system and the time it takes for a player to become acclimated to a new system and a new playbook. \u201cA third baseman is a third baseman, doesn\u2019t matter if they play for the Phillies or the Yankees,\u201d Roseman said. But in football, a linebacker in a 3-4 alignment may not play as effectively in a 4-3. A receiving tight end could be ill-suited for a team that requires its tight end to assume significant blocking responsibilities. A cornerback specializing in man-to-man coverage may become devalued in a zone defense. One reason the Eagles were so interested in Ryans was that they thought he fit better in their defense than in Houston\u2019s. The Texans went to a 3-4 defense last season, and Ryans was less effective than he had been during his two Pro Bowl seasons in a 4-3. \u201cIt\u2019s back to what I do naturally,\u201d Ryans said. \u201cI\u2019m a natural middle linebacker, and this is what suits my ability.\u201d The Texans also faced potential salary-cap problems, another reason teams makes trades. But it is more of a factor in other sports than in the N.F.L., which does not require guaranteed contracts. In sports with guaranteed deals, teams often exchange a player with an undesirable contract for another player with an undesirable contract, or attempt to find a team willing to pay a hefty salary. In the N.F.L., a player can be released with little haggling over the deal. \u201cA team can cut a player if they need to because they don\u2019t have the burden of going forward carrying guaranteed money,\u201d said Fletcher Smith, an agent who represents Donovan McNabb, who has twice been traded for draft picks. \u201cYou can\u2019t cut a player in the N.B.A. without incurring an additional cost.\u201d With 53 players in an N.F.L. locker room and the value placed on player development, teams are less willing to sacrifice a player or take on another for short-term gain. That is why a deal is more likely to be made for a draft pick than for another player. \u201cTeams, including us, are much more hesitant to take a player that they know and feel strongly about and go see him have success elsewhere,\u201d Roseman said. Andrew Brandt, ESPN\u2019s N.F.L. business analyst, has been an agent and a team executive, working with Roseman in Philadelphia and in Green Bay with John Schneider, now the Seahawks\u2019 general manager. Brandt said some organizations were less likely to move players, and others were more \u201cadaptable\u201d to trades. When told that the Eagles and the Seahawks topped the list of trades, Brandt did not seem surprised. \u201cThose guys are always going to be looking under every rock to find players to help them, and they\u2019re going to have more roster turn than other teams just in the way they think about player acquisition and player movement,\u201d Brandt said. The rarest type of trade is the player-for-player deal. Schneider and Roseman completed such a deal in 2010 with a swap of defensive ends when the Seahawks sent Darryl Tapp to the Eagles for Chris Clemons and a fourth-round pick. Schneider was in his first year as the general manager and had worked with Eagles Coach Andy Reid in Green Bay, so there was a relationship. In a different off-season, Tapp would have been an unrestricted free agent and Roseman said the Eagles would have made him a target. But in 2010, because of the rules associated with a year with no salary cap, Tapp was still under the Seahawks\u2019 control and the Eagles needed to make a trade if they wanted him. The deal was first discussed at the N.F.L. scouting combine in mid-February but was not reached until March 16 \u2014 after nearly a month of negotiations. \u201cThey were extremely creative on their part,\u201d Schneider said. Smith, Tapp\u2019s agent, said a big part of his going to the Eagles was his receiving a contract extension. Agents play a vital role in trades, especially when teams grant the player permission to seek a deal. Brian Mackler has seen clients like Domonique Foxworth, Deion Branch and Josh Wilson traded in recent seasons. When a team grants a player permission to seek a trade, his agent then tries to find the best situation for his client. Brandt noted that most player trade requests were euphemisms for wanting a new contract. Mackler said: \u201cYou don\u2019t just want to get traded. You want to get traded where you have the ability to capitalize.\u201d The N.F.L. is voting on a possible bylaw change that would move the trading deadline to Week 8 from Week 6. There were only two trades last season during the week of the deadline (a third, made by the Eagles, was voided), compared with at least 10 in the weeks of the N.B.A., N.H.L. and Major League Baseball trading deadlines. Brandt and Schneider agreed that a change could help facilitate more trades, although the same risks to consider when trading a player in March apply when dealing a player in October. In fact, concerns about a player\u2019s adapting to a new team would be more pronounced during the season, without the benefit of minicamps and training camp. Roseman cautioned against reading too much into the Eagles\u2019 high trade total in recent seasons. The Eagles were undergoing a roster transition, he said, and trading was a way to retool instead of rebuild. Of Schneider\u2019s 15 deals in Seattle, 13 came in 2010 when he and Coach Pete Carroll were overhauling the roster. Yet an element to player trading is the personality and philosophy of the general manager and organization. Roseman and Schneider said that trades would not always work. Neither would all draft picks. But an executive, they said, must be willing to make a mistake and understand when it was time to trade a player. \u201cI think you have to understand if you keep swinging, you\u2019re eventually going to make contact,\u201d Roseman said. \u201cAnd the ideal scenario is that both sides feel good about the trade, because that will give you incentive to do business with them again.\u201d", "keyword": "Trades (Sports);National Football League;Philadelphia Eagles;Seattle Seahawks;Football;Schneider John;Roseman Howie"}
{"id": "ny0177698", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/09/09", "title": "POW! Take That, Hitler! Men of Steel and Their Times", "abstract": "Superman greets you at the entrance to \u201cReflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes,\u201d the alluring show at the Montclair Art Museum . A life-size statue of the superhero stands guard over the displays. Unlike other recent comic book surveys, which tended to focus on a group of artists, a publication or a period, the current exhibition traces the way in which comics have reflected the trends, events and concerns of our society from their \u201cgolden age\u201d in the 1930s and \u201940s to the present. It presents an argument for the social relevance of comics as a popular art medium. To make the case, Gail Stavitsky, the museum\u2019s chief curator, has assembled more than 200 original comic drawings, rare comic books and graphic novels, many of them drawn from private collections around the country. One of the single biggest lenders to the exhibition is Michael Uslan of Cedar Grove, the executive producer of movies like \u201cBatman\u201d and \u201cBatman Begins.\u201d He obviously has a thing for superheroes. The modern comic book has its origins in the early 1930s as reprinted comic strips from Sunday newspapers. The superhero character makes an entrance a couple of years later with the arrival of Superman, the all-powerful alien from the planet Krypton, in the pages of a comic book from Action Comics in June 1938. His dual identity was apparently inspired by the double lives of the crusaders Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel, among a range of other influences, including mythological figures. The exhibition shows how the identities and concerns of superheroes have evolved over time to reflect social and political events. The original Superman of the Depression era, for instance, was a hard-nosed and rather cynical figure, a champion of working folk against the depredations of corporate greed and political corruption. In one of the comics on display, he foils a plot by some wealthy financiers to exploit the stock market and plunge the nation into another Depression. By the 1940s, however, Superman is playing a prominent part in supporting the Allies against the Axis powers. Batman was also enlisted in the war effort, having begun life in the pages of a comic book from Detective Comics in May 1939 following the success of the Superman formula. Of course, Batman was a dark and troubled human figure, relying on his scientific knowledge, skills and considerable personal fortune to pursue his activities as a vigilante crime fighter. A number of fresh superheroes dedicated initially to international conflict resolution emerged in the 1940s and \u201950s, as world wars and ideological conflicts proliferated. Among them were the Green Lantern, Captain Marvel and the first-ever female superhero, Wonder Woman. Captain America, a mega-patriot, appeared on the cover of his 1941 debut comic book in his nationalistic red, white and blue costume, with his shield of stars and stripes, slugging it out with Adolf Hitler. The later sections of the exhibition are broken down into historical periods, with comic book displays and drawings reflecting the mood and tenor of the era. After a time of conformity and censorship in the late 1950s, comic books sprang back to life and popularity in the 1960s with the introduction of more believable, morally ambivalent and vulnerable superheroes, like Spider-Man, who made his debut in the pages of Marvel Comics in 1962. He was an instant success. Spider-Man and the superheroes that followed in the 1960s, including the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Shang-Chi and the X-Men, paid less attention to international conflicts than to social and political issues at home: drug abuse, the struggle for civil rights, environmental pollution, Watergate, women\u2019s liberation and the rise of religious cults. Comic book heroes also filtered into wider public consciousness, with Wonder Woman appearing on the cover of the first issue of Ms. magazine in 1972 under the headline, \u201cWonder Woman for President.\u201d The 1980s and \u201990s were a period of change for the comic book industry, as it struggled to adapt to competition from interactive video technology and the Internet. Many of the popular comics of this period look like increasingly desperate attempts to cash in on the fame and marketability of existing superheroes: Superman dies in 1992, only to be resurrected and marry Lois Lane in 1996. More recent comic books continue to reflect a variety of social concerns and current events in an effort to stay relevant. For example, a 2001 comic has Spider-Man, Captain America and Daredevil helping to clear wreckage at ground zero after 9/11. In following issues they head out to bring those responsible to justice. Despite the industry\u2019s concerns about the relevance of comics, the world may need superheroes now more than ever.", "keyword": "Comic Books and Strips;Art;Museums;Montclair Art Museum"}
{"id": "ny0015906", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/10/10", "title": "Elephants Get the Point of Pointing, Study Shows", "abstract": "We point to things without giving much thought to what a sophisticated act it really is. By simply extending a finger, we can let other people know we want to draw their attention to an object, and indicate which object it is. As sophisticated as pointing may be, however, babies usually learn to do it by their first birthday. \u201cIf you don\u2019t get that they\u2019re drawing your attention to an object, they\u2019ll get cross,\u201d said Richard W. Byrne, a biologist at the University of St Andrews. When scientists test other species, they find that pointing is a rare gift in the animal kingdom. Even our closest relatives, like chimpanzees, don\u2019t seem to get the point of pointing. But Dr. Byrne and his graduate student Anna Smet now say they have discovered wild animals that also appear to understand pointing: elephants. The study, involving just 11 elephants, is hardly the last word on the subject. But it raises a provocative possibility that elephants have a deep social intelligence that rivals humans\u2019 in some ways. Researchers use a simple but powerful test to see if animals understand pointing. They put food in one of two identical containers and then silently point at the one with food in it. Then they wait to see which container the animal approaches. While primates and most other animals that have been studied fail the test, a few have done well. Most of them are domesticated mammals, with dogs proving to be especially good at understanding pointing. These results have prompted some researchers to speculate that during domestication, animals evolve to become keenly aware of humans. Others have made a different argument: they propose that the wild ancestors of species like dogs were already keenly aware of each other. In fact, that pre-existing capacity may have made those wild species easy to domesticate. In the mid-2000s, Dr. Byrne began to wonder if elephants could pass the pointing test, too. He got the idea while he and a graduate student were conducting an experiment on wild elephants in Kenya. They found that elephants could distinguish the smells of people from hidden pieces of clothing. Sometimes, Dr. Byrne noticed, the elephants would curl up their trunks, aiming them at the source of the smell. \u201cMaybe they were pointing,\u201d Dr. Byrne said. \u201cBut we don\u2019t know that. They could be just sniffing the breeze.\u201d Image Carl Zimmer Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times The logical way to start exploring this possibility would be to give elephants the pointing test. But these giant mammals are a lot more challenging to work with than a poodle. In fact, it wasn\u2019t until last year that one of Dr. Byrne\u2019s students, Ms. Smet, was able to run the test. Ms. Smet traveled to Zimbabwe, where a company called Wild Horizons offers elephant-back safaris. Each morning, while the elephants were waiting to take tourists on a trip, Ms. Smet would set up two buckets behind a screen. An elephant handler would bring one of the animals a few yards away from her. The elephant watched Ms. Smet lower pieces of fruit behind the screen and put them into one of the buckets. But the elephant couldn\u2019t see which bucket she put the fruit in. \u201cI actually checked that from elephant height,\u201d Ms. Smet said. Ms. Smet then brought the buckets out from behind the screen and stood between them. She pointed at the one with the fruit inside, and the handler walked the elephant toward the buckets. Ms. Smet noted which bucket it stuck its trunk in first. For two months, Ms. Smet tested 11 elephants. When she crunched the data afterward, she found that the elephants picked the right bucket 67.5 percent of the time. (One-year-old human babies do a little better at these tests, scoring 72.7 percent.) Ms. Smet found that the elephants could follow her pointing whether she stuck out her whole arm or just used her hand. And when she simply stood between the buckets, by contrast, the elephants stuck their trunks in the buckets at random. Ms. Smet and Dr. Byrne published their results Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The scientists were able to rule out the possibility that the elephants learned to associate pointing with food over the course of the experiments. \u201cThey were just as good on Trial 1,\u201d said Dr. Byrne. Other researchers were intrigued but cautious about drawing conclusions from the study. Diana Reiss, an expert on elephant cognition at Hunter College, wondered if the elephants had already learned about pointing by observing their handlers pointing to each other. \u201cIn these elephant camps such opportunities can easily go unnoticed by their human caretakers,\u201d said Dr. Reiss. Dr. Byrne and Ms. Smet plan to address this question and investigate whether wild elephants can point to each other. \u201cIt makes us want to revisit visual signals by elephants for elephants,\u201d said Ms. Smet. Dr. Byrne is also curious to know whether any other highly social wild mammals can also pass the pointing test. Whales and dolphins would be at the top of his list, but he isn\u2019t holding his breath for those experiments to be published. \u201cThey make elephants look easy to work with,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Elephant;Science and Technology;Current Biology Journal;Research"}
{"id": "ny0230284", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/09/16", "title": "Europeans Like Obama but Fret Over Some Policies", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 President Barack Obama \u2019s popularity remains high among Europeans, but there are growing doubts about his handling of some foreign policy issues, particularly Iran and Afghanistan, according to the annual Transatlantic Trends Survey published Wednesday. Although there was a slight decline in Mr. Obama\u2019s approval rating, down from 83 percent in 2009 to 78 percent this year, over half of the Europeans polled said they supported the United States\u2019 exerting strong leadership in world affairs. This is in sharp contrast to the ratings of Mr. Obama\u2019s predecessor, George W. Bush, who consistently received poor scores from Europeans. The latest survey, published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Compagnia di San Paolo, an Italian foundation, was conducted in June in 11 European Union countries \u2014 Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Spain \u2014 as well as in Turkey and the United States. The survey, a random telephone sampling of 1,000 men and women, 18 years and older, in each country, had a sampling error margin of plus or minus three percentage points. The major topics included attitudes toward the euro crisis, China, Turkey\u2019s foreign policy shift toward its neighbors and Poland\u2019s waning Atlanticism. With few exceptions, respondents in Europe said the euro has been bad for their economy. The only countries that had majorities supporting the euro were the Netherlands (52 percent) and Slovakia (64 percent). A plurality (46 percent) said it was the responsibility of each country\u2019s government to deal with the economic crisis, while 39 percent said Brussels should be primarily responsible for handling it. But most E.U. respondents (63 percent) agreed that being a member of the E.U., the world\u2019s biggest economy, was a good thing. Surprisingly, Germany was the only country in which a majority of participants (54 percent) said the European Union should have primary responsibility for economic decision-making, a view not shared by Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s coalition government. On two foreign policy issues, Afghanistan and Iran , the Europeans and Americans were at odds. A slim majority of U.S. respondents, (51 percent, down five percentage points from 2009) felt optimistic about stabilizing Afghanistan, compared to a quarter of Europeans. A majority of European respondents said their countries should reduce or withdraw all troops, while a majority of Americans supported maintaining or increasing a military presence. As for Iran, a big majority of Americans and Europeans said they were concerned about Iran\u2019s nuclear arms ambitions but differed on how to curb them. A majority of Europeans prefer economic incentives, while a majority of U.S. respondents support economic sanctions. Another divergence was over the growing role of China, with half of Americans believing that the United States had enough common values with China to cooperate on international problems. Almost two-thirds of European respondents said the values were so different that cooperating on international issues was impossible.", "keyword": "Obama Barack;European Union;Euro (Currency);Iran;Afghanistan;Surveys and Series;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions"}
{"id": "ny0104033", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/03/19", "title": "Traffic-Free Plaza Roils Little India in Queens", "abstract": "The new pedestrian plaza on 37th Road in Jackson Heights, in the heart of Little India , is an oasis of calm, a much-needed stretch of open space in a traffic-glutted area of Queens. Or, it is a glaring example of disastrous city planning, a blighted, unlovely esplanade that has all but decimated commerce in the neighborhood. It depends on whom you ask. Last September, in efforts to create more open space and decongest nearby Roosevelt Avenue, the city repurposed one block of the road \u2014 much as the Bloomberg administration has reinvented chunks of Times Square \u2014 to be a haven for pedestrians. But the plaza bears little resemblance to Times Square, just six miles away. A half-dozen traffic-blocking boulders and rickety picnic tables seem to be the sum total of the alterations to the streetscape to date, but business owners say it has been enough to turn a once-bustling block into a barren one. In the coming days, the plaza will be tweaked: parking spots will be added and a tributary road rerouted, among other things. But still the community remains divided between merchants and residents, who see the plaza, between 73rd and 74th Streets, as a boon for a park-starved populace. \u201cThis is a business place, this is not Times Square where people come from all of the world and sit there,\u201d said Javed Chaudhry, who sells phone cards and accessories at GRB Distributors. He recalled feeling a mounting dread as the boulders rolled in. \u201cI knew I was going to lose my bread and butter,\u201d he said. Without car traffic or the Q47 and Q49 buses that used to stop on the block, many merchants claim business has fallen by at least half. Park advocates say the recession is more to blame. But even during the economy\u2019s darkest days, says Raj Bhalla, who sells cellphones, Jackson Heights was largely spared, because of the bustling business of East Asian people drawn here for products from their homelands. Councilman Daniel Dromm, a Democrat who had pushed for the plaza, said he believed the business owners were overstating the impact, and he challenged the merchants to turn over their books and prove their losses. No one has done so. Even if the business community were to prove its claim, Mr. Dromm said, the plaza would most likely stay. The plaza was created after an 18-month study of safety and congestion in Jackson Heights by the city\u2019s Transportation Department, said Seth Solomonow, a department spokesman. No cost estimate is available, he said: the boulders, tables and paint were already on hand. It broke ground after unanimous resolutions by Community Boards 3 and 4. \u201cThey didn\u2019t ask me anything; nobody knew,\u201d said Abdul Karim, who manages the Jackson Heights Music Center on 37th Road. \u201cThey just came. They closed the street.\u201d Mr. Dromm said that he tried to reach out to business owners but that he was dismissed. Nooruddin Dashti owns two jewelry shops on the road. Since the closing in September, he says, he was forced to reduce hours at his newest shop after firing all but one of his employees because he could no longer pay them. Little India\u2019s customer base, the merchants argue, is not foot traffic. Destination shoppers come here for Nepalese, Indian and Bangladeshi goods. The closing ate up parking spots, merchants say, and made streets unnavigable. Some passers-by, however, enjoy it. \u201cWe like it, it\u2019s nice, it\u2019s kind of less crowded, otherwise you\u2019d see a lot of vehicles coming from here, there, you never know,\u201d said Karsang Dawa, who lives nearby in Woodside. \u201cBut it\u2019s very dirty, that\u2019s a problem.\u201d Mr. Dashti says he has been fined by the Sanitation Department for picnickers\u2019 litter. On a recent Thursday, piles of garbage spilled from trash bags on the tables and lumped in the street, next to boxes and a broken television. Cigarette butts eddied in the gutters. Workers from the Doe Fund now clean multiple times a day, says Mr. Dromm, who spent $42,500 from his discretionary fund on sanitation there. On a sunny morning in early March, the street was nearly empty. A few men slept at the blue picnic tables, more than one emitting a scent that made sharing a table impossible. The lounging men have become a fixture since the street closed, people who live nearby said. One man, who gave his name only as Derek, said he began hanging out on the block as soon as the street was closed. \u201cRather than be on an avenue that is all active and engines flowing here and going there,\u201d said Derek, as he paced back and forth unsteadily, \u201cit\u2019s calm and tranquil.\u201d Perhaps too calm and tranquil, says Mr. Chaudhry, the phone-card salesman. \u201cEither this park is going to be here,\u201d he says, \u201cor we\u2019re going to be here.\u201d", "keyword": "Jackson Heights (NYC);Pedestrian Malls;Parking"}
{"id": "ny0164450", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2006/11/13", "title": "So Many Causes, So Little Time for the Hollywood Do-Gooder", "abstract": "LAS VEGAS ON a clear October night along the Sin City strip, NBC Universal\u2019s chairman, Bob Wright, gathered friends and supporters to raise $1 million for Autism Speaks, the charity he helped found with his wife, Suzanne. It was a high-profile event in the season of high-flying Hollywood giving. For Hollywood, October had already been a brutal month: on the 5th came the Millennium Ball to raise money for U.C.L.A. On the 8th, a doubleheader \u2014 dinner for the Rape Foundation and an event for the Special Olympics. The American Cinematheque had its blowout fund-raiser on Oct. 13, and three days later the Fulfillment Fund, which helps poor students finish their educations, held its shindig. The month was not half over yet. Hollywood dignitaries heading up the Autism Speaks benefit committee at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino here included the DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife, Marilyn; the movie stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas; and Yahoo\u2019s chairman, Terry S. Semel, and his wife, Jane. But almost none of those luminaries actually attended \u2014 not even NBC Universal Television Group\u2019s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, and Mr. Wright is his boss. They skipped the stand-up stylings of the NBC star Jay Leno and the emcee gravitas of the former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw for writing a check. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to decide where to go,\u201d said Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios, who came from Los Angeles with his wife, Kelly, but was sympathetic to his colleagues who did not attend. \u201cMost of us get three to four legitimate invitations a week, and it\u2019s impossible to be physically at all of them.\u201d Mr. Meyer said that he came because he was moved by the Wrights\u2019 commitment to their cause; the power couple started the group after learning that their grandchild was autistic. But even Mr. Meyer has had to make choices. His studio gave up its annual sponsorship of TreePeople, a Los Angeles organization that plants trees around the city. Nonprofit activists know why. \u201cFor a lot of people, there\u2019s philanthropic burnout,\u201d said Andy Lipkis, the founder of TreePeople, speaking to a reporter at his annual fund-raiser at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the night after the autism event. Waiters circulated with trays of white wine around a \u201cgreen carpet,\u201d and an auction table included vintage T-shirts and a guided tour of the Griffith Park Observatory. \u201cIt\u2019s always a challenge,\u201d Mr. Lipkis continued. \u201cPeople are feeling pulled on.\u201d Hollywood has always had seasons of overbooked charity dinners, but as the merry-go-round spins from September to the end of this year, bone-weary fatigue has set in early. Another evening, another honoree. Another tux. Another sea bass with lemon grass. One worthy cause nudges another aside. And in the small circle of solicitors and givers, there is a desire to find a different approach. As one studio mogul put it: \u201cI tell them: \u2018I\u2019ll write a check, but I\u2019m not coming.\u2019 \u201d Actor-activists, asked constantly to come to public events, also acknowledged that they had scaled back their appearances. \u201cI\u2019ve had to let go a lot of efforts that I certainly believe in, like the Environmental Media Group,\u201d said Peter Horton, the producer and \u201cThirtysomething\u201d actor who was being honored at the TreePeople event. \u201cI just really felt I wanted to focus my efforts on a direct approach.\u201d In a world where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are changing philanthropy with megagifts and superambitious goals, it is only natural that Hollywood power players are starting to squirm in their swagged chairs, prisoners of the charity ball-and-chain. \u201cThe good news about the banquet circuit is that some hundreds of millions are raised for worthy causes each year,\u201d wrote the Variety editor Peter Bart in a column calling for an end to it all \u2014 the dinners, trumped-up humanitarian awards, endless speeches. \u201cThe bad news is that it\u2019s unrelenting, ferociously competitive and intensely political.\u201d Some say that the current model is on its way to oblivion, like 2-D animation and dial-up Internet service. Many others have appealed for temporary relief. \u201cOnce a year it would be great if Hollywood had one big megabanquet in which everyone could pick a special cause rather than the disease du jour,\u201d Mr. Bart wrote half-jokingly. The problem is, \u201cone rubber chicken dinner leads to more rubber chicken dinners, and the recycling of money,\u201d said Bobby Shriver, a former music producer who now spends most of his time on charity work with his globe-hopping rock-star friend Bono. \u201cThe relationship is: I ask you for $100, and in six months you ask me for $100. The leverage in there is very, very small. You work very, very hard for that $300,000.\u201d Which is pretty much the amount that Mr. Lipkis hoped to make after his Beverly Wilshire evening, with a major chunk deducted for expenses. (The parade of charity events also persists because it supports the local hotel and catering economy.) Mr. Shriver thinks that the ambitious goals of people like Mr. Gates, who is trying to eradicate certain illnesses, are trickling down. \u201cThe thing Gates may have done is make hard issues seem cool,\u201d he said. \u201c \u2018Build a concert hall? No, I\u2019m going to do river blindness.\u2019 People go: \u2018Let\u2019s look into that. Maybe I\u2019ll do waterborne diphtheria.\u2019 \u201d There is also movement the other way: adopting microcauses. At the United Talent Agency in Hollywood, for example, agents leapt at the chance to participate in an alternative to the banquet circuit. Last year, they began mentoring students from University High School in West Los Angeles, teaching teenagers there interviewing skills and financing school projects that were proposed by the students. An agency client, the actor Owen Wilson, was principal for a day, and the school is being used as a location in a film starring Mr. Wilson, which led to a school face-lift paid for by the movie production. \u201cWriting a check and showing up to a dinner is a very honorable thing, but it\u2019s not the way agents really want to be involved,\u201d said Chris Day, a spokesman for the United Talent Agency. \u201cWe knew if we set up a roll-up-your-sleeves program, they would jump in.\u201d Still, however fatigued Hollywood insiders may be, many say they have few options. Meanwhile, there will be more hors d\u2019oeuvres where the last tray came from. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of pain in this world, and people need a lot of help,\u201d said Mr. Lipkis, who started his group as a teenager in his parent\u2019s home. \u201cThe need is very much there.\u201d", "keyword": "Philanthropy;Actors and Actresses;Autism;National Broadcasting Co"}
{"id": "ny0204431", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/01/02", "title": "Heart of U.S. Occupation Reverts to Iraqi Control", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 The Green Zone, for nearly six years the headquarters of the American occupation of Iraq , passed from American to Iraqi control on Thursday, in a handover that was marked by two ceremonies of speeches, poems and music on a blustery cold day in Baghdad. The Iraqi flag was raised during a small ceremony at what had been the Republican Palace of Saddam Hussein attended by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. In a speech broadcast on state television, Mr. Maliki said that the handover had a special meaning for Iraqis. \u201cIt means we have gotten rid of the most dangerous remains of the policies that the former regime adopted,\u201d he said. Later, on a street elsewhere in the 5.6-square-mile Green Zone, a second ceremony was attended by senior Iraqi security officials, including the defense minister, and senior American Army officers, including Lt. Gen, Lloyd J. Austin III, the second-highest ranking United States commander in Iraq. At that ceremony, there were speeches about Iraq\u2019s readiness to take over responsibility of the Green Zone, children sang songs and a poem was read about Iraqi unity. An Iraqi marching band \u2014 with bagpipes \u2014 played the country\u2019s national anthem. Control of the Green Zone reverted to Iraqi control as part of the recent security agreement with the United States. From Thursday, the Iraqis will decide, with input from the Americans, who gets which buildings, what parts should be opened up to the rest of Baghdad and who can go in and out. Americans will even begin paying rent. Several committees have been set up, consisting of both Iraqi and American officials, to study and administer these matters, though it appears that little will be done immediately. Because of the immense strides in security, the reality outside \u2014 in the Red Zone, or, as soldiers call it, \u201con the economy\u201d\u2014 is inching toward equilibrium with the reality inside, but it is not quite there yet. So while Iraqi soldiers now stand at checkpoints, Americans are still watching from nearby, and intelligence about a possible terrorist attack has made the checkpoints more stringent than usual this week, an Iraqi military spokesman said. Plans to shrink the zone or open major thoroughfares, which could go a long way toward reducing Baghdad\u2019s strangling traffic, are promised but could be months away. Americans have been moving out of buildings since 2006, though it has not been decided in many cases who is taking their place. No real estate transfer is as significant as that involving the Republican Palace, Saddam Hussein\u2019s lavish showpiece, captured and occupied in April 2003 by American troops. It was home to the Coalition Provisional Authority and, later, the American Embassy. The American diplomats have moved into the enormous yet austere new embassy nearby, but the decision on who gets the valuable palace is still under discussion. It will probably be Mr. Maliki, said several Iraqi officials. Or President Jalal Talabani, said several others. Or both. Neither occupant \u2014 one a Shiite, the other a Kurd, both involved in armed resistance against the Hussein government \u2014 would be an agreeable sight for the man depicted on the huge portrait in relief that still remains, covered by a tarp, in the lobby of the palace. This portrait of Mr. Hussein as master architect is not the only reminder of his rule that has lingered in the nerve center of the new government. The country\u2019s most famous monument, though now inaccessible to most Iraqis, still dominates the Green Zone\u2019s skyline: the towering arches of crossed swords held aloft by forearms sculptured to resemble Mr. Hussein\u2019s own. Much less noticed is the tomb of Michel Aflaq, the founder of Mr. Hussein\u2019s Baath Party, which for a while was used by American troops as a gym and barracks. Despite the Green Zone\u2019s symbolic association with the American occupation, life inside the bubble is far from homogeneous. There are the American military and State Department minizones, where joggers, golf carts and duck-and-cover bunkers proliferate and parties take place, though with less abandon than in the early years. But there are also Iraqi high schools, an often startling firing range and a chaotic Iraqi taxi lot. Alongside the Tigris lies Little Venice, a well-tended neighborhood of minicanals where senior Iraqi government officials live in residences once occupied by Mr. Hussein\u2019s closest aides. Other officials have made their homes in the rooms of the Hotel Rasheed, or in Green Zone neighborhoods where driveways are guarded by dark sport utility vehicles and civilian Humvees. Many of the officials have complained that while they can come and go, relatives and guests cannot visit them without the same body searches and metal detectors awaiting every non-V.I.P. But that very complaint worries many of the other Iraqis who live and work in the Green Zone. Some were already living in the area when their homes became engulfed by the zone; others moved in after 2003 as poor squatters or high officials; still others lived in violent neighborhoods in Baghdad and lined up for work every morning at the frequently bombed checkpoints. Despite repeated mortar and rocket attacks, the Green Zone has been a sanctuary for these Iraqis, who number in the thousands. Hearing from relatives during the worst years about life in Baghdad \u2014 bloody and increasingly Islamist \u2014 was like hearing news from another planet. \u201cIt feels like Kurdistan,\u201d said Nabez Jamal Shahrazurri, 35, a Kurd who works for the Presidency Council. With the transfer of control, he is doubtful it will stay that way. The impersonal efficiency of the American checkpoints, which has angered countless Iraqis, is, in Mr. Shahrazurri\u2019s view, the chief reason that security has been so well maintained. \u201cThe American forces only deal with badges,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have no friends. The Iraqis have friends.\u201d Iraqis in the zone tend to view Americans more positively than their counterparts who live or work outside it, but many have kept their association a secret for years, as a matter of survival. In interviews, they expressed a deep fear that the transfer of the Green Zone would leave them in danger. Some families are so terrified they are considering moving elsewhere, said Adeer Kadim, 20, a taxi driver who has lived in the zone since 2003. Others say they are worried that they will be forced out. But the Iraqi government has been pushing for this day, and it seems natural that a security agreement that gives Iraq control of its radio frequencies and airspace would also include the seat of its government. \u201cEven if the Iraqi side is not as professional as the Americans, I still believe that it\u2019s better to be transferred,\u201d said Nawal al-Samarrai, the Iraqi minister for women\u2019s affairs and the sole cabinet member to vote against the agreement. \u201cThey are Iraqis, and this is their home,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are not foreigners, not occupiers.\u201d", "keyword": "Iraq;Iraq War (2003- );United States Armament and Defense;Baghdad (Iraq)"}
{"id": "ny0163716", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2006/02/12", "title": "At Charity Auctions, Doing Good While Doing Well", "abstract": "DAVID REDDEN, a vice chairman at Sotheby's, remembers that uncomfortable moment at a charity auction when one item just wasn't getting many bids. Donated at the last minute, it was described essentially as \"a week in somebody's house on Martha's Vineyard.\" Mr. Redden warned the crowd at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center in Garrison, N.Y., that if nobody was going to snap it up, he would. A few months later, Mr. Redden arrived at the property he had paid $2,000 to rent and found an eight-bedroom waterfront home. It was a bargain in that resort area. \"This wasn't the kind of place you would have been able to get\" at that price on the rental market, he said. For one thing, he added, \"it came with all sorts of boats.\" Going, going, gone -- for a song? Charities are increasingly turning to black-tie benefit auctions, using donated items, as the fund-raising tool of choice to attract a generation that has learned to bid on eBay. But as benefit auctions proliferate, and their offerings turn more elaborate to entice buyers, more bidders are getting a shot at luxury at bargain prices. Many of the country's most prominent annual charity auctions are scheduled in the coming weeks. So some bidders will have their paddles in the air and their eyes on the bottom line. No organization tracks the number of charity auctions nationwide, but live auction sales over all climbed to $240 billion in the United States last year, up 11 percent from 2004, according to the National Auctioneers Association in Overland Park, Kan. Benefit Auction Specialists, a company in Manassas, Va., that conducts charity sales across the country for schools, medical charities and other groups, said business was up about 40 percent from three years ago, with its average total per sale nearing $200,000. Late last month, the Naples Winter Wine Festival auction in Florida reaped $12.2 million. And the celebrity-packed Robin Hood Foundation auction and dinner in New York City last year raised $32 million. For all the glitz and glamour, there is a science and even a formula to charity auctions, according to organizers, auctioneers and veteran bidders. The same types of offerings generally soar: the private dinner prepared by a superstar chef (usually someone like Eric Ripert or Daniel Boulud), the coveted bottle of Champagne or -- that blockbuster of school auctions -- the chance for a child to be principal for a day. But most items, like a trip to a popular resort, end up selling for about 15 percent off their retail price or fair market value, said Fred Reger, a founder of Benefit Auction Specialists. And in silent auctions, in which bidders place bids on sign-up sheets, the deals can be greater, with luxury listings like Coach bags or skybox sports tickets selling for as much as 35 percent off. A quick look at an event's format can also provide clues to the likelihood of bargains. People seated at dinner tables for an auction almost always bid more aggressively than those sitting in rows, explained Richard Brierley, a Christie's auctioneer and wine specialist. That results not only from the availability of liquor, he said, but also from the peer pressure from tablemates. At an auction in Coral Gables, Fla., in 2004, Nick D'Annunzio's cue to start bidding came when he saw Madonna memorabilia that was failing to sell. He said the crowd, scattered across the lawn of a private home, simply wasn't paying attention to the sale, a benefit for the Bay Point Schools. So Mr. D'Annunzio, a veteran of about two dozen charity auctions, drew near the podium, hovered in view of the auctioneer and won a 12-day Celebrity cruise to the Mediterranean valued at just under $10,000, paying about half that. \"Concierge level, with a balcony,\" said Mr. D'Annunzio, who is co-owner of a public relations company focusing on fashion and travel. \"I got a deal.\" Sometimes, bargain hunting at auctions can turn belligerent. At the Winter Antiques Show's silent auction in Manhattan four years ago, \"there was a scuffle\" between two women bidding on an item of clothing and a man trying to buy it for his wife, said Steve Ketchum, a managing director at Banc of America Securities. The women \"were physically trying to block him from raising the bid,\" said Mr. Ketchum, who serves on the board of the East Side Settlement House, the charity that benefits from the silent auction. Mr. Ketchum intervened, and the women stormed out of the Seventh Regiment Armory's Tiffany Room, he said. Low bids aren't always unwelcome, Mr. Ketchum added. \"It's O.K. to bid 30 cents on the dollar for something that's unloved -- that, for whatever reason, isn't selling anyway,\" he said. But, he added, \"people lose sight of the fact that this isn't about the object they covet.\" Some people are opposed to bargain hunting at charity auctions. Isabelle Geday, a New Yorker who bids thousands of dollars annually at the auction for the Lyc\u00e9e Fran\u00e7ais de New York, where her daughters are enrolled, said she would rarely consider buying something for less than its appraised value and wouldn't like to be seen doing it. \"No, no, no,\" she said. \"Why would you do that?\" Auction bargain hunting can have drawbacks when it comes to tax breaks. By law, said Marc Albaum, a New York tax accountant, bidders can take a charitable deduction only for the amount they pay that exceeds an item's fair market value. In light of that, overpaying for some of the pricey experiences -- like $30,000 for a round of golf with Tiger Woods -- can actually be a good tax move for some donors, because the Internal Revenue Service values the item as a round of golf, period. Bargains aren't always just about price. Some charity art auctions give buyers the rare opportunity to get works by hot artists who have waiting lists of collectors. One tip when buying art at a charity auction: Check to see if it has been donated by an artist or by a dealer. Artists tend to donate high-quality works, but also tend to overstate their fair market value, Mr. Reger of Benefit Auction Specialists said. INDEED, a buyer should research the price of any big purchase at auction, since a donor may have a tax incentive to inflate value. \"There is usually no one to judge the items coming in for sale, so the items can be good, bad or indifferent,\" warned Helaine Fendelman, a past president of the Appraisers Association of America and author of several price guides for furniture, silver and folk art. The pros advise bargain hunters to look for larger sales (20 or more items), where interest may flag; for single-theme food or travel auctions with many similar items or for auctions offering trips that have stiff restrictions on when they can be taken, reducing the number of potential bidders. Items at private secondary school auctions, where parents do most of the bidding, don't tend to sell at low prices, but those for churches and colleges often do, auctioneers say. And best of all -- at least from the perspective of bargain hunters -- are auctions that are scheduled to start only after a series of speeches, or after a dinner, when people start streaming out. \"When I see that, my heart sinks,\" Mr. Redden said, adding that there are deals for bidders who stay. For some buyers, the biggest discounts may come in the days after the auction. As many as 10 percent of the buyers at any sale wind up not paying, organizers say. So an item may become available again, this time at a bargain price. The problem of nonpayment arises often enough that the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, which conducts fund-raising auctions every February to finance student scholarships, now requires credit card registration for its live bid auction and even for its silent auction, for less costly items. Organizers of such events, where wine is on hand, say bidders may become overenthusiastic. \"Once in a while, believe it or not, we have to chase people down\" who fail to honor their bids, said Lee Schrager, the director of the South Beach festival. \"And it's for charity.\"", "keyword": "BENEFIT AUCTION SPECIALISTS;NATIONAL AUCTIONEERS ASSN;PHILANTHROPY;AUCTIONS"}
{"id": "ny0257486", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/01/18", "title": "Rauch, a Reliever, Signs With Toronto", "abstract": "Reliever Jon Rauch and the Toronto Blue Jays agreed to a one-year contract worth a guaranteed $3.75 million. A 32-year-old right-hander, Rauch was 3-1 with a 3.12 earned run average and a career-high 21 saves in 25 chances for the Minnesota Twins last season. \u00b6Joey Votto, the National League most valuable player, signed a three-year, $38 million deal that allows the Cincinnati Reds to avoid arbitration. Votto, 27, was eligible for arbitration for the first time and would have received a huge increase over the $525,000 he made last season, when he led the Reds to their first playoff appearance in 15 years. reds (AP) \u00b6The Colorado Rockies agreed to a minor league contract with Jason Giambi. Giambi, 40, hit .244 with 6 home runs and 35 R.B.I. in 176 at-bats last season for the Rockies. rockies (AP)", "keyword": "Baseball;Draft and Recruitment (Sports);Toronto Blue Jays;Rauch Jon"}
{"id": "ny0174296", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2007/10/28", "title": "Star Horse From Europe Is Euthanized After Classic", "abstract": "OCEANPORT, N.J., Oct. 27 \u2014 George Washington, considered one of the top horses in Europe, sustained a fractured right front leg during the running of the Breeders\u2019 Cup Classic on Saturday and had to be euthanized. Trained by Aidan O\u2019Brien, George Washington was bred by Roy and Gretchen Jackson, also the breeders and owners of Barbaro , who was euthanized earlier this year after sustaining injuries in the 2006 Preakness Stakes. According to Dr. Wayne McIlwraith, the on-call veterinarian for the American Association of Equine Practitioners, George Washington, a 4-year-old colt, fractured a cannon bone and both sesamoids in the leg. \u201cIt was a hopeless injury so far as repairing it goes,\u201d McIlwraith said. McIlwraith said the decision was made quickly. \u201cAidan O\u2019Brien was on the racetrack with the horse right after it happened, and he requested euthanasia,\u201d he said. George Washington, who was based in Ireland, made his debut in the United States in last year\u2019s Classic, finishing sixth. He was then retired to stud but turned out to be sterile and was returned to training. He failed to win this year in four starts. He never appeared to be comfortable Saturday on a sloppy track. He was in midpack down the backstretch and started to drop back entering the far turn. He was eased about a sixteenth of a mile from the wire by jockey Mick Kinane. Despite the conditions, the first seven Breeders\u2019 Cup races went off without any apparent problems. But McIlwraith did not discount the possibility that the sloppy conditions might have led to the injury because the horse could have been running on the base of the track. \u201cObviously, the base is not made for them to be running on directly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe rest of the races went off well, but it\u2019s always a concern.\u201d", "keyword": "Breeders' Cup World Thoroughbred Championships;Horse Racing"}
{"id": "ny0114832", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/11/08", "title": "Supreme Court to Begin Weighing Gay Marriage Cases", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The victories for same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the first ones achieved at the ballot box rather than through courts or legislatures, are evidence of a remarkable shift in public opinion. They are also exceptionally timely data points for the Supreme Court . At their private conference scheduled for Nov. 20, the justices plan to consider some 10 requests that they address various aspects of what the Constitution has to say about same-sex marriage. It is close to certain that the court will agree to hear at least one case on the subject, with a decision expected by June. The justices tend to say they are not influenced by public opinion. But they do sometimes take account of state-by-state trends, and the latest developments will not escape their notice. On Tuesday, Maine and Maryland became the first states to embrace same-sex marriage through direct democracy, and Washington State seems poised to follow once all of the votes there are counted. Voters in Minnesota, which continues to bar same-sex marriage, rejected an attempt to withdraw the subject from democratic debate and judicial scrutiny through a state constitutional amendment. \u201cI would guess that 50 years from now, the high school civics books will treat Nov. 6, 2012, as a red-letter day in the history of the gay rights movement,\u201d said Michael J. Klarman , a law professor and historian at Harvard. Assuming Washington follows Maine and Maryland, he added, \u201cThe number of states with gay marriage increased by 50 percent overnight.\u201d But it is not clear which side benefited more from those developments at the Supreme Court. Supporters of traditional marriage, even as they registered disappointment, said the results showed that the question could be resolved democratically. \u201cIt bolsters our case,\u201d said Brian S. Brown , the president of the National Organization for Marriage. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to say you need a federal resolution of this question if states are resolving it for themselves.\u201d Adam Umhoefer , the executive director of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group behind a California case seeking to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, expressed mixed feelings about the developments. They were, he said, the right outcomes in the wrong forums. \u201cFundamental constitutional rights like marriage,\u201d he said, \u201cshould never be subjected to a popular vote.\u201d Other advocates for same-sex marriage were making more subtle calculations. Social justice movements, said Evan Wolfson , the president of Freedom to Marry, must eventually give rise to a national resolution. The question, he said, is timing. \u201cWe now have irrefutable momentum,\u201d he said. Beyond that, though, one important benchmark, the Supreme Court\u2019s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia , provides mixed signals. The decision, which was unanimous, struck down bans on interracial marriage fairly late in the day, at a time when only 16 states still barred such unions. By that measure, Mr. Wolfson said, \u201ceven with our wins last night, we still have work to do.\u201d On the other hand, he said, some 70 percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage in 1967, while recent polls show that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. The situation, then, he said, is at once more and less favorable than the one in 1967. Dale Carpenter , a law professor at the University of Minnesota who opposed the proposed constitutional amendment, said supporters of same-sex marriage had reason to be wary of a Supreme Court decision on whether the Constitution requires it. \u201cThis looks like increasing momentum for same-sex marriage,\u201d he said of Tuesday\u2019s developments, \u201cbut I\u2019ve got to say it\u2019s still 41 to 9. It\u2019s been pretty rare for the court to take on 41 states.\u201d At their private conference, the justices may agree to hear the California case, Hollingsworth v. Perry. But they need not decide it on broad grounds if they do. Indeed, the appeals court in the case gave the justices a legal road map for requiring same-sex marriage in California but not the rest of the nation. The Supreme Court could also sidestep or defer consideration of the case. But the justices will almost certainly agree to decide one or more cases about a narrower question: whether the federal Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional. Two federal appeals courts have struck down the part of the law that requires the federal government to deny benefits to same-sex couples married in states that allow such unions. The Supreme Court almost always reviews decisions in which lower courts invalidate federal laws. One aspect of Tuesday\u2019s results may hurt the cause of same-sex marriage in the courts, which sometimes insist on more searching judicial scrutiny of the justifications for measures that discriminate against politically powerless minorities than of those for ordinary legislation. That was a theme, though a minor one, of the decision last month from the federal appeals court in New York striking down the federal marriage law. \u201cHomosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public,\u201d Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote for the majority of a divided three-judge panel. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is thought to hold the crucial vote in gay rights cases, and he wrote the majority opinions in Lawrence v. Texas , a 2003 decision that struck down a Texas law making gay sex a crime, and in Romer v. Evans , a 1996 decision that struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that banned the passage of laws protecting gay men and lesbians. Professor Klarman said that it \u201cseems plausible\u201d that support for same-sex marriage at the polls \u201cwould influence the view of a justice like Anthony Kennedy, who clearly is influenced by \u2018evolving social mores\u2019 in his constitutional interpretations.\u201d As Justice Kennedy considers how to approach same-sex marriage, Mr. Wolfson said, he may have one eye on history. \u201cDo you want to be Plessy or Brown?\u201d Mr. Wolfson asked, referring to Plessy v. Ferguson , the 1896 decision that said \u201cseparate but equal\u201d facilities were constitutional, and Brown v. Board of Education , the 1954 decision that said otherwise.", "keyword": "Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships;Law and Legislation;Supreme Court;Constitutional Amendments;Maine;Maryland;Referendums;States (US);Washington (State)"}
{"id": "ny0182731", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/12/10", "title": "Chocolate in Beta Testing, Offered by a Wired Founder", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 -- In a vast refurbished warehouse on one of this city\u2019s historic pier, Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired magazine, is at it again. Only this time, his project has nothing to do with media or high technology. It is hand-crafted chocolate. But Mr. Rossetto, 58, is applying the language of high-technology business to chocolate making. Mr. Rossetto and his business partner, Timothy Childs, explain that their company, Tcho, is still in start-up mode, its chocolate still in beta. Beginning today, Tcho\u2019s dark chocolate will be available in 50-gram beta bars, representing Version .10. The $4 bars, made of Ghanaian beans and wrapped in brown paper, will be sold only locally at first, only to those who have signed up on the Tcho Web site, and only to those willing to go pick up the chocolate at Tcho headquarters. \u201cA lot of people think companies like See\u2019s and Godiva are chocolate makers,\u201d said Mr. Childs. \u201cBut they\u2019re not. They\u2019re confectioners who take someone else\u2019s chocolate and do something with it.\u201d Others, said Mr. Childs, simply remelt other people\u2019s chocolate and put their brand on it. Slightly less fresh-faced than he was in the early 1990s, but with no less fervor for his product, Mr. Rossetto likes to say that Tcho is \u201cwhere Silicon Valley start-up meets San Francisco food culture.\u201d The 15-person start-up, said Mr. Rossetto, combines many elements of classic Silicon Valley innovation: Tcho\u2019s approach to working with farmers, the rethinking of the chocolate lexicon, and its approach to raising money. Mr. Childs, 43, a technologist who is a longtime friend of Mr. Rossetto\u2019s, has been working with chocolate for the last five years. The two decided to go into business together two years ago when Mr. Childs called Mr. Rossetto to tell him he had found a chocolate factory for sale in an old castle in Wernigerode, in the former East Germany. Mr. Rossetto agreed on the spot to buy the equipment and to have it shipped to San Francisco, where it arrived still coated in chocolate. The machinery has been refurbished and is being updated with modern control systems and video cameras for monitoring. The rest of Tcho\u2019s financing has come not from venture capitalists, but from a few dozen friends and family members. Mr. Rossetto said he began his involvement with Tcho as little more than an investor, and as he grew increasingly fascinated by the process of making and marketing fine chocolate, his role gradually expanded. Now he is chief executive officer. And not only is Mr. Childs the founder, but he is, appropriately, Tcho\u2019s chief chocolate officer. Mr. Childs said that wherever possible, Tcho buys fair-trade organic beans. The company also hopes to move beyond prices to close engagement with the cacao producers, even sending them the finished chocolate. Many cacao farmers have never tasted finished chocolate from their beans, said Mr. Childs. Tcho is entering a competitive market. At least a dozen brands of artisan chocolate can be found at many grocery stores. For now, the beta phase at Tcho consists of small batches of handmade bars packaged in brown paper. But when the factory is up and running, early next year, mail-order distribution will be nationwide, through its Tcho.com Web site. By next summer, the partners will open a store in their 15,000-square foot converted warehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. Once Version 1.0 hits the market, packaging will be modern, said Mr. Rossetto, \u201creflective of what the founder of Wired might do if he was designing chocolate.\u201d", "keyword": "Chocolate;Rossetto Louis;Wired;Silicon Valley (Calif);Childs Timothy"}
{"id": "ny0078520", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/05/25", "title": "Slow Stephen Curry Down? This Division III College Did", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 Stephen Curry was busy assembling another special performance for the Golden State Warriors on Saturday night when Adam Choice, an admissions official at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, started exchanging text messages with Justin Sherman, one of his former college teammates. \u201cI still can\u2019t believe that Steph is this good,\u201d Choice recalled writing. In leading the Warriors to a three-games-to-none lead over the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference finals, Curry has managed to ritualize the extraordinary, whether that means setting a record for 3-pointers in a postseason, scoring 40 points against the Rockets in Game 3 or outmaneuvering every defender who attempts to slow his march to history. A victory against the Rockets on Monday night at Toyota Center would secure the Warriors\u2019 first trip to the N.B.A. finals since 1975. But for a small group of former players at Colby College, a Division III program in Waterville, Me., every feat by Curry presents another opportunity to reminisce about the time they held him in check \u2014 kind of, sort of \u2014 when he was a freshman at Davidson College. On Nov. 21, 2006, before a modest crowd at Davidson\u2019s John M. Belk Arena, Curry shot 10 of 24 from the field against the Colby Mules. Sure, he finished with 29 points. And yes, Davidson eventually plowed its way to a 99-69 victory against an undersize opponent. But the experience alone was something for the players from Colby to savor \u2014 \u201cI remember their next game after us was Duke,\u201d said Drew Cohen, the team\u2019s starting center \u2014 and its mystique has only grown as the years have passed. At the time, none of the players could have known that Curry would go on to become the N.B.A.\u2019s most valuable player. \u201cWhat this guy has become,\u201d Cohen said, \u201cis crazy.\u201d Lightly recruited out of high school, Curry was still largely known for being the son of the former N.B.A. player Dell Curry. He was not particularly imposing, either, with a slight build and a six-foot frame. But Mark Gaudet, a guard for Colby, kept telling his teammates, \u201cThis kid is going to be good.\u201d Dick Whitmore, who was then the coach at Colby, reinforced that message by showing his players film of Curry scoring 32 points in a 10-point loss to Michigan that month. Colby had opened its season against Babson College and Washington University, both fine programs. But Babson was not Michigan. Nick Farrell, a guard who would be tasked with defending Curry for much of the game, recalled watching the film and thinking, \u201cIf this guy is torching Michigan, what\u2019s he going to do to us?\u201d Still, for Division III players from Maine, an escape to North Carolina in late November to face a Division I opponent was a thrill \u2014 at least until their plane landed. \u201cWe get there, and it\u2019s snowing,\u201d said Artie Cutrone, a guard who was a sophomore at the time. Whitmore, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how to contend with Davidson\u2019s size. Colby had an outstanding shot blocker in Cohen but was otherwise undermanned in the frontcourt. Whitmore decided that he would have his perimeter players collapse and at least make life more difficult for Davidson\u2019s post players. If Davidson was going to beat Colby by launching jumpers from the outside, so be it. But Whitmore, who retired from Colby in 2011, felt it would be more effective than letting Davidson feast on layups. As for dealing with Curry? \u201cHe was a first-year guy,\u201d Whitmore said, \u201cso we said, \u2018Well, we\u2019ll let him shoot.\u2019 \u201d In hindsight, it was an unconventional strategy. But for a while, it seemed to work. After falling behind early, Colby adapted to Davidson\u2019s full-court pressure and mounted a small run late in the first half. Image Curry in 2008. Colby College, in Maine, once held him to 10 for 24 from the field. Credit Streeter Lecka/Getty Images \u201cI think they came out not expecting us to put up a fight at all,\u201d Farrell said. Bob McKillop, Davidson\u2019s coach, called for a timeout with his team holding a slim lead. \u201cIt was one of those moments where it\u2019s kind of why you coach,\u201d Whitmore said, \u201cbecause my guys get back in the huddle, and it\u2019s like, my God, we\u2019re closing in on a Division I team.\u201d McKillop was so vocal during the timeout that players from Colby could hear him from their bench. His message? Colby might be Division III, but these guys can play. So wake up! \u201cBob got his guys going,\u201d Whitmore said. \u201cAfter that, the game became much more complicated for us.\u201d As Curry warmed up, Davidson\u2019s lead began to swell \u2014 from 10 to 20 to 30. Colby went to a 2-3 zone for long stretches, but nothing seemed to affect Curry. \u201cI remember that his demeanor never changed,\u201d Farrell said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter how you were guarding him. Even if he was missing shots, he knew he was going to make some.\u201d Curry wound up setting program records for 3-pointers made (nine) and attempted (20). It was not his most efficient effort, but he made such an impression on the players from Colby that several of them sent him friend requests on Facebook after the game. Curry accepted them all and even wished the players luck for the rest of their season. \u201cHe\u2019s got a verified account and all that now,\u201d Choice said, \u201cbut I know I\u2019m still friends with him on Facebook.\u201d Whitmore wrote in his postgame notes that Curry had the quickest release of any player he had ever coached against. \u201cI mean, he was just amazing \u2014 even at that time,\u201d Whitmore said. \u201cSome guys catch and shoot. He was touch and shoot.\u201d Many of the former players from that Colby team have kept in touch with one another \u2014 Cutrone said he was expecting nine of his teammates to attend his wedding this summer \u2014 and Curry is a consistent topic of conversation. When Curry scored 54 points at Madison Square Garden two seasons ago, Choice sent a message to several of his friends. \u201cWe must be better than the Knicks,\u201d he wrote.", "keyword": "College basketball;Basketball;Stephen Curry;College Sports;Davidson College;Colby College;Golden State Warriors"}
{"id": "ny0079881", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/02/21", "title": "GFI Group\u2019s Board to Support BGC Partners Takeover Bid", "abstract": "The board of the GFI Group, the New York brokerage and clearing house, threw its support on Friday behind a takeover bid by BGC Partners after shareholders rejected a tie-up with the CME Group last month. In a statement on Friday, BGC Partners said that GFI\u2019s directors had agreed unanimously to support its offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of GFI. BGC Partners, which started a hostile bid for the company last year, has offered $6.10 a share in cash, valuing the company at about $778 million. As part of the agreement, BGC will be allowed to chose six out of eight directors on GFI\u2019s board. At least three of the directors will be independent directors chosen by BGC. BGC also extended the deadline, which had been Thursday, for GFI investors to tender their shares until Feb. 26. Investors agreed to sell 43.3 million of their shares to BGC through Thursday, BGC said. Together with 17.1 million shares held by BGC, that represents nearly 48 percent of GFI\u2019s outstanding shares. \u201cWe are thrilled to welcome the world-class people from GFI into the BGC family,\u201d Howard Lutnick, the BGC chairman and chief executive, said in a news release. \u201cWe have an extraordinary opportunity ahead to grow with BGC\u2019s strong financial position coupled with both companies\u2019 extraordinarily talented brokers and market leading technology.\u201d The announcement is the latest turn in a saga that kicked off last fall when BGC Partners announced plans to start a competing bid for the company. GFI reached a merger agreement in July with the CME Group, which operates the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Mercantile Exchange. CME was forced to up its bid several times under pressure from BGC and shareholders eventually rejected the CME offer in January. Following the acquisition, GFI will operate as a division of BGC, reporting to Shaun D. Lynn, the BGC president. BGC and GFI will remain separately branded divisions in the company.", "keyword": "Mergers and Acquisitions;BGC Partners;GFI Group;CME Group"}
{"id": "ny0010542", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/02/07", "title": "In Romania\u2019s Top Hockey Team, Ethnic Hungarians Find a Strong Voice", "abstract": "MIERCUREA CIUC, Romania \u2014 A city of 38,000 on a plateau in eastern Transylvania, Miercurea Ciuc is famous for three things: its status as one of Romania\u2019s coldest places; its brewery, where the country\u2019s Ciuc beer is produced; and its ice hockey team, which has won the last six Romanian league championships. But the name on the front of the team\u2019s blue-and-white hockey jerseys is not Miercurea Ciuc. It is Szekelyfold, the Hungarian word for the Szekely Land, a former province of the Kingdom of Hungary. Printed on the ice at the Vakar Lajos rink is the Hungarian name of the team: Hoki Sport Club Csikszereda. The fans at the team\u2019s home games chant the Szekely Land anthem in Hungarian. The Szekely Land, named for a warrior tribe that dates to the Middle Ages, is a Hungarian-dominated area of Romania, covering three counties in the center of the country. The roughly 1.2 million Hungarians represent Romania\u2019s largest ethnic minority, about 6 percent of the country\u2019s population. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I marooned millions of Hungarians in what is now Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia. The Szekely found themselves cut off and subject to a policy of assimilation, including heavy restrictions on the use of their language, under the former communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu. But for the past two decades, the region\u2019s ethnic Hungarians have been campaigning for greater autonomy, with Hoki Sport Club Csikszereda in the vanguard. Romania may be a soccer country, but in Csikszereda, ice hockey is the only game in town. The hockey club functions much like the storied Spanish soccer club Barcelona, which kept alive the flame of Catalan nationalism under the repressive rule of General Franco. \u201cI can say that this sports club, this ice hockey team, represents the Szekely,\u201d said Papp Elod, the club\u2019s former president, who is now a local politician. \u201cWe like to say that ice hockey represents our history as all our ancestors were warriors, and ice hockey needs warriors. There are very few Romanians who play for our club.\u201d Standing rinkside, Timo Lahtinen, the team\u2019s 65-year-old Finnish coach, said, \u201cEveryone in this town plays hockey and talks about hockey, this is the hockey center of Romania.\u201d Lahtinen paused, then corrected himself, \u201cActually, Hungary.\u201d The success of Csikszereda had caused a problem within Romanian ice hockey. The Romanian national team is almost entirely made up of ethnic Hungarians who play for Csikszereda. \u201cThe whole national team is only my players, and everyone speaks Hungarian,\u201d Lahtinen said. This anomaly reached a critical point during a 2011 game between Romania and Hungary in Miercurea Ciuc. After the game, almost all of Romania\u2019s players joined with their opponents to sing the Hungarian anthem. Image Outside the Vakar Lajos rink, where the Hungarian name of the team, Hoki Sport Club Csikszereda, is printed on the ice. Credit James Montague for The New York Times \u201cSome of the paparazzi caught it, and it was a big scandal,\u201d said Attila Goga, Csikszereda\u2019s captain, who has played for the Romanian national team for a decade but holds dual Romanian-Hungarian citizenship. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit strange, but I can see that, too. They don\u2019t understand our situation here.\u201d There was only one anthem Goga was going to sing. \u201cEveryone here is Hungarian,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel Hungarian. From a little child I spoke Hungarian. We learn Romanian, too, but Hungarian is my mother language.\u201d The fall of communism gave some Hungarian minorities the chance to push for greater cultural and political freedoms after years of repression. A move by the Hungarian government in 2010 to grant joint citizenship to its former subjects across Eastern and Central Europe has emboldened old allegiances. Laszlo Tokes, a former vice president of the European Parliament and one of Romania\u2019s most prominent Hungarian politicians, is campaigning for full Hungarian autonomy within Romania, centered on the Szekley Land, with sports playing an important part. \u201cOur culture was oppressed,\u201d Tokes said. \u201cSo it happened in sport. In Csikszereda that is why it is so important, the role of Hungarian sport life. Hockey sport because it is the people of Hungarian identity. Sport sometimes takes this function and role in a minority.\u201d Tokes, now a bishop, was a hero of the 1989 revolution that overthrew Ceausescu. When Romania\u2019s secret police attempted to arrest him, his congregation resisted, sparking nationwide protest that brought down the regime. Tokes called Romanians \u201cvery good friends,\u201d but said they did not accept his people as Hungarian. \u201cSometimes we are called Romanians speaking Hungarian,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is not true. We are full Hungarians in the original sense of the word.\u201d He added: \u201cEven if we lived on the moon, we would be Hungarian. Even if we are living in Transylvania, Romania, we consider ourselves Hungarians.\u201d Hoki Sport Club Csikszereda has attracted local businessmen and politicians promoting the Szekely Land. Although its home rink was built in the 1970s, it is well maintained, with a hotel next door to accommodate traveling teams. Inside, the walls are covered with advertisements from local businesses in Hungarian; Ciuc beer is featured prominently. A trophy cabinet heaves with the club\u2019s many honors. But in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, ice hockey has seen better days. The city\u2019s main rink was partly flooded. On a recent day, a young girl practiced figure skating routines around patches of water pooled on the surface. Stray dogs stalked the perimeter. One stray managed to entangle itself in the hockey nets, until it chewed through the ropes to break free. \u201cMiercurea Ciuc has a local political and social interest,\u201d said Marius Gliga, the technical director of the Romanian Ice Hockey Federation. \u201cIt is a small town. If they want to be seen by the rest of the cities, they have to show something. And they choose sport. The political men in the area use this team to promote themselves.\u201d Image Csikszereda\u2019s captain, Attila Goga, who has also played for the national team, shaking hands after a loss in the Romanian Cup final. Credit James Montague for The New York Times Before the revolution, Bucharest was the power center of Romanian ice hockey. Romania\u2019s golden age was in the 1970s and \u201980s, when it qualified for the 1976 and 1980 Olympics. Back then, Steaua Bucharest, the team of the army, was the dominant squad. \u201cThey used to take from the best players and allowed them to practice rather than have military service, which was good for the players,\u201d said Gliga, who played center for Steaua his entire career. \u201cThey had two years of practice, which was very good for them at 18 to 20. That was good for the national team.\u201d But the abolition of national service, the supremacy of soccer in Bucharest and the influx of money into Csikszereda from businessmen and politicians eager to further the Szekely Land\u2019s cause switched the balance of power. Now Steaua is a shadow of its former self, and Bucharest provided little more than the office for the federation and the officials for most matches, including the Romanian Cup final in late December between Csikszereda and Corona Brasov, a team that also hails from Transylvania but whose fans chant in Romanian. Csikszereda went ahead, 2-0, by the end of the second period, and it appeared that another piece of silverware was about to be added to its trophy cabinet. The Szekely flag was flying when the third period began, but it did not herald the coronation the home supporters had expected. Brasov stormed back, scoring three times in five minutes. When Csikszereda had a player sent to the penalty box with two minutes left, the match was effectively over. Brasov was crowned champion, the players celebrating wildly in front of their traveling fans. This time the Csikszereda fans chanted in Romanian, the language of the officials who had crammed into two cars and driven five hours from Bucharest to get there. \u201cThieves!\u201d they shouted at the referees. \u201cPeasants!\u201d they chanted. \u201cWe\u2019re Hungarian and the referees are always Romanian, so we always feel that Romanian referees aren\u2019t fair when it comes to matches,\u201d said Szikszai Laszlo, a 22-year-old fan of Csikszereda. As the Brasov team members passed the cup among themselves on the ice, Lahtinen stood on the sideline wondering how his team had lost the match. He said one of his players was suspended just a few minutes before the start of the match. \u201cWe were by far the best team and then I guess we got tired as they had more players,\u201d he said. Csikszereda had lost the final, but the fans had still had the chance to see the club play for a seventh league championship in a row. The rink, and the team, remain a symbol of something bigger than ice hockey. \u201cIn the period of communism, local newspapers couldn\u2019t write Csikszereda; you had to write Miercurea Ciuc,\u201d Laszlo said. \u201cBack then this place was a sanctuary. It was the only place where you could speak Hungarian freely. You can still feel that today to a certain level.\u201d", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Romania;Hungary"}
{"id": "ny0200544", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2009/09/11", "title": "In N.F.L. Opener, Steelers Win but Suffer a Big Hit", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 The bedrock upon which the Pittsburgh Steelers have always been built \u2014 and upon which their hopes for repeating as Super Bowl champions rest \u2014 is their suffocating defense, which confounds opponents with a beguiling mix of violence and deception. But on Thursday night, in the N.F.L.\u2019s season opener, it fell to the Steelers\u2019 offense \u2014 and to the sure-footed kicker Jeff Reed \u2014 to conjure a victory out of precious little production from a classic slugfest. When Hines Ward\u2019s reliable hands failed them and the ground game disappeared, it was quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, running a no-huddle offense, who sparkled in overtime. Roethlisberger, known for his gut-churning late-game heroics, had led the drive that tied the score late in the fourth quarter with one Reed field goal. The Steelers had nearly averted overtime, but the Tennessee Titans stripped Ward when he was just 5 yards from the end zone and the potential winning touchdown with less than a minute remaining. But in the overtime huddle, Rothlisberger told the rookie receiver Mike Wallace to just keep running, and he did, clutching a 22-yard pass during the first drive of overtime to set up Reed\u2019s 33-yard field goal. It gave the Steelers a 13-10 victory, their first of the season and their title defense. \u201cI told the coaches I didn\u2019t want to start this already, a fourth-quarter comeback,\u201d said Roethlisberger, who completed 18 of 22 passes for 183 yards in the second half and overtime, channeling the poise he showed in leading the Steelers last season. Titans safety Michael Griffin, the man who had stripped Ward, threw his helmet in frustration, but the night produced plenty of angst for the Steelers, too. The defense, and the Steelers\u2019 chance of being the first team to repeat since the New England Patriots won in 2003 and 2004, suffered a potentially crippling loss when Troy Polamalu, the whirling dervish safety, left the game with a left knee injury late in the first half and did not return to the sideline. Initial tests indicated a sprained medial collateral ligament, and Coach Mike Tomlin said the range for his return could be three to six weeks. But he stressed that the range was just speculation and he conceded that the damage might be worse. Polamalu\u2019s knees have been vulnerable before. In 2006, he missed three games with a M.C.L. injury in his left knee, and in 2007, he missed four games with a posterior cruciate ligament injury in his right knee. Still, the Steelers, with their six Super Bowl championships, are a constant in an ever-changing N.F.L. The new season that kicked off here will be played against the backdrop of empty seats born of economic strife (although not in Pittsburgh, where the 65,110 people who packed Heinz Field set a new franchise attendance record for a regular-season game), labor tension between owners and players, Brett Favre wearing purple in Minnesota, Michael Vick trying to resurrect his career in Philadelphia, and 11 coaches in new jobs and several more worried about keeping theirs. The style the Steelers share with the Titans \u2014 they are built on long-term coaches and stalwart defenses \u2014 won\u2019t make any offensive highlight videos. The slugfest that developed Thursday night was rife with mistakes and penalties, a typically sloppy season opener that the Steelers were fortunate to escape. \u201cWe talked about big men and blades of grass \u2014 winning the trench warfare, we didn\u2019t do that,\u201d Tomlin said. \u201cI thought we had to take care of the football and win the turnover battle. We didn\u2019t do that. We talked about out-hitting them. The jury is out on that. That last thing we talked about was not riding the emotional roller coaster and being prepared to play 60-plus minutes of football. We did that. We did a great job of it. Such is life in the N.F.L.\u201d The Titans, the best American Football Conference team in the 2008 regular season, are facing a formidable challenge this season. They lost the dominating defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth to free agency and the Washington Redskins. But on Thursday night, at least, they showed little ill effect, getting pressure on Roethlisberger with their front four defensive linemen and annihilating the running game, which managed just 36 yards as the offensive line struggled to block. The Steelers\u2019 offense had success only when Roethlisberger was in hurry-up mode. On the Steelers\u2019 first scoring drive, Roethlisberger toyed with the defense with pump fakes and when receiver Santonio Holmes split two safeties on his way to the end zone, Roethlisberger hit him with a 34-yard touchdown pass that provided a nice symmetry to the evening: Holmes had scored the final points of the 2008 season with a leaping winning touchdown catch in the back corner of the end zone at the Super Bowl, and now he has scored the first points of the 2009 season, too. The rest of the season may not be so poetic for the Steelers, though, particularly if Polamalu\u2019s absence is for an extended period. His play in the first half before his injury was electric. He made a brilliant leaping, one-handed interception that kept the Titans from getting inside the 5-yard line and had six tackles before he went out. Polamalu was hurt when Alge Crumpler, the mammoth Titans tight end, landed on him as the Steelers blocked a Titans field goal attempt late in the second quarter \u2014 the second Titans field goal to fail in the first half \u2014 and on the Titans next drive, his absence was obvious, with the Titans able to run and pass into wide-open spaces in the secondary on a touchdown drive. \u201cThe standard is the standard for the 11 men on the field for us,\u201d Tomlin said. It just may not be the 11 they want.", "keyword": "Football;Pittsburgh Steelers;Tennessee Titans;Polamalu Troy;Wallace Mike;Roethlisberger Ben;Collins Kerry;Bironas Rob"}
{"id": "ny0132221", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2012/12/31", "title": "Ch\u00e1vez Faces New Complications After Surgery", "abstract": "CARACAS, Venezuela \u2014 President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez of Venezuela is facing \u201cnew complications\u201d arising from a respiratory infection following cancer surgery in Cuba, Vice President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro said in a televised statement on Sunday night. \u201cNineteen days after the complex surgery, President Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s condition continues to be delicate, presenting complications that are being treated, in a process that is not without risks,\u201d Mr. Maduro said, speaking from Havana, where he had flown a day earlier to visit the president, who is being treated in a hospital there. Looking grim, Mr. Maduro said that, after arriving in Havana, \u201cwe were told about new complications arising as a consequence of the respiratory infection.\u201d Officials previously had said the infection was detected on Dec. 17, almost a week after the surgery. Mr. Maduro said that he had just come from a visit with Mr. Ch\u00e1vez. He also said that he spoke about national affairs with the president and that Mr. Ch\u00e1vez sent an end-of-the-year greeting to the families of Venezuela. Mr. Maduro, who has been designated by Mr. Ch\u00e1vez as the one to continue leading his Socialist revolution if he is too ill to govern, said that he planned to remain in Havana for \u201cthe coming hours\u201d to monitor the president\u2019s condition. Venezuela has been in deep uncertainty for weeks as a result of Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s sickness and his extended absence. Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, who has been president for nearly 14 years, was re-elected in October , but officials have said that he may not be able to return to Venezuela for the start of his new six-year term on Jan. 10.", "keyword": "Chavez Hugo;Surgery and Surgeons;Venezuela"}
{"id": "ny0090710", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/09/12", "title": "Hometown Salute for 3 Boyhood Friends Who Thwarted Train Attack in France", "abstract": "SACRAMENTO \u2014 In bursts of fluttering ticker tape and amid peals of cheers on Friday, this city reclaimed the somber date of Sept. 11 as a day of celebration. Under the blazing California sun, an exuberant parade unfurled through the streets in honor of the three young natives who last month tackled a would-be terrorist on a speeding train in France, likely preventing untold casualties. The three men \u2014 Alek Skarlatos, 22; Anthony Sadler, 23; and Spencer Stone, 23, all boyhood friends \u2014 stood on a float labeled \u201cHometown Heroes\u201d as it trundled down Capitol Mall. They doled out handshakes and high-fives and batted off flakes of ticker tape, looking slightly bewildered by all the attention. It had been less than a month since the trio\u2019s European vacation, when they encountered the gunman, Ayoub El Kahzani, who was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and packing a pistol and a box cutter on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris on Aug. 21. Moments after Mr. Kahzani, 26, stood from his seat and fired into the train car, injuring a passenger, he was tackled \u2014 first by Mr. Stone \u2014 then subdued by the rest of the trio and another passenger. Their actions \u201csent a message,\u201d said Sacramento\u2019s mayor, Kevin Johnson, standing on the West Steps of the alabaster Capitol Building at a rally at the parade\u2019s terminus. \u201cIt is said that good will always prevail over evil, that\u2019s what it said,\u201d he added. The three friends grew up in Sacramento County, and one of them, Mr. Sadler, is a senior at California State University, Sacramento. Mr. Stone is an airman in the United States Air Force, and Mr. Skarlatos is in the Oregon National Guard. \u201cToday, every Sacramentan has their chest puffed out a little bit,\u201d the mayor said. Image Thousands of Sacramento residents turned out. Credit Max Whittaker/Reuters Troops of cowgirls in red, white and blue-fringed chaps astride champing horses followed the young men down the parade route. Men in leather vests emblazoned with military emblems proclaiming their status as war veterans waved American flags at them, and a giant flag hung over 10th Street, suspended between two fire trucks with their ladders extended. At one point, the crowd\u2019s collective gaze craned upward as a C-17 transport jet zipped over the parade route. As it reached the cupola of the Capitol Building, it performed a waggle, tipping from side to side in salute. Many of the spectators were in tears as the young men passed, to choruses of \u201cthank you!\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s so beautiful when you have some boys \u2014 innocent like that \u2014 they can\u2019t wrap their heads around what\u2019s going on,\u201d said Penny Bryant, 62, a member of the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Mr. Sadler\u2019s father is the pastor. \u201cIt could have gone the other way, we could be going to a funeral,\u201d she said. In the crowd, children in mismatched patriotic socks \u2014 one red-and-white striped, one blue with stars \u2014 waved and cheered. A 6-year-old Yorkshire terrier named Lexi pranced in a star-spangled tutu. \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely unreal,\u201d said Mr. Skarlatos, leaning off the float to answer questions as it chugged toward the Capitol. The three have been awarded France\u2019s highest recognition, the Legion of Honor; appeared on late-night talk shows; and now starred in their own parade. How would Mr. Skarlatos go back to real life? \u201cYou\u2019re guess is as good as mine,\u201d he said with a shrug. \u201cI have no idea!\u201d At the parade\u2019s end, the three were greeted by a gospel choir and enthusiastic screams from cheerleaders from their alma mater, Del Campo High School. As the riotous afternoon drew to a close, the mayor placed in each of their hands three keys to the city. The friends each thanked the crowd, ending with Mr. Sadler. He took to the podium, looked around with a grin at the hundreds before him waving tiny American flags, shook his head and seemed at a loss for words. \u201cThank God we could all make it back in time,\u201d he said. Again, the crowd erupted in cheers.", "keyword": "Alek Skarlatos;Spencer Stone;Anthony Sadler;Sacramento CA;Terrorism;France;Awards"}
{"id": "ny0248208", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/05/21", "title": "Randy Savage, 58, Pro Wrestling\u2019s Macho Man, Dies", "abstract": "Randy Savage, who with his trademark sunglasses, bandannas and raspy voice was one of the most recognizable professional wrestlers of the 1980s and \u201990s as the character Macho Man, died on Friday in a one-car accident in Pinellas County, Fla. He was 58. His brother, Lanny Poffo, said that Savage was driving with his wife, Lynn, about 9:25 a.m. when he passed out at the wheel, drove over the median and hit a tree. His wife had minor injuries, the Florida Highway Patrol said. Savage, whose real name was Randy Poffo, would strut into the ring to his theme song \u201cPomp and Circumstance,\u201d muscles gleaming and neon spandex shining, growling his signature expression, \u201cOooh, yeah!\u201d before diving at his opponents, elbows first. Outside the ring, he would wear brightly colored cowboy hats and outfits dripping with fringe to appear as a spokesman for Slim Jim snacks (\u201cSnap into a Slim Jim!\u201d he would say. \u201cOooh, yeah!\u201d) or as a guest on talk shows like Arsenio Hall\u2019s, never breaking character. In a world in which enormous, half-naked men hurl their bodies at one another in front of thousands of people \u2014 complete with elaborate story lines, sequined costumes and theme music \u2014 Savage managed to stand out, perhaps because he spoke and dressed more loudly than most, or perhaps because he was equally successful playing a villain (known in the industry as a heel) and a good guy (a face). Colleagues who knew him at the height of his success, when he wrestled alongside Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan and Ricky the Dragon Steamboat, said he had charisma and a knack for spontaneity. \u201cThe real gift of a good wrestler is improv, and your ability to read a crowd and know what to do instinctively; Randy was very good at that,\u201d said the former pro wrestler Ted DiBiase, whose character, Million Dollar Man, had a much-publicized rivalry with Macho Man. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be very good in our industry, you have to be an athlete as well as an entertainer.\u201d Randy Mario Poffo was born on Nov. 15, 1952, in Columbus, Ohio, into a family of wrestlers. His brother, Lanny , wrestled under the name the Genius, and his father, Angelo Poffo, wrestled as well. Before becoming a wrestler in the mid-1970s, Savage played minor league baseball for about four years in the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds organizations, mainly as an outfielder. Savage\u2019s first wife, Elizabeth Hulette, was part of his act for many years as his manager, called Miss Elizabeth or the First Lady of Wrestling. The couple divorced, and in 2003, she died from a prescription drug overdose at 42. After his wrestling days, Savage found other avenues. He played the wrestler Bonesaw McGraw in the 2002 movie \u201cSpider-Man,\u201d appeared on situation comedies like \u201cMad About You,\u201d and lent his scratchy baritone to video games and cartoons, including \u201cFamily Guy\u201d and \u201cKing of the Hill.\u201d Savage and his second wife, Lynn, were married last May after some 10 years together, Lanny Poffo said. Beside his wife and brother, Savage is survived by his mother, Judy, and his stepchildren, Devin and Noel. Twitter was abuzz on Friday with tributes to Savage and condolences for his family. Hogan, with whom Savage had a legendary rivalry in the ring, said they had just started speaking again after 10 years. \u201cHe had so much life in his eyes & in his spirit,\u201d Hogan wrote. \u201cI just pray that he\u2019s happy and in a better place and we miss him.\u201d", "keyword": "Wrestling;World Wrestling Entertainment Inc;Deaths (Obituaries);Accidents and Safety"}
{"id": "ny0144880", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2008/10/31", "title": "Hubble Up and Running, With a Picture to Prove It", "abstract": "After an electrical malfunction caused it to go dormant a month ago, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. But the space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble has been pushed back again, NASA officials said Thursday. To show this week that the orbiting eye still has the same chops as ever, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore used Hubble\u2019s wide-field planetary camera 2 to record this image of a pair of smoke-rings galaxies known as Arp 147. The galaxies, about 450 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, apparently collided in the recent cosmic past. According to Mario Livio, of the space telescope institute, one of the galaxies passed through the other, causing a circular wave, like a pebble tossed into a pond, that has now coalesced into a ring of new blue stars. The center of the impacted galaxy can be seen as a reddish blur along the bottom of a blue ring. Hubble went down at the end of September when a router that gathers and formats scientific data for transmission to the ground failed. There is a backup data channel on board, but it had not been used in the 18 years that Hubble has been aloft. Last weekend, Hubble\u2019s engineers succeeded in waking it up. NASA hopes to replace the crippled router when astronauts visit the telescope for the last scheduled servicing mission. But in the announcement on Thursday, NASA officials said that a spare unit would not be ready for a hoped-for February launching, and that the mission would be pushed back to May.", "keyword": "Hubble Space Telescope;National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Stars and Galaxies;Space;Astronomy and Astrophysics"}
{"id": "ny0041493", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/05/02", "title": "Connecticut Allows Medical Marijuana, but Sellers Encounter Hurdles", "abstract": "BRIDGEPORT, Conn. \u2014 This state\u2019s law approving the sale of marijuana for medical purposes has been on the books for two years, but the drug is still not available. Among the challenges has been finding dispensing locations acceptable to Connecticut towns and cities. Fairfield and West Haven let applicants for licenses to operate dispensaries know they would not pass zoning muster; other municipalities, including Madison, New Canaan and Westport, have imposed moratoriums of as long as a year while their zoning rules are reviewed; and this month the Bridgeport zoning board turned down a licensee. The law, signed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, in May 2012, requires that a pharmacist dispense the drug, and limits the list of qualifying ailments. Four manufacturers and six dispensaries have so far been licensed. Yet even with the restrictions, those who are trying to open the facilities are running into opposition from residents who are concerned that a dispensary nearby would reduce the stigma for children to try marijuana, invite black markets or lower property values. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have passed laws permitting medical marijuana. Only Connecticut mandates an on-site pharmacist. In the patchwork of marijuana laws emerging across the country, Connecticut is somewhere in the middle: not as adventurous as Colorado and Washington, which have decriminalized marijuana for recreational use for people over 21, or California, where residents can buy medical marijuana for common conditions such as sleeplessness, loss of appetite and anxiety. (Anyone from other states can too, using a hotel room as a residence.) There is no official count of marijuana dispensaries in California, but Los Angeles alone is believed to have over 500 . Critics say California\u2019s porous rules, set forth in a 1996 law, have essentially legalized marijuana as a recreational drug. Image Ms. Fiorini has follicular lymphoma. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times Connecticut acted before neighboring New York, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat and longtime opponent of legalizing medical marijuana, said in January that he would approve an experimental program allowing up to 20 hospitals to prescribe the drug. Proponents of medical marijuana have also faced a struggle in New Jersey. The state enacted its Compassionate Care Act in 2010, when Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, was governor. It offers immunity from prosecution to people using marijuana for a range of ailments and makes a provision for six \u201calternative treatment centers\u201d to dispense it. Three have opened. The current governor, Chris Christie, a Republican, is opposed to the law and has limited edible marijuana to sick children. The first Connecticut dispensaries are not scheduled to open until summer, but almost 2,000 patients certified by doctors as eligible to benefit from medical marijuana have registered with the State Department of Consumer Protection by supplying proof of identity and a photograph, and paying a $100 fee. Some, like Angela Fiorini, a former 911 police dispatcher who is undergoing chemotherapy for follicular lymphoma, are smoking marijuana they buy from street-corner dealers with immunity from prosecution because legislators felt it was cruel to make genuinely sick people wait for the dispensaries. Opponents have slowed the drug\u2019s rollout. Last month, Bridgeport\u2019s zoning board turned down a location in a former library building chosen by a licensed dispenser, D & B Wellness. It would have been the most convenient dispensary for Fairfield County, but neighbors objected to the site\u2019s proximity to a low-income apartment house. Minnie Simmons, whose accounting office is near the proposed Bridgeport site, said she had worried that the presence of security guards and cameras would let people know that it was a marijuana dispensary and possibly encourage casual marijuana smokers to induce patients to sell them the drug, creating a black market. Children, she said, might also conclude that if some people can obtain marijuana legally, \u201cit\u2019s not such a bad thing.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not opposed to helping the people. We don\u2019t like the location,\u201d she said. \u201cWould you want that next to an apartment building with children? And with a Walgreen\u2019s you don\u2019t know what I purchased. If I come out of a marijuana facility, you specifically know what my situation is.\u201d Image Karen Barski, left, and Angela D'Amico have a dispensary license, but a proposed location was denied by a zoning board. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times D & B\u2019s lawyer will appeal to the city and the courts, but the company has only until Saturday to show it has zoning approval. William M. Rubenstein, the state\u2019s commissioner of consumer protection, said he would \u201cnot speculate about any course of action\u201d after that. \u201cAssuming the Bridgeport facility does not get its zoning approval, patients in Fairfield County will have to travel farther for their medicine,\u201d he said. Angela D\u2019Amico, a principal in D & B, said the board\u2019s rejection reflected a lack of understanding about marijuana\u2019s medical benefits. Calling it \u201cmiracle medicine,\u201d she said that it helped her with her own arthritis and insomnia when she used the drug with a medical marijuana card she obtained legally in California, and that she wanted others to experience such relief. Connecticut\u2019s law restricts marijuana to residents who are over 18 and have received a physician\u2019s certification that they have one of the conditions that marijuana might soothe. The qualifying ailments include cancer, glaucoma, H.I.V. or AIDS, Parkinson\u2019s, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord nerve damage, epilepsy, Crohn\u2019s disease, cachexia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr. Rubenstein said that established pharmacies could theoretically qualify as dispensaries, but that given the opposition in federal laws to marijuana, they might not want to risk the federal registrations they need for selling controlled substances. He said he did not think a sometimes amorphous diagnosis like PTSD might open the door to widespread use, because every patient would need to have a doctor confirm \u201cthe benefits of using marijuana outweigh any detriments.\u201d Stronger controlled substances are already legally prescribed for the disorder, he noted. Image This month, a Bridgeport zoning board turned down a dispensary location at this Main Street site for D & B Wellness, a licensed dispenser. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times The medical marijuana can be grown and produced as capsules, oils, pastries and patches, as well as the more common leaves and stems. Some forms have been shorn of the chemical \u2014 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC \u2014 that creates the marijuana high. No more than 2.5 ounces can be dispensed within 30 days. The six dispensary licensees, chosen from among 27 applicants who paid $5,000 apiece, are dispersed around the state and are, in addition to Bridgeport, in Branford, Bristol, Hartford, South Windsor and Uncasville. Mr. Rubenstein said the selections were based on business experience, financial wherewithal and operational plans. All except the Bridgeport site have received zoning approvals. Patients with state marijuana cards can buy it on the street without fear of prosecution. Ms. Fiorini, 51, who is from Monroe, Conn., said that for eight months she had been buying the drug from dealers in Bridgeport for roughly $120 an ounce that she smoked or baked in brownies. Until she began using it, she said, prescribed pills had not alleviated the nausea she experiences from chemotherapy. \u201cWithin 10 minutes of smoking marijuana, every single symptom of chemo was completely gone,\u201d she said. \u201cI went from vomiting to eating a full meal.\u201d Ms. Fiorini is ready to buy marijuana at a dispensary because it will be safer than buying from drug dealers. She has spoken at public meetings on behalf of Ms. D\u2019Amico\u2019s application. Ms. D\u2019Amico, 56, a Brooklyn-raised woman who was a publisher of art prints for 28 years, began investigating marijuana because she had heard that it could slow the progress of Alzheimer\u2019s, which had affected seven aunts and an uncle. Her business partner, Karen Barski, 42, a registered nurse, said she learned how marijuana calmed the tremors of Parkinson\u2019s and reduced migraine pain. Nick Tamborrino, 37, a pharmacist for Yale New Haven Health System, applied to open a dispensary \u2014 Bluepoint Apothecary and Wellness \u2014 in Branford. Dispensing marijuana, he said, should be no different from dispensing other controlled substances that he furnishes as a pharmacist. He was able to win approval from the Branford zoning board for a rented storefront in an industrial area. \u201cI didn\u2019t want it on Main Street in the public eye,\u201d Mr. Tamborrino said. \u201cI wanted it at a discreet location.\u201d", "keyword": "Medical Marijuana;Legislation;Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0144826", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/10/31", "title": "Inquiry Targeted 2,000 Foreign Muslims in 2004", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 An operation in 2004 meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before and after that year\u2019s presidential election focused on more than 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, but most were found to have done nothing wrong, according to newly disclosed government data. The program, conducted by the Department of Homeland Security , received little public attention at the time. But details about the targets of the investigation have emerged from more than 10,000 pages of internal records obtained through a lawsuit by civil rights advocates. Parts of the documents were provided to The New York Times. The documents show that more than 2,500 foreigners in the United States were sought as \u201cpriority leads\u201d in the fall of 2004 because of suspicions that they could present threats to national security in the months before the presidential election and the inauguration. Some of those foreigners were detained and ultimately deported because they had overstayed their visas, but many were in this country legally, and the vast majority were not charged. The internal reports show that immigration agents questioned the foreigners about what they thought of America, whether violence was preached at their mosques, and whether they had access to biological or chemical weapons. A sampling of 300 cases turned over by federal officials showed that none of those interrogated were charged with national security offenses. Fewer than one in five were charged, most of them with immigration violations. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement , Richard Rocha, would say only, \u201cDue to ongoing litigation, ICE is not at liberty to provide any comment.\u201d Officials said they were not aware of any similar programs now under way. At the time of the 2004 operation, the immigration agency said publicly that it was tracking leads in an effort to disrupt potential terrorism plots, but emphasized that its investigations were being conducted \u201cwithout regard to race, ethnicity or religion.\u201d But the records showed that 79 percent of the suspects were from Muslim-majority countries, according to an analysis by students at the National Litigation Project at Yale Law School, who obtained the records, as did the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Each group sued for the records under the Freedom of Information Act, and both say the operation showed that the government was using ethnic profiling to identify terrorism suspects. \u201cThis was profiling,\u201d said Michael Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School who helped lead the research effort. He added that the findings raised questions about both the effectiveness and the propriety of the program. \u201cThe resources devoted to this were enormous,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the results clearly were not.\u201d The issue of ethnic profiling in counterterrorism programs has taken on added significance because of new Justice Department guidelines that go into effect Dec. 1 and give investigators even broader authority to open terrorism investigations without evidence of wrongdoing. The American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups argue that the new guidelines will allow federal investigators to make targets of Muslims, Middle Easterners and others without evidence of links to terrorist groups. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the administration began a series of efforts that strained relations with Muslims and Arab-Americans in particular. The detention of more than 700 illegal immigrants as terrorism suspects \u2014 often for months at a time without lawyers \u2014 generated a blistering report from the Justice Department on the \u201cunduly harsh\u201d treatment of the prisoners. Follow-up efforts in 2002 and 2003 led to the questioning of thousands of Muslims and Middle Easterners as well as measures requiring that immigrants from some countries register their presence with federal authorities. The investigations conducted in the fall of 2004 were part of what federal authorities called Operation Front Line. It was unusual in that it relied on intelligence data from across the government to identify \u201cpriority leads\u201d and then conduct interrogations in October 2004, just before Election Day. One foreigner, in the country on a student visa, was asked his \u201copinion of America,\u201d according to internal investigative reports. He responded that he was \u201cliving the American dream and cared greatly for the equal opportunities, rights and values that are afforded in America.\u201d Another person, from South Asia, was asked about a mosque he attended and told an agent that \u201cthe mosque did not espouse any radical or fundamental form of Islam or denounce the United States in any way.\u201d A third visa holder was asked if he owned any chemical or biological explosives. He said he did not. The Homeland Security Department announced several hundred arrests at the time, mostly of visitors whose visas had expired, but the records obtained in the lawsuit show that the scope of the operation reached much further. More than 2,500 people were interrogated, with more than 500 arrests for immigration violations like overstaying visas. A former immigration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because aspects of the program remain classified, said the operation analyzed data, gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies, to identify people who might pose particular threats to national security. \u201cI think the intelligence we were getting was bona fide and mineable, and we were doing the best we could to follow it up,\u201d the former official said. Kareem Shora, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he considered the findings a \u201cslap in the face\u201d because they contradicted the claims of American officials. \u201cIt is very disappointing to see that despite all the reassurances that they were not profiling people, this comes out,\u201d Mr. Shora said. With nearly 80 percent of the targets in the 2004 operation coming from Muslim nations, he asked, \u201chow can you tell us you\u2019re not focusing on people from these countries?\u201d ", "keyword": "Homeland Security Department;Immigration and Refugees;Discrimination;Presidential Election of 2004;Suits and Litigation;Illegal Immigrants;Civil Rights;Immigration and Customs Enforcement (US);United States"}
{"id": "ny0105680", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2012/04/04", "title": "Bill Jenkins, 81, Drag Racing Driver and Innovator, Dies", "abstract": "Bill Jenkins, an influential and revered figure in drag racing who helped lift the sport from the streets to the professional track while introducing a host of technical innovations, died on Thursday in Paoli, Pa. He was 81. The cause was heart failure, his daughter Susan Jenkins said. Jenkins, a short, stocky, gravelly-voiced man who often chomped cigars, sometimes while driving, played a leading role in lifting drag racing to the level of a sanctioned sport from its \u201cdirty-fingernails street racing days,\u201d said Ron Watson, president of the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, into which Jenkins was inducted in 1996. To fans and fellow racers he was Grumpy Jenkins, and he relished the nickname \u2014 particularly because he knew that almost everyone knew that his gruff front was just that. \u201cPeople called him the lovable old grump,\u201d said John Jodauga, an editor at National Dragster, the newspaper of the National Hot Rod Association. Jenkins was No. 8 among the nation\u2019s 50 top racers in a poll of experts conducted by the N.H.R.A. in 2001, even though he won only 13 N.H.R.A. events while behind the wheel. He \u201cearned his well-deserved spot in drag racing\u2019s Top 10,\u201d the association said in a statement, \u201cbecause no other individual has contributed more\u201d to improving the engines that made straight-line, quarter-mile racing from a standing start more popular. Mr. Jodauga called Jenkins a \u201cvisionary mechanic\u201d who \u201ccame up with engine improvements that many other people copied for their own cars.\u201d His innovations included a front-suspension system that improved the performance of a stock car by transferring weight to the rear tires, and a \u201cslick-shift manual transmission\u201d that allowed the driver to shift gears without lifting a foot from the gas pedal. He also installed a so-called cool can, containing ice, along the fuel line to lower gasoline temperature, which increased horsepower. Jenkins\u2019s enhancements paid off. \u201cHe was the most successful racer of Chevy Pro Stock and Super Stock cars in the \u201960s and \u201970s,\u201d Mr. Jodauga said, \u201cwhich made him one of the most popular racers in the country, because so many fans back then raced or drove Chevrolets.\u201d Jenkins gained national prominence in 1966 when his 327-cubic-inch, 350-horsepower Chevy II outran most 426-cubic-inch, 425-horsepower Dodge and Plymouth Street Hemis in dozens of local races around the country. \u201cHe exploited the \u2018giant killer\u2019 approach in 1972 when he won six of eight national events with his 331-cid small-block Pro Stock Vega,\u201d the hot rod association said. Wins attributed in part to Jenkins\u2019s engineering went far beyond his own races. He opened an engine-building shop in his hometown, Malvern, Pa. Dozens of drivers took advantage of his technical skills. In a 2008 interview for the Web site Drag Race Central, Jenkins was asked how he felt about being inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. \u201cI\u2019ve had engines win 61 races and eight championships in all kinds of categories,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m fortunate enough that it happened before I died.\u201d William Tyler Jenkins was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 22, 1930. But it was in rural Downingtown, Pa., to which the family moved when he was 12, that he turned his tinkering skills to rebuilding a neighbor\u2019s tractor engine. \u201cHe did a little bit of local drag racing before he went off to Cornell,\u201d where he studied engineering, Susan Jenkins said of her father. Besides Ms. Jenkins, his daughter from his marriage to the former Alexandra Newman, which ended in divorce, Jenkins is survived by his second wife, the former Polly Wood; a son, William, and a daughter, Dani-El, from his second marriage; a sister, Elizabeth Wagoner; and one grandson. Jenkins left Cornell in his junior year. \u201cThe \u201955 Chevy came out and I thought, \u2018I can probably make something out of this,\u2019 and of course I did,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Jenkins Bill;Automobile Racing;National Hot Rod Assn;Deaths (Obituaries)"}
{"id": "ny0183909", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2007/12/12", "title": "Ukrainian Loses Her Bid for Premier", "abstract": "KIEV, Ukraine (AP) \u2014 Yulia V. Tymoshenko , a leader of Ukraine\u2019s pro-democracy protests in 2004, on Tuesday fell one vote short of the parliamentary majority needed to become prime minister. Ms. Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and on-again-off- again ally of President Viktor A. Yushchenko , received 225 votes in each of two rounds of voting \u2014 one vote short of the absolute majority needed. She and her supporters immediately claimed that the machine tabulating the votes was rigged. The parties backing each of the leaders won a narrow majority in September\u2019s national elections, and the two agreed to form a majority coalition on the understanding that Ms. Tymoshenko would be nominated as prime minister. \u201cThe voting was grossly and blatantly falsified,\u201d she said. After the second disputed vote, members of the Party of Regions, which opposes Ms. Tymoshenko and has the largest contingent in Parliament, blocked the rostrum. Lawmakers then went into a recess. Ms. Tymoshenko enjoys intense loyalty from her backers, especially since the 2004 Orange Revolution protests. Opponents say they are uncomfortable with her ambition and fiery oratory. Ms. Tymoshenko and the president have often locked horns in the past. He dismissed her as prime minister in 2005, after only seven months.", "keyword": "Ukraine;Tymoshenko Yulia V;Politics and Government;Yushchenko Viktor"}
{"id": "ny0160616", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2006/03/23", "title": "Bertelsmann Weighs End to Its Privacy", "abstract": "BERLIN, March 22 - Bertelsmann, the global media empire, reported upbeat financial results on Wednesday, propelled by pop-culture sensations like the singer Kelly Clarkson and Dan Brown's thriller \"The Da Vinci Code.\" But the company's most talked-about suspense story continues to be its own. Senior executives of Bertelsmann, a family-controlled German company, turned away a barrage of questions at a news conference here about how it would respond to a plan by a minority shareholder, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, to push for an initial public offering, possibly later this year. \"I can only say that we are prepared and we haven't any problem with it at all,\" said Bertelsmann's chief executive, Gunter Thielen. \"Whether we are publicly listed or not, what determines our work on the executive board is that we define the right long-term strategy for Bertelsmann.\" Behind the claim of business-as-usual is a flurry of activity, according to current and former executives, as Bertelsmann weighs whether to avoid selling shares by buying back Bruxelles Lambert's stake. To do that, the executives said, Bertelsmann, a company that has always struggled to balance global ambitions with a penchant for privacy, may consider selling one of its six divisions. The family of Bertelsmann's 84-year-old patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, which controls the company through a 75 percent voting stake, is reluctant to sell shares, these executives said, even though it would retain control. Bertelsmann took on the Brussels-based Bruxelles Lambert as an outside shareholder in 2001 as part of a complex swap in which it acquired the investment firm's 30 percent holding in the RTL Group, Europe's largest television broadcaster. The deal transformed Bertelsmann, a 170-year-old company that had concentrated on publishing and book clubs, into a multimedia powerhouse. RTL, which is now 90 percent owned by Bertelsmann, generates more profit than the combined earnings of four other Bertelsmann's units: Random House, BMG music, the Gruner & Jahr magazine group, and book clubs. But the RTL deal also put a very private empire on an uncomfortable course to the public market. Disagreements over whether Bertelsmann should sell shares to the public contributed to the Mohn family's ouster of Mr. Thielen's predecessor, Thomas Middelhoff, who negotiated the deal with Bruxelles Lambert. Buying back the shares would be expensive. In a recent research report, Goldman Sachs estimated that Bruxelles Lambert's 25.1 percent stake in Bertelsmann was worth about 3.5 billion euros ($4.26 billion) -- a valuation that includes a 15 percent discount because the shares cannot currently be publicly traded. To raise cash for a buyback, Bertelsmann may have to sell major assets, according to the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. One possible candidate, they said, would be its stake in BMG music, which is now part of a joint venture with Sony. In its report, Goldman values Bertelsmann's half-share in Sony BMG, as well as its wholly owned music publishing unit, at 1.6 billion euros ($1.93 billion). That still leaves a substantial shortfall, but these people said that Bertelsmann, with a sturdy balance sheet, could line up additional bank loans. Bertelsmann recently succeeded in replacing the chief executive of Sony BMG, Andrew Lack, with its own representative, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz. But Sony BMG's revenues plummeted 16.5 percent in 2005, reflecting both the turmoil in the recorded music industry and infighting at Sony BMG. Mr. Thielen said that Mr. Schmidt-Holtz faced a difficult task knitting together the corporate cultures of Sony and BMG. He said the company also needed to do a better job of discovering new talent. Mr. Thielen did not say whether Bertelsmann was considering a major divestiture. But he said the company regularly studied its portfolio of assets -- it recently retained Boston Consulting Group to conduct one such study -- and that it was always open to buying or selling properties. The hiring of a consultant, Mr. Thielen insisted, is not linked to its minority shareholder's plan. \"We wanted to see how our view of the assets related to the outside view of the assets,\" he said. As scrutiny intensifies, Bertelsmann's executives are responding with a mix of diplomacy and mild frustration. They can say little until they receive formal notice from Bruxelles Lambert, which they expect on May 23, a day after Bertelsmann's shareholders meet. Groupe Bruxelles Lambert is a canny investment firm. It is run by the Belgian billionaire Albert Fr\u00e8re, who amassed his fortune through well-timed investments in a variety of European energy and media companies. The firm has left itself plenty of flexibility as to when, or even whether, it will make a move. In a one-paragraph statement last January, it said it would ask for the \"possibility that is offered to list Bertelsmann if the market conditions are favorable.\" The questions surrounding Bertelsmann's future clouded a generally strong financial performance. The company's operating income rose 13 percent in 2005, to 1.6 billion euros ($1.93 billion), lifted by strong profits at RTL, Gruner & Jahr and Arvato, its huge printing division. Net profit fell slightly, to 1.04 billion euros ($1.25 billion), largely because Bertelsmann booked some one-time gains, like the sale of its office tower in New York, in the previous year. Mr. Thielen said Bertelsmann would achieve a 10 percent return on sales, compared with 9 percent last year, by 2007, when he is scheduled to retire as chief executive. The company, he said, will announce his successor in January or February of next year, and the person will probably come from its executive board. Bertelsmann says it has taken steps to prepare itself to sell shares, which would rank among the largest stock sales in German history. Virtually every major investment bank is angling for a role in a possible future company offering. But in other ways, Bertelsmann still seems culturally unsuited to the demands of being a public company. It does not disclose the compensation of its top executives, for example, listing only an aggregate number of 39.6 million euros ($47.9 million) for its seven-member executive board. When asked whether Bertelsmann would reconsider this policy if it went public, as some German companies have done, Mr. Thielen suggested that was unlikely. The Mohn family could still legally limit the disclosure of individual salaries. Besides, he added, \"Our shareholders know how much we make.\"", "keyword": "BERTELSMANN AG;GROUPE BRUXELLES LAMBERT;COMPANY REPORTS"}
{"id": "ny0124586", "categories": ["business", "smallbusiness"], "date": "2012/08/02", "title": "For Small Businesses, Bank Loan Alternatives", "abstract": "After years of a small-business credit crisis, conditions seem to have improved. But with the economy still struggling and new regulations meant to eliminate bad lending, bank loans continue to lag. \u201cThe days of yesteryear when you could go to your corner bank are over,\u201d said Kenneth Walsleben, who teaches in the entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises department at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University. \u201cSmall, emerging, growing businesses have few traditional sources to turn to. You have to get a little creative.\u201d Some creative alternatives have been around forever; others emerged during the crisis. Almost all are substantially more expensive than traditional bank loans, which is why they have been sources of last resort. But as demand for alternative options has increased, some prices have come down. This guide, based on conversations with lenders, brokers and business owners, suggests which products make the most sense for different types of businesses. Asset-Based Lending HOW IT WORKS Companies sell their receivables, or invoices, to a factoring company, which gives the companies 80 to 90 percent of the value upfront and the rest when the invoices are paid off. Some lenders offer loans based on a company\u2019s purchase orders, contracts or inventory. WHO USES IT Business-to-business companies that cannot wait for payment and especially troubled companies, because an invoice factor depends on the client\u2019s ability to pay, not the borrower\u2019s solvency. Purchase-order, contract and inventory loans require more creditworthiness from the borrower. \u201cIf you\u2019re in the office supplies business and you get an order from Staples, you can use purchase-order financing, and it can level the playing field,\u201d said Neil Seiden, managing director of Asset Enhancement Solutions , a financial adviser in Port Washington, N.Y. COST Purchase-order financing costs 4 to 5 percent monthly; factorers usually charge an effective annual interest rate of 18 to 30 percent, said Mr. Walsleben, who is also a co-owner of the Hamilton Group , a factoring company. SUPPLIERS Liquid Capital , the Interface Financial Group , Triton Business Solutions , Simplified Leasing , Rosenthal & Rosenthal and scores of other firms offer factoring and other asset-based lending services. Many are members of the International Factoring Association trade group. Lease-Back HOW IT WORKS A company sells its real estate or equipment for cash and simultaneously leases it back. WHO USES IT Healthy companies with warehouses, manufacturing locations or other properties that hold value that could be put to use elsewhere. The borrower sells at market value, usually the average of several appraisals, and leases the property back at the market rate for 10 to 25 years. COST The lease-back adds a monthly lease payment where previously there was none. Companies get less value from equipment than real estate because, unlike real estate, equipment depreciates over time, and lenders tend to value it at what is known as forced liquidation value, a lowball price based on what it would fetch at auction. Equipment lease-backs can create tax burdens as well. \u201cIf I own a press outright for 10 years and it\u2019s worth $1 million, but it\u2019s on the books for $250,000, and I sell it for $1 million, I\u2019ll have to pay tax on a gain of $750,000,\u201d Mr. Walsleben said. SUPPLIERS AIC Ventures , W.P. Carey , Calkain Companies and many others. Borrowers can search on the Commercial Finance Association trade group\u2019s Web site. Cash Advances HOW IT WORKS A business receives a lump sum from a lender, which then takes a percentage of the business\u2019s daily card receipts until the loan, plus a predetermined fee, is paid. WHO USES IT Restaurants and other retailers. Business-to-consumer companies generally have more limited financing options because they do not have wholesale invoices to factor or factories to borrow against. COST Twenty percent and up, but highly variable. EXAMPLE When he needed money last year to cover utilities and taxes during the slow winter months, Dennis Sick, owner of the Mohegan Manor restaurant in Baldwinsville, N.Y., took out a $45,000 advance on credit card receipts. The lender said he would take 13 to 18 percent of Mr. Sick\u2019s daily credit card sales until he had received $64,000, which would take 12 to 15 months and give him an annual rate of 60 to 75 percent. But Mr. Sick ended up paying the $64,000 in seven months, giving the lender an annual return of some 130 percent. SUPPLIERS AdvanceMe , RapidAdvance and many others. The North American Merchant Advance Association trade group gathers many providers. Nonbank Loans WHO USES IT Seasonal businesses, microbusinesses and other businesses that cannot meet bank requirements. HOW IT WORKS Lighter Capital , a revenue-based finance company in Seattle, offers loans of $50,000 to $500,000 to small businesses with high gross margins. The borrower pays Lighter Capital 2 to 8 percent of its monthly revenue until the repayment amount is reached, and usually gives the lender warrants for 1 to 5 percent of the company. The country\u2019s 400 or so nonprofit community development financial institutions , on the other hand, fill the role of small community banks, lending to microbusinesses. \u201cOur clients are supplemental income businesses, like cupcake trucks and Main Street businesses whose lines of credit got called,\u201d said Claudia Viek, chief executive of the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity , a network of California C.D.F.I.\u2019s. COST Lighter Capital\u2019s chairman, Andy Sack, said the cost of obtaining financing from his company was around 20 percent annually. Ms. Viek said she expected California C.D.F.I.\u2019s to make some 2,000 three- to five-year loans of up to $50,000 this year, at an average interest rate of about 8 percent. The rates can go as high as 14 percent. EXAMPLE \u201cIn the past, we would go to the local bank and get loans on signature,\u201d said Christi Riggs, 40, co-owner of Lone Star Linen laundry service, based in Taylor, Tex. When the bank said no, Ms. Riggs took out a loan from On Deck Capital , a New York-based company that analyzes business performance data \u2014 cash flow, credit, even social media information \u2014 to review loan applications from small businesses. Once granted, the loans, up to $150,000, are repaid through automatic daily bank account withdrawals, much as a merchant cash advance works. The short-term loans, typically for three to 18 months, charge an annual rate of 18 to 36 percent, said Noah Breslow, chief executive of On Deck. Ms. Riggs ended up paying $27,750 on a six-month loan of $25,500, or an annual rate of about 35 percent. SUPPLIERS Lighter Capital, On Deck Capital, Kabbage and others. Many C.D.F.I.\u2019s are members of the CDFI Coalition . Peer-to-Peer Loans HOW IT WORKS Individual investors combine to lend money to small-business owners through online vetting platforms like Lending Club . WHO USES IT Small-business owners with good credit scores who need money to expand or to buy equipment. COST Depending on the owners\u2019 credit ratings, annual rates can run from less than 7 percent to more than 25 percent. The loans are small, however, with a maximum of $35,000 at Lending Club. EXAMPLE When Hannah Attwood wanted to raise money to open a cloth diaper supply and cleaning service, she went to four banks. \u201cThey just kind of laughed at me,\u201d said Ms. Attwood, 34, founder of Adore Diaper Service , based in Ventura, Calif. She applied to Lending Club on a friend\u2019s suggestion, and within a week, 61 investors had jointly given her a three-year, $6,000 loan at 11.36 percent. She combined the loan with an equal amount of savings to buy industrial washers and dryers and cloth diapers. SUPPLIERS Lending Club and Prosper dominate the peer-to-peer market in the United States.", "keyword": "Small Business;Entrepreneurship;Banking and Financial Institutions;Credit and Debt;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0045553", "categories": ["business", "yourtaxes"], "date": "2014/02/09", "title": "Minimizing the Tax Drag on Your Investments", "abstract": "Unless you happen to be a certified public accountant, or related to one, the topic of taxes you pay on your investments probably has as much appeal as a root canal. Understood. Nonetheless, it\u2019s a topic well worth focusing on. That\u2019s especially true if you invest in mutual funds, which are required to distribute realized gains and income to shareholders. Over the 10 years through 2012, the actual return to investors in the average stock mutual fund shrank by eight-tenths of a percentage point, annualized, because of taxable distributions, according to research from Lipper , the fund data supplier. That represents more than 10 percent of the annualized gain for stock funds over that 10-year stretch. Taxable bond funds received a tax haircut of 1.8 percentage points, annualized, during that period, amounting to more than 20 percent of the annualized return for those funds. \u201cAnnual expense ratios get a lot more attention, but not understanding the potential tax drag of what you own and what type of account you own it in can be a bigger issue,\u201d says Tom Roseen , head of research services at Lipper. Even if you\u2019re not partaking of mutual funds \u2014 or at least those with a habit of generating big tax bills \u2014 and you\u2019ve been pleased with your portfolio\u2019s tax efficiency in years past, Robert S. Keebler , a certified public accountant in Green Bay, Wis., expects many investors to suffer \u201cpainful sticker shock\u201d when they complete their 2013 tax returns. Last year, a net investment income tax of 3.8 percent came into play for couples with modified adjusted gross income above $250,000, and for individuals with more than $200,000. (The figure is typically close to your adjusted gross income reported on Line 37 of your federal Form 1040.) Last year, the top income tax rate rose to 39.6 percent from 35 percent, and gains on investments sold in less than a year are taxed as ordinary income. The top long-term capital gains rate also rose, to 20 percent from 15 percent. \u201cThere\u2019s not one big thing you can do to minimize taxes, but there are a series of small decisions you can make at the margins that in the aggregate will leave you with more money,\u201d said Timothy M. Steffen , director of financial planning for the wealth management group at Baird. To shield as many investment dollars as possible from taxes, you can maximize what you tuck into tax-deferred retirement accounts. This low-hanging fruit still seems to elude many people. Vanguard reports that 30 percent of participants in 401(k) plans it administers who had income of at least $200,000 in 2012 did not contribute the maximum. For those with an income of at least $100,000, the figure was 64 percent. In 2014, anyone under 50 years old can contribute up to $17,500; if you\u2019re of AARP age \u2014 50 and older \u2014 you can contribute up to $23,000. And don\u2019t forget individual retirement accounts. Anyone can invest in a nondeductible I.R.A., regardless of income, and receive the benefit of tax-deferred growth. And couples filing a joint tax return with modified adjusted gross income below $181,000, or single filers with income below $114,000, can stuff up to the maximum of $5,500 a person into a Roth I.R.A. ($6,500 if you\u2019re at least 50). With a Roth I.R.A., contributions are made with after-tax dollars, so there\u2019s no upfront tax break. But your money grows tax-deferred and withdrawals in retirement will be tax-free. If you have investments in tax-deferred accounts as well as regular taxable accounts, it\u2019s worth considering the art of asset location. The standard advice has always been that investments that throw off income taxed at your income tax rate belong in a tax-deferred account. The theory is that for most of us, our income tax rate is higher than our capital gains rate. That has typically been an argument for keeping your bond holdings in your 401(k) and I.R.A., since bond interest is taxed as income. But Michael E. Kitces , director of planning research at the Pinnacle Advisory Group in Columbia, Md., says that today\u2019s low interest rates on high-grade bonds make that rule of thumb less important. Even if you are paying federal income tax of 39.6 percent on the interest from a core bond fund, the fact that the fund\u2019s yield is just 2 percent or so means that there\u2019s not much income in the first place. Mr. Kitces suggests a twist. \u201cFocus on making sure your highest-returning and least-tax-efficient investment is inside your 401(k) or I.R.A., and your most tax-efficient investment is in your taxable account,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd don\u2019t worry about everything else. Just get those two right and you\u2019ve done yourself a ton of good.\u201d Likely suspects for a tax-deferred account include high-yield, or junk, bonds and real estate investment trusts, and any actively traded portfolio that generates frequent short-term gains. Low-turnover stock index mutual funds or exchange-traded funds and municipal bonds are often the best bets for taxable accounts, as they are prone to generate low, or no, taxable distributions. While it may be heresy to index purists, actively managed funds can still be a solid investment, even with their typically higher tax bill. Yes, the performance of the average equity stock fund has failed to keep up with its indexing brethren. But there are exceptions. \u201cWhat matters is your after-tax return, not whether a fund is 99 percent tax-efficient,\u201d said Daniel P. Wiener , chairman of Adviser Investments. \u201cIf an actively managed fund delivers superior returns after tax, that\u2019s what I care about.\u201d That said, if you own an actively managed fund, it may be a candidate for your 401(k) or I.R.A. If you were subject to the new 3.8 percent net investment tax in 2013, you may be able to reduce this year\u2019s bite. Here\u2019s how the tax works: If you have investment income and your modified adjusted gross income is above $250,000 ($200,000 for individuals) you are in its cross hairs. The 3.8 percent tax is levied on the lesser of these two figures: the amount of your income that exceeds those thresholds of modified adjusted gross income, or the sum of all the net investment income you had in the year. If your income is well above the appropriate modified adjusted-gross-income threshold, it\u2019s likely that your net investment income is what will come into play. In that case, Mr. Keebler says that one tax reduction strategy is to consider municipal bonds, because their interest is not part of the calculation for net investment income. Just make sure you steer clear of private-activity municipal bonds, because interest from such bonds is subject to the alternative minimum tax. Alas, even tax-exempt investing has its traps.", "keyword": "Federal Taxes;Stocks,Bonds;Asset allocation;IRS;Capital gains tax;Mutual fund;Income tax;401k;IRA"}
{"id": "ny0256782", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2011/08/15", "title": "Market Gyrations Aid CNBC in Battle for Viewers", "abstract": "When Nik Deogun was running the financial coverage of The Wall Street Journal during the crisis in 2008, he kept a constant eye on CNBC as the events played out on television. \u201cIt was news being made, all the time, in real time,\u201d he said. Having left The Journal in 2010 for CNBC, Mr. Deogun is now in charge of the network\u2019s coverage of the gyrating global markets, a fresh crisis that has restored CNBC to prominence among retail investors who temporarily tune into business news in turbulent times. This time, however, there is stiffer competition from the Fox Business Network and Bloomberg Television, both of which are hoping to take advantage of what they perceive as CNBC\u2019s vulnerabilities. The markets\u2019 wild swings are not necessarily profit-generating for TV news outlets because most advertisers buy airtime far in advance, meaning that the prices do not rise in tandem with the ratings. But coverage of crises can burnish reputations, as the networks attract worried viewers who sample news and stock-picking shows for the first time \u2014 or at least for the first time in a long while. So far, CNBC \u2014 not its smaller rivals \u2014 seems to be benefiting the most from interest this month in the last-minute agreement on the United States debt ceiling , the Standard & Poor\u2019s downgrade of America\u2019s debt rating and concern over the stability of European banks. Through the first two weeks of August, CNBC, a unit of NBC Universal, had on average 378,000 at-home viewers during the New York market hours of 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., up sharply from 224,000 in July. Fox Business, a unit of the News Corporation, had an average of 107,000 viewers at those hours, up from 76,000 in July. Bloomberg Television is not publicly rated; private ratings indicate that it too had a surge in recent weeks, though its audience is smaller than that of Fox Business. It is exceedingly hard to estimate the reach of the business networks. CNBC, despite being dominant, flatly declines to talk about ratings because it says Nielsen\u2019s sample does not count out-of-home viewing or affluent viewers, exactly the kinds of viewers it says it attracts. The Nielsen ratings nonetheless serve as a barometer of sorts in good business times and bad. CNBC\u2019s at-home audience has not been this big since the so-called flash crash of May 2010, reaffirming that people are once again paying attention to the ups and downs of the markets. Kevin Magee, the executive in charge of the Fox Business Network, said that periods of big financial news usually helped \u201cthe new guy.\u201d Fox Business started in October 2007, and Mr. Magee is quick to point out that CNBC has both a 20-year head start and enviable distribution. (CNBC is available in about 100 million households, while Fox Business is in about 57 million.) Still, he said that once viewers found his network, \u201cthey have a tendency to stay with us after that.\u201d Fox Business broke even for the first time in the fiscal year that ended June 30. \u201cIt\u2019s a better channel today than it was 12 months ago,\u201d the News Corporation chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said on a conference call with reporters last week. Among other changes, it has added a program featuring Lou Dobbs at 7 p.m. and a libertarian-oriented talk show, \u201cFreedom Watch,\u201d at 8. Those two hours occasionally outperform CNBC, but during market hours, CNBC is always on top. Some at CNBC have said they regard Fox Business as another political flavor of Fox News, though Mr. Magee said that notion \u201chas no credibility in the industry other than in the hallways of Englewood Cliffs,\u201d the New Jersey town where CNBC is based. Nielsen data shows 81 percent of Fox Business viewers also watch Fox News, while 31 percent of CNBC viewers also watch Fox News. Of course, as the third-biggest channel on all of cable, Fox News is an asset for its little brother \u2014 which is why it simulcast Fox Business for two hours on Aug. 7. When asked about the Fox Business Network and Bloomberg Television, Mr. Deogun said that CNBC saw competition \u201ceverywhere\u201d and suggested that his staff members spent more time competing for guest bookings with each other than with external rivals. CNBC says its bookings tell the story: on Aug. 7, the network had the first interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner after S.& P. announced its downgrade of the United States debt rating; on Tuesday, it had the only interview with the Bank of America chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, after the bank\u2019s stock plummeted; and on Wednesday, the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale chief executive, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Oud\u00e9a, called in to dismiss speculation about France\u2019s creditworthiness. \u201cI have a Delta Force of reporters and producers around the globe, all of whom are attacking the story of the day every day,\u201d Mr. Deogun said. (The New York Times has a content-sharing deal with CNBC.) The networks, though, are careful not to appear to be benefiting from a market free fall. Andrew Morse, who took over the United States operations of Bloomberg Television six weeks ago, said, \u201cYou don\u2019t want to take advantage of the situation, but you do want to distinguish yourself through the quality of your work.\u201d Bloomberg Television has struggled to stand out since its inception in 1994. Recently it has replaced staid graphics, refashioned its schedule, taken out ads in New York for its morning anchors, Margaret Brennan and Betty Liu, and battled for better distribution. (It is available in about 60 million homes.) Over time, the network may reorient itself toward more general news, a bit more like CNN. For now, the situation suggests what many analysts said at the time of the Fox Business debut: there just may not be room enough for three all-business networks. But having three in the mix does allow for some diversity and some occasional infighting. When the government reached a deal on the debt ceiling on July 31, and when S.& P.\u2019s downgrade was made official on the evening of Aug. 5, CNBC stayed with taped feature programming while Fox and Bloomberg showed lengthy live reports. On that Sunday, \u201cwhen we were up with a special report, they had a dog dressed in pajamas,\u201d said Mr. Magee of Fox Business. Mr. Deogun said he did not regret the decision not to go live on those nights; what mattered more, he said, was the network\u2019s live special report on the Sunday after the Aug. 5 downgrade, when investors were anxious about the Asia market opening. That night, Mr. Geithner \u201cspoke to one outlet, and that was us,\u201d Mr. Deogun said. All three channels have added hours of special programming to cover the current market unrest, and producers at CNBC concede privately that the aggressive posture of Fox Business and Bloomberg Television is probably good for their network. \u201cDon\u2019t get complacent,\u201d one CNBC producer said he had told his staff members.", "keyword": "Television;News and News Media;CNBC;Fox Business Network"}
{"id": "ny0129354", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/06/07", "title": "U.S. Continues to Assure Israel About Efforts on Iran", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama and his senior advisers have said little publicly about Iran since the resumption of negotiations over its nuclear program in April, preferring to let the diplomats hash out the issues in the hope that tensions with Tehran can be managed, at least until the election in November. In Israel , however, the United States is still saying plenty, with a stream of current and former officials traveling there to threaten additional sanctions on Iran and to reiterate Mr. Obama\u2019s readiness to use military action against Iran if diplomacy fails. \u201cWhen the president said all options are on the table, let me reassure you that those options are real and viable,\u201d said Mich\u00e8le A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, speaking at a security conference in Tel Aviv last week. Referring to the Pentagon\u2019s planning for a possible military strike, she said, \u201cHaving sat in the Pentagon and spent a lot of my time on this issue, I can assure you of the quality of that work.\u201d David S. Cohen, a Treasury Department under secretary who oversees financial sanctions, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that if the next round of nuclear talks, in Moscow on June 18, break down, \u201cthere is no question we will continue to ratchet up the pressure.\u201d Israel and the United States, he said, are considering unspecified new measures that would build on the oil sanctions set to take effect at the beginning of next month. And their remarks followed a speech last month by the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, who said that the United States not only was willing to use force, but had also made preparations for a military operation. The White House says it has not coordinated a message campaign in Israel; Ms. Flournoy, who stepped down earlier this year as chief policy adviser to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, said she did not discuss her remarks in advance with either the Pentagon or the White House. But her statements dovetail with a concerted American effort that also includes frequent high-level meetings with Israeli officials \u2014 all aimed at giving Israel enough confidence in the diplomatic effort that it will hold off on a unilateral military strike. \u201cThere is, and has been, a consistent interest in reassuring the Israelis that we\u2019re not going to be played,\u201d said Dennis B. Ross, who was one of the president\u2019s senior advisers on Iran and is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. \u201cThat the goal is to raise pressure, not to relieve it, and that the objective remains prevention, not containment.\u201d Mr. Ross did his part for the effort at a public gathering in New York City last week, in which he recounted a meeting he had with King Abdullah II of Saudi Arabia in April 2009 when Mr. Ross was still in the administration. The king, he said, warned him explicitly that Saudi Arabia would press for its own nuclear bomb if Iran acquired nuclear weapons . Though Saudi Arabia\u2019s alarm about Iran was well known through leaked State Department cables, it was the first time a former Obama official had publicly confirmed the king\u2019s threat. Mr. Ross\u2019s remarks flew largely under the radar in the United States. But they were published prominently in Israel, where he is a well-known figure after decades as a negotiator on Middle East peace issues. By underscoring the danger of a nuclear arms race in the region \u2014 something Mr. Obama himself has emphasized in speeches and interviews \u2014 Mr. Ross was trying to reassure Israelis, some of whom harbor lingering suspicions that the White House would rather contain a nuclear Iran than go to war to prevent it. Israeli jitters have hardly been eased by the first two bargaining sessions between Iran and the major powers, which in addition to the United States include Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. The second meeting, in Baghdad last month, ended badly amid signs that the Iranians were unwilling to suspend enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity \u2014 a demand by the major powers that was intended to build confidence for a broader deal. For some Israelis, the latest signs of an impasse vindicate their worries that Iran will use the negotiations as a way to stall the West, delay the oil sanctions and buy itself time to stockpile more enriched uranium. In an interview published Wednesday in the German newspaper Bild, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained that the major powers were making \u201cinadequate\u201d demands of Iran at the bargaining table. Israeli officials also balked when the senior American nuclear negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, an under secretary of state for political affairs, declared on a visit to Israel after the Baghdad meeting that the United States and Israel were on the same page when it came to dealing with Iran. \u201cWe believe that the Iranian goal is to drag this out as long as possible,\u201d said an Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. \u201cWe\u2019re happy to hear what they have to say,\u201d this official said of the visiting Americans. \u201cWe\u2019re happy to try to be reassured.\u201d Ms. Flournoy, who now advises the Obama campaign, devoted most of her remarks in Tel Aviv to making the case that Israel should not launch a premature or unilateral strike on Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities. Such an attack, she said, would set back the Iranian nuclear program, at most, one to three years. And it could splinter the coalition the United States has assembled to impose crippling sanctions on Tehran. \u201cHere\u2019s the rub,\u201d Ms. Flournoy said at Tel Aviv University\u2019s Institute for National Security Studies. \u201cIf Israel or any other country were to launch a unilateral strike against Iran\u2019s nuclear program prematurely, before all other options to stop Iran have been tried and failed, it would undermine the legitimacy of the action.\u201d In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Flournoy said she was encouraged because several Israelis approached her at the conference to express opposition to an Israeli strike and skepticism of the government\u2019s assertions that the window was fast closing for a military attack that would incapacitate Iran\u2019s nuclear abilities. But she added that the diversity of opinion among ordinary Israelis did not ease her fears of military action since, she said, Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak \u201care getting clearer and clearer in their intentions.\u201d", "keyword": "Iran;Israel;United States International Relations;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions;Obama Barack;Netanyahu Benjamin;Flournoy Michele A;Nuclear Weapons"}
{"id": "ny0159317", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2008/12/24", "title": "Home Sales Fell Sharply in November", "abstract": "Home sales declined dramatically last month and housing prices posted their sharpest decline in four decades as a rapidly slowing economy discouraged many potential buyers from tip-toeing into the market. Sales of existing homes declined 8.6 percent last month, to a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.49 million, according to the National Association of Realtors, a trade association. The median price of a home fell 13 percent in November, to $181,300 from $208,000 a year ago. That was the lowest price since February 2004. \u201cThey\u2019re about as god-awful as they can get,\u201d said Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG. \u201cThis is pretty breathtaking stuff.\u201d The troubles plaguing the housing market, which is at the heart of America\u2019s financial crisis , are only multiplying as the broader economy deteriorates. Even though mortgage rates dropped after the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to record lows near zero percent, economists said that housing would continue to lag as unemployment increases and the spiral of slumping consumer spending and waning industrial growth continues. \u201cHousing dragged down the markets this summer,\u201d said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight. \u201cNow it\u2019s the economy and financial markets that are dragging down housing.\u201d The economy was shrinking over the summer and corporate profits were falling even before the financial crisis struck with full force. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product , the broadest measure of the economy, declined at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the third quarter as corporate profit fell 1.2 percent. Analysts are forecasting that those declines will be followed by much larger decreases this quarter as the longest recession in a quarter century gains intensity. Stock markets dived into negative territory as investors took in the economic news. Just before the market closed, the Dow Jones industrial average was down about 100 points or 1.25 percent while the wider Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index was down 0.8 percent. Shares of major homebuilders such as Toll Brothers and Pulte Homes were trading lower. Sales of single-family homes dropped 8 percent from October to November while the sales of condominiums and co-ops fell an even sharper 13 percent, the Realtors association reported. The pool of unsold homes grew slightly to 4.2 million last month. At the current sales rate, it would take 11.2 months to burn off the excess inventory, which is up from a 10.3-month supply in October. The Commerce Department also reported that new home sales dropped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 407,000 in November, from a downwardly revised rate of 419,000 in October. The median price of a new home sold in November was $220,400, down 11.5 percent from the period a year ago. It was the biggest year-over-year price decline since a 12.7 percent drop in March. Investors on Wall Street seemed to take the economic news in stride. Housing values have plummeted since the peak of the market in July 2006, when the median home price was $230,200. But the housing bubble burst, sales declined, credit dried up and a flood of foreclosed homes hit the market, a combination of events that pulled median prices down 21 percent to their November levels. Still, some economists said that home prices will fall even farther before they dip low enough to entice potential home buyers. Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR, said that some parts of the country may only be halfway through such a retrenchment. \u201cYou need to have a correction, you need to have an adjustment,\u201d Mr. Shapiro said. \u201cThe faster it happens, the better.\u201d Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, said that 45 percent of all home sales in November were so-called \u201cdistressed sales,\u201d meaning that the sellers faced foreclosure, or they were forced to sell their home for less than the value of the mortgage. That was slightly higher than the previous month. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the largest price drop since the Great Depression ,\u201d Mr. Yun said. \u201cThere needs to be some measure to counter this pessimism. Without housing market stabilization, it\u2019ll be very difficult for the economy to recover.\u201d That trend is especially pronounced in regions of the country hit hardest by housing\u2019s boom and bust. In parts of Southern California, more than half of all houses sold in November had gone through foreclosure at some point in the last 12 months, according to MDA DataQuick, a real-estate research firm. \u201cOutside of distressed properties, the market is nonexistent almost,\u201d Frederick Cannon, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said of the California market. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to sell into it. Most people are saying, \u2018I\u2019ll just stay in this house.\u2019 \u201d In California\u2019s Riverside County, real-estate agent Gary Crutchley said that he had sold six homes in the last four months. Three were foreclosure sales, two were \u201cshort sales\u201d in which homeowners sold to avoid a foreclosure, and one was a traditional sale \u2014 a couple who had saved their money, and were now looking to buy into a distressed market. \u201cThey\u2019re few and far between,\u201d Mr. Crutchley said.", "keyword": "Sales;Housing;Wall Street (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0291239", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2016/01/01", "title": "Digging Deeper for Missing Mac Mail Messages", "abstract": "Q . I tried the Rebuild command to find missing messages in Mac Mail on the El Capitan version (OS X 10.11), but it didn\u2019t fix my problem. What else can I try? A. Depending on the version of El Capitan your Mac is running, the mail accounts in question and where you check messages, you may have a few other troubleshooting steps available if the Rebuild command under the Mailbox menu has not helped. If you have not updated your Mac\u2019s operating system software in the last few months (or do not have the automatic updates feature enabled in the App Store area of your System Preferences), your Mac may be missing the latest incremental updates Apple has made to OS X 10.11. In October, the company issued its 10.11.1 update designed to fix a number of bugs with Mail, including message display and issues with outgoing server information. Some users reported issues with the update freezing the Mail app, but another update for the system, called 10.11.2 , arrived in November and was intended to fix the freezing issue, among other things. If you are not sure if your Mac has the latest software, you can check by going to the Apple menu in the top left corner and selecting About This Mac . The version number is displayed along with other software and hardware information about your Mac. If your version of OS X looks out of date, you can update it by clicking the Software Update button in the box; you can also look for updates to software by going to the Apple menu and choosing App Store. If you want to see if your Mac is set to check and download updates automatically, open the System Preferences (from the Apple menu option or the icon in the desktop Dock), click App Store and see if \u201cAutomatically check for updates\u201d is enabled. If your Mac is already up to date but the mail account is synced to other devices with Apple\u2019s iCloud service, message management on the iPhone or other gadget could be the issue with the missing mail. Messages in an iCloud mail account that you send to the Trash on a mobile device or on the web also moves them into the Trash on the Mac; messages stay in the Trash for 30 days before they are permanently deleted. As problems with the Mail application can be influenced by number of factors, a visit to Apple\u2019s online support forums may also help narrow down your specific solution. In some cases, mail issues can be messy (as when old mail suddenly reappears, as can happen in some situations) and take some time to sort out. Once you do, adding a backup drive and program \u2014 like Apple\u2019s free Time Machine software \u2014 can help guard against future problems with Mail or other applications on your Mac.", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Software;Apple;Email"}
{"id": "ny0090265", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/09/01", "title": "Danny Salazar Shines as Indians Top Blue Jays for Their Sixth Straight Win", "abstract": "Jerry Sands singled home the go-ahead run in the seventh inning, Danny Salazar struck out 10 and the Cleveland Indians won their sixth straight game, beating the Blue Jays by 4-2 on Monday night in Toronto. Salazar (12-7) allowed two runs and six hits in seven innings. He reached double digits in strikeouts for the fifth time this season and the first time since he struck out 10 against Baltimore on June 6. Bryan Shaw got two outs in the eighth, and Cody Allen finished for his 28th save. Ryan Raburn doubled home the tying run as the Indians matched their longest winning streak of the season and halted Toronto\u2019s run at four. Toronto\u2019s Edwin Encarnacion, who was named A.L. player of the week after batting .391 (9 for 23) with six home runs and 17 R.B.I., extended his hitting streak to 26 games with a leadoff single in the sixth. Encarnacion finished 2 for 4 with a double. It is the ninth straight game he has recorded at least one extra-base hit, matching Shawn Green\u2019s 1999 team record. But Encarnacion failed to record an R.B.I., ending an eight-game run. ASTROS 8, MARINERS 3 Dallas Keuchel allowed one run and struck out eight in seven innings to become the American League\u2019s first 16-game winner and lead Houston past visiting Seattle. The rookie Carlos Correa, who returned after missing four games with a hamstring injury, hit a two-run homer, and Jed Lowrie and Hank Conger added solo shots to help the A.L. West-leading Astros to the victory. Keuchel (16-6), who gave up six hits, improved to 12-0 at home this season and has won 13 straight in Houston dating to last year, tying a franchise record set by Danny Darwin in 1989 and 1990. Earlier, Mariners outfielder Austin Jackson was traded to the Chicago Cubs on Monday in exchange for a player to be named and money for an international draft slot. MARLINS 4, BRAVES 0 Martin Prado and Justin Bour each had R.B.I. doubles in the eighth inning, and visiting Miami extended Shelby Miller\u2019s winless streak to 19 starts with a victory over Atlanta. Miller, an All-Star with a sparkling 2.56 E.R.A., began the night with the worst support in the majors, and the Braves, losers in six straight and 13 of 14, stayed true to form. Beginning the night with the worst average (.227) in the N.L. with runners in scoring position since the All-Star break, Atlanta has scored two runs or fewer in 20 of Miller\u2019s 27 starts. Miller (5-12) gave up six hits and struck out seven in seven innings. The Braves traded Jonny Gomes to the Kansas City Royals for minor league shortstop Luis Valenzuela during the game. Gomes went 0 for 2 and left after the fifth inning. RAYS 6, ORIOLES 3 Chris Archer pitched six scoreless innings, and Tampa Bay hit three home runs in a win over host Baltimore. Asdrubal Cabrera and Evan Longoria connected off Wei-Yin Chen (8-7), and Tim Beckham added a solo shot against Brad Brach. Logan Forsythe had three hits for the Rays, coming within a home run of the cycle. Archer (12-10) gave up four hits, walked three and struck out six to earn his first win against Baltimore in seven starts since June 7, 2013. Archer, a right-hander, finished the month with 50 strikeouts, tying the club record for August held by Scott Kazmir (2007). Archer left after throwing 113 pitches and with Tampa Bay ahead by 6-0. Brad Boxberger, the third Rays reliever, worked the ninth for his 33rd save. The defeat was the 11th in 12 games for the Orioles.", "keyword": "Baseball;Danny Salazar;Cleveland Indians;Blue Jays"}
{"id": "ny0200586", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/09/29", "title": "More Cows and More Milk Mean More Headaches", "abstract": "HANFORD, Calif. \u2014 Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers. Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country \u2014 and the timing could hardly be worse. The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it. \u201cIt\u2019s real simple,\u201d said Tony De Groot, an early adopter of the new breeding technology, who milks 4,200 cows on a farm here in the heart of this state\u2019s struggling dairy region. \u201cWe\u2019ve just got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and coming.\u201d The average price farmers received for their milk in July was $11.30 for 100 pounds, down from $19.30 in July 2008. The retail price of milk has not dropped as much, but it is down 24 percent in a year, to an average of $2.91 a gallon for milk with 2 percent fat. Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has culled about 230,000 cows nationwide. But the sorting technique, known as sexed semen, is expected to put 63,000 extra heifers into milk production this year, compared with the number that would be available if only conventional semen had been used, researchers estimate. That number will jump to 161,000 next year, and farmers fear it could double again in 2011. While that is a fraction of the 9.2 million milk cows nationwide, the extra cows this year and next could roughly equal those removed from production by the industry\u2019s culling program. Economists expect milk prices to recover only gradually, which has farmers worried about the impact of so many extra heifers and the milk they could produce. \u201cJust as the industry starts to recover from these difficult times, we\u2019re going to see these heifers enter the marketplace,\u201d said Ray Souza, president of Western United Dairymen, which represents farmers who produce about 60 percent of the milk in California. \u201cAt the very worst it could certainly stop the recovery altogether and send us into another price recession.\u201d The sorting technology relies on slight size differences between the Y chromosome, which produces male offspring, and the X chromosome, which produces female offspring and has a slightly larger amount of genetic material, or DNA. After it is collected from a bull at a stud farm, semen is mixed with a dye that sticks to DNA. A machine detects the extra dye sticking to X chromosomes and sorts the sperm. The sorted semen is frozen and sold to farmers who use it to inseminate their livestock. (A fertility institute outside Washington is studying whether the same technique can be used safely in people. If it won approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the technology would let parents choose their baby\u2019s sex.) When the technology was first marketed widely to farmers in 2006, it represented a long-awaited breakthrough, and was embraced because global milk demand was outstripping supply. A typical Holstein herd using conventional breeding methods will produce 48 percent female offspring and 52 percent male. The male calves are usually sold for little money to be raised as meat, and the females are raised as milk producers. But the sorted sperm produces 90 percent or more female offspring, allowing farmers to expand their herds more efficiently. At Mr. De Groot\u2019s farm on a recent afternoon, a worker removed a slender pink tube of sexed semen from a liquid nitrogen canister, where it was kept frozen. He passed it to a colleague who inserted it into a heifer\u2019s body. The cow munched on feed, seemingly oblivious. If the insemination took, her calf would almost certainly be female. The technology\u2019s impact is being felt now, at the depths of the dairy industry\u2019s hard times, because of the long lag time in raising cows born of sexed semen to the point that they have calves of their own and thus enter milk production. Mr. De Groot, 74, first turned to sexed semen during the long economic boom because he wanted to expand his herd. \u201cWhen the world was short of milk we were all told, \u2018We need more milk!\u2019 Everybody was crying for more milk,\u201d he said in his farm office, decorated with trophies for the high quality of his milk. But his plans were interrupted by the economic crisis, which caused booming dairy exports to dry up and curbed demand at home, sending prices tumbling. At the same time, feed costs remained high, squeezing farmers from both sides. Mr. De Groot, who has used the technology with only a portion of his livestock, estimated that he would get up to 350 additional heifers a year by using sexed semen. But he cannot expand his herd because dairy processors will not buy the extra milk. So for the time being, as the sexed semen offspring come of age, he will put them into the herd in place of lower-producing animals. That will drive up output too, though not as much as expanding the total number of cows. Scott Bentley, dairy product manager at ABS Global, in DeForest, Wis., a major producer of sexed semen, said that in the long run, the technology should be a boon. But first, the industry has to get through its worst economic crisis in decades. \u201cThis is a really exciting thing,\u201d Mr. Bentley said of the technology. \u201cAnd this is very difficult times. And you combine the two and realize it didn\u2019t work as well as we hoped.\u201d", "keyword": "Reproduction (Biological);Cattle;Dairy Products;Milk;Factory Farming"}
{"id": "ny0029436", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/06/05", "title": "Merkel Visits Flood-Stricken Regions of Germany and Offers Aid", "abstract": "PIRNA, Germany \u2014 When Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in this Baroque town on Tuesday to wade through ankle-deep floodwaters and dole out human sympathy, Toni Schacha laid down his caulking gun on a stack of sandbags and strained to catch a glimpse of her. He had put up plywood across the front of his cafe and needed more sealant to keep some of the highest floodwater in five centuries from seeping in. \u201cSilicone! I need more silicone!\u201d Mr. Schacha, 33, called out. But only other residents engaged in the same battle with the elements \u2014 emptying homes and businesses of furniture and inventory and barricading doors and windows with sandbags \u2014 could hear. The chancellor was already hurrying to her next destination, an inundated village in the neighboring state of Thuringia. Mr. Schacha went back to applying sealant. \u201cMoral support,\u201d he said. \u201cAll anyone can give us now is moral support.\u201d Image Houses flooded by the Elbe River in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday. Credit Arno Burgi/DPA, via Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Ms. Merkel was thinking of something a bit more concrete. She pledged 100 million euros, about $130 million, in immediate aid for all flood-stricken regions. \u201cWhat is important now is that we are able to get the aid quickly to people,\u201d Ms. Merkel said in Passau, in southeastern Germany, where water still filled the streets of the medieval Old Town, although it was beginning to recede. On Monday, the Danube there reached a record level of 42 feet, which the authorities said was the highest in 500 years. In Pirna, on the Elbe River, the chancellor spoke with volunteers readying sandbags and with first responders who had helped evacuate nursing homes. Then she waded into the rapidly rising water in the city\u2019s Old Town, which was struck by the 2002 floods and had been largely renovated and refurbished since. Mayor Klaus-Peter Hanke said the city had only recently made efforts to capitalize on the brightly repainted and repaired historic downtown, immortalized in the paintings of Bernardo Bellotto in the 18th century. Now he pondered aloud how it would fare, given an obviously shortened tourist season on top of the flood damage. The city authorities have canceled a parade celebrating the city\u2019s 780th anniversary and a festival later this month. Image Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with relief workers in Passau, Germany, on Tuesday. Credit Andreas Gebert/European Pressphoto Agency \u201cEspecially our small businesses will need financial assistance,\u201d Mr. Hanke said. Helmut Gregert, a retiree who said he had spent Monday emptying out a church and helping friends clear basements, agreed. Remembering the devastating effects of the 2002 flood, he welcomed the chancellor\u2019s visit, albeit in restrained tones. \u201cIt is important that she is here and shows solidarity with people,\u201d he said. Others were less convinced. Several in Pirna who watched Ms. Merkel\u2019s being whisked in to view the damage before speeding out as the waters continued to rise grumbled about campaign tactics but declined to speak on the record with a reporter. About 4,000 soldiers from the German Army have been sent to help shore up local police officers and volunteers, along with 2,000 more disaster workers. Many worked through the night Monday filling and stacking sandbags to reinforce dikes and other barriers along the Danube, Elbe and Inn Rivers, swollen with rainwater and runoff from the neighboring Czech Republic and Austria. Residents in Dresden, just north of Pirna, began evacuating its downtown on Tuesday afternoon, as water there was expected to rise an additional five feet or so in coming days. The city\u2019s Semper Opera House altered its schedule, shortening some performances. Officials warned that the flood could reach 2002 proportions, when the river crested at nearly 31 feet. In Pirna, authorities said the flood could be even higher than in 2002. Asked if he had not taken a risk building a business in the flood-prone inner city, Mr. Schacha shook his head. \u201cThe flood of a century is supposed to happen once in a lifetime,\u201d he said. \u201cNot once every 10 years.\u201d", "keyword": "Flood;Germany;Angela Merkel"}
{"id": "ny0098266", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/06/19", "title": "F.C.C. Will Continue Plan to Subsidize Broadband for the Poor", "abstract": "The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted 3 to 2 along party lines to approve a proposal to explore subsidizing broadband Internet for poor Americans. The plan, introduced last month by the agency\u2019s Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, helps pave the way for sweeping changes to a $1.7 billion phone subsidy program. Republicans have opposed extending the phone subsidy \u2014 known as Lifeline and initiated in 1985 under President Ronald Reagan \u2014 pointing to past instances of fraud in the program and suggesting that any expansion would generate more fraud. On Thursday, the two Republican commissioners delivered strongly worded dissents. \u201cAdequate controls and deterrents against waste, fraud and abuse should be in place before considering expanding the program to broadband,\u201d said Michael O\u2019Rielly, a Republican commissioner. Part of Mr. Wheeler\u2019s plan approved on Thursday was an effort to allay those concerns. In its vote, the commission adopted stricter measures to ensure that eligible households claim only one subsidy of $9.25 a month. Those antifraud measures \u2014 including new record-keeping requirements for service providers, which are charged with verifying a person\u2019s income \u2014 are expected to take effect this summer. \u201cI am befuddled at how this Republican program has suddenly become so partisan,\u201d Mr. Wheeler said in responding to the dissents on Thursday. \u201cBut I am proud to cast my vote with the majority.\u201d The commission will now begin to discuss the logistics of how exactly to incorporate broadband into the program and write specific rules. Those changes would need to be approved by a separate vote, one not expected for at least several months. A principal question that regulators must address is how far, exactly, the current subsidy can go in financing broadband. Republicans and Democrats alike have wondered about the economic feasibility of offering a mix of phone service and broadband at the same price, which Mr. Wheeler has suggested would be possible. On Thursday, both Mr. O\u2019Rielly and his fellow Republican commissioner, Ajit Pai, said they wanted to establish a firm budget and spending cap on the program to keep its cost from multiplying. Mr. Wheeler called those concerns \u201ca rhetorical snowstorm to distract\u201d from the basic premise of the proposal. Still, Democrats celebrated the significance of taking aim at the so-called digital divide, the social and economic gap between those with access to technology and those without it. Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic commissioner, on Thursday called a broadband subsidy essential to bridging the \u201chomework gap\u201d in particular, pointing to children\u2019s increasing need for Internet access. \u201cStudents who lack regular broadband access are struggling to keep up,\u201d she said, noting that as many as seven in 10 teachers assign homework that requires online connectivity. \u201cNow is not a moment too soon, because this is about the future.\u201d The proposal, Mr. Wheeler said, was about attacking problems in America that the commission should be united against. \u201cBoth political parties are now engaged in serious campaigning as to who\u2019s going to be responsible for the country and the commission in a few years,\u201d he said. \u201cBut both political parties are in violent agreement that our country is challenged by economic inequality.\u201d", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;FCC;Telecommunication;Income Inequality;Tom Wheeler"}
{"id": "ny0246139", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/04/23", "title": "On Long Island, Police Find 2 Teeth at Remains Site", "abstract": "WANTAGH, N.Y. (AP) \u2014 The police on Friday discovered two teeth not far from where a human skull was found this month, in a dense section of underbrush along a Long Island highway. Ten sets of human remains have been found there since December. The authorities suspect a serial killer could be responsible for some of the victims dumped by the roadway near Jones Beach State Park, but they have neither identified a suspect nor linked all the remains to the same culprit. Detective Lt. Kevin Smith, a Nassau County police spokesman, said that it appeared likely that the teeth came from the skull, but that a medical examiner\u2019s evaluation would be needed to confirm that suspicion. Detective Lieutenant Smith said the police returned to the area after speaking with forensic experts, who suggested additional evidence may still be hidden along the 15 miles of thick underbrush that borders Ocean Parkway. The authorities, looking for a missing New Jersey woman who worked as a prostitute last seen in the area a year ago, uncovered the first of 10 sets of remains in December. Four bodies were later identified as women in their 20s, who all worked as prostitutes, booking clients online. The authorities said they suspected that because all the women shared similar lifestyles, they might have been singled out by the same killer. No suspects have been identified.", "keyword": "Serial Murders;Nassau County (NY);Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0129331", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2012/06/07", "title": "Europe and Consumer Groups at Odds Over Restricted Net Access", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 In Europe, the debate over unrestricted Internet access \u2014 so-called net neutrality \u2014 has shifted to a core question: How much should the European Union intervene when mobile Internet service providers restrict Web access? Neelie Kroes , the European commissioner for telecommunications, raised the issue late last month when she announced an effort to require clearer and more truthful descriptions of Internet service practices, particularly for mobile contracts. Ms. Kroes made the announcement after Berec, the European Commission \u2019s telecommunications advisory panel, calculated that mobile operators restricted rival services for 20 percent of European consumers. In some smaller European countries, Berec said, 95 percent of consumers may have restricted access. For example, many mobile operators prohibit the use of Skype, the free Internet calling service, because they prefer consumers pay to make calls. Ms. Kroes said she intended to push operators to clearly disclose Web restrictions as well as potential minimum Internet speeds, not just the maximums that operators promote in advertisements. Ms. Kroes did not forbid operators from blocking specific Internet services, saying she would not micromanage the industry, but rather advised national regulators to create new guidelines, in effect rejecting calls by the European Parliament in November to enforce net neutrality in European law. \u201cYou don\u2019t need me or the E.U. telling you what sort of Internet services you must pay for,\u201d she said last week. In June 2011, the Netherlands adopted a net neutrality law on a national scale, preventing KPN and other operators from blocking Internet calling programs or messaging applications like WhatsApp Messenger. The European neutrality debate has involved greater legal scrutiny of the traffic management strategies used by mobile operators. Current law permits European operators to manage traffic and assure adequate speeds and access for all. Ms. Kroes\u2019s plan was quickly criticized by consumer and Internet advocates as inadequate. John Phelan, a spokesman for the European Consumers\u2019 Organization, which is based in Brussels, called on Ms. Kroes to penalize operators that block Internet-based rivals. \u201cHer approach is to stand back and rely on an open market and consumer choice, but we don\u2019t think that is enough,\u201d Mr. Phelan said. \u201cWe think she needs to enshrine the concept of network neutrality into the European regulation of the sector.\u201d Harry Small, a technology and communications lawyer in London at the firm Baker & McKenzie, who advises Internet service providers and large companies buying broadband service, said Ms. Kroes\u2019s push for clearer contract language would help improve consumer choice and access. There was also some debate about whether the restricted Web access should be termed something other than \u201cInternet.\u201d Mr. Small said it was not likely that Ms. Kroes would try to restrict the commercial use of the term under fair advertising regulations. \u201cYou cannot restrict use of the word Internet unless you are falling below the general European standards of conduct to consumers,\u201d Mr. Small said. J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Zimmermann, the co-founder of a French net neutrality activist group, La Quadrature du Net, said the report by Berec underlined the growth of restricted Internet service in Europe and should alarm consumers. \u201cWhen 20 percent, maybe even half, of Europeans have only restricted Internet access,\u201d Mr. Zimmermann said, \u201cI would argue that network neutrality is failing in Europe.\u201d Marco Fiorentino, the co-founder of Messagenet, an Internet phone operator, said that European operators were increasingly selling broadband plans that block services like Messagenet. TeliaSonera, the Swedish operator, and Yoigo, an operator in Spain, recently added broadband plans that excluded Internet calling, or made it available at an additional charge, Mr. Fiorentino said. \u201cThis is happening more and more now,\u201d he added. \u201cBut it is unclear whether the E.U. is going to do anything to stop it.\u201d Messagenet is working to hide consumers\u2019 use of its services from the screening techniques operators use to identify and block Internet calling operators. The company\u2019s Internet voice service uses software that disguises signs of voice-over Internet traffic from operators, so the Internet calls can evade operators\u2019 filters. \u201cIt\u2019s a cat-and-mouse game,\u201d Mr. Fiorentino said. Operators block or restrict potential Web rivals by using a technology called deep packet inspection, which scours groups of data for markers indicating the use of a competing services. Ms. Kroes said she intended to draft guidelines for operators on the appropriate use of this analysis. Thierry Dieu, a spokesman for the European Telecommunications Network Operators\u2019 Association, said operators endorsed Ms. Kroes\u2019s push for greater transparency in consumer contracts as a way to ensure wider Internet access. He said that new restrictions should not interfere with operators\u2019 need to manage rising traffic levels to guarantee service for all consumers.", "keyword": "Kroes Neelie;Net Neutrality;European Union;European Commission;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0290810", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/01/09", "title": "Gunman Said He Shot Philadelphia Officer for ISIS, Police Say", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 A man who wounded a Philadelphia police officer in a patrol car, emptying his gun and even reaching through the car window to shoot the officer, told investigators that he did it in the name of Islam and the Islamic State, police officials said Friday. Using a stolen police handgun, the man fired at least 11 times late Thursday night, striking Officer Jesse Hartnett three times in the left arm, said Richard Ross Jr., the city\u2019s police commissioner. Though badly wounded, Officer Hartnett, 33, chased his attacker and returned fire, striking him in the buttocks. Arrested minutes later, Edward Archer, 30, \u201chas confessed to committing this cowardly act in the name of Islam,\u201d Commissioner Ross said at a news conference. \u201cAccording to him, the police defend laws that he believes are contrary to Islam.\u201d Capt. James Clark, commander of the Police Department\u2019s homicide division, quoted Mr. Archer as telling investigators: \u201cI follow Allah and I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. That is the reason why I did what I did.\u201d Image Edward Archer, the suspect Credit Philadelphia Police Department Dramatic images of the shooting, taken by a security video camera, swept across the national media, showing a gunman wearing a long robe \u2014 the kind of loose outer garment, known as a thobe or dishdasha, often worn by Muslim men \u2014 running toward the patrol car and firing, until finally he was reaching into the window. Then he ran away, firing at least once more as he fled. Officials said that while the video left little question about what happened, there was some doubt as to why. Mr. Archer\u2019s mother, Valerie Holliday, said he had serious psychological problems. But officials said they did not know if that was true. Beyond repeating his allegiance to Islam, Captain Clark said, \u201che wouldn\u2019t give us anything more than that.\u201d Officials said they did not know whether Mr. Archer had any contact with radicals or terrorist groups, or whether he had been influenced by such groups from afar and become \u201cself-radicalized.\u201d In talking with investigators, the man appeared \u201csavvy enough to stop short of implicating himself in a conspiracy, if there was one,\u201d Commissioner Ross said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t appear to be a stupid individual, just an extremely violent one.\u201d \u201cHe certainly was targeting police,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was trying to assassinate this police officer.\u201d In the wake of the massacres in San Bernardino, Calif., in December and in Paris in November, the Philadelphia shooting and its video images stoked fears of a continuing trend of young people inspired to violence by radical groups. That prompted Mayor Jim Kenney, standing with the commissioner at the news conference, to say, \u201cIn no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam have anything to do with what you\u2019ve seen on this screen.\u201d Image Officer Hartnett Credit Philadelphia Police Department Mr. Archer has recently lived at addresses in West Philadelphia and in Yeadon, Pa., a small suburban town nearby, and the police and F.B.I. were searching those locations Friday. Court records show he was found guilty in November of several charges, including fraud and forgery, and was awaiting sentencing. Last year, he was sentenced to nine to 23 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges of carrying an unlicensed gun and assault. Ms. Holliday told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Mr. Archer, the oldest of seven siblings, had suffered head injuries and had been hearing voices, and laughing and muttering to himself. Natalie King, 68, who lives across the street from Mr. Archer\u2019s Yeadon residence, said that she considered mental illness a more likely explanation than religious extremism. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t what you would call radicalized or nothing like that,\u201d she said. Mayor Rohan Hepkins of Yeadon said, \u201cTo think that we have been harboring not just a criminal but a potential terrorist, it just shows that this can happen anywhere in the United States.\u201d The gun used to shoot Officer Hartnett, which was recovered at the scene, was a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol taken from an officer\u2019s home in October 2013, Commissioner Ross said. He said that it was reported stolen at the time, and that the officer it was issued to had been disciplined. Image Commissioner Ross at a news conference Friday about the shooting of Officer Hartnett. Credit Mark Makela/Getty Images \u201cHow many hands it may have passed through in the last couple of years, we have no way of knowing,\u201d he added. The gun battle took place at about 11:41 p.m. Thursday in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood, a low-income area on Philadelphia\u2019s western edge. The officer, patrolling alone on low-rise residential streets, reached 60th and Spruce Streets, an intersection with a few small shops and a restaurant. Officer Hartnett, who has been on the force for five years and previously served as an officer with another department, suffered a broken bone and serious nerve damage in his arm, and \u201che lost a significant amount of blood at that scene,\u201d the commissioner said. After the officer fired back at the gunman, he radioed for help, yelling: \u201cI\u2019m shot! I\u2019m bleeding heavily!\u201d The intersection is only about a quarter-mile from where, in 1985, the Philadelphia police, trying to end an armed standoff with the black liberation group MOVE, dropped explosives on a house , starting a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed dozens of homes. The shooting Thursday resembled the December 2014 ambush of two New York City officers as they sat in a patrol car in Brooklyn. In that case, Ismaaiyl Brinsley fatally shot Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, then killed himself.", "keyword": "Philadelphia;Attacks on Police;Jesse Hartnett;Edward Archer;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Richard Ross;Pennsylvania"}
{"id": "ny0162928", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2006/02/10", "title": "Snowboarding Revolution Rolls On", "abstract": "Turin, Italy - SETH WESCOTT was 10 when he first felt the establishment wrath, when he was spit at in a lift line by a man who was apparently blinded in the snow to the inescapable forces of change. He was just a boy on his board, climbing the steepest mountain, the one resistant to upheaval, to what it doesn't recognize or know. \"All I wanted to do was to be out there on the mountain and there I was feeling prejudice from adults,\" Wescott said. \"It was disheartening.\" Now here he is, a 29-year-old United States Olympian, the reigning men's world champion of snowboardcross, a flashy four-person race that makes its Olympic debut here next week. \"A good bizarre,\" Wescott called the sensation of being part of the latest boarder invasion, the outsider suddenly in. \"I was part of a group that was the first snowboarders on Aspen Mountain,\" he said. \"To see the sport get to the point where people are putting their little kids right onto a board, to see it as a focus of NBC leading into the Games, it is kind of amazing to me.\" Does the snowboarders' indisputable transformation of the ski world and the Olympic infiltration of Generation X Games represent success or a sellout? That depends on one's definition of being a rebel. Wescott is from Sugarloaf, Me., and he has known Bode Miller, the American Alpine bad boy from Franconia, N.H., since he was 13. He believes Miller has been unfairly vilified recently, exploited by CBS and \"60 Minutes\" when the network stretched the bounds of context in the promotion of an interview that touched on Miller's well-advertised drinking habits. \"Bode wasn't saying he was going out on the mountain hammered,\" Wescott said. \"He said he was out celebrating after doing something amazing, winning the overall World Cup title, and he had a hangover the next day when he raced. There's a big difference and I thought that was the shame of it all.\" Miller had to apologize in the face of a potential pre-Olympic marketing meltdown and maybe he was manipulated for a little ratings sizzle, but for a guy who is characterized and even celebrated for being counterculture, it is fair to wonder just what he represents, besides Nike and the rest of his corporate sponsors. I know the area of the White Mountains in which Miller grew up, having had several friends who in the early-to-mid-1970's attended Franconia College, a now-defunct institution that offered an alternative educational environment. Miller lived nearby as a child, in a cabin without basic utilities. Supposedly all grown up, he seems to me to be mimicking or distorting his parents' social values more than practicing them, rebellious as a convenient rationalization for breaking all the rules. The snowboarders are the true ski revolutionaries, and not because of their well-documented penchant for partying, or their lifestyles of the young and restless. They at least made their own choices and wound up changing the system. They were the rebels with a cause. \"I was up at the top of the mountain with my acid-washed jeans because I was too cool to wear my ski pants,\" said Nate Holland, 27, another snowboardcross Olympian, from Sandpoint, Idaho. \"The only reason I took up snowboarding was because it was the rebel thing to do.\" In all snowboarding disciplines, it was never about the big money, at least not until recently. According to Wescott, most snowboarders make a decent living on the pro circuit -- though exceptions to the rule, like the halfpipe star Shaun White, are living large. The women's snowboardcross and halfpipe gold medal contender, the 20-year-old Lindsey Jacobellis, is cashing in on her flowing hair and disarming smile, starring in commercials for Visa, Kellogg's and Dunkin' Donuts. She doesn't recall anyone spitting on her when she was the curly haired blond girl on a snowboard at Stratton Mountain in Vermont, but, she said, \"People didn't respect it.\" Miller will be the headline act in what remains the premier Olympic ski event, the men's downhill, Sunday afternoon. \"Bode's a rebel, too,\" Holland said, graciously. \"He's skiing so fast, like a madman.\" Miller, the rebel of rowdy, nonetheless pales as a practitioner with a purpose in comparison with those boarders who forced their way onto the mountain that belonged to others and turned it into a residential cooperative. Wescott is predicting a grand future for snowboardcross, comparing it favorably to short-track speed skating, the sport that launched Apolo Anton Ohno's celebrity. \"More speed, big air,\" Wescott said. None of these sports is going to challenge the National Football League, usurp the Super Bowl, but there will be no moving off the mountain now for the snowboarders, even if a few harsh critics remain. \"Just last week in Aspen, we got on a chair in Aspen and all of a sudden, this old guy is screaming at us -- 'We can't ride with snowboarders up here! You guys don't belong!' \" Holland said. Guess he hadn't heard the war was over. The rebels won. \"The old-school way of thinking,\" Holland called it. \"We just laughed.\" Sports of The Times E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com", "keyword": "OLYMPIC GAMES (2006);WINTER GAMES (OLYMPICS);OLYMPIC GAMES;SNOWBOARDING"}
{"id": "ny0238940", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/12/02", "title": "Most Carmakers Report Increase in November Sales", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 New-vehicle sales in the United States rose nearly 17 percent in November, setting the stage for the industry to end the year on a high note and enter 2011 with considerable momentum. But one carmaker, Toyota, has been left out of the strong gains. Toyota, still struggling to overcome the damage done to its image by numerous recalls, reported a 3.3 percent decrease in sales last month. Among the 10 largest manufacturers, all but Toyota reported increases of at least 12 percent. All three Detroit companies posted sizable gains last month. Ford\u2019s sales were up 20 percent, General Motors 12.2 percent, and Chrysler 16.7 percent. Toyota is on pace to end the year with its lowest market share since 2005 and to sell the fewest passenger cars since 2003. Its share in November fell to 14.8 percent, from 17.9 percent a year earlier. \u201cThey just don\u2019t seem to be able to catch a break,\u201d Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and insight at TrueCar.com , which tracks vehicle sales, said. \u201cToyota has a tough road ahead. They have not been able to take advantage of the recovery this year.\u201d Mr. Toprak said he thinks Toyota\u2019s slow reaction and inability to reassure many consumers after widespread complaints about its vehicles accelerating suddenly, \u201chas hurt them permanently.\u201d Toyota officials attributed last month\u2019s decline to a decision to sell fewer vehicles to businesses and governments that pay discounted rates \u2014 known as fleet sales \u2014 and a shift in demand toward trucks and away from smaller cars, Toyota\u2019s forte. Robert S. Carter, a Toyota group vice president, noted that the Toyota brand, which he heads, remained the industry\u2019s most popular brand among individual buyers, even though its sales for the year were down. The Toyota Camry sedan is the top-selling car in the United States for the ninth consecutive year, despite a 24 percent decline in November. \u201cOver all, we believe our retail volume is right on track. We\u2019re pleased with the month,\u201d Mr. Carter said on a conference call with reporters. \u201cWe just chose not to participate in some of the fleet business that\u2019s out there.\u201d But he conceded that the recalls, totaling more than 10 million vehicles globally this year, have taken a toll, hurting the company\u2019s ability to attract new customers. On Tuesday, Toyota began a \u201climited service campaign\u201d \u2014 short of a full-blown recall \u2014 to repair a coolant pump on 650,000 Prius hybrid cars. \u201cI won\u2019t say that the opinion of our brand is where it was 18 months ago,\u201d Mr. Carter said. \u201cBut we\u2019re really pleased with the progress that we\u2019re making. Our retention of our current owner body has not wavered one bit.\u201d Toyota has been offering some of its best-ever deals this year in the hopes of drawing in shoppers. Meanwhile, the Detroit automakers have been largely successful in ending their dependence on big discounts, a tactic that helped cause many of their financial troubles. \u201cWithout new product to compete with and stripped of its bulletproof quality reputation, Toyota is forced to sell on the deal,\u201d Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst with Edmunds.com, which provides car-buying advice to consumers, said. \u201cThis lack of profitability is a growing concern for dealers.\u201d Ford is on track to outsell Toyota for the first time since 2006 with its sales in 2010 up 16.6 percent. The Ford brand sold 31.3 percent more passenger cars in November than a year ago, compared to an 18 percent decline for the Toyota brand. Ford said it planned to build 11 percent more vehicles in the first quarter of 2011 \u2014 635,000 \u2014 than it did a year earlier. Ford\u2019s 20 percent overall increase accounts for sales last year by the Volvo brand, which Ford no longer owns, while sales of its remaining brands were up 24.3 percent. Excluding the brands G.M. closed, Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer, and the one it sold, Saab, sales of the brands it still operates were up 21 percent. \u201cConsumers are still cautious,\u201d said Jim Bunnell, a G.M. executive who oversees the company\u2019s dealer network and sales, \u201cbut we\u2019re starting to see people show an inclination to come back into dealerships and go back into malls. As we go into 2011, we\u2019re going to continue to see a nice improvement.\u201d Among imports, sales were up 48.2 percent for Kia, 45.2 percent for Hyundai, 26.8 percent for Nissan and 21.1 percent at Honda. The Detroit automakers, all of which have operating profits for three straight quarters, are being helped financially by higher truck sales in recent months. Sales of light trucks, which generally sell at higher prices and generate more profits than cars, were up 24 percent at Ford and Chrysler and 21 percent at G.M. November was the second straight month in which the industry\u2019s seasonally adjusted annualized selling rate was more than 12 million. The rate was below 10 million in parts of 2009 but still far below the 17 million rate in the early 2000s. Analysts expect the industry to sell about 11.5 million vehicles in 2010 and project that 2011 sales could reach 13 million.", "keyword": "General Motors Co;Automobiles;Sales"}
{"id": "ny0155784", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/06/20", "title": "For New Mets Manager, Handling Reyes Is a Delicate Balancing Act", "abstract": "It was vintage Jos\u00e9 Reyes : a line-drive single, a stolen base, moving to third on a catcher\u2019s errant throw and scoring on a groundout. As Reyes bounded in from home plate in the first inning Wednesday night, his black jersey and gray pants already covered in dirt, the first person to greet him was the new Mets manager, Jerry Manuel . \u201cI got out of the dugout to ask if he\u2019s all right,\u201d Manuel said afterward with a grin. Manuel was wryly referring to another moment that was vintage Reyes: the fit he threw the previous night when Manuel pulled him from the game in the first inning after Reyes felt a twinge in one of his occasionally balky hamstrings. As Manuel tries to turn the Mets back into something more than expensive underachievers and remove the interim tag that he was given after replacing Willie Randolph on Tuesday, his ability to succeed figures to hinge in large part on how he manages Reyes. That Reyes, the shortstop and leadoff hitter, is the catalyst for the Mets may be an understatement. He is, actually, the embodiment of the team. The usual descriptions of Reyes \u2014 plenty of talent, inconsistent, questionable attention span \u2014 are often apt adjectives for the Mets, too. And as he has shown during Manuel\u2019s first two games, Reyes is just as likely to wreak havoc in one dugout as the other. \u201cHe\u2019s a tremendous talent,\u201d Manuel said after Reyes scored three runs Wednesday in the Mets\u2019 5-4, 10-inning victory over the Angels, one of the very few games this season in which the Mets rallied late in the game to win. \u201cI think he\u2019s got to take his rightful place as one of the top shortstops in the division,\u201d Manuel said, alluding to Reyes as well as Florida\u2019s Hanley Ram\u00edrez and Philadelphia\u2019s Jimmy Rollins. Ram\u00edrez was the National League rookie of the year last season, and Rollins was the league\u2019s most valuable player. Reyes? He was the player who went into a second-half tailspin that contributed to the Mets\u2019 September collapse. Manuel, 54, and Randolph, 53, are products of the same generation. From the start, Randolph seemed to appreciate Reyes\u2019s special value, even if he was far more flamboyant than Randolph had been as a player. He tolerated Reyes\u2019s celebratory antics on the field and in the dugout, made efforts to talk to him in private, but ultimately embarrassed him when he pulled him from a game last July when Reyes failed to run out a ground ball for the second time in four days. In the end, the somewhat restrained Randolph got along with Reyes but never seemed able to establish a special bond. Manuel\u2019s approach to Reyes already appears to be more personal and contemporary than Randolph\u2019s. It may be the difference between formal and familiar \u2014 or, in Reyes\u2019s native tongue, t\u00fa and usted. When Randolph did criticize Reyes last season, he paused in his remarks, choosing his words cautiously. Manuel seems to have no such filter. Manuel said at his introductory news conference Tuesday that he wanted his players to be \u201cgangsters on the field, ladies on the bus,\u201d descriptions he would later use in regards to Reyes. When he was discussing giving his starters more rest, Manuel said of Reyes: \u201cLast night, Reyes \u2014 she acted up. I brought her home with me. She had a day off.\u201d While the comment may have evoked memories of Bill Parcells mocking the toughness of receiver Terry Glenn by referring to him as \u201cshe,\u201d Manuel\u2019s comment appeared to be a benevolent stab at humor \u2014 with a needle rather than a knife. And that metaphor came up later, when Manuel joked that if Reyes acted out again, as he had in that first game, he\u2019d go \u201cgangster\u201d on him, and would have to cut him with a knife. Through his first two games in charge of the Mets, it has been hard not to notice how involved Manuel has been with Reyes. When he went out to stretch with the team before his managerial debut, he took a spot near Reyes, first baseman Carlos Delgado and second baseman Luis Castillo, sharing jokes with all of them. Not long after that, Manuel was back in the clubhouse, talking with Reyes after that first-inning tantrum, when Reyes flung his helmet and shouted as he left the field. A few innings later, Reyes returned to the bench, where he sat and talked some more with Manuel. \u201cI think any time you step into this position, you have to be ready to react and do what you think is right,\u201d said Manuel, who praised Reyes\u2019s attitude while calling his behavior unacceptable. \u201cAs long as I\u2019m doing that, yeah, it might take a while to get through, but as long as you\u2019re doing the right thing, I think everything will be O.K.\u201d The tantrum was more or less shrugged off in the clubhouse, in part because Reyes apologized. But his outburst did give some veterans some pause. \u201cI feel bad for Jerry,\u201d catcher Brian Schneider said Wednesday. \u201cBy no means should you do that out in the open like that. \u201cIf you do anything like that you always do it inside, where the cameras aren\u2019t on you,\u201d Schneider added. \u201cBut to do it in the open, I don\u2019t agree with it. It put Jerry in a bad position. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think there will be any grudges. Jos\u00e9 realizes what he did.\u201d Time will tell, of course. But when it was suggested that Manuel might have been fortunate to have such a moment with Reyes less than an inning into his reign, the manager was not so sure. \u201cI wasn\u2019t hoping that something like that would set a precedent at all,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cI looked up and it was like, Oh, lord, here we go.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Mets;Reyes Jose;Manuel Jerry;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0140677", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/02/15", "title": "Frank Piasecki, a Pioneer in Helicopters, Is Dead at 88", "abstract": "Frank Piasecki, an inventor of one of the first helicopters and the first to develop a tandem-rotor helicopter \u2014 the so-called Flying Banana \u2014 capable of carrying large cargo loads or troops into combat, died Monday at his home in Haverford, Pa. He was 88. The cause was a heart attack, his son John said. In the early 1940s, Mr. Piasecki developed the PV-2, a small single-seat helicopter with a three-blade rotor capable of a top speed of about 25 miles per hour. When the PV-2 took off from a field outside Philadelphia on April 11, 1943, with Mr. Piasecki at the controls, he became the second successful American helicopter engineer. (Earlier models had been designed in France and Germany.) \u201cHe was one of the three primary progenitors of the American helicopter industry,\u201d Roger Connor, curator of vertical flight at the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum , said in an interview on Wednesday. \u201cOne is Igor Sikorsky, who developed the modern helicopter and placed it in mass production. Another is Arthur Young, who built the first commercially sold helicopter. And the third was Piasecki.\u201d That first flight by Mr. Piasecki was, in a way, more successful than intended. When he stepped into the cockpit, Mr. Piasecki had only 14 hours of flight experience, in a small plane, a Piper Cub. The PV-2 was tethered to the ground by a clothes line and was supposed to rise only a foot or two. \u201cThe line broke,\u201d Mr. Connor said, \u201cand he was free-flying this totally untried aircraft with no training.\u201d Soon after, with about 10 hours of helicopter flight experience, Mr. Piasecki attached the PV-2 \u2014 tail first, and not on a trailer \u2014 to the back of his Studebaker and drove to Washington to demonstrate its capabilities to War Department officials. But the helicopter wheels had no bearings and rapidly heated. \u201cHe had to stop the car every 10 to 15 minutes and splash some water to cool them off,\u201d Mr. Connor said. \u201cOne time, he had to hop a fence to get some water and was chased by a bull.\u201d The demonstration was successful, and soon Mr. Piasecki\u2019s company, PV Engineering Forum, which he started in 1940 with Harold Venzie, was receiving government contracts. That led, in 1945, to Mr. Piasecki\u2019s major breakthrough: the tandem-rotor XHRP-X transport helicopter. While Sikorsky was the first American to develop a practical helicopter, his early designs had only one engine beneath a single rotor in front; any additional load to the rear could throw it off balance. Mr. Piasecki\u2019s XHRP-X had two rotors, one in front and a higher one in the rear. It was called the Flying Banana because of the bend in its fuselage. At just under 48 feet long with rotor diameters of 41 feet, the XHRP-X was far larger than the early Sikorsky helicopters. By today\u2019s standard, it was small, but at the time it was significant advance. It could carry up to 6,500 pounds of cargo, or about 10 soldiers. Today, the largest tandem-rotor helicopter, the Chinook, can carry up to 30,000 pounds or 44 passengers. In 1946, the company\u2019s name was changed to the Piasecki Helicopter Corporation, which later became the Rotocraft Division of the Boeing Corporation. In 1955, Mr. Piasecki formed the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation, in Philadelphia. By then, the company was challenging Sikorsky as the predominant manufacturer of military helicopters. An airplane \u201cmust have landing fields,\u201d Mr. Piasecki told The Saturday Evening Post in 1957. \u201cA truck needs roads; a train has to have tracks. Even a ship needs wharves and channels. But a helicopter, all a helicopter needs is a clearing.\u201d Mr. Piasecki\u2019s company suffered a serious blow on July 1, 1986, when one of his inventions, the Helistat, crashed in Lakehurst, N.J. The Helistat was a 343-foot-long, 1-million-cubic-foot Dacron bag \u2014 about five times the volume of a Goodyear blimp \u2014 attached by an aluminum frame to four helicopters. Designed for the United States Forest Service, it was intended to transport 25 tons of lumber. The crash, a half mile from the site of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, killed one of the pilots. Frank Nicholas Piasecki was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 1919, one of two sons of Nikodem and Emilia Lotocki Piasecki, immigrants from Poland. His father was a tailor. Besides his son John, Mr. Piasecki is survived by his wife of 49 years, the former Vivian O\u2019Gara Weyerhaeuser; two daughters: Lynn Cunningham and Nicole Heymann; four other sons, Frederick, Frank, Michael and Gregory; and 13 grandchildren. As a boy, Mr. Piasecki was assembled dozens of model airplanes. In his teens, he worked for a company in Philadelphia that made autogyros, a predecessor of the helicopter that looked like an airplane with a rotor on top. After studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Piasecki transferred to New York University where he received a bachelor of science degree in 1940. In the fall of 1940, with Mr. Venzie and several other friends from the University of Pennsylvania, he started the PV Engineering Forum. They avoided using the word \u201chelicopter\u201d in its name, he said, because \u201cpeople would have laughed.\u201d There was another first in Mr. Piasecki\u2019s career. On Oct. 20, 1943, after his arrival in Washington to demonstrate the PV-2 to the military, an inspector from the Civil Aeronautics Authority (forerunner to the Federal Aviation Administration) asked to see his commercial pilot\u2019s license. Mr. Piasecki did not have one, and he received the first helicopter license issued to someone who did not already have a license to fly a fixed-wing aircraft.", "keyword": "Helicopters;Engineering and Engineers;Piasecki Frank;Deaths (Obituaries);National Air and Space Museum"}
{"id": "ny0179502", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/08/10", "title": "Quake Rattles the Los Angeles Area", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES, Aug. 9 \u2014 An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.6 rattled the Los Angeles area on Thursday, shaking many people out of bed and causing the temporary closing of a bridge after chunks of concrete came loose. The quake, which hit at 12:58 a.m., caused no major damage. The bridge, known as the Whites Canyon Road bridge, in Santa Clarita, was closed about 2:30 a.m. after a sheriff\u2019s deputy noticed the loose concrete in a routine postearthquake inspection. It reopened at noon after engineers concluded that the damage was cosmetic, said Gail Ortiz, a spokeswoman for the city of Santa Clarita. The concrete came from joints designed to expand when distressed, Ms. Ortiz said. She said inspectors were on heightened alert after an Interstate highway bridge collapsed on Aug. 1 in Minneapolis. \u201cIt is earthquake retrofitted,\u201d Ms. Ortiz said of the Santa Clarita bridge, which was built in 1993. \u201cIt looks a little scary. It\u2019s like a tree that bends in the wind. But that\u2019s what the joints are supposed to do.\u201d The quake\u2019s epicenter was three miles northwest of the Chatsworth section of Los Angeles and seven miles northwest of the Northridge section, where an earthquake of 6.7 magnitude killed more than 60 people in 1994. Thursday\u2019s quake had three minor aftershocks, the United States Geological Survey said.", "keyword": "Earthquakes;Los Angeles (Calif)"}
{"id": "ny0261795", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/06/24", "title": "Lulz Security Says It Hacked Into Arizona Data", "abstract": "Lulz Security, a group of hackers who have claimed responsibility for a number of recent online data attacks, said Thursday that it had successfully breached the Arizona Department of Public Safety\u2019s internal servers, gaining access to hundreds of law enforcement documents, police profiles and e-mails. The group posted a huge log of data it said it had obtained, releasing them on public file-sharing Web sites and a link via its Twitter account. Lulz Security said in a news release that it had chosen to attack Arizona law enforcement because it the group is opposed to the state\u2019s law against illegal immigration . A Department of Public Safety spokesman, Capt. Steve Harrison, said the biggest worry was the release of personal information about officers, which could endanger their safety. He said the documents appeared to be authentic but were sensitive, not confidential. The content of the documents obtained by Lulz Security include what appear to be the names, addresses and phone numbers of Arizona law enforcement officials. The data also covers hundreds of documents described as \u201cnot for public distribution.\u201d Some of the documents offer instructions and manuals for interrogating individuals who have been arrested. The documents also include intelligence the department has collected about gangs in Arizona and Mexico.. Lulz Security also said it planned to release \u201cmore classified documents and embarrassing personal details of military and law enforcement\u201d in the coming weeks. In the last several months Lulz Security has attacked a number of government and private Web sites, including Sony, the Senate\u2019s Web servers and the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s Web site.", "keyword": "Hackers (Computers);Computers and the Internet;Lulz Security;Arizona;Police"}
{"id": "ny0089403", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/09/10", "title": "Seattle Teachers Go on First Systemwide Strike in 30 Years After Talks Collapse", "abstract": "SEATTLE \u2014 Elias Lawrence\u2019s first day of kindergarten did not turn out as planned. With teachers walking the picket lines and classes across the city canceled, Elias, 5, instead got a day at a city community center near his home and a brief lesson in labor relations from his father, Noah Lawrence. \u201cWe talked a lot about how the teachers are unhappy with how they\u2019re being treated at work, and so they are deciding not to work to make the point \u2014 I don\u2019t know if he totally gets it,\u201d said Mr. Lawrence, 37, an engineer. The first systemwide teachers\u2019 strike here in 30 years, which was set in motion Tuesday night after contract talks broke down over issues of pay and staffing, was a novelty on Wednesday, with teachers, parents, administrators and students improvising on unfamiliar terrain. At Ingraham High School in the city\u2019s north end, the principal, Martin Floe, carried a pot of coffee out to serve the teachers who were walking in a picket line on the sidewalk under a blue sky, joined by several parents who supported them. Lief Herald, a teacher who works with at-risk students, strummed out Peter, Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez anthems. Drivers honked and waved their support. But bitter feelings \u2014 or pangs of anxiety about the future if the strike drags on \u2014 were just below the surface. With nearly 53,000 students displaced from classrooms, and about 5,000 teachers and other staff workers off the job, each side accused the other of playing hardball. \u201cThey broke it off,\u201d said Stacy Howard, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Public Schools, referring to the teachers\u2019 union, the Seattle Education Association. \u201cThe district\u2019s bargain team has been ready and willing to meet anytime, day or night.\u201d But Alan Goodin, 70, the head of the art department at Ingraham High \u2014 and a veteran of the Seattle Public Schools, around long enough to remember the last strike, in 1985 \u2014 said the district had not put any real compromise positions on the table. And he said he had been struck by the level of resolve he saw this time among his colleagues. \u201cWhen they said, \u2018All the folks opposed to going out on strike, please say nay,\u2019 there wasn\u2019t a sound in the room,\u201d Mr. Goodin said, describing the union meeting before the strike. Much has changed in Seattle, and in the American labor movement, in 30 years. Seattle in 1985 was more of a blue-collar union city than it is now, with an economy still heavily tied to maritime work and manufacturing. And labor protest was in the air nationally: Teachers in seven states walked off the job that fall. Seattle\u2019s strike lasted 25 days and was settled after the governor stepped in to bring the two sides together. In the years since, teacher strikes in big cities have become relatively rare, with the last major one in Chicago in 2012 . But teachers and school officials here said that the context of this strike in Washington was also very different \u2014 with a huge tangle of recent court orders about state funding of public education hanging over both sides. The Washington Supreme Court, the state\u2019s highest appeals panel, has ordered the state held in contempt for what the court says are failures to meet constitutional obligations to adequately and equitably fund public education. Last month, the court began assessing $100,000 a day in fines to be put into an education fund until the Legislature passes an education spending plan that the justices will accept. Seattle teachers are also being careful about the message their strike sends to residents. Plans call for picket lines to be shut down on Friday, for example \u2014 the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 \u2014 with strikers encouraged instead to volunteer across the city in soup kitchens, shelters or parks. Other time clocks related to the strike have begun ticking loudly as well \u2014 like how the days lost to the strike might have to be made up by shortened holidays or an extended school year. Seattle Parks and Recreation, which runs before- and after-school care at community centers during the school year, has committed, at least so far, to all-day camps only through Friday. Contract talks are set to resume Thursday. For Finn Johansen, 6, who was walking on a picket line with his father, Peter Johansen, a special-education teacher, spending the day with the strikers mostly came down to a lack of choices. \u201cThere was nothing else for me to do,\u201d Finn said with a shrug. \u201cMy brother was going to preschool, and my mother was going to work.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s the inside story,\u201d Mr. Johansen said. Finn spoke up again: \u201cI was excited for school,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "K-12 Education;Strikes Labor;Teachers;Labor Unions;Seattle"}
{"id": "ny0142443", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/11/30", "title": "Corzine Pays $362,500 to End a Dispute", "abstract": "TRENTON (AP) \u2014 Gov. Jon S. Corzine has paid $362,500 to the brother-in-law of his former companion to settle a dispute over whether the governor reneged on a promise to find him a private-sector job. Mr. Corzine said he completed the confidential deal with Rocco Riccio, a former state employee, in late September after Mr. Riccio threatened to sue him. The governor said his lawyers recommended that he reach a settlement. The settlement was reported on the Web site of The Star-Ledger of Newark. Mr. Corzine said Mr. Riccio threatened suit \u201cto force an accommodation.\u201d Mr. Riccio is the brother-in-law of a state workers\u2019 union leader, Carla Katz , who dated Mr. Corzine from 2002 to 2004.", "keyword": "Corzine Jon S;Katz Carla"}
{"id": "ny0267588", "categories": ["sports", "rugby"], "date": "2016/03/24", "title": "Fresh Off Grand Slam Win, England Appears Energized by Its New Coach", "abstract": "WELLINGTON, New Zealand \u2014 England has celebrated its first Six Nations Grand Slam in 13 years, but the challenge it faces in Australia in June will most likely be significantly sterner and should give its new coach, Eddie Jones, a clearer picture of where his team sits in rugby union\u2019s global pecking order. Australia, a World Cup finalist last year, will surely pose a far greater threat to England in its three-test series than Scotland, Italy, Ireland, Wales or France did during the seven weeks of a largely mediocre Six Nations championship. England won all five of its matches to earn the Grand Slam. Much was written about the gulf in standards between Northern and Southern Hemisphere rugby when no teams from the north made the Rugby World Cup semifinals last October. The gulf will not have narrowed much after the Six Nations, but Australia knows it will face an England team much improved from the one it dismantled, 33-13, during the World Cup pool stages. England\u2019s roster is not vastly different, but in every other regard it is poles apart from the World Cup team, which was weighed down by expectations, fear and preprogrammed attacking strategies. The England team that swept its European neighbors aside was firmly in the mold of Jones \u2014 a no-nonsense Australian not afraid to talk about winning and about making England the No. 1 team in the world. With so little time in the job, Jones has not made sweeping changes in the way England plays, although its backs are lining up closer to the advantage line \u2014 similar to the line of scrimmage in football \u2014 when on attack than they did at the World Cup. But Jones has had an immediate effect on the players\u2019 mind-set and confidence, and he has given them a framework to meet their potential. Jones has emboldened his players to take charge and to play aggressive and attacking rugby. That was evident against France last weekend when, after a rough patch during the second half in which France pulled within a couple of points, England did not retreat into its shell and instead won, 31-21. \u201cHe\u2019s the sort of guy where, if you\u2019re going to go down, you\u2019re going to go down swinging, so to speak,\u201d said George Gregan, who was captain of Australia during Jones\u2019s tenure as Wallabies coach from 2001 to 2005. \u201cYou go down playing the way you want to play.\u201d Jones places high demands on his players, expecting hard work and total commitment to him and the team. But he also understands the value of down time and of players having a beer to celebrate their successes \u2014 something that rarely happened under the previous coach, Stuart Lancaster. Loose forward James Haskell, who has had four coaches during his international career with England, has described it as the \u201chappiest time\u201d he has had representing his country. Image James Haskell, center, fighting off French defenders during England\u2019s 31-21 win, which gave England its first Six Nations Grand Slam since 2003. Credit Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Gregan, who was also coached by Jones at the Australian Super Rugby franchise the ACT Brumbies and, in the latter years of his career, at the Japanese club Suntory Sungoliath, said Jones was the master of creating a situation for players to thrive in but one that constantly challenged them. \u201cHis ability to create an environment to make players better and coaches and the whole group better, he\u2019s the best I ever had in that regard,\u201d Gregan said. \u201cYou can see all that happening with this English squad. He\u2019ll look for them to improve themselves, not just through the coaching but individually taking responsibility to do it yourself. That\u2019s very much his mantra as well.\u201d That has never been more evident than with Chris Robshaw. Jones heavily criticized Robshaw at the World Cup and stripped him of the England captaincy, but Robshaw was one of England\u2019s consistently best players during the Six Nations. Dylan Hartley, whose promotion to captain raised eyebrows because of his poor disciplinary record, has performed well in the role, while Billy Vunipola is another who has blossomed in his short time under Jones. But perhaps the find of the tournament has been the lock forward Maro Itoje, 21, who got his opportunity only because Joe Launchbury was injured. Itoje has been a standout, showing that Jones is not afraid to select talented young players who perform well at club level. Jones will continue his search for young talent before he names his squad to travel to Australia. \u201cWe need a few guys to come through to really push the envelope,\u201d he told reporters after the victory in Paris. \u201cWe need them to come in, say, \u2018This isn\u2019t good enough\u2019 and lift the level again. I\u2019m looking for guys like a young Jonny Wilkinson.\u201d Wilkinson kicked the winning drop goal during extra time in the Rugby World Cup final between Australia and England in 2003. Jones added: \u201cThe 2003 lot still talk about when Jonny came into training as a young kid and turned the Bunsen burner up. The whole level of training increased because he had no fear and wanted to be No. 1 in the world. I need to find a couple of those kids. We\u2019ll work harder, work smarter and pick better players.\u201d The English turnaround has Gregan expecting a tight series in June. \u201cI\u2019d like it to be 3-0 because I\u2019m Australian, but I can see the matches going down to the wire just due to the improvement and the belief in that England team,\u201d he said. \u201cThis has been a really important seven weeks for English rugby.\u201d For all the bravado coming out of the Wales camp about claiming a first win against New Zealand since 1953, it did little in the Six Nations that will have New Zealand, the back-to-back world champions, too worried. The Welsh still have not developed a Plan B on attack when crashing the ball up the center of the field does not bring reward. Injury-ravaged Ireland had a difficult Six Nations, but it forced Coach Joe Schmidt to give new players test-match experience. Some of the injured players will be fit again in June for a tough trip to South Africa. Scotland showed that the improvement made at the World Cup was no fluke, but two tests in Japan will show whether the team remains on an upward curve. Italy and France, meanwhile, were awful in the Six Nations. Argentina is very likely to put both to the sword in June, while Canada and the United States will also like their chances against Italy.", "keyword": "England;Australia;2015 World Cup Rugby;Eddie Jones"}
{"id": "ny0107219", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/04/06", "title": "Indian Couple Deny Charges of Abusing Teenage Maid", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 The couple accused of abusing a 13-year-old maid and locking her in their apartment while they went on vacation, a story that has renewed attention on the exploitation of children in India , did no such thing, the couple\u2019s lawyer said Thursday. The maid is not under age, has not been abused and was not locked in the apartment, said the lawyer, Shailendra Bhardwaj. Nor was she watched with security cameras, as her statement to a court asserted, he said. The couple, Dr. Sanjay Verma and Dr. Sumita Verma, were arrested Wednesday after their return from a trip to Thailand and were being held by the police on preliminary charges of violating laws related to child labor and bondage. The girl, who has not been publicly identified, was rescued from the house by a firefighter last Thursday and was being held in protective custody. Her accusations of abuse have been front-page news in India since the case came to light a week ago. Mr. Bhardwaj said that the Vermas treated the maid like part of the family. \u201cShe was treated like a child, and we will shortly be releasing videos of the girl playing Holi with the family and Dr. Verma\u2019s daughter,\u201d he said in a telephone interview. \u201cWe don\u2019t know who prompted her to make the report.\u201d Holi is the tradition of dousing others with colored water and pigment associated with the Hindu spring festival. Mr. Bhardwaj said the maid had told the couple that she was 18, not 13, as reported by child welfare officials. He said she was left in their home in the Dwarka suburb of New Delhi at her request. Before the couple left for their vacation in Bangkok, he said, they asked the girl to stay at the wife\u2019s mother\u2019s house, but she declined. \u201cThey decided to leave her in their house at Dwarka because she said she was more comfortable there,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was given a key and 500 rupees,\u201d a little more than $9, \u201cto purchase daily groceries,\u201d Mr. Bhardwaj said. \u201cShe was also asked to keep the door locked and not open it for anybody except the couple.\u201d The girl said the couple had locked her in their apartment, according to child welfare officials. She said she was paid nothing, barely fed and was beaten if her work was not satisfactory. She said her uncle had sold her to a job placement agency, which sold her to the couple, officials said. Ravi Kant, the lawyer for Shakti Vahini, a nongovernmental organization that combats child trafficking, discounted the couple\u2019s denials. The girl\u2019s statement, made in front of a magistrate, carries a great deal of weight in court, he said. \u201cEven if the child goes back on her word, under coercion or for money, her statement will still hold,\u201d Mr. Kant said. A medical report corroborates the girl\u2019s assertions of being pinched and hit, he added. He said that employers were responsible for verifying an employee\u2019s age, regardless of what the employee may have claimed, and that only a birth or school certificate was considered legal proof. Indian law allows children as young as 14 to work a maximum of six hours a day in nonhazardous work, but younger children are legally prohibited from working as servants, a provision that is widely flouted. Mr. Bhardwaj, the couple\u2019s lawyer, said he would request bail when the couple appears before a magistrate at the Dwarka district court, at a hearing expected on Monday. Mr. Kant said his organization would strongly oppose the request. \u201cSuch people need exemplary punishment,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Child Labor;Domestic Service;New Delhi (India);Human Trafficking;India"}
{"id": "ny0267795", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2016/03/15", "title": "As CBS Dawdles, Fans Are First to Be Upset in This Tournament", "abstract": "They gave us a fattened N.C.A.A. tournament selection show, starting at 5:30 p.m. Eastern on Sunday and ending at 7:30. Who asked for it? Are two-hour studio shows worth watching, especially if all you want to know is who\u2019s playing whom and where? To read off each region\u2019s bracket requires about six minutes \u2014 meaning all the relevant content should be covered in about 24 minutes. Throw in some analysis and interviews, and an hourlong format made much more sense. But you could, I suppose, argue in favor of two or even three hours for a selection show if you\u2019re the type who likes to listen to insiders argue ad nauseam about which teams are left out, which are improperly seeded and which long shot has a chance to upset its way to the Final Four. For you, perhaps, the more of CBS\u2019s Seth Davis and Doug Gottlieb, the better. Believing that expanding to two hours was a proper move, CBS did it all wrong. It did not reveal the first quarter of the bracket for 20 minutes. The full bracket was not fully shown for an estimated 77 minutes \u2014 although someone mercifully pre-empted it around 6 p.m. by posting it on Twitter . By then, it really did not matter what anyone was saying or if Charles Barkley would figure out how to operate a touch screen to show which teams he thought would advance from the first round. CBS\u2019s slow-it-down pace had stretched some viewers past their breaking points. \u201cAlmost rooting for a Bernie protester to burst on the set and give this CBS selection show some life,\u201d one viewer wrote on Twitter . Executives of CBS and Turner refused to comment on Monday, apparently uninterested in suppressing the uproar among college basketball fans. But last week, Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, discussed the thinking behind the two-hour format with T he Los Angeles Daily News . In his telling, it sounded like a good idea. But it had not been executed yet. He said that the one-hour format let the network move through the brackets \u201cin a relatively efficient way\u201d but gave the show\u2019s analysts too little time to offer their perspectives before viewers went elsewhere for more analysis. 2016 Men\u2019s N.C.A.A. Tournament Bracket Kansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Oregon are the top seeds in the N.C.A.A. men\u2019s basketball tournament. \u201cMy thought is that if we have the exclusive rights, why not give guys the extra time, an extra hour, to go through the brackets,\u201d McManus told The Daily News. But the efficiency of the one-hour format turned into inefficiency over two hours. CBS would have avoided an outcry had it moved apace through each region during the first hour and reserved the second hour for extended commentary. But CBS decided to hold the news, milking the suspense by not unveiling one region soon after finishing another. That swift unveiling is what fans have traditionally come for. CBS had misunderstood what fans needed from the show. CBS changed the news paradigm, and fans reacted poorly to it. And they might have punished CBS for it. The 3.7 preliminary overnight rating for the selection show was the lowest in 20 years, probably affected by the 5:30 start, but at least as likely by the Twitter bracket leak. The negative response to CBS\u2019s stretch-it-out show suggests that fans can tolerate only so many anti-consumer acts from networks, leagues or teams. They pay ever-higher prices to get into games \u2014 and to watch on television because of the continually rising fees of ESPN and regional sports networks. They sit through longer and longer commercial breaks. They deal with stadiums coated in advertising. And they must adapt to annoyances like the Yankees deciding recently against the use of print-at-home tickets in favor of mobile ticketing. CBS\u2019s long reveal was seen as an intolerable act, slowing down fans\u2019 ability to fill out their March Madness brackets. As partners in a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract, CBS and Turner Sports jointly make all the television decisions at the tournament. The games are shown on CBS and three Turner networks (TBS, TNT and truTV). With an average of $770 million in rights fees each year paid by Turner and CBS, it is no surprise that they would seek extra revenue wherever possible, like selling more commercials in a two-hour selection show. McManus insisted to The Daily News that the decision to double the length of the selection show was based more on content concerns than advertising sales. But, he noted, \u201cthere\u2019s ad interest to sell it out with no problem.\u201d Over the two hours, CBS carried 52 ads, nearly twice the number as last year, according to iSpot.tv , which tracks national television advertising. Capital One, AT&T, Allstate, Quicken Loans and the N.C.A.A. had three commercials in the show. Last year, in a 60-minute show, no company bought more than two ads. The two-hour format might have been lucrative for CBS and Turner, but it was not an innovation. If they stick to the two-hour length in the future, they must deliver the bracket information as quickly as possible. Then they can give us the sound of seven hosts and analysts chatting.", "keyword": "TV;CBS;College basketball;NCAA;Charles Barkley;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness"}
{"id": "ny0250407", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/02/17", "title": "Luis Baerga, the Longest-Serving Sewer Inspector", "abstract": "New York City has 7,400 miles of sewer lines, more than any other city in the nation. Luis Baerga, 57, knows those miles better than most people: He is the longest-serving sewer inspector in the city. Mr. Baerga, a supervisor with the Department of Environmental Protection , has worked in the sewer system for 35 years. He was a 21-year-old former Marine when he started in April 1975. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. What it\u2019s like down there: It depends on how it was built. Some of it was built elliptical. Some of it looks like pipe. Some of it is square. I remember one time, Dick Gainer and Ed Coleman [his colleagues at the time in the agency\u2019s Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations] and myself, we all went down to a system off the Grand Central, because a French film crew wanted to take some pictures, and it looked like a catacomb. It was just a chamber where pipes were dumping in to be fed out into a bigger line. The great bathtub mystery: I was walking through a trunk line on Cypress Avenue, which is the border of Ridgewood, Glendale, and I found a tub in there. I mean, I don\u2019t know how it got there. We couldn\u2019t get it out through a manhole, but it was right there in the middle. Why a sewer man doesn\u2019t mind rodents: As the old-timers taught me, it was always good to see, when you opened a sewer cover, that there were rats and roaches and running water. If it was so decided that we would have to make entry, if they could live, so could us. But if they weren\u2019t there, if they were all dead, then the likelihood would be that we shouldn\u2019t go down there. We should test it or ventilate it. That part of the job I didn\u2019t mind. I like to see living organisms. Water and what it can do: If there\u2019s a problem, it won\u2019t go away until it\u2019s corrected. You may not see it for a while, but it won\u2019t go away. It\u2019s like a leak. The leak might be there for 10 years, but you don\u2019t see it. It\u2019s not bothering nobody, so nobody\u2019s complaining. But one day, the street falls. You see it then. Reading old manhole covers: Not too many people are aware that in the \u201940s and the \u201950s, the Bureau of Sewers came under the Department of Sanitation . So a lot of manholes were marked \u201cDS.\u201d You only find them in Manhattan. Beginnings: I came to work for the city April 21, 1975. At that time, D.E.P. didn\u2019t exist. I came on board with the Bureau of Sewers, which was located at 40 Worth Street. I wasn\u2019t aware of the system as I am now. I took it for granted like most people in the city of New York take it for granted. I go to the kitchen, turn on the faucet, and water comes out. I had no knowledge of where it came from. I go to the bathroom and flush the toilet. I had no knowledge where it went, what happened to that water. The whole alligator thing: At 40 Worth Street, in the old Bureau of Sewers, Fred Pocci [former division chief of sewer construction and sewer maintenance] had a picture. There were some workers pulling an alligator out of the sewer system. I think a lot of people that came to visit the office on the ninth floor mistook that for the city of New York. Where was the photo taken? In Florida.", "keyword": "Sewers;Manholes;Department of Environmental Protection;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0108473", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2012/05/18", "title": "Snedeker Borrows Clubs for Win", "abstract": "Brandt Snedeker used a loaner set of clubs to begin his World Match Play Championship with a 5 and 4 victory over Thomas Bjorn in Casares, Spain. Snedeker, the lone American in the 24-man field, teed off with only 10 clubs in his replacement bag, including a putter bought from the pro shop. His clubs had been lost in transit. Ian Poulter started defense of his title with a 3 and 2 win against John Senden. \u00b6 The top two seeds, Yani Tseng and Na Yeon Choi, advanced, but the third-seeded defending champion, Suzann Pettersen, lost to Jodi Ewart, 3 and 1, in the first round of the Sybase Match Play Championship in Gladstone, N.J. (NYT)", "keyword": "Golf;Snedeker Brandt;Bjorn Thomas"}
{"id": "ny0189557", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2009/05/29", "title": "At Colonial, Greens Are Soft and Scores Are Low", "abstract": "FORT WORTH \u2014 The third leg of the Texas Swing got under way at the venerable Colonial Country Club on Thursday, and not even a fancy facelift to the Grand Dame aimed at bringing her defenses up to date could prevent some very familiar suitors from having their way in the first round of the Crowne Plaza Invitational. The South African Tim Clark, Woody Austin and Steve Stricker led an old-fashioned Texas hoedown on the enhanced, reshaped and lengthened 7,204 yards of Colonial. All shot seven-under-par rounds of 63 \u2014 Clark and Austin without a bogey and Stricker with just one \u2014 to tie for the lead, one stroke clear of the two-time Colonial champion Kenny Perry and Vijay Singh at 64. A strong field that includes 8 of the top 15 players in the world attacked the vulnerable Colonial course, which had been softened by a major thunderstorm late Tuesday night. On a hot, still day, players peppered the receptive greens with approach shots that stuck like spitballs on a blackboard. \u201cThe conditions are good,\u201d said Stricker, who holed three 20-footers, three 15-footers, a 12-footer and a 30-footer for birdies. \u201cThe biggest thing is the greens are soft and they\u2019re not very fast, so guys can be very aggressive.\u201d At its firmest, Colonial does not take kindly to aggressive play, rewarding a combination of shaped tee shots on its many doglegs and well-struck irons into its relatively small greens. In the recent restoration project \u2014 which has been greeted favorably by most of the players \u2014 fairway bunkers were added and the 11th, 12th and 14th holes were lengthened to bring existing fairway bunkers back into play. Thursday, on the softened course, the field averaged one-half stroke under par, lower than the tournament officials envisioned, and the 61 under-par rounds were just two off the record of two years ago, when 63 golfers broke par in the first round. Ian Baker-Finch, the 1989 Colonial champion playing in his first Tour event since 2001, shot a two-under 68. Playing in his third tournament since retiring from the game in 1996, Baker-Finch said he never had second thoughts about returning. \u201cBut since I decided to come and do it, I did have thoughts of, \u2018Boy, I hope I don\u2019t make a fool of myself,\u2019 \u201d said Baker-Finch, a CBS analyst. Even with the conditions as benign as they could possibly have been, there were no golfers willing to tempt fate by talking about just how easy it was. \u201cThere\u2019s no way I\u2019d say the golf course was easy,\u201d said the Texan Chad Campbell, who shot a three-under 67. \u201cBut that rain made it a whole lot softer, and you could stop it on the greens.\u201d That was evident when Justin Leonard went out in 30 strokes early and added a birdie at the 10th to get to six under par. Shouts and rumblings accompanied Leonard, talk of a course record in the air. The course record of 61 has been shot six times, most recently by Campbell in 2004, and Leonard and Perry in 2003. The thought of breaking it may have briefly occurred to Leonard, because he fired his approach shot at a back pin into the 635-yard, par-five 11th. It bounced through the green, and he failed to get up and down for par, making the first of three bogeys that would mar his round of four-under 66. Ben Hogan might have smiled at that. His image is stamped on the golf course here, from the statue of him behind the clubhouse to the difficult stretch that bends back toward the clubhouse like a horseshoe. It is easy to imagine Hogan standing on the tee at 13, a lit cigarette burning between the index finger and the thumb of his right hand as he peered into the wind. To this day, the sounds of singing steel from Union Pacific freight train wheels pierce the air from the Davidson Yard, across the west bank of the Trinity River, audible on the 12th, 13th and 14th holes. The high-pitched notes from the Davidson Yard are a reminder of the steely toughness that built Fort Worth, and that frames the course known as Hogan\u2019s Alley. If the wind blows this weekend, the steel might be back in Colonial.", "keyword": "Golf;Clark Tim;Austin Woody"}
{"id": "ny0156228", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/06/17", "title": "F.C.C. Chief Backs Satellite Radio Merger", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The long-running government review of the proposed merger of the nation\u2019s two satellite radio companies took an important step forward on Monday when the head of the Federal Communications Commission announced he would circulate a plan this week to approve the deal. Commission officials and industry lawyers said they did not expect that the agency would complete its work on the deal before July, a year and a half after the two companies, Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio , announced it. After the Justice Department\u2019s antitrust division approved the merger proposal last March, the widespread expectation was that the F.C.C. would also clear it, although with conditions. In a statement issued shortly before he left the country for a trip to Asia for the next two weeks, Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, said that the transaction satisfied the requirement of being \u201cin the public interest\u201d with the conditions that the companies had accepted. Those conditions include a price freeze for subscribers for the next three years and a tiered pricing system that will give customers some flexibility in deciding which channels they want. In effect, subscribers can pay less for fewer channels. The companies have also agreed to set aside up to 8 percent of the channels for noncommercial and minority broadcasters. And they agreed to take steps that would make it possible for more radio manufacturers to sell compatible radios, including equipment that would also play HD radio. \u201cI am recommending that with the voluntary commitments they\u2019ve offered, on balance, this transaction would be in the public interest,\u201d Mr. Martin said. Mr. Martin\u2019s proposal needs the backing of at least two other commissioners for approval. Officials say they expect that Mr. Martin will get that support, although some details of the plan could change in the process. Michael Copps, one of the two Democrats on the commission, said he was skeptical that the merger was in the public interest, even with the conditions set by Mr. Martin. \u201cAs I\u2019ve said from the beginning, this merger is a steep climb for me,\u201d Mr. Copps said. \u201cThat hasn\u2019t changed.\u201d", "keyword": "Federal Communications Commission;Sirius Satellite Radio Inc;XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc;Martin Kevin J"}
{"id": "ny0013158", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/11/21", "title": "Thompson Finds Job at Old Office", "abstract": "William C. Thompson Jr., the former New York City comptroller who this year waged an unsuccessful bid for mayor, announced on Wednesday that he was returning to the municipal bond underwriting firm where he had previously worked. Mr. Thompson, who also ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2009, finished second in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, with about 26 percent of the vote . The first-place finisher, Bill de Blasio, won just over 40 percent of the vote in the primary, and then won the general election on Nov. 5. None of the other major candidates for mayor have disclosed their future plans. Two of the other Democratic candidates, Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, and John C. Liu, the current city comptroller, remain in office through the end of the year. Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican who was crushed by Mr. de Blasio in the general election, has not said what he plans to do next. Mr. Thompson is returning to his positions as chief administrative officer and senior managing director at Siebert Brandford Shank & Company L.L.C. , which has been the nation\u2019s biggest minority- and women-owned municipal bond underwriter for more than a decade. He reported making $727,000 in income last year , when he was still employed by the bond firm.", "keyword": "William C Thompson Jr;Job Recruiting and Hiring;Mayoral races;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0129687", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/06/08", "title": "Chapman Allows First Earned Run as Pirates Top Reds", "abstract": "Michael McKenry drove in the first earned run allowed by Aroldis Chapman this season with a double in the 10th inning, and the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Cincinnati Reds, 5-4, on the road on Thursday night. A sacrifice fly by McKenry, Pittsburgh\u2019s backup catcher, who is batting just .193, put the Pirates up, 4-3, in the seventh inning. But closer Joel Hanrahan blew a save for only the second time this season, giving up a leadoff homer to Ryan Ludwick in the ninth. Chapman had not allowed an earned run in a club-record 24 appearances, covering 29 innings. Clint Barmes opened the 10th with a double and came around on McKenry\u2019s double to right field. \u201cHe\u2019s a special guy with a special arm,\u201d McKenry said of Chapman. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to prepare for the 100-mile-per-hour fastball. You can\u2019t think about anything else.\u201d Chapman had allowed only seven hits all season heading into the game. Chris Resop got his second major league save, allowing the Pirates to take two of three in the series against the Reds , the leaders in the National League Central. Resop struck out Ludwick on a called third strike with two runners on base in the 10th. CARDINALS 14, ASTROS 2 David Freese hit a grand slam and a two-run homer, and the rookie Lance Lynn struck out a career-high 11 in earning his ninth win for visiting St. Louis. BRAVES 8, MARLINS 2 Jason Heyward hit two solo homers to center to help Atlanta complete a three-game sweep on the road. BREWERS 4, CUBS 3 Norichika Aoki hit two home runs, including a game-ending shot to lead off the 10th inning for host Milwaukee. DODGERS 8, PHILLIES 3 Aaron Harang earned his 100th career win, and Los Angeles completed its first four-game sweep at Philadelphia in 66 years. GIANTS 8, PADRES 3 Matt Cain struck out nine in seven innings to win his sixth straight start, and Buster Posey, Angel Pagan and Gregor Blanco homered for visiting San Francisco. WHITE SOX 4, BLUE JAYS 3 Orlando Hudson singled in the winning run with two outs in the ninth inning for host Chicago. RED SOX 7, ORIOLES 0 Clay Buchholz allowed four hits in his third career shutout \u2014 all of which have been against Baltimore \u2014 to lead host Boston. Baltimore went without a hit between Ryan Flaherty\u2019s single leading off the third inning and Wilson Betemit\u2019s single to start the eighth. TIGERS 7, INDIANS 5 Casey Crosby, making his second start for host Detroit, earned his first major league win. ATHLETICS 7, RANGERS 1 Coco Crisp hit a solo homer and a bases-loaded triple to match his season total for extra-base hits as host Oakland won its first series in more than a month. WIVES SPEAK AT CLEMENS TRIAL Eileen McNamee, the estranged wife of Brian McNamee, was on the stand for a second day at Roger Clemens\u2019s perjury trial, and the government\u2019s cross-examination highlighted discrepancies between her testimony at the trial and what she told the F.B.I. three years ago. The story given by Eileen McNamee, who was subpoenaed by the defense, also differs with her husband\u2019s in several ways, but they dovetail in one respect: Brian McNamee\u2019s motive in storing a box of drug waste. She testified that years ago he said he was keeping it for his protection. She also testified that she was furious when details of the medical condition of her oldest son with Brian McNamee were revealed at a Clemens news conference four years ago. She said she called Brian McNamee right away and told him \u201cnot to let him get away with it,\u201d referring to Clemens. She made it clear, however, that she was not a fan of either side in the trial and pointed out that she was testifying because she \u201cdidn\u2019t have a choice.\u201d Debbie Clemens, Roger Clemens\u2019s wife, took the stand late in the day to begin her much-anticipated testimony on behalf of her husband, but there was only time for her to answer mostly questions about her background before court adjourned for the day. NEW RULES ON DRUG TESTS Major League Baseball and the players\u2019 union announced changes to their drug-testing agreement in the wake of the Feb. 23 decision to overturn the suspension that followed a positive test by Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun. Lawyers for Braun argued the collector from Comprehensive Drug Testing did not follow the section of the joint drug agreement that stated, \u201cUnless instructed otherwise by CDT, the collector shall deliver the specimens to a FedEx office immediately following the completion of the collection.\u201d The new agreement replaces that language with \u201cAbsent unusual circumstances, the specimens should be sent by FedEx to the laboratory on the same day they are collected.\u201d It says unusual circumstances may include \u201cinclement weather,\u201d \u201ca personal emergency,\u201d a \u201ctraffic accident\u201d or \u201ccompletion of the collection at a time when the collector was unable to reach either of the two FedEx offices identified by CDT prior to their closing.\u201d LASORDA OUT OF HOSPITAL Tommy Lasorda, a former Los Angeles Dodgers manager, was released from a New York hospital, three days after a mild heart attack.", "keyword": "Baseball;Pittsburgh Pirates;Cincinnati Reds;Milwaukee Brewers;Chicago Cubs"}
{"id": "ny0186566", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/03/22", "title": "Having a Bat Mitzvah in Their 90s Because It\u2019s a Hoot", "abstract": "BEACHWOOD, Ohio \u2014 Ann Simon is worried she might forget all the Hebrew words she has memorized to become a bat mitzvah, a Jewish girl marking the transition into religious adulthood. Ms. Simon is no 12-year-old, though. At 94 she can be forgiven her fear that she might be seized by a senior moment or two as she stands on the bimah on Sunday to recite the section of the Torah that was read in synagogue on the Saturday closest to her 12th birthday. So can the other nine women who will take part in the bat mitzvah ceremony at the service in the synagogue of the Menorah Park senior residence in this Cleveland suburb. The youngest, Mintsy Agin, will turn 90 in July. The oldest, Molly Kravitz, will celebrate her 97th birthday in August. The women grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression , when bar mitzvah ceremonies for boys were weekly affairs but Jewish girls came of age without notice or fanfare. A bat mitzvah was rare in the United States until the 1950s and \u201960s, said an associate rabbi at Menorah Park, Howard Kutner. Since then, many adult women have decided to make up for what they were denied as children, but most who do so are in their 50s and 60s, Rabbi Kutner said. A septuagenarian is rare and a nonagenarian nearly unheard of, he said, but only those in or near their 90s showed up when he offered bat mitzvah instruction to Menorah Park women of any age. \u201cMost people in their 90s, they just eat their three meals a day and are happy to be alive,\u201d Rabbi Kutner said. \u201cI think this shows that at any age you can set a challenge and meet it.\u201d A challenge, perhaps, but not all the women see it quite that way. \u201cMy first thought was boy, what a hoot!\u201d said Millie Danziger Fromet, 90. A self-described \u201cfeminist all my life,\u201d Evelyn Bonder, 90, said she \u201calways thought girls should have the chance to participate\u201d in something that Conservative, Orthodox and Reform congregations embraced in stages. Ms. Agin said: \u201cMy daughter had a bat mitzvah. But it was on a Friday instead of a Saturday. It wasn\u2019t held inside the synagogue, and she wasn\u2019t allowed to read from the Torah.\u201d The women have met weekly with Rabbi Kutner to study Hebrew and the Torah in preparation for the service, which is scheduled for Sunday. The rabbi had planned to hold the ceremony in January, but he bumped it back to give the women more time to prepare. \u201cThe joke went around the room: Let\u2019s not do it after March,\u201d he said. \u201cWho knows if we\u2019ll still be here!\u201d On a recent Monday, the women entered Menorah Park\u2019s synagogue for a dress rehearsal. Three used walkers. Another carried a small oxygen tank. As they rose to speak, they left their medical gear by their seats. They approached the bimah unassisted, some limping, and steadied themselves at the lectern with both hands. Practice began with prayers in Hebrew. Some women stumbled and stuttered through the complicated scrum of consonants. Those who had taught Sunday school for decades spoke more fluidly. \u201cOne generation to another praises thy works,\u201d said Eva Rosenberg, 91, reading from Psalm 145. \u201cThey speak of thy awe-inspiring might, and I tell of your greatness.\u201d Next came the speeches, which traditionally respond to the Torah passage read in synagogue that week. Rabbi Kutner had consulted old calendars to determine the week in which each woman would have spoken at age 12. He asked them to prepare messages based on the passages they would have addressed eight decades ago. When Ms. Bonder was a child during the Depression, her parents lost their life savings in a bank failure. She later served as an aide to a United States senator. Her speech drew parallels to her Torah reading about Joseph, who rose from slavery to become a pharaoh\u2019s chief adviser. Belva Singer, 91, meditated on the power of the Birkat Kohanim, the ancient Priestly Blessing. \u201cThis is one of the oldest and most beautiful prayers,\u201d Ms. Singer said. \u201cIt is only 15 words, and it has been repeated by our people for thousands of years.\u201d Class members argued intensely over whether to limit each woman\u2019s speech to three minutes. The concern was not whether aging bladders could handle a ceremony that lasts an hour and a half, but whether relatives, some of whom are flying in from as far as Boston and California for the event, might be bored. \u201cThese women have spent their entire lives nurturing other people, and now the spotlight is finally on them,\u201d Rabbi Kutner said. \u201cThey were afraid of burdening their audience.\u201d They were not, however, afraid of telling the rabbi to pipe down. \u201cYou\u2019re overpowering me!\u201d Ms. Simon yelled during a period of singing. \u201cReally?\u201d the rabbi said with an embarrassed smile. \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d The singing resumed. Rabbi Kutner followed along, silently mouthing the words. \u201cYou\u2019re doggone right we\u2019re feisty,\u201d Ms. Agin said at one point. After Sunday\u2019s ceremony, each woman is to receive a certificate with words from Psalm 92: \u201cThey shall be fruitful even in old age; vigorous and fresh they shall be to proclaim that the Lord is Just. He is my strength.\u201d The new \u201cadults\u201d of Menorah Park may beg to differ. \u201cWe\u2019re not old people,\u201d Ms. Bonder said. \u201cWe\u2019re senior adults.\u201d Ms. Fromet looked over and frowned. \u201cNo we\u2019re not,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re adult seniors.\u201d", "keyword": "Jews and Judaism;Women;Elderly;Ohio;bat mitzvah"}
{"id": "ny0020729", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/09/04", "title": "Japanese Smartphone Manufacturer Sees an Export Market in Older Users", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 The Japanese electronics industry largely missed out on the smartphone revolution. Yet this summer, even as one Japanese company, NEC, exited the business, another one, Fujitsu , announced plans for a new export push. Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche \u2014 older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple\u2019s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series. In partnership with Orange , formerly France T\u00e9l\u00e9com, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or \u201ceasy easy.\u201d The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones. \u201cWe believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,\u201d said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu. In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year. Image Masami Yamamoto is president of Fujitsu. Credit Rie Ishii/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere. While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show. \u201cIf you\u2019re a smaller vendor and maybe haven\u2019t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,\u201d said Andr\u00e9 Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. \u201cIt\u2019s an underserved market.\u201d The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too \u2014 at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now. \u201cWe see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,\u201d said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange\u2019s device portfolio. While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in. At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen \u201cbuttons\u201d on the phone\u2019s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing. Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight. Image The Japanese actress Shinobu Otake, with a smartphone Fujitsu introduced last year that used its Raku-Raku technology, with features meant to appeal to older people. Credit Yoshikazu Tsuno/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone\u2019s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones. \u201cThe younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,\u201d Mr. Becquet said. While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users. Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said J\u00e9r\u00f4me Arnaud, the chief executive of the company. While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said. The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing. As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain. \u201cFor Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,\u201d said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, \u201cbut this technology does meet a demand.\u201d", "keyword": "FUJITSU;Smartphone;Old age,elderly,senior citizens;Japan"}
{"id": "ny0293422", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/06/19", "title": "Belgium Says It Prevented a Terror Attack on Soccer Fans", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The police raided dozens of sites across Belgium and brought in 40 people for questioning in an operation to interrupt a terrorist plot to attack fans gathering to watch a televised soccer match between the Belgian and Irish national teams, government officials said on Saturday. Three Belgians were charged with an attempt to commit terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group, the Belgian federal prosecutors\u2019 office said. The others brought in for questioning were released by Saturday evening. Prime Minister Charles Michel did not provide specifics in his comments after an emergency national security meeting. But Justice Minister Koen Geens and Deputy Prime Minister Kris Peeters, questioned by the Flemish broadcaster VRT, confirmed that the police had learned of a plot to attack fans gathering to watch the game Saturday on large screens in Brussels\u2019s squares or at bars. The police did not turn up guns or explosives, a statement said, and spectators watched the game without incident. Belgium won the game, 3-0, in Bordeaux, France. The scale of the raids and arrests, three months after the attacks in Brussels that killed 32 people, suggested in part that the Belgian authorities were working to dispel doubts about their dedication to rooting out potential terrorists. It also suggested that they believed they were in a race to prevent attacks. An earlier statement from the prosecutors\u2019 office on Saturday said the situation required \u201cimmediate intervention.\u201d Investigations are continuing into the Brussels attacks on March 22 and those in and around Paris in November, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds. The plot to attack soccer fans, however, did not appear to be related directly to the Paris and Brussels attacks. Video The Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, said on Saturday that the threat of terrorism was real but that the authorities were working diligently to prevent it. Credit Credit Francois Lenoir/Reuters The prosecutors\u2019 office identified each of the three arrested suspects by his given name and an initial for his surname: Samir C., 27; Moustapha B., 40; and Jawad B., 29. Before the raids Friday night, the most recent terror-related detention in Belgium had come earlier in the week, when federal prosecutors announced the detention and investigation of a man identified as Youssef E. A., 30, in connection with the March attacks in Brussels. He was charged on Friday with \u201cparticipation in a terrorist group, terrorist murders and attempted terrorist murders as a perpetrator, co-perpetrator or accomplice.\u201d This month, another man, Ali E. H. A., 31, was similarly charged. The broadness of the charges in both cases suggests that the authorities have yet to determine what role the two men may have played. After the Paris attacks, the Belgian authorities were accused of being insufficiently vigilant when it emerged that the attacks had been planned in Belgium and that the explosives had been manufactured there. Most of the attackers were Belgian or French citizens. Adding to the pressure on the Belgian authorities was information disseminated this month by the Belgian Coordinating Body for Threat Analysis. That government body, which evaluates intelligence and other terrorism-related information, sent an alert to the police saying extremists who had fought in Syria were headed for Belgium and France . While the warning was based on \u201craw intelligence,\u201d according to the Belgian authorities, its wide distribution to police services and its leak to a Belgian French-language newspaper suggested that it was being taken very seriously. In the course of questioning detainees thought to be connected to the Paris and Brussels attacks, investigators in Belgium have picked up several references to the possibility of attacks during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament in France, which lasts through July 10. Both France and Belgium are on high alert. Meanwhile, in the case of a police officer and his female companion who were stabbed to death in France on Monday night, the prosecutors\u2019 office announced that it had opened an investigation and placed two people in preventive detention: Charaf-Din Aberouz and Saad Rajraji. Both men had been sentenced along with the presumed killer of the couple \u2014 Larossi Abballa, who was fatally shot \u2014 in a 2013 terrorism case but were released from prison. They are facing preliminary charges of participation in a terrorist group that intended to commit one or many crimes.", "keyword": "Brussels Attacks;Terrorism;Brussels;Belgium"}
{"id": "ny0161107", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/04/29", "title": "Renovating With Profit in Mind? It Just Might Not Pay", "abstract": "When Mike McDonald and Jill Martenson bought their little Craftsman house on Locksley Street in Oakland, Calif., in 1999 for $325,000, the couple knew it needed a lot of work. \"It was the worst house on the block,\" Mr. McDonald said. He and his wife pulled off the vinyl siding, threw away the plastic shutters and stripped layers of paint off the interior Douglas fir woodwork. Then they rebuilt the front porch, reshingled the house, rewired it, added copper plumbing, a bedroom and two bathrooms. Their kitchen remodeling included trendy concrete countertops and cherry cabinets. Mr. McDonald said he was not quite sure of the exact cost of the six-year project but that it was probably around $300,000. This month they sold the house for $1.15 million, $155,000 over the asking price. \"Whether it is the hot real estate market or my brilliance, I don't know,\" he said. The funny thing is, no one else really does either. In the last 12 months, American homeowners spent about $155 billion on remodeling, an increase of more than 4 percent over the previous 12-month period, despite rising interest rates, said Kermit Baker, senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. Yet Mr. Baker and other experts say there is little research into the returns that American homeowners get on that investment. The most widely quoted figures come from a construction trade magazine, Remodeling, with a circulation of 80,480. Every year, it publishes the Cost vs. Value Report, an estimate of the cost of various projects in 58 cities balanced against estimates of how much those projects increased the value of a house. Last November's report, which also appeared in the December issue of Realtor magazine, said a minor kitchen remodeling would cost $14,913 and return 98.5 percent of that investment when the house was sold. Adding a midrange master bedroom suite, with a walk-in closet and dressing area as well as a bathroom, would cost $73,370, with only 82.4 percent of that being recouped. A modest bathroom redo, costing $10,499, could earn back 102.2 percent of the investment, Remodeling said. The magazine acknowledged that the projections of return on investment were reliable only on the broadest regional or national level. The estimates for its return-on-investment data come from a survey of about 1,600 real estate agents and appraisers. That is a reliable sample size, but it is often too small to provide reliable estimates on a city level, said Grant Farnsworth, president of Specpan, the Indianapolis company that manages the survey. Mr. Baker said researchers at the Harvard center \"threw up their hands\" after trying to determine the return on investment of remodeling projects. \"How a bathroom renovation affects value depends on a lot of things that are hard to quantify,\" he said. \"To do it well, you need neighborhood level estimates, but that would be very difficult.\" Consider, for instance, the question of adding a bathroom. The Remodeling magazine report estimates that it would cost $22,977, with a 86.4 percent return, at best. But agents may say that a house with one bathroom in a neighborhood where two bathrooms is the norm is at a disadvantage when the house goes on the market. Mr. Baker said that the homeowner might then see a good return on the investment by making the house competitive. But, he said, someone adding a third bathroom to a house in that neighborhood might get little return. You could call that keeping up with the Joneses, but it is an essential rule of remodeling, architects and remodeling contractors said. \"I encourage people to think about what the mainstream is doing,\" said Mark G. Richardson, president of Case Design/Remodeling, one of the largest firms in the country. \"Your tastes may be a liability.\" What the Remodeling magazine data shows is just how few projects yield a positive rate of return. Of the 22 projects it analyzed, only two -- an upper-range siding replacement and the modest bathroom remodeling -- would make money. That suggests that remodeling projects ought to be regarded not as a creator of value, but as a consumer product, like a car or purse, that appeals to taste and style. Consumers usually don't think about a financial return when they make those purchases. \"Do the renovations you want and don't worry too much about resale,\" advised Mr. McDonald, who now does remodeling for others. \"Someone will appreciate your fantastic kitchen, and you get to enjoy it in the meantime.\" How quirky a redesign should be depends on how long the homeowner plans to live in the house. Speculators, or those who intend to stay in a house a short time, will tend to do remodeling jobs that maximize their returns -- installing granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, for example. People who intend to live in a house for decades can feel safer designing a more personalized project because they will derive nonmonetary value from it. Those who want to satisfy their eccentricities might consider hiring a designer. The trend among remodeling contractors for the last decade has been to join forces with an architect or designer. The homeowner may have to pay at least 10 percent of the cost of the project upfront on planning, but design and building firms lay out a convincing case for why it pays off. Selecting as many of the finishes, appliances and fixtures early with the designer may cut down on costly change orders. Designers, working with the contractor, can often see possibilities that homeowners cannot, like a wall that may be removed. Expanding a kitchen out into other rooms can be cheaper and take less time than adding onto the house because there are fewer permits and objections from neighbors. Working with a designer, the contractor has less room to argue that a sloping floor or the need for additional lighting was not foreseen. Another advantage of spending on design upfront is that the renovation can be planned for construction in phases. That way, a contractor can do the hard work and leave the rest for the determined do-it-yourselfer or the time when more money becomes available. Getting the money is not as easy as it was even a year ago. As interest rates fell and home prices appreciated, homeowners could borrow money against the increased value of their homes or just take out cash in a refinancing. But the rates on home equity loans and home equity lines of credit, usually tied to the prime rate, have gone up faster than mortgage rates. Bankrate reports that the rate on a home equity line of credit is about 7.5 percent, while a 30-year fixed mortgage is bumping up against 6.1 percent. Refinancing is probably not an option, because a new mortgage would most likely come with a higher interest rate. And many remodeling companies dislike projects with construction loans because it injects one more meddler, the bank, into the process. So they may charge more for the annoyance. That does not leave a lot of good alternatives other than fixed-rate home equity loans. But lenders are hungry for this business and it is possible to find a good deal. Low interest rates, and the opportunities they gave Americans to refinance homes and extract cash, fueled the remodeling boom. Mr. Richardson of Case, based in Bethesda, Md., said the rising rates might not lower the demand enough to reduce the costs of a renovation. \"People who would have moved into a new home stick with their old house and invest in it,\" he said. But once homeowners decide to renovate, delaying the project will only cost more money, he warned. Costs have been going up 7 percent to 10 percent a year in many regions of the country. \"I don't see that changing,\" Mr. Richardson said.", "keyword": "REMODELING;HOUSING;RESTORATION AND REHABILITATION"}
{"id": "ny0266608", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/03/26", "title": "Most Global Exchanges Close for Good Friday", "abstract": "The few Asian stock markets that traded Friday mostly advanced, with shares in Tokyo and Shanghai up and Seoul stocks slightly lower. Markets in Europe, the United States and most of Asia were closed in observance of Good Friday. There also were no settlements for crude oil futures. Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 rose 0.7 percent to 17,002.75, and China\u2019s Shanghai Composite Index traded 0.6 percent higher at 2,979.43. South Korea\u2019s Kospi edged down 0.1 percent at 1,983.81.", "keyword": "Stocks,Bonds;Easter;Asia;China"}
{"id": "ny0047648", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/11/10", "title": "PBS to Stream Live Coverage of Miami Book Fair", "abstract": "PBS is venturing into territory that C-Span\u2019s Book TV has previously had largely to itself, with plans to stream live coverage of three days of Miami Dade College\u2019s Miami Book Fair International in November. C-Span has been a partner since the fair\u2019s inception in 1984, but its focus is on nonfiction. PBS envisions something broader, what producers describe as Olympic-style coverage of the extensive event. It runs Nov. 16 to 23 and will feature more than 500 authors, with attendance expected to top 200,000. Jeffrey Brown, culture correspondent of \u201cPBS NewsHour,\u201d and the author Kelly Corrigan will host, jumping from any one of the dozen-plus simultaneous live events to taped interviews and conversations in the studio. Authors as diverse as the novelists Richard Ford and Emma Straub, the young adult author Judy Blume, the musician Questlove and the poet Mark Strand will be included. The book industry has not \u201calways been as aggressive about creating a media opportunity around their business,\u201d said Rich Fahle, the executive producer of the PBS coverage, who previously worked on Book TV\u2019s introduction and at Borders, the book retailer. \u201cWe were looking for something a little bit different, with more energy,\u201d he said, adding that the fair was \u201can amazing collection of people and stories in one place.\u201d Surveys show a high correlation between book buyers and public media consumers, said Rich Homberg, chief executive of Detroit Public Television, which developed the idea and is producing the coverage, supported in large part with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. \u201cOur audience loves ideas, they love books,\u201d he said. Mitchell Kaplan, a co-founder of the book fair, said the fair \u201cjumped on it\u201d when Detroit Public Television broached the idea. He said organizers hoped to work with the American Booksellers Association to make some of the coverage available for independent booksellers\u2019 websites. PBS.org, local station websites and BookViewNow.org, among others, will stream the live webcast, from 4 to 9 p.m. Nov. 21 and noon to 6 p.m. Nov. 22 and 23. World Channel will broadcast half-hour daily highlight programs on three evenings. All coverage will be archived and made available afterward on demand through PBS\u2019s video apps, as well as on the websites. Ira Rubenstein, senior vice president for PBS Digital, said he expected audiences in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands, for the live streams, but once \u201cyou cut it up and archive it on demand, that\u2019s where you\u2019ll see continued growth and use of it.\u201d", "keyword": "Publishing;PBS;Miami Book Fair International;Books;Miami Dade College;TV;Writer;Miami"}
{"id": "ny0276868", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2016/02/25", "title": "Bolivian President Concedes Defeat in Term-Limit Referendum", "abstract": "ORURO, Bolivia \u2014 President Evo Morales, facing mounting pressure to concede defeat in a referendum that would have allowed him to run for a fourth term, accepted the loss Wednesday but said he would use the remaining years of his presidency to advance his Socialist-inspired agenda. \u201cWe will respect the results,\u201d the president said in a televised statement Wednesday. \u201cThe important thing is to salute the Bolivian people for their democratic will.\u201d Yet Mr. Morales, whose term does not end until 2020, reminded supporters and opponents alike that he remained their president \u2014 and would vigorously promote his left-wing movement that since 2006 has transformed the country by redistributing its natural gas wealth and seeking greater inclusion for its indigenous majority. \u201cWe still had half of voters supporting us,\u201d he said. Still, the results mark a shift in the political fortunes of Mr. Morales, Bolivia\u2019s first indigenous president, who won three previous elections by large margins . On Sunday, voters were asked to approve changes to the Constitution that would allow him to stay in office until 2025 if he kept winning elections. With 99 percent of ballots counted by Tuesday, Bolivia\u2019s election officials said the measure had failed by 51 percent to 49 percent. Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue , a policy institute in Washington, said that while Mr. Morales came into office as a popular outsider, \u201cnow Evo is the establishment, the elite.\u201d Video President Evo Morales of Bolivia accepted his defeat on Wednesday in a referendum that would have let him run for a fourth term. Credit Credit Aizar Raldes/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Leading up to the vote, Mr. Morales found himself on the defense over multiple issues, including a scandal involving a child born out of wedlock and accusations of corruption at a fund for development of native communities. And some of the indigenous groups that had secured his rise turned against him. Mr. Morales had been known for traveling on foot and playing soccer with voters, but more recently that Everyman image seemed to be fading. On a visit on Tuesday to Sica Sica, a small town in western Bolivia, to dedicate a sports arena, the president arrived by helicopter guarded by scores of soldiers. Afterward, guards rushed him to a waiting S.U.V., knocking over two indigenous women who were trying greet him. In the vote, Mr. Morales lost support among young people like Braulio Laura Garc\u00eda, a 20-year-old industrial engineering student who remembers no president before Mr. Morales. \u201cI don\u2019t like that he\u2019s created a monopoly on power; he controls everything,\u201d said Mr. Garc\u00eda, who lives in El Alto, a large city that city that sits above the administrative capital, La Paz. Mr. Garc\u00eda said many of his friends who were looking for work in the government, a large employer in Bolivia, had been pressured to join Mr. Morales\u2019s Movement Toward Socialism, or been asked if they carried identification cards the group issued. Though the referendum represents a rejection of Mr. Morales, no one else on Bolivia\u2019s political stage has anything approaching his high profile. \u201cThere is no alternative leader who has the force of Evo Morales,\u201d said Ludwig Valverde, a political scientist in La Paz. \u201cBut this result provides the chance for new leaders to emerge and, eventually, new ideas.\u201d In the days after the vote, aides to Mr. Morales refused to concede. But Wednesday, after some protests in the capital and pressure from Organization of American States election observers, the president took a different tone. \u201cThis is a small battle that we\u2019ve lost,\u201d he said. \u201cAn insignificant battle after a tremendous campaign against us.\u201d", "keyword": "Bolivia;Evo Morales;Referendum;Term limit;Socialism"}
{"id": "ny0145093", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2008/10/08", "title": "Marbury Accepts Role. Big Deal, Coach Says.", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 Even when he is falling into line, Stephon Marbury cannot help but draw attention to himself. Marbury\u2019s relationship with the Knicks has been troubled over the past few years, to say the least. Amid the headline-grabbing outbursts and extended bouts of sulking that became an emblem of the Isiah Thomas era, he made his feelings about spending time on the bench quite clear. He would rather be in a different city than on New York\u2019s sideline. But in the last two days, he changed his tune, saying that he had no problem coming off the bench if it helped the team. \u201cI just think that going forward, to limit the distractions and just concentrate on basketball, that\u2019s the most important thing,\u201d Marbury said Tuesday after practice, repeating comments that appeared in Tuesday\u2019s New York Post. Every time he speaks publicly, however, Marbury seems to create fresh distractions. Mike D\u2019Antoni, running his first preseason as the Knicks\u2019 coach, said he could not understand why Marbury\u2019s change of attitude warranted attention. In a thinly veiled jab at Marbury, D\u2019Antoni told reporters: \u201cFor you all, that\u2019s big news. For me, that\u2019s how everybody should act.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m really proud that he did that,\u201d he added, referring to Marbury. \u201cBut it shouldn\u2019t be newsworthy. To do the right thing should never make the news.\u201d If doing the right thing means accepting a place on the bench, then it seems as if Marbury will have plenty of opportunities to do it this season. Although Marbury, 31, is a more talented option at guard, D\u2019Antoni appears set to hand the starting role to Chris Duhon for the Knicks\u2019 first preseason game Wednesday night in Toronto. \u201cIt takes a lot for a guy who\u2019s been starting his whole career to say something like that,\u201d said Duhon, who joined the Knicks as a free agent in July. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the whole situation is with who is starting and all that, but knowing that he\u2019s on the same page with us makes everything feel great.\u201d During practice, Marbury wore one of the white jerseys usually reserved for the starters, but worked with the first team only in three-guard sets alongside Duhon and Jamal Crawford. How Marbury will fit into D\u2019Antoni\u2019s new up-tempo system may be the immediate concern. But how Marbury fits into the organization \u2014 and whether he will even have a place in it as the season unfolds \u2014 has been the overarching concern for some time. The Knicks owe Marbury $22 million for the final year of his contract, and Donnie Walsh, the new Knicks president, has appeared reluctant to waive him. Marbury\u2019s new show of team spirit could make that decision harder. \u201cWhatever role they want me to play,\u201d Marbury said, \u201cthat\u2019s what I\u2019m going to play.\u201d REBOUNDS Jerome James\u2019s teammates jokingly congratulated him over the weekend for making it through the first week of camp unscathed. But with James having a strained left quadriceps, they will not be doing the same this weekend. James signed a five-year, $29 million contract in 2005, but has made only 20 starts in the last three seasons. None of those came last season, when he had just two appearances.", "keyword": "Marbury Stephon;Basketball;New York Knicks"}
{"id": "ny0063150", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2014/01/06", "title": "A Frozen, Fertile Ground for Developing Tennis Players", "abstract": "COLLEGE PARK, Md. \u2014 Following tennis usually means chasing summer, with players training on sunbaked courts in Florida and California and traveling the globe in search of sunshine. But some of the most fertile soil for cultivating tennis talent is not known for palm trees. Junior Tennis Champions Center in suburban Washington, tucked just inside the Beltway, has proved itself a national leader in year-round training in the sport despite patches of snow that stubbornly cling to the edges of the facility\u2019s driveway. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of lazy thinking, that it\u2019s in a cold-weather location, so it cannot work,\u201d said Vesa Ponkka, a native of Finland and the center\u2019s director of tennis. \u201cWe choose to look at it as, if the training is good, training is good. It doesn\u2019t matter if the sun is shining outside or if we just have good lighting systems inside.\u201d With 15 indoor courts at the center complementing 17 outdoor ones, Ponkka has led a group of coaches in harvesting local tennis talent, rather than trying to cull the best from around the country and the world. \u201cWe are not looking at bringing in someone from Europe and then taking credit for him,\u201d Ponkka said. \u201cWe are trying to find kids when they are really young, and then we really invest our time and resources.\u201d The center was founded in 1999 by the investment banker Ken Brody. His investments allowed the center to operate as a nonprofit, which has helped attract athletes who otherwise would not be able to have elite training. Ray Benton, the center\u2019s chief executive since 2008, said that his ultimate goal was \u201cfilling every empty tennis court\u201d in America and that he immediately supported Brody\u2019s vision. \u201cI like people who have ambitious, audacious ideas,\u201d Benton said. \u201cAnd I thought it would be really good for the sport.\u201d Benton added that Brody\u2019s finances gave the operation a flexibility and an autonomy that were enabling and exacting. \u201cDo we have more freedom of choice here?\u201d Benton said. \u201cAbsolutely, which is a big plus \u2014 if you\u2019re making the right choices.\u201d The player who best embodies the center\u2019s inclusiveness and emphasis on the area has also proved to be one of its most successful. Francis Tiafoe, who turns 16 this month, spent much of his childhood residing in a room at the center while his father worked there as a maintenance man. Watching practice sessions when he was younger, Tiafoe became mesmerized by players like Denis Kudla of Arlington, Va., who is now on the ATP Tour and who cracked the top 100 for the first time in 2013, and Mitchell Frank of Vienna, Va., who won the decisive match for Virginia in the N.C.A.A. team final last spring. Tiafoe, who participated in on-court programs as well, has risen through the junior ranks. In December, he became the youngest boys\u2019 singles champion in the 67-year history of the prestigious Orange Bowl junior tournament in Plantation, Fla. \u201cWithout this place, I probably could just be a regular kid, going to a regular school, doing what a regular 15-year-old would do,\u201d Tiafoe said. \u201cBut with all the stuff they\u2019ve helped me with, I\u2019m doing not the ordinary. This place means a lot to me.\u201d Ponkka, the center\u2019s director of tennis, said, \u201cThere are so many people in the organization who have helped him over the years that, if he ever goes and wins a big tournament and he has to make a thank-you speech, you know, it\u2019s going to be like a phone book.\u201d Misha Kouznetsov, a former collegiate player in Baltimore, has coached Tiafoe since he was 8. Kouznetsov stressed that the continuity he had working with Tiafoe was a major advantage of the center\u2019s setup. In the United States Tennis Association model, Kouznetsov said, \u201cThe coaches work at one age group for maybe one year or two, and then the next coach takes it for one year or two, and then another coach.\u201d \u201cSo you could be there for six years with six different guys, and there\u2019s not as much passion and involvement and there\u2019s not as much consistency,\u201d he said. \u201cHere, we work together maybe 80 percent of the time, and then he\u2019s in the clinics doing live ball, playing matches, the rest, and then doing fitness or schoolwork.\u201d Tiafoe said he also enjoyed the relative seclusion of training in Maryland, north of the fray of Florida academies. \u201cYou\u2019re not worried about what someone is doing on the next court,\u201d he said. \u201cNo one is near you; you\u2019re just worried about yourself.\u201d Older players have also honed their skills at the center. Alison Riske, 23, a Pittsburgh native ranked 57th in the world, spent much of her off-season training there. \u201cI\u2019m so impressed by Francis,\u201d said Riske, who has practiced with Tiafoe on occasion. \u201cThat is one kid who loves the game more than anyone I\u2019ve ever met. I think it\u2019s so cool.\u201d Riske said she was especially impressed by Tiafoe\u2019s return to training after his triumph at the Orange Bowl. \u201cHe got back Sunday night, and he was out here Monday morning,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s a champion.\u2019 \u201d Tiafoe said of the Orange Bowl: \u201cIf you really look down at the champions, there are some champions that have won that tournament that I\u2019ve never heard of. And I don\u2019t want to be that guy, especially now that I\u2019m the youngest to win it.\u201d Tiafoe is also determined to finish high school and does his schoolwork in a classroom tucked into the garret of the clubhouse. \u201cI never try to get ahead of myself because there\u2019s nothing that bothers me more than cockiness,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s necessary at all. If anything, you just let your racket talk \u2014 there\u2019s no reason for you to talk if your racket can.\u201d", "keyword": "Tennis;Vesa Ponkka;Frances Tiafoe"}
{"id": "ny0215636", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/04/27", "title": "Italy: 31 Charged in Illegal Immigration Ring", "abstract": "Three months after violent race riots shook the Southern Italian city of Rosarno, Italian authorities on Monday broke up an illegal immigration ring in the area, arresting 31 people from Italy and North Africa and seizing 20 businesses and farmland valued at $13.3 million. Prosecutors in Calabria said that middlemen, most from North Africa, had procured immigrants for Italian landowners, who paid them wages as low as $33 a day to work in the fields. The arrests were not directly tied to the riots, in which about 50 people were wounded, but authorities said the illegal immigration ring contributed to the tensions in the area. In January, the police arrested eight people for inciting the riots, but human rights groups have criticized Italian authorities for not making more arrests.", "keyword": "Italy;Immigration and Emigration;Illegal Immigrants"}
{"id": "ny0044301", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/05/25", "title": "Rocker of the Rockaways", "abstract": "\u201cJust let me put on my Rockaway tuxedo,\u201d said Simon Chardiet, musician, surfer and defender of old-school Rock, Rock, Rockaway Beach , as he grabbed a wet suit draped over the fence of his bungalow. Soon he was covered from neck to toe in black rubber, and carrying his 10-foot-long surfboard on his shoulder across the Rockaway Freeway, headed toward the beach to catch some waves on Tuesday morning. Few welcome the approach of summer more than Mr. Chardiet, 55, who suffered through another cruel coastal winter in the Rockaways with only the good, uncrowded winter waves as comfort. But now he is back out on the boardwalk on a section that was rebuilt after Hurricane Sandy, near Beach 87th Street. He can be seen, especially when the surf is lame, playing his upright bass on the boardwalk, strumming his guitar on the beach or rocking out with one of his several bands at the boardwalk food stands. A few blocks from the ocean, next to the elevated A train, Mr. Chardiet lives in a studio apartment in the rear of a long bungalow, with his vintage guitars, amplifiers and bass fiddles, and a clothes rack of wet suits and leather and denim jackets. He keeps busy teaching and performing, often with his longest-running band, Simon and the Bar Sinisters , a stalwart of New York bars since 1991. Mr. Chardiet\u2019s style runs from surf guitar to blues to rockabilly, not to mention punk and bebop. Mr. Chardiet said he began playing in bars at age 14 and fell in with the Lower East Side punk and rock scene, often working as a bike messenger to scrape by. \u201cI did everything on the street level,\u201d he said in his apartment as his cat \u2014 a stray that Mr. Chardiet adopted and named Dee Dee, after the Ramones\u2019 bassist, Dee Dee Ramone \u2014 strolled through. Mr. Chardiet recalled jamming with Mr. Ramone, as well as with many other prominent rockers. Mr. Chardiet has lived all over this town, from the Lower East Side to Williamsburg to Bushwick, always trying to keep a step ahead of the gentrification, he said. He began surfing as a youngster after finding a board in the trash on Long Island. He would often surf in the Rockaways before settling there in 2002. He instantly felt at home in the area, where civil servant homeowners mix with residents of housing projects, where there is a surf culture but also the occasional gunshot, where the territorial locals gradually adopted him as their resident beatnik. \u201cParts of Rockaway are still like old New York, at least when the hipsters aren\u2019t around,\u201d said Mr. Chardiet, touching upon one of his refrains: mocking the summer influx of the artisanal-food-loving set, who show up with their beards and new tattoos from trendy-artsy sections of Brooklyn. Actually, he clarified, he hates no one, but he simply cannot abide posers and trust-funders \u2014 \u201cPeople who think, just because they have money, they\u2019re better than you.\u201d By now, he has come to make peace with the hipsters on his boardwalk, especially because they now make up much of the audience for his beachside gigs. His real fear is that gentrification might sanitize tough old Rockaway, he said, pulling out a hand-painted leather vest that commanded yuppies and hipsters to bug off, only in less gentle language. After all, where were the hipsters when Hurricane Sandy approached, and he was defying police orders and paddling out to ride the storm surf? \u201cOnce I paddled out, it was all cops and firemen surfing out there anyway, so I said, \u2018I guess I\u2019m O.K.,\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Chardiet, who later safely stowed most of his instruments and escaped rising floodwaters in his bungalow by squeezing out of his bathroom window. He paused only to grab two essentials: his classical guitar and a book of Bach partitas. \u201cI ain\u2019t going nowhere without a guitar \u2014 are you crazy?\u201d he said, adding that he holed up in a taller building next door and soothed himself by playing Bach as the storm raged. After his Tuesday morning surf session, he stripped off the wet suit, grabbed his upright bass and walked it barefoot in the street, back to the beach. Neighbors honked hello, and on the boardwalk, people stopped him to chat. He reminded everyone of his gig on Memorial Day at the Rippers concession stand on the Boardwalk and Beach 86th Street, with his surf-rock band the Supertones. And he is playing there with the Bar Sinisters on June 7. As he played his bass on the boardwalk, a man collecting bottles and cans stopped and pulled out a harmonica, and jammed a few numbers. \u201cRockaway is my heart and soul,\u201d Mr. Chardiet said. \u201cI have to be by the ocean or I can\u2019t live.\u201d", "keyword": "Simon Chardiet;Rockaway Peninsula Queens;Surfing;Music"}
{"id": "ny0114724", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/11/30", "title": "Most Americans Face Lower Tax Burden Than in the 80s", "abstract": "BELLEVILLE, Ill. \u2014 Alan Hicks divides long days between the insurance business he started in the late 1970s and the barbecue restaurant he opened with his sons three years ago. He earned more than $250,000 last year and said taxes took more than 40 percent. What\u2019s worse, in his view, is that others \u2014 the wealthy, hiding in loopholes; the poor, living on government benefits \u2014 are not paying their fair share. \u201cIt feels like the harder we work, the more they take from us,\u201d said Mr. Hicks, 55, as he waited for a meat truck one recent afternoon. \u201cAnd it seems like there\u2019s an awful lot of people in the United States who don\u2019t pay any taxes.\u201d These are common sentiments in the eastern suburbs of St. Louis , a region of fading factory towns fringed by new subdivisions. Here, as across the country, people like Mr. Hicks are pained by the conviction that they are paying ever more to finance the expansion of government. But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes \u2014 federal, state and local \u2014 than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times , the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980. Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980. Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010. The uneven decline is a result of two trends. Congress cut federal taxation at every income level over the last 30 years. State and local taxes, meanwhile, increased for most Americans. Those taxes generally take a larger share of income from those who make less, so the increases offset more and more of the federal savings at lower levels of income. In a half-dozen states, including Connecticut , Florida and New Jersey , the increases were large enough to offset the federal savings for most households, not just the poorer ones. Now an era of tax cuts may be reaching its end. The federal government depends increasingly on borrowed money to pay its bills, and many state and local governments are similarly confronting the reality that they are spending more money than they collect. In Washington, debates about tax cuts have yielded to debates about who should pay more. President Obama campaigned for re-election on a promise to take a larger share of taxable income above roughly $250,000 a year . The White House is now negotiating with Congressional Republicans, who instead want to raise some money by reducing tax deductions. Federal spending cuts also are at issue . If a deal is not struck by year\u2019s end, a wide range of federal tax cuts passed since 2000 will expire and taxes will rise for roughly 90 percent of Americans, according to the independent Tax Policy Center . For lower-income households, taxation would spike well above 1980 levels. Upper-income households would lose some but not all of the benefits of tax cuts over the last three decades. Public debate over taxes has typically focused on the federal income tax, but that now accounts for less than a third of the total tax revenues collected by federal, state and local governments. To analyze the total burden, The Times created a model, in consultation with experts, which estimated total tax bills for each taxpayer in each year from 1980, when the election of President Ronald Reagan opened an era of tax cutting, up to 2010, the most recent year for which relevant data is available. The analysis shows that the overall burden of taxation declined as a share of income in the 1980s, rose to a new peak in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. Tax rates at most income levels were lower in 2010 than at any point during the 1980s. Governments still collected the same share of total income in 2010 as in 1980 \u2014 31 cents from every dollar \u2014 because people with higher incomes pay taxes at higher rates, and household incomes rose over the last three decades, particularly at the top. There are now many more millionaires, in other words, paying more than they did in 1980, but they are paying less than they would have if tax laws had remained unchanged. And while they still pay a larger share of income in taxes than the rest of the population, the difference has narrowed significantly. The trend can be seen by comparing three examples: \u00b6A household making $350,000 in 2010, roughly the cutoff for the top 1 percent, on average paid 42.1 percent of its income in taxes, compared with 49 percent for a household with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980 \u2014 a savings of about $24,100. \u00b6A household making $52,000 in 2010, roughly the median income, on average paid 27.7 percent of its income in taxes, compared with 30.5 percent in 1980, saving $1,500. \u00b6A household making $22,000 in 2010 \u2014 roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four \u2014 on average paid 19.4 percent in taxes, compared with 20.2 percent, saving $200. Jared Bernstein , who served as chief economist to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. , said the Times analysis highlighted the need to raise taxes on the affluent and cut taxes for the poor. He cautioned that the middle class most likely would need to pay more, too. \u201cWhen you look at these numbers, you understand why we\u2019re not collecting the revenue we need to support the spending we want,\u201d said Mr. Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities , a liberal research group. \u201cWe\u2019ve really gutted the system.\u201d But Douglas Holtz-Eakin , a prominent conservative economist, said the changes in taxation over the last three decades reflected a conscious and successful strategy to encourage economic growth that should be reinforced, not reversed. Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is the president of the American Action Forum , said government should reduce deficits primarily through spending cuts, particularly to Medicare and Medicaid , the health programs that are the largest source of projected increases in the federal debt. \u201cWe can\u2019t grow our way out of it, and we can\u2019t tax our way out of it,\u201d he said of the government\u2019s fiscal predicament. \u201cWe have a spending problem, period.\u201d Mr. Hicks, like many residents of Belleville, views this debate with unhappiness. He would like the government to cut spending but not reduce services. He is certain that the government should not raise taxes on the middle class, a group in which he includes himself, but he is ambivalent about asking anyone to pay more. Higher taxes would hurt his businesses, he said, so raising taxes on those who make more money seems likely to hurt their businesses, too. \u201cAt this point, I guess it\u2019s inevitable in order to get us out of this hole,\u201d Mr. Hicks said of higher taxes. \u201c Illinois is in bad shape, along with a lot of the nation. But I don\u2019t feel like we should tax the middle class any more than we are right now. There\u2019s going to come a point where they take the incentive out of working hard.\u201d If the government cut his taxes, Mr. Hicks said, he would use the money to put a roof over the picnic tables outside the restaurant, expanding the year-round seating area. He already employs 14 people; then he could hire more. And if taxes rose? Would Mr. Hicks, who started working when tax rates were higher, really choose to slow down? He smiled. \u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cI like it. What else would I do with my time?\u201d Cutting From Both Ends The federal income tax, which will turn 100 next year, is in decline. Congressional Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly voted to reduce the share of income that people must pay. Over the last decade, annual revenues from federal taxation of individual and corporate income averaged just 9.2 percent of the nation\u2019s gross domestic product, the lowest level for any 10-year period since World War II . The recession and new rounds of tax cuts further reduced revenues, to 7.6 percent of economic output in the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. Stronger economic growth has produced a modest increase in tax collections, but the White House budget office estimates that collections for the fiscal year that ended in September will total 9 percent of economic output, still less than before the financial crisis. Federal spending, meanwhile, grew faster than the economy over the last decade \u2014 particularly during the recession. To pay those bills, the government borrowed more money than it collected in income taxes in each of the last three fiscal years, something it had not done in even a single year since World War II, federal data show . Congress could have eliminated those deficits by cutting spending. It might also have averted those deficits by leaving the tax code unchanged. The government on average would have collected an additional $800 billion in each year from 2006 to 2010 if the 1980 code had remained in effect and economic activity had continued at the same pace, the Times analysis found. The annual federal deficits during those years averaged $714 billion. Leaving the tax code as it was in 1980, however, would not have solved the nation\u2019s long-term fiscal problems. Increases in federal spending, driven primarily by the rising cost of health care, are projected to outstrip even the revenue-raising capacity of the 1980 tax code in the coming decades, necessitating some combination of spending cuts and tax increases. The income tax stands apart from other forms of taxation. It is the reason that upper-income households pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the rest of the population. The combined burden of all other federal, state and local taxes takes roughly the same share from all taxpayers. And many Americans \u2014 even in a middle-class, Democratic stronghold like Belleville \u2014 have misgivings about imposing higher tax rates on the affluent, an important reason that income taxation has declined. The share of Americans who said high-income households paid too little in taxes fell from 77 percent in 1992 to 62 percent in 2012, according to Gallup , even as income inequality rose to the highest levels since the Great Depression . Some people in Belleville subscribe to the argument that higher tax rates impede economic growth by discouraging investment. For others, it is a matter of fairness. Anita Thole, a middle-income safety supervisor for a utility contractor, is not wealthy. She does not expect that she ever will be. She is a single mother with a daughter in college, and she said she regarded the wealthy with a mixture of envy and admiration. But she does not want them to pay higher taxes. \u201cThey work their butt off to get what they got,\u201d she said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want them to pay more so that I can pay less.\u201d Do they work harder than you? \u201cWhat? No. I work my butt off,\u201d Ms. Thole, 46, said. \u201cBut you got to believe in the American dream. You got to love them for what they did, for what they made of themselves and for being more aggressive than me.\u201d Ms. Thole, like many in Belleville, is also convinced that governments could avoid raising taxes by adopting more frugal habits. \u201cThere\u2019s some days we stay home and we eat peanut butter,\u201d she said. What would she like governments to cut? \u201cI really like it when they cut the weeds along the highway,\u201d she said. \u201cI like it when there\u2019s good roads to drive on. The schools, I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t want to pull back from the schools. I don\u2019t have the answer of where to pull back. \u201cI want the state parks to stay open. I want, I want, I want. I want Big Bird . I think it\u2019s beautiful. What don\u2019t I want? I don\u2019t know.\u201d To Tax or Not to Tax? William L. Enyart is a rarity in Belleville: he wants to raise his own taxes. Mr. Enyart and his wife are lawyers, although for the last five years he led the Illinois National Guard. The couple made $380,587 in 2011 and paid $104,864 in federal taxes. His conviction that they should have paid more may not be shared by many of the area\u2019s higher-income residents. But as the newly elected Democratic congressman for southwestern Illinois, Mr. Enyart, 63, is also the only man in town with a direct vote on federal tax policy. Mr. Enyart, who won the seat of a retiring Democratic congressman, campaigned in part on his support for Mr. Obama\u2019s tax plan. He defeated a Republican candidate who opposed it, 52 percent to 43 percent. But Mr. Enyart said he heard little enthusiasm for tax increases in his district. What has changed, he said, is that people are increasingly concerned about cuts to government benefits and services. \u201cNobody likes to pay taxes. Nobody wants to raise taxes on anybody,\u201d Mr. Enyart said. \u201cBut nobody wants to cut veterans services, nobody wants to give up that Interstate highway, nobody wants \u2014 pick the service that you like. These are necessary services, and they need to be paid for.\u201d The tax increase proposed by Mr. Obama, on taxable income \u2014 income after deductions and other adjustments \u2014 above $250,000 a year, would pay for only a small part of those services. It would reduce the projected deficit over the next decade by a little less than 10 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office . Nonetheless, Mr. Enyart said that he did not support broader tax increases. The focus, he said, should be on requiring the rich to pay more. \u201cWe have the greatest disproportion of wealth since 1928, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a healthy thing,\u201d he said. \u201cHow much money is enough? Do hedge fund traders really need to make a billion dollars a year and pay only 15 percent in taxes when we have teachers making $50,000 and paying 20 percent?\u201d John Siemens, who did not vote for Mr. Enyart, said that kind of \u201craise taxes\u201d talk was a crowd-pleasing distraction from the need for painful spending cuts. Mr. Siemens and his wife, Jan, both 59, own a company with a pair of factories in southwestern Illinois where workers assemble dollar-bill scanners for vending machines, dashboard lights for automobiles, magnetic probes for hospitals and other electronic equipment. They earned about $250,000 last year, so Mr. Obama\u2019s plan would not have increased their income taxes. But it would raise the estate taxes they would have to pay to pass the company to their children someday. Like many opponents of the president\u2019s plan, Mr. Siemens thinks higher taxes will discourage investment and slow economic growth. \u201cThere\u2019s some tax rates that probably do need to be raised,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are some that need to be lowered. But the politicians are not having an honest discussion. Is it fair or not fair is not the question. The question is, If you want to raise revenues, does that make sense or not?\u201d He noted as an example that interest on municipal bonds is tax-exempt, which encourages the wealthy to lend to local governments. \u201cThose lower tax rates were put into place for a reason,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just, let\u2019s give the wealthy a break.\u201d Mr. Siemens does have a concern about fairness. He believes that lower-income households are not paying enough in taxes. \u201cBy any measure, the wealthy are still paying a disproportionate amount of their income in taxes,\u201d he said. \u201cIs that fair or not fair? I don\u2019t know, but I have an issue with the dramatic reduction of taxes at the low end because I think everybody needs some skin in the game.\u201d The debate is no longer theoretical here in Illinois. Facing perhaps the deepest budget crisis of any state , the Illinois legislature last year raised the state income tax rate to 5 percent from 3 percent . Unlike the federal income tax, Illinois taxes all income at the same rate. Mr. Enyart said that the state needed more revenue, but that it should move to a tax system that imposed a heavier burden on high-income households. Mr. Siemens said the state should have cut spending. The higher taxes have increased his costs and given an advantage to competitors in other states. And there are broader ripples, too: he said he was planning to buy some used machines, rather than new ones, to save money. \u201cWe feel the burden of that, but it hasn\u2019t gotten to the threshold of pain yet where we would move,\u201d Mr. Siemens said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of expense that would be incurred in moving, including a disruption of the work force, which you are always loath to do.\u201d View From the Lower End Taylor McCallister, 20, works the front window at Mr. Hicks\u2019s barbecue restaurant, taking orders from customers. She also works a second job and attends Southwestern Illinois College. She earned about $30,000 last year and, like her boss, she wishes the government would take less of that money. \u201cWhen I see my check it\u2019s like, damn, that\u2019s a huge chunk that was taken out,\u201d she said. \u201cI could have been making $450 instead of $378.\u201d Mitt Romney\u2019s remarks about the \u201c47 percent\u201d focused public attention on the rising share of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes, a trend that has encouraged the public perception that lower-income households are getting a sweetheart deal. The share of Americans who think lower-income households pay too little in taxes increased to 24 percent in 2012 from 8 percent in 1992 , according to Gallup. But low-wage workers like Ms. McCallister still pay federal payroll taxes, which provide financing for Social Security and Medicare. They still pay sales taxes. Even if they are renters, they still bear the cost of property taxes in the form of higher rents. And those taxes have climbed most quickly in recent decades. The average American in 2010 paid 30 percent more of income in payroll taxes than in 1980, even while paying 27 percent less in federal income taxes. As a result, revenue from the payroll tax almost equaled income tax revenue before a temporary payroll tax cut took effect in 2011. The cut is scheduled to expire at the end of this year. The rise of the payroll tax reflects the general movement away from requiring upper-income households to pay a larger share of income in taxes. All workers pay the same Social Security tax on wages below a threshold, which stood at $106,800 in 2010. The Medicare tax imposes a single rate on all wages, without a threshold. Some experts argue, however, that payroll taxes are a special case because workers are entitled to Social Security benefits based in part on the amounts that they pay in taxes \u2014 a system more akin to a pension plan than an income tax. In Illinois, the average burden of state and local taxes rose to 10.2 percent of income in 2010 from 8.8 percent in 1980, even before the latest round of tax increases last year. And Illinois, like most states, takes a larger share of income from those who make less. Illinois households earning less than $25,000 a year on average paid 14.3 percent of income in state and local taxes in 2010, while those earning more than $200,000 paid 9.4 percent, according to the Times analysis. Ms. McCallister said she and her friends worry about the nation\u2019s financial problems. Their answer is simple: Someone has to pay more, and the affluent can best afford to do so. She said it was time to reverse a trend that had been going on so long it predated her birth by a decade. \u201cI want to know honestly how the more wealthy feel,\u201d she said between tending to customers. \u201cYou\u2019d think that they would want to help. We\u2019re working these kinds of jobs and that\u2019s what we have to do to make it through, and there\u2019s other people making all this money. I don\u2019t get it, honestly. \u201cI feel that maybe people who don\u2019t make as much shouldn\u2019t have to pay as much in. But who makes the rules? \u201cNot me.\u201d", "keyword": "Federal Budget;Federal Taxes;Wages and salaries;Income Inequality;US Politics;US Economy;US states;Income tax;Tax"}
{"id": "ny0203876", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/08/15", "title": "Race for Governor\u2019s Post Turns Texas Republicans Against Each Other", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 Gov. Rick Perry looks as if he stepped out of a Marlboro billboard: square-jawed, weathered face, a shock of black hair, steely eyes. He even says \u201chowdy\u201d when he enters the room. His public persona is so folksy that many opponents have underestimated his political skills. But Mr. Perry, a conservative ideologue whose recent flourishes include expressing sympathy for secessionists and supporting a failed effort to add a \u201cchoose life\u201d logo to license plates, is already the longest-serving governor in Texas history and has announced that he is running for an unprecedented third term. The battle shaping up in the Texas Republican Party over whether he deserves another four years mirrors the larger conflict between the Republicans\u2019 moderate and conservative wings on the national level, strategists say. \u201cThis is a civil war,\u201d Mr. Perry said in an interview, \u201cbrother against brother.\u201d Mr. Perry\u2019s opponent is Kay Bailey Hutchison , the state\u2019s senior senator. On most issues, Ms. Hutchison is also a steady conservative hand, but her tone is more moderate, her positions on social issues are more nuanced, her votes on government spending are more pragmatic. The senator plans to formally open her campaign with a five-day tour of the state next week. She cuts a patrician figure on the hustings, a slender woman with a mellifluous voice and an easy smile. She has taken aim at the governor\u2019s failure to reduce property taxes and his support for toll roads, but her main message has been a warning that the party cannot stay in power unless it widens its appeal. \u201cI do not want a governor who is going to narrow our base, make it dwindle,\u201d Ms. Hutchison said in a speech this week. \u201cThat is what has happened at the national level, and that is not going to happen in Texas.\u201d \u201cI will work to build the Republican Party,\u201d she added, \u201cnot make it narrower. I am for Ronald Reagan\u2019s big tent.\u201d Elected to the Senate 16 years ago, Ms. Hutchison, now 66, has wanted for a long time to be governor. She pulled out of the governor\u2019s race in 2006 only after several major Republican donors persuaded her that Mr. Perry would not run for a third term. Mr. Perry, 59, denies he ever made such a promise, though some Republican donors now supporting Ms. Hutchison insist he did. In any event, the bad blood has made it impossible for party leaders to head off a primary fight this time around, several prominent Republicans said. Ms. Hutchison argues that Mr. Perry\u2019s aggressive courtship of conservatives has alienated moderates, independents and minorities. The party lost all the state\u2019s major metropolitan counties in the presidential election last year, an ill omen for the future, and its majority in the Texas House has shrunk to a single seat. The senator has the support of a handful of people who helped put George W. Bush in the White House. She has also attracted the support of Republicans with deep pockets from Dallas and Houston who backed Mr. Perry in the last two elections. Some of those people fear that the rightward tilt of the state party organization leaves an opening for a Democrat to win back the governorship for the first time since Ann Richards captured it 19 years ago. Others say Mr. Perry has not done enough to cut taxes on property and businesses. Mr. Perry, on the other hand, enjoys strong support from evangelical leaders and the voters who usually turn out heavily in the primaries: members of antitax groups, religious conservatives, creationists, foes of abortion and a variety of other Texans opposed to big government. A former Air Force pilot, Mr. Perry began his political career as a Democratic state legislator from West Texas. Switching parties in 1989, he won a race for agriculture commissioner. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1999, then became governor in December 2000 after Mr. Bush won the presidency. He has captured the two elections since. \u201cHe\u2019s been consistently underestimated by people, politically,\u201d said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics project at the University of Texas. \u201cHe\u2019s locked down the conservative section of the primary base. The people that don\u2019t like him make fun of him for the things that have strengthened his position. People think these are Neanderthal throwback positions, but Rick Perry and Jon Stewart don\u2019t have any overlapping constituency.\u201d In years when there is no presidential election, fewer voters generally turn out for the primaries. Since Republicans typically dominate statewide races in Texas, the winner of their primary usually cruises through the general election. That means a relatively small number of highly motivated conservative voters play a pivotal role in choosing the governor, strategists say. Ms. Hutchison is hoping to break that formula by drawing more moderates and independents to the primary. She has painted Mr. Perry as a divisive party leader more interested in partisan politics than in solving the state\u2019s problems. \u201cPeople want someone who has a vision for the future,\u201d she said, \u201cand we are not seeing new ideas.\u201d On the other side, Mr. Perry is betting he can cast Ms. Hutchison as a Washington insider with questionable credentials as a conservative. \u201cWe would say it\u2019s a fight between a real, proven conservative and one who is not so conservative,\u201d he said. So far, only Tom Schieffer, a businessman, former ambassador and onetime state legislator, and the singer and writer Kinky Friedman have announced candidacies for the Democratic nomination, although Ronnie Earle, former Travis County district attorney, is exploring a run. Whatever the outcome of that race, political scientists here say, its winner will be at a big disadvantage against either Mr. Perry or Ms. Hutchison. Ms. Hutchison has amassed $12.5 million for her run, to Mr. Perry\u2019s $9.3 million. Though she has yet to resign from the Senate to stump full time, her campaign is already in high gear, its press office producing daily attacks on the governor. But the senator was largely silent for the first half of the year, and her early reluctance to engage Mr. Perry has hurt her, Republican strategists say. Several recent polls suggest that he now has a significant lead among primary voters. While both candidates say taxes and fiscal policy will be leading issues in the campaign, they can both claim to be tightfisted with the public\u2019s money, and so their differences on some social issues are likely to become a battleground. He is firmly against abortion, for instance, while she backs many restrictions on it but opposes overturning Roe v. Wade. He is against embryonic stem cell research; she supports it. Against that kind of backdrop, Ms. Hutchison was led to tell Republicans gathered this week in Horseshoe Bay, near Austin, that she was just as conservative as the governor. \u201cI\u2019m not from Washington,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m from Texas.\u201d", "keyword": "Perry Rick;Hutchison Kay Bailey;Politics and Government;Elections;Republican Party;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0205172", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/01/19", "title": "Cost of Borrowing Zooms Higher for Corporations", "abstract": "Like consumers and homeowners, America\u2019s corporations binged on easy credit when times were flush, racking up huge debts. Now the bills are due, and paying them back will not be easy, or cheap. This year alone, more than $700 billion in corporate loans will come due, according to Standard & Poor\u2019s. That is the size of the federal bailout of the financial sector. Many companies were counting on being able to borrow more money to meet those obligations and kick their debt farther down the road. But with the credit markets still tight, corporations are being forced to pay much higher interest rates than they did a few years ago, putting more strain on balance sheets already hammered by falling profits and a grinding recession. It is a lesson the discount carrier Southwest Airlines learned firsthand in December, when it went to the bond markets to raise $400 million, in part to cover its losses from betting that fuel costs would stay high. Southwest, the only domestic airline with an investment-grade credit rating, put up 17 of its Boeing jets as collateral and agreed to pay interest of 10.5 percent, nearly double the rate it had paid in 2004 to raise $350 million. The company chafed at the costs, but it paid them because it needed cash and did not know what credit markets would look like in six months or a year. \u201cThat\u2019s the market now,\u201d said Laura Wright, the airline\u2019s chief financial officer. \u201cThere is not money available at the rates we were able to get a year ago.\u201d Southwest said it had seized the opportunity to raise cash at a time when other companies could not borrow at all. Companies with poor credit ratings are virtually locked out of credit markets or face the prospect of paying 20 percent interest. Many of them are slashing costs, canceling projects or putting assets up for sale to avoid defaulting on their debts. Despite huge government rescue programs and drastic reductions in the Federal Reserve\u2019s benchmark interest rate, borrowing costs for companies have remained stubbornly high. Investors are wary of anything riskier than ultrasafe Treasury bills, and banks, which lost billions of dollars making bad loans, have tightened their lending. \u201cThis is going to be a very challenging year for corporate treasurers,\u201d said Roger Lister, chief credit officer at the financial institutions unit of DBRS, the credit rating firm. Still, borrowing costs have fallen from record levels in October and November, especially for investment-grade bonds, and more companies have sold new debt in recent weeks. Investors who are getting scant returns \u2014 or none at all \u2014 from Treasuries are starting to gamble again on relatively safe corporate debt. \u201cYou are getting a very nice return in real terms,\u201d said Jim T. Swanson, chief investment strategist at MFS Investments, a mutual fund firm in Boston. \u201cCompanies are willing to pay the price, and the market is willing to take on new issuance.\u201d Despite this, capital markets are still shaky. Even companies with strong credit ratings are paying about 5 percentage points more than the federal government to borrow money, according to Standard & Poor\u2019s. That is more than double the premium they paid last January. Companies with so-called junk credit ratings are paying a 15 percent premium. \u201cThat\u2019s an extraordinary spread,\u201d said Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor\u2019s. \u201cThat\u2019s unprecedented in the speculative-grade market.\u201d On top of this, corporate bonds are at risk of being crowded out of the market as the government issues piles of new Treasury notes to combat the financial crisis . And another flood of government bonds is likely if Congress passes an $825 billion economic stimulus measure. What is more, the government guaranteed nearly $108 billion in cheap debt for financial companies in the last two months of 2008 as part of the rescue package. By contrast, relatively few nonfinancial companies have been able to raise money in recent months. And those doing so have paid dearly for it. For example, Nabors Industries , an oil services company, issued $1.1 billion in 10-year bonds two weeks ago, agreeing to a 9.25 percent interest rate. A year earlier, when oil prices were shooting up, the company had to pay just 6.15 percent to borrow $975 million. Taking out a $1.1 billion at last year\u2019s rates, could have cut annual interest payments by about $34 million. The higher interest bill may be too much to bear for some companies. \u201cCan existing business models support the significantly higher cost of debt that exists now?\u201d asked Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm in San Francisco. \u201cThat\u2019s a real issue.\u201d In all, corporations in the United States borrowed about $172.7 billion in the fourth quarter, down slightly from $179.1 billion issued in the last three months of 2007, according to DeaLogic. Some businesses planned well for the refinancing crisis, having socked away cash or set up lines of credit with banks that allow them to refinance debt at predetermined rates, said Ed Liebert, chairman of the National Association of Corporate Treasurers. Others that need to bring new debt to market could sell shorter-term notes at lower interest rates or turn to institutional investors like pension funds or insurance companies and issue debt privately, in hopes of negotiating better rates. Companies with shaky credit are especially vulnerable as their debts come due and are likely to be among the earliest of many expected defaults this year if they cannot find more cash.", "keyword": "Corporations;Credit;United States Economy;Nabors Industries Ltd;Southwest Airlines;Interest Rates;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008);Ratings and Rating Systems"}
{"id": "ny0019819", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/07/06", "title": "Bodies of 2 Jet Ski Riders Are Found at a Marina", "abstract": "Two people, missing since they fell into the water while riding a Jet Ski during Fourth of July celebrations, were found dead at a nearby marina on Friday, the police said. Willie Tom, 44, and Celine Fu, 29, had taken a Jet Ski into Coney Island Creek about 8 p.m. Thursday, the police said. They fell into the water, prompting divers from the Police and Fire Departments to search the area. The divers returned on Friday morning, the police said. After noon, the bodies of Mr. Tom, who lived in Manhattan, and Ms. Fu, of Brooklyn, were pulled from the water at Marine Basin Marina in Brooklyn , the police said. News reports suggested that Mr. Tom, described as an experienced Jet Ski rider and a strong swimmer, and his passenger had not been wearing life jackets. Police and fire officials declined to comment on the reports.", "keyword": "Coney Island Brooklyn;Fatalities,casualties;July 4th;Boat Accidents"}
{"id": "ny0148273", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/09/05", "title": "Congressman Seeks to Replace Wife on Ballot", "abstract": "Just when they thought he was out, Robert E. Andrews pulled himself back in. Mr. Andrews, the New Jersey congressman who declined a re-election bid last spring to mount a challenge to Senator Frank R. Lautenberg in the Democratic primary \u2014 an effort that ultimately failed \u2014 abruptly announced on Thursday that he would try to hold onto his House seat after all. At the same time, Mr. Andrews\u2019s wife, Camille \u2014 who in June won a primary to replace Mr. Andrews in New Jersey\u2019s First Congressional District \u2014 gave word on Thursday that she, too, was having second thoughts. Mr. Andrews said in a statement that his wife had taken her name from the ballot for his seat. Benjamin Parvey, Mrs. Andrews\u2019s campaign manager, confirmed Thursday night that she had done so. That clears the way for Mr. Andrews to get back on the ballot as the Democratic candidate, just in time for November\u2019s general election. The Republican candidate is Dale M. Glading. It is the latest move in a game of musical chairs that has provoked more than a few rolled eyes in New Jersey, where Mr. Andrews\u2019s bid to unseat Mr. Lautenberg, after pledging support for the four-term incumbent, ruptured the Democratic Party and alienated many of his colleagues in the House. Indeed, certain jaded souls had long predicted that Mr. Andrews, 51, had planned all along to run again should his bid to unseat the 84-year-old Mr. Lautenberg fail, despite publicly insisting that he was leaving Congress for good. (Mr. Andrews lost the Senate primary with roughly 34 percent of the vote to Mr. Lautenberg\u2019s 61 percent.) \u201cThis is something that we couldn\u2019t have predicted six months ago \u2014 not,\u201d said Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University. But in an interview, Mr. Andrews insisted that he had made up his mind only in the last week, after discussing it with his wife all summer. \u201cHer plan was to be considered as a serious candidate,\u201d Mr. Andrews said of his wife, a dean at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden. \u201cI had no intention of going back to the Congress until a week ago. I just looked deep into what I believe in and decided that this is what I had to do.\u201d He said he had entertained job offers in finance, including one from Goldman Sachs, but ultimately decided his heart was in public service. Mr. Andrews said that his wife had concluded around the same time that his prospective financial career would pose a conflict of interest if she came to serve in Congress. \u201cPublic service is the most meaningful professional activity in my life,\u201d he said. \u201cThe other options I had available to me were attractive, but they were not as attractive as public service.\u201d Some New Jersey Democrats said privately that they had been expecting the news since the Democratic National Convention last week, where Mr. Andrews spoke at a breakfast given by the New Jersey Congressional delegation. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t like a swan song \u2014 it was about the direction our country needs to go in,\u201d said one state Democratic operative who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. \u201cI turned to a colleague and said, \u2018I think this guy\u2019s coming back.\u2019 \u201d Under state rules, the vacancy on the ballot caused by Mrs. Andrews\u2019s departure must be filled by Sept. 17, on a vote by local Democratic officials from the Congressional district. Mr. Andrews has the support of key party figures in southern New Jersey, especially in his home base, Camden County. Political experts said his selection to fill the vacancy for the nomination was all but preordained. \u201cThis has outraged some people in Camden waiting to move up,\u201d Dr. Harrison said. But the district was well organized by party leaders, she said, as demonstrated by the orderly election of Mrs. Andrews in the June primary to fill her husband\u2019s seat, seen by some as a place-holding measure. About 600 officials are eligible to vote on the vacancy, according to the congressman\u2019s campaign. Mr. Andrews said he had spent Thursday trolling for votes, reaching about 150 people by the late afternoon. \u201cI\u2019ve been spending the day doing that, and the party leaders locally have been very supportive of my candidacy,\u201d he said. Several in the party released statements of support through Mr. Andrews\u2019s campaign on Thursday. \u201cRob\u2019s seniority and standing in the Congress are great benefits for South Jersey,\u201d said Jim Beach, the co-chairman of the Camden County Democratic Party. \u201cWe need him in Congress.\u201d Mr. Lautenberg declined to comment. But other New Jersey Democrats were less generous, particularly some colleagues in the Congressional delegation who had been outraged when Mr. Andrews broke ranks to try to beat Mr. Lautenberg. \u201cI guess nothing should surprise me,\u201d said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., a Democrat from Paterson. \u201cBut obviously it\u2019s a flaw in his character. We all have flaws in our character, but we try to solve them. I think it\u2019s very disingenuous.\u201d", "keyword": "Andrews Robert E;Lautenberg Frank R;House of Representatives;New Jersey"}
{"id": "ny0205437", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/01/09", "title": "Bull Market Dividends Were a Sign of Lax Lending", "abstract": "\u201cDividends don\u2019t lie.\u201d Chalk up the death of another Wall Street clich\u00e9. In the late bull market, dividend payments provided one of the seemingly strongest arguments for the bulls. Maybe earnings numbers could be manipulated, but dividend payments required cash. If the company had the cash to hand out, you could be confident the earnings were real. It was a lie. It is now becoming clear that the great news on the dividend front from 2004 through 2006 was not an indication of solid corporate performance; it was just another sign of lax lending standards. Lenders who willingly handed out money to homeowners with bad credit were even more generous to corporate borrowers. Now the situation has reversed. The quarter just ended had the worst dividend news for American companies in half a century, and this quarter could be even worse. Many corporate boards review annual performance and decide what to do about the dividend during the first two months of each year, and it is not likely to be a happy time. Until those meetings are completed, buying stocks for their high dividend yields may be risky. \u201cInvestors need to be careful of overly generous yields,\u201d said Howard Silverblatt of Standard & Poor\u2019s, pointing to the possibility that more cuts will soon be announced. In the final three months of 2008, S.& P. counted 288 announcements by public American companies of dividend reductions or eliminations, in contrast to 239 companies that either initiated or raised their payouts. It was the first time since 1958 that there were more negative announcements than positive ones. In the boom years of 2004 through 2006, there were fewer than 100 negative announcements each year \u2014 the three best years in that regard since S.& P. started collecting data in 1955. Companies appeared to be flush with cash during those days, but some of that was a mirage stemming from optimistic accounting, particularly at banks. In other cases, the cash was real but it did not stay in corporate treasuries very long. Wall Street was preaching the doctrine of shareholder value, and corporate America bought shares back at an unprecedented rate. From the fourth quarter of 2004 through the third quarter of 2008, the companies in the S.& P. 500 \u2014 generally the largest companies in the country \u2014 reported net earnings of $2.4 trillion. They paid $900 billion in dividends, but they also repurchased $1.7 trillion in shares. As a group, shareholders were paid about $200 billion more than their companies earned over that four-year period. Suffering investors who held onto their shares during the 2008 plunge may want to reflect on the fact that investors who were dumping shares got roughly twice as much of the money as the loyal holders did. It was not only public companies that were able to pay dividends with cash that might have come from lenders rather than profits. Private equity firms were able to bolster their returns by having companies they owned borrow more money and use the cash to pay dividends. Now some of those same companies are struggling to find cash to finance operations. The pain from the excessive payouts to shareholders from years past will be amplified by the fact that corporate loans have a lot in common with the exploding mortgages that came to dominate the home mortgage market before it collapsed. Until the recent boom, the vast majority of home mortgages called for the homeowner to make monthly payments for up to 30 years, with the loan paid off by the time the payments stopped. With fixed-rate mortgages, the payment was constant, so a homeowner who kept his or her job could repay the loan even if the home\u2019s value fell. Even with adjustable-rate mortgages, there would be no increased payment unless market interest rates rose. The new mortgages ended that. Some were known as 3-27 or 2-28 mortgages, with a teaser interest rate for the first two or three years, and then a sharp increase in payment no matter what happened to market rates. Others were interest-only, or called for payments of even less than the interest being accrued. The common thread was that the borrower would have to refinance at some point. Now, of course, many cannot. Their homes are not worth what is owed, or their income is not adequate to support such a loan under the tighter prevailing standards. In the business sector of the economy, similar loan terms were common. Many companies were financed by bank lines of credit that had to be renewed every few years. Even bond issues were only for 5 or 10 years. Most commercial real estate loans in recent years called for payments of just the interest, with the entire loan to be refinanced within 10 years. To make things seem even better during the good years, lenders were willing to lend larger sums, assuming that rents would rise rapidly in commercial buildings, or that profits would do the same at companies. Where that did not happen \u2014 which is to say at most places \u2014 many loans will not be able to be rolled over when they mature. Unnecessary bankruptcies loom. So did dividends lie? Perhaps they were simply misunderstood. Their real message from 2004 through 2006 was not that corporate America was doing so well. It was that lenders had embarked on an unsustainable credit expansion that was sure to end in tears.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Credit;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0288253", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/08/30", "title": "How Controversial Is Gov. Paul LePage of Maine? Here\u2019s a Partial List", "abstract": "Paul R. LePage, the Republican governor of Maine, faced a torrent of outrage and political pressure on Monday even from some members of his own party, after 48 hours last week in which he threatened a Democratic lawmaker in a profane voice mail message, made sweeping statements about race and ended the week by doubling down and seeming to endorse racial profiling to address the state\u2019s drug crisis. Mr. LePage, 67, has been the center of controversy many times over comments widely perceived as racially insensitive or otherwise offensive. But over the weekend, top Democrats in the state called for him to resign. And State Senator Amy Volk, a Republican, questioned Mr. LePage\u2019s mental health on Sunday in a Facebook post that also revealed that lawmakers were considering whether to convene a special legislative session to address his latest statements. \u201cI share your deep concerns regarding the governor\u2019s behavior,\u201d Ms. Volk wrote. \u201cWhat I do not know is whether it is due to substance abuse, mental illness or just ignorance.\u201d She added, \u201cSome sort of censure would seem appropriate, and I would welcome the ability to go on the record with a vote.\u201d Top Republicans huddled in meetings on Monday and over the weekend and said they wanted to meet with Mr. LePage, but had not yet settled on a course of action. \u201cLook, if anybody did this that was an employee of any corporation in our state, there would be ramifications,\u201d said Michael Thibodeau, the Republican president of the State Senate, according to The Portland Press Herald . A spokeswoman for Mr. LePage did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. Brash and often unapologetic, Mr. LePage, a businessman, swept into office in 2010 with Tea Party support, and was re-elected in 2014 by a base drawn to his unfiltered style. He has survived wave after wave of controversies. Here is a selected list: 2016 August On Wednesday, Mr. LePage told attendees at a town hall meeting that the vast majority of drug dealers in Maine, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, were black or Hispanic, and said he was keeping a binder of charged criminals to prove it. Those comments were condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, which raised concerns about racial profiling, and by Democratic lawmakers like State Representative Drew Gattine, who said the remarks were racially charged. Mr. LePage, under the impression that Mr. Gattine had called him a racist, left a voice mail message for Mr. Gattine, in which he called him obscenities and said, \u201cI am after you.\u201d According to The Press Herald, Mr. LePage then told reporters that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine and shoot him between the eyes. On Friday, Mr. LePage apologized to the state for his word choice, but declined to apologize directly to Mr. Gattine . He took his binder of drug arrests, with mug shots, to a news conference, and compared Maine\u2019s drug crisis to a war in which combatants must identify and shoot at the enemy. \u201cThe enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color, or people of Hispanic origin,\u201d Mr. LePage said. On Monday, he seemed to double down on his remarks, the State House News Service reported. At a meeting of New England governors and Canadian provincial premiers in Boston, he said: \u201cWhat I said was this: Meth lab arrests are white. They\u2019re Mainers. The heroin-fentanyl arrests are not white people. They\u2019re Hispanic and they\u2019re black, and they\u2019re from Lowell and Lawrence, Mass.; Waterbury, Conn.; the Bronx and Brooklyn. I didn\u2019t make up the rules. That\u2019s how it turns out. But that\u2019s a fact. It\u2019s a fact. What \u2014 do you want me to lie?\u201d April Mr. LePage apologized after storming offstage and calling protesting students \u201cidiots\u201d during a public appearance. March Mr. LePage displayed \u201cWanted\u201d-style posters aimed at environmentalist and union groups during a town meeting, saying those groups were holding the state back. February Mr. LePage said asylum-seekers brought disease and the \u201cziki-fly.\u201d When asked to apologize at an event in June, Mr. LePage did not, and said conditions like hepatitis C and H.I.V. were on the rise in Maine. Mr. LePage also drew criticism that month for appearing to mock a Chinese businessman\u2019s name. That month, Mr. LePage also delivered his State of the State address in the form of a letter , breaking the tradition of giving a speech to lawmakers. He said it would be \u201csilliness\u201d to address lawmakers who had tried to impeach him. January Mr. LePage apologized for a \u201cslip-up\u201d after saying drug-dealers would come from out of state and \u201cimpregnate a young white girl\u201d before leaving. The drug dealers, he said, in a comment that was widely perceived as racially charged, \u201care guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty \u2014 these types of guys.\u201d 2015 July Mr. LePage apologized to the son of a cartoonist for The Bangor Daily News because he had told the son he would \u201clike to shoot\u201d his father. That comment drew criticism, with some noting its added insensitivity given the attack at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris earlier that year, although the son said he was not offended. June A charter school in Maine said Mr. LePage had threatened to take away its funding if it did not rescind a job offer to the House speaker, Mark Eves, a Democrat. \u201cThe full power of the state was used to put a father of three out of a job because he was a lawmaker who disagrees with the governor on policy,\u201d the editorial board of The Press Herald wrote . Some Democrats called for impeachment, but an effort to investigate Mr. LePage \u2014 which would have been a precursor to impeachment in January 2016 \u2014 did not muster enough support for a vote. May Mr. LePage vowed to veto all Democratic-sponsored bills until the party accepted his effort to eliminate the state\u2019s income tax. The question of whether Mr. LePage had vetoed 65 bills within the proper time frame ended up in the State Supreme Court , which found that the bills could stand as law . 2013 August Two lawmakers, who remained anonymous, said they had heard Mr. LePage say at a fund-raiser that President Obama \u201chates white people.\u201d June Mr. LePage made a graphically lewd statement about Troy Jackson, a Democrat who was the assistant Senate majority leader at the time. He added that Mr. Jackson was a \u201cbad person\u201d with \u201cno brains\u201d and a \u201cblack heart.\u201d 2012 July Mr. LePage compared the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo in a radio address. Asked about the comment in a follow-up interview several days later, he said: \u201cWhat I am trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated. Maybe the I.R.S. is not quite as bad \u2014 yet.\u201d 2011 January Mr. LePage said leaders from the N.A.A.C.P. who had questioned his decision not to attend Martin Luther King\u2019s Birthday events could \u201ckiss my butt.\u201d 2010 September During his campaign for governor, Mr. LePage told a group of fishermen that he would tell Mr. Obama to \u201cgo to hell.\u201d", "keyword": "Paul R LePage;Maine;Governors;Republicans;Drew Gattine"}
{"id": "ny0288997", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2016/08/22", "title": "Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya Wins Marathon; Galen Rupp Takes Bronze", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 The favorite Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya won the Olympic marathon on Sunday, drawing away over the final four miles to win in 2 hours 8 minutes 44 seconds. Feyisa Lilesa of Ethiopia took second in 2:09:54, while Galen Rupp of the United States won the bronze medal in 2:10:05, his personal best. Kenyans won both marathons at the Rio Games. Jemima Sumgong won the women\u2019s marathon, becoming the first Kenyan woman to win a gold medal in the 26.2-mile event. Dressing Up, and Stripping Down, as Games End 14 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image James Hill for The New York Times \u201cIt is amazing for us,\u201d Kipchoge, 31, said. \u201cKenyans will be very happy. This is history, the first time the women and the men win\u201d in the same Olympics \u201cand it is the best moment of my life.\u201d At 35 kilometers, or 21.7 miles, of the men\u2019s race, Kipchoge held a lead of only one second over Lilesa and Rupp. Rupp seemed in a position to become perhaps the first American man to win the Olympic marathon since Frank Shorter won in 1972. But this was only the second marathon run by Rupp, who ran his first at the Olympic trials in February. He had finished fifth in the 10,000 meters in Rio after winning a silver medal in the event at the 2012 London Olympics. On Sunday, he began to fall back. Image Kipchoge won the men\u2019s Olympic marathon on Sunday in 2 hours 8 minutes 44 seconds. Credit Lucy Nicholson/Reuters At one point, Kipchoge motioned to Lilesa, 26, to help him share the lead. Lilesa would not or could not. And so Kipchoge drew away, winning by more than a minute, becoming what many consider the greatest marathon runner ever. He has won seven of the eight marathons he has entered. \u201cIt was a championship, and it was a bit slow, so I decided to take over,\u201d Kipchoge said. \u201cMaybe it was the rain, maybe not. Everyone wants a medal. I was coming here for gold.\u201d In April, he had come within eight seconds of the world record at the London Marathon, running his personal best of 2:03:05 on a cool, blustery day. Last fall, while winning the Berlin Marathon, Kipchoge might have set the world record, but the insoles came out of his Nike shoes. Image Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya leading the pack in the men\u2019s marathon on Sunday. Credit Quinn Rooney/Getty Images There was no chance of a world record at this Olympic marathon, which lacked pacesetters and had some sharp turns, and where an early morning rain had left the air muggy with a temperature in the 70s. At the halfway point, a group of about two dozen runners had a shot at the lead, running a 1:05:55. But the lead pack was down to nine runners at 30 kilometers (18.6 miles). By 20.5 miles, it was left to Kipchoge, Lilesa and Rupp to decide the race\u2019s between them. \u201cI was emotionally drained after the 10K, but I got it out of the system and decided to have an attacking race,\u201d Rupp, 30 said. \u201cMaybe this is my best event.\u201d The other American finishers were Jared Ward, sixth in 2:11:30, and Meb Keflezighi, 33rd in 2:16.46.", "keyword": "2016 Summer Olympics;Marathon;Eliud Kipchoge;Galen Rupp"}
{"id": "ny0167041", "categories": ["politics"], "date": "2006/01/11", "title": "House G.O.P. Considers Ban on Lobby-Paid Travel", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - House Republicans assembling a package of proposed changes in lobbying rules are contemplating a ban on all travel underwritten by outside groups, the lawmaker who is leading the effort said Tuesday. The lawmaker, Representative David Dreier of California, chairman of the Rules Committee, said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has endorsed the idea of prohibiting members of Congress and their aides from accepting trips not paid for out of Congressional budgets. \"The plan is to be really bold and strong here,\" said Mr. Dreier, who said he discussed a potential overhaul of lobbying rules Tuesday with Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has introduced his own plan in the Senate. Mr. Dreier said he was scheduled to meet Wednesday with Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, in an effort to approach the issue in a bipartisan way. A ban on privately financed travel is likely to be unpopular with many lawmakers as well as a variety of special-interest groups that arrange and pay for trips around the globe for lawmakers and senior aides as a way to foster relationships and educate them on their issues of interest. Registered lobbyists are prohibited from paying for such travel. But Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges last week, is accused of using third-party groups to pay for lavish trips overseas for Representatives Tom DeLay of Texas and Bob Ney of Ohio as well as senior Congressional aides. Many other lawmakers have also run afoul of requirements for reporting their private travel. Mr. Hastert and others have previously suggested creating a system for lawmakers that would require trips to be approved in advance by the House ethics committee but not eliminate them. Mr. Dreier said he was also examining ideas for new reporting requirements for lobbyists as well as tougher restrictions on how long lawmakers and aides must wait after leaving Congress before returning there to work as lobbyists. The current period is one year. \"There is a strong sense that we do need to move on this,\" Mr. Dreier said. \"I think the American people want us to act.\" The discussion on lobbying rules was intensifying as two senior Republicans, Representatives Roy Blunt of Missouri and John A. Boehner of Ohio, continued their recess battle to replace Mr. DeLay, who said Saturday that he was abandoning any effort to regain the position of majority leader after he was forced to step down last year as a result of his indictment in Texas. House leaders had been leaning toward a Feb. 2 election to fill that post, but lawmakers and aides said that there was a new move to conduct it earlier, possibly Jan. 30, if lawmakers can arrange to return to the capital. That change would allow President Bush to deliver his State of the Union address on Jan. 31 without the distraction of a leadership battle. Aides to Mr. Blunt released the names of new supporters on Tuesday as they counted 44 publicly declared backers of the 116 votes needed. Among them were Representatives Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Jack Kingston of Georgia, a member of the leadership. Aides to Mr. Boehner said he was making progress as well, putting their public pledge total at 30. They said time was on their side. Mr. DeLay, a longtime party vote counter who returned to the Capitol on Tuesday to begin his permanent transition out of the majority leader's position, said the contest was competitive. \"It's a real race,\" he said. \"The first we've had since '94.\" Mr. DeLay said that one reason for his quick trip to Washington was to consult with staff members who would need to change jobs. He said he was \"at peace\" with his decision to leave the leadership -- a move that came after lawmakers began circulating a petition calling for new elections -- and said the shake-up would ultimately be good for House Republicans. \"It's a cleansing process,\" he said.", "keyword": "WASHINGTON (DC);HASTERT J DENNIS;LOBBYING AND LOBBYISTS"}
{"id": "ny0086550", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/07/21", "title": "Planned Parenthood Tells Congress More Videos of Clinics Might Surface", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Planned Parenthood on Monday told congressional investigators that abortion opponents had harassed and unlawfully infiltrated its clinics for years and most likely possessed thousands of hours of surreptitious video recordings that they could \u201cdeceptively edit\u201d and spread for months to come. The charge came in a five-page letter from a Planned Parenthood lawyer that was the group\u2019s initial response to an investigation by Republicans on a House committee. Last week, the committee opened the inquiry after anti-abortion activists circulated a video showing one of the organization\u2019s doctors describing how some affiliates provide donated fetal tissue to researchers. The activists allege that the video proved that Planned Parenthood sells parts from aborted fetuses for profit, which is a criminal offense \u2014 an allegation now echoed by some Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates. Planned Parenthood denies the charge, citing the doctor\u2019s statements in the video as proof that affiliates charge only small amounts to cover handling costs, which is legal. The group\u2019s prediction of more videos to come is based on reports from its clinics nationwide that abortion opponents had infiltrated them, posing questions to unsuspecting employees and patients. If more videos surface, that could galvanize conservatives in Congress for some time, even contributing to the risk of a government shutdown this fall if enough Republicans try, as they have in the past, to block spending bills unless federal funding to Planned Parenthood is eliminated. In the letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the lawyer for Planned Parenthood, Roger K. Evans, said the organization\u2019s chief medical officer, Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, would brief congressional staff investigators about the group\u2019s practices in getting patients\u2019 consent and providing tissue to medical researchers. But in a letter Friday, the committee requested a briefing by July 31 from Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who was secretly recorded on the video with two abortion opponents posing as biotechnology representatives. Planned Parenthood is still considering whether Dr. Nucatola should speak to congressional staff members, Mr. Evans said, given the allegations of criminality against her from Republicans. While promising Planned Parenthood\u2019s cooperation with the committee, Mr. Evans devoted much of his letter to outlining, as he put it, \u201csome significant and disturbing facts about the individuals who have spurred this unfounded controversy, extremists who have spent a decade deceiving the public and making false charges\u201d to try to close Planned Parenthood and end abortions. He said the activist mainly responsible for the video, David Daleiden, created a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services for \u201ca campaign of corporate espionage.\u201d He said Mr. Daleiden had been involved in at least 10 \u201cattacks\u201d on Planned Parenthood over eight years, \u201cgaining access to our health centers and offices under false pretenses, taping staff (and sometimes patients) without their knowledge,\u201d and making at least 65 recordings. Mr. Daleiden on Monday declined to be interviewed, as he did last week when his video appeared on a website for a group he recently created called the Center for Medical Progress . But a statement on the site Monday said the center \u201cfollows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work,\u201d and promised that \u201cmore clear evidence that Planned Parenthood routinely profits from the sale of baby parts\u201d was coming. Mr. Evans, in his letter, said Mr. Daleiden\u2019s ruse to infiltrate Planned Parenthood included putting up exhibits for Biomax at the organization\u2019s conferences in recent years. The lawyer also raised questions about whether Biomax or the Center for Medical Progress violated state or federal laws involving corporate filings and taxes. A Biomax representative at least once was admitted by Planned Parenthood employees to \u201ca highly sensitive area in a clinic where tissue is processed after abortion procedures,\u201d Mr. Evans wrote. Another time, a Biomax representative asked about the racial characteristics of tissue provided to researchers; anti-abortion activists have often alleged that Planned Parenthood engages in \u201cgenocide\u201d of African-American babies. And Biomax proposed \u201csham procurement contracts,\u201d offering one clinic $1,600 for a fetal liver and thymus, Mr. Evans said. In the video, Dr. Nucatola says that clinics charge $30 to $100 for a specimen. Mr. Evans, in his letter, noted that she also said 10 times during a two-and-a-half-hour lunch that the charges were for expenses, not profit. But, he added, those statements were not included in the initial nine-minute video. He said they were in the full-length video, which was released at the same time.", "keyword": "Abortion;Planned Parenthood;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;House of Representatives;Congress;David Daleiden;Raegan McDonald-Mosley"}
{"id": "ny0043326", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/05/01", "title": "Man Charged With Killing a Developer in January", "abstract": "The New York Police Department has arrested a 26-year-old man in connection with the kidnapping and killing of a Brooklyn developer, whose body was found smoldering in a trash container at a gas station in Nassau County on Jan. 3. The suspect, Kendel Felix, of 921 Montgomery Street in Brooklyn, has been charged with second-degree murder, the police said Wednesday night. Earlier in the day, the police were questioning the suspect. \u201cWe\u2019re very pleased with the direction the investigation is now going,\u201d the New York police commissioner, William J. Bratton, told reporters earlier on Wednesday. \u201cOver the last 24 hours, the pace of that investigation has accelerated significantly, and our anticipation is over the next 24 hours that it will continue to accelerate and hopefully draw to a conclusion.\u201d Mourners at the funeral of the developer, Menachem Stark, described him as a pillar of the Hasidic community. But his finances were in disarray , even as he opened buildings across northern Brooklyn. Court records indicate that he and a business partner had defaulted on major loans. Mr. Stark, 39, had been abducted as he was leaving his office at 331 Rutledge Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, shortly before midnight. Two kidnappers forced him into a minivan after a struggle that lasted for several minutes, the police said. Mr. Stark\u2019s remains were found at a gas station in Great Neck the next day. An autopsy found that he had died from asphyxiation, indicating that he had probably been suffocated.", "keyword": "Menachem Stark;Murders;Williamsburg Brooklyn;Great Neck NY;NYC;Kendel Felix;Kidnapping"}
{"id": "ny0070325", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/03/02", "title": "Icy Stillness and Muted Fishing in a New England Port", "abstract": "NEW BEDFORD, Mass. \u2014 Mark Abraham, who has fished the New England coast for decades, kept a sharp eye on his catch as the slimy haddock spilled onto a dockside conveyor belt. He had just returned from 10 frigid days at sea, among the most brutal he has spent. \u201cIt\u2019s probably been the worst winter in 10 years,\u201d he said as workers sorted the fish by weight and slid them into bins. \u201cIt\u2019s not even the ice that\u2019s stopping you, it\u2019s the wind. It\u2019s too rough to fish. If it\u2019s rough like that, you don\u2019t catch anything.\u201d This winter has pounded much of New England with record snowfall, encased the region in a deep freeze that has kept the snow from melting, and disrupted work, school and lives in general for millions of residents. Here in New Bedford , the top commercial fishing port in the nation, the winter has also slowed commerce, as was instantly apparent from Mr. Abraham\u2019s relatively meager haul. He unloaded 18,800 pounds of haddock at the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction here; Richard Canastra, president of the auction, said that in good weather, Mr. Abraham might have brought in 40,000 pounds. A glance at the historic harbor, the epicenter of the whaling industry in the 19th century, when New Bedford was the richest city per capita in the world, also tells the story. The Acushnet, the river that is the city\u2019s lifeline to the sea \u2014 and the name of the New Bedford whaling ship that Herman Melville shipped out on in 1841 \u2014 is nearly frozen over. Vast ice floes clog the harbor, and many smaller vessels are locked in place. For an active port, it is astonishingly still. Nothing moves for hours. Old salts who know their history know the dangers of trying to navigate waterways caked with ice. The Whaling Disaster of 1871 was a teachable moment, when 33 whaling ships, many of them from New Bedford, were trapped in the Arctic off the Alaskan coast; the ice tightened like a noose around four of the vessels and eventually crushed their hulls. For the first time in more than a decade, the Coast Guard in February issued \u201csevere ice\u201d bulletins for southeastern New England. \u201cThe severe frigid weather we have experienced for the past two weeks or so is expected to continue for at least another five days,\u201d read one bulletin, issued Wednesday. The Army Corps of Engineers has banned vessels shorter than 65 feet from Cape Cod Canal. The Coast Guard has no mandatory restrictions in place, but warns that buoys and other navigational aids have been submerged or blown off their stations and rendered useless. It recommends daylight passage only and one-way traffic. \u201cVirtually all mariners have adopted these measures,\u201d said Edward G. LeBlanc, chief of the waterways management division of the Coast Guard for Southeastern New England . Image With boats unable to move up the channel, a seafood auction employee used the time to clean a filter. Credit Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times Mr. LeBlanc helps assign the Coast Guard cutters that break up the ice, though the latest bulletin warned that the ice was so thick in spots that it could not be broken. \u201cEvery day we look at where the ice is forming, what deliveries are expected and what ships need to get out,\u201d he said. \u201cIs it to bring in automobiles, which is important for the economy, or is it to bring heating oil and gas, which is vital to keeping people warm? Keeping ferries running to the islands is also key, not just a convenience but a necessity.\u201d Bigger fishing vessels, like the Humbak , on which Mr. Abraham sailed, continue to operate because livelihoods depend on them. Mr. Canastra, who runs the last fish auction in New Bedford, auctioned Mr. Abraham\u2019s haddock to buyers and processors the morning after it was unloaded. They in turn sold it to restaurants and supermarkets. The prices have climbed, Mr. Canastra said, because supply is low and demand is high; heavily Catholic New England is in the Lenten season and needs more fish on Fridays. From Jan. 1 through last Monday, Mr. Canastra said, the haul from all of his fishermen was 45 percent lower than in the same period last year. He attributed the decline to the weather as much as to federal quotas. \u201cIn a way, the quotas are worse,\u201d he said. \u201cThe storms are only two months of the year, while the quotas are 12.\u201d Image Crew members on the Ida Lewis prepared tools to tend to navigational gear in New Bedford Harbor last week. Credit Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times The harbor is not the only victim of the harsh winter. New Bedford is enduring record snowfalls and bitter temperatures; on Feb. 21, they plunged to 12 below zero. Like Boston, the city has had to truck snow out of its compact downtown to outlying snow farms. One of them, along the harbor here, is so vast that Jonathan F. Mitchell, the mayor of New Bedford, calls it a mountain range. Mr. Mitchell said he had set aside $350,000 for snow removal but had already spent twice that, with little to show for it since nothing has melted. \u201cIt\u2019s a big pain in the butt,\u201d he said. He had to close City Hall for several days, which also meant shutting down the schools and libraries, which in turn ground many businesses to a halt. Over the last several years, New Bedford has done much to pull itself out of the economic doldrums that have stymied so many other old Northeast industrial towns. But one growing concern here is that the harsh winter may nip that progress because it knocked out the transit system in Boston. That could mean little political will \u2014 and no spare money \u2014 to build a long-promised commuter rail line between New Bedford and Boston, 60 miles away. Mr. Mitchell said that while he wanted the rail service, it was not central to the city\u2019s economic development strategy, which he said depended more on growth at the port and on building out the campus of the nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The mayor has another plan in the works, saying that New Bedford could bolster Boston\u2019s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics by staging the sailing races in nearby Buzzards Bay. Those races are tentatively planned for Boston Harbor, but, Mr. Mitchell said, \u201cNew Bedford may well be the best place in America to host Olympic sailing.\u201d If the ice ever melts.", "keyword": "New Bedford Massachusetts;Port;Commercial fishing;New England;Winter;Ice;Acushnet River"}
{"id": "ny0110290", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/05/15", "title": "Council to Ask Banks to Describe Efforts to Aid Poor Areas", "abstract": "As a huge trading loss at JPMorgan Chase intensifies criticism of the nation\u2019s big banks, the New York City Council plans to vote on Tuesday to require banks to make public their efforts to be socially responsible before the city decides where to deposit the billions of dollars it keeps in banks. The city currently deposits money at 31 banks \u2014 among them JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America , Capital One , Deutsche Bank , HSBC and Wells Fargo \u2014 chosen for their financial soundness and ratings by federal and state agencies. But leaders of the Council say those criteria are no longer enough. As the Occupy Wall Street movement focuses attention on the role of banks in the financial crisis, and the JPMorgan loss prompts calls for increased regulation, council members want the city to begin weighing the services banks offer in poor neighborhoods when determining which ones to do business with. Cleveland and Philadelphia have had laws in place for over a decade similar to the one being proposed in New York, and now the financial crisis has led several other cities to consider them . Pittsburgh recently passed a bill that requires banks that want city deposits to submit community reinvestment plans every two years. Los Angeles , Boston , and San Diego are all considering similar measures. The New York measure, championed by Christine C. Quinn , the Council speaker and a leading candidate for mayor in 2013, opens yet another rift between the Council and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg over how the city should respond to concerns about economic inequality. The mayor has already threatened to sue the Council over two other pieces of legislation, the so-called living- and prevailing-wage bills, which would raise wages for some private-sector workers above the minimum wage. In a brief interview Friday, as he left a breakfast with local bankers in the Bronx , Mr. Bloomberg said he strongly opposed new restrictions on where the city could put its deposits, which can be as much as $7 billion. \u201cYou would think, between the federal government and the state government, we\u2019d have enough bank regulations,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why the City Council thinks that they have the expertise, or can really add anything other than just adding costs to banks to try to comply.\u201d The banking industry is fighting hard against the bill, which Michael P. Smith, the president of the New York Bankers Association, called \u201cunacceptable as far as our industry is concerned.\u201d \u201cThis would represent a whole new layer of regulation,\u201d said Mr. Smith. He said federal and state governments already monitored community performance by banks, and he warned that the measure could discourage banks from taking public deposits. Representatives of Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon , Capital One, Citibank and HSBC declined to comment, referring questions to the association. Kevin Friedlander, a spokesman for Wells Fargo, said that after a year of talking with the sponsors of the measure, \u201cWe can\u2019t support this proposal in its current form.\u201d But some bankers were more sympathetic to the idea. Keith Pilkington, a spokesman for Amalgamated Bank, said, \u201cAmalgamated Bank understands and shares the frustration of the City Council and tens of millions of Americans at a banking and financial system that took tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer aid.\u201d \u201cAmalgamated Bank believes that there is room to improve the pending bill to minimize the administrative and reporting burden on banks and urges the Council to make such changes before passage,\u201d Mr. Pilkington said. \u201cHowever, Amalgamated Bank believes that banks, and all other businesses that voluntarily choose to do business with New York City should be businesses that pay their employees living wages with benefits and that are committed to the long-term viability, diversity and vibrancy of New York City.\u201d Ms. Quinn, who in her early 20s worked for the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development , a housing organization that has pushed the measure, said she was motivated by seeing the owners of apartment buildings around the city get overloaded with debt and then be foreclosed on during the financial crisis. She said the proposed measure, which is being sponsored by Councilman Albert Vann of Brooklyn and appears to have the support of a veto-proof majority, was simply about transparency. \u201cIt\u2019s a bill to allow New Yorkers, whose money gets deposited in banks, to know how those banks are behaving in their neighborhoods,\u201d she said, adding that it was \u201cnot designed to be finger-wagging and punitive.\u201d The Council bill, called the Responsible Banking Act, would require the Department of Finance to create a new advisory board, which would publish an annual report on how banks that apply to take city deposits were doing in meeting the credit needs of the city\u2019s neighborhoods. Banks would be required to provide detailed information, by census tract, about branch locations, loans , delinquencies, foreclosures and loan modifications . The information, as well as the advisory board\u2019s evaluation of the banks, would be published on the Department of Finance Web site and, in the language of the bill, \u201cmay be considered\u201d by the mayor, comptroller, and finance commissioner in deciding which banks should be allowed to take city deposits. John Taylor, the president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a network of community organizations that is helping officials in several cities draft \u201cresponsible banking\u201d laws, said the measures allowed the cities to push banks to offer more services in poor neighborhoods. \u201cPeople have stopped looking to the federal government alone to solve all these problems and are looking at what they can do on a local level \u2014 what can we do to stimulate economic development and investment in our town,\u201d he said. Marlene Cintron, the president of the Bronx Overall Development Corporation, a nonprofit agency, said that she thought the bill was a good idea. A particular problem in the Bronx, she said, is the small number of local bank branches, a situation she said made banking expensive for residents and encouraged predatory lending. \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to know what our institutions have been doing in the Bronx \u2014 for the Bronx,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Banking and Finance;Regulation and Deregulation;New York City Council;Mike Bloomberg;Christine C Quinn;NYC;JPMorgan Chase"}
{"id": "ny0259022", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/01/24", "title": "Legal Bills for Fannie and Freddie Abuses Cost Taxpayers $160 Million", "abstract": "Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress. The bulk of those expenditures \u2014 $132 million \u2014 went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating. Documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that taxpayers have paid $24.2 million to law firms defending three of Fannie\u2019s former top executives: Franklin D. Raines , its former chief executive; Timothy Howard, its former chief financial officer; and Leanne Spencer, the former controller. Late last year, Randy Neugebauer, Republican of Texas and now chairman of the oversight subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, requested the figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It is the regulator charged with overseeing the mortgage finance companies and acts as their conservator, trying to preserve the company\u2019s assets on behalf of taxpayers. \u201cOne of the things I feel very strongly about is we need to be doing everything we can to minimize any further exposure to the taxpayers associated with these companies,\u201d Mr. Neugebauer said in an interview last week. It is typical for corporations to cover such fees unless an executive is found to be at fault. In this case, if the former executives are found liable, the government can try to recoup the costs, but that could prove challenging. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government in September 2008, their losses stemming from bad loans have mounted, totaling about $150 billion in a recent reckoning. Because the financial regulatory overhaul passed last summer did not address how to resolve Fannie and Freddie, Congress is expected to take up that complex matter this year. In the coming weeks, the Treasury Department is expected to publish a report outlining the administration\u2019s recommendations regarding the future of the companies. Well before the credit crisis compelled the government to rescue Fannie and Freddie, accounting irregularities had engulfed both companies. Shareholders of Fannie and Freddie sued to recover stock losses incurred after the improprieties came to light. Freddie\u2019s problems arose in 2003 when it disclosed that it had understated its income from 2000 to 2002; the company revised its results by an additional $5 billion. In 2004, Fannie was found to have overstated its results for the preceding six years; conceding that its accounting was improper, it reduced its past earnings by $6.3 billion. Mr. Raines retired in December 2004 and Mr. Howard resigned at the same time. Ms. Spencer left her position as controller in early 2005. The following year, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight , then the company\u2019s regulator, published an in-depth report on the company\u2019s accounting practices, accusing Fannie\u2019s top executives of taking actions to manipulate profits and generate $115 million in improper bonuses. The office sued Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in 2006, seeking $100 million in fines and $115 million in restitution. In 2008, the three former executives settled with the regulator, returning $31.4 million in compensation. Without admitting or denying the regulator\u2019s allegations, Mr. Raines paid $24.7 million and Mr. Howard paid $6.4 million; Ms. Spencer returned $275,000. Fannie Mae also settled a fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission without admitting or denying the allegations; the company paid $400 million in penalties. Lawyers for the three former Fannie executives did not respond to requests for comment. A company spokeswoman did not return a phone call or e-mail seeking comment. In addition to the $160 million in taxpayer money, Fannie and Freddie themselves spent millions of dollars to defend former executives and directors before the government takeover. Freddie Mac had spent a total of $27.8 million. The expenses are significantly larger at Fannie Mae. Legal costs incurred by Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in the roughly four and a half years prior to the government takeover totaled almost $63 million. The total incurred before the bailout by other high-level executives and board members was around $12 million, while an additional $18 million covered fees for lawyers for Fannie Mae officials below the level of executive vice president. Many of these individuals are provided lawyers because they are witnesses in the matters. Employment contracts and company by-laws usually protect, or indemnify, executives and directors against liabilities, including legal fees associated with defending against such suits. After the government moved to back Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Finance Agency agreed to continue paying to defend the executives, with the taxpayers covering the costs. But indemnification does not apply across the board. As is the case with many companies, Fannie Mae\u2019s by-laws detail actions that bar indemnification for officers and directors. They include a person\u2019s breach of the duty of loyalty to the company or its stockholders, actions taken that are not in good faith or intentional misconduct. Richard S. Carnell, an associate professor at Fordham University Law School who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions during the 1990s, questions why Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and others, given their conduct detailed in the Housing Enterprise Oversight report, are being held harmless by the government and receiving payment of legal bills as a result. \u201cTheir duty of loyalty required them to put shareholders\u2019 interests ahead of their own personal interests,\u201d Mr. Carnell said. \u201cHad they cared about the shareholders, they would not have staked Fannie\u2019s reputation on dubious accounting. They defied their duty of loyalty and served themselves. At a moral level, they don\u2019t deserve indemnification, much less payment of such princely sums.\u201d Asked why it has not cut off funding for these mounting legal bills, Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said: \u201cI understand the frustration regarding the advancement of certain legal fees associated with ongoing litigation involving Fannie Mae and certain former employees. It is my responsibility to follow applicable federal and state law. Consequently, on the advice of counsel, I have concluded that the advancement of such fees is in the best interest of the conservatorship.\u201d If the former executives are found liable, they would be obligated to repay the government. But lawyers familiar with such disputes said it would be difficult to get individuals to repay sums as large as these. Lawyers for Mr. Raines, for example, have received almost $38 million so far, while Ms. Spencer\u2019s bills exceed $31 million. These individuals could bring further litigation to avoid repaying this money, legal specialists said. Although the figures are not broken down by case, the largest costs are being generated by a lawsuit centering on accounting improprieties that erupted at Fannie Mae in 2004. This suit, a shareholder class action brought by the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, is being heard in federal court in Washington. Although it has been going on for six years, the judge has not yet set a trial date. Depositions are still being taken in the case, suggesting that it has much further to go with many more fees to be paid.", "keyword": "Lawsuit;Federal Housing Finance Agency;Franklin D Raines;Leanne Spencer"}
{"id": "ny0094977", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/01/17", "title": "Travel to Cuba Eases, but Airlines Will Miss Initial Rush", "abstract": "The Obama administration this week lifted some travel and trade restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba, but commercial airlines will not be flocking to Havana for at least another year, experts say. The new rules , which took effect on Friday, removed the need for travelers to get approval from the United States government before traveling to Cuba. Now, many more are able to travel legally, spend more money on the island, buy Cuban cigars and increase remittances to their families there. But before airlines can schedule direct flights to Havana and other airports, the two countries must still negotiate a new air service agreement. Until that happens, travelers will have to rely on charter flights booked through specialized travel agencies, and that is not expected to change for the next 12 to 18 months, according to travel experts and industry officials. The timeline could be further complicated by opposition in Congress as well as the presidential election next year, which could delay matters in unpredictable ways. \u201cThese are big changes and this will take some time, as there has been 50-plus years of mistrust to overcome,\u201d said Tom Popper, the president of Insight Cuba, a travel agency that has been operating in Cuba since 2000 and sends about 3,000 Americans to the country each year. He did not see the hurdles as insurmountable. \u201cThere is excitement in Cuba about those changes, and there is a willingness to change,\u201d he said. \u201cLike us, they are looking at this closely. We\u2019ve been divided forever and all of a sudden, in a three-week period, everything changes.\u201d About 100,000 Americans already visit Cuba each year, a number that has surged since more flexible travel rules were introduced in 2011. Cubans living in the United States make an additional estimated 400,000 visits a year. Still, the new policy means that those numbers are certain to increase. Travel agencies have already reported a jump in interest since the Obama administration announced that it was restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba last month, and they are increasing charter capacity in the coming months to address the expected growth in demand. \u201cThis will make a huge difference in the numbers of people who can go,\u201d said Bob Guild of Marazul Charters, a travel agency that has been organizing trips to Cuba for 36 years. \u201cThis opens up a chance for the American people to go to Cuba that they didn\u2019t have before.\u201d Outside the United States, many airlines already serve Cuban destinations. Travelers can also go to Canada, Mexico, or several Caribbean countries first and take connecting flights there, a loophole that many Americans have taken to circumvent restrictions imposed by the United States, since Cuba does not ban Americans from entering. The biggest carriers, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, among others, quickly signaled interest in Cuba after the new policy was announced, but so far have not made plans to fly there. \u201cWe look forward to expanding service into Cuba as more opportunities become available,\u201d Delta said. JetBlue operates charter flights from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., while American Airlines has been operating charter flights booked by travel agencies into Cuba for 15 years from Miami and Tampa, Fla. Neither is expected to schedule its own commercial flights until a new air service agreement can be established to replace an agreement dating to 1953. Image Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed International Airport in Havana. Washington has eased restrictions on travel to Cuba. Credit Reuters \u201cWe are reviewing the changes to the Cuba travel policy and will continue to be guided by the laws and policies of the U.S. government and the governments of the countries we serve, as they evolve,\u201d American Airlines said in a statement. United said on Thursday that it planned to seek approval for regular flights from Newark and Houston. The trade group Airlines for America said, \u201cThere are still a number of steps to be resolved on this issue.\u201d The Department of Transportation issued a notice on Thursday that outlined the steps that needed to be taken before commercial flights could resume. To start, the two governments need to agree on how many flights can operate, at what frequency and from which airports. Cuba, with at least 10 airports, has plenty of gates, but some aviation experts doubt that it will be willing to open up its airspace entirely, to protect the interests of its national airline, Cubana de Aviaci\u00f3n. An air service agreement would also encompass things like airport fees and other reciprocal arrangements between airlines and airports. Once an agreement is reached, domestic carriers will most likely face some forms of capacity limits to Cuba, analysts said. This could require the Department of Transportation to seek competitive bids from American carriers interested in flying to Cuba, just as it does to constrained airports in China or Japan, for instance. In its notice, the department said that airlines that served Cuba before the 1959 revolution would not have an advantage over other airlines. Under the new rules outlined by the White House on Thursday, Americans who travel to Cuba for any of a dozen specific reasons will no longer be required to obtain a special license from the Treasury Department. But travel will still be limited to people including those with close relatives in Cuba, those traveling on humanitarian or religious missions, travelers on educational programs, as well as academics and journalists. While specific trips for tourism remain officially banned, the government will no longer be able to enforce any direct oversight. The new rules therefore represent a momentous change, and there is likely to be a major touristic rush to Cuba in the coming years, according to travel specialists. \u201cThe floodgates have opened,\u201d Arthur Frommer, founder of the Frommer\u2019s travel guide series, wrote on his blog . \u201cStarting now, any determined American will be able to travel, without hindrance, to Cuba.\u201d Travelers will also be permitted to use credit cards, spend more money in Cuba, and bring back more souvenirs, including up to $100 in tobacco or alcohol. Mr. Frommer added, \u201cIt\u2019s obvious that Americans who honestly believe they fit within 12 permitted categories of travel for Cuba can simply pack up and go.\u201d", "keyword": "Cuba;Airlines,airplanes;Travel,Tourism;Embargoes Sanctions;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0282611", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/07/17", "title": "Turkey Rounds Up Thousands of Military Personnel", "abstract": "ISTANBUL \u2014 Turkey\u2019s government, rallying behind its defiant leader, rounded up thousands of military personnel on Saturday who were said to have taken part in an attempted coup, moving swiftly to re-establish control after a night of chaos and intrigue that left hundreds dead. By midday, there were few signs that those who had taken part in the coup attempt were still able to challenge the government, and many officials declared the uprising a failure. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to hundreds of flag-waving supporters outside his home in Istanbul on Saturday evening, declared that \u201cthe strong aren\u2019t always right, but the right are always strong.\u201d He called on the United States to arrest an exile living in Pennsylvania who Mr. Erdogan claimed was behind the coup attempt. Video Political leaders from several countries condemned the attempted coup in Turkey, and expressed support for the country's government on Saturday. Credit Credit John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images As the insurrection unfolded Friday night, beginning with the seizing of two bridges in Istanbul by military forces, Mr. Erdogan was not heard from for hours. He finally addressed the nation from an undisclosed location, speaking on his cellphone\u2019s FaceTime app \u2014 a dramatic scene that seemed to suggest a man on the verge of losing power. But in the early hours of Saturday, he landed in Istanbul, and steadily found his voice again, lashing out at his opponents, and one in particular. Mr. Erdogan placed blame for the intrigue on the followers of Fethullah Gulen , a Muslim cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, who was the president\u2019s ally until a bitter falling out three years ago. Mr. Gulen\u2019s followers were known to have a strong presence in Turkey\u2019s police and judiciary, but less so in the military. On Saturday morning, Mr. Erdogan said, referring to Mr. Gulen, \u201cI have a message for Pennsylvania: You have engaged in enough treason against this nation. If you dare, come back to your country.\u201d On Saturday evening, Mr. Erdogan, standing atop a bus outside his home, pressed this theme in a thundering message to his supporters, calling on the United States to arrest Mr. Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Even before Mr. Erdogan\u2019s speech, the gist of which American officials have heard before, Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that he would listen to any inquiries Turkey might have about the cleric. \u201cWe fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen,\u201d he said. In a statement released on the website of his group, Alliance for Shared Values , and in an interview with The New York Times on Saturday, Mr. Gulen condemned the coup, denied any link to it and expressed support for the democratic process, saying that \u201cthrough military intervention, democracy cannot be achieved.\u201d Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, calling the insurrection \u201c a stain in the history of democracy ,\u201d put the death toll in the clashes at 265, including civilians, pro-government forces and troops involved in the coup attempt, and said 1,440 people had been wounded. He added that 2,839 military personnel had been detained. Later in the day, Defense Minister Fikri Isik said that the state authorities were in full control of all areas in Turkey but that vigilance was required. \u201cWe have prevented the coup,\u201d Mr. Isik said, \u201cbut it is too soon to say that the danger is over.\u201d Video A failed coup attempt on Friday night has gripped Turkey. By Saturday morning, thousands of soldiers had been detained, accused of trying to overthrow the government, and civilians were left in a state of unease. Credit Credit Gokhan Tan/Getty Images Noting the intensity of the violence that had erupted, Mr. Erdogan said that Turkish fighter jets had bombed tanks on the streets of Ankara, and that a military helicopter being used by the coup plotters had been shot down. There was also a battle early Saturday at Turkey\u2019s intelligence headquarters in Ankara, which government forces later secured, and a Turkish official said the intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, had been taken to a secure location. In a news briefing on Saturday, Turkey\u2019s top military officer, Gen. Umit Dundar, the acting head of the general staff, said that \u201cthe coup attempt was rejected by the chain of command immediately.\u201d \u201cThe people have taken to the streets and voiced their support for democracy,\u201d he said, adding that \u201cthe nation will never forget this betrayal.\u201d General Dundar emphasized that only a small minority within the military, including members of the air force, a military-style police force and armored units, had revolted. Scenes From the Coup Attempt in Turkey 14 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Emrah Gurel/Associated Press \u201cThe army is ours,\u201d Mr. Erdogan said Saturday night. \u201cI am the chief commander.\u201d Supporters of the government demonstrated in Istanbul and other cities on Saturday night, chanting their disdain for the coup attempt as drivers honked their horns. \u201cWe will not fall, everything for our country,\u201d some people shouted as they waved large Turkish flags in the air. Even as it appeared that the elected government had re-established control, many questions remained, including who was behind the plot and what long-term damage had been done to the political system of Turkey, a NATO ally and important partner to the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. Much of the violence overnight related to the coup attempt was in Ankara, where different branches of the security forces fought one another over control of government buildings, including the Parliament building, where several explosions were reported. Early Saturday, soldiers surrendered on a bridge that traverses the Bosporus , one of two bridges that the military shut down as the coup attempt began Friday evening. Footage showed abandoned military clothing and helmets along the bridge. The government also moved on a military school in Istanbul, arresting dozens. Video Prime Minister Binali Yildirim described the coup attempt as \u201ca stain in the history of Turkish democracy,\u201d as he raised the death toll in the clashes to at least 265. Credit Credit Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Disciplinary actions extended to the judicial system on Saturday as an oversight body, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors , announced that 2,745 judges had been dismissed, the Anadolu agency reported. Turkey has a long history of military involvement in politics \u2014 there have been three coups since 1960, and the military forced another government to step down \u2014 and as the country became deeply polarized in recent years between supporters of Mr. Erdogan\u2019s Islamist government and those loyal to Turkey\u2019s secular traditions, many wondered if the military would intervene. Some, quietly, had even hoped it would. But once the coup was attempted, people in the country, even those bitterly opposed to Mr. Erdogan, seemed to have no desire for a return to military rule. Turks across the political spectrum, including the main opposition parties that represent secular Turks, nationalists and Kurds, opposed the coup. So did many top generals, highlighting that the attempt apparently did not have deep support even in the military. Speaking from Luxembourg, Mr. Kerry reiterated the United States\u2019 support for the Erdogan government. \u201cWe stand by the government of Turkey,\u201d he said. Video President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to the media at the Istanbul airport on Saturday after the military attempted a coup. Credit Credit Huseyin Aldemir/Reuters Mr. Kerry said it was not surprising that the United States and Turkey\u2019s other NATO allies had not been aware of the coup before it occurred. \u201cIf you\u2019re planning a coup, you don\u2019t exactly advertise it to your partners in NATO,\u201d Mr. Kerry said. \u201cIt surprised everybody, including the people in Turkey. I must say it does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event.\u201d Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany expressed concern about the developments in Turkey and called for a return to the rule of law, under the democratically elected government. Ms. Merkel said political change should take place only through democratic procedures. \u201cTanks on the streets and attacks from the air against their own people are against the law,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Turkey;Coups D'Etat;Recep Tayyip Erdogan;Fethullah Gulen;Military;Istanbul"}
{"id": "ny0190981", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/05/13", "title": "Counseling Was Ordered for Soldier in Iraq Shooting", "abstract": "He was a career Army man who joined up because it was a steady job, but he had fallen into debt paying off a $1,500-a-month mortgage, his father said. Now, just weeks from finishing his third tour in Iraq, Sgt. John M. Russell was in trouble with his commanding officer, who ordered him to turn in his gun and receive psychological counseling. On Monday, after a confrontation with the staff at a clinic at Camp Liberty, a sprawling base on the outskirts of Baghdad, Sergeant Russell returned with a weapon, possibly wrestled away from his armed escort, and killed five people, Army officials said. It appeared to be the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence among American forces in the six-year Iraq war. Sergeant Russell, 44, of the 54th Engineering Battalion, based in Bamberg, Germany, has been charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault in the shooting, said Maj. Gen. David Perkins, a spokesman for the military in Iraq. The dead included an Army officer and a Navy officer on the clinic staff, and three enlisted soldiers who were at the clinic. On Tuesday, details of the shooting remained unclear, with the Army conducting both a criminal investigation and a review of how Sergeant Russell obtained a weapon. But the multiple strains on Sergeant Russell\u2019s life began to emerge in lengthy remarks by his father to a Texas television station. In the interview, with the station, KXII, Wilburn Russell said his son had recently angered a commanding officer, who had \u201cthreatened\u201d him. When the officer ordered Sergeant Russell to undergo counseling and relinquish his weapon \u2014 a major rebuke in the military \u2014 he became nervous that the Army was \u201csetting him\u201d up to be discharged, Mr. Russell said. Having recently built a house in Sherman, Tex., a town of about 37,000 people north of Dallas, Sergeant Russell was deeply anxious that he could lose not only his steady paycheck but also his military pension, his father said. \u201cIf a guy actually goes to the clinic and asks for help, they think of him as a wimp and he\u2019s got something wrong with him and try to get rid of him,\u201d Mr. Russell said. \u201cWell, he didn\u2019t go and ask voluntarily for help. They scheduled him in, and they set him up. They drove him out. They wanted to put as much pressure on him as they could to drum him out.\u201d He added: \u201cI think they broke him.\u201d Sergeant Russell joined the Army National Guard in 1988 and the active duty Army in 1994, military records show. A spokesman for the Army in Washington declined to comment on Mr. Russell\u2019s remarks, citing the continuing investigation. But earlier in the day, General Perkins said the Army had handled the case appropriately. \u201cThe tools were all being used,\u201d General Perkins said. \u201cThey thought that he needed a higher level of care than the unit could provide, so they sent him to the clinic. I mean, you see, all the kind of things that we\u2019re taught to do were in place.\u201d The Navy identified its dead officer as Cmdr. Charles Keith Springle, 52, of Wilmington, N.C., a licensed clinical social worker. The Army on Tuesday night had not released the names of the other shooting victims pending notification of their families. The shooting has renewed debate over the stresses placed on troops that have deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, the Army had about 140 confirmed suicides, a record since the service began tracking the statistic in 1980. Many experts say that repeat deployments to combat zones are a factor behind the higher rate, along with financial and marital problems. Army studies and surveys show that multiple deployments and long deployments also contribute to higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and marital problems. It is unclear whether Sergeant Russell came under fire in Iraq or witnessed the death of a fellow soldier. Eight soldiers from the 54th Battalion have been killed in Iraq, data compiled by The New York Times show. But Mr. Russell said that his son\u2019s job entailed salvaging and rebuilding robots that set off roadside bombs, and that as a consequence he probably saw \u201ca lot of carnage and a lot of things that he shouldn\u2019t have seen, that nobody should\u2019ve seen.\u201d \u201cIt affects you,\u201d Mr. Russell said. \u201cNobody should have to go three times. They should\u2019ve realized that.\u201d Still, experts point out that the number of cases of violence against soldiers by fellow soldiers is much lower in the current wars than in the Vietnam War. Most soldiers in Iraq who visit combat stress control teams go voluntarily. But some are ordered by their commanding officers to get help or be evaluated after their behavior prompts concern about their mental health, as happened in the case of Sergeant Russell. \u201cA lot of times when the command would refer it was usually because of problems, the soldier was acting out,\u201d said Ronald Parsons, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served on a combat stress team at Camp Liberty and is now a nurse case manager for Veterans Affairs in Boston. Camp Liberty is one of four bases that also offers soldiers a place to go when they need more intensive counseling and rest. These so-called large restoration centers offer service members three hot meals and a cot to sleep in for up to four days to recharge. While they are there, they receive more rigorous care, including individual or group mental health counseling. Soldiers who visit a clinic or restoration centers are asked to secure their weapons in a rack. Therapists typically have their unloaded weapons with them. Sergeant Russell was at Camp Liberty\u2019s restoration center when the shooting occurred, although it is unclear whether he was in the restoration program or just seeking outpatient services. It is unusual for a commander to take a soldier\u2019s weapon away in Iraq, and it is often prompted by concerns that the soldier said something about the possibility of suicide or harming somebody else. Mental health specialists can also make the determination to take away a soldier\u2019s weapon. The weapon would be returned only after a behavior health provider re-evaluated the soldier. If a soldier\u2019s mental health did not improve, the soldier could be put on medication, hospitalized or, ultimately, evacuated from Iraq. Dr. Daniel Lonnquist, a clinical psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs who deployed twice to Iraq as part of a stress control team, said that if the situation did not improve within two weeks or a month, the soldier was usually shipped out. \u201cMost commanders would say, at some point, this soldier is not an asset to me,\u201d Dr. Lonnquist said. Camp Liberty, a sprawling installation, has 14 behavioral health specialists, including two psychiatrists, who see about 500 patients a month. Lt. Col. Edward Brusher, the deputy director of behavioral health proponency for the surgeon general, said in March that there was one provider for 640 service members in Iraq. \u201cThere are currently enough behavioral health providers,\u201d Colonel Brusher said.", "keyword": "Russell John M;Murders and Attempted Murders;Baghdad (Iraq);Iraq War (2003- );Military Personnel;Mental Health and Disorders;United States Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0209989", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/12/01", "title": "Fed Begins Testing Strategy to Exit Securities Program", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Reserve said Monday that it would begin testing its strategy to shrink its trillion-dollar portfolio of mortgage-backed securities and eventually unwind its biggest program to prop up financial markets. The central bank emphasized that the move was strictly an exercise in operational preparedness and did not signal a tightening of monetary policy or an effort to begin raising interest rates. Indeed, Fed officials announced in October that they were exploring the use of so-called reverse repo agreements as a tool for carrying out their \u201cexit strategy\u201d from emergency measures adopted during the financial crisis . But the move did demonstrate that the Federal Reserve\u2019s preparations were becoming more concrete, and it highlighted the delicate task of bringing monetary policy back to normal without disrupting financial markets. The Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark overnight interest rate virtually to zero last December. But because that was not enough to revive credit markets, it also announced plans to drive down long-term interest rates by purchasing almost $1.5 trillion worth of government-guaranteed mortgage-related securities and Treasury bonds . Buying up mortgage-backed securities helps push up their price and drives down the effective interest rate, or yield. The purchases have already helped double the size of the Fed\u2019s balance sheet, to more than $2 trillion, since September 2008. Reverse repurchase agreements, or repo agreements, are one way to tackle that job. Instead of actually selling the huge portfolio of mortgage securities, which some Fed officials fear would cause an abrupt spike in long-term interest rates, the central bank would essentially lend them out and promise to buy them back later. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which carries out the Fed\u2019s trading activities, said it would begin small-scale testing now that it has discussed the plan with market participants. \u201cLike the earlier rounds of testing, this work is a matter of prudent advance planning,\u201d the New York Fed said in a statement. It \u201crepresents no change in policy stance, and no inference should be drawn about the timing of any change in the stance of monetary policy in the future.\u201d", "keyword": "Federal Reserve System;Credit;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008)"}
{"id": "ny0048324", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/11/08", "title": "Lane Evans, Veterans Advocate in Congress, Dies at 63", "abstract": "Lane Evans, a Vietnam War-era Marine who fought for veterans\u2019 rights during his 24 years as a congressman from Illinois, died on Wednesday in East Moline, Ill. He was 63. His death was announced by Michael Malmstrom, a former member of his congressional staff who was also one of his legal guardians. Mr. Evans, who died in a nursing home, had Parkinson\u2019s disease. As the senior Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Mr. Evans pushed legislation to help those exposed to Agent Orange and to give former service members rights to judicial review in pursuing benefits claims. He also fought for veterans grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder and other health problems, as well as those having trouble finding employment. \u201cIn the early days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Lane was one of the first members of Congress to take on issues like\u201d post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, said Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. \u201cHe helped put our issues on the map.\u201d Mr. Evans learned he had Parkinson\u2019s in 1995 but did not announce the diagnosis for three years, worried that the revelation would stigmatize him. He left office in January 2007. President Obama has credited Mr. Evans with aiding his own political rise. He once said that he would not have made it to the Senate without Mr. Evans\u2019s early support. Mr. Evans is survived by three brothers.", "keyword": "Obituary;Veteran;US Politics;Parkinson's;Lane Evans"}
{"id": "ny0265873", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/03/11", "title": "Signs of Life for Public Tech Companies", "abstract": "Maybe technology initial public offerings can work after all. For months, the market for tech I.P.O.s has been slow to moribund, not helped by gyrating tech stocks and the underwhelming performance of a lot of recently public tech companies. But on Wednesday, two relatively young public tech companies reported earnings that were better than Wall Street had expected, which may breathe some life into stalled offerings. The companies were Square, the mobile payments company, and Box, the cloud storage company. Square reported a wider net loss but a 49 percent revenue increase for the fourth quarter, helped by growth in a number of software businesses. The results gave Square\u2019s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, a lift . Mr. Dorsey has been juggling his role as chief of both Square and Twitter, writes Mike Isaac. Box, meanwhile, posted a 36 percent increase in sales and narrowed its net loss in the fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier. The company has been something of a punching bag for skeptical investors because of steep losses and accumulating costs, but Box\u2019s chief executive, Aaron Levie, has long maintained it was right to go public and that being a public company would ultimately be an advantage . On Wednesday, Box\u2019s shares soared more than 10 percent in after-hours trading after it announced earnings.", "keyword": "Mobile Commerce;Earnings Reports;Box;Square;Jack Dorsey;Aaron W Levie"}
{"id": "ny0027422", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/01/10", "title": "Minnesota: Coleman Rules Out Rematch", "abstract": "Former Senator Norm Coleman says he will not seek a rematch with Senator Al Franken in 2014. Mr. Coleman, a Republican, lost to Mr. Franken, a Democrat, by a few hundred votes in 2008, but a recount and a court challenge delayed Mr. Franken\u2019s taking his seat. Mr. Coleman said he had not decided whether to run for governor.", "keyword": "Senate races;Norm Coleman;Al Franken;US Politics;Minnesota"}
{"id": "ny0176403", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/07/24", "title": "Albany: Spread of Virus Deadly to Fish", "abstract": "A deadly fish virus spreading through upstate New York has been detected in three new locations and for the first time has been found in rainbow trout, one of the state\u2019s top game fish, state scientists said yesterday. The disease, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, was found in fish from the Little Salmon River in Oswego County and the Seneca-Cayuga Canal, as well as an isolated farm pond in Niagara County, the Department of Environmental Conservation said. The virus causes internal bleeding in fish, but poses no risk to humans.", "keyword": "Fish and Other Marine Life;Viruses;New York State;Albany (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0196479", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2009/10/26", "title": "Lucy Danziger, Self Editor, Trades Town Car for Handlebars", "abstract": "Cond\u00e9 Nast has cut back, closing four magazines and asking the surviving ones to slice their budgets by about a quarter. So Lucy Danziger, the editor in chief of Self, has taken a step unlike any other editor and \u2014 horreur! \u2014 given up the car service that has been a longtime perk of senior management. As the editor of a fitness magazine, Ms. Danziger chose to bike to work instead. On a recent morning, she had already run six miles by her 8 a.m. departure time and looked at ease outside her apartment building at 91st Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, steadying her bike with one hand and holding a cup of coffee with the other. Her outfit was distinctly nonathletic: Tory Burch jacket, Tory Burch blouse, tight black pants, black boots and, yes, a bike helmet. \u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m doing in my brain \u2014 I\u2019m leaving the uptown zone and going to the most exciting workplace in America,\u201d she said. (Presumably she meant Midtown, not Cond\u00e9 Nast.) Then, midway through a sentence, Ms. Danziger was suddenly off. She hopped on the bike, and standing over the seat, began to pump her legs west to Fifth Avenue. She disappeared within seconds. She paused outside the Metropolitan Museum \u2014 she wasn\u2019t out of breath but just allowing a hastily hailed taxi to catch up. She got going again, swerving through Central Park, then downtown into the Midtown traffic madness, glancing left and right as billboards blinked overhead. When she joined the company eight years ago, Ms. Danziger said, the car service that the Cond\u00e9 chairman, Si Newhouse, provided wasn\u2019t a particular draw. \u201cI was like, \u2018I don\u2019t need a car,\u2019 then suddenly it\u2019s pouring, and Mr. Newhouse is waiting, and you\u2019re like, I need to get to work today,\u201d she said. But that turned into more of a burden recently. \u201cThe logistics of it, I always had to anticipate what time am I leaving. Let\u2019s say you call a car and say \u2018I\u2019m going to leave at 6,\u2019 and at 6:15 a model gets a cold and misses the plane, we\u2019ve got to rebook that,\u201d she said. She swung onto 43rd Street, and seconds later, she was standing outside the Cond\u00e9 Nast entrance with one leg on her bike, helmet off, hair unmussed, coffee drink unspilled and asking the taxi riders who had trailed her what had taken so long. Even Ms. Danziger concedes she didn\u2019t expect to ride during snowstorms, or when she had important meetings. \u201cIt\u2019s not an absolute,\u201d she said, adding that she would share a cab to save money. \u201cIt\u2019s a very New York thing to do.\u201d", "keyword": "News and News Media;Magazines;Economic Conditions and Trends;Bicycles and Bicycling;Conde Nast Publications Inc"}
{"id": "ny0185913", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/03/01", "title": "How to Make Electronic Medical Records a Reality", "abstract": "IN the world of technology, inventors are hailed as heroes. Yet it is more subtle forms of innovation that typically determine the impact of a technology in the marketplace and on society. Clever engineering, smart business models and favorable economics are the key ingredients of widespread adoption and commercial success. History abounds with evidence. For years, much of what was known as \u201cYankee ingenuity\u201d was, in fact, the American ability to pursue commercial applications of British inventions, from the Bessemer steel process to the jet engine. Even in computing, which we regard as made-in-America technology, the first stored-program computer, simple programming language and reusable code were pioneered in Britain. But, of course, computer technology and the industry really flowered in the United States. That happened in no small part because the federal government nurtured the market with heavy investment, mainly by the Defense Department, and by choosing standards, like the Cobol programming language. Today, Washington is about to embark on another ambitious government-guided effort to jump-start a market \u2014 in electronic health records. The program provides a textbook look at the economic and engineering challenges of technology adoption. In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration plans to spend $19 billion to accelerate the use of computerized medical records in doctors\u2019 offices. Medical experts agree that electronic patient records, when used wisely, can help curb costs and improve care. The proof is seen in large medical groups, with hundreds or thousands of physicians. They sift, sort and analyze the data from digital records, for example, to better manage the health of patients with costly, chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. These larger groups have the scale to invest in information technology, and they are often insurers as well as providers, so they benefit directly from the cost savings. Yet these large groups are the exceptions in American health care. Three-fourths of the nation\u2019s doctors practice in small offices, with 10 doctors or fewer. For most of them, an investment in digital health records looks like a cost for which they are not reimbursed. It is scarcely surprising, then, that only about 17 percent of the nation\u2019s physicians are using computerized patient records, according to a government-sponsored survey published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine. \u201cThis is really not a technology problem,\u201d observed Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of incentives and market failure.\u201d That market failure is a principal target of the Obama administration\u2019s plan. A main feature of the legislation calls for incentive payments of more than $40,000 spread over a few years for a physician who buys and uses electronic health records. But the technology is just a tool, one that needs to be used properly to improve health care. So the legislation states that physicians will be paid only for the \u201cmeaningful use\u201d of digital records. The government has not yet defined that term precisely. While the long-term goal is better health for patients, that can take years to measure. Consequently, many health experts predict that the meaningful use will be a requirement to collect and report measurements that can be closely correlated with improved health. Examples would be data for blood glucose, cholesterol and blood pressure levels for diabetes patients. The legislation, health experts say, seems thoughtfully put together, but the obstacles to success will be daunting. \u201cWhat\u2019s underappreciated is the implementation challenge,\u201d said Dr. Blackford Middleton, chairman of the Center for Information Technology Leadership, a research arm of Partners Healthcare in Boston. A crucial bridge to success, according to experts, will be how local organizations help doctors in small offices adopt and use electronic records. The new legislation calls for creation of \u201cregional health I.T. extension centers.\u201d In a letter to the White House and Congress last month, Dr. Middleton and 50 other experts emphasized the importance of these centers and pointed to the Primary Care Information Project in New York City as a model. The New York project\u2019s brief history, beginning two years ago with $27 million in financing, offers a glimpse of the challenges of wiring small physician practices. The New York team, headed by Dr. Farzad Mostashari, an assistant commissioner in the city\u2019s health department, started by bringing in decision-support experts in medicine to study how doctors work, so the technology would be easier to use. Team members considered writing their own software for simple, Web-based electronic health records, but abandoned that idea once they understood that patient records would have to be tightly linked to billing \u2014 a physician\u2019s financial lifeblood. The project\u2019s 50-member staff provides centralized technical support and education for doctors and others. \u201cThere\u2019s no way small practices can effectively implement electronic health records on their own,\u201d Dr. Mostashari said. \u201cThis is not the iPhone .\u201d The staff worked closely with its software supplier, eClinicalWorks, to tweak and tailor the system. They began rolling out the records a little more than a year ago. They are now used by more than 1,000 physicians, mainly in poorer neighborhoods, whose workplaces include two hospital outpatient clinics, 10 community health centers, 150 small group physician practices and one women\u2019s jail, serving a total of one million patients. The rollout is progressing, and the government plan promises to accelerate adoption. \u201cOur experience here is that it\u2019s just hard,\u201d Dr. Mostashari said. \u201cIt\u2019s not impossible.\u201d", "keyword": "Electronic Health Records;Law and Legislation;United States Politics and Government;United States Economy"}
{"id": "ny0057086", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/09/07", "title": "Sending Data Back to the Kitchen", "abstract": "To the Editor: Re \u201c Hey Chef: Next Time, Skip the Fennel \u201d (Aug. 31), about Dinner Lab, a company that creates pop-up restaurants and asks diners to rate their meals: Image Credit Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times I am appalled to learn of Dinner Lab, which seems determined to do to chefs what Amazon.com is now doing to authors, namely evaluate them solely in terms of how much they can sell to a homogenized demographic constructed through data collecting. If successful, it will result in worse working conditions and job security for chefs, and fewer choices for diners. This corporate-oriented ideal is the antithesis of the small, local, artisanal direction of much of the best in food and restaurants. I hope it will prove unsuccessful, but fear the worst. Fred Bohrer Washington, Sept. 1", "keyword": "Restaurant;Amazon;Dinner Lab"}
{"id": "ny0150632", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/04", "title": "NBC Ad Pairs \u2018Mummy\u2019 and Olympics", "abstract": "In the General Electric corporate family, NBC and Universal Pictures are like two glamorous cousins from the coasts: they make movies and television shows, while the other G.E. divisions make things like humidifiers, steam turbines and fluorescent lights. NBC even makes fun of this in its show \u201c30 Rock,\u201d where a G.E. executive has the title \u201cvice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming.\u201d These days, the cousins, both part of NBC Universal , are pulling together for marketing. A recent TV commercial tries to simultaneously plug a new movie from Universal (\u201cThe Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor\u201d) and NBC\u2019s broadcast of the Beijing Olympics. The spot begins without mentioning the movie or the Games. \u201cAcross the world\u2019s largest ocean, over the earth\u2019s highest peaks, there is a place steeped in tradition,\u201d says a narrator, over scenes of temples, statues and a sun. Then, incongruously, Brendan Fraser, the star of \u201cThe Mummy,\u201d appears, and the commercial proceeds to weave images from Olympics sports and the movie, which is set in China. A scene of characters fencing in \u201cThe Mummy,\u201d for example, morphs into clips of Olympic gymnasts. The executives involved call it synergy, but some viewers call it confusing. \u201cThat\u2019s bizarre,\u201d said Kevin Lane Keller, a marketing professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, after watching the spot. \u201cThey really are trying to weave this parallel story with China and the Olympics and this film, and it doesn\u2019t really flow together very well.\u201d Executives at Universal, of course, do not see it this way. Adam Fogelson, president of marketing and distribution for Universal Pictures, called the cross-promotion \u201ca perfect fit.\u201d \u201cI think that the Olympics were able to lend an air of quality and credibility to the film project,\u201d he said. \u201cThe imagery we were able to use in the spots adds sort of a cool, hip, fresh, young, relatable angle to the Olympic promos.\u201d Universal even moved the premiere date of \u201cThe Mummy\u201d to try to get a lift from the Olympics (among other reasons). The film was scheduled to open in mid-July, but it was changed to Aug. 1, a week before the Games. The two divisions have tried cross-promotions before. One commercial showed the title character from \u201cHellboy II: The Golden Army\u201d playing video games with the title character of NBC\u2019s \u201cChuck.\u201d But executives say the latest example is more comprehensive, with spots running on NBC networks, in Universal theme parks and in New York City taxicabs since July 1. So how did Universal and NBC split the cost of the joint promotion? Mr. Fogelson did not betray the G.E. omert\u00e0. \u201cIt was worked out within the family,\u201d he said. STEPHANIE CLIFFORD", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Olympic Games (2008);National Broadcasting Co;NBC Universal;Television;Motion Pictures;Beijing (China);Mummy The: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Movie)"}
{"id": "ny0114675", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/11/09", "title": "Russia\u2019s New Museum Offers Friendly Message to Jews", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 A stream of elegant visitors stopped in their tracks on Thursday as they toured Moscow\u2019s new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, a sprawling, state-of-the-art complex underwritten by oligarchs close to President Vladimir V. Putin . They had never seen a shtetl like this one. Touch the screen in one exhibit in this vast building and a visitor can appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a trader or a \u201crepresentative of the intelligentsia.\u201d Tap a Torah in a virtual synagogue, and a cantor\u2019s voice rings in the air. In a virtual Odessa, one can sit down in an interactive cafe to chat with long-dead writers. Mr. Putin has extended his personal support to the lavish project, donating a month\u2019s salary for its construction, which cost around $50 million. In part because of its scale \u2014 organizers say it is the largest Jewish history museum in the world \u2014 the project is meant to convey a powerful message to Jews whose ancestors fled or emigrated: Russia wants you back. President Shimon Peres of Israel , who attended the opening, said it affected him deeply. \u201cMy mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother\u2019s voice played in my heart,\u201d said Mr. Peres, 89, who was born in what is now Belarus. \u201cI came here to say thank you. Thank you for a thousand years of hospitality.\u201d There are practical reasons for Mr. Putin to rehabilitate Russia\u2019s image among diaspora Jews who, as descendants of refugees or refuseniks, may have been raised on dark stories about Russia. The country\u2019s Jews were confined to densely populated settlements, or shtetls, for long stretches under the czars. Then 70 years of Communism all but extinguished Jewish life and religious instruction, leaving in its wake an ingrained anti-Semitism. One donor, the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, said on Thursday that he hoped the museum would convey to outsiders the good health of Jewish society in Putin-era Russia, and perhaps ease recent tensions between Moscow and the United States. \u201cThe average American has developed this stereotype. They have a very wary approach to Russia, with the story of the evil empire and so forth,\u201d said Mr. Vekselberg, who is Russia\u2019s richest man, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . \u201cAmericans who come here to work or visit, often for business, and come to this museum will assess what is going on in Russia in a different way.\u201d Mr. Vekselberg said the project had a personal aspect, since his father\u2019s relatives, who lived in western Ukraine, were all shot in a single day during World War II . He said it was a \u201cconscious decision\u201d not to focus the museum on the Holocaust, as many such museums in the West do. The displays here mingle brighter historical material, about thriving village life and the high status of Jews in the Soviet intellectual firmament, with darker chapters. In the Odessa cafe, for example, the viewer can tap on a table to answer the question, \u201cIf your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do? A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.\u201d The Internet television channel Dozhd described the museum, created by the New York-based designer Ralph Appelbaum , as a \u201cJewish Disneyland.\u201d On Thursday, Russia\u2019s chief rabbi \u2014 a close ally of Mr. Putin\u2019s \u2014 said that Jews \u201chave never felt as comfortable in Russia as today,\u201d and that 100,000 Jews have returned from Israel as conditions in Russia have improved. He gave a guided tour of the museum to Mr. Peres, noting instances when Moscow acted in Jewish interests. \u201cThis is the story of World War II, and what the Soviet and Red Army did to save the Jewish people,\u201d the rabbi, Berel Lazar, said. He then pointed out a Soviet T-34 tank, saying \u201cwith this tank, which was built by a Jewish person, Jews were saved from concentration camps.\u201d Mr. Putin had been expected to attend the ceremony but canceled several days ago, instead inviting Mr. Peres to meet him for lunch afterward. Israeli reporters said they had been told Mr. Putin could not attend because of back problems, a widespread rumor that the Kremlin has denied. Whether Russia has become fully welcoming to Jews is a matter of opinion. The country\u2019s Jewish population began to melt away because of emigration after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 500,000 citizens identified themselves as Jews in 1989, according to the census; by 2010 the census count had dropped to 150,000, or 0.11 percent of Russia\u2019s population, though Jewish organizations say the actual number is far higher. After Thursday\u2019s ceremony, when speakers praised the welcoming atmosphere, some commentators reacted skeptically. \u201cIt\u2019s so comfortable that everyone has left,\u201d wrote one Facebook user, recalling that last weekend, a column of Russian ethnic nationalists marched through the center of Moscow. Others were deeply impressed, though. David Rozenson, whose family left Russia in 1978, said his mother was astonished when he told her about it. \u201cShe said, \u2018That\u2019s crazy, it can\u2019t be,\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Rozenson, the director of the AVI CHAI Foundation , which underwrites research into Jewish life in Russia. \u201cFor her, it is unthinkable that a museum like this is opening in Moscow, that Russian politicians would be there, the Israeli president. It\u2019s very easy to become cynical and say that this museum is just a political statement, but I think this museum and the interest in it are real.\u201d Aleksandr A. Dobrovinsky, a lawyer, said his eyes welled up when he saw the exhibit of Odessa, where he had visited his grandparents as a child. He gave Mr. Putin, who has been linked to the project for more than five years, much of the credit. \u201cWhat the president has done, I simply tip my hat to him,\u201d Mr. Dobrovinsky said. \u201cThey say, though I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s true, that he grew up in a communal apartment in St. Petersburg, and when his parents were working and had no one to leave him with, they left him with some older people who lived in the apartment, and they were Jews. That\u2019s what they say. I don\u2019t know.\u201d", "keyword": "Russia;Museums;Jews and Judaism;Putin Vladimir V;Holocaust and the Nazi Era;Moscow (Russia);Anti-Semitism;Peres Shimon;Israel;Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center"}
{"id": "ny0094493", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/01/27", "title": "Push Over, Cornish Pasty: Balti Curry Seeks a Place in British Culinary Lore", "abstract": "BIRMINGHAM, England \u2014 The year after opening a small restaurant here in 1977, Mohammed Arif spent two weeks in his native Pakistan , where he saw spicy, aromatic curries being cooked and served, sizzling, in the same dish. \u201cIt just came into my mind that I could take this idea back,\u201d said Mr. Arif, whose thought gave life to a new dish \u2014 the Balti, a curry usually made of meat, chicken or prawns, combined with vegetables and a spicy sauce, and cooked over a high heat. Mr. Arif\u2019s recently refurbished restaurant, Adil\u2019s , is thought to be the place where the first Balti curry was served in 1978, and lies in a colorful immigrant area of Birmingham where bustling shops sell South Asian food, spices and clothing. More than 35 years later, at a time when tensions over immigration, assimilation and religious and ethnic differences seem to be growing ever sharper, this adaptation of Pakistani cooking to British tastes is a symbol of culinary cross-fertilization in one of Britain\u2019s most multicultural cities. Most customers at Balti restaurants are non-Asian \u2014 a tasty retort to the much-mocked reports that areas of Birmingham, and of a number of other European cities, had become \u201c no-go zones \u201d for anyone but strict Muslims. Image Customers at Adil\u2019s in the so-called Balti Triangle. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times The area around Adil\u2019s is now known as Birmingham\u2019s Balti Triangle. Restaurants in other cities have their own recipes, and precooked Balti meals occupy supermarket shelves. But does that make Birmingham\u2019s Balti one of Britain\u2019s traditional specialties? That question is being pondered by European Union officials. They are now debating whether Birmingham Balti should be recognized and registered alongside famous European foods like Italy\u2019s Neapolitan pizza and its mozzarella cheese, and Spain\u2019s jam\u00f3n serrano . The British government wants European recognition . \u201cLet\u2019s hope the popular Birmingham Balti recipe follows in the footsteps of our other iconic foods like the Cornish pasty in achieving protected status,\u201d said Liz Truss, Britain\u2019s secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, referring to a traditional savory pie that has won a related European status . Curry is \u201ca great part of the U.K.\u2019s food heritage, along with fish and chips and pork pies,\u201d Ms. Truss said. She is not the first British politician to make such claims. In 2001, Robin Cook, who was then foreign secretary, described chicken tikka masala as \u201ca true British national dish.\u201d With its spicy, but creamy, orange-colored sauce it was, Mr. Cook said, a perfect illustration \u201cof the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.\u201d Both politicians have a point since Britain, India\u2019s former colonial overlord, has had a long love affair with food inspired by the subcontinent, but adapted to palates unaccustomed to hot spice. Even small British towns generally have an Indian restaurant and takeout, and Indian-influenced food features in everyday staples like sandwiches. Balti emerged at a time when curry was well established here. (Britain\u2019s oldest Indian restaurant, Veeraswamy , opened in London in 1926.) By the 1980s, such food was found all over the country, but was often eaten by late-night diners, their taste buds dulled by an evening\u2019s drinking. Many restaurants, according to Mr. Arif, \u201cjust put it on a plate and microwaved it.\u201d Eating Balti in Birmingham was, and remains, a different experience. Usually it is consumed not with a knife and fork, but with large naan breads dipped into hot wok-style cooking pots made from thin-pressed steel. During the 1980s, Birmingham\u2019s Balti restaurants were basic places, usually with glass tabletops, and, in line with Muslim beliefs, did not serve liquor (though most allowed customers to bring their own, and still do). Cooked in less than 10 minutes over a high heat and in vegetable oil, Birmingham Balti usually contains less cholesterol than curry recipes using ghee, a sort of clarified butter. Image The dish is made over a high heat in less than 10 minutes. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times This is hardly health food, however. It tastes simple but full of flavor, spicy but not fiery, oily but not too heavy. Mr. Arif ascribes its success to the fact that it is \u201cfresh cooking, and people like the fact that it is served sizzling.\u201d In the kitchen at Shabab restaurant , on Birmingham\u2019s Ladypool Road, the owner, Zafar Hussain, demonstrates the cooking technique over a fierce flame. One of his helpers rolls out a large naan bread and then, with an unexpected flourish, pulls out a pillow that is the perfect size to shape the bread, and then places it carefully into a hot, circular tandoori oven. \u201cWe get visitors from all over the world,\u201d Mr. Hussain said. \u201cBalti has a distinctive taste because it is cooked in a unique way.\u201d Each restaurant has its own sauce, but ingredients include turmeric, fenugreek, cumin, garam masala and coriander (jokingly known here as \u201cPakistani Viagra\u201d because of its supposed aphrodisiac qualities). There is debate over the origin of the name Balti, one theory being that it was derived from a South Asian term for \u201cbucket\u201d because at large gatherings on the Indian subcontinent, food was sometimes served from buckets. Another is that it refers to a mountainous area of northern Pakistan, known as Baltistan. Mr. Arif said the name was invented because it was easier to pronounce than the Pakistani cooking pot known as a karahi. Image A wok-like Balti pot. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times Andy Munro, adviser to the Birmingham Balti Association , has led the campaign to gain the European quality mark known as T.S.G., which stands for traditional specialty guaranteed, and is one of three programs intended to protect European agricultural products and foodstuffs. If successful, restaurants will be able to use the designation as a proof of authenticity and a quality guarantee, providing they cook according to a set of rules. These would apply only to Birmingham Balti, Mr. Munro said. Balti meals prepared elsewhere, or those not identifying themselves with the city, would not be affected, providing they did not describe themselves as \u201cBirmingham Balti.\u201d The European Commission, the executive body of the 28-nation bloc, says its deliberations are continuing, and Mr. Arif, 62, who came to Britain in the late 1960s, said he welcomed the bid for European recognition. He said he had some personal regrets that he did not exploit Balti more commercially. \u201cThis was my brand,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I never really bothered about it.\u201d But some have doubts about the Balti phenomenon, including one of the country\u2019s best known cooks and cookbook authors, Madhur Jaffrey, who pointed to uncertainty over the origin of the term Balti, and to questions about its authenticity. \u201cThat kind of dish does not come out of South Asia,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a dish created for the West by the West.\u201d Image A bakery on Stratford Road, part the Balti triangle in Birmingham, England. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times The popularity of Balti may be \u201cphasing out,\u201d Ms. Jaffrey said. \u201cI don\u2019t see the name that much anymore.\u201d Mr. Munro describes Ms. Jaffrey\u2019s criticism as \u201cculinary arrogance\u201d and questions her concept of authenticity. In fact, they agree that there are big differences between Birmingham Balti and food served in Pakistan, which is normally cooked in clay (not steel) dishes and over a lower flame. Yet Mr. Munro argues that this is what makes Birmingham Balti a unique \u201cfusion food,\u201d one that is easy both on a Western palate and, thanks to the heat at which it is cooked, on the British digestive system. \u201cI have had a couple of thousand Baltis,\u201d he said, \u201cand I have never had an upset stomach.\u201d", "keyword": "Birmingham England;Great Britain;Food;EU;Immigration;Cooking;England;Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0184993", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/03/28", "title": "Goldman Spent Millions to Bail Out 2 Executives", "abstract": "The financial giant Goldman Sachs spent tens of millions of dollars to bail out two senior executives last fall who were short on cash, according to the bank\u2019s proxy statement filed on Friday. In an unusual move, Goldman bought back stakes in some internal investment funds from Jon Winkelried, the bank\u2019s co-chief operating officer, and Gregory K. Palm, its general counsel. Both executives are among the largest shareholders in the bank, owning more than a million shares each, and directors were concerned that a large sale of Goldman shares by the two men would alarm investors during a period of market turmoil, according to a person briefed on the matter. To avoid the stock sales, Goldman paid Mr. Winkelried, who retired last month, $19.7 million to purchase about 30 percent of his investments in internal hedge funds and private equity investments. The bank paid $38.3 million to Mr. Palm for about a quarter of his investments. Soon after the bank aided the two executives, Warren E. Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman, and the bank\u2019s top four executives agreed not to sell more than 10 percent of their stock for three years. Mr. Palm was not one of the four barred from selling stock, but Mr. Winkelried was, and that agreement remains in place even though he has retired. The proxy also says that one bank executive, who is not identified, has pledged 500,000 shares of Goldman stock in exchange for loans from the bank. The executives are not the only Goldman employees who have faced a liquidity squeeze. Goldman also offered loans earlier this month to more than 1,000 employees who invested in its internal investment funds. About 10 percent of those employees have indicated interest in the loans, according to a person briefed on the matter. The employees will use the loans to meet their contractual obligations to put more money into the bank\u2019s internal investment funds. Few banks were as high-flying as Goldman when Wall Street was riding high. In 2006, the bank paid more than 50 people more than $20 million each. But longtime partners at the firm, like Mr. Palm and Mr. Winkelried, have been particularly stung by the slide in its stock, and Goldman has been among the banks that have made margin calls on their own workers. Goldman was the last Wall Street firm to go public, and many partners there, current and former, have held onto their stock since the offering 10 years ago because they did not want to pay the large tax bills attached to the profits that would accrue from sales of their shares. Some partners and other employees there borrowed against their stock for living expenses or to make other investments in areas like hedge funds and private equity funds. In a much-noticed sign of the times, Mr. Winkelried, a former investment banker, put his estate in Nantucket on the market last fall for $55 million. He has since lowered the price. He also owns a home in Short Hills, N.J., and a horse farm in Colorado. Mr. Winkelried spent 27 years at the bank, working in areas like leveraged finance and rates and commodities before being named a senior executive. Mr. Palm still works at Goldman, where he has been head or co-head of the legal department since 1992, when he joined the bank from the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. In 2007, he endowed a professorship in economics at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last fall, he represented Goldman before a Senate panel that focused in part on bank compensation. Mr. Palm and Mr. Winkelried did not return calls requesting comment on Friday. Goldman\u2019s chief, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and six other senior executives took no bonuses last year, the proxy confirmed, though they received some stock that was awarded to them in previous years. Goldman will hold its annual meeting on May 8.", "keyword": "Goldman Sachs Group;Executives and Management;Executive Compensation"}
{"id": "ny0014208", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/11/12", "title": "A New Firm Sets Out to Secure Women\u2019s Votes for a Vulnerable G.O.P.", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 After months of deliberating over how to better appeal to Hispanic and other minority voters, some Republicans believe their party is overlooking another dire demographic challenge: women. One year after President Obama carried female voters by an 11 percentage point margin in his re-election, Republican officials are again grappling with another competitive race lost in large part because of women. In the Virginia governor\u2019s race last week, Terry McAuliffe defeated Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the state attorney general, by only 2.5 percent, but won by nine percentage points among women. The Republicans\u2019 challenge is even more acute with unmarried women: Mr. Obama won this often younger voting block by 36 percent. Mr. McAuliffe \u2014 who blitzed Mr. Cuccinelli with a multimillion-dollar barrage of negative ads on abortion, contraception and divorce \u2014 carried single women by a staggering 42 percentage points. \u201cThere were something like 53 million unmarried women eligible to vote in 2012, but on campaigns you don\u2019t hear a specific strategy discussed of \u2018How are we going to reach unmarried women?\u2019 \u201d said Katie Packer Gage, who served as deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012. Given Democrats\u2019 repeated and successful efforts to portray Republicans as hostile to women, Ms. Gage and two other consultants are starting a political strategy firm to help the party\u2019s candidates better tailor their messages to women. Ms. Gage, Ashley O\u2019Connor and Christine Matthews this week are opening what appears to be the first Republican firm aimed specially at wooing female voters. They are calling it Burning Glass Consulting \u2014 a reference to what they see as the need for a focus on appealing to women that is so laserlike that it can burn glass. \u201cWe want to get smarter about how we communicate the Republican message specifically to women,\u201d said Ms. Gage. \u201cCertainly there are challenges with other demographic groups, but women represent 53 percent of the electorate.\u201d The three strategists will undertake public opinion research, TV ads and general consulting for Republican candidates about how to better reach that majority. The idea for the firm came about when Ms. Gage and Ms. O\u2019Connor worked together on the Romney campaign. The pair would find themselves among just a few women at meetings of about a dozen staff members. \u201cWe started to see things we felt weren\u2019t being accomplished,\u201d Ms. Gage said, citing Mr. Romney\u2019s message and tone. After the campaign they discussed their frustrations with Ms. Matthews, a pollster, and decided to create a new approach to both voter research and the campaign ads that are derived from such polling and focus groups. Ms. Matthews said that instead of commissioning a single poll or focus group among women, she was seeking \u201clonger-term engagement\u201d with a group of women, creating a relationship with them over a period of time to better assess what shapes their political views. Democrats dismiss such tactics, asserting that a consulting firm cannot change the core challenge, that Republicans have difficulties with female voters because of their party\u2019s policies and language. Democrats refer to the Republicans\u2019 approach as the \u201cwar on women.\u201d \u201cThe lesson for candidates in 2014 is unmistakable: Dismiss and demean women at your peril,\u201d Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said last week after the Virginia race. What is unmistakable is that Democrats think that in depicting Republicans as hostile to women, they have found a winning message. In Kentucky, home to perhaps the highest-profile Senate race next year, Democrats recruited Alison Lundergan Grimes, 34, the secretary of state, to run against Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and are already taking after him on gender-related issues. And, if Republicans nominate a man in Georgia, Democrats will surely do the same there, where they wooed Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn, to run for an open Senate seat.", "keyword": "Republicans;Women and Girls;Polls;Voting;Ashley O'Connor;Christine Matthews;Katie Packer Gage;US"}
{"id": "ny0265748", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2016/03/18", "title": "Stephen Curry Says He Can Get Better, and 29 Teams Shudder", "abstract": "OAKLAND, Calif. \u2014 Stephen Curry has a well-established after-practice routine of taking 100 shots from 3-point range. He works his way around the arc, hoisting 10 shots from each spot. He once made 70 in a row. He often looks annoyed if the ball so much as glances off the rim before falling through. Bruce Fraser, an assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors, passes Curry the ball and can sense, having spent so much time with him over the past two seasons, if Curry lacks his usual focus. An average total for him is somewhere in the mid-80s, Fraser said. Anything short of that is a disappointment. \u201cI can tell pretty easily if he\u2019s bored, because he\u2019ll only miss shots if he\u2019s bored,\u201d Fraser said. \u201cI mean, he\u2019s human \u2014 he\u2019s going to miss some shots \u2014 so maybe I should rephrase this, because he\u2019s not actually superhuman. If he\u2019s missing more shots than he normally does, then it\u2019s because he\u2019s bored.\u201d Deep into his record-setting season with the Warriors, Curry, 28, seems determined to push the outer bounds of basketball and to press himself, as always, to become a better player. This raises an interesting question: Is there actually that much room for improvement? Some of his teammates are skeptical. \u201cI mean, there isn\u2019t a whole lot,\u201d Andrew Bogut said. \u201cWhat\u2019s next? I guess shooting pull-ups from halfcourt on a more consistent basis.\u201d So, yes, on the surface, it sounds like an absurd question. Absurd because Curry, who led the Warriors to a 121-85 win over the Knicks on Wednesday, has made 330 3-pointers this season, obliterating the N.B.A. record of 286 that he set last season. Absurd because he is averaging a career-best 30.5 points along with 6.4 assists a game. Absurd because he is shooting 51 percent from the field and 46 percent from 3-point range. Absurd because he is the league\u2019s reigning most valuable player and a shoo-in to win the award again. Image Curry passing the ball against the Trail Blazers. \u201cHis physical skill as a passer has gotten better \u2014 the touch, the location,\u201d the Warriors assistant coach Bruce Fraser said. Credit Ben Margot/Associated Press But the question is absurd mostly because Curry, a 6-foot-3-inch, 185-pound point guard, is the guiding force behind the Warriors, who could be the most dominant team of all time. What could he realistically do at this stage to refine his skills, other than make every shot and eliminate some turnovers? Curry, for one, still sees room to grow \u2014 an unnerving prospect for the rest of the league. Most summers, he said, he concentrates on maintaining and even building his endurance. His shot works from the ground up, which means that he needs his legs \u2014 especially late in games, when all those parabolic jumpers are not nearly as effortless as he makes them look. As an example of his expanded range, he has made 15 of 30 attempts (50 percent) from beyond 30 feet this season, a stupefying level of accuracy. Last season, he was 3 of 16 (18.8 percent). \u201cI like the percentage of makes,\u201d Curry said of his shooting as a whole. \u201cI want to keep that increasing as well.\u201d Curry can catch and shoot, because of course he can, but he also thrives off the dribble. One of the things that make him such a maddening assignment for defenders is that he does not have a go-to move. Some shooters prefer to go to their left. Others rely on a jab step or a pump fake. There is a rhythm to the way most players go about their business. Curry, though, can do it all, and he syncopates his style, making it nearly impossible for opponents to anticipate what he will do next. He has enough confidence to know that he can shoot after dribbling between his legs or around his back \u2014 or after making countless other moves. He sizes up his defender and breaks the code. \u201cAs soon as it touches my hand, I can go from that point to a quick release and shoot it,\u201d Curry said. \u201cI don\u2019t really time stuff up \u2014 like, \u2018All right, I\u2019m about to hit him with a one-two and then shoot.\u2019 It\u2019s more just, as soon as you get into a move and see daylight, being able to transition from the dribble to the shot as quickly as possible.\u201d Image Curry with Fraser, who said Curry\u2019s psychological makeup helped make him impervious to pressure. Credit Gary Bassing/NBAE, via Getty Images He added, \u201cI work on that stuff and try to keep it as quick as I can, and as efficient.\u201d Curry also continues to improve, Fraser said, because he is constantly gaining familiarity with his teammates and their tendencies. For example, he has become a better passer, delivering the ball with greater precision. Against the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night, Curry made two dazzling passes in the first quarter \u2014 behind the back to Draymond Green in transition and then a lob from just inside midcourt to Bogut for an alley-oop dunk. \u201cHis physical skill as a passer has gotten better \u2014 the touch, the location,\u201d Fraser said. \u201cYou want to catch the ball right in your shooting pocket. Being able to throw the ball to a specific area for that person to be able to catch it and go into his shot is actually a big deal. Steph\u2019s passes were not always that accurate.\u201d But the biggest area for potential growth is clear to Fraser \u2014 although it might come as a surprise to the rest of humankind. \u201cHis focus,\u201d Fraser said. It has to do with the way in which Curry is wired, Fraser said. He has a lot of \u201clittle kid in him,\u201d as Fraser put it, and there are obvious benefits. Curry\u2019s psychological makeup helps make him impervious to pressure, Fraser said. Little seems to bother him. He plays freely and with joy. \u201cWe can\u2019t take away that mustang spirit,\u201d Fraser said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to bridle him.\u201d The drawback, Fraser said, is that Curry can get bored \u2014 bored with making the same solid pass, bored with shooting the same dependable jumper and even bored with winning games by the same lopsided margins. These are first-world problems, of course. But there are occasions when Curry appears to ratchet up the degree of difficulty just to challenge himself. \u201cThe game comes so easily to him now that he needs a little more juice at times,\u201d Fraser said, \u201cand that might mean taking more risks.\u201d These are risks that are not always necessary, and turnovers have been a (relatively minor) recurring problem. In January, he committed eight in a narrow win against the Philadelphia 76ers \u2014 not his finest moment. Coach Steve Kerr has continually emphasized the importance of making the solid play instead of the spectacular one. \u201cSteph will sometimes ask me during a game, \u2018How many turnovers do I have?\u2019 \u201d Fraser said. \u201cBecause he knows that\u2019s a thing Steve doesn\u2019t like. He\u2019ll never ask about his shooting numbers during a game, or any other kind of stats. But the only thing he knows is that Steve harps on turnovers, so it\u2019s definitely on his mind.\u201d Kerr recalled his playing days with the San Antonio Spurs, back when Manu Ginobili was in his first season with the team. Ginobili, Kerr said, had a habit of driving Coach Gregg Popovich crazy by throwing circus passes. Finally, after one game, Popovich turned to Ginobili and asked him why he felt it was so necessary. \u201cPop,\u201d Ginobili replied, \u201cthis is what I do.\u201d Popovich gradually came to accept Manu being Manu as a part of the package. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain amount of that on this team because of the skill involved, especially with Steph,\u201d Kerr said. \u201cSteph\u2019s going to throw some of the around-the-back stuff. He\u2019s going to make some crazy plays. And obviously so much more of it is good than bad, so you live with it.\u201d Besides, in the grand scheme of things, these are quibbles. We might as well critique the brush strokes of Rembrandt. Any momentary lapses in concentration, any lulls in focus after so many carefree wins \u2014 Curry\u2019s coaches are there to nudge him along. So Kerr emphasizes turnovers, and Fraser mixes things up at practice to stoke the flames in Curry\u2019s furnace. Fraser and Nick U\u2019Ren, a special assistant to Kerr and the team\u2019s manager of advanced scouting, make friendly wagers with Curry if they detect that he is laboring with his after-practice shooting routine. The amount they bet is weighted according to their respective salaries, which means that Curry puts up substantially more money \u2014 not that he is in danger of losing any of it. Fraser has kept a running tally for the season. \u201cWe owe him,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Basketball;Stephen Curry;Steve Kerr;Golden State Warriors"}
{"id": "ny0099057", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/06/06", "title": "Brittney Griner Seeking Annulment", "abstract": "Brittney Griner filed papers seeking to annul her 28-day marriage to Glory Johnson. \u201cIn the week prior to the wedding, I attempted to postpone the wedding several times until I completed counseling, but I still went through with it,\u201d Griner said in a statement to ESPN. \u201cI now realize that was a mistake.\u201d Griner and Johnson, both W.N.B.A. stars, married on May 9, three weeks after both were arrested in Arizona on domestic violence charges. Johnson announced Thursday that she was pregnant. \u25a0 Arn Tellem, one of the most powerful agents in sports, agreed to become the vice chairman of Palace Sports and Entertainment, the company that owns the Detroit Pistons. Tellem will be responsible for business strategy, public affairs, and planning and development. SCOTT CACCIOLA \u25a0 St. John\u2019s guard Rysheed Jordan has left school to pursue professional opportunities. The 6-foot-4 Jordan averaged 14.1 points in 31 games last season. (AP)", "keyword": "Basketball;Brittney Griner;Glory Johnson;Divorce;Domestic violence;WNBA"}
{"id": "ny0126659", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/08/13", "title": "Bloomberg to Press Obama and Romney Campaigns on Immigration", "abstract": "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants the presidential candidates to talk more about immigration policy. So on Tuesday, he will be visiting the cities where their campaigns have headquarters, pressing them on the issue. In the morning, Mr. Bloomberg will go to Chicago, home to President Obama \u2019s campaign organization, to hold a public discussion on immigrants and their role in the economy with William M. Daley , a former chief of staff in the Obama White House. In the evening, Mr. Bloomberg will hold a similar discussion with Rupert Murdoch , the chief executive of News Corporation, in Boston, where Mitt Romney \u2019s campaign has its headquarters. Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Bloomberg lead a group of mayors and chief executives called the Partnership for a New American Economy, which supports immigration changes as an economic issue. Whether Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney will heed Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s views on immigration is another story. Neither candidate will be anywhere near his headquarters on Tuesday. They will instead be campaigning in swing states: Mr. Obama in Iowa, and Mr. Romney in Ohio. \u201cIf we are going to create jobs in this country, we have to have immigrants,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said Sunday as he prepared to march in New York\u2019s Dominican Day Parade. \u201cWe\u2019re going to need immigrants to start new businesses. We\u2019re going to need immigrants to do the things that Americans just aren\u2019t willing to do. We\u2019re going to have to have immigrants to give us new ideas and tell us what\u2019s going on elsewhere.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg offered modest praise for Mr. Romney\u2019s choice of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, saying Mr. Ryan\u2019s budget plan, which calls for drastically shrinking the size of government, would at least force the campaigns to talk specifically about their approach to reducing the federal deficit. Noting that he had met with Mr. Ryan this year to discuss the congressman\u2019s budget proposal, Mr. Bloomberg said, \u201cAt least he had a plan,\u201d while adding, \u201cI don\u2019t think I agreed with most of his plan.\u201d \u201cIn all fairness, I think he was one of the few who had a concrete plan, other than Simpson-Bowles ,\u201d the mayor said, referring to the debt-reduction plan of Mr. Obama\u2019s bipartisan fiscal commission, led by Alan K. Simpson and Erskine B. Bowles. On the subject of immigration, Mr. Bloomberg advocates giving green cards to foreign-born graduates of master\u2019s or doctoral programs in science, technology, engineering or math at American universities, and allowing foreign-born entrepreneurs who are backed by American venture capital to develop their inventions or build their companies here. He has described the country\u2019s practice of sending such talent and ideas somewhere else as a form of \u201cnational suicide.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg also supports making it easier for the agricultural and hospitality industries to hire temporary foreign workers for jobs that they cannot fill otherwise. The mayor\u2019s chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt, said in an interview that the mayor\u2019s choice of Mr. Daley and Mr. Murdoch to join him in discussing immigration was intended to show that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum can be aligned on the subject. \u201cWhat we want to show is that there can be unanimity,\u201d Mr. Feinblatt said. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t have to be an issue fought at the extremes, like it usually is.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said Sunday that he would also continue demanding that the candidates say what they planned to do about gun violence. Since the recent mass shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. , and at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., Mr. Bloomberg has criticized Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney for failing to say what they would do to prevent such tragedies. On his weekly radio show on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that neither candidate had addressed the issues of greatest concern to New York City, like illegal guns. \u201cYou just have to be able to be safe walking down the street, and neither candidate has come up with a plan,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Bloomberg Michael R;Immigration and Emigration;Presidential Election of 2012;Chicago (Ill);Boston (Mass);Obama Barack;Romney Mitt;Foreign Workers"}
{"id": "ny0068443", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/12/19", "title": "Another Forward for Rangers Is Feared to Have Mumps", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 Lee Stempniak could be the third Rangers forward to contract mumps. He is being tested for the virus, which has been spreading through N.H.L. locker rooms, and he will be isolated from the team for five days. Forward Tanner Glass missed four games with the virus before returning Dec. 8. Forward Derick Brassard was sent home Sunday from the team\u2019s trip to Western Canada, but he is expected back on the ice Friday, Coach Alain Vigneault said. The Rangers (15-10-4) have a home-and-home series with the Carolina Hurricanes this weekend and then host the Washington Capitals on Tuesday before the league\u2019s three-day Christmas break. The mumps outbreak has affected at least 15 N.H.L. players , including the Pittsburgh Penguins\u2019 Sidney Crosby and members of the Anaheim Ducks, the Minnesota Wild and the Devils. Two on-ice officials have had confirmed cases, and several St. Louis Blues players were sidelined with suspected cases. Mumps causes swelling of the salivary glands; its symptoms also include fever, headache, fatigue and loss of appetite. The virus is spread through infected saliva and body fluids. Mumps has no specific treatment, and most patients recover within two weeks. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole protocol here, and our medical staff and trainers are doing all the things they need to do,\u201d Vigneault said Thursday after the team\u2019s optional skate. \u201cThis is all mandatory from the N.H.L.\u201d The league sent out guidelines for hygiene last month and urged teams to screen and vaccinate players for the virus, which usually occurs in childhood. ESPN reported Wednesday that the teams received more specific instructions this week. The Rangers also said two members of their American Hockey League affiliate in Hartford \u2014 Coach Ken Gernander and forward Joey Crabb \u2014 were being tested for mumps and would be isolated from the team. Goaltender Henrik Lundqvist said he had not changed his routines aside from being more careful when using water bottles. \u201cI had the shot this year and last year before the Olympics,\u201d Lundqvist said. \u201cI\u2019m not doing anything differently. The trainers here are doing their job. You can\u2019t think too much about it. But it\u2019s not good. It\u2019s not fun.\u201d PENGUINS 1, AVALANCHE 0 Blake Comeau scored his 11th goal of the season with 2 minutes 36 seconds left in overtime to lead host Pittsburgh over Colorado on Thursday night. Marc-Andre Fleury stopped 29 shots, registering his sixth shutout of the season just hours after the Penguins thought he had the mumps. Fleury was tested after missing Wednesday\u2019s practice with an illness, but the results came back negative. Sidney Crosby returned after missing three games with the virus. (AP) PANTHERS 2, FLYERS 1 Dave Bolland scored the winning goal in a shootout to lead visiting Florida over Philadelphia. Brandon Pirri also had a goal in the shootout for the Panthers, who played beyond regulation for the fourth straight game. Florida was coming off a 2-1 win against Washington on Tuesday that set a league record by going 20 rounds in the shootout. Thursday\u2019s shootout lasted six rounds. Scottie Upshall scored in regulation for the Panthers, and Jakub Voracek had the Flyers\u2019 goal. (AP) HURRICANES 4, MAPLE LEAFS 1 Justin Faulk had a goal and an assist, and Eastern Conference-worst Carolina broke a six-game losing streak and snapped the visiting Maple Leafs\u2019 six-game winning streak. The Hurricanes played hours after trading defenseman Jay Harrison to the Winnipeg Jets for a 2015 sixth-round pick. (AP) CAPITALS 5, BLUE JACKETS 4 Eric Fehr scored 42 seconds into overtime to lead Washington at Columbus, extending the Capitals\u2019 point streak to seven games and snapping the Blue Jackets\u2019 winning streak at seven. Mike Green skated past the goal line on the right wing and slid a centering pass to Fehr, whose shot beat Sergei Bobrovsky. (AP)DUCKS 2, CANADIENS 1 Matt Beleskey scored the tiebreaking goal in the third period as Anaheim won at Montreal, which lost its top scorer, Max Pacioretty, to an injury. Pacioretty took a late hit into the boards by the Ducks\u2019 Clayton Stoner. (AP)", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Lee Stempniak;Mumps;Rangers"}
{"id": "ny0182556", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2007/12/16", "title": "Top Scorer at Hofstra Is Motivated by Laziness", "abstract": "HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. \u2014 Ask the Hofstra senior Antoine Agudio why he works so hard, and he says it is because he is lazy. Laziness drives him to take 500 extra shots a day. Laziness made him work to develop from a catch-and-shoot guy into a diversified player who entered the weekend tied for the N.C.A.A. lead in scoring (27.0 points) and on the verge of breaking Hofstra\u2019s 43-year-old career points record. Agudio scored 30 more points on Saturday while making all six of his 3-point attempts as Hofstra defeated Charlotte, 70-68, to end a four-game losing streak. The Pride used a 10-0 run to take a 70-65 lead. \u201cA 9-to-5 job, I don\u2019t know \u2014 my father tells me I\u2019m too lazy,\u201d Agudio said. \u201cI put more effort into basketball than anything else. A 9-to-5, I won\u2019t be able to wake up. Basketball motivates me to wake up every morning.\u201d Wearing sneakers with his deceased grandfather\u2019s initials written on the sides, Agudio runs himself to exhaustion to improve his game, motivated by visions of playing professionally like several other recent Hofstra guards. After college, Agudio should have little trouble finding opportunities to play overseas, where Norman Richardson (class of 2001), Carlos Rivera (2007) and Loren Stokes (2007) are playing, if he cannot catch on in the N.B.A., where Speedy Claxton (2000) plays. At 6 feet 3 inches, he has a game like J. J. Redick\u2019s, with perhaps stronger ball skills and speed. Thanks to long hours in the gym, he is now as comfortable driving as he is firing from deep. That is why Agudio was third among active N.C.A.A. players in career scoring and 3-pointers. He was also 69 3-pointers behind the Colonial Athletic Association career record, 371. But Agudio\u2019s immediate goal is getting the Pride (2-5) winning again. Hofstra has made the National Invitation Tournament or the N.C.A.A. tournament in six of the last nine years and is looking to its fourth consecutive postseason appearance \u2014 something the program has never done. Wins have been hard to come by this season, although Hofstra\u2019s last four losses were by a combined 12 points. After Agudio, the Pride leans heavily on two freshmen and two transfers. That lack of wins is certainly not for a lack of effort by Agudio. He is taking 36.8 percent of Hofstra\u2019s shots. Given that he is shooting 45.7 percent from the field (48 on 3\u2019s), compared with 40.9 percent for the rest of his teammates, he may not be shooting enough. He also led the country in minutes per game. \u201cHe\u2019s unselfish to a fault,\u201d Hofstra\u2019s coach, Tom Pecora, said. \u201cI talk to him about not passing up shots.\u201d Agudio\u2019s game continued to mature over the summer, but the biggest development has been off the court. That change started in April when Pecora stressed to Agudio the importance of becoming a team leader. The previously reticent Agudio immediately began making greater efforts to bond with his teammates, living with them over the summer and offering advice. That has translated onto the court, where he is directing his teammates\u2019 passes and defensive assignments, while also pointing out mistakes and praising their good plays. \u201cLast year, he was real quiet,\u201d the junior Greg Johnson said. \u201cIt\u2019s a great thing for our best player to make sure everybody\u2019s in the right place and encouraging and giving us confidence.\u201d The genetic source of his newfound chatty nature, as well as his drive to excel, is not hard to find. His father, Alex Agudio, 43, sits a dozen rows behind the bench, wearing his son\u2019s Hofstra jersey and keeping track of every one of Antoine\u2019s mistakes. After the game, he tells Antoine about all of his faults, then breaks down the tape for an even more pointed critique. Like Antoine, Alex wore No. 13 and starred at Walt Whitman High School in Huntington Station, N.Y. He then went on to play at Penn State, Niagara and briefly as a pro in Israel before his mother-in-law died and he returned to the United States. \u201cI had to make a choice to either stay over there playing or come home and do my fatherly duties,\u201d said Alex, who now works on a garbage truck in Huntington Station and part time as a security guard. \u201cI came back home to groom my kids, especially Antoine. If I couldn\u2019t chase my dream then, I\u2019m chasing it now with him.\u201d Before Antoine gets to the pros, he will probably become Hofstra\u2019s leading career scorer. Steve Nisenson set the record in 1965 with 2,222 points in an era with only three years of eligibility and no 3-point line. At 1,856, Antoine needs to average 16.0 points in Hofstra\u2019s guaranteed remaining 23 regular-season games. \u201cI\u2019ll be happy for him,\u201d said Nisenson, 64. \u201cMy wife, children, grandchildren and friends might not be, though.\u201d There is no doubt Alex will be beaming. Then if Antoine ends up in Europe after he leaves Hofstra, the only question will be who will be his roommate. Alex insisted he would live with Antoine overseas for a while to help him adjust. That was where Antoine drew the line, with a smile. \u201cI\u2019m going to be a grown man,\u201d Antoine said on Dec. 1, his voice scratchy from yelling throughout an overtime loss to North Carolina-Wilmington, in which he scored 34 points. \u201cI\u2019m going to live by myself. He can stay one week maybe. One week.\u201d Antoine has worked hard enough to earn at least that much.", "keyword": "Hofstra University;Basketball;Agudio Antoine;College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0004151", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2013/04/17", "title": "I.M.F. Lowers Estimates for Global Economic Growth for 2013", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 With economic leaders gathering in Washington for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings this week, the I.M.F. has nudged down its estimates for world growth in 2013. In a periodic update to its economic projections, the fund said on Tuesday that it expected global growth of about 3.3 percent this year and 4 percent in 2014. That is a reduction of 0.2 percentage point since its January estimate for 2013; it did not change its estimate for next year\u2019s growth. Still, the report underscored that financial conditions had improved markedly since last year, in no small part because of aggressive monetary easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank. Recession continues to afflict Europe, and the world still struggles with high unemployment, but the greatest risks \u2014 in particular from the threat of a country\u2019s leaving the euro zone and from fiscal policy uncertainty in the United States \u2014 have faded. \u201cGlobal prospects have improved again but the road to recovery in the advanced economies will remain bumpy,\u201d said the report, called the World Economic Outlook . \u201cPolicy makers cannot afford to relax their efforts.\u201d Image Olivier Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund\u2019s chief economist, spoke at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington. Credit Stephen Jaffe/IMF, via Reuters The fund cut its projections of current-year growth for the euro zone economies of France, Italy and Spain, as well as for Britain, which has also carried out austerity policies and entered a period of economic contraction. I.M.F. officials have urged stronger European economies with lower borrowing costs, like Germany, to do more to foster growth across the entire region and to move more aggressively to finish a cross-border banking union to shore up investor confidence. The fund and many international economic officials, including Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, are expected to press Europe on its plans for growth again this week. \u201cPolicy should use all prudent measures to support sluggish demand,\u201d the report said. \u201cHowever, the risks related to high sovereign debt limit the fiscal policy room to maneuver. There is no silver bullet to address all the concerns about demand and debt.\u201d The fund warned that \u201cmarkets may have moved ahead of the real economy\u201d and noted that improved financial conditions had not, in many cases, translated to better access to credit for consumers and businesses, with lending standards remaining tight. In the euro area, indeed, credit continues to contract and lending conditions continue to tighten, the I.M.F. said, reflecting in part \u201cthe poor macroeconomic outlook for the region as a whole.\u201d The fund lowered its estimate of United States growth this year to 1.9 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from its January forecast. While Washington had avoided falling over the \u201cfiscal cliff,\u201d the I.M.F. said that the United States had proved too aggressive in carrying out budget cuts, given its still-sluggish rates of growth and high unemployment levels. It said it anticipated that the across-the-board $85 billion in budget cuts known as sequestration would push down growth levels this year and beyond. \u201cThe growth figure for the United States for 2013 may not seem very high, and indeed it is insufficient to make a large dent in the still-high unemployment rate,\u201d Olivier Blanchard, the fund\u2019s chief economist, said in the report. \u201cBut it will be achieved in the face of a very strong, indeed overly strong, fiscal consolidation of about 1.8 percent of G.D.P. Underlying private demand is actually strong, spurred in part by the anticipation of low policy rates under the Federal Reserve\u2019s \u2018forward guidance\u2019 and by pent-up demand for housing and durables.\u201d The fund raised its estimate of growth for Japan, which has recently undertaken an aggressive round of fiscal and monetary stimulus to aid its slow-growing economy. Still, the I.M.F. expects an economic growth rate of only about 1.5 percent for this year and next for Japan. Tokyo\u2019s assertive monetary easing \u2014 which has pushed down the value of the yen, thus aiding the country\u2019s exports \u2014 has reignited concerns about competitive devaluation, often referred to as currency wars. In the report, the fund acknowledged concerns over Japan\u2019s policy, but called the recent bout of currency complaints \u201coverblown.\u201d", "keyword": "Economy;IMF"}
{"id": "ny0224068", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2010/11/24", "title": "Many Violent Hits Remain Legal Even After N.F.L. Scrutiny", "abstract": "One player was tackled square in the face with the helmet of an onrushing opponent. Another, fighting for one last yard, took a polyurethane bash to the head. Still another player spent 10 minutes mostly motionless among dozens of praying players before medics carried him away on a stretcher after a helmet-to-helmet hit. No flags were thrown. And after watching multiple replays of each collision in Sunday\u2019s Giants- Eagles game at N.F.L. offices on Monday, Ray Anderson, the league\u2019s tackling disciplinarian, calmly confirmed that each play was legal. For now, perhaps. \u201cWe will continue to review hits to the head, including helmet-to-helmet hits, that are currently legal to determine whether more changes should be made,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are constantly looking for ways to increase player safety. Nothing is off the table.\u201d Indeed, despite the league\u2019s controversial threats last month to suspend players for helmet-to-helmet tackles, and four years into revelations of the short- and long-term consequences of football brain trauma, almost every head-on-head collision remains not just condoned but also part of the sport. N.F.L. rules forbid such hits essentially against only quarterbacks or defenseless players, like a receiver making a catch; all others are fair game. But the N.F.L.\u2019s recent movement toward eliminating particularly dangerous tackles suggests that some of the collisions like those seen Sunday night could be forbidden as early as next season. Given how youth and high school football tend to follow the N.F.L.\u2019s lead, the changes could affect more than just professionals. \u201cPeople in the league feel it coming and see it coming,\u201d said Rich McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons and co-chairman of the league\u2019s competition committee, which handles rules changes. He added, \u201cI think the league appreciates the idea that it needs to be a leader in this area.\u201d Promising to consider change is far easier than enacting it, but the N.F.L. has recently established momentum toward limiting shots to the head, which for years have been enforced with the vigilance of jaywalking laws. In 2009, teams returning kickoffs could no longer form a wedge of more than two blockers, and protection for defenseless receivers was expanded from helmet-to-helmet hits to those delivered to the head or neck area by the defender\u2019s helmet, forearm or shoulder. This season, receivers who have just made a catch \u2014 rather than only attempting to make one \u2014 are protected. That change outlawed hits like the shockingly violent one delivered by the Pittsburgh Steelers \u2019 Ryan Clark against the Baltimore Ravens \u2019 Willis McGahee in the A.F.C. championship game two years ago, when Clark\u2019s full-speed, helmet-to-helmet launch \u2014 which left McGahee unconscious and Clark all but \u2014 was perfectly legal because it came a split-second after McGahee caught the ball and stepped forward. Clark acknowledged, \u201cI probably could have stopped and waited and tried to tackle him, but it\u2019s sad to say I think I closed my eyes and I was praying that I\u2019d wake up when I hit the ground.\u201d Rule changes must be bargained with the players union, so Commissioner Roger Goodell termed his recent suspension edict a clarification of punishment rather than a rules update. Responding to Anderson\u2019s comments on Tuesday, Dr. Thom Mayer, the union\u2019s medical director, questioned not only the feasibility of further changes but also the sincerity of a league that until recently played down the long-term effects of concussions \u2014 and is also trying to expand the season to 18 games from 16. \u201cBlaming the players is not appropriate,\u201d Mayer said. \u201cWe\u2019ve created this violent sport that\u2019s nearly a $9 billion business. We\u2019re trying to make sure that players know the rules but also participate in the deliberations to see what\u2019s doable and not doable, while still maintaining the integrity of the game.\u201d Mayer added: \u201cAnything that can be done to improve the safety of our players really should be done, short of stopping playing the game. That\u2019s the $64,000 question.\u201d As Anderson watched replays of several legal hits from the Eagles-Giants game, he indicated that none were specifically subject to review next spring. (\u201cThose are football plays,\u201d he cautioned.) But, taken together, they communicated room for reform. \u00b6As the Giants\u2019 Will Blackmon awkwardly tried to pick up a bouncing punt, Moise Fokou ran into him full stride, face mask to face mask. \u00b6Corralled by some Eagles but fighting for extra yards, Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw crouched slightly before Keenan Clayton crashed into his head helmet-first. \u00b6On the kickoff return that left him face-down for 10 minutes and evoked fears of paralysis , the Eagles\u2019 Ellis Hobbs braced for impact by tilting the crown of his head toward the oncoming defenders. Such a maneuver, while somewhat instinctual, is the most common cause of football spine fractures. (Hobbs sustained a less serious disk injury from which he will not return this season.) \u00b6While jumping to catch a pass, the Giants\u2019 Mario Manningham was slammed in the head by the flailing arms of defender Quintin Mikell. Mikell was penalized for pass interference, not contact to the head. These plays also probably would not have drawn flags at football\u2019s younger levels, where the rules appear slightly stronger but are subject to wide interpretation. USA Football , whose rulebook is used by Pop Warner and other leagues for players age 6 to 14, prohibits a defender from \u201cinitiating contact with the helmet,\u201d although in practice almost all seemingly accidental or nonflagrant instances go unflagged. High school rules are similarly phrased and enforced. This month, following the N.F.L.\u2019s lead, USA Football strengthened its rules against defenseless receivers \u2014 but runners like the Giants\u2019 Bradshaw or the Eagles\u2019 Hobbs remain relatively unprotected. Said the USA Football spokesman Steve Alic, \u201cUltimately, we want coaches to teach to play the game lower.\u201d Some plays Sunday night remained encouraging. When the Eagles\u2019 Asante Samuel led with his helmet into the chin of the defenseless Giants receiver Derek Hagan, officials threw a flag they might not have thrown two months ago. Later, with a chance to deliver a devastating \u2014 and unless too high, legal \u2014 hit on Eagles receiver Jason Avant, the Giants\u2019 Corey Webster held up at the last second and merely touched Avant down instead. Watching with Anderson at N.F.L. headquarters, Merton Hanks, the former All-Pro defensive back and one of Anderson\u2019s lieutenants, said that play symbolized the intent of current, and perhaps future, rules changes. \u201cHe\u2019s in between deciding to deliver a blow, and given the time of the game, score 17-16, he doesn\u2019t want to risk a penalty,\u201d Hanks said. \u201cYou always want the defender to be mindful that you\u2019re in the area \u2014 that he\u2019s going to pay a physical price for going for the football. But it was the smart play.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Helmet;Concussion;NFL Super Bowl Super Bowl 2015;Sports injury"}
{"id": "ny0070760", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/03/11", "title": "Jonell Nash, Who Cut Fat, Not Flavor, Out of Soul Food, Dies at 72", "abstract": "Jonell Nash, who taught a generation of cooks that traditional African-American recipes could be flavorful but not necessarily fatty, and who introduced soul food to new followers at home and abroad, died on Feb. 27 in the Bronx. She was 72. The cause was cancer, her friend and former colleague Harriette Cole said. As the food editor of Essence magazine from 1984 until she retired in 2008 and the author of several cookbooks, Ms. Nash was among the pioneers in a cause popularized more recently by Michelle Obama: reducing rates of childhood obesity, which are higher among black and Hispanic youngsters than among whites. In her introduction to \u201cLow-Fat Soul,\u201d published in 1996, Ms. Nash said that \u201cin those painful days of our history,\u201d when satisfying meals were one of the few joys available, \u201cour forebears gave little thought to the fat or sugar stirred in.\u201d \u201cBesides,\u201d she wrote, \u201cthey burned off much of what they ate during long, grueling days toiling in the fields. Fat in the diet was actually important to survival.\u201d In today\u2019s more sedentary, health-conscious times, though, Ms. Nash recommended reduced-sodium recipes infused with legumes, sweet potatoes and cruciferous vegetables like cabbage and greens. Her credo: \u201cBoot the fat, boost the flavor,\u201d by substituting smoke-cured chicken, turkey, fish and even cheese for bacon, and by using butter sparingly. Forget the lard and ham hocks was how Publishers Weekly summarized Ms. Nash\u2019s other cookbook, \u201cEssence Brings You Great Cooking.\u201d Its review said Ms. Nash had two goals: \u201cThe first is to celebrate African-American food traditions in all their diversity; the second, to create a cookbook that will make nutritious home cooking appealing to the everyday cook. She succeeds on both counts.\u201d Ms. Nash is survived by two sisters, Gertrude Cherry and Marva Stanton, and a brother, Willie Nash. Her longtime partner, Paul Butler , a film and television actor, died in 2010. She was born in Delhi, La., on Dec. 20, 1942, the daughter of Willie Henry Nash Sr., who worked in a plastics plant, and the former Mollie Osborne, who worked in a dry cleaning store. The family moved to Detroit, where Ms. Nash graduated from Wayne State University and taught high school home economics. Ms. Nash was hired by Coed magazine, published by Scholastic, and then moved to New York, where she worked in the test kitchen at Woman\u2019s Day magazine. She joined Essence, which describes itself as a lifestyle magazine for black women, in 1984, and published \u201cEssence Brings You Great Cooking\u201d in 1994. She wove her commitment to quality cooking and baking, which she learned from her parents, into her personal and professional lives. Through Les Dames d\u2019Escoffier New York , an organization of women in the food and hospitality professions, she financed a scholarship in honor of Edna Lewis , a renowned chef who died in 2006, for students to study Southern cooking. The scholarship is being renamed for Ms. Nash. Even when Ms. Nash would eat at her desk, another former colleague, Sharon R. Boone, recalled, she would first put down a china place setting and silverware on a small tablecloth. Taste matters, she said in her cookbook. \u201cEven more than specific dishes or ingredients, soul food represents a certain spirit, an attitude, a flamboyance, a kind of loving that one brings to the kitchen and stirs into the pots,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIn essence, it\u2019s a flava.\u201d", "keyword": "Obituary;Cooking;Essence Magazine;Soul food;Nutrition;Jonell Nash"}
{"id": "ny0155233", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2008/01/14", "title": "PGA Will Move Barclays From Westchester Club", "abstract": "The PGA Tour has notified Westchester Country Club that it intends to pull the plug on the remaining five years of a six-year agreement to play host to the Barclays, the opening event of its four-tournament playoffs for the FedEx Cup, the club\u2019s president said Sunday. Philip M. Halpern, the president of Westchester Country Club, said in a telephone interview that the tour gave him no reason for its decision to move the Barclays, scheduled for Aug. 21-24. He indicated the tournament would be moved to Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J. \u201cI was very surprised and disappointed,\u201d Halpern said. \u201cThey were sending me letters asking me to consider access and logistical issues while they already had begun a dialogue with Ridgewood Country Club to host the 2008 event. Why did they do that? I don\u2019t know. You will have to ask them that.\u201d The PGA Tour spokesman Ty Votaw declined to comment on Halpern\u2019s statements. If the $7 million event is moved from Westchester, it would end a relationship between the Harrison, N.Y., club and the PGA Tour that dates to 1967, when Jack Nicklaus won the inaugural event by one stroke over Dan Sikes with a 72-hole total of 12-under-par 272. A copy of correspondence between the PGA Tour and Westchester Country Club given to The New York Times included a Dec. 6 letter that references \u201ca number of concerns and requests\u201d that the tour shared in a Nov. 28 meeting with Halpern and others at Westchester. Listed among the 12 items outlined in the Dec. 6 letter were requests that no club outings or tournaments be played during the week preceding the event, that rounds be limited to 100 a day Tuesday through Friday of that week and that the course be closed on the Saturday and Sunday preceding tournament week. The tour also requested unlimited access to holes 16, 17 and 18 for six weeks before the event in order to build expanded hospitality areas and bleachers and to reconfigure the corporate village so tents could face the ninth fairway. The reconfiguration request included the removal of three trees. The final section requested that Westchester form committees to assist with ticket sales to members and that the members\u2019 upstairs locker rooms be closed during tournament week. \u201cWe told them we would do our best to address the issues they raised, that we couldn\u2019t promise anything until we discussed it with our members,\u201d Halpern said. \u201cFrom the beginning, we have had tremendous support from our membership, which voted more than 80 percent in favor of hosting this wonderful event.\u201d One club member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the Barclays said pressure to move the event was coming from CBS, which was disappointed by mediocre television ratings for the 2007 event, won by Steve Stricker. Tiger Woods did not play in the first leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs, and had played at Westchester only three times in the past 10 years, skipping the event even when it was sponsored by Buick, one of his sponsors. Woods has never cited the 6,839-yard course as a reason for his absence, but the shorter layout does not play to his strengths. Although Halpern said he held a glimmer of hope that the 2008 event could still be played at Westchester, he pulled no punches in describing his reaction to how this situation has played out. \u201cThis is a disappointing outcome and disappointing behavior in a sport in which honor and character are everything,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re saddened that after 40-plus years, the PGA Tour has made this choice and that they\u2019re treating us this way. That\u2019s just not right.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Westchester County (NY);Barclays Plc;PGA Tour Inc;Athletics and Sports"}
{"id": "ny0158504", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2008/12/10", "title": "Array of Strategies Are Tried to Turn Back Pirates at Sea", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 The increasing number of pirate attacks on the open seas has shipowners and governments desperately seeking countermeasures to stop the brazen seizures. On Monday, the European Union began a yearlong naval operation in the Gulf of Aden, where 14 ships are being held for ransom, including a Saudi supertanker and a Ukrainian ship with tanks and other military equipment aboard. Eight countries are participating in the new flotilla, code-named Operation Atalanta, which will be backed up with three airplanes. Javier Solana, the European Union\u2019s foreign policy chief, said the mission would have \u201crobust rules of engagement,\u201d while coordinating with other navies already operating in the region, including those of the United States, India and Russia. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution last week that allows navies to breach the 12-mile territorial limit to enter Somali waters in pursuit of pirates . In the Gulf of Aden, 102 ships have been attacked so far this year and 40 have been hijacked. With 21,000 ships passing through the region each year and only a handful of international navies to run interference, the lure of piracy for impoverished Somalis has been extraordinary. \u201cSomali fishermen simply changed their business model, and they\u2019ve got military hardware in the meantime,\u201d said Dieter Berg, head of marine underwriting for the large reinsurance company Munich Re. \u201cPiracy is now a real industry in Somalia. Whole clans are living off it.\u201d Some pirate groups are now getting inside information in Europe about upcoming shipments of dangerous cargo and shipping routes, Mr. Berg said, the better to select their targets. Interviews with owners, insurers, security companies and antipiracy experts suggest that all manner of technical innovations are being tried to fend off attacks, from high-tech sonic cannons to electrified wires strung around the hulls of their boats. Some ships have put on extra crew members to stand watch around the clock. Sonic guns and night-vision goggles are in such demand in the region that their price has doubled. Foam sprayers and high-pressure fire hoses have been used to drench the speedboats used by hijackers as they approach ships. Huge floodlights have been installed on ships. Some ships are stocking sprays developed by the United States military to make decks so slippery that the pirates, if they do come aboard, would be unable to stand up. Some ships have built \u2014 and have actually used \u2014 panic rooms where crews can hide. Some well-known security companies are trying to expand into the maritime security business, offering teams of onboard guards, most of them former military combat veterans, to repel pirates. \u201cI\u2019ve had lots of e-mails from these security companies offering us their services \u2014 at vast expense,\u201d said Arthur Bowring, managing director of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association. The effectiveness of security guards remains to be seen, and many experts on piracy and insurers do not endorse the use of armed guards. But without armed guards, some analysts say, there is no real deterrent. \u201cHow do pirates in a small boat stop a 30,000-ton ship? It\u2019s firearms, that\u2019s all it is,\u201d Andy MacDonagh, a director of the private military contractor Raven Special Projects, said in an interview with the maritime trade publication Lloyd\u2019s List. \u201cBut as soon as you fire back, they are going to turn round and go the other way, because they\u2019re so vulnerable.\u201d An unarmed three-man security team was overwhelmed by pirates who captured the chemical tanker Biscaglia in the Gulf of Aden on Nov. 28. The guards jumped overboard as the pirates clambered onto the ship. They were plucked from the water by a rescue helicopter. \u201cOf course they went overboard,\u201d Mr. Bowring said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t want to sit on a beach in Somalia for three months.\u201d The security team, employed by Anti Piracy Maritime Security Solutions, based in Poole, England, was without firearms, but it did have water sprayers and a sonic cannon. The cannon \u2014 a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, which can cost as much as $125,000 \u2014 shoots sound waves from a dish transmitter. The noise, if properly aimed and focused, can be debilitating at 100 meters, or 330 feet. \u201cThe pirates were basically laughing at our guys,\u201d said Anti Piracy\u2019s owner, Nick Davis. \u201cLRADs don\u2019t work when they take an AK-47 round through them.\u201d The pirates won that skirmish and are now negotiating a ransom for the Biscaglia\u2019s release. Many antipiracy advocates are pushing for the United Nations to take action. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, has called for a multinational stabilization force in Somalia to pave the way for United Nations peacekeepers who would eventually deny the pirates safe harbor. The pirates usually come in the night, in speedboats too small and too fast to be picked up by radar. When they draw alongside, pirates throw grappling hooks over the railings and scamper up the sides. \u201cThe whole thing can take five minutes,\u201d said Noel Choong, director of the Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. \u201cOnce they\u2019re on board, it\u2019s over.\u201d Some hijackers throw crew members overboard, while others set them adrift in dinghies or keep them as hostages. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly traumatic time for the crew and their families,\u201d said Mr. Bowring of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association. \u201cAn owner sends them out there, and they\u2019re powerless to defend themselves.\u201d", "keyword": "Piracy at Sea;Gulf of Aden;International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0181555", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2007/06/15", "title": "British Court Names Terror Case Escapee", "abstract": "LONDON, June 14 \u2014 A British court lifted restrictions Thursday on identifying a terrorism suspect who was said to have absconded last year by clambering through a window at a mental hospital. He is still at large. The suspect, Zeeshan Siddiqui, 26, a former worker on the London subway system, is accused of having met other militants in Britain and Pakistan. Last month, the names of three men who also disappeared while under official restrictions were made public. The restrictions, which fall short of formal imprisonment, limit the movements of suspects who have not been convicted of crimes under Britain\u2019s counterterrorism laws. Mr. Siddiqui\u2019s name came to prominence in 2005 when extracts of a diary he had written were published in The New York Times.", "keyword": "Great Britain;Terrorism;Crime and Criminals"}
{"id": "ny0279055", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/11/14", "title": "Treasury Auctions Set for the Week of Nov. 14", "abstract": "The Treasury\u2019s schedule of financing this week includes Monday\u2019s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. The New York cash market was closed on Friday in observance of Veterans Day, but at its close on Thursday the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.48 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.59 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.29 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: MONDAY Florida Board of Education, $140.4 million of general obligation unlimited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Florida Department of Transportation, $137.3 million of turnpike revenue bonds. Competitive. TUESDAY Charles County, Md., $79.3 million of general obligation limited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Massachusetts, $200 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. University of Alabama Board of Trustees, $93.7 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. WEDNESDAY New Orleans, $70 million of general obligation unlimited tax taxable bonds. Competitive. THURSDAY Clark County, Nev., School District, $405.2 million of Series D general obligation limited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Clark County, Nev., School District, $57.7 million of Series E general obligation limited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Everett, Wash., $70.4 million of water and sewer revenue refinancing bonds. Competitive. Forest Lake Independent School District No. 831, Minn., $64.6 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. New Hampshire, $62.1 million of general obligation unlimited tax bonds. Competitive. New Hampshire, $51.4 million of general obligation unlimited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK Alabama Federal Aid Highway Finance Authority, $369 million of special obligation revenue and special obligation revenue refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Anchorage, $83.9 million of general obligation and general obligation refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Apple Valley, Minn., $53.7 million of senior living bonds. Piper Jaffray. Ballston Quarter Community Development Authority of Arlington County, Va., $57 million of revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Bexar County, Tex., $107.6 million of combination tax and revenue certificates of obligation. Morgan Stanley. California Statewide Communities Development Authority, $129.8 million of insured revenue bonds. Cain Brothers. Cincinnati, $192.9 million of water system revenue and revenue refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Columbia, S.C., $62.7 million of waterworks and sewer system revenue bonds. PNC Capital Markets. Columbia, S.C., $162.8 million of waterworks and sewer system revenue refinancing bonds. Raymond James. Denver and Denver County, Colo., $250 million of airport system revenue bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Hartford County, Conn., Metropolitan District, $173.5 million of general obligation bonds. Morgan Stanley. Katy, Tex., Independent School District, $225 million of limited and unlimited tax refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. King County, Wash., Public Hospital District No. 1, $186.7 million of limited tax general obligation bonds. Morgan Stanley. Lammersville Joint Unified School District, Calif., $111.5 million of general obligation bonds. Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. Los Angeles County, Calif., Metropolitan Transportation Authority, $515 million of debt securities. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Los Angeles Department of Airports, $661.9 million of Los Angeles International Airport subordinate revenue and senior revenue refinancing bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Marin Community College District, Calif., $60 million of general obligation bonds. Piper Jaffray. Maryland Health and Higher Educational Facilities Authority, $63.8 million of Doctor\u2019s Community Hospital revenue bonds. Ziegler. Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, $223 million of Emerson College taxable bonds. Barclays Capital. Mississippi, $223.6 million of general obligation bonds. Morgan Stanley. Missouri Housing Development Commission, $65 million of single-family mortgage revenue and special homeownership loan program bonds. George K. Baum & Company. Montgomery County, Tex., $141.4 million of unlimited tax road bonds and limited tax refinancing bonds. Wells Fargo Securities. Morgantown, W.Va., $64 million of combined utility system revenue bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. New Jersey Educational Facilities Authority, $137 million of Higher Education Capital Improvement Fund revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. New York, N.Y., TSASC, $1 billion of tobacco settlement bonds. Jefferies. New York State Mortgage Agency, $97.6 million of homeowner mortgage revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Philadelphia, $283.1 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Richmond, Va., $450 million of public utility refinancing bonds. Wells Fargo Securities. Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, Calif., $220 million of Consolidated Capital Assessment District No. 2 assessment revenue bonds. Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, Ariz., $719.8 million of electric system revenue refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Scotts Bluff County, Neb., Hospital Authority No. 1, $65.4 million of hospital revenue refinancing and improvement bonds. Ziegler. Shreveport, La., $110.2 million of water and sewer revenue bonds. Siebert Cisneros Shank & Company. Sonoma County, Calif., Junior College District, $100 million of general obligation bonds. Piper Jaffray. Sweetwater County, Wyo., $90 million of FMC Corporation Project solid waste disposal revenue refinancing bonds. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Torrance Unified School District of Los Angeles County, Calif., $61.3 million of general obligation bonds. Raymond James. Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., $54 million of public utilities system improvement revenue bonds. Piper Jaffray. University of North Carolina Board of Governors, $93 million of University of North Carolina Hospitals at Chapel Hill revenue bonds. Morgan Stanley. Vermont Educational and Health Buildings Finance Agency, $73 million of revenue bonds. Wells Fargo Securities. West Virginia Water Development Authority, $68.6 million of infrastructure revenue refinancing bonds. Piper Jaffray. Yonkers, N.Y., $77.5 million of general obligation refinancing and school refinancing bonds. M&T Securities.", "keyword": "Stocks,Bonds;Municipal bond"}
{"id": "ny0208759", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/12/02", "title": "Environmental Law Evolves", "abstract": "Environmental law has expanded rapidly over the past four decades and now encompasses concerns ranging from air and water quality to the decontamination of hazardous waste sites and the protection of biodiversity. One of the most recent specialties to be studied in law schools is climate change, a complex field that many schools are now starting to explore. There are two principal difficulties, says Professor Michael B. Gerrard, Director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School: \u201cFirst, an extraordinarily large number of different areas of law are involved. \u201cSecond, developments are occurring so quickly at the administrative, legislative and judicial branches that it is challenging to keep up with them all and to integrate them in a unified picture of what is happening.\u201d The scope and complexity of the climate change debate makes it very challenging to design a curriculum around it, said Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School. \u201cIt is multi-disciplinary, demanding a solid grasp of science, economics, technology, land use, ethics, domestic law, international law and many other subjects. There is a huge volume of literature to digest,\u201d Professor Parenteau said. \u201cThere are still huge uncertainties in the science regarding the speed with which changes are happening and the consequences of climate change at various spatial scales. \u201cThe law is still emerging so there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the shape that it will ultimately take.\u201d Climate change will require massive transformations of every economic sector, led by energy and transportation. \u201cThat in turn requires an understanding of how laws in these sectors currently work and how they must be changed. On top of all this are the domestic political considerations and the trade and equity issues between developed and developing worlds,\u201d Mr. Parenteau added. Students of climate change law are facing a steep learning curve as they familiarize themselves with climate science. To understand the laws and policy they must first achieve some carbon literacy \u2014 an understanding of the sources and effects of the main greenhouse gases. This takes both time and critical thinking, said Professor Michael P. Vandenbergh, director of an interdisciplinary climate change research network at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. \u201cFor example, stating that a company or country aims to achieve 20 percent emissions\u2019 reductions by 2020 tells us very little about their actual commitment,\u201d Professor Vandenbergh said in a written commentary. \u201cWe need to know whether the emissions are for just CO2 or CO2 equivalent (all six leading greenhouse gases); what the baseline year is (1990? 2000? 2005?), since emissions have been going up each year and a later baseline year implies less stringent cuts; and what the business-as-usual emissions would have been in the absence of cuts.\u201d European universities have been leading the charge to teach this new specialty. \u201cE.U. universities are ahead of U.S. institutions simply because the E.U. has been dealing with the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, while we have been on the sidelines looking on,\u201d said Mr. Parenteau. Still, some U.S. law schools are now engaging with climate change: Pace Law School in New York started this year to offer a climate change track in its environmental law masters program, the first U.S. university to do so. The Pace program features six specially developed courses: Climate adaptive management; climate and insurance; climate and corporate practice; climate change practice; disaster law and emergency preparedness; and state and regional climate initiatives. It also offers students a chance to participate in one of the school\u2019s signature programs \u2014 the Environmental Diplomacy Externship at the United Nations, in which students work two days a week at the United Nations with delegations and environmental agencies providing legal and policy support on climate change and sustainability issues. Mr. Parenteau said the Vermont Law School was also developing a special track for climate change in its masters program. \u201cFor us it\u2019s a matter of trying to select a coherent sequence of courses emphasizing the essential skills and competencies needed to address the climate crisis,\u201d he said. The new track should be offered as early as Fall next year. Law schools are slowly developing material for their new climate change courses, though there appears to be no standardized teaching methodology. This year, the Columbia University law school launched its Center for Climate Change Law, headed by Professor Gerrard, who is also the author of a leading book in the field, \u201cGlobal Climate Change and U.S. Law.\u201d The Columbia center hopes to advance an effective legal response to climate change, providing the framework to examine and shape environmental regulation and train future leaders. While Mr. Gerrard says the new center is not setting out to standardize the teaching of climate change law, it has been active in preparing study material that has been widely adopted, including a Web site which displays all U.S. litigation on climate change. \u201cWe are now working on a separate chart showing non-U.S. climate litigation,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if homogenization will occur or should occur, but I suspect that we will see some convergence on the core elements of a climate-literate law student,\u201d said Mr. Vandenbergh, of Vanderbilt. Core requirements would include a need for a basic understanding of climate science and an understanding of the principal greenhouse gases, their sources, and the emission reductions and atmospheric target levels needed to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change, he said. They would also include an understanding of the costs and benefits of climate mitigation and adaptation policies; an understanding of justice or equity issues; and an understanding of the global, national, regional, state, and local policy instruments that are available to policymakers. \u201cThat is a tall order, but many lawyers will need some facility with each of these issues to advise clients and make policy during the course of their careers,\u201d Mr. Vandenbergh said. Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment is supporting the Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network, where faculty and graduate students are exploring one of the most important and widely overlooked sources of greenhouse gases: individual and household behavior. While U.S. and European universities have been grappling with the teaching issues involved, Asian universities have been lagging behind. \u201cAsia has not been engaging in the climate change debate,\u201d said Jolene Lin, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. \u201cThis has therefore had an impact on the teaching of climate change law in its universities.\u201d \u201cThe issue is that the teaching scope is usually too limited to constitute an entire climate change law course,\u201d Ms. Lin said. \u201cIf taught in the U.K., for example, a course could typically cover the local legal and regulatory responses to climate change, the politics and policy issues, as well as E.U.-level policies and laws and those at the international level. \u201cSuch a course taught in Asia will be lacking on the domestic front,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you teach in Asia, you're really focusing on international developments and why most Asian countries are not quite there.\u201d", "keyword": "Education and Schools;Law Schools;Environment"}
{"id": "ny0060930", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/08/14", "title": "HBO Orders a Second Season of \u2018The Leftovers\u2019", "abstract": "HBO made official on Wednesday the expected news that \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d would be renewed for a second season. The well-reviewed drama, about the impact of the mysterious disappearance of 140 million people in a spontaneous act suspected to be the Rapture, has divided viewers on social media. Some have been deeply moved by the highly emotional stories of how a New York suburban town was affected by the unexplained loss of so many loved ones, and others have reported that the series is difficult and often depressing to watch. The ratings for the show, while not near the levels of HBO\u2019s big hits like \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d have been more than satisfactory for HBO, especially given its initial plays on Sundays, a night that has become stocked this summer with prestige dramas, including \u201cMasters of Sex\u201d on Showtime, \u201cThe Strain\u201d on FX, and \u201cManhattan\u201d on WGN America. HBO reported that \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d had averaged a total audience of about 7.4 million viewers, counting its numerous weekly plays as well as on-demand orders for the episodes. Its audience for its initial broadcasts on Sundays at 10 p.m. is about 1.6 million viewers. The numbers put the show above such HBO dramas as \u201cThe Newsroom\u201d and about on par with \u201cBoardwalk Empire.\u201d HBO also reported that the ratings pattern, which showed some loss after the premiere and a more recent build for each episode, is promising for the show\u2019s future. \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, who created the series in partnership with Damon Lindelof, in his return to television after his work on the long-running ABC hit drama \u201cLost.\u201d", "keyword": "TV;HBO;Tom Perrotta;Damon Lindelof;The Leftovers HBO"}
{"id": "ny0120076", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2012/07/26", "title": "In London, Olympics Test Commuters\u2019 Patience", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Londoners, forced to navigate a vast city using one of the largest and oldest public transit systems in the world and a road network first laid out by the Romans, are not noted for suffering transportation woes in silence. But the everyday grumbling here sharpened Wednesday as the restrictions and increased demands of the Olympic Games began to bite. London has spent more than $9 billion on refurbishing its creaking transportation infrastructure \u2014 parts of its underground train network date from 1863 \u2014 in time for the Games. The road and rail system will face a million trips a day in addition to the usual 3.5 million when the Games begin Friday, transportation officials warned in a news conference on Tuesday. Since the beginning of this month, the voice of Mayor Boris Johnson of London has been heard over public address systems. \u201cWe\u2019re welcoming more than a million people a day to our city, and there is going to be huge pressure on the transport network,\u201d the mayor warns sternly. \u201cDon\u2019t get caught out!\u201d The city\u2019s taxi drivers, in their well-known black cabs, have been among the most vocal predictors of doom, and they staged a protest on Tower Bridge this week. In the privacy of their cabs, they often regale passengers with more personal disaster warnings. \u201cI\u2019d leave the city if I could,\u201d said one, flagged down in east London on Wednesday afternoon. (He pulled off with an exasperated gesture, refusing to give his name.) Cabbies have been particularly worked up about road lanes that, starting at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, are reserved for Olympics traffic. Some have nicknamed them \u201cZil lanes,\u201d a reference to sections of road that were set aside in the Soviet Union for the party elite and their Zil limousines. Residents also reserved some amused vitriol for the aboveground Javelin train service, which aims to move 25,000 people an hour at peak times from central London to Olympic Park in the east of the city. After reports of long delays this week, some residents jokingly said it had turned into a \u201cshot put.\u201d Those delays, along with disruptions for hundreds of thousands of commuters traveling on London\u2019s intensively patched and refurbished Underground train network, have perpetuated concerns that the capital\u2019s transportation infrastructure remains the clearest threat to a successful Games. Transportation officials have remained bullish, pointing to significant improvements that will last beyond the Olympics. But Mark Evers, the director of Games transport for London, warned in an interview with The Financial Times this week, \u201cYou can\u2019t run a network as big and as complicated as ours without something going wrong,\u201d By the time the entire Olympics road network across London has come on line this weekend, a total of 30 miles of lanes, which run alongside normal traffic lanes and will operate from 6 a.m. to midnight throughout the Olympics, will have been reserved for authorized \u201cGames Family\u201d vehicles, those used by athletes, Olympics officials and V.I.P.\u2019s. According to some reported estimates, as many as 1,300 vehicles an hour will use them. The network, a requirement imposed by Games officials, was designed to ensure that athletes arrive at their competition sites on time. It is small compared with the 186 miles that were set aside for official use in Beijing four years ago and the 99 miles in Athens in 2004, yet it has been met with considerable opposition from drivers, who face a $201 fine if they inadvertently use the reserved lanes, and cyclists, who complain they are being diverted to unsafe routes and junctions. In an effort at appeasement, government ministers have been told to travel on public transportation where possible, according to reports in the British news media. It was also reported that high-level ministers, security officials and military commanders were expected to meet every morning in Whitehall to assess everything from the threat level to traffic delays. Transport for London, which runs the system, insisted that roads across the capital were no busier than during a normal rush hour on Wednesday despite the activation of the new lanes, and the Highways Agency described traffic as \u201cflowing.\u201d Drivers stuck in an eight-mile traffic jam beginning at the start of the Games Lane on the M4 motorway linking Heathrow, the gateway airport for the Games, with central London might have had cause to disagree. \u201cNobody said the Olympics were without pain,\u201d said the Transport for London commissioner, Peter Hendy, \u201cand we have asked people to do things differently if they can, and a lot of people have.\u201d", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2012);London (England);Roads and Traffic;Delays (Transportation);Olympic Games;Transit Systems"}
{"id": "ny0191154", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/05/25", "title": "Herbert York, 87, Top Nuclear Physicist Who Was Arms Control Advocate, Dies", "abstract": "Herbert York, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb and later became a leading advocate of arms control and nuclear test bans, died Tuesday in San Diego. He was 87. The cause was the effects of radiation from prostate treatment, his wife, Sybil, said. Mr. York by his own account played a rather minor role on the Manhattan Project. But in the 1950s he was an important scientist working on the development of nuclear weapons , first for the new Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at the University of California, which he directed from 1952 to 1958, and later as a top Pentagon scientist in the Eisenhower administration. His work on weapons systems convinced him of the need for arms control and a ban on nuclear testing, views he articulated as an adviser or arms-control negotiator to several presidents and in books like \u201cRace to Oblivion: A Participant\u2019s View of the Arms Race\u201d (1970) and \u201cMaking Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist\u2019s Journey From Hiroshima to Geneva\u201d (1987). \u201cHerb York\u2019s life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security,\u201d Harold R. Brown, defense secretary under President Jimmy Carter, told the Web site of the University of California, San Diego. \u201cIn the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs.\u201d Herbert Frank York was born in Rochester and studied physics at the University of Rochester, earning a bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degree in 1942. After graduating, he joined the staff of the radiation laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, working at the Berkeley laboratory and in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on the electromagnetic separation of uranium 235. After World War II ended, Mr. York returned to Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate in physics in 1949 and, after working as a researcher, joined the physics department in 1951. At the age of 28 he was named director of the newly created Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where he oversaw programs under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission that included work on developing the hydrogen bomb. After the Soviet Union began putting satellites into orbit, the Eisenhower administration scrambled to step up space and weapons research. In March 1958, Mr. York became the first chief scientist at the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, directing space and antimissile research. Later that year, he was named director of defense research and engineering, a position created to monitor and analyze the work of that agency. Mr. York gradually became concerned that the United States and the Soviet Union were developing more weapons yet becoming less secure and that the shortened response times to a pre-emptive nuclear strike would put nuclear decision making in the hands of low-level military officers or, ultimately, computers. He spent the rest of his life as an antinuclear advocate. In the 1960s he was an adviser to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. During the Carter administration he was a delegate at the strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva and chief United States negotiator in unsuccessful talks with the Soviet Union to impose a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Mr. York spent the later years of his career teaching physics at the University of California, San Diego. He served as the university\u2019s chancellor from its founding in 1961 until 1964, and again from 1970 to 1972. In addition to his wife, the former Sybil Dunford, he is survived by three children, Rachel York of San Diego, Dr. Cynthia York of Santa Rosa, Calif., and David Winters of Oakland, Calif.; and four grandchildren. Mr. York maintained a lifelong interest in arms control. In 1983 he founded the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, an organization, based at the university, that organized research and seminars on conflict resolution and promoted international efforts to avoid war. In 1990, with Sanford Lakoff, he published \u201cA Shield in Space?: Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative,\u201d a highly regarded analysis of President Ronald Reagan\u2019s proposed Star Wars missile defense system. In 1995 he published \u201cArms and the Physicist.\u201d", "keyword": "York Herbert;Arms Control and Limitation and Disarmament;Lawrence Livermore Laboratory;Deaths (Obituaries);Nuclear Weapons;Manhattan Project;Science and Technology;Physics;Missiles and Missile Defense Systems"}
{"id": "ny0241920", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/03/11", "title": "New York Says State Forcing Cuts to Homeless Program", "abstract": "Saying that state budget cuts have forced New York City to stop accepting new people into a successful program intended to reduce homelessness, the city mailed a letter on Thursday to hundreds of real estate brokers involved in the program informing them that no new participants will be taken after next Monday. The letter from Seth Diamond, the city\u2019s commissioner of homeless services, came after weeks of lobbying by the Bloomberg administration to restore state funding for the program, called Advantage, which provides housing subsidies for people who find stable jobs, allowing them to leave shelters. About 15,000 households now receive money under the program, which was created in 2007 and provides subsidies for up to two years, the city said. \u201cDue to proposed budget cuts that will eliminate the Advantage rental subsidy program, effective after the close of business Monday, March 14, we will stop conducting lease signings,\u201d Mr. Diamond said in the letter to the brokers, who connect homeless families with the program. Those already in the program will be able to stay in their homes. \u201cOver 90 percent of those who completed the subsidy period remain in the community and out of shelter,\u201d the letter said. \u201cThis funding reduction will cause a significant increase in the city\u2019s shelter population and force the city to build 70 new shelters.\u201d The city and state disagree on the numbers; city officials say the program costs $140 million annually, while the state says the cost is $103 million. The two also do not agree on what amount of financing the state is cutting. In an interview, Mr. Diamond said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo\u2019s proposed budget would kill the program. \u201cThe state budget decisions drive whether we will have Advantage next year,\u201d Mr. Diamond said. State officials pointed the finger right back. \u201cIn the midst of a serious budget process that affects the lives of all New Yorkers, it is counterproductive, disingenuous and dangerous to play games by announcing a so-called newly discovered crisis of the day,\u201d the governor\u2019s spokesman, Joshua Vlasto, said in a statement. \u201cThe reality is that, regardless of this year\u2019s anticipated cuts, New York City has the funds to support the continuation of this program if it so chooses.\u201d", "keyword": "Homeless Persons;Budgets and Budgeting;Housing and Real Estate;New York City;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0011618", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/02/22", "title": "H.P. Reports Decline in First-Quarter Revenue and Profit", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Hewlett-Packard may have gained running room, but it remains unclear if it can leap successfully to technology\u2019s new post-PC world. The world\u2019s largest maker of personal computers, printers, and computer servers has struggled for growth in a world increasingly full of smartphones, tablets and cloud computing services. Anchored in the traditional hardware, H.P. is challenged by new devices, which it does not make, and cutthroat competition in its old low-margin businesses, which is pressing margins. On Thursday, H.P. reported lower first-quarter revenue, profit and profit margins. Sales were down in all five of H.P.\u2019s major businesses, which also include software and services. Meg Whitman, the chief executive, declared in an interview after release of the results that \u201cthe patient showed improvement.\u201d She said that H.P. is building a number of consumer and business products, including new kinds of laptops and low-energy servers for cloud computing, that will renew the company. Positive sustained growth, however, is still a year away, Ms. Whitman said. \u201c2013 is \u2018fix and rebuild,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cAll of the pipe we laid in 2012, and will lay in 2013, will show up in 2014.\u201d Of smartphones, perhaps the biggest missing piece of H.P.\u2019s portfolio, she would say only: \u201cWe\u2019re still working on it.\u201d Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones, said: \u201cH.P. is trying to cut fat while restructuring. Cutting costs and investing at the same time is tough. It\u2019s a three- to five-year turnaround, probably, but the world isn\u2019t stopping for them.\u201d H.P. said net income fell 16 percent, to $1.23 billion, or 63 cents a share, from $1.47 billion, or 73 cents in the period a year earlier. Revenue fell 6 percent, to $28.36 billion. The results exceeded Wall Street expectations. Using the accounting methods preferred by analysts, H.P. reported net income of 82 cents a share, above the 71 cents a share predictions. Analysts also expected revenue of $27.8 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. Image Meg Whitman, H.P.\u2019s chief executive, said the company showed improvement that will be seen in new products next year. Credit Stephen Lam/Reuters H.P.\u2019s shares were up 5.85 percent in after-hours trading after the announcement. The stock had closed at $17.10, up 2.4 percent, in regular trading. For H.P. and others in high technology, many traditional categories no longer fit the realities of how people use their gear. Smartphones have not been considered part of the computer business, for example, but are commonly used not just to cruise around the Internet, but also to access personal and corporate data in the cloud. Servers were considered part of corporate computing, but ordinary people use them with every Google search and Facebook update. Tablets are used for gaming and watching videos streamed from the cloud, but also for dissecting corporate spreadsheets, often at the same time. On Thursday, the research group IDC acknowledged this new reality by releasing data on a \u201csmart connected device\u201d market, as opposed to a market of PCs and laptops. When smartphones and tablets were included along with PCs and laptops, IDC said, H.P. went from market leadership to fourth place, behind Samsung, Apple and Lenovo. Ms. Whitman acknowledged the changes, and said her company was responding. \u201cThe model is changing more rapidly than anyone thought,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re in a personal systems business. PCs and laptops are an important part, but so are tablets and smartphones.\u201d Last year, Ms. Whitman announced H.P. would lay off 29,000 employees over three years. About 15,300 of them are already gone, she said. She ascribed the company\u2019s better-than-expected performance to \u201coperational efficiencies\u201d that contributed to cash flow of $2.6 billion, a 115 percent improvement over a year earlier. Much of that cash, she said, is going into research and development for products, like data storage that works faster and cheaper by managing workloads across several machines, and printers that can scan and search the contents of documents. On Tuesday, Dell, H.P.\u2019s main American rival, said its first-quarter revenue fell 11 percent, to $14.3 billion, while net income was off 31 percent, to $530 million, or 30 cents a share. Michael Dell, Dell\u2019s founder, has proposed taking his company private, for about $24.4 billion, to focus on reorganizing Dell away from the eyes of Wall Street.", "keyword": "Hewlett-Packard;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Earnings Reports"}
{"id": "ny0160082", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/03/29", "title": "Years of Political Service vs. Some Ill-Timed Remarks", "abstract": "PATERSON, N.J. - SITTING at the back of a Lebanese restaurant in South Paterson in his crisp gray suit, cellphone incessantly beeping, Sami Merhi cites the Constitution, reflects on family, tells an immigrant's success story, muses ruefully about lessons learned. \"My grandfather told me this is the only place on earth where you will never feel a stranger,\" said the most famous almost-freeholder in Passaic County history. \"And I believe it.\" He says it in the present tense, though it's impossible to imagine the thought without a jagged edge. A week ago Mr. Merhi won a prize that loomed incredibly large to someone who immigrated from Lebanon 29 years ago: the endorsement by Democratic Party leaders as the party's nominee for Passaic County freeholder. Within days, he was being denounced as a terrorist sympathizer. (\"Defender of suicide bombers gets Dem nod in Passaic,\" ran the headline over an item in the widely read PoliticsNJ Web site last week.) A week later, after his candidacy became part of the parry and thrust in the United States Senate race and after his party's statewide leaders, Senator Robert Menendez and Gov. Jon S. Corzine, said they could not support it, the endorsement was rescinded. You can read two stories into the life of Sami Merhi. The first is told over 29 years in which he has prospered as a widely respected businessman and community leader. He is president of a local hospital, an energetic Democratic fund-raiser, a member of the Passaic County Counterterrorism Task Force. In this one, Mr. Merhi, 57, seems about as radical as a piece of pita bread. The second is told in a portion of a single day reported in The New York Times four years ago, when he made remarks that were, at the very least, politically insensitive and tin-eared about terrorism -- a topic on which no Arab-American can ever afford to hit a wrong note. Not surprisingly, the one day has obliterated the 29 years. Even his strongest supporter, United States Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., says Mr. Merhi made insensitive remarks and then failed to minimize the damage by undergoing the American political ritual of abject apology. But if Mr. Merhi falls short as a politician, he has succeeded as an educator -- the public lynching he has undergone over the past week or so has been a vivid lesson in how little margin for error an Arab politician has. \"This has gotten so far out of control I really can't believe it,\" said Harvey Sussman, who is Jewish and has been a friend and sometime business associate of Mr. Merhi. \"This is a peaceful, learned man. I've known him for 20 years, and I've never heard a single prejudiced remark. I wish he were in the U.N., because he's the kind of person who could get respect from both sides.\" MR. MERHI's problems date to remarks he made in April 2002 before and during a fund-raiser he organized for Mr. Pascrell. In them, while he condemned violence \"whether it's committed by a person, a group or a state,\" he spoke of the frustrations and feelings of despair that drive suicide bombers and of the need for both sides to listen to each other in the Middle East. Mr. Pascrell criticized the remarks the next day. And in the most problematic remark, after calling the 9/11 attackers \"coldblooded murderers,\" he was asked if that applied to suicide bombers. \"I can't see the comparison,\" he said. He said this week that because he lost a godson on 9/11 and his country was attacked, he was affected personally by one event, so that he couldn't compare it to the other. He said he wasn't minimizing the evil of suicide bombers and opposed all forms of terrorism. Friends tend to accept that explanation. Others accuse him of changing his story when it's convenient. (He was also accused of comparing Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler -- something others, not he, said at a rally the same day.) \"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them,\" Adlai E. Stevenson once said, and both thoughts apply to Mr. Merhi. Maybe he should have quickly eaten words capable of giving such offense. But friends, colleagues, fellow politicians, his local newspaper, people who know him, say his life shouldn't be reduced to those words, especially when they're small slivers of complex thoughts. (And, for what it's worth, the reporter who wrote the Times story in no way thought Mr. Merhi was defending suicide bombers). Mr. Merhi may be too radioactive at this point to have much hope, but he and other Arab leaders got to meet with Governor Corzine yesterday. Mr. Merhi says he still hopes, by one means or another, he'll end up a freeholder. Asked the realistic chances of that happening, he said, \"I pray.\" Our Towns E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com", "keyword": "PASSAIC COUNTY (NJ);MERHI SAMI;ARAB-AMERICANS;LEBANESE-AMERICANS;IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEES;ELECTION ISSUES;DISCRIMINATION;ELECTIONS;TERRORISM"}
{"id": "ny0204119", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/08/14", "title": "American Senator to Meet Myanmar Leader", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 An American senator is to meet with the leader of the junta in Myanmar this weekend, just days after the country\u2019s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi , was convicted and returned to house arrest in a case that has drawn international condemnation. The senator, Jim Webb , Democrat of Virginia, would be the highest-ranking American official to meet with the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, in at least a decade. Senior administration officials, speaking anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the trip, said Mr. Webb was traveling independently and \u201cnot carrying a message from the administration,\u201d although he was briefed by the State Department before he left. Officials described the visit as welcome and called it an opportunity to open lines of communication between the United States and Myanmar. As a military planner, journalist and novelist before joining the Senate, Mr. Webb has traveled extensively in the region. In the Senate, he is the chairman of a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee dealing with East Asian affairs. \u201cIt is important for the Burmese leadership to hear of the strong views of American political leaders about the path it should take toward democracy, good governance, and genuine national reconciliation,\u201d said Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council. \u201cSenator Webb can convey American views effectively on such subjects. The recent conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi, which was a serious step backward, indicates the magnitude of the challenge the international community faces in persuading the Burmese leadership to embark on that path.\u201d Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, was convicted Tuesday of violating the terms of her house arrest by allowing an American intruder to spend two nights at her home in early May. Her prison sentence of three years of hard labor was commuted to 18 months of house arrest. She has spent 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest. The intruder, John Yettaw , 53, of Falcon, Mo., was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. The United States, which maintains sanctions against the junta, criticized the conviction of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and called Mr. Yettaw\u2019s sentence \u201ccruel.\u201d Last week, former President Bill Clinton visited the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, and secured the release of two American journalists sentenced to 12 years at hard labor for entering the country illegally and \u201chostile acts.\u201d The United States has also called on Iran to free three Americans seized after they crossed the border from Iraqi Kurdistan while hiking at the end of July. President Obama came to office promising a new openness to engagement with Iran and other countries at odds with the United States, and his administration signaled the possibility of a less confrontational approach to the Burmese military government. \u201cImposing sanctions has not influenced the junta,\u201d Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in February. Mr. Webb landed in Laos on Thursday on the first leg of a two-week, five-nation tour. A statement on his Web site said that he was scheduled to meet over the weekend with \u201cleaders at the highest levels of the national government in Burma, including Senior Gen. Than Shwe.\u201d In the Laotian capital, Vientiane, he said, \u201cIt is vitally important that the United States re-engage with Southeast Asia at all levels,\u201d according to his office\u2019s press release . The same day, the European Union said it would add new sanctions against the country. Four members of Myanmar\u2019s judiciary \u2014 the prosecutor and the three judges who convicted Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi \u2014 will be added to a list of Myanmar officials subject to asset freezes and bans on travel to the member countries, a spokeswoman said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the details of the new sanctions will not be officially released until Friday. In addition, state-owned media associated with the junta will be newly subject to an asset freeze, the spokeswoman said, as will 58 other enterprises, 48 of which were already affected by a lesser ban on European investment.", "keyword": "Aung San Suu Kyi Daw;Myanmar;Webb James H Jr;Shwe Than"}
{"id": "ny0108602", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/05/11", "title": "A Pioneering Army Sergeant Fights to Keep Her Job", "abstract": "COLUMBIA, S.C. \u2014 When Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King was named the first female commandant of the Army\u2019s elite drill sergeant school in 2009, proponents of gender equality in the military hailed the news as a watershed. But it did not take long for the grumbling to start. Students who flunked out of the school complained that she set unfair standards. Some of her own instructors said she rigidly enforced old-fashioned rules. Traditionalists across the service asked: how could a woman with no experience in combat manage the Army\u2019s only school for training the trainers who prepare recruits for war? She says she tried to ignore the criticism, but her superiors did not. Last November, they suspended Sergeant Major King , forbidding contact with students or staff and opening an investigation into what they called the \u201ctoxic\u201d environment at the school. As that review dragged on, she says she felt like a criminal: isolated, publicly humiliated and so despondent that friends worried that she might hurt herself. Last week she decided to fight back, filing a complaint with the Army asserting that her male supervisors had mistreated her because she is a woman, and asking for a Congressional investigation. Four days later, the Army reinstated her , saying that the accusations against her \u2014 including that she had abused her power \u2014 could not be substantiated. Now, just a week from the scheduled end of her tour as commandant of the school, located here at Fort Jackson, and three months from mandatory retirement, Sergeant Major King, 50, is making clear that she is not ready to go quietly. In an interview this week, she described what she says was a yearlong campaign by two superiors \u2014 a command sergeant major based in Virginia and his boss, a major general \u2014 to undermine her authority and encourage her drill instructors to turn against her. \u201cThe Army was my life,\u201d she said. \u201cThese leaders, they almost destroyed me.\u201d Sergeant Major King\u2019s direct supervisor, Command Sgt. Maj. John R. Calpena, was traveling on Thursday and was not available for comment. Maj. Gen. Richard C. Longo, the former head of Initial Military Training for the Army, now deployed to Afghanistan, declined to be interviewed, citing Sergeant Major King\u2019s legal action, known as an Article 138 complaint. To her supporters, Sergeant Major King\u2019s case underscores how difficult it remains for even the toughest of women to ascend into high-profile jobs in the Army, where combat experience remains the essential currency. Because women cannot serve in combat, they are automatically handicapped in establishing their leadership bona fides, her supporters say. Her critics assert that Sergeant Major King, who spent the last decade mainly in training jobs on domestic bases, should at least have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan with a noncombat support unit. But she argues that if she had, she would not have gained much experience useful to training drill sergeants. \u201cAt the schoolhouse, you\u2019re training in doctrine,\u201d she said. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to go to combat to teach a sergeant how to transform a civilian into a soldier.\u201d \u201cWe certainly have a lot of work to do\u201d to integrate women into high-ranking jobs, she continued. \u201cLook at how I was treated. In public, in the open.\u201d Small, wiry and intense, Sergeant Major King does not seem the type to shout discrimination easily. The daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper, with 31 years in uniform, she thrived like few other women in the Army, earning top scores in fitness tests and evaluations, and becoming an unabashed expert in the minutia of Army regulations. Divorced and without children, she called the Army her family, and bore her nickname, No Slack, proudly. As commandant, Sergeant Major King recruited high-performing drill sergeants from training bases like Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., to be teachers at Fort Jackson, then oversaw the rigorous 10-week course that produces new drill sergeants. In her first months, she was pushed by her commander then, Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, to methodically enforce basic standards on everything from body fat to rifle handling, which he felt had declined. She ordered her staff to reject candidates who were even slightly overweight or unfit and to reprimand instructors for infractions like discourteous behavior and wearing their hair too long. The failure rate for drill-instructor recruits rose. \u201cWe were trying to maintain very high standards,\u201d General Hertling said in an interview. \u201cI think she did a very good job.\u201d But as soon as General Hertling transferred to become head of Army forces in Europe in early 2011, things changed. \u201cIt was like a duck hunt,\u201d said Sgt. Maj. Robert Maggard, Sergeant Major King\u2019s deputy and staunchest supporter. Once treated as an equal to brigade commanders, Sergeant Major King was no longer invited to meetings regarding the school. In his first visit, General Longo told her, \u201cI\u2019ve been hearing bad things about you,\u201d she said. In a subsequent visit, he had an aide tell her to avoid the cafeteria while the general dined there. In a visit last September, Sergeant Major Calpena delivered a blistering critique of Sergeant Major King\u2019s tenure, she said, telling the staff she had been overly doctrinaire and by-the-book. She said she once even overheard Sergeant Major Calpena urging a disgruntled sergeant to file a complaint against her. \u201cI was working 16-, 18-hour days, and Sergeant Major Calpena was running around, trying to get me relieved, sabotaging me,\u201d she said. Sergeant Major Calpena, an Army Ranger with multiple combat deployments, announced her suspension last November in a stormy private meeting in her office. \u201cHe came in swinging,\u201d she said, telling her she was deeply unpopular among her peers because of her unyielding style and lack of front-line experience. Cut off from her friends and students, she said, the holiday season was almost unbearable. \u201cIf I had just quit, I knew that I could possibly die. Because those were very dark days,\u201d she said. \u201cThe drill sergeant school was all I had.\u201d Sergeant Major Maggard\u2019s wife, Barbara, would call just to hear her voice, then hang up when she answered, not speaking because of the no-contact order. On Christmas, she left presents on Sergeant Major King\u2019s porch. In March, General Longo\u2019s office sent a redacted version of its investigation, which contained complaints from eight sergeants, all of whom had faced disciplinary action, according to her lawyer, James E. Smith, a state legislator and member of the Army National Guard. Two later rescinded their complaints, he said. \u201cIf she had been a man, this would not have happened,\u201d he said, noting that several recent male commandants have not had combat experience but did not face such complaints. Sergeant Major King gathered support statements from more than 45 soldiers, but no action was taken on her response until she filed the complaint. She is now asking to remain commandant for six additional months \u2014 the period she was under suspension. She also wants to stay in the Army beyond her mandatory retirement date in August. Her command has said she will be replaced on schedule, May 17. But she has implored South Carolina\u2019s Congressional delegation to intervene. \u201cIf I leave next week, where do I go?\u201d she asked. \u201cI had a family in the Army.\u201d", "keyword": "United States Army;King Teresa L;Women and Girls;Discrimination;Fort Jackson (SC);United States Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0150725", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/05", "title": "Bubble Question Frames Design for Olympic Aquatics Center", "abstract": "It is not often that a 19th-century scientist plays a central role in 21st-century architecture, but the new Beijing National Aquatics Center is no ordinary building. With a steel framework of seemingly random polyhedrons covered in soft plastic pillows, the center, known as the Water Cube and home to the swimming and diving events at the Olympics beginning this week, \u201creally looks like nothing else in the world,\u201d said Tristram Carfrae, the structural engineer who designed it. \u201cIt\u2019s a box made of bubbles.\u201d That\u2019s an appropriate image, for the inspiration for Mr. Carfrae\u2019s design originated with a problem about aggregations of bubbles \u2014 in other words, foams \u2014 posed by the great British physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. Lord Kelvin studied foams to try to understand the \u201cether,\u201d the medium through which he and others thought light propagated. In his work he wondered what would be the most efficient foam \u2014 how space could be partitioned into cells of equal volume that would have the least surface area. True bubbles were not the answer, of course, because there would be gaps between the spheres. The answer Kelvin came up with used 14-sided polyhedrons. Kelvin conjectured that his solution was the best possible one, although he offered no mathematical proof. And for more than a century, physicists and mathematicians tried without success to devise a solution using polyhedrons of less surface area. Then in 1993, Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan, physicists at Trinity College Dublin, answered the problem using two polyhedrons, one of 14 sides and one of 12, that nest together in groups of eight. Their computations showed that it had about 0.3 percent less surface area than Lord Kelvin\u2019s solution \u2014 the equivalent of beating him by a mile. It is this Weaire-Phelan structure that Mr. Carfrae used as the basis for the Water Cube. But it is not as if Mr. Carfrae had dabbled in foam physics and had been aware of the Kelvin problem. \u201cI knew nothing of this area at all,\u201d confessed Mr. Carfrae, a principal with the firm Arup. \u201cBut from an architectural perspective we were very keen to end up with a building that had some connection with water.\u201d So in the course of researching waves, icebergs, mists and the like, he came across foams and, ultimately, Weaire and Phelan\u2019s work. \u201cIt was not like anything I\u2019d seen before in the world of structural engineering,\u201d Mr. Carfrae said. There was no guarantee that it would make a good structure for a building, though, so it took much computer analysis to determine how it would work. And it took the labor-intensive Chinese construction industry to fabricate the structure from more than 22,000 steel beams. Just as Mr. Carfrae was not specifically looking for the Weaire-Phelan structure when he found it, Weaire and Phelan were not looking to solve the Kelvin problem when they did, said Dr. Weaire, now an emeritus professor at the university. \u201cThat would not have been a very fruitful thing to do to advance one\u2019s career,\u201d he said. So, as Dr. Weaire put it, they were \u201cplaying around on the fringes\u201d of the problem, looking at alternative structures as part of what for Dr. Weaire was a career-long investigation into the science of foams. In their work they were aware of clathrates, naturally occurring cagelike clusters of atoms that trap other atoms within them. So, using what was then new software developed by Kenneth A. Brakke at Susquehanna University, they decided to evaluate clathrate structures in relation to the Kelvin problem, Dr. Weaire said. They were stunned to discover that one particular structure, when translated into polyhedrons and run through the software, had lower surface area than Kelvin\u2019s solution. \u201cIt was a bit like a hole in one in golf,\u201d Dr. Weaire said. \u201cFrom a crystallographer\u2019s point of view this structure wasn\u2019t new,\u201d he added. But using it to beat Kelvin\u2019s solution was. Dr. Weaire is not a mathematician, and though he tediously created actual foams one bubble at a time to try to show that his structure was the definitive solution, he could not prove it. In fact, said Thomas C. Hales, a mathematician at the University of Pittsburgh, a proof of the Kelvin problem will probably not come for years. Dr. Hales should know. In 1998 he proved a similar problem, the so-called Kepler conjecture, on the close packing of spheres, or, put more informally, the best way to pack balls in a box. \u201cThe Kepler problem sounds very easy,\u201d Dr. Hales said. \u201cBut that proof relied on computers, it was 300 pages long, and used 40,000 lines of custom computer code.\u201d The Kelvin problem is far more complex. \u201cThe problem is to show that this is the very best of all possibilities,\u201d he said, \u201cand the possibilities are mind boggling.\u201d Given the enormous computing resources that would be required to solve it, some scientists say a proof will not come for a century. In the meantime, the Weaire-Phelan solution is doing just fine in Mr. Carfrae\u2019s building. It turns out that the structure is very flexible and thus efficient at absorbing seismic energy, which is good given China\u2019s history of earthquakes. Mr. Carfrae\u2019s major modification was to use a diagonal section through the Weaire-Phelan structure, as if cutting through a block of foam at a 60-degree angle, rather than adopting the structure straight-on. It is that decision that most impressed Dr. Weaire. \u201cThat\u2019s what gives it its random appearance,\u201d he said. \u201cOnly if you look carefully do you see that it\u2019s a repeating pattern. \u201cThat was just the masterstroke,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019d love to think that I suggested that to him, but he did that entirely on his own.\u201d", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2008);Buildings (Structures);Beijing National Aquatics Center;Science and Technology;Physics;Foam;Beijing (China)"}
{"id": "ny0146596", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2008/07/28", "title": "Worried Banks Sharply Reduce Business Loans", "abstract": "Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring. Two vital forms of credit used by companies \u2014 commercial and industrial loans from banks, and short-term \u201ccommercial paper\u201d not backed by collateral \u2014 collectively dropped almost 3 percent over the last year, to $3.27 trillion from $3.36 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. That is the largest annual decline since the credit tightening that began with the last recession, in 2001. The scarcity of credit has intensified the strains on the economy by withholding capital from many companies, just as joblessness grows and consumers pull back from spending in the face of high gas prices, plummeting home values and mounting debt. \u201cThe second half of the year is shot,\u201d said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the trading firm MKM Partners in Greenwich, Conn., who was until recently optimistic that the economy would continue expanding. \u201cAccess to capital and credit is essential to growth. If that access is restrained or blocked, the economic system takes a hit.\u201d Companies that rely on credit are now delaying and canceling expansion plans as they struggle to secure finance. Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, figured it would be easy to get a $300,000 bank loan to finance a new robot for his factory in Baltimore. His company, which makes parts for makers of home appliances, is growing and profitable, he said. His expansion would add three new jobs to an economy hungry for work. But when Mr. Greenblatt called the local branch of Wachovia \u2014 the same bank that had been aggressively marketing loans to him for years \u2014 he was distressed by the response. \u201cThe exact words were, \u2018We\u2019re saying no to almost everybody,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Greenblatt recalled. \u201cThis is why God made banks, for this kind of transaction. This is going to slow down the American economy.\u201d Earlier this year, credit extended by banks to companies and consumers was still growing at double-digit rates compared with three months earlier, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Goldman Sachs. By mid-June, bank credit was declining at an annualized pace of more than 6 percent. That is a drop of nearly $150 billion, an amount much larger than the value of the tax rebates the government has sent to households this year in an effort to spur economic activity. Financial industry executives say tighter credit from major banks represents a swing back to a realistic assessment of risk, after years of handing out money with abandon. Those practices produced a mortgage crisis whose losses could reach $1 trillion, by many estimates. \u201cBefore, they wouldn\u2019t verify income and they were loose on the valuations of collateral,\u201d said John W. Kiefer, chief executive of First Capital, a private commercial lender. \u201cNow they\u2019re tightening down on the ability to repay. They go off the reservation, and now they come back to basics. It\u2019s preservation for many of them at this point. It\u2019s survival.\u201d But if the newfound caution of American banks is prudent in the long run, the immediate impact is amplifying the troubles with the economy. The Federal Reserve has been lowering interest rates aggressively to make money flow more loosely and to spur economic activity. The financial system is not going along: As banks hold on to their dollars, mortgage rates are climbing. So are borrowing costs for corporations. Some suggest that the banks, spooked by enormous losses, have replaced a disastrously indiscriminate willingness to hand out money with an equally arbitrary aversion to lend \u2014 even on industries that continue to grow. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of disruption in the credit market, and a lot of traditional lenders have really tightened up,\u201d said Gregory Goldstein, president of Macquarie Equipment Finance, which leases computer gear and other technology to companies. \u201cBefore, some of the standards they lent on were weak, but we think they have overshot and gone too far on the other end.\u201d Such was Mr. Greenblatt\u2019s reaction, as he learned that an infusion of credit for his Baltimore factory would not come easily. His company has been enjoying double-digit sales growth. This month, it received the two largest orders in its history, he said. \u201cIt was jubilation,\u201d he said. \u201cI was doing the Funky Chicken.\u201d The initial call to Wachovia left him dismayed. \u201cI\u2019m stunned,\u201d Mr. Greenblatt said. \u201cGod is smiling on this factory. We\u2019re at such an exciting inflection point, and this is what a bank is supposed to do. There\u2019s sand in the gears.\u201d No loan meant one fewer order for the factory in Chicago that makes the robot Mr. Greenblatt wants to buy, and fewer hours for workers there. It meant less business for the truck driver who would have hauled the robot to Baltimore, and no help-wanted ads for Marlin Steel Wire Products. Mr. Greenblatt eventually got oral approval for the loan, though after more than a week. He was still waiting for the money at the end of last week. Wachovia, which lost $8.9 billion in the second quarter, declined to discuss the loan. But the bank confirmed that it has been reducing its lending in troubled areas of the economy. \u201cWe\u2019ve got industries that we consider to be stressed industries, and we\u2019re looking at those a lot harder,\u201d said Carlos Evans, a wholesale banking executive for Wachovia, listing as examples housing construction, building products and distributors for those goods. \u201cOur loan growth slowing is more indicative of the economy than anything else.\u201d Still, Wachovia\u2019s commercial and industrial loans grew by 13 percent in June compared with the prior year, Mr. Evans said. \u201cWe\u2019re saying yes daily,\u201d he said. But recent signs suggest that tight lending is spilling from housing into other areas of the business world. Companies with solid credit and profitable businesses can generally still get loans, but rates are higher and wait times are longer. According to a survey of senior loan officers conducted by the Federal Reserve in April, 55 percent of American banks tightened lending requirements for commercial and industrial loans to large and midsize companies \u2014 up from about 30 percent in the previous survey, in January. About 70 percent of the respondents said they have made such loans more expensive. \u201cBanks will be much more cautious and keep raising the bar, and that will lead to an outright decline in total commercial and industrial loans,\u201d predicted Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. \u201cBanks clearly have to rebuild their capital base. They\u2019re going to look a bit more nervously before they make those loans.\u201d Until last summer, banks lent freely, banking experts say, because they sold most of the loans they issued, making them less concerned about whether the customer could handle the payments: If the loan went bad, that was someone else\u2019s problem. But in the wake of the mortgage crisis, that system has all but shut down. Banks are now stuck with the loans they extend, making them more motivated to scrutinize their customers, particularly younger and smaller businesses. \u201cIt\u2019s the small business guy who creates most of the jobs,\u201d said Mr. Kiefer, the First Capital chief executive. \u201cIf they can\u2019t borrow to employ people, then we\u2019ve got a mess on our hands.\u201d For the last six months, Saul Epstein has been trying in vain to get a $2 million line of credit for his company, Global Harness Systems. The company, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., has a factory in Mexico, where it makes parts for engines. The factory gets paid for its wares weeks after they have shipped, necessitating credit to finance the upfront costs of production \u2014 raw materials, labor and transportation. Mr. Epstein figured that getting a loan would be easy. Since he became chief executive last year, Global Harness has gone from break-even to profitable. Sales should reach $20 million this year, up from $17 million last year, he said. But in this new era of caution, banks are focused on the fact that Global Harness lost money in 2005. \u201cThey keep saying, the way the times are, we need a longer track record,\u201d Mr. Epstein said. Mr. Epstein, forced to limit his production to what he can finance with his existing cash flow supplemented by his own money, has been tightening credit himself: He has been turning down orders from companies with any whiff of financial troubles, lest his company fail to get paid. \u201cThe same way the bank is hesitant to lend to me, you\u2019re concerned about taking on a customer that might go into bankruptcy,\u201d he said. George Rosero, president and chief executive of Atlanta Pediatric Therapy, has been trying for more than a month to increase his roughly $500,000 credit line to about $1 million. His company, profitable for the last two years, offers therapy to children with speech and physical impediments, he said. Mr. Rosero aims to expand by adding four sales people. He wants to buy new software to better manage communications with patients and hire a consultant to improve the work environment. All of that is on hold. \u201cThree or four years ago, I could just make a phone call and get an increase,\u201d Mr. Rosero said. \u201cNow, they\u2019re asking me for a lot more information.\u201d", "keyword": "Banks and Banking;Credit;Economic Conditions and Trends;Finances;Small Business;Economics"}
{"id": "ny0127835", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/06/03", "title": "On Sundays, Ramon A. Dominguez Races to Win, but Avoids Doughnuts", "abstract": "Ramon A. Dominguez is in an elite class of horse whisperers: his gift for guiding thoroughbreds across the finish line brought him the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Jockey in 2010 and again in 2011, when his mounts earned almost $20 million, tops in the nation. He won the 2011 Breeders\u2019 Cup Juvenile aboard Hansen, the Pegasus-like stallion that was also his 2012 Kentucky Derby mount; but his horse for the June 9 Belmont Stakes was withdrawn. Tall for his trade at 5-foot-6, Mr. Dominguez, 35, who was born in Venezuela, lives in Floral Park, N.Y., with his wife, Sharon; their sons, Alex, 7, and Matthew, 5; and their dog, Lucy. He also owns a 14-acre horse farm near Elkton, Md. Sunday is a race day, but afterward, he indulges in a normal Sunday dinner. Monday and Tuesday are off days, with no weigh-ins. DOUGHNUT RUN I wake up around 6, make a cup of green tea, and if I\u2019ve won a race the previous day, I call the Dunkin\u2019 Donuts next to Belmont, put in an order and pick it up on my way to the barns. It\u2019s a kind of tradition for winning jockeys to buy doughnuts for the grooms and people who work in the barns; usually your agent does it, but I prefer doing it myself. I get three dozen for each barn where I rode a winner. If I won three races, we\u2019re talking nine dozen! ONE FOR THE JOCKEY? No way; I don\u2019t eat doughnuts. EQUINE EXERCISE Sunday mornings are usually pretty quiet, but I might have a couple trainers who want me to exercise their horses, so I\u2019ll do that, and by the time I get home, the kids are up and having breakfast with my wife. I have a piece of toast with them or maybe some granola, but just dry, no milk. I hang out with the kids and then head back to the track, to the jockeys\u2019 room. We live really close; I almost feel like I live at the track. HANDICAP AND SWEAT The first thing I do is get on the scale and check my weight, then look at the scratches, and if I\u2019m riding a horse I don\u2019t know well, go on the computer and watch the replay of their latest race to get a sense of how they like to go. Then I put my plastic suit on over my sweats and go for a two-mile run. That\u2019s usually far enough. I run the turf course, or if the weather is bad, stay inside on the treadmill. I get a program and handicap every single race while I sweat. Then I go check my weight again, take a shower and put on my silks. WARDROBE COORDINATOR My valet picks up all the silks and matching helmets I need, so they\u2019re arranged in the order that I\u2019m going to ride. Time goes by really fast between races. You come into the jockey room, watch the replay, change silks, and before you know it, it\u2019s time to get back on. WATER BREAK I drink sparkling water between races. All the jockeys take this vitamin, Emergen-C . I\u2019ll eat a piece of fruit if there\u2019s time. FOOD, NOT DRINK On Sunday I actually get to eat more than any other day: steak, meatballs, whatever I want. We go nearby to Park Place , or if it\u2019s up to the kids, we go to the Cheesecake Factory . I love their chicken salad tostada; I might even have a bite of cheesecake. I drink no alcohol ever. As a jockey, you\u2019re fighting always with your weight. If we stay home, I\u2019ll grill steak or chicken. AFTER DINNER We might take a bike ride or go to a movie; the last one we saw was \u201cHugo.\u201d Or I just go in the living room and play Legos and watch cartoons with the kids. We try to get them in bed by 9. By 10 or 10:30, we\u2019re out, too.", "keyword": "Horse Racing;Jockeys Drivers and Trainers;Queens (NYC);Dominguez Ramon A"}
{"id": "ny0043242", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2014/05/08", "title": "U.S. Awards 3 Wind Power Grants", "abstract": "The long-promised potential of offshore wind development along American coastlines took a step toward fruition on Wednesday as the Department of Energy pledged up to $47 million each to three projects it previously supported. The grants are intended to help the projects, off the coasts of New Jersey, Oregon and Virginia, begin delivering electricity by 2017. \u201cOffshore wind offers a large, untapped energy resource for the United States that can create thousands of manufacturing, construction and supply chain jobs across the country and drive billions of dollars in local economic investment,\u201d Ernest J. Moniz, the energy secretary, said in a statement. The announcement represents the next phase of an Energy Department push to invigorate the industry by promoting innovation to help bring the cost of offshore wind power into line with that of conventional electricity production. It came on the same day that Siemens said it would move the headquarters of its power-generating operations to the United States, not only to capitalize on the booming oil and gas industries but also with an eye on the potential growth of the offshore wind industry. Far more advanced in Europe, the harnessing of offshore wind has yet to take root in the United States. It has been stymied by engineering, permitting and financing challenges, as well as political and community opposition in some corners. Near the end of 2012, the Energy Department announced that it would make $4 million grants to seven demonstration projects, which were working through their engineering, site evaluation and planning stages. Of those, Fishermen\u2019s Energy, a venture to bring five turbines of five megawatts each to the waters near Atlantic City; Principle Power, which seeks to install five six-megawatt turbines off the coast of Coos Bay, Ore.; and Dominion Virginia Power, which hopes to put two six-megawatt turbines off the shores of Virginia Beach, won the larger grants. The department is also working with two other projects \u2014 one planned for Maine near Monhegan Island and the other for Lake Erie \u2014 to further develop their technologies. Getting an Energy Department grant to develop a new technology can be helpful but is certainly no guarantee of success. The department tries to pick the applications most likely to succeed, but sometimes it picks wrong. In November 2012, the department selected Babcock and Wilcox , a well-established nuclear technology company, to develop a small reactor that could be built in a factory and delivered by truck or barge. The department offered a dollar-for-dollar cost match that could have reached over $200 million. But this year the company backed off on the technology and began laying off workers. The other recipient of money for small reactor work was NuScale Power, of Corvallis, Ore., which received $226 million in December 2013 and is moving forward with developing a small reactor.", "keyword": "Wind power;Energy industry;Energy Department;Electric power"}
{"id": "ny0255474", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/09/30", "title": "Cromartie\u2019s Ribs Hurt, but His Pride Is Fine", "abstract": "FLORHAM PARK, N.J. \u2014 Four days after a loss in which he was penalized four times, fumbled away a kickoff and bruised his ribs and a lung \u2014 all in the span of 3 hours 18 minutes \u2014 Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie was back at practice, not rattled at all. Cromartie said he would wear \u201csome stuff\u201d to protect his battered torso in the Jets\u2019 game Sunday night at Baltimore. He said he planned to adjust his playing style to cut back on the holding and interference penalties that plagued him in last Sunday\u2019s 34-24 loss to Oakland. Otherwise, he was the same old Cromartie. He was asked after participating fully in practice Thursday if the trip home from Oakland was long, considering that he had been hurt, that he performed poorly and that the Jets lost. Cromartie said he slept well. So much for agonizing over the defeat. \u201cLast week is last week,\u201d Cromartie said. About an hour earlier, Coach Rex Ryan said of Cromartie: \u201cLast week, obviously, he had a tough week, like we all did. Maybe it wasn\u2019t his best. But the one thing I liked about it was that he never flinched. He stayed aggressive.\u201d The Raiders tossed around the Jets\u2019 defense, amassing 383 yards. The Jets tumbled to 31st in the N.F.L. in rushing defense after, allowing 234 yards to the Raiders. They are giving up 136.7 yards rushing per game, a lot more than the 82 they average on offense. Even as the Jets prepared to stop a Ravens team that features the elusive and multitalented Ray Rice, the former Rutgers star, Ryan was having trouble being next-to-last (above only the St. Louis Rams) in a critical defensive statistical category. \u201cMost other coordinators have been there before and I have not,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cIt definitely bothers me.\u201d There has been a lot for the Jets\u2019 defense to clean up this week as they prepare for the Ravens (2-1), a opponent that believes in using blunt force on both sides of the ball, much as the Jets do. \u201cYou can\u2019t have a letdown after last week,\u201d Jets safety Eric Smith said. Asked if he still tasted the bile from the loss to the Raiders, even on Thursday, Jets nose tackle Sione Pouha thought for a moment, then said: \u201cA little bit. Personally, I do. I use it more for fuel to fill the engine, not to burn down the house. They did something right, we did something wrong, but that was last Sunday. This defense will stand the test of time.\u201d Cromartie, held out of practice Wednesday, could not get back to the field quickly enough. He said he had no problem breathing. He said he was injured tackling Oakland wide receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey on a third-down play in the fourth quarter. \u201cI changed the way I hit, because I didn\u2019t want to get a fine,\u201d Cromartie said. Both he and Ryan said Cromartie would alter the way he used his hands. Cromartie is 6 feet 2 inches, comparatively tall for a cornerback (Darrelle Revis is 5-11) and taller than most of the receivers he covers. His hands tend to be higher as he locks on to a receiver, Ryan said. \u201cWe need him to be more consistent,\u201d the defensive coordinator Mike Pettine said of Cromartie, who had two interceptions a week earlier against Jacksonville. \u201cWe don\u2019t need the great game, and then all the sudden it\u2019s a clunker the next week. We need to get him to the point where we can be a little bit more middle of the road with him where he\u2019s just solid.\u201d Cromartie was called for a 23-yard pass-interference penalty on the Raiders\u2019 first drive, which ended with a touchdown. He was flagged for two defensive-holding penalties on consecutive drives in the second quarter. He had a pass-interference penalty in the third quarter. He also fumbled the kickoff after Oakland took a 24-17 lead, a turnover that led to a Raiders touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter. Cromartie dropped the ball, then kicked it away while trying to pick it up, instead of falling on it. \u201cHe compounded the mistake, and I wish he wouldn\u2019t have done that,\u201d the special teams coach Mike Westhoff said. Cromartie said that the Jets would not face another kicker like Oakland\u2019s Sebastian Janikowski again and that he was still willing to return kickoffs if Ryan wanted him to. Ryan had said he was not so sure. \u201cHe\u2019s not going to return kickoffs \u2014 there\u2019s no chance,\u201d Ryan said. He then paused. \u201cUnless we need him to,\u201d Ryan said, arching his eyebrow and drawing laughs. Last week might as well be last century to Cromartie. He was asked about the prospect of covering the Ravens rookie receiver Torrey Smith, who had five catches for 152 yards and scored three touchdowns last Sunday in a 37-7 victory over St. Louis. \u201cHe had one big game,\u201d Cromartie said, scoffing. \u201cI don\u2019t care who I play, to be honest with you. My job is to shut down that receiver.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;New York Jets;Cromartie Antonio;Ryan Rex;Oakland Raiders;Baltimore Ravens"}
{"id": "ny0256548", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2011/08/31", "title": "Ernests Gulbis Forgoes Partying Well for Playing Well", "abstract": "Tuesday was Ernests Gulbis\u2019s 23rd birthday, an occasion he commemorated with a commanding 6-2, 6-4, 6-4 upset of Mikhail Youzhny, the 16th seed at this year\u2019s United States Open and a singles semifinalist a year ago. It was the first Grand Slam match victory in more than two years for Gulbis, a first-rate moneyed player from Latvia frequently undone by a second-rate everyday work ethic. Asked what he would do to celebrate his birthday Tuesday night, Gulbis hastily answered: \u201cI will go to sleep as fast as I can. No celebration. I\u2019ve had enough celebrations in my life.\u201d One of the tennis world\u2019s unabashed partiers, equally notorious for on-court tantrums that left rackets in cracked pieces as he was for visiting nightclubs until the crack of dawn, Gulbis has turned over a new leaf. In late July, Gulbis defeated Mardy Fish in the final of the Farmers Classic in Los Angeles . On Tuesday, he thoroughly outplayed the established Youzhny. Should he keep winning, Gulbis, ranked 53rd, would not face another seeded player until the fourth round, where Rafael Nadal , among other possibilities, would await him. \u201cI\u2019ve done all the possible wrong things that you can do in a tennis career,\u201d Gulbis said. \u201cBut I\u2019m very happy I made the mistakes that I did. That\u2019s important to understand. They were my mistakes, not others\u2019, and I learned from them. \u201cThe mistakes are simple. After playing a good tournament, you get a week off. You can spend that week the right way, going for a one-hour run each day or going to the gym. Or you can do nothing like I did. You eat and drink whatever you want and not sleep at night. After that one week, maybe at 17 you don\u2019t feel it. At 22 years old, you start to feel it. And you don\u2019t play so well.\u201d A scion of a wealthy family, Gulbis has been cast in the image of international playboy turned tennis professional for several years, a representation he has not contested. After being defeated by Nadal in the semifinals of the Rome Masters last year, he told stories of jetting home to Riga , the Latvian capital, arriving at 1 a.m. and heading right to a club with friends. In fact, he has so many friends in Riga, he frequently avoids going there during tennis season. \u201cMy friends like to keep me out all night,\u201d he said. In 2009, Gulbis spent a night in a Stockholm jail for what he called a misunderstanding. After paying a small fine, he was released in time to play in the Stockholm Open. Still, the affable, malleable Gulbis came out smiling. \u201cIt was a fun experience,\u201d he said the next day. \u201cI think everybody should spend one night in prison. You see a lot of things.\u201d Gulbis may have been destined to live the fully explored life; his book-collecting parents named him after Ernest Hemingway . Gulbis\u2019s father, Ainars, is an investment banker who has occasionally lent his private jet to his son to minimize tournament travel times. His mother, Milena, is an actress. One grandfather played basketball for the Soviet Union, another was a film director. \u201cI do not play tennis for the money, but I do need to work,\u201d Gulbis said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to live off others.\u201d Gulbis said there was no single turning point when he decided to improve his off-the-court discipline and commitment to train, but it appears to have coincided with the hiring of the former Argentine tennis pro Guillermo Ca\u00f1as as his coach this summer. Ca\u00f1as, 33, was known for his fitness regimen and relentlessness during his playing days. The carefree Gulbis has now been paired with a grinder. Ca\u00f1as also comes with a past, having been barred for 15 months after a doping test found traces of a diuretic, a banned substance. Ca\u00f1as blamed a cold medication. Asked if he worried about his coach\u2019s history, Gulbis said: \u201cI also have a bad reputation, so we are suited for each other. I never care what somebody says about somebody. I don\u2019t care.\u201d Gulbis credited Ca\u00f1as with getting him in shape for the Open with three devoted weeks of training in Miami. \u201cHe is hard-working and systematic,\u201d Gulbis said of Ca\u00f1as. \u201cIt is not complex. We practice well, and if you do that every day, you will improve. It helps you mentally as well. You feel more prepared.\u201d While Gulbis has occasionally been a racket-smashing machine \u2014 he once broke more than 70 in a year of competition \u2014 on Tuesday, he was composed and poised throughout his match. Then again, not much went wrong. With 14 aces and 77 percent of first serve points won, Gulbis controlled the match\u2019s rhythm and pace from beginning to end. The experienced Youzhny appeared exasperated, as if waiting for the erratic Gulbis to resurface. But even a leg cramp just before the final game could not derail Gulbis. \u201cI was relaxed, not nervous at all,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m very comfortable here right now. I like New York. It breathes life. There is so much action.\u201d But he has no immediate plans to wade into the action. Wearing a faded T-shirt and tattered Yankees cap, Gulbis hardly appeared headed anywhere glamorous Tuesday night. And where did this sophisticated Baltic tennis star get his frayed Yankees cap? \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Gulbis answered. \u201cI bought it because it was cheap.\u201d", "keyword": "US Open Golf;Tennis;Latvia;Ernests Gulbis"}
{"id": "ny0011349", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/02/12", "title": "Catholics React With Shock, Sympathy and Muted Criticism", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 From his native Bavaria to the farthest corners of the earth he touched during his papacy, the Roman Catholic world greeted the news of Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s departure Monday with surprise, concern for his health and more than a little understanding that an 85-year-old man no longer had the strength to lead a global flock of one billion faithful. The news that the pontiff would step down earned an immediate outpouring of tributes matched only by speculation about his health, about his future and that of a church in transition. Perhaps nowhere outside of the Vatican was it bigger news than Germany, where even non-Catholics took inordinate pride in their countryman\u2019s leading the Roman Catholic Church. The Web site of the newspaper Bild, which famously declared \u201cWe Are Pope\u201d nearly eight years ago when Benedict was elected, ran an enormous headline that read \u201cOur German Pope Benedict Steps Down,\u201d followed by his entire statement in German on a slightly mottled brown background, as if it were old parchment. Image Pilgrims prayed in front of Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Monday. The news that Pope Benedict XVI would resign drew an immediate outpouring of tributes. Credit Giampiero Sposito/Reuters Chancellor Angela Merkel recalled the pride that Germans felt to see one of their own elected by his fellow cardinals but also expressed understanding that he could not continue. \u201cIn our age of ever longer lives, many people will also be able to understand how the Pope must deal with the burdens of aging,\u201d Ms. Merkel said. Relatives, friends, church colleagues and lay Catholics around the world were shocked by the suddenness of the decision to hand over the reins of the Vatican to a successor while he was still alive. \u201cIt came as a bolt out of the blue,\u201d said Tadeusz Goclowski, the archbishop emeritus of Gdansk in northern Poland, speaking on Polsat News television. At first blush the criticism was muted for a pope with a controversial term, marred by child-abuse scandals and growing discord over conservative stances on issues like divorce and women in the clergy. Hans K\u00fcng, a leading critic of the pope, called his decision to step down \u201cunderstandable for many reasons,\u201d according to the German news agency DPA, but added that so many conservative cardinals had been named during his tenure it would be difficult to find someone \u201cwho could lead the church out of its multifaceted crisis.\u201d Image Pope Benedict XVI blessing members of the Order of the Knights of Malta at the Vatican on Saturday. Credit Samantha Zucchi Insidefoto/European Pressphoto Agency \u201cNo pope before him made more strides to improve the relationship with the Jews \u2014 on so many levels,\u201d said Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress who met with Benedict on three occasions at the Vatican, in a statement on Monday. Though they did not agree on everything, Mr. Lauder said, \u201cHe always had an outstretched hand and an open ear for Jewish leaders.\u201d The Most Rev. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, released a statement calling Benedict \u201ca witness to the universal scope of the gospel and a messenger of hope at a time when Christian faith is being called into question.\u201d The strongest criticism came from the victims of clerical sexual abuse, who faulted him for failing to take stronger steps or, in some eyes, any steps at all. Video The Times\u2019s Rachel Donadio reports from Rome. | John T. McGreevy, a professor at Notre Dame, on challenges in the United States for the Roman Catholic Church. \u201cThis pope had a great opportunity to finally address the decades of abuse in the church but at the end of the day he did nothing but promise everything and in the end he ultimately delivered nothing,\u201d John Kelly, of the Survivors of Child Abuse support group, told Agence France-Presse. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said in an interview with RTE, Ireland\u2019s national broadcaster, that the pope would be mainly remembered for his writings on theology. He said the pope had a very clear understanding of some of the moral problems confronting the church and he had addressed them \u201chead on.\u201d \u201cI have a great personal affection for the pope, I have known him for many, many years, and I\u2019m not surprised that he would take a decision of this kind if he felt that the burden he was under was too much,\u201d the archbishop said. Image The pope greeted people after celebrating a Mass at Yankee Stadium in 2008. 1 / 17 Speaking to a reporter from the German news agency DPA in Regensburg, his brother, Georg Ratzinger, said Benedict was having increasing difficulty walking, and that his doctor had advised against any more transatlantic journeys. \u201cMy brother wants more peace in old age,\u201d said Mr. Ratzinger, also a priest and for decades the head of the famous Regensburg choir the Domspatzen, who admitted he had known for months that his brother planned to step down. A former student of the pope,the Rev. Vincent Twomey, now a top theologian based in the Catholic seminary in Maynooth, Ireland, said the pontiff did not look well last summer. \u201cWe all felt he looked gray and tired, and shriveled, to a certain extent. Then he came the following day and said Mass for us and then joined us for breakfast.\u201d Antonio Mar\u00eda Rouco Varela, the archbishop of Madrid and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said that he and fellow members of the Spanish clergy felt \u201clike orphans because of this decision, which fills us with us with sorrow because we felt secure and enlightened thanks to his delightful teaching and fatherly proximity.\u201d In Poland, the information about Pope Benedict\u2019s resignation \u2014 in Polish, \u201cabdication\u201d \u2014 dominated the news entirely. Benedict, who was the closest adviser to the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, is seen as a friend to the country and, more than anything, an heir to the Polish pope. Appreciation for Benedict\u2019s contributions was heard in the Philippines as well, where his years coincided with extreme election violence and a string of natural disasters. \u201cWe recall, in particular, with fond gratitude, the many prayers and comforting words Pope Benedict XVI has dedicated to Filipinos in times of calamity and challenge, and his words of encouragement and witness in the many Catholic events that have brought Catholics together,\u201d said Edwin Lacierda, a spokesman for the president. \u201cHe\u2019s a thoughtful person and he will have given this decision a lot of consideration,\u201d said Rupert Hofbauer, a longtime neighbor of Benedict near the Bavarian city of Regensburg. \u201cIf he\u2019s not healthy and doesn\u2019t have the strength he needs anymore, then it was the right choice. He must know.\u201d", "keyword": "Pope Benedict;Catholic Church;Appointments and Executive Changes;Germany;Vatican City;Pope"}
{"id": "ny0052212", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/10/13", "title": "2nd Ebola Case in U.S. Stokes Fears of Health Care Workers", "abstract": "DALLAS \u2014 A nurse here became the first person to contract Ebola within the United States, prompting local, state and federal officials who had settled into a choreographed response to scramble on Sunday to solve the mystery of how she became infected, despite wearing protective gear, and to monitor additional people possibly at risk. The news further stoked fears of health care workers across the country, many of whom have grown increasingly anxious about having to handle Ebola cases. The confirmation on Sunday of the second Ebola case in Dallas \u2014 four days after the death on Wednesday of the first patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, a Liberian who arrived in this country in September \u2014 opened a new and more frightening chapter in the unfolding public health drama. While the new Ebola patient was not publicly identified, officials said that she was a nurse who had helped treat Mr. Duncan at a hospital here and that she may have violated safety protocols. It was the first confirmed instance of Ebola being transmitted in this country. Officials expanded the pool of people they had been monitoring, because the nurse had not been among the 48 health care workers, relatives of Mr. Duncan and others whom they were evaluating daily. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that health officials look more closely at the protective gear that nurses, doctors and hospital assistants use when treating Ebola patients. It also, for the first time, was considering the idea that patients with the virus should be transferred to hospitals with special containment units and experience in treating the disease. Image Mayor Mike Rawlings spoke to residents of the street. Credit LM Otero/Associated Press The Dallas hospital at the center of the two Ebola cases, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, was facing renewed scrutiny over whether it had properly trained its workers. It sent Mr. Duncan home on Sept. 25 under the belief he had a sinus infection, only to have him return Sept. 28 when his conditions worsened. The C.D.C. said it would conduct a nationwide training conference call on Tuesday for thousands of health care workers to ensure they would be fully prepared to treat a patient with Ebola. \u201cThe care of Ebola patients can be done safely, but it\u2019s hard to do it safely,\u201d Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., told reporters Sunday. \u201cEven a single, inadvertent innocent slip can result in contamination.\u201d The stricken nurse reported a low-grade fever overnight Friday, officials said. It appeared that she drove herself to the emergency room of Presbyterian Hospital, where she worked, and was admitted and put in isolation 90 minutes later, the officials said. Image In response to the latest report of the second victim in Dallas, officials moved swiftly to clean and decontaminate many places where the nurse had been. Credit Cooper Neill for The New York Times She had extensive contact with Mr. Duncan on multiple occasions after his second visit and admission to the hospital on Sept. 28, Dr. Frieden said. The nurse had been monitoring herself for symptoms of Ebola, under a regimen prescribed by the C.D.C. Health officials will now investigate who had been in contact with Mr. Duncan after he was admitted to the hospital and while he was in isolation, Dr. Frieden said. Before her trip to the emergency room, officials said, the nurse had not been at work for two days. A preliminary blood test was done at the state public health lab in Austin, and the positive result was received late Saturday evening, officials said. Late Sunday afternoon, the C.D.C. confirmed that she had Ebola after completing its own tests. The woman was in stable condition on Sunday. Dr. Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer of Texas Health Resources, which oversees Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, told reporters on Sunday that the worker had worn protective gear when coming in contact with Mr. Duncan, although he did not detail the type of contact. How Hospital Workers Are Supposed to Treat Ebola Safely A look at the C.D.C. guidance on protective clothing for workers treating the disease. \u201cThis individual was following full C.D.C. precautions,\u201d Dr. Varga said, adding, \u201cGown, glove, mask and shield.\u201d Asked how concerned he was that the worker tested positive despite the precautions, he replied, \u201cWe\u2019re very concerned.\u201d Despite Dr. Varga\u2019s reassurances about C.D.C. precautions having been followed, Dr. Frieden said it appeared that the woman had breached safety protocol at the hospital, possibly when removing the protective gear. Speaking on the CBS program \u201cFace the Nation\u201d and later at a news conference, he said that questioning of the worker had not identified precisely how a breach occurred, and that the cause of her infection was not known. Dr. Frieden said that everyone who had treated Mr. Duncan was now considered to be potentially exposed and that other cases of Ebola were possible. \u201cWe\u2019re deeply concerned about this new development,\u201d he said on the talk show. The C.D.C. has said that for health workers in the United States, gloves, gowns, masks and face shields or goggles would be protection enough. But many health workers across the country, seeing images of people in Africa completely encased in full-body hazardous-material suits, have requested similar protection. \u201cA lot of us are starting to get worried,\u201d said Debra Buccellato, an emergency room nurse in Santa Rosa, Calif. \u201cI\u2019m a single mom, so if I got sick there\u2019d be a huge void.\u201d Image Debra Buccellato, an emergency room nurse in Santa Rosa, Calif., said she had not undergone any active training for Ebola. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times Ms. Buccellato, 38, said supervisors at her hospital had distributed information about C.D.C. guidelines, but added, \u201cI have not seen any active training or practice drills, and I haven\u2019t seen any new or upgraded personal protective equipment.\u201d She said that she had emailed her manager to ask for more training, but that she was not sure that hazardous-material suits were the best option for her 90-bed facility, Sutter Santa Rosa Hospital. \u201cI don\u2019t know how realistic it is to go to that level when you have X amount of patients to take care of and time issues,\u201d Ms. Buccellato said. For now, she said, she plans to start wearing a face mask for her entire shift. On Sunday, National Nurses United, the country\u2019s largest union and professional association of nurses, continued to sound the alarm and call for hazardous-material suits at all hospitals. Image The authorities distributed informational fliers. Credit Louis Deluca/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press \u201cI\u2019m angry about this,\u201d said RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director. \u201cWe want the first line of defense to be the most prepared. Our hospitals are resisting us. The C.D.C. doesn\u2019t say that we need hazmat suits. If this doesn\u2019t change dramatically, we will picket every hospital in this country if we have to.\u201d President Obama on Sunday directed the C.D.C. to expedite its investigation into how the health care worker contracted the deadly virus, according to a White House statement . In an indication that the White House was taking steps in advance of any possible spread of the disease, Mr. Obama also directed federal officials to make sure that hospitals and health workers across the nation \u201care prepared to follow protocols should they encounter an Ebola patient,\u201d the statement said. Mr. Obama was briefed by Lisa Monaco, the president\u2019s assistant for homeland security, and then spoke by telephone with Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services. While other patients with Ebola have been treated in the United States in recent weeks, the nurse is only the second person \u2014 after Mr. Duncan \u2014 whose condition was diagnosed in the United States. All of the other patients \u2014 including medical personnel, relief workers and journalists \u2014 received a diagnosis while working in West Africa near Ebola victims, and were brought to this country for treatment. Is the U.S. Prepared for an Ebola Outbreak? A look at the government agencies and private entities that were involved in the case of the first person found to have Ebola in the United States. Four hospitals in the United States \u2014 Emory University Hospital in Atlanta; Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha; the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.; and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont. \u2014 have high-containment units for isolating patients with dangerous infectious diseases, and medical teams at those facilities have conducted extensive training and drills for dealing with pathogens like Ebola. But in Dallas on Sunday, officials were trying to persuade residents to remain calm, and reminded them that their risk of exposure was low. \u201cYou cannot contract Ebola other than from the bodily fluids of a symptomatic Ebola victim,\u201d said County Judge Clay Jenkins, Dallas County\u2019s chief executive, who himself has had close contact with those who lived with Mr. Duncan. \u201cYou cannot contract Ebola by walking by people on the street or by being around contacts who are not symptomatic. There\u2019s nothing about this case that changes that basic premise of science.\u201d City officials moved swiftly to clean and decontaminate many of the places where the nurse had been or had even briefly touched, including her apartment in a complex on Marquita Avenue, the complex\u2019s common areas and the car she took to the hospital. Police officers were prohibiting access to her apartment. Officials believe the woman\u2019s pet dog was inside the apartment, but was doing fine. Image A police officer provided security on Sunday at the Dallas residence of a nurse who had contracted Ebola. A barrel, left, held hazardous materials from a cleanup. Credit LM Otero/Associated Press \u201cWe have a plan in place to take care of the pet, and we do not believe that pet has any signs, and we\u2019ll move accordingly later today,\u201d Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas said. Remaining calm was easier said than done for many of the woman\u2019s neighbors. Early Sunday, city officials knocked on the doors of nearby homes and called residences in the four blocks surrounding the complex to inform people that someone who lived in the neighborhood had tested positive for Ebola. \u201cIt\u2019s a little creepy,\u201d said Kara Lutley, 25, who lives across the street from the nurse\u2019s apartment building. \u201cIt\u2019s been in Dallas, but it hasn\u2019t been this close.\u201d At the hospital, the car the woman arrived in was decontaminated and secured so no one could go near it, officials said. \u201cWe decontaminated hand railings, everything in the parking lot, so everybody can feel comfortable that the exterior was taken care of,\u201d Mr. Rawlings said. The hospital also took the unusual step on Sunday of prohibiting ambulances from bringing new patients into its emergency room. Officials said that the hospital was open, but that they had decided to put the emergency room on so-called diversion status because of staff limitations. \u201cWhile we are on diversion we are also using this time to further expand the margin of safety by triple-checking our full compliance with updated C.D.C. guidelines,\u201d hospital officials said in a statement. \u201cWe are also continuing to monitor all staff who had some relation to Mr. Duncan\u2019s care even if they are not assumed to be at significant risk of infection.\u201d", "keyword": "Ebola;Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital;Dallas;Nursing;Medical test;Epidemic"}
{"id": "ny0047747", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2014/11/19", "title": "EasyJet Profit Climbs as Battle for Business Passengers Intensifies", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 With Europe\u2019s economic slump threatening to further crimp company budgets, the battle for business travelers is growing ever more heated among the region\u2019s airlines. This is particularly true on short-haul routes, where incumbents like Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, British Airways and Alitalia \u2014 with their comfortable lounges, frequent-flier programs and shuttle-like frequencies \u2014 were once the preferred, and in some cases, the only option for busy executives jetting between European capitals. But in recent years, most of those same legacy carriers have gradually pared back those perks on European routes as they have struggled to cut operating costs amid years of losses. Meanwhile, the region\u2019s largest budget carriers have continued to add capacity, to expand into more cities and, increasingly, to move into the big airports where many business travelers want to fly. The low-cost airlines have also made a more direct play for a higher-spending clientele, offering add-ons like reserved seating, flexible tickets and priority boarding that, on some routes, make their service almost indistinguishable from their higher-fare rivals. On Tuesday, easyJet showed how well this strategy was paying off. The British budget carrier said net profit for the year that ended Sept. 30 rose 13 percent to 450 million pounds, or about $705 million, from a year earlier. Pretax profit, a more closely watched measure of earnings, rose 21.5 percent to \u00a3581 million. Revenue rose 6 percent, to \u00a34.5 billion. EasyJet\u2019s larger rival, the Irish carrier Ryanair, has also expanded aggressively throughout the economic slowdown, with similarly beneficial results. This month, Ryanair reported a 32 percent jump in earnings for the six months to Sept. 30 and raised its outlook for the current financial year, citing robust bookings for the coming winter months, as well as a strong increase in demand from business travelers. As part of efforts to shed a reputation for gruff and inflexible service, Ryanair has introduced a series of changes, including a revamped website, a new mobile booking application and reductions in certain charges like baggage fees. To attract more business customers, and to compete better with easyJet, Ryanair in October also added flexible tickets, fast-track security and reserved seating. \u201cWhat you\u2019re looking at is a structural change in business-class travelers in Europe today,\u201d said Chris Tarry, an independent airline consultant in London. \u201cWhat is the difference between sitting in a single-class airline like Ryanair or EasyJet and a full-service airline \u2014 besides maybe a free bread roll of indeterminate quality?\u201d he said. \u201cFrom a passenger point of view, you\u2019ve got convergence.\u201d Image Carolyn McCall, easyJet\u2019s chief executive, said the carrier was seeing increasing repeat business from corporate travelers. Credit Jacky Naegelen/Reuters Both Ryanair and EasyJet claim that 20 to 25 percent of their passengers are flying on business, a figure that has increased significantly as the European economic downturn has dragged on. Analysts said a prolonged regional downturn could continue to play in the favor of low-cost airlines with the biggest networks. \u201cIf I\u2019m a company, the two easiest things for me to cut are marketing and travel costs,\u201d said Mr. Tarry. \u201cSo intra-Europe, you are going to keep looking for even better value from a corporate travel point of view.\u201d Carolyn McCall, easyJet\u2019s chief executive, said on Tuesday that the carrier was seeing increasing repeat business from corporate travelers, which she attributed to the new features of flexible tickets, allocated seating and priority boarding. The airline said that 62 percent of passengers who booked a flight for business in the past year had booked again with easyJet, better than the 57 percent rebooking rate for leisure passengers. Over the past year, easyJet, which is based in Luton, England, has also increased its presence at several airports popular with business travelers, particularly at Gatwick Airport near London, where a quarter of its total fleet of 226 single-aisle Airbus planes is based. The carrier has increased capacity at Gatwick by 15 percent over the last six months with 25 new takeoff and landing slots that it acquired in March from Flybe, a struggling British regional carrier. EasyJet\u2019s earnings also benefited from recent labor unrest at Lufthansa and Air France. A two-week pilots\u2019 strike at the French carrier in September forced the cancellation of more than 8,500 flights and disrupted the journeys of nearly one million passengers. EasyJet said it had reaped \u00a35 million in additional revenue in September from passengers who had been unable to fly on Air France. Ms. McCall said the strong annual profit had prompted easyJet\u2019s board to recommend increasing the airline\u2019s dividend to 40 percent of annual profit, or 45.4 pence a share, from 33 percent, in line with a proposal this year to return more cash to shareholders. EasyJet said it carried 65 million passengers over the year, up 7 percent from a year earlier, and planned to expand seating capacity by a further 5 percent over the next 12 months. The recent decline in global oil prices is expected to reduce the carrier\u2019s fuel bill \u00a322 million to \u00a377 million over the next year, the company said. However, the group warned that nonfuel operating costs were expected to rise by around 2 percent, driven mainly by higher maintenance costs on some of its older planes, as well as investments linked to new bases it plans to open next spring at Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam and in Porto, Portugal\u2019s second-largest city. In an attempt to remain one step ahead of Ryanair\u2019s business-friendly initiatives, easyJet also revealed on Tuesday that it had been testing a new loyalty program with roughly 15,000 passengers in Britain, France and Switzerland. The trial program, which has been operating for the last three months, offers members increased booking flexibility, ticket price guarantees and a dedicated customer service hotline.", "keyword": "Airlines,airplanes;Earnings Reports;easyJet"}
{"id": "ny0196852", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2009/10/30", "title": "Time Inc. Expected to Cut $100 Million in Costs, and Jobs", "abstract": "Adding another blow to what is becoming an increasingly grim industry, the magazine publisher Time Inc. is expected to announce next week that it will cut $100 million in costs and make significant layoffs. Time Inc., publisher of magazines including Time, Fortune and People, is coordinating its announcement with the third-quarter earnings report of its parent, Time Warner, sources said. The earnings report is scheduled for Wednesday morning. The $100 million in cuts is expected to come largely from layoffs, said sources, who asked to be anonymous as they were not authorized to discuss the decision. No magazines appeared likely to close, one source said. At Time Inc., cuts have already been heavy. A year ago, it announced it was dismissing about 600 people , or 6 percent of its staff. Since 2007, it has shut magazines including Business 2.0, Cottage Living, Southern Accents and Life, which it had revived as a newspaper supplement. A stricter expense-account policy has been in place for some time, and some magazines have decreased the weight of the paper they use. And last week, Fortune announced that it would no longer be published every other week and would reduce its frequency to 18 issues a year, from 25. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said he expected third-quarter revenue at Time Inc. to fall about 19 percent, to $900 million. Most of that is because of weaker advertising, Mr. Nathanson said. \u201cFor the year, we\u2019re at about $3.7 billion, and this company had done almost $5 billion as late as 2007 ,\u201d Mr. Nathanson said. From 2004 until the end of this year, Time Inc. is expected to have cut about $800 million in costs, Mr. Nathanson said. Over all, he said that he expected Time Warner would post earnings of 54 cents a share, up from the 30 cents a share it posted in the third quarter of 2008. (The company has spun off its cable unit since then.) Dawn Bridges, a Time Inc. spokeswoman, declined to comment. Layoffs and cost-cutting are becoming standard practice in the magazine industry. Forbes announced on Monday that it was dismissing 40 to 60 people from its editorial staff. That followed layoffs of about 100 people in the last year or so. And most Cond\u00e9 Nast magazines are reducing their budgets by about 25 percent, which has included handfuls of layoffs at many magazines. Cond\u00e9 Nast also closed four magazines , including Gourmet, this month. Some Time Inc. employees at People, Time, Sports Illustrated, Money, Fortune and Fortune Small Business are covered by union contracts, which mandate severance in case of layoffs. The agreements largely apply to reporters; most editors are considered management, and are not covered, said Bob Townsend, local representative for the Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America. Those guild employees are eligible for severance packages in a layoff, of two weeks\u2019 pay for every year of employment, with a cap of 52 weeks\u2019 pay. Longtime employees receive a bonus, with 20-year veterans getting an additional eight weeks\u2019 pay, and 25-year employees an additional 10 weeks, he said.", "keyword": "Time Inc;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Magazines"}
{"id": "ny0048722", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/11/24", "title": "Nets Face Stiff Test; Then the Game Starts", "abstract": "As one of the best one-on-one players in the N.B.A., Joe Johnson has dispatched his share of the league\u2019s most suffocating defenders. But his most stubborn adversary \u2014 the persistent thorn in his side, the one who will never go away \u2014 might be a 51-year-old assistant coach named John Welch. Last season, Johnson started to make one-on-one games with Welch part of his workout, whether after practice or before a game \u2014 although Johnson is always on offense, and Welch is always on defense. Johnson has been nicknamed Iso-Joe, not always affectionately, for his desire for the ball and for his success with it when he is isolated against a defender. He said he used his sessions with Welch to keep his skills sharp. But the competitions are entertaining, too, for observers and participants alike. The juxtaposition of Johnson, who is listed at 6 feet 7 inches and 240 pounds, and Welch, who is rather small in comparison, creates an amusing image. More noteworthy, though, is how much of a fight Welch provides. \u201cMan, he fouls a lot \u2014 any chance you give him, he\u2019s going to foul you,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cBut when you go up to shoot, he pretty much becomes a nonfactor.\u201d Johnson\u2019s impromptu scouting report of his coach included one compliment, albeit a backhanded one: \u201cAt his age, he has great feet, can really move his feet.\u201d Welch, whom the Nets declined to make available to comment, is a basketball lifer, a gym rat, a disciple of Jerry Tarkanian and George Karl. He played for Tarkanian for a season at Nevada-Las Vegas and played professionally for a few years in New Zealand. Before joining the Nets last season, he spent eight seasons as an assistant with the Denver Nuggets under Karl. When Jason Kidd departed last summer after a season as the Nets\u2019 head coach, taking much of his staff with him to the Milwaukee Bucks, Welch remained in Brooklyn. Under Lionel Hollins, the new coach, Welch has many responsibilities, like helping to formulate game plans and taking a hands-on role in player development. Image Welch defending Johnson during a recent warm-up. \u201cHe\u2019s a trash talker,\u201d Johnson said. Credit Jason Szenes for The New York Times Before donning a suit and taking a seat near Hollins during games, Welch works up a sweat feeding players passes in shooting exercises, providing asphyxiating defense during finishing drills and issuing a steady onslaught of barbs, encouragement and instruction. \u201cThat\u2019s all he does,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cHe\u2019s a trash talker.\u201d Late last season, before a game against the Sacramento Kings, Johnson and Welch engaged in one of their spirited battles. Many of Johnson\u2019s familiar moves in crucial situations were on display, and Welch was doing his best to foil him. \u201cYou can\u2019t hit my arm when I fake,\u201d Johnson said after trying one of his moves. Welch looked at Johnson with mock disgust. \u201cYou\u2019re like a little kid: \u2018He\u2019s touching me, he\u2019s touching me,\u2019 \u201d Welch said, smiling and mimicking the voice of a whiny child. The one-on-one play continued, as did the repartee. At one point, Johnson starting backing Welch toward the basket. Welch set his feet and bounced his chest into Johnson\u2019s shoulders whenever Johnson came toward him. All the while, he swiped at Johnson\u2019s arms. \u201cYou don\u2019t like it when I hit you,\u201d Welch said between bumps. Still dribbling, Johnson suppressed a laugh. \u201cI love it,\u201d he said. Johnson is not the only benefactor of Welch\u2019s tactile coaching style. Two hours before a recent game, Welch was working with guard Bojan Bogdanovic and forward Mirza Teletovic. Periodically, while the players were doing their shooting drills, Welch had them try to finish off the dribble while he played his typically smothering defense. \u201cScore on me,\u201d Welch said to Bogdanovic. Bogdanovic sized him up, drove to the right and came to a jump stop. Welch, who was with him all the way, swung his arm down and knocked the ball away. Bogdanovic walked back to midcourt, smiling and shaking his head. \u201cThat\u2019s clean,\u201d Welch said. Minutes later, Welch took a defensive stance and faced up against Teletovic. \u201cHit me,\u201d Welch said. \u201cGet a piece of me.\u201d Teletovic took a few hard dribbles to his left and drove his shoulder into Welch\u2019s chest, sending him stumbling several yards toward the baseline. Welch laughed after regaining his balance and said: \u201cThere you go. That\u2019s a bump.\u201d Image Welch pointed at Mirza Teletovic as Bojan Bogdanovic, second from right, watched. \u201cHe\u2019s old, but believe me, he\u2019s very tough,\u201d Bogdanovic said. Credit Jason Szenes for The New York Times Welch, as he is before every game and after every practice, was soaked in sweat and red in the face. Bogdanovic, 25, who began playing professionally in Europe when he was a teenager, said Welch had been trying to make him a more physical player in his first N.B.A. season. It was a continuing adjustment, he said, but Welch\u2019s instruction was helping. \u201cHe\u2019s old, but believe me, he\u2019s very tough,\u201d Bogdanovic said. \u201cIt\u2019s good for me. He\u2019s fouling me all the time, on every shot, on all my layups. He\u2019s yelling at me all the time to be strong.\u201d Alongside the more formal lessons are the improvised one-on-one sessions Welch has with Johnson and other players. Jarrett Jack, who was traded to the Nets last summer, was a participant after a recent practice, taking turns with Johnson trying to beat Welch off the dribble. Laughter and shouting emanated from their end of the court long after other players had retreated to the locker room. \u201cCoach Welch is all about hand checking and body blocking,\u201d Jack said. \u201cHe\u2019s a guy that can really, really move his feet, and he\u2019s got great hands. He\u2019s no slouch. He\u2019s strong.\u201d Jack said such games, while fun, also helped him fine-tune his improvisational play and create muscle memory for \u201cinstinctive game situations.\u201d All teams have a coach who can play so-called dummy defense on players, but Nets players said few were as aggressive as Welch. Johnson, 33, who has been in the league since 2001, said the only coach who had tried to play defense on him in a similar fashion was Nick Van Exel, a former N.B.A. point guard who was an assistant with the Atlanta Hawks from 2010 to 2012. \u201cThey\u2019re all like this tall,\u201d Johnson said of Welch and Van Exel, holding his palm across his midsection, \u201cso there ain\u2019t much they can do.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;John Welch;Lionel Hollins;Brooklyn Nets;Joe Johnson"}
{"id": "ny0083087", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/10/17", "title": "Turkish Jets Shoot Down Drone Near Syria", "abstract": "ISTANBUL \u2014 Turkish fighter jets shot down a drone aircraft close to the Syrian border on Friday after it violated Turkey\u2019s airspace, the military said in a statement. \u201cAn aerial vehicle of unknown origin was detected inside our airspace on the Syrian border,\u201d the statement said, adding, \u201cOur aircraft on patrol mission on the border fired and shot down the vehicle within the rules of engagement.\u201d Since Russia began its military intervention in Syria on Sept. 30 with a series of airstrikes, Turkey has complained several times of incursions by Russian aircraft into its airspace. The Russians have said that the incursions were unintentional, but NATO, of which Turkey is a member, has moved to bolster the alliance\u2019s defenses . Syria and Rebels Battle for Aleppo as Cease-Fire Collapses A drastic escalation of fighting in Aleppo has shattered a partial truce. News agencies in Russia reported on Friday that the aircraft was not Russian. However, Reuters quoted an anonymous United States official as saying that American officials suspected that it was Russian. In Moscow, the Defense Ministry said that all of its warplanes operating in Syria had returned safely to base and that its drones were conducting aerial reconnaissance \u201cas usual.\u201d \u201cAll airplanes of the Russian aviation group in the Syrian Arab Republic have returned to the Hmeimim air base after accomplishing their combat tasks,\u201d Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Defense Ministry spokesman, told reporters on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency. Turkey has in the past brought down several drones operated by the Syrian Air Force, which is loyal to the country\u2019s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad. The last time Turkey shot down an aircraft on its border with Syria was in May , when the military claimed that a Syrian warplane had violated its airspace in the eastern region of Hatay. Syrian state television said the Turkish fighter jets had shot down a drone.", "keyword": "Turkey;Drones;Syria;Russia;Military aircraft"}
{"id": "ny0193925", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2009/11/11", "title": "Cultural Bent Hangs Over Oracle\u2019s Battle for Sun", "abstract": "Oracle \u2019s battle with European regulators over its acquisition of Sun Microsystems boils down to a conflict about the importance of free software and the government\u2019s role in protecting it. The verbal salvos heated up this week after the European Union issued formal objections on Monday to a bid by Oracle, the giant software maker, to buy Sun for $7.4 billion. Oracle immediately pilloried the objections, saying they were based on \u201ca profound misunderstanding\u201d of the software market. On Tuesday, the European Union struck back, with a spokesman for the union\u2019s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, dismissing Oracle\u2019s criticism as \u201cfacile and superficial.\u201d At one level, the sharp exchanges fit a familiar pattern in antitrust disputes between Brussels and American technology companies, including Microsoft and Intel. The Americans tend to portray the European authorities as technically clueless bureaucrats, while the Europeans cast the big American businesses as arrogant bullies. But the Oracle case also reflects very different views of open-source software by antitrust officials in the United States and Europe. The European regulators want Oracle to sell off a unit of Sun that manages the most popular open-source database program, MySQL. Like all open-source products, MySQL code is distributed free, and the company tries to make money by charging corporate customers for technical support and extra features. The European antitrust officials fear that Oracle, the largest maker of proprietary database software, will have little incentive to sustain and invest in MySQL, a potential rival. The United States Justice Department does not share the European concerns. After the Brussels decision on Monday, the American antitrust regulators made an unusual statement, saying that it had concluded there was a \u201clarge community of developers and users of Sun\u2019s open-source database\u201d who would likely keep maintaining and improving MySQL regardless of Oracle\u2019s future decisions about the product. Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the trans-Atlantic \u201cmegawar\u201d over open-source software was not surprising. \u201cIt makes sense that the Europeans come to the defense of open-source companies because the big proprietary companies are nearly all American,\u201d he said. (The exception is SAP, the large German maker of business management software.) European governments have long viewed open-source software as a potential tool of economic development and independence. The vision was laid out nine years ago in a report by a technology advisory group to the European Commission. Open-source software, the report concluded, presented \u201ca great opportunity\u201d for the region that could perhaps \u201cchange the rules in the information technology industry,\u201d wresting the lead in software from the United States and reducing Europe\u2019s reliance on imports. Several European countries have policies that encourage government agencies and municipalities to consider open-source software like MySQL and Linux, an alternative to the Windows operating system from Microsoft. The wider economic role of open-source software, legal experts say, appears to have figured into the thinking of Europe\u2019s antitrust regulators. \u201cThere is a greater sensitivity to the importance of open-source software in Europe,\u201d said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. \u201cThey value the competition from open-source software \u2014 and the need to support that competition \u2014 more than in the United States.\u201d Dennis Oswell, an antitrust lawyer with the firm Oswell & Vahida in Brussels, said the move against Oracle also reflected a greater willingness by European regulators to move against potential threats to competition before there is evidence of harm. \u201cThe Europeans are keen to police markets prospectively \u2014 even lightning-quick ones like technology \u2014 to ensure effective competition in the future,\u201d Mr. Oswell said. By contrast, he said, American regulators \u201csee low prices and competitive markets today and say, \u2018O.K., let\u2019s not worry too much about what might or might not happen tomorrow.\u2019 \u201d The review of the Oracle-Sun deal proceeded on different timetables in the United States and Europe, though the investigators did make some joint calls on Sun and Oracle customers as part of their inquiries. After the acquisition plan was announced in April, the investigation by both sets of regulators focused mainly on Java, a widely used programming language and Internet technology created by Sun, according to a person close to Oracle, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the company. By August, the person said, the focus of Europe\u2019s investigation had switched to MySQL, which took Oracle somewhat by surprise. The European authorities asked Oracle to divest MySQL, and Oracle resisted. Ms. Kroes first publicly raised concerns about MySQL in September \u2014 two weeks after the Justice Department\u2019s antitrust division had approved the Oracle-Sun deal. She said at the time that nurturing open-source software was vital when the world was emerging from an economic slump. Ms. Kroes met last month with Safra A. Catz, Oracle\u2019s president, but made no progress. Oracle\u2019s stance was that MySQL and Oracle database products rarely competed head on. MySQL is a fast, lightweight database, used mainly in software applications for the Web. Oracle\u2019s database, by contrast, is a heavier program intended for running more mainstream corporate applications like sales management. \u201cEurope is absolutely right that there is a competition problem in enterprise and database software markets, but MySQL doesn\u2019t actually compete with Oracle,\u201d said Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of Ingres, an open-source database company that does compete directly with Oracle in the corporate market. MySQL, the person close to Oracle said, is more naturally a competitor to Microsoft\u2019s database software, SQL Server. And Oracle has every reason to keep investing in MySQL to challenge Microsoft, the person said. A public hearing in the Oracle case is scheduled in Brussels for Nov. 25. The European Union\u2019s ruling is due on Jan. 19. The European setback is a new and uncomfortable experience for Oracle and its chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison. His company has had two previous deals cleared in Europe without conditions: Oracle\u2019s acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004, and its purchase of Siebel Systems a year later. Both were makers of proprietary business software.", "keyword": "Oracle Corp;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Sun Microsystems Inc;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0240178", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/12/31", "title": "Composite Bats Out", "abstract": "Composite bats will no longer be used in the Little League World Series. Little League officials announced a moratorium on the equipment based on research it commissioned from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Composite bats have metal shells enclosing woven fibers inside the barrels. Critics say the bats endanger youngsters because balls fly off them at high speeds. Supporters say they are lighter and easier to handle.", "keyword": "Sporting Goods;Little League Baseball and Softball;Little League World Series;Amateur Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0236687", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/06/18", "title": "Murray Hill and Bingo at the Bowery Poetry Club", "abstract": "They say this city is a playground, so this week the Miser found some excellent ways to play without having to pay ... much. Every Monday lay all your cards on the table for a most irreverent Bingo Nite . The drag queen Linda Simpson calls the numbers, and the shots, along with her wisecracking co-host, Murray Hill, at the Bowery Poetry Club starting at 7:30 p.m.-ish. Their sharp wit is a fine prize in itself, but the $2-a-card fee does go to a cash jackpot. Admission is free and tables fill quickly, so arrive early or just stand at the bar, where the sponsor, the Magic Hat Brewing Company, offers $4 drafts from 7 to 10 p.m. As Linda Simpson\u2019s Web site puts it, \u201cThis ain\u2019t your grandma\u2019s bingo!\u201d (308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker Streets, East Village; bowerypoetry.com or lindasimpson.org .) Yankees and Mets fans can get revved up for this weekend\u2019s Subway Series at the Delta Dugout in Madison Square Park. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, amateurs can take a swing at virtual pitching and batting stations or enjoy inexpensive stadium-style snacks while watching highlight reels of New York baseball on a giant screen in the middle of the park \u2014 just a few of the baseball-themed activities Delta Airlines is sponsoring there. The dugout opens at 10 a.m. and ends after a live showing of each Subway Series game. Expect appearances by former players, including a musical performance by Bernie Williams, along with prize giveaways. (Madison and Fifth Avenues, between 23rd and 26th Streets; complete schedule, facebook.com/delta .) Accidentally throw your Wii wand at the television screen? The Chinatown Fair Video Arcade offers an excellent substitute for gamers, with the best of classics like Street Fighter and Dance Dance Revolution. Open every day, noon to midnight, with prices from 25 cents to $1.50, this arcade is one of the most economical options for getting your game on in the city. (8 Mott Street, at Chatham Square; 212-964-1542.) FATHER\u2019S DAY DEAL Nothing says \u201cThanks, Dad\u201d like a live radio show and free clementines. O.K., many things do, but none quite as interestingly as the Horse Trade Theater Group\u2019s \u201c Cognac Live Radio Orchestra .\u201d The group describes the evening as a \u201csweet tirade of radio plays, audio sketches and character pieces,\u201d accompanied by sound effects, synchronized with the narrative by foley artists, and featuring musical acts and a dance crew. Shows are pay-what-you-will on the third Sunday of each month. (7 p.m., Under St. Marks theater, 94 St. Marks Place, between First Avenue and Avenue A, East Village; horsetrade.info )", "keyword": "Bingo;Baseball;Computer and Video Games;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0174389", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/10/17", "title": "Big Inning by Indians Puts Red Sox on Brink", "abstract": "CLEVELAND, Oct. 16 \u2014 Paul Byrd of the Indians throws pitches that are slow, slower and slowest. He teases hitters, trying to persuade them to swing at pitches that look so tantalizing and end up producing frustrating results. He is about precision, not power. Pitching, precision and a different sort of power prevailed on Tuesday night, prevailed in significant fashion as Byrd helped the Indians defeat the Red Sox , 7-3, in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series. Byrd did not allow a run for the first five innings and the Indians battered Tim Wakefield and Manny Delcarmen in a seven-run fifth on the way to a three-games-to-one lead in the best-of-seven series. By the time fans throughout New England sip their coffee on Wednesday morning, how many times might they mention 2004? A few million? A few billion? The Red Sox made history that season by rallying from a 3-0 deficit to stun the Yankees, take the A.L.C.S. and win their first World Series title in 86 years. Now the Red Sox are in almost as dire a position as they peer ahead to Game 5 on Thursday night. Josh Beckett, whom Manager Terry Francona decided not to pitch Tuesday on short rest, will start for Boston. Francona started Wakefield, who had not pitched since Sept. 29, and Wakefield gave up five earned runs in four and two-thirds innings. Boston\u2019s last three starters have not made it past the fifth, which is not the recipe for winning. If the Red Sox are searching for omens, Beckett pitched a shutout for the Florida Marlins in Game 5 of the 2003 National League Championship Series when they trailed the Chicago Cubs, 3-1, in that series. The Marlins rallied to stop the Cubs, with Beckett relieving in Game 7, and then beat the Yankees in the World Series. \u201cWe\u2019re still alive,\u201d Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got an opportunity to go out and get better. That\u2019s all we can do right now.\u201d There was a terrible omen hovering over Tuesday\u2019s game for Boston. Since the Red Sox have had a long and, until recently, tortured history, they have an endless list of forgettable dates. Tuesday was one of them. Wakefield worked on the fourth anniversary of the night he gave up Aaron Boone\u2019s dramatic home run at Yankee Stadium to end the 2003 A.L.C.S. Once again, Oct. 16 was unkind to Wakefield. For the first four innings, Byrd and Wakefield matched zero after zero. With Wakefield floating knuckleballs that eased in at around 65 miles an hour and Byrd throwing fastballs that were only 20 miles an hour faster, this duel matched Byrd\u2019s description of it: the slowest-tossing right-handed starters in playoff history. That succession of zeroes ended in the fifth. Casey Blake lifted a high knuckleball over the left-field fence for a home run. After a single, a hit batter and a fielder's choice, Cleveland had men on first and third. Asdrubal Cabrera's foul pop-up bounced out of the glove of first baseman Kevin Youkilis, so Cabrera's at-bat continued. Cabrera followed with a liner that deflected off Wakefield's glove for a run-scoring single. Had Wakefield not touched the ball, the Red Sox would have at least nabbed an out at second and might have had a double play. Instead, the Indians led, 2-0. One out later, V\u00edctor Mart\u00ednez singled in another run. Delcarmen replaced Wakefield and promptly gave up a three-run homer to Jhonny Peralta. Blake, who started the damage, ended it with a run-scoring single. \u201cIt hurts,\u201d Wakefield said. \u201cOne big inning cost us the game. I couldn\u2019t stop the bleeding.\u201d Once the Indians took a 7-0 lead, Byrd was not as effective anymore. Kevin Youkilis and David Ortiz began the sixth with back-to-back homers, causing Indians Manager Eric Wedge to visit the mound. After a brief discussion, Wedge replaced Byrd with Jensen Lewis. As Byrd returned to the dugout, he stared at the adoring fans and lifted his glove to them. He yielded two runs and six hits in five-plus innings, a solid outing. After Byrd left, Boston\u2019s too-little, too-late resuscitation continued as Manny Ram\u00edrez belted a 451-foot homer to center. Ram\u00edrez realized the ball was gone, so he stood at home, raised his arms like Rocky Balboa and forgot to peek at the scoreboard. Ram\u00edrez, the former Indian, was booed as he trotted around the bases and heard derisive chants later in the game. It was the first time a team had hit back-to-back-to-back homers in a league championship series game. The only other time it happened in the postseason was when Derek Jeter, Tim Raines and Paul O\u2019Neill did it for the Yankees against the Indians in the division series in 1997. The Red Sox did not make it four straight homers, or make the Indians sweat anymore, because Mike Lowell grounded out. Watching Byrd is like watching a pitcher who took a time machine from the 1967 season and landed in 2007. He swings his arms back before each pitch, sometimes double pumping during his delivery. He wears his uniform pants like an old-school pitcher, too, with the red stirrups showing up to his calf. The Red Sox were baffled by Byrd\u2019s precision and managed four singles in five innings. Byrd doubled pumped in his delivery before striking out Ortiz in the first and also retired Ortiz with two runners on in the third. Since Byrd was slow and steady, the Indians are one victory from winning this amazing race.", "keyword": "Cleveland Indians;Baseball;Boston Red Sox;Byrd Paul;Wakefield Tim"}
{"id": "ny0230662", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2010/09/19", "title": "Nebraska\u2019s Martinez Upstages Washington\u2019s Locker in a Rout", "abstract": "SEATTLE \u2014 Nebraska Coach Bo Pelini said he could not predict how the redshirt freshman quarterback Taylor Martinez would perform in his first start in a hostile environment. But when Pelini observed Martinez before Saturday\u2019s game, he let out a small sigh of relief. \u201cI felt pretty good about it, but you never know until you see it,\u201d Pelini said. For Martinez, Saturday\u2019s game at Washington was a chance to prove he could maintain his composure and deliver on the road. For the Washington senior Jake Locker, an impressive performance against the eighth-ranked Cornhuskers could have vaulted him back into the Heisman Trophy race. At the end of Nebraska\u2019s 56-21 dismantling of the Huskies in front of 72,876 at Husky Stadium, Martinez looked like the more prestigious passer, having completed 7 of 11 for 150 yards and a touchdown while also rushing for 137 yards and 3 scores. \u201cI think he\u2019s a pretty dynamic athlete,\u201d said Pelini, whose team tied the scoring record for an opponent at Husky Stadium, which was set by California in 2005. \u201cThe ceiling is still pretty high for him, but that\u2019s why we went with him, because I think he can be a pretty special football player.\u201d Martinez, a native of Corona, Calif., made the most of his return to the West Coast. Locker, on the other hand, threw a wobbly pass into double coverage that was intercepted by Eric Hagg during the first drive of the game. \u201cThat\u2019s not the way you want to start a game off,\u201d Locker said. Martinez needed just two plays to lead the Cornhuskers (3-0) 48 yards for a touchdown, finding Mike McNeill with a 24-yard scoring pass. Martinez\u2019s 55-yard completion to Brandon Kinnie on Nebraska\u2019s next drive set up Martinez\u2019s first rushing touchdown. It was a welcome site for the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Nebraska fans who made the trip to Seattle and dominated the seating sections in both end zones. Seeing all the red on the way to the stadium, Pelini heard someone say, \u201cIs this a home game?\u201d But the Huskies (1-2) answered. Running backs Chris Polk and Jesse Callier helped Washington drive 80 yards, and Locker scored on a 7-yard run. Early on, the stadium was loud. But Martinez, who made important plays through the air and on the ground, never seemed shaken, leading four scoring drives in the first half. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you could ever rattle the guy,\u201d Pelini said. \u201cHe\u2019s kind of got a quiet confidence about him.\u201d The Cornhuskers put Cody Green in at quarterback for one second-quarter series, but on the first play, deep in Nebraska territory, he was stripped, and Washington recovered the ball. Polk\u2019s 2-yard touchdown run two plays later made the score 21-14 and provided a little momentum, but Washington could not sustain it. Locker was 2 of 10 for 20 yards and an interception in the first half, after which the Huskies trailed, 28-14. Washington Coach Steve Sarkisian did not place the blame solely on Locker. \u201cI think the first part of it is this is the top pass defense in America,\u201d Sarkisian said. \u201cThese guys are really good. It was hard to get open, and when we did, I thought maybe Jake was pressing a little today.\u201d Martinez added to his impressive road debut on the first play of the second half, sprinting around the edge for an 80-yard touchdown, prompting the thousands of Nebraska fans to chant, \u201cGo, Big Red!\u201d Locker never found a rhythm, finishing 4 of 20 for 71 yards with a touchdown and two interceptions. \u201cAnytime you get in a situation where it\u2019s not really working for you, I think you can ask a lot of guys, and they\u2019ll say they\u2019re trying to make something happen,\u201d Locker said. \u201cA lot of times, if you\u2019re able to, you can turn the momentum of the game around, but we weren\u2019t able to today.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Nebraska;Washington University;Football;College Athletics;Martinez Taylor"}
{"id": "ny0071311", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/03/10", "title": "British Government Again Reduces Stake in Lloyds Banking Group", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The British government has further reduced its stake in the Lloyds Banking Group for the second time in less than a month, the lender said on Monday. The government, which is keen to reduce its holdings in Lloyds, announced in December that it would engage in a measured sale of a portion of its stake in the bank as part of a prearranged trading plan that runs through the end of June. The British government took significant stakes in Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland after the lenders received billions of pounds as part of a bailout during the financial crisis. On Monday, Lloyds said that the government had reduced its stake in the company to 22.98 percent, which followed the sale of another portion of its stake in late February. The British government had a 24.9 percent stake in the bank when it announced the new trading program in December. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement shows further progress made in returning Lloyds Banking Group to full private ownership and enabling the taxpayer to get their money back,\u201d a Lloyds spokesman said in a news release. The government held as much as a 40 percent stake in the British lender, but it has reduced its holdings since September 2013 as the bank\u2019s prospects have improved. Last month, Lloyds said that it returned to an annual profit in 2014 and would return 535 million pounds, or about $804 million, to shareholders in its first dividend since the bailout. Lloyds received \u00a317 billion from the British government in the bailout.", "keyword": "Lloyds Banking Group;Banking and Finance;Royal Bank of Scotland;Great Britain"}
{"id": "ny0264781", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/12/13", "title": "Some Blame Hydraulic Fracturing for Earthquake Epidemic", "abstract": "YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio \u2014 Until this year, this Rust Belt city and surrounding Mahoning County had been about as dead, seismically, as a place can be, without even a hint of an earthquake since Scots-Irish settlers arrived in the 18th century. But on March 17, two minor quakes briefly shook the city. And in the following eight months there have been seven more \u2014 like the first two, too weak to cause damage or even be felt by many people, but strong enough to rattle some nerves. \u201cIt felt like someone was kicking in the front door. It scared the stuffing out of me,\u201d said Steve Moritz, a cook who lives on the city\u2019s west side, describing the seventh quake, which occurred in late September. It was the strongest one, with a magnitude of 2.7. Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes\u2019 epicenters: most coincided with the location of a 9,000-foot well in an industrial lot along the Mahoning River, just down the hill from Mr. Moritz\u2019s neighborhood and two miles from downtown Youngstown. At the well, a local company has been disposing of brine and other liquids from natural gas wells across the border in Pennsylvania \u2014 millions of gallons of waste from the process called hydraulic fracturing that is used to unlock the gas from shale rock. The location and timing of the quakes led to suspicions that the disposal well was responsible for Youngstown\u2019s seismic awakening. As the wastewater was injected into the well under pressure, the thinking went, some of it might have migrated into deeper rock formations, unclamping ancient faults and allowing the rock to slip. As the United States undergoes a boom in the production of gas from shale, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has come under fire from environmentalists and others for its potential to pollute the air and contaminate drinking water. But the events in Youngstown \u2014 and a string of other, mostly small tremors in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, British Columbia and other shale-gas-producing areas \u2014 raise the disquieting notion that the technique could lead, directly or indirectly, to a damaging earthquake. Scientists say the likelihood of that link is extremely remote, that thousands of fracking and disposal wells operate nationwide without causing earthquakes, and that the relatively shallow depths of these wells mean that any earthquakes that are triggered would be minor. \u201cBut still, you don\u2019t want it to happen,\u201d said Mark Zoback , a geophysicist at Stanford University. Others point out that among the thousands of small earthquakes in central Arkansas since last year that were thought to be linked to disposal wells was one of magnitude 4.7, and that a disposal well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado \u2014 for wastewater from weapons production, not gas drilling \u2014 was tied to numerous quakes in the 1960s , including several of magnitude 5.0 or higher that caused minor damage in Denver and other cities. Deeper geothermal wells have caused damaging quakes as well. \u201cIt\u2019s true that you can\u2019t have an earthquake larger than a given fault can provide,\u201d said Serge Shapiro , a professor at the Free University of Berlin who has studied what scientists refer to as induced seismicity. \u201cBut an earthquake even of magnitude 4 in a populated area can be an unpleasant thing.\u201d Officials with D & L Energy , the Youngstown company that has been disposing of the waste, and with the Ohio government say there is no proof of a link between the disposal well and the earthquakes. \u201cRight now we can\u2019t definitively say yes or no,\u201d said Tom Tugend, deputy chief of the gas and oil division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources . But the state has asked the company to plug the bottom 250 feet of the well with cement as a precaution, to ensure that it is sealed from the deeper rock where the earthquakes are thought to have occurred. State officials are also working with researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of Columbia University, who have installed four temporary seismometers within several miles of the well. If more earthquakes occur, the instruments will help determine location and depth more precisely. \u201cIt should help us make the case one way or another \u2014 is this related or not,\u201d said John Armbruster, a Lamont seismologist. C. Jeffrey Eshelman, a spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America , said that as far as the industry was concerned, \u201cit has been impossible to determine whether hydraulic fracturing has anything to do with\u201d the quakes like those in Ohio. \u201cBut it\u2019s in our best interest to understand what\u2019s going on,\u201d he said. \u201cAlthough they are minor incidents, they are still something to be taken seriously.\u201d Scientists say that although it is known that wells \u2014 and reservoirs and quarries, among other things \u2014 can induce earthquakes, it can be difficult to prove a connection because there is not enough data. So specific cases often become a subject of debate. \u201cScientific research needs to be done to understand the data on fluid injections and volumes,\u201d said William Leith, senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards at the United States Geological Survey, which has re-established a project to study induced seismicity in response to the string of suspicious quakes in shale-gas areas. In Arkansas, the State Oil and Gas Commission was concerned enough about a possible link between disposal wells and earthquakes that in July it ordered that one well be shut down, and it placed a moratorium on new ones in an 1,100-square-mile area. Three other disposal wells closed voluntarily. While small earthquakes are still occurring in the area, their frequency has declined substantially. In Oklahoma, a state seismologist concluded that there was a \u201cpossibility\u201d that a series of small quakes in January about 50 miles south of Oklahoma City were induced by a nearby fracking operation. \u201cThe reason I can\u2019t make any real conclusive statements is just because of the limitations of the data,\u201d the seismologist, Austin A. Holland, said. In northwestern England, however, an independent report commissioned by a drilling company, Cuadrilla Resources, concluded that two quakes of magnitude 1.5 and 2.3 near the city of Blackpool last spring were related to a fracking well. The report suggested several ways to avoid further quakes, including monitoring and limiting the pressures and volumes of fluid used. Fracking is known to cause very slight tremors \u2014 far weaker than even the Youngstown quakes \u2014 when the fluid is injected into the shale under high pressure. Drilling companies often send sensitive instruments called geophones into the drill holes to analyze these tiny tremors because they indicate whether the rock is fracturing as expected. But the larger earthquakes near Blackpool were thought to be caused the same way that quakes could be set off from disposal wells \u2014 by migration of the fluid into rock formations below the shale. Seismologists say that these deeper, older rocks, collectively referred to as the \u201cbasement,\u201d are littered with faults that, although under stress, have reached equilibrium over hundreds of millions of years. \u201cThere are plenty of faults,\u201d said Leonardo Seeber , a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. \u201cConservatively, one should assume that no matter where you drill, the basement is going to have faults that could rupture.\u201d Drilling and disposal companies do not usually know that those faults exist, however. Seismic surveys are costly, and states do not require them for oil or gas wells (although larger companies routinely conduct seismic tests as part of exploration). Regulations for disposal wells are concerned about protecting aquifers, not about seismic risk. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates oil- and gas-related disposal wells unless its cedes its authority to the states, has no seismic requirements for its disposal wells, an agency spokeswoman said.", "keyword": "Earthquakes;Hydraulic Fracturing;Ohio;Drilling and Boring;Natural Gas;Science and Technology;Oklahoma;Arkansas;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0140731", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/02/12", "title": "Girl\u2019s Mother Won\u2019t Testify at Trial of Stepfather", "abstract": "Nixzaliz Santiago, the mother of Nixzmary Brown , will not have to testify in the murder trial of her husband, Cesar Rodriguez, a judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday. Mr. Rodriguez\u2019s lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, has built his defense around a claim that though Mr. Rodriguez admits beating 7-year-old Nixzmary repeatedly, it was Ms. Santiago who dealt the fatal blow in January 2006. Nixzmary, Mr. Rodriguez\u2019s stepdaughter, died after weeks or months of being abused and deprived of adequate food. To bolster his defense, Mr. Schwartz had sought to compel Ms. Santiago to testify. But when he asked some of his proposed questions at a brief, tense hearing on Monday in State Supreme Court, without the jury present, Ms. Santiago again and again invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself. \u201cWhen did you come to this country?\u201d Mr. Schwartz asked Ms. Santiago, 29, who was actually born in Puerto Rico. \u201cI take the Fifth,\u201d she said through a Spanish interpreter. Mr. Schwartz asked what was the last school grade she had completed. \u201cThe Fifth,\u201d Ms. Santiago replied. \u201cThe fifth grade?\u201d Mr. Schwartz asked. \u201cNo, I take the Fifth,\u201d she said. Mr. Schwartz ran through his list of questions. Were Ms. Santiago\u2019s parents legally married? How old was she when she first got pregnant? How much time has she spent in the work force? The Fifth, Ms. Santiago replied each time. One of Ms. Santiago\u2019s lawyers, Sammy Sanchez, said in court before the hearing that because Mr. Schwartz was trying to blame her for the murder, there was little his client could safely say on the stand. Ms. Santiago\u2019s lawyers were also concerned that if prosecutors cross-examined her, they might elicit information that could be used at her own murder trial. At the hearing, the judge, L. Priscilla Hall, listened for a few minutes to the defense lawyer\u2019s one-sided examination of the reluctant witness before calling a halt. Because Ms. Santiago would not answer Mr. Schwartz\u2019s questions, Justice Hall said, there was no legitimate reason for her to testify. \u201cI could not be sure,\u201d Justice Hall said, \u201cthat questions posed, even though seemingly innocuous, would not open the witness to incriminating herself.\u201d The hearing afforded Ms. Santiago and Mr. Rodriguez one of their occasional opportunities to see each other. When Ms. Santiago entered the courtroom, she looked in Mr. Rodriguez\u2019s direction, but he was blocked by his lawyers. When she was on the stand, Mr. Rodriguez looked up at her once or twice but mostly looked down. Ms. Santiago did not look his way again.", "keyword": "Santiago Nixzaliz;Brown Nixzmary;Murders and Attempted Murders;Child Abuse and Neglect;Courts"}
{"id": "ny0195434", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2009/11/25", "title": "U.N. Report Says Congo\u2019s Army Aids Rebel Groups", "abstract": "KHARTOUM, Sudan \u2014 A new United Nations report says that the Congolese Army continues to funnel weapons to rebel groups that are smuggling millions of dollars in gold and other minerals out of Congo, helping sustain one of Africa\u2019s bloodiest and most complicated wars. The lengthy report, which has not been made public but was provided to The New York Times, details a vast, rebel-driven criminal network in eastern Congo with tentacles touching Spanish charities, Ukrainian arms dealers, corrupt African officials and even secretive North Korean weapons shipments. None of this is especially shocking. For years, eastern Congo has been a steaming cauldron of ethnic tensions, competing commercial interests, land disputes and regional politics playing out at gunpoint. Most of the fighting is not soldier versus soldier but soldier versus civilian, and millions of people are thought to have died from gunshot wounds or easily preventable diseases since the war broke out in the mid-1990s. Women especially have borne the brunt of the conflict, with hundreds of thousands raped and mutilated, a sexual violence epidemic that has caught the eye of global figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The United Nations report lays bare exactly how various rebel groups finance their brutality, tracing the flow of illegal minerals from the lush green mountainsides of Congo, formerly Zaire, to Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, and eventually to markets in Europe or smelters in the Far East. The report charges that government officials in several African countries are working hand in hand with the rebels to help smuggle out minerals and bring in guns. According to the report, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, one of the most notorious rebel armies, \u201chas a far-reaching international diaspora network involved in the day-to-day running of the movement; the coordination of military and arms-trafficking activities and the management of financial activities.\u201d This document is likely to add momentum in the United States and elsewhere to efforts to crack down on Congo\u2019s illicit mineral trade. Congolese officials estimate that 80,000 pounds of gold are smuggled out of the country each year, which at today\u2019s high gold prices is worth more than $1 billion, much of it going straight into rebel hands. Already the Enough Project , an antigenocide group based in Washington, and Eve Ensler, an American playwright who has been supporting Congolese women\u2019s projects for years through the organization V-Day , among others, have been urging Congress to pass legislation that would bar American companies from buying Congo\u2019s \u201cconflict minerals,\u201d which include gold, tin and coltan, a metallic ore used in many cellphones and laptop computers. Several bills have been proposed. This effort is akin to a successful movement in the early years of this decade to crack down on blood diamonds, the term given to the gems unearthed in the rebel-held areas of West Africa that fueled gruesome civil wars in Liberia, Angola and Sierra Leone. It is a bleak picture of Congo that the report paints. Despite the billions of dollars the United Nations has spent on peacekeeping , countless so-called peace treaties and pledges of regional cooperation, the eastern part of the country remains in the grip of incredibly violent criminals, some of them high-ranking officers in the national army. Nothing seems to be working. Recent military operations to sweep out the rebels have mostly failed and instead led to widespread massacres and human rights abuses. The rebels, meanwhile, continue to seize mines and use their networks in Europe and the United States to raise cash. Timothy Raeymaekers, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who specializes in studying Congo, said the report contained \u201csome substantial new information.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s high time the U.N. gets serious about this criminal connection,\u201d he said. The United Nations Security Council is expected to discuss the Congo report this week. But the United Nations is in a difficult position. It recently cut ties to Congolese Army units accused of widespread human rights abuses. But at the United Nations headquarters in New York, diplomats are trying to delay the release of the new report because \u201cthere is a lot in there that makes us look complicit,\u201d admitted one United Nations official, who asked for anonymity because he said he could be punished for speaking candidly. The official called the conflict in Congo \u201cmessy and ragged.\u201d There is little doubt about that. Take the recently integrated rebel forces, which agreed earlier this year to join the Congolese Army. Many still have dubious loyalties. In one documented case, a commander ordered his troops to fire in the air to let rebels in the bush know the army was coming. In other cases, army commanders gave or sold weapons to the very armed groups they were supposed to be wiping out. There is also creeping warlordism. Local army commanders are taxing timber, charcoal, tomatoes, anything that passes through their roadblocks, making $250,000 a month, the report said. Commanders are even conscripting civilians to haul wood through the forest, reminiscent of the Belgian colonial days when pith-helmeted officers whipped Congolese porters with hippopotamus hide. Some Congo experts describe a \u201cshadow army\u201d within the national army, with rebels keeping their weapons to themselves and maintaining a separate chain of command, many of them still loyal to neighboring Rwanda. Jason Stearns, a researcher who has spent extensive time in eastern Congo, said the recent integration effort \u201chas led to a deep ethnicization of the army.\u201d \u201cWhile I don\u2019t see full-fledged war breaking out again,\u201d he said, \u201cthe situation will remain extremely volatile.\u201d", "keyword": "Congo (Formerly Zaire);Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare;Defense and Military Forces;Smuggling"}
{"id": "ny0107125", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/04/01", "title": "Charlotte Beers, on the Importance of Self-Assessment", "abstract": "This interview with Charlotte Beers was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant . Ms. Beers, former chairwoman and C.E.O. of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide , now runs seminars called \u201cThe X Factor\u201d for women who are leaders.  Q. Tell me about your early management roles. A. I was in my early 30s, and I was the first management supervisor at J. Walter Thompson who was female. I had been an account supervisor, but management supervisor was more people, more levels. I thought I was really doing well, and I certainly was comfortable with the business. But then a friend of mine told me that one of our colleagues described my management style as menacing. I thought of myself as a friendly, gentle Southern belle. But I began to watch myself \u2014 something I think we all have to do \u2014 and I realized that I did end meetings on a threatening note. I created urgency when there was none. I was taking on the persona of \u201cI really mean business\u201d that I had learned from an earlier boss. So I learned to watch myself more. I had to self-correct about talking too much and interrupting other people. Now that trait can be very helpful when you have to make a decision, but I also interrupted the process and discussion in meetings. Q. Was this something that you became aware of yourself, or was it explicit feedback? A. That comment from one of my peers about me coming off as menacing was devastating. It was exactly the opposite of the way I pictured myself. Nothing\u2019s more helpful than finding out how others see you. If you can conduct that exercise in an impersonal way, you have information you can\u2019t get any other way. It\u2019s like doing consumer research. I did mine inadvertently, but I\u2019ll never forget how helpful it was. Q. In your experience, do managers do that, or do they avoid it? A. When you do have some power, you can lose the sense of how you\u2019re behaving and who you are, and you don\u2019t want to do that. It\u2019s dangerous. It\u2019s very addictive to be given some power. One of the things I watch in other people is how they use the power they are given. It\u2019s very important to me when I\u2019m assessing someone. Q. Tell me more about that. A. I\u2019m trying to understand how they used the power to hire and fire and promote and make those kinds of invisible choices that really affect other people\u2019s lives. If they don\u2019t have some generosity of spirit and some quality of teaching, I worry that they\u2019re not going to bring along a strong culture. Q. And how do you tell whether somebody has those qualities? A. I would probably ask them, \u201cWhat do you think is the most important thing in deciding to fire someone?\u201d They might go through some business-school buzzwords, and then I say, \u201cWell, then, how do you actually do it?\u201d If they send a note, or they delegate it or they arrange three people in the room with them, I know that they\u2019re not prepared to take full, personal responsibility. When I had to fire someone, I did it one-on-one. Q. So what is an answer you like to hear in that context? A. What I\u2019m looking for is whether they are able to assess the whole person, not just some failing of theirs at work, because sometimes a person can be in the wrong slot. We are all inferior people to work with in some way, including ourselves. The trick is to match your failings with somebody\u2019s strengths. That\u2019s the game. These are very important moments of leadership. Q. You mentioned earlier the importance of doing a self-assessment. Can you elaborate on that? A. I have made that a big part of my teaching for women in the executive world. Don\u2019t let someone tell you who you are. Keep your own scorecard, and it has to include the good, the bad and the ugly. Q. What other lessons do you pass along? A. For most of us, it\u2019s a mistake to just let the quality of our work speak for itself, because sooner or later the quality of your relationships will prevail over the work. That was a watershed insight for me. You have to recognize there will be a moment in time when you will not be able to be represented by the quality of your work but rather by the relationships you have. If you\u2019re in a crisis, what matters is what you\u2019re made of and what you believe and how well you can express that. What I say to people is to get ready for those moments by practicing every chance you get to take the lead, to step out in front of the work. Don\u2019t hide behind it. When those moments come along and you need to draw on resources that are internal and your personal belief system, if you don\u2019t know what they are, others will tell you what they are. People can then come to you and say, \u201cWell, you just don\u2019t know how to lead from the front,\u201d a critique I\u2019ve never understood. Self-knowledge is so obvious-sounding that I hate to use it like that, but in fact you can be masterful at doing the work and you can be good in team relationships, but one day you will be called on to have difficult, complex relationships and a different part of you has to be used for that. Q. How did you get that self-knowledge? A. In my case, I was forced into it because I hit a wall, so sometimes the most useful way is just to get blown apart and have to step back and say, \u201cWhat can I learn?\u201d A lot of times it\u2019s something you can learn, and I think that mistakes are great teachers. Sometimes a company\u2019s culture is a big influencer in how you see yourself, and you have to sift through that and see if it\u2019s a fit. Part of it is knowing yourself so well that you know where you fit, and knowing yourself so well that you know why you work. Q. What about lessons from your childhood and teenage years? A. I don\u2019t recommend it, but I think adversity in childhood is pretty useful. I had two brothers who were a bit older than me, and my sister\u2019s 10 years younger. The three of us grew up feeling like our back was always against the wall. We grew up too young. My father was an alcoholic, and he was volatile. You learn coping mechanisms. You keep your expectations real, and you learn what you\u2019re made of. My mother was not a cuddly woman. They never knew what my grades were. They assumed I did fine, so we had a kind of a take-care-of-yourself game. It wasn\u2019t so bad, but at one key time, my mother said: \u201cAnyone can get married. What are you going to do?\u201d And I remember thinking, \u201cYou mean I can do almost anything?\u201d I was influenced by the fact that it looked like we would have to do a lot on our own. It all helped me develop emotional self-sufficiency. Q. Other management lessons? A. This is an art form, but you have to understand that the more diverse people are, and the more uncomfortable they make you, the more likely you are to create something new together. Entertaining a certain amount of discomfort is a very important management tool. Q. Can you elaborate? A. In the digital age, people put too much stock in logic, data, the facts. But all the excitement and innovation is in the illogical, and the interpretation of this data by someone who\u2019s still breaking the rules. So you as a manager have to be able to entertain chaos. Otherwise, you\u2019ll never get close to the creative process. I worry that more and more today we lean toward that which is provable, when all the excitement is in the hard-to-prove. Q. Other thoughts about culture? A. I remember being on a panel, and the moderator asked all of us to complete the sentence, \u201cThe hardest thing I\u2019ve ever tried to do is ... .\u201d Every single person said, \u201cChange the culture.\u201d It\u2019s an illusion that you can really change a culture in a highly dramatic way in any hurry, and the strongest companies are those that have deeply layered cultures, unless of course they\u2019re driving them into the ground. Then what you can do is change the edges and the top and keep the stuff that matters and strip away the rest. It\u2019s like a brand. There are some things about a brand that you can\u2019t afford to change. So culture is about how we do things around here, and I have found that most of the time the culture is informal and interpreted by instinct. The most dangerous thing is a company with no culture, where one guy speaks of it one way and one woman speaks of it another. Then you\u2019ve got a company that\u2019s rudderless. So there are worse things than a deeply entrenched culture. Q. Let\u2019s shift to hiring. What do you look for? A. Well, I think as a C.E.O., one-third of my time was spent on hiring the one right person, because that hire could shift the future of the agency. It\u2019s time-consuming and it\u2019s courtship. What am I looking for? I think it\u2019s very hard to measure the weaknesses in people. They\u2019re hidden, and sometimes they\u2019re hidden from themselves. If you don\u2019t know the weaknesses, you can\u2019t allow for them. That doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not going to hire them. We\u2019ve all got weaknesses. I can tell you mine in 3-D, but I want to know theirs, and I have to stay with them until we both discover it, so I know that it\u2019s not a killer if they come work for us. Q. How do you do that? A. I say to them, \u201cHere\u2019s a time when I made this kind of mistake and what I learned about it,\u201d and then I say, \u201cI want one like that from you.\u201d And they really try, they reach back, and most people say, \u201cWell, I work too hard and everybody got mad at me.\u201d If that\u2019s all they\u2019re going to say to me, then we\u2019re not going very far in the interview. I\u2019m asking for a real sense of revelation and personal understanding of their capacities, because then they won\u2019t be blindsided. I\u2019m always reaching for the intangible and the invisible. I really don\u2019t look at r\u00e9sum\u00e9s about sales increases and that sort of thing, although I\u2019m happy they had some productive results. I\u2019m trying to find out if they have confidence about the things that matter, their own ability to think and to get to the true center of things. So you try to learn things about them. Let\u2019s say somebody has a very short fuse. They\u2019re not going to discuss this with you, so what you do is you keep asking about their experiences, and say: \u201cGive me an example. What\u2019s an example of that?\u201d That will lead you to understanding more about them. Q. Sum it up for me. A. I\u2019m looking for something that allows me to see all of you, the interior tensile strength \u2014 which I know you have \u2014 and then how that can trap you sometimes, because I know it will. What you\u2019re looking for is the ability to deal with the unknown, and the other thing you\u2019re looking for is some kind of longer-term potential. I\u2019m trying to understand emotional and intangible assets. How is their tenacity? What\u2019s their energy like? What\u2019s their optimism and belief system? For instance, I have quite a bias against people who are naturally cynical. It can be amusing in certain situations, but in fact it\u2019s very derailing. I once gave a speech at the Association of National Advertisers and said, \u201cThe way I see things at many companies is there are one or two people originating and the rest are sitting in a semicircle, critiquing.\u201d Boy, were they insulted. ", "keyword": "Beers Charlotte;Executives and Management (Theory);Women and Girls;Hiring and Promotion;Advertising and Marketing;Ogilvy & Mather"}
{"id": "ny0296608", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/12/12", "title": "In Patz Trial, Suspect\u2019s Family Tells of His Odd Behavior", "abstract": "He demanded that his daughter hold his hand as she crossed the street, even though she was a teenager. He could be stubborn and taciturn and strict with his rules. He warned his daughter about a dark world \u2014 one in which there \u201cwere no good people.\u201d The woman, Becky Hernandez, said with resignation that she had come to learn that her father, Pedro Hernandez, was a peculiar man. He told her about visions of an angelic \u201clady in white\u201d and demons that choked him, and she remembered him watering a dead tree branch, thinking it would grow. \u201cIt was just my dad,\u201d Ms. Hernandez, 27, testified on Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, where her father is on trial on charges of killing and kidnapping Etan Patz , a 6-year-old boy who disappeared on the walk to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in 1979. The defense started laying out its arguments last week by assailing the credibility of Mr. Hernandez, whose own words, in admissions made to investigators, are the heart of the prosecution\u2019s case . Mr. Hernandez\u2019s lawyers have sought to portray their client as having limited intelligence and difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, as well as with making friends. They argue that Mr. Hernandez, 55, has schizotypal personality disorder, which can include symptoms such as severe social anxiety, paranoia and odd beliefs. Dr. Michael First, a psychiatrist, testified that Mr. Hernandez showed signs of paranoia when he covered up windows and said he was being watched through the cracks in the ceiling of his jail cell. Dr. First said Mr. Hernandez\u2019s lack of close friendships and his stoic demeanor were also indications of the disorder. Mr. Hernandez\u2019s lawyers showed video of Mr. Hernandez, taken from a psychiatric interview in 2014 while he was in jail, in which he describes his visions, like black shapes moving around his room at night. In one moment, his eyes darted nervously around the room. Prosecutors have countered that Mr. Hernandez was malingering \u2014 feigning symptoms in order to avoid being convicted of killing Etan \u2014 and said that even if he had the disorder, it did not mean his confessions were false. At one point during a lengthy cross-examination, Joel Seidemann, a prosecutor, asked if Mr. Hernandez could have knowingly created the characters that he claimed he saw with Etan in the basement of the bodega where he worked when the boy went missing. Dr. First said it was \u201ca possibility.\u201d Yet, Dr. First added, \u201che could also be imagining or making up the fact that he strangled Etan Patz.\u201d Dr. First said he had ruled out the possibility Mr. Hernandez was malingering in part because Mr. Hernandez had shown signs of the disorder before his arrest in 2012. Carmen Foschini, a younger sister of Mr. Hernandez\u2019s, testified that out of 12 siblings, she was the closest to Mr. Hernandez in childhood. She said he was protective and caring. \u201cHe was a good brother,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cHe was always there for us.\u201d He did not appear to have many friends, she said, except for a boy who lived near them and who, years later, was one of the people to whom Mr. Hernandez confided that he had killed a child. But, she conceded, the friend had a crush on her, and that could have been the reason he was often around. Prosecutors argued Mr. Hernandez\u2019s lack of friends could have been a reflection not of a personality disorder but of a strict and abusive father who kept his children from playing team sports or bringing friends home. Ms. Hernandez described seeing Mr. Hernandez having a conversation, even moving his hands, although no one was with him, and she recalled hearing him screaming loudly in his sleep. But he tried to keep these experiences to himself, she said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t like to tell us,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause he doesn\u2019t want to scare us.\u201d At various moments during her testimony, when she recalled him struggling, and failing, to assemble a desk and an entertainment center, Mr. Hernandez was slumped in his chair and looking down. Ms. Hernandez also said that she had found cocaine belonging to him in the family\u2019s car. She acknowledged that she had been placed in an uncomfortable position. \u201cThis is my life,\u201d Ms. Hernandez said, her voice breaking as she sat on the witness stand. \u201cThis is not easy to do \u2014 to stand here, in front of strangers, and tell them things about my life, things about my dad, things about my mom, so that people can judge me.\u201d Soon after, her mother and Mr. Hernandez\u2019s wife, Rosemary, who had been watching her daughter testify, walked out of the courtroom in tears.", "keyword": "Etan Patz;Pedro Hernandez;Becky Hernandez;Murders and Homicides;Missing person;SoHo Manhattan;Child Abuse"}
{"id": "ny0281594", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/10/25", "title": "Struggling for an Emmett Till Memorial That Withstands Gunshots", "abstract": "Along a secluded gravel road that runs between a riverbank and cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta region, a purple sign marks the area where Emmett Till\u2019s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in the summer of 1955. For eight years, the sign has been riddled with bullet holes. The 14-year-old from Chicago was visiting the South when he was accused of whistling at a white woman and murdered. His death became a rallying cry for the civil rights movement, but several signs meant to memorialize the killing \u2014 including the one on the riverbank between the towns of Glendora, Miss., and Webb, Miss. \u2014 have been vandalized by spray paint and bullet holes. Others have been stolen. It took a visiting filmmaker, Kevin Wilson Jr., to rally support for replacing the sign by the Tallahatchie River when he shared a photo of it on his Facebook page this month. \u201cI\u2019m at the exact site where Emmett Till\u2019s body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River 61 years ago,\u201d Mr. Wilson wrote on Oct. 15. \u201cThe site marker is filled with bullet holes. Clear evidence that we\u2019ve still got a long way to go.\u201d Online outrage, and a fund-raising campaign, soon followed. So far, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission has raised more than $18,000 to buy a new sign, and an official with the commission said the group was looking to install a new type of memorial \u2014 one that presumably could withstand gunshots. Patrick Weems, the project coordinator for the commission, also known as the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said on Monday that the group hoped to work with the same architect who had restored the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were tried and acquitted in the murder of the African-American teenager. (The two later publicly confessed to the killing in a magazine article .) Image In this 1955 file photo, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, wept at her son\u2019s casket at a Chicago funeral home. Credit Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press Mr. Weems said there were plans to turn the riverbank area into a park with a gazebo, where people could pray or observe a moment of silence. The commission hoped that a larger structure might withstand the periodic acts of vandalism against sites that honor the boy\u2019s life. \u201cHow do we replace it in a way where this doesn\u2019t happen?\u201d Mr. Weems said of the sign. \u201cI think it\u2019s a lot less likely for someone to go out of their way to vandalize a gazebo.\u201d The plans, he said, would commemorate a killing that laid bare a history of violent attacks against African-Americans at the hands of whites. Back in 1955, Emmett Till\u2019s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, had insisted on having an open-casket funeral to show the world what had happened to her son, who had been beaten beyond recognition and shot in the head . More than 100,000 people filed past the coffin to view his body, which was displayed unembalmed for four days. In 2005, 50 years after the murder, federal officials opened a new investigation into the killing. Till\u2019s body, which had never undergone an autopsy, was exhumed and reburied in a new coffin. Mr. Weems said the group has raised the idea of asking the National Park Service to designate the land a historic site, where any case of vandalism would prompt a federal investigation. Vandals have hit several Till memorials in the area over the past decade, according to Dave Tell, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, who is working on a book about the effort to commemorate the teenager\u2019s death. Image An undated portrait of Emmett Louis Till. Credit Associated Press \u201cFor 49 years and 11 months there was not a single marker in the entire state of Mississippi to the memory of Emmett Till\u201d after Till was murdered, Professor Tell said in an interview on Monday. That changed in 2005, when two memorial signs were placed along a 30-mile stretch of highway. Professor Tell said the signs were vandalized within months with black spray paint, and the letters \u201cKKK\u201d were scrawled on them. Three years later, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission installed eight signs about the murder, including the one on the riverbank. Two were stolen, including one in Sumner, Miss., where the trial was held. The sign sat on land owned by the son of John W. Whitten Jr., one of several lawyers who defended Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam. \u201cThe local community is very suspicious that the sign was removed from the property,\u201d Mr. Tell said. Mr. Weems said the commission was looking at options to replace that sign. The one along the riverbank was replaced once before, after it was shot and then stolen within months, Mr. Tell said. Local officials had vowed to replace the sign every time it was vandalized, but the new sign was \u201cimmediately shot up again,\u201d Professor Tell said. He added, \u201cAnd it\u2019s been sitting there now for eight years with bullet holes in it.\u201d Mr. Weems said that the commission had decided to dedicate its resources to developing a virtual tour of the sites rather than restoring the damaged signs. The vandalism has divided residents in a part of the country where \u201cit doesn\u2019t take too much scratching beneath the surface to see that race is still an issue,\u201d Mr. Weems said. \u201cI think there was some people who said, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s another sign that got shot; this happens all the time,\u2019 \u201d he added. \u201cAnd others said, \u2018No, this is absolutely what it looks like: This is a racist act and we need to stand together.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Emmett Louis Till;Murders and Homicides;Civil Rights Movement;Historic preservation;Vandalism;Race and Ethnicity;Mississippi"}
{"id": "ny0167243", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/01/10", "title": "Texas Instruments Is Selling Its Sensors Unit for $3 Billion", "abstract": "Texas Instruments said yesterday that it had reached a deal to sell its sensors and controls unit to a private equity firm, Bain Capital, for $3 billion in cash, ending an auction that had attracted several private equity firms as bidders. The division, which has $1 billion in annual revenue and 5,400 employees, is a small part of Texas Instruments and is not closely tied to the company's main business of making semiconductors for cellphones and other electronics. Texas Instruments, which is based in Dallas, put the unit up for sale in September. Morgan Stanley ran the auction. Reports that Bain Capital was near a deal for the unit surfaced about two weeks ago. The division, based in Attleboro, Mass., makes temperature and lighting sensors and controls for use in homes, cars, planes and industrial settings. A little more than half its sales come from outside the United States. Texas Instruments has been divesting businesses that are either not directly related to its dominant position in the wireless chip business or not successful enough to help lift the average profit margins of all its businesses. The company has sold divisions that made memory and personal computer chips. The chief financial officer, Kevin P. March, said, \"The semiconductor business has not only been growing much faster but the profitability in that business has also expanded very strongly, exceeding the profitability of our sensors and controls business.\" Mr. March said the company had no specific plans for the $3 billion, but he noted that Texas Instruments had used excess cash in recent times to increase its dividend, buy back shares and make acquisitions. He declined to say if the company planned to sell other businesses. Bain Capital, based in Boston, said that it would keep the division's current management after the transaction, which has been approved by the board of Texas Instruments and is expected to be completed before July. A managing director at Bain, Stephen M. Zide, said, \"There is a considerable amount of value that can be unlocked by focusing solely on growing sensors and controls' competitive position\" in a market that it already leads. The sale does not include the radio frequency identification business, which is part of the sensors division. That fast-growing technology is being used by companies and governments to keep track of products, assets and even people with transmitters that send signals over short distances. Shares of Texas Instruments fell 27 cents yesterday, to $34.18.", "keyword": "TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INC;BAIN CAPITAL"}
{"id": "ny0145815", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/10/22", "title": "Rested Phillies Ready for Improbable Rays", "abstract": "ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 The World Series has come to the land of cowbells and catwalks, where cownose rays swim in a 10,000-gallon tank above the fence in right-center field. Tropicana Field is home sweet dome to the Tampa Bay Rays , the surprise story of this baseball season. \u201cIf I would have told you in March that Tampa Bay would be the American League pennant winner, you\u2019d have laughed,\u201d Commissioner Bud Selig said. \u201cIt\u2019s a great story all the way around.\u201d Selig was also referring to the Rays\u2019 opponent, the Philadelphia Phillies , who are back in the World Series for the first time since 1993. The Phillies have more losses than any franchise in American professional sports history. The Rays had never exceeded 70 wins until this season. Yet the matchup may be one of the more exciting in recent memory. The future of the sport will be displayed on its grandest stage. \u201cThe players on these two teams are going to be the guys, 10 years from now, that are the superstars in this league,\u201d Phillies reliever Chad Durbin said. \u201cThere are some young guys on both teams that are superstars already.\u201d For the first time, the opening game of the World Series will feature two starting pitchers younger than 25. The Phillies\u2019 Cole Hamels and the Rays\u2019 Scott Kazmir are both former All-Star left-handers who are 24. If you are 30 years old on these teams, you are ancient. Every starting pitcher but the Phillies\u2019 Jamie Moyer is younger than 30. So are 13 of the 16 regular position players. The clubhouses, naturally, have a youthful vibe. The Mohawk haircut is the rage for the Rays, and Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel had customized rubber ducks placed in the locker of each player before Tuesday\u2019s workout. When the Phillies played Milwaukee in the first round, second baseman Chase Utley said he thought Manuel was too uptight. He told Manuel to relax with a colorful suggestion involving a comical reference to a duck. It gave Manuel an idea. \u201cI wanted our players to be loose and I wanted them to play like they always have,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cSo I bought them some rubber ducks. And before they go out on the field, they look up in their lockers and see a duck.\u201d The Phillies had plenty of time to work on duck designs. They clinched the National League title in Game 5 at Dodger Stadium last Wednesday, leaving six full days off before the World Series. The Rays finally finished off Boston in Game 7 on Sunday. For the Phillies, that is a bad omen. In the last two World Series, a team coming off a seven-game L.C.S. victory has emphatically beaten a team with at least six days off. \u201cIt\u2019s obviously a good thing for us to be riding the momentum at this point, especially coming off a big win like that and going into the World Series,\u201d Rays third baseman Evan Longoria said. \u201cWhere they\u2019ve been kind of stagnant for the past few days waiting to see who they would play, we\u2019ve been playing.\u201d The Phillies dismissed such talk, naturally, and for baseball, it would be good to have a lengthy World Series. The last four have finished in five games or fewer, the longest such streak since 1913 to 1916. Then again, however the series goes, baseball has reason to be happy with the matchup. The sport prizes parity, and in the last four years, eight different teams have shown up in the World Series. In the last decade, half of all teams (15 of 30) have taken part. And although the Phillies and the Rays seem like upstarts, they earned their way here: this is the first World Series since 2001 without a wild-card team. \u201cAny doubters now should be ashamed of themselves,\u201d Rays outfielder Cliff Floyd said. \u201cThis is not a fluke team.\u201d Maybe not, but the Rays are trying to do something that has never been done. According to Jayson Stark of ESPN.com , no team in any of the four major American pro sports has had the worst record in its sport one season and won a championship the next. For the Rays to do it, they may need more help from David Price, their not-so-secret bullpen weapon who closed out the Red Sox on Sunday in his eighth career game. Price is not among the Rays\u2019 four starters \u2014 after Kazmir, the Rays will start James Shields, Matt Garza and Andy Sonnanstine \u2014 but he could neutralize Utley and Ryan Howard, the Phillies\u2019 left-handed sluggers, in relief. \u201cHe said basically from the first pitch to the last pitch, I don\u2019t have a problem putting you in any situation,\u201d Price said, referring to Manager Joe Maddon. \u201cThat\u2019s what he\u2019s told me since I got here. It hasn\u2019t changed.\u201d The Phillies know about late-arriving rookies. In 1980, when they won their only title, they let Marty Bystrom start the decisive N.L.C.S. game after just six major league appearances. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody expected Price to come out of the bullpen and do what he did,\u201d said Dallas Green, a senior adviser for the Phillies and the manager of the 1980 club. \u201cHe just dominated a pretty good hitting team. Those are probably the kind of guys that are going to be difference-makers.\u201d The Rays may improvise, but the Phillies have a sure thing in closer Brad Lidge, who has converted all 46 of his save chances since opening day. Lidge\u2019s setup men, J. C. Romero and Ryan Madson, have a combined earned run average of 0.77 this month. The Phillies need more shutdown pitching to contain a Tampa Bay offense that has 22 home runs in 11 postseason games. The Phillies also have power, with 10 homers in nine playoff games. \u201cWe\u2019re at a very even level,\u201d Hamels said. \u201cI can\u2019t say who to favor \u2014 I\u2019m going to pick my side, no doubt \u2014 but I think it really is going to bring a good, competitive level to this World Series.\u201d", "keyword": "Philadelphia Phillies;Tampa Bay Rays;World Series;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0200654", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/09/16", "title": "Schwarzenegger Orders Increase in Renewable Energy Use", "abstract": "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order Tuesday requiring that California draw 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind power by 2020. The requirement is stricter than any other state\u2019s except Hawaii\u2019s, which calls for 40 percent by 2030. \u201cRight now, we are relying too heavily on coal -fired power plants,\u201d Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a news briefing in Sacramento, shortly before signing the order. About half the 50 states have renewable energy requirements, often called renewable portfolio standards. The climate bill passed by the House in June would establish this type of mandate at the national level, requiring 20 percent of the nation\u2019s electricity to come from a combination of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency measures by 2020. The Senate has yet to vote on a companion measure. In 2008, Mr. Schwarzenegger signed an executive order establishing a 33 percent renewable target by 2020. But Tuesday\u2019s order was more definitive and provided guidance to state regulators about how to carry out the requirement. Mr. Schwarzenegger said that increasing production of renewable energy was an important part of California\u2019s strategy to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. The details have recently been the subject of political wrangling. Last weekend, the Legislature, which Democrats control, passed bills with a 33 percent requirement for renewables. But Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said he would veto the bills, calling them \u201cpoorly drafted,\u201d \u201coverly complex\u201d and likely to raise costs. In particular, he and many environmental officials were concerned that the bills would have severely restricted the amount of renewable electricity that could come from outside California. \u201cI am totally against protectionist policies,\u201d Mr. Schwarzenegger said Tuesday. Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said that while any renewable energy requirement was likely to increase costs for manufacturers, the executive order was \u201ca step in the right direction\u201d relative to the Legislature\u2019s bills, which would have imposed heavier costs. The executive order explicitly states that renewable energy from \u201cresources and facilities located throughout the Western Interconnection\u201d is welcome. The Western Interconnection is the power grid that spans the West. Establishing a requirement, however, is far different from meeting it, as California is already finding out. The state\u2019s interim mandate of 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources and energy efficiency by 2010 looks likely to fall short. The San Diego Gas and Electric Company, the furthest behind of the state\u2019s three big utilities, says it currently gets 10 percent of its electricity from such sources.", "keyword": "California;Schwarzenegger Arnold;Alternative and Renewable Energy;Executive Orders;Wind Power;Solar Energy"}
{"id": "ny0207770", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/06/30", "title": "As Iraq Stabilizes, China Eyes Its Oil Fields", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 As the world\u2019s second-largest and fastest-growing consumer of oil, China is showing increasing interest in oil fields in a country that has until very recently seemed to be firmly in the American sphere of influence for natural resources: Iraq . Chinese oil companies are expected to bid for the rights to develop Iraq\u2019s oil fields in auctions that are set to start Tuesday, although Sinopec, the China National Petroleum Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation all declined to comment Monday about their bidding strategies. In another sign of China\u2019s interest in Iraqi oil fields, Sinopec, China\u2019s refining giant, offered $7.22 billion on Wednesday to buy Addax Petroleum, a Swiss-Canadian company with operations in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and in West Africa. If Addax\u2019s shareholders and Canadian regulators approve the deal, which Addax\u2019s board is recommending, it would be China\u2019s largest overseas energy acquisition. And Sinopec\u2019s archrival, the China National Petroleum Corporation, or C.N.P.C., started drilling in spring in the Ahdab oil field in southeastern Iraq. After six years of war, few Americans or Iraqis may have expected China to emerge as one of the winners in Iraqi oil. But signs of stability in Iraq this year, and a planned American military pullout from Iraqi cities on Tuesday, just happen to coincide with an aggressive Chinese push to buy or develop overseas oil fields. The Chinese companies \u201chave been interested in Iraq,\u201d said David Zweig, a specialist in Chinese natural resource policies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. \u201cThey were interested in Iraq before the war, and now that things have improved somewhat there, it\u2019s on their agenda.\u201d China\u2019s leaders were surprised by the steep rise in commodity prices early last year, which exposed the vulnerability of their country\u2019s huge manufacturing sector to high raw material prices. When oil prices plunged in autumn, China began buying, importing and storing oil in huge quantities, helping to drive a partial rebound in world oil prices in spring. And China stepped up its hunt to acquire foreign oil. Chinese officials, economists and advisers have been almost unanimous in recent weeks in saying that their country needed to invest more in natural resources, while also voicing concerns about the long-term creditworthiness of the United States and the buying power of the dollar . China has $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, mostly invested in dollar-denominated bonds, and has been looking for ways to diversify gradually into other assets like commodities, said a Chinese government adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of Chinese reserve policies. China\u2019s central bank, the People\u2019s Bank of China, called Friday for the development of an international currency other than the dollar that would be a safe repository of value, in the latest sign of China\u2019s search for other ways to invest its international reserves. Philip Andrews-Speed, a specialist in China\u2019s oil industry at the University of Dundee in Scotland, said Iraq was clearly attractive for China and its oil industry. \u201cAll, or nearly all, oil companies who have the courage want to be in Iraq because of the large size of the proven resource base and the potential for new discoveries,\u201d he wrote in an e-mail message. \u201cSo, in this respect, the Chinese are part of the herd.\u201d Chinese oil companies have been particularly interested in buying oil fields ever since crude oil prices plunged late last summer, because that dragged down the cost of oil fields as well, Mr. Andrews-Speed wrote. And with their experience in some of the most turbulent countries in Africa, Chinese oil companies may have the ability to cope with the unpredictability of Iraq. \u201cThey may be no more competent at managing these risks than other companies, but they do seem to be prepared to accept a higher level of risk,\u201d he wrote, citing China\u2019s willingness to do business in Sudan. Driving China\u2019s interest is the country\u2019s voracious thirst for oil. As recently as the early 1990s, China was a net exporter of oil because of production mainly from aging oil fields in the northeastern corner of the country. But China\u2019s oil consumption has soared since then, thanks to an economic boom and climbing car sales that have produced traffic jams in big cities. China surpassed the United States this year as the world\u2019s largest car market, partly because China has weathered the global economic downturn better than the United States; China\u2019s oil consumption reached 8 million barrels per day last year, up from 4.9 million in 2001, according to a statistical review from BP, the British oil company. Oil production has grown much more slowly, as older oil fields have run dry. New fields, either offshore or in western China, have barely replaced them. China produced 3.8 million barrels per day of oil last year, up from 3.3 million barrels per day in 2001, which still left the country dependent on imports for more than half its oil. Iraq has the world\u2019s third-largest proven reserves, after Saudi Arabia and Iran. Many geologists say that the true oil resources of Iraq are even greater than official statistics suggest, because Iraq\u2019s oil industry has suffered from decades of disruption and underinvestment. Many oil fields have not been fully explored as a result. Addax has oil licenses in two oil fields in northern Iraq, the Taqtaq and Sangaw North fields, both near Kirkuk, and its drilling has already struck large quantities of oil repeatedly in the Taqtaq field.", "keyword": "China;Iraq;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;International Trade and World Market;Offshore Exploration and Installations"}
{"id": "ny0130332", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/06/13", "title": "Protesters Defy Efforts to Muffle Anti-Putin Outcry", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Tens of thousands of protesters thronged central Moscow in a drenching rain on Tuesday, voicing renewed fury at President Vladimir V. Putin and defying recent efforts by his government to clamp down on the political opposition movement. The large turnout, rivaling the big crowds that had gathered at the initial antigovernment rallies in December, suggested that the tough new posture adopted by the Kremlin against the protests was emboldening rather than deterring Mr. Putin\u2019s critics. On Friday, Mr. Putin signed a new law that imposes steep financial penalties on participants in rallies that cause harm to people or property. On Sunday, officials arrested five more people on charges related to the last protest, which ended in a melee between demonstrators and riot police officers. And on Monday, the authorities searched the homes of several opposition leaders and issued summonses ordering seven of them to appear for questioning on Tuesday so they could not attend the rally. Despite these measures, organizers said, more than 50,000 people joined in Tuesday\u2019s protest, braving the heavy rains that soaked many participants beforehand and the claps of thunder and lightning that dispersed the crowd about four hours later. The police, who typically offer a muted estimate of crowd size, put the official tally at 15,000. Even the physical absence of some of the opposition\u2019s most prominent leaders seemed to strengthen rather than weaken the protesters\u2019 resolve, and organizers said the attendance showed that people would not be intimidated. \u201cIt means that we were not afraid of the tough actions of the powers and the police,\u201d said Dmitry G. Gudkov, a member of Parliament and a leader of the opposition, adding that the government could achieve more through negotiation. \u201cWe need dialogue with the authorities, and we need to pursue political reforms, constitutional reforms and the reform of the judicial system. It is the only way out of this political crisis in Russia \u2014 the only way out.\u201d Mr. Gudkov said it was silly for the authorities to issue summonses to prevent some opposition leaders from attending. \u201cEveryone is a leader here, and we can change speakers,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the people\u2019s protest, and I think Putin and the government need to realize it.\u201d Among those forced to skip the rally and instead face questioning by the authorities was the blogger and anticorruption activist Aleksei Navalny. But far from being silenced, Mr. Navalny posted a series of messages on Twitter mocking his interrogators. \u201cI am still in questioning,\u201d Mr. Navalny wrote at one point. \u201cThey are asking about the Anti-Corruption Fund, who works for it, what they do \u2014 surely they want to be employed by us.\u201d At another point, he wrote: \u201cThey just asked, \u2018How have you been employed since Jan. 1 2005?\u2019 It seems I have been planning unrest for a long time.\u201d Some in the crowd also mocked the authorities. \u201cDo you want a ticket to the paddy wagon?\u201d cried one young man, carrying a roll of fake bus tickets. \u201cStep up for a ticket to the paddy wagon!\u201d The police tightly penned in the march and rally site, a roughly mile-and-a-half stretch using barricades, trucks and other heavy equipment. But the overall police presence, while still large, seemed lighter than at previous protests. Officers, some dressed in camouflage, for the most part did not engage with the crowd. Some demonstrators tried to spin this as a public relations victory. \u201cThe police are with the people!\u201d they shouted. While that seemed wishful thinking, there was none of the violence that marred the last big protest , which occurred on May 6, the day before Mr. Putin\u2019s inauguration to a third term as president. So far, the authorities have arrested more than a dozen people on various charges related to the May 6 unrest, and the criminal inquiry is still under way. It was that investigation that led to the searches of opposition leaders\u2019 homes and their being summoned for questioning. Most complied. Mr. Navalny, the television star Kseniya Sobchak and the liberal organizer Ilya Yashin all reported to the Investigative Committee for questioning at 11 a.m., waving cheerfully to photographers on their way in. But the leftist Sergei Udaltsov defied the summons and went to the march. Instead, his lawyer delivered a statement explaining that as an official organizer of the demonstration, Mr. Udaltsov would have been irresponsible not to attend. Mr. Yashin, who went to the rally straight from being questioned, said he had thanked his interrogators for promoting the march. \u201cI told them that no one had done so much for the success of our demonstration,\u201d he said, to cheers from the crowd. \u201cWe have no better helpers than these criminal people who are carrying out senseless, idiotic repressions.\u201d Once again, the huge crowd of antigovernment protesters represented a panoramic range of political views, and in some cases the demonstrators seemed barely united by their opposition to Mr. Putin. The crowd, for instance, included many Russian nationalists dressed in black and flying black, yellow and white flags, and one column unfurled a huge banner reading, \u201cWe\u2019ll take back Russia for the Russians.\u201d Groups of liberals passed by wearing their own symbol \u2014 the white ribbon \u2014 with some murmuring, \u201cHow awful.\u201d Aleksei Kovalyov, one of the nationalists, expressed disdain for many of the liberal leaders of the demonstrations. \u201cThe only reason we\u2019re here is because we are going to unite the Russian people against the government,\u201d Mr. Kovalyov said. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to put us down like in Libya or Syria because every Russian knows something about total war in his soul.\u201d Roman Habarov, a former police officer from Voronezh who spoke at the rally, got a warm reception from the crowd. \u201cPolice officers are ready to defend the law but not the crooks who are currently dictating how it should be carried out,\u201d Mr. Habarov said. \u201cAll that remains for us is lawful but decisive protest.\u201d The protest coincided with a holiday, Russia Day, which commemorates Russia\u2019s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, and as a result city streets were largely empty except for the demonstrators. Dark storm clouds gathered all morning, and shortly before the scheduled start, the skies opened with a tremendous downpour. Meanwhile, the Web site of the Dozhd television station, which has given comprehensive coverage to the opposition marches, was paralyzed by a hacker attack, its editor in chief told the Interfax news agency. In an interview with Dozhd, Mr. Putin\u2019s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised the work of the police who supervised Tuesday\u2019s rally, calling it \u201ccivil, courteous, benevolent.\u201d and the participants in the rally, saying they were \u201cvery disciplined.\u201d Mr. Peskov added, \u201cPolitical culture is strengthening.\u201d Ivan A. Mefenko, 25, the director of an Internet cafe, said he had not been sure whether to attend the rally until the raids that took place on Monday, which were documented virtually minute by minute via Twitter and Internet news sites. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping they will start to listen, at last, to the opinions of the people,\u201d he said. Galina Petrenko, 49, who works in the cosmetics industry, said the government was miscalculating by taking punitive steps against the protesters. \u201cThey will simply speed up this wave coming toward them,\u201d she said. \u201cYou should not take actions against your own people.\u201d But in many ways the huge, peaceful rally left more questions than answers. Where will the arrests, searches and other government pressure lead? Will protesters at the next rally face arrest and the stiff penalties included in the new law? One demonstrator\u2019s sign seemed to capture the moment. It asked, \u201cAnd, what to do?\u201d", "keyword": "Russia;Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Navalny Aleksei N;Yashin Ilya;Udaltsov Sergei;Sobchak Kseniya;Putin Vladimir V"}
{"id": "ny0165237", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/07/21", "title": "Report Says Fiscal Abuse at Medical College Is Worse Than Suspected", "abstract": "TRENTON, July 20 \u2014 From the double-billing of Medicaid to the overbilling for supplies in the university cafeteria, financial abuse at New Jersey \u2019s state medical school involved tens of millions more taxpayer dollars than had been suspected, according to a report released Thursday by a court-appointed monitor. Investigators found that administrators at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey \u2014 who acknowledged last December that they had overcharged Medicaid by $4.9 million \u2014 had also overbilled the federal program an additional $35.5 million from 2001 to 2005. The inquiry also charged that the university had overbilled New Jersey\u2019s state-financed charity care program by at least $11 million and may have been ineligible for $51 million it received in state aid for providing mental health care for the indigent. Since being appointed by a federal judge early this year to review the university, the monitor, Herbert J. Stern, has opened 27 separate investigations, and the report said that an assortment of financial abuses had already surfaced: a $400,000 continuing education fund used for \u201cpork\u201d projects like holiday parties; $22 million in unauthorized spending since 2001; and $3.8 million for political lobbyists, some of whom cannot document that they did any work. Beyond those expenditures, investigators said the university\u2019s financial oversight was so shoddy that it was difficult to determine how much, if any, of the $104 million spent on recurring costs was squandered. The report also charged that a former university trustee, Dr. Frederic C. Sterritt, abused his position on the board by getting a relative a job. Given those problems, Mr. Stern, a former federal judge, chided the board for delaying its search for a compliance officer, general counsel and permanent president \u2014 recommendations made months ago. John Inglesino, a lawyer who works for Mr. Stern, said that oversight was needed because the university had exhibited such a cavalier attitude toward the billions of dollars in public financing it had received in the past two decades. \u201cThere\u2019s a culture of entitlement there dating back 20 years,\u201d Mr. Inglesino said. \u201cSome of the people there seem to think that the money should go into their pockets or for perks for themselves and their friends. There\u2019s a sense that people don\u2019t have to do their jobs very well in order to remain gainfully employed and they can waste taxpayer dollars and not be held accountable.\u201d During the past year, the college, the largest public health care university in the country, has been shaken by news reports about financial mismanagement, abuse and outright fraud. In December, university officials agreed to have a monitor installed rather than face federal prosecution for Medicaid fraud. Dr. Bruce C. Vladeck, who was appointed interim president in March, said through a spokeswoman that university officials were already moving to tighten their oversight procedures. In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Gov. Jon S. Corzine said that reports of rampant financial abuse at the university were \u201ca disgrace\u201d and that he would consider a proposal to merge the school with Rutgers. But similar plans have faced fierce opposition from medical educators and elected officials in the past, and Mr. Corzine acknowledged that the cost and complexity of such a merger might be prohibitive. Under its current configuration, the university has 4,500 students, 10,000 employees, 5 campuses and a $1.6 billion annual budget. In a letter to the United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, this week, Mr. Stern said the trustees\u2019 delay in finding a permanent president had hurt the university\u2019s recruitment efforts and financial stability. Dr. Vladeck, who recently extended his contract six months, has said that he would consider becoming a candidate for the post, but the board is expected to conduct a nationwide search for a president. In his statement Thursday, Dr. Vladeck praised the monitor\u2019s report, but he also sought to reassure taxpayers that news accounts that the university had wasted $243 million mischaracterized the report. Mr. Inglesino said that the $243 million figure included tens of millions that had been wasted or given to politically connected vendors along with more than $100 million that may have been spent properly but was not adequately documented. One example involved $35 million for computer and telephone services from Johnston Communications, whose workers had \u201cinappropriate\u201d relationships with university employees, the report said. It said nearly $30 million of its contracts are difficult to evaluate because the university violated its own policy by failing to require purchase orders. And even some of the documented expenses were cited as exorbitantly priced, the report said. The company was paid $301,660.77 for one work order, but when investigators tracked down the documentation, the only work performed was the removal of a Trojan horse and spyware from a desktop computer, the report said. \u201cThat\u2019s part of the frustration \u2014 the sheer amount of money that has been wasted due to gross mismanagement and lack of oversight,\u201d Mr. Inglesino said. \u201cWe know there\u2019s fraud, but we may never be able to definitively quantify how much is fraud and how much is gross mismanagement.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey;New Jersey;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0085557", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2015/07/20", "title": "Windows 10 Signifies Microsoft\u2019s Shift in Strategy", "abstract": "SEATTLE \u2014 Next week, when Microsoft releases Windows 10, the latest version of the company\u2019s operating system, the software will offer a mix of the familiar and new to the people who run earlier versions of it on more than 1.5 billion computers and other devices. There will be a virtual assistant in the software that keeps track of users\u2019 schedules, and Microsoft will regularly trickle out updates with new features to its users over the Internet. And the Start menu, a fixture of Windows for decades, will make a formal reappearance. But one of the biggest changes is the price. Microsoft will not charge customers to upgrade Windows on computers, a shift that shows how power dynamics in the tech industry have changed. The decision to make free a product that once cost $50 to $100 is a sign of how charging consumers for software is going the way of the flip phone. Companies like Google have crept into Microsoft\u2019s business with free software and services subsidized by its huge advertising business, while Apple in recent years has made upgrades to its applications and operating systems free, earning its money instead from hardware sales. Microsoft, whose core business is software, sought to buck this trend for as long as it could. But the inroads made by companies like Apple and Google have put intense pressure on Microsoft to find new ways to profit from some of its big moneymakers. \u201cIt will confirm people\u2019s expectations that you don\u2019t pay for operating systems,\u201d Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, said of Windows 10. He added, referring to Microsoft\u2019s devices: \u201cThey\u2019re basically killing off their ability to monetize anything on the consumer side, aside from Xbox, Lumia phones and Surface.\u201d Already, the company has been giving away mobile versions of Office apps like Word and Excel, an effort to give the software some life in a category of devices where the company is weak. And it has made Windows free to companies that make smaller devices, mainly smartphones and tablets, to get more of them to use the software. The thinking behind the Windows decision follows a similar logic. Microsoft decided to sacrifice some of its Windows revenue for the simple reason that the company needs people using Windows 10 \u2014 and fast. PCs have lost momentum in many ways to smartphones and tablets in recent years. The company\u2019s last operating system, Windows 8, did not revive the market and might have made matters worse with a bold redesign of its interface that turned off some users. During the second quarter, global PC shipments declined 9.5 percent, according to Gartner, the technology research firm. Gartner estimates that there will be about 300 million PCs sold this year and 1.9 billion mobile phones. Windows ships on less than 3 percent of the smartphones sold globally, with Google\u2019s Android and Apple\u2019s iOS accounting for most of the rest. \u201cConsumer Windows is fighting for relevance in a world where Apple and Android are the dominant OSes,\u201d said Bill Whyman, an analyst at Evercore ISI. \u201cThat\u2019s the challenge.\u201d An operating system is only as good as the programs that can run on top of it. But in recent years, Windows has become an afterthought for many software developers, who have turned to the huge and engaged audience on smartphones. That shift has left Microsoft in a precarious position with consumers in recent years. To generate more interest from developers, Microsoft has designed Windows 10 to run on PCs, smartphones and other devices, which is meant to make it easier for developers to write apps that run across all of them. And the company has sworn there will be one billion devices running the software in the next two to three years, giving developers a huge potential market to reach with their creations. Image The Start menu, a fixture of Windows for decades, will make a formal reappearance in Windows 10. A previous version of the software, which had a redesigned interface, turned off some users. \u201cI think we will see really huge adoption\u201d of Windows 10, said Kevin Sather, director of product marketing for systems at Razer, a maker of high-end gaming computers and other devices. The benefits of fast and free adoption of Windows 10 could well outweigh the revenue Microsoft is giving up. The company does not disclose how much upgrade revenue it normally makes from a new operating system, but analysts estimate that it is small compared with the other ways the company makes money from the operating system. Amy Hood, Microsoft\u2019s chief financial officer, recently told investors that the company expected to make about $15 billion in revenue from Windows during its last fiscal year, which ended June 30. Most of that revenue was related to the corporate market, where Microsoft\u2019s position is stronger than it is among consumers. About a quarter of Windows revenue was from volume licensing deals with big business customers, who typically pay for rights for Windows upgrades over several years, along with the ability to manage a multitude of users over corporate networks. Most people pay for Windows, whether they realize it or not, when they buy a new PC with a copy already installed. Nearly half of Windows revenue came from PC makers who licensed the operating system to put on machines aimed at the professional market, while a little over a quarter, about $4 billion, was from consumer PC makers. \u201cThe piece they\u2019re giving away is the piece nobody is buying anyway, which is the upgrade to Windows,\u201d said Steve Kleynhans, an analyst at Gartner. Windows remains the dominant operating system on PCs, and unless that starts to change, Microsoft is unlikely to stop charging computer makers for the software. Still, competitors are biting Microsoft\u2019s ankles in the consumer market, forcing the company to cut prices in some areas. Last year, Microsoft cut fees for the operating system for manufacturers in the low end of the laptop market, where Windows faces growing competition from inexpensive devices known as Chromebooks, which run a free Google operating system. The company\u2019s chief executive, Satya Nadella, also made Windows free on devices with screens smaller than nine inches, a category that consists mainly of smartphones and tablets, along with some laptop-like products. Microsoft executives have started talking up new ways to make money from Windows. Executives see advertising revenue from Bing, the company\u2019s Internet search engine, which is enmeshed in various functions within Windows, as one avenue. In addition, if the company can get enough people to buy games and other software through the Windows app store, its cut from those transactions could become meaningful. The company is pursuing such trade-offs in other areas. With Office, for example, Microsoft gives away mobile versions to get people to pay for a subscription to the product, which gives them the ability to use the software on PCs in addition to online storage and other benefits. Microsoft is also seeking to participate in the hardware side of the technology business, with its Surface tablet computers and Lumia smartphones, though it recently announced plans to scale back the smartphone business after weak sales. The company also has a broad array of software products aimed at the corporate market, including databases, messaging and cloud computing services, that are doing well and could help offset a loss in revenue from the free upgrades. But John DiFucci, an analyst at Jefferies, said Microsoft\u2019s grip on the business market may be less solid than generally assumed. He said he had noticed in meetings with investors that more and more bring iPads, Android tablets and Chromebooks to take notes. \u201cThere\u2019s some risk there I think people are ignoring, or at least not appreciating,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Microsoft;Microsoft Windows;Software"}
{"id": "ny0100907", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/12/28", "title": "Cincinnati Bengals at Denver Broncos Preview", "abstract": "Bengals (11-3) at Broncos (10-4) 8:30 p.m. Line: Broncos by 3 Two of the best teams in the A.F.C. playing in a prime-time game in the second-to-last-week of the season should be among the most anticipated games of the year, but Brock Osweiler and AJ McCarron filling in for Peyton Manning and Andy Dalton ratchets down the excitement. That unfortunately discredits each team\u2019s defense. The Bengals have allowed just 17.4 points a game and the Broncos are just behind them at 18.5, numbers that will increase the pressure on the young backup quarterbacks. Osweiler has performed well while learning on the job, and he is certainly further along than McCarron, but Denver has been outscored by 36-0 in the second half of their last three games. So even if the Broncos build an early lead, the Bengals can\u2019t be counted out. Pick: Broncos", "keyword": "Football;Bengals;Broncos"}
{"id": "ny0077013", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/05/07", "title": "E.C.B. Doubts Add to Uncertainties on Greek Debt Lifeline", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 As Greece mounts an 11th-hour diplomatic offensive across Europe to secure financial aid that it desperately needs to avoid a default , patience with Athens is wearing thin at the European Central Bank. That could pose big problems for Greece, since the central bank is the country\u2019s biggest creditor and a necessary source of financial support for struggling Greek commercial banks. A majority of the members of the European Central Bank\u2019s influential Governing Council are increasingly uncomfortable with the central bank\u2019s growing financial exposure to Greece, according to people with knowledge of the group\u2019s discussions. Members worry that the council has already stretched rules to extend additional help to the banks, whose financial health has been in serious decline because of Greece\u2019s deep economic downturn . The European Central Bank has already lent about 110 billion euros, or about $120 billion, to banks in Greece \u2014 more than to any other country\u2019s financial institutions, relative to the size of the economy. The banks need the cash to continue providing credit to the Greek economy. And while the central bank does not want to provoke a mass failure of Greek banks, or force Greece out of the eurozone, it may soon be compelled to tighten its flow of credit to the banks if Greece does not produce a set of economic overhauls that its creditors are demanding . Any significant economic changes are proving difficult for the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which was voted into power in January on promises to relieve Greece of the austerity measures demanded by its foreign lenders. On Wednesday, the central bank\u2019s Governing Council met in Frankfurt but did not impose any new restrictions on Greece. Instead, the council was planning to closely watch the outcome of a meeting in Brussels on Monday between Greece and the Eurogroup of finance ministers from eurozone countries. As it has been doing routinely for several months, the central bank again raised the limit on emergency cash for Greek banks. Policy makers there will decide whether Greece has come up with an adequate set of economic overhauls required before they will release more financial aid to the country, which is quickly running out of money. On Wednesday, Greece found funds to make a \u20ac200 million payment to another of its creditors, the International Monetary Fund. But on Tuesday, Greece must give the I.M.F. an additional payment of about \u20ac750 million \u2014 money that the Tsipras government says it will be hard-pressed to find. More than two months have passed since European leaders in late February negotiated a deal to extend Greece\u2019s \u20ac240 billion bailout program and to unlock an additional \u20ac7.2 billion from that program. Even if Greece can meet next week\u2019s I.M.F. repayment, the country desperately needs the additional funds to avoid defaulting on billions of euros in other debt payments that are due in coming weeks. The financial and political implications of a potential Greek default or the country\u2019s forced or voluntary exit from the euro currency union are hard to predict. Since that February deal, the stalemate and rancor between Greece and its creditors have deepened, and creditors have repeatedly withheld additional aid until Greece provides a list of measures to increase tax revenue, contain spending and overhaul the economy that they find satisfactory. In addition to the central bank and the I.M.F., Greece\u2019s other big creditor is the rest of the eurozone. Should that stalemate continue after Monday\u2019s meeting of Eurogroup finance ministers, the European Central Bank, whose credit program with Greek banks also hinges on the assessment of Greece\u2019s other creditors, might be compelled to pull back, the people with knowledge of the Governing Council\u2019s discussions said. \u201cAnother negative eurogroup would probably force their hand,\u201d said Lefteris Farmakis, an economist at Nomura in London. If the central bank curtailed its assistance, Greece\u2019s banks could be forced to take drastic measures, like imposing restrictions on how much money depositors could withdraw. That would send ripples through the economy and fan further uncertainty about whether Greece could remain within the eurozone. On Tuesday, Greek government officials traveled to various European capitals to meet with leaders and policy makers, intensifying a diplomatic offensive that began this week to seek an accord ahead of Monday\u2019s meeting in Brussels. The Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, flew to Rome on Wednesday to meet with his Italian counterpart, and was scheduled to meet with Spain\u2019s finance minister on Friday in Madrid. On Tuesday, Mr. Varoufakis, whose role in the negotiations has been downgraded after bitter personality clashes with other European officials, shuttled between Paris and Athens to meet with the French finance minister and Pierre Moscovici, the Brussels-based European commissioner for economic affairs. Mr. Tsipras has been busy working the phones, trying to build political support for a deal. On Tuesday night, he spoke to Christine Lagarde, the head of the I.M.F., and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. On Wednesday, he spoke to President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande of France. Whether the efforts bear fruit remains to be seen. Mr. Moscovici said European policy makers could unblock funding to Greece within a week. But he ruled out Greek requests to write off a portion of the nation\u2019s huge debt until Athens commits to economic overhauls. Mr. Varoufakis was not optimistic. This week, he said he did not expect a deal on May 11. On Tuesday, the Greek government blamed the I.M.F. and the European Union for the snarl, saying that the creditors themselves were failing to agree on a framework for a deal. But on Wednesday, the institutions hit back. In an unusual joint statement, the I.M.F., the European Central Bank and the European Commission \u2014 the European Union\u2019s administrative arm \u2014 said they were not obstructing a deal and shared \u201cthe same objective of helping Greece achieve financial stability and growth.\u201d But domestic politics continue to put pressure on the Greek government to spend more, not less, despite the demands of its creditors. Late Tuesday, the Parliament passed legislation that paved the way for rehiring more than 3,500 civil servants who had lost their jobs under the previous government, and that abolished a so-called mobility program that had put thousands more at risk of dismissal if they could not find jobs in other parts of the public sector. Less than a week earlier, Parliament voted to reopen the state broadcaster ERT and rehire more than 1,500 fired workers. Unless creditors are willing to overlook those moves and agree to more aid, Greece will have trouble making a series of looming debt payments. By mid-July, Greece must pay the I.M.F. nearly \u20ac3 billion, and roll over \u20ac11 billion worth of short-term debt. From July through August, Greece must also pay the European Central Bank about \u20ac6.7 billion on its Greek bond holdings. On Tuesday, the European Commission sharply cut its forecast for the Greek economy, saying the political chaos in Athens would prevent a recovery and cause the debt to surge further. Economists say Greece, which had only started to recover from a grinding five-year recession, risks a relapse because of the miasma of financial uncertainty. In turn, Greece has again cast a cloud over the eurozone economy, with the potential to derail a tentative recovery. Many economists say that eurozone growth has accelerated this year but remains vulnerable to shocks. In recent years, members of the E.C.B.\u2019s Governing Council have often been divided on crucial issues, including how aggressively to stimulate the economy. But people with knowledge of the council\u2019s sentiment say a clear majority is worried about the risk that the central bank has assumed to keep afloat Greek banks, and by extension, the government. In addition to having lent Greek banks about \u20ac110 billion, the central bank owns about \u20ac20 billion worth of Greek government bonds. The central bank does not want to be the institution that forces Greece out of the eurozone. \u201cIt is pretty certain the E.C.B. is not going to take it to the end immediately,\u201d Mr. Farmakis of Nomura said. But the central bank could, for example, impose additional restrictions on the use of Greek bonds as collateral for emergency central bank loans. Such restrictions would shorten the time before Greek banks run out of bonds or other securities they can use to get low-interest cash from the central bank. Analysts at Nomura estimate that Greek banks as a group can borrow an additional \u20ac25 billion to \u20ac30 billion before they run out of collateral. Before they reached that limit, which could cause some banks to fail, the lenders would need to begin restricting the amounts that customers could withdraw or transfer out of the country. Credit, already scarce, would become even more difficult to come by, further choking business investment. A similar sequence of events played out in Cyprus in 2012. The country survived, aided by an international bailout, but sank into a recession, which continues.", "keyword": "Greece;European Central Bank;Euro Crisis;Alexis Tsipras"}
{"id": "ny0223333", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/11/26", "title": "Afghan Government of Karzai Arrests Election Officials", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 Sharply intensifying a conflict over the results of parliamentary elections, the government of President Hamid Karzai issued arrest warrants on Thursday for several top election officials and accused a United Nations worker of leading a bribery ring. The warrants, announced by Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari, were part of a broader sweep that included the arrests on Thursday of three people identified as officials of the Independent Election Commission and two money-changers, all Afghans. Mr. Nazari said the United Nations official who is wanted by the authorities works at the organization\u2019s \u201celection monitoring office.\u201d The reason he was not arrested is that he sought refuge in the United Nations compound, according to an Afghan official. The Karzai government\u2019s actions greatly stepped up pressure on election officials a day after the Independent Election Commission announced final results from the country\u2019s Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, which proved deeply controversial with nearly all political factions. Within hours of the announcement of the results on Wednesday, Attorney General Mohammed Ishaq Aloko denounced the election commission, saying it had prematurely released the results, and he sharply criticized the United Nations mission here for endorsing the returns. Mr. Aloko suggested that his office might annul the results, or bring criminal charges against candidates who he believed had won seats by fraud. United Nations and Afghan election officials say that under the Afghan Constitution, the final say on election decisions rests with the Independent Election Commission, which manages elections, and the Electoral Complaints Commission, which investigates reports of violations of election law. There is no provision for the government to annul elections, and once Parliament convenes, which it is not expected to do before next week, members of Parliament might have immunity from prosecution. A Western diplomat in Kabul expressed alarm at the attorney general\u2019s actions. \u201cThis is looking increasingly dangerous,\u201d he said, speaking anonymously because of diplomatic sensitivities. \u201cWhere is the presidential palace in all of this? They could say back off, or have they given the green light, or has it just gotten out of control?\u201d A statement issued by President Karzai\u2019s office on Thursday noted that final results had been issued, but did not express support for the election commission. Instead the president called on losing candidates to avoid violence, and urged them \u201cto submit complaints to judicial authorities.\u201d The statement added that the president would act in accordance with the Afghan Constitution. Mr. Karzai did not elaborate on the brief statement. Mr. Nazari, the deputy attorney general, declined to identify the three election officials who he said had been arrested and charged Thursday, and the two money-changers. He said the authorities would also arrest officials from both election commissions on charges that included corruption, abuse of power and unspecified \u201ccomplaints by people.\u201d Arrest warrants for all the officials were given to the Kabul police chief late Thursday, but because Friday is a holiday the arrests will probably not be carried out until Saturday, Mr. Nazari said. From the Electoral Complaints Commission, the officials to be arrested are Amanullah Tajali, head of the audit department, and Ahmad Zia Rafat , a commissioner and the official spokesman. From the Independent Election Commission, those sought are Shafiq Kohistani, head of the information technology department, and Noor Mohammed Noor, the spokesman. Mr. Noor said he had not been informed of any charges against himself, nor of the arrest of any official from the commission. \u201cWe have no information about anybody from the I.E.C. being detained, but 90,000 people worked for us on election day,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the attorney general has solid proof against someone, we would welcome the news that they are detaining the criminal.\u201d The United Nations employee being sought is a dual German and Afghan citizen, said an Afghan official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give this information. Dan McNorton, a United Nations spokesman in Kabul, said, \u201cWe are aware of statements in the media by the attorney general\u2019s office, but the United Nations has not been approached by the office about any of its staff members.\u201d After the 2009 presidential election was widely denounced as fraudulent, Mr. Karzai tried with limited success to change the election officials to ones of his liking. \u201cWhat\u2019s behind this is a power struggle between the presidential palace and the commission,\u201d said Thomas Ruttig, a political analyst with the Afghanistan Analysts Network , a local policy research organization. \u201cThe commission has turned out to be much more independent than many people thought.\u201d Mr. Karzai and Mr. Aloko reportedly put severe pressure on the Independent Election Commission not to disallow Pashtun votes from Ghazni Province, a largely Pashtun area where fraud and violence kept Pashtuns from winning any seats. Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun, counts on support from Pashtun areas for his plurality in Parliament. In addition, the attorney general\u2019s office has been under great pressure from losing and disqualified candidates who, having exhausted any appeals available from the election commissions, have been taking to the streets to call for political intervention to overturn the results. Many of the losing candidates are prominent political figures. Fewer than half of the members of the last Parliament managed to win re-election; the Independent Election Commission threw out as fraudulent nearly a fourth of the votes cast nationwide. The commission has not yet announced what it intends to do in Ghazni. Options include reverting to the parliamentary members elected in 2005 or holding new elections in that province only.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Elections;Bribery and Kickbacks"}
{"id": "ny0237438", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/06/26", "title": "No Town Car or Crown Vic? N.Y. Streets Won\u2019t Be the Same", "abstract": "They are the muscular, leg-roomy fixtures of New York\u2019s crowded streetscape, the automobiles that came to represent the city. The Ford Crown Victoria served as the mainstay of taxi and police fleets. Its close cousin, the Lincoln Town Car , could reliably be found idling outside Lincoln Center or waiting to whisk a Wall Street type home for the evening. But in a little more than a year, both models will go the way of the Checker cab. Ford Motor Company plans to shutter the Canadian plant that manufactures the cars and discontinue the recognizably bulky frame that gives them their shape. That means the end for vehicles that have come to symbolize the full spectrum of New York life, from private black sedans purring on Park Avenue to the ubiquitous sight of the yellow cab, great equalizer of the varied urban tribe. \u201cThese cars are a facet of people\u2019s everyday experience,\u201d said David Yassky , the city\u2019s taxi commissioner. \u201cWhatever takes their place will have a real and tangible influence on the city\u2019s aesthetic.\u201d Passengers should prepare for a bumpier, more cramped ride. Forget roomy trunks that fit a French-door refrigerator; the older models are yielding to smaller gas-and-electric hybrid vehicles with knee-bumping back seats and flimsier frames. The impending departures have left New York\u2019s livery world scrambling. The Taxi and Limousine Commission is holding a contest to design a new taxicab to replace the city\u2019s 8,200 Crown Victoria yellow taxis. The Police Department will lose a fast-accelerating sedan it has depended on since 1992. And the black-car industry must replace 75 percent of its fleet. Prophecies of the cars\u2019 demise have come and gone: they survived one death notice in 2006 when Ford moved production from Michigan to Ontario. But widespread regulatory reform and industry financial troubles mean this is the true end of the road. The company says it believes that sales will drop off in coming years as more states require police and livery vehicles to meet stricter environmental standards \u2014 a high hurdle for gas-guzzlers like the Crown Vic and Town Car, which get about 16 miles a gallon in the city. Fickle consumer tastes have also played a role: the models sell well with commercial fleets but not individual drivers, who tend to prefer slimmer sedans. One exception is the retiree market in Florida, which has a fondness for Town Cars. (The Crown Vic is now sold only to commercial customers.) In other words, the lighter, greener hybrid has triumphed. \u201cWe need to move onto an improved, more sustainable product,\u201d Rob Stevens, Ford\u2019s chief engineer for commercial vehicles, said in an interview. But some drivers and fleet owners maintain that the Town Car and Crown Vic are uniquely well suited to their task of comfortably ferrying all manner of city dwellers, from expense-account Wall Street bankers to criminals handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. \u201cIt is large, it is safe, it is easily repairable,\u201d John Acierno, president of the Executive Transportation Group , said of the Town Car, which makes up more than 80 percent of his 1,800-car fleet. \u201cWhen you think of a black car or a limousine, your mind\u2019s eye sort of goes to it,\u201d Mr. Acierno said. \u201cIf there\u2019s one sitting in front of a building, you think the car is waiting for someone.\u201d The cars also deliver a particularly smooth ride, die-hards say, thanks to a forgiving suspension and the sturdy steel frame that underlies both models. The Crown Vic\u2019s plush leather back seat can resemble a sofa on wheels. Replacements have begun to crop up in the city\u2019s fleets, but some yellow taxi owners say they are unimpressed. Ronald Sherman, the president of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents 28 large fleet owners, said he had seen would-be taxi passengers ignore Chevrolet Malibu or Ford Escape cabs, opting for a longer wait in order to grab the more spacious Crown Vic. \u201cThese minis are ridiculous; passengers do not get into them,\u201d Mr. Sherman said, asserting that the smaller back seat and low headroom made the hybrids uncomfortable and potentially dangerous for riders. Kevin Healy, another fleet owner, agreed. Of the Volkswagen Jetta , another alternative taxi, he said: \u201cLiterally, I can\u2019t get in. And I would need a doctor to get out.\u201d Despite such objections, New York City\u2019s government is intent on greening its car fleet. A mayoral mandate is in place to depose the big gas guzzlers of yore: commissioners now drive hybrids, and the Police Department has reduced its Crown Victoria count to 1,400 cars today from 1,800 cars in 2006. The city also wants to establish fuel emissions standards for taxicabs. Those regulations have been held up in court, but owners have pre-emptively started to adjust. Crown Victorias still account for 60 percent of yellow cabs, but their dominance has been threatened by growing numbers of Ford Escapes (2,637 cabs) and Toyota Sienna minivans (1,381). The Lincoln Town Car remains a common sight on Park Avenue and outside the city\u2019s gilded corporate headquarters. But there are signs that its clients\u2019 tastes are changing, too. Only half of the cars idling outside Lincoln Center on a recent weeknight were Lincolns. Instead, well-to-do clients stepped into Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes and a BMW. A similar scene unfolded on a Wednesday morning at the Loews Regency Hotel, at Park Avenue and 62nd Street, where power breakfasters opted for Ford Expeditions, Lexuses and a Toyota Camry hybrid. For most of the 35 years he has driven his private car in the city as a chauffeur, Ziggy Kingston used a Lincoln. But he recently made the switch to a Prius, saying that his clients, including the 30-minute meal maestro Rachael Ray and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, often prefer the hybrid. \u201cIt\u2019s a good image for them,\u201d he said, waiting for a pick-up outside the Barclays building in Midtown. Gesturing toward a nearby Town Car, Mr. Kingston continued, \u201cThis was the car you wanted when no one cared about pollution and the mayor didn\u2019t care.\u201d Now, he said, \u201cyou got to go with what the environment is good for.\u201d Fleet owners are unsure about what will replace the Town Car, although Lincoln has created several new models intended for livery use. But none have the same Yao Ming-size legroom or trunk space. Eager to retain the taxi market, Ford is marketing a custom version of its Transit Connect van, whose oblong shape and tall roof resemble a London cab\u2019s. The van gets 22 miles a gallon in the city and comes equipped with big picture windows for a scenic ride. More radical designs have been submitted to the city\u2019s taxi commission, which has solicited ideas for a new taxicab built from scratch, rather than retrofitted from an existing car. The winner, which will not be announced for months, will have the exclusive right to build the city\u2019s cabs for a decade. Mr. Sherman, who owns a taxi fleet himself, said that his needs, like those of passengers, were simple: \u201cWhat people are looking for in a taxicab,\u201d he said, \u201cis a safe ride from A to B.\u201d", "keyword": "Ford Motor Co;Taxicabs and Taxicab Drivers;New York City;Police Department (NYC);Yassky David;Taxi and Limousine Commission;Hybrid Vehicles;Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade"}
{"id": "ny0159649", "categories": ["nyregion", "connecticut"], "date": "2008/12/14", "title": "Giving Buzzards a Hint They\u2019ll Heed", "abstract": "WESTON JUST after Thanksgiving, as residents in the waterfront community known as Crystal Lake were untangling strands of outdoor Christmas lights and hanging fragrant wreaths, Tom Logan was ascending to the roof of a stately home to hang a unique seasonal decoration: a dead turkey vulture. Message to other buzzards who have taken to roosting here over the winter: Hit the road. Mr. Logan, proprietor of a Stratford-based wildlife management service called Wild Things, shot and hung the bird \u2014 in a spot not visible from public roads \u2014 with permits and depredation guidelines from the state\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection. The department confirmed, through its spokesperson Cyndy Chanaca, that the vulture roosting problem was the first in Connecticut severe enough to warrant the permit to take a bird. The term for this method of deterrence is, in fact, \u201changing an effigy,\u201d and it has been shown to be effective in moving problem populations from residential areas. Apparently, birds that thrive on plunging their bald heads deep into the rotting viscera of many species are repulsed by the death of one of their own. Turkey vultures are migratory, and for the last few years, they have been spending their winters in ever increasing numbers in this upscale neighborhood. Look down, and you can see their strafing patterns splattered on roads, barbecue grills and BMW\u2019s. Look up \u2014 if you dare \u2014 and they can be seen perched like boulders, 10 to 20 to a tree. Some roost on chimneys and roofs; one home with a flat roof favored by warmth-seeking buzzards sustained $10,000 in damage last winter as the basking birds pecked and clawed off roofing. Last Christmas, more than a hundred vultures roosted at one corner of the lake; the scene was more Hitchcock than Currier and Ives as some residents awoke to beady eyes staring in their bedroom windows from balcony railings and nearby trees. One resident, Ginger More, is especially worried about health issues. \u201cI have four grandchildren,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I have to go out and scrub the play equipment we installed for them before I dare let them near it.\u201d Vultures aren\u2019t exactly uninvited guests. Humans and their sprawl have set a bounteous table for winged carrion eaters: more and more warm asphalt, serving up plenty of easily spotted morsels. Feeding on the road kill provided by robust deer populations, and aided, some scientists say, by warm, man-made \u201cthermal corridors\u201d above car-clogged routes like Interstate 95, black and turkey vultures \u2014 both protected by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act \u2014 are on the increase in states on the Eastern Seaboard. \u201cIt\u2019s generally agreed that we have a growing problem in this area as well,\u201d said Monte Chandler, state director for Wildlife Services at the United States Department of Agriculture. \u201cComplaints are on the rise. They do peck roofs, and the corrosive factor of their acidic droppings can lead to defoliation since they roost communally in large numbers.\u201d The big birds, with wingspans of up to five feet, are a marvel of nature in their unique biology. Turkey vultures are the only carrion eaters that find their food by smell: they fly low so they can sense the gases of decay. In the air, they are as graceful as eagles riding the thermals off the lake. On the ground, they are ravenous bio-engines of disease control, checking botulism and other infectious wildlife illnesses with their evolved ability to metabolize the toxins in a carcass. \u201cThey are nature\u2019s garbage men,\u201d said Mr. Logan. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to think what the roads would look like without them.\u201d The earliest complaints here came to the Weston animal control officer, Mark Harper, who said that human action first dislocated the birds. \u201cThey used to roost in a wooded area off Old Weston Road. But a new subdivision went in there, and with it, the trees. So they just moved on down the line.\u201d The callers have sounded desperate, said Mr. Harper. He has to tell them that he cannot offer any local assistance, because of the birds\u2019 federally protected status: killing one without a permit can result in fines up to $15,000 and jail terms of up to six months. He referred callers to the Department of Environmental Protection. Navigating a regulatory no-man\u2019s-land between the 1918 protective statute and a 2008 nuisance issue, some Crystal Lake residents said they found themselves increasingly frustrated. According to Ms. More, DEP officials have repeatedly suggested other nonlethal methods of dispersal, from pyrotechnics to rooftop wiring systems that can cost up to $10,000 per home. \u201cIn my experience,\u201d Mr. Logan said, \u201cthe effigies work most consistently.\u201d At about $250 per bird, the costs are not prohibitive. But wildlife officials say they need more information. \u201cThough the vultures have been a problem down south for a while, this is all new to us,\u201d said Dale May, director of the Connecticut DEP\u2019s Wildlife Division. \u201cSince we expect this to be a growing problem as the birds move further north, we\u2019d like to see an integrated approach that would include nonlethal hazing methods as well. We\u2019re trying to learn what works best, and for how long.\u201d Mr. Chandler of the Wildlife Service said that experiments at a USDA wildlife research center in Gainesville, Fla., had shown effigy-hanging to be effective, but that the greatest weapon was human cooperation, whatever method is used. \u201cVultures can be moved if the dispersal is done collaboratively between neighbors. It takes vigilance, personnel and a lot of labor. Everybody has to be on the same page.\u201d Ms. More has applied to the DEP on behalf of the neighborhood homeowners\u2019 association for a permit to kill and hang a few more birds. She said she believed that the entire perimeter of the lake could be liberated from the scourge if the DEP would allow Mr. Logan to place effigies at the four corners of Crystal Lake, a 22-home enclave. The permit application is still under review. Since the first effigy was hung, the vultures have all but disappeared from the end of the lake where they were having a severe effect. It won\u2019t be known just where they went to roost, Mr. Harper said, \u201cuntil a new set of complaints starts coming in.\u201d Meanwhile, the effigy will twist in the wind. \u201cWe\u2019ll leave it up until about April,\u201d said Mr. Logan, \u201cuntil the birds migrate elsewhere to nest.\u201d And hatch a bumper crop of baby buzzards? Could be, Mr. Logan said. \u201cThese are very robust birds.\u201d", "keyword": "Turkey Vultures;Birds;Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0022922", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/09/23", "title": "With Third Victory in Row, Mets Climb Out of Fourth", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 The Mets have been asked for weeks to assign meaning to their games. How should these Mets measure progress? In recent years, when September has begun, they have been out of playoff contention, and their attention has turned toward younger players who are trying to prove themselves. The games themselves have come to mean very little. Manager Terry Collins said Friday that he measured progress by the team\u2019s effort, which he said he was pleased with. On Sunday, the Mets took a step toward something more tangible. Mets starter Carlos Torres matched the Phillies\u2019 Cliff Lee for six innings; Wilfredo Tovar, a 22-year-old shortstop prospect, had a crucial hit in his major league debut; and the Mets won, 4-3, to sweep the series and tie Philadelphia for third place in the National League East. The game started poorly for the Mets. David Wright was sitting, Lee was on the mound for the Phillies\u2019 final home game this season, and Citizens Bank Park had a capacity crowd for only the sixth time this year, with an announced 44,398 in attendance. Lee breezed through the first, striking out the first three batters he faced, and he did not allow a hit through three innings, on 30 pitches. The Mets\u2019 Eric Young singled to lead off the fourth, and Wilmer Flores doubled to right. Lee retired the next three Mets, but Young did score, on a groundout by Andrew Brown to tie the score, 1-1. Lee did not run into trouble again until the seventh, when Tovar came up to bat with one out and Anthony Recker and Juan Lagares on second and third. Tovar calmly ripped a fastball into left field, scoring Lagares, and when Domonic Brown mishandled the ball, Recker scrambled home to give the Mets a 3-2 lead. Recker, Tovar and Young had two hits apiece, and Lagares, who had three hits, drove in an insurance run in the eighth. Torres struck out six and allowed two runs over six innings. LaTroy Hawkins closed out the ninth, earning his 100th career save. The Mets have won 7 of their last 10 games and now, perhaps, have a realistic goal: to finish in third. Their last seven games this season are against Cincinnati and Milwaukee. Wright, who returned this weekend from a hamstring injury, homered in each of the Mets\u2019 first two games against the Phillies, but he was given Sunday off to recover and rest. Asked last week about the Mets\u2019 chase of the Phillies in the N.L. East race, Wright said: \u201cIn my eyes, third place, fourth place, you\u2019re still going home. So to me, it\u2019s not all that important.\u201d Wright added that he valued trying to win each game, and he said this was an ideal time for the younger players to make an impression. Perhaps Matt den Dekker, Josh Satin, Lagares or Flores could earn key roles on the team next season. Then there is the Mets\u2019 young rotation, which has become a sight to behold. Matt Harvey, Jon Niese, Dillon Gee and Zack Wheeler have each had their moments, even though Harvey was injured and Wheeler, who had experienced stiffness in his pitching shoulder after his start Tuesday, was shut down Saturday for the rest of the season. Collins told reporters, \u201cWith what\u2019s happened with Matt, it\u2019s not the time to take chances right now.\u201d After Sunday\u2019s win, as part of the team\u2019s annual hazing, bridesmaids dresses hung in the rookies\u2019 lockers, and a wedding dress, with a light blue garter pinned to it, was left for Wheeler. A game ball sat in Hawkins\u2019s locker. Tovar tried to explain, through an interpreter, how he got the best of Lee. The mood in the clubhouse was light and fun. The Mets had perhaps not felt this good in some time.", "keyword": "Mets;Phillies;Juan Lagares;Carlos Torres;Baseball;Cliff Lee"}
{"id": "ny0245475", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/04/21", "title": "Nocturnalist - Black Eyed Peas and Beetles, Together on Stage", "abstract": "Along with will.i.am , Fergie and the rest of the Black Eyed Peas, images of Volkswagens flashed across the stage on Monday night at a concert to promote the 21st-century update on the Beetle. But despite the vehicular backdrop and the two new Beetles that stood sentry at Terminal 5, the site of the concert, asking the Peas their thoughts on Beetles \u2014 the subject of the event \u2014 was apparently not allowed. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing any questions about the car,\u201d said a woman who asked to see our written questions but did not identify herself. So we thought up new questions while standing spitting distance from the band for about an hour and a half as the group stood around, or, in will.i.am\u2019s case, sang to himself and did a little jig, during the pauses amid a number of interviews. We didn\u2019t get to ask anything. Organizers, who had kindly slotted us into the event at the last minute, said they had run out of time. After the concert, we headed to the Pealess after party on West 37th Street in a non-Volkswagen bus emblazoned with the Volkswagen insignia. There, another Beetle \u2014 an appropriately after-partyish little red number \u2014 twirled on a dais. Guests clambering in for photo ops fought to stay upright on three fronts: the rotating car, their sky-high heels and the flowing sparkling wine. The car was a celebrity. We waited our turn and struggled into the twirling Beetle and felt a little dizzy. But we could ask it anything we liked. A Seder in Style The Empire Hotel, as any good student of juicy television will tell you, is owned by Chuck Bass, the fictional hotshot in the show \u201c Gossip Girl .\u201d On Tuesday night, a dining room there was taken over by other dark-suited men, and much more modestly clothed women: several dozen Jews, mostly Orthodox, were there under the crystal chandeliers to celebrate the second night of Passover . The Seder was hosted by CCF New York , a Chabad-Lubavitch organization that serves primarily New York\u2019s French expatriate Jewish community; the Midtown Young Leadership Committee; and the West Side Jewish Center. It was open to all denominations and cost $75 to attend. Before a single parsley frond was dipped in salt water, David Abergel, an organizer, insisted we speak to the rabbi, with some explicit instructions about respecting his orthodoxy: \u201cYou can ask the rabbi questions, but you\u2019re not allowed to write or take pictures on a holiday,\u201d Mr. Abergel said. Surreptitiously recording the rabbi, however, he said upon inquiry, was fine by him. We declined. Stacks of matzo were arranged on the tables while a hip-hop remix of Fatboy Slim\u2019s \u201cPraise You\u201d thumped in the lounge downstairs. Since we could not take notes, the rabbi, who is friendly with the hotel\u2019s real owners, told us to e-mail him. \u201cRabbi is so cool!\u201d Mr. Abergel said. \u201cHe is very Internet-savvy. We are on Facebook . We can be \u2018friends\u2019 now.\u201d He turned toward Nocturnalist\u2019s correspondent: \u201cRabbi will find you a nice Jewish husband.\u201d A Fete for a Disaster There were outsize strawberries bigger than a baby\u2019s fist at the Ukrainian Institute on the Upper East Side on Tuesday night \u2014 \u201cChernobyl strawberries,\u201d Kathy Nalywajko, vice president of the institute\u2019s board, joked to us. As we were at an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of that nuclear disaster, suddenly the strawberries didn\u2019t seem so succulent. A show of photography of \u201cChornobyl\u201d (the Ukrainian spelling, naturally) by Michael Forster Rothbart was followed by a concert by the Gryphon Trio in the French-style neo-Gothic mansion on 79th Street. The mansion, which when it\u2019s not commemorating disaster has moonlighted as a set for the TV show \u201cUgly Betty,\u201d has a moat. The moat is spanned by stairs \u2014 good news for neighbors like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, should he ever want to stop by. Guests on Tuesday night, like Serhii Pohoreltsev, the consul general of Ukraine, had lively conversations in Ukrainian and English. Valerii P. Kuchynskyi, a Ukrainian ambassador, discussed matters of state with us, for example, his thoughts on diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks. \u201cNot such a big problem,\u201d he said. \u201cWe did not have so many secrets.\u201d", "keyword": "New York City;Black Eyed Peas;Volkswagen AG"}
{"id": "ny0234568", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/01/29", "title": "3M Posts Higher-Than-Expected Profit and Raises Forecast for 2010", "abstract": "The 3M Company , the diversified manufacturer, posted higher-than-expected quarterly earnings on Thursday and raised its forecast for 2010, citing strong demand for all its products. But its shares fell, caught up in a stock market sell-off that was especially hard on industrial companies. 3M, probably best known for its trademark brands like Post-it notes and Scotch tape, reported fourth-quarter net income of $935 million, or $1.30 a share, up from $676 million, or 97 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts had expected earnings of $1.21 a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Revenue increased 11 percent, to $6.1 billion, above Wall Street forecasts for $5.77 billion. The company, which makes a variety of products including adhesives, abrasives, stethoscopes and insect repellent, said the results were driven by a 15.7 percent jump in sales of display and graphics products, like the coatings found on high-definition TVs and computer monitors. Strong sales of health care products, including masks used to prevent infections from the H1N1 flu virus and other pathogens, contributed to the results. 3M raised its forecast for 2010 earnings to a range of $4.90 to $5.10 a share, up from $4.85 to $5 a share. Analysts were expecting $4.57, according to Thomson Reuters. Despite the better-than-expected results and the raised forecast, 3M shares fell as weaker-than-expected economic data on durable goods and jobless claims raised fears that the recovery might be faltering. The economic news pulled down the broader market, including shares of other industrials like Caterpillar and Deere. 3M shares, which rose ahead of the results to a two-year high, edged lower as the market fell. The stock fell $1.55, or 1.9 percent, to close at $80.75 on the New York Stock Exchange.", "keyword": "Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0198645", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/07/19", "title": "Whee! Also, There\u2019s a Net", "abstract": "Don\u2019t do Jane Fonda, don\u2019t do Jane Fonda,\u201d shouted Evan Armbrister as I swung on a trapeze 23 feet above ground. Clearly I had been pegged as a \u201cflier\u201d of considerable age, one capable of flashbacks to the Jazzercise era of leotards and leg warmers and \u201chot cross buns.\u201d I had flubbed his instructions once again, raising my legs high (so stylishly, I thought) rather than hooking my knees over the bar and hanging upside down. I hooked at the wrong time, swung at the wrong time. \u201cYou\u2019re not listening,\u201d said Mr. Armbrister, an actor and former kung fu instructor, who held tight to the ropes that clamped on to my safety harness. I dropped to the net, my hands coated in chalk powder, and stole a glance at Coco Sacks. She has no trouble listening. \u201cCan we do a couple of back flips?\u201d she asked. Coco is 9. She lives in Seattle and has made outdoor trapezing in New York a yearly pilgrimage. Who can blame her? Flying through the air on a trapeze alongside the Hudson River, even badly, as the sun lingers high and the downtown skyline stares you straight in the face, offers up a kind of New York nirvana. For a brief moment, you float above the din and chaos without forgoing the rush of adrenaline and accomplishment. You feel the city slipping serenely away. Every summer, the Trapeze School New York pitches a rig and stretches a net across part of the roof along Pier 40, luring a curious blend of people seeking to swing al fresco: Thrill-seekers eager for the next jolt (many of them regulars). Stilettoed work friends looking to trade one kind of happy hour bar for another (at least today). Tourists trying to squeeze one more novelty into a week\u2019s vacation. Children who aspire to take jungle-gym swinging to the next level. Gypsies at heart who once romanticized the life of a circus artist (that last category would be me). Then there are those people \u2014 a surprisingly large number, really \u2014 who arrive in their yoga pants to grapple with a fear of heights. They come ready to vanquish their phobia as Carrie Bradshaw did in an episode of \u201cSex and the City.\u201d They come for catharsis. \u201cThere is nothing better for anxiety than exposure, and taking smart risks,\u201d said Hilary Levine, speaking like the Upper West Side psychologist she is, and one with absolutely no fear of heights to boot. \u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful exercise in personal growth.\u201d Pass the chalk. Dr. Levine was there with a friend and fellow psychiatrist (detect a pattern?), Alexa Albert, Coco\u2019s mother, who squinted up into the sun as her daughter effortlessly sailed skyward. Dr. Albert is an acrophobe. Yet last year she climbed the seemingly endless metal ladder to the narrow platform high above the ground, where the trapeze taunted her coyly. \u201cI was terrified,\u201d she said. \u201cLiterally. I felt terror. But I did it, and it was exhilarating. The feeling, the sensation, catches your breath. There is nothing else like it. It numbs any fear you have.\u201d Exhilaration, though, was not quite in the cards for Talia Silverstein, an 11-year-old from Port Washington, on Long Island, who arrived with her mother, Mara Silverstein. \u201cNone of my friends would do it with me,\u201d Talia\u2019s mother confided. \u201cIt\u2019s the whole height thing.\u201d Two years ago, Talia trapezed and loved it. This year, not so much. After she climbed up four rungs of the ladder, a look of unmistakable anguish clouded her face. She climbed down, hesitated, then climbed back up. Bravely, she reached the top. The view from there \u2014 the Woolworth Building, the Statue of Liberty\u2019s torch at night \u2014 is riveting. But, really, fliers are so hyper-focused on the task at hand, the view could be of a shopping mall in Sioux City and it wouldn\u2019t matter. Fortunately, Jamielee Smith, a trapeze teacher, was on the platform. Ms. Smith is a high school drug and alcohol counselor during the school year, a job that has trained her to listen, to coax, to provide moral support. \u201cYou\u2019re safe,\u201d Ms. Smith assured. \u201cI got you.\u201d But the hard part lay ahead. After the vertigo-inducing climb, Ms. Smith secures a safety line to a flier\u2019s thick leather belt. Then she holds the back of your belt with her hand and sweetly asks you to lean forward, way forward, beyond your center of gravity, so you can grab the trapeze bar with both hands. All of us had practiced this effortlessly on the ground, which is akin to racing a Formula 1 car on a Wii console. It is at that moment, when you are leaning forward, placing full trust in the tiny Ms. Smith to keep you from plummeting, that some people feel the churn of panic and refuse to follow the next command: \u201cHep,\u201d she says, circus-speak for hop off the edge of the board, a word that can trigger either transcendence or nausea. \u201cClose your eyes if you want,\u201d Mr. Armbrister instructed Talia helpfully from below. Talia shook her head no several times. Then, taking his advice, she closed her eyes tight and hepped. \u201cThat\u2019s one of our prerequisites: Being able to make people comfortable in a very unnatural situation,\u201d said Matt Russo, 22, who has a degree in neuropsychology (again) and now manages the rig. \u201cJumping off a 23-foot platform to an uncertain end is not natural for most people.\u201d It\u2019s all about perspective. Having spent a lifetime in turbulent Jerusalem, Benjamin and Almog Hassidim, two brothers, seemed quite at home on the trapeze bar. Only their baggy mid-calf shorts gave them up as novices. They hooked their legs and swung upside down just as Mr. Armbrister instructed. \u201cI loved it,\u201d Benjamin said. \u201cExtremely.\u201d \u201cIt was too short,\u201d Almog complained. A 10-person class, which costs $50 to $70 depending on the day and hour, gives each flier three or four turns at the trapeze. For those who manage to hook, hang upside down and swing successfully, it all leads up to the grand finale: the moment when Randy Winner, a former dancer with a formidable grip, hangs upside down opposite you on his own trapeze to catch you in the air as you, also upside down, arch and swing toward him. \u201cI\u2019m learning a thing or two up here,\u201d Mr. Winner said, laughing, after he managed to catch yet another flier who had failed to get the timing right. \u201cI\u2019m learning to adjust.\u201d Then \u2014 plop! \u2014 you drop on to the net one final time, ready to do it all over again.", "keyword": "Trapeze School of New York;New York City;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0064745", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/06/11", "title": "\u2018Friendly Fire\u2019 Strike Kills 5 Special Operations Soldiers in Afghanistan", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 Five American Special Operations service members and at least one Afghan soldier were killed when a United States Air Force B-1 bomber unleashed an airstrike on their position in southern Afghanistan, in one of the deadliest instances of friendly fire in more than a decade of war, Afghan and American officials said Tuesday. Investigators were looking into possible causes, including faulty coordinates, an errant bomb or other human errors. The Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, said in a statement that five American soldiers had been killed \u201cduring a security operation in southern Afghanistan.\u201d He added: \u201cInvestigators are looking into the likelihood that friendly fire was the cause. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of these fallen.\u201d While the military had not identified the dead, relatives identified one as Aaron Toppen, 19, of Mokena, Ill., telling The Chicago Sun-Times he was deployed early this year, a month after his father died. The deaths happened Monday night in the restive Arghandab district of Zabul Province, where troops were conducting security operations connected to the presidential runoff election on Saturday, said Ghulam Sakhi Roghliwanai, the province\u2019s police chief. As the mission drew to a close, Taliban militants ambushed the troops, Mr. Roghliwanai said. The troops called for air support, but were killed when the airstrike hit them. Hajji Qudratullah Khan, a resident of the village of Giza, near where the airstrike hit, said the area is a Taliban stronghold, in a valley surrounded by mountains covered in bushes. He said the military had not been based in the area for some time, allowing the Taliban there to operate with impunity. \u201cSecurity is not good in the district,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have only one school in the district center, it is for boys, and the rest of the area is controlled by Taliban.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t think people will come out for election, because only the district center is secure,\u201d he added. Airstrikes have long been a point of contention between the Afghan government and the coalition forces, most often when they have caused civilian casualties. Video The Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, said five American troops were killed during a security operation in southern Afghanistan. Airstrikes that kill coalition soldiers have been less common. Since the war began, there have been more than a dozen cases in which airstrikes mistakenly killed allies, or gunfights erupted among coalition troops unaware they were firing on one another. Among the most highly publicized was the fatal shooting of the former National Football League player Pat Tillman, who was serving in an Army Ranger unit when he was killed by coalition fire in April 2004. More recently, Afghan security forces have been the victims in such cases, including an airstrike in March that killed five Afghan soldiers in eastern Logar Province. That is in large part because there are fewer coalition soldiers fighting on the ground in Afghanistan other than Special Operations forces. The Taliban also released a statement about the airstrike, confirming their role in the ambush and claiming that their troops also ambushed a joint patrol in the Mizan district of Zabul. As in the first round of the presidential election in April, Afghan forces have stepped up security operations ahead of the runoff vote on Saturday. Zabul Province is an especially challenging place to hold an election, with an unforgiving landscape and a heavy insurgent presence. In Arghandab district, just 183 ballots were cast in the first round of voting, the second-smallest number of ballots of any district in the province, according to the National Democratic Institute, an American-financed pro-democracy organization. With the exception of a recent attack in Kabul on the convoy of the presidential front-runner, Abdullah Abdullah, the insurgents seem to be focusing their efforts to disrupt elections on more rural areas, where security is lighter or absent. \u201cThey know that our security forces are now very capable of controlling the security situation in the cities, so they are targeting areas where it is difficult for the security forces to reach and defeat them right away,\u201d said Hajji Abdullah Barakzai, a member of the Afghan Parliament for Zabul Province. Perhaps the most devastating example took place last month in a mountainous area of northern Badakhshan Province, where the Taliban overran the district center, capturing 27 police officers and holding the government compound for nearly three days. In the Charchino District of Oruzgan Province, Afghan officials said the Taliban marshaled hundreds of fighters to mount a coordinated assault on as many as 20 police checkpoints two days ago. After a long firefight, the Afghan forces were reported to have lost five men, while the Taliban lost nearly two dozen, said Dust Mohammad Nayaab, a spokesman for the provincial governor. In another audacious militant attack in southern Afghanistan, gunmen on Tuesday abducted a busload of 35 teachers and students from Kandahar University who were traveling to visit their families during a school holiday week. The bus was stopped in Ghazni Province, where officials are scrambling to secure the release of the captives. \u201cWe have not yet been contacted by any group who claims the arrests or kidnapping of the teachers,\u201d said Hazrat Mir Totakhail, the chancellor of Kandahar University. \u201cHowever, whoever is involved, we are asking them to free them, because the teachers are not involved in politics and are not supporting any political group.\u201d The Taliban also appeared confused about the abduction, with the group\u2019s spokesman saying he did not know about the detentions. \u201cIf our mujahedeen did it, we will investigate who they are and what they are doing,\u201d said the Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid. \u201cIf they prove to be university students and teachers, then we have no problem with them.\u201d He added: \u201cAfghanistan is full of teachers and students. It is not a crime.\u201d", "keyword": "US;Afghanistan War;Fatalities,casualties;US Military;US Special Operations Command;US Air Force"}
{"id": "ny0179135", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/29", "title": "Albany: New Environmental Standards", "abstract": "Dozens of state construction projects will have to meet new environmental standards beginning next year, officials announced yesterday. The Dormitory Authority, a state agency that provides financing and construction services to universities and nonprofit health care facilities, will require new projects to meet environmental standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council. The agency has more than 72 projects that total more than $3.5 billion already under way, but those projects will not be forced to meet the new standards. The new standards are expected to reduce energy use by 32 percent per building.", "keyword": "Albany (NY);Energy Efficiency"}
{"id": "ny0127861", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/06/03", "title": "In \u2018Freedom\u2019s Forge,\u2019 U.S. Industry as War Hero \u2014 Review", "abstract": "ARTHUR HERMAN has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history\u2019s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II . Dr. Herman, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a writer of popular histories, says he believes that American business has never gotten its due. He contends that it won the war but lost \u201cthe narrative.\u201d Business was denigrated by envious New Dealers, he says, and upstaged by the Keynesian focus on the war years\u2019 $300 billion in deficit spending that finally ended the Great Depression . The author is avowedly pro-business, but you don\u2019t have to share that perspective to enjoy \u201c Freedom\u2019s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II\u201d (Random House, $28). It is indeed a rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry as it exploded from negligible arms output to an arsenal of weaponry then unmatched in human history. Strange to our eye, big business in that day was still dominated by willful, roll-up-the-sleeves men who built companies from the ground up. Dr. Herman centers on two of the most remarkable of these self-made men: William S. Knudsen and Henry J. Kaiser . Mr. Knudsen was a raw young Danish immigrant, handy with his fists, who worked his way from the shop floor to become Henry Ford\u2019s production ace. Wearying of Mr. Ford\u2019s crankiness, he quit and proceeded to build General Motors into an even greater Goliath than Ford. In May 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to spearhead industrial mobilization, Mr. Knudsen was at the pinnacle of American industry. He agreed without quibble, saying he wished only to repay the nation for his success. He had mastered Detroit\u2019s discovery: the enormous power of using precisely tooled, interchangeable parts to break down complex manufacturing into far simpler steps. He also knew everyone who was anyone in industry. When he urgently needed a thousand tanks a month, his way was to call up K. T. Keller, Chrysler\u2019s president. \u201cCan you do it?\u201d The answer was, \u201cSure.\u201d For the engines, he phoned Jack Reese at Continental Motors, who welcomed the business. For welding heavy steel plates, never before done with tanks, it was Bill Smith at A. O. Smith. In that way, and well before Pearl Harbor, Mr. Knudsen enlisted the entire auto industry, even persuading it to free capacity by giving up its annual model changeover. He believed that only big business had the expertise and sheer size to get the job done \u2014 and that business needed to make money. As Dr. Herman notes, Adam Smith would have been pleased. But Mr. Knudsen was politically indifferent, if not na\u00efve. Roosevelt gave him little authority beyond the power to exhort and orchestrate. In a year and a half, he did yeoman\u2019s work to begin mobilization, but was ground down by Washington politics. After Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt was free to reorganize for outright war, Mr. Knudsen, with his volunteer philosophy, was out, his office replaced by a War Production Board with greater authority. He was faulted in the press as having done too little, but, in fact, the armaments makers were on their way. Dr. Herman seems to believe that zealous New Dealers and fractious labor unions were the enemy here. He writes that after Mr. Knudsen was gone as mobilization chief: \u201cThe New Dealers thought they had won. They were too late. America was indeed in production now, with 25,000 prime contractors and 120,000 subcontractors making products they had never dreamed of making, and thousands more to come. And nothing the people in Washington or the Axis could do now would stem the tide.\u201d Unlike Mr. Knudsen, Mr. Kaiser, a politically astute Democrat, enjoyed Roosevelt\u2019s favor. A self-made construction magnate, he understood the brute force of thousands of men pouring millions of yards of concrete, creating huge structures like Hoover Dam. Where Mr. Knudsen was best of the manager\u2019s breed, Mr. Kaiser was an insatiable empire builder. As such, he was ideal to lead the effort that became one of World War II\u2019s most unlikely successes: the ugly, ungainly Liberty ship. Liberty ships were desperately needed to keep Britain resupplied. They were brilliantly designed to be just good enough, indeed expendable, and simple enough for novice shipbuilders. They were bare-bones, with no electricity or running water for their crews. A consortium led by Mr. Kaiser jumped at the job, first building the shipyards and then the ships. On mud flats on the east side of San Francisco Bay, his crews had a yard running within weeks; it was later renowned as his Richmond No. 1 yard. By mid-1941, Dr. Herman writes, some 4,000 employees were at work there; by the end of 1942, the number had grown to 80,000. Some 2,700 Liberty ships were built; they kept not only Britain but also Russia in the war. The first ships took seven or eight months, but with novel and relentless reliance on piecing together prefabricated sections, Mr. Kaiser hammered down the shipyard time to 10 days. Once, going all-out, he built and launched a ship in less than five. The pace of change all across America was staggering. By the end of 1942, the author says, three million women were working in a war industry, up from barely 80,000 six months after Pearl Harbor. In due course, America\u2019s arsenal turned out two-thirds of the Allies\u2019 total war needs, an astonishing outpouring of aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, submarines, bombers, tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, jeeps, machine guns and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Yet America had done all this while remaining the least mobilized of all the belligerents. In percentage terms, fewer men had gone off to fight, and fewer women had taken factory jobs. The output of civilian goods was larger for every war year than it had been in 1939. Like the war itself, \u201cFreedom\u2019s Forge\u201d is a sprawling affair. As it faithfully recounts the travails of the M3 tank and other weapons long forgotten, it also numbs with repeated recitations of so many ships, airplanes, tanks, cannons and machine guns produced. It is much better when it zeros in on specific cases, like that headlong scramble to produce the Liberty ships or the staggering efforts to build, revise and deploy the endlessly complex B-29 bomber. Taken together, these often-chaotic industrial efforts were indeed monumental \u2014 and it is still hard today to grasp such a breathtaking national achievement.", "keyword": "Books and Literature;World War II (1939-45);Knudsen William S;Kaiser Henry J;Roosevelt Franklin Delano;Herman Arthur;Detroit (Mich);United States Defense and Military Forces;Factories and Manufacturing;Freedom's Forge (Book)"}
{"id": "ny0032174", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2013/12/03", "title": "Treasury Bill Auction Is Delayed", "abstract": "The Treasury Department has delayed the weekly auction of three-month and six-month Treasury bills because of an error that occurred during a test of its auction system. The Treasury said that the auction scheduled for Monday would take place on Tuesday. Officials said the delay was caused by an error during a systems test that impaired its ability to take bids. Joyce Harris, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Public Debt, said it was rare for the government to postpone a regularly scheduled auction of Treasury debt. Separately, the Federal Reserve said on Monday that the average yield for one-year Treasury bills, a popular index for making changes in adjustable-rate mortgages, was 0.13 percent last week, unchanged from the previous week.", "keyword": "Treasury Department;Auction;Government bond"}
{"id": "ny0046418", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2014/02/25", "title": "Step 1 Before Red Bulls\u2019 Opener: Remove Foot of Snow", "abstract": "Soccer players can be among the most fickle of professional athletes. Things have to be just so, from the cut of their uniforms to the look and feel of their cleats. But what really gets their attention, their extreme, undivided attention, is the condition of the playing surface. Dan Shemesh, the director of grounds for the Red Bulls at their stadium in Harrison, N.J., and their training center in Hanover, N.J., has also worked with the Phillies and the Eagles in Philadelphia and the Patriots and the Revolution in New England. Through cold and warm weather, rain and snow, grass and artificial turf, he said, many of the athletes he encounters do not care much about the condition of the material underfoot. That category, however, does not include soccer players. \u201cIt\u2019s not even close how much they are obsessed with the grass,\u201d Shemesh said Sunday in a telephone interview as his grounds crew was in the process of removing more than a foot of snow from the field at Red Bull Arena. \u201cThe only complaint I ever heard from a football player was from David Akers in Philadelphia. He was the most critical. The kickers like the synthetic stuff. Soccer players just hate it.\u201d But now Shemesh, 33, faces a challenge he has seldom encountered in his career, which he began by studying turf science and management at Penn State. (\u201cMost guys went to work at golf courses,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t care much for golf.\u201d) The challenge: preparing a grass field for the Red Bulls\u2019 first home game of the Major League Soccer season, on March 15, after the field has been buried in ice and snow for more than a month. Over the weekend, Shemesh and his crew began to remove more than a foot of compacted snow. (At the training center in Hanover, one of its three fields is playable because of an underground heating system.) \u201cIn the middle of the field last week we had about 18 inches of solid walk-on-the-top-of-it snow and ice,\u201d Shemesh said. \u201cWe\u2019re just so concerned about damaging the field that we first did a demonstration just taking the snow from the edges and putting it on the track around the field and in the corners. Once it\u2019s on the track, we can scoop it up later.\u201d Shemesh and his crew are in a race against time. Unlike the Yankees and the Mets, the Red Bulls do not have the luxury of time to prepare their field for the new season, which for the baseball teams begins in late March or early April. While time is critical, the Red Bulls\u2019 grounds crew also knows that the slightest damage to the field will be noted by the players. Image An industrial-strength snowblower was used to painstakingly remove snow from the field. \u201cThierry Henry is very into the condition of the field,\u201d Shemesh said. \u201cAfter all, he played at Arsenal and Barcelona, two of the best fields in the world. He usually won\u2019t say anything, but we know what his expectations are. He doesn\u2019t have to say anything because I can see, when he comes out to training at the stadium or in Hanover, he looks at it and then talks with the other guys. They\u2019re always evaluating.\u201d The cold and snowy winter has set back Shemesh and his crew as they rush to get the 2.5-acre field of prime Kentucky bluegrass ready. After working around the edges of the field to test the process, Shemesh said a contractor went to work from penalty area to penalty area using a double-wide (60-inch) snowblower that deposits the snow into a trailer. Not just any trailer, but one with special flat tires that leave no imprint on the ground. \u201cReal gentle,\u201d Shemesh said. \u201cThe average person might not see the indents, but I notice. The players notice.\u201d Letting the snow melt naturally was not an option because of its depth and the stadium\u2019s layout, which does not give the field direct sun for many hours of the day. And the grass cannot be covered in the off-season, Shemesh said, because even in a dormant state, it still needs air. Plowing each time it snowed would ruin the surface, which has been replaced numerous times (with sod from Hammonton, N.J.) since the club moved to Red Bull Arena in March 2010. \u201cThe biggest challenge on a grass field is snow removal,\u201d Shemesh said. \u201cThere simply is no good way to do it. It\u2019s a nightmare and I do lose sleep over it. I feel the pressure of the schedule. I hate games in March.\u201d With the forecast this week calling for the possibility of snow Tuesday night into Wednesday, with more cold temperatures, Shemesh said he was watching the weather forecast. \u201cWe\u2019ll have it cleared by Monday,\u201d he said. \u201cThen we\u2019ll debate whether to cover it with a special tarp. We\u2019ll wait until the last minute Tuesday night, but we really can\u2019t figure it out until the day before. What worries me before the first game is a big storm.\u201d He added: \u201cThe thing is, the field needs to be in good shape no matter what time of year it is. It doesn\u2019t matter. In this area, there\u2019s no holiday, no weekend for the grass. It\u2019s a battle against the climate.\u201d", "keyword": "Soccer;Snow Snowstorms;Harrison NJ;New York Red Bulls Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0253084", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2011/10/11", "title": "After Fukushima, Does Nuclear Power Have a Future?", "abstract": "A couple of months after the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant March 11, an American nuclear expert posed an interesting question. \u201cThe post-Fukushima public sentiment is surprisingly low-key isn\u2019t it? What a difference between this event and TMI or Chernobyl,\u201d he wrote in an e-mail, using an abbreviation for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. \u201cWhat do you think is going on? Why so quiet?\u201d I was not convinced. What he said was certainly true in the United States, but the accident had a profound effect in Germany, China and several other countries, serving as a fearful reminder of what can go wrong with nuclear power plants. Phase-outs were the order of the day in Germany (where Chancellor Angela Merkel also demanded immediate shutdowns of eight of the country\u2019s oldest reactors) and Switzerland. China suspended approvals for new reactors pending a safety review, which is now reportedly completed. This has resulted in a downward revision of China\u2019s unofficial pre-Fukushima goal to install 86 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2020. It now looks like that will be set around 60 gigawatts (up from around 12 currently) or just a little higher. Italy said no to new reactors for the second time, ending a relatively brief flirtation with nuclear planners after a long post-Chernobyl freeze. \u201cI think there is now less than 0.01 percent chance for nuclear in Italy,\u201d said Luigi De Paoli, energy economy professor at the Bocconi University in Milan, according to Reuters. Taiwan appears on the brink of some kind of phase-out involving four reactors, although it is likely to allow a recently constructed fifth unit to operate. Venezuela and Israel, both countries that had harbored nuclear power ambitions, decided they could do without after all. \u201cI think we\u2019ll go for the gas,\u201d Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN. \u201cI think we\u2019ll skip the nuclear.\u201d In Japan, of course, the effect was most dramatic. Thirteen units were automatically \u201cscrammed\u201d when the earthquake struck, and a 14th was already out for maintenance. With 15 others offline because of previous quakes or for mandatory inspection and refueling, the country\u2019s fleet of 54 operating reactors was cut to 25. In May, the government ordered a shutdown of three additional units (one of which had already been down for maintenance) at Hamaoka, situated in a particularly vulnerable seismic zone near Tokyo. The nuclear \u201ccapacity factor\u201d \u2014 a measure of how much electricity reactors generate as a percentage of what they could provide \u2014 had dropped precipitously, from 71 percent in February to 51 percent in May, but it would plunge even further in subsequent months. Facing the prospect of broad electricity failures over the summer, Japan\u2019s leadership did not dare order more plants shut down, but it hardly needed to. Because of the requirement for inspections every 13 months, more reactors were taken offline, one after the other. Now only 11 are operating. (The Japan Atomic Industrial Forum stopped publishing monthly capacity factors after July, when the figure stood at 34 percent, with 19 units operating.) While there certainly were electricity shortages, Japan survived the summer without the extensive blackouts that had been predicted. Normally the reactors would have been restarted within several weeks of shutdown, but these are not normal times in Japan. Restarts require approvals from local and prefectural governments, and these have not been received since the disaster. The 11 reactors still in operation are due to go down for maintenance between now and next September, and that in theory could leave Japan with zero nuclear-generated electricity \u2014 although that is unlikely, given the pro-nuclear sentiment of governors in some prefectures and the intense pressure for restarts from Tokyo. However, the Japanese government has ordered a gradual phase-out of the country\u2019s reactors, reversing a previous policy of increasing nuclear\u2019s share of the generating mix to 50 percent by 2030. (Japan\u2019s reactors were generally credited with supplying about 30 percent of the electricity mix, but the figure was debatable, given the frequency of power failures even before Fukushima.) \u201cTo build new reactors is unrealistic, and we will decommission reactors at the end of their life spans,\u201d Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said in his first policy speech Sept. 2. Despite this relatively dismal outlook for nuclear energy , the London-based World Nuclear Association predicts a 30 percent increase in global nuclear generating capacity over the next decade; it foresees 79 more reactors online by 2020, for a total of 514, even taking Fukushima into account. And it sees a 66 percent increase by 2030, with capacity additions in China, India, South Korea and Russia outnumbering projected declines in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Curiously, it assumes Japan will restart all but the six units at Fukushima Daiichi and continue to build new reactors to replace aging ones, for a net number of operating reactors in 2030 more or less the same as before Fukushima. While the nuclear association is obviously bullish, it is less so than it was in its last forecast two years ago. And the projected increase would only keep nuclear energy treading water. As a percentage of global generation it would account for just 14 percent, the same amount the association says it currently contributes. (Other experts say the figure is lower.) In the United States, currently home to the world\u2019s largest reactor fleet, only one proposed project, in Texas, was effectively canceled after Fukushima, but it had been teetering for more than a year since its largest backer, NRG Energy, decided to pull the plug. Plans for about 30 new reactors in the United States already had been whittled down to just four, despite the promise of large subsidies and President Barack Obama\u2019s support of nuclear power, which he reaffirmed after Fukushima. Perhaps most interesting to watch will be France, whose dependence on nuclear energy is the highest in the world, with nearly 80 percent of the country\u2019s electricity produced by 58 reactors, a fleet second in size only to that of the United States. A poll by the Institut Fran\u00e7ais d\u2019Opinion Publique in May, published in Le Journal du Dimanche, found 77 percent of the public favored some kind of nuclear phase-out. That is not completely surprising, given past polls showing French opinion toward nuclear energy to be lukewarm. What is clear is that Fukushima is prompting a major rethinking of the country\u2019s energy policies and that the nuclear issue promises to be a big factor in the presidential election next year. Against this background, it is not surprising that in the World Nuclear Association\u2019s midcase scenario, both the United States and France show a gradual decline in the number of operating reactors over the next two decades. It has been evident for some time that nuclear energy\u2019s future increasingly lies in Asia. Whatever the reasons for the muted response to Fukushima, the European phase-outs prompted by the tragedy would make this trend even more pronounced. But even in Asia, a nuclear future is no certain thing. Twenty-five years apart, Chernobyl and Fukushima were events that nuclear plant designers assumed would never happen. Any further major accidents could spell the industry\u2019s doom. Stephanie Cooke is editor of the Energy Intelligence Group\u2019s Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and author of \u201cIn Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age.\u201d", "keyword": "Nuclear Energy;Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)"}
{"id": "ny0150744", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/08/02", "title": "Baby, You Can Drive My (Rented) Car, and Other Perks", "abstract": "With Massachusetts deciding this week to allow marriages of same-sex couples who live out of state, and Gov. David A. Paterson of New York directing state agencies in May to recognize gay marriages performed legally elsewhere, many expect scores of New Yorkers to soon become husband and husband or wife and wife. They will still have to file federal income taxes separately, but could be eligible for a number of new benefits, according to state officials and the gay-rights group Empire State Pride Agenda. In a recent memo to the governor\u2019s office, the Department of Environmental Conservation said that members of same-sex married couples would be granted the right to take deer or bear from their spouse\u2019s land and shuck shellfish if their spouse has a permit. Other spousal rights include eligibility for benefits from the Crime Victims Board and inclusion in employee ethics filings. The governor\u2019s office released a page-long list of other examples. As part of its push to legalize gay marriage in New York State, the Pride Agenda joined with the New York City Bar Association to mine state and local law books and find privileges reserved for married couples, and came up with 1,324 items. Here are some highlights: \u00b6The surviving spouse of a veteran can receive priority for public housing, and is entitled to free certified copies of the veteran\u2019s honorable discharge papers. \u00b6A surviving spouse may authorize a partner\u2019s autopsy and donate the body to science. \u00b6An absentee ballot can be provided if someone is out of town to be with his or her spouse. \u00b6Spouses may not be compelled to testify about statements made to each other during their marriage. \u00b6If a person dies without a will, his or her spouse inherits the estate, and if there are children, shares it with them. \u00b6Spouses cannot be disinherited, and have the right to contest a partner\u2019s will. \u00b6If the state needs to move a cemetery because of flooding, surviving spouses have certain rights over the remains. \u00b6A spouse can take possession of the body of a prisoner executed by the state. \u00b6The surviving spouse of a correction officer can receive benefits from the state unless he or she remarries. \u00b6A spouse is considered an \u201cauthorized driver\u201d of a rented car. And if someone transfers a used car to a spouse, the warranty goes along with it. \u00b6If the deaf spouse of a crime victim needs an interpreter during court proceedings, the state will pay for it. \u00b6A spouse has the right to 10 days of unpaid leave from work during a partner\u2019s leave from the military in wartime. But the spouse of a current or former professional gambler or of someone convicted of a crime cannot receive a license to conduct bingo games. TINA KELLEY", "keyword": "Homosexuality;Marriages"}
{"id": "ny0221884", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/02/25", "title": "Turkey Shaken by Military Officer Arrests in Ergenekon Case", "abstract": "ISTANBUL \u2014 Tensions between Turkey\u2019s powerful military and the government have escalated sharply as a court has ordered the formal arrests of 20 former and current officers on charges they had plotted a coup. The 20, arrested Wednesday and Thursday, were among 49 people detained Monday as part of an investigation into allegations of a 2003 military plan called Sledgehammer. Prosecutors say the military at that time intended to stir chaos to justify overthrowing the governing Justice and Development Party , known as the AK Party, which came to power in 2002. Turkey\u2019s army regards itself as a protector of the country\u2019s secular traditions and has had tense relations with the AK Party, which is rooted in political Islam. The arrests of military officers, including several retired generals and admirals, in a security operation aimed solely at members of the army, have no recent precedent in Turkey and are likely to further alarm the country\u2019s secular elite. But the military\u2019s power has been eroded in recent years as Turkey enacts reforms intended to enhance its candidacy for admission to the European Union. \u201cIt is not an easy power struggle to reach an end anytime soon, when the military tries to maintain its power and the government remains somewhat involved in the trial process,\u201d said Rusen Cakir, a columnist with Vatan, a daily newspaper. \u201cWe still do not know where this polarization in the society, anxiously watching these happenings, will lead Turkey.\u201d The plan under investigation appears to be part of what prosecutors have called the Ergenekon conspiracy . Prosecutors say an alliance of top military officers and secular power brokers in Turkish society was aimed at creating conditions that would allow the army to topple the country\u2019s government. The army has acknowledged the existence of strategic planning to prepare for war situations, but has strongly denied that it had plotted a coup. Army officers also deny involvement in any network called Ergenekon and dispute claims that they intended to attack civilian and religious targets to foment unrest. In a rare meeting at the General Staff Headquarters in Ankara, the capital, on Tuesday, the highest-ranking generals of the army gathered to discuss the situation, a written statement posted on the military\u2019s Web site said, but it gave no further details. The army, which has long enjoyed full immunity from civilian law, ousted four governments in the past 50 years without facing any challenges itself until the AK Party came to power. The continuing trial in the Ergenekon case is deeply divisive in Turkey. Efforts to punish those thought to have tried to destabilize the government are broadly popular. But some government critics say the investigation, which is led by pro-government forces within the judiciary, has become a tool of political manipulation intended to punish a wide range of vocal critics of the government. AK Party leaders deny that they have used the investigation to settle political scores. The investigation is led by several state prosecutors with special powers, looking into a wide range of evidence, including weapons and illegal documents confiscated during various security operations since 2007. More than 200 people have been arrested so far in the name of the investigation, including intellectuals, journalists and academics, some of them jailed without facing official charges. Among the detainees in the latest proceedings are two retired generals and a retired admiral: a former deputy chief of the general staff, Ergin Saygun; a former air force commander, Ibrahim Firtina; and the former naval commander, Ozden Ornek. All served during the AK Party\u2019s tenure. The former generals will appear in court on Thursday and face a decision on whether the prosecution\u2019s case against them will proceed. On Thursday, President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the chief of the general staff, Gen. Ilker Basbug, will evaluate the situation, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.", "keyword": "Turkey;Coups D'Etat and Attempted Coups D'Etat;Ergenekon Conspiracy"}
{"id": "ny0253381", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/10/07", "title": "A Question of Trimming Pay at Goldman Sachs - Breakingviews", "abstract": "A rare loss potentially looms for Goldman Sachs . A growing number of analysts estimate that the Wall Street titan will slip into the red when it announces third-quarter results. Given the state of the markets, it is not hard to imagine. But most assessments also expect Goldman to sock away nearly half its revenue to cover compensation for its employees. That could mean that the top brass needs to grin and bear draining the pool. The numbers don\u2019t look promising. Assume, as Barclays Capital predicts, that Goldman reports a $180 million quarterly loss and that Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive, sets aside $1.8 billion for pay and benefits. Cutting the pay pool in half would swing the firm to a profit of about $500 million. That is no windfall. It equates to return on equity of just below 3 percent. Even if Goldman left the compensation line empty for the quarter, it would fail to reap enough to meet its cost of capital. Such restraint would nevertheless show a willingness to put shareholders first. And it wouldn\u2019t necessarily be just a short-term solution. After all, Goldman\u2019s first half wasn\u2019t great, either. Excluding the one-time cost of redeeming Warren E. Buffett\u2019s preferred stock, it posted a return on equity of 10.2 percent. That is around half of Goldman\u2019s recent historical average through the cycle. Achieving a more respectable 15 percent would have required cutting the compensation ratio to 33 percent, a bit lower than in 2009. Lower pay might have encouraged some to leave, though rivals weren\u2019t exactly swimming in money, and over all, Goldman would still have squirreled away an average of $179,000 per employee. The other option, of course, is to cut its staff. That move also has costs, though, especially with more stock payouts that take years to vest. Keeping average pay higher in the first six months with a shallower compensation pool would have meant showing a quarter of employees the door, undermining morale and the ability to satisfy clients. Goldman may yet hold out longer before trimming pay. But with no obvious signs of business picking up, bankers and traders may need to get used to the idea of sacrificing more of their waning spoils to keep shareholders on board. Testing the Banks Europe\u2019s banks may need to retake their summer exams. Regulators are seeking ways to inject more capital into the region\u2019s troubled lenders. One potential quick fix is to use the same data as was used in July\u2019s discredited stress tests, but to also impose markdowns on sovereign debt. Still, this wouldn\u2019t be enough. The authorities should also raise the minimum capital ratio that banks need to clear. The flaw in July\u2019s tests was that banks did not have to mark down the government bonds they hold at face value. As a result, only eight of the European Union\u2019s 90 largest lenders flunked the exam, with a capital shortfall of just 2.5 billion euros. Since then, worries about sovereign debt have spread from Greece and Portugal to Spain and Italy, threatening a systemic crisis. Ideally, regulators would conduct another test. But that would take months, and Europe does not have the luxury of time. An alternative is to rerun the tests with the same data, while forcing the banks to mark all sovereign bonds to current market prices. In that case, 18 banks would fail, with a capital hole of 40 billion euros, according to calculations by Breakingviews. But even that wouldn\u2019t restore confidence. The International Monetary Fund puts the capital shortfall of European banks at 100 billion to 200 billion euros. Some analysts have come up with even higher numbers. To address these concerns, regulators should simultaneously raise the minimum core Tier 1 capital ratio that banks need to clear. If it was raised to 7 percent from July\u2019s 5 percent, more than half of the 90 banks involved in the tests would need a combined 98 billion euros of extra capital. Problems could arise from this approach. But as a quick way to restore confidence in Europe\u2019s banking system, imposing a tougher test may be worth a try.", "keyword": "Banking and Financial Institutions;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );Goldman Sachs Group Inc"}
{"id": "ny0282508", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2016/07/28", "title": "Bill O\u2019Reilly Defends Comments About \u2018Well Fed\u2019 Slaves", "abstract": "Addressing Michelle Obama\u2019s remarks about slaves having built the White House, Bill O\u2019Reilly said Tuesday on his Fox News program that those slaves were \u201cwell fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.\u201d His comments drew swift rebukes online. He fired back on his Wednesday program, saying that the nation\u2019s first president provided slaves with \u201cmeat, bread and other staples\u201d and \u201cdecent lodging.\u201d It all began in a 90-second segment near the end of \u201cThe O\u2019Reilly Factor\u201d on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday night, when Mr. O\u2019Reilly delved into the history of the White House dating to George Washington\u2019s selecting the site for it in 1791. Mr. O\u2019Reilly, a conservative pundit and the author of historical books like \u201cKilling Kennedy,\u201d appeared to be attempting to fact-check a statement the first lady made on Monday at the Democratic National Convention, calling her words \u201ca positive comment\u201d and adding that \u201cthe history behind her remark is fascinating.\u201d Image A brick made by a slave from the construction of the White House. Credit Tim Gruber for The New York Times \u201cSlaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So, Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working, as well.\u201d Twitter users seized on his comments, which were criticized as making light of the slaves\u2019 treatment and regurgitating the antebellum view of the \u201chappy\u201d or \u201ccontent\u201d slave. Mr. O\u2019Reilly responded on Wednesday, first on Twitter and then on television. Then, on his program, Mr. O\u2019Reilly attributed the criticism to \u201csmear merchants\u201d and called it \u201ca given that slavery is an abomination.\u201d He then, again, addressed the conditions in which slaves worked. \u201cAs any honest historian knows, in order to keep slaves and free laborers strong, the Washington administration provided meat, bread and other staples, also decent lodging on the grounds of the new presidential building,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is a fact. Not a justification, not a defense of slavery,\u201d Mr. O\u2019Reilly added. Historians generally agree that slaves indeed helped build the White House . The White House Historical Association said African-Americans \u2014 enslaved and free \u2014 provided \u201cthe bulk of the labor that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings.\u201d Slaves worked at the government\u2019s quarry in Aquia, Va., to cut the stone for the White House walls, the organization said. Jesse Holland, a journalist who wrote \u201cThe Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House,\u201d said he appreciated that Mr. O\u2019Reilly acknowledged the slaves, considering others had disputed their role in the White House after Ms. Obama\u2019s comments. Most of Mr. O\u2019Reilly\u2019s history lesson was accurate, he said. But there\u2019s no historical evidence either way on the question of how well fed the slaves were, he said. The slaves were indeed fed pork and bread, but it\u2019s unknown what kinds and how much they were given, he said. \u201cWe know as construction workers they were expected to do hard, grueling, backbreaking work,\u201d Mr. Holland said. \u201cSo they had to feed them enough so they could actually get their money\u2019s worth. Were they well fed? That\u2019s not something that, right now, history supports.\u201d Many of the slaves lived in a structure described as a barn, Mr. Holland said. There were houses built for workers, but it\u2019s unknown if the slaves got to live in them. Following is a transcript of Mr. O\u2019Reilly\u2019s original remarks on the Tuesday program, in the video above: Finally tonight, Factor Tip of the Day. As we mentioned, Talking Points Memo: Michelle Obama referenced slaves building the White House in referring to the evolution of America in a positive way. It was a positive comment. The history behind her remark is fascinating. George Washington selected the site in 1791 and as president laid the cornerstone in 1792. Washington was then running the country out of Philadelphia. Slaves did participate in the construction of the White House. Records show about 400 payments made to slave masters between 1795 and 1801. In addition, free blacks, whites, and immigrants also worked on the massive building. There were no illegal immigrants at that time \u2014 if you could make it here, you could stay here. In 1800, President John Adams took up residence in what was then called the Executive Mansion \u2014 it was only later on they named it the White House. But Adams was in there with Abigail, and they were still hammering nails, the construction was still going on. Slaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802. However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So, Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it all? There will be a quiz.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;White House;Democratic National Convention,DNC;Michelle Obama;Bill O'Reilly"}
{"id": "ny0146660", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/07/17", "title": "Sampling the Best of the iPhone App Store\u2019s Diversions", "abstract": "APPLE turned on the tap for its iPhone App store last week, unleashing more than 500 applications for iPhone users. If you have an iPhone, you just might forget the device is capable of making phone calls, since you\u2019ll be so busy updating Facebook pages, coveting your neighbor\u2019s co-op and wielding your handset to swerve around virtual racetracks. The store is an object lesson for other cellphone makers and carriers on how to make your customers\u2019 phones indispensable. The App Store is simple to use, thanks to its elegant and intuitive interface. Many of the apps are free, and most cost $9.99 or less (although a select few cost as much as $79.99). Five buttons \u2014 Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search and Updates \u2014 line the bottom of the screen, and that\u2019s about all you need to navigate. Each app includes an overview from the publisher, a rating (one to five stars) and user reviews. If you\u2019re considering a for-pay program, read the comments first because reviewers often describe glitches that might change your mind. The Categories screen will give you a good idea of the sweeping breadth of apps available, from work (scientific calculators) to play (tossing cows), with an emphasis on fun. If you know what you\u2019re looking for, the fastest way to get it is to enter keywords in the search field. To download an app, simply touch and hold the Install key. The phone will ask for your iTunes password, and then will automatically load the app. If the app maker charges a fee, the amount will be charged to your iTunes account. The most promising of the new programs take advantage of the iPhone 3G\u2019s built-in G.P.S. to provide location-aware capabilities. Suppose you\u2019re having a drink after work and suddenly sushi seems like an imperative. Apps such as Yelp can automatically pinpoint your current location using G.P.S. and display nearby Japanese restaurants. The iPhone can also do double duty as a hand-held gaming console, thanks to its accelerometer, which, for instance, lets you use the device to steer a race car in a driving simulator game. Better yet, the graphics are surprisingly crisp. Many of the software titles present information that you could also find using the iPhone\u2019s Safari Web browser, but the apps often win out. Say, for instance, you want to check your Facebook page. If you navigate to the Web site using Safari, you\u2019ll need to home in on a certain part of the page and enlarge it to read, then scoot around to other parts of the page as necessary. With the Facebook app for the iPhone, all the information is reformatted so it is readable and organized. No scooting required. One important limitation is that applications don\u2019t run in the background, so if you\u2019re listening to an online radio station and toggle to your e-mail application, you\u2019ll lose the radio feed. Here are eight of the best applications currently available. (Visit nytimes.com/personaltech for a slide show that shows you these and 10 other top picks.) Entertainment BoxOffice (Free): BoxOffice takes advantage of the iPhone\u2019s G.P.S. capabilities to find movies near you. You can browse by theater, movies, showtimes and distance. When you find what you want, BoxOffice provides a short synopsis of each movie and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site. It will also display the address of the theater, and locate it for you on Google Maps. You can even link to Fandango for ticket purchases. Games Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D ($9.99): Flip your iPhone horizontal and hop into a hot rod with the crusading Crash Bandicoot. The iPhone\u2019s accelerometer enables you to steer your car by tilting the phone to the left and right. The game offers 12 tracks and environments, as well as plenty of opportunities to blast through opponents and crates of fruit. The graphics are mighty impressive, but be warned that this game will drain your battery faster than an S-curve wipe-out. Health Care and Fitness Epocrates Rx (Free): This prescription-drug database contains data on more than 3,300 brand-name and generic drugs. While it\u2019s meant for health care professionals, Epocrates delivers a wealth of information that is useful to consumers, too. For instance, Epocrates spells out common medication dosages for adults and children, side effects, interactions with other medications and even photos of the pills to help you identify or verify medication. Lifestyle Yelp (Free): Yelp fuses social networking, user reviews and local searches into one easy-to-use app that\u2019s essential for any iPhone on the roam. This portable version of Yelp.com , a Web portal that has been around for a few years, has a substantial stock of user reviews (with ratings) and content. You can use G.P.S. to search for nearby restaurants, bars, coffee and tea shops, banks, gas stations and drugstores. Click the Map button and Yelp will display all search results on a Google Map. Music Tuner ($4.99): When you tire of your own tunes (remember, the iPhone is also an iPod ), turn on Tuner, an app that serves up thousands of Internet radio stations in a format that makes it easy to find exactly what you want to hear. You can either browse its incredibly comprehensive genres section (Albanian, anyone?), check out the Top 500 list, or simply search for your own favorite station. As with most Internet radio stations, the sound isn\u2019t CD quality and the volume is sometimes a bit low, but the selection is vast. Be warned, however, that when you flip to another application, Tuner closes and you lose audio. Navigation CityTransit NYC Subway Guide ($2.99): This subway map (no folding!) is your guide to trains in the New York metro area. Plan your transportation via a map view or using a stop-by-stop subway line view. If you\u2019re out and don\u2019t know where to find the nearest subway, hit the Locate button for a list of nearby stations. Select one and CityTransit will plot the station for you on a Google Map. Bonus: The app also includes maps of Long Island Rail Road and Metro North. Social Networking MySpace (Free): The MySpace site is known for its unabashedly homely appearance, so it\u2019s a bit surprising that its software developers delivered an iPhone app that is attractive, easy to use, and packed with features. The app offers many of the same features as the Web site (without the annoying music). Check on all your friends by viewing their photos, bulletins and comments. This app is an amazingly tight distillation of the full-fledged MySpace site. Sports MLB.com At Bat ($4.99): Stat-happy baseball fans will cheer for MLB.com At Bat, which delivers real-time scores of all Major League Baseball games. Click a game (they\u2019re organized by date) and you\u2019ll get an inning-by-inning rundown of runs scored, as well as stats on the winning and losing pitchers. Each game includes eight or so video clips of the day\u2019s highlights (they look great on a Wi-Fi connection but woefully choppy on AT&T\u2019s 3G network).", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Software;iPhone;Apple Inc;Social Networking (Internet);Global Positioning System"}
{"id": "ny0191266", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/02/03", "title": "Bomber Kills 21 Policemen in Afghanistan", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 A man wrapped in explosives walked into a compound filled with Afghan police officers on Monday morning and detonated his payload, killing 21 officers and himself. The attacker struck in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, a mountainous area where the government\u2019s authority is being contested by the Taliban. Oruzgan is the birthplace of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement. The Interior Ministry said the attacker was dressed in a police uniform and set off the explosives during a training exercise in the compound. Eight other officers were wounded. Separately, the Defense Ministry said Afghan Army forces had seized three men wearing vests filled with explosives in the Deh Rawood district of Oruzgan. Monday\u2019s attack was the second in as many days. On Sunday, a man drove a car filled with explosives into a convoy carrying French and Afghan soldiers on the southwestern edge of Kabul, the capital, killing himself and injuring three other people, including a French soldier. Two weeks ago, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the German Embassy in Kabul, killing an American serviceman and four civilians. The Taliban, which has launched hundreds of attacks against American, Afghan and other targets, claimed responsibility, news services reported. In recent months the number of suicide attacks has dropped significantly, largely a result of stepped-up security measures. In 2007, about 140 suicide bombers struck in Afghanistan; in 2008, the number dropped to about 80. As security has tightened against suicide attackers, the Taliban has turned to roadside bombs; in 2008, the number of attacks was double that in 2007.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Bombs and Explosives;Terrorism;Afghanistan War (2001- )"}
{"id": "ny0247284", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/05/18", "title": "Gus Johnson Is Eager to Expand His Horizons at Fox", "abstract": "Last week, at the exact moment that the broadcaster Gus Johnson learned he would no longer call the N.C.A.A. men\u2019s basketball tournament, he was shooting baskets. Johnson found that a remarkable coincidence. In many ways, the tournament defined him, made him famous. His cult following had grown from his work in March. Johnson felt sad that CBS Sports , his home for 16 years, had declined to match the offer he accepted from Fox Sports; excited about the future; relieved that an unexpected turn under the microscope had ended. The process, he said, had been \u201cvery, very, very painful.\u201d Over lunch Tuesday in New York\u2019s Little Italy , Johnson said: \u201cI\u2019m tired of thinking. Weighing. Grappling with my thoughts. You\u2019re giving up something to gain something. But you\u2019re still giving up something. I\u2019m leaving something that I love. And I love that thing. That was my thing. Sometimes, you\u2019ve just got to walk away.\u201d Since last November, Johnson has walked from the two jobs he loved most. First, he left the Knicks, where he was the play-by-play announcer. Then, he departed CBS. For Fox, Johnson will work college football and basketball games, and become part of the network\u2019s N.F.L. rotation. He said he would miss the N.C.A.A. tournament, but he does not plan to watch next March, the same way he did not watch the Knicks until January or so. But Johnson also reiterated that he did not fear leaving the tournament \u201cthat made me.\u201d He described his split from CBS as amicable, a necessary step. \u201cI believe in myself,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cI believe in my ability to do my job, whether it be the N.C.A.A. tournament or the world tiddlywinks championship.\u201d Johnson said negotiations with Fox started in early March, right before the tournament. When he told CBS about the other offer, he expected a quiet round of talks. Instead, when he arrived in Las Vegas to work Manny Pacquiao\u2019s welterweight title defense against Shane Mosley on May 7, Sports Illustrated reported he was leaving CBS. The news broke as Pacquiao entered a production meeting, and Johnson\u2019s cellphone buzzed with some 75 messages over the next hour. It was, Johnson said, \u201clike, boom goes the dynamite.\u201d As he worked the fight, Johnson deflected questions regarding his contract status, which he maintained was still being negotiated. CBS had the right to match, he said. The volume of response surprised Johnson. \u201cI never thought it had the potential to become anything like that,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like that. I still don\u2019t understand what the big deal is, why there are so many opinions. I\u2019m just a regular dude. I didn\u2019t think it would have this kind of impact.\u201d Johnson did not rule out returning to CBS in the future. The network declined to comment, sending the same statement it used last week: \u201cWe were not able to reach an agreement with Gus. We wish him continued success.\u201d Over the years, Johnson has become familiar with the criticism lobbed in his direction \u2014 that he did not prepare as well as other broadcasters, that he overshadowed color analysts, that he called average games with unnecessary excitement \u2014 but he said CBS never expressed any of those concerns to him. Instead, he credited the network for its role in his career advancement and noted the \u201cgreat roster of talented announcers\u201d who stood above him. Fox\u2019s offer, which included Big 12, Conference USA and Pacific 12 football games, simply proved too enticing, Johnson said. He will continue to work boxing and mixed martial arts events for Showtime Sports, and cover college basketball for the Big Ten Network (of which Fox is a minority owner). And he just finished the voice-over for the video game Madden N.F.L. 12 . Johnson will continue to live in Manhattan, to be close to his 7-year-old son. He said that Fox wanted \u201cto mold some things around my style.\u201d He added: \u201cThey\u2019ve elevating me to a status I\u2019ve never been before. For the first time, I\u2019m No. 1 at something. I\u2019m at the point where I\u2019m not a kid anymore. I\u2019m in my 40s. I\u2019ve paid my dues.\u201d He says he sees this job as the next step toward a future where he works entirely for himself. On his cellphone, Johnson showed off the new hat and T-shirt designs for his Rise & Fire apparel line, which will be for sale soon. He talked of other ventures, other plans, some far outside of broadcasting. One week after the move to Fox became official, Johnson had already begun to move forward. He expressed no bitterness, as he tried to understand all the interest his future had generated in the past two weeks. \u201cI feel no pressure,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cThis is what I do. And I\u2019m good at what I do. I\u2019m going to be better at what I do. I\u2019m going to have fun with this.\u201d", "keyword": "Television;College Athletics;Johnson Gus;Fox Broadcasting Co;CBS Corp;Football"}
{"id": "ny0001410", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2013/03/26", "title": "Leader of Central African Republic, Fran\u00e7ois Boziz\u00e9, Is in Cameroon", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 A day after being ousted by rebel forces, President Fran\u00e7ois Boziz\u00e9 of the Central African Republic surfaced in Cameroon on Monday, according to a statement read on state radio by a senior Cameroonian official. He will remain there until he finds a more permanent refuge, said the official, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh. The rebel coalition, known as Seleka, the word for alliance in the Sango language, solidified its grip on the capital, Bangui, and pledged to stick to the terms of an earlier transition plan negotiated in neighboring Gabon that was to lay the groundwork for new elections in two or three years, Reuters reported. Under that agreement, the rebels, the civilian opposition and Mr. Boziz\u00e9\u2019s allies were to share power, but the Seleka rebellion claimed that Mr. Boziz\u00e9, who himself came to power in a military coup in 2003, was not respecting its terms. The rebels withdrew from the power-sharing deal and returned to the battlefield. The African Union on Monday froze the assets and imposed a travel ban on the seven leaders of the rebel coalition, according to news reports. There were also indications of disagreement within the rebel ranks over who was in charge, with one leader, Michel Djotodia, declaring himself the new head of state and The Associated Press quoting another rebel leader, Nelson N\u2019Djadder, as disputing Mr. Djotodia\u2019s assertion. South Africa, meanwhile, announced that 13 of its soldiers had been killed while fighting the rebels near Bangui. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa said 200 soldiers had battled more than 1,000 rebels, whom he referred to as \u201cbandits.\u201d Image President Fran\u00e7ois Boziz\u00e9 during a press conference at his palace in Bangui in January. Credit Sia Kambou/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images \u201cThey fought a high-tempo battle for nine hours defending the South African military base, until the bandits raised a white flag and asked for a cease-fire,\u201d he said at a news conference in Pretoria. \u201cOur soldiers inflicted heavy casualties among the attacking bandit forces.\u201d South Africa had sent 200 of a planned deployment of 400 troops to the Central African Republic as part of an agreement with Mr. Boziz\u00e9\u2019s government to bolster and train the country\u2019s ragtag army. The high death toll shocked South Africans, many of whom did not know that the country had sent soldiers there and who questioned South Africa\u2019s involvement in helping to prop up Mr. Boziz\u00e9. South Africa\u2019s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, called the deployment of troops there \u201chighly questionable\u201d and declared the mission \u201ca complete disaster from the beginning.\u201d The Central African Republic is one of the most fragile and impoverished nations in the world. It has a long history of military coups and harsh dictatorship, and of meddling by the troubled nations on its borders. Mr. Boziz\u00e9 came to power with the assistance of Chad, to the north. The Central African Republic also borders Sudan, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which have been at the center of major regional conflagrations.", "keyword": "Central African Republic;Francois Bozize;Cameroon;Coups D'Etat;Seleka;South Africa"}
{"id": "ny0126405", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/08/23", "title": "Malcolm Smith Demands Apology for Lil Wayne\u2019s Insult to New York", "abstract": "State Senator Malcolm A. Smith of Queens said Wednesday that he was \u201cangry,\u201d \u201ctaken aback\u201d and \u201cshocked\u201d by five words uttered by the rapper Lil Wayne \u2014 five words that, unlike some other Lil Wayne lyrics, can be printed here in their entirety: \u201cI don\u2019t like New York.\u201d \u201cI take strong exception to the words \u2018I don\u2019t like New York,\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Smith, a Democrat. He called a news conference in Father Duffy Square, the island between West 46th and West 47th Streets, on Wednesday to demand an apology. Lil Wayne, whose given name is Dwayne M. Carter Jr., made the comment to MTV News in Las Vegas on Monday night. It was probably not a surprise to anyone, since Mr. Carter has made it clear that performing in the city that never sleeps is not high on his to-do list. After all, he was arrested after his first show in Manhattan, in 2007. He pleaded guilty to a weapons charge and spent eight months on Rikers Island. So Mr. Carter, originally from New Orleans, has something of a history with the city. Still, Mr. Smith \u2014 who said his 19-year-old daughter, Amanda, is a Lil Wayne fan \u2014 said it was wrong to be disrespectful of New York. Mr. Smith said he believed the comment resulted from \u201ca lapse in mental judgment\u201d on Mr. Carter\u2019s part. \u201cIf you don\u2019t like New York,\u201d Mr. Smith said, \u201cyou don\u2019t have to come to New York. You don\u2019t have to sell your products here. And perhaps we won\u2019t come to your concerts.\u201d Mr. Smith said he took on Mr. Carter because his legislative district was \u201ca little small place in New York City called Hollis, Queens, which is essentially the home and the origin of hip-hop.\u201d He offered to meet Mr. Carter \u201canyplace, anytime,\u201d adding that he hoped the agenda would be broadened to include discussion of \u201chow to stop gun violence in our cities.\u201d Mr. Carter\u2019s remark came two days after more than 500 guns were turned in under a police gun-buyback program in Queens. Mr. Smith was one of the officials who sponsored the exchange, which promised $200 bank cards in exchange for illegal guns. \u201cNew Yorkers are forgiving people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re prepared to forgive Lil Wayne if in fact he makes a sincere apology.\u201d A spokeswoman for Mr. Carter had no comment. Mr. Carter is writing a book about his experience at Rikers Island.", "keyword": "Lil Wayne;Smith Malcolm A;New York City;Music"}
{"id": "ny0029039", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/01/22", "title": "Merkel\u2019s Standing Takes a Hit in Local German Elections", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 Chancellor Angela Merkel is without question the most powerful politician in Europe, trusted by German voters with their money and their future, but that still may not be enough to secure her a third term in elections this year. A down-to-the-wire state election over the weekend has shaken up German politics, handing the upper house of Parliament squarely to the opposition and jeopardizing Ms. Merkel\u2019s re-election chances in September. Speaking to reporters after meeting with her Christian Democratic party leaders, the chancellor did not try to play down the outcome of Sunday\u2019s vote in the state of Lower Saxony. \u201cI don\u2019t want to beat around the bush \u2014 after such an emotional roller coaster, a loss hurts all the more,\u201d said Ms. Merkel, standing beside her party\u2019s lead candidate from the state, a visibly shellshocked David McAllister, who had led the polls for months. The Social Democrats and Greens were poised to take power in the state after winning a one-seat majority in the state Parliament, ending a decade of conservative control. Once again it was the relative weakness of Ms. Merkel\u2019s coalition partners, the Free Democrats, that decided the election. The Social Democrats took 32.6 percent of ballots, while the Greens won 13.7 percent, official preliminary results showed Monday, giving them 69 seats in the state legislature. Although the Christian Democrats emerged as the strongest party, with 36 percent of the vote, combined with their Free Democrat partners they were able to secure only 68 seats. The Christian Democrats were so concerned about the smaller party\u2019s chances that their leaders implored their own voters to split their votes with the struggling party. In elections in most German states, each voter casts two votes, one for an individual candidate and the other for a party. The tactic nearly worked. The Free Democrats, polling right around the 5 percent threshold for representation in the state Parliament, won 9.9 percent of the vote. Analysis showed that more than 100,000 voters from the Christian Democrats shared their votes with the Free Democrats. Ms. Merkel can only hope that the Free Democrats put their house in order before parliamentary elections in eight months. Indeed, analysts interpreted the results as a worrying omen for Ms. Merkel as she squares off against her main challenger for chancellor, Peer Steinbr\u00fcck of the Social Democrats. Though he kicked off his campaign with a series of gaffes and trails far behind Ms. Merkel, voters will not be choosing one over the other. Germany does not have a two-party, winner-take-all system; parliamentary politics come down to party success and alliances. The chances that Ms. Merkel\u2019s Christian Democrats will win an outright majority in September\u2019s elections are extremely low, polls show. Image Chancellor Angela Merkel at a news conference on Monday, when it became apparent that the opposition had picked up votes. Credit Michael Sohn/Associated Press That means that Ms. Merkel needs the Free Democrats to pull out of their tailspin. Otherwise, she could see a national repeat of the result in Lower Saxony, where her party won the largest share of the vote but watched the Social Democrats and the Greens team up to take power. Avoiding such an outcome will not be easy. Ms. Merkel is renowned for her tactical maneuvering but often criticized for succeeding at the expense of her associates and subordinates. Opinion surveys consistently show that she is more popular than ever, with voters particularly approving of her tough stance in the euro crisis on bailouts for deeply indebted nations like Greece. But analysts have questioned whether the Christian Democrats have therefore become too much of a one-woman party \u2014 and perhaps have jeopardized the junior partners in the governing coalition by overshadowing them. Philipp R\u00f6sler, the head of the pro-business Free Democrats and Ms. Merkel\u2019s vice chancellor, responded Monday to the Lower Saxony defeat by offering to step down as party chairman. The leadership decided that he would remain but not lead the party in the parliamentary elections, making Mr. R\u00f6sler in effect a lame duck. Complicating matters further, the left-leaning coalition now enjoys an outright majority in Parliament\u2019s upper house, the Bundesrat, where state delegations vote on legislation. The Social Democrats and Greens can now reject bills that need the upper house\u2019s approval, forcing their return to the lower house for more debate. Although the shift of power is not expected to affect the government\u2019s handling of the euro crisis, it could provide opportunities for the opposition to drag out other issues, resulting in an extended period of gridlock that could damage the governing coalition\u2019s public standing. Ms. Merkel made it clear that the Free Democrats remain her preferred partner, but that she would not rule out a return to her coalition from 2005 to 2009, in which her Christian Democrats governed with the Social Democrats. \u201cIt will be a national election in which every party fights for its own votes,\u201d Ms. Merkel said. The result in Lower Saxony continued a trend of losing state elections for the Christian Democrats in important states where they once held clear majorities. In May, the Christian Democrats failed to take control of Germany\u2019s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, where the Social Democrats and Greens consolidated control, and they lost Schleswig-Holstein . A year earlier, they had been forced to step down after 58 years at the helm in Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg. Although the Christian Democrats fared much better in Lower Saxony than in those states, as J\u00fcrgen Falter, a professor of political science at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, pointed out, it set a dangerous precedent for what could happen in September. \u201cThe result showed that the conservative camp can rack up a considerable result, but that may still not be enough to build a coalition,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Germany;Election;Legislature;Angela Merkel;Social Democratic Party Germany;Free Democratic Party Germany"}
{"id": "ny0139931", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/02/26", "title": "Max Raab, Maker of Fashion and Film, Dies at 81", "abstract": "Max L. Raab, whose apparel company helped extend the button-down preppy look of the early 1960s to women\u2019s clothing and who then moved into the film industry as an executive producer of several mind-bending movies, including \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d died Feb. 21 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 81. The cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s, his wife, Merle, said. Mr. Raab and his brother, Norman, started what became a nationally known clothing label, The Villager, in 1958. Before that, while working for their father, Herman, a shirt manufacturer, they had noticed that more and more college women were buying Brooks Brothers-type button-down men\u2019s shirts. The Raab brothers\u2019 solid-color button-down blouses soon began selling so well that The Villager label \u2014 enclosed in an oval and guarded by an eagle \u2014 gained wide recognition. The company line expanded to florals, stripes, plaids and shirtwaist dresses with buttons all the way down to the hem, among other items. In 1980, six years after Max Raab started another apparel company, J.G. Hook, the headline on an article in The New York Times called him \u201cThe Dean of the Prep Look,\u201d and said he was responsible for \u201csupplying American women with as many blazers and button-down Oxford-cloth shirts as they could wear with the Fair Isle sweaters and Bass Weejun loafers.\u201d By then, however, Mr. Raab had already been lured into the movie business, after being asked to supply the wardrobe for a low-budget independent film. In the late 1960s, he bought the film rights to Anthony Burgess\u2019s disturbing futuristic novel \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d about roaming gang members who committed violent crimes just for fun. Directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick, with Mr. Raab as one of the executive producers, the movie was released in 1971. That same year, Mr. Raab was executive producer of \u201cWalkabout,\u201d about two children lost in the Australian Outback who learn to survive after meeting an Aborigine. Among Mr. Raab\u2019s other film production credits are \u201cEnd of the Road\u201d (1970); \u201cHex\u201d (1973); and \u201cMoment to Moment\u201d (1975). Max Louis Raab was born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1926, the son of Herman and Fanny Kessler Raab. He served in the Army in Germany during World War II, and then in occupied Japan. After coming home he worked for his father\u2019s company. Besides his wife, the former Merle Kass Levin, Mr. Raab is survived by his daughter, Claudia Raab of Philadelphia; two sons, Adam Max Gould of Brooklyn and Paul English of Paris; and two grandchildren. His first wife, the former Anita Charkow Mednick, died before him. His second marriage, to Mary Flores Raab, ended in divorce. His former companion, Nancy English, died in 1995. His brother, Norman, died in 2005. In 1974, on his own, Mr. Raab returned to the apparel business by opening J.G. Hook, which specialized in women\u2019s sportswear. By 1980, the company\u2019s annual revenue was more than $50 million. Mr. Raab also opened Tango, a necktie manufacturing company. In 1998, Mr. Raab left the clothing business to start Max Raab Productions, a documentary film company. Three years ago, working with Robert Downey Sr., the writer and director best known for \u201cPutney Swope,\u201d Mr. Raab produced \u201cRittenhouse Square,\u201d a yearlong look at one of Philadelphia\u2019s cultural hubs. Then, last year, just for fun, Mr. Raab opened a shop that sells tin toys and model planes, boats and cars.", "keyword": "Raab Max Louis;Apparel;Deaths (Obituaries);Villager The;Motion Pictures;A Clockwork Orange (Movie)"}
{"id": "ny0009404", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/02/02", "title": "Suicide Bomber Attacks Market in Pakistan", "abstract": "PESHAWAR, Pakistan \u2014 An explosion in a market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday killed at least 21 people and wounded 33 in what the police described as a suicide bombing. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Hangu, about 70 miles west of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Abu Omar, a Taliban commander in the neighboring tribal region of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview that the attack was in revenge for the killing on Thursday of a Sunni cleric. The cleric, Mufti Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, 60, was shot in the southern port city of Karachi, setting off fears of reprisals against Shiites. Mr. Deenpuri was a senior teacher at Jamia Binoria, one of the largest seminaries in Pakistan. A gunman opened fire on a vehicle carrying the cleric and a colleague at a busy intersection and then fled. While the security situation is precarious across Pakistan , Rehman Malik, the interior minister, had warned of the potential for an attack in Karachi, a sprawling, violence-prone port city. Cellphone service was suspended there from noon to 3 p.m. during Friday Prayer. Image A man injured in the explosion in Hangu was transported to a hospital in Peshawar for treatment. Credit Fayaz Aziz/Reuters Sectarian violence has also occurred in Hangu in the past, often forcing the authorities to impose a curfew. The town borders the Orakzai tribal region, where the army and paramilitary forces are fighting Taliban militants. Friday\u2019s explosion occurred just after Friday Prayer as worshipers filed out of nearby Sunni and Shiite mosques, police officials said. \u201cPeople were coming out of the mosque when the explosion occurred,\u201d said one officer in Hangu, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Another police official in Hangu said a suicide bomber had detonated his explosives. While Shiites were the likely target, the dead included people from both Islamic sects, he said. Separately, a Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said 30 mortar shells fired from Afghanistan on Friday morning killed six residents of Angoor Adda, a border village in South Waziristan. However, there was no official comment from the Pakistani military, and a local government official gave a conflicting number of casualties, saying three people were killed and six wounded. In recent years, Pakistan and Afghanistan have traded barbs over accusations of cross-border rocket and artillery fire. The 1,510-mile craggy border between the two countries has long posed a problem for both sides, each accusing the other of not manning the border effectively. Both sides maintain that insurgents easily cross over the porous border, but plans to fence the border have been rejected as impractical. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2013 , which sharply criticized the Pakistani government and its military and intelligence agencies for failing to reduce human rights abuses. \u201cPakistan\u2019s human rights crisis worsened markedly in 2012 with religious minorities bearing the brunt of killings and repression,\u201d said Ali Dayan Hasan , the director in Pakistan for Human Rights Watch.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Mosque;Taliban;Bombs"}
{"id": "ny0295230", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/12/18", "title": "ISIS Suicide Attack Kills 48 in Southern Yemen", "abstract": "AL MUKALLA, Yemen \u2014 A suicide bomber disguised as a disabled man blew himself up at a gathering of Yemeni security officers in the southern port of Aden on Sunday, killing 48 people and wounding dozens of others, Yemeni officials said. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, naming the attacker and publishing a photograph of him smiling with a rifle at his side and wearing an explosive vest. The attack was the second this month to kill scores of security forces near a military base in Aden, highlighting the failure of the Yemeni government and its allies to ensure basic security in the areas they control. Yemen has been mired in conflict since 2014, when rebels aligned with Iran, known as the Houthis, seized the capital, Sana. They later forced the internationally recognized government into exile in Saudi Arabia. Video A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a military camp in the southern Yemeni city of Aden on Sunday morning, killing dozens of soldiers. Credit Credit Wael Qubady/Associated Press The country is now split, with the Houthis and army units allied with them controlling the northwest and a coalition of forces nominally loyal to Yemen\u2019s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, holding the south and the east. Jihadists have taken advantage of the disorder to launch attacks in the south, where the Islamic State and the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda have a presence. Sunday\u2019s attack occurred as hundreds of members of the Yemeni security forces crowded outside the home of Nasser al-Anbouri, the commander of the Special Security Forces, near a military base in Aden, where they hoped to receive their salaries, said Ramzi al-Hassani, the commander\u2019s office manager. The bomber was dressed in a police uniform and pretended to be disabled, infiltrating the crowd before detonating his explosive, Mr. Hassani said. The blast killed 48 people and wounded 84, according to Abdul-Nasser al-Wali, of the Yemeni Health Ministry. The bombing occurred a little more than a week after a suicide bombing near the same base. That attack, on Dec. 10, targeted a gathering of soldiers, killing 57. The Islamic State also claimed that attack.", "keyword": "Aden;Yemen;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Terrorism;Military Bases;Bombs"}
{"id": "ny0216900", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2010/04/06", "title": "Woods Denies Using Performance-Enhancing Drugs", "abstract": "AUGUSTA, Ga. \u2014 Tiger Woods got the tough part of this Masters week out of the way Monday, getting in front of the public in the morning and the news media in the afternoon. After engaging fans who came out for his practice round, Woods took aim at winning over a national television audience by taking on tough questions \u2014 about his personal life, his behavior and treatment he received from a Canadian doctor \u2014 without rancor. In a performance that was at turns sober, earnest and vulnerable, Woods, 34, took another step in the atonement for a string of extramarital affairs that erupted into a scandal that cost him millions of endorsement dollars while shattering the illusion of an idyllic Woods family life. After a morning that began with a cool reaction by fans at the first tee and ended with a warm ovation at the 18th green just after noon, Woods said he was overwhelmed by the reception given him by galleries at Augusta National Golf Club. Woods looked and sounded like the fresh young golfer who took Augusta by storm in 1997 by winning his first Masters \u2014 and the first of his 14 major championships \u2014 by 12 strokes. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what to expect with regards to the reception, and I\u2019ll tell you what, the galleries couldn\u2019t have been nicer,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, it was just incredible. The encouragement I got, it was just \u2014 it blew me away, to be honest with you, it really did.\u201d With more than 200 international print and television journalists arrayed in front of him at the Augusta National media center at 2 p.m., Woods was measured and direct. He offered answers about dark revelations concerning his personal life that began in the early hours of Nov. 27, when he crashed his car into a neighbor\u2019s tree outside his home in the Orlando, Fla., subdivision of Isleworth. Woods said he did not address the public or speak to the police in the days and weeks after his car accident on the advice of his lawyer. He also denied using performance-enhancing drugs, including human growth hormone, in connection with treatment by the Canadian sports medicine specialist Anthony Galea as part of rehabilitation from his 2008 knee surgery. Galea is under federal investigation into whether he distributed performance-enhancing drugs to several athletes. Woods said Galea visited him at home four times. He said that his agent, Mark Steinberg, had been contacted by federal authorities but that they had not asked to speak with Woods. \u201cHe never gave me H.G.H. or any P.E.D.\u2019s,\u201d Woods said of Galea. \u201cI have never taken any of those. I\u2019ve never taken any illegal drugs in my life.\u201d When pressed later about why he had selected Galea to treat him when many other doctors offer the same blood-spinning therapy, Woods replied: \u201cHe\u2019s worked with so many athletes. And there\u2019s a certain comfort level to that when a person has worked with athletes.\u201d Woods did acknowledge taking the prescription painkiller Vicodin for a knee injury and an Achilles\u2019 tendon injury, and the sleeping medication Ambien, around the time his father, Earl, died in 2006. Until now, Woods\u2019s only attempts to address any issues arising in the last five months have been statements on his Web site, in which he admitted infidelity; his apology read in front of cameras Feb. 19, in which he did not answer questions; and two five-minute interviews with ESPN and the Golf Channel on March 21. During the Feb. 19 apology, Woods gave the impression to many that his return to the game was not imminent and might not come this year. He insisted that in that moment, he meant just what he said. And in one of his more animated moments in a day that had included many, Woods started describing what it was that changed his mind, what made him think about why he needed to get back in the arena sooner rather than later. As he did so, he began to smile. \u201cI just had barely started practicing two days prior to that,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the first time I hit balls. And then I started hitting more balls, and more balls, and more balls, and I started getting the itch again to start playing again.\u201d Then, referring to his swing coach, Hank Haney, he said: \u201cHank came down and we started working again, and that felt great. It felt like old times. So much has transpired, it felt like old times to have Hank out there working on my game and for hours and hours and hours on end, and that\u2019s when I made the decision to come back and play.\u201d Woods never seems happier than when he is competing. And after he said that on Monday, it was clear that any trepidation he might have had about coming back had evaporated by the time he was wrapping up his news conference, right about the time he was telling the man who prepares his official Web site that he was \u201cgoing to go out there and try to win this thing.\u201d Could Woods be readying one of those sublime golf moments, when he finds a way to snap everything into critical focus and mow down the field? \u201cIt feels fun again,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know, that\u2019s something that\u2019s been missing. Have I been winning, have I been competing, have I been doing well? Yeah, I have. I\u2019ve won numerous times the last few years, but I wasn\u2019t having anywhere near the amount of fun. \u201cWhy? Because look at what I was engaged in. When you live a life where you\u2019re lying all the time, life is not fun. And that\u2019s where I was. Now that\u2019s been stripped all away and here I am. And it feels fun again.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Masters Golf Tournament;Augusta National Golf Club;Woods Tiger;Galea Anthony;Woods Elin"}
{"id": "ny0292941", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/06/29", "title": "Review: \u2018Chaos Monkeys\u2019 Is a Guide to the Spirit of Silicon Valley", "abstract": "There is plenty not to like in Antonio Garc\u00eda Martinez\u2019s Silicon Valley tell-all, \u201cChaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley\u201d (Harper). An author whose biography boasts that he \u201clives on a 40-foot sailboat on the San Francisco Bay\u201d is not well positioned to lampoon the social mores of the West Coast tech culture. The book\u2019s dedication \u201cto all my enemies\u201d who made the oeuvre possible confirms the impression that the blizzard of score-settling that follows is less than balanced. The aphorisms are sometimes lazy, the facts can be sloppy, and the studied cool \u2013 all the while insisting that \u201cI am the uncoolest person you will ever meet\u201d \u2013 can be grating. I also could definitely have done without learning about Mr. Garc\u00eda\u2019s weakness for \u201cstrenuous fornication\u201d and drunken romps in the Facebook broom closet. And yet, somehow, \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d manages to be an irresistible and indispensable 360-degree guide to the new technology establishment. Hiding underneath the braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses lies the beating heart of a formidable teacher. \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d is likely to attract headlines and interest because of the prominent names and institutions mercilessly described. This is unfortunate. Mr. Garc\u00eda may apologize for his pedagogical asides, but these actually form the true core of what is a remarkably learned book. He schools us in three domains worthy of close study. The first half of \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d takes us inside the world of venture capital. After leaving \u2013 and litigating with \u2013 one early-stage tech company to start another, Mr. Garc\u00eda sells out to Twitter, only to immediately abandon his co-founders for Facebook. Along the way, we meet the lawyers, angel investors, venture firms and associated institutions \u2013 notably the Y Combinator, which plays an outsize role in securing financing from the most prestigious investors \u2013 that drive this ecosystem. The second half of \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d takes place at Facebook, and it concerns the handful of dominant companies that have emerged from this start-up culture. These companies (in addition to Facebook, notably Google and Amazon), whose market values start at more than $300 billion, are approaching (or in the case of Apple and Microsoft, managing) middle age. In addition to contrasting their collective ethos with that of the start-up world, \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d touches on the also-rans like Twitter who failed to break into this rarefied plane. Beyond the author\u2019s personal story, what connects the two distinct halves of the book is his area of actual domain expertise: advertising. Mr. Garc\u00eda was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley before joining Goldman Sachs to model prices for credit derivatives. He moved to Silicon Valley to perform the same magic in valuing the attention of internet users. And it is the explosion of digital advertising that has fed the emergence of the most recent crop of internet giants. In the course of describing his path from ad-tech start-ups to ad-targeting product manager at Facebook, Mr. Garc\u00eda provides fascinating insights into the nature of the online and offline advertising worlds \u2013 both regarding what has changed and what has stayed stubbornly the same. Two aspects in these central lessons make \u201c Chaos Monkeys \u201d a particularly compelling read, despite its faults. First, Mr. Garc\u00eda is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense. Well before the investor Peter Thiel was revealed as the secret backer of the lawsuit that put Gawker into bankruptcy, Mr. Garc\u00eda was writing that \u201cthe tech start-up scene, for all its pretensions of transparency, principled innovation, and a counterculture renouncement of pressed shirts and staid social convention, is actually a surprisingly reactionary crowd.\u201d Even where Mr. Garc\u00eda completely mangles the facts \u2013 as he does for instance in describing the mechanics of the Facebook initial public offering \u2013 he manages to draw multiple fresh insights that somehow feel directionally correct. And in contrast to the self-serving verdicts rendered on his allies and enemies, his broader conclusions seem well balanced. The world he inhabited, Mr. Garc\u00eda reflects, \u201cis no worse than traditional industry and politics, but certainly no better either.\u201d Which brings us to the second reason \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d is a must-read. It matters. Mr. Garc\u00eda is providing tools to honestly deconstruct a corner of the world that has amassed breathtaking cultural, economic and political influence, and not always for the good. Fully 60 percent of Harvard Business School graduates now go to work at companies with fewer than 500 employees. A fuller conversation is required before we rejoice that the invidious hegemony of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company and hedge funds as the resting place for our best and brightest graduates has been replaced with early-stage tech companies. At the least, readers of \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d will think twice before taking at face value tech leaders\u2019 high-minded arguments for refusing to assist our national security apparatus in fighting terrorist threats. Even in the area of advertising, important social and public policy questions are implicated. The greatest danger of \u201cChaos Monkeys\u201d is that it could suffer the same fate as many equally prescient cautionary tales: It is appreciated less as trenchant social criticism and more as a how-to manual. Such is the irresistible pull of Silicon Valley that I fear the manuscript will be pored over mainly for clues to getting a job at Facebook or having a venture selected by the Y Combinator. If that is the case, we all may want to join Mr. Garc\u00eda on his boat and just sail away.", "keyword": "Chaos Monkeys;Antonio Garc\u00eda Martinez;Books;Silicon Valley;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Venture capital;Facebook"}
{"id": "ny0253312", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2011/10/26", "title": "Behind the Power Grid, Humans With High-Stakes Jobs", "abstract": "QUICK! You are on duty in a secret control room in a nondescript, windowless building. The sign out front is so small that people driving by cannot read it, and it may give no clue what goes on inside, anyway. But your task is crucial: you are matching the ever-changing power needs of tens of millions of electricity customers with supply coming from hundreds of electricity generators, deciding which units will run and which ones will be idle, and making quick adjustments for the generators you can\u2019t schedule, like the wind machines and solar panels. Hardly anybody will ever know you are here, unless you mess up. All is going smoothly until you get a message from a neighboring electrical entity requesting emergency assistance. A quick glance at your computer screen tells you that you have sufficient spare capacity to help. Should you: A. Call your contracts department and ask what price you will charge? B. Go ahead and raise the generation in your area by the required amount? C. Review the computer system used by all the generators to see what transmission is available? D. Set up an emergency schedule with your neighbor? If you answered D, and you also gave the correct answers to several much more complicated questions , you are on your way to a job in an increasingly tough and essential field: managing the North American power grid. \u201cThe bar is being raised,\u201d said Lourdes Estrada-Salinero, the director of operations compliance and control at the California Independent System Operator, one of the more than 100 \u201cbalancing authorities\u201d that are responsible for coordinating supply with demand in some portion of the North American grid. About 40 percent of all the energy used in the United States \u2014 all the oil, gas and coal , uranium, wind and falling water \u2014 is turned into electricity before it is consumed, and that fraction seems destined to rise, as more air-conditioners, electric cars and yet-to-be invented hand-held gizmos are added to customers\u2019 inventory. But the tolerance for failure is getting lower, and the power mix is getting more complicated. States, led by California, are demanding that an increasing fraction of the electricity come from sources that can turn themselves on or off with very little warning, as the weather changes and the wind and sunlight vary. Utility companies used to hire and train their own people to operate their systems. As the grid became more interconnected, some utilities organized themselves into power pools, with one control room handling the supply for multiple utilities. The earliest was the entity now known as PJM, which used to stand for Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland but now stretches into all or part of Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois and scattered parts of other states. New York had a power pool and so did the six New England states. The job got exponentially more complicated when the federal government pressed the pools to convert into power markets, where the utilities would sell off their generating stations and third parties would be allowed to build generators. The hour-by-hour decisions about who would generate to serve what load were made mostly by an auction process and turned the pools into \u201cindependent system operators.\u201d The human operator\u2019s job, though, was mostly still unregulated until August 2003, when a series of errors in a control room in Carmel, Ind., at the Midwest Independent System Operator, created the biggest blackout in history. (For future reference, when disabling vital computer systems to install upgrades, kindly do not neglect to warn the system operators and do not leave the systems shut off when you go to lunch .) The lights went out as far away as New York. After that blackout, a utility that operates in the central United States hired Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor and \u201chuman factors\u201d specialist at the University of Southern California, to review operations in some of its control centers. (Dr. Meshkati asked that the utility not be named because it did not make the report public.) The report stressed that operators needed \u201ctotal systems comprehension\u201d to understand what was happening on the grid. But sometimes the job is set up in a way that will overload the operator, he found. And the operations centers can have an \u201cunspoken \u2018macho\u2019 culture\u201d in which operators think that asking for help will jeopardize their job performance rating, he discovered. To improve operations in the control centers and reduce the frequency of blackouts, Congress gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to enforce detailed new rules. But that government agency lacked the expertise to write them; for that, it turned to a voluntary organization, now called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation , which it designated as a standards-setting and enforcement agency. It is still setting rules, almost a decade after the blackout, and it is requiring licenses for people who hold various jobs in the control centers. Holding such a certification is a key part of the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for a class of workers who are neither white-collar nor blue-collar. They might be called plastic collar, the people whose necks may or may not be girded in a necktie, but are sure to have a lanyard for an ID card that incorporates a computer chip that will get them into the windowless, label-less control rooms. They sit through an exam of approximately three hours, sometimes after sessions on online schools that have sprung up to help applicants cram. They end up with a certificate to frame on the wall. There are about 6,000 such professionals, although some are management employees and do not work regular shifts. And some staff duplicate control rooms, located miles from the main control room, ready to take over if there is a fire or mechanical failure, or if the villains decipher the sign out front. They get 200 hours of training every three years, and their continuing education resembles what the airlines give their pilots: extended sessions in full-scale simulators, with a computer playing the role of real hardware so the trainers can set up dire problems and see if the trainees can diagnose the situation and respond fast enough to prevent catastrophe. The increased training did not come without difficulty. Daniel E. Frank, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in utility issues, said, \u201cIt takes time to do it and nobody has a lot of time. The utility industry is no different from anybody else.\u201d \u201cAny time you have to go in to training means somebody is away from the actual control room operations,\u201d he said. Some centers maintain six teams to keep operations going around the clock; at any given time, one team is in training. On the job, the operators typically work four 12-hour days a week, alternating between days and nights. And they are paid well. With overtime, they commonly earn six-figure salaries, and they work in rural, low-cost areas. Recruiting is a challenge, though. Grid entities look for candidates with some background in engineering, but they also need certain personality traits, like the ability to work collaboratively but not to debate endlessly. People with military backgrounds are favored, because they often have appropriate organizational and technical skills. One aspect that makes the job complicated is that on the grid these days, there is a market not just for electricity, but also for \u201cancillary services.\u201d These include the ability to ramp up and down quickly, which will be required as the wind and sun vary in intensity; the ability to add or subtract very large amounts of power in tiny fractions of a second, to keep the alternating current system working as closely as possible to 60 alternations per second; the ability to step in to control voltage; the ability to stand by for hours or days at a time, poised to start up if something goes wrong; and the ability, if everything goes wrong, to begin generating with no outside power to help. Operations are also governed by rules about how much air pollution a generating station is allowed to emit; how much it is permitted to raise the temperature of the lake or river it uses for cooling water; and how much power must be generated within a geographic area, regardless of capacity elsewhere, to ensure reliability. Some of that is built into computer programming, and some of it is drilled into the operators\u2019 heads. John T. McCain is a former captain in the Marines who recently completed his training at the California I.S.O. as a \u201creal-time scheduler,\u201d coordinating what generation will run from hour to hour. \u201cIt reminds me of training that I\u2019ve had in the military,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s fast-paced, and there\u2019s a lot to learn.\u201d In some respects, it is more difficult than military training, he said. His boss, Stephen Berberich, the president and chief executive of the I.S.O., said, \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting mix between physics and policy and economics.\u201d", "keyword": "Labor and Jobs;Electric Light and Power;Hiring and Promotion;Federal Energy Regulatory Commission"}
{"id": "ny0077552", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/05/01", "title": "Germany: Officials Say They Foiled Plot for Attack on Professional Cycling Race", "abstract": "German authorities said Thursday that they had foiled what they believed might have been an imminent attack on a professional cycling race planned for Friday. The authorities seized a cache of weapons, including a pipe bomb, and chemicals that can be used to make explosives when they raided a home outside Frankfurt. They detained a 35-year-old Turkish-German man and his 34-year-old Turkish wife in Oberursel. The couple, whose names were not released in line with Germany privacy rules, had been under surveillance. Officials were worried that the couple might have been planning an attack during the one-day Eschborn-to-Frankfurt race on Friday. The police said the race would be canceled in case the couple had accomplices or they had placed as-yet undetected explosive devices along the route. \u201cAccording to our current information, we have prevented an attack,\u201d said Stefan Mueller, the chief of police for Hesse State. Mr. Mueller declined to say whether officials believed that known extremist groups were involved.", "keyword": "Germany;Bombs;Frankfurt"}
{"id": "ny0275219", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/02/17", "title": "C. J., a German Shorthaired Pointer, Wins Best in Show at Westminster", "abstract": "As each of the seven competitors for best in show at the 140th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on Tuesday approached Richard Meen, the judge, he told them, \u201cRelax.\u201d But you wonder if any one of the four-legged champions, let alone their handlers, could heed the advice, even if they were aware that his non-canine work is psychiatry. Relaxation would seem to be the last thing on the mind of the last 14 dogs and humans standing after two days of competition. Whatever anxiety existed dissipated quickly. Meen is not one of those judges who drags out his decision as if he were telling a mystery story. He eyed each of the dogs, held out both his hands to frame their expressions, had them take a last lap around the green-carpeted ring at Madison Square Garden and headed straight to the judge\u2019s table to write down his decision: He chose C. J., a 3-year-old male German shorthaired pointer. C. J. appeared to have grasped Meen\u2019s advice to relax. When he won, he was impassive, looking out at the crowd as if he might have anticipated the outcome. Or maybe his serious demeanor was another way to show his shock. His handler, Valerie Nunes-Atkinson, was more emotional, kissing Meen and rival handlers, then dropping to her knees to hug and kiss C. J. \u201cI just couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d she said afterward. \u201cFor us in the sport, this is the pinnacle. This is what we strive for, what we shed tears over. The best dogs come here. This is the show to win.\u201d The Sound and the Furry Barking is rarely encouraged in or asked of well-mannered pooches, but The Times recently took portraits and recorded the barks of various show dogs. Try to match the barks with the portrait. Nunes-Atkinson said she was thrilled to have won the sporting group earlier in the night and was apparently aware that odds in Las Vegas were against C. J., whom she calls her \u201cheart dog.\u201d She was not intimidated that other dogs were favored over hers. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t go wrong with any of them,\u201d Nunes-Atkinson said. \u201cBut I believe in my dog 100 percent. He\u2019s a great German shorthaired pointer.\u201d Earlier in the evening, after winning C. J.\u2019s group, she said, \u201cHe loves it here. He was born this way. At 6 weeks, he walked across the living room floor and we said, \u2018Oh, my.\u2019 He has that sparkle that makes you stop and look at him.\u201d She added: \u201cWe expected great things from him from the start.\u201d Every victory confirmed that he was moving into rarefied territory. His bloodline is strong, most notably his grandmother, Carlee, who won best in show in 2005. Nunes-Atkinson herself started young, winning Westminster\u2019s award for best junior showmanship when she was 15. Winning Westminster as an adult was \u201cexactly as I expected it would feel when I was 10.\u201d C. J. defeated Rumor, a German shepherd who entered the show as the top purebred dog last year; Lucy, a borzoi, who was the best dog in all breeds in Japan last year; Annabelle, a bulldog who was one of the crowd\u2019s favorites; Bogey, a smiling Samoyed; Panda, a shih tzu; and Charlie, a Skye terrier who lost Best in Show last year to Miss P, a beagle. Throughout the news conference, liver-and-white C. J. rarely deviated from his serene, unaffected demeanor. He mostly stared at Nunes-Atkinson; occasionally pursued a treat, and appeared not to pay attention to the news media. \u201cIn the ring, it\u2019s all serious with him,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he\u2019s silly at home, playing with his best friend, Ramona, a whippet. He\u2019s a typical dog. He gets dirty. He always needs something in his mouth.\u201d Meen, who breeds Borzois, said that C. J. passed his ultimate test. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s very important that every dog take me back into the past to what they were bred to do,\u201d Meen said. \u201cThey were bred to point in the field, and they have to move well. He never stopped looking, focused in front of him, and he floated around the ring.\u201d Meen said his advice to relax was simply to remind the handlers to take a breath after the intensity of the competition. He laughed when he was asked if he mixed his vocation and avocation to treat dogs. \u201cDogs take care of themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s humans that are a mess.\u201d Losing, of course, is melancholy for owners and handlers (although the dogs might not notice). Gene Zaphiris, who owns Charlie, said before the final decision that competing in Westminster\u2019s best in show for the second year in a row was a \u201csweeter\u201d experience. Win or lose, Charlie was to retire. But it will be C. J., not Charlie, who is off on the winner\u2019s media tour on Wednesday, heading to \u201cGood Morning America,\u201d the Empire State Building and Sardi\u2019s. Such are the spoils of being top dog. NOTES Uno, widely considered the most popular and best-known best-in-show winner, was supposed to appear Monday night on the Westminster show on CNBC. But he was barred from the guest shot by Westminster officials after it was determined that he had not been registered to be at the show or inside Madison Square Garden (as if he were a former star player denied credentials to the stadium). When security was told that Uno, 10, was in a room used by USA Network (a part of NBC Universal, as is CNBC), an investigation began, said Gail Miller Bisher, the Westminster spokeswoman. \u201cHaving no prior approval to attend nor any documentation, he was requested to leave the premises,\u201d she said. Uno lives on a ranch in Austin and was driven to Manhattan by the ranch manager. Pierre Moossa, the producer of the Westminster broadcasts, called the issue a \u201cmisunderstanding.\u201d", "keyword": "Westminster Dog Show;Dog;Richard Meen"}
{"id": "ny0059242", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2014/08/28", "title": "Food Safety Is Crucial in China Deal for Baby Milk", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 Six years ago, when tainted infant formula killed six babies in China and sickened 300,000, one of the biggest foreign investors in the sector was caught by surprise. The investor, the Fonterra Cooperative Group of New Zealand, one of the world\u2019s largest dairy companies, had put millions of dollars into a partnership with the Sanlu Group, a Chinese maker of infant formula that was one of several found to have mixed an industrial chemical into milk powder to artificially raise protein readings. Sanlu was declared bankrupt , and four of its executives were imprisoned. Fonterra was forced to write down the entirety of its investment of 200 million New Zealand dollars, or about $167 million at current exchange rates, in the Chinese venture. Yet on Wednesday, Fonterra became the latest foreign company to make a new bet that it could turn a profit by bringing safer food to China. The company said it would spend more than $500 million in a deal with the Beingmate Baby and Child Food Company, a Chinese manufacturer of infant formula. A day earlier, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, an American private equity giant, announced an investment of about $400 million in China\u2019s largest chicken breeder, Fujian Sunner Development, in a deal intended to improve food safety and quality. \u201cChina is a completely different environment now; Beingmate is a completely different partner,\u201d Theo Spierings, the chief executive of Fonterra, said on Wednesday in response to questions from reporters about the Sanlu episode, according to Reuters . \u201cWe are very focused on learning from the past and moving on to the future.\u201d Food safety scandals occur with disturbing frequency in China. This week alone, according to reports in the state-run news media: The authorities seized more than 30,000 tons of chicken feet, a common menu item in China, that had been contaminated by a hydrogen peroxide cleaning agent; and in Zhejiang Province, 17 people were in court on accusations of selling 38 tons of dog meat \u2014 consumed in parts of the country \u2014 that had been poisoned when the animals were slaughtered with cyanide or overdoses of anesthetics. The challenge confronting big foreign food companies in China is how to ensure that their standards are enforced by all workers at all stages of the food supply chain. Ignorance can be a more common problem than outright deception, experts say. \u201cMost of the time it\u2019s not that something is being hidden, it\u2019s more that the people are not aware of the standards that Western companies expect,\u201d said S\u00e9bastien Breteau, the chief executive of AsiaInspection. The company conducts spot checks on all kinds of factories in China on behalf of the companies they supply, and among food factories, the failure rate for inspections so far this year has been more than 50 percent. \u201cWhat I\u2019ve seen,\u201d Mr. Breteau said, \u201cwhen you sit down in a factory and you explain what matters for a client, if you train them over more demanding standards in terms of manufacturing, then they catch up with it very quickly.\u201d Although food companies with foreign backing are often financially stronger and are perceived as having higher quality and safety standards, some prominent lapses in China have shown that such companies can still run into problems. Fonterra\u2019s investment in Sanlu was an early example. Last week, the American food producer H. J. Heinz recalled several batches of baby cereal products after they were discovered to contain high levels of lead. And last month, the OSI Group, an American-owned supplier for McDonald\u2019s, KFC and other fast-food chains, became the subject of an investigation by the police and food safety officials in Shanghai. A local television station had broadcast a program accusing OSI employees of doctoring labels to extend expiration dates on chicken and beef products and showed footage seemingly of workers scooping up meat from the floor and putting it back on conveyor belts for processing. For OSI, which is based in Aurora, Ill., and had been known for its industry-leading operations and quality control, the episode was jarring. In response to food safety concerns in China, it had invested hundreds of millions of dollars building a chicken-meat supply chain in the country that included a feed mill, hatcheries and slaughtering operations. In the United States, it focuses on processing meat that is purchased from other suppliers. In the Fonterra deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals and calls for it to take a 20 percent stake in Beingmate, the two companies will import infant formula ingredients from Fonterra\u2019s dairies and manufacturing sites in New Zealand, Australia and Europe for sale in China. \u201cExtensive due diligence has taken place from both sides,\u201d said Mr. Spierings of Fonterra, \u201cand we have made arrangements on governance very clear.\u201d Experts say that China\u2019s food industry tends to be highly competitive and to have low profit margins, meaning that businesses can be tempted to skip steps to save money, in some cases turning a blind eye to possible dangers to consumers. \u201cProducing food as a business is not the same as producing T-shirts,\u201d said Peter Karim Ben Embarek, a food safety scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva who was previously based in China. \u201cIf you cut corners making T-shirts, some customers might be upset, but if you do it with chickens, you might end up killing people.\u201d He added: \u201cYou have a bit of a Wild West situation where the public oversight is still lacking in terms of on-the-ground implementation.\u201d Gao Guan, the deputy secretary of the China Meat Association, said one problem is that China does not have enough food inspectors. \u201cThe level of regulation and enforcement is too low,\u201d Mr. Gao said. He cited recurring problems at meat processors, which can be reckless in their pursuit of profit. \u201cIf you rely on the individual processors, then you will never be able to enforce safety standards, because everybody is just trying to make fast money.\u201d", "keyword": "Food Safety;Fonterra Co-operative Group;Sanlu Group;Beingmate Baby and Child Food Company;China;Milk;New Zealand"}
{"id": "ny0152010", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/08/31", "title": "Stocks Waffle, Then Dip on Spending News", "abstract": "The major stock indexes zigzagged through the week but ultimately ended lower. On Friday, investors sold off stocks after a government report indicated that personal incomes had fallen and consumer spending had slumped in July. A weak earnings report from Dell dragged down the technology sector. For the week, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 84.51 points, or 0.7 percent, to close at 11,543.55. The Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index fell 9.37 points, or 0.7 percent, to close at 1,282.83. The Nasdaq composite index dropped 47.19 points, or nearly 2 percent, to close at 2,367.52. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.81 percent from 3.87 percent the previous week. For the month, however, stocks were in positive territory. The Dow gained 1.46 percent in August, the S.& P. 500 was 1.22 percent higher, and the Nasdaq was up 1.8 percent. PRADNYA JOSHI", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Dow Jones Stock Average;Nasdaq Composite Index"}
{"id": "ny0241819", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/03/18", "title": "Like the Devils, the Nets Are Surging", "abstract": "NEWARK \u2014 The Nets use a locker room across the hall from a much bigger room that the Devils use to dress for their games at Prudential Center. But that does not mean the Nets have been inspired by \u2014 or even paid any attention to \u2014 the Devils\u2019 amazing surge. \u201cI would like to get out and see them play before the season is over,\u201d Coach Avery Johnson said with a smile before Thursday\u2019s game against the Chicago Bulls . What the Nets say they have done recently, and with some success, is to sweat the details and take on their opponents one at a time \u2014 much like the Devils. An 84-73 loss Thursday was a tough setback, but the Nets are actually playing games that count these days. Really. A year ago, the Nets were 7-61, headed to a record of 12-70. Although they have twice as many losses as victories, the Nets (22-44) lurched into playoff contention \u2014 or maybe just staved off elimination \u2014 with their just-broken five-game winning streak, their longest in three years. \u201cWe\u2019re playing with a lot of intensity, defensively and offensively, we\u2019re on the same page and we\u2019re unselfish,\u201d guard Anthony Morrow said. \u201cOur goal is still to make the playoffs, like it was at the beginning of the season,\u201d he added. \u201cHopefully, we can keep this up, do what we\u2019ve been doing.\u201d The loss to the Bulls dropped them six games behind the Indiana Pacers (29-39), who are clinging to eighth place in the Eastern Conference, a half game ahead of the Charlotte Bobcats. The Nets have 16 regular-season games to make up the difference. The Bulls (49-18) won their eighth straight game because they put together a late 7-point spurt against the Nets, who have not given up on the notion of playing in the postseason. At least the idea does not sound as outrageous as it did as recently as Feb. 28, when the Nets lost their sixth straight. \u201cIf we didn\u2019t have a chance at the playoffs, I\u2019d be on vacation,\u201d guard Sasha Vucacic said. \u201cWe are in a hard position. It doesn\u2019t depend on us as much as it does on other teams to make the playoffs. But you can build momentum.\u201d Thursday\u2019s loss was not that demoralizing. The Nets held the Bulls to 84 points on 40 percent shooting from the field, but lost because they made only 35 percent of their shots. Nets guard Jordan Farmar said, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to shoot like this every game, hopefully.\u201d A Nets game at Prudential Center has an odd feel, as if the place has been borrowed either by the Nets or their opponents. When the Bulls\u2019 Derrick Rose took two free throws in the first half Thursday, a boisterous \u201cM.V.P.\u201d chant erupted. The seats in the arena were filled with a substantial number of fans wearing Bulls jerseys. It was no surprise for the Nets, who rank 28th among 30 N.B.A. teams in average home attendance. \u201cRight now, all we can continue to do is try to win our games, and at the end of the day, if we make it, we make it,\u201d Billy King, the Nets\u2019 general manager, said before the game. \u201cAs big as this game is tonight, if we win it, tomorrow\u2019s game is bigger. I just like how there\u2019s been a sense of confidence and a belief in each other\u2019s abilities.\u201d Had the Nets played only 32 or 33 games so far, Johnson said, maybe he would talk to his players about the playoffs being attainable. Instead, he said that he has tried to get them to focus on the next game. The approach has worked, Johnson said. Johnson sounded like Jacques Lemaire, the Devils\u2019 interim coach. Johnson, 45, is 20 years younger than Lemaire and is completing his fourth season as an N.B.A. coach. But he, like Lemaire, knows not to worry about who uses the arena after April 11. \u201cRight now, I\u2019m not trying to add any more pressure on the team,\u201d Johnson said.", "keyword": "Basketball;New Jersey Nets;Chicago Bulls;Johnson Avery"}
{"id": "ny0259363", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/01/13", "title": "Deeper Presidential Challenge for Obama - News Analysis", "abstract": "TUCSON \u2014 When President Obama took the stage here Wednesday to address a community \u2014 and a nation \u2014 traumatized by Saturday\u2019s killings, it invited comparisons to President George W. Bush\u2019s speech to the nation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the memorial service President Bill Clinton led after the bombing of a federal office building killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. But Mr. Obama\u2019s appearance presented a deeper challenge, reflecting the tenor of his times. Unlike those tragedies \u2014 which, at least initially, united a mournful country and quieted partisan divisions \u2014 this one has, in the days since the killings, had the opposite effect, inflaming the divide. It was a political reality Mr. Obama seemed to recognize the moment he took the stage. And it was one he seemed determine to address, with language that recalled a central part of Mr. Obama\u2019s appeal as a presidential candidate in 2008. He called for an end to partisan recriminations, and a unity that has seemed increasingly elusive as each day has brought more harsh condemnations from the left and the right, starting here in Arizona but rippling across the nation. \u201cWhat we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,\u201d he said. \u201cThat we cannot do. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.\u201d While some on the left sought to link the killing to the Tea Party movement or to heated speech from prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin, Mr. Obama pointedly noted that there was no way to know why the gunman opened fire, killing 6 people and injuring 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. \u201cFor the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,\u201d he said. \u201cNone of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man\u2019s mind.\u201d On a day when Ms. Palin posted a video accusing commentators of committing \u201cblood libel\u201d by suggesting her commentary had enabled the crime, Mr. Obama \u2014 speaking at times like a political leader, at times like a preacher \u2014 urged his audience and the nation to avoid recriminations, to \u201chonor the fallen\u201d by moving forward and by \u201cmaking sure we align our values with our actions.\u201d \u201cAt a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it\u2019s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds,\u201d Mr. Obama said. When it comes to being emotive, Mr. Obama may never match Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush. His voice sometimes wavered, but he is not the kind of leader whose eyes tear up at public events. Yet these are tougher times and he was, here and across the country, speaking to a tougher audience. Even as it began, some conservative commentators were posting comments criticizing the memorial service for being overly partisan and more like a pep rally, and there were some boos in the hall when Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, spoke. Those reactions would have been hard to imagine, say, in the days after the Oklahoma City bombing. \u201cLast time there was uniform revulsion,\u201d said Don Baer, who was the chief speechwriter in the White House for Mr. Clinton in 1995 and helped write Mr. Clinton\u2019s speech. \u201cThis time, in the interest of condemning vitriol, all sides have become vitriolic. In some ways the country is more in need of a unifying voice that says, \u2018Enough already.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Baer said that made the demands on Mr. Obama different than those on Mr. Clinton, and made Mr. Obama\u2019s return to the language of his campaign \u2014 the call for an end to partisan rancor \u2014 so logical. \u201cThe best message for President Obama,\u201d Mr. Baer said, \u201cis the one that brought him to national attention from the start: That there is not a red America or a blue America but a United States of America.\u201d The speeches Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton gave were seen as turning points in their presidencies. Wednesday night\u2019s event seemed less about Mr. Obama\u2019s presidency and more about the state of this country. His calls during the campaign for an end to brutal partisanship appeared to carry little weight these past two years in Washington. There is no way to know if his similar call on Wednesday, under tragic circumstances, will have more traction.", "keyword": "Tucson Shooting (2011);Obama Barack;Speeches and Statements;Tucson (Ariz);United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0180878", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2007/08/13", "title": "Jones Appears and Is Untouched", "abstract": "ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 12 (AP) \u2014 Pacman Jones, the Tennessee Titans \u2019 suspended cornerback, ended up surrounded by the police Sunday night. The officers were actors trying to help Jones, who had been \u201cattacked.\u201d Not a finger was laid on Jones on-camera at the Total Nonstop Action Wrestling event, but several were awfully close. A wrestler rushed the stage after jawing with Jones, but four actors with police clothing tackled him just out of reach. Minutes later, the studio television screens flashed to Jones backstage, lying on the ground after supposedly being attacked. Jones, the Titans and T.N.A. reached an agreement Friday allowing him to perform \u2014 under extensive stipulation. He could not touch or be touched, grapple, shove, throw or have anything thrown at him. Jones has been suspended from the N.F.L. for the 2007 season. He has been arrested six times.", "keyword": "Football;Jones Pacman;Tennessee Titans;National Football League"}
{"id": "ny0179790", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2007/08/26", "title": "Broncos Threesome Stepped Into the Ring", "abstract": "Denver Broncos safeties John Lynch and Hamza Abdullah are accustomed to hitting guys hard. They have a newfound respect for boxers after taking up the sweet science in the off-season, with receiver-returner Quincy Morgan. Lynch decided to add six weeks of boxing to his winter workout regimen to refresh his mind and body as he prepared for his 15th season in the N.F.L. Abdullah and Morgan followed suit in the summer, and all three say it is something that will be a permanent part of his strength and conditioning program. \u201cI don\u2019t take breaks \u2014 I don\u2019t feel like you can \u2014 but you need things to keep training fresh,\u201d said Lynch, who did not want to do only his usual running drills in the off-season. \u201cIt gets old, it gets tired. And I thought it was something that could keep it fresh and prove beneficial \u2014 the hand placement, the quickness, things that we use blitzing \u2014 and it just really got me in good condition. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be in tremendous condition, particularly at this altitude.\u201d Lynch said the boxing helped his footwork and his handwork, \u201cand one thing it certainly made me do is respect those guys. Going three-minute rounds, I wasn\u2019t even getting hit. We were just punching the bags and stuff. My gosh, those guys are impressive.\u201d Abdullah said boxing improved his strength and stamina. \u201cI have a newfound respect for boxers and the training that they go through,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, you don\u2019t realize how long three minutes is until your trainer has you punching for three rounds straight, or even jump-roping for three minutes straight.\u201d While Lynch and Abdullah were introduced to boxing at different gymnasiums in the Denver area, Morgan has grown up around boxing in Texas. But this was the first off-season that he trained with his uncle, John Morgan, a former youth champion, at Houston\u2019s Savannah Boxing Club, where the former heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield and the lightweight champ Juan D\u00edaz also work out. \u201cI did it for conditioning and taking some of the pressures off my body, my knees,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cThe guy I go to, I do 6 to 10 rounds of sparring with hand bags. You get off that, you get out in the ring, you go to 100-punch drills on the heavy bag. Those guys, they work, the boxers.\u201d Morgan said he could tell the difference in training camp because he had better cardiovascular conditioning, and his energy and endurance were noticeably higher. As much as he hesitated to admit it, two-a-days were a relief for Morgan after his time in the ring. \u201cYou can try it, if you\u2019re punching your arms, you get more out of that than running 100\u2019s and \u2018gases\u2019 because you\u2019re constantly swinging and you\u2019re not only swinging but you\u2019re staying low, you\u2019re dodging, you\u2019re moving around the ring and then you\u2019re punching,\u201d Morgan said. He said he was kicking himself for not taking it up sooner. \u201cMy uncle\u2019s boxed his whole life, so I\u2019ve been around it,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cHe always used to take me to the gym when I was younger.\u201d While Lynch plans to keep lacing up the gloves, he does not seem interested in mixed martial-arts fighting like some of his contemporaries, including the San Diego linebacker Shawne Merriman and the Kansas City defensive end Jared Allen. \u201cI was back in San Diego, and Shawne Merriman heard I was doing some boxing and he\u2019s doing some of the Ultimate Fighting stuff, so he invited me out to do that. I said, \u2018Maybe not such a good move with Shawn Merriman out there at 270,\u2019 \u201d said Lynch, who is 50 pounds lighter and 2 inches shorter than Merriman. \u201cI said, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019ll catch you next year.\u2019 But he just wanted to show me what he was doing. A lot of guys are doing things like that.\u201d Like Lynch and Morgan, Abdullah is going with stick with boxing. \u201cI bought a two-year membership,\u201d he said. \u201cI have to keep going.\u201d", "keyword": "Boxing;Football;Denver Broncos;National Football League;Lynch John"}
{"id": "ny0096767", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2015/01/22", "title": "Barcelona Gains Edge on Lionel Messi\u2019s Goal", "abstract": "Barcelona seized control of its Copa del Rey quarterfinal against Atl\u00e9tico Madrid when Lionel Messi followed up his saved penalty shot with a goal for a 1-0 first-leg victory at home. \u25a0 Tottenham used an Andros Townsend penalty kick to gain a slender advantage over a visiting third-tier team, Sheffield United, in the League Cup, taking a 1-0 lead before the second leg of their semifinal next week. (AP) \u25a0 Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso each wasted several chances in a 0-0 draw at the Africa Cup of Nations in Bata, Equatorial Guinea. The Republic of Congo recorded a surprise 1-0 win over Gabon in the day\u2019s other game. (AP)", "keyword": "Soccer;Lionel Messi;Barcelona Soccer Team;Atletico Madrid Soccer Team"}
{"id": "ny0080955", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/02/22", "title": "Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher", "abstract": "For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity. One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun\u2019s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming. But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon\u2019s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests. He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work. The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as \u201cdeliverables\u201d that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress. Though Dr. Soon did not respond to questions about the documents, he has long stated that his corporate funding has not influenced his scientific findings. The documents were obtained by Greenpeace , the environmental group, under the Freedom of Information Act. Greenpeace and an allied group, the Climate Investigations Center , shared them with several news organizations last week. The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization. Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding. Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden. \u201cThe whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,\u201d said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of \u201c Merchants of Doubt ,\u201d a book about such campaigns. \u201cWillie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.\u201d Funding That Climate Researcher Failed to Disclose These documents show that Wei-Hock Soon, a part-time researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., received funding from fossil-fuel interests that he subsequently failed to disclose in a string of scientific papers. Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon\u2019s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing. \u201cWhat it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,\u201d said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change. Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals. \u201cI think that\u2019s inappropriate behavior,\u201d Dr. Alcock said. \u201cThis frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.\u201d Dr. Soon is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, which jointly sponsors the astrophysics center with Harvard. \u201cI am aware of the situation with Willie Soon, and I\u2019m very concerned about it,\u201d W. John Kress , interim under secretary for science at the Smithsonian in Washington, said on Friday. \u201cWe are checking into this ourselves.\u201d Dr. Soon rarely grants interviews to reporters, and he did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls last week; nor did he respond to an interview request conveyed to him by his employer. In past public appearances, he has reacted angrily to questions about his funding sources, but then acknowledged some corporate ties and said that they had not altered his scientific findings. \u201cI write proposals; I let them decide whether to fund me or not,\u201d he said at an event in Madison, Wis., in 2013. \u201cIf they choose to fund me, I\u2019m happy to receive it.\u201d A moment later, he added, \u201cI would never be motivated by money for anything.\u201d The newly disclosed documents, plus additional documents compiled by Greenpeace over the last four years, show that at least $409,000 of Dr. Soon\u2019s funding in the past decade came from Southern Company Services, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, based in Atlanta. Southern is one of the largest utility holding companies in the country, with huge investments in coal-burning power plants. The company has spent heavily over many years to lobby against greenhouse-gas regulations in Washington. More recently, it has spent significant money to research ways to limit emissions. \u201cSouthern Company funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public-policy implications for our business,\u201d said Jeannice M. Hall, a spokeswoman. The company declined to answer detailed questions about its funding of Dr. Soon\u2019s research. Dr. Soon also received at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. (Mr. Koch\u2019s fortune derives partly from oil refining.) However, other companies and industry groups that once supported Dr. Soon, including Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute, appear to have eliminated their grants to him in recent years. As the oil-industry contributions fell, Dr. Soon started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through DonorsTrust , an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that accepts money from donors who wish to remain anonymous, then funnels it to various conservative causes. Image Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, praising scientists like Dr. Soon. Credit CSPAN The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , in Cambridge, Mass., is a joint venture between Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution, housing some 300 scientists from both institutions. Because the Smithsonian is a government agency, Greenpeace was able to request that Dr. Soon\u2019s correspondence and grant agreements be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Though often described on conservative news programs as a \u201cHarvard astrophysicist,\u201d Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary. Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun\u2019s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change. Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change. Gavin A. Schmidt , head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it. \u201cThe science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,\u201d Dr. Schmidt said. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose scientists focus largely on understanding distant stars and galaxies, routinely distances itself from Dr. Soon\u2019s findings. The Smithsonian has also published a statement accepting the scientific consensus on climate change. Dr. Alcock said that, aside from the disclosure issue, he thought it was important to protect Dr. Soon\u2019s academic freedom, even if most of his colleagues disagreed with his findings. Dr. Soon has found a warm welcome among politicians in Washington and state capitals who try to block climate action. United States Senator James M. Inhofe , an Oklahoma Republican who claims that climate change is a global scientific hoax, has repeatedly cited Dr. Soon\u2019s work over the years. In a Senate debate last month, Mr. Inhofe pointed to a poster with photos of scientists questioning the climate-change consensus, including Dr. Soon. \u201cThese are scientists that cannot be challenged,\u201d the senator said. A spokeswoman for the senator said Friday that he was traveling and could not be reached for comment. As of late last week, most of the journals in which Dr. Soon\u2019s work had appeared were not aware of the newly disclosed documents. The Climate Investigations Center is planning to notify them over the coming week. Several journals advised of the situation by The New York Times said they would look into the matter. Robert J. Strangeway, the editor of a journal that published three of Dr. Soon\u2019s papers, said that editors relied on authors to be candid about any conflicts of interest. \u201cWe assume that when people put stuff in a paper, or anywhere else, they\u2019re basically being honest,\u201d said Dr. Strangeway, editor of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. Dr. Oreskes , the Harvard science historian, said that academic institutions and scientific journals had been too lax in recent decades in ferreting out dubious research created to serve a corporate agenda. \u201cI think universities desperately need to look more closely at this issue,\u201d Dr. Oreskes said. She added that Dr. Soon\u2019s papers omitting disclosure of his corporate funding should be retracted by the journals that published them.", "keyword": "Climate Change;Global Warming;Wei-Hock Soon;Conflict of interest;Climate Investigations Center;Greenpeace;Greenhouse gas;Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics;Research;DonorsTrust"}
{"id": "ny0261811", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/06/24", "title": "Drug Companies Win Two Supreme Court Decisions", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court on Thursday handed drug companies two significant victories, one limiting suits from people injured by generic drugs and the other striking down a law that banned some commercial uses of prescription data. In the first case, Pliva v. Mensing , No. 09-993, the court split 5 to 4 along ideological lines in ruling that the makers of generic drugs \u2014 which account for 75 percent of prescriptions dispensed nationwide \u2014 may not be sued under state law for failing to warn customers about the risks associated with their products. Two years ago, in Wyeth v. Levine , the court decided the same question in the context of brand-name drugs but came to the opposite conclusion. That decision was based in large part on the fact that such drug companies can sometimes change the labels on their products without permission from the Food and Drug Administration. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority on Thursday, acknowledged that in the eyes of injured consumers, the new distinction between generic and brand-name drugs \u201cmakes little sense.\u201d But he said it followed from the way the two kinds of companies are treated under federal law. The manufacturers of generic drugs, he said, must use the same warning labels as the corresponding brand-name drugs, and they may not unilaterally alter those labels. That means, Justice Thomas wrote, that makers of generic drugs are caught in an impossible bind: they can comply with a state law requiring them to change their labels or the federal law prohibiting changes, but not both. Given that impossibility, federal law pre-empts state law under the Constitution\u2019s supremacy clause, he wrote. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority opinion invented \u201cnew principles of pre-emption law out of the air\u201d and will lead to \u201cabsurd consequences.\u201d \u201cAs the majority itself admits,\u201d Justice Sotomayor wrote, \u201ca drug consumer\u2019s right to compensation for inadequate warnings now turns on the happenstance of whether her pharmacist filled her prescription with a brand-name drug or a generic.\u201d The decision considered three consolidated cases brought by women who took generic metoclopramide, which is sold under the brand name Reglan. They took the drug for stomach ailments and developed a serious neurological disorder. Appeals courts ruled against the drug makers, saying that the federal regulatory regime did not block claims under state law. The Supreme Court reversed those decisions on Thursday, rejecting what Justice Thomas called the \u201cfair argument,\u201d that the defendants should have at least tried to persuade the federal drug agency to let them use a safer label. But the process of asking the agency to change a label, he wrote, can be as complicated as a children\u2019s board game. \u201cIf they had done so,\u201d Justice Thomas wrote of a possible request for a label change, \u201cand if the F.D.A. decided there was sufficient supporting information, and if the F.D.A. undertook negotiations with the brand-name manufacturer, and if adequate label changes were decided on and implemented, then the manufacturers would have started a Mouse Trap game that eventually led to a better label on generic metoclopramide.\u201d Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the majority. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that she agreed that the makers of generic drugs could not unilaterally change their labels. But she said that did not allow them to remain idle after learning of safety issues. \u201cHad the manufacturers invoked the available mechanism for initiating label changes,\u201d she wrote, \u201cthey may well have been able to change their labels in sufficient time to warn\u201d the women injured by their drugs. The majority opinion, Justice Sotomayor said, may reduce the demand for generic drugs and put doctors in an ethical bind. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the dissent. In a second decision on Thursday, Sorrell v. IMS Health , No. 10-779, a six-justice majority of the court struck down a Vermont law that banned some but not all uses of prescription information collected by pharmacies. The law sought to restrict a form of marketing called \u201cdetailing,\u201d in which representatives of drug companies pitch information about new drugs to doctors known to be prescribing certain kinds of medicine. The companies obtain prescription records to help them identify the most suitable doctors from data mining companies, which buy the records from pharmacies. The records are meant to be stripped of information that identifies individual patients. The law banned the use of prescription data for detailing but allowed other uses of it, including by law enforcement, insurance companies and journalists. Drug companies remained free to market their drugs in a more indiscriminate fashion, without knowing the prescribing habits of individual doctors. The law was challenged by data mining and drug companies, who argued that the law\u2019s point seemed to be to protect doctors from hearing about more expensive drugs while the state pushed cheaper generic drugs. The state, as its lawyer Bridget C. Asay put it at the argument in April, said the law sought to address \u201can intrusive and invasive marketing practice.\u201d Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said the case presented fundamental First Amendment issues because it restricted the use of truthful information in private hands based on the identity of the speaker and the content of its speech. He supported his decision with citations to classic First Amendment decisions outside the realm of commercial speech, including ones on prior restrain and incitement. \u201cIf pharmaceutical marketing affects treatment decisions,\u201d he wrote, \u201cit does so because doctors find it persuasive. Absent circumstances far from those presented here, the fear that speech might persuade provides no lawful basis for quieting it.\u201d Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor joined the majority opinion. Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, dissented. Justice Breyer said the majority had looked at the case through the wrong First Amendment lens. It is a mistake, he said, \u201cto apply a strict First Amendment standard virtually as a matter of course when a court reviews ordinary economic regulatory programs.\u201d Under ordinary standards applicable to commercial speech, Justice Breyer continued, the Vermont law should have been upheld. \u201cAt best,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe court opens a Pandora\u2019s box of First Amendment challenges to many ordinary regulatory practices that may only incidentally affect a commercial message.\u201d The majority opinion is an echo, he continued, of Lochner v. New York , a 1905 decision that struck down a New York work-hours law and has become shorthand for improper interference with matters properly left to legislatures. \u201cAt worst,\u201d Justice Breyer wrote of the majority opinion, \u201cit reawakens Lochner\u2019s pre-New Deal threat of substituting judicial for democratic decision-making where ordinary economic regulation is at issue.\u201d", "keyword": "Supreme Court;Labeling and Labels;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals);Generic Brands and Products"}
{"id": "ny0081296", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/11/04", "title": "Deal for Candy Crush Maker Favors Hope Over Experience", "abstract": "The latest play by King Digital Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush, will leave investors short of the sugarlike high its biggest hit often induces. The London-based maker of the sweet-matching mobile game is selling out to Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion , below the price of last year\u2019s initial public offering. King\u2019s model relies on producing a steady stream of new games in an effort to find another mega-hit like the confectionery-based puzzle. But mobile gamers are fickle. Recent introductions have failed to match the rapid growth of Candy Crush, even as the latter has faded. Revenue is expected to fall 13 percent this year, to $1.98 billion, according to Thomson Reuters Eikon estimates. The model can be hugely profitable. King delivered a return on invested capital of 405 percent in 2013, according to Cowen. Financial savings look minimal \u2014 King will continue to be run separately. The main benefit of blending the two companies appears to be to allow Activision access to new customers over and above those who play its mainly console-based games, like the shoot \u2019em up Call of Duty. There are shades of opportunism, too. King\u2019s stock has fallen recently, and the slim 20 percent premium based on last week\u2019s close is in line with analysts\u2019 estimate of its fair value, according to Eikon. The deal allows Activision to deploy excess cash. More than half will be financed through offshore cash reserves, and the rest by gearing up. The history of the video gaming industry is littered with one-hit wonders. The Finnish developer Rovio Entertainment has struggled to replicate the success of Angry Birds. Its American peer Zynga is still living off its FarmVille franchise. Perhaps Activision will get lucky with King, which has produced other popular games, albeit none on Candy Crush\u2019s scale. For now, though, taking it off the public market looks more like a Call of Duty-esque mercy killing.", "keyword": "Computer and Video Games;Mergers and Acquisitions;Activision Blizzard"}
{"id": "ny0143815", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/18", "title": "A Plan to Improve Health Care and Limit Costs", "abstract": "THE issue of health care costs usually comes up for discussion right after the economy as costs for businesses and consumers continue to climb. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association insures 102 million Americans \u2014 one in three people \u2014 and has networks that include 90 percent of the nation\u2019s providers and 80 percent of its hospitals . The association\u2019s board just adopted a four-point initiative aimed at containing health care costs and improving care. The goals range from eradicating hospital infections to pushing for health care coverage for everyone. From Chicago, Scott Serota, the association\u2019s president and chief executive, recently discussed the new goals: Q. What was the impetus for adopting a new plan of action, and why now? A. Much of what is discussed in virtually all forums as health care reform is really health care financing reform. We really have not gotten sufficient national attention on the real underlying issue, which is that the entire health care delivery system needs to be modified. We, the Blues, feel we should try to drive toward a vision for the health care delivery system which we can move collectively forward with our partners. Q. One of your goals is to cut the prevalence of diabetes in half. Why did you select that? A. There are 57 million Americans today who are prediabetic. The cost of treating it is $116 billion annually. We treat it pretty well, but there are tangible things we can do in the areas of obesity , weight management , nutrition , fitness and health risk assessment to reduce the incidence of diabetes. We can cut that 57 million number in half and make a dramatic impact not only in the delivery system costs but in people\u2019s lives. Q. Your second point is more affordable health care. How do you translate that sweeping goal into something concrete when costs are steadily mounting for both businesses and individuals? A. We\u2019re not saying the cost of health care will go down. It won\u2019t. Our goal is that health care costs rise no faster than any other goods and services. The essential fundamental to getting there is improving the underlying system because 30 percent of care rendered today, according to some studies, is unnecessary, redundant and, in some cases, even harmful. We need to get waste out of the system. That means $700 billion in a $2.4 trillion system. Q. When you say waste, what do you mean? A. I\u2019m talking about a whole battery of things like duplicative testing such as two M.R.I. \u2019s instead of one or hospital-acquired infections. The cornerstone of how we get at this is creating a comparative effectiveness institute to study what treatments really work best for a given condition \u2014 and letting everyone know what works. There is legislation on this pending in Congress. Q. Medicare just announced it would stop paying hospitals to treat patients harmed by care, like being given an incompatible blood transfusion. One of your goals addressed that \u2014 to eradicate so-called \u201cnever events\u201d \u2014 but is that the cart following the horse? A. Not paying for them is the end point. If they are no longer getting reimbursed for those costs, institutions will be very aggressive in eliminating those events. There are some Blue plans that are not paying for those events. Q. Why haven\u2019t more Blue plans limited reimbursement for hospital-caused problems? A. More will. We\u2019re trying to figure out mechanisms to help them improve their performance. Then we\u2019ll tie reimbursement to performance. These events are a huge problem where we haven\u2019t made a lot of progress over the last 10 years. We have to fix it, then adjust the financing. Q. An ambitious point you have adopted is to ensure that everyone has health care coverage. What specific steps can Blue Cross Blue Shield take to solve something that has remained so elusive? A. We believe that every American should have coverage, but 45 million don\u2019t have it. The reasons are not the same, but if coverage is affordable, more people will be able to buy it. We also need to work with people who are eligible for government programs but are not enrolling. And we need to develop new products like high-deductible plans to attract people like the \u201cyoung invincibles\u201d \u2014 who think they will never get sick \u2014 and get them in the habit of buying coverage. Q. Do you support proposals like the one from the Republican presidential candidate John McCain that move away from the employer-based system? A. It is essential that we continue to support the employer-based system because 162 million Americans today get their coverage through their employer. We should not disrupt this important piece. Employers provide significant financing and they keep us on our toes. Q. How do you plan to get others in the health care industry to sign on and help achieve your newly adopted goals? A. Conversations, dialogue and meeting with trade association leaders. These are goals for all of us. We are insuring one-third of all Americans so we need to step out and provide leadership with real actionable steps. Q. Do you have any near-term \u2014 like one-year \u2014 benchmarks to measure whether the Blues are making progress in meeting each of the new goals? A. We will have annual benchmarks that we will put out. We believe that what gets measured is what gets done.", "keyword": "Health Insurance and Managed Care;Serota Scott;Blue Cross Blue Shield Association;Hospitals"}
{"id": "ny0240768", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/12/15", "title": "Haiti: Candidate Wants a New Vote", "abstract": "Haiti", "keyword": "Haiti;Martelly Michel;Elections"}
{"id": "ny0000400", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/03/20", "title": "Mark Sanford Gets to Runoff in South Carolina Race", "abstract": "The first chapter in a wild race to fill a Congressional seat in South Carolina was written Tuesday when former Gov. Mark Sanford staged something of a comeback in a Republican field crowded with 16 candidates, and Democrats overwhelmingly picked Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a businesswoman on leave from Clemson University. Mrs. Colbert Busch is a sister of the comedian Stephen Colbert, a burst of celebrity in a race with other marquee names. Chief among them for the Republicans was Mr. Sanford, 52, the former governor who turned the special election into a stage for his political comeback after his fictitious walk along the Appalachian Trail led to a divorce, ethics charges and censure. By the time the polls closed in the district, which stretches along the coastal Low Country and includes Charleston, it was clear Mr. Sanford had at least some political redemption. With 99 percent of the votes counted , he got 37 percent of them. But because he did not get more than 50 percent, he will have to stand in a runoff before he can hope to face the Democrat on May 7. In a close race for second among the Republicans that will prompt a recount, Curtis Bostic, a former member of the Charleston County Council, had 13 percent of the vote, while Larry Grooms, a state senator, had 12 percent. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Grooms conceded defeat. But because the results were so close, state law requires a recount. Election officials said the recount would likely to happen on Friday morning. Teddy Turner, a political newcomer and the son of the media mogulTed Turner, finished fourth, with 8 percent. Mrs. Colbert Busch, 58, easily beat Ben Frasier, who has run for office in almost every election cycle since 1972. She won 96 percent of the vote. Voting was light, and 15 percent of 453,632 registered voters registered in the newly drawn district went to the polls. The election was also the first major test of the state\u2019s new voter identification law, which requires voters to produce driver\u2019s licenses, passports or other forms of state-approved voter photo ID cards. Because of that, the United States Justice Department was monitoring the election to ensure compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Over the longer term, the primary for the First Congressional District will set the stage for what many thought impossible: a chance for a conservative district in a very red state to send a Democrat to Congress. Image Elizabeth Colbert Busch, winner of the Democratic primary, after voting in Mount Pleasant, S.C. Credit Bruce Smith/Associated Press In December, Senator Jim DeMintstepped down to take over the Heritage Foundation, and Gov.Nikki R. Haley appointed Representative Tim Scott to the post, making Mr. Scott the Senate\u2019s only black member. That appointment opened up the Congressional seat, which Mr. Sanford held in the 1990s. Mr. Sanford, who left the governorship in 2011 and had spent the time since regrouping after a divorce and his painful last year in office, said in an interview that he viewed the timing as something of a miracle that came just as he was contemplating his next move. His strategy, in ads and interviews, had been to first ask for forgiveness for leaving his office unattended for six days as he pursued a woman in Argentina who is now his fianc\u00e9e. He lied about it, saying he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Although he finished his term, he faced ethics fines, censure by his party and a divorce from his wife of 21 years, Jenny. His first ad spoke of finding grace and the god of second chances. His second ad quickly left that theme behind, and hammered home his conservative qualifications, which included being rated by the Cato Institute, a libertarian group, as the most fiscally conservative governor during his tenure. Tuesday\u2019s vote offered some indication of how far forgiveness and fiscal conservatism will go in a part of South Carolina that is Republican, certainly, but populated by relative newcomers (by South Carolina standards) and is more moderate than other parts of the state. \u201cRepentance works better in the South Carolina Upcountry, where it\u2019s more evangelical,\u201d said Jack Bass , who has written several books about civil rights, the state\u2019s politics andStrom Thurmond, the long-serving senator. \u201cThis is a moderate district,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the only South Carolina Congressional district that went for Romney in the primary.\u201d Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, won the 2012 primary by 12 points, blocking what at the time seemed an inevitable and easy walk to the presidential nomination forMitt Romney. This season, 15 other Republicans in the race with Mr. Sanford have had to run hard in a short period of time to differentiate themselves. The candidates spent six weeks attacking one another and targeting Mr. Sanford, with candidates striking notes for their own fiscal conservatism, as well as their own strong families and conservative social and religious values. With so many candidates in the race, winning boiled down to name recognition, said Chip Felkel, a Republican political consultant based in Greenville, S.C., who is not affiliated with any campaign. By April, voters and Republican strategists will have to decide if Mr. Sanford will be the strongest candidate to send into battle against Mrs. Colbert Busch, who will be able to build up her campaign funds while the two Republicans fight each other. Democratic strategists believe that in the May general election Mrs. Colbert Busch could peel off female Republican voters faced with having to chose Mr. Sanford or cross party lines.", "keyword": "South Carolina;Primaries;Mark Sanford;Elizabeth Colbert Busch;House races;Congressional elections"}
{"id": "ny0143463", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2008/10/03", "title": "College Teams Are Feeling the Squeeze From Fuel Costs", "abstract": "It was agony added to misery. Shortly after Ohio State\u2019s football team returned from a walloping by Southern California, Ben Jay, the Buckeyes\u2019 senior associate athletic director for finance and operations, said he did a double take when he received a $346,000 bill for the group\u2019s two charter flights to Los Angeles for players, staff and boosters. The fuel surcharge, which in previous years added at most a couple of thousand dollars to the bill, tacked on another $24,200. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of one of those things that you knew was coming,\u201d Jay said of the cost. \u201cYou just didn\u2019t know how much.\u201d Collegiate sports programs throughout the nation, from powerhouses to pushovers, were facing increasing costs even before the current economic crisis. Athletic department administrators said that was one of the most serious issues confronting their programs, which are straining to find innovative ways to stay within their budgets. In recent years, the cost of bus rides for shorter trips has also increased, as has the cost of feeding teams at home and on the road. Now, when teams take commercial flights, they are confronted with extra baggage fees at check-in, unbudgeted and considerable expenses for large teams with lots of equipment. Administrators at Ohio State, with a $115 million annual athletic budget, are feeling the pinch. \u201cFor each and every one of these trips, you have to make a decision on whether it\u2019s cost efficient or not and whether it\u2019s worthy,\u201d Jay said. \u201cIt can\u2019t be business as usual.\u201d To compensate, some programs are starting to limit the number of student-athletes who travel, and some are contemplating shorter seasons. Several college administrators expressed concern that some nonrevenue sports might be eliminated. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely gender neutral,\u201d said Rob Edson, senior associate athletic director for finance at Syracuse, adding that travel costs had risen 7 to 10 percent from a year ago. \u201cIt\u2019s something that\u2019s affecting the entire enterprise of everything we do, and we are feeling it across the board.\u201d Aiming to maintain a national presence while counting pennies is like walking a tightrope. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a perfect solution for now,\u201d said Tom Larson, a senior associate athletic director for finance at Oregon, whose travel expenses increased to $3.2 million from $2.9 million in the 2006-7 academic year. \u201cBut we need one in the future.\u201d The problem is being researched by many conferences as well as by the N.C.A.A. The cost of travel to N.C.A.A. championship games climbed to $42.6 million in 2007-8 from $34.5 million in 2006-7, said Keith Martin, the managing director for finance and operations with the association, which reimburses the colleges. \u201cWe really started seeing a spike with our winter and spring championships,\u201d Martin said. \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of things, the fuel prices and the airlines pulling back on seating capacities. There was kind of a double combination where it\u2019s a supply-and-demand scenario.\u201d In response, the N.C.A.A. increased the minimum distance for plane travel to 400 miles from 350 for fall Division I championships. Division II recently approved a one-time allocation of $250,000 to be divided among institutions highly affected by rising travel costs. Martin added that the N.C.A.A. was also looking into allotting more time between the announcement of the brackets and the competitions so teams could find less expensive transportation, designing software that will estimate costs in determining how far teams travel and considering rescheduling contests from heavy-volume travel times like holidays to reduce expenses. But beyond the championships, athletic programs are being hit hard. At Wheaton College, a private institution near Chicago with Division III teams, Athletic Director Dr. Tony Ladd said his baseball team was contemplating taking a spring trip to Florida instead of a scheduled visit to Arizona because the cheapest flight to Phoenix would cost $600 a player. Wheaton, with about 2,400 undergraduates, has increased its overall travel budget to $334,901 from $260,761 in 2007-8. Each of its 22 sports teams usually takes one major trip a season. Ladd described several solutions. \u201cThankfully, the men and women who have been in this program value it so much and give back,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you look for other ways to save. Does that mean men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball travels together in a chartered bus? Another would be to cut back on the number of sports events, meaning a basketball team would play 24 games instead of 25. But that would be one of the last things and one of the more dramatic changes.\u201d Few colleges face the hurdles confronting the Seawolves from Alaska Anchorage, a public university known for its hockey team. Every road game requires a flight. Alaska Fairbanks, 310 miles away, is the closest opponent. The average athlete at Anchorage logs 25,000 miles each season, said Dr. Steve Cobb, the Seawolves\u2019 athletic director. \u201cNobody cares what it costs us to get there,\u201d Cobb said. \u201cWe just have to be there for tip-off.\u201d Cobb has had trouble finding nonconference opponents willing to travel to Alaska. The annual Great Alaska Shootout, a preseason basketball tournament that Anchorage hosts, is usually its top draw. But because of the increase of tournaments around the country and rising costs, Cobb has had trouble filling out the tournament brackets, featuring eight men\u2019s teams and four women\u2019s teams. The university\u2019s travel budget rose to $1.7 million this year, up from $1.5 million a year ago. Cobb estimated that the hockey team could pay about $20,000 in additional airlines fees for checking equipment this season. In response, the athletic department petitioned the board of regents for a one-time allotment of $225,000. \u201cWe don\u2019t have much flexibility,\u201d Cobb said. \u201cBy the time school starts, things have been in blood for a long time. Our conference schedule is always made in advance. We don\u2019t have much room to adjust to current market prices.\u201d So colleges are looking to cut costs elsewhere. Cobb said he was negotiating with airlines to have them waive extra-baggage fees. Some teams are taking cheaper flights at more inconvenient times. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of swallow hard and try to find more money in the budget elsewhere,\u201d Wheaton\u2019s Ladd said. \u201cIt\u2019s an adjustment that has to be made. We\u2019re just in the beginning framework of this. I think this is an issue that is going to explode in the next two to three years.\u201d", "keyword": "College Athletics;Budgets and Budgeting"}
{"id": "ny0017965", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/07/05", "title": "Israel: Cameraman Held at U.S. Party", "abstract": "The American-financed Alhurra network said Thursday that one of its cameramen was interrogated and strip-searched by Israeli security officers while covering a Fourth of July party at the American ambassador\u2019s residence near Tel Aviv. The Arab satellite channel had coordinated with the prime minister\u2019s office to cover the event on behalf of the international news media. Ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials were in attendance. But when the cameraman, Samer Jallad, arrived, he said he was detained for questioning, ordered to remove his shoes and sit in the sun for more than half an hour, and then taken to a room where he was forced to remove his pants for a body inspection. He said he was held for more than 90 minutes before he was permitted to enter. The embassy and Mr. Netanyahu\u2019s office had no immediate comment.", "keyword": "Search and seizure;Alhurra;Israel;Daniel B Shapiro"}
{"id": "ny0036655", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/03/21", "title": "Idzik Says Jets Seek \u2018Sustainable Success,\u2019 Not Quick Fixes in Free Agency", "abstract": "With the arrival of spring, the Jets are already playing defense. John Idzik, under fire in his second year as general manager for his relative inaction so far in free agency despite ample space under the salary cap, insisted Thursday that he was following a plan that would lead to lasting success. Coach Rex Ryan, under scrutiny after missing the playoffs for three consecutive seasons, voiced support for Idzik amid reports to the contrary. Idzik, who was joined by Ryan on a conference call with reporters, said: \u201cWe\u2019re always aiming to win, but we\u2019re in a very competitive league. What I\u2019m trying to build here is sustainable success. We\u2019re not going to put a finger in a dike to try to do something for a short-term gain if we feel like it\u2019s going to hurt us in the long term.\u201d According to Ryan, he is working \u201cside by side\u201d with Idzik. Ryan said: \u201cI know the direction of this football team. We\u2019re in great hands because we have John as our general manager.\u201d The comment came shortly after Antonio Cromartie, a cornerback the Jets had released but hoped to re-sign to a lesser contract, agreed to a one-year deal with the Arizona Cardinals. Cromartie\u2019s decision left the Jets with an urgent need for a cornerback to play opposite Dee Milliner, whose progress late in his rookie season helped the team finish 8-8. Idzik, who is rapidly gaining a reputation for being deliberate, watched the New England Patriots sign Darrelle Revis to a one-year contract worth $12 million hours after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers released him. In one of Idzik\u2019s first major decisions, the Jets traded Revis to Tampa Bay for the Buccaneers\u2019 first-round draft pick last year \u2014 No. 13 over all, which they turned into the promising defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson \u2014 and a fourth-round pick this year. Idzik declined to say why the Jets did not try to sign Revis, who made a gradual recovery in 2013 from a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. But Idzik said, \u201cI don\u2019t know that I would characterize last year\u2019s departure as acrimonious.\u201d Immediately after the trade, Revis accused Idzik of misleading him. Idzik said of Cromartie\u2019s release, \u201cWhat we made clear to him was that we weren\u2019t closing the door on anything and we were in touch with Cro.\u201d The Jets also failed to land Cromartie\u2019s cousin, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, a cornerback who added his name to an impressive list of free agents signed by the unusually active Giants. Idzik noted that the Jets retained seven players who could have left as free agents, including the reserve cornerbacks Ellis Lankster and Darrin Walls, while adding a needed wide receiver in Eric Decker and signing Breno Giacomini to replace Austin Howard at right tackle. The Jets are expected to make a push to sign quarterback Michael Vick when he visits them on Friday as a prelude to the team\u2019s releasing Mark Sanchez, who is owed a $2 million roster bonus next Tuesday. Marty Mornhinweg, the Jets\u2019 offensive coordinator, knows Vick well from their four years together with the Philadelphia Eagles. Vick, who will turn 34 in June, may be given the opportunity to compete against Geno Smith, who struggled in his rookie season with 21 interceptions and 8 fumbles, 4 of which were lost. Idzik insisted that he operated with a long-term vision. \u201cWinning is not just a one-time thing to us,\u201d he said. \u201cWinning is something that is going to be pervasive here. It\u2019s going to span time. That\u2019s what our aim is.\u201d WOODSON STAYS IN OAKLAND Safety Charles Woodson agreed to a one-year deal to extend his second stay with the Raiders to a second season. Woodson, 37, started 16 games and had 75 solo tackles, 1 interception, 2 sacks, 3 passes defensed, 3 forced fumbles and 2 fumble recoveries. (AP) PANTHERS SIGN COTCHERY Carolina signed the free-agent receiver Jerricho Cotchery to a two-year contract. Cotchery has spent 10 seasons in the N.F.L., the last three with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He also played for the Jets (AP) CAMPBELL TO BACK UP DALTON The Cincinnati Bengals signed quarterback Jason Campbell to be Andy Dalton\u2019s backup. Campbell has played for Washington, Oakland, Chicago and Cleveland. He started eight of the Browns\u2019 last nine games last season. (AP) SEATTLE SIGNS LINEMAN The Seahawks signed the free-agent offensive lineman Stephen Schilling. In three seasons with the Chargers, Schilling appeared in 18 games with three starts. He played at both left and right guard during his time in San Diego. (AP)", "keyword": "Football;Jets;John Idzik;Rex Ryan"}
{"id": "ny0257002", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2011/01/03", "title": "A Strong Crop of Documentaries, but Barely Seen", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 With the books closed on 2010, it will go down as a banner year for film documentaries. Unless you expected someone to go see them. Even with backing from some of Hollywood\u2019s most aggressive distributors, a strong and varied lineup of feature documentaries like the educational critique \u201cWaiting for Superman\u201d from Paramount Vantage, the baby-gazing \u201cBabies\u201d from Focus Features, and the conflict-charged \u201cThe Tillman Story\u201d from the Weinstein Company barely registered with a mass audience that clearly preferred fiction to anything real. The best performer among conventional documentaries released in 2010 was Walt Disney\u2019s \u201cOceans,\u201d an English-language reconstruction of a French nature film by the directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud. Released in April, \u201cOceans\u201d had domestic ticket sales of about $19 million. To put things in perspective, a similarly revamped French nature film, \u201cMarch of the Penguins,\u201d took in more than $77 million for Warner Independent Pictures after its release in 2005. Based on figures compiled by Box Office Mojo, feature documentaries had combined ticket sales of about $45 million last year. That roughly matches the box-office sales for \u201cSaw 3D,\u201d a modest horror hit for Lionsgate, and falls short of the opening weekend sales for \u201cMegamind,\u201d a middling performer from DreamWorks Animation. In a year when \u201cThe Expendables,\u201d a fact-free action thriller, has so far outsold \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d a nonfiction drama, the top-ranked film with roots in the real was \u201cJackass 3D.\u201d That film, part of a series that chronicles dopey stunts \u2014 and appears to be in a class by itself, as the documentary world doesn\u2019t much bother with it \u2014 was ranked No. 19 as the year ended, with ticket sales of about $117 million for Paramount. The year\u2019s top box-office draw was \u201cToy Story 3,\u201d from Disney, which had about $415 million in ticket sales, followed by a long list of fantasies, comedies and a couple of reality-bending dramas, \u201cInception\u201d and \u201cShutter Island,\u201d with Leonardo DiCaprio. (Total domestic sales for the year were about $10.56 billion, just short of last year\u2019s $10.6 billion, though theater attendance dropped about 5.36 percent, according to estimates by Hollywood.com\u2019s box-office analyst, Paul Dergarabedian.) Even critically admired documentaries like \u201cInside Job,\u201d about Wall Street\u2019s collapse, or \u201cExit Through the Gift Shop,\u201d about the elusive street artist Banksy, fell short of marks that were set by films like \u201cSuper Size Me,\u201d \u201cReligulous,\u201d and Michael Moore\u2019s hit, \u201cFahrenheit 9/11.\u201d Paul M. Roeder, a spokesman for Disney, said \u201cOceans,\u201d which was released by the Disneynature division, was helped along by group sales, including the advance sale of 400,000 tickets before the film opened. \u201cWe saw tremendous support from school groups and the educational community,\u201d Mr. Roeder said in an e-mail last week. By one theory, at least, documentaries are not so much failing at the box office as becoming the mainstay of a new distribution system that relies more on video-on-demand through cable systems and online delivery than on theaters. \u201cToo many great documentaries are made each year, and only a select number receive a theatrical run,\u201d said Ted Leonsis, the founder and chairman of SnagFilms, which has made a business of aggregating documentaries and distributing them both via Web sites and, under a recent arrangement, on fee-based channels through Comcast and Verizon\u2019s FiOS service. Mr. Leonsis said his operation logged more than a half-million views with a 2010 SummerFest that went online with six documentaries from the film festival circuit. The best performer among them was \u201cShooting Robert King,\u201d about the war photographer Robert King. It was seen online by 180,000 people during a two-week run, Mr. Leonsis said, far surpassing the theatrical audience for a typical documentary. In expanding their field of best picture nominees to 10 from five, officials of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Oscars, have said they hope documentaries will begin to pepper the nominations for the top award, perhaps enticing the audience. This year, \u201cWaiting for Superman,\u201d \u201cInside Job,\u201d and \u201cClient 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,\u201d have drawn attention as the awards season unfolded. Meanwhile, the genre has been hanging tough. Over Christmas, for instance, \u201cCool It,\u201d a climate change documentary directed by Ondi Timoner, struggled to a total box-office take of $62,713 since its release by Roadside Attractions on Nov. 12. Its receipts for Christmas weekend, according to the reporting service: $11 .", "keyword": "Documentary Films and Programs;Sales;Oceans (Movie)"}
{"id": "ny0037256", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/03/01", "title": "Rangers Re-Sign Girardi as Trade Deadline Looms", "abstract": "The Rangers cleared one elephant from their room Friday, agreeing to terms with defenseman Dan Girardi on a six-year contract extension that keeps their solid defense corps intact. The signing of Girardi, 29, who would have been an unrestricted free agent after the season, ended talk that General Manager Glen Sather would trade him by Wednesday\u2019s deadline. \u201cDan has been a Ranger for his entire career, signing with us as an undrafted free agent and working his way to become a top defenseman in the N.H.L.,\u201d Sather said in a statement. \u201cHis dedication to this club, as a leader both on the ice and in the locker room, is invaluable to this team. We are happy to have been able to ensure that he will continue to wear the Blueshirt.\u201d But the captain Ryan Callahan, another pending free agent, remains unsigned, and rumors persist that Callahan will be traded if an agreement cannot be reached by Wednesday. Talks between Sather and Girardi\u2019s agent, Don Meehan, proceeded through the Olympic break. But Sather and Callahan\u2019s agent, Steve Bartlett, did not talk during the break. Girardi\u2019s contract, worth $33 million with an average annual cap hit of $5.5 million per year, includes a full no-move clause the first three years, and a modified no-trade clause for the last three years. Girardi, an eight-year veteran from Welland, Ontario, plays alongside Ryan McDonagh on the Rangers\u2019 top defense pair and has ranked among the N.H.L.\u2019s top six in blocked shots in each of the last four seasons. Since the start of the 2009-10 season he has blocked 847 shots, tops in the N.H.L. A solid, stay-at-home defender who takes few penalties, Girardi has 35 goals, 171 points and just 215 penalty minutes in 548 career games. This season he has 4 goals and 17 points. He leads the Rangers in hits (145) and blocked shots (121) and ranks second in average ice time (22:40). In Thursday\u2019s 2-1 victory over the Chicago Blackhawks, the Rangers\u2019 first game after the end of the Olympic break, Girardi went plus-2 and blocked a game-high 5 shots. He said he paid no attention to the constant trade rumors that went along with his pending free agent status. \u201cAway from the rink you try to work things out, but once I come to the rink it doesn\u2019t come into my head,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cIn the game, that\u2019s the last thing on my mind.\u201d", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Rangers;Glen Sather;Dan Girardi"}
{"id": "ny0253974", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/07/20", "title": "Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google", "abstract": "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. \u2014 Google thinks it can be young and crazy again. And it is betting $200 million that it is right. In the hottest market for technology start-up companies in over a decade, the Silicon Valley behemoth is playing venture capitalist in a rush to discover the next Facebook or Zynga. Other pedigreed tech companies are doing the same, as venture capital dollars coming from corporations approach levels last seen in the dot-com bubble era of 2000. To some, it is a telltale sign of an overheated industry, symptomatic of a late and ill-advised rush to invest during good times. But Google says it has a weapon to guide it in picking investments \u2014 a Google-y secret sauce, which means using data-driven algorithms to analyze the would-be next big thing. Never mind that there often is very little data because the companies are so young, and that most venture capitalists say investing is more of an art than a science. At Google, even art is quantifiable. \u201cInvesting is being in a dark room and trying to find the way out,\u201d said Bill Maris, the managing partner of Google Ventures, the corporate investment arm. \u201cIf you have a match, you should light it.\u201d Corporate venture funds invested $583 million in start-ups in the first three months of the year, according to the National Venture Capital Association, up from $443 million in the same period last year and $245 million in 2009, before tech investing began its rapid turnaround. Today, 10 percent of venture capital dollars comes from corporations, nearing the previous bubble-era high of 15 percent in 2000. Facebook, Zynga and Amazon.com are investing in social media start-ups. AOL Ventures restarted last year after three previous efforts, and Intel Capital expects to invest more this year than the $327 million it invested last year. Google Ventures says it has invested as much money in the first half of this year as in all of last, and Larry Page , the company\u2019s co-founder, who became chief executive this spring, has promised to keep the coffers wide open. Corporate venture arms have sprung into action before during boom times, like the early 1980s and the late 1990s, but they have had mixed records. \u201cWhen the corporate guys get involved, it usually means that we\u2019re at the top of the market,\u201d said Andrew S. Rachleff, who teaches venture capital at Stanford and was a founder of Benchmark Capital, the venture firm. Mr. Rachleff also questioned Google\u2019s reliance on its algorithms. \u201cThere\u2019s no analysis to be done when you\u2019re evaluating a company that\u2019s creating a new market, because there\u2019s no market to analyze,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to apply judgment.\u201d Although even Mr. Maris compares venture investing to \u201cbuying lottery tickets,\u201d Google says it has faith in its algorithms. At the same time, it is taking the unusual step of providing the chosen start-ups with access to its 28,770 employees for engineering, recruiting and business advice, and offering office space at the Googleplex and classes on building a business. Mr. Page, who declined a request for an interview, has already promised Google Ventures $200 million this year and says a virtually unlimited amount is available, Mr. Maris said, as Google reconnects with its start-up roots. \u201cI\u2019ve had conversations with Larry when he says, \u2018Do as much as you can, as fast as you can in as big and disruptive a way as possible,\u2019 \u201d he said. Google says its approach is paying off. One of its investments, Ngmoco, was acquired by a Japanese gaming company, DeNA, for up to $400 million, and another, HomeAway, for renting vacation homes, received a warm welcome from investors when it went public last month. A third, Silver Spring Networks, a smart-grid company, filed to go public last week. Google Ventures invests in various areas \u2014 the Web, biotechnology and clean technology. It puts large amounts of money into mature companies, but it is also investing small amounts in 100 new companies this year. To make its picks, the company has built computer algorithms using data from past venture investments and academic literature. For example, for individual companies, Google enters data about how long the founders worked on start-ups before raising money and whether the founders successfully started companies in the past. It runs similar information about potential investments through the algorithms to get a red, yellow or green light. Google says the algorithms have taught it valuable lessons, from obvious ones (entrepreneurs who have started successful companies are more likely to do it again) to less obvious ones (start-ups located far from the venture capitalist\u2019s office are more likely to be successful, probably because the firm has to go out of its way to finance the start-up.) Start-ups backed by Google Ventures can work in a 20,000-square-foot space at the Googleplex, supplied with a Ping-Pong table and a snack-filled kitchen. In exchange, they make a $5-a-month donation to the barbecue fund. But the company offers a lot more than space, say the chosen entrepreneurs. Adimab, a biotech company, is using free space on Google\u2019s enormous servers. EnglishCentral, an English-language education site, tested its coursework and accents for Japanese speakers with employees in Google\u2019s Japan office. Google shared a contact list for airport chief information officers with Scvngr, a mobile gaming company, when it wanted to partner with airports. Craig Walker, a serial entrepreneur who recently started Firespotter Labs, backed by Google Ventures, said a Google recruiter had helped him hire engineers. \u201cA lot of times V.C.\u2019s will say, \u2018We\u2019re not just money, we\u2019re value-add,\u2019 and I\u2019ve always been somewhat doubtful of those claims,\u201d Mr. Walker said. \u201cWith Google Ventures, those claims are completely justified.\u201d Still, some entrepreneurs who have worked with Google Ventures say Google\u2019s drive to analyze everything exhaustively, even for small investments in untried companies, slows the investment process when compared with other firms. Google Ventures also turns to Google employees to find investment ideas. It offers $10,000 to anyone who suggests a start-up that results in an investment. And the company has invested in three of the ex-Google employees who have been leaving as the company grows . Like the entrepreneurs, Mr. Maris has learned a lesson from Google: meet founders, even if their start-up idea sounds crazy. Fifteen years ago, a friend of his, Anne Wojcicki, suggested he meet a couple of engineers who were working on a start-up in her sister\u2019s garage, but he declined. The start-up was Google, which still makes him cringe. \u201cIt\u2019s ironic I\u2019m running the venture business now,\u201d Mr. Maris said, \u201cbecause I missed the biggest venture idea of all time.\u201d", "keyword": "Venture capital;Google;Startup"}
{"id": "ny0194812", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/11/01", "title": "Pettitte\u2019s Pitching and Hitting Lift Yankees in Game 3", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 After the fifth inning of Game 3 of the World Series on Saturday, the Phillie Phanatic cavorted on the field at Citizens Bank Park with a band of monsters and goblins. A man in a Yankees jersey strolled by, and suddenly, the mascot and his crew cowered in fear, rushing off the field. The holiday gag, of course, was that the mere sight of the Yankees was hideous enough to scare away a pack of ghouls. But for the Philadelphia Phillies , the joke hit too close to home. The real Yankees were all too frightening, seizing a two-games-to-one lead in the World Series behind Andy Pettitte \u2019s 8-5 victory, bruising Cole Hamels and battering the bullpen. It is the first time in the last two postseasons that the Phillies have trailed in games. Last year at this point, they were ahead, 2-1, and preparing to face the Tampa Bay Rays\u2019 Andy Sonnanstine in Game 4. Now they are staring down the Yankees\u2019 ace, C. C. Sabathia. \u201cThey\u2019ve got C. C., but oh well,\u201d said the Phillies\u2019 Shane Victorino. \u201cWe got him in Game 1. Why can\u2019t we do it again?\u201d It was meant as a rhetorical question, but the answer is obvious: the Phillies\u2019 ace, Cliff Lee, faced Sabathia in Game 1. Now Joe Blanton will face him in Game 4, just as the Yankees\u2019 offense is warming up. The Yankees had homers from Alex Rodriguez , Nick Swisher and Hideki Matsui on Saturday, and pivotal doubles by Swisher and Johnny Damon. But the hit that pulled them even was a single by Pettitte in the fifth inning. And that was not his least likely accomplishment. There seemed no way Pettitte would last long after he made 52 pitches through two innings. But he managed to throw just 52 more in the next four innings, and the Phillies collected only two hits after the second. \u201cIt was tough,\u201d Pettitte said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to lie to you, I couldn\u2019t put the ball where I wanted to. I wasn\u2019t getting it down and away consistently like I wanted to, and I wasn\u2019t able to throw my curveball for strikes. It was an absolute grind tonight.\u201d Fortunately, Pettitte said, the Phillies had three left-handers in their lineup who could not handle his cutter. Those hitters \u2014 Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez \u2014 went 0 for 9 off Pettitte and 0 for 12 in the game. Howard has nine strikeouts in the World Series, just three shy of Willie Wilson\u2019s 1980 record. Utley and Howard ended the first inning with strikeouts, but Jayson Werth started the second with a homer to left. With one out, the bottom of the order offered no break. Pedro Feliz doubled and Carlos Ruiz walked, bringing up Hamels. He pushed a bunt between third base and the mound, Pettitte and catcher Jorge Posada converging on it too late. Then Pettitte walked Jimmy Rollins to force in Feliz, and Victorino brought home Ruiz with a sacrifice fly. \u201cThe big play in that inning was we didn\u2019t execute getting the out with the bunt,\u201d Manager Joe Girardi said, adding later, \u201cThat was the reason, to me, they got the three runs.\u201d The Phillies put their 3-0 lead in the left hand of Hamels, the reigning World Series most valuable player who retired the side in order in the third. But with one out in the fourth, Hamels walked Mark Teixeira on a fastball, down and in. \u201cIt was a strike,\u201d Hamels insisted after the game, but by then, of course, it did not matter. Rodriguez lifted a fly to right that carried toward the corner. It seemed to be hooking foul, but struck a hard surface and caromed back to the field. The ball would not have bounced that way if it had hit the chain-link at the top of the wall. \u201cIt was tough to see from where we were,\u201d said Swisher, who was in the third-base dugout. \u201cBut then some guys were running up in the tunnel saying, \u2018Hey, it hit the camera! It hit the camera!\u2019 \u201d The umpires ruled the ball in play, and Rodriguez stopped at second. But they huddled, went to the replay room and determined that the ball had, indeed, struck the front of a camera overhanging right field. It was the first replay review in the World Series \u2014 it is used only on home runs \u2014 and the umpires got the call correct. Rodriguez, also the subject of the first regular-season review in 2008, was awarded a homer, his first hit in nine World Series at-bats. The Yankees cut the lead to 3-2. \u201cOverall, our game plan is simple \u2014 swing at strikes,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cIf I swing at strikes, I can do a lot better.\u201d Hamels threw no curveballs the first time through the Yankees\u2019 order, when he allowed no hits. But the lack of a third pitch has hurt Hamels, and he started trying a curveball in earnest in the fifth inning. Hamels said his curveballs were hitting their spots. But Nick Swisher rapped one down the left-field line for a leadoff double in the fifth, and with one out, Hamels threw a first-pitch curveball to Pettitte, a career .134 hitter. \u201cIt\u2019s a 0-0 count in a bunting situation to a pitcher who hasn\u2019t hit all year,\u201d Hamels said. \u201cI know, as a pitcher myself, I wouldn\u2019t swing at a first-pitch curveball.\u201d Pettitte said that with a runner in scoring position, he wanted to be aggressive and slap the ball somewhere. He said Hamels\u2019s curveball was high, allowing him to dump a single to shallow center to score Swisher. It made Pettitte the first Yankees pitcher to drive in a run in the World Series since Jim Bouton in 1964, a distinction that Sabathia, an enthusiastic hitter, had hoped would be his. \u201cI\u2019ve got to do something,\u201d Sabathia said. \u201cThat\u2019s what Andy was just telling me: \u2018I put some pressure on you.\u2019 \u201d The score was 3-3, and Hamels was broken. Derek Jeter punched a single to center in front of a sliding Victorino. Then Damon lashed a fastball to the gap in right center, bringing in Pettitte and Jeter, the go-ahead run and insurance. Pettitte and Jeter have won four titles together, but they have never scored runs like this, one in front of the other. Pettitte, in fact, had scored only once before as a Yankee. \u201cI could have caught him,\u201d Jeter said. \u201cIt would have been embarrassing, I think, for him. But what can you say? He pitched, he hit, he did everything today.\u201d Hamels walked Teixeira again, and that finished his night. He left to boos that gave way to some cheers, but Hamels is clearly frustrated. He answered wave after wave of questions after the game, calm and composed, yet defeated. Hamels had given up five runs on five hits in four and a third innings, and his postseason earned run average is 7.58 in four starts. Last year, in five starts, it was 1.80. He pitched aggressively until the end Saturday, firing first-pitch strikes to each of his last 13 batters. But it did not help. \u201cSometimes you can\u2019t do anything right,\u201d Hamels said. \u201cYou can do what you\u2019re supposed to do, and unfortunately, the results go against it.\u201d The bullpen was not much better. Swisher homered in the sixth off J. A. Happ. Posada knocked in Damon in the seventh, flicking a two-out, full-count single to left off Chad Durbin. With two outs in the eighth against Brett Myers, Hideki Matsui smoked a pinch-hit homer to left. The Phillies\u2019 offense could not sustain that pace. After Hamels\u2019 single in the second, they had just one more hit until the ninth, a homer by Werth in the sixth. That made Pettitte\u2019s pitching line look ordinary \u2014 six innings, four runs \u2014 but those were just numbers. Pettitte found a way to do his job, keeping the game steady, allowing his offense to take over. It was his 17th postseason victory, but that history meant nothing as he earned it. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to draw on past success or whatever when you\u2019re standing out on that mound and the ball is not going where you want it to,\u201d Pettitte said. \u201cIt\u2019s a grind when you\u2019re out there and you\u2019re by yourself. There\u2019s not a whole lot of anything that can help you, except trying to just keep battling.\u201d That is what Pettitte did, as he has done so many times before. He pulled his cap down and kept working, and when he was done, the Yankees were leading in the game. Now they are leading in the World Series, with their best pitcher starting Sunday.", "keyword": "Baseball;World Series;New York Yankees;Philadelphia Phillies;Hamels Cole;Pettitte Andy;Swisher Nick;Rodriguez Alex;Matsui Hideki"}
{"id": "ny0150106", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/09/15", "title": "Rays' Price Makes Impressive Debut in Tradition-Filled Setting", "abstract": "He arrived early Saturday to the big leagues at its biggest stage, making a beeline toward Yankee Stadium and capturing the moment and images on his cellphone. That was not enough, so David Price also arrived early Sunday to sneak another peek, this time at Monument Park. It followed simple order that Price, the Tampa Bay Rays \u2019 No. 1 overall selection in last year\u2019s amateur draft, would make his major league debut early and for the long haul in Sunday\u2019s 8-4 loss to the Yankees . With Rays starter Edwin Jackson allowing six runs and recording only six outs, a wobbly-kneed, strong-armed, emotion-filled Price jogged onto the mound to take over in the third inning. \u201cI felt like I was about to fall off the mound there,\u201d Price said. He didn\u2019t. Instead, Price retired the side in order, and did the same the next inning, firing a fastball that often crackled into the mid-90s. In the fifth inning, Derek Jeter welcomed Price into the Stadium\u2019s record books. Jeter tied Lou Gehrig for most hits at Yankee Stadium with his 1,269th, a home run to lead off the fifth inning. Price, a 6-foot-6 left-hander taken after his junior season at Vanderbilt, allowed another run in the seventh inning when Wilson Betemit singled in Alex Rodriguez. In five and a third innings, Price struck out four and allowed three hits, walking none. More important to Rays Manager Joe Maddon, he backed up a battered Jackson and kept his team within striking distance. \u201cI think it just reaffirmed what we thought of him,\u201d Maddon said. \u201cAll we really wanted to do was stretch him out a little bit and make sure that he didn\u2019t go out there and regress. He did a great job, showed us some good composure and was able to save our bullpen.\u201d As far as debuts go, there was no win or loss to commemorate it. But memorable it was, amid a burden of lofty expectations. After his first inning, Price said, \u201cI wasn\u2019t nervous anymore, and I was all right.\u201d Price, 23, made a rapid ascension through the Rays\u2019 minor leagues, starting his professional career in Class A Vero Beach. He was recalled over the weekend from Class AAA Durham, which had been eliminated from playoff contention. In 19 minor league starts in the regular season, he had a 12-1 record and a 2.30 earned run average. In the long run, Price will not be coming in from the bullpen too often. His role down the stretch this month, however, will be molded as the season concludes. \u201cObviously, he will be a starter in the future,\u201d Maddon said. \u201cI thought today\u2019s showing was a positive sign, and we\u2019ll see how he progresses. It\u2019s good to have someone like that in your back pocket.\u201d Good in that a hard-throwing left-hander is at his disposal with the Rays\u2019 eyes cast toward their first playoff appearance in franchise history. And also reassuring. \u201cLike a handkerchief,\u201d Maddon said.", "keyword": "Price David;Baseball;Tampa Bay Rays;New York Yankees;Yankee Stadium (NYC);debuts"}
{"id": "ny0002032", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/03/01", "title": "With Iowa Swabian Hall, a Farmer\u2019s Quest for Perfect Pig", "abstract": "IONIA, Iowa \u2014 There once was a young boy who built motorcycles with his father, raised pigs for Iowa county fairs and eventually fell in love with computers when his fingers first tapped on a Teletype portal in middle school. He would write programs to help with eighth-grade algebra and use ASCII code to create images resembling Playboy centerfolds. When he grew up, he would parlay his ingenuity into a career of building Internet portals for cities and computer networks for big companies. He would spin another business from a whim and a joke \u2014 building aquariums out of old Macintosh computers. And when he reached his mid-40s, rather than settle into his career, he embarked on a new unconventional endeavor, one he hopes will revolutionize an industry. Carl Edgar Blake II has tried to breed the perfect pig. Fatty and smooth. Meaty and flavorful. He crossed a Chinese swine, the Meishan, with the Russian wild boar \u2014 emulating a 19th-century German formula created when King Wilhelm I imported the fatty Meishan to breed with leaner native wild pigs in what is now the state of Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg. They called that one the Swabian Hall. With dark and juicy meat, it assumed a place among Europe\u2019s finest swine. Mr. Blake, 49, has bet that his 21st-century American version \u2014 the Iowa Swabian Hall \u2014 can be equally delectable. The early reviews have been promising. Two years after his operation began, his pig won a heritage pork culinary contest in 2010, Cochon 555 in San Francisco . Image Some of Carl Edgar Blake II\u2019s pigs, an Iowa Swabian Hall, left, and a Meishan sow, at a finishing farm. Credit Stephen Mally for The New York Times \u201cIt was great meat,\u201d said Staffan Terje, the chef and owner of Perbacco in San Francisco, who prepared Mr. Blake\u2019s pig for the competition. \u201cIt was rich in flavor and well-marbled,\u201d said Michael Anthony, the executive chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York, who cooked dishes for his restaurant with an Iowa Swabian Hall. At a glance, Mr. Blake would hardly be considered part of the upscale culinary culture. His 6-foot-2-inch balloonlike frame, and his beard, ponytail and signature overalls with the left strap unslung (he owns a dark pair for funerals), scream more Andr\u00e9 the Giant than Jean-Georges. He shoots guns and soaks in \u201chillbilly hot tubs\u201d (dig a hole, lay a tarp, fill with water and dive in). Then again, Mr. Blake has long taken pride in his unconventionality. \u201cI can build a motorcycle, I can fly a model airplane, I can throw somebody out of a bar, I can wrestle a pig and I can program a computer,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m a strange duck, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d His leap into the heritage pork business started when he read an article online about a popular breed, the Mangalitsa, that a businessman was raising in Washington State. Unable to buy any of the businessman\u2019s stock, Mr. Blake began researching heritage pigs and said he discovered that the Swabian Hall regularly outperformed other fine swine in taste contests. Image A Russian wild boar. Credit Stephen Mally for The New York Times After asking around, he eventually found Meishan hogs that Iowa State University was using for research and bought several of them. He bought a Russian wild boar named Hercules from a hunting reserve. In November 2009, the first Iowa Swabian Hall pigs were born. They are floppy-eared with black fur, broad jowls, a thick rump, creased foreheads, and long bodies and snouts. When butchered, they have a broad slab of ivory fat to go with deep red meat, the antithesis of the \u201cother white meat\u201d craze when the pork industry moved toward leaner hogs. But Swabians have not been universally admired. Herb Eckhouse, the owner of La Quercia , a cured meat manufacturer near Des Moines, made prosciutto from one of Mr. Blake\u2019s pigs and said he would not work with them anymore because they were too fatty. He said he was having difficulty selling the meat. \u201cWe found that we preferred other breeds to that breed for their flavor,\u201d he said. Criticism is among the smallest bumps in Mr. Blake\u2019s porcine journey. He has had to wrestle aggressive pigs and once even shot one. State inspectors have visited, demanding to see his wild boars out of concern that he possessed them illegally. The police have responded to accusations of maltreated pigs. The gaunt backs of his Meishan pigs were normal, the result of their belly fat stretching the skin, he said he told the police, who were initially skeptical. \u201cYou ain\u2019t taking them over my dead body,\u201d Mr. Blake said he told the authorities, who, after further investigation, let him be. Image Mr. Blake, proud of his unconventionality, has a \u201cman cave\u201d at his farm, right. Credit Stephen Mally for The New York Times There was even a suspected case of poisoning, Mr. Blake said. One morning in the middle of 2009, two men \u2014 one tall, one short \u2014 showed up in a black truck at a farmstead where Mr. Blake kept his pigs, he said. The family living there thought the men were friends of Mr. Blake\u2019s, and they entered the barn with a black satchel. About a week and a half later,he said, his sows were birthing dead piglets. At one point, Mr. Blake said, his herd had grown to more than 1,200. But the numbers have since decreased sharply through sales, samples he gave away and some hitches in the raising process. There was one instance, he said, when a man he had hired to raise the pigs botched a castration, leaving one testicle attached. Mr. Blake also struggled to finance his operation, which he calls Rustik Rooster Farms . He went to banks, the government, angel investment groups and individuals but could not get anyone to invest. Things became so dire that one day last summer he had decided to quit, only to receive a call the next morning from a producer of the Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cBizarre Foods,\u201d saying the network wanted to feature him in an episode. The episode was broadcast on Monday, and Mr. Blake said he has been inundated with calls from people across the country wanting pigs and bacon. Over the past year, Mr. Blake has stepped back from his operation to regroup. He has hired Amish farmers in eastern Iowa to raise his pigs so he can focus on the marketing and sales. Several times a week, with a Rockstar Energy Drink in hand, he slides into a red, rusted 1994 Toyota pickup truck to make the five-hour round-trip journey from his headquarters here to the farmers\u2019 rolling pastures. By March, he said, he hopes to have about 50 of his Swabians market-ready \u2014 he sells them for $3.75 to $4.50 per pound. Within the next seven months, he said, he hopes to have enough pigs to begin selling them weekly. In the meantime, he is supporting himself by selling bacon, beef sticks, novelties like bacon floss and bandages, and roasting pigs for special events. But Mr. Blake is never quite satisfied. He speaks giddily of the hydroponic chambers (not \u201chippie hydroponics,\u201d he says) he uses to make barley to feed his pigs, and of a \u201csuper pig\u201d he is breeding \u2014 one with the tasty qualities of the Swabian that can be raised at the speed of commercial pigs. For now, he is not saying much more than that. \u201cI think we\u2019re on the verge of something,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Pork;Pig;Agriculture;Iowa;Carl Edgar Blake II"}
{"id": "ny0256922", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/08/22", "title": "For Tigers, Cabrera Is Complete Package, Handled With Care", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 The call came to Dave Dombrowski\u2019s home around Thanksgiving in 2007, and he knew that was unusual. Dombrowski, the president and general manager of the Detroit Tigers , does not usually hear from his boss at home. But Mike Ilitch, the pizza mogul who owns the Tigers and the N.H.L.\u2019s Red Wings, had read that the Florida Marlins were shopping their superstar first baseman, Miguel Cabrera. Dombrowski confirmed the rumor. \u201cWell, can we get him?\u201d Ilitch said. \u201cDon\u2019t you think he\u2019d look good in a Tigers uniform?\u201d Of course, Dombrowski said, but he would not fit into the budget. \u201cWell, let\u2019s see what we can do,\u201d Ilitch replied, and Dombrowski understood. Two weeks later Cabrera was a Tiger, and before his first game for the team, he signed an eight-year contract worth $152.3 million. Since then Cabrera has been the best hitter in the American League. He is more than halfway to 3,000 hits and 500 homers, and he is only 28. \u201cI think he\u2019s going to be right up there in the top five of all time,\u201d said the Tigers\u2019 hitting coach, Lloyd McClendon, who may be right. Only five players in major league history have had 1,500 hits and 250 homers, while hitting .310 or better, through their age-28 season. They are Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Hank Aaron, Albert Pujols and Cabrera. That is heady company, but Cabrera said he did not think much about his place in history. \u201cIt\u2019s too early,\u201d he said Friday night after the first victory of a three-game sweep over the Cleveland Indians. \u201cYou never know what\u2019s going to happen tomorrow or next month or next year. I\u2019ve got to live for a lot of years. I live day by day, one day at a time, and try to do my job.\u201d That phrase \u2014 one day at a time \u2014 may have been a throwaway athlete clich\u00e9. But it is also a mantra that has long helped recovering alcoholics. And while Cabrera has never publicly called himself an alcoholic, two incidents in the last three years have threatened to undermine a prolific career. On the final Saturday morning of the 2009 season, with the Tigers\u2019 playoff hopes fading fast, Dombrowski took another surprise phone call about Cabrera. Dombrowski was summoned to pick up Cabrera at the Birmingham, Mich., police station. Cabrera\u2019s wife had called 911 after the couple fought, and the police said Cabrera\u2019s blood-alcohol content was 0.26 percent. Three months later, Cabrera denied that he had an alcohol problem but said he had made a mistake and was speaking by phone with a counselor. Dombrowski said he believed Cabrera did not have another drink until this February , when he was arrested in Fort Pierce, Fla., and jailed on suspicion of drunken driving. The police report said Cabrera drank from a bottle of Scotch in front of an officer and repeatedly refused to cooperate. (A hearing has been delayed until Sept. 15.) When Cabrera reported to camp, five days after the rest of the position players, he apologized and said, \u201cIt was just one bad decision on my part.\u201d He has not discussed the subject since, limiting his interviews to baseball topics. Raul Gonzalez , a former major leaguer who serves as Cabrera\u2019s sober companion in a program established by Major League Baseball and the players union, does not speak with the news media. Dombrowski would not detail Cabrera\u2019s program but said there were strong checks and balances, and for Cabrera to play, he must comply. Cabrera has played every game this season. \u201cWhen you\u2019re not with somebody 24 hours a day, and I guess even if you were, you\u2019d still have some concerns,\u201d Dombrowski said. \u201cSo, sure, there is always a concern. Do I think he\u2019s committed? Yes. Do I think he\u2019s doing everything he possibly can? Yes. Is there still some concern something could happen? Sure. That\u2019s why they call things addictions. They\u2019re hard.\u201d The former pitcher Dickie Noles , a recovering alcoholic who is the Philadelphia Phillies\u2019 employee assistance professional, said it would be foolish to assume a player was sober because he performed well on the field. \u201cPeople can function,\u201d Noles said. \u201cI mean, look at Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle functioned for a long period of time \u2014 or did he? I think if we really looked at alcohol the way we should, Mickey would have gotten help a long time before he did.\u201d More recent stars, like Dennis Eckersley and Josh Hamilton, have shared their stories of addiction as part of their recovery. However Cabrera has defined his problem \u2014 in public or in private \u2014 his teammates believe it is under control. \u201cWe all know what kind of a guy he is,\u201d catcher Alex Avila said. \u201cWe were just concerned with making sure he was all right. Once everybody felt that he was, it wasn\u2019t even an issue. It\u2019s like normal.\u201d Avila was 12 when he first met Cabrera, in the summer of 1999. Avila\u2019s father, Al, now the Tigers\u2019 assistant general manager, was the Marlins\u2019 scouting director when Cabrera signed from Venezuela for $1.8 million at age 16. Cabrera was a shortstop then, but Avila said he was already physically imposing. He would fill out to 6 feet 4 inches and 240 pounds, and learned his swing from an uncle, David Torres , who had played in the minors. Cabrera\u2019s mother was a softball star and his father also played baseball, giving Cabrera exceptional instincts. \u201cHe\u2019s one of the smartest players I\u2019ve ever been around,\u201d Avila said. \u201cA lot of times when you\u2019re playing the field, it\u2019s easy just to get lost in the game and not really know what\u2019s going on. But he knows, and the way his mind works, he\u2019s a baseball player, not only hitting, but also defense, base running, even pitch-calling. He might see things a hitter is doing that I can\u2019t see. \u201cThere\u2019s times I have looked at him, and I can tell, by the way he\u2019s looking at me, \u2018Well, I should probably call this pitch.\u2019 He\u2019s just very knowledgeable.\u201d McClendon said Cabrera could recite pitch sequences from months before. Younger hitters talk with him about the mental side of hitting, but Cabrera is so gifted there is little they can emulate from his swing. Outfielders Brennan Boesch and Austin Jackson both called Cabrera a natural, with extraordinary opposite-field power. Because of that, pitchers use extreme caution, feeding Cabrera a diet of slop. He has more walks than strikeouts this season, for the first time in his career, and only Jose Bautista has a better on-base percentage in the American League. \u201cWhen he stays in the strike zone, he\u2019s as good as anybody,\u201d Manager Jim Leyland said. \u201cWhen he doesn\u2019t swing at balls, he can be a wrecking crew.\u201d Cabrera has been especially dangerous lately, hitting .380 during a 17-game hitting streak that ended Sunday. He seems perfectly at peace in the Tigers\u2019 clubhouse, where his locker is the closest to the dugout tunnel, in the corner of the room, where he sees everything. On Saturday, he stood within a group of reporters huddled around Brandon Inge, a veteran just back from the minors. Cabrera waited for a few questions, then interjected an urgent one of his own: \u201cDo you wash your hair with shampoo? Pert Plus? O.K., that\u2019s good to know.\u201d He walked away, smiling and cackling, another fun day at the ballpark with a game starting soon. As always, Cabrera would show up to play. Whatever else he has dealt with since February, he has always done that. \u201cI always thank God for giving me an opportunity to go out there every day,\u201d Cabrera said. \u201cWhen you play every day, you\u2019re able to do something. When you don\u2019t play, you\u2019re able to do nothing. I would say I\u2019m lucky.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Cabrera Miguel;Detroit Tigers;Dombrowski Dave;Florida Marlins;Ilitch Mike"}
{"id": "ny0295008", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/12/05", "title": "Bhutan Faces an Important Test of Press Freedom", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 In what rights advocates regard as an important test case for press freedom in Bhutan, a prominent journalist is facing a defamation suit for sharing a Facebook post documenting a property dispute involving a local businessman. The journalist, Namgay Zam, has been accused of libel by the businessman, Sonam Phuntsho, in what Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay has called a landmark case that could shape proposed restrictions on social media usage in Bhutan. The post includes allegations that Mr. Phuntsho had garnered favors from the country\u2019s judiciary, where his son-in-law is chief justice. Ms. Zam, a former television presenter with the state-run Bhutan Broadcasting Service, and the woman who wrote the post, Shacha Wangmo, face a maximum fine of about $38,000 \u2014 around 15 times the country\u2019s annual per capita income \u2014 or up to three years in prison if convicted. Ms. Zam and Ms. Wangmo presented evidence at a district court in Thimphu, the capital, on Monday. Known for its adherence to \u201cgross national happiness,\u201d a development indicator that values levels of well-being over economic indicators such as gross domestic product, Bhutan was considered a success story in South Asia when it held peaceful democratic elections in 2008, after a century as an absolute monarchy. But some say the case exposes fault lines in the country\u2019s record of protecting its constitutional freedoms of speech and of the press. Because many public officials and institutions have ties to the popular royal family, journalists cite a high level of self-censorship that deters Bhutanese from criticizing the elite. A 2014 report from the Journalist Association of Bhutan found that a majority of the 119 respondents felt \u201cunsafe\u201d covering certain types of events. Many of the respondents also said it was difficult to gain access to information in the country, citing few resources and little institutional support. Ms. Zam said that because of her actions she had been called \u201cantinational\u201d by some sections of Bhutanese society. \u201cWhat\u2019s not coming out in national media comes out in social media, and oftentimes, it is the truth,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cMedia freedom is diminishing. We had our high point in 2008, during the first democratic elections, but it\u2019s just been a downward spiral since then.\u201d Sarah Repucci, senior director of global publications at Freedom House , a nonprofit group that releases an annual report on press freedom, said the case could affect Bhutan\u2019s rating on the list, which she said was \u201cconsistently mediocre.\u201d \u201cWe have not in recent years documented cases specifically against journalists,\u201d she said, but she noted that certain topics in Bhutan, including the expulsion of thousands of residents of Nepalese descent from the country, are still considered taboo. Mr. Phuntsho\u2019s son-in-law, Dasho Tshering Wangchuk, the chief justice of Bhutan, said in an interview that he believed free speech existed in the country, but that social media \u201cguidelines\u201d were needed, in part to protect the \u201csovereignty and security\u201d of a small country like Bhutan, which is sandwiched between the regional superpowers, China and India. \u201cThis particular social activist is a very popular young lady and a lot of impressionable young people follow her,\u201d he said of Ms. Zam. \u201cFor them, whatever she writes is the gospel truth. That becomes dangerous.\u201d \u201cLike in the judiciary, also, you must have your code of ethics,\u201d he said, referring to the state of journalism in the country. \u201cThe court will not force them to divulge some source. But then we must all remember that your fundamental rights are not absolute. It\u2019s subject to reasonable restrictions.\u201d", "keyword": "Freedom of the press;Social Media;Bhutan;Defamation;Facebook;Namgay Zam"}
{"id": "ny0200792", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/09/17", "title": "St. Joseph, Superagent in Real Estate", "abstract": "MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. Lord knows it\u2019s rough out there in the housing market. Still, you had to feel bad for Patty Bonadies, digging with a spoon in the rocky soil in front of the new three-story colonial for sale at 7 Old Roaring Brook Road in search of the tiny statue of St. Joseph she had buried in hopes of helping the house sell. \u201cI should have brought a bigger spoon,\u201d she said. She wanted to move the statue, which she had planted near the front door in May, to a perhaps more propitious spot. Her late mother-in-law\u2019s house in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is for sale, and she plans to plant a statue there, too. \u201cYou have to believe,\u201d she said. \u201cIn this market, you\u2019re looking for any help you can get.\u201d Mrs. Bonadies, a real estate agent for three years, is Roman Catholic, but St. Joseph, who is said to look after homes, families and carpenters, among many other things, isn\u2019t just for Catholics anymore. With the housing market still dismal, the Catholic tradition of planting a statue of him as a way to help a house sell is going like gangbusters online, in stores selling religious goods and elsewhere \u2014 even if home sales are not. \u201cIn the past, we\u2019ve seen some upticks in sales of the kits whenever there\u2019s a sign that the housing market is on the skids,\u201d said Nicholas Cole, director of marketing for the Catholic Company , based in Charlotte, N.C., which sells religious items online and through catalogs. \u201cBut the sales of the product have been really strong for the last two years. We saw a really big spike last year, and they\u2019re still really selling. I don\u2019t want to say \u2018desperate\u2019 is the right word, but I think it\u2019s selling to people across the board, not just Catholics.\u201d He added that the statue had helped him sell a house and a condominium in the past few years. It\u2019s not completely clear when the tradition began, and devotees disagree over how best to participate. Head down? By the \u201cfor sale\u201d sign? In a flowerpot? But it has been adopted by many real estate agents, who suggest that sellers, particularly in this market, give the statue a chance. A religious-goods store in the area has four green-and-white St. Joseph kits \u2014 a 3 \u00bd-inch plastic statue, a card with the words to a prayer to St. Joseph, and an instructional pamphlet \u2014 on its front counter. The front of the kit shows the statue and a house with a \u201csold\u201d sign. The back explains: \u201cCan\u2019t sell home? Ask St. Joseph. He\u2019s helping 1,000s.\u201d It adds, \u201cFaith can move mountains and homes!!!\u201d And online, St. Joseph is everywhere. The Underground Real Estate Agent Kit offers four-inch and eight-inch statues; a book, \u201cSt. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent\u201d; and a free online home listing. On sites like Amazon.com, the reviews of the statues tend to be pretty straightforward. It either worked (\u201cHouse had been on the market for 7 months and got an offer within 1 week of this statue\u2019s arrival\u201d) or it didn\u2019t (\u201cI fell for it! I bought the St. Joseph. I followed his instructions to the T and got no buyers for my house still after 2 months.\u201d) SOME find the notion of magic house sales distasteful. \u201cIf you just bury the statue in the ground, you\u2019re not going to sell your home,\u201d said Gerard Siccardi, whose family runs a religious-goods business in White Plains. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to pray. You\u2019re supposed to have some reverence about this. It\u2019s a faith-based item.\u201d But Stephen J. Binz, the author of 25 books on religion, including \u201cSt. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s the lightest of them,\u201d he said), said that even on a casual level, there\u2019s a kind of grass-roots spirituality involved. \u201cI believe God can work in people\u2019s lives in all sorts of ways without our really understanding them,\u201d he said. And so, for whatever reason, the statue has plenty of fans, even if asking the right price might mean more than finding the right statue. Joe Becwar, an observant Catholic, said he sold his house in Southampton, N.Y., soon after his mother suggested the statue and his real estate agent told him to plant it head down, facing the house, by the \u201cfor sale\u201d sign. His brother in Chicago had the same experience, he added. And Cheryl Katz, who is Jewish and works with Mrs. Bonadies, said the statue helped her sell two houses as a real estate agent. Now that her own house is on the market, she\u2019s using it for herself. \u201cYou want to believe in something,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Housing and Real Estate;Superstitions;Roman Catholic Church;Christians and Christianity"}
{"id": "ny0090793", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/09/13", "title": "Searching for the Best Bar Burgers in New Jersey", "abstract": "Finding a simple cheeseburger is difficult these days. Gastropubs, for example, take enormous pride in offering fancy burgers with novel-like back stories. You know them: hamburgers made from a hand-massaged steer that was slaughtered by Michael Pollan himself, grilled over virgin charcoal and topped with an insouciant blue cheese that was aged under the bed of a Trappist monk in New Hampshire. But there are only so many overwrought burgers a girl can eat. I yearned for a great bar burger, the kind best enjoyed along with a beer or three, so I went on a quest to find one in North Jersey. I found three shining examples. My criteria: They had to be simple; asking what kind of meat the burger was made from, I would be just as likely to hear \u201ccow\u201d as \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d They needed proximity to beer. And they had to be juicy \u2014 the right amount of greasy to sop up the hops. And one more rule: Each of these burgers had to be found in bars that served food, not restaurants that served alcohol, a distinction that Ellen LaMotta of Krug\u2019s Tavern in Newark made clear to me. Image Left, the burger at Zagursky\u2019s; right, its counterpart at the New Park Tavern. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times Ms. LaMotta is the co-owner of Krug\u2019s along with her brother- and sister-in-law, Frank and Susan LaMotta. Krug\u2019s has been in the same family since 1932. Ellen LaMotta lives in the apartment above the bar, just as earlier family members did before her. I visited Krug\u2019s shortly after its bacon cheeseburger had been named New Jersey\u2019s Best Burger by NJ.com. We were welcomed with a friendly warning from our waitress, Christina LaMotta, Ellen\u2019s daughter: Because of the recent triumph, we were told we might have to wait an hour for our burgers. The wait turned out to be only 40 minutes, and it was well worth it. The bacon cheeseburger was excellent, with a crunchy exterior and juicy middle. Ellen LaMotta\u2019s pride in her family\u2019s accomplishments was evident in a conversation we had after my visit. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of burgers, a lot of chop meat and a lot of running around,\u201d she said. On my visit to Zagursky\u2019s Bar and Grill in Whippany, my friend and I sat in our car behind the unassuming white building on the side of the old Route 10 as we considered which of the two not-very-inviting doors was the entrance. Luckily, a man popped out of one, grinned and waved at us enthusiastically. We sheepishly waved back, assuming he had mistaken us for people he knew. Image Bobby Courtney in the kitchen of the New Park Tavern in Jersey City. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times We met him moments later, after braving one of the doors. \u201cHiya, I\u2019m Kevin,\u201d he said as he handed us menus. \u201cBut you can call me \u2018Kevin from Heaven.\u2019 \u201d Kevin also goes by the name Kevin Yannotta. He owns the bar with his equally friendly brother Bobby. The Yannotta brothers\u2019 grandparents, Anna and John Zagursky, built the bar in 1945. At the time, Whippany was home to three mills and a box-making factory, Bobby Yannotta said. With the mills running three shifts, 24 hours a day, Zagursky\u2019s would close at 2 a.m., only to reopen again at 7 to receive the workers from the night shift. \u201cIt was a way different world,\u201d Bobby Yannotta said wistfully. When mill workers went on strike, he said, Mr. Zagursky would lend them money. \u201cWhen the strike was over, they\u2019d pay him back. And the guys who didn\u2019t? He\u2019d chase them down at the other bars in town to get his money back.\u201d The mills closed in 1979, just as the Yannotta brothers were starting out at the bar (their grandparents turned the license over to Bobby and Kevin in 1987). Nowadays, the crowd is made up of softball teams, patrons wanting to watch sports and local construction workers popping in for a quick lunch and some midday cheer, plus a stalwart group of retirees who used to work nearby. No matter who shows up, they can expect a warm welcome and a very good burger. The patties come from a local butcher and are gently griddled and then steamed, which accounts for their superior juiciness. American cheese is placed on both the top and bottom roll, a simple innovation we should all consider. Image The interior of the New Park Tavern. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times In my highly unscientific study of bars with the best burgers, I found two recurring facts: The places with the tastiest burgers were all on their second or third generation of continued ownership. The other: They were all easy to miss. And finding the New Park Tavern in Jersey City was the most difficult. The discreet, unmarked doorway of the tavern is meant to invoke a speakeasy, but it also means any new patron is more likely to find the latex fetishist shop a few doors down. The proximity of said shop made me pause before pushing open the unmarked door to the tavern. The bartender gestured toward a small chalkboard at the end of the bar that displayed the six-item menu, which ranged in offerings from a cheeseburger to that quintessential New Jersey food, the Taylor ham sandwich . I placed my order and was a little surprised to see the bartender turn and walk to the grill to start preparing it. He turned out to be Bobby Courtney, the bartender, cook, manager and son of the owner of the tavern. Mr. Courtney\u2019s father, John, bought the bar in 1972, but the original tavern was built in the late 1930s. The patrons are a mix of police officers and firefighters, public workers and families. \u201cIt\u2019s a regular crowd,\u201d Bobby Courtney said. \u201cThe grandkids of our early patrons are now coming in. It\u2019s a lot of neighborhood people.\u201d In fact, they only felt the need to list themselves in the phone book three years ago. Mr. Courtney\u2019s burger, which won a similar NJ.com \u201cbest burger\u201d contest in 2013, was a testament to simplicity. It was nearly round, like a glorious giant meatball, and it was perfect: beefy with just the right amount of shirt-staining fattiness. When I pressed Mr. Courtney for the secret, he was humble. \u201cThere\u2019s no special technique,\u201d he said. \u201cFlip it a few times. Don\u2019t squeeze it. And give it a little bit of love.\u201d", "keyword": "Restaurant;Hamburger;Newark NJ;Jersey City;Whippany;bars,nightclubs;Krug's Tavern;New Park Tavern;Zagursky's Bar and Grill"}
{"id": "ny0244834", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/04/11", "title": "Helping Immigrants Navigate Local N.Y.C. Government", "abstract": "At a Haitian church in Canarsie, Brooklyn, officials from the mayor\u2019s office spent a recent Saturday morning discussing food stamps and discrimination in the workplace, their words translated into Creole for an audience of some 50 people. The next night, another delegation spoke to a group of Bangladeshi immigrants in the Bronx about police precincts and community boards. In recent weeks, officials have held similar meetings with Albanians, Mexicans and West Africans. The forums are part of a new program, run by the mayor\u2019s office, that is intended to improve the relationship between city government and immigrants who are often wary of local authorities or unaware of city services available to them. One N.Y.C., One Nation, as the program is called, is in some ways an acknowledgment that despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg \u2019s vocal support for the city\u2019s immigrants, too many of them remain cut off from the mainstream. The first forums have found many immigrants distrustful of the local police, unengaged with their elected officials and unable to find reliable legal help for their immigration problems. \u201cHow do we fundamentally engage our immigrant communities to help them understand that their voice matters?\u201d asked Fatima A. Shama , commissioner of the Mayor\u2019s Office of Immigrant Affairs , which is coordinating the program. The initiative, which began in February, also represents a shift of emphasis for the Bloomberg administration, which has spent significant energy rallying mayors and business leaders to lobby for a broad overhaul of federal immigration policy \u2014 only to see its campaign stall in Congress. Instead of looking toward Washington, the new program focuses on government at its most humble: police precinct councils, community board meetings, zoning laws. While local officials and agencies directly affect immigrants\u2019 quality of life and sense of empowerment and security, Ms. Shama said immigrants rarely connect with them. At the meeting with Haitian immigrants at Beracan Baptist Church on Flatlands Avenue, the program\u2019s director, Camelia Ghiuzeli Mitchell, asked whether anyone had ever heard of police precinct councils \u2014 neighborhood groups that meet with the local police to discuss safety issues. Not a hand went up. \u201cOur immigrant communities,\u201d Ms. Shama said, \u201cknow how to navigate a lot of the city that they participate in \u2014 they know how to put a parade together. But do they know what a community board is? Are they engaged with the park cleanup?\u201d \u201cThe success of the city will always be dependent on people being a part of their communities,\u201d she added. \u201cNow more than ever we have to make sure that immigrants trust us.\u201d The program was created in part as a response to some of the inflammatory remarks in last summer\u2019s debate over a proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, as well as several high-profile attacks against Muslims, gays and other minorities. \u201cWe had some intolerance happening in the city, which forces us to be smarter to ensure that our immigrant communities feel more comfortable,\u201d Ms. Shama said. One Nation , a national foundation that promotes civic engagement with an emphasis on reaching Muslims, is financing the project with a two-year, $500,000 grant to be supplemented by at least $500,000 raised by the New York Community Trust. Ms. Shama said the New York initiative, which seeks to engage myriad immigrant groups on a wide range of projects, is the first of its scale in the country. Posters and speakers will urge immigrants to become more involved with their children\u2019s schools, to participate in English study programs and to open bank accounts. College readiness seminars and financial literacy sessions will be offered. But the program also seeks to identify a new wave of leaders in immigrant communities who have ideas for reshaping their neighborhoods to better suit the changing populations. The mayor\u2019s office is teaming up with the Coro New York Leadership Center to offer small grants to 20 immigrants, who will receive leadership training and help in creating community development projects. The hope is to cultivate a group of potential leaders to represent communities whose voices are seldom heard, Ms. Shama said. Advocates for immigrants said they were pleased to see the city focusing on civic engagement, as long as the authorities continued offering basic services to the needy. \u201cIf you\u2019re shuttling your family to soup kitchens, it\u2019s hard to play a meaningful role on the community board,\u201d said Andrew Friedman, co-executive director of Make the Road NYC . \u201cBut there is a real desire in immigrant communities throughout the city to figure out how to engage.\u201d The meeting with the Haitians showed both the project\u2019s potential and its challenges. The group sat patiently through more than an hour of presentations about city services and privacy policies, but at the end, few questions touched on any of the programs mentioned. Instead, nearly all asked about their immigration status, a matter largely beyond the program\u2019s purview. Still, many in the audience said the session proved valuable. \u201cAs an immigrant, we don\u2019t know our rights, how to get help, who to talk to,\u201d said Verlande Antoine, a Haitian nursing assistant who has lived in New York for nearly a decade. \u201cYou never know when you\u2019re going to need help.\u201d", "keyword": "Immigration and Emigration;Bloomberg Michael R;New York City;Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs"}
{"id": "ny0184124", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2007/12/22", "title": "\u2018Facts Are Stubborn,\u2019 Romney Once Said, and He Should Know", "abstract": "FORT DODGE, Iowa \u2014 There was the period last spring when Mitt Romney claimed while campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire that he had been a hunter \u201cpretty much all my life,\u201d only to have to admit later that he had seriously hunted only on two occasions. Then there was the endorsement Mr. Romney claimed on the NBC News program \u201cMeet the Press\u201d last Sunday that he received from the National Rifle Association while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, when it turned out the group had never endorsed him. Mr. Romney\u2019s latest concession is that he only \u201cfiguratively\u201d saw his father, George, march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., something he claimed in his highly publicized speech about his Mormon faith this month. Some publications have raised doubts that Mr. Romney\u2019s father ever marched with Dr. King. But Mike Allen, a writer for the political Web site Politico.com , reported on Friday that he had interviewed two people who recalled seeing George Romney and Dr. King marching together in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in 1963. Mr. Romney once said, in reference to misstatements by his Republican rival Rudolph W. Giuliani, \u201cFacts are stubborn things.\u201d But does he have his own problem with blurring the truth? Some of the instances when Mr. Romney has tripped up on his facts show that he is prone to exaggeration, taking what is essentially a kernel of truth and stretching it to bolster his case. On Thursday, for instance, at a campaign stop in Indianola, Iowa, he ran into trouble when talking about his record on illegal drugs while governor. Mr. Romney had been running ads in Iowa attacking his rival Mike Huckabee for his record on clemencies while governor of Arkansas and for reducing penalties for methamphetamine-related crimes. \u201cI\u2019m very proud of the fact that we, my state, when I was governor, we made it tougher for people with meth labs,\u201d Mr. Romney said, echoing his commercial in which he claimed that he \u201cgot tough on drugs like meth\u201d while in the governor\u2019s office. \u201cWe cracked down on crime and on meth in particular,\u201d Mr. Romney added. \u201cIt\u2019s a very important topic. I want to make sure we do everything we can to keep our kids off of this terrible, pernicious, captivating drug.\u201d But both the advertisement and Mr. Romney\u2019s claims on his record were misleading. Mr. Romney\u2019s office proposed legislation that would have toughened penalties on those in possession of methamphetamine and the chemicals to manufacture it, but the bill stalled in the state legislature. After The New York Times pointed out Mr. Romney\u2019s misstatement in a posting on its politics blog, he made sure to correct himself before taking questions from reporters at his next campaign stop here. \u201cIf I said this morning that we \u2018got tough\u2019 on methamphetamines , I proposed we get tough on methamphetamine, and I\u2019ve corrected that right here for all of you,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to make any error of reporting that somehow Governor Romney actually got it done.\u201d His claim of being a lifelong hunter was similar. When asked at public forums about his stance on guns, Mr. Romney portrayed himself as a sportsman, a \u201chunter pretty much all my life,\u201d who strongly supported the right to bear arms. He recalled how he had gone hunting with his cousins as a teenager. The last time he went hunting, he said, was last year, when he shot quail in Georgia and \u201cknocked down quite a few birds.\u201d \u201cSo I\u2019ve been pretty much hunting all my life,\u201d he said again. After the notion was challenged by The Associated Press, Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign initially conceded that those were the only two instances he had really been hunting in his life, but later rushed to add that he had also gone pistol shooting for \u201cvarmints\u201d at his vacation home in Utah, although he did not have a hunting license or own a gun. On the National Rifle Association endorsement, Mr. Romney argued that the group had phone banked for him, but he conceded it did not formally endorse him. \u201cFrankly, I didn\u2019t realize the N.R.A. had an official endorsement program that was different than their phone banking for me,\u201d Mr. Romney said Thursday to reporters here. \u201cThe fact that they phone banked and encouraged their members to vote for me, I thought qualified for saying they had endorsed me.\u201d With the questions now being raised by various publications about whether Mr. Romney\u2019s father, a former Michigan governor who died in 1995, ever marched with Dr. King, no one is disputing that George Romney was active in the civil rights movement. What is being challenged is the precision of his son\u2019s statement. Indeed, with many of these instances, there has often been at least an element of truth in his claims. But for a candidate who has featured his business background and made much of his propensity for careful analysis of data, Mr. Romney is not always precise. Asked about it on Thursday, he said he would correct whatever was wrong. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be hyper-scrutiny of each word,\u201d Mr. Romney said. \u201cThat\u2019s part of running for president. I\u2019m up to it. You can look at the things I\u2019m saying about my record and about the events of campaign and history, and you\u2019ll find if now and then I miss a word or I get something slightly off, I\u2019ll correct it, acknowledge where it\u2019s wrong. But the overall thrust, the overall meaning, of the story, is very accurate.\u201d", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2008;Romney Mitt"}
{"id": "ny0225742", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/10/17", "title": "Fifa to Examine Bribe Story", "abstract": "FIFA said it would examine evidence from a British newspaper alleging that two FIFA executive committee members offered to sell their votes in World Cup bidding. The Sunday Times of London filmed Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Temarii, a Tahitian who is the president of the Oceania Football Confederation, asking for money to finance projects. The reporters were posing as lobbyists who wanted to help bring the World Cup to the United States. \u00b6New Mexico defender Elizabeth Lambert, an Internet sensation when she was caught on video last November yanking a Brigham Young player to the ground by the ponytail, stayed on the bench as the Lobos beat B.Y.U., 1-0, in double overtime in Albuquerque in the teams\u2019 first game since the hair-pulling fracas. Lambert was suspended for the first two games of the season and has played sparingly since. lambert \u00b6The Manchester United star Wayne Rooney was dropped from the team\u2019s starting lineup without explanation and played only the last 20 minutes of a 2-2 draw with West Bromwich Albion in a home game in the Premier League. Rooney was left on the bench days after contradicting Manager Alex Ferguson by denying that he had missed games because he had been struggling with an ankle injury. rooney", "keyword": "World Cup (Soccer);FIFA;Sunday Times;Bribery and Kickbacks;Soccer"}
{"id": "ny0120533", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/07/08", "title": "Behind Stabbing, a Feud About a Band Called the Cro-Mags", "abstract": "The violence that erupted during a music festival at Webster Hall in the East Village on Friday night lasted just a few minutes, but apparently it had been brewing for some time. When it was over, Michael Couls, the bass player of the Cro-Mags , an influential New York hard-core punk band, had been slashed with a knife, and one of the band\u2019s founders, Harley Flanagan, was under arrest after being caught by security, witnesses said. The attack took place during a show that also featured the bands Sick of It All and Vision of Disorder and was part of the first CBGB Festival , organized by investors who recently bought the assets of the now-defunct music club that stood on the Bowery for more than 30 years before being closed in 2006 . Mr. Flanagan, 45, was the band\u2019s original bassist. On Saturday, he was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon. John Joseph, the band\u2019s lead singer, said that Mr. Flanagan had been at odds with other members of the Cro-Mags since he left the band in 2000 and had not been permitted to rejoin. \u201cThis dude has been a negative thorn in the side of this band forever,\u201d Mr. Joseph said. \u201cI hope he gets what\u2019s coming to him.\u201d Few bands were as energetic as the Cro-Mags during the heyday of the Lower East Side hard-core scene in the mid- to late 1980s. Their first record, \u201cThe Age of Quarrel,\u201d featured an illustration of a mushroom cloud on the cover and driving songs with shouted lyrics about existential fear and the limits of anarchism. In many ways the songs were a reflection of the world as seen by Mr. Flanagan, who left school at an early age and began hanging out on the decaying streets of the Lower East Side, where rent was cheap, abandoned buildings proliferated and the drug trade flourished. The hard-core scene gradually become less visible, said Clayton Patterson, a photographer on the Lower East Side who has documented many of the bands, but it has experienced a revival in recent years. The crowd was waiting for the Cro-Mags on Friday night when Mr. Flanagan darted from the dressing room while yelling something that onlookers could not make out, according to a spectator, Elie Perler, 30. At almost the same time, Mr. Perler, the co-creator of the Bowery Boogie blog , said security guards yelled, \u201cGet his hands,\u201d and \u201cHe has a knife,\u201d as they converged on him. \u201cIt took all of those huge guys; he was squirming and flailing,\u201d he said. The guards subdued Mr. Flanagan, with one sitting on his back, Mr. Perler said, and others grabbing his hands and feet. Mr. Flanagan appeared to have injured his leg in the struggle, Mr. Perler said. Mr. Couls emerged from the dressing room pressing a bandage against his chest, according to Mr. Perler. \u201cIt was a little tense,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a little scary.\u201d It was also the end of the show. The police ordered everyone out. The festival ends on Sunday. \u201cWe are saddened to learn about the events that occurred last night at Webster Hall,\u201d a spokesman for the festival said on Saturday. A police report did not shed any light on exactly what motivated the melee but said that Mr. Flanagan first attacked a man in the dressing room, slashing him in the side and arm with a knife. When a second person intervened, the police said, Mr. Flanagan bit that person\u2019s hand and slashed him.", "keyword": "Rock Music;Assaults;Webster Hall;Cro-Mags (Music Group);East Village (NYC);Music;Couls Michael;Flanagan Harley;Cro-Mags"}
{"id": "ny0011053", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2013/02/24", "title": "At Duke, Basketball Tent City for Fun and Profit", "abstract": "DURHAM, N.C. \u2014 Duke is an elite private university where the buildings are pretend Gothic, where tuition is $42,000 a year, and where hundreds of students eagerly and voluntarily spent five wintry weeks camping in the famed tent city known as Krzyzewskiville for one simple reason: to get a good seat for the basketball game against archrival North Carolina. But even at Duke, where crazy is cool and basketball is king, some administrators, faculty and students are asking if big-time sports \u2014 and some of the behavior that goes with it \u2014 is a big waste of time and energy. \u201cFor a big state school, there\u2019s some justification for big-time sports; for a private institution like Duke, it\u2019s a little harder to figure out,\u201d said Charles T. Clotfelter, a professor of public policy, economics and law at Duke who has written a book called \u201c Big-Time Sports in American Universities .\u201d \u201cWhy are we here?\u201d Clotfelter added. \u201cWe\u2019re here to educate people. There has been a lot of new chatter about this in the past three years. I think it\u2019s better for us to come clean and say, yes, we do commercial sports.\u201d That kind of talk is not confined to Duke, or to other elite, private universities. It is taking place at college campuses of all sizes around the country. Duke, however, is a university accustomed to having it all \u2014 high academic standards, a vibrant social life and big-time sports \u2014 and that was enough to take a trip to see what the debate on campus was like. In 2010, the Knight Commission, an N.C.A.A. watchdog group made up of university presidents and other leaders, reported that spending on high-profile sports was growing at up to triple the pace of spending on academics. \u201cWe\u2019ve reached the point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose,\u201d William E. Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland system and a co-director of the commission, said last year. Clotfelter pointed out that the current debate about the damaging fallout from big-time college sports echoes an argument that dates to the 1920s. \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s different now is the money,\u201d he said. Image Duke students camping in the tent city called Krzyzewskiville in a bid for tickets to the game against North Carolina. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times And at Duke, the money generated by the basketball team is way past crazy. In his book, Clotfelter set out to document the nationwide academic cost of athletic success. Among his findings: at colleges with teams in the N.C.A.A. men\u2019s basketball tournament, library patrons view 6 percent fewer articles a day as long as the team is in the tournament; on the day immediately after a team wins in an upset or a close game, library use plunges by 19 percent. Clotfelter also found that from 1985 to 2010, average salaries at public universities rose by 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches. Just how crazy is the basketball money at Duke? To find out, I visited a six-story ziggurat called the Schwartz-Butters Athletics Center . It towers over Cameron Indoor Stadium and a new $18.5 million structure known as the Michael W. Krzyzewski Center for Academic and Athletic Excellence, where the men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball players practice and lift weights, and where all of the university\u2019s 620 athletes in 26 sports can come to work on their studies. On the top floor, I was ushered into the office of Mike Cragg, the senior associate director of athletics, who is in charge of what is called the Legacy Fund, which has raised $65 million since 2000 to finance the men\u2019s basketball program \u2014 scholarships, salaries, the operating budget and capital projects. I asked Cragg who came up with the idea. \u201cCoach K had a vision,\u201d Cragg said. \u201cWe realized we had an opportunity to monetize the commitment to the basketball program, and we could expand our donor base outside alumni.\u201d The most generous donor has kicked in $7.5 million, and the minimum donation is $1 million. With a thought to some of the ideas Clotfelter has studied, I said, \u201cHave you ever considered getting rid of K-Ville?\u201d Cragg looked at me like I might require medical attention. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing we would want to get rid of,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s part of the university fabric. It brings an energy to the program because our staff and players know we\u2019re all in this together with the students. That translates onto the court.\u201d Indeed, Duke\u2019s fans, known as the Cameron Crazies, are as synonymous with the team as Krzyzewski. They are passionate, inventive and, depending on your viewpoint, uproariously funny or brutally annoying. Krzyzewski \u2014 winner of 946 college games, 4 national championships and 2 Olympic gold medals \u2014 has called them Duke\u2019s \u201csixth man.\u201d When it comes to the tent village, students say that the experience is a vital part of their Duke education. No one pretends much studying is done, but they say it helps them with team building, time management and organizational skills. (There are various self-imposed rules that must be followed in the village.) Many opponents of the practice realize it is here to stay. \u201cBy now, tenting has become part of the Duke brand and undergraduate experience,\u201d said Orin Starn, who teaches the anthropology of sports at Duke and has spoken out against the \u201cstrain of anti-intellectualism\u201d that comes with big-time college sports. \u201cNone of us on the faculty or in the Duke administration would dare to suggest that student time might be better invested elsewhere.\u201d In \u201c Buck Duke\u2019s University ,\u201d a withering satire that appeared in H. L. Mencken\u2019s American Mercury magazine in 1933, W. J. Cash derided the tobacco baron James Buchanan Duke\u2019s school as a \u201cBabbitt factory \u2014 a mill for grinding out go-get-\u2019em boys in the wholesale and undeviating fashion in which his Chesterfield plant across the way ground out cigarettes.\u201d Image Students formed a line in the early morning for a home basketball game against Maryland. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times That is a far cry from what Duke is today. It is a diverse institution that attracts qualified and motivated students from nearly every state and some 90 foreign countries. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Duke has a strong reputation for teaching and research, as well as renowned graduate schools of business, public policy, engineering, medicine and law. Amid all the diversity and academic excellence, there is also a concerted effort to curtail some of the less-than-intellectual practices linked to sporting events, including tailgating parties, heavy drinking and other assorted shenanigans. The face of this moderation effort is Larry Moneta, the vice president for student affairs. Moneta discontinued Tailgate, an alcohol-saturated costume party that used to precede football games. (The last straw was when a 14-year-old boy was found passed-out drunk in a portable toilet.) Moneta also supported a policy that requires most on-campus parties to have a monitor who looks for signs of excessive drinking. When people started pitching tents in K-Ville as early as December, Moneta put a stop to it, decreeing that tenting could not start until after winter break. \u201cThe extremes have been cut back dramatically \u2014 out-of-control parties, the number of alcohol-related hospitalizations,\u201d Moneta said. \u201cI think we\u2019ve done a good job of working with students to find reasonable solutions. Our goal has been to take extremes out of the equation. I want them to have a good time and wake up alive the next morning.\u201d There have even been timid steps to let some of the air out of Duke basketball. Richard H. Brodhead, a former English professor and dean at Yale who was named Duke\u2019s president in 2004, recently said he found it \u201cfoolish\u201d and \u201cdisheartening\u201d when high school students listed the men\u2019s basketball team as the primary reason they applied to Duke. The comment set off a typhoon of response \u2014 some of it positive, most of it negative \u2014 among students and alumni. Brodhead probably was not surprised. On his first day on the job, he got the distressing news that Krzyzewski was being wooed by the Los Angeles Lakers of the N.B.A., who were said to be offering $40 million. Brodhead found himself in an unfamiliar bind. He had spent his entire career in the Ivy League, where there are no athletic scholarships, and now he was getting a crash course on the importance of sports at Duke. Specifically, he was learning that the most powerful person on campus is the men\u2019s basketball coach. Realizing that losing Krzyzewski would not be the ideal way to start his tenure, the scholarly Brodhead swallowed hard and joined a crowd of students chanting, \u201cCoach K, please stay!\u201d Brodhead was also part of a human chain forming the letter \u201cK\u201d outside Cameron. Starn, the professor of the anthropology of sports, said at the time, \u201cWhat you saw there was the lay of the land.\u201d Sitting among the Cameron Crazies during a Duke game is a lot of fun. The team is thrilling to watch, and the fans are, well, crazy. The experience is like being trapped in a mosh pit inside a jet engine during a hurricane. But if you can get beyond the clich\u00e9s \u2014 the costumes, the body paint, the pep band, the noise \u2014 you realize you are in a rarefied world of oak paneling, gleaming brass rails and polished floors, where things happen with military precision, echoing Krzyzewski\u2019s West Point background. Cameron, you realize, is not just a basketball arena. It is a tabernacle, a place whose trappings, rituals and exclusivity are perfect to prepare Duke students for the places they are likely to wind up after graduation: big banks and law firms, corporate board rooms and country club locker rooms. No, Cameron is not only a basketball arena. It is a flawless expression of the thing that beats in the heart of Duke and every other elite school in the land: privilege. And privilege comes with prerogatives for students, including the freedom to do things that seem to have nothing to do with getting an education. Things that are, quite simply, nuts.", "keyword": "Basketball;College Sports;Duke;College basketball;College"}
{"id": "ny0146718", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/07/10", "title": "Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come", "abstract": "GREENWICH, Conn. Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend\u2019s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: \u201cIf we build it, they will come.\u201d After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it \u2014 a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes. But, alas, they had no idea just who would come \u2014 youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid\u2019s field of dreams is an adult\u2019s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present. \u201cPeople can remember how much fun it was to go out in the woods in the summer, build a fort, do something fun and creative, so there\u2019s something pretty cool in what these kids did, especially at a time kids grow up in such an incredibly structured and stressful environment,\u201d said Lin Lavery, one of three Greenwich selectmen, who inherited Wifflegate while the first selectman, Greenwich\u2019s version of mayor, is on vacation. \u201cBut we have a situation that\u2019s escalated,\u201d Ms. Lavery said. \u201cNeighbors are upset that it\u2019s too close to their property; building has been done on town property; there are issues of traffic and drainage. We\u2019re hoping to come up with a compromise, but there are a lot of issues to address.\u201d There\u2019s plenty of local history in Wiffle ball (it was invented up the road in Fairfield) and Greenwich land-use disputes (where to start?), but Vincent and Justin say they just wanted a place to play Wiffle ball. They got materials from a friend\u2019s basement plus two big pieces of plywood being thrown away by a Shell station on East Putnam Avenue. They fished pallets out of Dumpsters and spent perhaps $200, mostly on green paint. But even before they were finished, things began to get complicated. They were told the neighbors had complained, the field was on town-owned land, they needed a permit to put up their field and it would probably have to come down. This being Greenwich, they decided not to go quietly. They and/or parents alerted the local newspaper and politicians up to Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele of nearby Stamford. Soon they had everyone in town talking about it, with most of them seemingly put off by the notion that even a Wiffle ball field needs to enlist the armies of adult supervision and legalistic oversight. \u201cBACK before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious hours in the summer sun,\u201d the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, wrote in an editorial in support of the youths on Wednesday. The regular players, mostly high school boys but including Tara Currivan, 15 (who swings a mean bat and brings lemonade to the field), and Scott Atkinson, 13, seem a little befuddled by the whole thing. \u201cThey think we\u2019re a cult,\u201d said Jeff Currivan, 17. \u201cPeople think we should be home playing \u2018Grand Theft Auto.\u2019 \u201d And they seem to get the fact that many adults are taken with the idea of kids\u2019 doing something that\u2019s not structured, not organized and not oriented toward improving your SAT scores. \u201cIt\u2019s just old-fashioned fun,\u201d said Vincent Provenzano. \u201cWe did it on our own. Maybe people think that\u2019s unusual.\u201d We\u2019d all like our own Field of Dreams, but it\u2019s worth remembering that Mr. Costner\u2019s was in an Iowa cornfield. And, with all due nostalgia for simpler childhoods in simpler times, it\u2019s possible Greenwich\u2019s Wiffle version \u2014 on a lot valued at $1.25 million, according to the Greenwich newspaper \u2014 was too good to be true. The neighbors, one an ultra-endurance athlete who does charity work around the globe, another building a house to accommodate her brother, who uses a wheelchair, turn out to be not that much different from most suburbanites seeing their backyard go from their own to a quasi park full of teenagers from near and far. They say that the land floods and that the area was designated by the town as a drainage area, a function largely undone when the youths stripped away all the greenery and undergrowth. The complaining neighbors want the field closed immediately. The field had 40 people last weekend for a Wiffle tournament, which is something no one bargained on when they bought their houses. \u201cI\u2019m all for Wiffle ball and apple pie and baseball and the American flag, but there are plenty of fields in town they can use instead of building something in people\u2019s backyard,\u201d said Liz Pate, who is building a new house behind what\u2019s now home plate. \u201cIf I come home at 6 at night after working all day, I want peace and quiet. I can\u2019t have that. I have dozens of people behind my house playing Wiffle ball. If their parents think this is so great, let them play at their house.\u201d The liability panic is adult nuttiness except when it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a fairly raw issue in Greenwich, where, for instance, a doctor was awarded $6.3 million a few years back when he broke his leg in two places while sledding with his 4-year-old son. All kids deserve a Huck Finn summer. We perhaps have lost our collective minds about our overscheduled, overstressed young. But, in the end, maybe there was a reason that Kevin Costner built that Field of Dreams in Iowa and not in Greenwich.", "keyword": "Athletics and Sports;Children and Youth;Greenwich (Conn)"}
{"id": "ny0231959", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2010/08/03", "title": "The Complexities of Being on a Roll", "abstract": "Galileo\u2019s rolling of spheres down an inclined plane four centuries ago disproved Aristotle\u2019s notion that falling (or rolling) objects move at a constant speed. That was one of the earliest examples of using experiments to devise and test hypotheses to explain observations. When the rolling object is not rigid but flexible, the behavior of the rolling becomes more complicated and counterintuitive, as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered in more recent experiments. Christophe Clanet , a professor at \u00c9cole Polytechnique in France who was a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. in 2008, challenged graduate students there to update Galileo\u2019s 17th-century study. One group came up with the idea of rolling circular elastic bands. Placed on their sides, the bands, about two inches in diameter and cast out of rubberlike vinyl polysiloxane, were squashed a little by gravity into an oval shape. To study the rolling behavior, the students placed the bands inside a steel cylinder, a foot in diameter, which spun like a hamster wheel or a clothes dryer drum. One might expect that as a band began rolling, it would become more circular with the centrifugal force counteracting the pull of gravity. Instead, the top of the band sagged even more, into a peanut shape. At fast enough speeds, the band\u2019s top half sagged enough to touch the bottom part. While the rotating motion would make the band\u2019s shape more circular, that was not the only force at work. There was also energy stored in the stretching and bending of the band, and the interplay of the dynamics. The findings appeared last month in the journal Physical Review Letters .", "keyword": "Physics;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0100515", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/12/27", "title": "Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens Preview", "abstract": "Steelers (9-5) at Ravens (4-10) 1 p.m. Line: Steelers by 11.5 It is hard to imagine this season going worse for the Ravens, who have 19 players on injured reserve but were on their way to irrelevance long before the injuries. As the Ravens wait for the season to end, they will have to endure a week against a dominant Pittsburgh offense that is playing as well as it has in recent memory, even without the star running back Le\u2019Veon Bell. Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown, Martavis Bryant and DeAngelo Williams have the Steelers dreaming of a seventh Super Bowl ring, and the Ravens are just a small speed bump on the road. Pick: Steelers", "keyword": "Football;Ravens;Steelers"}
{"id": "ny0287467", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/08/16", "title": "On Avenue of Americas, No Brazil or Mexico. Panama or Peru, Either.", "abstract": "There is no Brazil. It\u2019s a good thing the eyes of the world are on Rio. If they scanned the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan \u2014 intended as an expression of Pan-American unity \u2014 they would find Brazil missing from the shrinking, deteriorating ranks of national medallions suspended over the thoroughfare. Sixth Avenue, a wide north-south artery of Manhattan, was renamed on Oct. 20, 1945, as \u201can expression on the part of our people of the love and affection we have for our sister republics of Central and South America,\u201d in the words of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia , who presided at the ceremony with President Juan Antonio Rios of Chile. In 1959, medallions depicting the coats of arms of the nations of the Western Hemisphere were installed on 300 lampposts from Lower Manhattan to the southern edge of Central Park. They were made of porcelain enamel. Each was three feet in diameter. Many, if not most, were removed during a renovation of the avenue in the 1990s. Today, if you\u2019ve seen 22 Americas medallions, you\u2019ve seen them all. Mexico is missing. (No small matter in this presidential election year.) So are Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico and El Salvador, to name just a few. Streaks of rust darken the center of many of the surviving medallions, seeping down from their attachment clips. These are not the only ways the medallions betray the indifference of the city\u2019s Transportation Department. A white horse gallops rightward in a field of blue on Venezuela\u2019s coat of arms. But in 2006, President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez ordered the \u201c imperialist horse \u201d to turn leftward , as his government was doing. New York\u2019s horse never got the memo. Canada added a red ring to its coat of arms in 1994. It symbolizes the Order of Canada , an honor bestowed for outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. The ring is missing from the New York medallion. Image A statue of President Benito Ju\u00e1rez of Mexico near 41st Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times So is the 10th star from a ribbon in the Bolivian coat of arms , symbolizing a claim to the coastline area of Litoral, which would be the landlocked nation\u2019s link to the sea \u2014 if it were not in the hands of Chile. Surinam changed its spelling to Suriname after it gained independence from the Netherlands. You wouldn\u2019t know it from the country\u2019s two medallions on the Avenue of the Americas. But you probably don\u2019t even know the avenue by that name. Even on Day 1, the fancy designation had a hard time getting traction. Four thousand World War II veterans marched in the October 1945 renaming ceremony. They stole the show. The New York Times said the street more truly resembled the \u201c Avenue of the Navy \u201d that day. Over the years, New Yorkers clung to Sixth Avenue. Only real estate developers, prestige-minded corporate tenants and The Times used Avenue of the Americas. In 1984, Mayor Edward I. Koch ordered the restoration of supplementary \u201cSixth Avenue\u201d signs. The thoroughfare still retains a special hemispheric character, thanks to the presence of monuments along its route honoring Juan Pablo Duarte of the Dominican Republic, Gen. Jos\u00e9 Artigas of Uruguay, Jos\u00e9 Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva of Brazil, Benito Ju\u00e1rez of Mexico, Gen. Jos\u00e9 de San Mart\u00edn of Argentina, Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar of Venezuela and Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed of Cuba. There is also Little Brazil Street , which New Yorkers know as West 46th Street. It intersects with the Avenue of the Americas and would seem the perfect spot for a Brazilian coat of arms. Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions in 1998, when Brazil was in their ranks, a spokesman for the Transportation Department said, \u201cD.O.T. is reviewing what would be required to put them back up .\u201d The medallions were stored in an agency sign shop, where they still are. Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions in 2008, a spokesman for the agency said, \u201cIn the interest of safety, we have removed some medallions but the spirit of the avenue will live on .\u201d Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions last week, a spokesman said there were no plans to replace them but that the department would \u201cconsider discussions with any entities wishing to pursue the matter.\u201d The agency\u2019s inaction has had advantages. When the medallions went up, the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, was not yet anathema in the United States. Even after relations between the two countries ruptured, Cuba\u2019s coat of arms remained on the avenue. Today, three Cuban medallions can be seen, at King, West Fourth and 57th Streets, as if the City of New York has always known what your mother told you: Keep something around long enough and it is bound to come back into fashion.", "keyword": "NYC Transportation Dept;Avenue of the Americas NYC;Signage;NYC;Fiorello H la Guardia"}
{"id": "ny0233724", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2010/08/12", "title": "Red Bulls Display Some of Their Star Power", "abstract": "HARRISON, N.J. \u2014 Global soccer stars have been shuttling into the United States all summer, some playing exhibitions for national teams or foreign clubs, others as designated players in the domestic league. At times, the fanfare that accompanied those cosmopolitan figures as they jetted in and out has overshadowed the fact that there is a league here in full swing. In the thick of a playoff hunt, the Red Bulls played an important match against Toronto F.C., a division rival, on Wednesday night at Red Bull Arena, and won, 1-0. The victory kept the Red Bulls in second place in the East with 31 points, while Toronto stayed in third with 26. \u201cIt was a key game for both teams,\u201d Red Bulls Coach Hans Backe said. \u201cWe knew it was going to be a battle.\u201d And still, the focus for some remained on which stars were in the building, and which ones were not. The Red Bulls\u2019 marketing team trumpeted this match as the \u201cofficial\u201d home debut of the designated player Thierry Henry . He had previously played in an exhibition at home against Tottenham Hotspur on July 23 \u2014 and even scored a goal to appease the crowd of 20,312. But that did not count. Just 19,035 bought tickets for Wednesday, yet another game that the Red Bulls, with a new $200 million, 25,000-capacity stadium, failed to sell out. But the building will have its first sellout soon, on Saturday night, when the Los Angeles Galaxy arrives with its own star, Landon Donovan, on the field and another, the injured David Beckham, on the bench. That game has been sold out since July 27. That night will also mark the home debut of Rafael Marquez, the Mexican midfielder who along with Juan Pablo Angel completes the Red Bulls\u2019 troika of designated players. Toronto forward Wade Barrett called them \u201cthe Miami Heat of our league.\u201d Marquez missed Wednesday\u2019s game after being summoned for duty with his national team. So Red Bulls fans made do with two stars. At its best, the forward-line tandem of Henry and Angel will operate like a see-saw, the two of them making contrapuntal moves, up and down, to draw defenders and create space for one another. It was this dynamic that created the game\u2019s only goal, in the 23rd minute. After coaxing the Toronto defense into its own area, Angel dropped back into a pocket of space and headed a lofted ball into the path of Henry, who had been sprinting toward him from the center circle. \u201cWe talk, I know his movements,\u201d Angel said. \u201cWhat I try to do is the opposite of what he does, just to create spaces for each other.\u201d Released on his own and at full speed behind Toronto\u2019s defense, Henry appeared to be tripped by keeper Stefan Frei, who had slid wildly toward the ball. Henry yelled for a penalty, but his protestations were short-lived. Seconds later, Henry regained possession of the ball and barreled his way through three Toronto defenders before laying it off to Seth Stammler at the top of the penalty box. Stammler scooped the ball with his laces over a wall of defenders to Joel Lindpere, who knocked the ball easily inside the far post. \u201cFor me it was a penalty, but the ref didn\u2019t call it,\u201d Henry said. \u201cI stood up after, and we scored straight after, so it\u2019s not really important.\u201d Henry came into the game nursing a strained groin muscle sustained in the Red Bulls\u2019 game against the Chicago Fire on Sunday and was substituted at halftime. But he had done his job. And the Red Bulls reverted to a rough and scrappy defensive stance in the second half to preserve the lead. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t pretty today,\u201d said Backe, who admitted that with better players, the play on the field would be more attractive. But the quality of play should elevate Saturday when the Red Bulls face the Galaxy, who sit in first place in the West. The Red Bulls will also welcome back Marquez, who played 57 minutes in a 1-1 draw against Spain in Mexico City. \u201cWe are all in a hurry to play against them,\u201d Henry said of the Galaxy. \u201cRafa is going to be back. When he plays in the middle, he does make a lot of difference. Henry is the most famous player to sign with M.L.S. since Beckham joined the Galaxy in 2007, but their experiences have been markedly dissimilar. No \u201cHenry-cam\u201d has made its way into a broadcast, and he has generally avoided painting himself as an ambassador of the game. Instead, Henry has extolled the virtues of life\u2019s simpler pleasures: enjoying a cup of coffee undisturbed, or riding public transportation. The Red Bulls say that Henry was signed to win games. With Marquez about to join him again, they will be expected to do just that.", "keyword": "New York Red Bulls;Henry Thierry;Toronto FC;Major League Soccer;Soccer"}
{"id": "ny0057939", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/09/12", "title": "Austrian Court Unblocks Assets of Former U.S. Ambassador\u2019s Wife", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 A Vienna court has unfrozen assets belonging to the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, a former United States ambassador reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering, according to a statement from the couple and their lawyer on Thursday. Holger Bielesz, a lawyer for the couple, said in a telephone interview that a higher Vienna court ordered the accounts unfrozen on Sept. 3, but that the decision was conveyed to him only on Wednesday. The case surfaced on Monday after Profil, an Austrian newsmagazine, reported that the American authorities were investigating transfers into seven accounts held by Mr. Khalilzad\u2019s wife, Cheryl Benard, totaling 1.15 million euros, or nearly $1.5 million. Profil said that documents from the Vienna legal authorities, including a Justice Department order from May 2013 concerning an investigation into Mr. Khalilzad\u2019s financial dealings, had been found in a garbage dump by a blogger between March and August. The newsmagazine said the inquiry concerned possible tax evasion and money laundering. Although the American authorities had sought only information about Ms. Benard\u2019s accounts in Vienna, Mr. Bielesz has said, Austrian prosecutors obtained a court order in February freezing them. Ms. Benard, a social scientist and author, holds American and Austrian citizenship. Mr. Khalilzad is a former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations. Mr. Bielesz refused to confirm details in the Profil report, but the statement said: \u201cThe appellate decision by the regional high court is a complete vindication of the position of Ms. Benard and Ambassador Khalilzad. The seizure of the accounts is lifted, and the funds in the accounts are no longer frozen.\u201d Image The former envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is reported to be under investigation on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. Credit Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times Quoting the couple, the statement said the Vienna court \u201cfurther ruled that there was no authority for Viennese prosecutors to seek the bank information regarding our accounts in the first place, much less be given the ability to unlawfully restrain us from accessing our accounts.\u201d It made no mention of any continuing investigation into Mr. Khalilzad\u2019s financial dealings. On Monday, a law enforcement official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Justice Department had asked the Austrian government for help in the case but did not elaborate on its nature and scope. Asked about the investigation, Mr. Khalilzad said in an email, \u201cI am not aware of what the D.O.J. is doing and so cannot comment on that.\u201d Mr. Bielesz called it \u201ca scurrilous twist of fate\u201d that the appellate court had already ruled in favor of Mr. Khalilzad and Ms. Benard when the matter became public on Monday. In a statement issued by his lawyers on Monday, Mr. Khalilzad, 63, emphasized that neither he nor his wife faced any formal accusation or charges. The former ambassador, who was born in Afghanistan, is now a business consultant in Washington. He first served in the State Department in the mid-1980s, and worked for the Reagan administration and both Bush presidents. He was a special adviser to President George W. Bush on Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2003, he was appointed ambassador to Kabul, the Afghan capital. He became ambassador to Iraq in 2005, and to the United Nations in 2007. Ms. Benard earned her doctorate at the University of Vienna. The two met at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972.", "keyword": "Zalmay Khalilzad;Money laundering;Tax Evasion;Cheryl Benard;Frozen Assets;Vienna;Austria"}
{"id": "ny0055578", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/09/04", "title": "Fantasy Football: Week 1 Player Tiers", "abstract": "In this statistical model, I apply a clustering algorithm called the Gaussian mixture model to an aggregation of expert ranking data provided by Fantasypros.com . The algorithm finds natural tiers and clusters within the data. The charts that result visualize the tiers and help you decide your starting lineup each week. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers slides down to Tier 3 in Week 1 because of his matchup against the N.F.L.'s best defense, the Seattle Seahawks. Others in this tier include Nick Foles, Matt Ryan, Colin Kaepernick and Jay Cutler. Tom Brady leads Tier 4, as Rob Gronkowski is expected to play, or at least that\u2019s what Gronkowski has said. Philip Rivers did not make the cut to Tier 4. Those who drafted him as an underdog will have to wait until Week 2, as he faces the tough Arizona Cardinals this week. His opponent, Carson Palmer, gets a boost to Tier 5, as the San Diego Chargers\u2019 defense was the eighth most generous to fantasy quarterbacks last season. Fantasy Football: Tiered Player Ranking Charts Charts resulting from a statistical algorithm find natural tiers and clusters within fantasy football player ranking data. Running back Nine players make up the top two tiers this week at running back. Montee Ball and Marshawn Lynch have a slight edge on Eddie Lacy, Arian Foster and DeMarco Murray in Tier 2. While Frank Gore lands in Tier 4, he should be benched in favor of Alfred Morris and Doug Martin. Reggie Bush is only one tier ahead of Joique Bell, who is expected to get much of the goal-line work for the Detroit Lions. After Bell, a large drop off occurs to Tier 7, where we find Steven Jackson facing New Orleans, and Bernard Pierce, who has been underwhelming and faces Cincinnati, which had the second best run defense last season. Wide Receiver The top 23 wide receivers, filing Tiers 1-4, all have a good chance of posting WR1 numbers this week. Emmanuel Sanders makes the cut into Tier 4 with the recent news of Wes Welker\u2019s four-game suspension. There is some uncertainty about all the players in Tier 5. With Robert Griffin III looking shaky in the preseason, DeSean Jackson\u2019s first game with Washington will be closely watched. Eric Decker debuts for his new team, the Jets. He is clearly the No. 1 receiver for a team that is known for being unproductive for fantasy league players. Marques Colston continues to not break into the top tiers because he shares the field with Jimmy Graham. Tight End The position is largely unaffected by matchups in this first week, with the same 10 players from the fantasy draft season making up the top three tiers. Zach Ertz does not make the cut to Tier 3. It looks like experts are waiting to see if his preseason hype carries over into a real game before buying into him. He is also expected to split the position with Brent Celek. Travis Kelce has a higher expert consensus rank than Delanie Walker, despite having a lower average rank, signaling that the top experts like Kelce more.", "keyword": "Football;Fantasy sport;Statistics"}
{"id": "ny0050713", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2014/10/10", "title": "Arrest of Suspected Drug Lord in Mexico Is Seen as Symbolic Amid Police Scandal", "abstract": "MEXICO CITY \u2014 Vicente Carrillo Fuentes was the mediocre heir, the authorities said. He never quite gained the fame or authority of his brother, Amado Carrillo Fuentes \u2014 the Juarez cartel\u2019s late founder and the kingpin famous for both flying cocaine to the United States in jumbo jets and dying during failed plastic surgery in 1997. Instead, Vicente was vicious. Mr. Carillo Fuentes, who was arrested Thursday by Mexican authorities in the northern city of Torreon, ran the Juarez ring with an eye for killing and a thirst for allies, according to American and Mexican officials who have been pursuing him for 14 years. His was the era when the battle between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels made Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez as bloody and violent as a war zone. And yet at this point, with Juarez far more calm, experts said, his arrest was mostly symbolic. \u201cBy 2012, it was clear his forces had lost, and he went into exile,\u201d said Steven S. Dudley, a director of InsightCrime.com , a website that tracks and analyzes Latin American crime trends. \u201cSome thought he was even retired.\u201d Thus the timing of his arrest has raised suspicions among some in Mexico. President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto is in the midst of the largest security scandal of his term, with Mexico and the world aghast at the recent discovery of a mass grave with 28 bodies near a town in the state of Guerrero, where 43 students were reported missing after a confrontation with the police in late September. At a news conference Thursday, Mexico\u2019s attorney general announced that more graves and bodies had been found in the area, and that four more people had been arrested, in addition to the 22 police officers already detained. The Pe\u00f1a Nieto administration is also weathering criticism from human rights advocates over the way it has handled another case from late June, in which 22 people were killed by Mexican soldiers in a small mountain town near a common drug route. Mexican military officials initially claimed the deaths had occurred in a firefight only to later admit that at least some were killed after surrendering. Security analysts and former intelligence officers \u2014 along with American officials \u2014 have been arguing for months that these and other episodes clearly show that Mr. Pe\u00f1a Nieto needs to get serious about reforming the criminal justice system and establishing more effective systems of accountability for security forces, after spending the first two years of his presidency emphasizing the improving economy. The president, though, has stopped far short of an overhaul. Responding to the case of the missing students, Mr. Pe\u00f1a Nieto delivered a four-minute speech on Monday, in which he kept the focus relatively narrow, saying, \u201cWe need to find the truth and make sure the law is applied to those responsible for these outrageous, painful and unacceptable acts.\u201d At least in part, some experts said, the theatrics around Thursday\u2019s arrest \u2014 with Mr. Carrillo Fuentes put on display upon arrival at the airport here \u2014 seemed aimed at casting security forces in a better light. \u201cThe Mexican federal government is in desperate need of this kind of success, in order to neutralize the effects of all the attention to what happened in Guerrero,\u201d said Ra\u00fal Ben\u00edtez Manaut, a researcher at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City who studies criminal groups. And yet, he and others added, it was a legitimate success. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes has been on the run for more than a decade. \u201cThese people should not be allowed to walk free, unpunished, enjoying their drug-related money,\u201d Mr. Ben\u00edtez said. Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence official under Mexico\u2019s last president, Felipe Calder\u00f3n, added that the positive attention from an arrest dissipates too quickly \u2014 and the arrests themselves are too hard to obtain \u2014 to believe that this was simply a political ploy. If anything, he said, the arrest and its promotion \u201creinforces the sense of continuity between Calder\u00f3n and Pe\u00f1a, something the Pe\u00f1a people have been trying to run from.\u201d Indeed, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 51, was the second suspected kingpin captured over the last two weeks. On Oct. 1, the Mexican Army arrested H\u00e9ctor Beltr\u00e1n-Leyva, 49, who the authorities say is the head of the Beltr\u00e1n-Leyva cartel. He was caught in the colonial city of San Miguel de Allende while eating dinner at a seafood restaurant. Both men were heirs to their family businesses, and in middle-age, dinosaurs of the trade. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes often used disguises and moved from city to city, authorities said. Mr. Beltr\u00e1n-Leyva had been presenting himself as a local businessman. The new generation of criminal leaders, experts note, tends to be less polished, at least as brutal, and more diffuse in their organizational structure \u2014 like the gangs that are believed to have colluded with the police in the case of the missing students. That case, many argue, is far too significant and too telling to be brushed aside by an unrelated arrest. \u201cIf the capture had happened in any other given moment, it would have had a much greater effect and impact, a much bigger political gain for Pe\u00f1a Nieto,\u201d said Jorge Chabat, a drug and security expert at CIDE, a Mexico City research group. \u201cBut it\u2019s happening at a moment where all eyes and everyone\u2019s attention is on the missing students.\u201d", "keyword": "Mexico;Vicente Carrillo Fuentes;Drug Abuse;Drug cartel;Enrique Pena Nieto;Juarez Cartel"}
{"id": "ny0086288", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/07/10", "title": "July 4 Terror Plots Foiled, F.B.I. Chief Says", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Thursday that counterterrorism authorities had thwarted multiple attacks being plotted for July 4 by the Islamic State and its sympathizers in the United States. Mr. Comey would not say what the plots entailed or how many people had been arrested, but he said the plotters were among more than 10 people with ties to the Islamic State \u2014 also known as ISIS or ISIL \u2014 who had been arrested across the country in the past month. Those arrested \u201care products of this ISIL online recruiting, motivating, directing effort\u201d that often begins on Twitter, he said in his quarterly meeting with reporters, adding that some of the plotters had switched to encrypted communication that made them more difficult to track. In the days leading up to July 4, federal authorities and national security experts said that the United States was more susceptible to an attack. They cited repeated calls by the Islamic State for its sympathizers to carry out acts of violence in the group\u2019s name. Instead of pulling off spectacular attacks like those Al Qaeda often tried to mount, the Islamic State has tried to motivate its followers to stab police officers or shoot members of the military. To call attention to the threat, federal authorities sent bulletins to state and local law enforcement officials in the days before July 4. Image Workers set up a security checkpoint near the Capitol for an Independence Day concert. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images Mr. Comey said the bulletins were sent because \u201cwe perceived a potential threat that we were looking to make sure we motivated our state and local partners to focus on.\u201d The comments from Mr. Comey came a day after he and Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general, testified on Capitol Hill about how law enforcement agencies are struggling to intercept communications as encrypted channels have become more popular. Senators and representatives from both parties appeared to embrace that perspective. Mr. Comey has said he is hoping to spawn a debate on the subject and to find a solution that protects the privacy of individuals but also gives law enforcement officials access to the communications of criminals and terrorists. \u201cThe tools I have are significantly diminished by this phenomenon,\u201d Mr. Comey said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to stay after it and, as I said, we will try and use all the tools that we have. What I\u2019m trying to do is make sure the American people, who own the F.B.I., as I said yesterday, understand these tools you think we have are being changed significantly and I can see the future in which that change continues to grow.\u201d The country may decide ultimately that the problem is too difficult to fix, Mr. Comey said, and \u201cthat we\u2019re just going to live with law enforcement having the set of the tools they have.\u201d \u201cAnd my response to that is \u2018O.K., fine that what people decided is O.K. and that\u2019s where we\u2019ll operate and we\u2019ll stay at it and we\u2019ll still find ways to make these cases.\u2019\u201d", "keyword": "Terrorism;July 4th;FBI;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;James B Comey;Security;Spying and Intelligence Agencies;US"}
{"id": "ny0295115", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2016/12/02", "title": "Did Patriots\u2019 Title Hopes Go Down With Rob Gronkowski? Not So Fast", "abstract": "To hear some tell it, the Patriots\u2019 bid for a Super Bowl title was just derailed by the injury to their totemic tight end, Rob Gronkowski. Gronkowski has a herniated disc in his lower back and is most likely out for the rest of the season. He was to have surgery on Friday. Gronkowski gets a lot of attention, whether he is catching passes, hosting Nickelodeon shows or going on a cruise . But how big a blow will his absence be, really? At first glance, Gronkowski\u2019s numbers seem as great as ever, maybe even better. Before the injury, he was averaging more than 21 yards per reception, the best in the league and in his career. But those long catches do not hide the fact that Gronkowski was also being used less. He has been targeted only 38 times this season, fewer than five times a game. That is down from his average of eight or nine targets a game in recent seasons. N.F.L. Playoff Simulator: Every Team\u2019s Playoff Path Explore every team's path to the playoffs. He accounts for 10 percent of the Patriots\u2019 catches this season, 18 percent of their receiving yards and 14 percent of their receiving touchdowns. All those figures are down significantly from the last two seasons, when they were 20, 26 and 33 percent. And the Patriots still have one strong tight end, Martellus Bennett, who has actually been a bigger part of the offense than Gronkowski this year. They are not deep beyond Bennett, however, and will have to stop using so many two-tight-end formations. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t help losing great players,\u201d quarterback Tom Brady said on Westwood One radio . \u201cAnd to not have Gronk out there \u2014 one of our best players and most dependable, consistent players \u2014 not in the lineup makes things challenging for us. But that\u2019s what the N.F.L. season is about \u2014 it\u2019s about overcoming challenges.\u201d Gronkowski is a four-time Pro Bowler who is at the top of nearly everyone\u2019s list when the league\u2019s tight ends are rated. It would be laughable to suggest that his loss is not a blow to New England. But the Patriots (9-2) are still a serious title contender, and it helps that there is no obvious threat to them in the A.F.C. The Raiders also are 9-2 but have yet to convince most experts that they are for real. The Chiefs (8-3) are winning ugly . The traditionally strong Steelers (6-5) may not even make the playoffs, and last year\u2019s Super Bowl champions, the Broncos, are still finding their equilibrium with their new quarterback, Trevor Siemian. The Patriots evoke strong feelings among N.F.L. fans, and for fans and critics, it is hard to evaluate a big blow like the loss of Gronkowski dispassionately. But oddsmakers tend to see though partisanship and focus on the bottom line, and they have not flinched. The Patriots remain the comfortable favorites to win the Super Bowl with every bookmaker out there .", "keyword": "Rob Gronkowski;Patriots;Sports injury;Football"}
{"id": "ny0288797", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/08/12", "title": "Yankees Beat a Rival, but Alex Rodriguez Goes Hitless in His Fenway Finale", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 As Alex Rodriguez stepped into the batter\u2019s box for his 133rd game at Fenway Park on Thursday, the memories flooded back to him. It was not Eduardo Rodriguez that he saw on the mound facing him, or Sandy Leon catching, but Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe on the mound and Jason Varitek crouching down behind the plate in a wave of recollection culled from the height of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry of a dozen years ago. \u201cThat just kept coming back to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI kept seeing Schills back there and Pedro. It was pretty awesome.\u201d But in reality, it is 2016, and Alex Rodriguez, 41, who will be released by the Yankees after Friday\u2019s game, was not in his first year with the team, but in his penultimate game with it. He was greeted in much the same manner as he was in those overheated days of 2004 and 2005, with resounding boos and a smattering of cheers. He went 0 for 4 with a strikeout and an R.B.I. in the Yankees\u2019 4-2 win over the Boston Red Sox , then headed back to New York, where he will be honored Friday night at Yankee Stadium. Rodriguez came to the plate in the eighth inning with the bases loaded and one out, and he cued a 2-2 pitch in front of the plate. Leon pounced and threw out Rodriguez at first, but Brett Gardner scored for the 2,085th R.B.I. of Rodriguez\u2019s career, and his 1,095th as a Yankee. \u201cIt was not how I pictured it when I woke up this morning,\u201d Rodriguez said with a laugh. The Yankees announced Sunday that they would release Rodriguez after Friday\u2019s game against the Tampa Bay Rays but that he would remain an adviser to Hal Steinbrenner, the managing general partner. The Yankees allowed him to stay with the team until Friday so his mother and his two school-age daughters could watch his final game with the team. \u201cTomorrow,\u201d he said, \u201cis about me thanking the fans for putting up with me for such a long time.\u201d", "keyword": "Yankees;Red Sox;Alex Rodriguez;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0055155", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/07/14", "title": "A Humorous Campaign for ThinkThin Urges Consumers to Skip the Guilt", "abstract": "Decades after the adman played by Cary Grant in \u201cNorth by Northwest\u201d asked his secretary to put a note on his desk reminding him to \u201cThink thin,\u201d a brand of protein bars offering those words of advice is starting a campaign centered on an idea long popular among admen: that a food product can be indulged in without generating guilty feelings. The campaign is the first significant national effort for the brand, known as the ThinkThin High Protein Bar, and it is the first big campaign being created by a new agency, Adams & Partners , based in the Venice section of Los Angeles. The budget for the campaign is estimated at more than $9 million. The campaign, which takes a humorous tack in introducing ThinkThin to a wider audience, includes commercials on television and online; print, digital and mobile ads; and a presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter . The ads use a slogan, \u201cthinkPositive,\u201d styled like the brand name, which is officially thinkThin, and an accompanying hashtag, #thinkPositive. The campaign is the most recent in a skein of marketing initiatives for protein-laden products, reflecting a growing interest \u2014 or fad, trend, craze, take your pick \u2014 among consumers in getting more protein in their diets, which is increasing sales of groceries like Greek yogurt and nuts in addition to protein bars . For example, the August issue of Family Circle magazine carries four full-page ads that play up the protein in Barilla Plus pasta, Horizon organic milk boxes, Kellogg\u2019s cereals and MorningStar Farms veggie burgers. An article last week in USA Today bore the headline \u201cTaco Bell Pumps Protein Into Eats.\u201d And General Mills has brought out a version of its venerable Cheerios cereal brand called Cheerios Protein , in two flavors. The new variety got top billing in a recent Target weekly circular on a section of a page devoted to products \u201cnew at Target.\u201d The ThinkThin High Protein Bar comes in 10 flavors, and sibling bars like ThinkThin Lean Protein and Fiber, along with ThinkThin High Protein and Fiber, come in multiple flavors, too. Add to the mix all the products energy bars \u2014 among them, Balance Bar , Clif Bar, Kind, Luna, Power Bar and Zone Perfect \u2014 and the target audience, typically women ages 18 to 54, could be overwhelmed when trying to figure out which bar to buy. \u201cWe call it a rainbow of confusion at the shelf,\u201d says Megan Crossland, the marketing director, based in Santa Monica, Calif., of the ThinkThin parent, ThinkThin L.L.C . That is compounded because \u201cwe know we have very low awareness as a brand,\u201d she adds. \u201cWe had a lot of success with experiential marketing and sampling, doubling distribution in the last year,\u201d Ms. Crossland says. \u201cWe need to create a lot of brand awareness to support that distribution.\u201d \u201cWe have some better awareness in the West,\u201d she adds, because the brand started in California, \u201cbut over all, awareness is low, under a percent nationally.\u201d \u201cI\u2019d be really happy,\u201d Ms. Crossland says, if the unaided awareness of the ThinkThin High Protein Bar \u2014 that is, consumers bringing up the brand without being prompted \u2014 grew to 2 percent as a result of the campaign. In addition to generating awareness, she adds, the campaign seeks \u201cto differentiate ourselves from the rest of the category, to set ourselves apart, in an emotional and unique way.\u201d Humor is a differentiator because \u201cif you look at a lot of positioning\u201d of other brands, Ms. Crossland says, \u201cyou\u2019ll see performance and functional messages.\u201d Image A print ad in the new campaign for ThinkThin protein bars. The thought that the campaign seeks to convey \u2014 that a ThinkThin High Protein Bar can be enjoyed with \u201czero guilt\u201d \u2014 helps deliver the message that the bar has \u201c20 grams of protein\u201d and \u201czero grams of sugar,\u201d she adds. The idea to focus on guilt-free eating came, Ms. Crossland says, after the company began working with Chris Adams, the founder of Adams & Partners; he had been an executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles and before that worked at TBWA/Chiat/Day on brands like Apple, Nissan and Pedigree. \u201cA group of us at the company come from a more traditional packaged-goods background and were fortunate to have worked with him,\u201d she adds. \u201cIn talking through things with the consumer, we landed on this insight that nobody really has to feel guilty\u201d about eating a ThinkThin bar, Ms. Crossland says, which could be dramatized by \u201ctrying to juxtapose\u201d that in a lighthearted way with \u201cwhat other things in life women can feel guilty about\u201d and then concluding with the \u201cthinkPositive\u201d theme. For instance, the initial commercial in the campaign, directed by Michael Downing at Epoch Films, begins with a lanky young man, running in skimpy shorts and a tank top, attracting the attention of three women at an outdoor cafe. After the ogling goes on for a bit, he and one of the women connect in a way that suddenly brings a look of dismay and chagrin to her face. \u201cHi, Mrs. Adams,\u201d says the runner, played by an actor named Pierson Fode. \u201cHey, say hi to Brian for me. O.K., bye.\u201d The voice of a female announcer then declares: \u201cThere are lots of things to feel guilty about. ThinkThin isn\u2019t one of them. Twenty grams of protein. Zero sugar. Zero guilt.\u201d The theme \u201cthinkPositive\u201d then appears on screen. In a similarly jocular vein, a print ad shows a ThinkThin High Protein Bar above the headline: \u201cGuilt free. Unless you steal one.\u201d The text at the bottom of the ad reads: \u201c20 grams of protein. 0 grams of sugar. 0 guilt. ThinkThin. ThinkPositive. Look for us in the energy bar aisle.\u201d Among the many products that have been peddled through the decades as guilt-free foods, perhaps the best-known is TCBY frozen yogurt, with this slogan: \u201cAll the pleasure. None of the guilt.\u201d A couple of years ago, Special K Popcorn Chips were promoted with the phrase \u201cNothing guilty about this pleasure.\u201d And the British retailer Marks & Spencer sells products under the label \u201cGuilt-free snacking.\u201d According to Mr. Adams, who is executive creative director of Adams & Partners, a \u201cstrategic brainstorming day\u201d with executives of ThinkThin led to a decision that the brand needed to convey more than \u201cenergy on the go\u201d to stand out in its crowded category. The idea that \u201cwomen should never have to feel guilty about what they eat\u201d was \u201csuch a huge idea,\u201d he says, \u201cand in creative development we made sure that was something we pushed.\u201d The decision was made to take a humorous tack so that \u201cwe would create something enjoyable and shareable,\u201d Mr. Adams says, making \u201cthe point in a fun way that indulging in a ThinkThin bar is something you can do without feeling guilty.\u201d Image A new ThinkThin commercial features a young man, in running shorts and a tank top, attracting the attention of a group of women. One of the women soon realizes with dismay that he is her son's friend. \u201cThere are lots of ways you could go with \u2018guilty\u2019; it\u2019s a pretty loaded word,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to bring people down.\u201d The campaign is meeting with some criticism in social media. For example, on Facebook and YouTube someone left this comment: \u201cYour commercial is so sexist! Since when should women be ashamed about checking out a younger man?\u201d Another comment, on Facebook, reads: \u201cWomen are already filled with more guilt than they should carry. Telling us there are a lot of things to feel guilty about perpetuates this silly myth that women should feel guilty over nothing. We shouldn\u2019t.\u201d There are also supporters of the commercial who have left positive comments \u2014 \u201cWin,\u201d \u201cha HA!\u201d \u2014 as well as rebuttals of the critics\u2019 remarks. There is also this comment from ThinkThin on both Facebook and YouTube: \u201cAt ThinkThin, we believe that women should never have to feel guilty about what they eat. Our new campaign makes this point in a fun way, while reminding women that they can always #thinkPositive about ThinkThin.\u201d Ms. Crossland weighs in, too. \u201cWe are all about empowering women,\u201d she says, \u201cand we want our brand to play a very positive role in their lifestyles.\u201d The founder of ThinkThin L.L.C. is a female entrepreneur named Lizanne Falsetto, she adds. The guilt-free idea \u201ctested terrifically\u201d with consumers, Ms. Crossland says. \u201cWe feel we have something with stopping power that will break through the clutter.\u201d \u201cGuilt could be a really serious topic; we\u2019re not trying to deal with it in that way,\u201d she adds. \u201cWe want to catch their attention and entertain a bit as they learn more about our brand.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not about bringing out the measuring tape,\u201d Ms. Crossland says. \u201cWe\u2019re not a diet brand.\u201d Mr. Adams echoes her. \u201cWe believe in eating well and living well,\u201d he says, adding: \u201cWe are not about guilt and deprivation. You will never see a little red bikini or measuring tape in our communications. Unless we are cutting them up.\u201d (The red bikini and measuring tape are staples of campaigns for various Special K products sold by the Kellogg Company.) \u201cThe most important thing I could do for my business is to get this right and have this be a great case study,\u201d Mr. Adams says of bringing out the campaign, which began this month and is to continue through October. The commercials will appear, Ms. Crossland says, on broadcast networks as well as cable channels watched by women like Cooking Channel, DIY Network, HGTV, Lifetime and TLC. The print ads are running in magazines like InStyle, People and US Weekly, she adds. The media agency for the campaign is the Universal City, Calif., office of Starcom, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe. If more than $9 million is spent on the campaign, that would be a huge increase compared with recent spending levels reported by the Kantar Media unit of WPP: $416,000 in 2011, $11,000 in 2012 and $293,000 last year. If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that appears Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;ThinkThin;Adams & Partners"}
{"id": "ny0080325", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/02/06", "title": "Denmark Cuts Interest Rates for Fourth Time in a Month", "abstract": "Denmark\u2019s central bank has cut a key interest rate for the fourth time in a month as it tries to keep the krone currency stable against the euro. Nationalbanken said on Thursday it had cut the interest rate on certificates of deposit by a further 0.25 percentage point to minus 0.75 percent. The change takes effect Friday and is the bank\u2019s latest attempt to prevent the krone from rising too much against the euro. A negative deposit rate means banks have to pay to park their cash at the central bank. Other key interest rates were left unchanged.", "keyword": "Denmark;Interest rate;Banking and Finance"}
{"id": "ny0169826", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/04/15", "title": "On the Internet, a Video Showcase for Poets", "abstract": "SETAUKET DUANE ESPOSITO had just been introduced to the crowd at Setauket Neighborhood House as a college professor and a \u201cnew daddy,\u201d an image that didn\u2019t quite seem to fit with his military cap and his tattoo-covered arms. The contrast definitely added interest to the poetry he began to read: Seeing and hearing a poet speak his own words is what attracts audiences to live poetry readings. But the more than 60 poetry lovers gathered at the Neighborhood House last weekend were not only appreciating the live poets, they were also celebrating the first anniversary of poetryvlog.com , a Web site that has taken poetry reading to a 21st-century level. Each Saturday, poetryvlog.com introduces a new video of a poet reading about five minutes\u2019 worth of his or her work. While many of those featured have been Long Islanders, others have been from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ireland and Iceland. The videos are filmed and archived by the Web site\u2019s creator, Michael Mart of St. James, and the poets are chosen by George Wallace, of Huntington, who was named Suffolk County\u2019s first poet laureate in 2003. The inception of poetryvlog.com was largely a result of a physical space problem. Mr. Mart, a contemporary poetry enthusiast and the owner for more than 30 years of the tiny Good Times Bookshop in Port Jefferson, never had room there for readings, he said. But a few months before he closed the shop last July, he said, he realized that virtual space was the solution. Inspired by Rocketboom, a New York City-based videoblog, Mr. Mart discovered he could start a Web site for very little money. \u201cIt helps everyone,\u201d he said. \u201cThe poet gets noticed, and it expands the audience to whomever might have an interest and an Internet connection.\u201d A year later, Mr. Mart said, the poetry site receives an average of 17,000 visits a month. \u201cThat\u2019s more attention than any poet would\u2019ve gotten in our bookshop,\u201d he noted. Exposure has increased primarily through word of mouth, according to Mr. Mart. Neither he nor Mr. Wallace makes money from the site, he said. Mr. Wallace, who met Mr. Mart as a customer at Good Times, is also well connected to the Long Island poetry community. He organizes poetry readings in Manhattan and Long Island and publishes an online poetry magazine at www.poetrybay.com . As a Web-based publisher, Mr. Wallace said he understood the power and potential of the Internet when Mr. Mart approached him with his idea. \u201cThe Internet is really the downtown of the 21st century,\u201d Mr. Wallace said at the anniversary party. Mr. Wallace said he does not choose the featured poets based on their performance ability. \u201cI\u2019ve tried to be as inclusive as possible while maintaining the quality,\u201d he said. \u201cI also want to present different voices.\u201d Among those voices has been that of Mr. Esposito, who lives in South Huntington and teaches in the English department at Nassau Community College in Garden City. Another is that of Adam D. Fisher, a retired rabbi from Stony Brook, who was also one of more than two dozen guests to read at the poetryvlog.com party, which was sponsored by the Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council. Although Mr. Wallace said he did not know of any poets who had been discovered by agents or publishers as a result of the site, it has helped the writers in other ways. Marcia Slatkin, a poet from Shoreham, said her video helped her publicize a scheduled reading of her work. Others said the site introduced them to the local poetry community. Mr. Wallace said that with all the poets he now knows on Long Island alone, he could fill two or three years\u2019 worth of the site\u2019s weekly slots. \u201cFor quality of poets,\u201d he said, \u201cLong Island can compete with any region pound for pound.\u201d", "keyword": "Poetry and Poets;Computers and the Internet;Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0274592", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2016/02/18", "title": "Aston Martin and LeEco Plan to Develop Electric Car", "abstract": "The British luxury-car maker Aston Martin has set up a venture with the Chinese consumer electronics group LeEco to jointly develop an electric vehicle. Aston Martin and LeEco said that the car would be based on Aston Martin\u2019s Rapide S model, and that if successful the venture would develop other electric vehicles, including for LeEco. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. \u201cIt brings Aston Martin\u2019s electric car project forward,\u201d Aston Martin\u2019s chief, Andy Palmer, said, adding that the new car would come to market in 2018 and be built in Gaydon, England.", "keyword": "Aston Martin;LeEco;Electric Cars and Hybrids;China;Great Britain"}
{"id": "ny0170570", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2007/02/17", "title": "Detained AIDS Doctor Allowed to Visit U.S. Later, China Says", "abstract": "BEIJING, Saturday, Feb. 17 \u2014 China gave in to international pressure on Friday and agreed to release a prominent AIDS doctor from house arrest so she can attend an awards ceremony in Washington next month. \u201cWe\u2019re just really excited about it,\u201d said Wenchi Yu Perkins, an officer with Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit women\u2019s advocacy group that will honor the doctor, Gao Yaojie, in March along with other women from around the world. \u201cI just talked to Dr. Gao,\u201d Ms. Perkins added. \u201cShe confirmed that last night an official visited and informed her that they would respect her wish to come to the U.S. I think that is the best gift for her for the Chinese New Year.\u201d Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton , an honorary co-chairwoman of Vital Voices, announced China\u2019s decision on Friday after receiving the news from the Chinese ambassador in Washington. Mrs. Clinton said in a statement that she was \u201cdelighted\u201d and that she had been assured that Dr. Gao would \u201cbe allowed to travel freely to the United States.\u201d Dr. Gao, 80, has been kept under house arrest since Feb. 1 in the central China city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province. Authorities detained her to stop her from traveling to apply for a travel visa , friends and AIDS advocates said. Dr. Gao is famously outspoken, and although China has taken a more open approach toward AIDS in recent years, officials were apparently worried she might say something provocative or embarrassing in Washington. She gained international attention for her work helping to expose the government-sponsored blood-selling operations that caused thousands of farmers to be infected with H.I.V. during the 1990s. Dr. Gao\u2019s detention had attracted international attention and brought pressure on the Chinese government. On Tuesday, a provincial newspaper, Henan Daily, published a photograph and article detailing how provincial officials had visited Dr. Gao to wish her \u201csincere greetings\u201d for the upcoming Lunar New Year. Many AIDS advocates saw the photograph and assumed it meant that China had released her. But, in fact, she was still under house arrest. Dr. Gao could not be reached for comment on Saturday morning.", "keyword": "China;Clinton Hillary Rodham;Gao Yaojie;Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome;International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0179623", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/08/19", "title": "He Never Stopped Walking", "abstract": "Matthew Stanley, 43 Senior environmental manager, State Dormitory Authority FAVORITE WALK From his office at West 34th Street and Eighth Avenue down to 14th Street and Eighth Avenue and back, almost every workday during lunch. WHY HE WALKS \u201cI started long walking when I moved to New York in 1989 after graduate school. I lived in Astoria, in Queens, and the nearest subways were a 20-, 25-minute walk. \u201cEventually I found a job and moved to Manhattan. But I never stopped walking. My longest walks have been from Bowling Green north to Grant\u2019s Tomb, from the Municipal Building over the Queensboro Bridge to Long Island City, and from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle. Now I wouldn\u2019t dream of taking the subway for a distance of less than 30 blocks. Except maybe in the pouring rain.\u201d", "keyword": "Walking;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0231932", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/08/03", "title": "Personalities Fuel a One-Party Race for Washington Mayor", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 At times it seems like the mayoral race here between the two front-runners \u2014 Mayor Adrian M. Fenty , who is seeking a second term, and Vincent C. Gray, the City Council chairman \u2014 is boiling down to a personality contest. It is not because there are no important issues at stake as the two men battle for the Democratic nomination. At a spate of campaign events last week, for example, sparks flew over Mr. Fenty\u2019s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. Ms. Rhee has earned the ire of a teachers\u2019 union after dismissing dozens of teachers for poor performance, even as she has won plaudits for improving a notoriously bad school system. Mr. Gray has not indicated whether he would keep Ms. Rhee in the job if he were to take office, and Mr. Fenty has criticized what he characterized as Mr. Gray\u2019s wishy-washiness on the issue. Mr. Gray also asserts that Mr. Fenty has not done enough to create jobs in a city where unemployment in some areas runs as high as one-third. And the two candidates have traded accusations of corruption and cronyism, each claiming the other steered city contracts worth millions to friends or supporters. To some degree, it is a surprise to supporters on each side that Mr. Fenty, who has a big advantage in fund-raising and name recognition, appears at all vulnerable, given his reputation among Democrats in Washington as a successful reformer. Yet critics and even some supporters say that after a charmed first two years in office, Mr. Fenty grew aloof, canceling appearances, minimizing personal contact with residents and failing to adequately explain controversial new policies, including Ms. Rhee\u2019s overhaul of the school system. In this heavily Democratic city, the race for the party\u2019s nomination, to be decided on Sept. 14, is tantamount to winning the general election in November, and the campaign has grown heated. At a raucous mayoral forum hosted by the Ward 6 Democrats last week, Mr. Fenty\u2019s supporters were vocal and numerous but clearly outmatched by Mr. Gray\u2019s boisterous crowd. Mr. Gray, who as chairman was elected at-large and formerly represented Ward 7, has earned numerous prominent endorsements and won a number of straw polls in the city. City Councilman David A. Catania, who has not endorsed either candidate, said the mayor had had a \u201cgenerational impact\u201d on the reform of Washington\u2019s public schools. Another City Council member who has not announced an endorsement, Jim Graham, said Mr. Fenty \u201chas done things in this city that are truly remarkable.\u201d Mr. Graham said that Mr. Fenty had demonstrated good leadership during the blizzards that blanketed snow over the Washington area for weeks last winter, and that he had had also proved his ability to streamline and improve city services. But, Mr. Graham added, \u201cin the process of being mayor he\u2019s obviously upset people, over issues that I bet in hindsight he would say didn\u2019t matter that much.\u201d Mr. Graham, citing one example of strained relationships in Washington political circles, pointed to the mayor\u2019s decision to withhold from City Council members the season tickets they traditionally receive to Nationals baseball games. Mr. Fenty conceded in a forum last week that the episode \u201cshouldn\u2019t have happened.\u201d The Fenty campaign said that making significant changes to the city\u2019s bureaucracy had meant upsetting entrenched interests, and that his administration had simply been making the tough decisions his predecessors avoided. Mr. Fenty had raised just under $4.4 million as of June, compared with $561,343 for Mr. Gray. In an interview, Mr. Fenty acknowledged that his administration had not always done a particularly good job of connecting with voters. \u201cIf you cannot communicate to people how much you have done, and how hard it\u2019s been, and how important it\u2019s been to them, you are going to have people who are disconnected,\u201d he said. \u201cSome people very plainly need more information, and if we don\u2019t get them that information, they really may not vote for us.\u201d Even Mr. Fenty said that constituents had come up to him and spoken of the substantive similarities between the candidates. Critics of the mayor point less to any substantial policy failures than to what they called Mr. Fenty\u2019s unresponsive and at times even arrogant decision-making process. \u201cI think a lot of the decisions have been made absent of working with the other elected officials in this city,\u201d said City Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. Mr. Thomas, who is supporting Mr. Gray, said the City Council had not been made a partner in education reform efforts, for instance. Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights activist who supports Mr. Fenty, said that many African-Americans in Washington were \u201cmad as hell\u201d at Mr. Fenty for not attending the funerals of prominent blacks and not including more blacks in his inner circle. Franklin Garcia, the president of the District of Columbia Latino Caucus, said Mr. Gray had reached out to Latinos during his time on the Council more than Mr. Fenty had. \u201cAll these different events that we\u2019ve held throughout the years, we\u2019ve always reached out to the mayor for his presence,\u201d Mr. Garcia said. \u201cAt all times he\u2019s said no or ignored our calls. Chairman Vincent Gray has been able to substitute that void.\u201d", "keyword": "Fenty Adrian M;Washington (DC);Elections;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0201928", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/09/14", "title": "Robert Morgenthau Keeps Eye on Manhattan District Attorney Race", "abstract": "Robert M. Morgenthau \u2019s name is not on Tuesday\u2019s election ballot for the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s job. But he is campaigning as if it were. He has called up a former mayor, assemblymen and other officials, urging them to back his chosen successor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. He has regularly dispensed campaign advice to Mr. Vance and encouraged donors to contribute to him. He has taken issue with those who back other candidates, especially Leslie Crocker Snyder, who earned Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s enmity by daring to run against him four years ago. Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s intense push and the spirited battle among the three candidates vying for the seat have turned the district attorney\u2019s race into a marquee fight in Tuesday\u2019s primary. The mayor\u2019s race has been unusually sleepy so far, despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg\u2019s early spending and ubiquitous television advertising. And neither of the other citywide races, for comptroller and public advocate, have captured the public\u2019s imagination. [Articles, Pages A16 and A17.] So the contest to succeed Mr. Morgenthau, 90, who has presided over the office for 35 years, has attracted heightened attention, and taken on a personal texture, especially for the retiring Mr. Morgenthau, who acknowledges making calls for Mr. Vance but denies taking an active role in the campaign. Mr. Vance, Ms. Snyder and a third candidate, Richard M. Aborn, are all Democrats, so the primary vote on Tuesday will essentially decide the election. No Republican is running in the November election. The three \u2014 all of whom once worked for Mr. Morgenthau \u2014 are seeking to take over an office of 500 lawyers, a budget of about $75 million and responsibility for prosecuting everything from violent street crime to Wall Street malfeasance. For Mr. Morgenthau, the stakes are high, too. His friends say he is consumed with preserving a legacy of tackling complex cases, including white-collar prosecutions that stretch across international and financial jurisdiction, and pride in an office that has spawned careers like that of Sonia Sotomayor and has been run by only three people since 1941. \u201cThe emotion there is that his life\u2019s work gets continued by someone he knows can do it the way he did it,\u201d said Elkan Abramowitz, a friend of Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s and a partner at the law firm where Mr. Vance works. \u201cI think this is a bittersweet moment for him in the sense that he sees his long career coming to an end.\u201d As Mr. Morgenthau sat recently in his eighth-floor office, he said he did not spend much time fretting over the campaign. He said his interest stemmed from his concern about the direction of the office after he leaves. \u201cI think it\u2019s important somebody comes in here who will be interested in and pursue the things that I think are important,\u201d Mr. Morgenthau said. And he has not been shy about making his preferences known, especially when it comes to his distaste for Ms. Snyder. During their unusually nasty primary campaign in 2005, the two questioned each other\u2019s ethics and qualifications. So when Mr. Morgenthau heard that Edward I. Koch , a good friend and former New York mayor, was to endorse Ms. Snyder in June, he made a phone call. As Mr. Koch recalled, Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s message was clear: How could you support her after the way she ran against me? \u201cI would follow Morgenthau into the flames of any issue,\u201d said Mr. Koch, who appointed Ms. Snyder to be a judge in 1983. \u201cBut he\u2019s not running.\u201d Mr. Morgenthau has bent other ears in recent months. Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, for example, recounted a similarly blunt message delivered over several phone calls: \u201cKeith, I need you to endorse Cy Vance.\u201d Mr. Wright has not endorsed a candidate, although he did release a statement on Friday criticizing Ms. Snyder\u2019s literature attacking Mr. Vance\u2019s record as a defense lawyer in Seattle. And at an event several months ago, Mr. Morgenthau told Assemblyman Daniel J. O\u2019Donnell that he wanted to speak with him about the race. Mr. O\u2019Donnell told him he had endorsed Mr. Aborn, but Mr. Morgenthau was undeterred, and made his pitch for Mr. Vance, saying he was best suited to \u201cpreserve the team,\u201d according to Mr. O\u2019Donnell. On Monday, Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s pitch will be more direct: He is scheduled to accompany Mr. Vance to senior centers and the Jewish Community Center; at 2 p.m. they will appear at a rally on the courthouse steps. Until now, Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s only public appearance with Mr. Vance was for his endorsement in June. Mr. Vance\u2019s opponents have been particularly critical of Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s endorsement, contending that it masked Mr. Vance\u2019s lack of qualifications. Ms. Snyder declined to comment for this article. But in an interview in August, she suggested that Mr. Vance could avoid the perception of running a negative campaign \u201cbecause he has everyone else doing his dirty work for him.\u201d Mr. Vance said that Ms. Snyder was wrong. \u201cI\u2019m not asking people to do dirty work for me because I\u2019m not trying to do dirty work,\u201d he said. Mr. Vance said that although Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s endorsement was helpful, he had no official role in the campaign and was just one of many people offering him advice. \u201cI certainly know he has been supportive of my candidacy to a broad range of people in the community, which I appreciate,\u201d Mr. Vance said. \u201cI think that helps. I really leave that to him. It\u2019s not something I\u2019m directing.\u201d Those closest to Mr. Morgenthau said he was thinking about his replacement even before the last election in 2005. Jessica de Grazia, his former chief assistant who remains a confidante, said she believed that Mr. Morgenthau would not have run then if he had a successor lined up whom he had confidence in. Mr. Morgenthau has not contributed any money to Mr. Vance\u2019s campaign. And of the roughly $900,000 in his own campaign war chest, his committee, Friends of Morgenthau, has directed only $10,000 to Mr. Vance. But Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s influence is still being felt: According to campaign finance records, 57 people who have donated money to Mr. Morgenthau in the past four years also have contributed to Mr. Vance, totaling $171,056. And 10 former top assistants in Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s office signed a letter that was sent in March to many former assistant district attorneys, urging them to support Mr. Vance. There are some people, like Mr. Koch, who have thrown their support elsewhere. More than a dozen elected officials who endorsed Mr. Morgenthau four years ago have endorsed Mr. Aborn this year, including Representative Jerrold Nadler and Assemblyman O\u2019Donnell. All of the Democratic clubs that support Mr. Aborn endorsed Mr. Morgenthau four years ago, as did the Working Families Party. Mr. O\u2019Donnell said that Mr. Morgenthau\u2019s focus on Mr. Vance keeping his staff together turned him off. \u201cPreserving the Morgenthau team is not a very compelling argument to get me to support anyone,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Morgenthau Robert M;Vance Cyrus R Jr;Elections;New York City;District Attorneys;Endorsements;Democratic Party;Aborn Richard M;Koch Edward I;Wright Keith L T"}
{"id": "ny0113264", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/11/05", "title": "China\u2019s Communist Party Expels Bo Xilai", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Several hundred of the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s top leaders decided Sunday on a raft of measures that pave the way for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition scheduled to start this week. Among its decisions, the party\u2019s Central Committee endorsed the expulsion of the disgraced politician Bo Xilai from the party and promoted two military leaders. The decision to expel Mr. Bo signaled that top leaders had reached a consensus on this delicate issue. Mr. Bo had been a contender for one of the party\u2019s highest positions until his spectacular fall this year and still had support among some party members. Among the accusations against him are that he abused his power, took large bribes and hindered a police investigation into the death of a British businessman. Mr. Bo\u2019s wife was convicted of the Briton\u2019s murder in August. Mr. Bo, who has been incommunicado since his detention in March, is expected to stand trial in the coming months. The committee also agreed to expel the former railway minister, Liu Zhijun, from the party. Mr. Liu has been accused of receiving bribes in excess of $100 million during the years he oversaw the expansion of the nation\u2019s high-speed rail system. The 365-member Central Committee met for four days before the start of the 18th Party Congress on Thursday, when President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao are to retire. Mr. Hu is to be replaced by Xi Jinping and Mr. Wen by Li Keqiang. The Central Committee also voted to make two generals, Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang, vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, which oversees China \u2019s military. General Fan, formerly the commander of an artillery unit, and General Xu, an air force officer, will serve under Mr. Hu, who also leads the military commission. A crucial question is whether Mr. Hu will resign as chairman of the military commission and give the position to Mr. Xi, who is already a vice chairman, or stay on for two more years. Mr. Hu\u2019s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, waited two years before making Mr. Hu commander in chief, but some analysts in Beijing say Mr. Hu is in a weaker position than Mr. Jiang and may not retain the post. The Central Committee gave no indication of which members would make up the Standing Committee of the 24-member Politburo. The Standing Committee, the body that effectively governs China, has nine members but is expected to shrink to seven . If so, five people will be appointed to the body in addition to Mr. Xi and Mr. Li. Before his downfall, Mr. Bo, the former party chief of Chongqing, in southwest China, was viewed as a contender for the committee. Unsurprisingly, the Central Committee praised the performance of its members, who also received a preview from Mr. Xi of the draft report that will be presented to the 18th Party Congress. Mr. Xi\u2019s role at the meeting suggests that he will be heavily involved in determining the next congress\u2019s direction, but just how much of an immediate impact he will have on the country\u2019s policies is unclear. Some reports suggest that the Standing Committee\u2019s makeup is the subject of jockeying between Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang, with Mr. Xi possibly having to bide his time and slowly build his influence.", "keyword": "Bo Xilai;Communist Party of China;China;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations;Fan Changlong;Xu Qiliang"}
{"id": "ny0225945", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/10/19", "title": "A Spray of DNA to Keep the Robbers Away", "abstract": "ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands \u2014 When the McDonald\u2019s down from City Hall here was burglarized a few years ago, its managers decided they needed a new security system. It was just about that time that local police officers were offering something totally different that they hoped would stem a rising tide of robberies that occur mainly in the immigrant neighborhoods of this rough-and-tumble port city. The new system involved an employee-activated device that sprays a fine, barely visible mist laced with synthetic DNA to cover anyone in its path, including criminals, and simultaneously alerts the police to a crime in progress. The mist \u2014 visible only under ultraviolet light \u2014 carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald\u2019s prominently warns potential thieves of the spray\u2019s presence: \u201cYou Steal, You\u2019re Marked.\u201d The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed in Britain by two brothers, one a policeman and the other a chemist. But they credit its presence \u2014 and signs posted prominently warning of its use \u2014 for what they call a precipitous decline in crime rates (though they could not provide actual figures to back that up). But the goal is not so much capturing crooks as scaring them away. \u201cThe whole thing is prevention, not about recovering stolen goods or capturing criminals,\u201d said Donald van der Laan, whose company, the Rhine Group, distributes the spray. As far as the DNA is concerned, \u201cthe material is identical\u201d to human DNA, he said, \u201cthough there is a different sequence of components.\u201d Much of the spray\u2019s effectiveness, he said, comes from the mystique surrounding DNA. \u201cNo one really knows what it is,\u201d he said. \u201cNo one really knows how it works.\u201d At this McDonald\u2019s the DNA liquid is contained in an orange box the size of a large paperback book, mounted over an entrance door. \u201cYou don\u2019t smell it; you don\u2019t see it; nobody knows it\u2019s there,\u201d said Jean-Paul Fafie, who has managed the McDonald\u2019s for the last 12 years. The system and the all-important warning sign seem to have successfully warded off any potential robbers. But there were kinks to be worked out. \u201cIn the beginning, it went off many times, even when there was no robbery,\u201d Mr. Fafie said. \u201cAnd the police came every time.\u201d The false alarms were caused by employees who forgot, or never knew, about the protocol for secretly activating the system \u2014 removing a 10 euro bill from a special bill clip kept behind the counter. \u201cWe didn\u2019t train our counter people properly,\u201d Mr. Fafie said sheepishly. As for a potential thief, he said, \u201cwe hope he\u2019ll think twice before coming in.\u201d Across the restaurant, Dilek Gokceli, 30, sipping coffee with her husband, said she had not noticed the sign on the door alerting the public to the presence of the spray. Mrs. Gokceli said she felt reassured. \u201cIt\u2019s for my sake, if there\u2019s danger,\u201d she said. \u201cFor the police, they don\u2019t have to search a lot.\u201d The city is pushing the use of the spray and sometimes assuming the cost; it is also promoting the use of a kind of DNA crayon with which valuable items like computers or cameras can be marked to facilitate their identification as stolen goods. Already about 4,000 computers at Erasmus University here have been marked. Creative Factory, a former industrial building on the edge of the harbor that is now home to innovative start-up companies, began using the crayons after computers and other electronic equipment were stolen. \u201cWe are surrounded by crime-ridden areas,\u201d said Leo van Loon, the executive director of Creative Factory, which stands wedged between the harbor\u2019s water and the tough Charlois neighborhood. There have been instances in which customers have been sprayed inadvertently. But no one has been falsely accused, Mr. van der Laan, the company owner, said. Down along Beijerlandselaan, a shopping street in the south of the center, Jale Sag has owned Gulnar jewelers for the last three years and has seen a wave of robberies peak and then recede. Partly, she says, that is the result of closed-circuit television cameras that were installed all along the street \u2014 there are two outside her store and two more inside \u2014 but also because the police department and the city paid for a DNA spray system to be installed in her store. She says she has seen a difference. Robberies were \u201ca real problem,\u201d she said. \u201cNowadays, it\u2019s going better.\u201d Just down the street, Bart Vos, 51, a manager at a barge company, gazed in the window of Jansen, another jeweler outfitted with the DNA spray. \u201cThey see that sign,\u201d he said, \u201cthey think twice.\u201d", "keyword": "DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid);Forensic Science;Crime and Criminals"}
{"id": "ny0264506", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/12/24", "title": "Vikings\u2019 Jared Allen Pursues Strahan\u2019s N.F.L. Record for Sacks", "abstract": "EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. \u2014 After ripping the tape off his hands after practice Wednesday, Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jared Allen paused in conversation just long enough to roll the tape into a ball and flick it like a basketball at a trash receptacle 20 feet away. Plop. Perfect. \u201cThat\u2019s a nice shot,\u201d he said. \u201cYou saw that, right?\u201d It was hard to miss, just like any of his 17 \u00bd sacks this season, each of the tackles celebrated with a calf-roping pantomime. Allen\u2019s pursuit of Michael Strahan \u2019s N.F.L. single-season record for sacks \u2014 22 \u00bd, in 2001 \u2014 has been one of the few positives in a dreadful season for the 2-12 Vikings, who must win their final two games to avoid the worst record in franchise history. The chase hit a pothole last Sunday when New Orleans held Allen without a sack in a 42-20 rout. Meanwhile, Philadelphia defensive end Jason Babin posted his second consecutive three-sack game, against the Jets, to slip ahead of Allen for the N.F.L. lead with 18. That, Allen said, gives him additional incentive in chasing Strahan\u2019s record these final two weekends, beginning Saturday at Washington. \u201cI don\u2019t know when I\u2019m going to be this close to it again, so I\u2019m definitely going to go for it,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to play out of body to get to it, just shooting up the field and forgetting about my responsibilities. But it\u2019s still attainable. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve even got motivation. Babin came out of nowhere these last two weeks. So I\u2019ve got to get my lead back.\u201d After a fall-off in production last year \u2014 Allen\u2019s 11 sacks were a four-year low, and he did not make the Pro Bowl for the first time since 2006 \u2014 Allen entered this season determined to dominate again. That he has been this productive with a team this bad is unprecedented. Since sacks became an official N.F.L. statistic in 1982, 24 players have had 17 \u00bd or more in a season, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com . Only eight of those players were on losing teams, including Allen and Babin \u2014 the Eagles are 6-8. None played for a team with a record as poor as Minnesota\u2019s. The next closest: Strahan, who had 18 \u00bd sacks for the 4-12 Giants in 2003. And while Babin benefits from having another dynamic pass rusher on the opposite side \u2014 Trent Cole, who has nine sacks \u2014 Allen, 29, goes it alone. The next most productive Viking, left defensive end Brian Robison, has six sacks, but only one and a half in his last nine games. And Minnesota\u2019s 30th-ranked pass defense affords Allen few opportunities for coverage sacks. \u201cHe\u2019s obviously been our best player on defense, and possibly on the team,\u201d linebacker Chad Greenway said. \u201cWe as teammates certainly appreciate that effort and appreciate him being there for us, week in and week out. Unfortunately, he\u2019s not getting the credit he deserves this year.\u201d It is not as if Allen, acquired from Kansas City in a 2008 trade, sneaked up on anybody. He has posted double-digit sacks in five consecutive seasons, and he made consecutive Pro Bowls from 2007 to 2009, two as a starter. In a January 2010 interview, Vikings Coach Leslie Frazier, then the team\u2019s defensive coordinator, predicted that Allen would threaten Strahan\u2019s mark at some point. Last season, though, did not go as planned. Coach Brad Childress was fired after 10 games, quarterback Brett Favre was battered into retirement, and the collapse of the Metrodome roof forced the relocation of the final two home games. The Vikings finished 6-10, one season after reaching the N.F.C. championship game. \u201cI thought I played some good ball late in the year, but I kind of let the circumstances that were going on in the facility last year get to me a little more than I wanted to,\u201d Allen said. \u201cIt was kind of miserable around here.\u201d Allen vowed to be more positive this season. It has not been easy. The Vikings lost the emerging defensive end Ray Edwards to free agency. The Pro Bowl tackle Kevin Williams sat out the first two games under N.F.L. suspension for using a banned diuretic. The Vikings started 0-4 and squandered double-digit halftime leads in the first three games, an N.F.L. first. Williams\u2019s return in Week 3 helped, and Allen had seven sacks in the next three games. Six of Allen\u2019s sacks, three in each game, have come against the Vikings\u2019 N.F.C. North rival Detroit. But season-long coverage problems, partly because of injuries, dragged down the defense, which has given up 406 points, the second-highest total behind Indianapolis. Minnesota\u2019s six interceptions, none in the last nine games, are a league low. Last Sunday, New Orleans left tackle Jermon Bushrod and the nimble-footed quarterback Drew Brees frustrated Allen, who twice got to Brees an instant too late. Late in the game, center Brian De La Puente chop-blocked Allen to prevent a sack of the backup Chase Daniel. After Minnesota\u2019s fifth consecutive loss, Allen appeared to criticize his younger teammates for being timid, and the coaching staff for taking him out on the final series. \u201cWhat are they resting me for, the playoffs?\u201d he said. On Wednesday Allen clarified that his point was that inexperience is no excuse for repeated mistakes. \u201cI came in and started as a rookie and was expected to play, as if, and be productive,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the standard I hold everybody to. If you\u2019re going to be on that field, I consider you a starter. You need to be productive, as if. \u201cThe frustration lies in the consistency of the mistakes we make. If you get beat trying to make a play, if you jump routes, I can live with that. It\u2019s the same check-downs, and missing tackles.\u201d Frazier and the defensive line coach Karl Dunbar hinted this week that they might move Allen around to prevent teams from ganging up on him. \u201cWe expect people to copy what New Orleans did this past week, chip him and put two or three people on him,\u201d Frazier said, referring to schemes in which a tight end, wideout or running back tried to slow Allen with brief contact. \u201cWe\u2019re going to do our very best to see him lead the league in sacks and hopefully break that record.\u201d Teammates like Robison will not be surprised if that happens. \u201cThere are so many times that I\u2019ll come around the corner with a clean move, and I think I\u2019ve got the quarterback dead in my sights, and he\u2019s already beaten his guy,\u201d Robison said. \u201cI\u2019m like, I can\u2019t beat my guy any faster, and yet you did it. It\u2019s just amazing to see some of the things he can do.\u201d", "keyword": "Minnesota Vikings;Football;Strahan Michael;National Football League;Records and Achievements;Allen Jared (1982- )"}
{"id": "ny0230742", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/09/26", "title": "Yankees Get Speech by Dungy but Fall to Red Sox", "abstract": "Should Manager Joe Girardi want his Yankees to hear another football pep talk, he might consider that old film of Knute Rockne addressing his Notre Dame players. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna go, go, go, go!\u201d Rockne said in the black-and-white newsreel, viewable on the Internet. \u201cThey can\u2019t lick us! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!\u201d Certainly the Yankees could use a pickup. Despite a pregame visit from the former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy on Saturday, the Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox , 7-3, in front of 49,558 grumbling fans at Yankee Stadium. It was the fourth consecutive defeat for the Yankees and the 13th in their last 19 games. Although likely to qualify for the playoffs, the Yankees are limping to the finish line of the regular season. When a top team slumps, there are bound to be multiple theories as to why, including the manager\u2019s use of personnel and the third-base coach\u2019s decision to send home a runner who is tagged out, as was the case Saturday. But Alex Rodriguez offered a different thought. \u201cIt starts with starting pitching,\u201d said Rodriguez, who hit his 28th home run Saturday, a solo shot in the ninth inning. \u201cWe have to have someone come in and shut the door and step up. It\u2019s hard to play with an edge when you\u2019re down five or six runs.\u201d Saturday\u2019s starter and loser was Ivan Nova (1-1), who gave up four runs in four and two-thirds innings. He followed recent unsatisfactory outings by Andy Pettitte, A. J. Burnett and C. C. Sabathia. Sunday\u2019s starter will be Dustin Moseley (4-3), replacing Phil Hughes (17-8), who is being rested. Moseley will face Daisuke Matsuzaka (9-6). The Yankees\u2019 loss, coupled with Tampa Bay\u2019s 9-1 victory over Seattle, dropped them a game and a half behind the Rays in the American League East. To clinch a playoff berth, the Yankees need any combination of three victories or Red Sox losses. \u201cWe\u2019re still in a good spot,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cYou can\u2019t make too much of four games.\u201d Before Saturday\u2019s game, Girardi praised Dungy, who won a Super Bowl with the Colts in February 2007 and is now an N.F.L. commentator for NBC Sports. \u201cI admire tremendously his faith,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cI\u2019ve read his books. I subscribe to his Web site. This is the first time I\u2019ve ever met him. He has a lot of wisdom.\u201d Although Dungy is a professional motivational speaker, he said Saturday\u2019s talk was not a paid appearance but a favor to Girardi, who had hoped to present Dungy during spring training. According to Curtis Granderson, Dungy\u2019s theme was \u201cdon\u2019t take anything for granted.\u201d Granderson added, \u201cEven though you may have had success in the past, it\u2019s not always guaranteed.\u201d Pitcher Joba Chamberlain said: \u201cHe talked about what he preaches to his team. You see how important his faith and his family are.\u201d Dungy, who played high school baseball in Jackson, Mich., said he thought Saturday\u2019s visit was his first to a professional baseball team. Dungy lives in Tampa, Fla., where the Yankees train, and follows the Rays and the Minnesota Twins. Both are potential Yankees opponents in the postseason, and Dungy went to the University of Minnesota and coached for the Vikings. Boston led, 6-0, until Jon Lester (19-8) left after seven innings and Granderson broke the shutout with a two-run homer off Daniel Bard. It was Granderson\u2019s 23rd home run. Lester retired his first 12 batters until Rodriguez led off the fifth with a walk. The first hit by the Yankees came in the sixth when Francisco Cervelli singled to left on a sinking liner off the glove of Daniel Nava. But Nava made up for it on the next batter. After Derek Jeter singled, Nava threw out Austin Kearns at home. Kearns was sent by the third-base coach Rob Thomson despite the Red Sox\u2019 4-0 lead. There were other gaffes. With Chamberlain pitching in relief in the ninth inning and Yamaico Navarro on second base, Chamberlain seemed to forget where the runner was. He started to throw to first, and the ball fell out of his hand. It was neither a balk nor an error because timeout had been called by the home-plate umpire, Chris Guccione. \u201cIt\u2019s something that I\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d Girardi said. Chamberlain added: \u201cWe lost the game. Nobody really cares about that.\u201d INSIDE PITCH Phil Hughes, the Yankees\u2019 starting pitcher for Wednesday\u2019s game at Toronto, said Saturday that he did not feel passed over for his scheduled start against the Red Sox on Sunday. \u201cI just look at is as being pushed back,\u201d Hughes said. Joe Girardi has tried to limit Hughes\u2019s innings to keep him fresh for the playoffs. Hughes (17-8) has worked 169 1/3 innings in his first full season as a starter. He is likely to be the Yankees\u2019 fourth starter in the postseason. ... Tony Dungy refused to go into detail about his visit earlier Saturday with Jets Coach Rex Ryan. A few weeks ago, Dungy criticized Ryan\u2019s cursing in the HBO series \u201cHard Knocks.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Boston Red Sox;Baseball;Dungy Tony"}
{"id": "ny0099201", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/06/23", "title": "Army Reprimanded a Top General Involved in ISIS Fight", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Army has reprimanded a once highly regarded general involved in the war against the Islamic State because he guided a defense contract to a company run by his former classmates at West Point, a move that effectively ends his military career, military officials said Monday. Maj. Gen. Dana J. H. Pittard, the Army \u2019s former deputy commander for operations in the Middle East, was formally reprimanded in February after an investigation, \u201cwhich called into question his suitability for continued services and resulted in his request for retirement,\u201d Cynthia Smith, an Army spokeswoman, said in an email. An Army review board is considering whether he will be stripped of his rank as a two-star general before he is allowed to retire, Ms. Smith said. The reprimand is a huge dent in the career of a general once believed to represent the future of the Army. A former military assistant to President Bill Clinton, General Pittard had years of combat experience in Iraq and was long viewed as someone who could rise to the level of Army chief of staff. Image Maj. Gen. Dana J. H. Pittard speaking to troops in 2012. Credit Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press From July 2013 to April 2015, General Pittard was the deputy commanding general for Army Central, based in the Middle East. He returned to the United States in April after the reprimand, which was first reported by The Washington Post . The Post, citing documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, said the investigation into General Pittard began in 2011 after an anonymous whistle-blower alleged that he had abused his authority by awarding lucrative renewable-energy contracts to his friends while serving as the commander of Fort Bliss in Texas. One of General Pittard\u2019s former West Point classmates was convicted on wire-fraud charges in September, and while General Pittard was not accused of financial gain, he was reprimanded for his \u201cexcessive involvement\u201d in awarding the $492,000 contract. Ms. Smith, the Army spokeswoman, said General Pittard had been removed from his position in the Middle East as part of a normal rotation and not because of the misconduct. General Pittard is now serving as special assistant to the commanding general at the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, where he will remain until the secretary of the Army decides on his retirement request and whether to strip him of his rank.", "keyword": "Dana J. H. Pittard;US Military;Defense contractor;US Army;Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Middle East;Bill Clinton"}
{"id": "ny0035907", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/03/29", "title": "South African Horse Gets His Star Turn", "abstract": "Arranging a typical racehorse\u2019s schedule may seem to be a straightforward task, but 6-year-old Variety Club, the two-time South African horse of the year, is not your typical racehorse. When he leaves the gate in the Group 2 Godolphin Mile on Saturday, he will have completed a circuitous and, for his human backers at least, frustrating 12-month journey. In January 2013, after his victory in South Africa\u2019s prestigious Queen\u2019s Plate, Variety Club\u2019s owners, Markus and Ingrid Jooste, petitioned the Dubai Racing Club for special dispensation from quarantine rules so the horse could ship directly to Dubai for the Godolphin Mile or the Dubai Duty Free. But the request was denied. So Variety Club had to stay in South Africa. Attempts to travel to the United States were also abandoned, with the four-time Group 1 winner racing two more times at home \u2014 he won both events \u2014 and embarking in June on a now well-worn path for South African horses that leave the country: a nearly six-month trip that includes a three-week quarantine in Cape Town, three months in Mauritius, one month in England, and, finally, additional restrictions at Meydan Racecourse in Dubai. But Variety Club\u2019s long-anticipated arrival on the international scene was sensational. Without a race since June 8, in Durban, South Africa, he blitzed the Grade 3 Firebreak Stakes on Feb. 13 over 1,600 meters. He went straight to the front and laid down the fastest time of the season at that distance. \u201cIt was an exceptional performance from him,\u201d said Derek Brugman, racing manager for the Joostes. \u201cTo come back with a little over a month\u2019s preparation and do that was a testament to his ability and talent.\u201d In the Burj Nahaar three weeks later, he was denied by the filly Shuruq, a performance Brugman chalked up to a mild regression after his previous exertion. Still, Variety Club remains a model of consistency: He has won 15 of 21 races, and only once has he finished outside the money. The chestnut son of Var, he was bred by Anton and Dominique Shepherd\u2019s Beaumont Stud, the ninth and last foal of his dam La Massine. Last year, Brugman tried arranging for him to run in the Breeders\u2019 Cup in the United States. But the horse would have been required to stand in a box at a New York airport for 60 days, Brugman said, with no exercise or sunlight. Brugman said he had asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a treadmill, but the request was denied. \u201cThe quarantine rules have actually gotten worse rather than better, which is frightening, considering how bad it was,\u201d Brugman said. \u201cThere\u2019s no light at the end of the tunnel at the moment.\u201d In 2011, the European Union began requiring South African horses to undergo the quarantine \u2014 across four countries and two hemispheres \u2014 in response to African horse sickness, a vector-born disease, similar to malaria in humans, that is not contagious. It comes and goes seasonally, and is found only in the south of Africa in the wet summer months. The South African racing industry has long maintained tight rules to prevent an outbreak. It keeps a so-called free zone in Cape Town, from which horses are shipped overseas, and next to it an observation area that safeguards the free zone. No case of African horse sickness has ever been exported. In 2011, there was a breach of the observation area, which led to the European Union restrictions. Last fall, the European Union decided to continue the ban. Yet despite these barriers, South African horses have shown that they are on a par with the world\u2019s best gathered in Dubai. There are major South African contenders in most of the races on Saturday: Sanshaawes in the Dubai World Cup, Soft Falling Rain and Variety Club in the Godolphin Mile, Shea Shea in the Al Quoz Sprint, Vercingetorix in the Dubai Duty Free, Star Empire in the Gold Cup. Shea Shea and Soft Falling Rain won their races last year. All are trained by Mike de Kock, South Africa\u2019s leading trainer and historically one of the most successful at the Dubai races, except for Variety Club, who is trained by Joey Ramsden. De Kock has been the loudest proponent for overturning the quarantine restrictions, and he believes South Africa\u2019s success at this meet further supports his case. \u201cIf the racing world doesn\u2019t wake up after this, I don\u2019t know what it will take to get them behind us,\u201d he said. \u201cOur stud farms breed high-quality bloodstock at the most affordable prices. They\u2019re able to hold their own anywhere in the world \u2014 we\u2019ve proven that time and again and our results get better every year.\u201d Variety Club has managed the process well, which is not always a given. The change in weather \u2014 from a hot summer to wet winter \u2014 from Mauritius to Newmarket, England, could not have been more stark. One of his traveling companions was not so lucky. Blueridge Mountain, a Group 1 winner in South Africa, grew a winter coat immediately and her plans for Dubai were aborted. \u201cSo we spent all the money for her to get there and had to abandon ship,\u201d Brugman said. \u201cIt was very disappointing.\u201d Blueridge Mountain remained in England, where she should return to the races in the spring. By then, she may be rejoined by Variety Club. After the Godolphin Mile, the major assignments of international racing are now, finally, within his reach. Brugman said races in England, France, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States are all possible. \u201cNow that he\u2019s an international horse and doesn\u2019t have to go through all that quarantine, we plan on campaigning him on the world stage,\u201d he said. \u201cHopefully, on World Cup night he shows what a good horse he is and what a good product South Africa can produce.\u201d", "keyword": "Horse racing;Dubai;South Africa"}
{"id": "ny0043926", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/05/12", "title": "Too Long a Wait for Michael Sam at the N.F.L. Draft", "abstract": "By the time I arrived at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan on Saturday, the sixth round of the N.F.L. draft had started, but Michael Sam had still not been selected. The team that took Sam, an all-American defensive end at Missouri, would be the league\u2019s first to draft a publicly gay player . No team had raised its hand. Seattle passed with the 227th pick, early in the seventh and final round, and you could understand why: The Seahawks already had a great defense. Washington, picking next, chose a kicker from Arkansas. Detroit, a perennial loser, also chose a kicker. Perhaps Pittsburgh would step forward at No. 230. The Steelers, though, with Coach Mike Tomlin\u2019s job perhaps in danger, took a tight end from Massachusetts. Indianapolis, at No. 232, has an owner who entered a drug rehabilitation center in March and perhaps did not want more attention devoted to off-field matters. Miami, two spots later, seemed a possibility, a team in need of redemption after the Richie Incognito bullying scandal . The Dolphins did take a defensive end \u2014 from Marist. Maybe Dallas, which passed at No. 231 but was picking again at 238, would choose Sam. After all, Jerry Jones, the Cowboys\u2019 owner, is always up for making headlines. Instead, the Cowboys drafted a linebacker from Texas Tech. And so it went, Denver taking an Oklahoma linebacker at No. 242, San Francisco selecting a Boston College defensive end at 243, Dallas skipping over Sam again at 248. This had the makings of a horrible day for a league already up to its eyeballs in moral and ethical questions about the safety and the culture of the sport. Finally, around 6:45 p.m., Mike Kensil, the N.F.L.\u2019s vice president for game operations, strode to the lectern to make a historic announcement: With the 249th pick of the draft, the St. Louis Rams had selected Sam . \u201cIt was somewhat overwhelming to walk out,\u201d Kensil said after the draft. \u201cI really felt like I was a part of N.F.L. history. It was a memorable moment, and I really felt honored to be a part of it.\u201d Asked if he was concerned that Sam might not be drafted, Kensil said: \u201cI don\u2019t know if we were concerned about it. He\u2019s a good player. St. Louis realized he was a good player, and they were smart enough to take him.\u201d Kensil added, \u201cAnytime you get the SEC defensive player of the year in the seventh round, that\u2019s a pretty good pick.\u201d And that is precisely why the N.F.L. doesn\u2019t get a parade: Sam should have been taken three rounds earlier. You cannot acknowledge the Southeastern Conference as the best college football conference, as the N.F.L. has, and then let one of its top players be drafted behind kickers and players from obscure programs in obscure conferences. \u201cAs is the case in the draft, sometimes players fall,\u201d Rams Coach Jeff Fisher said in an interview with NFL.com. \u201cHe fell.\u201d So why did Sam, a 6-foot-2, 261-pound senior pass rusher, fall? His off-the-field conduct was apparently stellar: no firearm violations, no driving-under-the-influence arrests, no reports of domestic abuse or barroom brawls. Especially after his mediocre performance at the scouting combine in February, critics said he was too slow to play linebacker in the N.F.L. and too small to be an effective lineman. Sam may have been overlooked, though, because of his sexual orientation. Even teams that had no problem with Sam\u2019s being gay might have been wary of the possibility of a news media distraction and of a public-relations quandary, real or imagined. Still, players and fans have recently been able to see how public outrage and scrutiny can influence an entire league\u2019s behavior. Two weeks ago, the N.B.A. barred the Los Angeles Clippers\u2019 owner , Donald Sterling, for life and fined him $2.5 million for racist comments he made in private. On Saturday, the N.F.L. made history with Sam\u2019s selection. In each case, the leagues had little ethical wiggle room. Had Sam not been drafted, the N.F.L. would have had much explaining to do. After the draft, I asked myself which was more captivating: Sam\u2019s being drafted or Johnny Manziel\u2019s being repeatedly passed over in the first round. I must admit that there was a guilty pleasure in watching Manziel sweat and stew as teams cast vote after vote for substance over style. For all the attention on Sam\u2019s sexuality, the vanity embodied by Manziel poses a greater challenge to the American soul. In a sense, both players got what they were due: acceptance for Sam and an indictment for Manziel. Viewed through that prism, the draft was a triumph of enlightenment over entitlement. The N.F.L. did the right thing by Michael Sam; I only wish it would have done the right thing a little sooner.", "keyword": "Football;Sports Drafts and Recruits;MIchael Sam;Rams;Gay and Lesbian LGBT"}
{"id": "ny0127503", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/01/30", "title": "Tabasco and Frank\u2019s RedHot in a Buffalo Wing Sauce Duel", "abstract": "\u201cSOME like it hot,\u201d Tony Curtis told Marilyn Monroe in the 1959 movie of the same name, referring to music. Since then, Americans have grown to like something else \u2014 food \u2014 even hotter, as evidenced by the popularization of spicy fare like Buffalo chicken wings, made with cayenne pepper hot sauce. Now, a hot sauce war has broken out in time for the Super Bowl , perhaps the most snack-centric day of the year. According to a survey from the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, consumers who plan to watch Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday will spend $11 billion on food and other goodies, compared with the $10.1 billion they said they would spend before Super Bowl XLV last year. One hot sauce warrior is the McIlhenny Company, which is introducing a seventh flavor in its Tabasco line, Tabasco Buffalo Style hot sauce, joining varieties like the original, known as Tabasco pepper sauce, and chipotle pepper sauce. The new flavor is celebrated in a campaign by Ogilvy West in Los Angeles as \u201cfrom the people who perfected hot sauce,\u201d offering \u201cclassic Buffalo flavor with just the right amount of heat.\u201d As those ads begin, Tabasco\u2019s principal rival, Frank\u2019s RedHot sauce, is expanding to national television a sassy campaign, previously in print and on radio, that carries the theme \u201c I put that \u2014 \u2014 on everything. \u201d ( The campaign, with a budget estimated at $15 million, is created by Euro RSCG New York. In the frank Frank\u2019s commercials, a bleeping sound is heard over the word as it is uttered by a mischievous older woman named Ethel. On screen, her mouth is covered by a splat, as if a censor spilled sauce on the film. Ethel adds \u201ca little bit of heat\u201d to everyday life, \u201cand not only metaphorically,\u201d said Rahul Sabnis, executive creative director at Euro RSCG New York, part of the Euro RSCG Worldwide unit of Havas. Because \u201cwe want to be clever and fun, but we don\u2019t want to go over the top,\u201d he added, the intent is to portray her as \u201cyour grandmother being a straight talker.\u201d The maker of Frank\u2019s, Reckitt Benckiser, also plans to send a branded bus on a cross-country Frank\u2019s to the People tour. It starts this week in Indianapolis, this year\u2019s host of the Super Bowl. When Buffalo wings were first served, in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1964, Frank\u2019s RedHot was an ingredient in the sauce. Frank\u2019s also offers a RedHot Buffalo Wings sauce, introduced in 1996, and even sells a flavor called Frank\u2019s RedHot Hot Buffalo Wings. The heating up of the hot sauce category is indicative of the increasing efforts by marketers of packaged foods to take advantage of a trend that began in 2008, when consumers seeking to economize started eating at home more often . That dovetailed with another change, a yen for bolder, intensely flavored foods. For instance, the inside front cover of the Feb. 6 issue of Time magazine carries an ad for Lay\u2019s Kettle Cooked Mesquite BBQ potato chips, sold by the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo. \u201cBBQ so real,\u201d the headline promises, \u201cyou\u2019ll want to wipe the sauce off your face.\u201d (Hmmmm. Maybe Lay\u2019s could flavor a chip with Tabasco or Frank\u2019s RedHot.) \u0095 \u201cWe did a \u2018needs gap\u2019 study with consumers in 2010,\u201d said Martin Manion, vice president for corporate marketing at the New Orleans office of McIlhenny, and \u201cover 80 percent of the people we talked to thought that Buffalo would be a great addition to the Tabasco portfolio.\u201d Although \u201cFrank\u2019s is aligned with chicken wings through the story of Buffalo wings,\u201d Mr. Manion said, in taste tests with consumers \u201csix in 10 preferred the Tabasco formula to the one we tested against.\u201d The campaign promotes the product as \u201ca Louisiana twist on something you\u2019re familiar with,\u201d he added, echoing a commercial that declares, \u201cBuffalo, New York, meet Buffalo, Louisiana.\u201d \u201cWhat McIlhenny has done is try to understand and remain on the leading edge of how palates have evolved over time,\u201d Mr. Manion said. \u201cWhen we introduced chipotle sauce, 90 percent of people couldn\u2019t pronounce it.\u201d \u0095 The campaign for Tabasco Buffalo Style, with a budget estimated at $3 million, includes television, radio and online ads; the Tabasco Web site, tabasco.com ; and social media like Facebook and Twitter . The campaign carries a theme, \u201cAre you one of us?,\u201d created by Ogilvy West for the Tabasco brand. \u201cThere are people who get hot sauce, and those who don\u2019t,\u201d said Colin Drummond, senior partner and head of planning at Ogilvy West, part of the Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide unit of WPP, and Tabasco is particularly interested in those \u201cwe call \u2018zesties,\u2019 who share a zest for life and the food they eat.\u201d His colleague at Ogilvy West, Peter Kang, senior partner and executive creative director, said: \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like life turned up to 11. Zesties carry Tabasco with them to put on their Egg McMuffins in the morning and on their dinners at four-star restaurants.\u201d As Reckitt Benckiser confronts competition in hot sauce, it is introducing a $20 million multimedia campaign \u2014 also by Euro RSCG New York \u2014 for another of its pantry staples, the French\u2019s line of mustards, which carries the theme \u201c Friends. Family. French\u2019s .\u201d In mustards, too, flavor is a focus, with ads for products like Spicy Brown and Dijon With Chardonnay along with original yellow. Although they are \u201cso different as brands,\u201d said Paolo Zotti, vice president for marketing in the food division of Reckitt Benckiser in Chester, N.J., each campaign is about \u201ctrying to leverage and nurture a brand experience\u201d centered on variety. \u201cI\u2019m a romantic marketeer,\u201d he added. \u201cYou\u2019re successful if people love your brands.\u201d", "keyword": "Super Bowl;Sauces;McIlhenny Co;Reckitt Benckiser;Frank's RedHot;Advertising and Marketing;Football"}
{"id": "ny0058101", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/09/14", "title": "With Governor\u2019s Indictment, Scrutiny of Grand Jury System", "abstract": "AUSTIN \u2014 The indictment of Gov. Rick Perry by a Travis County grand jury has put the spotlight on the state\u2019s quirky system that gives judges a choice in how to seat a grand jury. Mr. Perry\u2019s charges for overstepping his authority as governor came from a type of grand jury that is not the norm in Austin\u2019s criminal courts: one whose members were chosen at random. Austin courts, like those in many of Texas\u2019 larger cities, typically rely on a so-called \u201ckey man\u201d selection process, where judges choose a commissioner responsible for recruiting a panel of grand jurors. The practice was not used to seat Mr. Perry\u2019s grand jury because the judge overseeing the case comes from San Antonio, where random selection is preferred. As the case moves to trial, it is prompting questions about whether it is time to end the \u201ckey man\u201d practice, which can be seen as favoring prosecutors. \u201cThe difficulty is, where did the \u2018key man\u2019 come from?\u201d asked Larry Karson, a criminal justice professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who studied the system in 2004. \u201cWhat is the relationship of the key man to the judge? And what is the relationship of the potential grand juror to the key man?\u201d (The University of Houston is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) Texas law allows judges in its 254 counties to decide whether to have grand jurors chosen at random or selected by a key man \u2014 a method frequently used by judges in Austin, Dallas and Houston. Grand jury selection preference is often dictated by experience, and Mr. Perry\u2019s was random because that is the method favored in San Antonio\u2019s Bexar County, where Senior District Judge Robert C. Richardson, who is presiding over the case, resides. Critics derisively call the system the \u201cpick-a-pal\u201d method, because judges select people they know to find willing citizens to serve as grand jurors. \u201cI find the random system much easier,\u201d said Judge Sid Harle, who oversees the 226th state district court in San Antonio. \u201cWith the random selection, I think you get a better demographic, people from across the county.\u201d But those who like the key man system say it speeds the process. One proponent is John B. Holmes Jr., who was district attorney in Houston\u2019s Harris County for 21 years. He said it is tough enough to use the random selection process to seat a trial jury. It would be even harder to use that process to find people willing to sit for a grand jury, which generally meets a couple of times a week for three straight months. \u201cIt fouls up your work, taking care of your kids,\u201d Mr. Holmes said. \u201cGetting the people who are willing to do it is a big thing.\u201d Mike Lynch retired in 2012 after serving 20 years as a judge in Travis County. He said he always used the key man method because it is the one he was taught to use. \u201cDone properly, you can get a good mix,\u201d he said. But he added that in Mr. Perry\u2019s case, he would have switched gears and used random selection, because it is a way to eliminate the appearance of any bias. While bias is critics\u2019 biggest concern with the key man system, Mr. Holmes argued that putting someone who does not want to serve on a grand jury creates its own risk \u2014 that he or she may take out their resentment on the prosecutor. \u201cYou\u2019re really going to get a reaction,\u201d he said, adding that a prosecutor needs grand jurors to weigh the evidence, not plot ways to get back at them. \u201cThey\u2019re already mad about having to serve.\u201d", "keyword": "Jury;Judiciary;Rick Perry;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0161234", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/04/19", "title": "Actor Gets an Encore as Broker's Spokesman", "abstract": "SAM WATERSTON is taking on a new role. No, he is not leaving the NBC series \"Law & Order,\" where he has portrayed stalwart Jack McCoy for 11 seasons. Rather, Mr. Waterston, who served for two years as the spokesman for the TD Waterhouse brokerage firm, is becoming the face and voice of TD Ameritrade. A campaign, scheduled to begin Monday, will introduce TD Ameritrade to Wall Street and Main Street. The company was formed in January after the Ameritrade Holding Corporation, a brokerage firm, completed the acquisition of TD Waterhouse USA from Toronto-Dominion Bank. The deal was among a spate of recent consolidations in the online and discount brokerage business, which also included the purchases of BrownCo and HarrisDirect by the E*Trade Financial Group. The TD Ameritrade campaign carries the theme, \"The independent spirit,\" expressed in headlines like, \"Independence is the spirit that drives America's most successful investors.\" The double meaning is meant to evoke the do-it-yourself approach of current and potential TD Ameritrade customers. Mr. Waterston will be at the center of the campaign, which is being created by the former Ameritrade agency, OgilvyOne Worldwide in New York, part of the Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide unit of the WPP Group. He will be in advertising on television, in print, in brokerage offices and on Web sites, both general interest like msn.com and yahoo.com, as well as financial-oriented ones like MarketWatch (marketwatch.com), Motley Fool (fool.com) and of course, the coming TD Ameritrade (www.tdameritrade.com). Of the $150 million estimated marketing budget that TD Ameritrade plans to spend in the next year, about half is earmarked for online media and direct marketing. That is indicative of the increasing commitment being made by major marketers to the nontraditional media, which also include e-mail marketing, video on demand, search engine marketing and branded entertainment. \"It's a very strong presence in the online space,\" said Chris Armstrong, executive vice president for sales and marketing at TD Ameritrade, who is based in Jersey City. \"We have to work at building a brand where the customers of both brands could find themselves, as well as appeal to prospects,\" said Mr. Armstrong, who had been chief executive at TD Waterhouse. When one company acquires another in the same category, it is unusual for the celebrity pitchman of the acquired company to be retained. But that made sense in this instance, Mr. Armstrong said. \"We had to decide whether or not Sam and his appeal with the old brand would alienate the Ameritrade customers,\" Mr. Armstrong said. To the contrary, he added, research found that Mr. Waterston \"resonates incredibly well with customers of both brands.\" In addition to Mr. Waterston, TD Ameritrade is adopting other elements from the marketing of the TD Waterhouse brand, including the green and white color scheme, the style of the logo and the serious tone of the campaign. Ameritrade ads were more light-hearted, carrying themes like: \"It's the 21st century. Trade like it.\" The continuity from TD Waterhouse partly reflects \"the fact we have a large shareholder with a North American strategy we could help extend,\" Mr. Armstrong said. His reference was to Toronto-Dominion, which owns 32.5 percent of TD Ameritrade and is to increase its stake to 37.5 percent by January 2007. Toronto-Dominion also operates a division, TD Banknorth, that owns banks in the Northeastern United States, which keeps the \"TD\" letters in front of American consumers. The TD Waterhouse campaign featuring Mr. Waterston was introduced in November 2003 by Cossette Post in New York, an agency that is part of the Cossette Communication Group. When one company acquires another in the same category, it is typical for the agency of the acquiring company -- here, OgilvyOne -- to be kept on. \"OgilvyOne has had the relationship going back to 1997,\" said Harvey Kipnis, co-managing director for the OgilvyOne New York office, \"and built for Ameritrade over time a 'test and learn engine' -- trying new things, measuring them, putting dollars around what provides the best return.\" \"The TD Ameritrade media strategy is a blend of what has worked for Ameritrade and what has worked for TD Waterhouse,\" Mr. Kipnis said. \"We'll see what works over the next year and shift our investments for better yield.\" Bill Heater, creative director at OgilvyOne, said the agency and TD Ameritrade discussed \"for a long time whether we stay with Sam Waterston or not,\" adding: \"At the end of the day, we decided he is a valuable, credible spokesman for the idea of independence. In his role on 'Law & Order,' he is the voice of critical, independent thinking.\" In the TD Ameritrade campaign, Mr. Waterston \"will be moving from the pitchman role he had with TD Waterhouse to an anchor role,\" Mr. Heater said. In the commercials, Mr. Waterston will speak briefly, introduce actors who portray different types of TD Ameritrade customers, then return at the end to deliver the independence theme. \"Independence was in the DNA of both brands,\" Mr. Heater said. \"For TD Waterhouse, Sam Waterston said, 'You can do this,' and Ameritrade celebrated the active traders by giving them tools to invest. It was all about empowerment, independence.\" Mr. Kipnis invoked perhaps the most famous Ameritrade campaign, created by OgilvyOne in 1999. It featured an office clerk named Stuart who helped his boss, Mr. P, go online to trade stocks. A line of dialogue that Stuart uttered to encourage the boss, \"Let's light this candle!\" became a catchphrase. \"That was about independent spirit,\" Mr. Kipnis said. Perhaps Michael Maronna, the actor who portrayed the voluble Stuart, could make a cameo appearance in the campaign. Indeed, according to the imdb.com data base, Mr. Maronna appeared with Mr. Waterston in an episode of \"Law & Order\" that was broadcast on Sept. 24, 1997.", "keyword": "OGILVYONE WORLDWIDE;AMERITRADE HOLDING CORP;AMERITRADE HOLDING CORP;TD WATERHOUSE;TD AMERITRADE;WATERSTON SAM;WATERSON SAM;ADVERTISING AND MARKETING;STOCKS AND BONDS;ADVERTISING (TIMES COLUMN)"}
{"id": "ny0152858", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/14", "title": "Gazing at Bodies During the Olympics", "abstract": "HERE is a confession: I like to watch. For two summer weeks every four years, I avoid the lure of sun and sand to hole myself up in a darkened room and watch mesmerized as nearly naked people perform curious acts on television. On the evidence of the broadcast hours being devoted to satisfying this obsession, it cannot be mine alone. Across the two-plus weeks of the Beijing Olympics, NBC Universal will have broadcast nearly 2,900 hours of live coverage (and 3,600 hours of total coverage) on NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, Telemundo, Universal HD, the USA Network and streamed coverage on its Web site, NBCOlympics.com . Without question, this is too much Bob Costas \u2014 he of the ready clich\u00e9, the coltish forelock and the jaw-dropping impertinence. (Has another broadcast journalist ever concluded an interview with an American president by informing him that he was \u201cdismissed\u201d?) Even so, it is worth enduring Mr. Costas\u2019s banalities, along with the welter of kooky color stories (\u201cThere is this and there is that,\u201d noted the sage Al Trautwig, always quick with a koan, during one prime-time feature on a gymnast), the commercial barrage of beer-barrel Americana and even the sometimes thinly veiled journalistic partisanship in order to get to the heart of the Summer Games. By that one means that, for days and nights in the privacy of one\u2019s living room, and without once resorting to XTube, a viewer is permitted and even encouraged to ogle an ongoing parade of muscled and lithe and rippling and toned and occasionally highly perplexing bodies, wearing little more than the evidence of our mutating cultural ideals. Here, for example, is Michael Phelps, the Baltimore merman, whose varied anatomical particulars (short legs, long torso, jug ears, size 14 feet, Olympic rings tattoo below right hipbone, on latitude with the pubic bone) have in recent days become more familiar in some ways than our own. Here are the gnomish female gymnasts, seemingly more compact than ever, more muscularly developed and yet at the same time troublingly arrested, to judge from the lack of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts. Here is Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer with the blister-pack abs and the padded deltoids, her stupendous physique attained, she says, through Herculean training, and now unquestionably resembling that of a cover boy for Men\u2019s Health. Here are the sprinters, their muscular bodies so different from those of the whippet-lean athletes of yesteryear. What is it that happened to the human body, one finds oneself asking. Is it diet or drugs or training or mysterious substances like human growth hormone that have turned so many sports stars into bendable action figures? Just as in baseball , when athletes overnight began looking more like Humvees than the reliable mid-size family Chevy, one\u2019s eye registers a difference that defies any easy effort to comprehend. It was the art historian Anne Hollander who noted that, even naked, the body is subject to fashion and that the body beautiful differs according to an era\u2019s prevailing mores and tastes. Because the Greek word gymnasium translates as something more or less like \u201cnuditorium,\u201d it seems clear that few events offer a richer opportunity to see how physical beauty is currently constructed than the Beijing Games. In a book \u201cMade in Beijing,\u201d put out by the German sportswear giant Adidas, there is a compelling group of archival pictures that date as far back as the 1920s. They show athletes like Emil Zatopek (the \u201cCzech locomotive\u201d), Bob Mathias and a surprisingly lean young boxer still known at the time as Cassius Clay. What is striking about these images is how lightly muscled the athletes\u2019 bodies appear, how fine in proportion and aesthetically balanced, and how unlike so many of those on view in these Games, bodies that even in real time seem digitally enhanced. It has been nearly two decades since I wrote a profile for Vanity Fair of the pioneering Australian body builder Bev Francis, and it is instructive to recall that Ms. Francis\u2019s rippling physique drew stares on the street back then. Now that the eye has adapted to more muscular padding on women (Madonna\u2019s shoulders, Dara Torres\u2019s arms), Bev Francis would barely rate a second glance. None of this is to infer that everyone in sports is juiced on steroids or ingests still-undetectable substances or requires DNA testing to determine his or her sex. And it is not to suggest that the Olympic ideals have been forever lost. Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox (and then consuming it later: certain athletes at the ancient Games gained laurels, while others won all they could eat). A mosaic floor in a fourth-century villa at the Piazza Armerina in Sicily depicts three female athletes playing some sort of ball game and wearing bandeau bikinis. One of them looks distinctly like that Diana of beach volleyball , Kerri Walsh. \u201cThe Olympics caters to all shapes and sizes,\u201d as Rick Burton, the marketer-in-chief of Team USA at the Olympics, points out. \u201cIt always has.\u201d What the Games also frankly accommodate is a taste for the spectacle of straining young bodies, an appeal that was not lost on the ancients. The crowds at the early Games, according to the historian Nigel Spivey, were as excited by the \u201cboys with slim waists, broad shoulders, neatly proud buttocks and springy thighs\u201d as they were by the lofty ideal of the Games. However distorted, the belief that to be fit is not merely to be brimming with sexual aliveness, but also to be prepared for hardship and battle, to be pure and good, remains deeply enmeshed in every Olympiad. Goony for athletic beauty, Socrates managed to find in all that young flesh not only a delight to the eyes, but also food for the soul. In many ways, the marketers of the Summer Olympics are still mining Socratic ideals, even if purity in sports at this point is surely a fantasy. At least that is the impression one obsessive has taken away from the Games thus far, as the shape of human perfection continues to evolve. There is a picture in the Adidas book of Nadia Comaneci at her Olympic apotheosis. If you happened to have been alive to watch those Montreal Games, you will probably recall how curious her superpowered child\u2019s body looked at the time. But hold that image of Comaneci against the current hypertrophied Pocket Pals, and the prepubescent Romanian gymnast of 1976 seems as willowy and womanly as Cyd Charisse.", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2008);Muscles;body image;History"}
{"id": "ny0053110", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/07/27", "title": "A Review of Harvest on Hudson, in Hastings-on-Hudson", "abstract": "Like the other restaurants operated by the Fort Pond Bay Company \u2014 Harvest on Fort Pond and East by Northeast in Montauk, and Half Moon in Dobbs Ferry \u2014 Harvest on Hudson, in Hastings-on-Hudson, sits on a waterfront with million-dollar views. But Harvest on Hudson offers something else: an opportunity for diners to build up their appetites with a pre-dinner stroll through the restaurant\u2019s lush, well-tended vegetable and herb gardens, filled with flourishing peppers, tomatoes, squashes, mint and thyme. The menu at Harvest is flexible and allows diners to share and sample many dishes by ordering for the table. It\u2019s communal and it\u2019s fun. Select among sfizi (very small snack plates), the raw bar, a cheese selection, salads, antipasti, risottos, pizzas, pastas, even slices of steak. Diners might find some items on the salty side, like the cod fish fritters and, except for the silken prosciutto, the sausages on the salumi platter. A pizza of broccoli rabe, sausage and Gorgonzola met the same judgment from the palates at our table. Salad, risotto or pasta helped balance any salinity. Image Pork tenderloin in crepinette. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times Risottos are available in full or small portions, a welcome idea for this satisfying dish. We shared a richly layered half portion of the anatra \u2014 a play of tangy sheep\u2019s milk cheese, bits of duck confit and fatty pine nuts mingled into perfect rice. Also appealing was an appetizer special of vegetable-stuffed calamari, further enhanced by its bed of lovely soft chickpeas bathed in the exotic flavors of brown butter dashed with black squid ink. Considering the aggressive seasoning of some dishes, the pastas we sampled were surprisingly subtle, like a special of rigatoni in thin flavorless clam rag\u00f9. But mellow ravioli with spinach, ricotta and a touch of sage offered relief from the spiciness and salinity of some other dishes. Informing diners of the provenance of a menu item has become a welcome trend, and we found that all of Harvest\u2019s cheese selections came from farms in our own Hudson Valley. A selection of four of them makes a perfect snack or a course at meal\u2019s end. Image A cheese selection. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times As for entrees, don\u2019t miss the pork tenderloin in crepinette. If all the dishes here were as good as this moist, tender fillet \u2014 adorned with excellent glazed asparagus and a Parmesan sabayon that added a touch of tangy salinity to the modestly salted meat \u2014 this restaurant would be noted in travel books as a reason to come to New York. Running a close second, a roasted Crystal Valley Farm half-chicken could not have been more succulent, or more deserving of its association with smoked bacon, cremini mushrooms and sage. On the other hand guancia, or pork cheeks, with potatoes and spinach sharing the plate, was overly salty. As for fish, the crisped seared skins were delicious, but the flesh of a whole dorado was overcooked, although it came with a dewy fresh salad, dates adding a sweet note. Halibut had spent too much time under the flame as well, and it arrived in a bowl, an awkward entree presentation that this kitchen seems to favor. There seemed to be a disconnect between the desserts described on the menu and those brought to the table. Macerated cherries sparked a simple, creamy panna cotta; coffee gelato balanced a dark bitter chocolate semifreddo of Amedei chocolate. But the promised dulce de leche seemed missing from a weird, molten, unpleasantly bitter chocolate coulant cake. With the task of serving up to 175 diners outside and an additional 200 indoors, it\u2019s no wonder the kitchen\u2019s efforts can be inconsistent. Nonetheless, Harvest is a festive and exciting place. Bring along a hat and sunglasses for sun protection, and a jacket, in case the river wind blows cold. Kudos to Harvest on Hudson for reclaiming a section of the river\u2019s long-neglected Westchester waterfront and turning it into a gorgeous showplace everyone can enjoy.", "keyword": "Harvest on Hudson Hastings-on-Hudson NY Restaurant;Westchester;Hastings on Hudson NY;Restaurant;Fort Pond Bay Company"}
{"id": "ny0080626", "categories": ["sports", "skiing"], "date": "2015/02/15", "title": "Experiencing the Alpine World Ski Championships From Above", "abstract": "BEAVER CREEK, Colo. \u2014 The first ski race I covered was the Olympic women\u2019s downhill in Meribel, France, in 1992, and I watched it from the finish area amid the cheers, the groans and the rubbing shoulders in the close-quarter mixed zone. So it has continued, but after 23 years of staring uphill as great skiers carved their way down, I had the opportunity on Friday to observe from a different vantage point: to look downhill instead and see a championship race from the start. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the better views in sport,\u201d said Barry Bryant, a 79-year-old American known as Bear who was the assistant start referee for the men\u2019s giant slalom at the 2015 Alpine world ski championships . The truth is that it can be hard to see the forest or the trees when the fog is thick or the snow or sleet is coming down sideways. But Friday was not one of those days. Bryant got to enjoy the panorama of the Rocky Mountains on a blue-sky afternoon with Grouse Mountain and Larkspur Bowl stretched out before him and a packed grandstand that looked like a scale model in the distance. He got to see great talents like Ted Ligety and Marcel Hirscher kick out of the start and, fresh and full of ambition, attack the opening slope and the first few gates of the course before dropping quickly \u2014 astonishingly quickly \u2014 out of sight. \u201cIt\u2019s what I live for,\u201d Bryant murmured when the day\u2019s work was done. But as Bryant stood watch in the start house \u2014 an inflated white archway that comes from the same architectural tradition as the bouncy castle \u2014 what he could not see was all that was transpiring outside the temporary walls of his domain. Image Ted Ligety, in bib, amid a group watching the race on a TV screen. Credit Christopher Clarey/The New York Times He could not see the racers, lips pursed and eyes closed or open, contorting their bodies as they visualized the race and the challenges to come. He could not see them stooping in their boots to grab a handful of snow and then slap it on their necks to stay cool on an unseasonably warm day. \u201cIt\u2019s 50 degrees,\u201d Ligety mumbled to Steve Porino, the American television reporter, in what sounded like a complaint. On the World Cup circuit, the challenge at the top often can be staying warm. On Friday, it was quite the contrary, but the racers still warmed up nonetheless. There were push-ups, crunches and planks; sprints up the steep slope just outside the start house. A few earnestly yanked on elastic bands looped around their trainers\u2019 legs \u2014 a little too earnestly for Tim Jitloff, the veteran American. \u201cThat\u2019s the new trend,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve got the bands and the trainer, and it\u2019s all kind of ridiculous. I don\u2019t need it. I just do my own thing and stay calm and go for it.\u201d With 60 racers qualified for the second run, there were indeed a world of pregame philosophies on display in the corral that surrounded the start house. The top 30, as usual at world championships, went first on the second run and in reverse order of their first-run finishes. Between the support staff and the competitors, it made for quite a crowd in a tight space, but the surprise to an outsider was how quiet and orderly it all seemed: more tea ceremony than ready room. There was little chitchat, virtually no tomfoolery except for one lobbed snowball. You could hear the hum of the generator that was keeping the start house inflated and the occasional shouts accompanying a racer\u2019s burst out of the start gate that were not unlike the intermittent shrieks of teenagers jumping off the diving board in a different season. The Sounds of the Downhill Some of the top ski racers in the world describe the sounds of a World Cup downhill. But in general it was enough to pick up on the subtleties: the slap of the skis as a racer bounced to get himself ready, the thump of the therapist\u2019s palms on a skier\u2019s powerful thighs. \u201cIt is very quiet, because it\u2019s a no-joke matter,\u201d Jitloff said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like the room before you take the test.\u201d Except when you prepare to take the test, the student at the neighboring desk probably was not performing moves that Martha Graham or Twyla Tharp could have choreographed. Skiers, like many athletes, have been visualizing for decades, but it is still quite a sight, particularly in close quarters, and ever more a stylistic smorgasbord. Some lean on their poles and use one hand to trace a sinuous path through the air; the path that mimics the one they intend to follow past the gates. Some grip both poles, throw body and artistic soul into the task and work up a sweat. Others, like Ligety, are much closer to Zen as they stand quietly and barely twitch a muscle as they see what is not yet there. \u201cAnother thing that\u2019s special with Ted is he does conserve his energy,\u201d said Adam Cole, the start coach for the U.S. Ski Team who was on site on Friday. \u201cHe\u2019s not stressed out for two hours before his run or anything. He\u2019s pretty even keel all the way until we are in the tent.\u201d Image Barry Bryant, known as Bear, is a starting official. Credit Christopher Clarey/ The New York Times Half asleep might be a better way of putting it for a man who is viper quick between the gates. But Ligety took his time and then some, whether it was donning his speed suit or his bib or buckling his boots. He took in the view with the crowd gathered around the television monitor that sits just outside the start house. \u201cI was staying as relaxed as I possibly could,\u201d said Ligety, even if it did not reflect his inner state. \u201cI know any time I get in the start gate of a giant slalom I have a good chance of winning, and that adds that extra bit of pressure because you are fighting for the title.\u201d He fought particularly well on Friday, and when he finished his remarkable second run, the roar from far below in the valley was obscured by the round of applause from those gathered around the screen up on top, most of whom had very little to gain from Ligety\u2019s excellence. \u201cMaybe it was everyone clapping for what they recognized as a little piece of art,\u201d Porino said. \u201cAll I know is I\u2019ve never heard that before.\u201d Only Hirscher, the first-run leader, would have a real crack at drawing a mustache on Ligety\u2019s Mona Lisa. Unlike his rivals, Hirscher had arrived in the start area just a few minutes before his second run: emerging from splendid isolation by way of the women\u2019s downhill course. Once into the enclosure, he shadow boxed and stretched, heard a course report from the Austrian coaches delivered by two-way radio and then another course report as he clicked into his skis at the entry to the start house. He lifted them, first the right and then the left, as a ski technician wiped the bottoms with a cloth. He then slid methodically forward, his eyes fixed on the light-filled space in front of him before he finally heard the countdown and the electronic beep and propelled himself into the arena. Television now shows you so much with Alpine skiing, but it still cannot quite capture the steepness of the pitch or the speed of the racers. Watching Hirscher from this fresh angle, as he leaned hard and sliced past the gates and through the air, he looked computer generated in his wind-tunnel-ready perfection. But the challenge was very real, and when the last and loudest roar rumbled up to those of us whom Hirscher had left behind, it was the roar of an American celebration.", "keyword": "Skiing;World Cup Skiing;Beaver Creek Colorado"}
{"id": "ny0067900", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/12/29", "title": "Carmelo Anthony Hobbled as Knicks Extend Skid to Eight Games", "abstract": "Wesley Matthews scored 28 points, including six 3-pointers, and the host Portland Trail Blazers beat the short-handed Knicks, 101-79, on Sunday night. Matthews, who leads the N.B.A. with 106 3-pointers this season, made five 3s in the first half against the Knicks. His teammate Nicolas Batum finished with five 3-pointers and 17 points. The Blazers went 16 for 36 from long range on the night. They have made at least 10 3-pointers in five of their last six games. \u201cIt\u2019s contagious,\u201d Matthews said. \u201cIt was just a good vibe from the jump.\u201d It was the eighth straight loss for the Knicks (5-28), who had just nine available players to start the game and then lost Carmelo Anthony for the second half because of a sore left knee. Portland, which led by as many as 27 points, has won eight of its last nine games. Cole Aldrich had 12 points and a career-high 19 rebounds for the Knicks, and Tim Hardaway Jr. scored 17 points. The Blazers were without LaMarcus Aldridge, who has missed three of the last four games with an upper respiratory illness. The Knicks were without J. R. Smith, who is having continuing problems with his left heel. Samuel Dalembert was sidelined by a sprained right ankle, and Amar\u2019e Stoudemire missed the game with a sore right knee. To make matters worse, Anthony, who had been nursing a sore left knee, did not return for the second half. Anthony had 36 points in a 135-129 overtime loss at Sacramento on Saturday night. Anthony had 13 points in the first half on Sunday, but he grimaced in pain at times. \u201cTonight it feels like fatigue, and not getting a chance to recover from last night,\u201d Anthony said. \u201cI felt this before the game, but I looked around the locker room, and we have seven or eight guys ready to go \u2014 I really didn\u2019t have a choice but to go out there and attempt to play and see how much I could take.\u201d Image The Spurs\u2019 Tim Duncan, who finished with 16 points, shooting against the Rockets, who lost, 110-106, on Sunday. Credit Darren Abate/Associated Press Matthews made three 3-pointers in the first quarter, helping the Blazers to a 31-22 lead. Batum hit a 3-pointer to extend the lead to 50-32 in the second. At that time, 30 of Portland\u2019s points were from 3-pointers by either Matthews or Batum. Batum made a 3-point shot in the third quarter that pushed Portland\u2019s lead to 71-47. PISTONS 103, CAVALIERS 80 Brandon Jennings scored 25 points, and Detroit mounted an 18-0 run in the second quarter to roll past host Cleveland. Andre Drummond had 16 points and 17 rebounds for the Pistons (7-23). Detroit set a season high for 3-pointers made by going 17 for 31 from long range. Kevin Love had 20 points and 10 rebounds for Cleveland. It was Detroit\u2019s first road win against an Eastern Conference team this season. SPURS 110, ROCKETS 106 Danny Green had 24 points, and injury-depleted San Antonio held off a late rally to beat visiting Houston, ending a six-game skid against an intrastate rival. Tim Duncan had 16 points and Manu Ginobili had 15 for San Antonio (19-13), which won for the first time in three games. James Harden had 28 points, and Dwight Howard added 24 points and 17 rebounds for Houston (21-8). MAVERICKS 112, THUNDER 107 Dirk Nowitzki matched his season high with 30 points, Chandler Parsons added 26, and host Dallas beat Oklahoma City. The Mavericks rallied from 7 points down to start the fourth quarter. They were without center Tyson Chandler, a late scratch with back spasms. Nowitzki put the Mavericks ahead for good with a pair of free throws with 3 minutes 25 seconds to go. Serge Ibaka led Oklahoma City with a season-high 26 points.", "keyword": "Basketball;Carmelo Anthony;Wesley Matthews;Cole Aldrich;Tim Hardaway Jr;Knicks;Trail Blazers"}
{"id": "ny0092023", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/08/16", "title": "Mozzarella for Big Cheeses at an East Hampton Market", "abstract": "Unlike other East Hampton haunts treasured by affluent summer people for their beachy, low-key vibe, Red Horse Market bustles with productivity. The produce is arranged like a Flemish still life, women in equestrian garb demand to know the provenance of the grass in the grass-fed beef, and the Kardashian sisters once fought on camera in this small shop. Its patrons are a devoted lot. \u201cBecause of the quality, of the meat, of the seafood, because they stock local producers,\u201d said Molly Dunkirk, a personal chef who was filling her car with grocery bags on a recent Thursday afternoon. The shop attracts its share of boldface names \u2014 Martha Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Fallon, Drew Barrymore, Katie Couric, Ed Burns \u2014 as well as finance and movie-industry types. East Hampton is a town where million-dollar homes are described by real estate agents as \u201caffordable.\u201d So it\u2019s probably no surprise that behind the neatly arranged shelves (black chia seeds and $8 jars of sauce), there is an ultra-attentive level of service. \u201cI personally stock the refrigerators for some of our people,\u201d Jeff Lange, one of three men who own the store, said. \u201cThe cupboards, too. So that when they arrive on a Friday night, everything that they need is right there.\u201d That kind of efficiency, though expected, is not what draws the weekender to the market. The coffee is always on, and there is a rack of newspapers for those whose morning routine includes sitting on one of the benches just outside the doors. The best-selling item in the store is \u201cGrandma\u2019s chicken salad,\u201d Mr. Lange said. Of course, among a clientele that owns helicopters, the market also sells a fair amount of octopus salad and chicken Florentine. The butcher shop is the store\u2019s centerpiece, and summer is high grilling season. According to the owners, one family in Water Mill regularly orders $2,000 to $3,000 of beef each weekend (primarily wagyu, at $45 a pound). In one corner, there is a pizza oven. At the other end of the store is Pasquale Langella, who presides over the market\u2019s mozzarella station. \u201cHow many?\u201d he calls out to shoppers. Toddlers stand on tiptoe in front of his work space: an immaculate table where he is surrounded by buckets of milky water and where he pulls and swirls amorphous slabs of the soft cheese in hot, salty water. Out of the aluminum caldron, he twists off a knob and skewers it on a toothpick for a sample, which is usually quickly snapped up. Last year, the market sold 34,000 pounds of fresh mozzarella. Even hedge funders seem to defer to Mr. Langella. \u201cHey, Pasquale!\u201d Josh Harlan (of Harlan Capital) said from the other end of the store. \u201cThe cheese was excellent last night. I had my mother over for dinner.\u201d In a precinct hungry for authenticity, each summer Mr. Langella, 59, is the attraction at several charity events and private parties in the Hamptons, making the cheese on-site. \u201cI\u2019ve been making mozzarella since I was 14 years old,\u201d he said. \u201cMy grandma taught me. She picked me out of all of the kids. You know why? You gotta have patience for the cheese.\u201d But patience is sometimes in short supply at Red Horse Market. \u201cThey literally fight in line here over who is going to get the mozzarella first,\u201d Mr. Langella said of some of his customers. \u201cAlways in a hurry. What do they think, the beach is gonna disappear?\u201d", "keyword": "Red Horse Market;East Hampton NY;Supermarkets;Cheese;Pasquale Langella"}
{"id": "ny0173173", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/22", "title": "S.E.C. Investigates Company Founded by Clinton Donor", "abstract": "OMAHA, Nov. 21 (AP) \u2014 The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into spending by a database marketer in Omaha that already faces a lawsuit contending that the company misspent millions, some of it on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton . The shareholder lawsuit contends that Vin Gupta, founder of the company, InfoUSA, used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal and campaign trips; that Mr. Gupta gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract; and that the company paid for luxuries that Mr. Gupta enjoyed. The company said in a filing Tuesday that it would cooperate with the S.E.C.\u2019s request for documents related to expense reimbursement, transactions with related parties, some corporate expenditures and certain trades of company stock. The company did not specify what the S.E.C. was looking for, but the lawsuit, filed by two investment managers in a Delaware court, might offer some clues. The investment manager Cardinal Value Equity Partners and the hedge fund Dolphin Limited Partnership filed the lawsuit earlier this year, contending that Mr. Gupta misspent millions of dollars in corporate funds. The lawsuit states that Info USA has spent nearly $900,000 since 2001 flying the Clintons to domestic and international destinations and political events. Mr. Gupta has been a major donor to Democrats and gave at least $1 million to Mr. Clinton\u2019s presidential library in Arkansas. Mr. Gupta also took part in a June fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in Manhattan. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said in May that all the flights connected to InfoUSA were reimbursed and disclosed in accordance with Federal Election Commission and Senate ethics rules. The investment managers also say InfoUSA paid for use of a jet plane, the 80-foot yacht American Princess, condos in Hawaii and California and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln stadium box. Some of the $28 million in \u201crelated-party transactions\u201d the investment managers have questioned included payments to Annapurna Corporation, which Mr. Gupta owned. InfoUSA did not immediately reply to a message seeking comment Wednesday. In the past, Mr. Gupta and InfoUSA said the jet, condos, stadium box and American Princess were for entertaining clients.", "keyword": "infoUSA Inc;Securities and Exchange Commission;Securities and Commodities Violations;Clinton Hillary Rodham;Clinton Bill;Presidential Election of 2008"}
{"id": "ny0067066", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/12/03", "title": "Sweden: Government May Fall", "abstract": "Sweden\u2019s left-leaning minority government was on the verge of collapse Tuesday after a far-right party, the Sweden Democrats, said it would side with the opposition to vote against a proposed budget in an attempt to force the government to resign. Options for Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, a Social Democrat, appeared limited: He could withdraw the budget plan, which would postpone the vote set for Wednesday, resign or wait until Dec. 29 to call for a new election.", "keyword": "Sweden;Stefan Lofven;Budget;Sweden Democrats"}
{"id": "ny0159189", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2008/12/01", "title": "Endeavour Lands in California, Avoiding Florida Weather", "abstract": "Jarring the Mojave Desert calm with rumbling sonic booms, the shuttle Endeavour dropped out of a cloudless blue sky and glided to a smooth landing Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base in California to close out a 16-day assembly mission for the International Space Station. Diverted from a planned landing in Florida by low clouds and high crosswinds at the Kennedy Space Center, Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy, the shuttle commander, guided the winged orbiter to a picture-perfect touchdown on Runway 4 at 4:25 p.m. Eastern time. A few moments later, Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force, the shuttle\u2019s pilot, released a red and white braking parachute and the shuttle rolled to a halt, wrapping up a 6.6-million-mile voyage that included 250 orbits since its launching on Nov. 14. \u201cWheels stopped, Houston,\u201d Captain Ferguson radioed. \u201cCopy, wheels stopped, Endeavour,\u201d replied Capt. Alan G. Poindexter of the Navy from the mission control center in Houston. \u201cWelcome back. It was a great way to finish a fantastic flight, Fergie.\u201d The astronauts had hoped to land in Florida, where friends and family had gathered, but low clouds and high crosswinds from a cold front forced the flight director, Bryan Lunney, to wave off two landing opportunities. He briefly held open the option of keeping the astronauts in orbit an extra day and trying again for Florida on Monday. But forecasters concluded there was little chance the weather would improve. Flight surgeons were standing by to assist the outgoing space station flight engineer, Gregory E. Chamitoff, returning to the unfamiliar tug of Earth\u2019s gravity after six months aboard the space station. To ease his return to gravity, Dr. Chamitoff made the trip resting on his back in a recumbent seat on the shuttle\u2019s lower deck. Also on board: More than a gallon of processed urine and condensate, the first samples from a newly installed water recycling system aboard the station that is a central element in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2019s plans for increasing the lab\u2019s crew size to six from three next May. At least three months of testing are required before station astronauts will be allowed to drink any recycled water. Joining Captain Ferguson, Colonel Boe, Dr. Chamitoff and Mr. Pettit for the trip home were Capt. Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper and Capt. Stephen G. Bowen, both of the Navy, and Lt. Col. Robert S. Kimbrough of the Army. Endeavour delivered more than eight tons of equipment and supplies to the space station for what was dubbed an extreme home makeover, including the water recycling gear, a new toilet, a new galley, a refrigerator and two astronaut sleep stations. While their crewmates worked inside the station, Captain Stefanyshyn-Piper, Captain Bowen and Colonel Kimbrough carried out four spacewalks to overhaul the space station\u2019s damaged right-side solar array rotary mechanism and to lubricate its left-side counterpart. They also installed a spare cooling system component, removed a spent nitrogen tank and prepared the Japanese Kibo lab module for attachment of an external experiment platform next year. Endeavour also delivered Sandra H. Magnus, Dr. Chamitoff\u2019s replacement. Dr. Magnus will remain aboard the lab with Michael Fincke, the Expedition 18 commander and an Air Force colonel, and Yury Lonchakov, a cosmonaut and a colonel in the Russian air force, until the next shuttle visit in February.", "keyword": "Space;Endeavour (Space Shuttle);Space Stations;National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Mojave Desert (Calif);International Space Cooperation and Ventures"}
{"id": "ny0042687", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/05/21", "title": "As City\u2019s Elderly Population Swells, Concerns Rise Over Lack of Access to Retirement Plans", "abstract": "New York City\u2019s elderly population is exploding: By 2030, the city will have 1.3 million people 65 and over, up from a million today. And few of them are likely to have a retirement plan. Nearly 60 percent of workers in the city do not have access to a pension or a 401(k), said Teresa Ghilarducci, the director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. That, combined with the population projection, made for what she called a looming crisis. \u201cIt isn\u2019t just a matter of people not being able to keep up their standard of living,\u201d Ms. Ghilarducci said. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about people who will be old and in a chronic state of deprivation.\u201d Ms. Ghilarducci and two others \u2014 Bill Samuels, a Democratic activist, and Letitia James, the city\u2019s public advocate \u2014 are asking city officials to consider an idea that has been gaining traction in other parts of the country: creating a pooled pension fund for private sector workers that the city itself could manage. The proposed solution seems somewhat counterintuitive at a time when areas around the country are struggling under their pension obligations. But California is looking at creating such a retirement fund, and Democrats in other states have made similar proposals . Massachusetts has created such a fund for employees of small nonprofits, overseen by the state treasurer. The city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, is expected to attend a meeting at the New School on June 17 to learn more about the issue and talk to State Senator Kevin de Le\u00f3n of California, who pushed the idea there. According to Ms. Ghilarducci\u2019s research, 59 percent of workers in the city do not have either a pension or a 401(k), up from 51 percent a decade ago. Many small businesses do not have the human resources capacity to manage a 401(k). Moreover, Ms. Ghilarducci says, 401(k)\u2019s are less than ideal for workers themselves, since they charge higher fees and have lower rates of return than pension funds, in part because people can withdraw their money at any time. In her and Mr. Samuels\u2019s proposal for the city, workers would be required to contribute a percentage of their pay. There would be no required employer match. Ms. Ghilarducci compares the proposal to the \u201cpublic option\u201d proposed by liberals during the health care reform debate, because private individuals would be able to take advantage of the negotiating leverage and oversight of the government. The fund would cost taxpayers nothing, Ms. Ghilarducci says, because workers\u2019 contributions would pay the full administrative costs. Also, unlike the defined benefit plans offered to many public workers, the fund\u2019s guaranteed rate of return would vary each year based on market conditions.", "keyword": "Pensions and Retirement Plans;401k;Old age,elderly,senior citizens;NYC;Retirement"}
{"id": "ny0246325", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/04/12", "title": "Report by Catholic Church Sees Gains on Sexual Abuse", "abstract": "An annual report issued by the Roman Catholic Church in the United States found that almost all of its 195 dioceses and archdioceses were in compliance with the abuse prevention plan that American bishops put in place in 2002 in response to the national scandal over clergy sexual abuse. The report found that while current accusations of abuse of minors are rare, the church is still deeply mired in the fallout from past cases. In 2010, 683 people made abuse accusations for the first time, with 653 of them reporting alleged abuse from years ago. Thirty of the accusations were made by minors, and the report said that all of these were forwarded to the civil authorities. However, victims\u2019 advocates and church critics say the annual report lacks credibility because it is based on self-reporting by the dioceses. The information is given to an outside auditing firm called the Gavin Group. The auditors do not examine personnel records or case files of those accused of abuse, so they cannot verify the dioceses\u2019 information. The credibility of the process came under scrutiny this year after a grand jury accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to remove from the ministry 37 priests accused of abuse or inappropriate behavior \u2014 a violation of the church\u2019s own policies. In response, the archdiocese suspended 24 priests, and recently suspended two more. But in the report released on Monday, the Philadelphia Archdiocese was found fully in compliance with the abuse prevention policy, known as The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People . Church officials say they were looking into the reasons for the discrepancy. The Dioceses of Lincoln, Neb., and Baker, Ore., as well as five jurisdictions for Eastern-rite Catholics, refused to participate in the audit and so were found not in compliance. The church says it cannot compel a bishop to participate. Of the 188 participating dioceses, the auditors sent warning letters to 55 saying they must improve their practices. The most common problem was the failure of parishes or schools to offer \u201csafe environment\u201d training for children. The church spent about $70 million on settlements with victims in 2010 and nearly $34 million on lawyers\u2019 fees \u2014 a decrease from the peak in 2007, when the church spent $420 million on settlements and $53 million on lawyers. Insurance covered about one-third of the abuse-related costs. The report also found an increase in reports of \u201cboundary violations,\u201d or inappropriate behavior, by priests. It attributed the increase to the success of the church\u2019s safe environment programs in raising awareness among young people and families.", "keyword": "Children and Youth;Sex Crimes;Roman Catholic Church;United States"}
{"id": "ny0075530", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/05/04", "title": "Many Democrats Turn Their Backs on Free Trade", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton needed Republican support to win a bitter battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also garnered 40 percent of congressional Democrats, including almost half the party\u2019s senators. President Obama may also win some close trade votes \u2014 first with the approval of a bill giving him so-called fast-track authority to negotiate the huge Trans-Pacific Partnership and then when the deal itself moves through Congress. This time, more than 80 percent of congressional Democrats will oppose the president. Democrats have turned decidedly protectionist in the decades since the passage of Nafta, which have coincided with increasing globalization and steep losses of American manufacturing jobs. Even Hillary Rodham Clinton is breaking with her husband\u2019s free-trade record, hinting that she may oppose the Pacific trade pact, which would bind the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. Mr. Obama and his unaccustomed allies, Republican congressional leaders, want to pass fast-track authorization \u2014 which assures a straight up or down vote on the Pacific pact and other trade deals \u2014 by the end of the month. It\u2019s a slog. For now, fewer than 20 House Democrats are on board, and the maximum is 30; 10 Senate Democrats may go along, but no more than 15. Although leading Republicans embrace the free-trade measures, a handful of the party\u2019s senators and as many as 50 of its House members may vote against it, chiefly because it is supported by Mr. Obama. Rational critics often conflate unbridled trade, which has hurt America\u2019s industrial work force, and trade pacts. The complaints used to center on Japan, but now they focus on China, even though the United States has no plans for a free-trade agreement with that country. Nonetheless, there are legitimate concerns about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other deals. One raised by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, is the \u201cInvestor-State Dispute Settlement,\u201d which permits multinational companies to go before special tribunals to challenge certain domestic practices. Opposition to this provision, labor leaders say, scores through the roof in polls. Proponents have done an inadequate job of addressing concerns that this could affect American labor or environmental laws; Pacific pact negotiators may have to tighten this provision. Less legitimate are demands to include currency manipulation protections in any Pacific deal. This is aimed at China, which is not part of the pact. Yet the issue has been raised by serious lawmakers such as Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a former United States trade representative, forcing Obama administration officials to try to come up with some cosmetic way to appease them. The overpromising of earlier trade deals, especially Nafta, has produced a backlash. For Democrats, two factors emerged in a study of the Nafta vote by the Economic Policy Institute. Back in 1993, there were 67 rural Democrats, who split almost evenly for and against the treaty, while Democrats representing urban or suburban areas opposed it almost 2 to 1. Today, there are few rural Democrats in the House. And business, which provided a big chunk of campaign cash for those pro-Nafta Democrats, gives much less support for Democrats now. The protectionist pressure has reached Mrs. Clinton. Signaling that she may oppose the Pacific deal may be good primary politics, but it may not be as popular a stance in a general election. Although conditions have changed markedly, it\u2019s instructive to remember John B. Connally, the onetime Democrat who, more than Ronald Reagan, became the most dynamic Republican candidate at the start of the 1980 presidential race. He ran on a get-tough-on-trade platform, warning the Japanese that they \u201cbetter be ready to sit on the docks of Yokohama in their own Toyotas, watching their own Sonys.\u201d Mr. Connally spent $12 million \u2014 or $39 million today \u2014 and got one delegate, Ada Mills of Arkansas. He had to drop out after only the third primary.", "keyword": "Trans-Pacific Partnership;Hillary Clinton;Bill Clinton;Barack Obama;International trade;Protectionism;NAFTA;Democratic Party Japan"}
{"id": "ny0078275", "categories": ["business", "retirementspecial"], "date": "2015/05/14", "title": "For the Love of Animals", "abstract": "Linda and Gary Childs go almost everywhere with their \u201clittle girl.\u201d The retirees, from West Boylston, Mass., love to parade 3-year-old Chino down busy streets in her stroller. They take her to restaurants dressed in her fur-lined vest or polo hoodie where \u201cshe sits in her own chair, very polite.\u201d But their favorite place may be the seashore, where Chino wears sunglasses and one of her four beach dresses while lounging in a chair embroidered with her name. \u201cChino gives us so many laughs and so much love,\u201d Ms. Childs, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher, said of the 12-pound Chihuahua-pug mix. \u201cShe just makes everything better.\u201d The Childs are unusual in some respects. Retirement remains a time when many Americans move away from things they have to paint, feed or nurture. Only 41 percent of Americans 65 and older live in households with pets, compared with 68 percent of those 45 to 54 and 76 percent of 18- to 24-year olds, according to a 2014 survey by Mintel, a market research agency. The golden years may have less bark, bite and meow, but in the last decade new scientific studies, evolving attitudes about pets and changing family structures have reshaped the relationship between retirees and animals, even if much of the new research is not universally accepted. Erika Ribaudo, a senior adviser at A Place for Mom , which helps about 200,000 families a year find living arrangements for retirees, noted a growing demand for pets by retirees and the willingness of senior living communities to accept them. \u201cAs recently as 2005 there were very few communities that accepted pets,\u201d Ms. Ribaudo said. \u201cNow, probably 40 percent of them are pet friendly, and that number is growing. Science tells us that pets make people feel so much better, and more clients just don\u2019t want to give up their beloved family member. Today, they don\u2019t have to.\u201d From 2010 to 2015, pet ownership in the United States increased about 3 percent; 65 percent of households own a pet, usually a dog or cat. During that same time, according to the American Pet Products Association, spending on pet items increased about 25 percent, to what is expected to be $60.5 billion this year. For retirees, smaller is better. Younger pet owners are more likely to own dogs than cats \u2014 by a roughly 60-40 split, Mintel found. This gap begins to narrow with age, so that the 65 and older crowd is slightly more likely to own cats than dogs. Image Chino at home in West Boylston, Mass., with his owner, Linda Childs. Credit Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times There are no definitive statistics on the breeds of dogs favored by various age groups, but the American Kennel Club suggests that less active retirees \u2014 as well as those living in apartments or who travel a lot \u2014 consider smaller breeds like Chihuahuas or Dachshunds. It is easier to trip over smaller dogs, but it is harder for them to knock down their owners. As more Americans live alone and families have fewer children, \u201ctheir attachment to pets is deepening,\u201d said Hal Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University and author of \u201cSome We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It\u2019s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.\u201d \u201cThey think of them as people, and they are making greater emotional and financial investments in their pets.\u201d Glenn A. White, an 87-year-old retired businessman of Waltham Crossings, Mass., said he \u201cspends a lot of time talking to my 8-year-old Havanese, Cody. \u201cOf course,\u201d Mr. White added, \u201che talks back. I even sing to him\u201d \u2014 though Cody has yet to respond with his own version of \u201cHound Dog.\u201d Just as helicopter parents try to provide their children with every advantage, pet owners primp and pamper their cosseted companions. Pet shops become superstores with designer clothes and jewelry. High-end pet foods \u2014 including organic, holistic, grain-free, non-G.M.O. offerings rich with meat, poultry and fish \u2014 account for more than 40 percent of sales. And veterinarians report a rise in pet obesity. Retiree pet owners seem especially devoted as they buck the tendency to give up pets. \u201cAs boomers become empty nesters, they look for other things to nurture,\u201d said Richard Rosso, a certified financial planner in Houston. \u201cI\u2019ve been in this business for 26 years, and during the last seven to 10 years I have noticed that the retirement dream for many clients is still drinking a pi\u00f1a colada on the beach, but now they see a Lab next to them.\u201d Since the average American pet owner spends more than $1,600 per year on a dog and $1,100 on a cat, Mr. Rosso said, he now includes pet budget lines in his financial plans for retirees. Retirees and other pet owners have become more demanding in recent years, expecting businesses that cater to them to also serve their pets. The changing landscape of pet ownership is apparent at R.V. parks and campgrounds. \u201cThey have always accommodated pets, but in the last five years or so they have started investing capital in dog parks, agility courses, sticks and tubes and doggy washing stations,\u201d said Debbie Sipe, executive director of the California Association of R.V. Parks and Campgrounds . \u201cJust having a dog run is no longer enough.\u201d Kampgrounds of America , which has over 485 locations in the United States and Canada, is expanding such pet-friendly features through its Kamp K-9 program, according to Mike Gast, vice president of communications. He said that about 55 percent of its campers \u2014 the vast majority of whom travel by R.V. \u2014 own pets. Image Jackie Caldwell and her husband, Paul, with their 10-year-old Pomeranian, Foxy, who accompanies them on R.V. journeys between their homes in Pennsylvania and Florida. Credit Jeff Swensen for The New York Times \u201cAll of our facilities are pet\u2013friendly, and about half of them now have Kamp K-9s, which includes off-leash areas, agility courses,\u201d Mr. Gast said. \u201cWe\u2019ve added 50 of them in just the last year.\u201d The changing role of pets and retirement can be seen at Brighton Gardens of Raleigh, an assisted-living and memory care community in Raleigh, N.C., that could almost be mistaken for a menagerie. A pair of love birds greets visitors at the door. A well-fed Basset mix named Mr. Copper \u2014 the community pet known as the king of the table scraps \u2014 lounges on the dining room floor amid residents enjoying an afternoon cocktail. A volunteer pet therapist has a Shetland sheepdog in her lap as a smiling resident gently strokes it under the ear, while dogs and cats scamper down the hallways with their owners. \u201cEvery one of our 302 communities has at least one community pet,\u201d said Rita Altman, senior vice president of memory care and program services for Sunrise Senior Living , which operates Brighton Gardens communities throughout the country. \u201cIt is hard to measure all the benefits they bring \u2014 the happiness, the sense of purpose, the ability to nurture something \u2014 but we know they make a meaningful difference.\u201d Blair Patterson, a 79-year-old Brighton Gardens resident who uses a wheelchair because of arthritis, said his 9-year-old Shih Tzu is a constant source of joy. \u201cShe is so good for my ego,\u201d Mr. Patterson, a retired investment broker, said. \u201cShe thinks my wife and I are the most. Sometimes I think, \u2018Dear God, please help me be the man my dog thinks I am.\u2019 \u201d The growing belief that pets are not just good, but good for you, may make ownership more appealing to retirees. Some studies find that pet ownership can help reduce blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol while increasing one-year survival rates after a heart attack, according to Alan Beck, a researcher who is the director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. Other studies show that pets reduce loneliness and stress, promote interaction between people and encourage exercise. \u201cIt is clear that animals are good for your health\u201d Mr. Beck said, while cautioning that the field is still relatively young, with few comprehensive studies to draw from. Although people have owned pets for tens of thousands of years, scientists only began investigating the health implications of the human-animal bond during the 1970s. \u201cUntil then most research focused on the harm animals might pose through bites or spreading disease,\u201d he said. Mr. Herzog, the Western Carolina University professor, is less convinced that pets provide specific, widespread health benefits. He said studies showing specific benefits received wide attention in the media, whose addiction to \u201cfeel-good stories\u201d about pets was matched only by their penchant for reports of astounding \u201cmedical breakthroughs.\u201d These studies, he said, are also trumpeted by the pet industry. \u201cWe don\u2019t hear much about the compelling research finding that pets do not improve our health, reduce our loneliness or make us happier,\u201d Mr. Herzog said. \u201cOr about the 85,000 or so people a year, many of them older, who go to emergency rooms with broken bones each year because of their pets. Pets may be good for us, but, right now, I think it is more of a hypothesis than a proven fact.\u201d Such debates are an afterthought to retirees like Paul and Jackie Caldwell, whose 10-year-old Pomeranian, Foxy, is their constant companion as they travel in an R.V. between their homes in Florida and Pennsylvania. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine life without her,\u201d said Ms. Caldwell, 67. But sometimes Ms. Caldwell does need a break. Fortunately, a neighbor in Florida is happy to babysit. \u201cFoxy loves her Aunt BeaBea so much,\u201d she said. \u201cDuring the summer, when she is back home in New Brunswick, Canada, we Skype her once a month, and Foxy is so excited to see her.\u201d", "keyword": "Pet;Retirement;Old age,elderly,senior citizens"}
{"id": "ny0249160", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/05/13", "title": "Suspects in Terror Case Wanted to Kill Jews, Officials Say", "abstract": "The 26-year-old man from Queens had discussed growing a beard and the side curls of a Hasidic Jew, the police commissioner said, a disguise that he apparently hoped would enable him to attack a synagogue in Manhattan \u201cand take out the whole entire building.\u201d His ambitions did not end there. The man, a native of Algeria, also expressed an interest in blowing up the Empire State Building, the commissioner said. He was not a member of a terrorist group like Al Qaeda, the commissioner said. Indeed, his father said, he once sold cosmetics at Saks Fifth Avenue and was now trying to be a fashion model. Yet driven by a hatred of Jews and a belief that Muslims are mistreated the world over, the man, Ahmed Ferhani, began piecing together a plan to commit terrorism, the authorities said on Thursday, leading to his arrest after he and an accomplice bought weapons in a police undercover operation. Mr. Ferhani, along with a 20-year-old naturalized United States citizen from Morocco, were charged on Thursday in a terrorism case that is remarkable not only for the would-be model-actor the authorities have identified as its central player, but also for the unusual way the case was brought. The charges were announced at a City Hall news conference with arrest photos on display, featuring comments from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The case was presented in State Supreme Court, with no involvement from the F.B.I. or the United States attorney\u2019s office, typically crucial in such investigations and prosecutions. The accusations as detailed by the three officials sounded chilling. Just before Mr. Ferhani and his co-defendant, Mohamed Mamdouh, were arrested on Manhattan\u2019s West Side on Wednesday evening, they had bought a hand grenade, three semiautomatic pistols and 150 rounds of ammunition. They wanted to kill Jews; they mulled blowing up churches; and shortly before Mr. Ferhani was arrested at 58th Street along the West Side Highway, he asked an undercover detective, who was posing as a gun dealer, if the man could get him a bullet-resistant vest, a silencer and a police radio. Mr. Mamdouh was arrested nearby. \u201cThey conspired and took concrete steps to blow up synagogues and churches to advance those ideological goals and to possess and use illegal firearms and explosives,\u201d Mr. Vance said at the news conference. \u201cThey did it for jihad, something they referred simply to as the cause, which meant the violence and armed fight against Israel, Jews and other non-Muslims and the West.\u201d Mr. Kelly said Mr. Ferhani, using an expletive, explained he was fed up that Muslims around the world were being treated \u201clike dogs.\u201d The two men, who both live in Queens, were charged in a criminal complaint under a state terrorism statute passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that Mr. Vance said had not been used before in New York City in a terrorism case. Among the charges were second-degree conspiracy as a crime of terrorism, second-degree conspiracy as a hate crime and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism. If convicted of the top count, the men face life in prison without parole. The charges concluded what Mr. Kelly said was a seven-month investigation. Major terrorism cases are generally investigated by the F.B.I.- N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force, staffed with police detectives and federal agents, and prosecuted by the United States attorney\u2019s office in federal court. One law enforcement official said the Police Department\u2019s Intelligence Division, which handled the case, had notified the task force about it and the group had opted not to get involved. Little clarification was offered at the news conference, where officials offered explanations for why a case presented as a serious terrorism matter had not been brought in federal court. \u201cThey don\u2019t take all the cases,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said simply, referring to the federal authorities. The commissioner said federal authorities have the right of first refusal on any tip, adding that the case began as a local criminal matter with the district attorney\u2019s office, and \u201cit was logical to keep it going when it morphed into a terrorism investigation.\u201d Mr. Vance said in this case, prosecutors worked with the local police, but suggested that in some matters, it was important to share information with federal authorities. A spokesman for the F.B.I., Timothy Flannelly, declined to comment. The reasoning notwithstanding, Mr. Vance described Mr. Ferhani as a volatile threat. \u201cHe was committed to violent jihad, and his plans became bigger and more violent with each passing week,\u201d Mr. Vance said. At Mr. Ferhani\u2019s home in Whitestone, Queens, his father said his son had befriended people who were bad influences. \u201cHe\u2019s a very good kid,\u201d the father, J. Ferhani, 51, said. \u201cHe got involved with a bad kid. He\u2019s a na\u00efve person. He has a very good heart, but if somebody tries to tell him something, he always believes it.\u201d Told of the accusations against his son, Mr. Ferhani, a cabdriver, laughed in disbelief. \u201cOh my God, that\u2019s unbelievable,\u201d he said. \u201cBomb a synagogue? That\u2019s not my son.\u201d He said his son was raised as a Muslim, in Algeria, before the family fled in 1994 at the height of its civil war. \u201cBut he\u2019s not a religious fanatic,\u201d Mr. Ferhani said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t pray; he drinks.\u201d Late in the afternoon, the two suspects appeared before Judge Melissa C. Jackson in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. A prosecutor, Margaret E. Gandy, asked the judge to hold both men without bail. \u201cThe seriousness of this crime is considerable,\u201d she said, adding that investigators had an overwhelming amount of evidence. As she spoke, Mr. Ferhani lifted his head and mouthed words that could not be heard from the gallery. Neither defendant entered a formal plea, but lawyers for both said their clients denied wrongdoing. Judge Jackson ordered the men held without bail.", "keyword": "Terrorism;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0186118", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2009/03/23", "title": "Secretary Chu\u2019s Bumpy Ride From Laboratory to Washington", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber. But in his new job as energy secretary, Dr. Chu is observing phenomena he never saw in the science laboratory. At a recent Senate hearing, for example, he witnessed a junior cabinet member (himself) being systematically dissected by a senior senator (John McCain). Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, was unhappy when Dr. Chu affirmed the Obama administration\u2019s intention to suspend work at a planned nuclear waste site in Nevada. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr. Chu?\u201d he demanded repeatedly as Dr. Chu tried to explain. \u201cI think we can do a better job,\u201d Dr. Chu finally replied. For a slight, soft-spoken Nobel laureate, Washington has been an initiation that he has likened to being \u201cdumped in the deep end of the pool.\u201d Dr. Chu, 61, was chairman of Stanford\u2019s physics department and ran a national research laboratory. But in addition to being verbally slapped around by Mr. McCain, he has been forced to backtrack on some ill-informed comments about OPEC and ordered to spend quickly tens of billions of dollars in stimulus money with virtually no top-level help. Dr. Chu is still mastering skills like ducking a tough question from a reporter and delivering the all-purpose \u201cI\u2019ll get back to you on that.\u201d He has admitted his na\u00efvet\u00e9 on certain policy questions, like OPEC production quotas, and is still getting used to the scrutiny that comes with a cabinet job. \u201cI didn\u2019t appreciate how much of a public figure you become,\u201d Dr. Chu said in an interview recently in Milwaukee, where he spent the day talking to scientists about biofuels and touring a home that was being weatherized under a local program. President Obama has assigned Dr. Chu to carry out some of his central priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the nation\u2019s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change . The science part of his job is the most rewarding, Dr. Chu said. On his visit to Milwaukee, he visibly brightened when one University of Wisconsin researcher told him about a local entrepreneur who was turning the waste products from cheesemaking into ethanol, which was then blended with gasoline at a nearby convenience store. \u201cDoes he drop some off at the liquor store on his way?\u201d Dr. Chu asked impishly. A few hours later, wearing khakis frayed at the cuffs and brown, thick-soled professorial shoes, he dutifully traipsed through the small house that was getting new insulation and appliances to cut the owner\u2019s electric bills. When he emerged, five news cameras were set up on the lawn. But to his relief, most of the questions went to Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, who had accompanied him on the tour. Asked later what part of his job he liked the least, Dr. Chu said: \u201cThe fact that I\u2019m constantly being told that I have to be careful what I say to the press and in public. I can\u2019t speculate out loud anymore. Everything I say is taken with total seriousness.\u201d Yet as he takes on one of the toughest policy and management challenges in government, Dr. Chu brings certain assets that none of his peers or predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize , a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (\u201cDr. Wu\u201d by Steely Dan). He is a major celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific achievement is rewarded with rock star status. He is a member of Academica Sinica, Taiwan\u2019s most distinguished scholarly society, as was his father. Dr. Chu is struggling to get his arms around one of the most perplexing and intractable bureaucracies in Washington and to efficiently \u2014 and carefully \u2014 disperse $39 billion in funding from the stimulus package . Most of the department\u2019s top appointed positions, including deputy secretary, remain unfilled, leaving him largely reliant on career staff members to manage 114,000 employees and contractors and a budget that has more than doubled this year. The task at times appears overwhelming, and some in Washington quietly wonder if Dr. Chu is in over his head. Karen Harbert, president of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, praised Dr. Chu\u2019s academic credentials, calling him Mr. Science. But she suggested that the main decisions on energy and climate change policy were being made at the White House by a small team led by Carol Browner, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. \u201cIs he secretary of energy or secretary of research and development?\u201d Ms. Harbert asked. Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department\u2019s director of public affairs, said that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a little time to adjust. \u201cA Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,\u201d Mr. Leistikow said. Dr. Chu came to Washington after serving as director of the Energy Department\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a civilian research organization with 4,000 employees and a $600 million annual budget. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. He shared the 1997 Nobel in physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He comes from a family of academic overachievers. His father emigrated from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and retired as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. His mother studied economics in China and at M.I.T. One brother, Gilbert, is a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Stanford; the other, Morgan, is a highly regarded intellectual property lawyer in Los Angeles. Dr. Chu once described himself as the academic black sheep of the family. Morgan Chu said of his brother, \u201cHe\u2019s acclimating very well, all things considered.\u201d He added, \u201cHe has a wonderful set of skills for the job \u2014 an unbending respect for discovering the unvarnished truth and a willingness to challenge established dogma.\u201d Matt Rogers, an energy expert with McKinsey & Company whom Dr. Chu brought in last month to help speed the pace of Energy Department spending, said it would be a mistake to dismiss Dr. Chu as just a science geek. \u201cHe is a kind man; he is a nice man,\u201d Mr. Rogers said. \u201cBut he is not a patient man. People are going to have to take a deep breath and realize they\u2019re going to be moving at a much quicker pace than they were used to.\u201d Dr. Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the glacial pace of his department. He is eager, he said, to get on with what he sees as his main task: finding and financing the scientific breakthroughs that will end the nation\u2019s dependence on carbon-based fuels and solve the climate change problem. Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in Washington, Newton\u2019s first law \u2014 a body in motion tends to stay in motion \u2014 does not apply. \u201cIn a bureaucracy, if you start something in motion, it either stops or gets derailed,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to keep applying force.\u201d He intends to keep applying that force, he said, because it could help solve the world\u2019s energy and climate change problems. \u201cIf we don\u2019t spend this money wisely and invest in new technology that addresses these challenges,\u201d he said, \u201cwe will have failed the country. We will have failed the world.\u201d", "keyword": "Chu Steven;Energy Department;Science and Technology;United States Politics and Government;American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009);Global Warming"}
{"id": "ny0023956", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/08/18", "title": "The Impossible Mayor of the Possible", "abstract": "The question was a trap, put to a novice politician who had only just been elected mayor and had no government experience whatsoever. Would Michael R. Bloomberg be keeping any of the seasoned hands from the administration of his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acclaimed after 9/11 as America\u2019s Mayor, Time Magazine Person of the Year, not to mention The Guy Who Personally Tamed and Therefore Saved New York City? Mr. Bloomberg had no intention of doing so, nor was he going to say that. He praised the Giuliani team. Then he explained why he needed new faces. \u201cAfter you\u2019ve done a job for six or eight years,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said, \u201cyou know what can\u2019t be done.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg was keen to take on the impossible, or at least the seemingly so. And he did. A man whose public personality came in a plain brown wrapper presided during an era of radical change and rebirth in the city, much of it fostered by his administration. He has stayed so long that he and New Yorkers are now getting on each other\u2019s nerves: he, increasingly peevish and deaf to his critics; they, in turn, no longer able to detect or grant him any qualities beyond arrogance. Mayors rarely leave office in New York on affectionate terms. In the case of Mr. Bloomberg, a relationship that was always fraught \u2014 and could it have been anything else with a mayor whose net worth, enormous to begin with, increased every 15 minutes by more than the city\u2019s median annual household income? \u2014 has frayed. Baffling, visionary, obstinate and brilliant, Mr. Bloomberg had complications that could be maddeningly hypocritical or endearingly human. He preached the virtues of dietary sodium restrictions, but sneaked shakes of salt onto slices of pizza. His staff let it be known that Mike Bloomberg had a regular guy palate for beer and a hot dog; at dinner with a few commissioners, he confided that he didn\u2019t see why anyone should have to pay more than $300 for a good bottle of wine. He led the country \u2014 indeed, the world \u2014 in taking strong measures to reduce carbon emissions, anticipating that the city\u2019s population would grow by one million in the decade after he left office; meanwhile, he flew everywhere on private jets, the least carbon-efficient form of transportation on or above the earth, whether going to spend weekends at his house in Bermuda, or to lecture at a climate change conference in Copenhagen. He was not naturally inclined to soaring oratory, so on his rare forays, the eloquence was indelible. Practically alone among elected officials in the United States, Mr. Bloomberg spoke in 2010 for the right of a Muslim group to open a mosque a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks, citing the founding principles of the nation. As he stood on Governors Island, with the Statue of Liberty visible over his shoulder, Mr. Bloomberg said: \u201cWe would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.\u201d Last week, during a news conference in City Hall, the same mayor snarled at a judge for ruling that in searching the pockets of millions of young black and Latino men who had done nothing wrong, the police and the city had violated their constitutional rights. The moment lacked even a whisper of the grace that had made his voice so powerful on Governors Island. It would be futile to try squaring those two Bloombergs. Yet as he enters his final months in City Hall, the full arc of his era is coming into view. Mayors are often spectators, forced to play the hands dealt them by history, the economy, the public, their allies or campaign contributors. As much as any mayor of modern New York, Mr. Bloomberg has been a transformative figure, a shaper of his time. Elected to lead a city that was the grieving, wounded site of an atrocity, he will depart as mayor of a city where artists have been able to decorate a mighty park with thousands of sheets of saffron, for no reason other than the simple joy of it; where engineers figured out how to turn sewage gas into electricity; where people are safer from violent crime than at any time in modern history. He is shrewd and has often had good luck, and when that happy combination was in short supply, his vast personal fortune helped patch things over, do good deeds, buy allies. He was not conventionally partisan, and was clumsy in dealing with the baroque centers of power in Albany. The ideology that shaped his goals was, broadly, the allure of large numbers: get enough rich people and companies here, and they will support a government that can keep the city running for everyone else; make policies in public health, education and policing that, when multiplied across eight million people, will create a healthier, smarter, safer city. The love of big numbers led to great success and, at times, toxic excess. Perhaps most important, he has had a knack for avoiding unnecessary political fights, and little anxiety about trying and failing. At his best, that combination of emotional efficiency and fearless experimentation changed not only the city, but the world. He didn\u2019t want to know what couldn\u2019t be done. Imagine the deep, drawn breaths of the audience \u2014 the gasps \u2014 at the finale of a special show held at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle on Feb. 24, 2005. In an elegant performance hall, 13 honored guests, delegates from the International Olympic Committee, had been treated to aperitifs and a 40-minute revue that captured the New York of story, song and cinema. Mayor Bloomberg and his committee had spared nothing in the enchantments, hoping to lure the 2012 Olympics to the city. Dancers whirled. Meryl Streep charmed. Whoopi Goldberg cracked wise. The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis pulled rhythm and melody from sky and cellar. A reel of iconic movie clips rendered the city in every shade from the noir to the gaudy. Finally, at the very back of the stage, a giant curtain began to drop from a three-story wall of glass, shifting the spectacle to the actual city. Framed in the giant window was Central Park. Its winter browns were pillowed in snow and swaddled in streaks of the saffron cloth of \u201cThe Gates,\u201d an art installation that was glowing, thanks to lights held by volunteers stationed along miles of winding paths. Overhead, fireworks spattered rivers of color in the sky. The only word for it was breathtaking: what human brain trying to process such a scene would not instantly demand more oxygen? The Olympics delegation rose in ovation. Now, eight years later, all of that evening\u2019s shimmer has been stilled, the last trumpet notes faded with the embers from the rockets and the pinwheels. The 2012 Olympics went to London, not New York. That is the way of political administrations: a million struggles and crises and circuses, \u201can October surprise every month,\u201d as Mayor Edward I. Koch once said, so many of them vanishing in the wink of a New York minute. Tucked into that evening was something beyond a fling with the Olympics, which many New Yorkers could not have cared less about. Beyond the overreaching was something far-reaching. In the gasps at the finale, in every breath drawn by the audience, was the invisible substance that could be counted as Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s most enduring, radical work: cleaner indoor air. The room was free of tobacco smoke. Even during cocktails, no one lit up. And not just on that gilded night, in that privileged space at the center of Manhattan, but in every restaurant, bar and watering hole throughout the five boroughs since March 30, 2003. Soon after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg had met at Gracie Mansion with his first health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who urged him to push for a complete ban on smoking in places where people work \u2014 no exceptions, no special pleadings by hotels or small places or private catering halls. A person who spent one minute in a smoky bar, Dr. Frieden said, would be exposed to as much pollution as someone who stood in the Holland Tunnel for 60 minutes at rush hour. Image The mayor at a news conference on May 2, 2010, after a bomb was discovered in a car in Times Square. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Would such a ban save lives, Mr. Bloomberg wanted to know. Yes, Dr. Frieden said. Then go ahead, the mayor said. With that, Dr. Frieden continued his briefing by mapping the political heat that would be applied by the hospitality industry. The mayor cut him off. \u201cHe told me, \u2018The first rule of business is, once you make a sale \u2014 leave,\u2019 \u201d Dr. Frieden said in Joyce Purnick\u2019s authoritative biography, \u201cMike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.\u201d Most dramatically, the New York ban included bars and restaurants, whose trade lobbyists tried to stop it by warning of economic disaster. Commentators jeered about \u201cMommy Mayor\u201d and the \u201cNanny State.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg pushed past the catcalls and got a bill through the City Council that in addition to the ban, included money for cessation programs and steep taxes on cigarettes. The smoking rate for adults declined by a third, and for young people by half. California and a few cities and towns in the United States already had similar restrictions, but they were little-noticed beyond their borders. After New York City took the step, the crusade started by Mayor Bloomberg and Dr. Frieden crossed the country and then the oceans. Since New York City passed its law, 500 other cities in the United States and 35 states enacted smoke-free legislation. In March 2004, a national smoking ban in public places was adopted by the Republic of Ireland , making it the first country in Europe to have one; anyone who had frequented Irish pubs fogged with smoke might have thought they would be the last places on earth to stub out cigarettes. There was more. On the night in 2005 of the Olympic spectacle, only one of the 10 countries with delegates in the audience had a law that restricted smoking in public places. Now nine of those countries do. By the end of 2012, 48 countries had followed New York in adopting smoking bans, providing some protection to 1.2 billion people. That works out to about one in seven of all the humans now on earth: breathtaking and breath-giving. Not just the air changed. City parkland grew by about 800 acres; 750,000 new trees have been planted, toward a goal of one million, an initiative that took off after the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, reported that every dollar the city spent on a tree returned $5.50 in savings on heating, cooling and public health. The transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, added 285 miles of bike lanes and turned over parts of Broadway near Times Square to pedestrians. The waterfront on the East River in Queens and Brooklyn, rezoned to accommodate the Olympics that never came, grew to absorb a population that increases by the thousands every month. The No. 7 train line is being extended to 11th Avenue from Times Square, and then south, to irrigate a new crop of skyscrapers being planted on and around train yards. The city alone picked up the bill \u2014 unusual for transit projects \u2014 and intends to pay for it with the real estate taxes collected from new development. Mr. Bloomberg committed $4 billion, more than all his predecessors combined , to build the third water tunnel, which was first proposed more than 60 years ago. Construction had begun in 1970, then dragged on through six mayoral administrations, slowing and stopping when money was tight; his acceleration of the project, however farsighted, had no political upside \u2014 it will not be completed until 2018, but property owners have had to pay steep increases in annual water bills. Cornell University, with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is building a new campus for applied sciences on Roosevelt Island; the project was instigated by the Bloomberg administration and became possible when the philanthropist Charles F. Feeney pitched in $350 million . The city cut the number of young people detained for trial in juvenile court by as much as 50 percent, and reduced over all the number of people it sent to jail . Crime went down. At the same time, public health doctors increased screenings and treatment at Rikers Island, a likely vortex of communicable disease. As one of his first acts, Mr. Bloomberg sought and won control of the schools, saying it would create accountability. He invested heavily in education: the amount of money spent on schools has doubled since 2001. More students graduated from high school in four years, though that success was not closely tied to how much money was spent in a given school ; nor were the additional resources able to close the frustrating gap in test scores between higher-performing Asian-American and white students and their lower-scoring black and Hispanic classmates. The city opened 28 career and technical education high schools, the first new ones since the 1960s. Teachers were paid more, though the city did not negotiate a new evaluation system when it agreed to the increases, and later got into an ugly fight over it. However, approval of tenure applications, once all but automatic, dropped to 55 percent from 97 percent. Mayoral control of the education system meant that a central administration had the power to close schools, corral space for charter programs, and set rigid rules for assigning students to schools. Many parents found the new educational bureaucracy hidebound and remote, and looked fondly back at the once-reviled community board system. Air, water, ground had changed. So did the tone. Unlike most elected officials, Mr. Bloomberg had ample balm to spread around when the city budget dried up; over nine years, he gave about $200 million through the Carnegie Corporation to 600 arts and cultural groups, many of which had been cut adrift from the city budget. \u201cThe grants conveyed an indisputable good to the city\u2019s social and cultural fabric,\u201d the investigative reporter Tom Robbins wrote in The New York Post in June. \u201cBut political advantage was equally inescapable.\u201d The giving doubled in 2005, an election year, and tripled in 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg sought the right to run for a third term in office by undoing a limit of two that had been voted into law by public referendum. He spent more than $110 million on his re-election campaign, and barely won. No mayor finishes all the business that needs to be taken care of. When Mr. Bloomberg was toying with a run for president, he kicked liabilities down the road. In recent weeks, he has been saying how important it is for the next mayor to negotiate concessions on pensions and health benefits from the city unions \u2014 something he did talk about at the time, but did not win at the bargaining table. Meanwhile, the city\u2019s public housing authority, which provides homes or vouchers for more than 600,000 people, has deferred maintenance in thousands of apartments. It needs $6 billion in capital financing . And the durability of the experimental spirit that Mr. Bloomberg encouraged remains uncertain, as is the $383 million in private donations he raised in support of varied pilot projects: stopping domestic violence, preventing black and Latino young men from falling behind, manufacturing green roofs, getting salads into schools. The siren song of large numbers led the city to multiply the number of people that the police stopped and frisked. But the Constitution protects the rights of individuals and does not recognize the laws of large numbers. It requires that the more invasive an action the authorities take against a person, the greater the cause must be. More than a year ago, Mr. Bloomberg himself had \u2014 sotto voce \u2014 said there would be changes to the police approach. The number of stops declined sharply. A more agile Mr. Bloomberg would have avoided a needless fight on behalf of a program that was already being reformed. Asked on Monday about a judge\u2019s order that the police wear body cameras in five precincts for a year, to document precisely what was happening in the streets, Mr. Bloomberg seemed especially angry. A \u201cnightmare,\u201d he said. He insisted the test would fail: a police officer might turn his or her head and the camera would miss the action. The judge said it would be an experiment, a pilot project for a year, but Mr. Bloomberg wasn\u2019t having it. \u201cIt is a solution that is not a solution,\u201d he declared. Michael Bloomberg had become the kind of expert that 12 years ago he would not hire for his government: someone who knew \u201cwhat can\u2019t be done.\u201d", "keyword": "Mike Bloomberg;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0054172", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/07/31", "title": "Jay Maeder, 67, Newspaperman Who Wrote \u2018Annie\u2019 Comic Strip, Dies", "abstract": "Jay Maeder, a columnist and editor for The Daily News and The Miami Herald and the last writer of the comic strip \u201c Annie ,\u201d died on Tuesday at his sister\u2019s home in Houston. He was 67. The cause was cancer, his companion, Amanda Hass, said. He lived in Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Mr. Maeder wrote the \u201cPeople\u201d column for The Herald in the 1970s and \u201980s and the \u201cNewsreel\u201d and \u201cLounge Lizard\u201d columns for The News in the 1980s and \u201990s. His irreverent style could test his editors; in one 1982 Herald column, he quoted Mother Teresa as saying she preferred being \u201cwith lepers\u201d to dealing with journalists and asked: \u201cSomething we said? You don\u2019t like our cologne?\u201d A Daily News editorial he wrote about Joel B. Steinberg, who was released from prison in 2004 after being convicted of beating his 6-year-old adopted daughter to death in 1987, drew wide attention. It appeared in part on the front page, beginning, \u201cLet him feel every New York eye burning straight through his rotten soul.\u201d Mr. Maeder also edited The News\u2019s Sunday magazine and the newspaper\u2019s Big Town series about New York history. A historian of the comics pages, Mr. Maeder wrote \u201cDick Tracy: The Official Biography\u201d (1990) and contributed to \u201cThe Encyclopedia of American Comics.\u201d In 2000, he took over writing \u201cLittle Orphan Annie,\u201d as the comic strip was known when Harold Gray began writing it in 1924. Mr. Maeder and the artist Andrew Pepoy updated Annie\u2019s red dress and curly hair and added the pilot and former C.I.A. agent Amelia Santiago, but kept the catchphrase \u201cLeapin\u2019 Lizards!\u201d \u201cI tell people it\u2019s \u2018Indiana Jones\u2019 with chicks,\u201d he told The News. Jay Edward Maeder Jr. was born in Cleveland on Jan. 29, 1947, and grew up in Fort Myers, Fla. He attended several colleges and served in the Army in Vietnam before taking his first newspaper job, at The Morning Journal in Northern Ohio. He joined The Miami Herald in 1971 and moved to The News in 1985. After retiring in 2008 he continued to work on \u201cAnnie.\u201d He also contributed posts to the City Room blog of The New York Times. They were discontinued after similarities were found between descriptive passages in the posts and those in articles he had written for The News. His two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his sister, Jane Walsh, and Ms. Hass, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Jordan and Christopher; and four grandchildren. Mr. Maeder\u2019s updating of \u201cAnnie\u201d could not reverse its decline. Tribune Media Services stopped the strip mid-storyline in 2010, when fewer than 20 American newspapers carried it. \u201cIt is no longer a great marketplace for adventure comic strips in the daily newspapers,\u201d Mr. Maeder said in 2010, adding, \u201cI\u2019m going to miss the girl a lot.\u201d", "keyword": "Jay Maeder;Newspaper;Comic strip;Obituary;New York Daily News;Miami Herald"}
{"id": "ny0148735", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/09/29", "title": "A Mellowed Pirro, but No Less Blunt on TV", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 Jeanine F. Pirro \u2019s brassy, salty style always made her one of the more vivid characters in New York\u2019s Technicolor cast of political personalities. When she bowed out of politics after her loss to Andrew M. Cuomo in the 2006 campaign for state attorney general, the lingering image that many New Yorkers were left with was textbook Jeanine. She was caught on a recording fuming to her friend Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner, in terms not quite the Queen\u2019s English (and certainly not printable here) about exacting revenge on her husband, Albert, who she suspected had been carrying on an affair. So last week, as she was scolding a defendant during a taping of her new television show on the CW network, \u201c Judge Jeanine Pirro ,\u201d her choice of words seemed somewhat un-Jeanine. \u201cYou know what?\u201d Ms. Pirro barked at the defendant, a man who was being sued by his soon-to-be-ex-wife for spending his income tax refund on an Xbox video game console and a tattoo rather than on day care for their son. \u201cYou\u2019re full of hogwash!\u201d Hogwash? That\u2019s just one snippet of a Jeanine Pirro who on TV seems a little tamer, a little less defiant, maybe even a little Zen. \u201cI\u2019ve mellowed,\u201d Ms. Pirro said during a recent interview from her \u201cchambers,\u201d which are actually more of a dressing room and contain not shelves of law books but a lighted vanity mirror, overstuffed couches and framed pictures of her with the country singers Toby Keith and Brooks & Dunn. For much of her three-decade career as a Westchester County assistant district attorney, a judge and a three-term district attorney, Ms. Pirro was a woman whose image was defined by other people \u2014 her political opponents, the media and, most of all, her husband. Mr. Pirro\u2019s highly publicized extramarital affairs, his child with another woman, reputed mob ties and conviction on tax-evasion charges in 2000 were constant distractions, and many political observers have said that his baggage kept her from winning higher office. But she has tried to put much of that behind her. She separated from her husband last year and swore off politics. When she wags her finger at one of the many derelicts who appear before her in court, a wedding ring is nowhere to be seen. \u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d Ms. Pirro said, sounding as if she were lecturing from the bench, \u201clife really is a series of ups and downs. I know. I\u2019ve made the journey many times. And you don\u2019t look back and say what would\u2019ve or could\u2019ve or should\u2019ve. You look forward.\u201d Make no mistake about it: Ms. Pirro has hardly lost her ability to rant or harangue or slam down her gavel in disgust. As she rendered her decision in the case with the couple feuding over day care payments, she admonished the young man, who was countersuing his wife for slander after she wrote disparaging comments about his abilities as a father on her MySpace page. \u201cTruth is an absolute,\u201d Ms. Pirro shouted, \u201cand you are a bad father.\u201d She ruled in favor of the wife. But she is just as quick to sympathize as she is to chastise. In a case she heard last week involving two mothers who were battling heroin addictions and who were fighting over $3 an hour in babysitting wages, Ms. Pirro expressed outrage that the two women were getting high while raising their children. \u201cIf I was a district attorney, I\u2019d be looking to put you in jail,\u201d she told them. But her demeanor softened as the defendant choked back tears and explained how she had recently gotten herself clean and managed to scrape together just enough money to buy a house for her and her daughter. \u201cYou\u2019re a very lucky lady,\u201d Ms. Pirro said, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. The show has provided a convenient point from which to begin a midlife transition for Ms. Pirro, who recently turned 57. She works in Chicago \u2014 from the same studios just off Michigan Avenue where Jerry Springer and Judge Greg Mathis film their shows \u2014 three days a week. She said it provided a nice break from life in New York. If Ms. Pirro has any regrets or second thoughts about any of her public stumbles \u2014 her abortive bid against Hillary Rodham Clinton for Senate in 2005, her 10-point loss to Mr. Cuomo in 2006 or her comments to Mr. Kerik that became part of a federal investigation into whether she illegally eavesdropped on her husband \u2014 she does not betray them. As for being made into a political punching bag at times, she said: \u201cIt just goes with the territory. I mean, grow up and deal with it. Otherwise get out of the business.\u201d As for her troubled marriage: \u201cI don\u2019t regret anything. Period. End of story.\u201d Though the Pirros separated last November, they have not yet divorced. Mr. Pirro did not respond to messages left at his legal office in White Plains. Ms. Pirro\u2019s friend and former campaign strategist, Kieran Mahoney, said it was consistent with her character not to get bogged down thinking about what her political career could have been. \u201cI never felt that after that process she wavered or gave into self-pity,\u201d Mr. Mahoney said. \u201cShe liked the fight.\u201d Telepictures Productions, which produces \u201cJudge Jeanine Pirro\u201d and other programs like \u201cThe Ellen DeGeneres Show\u201d and \u201cThe People\u2019s Court,\u201d has agreed to film a year\u2019s worth of shows, or 150 episodes. The CW airs the program across the country on weekdays at 3 p.m. \u201cI\u2019m in a very good place. I am,\u201d she said, referring at first to her job, then to her overall state of mind. \u201cI\u2019m happy. I\u2019m really happy.\u201d Michael Edelman, a Republican political consultant who was close to the Pirros during their most trying times as a couple, said life outside of politics must come as a relief to Ms. Pirro. \u201cShe has to be happy that it\u2019s now just about her. It\u2019s not about her family life. It\u2019s not about Al,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to get out from under all that.\u201d Ms. Pirro, who has been a legal commentator for CourtTV, CNN and, most recently, Fox News, said being a television personality was a good fit. And she insisted that she had no intention of returning to political life. \u201cFor everything there is a season. That season has passed,\u201d she said. Mr. Edelman said he had watched \u201cJudge Jeanine Pirro\u201d and thought to himself, \u201cIt\u2019s right up her alley.\u201d", "keyword": "Television;Pirro Jeanine;Suits and Litigation;New York State;Judge Jeanine Pirro (TV Program)"}
{"id": "ny0260584", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2011/06/16", "title": "Chromebook From Samsung Has Its Head in the Cloud", "abstract": "You can say all kinds of nice things about Google \u2019s Chromebook laptop concept. You can say it\u2019s ahead of its time. Or that it\u2019s thinking way, way outside the box. Or that, as failures go, at least this one swung for the fences. Last year, Google made limited quantities of the CR-48, a gorgeous, sleek, prototype black laptop that it sent to journalists and bloggers, seeking feedback. Its hope was that, eventually, real laptop companies would manufacture Chromebooks. Tomorrow, the first one goes on sale: the Samsung Series 5 ($500 with cellular, $430 Wi-Fi only). So what is the Chromebook concept? Assumption 1: These days, you can get online almost anywhere. Assumption 2: Google\u2019s free online software can do almost everything regular software can do \u2014 e-mail (Gmail), Web browsing (Chrome), chat (Google Talk), photos (Picasa), word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows (Google Docs). Conclusion: A laptop doesn\u2019t need a hard drive. Doesn\u2019t need programs on it. Doesn\u2019t need Windows or Mac OS X. Doesn\u2019t need a desktop, files or folders. Everything you need is online, so all the laptop needs is a Web browser. It\u2019s a sexy idea. No hard drive? That means no moving parts and long battery life (8.5 hours on a charge). That also means lighter weight (3.3 pounds). The Samsung has only a 16-gigabyte SSD drive (basically a big memory chip, like on the iPad or iPhone ). No Windows? That means no viruses or spyware. No serial numbers or copy protection. No payments to Microsoft for upgrades every couple of years. No two-minute start-up process; a Chromebook starts up in under 10 seconds. No files stored on the laptop? That means you don\u2019t care if your Chromebook is lost or stolen. (Well, not as much.) You don\u2019t have to worry about backups. You can log into any other Chromebook, and find your whole software world waiting for you. The Samsung itself is beautiful, with a sparse, uncluttered MacBookish feel. The rounded edges of the black plastic body (and the white or silver top panel) make it a joy to hold \u2014 and to behold. The typing feel is fantastic. The simplicity and purity of this laptop is refreshing and unthreatening; it\u2019s like an iPad with a keyboard (and no touch screen). Samsung/Google may, in fact, have gone a little too far in the pursuit of spartan elegance. Instead of a row of function keys at the top, you get dedicated keys for brightness, speaker volume and Web browsing (Back, Forward, Refresh, Full Screen, Next Window). There\u2019s no Forward Delete key, Fn key, menu key, Print Screen key or Windows key (duh). In fact, there\u2019s not even a Caps Lock key. It\u2019s great that Google wants to weed out keys it doesn\u2019t think people use very much, but come on \u2014 Caps Lock? What\u2019s next, the bracket keys? The semicolon? Q, Z and X? (Deep on a Settings page, there\u2019s a way to reassign the magnifying-glass key \u2014 the Search key for Web browsing \u2014 so that it performs the Caps Lock function. But even if that were an ideal solution, which it\u2019s not, you\u2019d be lucky to find it: Samsung doesn\u2019t provide a single page of printed operating instructions.) The laptop has two USB jacks, a Web cam, a video output jack, a memory card slot and a headphone/microphone jack \u2014 but no Bluetooth, Ethernet jack, FireWire port or DVD drive. It\u2019s really weird to use a computer where everything happens in your browser; if you attach a hard drive or flash drive, you even see its contents in a browser window. You can never quit or minimize the browser; there\u2019s no desktop behind it, no matter what your instincts say. But let\u2019s give this shifted paradigm a chance. How well does Google\u2019s newfangled concept hold up in the real world? Unfortunately, not very well. The first assumption is that you\u2019re online everywhere you go. That\u2019s rather critical, because when it\u2019s not online, a Chromebook can\u2019t do much of anything. You can\u2019t peruse your e-mail, read documents or books or listen to music . With very few exceptions, when the Chromebook isn\u2019t online, it\u2019s a 3.3-pound paperweight. (Google says that an upgrade this summer will at least permit you to read your e-mail, calendar and Google Docs when you\u2019re offline, and that over time, more apps will be written to be offline-usable.) Maybe in Silicon Valley, where Google\u2019s engineers live, you can live your entire life online. But in the real world, you can use this laptop only where you can find, and afford, Wi-Fi hot spots. Or a Verizon cell signal, if you\u2019ve bought the $500 Samsung model. Verizon offers two years of free service with that model, but you\u2019re capped at 100 megabytes of data a month \u2014 a laughably small quota for a laptop that can\u2019t even scratch its nose without an Internet connection. You can upgrade: for example, 1 gigabyte of data for $20 a month, or 5 gigabytes for $50. At least no two-year contract is required. I tried valiantly to use the Samsung as my main machine, but by the end of a week, I was about ready to toss it like a Frisbee. I took four flights with it. At each departure gate, I had to pay $7 for Wi-Fi. Three of the flights had no Wi-Fi on board, so the Chromebook sat uselessly in my bag. On the fourth, Wi-Fi cost $13. That\u2019s right: $13 every time you fly, just to look at your own photos and documents. Then $17 for the hotel\u2019s crummy Wi-Fi. Heaven help you on a cruise ship, where Wi-Fi can cost several dollars a minute. What about the second assumption \u2014 that Google\u2019s free online software can do everything you\u2019d ever want? Google\u2019s software does the job for the basics (you can\u2019t use a Chromebook without a Google account). But what if you want to run real, brand-name software? Photoshop? Quicken? Skype ? World of Warcraft? FileMaker or Access? How will you sync or back up your iPad, iPhone or iPod if you can\u2019t run iTunes? What about the specialized apps that your company might require? The Chrome marketplace offers 1,000 Chrome programs. Most are free. But most are also lightweight, phone-type programs: weather, sports tickers and so on. They live online, so all you\u2019re actually installing is a bookmark. There\u2019s another, more disturbing problem: doesn\u2019t it make you feel a little antsy that your photo collection isn\u2019t on a computer that you can put your hands on? That when the Internet goes down, you can\u2019t get to any of your files? Furthermore, Google says that its Chrome operating system is supersecure. But these days, every week brings another story of a hacker attack on a major corporation, and more of our private data stolen: Sony , Citibank and so on. In March, someone hacked a marketing company and gained access to the mailing lists of Best Buy , Wal-Mart , TiVo , CapitalOne, Marriott, the College Board , Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, US Bank, Chase Bank, Kroger, Barclays and many others. Is \u201cthe cloud\u201d really where you want to keep the only copies of your most private, most important files? Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it\u2019s as big, heavy and expensive as it is. You can find plenty of full-blown Windows laptops with the same price, weight and size. Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500. Maybe it makes more sense if you rent it (students and corporations can lease Chromebooks for $20 to $30 a month). Maybe it will fly once this country gets free coast-to-coast 4G cellular Internet, which should be just after hell freezes over. For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody\u2019s trying to shake up the operating system wars. But unless you\u2019re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn\u2019t buy a Chromebook.", "keyword": "Google Chrome OS;Laptop;Google;Samsung;Computers and the Internet;Cloud computing"}
{"id": "ny0133762", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/03/07", "title": "Loophole Lets Bank Rewrite the Calendar", "abstract": "It is not often that a major international bank admits it is violating well-established accounting rules, but that is what Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale has done in accounting for the fraud that caused the bank to lose 6.4 billion euros \u2014 now worth about $9.7 billion \u2014 in January. In its financial statements for 2007, the French bank takes the loss in that year, offsetting it against 1.5 billion euros in profit that it says was earned by a trader, J\u00e9r\u00f4me Kerviel, who concealed from management the fact he was making huge bets in financial futures markets. In moving the loss from 2008 \u2014 when it actually occurred \u2014 to 2007, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale has created a furor in accounting circles and raised questions about whether international accounting standards can be consistently applied in the many countries around the world that are converting to the standards. While the London-based International Accounting Standards Board writes the rules, there is no international organization with the power to enforce them and assure that companies are in compliance. In its annual report released this week, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale invoked what is known as the \u201ctrue and fair\u201d provision of international accounting standards, which provides that \u201cin the extremely rare circumstances in which management concludes that compliance\u201d with the rules \u201cwould be so misleading that it would conflict with the objective of financial statements,\u201d a company can depart from the rules. In the past, that provision has been rarely used in Europe, and a similar provision in the United States is almost never invoked. One European auditor said he had never seen the exemption used in four decades, and another said the only use he could recall dealt with an extremely complicated pension arrangement that had not been contemplated when the rules were written. Some of the people who wrote the rule took exception to its use by Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale. \u201cIt is inappropriate,\u201d said Anthony T. Cope, a retired member of both the I.A.S.B. and its American counterpart, the Financial Accounting Standards Board. \u201cThey are manipulating earnings.\u201d John Smith, a member of the I.A.S.B., said: \u201cThere is nothing true about reporting a loss in 2007 when it clearly occurred in 2008. This raises a question as to just how creative they are in interpreting accounting rules in other areas.\u201d He said the board should consider repealing the \u201ctrue and fair\u201d exemption \u201cif it can be interpreted in the way they have interpreted it.\u201d Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale said that its two audit firms, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche, approved of the accounting, as did French regulators. Calls to the international headquarters of both firms were not returned, and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale said no financial executives were available to be interviewed. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission has the final say on whether companies are following the nation\u2019s accounting rules. But there is no similar body for the international rules, although there are consultative groups organized by a group of European regulators and by the International Organization of Securities Commissions. It seems likely that both groups will discuss the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale case, but they will not be able to act unless French regulators change their minds. \u201cInvestors should be troubled by this in an I.A.S.B. world,\u201d said Jack Ciesielski, the editor of The Analyst\u2019s Accounting Observer, an American publication. \u201cWhile it makes sense to have a \u2018fair and true override\u2019 to allow for the fact that broad principles might not always make for the best reporting, you need to have good judgment exercised to make it fair for investors. SocGen and its auditors look like they were trying more to appease the class of investors or regulators who want to believe it\u2019s all over when they say it\u2019s over, whether it is or not.\u201d Not only had the losses not occurred at the end of 2007, they would never have occurred had the activities of Mr. Kerviel been discovered then. According to a report by a special committee of Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale\u2019s board, Mr. Kerviel had earned profits through the end of 2007, and entered 2008 with few if any outstanding positions. But early in January he bet heavily that both the DAX index of German stocks and the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx index would go up. Instead they fell sharply. After the bank learned of the positions in mid-January, it sold them quickly on the days when the stock market was hitting its lowest levels so far this year. In its annual report, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale says that applying two accounting rules \u2014 IAS 10, \u201cEvents After the Balance Sheet Date,\u201d and IAS 39, \u201cFinancial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement\u201d \u2014 would have been inconsistent with a fair presentation of its results. But it does not go into detail as to why it believes that to be the case. One rule mentioned, IAS 39, has been highly controversial in France because banks feel it unreasonably restricts their accounting. The European Commission adopted a \u201ccarve out\u201d that allows European companies to ignore part of the rule, and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale uses that carve out. The commission ordered the accounting standards board to meet with banks to find a rule they could accept, but numerous meetings over the past several years have not produced an agreement. Investors who read the 2007 annual report can learn the impact of the decision to invoke the \u201ctrue and fair\u201d exemption, but cannot determine how the bank\u2019s profits would have been affected if it had applied the full IAS 39. It appears that by pushing the entire affair into 2007, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale hoped both to put the incident behind it and to perhaps de-emphasize how much was lost in 2008. The net loss of 4.9 billion euros it has emphasized was computed by offsetting the 2007 profit against the 2008 loss. It may have accomplished those objectives, at the cost of igniting a debate over how well international accounting standards can be policed in a world with no international regulatory body.", "keyword": "Accounting and Accountants;Finances;Societe Generale;International Accounting Standards Board"}
{"id": "ny0264002", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/12/31", "title": "Obama to Delay Budget Request So Congress Can Comment", "abstract": "HONOLULU \u2014 President Obama agreed on Friday to delay a request to Congress to expand the government\u2019s borrowing authority by $1.2 trillion, allowing lawmakers time to return from recess and register their views on it. The delay, which a White House official said would be only a few days, will not jeopardize the operations of the government, as last summer\u2019s impasse over the debt ceiling did. The budget agreement of Aug. 2, which broke that deadlock, has made it highly unlikely that Congressional Republicans could block an increase in the debt limit through the 2012 election. Since signing legislation to codify that agreement, Mr. Obama has already obtained two increases totaling $900 billion. Still, House Republicans, who led the battle over the debt ceiling, are likely to seize the opportunity to condemn further borrowing and vote against the increase even if they cannot block it. By agreeing to the request for a delay from Senate and House leaders, the White House in effect is giving lawmakers the chance to weigh in without having to cut short their vacations. The delay also insulates the White House against accusations that it sought to push the increase through while Congress was away. House Republicans said they were willing to come back early if had been necessary to vote on the debt limit increase. \u201cOur members want to vote on the resolution of disapproval provided in the Budget Control Act,\u201d said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. \u201cIt was our preference not to call members back early to do so, but we would have if the timing of the submission required it.\u201d Under the terms of the budget act, Congress has 15 days after the president submits a request for additional borrowing authority to vote on a motion to block it. If he had submitted it by the end of Friday, as expected, the 15 days would have passed before Congress was back in session. (The House is back in session on Jan. 17, the Senate the following week.) Mr. Obama\u2019s request of $1.2 trillion would raise the federal debt limit to $16.4 trillion, and after that the White House would not have to seek further increases before the election, officials said. The Senate, with a Democratic majority, is all but certain not to oppose the additional borrowing authority. Even if both houses voted against the proposed increase, President Obama would veto the legislation, the White House official said, and the votes are not in place to override the veto. \u201cThe Treasury Department expects that debt will be within $100 billion of the limit by the close of business today, and therefore, we had anticipated submitting a certification to Congress later today,\u201d Joshua R. Earnest, the deputy press secretary, said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where Mr. Obama is on vacation this week. \u201cHowever, we have been asked by the bicameral leadership of Congress to delay certification in order to give both houses time to consider when votes may occur, given the current Congressional schedule,\u201d he said. The Treasury Department will be able to put into place accounting measures to keep the government from hitting the debt limit in the next few days, the White House official said. As a result, he said, there is no danger that the government\u2019s creditworthiness will be affected. The official declined to give details about which Congressional leaders asked for the delay, or whether the White House resisted. He portrayed the president\u2019s agreement to delay as a sign of cooperation between the executive and legislative branches.", "keyword": "Law and Legislation;National Debt (US);Federal Budget (US);Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0081839", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2015/10/03", "title": "Cable and Satellite Ads Aim to Revamp the Industry\u2019s Image", "abstract": "Who knew cable guys had a sense of humor? Owning up to its ranking at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys \u2014 not only for cable but for all industries \u2014 Time Warner Cable is poking fun at itself, and promising to do better, in a new marketing campaign starting this weekend. \u201cWe get it,\u201d reads an open letter that the cable operator plans to publish in 18 news outlets starting Saturday. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen where Time Warner Cable falls on customer satisfaction surveys and we know the \u2018cable guy\u2019 jokes by heart.\u201d Time Warner Cable knows the jokes so well that it is starting to make some of its own. A new TV spot \u2014 one of more than 30 planned for the campaign \u2014 features a man dancing to the elevator music that people hear when they call the cable company and are put on hold. The company offers a mock apology for the fact that it is no longer offering extended periods of the music free, saying that it created a website with its greatest on-hold hits for people who miss the music. \"Hold Music\" - Reduced Wait Time - Time Warner Cable Credit Credit Video by TimeWarnerCable The ad is one of a series by cable and satellite operators, including Comcast and DirecTV, aimed at restoring trust and satisfaction in an industry detested by millions of disaffected consumers. Time Warner Cable has spent nearly two years working to improve its customer service, executives say. Among the goals: reducing the time people spend on hold, offering one-hour arrival windows for service visits, creating self-service options and delivering faster Internet speeds and more programming. \u201cWe are done making excuses,\u201d Robert Marcus, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said in a telephone interview. \u201cWe are all about fixing and making the situation better. Poking fun at ourselves and acknowledging these issues is a big step, and a good one.\u201d While Time Warner Cable is making fun of itself, its competitors are making fun of each other. The satellite company DirecTV released two new commercials this week that star the Emmy Award-winning actor Jeffrey Tambor. He plays the chief executive of a fake cable company that tries to beat the competition from satellite providers by merging with another much-hated cable company. After the merger, executives acknowledge that they forgot to come up with ideas on how to take on DirecTV. \u201cWe got messed up last night, you\u2019re lucky we\u2019re even here,\u201d one says. Comcast and Charter Communications, meanwhile, have both released ads in recent months that mock DirecTV, which was acquired in July by AT&T for $48.5 billion. The Comcast ad called the merger \u201cthe dawn of an old day,\u201d saying that it offered \u201cyesterday\u2019s technologies today: TV from space, as long as it\u2019s not too rainy or windy, or there isn\u2019t a branch in the way.\u201d The Charter ads \u2014 one of which spoofs \u201cStar Trek\u201d \u2014 characterize satellite TV as a 20-year-old technology that doesn\u2019t work during bad weather. While the ads might generate some laughs, branding experts said that they were likely to cause more harm to an industry already suffering a dire image crisis. Customer satisfaction with TV and Internet service providers scored dead last this year, resulting from poor service and higher prices, according to a survey of 43 industries by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. This despite the fact that the category is a big advertiser. Time Warner Cable\u2019s ad spending, for instance, totaled $60 million in 2014, while DirecTV, with a nationwide customer base, spent $355 million, according to WPP\u2019s Kantar Media. Allen Adamson, a branding expert at WPP\u2019s Landor Associates, said the new ads were likely to reinforce the negative perceptions consumers have about both cable and satellite television and will make it harder in the long run for the companies to improve their image. \u201cThey are all throwing stones at glass houses,\u201d he said. \u201cThe net takeaway is that it is going to reinforce all the negatives about the entire category.\u201d The enmity, some industry analysts said, didn\u2019t do Comcast any favors with regulators this year with its failed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, which collapsed under regulatory pressure . Regulators are now scrutinizing Charter\u2019s proposed acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, which together total $67.1 billion. Since their deal fell apart, both Comcast and Time Warner Cable have ramped up public relations campaigns about their initiatives to improve customer service. Time Warner Cable executives said they were doing this not to sway regulators but because it was good for business. They added that the time was right to open the marketing campaign because the company had already started making strides in its initiatives. For example, the number of calls Time Warner Cable receives has dropped about 12 percent in the past two years, and its technicians now arrive within their designated one-hour time windows 98 percent of the time, the company said. Time Warner Cable is also creating a new \u201ctech tracker\u201d service that lets customers monitor appointments and see the technician\u2019s name, identification number and photo when the technician is on his way. \u201cWe wanted to make sure that when we did,\u201d start a marketing push, \u201cwe had a lot of things to say about what we\u2019d already done,\u201d said Dinesh Jain, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable. But it remains to be seen whether Time Warner Cable can change the image of the cable guy. Ultimately, the task might fall to Charter if regulators approve the merger. \u201cIt takes a short time to establish a really bad relationship, and a really long time for customers to have a really good point of view,\u201d Mr. Marcus said. \u201cWe don\u2019t like being at the bottom of that list.\u201d Mr. Adamson, the branding expert, said customers were looking for cable and satellite companies to show them \u2014 not tell them \u2014 that they have improved their service. \u201cThere is much skepticism and burned bridges,\u201d he said. \u201cPromises don\u2019t really stick in this category.\u201d", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;TV;Time Warner Cable;DirecTV;Comcast;Cable television"}
{"id": "ny0121961", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/09/18", "title": "McCormick Brings Spices to Retail Store - Advertising", "abstract": "AS savings accounts shrank in recent years, spice racks expanded, with Americans cooking more to save money. Revenue for individual spices (excluding salt and pepper) grew 4.1 percent, to $1.34 billion, for the 52 weeks that ended Aug. 12, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Walmart, warehouse club stores and convenience stores. Over the same period, pepper revenue grew 6.8 percent; salt, seasoned salt and salt substitute grew 2.1 percent; and dry seasoning mixes for meat and seafood grew 1.3 percent. Now McCormick & Company , the spice maker whose revenue grew 10.8 percent in 2011, to $3.7 billion, is feeling so bullish that for the first time in its 123-year history it has entered the retail business. \u0095 In late August, the company opened McCormick World of Flavors , a 3,800-square-foot retail space, in the Inner Harbor section of Baltimore. McCormick, which today is based in Sparks, Md., began in Baltimore in 1889 , and for almost seven decades, until 1989, operated its factory and headquarters directly across the street from its new store. (Baltimoreans at the time grew fond of the emanating smell of cinnamon.) Along with its spice brand, the store also features other brands that McCormick owns, including Lawry\u2019s, Old Bay, Zatarain\u2019s and Thai Kitchen. While it carries products from those lines, along with branded items like cooking utensils, aprons and oven mitts, the objective of the store is less to make a sale than an impression. \u201cThis is much more of a destination for building brand excitement than a traditional retail outlet,\u201d said Alan D. Wilson, chief executive of McCormick. McCormick spent $71.1 million on advertising in 2011, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Sales of seasonings have accelerated in recent years, both because of more eating in and because of Americans\u2019 \u201cgrowing interest in gourmet cooking and ethnic cuisines, which often requires an investment in new varieties of seasonings,\u201d according to a Mintel report. McCormick tops several spice categories including a 48.2 percent share of the pepper market, a 35.8 percent share of individual spices and a 52.3 percent share of flavor extract and food coloring, according to SymphonyIRI. Brand loyalty is strong among spice buyers, with 64 percent telling Mintel that they usually buy the same brand. High brand loyalty has helped McCormick thrive during the downturn because the company has been able to raise prices on some items with a smaller risk of losing customers, said James Early, a senior analyst at the Motley Fool, an investment Web site. If price-sensitive consumers do switch to store-brand oregano, that, too, is apt to be made by McCormick, and it will still profit, albeit with smaller margins. McCormick produces about half of store-brand spices sold annually (though the company declines to reveal which stores), and store brands account for a significant share of spices like pepper (36 percent) and extracts and coloring (27.4 percent).\u201cThey\u2019re the 800-pound gorilla,\u201d Mr. Early said of McCormick. \u201cShelf space is the most precious commodity in retail and they just own the grocery store aisle.\u201d Consumer sales accounted for 59 percent of McCormick revenue in 2011, with the remaining 41 percent being industrial sales, primarily to restaurants and to snack makers. The flavors in a bag of mesquite-flavored chips, or a chipotle chicken sandwich from a chain may well have been custom-developed and produced by McCormick. Since 2000, the company has issued an annual \u201cflavor forecast,\u201d directed primarily at the food industry, in which it collaborates with chefs internationally. Among the flavor combinations it is predicting this year, for example, is ginger with coconut . Its objective is to encourage restaurant and snack industry executives to introduce products with the flavor and then, naturally, to hire McCormick for its seasoning expertise. The company wants to be recognized not just for its sage, but also for its sage advice. \u201cPeople have tended to think of McCormick as a spice and seasoning company, and that\u2019s absolutely true,\u201d Mr. Wilson said. \u201cBut we definitely see ourselves as a flavor company.\u201d Sales for seasonings are, appropriately enough, seasonal. McCormick revenue is lowest in the first half of the year, picks up in the summer grilling months and peaks with holiday cooking in the last three months. While McCormick brands are prominent in the spice aisle, the company strives to display them closer to foods they will accompany, like positioning taco seasoning near ground beef and marinade near chicken. Products in satellite displays outside the spice aisle account for 15 percent of supermarket sales, said Ken Stickevers, president of the United States consumer products division at the company. \u0095 \u201cConsumers are looking for inspiration while they\u2019re shopping, because they\u2019re not sure what they\u2019re going to have for dinner,\u201d Mr. Stickevers said. McCormick\u2019s new store in Baltimore features an open kitchen for cooking demonstrations, display cases with company memorabilia and interactive displays with touch-screen monitors. For a \u201cflavor print analyzer,\u201d visitors proceed through several screens where they highlight dishes they find most appealing, and based on those preferences are assigned one of 12 flavor print types, like \u201cCocoa Loco\u201d (\u201cYou enjoy the sweet, roasted bitter taste of coffee or chocolate\u201d) or \u201cHot\u201d (\u201cHeat from the chili pepper is your thrill of flavor\u201d). At \u201cGuess That Spice,\u201d a scent wafts out of a nozzle and participants seek it among choices on a touch screen, with those who ace the contest receiving 25 percent off purchases. The company also is sniffing around itself, offering some items exclusively at the store, like flavored oils and balsamic vinegars under the McCormick brand, and monitoring how they sell. \u201cIf they work out in the store, we\u2019ll roll them out nationally,\u201d Mr. Wilson said. \u201cWe\u2019ll use it as a laboratory to develop consumer insight.\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Spices;Shopping and Retail;McCormick & Company Inc"}
{"id": "ny0220363", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/02/18", "title": "Royal Bank of Scotland\u2019s Shining Star in Connecticut", "abstract": "STAMFORD, Conn. \u2014 The Royal Bank of Scotland may be one of Britain\u2019s most bailed-out banks. But at its American headquarters here, there is hardly a whisper of distress. The gleaming glass and steel building \u2014 planned years before the financial crisis curbed R.B.S.\u2019s sway over the British financial industry \u2014 now looms over Interstate 95, a scrappy challenger to another once-swaggering foreign bank, UBS of Switzerland, which put down roots near the same spot more than a decade ago. With an outdoor terrace, a gym where workers can purchase massages and one of the largest trading floors in the world, the 11-story building would probably stir the ire of British taxpayers already reeling from a government bailout of more than $71 billion at today\u2019s exchange rate. But perhaps luckily for the workers here, those taxpayers are an ocean away. R.B.S., in some ways, is the British version of Citigroup or the American International Group, the two financial companies in which the United States government still owns large stakes. A year ago, R.B.S. recorded the largest ever loss for a British company, \u00a324.1 billion ($35 billion at exchange rates at the time). The British government took what is now an 84 percent stake in exchange for the bailout. Like A.I.G., the British bank has been the target of many attacks by unhappy taxpayers, including protests during the Group of 20 summit meeting in London in April 2009 and a snowball barrage on some of its workers in London two months earlier that became popular images on the Internet. Last month, the British singer Billy Bragg rallied a crowd in Hyde Park in London to demand that R.B.S halt bonus payments. And so, five time zones away, executives in R.B.S.\u2019s American outpost are a bit cautious as they give a tour of their new offices, a $500 million building designed in 2006. \u201cIt\u2019s very bull market,\u201d said Michael Lyublinsky, co-head of global banking and markets for R.B.S. in the Americas. R.B.S. traders and investment bankers moved into the new building throughout last year from several offices in Stamford, in Greenwich, Conn., and in New York City. Executives say the company never considered canceling the move in light of the bank\u2019s problems, and they say the building has been a morale booster in tough times. \u201cIt\u2019s been a source of pride and kind of a rallying cry,\u201d said Robert McKillip, the other co-head of global banking and markets in the Americas. \u201cWe\u2019ve been through a lot.\u201d The Stamford office holds R.B.S.\u2019s second-largest trading center, making it akin to the London trading offices of United States banks. Visitors are greeted by receptionists wearing tartan-plaid blazers. Unlike the foreign headquarters of other powerful banks, there is no grand collection of art on display in the entrance. Instead, videos of workers and the bank\u2019s customers flash in the lobby, an electronic testament to the ebb and flow of the monumental business R.B.S. does in global financial markets. The building\u2019s highlight is an elevator ride away from the entrance. Though R.B.S. combines consumer banking, insurance and trading under one roof, a button pressed for the sixth floor is a voyage to the bank\u2019s true nerve center: a trading floor as immense as an airport hanger. About 900 people work there in space that can hold up to 1,000 traders. In a world where numbers matter, the trading floor was rumored during construction to be larger than UBS\u2019s, currently the world\u2019s largest. R.B.S.\u2019s ultimately came in 3,000 square feet smaller, but bank officials are fond of saying that there is always room for expansion. On Wall Street, the R.B.S. brand had long been an afterthought because until last year its trading unit used the name Greenwich Capital, which R.B.S. acquired as part of its purchase of another British bank, National Westminster, in 2003. Traders there were not fully integrated into R.B.S. until the move into the new headquarters. Much of R.B.S.\u2019s growth in recent years has been driven by acquisitions, but the last one caused the bank particular trouble. In 2007, R.B.S. led a hostile takeover of the Dutch bank ABN Amro, for which, as it turns out, it grossly overpaid. Soon, it was saddled with heavy investments in leveraged loans and real estate assets. The bank\u2019s former chief executive, Frederick A. Goodwin, who signed off on the new American building, was pushed out early last year. Mr. McKillip and Mr. Lyublinsky said the British government\u2019s ownership had not worked against R.B.S.\u2019s business interests, citing the bank\u2019s involvement in helping Kraft Foods take over Cadbury, even though it was a British company. But the bank has been shedding divisions and slimming down as required by the British government, while trying to retain workers. R.B.S. announced on Tuesday that it had sold part of Sempra, a lucrative energy trading unit, to JPMorgan Chase for $1.7 billion. Recently, the biggest buzz around the new building centered on bonuses, a topic of speculation across Wall Street and a sore spot for the British taxpayers who are helping keep R.B.S. afloat. The bank said a year ago that bonuses would no longer contain cash, a more draconian step than ones taken by most banks, which simply reduced the cash portion of bonuses. Soon after, a spate of traders quit R.B.S., executives said, saying that the change was an affront to the culture of many who previously had worked entirely on commission for Greenwich Capital. \u201cIt was painful,\u201d said Mr. McKillip. \u201cBut the market has come our way in terms of clawbacks and deferrals.\u201d The bank ultimately decided to allow employees to sell a portion of their stock bonuses this June, alleviating some of the restrictions. Despite proposals to rein in risky banking activity and compensation in the United States, which could add to the list of changes they must make, Mr. McKillip and Mr. Lyublinsky are optimistic about the market and say they are eager to take on the likes of Goldman Sachs and foreign banks like Credit Suisse that did not receive government aid. Now is the time for the bank to pursue a fresh start, they said. \u201cNo other bank was cleaned up more than R.B.S.,\u201d Mr. Lyublinsky said.", "keyword": "Royal Bank of Scotland Plc;Stamford (Conn);Banks and Banking;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties"}
{"id": "ny0231297", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2010/09/06", "title": "70 Die and 200 Are Feared Dead in 2 Congo Boat Accidents", "abstract": "KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo (AP) \u2014 Two boats capsized in one weekend on Congo \u2019s vast rivers, leaving 70 people dead and 200 others feared dead in unrelated accidents that both involved heavily loaded boats operated with few safety measures, officials said Sunday. Early Saturday, a boat on the Rupi River in northwest Equateur Province hit a rock and capsized, a provincial spokeswoman, Ebale Engumba, said Sunday. She said more than 70 people were believed dead among an estimated 100 passengers. She said officials were investigating why the boat was traveling through the darkness without a light. In another accident on the Kasai River in Kasai-Occidental Province, 200 people were feared dead after a boat loaded with passengers and fuel drums caught fire and capsized in southern Congo, survivors said Sunday. The episode in southern Congo would be the deadliest boat accident in that country and among the worst in Africa this year. The boats that cross Congo\u2019s rivers are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity. The industry is not well regulated and operators are known to fill boats to dangerous levels. In the first accident, in northwest Congo, Ms. Engumba said officials believed the boat\u2019s lack of lighting was responsible. \u201cWe are going to arrest people involved who are in charge of regulating the boat\u2019s movement who failed to stop that boat from traveling at night,\u201d she said. In the second accident, survivors said the boat was overloaded with people and goods. Francois Madila, a local official, said two of the boat\u2019s crew members had been arrested, but he did not say how many people were aboard. A survivor, Romaine Mishondo, said the boat was already packed with hundreds of passengers when it stopped about 10 minutes before the fire to pick up more people. When the fire started and people began jumping overboard, she said, nearby fishermen ignored pleas for help. \u201cFishermen attacked the boat and started beating passengers with paddles\u201d as they tried to loot goods, she said. The boat\u2019s owner said a survivor and an employee had told him that workers spilled fuel and the engine ignited.", "keyword": "Congo (Formerly Zaire);Accidents and Safety"}
{"id": "ny0230071", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/09/11", "title": "Inquiry Sifting Cause of Blast in the Bay Area", "abstract": "SAN BRUNO, Calif. \u2014 For weeks, residents in this community of trim suburban homes in the hills near San Francisco International Airport had reported catching the occasional whiff of natural gas in the bay breezes. Utility repair crews were regularly seen driving around the neighborhood. And on Thursday night, just around dinner, a 30-inch natural gas pipe running three feet under ground erupted and fueled a devastating explosion and towering walls of wind-whipped fire, killing at least four people and consuming dozens of homes with a blaze that moved so quickly that residents barely had time to gather their belongings and run. Throughout the day on Friday, firefighters struggled to put out the remnants of the blaze, search parties with dogs hunted for more bodies and residents huddled in Red Cross shelters, confronting the loss of their homes and the realization that part of their neighborhood had been reduced to a deep crater filled with water. \u201cI need to know if my house burned down,\u201d Steve Hoff, 38, implored a California Highway Patrol officer at a police barrier that cordoned off the 15-acre disaster site on Friday. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I have a home left or not.\u201d The National Transportation Safety Board , which also investigates natural gas explosions, sent a team of four investigators to this city 12 miles south of San Francisco to determine what had caused the blast. One of the board members, Christopher A. Hart, toured the site on Friday afternoon and said he had been stunned by the destruction he saw. He said a large portion of the pipe had been blown out of the ground and across the road. \u201cMy immediate assessment was the amazing destruction, the charred trees, the melted and charred cars, the houses disappeared,\u201d he said. Officials at Pacific Gas and Electric promised to cooperate, but declined to confirm reports from many neighbors of a history of complaints of gas odors, or that a Pacific Gas repair truck had been spotted the other day near the area where the blast occurred. \u201cWe have yet to be able to get close enough to the actual source to be able to determine exactly why this happened,\u201d said Christopher P. Johns, president of PG&E. \u201cWe\u2019re working diligently to do that.\u201d Mr. Johns said that the company was aware that residents were saying they had called complaining of gas odors and that the company was now going through records to see what calls were made and what the company\u2019s response was. PG&E also said it would provide temporary housing, food and clothing for the survivors. Christina Veraflor, 41, said she had visited her mother, who lives here, six weeks ago and noticed the smell of gas in the air. \u201cThat happened a lot in that area: You would get a whiff of gas, and then it would disappear.\u201d Darlene Esola, 59, a teacher who has lived in San Bruno for 26 years, said she noticed an odd odor while walking in the neighborhood on Tuesday night. \u201cIt smelled a bit gaslike,\u201d Ms. Esola said, as she spent the afternoon at a Red Cross shelter where people waited to talk to insurance company representatives and passers-by dropped off food and clothing. She said she had mentioned it to her husband but did not think of it again until after the explosion, when several neighbors also mentioned smelling gas in recent weeks. Jerry Hill, a member of the State Assembly who represents the area, estimated that the pipeline had been installed in 1948, a reflection of just how old and worn much of the gas system is in this part of the state. He criticized the company for the way it had dealt with maintenance questions and responded to the crisis. \u201cIf the indication is that there is a problem, a pipe deterioration problem or a gas leak problem, this needs to be resolved quickly and statewide,\u201d Mr. Hill said. The utility has some history of problems with federal regulators, records show. The N.T.S.B. cited PG&E for shortcomings in its response to a 2008 natural gas leak in Rancho Cordova, one that eventually killed a resident and injured two more in an explosion. The N.T.S.B. found that the company had used improper piping that allowed gas to leak from a mechanical coupling in 2006. When a neighbor smelled gas, the company delayed nearly three hours before sending a properly trained crew to identify the leak, and the slow response was a key reason for the explosion that same day, according to the N.T.S.B. report. The 2008 episode had been the worst of 65 gas pipeline accidents involving PG&E since 2004; cases that include nine other injuries, according to federal Department of Transportation records. Seventeen incidents were deemed \u201csignificant\u201d by federal regulators because large amounts of gas escaped from leaking pipes, ruptures and other failures. More than half the time in all the accidents, the gas either ignited or led to an explosion. At least 16 episodes also spurred evacuations of dozens of homes and businesses, in part because of threats to public safety. Mr. Hart, the member of the N.T.S.B., said it could take up to 18 months until the board issued its finding on what caused the blast, but he said that if it discovered any safety lapses, it would not delay announcing them and recommending changes. Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who was running this state while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was on a trade mission to China, said the authorities had gone through 75 percent of the disaster site. The rest, he said, was too hot to confront. As of late Friday, besides the 4 people confirmed dead, 52 people were injured and 3 suffered third-degree burns, Mr. Maldonado said. A total of 37 structures had burned, and 7 more were damaged, he said. There was one arrest on Thursday night for looting. As many as 400 firefighters from local and state crews responded to the blaze, which began about 6:30 p.m. Thursday. The explosion comes as the fossil fuel industry is reeling from a succession of deadly and costly accidents, including the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It also comes two months before California is to vote on a proposition backed by the oil industry that would suspend a tough law intended to curb carbon emission and push the state to explore different forms of energy. Whatever the cause of the explosion, the effects were devastating. On this sparkling late summer day, residents walked up and down the streets, many with sweeping views of the hill and bay, peering over police lines to get a glimpse of the damage. They traded stories of what happened when they heard the explosion; even in this part of the state, hardened by living in the heart of earthquake territory, residents seemed rattled by the randomness of the destruction. \u201cI got the dogs, kids and wedding pictures and started running,\u201d said Rhonda Boone, who emerged from her house to see walls of flame higher than the trees. Vijay Duggal, 60, was watching a football game. \u201cI thought we\u2019d been attacked by a missile,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything was shaking. I thought, This is the end.\u201d", "keyword": "San Bruno (Calif);Explosions;Natural Gas;Fires and Firefighters;Accidents and Safety;Pacific Gas and Electric Co;National Transportation Safety Board"}
{"id": "ny0089377", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/09/17", "title": "After Trade, Sylvia Fowles Helps Lynx Flourish", "abstract": "MINNEAPOLIS \u2014 The Minnesota Lynx traditionally break out brightly colored sneakers for the W.N.B.A. playoffs, picked by the six-time All-Star Seimone Augustus. Sylvia Fowles, who joined the Lynx in midseason, was delighted to find a royal blue pair when she arrived at practice this week. \u201cThis is my first time wearing the same kicks as a unit,\u201d said Fowles, admiring the sneakers on her feet after practice. \u201cI don\u2019t know what we\u2019re wearing next round, or in the finals. Hopefully, it will be something sweet.\u201d About two months after forcing a trade from the Chicago Sky, the only W.N.B.A. team she had played for, Fowles is where she wants to be, on a team chasing its third title in five years. Fowles, a 6-foot-6 center and two-time league defensive player of the year, is seeking her first. With Fowles, the Lynx struggled through injuries and a shaky August to win their fourth Western Conference regular-season title in five years. Augustus (sprained left foot) and point guard Lindsay Whalen (right Achilles\u2019 strain) are expected back for Minnesota\u2019s first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Sparks, which begins Friday. In a season lacking a dominant team, the Lynx are among four top contenders for the championship, along with the Eastern Conference-leading Liberty, the defending champion Phoenix Mercury and Fowles\u2019s former team, Chicago. It is not as if Fowles left an unpleasant situation. The Sky have Elena Delle Donne, who was named the W.N.B.A.\u2019s most valuable player Wednesday, and they reached the finals last season, losing to Phoenix. Fowles spent most of her career playing for Pokey Chatman, the Sky\u2019s coach and general manager: three seasons at Louisiana State, two with Spartak Moscow in Russia and four with the Sky. Although the W.N.B.A. technically has unrestricted free agency, players like Fowles are rarely free to change teams. To keep stars where they are, the league created a core player designation, permitting teams to retain exclusive rights to a free agent for up to four years. Chicago designated Fowles as a core player when her contract expired after last season. Refusing to play is often a free agent\u2019s only recourse. That was how Tina Charles, the 2012 M.V.P., nudged the Connecticut Sun into trading her to the Liberty before last season. As Charles did with her team, Fowles told the Sky to trade her. Then she sat at home in Miami waiting for it to happen. Seven months later, on July 27, Fowles was sent to Minnesota, two young Lynx players and a first-round draft pick went to the Atlanta Dream, and Erika de Souza went from the Dream to the Sky. Changing teams was not a financial windfall for Fowles, already believed to be making close to the W.N.B.A. maximum salary of $107,000. \u201cFrom the women\u2019s side of things, people make it more about the personal and not about the professional,\u201d Chatman said. \u201cThis is professional sports. Teams have a right to core players after so many years. Players have a right if they want to play or not. You don\u2019t have to understand it, but you have respect the process. I\u2019m just happy we made really good out of an initially tough situation.\u201d Until Delle Donne joined the Sky in 2013, Fowles was the franchise\u2019s best player. A three-time All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist, Fowles averaged 15.7 points and 9.7 rebounds over seven seasons. Chicago\u2019s career scoring and rebounding leader, Fowles compiled the highest field-goal percentage in league history (.585). Fowles said she considered leaving Chicago four years ago when her rookie contract expired. She reconsidered and agreed to a three-year extension. But when Chicago offered another extension last September, Fowles demurred. In January, she told Chatman and the owner Michael Alter that she preferred playing somewhere else. \u201cChicago is a great team,\u201d Fowles said. \u201cI was fortunate enough to play seven seasons there. Great seasons, great teammates, great coaches came through the system. But there was something I felt like I was lacking. It was a tough decision, but at the same time, it was something that I really wanted for a while now.\u201d Fowles considered Washington, Los Angeles and Minnesota, all with coaches she admired, before settling on the Lynx and Coach Cheryl Reeve. Minnesota also had Augustus, Fowles\u2019s former L.S.U. teammate; a winning culture; and a state-of-the-art practice complex across from Target Center. Chatman demanded a veteran impact player in return. The Lynx refused to part with Augustus, Whalen or Maya Moore \u2014 all of them American Olympians \u2014 so talks stagnated. \u201cWhen you have a chance to get Sylvia Fowles, you need to make it work,\u201d Reeve said. \u201cYou need to figure it out. An Olympian for an Olympian wasn\u2019t going to work for us. We worked the hardest on finding a third team.\u201d A potential deal fell apart three times. One appeared so imminent in early July that Fowles, visiting friends in California, booked an earlier plane ticket home so she could pack. She never used it. \u201cThat was a bummer,\u201d Fowles said. \u201cProbably after the third time I heard I was going to get traded and didn\u2019t get traded, I had the mind-set I wouldn\u2019t play this summer.\u201d Chatman had given the Lynx three possible trade targets. One was the 6-foot-5 de Souza, a Brazilian who followed a breakout 2013 season by averaging a career-high 13.8 points plus 8.7 rebounds last year. Atlanta wanted young players back. Once Lynx General Manager Roger Griffith added the rookie forward Reshanda Gray to the deal with Damiris Dantas, a promising second-year forward, things progressed. Fowles described the news as Christmas times three. \u201cIt was a long process, but it was worth the wait,\u201d Fowles said. Over the years the Lynx won with high-post, passing centers like Janel McCarville and Taj McWilliams-Franklin. Fowles is a low-post scorer. Reworking the offense to incorporate Fowles, coupled with Augustus sitting out with injuries, contributed to Minnesota\u2019s 6-6 August slump. Once Fowles settled in, she posted five consecutive double-doubles, one short of Rebekkah Brunson\u2019s franchise record. She averaged 15.3 points and 8.3 rebounds in 18 games, scoring double figures in every game but one. The Lynx won three of their last five. \u201cI think she kind of started off slow and everybody was kind of in panic mode, like, \u2018We\u2019re struggling,\u2019 \u201d Augustus said. \u201cBut it takes a while to learn your new teammates, learn the system, get accustomed to how we move and groove around here. Once she got into her groove, you can see the results.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;Sylvia Fowles;Sports Trades;Pokey Chatman;Chicago Sky;Minnesota Lynx"}
{"id": "ny0216617", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/04/30", "title": "South Korea Vows to Avenge Sailors\u2019 Deaths", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 The South Korean military vowed revenge without identifying a target as the country gave an emotional farewell on Thursday to the sailors killed when their ship sank last month near a disputed sea border with North Korea . If the ship is found to have been torpedoed by North Korea, as many South Koreans suspect, it will amount to one of the most serious provocations from the North in recent decades. Seoul has repeatedly vowed \u201cstern countermeasures\u201d but has shied from publicly discussing its options until an investigation is over. Military retaliation, however, is unlikely, analysts say. \u201cWe\u2019ll never forgive whoever inflicted this great pain on us,\u201d said the navy chief of staff, Kim Sung-chan, at a mass funeral for the victims on Thursday in the port city of Pyeongtaek, about 45 miles south of Seoul, home of the ship\u2019s naval base. \u201cWe will track them down to the end and we will, by all means, make them pay for this.\u201d Sirens wailed, flags flew at half-staff and navy ships sounded whistles as South Korea honored the 40 sailors known to have died and 6 others who are missing and presumed dead. There is widespread suspicion among South Koreans that the ship was hit by a North Korean torpedo . Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said on Thursday that he noticed \u201cuncharacteristic reticence and nervousness\u201d among South Korean officials although, metaphorically, \u201cthey found a body with a bullet hole in the head and North Korea was the only guy in the room with the pistol.\u201d Mr. Klingner has met South Korean officials in the past week over the ship\u2019s sinking. Investigators are studying the salvaged wreck of the ship , which broke in half on March 26. They are also searching the seabed for evidence of what caused the explosion. South Korea\u2019s defense minister has said a heavy torpedo was the most likely cause, although he has not openly blamed North Korea, which has denied involvement. More than 2,000 guests, including President Lee Myung-bak and foreign ambassadors, attended the funeral. Mothers of the sailors wailed as they clasped their sons\u2019 photos and the urns containing their ashes. The families of the six missing sailors burned their naval uniforms and personal belongings and buried those ashes on Thursday. The name of each sailor was read out while Mr. Lee placed a military medal on an altar before the sailor\u2019s photograph.", "keyword": "South Korea;Defense and Military Forces;North Korea"}
{"id": "ny0233934", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/08/25", "title": "Wall Street Hit Again, This Time by Housing Data", "abstract": "The Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index ended lower Tuesday for a fourth consecutive day, unable to rebound from a disappointing report on existing-home sales. The Nasdaq closed lower for a second day, missing a four-day losing streak by rising less than a point on Friday. \u201cThere is basically a bubble of negativity right now,\u201d William Smith, the president of Smith Asset Management, said. \u201cThe market has got a very short memory. It is day to day. Today it is terrible housing numbers, which were anticipated.\u201d The National Association of Realtors said in its latest report that existing home sales in July were at their lowest level in more than a decade. The purchases of existing homes declined 27.2 percent last month to a 3.83 million annual rate. Analysts had expected a 13.4 percent decline. At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 133.96 points, or 1.32 percent, 10,040.45. The broader Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index declined 15.49 points, or 1.45 percent, to 1,051.87, and the Nasdaq fell 35.87 points, or 1.66 percent, 2,123.76. Mr. Smith said the housing numbers had been anticipated, possibly making it easier the Dow to recover somewhat from 180-point decline in mid-morning trading. \u201cFears of another leg down in real estate are certainly weighing on hopes for broad-based economic recovery,\u201d said Nicholas Colas, the ConvergEx Group chief market strategist. Health care, industrials, materials, financial and consumer discretionary stocks were all down by about 1 percent or more. Investors will take in several other reports this week, including data on new home sales and durable goods on Wednesday and the latest estimate on second-quarter economic output on Friday. All are expected to reinforce the notion that growth in the United States has slowed. Most economists expect the latest snapshot of second quarter growth to be revised sharply lower. Trade deficit figures and revisions to other statistics point to growth of 1 to 1.5 percent in the quarter, rather than the previous estimate of 2.4 percent, Economists from Capital Economics said in a research note that policy makers might turn to regulatory and trade policy as an alternative means of bolstering the economy. Mr. Colas said another issue was the extent to which analysts would have to cut expectations. \u201cIt is clear that analysts have started to cut their revenue expectations,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have hit the tipping point.\u201d Mr. Colas said that a gathering of Federal Reserve officials at the end of the week was also generating some apprehension, especially after the central bank\u2019s decision to buy government debt . \u201cThere is almost a fear of what they are going to try,\u201d Mr. Colas said. The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, will address the annual symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyo., on Friday. The tone for Wall Street was set before the opening bell, with markets in Asia and Europe also falling. Investors will get looks at several reports other than housing later this week, including data on durable goods and economic output that are expected to reinforce the outlook that growth in the United States has slowed. Keith B. Hembre, the chief economist and chief investment strategist at First American Funds of Minneapolis, said the lower Asian markets, the weakness in Europe and the home sales were factors weighing on the market. \u201cIt is the fundamental backdrop of decelerating economic growth, and overseas influence,\u201d Mr. Hembre said. \u201cThe yen continuing to be sharply stronger is generally not good for risky assets.\u201d \u201cAnd then, of course, the time of year: It is the summer doldrums,\u201d he added. Trading volume has been low, even for August, with many traders staying on the sidelines because of the uncertainty. The rates on Treasury bonds continued to fall as investors sought a safe haven. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note was 2.53 percent, down from 2.60 percent late Monday. The declines that reached Wall Street on Tuesday started in Asia, with the Nikkei in Tokyo declining 1.33 percent to 8,995.14 \u2014 closing below 9,000 for the first time since May 1, 2009. The Nikkei\u2019s decline is the result of a stronger yen, which hit a 15-year high against the dollar . That has caused shares of many Japanese exporters, including electronics companies and automakers, to fall. A stronger yen makes Japanese products more expensive in the world markets. Earlier Tuesday, the dollar fell to 84.36 yen, slightly above the earlier low of 84.17 yen. Shares were also lower in Europe, amid concerns about weakness in the American economy. In London, the FTSE 100 was down 78.89 points, or 1.5 percent, while the DAX in Frankfurt fell 75.47 points, or 1.2 percent. The CAC 40 in Paris was 62.12 points, or 1.75 percent, lower. Oil prices also declined.", "keyword": "International Trade and World Market;Yen (Currency);Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0099247", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/06/23", "title": "Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 More people will be exposed to floods, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather associated with climate change over the next century than previously thought, according to a new report in the British medical journal The Lancet. The report, published online Monday, analyzes the health effects of recent episodes of severe weather that scientists have linked to climate change. It provides estimates of the number of people who are likely to experience the effects of climate change in coming decades, based on projections of population and demographic changes. The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12, according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain. Climate projections typically are expressed as averages over large areas, including vast expanses, like oceans, where people do not live. The report calculates the risk to people by overlaying areas of the highest risk for climate events with expected human population increases. It also takes into account aging populations \u2014 for example, heat waves pose a greater health risk to old people. The report is part of a series of efforts to analyze how climate change might affect human health. Other major climate reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global document, and the National Climate Assessment in the United States, have addressed the issue. But Professor Cox said the new report was the first large-scale effort to quantify the effects that different types of extreme weather would have on people. \u201cWe are saying, let\u2019s look at climate change from the perspective of what people are going to experience, rather than as averages across the globe,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to move away from thinking of this as a problem in atmospheric physics. It is a problem for people.\u201d Image Men in Pakistan cool themselves in a river near Islamabad during a heatwave. The Lancet study is part of an effort to look at how climate might change life on earth for people. Credit Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The Lancet first convened scientists on the topic in 2009 , and produced a report that declared climate change was \u201cthe biggest global health threat of the 21st century.\u201d Monday\u2019s report notes that global carbon emission rates have risen above the worst-case scenarios used in 2009, and that in the absence of any major international agreement on cutting those rates, projections of mortality and illness and other effects, like famine, have worsened. \u201cEverything that was predicted in 2009 is already happening,\u201d said Nick Watts, a public health expert at the Institute for Global Health at University College London, who led the team of more than 40 scientists from Europe, Africa and China that produced the report. \u201cNow we need to take a further step forward. The science has substantially moved on.\u201d For years, climate change was presented in terms of natural habitats and the environment, but more recently, experts have been looking at how it might change life on earth for people. Scientists and some governments are trying to frame the dangers of climate change in health terms in order to persuade people that the topic is urgent, not simply a distant matter for scientists. Governments around the world are preparing for a United Nations summit meeting on climate change in Paris in December to discuss new policies to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. The report measures the increase over time in \u201cexposure events,\u201d which it defines as the number of times people experience any given extreme weather event. By the end of the century, the report estimates, the exposure to heat waves each year for older people around the world is expected to be around 3 billion more cases than in 1990. The number of times people of all ages are exposed to drought would increase by more than a billion a year. The rise in exposures to extreme rain would be around 2 billion a year by the end of the century, in part because populations are growing. Even without climate change, the health problems that come along with economic development are significant, the authors note. About 1.2 million people died from illnesses related to air pollution in China in 2010, the report said. Most broad climate reports do not go further than explaining the science, but much of the Lancet report is dedicated to policy prescriptions to slow or stop climate change and mute its effects on health. It notes that using fewer fossil fuels \u201cis no longer primarily a technical or economic question \u2014 it is now a political one,\u201d and urges governments to enact changes that would accomplish that.", "keyword": "Climate Change;Global Warming;Weather;The Lancet;Population;Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;UN"}
{"id": "ny0010870", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/02/01", "title": "49ers\u2019 Mike Iupati Is Content to Create Holes, Not Attention", "abstract": "NEW ORLEANS \u2014 The San Francisco 49ers had an N.F.L.-high nine players selected to the Pro Bowl this season. At this week\u2019s media day, eight of them sat on podiums in front of television cameras and masses of reporters. The ninth, Mike Iupati, the starting left guard, roamed through the crowd with far less fanfare. It would have been easy to mistake Iupati, wearing his jersey and no pads, for a fan if he were not 6 feet 5 inches tall and more than 330 pounds. His size, along with a Mohawk-style haircut and arms covered in tattoos, make him an intimidating presence, right up until he speaks. Iupati is a 25-year-old run-blocking specialist from American Samoa described by teammates as gigantic, fearsome and a monster, but he speaks softly, even taking the time to politely correct a reporter who mispronounced his surname. (It is you-PAH-tee, not eye-ooo-PAH-tee). \u201cMike is just goofy,\u201d said Joe Staley, the team\u2019s Pro Bowl left tackle. \u201cHe loves to have fun. He\u2019s like a big kid, the biggest kid you\u2019ll ever see.\u201d But that fun and pleasant demeanor goes away when Iupati becomes a bulldozer clearing paths for a running game that has helped the 49ers reach the Super Bowl. Having averaged 155.7 yards a game on the ground during the regular season, placing them fourth in the N.F.L., the 49ers have also excelled in the playoffs, with Colin Kaepernick setting a record for rushing yards in a game by a quarterback in the divisional round against Green Bay and Frank Gore chewing up time and running for 90 yards and 2 touchdowns in the N.F.C. championship game against Atlanta. One of the biggest reasons for the success has been the team\u2019s commitment to the interior line, an oft-overlooked component in a league that celebrates the left tackle. For all of the talk of the read-option offense, the team\u2019s versatile tight ends and Kaepernick\u2019s strong arm, the 49ers have never wavered from their commitment to run. \u201cWe like to play smash-mouth football,\u201d said Tom Rathman, the team\u2019s running backs coach and a noted 49ers fullback in his playing days. \u201cOur philosophy is physical and talented. You want to move guys out of the hole to create lanes for the running backs, and I think that\u2019s what our offensive line has done this year.\u201d LaMichael James, the team\u2019s change-of-pace running back, thinks Iupati\u2019s combination of size and speed is a key. \u201cWhen I\u2019m running behind him, they really can\u2019t see me too well,\u201d said James, who is listed, perhaps generously, at 5-foot-9. \u201cSo I try to stay behind him. I just pick a spot and go.\u201d Gore praised Iupati\u2019s ability to anticipate where the running backs may be going, but Iupati played that down, saying his strength was in blocking indiscriminately and letting those running behind him, including Kaepernick, handle the rest. \u201cWhatever color I see, I hit, and he knows that,\u201d Iupati said of Gore. \u201cHe knows the reads, so he\u2019s the one doing the job. I\u2019m just there to block.\u201d They have played together for three seasons, and the comfort level between Gore and Iupati is apparent. During the regular season, Gore rushed behind the center and left guard 61.2 percent of the time, averaging nearly 5 yards a carry on those runs. Gore\u2019s runs behind right guard averaged just 3.7 yards, but Coach Jim Harbaugh brushed aside the suggestion that the team might have a preference. \u201cWe feel pretty good running to either side,\u201d Harbaugh said. \u201cI think that may be more of a coincidence than a strategy.\u201d Still, Harbaugh praised Iupati as one of the best guards in the game, calling his line one of his \u201coffensive weapons\u201d against Baltimore. \u201cThere\u2019s no statistical agenda with those guys,\u201d Harbaugh said. \u201cThey\u2019re about playing the game, playing it tough, playing it strong, playing for a win and playing for a level of respect. That\u2019s what drives our football team.\u201d The team\u2019s commitment to the offensive line was evident when it spent two first-round picks on linemen in 2010. After selecting Anthony Davis, a 6-foot-5 tackle out of Rutgers, with the 11th pick, the 49ers drafted Iupati from Idaho at No. 17. That surprised some, if only because of his position. Iupati is one of just seven active guards who were drafted in the first round, not counting those who were taken as tackles but later converted to guard. Guards are paid less, receive less attention, and yet are integral to any team\u2019s running game. Coming off a dominant college career, Iupati was considered by many to be the best guard prospect since Michigan\u2019s Steve Hutchinson in 2001. Despite that, he felt he needed to prove his ability to play tackle to increase his draft position, and he trained at both positions with the Hall of Fame offensive lineman Jackie Slater in the lead-up to the draft. Iupati became the first interior lineman selected by the 49ers in the first round since Forrest Blue, who was taken with the 15th pick of the 1968 draft. With Staley entrenched at left tackle, and Davis drafted to play right tackle, it was obvious that Iupati would remain a guard, a development that pleased him. \u201cI knew I was a guard,\u201d Iupati said. \u201cI played all my career as a guard, so I don\u2019t see why I wouldn\u2019t be a guard in the N.F.L.\u201d In three seasons, Iupati has cemented a reputation as one of the best in the league at what he does. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question,\u201d Rathman said when asked if Iupati was among the top run blockers in the N.F.L. \u201cYou look at how big he is. He can cover up a defender and he can get movement on him. That\u2019s the biggest thing.\u201d There may come a time when Iupati joins Staley and his other more well-known teammates at podiums during news conferences. But for now, Iupati is happy to be mostly anonymous. And come Sunday, when he sees the white jerseys of the Baltimore Ravens, he plans to hit them as hard as he can.", "keyword": "Football;49ers;Super Bowl;Mike Iupati"}
{"id": "ny0267032", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/03/31", "title": "Injuries Threaten to Pare Yanks\u2019 Loaded Bullpen", "abstract": "TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 As Andrew Miller left the Yankees\u2019 clubhouse early Wednesday evening, his bruised right wrist heavily bandaged, he felt lucky to be merely annoyed. A few hours earlier, Miller, expected to be the closer on opening day, had thrown one pitch against the Atlanta Braves in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. Willians Astudillo rocketed the ball back toward the left-handed Miller, nailing him on the right wrist and sending his glove flying and Manager Joe Girardi\u2019s heart racing. What had begun as a tuneup for Monday\u2019s season opener had the potential to be grave. Miller returned to Tampa for tests and was encouraged that X-rays were negative. However, a CT scan taken later revealed he had sustained a chip fracture. The Yankees said Miller would see a hand specialist on Thursday. Suddenly, the bullpen \u2014 which looked historically formidable when spring training began \u2014 could be perilously thin when the season begins Monday at Yankee Stadium against the Houston Astros. Already missing is Aroldis Chapman, the new closer, who will begin serving a 30-game suspension over domestic violence accusations. And Miller was not the only reliever whose status to open the season was suddenly in doubt. One inning after Miller left, Bryan Mitchell, who had won a spot in the bullpen with a superb spring, sprained his left big toe. He also returned to Tampa for tests, although the injury appeared innocuous and Mitchell seemed to think he had injured his foot coming off the mound to cover first base. As hopeful as Miller seemed, his loss for a lengthy period would be \u201csubstantial,\u201d Girardi told reporters in Lake Buena Vista after the game. \u201cThe one thing that we\u2019ve talked about is, we like our bullpen and the length that it has,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cYou lose one, someone has to step up. You lose two, and you\u2019re asking a lot.\u201d Mitchell has pitched superbly during the exhibition season, allowing seven hits and one earned run in 152/3 innings. His absence would leave the Yankees\u2019 bullpen with Dellin Betances, Chasen Shreve and a raft of questions. The Yankees began Wednesday by sending Branden Pinder, Nick Goody and Tyler Olson to Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, leaving four pitchers competing for two spots in the bullpen. Now all four \u2014 Luis Cessa, Kirby Yates, Johnny Barbato and Anthony Swarzak \u2014 could be on the opening day roster. The Yankees need no reminders about the effect baseballs can have on bones. When Mark Teixeira fouled a ball off his shin last Aug. 17, the injury was diagnosed as a bone bruise and was expected to sideline him a day or two. More than two weeks later, a third magnetic resonance imaging test revealed a fracture, and Teixeira was lost for the season, with his absence contributing to the screeching decline of the offense in the final weeks. \u201cNot to downplay it, but this isn\u2019t the same,\u201d Miller said, adding that an injury to a pitcher\u2019s nonthrowing wrist should not be serious \u2014 at least not in the way such an injury might be to a hitter like Teixeira. Other roster decisions are being finalized. Girardi said Ronald Torreyes had won the job of utility infielder. Torreyes, who can play third base, second base and shortstop, hit .306 this spring and will be the primary backup for third baseman Chase Headley. Austin Romine appears to have won the backup catcher\u2019s job, a role he lost last spring to John Ryan Murphy, who was traded in November. Ivan Nova, who had appeared to be headed to the bullpen, having failed to separate himself from C. C. Sabathia in the competition to be the fifth starter, pitched superbly on Wednesday in his final spring training start, allowing two hits over six scoreless innings against the Braves. What seemed like a foregone conclusion, given that Sabathia will earn a team-high $25 million this season, may not be. \u201cIt\u2019s hard,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cThis is not etched in stone.\u201d The decision, along with the presumed announcement that Masahiro Tanaka will start on opening day, could be made Thursday, when the Yankees break camp and head to Miami for their final two exhibition games. As Miller, who lives in Tampa, prepared for his last night at home, he was considering contingencies, too. \u201cIt\u2019s annoying,\u201d Miller said before he knew the result of the CT scan. \u201cI\u2019d rather be heading to Miami to pitch and get ready for the season.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Andrew Miller;Sports injury;Yankees;Bryan Mitchell"}
{"id": "ny0189901", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/05/10", "title": "Missing Manager, Mets Find Their Offense", "abstract": "When Pirates pitcher Paul Maholm crossed the plate in the fifth inning after lifting the first home run of his career into the right-field stands at Citi Field , he could not help grinning toward his dugout. The five runs he had given up an inning earlier were momentarily forgiven, and he took a second to revel in his fluke. When Carlos Beltran led off the bottom half of the fifth with a home run to left, he did not smile or glance playfully at his Mets teammates. He just glided around the bases with his National League-leading batting average kicked up a notch and the Mets well on their way to a 10-1 victory Saturday, their sixth win in a row. This was no fluke. Neither were any of the Mets\u2019 16 other hits on the warm, gray afternoon, as they delivered the kind of offensive performance they had been waiting for all season. It also meant that the bench coach Sandy Alomar Sr., who was sitting in as manager for the suspended Jerry Manuel, could spend a leisurely afternoon on the top step of the dugout, free from tricky decisions. And, after the Phillies lost to the Braves, 6-2, it allowed the Mets to climb atop the N.L. East, a half-game ahead of Philadelphia. \u201cWhen you get 10 runs and the other team gets one run, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s difficult,\u201d Alomar said. Manuel, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, was confined to General Manager Omar Minaya\u2019s suite for one game after he was disciplined by Major League Baseball for an altercation with the umpire Bill Welke on Thursday in Philadelphia. It was the first time a Mets manager had been suspended since 1999 when Bobby Valentine thought he could outwit the baseball rule enforcers with a cunning disguise. After being tossed out of a game, he had tried to sneak back into the dugout wearing a fake mustache and sunglasses. But it was not clever enough to fool anyone and he was barred for one game. The only person who thought he was fooling anyone Saturday was John Maine. Despite a solid pitching line \u2014 he allowed three hits in six innings with two walks (one intentional) and three strikeouts \u2014 he was the harshest critic in the park. \u201cI didn\u2019t have much today,\u201d he said. \u201cI just kind of battled through it and got lucky.\u201d Still, it was Maine\u2019s third win in his last three outings, despite what he called an \u201cawful\u201d session in the bullpen before the game. Even though he may be tempting fate by allowing so many fly balls, the acres of outfield behind him make this stadium more forgiving than most. And on offense, the vast outfield that initially seemed as if it could doom the Mets appears to be slowly turning into an asset. In a five-run fourth \u2014 the Mets\u2019 second five-run inning in two games against Pittsburgh \u2014 they explored every corner of the crisscross outfield grass from chalk line to chalk line by sending 10 batters to the plate. Beltran was in the middle of the rally, hitting a single, before David Wright, Gary Sheffield and Fernando Tatis each drove in a run with base hits. Jose Reyes drove in two more with a line single to center field to make the score 6-1. He finished 3 for 5, with three runs batted in. But Reyes\u2019s productive games have been less frequent than the Mets would like, just as they have been for Wright and Carlos Delgado through the early part of the season. Beltran, meanwhile, has been the high-revving engine of the batting order. \u201cThere are times in the season when you feel good, but this year I feel like I\u2019m being more consistent,\u201d said Beltran, who is hitting .378 with 6 homers and 22 R.B.I. \u201cAnd once you feel good like that, you really want to keep it simple.\u201d The Mets tacked on a run in the seventh and two more in the eighth to guarantee Alomar his first victory as a major league manager. \u201cIt was a great pleasure to help the ball club,\u201d Alomar said. \u201cBut actually it was the ball club who was helping me today.\u201d INSIDE PITCH Catcher Ramon Castro left the game in the seventh inning with tightness in his right quadriceps. The Mets said that he was day to day, leaving them fairly exposed at catcher because Brian Schneider is on the disabled list with a calf injury. In Castro\u2019s absence, Omir Santos will most likely move into the lineup.", "keyword": "Beltran Carlos;Baseball;New York Mets;Pittsburgh Pirates"}
{"id": "ny0046751", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2014/11/05", "title": "Blues Edge Devils to Extend Streak", "abstract": "Vladimir Tarasenko scored on a power play early in the third period, and the St. Louis Blues extended their winning streak to six games with a 1-0 victory over the host Devils. Jake Allen stopped 26 shots in earning his second straight shutout and ending the Devils\u2019 two-game winning streak. \u25a0 Alex Ovechkin became the leading scorer in Capitals history, raising his career point total to 827 with a pair of assists Washington\u2019s 4-3 overtime loss to visiting Calgary. \u25a0 Brad Marchand scored 3 minutes 27 seconds into overtime to lift host Boston to its ninth straight win over Florida, 2-1. Tuukka Rask made 18 saves for the Bruins, who have won three straight. \u25a0 John Gibson, a rookie goalie for the N.H.L.-leading Anaheim Ducks, will be out for six weeks with a groin injury. Gibson was hurt during warm-ups before Anaheim\u2019s game at Colorado last Saturday. He is 2-2-0 with a 2.28 goals-against average. Gibson, 21, has been the backup to Frederik Andersen. \u25a0 A hot streak by the University of North Dakota hockey team has propelled it to second in both national polls. It received nine of the 34 first-place votes in the USA Today/USA Hockey Magazine Poll, and 11 of the 50 first-place votes in the USCHO.com poll. U.N.D. has five wins and a tie in its last six game. Minnesota remains atop both polls. Boston College, Colgate and Boston University round out the top five in each poll.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;University of North Dakota;Devils;St Louis Blues"}
{"id": "ny0277642", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/11/16", "title": "House Votes to Extend Iran Sanctions in Bid to Ensure Nuclear Compliance", "abstract": "The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday for legislation to extend American sanctions on Iran for 10 years, a move that proponents called critical economic leverage to ensure Iranian compliance with an international nuclear agreement. The legislation, known as the Iran Sanctions Extension Act, needs Senate approval and President Obama\u2019s signature before the end of the year, when American sanctions are set to expire. Under the nuclear agreement , which took effect in January, between Iran and six world powers including the United States, many economic sanctions were suspended or relaxed in exchange for Iran\u2019s verifiable pledges of peaceful nuclear work. But the deal also contained a \u201csnapback\u201d provision that would allow for the reimposition of sanctions if Iran were found to have violated the terms. The legislation approved by the House on Tuesday would also extend longstanding American sanctions against Iran that predate the dispute over that country\u2019s nuclear activities. Image President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in September. Trying to reassure his cabinet ministers after Donald J. Trump\u2019s election, Mr. Rouhani said that Iran\u2019s nuclear agreement \u201ccannot be overturned by one government\u2019s decision.\u201d Credit Lucas Jackson/Reuters Iran has increasingly complained about these non-nuclear sanctions, particularly the prohibition on Iranian access to the American financial system and use of the dollar. The Iranians say such restrictions have discouraged many foreign companies from investing in Iran, subverting the economic rewards it expected from the nuclear agreement. Republicans and many Democrats opposed the agreement, asserting that Iran was untrustworthy and had gained too many concessions during the negotiations. President-elect Donald J. Trump said during his campaign that he would renegotiate the accord or renounce it. In a March speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington, he said his top priority was to \u201cdismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.\u201d Whether he will follow through on that pledge remains unclear. The other countries that agreed to the deal with Iran \u2014 Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia \u2014 have said they intend to honor it. President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande of France said on Tuesday that he did not believe Mr. Trump would scrap the agreement, telling the France 24 television channel that the \u201cabsence of an accord would be very serious.\u201d Iranian leaders, reacting to Mr. Trump\u2019s victory, have also asserted that he will not be able to undo the agreement. President Hassan Rouhani of Iran told his cabinet ministers the day after the American election that the agreement \u201ccannot be overturned by one government\u2019s decision,\u201d according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. On Monday, 76 national security experts, including former officials of Republican and Democratic administrations, exhorted Mr. Trump not only to accept the nuclear agreement but to use it as a way to ease tensions with Iran on other longstanding problems.", "keyword": "Iran;Embargoes Sanctions;Donald Trump"}
{"id": "ny0222848", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2010/11/16", "title": "How Is Blood Volume Calculated? Science Q&A", "abstract": "Q. My husband weighs twice as much as I do. How does his blood volume compare with mine? A. Blood volume depends on many factors and is highly variable, but estimates based on body height, weight and gender can be made, and an online calculator based on recent research is available at easycalculation.com/medical/blood-volume.php . For a 200-pound, six-foot male, the blood volume is estimated at 7.2 liters, or about seven and a half quarts. For a 100-pound, five-foot female, the estimate is three and a half liters, or 3.7 quarts. The normal range for an adult human is usually estimated at five to six quarts. An updated, semiautomated method of getting a quick and reliable estimate of blood volume using radioactive tracers is discussed in a 2003 article in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology . Obtaining such a reading is important in many areas of treatment, like perfusion, or injecting a therapeutic substance into a patient\u2019s blood supply. \u201cObviously, larger people have larger blood volumes, but blood volume also varies greatly by body composition,\u201d the article explains. \u201cInitial attempts to predict normal blood volume used a fixed ratio of blood volume to body weight, with different ratios for men and for women. However, fat is much less vascular than lean tissue, so two individuals of the same weight with different body compositions can have markedly different normal blood volumes.\u201d C. CLAIBORNE RAY", "keyword": "Blood;Medicine and Health;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0019039", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/07/19", "title": "Retiring U.S. Envoy Faults Hong Kong and China on Snowden", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 The American consul general here had some pointed words on Thursday for Hong Kong and the Chinese authorities, saying that their decision to let the former United States intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden flee to Moscow last month had \u201cdamaged the very high level of trust\u201d between Hong Kong and the United States, and that repairing the relationship would take time. The consul general, Stephen M. Young, who will leave his post as the top American representative here by the end of the month, said in departing remarks to reporters that the Snowden case raised serious questions about the legal autonomy Hong Kong is supposed to hold under the agreement by which Britain handed its former colony over to mainland China in 1997. \u201cThere was a China factor here,\u201d he said in suggesting that the Chinese government steered Hong Kong into letting Mr. Snowden flee to Russia on June 23. \u201cChina let us down.\u201d During an hourlong news conference, Mr. Young occasionally directed pointed words at Beijing\u2019s influence here, and at one point upbraided a reporter from a mainland Chinese newspaper, saying, \u201cI wish you would be more objective,\u201d adding, \u201cbut you have your masters in Beijing.\u201d Until the Snowden episode, Hong Kong had warm relations with the United States and cooperated closely on local law enforcement matters. But Mr. Young said that trust had been eroded by Mr. Snowden\u2019s departure, noting that American presidents and secretaries of state are not normally focused on ties with Hong Kong, and that this sequence of events had probably left a negative imprint in their minds. \u201cIt will take some time to repair the damage there,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were frankly disappointed by the way our colleagues here in Hong Kong\u201d handled the situation. Mr. Snowden fled Hong Kong after the United States asked the local authorities to detain and send him to the United States on charges that he illegally disclosed classified documents about global American surveillance programs. He has been staying in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, awaiting a decision from the Russian authorities on his request for temporary asylum. While citing recent cases of what he called mainland Chinese intimidation of Hong Kong media outlets, Mr. Young nevertheless expressed confidence in the \u201cone country, two systems\u201d governance of Hong Kong, in which Beijing exercises control over the territory\u2019s defense and foreign policy while ceding autonomy on other matters. \u201cThe U.S. has long had an interest in the success of the one country, two systems model,\u201d he said. Mr. Young, who will retire from the Foreign Service, is being replaced as consul general by Ford Hart, who is the United States special envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea, which have stalled amid tensions over Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear program.", "keyword": "Edward Snowden;Hong Kong;China;US;US Foreign Policy;International relations"}
{"id": "ny0013361", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2013/11/07", "title": "Call Collins? Knicks Have Little to Lose", "abstract": "One week into an already stressful season, the Knicks do not have a center, a defensive beacon in the N.B.A. storm. There is no short or complete answer to the loss of Tyson Chandler, who has a nondisplaced fracture of the right fibula. But there will be suggestions on how to cobble together a plan to survive for the next four to six weeks. And here is one: Get the agent Arn Tellem on the phone and see how quickly Jason Collins can get to New York. Collins has been home in Los Angeles, working out and waiting for the inevitable injury that would send a front-line player to the injured list and get him back into the league for at least part of a 13th season. Chandler was the first and will not be the last. Reluctant to be quoted on a touchy subject, many N.B.A. insiders have insisted that Collins\u2019s exclusion has had nothing to do with the announcement last spring that he is gay . It has been, they said, more about his age, his limited abilities and, in some cases, luxury-tax complications related to the salary cap. They are right that Collins, who turns 35 next month, is no compelling asset for any team that does not have wreckage. But the Knicks are suddenly a desperate team, terrified of falling behind in the race for playoff seeding in a season that could determine Carmelo Anthony\u2019s future with the franchise. In training camp, Coach Mike Woodson said the Knicks had considered signing Collins. Over the next six weeks, Woodson is going to need all the height, experience and big-man savvy he can get. Jeremy Tyler, who was cut at the end of training camp, could be re-signed. But he is young and unproven. If Collins can provide 10 to 15 minutes a game of smart, positional defense \u2014 and he can \u2014 he is worth signing, too. At the least, he would bring more value to the Knicks than Chris Smith, brother of J. R., and one or two others on their very flawed roster put together by Glen Grunwald, the former general manager, who was removed the week before training camp. What owner makes a move like that? Rational critics could not help but wonder while trying to read the mind of the Madison Square Garden strongman James L. Dolan. Behold the prescience and basketball savvy of Dolan as the Knicks \u2014 1-3 after surrendering 64 first-half points and losing at home to Michael Jordan\u2019s Charlotte Bobcats on Tuesday night \u2014 devolve before our eyes. Play along with the gag here as we claim that Dolan recognized that Grunwald, the architect of a 54-victory team last season, did a lousy job of addressing the issues and needs of the Knicks after their deflating and revealing second-round defeat to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season. (To the contrary, Dolan told Grunwald\u2019s replacement, Steve Mills, that he was handed championship material.) Image Jason Collins who has announced he is gay, is unsigned. Credit Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images Remember how the Knicks were hammered on the boards by the bigger and more athletic Pacers, outrebounded by an average of almost nine per game during a six-game series? Explain, then, how Grunwald\u2019s major off-season acquisition came to be Andrea Bargnani, a jump-shooting 7-footer whose reputation for not rebounding or playing with aggression was known to most N.B.A. fans in North America and millions more in Europe and Asia. Chandler, who turned 31 last month and has played professionally since he was a teenager, took a beating at center last season and looked more like 41 against Indiana\u2019s Roy Hibbert. Forget a viable alternative for this season in the event Chandler got hurt, as he did Tuesday night when he collided with Charlotte\u2019s Kemba Walker. Grunwald failed to provide even an actual center (unless you count Cole Aldrich, inactive against Charlotte). For a team that was overloaded last season with basketball geriatrics (Rasheed Wallace, Marcus Camby) whose health predictably betrayed them, Grunwald re-signed Kenyon Martin, whose 35-year-old and battle-worn body was breaking down by last spring\u2019s playoffs after only 18 regular-season games. Martin now seems to be available to help out at center \u2014 a position for which he is undersized \u2014 only for limited minutes and perhaps not every night. That further hinders a roster hamstrung by the increasingly dysfunctional Amar\u2019e Stoudemire, a defensive liability at any position. Collins would be no more than a Band-Aid, but he has been running hills in Los Angeles, lifting weights, doing yoga. \u201cA lot of eyeballs on me,\u201d he said in an interview last month, imagining being back in the sport. Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers, who had Collins last season in Boston, told a story about how he was critical of Collins during a game for giving up a dunk. Kevin Garnett piped up: \u201cAre you kidding, Doc? He ain\u2019t ever in the wrong spot.\u201d Rivers said, \u201cAs it turned out, they were right \u2014 he was in the right spot, as usual.\u201d With the Knicks in a spot, does this franchise have the kind of enlightened cultural environment to handle the attention Collins would bring and the sensitivity he would deserve? This, of course, was the group that followed Martin when he suggested to teammates that they dress all in black for a presumed playoff burial of the Celtics last April, not long after Boston was traumatized by the marathon bombings. Collins in this mix might sound like a stretch, but let\u2019s be positive. While the Garden\u2019s City Dancers are being rebranded (the official explanation for the disappearance of their routines), here is an unexpected opportunity to rebrand the Knicks as a franchise with a social conscience and bring in a player they could use to boot. The way this season has begun, what do they have to lose? Anyway, in the end, it will all be Grunwald\u2019s fault.", "keyword": "Basketball;Knicks;Jason Collins;Glen Grunwald"}
{"id": "ny0280511", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/10/21", "title": "Indians\u2019 Jose Ramirez Has Been Unlikely Hero as a Super Fill-In", "abstract": "TORONTO \u2014 Jose Ramirez stood off in the corner, away from the revelry inside the visitors\u2019 clubhouse at Rogers Centre on Wednesday night. Only moments before, the Cleveland Indians had clinched their first American League pennant since 1997. Players poured beer down teammates\u2019 backs and sprayed Champagne into coaches\u2019 faces. Only seven years ago, Ramirez was an overlooked prospect in the Dominican Republic. He was considered a little too old and too small, but the Indians liked his potential and signed him anyway for a bonus of $50,000. He spent parts of his first three years in the major leagues as a part-time player. Thrust into an everyday role this season, Ramirez unexpectedly led the Indians with a .312 average. \u201cThis is something incredible,\u201d Ramirez, 24, said in Spanish as he surveyed the scene before him, waiting for celebratory cigars to be passed out. \u201cI\u2019m so happy, I don\u2019t know how to explain it.\u201d Ramirez, in many ways, epitomizes this surprising Indians team. Without two of their best starters, Danny Salazar and Carlos Carrasco; their starting catcher, Yan Gomes; and outfielder Michael Brantley, their most valuable player candidate of two years ago, the Indians claimed the A.L. Central title and lost only one playoff game as they barreled into the World Series. How much of the roster could the average baseball fan name? The Indians have talent \u2014 shortstop Francisco Lindor, second baseman Jason Kipnis, first baseman Mike Napoli and designated hitter Carlos Santana, among others \u2014 but they are better because of the sum of their parts. The backbone of the team, the starting rotation, was decimated by injuries, and the former A.L. Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber was the last healthy formidable starter left standing during the A.LC.S. victory over the Toronto Blue Jays. Led by the star reliever Andrew Miller, the bullpen has carried Cleveland deep into the playoffs. The World Series will serve as an introduction to baseball fans across the country to the Indians\u2019 other talented players, including outfielder Tyler Naquin, reliever Cody Allen and Ramirez. \u201cCleveland knows who is on the team, but guys that might have flown underneath the radar will get a bit more notoriety playing during the postseason,\u201d the veteran outfielder Coco Crisp said. \u201cIt\u2019s special they\u2019re going to get a chance for people to actually know who is actually on this team.\u201d One of them is Ramirez, a 5-foot-9, 180-pound switch-hitting utility player who became an unlikely hero when Brantley, who finished third in the A.L.\u2019s most valuable player voting in 2014, endured setbacks from shoulder surgery and played only 11 games this season. Manager Terry Francona used a colorful phrase in saying that Ramirez had saved the team, adding: \u201cAnd that\u2019s all playing left field, third base \u2014 he\u2019s played short, he\u2019s played second. We know we have an everyday player that can hit the middle of the order at multiple positions.\u201d Ramirez began the 2015 season as the Indians\u2019 starting shortstop, but he struggled and was demoted to Class AAA Columbus twice. He finished the season strongly, however, and his play carried over into this season. He played mostly left field at first, in Brantley\u2019s absence, then handled third base every day after Juan Uribe was released in August. \u201cI felt good,\u201d Ramirez said. \u201cAnd thanks to the team for giving me a chance. I didn\u2019t worry about who was hurt or not. I just worked hard and prepared myself to give the best I could.\u201d In a career-high 152 games, Ramirez finished the season with the seventh-best average in the A.L. and was second in the league with 46 doubles. He did not strike out much (62 times), stole 22 bases, smacked 11 home runs and drove in 76 runs. \u201cVery aggressive and very fearless,\u201d said Ty Van Burkleo, the Indians\u2019 hitting coach. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing I love about him most: He\u2019s a fearless hitter. He can handle fastballs as well as breaking balls. He\u2019s tough to pitch to.\u201d Van Burkleo described an attribute that stands out immediately about Ramirez. Despite being overlooked as a prospect in the Dominican Republic because of his stature, Ramirez does not lack for confidence or personality. He carries himself with a bounce in his step that has not gone unnoticed by teammates. \u201cHe\u2019s got that George Jefferson walk,\u201d Kipnis said. \u201cHe\u2019s just got that quiet confidence. Wait, not quiet. He\u2019s not quiet himself. He\u2019s learned who he is as a player and grown to harness it and exploit the things that he does well. He\u2019s worked on it, and it\u2019s made him an impactful player.\u201d Ramirez added: \u201cThat\u2019s just what I\u2019m like. I\u2019ve always had confidence in myself. I don\u2019t worry about anything. I\u2019m the same always.\u201d Before batting practice on Tuesday, Ramirez wore a shirt given to him by a Cleveland apparel company that featured his trademark flashy hair and a slogan, \u201cYes Way Jose.\u201d Visible when his cap is off, Ramirez\u2019s poofy orange hair has attracted humorous attention. \u201cI\u2019m probably the last person that should comment on hair,\u201d said Francona, who is bald. \u201cBut since you asked, I think it\u2019s atrocious.\u201d Ramirez laughed at Francona\u2019s comment. \u201cThat\u2019s so weird,\u201d he said. \u201cI really like my hair. It has brought me many blessings, and we\u2019re going to keep it like this.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Cleveland Indians;Jose Ramirez"}
{"id": "ny0058454", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/08/04", "title": "Wilfred Feinberg, Federal Appeals Court Judge and Mentor, Dies at 94", "abstract": "Wilfred Feinberg, a federal appeals court judge in New York who ruled in major cases involving the Vietnam War and labor rights over his five decades on the bench and shepherded the careers of many young lawyers to prominence, died on July 31 in Manhattan. He was 94. His son, Jack, said the cause was pneumonia. Judge Feinberg was a lawyer in private practice in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy appointed him to a newly created position on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Five years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He served 45 years there, eight as its chief judge. In 1966, he was part of a three-judge panel that found that a young military draftee had violated a new law prohibiting the burning of draft cards. The year before, after a wave of draft-card burnings in protest of the Vietnam War, Congress had made burning the cards illegal. Lawyers for the defendant, David J. Miller, argued that card-burning was a symbolic protest protected as free speech. The appeals court affirmed a lower-court ruling, which said Congress had the right to pass the law under its authority to create and maintain armies. \u201cThe range of symbolic conduct intended to express disapproval is broad; it can extend from a thumbs-down gesture to political assassination,\u201d Judge Feinberg wrote in the majority opinion. \u201cWould anyone seriously contend that the First Amendment protects the latter?\u201d On June 23, 1971, Judge Feinberg was one of three on an eight-judge panel who dissented from a majority opinion that delayed the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times. A lower court judge had ruled that The Times could publish the documents, which chronicled American involvement in the Vietnam War, but five of the appellate judges ordered publication to be delayed to allow the government time to prove that it would threaten national security. Days later, the United States Supreme Court allowed the publication to go forward. Later in the 1970s, Judge Feinberg was involved in a decision that required a North Carolina textile company, J. P. Stevens and Company, to allow employees to pursue efforts to unionize. The case inspired the 1979 movie \u201cNorma Rae,\u201d with Sally Field as a textile-factory labor activist. Judge Feinberg was born on June 22, 1920, in Manhattan, the youngest of three children of Jac and Eva Feinberg. The family had a company that sold hosiery. He graduated from Columbia College in 1940, then served in the Army in Europe during World War II. He went on to attend Columbia Law School, where he was editor of the Law Review and graduated in 1946. He spent much of the next 15 years in private practice before President Kennedy appointed him to the federal bench. Judge Feinberg\u2019s selection to the appeals court in 1965 was to fill a seat being vacated by Judge Marshall, who had been named solicitor general. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York and some prominent advisers had urged President Johnson to select Edward Weinfeld, who was also a federal judge. Judge Weinfeld had many more years of experience and a national reputation. He was 64 at the time; Judge Feinberg was 45. Some people speculated that Johnson had been influenced by the fact that Judge Feinberg\u2019s older brother, Abraham, was a major contributor to Democratic candidates. Others said the president chose Judge Feinberg for his potential to have a long career on the court. Besides his son, he is survived by his wife of 68 years, the former Shirley Marcus; his daughters, Susan Stelk and Jessica Twedt; and six grandchildren. Judge Feinberg\u2019s former clerks include Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia; Richard L. Revesz, the former dean of the New York University School of Law; and Gerard E. Lynch, an appellate judge on the Second Circuit. Judge Feinberg was a leader in judicial administration, serving on national committees. In 2004, he received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award. The selection committee was led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Mr. Revesz said in an interview that though they differed ideologically, Justice Rehnquist had longstanding high regard for Judge Feinberg. Years earlier, after being appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Marshall had selected Mr. Revesz as one of his clerks. In the move from New York to Washington, Mr. Revesz shared a moving trailer with his co-clerk in Judge Feinberg\u2019s office, Alan B. Vickery. Mr. Vickery was going to work for Justice Rehnquist.", "keyword": "Wilfred Feinberg;Obituary;United States courts of appeals;New York;Judiciary;Lyndon Baines Johnson;Vietnam War"}
{"id": "ny0069704", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/12/13", "title": "Washington Redskins at New York Giants Preview", "abstract": "Redskins (3-10) at Giants (4-9) 1 p.m. Sunday, Line: Giants by 7 Eli Manning has been the Giants\u2019 starting quarterback in every game since Nov. 21, 2004. In that time, Washington has had 10 starting quarterbacks. The revolving door does not appear to be stopping anytime soon, as the Redskins appeared determined to delay committing to a quarterback for this game from among the three who have started for them this season. Yet Washington still has more passing yards this season than the Giants. DeSean Jackson, a wide receiver signed this off-season, has helped introduce a vertical element to the Redskins\u2019 offense, resulting in a team average of 8.1 yards per pass attempt, which is third in the N.F.L. Manning no doubt provides more consistency than anyone Washington has to offer, but the Redskins\u2019 triumvirate has outperformed Manning, a two-time Super Bowl winner. Pick : Redskins", "keyword": "Football;Redskins;Giants"}
{"id": "ny0184116", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/12/22", "title": "Jailed 17 Years, Long Island Man Gets Second Trial", "abstract": "A state appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction of a Long Island man imprisoned 17 years for the grisly murders of his parents in 1988. The decision cited the \u201ccumulative effect\u201d of new witnesses and extensive new evidence that have emerged in recent years, pointing to other suspects as the real killers. The man, Martin H. Tankleff , was a teenager in 1990 when a jury convicted him, largely on the basis of an incomplete confession written by detectives, which he repudiated almost immediately and never signed. The long campaign to free him drew national attention and support from a battery of prominent pro bono lawyers and former prosecutors and judges, as well as his relatives and a private investigator who unearthed the new evidence. But several appeals were denied by state and federal courts. Friday\u2019s decision, a unanimous ruling by a four-judge panel in the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, granted a new trial for Mr. Tankleff, who is now 36. It also renewed attention to questions he has raised about police and prosecutorial methods in Suffolk County, where a state investigation found rampant misconduct in the 1980s. \u201cIt is abhorrent to our sense of justice and fair play to countenance the possibility that someone innocent of a crime may be incarcerated or otherwise punished for a crime which he or she did not commit,\u201d the judges wrote in a 21-page opinion. Suffolk County prosecutors said they were considering whether to appeal the ruling. \u201cWe respectfully disagree with the court\u2019s decision,\u201d said District Attorney Thomas J. Spota. If the ruling stands, Mr. Tankleff will be retried under the original indictment, said the assistant district attorney in the case, Leonard Lato. Mr. Tankleff\u2019s lawyers began arranging bail for his release, which prosecutors have agreed to. \u201cMarty was very, very happy,\u201d said one lawyer, Bruce A. Barket, who gave his client the news in a phone call to the Great Meadow state prison, near Lake George, where Mr. Tankleff is serving a sentence of 50 years to life. \u201cLiterally his first words were: \u2018Finally, justice is starting to tilt to us,\u2019\u201d Mr. Barket said. Mr. Tankleff\u2019s jubilant supporters said they welcomed the opportunity for him to prove his innocence at a new trial. But they demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the case and pursue the other suspects, saying they did not trust Suffolk County law enforcement. \u201cWe handed this evidence to them, and they did nothing,\u201d said Ron Falbee, Mr. Tankleff\u2019s cousin and a family spokesman. \u201cThey\u2019ve been covering up something, big time.\u201d Prosecutors have denied the accusation. Mr. Tankleff has also accused the lead detective in the case, K. James McCready, of lying and shielding the real culprits. The detective, now retired, has denied doing so. Mr. Tankleff has not wanted for defenders. His cause has drawn help from public relations consultants and volunteers who organized a Web site. Friend-of-the-court briefs were filed by former state and federal prosecutors and judges, state and national defense lawyer associations and watchdog groups like the Innocence Project. The case was featured on Court TV and news programs including \u201c48 Hours.\u201d Mr. Tankleff had just turned 17 when his parents, Seymour and Arlene, were slashed and bludgeoned in their spacious home in Belle Terre, on a North Shore cliff overlooking Long Island Sound on Sept. 7, 1988. He was arrested that day, based on the disputed confession, which became the prime evidence in his conviction. Appeals to state and federal courts challenging the admissibility of the confession were rejected, sometimes narrowly. Several new witnesses came forward starting in 2003, implicating Joseph Creedon and Peter Kent as the killers. Mr. Tankleff said he believed the two had acted at the behest of his father\u2019s embittered business partner, Jerard Steuerman. Under oath, the three men have all denied guilt, though other witnesses said they had admitted their involvement. Last year, Judge Stephen Braslow of Suffolk County Court denied an appeal, discounting the witnesses as \u201ca cavalcade of nefarious scoundrels.\u201d Several had psychological problems, criminal records or histories of drug abuse. But others included a restaurant owner, a cabinet maker, a retired businessman and a priest. In reversing Judge Braslow, the appellate court said: \u201cThe county court in effect applied a blanket disqualification for all of the defendant\u2019s proffered evidence. It viewed almost all of the defendant\u2019s witnesses as questionable, untrustworthy or unreliable.\u201d But, the appellate judges said, \u201cAt this juncture there is no basis to conclude that all of the subject evidence is inadmissible.\u201d The panel noted that the lower court had \u201ccompletely disregarded a crucial fact which is pivotal to our determination\u201d \u2014 that many of the witnesses did not know each other, yet implicated Mr. Creedon and Mr. Steuerman. \u201cIt appears that the county court never considered that the cumulative effect of the new evidence created a probability that, had such evidence been received at trial, the verdict would have been more favorable to the defendant,\u201d the appellate court said. It concluded, \u201cThis evidence warrants a new trial.\u201d The decision was signed by Judges Reinaldo E. Rivera, Gabriel M. Krausman, Anita R. Florio and Mark C. Dillon. At the time of the murders, Seymour Tankleff was pressuring Mr. Steuerman to repay him $500,000, and they were fighting over control of their growing chain of Strathmore Bagel stores, witnesses testified early in the case. Mr. Steuerman was at the Tankleff home for a late poker party on the night of the murders and was the last player to leave, according to testimony. When Detective McCready and other investigators arrived at the scene the next morning, Martin Tankleff \u2014 who had called 911 and administered first aid to his father \u2014 told them to investigate Mr. Steuerman. Instead, they focused on Mr. Tankleff. Detective McCready acknowledged that he had tricked Mr. Tankleff during interrogation, telling him that investigators had found his hairs in his mother\u2019s hands, that a humidity test proved he had used the shower to wash off the blood and that his father had regained consciousness and named Mr. Tankleff as the attacker. None of that was true, but Mr. Tankleff said he began doubting himself. He told the interrogators: \u201cCould I have blacked out ... and done this?\u201d and adding, \u201cCould I be possessed?\u201d That led to the disputed admissions. A co-founder of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck, said on Friday, \u201cThis had all the earmarks of a classic false confession.\u201d A decade after Mr. Tankleff went to prison, a private investigator working for the defense, Jay Salpeter, began turning up new evidence. The first breakthrough was finding Glenn Harris, an ex-convict who said he had driven Mr. Creedon and Mr. Kent to and from the Tankleff house that night. Other witnesses followed, including Mr. Creedon\u2019s son, who said his father had admitted to the killings. Despite Detective McCready\u2019s denials that he knew Mr. Steuerman, two witnesses said they had seen the men together. A restaurant owner said Detective McCready told him that a construction business he owned had done work for Mr. Steuerman. There were also questions about District Attorney Spota, who as a private lawyer had represented Mr. McCready when he was investigated by a state commission that found he had lied in another murder case, and later when Mr. McCready was charged and acquitted of assault. Mr. Spota\u2019s law partner had also represented Mr. Steuerman. \u201cThe big question is what happens now,\u201d said Bennett L. Gershman, a law professor at Pace University and a former prosecutor who has followed the case closely. \u201cYou have three people walking at liberty \u2014 Creedon, Steuerman and Kent \u2014 who are potential killers. Is Spota going to continue on the case? I don\u2019t see how he can.\u201d Mr. Gershman praised the appellate ruling, saying: \u201cFinally you have an objective, fair-minded view of this case, which has never happened before.\u201d", "keyword": "Tankleff Martin;Long Island (NY);Decisions and Verdicts"}
{"id": "ny0217884", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/05/20", "title": "Teaching Candidates Aplenty, but the Jobs Are Few", "abstract": "PELHAM, N.Y. \u2014 In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California . The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions \u2014 the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career. Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut , chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively. The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression . Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles , which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs. Even upscale suburban districts are preparing for huge levels of layoffs. School officials and union leaders estimate that more than 150,000 teachers nationwide could lose their jobs next year, far more than any other time, including the last major financial crisis of the 1970s. Juliana Pankow, who just graduated from Teachers College at Columbia University , has sent out 40 r\u00e9sum\u00e9s since January. A few Saturdays ago, she went to a school in Harlem because she heard the principal would be there (she was invited back to teach a demonstration lesson, but it may be for naught since the city has a hiring freeze). Now, Ms. Pankow said she might have to move back in with her parents in Scarsdale, N.Y., and perhaps take up SAT tutoring. \u201cI can\u2019t think of anything else I\u2019d rather do,\u201d said Ms. Pankow, 23, as she waited outside the principal\u2019s office at Pelham Memorial last week, among 619 people applying for one English position. \u201cWhich is a problem, because I might have to do something else.\u201d At Teachers College, so many students like Ms. Pankow are looking for work that two recent job fairs attracted a record 650 students and alumni, up from 450 last year. Last month, the college added a job fair focusing on schools in Harlem. But job postings are down by half this year, to one dozen to two dozen a week, mostly in charter schools , said Marianne Tramelli, the college\u2019s director of career services. Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, are practically the only ones hiring in New York and elsewhere because of growing enrollments amid expanding political and economic support for school choice. Even so, they do not have nearly enough jobs to go around. In New York, where the Success Charter Network is hiring 135 teachers for its seven schools in Harlem and the Bronx , some of the 8,453 applicants have called the office three times a day to check on their status. Veteran teachers have also offered to work as assistant teachers. \u201cIt\u2019s heartbreaking \u2014 there\u2019s much more desperation out there,\u201d said Eva S. Moskowitz , a former councilwoman who is the network\u2019s founder and chief executive. KIPP , another charter school network with 82 schools nationwide, has received 745 applications since January at its seven schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, compared with 385 last year. At the University of Pennsylvania , most of the 90 aspiring teachers who graduated last weekend are jobless. Many had counted on offers from the Philadelphia public schools but had their interviews canceled this month after the district announced a hiring freeze. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to encourage everyone to hold on,\u201d said Kathy Schultz , an education professor at Penn. \u201cBut that\u2019s very difficult because students have taken out loans and want to be assured of a job.\u201d Michigan State University has pushed its 500 teaching graduates to look out of state. As local jobs have dried up, it started an internship program in Chicago , a four-hour drive from campus. Professors now go with students to the annual campus job fair to make sure they do not hover around the Michigan tables, but walk over to, say, North Carolina , Texas or Virginia . \u201cWe have a culture of people wanting to stay here and teach where they went to school, but we also want them to get jobs,\u201d said Suzanne Wilson , the chairwoman of the department of teacher education. Along with five other former teachers, Jade Stier, 27, finally gave up and enrolled in a nursing program last fall, after three years of looking for an elementary school job. She sent out hundreds of r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, only to land one interview a year. She settled for working as a substitute teacher, earning $85 a day with no benefits. \u201cSpending $50,000 for an education you can\u2019t use is really frustrating,\u201d Ms. Stier said. \u201cI definitely miss teaching, but I felt like I had no other choice.\u201d If there is an upside to the shortage of teaching jobs, it is that schools now have their pick of candidates. Teach for America , which places graduates from some of the nation\u2019s top colleges in poor schools, has seen applications increase by nearly a third this year to 46,000 \u2014 for 4,500 slots. From Ivy League colleges alone, there are 1,688 would-be teachers. Here in Pelham, a well-regarded district where teaching salaries range from $50,000 to $134,000, high school administrators and teachers have spent recent weeks winnowing applicants\u2019 r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. Candidates with grade point averages below 3.0 were eliminated (3.3 in some departments), as were those who missed the April 30 application deadline. Almost 200 were invited for interviews. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult,\u201d said Jeannine Clark , the high school principal in Pelham. \u201cMore so than in years past because there are so many very qualified candidates.\u201d While Ms. Clark and the English supervisor were meeting with prospective teachers last week, candidates for the social studies job were down the hallway typing a 40-minute timed essay on the French Revolution. Upstairs, interviews for physics and biology teachers were being conducted. \u201cPeople will come in here begging for anything,\u201d said Dennis R. Lauro Jr. , the superintendent, who started closing his office door this year because out-of-work teachers would drop in unannounced to hand him r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. \u201cWe\u2019ve never seen these kinds of numbers before.\u201d Top candidates will be asked to return several more times to meet with Dr. Lauro, parents and students and to teach a demonstration class. Ms. Pankow is hoping she will be among them. \u201cIt would be unbelievable,\u201d she said. \u201cI would love it here, but I\u2019m not necessarily putting all my eggs in this basket.\u201d", "keyword": "Teachers;null;Recession and Depression;Layoffs;Careers and Professions"}
{"id": "ny0115257", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/11/23", "title": "After Madoff, the Mets\u2019 Other Potentially Risky Investor: Steven A. Cohen", "abstract": "It was, even then, a risk perhaps not worth taking. The owners of the Mets , fresh off the humbling and costly financial entanglement with a family friend, Bernard L. Madoff, sold a minority stake in the team to another secretive hedge fund manager and family friend whose operation was in the cross hairs of determined federal prosecutors. But the owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz , went ahead and sold a 4 percent share earlier this year to Steven A. Cohen , the owner of SAC Capital Advisors, who has seen at least seven of his former employees implicated in the federal government\u2019s multiyear insider trading investigation. Three have pleaded guilty to insider trading while working for Cohen. The Mets presumably had done their due diligence, although, because Cohen was a billionaire friend, a fan of the team and a season-ticket holder, it is unclear how exacting their look at his controversial financial past was. But Major League Baseball had to clear Cohen, too, as a consequence both of his interest in the Mets and his grander ambitions to buy the Dodgers. Now, however, prosecutors appear to have drawn closer to Cohen. On Tuesday, one of his former portfolio managers, Matthew Martoma, was arrested and charged with being part of an insider trading scheme that made more than $276 million, the largest such case ever, according to the federal prosecutors. In the case, the government for the first time cited Cohen\u2019s participation in a trade that may have been improper. Cohen has not been charged and may never be. Through his spokesman, he has vigorously contended that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, a contention that his legal teams made to Major League Baseball when his business was vetted to buy the Dodgers. He lost the bid for the Dodgers to a group featuring Magic Johnson. Had he won, he would have had to sell his sliver of the Mets. If prosecutors eventually make a case against Cohen, which many in the city\u2019s financial and legal circles believe they are intent on doing, it will be another whopping embarrassment for the Mets so soon after suffering huge losses because of their trust in Madoff and what turned out to be his Ponzi scheme . If Cohen is charged, Commissioner Bud Selig could suspend him or compel the Mets to buy out his ownership share. Unless the Mets have another buyer ready in the wings, they would have to find $20 million to repay his investment, which could be a big burden for a club that went to Cohen and others precisely to raise desperately needed cash. On Wednesday, the Mets and Major League Baseball would not comment on the latest legal developments involving Cohen\u2019s firm. Cohen, who manages billions in investor money and whose returns have been among the best in the industry, has not publicly discussed his investment in the Mets. He was asked by Wilpon, and said yes. It struck many who know of this deal as something more of a friendly gesture than an investment made with an eye toward big returns. And it was a pittance compared with his wealth. \u201cYou have to scratch your head and say, \u2018Was this the smartest thing in the world for the Mets?\u2019 \u201d said Philip Aidikoff, a partner in the securities firm Aidikoff, Uhl & Bakhtiari in Los Angeles, who has clients defrauded by Madoff. He said that there must have been other wealthy people who were willing to buy a piece of the Mets \u201cwho don\u2019t have the kind of baggage Cohen has.\u201d Cohen was one of numerous people approached to buy minority stakes in the Mets over the last 18 months, but only a few individuals ultimately did \u2014 the media investors Kenneth B. Lerer and Robert W. Pittman; the comedian Bill Maher; and James F. McCann, the head of 1-800-Flowers.com , who is also a friend of Wilpon\u2019s and a formal commercial sponsor of the Mets. Seven shares went to Mets insiders: four were bought by Time Warner and Comcast, the team\u2019s partners in the SNY cable channel, and three were purchased by the Wilpon family. Cohen\u2019s involvement with the Mets did not begin with the limited partnership he ultimately bought. In 2010, he was initially approached to take a big piece of the team \u2014 although before the court-appointed trustee for Madoff\u2019s victims sued the team\u2019s owners and the extent of the team\u2019s financial problems were publicly known. He was approached again, but the Mets made a deal with another hedge fund star, David Einhorn, to sell a third of the team for $200 million. When that deal fell apart, the Mets started to market the limited partnerships, which promise investors like Cohen relatively little because they have no control. Some of the modest perks that come with the shares include access to Mr. Met, the team\u2019s mascot; a free parking spot; an annual chance to throw out a game\u2019s first pitch; a luxury box; and a return on investment of 3 percent, compounded annually if the stake is kept for six years. Cohen\u2019s investment returns are among the best on Wall Street, averaging about 30 percent over the last two decades. Meanwhile, the Mets have racked up four straight fourth-place finishes, with declining attendance at Citi Field and losses that escalated to $70 million in 2011. Even as they operate with a player payroll closer to a middle-market club\u2019s, they are considering whether to sign their most productive players, R. A. Dickey, the National League Cy Young Award winner, and David Wright, to long-term contracts.", "keyword": "Baseball;Wilpon Fred;Katz Saul B;Cohen Steven A;New York Mets;Frauds and Swindling"}
{"id": "ny0144174", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/10/28", "title": "Judge Blocks Rules Limiting Sex Offenders on Halloween", "abstract": "A federal judge in Missouri on Monday temporarily blocked parts of a new state law that requires sexual offenders to remain in their homes on Halloween evening and to avoid any contact with children related to the holiday. The judge, Carol E. Jackson, of United States District Court in St. Louis, said the law was unclear, questioning language that prohibits \u201call Halloween-related contact with children\u201d and allows sexual offenders to leave their homes from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. only if they have \u201cjust cause.\u201d Two issues raised by the case were whether sexual offenders could celebrate the holiday with their own children or grandchildren, for example by hanging decorations or carving pumpkins, and on what grounds they could leave home during the curfew. The attorney general\u2019s office said it would appeal the order, but declined to comment further. Chief Judge Jackson allowed two provisions in the law to stand, requiring sexual offenders to post a sign stating \u201cno candy or treats at this residence\u201d and to turn off any porch lights. Illinois and Louisiana have also passed state laws restricting sexual offenders\u2019 activities on Halloween, and some other states have similar agency regulations or municipal ordinances. Missouri\u2019s law was enacted as part of broader legislation cracking down on sexual offenders. \u201cWe\u2019re counting it as a victory that kids going trick-or-treating will be a degree safer,\u201d said State Senator John Loudon, a Republican who sponsored the legislation, speaking of Monday\u2019s ruling. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll have to go back to the drawing board depending on court action.\u201d The ruling came after four anonymous convicted sexual offenders sued this month, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. They say the law is not only vague but also unfair and unconstitutional, an argument their lawyer vowed to keep pushing. \u201cOnce people have completed their sentences,\u201d said the lawyer, Anthony E. Rothert, \u201cyou can\u2019t go back and punish them for the same crime.\u201d Detective Gary Coxen of the St. Louis County Police Department had planned to knock on doors to ensure the sexual offenders were home, but he worried they would ignore him, mistaking him for children trick-or-treating. After the ruling, he said his job would be easier; he would simply go to each house to ensure that a sign was posted and the porch lights were off. \u201cIt takes the guesswork out,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Halloween;Missouri;Law and Legislation"}
{"id": "ny0139488", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/02/16", "title": "An Iranian Revolutionary, Dismayed but Unbowed", "abstract": "TEHRAN REVOLUTIONARIES know exactly what they want to tear down, but often lack the ability to predict what will come next. That was true of Ebrahim Yazdi and many of his allies in the Iranian revolution who now, three decades later, still savor the memory of the day the shah fled Iran , but struggle with the bitter reality that they have been spit out, marginalized and rejected by what it is they helped create. Iran celebrated the 29th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution this month, but there are many fathers of that revolution, like Mr. Yazdi, who have not been part of any official celebration. \u201cOf course this is not a monarchy, it\u2019s a republican state,\u201d Mr. Yazdi said during an interview in his living room, where he reflected on the government he helped to establish. \u201cHowever, the political system, basically, is a despotic one. Many basic rights and liberties are continuously being denied. Therefore, one inspiration behind the revolution, restoration of people\u2019s sovereignty, democracy and so on, hasn\u2019t been achieved \u2014 yet.\u201d Mr. Yazdi was an adviser to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini , the moving force behind the ouster of the shah, the larger-than-life cleric who forged a nation that sought to merge religious governance and republican ideals. Mr. Yazdi was the first deputy prime minister and the first foreign minister. Today he is 76 years old, the leader of an illegal, if tolerated, party that has virtually no influence in Iranian affairs. He tried to run for president in 2005, but was disqualified and barred from the ballot. Mr. Yazdi has white hair now, a white beard, and a face softened by time, barely resembling the tight, stern young man who strode beside Ayatollah Khomeini in the early days of the revolution. He has a nice house in a nice section of Tehran, with crystal chandeliers in the living room, a large collection of parakeets that sing all day, a study lined with books and old photographs \u2014 and time, a lot of time. MR. YAZDI opposed the student takeover of the United States Embassy in 1979, but that is not to say he was pro-American. He was a critic of Washington\u2019s policies toward Iran, and an enemy of Zionism. But he wanted a normal state, one recognized by the international community, not a pariah, isolated and radicalized. He says he knew that taking diplomats hostage would lead to the kind of Iranian state that exists today, one that continues to reward the most radical ideas. Unexpectedly, Mr. Yazdi finds himself today aligned with some of those hostage takers, like Abbas Abdi, who, like Mr. Yazdi, now want to reform the system, and, like Mr. Yazdi, have been marginalized for their views. \u201cWe thought we knew a lot of things back then,\u201d Mr. Abdi said. \u201cEverything was simplified. We thought, if only the shah goes, everything will be solved and finished. But the revolution was right, there was no alternative, no solution.\u201d Mr. Yazdi says he is a fundamentalist, but what he means is that he is a Muslim intellectual, traditional in his adherence to ritual and teachings. But he is a staunch democrat who defines democracy not by the mechanics of governance, not by elections and institutions, but by ideas. \u201cWe recognize tolerance as a basic component of democracy,\u201d he said. \u201cGod has not created all of us alike \u2014 we are different \u2014 human society is a pluralistic society. In the Koran, God is telling us that man is created to be free. So we are free to think, and think different. So the aim of democracy is to recognize the pluralistic nature of human society. The second item is tolerance, I have to tolerate my opponent. With tolerance comes compromise; without compromise democracy doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d But, Mr. Yazdi says that those who took over, those whose voices are loudest among Muslims these days, not just in Iran but around the region (and, he said, in Washington, too), are those who condemn diversity, and demand allegiance to one view. In Iran, he says, those he sees as having hijacked his revolution are the traditionalists, the people like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who he says want to rule as religious leaders did centuries ago. \u201cThe simplistic perception of the state was that there is a leader, chosen by God, a divine person, so they were expecting that the system would work as it was working centuries ago,\u201d Mr. Yazdi said. \u201cThey have succeeded. They have a leader, and he can do everything. And yet the problems are still here.\u201d Mr. Yazdi turned to radical politics after the United States and Britain helped stage a coup in 1953, deposing the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, a nationalist who opposed foreign control of Iranian affairs, and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Mr. Yazdi joined an underground organization opposed to the shah but in 1960 traveled to the United States to study. He remained there \u2014 mostly in Houston \u2014 until 1979, when he returned with Ayatollah Khomeini. After earning a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Tehran University, Mr. Yazdi did postdoctoral work in molecular genetics at Baylor University in Houston before joining its medical school faculty. IT is hard to reconcile the American-trained scientist, fluent in English, comfortable in Houston, with the images now available on YouTube, old washed-out pictures of a young revolutionary. In one, Mr. Yazdi, Ayatollah Khomeini and Yasir Arafat are shown taking over the Israeli Embassy in Tehran. Mr. Yazdi held Mr. Arafat\u2019s hand as they faced a sea of cheering men and women. \u201cThe story of the Iranian revolution is similar to the story of other revolutions,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a restoration of people\u2019s rights and liberties \u2014 people rose against the tyrannical regime of the shah.\u201d \u201cThe day after the revolution, Khomeini was facing the question: What is an Islamic republic?\u201d Mr. Yazdi recalled. \u201cI was in favor of a constitution and elections. They were against it. Khomeini was oscillating, but gradually he turned to the conservative side.\u201d Nevertheless, Mr. Yazdi remains an optimist. He says he sees more traditional thinkers taking an increasingly pragmatic view. He says that Iranian society is maturing, moving through a difficult stage on its way to constitutional democracy. Economic hardships now, he says he believes, are the sign many traditionalists need to accept changes. \u201cIran is learning democracy,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause democracy is a learning process. Nobody will learn in a classroom. Democracy is not a commodity to be imported. America doesn\u2019t carry democracy in its soldiers\u2019 rucksacks. Democracy should come from within, through our own challenges and experiences.\u201d \u201cTrial and error,\u201d he said, of the people running the state now. \u201cThey have to do it by themselves, just to learn what they are doing doesn\u2019t work. There is no other way.\u201d", "keyword": "Iran;Politics and Government;Yazdi Ebrahim;Khomeini Ruhollah"}
{"id": "ny0016011", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/10/19", "title": "Mexico: Soda-Tax Bill Moves Forward", "abstract": "The lower house of Mexico\u2019s Congress has approved a tax on soda and other sugary drinks as part of the government\u2019s fight against the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes. The legislators also added a junk food tax of 5 percent to most snacks and candy when they approved a broad overhaul of Mexico\u2019s tax system late Thursday. The beverage industry, along with sugar producers and the owners of small stores, has led a fierce lobbying campaign against the tax, but public health advocates have fought back. The Senate will take up the tax bill next week.", "keyword": "Mexico;Soda;Sales Tax;Excise Tax;Obesity;Diabetes"}
{"id": "ny0189937", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/05/19", "title": "Profit Falls 22%, but Lowe\u2019s Tops Expectations", "abstract": "MOORESVILLE, N.C. (AP) \u2014 Lowe\u2019s, the nation\u2019s second-biggest home improvement chain after Home Depot, said Monday that its first-quarter profit fell 22 percent because of the housing market downturn. But the results were still above Wall Street\u2019s expectations. Lowe\u2019s said that consumers continued to stay away from bigger-ticket housing items as they tried to shore up their savings amid the recession. But it said smaller, outdoor purchases seemed to do well. Lowe\u2019s remains optimistic. \u201cIn recent weeks we have seen consumer confidence improve, housing turnover show signs of a bottom in certain markets, and home prices slow their decline,\u201d the chairman and chief executive, Robert A. Niblock, said in a statement. Mr. Niblock noted that Lowe\u2019s would still be keeping an eye on its expenses and would \u201ccontinue to plan conservatively\u201d since many of the variables affecting the housing market are still at or near historic lows. For the period ended May 1, earnings dropped to $476 million, or 32 cents a share, from $607 million, or 41 cents, a year ago. Analysts predicted net income of 25 cents a share, according to a Thomson Reuters poll. Analysts\u2019 estimates normally exclude one-time items. Sales dipped 2 percent to $11.83 billion from $12.01 billion, but topped Wall Street\u2019s estimate of $11.63 billion. For the year, Lowe\u2019s forecast earnings of $1.13 to $1.15 a share. The retailer\u2019s second-quarter guidance anticipates profit of 51 to 55 cents a share. The company expects a sales decline of 2 percent to an increase of 1 percent for both the full year and the second quarter. Analysts predict 2009 net income of $1.11 a share on revenue of $47.16 billion. Second-quarter profit is expected at 50 cents a share on sales of $14.12 billion. Lowe\u2019s forecast a sales decline of 4 to 8 percent at stores open at least a year for both the second quarter and the year.", "keyword": "Lowe's Companies;Company Reports;Housing and Real Estate"}
{"id": "ny0154815", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2008/01/06", "title": "Going for Growth, Even in a Slowdown", "abstract": "IN times of economic uncertainty, you would think that investors would flock to traditionally defensive stocks, like shares of stable utility companies or value-oriented dividend-payers. Yet in the current slowdown, which may turn into a full-blown recession, money managers are betting on what has often been a riskier segment of the market: growth stocks. These stocks are shares of fast-growing companies whose earnings tend to expand more rapidly than the market as a whole, and they are often more volatile than the broader market, too. So far, growth has been a winning bet. Since the stock market became jittery in July amid fears about a slowing economy, growth stocks in the Russell 1000 index have advanced 2 percent. By comparison, defensive-minded value stocks \u2014 beaten-down or overlooked shares that tend to appeal to cautious investors \u2014 have lost more than 7 percent. Even as slowdown fears are turning into recession worries this year, many investors still favor growth. \u201cI still think growth is where you want to be,\u201d says Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial Services in Boston. Mr. Kleintop said he particularly favors large-capitalization growth stocks in the technology, health care and industrial sectors. A recent survey of investment managers by the Russell Investment Group in Tacoma, Wash., found that three out of four money managers described themselves as \u201cbullish\u201d on large-cap domestic growth stocks. And nearly four in five were optimistic about technology stocks. By comparison, less than half described themselves as bulls on emerging-market stocks and less than a third were upbeat about value. But why bet on growth stocks, which are riskier and throw off less dividend income than value shares? There are several compelling reasons. For starters, until last year, large-cap growth stocks had long underperformed the broad market. From 2000 through 2006, such stocks lost nearly 5 percent a year, in contrast to annual gains of nearly 8 percent for value shares and about 2 percent for the broader stock market. So the argument goes like this: If the stock market is on the verge of a recession-driven downturn, growth may have less room to fall. Moreover, the Federal Reserve has recently been lowering short-term interest rates to bolster economic activity and head off recession. Many market watchers expect the Fed to keep lowering rates this year, especially if the housing market continues to cool. Historically when the Fed cuts rates, growth stocks benefit. Since 1974, growth stocks in the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index have advanced 11 percent, on average, in the six months after the first in a series of Fed rate cuts. During those same periods, value stocks gained just 7.9 percent, according to an analysis by Sam Stovall, S.& P.\u2019s chief investment strategist. Money managers recommend focusing on stable growth companies for another reason. In times of slowing growth, investors are apt to choose companies with more reliable earnings growth, said Ernest M. Ankrim, Russell\u2019s chief investment strategist. This would point to traditional growth sectors like technology and health care. Sure enough, growth stocks have shown stable \u2014 and enviable \u2014 earnings of late. Consider the third quarter of 2007. While profits among companies in the overall S.& P. 500 fell nearly 5 percent, on average, earnings of tech companies in the index rose 17 percent, and those of health care companies in the index grew 13 percent. More of the same is expected for the fourth quarter. The consensus on Wall Street is that the tech earnings grew 22 percent and the health care earnings 15 percent in the final three months of last year. Those figures are in stark contrast to the 9.5 percent drop in overall fourth-quarter S.& P. 500 profits that analysts are bracing for, according to Thomson Financial. Here are some other reasons to consider growth sectors in this slowing economy: TECHNOLOGY Tech sector funds returned more than 17 percent, on average, in 2007, one of the best years for the sector since the Internet bubble burst in 2000. \u201cBig-cap tech had a great year, and I wouldn\u2019t see any reason why that would change,\u201d said Michael J. Cuggino, manager of the Permanent Portfolio, a mutual fund that invests in stocks, bonds and alternative assets. Would a potential recession throw a wet blanket on this comeback? Perhaps. But keep in mind that 55 percent of tech sector revenues are now derived overseas, making technology one of the most globally oriented sectors in the S.& P. 500. And because there are greater fears of a recession occurring in the United States than in the global economy, tech may be able to withstand trouble here better than some other sectors, market strategists said. HEALTH CARE This sector in general, and pharmaceutical shares in particular, have been a disappointment lately because of a dearth of new blockbuster drugs. But among classic growth sectors, health care is considered relatively recession-proof. After all, no matter how healthy the economy, people still get sick. And after years of being unloved, health care stocks in the S.& P. 500 are trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of around 15, on average. That\u2019s roughly in line with the ratio of the overall index, though health care stocks have traditionally traded at a significant premium. INDUSTRIALS While it\u2019s true that the industrial sector is economically sensitive, it is now sensitive to the global economy. More than two out of five dollars generated by domestic manufacturers now come from overseas, according to S.& P. And thanks largely to the falling dollar, the cost of doing business with domestic manufacturers is tumbling, making the sector even more appealing. David A. Rosenberg, an economist at Merrill Lynch, noted in a report that unit labor costs for domestic manufacturers were now 30 percent lower than the average for the rest of the industrialized world. The dollar might weaken further if the Fed continues to cut interest rates, so concern about the economy could make the growth sector more attractive than other parts of the market \u2014 not less.", "keyword": "Finances;Stocks and Bonds;Mutual Funds;Economic Conditions and Trends;Recession and Depression;Federal Reserve System;Standard & Poor's Corp"}
{"id": "ny0262907", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/12/20", "title": "Russia: Rescuers Voice Pessimism About Survivors From Sunken Rig", "abstract": "Rescuers said Monday that it would be a miracle if they found anyone else alive after a drilling rig with 67 men on board sank Sunday in the icy seas off Russia \u2019s Far Eastern coast. Fourteen workers were rescued from the water immediately after the rig sank; rescuers later removed 10 bodies from the Sea of Okhotsk and know of 4 others, the Emergencies Ministry said, leaving 39 people missing.", "keyword": "Offshore Drilling and Exploration;Rescues;Russia;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Maritime Accidents and Safety;Sakhalin Island (Russia)"}
{"id": "ny0157647", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/12/03", "title": "Jews of Mumbai, a Tiny and Eclectic Group, Suddenly Reconsider Their Serene Existence", "abstract": "MUMBAI, India \u2014 The peeling turquoise facade of the colonial-era Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in the heart of the city\u2019s financial district has long been a tourist attraction, a reminder of the centuries of Jewish influence that have helped shape Mumbai and of the acceptance Jews have enjoyed here. But after the terrorist attacks last week, Mumbai\u2019s Jews are dismayed to find another building suddenly vying with the 124-year-old synagogue as a symbol of their presence: the charred remains of Nariman House, where gunmen killed Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, and four other Jews. Although none of the Jews killed in the terrorists\u2019 assault on Nariman House, the community center run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, were Indian citizens, the attacks have badly shaken Jews in India. Mumbai has about 4,000 Jewish residents, accounting for a vast majority of India\u2019s Jewish population. \u201cThis is the first time when a Jew has been targeted in India because he is a Jew,\u201d said Jonathon Solomon, a Mumbai lawyer and president of the Indian Jewish Federation. \u201cThe tradition of the last thousand years has been breached.\u201d The origins of India\u2019s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a source of pride in India. \u201cThis is one of the few countries where Jews never faced discrimination and persecution,\u201d said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, a leader of the Jewish community in New Delhi. Jews played a prominent role in several coastal cities, but nowhere more so than in Mumbai. Jewish merchants from Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries arrived in the late 18th century in what was then British Bombay and quickly established themselves as leading businessmen, opening textile mills and international trading companies. Only about 200 of these so-called Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai, with the rest having immigrated to Israel, Britain and the United States. But their legacy endures: synagogues, libraries and schools, many of which serve Jews and non-Jews. They also financed the construction of several city landmarks, including the Flora Fountain and the Sassoon docks. Today, most of Mumbai\u2019s Jews have roots in a group known as the Bene Israel community, which claims to be descended from seven Jewish families who were shipwrecked on India\u2019s shore while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C. Over the centuries, they adopted Indian language, dress and cuisine. Since India became independent, these Jews have often played influential roles in Indian society, including in government and Bollywood. \u201cWe always felt we were Indians first and Jews second,\u201d said Mr. Malekar, a Bene Israel Jew. That sensibility has been shattered by the siege of Nariman House. \u201cThis attack has really shaken us up,\u201d said a Jewish educator in Mumbai who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. \u201cIf with such ease they could finish off the whole Chabad House \u2014 the property and the people \u2014 now we have to have a fresh look at our own security.\u201d Many Jewish institutions have remained closed this week as a security precaution. Jewish leaders said they might have to begin restricting access to synagogues and community centers. \u201cJewish institutions in India are soft targets,\u201d Mr. Solomon said. \u201cAfter being used to living fearless for so long we are going through a phase where we are debating with ourselves about being careful and whether we need to change our mode of existence.\u201d Heightening anxieties is the location of many of Mumbai\u2019s synagogues, which are now in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods. Historically, relations between the two religious groups in Mumbai have been good. \u201cThey live with us as brothers and in brotherhood we also live with them,\u201d said Solomon Sopher, chairman and managing trustee of the Sir Jacob Sassoon and Allied Trusts, which manages several Jewish institutions, including a high school that was founded as a Jewish school but now enrolls mostly Muslims. After the terrorist assaults, some Mumbai Jews said they were increasingly apprehensive about their Muslim neighbors. Mr. Solomon said the attack convinced him of the need for India\u2019s Jews to seek official recognition as a minority group. Such status confers privileges, including reserved places for admission to universities and for government jobs. More important, Mr. Solomon said, it would require the Indian government to protect the Jewish community from persecution. In the past, the Indian government has argued that there are too few Jews in the country to grant minority status. Many Mumbai Jews said they had limited interaction with Rabbi Holtzberg and Chabad House, whose activities were focused on Orthodox Jews visiting from abroad and encouraging greater religious observance among young Israeli backpackers. Few Jews live in the Colaba neighborhood where Nariman House is, having moved to more affluent areas in northern and western parts of the city. In addition, the Lubavitchers\u2019 ultra-Orthodox practices are much stricter than the observance of most Mumbai Jews. But Rabbi Holtzberg did preside over Sabbath services every Friday at the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue. He also conducted religious study classes and helped supply the city\u2019s more religious Jews with kosher meat. Some Jews said the attacks were likely to foster closer ties within the city\u2019s Jewish population, which in the past had been deeply divided between the Baghdadi community and the Bene Israel group, although those tensions were easing as the city\u2019s Jewish population dwindled. Representatives from both Indian Jewish communities, as well as Chabad, mourned the Holtzbergs and the other Jewish victims from Nariman House at a memorial service on Monday. Mr. Solomon, who described himself as a secular Jew, said he would be sure to visit the Chabad House when it reopens. A new rabbi, Dov Goldberg, has already been selected. \u201cNext time it opens, I will make it a point of going to show my solidarity with them,\u201d Mr. Solomon said. \u201cI suppose the same will go for many members of our community.\u201d", "keyword": "Jews;Mumbai (India);India;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0069164", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/12/06", "title": "A Step-by-Step Guide to Berkeley\u2019s Many Quirks", "abstract": "BERKELEY, Calif. \u2014 Tom Dalzell looks too strait-laced to be the arbiter of the eccentric. Nonetheless, almost two years ago, Mr. Dalzell, 63, set out in his khakis and comfortable shoes to walk every street, alleyway and path and document this city\u2019s material oddities on a website he calls Quirky Berkeley . \u201cThere is a tremendous diversity of thought here,\u201d Mr. Dalzell said. \u201cAnd one of the ways we express our lack of conformity is with the quirky things we put on our houses and in our yards.\u201d The rules are simple: no seasonal decorations, and all quirk must be viewable from the street. So far, Mr. Dalzell has walked nearly 150 miles and shot some 9,000 photos of rogue garden gnomes who moon passers-by; a four-foot-wide peace sign outside a house long occupied by Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame and his Hog Farm commune compatriots; dozens of colorful hard hats hanging from a front yard tree; a massive wolf sculpture made from old car parts; a menagerie of animal-shaped mailboxes ; a giant metal orange that once served as a roadside refreshment stand but now sits in a wooded side yard; and a variety of wildly painted houses and sculptures. Sometimes Mr. Dalzell uses the site to riff on the city\u2019s culture and history. Introducing items filed under \u201cPeace,\u201d he writes: \u201cI make the following claim: Berkeley is the peace symbol/flag/pole capital of the world. Go ahead, prove me wrong.\u201d Mr. Dalzell moved to Berkeley 30 years ago, after a stint working for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. He manages a labor union of gas and electric utility workers by day and moonlights as an author of slang dictionaries and a collector of idiosyncrasies. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Dalzell stood on the sidewalk outside what he considers the crown jewel of Berkeley\u2019s quirk: a strange, bulbous structure that locals call \u201cthe fish house\u201d built on a block of low-slung, single-family homes on the city\u2019s south side. \u201cAs Ken Kesey would say, this is \u2018bull goose loony,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Dalzell said. The house is not, it turns out, modeled after a fish but rather a tiny, indestructible microcreature called a tardigrade, or water bear, which can survive deep freezing, boiling and 10 days in space. The architect Eugene Tsui \u2014 who said he was in the process of legally changing his surname to Tssui after a dream he had in China that involved Genghis Khan \u2014 designed the home for his parents, who had no idea what a tardigrade was but wanted an earthquake-proof home. In a sign of the changes underway here, Mr. Tsui now rents it to four young men and their technology start-up. Like most things in this city of close to 117,000 residents , the question of whether Berkeley is actually more bohemian in thought and yard ornamentation than, say, Denver, is the subject of heated debate. \u201cAll the assumptions about Berkeley are flat-out wrong,\u201d Mr. Tsui said. \u201cIt is a myth that this is a liberal-minded, freethinking place; at its heart, it\u2019s a conventional bedroom community.\u201d Mayor Tom Bates, for one, disagrees. The large state university here has long drawn creative types, and the city\u2019s residents have always embraced \u201cthings that are different,\u201d the mayor said. The city was a center of the antiwar and Free Speech movements of the 1960s, and has consistently passed laws that look left-of-center to much of the country, including most recently the nation\u2019s first tax on sweetened sodas. \u201cOne of the real joys of walking this city,\u201d said Mr. Bates, who does not own a car, \u201cis to come across a house or lot where someone has done something zany.\u201d After a year of meticulously inventorying and cataloging, Mr. Dalzell has settled on a few general theories of quirk. First, quirk begets more quirk. \u201cIf one person puts up an animal mailbox, you\u2019ll often see other animal mailboxes pop up around them,\u201d he said, describing a kind of keeping up with the Joneses, Berkeley-style. Second, the density of quirk is thicker in the city\u2019s traditionally lower- and middle-class flatlands than up in the hills, where the wealthier tend to live. Third, nothing (as the Buddhists say) is permanent. \u201cSometimes you\u2019ll see something really interesting, only to go back a week later to find it gone,\u201d Mr. Dalzell said. Still, there are some who view the whole Quirky Berkeley enterprise more as a testament to its creator\u2019s kookiness than its subjects\u2019. \u201cWe urban and architectural historians exhibit variants of this strange behavior in cities around the globe,\u201d said Stephen O. Tobriner, a professor emeritus of architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. Upon close inspection, he said, any urban area yields all sorts of evidence of curious human behavior \u2014 including, sometimes, an inhabitant\u2019s desire to walk every city block. Even in the era of Google Street View, walking each mile of a city has become something of a fad. A woman finished walking every street in Berkeley in 2007. A man in his mid-90s walked over 300 miles of Sydney, Australia, before he died in 2008. It took three years for a Minneapolis woman, Francine Corcoran, to walk the 1,071 miles that make up the city. London has been walked, as has San Francisco. And while the other walkers did not set off explicitly to round up wackiness the way Mr. Dalzell did, at a walker\u2019s pace, they no doubt saw plenty of it anyway. \u201cWhen you walk a city block by block, you are forced to slow down and look at everything \u2014 you see more, you feel more, you get into the rhythm of the neighborhoods,\u201d said William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology at City College of New York who wrote \u201cThe New York Nobody Knows ,\u201d a book about walking every street \u2014 some 6,000 miles \u2014 of the city\u2019s five boroughs. \u201cIn urban areas, you often don\u2019t feel like an individual, which makes you want to put your stamp of uniqueness on something,\u201d Professor Helmreich said, \u201ceven if it is just the paint on your house.\u201d", "keyword": "Berkeley;Tom Dalzell;Walking;Collecting;California"}
{"id": "ny0151406", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/17", "title": "Kept Out of the \u201976 Games, Now Looking on, and Proud of China", "abstract": "Inside his ruby-hued, custom-designed office in Flushing, Queens, David Peng is surrounded by the tokens of the present. There, on a shelf, rests a dog-eared copy of the New York City Building Code, bulging with notes written in Chinese on memo stickers. There, in the back, stands a drafting table, opposite a scroll blessing his company, Windstar Construction. And there, next to the tea set on his desk, is a rare memento from the past: a weathered pamphlet called \u201cModern Pentathlon : The Challenge of Skill and Endurance,\u201d which is written in Chinese and features black-and-white photos of a young Olympic hopeful \u2014 Mr. Peng. It is a chapter of his life that Mr. Peng, a 55-year-old emigrant from Taiwan , hardly dwells upon anymore. But it is a story that nonetheless played out in the shadow of a moment in Olympic history in which the messy collision of sports and politics derailed the aspirations of athletes like Mr. Peng. In 1976, Mr. Peng was vying for a spot to represent Taiwan in the pentathlon, and he had traveled to San Antonio with another Taiwanese competitor to train for two months with the American team. But a few weeks before the start of the Summer Games in Montreal, after Canada bowed to pressure from Beijing, Mr. Peng learned that Taiwanese athletes would not participate. China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, demanded that Taiwan \u2014 officially known as the Republic of China \u2014 change its name in order to take part in the Games. \u201cWe were very innocent, and we didn\u2019t know what was going on,\u201d Mr. Peng said during an interview in Mandarin. \u201cI felt a little disappointed that I couldn\u2019t go.\u201d The Games in Montreal foreshadowed the politically charged Olympic boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Games. But for Taiwanese athletes, the summer of 1976 may have been especially raw because their country had participated in the Winter Olympics a few months earlier in Innsbruck, Austria. So imagine Mr. Peng\u2019s amazement that China is now the host of these Olympics and that Taiwanese athletes are now competing on Chinese soil. He is so riveted by the reality, in fact, that he put an extra television set in his office and asked a friend to tape the pentathlon. Mr. Peng has also cheered on all Chinese athletes, regardless of what national anthem they sing. \u201cI never thought this was possible,\u201d Mr. Peng said. \u201cSo much has changed in such a short period of time. I\u2019m very proud of the Chinese people. The Chinese have always been seen as weak; now we are showing that we can be strong.\u201d Mr. Peng grew up as the son of a carpenter in Hualien, on Taiwan\u2019s mountainous east coast. He was a gifted swimmer and runner in high school. During a mandatory stint in the military, he was tapped to join an elite naval unit that recruited the strongest and the fittest soldiers. Mr. Peng, a versatile athlete, began training for the pentathlon, which combines cross-country running, swimming and pistol shooting \u2014 all familiar disciplines for a soldier \u2014 with epee fencing and horse-jumping. He even earned the nickname \u201cPo Dan,\u201d or \u201cBreaking an Egg,\u201d a play on his Chinese name, Yan Dan. He said it was meant to symbolize the hope that he could achieve an athletic breakthrough. Thorn Bigley, who was the director of development programs at the San Antonio pentathlon center at the time, vividly recalls Mr. Peng and the other Taiwanese athlete, Chang Chi-ming. Mr. Peng and Mr. Chang were hardly medal threats. Like most of the pentathletes from other countries who trained in San Antonio, they were weak in fencing and horse-jumping. But whatever they lacked in skills, they tried to compensate for with their determination and sportsmanship, Mr. Bigley said. \u201cThey were athletic, they worked hard, and they were like Special Forces guys \u2014 really strong,\u201d he said. To this day, there remains a bit of confusion over Mr. Peng\u2019s exact Olympic status, since his name was not on the official Taiwanese roster for the 1976 Games \u2014 though Mr. Chang\u2019s was. But in an interview from her office in Taipei, Chi Cheng, a former world record-holder in track, said that Mr. Peng may well have been part of the delegation and that his story was consistent with an elite athlete hoping to go to Montreal. Mr. Bigley, meanwhile, said the San Antonio training center typically would have welcomed only international athletes who were on their way to the Olympics. \u201cObviously, they were representing their country,\u201d said Mr. Bigley, now a business consultant in Golden, Colo. \u201cIt was kind of a given: They were the athletes training for that event.\u201d After Mr. Peng returned to Taiwan having never realized his Olympic moment, he coached pentathletes for a year and edited the training pamphlet. But he quit the sport when he came to believe that his students would probably never have a chance to compete in the Olympics because of politics. \u201cAs an athlete, you train so hard, and you have a goal of competing,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you can\u2019t compete, then what\u2019s the goal?\u201d Mr. Peng said he immigrated to the United States in 1983 with his wife and two young children. And in short order, his family forged a classic tale: He got a job in construction, then started his own company building apartments and houses. His wife got a job as a lab technician. They moved to Long Island. Today, their daughter is a doctor, while their son, a former collegiate swimmer, may one day take over the family business. Mr. Peng is not given to ruing his past. He had a hard time, at a reporter\u2019s request, finding photos of his pentathlon days, producing two snapshots of a banquet in San Antonio. Mr. Bigley, who later looked at the photos, confirmed that they showed Mr. Peng and Mr. Chang with pentathlon coaches. There are also no signs of Mr. Peng\u2019s athletic past in the waiting area of his office. Instead, the walls are stocked with large works of Chinese art. One thing that has clearly slowed him down, Mr. Peng acknowledged, was a habit he started after he quit the sport: smoking more than a pack of cigarettes a day. \u201cThe past is the past, so I don\u2019t think about it much,\u201d he said. Mr. Peng did, however, allow for one moment of reflection. It was 1986, and Mr. Peng traveled with his family that summer to Montreal. Mr. Peng wanted to see the Olympic venues where he had hoped to compete. They were deserted. The flagpoles did not have any flags. The swimming pool did not have any water. The track-and-field stadium was empty. Mr. Peng said he thought about what could have been, before putting it all behind him and returning to his life in New York.", "keyword": "Olympic Games;Pentathlon;Taiwan;China;Beijing (China);Queens (NYC);Peng David"}
{"id": "ny0009214", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/02/04", "title": "Oil Tax Forces Greeks to Fight Winter With Fire", "abstract": "ATHENS \u2014 Even in the leafy northern stretches of this city, home to luxury apartment buildings, mansions with swimming pools and tennis clubs, the smell of wood smoke lingers everywhere at night. In her fourth-floor apartment here, Valy Pantelemidou, 37, a speech therapist, is, like many other Greeks, trying to save money on heating oil by using her fireplace to stay warm. Unemployment is at a record high of 26.8 percent in Greece, and many people have had their salaries and pensions cut, but those are not the main reasons so few residents here can afford heating oil. In the fall, the Greek government raised the taxes on heating oil by 450 percent. Overnight, the price of heating a small apartment for the winter shot up to about $1,900 from $1,300. \u201cAt the beginning of autumn, it was the biggest topic with all my friends: How are we going to heat our places?\u201d said Ms. Pantelemidou, who has had to lower her fees to keep clients. \u201cNow, when I am out walking the dog, I see people with bags picking up sticks. In this neighborhood, really.\u201d In raising the taxes, government officials hoped not just to increase revenue but also to equalize taxes on heating oil and diesel, to cut down on the illegal practice of selling cheaper heating oil as diesel fuel. But the effort, which many Greeks dismiss as a cruel stupidity, appears to have backfired in more than one way. For one thing, the government seems to be losing money on the measure. Many Greeks, like Ms. Pantelemidou, are simply not buying any heating oil this year. Sales in the last quarter of 2012 plunged 70 percent from a year earlier, according to official figures. So while the government has collected more than $63 million in new tax revenue, it appears to have lost far more \u2014 about $190 million, according to an association of Greek oil suppliers \u2014 in revenue from sales taxes on the oil. Meanwhile, many Greeks are suffering from the cold. In one recent survey by Epaminondas Panas, who leads the statistics department at the Athens University of Economics and Business, nearly 80 percent of respondents in northern Greece said they could not afford to heat their homes properly. The return to wood burning is also taking a toll on the environment. Illegal logging in national parks is on the rise, and there are reports of late-night thefts of trees and limbs from city parks in Athens, including the disappearance of the olive tree planted where Plato is said to have gone to study in the shade. Image Workers cutting and stacking firewood for sale in Halandri, north of Athens. Demand has caused an increase in illegal logging, and trees have been reported stolen from parks in Athens. Credit Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times At the same time, the smoke from the burning of wood \u2014 and often just about anything else that will catch fire \u2014 has caused spikes in air pollution that worry health officials. On some nights, the smog is clearly visible above Thessaloniki, Greece\u2019s second-largest city, and in Athens, where particulate matter has been measured at three times the normal levels. \u201cPlaces that in 2008 wouldn\u2019t even think about using their fireplaces for heating, now they are obliged to do so,\u201d said Stefanos Sabatakakis, a health supervisor with the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention . He said the rise in pollution could cause eye irritation and headaches in the short term and far more serious problems in the long term. The air is particularly bad for asthma sufferers. The agency has asked that anyone who is lighting living-room fires just for the aesthetics give them up. It has also uploaded information on its Web site about what not to burn \u2014 anything that is painted or lacquered, for instance. But in these times, Mr. Sabatakakis acknowledged, people are not that picky. Government officials say it is too early to judge the new tax. The winter is not yet over. It has not been particularly cold, they say, and many people may have stocked up on fuel oil last season. In the north of Greece, temperatures often dip to freezing at night, while in Athens they are more likely to stay in the low 40s. \u201cThis is a very complex environment,\u201d said Harry Theoharis, the secretary general of the Ministry of Finance , adding that many factors were affecting people\u2019s behavior. \u201cIt is not easy to isolate and say: \u2018O.K., this tax, this is the effect it had.\u2019 \u201d He said there were no clear indications yet that the tax had discouraged illicit sales of heating oil as diesel, though he had detected a slight change in buying patterns that might indicate some change. It is impossible not to notice the stacks of wood for sale all over Athens this year. Not far from Ms. Pantelemidou\u2019s place is a wood lot run by Valantis Topalis, 44, who used to own an interior design company. He started selling wood last year, eager to have a business that was not reliant on people paying their bills. Last year, he made some money. But this year, he said, everybody is selling wood \u2014 some of it stolen from national parks \u2014 and business is not so good. Even in this wealthy area, a lot of the customers come in for only 20 euros, or $27, worth of wood on colder days. \u201cThe worst part is not the lack of money,\u201d Mr. Topalis said of his life today. \u201cThe worst part today is the mood that people are in.\u201d Those who can afford to, like Ms. Pantelemidou, are using a combination of their fireplaces and electric heaters, unsure what this will do to their electric bills. But that is likely to bring some unpleasant surprises, as the government recently announced an increase in the cost of electricity that, depending on consumption, could be as much as 20 percent. Image Yiorgos Tsouvalakis feeding his wood stove in Nikaia, an Athens suburb, after Greece raised taxes on heating oil by 450 percent. One of the goals was to tax heating oil more like diesel fuel. Credit Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times Still, oil suppliers are glum about their prospects. Elias Bekkas, who provides oil to 65 buildings around the city, said that many of his clients had not ordered any oil, and that some who had could not pay the bill. Last winter, he said, his company sold a little more than a million gallons. This season, it has sold only about 65,000 gallons, and he doubted the total would get to 225,000. Tenant meetings to decide whether to buy oil, he said, have gotten ugly. A year ago, two buildings covered the costs for people who could not pay. But this year there is only bickering. \u201cThere is anger, bitterness between neighbors who can afford oil and those that cannot,\u201d Mr. Bekkas said. \u201cThat is what Greece is like now.\u201d Hes said he had detected a third class of people as well this winter. \u201cThere are those who are just making a political statement,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are just angry about the taxes.\u201d Ms. Pantelemidou, like many others in newer buildings, has a fireplace that was designed largely for decorative purposes. It hardly heats her living room, let alone the rest of her apartment. She has pulled a chair close to it so she can stay warm. In a working-class area of town, Aggeliki and Christos Makris are also making do without heating oil. They bought their three-bedroom apartment in 2009, when they had a combined income of $63,400 for a family of five. Since then, the salary of Mrs. Makris, 45, who works as a cleaner for the government has been cut to about $1,100 a month from $1,750 a month. Mr. Makris, 42, who runs heavy machinery at a mining company, lost all of his overtime. They are behind on their taxes and, after mortgage payments, living on less than $340 a week. To cut down on the electric bill, Mrs. Makris has even reduced the ironing she does. Paying for heating oil was out of the question. This year, Mr. Makris went north to his village to cut firewood himself. He said no one in his building wanted to buy heating oil. \u201cThe super did not even bother to ask,\u201d said Mr. Makris. \u201cWe are all in debt.\u201d The Makrises said they were at least lucky that they had made a good choice in upgrading the fireplace when they bought the apartment. It burns efficiently and warms much of their living space. Mr. Makris said it was far worse for the pensioners he saw, who really need central heating and do not have the strength, the energy or the money to get good firewood. Instead, they pick up scraps of wood left on the street, whether it is painted or not. \u201cThere is an old man I see at the market, and every week there is less and less in his grocery bag,\u201d he said. \u201cI cannot blame him, no matter what garbage he burns.\u201d", "keyword": "Greece;Trees;Oil and Gasoline;Heater;Sales Tax;Excise Tax"}
{"id": "ny0002269", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2013/03/24", "title": "Shane Larkin and Durand Scott Spark Miami From the Backcourt", "abstract": "AUSTIN, Tex. \u2014 The drill immediately stokes their competitive fire. When Miami Coach Jim Larranaga calls out \u201cfive minutes of 3s\u201d at practice, his players respond with an energy and alacrity reflected in Larranaga\u2019s tone. The Hurricanes have five minutes to make as many 3-point shots as possible. The prize: a freedom to launch a 3-ball whenever and wherever they have an open look in a game. A lot of teams employ the goal-oriented drill in various forms, but guards Shane Larkin and Durand Scott pushed to the point where practice totals would be posted in the locker room. \u201cMy assistants kept telling me in meetings, \u2018Coach, we\u2019ve got to keep score, because Shane and Durand won\u2019t go very hard unless there\u2019s something to win,\u2019 \u201d Larranaga said. That basic instinct has evolved into a killer chemistry between Larkin and Scott, whose styles seem to blend into any situation. Larkin, the son of the former major league baseball star Barry Larkin, is a sophomore who transferred to Miami from DePaul and took over Scott\u2019s position at point guard. Scott, a heralded high school player from the Bronx, is a senior who did not hesitate to defer to the underclassman. \u201cI\u2019m a basketball player,\u201d Scott said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what position I play. I can play all of them. Whatever it takes to win.\u201d That attitude was on display Friday in the No. 2 Hurricanes\u2019 78-49 victory over Pacific in an East Region opener. Larkin scored 10 points in the first half on 2-of-6 shooting, but recognized how Scott was beginning to create a flow of his own. In the second half, Scott scored 18 of his team-high 21 points, feasting on passes from Larkin and at one point drilling three 3-pointers in a row. \u201cHe\u2019s a selfless point guard,\u201d Scott said. \u201cWe always go into it together fired up. I know if I just run the floor and if I get open, he\u2019ll find me. I was just able to knock the shots down.\u201d Scott is not considered the Hurricanes\u2019 primary 3-point threat, but he made 5 of 8 against Pacific. He also made five against North Carolina State in the semifinals of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. Before that, he had hit four 3-pointers only once in a game this season. \u201cHe\u2019s hot right now,\u201d Larkin said. \u201cI\u2019m going to do the best I can to find him and get him easy shots.\u201d That was not the case early in the season, when Scott would often hesitate with pump fakes and moves to his right after taking passes from Larkin. \u201cI don\u2019t think Durand believed in his shot as much then as he does now,\u201d Larkin said. \u201cHe\u2019s been known as a slasher, but he\u2019s been working on his shot. He\u2019s gotten more confident in his jumper, and that\u2019s made us an even more dangerous team because people can\u2019t just play him as a slasher; now they have to play him as a shooter as well.\u201d Larkin did not score in the second half against Pacific, attempting only two more shots, but he finished with nine assists. \u201cHe\u2019s like a little brother to me,\u201d said Scott, who is two years older. \u201cBut it\u2019s funny how I\u2019ve learned so much from him. I just feed off him. He\u2019s a very emotional player. I try to get him hyped just like he tries to get me hyped. We just do the best we can, especially on the defensive end, and try to win ballgames.\u201d The Hurricanes\u2019 game Sunday against No. 7 seed Illinois (23-12) has the potential to turn into an extended version of Miami\u2019s 3-point drill. The Illini fired 31 shots from 3-point range, making only 8, in their opening 57-49 victory over Colorado. \u201cEverybody was saying we peaked at the wrong time, and it lit a fire under us and really motivated us to come out and play great on the offensive end,\u201d Larkin said. \u201cDefensively, we\u2019ve stepped on people early, and when we\u2019ve done that, we\u2019ve gotten off to good starts.\u201d In Miami\u2019s 3-point drill, Larkin has made a personal-best 75 shots and Scott 68, but those totals are not the team\u2019s best. Trey McKinney Jones once hit 81. \u201cWe just come out focused every single game,\u201d Larkin said. \u201cIt\u2019s March Madness. Crazy things happen. We just have to come out with a lot of intensity and try to step on their throats early and give them no hope.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;University of Miami;University of Illinois;Shane Larkin;Durand Scott"}
{"id": "ny0019522", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/07/31", "title": "Pakistani Lawmakers Choose Next President", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 Pakistan\u2019s lawmakers on Tuesday elected Mamnoon Hussain, a little-known industrialist and loyalist of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, as the country\u2019s 12th president, state television announced. Mr. Hussain\u2019s victory followed a vote in the national and regional legislatures earlier in the day that had been devoid of tension because Mr. Hussain, a businessman from Karachi, had been widely expected to win. Pakistan\u2019s presidency is a largely ceremonial position. But the stark challenges facing the entire political leadership were underscored early Tuesday when Taliban fighters staged an audacious jailbreak in the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan that freed 250 prisoners, including at least 30 militants. As the voting got under way, strict security measures were in place for the National Assembly, the Senate and four provincial assemblies, where, under Pakistan\u2019s electoral laws, lawmakers choose the president. Mr. Hussain will succeed President Asif Ali Zardari, a contentious figure who is expected to step down in September at the end of a tumultuous five-year term. Mr. Zardari spent much of his presidency engaged in rolling battles with the country\u2019s judiciary and military leaders, all the while struggling to shake off longstanding corruption accusations. His Pakistan People's Party boycotted the election on Tuesday to protest a Supreme Court ruling that approved a government decision to move up the election, to July 30 from Aug. 6. Mr. Sharif moved up the election to facilitate voting by lawmakers who wished to make a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia toward the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Image Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, left, with Mamnoon Hussain, the newly-elected president, on Tuesday at the parliament house in Islamabad. Credit Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Mr. Zardari\u2019s authority largely came from being the widower of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister who was assassinated in 2007. In recent years, he defused some of the public antipathy about his presidency by maintaining a low public profile. Mr. Zardari also changed the presidency by instigating constitutional reforms that drained his office of power and, ultimately, should make it more difficult for the military to seize power. He confounded his many critics, who regularly predicated his political demise, through adroit maneuvering. And he survived intense pressure from the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, which aggressively pursued Mr. Zardari and his party through the courts. While Mr. Zardari owed some of his power to his family background, Mr. Hussain\u2019s main qualification seems to be his low-key profile. He served briefly as the governor of Sindh Province in 1999, when Gen. Pervez Musharraf toppled Mr. Sharif\u2019s previous government in a bloodless coup. Mr. Hussain remained a steadfast ally of Mr. Sharif in those days, defying pressure and intimidation from the military. His forays into electoral politics were less successful. Mr. Hussain contested the 2002 general election but failed to win a seat by a wide margin. Since then he has had a low public profile and concentrates on his interests in the textile industry. Political analysts say the presidency may be his reward for his unflinching loyalty to the Sharif family. In choosing Mr. Hussain, Mr. Sharif may also have had ethnic considerations in mind. Mr. Hussain was born in the Indian city of Agra in 1940. His family migrated to Pakistan after its partition from India in 1947, where it established a textile business. \u201cI belong to Karachi,\u201d Mr. Hussain has been quoted as saying by local news outlets. \u201cIf elected, I\u2019ll try to resolve Sindh\u2019s issues and restore peace in Karachi. Development and progress will begin from Sindh.\u201d", "keyword": "Pakistan;Election;Mamnoon Hussain;Nawaz Sharif;Asif Ali Zardari"}
{"id": "ny0255743", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/09/13", "title": "For Debate Partners, an Unusual Pairing", "abstract": "TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 In the pantheon of strange political bedfellows, CNN and the Tea Party could go down as one of the oddest pairings since James Carville and Mary Matalin. CNN , the 24/7 cable news pioneer long derided by conservatives as a mouthpiece of the political left, and Tea Party activists, who pride themselves on bucking the establishment, came together here Monday evening for a presidential debate \u2014 an unusual display of cooperation between the news media and some of its most hostile critics. Each stands to benefit from reaching the other\u2019s following, raising questions about whether the arrangement was a shrewd political transaction masquerading as public service. Sal Russo, a co-founder of the Tea Party Express , said he expected the partnership to help dispel misperceptions about the Tea Party as a fringe movement. \u201cThe fact that they\u2019re broadcasting and partnering with us shows that they understand it\u2019s a broad-based political movement and that it isn\u2019t fractured and narrow,\u201d Mr. Russo said. CNN, which has sought to establish itself as an island of cable news centrism between MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right, went to great lengths to make the event as authentically Tea Party as possible. The network planned the debate for Sept. 12, a symbolic date for Tea Party activists. The venue CNN selected, the Florida State Fairgrounds, was chosen for its grass-roots appeal and its ability to easily accommodate thousands of Tea Party spectators. And the partner it sought out, the Tea Party Express, used its ties to hundreds of Tea Party groups across the country to recruit attendees. \u201cAfter the 2010 elections, it was undeniable that the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party was a force, and that it was likely to help determine the outcome of the nomination,\u201d said Sam Feist, CNN\u2019s Washington bureau chief. \u201cWe decided that it makes sense for one of the debates to have a Tea Party connection, and that we were the right network to do it.\u201d Networks regularly partner with established political organizations to host debates during primary season. Fox News, CNBC and ABC News, for example, are all sponsoring debates later this year with state Republican groups in several states. Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Tim Pawlenty presidential campaign until Mr. Pawlenty dropped out last month, said news organizations partnered with political entities to make sure that candidates showed up for debates \u2014 and to make sure that viewers tuned in. \u201cThere are so many debates; the networks look for ways to partner with groups that would help the debate stand out,\u201d Mr. Conant said. But the CNN debate on Monday was the first event hosted jointly by a major news organization and a Tea Party group. And their partnership left some questioning whether the network had gone too far in reaching for centrist credibility. \u201cIs there really a need for another national cable news channel devoted to promoting far-right elements within the Republican Party?\u201d the liberal media watchdog group FAIR said Monday in an e-mail alert to its members in which it labeled the Tea Party \u201ca controversial political group.\u201d CNN, which said it maintained complete control over what would be asked during the debate and which candidates could participate, coordinated with Tea Party activists from across the country to solicit questions. It arranged for live satellite feeds for Tea Party activists to ask questions from gatherings in Arizona, Virginia and Ohio. And the Tea Party Express identified almost 1,000 people from 31 states and the District of Columbia to sit in the audience. Even the graphics on the video screens behind the stage flashed flags that are often seen at Tea Party rallies. Here in Tampa, there were signs the network was sensitive to perceptions that it was being too cozy with Tea Party activists. During a tour of the debate hall, Mr. Feist referred to the gatherings in Arizona, Virginia and Ohio, saying, \u201cWe\u2019ll have watch parties.\u201d He was swiftly corrected by CNN\u2019s special events producer, Kate Lunger, who interjected, \u201cWell, we won\u2019t have watch parties.\u201d CNN is not the first network to be associated with the Tea Party. Rick Santelli, a reporter for CNBC, is credited with galvanizing the movement in early 2009 with his \u201cChicago Tea Party\u201d rant that attacked government bailouts. Fox News swiftly gravitated to the Tea Party movement, broadcasting whole shows from several rallies and even taking out an advertisement lambasting its competitors for missing one such event that year. (The competitors had, in fact, covered it.) When CNN has covered Tea Party rallies in the past, it was met more than once by hostile crowds. During a Capitol Hill demonstration in September 2009, protesters shouted \u201cTell the Truth!\u201d at the correspondent Lisa Desjardins before breaking into a chant for Glenn Beck, the former Fox News host. Since then, CNN has moved aggressively to cover the Tea Party as a political phenomenon; last year it showed an hourlong documentary about the movement, and earlier this year it hired a Tea Party leader and radio host as a contributor.", "keyword": "News and News Media;Tea Party Movement;Debates (Political);United States Politics and Government;CNN"}
{"id": "ny0278356", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/11/30", "title": "Preet Bharara Says He Will Stay On as U.S. Attorney Under Trump", "abstract": "Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan who has built a reputation as a fierce prosecutor of public corruption cases, said on Wednesday that he intended to remain in office under President-elect Donald J. Trump\u2019s administration. Mr. Bharara, who was appointed to the position in 2009 by President Obama, made the announcement after meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower. Mr. Bharara, 48, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said Mr. Trump had asked to see him to discuss \u201cwhether or not I\u2019d be prepared to stay on as the United States attorney to do the work as we have done it, independently, without fear or favor for the last seven years.\u201d \u201cWe had a good meeting,\u201d Mr. Bharara continued. \u201cI said I would absolutely consider staying on. I agreed to stay on.\u201d Mr. Bharara said that he had already talked to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who is Mr. Trump\u2019s choice for attorney general. \u201cHe also asked that I stay on, and so I expect that I will be continuing,\u201d Mr. Bharara said. Mr. Bharara, who before becoming the United States attorney served as chief counsel to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, did not elaborate on how the meeting was arranged. But Mr. Schumer, in a statement issued after Mr. Bharara made his announcement, said, \u201cPresident-elect Trump called me last week and asked me what I thought about Preet Bharara continuing his role as U.S. attorney.\u201d \u201cI told him I thought Preet was great,\u201d Mr. Schumer added, \u201cand I would be all for keeping him on the job and fully support it. I am glad they met, and am glad Preet is staying on.\u201d Mr. Trump also asked Mr. Schumer how best to reach Mr. Bharara, and the senator provided Mr. Trump with Mr. Bharara\u2019s direct line, said a person who was briefed on the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity. United States attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and typically offer their resignations after a new president takes office. Mr. Trump did not immediately issue a statement about his decision, but Mr. Bharara, in his comments, said that Mr. Trump had asked to meet with him \u201cpresumably because he\u2019s a New Yorker and is aware of the great work that our office has done.\u201d Mr. Bharara has shown a record of independence as a prosecutor, as well as a willingness to take on powerful figures in state government, Democrats included. Last year, his office won the convictions of Sheldon Silver , the former speaker of the State Assembly and a Democrat, and of Dean G. Skelos , the former State Senate majority leader and a Republican. His office also investigated Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo\u2019s shutting down of an anticorruption panel known as the Moreland Commission (no charges were brought against Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat). And the office recently charged two former advisers to Mr. Cuomo in a bribery and bid-rigging case. \u201cPreet has shown as a prosecutor that he is willing to take on the political establishment,\u201d said Arlo Devlin-Brown, a former chief of Mr. Bharara\u2019s corruption unit who is now a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling. \u201cHe\u2019s also shown he can win. There is no question that these are qualities that the president-elect admires.\u201d Mr. Bharara\u2019s tenure of more than seven years as the United States attorney in Manhattan has been exceeded in the past 100 years by only two of his predecessors: Mary Jo White and Robert M. Morgenthau. Mr. Bharara\u2019s office is currently prosecuting Ahmad Khan Rahami, a New Jersey man accused of setting off a bomb in the Chelsea section of Manhattan that injured more than 30 people (he has pleaded not guilty ). Other cases being prosecuted by the office involve charges of insider trading against William T. Walters, a Las Vegas sports gambler who has also pleaded not guilty, and an alleged kickback scheme by a former executive at Valeant Pharmaceuticals.", "keyword": "US Attorney;Preet Bharara;Donald Trump;Manhattan;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0017388", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2013/10/13", "title": "Driver\u2019s Death Linked to Crash", "abstract": "The family of the former Formula One test driver Mar\u00eda de Villota said her death Friday was linked to the injuries she received in a crash last year. De Villota sustained head and facial injuries, including the loss of her right eye, while testing a car in England. \u25a0 Brad Keselowski, Nascar\u2019s defending Sprint Cup champion, snapped a 37-race winless streak by chasing down Kasey Kahne in the closing laps at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. (AP)", "keyword": "Car Racing;Formula One;Maria de Villota"}
{"id": "ny0004064", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/04/28", "title": "Unauthorized Colonies Dot New Delhi, Seeking Legal Status", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 New Ashok Nagar is a typical crosscut of Indian urban chaos: Dust rises off battered, narrow lanes, tangles of telephone and electricity lines hang between poorly constructed, mismatched brick buildings. Sewage overflows from uncovered channels. And people are in the streets, in the doorways, everywhere. What is also fairly typical about New Ashok Nagar is that it is not supposed to exist. The district, on the eastern edge of New Delhi, is an \u201cunauthorized colony,\u201d with an estimated 200,000 residents despite its lack of government approvals or full city services. Across New Delhi, as many as 5 million of the city\u2019s 17 million residents live in unauthorized colonies, whether in slums, middle-class areas or even a few illegally constructed enclaves of the rich. Now Sheila Dixit, the chief minister of Delhi, the state that includes the national capital, New Delhi, has promised what amounts to an election-year urban amnesty program. She has pledged that scores of unauthorized colonies, including New Ashok Nagar, will be granted legal status \u2014 which could lead to new or improved sewer lines, electrical and water connections, and better roads \u2014 a change that could move residents closer to modern standards of living. Possibly. \u201cWe are on the list of authorized colonies,\u201d said S. P. Tyagi, who has lived in New Ashok Nagar since 1984 and seen the difference between political promises that are made and those that are delivered. \u201cBut it is not clear if it will happen or not. There are some doubts.\u201d India is often demarcated along lines of caste or class. But many of India\u2019s rapidly growing cities are also delineated by the legal status of where people live. For years, as migrants have poured into Indian cities in search of work and opportunity, illegal settlements, often slums, have sprung up in the absence of available, affordable low-income or even middle-class housing. Many of these settlements have grown into bustling districts more populous than many American cities, yet lacking amenities and legal protections, and residents face the perpetual threat of eviction. This month, government bulldozers flattened a small slum in New Delhi known as Sonia Gandhi Camp, named after the president of the governing Indian National Congress Party. At the edge of a road called Tamil Sangam Marg, not far from one of the city\u2019s wealthiest districts, about 50 migrant families had lived there for two decades. Many had voting cards or government ration cards that listed their address as Sonia Gandhi Camp. One city agency had even built a public toilet, though the encampment remained illegal. \u201cThey asked us to stand in front of our homes,\u201d said one man, who gave only his given name, Ramesh. He said residents were told the land was needed for a road project. \u201cWe showed them our papers and cards. But they did not listen. They started on one side and demolished everything.\u201d An elderly woman, Rama Devi, could not contain her anger as she stood in the rubble. \u201cThey have left us on the road,\u201d she said. \u201cI wish they would go to hell.\u201d Rapid Growth Creates Cities Within Cities in India 8 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times This blend of demolition and rampant illegal construction is part of the rough, pell-mell process of an Indian megalopolis coming into being. New Delhi is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, adding 200,000 new residents every year, according to city officials. Yet much of the land in the city is controlled by the Delhi Development Authority, an agency under the national government that has been criticized for failing to develop enough housing, especially for the poor and the middle class. \u201cWhat happens to the people who come?\u201d asked R. K. Srivastava, the secretary of urban development in the Delhi state government, who is critical of the national development agency. \u201cThere is no housing stock. These people are forced to live in shanties, unauthorized colonies and, shall I say, subhuman facilities.\u201d In the 1970s, the Delhi Development Agency took control of New Ashok Nagar, which was then farmland. The agency never took physical possession of the land, even as it doled out compensation to farmers, and residents say that some farmers simply resold the same plots to people looking to live in the capital. \u201cI knew this was an unauthorized colony, but I did not have the money to buy in an authorized colony,\u201d said Mr. Tyagi, the longtime resident. A public school English teacher, he bought a plot of about 1,000 square feet for 8,000 rupees, or $148. \u201cAt that time, even 8,000 rupees were too much for me,\u201d he said. Mr. Tyagi estimates that when he arrived in 1984, perhaps 5,000 people lived in the colony. \u201cWe used to live without electricity,\u201d he said. \u201cWe made our own arrangements with candles or kerosene lights. For water, we built our own hand pumps.\u201d To fend off the occasional demolition notices, residents began dabbling in politics. As the populations rapidly grew in colonies like New Ashok Nagar, local lawmakers realized that these colonies represented troves of potential voters and found ways to divert funds to provide rudimentary electrical connections, roads and other services. Tapan Kumar Chowdhury, 62, a retiree now working as an activist in the colony, said legalized status would be likely to improve sanitation and local health standards through installation of a true sewage system. But he remained skeptical about whether the election-year promises would be carried out, noting that politicians preferred to keep colonies vulnerable so that residents remained more beholden to them for even incremental improvements. \u201cThey have a vested interest in keeping us illegal and unauthorized,\u201d he said, \u201cso they can use us as a vote bank.\u201d Or as a real bank. Merchants like Vinod Kaushik, who runs a small pharmacy, said petty officials routinely demanded bribes to allow new construction projects. Others said that the police routinely required payoffs, too. Mr. Srivastava, the state urban development secretary, agreed that even those colonies like New Ashok Nagar that were listed to become authorized still had to navigate loopholes, like providing layout plans for official approval. Doing this would mean that every lane and building must meet city specifications, though code violations are common. He characterized the requirements as somewhat unrealistic but said the process was established under a 2007 national law. He said state officials were planning to seek the \u201crelaxation\u201d of certain code requirements, which could help illegal colonies like New Ashok Nagar pass muster but would also leave them with substandard housing. \u201cWhere will the poor man go?\u201d he asked. \u201cThat is the problem.\u201d Partha Mukhopadhyay, an urban affairs specialist at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said politicians had made promises that were not fulfilled, but that this time the process seemed much farther down the bureaucratic track, a reason for cautious optimism. \u201cUsually, it is promised and not delivered,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is possible that this time they might actually go through with the regularization process.\u201d", "keyword": "New Delhi;Squatting;Sheila Dixit;New Ashok Nagar New Delhi India;India"}
{"id": "ny0140598", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/02/23", "title": "Troubled Firm to Close 2 Funds Worth $4 Billion", "abstract": "D.B. Zwirn, a New York hedge fund that has been plagued by accounting irregularities, is closing two of its largest funds after investors demanded the firm return $2 billion. The investors will not get their money any time soon, however. D.B. Zwirn invests in illiquid assets like loans to companies around the world, including some in China. In a letter sent to investors on Thursday, Daniel B. Zwirn, the firm\u2019s founder, said it would take two to four years \u201cor longer\u201d to sell the assets in an orderly fashion. His firm, which oversees $5 billion, is closing funds worth about $4 billion. The troubles at D.B. Zwirn did not come as a surprise. In late 2006, the firm uncovered improper money transfers between its funds and improper charges to clients. Later, Mr. Zwirn, in a letter to investors, called the episode \u201ccompletely unacceptable to us and deeply embarrassing.\u201d The firm paid clients back, with interest. But investors were shaken, and the Securities and Exchange Commission initiated an investigation. \u201cThey stole from their clients,\u201d said one investor who did due diligence on the fund but decided against investing. \u201cI don\u2019t know how you give money to a fund after that.\u201d Yet D.B. Zwirn delivered steady returns \u2014 1 to 2 percent a month \u2014 without much volatility, making the firm a magnet for new money. It doubled in size from 2004 to 2006 and returned 11 percent in its onshore fund and 7 percent in its offshore fund in 2007. But investors say the fund did not invest enough in risk management and financial controls required to handle such a big fund, particularly one with investments that are difficult to value. In a letter to investors on Thursday, Mr. Zwirn attributed the closing of the funds to the fact that the accounting problems led to a \u201cdelay in the completion of the audited financial statements for 2006.\u201d Potential and actual investors disagreed. They said the reason that it took so long for D.B. Zwirn to close the funds was that the firm required clients to invest in its funds for at least three years before they could withdraw money. It also required investors to give 120 days notice for withdrawals. Investors seeking to pull out money have their funds placed in separate accounts to be liquidated when and if the loans are paid off, a process that could take years. \u201cIt is the most complex lock-up period I have ever seen,\u201d said the investor who contemplated investing in the fund last year. News that the fund was shutting down was first reported by The Financial Times. For all the turmoil at his firm, Mr. Zwirn has an impressive resume. In 1993 he received a computer science degree \u2014 cum laude \u2014 from the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Moore School of Electrical Engineering and a bachelor of science in economics with a self-designed triple concentration \u2014 accounting, finance and corporate control \u2014 from the university\u2019s Wharton School. In 1998 he received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He worked at several prestigious financial institutions, including Lazard Freres and Madison Dearborn, before moving to MSD Capital, the private investment group for Michael Dell. In October 2001, Mr. Zwirn joined Highbridge Capital Management, the big hedge fund group now majority-owned by JPMorgan Chase. He struck out on his own in 2004. The accounting problems were not D.B. Zwirn\u2019s only hiccup. In 2005 it hired David Becker, a trader who had been fired from Citigroup for allegedly inflating the size of his commodities book by $20 million to bulk up his bonus. A year later, Mr. Becker pleaded guilty to conspiracy to falsify bank records and commit wire fraud related to the Citigroup allegations (he was fired from the firm the same week). At the time he was fired, D.B. Zwirn said a background check had not raised any red flags. Several high-ranking employees have left the firm, including the chief financial officer, chief operating officer and general counsel. Mr. Zwirn, however, sounded at optimistic note this week. At the end of his letter, he thanked his investors for \u201cour years of partnership.\u201d \u201cIt is our sincere hope to continue that partnership with many of our current investors in the future,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Hedge Funds;D B Zwirn;Frauds and Swindling;Stocks and Bonds"}
{"id": "ny0146309", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/07/18", "title": "Giants Seat Licenses Priced From $1,000 to $20,000", "abstract": "The Giants laid out on Thursday the prices for personal seat licenses in the team\u2019s new stadium, a roster of one-time fees that start at $1,000 each for 26,179 upper-deck seats and rise to $20,000 apiece for 4,162 lower-level field seats. Between the highest and lowest prices that fans must pay for the rights to keep their season tickets are fees that range from $4,000 each for 10,905 mezzanine seats above each end zone to $12,500 each for 3,052 mezzanine club seats overlooking the sidelines. The Giants are selling licenses to every seat in the $1.6 billion stadium they are building with the Jets, and will generate about $367 million if they sell all 78,448 licenses. After taxes, about half the revenue will go to paying the Giants\u2019 stadium debt. The stadium is scheduled to open in East Rutherford, N.J., in 2010. Even before the Giants released their pricing plan, which has 10 options, fans were resigned that they had to buy licenses, which guarantee the right to buy and control their season tickets \u2014 or lose their places in the new building. John Moss, of Roseland, N.J., learned that he would be paying $5,000 each for his four front-row, end-zone seats at the new stadium. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to afford,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019m better off than the guy at the 40-yard line in the 27th row who\u2019s paying $20,000.\u201d It would cost $80,000 for four seat licenses and $28,000 a year to buy the tickets in the field level behind the Giants\u2019 bench, which will become an elite Coach\u2019s Club in the new stadium. \u201cFor people like me, these tickets are part of my family heritage,\u201d said one fan with seats in that section, who did not want to be named for fear of possible retribution by the Giants. \u201cAnd because of my parents\u2019 efforts, we have excellent seats, so it\u2019s a kick in the stomach to be presented with a plan like this that we can\u2019t afford.\u201d John Mara, the team\u2019s president and co-owner, said fans had written and called him, some unhappy about the seat licenses. One sentiment has been that his late father, Wellington, would never have sold them. \u201cBelieve me, I\u2019ve felt that, but my father wasn\u2019t faced with this kind of debt on a new building,\u201d Mara said on a conference call with reporters. The team is giving existing season-ticket holders four preferences for where they wish to be in the new stadium, including where they now sit. Mara knows that people who cannot afford the more expensive licenses will move to cheaper perches or leave entirely. \u201cIf that happens, it will make me sad, but I think we\u2019ve provided enough options for people who want to stay there,\u201d Mara said. The advent of seat licenses will also usher in higher ticket prices. Tickets for Giants\u2019 home games next season range from $85 to $115 a game. In 2010, they will start at $85 (for the upper level seats above the end zones), increase to $95, $105, $120, $140 and $160, and then make the leap to $400 and $500 each for the 7,085 mezzanine club seats. The Coach\u2019s Club, with its $700-a-game seats, will feature a restaurant (with free food), bars (the alcohol is not gratis) and TV sets in an area behind the seats. It will also have a glassed-off area where fans will be able to watch reporters grill players and coaches after games. Meanwhile, the Jets have been assessing the results of a fan survey about licenses. A spokesman, Bruce Speight, said the team would announce its plan in late August. The Giants\u2019 plan, the 13th seat license plan offered by an N.F.L. team since 1993, differs widely from one advanced recently by the Dallas Cowboys for their new stadium that is to open in 2009. The Cowboys are selling licenses for 80 percent of the stadium\u2019s seats, mostly for $2,000 to $5,000 each, but club-seat licenses are going for $16,000 to $150,000 each. Giants season-ticket holders will receive brochures and applications starting later this month. Mara said no seat assignments would be completed and no licenses sold until every season-ticket holder had gotten the information.", "keyword": "New York Giants;Stadiums and Arenas;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)"}
{"id": "ny0130706", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2012/12/03", "title": "Seahawks\u2019 Russell Wilson Shows He Belongs Near Head of Rookie Class", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 Russell Wilson walked to the microphone shortly after Seattle\u2019s 23-17 overtime win dressed in a sharp gray suit, crisp white shirt and dark tie. His trademark eye black was washed from his face. \u201cThat was a blast,\u201d he said. In a season of dazzling rookie quarterbacks, Wilson reminded viewers Sunday that he, too, must be reckoned with. He led two clutch touchdown drives \u2014 one late in the fourth quarter and another in overtime \u2014 as the Seahawks snatched a victory from the Bears at Soldier Field and knocked them into a tie for the N.F.C. North lead with the Green Bay Packers, who hold the tiebreaker over Chicago. \u201cIt was extraordinary, exquisite poise,\u201d Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll said of Wilson. \u201cThere were so many plays where he had to do something special.\u201d The defenses ruled this game for nearly four quarters on an unseasonably balmy, 60-degree December afternoon off Lake Michigan. The Bears led by 14-10 when Wilson and the Seahawks took over at their 3-yard line with 3 minutes 40 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Seahawks\u2019 ensuing drive covered 12 plays and included a fourth-down conversion, two key runs by Wilson and a fumble recovery \u2014 by Wilson. The fumble happened in Seattle territory when Charles Tillman poked the ball free from Marshawn Lynch along the sideline before Wilson dived on it. Wilson capped the drive with a 14-yard touchdown pass to Golden Tate with 24 seconds remaining, giving Seattle a 17-14 lead. \u201cI went to the huddle that last drive right before we went into overtime and said, \u2018Guys, this is what the season comes down to right here and right now,\u2019 \u201d Wilson said. The Bears\u2019 Jay Cutler answered with a drive of his own. Cutler, who finished 17 of 26 for 233 yards and 2 touchdowns, completed a 56-yard prayer of a pass to Brandon Marshall to set up Robbie Gould\u2019s 46-yard field goal to tie the game, 17-17, as time expired in regulation. Seattle won the coin toss in overtime and Wilson continued to gash the Bears, one of the league\u2019s top defenses, with his arm and his legs. He rushed three times for 28 yards and helped Seattle convert three third downs on a 12-play, 80-yard march. It was over, and so was the game, when Wilson connected with Sidney Rice, who slithered into the end zone for a 13-yard score ahead of a hard hit from Major Wright that jarred the ball loose. Rice lay on the ground for several minutes before leaving the field without assistance. An official review confirmed the touchdown, and Seattle moved to 7-5 and within a game and a half of San Francisco for first place in the N.F.C. West. Wilson finished the game 23 of 37 for 293 yards and 2 touchdown passes. He also rushed for 71 yards. Wilson was drafted by the Seahawks in the third round last spring and won the starting job. Indianapolis\u2019s Andrew Luck and Washington\u2019s Robert Griffin III have had flashier rookie seasons, but the Seahawks said Wilson belonged in the same class. \u201cHe\u2019s now beaten Cutler, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady,\u201d cornerback Richard Sherman said. \u201cThese are things you got to think about, but he might get overlooked because of where we are and the team he\u2019s on.\u201d After the game, receivers talked glowingly about the e-mails and texts Wilson sends them at the beginning of every week to help them prepare for defenses. Tate recalled a text he received from Wilson on Monday that he said was \u201clike a novel.\u201d \u201cWe communicate with him and he communicates with us,\u201d Tate said. \u201cHe does everything perfect. I almost think he\u2019s a perfect person.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Wilson Russell;Seattle Seahawks;Chicago Bears"}
{"id": "ny0226507", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/10/30", "title": "Russia Joins Afghan Drug Raid", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Russian counternarcotics agents took part in an operation to eradicate several drug laboratories in Afghanistan this week, joining Afghan and American antidrug forces in what officials here said Friday marked an advance in relations between Moscow and Washington. The operation, in which four opium refining laboratories and over 2,000 pounds of high-quality heroin were destroyed, was the first to include Russian agents. It also indicated a tentative willingness among Russian officials to become more deeply involved in Afghanistan two decades after American-backed Afghan fighters defeated the Soviet military there. \u201cThis is a major success for cooperative actions,\u201d Viktor P. Ivanov, Russia \u2019s top drug enforcement official, told journalists in Moscow. \u201cThis shows that there are real actions being taken amid the reset in relations between Russia and the United States.\u201d Although Russia has a large stake in the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, the country has not participated in the NATO-led military coalition there and has seemed ambivalent about the American effort in its backyard. Officials in Russia and the United States have called Afghanistan an important arena for cooperation, but they have often clashed over the conduct of the war. Russian officials have granted permission for nonlethal cargo destined for Afghanistan to be transported across Russian territory, but they have also pushed the authorities in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan to close an American military base there that acts as a crucial supply hub for the war. So far, the base remains open . At the same time, Russia has strong interests in a stable and cooperative Afghanistan. A Taliban resurgence and the return of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan could bolster Islamic extremism in Central Asia and southern Russia, where the authorities continue to battle a potent Islamic insurgency in Chechnya and the surrounding region. The issue of Afghan heroin, which is derived from opium, is particularly vexing. Afghanistan is the world\u2019s largest producer of heroin, much of which seeps into neighboring Central Asian countries and then into Russia, where it finds a ready market of over a million users. Almost 90 percent of Russia\u2019s heroin comes from Afghanistan, according to government statistics. Injected drugs kill thousands annually and are the main driver of Russia\u2019s H.I.V. epidemic, which is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the world. While Russia has struggled to bring heroin use under control domestically, officials have criticized the United States for not doing enough to halt the production of the drug in Afghanistan. Some here have even suggested that the United States was abetting the drug trade in an effort to weaken Russia. Mr. Ivanov, who is also a close adviser to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, has been pressing his counterparts in Washington to increase efforts to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. Afghanistan\u2019s opium production, estimated at almost 4,000 tons in the last year, has been a major source of financing for the Taliban. But the Obama administration has scaled back eradication programs, which were employed in the Bush era, out of fears that farmers would turn to the Taliban for assistance. Russia and the United States created a counternarcotics working group last year in part to reconcile these disagreements, and this week\u2019s raid on the heroin factories appears to be a step in that direction. Of about 70 people taking part in the raid early Thursday morning, only four were agents of Russia\u2019s Federal Counter Narcotics Service. The others were from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the Afghan drug police. Senior D.E.A. officials said that the multinational task force, acting on intelligence, located a major clandestine heroin laboratory in the Zerasari village of Achin District, in Nangarhar Province near the Pakistani border. After they arrived, the agents discovered three additional labs hidden by vegetation. All four sites had been abandoned at the time of the operation, but officials said the evidence collected there confirmed that all were actively producing heroin and morphine. The agents seized about 2,000 pounds of heroin and about 345 pounds of opium, as well as other chemicals and equipment. The D.E.A. said the heroin was worth $55.9 million. \u201cJust in terms of disruption this was a very important operation, but it was also part of a larger strategy to attack the drug flows,\u201d said Eric Rubin, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Moscow. \u201cThe goal is to identify, disrupt and deny material support to terrorism, and very specifically to the Taliban elements that are supporting this drug trade.\u201d", "keyword": "Heroin;Afghanistan;Russia;United States;Drug Abuse and Traffic;Opium"}
{"id": "ny0290893", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/01/09", "title": "Nationals Trade Reliever", "abstract": "The Washington Nationals accommodated reliever Drew Storen, trading him to the Toronto Blue Jays for outfielder Ben Revere. Storen, 28, had sought a deal. He lost his closer role in late July when the Nationals acquired Jonathan Papelbon from Philadelphia. Storen had converted 29 of 30 save chances with a 1.73 E.R.A. when Papelbon was acquired. \u25a0 The Yankees acquired reliever Kirby Yates from the Cleveland Indians for $78,000. Yates, a 28-year-old right-hander, was 1-2 with one save and a 5.27 E.R.A. in 57 relief appearances for Tampa Bay in 2014 and 2015. Last season, in 201/3 innings, he gave up 10 home runs. Cleveland had acquired him for cash on Nov. 25. (AP) \u25a0 Kelly Johnson and the Braves finalized a $2 million, one-year contract that returns Johnson, a utility player, to Atlanta for a third stint. Johnson, 33, started the 2015 season with the Braves and was dealt to the Mets. He hit .265 with 14 homers and 47 R.B.I. in 111 games. (AP)", "keyword": "Baseball;Drew Storen;Ben Revere;Washington Nationals;Blue Jays"}
{"id": "ny0294251", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2016/06/24", "title": "Croatia Beat Spain, 2-1, but the Notable Score Came From the Orchestra", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 On a Tuesday night, as on many other occasions, the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall that seats 2,400, resonated with long, flowing melodies and intricate musical compositions of unbuttoned exuberance. This time, however, an ecstatic audience cheered and burst into applause, and even booed, in tune not only with the players onstage, but also with the 22 other ones who ran up and down the field on a giant screen set up behind them. Every tackle and pass intertwined with serene pizzicati, rhythmic spiccato and even the droning noise of electric guitars. In the performance \u2014 a joint initiative of Tatane , a sports collective, and the Philharmonie de Paris \u2014 students from the Regional Conservatoire of Paris provided the audience with an eclectic musical backdrop to Croatia\u2019s victory against Spain in the European Championships group stage. The Philharmonie de Paris, on the northeastern edge of the city, has hosted many concerts of the talented young musicians since it was inaugurated by Fran\u00e7ois Hollande in January of last year. The F\u00eate de la Musique, an annual music celebration held on June 21 in France since 1981, made the perfect occasion to enchant ears with Dvorak as the ball on the field was being lightly exchanged between players. The music abruptly changed to the easily recognizable beat of \u201cEye of the Tiger\u201d when things on the field started to heat up. The audience heard the names of Mendelssohn and Brahms, but also those of Morata, Kalinic and Perisic, the players who scored in the match. The warm notes of the Spanish composer Alb\u00e9niz accompanied La Roja\u2019s players as they took over the Croatian half. People who attended the concert-game had not been exactly sure what to expect before the show. \u201cI think it\u2019s weird, it doesn\u2019t mingle well,\u201d said L\u00e9a S\u00e1nchez, a 20-year-old French-Spanish woman who wore a Spain jersey and attended with her sister and grandmother, Alissia Gonz\u00e1les, who was coming to the Philharmonie de Paris for the first time. Video When Spain moved with the ball, students from the Regional Conservatoire of Paris played the Spanish composer Albeniz. While the city handed out 2,000 free invitations to attract an audience that was not familiar with classical concerts, most of the attendees consisted of smart-looking Parisians, some of whom sipped white wine at the bar before kickoff. The wrapped-in-flags kind of supporters that public viewings of games at the Euros regularly attract were not exactly present. But the Philharmonie de Paris, with its futuristic waves of steel and concrete, can be intimidating. \u201cI had a hard time finding people who like both music and soccer,\u201d said Pastor Peppe, a 48-year-old Spaniard living in France. \u201cI was expecting more flags,\u201d he added. The venue on Tuesday was something like a gigantic movie theater, a stadium and a concert hall, with hundreds of people who sat on the floor and others in the seats above them. Some seized the opportunity to enjoy a festive moment without the hurdles of actually having attended the game. \u201cI would not take my children into a stadium,\u201d said Vianney Foucault, a 33-year-old computer engineer and father of two. Foucault said he was tear-gassed at the French Cup final between Paris St.-Germain and Marseille at Stade de France a few weeks ago. After intermission \u2014 halftime in the match in Bordeaux \u2014 the orchestra of more than 40 musicians spanned a wide register and carried listeners through the Colombian pop singer Shakira, the French composer Georges Delerue\u2019s drawling melodies, Bernard Herrmann\u2019s nerve-racking compositions and even Eminem\u2019s \u201c8 Mile.\u201d The game ended with a standing audience that cheered and sang along to Queen\u2019s \u201cWe Are the Champions\u201d as the Croatian players, who had surprised Spain, 2-1, took each other in their arms onscreen.", "keyword": "Music;Classical music;Soccer;Philharmonie de Paris;Euro 2016 UEFA European Championship;Croatia;France;Paris France"}
{"id": "ny0180748", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/08/12", "title": "Russian Voters Feeling Lost Without Translation", "abstract": "WHEN Inna Stavitsky ran for City Council from Brighton Beach in 2001, she found herself operating an unpaid sideline in translation. \u201cI had to translate all the fliers into Russian by myself and print up thousands of copies,\u201d Ms. Stavitsky recalled the other day. \u201cInstructions on how to vote, how to use the machines. Who has the right to vote? Who doesn\u2019t? Can you ask for an interpreter?\u201d Ms. Stavitsky, who works as a property manager for a nonprofit group that serves the elderly, did not win the election. But she has followed with great interest the fate of a state bill that would require the city to translate absentee ballots, voter registration cards and other electoral paperwork into Russian. Such material is currently rendered in Chinese, Spanish and Korean, a policy that has long puzzled the city\u2019s Russian-Americans. They note that according to the 2000 census, more than twice as many New Yorkers speak Russian at home as speak Korean. Recently, however, the proposed legislation hit a roadblock. State Senator Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, its sponsor, said the Senate leadership prevented the bill from reaching the floor during the last legislative session. The issue was reported in The Jewish Week, a community newspaper. A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg said he had not taken a position on the bill. John Ravitz, executive director of the city\u2019s Board of Elections, called legislators, however, to express what Valerie Vasquez Rivera, a board spokeswoman, described as \u201cconcern over the logistics of the bill.\u201d Under federal law, the board is required to provide translations in Spanish and some Asian languages in parts of the city where those languages are widely spoken. Adding new translations, Ms. Rivera said, would open the floodgates to demands from speakers of other tongues. \u201cWe can\u2019t start printing one language on the ballot and not expect speakers of other languages to ask for the same right,\u201d she said. On Tuesday evening on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, each former Soviet republic seemed to have colonized a bench with ex-citizens. Isaac Stukalov, a Ukrainian-American sitting with friends, offered his opinion on the matter. The language barrier was a problem, he acknowledged. \u201cBut,\u201d Mr. Stukalov said, \u201cthe problem really is that people do not want to vote. Laziness is No. 1.\u201d", "keyword": "Voter Registration and Requirements;Brighton Beach (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0039265", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/04/28", "title": "Syria Misses New Deadline as It Works to Purge Arms", "abstract": "GENEVA \u2014 Syria missed a revised deadline on Sunday for completing the export or destruction of chemicals in its weapons arsenal, but the government of the war-ravaged country may be only days away from finishing the job, according to international experts overseeing the process. The Syrian government had agreed to complete the export or destruction of about 1,200 tons of chemical agents by April 27 after missing a February deadline, but by Sunday, it had shipped out or destroyed 92.5 percent of the arsenal, said Sigrid Kaag, the coordinator of the joint mission by the United Nations and the watchdog agency the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Syria had made significant progress but must \u201ctake the final step very soon\u201d to purge the remaining 7.5 percent of the arsenal, Ms. Kaag told reporters in Damascus, according to a report on the United Nations news service website . It was unclear from the report what chemical, or chemicals, were in the remainder. If Syria completes the process, it would be regarded as a critical step toward demonstrating its commitment to eradicating its entire chemical weapons program by the end of June, as the government had agreed in a deal negotiated by the United States and Russia, which was prompted by outrage over the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in a Damascus suburb. The United Nations news service report said Ms. Kaag had emphasized that \u201cevery effort must be made\u201d to ensure that Syria\u2019s entire chemical arsenal is destroyed by June 30. Syria has destroyed some of its less-dangerous chemical agents by itself, but it is shipping most of them outside the country to be destroyed by a specially adapted American vessel, the Cape Ray, and at specialized facilities in Europe and the United States. The slow rate of shipments in the first two months of the year raised concerns that Syria might renege on its commitments, but deliveries accelerated in March and April. And although the revised deadline passed on Sunday without completion, the watchdog agency said it believed that the government was in a position to finish delivering chemicals to the Syrian port of Latakia for shipment abroad within days. Syria has completed removing chemical weapons from 11 of the 12 sites where it had stored them, and the volume of chemicals remaining could be moved in \u201cone large consignment or two regular consignments,\u201d said Michael Luhan, a spokesman for the agency based in The Hague. Disarmament experts say the pace at which Syria has dismantled its chemical weapons program has few parallels, if any. \u201cIt\u2019s been a unique operation, quick under the circumstances,\u201d Ralf Trapp, a chemical weapons expert, said in an interview in which he alluded to the security challenges faced in moving the dangerous cargo in a civil war. \u201cFrankly, many people wouldn\u2019t have expected it would be achievable six months ago.\u201d That achievement, however, is now overshadowed by reports that Syrian forces have attacked targets with bombs filled with chlorine gas. The government denied those reports. As a common industrial chemical, chlorine is not on the list of agents prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty signed by Syria last year, and the country was not under any obligation to include it in the inventory it was required to deliver to the watchdog agency. Disarmament experts say, however, that the use of any chemical for military purposes violates the convention. Syria also has to complete the destruction of 12 production facilities used in its chemical weapons program, an issue that will be considered at a meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons\u2019 executive council on Tuesday. Syria said it had sealed and thus neutralized the facilities, including seven underground bunkers that it argues would be costly to destroy, but the United States and other Western countries say that the measures taken could be reversed and that the convention requires the destruction of the facilities.", "keyword": "Syria;Biological and Chemical Warfare;Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons;Sigrid Kaag;UN;Arab Spring;Russia;US;Latakia Syria"}
{"id": "ny0126334", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/08/24", "title": "For Paul and Janna Ryan, a Union Across Political Lines", "abstract": "Their union was not necessarily one that friends and family saw coming. She was from a prominent Democratic family and dabbled in liberal causes during her college years at Wellesley, even once taking a road trip to Washington to march for women\u2019s rights. And he, an up-and-coming Republican congressman, had worked after-school jobs to help support his family as a teenager and was known for his deeply conservative views. So, on the surface, it was surprising when Janna Little, a socially popular lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin , who had been dating aerobics instructors at his gym, hit it off after he asked for an introduction. They met at a party, started dating and were married in the winter of 2000. \u201cThat was a big deal at the time,\u201d said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma , a Republican who is a longtime friend of the Little family, elected from the largely rural district where Janna Little Ryan grew up. \u201cBut certain values transcend politics.\u201d Now Mrs. Ryan, 43, is one of the public faces of the Republican ticket, married to a candidate whose selection has electrified conservatives while alarming others with his views on abortion and his zeal for cutting spending on social welfare programs. It is an unconventional path for a woman from Democratic Party royalty in Oklahoma, one who gave up her career as a Washington lobbyist to become a wife and mother in Janesville, Wis., as her husband built his career as the ideological leader of his party in Congress. Friends say Mrs. Ryan chose her political life\u2019s path with a sense of purpose, and they describe her as being a \u201cpractical conservative\u201d these days, even if she might once have been more of a Democrat. As a former Wellesley roommate, Rachel Clark, said of their college days: \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say that we were all on the more liberal side of things back then. And as often happens, people\u2019s views change and evolve over time.\u201d As she adopts a more public role, she has seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. At the rally where Mitt Romney named Mr. Ryan as his running mate, Mrs. Ryan was given the opportunity to speak after Ann Romney , but she declined the invitation, shaking her head slightly, an unusually spontaneous moment for such a scripted event. She is not, however, someone who has shied away from asserting herself. Mrs. Ryan is a lawyer and a tax specialist who, before her marriage, worked for prestigious government affairs and accounting firms as a lobbyist, representing some of the biggest names in a range of industries, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Novartis and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Her public face now, though, is representative of what she has been for the past dozen years: a mother raising the couple\u2019s three children in their Georgian-style brick house. Upon marriage, the Ryans decided to settle in Janesville instead of in Washington so that their children might have the same sort of upbringing that they had once enjoyed. Mrs. Ryan\u2019s life changed greatly, as she traded her high-octane career for a quieter existence behind her husband\u2019s rising profile. \u201cThere was no debate, question or concern about her quitting her job and going to Janesville because that\u2019s what she wanted to do,\u201d said Leslie Belcher, who was a bridesmaid in Mrs. Ryan\u2019s wedding. \u201cShe\u2019s the stabilizing force in the family.\u201d Mr. Cole said that Mrs. Ryan brought \u201cthe characteristics of a fine lawyer\u201d to the relationship, being a problem solver and dealmaker who is mainly interested in finding common ground. \u201cThis is not a Matalin-Carville relationship,\u201d Mr. Cole said, referring to the political commentators Mary Matalin and James Carville , a married couple on opposite sides of the political spectrum. \u201cIt was never a matter of partisan warfare. Paul is more ideological, and Janna is a more practical conservative. She is very pragmatic in her thinking.\u201d And although she has not been in the spotlight until now, national politics is not something new for Mrs. Ryan, who is a first cousin of Representative Dan Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat and the son of a former senator and governor, David L. Boren. Mrs. Ryan went east to study at Wellesley, following in the footsteps of her mother, Prudence Little, who, according to her obituary, was a founding member of the Oklahoma Ethics Commission. Mrs. Ryan\u2019s father, Dan Little, who is also a lawyer, practices in Madill, Okla., where Mrs. Ryan and her two sisters grew up. Mrs. Ryan\u2019s mother struggled with cancer for the last 35 years of her life, first battling advanced melanoma , then breast cancer , then ovarian cancer and a recurrence of the melanoma she thought she had beat. She died two years ago. Mrs. Ryan was always open about how she dealt with her mother\u2019s long illness, even discussing how she coped in a Spanish class, said Joy Renjilian-Burgy, a professor. Mrs. Ryan\u2019s professors described her as being interested in social justice and the broader world around her. She belonged to Wellesley\u2019s art and music society and spent the spring of 1990 studying in C\u00f3rdoba, Spain , to sharpen her Spanish and explore other parts of Europe . \u201cI didn\u2019t get the sense that she was a political activist,\u201d said Professor Renjilian-Burgy, who wrote Mrs. Ryan\u2019s recommendation to study abroad. But when it came to topics like the history and treatment of indigenous peoples around the world, Professor Renjilian-Burgy said, \u201cshe was very sensitive to these issues.\u201d After graduating from George Washington University Law School and working on Capitol Hill for a family friend, Representative Bill Brewster, Democrat of Oklahoma, Mrs. Ryan gained a reputation for being smart and social. Mr. Ryan, only recently elected to Congress, had been admiring her from afar, said A. Mark Neuman, a mutual friend who set the couple up at Mrs. Ryan\u2019s 30th birthday party. Mr. Neuman agreed to get them together, he said, because he thought the two would be a good match, both \u201csophisticated people who share small-town Middle American values.\u201d So what made Mrs. Ryan click with Mr. Ryan, who in college developed a passion for libertarian thinking? They both enjoy fishing and hunting and had both grown up treasuring their moments in nature, she in the Great Plains and he in the Midwest. Friends say they also found each other intellectually lively. \u201cI think they both probably knew fairly quickly that they\u2019d met their match in each other,\u201d said Ms. Clark, her Wellesley roommate. \u201cThey\u2019re both committed to family and public service, and they\u2019re both extraordinarily nice people.\u201d One phrase that is used with some frequency when friends describe Mrs. Ryan is \u201cdown to earth.\u201d Although the Ryans are affluent by any measure, with assets that were valued last year at between $2 million and $7.8 million, much of which is in Mrs. Ryan\u2019s trust, the family is not known for displays of wealth. Ms. Clark said that Mrs. Ryan \u201chas always been well liked\u201d and described her as \u2014 yes, again \u2014 \u201cdown to earth.\u201d Beyond that, though, Ms. Clark said she could put a finger on the personality trait that has propelled Mrs. Ryan through life. \u201cShe has a confidence and strength that allows her to think deeply and think for herself,\u201d Ms. Clark said, \u201cwhile being respectful and gracious toward others who may disagree.\u201d", "keyword": "Janna Ryan;Paul D Ryan Jr;2012 Presidential Election;Republicans;US Politics;Mitt Romney;House of Representatives"}
{"id": "ny0115953", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/10/04", "title": "Possible Trading Errors Affect Kraft Shares", "abstract": "The Nasdaq canceled some trades in the Kraft Foods Group on Wednesday after its shares posted an unusual price spike when the market opened. Shares of Kraft opened at $45.55 and surged 29 percent in the first minute to $58.54. The exchange says it is looking into \u201cpotentially erroneous transactions\u201d and will cancel all trades that were made above $47.82 in the one minute after 9:30 a.m. The issue comes only days after Kraft Foods and a former Kraft snack business, Mondelez International, began trading as two separate companies. There have been several prominent trading errors recently with the increasingly complicated electronic systems that run stock trading. Those systems have shown signs of strain as more traders and investment firms use powerful computers to execute trades in fractions of a second. Shares of Kraft, which is based in Northfield, Ill., fell 55 cents, or 1.21 percent, on Wednesday, to $44.87.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Kraft Foods Group Inc.;Nasdaq Stock Market;High-Frequency and Flash Trading"}
{"id": "ny0021154", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/09/18", "title": "Snowden Among Nominees for a European Human Rights Prize", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought , considered Europe\u2019s top human rights award, has been bestowed on luminaries like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. This year, in a slap against Washington, the award could go to Edward J. Snowden, known as either the N.S.A. whistle-blower or a traitor, depending on one\u2019s perspective. The European Parliament, the European Union\u2019s only directly elected body, nominated Mr. Snowden for the prize late Monday. The others in contention include Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl who was 14 when the Taliban shot her in October but survived to become a potent voice in the struggle for education rights for women; Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic who is imprisoned in Russia; and Erdem Gunduz, who helped inspire the mass protests against the Turkish government\u2019s perceived authoritarianism this year in Istanbul\u2019s Taksim Square. The nomination of Mr. Snowden is the latest in a series of rebukes from European lawmakers upset with the Obama administration\u2019s foreign policies, including its surveillance program. More recently, the British Parliament refused to authorize the country\u2019s participation in a military strike against Syria for a gas attack that killed more than 1,400 civilians. Only France, which does not require legislative approval of military actions, backed President Obama\u2019s call to punish Syria for using chemical weapons. While hardly as momentous as the Syria vote, the nomination of Mr. Snowden carries great symbolic weight. It glaringly illustrates the chasm the leaks have opened between the United States and its allies, not only European countries but also Brazil, Mexico and other nations that have been spied on by the National Security Agency. In late June, after reports in Der Spiegel magazine that Washington was spying on the European Union and that the N.S.A. had tapped its offices in Washington, Brussels and the United Nations and gained access to internal computer networks, there was an angry outcry from European politicians. Mr. Snowden, 30, who has received temporary asylum in Russia, has been charged in the United States with espionage and theft, after his leaks of N.S.A. materials showing the extent of American spying at home and abroad. But the leftist and Green party members of the European Parliament who nominated him for the award praised him for his courage. Mr. Snowden \u201cdeserves to be honored for shedding light on the systematic infringements of civil liberties by U.S. and European secret services,\u201d Daniel Cohn-Bendit of France and Rebecca Harms of Germany, the leaders of the Parliament\u2019s Green members, said in a statement. \u201cSnowden has risked his freedom to help us protect ours.\u201d In an online New York Times opinion article on Sunday, Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, wrote that Mr. Snowden had exposed a gap between members of the younger \u201cWikiLeaks generation,\u201d who regard him as a role model, and older commentators in the traditional news media, who believe he needs to be brought to justice. Mr. Ludlow cited a recent poll showing that 70 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 believed that Mr. Snowden \u201cdid a good thing.\u201d The winner of the prize will be announced in October, and the awards ceremony will be held in Strasbourg, France, in December. Last year, two convicted Iranians \u2014 Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer who represents opposition activists and is now in prison, and Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker who has been released on bail but was banned from making films or leaving the country \u2014 were joint recipients of the prize.", "keyword": "European Parliament;Edward Snowden;Awards;Malala Yousafzai;Mikhail B Khodorkovsky;Human Rights;NSA"}
{"id": "ny0278858", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2016/11/15", "title": "Vast and Pristine, Russia\u2019s Lake Baikal Is Invaded by Harmful Algae", "abstract": "LAKE BAIKAL, Russia \u2014 Yury Azhichakov set out early by bike for Senogda Bay, his favorite beach, on the northwestern shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. The world\u2019s oldest, deepest and most voluminous lake, Baikal holds 20 percent of the planet\u2019s unfrozen freshwater. It is often described as the world\u2019s cleanest lake. As Mr. Azhichakov discovered, that is no longer the case. Senogda\u2019s once pristine sands were buried under thick mats of reeking greenish-black goo. \u201cThis stuff stretched far into the distance, for several kilometers,\u201d said Mr. Azhichakov, 61, a retired ecological engineer. \u201cThe beach was in terrible condition.\u201d The muck, scientists have discovered, follows mass algal blooms at dozens of sites around Lake Baikal\u2019s 1,240-mile perimeter. Confined to shallow water and shores near towns and villages, the problem seems to stem from an influx of untreated sewage \u2014 the result of inadequate wastewater treatment. Algal blooms threaten iconic freshwater bodies around the world, including the Great Lakes, Lake Geneva, and Lake Biwa in Japan. But Lake Baikal is especially precious: a World Heritage site home to more than 3,700 species, more than half found nowhere else. \u201cPeople are dumping sewage, waste and rubbish around the lake, creating pretty appalling conditions in some places,\u201d said Anson MacKay, an environmental scientist at University College London. Runoff from fertilizers and other pollutants leads to so-called eutrophication, an excessive growth of algae. These blooms eventually deplete the water of oxygen, suffocating aquatic plants and animals. Russian scientists had assumed that Lake Baikal is simply too vast to suffer such a fate, but recent growth in tourism and development seem to be changing the calculus. Image Thick mats of reeking goo on a beach at Lake Baikal in Russia. Such algal blooms caused by pollution team with planned Mongolian dams and climate change as areas of concern. Credit Rachel Nuwer \u201cWe have a saying in Russia: A clever person is trained on the mistakes of others,\u201d said Oleg Timoshkin, a biologist at the Russian Academy of Science\u2019s Limnological Institute in Irkutsk, 40 miles from Baikal\u2019s southwestern shore. \u201cUnfortunately, we\u2019re now repeating the mistakes of so many other countries.\u201d Dr. Timoshkin and his colleagues have found that Spirogyra, a type of green algae that had rarely grown in Lake Baikal\u2019s shallow zones, accounts for the outbreaks. In Severobaikalsk, Mr. Azhichakov\u2019s town, the researchers traced Spirogyra blooms to locations downstream of the town\u2019s wastewater facility, as well as to an illegal sewage dumping site. The researchers also found little difference in phosphorus and nitrogen content \u2014 indicators of synthetic detergents and fecal material \u2014 in treated and untreated water entering the lake. And, as it turned out, Russian Railways had been adding industrial-grade waste to the town\u2019s sewage system, overwhelming it. Despite remedial action, high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in Severobaikalsk\u2019s wastewater persist even today, and fecal bacteria in treated wastewater have turned up at various sites around Lake Baikal. Dr. Timoshkin\u2019s team is trying to figure out which nutrients are fueling Spirogyra\u2019s growth. Spirogyra smothers other species of algae, and thousands of empty snail shells \u2014 gastropod cemeteries, as Dr. Timoshkin calls them \u2014 regularly wash up alongside the blooms. But the damage is more extensive than that. Underwater forests of native Lake Baikal sponges have begun dying off. In nearly 90 dives around the lake, researchers have found that 30 to 100 percent of sponges are affected in a given area. The green stalks \u2014 some a century old \u2014 are turning a dull brown, reminiscent of cattails. The cause of death is unknown, although Dr. Timoshkin and his colleagues suspect that pathogens from sewage may be causing disease outbreaks, or that the influx of nutrients is causing symbiotic algae to vacate the sponges. Without intervention, the researchers believe that the environmental damage will worsen. Algal blooms, for instance, can produce neurotoxins that are harmful to fish and crustaceans \u2014 and the humans who consume them. Last year, the largest algal bloom ever recorded shut down the crab and clam fisheries along the West Coast of the United States. Image Fishermen on Lake Baikal complain that Spirogyra algae are tangling in their nets, and some locals say they can no longer drink water from their taps during algal blooms. Credit Rachel Nuwer Along Lake Baikal, some locals say they can no longer drink water from their taps during blooms. Fishermen complain of Spirogyra tangling in their nets. \u201cWill Baikal be able to attract the same amount of tourism, which is a major part of the economy, if tourists show up and see a green lake?\u201d said Ted Ozersky, a limnologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth. In 2014, Dr. Timoshkin testified before the Duma, Russia\u2019s Parliament, about Lake Baikal\u2019s problems. Earlier this year, he and his colleagues also published their findings in The Journal of Great Lakes Research . They are calling for an immediate ban on synthetic detergents and for help from the federal government in reforming sewage facilities around the lake. But such fixes will probably be slow to come. Some government officials and academics insist that the problems are caused by climate change, not pollution; others blame mud volcanoes , or even say that Lake Baikal\u2019s eutrophication is a lie made up by scientists to gain funding. Russia\u2019s Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment has yet to formally acknowledge that the lake\u2019s health is in question at all. \u201cOne of the tragedies of Baikal is that top-level, senior scientists who are themselves never on a field expedition mistakenly believe that the lake can never be eutrophied because it is too huge, too pure and full of too much water,\u201d Dr. Timoshkin said. \u201cIt\u2019s an easy idea to have, but it\u2019s wrong.\u201d Even as federal aid stalls, some people are attempting to address the problems where they live, organizing beach cleanups and trying to find ways to put the thousands of pounds of washed-up Spirogyra to use as fertilizer or material for making traditional Siberian paper. Marina Rikhvanova, an award-winning environmental activist in Irkutsk who helped raise initial awareness about the Spirogyra outbreaks, persuaded a local investor to fund a plan for a prototype sewage treatment plant. \u201cMore and more people with various specialties and interests are working together for the lake,\u201d she said. \u201cThis, at least, is a source of optimism.\u201d Eutrophication, however, is not the only threat to Lake Baikal. Mongolia is planning to build up to eight hydroelectric dams on the Selenga River and its tributaries, the source of 50 percent of Lake Baikal\u2019s surface water. Despite hearings and protests in Russia and Mongolia, the Mongolian government \u2014 which imports around 8 percent of its energy from Russia and 12 percent from China \u2014 argues that the dams will help achieve energy independence and cut back on coal use. Some experts think there must be a better way. Mongolia can technically produce around 100 gigawatts of power from wind and solar in their part of the Gobi Desert alone \u2014 about 90 times the country\u2019s current capacity, said Eugene Simonov, an international coordinator with the nonprofit Rivers Without Boundaries Coalition. \u201cInstead, the plan is to first build dams, then to develop a huge capacity to produce thermal energy from coal, then to build the next generation of big dams to offset the negative effects of coal on the climate and then, finally, to use some of the proceeds to build true renewables.\u201d Researchers predict that Mongolia\u2019s dams would have significant ecological effects on Lake Baikal, including disrupting the flow of water and sediment into the lake, effecting the quality of breeding sites for birds and fish, and blocking migration routes. \u201cThis is likely to be yet another step toward biotic homogenization, where widely distributed, cosmopolitan species like pike increase while unique endemic species like taimen lose ground,\u201d said Olaf Jensen, an aquatic ecologist at Rutgers University. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the ecological equivalent of Starbucks replacing the local bodega.\u201d Heeding such warnings, China, which is funding the largest of the projects, in July froze all dam construction until Mongolia and Russia jointly assess potential effects on the lake. \u201cThis is important, but just a small step in the right direction,\u201d Dr. Simonov said. In October, however, Russian and Chinese tourism firms announced intentions to invest $11 billion in developing new hotels, attractions and infrastructure around the lake \u2014 a plan that Marianne Moore, an aquatic ecologist at Wellesley College, called \u201cchilling.\u201d \u201cEven if the project is tightly regulated by the government, I\u2019m unsure whether the coastal zone could be developed sustainably without harming it,\u201d she said. \u201cNutrient pollution from human waste and shoreline erosion will be enormous problems.\u201d Overshadowing the threat of pollution and dams, however, is climate change, the effects of which are already being felt at Lake Baikal. Summer surface waters lake-wide have warmed about two degrees Celsius since 1977, and winter ice cover has decreased in duration and thickness compared with a century ago. Plankton species associated with warm water have also increased in summer months. \u201cThe question that many ecologists are asking now is whether the endemic, cold-loving species will be able to adapt and persist if warm-loving species begin increasing in abundance,\u201d Dr. Moore said. Another unanswered question is how the triple stressors of pollution, dams and climate change might combine to produce even greater effects on the lake. As Dr. Moore said, \u201cCorrecting the problems that we do have control over will help the lake respond as best it can to climate change.\u201d But that first requires acknowledging that Lake Baikal is \u201cabsolutely ill,\u201d Dr. Timoshkin said. \u201cWill we Russians be able to show the world that Baikal can avoid the common fate of so many other lakes? That is a question I ask from the bottom of my heart.\u201d", "keyword": "Lake Baikal;Water pollution;Algae;Lake;Sewers Sewage;Siberia"}
{"id": "ny0093096", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2015/08/01", "title": "At the 2022 Winter Olympics, No Snow Is No Problem for the I.O.C.", "abstract": "It\u2019s a sad day when the International Olympic Committee cannot even clear one of the lowest bars for choosing the host city for the Winter Games: snow. Yes, snow \u2014 the element that most would say is crucial for holding events that are contested on it. But the I.O.C. on Friday still went ahead and chose Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Games , even though the mountains in those Olympic plans have \u201cminimal annual snowfall\u201d and the Games would \u201crely completely on artificial snow,\u201d according to an I.O.C. evaluation report published in June. The vote over the only other bid, from Almaty, Kazakhstan, was closer than expected, 44-40. But those tough-minded I.O.C. delegates weren\u2019t wooed by Almaty and its picture-perfect setting or its longstanding tradition of winter sports. Or, of course, by its mountains, which Almaty organizers pointedly \u2014 and repeatedly \u2014 noted were covered by snow that actually fell from the sky. While the Almaty bid\u2019s slogan was \u201cKeeping It Real,\u201d Beijing\u2019s could have been, \u201cKeeping It Impractical.\u201d Image A ski resort in Zhangjiakou, 135 miles away from downtown Beijing, could be the site of some skiing events for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Credit Rolex Dela Pena/European Pressphoto Agency The skiing competitions will be held in two different areas, one 55 miles from the Chinese capital, the other 100 miles away. There is a plan for a high-speed railway that would cut the travel time there to just under an hour, but no mention of the cost of it in a proposal that was supposed to be transparent. The estimated 1,500 people who will lose their homes for the ski jump and the Olympic Village were apparently dismissed as collateral damage. The most obvious consequence of Friday\u2019s I.O.C. vote \u2014 eliminating the annoying hurdle that the Winter Games host actually has natural snow \u2014 is that it has created a precedent for holding a Winter Games almost anywhere. Imagine the possibilities. A St. Tropez Winter Games. (Grenoble is, after all, just 140 miles away by air.) Slogan: Forget Snow, We\u2019ve Got Sand. Or Phoenix, where the luge track can run right down the side of the Grand Canyon. (It\u2019s only a few hours away.) Or Dubai, where the organizers have enough cash to fly everyone to the Alps for the skiing events. Then again, I take that back: People are probably skiing there as you read this, albeit inside a giant building . So bring on the Winter Games! Slogan: Keeping It Completely Indoors. Already, Beijing gave us a glimpse at an Olympics held not as part of the city, but in a far-off corner of the city, devoid of an atmosphere that would reflect the world\u2019s biggest sporting party. In 2008, the Olympic Park was miles from downtown Beijing. Instead, inside high gates, it was held in a massive Olympic Disney World, with brilliant venues and stunning architecture, but without the buzz and joy of the four Olympics I\u2019d covered before. Even in that manufactured sporting bubble, though, the organizers couldn\u2019t manufacture real fans. Sure, they said, they had sold all of their tickets to the competitions, but \u2014 in a city of nearly 17 million residents \u2014 where were all the people? There were so many empty seats that those organizers had to bring in \u201ccheer squads\u201d to fill stadiums and act happy. And that was for the summer sports. What will happen in 2022, when China is faced with trying to fill seats for winter sports, which have almost no history in that country in the first place? Image Members of the Beijing delegation celebrate their city's selection as host for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games Friday. Credit Stanley Chou/Getty Images But then, the I.O.C. obviously isn\u2019t aiming for authenticity. Just bring back those cheer squads, Beijing, this time not in the bright yellow shirts they wore in 2008 but in bright yellow ski parkas that will never be worn again. I\u2019ll give Beijing this: Its 2008 Olympics were a marketing coup for the companies eager to court China\u2019s 1.3 billion residents. Now how about 2022? There\u2019s even more to be made, considering the huge commercial upside. Yao Ming, the basketball player who was involved in the Olympic bid, saw the potential. At the news conference after Beijing won the bid, he joked that he might start a winter sports company. An associate on the bid team laughed and said she would join him. It sounds funny, but it\u2019s not. There are serious problems \u2014 again \u2014 to having Beijing play host. In 2008, those who projected that bringing the Games there might open up China saw nothing of the sort. Potential protesters were detained, some sentenced to \u201cre-education through labor.\u201d Websites were blocked. A day after the closing ceremony, thick, yellow pollution returned to the city\u2019s sky. Seven years later, the only use for most of the dusty, unloved venues from 2008 was as a lure for another chance at the Games in 2022. Image The Trans-Ili mountains as seen from the Sunkar Ski Jumping Complex in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Almaty's Olympic bid organizers made it a point to note their mountains had real snow. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Yet back to Beijing the world will go \u2014 somehow, some way. The I.O.C. didn\u2019t demand that the Chinese fulfill their promises in 2008, and in the interim the country\u2019s human rights record has gotten worse, not better. It\u2019s hard to expect change this time around. President Xi Jinping of China, in a video statement before Friday\u2019s vote, said, \u201cWe will honor all the commitments.\u201d And something made the I.O.C. actually believe that, even though it had heard that pitch before and been burned by it. Now Beijing\u2019s second Games will test Thomas Bach, the I.O.C. president, in a way he has not been tested before. Last fall, he announced that he would include an anti-discrimination clause in future contracts with host cities. But will he stand by that rule, in the face of a Chinese government unwilling to bend to outside influence and the corporate sponsors who have begun to drool? If Beijing does not follow through on its guarantees, what can Bach do? He could always ask another city to jump in. How about Boston? It shot down a chance to host the Summer Games this week, but it does have at least one advantage over Beijing: It snows there in winter.", "keyword": "China;International Olympic Committee;Beijing;Human Rights;Snow Snowstorms;Almaty Kazakhstan"}
{"id": "ny0131495", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/12/16", "title": "Seven Basketball Schools Vote to Leave Big East", "abstract": "The seven Big East programs that do not play Football Bowl Subdivision football are leaving the conference many of them founded to build a league focused on basketball, the universities\u2019 presidents announced Saturday. \u201cEarlier today, we voted unanimously to pursue an orderly evolution to a foundation of basketball schools that honors the history and tradition on which the Big East was established,\u201d the statement said. \u201cUnder the context of conference realignment, we believe pursuing a new basketball framework that builds on this tradition of excellence and competition is the best way forward.\u201d The seven basketball programs leaving the Big East are Georgetown, St. John\u2019s, Villanova, DePaul, Marquette, Seton Hall and Providence. Georgetown, St. John\u2019s, Seton Hall and Providence helped form the Big East, which started playing basketball in 1979. Villanova joined in 1980. The Big East did not begin playing football until 1991. The statement from the seven Catholic institutions did not say when they want to depart or whether they will try to keep the Big East name. Big East bylaws require departing members to give the conference 27 months\u2019 notice, but the league has negotiated early departures with several universities. Big East rules allow colleges to leave as a group without having to pay exit fees. There are also millions of dollars in N.C.A.A. basketball tournament money and exit fees collected from recently departed members that will be divided. The latest hit to the Big East leaves Connecticut, also a founding member, Cincinnati, Temple and South Florida \u2014 the four current members with F.B.S. programs \u2014 as the only universities currently in the Big East that are scheduled to be there beyond next season. The Big East is still lined up to have a 12-team football conference next season, with six new members joining, including Boise State and San Diego State for football only. Rutgers and Louisville, which both announced intentions to leave the Big East, are still expected to compete in the conference next year.", "keyword": "College Athletics;Big East Conference;Providence College;Georgetown University;Seton Hall University;St John's University;Marquette University;Villanova University;DePaul University;Basketball (College)"}
{"id": "ny0038892", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/04/27", "title": "South Korean Prime Minister Offers to Resign Over Deadly Ferry Disaster", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 Prime Minister Chung Hong-won, the No. 2 official in the South Korean government, apologized and offered to resign on Sunday, as the country remained angry and saddened over the sinking of a ferry that left 302 people, a vast majority of them high school students, dead or missing. The government has come under fire as early investigations revealed a slew of loopholes in safety measures and a lax regulatory enforcement that investigators said contributed to the sinking of the 6,825-ton ferry, the Sewol, on April 16. It was also criticized for failing to respond quickly and efficiently to the crisis and for fumbling during the early stages of rescue operations. A somber-looking Mr. Chung accepted the criticism on Sunday when he offered \u201can apology to the people\u201d during a nationally televised news conference. \u201cWhen I saw the people\u2019s sadness and fury, I thought it was natural for me to step down with an apology,\u201d he said. Mr. Chung was the highest-ranking government official to lose his job over the sinking, South Korea\u2019s worst disaster since 1995, when a department store collapsed in Seoul, killing 501 people. South Koreans were especially traumatized by the fact that most of the dead and missing were students on a class trip. Many survivors reported that the crew repeatedly instructed passengers to stay inside while the ship was listing dangerously and gradually sinking off southeastern South Korea. The ship\u2019s captain, Lee Jun-seok, 69, and 14 other top members of the crew escaped the ferry in the first two Coast Guard ships arriving at the scene. All of them were now under arrest on criminal charges, including accidental homicide. Mr. Chung\u2019s resignation will become official when President Park Geun-hye accepts it. By midday Sunday, Ms. Park had not commented publicly on the resignation offer. The prime minister is a largely ceremonial post in South Korea, with the executive power concentrated in the president, and is sometimes fired when the government takes responsibility for a major scandal or policy failure. As of Sunday morning, 115 ferry passengers remained missing. The number of the survivors, 174, has not changed for the past 11 days. The official death toll was at 187 on Sunday, where it has remained because of bad weather. Divers trying to reach inside the ship have been stymied by strong waves and rapid currents. Once inside, they face the more challenging task of making their way through narrow corridors clogged with debris to try to reach into small cabins in the front and a large communal sleeping hall in the back of the ship where many of the students were believed to have been trapped. The nation has been plunged into a paroxysm of grief and shame . Loud cheering at baseball stadiums has been banned, and television comedy programs suspended. Schools canceled their spring-break trips. When thousands of Buddhists paraded through downtown Seoul on Saturday evening, ahead of the Buddha\u2019s May 6 birthday, many of them carried black-and-white lotus lanterns in memory of the dead.", "keyword": "South Korea;Boat Accidents;Ferry;Chung Hong-won"}
{"id": "ny0192728", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/02/06", "title": "Sweden Wants to Lift Reactor Ban", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 The Swedish government on Thursday proposed refreshing its nuclear power industry, joining a growing list of European nations considering putting the technology in the forefront of future energy plans. Swedes voted nearly three decades ago to phase out nuclear power by 2010. But 10 of the country\u2019s 12 reactors are still operating, and public opinion has become more favorable toward the technology. The Swedish plan was agreed on by the center-right coalition government and foresees the building of new reactors at the 10 sites where reactors are currently operating. Under the plan, which still needs approval from Parliament, Sweden would replace existing reactors gradually. Reactors account for half of the electricity produced in Sweden. The new reactors are likely to be more powerful than existing units, allowing Sweden to potentially increase nuclear capacity.", "keyword": "Sweden;Atomic Energy"}
{"id": "ny0027887", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/01/09", "title": "Aid Groups Report Rising Misery Among Displaced Syrians", "abstract": "New signs of deprivation plaguing Syria\u2019s war-ravaged civilians emerged on Tuesday, with the United Nations saying it is unable to feed a million hungry residents in combat zones and aid agencies reporting an outbreak of violence in a large refugee camp in Jordan, where a winter storm felled tents and left many frustrated inhabitants shivering in a cold rain. Weather forecasters said another storm was threatening Syria and its neighbors with snow on Wednesday. The World Food Program , the food agency of the United Nations, said that it was providing food to one and a half million people inside Syria this month but that as many as two and a half million needed help, mostly in areas made hazardous by fighting between insurgents and loyalist forces of President Bashar al-Assad. \u201cOur partners are overstretched, and there is no capacity to expand operations further,\u201d said a World Food Program spokeswoman, Elizabeth Byrs, at the agency\u2019s Geneva headquarters. \u201cWe need more implementing partners.\u201d She also said acute fuel shortages in Syria had delayed food deliveries and contributed to severe inflation in the price of bread because bakeries needed fuel for their ovens. In the contested city of Aleppo, for example, the price of a kilogram of bread is 250 Syrian pounds, or about $3.50, at least 50 percent higher than in other parts of Syria and at least six times more than its cost when the Syrian conflict began nearly two years ago. The United Nations appealed last month for $1.5 billion in additional aid to handle the growing humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian conflict, which has left at least 60,000 people dead and is threatening to destabilize the Middle East. More than half a million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries, and the United Nations refugee agency has forecast a doubling of that number by the middle of 2013. The most heavily burdened neighbors \u2014 Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon \u2014 have been persistently calling for more international aid, particularly during the cold winter months. At the Zaatari refugee camp, which shelters 54,000 Syrians in northern Jordan, fighting erupted Tuesday during food distribution after a night of relentless rain inundated parts of the encampment. The number of injuries was unclear. A statement by the Jordanian police said two aid workers had been hurt. Save the Children, one of the international groups that help the United Nations refugee agency administer the camp, said 11 people had been hurt, more than half of them Save the Children workers. Video The Times\u2019s David E. Sanger discusses the bid to keep the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, from using chemical weapons. \u201cThe incident followed a night of heavy storms, during which torrential rains and high winds swept away tents and left parts of the camp flooded,\u201d Save the Children said in a statement. Mohammed Abu Asaker, a regional spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency, acknowledged weather-related problems at the camp, aggravated by a large number of new residents \u2014 roughly 9,000 arrivals in the past week. \u201cIt is a difficult situation in the camp,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a frustration from the refugees.\u201d Ali Bibi, a liaison officer with the refugee agency, said the violence on Tuesday was the latest in a series of at least four clashes among refugees, aid workers and the police in recent weeks. Melissa Fleming, the chief spokeswoman for the refugee agency in Geneva, said in an e-mail that most of the camp had withstood the rainfall and that aid workers were expediting efforts to move families into prefabricated housing. She attributed tensions among the camp population to \u201cfears of worsening weather conditions, with some families rushing to occupy prefabs out of turn.\u201d One refugee, who described himself as a colonel in the Syrian Army before he defected, said that even though he was living in one of the prefabricated houses and covering himself with blankets, he could not stay warm. \u201cThe tents are drenched. Kids are crying. Puddles of water are all over,\u201d the refugee, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Mohamad, said in a telephone interview. \u201cI am walking, my shoes are covered with rainwater. I can\u2019t remember being so cold. I don\u2019t even want to think about more than half of the camp living in tents. Something has to be done.\u201d In Syria on Tuesday, activists reported new violence in the Yarmouk district south of Damascus, a longtime Palestinian refugee encampment convulsed by fighting last month when insurgents temporarily seized control . The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition group with a network of contacts in Syria, reported an unspecified number of casualties in the area, as well as shelling by the Syrian military aimed at insurgent pockets in other Damascus suburbs. In a speech on Sunday , Mr. Assad, whose family has dominated Syria\u2019s politics for four decades, denounced those fomenting the armed uprising against him as foreign stooges, rejected negotiations and instead offered his own plan for political changes, which critics said was meant to keep him in power. His speech was denounced by the opposition, its Arab and Western supporters, and the United Nations secretary general. On Tuesday, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former friend of Mr. Assad\u2019s who has since become a strident foe, added his voice to the criticism. \u201cIt is unimaginable to consider suggestions of a person who has killed his people with bombs, planes and shelling as democratic,\u201d Turkey\u2019s semiofficial Anatolian News Agency quoted Mr. Erdogan as saying.", "keyword": "Syria;Arab Spring;Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Jordan;Humanitarian aid;UN;World Food Programme;Bashar al-Assad"}
{"id": "ny0278221", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/11/07", "title": "Theresa May Prepares to Stare Down Parliament in \u2018Brexit\u2019 Standoff", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Against a backdrop of rising political acrimony, Theresa May, the British prime minister, warned critics on Sunday not to thwart her timetable for withdrawal from the European Union, as she prepared for a standoff with lawmakers that could prompt calls for an early general election here. Mrs. May, who wants to start the formal process of leaving the bloc by the end of March, now has a serious fight on her hands, after several months of facing relatively little challenge over her plans for British withdrawal, known as \u201cBrexit.\u201d Judges on Britain\u2019s High Court ruled last week that she could not start exit negotiations by invoking Article 50 of the European Union\u2019s treaty without first consulting Parliament, where the government\u2019s majority is slim. The government is appealing the case to the Supreme Court, but if it loses, and then finds itself constrained by lawmakers, the temptation to seek an early general election may become overwhelming for Mrs. May. For now, the government is playing down that prospect. Mrs. May insisted on Sunday that she had a mandate to pursue Britain\u2019s exit without consulting Parliament. In a referendum in June, about 52 percent of voters elected to quit the bloc. \u201cThe British people, the majority of the British people, voted to leave the European Union,\u201d Mrs. May said at Heathrow Airport as she left for a trade mission to India. \u201cThe government is now getting on with that.\u201d After the court ruling, however, Mrs. May now knows there is a good chance that she may not be able to do so with the free hand that she wants. So far she has specified almost no detail about her objectives, arguing that she wants to keep her negotiating position as strong as possible. At the heart of the dispute lies an ambiguity inherent in a referendum that asked voters to say whether they wanted to quit the European Union but that did not seek their views on what relationship should replace it. Supporters of Brexit contend that opponents now want to thwart the will of the people as expressed in the referendum. Critics fear that the government has no coherent Brexit strategy, and worry that the country may lurch into a damaging economic rupture with the bloc, which voters did not endorse. On Sunday, Gina Miller, the founder of an investment management firm who was the lead claimant in the legal case against the government, told the BBC that Mrs. May must take the decision to Parliament \u201cbecause we do not live in a tin-pot dictatorship.\u201d Ms. Miller said she had faced online death and rape threats over the case. Nigel Farage, the interim leader of the U.K. Independence Party, which campaigned for British withdrawal, warned of protests in the streets if the decision in favor of Brexit was ignored. \u201cBelieve you me, if the people in this country think they\u2019re going to be cheated, they\u2019re going to be betrayed, then we will see political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country,\u201d he said. The court ruling has unleashed an ugly political discourse, with one tabloid newspaper that supported Brexit describing the judges who delivered the verdict as \u201c Enemies of the People .\u201d How \u2018Brexit\u2019 Could Change Business in Britain Britain has started the clock on leaving the European Union, and will be out of the bloc by March 2019. Here is how \u201cBrexit\u201d has affected business so far. While the government has said it defends the independence of the judiciary, it has not rushed to condemn the newspaper coverage, prompting criticism from some senior legal figures. More worrisome for Mrs. May is the parliamentary math should she be forced to take her case for British withdrawal to lawmakers. Last week, David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the European Union, conceded that if the appeal to the Supreme Court failed, the government would probably have to put forward legislation to trigger Article 50. That could give opponents the possibility to amend it, and tie down its negotiating stance. In an interview with The Sunday Mirror , the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said he would push for Mrs. May to adopt his \u201cBrexit bottom lines.\u201d \u201cWe are not challenging the referendum,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are not calling for a second referendum. We\u2019re calling for market access for British industry to Europe.\u201d The party\u2019s deputy leader, Tom Watson, took a more lenient position. He told the BBC that Labour was \u201cnot going to hold this up,\u201d and that \u201cArticle 50 will be triggered when it comes to Westminster.\u201d Asked about the possibility of a general election, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told the BBC on Sunday that it was \u201cthe last thing the government wants\u201d \u2014 a formulation that does not specifically exclude it happening.", "keyword": "Brexit;Theresa May;EU;Great Britain;Legislature;Jeremy Corbyn;Nigel Farage"}
{"id": "ny0051525", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/10/08", "title": "Oil\u2019s Comeback Gives U.S. Global Leverage", "abstract": "It has become fashionable to note a decline of American global power and influence, but don\u2019t tell that to the energy experts. Many see increased domestic production of oil and gas as driving more muscular United States energy diplomacy, power that exists in curious tandem with the Obama administration\u2019s efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels. \u201cThe rapid rise in U.S. oil and gas production, together with the decline in oil consumption and the elevation of climate change as a priority, is completely scrambling the way policy makers think about energy diplomacy,\u201d said Michael A. Levi, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Joseph S. Nye Jr., the Harvard professor who articulated the notion of \u201csoft power\u201d in international affairs, sees a \u201cshale gale\u201d propelling America\u2019s status: \u201cIf you are attracted to a country or any leader, a lot has to do with the feeling, \u2018Do they have momentum? Is the wind in their sails or are their sails flapping?\u2019 We\u2019ve got a gust.\u201d Carlos Pascual, a former senior American diplomat, agrees. Increased energy production \u201cstrengthens our hand.\u201d he said. \u201cChina, when it talks to us about global energy supplies, it sees us as a supplier,\u201d he said. This monumental shift, Mr. Pascual said, allows the United States to cooperate more closely with the world\u2019s largest energy consumers to combat climate change \u2014 for example, by persuading them to reduce their heavy reliance on coal. \u201cIf we can\u2019t work with China on diversifying their fuel mix, then we\u2019re all going to die,\u201d Mr. Pascual said calmly, calling natural gas \u201cthe fuel in the interim that has the greatest prospect for substituting for coal.\u201d The State Department\u2019s Bureau of Energy Resources , which Mr. Pascual ran from its inception in 2011 until last August, is evidence of a brighter spotlight on energy. It has grown from a staff of fewer than 50 to 90 today, with a mission to \u201cdevelop, harmonize and promote U.S. energy security overseas,\u201d according to a State Department document . Several federal agencies have increased investments in foreign energy projects in recent years. Some are modest, such as a $750,000 loan by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to an Indian start-up that builds micropower plants run on discarded rice husks. Others are huge: OPIC recently announced $230 million in loan guarantees to construct a 141-megawatt solar power plant in Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert, the largest project of its kind in Latin America. On Sept. 23, President Obama issued an executive order that \u201crequires the integration of climate-resilience considerations into all United States international development work.\u201d Still, the United States government remains a big backer of fossil fuel production. The Export-Import Bank of the United States underwrote a $1.5 billion bond guarantee last year, enabling Mexico\u2019s state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex, to patronize United States companies. In 2010, the bank lent $3 billion for a liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. The project, led by Exxon Mobil, started shipping gas this year to Japan and has contracts with clients in Taiwan and China. No doubt many investments abroad are intended to generate economic benefits at home. That\u2019s an old story. In the late 19th century, Standard Oil, owned by John D. Rockefeller, \u201cdepended on the State Department to fight for the removal of tariffs and other barriers to the entry of American oil into foreign markets,\u201d Rosemary A. Kelanic, an assistant professor of political science at Williams College in Massachusetts who studies energy access as a coercion tactic, said by email. In \u201cTitan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.,\u201d Ron Chernow quotes the oil magnate as saying, \u201cOur ambassadors and ministers and consuls have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the world.\u201d The Pemex financing arguably continues that tradition, with an estimate that it would support around \u201c6,800 U.S. jobs spread across about 10 states,\u201d according to the Export-Import Bank\u2019s website . But some loans, grants and bond guarantees also serve as attempts to win friends and electrify neighbors. In 2007 the United States Agency for International Development spent $43.8 million for energy services, but that rose to more than $391 million by 2013. OPIC\u2019s financing of energy projects soared from $123 million in 2007 to $1.21 billion in 2013, roughly tenfold. \u201cInvesting in development today means averting instability tomorrow,\u201d OPIC\u2019s president and chief executive, Elizabeth L. Littlefield, said by email. Sometimes, the State Department\u2019s energy bureau forges agreements directly with other countries. In August, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Grenada to provide technical assistance and encourage private investment in sustainable energy technology. While Mr. Nye of Harvard considers the Grenada agreement \u201cminor,\u201d he views it as further evidence of America\u2019s enhanced status: \u201cIf you want the vote of Grenada in the U.N., and Venezuela is now purchasing it, along with a lot of other Caribbean votes, by subsidized energy, we are now going to be able to compete in that area.\u201d The United States has used its energy resources to play diplomatic hardball. In the summer of 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s administration slapped licensing requirements on oil exports to Japan, \u201cwhich effectively amounted to a complete embargo,\u201d Victor McFarland, an assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri, said by email. It was the \u201cfirst time that access to oil was used as a foreign policy tool on a big scale,\u201d he added. At the time, the United States accounted for nearly two-thirds of global oil production, but \u201crather than restraining Japanese aggression,\u201d he said, \u201cthe embargo helped push Japan towards war.\u201d Ellen R. Wald, a professor of Middle East history at Jacksonville University, draws parallels between the United States\u2019 ascending role as an energy supplier and the postwar period, when the country still ranked as an oil powerhouse. Government officials funneled foreign-bought oil to rebuild Europe as part of the Marshall Plan. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower used access to oil to intimidate Britain and France. After Egypt\u2019s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, Britain and France launched a surprise aerial attack to seize the critical waterway on Oct. 31. (Two days earlier Israel had invaded the Sinai Peninsula in concert with Britain and France.) Furious about being blindsided, the Eisenhower administration stepped up its pressure tactics, weakening the British pound and threatening to withhold oil from Britain and France at a time when both had limited reserves of fuel. The British and French soon relented. In other words, the United States wielded its energy policy to achieve geopolitical ends. \u201cThat\u2019s something we did do historically,\u201d Ms. Wald continues, \u201cand we may be able to do again.\u201d It seems a fair bet. The State Department\u2019s energy bureau helped persuade China, India and other countries to reduce imports of Iranian crude oil. The arm-twisting very likely spurred Tehran to freeze its nuclear program last year, though Mr. Pascual, a former ambassador to Mexico and Ukraine, put it more diplomatically. \u201cWe were able to have a different kind of conversation than we could have had even 10 years ago,\u201d he recalls, providing negotiating partners with an \u201canalysis of global oil markets: what the trends were in those markets, where supply was coming from \u2014 in particular, from the United States.\u201d", "keyword": "Oil and Gasoline;US Foreign Policy;Renewable energy;Climate Change;Global Warming;International trade"}
{"id": "ny0136314", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/04/14", "title": "Wachovia Is Said to Raise Billions Amid Losses", "abstract": "The Wachovia Corporation , the country\u2019s fourth largest bank, is raising several billion dollars from outside investors because of mounting housing losses and an ill-timed acquisition of a big California mortgage lender, people briefed on the matter said Sunday night. It is unclear whether the investment will come from the issuing of new shares of stock to the public or from private investors. Wachovia said Sunday night that it would move up the release of its first-quarter earnings to Monday from Friday, without explanation. That has led to speculation that an announcement of an investment deal could come with its earnings report. Representatives of the bank did not return calls seeking comment about the investment. Wachovia is the latest financial institution to seek outside funding. Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS raised tens of billions of dollars from foreign and private equity investors last fall, and last week Washington Mutual secured $7 billion from a group of investors led by the buyout firm TPG. Meanwhile, other lenders, including small local banks, are actively looking to raise capital. Taken together, the moves show how quickly the banking industry\u2019s health has deteriorated. The deals will help shore up the balance sheets of those banks, which have suffered a series of blows since housing and credit markets started cratering last summer. But the transactions will probably erode the value of shares held by existing investors and could lead to a wave of shotgun acquisitions. The investment in Wachovia comes after bank executives tried to stave off such a move for months, maintaining that the company was financially strong. Earlier this year it raised more than $8.3 billion by issuing preferred stock and other securities. Wachovia had been riding high over the last few years, aggressively expanding its retail franchise and benefiting from unusually few credit losses. But in May 2006, the bank\u2019s chief executive, G. Kennedy Thompson, made a big bet on the housing market: a $25.5 billion acquisition of Golden West Financial, a large California thrift that specialized in interest-only mortgages. The deal gave Wachovia a foothold in the fast-growing California market. Executives played down the risks at the time, but many Wall Street analysts and investors questioned the logic of the bank ratcheting up its exposure to the nation\u2019s most buoyant market as the housing boom appeared to peak. Wachovia shares fell sharply after the deal was announced. The bank has continued to take a beating, especially in California. Bank executives have been caught off guard by the high number of borrowers walking away from their homes after falling behind on their payments. Other parts of the bank\u2019s portfolio have been hit similarly hard: Losses tied to auto, credit card and home equity loans have risen sharply over the last few months. Wachovia also faces pressure in its capital markets business, where it was a big packager of mortgage-related loans and provider of corporate buyout loans. Analysts say the bank could be in store for bigger losses tied to commercial real estate loans, where it has about $12 billion of exposure to construction loans.", "keyword": "Wachovia Corp;Stocks and Bonds;Mortgages;Housing"}
{"id": "ny0220265", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/02/20", "title": "Federal Judge Declines to Return Hiram Monserrate to Senate", "abstract": "A federal judge on Friday refused to reinstate former Senator Hiram Monserrate , the first member of the New York State Legislature removed from office since the 1920s, rejecting Mr. Monserrate\u2019s claims that his expulsion was unconstitutional. Writing that a legislative body\u2019s power to expel its members is \u201cembedded in American Democracy,\u201d Judge William H. Pauley of United States District Court in Manhattan denied Mr. Monserrate\u2019s request to have his removal blocked and the special election to replace him halted. The decision about who should represent Mr. Monserrate\u2019s former district in Queens should be left to the voters and not to the courts, Judge Pauley said. The ruling marked the first decision in what could be a lengthy appeals process for Mr. Monserrate. Judge Pauley\u2019s order applied only to Mr. Monserrate\u2019s most immediate request to the court: to block his expulsion so he could return to the Senate when it reconvenes on Monday. The case is expected to proceed in Judge Pauley\u2019s court, though lawyers for Mr. Monserrate said they were strongly considering an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Norman Siegel , one of Mr. Monserrate\u2019s lawyers, said the judge\u2019s ruling \u201copens the door to arbitrary and unfettered decisions that violate the rights of duly elected officials and their constituents.\u201d But Judge Pauley rejected Mr. Monserrate\u2019s argument that the people of his district were disenfranchised, writing that the impediment to voting rights was \u201cgossamer.\u201d \u201cThe burden here,\u201d Judge Pauley wrote, \u201cis no greater than the occasional vacancies due to death or resignation.\u201d Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo , whose office is defending the Senate in the case, said he was gratified by the decision. \u201cThe time for changing the culture of Albany is long past due,\u201d Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. \u201cToday\u2019s ruling is a step in that direction.\u201d The ruling raised numerous questions about the merits of Mr. Monserrate\u2019s legal claims and indicated that the court would ultimately decide against him if he pressed on with the case. Judge Pauley was especially skeptical of the arguments that Mr. Monserrate\u2019s rights were violated under the 1st and 14th Amendments. His lawyers alleged that the expulsion process was not only unfair and unconstitutional, but was also political payback for Mr. Monserrate\u2019s role in a leadership coup last summer and his critical public comments about the Senate\u2019s investigation into his conduct. Mr. Monserrate\u2019s lawyers said his ouster was an unlawful coup, a choice of words the judge said he found to be \u201can ironic twist.\u201d Judge Pauley was also not persuaded by Mr. Monserrate\u2019s claims that he was denied due process by the special Senate committee that recommended his expulsion. The judge noted that the former senator refused to testify before the committee or present evidence in his favor. Mr. Monserrate\u2019s lawyers also argued that the provision of state law the Senate relied on to expel him was too vague. But the judge was not persuaded. The law, he wrote, is a \u201cshort and plain\u201d statement that is \u201cneither standardless nor so unclear that a person of reasonable intelligence could not understand its meaning and application.\u201d The Senate removed Mr. Monserrate by a vote of 53 to 8, citing his conduct in a violent confrontation in 2008 that left his female companion with a deep gash on her face. A judge acquitted him of felony assault charges but convicted him of a misdemeanor for dragging her down a hallway \u2014 an act caught on videotape. State law provides for the automatic expulsion of any legislator convicted of a felony, but it is silent with regard to misdemeanors. The judge said that simply because the law did not spell out every circumstance under which a legislator might be expelled \u201cdoes not make the statute vague or overbroad.\u201d", "keyword": "Monserrate Hiram;Assaults;Decisions and Verdicts;Siegel Norman;Cuomo Andrew M;State Legislatures;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0208727", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/12/02", "title": "New York Fire Dept. Cuts Crews on Pumpers to Limit Overtime", "abstract": "With hundreds of city firefighters out of work every day for medical problems ranging from broken bones to more serious illnesses, the Fire Department is moving to reduce staffing at 49 engine companies in the five boroughs, city officials said Tuesday. Officials say the change, to take effect at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, is prompted by a provision in the labor contract that allows the city to reduce staffing when the average number of firefighters on medical leave citywide reaches a certain percentage over a 12-month period. In doing so, the city can avoid paying overtime to firefighters to keep engine companies at agreed-upon staffing levels. The move immediately ignited a new round of debate over an issue that has long been a source of contention between the department and the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the union that represents the city\u2019s 8,800 rank-and-file firefighters. It is the third time since 2003 that the department has cut staffing at engine companies \u2014 a condition that usually lasts a few months, until sick firefighters return to work. The average number of firefighters out sick each day during the last three weeks has ranged from 500 to 700. \u201cThey are clearly spoiling for a fight on staffing and firehouse closings,\u201d said Stephen J. Cassidy, the union\u2019s president, who held a news conference on Tuesday afternoon to denounce the city\u2019s decision. The 49 engine companies affected have five firefighters per shift and will lose one. Fifteen companies in the Bronx, 14 in Brooklyn, 12 in Manhattan, 7 in Queens and one on Staten Island are affected. Of the other 145 engine companies in the city, 134 are already staffed with four firefighters. The remaining 11 are always staffed with five firefighters, regardless of the medical leave numbers, because their members provide daily backup to companies whose firefighters call in sick. Ladder companies, in contrast, are staffed with five firefighters at all times. But Mr. Cassidy warned of reduced staffing at ladder companies as well if the number of those on medical leave in the engine companies outpaces those on hand to fill in for them. With the medical leave numbers rising for months, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who is leaving at year\u2019s end, is exercising his discretion to reduce staffing at the 7.5 percent threshold. The contract mandates such cuts when the rate reaches 7.6 percent, officials said. \u201cIncreased medical leave is costing us more in overtime, and we\u2019re going to do everything we can to be fiscally prudent in these difficult economic times,\u201d Mr. Scoppetta said in a statement. Mr. Cassidy contended that a minimum of five firefighters per engine company was essential for the health and safety of firefighters and the public. The union also suggested that the prevalence of swine flu had driven the sick rate higher than normal, but the department said those numbers were negligible.", "keyword": "Fire Department (NYC);Fires and Firefighters;New York City;Uniformed Firefighters Assn"}
{"id": "ny0032975", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/12/29", "title": "Vaccine Aide Gunned Down in Pakistan", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 A health worker supervising a polio vaccination campaign was fatally shot and two others were wounded on Saturday when gunmen opened fire at a hospital in northwestern Pakistan, officials said. No one immediately took responsibility for the killing, but the Taliban, which accuses the United States of using a drive to eradicate polio in the country as a cover for spying, has threatened the lives of health workers who immunize children. Pakistani officials said two gunmen riding a motorbike had opened fire at a government hospital in Matni, a suburb of Peshawar, the provincial capital of the restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Zahid Gul, who was overseeing the vaccination campaign, was killed and another man and a woman were wounded in the attack. The gunmen fled. Saturday\u2019s episode was a particular setback to the former cricket star and current opposition leader Imran Khan, whose political party controls Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Mr. Khan this month condemned the attacks on health workers taking part in vaccination efforts. He said that he would personally lead the anti-polio drive and warned that the country risked being quarantined internationally if the attacks continued. Pakistan is one of only a few countries where the polio virus is still rampant. Mr. Khan has supported peace talks with Taliban militants and opposes the Pakistani military\u2019s operations against them in the semiautonomous tribal regions adjoining Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. He also vehemently opposes drone strikes by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and says civilian casualties from the missile strikes fuel more militancy, instead of curbing it. The Taliban\u2019s resistance to polio vaccination hardened after the raid in May 2011 on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound in northern Pakistan, as revelations surfaced that the C.I.A. had used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to run a vaccination campaign that aided efforts to locate Bin Laden. Since then, the Taliban has repeatedly targeted the vaccination campaign.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Terrorism;Polio;Taliban;Vaccines Immunization"}
{"id": "ny0070312", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2015/03/05", "title": "World Cup Rights Awarded", "abstract": "ESPN was awarded the American rights to the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. ESPN was selected ahead of NBC Sports Group, which is in the midst of a 10-year contract to broadcast N.H.L. regular-season and playoff games through 2020-21. ESPN was the N.H.L.\u2019s American broadcaster from 1992 through the league\u2019s lockout that wiped out the 2004-05 season. \u25a0 The Florida Panthers will be without the injured goalies Roberto Luongo and Al Montoya for at least Thursday night\u2019s game against Dallas, and possibly longer. To replace them, the Panthers recalled Dan Ellis from San Antonio of the A.H.L., and he will start on Thursday. Florida is two points behind Boston for the last playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. (AP)", "keyword": "Ice hockey;ESPN;NBC Sports Network"}
{"id": "ny0165063", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/07/18", "title": "City to Clear Homeless Encampments", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, July 17 \u2014 Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City\u2019s streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday. The city has found 73 of those sites inhabited by groups of chronically homeless people, the mayor said. \u201cHumanely, respectfully and firmly, we\u2019ll work to get these men and women to enter supportive housing, enroll in treatment programs or go into shelters,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said to a gathering of government officials and social service providers from around the country. The changes amplify the mayor\u2019s longstanding effort to steer the city away from its emphasis on emergency shelter for the homeless, and toward providing permanent housing and using social services to prevent homelessness. The measures discussed by the mayor on Monday represented a significant shift in the culture of the Department of Homeless Services. \u201cWhile everyone has a right to emergency shelter, that doesn\u2019t always make emergency shelter right for everyone,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said, adding that his administration was working to replace \u201cthe dead-end model of managing homelessness with the new goal of ending it.\u201d He cited his administration\u2019s program to create 12,000 units of supportive housing, which offers social services like mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment. And he announced plans to expand another program, which helps people on the verge of homelessness hold onto their homes. But the new element is potentially controversial. The Department of Homeless Services, under its new commissioner, Robert Hess, has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in Manhattan, to which roughly 350 homeless men and women \u2014 of a total homeless population of about 3,800, according to the city\u2019s last count \u2014 return nightly. Most of the encampments are little more than collections of cardboard boxes, or tarpaulins hung over a beam, officials said. Now, working with community and faith-based organizations, the city plans to work more aggressively to persuade people to leave those areas and enter housing, treatment programs or shelters. The vigorous focus on the street population is an unusual approach that Mr. Hess brings from his time supervising services to adults in Philadelphia, where he built a reputation for reducing the number of people living on the streets. The strategy, which officials say has been tried in only a few cities, reflects a growing consensus that a small number of long-term, chronically homeless people account for a large share of the medical care and other services required by the homeless population over all. Officials stopped short of saying that they would force people off the streets, but they do plan to clear the makeshift dwellings and make them inaccessible for others to return. \u201cWe\u2019re going to let them know that their days on the streets must come to an end,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said in an address to the annual conference of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll secure and clean up the places where they\u2019ve been bedding down, to make sure that they won\u2019t be occupied again.\u201d Over the past four years, officials said, the administration has worked to shift its focus from improving and expanding shelters toward more permanent solutions. That effort has included the use of supportive housing \u2014 or housing that affords a range of on-site social services \u2014 and a program called HomeBase, which offers flexible subsidies or other support for people at risk of homelessness. Mr. Hess would not give the precise locations of the sleeping areas \u2014 most of them out of sight of the public \u2014 that the city plans to target, out of respect for the people who stay in them, he said. But officials said that some of the sites are already familiar to the department\u2019s teams of outreach workers and that they will coordinate with the Police and Sanitation Departments and with transit officials to identify other sites, both outdoors and in vacant buildings. One site, near Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, is known to homeless workers as the Bat Cave. Lately, it has been home to at least four people, including Gladys Anderson, 44, who sleeps on a discarded bed propped on milk crates. Monday afternoon, sitting on a red velveteen bedspread, she said she would gladly accept the mayor\u2019s offer of more permanent housing. She said it was \u201ctime to be out\u201d of the cave. \u201cI will drop it like it\u2019s hot,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is not no life adventure for me. We\u2019re just passing through.\u201d City outreach workers stopped by a few days earlier, she said, and had the people in the encampment fill out paperwork needed to get apartments. Her boyfriend, who would give his name only as Country, was more skeptical of the offer. \u201cThis is America,\u201d he said as he loaded 12 garbage bags full of cans and bottles onto a large rolling cart. \u201cThis is living off the land. That\u2019s how we built this thing.\u201d The largest group of street homeless identified by city workers, 195, is in Manhattan, officials said, spread over 30 locations. In the Bronx there are 54 people living at 12 sites; in Brooklyn, workers identified 45 people in 10 areas; in Queens they found 40 people at 10 sites; and in Staten Island, they identified 24 people gathering at 11 spots. The city estimates that it will take six months to a year to clear the often-squalid locations, which will then be secured with fencing or other methods, said Mr. Hess, who appeared with the mayor at a news conference after Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s speech. Both men emphasized that they would not forcibly remove people, pointing out that there are legal barriers to doing so. \u201cThe objective is not in any way to force people from one area to another,\u201d Mr. Hess said. \u201cIt is to take a social service intervention strategy approach to help people make a decision to move from these very unhealthy encampments.\u201d Two years ago, Mr. Bloomberg pledged to create the 12,000 units of supportive housing, in addition to 21,000 built over the previous two decades. On Monday, he said the money had been secured to keep his promise. He also said that the city would funnel an extra $10 million into HomeBase, which helps people to stay where they live by interceding with landlords to head off eviction, making temporary loans for rent or helping obtain needed job referrals, health care or other services. Mr. Bloomberg faced a receptive audience, which interrupted his speech with applause more than a dozen times. As if to anticipate criticism of his efforts, he used the address to take several jabs at some advocates for the homeless, who have been a frequent thorn in the side of his and previous administrations, suing the city to force it to change its policies. \u201cTo rid our society of homelessness we must first liberate ourselves from the chains of conventional wisdom, from the fetters of political correctness, from the tyranny of the advocates and their unwillingness to admit that we\u2019re ever making progress,\u201d the mayor said. ", "keyword": "Bloomberg Michael R;Homeless Persons;Housing;Department of Homeless Services;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0150452", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/09/25", "title": "Cerberus in Talks to Buy Remainder of Chrysler", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 Cerberus Capital Management said Wednesday that it was negotiating to buy Daimler AG\u2019s 19.9-percent stake in Chrysler , a move that could pave the way for further changes at the American automaker. Cerberus bought 80.1 percent of Chrysler a year ago for $7.4 billion, ending the troubled nine-year marriage between Daimler and Chrysler. Since then, Chrysler\u2019s automotive operations have struggled amid speculation that Cerberus might be looking to sell the business or align Chrysler with a foreign automaker. Cerberus has repeatedly said that it has a long-term investment plan for Chrysler. But industry analysts viewed the buyout of Daimler\u2019s stake as a necessary step toward a larger deal. \u201cIt looks like they are cleaning Chrysler up for a deal with somebody else,\u201d said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Cerberus said in a statement that it approached Daimler about acquiring its stake and the discussions were continuing. A Cerberus spokesman, Peter Duda, declined to elaborate on the talks. A Daimler spokesman, Han Tjan, confirmed that negotiations were continuing, but did not provide further details. The acquisition of Chrysler last year was considered a bold but risky move for Cerberus, a leading private-equity firm with growing interests in the automotive sector. But high gas prices and a soft economy have been tough on Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit\u2019s Big Three automakers. Chrysler\u2019s United States sales have fallen 24 percent this year, as consumers have fled from its core truck products into smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Because it is privately owned, Chrysler is not required to release its financial results. The company has said it lost $400 million in the first quarter, but has not provided any updates since. Under Cerberus\u2019s ownership, Chrysler has been cutting jobs and vehicle production to match its shrinking market share. Robert L. Nardelli, Chrysler\u2019s chairman, and his executive team have also been aggressively pursuing alliances and joint ventures with other automakers. A buyout of Daimler\u2019s stake could make it easier for Cerberus either to sell Chrysler or enter an alliance involving an equity exchange with another automaker. \u201cIt gives Cerberus more exit options,\u201d said John Casesa, a principal in the consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group. \u201cIt clearly would make it easier to sell the business.\u201d The spokesmen for Daimler and Chrysler gave no timetable for the talks regarding Daimler\u2019s remaining stake. In its statement, Cerberus said \u201cexisting industrial relationships\u201d between the two automakers would continue even if the transaction is completed. Chrysler, for example, is expected to use components developed by the Mercedes-Benz unit of Daimler for the next generation of its Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utility vehicle. Like its American rivals General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, Chrysler is hoping for a cash infusion from a proposed $25 billion federal loan program to help meet tougher fuel-economy standards. From a business standpoint, Chrysler is banking heavily on the introduction of its new Dodge Ram pickup this fall to improve its sagging sales. The company also surprised analysts and competitors this week by introducing three potential electric vehicles, one of which Chrysler said will go on sale by 2010.", "keyword": "Chrysler LLC;Cerberus Capital Management;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Automobiles;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Reform and Reorganization"}
{"id": "ny0212568", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2017/01/12", "title": "Obama Ends Exemption for Cubans Who Arrive Without Visas", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama said Thursday that he was terminating the 22-year-old policy that has allowed Cubans who arrived on United States soil without visas to remain in the country and gain legal residency, an unexpected move long sought by the Cuban government. \u201cEffective immediately, Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally and do not qualify for humanitarian relief will be subject to removal, consistent with U.S. law and enforcement priorities,\u201d Mr. Obama said in a statement . \u201cBy taking this step, we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries.\u201d The move places a finishing touch on Mr. Obama\u2019s efforts as president to end a half-century of hostility between the United States and Cuba and to establish normalized relations and diplomatic ties with a government American presidents have long sought to isolate and punish. The action came through a new Department of Homeland Security regulation and a deal with the Cuban government, which Mr. Obama said had agreed to accept the return of its citizens. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve agreed to is that the past is past, and the future will be different,\u201d said Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary. \u201cThis is us repealing a policy unique to Cuba given the nature of the relationship 20 years ago, which is very different right now.\u201d The so-called \u201cwet foot, dry foot\u201d policy, which dates to 1995, owes its name to its unusual rules, which require Cubans caught trying to reach the United States by sea to return home, yet allow those who make it onto American soil to stay and eventually apply for legal, permanent residency. It was one way in which the United States tried to weaken Fidel Castro\u2019s government, by welcoming tens of thousands of Cubans fleeing repression. In recent years, however, it has become a magnet for economic refugees, enticing many Cubans to make a perilous journey to the United States, where they enjoy a status unlike migrants from any other country. \u201cThe exceptionalism of the \u2018wet foot, dry foot\u2019 policy toward Cuba is a relic of the Cold War, and this decision by the administration is really its final effort to normalize an area of interaction between Cuba and the United States, migration, that is clearly in need of normalization,\u201d said Peter Kornbluh, a co-author of \u201cBack Channel to Cuba,\u201d which recounts the secret negotiations between the United States and Cuban governments that forged the policy. But the change drew sharp criticism from opponents of Mr. Obama\u2019s move to thaw United States relations with Cuba, who argued it would reward dictators in Cuba, ignoring their human rights abuses. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement will only serve to tighten the noose the Castro regime continues to have around the neck of its own people,\u201d Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said in a statement . He said Congress had not been consulted on the move, and he added, \u201cThe Obama administration seeks to pursue engagement with the Castro regime at the cost of ignoring the present state of torture and oppression, and its systematic curtailment of freedom.\u201d Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, who led clandestine negotiations that produced the 2014 opening, said most Cubans who came to the United States in the past \u201cabsolutely had to leave\u201d Cuba \u201cfor political purposes.\u201d Now, he said, the flow is largely of people seeking greater economic opportunity. Ending the policy, he added, is a reflection of Mr. Obama\u2019s view that, ultimately, the rise of a new generation of Cubans pressing for change in their own country is vital to bringing about change there. \u201cIt\u2019s important that Cuba continue to have a young, dynamic population that are agents of change,\u201d Mr. Rhodes said. Jorge Mas, the chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, said the changes would force Cuba\u2019s leaders to be more responsive to their citizens. \u201cPeople may be initially upset at not being able to have this way of getting out of Cuba, but ultimately, the solution for Cuba is people fighting for change in Cuba,\u201d Mr. Mas said. The change in policy essentially guts the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which assumed that Cubans were political refugees who needed protection and allowed those who remained in the United States for more than a year to become legal residents. Obama administration officials urged Congress on Thursday to repeal the measure, but in the interim, by eliminating the policy that automatically afforded parole to Cubans arriving in the United States, they have essentially denied Cuban migrants the opportunity to take advantage of its benefits. Cuba, likewise, still has a law in place that denies re-entry to migrants once they have been gone for four years or more; Mr. Rhodes said officials in Havana have pledged to repeal it once the United States Congress scraps the Cuban Adjustment Act. Cubans who believe they will be persecuted if they return home will still be permitted to apply for political asylum when they reach the United States. According to the agreement, which was signed on Thursday in Havana, the Cuban government said it would accept 2,746 people who fled in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 back into the country, and consider accepting back others on a case-by-case basis. The Obama administration also eliminated the Cuban Medical Parole program, in which Cuban medical professionals stationed in international missions could defect and get fast-tracked visas to the United States. Obama administration officials had initially said they were not planning to change the policy after efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. But the thaw prompted speculation that once diplomatic relations resumed \u2014 as they did in 2015 \u2014 the arrangement would end. On Thursday, the officials said they had deliberately played down talk of revising the policy for fear of setting off an even larger exodus from the island nation. The number of Cubans trying to arrive by sea surged after the United States and Cuba announced the decision to restore diplomatic relations in 2014. In the 2014 fiscal year, almost 4,000 Cubans either landed or were caught. Two years later, the number shot up to 7,411, according to the Coast Guard. The number of Cubans who have since begun to arrive in the United States by land has also soared in recent years. The number of Cubans who arrived at the Southwest border has increased more than fivefold since 2009. Last year, almost 55,000 Cubans arrived nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security said. Kevin Appleby of the Center for Migration Studies of New York praised the specific change, while questioning the broader rules covering asylum. \u201cThe good news is that it ensures equal treatment between Cubans and asylum-seekers from other nations,\u201d he said. \u201cThe bad news is that our asylum system is broken and does not afford adequate due process and protection to those who need it.\u201d Phil Peters, president of the Cuba Research Center, said that the number of Cubans entering the United States is actually much higher because tens of thousands more overstay their visitor visas and still others migrate legally. \u201cThis is a favor to Trump because it\u2019s a tough measure to take, but it\u2019s the right measure to take,\u201d Mr. Peters said. \u201cThese are economic migrants coming here that, unlike any other nationality, get a big package of government benefits without any justification.\u201d There was a mixed reaction among Cubans in Havana to news of the sudden change in policy. Some said they felt its repeal was long overdue. Others thought the impact would be widely felt among Cubans still hoping to leave their island. Michel, 33, who declined to give his last name for fear of running afoul of the government, said he tried to escape on a makeshift boat in the early 2000s, but the vessel broke down halfway to the Florida Keys. Since then, he has given up on his desire to move to the United States. But he knows many Cubans who still hope to leave and who would be devastated by the change in policy. \u201cThis is going to make a lot of people\u2019s lives very hard,\u201d he said. Alberto Herrero, 58, a high school biology teacher, applauded the move by the Obama administration, saying the previous regulation was \u201can unfair law. It\u2019s unfair to the rest of the world\u2019s people, especially those in Latin America.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s exclusive to us, and that\u2019s not fair to the world,\u201d he said, adding that he hoped the removal of the policy was a signal of a re-evaluation of other outdated measures taken by the Americans against Cuba. \u201cMaybe other restrictions will be lifted, like the embargo,\u201d he added.", "keyword": "US Foreign Policy;Cuba;Immigration;Barack Obama;Homeland Security"}
{"id": "ny0031247", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/06/01", "title": "Yankees\u2019 Wait for Reinforcements Revives Patience at the Plate", "abstract": "In last three Subway Series games, the Yankees failed to draw a walk. The impatient approach was an indictment of a lineup filled with replacement players who had filled in admirably for a core of injured stars. While it would have been ambitious to say that Kevin Youkilis and Mark Teixeira would make an immediate impact when they returned to the lineup on Friday against the Boston Red Sox, Manager Joe Girardi eagerly looked forward to having two players who would make pitchers work. \u201cThese guys grind out at-bats,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cI think their impact is big. We need to keep them healthy.\u201d In their first at-bats in the Yankees\u2019 4-1 win, Youkilis and Teixeira each saw seven pitches from the ace Jon Lester, a patience that would set the tone for the rest of the evening. By the end of the night, the Yankees had drawn four walks and the offense once again seemed patient. \u201cI think when you get two guys that grind out at-bats, I think that affects other guys in the lineup,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cIt changes our lineup. It gives us a better balance.\u201d Teixeira, who made his season debut after injuring his wrist in March while practicing with Team USA for the World Baseball Classic, said that he made it a point to see as many pitches as possible in his first at-bat. In the second inning, Teixeira saw several cutters and sinkers before finally walking on a 3-and-2 fastball. Teixeira scored the Yankees\u2019 first run on a single by Jayson Nix. \u201cThat was a good at-bat for me and the team,\u201d Teixeira said. Youkilis, who faced Boston, his former team, in his first game back after missing more than a month with an injured lower back, would not address the topic of his old team. \u201cNext question,\u201d Youkilis said when asked if it continued to be peculiar playing against Boston. Youkilis burned the Red Sox in the fifth inning with a run-scoring single, which gave the Yankees a 3-0 lead. Teixeira and Youkilis combined to go 1 for 7 with a walk, a run and a run batted in. It was not the immediate impact on the scoreboard that will be expected from them as the season progresses, but for a first impression, it was fine. Both players realized that it would take some time for them to get back to their old selves. \u201cPhysically, the timing is going to come,\u201d Teixeira said. \u201cMentally, I want to see a lot of pitches and swing at strikes.\u201d Neither player has any physical limitations. Teixeira said he iced only his wrist after the game. Girardi said he expected both to be back in the lineup again on Saturday. But Youkilis probably will not play the field until Sunday\u2019s series finale. Youkilis said he was not bothered by continuing to be the designated hitter. \u201cI get paid a lot of money to play baseball,\u201d Youkilis said. \u201cI\u2019m living my dream.\u201d Youkilis said he played many five-inning extended spring training games, in which he hit every inning, and they prepared him for the grind of returning. But he joked, \u201cThe pitchers are much better here.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Yankees;Red Sox;Mark Teixeira;Kevin Youkilis"}
{"id": "ny0206810", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/06/18", "title": "Overhaul Largely Ignores Rating Agencies Like Moody\u2019s", "abstract": "Four stars, two thumbs up, a must read: Rave reviews like those might seem a bit suspect if they were paid for by the restaurateurs, movie makers and authors being reviewed. But that is essentially how things work in the credit-rating industry, a central culprit of the financial crisis that, to its critics\u2019 dismay, now seems to be escaping serious change. In the overhaul of financial regulation proposed by the Obama administration on Wednesday, rating services \u2014 which, during the boom, stamped high ratings on many subprime securities \u2014 will avoid the radical changes their detractors have urged. While the administration is proposing some modest changes, none addresses what many see as the central problem: Services like Moody\u2019s and Standard & Poor\u2019s are paid by the companies whose securities they are evaluating. It is as if Hollywood studios paid movie critics to review their would-be blockbusters. Despite calls to shake up the ratings establishment, the industry\u2019s \u201cissuer-pay\u201d system is deeply entrenched. And, while the services have taken some steps to mitigate conflicts, they reject the idea that they should have been more vigilant. \u201cThis is not an effort to remake the industry,\u201d Jerome Fons, a former managing director of credit policy at Moody\u2019s, said of the administration\u2019s proposals. \u201cIf we believe the system is broken, this doesn\u2019t offer a fix.\u201d The rating services play a crucial role in the capital markets by rating everything from plain-vanilla corporate bonds to trickier \u201cstructured\u201d investments. By law, banks must take ratings into account when investing in bonds. Big money managers often base investment guidelines on them. But over the last decade, the rating services helped Wall Street repackage mortgages into securities, thereby fostering the spread of risky lending that eventually imperiled the economy. Many securities that had been rated AAA are now worthless. Yet now the agencies appear poised to retain their lucrative, and well-protected, perch. Many of the proposals laid out Wednesday are vague principles or paper standards that go little beyond changes being contemplated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, or even the rating agencies themselves. The proposals call for the agencies to improve disclosure and release more detailed information, as well as establish policies for \u201cmanaging and disclosing conflicts of interest.\u201d But the plan does not alter the issuer-pay model, whereby the companies selling securities pay to have them rated. Nor does it encourage competitors to enter the industry, which many regard as an oligopoly. The proposal does call for regulators to reduce their reliance on agency ratings when deciding whether structured investments are safe enough for banks, insurance companies, pension funds and money market mutual fund investors. Regulators should encourage more independent analysis, a Treasury official said, but the administration did not propose an alternative standard. Many of the other proposals rehash \u201cbest practices\u201d that the major agencies were either moving toward or had already begun to employ. For example, the proposal calls for disclosing ratings methodology and the types of risks that the services do \u2014 and do not \u2014 assess. It also would require the agencies to distinguish between their grades for complex mortgage-related investments and more traditional bonds, one of the few elements of the proposal that the industry strongly opposes. \u201cIt\u2019s like a scarlet letter,\u201d George Miller, the head of the American Securitization Forum, said of the possible designation. \u201cIt indicates that there is something to be aware of, but it doesn\u2019t tell you what it is.\u201d He also said such a step would be a burden for some investors, who would have to rewrite their investment guidelines. But the proposals do little to address the behavior that contributed to the crisis, industry critics maintain. \u201cLacking any significant performance history, rating agencies rated unratable products for regulatory approval and escaped liability for doing so under First Amendment protection,\u201d said Joseph Mason, a finance professor at Louisiana State University. \u201cNothing in the Treasury proposal changes that.\u201d The ratings proposals are part of a broader plan to revive and overhaul the securitization markets, which supply roughly two-thirds of the credit in the economy (banks provide the rest, with loans). To keep banks and other lenders from bundling the riskiest loans, the administration proposed requiring loan originators to keep 5 percent of loans that they package, so the banks have their own money at stake. While that step, in theory, should make banks more careful, industry experts said they were unsure if it would. After all, in the current crisis, many banks got stuck holding too many risky mortgage bonds. \u201cThe reason why so many investment banks got into difficulty was that they did have skin in the game,\u201d said Lawrence J. White, a New York University economics professor. But the proposal gives regulators the flexibility to adjust the size of the banks\u2019 interest in the securities and leaves room for institutions to offset some risk to ensure they are sound. Given the failures of the credit rating industry \u2014 and the conflicts laid bare by the mortgage collapse \u2014 some industry experts said the Obama administration is missing a rare chance to rework the industry. \u201cIt\u2019s the equivalent of grabbing the rating agencies by the lapels, shaking them, and saying \u2018do a better job,\u2019 \u201d said Professor White. \u201cThis was a big-time missed opportunity.\u201d", "keyword": "Banks and Banking;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Ratings and Rating Systems;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Moody's Corporation;Standard & Poor's Corp"}
{"id": "ny0237876", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2010/06/08", "title": "For ESPN and Univision, the U.S. Is a Soccer Country", "abstract": "ESPN and Univision are paying more than ever to carry the World Cup in the United States, proof that the quadrennial soccer tournament that begins Friday keeps increasing in value. \u201cIf you ranked World Cup viewing by countries going back to 1998, the U.S. ranked 23rd,\u201d said Kevin Alavy, director of Initiative Sports Futures, a London-based analysis firm. \u201cIn 2002, the U.S. jumped to 13th, and in 2006, it jumped again to 8th place. And we expect America to keep on jumping.\u201d In 2006, the ESPN-ESPN2-ABC broadcasts of the World Cup reached 70.2 million viewers while Univision reached 29.5 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. If soccer isn\u2019t as popular in the United States as it is in Europe and South America, it is more firmly established than ever. And ESPN\u2019s World Cup marketing push is the largest it has undertaken for a single event. \u201cWe\u2019re definitely selling the World Cup as if the U.S. has been converted to soccer,\u201d said Ed Erhardt, the president of ESPN customer marketing and sales. \u201cIt\u2019s a more diverse country than it\u2019s ever been.\u201d ESPN is paying $100 million for the rights to two World Cups and two Women\u2019s World Cups through 2014 \u2014 up from $11 million in 1994 and $22 million in 1998. For the package of rights that included the 2006 World Cup, ESPN got a break. Soccer United Marketing, created by Major League Soccer, paid $40 million to FIFA, soccer\u2019s world governing body, for the United States rights, then rented the time on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC to show the games. Univision is paying $325 million for the current package of domestic Spanish-language rights, up from its previous fee of about $125 million. It is allocating about $155 million of its total payment to this year\u2019s tournament. \u201cUnivision is the home of the World Cup in so many ways,\u201d said Cesar Conde, the president of Univision Networks. \u201cWe\u2019ve had it since 1978. It\u2019s a real passion point for our audience, our talent and our employees.\u201d Asked if Univision would make a profit from the World Cup, Conde was noncommittal. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly important event that has so many benefits for us \u2014 monetary, tangible, intangible,\u201d he said. Univision and ESPN said they were each close to selling out their commercial time. \u201cWe\u2019ve exceeded all our expectations for every part of the portfolio,\u201d Erhardt said. Most of the 30 percent jump in ad revenue on ESPN.com is attributable to the World Cup, he said. It is not surprising that with so many advertisers in ESPN\u2019s World Cup fold that the current issue of ESPN magazine is its thickest ever. John Skipper, ESPN\u2019s executive vice president for content, said that the challenge of paying a good-size rights fee (although it is cheap compared to many other events it has) and selling the advertising would be \u201cfinancially advantageous\u201d because it lets ESPN unleash its various platforms. \u201cWe\u2019re not just doing matches, but 230 hours of studio shows, including a daily preview, daily wrap-ups,\u201d Skipper said. \u201cWe have three networks, three digital sites, radio. Four years ago, what we did was fairly modest.\u201d ESPN and Univision are offering strikingly similar viewing options. Among ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, all 64 games will be shown live; all will be available in high definition, and all will be streamed on ESPN3.com . Twenty-five games will be carried in 3-D. Univision and its sibling network, TeleFutura, will carry all of the games live, in HD, and stream them at UnivisionFutbol.com . \u201cWe bring our blood, sweat and tears to cover this event,\u201d Conde said. \u201cSoccer runs through our veins.\u201d Univision has not had to change how it presents soccer. Its announcers bring an intense patter to nearly everything they say and draw in some viewers who do not understand Spanish. \u201cThey feel it\u2019s painful not to be engaged,\u201d Conde said. \u201cSo they say, \u2018I\u2019m tuning to you guys even if I don\u2019t understand what they\u2019re saying.\u2019 \u201d ESPN is not fretting about defections to Univision. But viewer satisfaction and lack of deep expertise was enough of a concern to import announcers from Britain (Martin Tyler, Ian Darke, Derek Rae and Adrian Healey). The decision atones for the decision to use Dave O\u2019Brien, a baseball announcer who had never called a soccer game until months before he became ESPN\u2019s lead 2006 World Cup announcer. O\u2019Brien was criticized for mistakes he made and his lack of knowledge about soccer\u2019s nuances. Skipper said his decision to hire British relief was made after the European Championship in 2008, when Healey and Rae Anglicized ESPN\u2019s broadcasts. \u201cWe didn\u2019t try to Americanize the games or overexplain what\u2019s going on,\u201d Skipper said. \u201cWe assumed there were sophisticated viewers and it worked.\u201d Skipper\u2019s inclination sounds right. Why not seek experienced soccer voices from places where soccer is more popular? Only one American, John Harkes, will be analyzing ESPN\u2019s games from South Africa. His colleagues are the former players Efan Ekoku, an English-born Nigerian, and Robbie Mustoe, an Englishman. None of the studio analysts, save for Alexi Lalas, are Americans. Asked if ESPN had gone too far in its de-Americanization policy, Skipper said, \u201cI think people will be happy with our breadth of talent.\u201d", "keyword": "World Cup 2010 (Soccer);Television;ESPN;Univision"}
{"id": "ny0176825", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/09/02", "title": "Suffolk Loses Ground in \u201906 Census Report", "abstract": "SUFFOLK COUNTY dropped to 29th in median household income in 2006, from 21st in 2005, on a national list of large counties in a 2006 census report released last week, and its reported poverty rate jumped. Nassau County, however, climbed four spots in the ranking of income to 10th, and its poverty rate was unchanged. Nassau had the highest median income among counties in New York in 2006, at $85,994. The rankings come from the American Community Survey, which reported results for 786 counties with populations of more than 65,000. The import of the new numbers was not fully clear last week, because changes in the way the Census Bureau reports data make it hard to compare 2005 and 2006 directly. But economists said the numbers might reflect a growing strain among families who have moved to the periphery of the region\u2019s suburbs. \u201cThe outlying suburbs generally have the youngest families, the most first-time home buyers, and these are people who are operating closest to the financial margins,\u201d said Pearl M. Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, a business group. In a year in which the national poverty rate dropped for the first time in President Bush\u2019s tenure, Suffolk\u2019s rate climbed to 6.5 percent, from 4.8 percent in 2005. The 2006 numbers at the county level include people living in institutions, like group homes and treatment centers, who were not included in 2005, and it was unclear what impact the change might have had. Nassau\u2019s poverty rate was unchanged at 5.2 percent. \u201cNassau has a large proportion of mature households in their prime earning years,\u201d Dr. Kamer said. \u201cThese people have more discretionary income.\u201d Several counties on the edges of the region, like Warren in New Jersey and Putnam and Rockland in New York, experienced increases in reported poverty rates and apparent decreases in median income. The income changes in most cases were within the margin of error of the census surveys, meaning that there is a possibility that the changes were a result of chance. Putnam\u2019s median income, $81,907, ranked 14th nationally in 2006, down from 12th in 2005. Rockland\u2019s income, $76,710, was 30th, down from 18th in 2005. But, like Nassau, Westchester\u2019s income ranking climbed, to 35th from 37th. Its median income was $75,472. Westchester\u2019s poverty rate also declined, to 7 percent from 7.9 percent. \u201cThe demographic segment that\u2019s growing fastest is the baby boom echo, the group in their 20s,\u201d said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. \u201cThose are young households, and they\u2019re probably below the median, so they may be bringing the median down in some outlying areas.\u201d New York City\u2019s poverty rate was virtually unchanged at 19.1 percent. The county with the highest median income in the country was Fairfax in Virginia, at $100,318, and Loudoun County in Virginia was second, at $99,371. The two counties, both suburbs of Washington, were reversed in 2005, with Loudoun at the top. Five of the top 10 were suburbs of Washington and four were in the New York metropolitan area. Three counties in New Jersey had higher incomes than Nassau: Hunterdon, with a median income of $93,297; Somerset, at $91,688; and Morris, at $89,587. The only county in the top 10 outside the Washington and New York metropolitan areas was Douglas County, Colo., a Denver suburb where the median income was $92,125.", "keyword": "Economic Conditions and Trends;Census;Suburbs"}
{"id": "ny0039358", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/04/17", "title": "Plants That Practice Genetic Engineering", "abstract": "In the debate over genetically modified crops, one oft-said word is \u201cunnatural.\u201d People typically use it when describing how scientists move genes from one species into another. But nature turns out to be its own genetic engineer. Genes have moved from one species of plant to another for millions of years. Scientists describe a spectacular case this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which ferns acquired a gene for sensing light from a moss-like plant called hornwort. Gaining the gene appears to have enabled the ferns to thrive in shady forests. The new research builds on a 2004 study on ferns carried out by Kathleen M. Pryer of Duke University and her colleagues. They traced the evolutionary history of ferns by comparing samples of DNA from 45 fern species. The scientists found that roughly 100 million years ago, ferns exploded into a number of new lineages. Eighty percent of today\u2019s fern species can be traced to that evolutionary burst. Intriguingly, these successful ferns also evolved a new kind of light-sensing protein. Known as a neochrome, it makes ferns sensitive to dim levels of light. These neochromes may have enabled ferns to thrive on shady forest floors. In 2011, one of Dr. Pryer\u2019s graduate students, Fay-Wei Li, set out to discover the origin of neochromes. It was possible, he speculated, that an older light sensor that was sensitive to brighter light became adapted to dim forest shade. To find that ancient gene, Mr. Li examined the neochrome gene, and then he looked at genes for other light sensors in ferns. But as hard as Mr. Li looked, he couldn\u2019t find a light-sensor gene in ferns that was closely related to the neochrome gene. \u201cI remember walking to my adviser\u2019s office and telling her my Ph.D. was doomed because I couldn\u2019t figure it out,\u201d Mr. Li said in an interview. But just as Mr. Li was despairing, a team of scientists at the University of Alberta unveiled a new database of DNA from hundreds of plant species. Mr. Li renewed his search, searching this new cache of genes for a neochrome-like gene. He found one. To his surprise, however, the gene was not in a fern. Instead, it belonged to a hornwort. These primitive plants, which lack roots or stems, grow in mats on damp banks or on trees. It was a strange connection to find because hornworts are only distantly related to ferns. \u201cThe first thing that came to my mind was that this must be a contamination,\u201d Mr. Li said. A neochrome gene must have somehow been mixed into a sample of hornwort DNA. The only way to know for sure was to look at more hornwort DNA. Mr. Li obtained hornwort tissue from other scientists and gathered some of his own from a roadside ditch near Duke. In all five species, he found variants of the neochrome gene. Comparing all the data, Mr. Li and his colleagues came up with an unexpected hypothesis for how ferns got their neochromes. Neochromes did not gradually evolve in ancient ferns. Instead, a single lineage of ferns picked up the neochrome gene from hornworts about 180 million years ago. Mr. Li speculates that the transfer took place between a hornwort and a fern growing in intimate contact. Once a fern picked up the neochrome gene, his research indicates, it moved into other fern species as well. It\u2019s possible that acquiring this gene enabled ferns to thrive in dark forests. \u201cThe results look to be strong and convincing,\u201d said Jeffrey D. Palmer , an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Dr. Palmer has found evidence for DNA moving between plant species, as have other researchers in recent years. Those previous studies suggested that plants sometimes replaced one of their genes with a version from another species. \u201cIt\u2019s like swapping out one part of a machine for another part made in another country,\u201d said Dr. Palmer. The fern study, on the other hand, shows that plants have also gained functions by acquiring new genes from other plants. And Dr. Palmer expects that Mr. Li\u2019s study will prompt other researchers to hunt for other cases. \u201cWe\u2019re bound to find more,\u201d Dr. Palmer said.", "keyword": "Flowers and Plants;Genetics and Heredity;Evolution;Kathleen M Pryer;Fay-Wei Li"}
{"id": "ny0101757", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/12/30", "title": "Deutsche Bank Joins Retreat From China", "abstract": "Deutsche Bank is joining peers in cashing out of China. The German lender is selling a $3.8 billion, 19.9 percent holding, in Hua Xia Bank to local insurer PICC Property and Casualty. Like such rivals as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch before it, Deutsche Bank is crystallizing a solid return \u2014 while acknowledging that minority stakes on the mainland are of little use. Given China\u2019s troubles, this is a less-than-ideal time to sell. Shares of the bank, which is listed in Shenzhen, trade at just 6.5 times forward earnings, or 0.9 times book value, both roughly one-third below their 10-year average, Thomson Reuters StarMine data shows. But the foray was still worth the effort. In total, Deutsche Bank invested about 1.3 billion euros from 2006 to 2011. The final sale price will depend on how Hua Xia\u2019s shares trade. But at the midpoint of the stated range, \u20ac3.45 billion, plus \u20ac400 million or so of previous dividends, Deutsche Bank will have nearly tripled its money on a gross basis. That is not to be sniffed at, even if taxes on dividends and capital gains will presumably cut the net return significantly. Goldman Sachs made about 3.5 times its money investing in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, albeit over a shorter time frame. Moreover, Deutsche Bank gets a clear capital benefit: a 30- or 40-basis point uplift to its Common Equity Tier 1 ratio, currently at 11.5 percent. Basel III rules make holding small stakes in other financial institutions an extra burden. The German bank is also now off the hook should Hua Xia need shareholders\u2019 help in shoring up its balance sheet. Shareholders will be heartened in other ways, too. Minority positions with little influence, and no prospect of future control, look badly out of place when banks are struggling to make sustainable returns. This holds doubly true given China\u2019s slowdown. The era of Western investment in Chinese banks is not quite over \u2014 HSBC is a notable holdout, firmly committed to its stake in Bank of Communications. But further retreats are likely, such as a sale by Standard Chartered of its holding in Agricultural Bank of China. The exodus will go on.", "keyword": "Deutsche Bank;China;Mergers and Acquisitions"}
{"id": "ny0108359", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2012/05/20", "title": "Fallow Years Leave Todd Demsey on Margins of Golf World", "abstract": "IRVING, Tex. \u2014 Todd Demsey walked onto the first tee at T.P.C. Four Seasons Resort at Las Colinas on Thursday dressed in an off-the-rack golf shirt and khaki pants held up by a white cotton belt with a nondescript buckle. His clubs sat in a vintage lightweight leather golf bag with one divider, two pockets and no logos. On the brand-conscious PGA Tour, Demsey looked out of place, like a muni golfer who had crashed the Byron Nelson Classic. The truth is, few pros have a better pedigree than Demsey, who won an N.C.A.A. championship, a Pacific-10 Conference title and the Pacific Coast Amateur while at Arizona State, where he was a four-time All-America selection. Demsey was pegged for stardom when he turned professional in 1995. A chronic back injury and two operations for a benign brain tumor have limited him to two tours on the PGA circuit. \u201cHe has a lot of game,\u201d said Phil Mickelson , a recent inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame and a former teammate of Demsey\u2019s at Arizona State. \u201cHe is a really, really good ball striker and has always had a lot of talent, been a tough competitor, and he and I have had great matches over the years. I have always expected and still expect to see him succeed.\u201d On the tour, the difference between success and failure can be harder to judge than where the fairway ends and the first cut of rough begins. Demsey\u2019s health problems clipped his practice and preparation, which pruned his confidence, which curtailed his consistency. David Duval, who lost the 1993 N.C.A.A. individual title to Demsey by one stroke, is ranked 676th in the world, down from No. 1 in 1999. \u201cI\u2019ve had my share of setbacks, so I know what it\u2019s like,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough. I do admire the work ethic, the keeping at it, the belief in himself that he\u2019s shown.\u201d For more than three years, Demsey has eked out a living on the margins of the Nationwide Tour and in lesser pro events that are a day\u2019s drive from his Arizona base. With his 40th birthday looming at the end of this month and a wife and two children under the age 6 to support back home in Scottsdale, Demsey feels a sense of urgency that his unhurried stride does not betray. Having regained his health, he has turned his attention to reclaiming his spot among golf\u2019s elite. \u201cI\u2019m never too far off,\u201d Demsey said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of letting myself play well. You just have to go play golf and not worry about everything else, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do.\u201d He added: \u201cI feel I have a lot of years left in me. Physically, I feel the best I\u2019ve ever felt.\u201d He gambled that his game was ready this past week, shelling out $100 to enter Monday qualifying and a shot at one of four spots. Demsey beat out several dozen other golfers to secure his place in the field. Playing in the last group off No. 1, in a threesome that included Steven Bowditch and Charlie Beljan, he started inauspiciously, with an errant drive that led to a bogey. After making another bogey, on the third hole, Demsey was approached by the volunteer who was carrying the walking scoreboard for his group. Demsey listened with growing interest as the man described his receiving a diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor a few years ago, his subsequent surgery and continuing recovery. \u201cI probably wasn\u2019t in the mood to start chatting, but I\u2019m glad he came up to me like that,\u201d Demsey said. \u201cListening to him tell his story, it sort of settled me down.\u201d Demsey reeled off four consecutive birdies on the front and three on the back nine on his way to a three-under-par 67. After he signed his scorecard, he was walking toward the clubhouse when a fan approached him and said: \u201cIt was a pleasure watching you play today. I\u2019ve heard bits and pieces of your story. It\u2019s very inspiring.\u201d He hears that a lot, Demsey said. \u201cI\u2019d rather be known for doing good things on the golf course,\u201d he said. In Arizona, Demsey\u2019s college coach, Randy Lein, had tracked his round on the Internet. Lein is never surprised when Demsey shoots a low score, he said, because Demsey\u2019s swing has changed little since he set a course-record 11-under 61 at Desert Mountain Renegade, then rated by Golf World as the toughest course in the United States, as a redshirt freshman in college. \u201cHe\u2019s one of the only guys where I can say I could watch him hit balls and feel as though I was getting better because he has such a rhythmic swing,\u201d Lein said by telephone. Demsey can repeat his swing, but could he duplicate his low score in the second round? That was the question gnawing at Lein, who said: \u201cIt\u2019s difficult because you\u2019ve got to be ready to play when you do have these opportunities. You have to be able to seize the moment.\u201d On Friday, Demsey made seven bogeys on his way to a 77 and missed the cut by two strokes. Instead of a potentially big payday, Demsey was staring at a shortfall because of his travel and lodging expenses for the week. Lein said, \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of people ask me, \u2018How does Todd afford to keep going out there?\u2019 \u201d When the question was conveyed to him, Demsey said: \u201cI guess people don\u2019t pay attention. I\u2019ve been a pro for 17 years and I\u2019ve made enough money to keep going. \u201cThe last two years have been really bad, but I\u2019m proud that I\u2019ve been able to play the game for a living and support my family. Not many people can do that.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Demsey Todd;Arizona State University;Mickelson Phil"}
{"id": "ny0233533", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/08/23", "title": "\u2018Lost\u2019 Memorabilia Draws Big Bids at Auction", "abstract": "SANTA MONICA, Calif. \u2014 Carrying a presale estimate of $400, a mangled piece of Oceanic Airlines fuselage \u2014 immediately identifiable to any fan of \u201cLost\u201d \u2014 came up for bids here on Saturday. Four paddles popped into the air, which was tinged with fake fog. \u201c$1,500! $2,000!\u201d the auctioneer shouted as offers climbed. James Comisar, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat, ultimately emerged the proud owner of a (very heavy) piece of television history by paying $3,000. \u201cAnything tightly related to that plane is going to emerge as iconic \u2014 the plane is the key to the whole show,\u201d said Mr. Comisar, who is a leading collector of TV memorabilia. Ultimately, no item proved to be too mundane at the circuslike auction of props and costumes that closed the door on \u201cLost,\u201d the celebrated castaway drama that ended in May on ABC. Collectors, dealers and fans \u2014 some in costume \u2014 were on track late Sunday to snap up every item for sale: 1,174 lots, with most entries containing multiple items. \u201cThis show is the new \u2018 Star Trek \u2019 when it comes to collecting,\u201d said Joseph Maddalena, the founder of Profiles in History, the auction house that mounted the event. A copy of \u201cWatership Down,\u201d read by the actor Josh Holloway in several episodes, sold for $3,300 (including a 20 percent buyer\u2019s fee) against an estimate of $300. A set of Oceanic Airlines-branded water bottles, seen in the pilot episode and estimated at $200, went for $1,680. Among the top sellers was a script signed by two of the program\u2019s creators, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. The script, estimated at $300, brought a frenzy of bidding \u2014 over 100 people were vying for it in person, on the telephone and over the Internet \u2014 and it sold for $18,000. Hurley\u2019s red-and-white Camaro, prominently featured in season three, was estimated at $15,000 and sold for $24,000. In decades past, TV studios threw away old props and costumes or recycled them for new programs. As fans salvaged items, a collecting market was born. In recent years, studios, under severe financial pressure, have grown more interested in auctioning show materials. Profiles in History said Saturday\u2019s session totaled about $900,000 with bids coming in from 35 countries. No total was available for the Sunday portion, which stretched into the evening, although it appeared to be on track to exceed $1 million. Several thousand people attended the auction, in a hangar at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport, although many fans came just to view an elaborately staged exhibition of the material up for sale. Set decorators and lighting designers from ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, had created a palm-tree jungle replete with waterfalls. That fake fog billowed from \u201cthe hatch,\u201d a set piece familiar to \u201cLost\u201d fans as the steel entrance to the Dharma Initiative bunker. A woman dressed as Mother, the adoptive parent of Jacob and the Man in Black \u2014 if you didn\u2019t watch the show, don\u2019t even ask \u2014 took a peek inside while her four children lay on the ground and spelled out the show\u2019s title with their bodies. (The children were all named after \u201cLost\u201d characters, one coincidentally, the other three deliberately.) \u201cI think it\u2019s terrific that fans have the chance to own and treasure these things,\u201d said Jessica Holmes, 28, a student from Long Beach who was dressed as a \u201cLost\u201d polar bear. Profiles in History, which has recently suffered a black eye from selling movie posters that turned out to be fake, came under scrutiny before the sale from collector sites like thePropBlog.com for misrepresenting items. Some props described as appearing on screen had not, for instance; Profiles in History eventually issued multiple corrections and clarifications on the catalog, which the auction house sold for $55. Some small items from \u201cLost\u201d were, well, lost \u2014 taken by cast members as souvenirs. Terry O\u2019Quinn, who played the outdoorsy John Locke on the show, has one of those narcotics-filled Virgin Mary statues from season one, for instance. Locke\u2019s knife \u2014 the main one used for filming \u2014 was donated to the Walt Disney Company\u2019s archives, which also has one of the show\u2019s Dharma vans. It is unusual for a studio to participate as fully in a sale as did ABC, which helped organize the auction into an experience worthy of charging $42 for admission (the entrance fee was waived for registered bidders). An ABC spokeswoman said an undisclosed portion of the auction proceeds would go to charities in Hawaii, where the series was taped. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely sad,\u201d said Noreen O\u2019Toole, a \u201cLost\u201d associate producer, as she watched the sale from the sidelines. \u201cBut this at least is a way for \u2018Lost\u2019 to live on in people\u2019s homes forever.\u201d", "keyword": "Lost (TV Program);Television;Auctions;Memorabilia and Souvenirs"}
{"id": "ny0202469", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/08/18", "title": "On Taconic Parkway, 20th-Century Design Meets 21st-Century Traffic", "abstract": "BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. \u2014 As it unfurls for more than 100 miles from the Kensico Dam in Westchester County to the Albany region, the Taconic State Parkway meanders north through suburbs and dense woods and on past meadows, gracious weekend homes and working farms. The Taconic, with its arching stone bridges and spectacular vistas, has long been regarded as one of the most scenic byways in the New York region. It is a leaf peeper\u2019s paradise, a city dweller\u2019s escape route to the country, a link to the Sunday drives of long ago. But on a Sunday three weeks ago, it was the scene of Westchester\u2019s deadliest car accident in 75 years when a Long Island woman, Diane Schuler , entered from the Pleasantville Road exit ramp here and drove the wrong way for nearly two miles. Accompanied by three nieces and her own two children, she eventually crashed her minivan head-on into a Chevy TrailBlazer carrying three men. All but Ms. Schuler\u2019s 5-year-old son were killed. There was nothing confusing about the signs at the exit ramp, which clearly warned \u201cDo Not Enter\u201d and \u201cOne Way,\u201d although the state added two \u201cWrong Way\u201d signs after the crash. And once Ms. Schuler, whom the authorities say was drunk and high on marijuana , got onto the parkway headed in the wrong direction, there was ample opportunity to get out of harm\u2019s way, by pulling onto a small shoulder or a median. Still, among its veteran travelers, the parkway has a reputation for being scary. At night, with no overhead street lights or illuminated shopping centers nearby, it is pitch dark, the deer staring blankly along its grassy fringes. In certain areas, particularly in Putnam County, the lanes are especially winding and narrow. Farther north, in Dutchess County, there are still several \u201cat grade\u201d intersections where drivers approaching the Taconic have only stop signs before they zip across four lanes of high-speed traffic. From 2004 through 2008, 18 people were killed along its 105 miles. Over the decades the number of accidents has jumped along with traffic volume, to 1,392 in 2007 from 847 in 1977, according to the State Department of Transportation. Last year the number of accidents dipped to 1,301. Nonetheless, compared with other state highways, the Taconic is a bit safer, having a slightly lower accident rate, calculated by the number of accidents per miles traveled. Last year, for example, the accident rate on the Taconic was 1.41 per million miles driven, compared with the statewide accident rate that year of 1.45 in urban areas and 1.79 in rural areas. For statistical purposes, the Taconic comprises a mix of urban and rural areas, according to Allison Ackerman, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Department. Transportation engineers have worked to make the parkway safer, through both tweaks and major renovations. Such upgrades began in the 1960s in Westchester County, the most heavily traveled portion, just around the time the parkway was finally completed. Beginning as a 30-mile extension of the Bronx River Parkway, the Taconic \u2014 named in the early 1940s after a geologic ridge \u2014 was designed and built in sections over nearly 40 years, starting in the 1920s. Over the years, the state has had to consider the competing challenges of speed and volume. Designed as a scenic roadway with recreational features like parks, campgrounds and swimming areas along its periphery, the Taconic evolved into a major commuter route between the capital region and Westchester County, which itself shifted from a pure suburb to a commercial center in its own right. \u201cWhen the parkway was first thought about in the 1920s, it was a different driving environment,\u201d said Richard Peters, a regional planning and program manager for the State Department of Transportation. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t drive as much or as fast, and there was less traffic. Now everybody\u2019s used to driving on an expressway or freeway where you have 12 lanes going 70 miles per hour.\u201d He added, \u201cThe Taconic requires you to pay attention.\u201d The speed limit was raised over the years to the current 55 miles an hour, but the reality is that many drivers on the Taconic push their cars to 70 and beyond. In the interest of safety and traffic flow, transportation officials have added lanes, shoulders, ramps and overpasses to portions of the Taconic. Since 2000, the Transportation Department has spent $103 million on such construction work. Engineers are now planning a new $20 million interchange and overpass for Pudding Street in Putnam County, one of the remaining at-grade crossings on the parkway. Signage on the Taconic is continually reviewed as well, Ms. Ackerman said. After the collision that killed eight people on July 26, the Westchester County executive, Andrew J. Spano, said he would \u201cdouble- and triple-check\u201d ramps and entrances on four county parkways, including the Bronx River, so that \u201cthere can be no question of whether you\u2019re entering or exiting.\u201d On Aug. 7, the state installed \u201cWrong Way\u201d signs about 100 feet down the long exit ramp that Ms. Schuler used to enter the parkway. Ms. Ackerman called the existing signage \u2014 two \u201cDo Not Enter\u201d signs and two \u201cOne Way\u201d signs \u2014 \u201cproper\u201d and \u201cfully in compliance\u201d with state guidelines. But the new signs will \u201cenhance drivers\u2019 perception of existing traffic patterns,\u201d she said. As they try to bring the Taconic into the 21st century, transportation officials are mindful that for many, the parkway is an important piece of the Hudson Valley\u2019s heritage, as much as the Gilded Age mansions along the river\u2019s shores. When installing a new overpass, for example, planners try to use stone facing instead of concrete. \u201cWe\u2019re always keeping two things in mind: safety and how do you keep it looking like a parkway,\u201d Mr. Peters said. \u201cThe parkway sits in the land; it doesn\u2019t overpower the land. It\u2019s like you\u2019re riding through nature. You just don\u2019t want to make it look like the Thruway.\u201d", "keyword": "Taconic State Parkway (NY);Schuler Diane;Accidents and Safety;Roads and Traffic;Drunken and Reckless Driving;Transportation Department"}
{"id": "ny0083517", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2015/10/07", "title": "Putting the Past Behind in China", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 The days of China\u2019s relying on export manufacturing and infrastructure construction as drivers of economic growth are gone. China\u2019s service sector is now larger than its manufacturing sector and growth of gross domestic product is slowing, fueling seismic shifts in current and future energy demand against a background of complex developmental and political factors. China\u2019s official G.D.P. growth in the second quarter of this year was 7 percent, but power demand growth for the same period was a mere 1.6 percent. Oil consumption is growing at half the rate of just a few years ago, and in the first four months of 2015, coal consumption dropped 8 percent year on year. On the surface, these numbers paint a picture of a more drastic slowdown than official G.D.P. statistics suggest. But the reality isn\u2019t that simple, said Zhou Xizhou, senior director and head of China Energy at IHS Energy. \u201cIf you look one level deeper, you can see a pattern,\u201d Mr. Zhou said. \u201cThe structure of G.D.P. and that of power demand are very different. The numbers are painting a very clear picture of the heavy industrial sector\u2019s energy consumption slowing down.\u201d Because heavy industry represents such a large percentage of energy consumption, small shifts in consumption have a big impact on overall data. Notably, heavy manufacturing accounts for 17 percent of G.D.P., but 41 percent of power demand. Data for the second quarter of this year showed a 0.9 percent year-on-year decline in power consumption by heavy industry, compared with growth in consumption by light industry and the commercial sector of 2.4 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. \u201cChina went through an extraordinarily high-energy growth period, driven by energy-intensive investments in heavy industries and infrastructure,\u201d said Edward C. Chow, senior fellow at the Energy and National Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. \u201cThat was bound to slow down.\u201d Chinese energy demand has exaggerated and extended global cycles, Mr. Chow said. During a period of high oil prices, Chinese imports grew at a high rate, including a spike of one million barrels per day in 2010, a result of the government stimulus in response to the recent financial crisis. \u201cNow that oil prices have dropped by more than half, along with lower international coal and gas prices, Chinese energy demand and import growth seem to be slowing at a rate lower than official G.D.P. growth numbers,\u201d he said. China\u2019s economy has experienced a bumpy ride this year, when compared with most of the preceding quarter century. This will put the economy front and center for the short term. \u201cThe prospects for the economy will be the most powerful factor shaping China\u2019s energy plan, especially the next five-year plan between 2016 and 2020,\u201d said Tao Wang, resident scholar in the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. The plan is being completed and is expected to be adopted in March 2016. Cheaper oil also raises other issues. How the major state-owned oil companies will fare is a big question, but not as big as in a country like Russia, where oil revenues are vital for the government. An additional question is how much Beijing has done to build up strategic and commercial reserves. \u201cChina appears to be taking advantage of lower prices to build strategic oil stocks, although not much data is available on this,\u201d Mr. Chow said. \u201cData availability, accuracy and transparency in general are challenging in China, including for the authorities themselves.\u201d Image A wind farm in China\u2019s northwest Xinjiang Province. China is the largest investor in renewables. Credit Cai Zengle/Imaginechina, via Agence France-Presse In terms of Beijing\u2019s short- to mid-term oil and gas strategy, \u201cthere is general policy confusion at this point, although long-term objectives of diversifying supply sources and routes are unlikely to change,\u201d he added. With major pipeline projects with Russia and other countries either on line or on the way, energy security, once a prime concern for China, is beginning to yield to other more pressing problems. \u201cIn the short term, there will be much less concern regarding security of supply for oil and gas,\u201d Mr. Wang said. The economics of existing deals and investment and how to reform the country\u2019s oil and gas sector in the context of low prices \u2014 and profits \u2014 are moving to the forefront, he said. Because of China\u2019s large consumption base, incremental demand volumes for oil remain large. IHS expects China to continue to be significant in terms of global oil consumption growth, accounting for 30 percent to 40 percent of new oil demand growth through 2020. Last year was a turning point for coal consumption in China\u2019s coastal region, where the first phase of intensive economic development began in the late 1970s. In 2014 coal consumption along the coast peaked, with consumption rising in the central and western regions, Mr. Zhou of IHS said. \u201cThe coast has already peaked for several reasons, including slower growth but also environmental pressure, which has made it difficult to site new coal-fired power plants and industrial boilers,\u201d he said. However, he added, coal consumption will continue to grow, peaking in the 2020s. Now new facilities are being built in the interior, both for power transmission to the coast and to serve indigenous consumption growth. The days of China\u2019s reliance upon coal to produce as much as 75 percent of its electricity are coming to a close, for two reasons. The first is the shift away from an economy focused on industry, which currently accounts for 80 percent of China\u2019s coal consumption. The second is political: Last November, China and the United States agreed to reduce greenhouse emissions, with China pledging to hit a peak for carbon dioxide by 2030. Renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal power plus hydropower have received much attention and investment during the past three years. China is the largest investor in renewables, although like other countries, it is struggling to deal with challenges such as enabling the electric grid to handle the intermittency of wind and solar power. \u201cThe renewable energy industry is growing fast in China, despite the slow economy,\u201d Mr. Wang said. \u201cThe government is determined to make it a strategic industry for the future, and it will increasingly play a more important role in China\u2019s energy system in the coming decade.\u201d China has won praise for pushing renewable technology forward, but in terms of immediate environmental impact, it will still be minimal. Renewables account for less than 1 percent of China\u2019s current energy mix. Richard Brubaker, founder of the Shanghai-based consulting firm Collective Responsibility, said that reducing demand by improving building energy efficiency in China\u2019s cities, which will add 300 million residents in the coming decade, should be a developmental focus. \u201cCities really need to start implementing energy efficiency programs, be it through glass curtains, HVAC systems, insulation or other areas,\u201d Mr. Brubaker said. \u201cThese are investments that are nearly impossible to make if relying on developers or investors alone, because of the motive to invest in lowest tech benefits investors who are only concerned in short-term gains.\u201d Instead of heavy investment in renewable energy sources, putting that money into improving building efficiency will have greater returns, he said. \u201cReduce their load 40 percent and you have done far more to improve the sustainability of energy than any investments in solar,\u201d he said. \u201cThen, make the investments in renewable to clean up the remaining supply.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Oil and Gasoline;Energy industry;Energy Efficiency;GDP"}
{"id": "ny0207490", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/06/26", "title": "Court Confirms Death Sentence for Egyptian Tycoon", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 A court on Thursday confirmed the death penalty for an Egyptian tycoon convicted of paying a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop star, in a case that has riveted the Arab world with its tantalizing blend of fame and fortune. The tycoon, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, an Egyptian real estate developer and politician with an estimated net worth of $800 million in 2007, was initially sentenced to death in May for ordering the killing, but the punishment first had to be approved by Egypt \u2019s chief religious official before the court could confirm it. Mr. Moustafa\u2019s lawyers have said they will appeal the verdict, but it is widely believed here that Thursday\u2019s ruling is unprecedented in a country where money and power can often trump justice. \u201cIt is a fair verdict and a respectable judge,\u201d Belal Fadl, an Egyptian scriptwriter and columnist, said after the initial ruling. \u201cIt makes you think that the judicial institution is still alive in Egypt.\u201d Prosecutors said that Mr. Moustafa, 50, a member of Egypt\u2019s governing National Democratic Party in the upper house of Parliament, paid $2 million to a former Egyptian state security officer to kill Suzanne Tamim , 30, a Lebanese singer who fled Egypt after a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa. The fact that the murder was committed and investigated in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is an element that many analysts in Egypt say rendered Mr. Moustafa\u2019s political influence useless in the face of his crime. A statement issued by Egypt\u2019s public prosecutor at the beginning of the yearlong case said that the man Mr. Moustafa hired to carry out the murder, Mohsen al-Sukari, had stayed in a hotel close to Ms. Tamim\u2019s residence in Dubai. On July 28, 2008, he knocked on her door, disguised as an employee of the building, supposedly to deliver a gift and a letter. When Ms. Tamim opened the door, he attacked her with a knife and slit her throat, the statement said. Mr. Sukari was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Despite the court\u2019s ruling, few here expect this to be the end of the story, or the end of Mr. Moustafa, who has close ties to the family of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. \u201cThis is essentially a political, not criminal, case about the marriage of power and money in Egypt,\u201d said Magdy el-Gallad, the editor of the Egyptian independent daily Al Masry Al Youm, which dedicated more than 200 pages to the coverage of the Moustafa-Tamim saga. \u201cIt delivers a very strong message to all businessmen, but in the end, Hisham Talaat Moustafa will not be executed.\u201d", "keyword": "Moustafa Hisham Talaat;Tamim Suzanne;Decisions and Verdicts;Capital Punishment;Murders and Attempted Murders;Egypt"}
{"id": "ny0168915", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2006/12/28", "title": "Texas: Cleanup After Oil Spill", "abstract": "A ruptured offshore pipeline that spilled 42,500 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is leaking at a rate of about 500 gallons a day as crews begin the cleanup, officials said. Crews began skimming operations after the weather calmed at the site about 30 miles southeast of Galveston, said Petty Officer Mario Romero of the Coast Guard. The spill occurred after a portion of the High Island Pipeline System ruptured early Sunday. Plains All American Pipeline, the pipeline\u2019s owner, shut down the line after detecting a pressure loss in the system, Petty Officer Romero said. The spill had spread to a light sheen 4.7 miles long and 80 yards at its widest spot, he said.", "keyword": "Plains All American Pipeline LP;Gulf of Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0272888", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2016/05/09", "title": "Sandusky Settlements Date to Abuse Claims in 1971", "abstract": "The settlements paid out by Penn State University to accusers of the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky include one alleging sexual abuse in 1971, 40 years before his arrest, the university said.", "keyword": "College football;Rape;Child Abuse;Jerry Sandusky;Joe Paterno;Penn State"}
{"id": "ny0212414", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2017/01/23", "title": "Protests Over Bull Riding Turn Violent in India", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 In the traditional bull-wrestling sport of jallikattu, men compete for prizes based on their ability to ride or hold on to a bull that is released into a crowd. But after years of complaints about cruelty to the animals, the Supreme Court issued a ban on the practice, leading to protests in the southern state of Tamil Nadu over the past week. On Monday, those protests turned violent when the police tried to evict demonstrators from Marina Beach in Chennai, Tamil Nadu\u2019s capital, and several other districts, The Hindu newspaper reported . Image Police officers tried to evict demonstrators from Marina Beach in Chennai, Tamil Nadu\u2019s capital. Credit Associated Press The newspaper said protesters, who had gathered at the beach in support of jallikattu, refused to leave and blocked the roads near Marina Beach and many other locations. They said that the sport, long associated with a winter harvest festival, was central to their cultural identity. Protesters also attacked a police station in Chennai, burning automobiles parked out front and more than a dozen two-wheeled vehicles, the NDTV television channel said. Local news media reports said hundreds of people were detained. The local police, reached by phone, refused to release figures for the number of people arrested and injured, or to discuss violence perpetuated. Image During the competition, men win prizes if they successfully hold on to the hump of a bull for a particular distance or length of time. Credit Arun Sankar K/Associated Press Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said he appreciated the rite\u2019s cultural significance, and noted that the court was reviewing its ruling. The protests prompted the state\u2019s lawmakers to adopt an emergency law allowing the practice to continue, The Hindu reported, though it was not clear whether that superseded the Supreme Court ruling. PETA India has said that bulls were often given alcohol and \u201cpoked with spears, knives and sticks\u201d during the competition, in which men win prizes if they successfully hold on to the hump of a bull for a particular distance or length of time. Seventeen people died and about 1,100 people were injured in the festivals from 2010 to 2014, according to PETA India , which tallied injuries and deaths reported in local news media. Jallikattu seemed to be going ahead elsewhere in Tamil Nadu, where a police officer in the Virudhunagar district died Monday afternoon after he was injured by a bull, a police official said. \u201cThe policeman was injured by the bull while on duty at the jallikattu and trying to save people,\u201d the official said in a telephone interview.", "keyword": "Civil Unrest;Animal Abuse;Chennai"}
{"id": "ny0060489", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/08/24", "title": "Latvia\u2019s Tensions With Russians at Home Persist in Shadow of Ukraine Conflict", "abstract": "RIGA, Latvia \u2014 History has bequeathed this Baltic port capital much beauty, captured in elegant Art Nouveau buildings or the Gothic church steeples that stud the windswept skyline. But it has also left a nasty ethnic rift that has persisted despite Latvia\u2019s absorption into NATO, the European Union and the euro currency, and which has now deepened with the crisis in Ukraine. In this nation of two million, about one-third of the residents speak only or primarily Russian. Many \u2014 but not all \u2014 are people whose families arrived during the decades of Soviet rule here. Ever since Latvia declared independence in 1991, many of these Russian speakers have been in limbo, as noncitizens squeezed out of political life, largely unable to vote, hold office or even serve in the fire brigade. Those who refuse to acquire proficient skill speaking Latvian do not get citizenship. In the coming October elections, unless the government decides to issue special voting cards, about 283,000 will, once again, not cast ballots. This weekend the Baltic nations marked 25 years since the Baltic Way, a seminal event in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when two million of their citizens linked hands across nearly 400 miles to declare their goal of independence. Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians \u201ctook each other by the hand back then to show the world that they wanted to be free, independent states,\u201d noted Laimdota Straujuma, the prime minister of Latvia, at a ceremony here on Saturday. It was \u201ca shout of three abandoned nations for freedom,\u201d said her Estonian counterpart, Taavi Roivas. But while the Baltic majorities remember with relish their successful bid for freedom, others who live in the three lands recall the end of the Soviet Union as a misfortune, or worse. As an ethnic Russian member of Latvia\u2019s Parliament, Boriss Cilevics feels the daily crosscurrents created by the rift which, he stressed, is \u201cnot a problem of blood.\u201d About 25 percent of marriages are mixed Latvian-Russian, he noted. \u201cWe work together, and spend time together.\u201d Russian is widely heard, and Russian citizens make up about a third of the tourists who visit the country. But the dominant political consensus, Mr. Cilevics said, holds that \u201can absolute majority of ethnic Latvians must be ruled by ethnic Latvians only.\u201d Mr. Cilevics is a member of Harmony Centre, a political party often supported by Russians that has regularly cleared the 5 percent hurdle needed to get into the 100-seat Parliament but has never been included in Latvia\u2019s coalition governments. The government has one ethnically Russian minister \u2014 Vjaceslavs Dombrovskis, in charge of the economy. Riga\u2019s telegenic blond mayor, Nils Ushakovs, is the Russian leader of Harmony Centre and has won election twice in the city of 700,000, by far Latvia\u2019s largest. In October, he is making a bid for prime minister, though he is considered unlikely to succeed. Latvian politicians who defend the status quo portray it as the natural outcome of the Soviet period, when the ethnic Latvian population here dwindled dangerously close to 50 percent after deportations of Latvians to Siberia before and after Nazi occupation, and an influx arrived from other parts of the Soviet Union. In 1991, citizenship was automatically granted to those who had held citizenship before 1940 \u2014 the start of Soviet occupation \u2014 and their descendants, including many who fled abroad in the chaos during and after World War II. Those non-Latvians who had arrived in Soviet times, and their descendants, had to prove they knew the language and history. \u201cIf the major goal is for everybody to become a citizen, you have to have some kind of attachment to the values,\u201d said Artis Pabriks, a former foreign and defense minister here who now sits in the European Parliament. Today, Mr. Pabriks asked, noting President Vladimir V. Putin\u2019s annexation of Crimea and interference in eastern Ukraine, if Russian speakers \u201care sharing values with Putin, how can they be citizens of Latvia?\u201d Image Credit The New York Times Mr. Pabriks, who wrote his doctorate on minorities in Europe, noted that the number of Latvian residents without citizenship had dropped dramatically, to 12 percent from 36 percent in the early 1990s. By comparison, he said, 9 percent of German residents are not citizens. That is beside the point for ethnic Russians living in Latvia like Lyudmila, 56, a flower seller and mother of six who declined to give her last name. \u201cI was born here, but I\u2019m not a citizen. I studied Russian, and you have to go and get that naturalization. I am not going to beg,\u201d she said. \u201cI do feel at home here, but there is some kind of process of differentiation, and it is offensive.\u201d The Ukraine crisis has made matters worse, Mr. Cilevics of the Latvian Parliament argued, because most Latvians rely on media in their own language, which give very different views of the conflict. Broadly speaking, the Latvian media is more supportive of Ukraine\u2019s tug away from Russia while Russian-language media echoes, though more mildly, the Kremlin line. Exceptionally, Mr. Cilevics said, \u201cI am one of those people who have two ears,\u201d absorbing Russian media, but also subscribing to reports from European monitors in Ukraine, and finding \u201cthe truth is somewhere in between.\u201d It reminds him of Soviet times, he said, reading the Communist daily Pravda, then listening to Radio Liberty, which is financed by the United States. But most people, he noted, \u201conly have one ear.\u201d Mr. Ushakovs, the mayor, added that many Latvians \u201cstill have some concerns about Russians, because of the very complicated history in the past.\u201d Thousands of Latvians who survived mass Soviet deportations are still alive, for example. Conversely, Russians here \u201care not happy when they see fellow Russians burned to death in Odessa,\u201d he said, referring to the deaths of some 40 people in violence in the Ukrainian port in May. The divide, Mr. Pabriks stressed, \u201cis not an ethnic issue. It is political.\u201d Seeing Ukraine pulling out of Russia\u2019s orbit reminds Russian speakers of how Latvia did the same as the Soviet Union collapsed. They have \u201ca feeling of humiliation that the Soviet Union was dissolved. This is about perception of the world. They think, \u2018Who are you, you small countries? You have no greatness.\u2019 This is how they feel and this is why they don\u2019t want to integrate.\u201d On the other hand, as Mr. Ushakovs put it, summing up the sentiments of more than a dozen conversations, \u201cno one wants Ukraine here.\u201d That nightmare, he argued, could not repeat in Latvia or the other small Baltic States, which are suddenly feeling vulnerable to Russian aggression, agricultural sanctions on produce from the European Union and Mr. Putin\u2019s threats to protect Russian minorities outside Russia. Latvia and its neighbors, Lithuania and Estonia, which have smaller Russian minorities, have always been stable, with per capita gross domestic product in Latvia four times higher than Ukraine, the mayor said. Mr. Pabriks, the former minister, estimated that approximately 60 percent of Russians in Latvia are sympathetic to Mr. Putin, and his cultivation of Soviet glory. \u201cOn the other hand, even 99 percent of the supporters of Putin in Latvia, I don\u2019t think they are ready to do more than talk.\u201d Russia could make its influence felt in other ways. Latvia depends 100 percent on Russia for deliveries of natural gas. Although the country gets about one-third of its electricity from hydropower, and has shifted toward renewable energy, it is clearly vulnerable to pressure from Russia\u2019s Gazprom, which has a large stake in Latvijas Gas, the natural gas company. Reinis Aboltins, a researcher at the nongovernmental Providus Institute, cited a parliamentary vote last March postponing until 2017 what was supposed to be a mandatory diversification of the gas supply network as one example of Russia\u2019s bringing pressure to bear. Yet dependence is to some extent mutual: Gazprom, which has never cut off delivery to the Baltics, also relies on part of the Latvian network to supply gas back into northwest Russia, including St. Petersburg. For centuries, Russia and Germany have wielded influence here. Riga was an imperial port in czarist times. Russians have been a large minority here for more than 200 years. Today, as visitors drive in from the airport, the first commercial office is that of Siemens, the German engineering giant. The first gas station belongs to Russia\u2019s Lukoil. But now Latvia\u2019s foreign ties are no longer a symbol of dominance by another nation. When Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany visited last week , making clear that NATO will support the Baltic States but not permanently station troops so close to Russia\u2019s borders, crowds of a few hundred cheered her at two different locations. Most were tourists, \u201cnot just from Germany but from all over Europe,\u201d the chancellor noted later. \u201cThat shows,\u201d she said, \u201cjust how much Latvia has simply become also a part of our common European space.\u201d", "keyword": "Latvia;Russia;Ukraine;Russian language;Citizenship;Language;Angela Merkel"}
{"id": "ny0073313", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2015/04/03", "title": "Serena Williams Outlasts Simona Halep to Advance to Miami Open Final", "abstract": "KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. \u2014 The duel was supposed to happen last month in the California desert in Indian Wells. But Serena Williams\u2019s winning streak finally did collide with Simona Halep\u2019s winning streak, and it was worth the wait. It was punch against counterpunch late Thursday night. It was Williams\u2019s dictation against Halep\u2019s deft baseline typing. And although Williams fluctuated between ruthlessly efficient and surprisingly shaky, she managed \u2014 as she has so often against her most dangerous opponents \u2014 to find the lines and the solutions under greatest duress. Her 6-2, 4-6, 7-5 victory put her into her yet another final at the springtime tournament in South Florida now called the Miami Open. The event has changed names and sponsors through the years, but Williams has been a near-constant factor. She is now 10-0 in semifinals here and will be going for her eighth singles title on Saturday. She will face an unexpected opponent: Carla Su\u00e1rez Navarro, the 12th-seeded Spanish veteran who is now assured of rising into the top 10 for the first time after defeating Andrea Petkovic, 6-3, 6-3, in Thursday\u2019s first semifinal. It has been 14 years since a Spanish woman was in the top 10, and Su\u00e1rez Navarro is only the third woman to make it into that select group, joining Arantxa S\u00e1nchez Vicario and Conchita Mart\u00ednez. But Su\u00e1rez Navarro will certainly be no favorite on Saturday. She is 0-4 against Williams and has lost the eight sets they have played by the following scores: 6-0, 6-3, 6-2, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, 6-2, 6-3. No wonder Su\u00e1rez Navarro admitted that she was hoping to play Halep next. It could have happened, despite a remarkable first set from Williams in which she did a fine impression of a player in the zone. But Halep \u2014 the last woman to beat Williams \u2014 managed to avoid the knockout punch in the second set and finally broke her serve at 4-4. Halep, the third seed, from Romania, was so focused on the challenge at hand that when she held serve in the next game, she was unaware at first that she had won the set. She finally realized that it was time to sit down, and she did so laughing to herself. \u201cI didn\u2019t play for the score,\u201d she said. \u201cI played just to try to play my best tennis, to try to be close to her, and just to hit and to fight for every ball.\u201d That was what was required, but the No. 1-seeded Williams was definitely keeping score despite her ups and downs, her satisfactions and frustrations. They were supposed to play in the semifinals in Indian Wells, but Williams was forced to withdraw with a knee injury. Halep went on to win the title, but her winning streak is now over. Williams rolls on and has won the last 20 matches she has played.", "keyword": "Tennis;Serena Williams;Simona Halep;Miami"}
{"id": "ny0191630", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2009/02/18", "title": "With Four More Months to Switch, Hundreds of Television Stations Are All Digital", "abstract": "More than 400 television stations have stopped broadcasting in old-fashioned analog form, according to the Federal Communications Commission, months before the rescheduled transition to digital TV. Turning off the analog signal allows stations that are short of cash to save money, but it also means a loss of service for viewers who have not yet upgraded their older television sets. The long-awaited move to digital TV, which promises clearer pictures and more channel choices for over-the-air television viewers, had been scheduled to happen Tuesday, more than three years after the federal government set the day as the deadline for stations to cease analog broadcasting. This month, however, the government delayed the move until June 12, citing a troubled transition process and a fear that millions of Americans would find that their televisions had been rendered incapable of receiving signals. Despite the delay, 421 stations, most of them in smaller TV markets, chose to turn off their analog signals Tuesday. When they are combined with the 220 broadcasters that already broadcast solely in digital, the F.C.C. estimates that 36 percent of the nation\u2019s stations will have switched by Wednesday morning. President Obama signed legislation last week that pushed back the deadline until June and allowed some stations to turn off their analog signals earlier. Nielsen Media Research estimates that about 5.8 million households, or about 5.1 percent, have not upgraded their sets. Households that rely on rabbit ears and older analog televisions to watch TV over the air need to install a converter box to view the digital programming. The government\u2019s coupon program to subsidize the cost of the converter boxes is experiencing a backlog; the stimulus bill Mr. Obama signed on Tuesday allots $650 million more for the initiative. The F.C.C. said it had sought to ensure that at least one ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC affiliate in each market would stay on the air in analog form until June. In about 20 markets where all the major affiliates intended to turn off the analog signal on Tuesday, the agency pushed stations to keep at least one signal on the air for news and emergency information. \u201cWe are trying to make the best of a difficult situation,\u201d Michael J. Copps, the acting chairman of the agency, said in a statement. \u201cWhile this staggered transition is confusing and disruptive for some consumers, the confusion and disruption would have been far worse had we gone ahead with a nationwide transition on Tuesday,\u201d Mr. Copps said. In major markets like New York, all the major affiliates will remain on the air in analog until June. San Diego is the largest market where three of the biggest affiliates are turning off their analog signals. In that market, only 7 percent of people rely on over-the-air signals. \u201cWe have been running crawls and stories and spots, everything required by the F.C.C., in great abundance, to try to end whatever confusion there is,\u201d said Ed Trimble, the general manager of KFMB, the CBS affiliate in San Diego. Most stations across the country are choosing to stay in both analog and digital form until June 12, meaning that viewers will see four more months of reminders to buy a converter box. \u201cThere are still a few consumers who are not quite prepared yet, and that\u2019s why we elected to go with the delay,\u201d said Brent Hensley, the general manager of KOCO, the ABC affiliate in Oklahoma City. Under the F.C.C.\u2019s current rules, other stations may be allowed to turn off their analog signals in March and June. Once stations stop analog broadcasting in local markets, the stations are bound to hear from confused consumers. The F.C.C. said more than 4,000 people were available to answer the agency\u2019s phone number, 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322), to help consumers who are confused about the switch.", "keyword": "Digital Television Transition;Television;Digital and High-Definition Television"}
{"id": "ny0077488", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/05/01", "title": "Freddie Gray\u2019s Injury and the Police \u2018Rough Ride\u2019", "abstract": "In Baltimore, they call it a \u201crough ride.\u201d In Philadelphia, they had another name for it that hints at the age of the practice \u2014 a \u201cnickel ride,\u201d a reference to old-time amusement park rides that cost five cents. Other cities called them joy rides. The slang terms mask a dark tradition of police misconduct in which suspects, seated or lying face down and in handcuffs in the back of a police wagon , are jolted and battered by an intentionally rough and bumpy ride that can do as much damage as a police baton without an officer having to administer a blow. Video Residents of Baltimore describe their experience with \u201crough\u201d rides in police vans. The exact cause of the spinal injury that Freddie Gray, 25, sustained while in police custody in Baltimore before his death April 19 has not been made clear. The police have said that he was not strapped into a seatbelt, a violation of department policy. That has led some to wonder whether he was deliberately left unbuckled, reminiscent of a practice that while little known has left a brutal, costly legacy of severe injuries and multimillion-dollar settlements throughout the country. A lawyer for the Baltimore police union and news reports Thursday focused on Mr. Gray\u2019s ride in the back of the van after his arrest by Baltimore officers on April 12. \u201cOur position is something happened inside that van,\u201d the lawyer, Michael E. Davey, said at a news conference last week. \u201cWe just don\u2019t know what.\u201d Determining exactly how Mr. Gray was injured will be a focus of the investigation. Even if it happened in the van, it does not necessarily point toward an intentional rough ride, a ritual experts said was at least several decades old. \u201cI never saw it, but I\u2019ve heard about it,\u201d said Bernard K. Melekian, the undersheriff of Santa Barbara County, Calif., and a former director of the Justice Department\u2019s community-oriented policing office. \u201cMy sense was that that kind of behavior had long been gone.\u201d The tradition was regarded as a technique by aggressive officers to inflict punishment on those they arrested without ever being accused of physically assaulting them with their weapons or hands. For a suspect with hands cuffed behind him, seated on a thin bench in the back of a speeding police van, a sudden stop or a sharp turn or a bumpy road can cause severe injuries that can leave a person in a wheelchair or disfigured for life. Image A still from a video made by a bystander at Freddie Gray's arrest. The police say he was not in a seatbelt, making some wonder if he was taken on a \u201crough ride.\u201d One June night in 1980, Freddie Franklin was walking on 75th Street in Chicago with a friend when he said that a group of police officers wrongfully arrested him, placed him in handcuffs and forced him into the back of a wagon. Two officers drove the van recklessly, to throw him around the floor of the van, he said in a federal lawsuit. According to court documents, by the time Mr. Franklin arrived at the police station, he had bitten off his lower lip. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of a retaliatory gesture,\u201d said Robert W. Klotz, a police-procedures expert and former deputy chief of police of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those nebulous type of things where the individual feels they\u2019ve been subjected to it because they\u2019ve been mouthy. The officers say they have no intent in doing anything. It winds up in a he said-she said situation.\u201d Video Residents of Baltimore\u2019s downtown areas largely view the influx of State Police and National Guard members positively. But blocks from where Freddie Gray was arrested, residents are much more wary. Lawyers and police experts said it was impossible to know how widespread the rough-riding practice has been throughout the country. Allegations have surfaced over the years in cities large and small. In 1999, a former police chaplain in Aurora, Ill., a city of nearly 200,000 outside Chicago, filed a civil rights lawsuit accusing the police department there of making it a common practice for drivers to stop suddenly to injure handcuffed suspects. Police leaders denied the allegations, but the suit was later settled. Police Board Clears Driver in Freddie Gray Case; No Officers Have Been Convicted Prosecutors dropped all charges against three officers awaiting trial. Three other officers had already been acquitted. In 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of articles detailing injuries sustained by 20 victims of so-called nickel rides. The victims were paid $2.3 million in city legal settlements, although no officer had ever been disciplined for the practice. In response, the police commissioner at the time, John F. Timoney, banned the use of all police wagons not equipped with seatbelts or safety padding. In Chicago, the American Civil Liberties Union represented Mr. Franklin in the federal lawsuit he filed against six police officers, alleging injuries that required two reconstructive operations on his mouth. Although the city\u2019s lawyers denied the officers had done anything wrong, the city settled the lawsuit for $135,000. At least two other Baltimore men, Jeffrey Alston and Dondi Johnson, were paralyzed after police van rides in separate cases that led to lawsuits. Mr. Alston, paralyzed from the neck down, settled for $6 million in 2004. Experts said that nationally, the tradition was no longer as prevalent as it once was. Many departments now require officers to place suspects riding in vans in seatbelts or other restraints. Some agencies use vans that allow prisoners with their hands cuffed behind their backs to hold on to belts behind them. And public scrutiny of police misconduct has helped reform agencies that might have once tolerated or ignored complaints of rough van rides. \u201cI don\u2019t believe this is standard operating procedure,\u201d said Hubert Williams, a former police director of Newark, who is a consultant with the nonprofit Independent Institute. \u201cWhat\u2019s been happening through the years is that the police have changed. Policing by and large through the years has become more community-oriented and more accountable to the public. But that does not dispose of these questions. I think the absence of accountability is the reason they occur.\u201d", "keyword": "Baltimore;Freddie Gray;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Black People,African-Americans;Car Crash;Civil Rights;Chicago"}
{"id": "ny0254238", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/07/17", "title": "Last Golfer in Becomes Odd One Out", "abstract": "SANDWICH, England \u2014 Safely inside the interview tent with water still dripping off the bill of his cap, Matt Millar, the first man to finish on Saturday, looked over his shoulder toward the British Open course where he had just shot a 10-over-par 80. \u201cIt just belted me today,\u201d he said. Millar was hardly alone on this tempestuous day when scores and suffering soared, particularly during early play, and pars felt like birdies, but Millar was more alone than anyone else in the field as he played the third round. With an odd number of men \u2014 71 \u2014 making the cut and with pairings the format, someone was destined to go without a playing partner. Millar, a 34-year-old Australian playing in his first British Open, was the odd man out as the last player to secure his spot. And so, at 8:55 a.m., while his competitors prepared to play two-by-two at Royal St. George\u2019s, Millar teed off as a party of one. Not that he got lonely. Along for the walk were a scorer, a standard-bearer, a rules official and his caddie from New Zealand, Rod Gutry. \u201cIt is strange, a bit different,\u201d Millar said. \u201cUsually you get to see someone else hit, and sometimes that can be an advantage, sometimes it\u2019s a disadvantage. But once you get into it, three or four holes in, you sort of don\u2019t think about it.\u201d Millar had to do plenty of thinking before the round. He could have played with a marker, a partner provided by the Open who was not competing in the tournament. But after Millar and Gutry discussed it, they declined the marker, believing that on a day like Saturday, misery was best avoided without company. \u201cThe nicest way to say it is, Look it\u2019s terrible conditions out there, the pros are struggling,\u201d Gutry said. \u201cYou put an amateur out there, it\u2019s a distraction, because you can\u2019t tell me they\u2019re not going to be searching for golf balls all the time. The other thing is, when there\u2019s one of you, you play at your pace, and we were trying to get as many holes done as possible before the weather turns really bad.\u201d The rain and wind did intensify for a time after Millar finished at around 12:45 p.m., but there was no dearth of foul weather in the morning. There were even a few hardy spectators, some of whom had concerns of their own. As Millar walked the 16th, a spectator held up an object made of metal spokes and shreds of fabric. \u201cYou know what this brolly is?\u201d he said, answering his own question with a curse. But there were fewer complaints than cheers (not that this was Augusta National on a Sunday). \u201cThey are so encouraging, and I can\u2019t even believe they are out here, to be honest,\u201d Millar said. \u201cWould you spend your weekend out there if you were not playing?\u201d Simon Chase, a 25-year-old surveyor from the English city of Birmingham, said he never considered not making the journey to Sandwich. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a ticket, booked your train,\u201d Chase said. \u201cI suppose some of these courses would get torn apart by these guys without the weather. That\u2019s part of the game.\u201d Chase\u2019s friend Marcus Lovatt said that watching men like Millar persevere in person was educational. \u201cI think it adds to it to see what these guys have to go through, the mentality they go out there with on a day like this,\u201d said Lovatt, 25, of London. Millar, a father of two who is based in the Australian capital of Canberra, has had to endure plenty to get his moment in the sun (so to speak). He lost his European Tour card after finishing 194th on the European Tour money list in 2009 and now plays on the One Asia Tour, a less prestigious and lucrative circuit. He made it into the field here by winning the Australian qualifying event, then \u2014 with no tournaments available to prepare \u2014 spent weeks practicing on his own during the Australian winter, sometimes in conditions not dissimilar to Saturday\u2019s. \u201cI had a couple of days where I was able to practice in this, but you don\u2019t spend five hours out there, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d he said. He did not spend five hours out there Saturday, either. His round, without the waiting that comes with playing in a pairing, required only about 3 hours 45 minutes, a fair bit of it spent drying off his equipment or pondering the unusual choices the weather was imposing on him. One example among many: On the par-4 15th, he hit a driver off the tee and a 3-wood but still required a sand wedge just to reach the green. \u201cThose last few holes, there were a lot of funny clubs to be hit there,\u201d Millar said. Those last few holes, he was not the only one in his party suffering. Sam Monro, the 16-year-old standard-bearer from Sandwich who carried the placard displaying Millar\u2019s mounting score, was shivering uncontrollably. \u201cPoor bugger, I was talking to him going down the 15th, and he couldn\u2019t hear me, and he was just shaking,\u201d Millar said. Monro was asked what the worst part was. \u201cThe wind,\u201d he answered, looking haunted. But after the final indignity, a double bogey on the 18th, Millar and Monro were able to begin drip-drying. And on Sunday, Millar will have a bit more company as he tees off with the former Open champion Paul Lawrie. The South Korean teenager Hwang Jung-gon, in last place with a 54-hole total of 225, will be the odd man out this time.", "keyword": "British Open (Golf);Golf;Millar Matt"}
{"id": "ny0223363", "categories": ["sports", "skiing"], "date": "2010/11/26", "title": "Top Skiers Seek An Ever Faster Ski", "abstract": "VAIL, Colo. \u2014 Forget podium ceremonies, World Cup trophies or Olympic medals. Perhaps the best way to judge the stature of top Alpine racers is to count the pairs of skis allotted them for testing, training and racing during a year. Ted Ligety of Park City, Utah, the gold medalist in combined at the 2006 Olympics and a two-time giant slalom overall World Cup champion, said he had used 35 pairs of skis while training here. Julia Mancuso , a three-time Olympic medalist from Squaw Valley, Calif., who had been on 20 World Cup podiums entering this season, switched to the German ski manufacturer V\u00f6lkl over the summer. She estimated that between the four Alpine events in which she competes, she has been on 40 different pairs so far this season. Then there\u2019s Lindsey Vonn , the most decorated female skier in United States history, with 33 World Cup wins, 3 straight World Cup overall titles and 2 Olympic medals. Vonn said recently that she had 125 skis from the Austrian manufacturer Head in her quiver for the season. That is not overkill, she stressed, in a sport where the best in the world are separated from the rest by hundredths of a second. \u201cI will try everything and anything to be fast,\u201d Vonn said while training at Golden Peak. \u201cI try men\u2019s skis, I try a lot of the men\u2019s setups, I\u2019ll try women\u2019s setups, I\u2019ll try everything. I think I went through 30 boots this year. It\u2019s just a constant process of trying to find the next best ski.\u201d That process consists of a steady stream of communication between racer and ski technician, an often-thankless behind-the-scenes role that is part crew chief, part caddie. A ski technician spends countless hours tuning skis, boots and bindings to exacting specifications while working as a liaison between racer and ski manufacturer. A ski tech\u2019s role is arguably even more tied to a racer\u2019s success than good coaching, Vonn said. \u201cYour skis and boots are everything,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have good equipment, you have no chance of winning races.\u201d When Vonn began using men\u2019s skis in the speed events of downhill and super-G last season, and won 10 races in the two disciplines, the rest of the circuit took notice. Other women started testing the longer, heavier skis in training, but only a few, most notably the Austrian speed specialist Andrea Fischbacher, used them in a race. \u201cIt didn\u2019t improve their results, and I\u2019m pretty sure they stopped racing on them,\u201d Vonn said. Nonetheless, ski manufacturers this year introduced longer women\u2019s speed skis that more closely resemble the men\u2019s skis Vonn used last winter. \u201c \u201cYou\u2019re always trying to find that next little bit of advantage,\u201d she said. Or trying not to get left behind. When Bode Miller switched from the French manufacturer Rossignol to the Austrian manufacturer Atomic before the 2005 season, then won four of the first seven races, it did not sit well with some members of the Austrian ski team. Miller, at the time, had procured the ski technician of the retired Austrian star Stephan Eberharter , the 2003 overall champion and 2004 runner-up. Some members of the Austrian team implied that Miller had jumped his place in line. Miller was indifferent to those critics, pointing out that Atomic was owned by a Finnish parent company and that none of his wins had come on skis that Eberharter had previously used. Miller, in his World Cup career, has raced for four ski companies: Fischer, Rossignol, Atomic and now Head. Considering the success he has had, it raises the question: Is it the skis or the skier? \u201cIt\u2019s just the direction you want to take with your career,\u201d Miller said of his penchant for change. \u201cIn some cases, it\u2019s about the other people who are on the equipment, or the interaction with the company and yourself and the athletes. Head is a really proactive company.\u201d Mancuso said she switched from Rossignol to V\u00f6lkl because she believed that she had a stronger commitment from V\u00f6lkl when it came to providing her with the resources she needs to compete for an overall crown. World Cup skiers typically sign contracts with manufacturers that have victory schedules \u2014 an incentive-based structure that rewards skiers for results like World Cup podium finishes and world championship medals. \u201cIt\u2019s not about the money anymore, because there aren\u2019t a lot of ski companies who have the money anymore,\u201d Mancuso said. \u201cThey\u2019re always making stuff in the factory, but it\u2019s another deal when you go in there and try the equipment and know that things need to be changed, and to have the support that they\u2019ll actually go and make you new skis, and try to make everything the fastest for you.\u201d Vonn switched to Head from Rossignol before last season for that reason. She was under contract with Rossignol through the Olympics, but the company gave her an out to look for another equipment sponsor when Rossignol scaled back some of its commitments to its roster of World Cup skiers. \u201cThey said either you can accept 50 percent of the salary or look for something else,\u201d said Ben Drummond, Head USA\u2019s racing and promotions manager, who works with United States racers like Vonn, Miller and Ligety. Drummond said equipment sponsorship deals were written with clauses that allow manufacturers to cancel or restructure contracts. He said he had never heard of the opposite: a skier trying to get out of a contract without prompting from the ski manufacturer. It pays to find the right company that will provide the equipment to win races, as opposed to signing with the brand that offers the most base salary, Mancuso said. Ligety agreed, saying his decision to switch to Head from Rossignol was based on a long-term plan. \u201cThe money is obviously an issue, but the biggest thing is you\u2019re not going to be making money unless you\u2019re winning ski races,\u201d he said. Deciding is pretty simple, Ligety said. \u201cYou need to go onto a brand that you know is going to help you make the next step and make you a better skier.\u201d Vonn even said there was a term for skiers who are shortsighted about equipment sponsorships. \u201cCash in and fade out,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can take a bigger offer with a ski company, but it doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re going to be fast. When I made the decision to switch to Head, I switched because they were the better ski company, period. That showed in my results.\u201d", "keyword": "Alpine Skiing;Shoes and Boots;Ligety Ted;Mancuso Julia;Vonn Lindsey;Miller Bode;Eberharter Stephan"}
{"id": "ny0107477", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/04/15", "title": "In-Box \u2014 Augusta, the Tour and the Uninvited", "abstract": "To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cTouchy Day at Augusta National Men\u2019s Club,\u201d April 5: Virginia M. Rometty, the chief executive of I.B.M., has ascended the corporate ladder without the assistance of Augusta National Golf Club. It appears the club has more to gain from her membership than does Rometty. She should not accept an official invitation to join Augusta National until the chairman issues a televised apology for the club\u2019s colossal lapse in judgment. Kevin Palmer Martinez, Ga. \u0095 To the Sports Editor: Don\u2019t blame Augusta National for its restrictive men-only policy. Any private club should be allowed to designate its membership any way it chooses. The fault is with the PGA Tour, which plays a tournament on the golf course of a restrictive organization. It will not sanction a tournament on a private golf course that excludes blacks, Jews, Hispanics or any other minority. But restricting female membership is somehow all right. Richard Jafolla Vero Beach, Fla. \u0095 To the Sports Editor: When Augusta National opens its private gates to the world\u2019s television viewers for the Masters, it willingly becomes public. If the club wants total privacy, it must cancel any public broadcasting. Augusta can no longer have it both ways. Jerry Collamer San Clemente, Calif. Thorny, and Free, Speech To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cIn Miami, Winning Clearly Isn\u2019t the Only Thing,\u201d April 11: We all know that Ozzie Guillen makes a much better baseball strategist than a candidate for the diplomatic service. However, I believe that he has the right to publicly express his opinion, no matter how controversial it may be. Suppression of opinion is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. Martin Sternberg New York \u0095 To the Sports Editor: Those outraged at Ozzie Guillen\u2019s exercise of his constitutional right to free speech would be better advised to direct their outrage instead toward the United States government\u2019s antiquated, tone-deaf cold war embargo against Cuba, which serves only to strengthen the power of the man they hate so much. Tom Miller Oakland, Calif. College Sports \u2018Servitude\u2019 To the Sports Editor: Re \u201cBegrudging the Wildcats\u2019 Success and Opportunities,\u201d April 9: All well and good for William C. Rhoden to posit N.C.A.A. basketball as \u201copportunity.\u201d But that putative benefit is a mirage: what minuscule part of the populace can it serve? Instead of anointing Kentucky Coach John Calipari as the best thing since the New Deal, Rhoden might have thrown his support to exposing N.C.A.A. revenue sports for what they are: gross servitude, not to mention how inimical they are to the universities\u2019 true missions. How many football or basketball players (or even athletes in the low-revenue sports) actually belong in a university? Calipari\u2019s Bismarckian realpolitik should not be lauded.Stephen D. Craig Charlotte, N.C.", "keyword": "Golf;Masters Golf Tournament;Basketball (College)"}
{"id": "ny0147518", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/07/24", "title": "The Road Ahead for Ford Is Full of Smaller Cars", "abstract": "DEARBORN, Mich. \u2014 In recent months, as Ford Motor Company executives watched $4 a gallon gas and a softening economy take a growing toll on sales and market share, the chief executive, Alan R. Mulally , prodded his management team for answers. \u201cEverybody says cut and cut some more, but how are we going to sustain this company?\u201d Mr. Mulally said in one meeting in his office on the 12th floor of Ford headquarters, according to people in attendance. \u201cWhat does a sustainable Ford look like, gentlemen?\u201d In less than two years since he arrived as an outsider from Boeing to run Ford, Mr. Mulally had already mortgaged the company to raise cash, sold off three brands and cut truck production in the face of rising gas prices. \u201cWhy are we in business?\u201d he repeatedly asked the group. \u201cWe are in business to create value. And we can\u2019t create value if we go out of business.\u201d On Thursday, the company will officially announce its response to those questions \u2014 a huge shift in production to build more small cars , and fewer pickups and sport utility vehicles. It\u2019s a big bet on the future of the American auto industry, involving the redirection of billions of dollars in investment, that Mr. Mulally hopes will help Ford thrive, not just survive. There are no guarantees that it will pay off, of course. But industry analysts are beginning to see Mr. Mulally as an executive who is willing to take big chances to reinvent a way of doing business in Detroit. The old way, relying on sales of big, profitable trucks and S.U.V.\u2019s, increasingly looks out of step with the times. \u201cHe has become the symbol of change for the American auto industry,\u201d said John Casesa of the consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group. \u201cBecause he\u2019s from the outside, he\u2019s not tied to the past.\u201d Mr. Mulally, who will turn 63 next month, has been unavailable for interviews in advance of Thursday\u2019s announcement of Ford\u2019s new direction and its second-quarter earnings. Rapidly shifting consumer tastes have forced Mr. Mulally to quickly find a way to break Ford\u2019s dependence on pickups and sport utility vehicles for profits in North America. After losing a combined $15.3 billion in 2006 and 2007, Ford surprised the industry by posting a $100 million profit in the first quarter of this year. But with gas prices rising and truck sales collapsing, Mr. Mulally stunned the industry less than a month later by announcing that Ford was abandoning its 2009 profit goal and drastically scaling back truck production. Analysts said the company, long considered the least nimble of Detroit\u2019s automakers, usually would have waited at least until another quarter passed before dropping such bombshell. \u201cMulally is far more of an activist than the traditional Ford chief executive who was a 35-year lifer in the company,\u201d said David Healy of Burnham Securities. Mr. Mulally has also made a believer of Kirk Kerkorian, the financier who has invested more than $1 billion in Ford stock since April. Mr. Kerkorian had previously taken large stakes in General Motors and Chrysler, and then sold out after running afoul of management. But his interest in Ford appears primarily based on Mr. Mulally\u2019s leadership and strategic direction. In fact, Mr. Kerkorian substantially increased his stake in Ford after his top deputy, Jerome York, had a meeting with Mr. Mulally. \u201cAlan is the real deal,\u201d Mr. York said. On Thursday, Ford is expected to report a second-quarter loss that includes charges to cover the temporary shutdowns of several assembly plants and reductions in its salaried and hourly work forces. But investors and analysts will be focusing more on Ford\u2019s radical plan to shift production to smaller cars and crossover vehicles. \u201cThis is not a sure thing by any means,\u201d said Rebecca Lindland, an auto analyst with the forecasting firm Global Insight. \u201cThe question is whether Ford can produce the styling and quality in cars that consumers want.\u201d Where once Ford built its car line around the midsize Taurus sedan, the company will now make its compact Focus the linchpin of the lineup. Restoring Ford\u2019s car business has been a paramount concern for Mr. Mulally since he succeeded William C. Ford Jr., a Ford family scion, as chief executive. As recently as 2004, two-thirds of Ford\u2019s United States sales were of truck-based products. Many people in the company were skeptical that Ford could be profitable with more small cars in the showroom. But Mr. Mulally has challenged those notions. At a town hall-style meeting this year, he expressed frustration when one employee suggested that making small cars was a money-losing proposition. \u201cWhy can\u2019t we make money on small cars?\u201d Mr. Mulally said, according to two people in attendance. \u201cDo you think Toyota can\u2019t make money on small cars?\u201d At virtually every management meeting, Mr. Mulally would repeatedly refer to charts showing that smaller vehicles constituted 60 percent of the global automotive market. Each time an executive suggested that Ford\u2019s future lay in expanding its truck business, Mr. Mulally pulled the charts out. \u201cLet\u2019s see, the global share of large vehicles is 15 percent,\u201d he said at one such meeting, according to people in attendance. \u201cAnd you\u2019re telling me you want to invest more in them?\u201d He often exhorts his employees to \u201ctake a point of view of the future,\u201d and then devise a plan supporting it. By betting on the growth of small cars, Ford will move billions of dollars in investments away from the pickups and S.U.V.\u2019s that have provided the bulk of its profits for nearly two decades. Mr. Mulally is committed to building global platforms for Ford cars that can be sold throughout North America, Europe and Asia. And his senior managers have been hand-picked for their expertise in international markets. Mark Fields, who heads Ford\u2019s Americas division, was formerly a top executive with Ford\u2019s Japanese partner Mazda. Derrick Kuzak, the company\u2019s product chief, previously ran European vehicle programs. Mr. Mulally also recruited James Farley from Toyota to lead Ford\u2019s global sales and marketing efforts. Besides recasting his executive team, Mr. Mulally changed how they worked together. Ford had been famous for its culture of executive fiefs that insulated senior officials from one another. One of Mr. Mulally\u2019s first tasks was to institute regular Thursday meetings of top managers to review business plans and encourage debate among departments. He also created a new mantra for all employees to help break down walls: \u201cOne Ford, One Team, One Plan, One Goal.\u201d Having spent 37 years with Boeing, Mr. Mulally often refers to his old company in describing how Ford can emerge from crisis conditions. As head of engineering for the Boeing 777 airliner in the early 1990s, Mr. Mulally would urge employees to stay focused even as the economy and airline industry struggled. In a documentary film about the making of the aircraft, Mr. Mulally repeatedly stressed that sticking to the plan was paramount, words that could as easily apply to Ford today. \u201cWe can\u2019t let the anxiousness of today\u2019s environment in any way slow us down,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t let current events affect our intensity of getting this program done.\u201d", "keyword": "Ford Motor Co;Mulally Alan R;Automobiles;Detroit (Mich);Small Cars (Compact Subcompact and Microcars);Executives and Management;Sales;Stocks and Bonds;Utility Vehicles and Other Light Trucks"}
{"id": "ny0237797", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2010/06/30", "title": "Stars Won\u2019t Re-Sign Modano", "abstract": "If Mike Modano plays a 21st season in the N.H.L., it will not be with the Dallas Stars . Modano will not be offered a contract by the Stars when free agency opens Thursday, according to his teammate turned boss, Stars General Manager Joe Nieuwendyk. They won a Stanley Cup together 11 years ago \u2014 the only title in franchise history \u2014 but Nieuwendyk said the team needed to make room for younger players. Modano, 40, said he was \u201cdisappointed and upset\u201d and was leaning toward returning with another team.", "keyword": "Modano Mike;Dallas Stars;Hockey Ice;Free Agents (Sports)"}
{"id": "ny0260196", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/06/20", "title": "Congress to Vote on Financing for U.S. Role in Libya", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The House appears likely to vote this week on a measure that would limit financing for the American military efforts in Libya , using the chamber\u2019s appropriations power to push back against the White House, which did not seek Congressional authorization for the mission. Any measures to end or reduce financing for the military\u2019s involvement in the NATO -led airstrikes in Libya are likely to divide members of Congress. They are split in both the House and Senate between two slightly incongruous alliances: antiwar Democrats and Republicans who are angry about the usurping of Congressional authority, and Democrats who do not wish to go against the president, joined by hawkish Republicans who strongly support America\u2019s role in Libya. Last week, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, said he would offer an amendment to a spending bill for the Department of Defense that is expected to reach the House floor this week. The amendment would cut off current and future spending for military operations in Libya. At least one Republican could propose a separate bill that would set terms for the financing of the Libya operation, Republican officials said. It would probably take a more narrow approach than the Kucinich amendment, cutting off spending for specific actions like Predator strikes. It also could prohibit the use of ground forces in the country. (There are no such American forces there now.) \u201cThe next step is something we\u2019ll discuss with the members,\u201d Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner , said on Sunday. In recent weeks, Mr. Boehner has warned President Obama that his administration is in violation of the War Powers Resolution for failing to seek authorization from Congress for the United States\u2019s military involvement in the NATO operations in Libya, meant to protect civilians there and put pressure on its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi . Under some lawmakers\u2019 interpretation of the resolution, Mr. Obama would need to terminate or scale back the mission after Monday, barring such authorization. Mr. Obama has responded by saying that American operations are limited and do not rise to \u201chostilities\u201d as defined in the War Powers Resolution, and, therefore, Congressional authority is unnecessary. The question of financing the operations gained urgency over the weekend after an article in The New York Times revealed that President Obama had rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department in deciding that he had the legal authority to continue American participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization. Earlier this month, Mr. Kucinich offered a resolution that called for a withdrawal of the military from the air and naval operations in and around Libya within 15 days. The measure failed (though many Republicans voted for it) only because Mr. Boehner offered an 11th-hour resolution of his own, simply to rebuke Mr. Obama for failing to seek Congressional approval. That resolution passed , 268 to 145. As more lawmakers become impatient with the Libya mission, there may be more pressure on House members to rein in spending there. \u201cCongress must use its constitutional authority of the power of the purse to end this war,\u201d Mr. Kucinich said in a written statement . \u201cMy amendment will provide the first test whether this Congress will defend its own authority under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.\u201d Mr. Boehner and many other Republicans are torn, wanting to chastise the Obama administration yet loath to pull out of a NATO operation, which they said would be a poor signal to American allies. The argument posed by the White House \u2014 that air operations and support of NATO\u2019s operations do not constitute war \u2014 has been rejected by members of both parties. On the NBC program \u201cMeet the Press\u201d on Sunday, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the assistant majority leader, said, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t pass a straight-face test in my view that we\u2019re not in the midst of hostilities.\u201d He added: \u201cWe are engaged in hostilities in Libya. What we should do is act on a timely basis to pass Congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.\u201d He said, however, that he would not support cutting off financing for the operations. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on the same program: \u201cThe president has done a lousy job of communicating and managing our involvement in Libya. But I will be no part of an effort to defund Libya or try to cut off our efforts to bring Qaddafi down. If we fail against Qaddafi, that\u2019s the end of NATO.\u201d Other senators \u2014 including John McCain, Republican of Arizona \u2014 have criticized House Republicans for moving against Mr. Obama on this issue. On \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates defended Mr. Obama\u2019s interpretation of the War Powers Resolution and suggested that Congress would be mistaken to move to block spending on the mission. \u201cFrankly, I think cutting off funding in the middle of a military operation when we have people engaged is always a mistake,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI believe that President Obama has complied with the law, consistent in a manner with virtually all of his predecessors. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s breaking any new ground here.\u201d", "keyword": "United States Politics and Government;War Powers Act (1973);Libya;Obama Barack;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Qaddafi Muammar el-;House of Representatives;Senate;North Atlantic Treaty Organization"}
{"id": "ny0203571", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2009/08/08", "title": "Moreno, the Broncos\u2019 Top Pick, Agrees to a Five-Year Deal", "abstract": "Knowshon Moreno, the Denver Broncos \u2019 top pick who was the first running back selected in the N.F.L. draft, ended his eight-day holdout on Friday, agreeing to a five-year, $23 million deal that includes $13 million in guarantees. Moreno, who rushed for 2,734 yards and 30 touchdowns in his two seasons at Georgia, was the 12th pick over all in the draft in April. Moreno will join the team for practice Sunday afternoon. The Broncos do not have a session Saturday. Broncos Coach Josh McDaniels said he and Moreno\u2019s teammates were excited for him to arrive. \u201cI understand how this game works,\u201d McDaniels said Friday while the sides were still working out the final details of Moreno\u2019s contract. \u201cHis representatives are doing what they feel is best for him.\u201d Although Moreno has some catching up to do, McDaniels insisted he had not missed his chance to win the starting tailback job. \u201cHe\u2019s missed 12 practices, so I think \u2014 he\u2019ll earn his role after he gets here, that\u2019s the best way to say it,\u201d McDaniels said. Moreno will join a crowded Broncos backfield, which includes the free agents LaMont Jordan and Correll Buckhalter and the second-year holdovers Peyton Hillis and Ryan Torain. INJURY FOR GIANTS , SORT OF The first significant injury of the Giants\u2019 training camp was to a ball boy. Ryan Kennelly, the 14-year-old son of the assistant head trainer Steve Kennelly, broke his left wrist Thursday night when he was bowled over by the rookie tight end Travis Beckum during a seven-on-seven passing drill. Linebacker Zak DeOssie knocked Beckum off balance at the line of scrimmage. Beckum, a third-round draft choice, then collided with Ryan Kennelly, who was holding a foam bag that simulates the end of the offensive line. \u201cThe way I tripped, I felt I would have kneed him,\u201d Beckum said Friday. \u201cI just tried to spread out to decrease the impact, but unfortunately he fractured his wrist.\u201d Kennelly finished the drill before receiving attention for the fracture, which did not require surgical pins to fix. \u201cWhen it involves your kid, it\u2019s a little bit different,\u201d Steve Kennelly said, adding: \u201cIt\u2019s all part of football. He has a story for the rest of his life. His first training camp as a ball boy.\u201d Coach Tom Coughlin said that after a second ball boy took a hit Thursday, he made changes on Friday. When the seven-on-seven drill was run again, Terry Mansfield, the team\u2019s field security manager, and another adult held the foam bags. SUSPECT WON\u2019T WITHDRAW PLEA The only suspect to plead guilty so far in the slaying of the Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor told a judge Friday in Miami that he was abandoning an effort to withdraw his plea. Venjah Hunte, 21, made the decision after a private meeting with his lawyer and his mother. At a brief hearing, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dennis Murphy asked Hunte if he still insisted on pursuing his motion to withdraw guilty pleas to second-degree murder and burglary charges. Hunte said no. He had previously claimed that he did not fully understand the requirements of his plea deal, in which he agreed to testify against his four co-defendants in exchange for a 29-year prison sentence. If he had gone to trial, Hunte would have faced a life sentence. 49ERS \u2019 JONES HURTS SHOULDER San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Brandon Jones will miss eight weeks because of a small fracture in his right shoulder. Jones was injured Thursday while trying to make a diving catch. The 49ers still have not signed their top pick, receiver Michael Crabtree. The sides were said to be far apart Friday. \u201cIn terms of Crabtree, when he comes in, he comes in,\u201d Coach Mike Singletary said. \u201cWould you love to have him in? Absolutely. You\u2019d love to have him. Do we want him here? Yes, we want to have him in. But until that happens, I just can\u2019t sit back and think about the what-ifs. All I can do is concentrate on what is, and control that.\u201d INDUCTION DAY Ralph Wilson, the 90-year-old owner of the Buffalo Bills, will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday in Canton, Ohio, along with five former players: defensive end Bruce Smith, linebacker Derrick Thomas, defensive back Rod Woodson, offensive guard Randall McDaniel and receiver Bob Hayes. Thomas, whose career was cut short in 2000 when he died after a car accident, and Hayes, who died in 2002 at age 59, will be inducted posthumously.", "keyword": "Football;Denver Broncos;New York Giants;Washington Redskins;San Francisco 49ers;Moreno Knowshon"}
{"id": "ny0170532", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/02/16", "title": "Hershey Cutting Work Force 12%", "abstract": "Hershey will close more than a third of its assembly lines and eliminate 12 percent of its work force after sales fell for the first time in 3 \u00bd years, the company said yesterday. The company, whose products include Hershey\u2019s Kisses and Reese\u2019s peanut butter cups, will cut 1,500 jobs over the next three years and start production at a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico. The reductions will cost as much as $575 million before taxes, the company said. Hershey, which is based in Hershey, Pa., lost market share last year to Mars, the maker of Snickers, and last month reported a fourth-quarter sales decline of 0.7 percent. Hershey\u2019s United States market share fell to 42.5 percent in the 13 weeks through Dec. 24, from 43.5 percent at the end of the fourth quarter of 2005, according to Information Resources. Mars\u2019s share rose to 25.9 percent, from 24.2 percent. The data excludes sales to Wal-Mart Stores. When the plan is completed, Hershey expects 80 percent of its production to be in the United States and Canada. Shares of Hershey rose 80 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $52.10 on the New York Stock Exchange.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Hershey"}
{"id": "ny0157026", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/06/24", "title": "Citing Gas Prices, I.R.S. Raises Auto Mileage Deduction", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The Internal Revenue Service , citing the drain of high gas prices on households, said Monday that it was raising the automobile mileage rate that businesses and others could claim. The tax agency said the optional standard rate to calculate deductible operating costs for business vehicles will rise to 58.5 cents a mile, from 50.5 cents, for the final six months of 2008. That rate also applies to businesses and others entitled to depreciation allowances that operate autos for charitable, medical or moving purposes. The I.R.S. said it was also changing the rate for computing deductible medical or moving expenses to 27 cents a mile, from 19 cents, for the final six months of the year. That applies to individuals not entitled to depreciation allowances. Congress must enact legislation to change the rate for providing services for charitable organizations, so that will stay at 14 cents a mile. The I.R.S. normally updates the rates once a year in the fall for the next calendar year.", "keyword": "Internal Revenue Service;Tax Deductions;Automobiles;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)"}
{"id": "ny0193699", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/20", "title": "Transit Officials Decide to Put \u2018Optimism\u2019 on MetroCards", "abstract": "\u201c The Waterfalls \u201d flowed in the East River. \u201cThe Gates\u201d snaked through Central Park. Now New York\u2019s latest large-scale public art project is being exhibited in an even unlikelier space: your wallet. On the back of seven million MetroCards distributed this fall is a single printed word: \u201coptimism.\u201d Composed in clean, bold, sans-serif letters, it floats in a sea of white just beneath the boilerplate fine print. Another seven million are on the way early next year. At first glance, the word appears simple and unassuming, a non sequitur easily overlooked amid the blur of travel in the city. Even its creators acknowledge that many subway and bus riders may never see it. But as unemployment in the city reaches a 16-year high, as corporations close and deficits mount, optimism has become a scarce commodity, aboveground and below. New York, it seems, could use a chance to restock. \u201cGod knows people want to feel good, they want to feel up, they want to feel positive,\u201d said Christopher P. Boylan, who oversaw the project at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority . \u201cIf I can make a couple of customers smile a day, that\u2019s nice.\u201d The work itself is the creation of Reed Seifer, a graphic artist and designer who first printed the \u201coptimism\u201d logo on small buttons that he distributed as a college student . \u201cI\u2019ve always loved art that exists in unexpected places,\u201d he said recently, near his home in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. \u201cI like that maybe not everyone\u2019s going to see it. Or maybe one day you just look and say, \u2018Oh.\u2019 \u201d The MetroCard , a ubiquitous slip of thin plastic barely three and a half inches across, certainly qualifies as an unusual canvas for conceptual art. The back of the card is mostly reserved for historical factoids (\u201cThe first female subway conductor began work on Dec. 28, 1917\u201d), safety tips (\u201cFold the stroller. Hold your baby\u201d), or the occasional commemoration of a World Series win or Rockettes performance (\u201cMetroCard saves you $10 to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular!\u201d). Occasionally, the card is also used for advertising, but those revenues have remained low, in part because of a lengthy production process. This year, the authority sold $165,000 worth of MetroCard ads, a fraction of its overall take in advertising revenue. The MetroCard ad revenue in 2009 is nearly double the amount sold in 2008, but ads were still printed on fewer than 3 percent of the 120 million MetroCards produced in the first 10 months of this year \u2014 perhaps underscoring the relevance of \u201coptimism\u201d to an agency facing further budget cuts from the state. Indeed, not all that the \u201coptimism\u201d project suggests is, well, optimistic. The word on the card can be read as an encouragement, a command, a taunt, an aspiration. \u201cI like that people can digest it in any way they choose,\u201d Mr. Seifer, 36, said. \u201cI accept all praise and criticism. I love artwork in which people perceive things beyond the intention of the artist.\u201d Despite its sunny surface, \u201coptimism\u201d originated in a darker place. Mr. Seifer was inspired by a maxim he found printed on a Domino\u2019s sugar packet: \u201cAn optimist is someone who tells you to cheer up when things are going his way.\u201d An undergraduate at the time, studying art at Clark University, Mr. Seifer incorporated the phrase into his senior thesis, which focused on an incident with his father, who once offered an empty soda bottle to a homeless man collecting cans for redemption. The man refused, finding the offer patronizing. To promote the project, Mr. Seifer created the \u201coptimism\u201d logo, a balanced, streamlined composition in Akzidenz-Grotesk, a 19th-century font considered a precursor to Helvetica. (An influential, widely used font, Helvetica is common in the subway system\u2019s signage.) \u201cIt\u2019s very open and minimal, and you can see the line weights of the letter forms are all equal weight, so it\u2019s not distracting,\u201d Mr. Seifer said. \u201cWhat I like about this typeface is it promotes without calling attention to itself, which is sort of what the \u2018optimism\u2019 MetroCard is about.\u201d \u201cOptimism\u201d buttons have been sold at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Public Library, and handed out free by Mr. Seifer himself. Early last year, seeking a wider distribution, he got in touch with Creative Time , a nonprofit organization that works with artists on public art projects. The MetroCard idea came to him at an interview, after his initial plans were rejected. Arts for Transit , an arm of the transportation authority, receives hundreds of ideas from artists. But Mr. Seifer\u2019s plan, with its simplicity and ease of installation, caught the eye of Sandra Bloodworth, the program\u2019s director, who immediately accepted it. Riders and reporters were not informed when the word began appearing on MetroCards in September. The point, Mr. Seifer said, was for it to be intimate, a serendipitous discovery for the viewer. \u201cIt exists between the card and the person who receives the card,\u201d he said. As he designed the card, Mr. Seifer said, he did not take into account the small hole punched along the left edge of every MetroCard. In a happy accident, the hole lined up perfectly with the word, becoming a kind of period. Mr. Seifer found this appropriate: \u201cOptimism is about openings where people don\u2019t expect to find them.\u201d", "keyword": "Art;MetroCard (NYC);Metropolitan Transportation Authority;Subways;Transit Systems;Seifer Reed"}
{"id": "ny0102620", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/13", "title": "Where Katharine Hepburn Got Her Chocolates", "abstract": "The sign does say \u201cMondel Chocolates.\u201d But the display window, a collection of boxes, posters and a neon sign that repeats the store name, shows no sweets. Habitual customers, however, ignore the arrangement and walk into Mondel\u2019s with the same intention they have had for years. Thomas DiPrete was one such determined customer, entering and exiting shortly after with a paper bag of mixed dark chocolates with almond logs, citrus truffles, cordial cherries and Black Forest truffles. \u201cI favor the ones that have a real fruity flavor,\u201d Mr. DiPrete said. Mr. DiPrete, 65, of Morningside Heights, said he had occasionally been coming to Mondel Chocolates for a decade, but a few years ago he moved next door to the store on Broadway and West 114th Street. \u201cNow I have to try to not come too often,\u201d Mr. DiPrete said. \u201cOnly every few weeks.\u201d Once you\u2019re through the door, the narrow store reveals display cases filled with dozens of types of candies, like raspberry jellies and champagne truffles and almond bark. The handwritten price signs are yellowed with age. The little space that is not stocked with chocolates is occupied by fancy gift boxes and tins. Carl Mondel and his wife, Elsie, opened the store in 1943. Their daughter Florence worked there, starting as a young girl and retiring only a few years ago. According to Paula Blat, the manager and an employee for the past 22 years, the store hasn\u2019t changed much since it opened. Image Paula Blat, the owner of Mondel Chocolates, assists a longtime customer. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times \u201cThe store is the same,\u201d Ms. Blat said. \u201cThe same people come in. They say it\u2019s exactly the same.\u201d Such longevity creates longtime customers , some who discover Mondel Chocolates when they are students at nearby Barnard and Columbia and keep coming even once they graduate and move away. For instance, there\u2019s the story (reported in Metropolitan Diary in 2003 ) of a man who was devoted to orange creams when he was a Columbia student in the 1960s. Thirty years later, he returned to Mondel with his daughter. The proprietor recognized him and mentioned that she hadn\u2019t seen him \u201cfor a while.\u201d The proprietor was Florence, if Ms. Blat recalls correctly, but an experience like that isn\u2019t unusual, she said. \u201cThere are people that come with their children and then grandchildren,\u201d Ms. Blat said. Perhaps Mondel Chocolates\u2019 most recognizable fan was Katharine Hepburn, who called the store\u2019s chocolates \u201cthe best in the world.\u201d A note on the stationery of \u201cKatharine Houghton Hepburn,\u201d sent by the actress\u2019s niece and now taped to the glass near the register, reads, \u201cThank you for the delicious chocolates \u2014 how very thoughtful \u2014 Ms. Hepburn was pleased.\u201d The store had sent chocolates for Ms. Hepburn\u2019s 90th birthday in 1997. For years, Hepburn would be driven to Mondel Chocolates to pick up her standing order: pecan turtles, molasses chips, butter crunch, dark orange peel, champagne truffles and dark almond bark. Customers still come in and request the Hepburn mix. The holidays are the busiest time. Boxes of chocolates are an obvious gift, but Mondel Chocolates also sells nuts and dried fruits for Hanukkah that can be paired with kosher chocolates. At Easter, Mondel finds room on the shelves for stuffed plush bunnies and the rest of the makings for an Easter basket. The economist Glenn Hubbard , the dean of Columbia Business School since 2004 and a resident of the Upper West Side since 1988, doesn\u2019t remember how he first learned about Mondel Chocolates. But he stocks his office with Mondel gift boxes to give to visitors and leaves out a bowl of butter crunch. \u201cI think gifts should be, if possible, local and special,\u201d Mr. Hubbard said.", "keyword": "Mondel Chocolates;Morningside Heights Manhattan;Katharine Hepburn"}
{"id": "ny0203847", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2009/08/23", "title": "Kyle Busch Wins Sharpie 500 at Bristol and Inches Closer to Spot in Chase", "abstract": "BRISTOL, Tenn. (AP) \u2014 Kyle Busch took a big step toward saving his season Saturday night by winning a gutsy side-by-side sprint to the finish against Mark Martin in the Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. Fighting hard for a berth in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, Busch drove a steady and smooth race at one of the toughest tracks in Nascar to climb off the ropes and keep his title hopes alive. His fourth win of the season \u2014 tying him with Martin for the most in the Sprint Cup series \u2014 allowed him to jump two spots in the standings to 13th. With two races to go before the 12-driver Chase field is set, Busch trails the 12th-place driver, Matt Kenseth , by just 34 points. \u201cNo pressure on us yet!\u201d one of his team members radioed after he won. \u201cThis 18 is not going down without a fight!\u201d Busch was silent for a few seconds before celebrating with a smoky burnout on the front stretch and his traditional bow to the crowd. He then grabbed the checkered flag from a Nascar official and gave it to a fan through a hole in the fence. \u201cI hope this just isn\u2019t a fluke to get in the Chase; we need to run well at Atlanta and Richmond,\u201d he said in victory lane, referring to the last two races before the playoffs. Martin, the pole-sitter, finished second in the 1,000th start of his career. He also improved his Chase chances and moved up two spots in the standings to 10th. But he could have moved Busch out of his way several times over the final 50 laps, including the dramatic four-lap sprint to the finish. Instead, he raced him clean and defended his decision not to use his bumper on Busch. \u201cAnyone who thinks I was soft out there on the racetrack wasn\u2019t watching,\u201d Martin said. \u201cI raced my guts out.\u201d Martin led 240 of the 500 laps on the roughly half-mile track, and Busch could commiserate with his runner-up showing. \u201cMark Martin, what a class act,\u201d Busch said. \u201cHe deserved to win this race. I\u2019m sorry he got second. I know how he feels. But man, I drove as hard as I could. He had a chance, could have done it. He raced me clean.\u201d The victory broke a 13-race winless streak in the Cup series for Busch, an eternity for him since joining Joe Gibbs Racing last season. But he has been struggling to regain the momentum he had most of last year, and his confidence at times has seemed shattered as he struggled to accept defeat. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have the best car, but had a car capable enough to doing it if I can drive it hard enough,\u201d he said. \u201cI gave it everything I had. It\u2019s crazy.\u201d Marcos Ambrose was third, and Greg Biffle and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top five. Hamlin came back after an early tire problem. Ryan Newman was sixth and was followed by Kurt Busch, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kenseth. It was a mixed night for the Chase contenders. The points leader, Tony Stewart, had an early radio problem, an issue with his power and a generally miserable night as he finished 33rd. Kasey Kahne was 28th, and Carl Edwards was 16th. Juan Pablo Montoya moved as high as second at one point, but a tire problem caused him to lose six positions before he was finally saved by a caution. \u201cGood! What has changed on this thing?\u201d Montoya asked. \u201cWe\u2019re going to wreck.\u201d Fighting for his own Chase berth, he was urged to stay calm by his crew chief, Brian Pattie. \u201cDude, you\u2019re going to be fine,\u201d Pattie said. But when racing resumed, Montoya continued to slide backward, finally heading to the pits to change what he suspected was a flat tire. He finished 25th and fell two spots in the standings, to ninth. The four-time series champion Jeff Gordon struggled and finished 23rd, while Johnson put himself in position to cross Bristol off the list of six active tracks where he has not win. Instead, a loose wheel on a late tire change sent him back into the pits, and he dropped from contention.", "keyword": "Automobile Racing;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing;Gibbs Joe Racing;Busch Kyle;Martin Mark;Kenseth Matt;Ambrose Marcos"}
{"id": "ny0171740", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2007/11/28", "title": "A Battle-Scarred Edwards, Emerging a Fighter", "abstract": "MILFORD, N.H. \u2014 He has beat his Diet Coke addiction \u2014 \u201ctoo much caffeine.\u201d He no longer shrinks from foreign policy talk and salts his speeches with lines like, \u201cI saw a piece recently in the Guardian newspaper, a British newspaper.\u201d And where he once meandered from topic to topic, the John Edwards of today tries to keep it concise. \u201cBecause I want to take your questions, I am not talking about what I think is a moral crisis, which is climate change ,\u201d he told an audience at Dartmouth College in November. \u201cI hope somebody will ask me about it. I think it\u2019s a huge issue facing the world. I am not talking about poverty, which is my personal passion.\u201d Then it\u2019s on to Iraq and Iran. Mr. Edwards, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and then ran with Senator John Kerry as his vice-presidential choice, has not dispensed with his old self as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination this year. Poverty was a central theme in the 2004 primary campaign, with his signature \u201ctwo Americas\u201d speech on economic inequality, and it is still a focus today. Mr. Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, also remains an emotional, wide-eyed campaigner speaking out against injustices, invoking his mill-worker father and the corporations he fought as a personal injury lawyer in courtrooms. But there have been certain refinements in the four years since Mr. Edwards first stumped through Iowa and New Hampshire, a reporter who has seen both campaigns has found. Much of the change is in style, as his competitors have noted. Mr. Edwards was sunny and optimistic in 2004, to the point of criticizing other candidates for their \u201csniping.\u201d \u201cIf we are the party of anger in 2004, we will not win,\u201d he said back then. He also said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe voters in New Hampshire care about what someone said seven years ago about whatever they were talking about. I don\u2019t think they care about what somebody said yesterday about some small nuance of some issue.\u201d But this time he is often the one doing the sniping, usually singling out his rival Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He has criticized her record on Iraq and Iran, hammered her for accepting donations from corporate lobbyists and portrayed her as a Washington insider, no different from Republican politicians \u2014 lines of attack that are similar to those of liberal bloggers. This shift in style is, in some ways, more consistent with Mr. Edwards\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 as a ferocious and successful trial lawyer, but it raises the question of which is closer to his true self, the candidate of 2003 or of 2007? Mr. Edwards insists he has not fundamentally changed, but the experience of the last campaign, the return of his wife Elizabeth\u2019s incurable cancer, and his intense preparation for this campaign have undoubtedly had an effect. \u201cI do think that when you go through a national campaign, the intensity of a national campaign, and the experience we\u2019ve had with Elizabeth\u2019s health, it does make you tougher,\u201d he said in an interview between campaign stops in New Hampshire. \u201cIt seasons you. There\u2019s also more depth because I have done a lot of work both during the last campaign and since the last campaign. It\u2019s a combination of all those things.\u201d The most obvious difference in this campaign comes in what Mr. Edwards emphasizes and what he does not. While Mr. Edwards in 2004 played up his single Senate term as a way to overcome doubts about his experience and political heft, today he hardly mentions that part of his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 \u2014 nor does he mention his run on a presidential ticket, a unique experience among his rivals \u2014 presumably in the interest of promoting himself as a Washington outsider. Instead, his courtroom days are front and center, mainly used to portray himself as a fighter. \u201cI beat them, and I beat them, and I beat them again,\u201d he thundered here at a town-hall-style meeting, describing his trial victories against big corporations with a line reprised from 2004. While lobbyists fell in his gun sights then, he has stepped up the attack to accuse them of \u201ccorrupting the government\u201d \u2014 a shift he describes as \u201cdirectness and honesty.\u201d \u201cUsing a word like \u2018corruption\u2019 would have been a hard thing in 2004 because nobody uses words like that,\u201d Mr. Edwards said. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to be more careful. It\u2019s not politically correct.\u201d This edgier side has brought accusations of hypocrisy from opponents and cost him an important supporter in this state, where he is trailing in the polls and came in fourth in 2004. State Senator Lou D\u2019Allessandro, a kingmaker who was chairman of Mr. Edwards\u2019s campaign here in 2004 and who was lobbied heavily by most of the Democratic contenders, decided earlier this month to support Mrs. Clinton. \u201cHe is a lot different,\u201d Mr. D\u2019Allessandro said in an interview. \u201cHe is in attack mode now rather than talking about the two Americas and using that warm, embracing style that he had.\u201d The last time, of course, Mr. Edwards, with his positive message and tone, found it hard to be heard in a crowded field. It bears noting that he was never entirely warm and fuzzy then, either. Before he got to the talk about \u201cbuilding people up, not tearing them down,\u201d he raged against \u201cGeorge W. Bush\u201d \u2014 he almost always used the initial \u2014 \u201cwalking around that ranch with his huge belt buckle,\u201d ignoring the plight of \u201creal America.\u201d Mr. Edwards said he believed he had bridged the failure of the last campaign with the spunk of the new one. \u201cI\u2019m seasoned enough to now believe that you need both,\u201d he said, \u201cthat hope alone won\u2019t do it, that there are fights that have to be taken.\u201d", "keyword": "Edwards John;Presidential Election of 2008;Presidential Election of 2004"}
{"id": "ny0044679", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/02/18", "title": "King Richard III\u2019s Eyes, and the Munchies", "abstract": "It was a week of revived hopes. Thermonuclear fusion is looking a bit more promising; a moon rover thought dead may yet work; and we may finally discover the color of King Richard III\u2019s eyes. Keep your fingers crossed. Developments Medicine: New Doubts About Mammography One of the largest studies of mammograms ever conducted found that death rates from breast cancer were the same among women who got the test and those who did not. And one in five cancers found by the test, leading to therapies like chemotherapy or surgery, posed no real threat to the woman\u2019s health. Ultimately, the study found no benefit to detecting breast cancers that were still too small to feel. The new finding \u201cwill make women uncomfortable, and they should be uncomfortable,\u201d said a screening expert not involved in the study. Image The skeleton of Richard III. Credit University of Leicester, via Reuters Genetics: Human History, Drawn by Genome A team of geneticists took a first shot at using the genome to reconstruct human history. By sampling human genomes from around the world and applying statistical models, the scientists have tried to identify and date the major population-mixing events of the last 4,000 years. For instance, people of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East acquired segments of African origin in their genomes between A.D. 650 and 1900, the scientists said. This correlates with the advent of the Arab slave trade in the seventh century. Sequencing the King What color were King Richard III\u2019s eyes? British scientists hope to find out when they grind up some of his bones, found under a Leicester, England, parking lot in 2012, to try to sequence his genome. They also hope to discover what kind of infectious bacteria the embattled monarch might have been hosting when he died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Energy : A Step Toward Sustainable Fusion It took five years and many billions of dollars, but scientists in California say they have finally managed to produce fusion reactions with lasers , an important step toward the dream of producing nearly limitless energy through thermonuclear fusion. Writing in the journal Nature , scientists described two successful attempts at using lasers to crush a hydrogen pellet into helium, releasing more energy than had been deposited into it. As an energy source, the process remains impractical \u2014 only about 1 percent of the initial laser energy reached the hydrogen. But \u201ca lot of people are jazzed,\u201d said one of the researchers. Neuroscience: The Munchies Demystified Ingesting marijuana may make food smell and taste better, at least in mice, reported European researchers writing in Nature Neuroscience . THC, the active ingredient in the plant, binds to receptors in the olfactory bulb of the brain, increasing the user\u2019s ability to smell food, which may partly explain the \u201cmunchies.\u201d Earlier research showed that THC stimulates the release of dopamine, making for a satisfying meal, Smithsonian.com reported . Coming Up Space: A Chinese Rover Reborn Less than 24 hours after it was pronounced dead, China\u2019s moon rover, Jade Rabbit (Yutu, in Mandarin), perked up again. After malfunctioning for weeks, it entered hibernation early last week, a Chinese lunar program spokesman said. By Thursday it had revived, but was still malfunctioning. What went wrong, and can the rover be fully restored? Scientists will spend the next few weeks trying to figure that out, Reuters reported .", "keyword": "Science and Technology;Genetics and Heredity;DNA;King of England Richard III"}
{"id": "ny0019204", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/07/21", "title": "In a Military Town, Calls Grow to Lift the Voices of Sexual Assault Victims", "abstract": "OCEANSIDE, Calif. \u2014 Among the scores of memories that Tiffany Lucas collected during her years as a Marine gunnery sergeant, she wears most of them with pride. When a superior ordered male Marines not to curse in front of female Marines \u2014 as if the women were too delicate to take it \u2014 she spit an expletive his way. When other women selected the skinniest male Marines to carry on their shoulders during training, as if from the battlefield, she instead picked the heavy ones. But the memory that has haunted her was her failure to push back against a commander who told her not to report a young female recruit who said she was raped by a male Marine, who, Ms. Lucas said, went on to assault two more women. \u201cI was too weak to stand up to my commanding officer,\u201d said Ms. Lucas, who served in the Marines for 11 years, including in Falluja, Iraq, in 2006 and 2007. \u201cI really wish I had done something. If I could go back in time, I would stand up for her.\u201d In Oceanside, a scrappy beach town 10 miles south of Camp Pendleton, the Marine base that sprawls for 125,000 acres along the Southern California coastline, almost everyone who has served has a story to tell about sexual misconduct in the military. Some were harassed or assaulted themselves, while others worked among men and women who were victims of abuse. But in more than a dozen long interviews, veterans and active-duty military personnel here sounded a consistent theme: they believe commanders in charge of deciding which cases to prosecute conceal far too much out of fear that the cases will taint their careers. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge problem, mainly because of the fact it goes unreported,\u201d said Jimmy Coats, who served in the Navy for eight years and was raped, he said, by a man he had been dating. \u201cMy supervisor told me not to tell my commanding officer,\u201d Mr. Coats added. \u201cI worked in a clinic, and in quite a few instances there were people who didn\u2019t want to talk about it. When a report was made, they tried to keep it as quiet as possible.\u201d San Diego County has the highest concentration of active-duty military personnel in the country, where veterans from every service branch can be found on Oceanside\u2019s pier and in its plywood-floor bars, surplus stores and tattoo parlors. It remains a military-proud town, where people say there is disappointment that the Pentagon has not been better at tackling the problem of sexual assault. A recent Pentagon survey found that an estimated 26,000 people in the armed forces were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010. \u201cA lot of people around here worry about this,\u201d said Dennis Martinez, who served in the Marines in Vietnam. \u201cThey worry that when these things happen, it doesn\u2019t always get handled the right way. This is something that has been happening for many years.\u201d Image Tiffany Lucas, who served in the Marines for 11 years, says she regrets her failure to push back against a commander who told her not to report that a female recruit said she had been raped by a Marine. Credit Thomas Patterson for The New York Times Congress, led in part by women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is trying to grapple with the issue in a series of legislative proposals that are intended to crack down on offenders and keep commanders from reversing guilty verdicts in sexual assault convictions, which happens very rarely. Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand , Democrat of New York, proposed a measure that would give military prosecutors, rather than commanders, the power to decide which sexual assault cases to try, with the goal of increasing the number of people who report crimes without fear of retaliation. The idea of removing these powers from commanders has been met with stiff resistance both throughout the Pentagon and among some fellow lawmakers. The measure was rejected by the committee, but Ms. Gillibrand has said she will try to revive it later this year on the Senate floor. Ms. Lucas, 34, who was the only woman in her unit, oversaw a large group of trainees, including a 22-year-old woman who liked to go out drinking, Ms. Lucas said. After an overnight trip outside Reno, Nev., the trainee told Ms. Lucas she had been raped by a male Marine with a stellar training record. Ms. Lucas, appalled, went to her commanding officer to get an investigation started. \u201cI was told not to file a complaint,\u201d Ms. Lucas said, adding that she suspected it was because her commanding officer did not want such an event recorded on his own performance evaluation. \u201cHe felt the girl was promiscuous,\u201d Ms. Lucas said of her commanding officer. \u201cShe drank.\u201d Her commanding officer told her, she said, that the male Marine was great in every other aspect. \u201cI said, \u2018That\u2019s not the point.\u2019 I really wish I had done more. She was depressed, and he went on to assault two women in Japan. Nothing good came of it.\u201d While there are disagreements among veterans and active-duty military personnel about whether commanders should have power over prosecutions, there is broad agreement that the system does not always function in a way that best serves victims or the accused. \u201cWe heard about it all the time,\u201d said Jeff Edgington, 23, who just finished five years in the Marines. \u201cYou heard about older guys getting with the new girls. There are such huge biases that these cases don\u2019t get investigated as well as they could.\u201d Victims have long said that they fear retaliation if they report sex crimes to commanders, and that their careers could suffer. President Obama himself joined the debate in May when he proclaimed at the White House that those who commit sexual assault in the military should be \u201cprosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged \u2014 period.\u201d The president said he had ordered Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel \u201cto step up our game exponentially\u201d to prevent sex crimes. \u201cThe system is not built to effectively resolve allegations or help actual victims,\u201d said Eric S. Montalvo, a lawyer who has represented defendants in such cases and a former judge advocate general. \u201cI have been in the middle of proceedings where victims did not get justice because the system did not work properly.\u201d The focus will remain on the issue in places like Oceanside, particularly at a time when the Pentagon is moving more women into combat positions previously closed to them . \u201cThis has always been part of the culture,\u201d said Howard Buford, 88, who served in the Air Force for 20 years. \u201cThe women always kept their mouths shut because people didn\u2019t pay attention to them. But I think there is enough pressure now that the generals and colonels will start acting like they know what\u2019s going on.\u201d", "keyword": "US Military;Veteran;Rape;US Marines;Oceanside CA"}
{"id": "ny0246008", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2011/04/06", "title": "Syrian Rights Groups Raise Toll From Unrest", "abstract": "CAIRO \u2014 Human rights groups on Tuesday raised their estimates of the death toll from unrest in Syria , as protest organizers there continued their call for more demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad . The tally has risen steadily in recent days as rights groups have struggled to document the number of dead from a government crackdown on dissent that began more than two weeks ago. Wissam Tarif, the executive director of Insan, a Syrian rights group, said that at least 173 people had died in the unrest, including 15 in Douma, a working-class suburb northwest of Damascus, and 143 in and around Dara\u2019a, the southern area where the protests began. The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, working with the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies, said it had documented 123 deaths , including 22 in Douma. It said it did not have a number of dead in Dara\u2019a. Both groups said their figures were based on testimony from doctors, families of the dead and witnesses. It was impossible to verify their numbers. Pro-democracy advocates have called for a week of renewed protests in honor of those who have died, labeling it \u201ca week of martyrs.\u201d The advocates are part of a Facebook group called The Syrian Revolution 2011, which has more than 100,000 members. Documenting the dead in Syria is complicated by the omnipresence of security forces and the government\u2019s refusal to release the bodies of many of those killed at demonstrations, said Mr. Tarif and Radwan Ziadeh, the director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. The authorities in Douma have released 15 bodies, Mr. Ziadeh said, but families of seven more men have been told by witnesses that they were killed at protests. Gunshot wounds accounted for most of the dead, both organizations said. Mr. Tarif said his organization documented four cases of people injured at protests in Douma who were arrested by security forces inside the civilian Hamdan Hospital. They were taken to Tashreen Military Hospital, where families said they were denied treatment and later died, Mr. Tarif said.", "keyword": "Demonstrations Protests and Riots;Assad Bashar Al-;Syria;Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )"}
{"id": "ny0215779", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/04/29", "title": "Goldman a Lobbyist Non Grata", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Last week, White House officials quietly approached leading financial firms seeking formal letters of support for a Congressional overhaul of financial regulations . One Wall Street powerhouse was left off the list: Goldman Sachs . Given the government\u2019s lawsuit against Goldman, \u201cthe message,\u201d said a financial industry executive involved in the discussions about the White House solicitation, \u201cwas that Goldman\u2019s opinion doesn\u2019t matter and that it would be negative if Goldman was supportive of what we were doing.\u201d Goldman Sachs employs perhaps the country\u2019s most well-connected stable of Washington lobbyists, and it spent $2.8 million last year to bend the ear of federal officials and lawmakers. But the pounding the investment firm has taken in recent days has left it sidelined \u2014 at least in public \u2014 as Congress moves toward a decision that could reshape the very industry it rules. With Goldman the target of a Securities and Exchange Commission fraud lawsuit filed two weeks ago and nearly 11 hours of questioning in a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, the company has been portrayed by many as a symbol of Wall Street excess and abuse. \u201cAll of the Wall Street banks today are politically toxic,\u201d said Jaret Seiberg, a financial policy analyst for Concept Capital, a financial policy research group. \u201cGoldman is in that bucket. The hearing makes it harder to get their message out in Washington, but that was true before the hearing and that is true today. To be a Wall Street bank today means there are already two strikes against you.\u201d Still, the company is trying to find a way to influence the debate, even if it cannot play as visible a role. Goldman Sachs declined to comment on Wednesday on the impact that its legal and public relations troubles have had on its Washington lobbying operations. But one person briefed on its plans, but who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the firm\u2019s continuing legal and political troubles, said it was still trying to push its agenda. In seeking to make its case to lawmakers and their aides, the bank has been largely relying on trade groups, like the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the American Banking Association, or the Financial Services Forum, to plead its case about concerns in the financial legislation, industry officials said. In contrast to JPMorgan Chase and other rivals, Goldman has not tried grass-roots outreach efforts, like setting up hot lines to have employees call their Congressional leaders. But on occasion, Goldman and its lobbyists have approached Senate Democrats directly on areas of particular concern, like the so-called Volcker Rule, which would bar institutions like Goldman from buying and selling for their own profit, rather than as a service to its clients, according to a Democratic aide. Another provision that the firm would like to see changed is a ban on banks\u2019 trading in the derivatives market. More often, the firm \u2014 whose lobbyists and outside lawyers include Washington luminaries like Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader, and Ken Duberstein, the former Reagan administration official \u2014 has relied largely on intermediaries because politicians are worried about being associated with it, government and industry officials said. \u201cThey know they\u2019re not going to have that much of an impact,\u201d said one lobbyist who works with Goldman but did not want to be named for fear of jeopardizing his relationship with the firm. In addition to the political concerns, there were also pragmatic ones: many of the Goldman\u2019s highest-ranking executives, including Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive, had been preoccupied for the last week in preparing for the Senate hearing. At the hearing, senators pressed Goldman executives on the allegations by the S.E.C. that the firm had misled investors by selling them a complex mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail. Senate investigators also made public internal documents that shed light on the large profits the company made, and the satisfaction some of its executives derived, as the housing market began collapsing. And the events of recent weeks are clearly hurting the access of a company once renowned in Washington for sending its executives to senior posts at the Treasury Department. For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat who wrote the provision that would ban banks like Goldman Sachs from trading in derivatives, had discussed having a fund-raiser at the firm\u2019s New York offices this month, but she scuttled the possible event after the S.E.C. filed its lawsuit. Ms. Lincoln said she would no longer take political contributions from the firm, which has been one of the most prolific contributors to campaigns. Goldman executives and its political action committee have given more than $24 million to federal candidates in the last decade, including nearly $1 million to Mr. Obama\u2019s 2008 presidential campaign.", "keyword": "Goldman Sachs Group;United States Politics and Government;Banks and Banking;Lobbying and Lobbyists;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Securities and Commodities Violations;Securities and Exchange Commission"}
{"id": "ny0140318", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/02/01", "title": "New York Candidates Awash in Real Estate Cash", "abstract": "The real estate industry, racing to beat strict new limits on campaign contributions, has been flooding New York City candidates with donations for the 2009 campaign at a rate three and four times that in previous election cycles. The industry, which looks to City Hall for everything from zoning changes to tax breaks, is traditionally a dependable source of cash for city election candidates. But with new regulations set to take effect starting on Saturday, donations have soared. The New York Times examined contributions from executives and others affiliated with 25 of the city\u2019s most prominent property management, brokerage and real estate development firms. The companies together had given more than $1 million by Jan. 15, the most recent reporting deadline for the 2009 election. Those same firms had given $239,000 by the same point in January 2004 and $348,000 by January 2000. The giving reflects a broader trend: Over all, candidates have raised about $28.8 million to date for the 2009 race, up from $12.2 million in 2001 and $8 million in 2005, according to the city\u2019s Campaign Finance Board. The surge is driven in large part by a major overhaul in the city\u2019s campaign finance law, which, starting this month, will cap contributions for people who do business with the city at less than a tenth of what is allowed now. That means many developers, brokers, landlords and contractors will be limited to giving $400 to a mayoral candidate, compared with $4,950 now. \u201cThey\u2019ve got to get the money to the potential elected officials, so they\u2019ve got to pump this money out as fast as they can,\u201d said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor of public policy at Baruch College. The changes, aimed at reducing the influence of big money in elections, are set to be phased in over the next 10 months as the city creates databases to monitor donors. The real estate industry will be most affected in the final phase, set to begin in December, which applies to anyone involved in land use decisions. But firms signing or renewing city leases or seeking economic development agreements could be affected in the first and second phases, which take effect this Saturday and in August. Some industry officials say that candidates have used the looming restrictions as a way to aggressively solicit money now. The changes, which the City Council passed in June, have caused broad confusion and worry among firms that do business with the city, and some lobbyists have discussed filing a legal challenge to block it. \u201cEven while the bill was still being discussed, the candidates would say, \u2018Well, we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen after January, so you have to give us the money now,\u2019 \u201d said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group and lobbying arm for the industry. The major real estate firms examined by The Times are spreading money generously and in similar amounts to those considered the leading contenders for mayor: Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Representative Anthony D. Weiner and City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., with Ms. Quinn collecting the most of the three. But no one has attracted more real estate money than Councilwoman Melinda Katz, who has used her perch as chairwoman of the powerful Land Use Committee, which must approve all major projects and zoning changes, to assemble a Who\u2019s Who of industry supporters. A candidate for city comptroller, Ms. Katz, a Queens Democrat, received $196,266 from the 25 firms examined by The Times. \u201cNo matter who gives to you, there\u2019s going to be a perception,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I think the perception I have is: These are folks that care deeply about the future of New York. They have an interest in making sure the economy of this city is strong and remains viable. And if they have faith that I may be the one able to provide that, then that\u2019s not a bad perception.\u201d The real estate industry is coming off a period of not only extraordinary growth in the city, but also exceptional cooperation from City Hall. Daniel L. Doctoroff, who stepped down as deputy mayor for economic development on Jan. 11, recently boasted at a meeting of Brooklyn leaders that the Bloomberg administration was 78-0 in pushing zoning changes through the City Council. \u201cAt least until recently the industry had been in a remarkable period in its history,\u201d said Kenneth K. Fisher, a land-use lawyer with the firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen and a former City Council member. \u201cAnd I think a lot of industry players wanted to encourage that so that it continues, so they are supporting people who they feel will be supportive of continued development.\u201d That cooperation could be even more critical as the credit market continues to slump, which could force many developers to seek more generous tax and subsidy packages from the city. Among the biggest contributors are companies engaged in pivotal development battles. The most money was given by Rudin Management, run by one of the royal families of New York real estate. The company, which appears headed for a major landmarks fight over the redevelopment of St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital Manhattan and the surrounding area in Greenwich Village, had given $199,600 to a dozen candidates by Jan. 15, an increase of 45 percent over the firm\u2019s contributions in the entire 2001 and 2005 elections combined. In a move that is common in the industry, Rudin contributed $29,700 equally to the three leading mayoral contenders. While corporate donations are prohibited under the city\u2019s campaign finance laws, the contributions were given through six family members and executives associated with the firm. William C. Rudin, president of the firm, did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article. Though all three candidates disagree with the industry on some issues, including rent regulations, all have shown a willingness to work with it on critical matters, Mr. Spinola said. More important, he added, \u201cnone of them have been at war with us.\u201d Related Companies, a co-developer (with Vornado Realty Trust) behind the plan to rebuild Pennsylvania Station, and which is vying to redevelop the West Side railyards, was next on the list. Related\u2019s chairman, Stephen M. Ross, and other employees had contributed $143,200 to nine city candidates. That was more than four times what he and his employees had contributed by the same period in the 2001 elections. Jeffrey R. Gural, chairman of the brokerage firm of Newmark Knight Frank, and other executives and employees associated with his firm had given at least $101,700 to a dozen candidates, compared with $24,000 at this point in the 2001 cycle. Mr. Gural and Mr. Ross did not return calls seeking comment. Representatives of Ms. Quinn\u2019s and Mr. Thompson\u2019s campaigns described real estate as just a small part of their efforts to get support from a broad base of industries and individuals. Mr. Weiner also said the industry was just a part of his support, and described himself as pro-development. \u201cI believe we need to keep growing this city,\u201d he said, \u201cand we need to keep growing in a way that protects our neighborhoods and our environment.\u201d The sharp increases in giving come as an unusually large number of candidates are raising money earlier and more aggressively to fill a swath of city offices up for grabs in 2009 because of term limits. More than 100 candidates have already registered to raise funds, compared with 61 at this point in the 2001 cycle, an early start that some City Hall insiders also attribute to the coming campaign finance changes. Mr. Spinola said he suspected that once the initial rush of giving was over, the fund-raising totals for this cycle would largely resemble those in the 2001 election. That is considered most comparable because the offices of mayor, comptroller and public advocate will be open, along with at least four of the five borough presidencies and two-thirds of the Council seats. But several of the companies examined by The Times had already exceeded their 2001 total, including six of the top 10 contributors: Rudin, Related, Newmark, the Durst Organization, Two Trees Management and Taconic Investment Partners.", "keyword": "Elections;Finances;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0269075", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/04/29", "title": "Better New York Team? Numbers Say Mets", "abstract": "The 2015 baseball season began amid speculation that the Mets would actually outperform the Yankees, which is not something that happens that often. Those predictions turned out to be accurate, but it took awhile to pan out. At the conclusion of the July 31 trading deadline, for instance, the Yankees were a solid 58-44 and six games up in the American League East. The Mets? They were barely above .500 at 53-50 and were fortunate to be just two games back of an underachieving Washington club in the National League East. Things changed in August. With Yoenis Cespedes added to their lineup, the Mets took off. By Sept. 1, they were 73-59 and had roared right past the Nationals. The Yankees, meanwhile, flattened out. Their 73-58 record was barely better than it had been a month before and they were now a second-place club, trailing Toronto. The contrasting trends continued through the remainder of the season. The fading Yankees finished at 87-75, a wild-card club that lasted all of nine innings in the postseason. The surging Mets finished at 90-72, division winners who made it all the way to the World Series. Now, 20 games into the 2016 season, nothing has changed. The Yankees, who have an intimidating late-game bullpen, inconsistent starting pitching and a creaky middle of the batting order, are floundering with an 8-12 mark. The Mets, with a capable-looking lineup and a standout rotation that is coming together after a bumpy start, are an impressive 13-7. That is a five-game gap that could mean something, or nothing at all, since it is still so early in the season. But it does sort of hint at the notion that the Mets are now in one of those rare periods where they might be the better New York team for a while. The last time it happened was in the mid- to late 1980s, when the Yankees were usually pretty decent but not as good as the Mets, who twice won 100 games in the regular season and, in 1986, prevailed in the World Series. This season\u2019s gap is easily grasped from a handful of team statistics. The Mets, with a surprising 30 home runs, ranked fourth in that category in the majors going into Thursday\u2019s games. The Yankees, with 21 homers, ranked 15th. The Mets were 13th in team batting average (.251) and runs scored (88). In those two categories, the Yankees were a woeful 23rd (.237) and 27th (72). On the pitching side, the Mets ranked fourth in team E.R.A., at 2.91. The Yankees, with a 4.42 E.R.A., ranked 23rd. Both teams have intriguing weekends ahead of them. The Yankees will be in Fenway Park for their first meeting this season with a Boston team trying to rebound from consecutive last-place finishes in the A.L. East. The Red Sox are 12-10, with better hitting than pitching. However, the Yankees are scheduled to face Boston\u2019s expensive new ace, David Price, who is 3-0 this season (with a shaky 5.76 E.R.A.) and, on Sunday night, will be making the 31st start of his career against the Yankees. Set to oppose him is Nathan Eovaldi, who carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning when he faced Texas on Monday. As is often the case when the Yankees play the Red Sox, the Sunday game will get prime-time treatment from ESPN. But in a reflection of the shifting terrain in New York, that game may be overshadowed by Sunday afternoon\u2019s marquee matchup at Citi Field, with San Francisco\u2019s Madison Bumgarner scheduled to go up against the Mets\u2019 Noah Syndergaard. Bumgarner, who has three World Series rings and was voted the most valuable player of the 2014 Series, is 2-2 this season with a 3.64 E.R.A. He has not pitched that well, but he did hit the 12th home run of his career this month, and his second off Clayton Kershaw. As for Syndergaard, he is 2-0 this season with a 1.69 E.R.A. and has been making the radar gun go berserk. Then again, Syndergaard doesn\u2019t throw any harder than the Yankees\u2019 Aroldis Chapman, who, when he returns from his suspension, will combine with Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller to create a potential nightmare for opposing teams in the late innings of close games. Perhaps that threesome will even come to rival the popular appeal of the Mets\u2019 starting pitchers \u2014 Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey and Steven Matz. But not yet. For now, at least, the Mets continue to be No. 1.", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Yankees"}
{"id": "ny0015841", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/10/17", "title": "2 European Coaches Fired", "abstract": "Poland Coach Waldemar Fornalik was fired after his team\u2019s 2-0 loss to England in a World Cup qualifying match. Croatia Coach Igor Stimac was also fired, after a 2-0 loss to Scotland.", "keyword": "2014 World Cup;Soccer;Igor Stimac;Poland;Croatia;Waldemar Fornalik"}
{"id": "ny0029071", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/01/25", "title": "Assemblyman Lopez Declines to Testify on Harassment", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez has declined to testify in an investigation being conducted by the state ethics commission into claims that he sexually harassed four former aides and the Legislature\u2019s response to those allegations. On his lawyer\u2019s advice, Mr. Lopez also does not plan to testify in a parallel inquiry being conducted by a special prosecutor. Mr. Lopez\u2019s lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, said he had advised the assemblyman, who is also a former Brooklyn Democratic Party chairman, not to testify in either inquiry because of the criminal investigation. \u201cNobody to our knowledge reported a crime, but nevertheless witnesses are being interviewed by assistant district attorneys as well as JCOPE people, together,\u201d Mr. Lefcourt said, referring to the state\u2019s Joint Commission on Public Ethics. \u201cUntil we know what it is the district attorney is looking at specifically, my advice is to supply all the information we can short of having Mr. Lopez testify, until we know where this is going, if it\u2019s going anywhere.\u201d In the last three or four weeks, Mr. Lopez received a commission subpoena for his testimony, but he has not been asked to testify by the special prosecutor\u2019s office. He has provided documents to investigators, his lawyer said. John Milgrim, a spokesman for the ethics commission, declined to comment. A spokesman for the special prosecutor, District Attorney Daniel M. Donovan Jr. of Staten Island, could not be immediately reached. Mr. Lopez, who has been battling illness, was not in the Capitol for the legislative session on Thursday, and his office referred questions to Mr. Lefcourt. Image Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez\u2019s lawyer advised him against testifying in investigations of his actions and the state\u2019s response. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times The sexual harassment scandal began last summer, after the State Assembly released a letter censuring Mr. Lopez, indicating that he had verbally harassed, groped and kissed two of his staff members. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said at the time that the Assembly had \u201czero tolerance\u201d for such behavior. The New York Times later reported that Mr. Silver had previously authorized a confidential payment of $103,080 to settle earlier allegations against Mr. Lopez by two other women. Mr. Lopez, who at the time was the county Democratic chairman as well as an assemblyman, had been one of the city\u2019s most feared power brokers. Within several weeks, however, he had given up his party leadership post. He was re-elected in November against only nominal opposition, but he has been stripped of his committee chairmanship, had his legislative salary cut and lost many of the benefits that would ordinarily come to a lawmaker with his seniority. Mr. Lopez, 71, has said he did nothing wrong. \u201cI won my district after a huge barrage of attacks and allegations,\u201d he said this month. \u201cI got over 90 percent, over 30,000 people voted, and I have a strong mandate to come here and represent the district.\u201d The investigations are examining not only Mr. Lopez\u2019s actions toward female employees, but also the actions of the Assembly leadership in approving a confidential settlement of allegations brought by some of those workers. A judge authorized Mr. Donovan\u2019s office last year to expand its criminal investigation by examining whether crimes were committed when public and private money was used to settle the complaints brought by two female staff members. Mr. Donovan was named a special prosecutor after the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, recused himself, citing his political ties to Mr. Lopez. The ethics commission has also been examining the role of the Assembly leadership in responding to the harassment allegations, but its inquiry is saddled by political intrigue . The commission is largely controlled by appointees of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, but legislative appointees effectively have veto power that can block investigative avenues. Mr. Silver has acknowledged mistakes in his response to the initial harassment allegations, saying the first allegations of harassment should have been referred to an Assembly ethics committee. In the future, he has said, the Assembly \u201cshould not agree to a confidential settlement.\u201d", "keyword": "Sexual harassment;State legislature;Special prosecutor;Vito J Lopez;Brooklyn;New York;Politics"}
{"id": "ny0045607", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/02/08", "title": "Lacking a House, a Senator Is Renewing His Ties in Kansas", "abstract": "DODGE CITY, Kan. \u2014 It is hard to find anyone who has seen Senator Pat Roberts here at the redbrick house on a golf course that his voter registration lists as his home. Across town at the Inn Pancake House on Wyatt Earp Boulevard, breakfast regulars say the Republican senator is a virtual stranger. \u201cHe calls it home,\u201d said Jerald Miller, a retiree. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been here since \u201977, and I\u2019ve only seen him twice.\u201d The 77-year-old senator went to Congress in 1981 and became a fixture: a member of the elite Alfalfa Club and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which made him a regular on the Sunday talk shows. His wife became a real estate broker in Alexandria, Va., the suburb where the couple live, boasting of her \u201cextensive knowledge\u201d of the area. But such emblems of Washington status have turned hazardous in a Republican establishment threatened by the Tea Party and unnerved by the defeat of incumbents like Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who was viewed as a creature of the capital. Mr. Roberts is now desperate to re-establish ties to Kansas and to adjust his politics to fit the rise of the right in the state. But his efforts underscore the awkward reality of Republicans who, after coming of age in an era of comity and esteem for long-term service, are trying to remake themselves to be warriors for a Tea Party age. In an interview, the three-term senator acknowledged that he did not have a home of his own in Kansas. The house on a country club golf course that he lists as his voting address belongs to two longtime supporters and donors \u2014 C. Duane and Phyllis Ross \u2014 and he says he stays with them when he is in the area. He established his voting address there the day before his challenger in the August primary, Milton Wolf, announced his candidacy last fall, arguing that Mr. Roberts was out of touch with his High Plains roots. \u201cI have full access to the recliner,\u201d the senator joked. Turning serious, he added, \u201cNobody knows the state better than I do.\u201d That assertion is disputed by Tea Party activists energized by Mr. Wolf\u2019s candidacy. \u201cIn four and one-half going on five years of existence have we been contacted by Senator Roberts or any of his staff? Not once,\u201d said Chuck Henderson, a Tea Party activist in Manhattan, Kan., who mocked the notion of the senator\u2019s \u201cofficial\u201d residence here. Mr. Roberts\u2019s race highlights the divisions within the Republican Party that are playing out in primaries across the country at a time when anti-Washington animus is running high and moderate voices have been displaced by lawmakers with conservative positions on abortion, taxes and education. Mr. Roberts has suddenly begun aligning himself with the most conservative elements of the Senate, after a career in the mainstream conservative tradition of fellow Kansans like Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum. Image Mr. Roberts is registered to vote at this house in Dodge City, Kan. Credit Craig Hacker for The New York Times He opposed a major spending project at his beloved alma mater, Kansas State University, that he had sought for a decade, because it was tied to a larger appropriations measure. And he called for the resignation of the health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, the daughter-in-law of his former boss, Representative Keith Sebelius, over the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act. \u201cIt isn\u2019t personal,\u201d Mr. Roberts said of demanding that Ms. Sebelius quit. \u201cWas it tough? Sure, it was tough.\u201d When Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, took to the Senate floor last fall for 21 hours to protest the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Roberts joined him in the early morning. He also opposed a United Nations treaty banning discrimination against people with disabilities after being personally lobbied to support it by his predecessor, Ms. Kassebaum, and by Mr. Dole, who uses a wheelchair. (Mr. Roberts said he did not trust the United Nations.) \u201cI have to say I\u2019m disappointed in Pat,\u201d said Ms. Kassebaum, referring to both the treaty vote and his larger reluctance to stand up to his party\u2019s right wing. \u201cYou\u2019re not sent there just to go whichever way the polls tell us.\u201d Mr. Dole, who supports Mr. Roberts, acknowledged that his old friend\u2019s vote had irritated him \u201ca little bit.\u201d \u201cMy view is we need to be a party of inclusion, and that includes moderates as well as conservatives,\u201d Mr. Dole said. Mr. Roberts\u2019s aides candidly acknowledge that the moves are an effort to ensure that he will not suffer the same fate as Mr. Lugar, who was criticized for staying in hotels when he returned home and listed on his voter registration an Indianapolis address at which he did not reside. Mr. Roberts moved his address from a rental property he owned in Dodge City but had long since leased to tenants, and got a new driver\u2019s license giving the golf course home as his address. He began paying the Rosses $300 a month to allow him to stay overnight with them occasionally. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to get Lugared,\u201d said David Kensinger, an adviser to Mr. Roberts. Mr. Ross said in a telephone interview that he could not remember how many times the senator had stayed at the family\u2019s home since October. \u201cI would say several,\u201d he said. Asked when the last time was, he said he could not remember, and the senator\u2019s staff also declined to provide dates, but said he had stayed there \u201ca few\u201d times. Job security has rarely been an issue for Mr. Roberts, who has tended to his state\u2019s agricultural needs and delivered projects. He won with 60 percent of the vote in 2008, before the rise of the Tea Party, with its anti-establishment ethos, suspicion of long-term Washington tenure and emphasis on ideological purity. \u201cI think career politicians are changed by Washington,\u201d said Mr. Wolf, Mr. Roberts\u2019s opponent, who is a radiologist and a second cousin of President Obama on the president\u2019s maternal side. Image Mr. Roberts, a Kansas Republican, owns a home in Alexandria, Va. Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times Kansas has not had a Democratic United States senator since 1939, but the Republican Party here no longer embraces the consensus-minded centrist-style politics of its most famous son, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The national Tea Party-versus-establishment battle has become particularly vivid in Kansas, where conservatives, including Gov. Sam Brownback, have ousted their party\u2019s old guard from power in the State Capitol after decades in which a coalition of center-right Republicans and Democrats had effective control. \u201cPat\u2019s very cognizant of what\u2019s happened to the party,\u201d said Mr. Brownback, who served alongside Mr. Roberts in the Senate until being elected governor in 2010. Given the changing political climate, Mr. Brownback says that Mr. Roberts is doing precisely what he needs to do to win another term. \u201cBeing active, being aggressive, being conservative,\u201d the governor said. \u201cHe\u2019s got to get through a Republican primary, and people are pretty fired up about what\u2019s going on at the federal level.\u201d Nowhere is mistrust of Washington more evident than in the Capitol. There are two statues of Eisenhower in the building, but conversations with the new vanguard of conservatives here seem to reflect the Capitol\u2019s gripping mural of a zealous-looking John Brown more than the even-tempered Eisenhower. \u201cI believe that to really turn the country around there will have to be some political martyrs out there,\u201d said State Representative Marty Read, a rancher and auctioneer who is one of the few state legislators backing Mr. Wolf. Still, Mr. Wolf\u2019s obstacles are formidable. He has only $179,000 in the bank, compared with Mr. Roberts\u2019s $2.2 million, but his aides are hoping to win over deep-pocketed outside groups such as the Club for Growth by demonstrating viability before the primary. On policy, though, Mr. Wolf is already having an impact. The latest reminder came this week, when Mr. Roberts opposed the five-year, nearly $1 trillion farm bill, which was prized by leaders of the Kansas farm lobby but opposed by Tea Party activists. Mr. Roberts, who had written an earlier version of the measure, said the final legislation included too many subsidies. In the interview, Mr. Roberts conceded that \u201ceverything\u2019s changed\u201d about politics since he began working as a staff member. He arrived in Washington in 1967, and was first elected in 1980, in an era when finding a new house and school for the children in the capital area was as much a part of coming to Congress as learning how to cast a vote, and when he was rarely questioned back home. Now, connectedness to the home state is more important than ever in an election climate with Congress\u2019s approval ratings at record lows and conservative activists seeking purity, not pork-barrel spending. The new political reality helps explain his extraordinary efforts to establish voting residency and be seen back in the state \u2014 in the last year, he has visited 72 of the state\u2019s 105 counties, several of them more than once. Sitting in his Senate office, across from a painting of a covered wagon and from photographs and totems from Kansas, Mr. Roberts said his loyalty to the state where his ancestors settled in the 1800s was beyond question. \u201cI\u2019ve been to every county in Kansas more than anybody else,\u201d he said, pausing for a moment before noting that only Mr. Dole \u201cmight quarrel with that.\u201d \u201cSenators have a tendency to get involved in their committees and important works,\u201d Mr. Roberts said, recalling Mr. Lugar. \u201cYou get involved in that, and you\u2019re not out there touring 105 counties like I am. We get out.\u201d", "keyword": "Pat Roberts;Republicans;US Politics;Kansas;Tea Party movement;Senate races"}
{"id": "ny0266215", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2016/03/28", "title": "Top-Seeded North Carolina Fills Last Spot in Final Four", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 The Earth has managed to orbit the sun for the last seven years in spite of one of college basketball\u2019s great injustices. Somehow the Final Four had been contested each spring since without the presence of North Carolina, challenging an enduring belief among its supporters that if God were not a Tar Heel, then why is the sky Carolina blue? For the nation\u2019s most eminent programs, such a shard of time is like an eon. North Carolina identifies itself by championships won, and after continuing its romp through the N.C.A.A. tournament Sunday, it will pursue another one next weekend in Houston. The Tar Heels pounded Notre Dame, 88-74 , in the East Regional final, restoring order to a tournament pummeled by upsets. A formless regular season gave way to a tournament that, after some early mayhem, unfurled as the bracket designers intended, with all four top seeds advancing to the regional finals. But then chaos descended again. As Oregon, Kansas and Virginia all succumbed this weekend, North Carolina survived, reaching the Final Four for the first time since 2009, when it thrashed Michigan State to win a fifth title. In a nod to all that bedlam, with 34 seconds remaining, Marcus Paige, the Tar Heels\u2019 calm-as-low-tide guard, gathered his teammates for a huddle. \u201cI was saying, \u2018Fellas, I know this feels good, but play 30 more seconds and we in the Four,\u2019 \u201d Paige said on the court afterward. \u201cThere\u2019s been some crazy things that have happened. I wanted to make sure we were in.\u201d Oh, they were in. For reasons beyond their seeding or pedigree, these Tar Heels will be considered the favorite as they try to capture Championship No. 6, to beat upstart Syracuse on Saturday and Villanova or Oklahoma thereafter. Complemented by Paige, the frontcourt, best in Division I, is powered by a collection of enormous young men whose size belies their agility and athleticism. One after another, they tormented Notre Dame on Sunday: the 6-foot-8 pogo stick Justin Jackson (11 points, 5 rebounds), sinking 3-pointers from the wing and driving along the baseline; the 6-foot-10 forward Brice Johnson (25 points, 12 rebounds), selected as the regional\u2019s most outstanding player, balancing a dominant low post game with a pillowy jumper; the 6-foot-10 center Kennedy Meeks, scoreless in the first half but unstoppable in the second. Trailing, 51-40, after Meeks\u2019s fourth straight basket, the Irish trudged to the bench for a media timeout with 15 minutes 47 seconds left in the game. Limping after a spill on the baseline, Demetrius Jackson went back out and made a layup, swished a 3-pointer and tossed an alley-oop to Zach Auguste, who, fouled, made his free throw. Before the Tar Heels could score again, they had allowed 12 straight points. But before the Irish could score again, they, too, allowed 12 straight points. This is how North Carolina operates. It weathers poor stretches and then crushes souls and dreams. The Tar Heels outrebounded Notre Dame by 32-15 and scored 12 more points \u2014 42 to 30 \u2014 in the lane. Asked why he did not have his players foul when North Carolina possessed the ball for nearly a minute late, Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey all but shrugged. \u201cBecause it was over,\u201d Brey said. \u201cIt was over. Our guys were exhausted, too.\u201d They were exhausted by Sunday\u2019s events, but also the last 10 days collectively. By all good sense, the Fighting Irish should have been back in South Bend a week ago, monitoring the school\u2019s burgeoning quarterback controversy, eliminated in the first round after trailing Michigan by 12 at halftime; or in the second round, after trailing Stephen F. Austin by 6 with 95 seconds remaining; or in the regional semifinal Friday, after trailing Wisconsin by 3 with 25 seconds left. In the final minute of each of those last two victories, Notre Dame outscored opponents by 14-3. The mission for the Irish on Sunday was to remain that close, that long. They made nine of their first 12 shots, and 14 of 24 over all, and still trailed, 43-38, after a first half that asserted their resilience. Not even three weeks ago, the Irish lost to North Carolina by 31 in the semifinals of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. \u201cThose are ones that you burn, you don\u2019t go back to,\u201d Brey said of the game tape. \u201cBut you certainly have to learn from it.\u201d The Irish responded by elevating another skilled ballhandler, Matt Farrell, to the starting lineup. They refined their ability to compartmentalize. What they could not do is consistently crack a North Carolina defense that has morphed into a strength. All season, as North Carolina kept scoring 90 but floundering on defense, Coach Roy Williams reminded his players of a Tar Heel truism: Both of his N.C.A.A. champions, in 2005 and 2009, just suffocated opponents. Implied was a challenge that players took weeks to convert into results. The Tar Heels cited a film session after their Feb. 27 loss at Virginia as pivotal. Rarely does Williams demand his players watch every single second from a game again, but he wanted them to see Virginia\u2019s precision, execution, spirit. Play like that, he told them. But by the later stages Sunday, the coaches were not yelling much anymore. They were standing behind Williams, shaking hands and dispensing hugs, and after the final buzzer, the party spilled onto the court. Johnson, clutching a pair of scissors, asked his teammates if he could cut the net first. Meeks grabbed a selfie stick and snapped a photo. Williams climbed the ladder to clip the net as regional champion for the eighth time in 28 seasons as a head coach, only now he sliced his pinkie finger. \u201cHe should be used to cutting nets,\u201d Paige quipped. \u201cThat\u2019s something he\u2019s done several times in his career.\u201d It has been a while, though \u2014 seven long years, as Williams and the Tar Heels can attest. Notre Dame has been waiting far longer, since 1978, but one hiatus had to end, and it belonged to the bigger, better blue bloods. It belonged to North Carolina.", "keyword": "College basketball;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;UNC;University of Notre Dame"}
{"id": "ny0087358", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2015/07/06", "title": "Once Wimbledon\u2019s Foundation, Croquet Now Lives in Its Margins", "abstract": "WIMBLEDON, England \u2014 World-class croquet lacks the surrealism of the Queen of Hearts\u2019 game in Disney\u2019s animated film \u201cAlice in Wonderland,\u201d as playing cards are replaced by rigid hoops often barely wide enough for a ball to pass through. Competitive croquet also does not include the tactical spitefulness of stepping on one ball while sending an opponent\u2019s ball flying into backyard shrubbery, as in the 1988 dark comedy \u201cHeathers .\u201d What top-flight croquet does have, albeit less captivating, are talented players often reeling off perfect shot after perfect shot without much interruption. Though now synonymous with tennis, Wimbledon\u2019s grass courts were born from croquet. One of the first sports that allowed men and women to play on equal terms, croquet surged in popularity in Victorian England, and in 1868 the All England Croquet Club was founded. \u201cCroquet began to take off, and it became quite popular among the more landed gentry,\u201d said Chris Williams, the archivist for the Croquet Association, the sport\u2019s governing body in England. \u201cBut it was never really a spectator sport. It was more a sport for playing. Tennis effectively pushed croquet out.\u201d If the game of mallets and hoops (often called wickets in the United States) was on its way out, the courts were here to stay. Croquet\u2019s flat, closely shorn lawns proved perfect for the trendy new game of lawn tennis, and two tennis courts could fit into one croquet court (the current dimensions of tennis courts come in large part from the regulations for croquet play). Nine years after it was founded, the All England Croquet Club held its first tennis championships, and the name was amended to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. Croquet was removed from the name within five years before being restored in 1899 to the name that endures today: the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, or the All England Club. Image Ben Rothman, the top American croquet player, during practice before the British Open Championships in Surbiton, England. Credit Ben Rothenberg/The New York Times In the early 1920s, the club moved one mile from its home near the Wimbledon train station to its current location, but croquet did not follow. Croquet was part of the club only in name until 1953, when the sport was reintroduced to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The lone croquet lawn was removed in 2007 to make way for the new No. 2 Court. A year later, three croquet courts were added to an adjacent property owned by the club. But tennis is still king here, particularly during Wimbledon, when the croquet lawns are converted to practice tennis courts. \u201cWe have a lot of tennis players practicing and doing a bit of physical aggression to our wonderful croquet lawns,\u201d said Michael Hann, the honorary secretary of the club\u2019s croquet section. \u201cIt was founded as a croquet club, but tennis is far more exciting. People dashing around and sweating, all this sort of stuff. We are a club which is 99.9 percent lawn tennis and 0.1 percent croquet. But we still enjoy it.\u201d Hann said most croquet players at the All England Club were former tennis enthusiasts like himself who were no longer able to actively play and found croquet to be physically less demanding. He said only about 25 of the roughly 350 Wimbledon members participated in croquet. \u201cI\u2019m sorry to tell you the section is not increasing by that much,\u201d Hann, 77, said. \u201cWe\u2019re not all old fuddy-duddies; we have some younger people that play, but they have lives to lead and tennis to play.\u201d Croquet is similarly dwarfed across England. According to a 2014 survey by Sport England, the number of people who played tennis at least once a month was 779,200, while the number playing croquet was 11,900. The All England Club does not field croquet teams in larger interclub competitions, instead limiting itself to eight exhibitions a year \u2014 four away from the club while its lawns are being used for tennis, and four at home after the tennis world packs up and moves on. \u201cIt\u2019s a pleasure to bring these people to the club and show them around,\u201d Hann said. \u201cWe play in the morning, then we have lunch in the main clubhouse, and then we play in the afternoon, we have tea, and we all go home.\u201d Image A croquet display at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. Credit Ben Rothenberg/The New York Times But croquet is not just a way to occupy time between lunch and tea. About six miles southwest of Wimbledon, the Surbiton Croquet Club is the site of this year\u2019s British Open Championships, one of the world\u2019s top croquet tournaments. The 50 participants (48 men and two women) traveled from four continents to compete for honor, if not fame or fortune. Ben Rothman, 31, of Oakland, Calif., is the top-ranked player in the United States. He wore a stars-and-stripes ensemble on the Fourth of July, the first day of play, testing the all-white dress code that croquet maintains (albeit less rigidly than Wimbledon does). Rothman said a croquet publication once listed him as the world\u2019s leader in prize money won; he had earned $4,500. But he has found rare full-time work in the sport as a croquet pro at the Mission Hills Country Club near Palm Springs, Calif., during the six cooler months of the year, the peak season for the desert resort. An easy explanation of what he does for a living proves elusive. \u201cMost people wonder if that\u2019s a thing, if you can actually be a professional croquet player,\u201d said Rothman, who first picked up the sport at his uncle\u2019s home in Bar Harbor, Me. \u201cThe introduction to it is usually I have to see if people have ever played backyard croquet, and sometimes people are familiar because they play on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day with their family, and dust off their old croquet set in the garage. And if they\u2019re not familiar with that, then I have to ask if they\u2019ve ever seen \u2018Alice in Wonderland\u2019 and go over that description, explaining that we don\u2019t use flamingos or hedgehogs.\u201d Rothman said he thought there could be a TV audience for croquet if it were packaged properly. \u201cYou could edit it creatively, with good commentary, to actually make something very watchable,\u201d he said. \u201cLike the World Series of Poker, where 20 hours of poker has them throw away the 19 \u00bd hours of folded hands.\u201d While the appeal of the game in its Victorian origins and in its backyard varieties has long involved its playful social aspects, the elite levels of the game can verge toward tedious. Excellent, steady croquet is often devoid of the more difficult, breathtaking shots necessitated by less proficient play. Doug Grimsley, 65, a retired furniture salesman from Vienna, Va., who is also participating in the British Open, was once reminded of this in backhanded fashion by Robert Fulford, a Briton whom Grimsley called the Babe Ruth of croquet. \u201cRobert Fulford told me I was a much more exciting player than he was,\u201d Grimsley said. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t a compliment.\u201d", "keyword": "Tennis;Croquet;All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club;Wimbledon Tennis,Wimbledon"}
{"id": "ny0285649", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/09/09", "title": "G.E. Spent Years Cleaning Up the Hudson. Was It Enough?", "abstract": "FORT EDWARD, N.Y. \u2014 Ask Matthew Traver, the mayor of this village north of Albany, his opinion of General Electric and its two closed factories that spilled PCBs into the Hudson River for decades, and his words could not be clearer. \u201cG.E.,\u201d he said, \u201chas done a lot of damage to this community.\u201d But ask Mr. Traver if he and other residents believe that the industrial giant should continue dredging the Hudson to remove more of the chemical poison \u2014 as G.E. did for years before finishing last year \u2014 and his answer is equally firm, if surprising. \u201cI\u2019d say the general consensus in this community is, \u2018You\u2019ve dredged, you\u2019re done,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s over.\u201d That sense of resignation, shared by some others on the Upper Hudson, is the direct opposite of a position taken recently by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which is pushing the federal government to closely consider the issue of whether G.E.\u2019s cleanup efforts have been enough. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has said that the company fulfilled its promises under a 2005 order, resulting in the removal of nearly three million cubic yards of contaminated sediment. But Basil Seggos, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, in a recent letter to the E.P.A.\u2019s top official in New York, challenged the federal remedy, saying \u201cunacceptably high levels of PCB-contaminated sediment remain in large portions of the Upper Hudson.\u201d \u201cThe work is not done,\u201d Mr. Seggos said in the letter to Judith Enck, the agency\u2019s regional administrator who oversees New York. The state believes that at least 136 acres of underwater sediment in the Upper Hudson \u2014 stretching north from Albany \u2014 harbor \u201cunacceptably high\u201d levels of PCBs, or the synthetic chemical polychlorinated biphenyl, which was used to make transformers, capacitors and other electrical products. The state bolstered its claim by pointing to an analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing that the recovery of fish in the Lower Hudson was not as robust as hoped. The Environmental Protection Agency, responding to the state\u2019s concerns, noted that it disagreed with the findings on fish recovery and questioned NOAA\u2019s methods , which the agency said took place at a single sampling station near Albany shortly after the completion of dredging. \u201cIt is not possible for the fish to recover immediately,\u201d the agency said. The cleanup of the Upper Hudson paid for by G.E. was prescribed to remove over 2.5 million cubic yards of sediment and encompass a roughly 40-mile stretch of the river, from the Troy Dam to Fort Edward. Its progress is assessed every five years. But Mr. Seggos, in an interview, said federal officials had allowed G.E. to declare mission accomplished too soon. \u201cBoth the amount of sediment and the fish are suggesting that the initial goals of the remedy have not been, and may not be met, for decades,\u201d he said. Image The General Electric plant in Hudson Falls during the early 1970s. In June, the company began demolishing the plant, an Eisenhower-era relic. Credit The New York Times The state\u2019s move has been cheered by environmentalists, who have long lobbied for more expansive solutions to a pollutant whose toxicity was first suspected in the 1930s. \u201cIt\u2019s been clear that this was a partial cleanup,\u201d said Ned Sullivan, the president of Scenic Hudson , a nonprofit group based in Poughkeepsie. \u201cNew York State stood up and said, \u2018We do not believe that what has been conducted to date is sufficient.\u2019\u201d Mr. Sullivan also noted that dozens of communities on the river had shown support for additional measures. The questions around the dredging also come at an awkward moment in G.E.\u2019s history on the Upper Hudson, which dates to the end of World War II. In January, the company closed its plant in Fort Edward, having moved 200 jobs to Florida, at about the same time that it said it would move its headquarters from Connecticut to Boston , despite an active effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to woo G.E. to New York. In May, the company also began demolishing its nearby Hudson Falls plant, an Eisenhower-era relic that sat on the edge of the Hudson, its soil so polluted with PCBs that engineers dug tunnels 200 feet into bedrock to capture minute amounts of poison seeping into the river. For its part, the company hailed what a spokeswoman called its \u201cworld-class engineering work\u201d and the $1.6 billion it spent on dredging efforts. \u201cThe PCB levels in the Upper Hudson have already shown significant declines,\u201d said the spokeswoman, Deirdre Latour, adding that the E.P.A. had already agreed that the company had met its obligations under the agreement, and that \u201c no additional dredging was necessary.\u201d And while the E.P.A. is still conducting a review of the project, due next spring, \u201cWe\u2019re confident that assessment will show the dredging project achieved the agency\u2019s goals of protecting public health and the environment,\u201d Ms. Latour said. The long-running campaign to restore the Hudson, one of America\u2019s signature waterways, has yielded cleaner waters. Still, the result of the five-year review could be used to compel G.E. to do more dredging. But regardless of the outcome of that review, due in April, the company has left behind a deep vein of anger and pain as a result of its plants\u2019 closings and their history of pollution . \u201cThey contaminated it, cleaned some of it up,\u201d Mayor Traver, of Fort Edward, said. \u201cAnd left us high and dry.\u201d The state Department of Environmental Conservation cites maps showing scores of spots along the Upper Hudson where elevated levels of PCBs still sit in the silt below the water. Mr. Seggos, the agency\u2019s commissioner, believes additional cleanup could take as little as two years, though it would be expensive. Cassie Wilusz and her mother, Gail Taras, who live in Schuylerville, a river town with a smattering of upscale businesses, said that if the state believed more dredging was needed, it should be done. \u201cAt the end of the day, I want my daughter to be 40 and be able to go in the water,\u201d said Ms. Wilusz, 35, whose daughter is 6. Image The Hudson River, near the Troy Dam. Under a 2002 plan by the federal government, G.E. would pay to clean sediment from a roughly 40-mile stretch of the river, from the dam to Fort Edward. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times Ms. Taras, 60, nodded, but for now, she will tell her grandchildren to \u201cshower when they get out of that river.\u201d And sure enough, people still swim in the river \u2014 jumping from bridges, and boats \u2014 even if signs still warn not to eat the fish. It was the water, of course, that brought many businesses here in the first place \u2014 including still-active paper and plastics plants \u2014 and the names of villages along the river here are inextricably linked to it: Waterford, Stillwater, Hudson Falls. As a result, in many places, water contamination was simply a fact of life, particularly after evidence of PCBs \u2014 which are probable carcinogens , according to the E.P.A. \u2014 in the Hudson River began to emerge in the 1970s. Residents knew not to the eat fish from the river, public beaches closed and tales of strange ailments began to circulate. \u201cYou\u2019d dry off and you could feel it,\u201d said Debbie Comorski, 51, a riverfront resident in Stillwater. \u201cYour skin would just tighten up.\u201d Ms. Comorski is among those who believe that General Electric needs to get back in the water. \u201cDo it now,\u201d she said. \u201cClean it.\u201d But others say it would do more harm than good. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to muck it up,\u201d said Bob Hallum, 72, a business owner in Stillwater who worried about the impact on fishing and boating. Mr. Hallum said that residents there had been warned about PCBs in their soil deposited on riverfront properties by flooding. \u201cSo what are they going to do?\u201d he said. \u201cDig up the lawns?\u201d In Fort Edward, where some of the more than one million pounds of PCBs that poisoned the Hudson were used, there is ambivalence about G.E.\u2019s efforts. \u201cIt\u2019s a farce,\u201d said Pat Fitzsimmons, a barber, who had watched the dredging \u2014 done with claw-like heavy equipment and barges \u2014 and was skeptical about its success. \u201cHow much did they migrate south along the river?\u201d Mr. Fitzsimmons\u2019s friend Joe Viele concurred. \u201cIt\u2019s not an exact science,\u201d he said. Then, he offered to take a reporter to see the site of the old Hudson Falls plant. The site is now rubble: its buildings torn down to their foundations, a single empty flagpole still standing. Mr. Viele, whose mother worked at G.E. for decades before dying of cancer, joked that he \u201cnever caught a three-eyed fish.\u201d He grew quiet. \u201cIt\u2019s just a shame,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople just didn\u2019t realize what was happening at the time.\u201d", "keyword": "General Electric;Hudson River;EPA;PCB;Environmental Conservation Department;Water pollution;New York;Conservation of Resources;HazMat"}
{"id": "ny0062905", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/01/30", "title": "Uncertainty Over Whether N.F.L. Settlement\u2019s Money Will Last", "abstract": "As intriguing football matchups go, Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl has nothing on one looming down the turnpike in federal court in Philadelphia \u2014 with Judge Anita B. Brody the ultimate referee. Brody, considering the N.F.L.'s recent settlement with 4,500 retirees over work-related brain injuries, has asked both sides to demonstrate that their $765 million bargain will fulfill its promise to compensate every currently retired player who has or will develop a neurological condition such as dementia or Parkinson\u2019s disease. Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the N.F.L. said independent actuaries and medical experts had endorsed the terms of the settlement. But the lawyers refuse to share any of their data with the public to help substantiate how they arrived at the $765 million figure, and there is growing displeasure among plaintiffs who have not been allowed to see the data, either. Numbers can speak for themselves, though, and they bring a clear warning: The $765 million could run out faster than either side apparently believes. When one forecasts how many of the roughly 13,500 currently retired players may develop these conditions over the next 65 years, compensating them as the settlement directs could very well require close to $1 billion, and perhaps more. No one can divine how many players will develop these conditions. But the best data available comes straight from the N.F.L., and it becomes instructive after some basic guidelines. The settlement essentially promises that when a player receives a diagnosis of an eligible condition (primarily dementia), he will get a lump-sum payment that varies with his age and career length. For example, a 12-year player with Alzheimer\u2019s disease at 62 receives $950,000, while a one-year player with Parkinson\u2019s at 57 receives $260,000. No player has to prove that football caused his condition, a futile task in individual cases; those who get ill get paid. More housecleaning: Expenses and additional wrinkles leave the total payment pool capped at $712.5 million. Families of players who died with a condition after 2006 can receive retroactive payments immediately. And contrary to urban myth, N.F.L. players generally live as long as other American men. Those typical American men set a baseline for future settlement payments. The best research on nationwide dementia prevalence \u2014 rates that some experts consider conservatively low \u2014 estimates that, for example, 1.3 percent of American men aged 60 to 64 have the condition. For those aged 70 to 74, the rate is 6.8 percent, and so on. Those rates would predict that 220 living N.F.L. retirees have dementia now, and about 1,500 will in the future. Total payments, adjusting for career length: $262 million. Given the national rates for Parkinson\u2019s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease), which call for higher payments than dementia, the expected total over 65 years rises to $350 million \u2014 just among regular American men. So what happens if and when players develop conditions more often than the general population, which the settlement is designed to address? The exact numbers are unknown. But the best available data on dementia among former players suggests payments could soar. \u00b6 A 2009 University of Michigan survey commissioned by the league found that 1.9 percent of N.F.L. retirees aged 30 to 49 reported a dementia-type diagnosis, 19 times the national average. The rate was 6.1 percent for retirees 50 and above, five times higher than normal. \u00b6 A 2013 government study found that N.F.L. players were four times more likely than other American men to die with Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease or Alzheimer\u2019s, the most common form of dementia. N.F.L. players showed no higher risk for Parkinson\u2019s. \u00b6 The league\u2019s 88 Plan, which reimburses medical costs for retirees with dementia, Parkinson\u2019s or Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, currently has 165 living enrollees, according to the league. That represents the minimum estimate of the true total living with these conditions: Older retirees who played fewer than four seasons are generally not eligible, and many ill players do not enroll for various reasons. Not all considerations in the forecasting model can be detailed here. But if one makes all retired players eligible, follows their expected aging patterns across the next 65 years and then applies disease rates that mirror current and historical 88 Plan data, total settlement payments project between $400 million and $600 million. This would be the floor. Players have much more incentive to seek and report early-onset diagnoses when the reward is not paperwork-heavy expense reimbursements, but instant six- or even seven-figure checks. This near certainty could easily add at least $200 million in payments, increasing the total to $600 million to $800 million \u2014 which, not coincidentally, begins to approach what the more crude Michigan and government studies foresee. Lawyers for both the players and the league declined an offer to scrutinize these projections. No model is perfect, including this one. The method was reviewed by Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, the director of the neurocognitive disorders program at Duke University Medical Center, and Richard Davis, chairman of the statistics department at Columbia University. \u201cAside from taking into account uncertainties associated with the disease rates,\u201d Davis said, \u201cthis modeling approach gives a reasonable estimate of the expected payments.\u201d The $600 million to $800 million figure is just for players currently alive. The roughly 50 players who died with chronic traumatic encephalopathy \u2014 a degenerative disease caused by repeated brain trauma \u2014 call for payments totaling about $40 million. The hundred or more families of players who died since 2006 with only dementia could come forward for another $30 million, depending on the players\u2019 age at diagnosis. The lesson here is that heeding what we have already seen with N.F.L. players leads to payments totaling about $700 million to $900 million. If the rate of early-onset disease rises among the heavier, faster players from the 1990s and 2000s \u2014 no one knows yet if it will \u2014 the numbers could rise well past $1 billion. The final total might come in low at $600 million. But it could be close to twice that. We do not know, and cannot. But making the fund $712.5 million and not a penny more, as proposed, runs a reasonable risk of leaving a thousand future players uncovered. These estimates might even be conservative. Better medical care is expected to leave all Americans living into the advanced ages when dementia more often develops. The estimates ignore all retired players under 30, as well as the roughly 1,000 replacement players from the 1987 strike season who did not play long but remain eligible for relatively low payments. And the model credits a player with a season of service only if he appeared in a game; the settlement rules are less strict and could lead to some higher payments. Of course, some assumptions could be off in the other direction. Some \u2014 perhaps many \u2014 players will become ineligible for payments either by formally opting out of the settlement or by not registering during the strict 180-day window. The reserve in the settlement fund will appreciate through investments that should outpace inflation. And although no cure for dementia is on the immediate horizon, 65 years is a long time for science to come up with a treatment that makes most payments unnecessary. But with the promise of payments to an unknown number of players, any hard cap must derive from what is already known about the aging and disease patterns of these men and then allow for reasonable worst-case scenarios. Some deviations could be wonderful news. Others could be disastrous. If the N.F.L. demands the certainty of a cap, it can set a higher one. If the plaintiffs demand the certainty of guaranteed player awards, they can set lower ones. Or both sides could concede to the unknown. Let the program run for five years so that information far better than either side has now could be collected and considered.", "keyword": "Football;Lawsuits;NFL; Super Bowl; Super Bowl 2015;Dementia;Anita B Brody;Chronic traumatic encephalopathy;Concussion"}
{"id": "ny0192999", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/02/12", "title": "Texas Ranchers and Farmers Struggle in Drought", "abstract": "BEEVILLE, Tex. \u2014 Austin Brown II kicked the sandy dirt near a feedlot with his spurred boot and surveyed the land his family has ranched for three generations. Most years the first green shoots of spring and pink bursts of paintbrush flowers would be rising from the soil by now. Nothing meets his eye but brown grass, dried up oaks and dust billowing in the wind. \u201cYou can see how the sand is just drifting,\u201d said Mr. Brown, 65, digging his toe into the dust piled up at his feet. \u201cThis normally would be grass.\u201d The worst drought in nearly 100 years is racking three-quarters of Texas . Much of the state has not had a significant rainfall since August. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting. \u201cThe last time we had a drought this bad was in January 1918,\u201d said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist. \u201cThe droughts in the 1950s in individual years were not as bad as this.\u201d Mr. Nielsen-Gammon, a professor at Texas A&M, said the weather had been unusually dry for the last year and a half, but since August, much of the central part of the state \u2014 a broad swath from just south of Dallas, through Austin and San Antonio and down to Corpus Christi \u2014 had gotten little or no rain. Even last year\u2019s hurricanes , Dolly and Ike, did not help, he said. Though about a half-inch of rain fell in Austin and Dallas this week, it was not enough to offset the 20-inch deficit in rainfall over the last 18 months, he said. A weather pattern over the Pacific known as La Ni\u00f1a has pushed the jet stream north, keeping the normal fall and winter rains away, meteorologists say. In the last three months, only about a quarter of the usual rain and snow has fallen across the state. \u201cWe are dry from the Rio Grande Valley through the High Plains \u2014 there is no subsoil moisture,\u201d said Travis Miller, head of soil and crop sciences at the Texas AgriLife Extension Program. \u201cI really don\u2019t think anybody\u2019s going to plant until we get significant moisture.\u201d The time for planting corn and sorghum is passing fast. In central Texas, farmers plant corn from mid-February to late March, hoping to harvest it before the intense summer heat in August. Sorghum is planted a bit later, in late April. The last option is cotton, which can be planted as late as May. Archie Abrameit, the manager of the Stiles Farm Foundation, a state-owned farm of 2,900 acres near Thrall, said the parched soil thwarted the winter wheat from coming up. Farmers have no hope that the spring crops will do better, since not even wild plants are sprouting. \u201cWe make the joke we can\u2019t even grow weeds this winter,\u201d Mr. Abrameit said. As a result, farmers have found themselves playing a guessing game. Does one plant corn now and hope for rain, or wait for rain, hoping it comes in time to plant sorghum? Or wait still later and plant cotton, which can be grown until later in the summer? Some admit privately that they will plant knowing the crop will fail in hopes of collecting insurance. Others say they may not plant at all. \u201cThe clock is ticking as far as coming up to planting time,\u201d said Terrell Hamann, who farms 1,800 acres near Taylor, just northeast of Austin. \u201cI change my mind about three times a day about what to do.\u201d Complicating the calculus for farmers and ranchers, prices for grain and beef have dropped, as people across the country have cut their spending in the economic crisis. At the Brown Ranch in Beeville, about 85 miles southeast of San Antonio, the family is bracing for what could be a terrible year. So far, Mr. Brown and his son, Austin Brown III, have kept their 2,000 head of Angus, Hereford and Akaushi cattle watered by pumping well water into troughs, at great cost in electric bills. They have also dipped into the ranch\u2019s savings to buy hundreds of bales of hay and hundreds of pounds cottonseed \u201ccake,\u201d dense protein-rich pellets, to feed the animals. As the younger Mr. Brown spread the cottonseed cake on the ground on a recent afternoon, a hungry mob of Hereford cows chased after his truck, jostling and bumping one another. The ground was devoid of green life as far as the eye could see. The cows and their calves had devoured a towering roll of hay left for them but could find nothing to forage. \u201cWhen the grass is real green and lush and they have a lot to eat, they won\u2019t hardly come to you,\u201d the younger Mr. Brown said. A point comes when the cost of feeding the cattle in a drought becomes so high it makes no sense to continue, the elder Mr. Brown said. Then all or part of the main herd of reproductive cows and bulls must be slaughtered. It is a prospect every rancher fears, for that core herd is what produces a yearly bounty of calves to be raised and fattened for the market. \u201cWe are going to try to keep these cattle going into June,\u201d the elder Mr. Brown said, \u201cand if we don\u2019t get any rain by June, then it\u2019s all over and we will have to send them to market.\u201d", "keyword": "Drought;Texas;Agriculture"}
{"id": "ny0233835", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/08/14", "title": "German Suspect Linked to Hamas Figure\u2019s Assassination Posts Bail", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 A man suspected of being an Israeli spy involved in the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai last January was released on bail by a German judge on Friday. \u201cHe can return to Israel if he wants to,\u201d said Rainer Wolf, the spokesman for the prosecutor\u2019s office in Cologne. The suspect, known as Uri Brodsky, was charged with acquiring a passport under false pretenses. The prosecutor\u2019s office said that Mr. Brodsky applied for and received a German passport in Cologne in 2009. Mr. Brodsky identified himself as Michael Bodenheimer and said his father was a victim of the Nazis. German law provides citizenship to descendants of families persecuted by the Nazis. With the passport, Mr. Brodsky is believed to have traveled to Dubai and joined Israeli intelligence agents who assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh , a senior Hamas official, in his hotel room. The plot was quickly uncovered, and closed-circuit television images of the suspects disguised as tourists were widely published. The sloppy work embarrassed Israel , whose Mossad spy agency had been considered the world\u2019s best, and angered several European countries who said that the suspects carried forged European passports. Mr. Brodsky was arrested at the Warsaw airport in June by Polish authorities acting on a German warrant. Germany requested his extradition on charges of spying and passport fraud, but a Polish court ruled that he could not be extradited for espionage because spying against Germany is not a punishable crime in Poland. Poland handed Mr. Brodsky over to the German police on Thursday on the forgery charge, meaning that Germany could charge him only with that crime. That charge was issued in Cologne on Friday. The maximum fine would be covered by the bail, the prosecutor\u2019s office said.", "keyword": "Hamas;Mossad;Brodsky Uri;Israel"}
{"id": "ny0176288", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/07/31", "title": "Manhattan: Sept. 11 Ceremony to Relocate", "abstract": "The Sept. 11 anniversary remembrance will not be held at its original location at ground zero this year because construction on the site has made it unsafe for a large public gathering, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday. The ceremony will be held at a plaza near the southeast corner of the site. Some family members of victims have protested, but the mayor said that the decision was final and that \u201cit would be a big shame\u201d if anyone skipped the event out of anger.", "keyword": "World Trade Center (NYC);Bloomberg Michael R"}
{"id": "ny0260633", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/06/16", "title": "Czechs Pull Out of U.S. Missile Defense Project", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The Czech Republic announced Wednesday that it was withdrawing from plans to participate in the United States missile defense program out of frustration at its diminished role in the system, which was conceived as a deterrent against a potential threat from Iran . The administration of President George W. Bush had initially proposed stationing 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and a radar facility in the Czech Republic. But in September 2009, the Obama administration scrapped those plans and proposed a revamped program with an unspecified role for the Czechs. Two months later, it offered the Czech Republic the possibility of hosting a separate early warning system. The shift prompted accusations from Republican critics who accused President Obama of betraying allies under pressure from Russia, while officials in Eastern Europe, who viewed missile defense as a symbol of American support for the region, expressed discomfort at the change in policy. The Czech defense minister, Alexandr Vondra, who met Wednesday in Prague with Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III, said that the conditions offered by Washington were not good enough. \u201cWe will seek other possibilities of how the Czech Republic may participate in the allied system in future,\u201d he said. \u201cThey gave us an offer and we assessed that.\u201d Mr. Vondra, a former Czech ambassador to the United States, was previously an outspoken proponent of Czech participation in missile defense, even as his center-right party faced deep resistance from a skeptical public. But at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels last week, Mr. Vondra dismissed the revamped Czech role as \u201ca consolation prize.\u201d \u201cOur ideas about the future cooperation are more colorful than just a room or two with some screens there,\u201d he said. The decision by the Czechs to step away from missile defense came a month after Mr. Obama traveled to Poland for a 24-hour visit during which he emphasized America\u2019s close ties with its allies in the former Eastern Bloc. Yet Polish and Czech officials have watched with increasing concern as the Obama administration has reached out to Russia as part of a broader effort to restart talks to reduce nuclear weapons and to seek closer cooperation over Iran and Afghanistan. On Wednesday, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that the shared early warning center had been \u201covertaken by events,\u201d because missile defense was adopted as a NATO mission at a Lisbon summit last November. Even so, the tone of Mr. Vondra\u2019s remarks last week and on Wednesday show the level of disappointment with the Obama administration among what have been staunchly pro-American countries in this part of Europe. Separately, Russia, China and other members of a regional security organization signed a declaration on Wednesday that criticized plans by the United States to deploy a missile shield, saying it \u201ccould harm strategic stability and international security.\u201d", "keyword": "Czech Republic;Missiles and Missile Defense Systems;United States International Relations;United States Defense and Military Forces;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Iran;Bush George W;Obama Barack;Vondra Alexandr"}
{"id": "ny0056896", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/09/26", "title": "Drone Exemptions for Hollywood Pave the Way for Widespread Use", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood. The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the F.A.A. has not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska. Put bluntly, this is the first time that companies in the United States will be able to legally use drones to fly over people. The decision has implications for a broad range of industries including agriculture, energy, real estate, the news media and online retailing. \u201cWhile the approval for Hollywood is very limited in scope, it\u2019s a message to everyone that this ball is rolling,\u201d said Greg Cirillo, chairman of the aviation practice at Wiley Rein, a law firm in Washington. Michael P. Huerta, the administrator of the F.A.A., said at least 40 similar applications were pending from companies beyond Hollywood. One is Amazon, which wants permission to move forward with a drone-delivery service. Google has acknowledged \u201cself-flying vehicle\u201d tests in the Australian outback. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement is a significant milestone in broadening commercial use,\u201d Anthony R. Foxx, secretary of transportation, told reporters in a conference call. Under the six waivers granted on Thursday \u2014 a seventh, for a company called Flying-Cam, is still under review \u2014 the companies can use camera-equipped drones on outdoor movie and television sets that are closed to the public. The equipment must be inspected before each flight, fly no higher than 400 feet and be operated by a technician with a pilot\u2019s license. The F.A.A. must be notified of filming. Image Flying-Cam, a filmmaking company, on a movie set in Dunhuang, China. Its application for a waiver to use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets is still under review. Credit Flying-Cam Night use is prohibited, at least for now. Some aviation-safety advocates and other watchdog groups have opposed the waivers for Hollywood, worrying about air traffic situations like drone crashes in populated areas. Privacy has also been a concern. Mr. Foxx said on Thursday that he determined that the waivers did \u201cnot pose a risk to national airspace users.\u201d Studios like Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures have already been using drones in overseas shoots for movies like \u201cTransformers: Age of Extinction\u201d and \u201cSkyfall.\u201d Filming in Bulgaria , Millennium Films and Lionsgate recently used a drone-mounted camera for portions of \u201cThe Expendables 3.\u201d Studios, battling a severe slump at the domestic box office, are looking to unmanned flying cameras to create ever more dazzling footage. Hollywood has also cited significant cost savings from forgoing helicopter filming and improved safety; three people were killed last year when a helicopter crashed while filming a Discovery Channel show. Studios also say drone filming will keep production at home. \u201cBy creating a climate that further encourages more movie and TV production in the U.S., today\u2019s decision also supports job creation,\u201d said Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Motion Picture Association. Mr. Dodd, a former senator from Connecticut, added that the decision was \u201ca victory for audiences everywhere as it gives filmmakers yet another way to push creative boundaries.\u201d The six film companies receiving approval are Aerial Mob, Astraeus Aerial, HeliVideo Productions, Pictorvision, Snaproll Media and Vortex Aerial. Among major companies, Amazon has perhaps been the leading proponent of drone use, but it is far from alone. On Friday, the German logistics company DHL is expected to begin using a drone to deliver supplies to residents of the island of Juist. It is the first time such a device has been authorized for regular use in Europe, the company said. And entertainment companies are racing to use drones in more than the movies. Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian operator of acrobatic shows, on Monday released a video that explores storytelling on stage using drones called \u201cquadcopters.\u201d The video depicts an electrician surrounded by 10 drone-powered floating lamps; he then appears to conduct their movement in the air \u2014 a bit like the way Mickey Mouse interacts with the dancing brooms in Disney\u2019s \u201cFantasia.\u201d In August, Disney applied for three drone patents related to outdoor theme park shows. Based on the applications, the company appears to want to use drones to fly projection screens into the air and to move huge marionettes. The company, which has declined to comment, submitted an example of a flying version of Jack Skellington from \u201cThe Nightmare Before Christmas.\u201d", "keyword": "Drones;Movies;FAA"}
{"id": "ny0213778", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/03/17", "title": "For a Fee, Trial Recordings", "abstract": "Federal judges have voted to make available digital audio recordings of some trials and hearings for a small fee. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which sets federal court policies, said its actions Tuesday would improve public access. Audio files will cost $2.40 and will be available soon after court proceedings conclude, although judges may withhold audio in some cases. Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, said releasing audio of some criminal trials could raise security concerns.", "keyword": "Suits and Litigation;Recordings and Downloads (Audio);Judges"}
{"id": "ny0131683", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/12/10", "title": "NBC Rides \u2018The Voice\u2019 to First Place", "abstract": "Could it still be true that even the worst performing television network is only one hit away from a turnaround? Apparently so, as long as the hit is on for more than 40 hours in four months. NBC has managed that unexpected turnaround from worst to first this fall, largely \u2014 competitors suggest almost exclusively \u2014 on the strength of the addition of a single show: \u201cThe Voice,\u201d the singing competition that features swinging chairs and big-name musical artists as coaches. Yes, NBC also has \u201cSunday Night Football,\u201d but that powerhouse was on the schedule last fall, when NBC had a 2.6 rating among the viewers preferred by many advertisers, ages 18 through 49. Each rating point in that age category equals 1.26 million people. With those 40-plus hours of \u201cThe Voice\u201d added (as well as vastly improved ratings for adjacent shows), NBC is up 23 percent to a 3.2 rating. On Mondays, when the first of two weekly editions of the show plays, NBC is up a staggering 206 percent. \u201cWe built our strategy around \u2018The Voice,\u2019 \u201d said Paul Telegdy, the president of reality and late-night programming for NBC. \u201cWe wanted to use Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to build momentum, and we\u2019ve successfully done it.\u201d The show\u2019s most recent edition started in February, coming out of a big introduction on the night of the Super Bowl. With its prime-time in tatters, NBC decided to insert the series twice this season, something its most similar antecedent, \u201cAmerican Idol,\u201d has never done. But the show\u2019s executive producer, Mark Burnett, has done it before with shows he produced. \u201cI knew it would be a challenge, but it was a challenge to take \u2018Survivor\u2019 to twice a season and \u2018The Apprentice\u2019 to twice a season, and that all worked out,\u201d he said. The pressing question for NBC is what happens after Dec. 18, when this edition of \u201cThe Voice\u201d has its finale. (Or, for that matter, when the N.F.L. season ends.) Senior executives at two competing networks said NBC was taking a risk by being carried by one show. That immediately conjured comparisons to \u201cIdol,\u201d which for years lifted the Fox network almost single-handedly to first place, and \u2014 more ominously \u2014 to \u201cWho Wants to Be a Millionaire,\u201d the game show phenomenon that blazed at ABC and then flamed out from overuse. \u201cYou do wonder if this is the NBC version of \u2018Millionaire,\u2019 \u201d said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. Mr. Burnett questioned that premise, noting that his \u201cSurvivor\u201d has been on twice a season and is now in its 25th edition. Still, \u201cThe Voice\u201d does occupy a singing genre crowded with Fox\u2019s two entries, \u201cThe X Factor\u201d and \u201cIdol.\u201d Both have had recent ratings declines for their latest editions. \u201cThe Voice\u201d will also go through a test when it returns in March with two new coaches, the singers Shakira and Usher, replacing Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green, who are taking off that cycle. Blake Shelton and Adam Levine will remain in the four-coach mix. Preston Beckman, the longtime senior program executive at Fox, said, \u201cI do think they will feel the loss in January and February, and it gives \u2018Idol\u2019 the sole ownership of the genre for a few months. The real test will be what it does when it returns, especially with the two new judges. That will determine what happens to the network next year.\u201d Mr. Telegdy credited the success of \u201cThe Voice\u201d to the power of the format, which was created by the Dutch producer John DeMol. It is now produced in more than 50 countries, and has been an explosive hit in many of them. \u201cThe finale of the Chinese version attracted 300 million viewers,\u201d Mr. Telegdy said. But he and Mr. Burnett credited strategic tinkering for enhancing the show this season. \u201cThe Voice\u201d had some falloff in previous editions when the blind audition segments, which feature the coaches with their backs to the contestants swinging their chairs around to select singers for their team, ended. This season, the show introduced an element it called \u201cthe steal,\u201d which allowed the coaches to take singers from another coach. \u201cIt\u2019s made it very sportslike,\u201d Mr. Burnett said. \u201cLike the N.B.A. or N.F.L. or soccer, where teams take away players or get them in trades.\u201d Mr. Telegdy said the idea for the steal came from NBC\u2019s top entertainment executive, Bob Greenblatt, though he acknowledged the entire network hierarchy is consumed with managing NBC\u2019s most crucial asset. \u201cYou understand the importance of this show to this place. You can imagine how many bright minds lie awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering what to do next with it.\u201d Mr. Telegdy said the show\u2019s format was inherently strong enough to endure. \u201cThis is a thoughtful, quality music show,\u201d he said. \u201cNo overblown production, no pyrotechnics, or air cannons. There are no back tracks or Auto-Tune or the audio manipulation that the other shows do.\u201d The show accommodates the coaches with an intensely packed production schedule. The blind audition segments are shot in just five days. The battle round is shot in four days. \u201cIt takes us only nine days to capture fully the first 18 hours of the show,\u201d Mr. Telegdy said. Beyond ratings increases, \u201cThe Voice\u201d has let NBC break through with the drama \u201cRevolution,\u201d which follows it on Mondays, and the comedy \u201cGo On,\u201d which follows it on Tuesdays. Still, Mr. Adgate said CBS would almost surely end the season, which began in the fall and ends in May, on top, (it will have the Super Bowl on Feb. 3 to add to other assets) and NBC could fall well behind with \u201cThe Voice\u201d off the air for three months. Mr. Telegdy acknowledged, \u201cWe\u2019re prepared for, shall we say, a radically different rating for the period that \u2018The Voice\u2019 is off.\u201d But that won\u2019t change the result from this fall, he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve rebuilt a very important quarter for us.\u201d", "keyword": "The Voice (TV Program);Television;Ratings (Audience Measurement);National Broadcasting Co;CBS Corporation;Voice The (TV Program)"}
{"id": "ny0212529", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2017/01/12", "title": "House Expected to Follow Senate\u2019s Lead on Rush to Repeal Health Law", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The House is expected to give final approval on Friday to a measure that would allow Republicans to speedily gut the Affordable Care Act with no threat of a Senate filibuster, a move that would thrust the question of what health law would come next front and center even before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office. The House vote would come after the Senate narrowly approved the same measure, a budget blueprint, early Thursday morning. Americans woke up Thursday to the realization that a Republican Congress was serious about repealing President Obama\u2019s signature domestic achievement \u2014 a move that could leave 20 million Americans unsure of their health coverage and millions more wondering if protections offered by the Affordable Care Act could soon be taken away. \u201cThis is a critical step forward, the first step toward bringing relief from this failed law,\u201d Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said. Democrats said the rush to repeal was the height of legislative irresponsibility and would endanger the health of millions. \u201cFor the life of me, I can\u2019t understand the need to take health care away from people, and why in the world anybody would even contemplate doing that without something to replace it,\u201d said Representative Louise M. Slaughter of New York. \u201cJust snatching it out from under them and it\u2019s gone. I think that there\u2019s going to be a mighty rumble in this country, an outburst of anger and fear.\u201d What comes next may be the most pressing problem facing Republicans, who may find that dismantling the health law is far easier than replacing it with one that can unite their fractious members \u2014 and win over some Democrats. After a marathon session, the Senate voted 51 to 48 to approve a budget measure that would clear the way for the health care law to be repealed with a simple Senate majority. As the House approached its vote, some Republicans remained reluctant to act without a clear strategy to replace the health law. \u201cWe\u2019d like to see a little more flesh on the bone before we sign on the dotted line,\u201d said Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, an anesthesiologist and a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Republicans skeptical of moving forward risked looking hostile to the repeal effort. And there was a prevailing sense of the importance of following through on a campaign promise upon which so many House Republicans had staked their political reputations. \u201cThis is an issue that really and truly, in some ways, put two-thirds of our conference here,\u201d said Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, a member of the party\u2019s leadership team. \u201cEverybody wants to get it right,\u201d he said. Republican leaders sought to reassure members that the House budget vote \u2014 procedurally important as it is \u2014 is only the first step in an exhaustive process to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Four committees in the House and Senate would then be tasked with drafting the legislation that would gut the existing health law. Image Senator Mitch McConnell, on his way to his office, said a Senate vote on Thursday was \u201cthe first step toward bringing relief\u201d from the Affordable Care Act. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times The concerns fostered a remarkable alignment between some centrist Republicans and their counterparts in the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group that is disposed to disagree with its own party\u2019s leaders. Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin worked to soothe concerns even as he expressed the urgent need to get rid of a law that Republicans hate. Republicans would embark on \u201ca thoughtful, step-by-step process,\u201d he said, even though the law is \u201ccollapsing while we speak.\u201d Mr. Ryan also said he was working with Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Mr. Trump called this week for a near simultaneous repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. \u201cWe are in complete sync,\u201d Mr. Ryan said. But Republicans face a significant challenge in passing the necessary legislation to replace the health care law. They can repeal major parts of the existing law without facing a filibuster, but they would not be able put in place a full replacement in the same measure, because arcane budget rules limit what can be included in such a filibuster-proof bill. Instead, they would almost certainly need to pass another bill or multiple bills with 60 Senate votes, and that would require at least some Democratic cooperation. Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a prime target for Republican wooing, asserted on Thursday that Mr. Trump did not want to \u201crepeal\u201d Obamacare but \u201crepair\u201d it. He cited Mr. Trump\u2019s stated support for popular provisions like requiring insurers to provide coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions. \u201cWe\u2019re in a repair mode,\u201d Mr. Manchin said. \u201cThey need 60 votes to repair. I\u2019m actually happy to work with them.\u201d Republicans in Congress have offered many replacement ideas, but it is not clear whether their most conservative members will ever be able to agree on legislation acceptable to the party\u2019s moderates. A manifesto issued by House Republicans in June outlined a consensus proposal, produced by the chairmen of four House committees, including Representative Tom Price of Georgia, chosen by Mr. Trump to be secretary of health and human services. Mr. Trump and congressional leaders said they were counting on Mr. Price to help them write a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, most likely drawing from a bill that he introduced in July 2009 and has reintroduced several times since. \u201cI think there\u2019s an acknowledgment both by the administration coming in and people around here that his imprint needs to be on this,\u201d Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said. Senate Republicans do not have a detailed plan. But Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the health committee, laid out a road map on the Senate floor this week that pointed to a measure potentially more expansive than House plans. How Republicans Can Repeal Obamacare Piece by Piece Peeling away pieces of the law could lead to market chaos. The major Republican proposals have not been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, so no independent or authoritative estimates exist of their costs or the number of people who might gain or lose coverage. On several points, the major Republican proposals agree. They would eliminate the requirements that most Americans carry health insurance and that larger employers offer it to employees. They would offer tax credits for health insurance and new tax incentives for health savings accounts; provide subsidies for state high-risk pools, to help people who could not otherwise obtain insurance; and make it easier for insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. They would also provide some protection for people with pre-existing conditions who have maintained \u201ccontinuous coverage.\u201d They could not be dropped by an insurer and could move from one plan to another, but a person with a pre-existing condition seeking insurance after a lapse of coverage could in some cases be charged higher rates. The protections would be weaker than those in the Affordable Care Act. Republicans also do not agree on how to pay for a replacement plan. In the House document, Republicans proposed limiting the value of tax-free health benefits that employers could provide to employees. Under the current law, employees do not have to pay federal income tax on contributions that employers make to their health insurance. House Republicans said this open-ended subsidy had encouraged people to select more expensive coverage, driving up premiums. But business groups, labor unions and some conservative lawmakers vehemently oppose that change, saying it amounts to a new tax on benefits and on working families. Senate Republicans have also not expressed support for the idea. Many House Republicans, including Mr. Price, would provide tax credits to help people buy insurance. But the amount of assistance would increase with age and would not be tied to income, as it is under the existing health care law. The subsidies would probably be smaller than under the Affordable Care Act. But insurance would be less expensive, Republicans say, because the government would impose fewer requirements. Mr. Alexander said he would \u201callow individuals to use their Obamacare subsidies to purchase state-approved insurance outside the Obamacare exchanges.\u201d Under the health care law, such assistance can be used only in the insurance exchanges. Many Republicans say states should have much more power to define \u201cessential health benefits.\u201d On Medicaid, the federal insurance program for low-income people, House Republicans would roll back the Affordable Care Act\u2019s expansion and give each state a fixed amount of money for each beneficiary \u2014 or a lump sum of federal money for all of a state\u2019s Medicaid program. But more than half the states, including some with Republican governors, have expanded Medicaid eligibility under Mr. Obama\u2019s law, with large sums of federal money, and pragmatic Republicans are reluctant to snatch away the federal money that has allowed big increases in Medicaid enrollment.", "keyword": "Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;Health Insurance;Federal Budget;House of Representatives;Congress;Senate;Congress;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0009193", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/02/04", "title": "Fresh Questions Raised Over a Bank of America Settlement", "abstract": "Bank of America has long rued its decision in 2008 to acquire Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage giant. To date, the bank has set aside some $40 billion to settle claims of mortgage misconduct that occurred before it acquired the freewheeling lender. It has been a regular refrain at Bank of America. Last month, Brian T. Moynihan, the bank\u2019s chief executive, told Bloomberg television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that carrying Countrywide was like climbing a mountain with \u201ca 250-pound backpack.\u201d But according to new documents filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan late on Friday, questionable practices by the bank\u2019s loan servicing unit have continued well after the Countrywide acquisition; they paint a picture of a bank that continued to put its own interests ahead of investors as it modified troubled mortgages. The documents were submitted by three Federal Home Loan Banks, in Boston, Chicago and Indianapolis, and Triaxx, an investment vehicle that bought mortgage securities. They contend that a proposed $8.5 billion settlement that Bank of America struck in 2011 to resolve claims over Countrywide\u2019s mortgage abuses is far too low and shortchanges thousands of ordinary investors. The filing raises new questions about whether a judge will approve the settlement. If it is denied, the bank would face steeper legal obligations. Lawrence Grayson, a spokesman for Bank of America, denied the bank was putting its own interests ahead of investors. \u201cModifying mortgages for homeowners in severe distress is critical to the ongoing economic recovery and is encouraged by the government at all levels,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is difficult to see how federally regulated entities like the Federal Home Loan Banks would seek to attack that practice which helps families to stay in their homes and in no way violated the contracts at issue.\u201d Among the new details in the filing are those showing that Bank of America failed to buy back troubled mortgages in full once it had lowered the payments and principal on the loans \u2014 an apparent violation of its agreements with investors who bought the securities that held the mortgages. Image A Bank of America branch in Boston. The bank has set aside billions of dollars for claims of mortgage misconduct. Credit Charles Krupa/Associated Press An analysis of real estate records across the country, the filing said, showed that Bank of America had modified more than 134,000 loans in such securities with a total principal balance of $32 billion. Even as the bank\u2019s loan modifications imposed heavy losses on investors in these securities, the documents show, Bank of America did not reduce the principal on second mortgages it owned on the same properties. The owner of a home equity line of credit is typically required to take a loss before the holder of a first mortgage. By slashing the amount the borrower owes on the first mortgage, Bank of America increases the potential for full repayment of its home equity line. Bank of America carried $116 billion in home equity loans on its books at the end of the third quarter of 2012. The filing contains three examples of such modifications, all from 2010, well after the Countrywide purchase. One example shows investors suffering a loss of more than $300,000 on a $575,000 loan made in 2006. In May 2010, Bank of America reduced the principal owed on a first mortgage to $282,000, but at the same time, real estate records showed, Bank of America\u2019s $110,000 home equity line of credit on the property remained intact and unmodified. Another example indicates that Bank of America kept its $170,000 home equity line intact on a property while modifying the first mortgage held by investors. In that case, the investors took a $395,000 loss. Bank of America, the filing noted, \u201cmay have engaged in self-dealing and other misconduct, including in connection with modifications to first lien loans held by the Trusts where BofA or Countrywide held second lien loans on the same subject properties.\u201d Triaxx conducted the analysis by combing through the thousands of loans administered by Bank of America in 530 securities issued by Countrywide from 2005 through 2007. Triaxx then ran the loans through an extensive database it has created of every real estate transaction conducted across the United States during the last decade. \u201cWe\u2019re confident that our approach will be successful for investors and that the facts speak for themselves,\u201d said Thomas Priore, founder of ICP Capital, who is overseeing the Triaxx analysis. \u201cThese are just a few examples of the negligence we found.\u201d Image Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America\u2019s chief executive. Credit Win Mcnamee/Getty Images Triaxx\u2019s loan analysis has been accepted in another mortgage suit involving claims against Residential Capital, the bankrupt mortgage company that is a unit of Ally Financial. Investor recoveries in that case, being heard in bankruptcy court in Manhattan, will be based in part on Triaxx\u2019s work. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, investors in mortgage securities have had difficulty identifying improper loan modifications and other servicer abuses like those described in this filing. Servicers have kept under wraps the detailed loan data that could point to these kinds of practices and have forced investors to sue to get access to these files. Included in their court filing was a letter Triaxx and the other investors wrote to Bank of New York Mellon, the trustee that was hired to oversee the Countrywide securities to ensure that investors in them were treated fairly. The investors asked Bank of New York Mellon to explain why it had not pursued claims against Bank of America relating to the modifications on behalf of investors in the Countrywide securities. Kevin Heine, a spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon said in a statement: \u201cAs trustee, we have complied with our duties under the agreements and will follow any direction the court issues in connection with the letter.\u201d The letter and the underlying analysis were filed in New York State Supreme Court where Justice Barbara R. Kapnick is overseeing the $8.5 billion settlement reached in June 2011 by Bank of America and a handful of Countrywide mortgage securities holders. That settlement, which covers the same 530 Countrywide securities examined by Triaxx, would generate roughly 2 cents on the dollar to the investors who agreed to it. When the securities were sold, they contained loans totaling some $425 billion. The investors include the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Pimco and BlackRock, two large asset management companies. Bank of New York Mellon has also agreed to the settlement, releasing Bank of America from any future claims by investors trying to recoup their losses. \u201cDespite its knowledge of the Trusts\u2019 Loan Modification Claims,\u201d the letter said, \u201cthe Trustee agreed to release such claims in the Settlement, apparently without any investigation of the extent or merit of such claims, and without any compensation for the Trusts with respect to such claims.\u201d Mr. Priore said: \u201cWe\u2019re mystified how other managers would allow these institutions to ignore their responsibility when it has such a significant impact on investors.\u201d Trustees have been reluctant to take action against servicers on behalf of the investors in mortgage securities. Such actions would be costly, according to those in the industry, and would reduce profits in what is already a low-margin business. But this has left investors to fend for themselves with little information.", "keyword": "Bank of America;Mortgage loan;Banking and Finance;Real Estate; Housing;Lawsuit;Federal Home Loan Banks;Thomas J Priore;Bank of America Home Loans"}
{"id": "ny0109615", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2012/05/31", "title": "Film Photography\u2019s Revival in a Digital World", "abstract": "When is the last time you took a photo with an old-school camera \u2014 the kind that doesn\u2019t have a wireless connection, needs to be loaded with finicky rolls of film and is too bulky to slide into a back pocket? Unless you are a professional photographer or an artist, it has probably been a while. Most people have abandoned film cameras for digital models or, more recently, smartphones outfitted with lens accessories and apps like Instagram that make photo-sharing extremely simple. But film photography is having another moment in the sun, thanks to some hip, quirky companies like Lomography and the Impossible Project, which are resurrecting this seemingly archaic art for enthusiastic hobbyists. These companies and their customers tend to embrace the imperfections of film, rejecting the cold precision of digital photos. It is important to bear in mind, of course, that film photography takes a little more effort than tapping a button on a screen. In my experience, the pros outweigh the cons, but both are worth considering before you invest a significant amount of time \u2014 and coin \u2014 into this hobby, particularly if you are new to the world of film. Let\u2019s start with the cons. Analog cameras require a little more precision to operate than digital ones. It can take some time to figure out how they work and to learn how to reload them without dropping them on the sidewalk. The film itself is fairly delicate and often needs to be refrigerated and shielded from the sun. The pictures are rarely perfect. Certainly, the artsy streaks and blurring that some of the cameras mentioned below can give to images are part of the charm and overall appeal. But it can be frustrating to have a sprawling white smear blotting out the scenic vista you were hoping to capture. Cost is another factor; expect to part ways with a few bills at first, for getting set up with equipment, and then for buying the film and having it developed. Even finding a place to develop film can be challenging, although many chain drugstores and professional photography shops still do. Given all that, the upsides to working an old-school camera into your daily routine are numerous. Perhaps the most interesting benefit is how it shapes the way you interact with your surroundings. The luxury of documenting every meal, sun-soaked afternoon and live concert with a smartphone\u2019s vast memory bank does not exist with film cameras. You have a limited number of frames to shoot with, forcing you to carefully weigh what you want to capture. That sounds like a drawback until you consider the advantages of being more present in the moment, since you aren\u2019t constantly engrossed by the screen of your smartphone. There is also something refreshing about not immediately knowing what your image will look like. It instills a kind of patience that has all but disappeared as we surround ourselves with real-time technology. And when the prints show up, there can be wild variations in color and the sort of unpredictability that turns a photo into something that seems like a unique piece of art. As an added bonus, film cameras are the ultimate icebreakers. Spotting a Polaroid camera in the wild is rare, so if you walk into a party with one, you\u2019re guaranteed to be the most popular person in the room. Here are some options available to those who want to try their hand at wielding an old-fashioned camera. LOMOGRAPHY This company manufactures and sells a line of quirky cameras online and in a handful of stores around the globe, including locations in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and London. Most of their offerings , which start at around $50, use 35-millimeter film. They include the simple Russian LC-A+, which produces whimsical, color-drenched pictures; cameras with a fisheye lens that create a bulging, surrealist perspective; and the Spinner 360, which comes rigged with a manual ripcord that whirls the lens around to capture a panoramic image. My personal favorites are the cute DianaF+ and La Sardina, stylish and compact machines that fit easily into a handbag and look like something you would see on the set of a chic Italian movie. For the ambitious, the company recently began selling a camera called the LomoKino that captures short movies on 35-millimeter film. It takes a while to get used to a Lomography camera when you\u2019ve been shooting on an iPhone or digital camera. I never knew if the film was advancing properly, and once I accidentally yanked off the back panel, ruining at least five exposures by baring them to the light. But once you get past the initial awkwardness of the machinery, it\u2019s so much fun to take photos of your friends on a crowded dance floor, flowering trees and lazy dogs lolling in the sun with a funky, old-looking camera. No one minds when you stick it in their faces to get a shot \u2014 making it an easier sell than the intrusive glowing screen of an iPhone. THE IMPOSSIBLE PROJECT When Polaroid announced it would cease production of its film and abandon its signature technology in 2009 amid flagging fortunes, a group of Polaroid fans leapt to attention and started campaigning to save the format . After raising money from backers, they began hiring former Polaroid engineers and buying the company\u2019s equipment, determined to reverse-engineer its chemical formulas and production techniques. Those efforts were successful: The Impossible Project manufactures and sells a variety of instant film, online and in stores in New York, as well as through various art galleries and dealers around the world. The company\u2019s film is designed to work in the Polaroid 600 and SX-70 cameras. If you cannot find one in your parents\u2019 attic, you\u2019ll have to scavenge your own from eBay, Etsy or a garage sale. Or you can buy a camera that the Impossible Project has salvaged and refurbished. A starter kit containing one Polaroid camera and a pack of film starts at $129. These neat machines generate gasps of awe when you pull them out. FUJI INSTAX Another company that still makes instant film, Fuji, recently released a small line of instant cameras that are available from a variety of online retailers, starting at around $100; a pack of 10 shots costs $10. Although I begged my sister for a Fuji Mini for my last birthday, thinking it\u2019d be easier to lug around, I wound up preferring the larger 210 format, which my friend Alan brings along on all of our social outings. The photos that the Mini camera spits out are adorable, but tiny, and harder to hang on a wall or frame and give to a friend.", "keyword": "Photography;Cameras;Lomography;Impossible Project"}
{"id": "ny0117124", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/10/19", "title": "Leaders Say They Expect Agreement on Aid for Spanish Banks", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 European Union leaders said early Friday that legislation enabling rescue aid to be channeled directly to Spanish banks should be agreed by the end of the year, but they left open critical decisions on how soon it could go into effect. By leaving the start date vague, Germany could shape the legislation over the next three months to delay any use of a new bailout fund to directly recapitalize Spanish lenders until after national elections in September 2013. The legislation focuses on improving supervision of banks in the euro area by putting them under the aegis of the European Central Bank , and it is one of the tools developed by Europeans aimed at salvaging the euro. The leaders agreed at their last summit in June that the direct recapitalization of banks could go forward once effective supervision by the European Central Bank is in place. But such direct aid could be an election issue because German citizens have grown weary of paying most of the bill for bailouts, and they are wary of using more funds to help Spanish banks. At a news conference Friday morning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany would not give a precise start date for the system nor for the direct recapitalization of banks. Mrs. Merkel said that Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, had informed leaders that \u201cit will take some time until this banking supervision is up and running.\u201d Mr. Draghi \u201cdidn\u2019t give us specific months, but it is not a matter of just one or two, it will take longer,\u201d she added. The French government and the European Commission have sought to hasten that legislation in order to allow direct recapitalization of some of the euro zone\u2019s most vulnerable banks to start on Jan. 1, 2013. But Fran\u00e7ois Hollande , the French president, was also unable to give a date for the start of the system and instead said markets should be confident that direct recapitalization of banks would be able to go forward over the course of 2013. \u201cWeeks or months will be needed for the mechanism to be implemented\u201d once the legislation was completed at the end of 2012, Mr. Hollande told a news conference. \u201cThe worst is over,\u201d he added, seeking to assure investors and citizens that Europe was keeping up momentum to emerge from its financial crisis. Mrs. Merkel arrived at a two-day summit here insisting that putting some of the bloc\u2019s most vulnerable banks under the single supervisor by January was too ambitious. After about five hours of talks, the leaders tweaked language in their final report making it clear that they did not expect the new system of bank supervision to be up and running by Jan. 1. French leaders have also pressed for speedy adoption of European legislation to tighten budget discipline across the euro zone, as well as measures to pool at least some of the euro zone countries\u2019 debt. Germany, by contrast, has emphasized a more cautious approach and is seeking even greater powers of intervention to enable the most solvent countries to enforce budgetary discipline in the euro zone. The differences between France and Germany matter. Agreement between governments in Paris and Berlin is seen as vital to any steps toward further integration in Europe and for ensuring the survival of the common currency for the 17 European Union countries using it. The creation of a single banking regulator for the euro area was supposed to be a relatively straightforward matter after leaders agreed at a summit meeting in late June to put all lenders in the region under the aegis of the European Central Bank. The idea was eagerly supported by Ireland and Spain, because it would be a precursor to letting weak banks in those countries tap Europe\u2019s new bailout fund directly, without loading more debt on those countries\u2019 governments. Since June, though, Germany has balked at proposals by the European Commission and France to put all 6,000 lenders in euro zone countries under the supervision of the regulator in a system that would be phased in starting Jan. 1. The government in Berlin wants to ensure that the central bank has the capacity to do that job, while some German regional leaders are opposed to greater scrutiny of state and local banks by the central bank. Last month finance ministers from Germany, Finland and the Netherlands set off new alarms with a joint statement proposing that any bank rescues from the bailout fund go only toward future problems. Non-euro Eastern and Central European countries have their own concerns about a potential run on their banks, which would not be part of the new central system or backstopped by the European bailout fund. And then there is Britain, which is a European Union member but has its own currency. The British are seeking to secure a voting system that would ensure that decisions cannot be imposed on Britain\u2019s banks by the euro zone countries working together as a bloc. Amid the stalled progress on the banking rules, warnings have been growing louder of a creeping lack of urgency to tackle the most pressing problems still hanging over the euro zone. A pledge in September by the central bank to buy unlimited quantities of bonds has steadied borrowing costs in some of the most vulnerable euro zone countries like Spain. And while that decision has taken the edge off the crisis, it also could set the scene for a new outbreak of market jitters. \u201cIt is very important that the summit now maintains the momentum of reforming the economic and monetary union including the banking union,\u201d Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said on Thursday. \u201cNow the political will of member states is tested.\u201d In the case of Greece, little was forthcoming at the summit meeting beyond a statement that appeared intended to paper over the slow pace of negotiations with Athens on the release of more rescue money, and that seemed aimed at lending support for Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. \u201cWe welcome the determination of the Greek government to deliver on its commitments and we commend the remarkable efforts by the Greek people,\u201d the leaders said. \u201cGood progress has been made to bring the adjustment program back on track,\u201d they said.", "keyword": "European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );European Union;Hollande Francois;Merkel Angela;European Central Bank;European Stability Mechanism;Spain;Banking and Financial Institutions;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0012478", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/11/11", "title": "On Field and on Sideline, Changes Bring Same Result for Texans", "abstract": "GLENDALE, Ariz. \u2014 The understudy Wade Phillips played an N.F.L. head coach on Sunday, and in some respects, it was as if nothing had changed since the last time he inhabited the role. Phillips, relieved of his lead position with a one-win Dallas Cowboys team three Novembers ago, was again at the helm of an underachieving Texas team, a Super Bowl contender gone bad. There were degrees of difference in the script this time as Phillips guided the two-win Houston Texans against the Arizona Cardinals (5-4) at University of Phoenix Stadium. Jason Garrett, a former N.F.L. quarterback who backed up the Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, was the midseason replacement in 2010 for Phillips, who was the temporary replacement for Gary Kubiak, a former N.F.L. quarterback who backed up the Hall of Famer John Elway. Phillips, the Houston defensive coordinator, was not on the hot seat, his future in the hands of a capricious owner like the Cowboys\u2019 Jerry Jones. Phillips was on the warm seat, entrusted with holding Kubiak\u2019s place as he recovers from the ministroke that felled him as he left the field at halftime of last week\u2019s home game against the Indianapolis Colts. For the Texans this year, it seems not to matter who calls the plays, lines up under center, carries the ball or patrols the secondary. The more the personnel changes because of injuries, illness and ineptitude, the more the results stay the same. Missing Kubiak on the sideline and also the All-Pro Arian Foster in the backfield, the Texans frittered away a 3-point halftime lead on their way to a 27-24 loss. It was a franchise-record seventh consecutive defeat, during which the Texans have been outscored in the second half, 107-26. Their quarterback, Case Keenum, who tied a team record in his first start, against Kansas City, by completing six passes of 25 yards or more, threw for 201 yards and 3 touchdowns. But he was a combined 2 of 7 through the air on Houston\u2019s final drives of the first and second halves. Keenum\u2019s favorite target, Andre Johnson, made two acrobatic catches in the end zone, and J. J. Watt had a sack and a fumble recovery in the final minute of the second quarter to give the offense the ball on the Arizona 22. But the Texans (2-7) were unable to ride the momentum Watt had created, coming away from the series with no points after Randy Bullock\u2019s 40-yard field-goal attempt was blocked by Justin Bethel. \u201cA lot of teams can move down there and make the plays, but we didn\u2019t do it,\u201d Phillips said. He added that the losing streak \u201cis obviously upsetting to all of us.\u201d Safety Ed Reed, the Texans\u2019 prized off-season acquisition who lost his starting job to Shiloh Keo, insinuated that the team was being outcoached and outplayed. \u201cIf you\u2019re watching the game, it\u2019s no-brainers,\u201d Reed said. \u201cCertain situations we have to get off the field. We need three and out. You have to also come out as an offense and move the ball. We can\u2019t go three and out and put your defense on the field that quick.\u201d He added, \u201cA lot of soul searching needs to be done as coaches and players.\u201d Foster is expected to have back surgery that will end his season, but Kubiak, the offensive play-caller, could return this week. \u201cI think it\u2019s too early to tell,\u201d said Phillips, who is in his third go-round as an interim head coach. This time is especially bittersweet for Phillips because it comes less than a month after the death of his father, Bum, whose abrupt resignation from the Saints in 1985 resulted in Phillips\u2019s first temporary promotion. In 2003, Phillips guided the Atlanta Falcons to a 2-1 finish after taking over for Dan Reeves. Kubiak, 52, fell to his knees as he walked off the field after experiencing a transient ischemic attack, a condition that causes stroke symptoms by temporarily stopping blood flow to the brain. The Texans, who were ahead by 18 points at the time, came out in the second half unsure of Kubiak\u2019s condition and, perhaps not surprisingly, lost their lead and the game by 27-24. Kubiak made an appearance at practice Thursday, two days after being released from a hospital. He was there ostensibly to show his players he was on the mend but perhaps also to deliver the message, however subliminal, that he would not be easily pushed aside. After coaching the Texans to back-to-back A.F.C. South titles, Kubiak had lost the support of some fans who last month started calling for a paper-bag protest at home games. In the N.F.L., head coaches do get time off, often with pay. Their idea of vacation is what the rest of the working world would call being between jobs. By that measure, Phillips last enjoyed time away from football in December 2010, before his January 2011 hiring by the Texans. If the Texans cannot finish strongly, Kubiak may end up with more time to regain his health than his heart desires.", "keyword": "Football;Houston Texans;Arizona Cardinals;Gary Kubiak;Arian Foster;Wade Phillips"}
{"id": "ny0160968", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2006/04/20", "title": "EBay Profit Off 3% as Revenue Climbs; Forecast Is Left Unchanged, and Stock Falls", "abstract": "The shadow of the search engine Google loomed over eBay yesterday as eBay reported first-quarter results, sending its share price down in after-hours trading. EBay, the online shopping company, matched Wall Street's expectations for revenue and profit, but did not raise its forecast for 2006 results, leading some investors to worry that its growth is slowing. \"The novelty has worn off,\" said Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, noting that consumers are increasingly comfortable finding things to buy through search engines like Google, or on comparison shopping sites. \"They are smaller and slightly less important than they used to be,\" he added. EBay earned $248.3 million, or 17 cents a share, down 3 percent from $256.3 million, or 19 cents, in the period a year earlier. Its earnings declined because the company has started to treat the cost of stock options granted to employees as expenses. Excluding charges for stock-based compensation and some acquisition expenses, the company earned $342.9 million, or 24 cents a share, matching Wall Street's estimates. The company reported revenue of $1.39 billion, up 35 percent. On a conference call with investors, Meg Whitman, eBay's chief executive, gave an upbeat assessment of the company's performance. \"The future looks very bright,\" she said. \"We have built the best e-commerce portfolio in the world.\" Shares of eBay fell nearly 5 percent, to $38.40, in after-hours trading, down from their regular-session closing price of $40.35. Mr. Rohan noted that the average price of products sold on eBay's core auction site is declining, which he said was a sign that the company was involved in less valuable, and thus less profitable, products. Ms. Whitman described some uncertainty as the company moves to offer more fixed-price products for sale. During the quarter, the company started showing fixed-price products from its eBay stores service as well as from its auctions when users searched for items to buy. That confused many users, leading to fewer purchases, and eBay rescinded the change in the United States. Ms. Whitman said that the company had high hopes for its new eBay Express service, which features fixed-price offerings, and that many merchants were setting up stores to sell through the service. But she said that it is hard to predict the financial effect of changes to eBay's market system. \"You don't know what is going to happen because nobody has done it before,\" she said. EBay's marketplace business in the United States, which includes auctions, stores and its Shopping.com site, posted revenue of $527.2 million, up 30 percent from the period a year earlier. Marketplace revenue outside of the United States was $493 million, up 25 percent. The growth would have been 32 percent were it not for the rise of the dollar. The company's PayPal unit, which handles payments for merchants on its site and others, continued to be its fastest-growing division, posting revenue of $335.1 million, up 44 percent. Skype, the Internet telephone service it bought last October, had revenue of $35.2 million. Bob Swan, eBay's chief financial officer, predicted that Skype would have revenue of $200 million this year.", "keyword": "EBAY INC;EBAY INC;GOOGLE INC;WHITMAN MEG;COMPANY REPORTS;COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET"}
{"id": "ny0075246", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/04/14", "title": "A Clam Cancer Outbreak, Spread by One Set of Cells", "abstract": "The idea that infectious cancer cells are drifting in the ocean, spreading a devastating leukemia-like disease may sound like a dystopian fantasy. But scientists say that is exactly what is happening \u2014 in clams. It is no surprise that clams suffer from the disease. For at least 40 years, outbreaks of the clam equivalent of leukemia have been hammering populations of soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria), also called steamers and little necks, along the East Coast from Maine to the Chesapeake, causing declines in harvest and loss of jobs. But the cause of the disease and how it spread were unknown. Investigations had pointed to environmental factors \u2014 at least affecting the susceptibility of the clams \u2014 and researchers had recently come to suspect the disease was transmitted by a virus. When American and Canadian researchers looked into that possibility, they ended up sequencing the genes of the cancer cells, much as a forensic expert would sequence DNA at a crime scene. And they found that the cancer cells in clams from waters from different locations \u2014 Prince Edward Island, Maine, and New York \u2014 pointed to the same culprit. \u201cWe realized that maybe this was a clone of cells that had spread,\u201d said Stephen P. Goff at Columbia University. One original cancer in one clam had escaped its host, and spread from one clam population to another. Cancers usually arise in an animal when its own cells start growing out of control. That is why cancer cells have the same genes as the person or animal suffering from cancer. But, Dr. Goff said, he and his colleagues found that none of the cancer cells had DNA matching the clams they were found in. Instead, the cancer cells were like one another; except for minor differences, they all had the same DNA. That meant they all came from one original case of cancer in one clam. As Dr. Goff and his colleagues, Michael J. Metzger at Columbia and Carol Reinish and James Sherry at Environment Canada, reported in the journal Cell , it was not a virus hopping from clam to clam but the cancer cells themselves. They may last only hours in seawater, but that is long enough to reach other clams and infect them. This is the third such cancer known in nature. A devastating facial tumor in Tasmanian devils spreads by biting, and a tumor in dogs spreads by sexual contact. Elizabeth Murchison, of the University of Cambridge, who studies these transmissible cancers, said in an email that she was not that surprised that a third transmissible cancer had been discovered. But, she added, \u201cI would not have guessed that it would be clams!\u201d Dr. Goff said that he and Dr. Metzger were approached by Dr. Reinish because of their expertise in mouse leukemia viruses. They started out looking for evidence of viruses but quickly came to suspect that the cancer cells themselves were spreading, and further tests confirmed that conclusion. It may be, say the authors, that contagious cancers may be more common in nature than had been thought. Cockles, mussels and oysters have similar diseases, and Dr. Goff and his colleagues will investigate them next. There are so few cancers that spread in this way, Dr. Murchison said, because to do so, the cancer cells must escape the host, survive long enough to reach another host, and overcome the reaction of the immune system to reject foreign tissue. Dr. Goff said the way cancers make such a transition may be connected to how cancers spread within a body from one organ to another, called metastasis, a step that makes cancers turn deadly. But there is nothing to suggest anyone should avoid swimming or worry about eating clams because of cancer fears. Cancers are adapted to individual species, and the human immune system would block such foreign tissue.", "keyword": "Clams;Cancer;Cell Journal;Oceans and Seas;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0068803", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2014/12/09", "title": "Hosting the Games, Just Not All of Them", "abstract": "Now that the International Olympic Committee is allowing potential host cities to share bids with other cities as a cost-saving measure, the door has opened to some wondrous possibilities. Imagine: the London Winter Games, featuring skiing events in Italy. A Summer Games in landlocked Bolivia, with its sailing events in Brazil. Every future Summer Games holding their taekwondo events in Athens. (The taekwondo venue there cost tens of millions of dollars to build and has sat virtually empty for the last decade. Might as well put that white elephant back to work.) O.K., so maybe that\u2019s a bit of a stretch. But in one of the 40 reforms it approved Monday , the I.O.C. made it clear that an event now could be moved from an Olympic host city and sent to a far-off place \u201cin exceptional cases.\u201d Those cases, left to the discretion of the committee, include situations when a city\u2019s geography isn\u2019t conducive for an event, or even an entire discipline. Basically, Olympic officials are finally trying to get out of the white elephant business, at which they have thrived for many decades. Their newest quandary is Pyeongchang, South Korea, which was awarded the 2018 Winter Games but does not have a facility to hold the luge, bobsled and skeleton events \u2014 or a particularly strong interest in building one. Sliding centers, you see, aren\u2019t cheap. They\u2019re essentially 4,500 feet of refrigeration. That\u2019s a lot of Frigidaire. In light of the reforms, there is talk that the Pyeongchang Games will back out of their commitment to host every Winter Olympics event and that they will send the sliding sports to Japan, the United States, Canada or Europe. Any place, really, that already has a sliding facility. The rationale is that the sliding center \u2014 with a price tag of about $100 million \u2014 would be too expensive to build and would be useless after the Games because luge, bobsled and skeleton are not especially popular in South Korea. (If anyone has any bright ideas for repurposing a curving, almost-mile-long sheet of ice, there might be a job for you every four years.) Didn\u2019t anyone think about this problem earlier? Pyeongchang previously lost bids for the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games, so it has been shaping its plan \u2014 including the fantasy of a sustainable sliding site \u2014 for more than a decade. The I.O.C. has had the same amount of time to examine Pyeongchang\u2019s bid. Yet no one ever had the courage to say, \u201cWhoa, what about the lugers?\u201d Instead, the I.O.C. overwhelmingly chose Pyeongchang over two cities that are relative hotbeds for winter sports: Munich and Annecy, France. Thomas Bach, the I.O.C. president, has great intentions to revamp his organization and the Olympics \u2014 the addition of language regarding sexual orientation to the Olympic Charter\u2019s anti-discrimination clause on Monday was long overdue \u2014 but kicking the sliding events into another time zone in 2018 seems a bit harsh for the athletes who will compete in them. Congratulations, you\u2019ve won a gold medal in four-man bobsled. To reach the medal ceremony, you\u2019ll have to connect through Frankfurt and San Francisco, then catch a taxi from the airport. One of the best parts of competing in the Olympics, as many athletes have told me over the years, is being a part of the Olympic Village and seeing the world converge in one place. The community that forms in the athletes\u2019 village at the Games is inspiring. It\u2019s a gaptoothed hockey player from Latvia bumping into a teeny South Korean figure skater in line at the salad bar. It\u2019s a 55-year-old curler checking his email next to a 17-year-old ski jumper. Such chance encounters are difficult when the bobsled track for the Pyeongchang Olympics is in, say, a city that is at least 600 miles from Pyeongchang \u2014 and maybe even 6,000-plus miles from Pyeongchang. The organizers of the Pyeongchang Games and the I.O.C. might look back to the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics for inspiration to keep the sliding track local. (I propose that they split the cost for it because, after all, both entities are at fault here.) Building that track \u2014 the first refrigerated bobsled and luge track in the United States \u2014 was one of the biggest hurdles for the organizers of the Lake Placid Games. Those Games wound up costing triple the original estimate, and many griped about the money. But when the Games began and the transportation system to more remote events broke down, fans clamored to luge because of its proximity. The athletes competing were rock stars. If they had been shipped off to Buffalo, everyone would have lost a little something. The international federations for luge, bobsled and skeleton said they hadn\u2019t been contacted by the Games organizers or by the I.O.C. about the issue of moving their site in 2018. \u201cIt was premature to enter into any form of speculation,\u201d they said Monday in a statement. So for now, the sliding sport athletes are not complaining, at least publicly. They are somewhere training and competing, with their eyes on the 2018 Winter Olympics, wherever that may take them.", "keyword": "Olympics;2018 Winter Olympics;Pyeongchang;International Olympic Committee;Thomas Bach"}
{"id": "ny0172933", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2007/11/12", "title": "Musharraf Sets No Date to End Emergency Rule", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan , Nov. 11 \u2014 Gen. Pervez Musharraf , the Pakistani president, appeared to yield to intense American pressure on Sunday by restoring parliamentary elections in early January, but he said his emergency decree would last at least through then, immediately raising new questions about the vote\u2019s legitimacy. American officials and General Musharraf\u2019s most important political rival, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, endorsed his announcement as a small step. Still, any election held when basic civil liberties have been scrapped could create new credibility problems for General Musharraf, who has become increasingly isolated politically, and for Ms. Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan from a life in exile to participate in the electoral process. At a combative news conference where General Musharraf sweated visibly, he defended his Nov. 3 emergency decree as the tough decision-making of a selfless leader intent on saving his country from anarchy. \u201cI found myself between a rock and a hard surface,\u201d said General Musharraf, who mostly spoke in English. \u201cI have no egos, personal egos and no personal ambitions to guard.\u201d He also said he was committed to holding elections by Jan. 9. But many opposition politicians and Western diplomats called the election date a ruse to ease the outcry against General Musharraf\u2019s seizure of additional power. They questioned how Pakistan could have fair elections when his security forces have arrested 2,500 civilians, suspended the Constitution, blocked independent news channels and banned public gatherings. \u201cIt\u2019s an attempt at a sop,\u201d said one Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. \u201cHe\u2019s looking to see whether simply announcing an election date will placate people.\u201d In another expansion of power, the government announced Saturday that it had amended an army law so that civilians could be prosecuted by military courts. The last time Pakistani civilians faced courts-martial was during the 11-year military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, which ended in 1988. In Baluchistan, the government said two politicians from the province, Mir Hasil Bizenjo and Yusuf Mastikhan, would be charged with treason for protesting emergency rule. Muhammad Ali Saif, a government legal adviser, said the burning of army uniforms by protesters would be prosecuted in military courts. General Musharraf\u2019s news conference was his first since proclaiming emergency powers, a move that has created global alarm about the political stability of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country where Islamic militants have been expanding their reach. But General Musharraf rejected demands at home and abroad to set a date for ending the emergency decree, which has effectively placed Pakistan under martial law. Defiant and increasingly authoritarian, General Musharraf said the decree was precisely what was needed to fight the growing Islamic terrorism threat and \u201censure absolutely fair and transparent elections.\u201d Raising his voice at times and showing flashes of anger, the normally poised general, who seized power from the last democratically elected government in a military coup eight years ago, spoke a day after President Bush described him as an ally America needed in the fight against Al Qaeda. Some Pakistanis felt General Musharraf was emboldened by President Bush\u2019s embrace. The general insisted that he remained popular in Pakistan. But he refused to specify a time when he would end the state of emergency, a step that American officials, including Mr. Bush, have repeatedly asked General Musharraf to take. \u201cI cannot give a date,\u201d General Musharraf said. \u201cWe are in a difficult situation, therefore I cannot give a date.\u201d He also declined to give a date for stepping down as chief of the military, a move that the United States and other Western countries have requested as a sign of his seriousness about a transition back to democracy. In Washington, American officials said that General Musharraf should be given more time. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised the announcement of an election date but called for an end to the state of emergency. \u201cThe key is to take this in steps,\u201d she said on the ABC News program \u201cThis Week.\u201d \u201cAnd the first step is to make certain that the state of emergency ends, to make sure that people can compete for free and fair elections for the Parliament.\u201d Ms. Bhutto, who is supported by Washington in her return to politics here, echoed Ms. Rice\u2019s tone. She called General Musharraf\u2019s announcement a \u201cfirst, positive step\u201d at a news conference in Lahore, the eastern city where she has threatened to lead a protest march on Tuesday. Ms. Bhutto also said that holding fair elections under the state of emergency \u201cseems to be difficult.\u201d But she said she had \u201cnot shut the door\u201d to talks with the Pakistani leader, perpetuating speculation that she and General Musharraf may be privately negotiating a power-sharing agreement. The events on Sunday appeared to again place in jeopardy a troubled effort by American officials to unite General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto in an alliance to combat members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who operate out of the country\u2019s rugged northwest area adjoining Afghanistan. Pakistani analysts say that General Musharraf\u2019s popularity is plummeting and that a review of that idea is urgently needed. \u201cThe U.S. administration is not willing to accept that Musharraf has messed up,\u201d said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a leading political and defense analyst based in Lahore. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to do any new thinking on Pakistan. At the highest level, they stick to their own framework.\u201d The analysts also warned that Ms. Bhutto, who has been advised by American officials not to rule out an agreement with General Musharraf, might taint herself by associating too closely with him. If she were elected under emergency rule, they said, she too would likely lose popular support. \u201cOver time, this simmering resentment and cynicism about her and her deal will undermine whatever elections results there are,\u201d said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Studies. \u201cThe new generations want some respect for the country, a Pakistan that is in the mainstream of modern civilization.\u201d Western diplomats and Pakistani analysts questioned several aspects of General Musharraf\u2019s performance at the news conference. Many of his statements, they said, were inaccurate or contradictory, and his demeanor was unusually tense. \u201cIt was a pure defense of all his actions,\u201d said Ikram Sehgal, a retired military officer and friend of General Musharraf\u2019s who flew the helicopter used by the general\u2019s commando unit. \u201cHe was not the same confident general I used to know.\u201d Dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks instead of his customary military uniform, General Musharraf insisted throughout the news conference that he had not violated the Constitution. Instead, his declaration of emergency and suspension of the Constitution put the \u201cderailed part of democracy back on the rail.\u201d He called the emergency decree \u201ca bitter pill to swallow\u201d and \u201cno doubt that this was the most difficult decision I have ever taken in my life.\u201d But his sole motivation, he said, was to save Pakistan from continued \u201cturmoil and shock and confusion.\u201d The Pakistani leader spent 10 minutes giving a detailed accounting of corruption and abuse of power allegations against the chief justice of the country\u2019s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who became highly popular in recent months for challenging General Musharraf\u2019s authority. \u201cNobody is above the law, ladies and gentlemen,\u201d General Musharraf said. He said he had replaced Mr. Chaudhry after the emergency declaration to regain control of a court whose decisions left the country\u2019s police forces \u201ctotally demoralized and shattered\u201d and terrorists \u201cencouraged.\u201d Knowing that the move would lead to international condemnation, he said he went ahead with it anyway. \u201cI needed to take a decision in the interest of this nation, to preserve this nation, to safeguard it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd risk myself.\u201d Opposition politicians have said the president acted because the Supreme Court was days away from ruling on the legality of his re-election last month. The verdict had been widely expected to declare General Musharraf ineligible to serve another term. The country\u2019s election commission, whose chairman General Musharraf appointed, will provide \u201cabsolutely aboveboard\u201d election rules, he said, and opposition figures detained over the last week would be released and allowed to run in elections. But no one would be allowed to \u201cdisturb law and order,\u201d he said, or \u201ccreate anarchy in Pakistan in the name of election, in the name of democracy.\u201d Resigning his military post would sharply reduce General Musharraf\u2019s power, according to Pakistani analysts. And many believe he will delay giving up the post as long as possible. Defending the closing of independent television news stations, General Musharraf said he favored an independent press, but wanted safeguards on \u201cdefamation by design, distortion of facts, projecting nontruths, humiliation.\u201d \u201cIf the media is going to make heroes of terrorists,\u201d he said at one point, \u201cGod save our battle against terrorism.\u201d Raising his voice, General Musharraf lectured journalists seated in the presidential building, complaining that the West did not understand Pakistan. He said foreign journalists overestimated Ms. Bhutto\u2019s political support in Pakistan and that you \u201ccannot impose sudden change.\u201d", "keyword": "Pakistan;Musharraf Pervez;Politics and Government;Martial Law;Elections"}
{"id": "ny0295530", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/12/28", "title": "Trump Weighs Letting Veterans Opt Out of V.A. Medical Care", "abstract": "WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. \u2014 President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering a plan to allow military veterans to opt out of medical care at Veterans Affairs hospitals and instead see private doctors of their choosing, a senior transition official told reporters here on Wednesday. Mr. Trump met with several executives of private hospital systems at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Wednesday. After the meeting, Mr. Trump called out to reporters, saying he wanted to describe his ideas for changes to the Department of Veterans Affairs, but then quickly directed one of his senior aides to describe the proposals under consideration. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, provided no details about how the plans would work, how much they would cost, or the possibility of unintended consequences from privatizing part of the V.A.\u2019s sprawling medical system. As a candidate, Mr. Trump repeatedly seized on reports of long waits for doctor visits at V.A. hospitals to criticize Hillary Clinton and President Obama. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was concerned about the impact on veterans\u2019 health. \u201cWe\u2019re working on something to make it great for the veterans,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cPeople are dying. We\u2019re going to fix it properly.\u201d The ideas described by the transition aide on Wednesday echoed vague promises Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail that veterans would get timely care from either a V.A. facility or a private doctor. The transition official said that Mr. Trump had discussed the possibility of a \u201cpublic-private option\u201d with the hospital executives. \u201cSome vets love the V.A.,\u201d the official said, and \u201csome vets want to go to the V.A.\u201d The official added that \u201cthe idea is to come up with a solution that solves the problem.\u201d Asked whether the president-elect was \u201cadvanced\u201d in his thinking on how to confront the V.A.\u2019s problems, the official said, \u201cOf course.\u201d The official then added, referring to the possibility of private care: \u201cIt\u2019s one of the options on the table. Definitely an option on the table to have a system where potentially vets can choose\u201d to receive a combination of public and private care or simply opt to go to private doctors. The Department of Veterans Affairs has struggled to provide timely care to many veterans, and even its supporters say it needs an overhaul. News reports in 2014 said that dozens of veterans had died while waiting for care at a V.A. hospital in Phoenix, and that leaders of the agency had hidden delays and collected bonuses. Eric Shinseki, Mr. Obama\u2019s first secretary of veterans affairs, resigned after a White House investigation found similar manipulations at dozens of hospitals. But veterans groups and Democrats strongly oppose any move toward privatization. In an August speech to the Disabled American Veterans, Mr. Obama warned that ideas like the ones floated by Mr. Trump should be rejected. \u201cWe cannot outsource and privatize health care for America\u2019s veterans,\u201d Mr. Obama said to applause. \u201cNow, there are folks who keep pushing this. They don\u2019t always come out and say the word \u2018privatize,\u2019 but you read what they say, that\u2019s what they mean. And these radical proposals would begin to dismantle the V.A. health care system that millions of veterans depend on every day. And that would hurt veterans.\u201d Mr. Trump met on Wednesday afternoon with John H. Noseworthy, the president of the Mayo Clinic; Paul Rothman, the chief executive of Johns Hopkins Medicine; David Torchiana, the chief executive of Partners HealthCare; Delos Cosgrove, the chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic; and several others. The transition official said Mr. Trump was considering asking members of that group to form an advisory committee to help him reshape the V.A.", "keyword": "Veteran;Hospital;Veteran Affairs;Donald Trump;West Palm Beach;Health Insurance"}
{"id": "ny0192607", "categories": ["nyregion", "westchester"], "date": "2009/02/01", "title": "Here to Stay, at the Neuberger", "abstract": "So much attention is focused on temporary exhibitions throughout the region that we often forget that many museums are constantly collecting wonderful things. Every now and then we get an opportunity to sample the best of these acquisitions through collection shows like the two currently at the Neuberger Museum of Art . The Neuberger received its first donation of African art when it opened back in 1974. Since then, further significant donations and occasional acquisitions have turned the museum into a major repository of African art. To reflect this, in 2007-8, the museum reinstalled 83 of the most beautiful works from its collection, along with 17 long-term loans, in a larger space with specially designed display cases, cabinets and columns. For those who have not yet seen the exhibition, here\u2019s some encouragement: It looks spectacular. The works are grouped according to geographical areas from northern to southern Africa, or the other way around depending on which end you enter the show. But within that arrangement the museum\u2019s African art consultant-curator, Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Brincard, has brought out certain subjects and themes, including masks and headdresses; symbols of political office; and the human figure. Lots of wall labels and text help you identify what you are looking at. The virtue of thematic groupings is that they help illustrate connections between art and artists across the continent. For instance, several headdresses, masks, amulets and other ritualistic objects here represent animals believed to have symbolic powers in African cultures, among them the antelope, snake and the crocodile. Two undated headdresses from Mali \u2014 each of which represents an antelope and is made of wood and fiber \u2014 are especially evocative and beautiful. But just as importantly, the thematic groupings remind us of something else: that in Africa, with almost 1 billion people speaking more than 1,000 languages spread across 57 countries, culture and art differ from place to place. Compare, for instance, about two dozen tiny wooden figures, each carved by a different artist, representing ancestors, family members and gods from various regions of Africa. An extraordinary diversity of styles and facial features is evident among the figures, which are installed together in a pyramidlike display toward the end of the show. Elsewhere in the exhibition is an unusual, beautifully carved wooden equestrian figure from Mali, dating from the late 19th or early 20th century. Horse-owning was a sign of privilege and power in West Africa, suggesting that this sculpture might represent a wealthy village priest, headman or possibly even a foreign invader, warrior or emissary. Either way, it is a visually striking work of art. IN further tribute to the depth of the museum\u2019s permanent collection, the large back gallery is devoted to \u201cGreat Women Artists: Feminist Art From the Permanent Collection.\u201d The show is fun and eye-catching and well worth a visit, but the title is slightly misleading, for not all of this art can rightly be classified as feminist \u2014 that is, art that reflects on women\u2019s lives and experience. It would be more accurate to say this is simply a show of the work of 50 women artists. Titles and terminology aside, this exhibition has the distinct virtue of showing off some very impressive works in the museum\u2019s collection, some of which have never \u2014 or rarely, at best \u2014 seen the light of day. Among the painting highlights are Bridget Riley\u2019s \u201cUntitled\u201d (1966), a masterpiece of optical art. Meanwhile, in sculpture, feast your eyes on Yayoi Kusama\u2019s \u201cSilvery Sea\u201d (1981-82), a fiberglass rowboat covered with silver-painted work gloves. It is a signature work. Around half of the pieces in the show are listed as being promised gifts to the museum from the Vance-Waddell Collection in Cincinnati. In some ways, the show celebrates this gift, putting the new acquisitions in the context of artworks that are already in the collection. It is a smart idea, illustrating to art students and visitors how the new acquisitions augment the museum\u2019s holdings in particular areas. Much of the work from the Vance-Waddell Collection is from the 1990s, and nicely complements a strong selection of works from the 1950s, \u201960s and \u201970s (Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Lee Krasner and Eva Hesse, among others) donated by the museum\u2019s founder, Roy Neuberger. Mr. Neuberger actively collected works by women at a time when it wasn\u2019t fashionable. Holdings from the mid-\u201970s through the late \u201980s, core years for the feminist art movement, are still a little patchy, though many of the marquee artists are represented with minor work. Despite the lack of a clear chronology, or perhaps because of it, viewers can simply make their way through the show enjoying whatever catches their eyes. I was drawn to several pieces, including sculptures by Beverly Pepper, Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Graves and Polly Apfelbaum, and photographs, drawings and paintings by Susan Rothenberg, Agnes Denes and Donna Dennis. Some of these pieces are so good that they should be permanently on view.", "keyword": "Art;Neuberger Museum of Art;Feminist Movement;Africa;Westchester County (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0185414", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/03/21", "title": "Travelers, Your Tour Bus Is Boarding for Basra", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 Jo Rawlins Gilbert, a 79-year-old retired probation officer from Menlo Park, Calif., started traveling, as she put it, \u201cas most people do.\u201d First England . Then Europe . Eventually she and her husband, who died in 2004, made it to Tibet for his 80th birthday. She became, late in life, an adventure traveler, visiting Syria , Yemen , Bosnia and even Afghanistan . What could top that? Well, here she was in the lobby of a Baghdad hotel, ending a 17-day tour around one of the world\u2019s ultimate danger destinations. \u201cIt had always been on my list,\u201d said Ms. Gilbert, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a cartoon cat and the phrase \u201cLife Is Good. \u201d \u201c If it opened up, I wanted to go.\u201d Whether Iraq can be described as open is debatable. But Ms. Gilbert is a member of a group, mostly middle-aged and older, that has the honor of being on the first officially sanctioned tour of Westerners in Iraq since 2003 (outside of the much safer enclave of Kurdistan). Her guide is Geoff Hann, 70, the owner of Hinterland Travel , a \u201cspecialist adventure travel company\u201d based in England. The trip has not been nearly as perilous as most expected. On Friday night \u2014 six years after the American invasion began \u2014 a white-haired British man and woman bought big bottles of cold Heineken in central Baghdad, walking home in the dark. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which helped arrange the tour, had provided armed guards for the trip, but Mr. Hann said they were too restrictive. So the group had driven around, in a minibus, with little or no security. They have been to Babylon and Basra, Ur and Uruk, the Shiite shrines in Karbala and Najaf, places where, not so long ago, a visit would have made the return ticket unnecessary. They made a disappointingly brief visit to the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, whose bombing in 2006 propelled an already violent Iraq toward all-out civil war. \u201cThe police didn\u2019t want us to stick around at all,\u201d said Mr. Hann, an unassuming man shod in socks and sandals. Iraq is far more stable and secure than it was two years ago. But the daily episodes of violence continue. On Wednesday night, a Sunni politician was killed in Baghdad when a bomb exploded under his car. On Thursday, an American military spokesman said, allied forces called in airstrikes against insurgent hide-outs in Diyala Province, killing at least 11. On Friday, the loud thumps of explosions could be heard not far from the hotel. It is not a trip for the squeamish. Just about everyone in the eight-person group has been to Afghanistan. (Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone is single.) Insurance , which is not provided by the company, is nearly impossible to come by. For that reason, the tourists on these trips tend to be older because they have financial support networks and, Mr. Hann said, \u201cbecause in the end you\u2019ve been to places and you don\u2019t really worry as much, if you know what I mean.\u201d The youngest is David Chung, 36, a cheerful vice president at an asset management firm in Manhattan . Mr. Chung has been to Algeria , Nepal , Sri Lanka , Saudi Arabia , Sudan , Eritrea , Pakistan \u2014 the list goes on. \u201cI get my best travel ideas from the State Department\u2019s travel warning list ,\u201d he said. His impression of Iraq? \u201cThe surge has worked,\u201d he said, describing the safety and ease of travel in most places and the startlingly widespread BlackBerry coverage. Not that there haven\u2019t been snags. First, the group arrived in Baghdad on a national holiday, so most sites were closed. Checkpoints have eaten up hours of the tour. Some trips that seemed feasible, like a visit to Assyrian ruins in the north, were declared too dangerous by the government. Others, namely the Shiite sites, were made rather easy by the Shiite-led Iraqi government. On Friday night Mr. Hann, who first came to Iraq in the mid-1970s and has been back dozens of times since, was nearly apoplectic when ministry officials suddenly told him that the next day\u2019s trip to the Iraqi museum would not work. It was not like last time. That was in October 2003, well after the war started and as the insurgency was gaining steam. His tour group then saw a man beaten to death by a crowd in Mosul, and heard a bomb explode just up the street at the Turkish Embassy. On the other hand, with war raging and the structures of civilization falling, it turned out to be his best trip: telling tourists where they could and could not go was not a high priority in the country. Over the next five years he was repeatedly contacted by eager tourists, but the situation was too unpredictable. Religious tourism, mostly Shiite pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, has never really stopped, and there have been a few stray Western tourists, notably a Canadian and an Italian, who ended up being detained. But there were no Western group tours. In November 2008, Mr. Hann finally returned to Iraq for a tourism conference. He was just about the only Westerner there, except for some Spanish architects. He soon began discussions with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities about a trip, and on March 8, the group arrived. He is planning future tours. \u201cAt the moment, I\u2019ve got an American group in October from California ,\u201d Mr. Hann said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve got a lot of odd people who want to go individually. That I dissuade.\u201d", "keyword": "Travel,Tourism;Iraq"}
{"id": "ny0075429", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/05/03", "title": "The Living Museum, on the Creedmoor Campus in Queens, Puts Patients\u2019 Work on Display", "abstract": "The rambling campus of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center , where Lou Reed was treated and Woody Guthrie died, is home to an unbridled collection of contemporary art, though finding it among the nearly century-old buildings takes some mettle. Once you enter the gates at 80-45 Winchester Boulevard, ask someone to direct you to a faded-brick edifice framed by beribboned trees and ghostly white sculptures. THE LIVING MUSEUM , founded in 1983 by Bolek Greczynski , an artist who died in 1995, and Dr. Janos Marton, 65, who still directs it, feels like a beehive of beautiful, sometimes unfiltered minds. Housed in what was the Creedmoor kitchen hall, it has a crumbling, gothic quality and nurtures scores of mostly outpatient artists who can be hard to distinguish from the counselors who work with them. The relaxed environment feels nothing like a locked psychiatric ward; visitors are welcome by appointment (718-264-3490) Monday through Thursday at no cost. Some artists sell their work; others won\u2019t part with it. A huge soup pot, used as a vase for a forest of branches, is a remnant that shows how many once ate here. Notoriously overcrowded, Creedmoor held up to 7,000 patients at its peak in the 1950s. Today, it treats 1,600 outpatients and has 325 residents, the decline owing to the effectiveness of new medications and the movement to deinstitutionalize, which began in the 1960s. In John Tursi\u2019s art studio, bins are stacked with wire hangers that he twists into Picasso-inspired sculptures. Mr. Tursi\u2019s mighty, mythological horse family was built from a mind-boggling number of hangers. \u201cI never counted how many,\u201d Mr. Tursi, 53, said with a sly smile. \u201cThat would make me go crazy.\u201d Another artist, James Kusel , 49, is rightly proud of his wild, old-school graffiti lettering. A walking history of graffiti art\u2019s early days, Mr. Kusel said he and the artist Keith Haring had been friends. \u201cI crashed his show in February of 1983 and was really high and told him his work sucked and we got along ever since,\u201d he said, adding that his days of drugs, alcohol and run-ins with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are long past. \u201cI don\u2019t like things that interfere with my creative process. I found my way to become a good artist here and stay out of trouble.\u201d Perhaps the most articulate of the artists is Issa Ibrahim , 49, a former patient who works as a peer counselor and comes to the Living Museum to rehearse with his band, DSM5, named for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition). The group\u2019s songs include \u201cShock Value\u201d and \u201cChristmas in Creedmoor.\u201d Mr. Ibrahim\u2019s subjects range from icons of the civil rights movement to pop culture superheroes and villains, which he calls \u201ca metaphor for a bankrupt culture.\u201d \u201cSave yourself and save each other,\u201d Mr. Ibrahim said. \u201cDon\u2019t wait for Superman because he\u2019s not going to come. We can be our own superpeople.\u201d Evidence of the Living Museum\u2019s ability to empower was found in a trove of straitjackets that have been given to the artists to use as canvases. \u201cWe outgrew them,\u201d Mr. Kusel said, smirking. On the second floor, past a riotous garden room, is the studio of Christine Nicholas, 66, an art counselor. In addition to bright, ordered mosaics of crosses textured with thread was a straitjacket she had painted in magenta, green and gold. Across it she had appended sayings like \u201cBe anxious for nothing,\u201d transforming the jacket into a garment of liberation rather than bondage. \u201cDr. Marton likes to say this is a vocational rehab place,\u201d she said, \u201cwhere people re-identify themselves from a crazy mental patient to a crazy artist.\u201d Frank Boccio, 63, another artist and volunteer, had upholstered a child\u2019s chair with dozens of tiny, pink doll hands. \u201cThey\u2019re reaching toward something more, something better,\u201d he said. There is no easy way to get to the Living Museum. Google Maps suggests subway and bus routes that take about 90 minutes from Manhattan. Only the most intrepid rider would make the trip by bicycle, but the advantage of doing so is the nearby, tree-lined LONG ISLAND MOTOR PARKWAY TRAIL , first built by a Vanderbilt family scion as a racetrack and now flush with songbirds. It is possible to take a bike on the No. 7 train to its last stop, and carefully make your way from there. Along Hillside Avenue in Queens Village is a parade of Indian restaurants. RAJDHANI (206-08 Hillside Avenue; 718-464-9100) coaxes extra flavor from tender halal meats and fresh vegetables by lavishing them with herbs and spices and showing restraint with cream. Relish the goat bhuna imbued with garlic and ginger, lusty chicken tikka masala and lamb korma in an almond-rich sauce. Two can eat for $25. Regulars include Indian cabdrivers from Jackson Heights, which says it all.", "keyword": "Restaurant;Living Museum;Queens Village;Queens;Art;Museum;Creedmoor Psychiatric Center;Rajdhani"}
{"id": "ny0262021", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/06/15", "title": "F.D.A. Unveils New Rules About Sunscreen Claims", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 After 33 years of consideration, the Food and Drug Administration took steps on Tuesday to sort out the confusing world of sunscreens, with new rules that specify which lotions provide the best protection against the sun and ending claims that they are truly waterproof. The F.D.A. said sunscreens must protect equally against two kinds of the sun\u2019s radiation, UVB and UVA, to earn the coveted designation of offering \u201cbroad spectrum\u201d protection. UVB rays cause burning; UVA rays cause wrinkling; and both cause cancer . The rules, which go into effect in a year, will also ban sunscreen manufacturers from claiming their products are waterproof or sweatproof because such claims are false. Instead, they will be allowed to claim in minutes the amount of time in which the product is water resistant, depending upon test results. And only sunscreens that have a sun protection factor, or SPF, of 15 or higher will be allowed to maintain that they help prevent sunburn and reduce the risks of skin cancer and early skin aging. The rules have been under consideration since 1978, when \u201cBoogie Oogie Oogie\u201d was a hit on the radio and most beach lotions were intended to encourage tanning, not protect against it. But federal regulators said they had yet to decide whether to end an SPF arms race in which manufacturers are introducing sunscreens with SPF numbers of 70, 80 and 100 even though such lotions offer little more protection than those with an SPF of 50. Still, dermatologists said they were thrilled. \u201cNow, we\u2019ll be able to tell patients which sunscreens to get,\u201d said Dr. Henry W. Lim, chairman of dermatology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and a spokesman for the American Academy of Dermatology. The rules will transform the $680 million domestic market for sunscreens, which has been growing rapidly because of an aging population and growing worries about skin cancer. And the final regulations are a stark change from a proposal the agency released in 2007, which would have created a star-based system for UVA protection. Under that system, sunscreens would have provided an SPF number for UVB protection and one to four stars for UVA protection. The agency received more than 3,000 comments on that proposal, with many asserting that allowing products to offer differing levels of protection against UVB and UVA rays would be confusing. So the agency ditched the stars and instead will tell manufacturers that if they wish to label their products as offering \u201cbroad spectrum\u201d protection they must make their defense against UVB and UVA radiation proportional. \u201cWe think this is going to be much easier for the consumer to understand,\u201d Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A.\u2019s drug center, said in an interview. \u201cAll they\u2019re going to need to do is pick an SPF number and then make sure that it\u2019s broad spectrum.\u201d Any product that fails to offer proportional protection or has an SPF of 2 to 14 must include a warning that the product has not been shown to help prevent skin cancer or early skin aging. The new rules will standardize the testing that manufacturers must conduct for UVA protection. The agency had proposed allowing manufacturers to use SPF numbers no higher than 50, but that remains only a proposal for which the agency will seek further comment. In particular, the government is asking whether there are special groups of people who would somehow benefit from having a product with an SPF of more than 50. \u201cRight now, we don\u2019t have any data to show that anything above 50 adds any value for anybody,\u201d Dr. Woodcock said. Dr. Warwick L. Morison, a professor of dermatology at Johns Hopkins University and chairman of the photobiology committee for the Skin Cancer Foundation, said he was disappointed that the F.D.A. failed to ban SPF numbers higher than 50 because such products expose people to more irritating sunscreen ingredients without meaningful added protection. \u201cIt\u2019s pointless,\u201d Dr. Morison said. More than two million people in the United States are treated each year for the two most common types of skin cancer, basal cell and squamous cell, and more than 68,000 receive a diagnosis of melanoma , the most deadly form of the disease. Sunscreens have not been shown to prevent the first case of basal cell carcinoma , but they delay reoccurrences of basal cell and have been shown to prevent squamous cell and melanoma. The F.D.A. announced that it was re-examining the safety of the roughly 17 sunscreen agents approved for use in the United States, although it has no information to suggest that they are not safe. Tuesday\u2019s announcement will do nothing to speed the approval of more sunscreen agents. There are roughly 28 such agents approved in Europe and 40 in Japan , and some in the industry complain that the best ingredients have yet to reach American shores. Some consumer and environmental groups have expressed concern that the ingredients in some sunscreens have been made so microscopic that they could be absorbed through the skin into the body, but Dr. Woodcock said that the F.D.A.\u2019s own tests had found no cause for such concerns. The agency is also asking for more information about sunscreen sprays to ensure that consumers get adequate quantities from spray bottles and to explore what happens when those products are inhaled. \u201cYou could imagine a child getting a sunscreen sprayed on and turning their face into the blast and breathing it in,\u201d Dr. Woodcock said. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of safety.\u201d The new regulations will do nothing to prevent the most common problem with sunscreens lotions, which is that consumers fail to use enough of them. The rules become effective in one year, although manufacturers with less than $25,000 in annual sales will have two years to comply. Senator Jack Reed , Democrat of Rhode Island , said the new rules were important. Mr. Reed proposed legislation mandating that the F.D.A. finally adopt the sunscreen proposals it floated in 2007. \u201cThe F.D.A. has been sitting on these proposals for many, many years,\u201d Mr. Reed said. \u201cThis is a major step, and I\u2019m glad they\u2019ve done it.\u201d ", "keyword": "Sunscreen;FDA;Skin cancer;Consumer protection"}
{"id": "ny0150345", "categories": ["sports", "playmagazine"], "date": "2008/09/14", "title": "Do Pretty-Boy Quarterbacks Make More Money?", "abstract": "When Brett Favre \u201cretired,\u201d he held the records for most career touchdown passes and most career passing yards. He also ended 2007 with another record: most attractive starting quarterback. We tend to think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Research, though, has indicated that what we think of as facial attractiveness is really just facial symmetry. And of all the faces of starting quarterbacks from 2007, Favre\u2019s, as measured by a computer, is the most symmetrical. In other words, he\u2019s the most attractive. In football, prettiness shouldn\u2019t matter \u2014 just ask Johnny Unitas. Players are evaluated solely on their ability to contribute to wins, right? Not entirely. The economists Rob Simmons, Jennifer VanGilder and I collected data on 121 N.F.L. quarterbacks who played from 1995 to 2006. We looked at the factors that determine player pay \u2014 career statistics, experience, Pro Bowl appearances and draft position \u2014 as well as the symmetry of each quarterback\u2019s face. Sure enough, symmetry had a positive impact on a quarterback\u2019s salary. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in facial symmetry led to a nearly 8 percent increase in pay. To put this result in perspective, we found that a \u201cgood-looking\u201d quarterback like Kerry Collins or Charlie Frye earned approximately $300,000 more per year than his stats and other pay factors would predict. Meanwhile, quarterbacks like Jeff George and Neil O\u2019Donnell , who, sadly, were not found to have very symmetrical faces, suffered an equivalent penalty. But it\u2019s not the Brett Favres \u2014 the guys often referred to as \u201cthe face of the franchise\u201d \u2014 who receive the greatest return on their handsome faces. It\u2019s the QBs clinging to the bottom of the roster who get the biggest pay bump from good looks. What this indicates is that when teams are scouting backups, they may be looking for just another pretty face. This is good news for Dan Orlovsky, who is battling Drew Stanton for the backup position with the Detroit Lions. No offense to Stanton, but the computer has spoken: Orlovsky is the better-looking prospect.", "keyword": "Wages and Salaries;Football;Favre Brett;O'Donnell Neil;National Football League;Unitas Johnny;Collins Kerry"}
{"id": "ny0065805", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/06/30", "title": "After Supreme Court Ruling, Aereo\u2019s Rivals in TV Streaming Seize Opening", "abstract": "Mark Ely saw an opportunity, and he took it. The day after the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo in a copyright case brought by the nation\u2019s major broadcasters, Mr. Ely was trying to scoop up Aereo customers by promoting his start-up, Simple.TV, on social media. \u201cFormer Aereo customer? Join the Simple.TV Family,\u201d the company wrote on Twitter on Thursday. \u201cWe\u2019re telling Aereo customers: \u2018Your favorite service is going away. Here\u2019s an idea that isn\u2019t,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Ely, who started his company in 2011, said in an interview. The television establishment still has much to worry about after its Supreme Court victory on Wednesday over Aereo, the digital start-up that had threatened to upend the economics of the media business. \u201cTelevision is a castle filled with money,\u201d said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the Publicis Groupe\u2019s digital marketing unit. \u201cPeople are trying to get into that castle and take some money.\u201d But while the court\u2019s decision broadens the moat, traditional broadcasters still must find ways to defend themselves against an array of companies like Mr. Ely\u2019s that want to give viewers an alternative to the their model. Eager for a piece of the $167 billion American television market, dozens of companies are offering options for the growing number of viewers known as cord cutters, who are canceling their traditional pay-television subscriptions. The providers range from Hulu, which the broadcasters own, to bigger services like Amazon, Google and Netflix, all of which offer cheaper streaming alternatives. Other companies, including Roku, Sling Media, TiVo, Simple.TV and Mohu, sell hardware that allows viewers to stream television to digital devices or watch web video on television sets. And Aereo may yet stick around; the company said on Saturday that it would pause its service temporarily as it sorted out its options but that its journey was \u201cfar from done.\u201d Image Chet Kanojia, the chief executive of Aereo, showing one of the dime-size antennas the company rents to customers. Credit Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press \u201cI don\u2019t think you are going to find a silver bullet to disrupt the broadcast industry,\u201d said Kenneth Lerer, a venture capitalist who has invested in a series of digital media start-ups. \u201cI think you are going to find a lot of little bullets. Aereo was hoping it was a silver bullet.\u201d Aereo and its two-year legal battle with broadcasters overshadowed the efforts of several other start-ups that offer ways to watch free over-the-air television on cellphones, tablets, laptops and Internet-connected televisions. Those companies paid tribute to Aereo, saying it helped advance the notion that there are ways to watch TV without paying expensive cable bills. But they are now trying to grab the spotlight after the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on tiny antennas stored in warehouses and transmitting them to paying subscribers. Mr. Ely started Simple.TV, based in Tiburon, Calif., months before Aereo made its debut in 2012. A former president of Sonic Solutions, a computer software firm, Mr. Ely noticed how a growing number of people were watching television shows and movies over the Internet but did not have access to live television programming like news and sports. His idea was to sell consumers a \u201cprivate TV server\u201d that plugged into an antenna, a hard drive and a router. With Aereo, subscribers paid $8 to $12 a month to rent a dime-size antenna stored in a warehouse. Users could then stream near-live television and record programs from major broadcasters. With Simple.TV, people buy their own antenna and the $199 Simple.TV box. Users can record programs on a hard drive that they connect to the device. The company also sells a premium service that provides features like automatic recording and remote access from almost anywhere in the world. Mohu, a start-up based in Raleigh, N.C., also hopes to grow after the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling. The company, which sells over-the-air antennas and offers a streaming service, began as a military contractor developing high-performance antennas for the Army and Navy. Since its founding in 2011, it has sold 1.5 million high-definition television antennas to consumers. \u201cAereo made people aware that they can get high-definition broadcast television for free without paying for cable,\u201d said Mark Buff, Mohu\u2019s founder and chief executive. Video The Supreme Court ruled that Aereo violated copyright law, granting television networks a much-desired win that will preserve the status quo \u2014 at least for now. Credit Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images The main difference between these companies \u2014 which have not drawn the ire of broadcasters \u2014 and Aereo is that their customers own the antennas and capture signals in their homes, as opposed to remotely. Mr. Ely and Mr. Buff say they believe that will satisfy the requirement under copyright law that the transmissions be private performances, a position that Aereo argued unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court. \u201cWhere you capture the signal makes all the difference,\u201d Mr. Ely said. \u201cThis fits squarely in fair use.\u201d Simple.TV, which has 30 employees and counts tens of thousands of customers, has raised $5 million in financing and is working on a new round of funding. Some venture capitalists said they would continue to invest in streaming-television start-ups despite Aereo\u2019s loss in court. \u201cIf cable companies believe that their old ways of doing business are protected by the Aereo Supreme Court decision, they are clearly misguided,\u201d said Dan Nova, a partner at Highland Capital Partners, one of Aereo\u2019s backers. \u201cConsumers are rejecting cable companies and traditional consumption models. The horse is out of the barn.\u201d The number of households in the United States subscribing to pay-television services has slipped in recent years. About 101 million households in the United States subscribe to pay TV, down 7 percent from 2013, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. At the same time, the total number of households in the United States that use the Internet or other streaming services instead of traditional TV to watch television shows or movies has climbed to 7.6 million, up about 30 percent from 5.8 million in 2013, according to SNL Kagan. Recognizing the threat, cable and satellite companies are introducing options to lure new customers and keep those who might be tempted to cancel their subscriptions. Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States by subscribers, is offering cloud-based television-streaming technologies; an Internet Plus bundle that includes broadband, basic cable and HBO; and special packages for college students. Broadcasters, too, are trying to profit by offering to sell their programming to streaming companies that are willing to pay for it. During a phone interview after the Supreme Court ruling, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, said his network did not oppose the new technology. \u201cWe are not against people moving forward and offering our content online and all sorts of places, as long as it is appropriately licensed,\u201d he said. \u201cInnovation is still alive and well and thriving.\u201d", "keyword": "TV;Simple.TV;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Cable television;Copyrights;Aereo;Hulu.com;Amazon;Netflix"}
{"id": "ny0221883", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/02/25", "title": "Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap", "abstract": "WARSAW \u2014 When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God. \u201cI still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,\u201d said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. \u201cWhen I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,\u201d he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. \u201cEvery minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.\u201d Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family. Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland , of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past. Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted. Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews \u201cour elder brothers,\u201d had finally entered the public consciousness. Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered. \u201cBefore 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, \u2018I am a Jew,\u2019 \u201d Rabbi Schudrich said. \u201cBut two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn\u2019t correspond to the Poland of 2010.\u201d The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II. In the past five years, Warsaw\u2019s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music. Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. \u201cPoland is changing,\u201d he said. \u201cI am Jewish and I feel good,\u201d he said. Pawel\u2019s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute. \u201cOy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,\u201d Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. \u201cWe sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.\u201d One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. \u201cWe made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,\u201d he said. Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets. \u201cOne time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, \u2018If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!\u2019 \u201d Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel\u2019s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents. When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust. \u201cI went to my parents and said, \u2018What the hell\u2019? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn\u2019t look in the mirror for weeks,\u201d he said. \u201cMy parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.\u201d Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread \u201cMein Kampf\u201d but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed. \u201cWhen I asked a rabbi, \u2018Why do I feel this way?\u2019 he replied, \u2018The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.\u2019 \u201d At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home. Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. \u201cWhen younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, \u2018Get out and go back to your country\u2019 or \u2018Jew go home!\u2019 \u201d And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. \u201cI am good with knives,\u201d he explained.", "keyword": "Jews and Judaism;Poland;Synagogues;Holocaust and the Nazi Era;Anti-Semitism"}
{"id": "ny0253596", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/10/06", "title": "Granderson\u2019s Catches Add to October Lore", "abstract": "Talk about fast hands and professional skills: on Wednesday morning, just a few hours after Curtis Granderson \u2019s magnificent evening in center field, I was at the gate for the flight from Detroit back to New York, surrounded by other sleepy souls. Four photographers were clustered nearby, discussing their own challenges under pressure. One photographer said, \u201cI got the catch,\u201d and a colleague \u2014 maybe even a rival \u2014 gave him a fist bump. It\u2019s easy to focus on the mound or the batter\u2019s box, but once the batter swings, who knows where the ball is going to go? Some of the greatest moments in postseason baseball have taken place after the deliberate pitch and the reactive swing. Granderson, who is smooth on the field and off, made two very different catches to stave off trouble as the Yankees stayed alive with a 10-1 thumping of the Tigers on Tuesday night. Granderson overcame his own false step forward to snag Don Kelly\u2019s bases-loaded smash to end the first inning. That change, of course, was sheer terror on Granderson\u2019s part, and is no doubt the most important reason everybody is trooping back to the Bronx on Thursday night. But Granderson also reacted with a long race into left-center field to haul in Jhonny Peralta\u2019s bid for a gapper in the sixth inning, while the game was still within reach. Granderson made the play with an elbows-and-knees dive that may have also included his chin, as the entire stadium saw the white ball vanish into the glove. \u0095 The two catches put Granderson in the category of fielders who have had epic moments in the autumn. Perhaps in a separate category \u2014 mind over matter \u2014 were plays performed by No. 1 and No. 2 of the Yankees. Billy Martin chased down Jackie Robinson\u2019s wind-blown pop-up in the 1952 World Series, because nobody else did. And Derek Jeter knew enough to wander past the first-base line to corral the loose throw and toss out Slide-Jeremy-Slide Giambi at the plate. (Jeter, now a poor old feller of 37, was up to his old tricks last Saturday, when he grabbed the relay and made a terrific throw home to nab the Tigers\u2019 Alex Avila.) Outfield catches are a different art form because they take long seconds to develop. Some of the greatest defensive plays in the postseason include: Kirby Puckett\u2019s elevating his 5 feet 8 inches against the plexiglass to haul down Ron Gant\u2019s long drive in the sixth game of the 1991 World Series; Paul O\u2019Neill, tight hamstring and all, going back, back, back to catch Luis Polonia\u2019s shot to right-center in the ninth inning of the fifth World Series game in 1996. (The Yankees coach Jose Cardenal had just waved O\u2019Neill farther over toward center, seeing that Polonia was swinging late on John Wetteland\u2019s fastball.) Going back further in time are gems like Mickey Mantle\u2019s race to grab Gil Hodges\u2019s line drive during Don Larsen\u2019s perfect game in 1956, Ron Swoboda\u2019s dive on Brooks Robinson\u2019s smash in 1969, Sandy Amoros\u2019s tracking down of Yogi Berra\u2019s slice to left field in 1955, when Next Year finally arrived for Brooklyn; Al Gionfriddo\u2019s similar catch off Joe DiMaggio in 1947; and Willie Mays\u2019s chasing down of Vic Wertz\u2019s long shot into the canyon of center field of the Polo Grounds in 1954. Admittedly, Granderson\u2019s two plays took place in the first round of what could be called the playoffs, not quite the same thing as catches in the singular majesty of the old-fashioned World Series. But great catches are great catches. Granderson was the first to admit he made the Kelly catch more difficult than it needed to be. \u201cRight away I thought he hit it right to me,\u201d Granderson said . \u201cI took a step in and froze. It started to get some air. At least for my perspective, it kind of went up. I was, like, \u2018Oh man.\u2019 I was able to go ahead and not be committed one away or the other. I ended up having to leave my feet, which I didn\u2019t want to. I ended up reeling it in finally at the end. Don Kelly came up to me later in the game. He goes, \u2018How did you do it?\u2019 \u201d Granderson told Kelly that his big mistake was hitting the ball too hard. \u0095 The second catch, on Peralta, was made more difficult because of Granderson\u2019s positioning. \u201cI felt he was a guy that was going to hit the ball to the right-center gap, so that\u2019s where I was shading him,\u201d he said. \u201cSure enough, he ended up hitting the ball to the left-center gap. So I ended up having to go a lot further for it. Looked at Brett Gardner, he wasn\u2019t there yet. So I decided to lay out for it. Ended up holding onto the ball. \u201cThe reason I was slow getting up,\u201d Granderson continued, \u201cI ended up knocking the wind out of myself and I think I hit my head a little bit because I had a little headache afterwards.\u201d The first catch probably saved three or even four runs and surely gave a boost to A. J. Burnett, the starter on a very short leash. Granderson liked the second catch better because it did not begin with a mistake. His proud response was a mirror into the heart of a professional. For that matter, so was eavesdropping on photographers, talking shop about great defensive plays at a time of year when they matter most.", "keyword": "Baseball;Playoff Games;New York Yankees;Granderson Curtis;Detroit Tigers"}
{"id": "ny0022187", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/09/07", "title": "Just Before Brooklyn Boy\u2019s Funeral, 2 Arrests in His Killing", "abstract": "Hours before mourners began filing past the open coffin of a 16-month-old Brooklyn boy who was fatally shot in his stroller last weekend, detectives on Friday broke into a Pennsylvania apartment and arrested two suspects in the killing. The arrests were the culmination of a five-day manhunt that stretched from the Brownsville neighborhood, where a .45-caliber bullet ended the life of the boy, Antiq Hennis, to Maryland and Pennsylvania, where investigators suspected the fugitives had gone to hide with relatives or friends. Yet that was cold comfort to the hundreds of people gathered at the Grace Funeral Chapel in Ozone Park, Queens. Some wore T-shirts bearing a message written with childlike punctuation: \u201cim ok mommy grandpa will take good care of me.\u201d Surrounded by nine clusters of white balloons and dressed in a white suit and a white Yankees cap, Antiq (pronounced an-TEEK) lay with his hands folded at his waist in a small white coffin. His eyelashes curled upward; his face appeared to glisten. The search for the suspects, Daquan Breland, 23, and Daquan Wright, 19, was complicated from the start by the boy\u2019s father, Anthony Hennis, who had been pushing Antiq in the stroller when the shooting occurred and appeared to have been the target. According to the police, he refused to answer questions. Image Daquan Breland was apprehended Friday. Credit Aimee Dilger/The Times Leader, via Associated Press But others in Brownsville, where gun violence among young men is despairingly common, did come forward. On Friday, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that a witness told investigators that Mr. Wright handed a pistol to Mr. Breland, who fired four shots. Two bullets hit the stroller; one struck Antiq in the head. The shooting, on the corner of Livonia Avenue and Bristol Street, shocked the neighborhood and drew condemnation from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and candidates seeking to replace him next year. A few hundred people attended the wake and funeral in a long, narrow parlor. Relatives and family friends were also dressed in white and most remained silent. An older woman, perhaps not yet aware that two suspects had been taken into custody, wailed in the back. \u201cHe\u2019s a baby,\u201d she said. \u201cThey need to turn themselves in.\u201d During the funeral, family members and friends stood by the coffin and called for an end to killings like Antiq\u2019s. A young girl stood at the front and delivered a message. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you let us live our time?\u201d she sang to the group. \u201cLay the guns down. Don\u2019t try to kill us now.\u201d Applause rippled through the audience. Over several days, detectives from the New York Police Department tracked the two suspects to the Sherman Hills Apartments in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., about 130 miles northwest of where the shooting took place. Image Daquan Wright was also arrested. Credit Aimee Dilger/The Times Leader, via Associated Press Mr. Kelly said the police zeroed in on the complex, near Interstate 81, after learning that Mr. Wright\u2019s sister lived there. Mr. Kelly said the same woman was also the girlfriend of Mr. Breland, who is on parole for a conviction in a June 2009 shooting in Auburn, N.Y. About 6 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Kelly said, New York detectives as well as members of the Wilkes-Barre Police Department and the United States Marshals Service arrived at the apartment, but the woman, who was not identified, said the men had left two days before. \u201cUpon further investigation, detectives had reason to believe that they were still in the neighborhood,\u201d Mr. Kelly said. They began showing residents pictures of the two men, and about an hour and a half later discovered that the men were in another apartment in the complex. When people in that apartment refused to open the door, officers forced their way in and found Mr. Wright and Mr. Breland lying facedown in a bedroom, Mr. Kelly said. The men were taken into custody by the Wilkes-Barre police, Mr. Kelly said, and the authorities were arranging for their return to New York. Image Antiq Hennis was fatally shot last weekend in Brownsville, Brooklyn, while he sat in a stroller pushed by his father. Mr. Kelly added that ballistics tests on the .45-caliber casings recovered at the scene appeared to link the handgun to previous crimes, but he did not elaborate. He also declined to describe any affiliations the two men might have with criminal gangs in Brownsville or delve into the motivation for the shooting. \u201cWe\u2019re still looking to determine\u201d those things, he said. Mr. Wright\u2019s 24-year-old brother was a victim in two separate shootings in Brownsville last year, the police said. He was the only victim in a shooting on May 28, and was among several people in a crowd who were shot on July 29. Mr. Breland served about two years in prison for his role in the Auburn shooting, in which two shotguns were fired into a crowd in a dispute over money. One man was wounded. The police earlier described Mr. Hennis, 22, who has a record of drug arrests, as an associate of the Crips gang and suggested that, because of his son\u2019s death, there was the possibility of retaliatory shootings. \u201cYou always have to worry about retaliation,\u201d Mr. Kelly said on Friday. \u201cYou have to look at that right away.\u201d On Friday evening, several police officers stood outside the funeral home.", "keyword": "Funerals;Murders;Antiq Hennis;Daquan Breland;Daquan Wright;Brownsville Brooklyn;Anthony Hennis;Pennsylvania"}
{"id": "ny0110624", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2012/05/14", "title": "Fire in Garage Cuts Short Party After Formula One Victory", "abstract": "Pastor Maldonado held off Fernando Alonso to win the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, giving the Williams team its first Formula One victory in eight years. Maldonado started from the pole and withstood the challenge by Alonso\u2019s Ferrari to take the 66-lap race at the Catalunya Circuit by 3.1 seconds. The celebration quickly gave way to concern when a fire in the Williams garage left 31 people injured. Seven were hospitalized. Maldonado, making his first visit to the podium, is the first Venezuelan winner in Formula One. It was Williams\u2019s 114th triumph but its first since the 2004 Brazilian Grand Prix. \u00b6 Sebastian Saavedra of Colombia ran the fastest lap of the week in practice for the Indianapolis 500. Saavedra covered the 2.5 miles at 221.526 miles per hour. Qualifications are next weekend, and the race is May 27. (AP)", "keyword": "Automobile Racing;Formula One;Alonso Fernando;Maldonado Pastor"}
{"id": "ny0234425", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/01/27", "title": "Problem Loans Plague Banks in Austria", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The Austrian banking regulator said Tuesday that it expected \u201cmassive write-offs\u201d this year by the country\u2019s banks as they recognized more bad loans in Eastern Europe. Austrian banks have been among the biggest lenders to corporate borrowers in Eastern Europe, booking \u20ac180 billion, or $254 billion, in loans over the past few years. A so-called stress test published last year by the Austrian central bank indicated that Austrian banks faced \u20ac10 billion to \u20ac20 billion in bad debt write-downs over the next two years. \u201cWe expect that massive write-offs will be needed in the next 12 months,\u201d Helmut Ettl, co-chairman of the Financial Market Authority, said in Vienna. Kurt Pribil, also a co-chairman of the regulator, said it was \u201cvery important that risk buffers are built up further. We strongly recommend that profits are not paid out excessively but are retained to create capital.\u201d Representatives of two major Austrian banks said Tuesday that while the financial crisis had taken its toll on bank balance sheets, the banks were now on solid financial footing. \u201cThere was a lot of panic at the time,\u201d said Ionut Stanimir, a spokesman for Erste Group, parent of Erste Bank. \u201cAnd of course there is continuing concern for the banking sector. \u201cWe are not out of the woods, yet,\u201d he added, \u201cbut neither are we in the middle of the woods.\u201d By the end of the third quarter of 2009, Erste Group had a total of \u20ac51 billion in deposits in Central and Eastern Europe. Loans, made mostly to individuals and small and midsize companies totaled \u20ac50 billion, Mr. Stanimir said. During that period, Erste Group\u2019s problem loans made up 6.3 percent of its total customer loan exposure of \u20ac130 billion. \u201cWe see our exposure as manageable,\u201d Mr. Stanimir said. \u201cWe feel adequately capitalized.\u201d Michael Palzer, a spokesman for Raiffeisen International, the parent of Raiffeisen Bank, said Tuesday that the regulator\u2019s comments were not surprising. \u201cThe bank said just last week that nonperforming loans will increase throughout the region this year,\u201d he said. \u201cBanks are challenged to build up their capital position. This is something that we never neglected.\u201d Raiffeisen International\u2019s nonperforming loans in Central Europe rose to 6.7 percent, or \u20ac1.5 billion, by the end of the third quarter of last year compared with 1.7 percent, or \u20ac751 million, a year earlier. One reason for an increase in nonperforming loans during 2010 will be the growing rate of unemployment, Mr. Palzer said. Poland, which until now has been the only country in the region to maintain some economic growth, is expected to have unemployment rise to nearly 13 percent in 2010 from 11 percent last year, according to recent forecasts published by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. In the Czech Republic, unemployment will rise in the same period to 10 percent from 8.1 percent, the institute predicts. \u201cThe deteriorating labor market will affect repaying loans,\u201d Mr. Palzer said. Raiffeisen International last year teamed up with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to strengthen the banks in Ukraine, Romania and Russia. The development bank provided a \u20ac150 million financing package for three subsidiaries of Raiffeisen International, complementing the group\u2019s own continued provision of capital and financing for its banks in Eastern Europe.", "keyword": "Banks and Banking;Austria;Central Europe;Eastern Europe;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0149711", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/09/08", "title": "Interception Interrupts Pennington\u2019s Hopes for Last-Second Win", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 Miami Dolphins quarterback Chad Pennington ended his practice Friday afternoon with a touchdown pass on fourth down \u2014 a dream situation for the man who would be facing his former team only a month after he had been dumped for Brett Favre. Pennington had insisted all week that he was not seeking revenge for the unceremonious breakup with the Jets , but he also knew that the game was likely to come down to the final moments. He wanted his new, younger teammates to be prepared. But there was no perfect finish for Pennington on Sunday. Instead, on the final play of the game, with 10 seconds remaining and the Dolphins on the Jets\u2019 18-yard line, Pennington put as much air under a pass as he could, trying to give receiver Ted Ginn Jr. a chance to snatch a jump ball in the end zone. But as soon as Pennington released the ball, he saw Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis boxing out Ginn, as if they were on a basketball court instead of a grass field. Then, Pennington thought something else. \u201cKnock it down,\u201d he said. No such luck. Revis intercepted the pass, and Pennington, who had come up short enough times in New York that the Jets went after Favre, came up short again, and the Dolphins lost, 20-14. Pennington is achingly new to the Dolphins. He is still living in a hotel. And he said that he was so excited to start the game that he went through his reads too quickly, leading to off-the-mark passes. Pennington, who finished 26 of 43 for 251 yards, did not complete a pass for a gain until late in the first quarter. And the Dolphins\u2019 offense sputtered so often that Coach Tony Sparano almost abandoned the run in the second half \u2014 it ran just four times \u2014 in an attempt to generate some passing rhythm. But the Dolphins, who won only one game last season, are young. Their mistakes came in bunches, short-circuiting nearly every drive. They gave up four sacks. Receivers ran the wrong routes. They kicked the ball out of bounds. They committed bad penalties on two Pennington scrambles. The Dolphins avoided the run so much that when they drove to the Jets\u2019 2-yard line early in the fourth quarter, the coaches called for two straight passes instead of rushes. They turned the ball over on downs. Miami\u2019s most damaging error was in leaving Jets receiver Chansi Stuckey uncovered at the goal line, allowing him to catch Favre\u2019s all-or-nothing heave on a fourth-and-13 midway through the second quarter. \u201cIt was a game of errors,\u201d Pennington said. \u201cThey made less errors than we did. A lot of times, experience doesn\u2019t happen until it\u2019s real.\u201d Still, the Dolphins had a chance to win, largely because the offense was in Pennington\u2019s hands. With 6 minutes 48 seconds remaining in the game, they started a drive at the Miami 47. Pennington completed six of seven passes, finishing the drive with an 11-yard touchdown pass to tight end David Martin. The Jets had taken away the Dolphins\u2019 receivers, allowing Pennington to connect with his tight ends. Both touchdown passes and 12 of his completions were to tight ends. With 1:43 left, Pennington took the ball on the Miami 39 and completed five consecutive passes to put the Dolphins at the Jets\u2019 18 with 23 seconds to play. The drive ended with Revis\u2019s interception. But Pennington continued to forge a bond with his new team, like the one he developed during his eight seasons with the Jets. That bond was so strong that Pennington talked to Jets receiver Laveranues Coles on Saturday night and said he was trying to say hello and shake hands with 75 or 80 people \u2014 his former teammates. \u201cChad\u2019s a leader from beginning to end,\u201d Dolphins receiver Greg Camarillo said. \u201cHe looked us in the eye and said, \u2018Let\u2019s get going.\u2019 He\u2019s not going to let the offense lose its swagger. That last drive started with him. We just wish we could have ended it.\u201d Camarillo said that he could see a little blood in Pennington\u2019s mouth from the pounding he had taken. Pennington was subdued and soft-spoken afterward, but no more so than when he lost with the Jets. He said it did not matter whether he lost to the Jets or to any of the other teams in the league. But his former team escaped with a victory for their new quarterback. Pennington, a Dolphins cap on his head, was asked where he was hurting. He pointed to his chest. \u201cMy heart,\u201d he said. \u201cMy pride is hurt. Losing is not fun. True pros bounce back and continue to fight another day. You\u2019ve got to have a heart to lose. You\u2019ve got to continue to prepare and fight through those things, not let it get into a downward spiral.\u201d The Dolphins, and the Jets, too, know something about that.", "keyword": "Football;Miami Dolphins;New York Jets;Pennington Chad"}
{"id": "ny0272790", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/05/07", "title": "Dateline North Korea, but Still Reporting From a Distance", "abstract": "Journalists from around the world were invited to North Korea to cover the ruling party\u2019s first congress in 36 years on Friday. But while many were allowed to travel to Pyongyang, the capital of the reclusive country, they were then barred from the actual event. So on Twitter and Facebook, journalists reported far from the proceedings taking place inside the convention hall where the country\u2019s leader, Kim Jong-un, is using the rare political gathering to consolidate his power . In theory, the Workers\u2019 Party, which governs North Korea, is supposed to hold a congress every five years. But this is only the seventh in the party\u2019s 70-year history. The last one was held in 1980, before Mr. Kim was even born. Kim Il-sung was in charge then. It is not entirely clear why the event is happening now or what the government hoped to get with world news coverage. Reporters were working around the restrictions, with some improvisation on social media. The press restrictions were not unusual for the country, which does not allow journalists to move freely. They are typically accompanied by government minders who monitor every step outside the hotel. Interviews with people on the street are overseen by the monitors as well. News bureaus operated by foreign press organizations are rare. The Associated Press, for example, has been permitted to have an office, but without a full-time presence. The agency\u2019s journalists are required to get government permission each time they visit, which they are allowed to do only for several weeks at a time. They are not allowed to move about freely when they do. (The New York Times was not granted visas to enter the country for the conference.) This congress was not the first time that international journalists have been corralled far from the action. In 2012, more than 50 foreign journalists accepted coveted invitations to North Korea for celebrations exalting the centenary of the country\u2019s deceased founder, Kim Il-sung, the ascension of Kim Jong-un and a rocket launching. They were cloistered in a hotel\u2019s press room, which North Korean government chaperones would not let them leave for hours. The reporters learned about the rocket launching via messages and telephone and Internet connections from people outside the country. On Friday, as in 2012, as the congress proceedings got underway, foreign journalists on the scene reported at a distance. It was not immediately clear whether access to the event, which last several days, will change for the unusually large press corps in the country, which Reuters reported was 128 reporters from 12 countries. So the visiting journalists found themselves out on Twitter and Facebook, with the rest of us.", "keyword": "News media,journalism;Social Media;AP;Workers' Party of Korea;Kim Jong-un;North Korea;Pyongyang"}
{"id": "ny0088389", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2015/09/05", "title": "For Labor Day Drivers, Lowest Gasoline Prices in 11 Years", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 Despite the recent tumult in global stock and energy markets, American travelers can count on bargains at the pump this Labor Day weekend, with prices for gasoline at their lowest levels in 11 years. With oil prices diving by more than 50 percent since last summer, the low prices are no surprise, analysts say. But the numbers can be startling to any driver who habitually glances at the gasoline price billboards along the highway. On Friday, the national average for regular gasoline was $2.42 a gallon, 9 cents lower than only a week ago and $1.01 lower than last year, according to the AAA motor club. \u201cConsumers will feel a lot better at the pump this holiday than they will looking at their 401(k)\u2019s,\u201d said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service. All told, Mr. Kloza estimated that Thursday through Monday, Americans would spend $3.9 billion on fuel, down from $5.5 billion during the holiday weekend in 2014 and 2013. Behind the low gasoline prices are widespread fears that the global economy is slowing, along with a resilient expansion of domestic oil production. The prices represent an astonishing reversal from recent years, when motorists complained bitterly about gas expenses. An estimated 8,250 gas stations in 24 states \u2014 representing more than 5 percent of the nation\u2019s stations \u2014 now have prices below $2 a gallon. Not a single station in the country sold gas at that price last Labor Day weekend, specialists say. \u201cAverage U.S. gas prices are falling at the fastest rates since December,\u201d said Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA, referring to the month after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries shocked oil traders by refusing to cut production and allowing crude prices to collapse. Several AAA clubs project that 35.5 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more over the weekend, the highest volume since 2008 and a 1 percent increase from last year. The AAA clubs say 86 percent of the travelers will drive. Cheap gasoline is encouraging motorists to drive more. The Federal Highway Administration has reported that the mileage driven in the first half of the year was the highest since 2008, before the recession. In July, drivers traveled 266.8 billion miles, a 1.5 percent increase from last year, when prices exceeded $100 a barrel and gasoline prices were roughly a dollar a gallon higher. Today, global oil benchmark prices are hovering around $45 to $50 a barrel, although in recent days they have been on a particularly wild ride, jumping or falling 5 percent or more, sometimes within hours. Last summer, oil and gasoline prices jumped as turmoil rocked the Middle East. But Iraq kept pumping and exporting, as have Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Meanwhile production in the United States has remained high as producers have become more efficient. And after the recent nuclear deal, the prospect of Iran exporting large amounts of oil again has worried traders and energy executives that a glut could last years. But drivers have not saved as much this summer as they might have expected. Typically, according to AAA, gas prices drop 2.4 cents a gallon for every $1 a barrel drop in crude price. But this summer the savings have been less than 2 cents a gallon largely because of refinery mishaps. An explosion in February at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, Calif., was so severe the plant is still not operating at full capacity. And last month, BP\u2019s refinery in Whiting, Ind., the largest in the Midwest, was forced to shut down its biggest crude distillation unit for several days because of leaky pipes. That sent gasoline prices soaring across the Great Lakes region, and some energy specialists warned that high prices could last more than a month. But technicians fixed the problem sooner than expected, and the national average for a regular gallon of gasoline has dropped every day for more than two weeks, in time for the holiday weekend. Prices are bound to decline more as the busy summer driving season ends and refineries process cheaper winter blends. \u201cSeptember looks like another month that consumers will save about $60 at the pump versus last year,\u201d Mr. Kloza said. He estimated that the average driver puts 60 gallons a month into his or her gas tank. The Energy Department recently predicted that the average national price for regular gasoline would decline to $2.11 in the fourth quarter, contributing to an annual average of $2.41 for 2015. That is roughly a dollar lower than last year. The one wild card for prices is, as always, the price of crude oil, which can jump in the event of a crisis in the Middle East. But at the moment, commodity traders are more fearful of a decline in global demand mostly because of the slower economic growth in China. \u201cA slowdown in China means more than just a slowdown in Chinese oil demand,\u201d according to a Barclays report on Friday. \u201cChina\u2019s industrial activity and global links, the energy intensity of its commodity imports, and even the oil used to get these goods to the country will all stumble if China does.\u201d", "keyword": "Oil and Gasoline;Cars;American Automobile Assn;Price;Labor Day;International trade"}
{"id": "ny0264031", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/12/31", "title": "As Spain Trims Deficits, Scrutiny Falls on Regional Governments", "abstract": "FIGUERES, Spain \u2014 Facing a wider than expected budget deficit, Spain\u2019s new government announced a $19.3 billion package of tax increases and spending cuts on Friday and admitted that the country\u2019s finances were probably even worse because of overspending by the autonomous regions. Spain\u2019s new prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said the austerity package was needed to maintain the confidence of European bond markets after it became clear that the budget deficit was expected to reach 8 percent of gross domestic product this year \u2014 two percentage points above the government\u2019s target. And while Spain\u2019s overall fiscal status is nowhere near as dire as Italy \u2019s, it has another problem all its own, as the new budget minister, Crist\u00f3bal Montoro, made clear Friday: serious budget shortfalls in its 17 autonomous regions, which have spent recklessly in the past decade. Evidence of the regional profligacy dots the countryside. On the top of a hill here in the birthplace of Salvador Dal\u00ed , in northeastern Spain sits a giant, empty penitentiary. But even without a single prisoner in residence, the prison is costing Spain\u2019s heavily indebted regional government of Catalonia $1.3 million a month, largely in interest payments. If prisoners were actually moved in, it would cost an additional $2.6 million a month. So it sits empty, an object of ridicule around here, often referred to as the \u201c spa .\u201d Analysts say the mistakes are adding up. The Bank of Spain announced this month that regional debt had surged 22 percent, to $176 billion in September from $144 billion the year before. And some experts say that there remain tens of billions of dollars in \u201chidden\u201d regional debt yet to be discovered. The financial state of the regional governments is so bad, in fact, that some may be willing \u2014 maybe even eager \u2014 to shed some of their wide-ranging and costly responsibilities, like health care and education. Much as the debt crisis is forcing the European Union to refashion its relationship with its member countries, stepping up oversight and control, some experts believe that some of Spain\u2019s autonomous regions may be less so in the future. \u201cWhether publicly or not, some of the regional governments are saying: \u2018Take this away from me. I didn\u2019t realize how difficult it would be,\u2019 \u201d said \u00c1ngel Berges Lobera, an economist at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Madrid and an expert on regional debt. In recent years, the regions and municipalities have racked up debts, offering generous public services and investing in a wide range of projects, some of them bordering on the ridiculous, critics say. Castilla-La Mancha, for instance, an agricultural region bordering Madrid, built itself an airport complete with a runway big enough for jumbo jets. But it may close soon, as no airline \u2014 even with smaller planes \u2014 is interested in flying there. Municipalities have not done much better. They have also been accumulating debt, a total now of about $48 billion. One town, Alcorc\u00f3n, about 10 miles southwest of Madrid, spent $150 million on a cultural center, complete with a permanent circus and free birthday parties for its children. \u201cIt\u2019s been chaos out there,\u201d said Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quir\u00f3s, an economist who has been critical of Spain\u2019s system of autonomous regions, a structure developed after Gen. Francisco Franco \u2019s dictatorial rule ended in 1975. And there is that \u201chidden debt,\u201d most of it in unpaid bills, which is not included in Spain\u2019s total national indebtedness of $915 billion. That could easily amount to $25 billion to $40 billion more, experts say. And the bad news probably is not over. Some experts believe that as newly elected members of Mr. Rajoy\u2019s Popular Party take control of some regional administrations, they are sure to unearth even more financial excesses. That is what happened in Catalonia, where the \u201chidden debt\u201d problem first popped up this year. When elections were held there in 2010, the ratio of debt to regional G.D.P. was believed to be less than 2 percent. But after the vote, the departing government disclosed that its full year deficit could be 3.3 percent. The new government later revised that figure again, to 3.8 percent. Experts believe that this kind of markup is possible elsewhere, including Andalusia in the south, which has Seville as its capital. \u201cAndalusia could be spectacular,\u201d Mr. de Quir\u00f3s said. Some areas, like the Basque region, which suffered particularly severe repression under Franco, pushed hard for the right to govern themselves. Now, however, the trend seems to be heading in the other direction. One important factor favoring a redrawing of Spain\u2019s system of autonomous regions was the landslide victory of the Popular Party. That gave the conservatives control over the central government and most regional administrations, something that had never happened before. In the past, the regions and the central government, usually from opposite parties, could blame one another for whatever fiscal issues arose. But that is not going to work this time. \u201cThey used to fight to tell the voters, \u2018It\u2019s not my fault,\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Berges Lobera, the economist. \u201cNow they can\u2019t do that.\u201d Spain\u2019s autonomous regions have huge responsibilities. They are generally in charge of administering schools, universities, health and social services, culture, development and, in some cases, policing. The education and health care portfolios are particularly problematic, because those costs just keep growing. At the same time, some main sources of financing \u2014 taxes on real estate sales and building permit fees \u2014 have dried up with the collapse of the housing boom. For that reason, some regions may actually want the central government to take health care and education back. In July, officials from the regions of Murcia, Valencia and Arag\u00f3n suggested as much. Catalonia, like the Basque region, remains fiercely independent. But it faces an uphill battle as it tries to get its budget under control. The prison in Figueres, which experts say was not needed, was not the only big project the region undertook in the last few years, arguing that public works would provide much-needed economic stimulus in the face of Spain\u2019s high unemployment rate, currently 22 percent. In addition to the prison, Catalonia started highway projects and a 30-mile extension of Barcelona \u2019s subway system, which has now proved difficult to halt. \u201cWe have a lot of contractual obligations that don\u2019t make these projects easy to stop,\u201d said Albert Carreras, the secretary general of the regional Ministry of the Economy. In recent months, however, Catalonia has been slashing its budget in ways that other regions expect to have to follow soon, though like many other regional governments, it failed to meet its year-end targets. The cuts have spawned a range of protests and strikes, involving even high school students, including those at the Institut Francesc Maci\u00e1 , a secondary school on the western outskirts of Barcelona. When Adria Junyent, 17, found himself in a philosophy class so large that his teacher had to use a microphone to be heard, he organized a \u201csleep-in\u201d in the auditorium. \u201cWe were not the only ones with problems,\u201d he said. \u201cThe chemistry classes had their budget cut for Bunsen burners. There are all kinds of cuts. This didn\u2019t even happen under Franco.\u201d", "keyword": "Economy;Euro Crisis;Spain;Mariano Rajoy;Catalonia"}
{"id": "ny0016623", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/10/08", "title": "Navajo Leader Drops His Support for Slaughter of Wild Horses on the Reservation", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 Under pressure by animal welfare groups and many of his own people, the president of the Navajo Nation, Ben Shelly, has reversed his stance on horse slaughtering, saying he will no longer support it and will order the temporary suspension of the roundups of feral horses on the reservation. The agreement, brokered by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, is scheduled to be announced on Tuesday. One of its key provisions is to pressure the federal government to do more to help the Navajos handle the tens of thousands of horses that roam freely on their land. Mr. Shelly has estimated that feral horses cost the Navajos $200,000 a year in damage to property and range. \u201cI am interested in long-term humane solutions to manage our horse populations,\u201d Mr. Shelly said. \u201cOur land is precious to the Navajo people as are all the horses on the Navajo Nation. Horses are sacred animals to us.\u201d Mr. Shelly\u2019s recalibrated position is sure to strengthen the arguments against horse slaughter in the nation, just as a legal fight to block the opening of horse slaughterhouses in New Mexico and Missouri reaches its final stages. It could also smooth relations between his administration and tribal elders in some of the Navajo Nation\u2019s largest chapters, who have stood steadfastly against the roundups even as Mr. Shelly embraced them in August as the best available option, given the tribe\u2019s limited resources, to keep its feral horse population under control. At the time, his stance put the country\u2019s largest federally recognized tribe in a collision course with Mr. Richardson and the actor Robert Redford, who had justified joining a lawsuit against horse slaughtering filed by animal-rights groups by saying they were \u201cstanding with Native American leaders.\u201d In a unanimous vote last month, the Navajo Nation chapter in Shiprock, N.M., banned horse roundups in its territory. The chapter\u2019s president, Duane Yazzie, said members were concerned about the abandoned colts and the sale of the horses to meat plants in Mexico, where slaughter is legal. Image Ben Shelly On Saturday, several of the chapter\u2019s members protested as Mr. Shelly took part in a parade at the Northern Navajo Nation Fair in Shiprock. Mr. Shelly and Mr. Richardson met in Farmington, N.M., just outside Navajo lands, shortly after the parade to complete the agreement. It charges several animal welfare groups \u2014 including Animal Protection of New Mexico and the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife, founded by Mr. Richardson and Mr. Redford \u2014 with developing alternative policies. One option is rounding up the horses and putting them up for adoption; another is dispensing contraceptives. \u201cThis is a huge event,\u201d Mr. Richardson said. \u201cOne of the most important and largest tribes in the country is now on the record against horse slaughtering, and that should be a major factor both in Congress and in the courts.\u201d All along, Mr. Shelly had spoken about the \u201cdelicate balance,\u201d as he put it, between the horses\u2019 significance to the Navajos and the cost of repairing the damage caused by feral horses on the reservation, which covers roughly 27,500 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The Navajos estimate there are 75,000 feral horses roaming the reservation, an estimate based on aerial observations, a method they concede is unreliable. One of the points of the agreement is to find a way to take an accurate count. During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr. Shelly told several animal welfare groups that the federal government needed to \u201clive up to its responsibilities,\u201d according to his spokesman, Erny Zah, and help the Navajos manage the feral horses. It was not until the agreement with Mr. Richardson, however, that he made his new stance on horse slaughtering official. The Humane Society of the United States and other groups sued the United States Department of Agriculture in July to keep horse slaughter plants from opening in New Mexico, Iowa and Missouri, arguing that the agency had failed to carry out all of the environmental checks, and asked the courts to block its inspectors from working there. The owners of the plant in Iowa have since scrapped their plans to slaughter horses and turned their focus to cattle. In August, Judge M. Christina Armijo of United States District Court in Albuquerque halted the inspections until she makes her final ruling on the case, which is expected by the end of the month.", "keyword": "Navajo Indians;Horse;Animal Abuse;Slaughterhouse;Bill Richardson;New Mexico;Missouri;Lawsuits;Iowa;M Christina Armijo"}
{"id": "ny0160586", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2006/03/24", "title": "Two Freshmen and a Baby Leave Duke Wailing", "abstract": "ATLANTA, March 23 - J. J. Redick went to the Duke bench with 13 minutes 36 seconds remaining, his face flushed red, his head down. He had made just 2 of 12 field-goal attempts and Coach Mike Krzyzewski wanted Redick, the second-leading scorer in the nation and the career leading scorer in the Atlantic Coast Conference, to collect himself. \"He just told me to take 30 seconds, take a little break, and go back in there and take my shot,\" Redick said. The rest, however, did little good for Redick, who was hounded for almost 40 minutes by the 6-foot-5 Louisiana State freshman guard Garrett Temple. In his final collegiate game, Redick made just 3 of 18 field-goal attempts and scored 11 points as top-seeded Duke was upset by fourth-seeded L.S.U., 62-54, in an N.C.A.A. tournament regional semifinal in the Georgia Dome. On Saturday, L.S.U. faces second-seeded Texas, a 74-71 winner over West Virginia on Thursday night, for the right to advance to the Final Four in Indianapolis. \"He's long and it was just a very physical game; he was physical with me as well,\" Redick, who was averaging 27.2 points a game, said of Temple. \"He did a good job of contesting my jump shots, and when I did drive, they had shot-blockers back there.\" Duke, which has been to the Round of 16 nine consecutive seasons, played a gruesome game offensively, tying a season low for points and shooting just 27.7 percent from the field (18 of 65). The senior center Shelden Williams, who also played his final game for Duke, led the Blue Devils with 23 points. Duke, which had been ranked in the top three all season, finished 32-4. It was the first trip to the Round of 16 for L.S.U. since 2000, and the Tigers (26-8), the champions of the Southeastern Conference, were supposed to be at a disadvantage in a close game with tournament-tough Duke. But in the final minute, the big plays were made by the L.S.U. freshman forward Tyrus Thomas. L.S.U. led, 55-54, when the 6-foot-9 Thomas broke the Duke press and dribbled down the floor for a dunk with 34 seconds to play to make it 57-54. \"We were in the double bonus, so the objective was to get fouled, but I saw an open lane so I took it,\" Thomas said. On Duke's possession, Thomas blocked the shot of Greg Paulus, who was driving the lane with 27 seconds to play. The Big Baby, the 6-foot-9 L.S.U. sophomore Glen Davis, then took over with two offensive rebounds after missed free-throw attempts by the Tigers, who stretched their lead to 60-54 and held on for the shocker. Thomas, who is already being considered a first-round draft pick in the N.B.A., had 5 blocked shots and 13 rebounds in a physical game. The senior guard Darrel Mitchell and Davis led L.S.U. with 14 points. There were two significant possessions before Thomas decided the game with his run-out dunk. Duke led, 45-40, with 8:47 to play after a 10-0 run. L.S.U. was struggling through a drought of eight minutes without a field goal. Redick had a chance to increase the Duke lead to 8 points, but another of his 3-point field-goal attempts rimmed out. On L.S.U.'s possession, Mitchell came down and sank a 3-pointer to make it 45-43 to end the Tigers slump. \"I think it was real big, it got the team back on its intensity level,\" Mitchell said. \"That shot got us going again.\" \"It was huge,\" Krzyzewski said. There was nothing bigger, however, than Temple's defense on Redick. The L.S.U. freshman would chase Redick around screens, but dip his shoulders and stay low as he cut so he did not run square into the bodies of the 6-foot-9 Williams and the 6-foot-10 Josh McRoberts. \"The big thing was getting under them so they couldn't get their shoulders on me,\" Temple said. Temple said he finally saw Redick get frustrated in the second half when he threw the ball against the stanchion holding up the basket. Temple played 40 minutes and spent nearly all of them chasing Redick around the floor. He made just 1 of 6 field-goal attempts, but it went unnoticed in the L.S.U. locker room, as Temple was surrounded by reporters and asked about shutting down Redick, the second-highest scorer in the country. Redick and Williams were pulled from the game with nine seconds to play so they could enjoy one more ovation from the throng of Duke fans and others that crowded into the Georgia Dome. \"It's just to make sure they get a chance and for our fans, and not just our fans, but basketball fans at that moment, to say thanks,\" Krzyzewski said.", "keyword": "LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY;DUKE UNIVERSITY;NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT;BASKETBALL"}
{"id": "ny0099879", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/12/03", "title": "NASA Set to Launch Supply Ship to Space Station", "abstract": "NASA \u2019s supply ships to the International Space Station are soon to fly again. Orbital ATK , one of two companies that NASA has hired to ferry cargo, is set to launch 7,700 pounds of equipment, experiments and supplies, but bad weather delayed the launch until at least Friday. Orbital\u2019s last cargo run, in October last year, ended in a fireball when the rocket exploded 15 seconds after liftoff . Investigators blamed the failure of one of two refurbished 1970s-era Soviet engines that powered Orbital\u2019s Antares rocket. The launchpad at Wallops Island, Va., was badly damaged. This time, Orbital\u2019s unmanned spacecraft, Cygnus, is flying on top of a competitor\u2019s rocket, an Atlas 5 built by the United Launch Alliance. \u201cWe\u2019re very confident once we\u2019re delivered into orbit, we\u2019ll be able to get back in the groove and do what we\u2019ve done before,\u201d said Frank L. Culbertson Jr., president of the space systems group at Orbital ATK. Liftoff was scheduled for a 30-minute window beginning at 5:55 p.m. Eastern time Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, but rain, clouds and winds persisted. Poor weather is also expected Friday, with only a 30 percent chance of favorable conditions during a 30-minute window that starts at 5:33 p.m. When it finally gets off the ground, the cargo spacecraft is to orbit for a few days before arriving at the space station, greeted by the six astronauts on board: two Americans, three Russians and one from Japan. The Atlas 5 is a more powerful rocket, and an upgraded Cygnus capsule, about three and a half feet longer, has 25 percent more cargo space than earlier Orbital flights. The cargo on the Cygnus includes small satellites to be deployed from the space station; a new jetpack for astronauts during spacewalks; high-pressure nitrogen and oxygen tanks for the space station\u2019s air supply system; and Microsoft HoloLens visors, \u201cmixed reality\u201d devices that project holograms to appear next to real, physical objects. In one mode, the visors will allow controllers on the ground to see exactly what an astronaut is seeing. Experts on the ground can then draw annotations that show up in an astronaut\u2019s field of view. In a second mode, animated holograms could act as a real-time, three-dimensional instruction manual, potentially simplifying and speeding training. The science experiments include one that will test the effectiveness of flame-resistant fabrics in space. In the absence of gravity, flames and combustion behave differently than on Earth. Image In its last cargo run, in October 2014, Orbital exploded 15 seconds after liftoff. Credit Joel Kowsky/NASA, via Associated Press The cargo flight will also take up a new laboratory for the study of bacteria and other micro-organisms, cells and tissues, and small plants and animals. One of the small satellites on the Cygnus was built by students from prekindergarten through eighth grade at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Va. In January, the Cygnus is to undock from the space station carrying 3,000 pounds of trash. By design, it will burn up while re-entering Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Orbital is to launch one more time on top of an Atlas 5 rocket next spring, and then plans to resume launching its Antares rocket. Orbital will no longer use the old Soviet-era engines, having revamped the Antares design with newer, more powerful RD-181 engines from Russia. Meanwhile, NASA\u2019s other cargo company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation , or SpaceX, also hopes to resume flying this month by launching a couple of commercial satellites. SpaceX has been grounded since June when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies for the space station broke apart in flight , because of the failure of a strut within the second-stage liquid oxygen tank. SpaceX\u2019s next cargo delivery for NASA, which will include an inflatable module to be added to the space station, will not occur until next year. A Russian Progress cargo rocket failed in April , but another Progress successfully launched in July . Because of cargo launches by Russia and Japan, the astronauts on the space station have not run out of supplies. At a news conference Wednesday, Kirk Shireman , NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said toilet supplies would last until February and food until April. \u201cWe\u2019re not overly concerned at this point in time,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we\u2019re not as robust as we would like to be.\u201d NASA originally awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights, and Orbital \u2014 then known as the Orbital Sciences Corporation \u2014 a $1.9 billion contract for eight flights. SpaceX and Orbital ATK, formed in February in the merger of Orbital Sciences and the aerospace portion of Alliant Techsystems, are among the companies competing to operate a second batch of cargo flights. NASA had delayed announcing three times; it is now expected by the end of January. Instead, NASA ordered three additional flights from SpaceX and two from Orbital ATK under the current contracts. NASA has not revealed how much it will now be paying SpaceX and Orbital ATK, but the space agency said both contracts remained under the maximum potential value of $3.1 billion.", "keyword": "NASA;International Space Station;Space;Rocket;Private spaceflight;SpaceX;United Launch Alliance;Cape Canaveral"}
{"id": "ny0010723", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/02/08", "title": "Using Fashion to Make a Statement on Technology", "abstract": "THE fashion designer Alexander Wang is joining forces with Samsung to create a new print based on doodles, sketches and photographs that are being contributed via smartphone by some of the top names in fashion. Mr. Wang\u2019s collaborators will participate electronically, sending ideas on Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphones, as inspiration for a one-of-a-kind print that will be used on a limited collection bag. Proceeds from sales of the bag will be donated to a New York art charity for children. For Mr. Wang, who recently became the creative director of the storied French fashion house Balenciaga, partnering with Samsung \u201crepresents a new way that technology and style can come together,\u201d he said in an interview. In a nearly two-minute video , called \u201cBe Creative,\u201d which was released on Thursday in tandem with the opening of New York Fashion Week, Mr. Wang uses his Galaxy phone to capture ideas on the way from his Soho apartment to his design studio, and then to configure the space where his collection will be shown. Samsung, which is taking a viral approach and showing the video only on social media, hopes the partnership with Mr. Wang will underscore its message that \u201ctechnology empowers creativity,\u201d said Christine Cho, director of global marketing for Samsung Electronics, from its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. \u201cWe thought Alexander Wang would be able to show that,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause of his passion for experimentation and his on-the-go lifestyle.\u201d The electronics giant is walking in the footsteps of companies in other industries, like automakers that have allied with luxury-level fashion to distinguish themselves from rivals. To gain notice for the 2013 Chevy Malibu, General Motors, for example, worked with the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who created an apparel and accessories collection celebrating the car\u2019s redesign. \u201cFashion can be a good way to humanize technology,\u201d said Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group, a digital communications agency, who noted that technology companies \u201coften forget to strike that emotional connection with consumers.\u201d Image Alexander Wang teamed up with Samsung to market the Galaxy Note II smartphone. Credit Matthew Hranek For Samsung, establishing a distinctive identity is critical as it battles its biggest rival, Apple, in the hotly contested mobile devices market. Last year, Samsung shipped 396.5 million mobile phones worldwide, according to a report from the Boston research firm Strategy Analytics. Smartphones earn the most revenue for Samsung, which had more than $143 billion in sales last year. Samsung also sells products like flat screens, chips and microprocessors. Samsung did not divulge how much it is spending on its partnership with Alexander Wang, but overall, the company spent nearly $212 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2012, according to figures provided by Kantar Media, the WPP unit. Samsung introduced the Galaxy Note II smartphone last year. It is striving to familiarize consumers with its abilities with its new campaign. \u201cIt\u2019s all about association. If Samsung wants to be perceived as hip, cool and cutting edge, it has to have a partner with the same qualities,\u201d Hal Hershfield, assistant professor of marketing at New York University\u2019s Stern School of Business, said of Samsung\u2019s alliance with Mr. Wang. \u201cLike Apple, which has a certain image, both Microsoft \u2014 with indie bands \u2014 and Samsung with fashion are saying that we can play this game, too,\u201d Mr. Hershfield said. After the Feb. 23 deadline for submissions from Mr. Wang\u2019s fashion circle \u2014 including models, photographers and fashion editors like Vogue\u2019s Sally Singer \u2014 Mr. Wang will create a designer print for the limited edition bag. Samsung, an official sponsor of New York Fashion Week, plans to donate the proceeds to Art Start, a New York City nonprofit that provides art workshops for at-risk children ages 5 to 21. Mr. Wang chose the charity. Samsung has made other forays into the fashion field. Last summer, the company paired with the well-known designer Zac Posen to highlight an earlier Samsung tablet. A video featuring Mr. Posen showed him using his Samsung for notes, draping and creating a gown. He has appeared as a judge on \u201cProject Runway,\u201d the Lifetime Television show whose sponsor, Hewlett-Packard, provided touch-enabled screens for fledgling designers to create original patterns. Samsung\u2019s current pairing, with Mr. Wang, allies it with a young designer who created his own fashion label and entered fashion\u2019s top ranks when he won the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award in 2008. In his video, filmed by Matt Bieler, a director for Serial Pictures, the boyish Mr. Wang collects ideas, designs and makes business preparations for his Fashion Week show. \u201cWith a little multitasking, I can keep it all together,\u201d he says in the video, where he uses the stylus to write notes and create drawings. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the clothes. It all makes up the bigger picture.\u201d When he arrives at the Cunard Building in Lower Manhattan, the 1921 Art Deco edifice that once housed the passenger shipping company, to plan his Fashion Week showing, he sketches out the seating, lighting and runway placement on his Galaxy. Then, using the device\u2019s file-sharing software, he taps his phone to an assistant\u2019s to instantly transmit his plan. \u201cWhen I see something that inspires me, I don\u2019t have to wait until I get home or to my office to sketch it.\u201d Mr. Wang said. \u201cI can do it on the spot,\u201d he added, \u201cwhich is helpful because I have the worst memory.\u201d", "keyword": "Fashion;Smartphone;Samsung Electronics;Art;advertising,marketing;Alexander Wang"}
{"id": "ny0263147", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/12/11", "title": "O\u2019Shea and Uhlaender Win Skeleton Medals", "abstract": "No American woman had reached a World Cup skeleton medals podium in nearly three years, a drought that finally ended in the snowy mountains of France on Saturday. Annie O\u2019Shea took the silver medal and Katie Uhlaender won the bronze at La Plagne, a breakthrough finish for an American program that is trying to build momentum for the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia. Uhlaender is a former two-time World Cup overall champion, but O\u2019Shea is a second-year member of the tour who had never finished better than seventh. Mellisa Hollingsworth of Canada won the race, putting down the fastest time in each of the two runs and finishing in a combined 2 minutes 6.09 seconds. O\u2019Shea was 0.37 back, Uhlaender another 0.18 off Hollingsworth\u2019s pace \u2014 but completed a rare 1-2-3 sweep for North Americans on a European track. Uhlaender was the last American woman to win a medal in a World Cup race, on Feb. 12, 2009. She has been bothered by knee and hip injuries since then and missed the opening race on this season\u2019s circuit while competing in a weight-lifting competition with hopes of qualifying for the 2012 London Games in that sport. AUSTRIA IS UPSET IN SKI JUMP Norway upset the favored Austrians to win a World Cup ski jumping team event in Harrachov, Czech Republic. Anders Bardal cleared 139 meters in the final jump on the large hill to seal the victory with 997.3 points. Austria was 37.7 points behind in second; Slovenia was third. Gregor Schlierenzauer of Austria, who won an individual competition on the large hill in the northern Czech resort on Friday, jumped only 124 meters. GERMANS BEAT U.S. IN BOBSLED Thomas Florschuetz and Kevin Kuske of Germany won a World Cup two-man bobsled event in La Plagne, edging Steven Holcomb and Steve Langton of the United States. Florschuetz drove his two runs in 1:58.50. Holcomb was 0.35 back for the silver medal, another 0.06 ahead of the bronze medalists, Beat Hefti and Thomas Lamparter of Switzerland. NORWEGIANS 1-2 IN BIATHLON The two-time Olympic biathlon champion Emil Hegle Svendsen edged Tarjei Boe by a tenth of a second at a World Cup 12.5-kilometer pursuit in Hochfilzen, Austria, for a Norwegian 1-2 finish. Benjamin Weger of Switzerland finished 4.9 seconds back in third. Darya Domracheva of Belarus beat Olga Zaitseva by 0.3 to win the women\u2019s 10-kilometer pursuit in 29:34.4. The overall World Cup leader, Magdalena Neuner of Germany, was third. SCHMID WINS NORDIC COMBINED Jan Schmid of Norway defeated the Olympic and world champion Jason Lamy-Chappuis at a Nordic combined World Cup event in Ramsau, Austria, for his first career victory. Schmid, who was fourth after the jumps, posted the 19th-fastest time in the 10-kilometer cross-country race to finish in 22:05.8. Tino Edelmann of Germany was another 0.6 back in third to retain his lead in the World Cup standings. CROSS-COUNTRY TO NORWAY Petter Northug and Marit Bjoergen of Norway won cross-country skiing World Cup distance races in Davos, Switzerland. Northug won the 30-kilometer freestyle in 1 hour 7 minutes 43.8 seconds, beating Maurice Manificat of France by 51.4 seconds. The Czech Lukas Bauer was third. Bjoergen captured her 49th World Cup victory, covering the 15-kilometer freestyle course in 35:59.5. In a Norwegian podium sweep, Vibeke Skofterud trailed Bjoergen by 41.8 seconds and Therese Johaug was third.", "keyword": "World Cup (Skiing);Nordic Combined (Winter Sport Event);Skiing;Alpine Skiing;Hollingsworth Mellisa;Uhlaender Katie;Canada;O'Shea Annie;Skeleton (Sport)"}
{"id": "ny0136782", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2008/05/02", "title": "Cubans Urged to Work Toward Change", "abstract": "HAVANA \u2014 The leader of Cuba \u2019s labor union told tens of thousands of workers gathered in Havana\u2019s Revolution Plaza on Thursday morning that they must get to work to build a better country. In a May Day address, Salvador Vald\u00e9s Mesa, secretary general of the Cuban Workers Confederation, said \u201cinefficiencies and weaknesses\u201d needed to be overcome as Cuba advanced from the long era of Fidel Castro to his younger brother, Ra\u00fal, who took over officially as president in February. \u201cIt is fundamental to concentrate efforts on increasing production and productivity, above all of food,\u201d he said, citing rising food and fuel prices across the globe. Looking on and waving was the younger Mr. Castro, 76, who was dressed in a green military uniform. Unlike his brother, who sometimes used May Day to deliver provocative lectures on the state of the world, the new president stayed silent. But he has issued a flurry of orders in recent weeks loosening up an array of government restrictions that had irritated Cubans. Now accessible to those who can pay are hotel rooms, rental cars and an array of consumer items. Experiments are also under way to allow private farmers to use fallow government land and keep the profits.", "keyword": "Cuba;Labor;Labor Role In Politics;Havana (Cuba)"}
{"id": "ny0156961", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/06/06", "title": "Wealthy Americans Under Scrutiny in UBS Case", "abstract": "One afternoon in April, six dozen wealthy Americans were entertained at a luncheon party in Midtown Manhattan, along with a special guest from Paris: Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. The host of the exclusive gathering was the Swiss bank UBS , whose elite private bankers built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires. As the wine flowed and Mr. Loyrette spoke of the glories of France, UBS bankers courted their affluent guests. But now, as the federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the secrets of this rarefied world are being dragged into the open \u2014 and UBS\u2019s privileged clients are running scared. Under pressure from the authorities, UBS is considering whether to divulge the names of up to 20,000 of its well-heeled American clients, according to people close to the inquiry, a step that would have once been unthinkable to Swiss bankers, whose traditions of secrecy date to the Middle Ages. Federal investigators believe some of the clients may have used offshore accounts at UBS to hide as much as $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service . Doing so may have enabled these people to dodge at least $300 million in federal taxes on income from those assets, according to a government official connected with the investigation. One prominent UBS client, a wealthy property developer in California named Igor Olenicoff, has already pleaded guilty to filing a false 2002 tax return. But as the investigation tears holes in the veil of secrecy surrounding tax havens like Switzerland and Liechtenstein, other names are surfacing, according to the authorities. New revelations are likely to come Monday, when a former UBS banker is expected to testify in a court in Florida about how he helped Mr. Olenicoff and other clients evade taxes. The former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, is set to plead guilty to helping Mr. Olenicoff conceal $200 million. \u201cHe\u2019s going to sing like a parakeet,\u201d one of Mr. Birkenfeld\u2019s former clients said. UBS said that it was cooperating with investigators and that it was against its policy to help Americans evade taxes. Officials at the bank declined to comment for this article. Using offshore accounts is not illegal for United States taxpayers, but hiding income in so-called undeclared accounts is. At issue is whether the UBS clients filed W-9 tax forms with the bank, disclosing their names, addresses and taxpayer identification numbers, as required by law. Switzerland does not consider tax evasion a crime, and using undeclared accounts is legal there. The case could turn into an embarrassment for Marcel Rohner, the chief executive of UBS and the former head of its private bank, as well as for Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who is now the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the Swiss bank\u2019s investment banking arm. It also comes at a difficult time for UBS, which is reeling from $37 billion in bad investments, many of them linked to risky American mortgages. The federal investigation, which is part of a broad, international crackdown on tax cheats, suggests that United States authorities are shifting their focus to Liechtenstein and Switzerland from Caribbean havens like the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to hold hearings as early as this month on offshore products sold by UBS and by the LGT Group, the bank owned by Liechtenstein\u2019s royal family. At the center of the UBS investigation is Mr. Birkenfeld, 43, who grew up in the Boston area and went on to live what might seem like a charmed life as a private banker in Switzerland. Through his lawyer, Danny Onorato, Mr. Birkenfeld declined to comment. Mr. Birkenfeld\u2019s testimony could deal a stinging blow to UBS, the world\u2019s largest money manager for people whom bankers politely call \u201chigh net worth individuals.\u201d Since 2006, the bank has opened plush offices in New York and six other United States cities, among them Boston, Chicago and Houston, to cater to people who are worth at least $10 million. Many UBS customers are worth far more than that. To lure them, UBS bankers canvassed cultural and sports events like Art Basel , the America\u2019s Cup and Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of finding wealthy people; it\u2019s a question of how do you develop a network,\u201d said Purvez Siddiqi, who recruits private bankers like Mr. Birkenfeld for big banks. But Mr. Siddiqi said he was \u201castonished\u201d by how aggressively UBS marketed its offshore accounts to Americans. Mr. Birkenfeld took care of important clients for UBS\u2019s private bank catering to United States citizens with offshore accounts, and was central to UBS\u2019s effort to lure them. Before joining UBS in 2001, he worked at Barclays Bank in Geneva, where brought in Mr. Olenicoff, the billionaire owner of Olen Properties. When Mr. Birkenfeld joined UBS, he brought Mr. Olenicoff along, and later helped him move hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bahamas to Switzerland, according to a financial executive briefed on the matter. Shortly after Mr. Olenicoff left UBS for LGT, the Liechtenstein bank, in 2005, Mr. Birkenfeld resigned. The banker formally left UBS in March 2006. Mr. Birkenfeld later claimed in a Swiss legal proceeding that UBS had not paid him a bonus he was owed. A former associate said Mr. Birkenfeld had become angry over what he considered the bank\u2019s wink-and-nod standard regarding tax evasion. UBS typically rewarded private bankers for attracting new clients in the United States, rather than for the fees the bankers generated for UBS from existing customers. Mr. Birkenfeld also was angered when UBS asked bankers to sign papers saying that they, not the bank, would be responsible if they broke non-Swiss tax laws, according to a European financial executive briefed on the matter. About a year ago, concerned by a tax investigation into Mr. Olenicoff, Mr. Birkenfeld contacted the Justice Department and California authorities and offered to cooperate with prosecutors in the hope of securing immunity for himself, according to a person close to the case. His deal fell through, however, and Mr. Birkenfeld was charged, along with a financial executive from Liechtenstein, in an indictment unsealed May 13. As the authorities focused on UBS last January, the bank abruptly shut its three Swiss offices that had sold undeclared offshore banking services to United States clients. Those offices catered to thousands of wealthy Americans, some of whom may now have their tax secrets put on public display.", "keyword": "UBS AG;Tax Evasion;Banks and Banking;Frauds and Swindling;Justice Department;Internal Revenue Service;Birkenfeld Bradley"}
{"id": "ny0010759", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/02/08", "title": "Jets Hire Assistants", "abstract": "Brian VanGorder, who spent four years as the Falcons\u2019 defensive coordinator before holding the same position at Auburn last season, will coach the Jets\u2019 linebackers next season. He replaces Bob Sutton, now the defensive coordinator in Kansas City. The Jets also hired Bobby April III as a defensive quality-control coach. He held the same job the last two seasons in Philadelphia.", "keyword": "Football;Jets;Brian VanGorder;Bobby April III"}
{"id": "ny0252953", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/10/20", "title": "Obama Ends Jobs Bill Bus Tour in Virginia", "abstract": "NORTH CHESTERFIELD, Va. \u2014 Wrapping up his three-day bus tour on an intimate note, President Obama dropped in at a suburban firehouse here on Wednesday and urged firefighters and rescue workers to pressure Republicans to support his jobs bill. The Senate will vote in the coming weeks on a $35 billion chunk of the bill designed to retain teachers and emergency workers. And for all the personal encounters and human moments that animate these bus tours, the president made it clear he wanted something from this audience. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful to have a chance to see everyone and shake hands and take pictures,\u201d Mr. Obama said, standing in front of a yellow-and-white pumper truck, \u201cbut the main reason I\u2019m here is that I want you to send a message to Congress that this is important.\u201d The president pounded that message everywhere he went in Virginia and North Carolina, two important states that he won in 2008 and faces a struggle to hold on to in 2012. But as his black bus stopped at a military base and the firehouse in this historically Republican country, Mr. Obama seemed to soften his partisan tone just a shade. Maybe it was the presence of Michelle Obama, who joined the president at Joint Base Langley-Eustis to announce a partnership with private industry aimed at employing 25,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and military spouses within two years. Describing the initiative as a \u201chuge deal,\u201d Mrs. Obama said 270 companies \u2014 including giants like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods, which supply goods to military commissaries and post exchanges on bases \u2014 had agreed to hire more veterans. \u201cIt\u2019s huge enough for you to even be involved,\u201d she said drily, glancing back at a grinning Mr. Obama. Afterward, Mrs. Obama hopped on the bus to accompany the president to a nearby farmers market in Hampton, where he played a mix of amused spectator and harried husband as he watched his wife hoist 10 pumpkins \u2014 including two giant white specimens weighing 70 pounds each \u2014 onto a metal cart. \u201cHow many are you going to buy?\u201d Mr. Obama asked. \u201cYou want anything else?\u201d The first lady demurred, saying it would be challenging enough to fit the pumpkins on the bus. Mrs. Obama\u2019s presence livened up a tour that has had some good moments (the president\u2019s rapturous welcome at a child-care center in Virginia) but also a few awkward ones, including an exchange in which a diner at a restaurant in North Carolina said he was a funeral director and Mr. Obama replied: \u201cFantastic! That\u2019s important work.\u201d This was the president\u2019s second bus tour \u2014 he tooled through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois in August \u2014 and it was different in several ways that illustrate how much has changed for him since the grueling debt-ceiling impasse of the summer. On the heels of that dismal experience, Mr. Obama had little to sell. In town-hall sessions dressed up with bales of hay or bags of seed corn, he mostly listened to people voice frustration with the gridlock in Washington and seconded their emotions. Now, the president has a meaty, if politically divisive, bill that he is avidly selling. This week, the White House scrapped the town-hall format in favor of traditional campaign-style speeches, where Mr. Obama presented his proposals and assailed Republicans for blocking them. Speaking to 2,400 troops at the base, Mr. Obama outlined the proposal to give companies a tax incentive to hire veterans. Unlike other parts of the jobs bill, that provision, which is also likely headed for a Senate vote as a separate measure, has won the support of Republicans. \u201cWhen I first proposed this idea to a joint session of Congress, people stood up and applauded on both sides of the aisle,\u201d Mr. Obama said to noisy applause. \u201cSo when it comes for a vote in the Senate, I expect to get votes from both sides of the aisle.\u201d The itinerary was also different, and arguably more challenging. In August, Mr. Obama\u2019s caravan rolled through Midwestern farming counties he won easily in 2008. This time, he ventured into Republican strongholds like Wilkes County in North Carolina, where Senator John McCain rolled up close to 70 percent of the vote. Yet Mr. Obama was also politically opportunistic \u2014 nowhere more so than in Chesterfield County , a changing suburb of Richmond that Democrats view as ripe for gains. \u201cThe suburbs are getting better and better for Democrats,\u201d said Mike Henry, a Democratic strategist who is managing former Gov. Tim Kaine\u2019s bid for a Senate seat. \u201cChesterfield County is really getting to be much more like northern Virginia,\u201d where Mr. Obama piled up big numbers in 2008.", "keyword": "Veterans;Labor and Jobs;Corporations;United States Defense and Military Forces;Obama Barack;Presidential Election of 2012;United States Economy"}
{"id": "ny0246892", "categories": ["science", "earth"], "date": "2011/05/04", "title": "BP Is Fined $25 Million For \u201906 Pipeline Spills", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 BP will pay $25 million in civil fines to settle charges arising from two spills from its network of pipelines in Alaska in 2006 and from a willful failure to comply with a government order to properly maintain the pipelines to prevent corrosion, federal officials announced on Tuesday . The fine is the largest per-barrel assessment ever levied against an oil company in a spill case and represents a new blow to BP\u2019s corporate treasury and reputation. The aggressive approach of federal prosecutors in this case could portend huge fines and penalties from BP\u2019s much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. That case, which is still under investigation, could cost the British oil giant more than $20 billion if the company is found grossly negligent, as it was in the Alaska pipeline matter. \u201cThis penalty should serve as a wake-up call to all pipeline operators that they will be held accountable for the safety of their operations and their compliance with the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the pipeline safety laws,\u201d Ignacia S. Moreno, head of the environmental enforcement division at the Justice Department, said in a conference call with reporters. \u201cThis agreement will help prevent future environmental disasters and protect the fragile ecosystem of Alaska\u2019s North Slope.\u201d Ms. Moreno declined to answer any questions about the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill in the gulf in April 2010, which killed 11 people and poured nearly five million barrels of oil into the ocean. BP Exploration Alaska owns the largest share of the consortium that runs the pipeline and depends on income from North Slope production to pay for damages caused by the gulf blowout. As a result of corrosion and poor maintenance of its pipelines in Alaska, BP was found responsible for the discharge of more than 5,000 barrels of oil onto the Arctic tundra and into a lake on the North Slope in March 2006; a much smaller spill occurred in August of that year. The company paid more than $20 million in criminal fines and restitution and was ordered by the federal Department of Transportation to perform extensive repairs on its system of 1,600 miles of pipelines. The Department of Transportation\u2019s pipeline safety division determined that BP had failed to fully comply with the order to clean and replace miles of pipeline, and the government sued the company again in 2009. The consent decree announced on Tuesday requires BP to develop a program to maintain the safety and integrity of its pipelines and will subject the company to enhanced surveillance of its operations by federal regulators. The company also will be required to hire an outside monitor to ensure that it is regularly inspecting and maintaining its pipelines. \u201cWe are not just going to take BP at its word,\u201d said Cynthia Giles, director of the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s office of enforcement and compliance assurance. \u201cThis requires an independent monitor to assure that BP is fully complying with the terms of today\u2019s settlement. This case sends a clear message that we are vigorously enforcing the nation\u2019s environmental laws.\u201d Since the Deepwater Horizon spill and a fatal natural gas pipeline explosion last year in San Bruno, Calif., federal regulators have been taking a much harder regulatory line on drilling permits and pipeline inspections in general. In a brief statement, BP said the company did not admit to any liability in reaching the agreement with the government. The company also said the penalty was not calculated on a per-barrel basis, although government officials described the payment in those terms. BP did not say how it was calculated or offer specifics. The settlement must be ratified by a federal court to take effect. Alaska\u2019s North Slope is one of BP\u2019s most important oil fields and provides a vital income stream. BP produces nearly two-thirds of the 600,000 barrels a day that come from the North Slope, a giant oil field that has been in decline for many years but still produces about 3 percent of the crude oil consumed by the United States. Last week BP reported a first-quarter profit of $5.37 billion excluding one-time items and inventory changes, down 4 percent from a year earlier. The results included a $400 million charge related to the gulf spill.", "keyword": "Pipelines;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Fines (Penalties);Clean Water Act;BP Plc;Alaska"}
{"id": "ny0000136", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/03/04", "title": "In India, Making Small Changes on a Large Scale", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 It was the taxi ride from the Mumbai airport that pulled Sharath Jeevan off the corporate ladder. Although born in Chennai, India, he had been raised mostly in Saudi Arabia and England, graduating from Cambridge with a degree in economics. An M.B.A. from Insead, a prestigious France-based business school, led to a management consultant\u2019s job at Booz Allen and then a job with eBay in Britain. \u201cI\u2019d go back to India every summer, and the only option was to go through Mumbai,\u201d he recalled. \u201cWe\u2019d drive through the slums and kids would run up to the cab to sell things, or to beg. It made me see how on a knife edge their lives were. Education seemed like an area where you can make a real difference.\u201d The problem is not a lack of schools. \u201cNinety-five percent of kids in India have access to free government schools within a half-mile of where they live,\u201d he said, a distance of 800 meters. The problem is that many of these schools offer poor-quality education. \u201cThe average Indian fifth grader reads like a second grader in Britain or the U.S. Two-thirds of them can\u2019t read a paragraph or do simple fractions,\u201d Mr. Jeevan said. His new venture, Schools and Teachers Innovating for Results , which will be officially introduced on Monday in Delhi, aims to change that. Backed by funding from the British Department for International Development and a number of British charities, STIR has spent the past 15 months researching the most successful \u201cmicro-innovations\u201d \u2014 small, inexpensive, easy-to-implement changes \u2014 in classrooms across India. \u201cWe visited 300 schools and conducted 600 face-to-face meetings, speaking to over 3,000 teachers,\u201d he said in an interview at the STIR office in London. The explosive growth of Indian schools means that many teachers have had little or no formal training. \u201cIndian teachers are used to thinking of themselves as instruments of a ministry or of government policy,\u201d Mr. Jeevan said. \u201cIt was the first time many of them had been asked about anything.\u201d \u201cThrough innovation, we wanted to get teachers to think of themselves more seriously \u2014 as professionals,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea is to create a platform to collect the best of these micro-innovations, test them to see if they work, and then take them to scale. There are 1.3 million schools in India, so scale is a huge problem.\u201d Some of the ideas, recounted in STIR materials, will sound familiar to parents in wealthier countries. At Majeediya Madarsa-e-Jadeed, a school catering to a predominantly Muslim community in Seelampur, Iram Mumshad, a teacher, noticed that parents, many of whom worked as day laborers, seemed unaware of how to support their children\u2019s education. To engage parents, the school started incorporating their feedback on children\u2019s behavior at home into school reports, building relationships between teachers and parents, and underlining the importance of parental support. At Babul Uloom, a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in East Delhi, Sajid Hasan realized that his students started school with fewer learning skills than students from wealthier parts of the city \u2014 a gap that seemed to increase with each passing month. So Mr. Hasan, a member of the Teach for India program that puts young, highly motivated teachers in some of the country\u2019s toughest schools, decided to give his students extra time to catch up by extending the school day for two hours. \u201cIndia normally has one of the shortest school days in the world,\u201d Mr. Jeevan said. Most schools finish by 1 p.m. The two extra hours, he said, \u201cgives the children more time to learn and also more structure in their lives. It also helps the teachers to focus on the students\u2019 current level to help get them to where they need to be.\u201d But some of the innovations have a uniquely Indian flavor. Students at the S.R. Capital School in Shahadra struggled with the poetry included in the curriculum, yet they all seemed well versed in the latest Bollywood hits. So Bindu Bhatia, their teacher, fit the words of the texts studied in class to the tune of popular songs, then encouraged the students to perform the poems, making classes more fun and giving students added confidence in approaching potentially daunting material. After it is officially introduced in Delhi, STIR plans to open additional hubs in Mumbai and Bangalore \u2014 big ambitions for a program that has just 10 full-time employees, four in Britain and six in India. But Mr. Jeevan has a track record of developing similar programs. While he was at eBay, he started eBay for Charity, which let buyers and sellers on the auction site donate a portion of the price of items they bought and sold to the nonprofit organization of their choice. The initiative has raised \u20ac43 million, or $65 million, for British charities. Then he introduced a new program, Teaching Leaders . \u201cWe know that Sharath is really good at taking an organization from scratch and building it, because that\u2019s what he did with Teaching Leaders,\u201d said Sally Morgan, an adviser to Absolute Return for Kids , a hedge-fund education charity that is one of STIR\u2019s main backers. Based on the recognition that standardized tests showed four times as much variation within schools as between schools, Teaching Leaders was started by Mr. Jeevan in 2008 \u201cto help great teachers become great leaders and managers.\u201d The program was given initial backing by Absolute Return for Kids and within five years, the results were sufficiently impressive to win the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a \u00a310 million, or $15 million, grant to expand the program across Britain. \u201cSharath is very focused, very driven by results,\u201d said Ms. Morgan, who also serves as the chairwoman of Ofsted , the British government\u2019s school inspection agency. \u201cSo when he came to us and was able to show that seemingly simple things \u2014 like using phonics when teaching English as a second language, instead of making the students start by memorizing grammar or rules \u2014 had a big impact in the classroom, it ticked a lot of our boxes.\u201d \u201cEven if you find something that works in your own class, there was no way of sharing those results with anyone else,\u201d Ms. Morgan said. \u201cPeople who want to make change happen can feel really isolated.\u201d STIR is designed to allow innovative teachers to feel like they are part of a network. \u201cSmall changes in practice can make a big difference in the classroom,\u201d Mr. Jeevan said. \u201cBut what matters more in the long term is the change in how teachers think of themselves.\u201d", "keyword": "Education;Great Britain;India;Teachers;Mumbai,Bombay"}
{"id": "ny0226662", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/10/01", "title": "At Hearing, a Dispute Over Banking Provision in Reform Law", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The unity of regulators who have to put the Dodd-Frank financial reform law into effect was put to the test at a Congressional hearing Thursday as squabbling emerged over a provision affecting lenders. The disagreement involved a measure requiring lenders to keep at least 5 percent of the credit risk when they bundle and sell debt. Before the housing market collapsed in 2007, many mortgage originators made reckless loans, in part because they were able to quickly sell them to other investors to lay off the risk. The new law required regulators to change that. So on Monday, the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation voted 4 to 1 to approve a rule that makes \u201crisk retention\u201d by banks a condition for any bank that wants protection under new accounting rules if the bank were to fail. In principle, the rule was consistent with the new law, but because other agencies needed to adopt their own, similar regulations to conform to the law, the timing of the vote rankled other regulators and some lawmakers. \u201cI know you sort of jumped out in advance of everybody in that regard, and I\u2019m just wondering if you\u2019ve had any input from the other agencies,\u201d Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, asked the F.D.I.C. chairwoman, Sheila C. Bair, at the hearing. Ms. Bair replied that the F.D.I.C. had no choice but to act because it faced a deadline relating to new accounting standards. \u201cIf we didn\u2019t do something we would have disrupted the securitization market,\u201d she said. But John Walsh, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, who sits on the F.D.I.C. board and was the lone opposition vote, testified that the deadline could have been extended, and that \u201cwe didn\u2019t see any great downside\u201d to doing so. Mr. Corker wryly observed, \u201cI sense a slightly less playing-well-together than appeared.\u201d The F.D.I.C. vote irritated the Treasury Department, whose leader, Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, has occasionally clashed with Ms. Bair. In addition, the American Securitization Forum, which represents 350 companies involved in the packaging and sale of loans, said the F.D.I.C. had \u201cacted ahead of other regulators in an uncoordinated manner.\u201d The issue is hardly the most urgent one requiring regulatory coordination, but members of the Senate Banking Committee made it clear Thursday that they were concerned that the process be harmonious. One of the crucial questions in the months ahead is whether the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can overcome an entrenched rivalry and jointly develop rules governing over-the-counter derivatives . \u201cMark my words here this morning: there will be another crisis, as certain as we\u2019re sitting here,\u201d said the committee\u2019s chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of the leading authors of the act. \u201cGreed and recklessness will rear their heads again.\u201d Mr. Dodd said that \u201cwe have provided regulators with the tools they need to see it coming and to put a stop to it in time,\u201d but cautioned, \u201cWhether they will actually do so largely depends upon the foundation laid by those of you who are before us today.\u201d Among its many provisions, the law created a body of regulators, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, led by the Treasury secretary, which will meet for the first time on Friday. Over the long run, the council, which is supposed to watch out for future risks to the financial system, will test the ability of regulators to work together. The initial meeting \u2014 to be streamed live on the Treasury Department\u2019s Web site \u2014 will touch upon two big areas that will require regulators to cooperate. The council will begin a discussion of which criteria to use in determining whether a nonbank financial company is \u201csystemically important\u201d and therefore needs to be supervised by the Federal Reserve. The council will also start a process for hashing out details of the Volcker Rule , a much-debated provision of the law that is intended to restrict banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments if they are not on behalf of their clients. Neal S. Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, testified that the council was required under the law to commission four studies: two relating to the Volcker Rule, one concerning the risk-retention issue that the F.D.I.C. had already acted upon; and a final one concerning \u201cthe overall economic effect\u201d of the Dodd-Frank law. But Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Banking Committee, who opposed the law, criticized the whole enterprise. \u201cBy delegating the major policy decisions \u2014 and therefore, most of the real work \u2014 to the regulators, the Dodd-Frank legislation undermines the effectiveness of our regulators by asking them to do too much,\u201d Mr. Shelby said.", "keyword": "Banking and Financial Institutions;Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010);Law and Legislation;United States Politics and Government;Federal Deposit Insurance Corp"}
{"id": "ny0123396", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/09/01", "title": "At Paralympics, First Thing Judged Is Disability", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Anthony Dawson, who has cerebral palsy and little muscle function on his right side, rode for South Africa in the first round of the equestrian dressage competition at the Paralympics on Thursday, guiding his horse through an intricately choreographed series of movements. Last summer he had to perform an altogether different set of exercises in front of a medical professional, a way of determining what for many is the most crucial and potentially fraught aspect of the Paralympics: the disability category in which he would compete. There are five grades for Paralympic equestrians , ranging from 1A, for the most severely disabled riders, to IV, for the least impaired. Dawson, 17, was put in Grade II, the group to which he has been assigned in every evaluation he has gone through. He is confident that he belongs there, though some of his competitors clearly are not: so far in his brief career, Dawson said, he has been the subject of eight official complaints about his classification. \u201cThey were saying that I\u2019m too able for Grade II,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Grade II is by far the most diverse grade, and that\u2019s where I\u2019ve always been placed.\u201d He added dryly, \u201cI have really gotten to know the classifiers.\u201d The London Paralympics, which opened Wednesday, are no less competitive than the Olympics held here earlier this summer. The Paralympics are the largest ever, with 4,200 athletes competing in 20 sports. Some are in wheelchairs, some are wholly or partially blind, some have three, two, one or no limbs, some have dwarfism, some have intellectual deficits, some have complex coordination and muscle-control problems and some have multisymptom conditions like multiple sclerosis. The classifiers, as they are called, must ensure that athletes compete against others with similar levels of ability \u2014 an exercise in physical examination and assessment that exists nowhere else in sports. \u201cIts not always as simple as if you\u2019re just dealing with amputations, for example \u2014 one arm, one leg,\u201d said Christine Meaden, chief classifier for the International Paralympic Equestrian Committee. \u201cWe have people with coordination problems, paralysis, amputations and visual impairments \u2014 and people who have a mixture of types of disabilities.\u201d Paralympians have to be assessed by international classifiers before arriving at the Games. But, said Peter van der Vliet, the International Paralympic Committee\u2019s chief medical classifier, some 245 athletes here have been deemed borderline \u2014 hovering between one grade and another \u2014 and have been reassessed at the Games. Forty have been moved to different classifications, and eight athletes (in track and field, swimming and judo) have been ruled ineligible and sent home because, he said, they did not meet \u201cthe minimal disability criterion.\u201d The classification process is multifaceted and different for each sport. Riders in international equestrian events are observed riding in competition. They also have to undergo face-to-face medical evaluations from two international classifiers, involving a range of movements that tests for strength, coordination and flexibility. The exercises can be as straightforward as touching a finger and thumb together, moving the shoulder, or placing a heel in set spots on the ground. \u201cThey seem like simple tasks,\u201d said Dawson, \u201cbut when I started doing them I was like, \u2018Oh, my life \u2014 this is so difficult.\u2019 \u201d The system is meant to focus on the athletes\u2019 physical abilities and on the limitations their disabilities impose, not on their riding prowess. But it can anger competitors who believe that they are being forced to compete against people who are less disabled than they are. \u201cPeople will say, \u2018You shouldn\u2019t be in grade 1A \u2014 you ride so well,\u2019 \u201d said Donna Ponessa, a rider on the United States team. She has multiple sclerosis and is paralyzed from the chest down. She uses a wheelchair and a ventilator, except when she rides. \u201cBut I\u2019ve given up a year and a half of my life for the Olympics,\u201d she said \u2014 time almost entirely spent riding, exercising at the gym or working. Riders with fluctuating conditions like multiple sclerosis are frequently re-evaluated, and athletes unhappy with their classifications can appeal. \u201cThere are two reasons for this,\u201d Mr. van der Vliet said. \u201cFirst, it\u2019s a fundamental right that if an athlete believes a wrong decision is taken, he has a right to protest. And with some athletes their default mode is that they will challenge a decision any time they can when they are not in agreement with it.\u201d Swimming has 10 classifications for athletes with different physical impairments, plus three more for visual impairments and one for athletes with intellectual deficits. For that reason it is particularly prone to challenges, and swimmers say they sometimes suspect that athletes have not been classified correctly. Three weeks before she was set to compete in the London Paralympics, Mallory Weggemann, an American swimmer who is paralyzed from the waist down, learned that officials from the International Paralympic Committee had questions about her level of ability and were requiring her to submit to reclassification in London. Weggemann has always swum at the S7 level, against athletes who, for instance, might have double leg amputations or paralysis down one side of their bodies. But after a physical evaluation by two examiners four days ago, she was abruptly moved to level S8, a class in which the athletes are less disabled. \u201cI have no function or feeling from the belly button down, and now I\u2019m competing against people who are, say, missing just one arm or have leg amputations below the knee,\u201d Weggeman said. \u201cI think there\u2019s a significant difference in functional ability between myself and the new competitors.\u201d It works both ways, and athletes say they have all heard of instances of people trying to game the system. \u201cI think I\u2019m in the right class, but always there are some people who \u2014 how do you say this? \u2014 lie a little more than others and pretend to be worse than they are,\u201d said Amaya Alonso , a Spanish swimmer who competed Thursday in the women\u2019s 400-meter freestyle S12 class , for swimmers with visual impairments. One competitor, who did not want to be identified talking about cheating, said: \u201cYou hear people say, \u2018Well, I know what it takes to be a I or a II.\u2019 Everybody is in search of that win, present company included, and I\u2019m told that some people are less than scrupulous.\u201d Asked if the system was vulnerable to abuse, Mr. van der Vliet said: \u201cI can counter that one with a question: can I eliminate doping from the Games?\u201d (The answer is no.) The most notorious example of Paralympic classification manipulation took place at the 2000 Games in Sydney. The Spanish men\u2019s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members were not intellectually disabled at all . After that, mentally disabled athletes were barred from the Paralympics while officials revised the classification process; they are back again this year. The athletes say they sympathize with the difficulties faced by the classifiers, who are forced to determine how to sort people who have several hundred different types and degrees of disability. \u201cNo system is perfect,\u201d Dale Dedrick, a U.S. para-equestrian who has systemic lupus and competes at Level II, said in an e-mail. \u201cBefore I would wish to challenge someone else\u2019s disability, however, I would consider carefully the old adage of walking a mile in their shoes.\u201d", "keyword": "Paralympic Games;Disabilities;Horsemanship and Equestrian Events;Swimming"}
{"id": "ny0084868", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/10/14", "title": "Santander to Pay $6.4 Million in Puerto Rico Bond Settlement", "abstract": "For the second time in less than a month, a global bank with operations in Puerto Rico has agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle accusations that it violated industry rules when selling the island\u2019s bonds to customers. Santander Securities, a subsidiary of Banco Santander, will pay $4.3 million in restitution to clients on the island who lost money on Puerto Rican bonds, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, known as Finra. Finra also said that the brokerage unit would buy back Puerto Rican bonds from a limited group of customers who still hold them, and would pay a fine of $2 million for failing to properly supervise its employees. It estimated the total restitution and penalties at $6.42 million. Finra\u2019s settlement letter said it was relevant that the Santander unit had already been disciplined in 2011, and was required to pay $9 million to resolve other \u201cdeficiencies.\u201d A spokeswoman for Santander said that the brokerage unit was \u201cpleased to resolve this matter\u201d and would comply with the settlement terms. \u201cThe firm has taken steps to enhance its controls in connection with the activities described in the Finra letter,\u201d she said. For many years Puerto Rican bonds were a popular investment, both on the island and the United States mainland, because they offer tax benefits and often a higher yield than comparable bonds issued by American states and cities. Puerto Rico is now in deep financial trouble, however, and its governor, Alejandro Garc\u00eda Padilla, has been calling for a debt moratorium. In this environment, its bonds\u2019 values have plunged. Finra\u2019s enforcement action grew out of the way Santander Securities brokers bought and sold the bonds in the firm\u2019s dealings with customers over about three and a half years, starting in 2010. Some of the violations began in December 2012, when Moody\u2019s Investors Service downgraded Puerto Rico\u2019s general obligation bonds to one notch above junk, saying that the island was carrying a large, growing debt; that its pension system might run out of money; and that it was issuing bonds to raise cash for day-to-day operations, a practice that is not sustainable. Just one month earlier, the Santander brokerage unit had begun selling off its own inventory of Puerto Rico\u2019s bonds. The downgrade prompted it to accelerate the process, Finra said, reflecting the firm\u2019s heightened concern about the risk. But at the same time, the Santander unit did nothing to change the internal, color-coded system that its brokers used to assess the risks of various securities. The system made it seem as if nothing had happened, and the brokers kept selling the bonds to their clients. Retail customers bought about $180 million of the bonds directly, and another $101 million of them through Santander\u2019s closed-end funds. In addition, the Santander unit failed to supervise its clients\u2019 use of margin loans to buy even more of the bonds than their own resources would permit. That meant some clients not only bought the shaky debt instruments, but ended up increasing their own indebtedness as well, Finra said. In a falling market, a brokerage firm is expected to have systems for tracking its clients\u2019 margin purchases and making sure they are still suitable. Finra said some Santander brokers who received \u201cbuy\u201d orders from their clients sold them Puerto Rican bonds out of their personal portfolios. Finra said the brokerage unit was required to monitor such transactions to make sure the customers knew there was a potential conflict of interest, but it had no procedures in place for doing so. It said the clients bought about $50 million worth of the bonds in such transactions. The settlement calls for Santander to buy back the bonds that were sold out of employee accounts, for a total $121,000. Finra earlier took an enforcement action against the Puerto Rican operations of UBS, the large Swiss bank. It agreed to pay a total of $34 million in fines and restitution after Finra, along with the Securities and Exchange Commission, found improprieties and conflicts of interest in the underwriting and marketing of Puerto Rican bonds. Neither enforcement action affects American investors on the mainland who have purchased Puerto Rican bonds.", "keyword": "Banco Santander S A;Puerto Rico;Government bond;Financial Industry Regulatory Authority;Securities fraud;Alejandro Garcia Padilla"}
{"id": "ny0253502", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/10/08", "title": "Europe Approves Microsoft Purchase of Skype", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The European Commission on Friday approved Microsoft \u2019s $8.5 billion purchase of Skype , saying it had no objections to a deal that would link the world\u2019s largest software maker with the leading Internet communications service. While the assent from the European competition commissioner, Joaqu\u00edn Almunia, is not the final antitrust hurdle for the transaction \u2014 regulators in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan are still deliberating \u2014 the positive review from Brussels was considered the last significant threat to what would be Microsoft\u2019s largest takeover to date. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved the transaction in June. In voicing no objections to the deal, Mr. Almunia, a Spanish economist, chose not to act on a complaint from an Italian competitor to Skype, Messagenet of Milan, which had asked that the deal be blocked unless Microsoft opened Skype\u2019s 124-million user network to competitors. Mr. Almunia in February approved Microsoft\u2019s purchase of the search advertising business of Yahoo. This time, the competition commissioner said he was approving the purchase of Skype \u201cbecause the deal would not significantly impede effective competition,\u201d according to a statement by his office. In the consumer communications business, the commission said Microsoft and Skype overlapped only in video communications, which Microsoft offers separately through its Windows Live Messenger program. \u201cHowever, the commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present,\u201d the commission said in its statement. In the sale of Internet communications to businesses, Skype had only \u201ca limited presence,\u201d the commission concluded, which did not overlap with Microsoft\u2019s Lync Internet communications software, used by large companies. Microsoft, in a statement, called the European approval \u201can important milestone. We look forward to completing the final steps needed to close the acquisition.\u201d The approval from Brussels will expedite the fusion of Microsoft, maker of the ubiquitous Windows computer operating system and Office business application suite, with Skype, an Internet seller of free and low-cost audio and video telephony founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom, a Swede, and Janus Friis of Denmark. During the past eight years, Skype has become the largest provider of Internet-based communications. But profitability has remained elusive. A previous owner, eBay, which bought Skype for an estimated $2.6 billion in October 2005, was not able to integrate Skype profitably into its online auction business. In October 2007, eBay took a $1.4 billion impairment charge reflecting what it estimated that it had overpaid for Skype. Last November, eBay sold a 70 percent stake in Skype to an investor group led by Silver Lake Partners for an estimated $2 billion. Microsoft, which announced its agreement to buy Skype on May 10, is paying nearly three times Skype\u2019s market value, as measured by the sale of eBay\u2019s stake almost a year ago to private investors. Leif-Olof Wallin, an analyst in Stockholm for Gartner, said Microsoft would use Skype to bolster its push into Internet-based telephony around its Lync software for businesses. With Skype\u2019s huge user base, Microsoft will be able to greatly expand the availability of low-cost Internet telephony, Mr. Wallin said. He added that Microsoft\u2019s distribution of Skype through its Windows operating system would improve the image of Internet calling, especially among businesses, which are increasingly encouraging workers to use their own computers and software for company business. That will make Microsoft more of a direct competitive threat to Cisco Systems and Avaya, the two biggest companies that sell Internet-based telephone service software for businesses. But it will also accelerate downward pressure on long-distance and international calling prices, Mr. Wallin said. \u201cOnce it is preloaded on a device, whether it is a computer or a phone, it becomes more convenient to use,\u201d Mr. Wallin said. \u201cThat will make consumers more likely to discover and try it.\u201d Whether Microsoft can generate a profit from Skype, or create profitable synergies with its other software services and products remains unclear, said David W. Cearley, an analyst for Gartner in Stamford, Connecticut. \u201cI do not believe that direct revenue was the main reason for the purchase,\u201d Mr. Cearley said. \u201cThe main thing that Microsoft is buying with Skype is brand presence on the Web and a customer base.\u201d", "keyword": "Skype Technologies;Microsoft Corporation;European Commission;Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues;Almunia Joaquin"}
{"id": "ny0017907", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/07/04", "title": "With Harvey Less Than Perfect, the Mets Are Less Than Successful", "abstract": "Matt Harvey\u2019s persistent dominance this year may have lulled some fans and observers into idle expectancy, a mental state in which a merely serviceable outing from the young ace, like the one he offered Wednesday night, feels oddly jarring. Even when the Mets were struggling earlier this year, losing games at an alarming rate, Harvey was their every-five-days salve. And yet here he was on a muggy night at Citi Field, struggling to keep alive his team\u2019s newfound midsummer momentum. Pitching before a sellout crowd \u2014 only the second one this year for the Mets \u2014 Harvey allowed five runs, tying a career high, over six-plus uneven innings. His struggles were relative, considering he notched nine strikeouts, and at times he appeared overpowering, as he generally does. But for once he was inadequate, as the Mets fell, 5-3, to the Arizona Diamondbacks. \u201cHe just didn\u2019t have command of his stuff \u2014 you know, a lot of deep counts,\u201d Manager Terry Collins said. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen him pitch a lot better, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d The Mets, who began the day 11-6 over the previous 17 games, fell to 35-46 over all and will play one more game at home before embarking on a three-city trip to close out their first half. Harvey threw his first pitch at 9:01 p.m. \u2014 after rain delayed the start by 1 hour 51 minutes \u2014 inside a packed stadium. The Mets, on the night before the Fourth of July, were promising a postgame fireworks display, and there was a festive mood around the park, where chants were spreading quickly across noisy stands. During one between-innings scoreboard interlude, Mrs. Met, a female counterpart for the team\u2019s longtime mascot, was reintroduced after nearly a decade away, to much applause. But the most compelling draw was on the mound. Less than a year into Harvey\u2019s big-league career, his excellence has become taken for granted. The question before any start now seems to be whether he might pitch a no-hitter. On three occasions this year, he put together no-hit bids that exceeded six innings, and last Friday, he retired the first 14 Washington Nationals batters he faced. But the intrigue was punctured quickly. After recording one fast out, Harvey allowed two quick singles and then issued a walk to load the bases. This prompted David Wright to jog toward the mound to deliver a quick, encouraging word, and Harvey induced a double play to end the inning. Collins said he did not know whether the delay harmed Harvey, but he knew it did not help him. \u201cYou\u2019ve just got to block it out and try to do everything normal,\u201d Harvey said of the delay. \u201cI prepared for 7 o\u2019clock. I\u2019m not one to make an excuse. I should have been more prepared. I obviously didn\u2019t do a good job of that.\u201d Image Harvey took his second loss of the season. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times After that hiccup, it seemed Harvey was bouncing back. He appeared to find a short groove, striking out a chain of batters, riling up the crowd. The 92-miles-per-hour slider he used to slip away from a minor fifth-inning jam seemed unhittable. And as he stabilized somewhat, the Mets provided him a lead on a fourth-inning power surge against Randall Delgado, the Diamondbacks\u2019 starter. Wright slammed his 13th home run \u2014 his first since June 23 \u2014 into the left-field stands, crouching ever so slightly as he slashed at a 3-2 changeup near his kneecaps. One out later, first baseman Josh Satin battled through a nine-pitch at-bat before whipping a full-count inside fastball just inside the left-field foul pole. Satin, a minor revelation for the Mets since the team sent Ike Davis to the minor leagues earlier this month, increased his hitting streak to nine games and his on-base streak to 14. \u201cThat was really the last thing left that I hadn\u2019t done,\u201d Satin said of his homer. \u201cIt was great feeling.\u201d But the ballpark grew hushed \u2014 the buzz felt extinguished \u2014 during the sixth, when Cody Ross belted a hanging slider from Harvey over the left-field wall for a three-run homer. Suddenly, the Mets were behind, 3-2. It was only the sixth home run Harvey has allowed this year and, just like that, he was positioned for just his second loss this year. Harvey could not gather himself after that. He came out for the seventh, but allowed a walk, a single, and a double off the left-field wall. Through that sequence, the Diamondbacks increased their lead to 4-2 and sent Collins to the mound to fetch his ace. The Diamondbacks added another run, charged to Harvey, on a sacrifice fly. \u201cPretty much all night, I wasn\u2019t; making good pitches,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t hitting my spots too well. The ball was up a little bit, and they took full advantage of that.\u201d Harvey allowed nine hits over all and walked three batters. His earned run average crept up to 2.27, while his record fell to 7-2. Once he was pulled, the Mets inched back, getting an eighth-inning solo home run from Daniel Murphy. But it was not enough to salvage a night when their ace \u2014 a player for whom brilliance has felt commonplace \u2014 pitched below his own lofty standard. INSIDE PITCH Shaun Marcum this week experienced a recurrence of the shoulder and neck tightness that plagued him during spring training and forced him to the disabled list at the start of the season, Terry Collins said. After throwing 101 pitches over six innings on Monday night, Marcum informed coaches about the discomfort. On Tuesday he was sent for a magnetic resonance imaging exam, which showed no structural damage. Collins said Marcum would still make his next scheduled start Saturday night against the Milwaukee Brewers.", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Diamondbacks;Matt Harvey"}
{"id": "ny0292709", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/06/18", "title": "A Thud of Retribution Reverberates in Russia", "abstract": "So the bear will be left to wander the athletic wilderness this August. For years, haltingly at first and now with eloquence, some elite athletes have spoken of ridding their sports of doping and the accompanying clouds over grand accomplishment. Last March in Oslo, I talked with the American biathlete Lowell Bailey. \u201cAre we supposed to just accept that we\u2019re not nearly as clean as we thought?\u201d he said. He answered his question with a shake of the head: \u201cYou want repercussions, some sort of retribution.\u201d Repercussion and retribution arrived Friday with a thud. The chiefs of international track and field barred the participation of Russia in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. A global superpower, Russia had engaged in top-down and systematic doping of its elite athletes and covered it up, they said. Video Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said on Friday at an economic forum that the actions of a few athletes should not affect those from an entire federation. Credit Credit Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press Rune Andersen, an antidoping specialist for the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs track, took a seat in a room in Vienna and spoke in soothing Scandinavian-accented English. His message was unyielding. \u201cThe system in Russia has been tainted by doping, from the top level and down,\u201d he said. In a system this broken and corrupted, he added, you cannot know who is clean and who is not. That there was justice to be heard in Andersen\u2019s every word was indisputable. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow lab that tested thousands of Russian Olympians, has turned whistle-blower. He recently spoke to The New York Times of his handiwork. He described concocting exotic doping cocktails with the brio a top bartender brings to mixing a mean mojito. Victories in the war on doping come encoded with risk, and worry. Olympic politics are inseparable from national and global politics, and President Vladimir Putin, a cobalt-eyed sort, has embraced sporting dominance as a symbol of Russia\u2019s re-emergence as a global power. Video The International Association of Athletics Federations upheld its ban on Russia\u2019s track and field team from the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Credit Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press \u201cThe whole doping scandal is a painful blow for the Kremlin, and humiliation for Russia,\u201d Lilia Shevtsova, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. \u201cIn a situation of gradual exhaustion of resources, Putin has been especially keen on making sport a building block of Russian greatness.\u201d Putin did not stamp his foot and rumble on Friday, as he is in a conciliatory phase of late. He did sound indignant as he made clear his displeasure. \u201cThere was not and cannot be any support for violations in sport, or in doping on the state level in Russia,\u201d he said in St. Petersburg, Russia. \u201cThis cannot be a foundation for building anti-Russia policy.\u201d Putin prides himself on strategic unpredictability and mixes the statesmanlike with the frankly intimidating. So long as the international sports chieftains hold strong, Russia could feel pressure to reform its laboratories, the better to get its runners and high-jumpers swiftly back on the world stage. Video A former Russian Olympic ice skater, Svetlana Zhurova, and Moscow residents criticized the barring of Russia\u2019s track and field team from the Rio Games. Credit Credit Paul Sancya/Associated Press As ever, it\u2019s worth noting that doping is a problem afflicting athletes in every nation, and that many Americans have been suspended over the years. Russia, however, remains among a relative handful of nations plausibly accused of having state-run doping programs. To compete as a clean Russian athlete is to risk the anger of your coach, and discipline from your federation. Andersen and the I.A.A.F. president, Sebastian Coe, had no sooner finished talking than eyes turned to Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee. Bach wears his imperial hauteur like a winter overcoat. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, he shared a flute or five of champagne with Putin. Bach, who is German, was defensive of his Russian friend, and he pointedly warned the world to keep its nose out of Russia\u2019s business. \u201cPeople have a very good understanding of what it really means to single out the Olympic Games to make an ostentatious gesture which allegedly costs nothing but produces international headlines,\u201d Bach said. Next week, Bach and his committee must ratify the decision of the I.A.A.F. Perhaps with an eye toward uncertainty, Coe set down survey sticks on Friday that demarcated his power. \u201cIt\u2019s entirely the decision of the I.A.A.F,\u201d he declared of the decision to bar Russia. \u201cIt is a very clear proposition that the eligibility sits and lies with the I.A.A.F.\u201d Coe and Andersen were careful Friday to murmur encouragement, noting that the Russians had made progress in their rehabilitation. The reality is that they are at best surly reformers. Yuriy Borzakovskiy, a former middle-distance runner and Olympian, coaches the Russian national team. To listen to Russian Ministry of Sport leaders, he is just the man to lead a new generation of clean athletes. To embrace that notion requires a double dose of amnesia pills. As the I.A.A.F report released Friday noted, the same Borzakovskiy repeatedly insisted that no particular doping problems afflicted Russian athletes. He attributed an unfortunate spate of adverse findings to poor biometric analysis. The coach and his fellow Olympian Yelena Isinbayeva dismissed a damning World Anti-Doping Agency report on Russia as \u201cgroundless.\u201d Isinbayeva recently wrote an op-ed essay for The New York Times in which she argued that she and clean Russian athletes should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. How do we know that they are clean? They passed all their urine tests, she said. This elides the fact that investigators found that her nation\u2019s laboratory had tinkered with many hundreds of urine tests, substituting the clean for the dirty. \u201cIn interviews with the task force,\u201d the I.A.A.F noted dryly, \u201cit emerged that neither of them has ever actually read the report.\u201d The rehabilitation of the bear could prove a lengthy and imaginative process.", "keyword": "Russia;2016 Summer Olympics;Doping;Track and field;International Assn of Athletics Federations;Vladimir Putin"}
{"id": "ny0084404", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/10/24", "title": "Sorry, Jose, This Joe Batt Came First", "abstract": "JOE BATT\u2019S ARM, Newfoundland \u2014 At first glance at a map, you wonder if this little fishing hamlet on a remote island off the northern coast of Newfoundland is playing a gag on everyone. After all, Canadians are discovering amusing ways to celebrate the Toronto Blue Jays\u2019 return to the playoffs for the first time in 22 years. The CN Tower in Toronto is lit in blue, and a famous coffee chain is selling Blue Jays doughnuts. So why couldn\u2019t Joe Batt\u2019s Arm, a little town on Fogo Island, have changed its name to honor the team\u2019s biggest star, Jose Bautista, a.k.a. Joey Bats? Perhaps the island residents who watched Game 5 of Toronto\u2019s American League division series saw the dramatic pose that Bautista struck after hitting a mammoth three-run home run. He chucked his bat defiantly toward the Texas Rangers\u2019 dugout, his left arm remaining shoulder high, parallel to the ground and curved like the cove that defines the shape of this town. The name could also refer to Joey Bats\u2019s cannon of a throwing arm that he unleashes from right field. It\u2019s a natural. Draw up the papers, a quick proclamation at Town Hall and voil\u00e0: Joe Batt\u2019s Arm. Who would notice in a country with towns named Saskatoon, Stoner, Skookumchuck and St.-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! There is only one problem. \u201cIt\u2019s not named for him,\u201d said Edmund Decker, a 72-year-old retiree and former fisherman who was born on Fogo Island. \u201cThe name is over 200 years old. But Bautista is a great player. Wouldn\u2019t it be nice if the boy\u2019s from home?\u201d Image Edmund Decker on the ferry to Fogo Island. \u201cThe name is over 200 years old,\" he said of Joe Batt's Arm. \"But Bautista is a great player.\" Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times \u201cThe boy,\u201d in Newfoundlandese, is pronounced \u201cbuy\u201d and is a common refrain used to describe a male of virtually any age. So, no, Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is not named for Joey Bats and his bat-wielding or fireballing arm. \u201cBut we like to have fun with it,\u201d said Rita Penton, a volunteer at the local post office. \u201cThere was a funny thing on YouTube after he threw his bat and it said, \u2018Joey Bat\u2019s Arm.\u2019 \u201d Quite a coincidence. Imagine a town in upstate New York called Joltin\u2019 Joe\u2019s Leg, or a Vermont town called Big Papi\u2019s Fist. But if Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is not named after Bautista and his mighty arm, then where did the name come from? On the day before Game 6 of the American League Championship Series \u2014 a 4-3 loss to Kansas City in which Bautista homered twice but allowed the winning run to score with a questionable throw as Toronto was eliminated \u2014 it had to be investigated. \u201cYou\u2019ll never find out the true story of Joe Batt\u2019s Arm,\u201d said Dennis Adams, a 74-year-old retired fisherman. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying for the last 74 years, and I haven\u2019t found out yet.\u201d The most accepted version of the story involves a poor, wretched sailor named Joe Batt, who was said to have served aboard ship for one of the most famous seafarers, Captain James Cook, in the mid-18th century. When Cook was charting Newfoundland, Batt was somehow jettisoned overboard \u2014 whether he was tossed or he jumped as a deserter is in dispute. Batt ended up on Fogo Island and was said to be very popular with the local residents. But Joe Batt, unlike Joey Bats, was poor and shoeless. He stole some shoes and was arrested and sentenced to 15 lashes. But the townspeople liked him so much that they stormed the magistrate\u2019s office and rescued him. They all went off happily together to the nearby cove with a shoreline shaped like the arm of a person drinking a pint of lager, known in these parts as an arm, and they named it after Joe. Image Cod left out to dry in Joe Batt's Arm, Newfoundland, Canada. Cod was once so plentiful there that fishermen could stand on shore and scoop the fish up in nets. Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times It is unknown how long Batt remained there, or if he ever threw anyone out at third base. Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is said to have been settled in 1685. The early settlers were joined by others from the West and North of England and many Irish. Most islanders seem to have inherited distinct characteristics of certain Irish accents, including pronouncing \u201cth\u201d as \u201ct\u201d and pronouncing words like \u201cdecided\u201d as \u201cduh-soyded.\u201d And, of course, \u201cthe buys.\u201d Adams and his brother, Benedict, said they were descendants of scalawags and thieves on the run from British authorities. The brothers discussed many aspects of the history and culture of Joe Batt\u2019s Arm while at their house along the arm (or inlet). A medium-size fishing vessel, full of holes, sat on stilts nearby. \u201cThat\u2019s where we caught all our fish over the years,\u201d Dennis Adams said. They offered two passers-by pieces of potent salt cod drying on racks, just down the road from the Fogo Island fish plant and co-op, and demonstrated how they cured it. Cod was once so plentiful, Benedict Adams said, that they could stand on shore and scoop them up in nets. Today there are restrictions. \u201cWe\u2019re allowed to catch five pieces a day for five days,\u201d Dennis Adams said. \u201cBut we\u2019re not allowed to wait one day and catch 25. You figure it out.\u201d Benedict Adams said that today the boats hauled a lot of mackerel, shrimp and Atlantic snow crab. In addition to abundant fishing, Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is the home of the recently built Fogo Island Inn, a modern, environmentally friendly luxury hotel with a stunning view of the North Atlantic. The hotel and the island are accessible by ferry or helicopter. Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is not the only unconventionally named town on Fogo. South of Joe Batt\u2019s Arm is Seldom, and next to that is Little Seldom and then Seldom Come By. Next to Fogo Island is Change Island (no, it was never called Changeup Island). There are also many towns in Newfoundland with similar names: Cobb\u2019s Arm, Aaron Arm, Goose Arm and Coney Arm. On New World Island just west of Fogo Island, there is Too Good Arm. It just has to be named after the Mets\u2019 pitching staff.", "keyword": "Baseball;Geographic Names;Jose Bautista;Newfoundland;Canada;Blue Jays"}
{"id": "ny0122040", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/09/27", "title": "Japan's Automakers Scale Back Production in China as Sales Drop", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Japanese automakers, including Toyota and Nissan, are cutting back production in China after anti-Japan protests that closed dealerships and darkened the sales outlook in the Chinese car market, one of the world\u2019s largest. Production slowdowns are a normal feature of the auto industry in mature markets like the United States and Japan, where inventories are kept from ballooning, keeping pressure off automakers that would push them into offering discounts, at a cost in profitability. But steps by the Japanese automakers to cut output in China are an anomaly in a market that has driven the industry\u2019s global growth over the past decade and where most automakers had been adding capacity until China\u2019s economic slowdown in recent months. The slowdown caused production to outpace sales, resulting in larger-than-normal inventories for many car dealers. \u201cFor the time being I think you\u2019re going to see Japanese automakers\u2019 sales in China down by 20 to 30 percent,\u201d said Koji Endo, auto analyst at Advanced Research Japan, a firm dealing in investment information. \u201cThe last time we had protests like this, in 2010, the effects only lasted about a month, but I think this time is going to be different. This is going to have a serious impact.\u201d Nissan, one of the top Japanese automakers in China, said that it would halt production at a joint venture in China starting Thursday, three days earlier than planned, and would extend the halt through the national holiday period next week. Toyota plants in Tianjin and Guangzhou will also suspend production, from Wednesday through the holiday, a Tokyo-based spokeswoman, Shino Yamada, said. That closing will be a few days earlier than planned. Production at factories in China may be curtailed further, depending on market conditions, she said. A senior Toyota executive in Beijing said that as a result, the company probably would not be able to meet its goal of selling one million cars in China this year. Toyota and its local Chinese partners sold about 900,000 cars in the country last year. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to sell cars right now, but that\u2019s true with every Japanese brand. Not just us,\u201d said the executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. In addition to Toyota and Nissan, Mazda has decided to halt production in China on Friday and Saturday, giving workers two extra days off in an extension of the production shutdown for the national holiday. Suzuki Motor said that it also had stopped one of two shifts that it runs in China. Anti-Japan sentiment in China intensified earlier this month after Japan said that it would buy a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea, called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, from a private owner. Tension between the Asian neighbors have smoldered since the end of World War II . In protests across China, angry demonstrators vandalized the properties of Japanese companies, including a Toyota outlet in the eastern city of Qingdao that was burned. The latest production adjustments follow cutbacks that Japanese automakers had been making before the protests to cope with slower-than-anticipated sales in China this year. In the second quarter, the Chinese economy grew at the slowest pace in more than three years. In the Chinese auto sector, Japanese automakers had a share of about 19 percent of the passenger car market in August before the protests. That was down from 20 percent in July, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. An analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bin Wang, said that Japanese auto dealers in Guangdong province had seen sales fall about 60 percent since the protests, adding that the slowdown had bolstered sales for German, American and Korean brands. Mr. Endo of Advanced Research Japan said that he expected Japanese automakers to continue to adjust production if sales remained weak and would take measures like cutting shifts or slowing production speed to keep inventory from building. As a result, he said, parts suppliers in both China and Japan would have to cut output as well.", "keyword": "Automobiles;Toyota Motor Corporation;Nissan Motor Co;Japan;China;Senkaku Islands"}
{"id": "ny0059332", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/08/17", "title": "Tug of War Between Republicans Seeking Same Base Support", "abstract": "FORT WORTH \u2014 One week before a grand jury in liberal Travis County indicted Gov. Rick Perry on two felony counts, he and United States Sen. Ted Cruz were in friendlier territory, speaking at a conference hosted by a conservative blog here in the largest reliably Republican community in Texas. Mr. Perry walked onto the stage of the RedState Gathering to warm applause, his regard among conservative activists having been bolstered by his recent activity related to the border, particularly his decision to send National Guard troops there in response to an influx of migrants. \u201cIf Washington won\u2019t act to secure the border, as governor of Texas, I will,\u201d Mr. Perry said. Eight hours later, Senator Ted Cruz walked into the same hotel ballroom, greeted with the kind of rapturous cheers fitting a military commander returning home from a combat victory. \u201cThe grass roots are winning fight after fight after fight,\u201d Mr. Cruz said , adding later, \u201cI believe we have laid the foundation for winning the war to repeal Obamacare.\u201d Mr. Perry\u2019s presidential ambitions have since been overshadowed by the news Friday of his indictment related to a 2013 veto of funding for the state\u2019s anti-corruption prosecutors. Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, who oversees the public integrity unit, refused Mr. Perry\u2019s calls to resign after she pleaded guilty to drunken driving, prompting the governor\u2019s veto. Mr. Perry was indicted on counts of abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. His office has said he has only acted within his authority as governor, and Mr. Cruz called the indictment politically motivated. Even before his recent legal troubles, Mr. Perry was already operating in Mr. Cruz\u2019s shadow, as most conservative activists in attendance made clear they would rather see the freshman senator vie for the White House in two years than the three-term governor. Image Gov. Rick Perry spoke to supporters at the 2014 RedState Gathering in Fort Worth this month. Credit Cooper Neill for The Texas Tribune \u201cWhen I look at you, I imagine you would be just like one of the founding fathers of this country,\u201d a female attendee told Mr. Cruz after his speech. The dynamic underscored a growing tension in Texas politics. As the state\u2019s two highest-profile Republicans are contemplating bids for the White House, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Perry are at the start of a period where they are likely to be constantly jockeying for favor among the same audiences. The legal troubles that have surfaced for Mr. Perry could scuttle his hopes of running again for president before they gain traction. \u201cThis will \u2014 depending on how it plays out and how long it lasts \u2014 will certainly be detrimental to that nascent campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016,\u201d said Cal Jillson, a political-science professor at Southern Methodist University said. (S.M.U. is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) While Mr. Cruz is vying for the favor of Tea Party voters, Mr. Perry could still be a powerful draw to a segment of conservatives more interested in a candidate with executive experience, Mr. Jillson said. \u201cHe\u2019s going as an experienced executive, governor of the second largest state in the country with an economic success story to tell,\u201d Mr. Jillson said. \u201cAnd the immigration issue brings him to attention among conservatives.\u201d In Mr. Cruz\u2019s speech, he promoted recent conservative victories in Washington, including the Democrats\u2019 failure to pass gun control legislation after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., as signs of a shift in the relationship between grass-roots conservatives and elected officials. \u201cI\u2019m convinced the biggest divide we\u2019ve got in politics in this country is not between Republicans and Democrats,\u201d Mr. Cruz said. \u201cIt is between entrenched politicians in both parties and the American people.\u201d Mr. Perry\u2019s speech was reminiscent of ones he gave during his 2012 bid for president in the way it focused on the robust Texas economy, and his belief that the federal government should follow the lead of Texas and other conservative states by lowering taxes and balancing budgets. Image Ted Cruz spoke as well before the two likely candidates went to Iowa. Credit Cooper Neill for The Texas Tribune \u201cYou all know I brag a lot about Texas,\u201d Mr. Perry said. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of been part of my job description for the last 13-plus years. But frankly, we have a lot to be proud of.\u201d Bob Guzzardi, a conservative activist from Ardmore, Pa., told Mr. Perry after his speech that he hoped a man with his message would run for president. Asked about it a day later, Mr. Guzzardi stopped short of saying he would support Mr. Perry in a second presidential run. \u201cI liked the emphasis of what he is talking about, but frankly, I\u2019m more of a Ted Cruz guy,\u201d Mr. Guzzardi said. Kathleen Wazny of Denton echoed a similar sentiment, praising Mr. Perry\u2019s record and noticing an improvement in his delivery from his first presidential run. Yet there was no question whom she hopes to support in 2016. \u201cCruz has been in Washington, and he\u2019s seen the petty politics there,\u201d Ms. Wazny said. \u201cRunning the chessboard in Washington is very different from running the chessboard in Austin.\u201d The enthusiasm gap even extended to Erick Erickson, editor in chief of RedState.com and the conference M.C., who seemed to favor Mr. Cruz in his introductions. While he praised Mr. Perry as \u201ca man who, while the president is at the golf course, is leading the nation at the border,\u201d he compared the excitement around Mr. Cruz to that of the Beatles and introduced him as \u201cthe leader of the conservative movement in the United States of America.\u201d As Jeff Tucker of Round Rock and Michael Pemberton of Radcliff, Ky., poured themselves cups of coffee ahead of another day of RedState panel discussions and speeches, they compared impressions of the day before. Mr. Pemberton described Mr. Perry as more passionate but said that Mr. Cruz\u2019s arguments were sharper. \u201cI think of the two of them, together, they make one great politician,\u201d Mr. Pemberton said. He then wondered aloud: Could the two Texas leaders possibly run on the same ticket? \u201cI\u2019ve thought a lot about that,\u201d Mr. Tucker admitted. But who should be at the top of the ticket? The two men considered the question for a moment. \u201cProbably Ted Cruz,\u201d Mr. Tucker said, his friend nodding in agreement. \u201cHe fights those guys. He doesn\u2019t back down.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance;Republicans;Rick Perry;Ted Cruz;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0156791", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/06/08", "title": "Court Order Allows Rallies in Capital of Zimbabwe", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 A Zimbabwe court ruled Saturday that opposition rallies planned for this weekend in Harare, the capital, should not have been banned by the police and may take place, Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the political opposition, said. But the court\u2019s action has limited impact, Mr. Chamisa said. It was issued too late for two of the rallies, which were scheduled for Saturday in crowded urban townships, and it does not affect a nationwide police ban on opposition rallies, he said. \u201cWe still have to deal with a ban put in place nationally, which is making it difficult for us to campaign,\u201d said Mr. Chamisa, of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Two rallies will be held Sunday afternoon in Harare, he said. The party\u2019s standard-bearer, Morgan Tsvangirai , won the most votes in presidential elections in March, and he faces President Robert Mugabe , who has been in power since 1980, in a runoff that is now less than three weeks away. The government detained Mr. Tsvangirai twice in recent days for hours at a time and blocked his rallies. It also suspended operations of all humanitarian groups, on which millions of people depend for food and other basic needs. As the government prints more money to pay its bills, hyperinflation is now putting staple foods further and further out of reach in a country where more than 80 percent of the people are out of work. The price of a loaf of bread has skyrocketed to 350 to 700 million Zimbabwe dollars in many shops, the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, reported Saturday. Last month, the price was 100 million. In 2006, it was one million. Bright Matonga, the deputy minister of information, told The Herald, a mouthpiece for ZANU-PF, the governing party, that the nongovernmental organizations had been acting like political parties supporting the opposition. He accused some of the groups of threatening to cut off food to those who voted for Mr. Mugabe, and he contended that they had received $6 million from the American government to destabilize the country and support Mr. Tsvangirai\u2019s campaign. The aid groups adamantly deny that politics has influenced their distribution of food, and they say the government has yet to back up its accusations with any proof. No specifics were offered in the article published Saturday in The Herald. Human rights groups and aid officials say Mr. Mugabe\u2019s party is trying to clear the countryside of independent witnesses to its campaign of violence against the opposition and to control the flow of patronage, especially food, to win votes.", "keyword": "Zimbabwe;Politics and Government;Mugabe Robert;Tsvangirai Morgan;Demonstrations and Riots"}
{"id": "ny0209275", "categories": ["business", "smallbusiness"], "date": "2009/12/17", "title": "Small-Business Owners Learn to Handle Slow Payers", "abstract": "When credit markets seized up more than a year ago, many small businesses were caught flat-footed. Their clients were not paying, or were paying more slowly, and the owners were left emotionally stressed and financially damaged. But after the initial shock wore off, those owners have come up with a variety of ways to make sure they do get paid. The National Federation of Independent Business, which has 350,000 members, signed up 200 members for a Web seminar on collections, said Karen Harned, executive director for the organization\u2019s small-business legal center. \u201cThis is always a big issue for small-business owners.\u201d Arne Salkin, an account executive with Transworld Systems, a 39-year-old national collections agency, said the problem was felt by owners in an array of businesses. \u201cOur clients include cigarette wholesalers, pest management companies, nursing homes and private day schools,\u201d he said With 150 offices and 75,000 customers across the United States, Transworld sends out customized demand letters, he said. Its customers, most of them small businesses, pay $750 for a series of five letters asking for payment, each escalating in intensity. Typically, they are sent out every two weeks, matching a standard pay period. This system worked, in one instance, for David Neal, assistant corporate controller for Hoover Treated Wood Products, a lumber wholesaler in Thomson, Ga., when a client owing $15,000 paid the entire amount after receiving two letters. \u201cI was shocked,\u201d Mr. Neal said. \u201cWe were very surprised that it worked.\u201d But another client \u2014 a longtime customer, Mr. Neal said \u2014 was in arrears for $45,000, ignored all five letters and then went out of business in late October. \u201cIt will have to be written off,\u201d he said. That is painful for a low-margin industry like his, which typically bills within 15 days and in which 95 percent of clients pay promptly, Mr. Neal said. His firm typically has $4.5 million a week in receivables, he said, and payments started slowing in November 2008. Geoffrey Wilson, owner of 352 Media, a 10-year-old Web development firm in Gainesville, Fla., lost $165,000 in early 2008 when three clients did not pay. The three firms were start-ups, he said, two in Florida, one in Michigan. \u201cIt was devastating,\u201d he said. \u201cIt damaged our cash flow and really hurt us.\u201d The company, with major companies like Microsoft and American Express, did not have to lay off any of its 40 employees, but the experience left scars, Mr. Wilson said. \u201cIt makes you really angry,\u201d he said. \u201cThese were clients we had extensive interactions with over several months, sometimes with as many as 50 meetings. It felt very personal. Suddenly you have to threaten them, sue them.\u201d Today, Mr. Wilson is much more cautious about accepting new clients and is clear from the outset about payment terms \u2014 33 percent upfront, raised from 25 percent in August 2008. Clients are now classified as standard or preferred, the latter being firms with 15 employees and at least two years in business. Standard clients must pay in full before material is delivered, and the business owner will be asked for a personal guarantee, he said. Some customers are newly candid about their own financial woes, \u201cwhich we\u2019d never seen before,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve become very truthful. As a business owner, I really appreciate their honesty. It allows us to better plan our situation. I need an accurate understanding of what\u2019s coming in instead of having a client simply go silent.\u201d Lisa Brock, head of Brock Communications in Tampa, Fla., is taking a personal approach to managing late payers, recently visiting the chief executives of two local clients to negotiate payment. Now, more than ever, Ms. Brock said, she wants to know whom she is dealing with before entering into any business deal. A free consultation allows her to decide if a client\u2019s values match hers. If so, she delves deeply into their references. \u201cWe\u2019ve done more of this recently than in the 14 years we\u2019ve been in business,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are a number of ways to check people out: annual reports, a Dun & Bradstreet report, ask for personal and professional references.\u201d Cindy White, whose 11-year-old company manufactures knitted ribbon jackets that are sold in 40 high-end boutiques nationwide for $800 to $1,000, has been owed $5,000 for six months from several clients, forcing her to lay off employees. She has also fallen behind in the rent on her Phoenix design studio. \u201cI have a lot of stores out there who owe me money, but they\u2019re my bread and butter. You don\u2019t want to upset them by suing or sending out collection letters.\u201d The decision whether to hold back or escalate demands for payment was made for her recently after a seven-year client, a store that closed, refused to communicate with her and did not pay for the jackets she had shipped. \u201cI was furious,\u201d Ms. White said. \u201cThis was a store I had a longstanding relationship with.\u201d Ever since, she said, \u201cI have been on the phone every few days with all the stores that owe me money, just keeping tabs and making sure they are still viable.\u201d She said she is hopeful that the economy will come back, and \u201cI am willing to work with them because they are my lifeblood.\u201d Such attentiveness is necessary, agreed Ms. Brock. \u201cI look at our profit and loss statements biweekly.\u201d She advises scrutinizing client lists to predict potential trouble spots. \u201cEven having two slow payers is significant.\u201d When a client refuses to pay, last-ditch options include hiring a collections agency \u2014 which typically recoup in full only 11 percent of the time \u2014 hiring a collections lawyer, who may claim one-third of what they recover, or filing a case in small-claims court. Joshua Friedman, a collections lawyer in Beverly Hills, Calif., said his business had been booming since last fall, with clients coming to him \u201cin every field you can imagine.\u201d \u201cSometimes people can\u2019t pay. Sometimes it\u2019s a matter of straight-out fraud, where buyers are not doing enough due diligence. People are desperate to do the deal,\u201d he said. Mr. Friedman takes on only cases worth more than $10,000. \u201cI try to resolve everything without filing a suit,\u201d he said. His success rate is still only 20 percent, he warned. \u201cMy clients know better than I do if the client is really likely to settle.\u201d", "keyword": "Small Business;Recession and Depression;National Federation of Independent Business"}
{"id": "ny0279823", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/10/11", "title": "Elizabeth F. Rohatyn, Supporter of Education and the Arts, Dies at 86", "abstract": "Elizabeth F. Rohatyn, a major supporter of numerous arts and educational organizations, including the New York Public Library, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 86. Her death was confirmed by Heather Kelly, her nurse. Ms. Rohatyn, the wife of the financier Felix G. Rohatyn , was a former chairwoman of the library, a board member of Lincoln Center, a former president of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association and the founder of Teaching Matters Inc., a nonprofit to help teachers use technology in the classroom. She also worked with New Visions for Public Schools and WNET/Channel 13. She and Mr. Rohatyn sponsored an I Have a Dream Foundation project, which followed more than 50 low-income children through six years of middle and high school, graduation and four years of college. (The foundation reports that almost 90 percent of its more than 2,500 participants in the New York area have graduated from high school, and 87 percent have gone on to higher education.) When Mr. Rohatyn was ambassador to France, from 1997 to 2000, Ms. Rohatyn created Frame, the French Regional & American Museum Exchange , a consortium of museums in American cities like Dallas, Minneapolis and Cleveland and French cities like Lille, Montpellier and Lyon. She was named a member of the Legion d\u2019Honneur in 2002 and an officer in 2007. Elizabeth Fly was born on May 11, 1930, in Memphis, the daughter of D. Wilson Fly, a stockbroker, and the former Louise Campbell. She graduated from the Foxcroft School in Virginia and attended both Sarah Lawrence College and the College of Santa Fe. Her first two marriages, to Charles C. Renshaw Jr., an editor and publishing executive, and to Alexander Vagliano, ended in divorce. She married Mr. Rohatyn in 1979. As chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, created by New York State, he engineered the rescue of New York City from insolvency in the 1970s. Besides her husband, her survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, Nina Griscom; three stepsons, Nicolas, Pierre and Michael; and several grandchildren. Children were not allowed, however, at Ms. Rohatyn\u2019s annual Easter egg hunt at the couple\u2019s home in Southampton, N.Y. The guest list was more likely to include Oscar de la Renta, William S. Paley, Marella Agnelli and Henry and Nancy Kissinger.", "keyword": "Elizabeth F Rohatyn;Obituary;Philanthropy;NYPL;The arts;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0034828", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/12/14", "title": "Iran: Nuclear Talks Interrupted", "abstract": "Iranian diplomats involved in nuclear talks with six world powers in Vienna interrupted the discussions on Friday after the United States announced an expanded list of companies and individuals whose trading activities it would try to block for evading sanctions against Iran. The Iranians, suggesting that they needed to consult with officials in Tehran, responded angrily to what the Obama administration characterized as enforcement actions. They said the measures undermined the interim deal reached last month, when Iran was given sanctions relief in exchange for suspending some parts of its nuclear program for six months. \u201cThis two-sided game and confusion we are witnessing is not beneficial for the atmosphere of the talks,\u201d Iran\u2019s top negotiator and deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told the semiofficial Tasnim news agency on Friday. A spokesman for Catherine Ashton, the European Union\u2019s foreign policy chief and the coordinator of the negotiations with Iran, said the discussions were expected to resume in the near future. But in Tehran on Friday, some politicians called for the acceleration of Iran\u2019s nuclear program.", "keyword": "Iran;Nuclear weapon;International relations;Vienna"}
{"id": "ny0184681", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/03/27", "title": "Advisory Against Visiting Caves", "abstract": "Federal officials are asking people to stay out of caves in states from West Virginia to New England, where as many as 500,000 bats have died from a disease called white-nose syndrome. The Fish and Wildlife Service made the request to guard against the possibility that people are unwittingly spreading the mysterious affliction when they explore multiple caves. There is no evidence that the disease is a threat to people. White-nose syndrome is named for the sugary smudges of fungus on the noses and wings of hibernating bats. White-nose bats appear to run through their stores of winter fat before spring. The disease was confirmed in eight states this winter from New Hampshire to West Virginia and there is evidence it may have spread to Virginia, said a wildlife service spokeswoman, Diana Weaver. Some estimates of deaths are as high as 500,000 bats. Researchers worry about a mass die-off of bats, which help control the populations of insects that can damage wheat, apples and dozens of other crops. The advisory seeking a voluntary moratorium on caving would also cover states adjacent to affected states, Ms. Weaver said. That swath stretches from Maine south to North Carolina and west to Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. Recreational cavers, who have supported past efforts to control white-nose syndrome, seemed bewildered by the breadth of the request. Peter Youngbaer, white-nose syndrome liaison for the National Speleological Society, said the advisory covers tens of thousands of caves and would affect a large array of activities including organized caving events and equipment sales. \u201cThe ramifications are mind-boggling, and I guess we\u2019re all just trying figure out what to do,\u201d said Mr. Youngbaer, who is based in Vermont.", "keyword": "Bats;Infections;Caves and Caverns;Fish and Wildlife Service;West Virginia;New England States (US);North Carolina;Kentucky;Ohio"}
{"id": "ny0248806", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/05/06", "title": "Jackson and Lakers Are Facing an Abrupt Ending", "abstract": "EL SEGUNDO, Calif. \u2014 Phil Jackson is not wavering, unlike the Lakers in their first two games against the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference semifinals. It might be appropriate if here, in the limelight surrounding Hollywood\u2019s team, Jackson changed his mind and returned to the Lakers if this season\u2019s ending is deemed too swift and unfulfilling. After all, Jackson took breaks after coaching the Chicago Bulls and after his first Lakers stint. Each time, he said he was retiring. But after some traveling, crisp Montana air and internal debate, he returned to coaching. Now, however, Jackson remains intent on retiring from the Lakers at the end of the playoffs, even if the ending for the book he plans to write about the season is not Hollywood perfect. \u201cIt\u2019s winding down,\u201d said Jim Cleamons, a longtime assistant to Jackson in Chicago and Los Angeles. \u201cWe certainly didn\u2019t want or expect to be down two in a series where you have the home court, but it happens sometimes. This is not a reality show. Sometimes, there\u2019s not a happy ending. This is real life. If it\u2019s not the way you want it to end, there\u2019s not a retake.\u201d The Lakers are set up for a comeback, if only they could show signs of one against the Mavericks, who defeated the Lakers, 93-81, on Wednesday at Staples Center to go ahead, two games to none. The Lakers, Andrew Bynum said, have trust issues, but they also have basketball problems. Forward Ron Artest was suspended for Game 3 in Dallas on Friday. Only three of the 18 teams that have held home-court advantage and lost the first two games have come back to win the series. No team has rallied from a 3-0 deficit. The Lakers remained confident, if not steadfast, in refusing to address the chance that Jackson had coached his final game at Staples Center, where he, Kobe Bryant and Derek Fisher have had five championship seasons. This is the team that trailed the San Antonio Spurs, 2-0, in 2004, won the next two games, then benefited from Fisher\u2019s miraculous shot with 0.4 seconds left in Game 5. But the Mavericks, a more seasoned team than in years past, can win the best-of-seven series without returning to Los Angeles. Jackson was calm on Thursday, often cracking jokes, and said that deciding whether to return after last season had been consuming enough. \u201cThat was long enough for me to think about it,\u201d Jackson said, and, just to make sure it was apparent that he did not believe the Lakers were doomed, added, \u201cWe\u2019ll be back on Tuesday night.\u201d That is when a Game 5 would be played in Los Angeles. Bryant maintained the same philosophy. \u201cI just don\u2019t believe we\u2019re going to lose,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not thinking about that. I\u2019m thinking about the next game and going from there.\u201d To do so, the Lakers must adjust. Pau Gasol is losing confidence, and Dallas presents a separate set of issues than New Orleans, which played the Lakers capably in the first round. The Mavericks, who like to use the pick-and-roll, present three capable distributing guards \u2014 Jason Kidd, J. J. Barea and Jason Terry \u2014 instead of just one like New Orleans\u2019s Chris Paul. With Dirk Nowitzki excelling, the Lakers\u2019 interior is hesitant to help off of him, leaving the lanes accessible to the guards. That is the trust Bynum referred to Wednesday: one teammate being able to help another on defense. \u201cObviously, we have trust issues, and unless we come out and discuss them, nothing is going to change,\u201d Bynum said. Artest guarded Nowitzki for stretches Wednesday, but with the game out of reach in the closing seconds, he struck Barea in the face. On Thursday, the N.B.A. upgraded the call to a flagrant foul penalty-2 and suspended him for Game 3. Artest started every game this season. Jackson did not say whether he would start Lamar Odom, the N.B.A.\u2019s sixth man of the year, or Matt Barnes in Artest\u2019s place. They combined to miss 11 of 14 shots Wednesday. Jackson is seeking the opportunity for his 12th title as a coach, but he was lighthearted Thursday. If the end is near, it will come with a laugh and not tears. After the loss Wednesday, Jackson joked that he would flog the team as its punishment. \u201cI thought the flogging message was really important last night that I imparted,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cI didn\u2019t flog them physically, but I did a little mental flogging today. There was a little bit of that.\u201d And of the series, he said: \u201cI\u2019d like to cry, but I can\u2019t right now. It\u2019s a game and we know it\u2019s a game and we play it and we play it hard, and we anticipate winning in Dallas.\u201d", "keyword": "Jackson Phil;Los Angeles Lakers;Basketball;Dallas Mavericks;Playoff Games;Artest Ron;Bryant Kobe"}
{"id": "ny0195671", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/10/02", "title": "After Lewis, Who Can Take Charge at Bank of America?", "abstract": "Who will lead Bank of America out of this mess? That question is reverberating through Wall Street and Washington after the abrupt resignation of Kenneth D. Lewis , the bank\u2019s beleaguered chief executive. On Thursday, a day into this remarkable boardroom drama, bank insiders and a rapt audience in the financial community were grasping for a clear answer. No sooner did news of Mr. Lewis\u2019s resignation break Wednesday evening than the handicapping began. Wall Street odds-makers tossed out the names of half a dozen possible successors. But Bank of America directors, many of them stunned by the turn of events, have only just begun to consider their options. The search is expected to take weeks. For all the names being floated, few banking executives have the skill and experience to run Bank of America, a coast-to-coast giant with nearly $1 trillion in deposits \u2014 and a bunch of giant-size problems. Some executives with the right r\u00e9sum\u00e9 have, like Mr. Lewis, fallen from grace during the financial crisis . Few would come without baggage. While federal regulators will not handpick the successor, they will effectively have veto power of the board\u2019s choice, according to a person briefed on the matter. Whoever gets the job will face the daunting task of guiding Bank of America into its post-bailout future. The bank has yet to repay the many billions of taxpayer dollars that propped it up during the worst of the crisis. Its controversial takeover of Merrill Lynch, which nearly undid both companies, remains problematic. And the bank\u2019s legal troubles \u2014 and Mr. Lewis\u2019s \u2014 are formidable. So while Mr. Lewis transformed Bank of America into national behemoth, his successor must grapple with this troubled legacy. The new leader must repair the bank\u2019s strained relationship with its regulators, and perhaps, set it on a new course. \u201cIt is not only the choice of who is going to be the captain, but also what direction the ship needs to sail,\u201d said Rakesh Khurana, a leadership and corporate governance professor at Harvard Business School. Mr. Lewis, who intends to leave on Dec. 31, did not groom an heir. Indeed, his resignation came just two months after Bank of America\u2019s board drew up a list of deputies who might fill the top job \u2014 but then refused to select one, believing that Mr. Lewis would stay, according to two people with knowledge of the board\u2019s actions. Now the board, in a state of upheaval, is moving quickly to interview several internal candidates. It plans to designate a group of directors on Friday to lead the search for Mr. Lewis\u2019s replacement. It also plans to hire an executive search firm to review outside prospects. One controversial option under consideration would be to name an interim chief executive, someone who might stay in the position for two or three years. An interim leader might be viewed as a lame duck \u2014 a significant risk, considering the bank\u2019s challenges \u2014 but it would give Bank of America time to cultivate another executive to take over. One possible interim chief is Gregory L. Curl, the bank\u2019s chief risk officer and the architect of Mr. Lewis\u2019s biggest deals. Mr. Curl, who is about 60 years old, has avoided the spotlight for years. He served as Mr. Lewis\u2019s chief negotiator in the ill-fated Merrill deal, which prompted Bank of America to seek a second financial lifeline from Washington. The list of internal candidates is long. Brian T. Moynihan, 49, the head of the bank\u2019s big consumer unit, is perhaps the top contender. Mr. Moynihan, an adviser to Mr. Lewis who has rotated through four top jobs in the last year, has a background in law and appears to have the confidence of some members of the board. After he refused to move to Delaware to take over Bank of America\u2019s credit card unit, Mr. Lewis, who is said to believe that bank executives should do whatever it takes to serve the company, first told him there no option other than to leave. Under pressure from several directors, Mr. Lewis reversed course and named him the bank\u2019s legal chief. Like Mr. Curl, Mr. Moynihan was closely involved with the Merrill deal, and both would probably be carefully vetted by regulators. The odds, analysts say, are longer for Thomas K. Montag, 52, who runs the investment banking business; Barbara J. Desoer, 56, the head of mortgage operations; and Joe L. Price, 48, the chief financial officer. The board will almost certainly consider outside candidates as well, but few of them would come without problems. Among the names that have surfaced are Robert K. Steel, 58, who has held discussions about the possibility with some of the bank\u2019s investors. Mr. Steel, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Treasury under secretary in the Bush administration, is a North Carolina native. But there are lingering concerns related to his time leading another North Carolina-based bank, the Wachovia Corporation. Among them are a television appearance where he promoted the company just before it was sold to Wells Fargo in duress and at least one open regulatory inquiry. A spokesman for Mr. Steel said he declined to comment on the search. Other possible candidates have close ties to Bank of America, including Alvaro G. de Molina, 52, a former finance chief who now runs the finance company GMAC, which has also received extraordinary government support. Another is Gregory J. Fleming, 46, the former Merrill Lynch president, who negotiated a great deal for Merrill Lynch shareholders in selling the brokerage company to Bank of America. Bank of America\u2019s board must make its choice amid looming questions about the bank\u2019s future. The board has been reviewing the bank\u2019s businesses, weighing the risks and opportunities for every area of the company, including those businesses that might suffer severe losses if the economy worsens. Management is also conducting a stress test similar to the one the bank provided for regulators last spring to help determine the shape of its businesses. The conclusion of those reviews is bound to influence the choice of a new leader. But many see the Lewis era fading. \u201cKen Lewis had a very clear leadership style \u2014 it was his way or the highway,\u201d said Meredith A. Whitney, a prominent banking analyst. \u201cNow you have a weak, undefined and to-be-determined leadership operation.\u201d", "keyword": "Bank of America Corp;Lewis Kenneth D;Banks and Banking;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations;Steel Robert K;Molina Alvaro G de;Fleming Gregory J"}
{"id": "ny0169252", "categories": ["business", "businessspecial2"], "date": "2007/03/07", "title": "The New Bioplastics, More Than Just Forks", "abstract": "MEG SOBKOWICZ was on a fast career track in the oil industry. A bachelor\u2019s degree in chemical engineering from Columbia landed her a job at Schlumberger running wireline logs on oil wells in New Mexico. Next stop was to be Casper, Wyo., the heart of the interior West\u2019s oil and gas boom. But she jumped off the track. \u201cI knew that working in the oil industry was not in sync with my values,\u201d said Ms. Sobkowicz, 28. \u201cI wanted something with an alternative-energy connection.\u201d Now, as a doctoral student at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Ms. Sobkowicz is one of a growing number of chemists who are developing bio-based plastics that can supplant those made from oil. Ms. Sobkowicz is working on improving the durability of plastics derived from corn and other plants, developing nanoscale fibers from cotton to reinforce them. Bioplastics can offer several benefits: reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the production process, minimizing toxic waste in the environment and promoting rural economic development by using local crops. They can also be biodegradable. While disposable cutlery, food packaging and even fabrics made from corn have been on the market for several years, companies are now moving toward applications where performance, heat resistance and durability are more important. These applications typically require that biopolymers be reinforced with kenaf fiber (similar to jute) or other fillers. Products based on durable biopolymers have begun appearing in the marketplace. Japanese companies like NEC Corporation, Unitika and NTT DoCoMo are manufacturing cellphones with casings made from bioplastics. Toyota Motor Corporation uses bioplastic reinforced with kenaf for the rear package tray in its Lexus ES300 model. The largest commercial producer of bioplastic is NatureWorks, which is owned by the food-processing giant Cargill. The company\u2019s plant, in Blair, Neb., uses corn sugar to produce polylactide plastic packaging materials and its Ingeo-brand fibers. It churns out white pellets that other manufacturers use. The second largest biopolymer producer is Metabolix of Cambridge, Mass. It makes a different form of polymer for applications ranging from rigid molded items to flexible film for shopping or garbage bags. Metabolix claims that its plastics are biodegradable in such varied environments as backyard composting bins, wetlands and the ocean itself. (According to the Biodegradable Products Institute, bioplastics should decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a \u201ccontrolled composting environment\u201d \u2014 a municipal facility, for instance \u2014 in under 90 days.) \u201cA lot of bio-based products are tossed out like cigarette butts, and for various reasons never decompose,\u201d said James J. Barber, Metabolix\u2019s chief executive. \u201cI can\u2019t conceive of a system that\u2019s so perfect that none of this stuff will escape into nature. For the stuff that does escape, we\u2019re a backstop, ensuring that it won\u2019t last thousands of years.\u201d But representatives of the petrochemical industry point out that plastics made from fossil fuels can be biodegradable, too. And they note that most bio-based plastics, if tossed in a landfill rather than a municipal-scale composting facility, might as well be a tin can or a conventional plastic bottle. \u201cIt\u2019s not just bio-based versus petroleum-based,\u201d said Judith Dunbar, director for environmental issues at the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council, which represents hundreds of plastics manufacturers. \u201cI believe conventional plastics would probably be better than renewables over a full life cycle.\u201d Even some scientists who are creating bioplastics caution against overstating their benefits. John Warner, director of the Center for Green Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said it was unlikely that bioplastics would offer advantages in every application. \u201cIt\u2019s not about finding the magic material that\u2019ll replace all bad materials,\u201d he said. \u201cThat home-run mentality will kill us, because we\u2019d never move forward. But if you promote a replacement material, it\u2019s got to do as good of a job, not just sell itself as a swell biopolymer. And it\u2019s got to be cost effective. We\u2019ll get there.\u201d", "keyword": "Science and Technology;Containers and Packaging;Engineering and Engineers;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Environment;NEC Corp;NTT DoCoMo Incorporated"}
{"id": "ny0125618", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2012/08/21", "title": "Does Pumping Result in Reduced Breast Milk Production?", "abstract": "Q. Does a woman who is pumping breast milk and bottle-feeding it to a baby make as much milk as someone who is breast-feeding ? A. \u201cA woman can make as much milk pumping as she does breast-feeding directly,\u201d said Dr. Susan Bostwick , chief of general academic pediatrics at the Komansky Center for Children\u2019s Health at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. \u201cThe body makes as much milk as it is told to based on the stimulation to the nipple, either from a baby or from the pump,\u201d Dr. Bostwick said. \u201cHow often and how long the nipple is stimulated determines the amount of milk made by sending a signal to the brain that the milk is being taken from the breast.\u201d The brain, in turn, sends a signal in the form of increased hormones back to the breast, telling it to make more milk. This is why a woman can breast-feed twins or triplets . On occasion, Dr. Bostwick said, the suction from the pump can cause more stimulation than a nursing baby, leading to the production of even more milk than with actual nursing. There is an emotional component in nursing, but Dr. Bostwick said she did not know of any scientific studies that show its relationship to how much milk is produced. \u201cIn other parts of the world and other times in history,\u201d she said, \u201cthe traditional nursemaid was hired to breast-feed someone else\u2019s child, and while a bond may grow, it was a job.\u201d C. CLAIBORNE RAY", "keyword": "Breastfeeding;Medicine and Health;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0077132", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/05/09", "title": "Ukraine: Leader Gives War\u2019s Grim Toll", "abstract": "Nearly 7,000 civilians have been killed in the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists since fighting erupted last year, and more than 1,000 people remain unaccounted for, President Petro O. Poroshenko said Friday. The figures are a sharp increase from the most recent United Nations tally of about 6,100 people killed. The president also said that 1,657 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in combat.", "keyword": "Civilian casualties;Ukraine;Petro Poroshenko"}
{"id": "ny0161351", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2006/04/07", "title": "It's Close, but No Celebration for Jagr", "abstract": "Jaromir Jagr was on the verge of breaking one of the Rangers' most cherished records, and the last thing he wanted at Madison Square Garden last night was an on-ice celebration. Then he was treated to one he did not deserve. With 47.6 seconds left in the second period, Jagr was showered with a standing ovation, chants of \"M-V-P!\" and an announcement over the public address system that he had broken Adam Graves's team record for most goals in a season with his 53rd -- a goal, it turned out, that Jagr did not score. At the end of the period, Jagr skated over to the referee Stephane Auger. \"I said I didn't touch it,\" Jagr said later, referring to Martin Straka's centering pass. \"It wasn't my goal.\" Television replays confirmed Jagr's display of conscience, clearly showing Straka's pass had banked off the skate of Islanders center Wyatt Smith in the slot and then through the pads of goaltender Rick DiPietro for what would be the game-winning goal, as the Rangers defeated the Islanders, 3-1. \"I feel like if I'm going to break the record, it should be on some good-looking goal,\" Jagr said. The Islanders (33-38-5) dropped their sixth consecutive game. With their fourth victory in their past five games, the first-place Rangers (43-21-12) extended their lead in the Atlantic Division to 5 points over the Philadelphia Flyers. The Flyers, who did not play last night, have seven games remaining; the Rangers have six. Jagr has six more chances to break Graves's record, but if and when he does, he has made it clear that he does not want any over-the-top celebrations by his teammates. \"I don't like that,\" Jagr said. \"It's good with the fans. If I would score 900 goals, then that would be different.\" Rangers Coach Tom Renney said: \"He doesn't want any major league celebration by people leaving the bench and all that kind of stuff. He'd rather just deal with it and away we go. And I think that's pretty professional of him. There's another team out there that's trying to play and win. That's pretty noble of him.\" So was Jagr's reaction to go to Auger and tell him the goal was not rightfully his. When it was announced before the start of third period that there had been a change in scoring, and that the goal belonged to Straka, a groan was voiced by the sellout crowd. \"I felt bad when the fans booed me when they said I scored the goal,\" Straka, who scored again in the third, said with a smile. The Rangers also heard boos after they skated through a sloppy opening period, which ended with the Islanders leading by 1-0 on Miroslav Satan's 31st goal. Just 21 seconds into the second period, the jeers turned into cheers. Jarkko Immonen, the 23-year-old rookie center who was playing his first N.H.L. game because Steve Rucchin has a fractured bone in his right foot, scored his first goal. That led to a seasoned move from the 23-year-old rookie Petr Prucha, a veteran of 62 N.H.L. games. Prucha, who has scored 29 goals, remembered his first. He quickly burrowed into the goal to retrieve the puck as a keepsake for Immonen. For a few seconds late in the second period, it appeared Jagr would be receiving his own souvenir puck. Jagr, whose streak of recording at least 1 point ended at 12 games, has been stuck on 52 goals for four games. Not that Jagr has seemed concerned with the record. \"If I get it, then I get it,\" said Jagr, who has two years remaining on his contract. \"If I don't get it, then I told you, I've got six games and two years left to do it.\"", "keyword": "NEW YORK RANGERS;NEW YORK ISLANDERS;JAGR JAROMIR;HOCKEY ICE"}
{"id": "ny0172710", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2007/11/24", "title": "Bearing Aid, U.S. Vows to Tread Lightly in Bangladesh", "abstract": "DHAKA, Bangladesh , Nov. 23 \u2014 As an American warship with more than 3,000 troops arrived off the coast of Bangladesh to help deliver food, water and medicine to the most remote corners of this cyclone-battered country, United States military officials took pains on Friday to say they would not take any steps that might seem intrusive. Speaking to reporters, Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the commander of American forces in the Pacific, said American troops would work alongside Bangladeshi troops and make joint decisions about where American military assets would be helpful. \u201cThis is not a U.S.-only operation; it\u2019s in support of Bangladeshi operations,\u201d he said at a news briefing after meeting with Bangladeshi Army officials here in Dhaka, the capital. \u201cWe are not just going to come storming ashore.\u201d The approach illustrated how tricky it has become for American troops to deliver even humanitarian aid to a friendly Muslim-majority nation. The Bangladeshi Army\u2019s chief of general staff, Maj. Gen. Sina Ibn Jamali, acknowledged that there was \u201csensitivity\u201d to American military involvement in the nation\u2019s relief operations. He said the Americans had been invited because his own military-backed government lacked the aircraft, in particular, to distribute aid swiftly to areas that needed it most. \u201cThey will be working with us, uniform and uniform,\u201d the general said. The Associated Press reported that members of a small Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, protested the American military presence after Friday Prayer at Dhaka\u2019s largest state-run mosque. The American vessel, Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship equipped with 20 helicopters and three landing craft that can maneuver in coastal areas, was stationed Friday about 30 miles off the southern coast of Bangladesh. United States military officials said that only a handful of American troops would be on Bangladeshi soil at any time, with most marines and Navy personnel staying aboard the Kearsarge and coming ashore to deliver supplies. Admiral Keating said the troops would stay as long as they were needed. A second American ship was on its way, packed mostly with supplies. The Americans said they expected to start delivering aid as early as Saturday. The Kearsarge arrived as aid workers warned of an imminent risk of water-borne disease from the Nov. 15 cyclone and, eventually, a worsening of childhood malnutrition, which already hovers around 48 percent, according to Unicef. Although the cyclone\u2019s death toll was put at nearly 3,200, according to Bangladeshi Army officials, with 1,700 more people still missing, the government estimated that the storm had affected more than six million Bangladeshis by destroying homes, fields and fish ponds. The Bangladeshi military continued to ferry food and clothing to the cyclone zone. On Friday afternoon, a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter made its last run to a small town called Nalcity, where the cyclone had uprooted tall trees, blown off tin roofs and flattened acres of rice fields. The birds scattered and the dust blew furiously as the helicopter descended, bearing dried dates and biscuits as well as saris and lungis, the basic clothing for Bangladeshi women and men.", "keyword": "Cyclones;Bangladesh;Foreign Aid;Armament Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0184561", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/03/20", "title": "Blockbuster Reports Loss and Restructures Its Debt", "abstract": "Blockbuster , the movie rental chain, posted a quarterly loss of $359.7 million on Thursday, but beat Wall Street earnings estimates and said it had reached agreements with creditors to reorganize debt due in August. But the company warned that the its new loans would be expensive, and it planned to pull back temporarily on plans to spend on stores to conserve capital. Blockbuster said the loss came to $1.89 a share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $41 million, or 8 cents a share. Results in the most recent period were hurt by a noncash charge of $435 million to write down the value of Blockbuster\u2019s chain of retail stores and other assets. Excluding one-time items, Blockbuster earned $80.4 million, or 40 cents a share, up from $57.8 million, or 26 cents a share, a year earlier, and better than the 25 cents expected by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the period, which ended Jan. 4 and was the fourth quarter of Blockbuster\u2019s fiscal year, fell 12 percent, to $1.38 billion from $1.57 billion a year earlier. The company said its results were affected by a shorter fiscal year, by a decline in rental revenues, negative foreign currency exchange rates and a smaller store base. In a preliminary report this month, Blockbuster said quarterly domestic same-store sales increased 4.4 percent, with a 36.5 percent increase in consumer electronics sales offsetting a 2.6 drop in rental revenue. Blockbuster\u2019s chief executive, James W. Keyes, said the company had reached agreements with the JPMorgan Chase Bank and two of the largest lenders under its existing revolving credit facility to amend and extend the facility through Sept. 30, 2010. The principal amount of the facility will be reduced to $250 million, Mr. Keyes said. Blockbuster is also working to revamp a term loan due in August, Mr. Keyes said. He said that Blockbuster\u2019s financial statements and auditors\u2019 report most likely would \u201cinclude reference to going concern risks until our financing is complete.\u201d Stock in Blockbuster, which is based in Dallas, rose 6 cents, or 7 percent, to 89 cents a share.", "keyword": "Blockbuster Inc;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0271483", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/05/05", "title": "Israel Responds to Hamas Mortar Fire With Airstrikes in Gaza Strip", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 In response to mortar rounds fired by Hamas toward Israeli defense forces operating outside the Gaza Strip, Israel hit five targets in Gaza with airstrikes on Wednesday, a military spokesman said. Hamas\u2019s military wing complained in a statement that Israeli forces had been excavating enormous areas east of Gaza. Israel has been using the excavations to help search for new warrens of tunnels that Hamas is believed to be digging beneath the border between Gaza and Israel. Israeli military commentators said that the mortar fire \u2013 a total of six rounds on Wednesday \u2013 was clearly intended to discourage Israeli attempts to find the tunnels. Although missiles and other weaponry are fired sporadically from Gaza, Israel has seldom named Hamas as the source since a cease-fire in 2014 that ended 50 days of fighting, and other rogue groups operate in the area. In this case, though, Israel said Hamas fired more than five mortar rounds at its defense forces, adding that Israel would continue to guard against \u201call terrorist threats above and beneath ground.\u201d An Israeli military commentator, Roni Daniel, said on Israeli television that the mortar fire did not seem intended to hit the military engineers searching for the tunnels, but only to warn Israel and disrupt the work. The area has been fairly quiet since the 2014 war, and while neither side is eager to set off a new escalation, the exchanges of fire could have unpredictable consequences, Mr. Daniel said. Witnesses in Gaza saw one Israeli airstrike hit a tower used by Hamas\u2019s military wing. At least two schools were evacuated and Hamas police officers streamed from their stations in Gaza City. Hamas claimed that the Israeli excavations had caused unspecified damage to Gazan land.", "keyword": "Military;Hamas;Gaza Strip;Israel;Palestinians"}
{"id": "ny0210414", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/12/13", "title": "At Spoon, the Emphasis Is on the Japanese", "abstract": "SPOON is full of surprises. During the day, the restaurant could escape detection, disappearing into the undistinguished strip of shops anchored by a D\u2019Agostino\u2019s. But after dark, the storefront glows with a prism of color slowly shifting its way through the spectrum. Inside, the large space is at once stylish yet comfortable. A pleasing dimness emphasizes lighting that defines the restaurant\u2019s areas: long full bar to the right, dining space to the left and, dramatic under brighter hanging lamps, a busy sushi station straight back \u2014 stage center for Spoon\u2019s star performers, the sushi chefs. Billing itself as Japanese-Asian fusion, the restaurant leans more toward Japan, with its sashimi in particular. Blue lights glowing through the bottles behind the bar \u2014 so Hollywood \u2014 and an insistent techno beat of background music hardly provide a fitting atmosphere for the kind of zen mindfulness that tasting fine sashimi might require. Yet, as it has with the design of the place, Spoon went for a bit of glitz in its eye-catching table presentation of sashimi, illuminated by a blue light tucked beneath the bed of crisp rice noodles supporting the dewy cuts. The best of our sashimi sampling included white tuna, maguro tuna, salmon and yellowtail. Acidic lemon clobbered the flavor of sea scallop. Show interest in what fish are available in the refrigerated case and management might appear to give a tour of the stock and to introduce Stanley Yong, the artist in charge of the station, who knows the muscle and skeletal structure of every fish he cuts. Slicing techniques vary according to texture, from soft and fragile to firm. The best slices are usually saved for sashimi. The least perfect pieces are tucked into rolls, perhaps along with rice, cucumber, avocado or other flavorings. Chef\u2019s special rolls took a back seat to the sashimi, but for diners who prefer combinations, our sampling of Spoon roll (similar to California roll), classic dragon roll and golden roll topped by pale salmon roe suggested that others would be just as good. Sashimi is not Spoon\u2019s only strong suit. Among possible starters were the dynamite wasabi-seaweed crackers topped with spicy tuna and black tobiko (five tuna-heaped crackers for $12) and deeply flavorful, fabulously tender baby back ribs. Chicken \u201cwraps,\u201d enfolded in lettuce leaves, were nicely sparked by orange, crunchy jicama and fresh green pepper. But skip the muddy-flavored tuna tortilla pizza and pointless Asian pancakes with curry chicken sauce. Chunks of roasted pineapple garnished the Asian duck salad , inspired by Peking duck. The sweet-sour fruit balanced the richness of duck strips and the saltiness from hoisin sauce \u2014 all waiting to fill six hot and steamy pancakes. Seaweed salad was all it should be. Diners who crave spicy heat might enjoy an entree modestly called Sichuan tofu . Seared egg tofu, soft as custard, came with loads of finely chopped vegetables, peas and chicken, slices of steamed rice bread on the side ($15 and plenty for two). Other entree favorites included tender Vietnamese barbecued pork loin with a rice pyramid and a small shredded lettuce and cucumber salad; and good and slurpy Japanese seafood udon with calamari, scallops and shrimp atop the noodles ($15). A few entrees were less successful. At $31, spicy-hot Indian curry seafood was brought down by seriously overcooked lobster tail, shrimp and scallop. Sesame beef with broccoli was indelibly tough; mango chicken, bland. And only size distinguished five jumbo prawns. But we enjoyed a couple of sweet endings: crepe with apple and \u201cambrosia,\u201d a harmonious composition of vanilla ice cream and bits of coconut and fruit alongside a wedge of dark chocolate cake, dense and delicious as a truffle. Spoon 415 King Street Chappaqua (914) 238-1988. spoonasianfusion.com WORTH IT THE SPACE New dining room with upholstered booths running the length of one wall and an attractive bar stretching along another. Spotlighted sushi station at the rear. Handicapped accessible. THE CROWD Casually dressed and multigenerational. Service ranges from efficient to aimless, with untrained staff inattentive about clearing plates between courses and the table for dessert. THE BAR Inventive cocktails range from $9 to $12. On a cold night, try the ginger blossom martini, $11. Drinks at the bar are half-price during happy hour (Monday through Saturday, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.). THE BILL Reasonably priced, especially at lunch, when a set menu (soup, appetizer and entree) is $12 to $14 and dim sum goes for $2.50 to $4 per steamer basket of two or three pieces. A much bigger range at dinner (entrees, $12 to $31). Major credit cards accepted. WHAT WE LIKED Sashimi, wasabi crackers with spicy tuna, chicken wraps, seaweed salad , Asian duck salad, baby back ribs, Vietnamese pork loin, Japanese seafood udon, Asian duck with pancakes, Sichuan tofu , chocolate truffle cake with ice cream (ambrosia), apple crepe. IF YOU GO Lunch: Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dinner: Monday through Saturday, 4:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 4:30 to 10 p.m. Reservations a good idea on weekends. Easy parking in front of the restaurant. RATINGS Don\u2019t Miss, Worth It, In a Pinch, Don\u2019t Bother.", "keyword": "Restaurants;Westchester County (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0097098", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2015/06/04", "title": "Gary Bettman Denies Brain Disease Link", "abstract": "N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman on Wednesday stood by his recent comment that there was no definitive evidence linking hockey and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that scientists have found in many athletes who played contact sports. Bettman said his views echoed those of the federal court judge who approved a settlement between the N.F.L. and thousands of retired players. The N.H.L. is being sued by former players who say the league did not warn them of the dangers of concussions. Speaking before the start of the Stanley Cup finals in Tampa, Fla., Bettman also said that the Arizona Coyotes were in no danger of moving and that the Florida Panthers were in no danger of going bankrupt, despite reports to the contrary. Bettman said he would update the league\u2019s Board of Governors about investor interest in potential clubs in Las Vegas, Quebec City and Seattle. That could lead the league to start a formal expansion process.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Chronic traumatic encephalopathy;Gary Bettman;NHL"}
{"id": "ny0072906", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/03/13", "title": "French Win Latest Battle of Waterloo", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 It was to have been a commemoration that would have placed France \u2019s humiliation at the Battle of Waterloo in every European\u2019s purse or pocket. Instead, it turned into a tussle of a different kind, redolent of history\u2019s long shadow, in which France finally emerged triumphant. The events began as Belgium was casting around for a design for a 2 euro coin that would feature an image of the monument that commemorates the battlefield at Waterloo where, on June 18, 1815, Napoleon\u2019s forces were defeated by the armies of Britain, its allies in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, and Prussia. In London, a railroad station was named for the battlefield, and the phrase \u201cto meet one\u2019s Waterloo\u201d has entered the English-language lexicon as denoting a particularly cruel defeat. But when Belgium produced its design for the coin, officials in Paris sent a letter to the European authorities to complain of its \u201cnegative\u201d connotations, arguing that Waterloo\u2019s place in European memory went far beyond the battlefield. Indeed, the officials said, French reactions to the coin might well undermine efforts to deepen cohesion among the eurozone countries \u2014 as if the 19 nations in the currency union were not already divided by fiscal woes in Greece and grumbling at German-led demands for belt-tightening. The coin\u2019s proposed design \u201cappears prejudicial, in a context where the governments of the eurozone are trying to strengthen unity and cooperation throughout the monetary union,\u201d the letter from Paris said. And so, on Wednesday, Belgium withdrew its plan, news reports from Brussels said, offering France a victory at Waterloo, albeit two centuries later, and averting the prospect of a potentially divisive vote among European ministers. The coin, which is worth about $2.13, was to have been part of ambitious commemorations in which France, from other perspectives, seems happy to join. Even as the question of the coin bubbled up, France was preparing to transport the distinctive hat worn by Napoleon at Waterloo from a museum near Paris to be displayed in Belgium, the newspaper Le Monde reported. It is axiomatic of history\u2019s rose-tinted vision that nations offer differing accounts of victory and defeat , of who really did what and when. Particularly, since the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, or perhaps since the Norman invasion in 1066, France and Britain have sparred, sometimes as rivals, sometimes as allies, and sometimes as both at once. And so, French discomfort at the proposed coin provoked harrumphs here in London. The French \u201creally should recognize that this is a momentous event in Europe\u2019s history and an important one for freedom and democracy \u2014 which I\u2019d have thought the French Republic would have celebrated, rather than sought to prevent,\u201d Sir Peter Luff, a Conservative lawmaker, told the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, referring to Waterloo. Britain itself has no such qualms about commemorations in coinage. The Royal Mint is offering a special 5 pound coin showing Waterloo\u2019s victors \u2014 the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Gebhard von Bl\u00fccher of Prussia \u2014 shaking hands in \u201cthe spirit of camaraderie,\u201d as the mint\u2019s website put it, a spirit that did not always endure.", "keyword": "Euro;Belgium;France;Currency;Great Britain;Brussels;Waterloo (Belgium)"}
{"id": "ny0102741", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2015/12/14", "title": "NBCUniversal to Team With Data Trackers to Study Olympics Viewing", "abstract": "NBCUniversal \u2019s research chief has called the Olympics his \u201cbillion-dollar research lab.\u201d The Games offer a perfect opportunity every two years to analyze how media habits are changing , said Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at the company, because they deliver a large audience that tunes in to hundreds of hours of coverage across a proliferation of screens over a 17-day period. For the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next year, NBCUniversal plans to team up with the television tech company TiVo and RealityMine, a research start-up, to track how people watch the Games on television, mobile and digital platforms. The partnership, to be announced on Monday, is intended to provide insights into the daily habits of Olympics viewers and the interplay between watching coverage on television and using tablets and smartphones. It is also expected to deliver clues to how people watch outside the home, as well as the effect of social media on viewership and the effectiveness of advertising during Olympics coverage. The deal is part of a growing push across the media industry to better understand how vast digital changes are transforming the way people consume entertainment. Industry executives have said that they are seeking alternatives to Nielsen, the dominant measurement company for user engagement, which they complain has been slow to adapt. As Nielsen has introduced new offerings to track digital media, rivals also have pushed ahead. In September, two smaller measurement companies, comScore and Rentrak, announced plans to merge , seeking to create a stronger challenge to Nielsen. \u201cMore competition is always healthy,\u201d Mr. Wurtzel said. \u201cFrankly, it is a good opportunity to see whether or not there are some other players out there that can contribute to the TV measurement industry.\u201d TiVo, which introduced the first digital video recorder in 1999, has built a research business based on proprietary TiVo set-top-box data and partnerships with cable and satellite companies. Its panel now includes 2.3 million households. RealityMine was founded in 2012 and tracks digital media activity, offering the ability to measure how people watch programming across platforms. (RealityMine also plans to announce on Monday that it has landed a $16 million investment.) Noting that TiVo places software in homes that captures every second of television viewing, Tom Rogers, the company\u2019s chief executive, said, \u201cWe know what actual homes are doing, what they watch, what they buy.\u201d Mr. Wurtzel said getting the research right was crucial to NBCUniversal, which in 2014 agreed to pay $7.75 billion for exclusive broadcast rights to the six Olympic Games from 2022 to 2032. The research helps dictate programming decisions. During past Olympics, for example, one major concern was that live-streaming a sporting event during the day would cannibalize viewership of the same event when it was shown later on tape delay. Mr. Wurtzel said the research showed that the live stream actually served as a promotional tool to drive viewership for the prime-time event. \u201cThe notion of ubiquity is not cannibalization,\u201d he said. Mr. Wurtzel said that research around the Olympics is also valuable because it can accelerate the adoption of new media habits. His prediction for the 2016 Games is a surge of mobile viewing among broader audiences. \u201cDuring those three weeks,\u201d he said, \u201cyou get a glimpse into the future.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Summer Olympics;NBCUniversal;TiVo;TV;TV Sets;Olympics"}
{"id": "ny0242959", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2011/03/09", "title": "Devils, Driving for Playoffs, Lose to Last-Place Senators", "abstract": "NEWARK \u2014 The Ottawa Senators came to town Tuesday with the worst record in the N.H.L. and with a lot less motivation to beat the Devils than the Devils had to beat them. But stunning a crowd of 15,978 who wanted to see the Devils stay hot, the Senators picked up a 2-1 victory on a freakish goal by the rookie Erik Condra with just 2 minutes 13 seconds left in regulation. It was the second goal of the game for Condra, who has four in 10 N.H.L. games. The loss was only the third in regulation in the last 25 games for the Devils (30-32-4), who did get a small break when Buffalo, the eighth-place team in the Eastern Conference, lost to Pittsburgh, 3-1 . The Devils remain 8 points behind Buffalo with 16 games to play. \u201cI don\u2019t believe we\u2019re out of it yet,\u201d the veteran forward Brian Rolston said. But the Devils thought this was a game they probably could have won, and not just because Ottawa has a bad record. The Devils had a pair of two-man advantages in the second period, the latter for 72 seconds, and did not score. The Devils scored what appeared to be a tying goal at the end of what amounted to a nearly five-minute power play, but it was called off because the officials said the Devils rookie Jacob Josefson swatted the puck with a high stick. \u201cI think the ref knows the rules better than I do,\u201d Josefson said. Patrik Elias tied the score at 4:01 of the third by taking a pass from Rolston and slapping in his 15th goal, but the Senators (23-34-9) scored the winner when Jason Spezza\u2019s pass was deflected on a bounce to Condra, who beat goaltender Martin Brodeur. The Devils had won four straight games by one goal, and Jacques Lemaire, their interim coach, figured the Devils were due to lose a close one. He said the Senators played tight defense \u2014 \u00e0 la the Devils \u2014 and the two fruitless, fumbling five-on-threes were an issue. \u201cWhen you get two? Come on, come on,\u201d Lemaire said. \u201cThat\u2019s the most frustrating thing from this game.\u201d The Devils did not score in the first period, but the Senators did not either, so the Devils extended their N.H.L.-record streak of games without allowing a first-period goal to 14. But Condra scored his first goal at 4:45 of the second period by swatting in the rebound of his shot. It looked as if Elias\u2019s goal would extend the game into overtime, in which the Devils would have gotten at least 1 point in the standings and perhaps 2, given how they have played for two months. Condra\u2019s second goal left them empty-handed. \u201cIt\u2019s tough because of the situation we\u2019re in,\u201d Devils center Travis Zajac said, \u201cbut because of that, we just can\u2019t dwell on this.\u201d PENGUINS 3, SABRES 1 James Neal and Zbynek Michalek scored goals 3:17 apart for host Pittsburgh. It was the first win in regulation for the Penguins since Feb. 4. (AP) ISLANDERS 4, MAPLE LEAFS 3 Blake Comeau\u2019s tip-in with 57.3 seconds left in overtime lifted the host Islanders over Toronto. The Islanders have won 11 of 19 since the All-Star break. (AP ) FLYERS 4, OILERS 1 Jeff Carter scored two goals to help host Philadelphia end a four-game losing streak. (AP) CANADIENS 4, BRUINS 1 Lars Eller scored twice in the first period and Carey Price made 30 saves as host Montreal won its fifth straight. The Canadiens\u2019 Max Pacioretty was taken to a hospital for observation after a hit by Boston\u2019s Zdeno Chara. (AP) WILD 5, AVALANCHE 2 John Madden of host Minnesota scored with 9:05 left to break a 2-2 tie. The Wild began the day in a three-way tie for ninth place, 2 points out of eighth. Guillaume Latendresse returned from a 58-game absence after two operations to repair injuries to his midsection. (AP) PANTHERS 3, BLACKHAWKS 2 David Booth had a goal and an assist for host Florida. Chicago had won eight in a row. (AP) CANUCKS 4, COYOTES 3 Dan Hamhuis scored twice, including the winner with 2:47 left in overtime, as visiting Vancouver won its third straight. (AP)", "keyword": "Hockey Ice;New Jersey Devils;Ottawa Senators;Condra Erik"}
{"id": "ny0262218", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/06/13", "title": "Tyson and Stallone Inducted Into Hall", "abstract": "Mike Tyson broke down in tears and cut short his speech, and Sylvester Stallone proclaimed, \u201cYo, Adrian, I did it!\u201d as they were inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. The Mexican champion Julio C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez, the Russian-born junior welterweight Kostya Tszyu, the Mexican trainer Ignacio Beristain and the referee Joe Cortez were also inducted.", "keyword": "Boxing;International Boxing Hall of Fame;Tyson Mike;Stallone Sylvester"}
{"id": "ny0003399", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/04/02", "title": "Odessa Celebrates April Fools\u2019 Day", "abstract": "ODESSA, Ukraine \u2014 Starting early in the morning, men of widely varying physical types began collecting around the Magic Bar, which had been set up in central Odessa at a height of about eight feet. It looked easy: Pay your $2.50, hang on for two minutes and walk away with $40. But something funny happened to people on the Magic Bar. Their fingernails turned white, their forearms began to tremble, their legs pumped as if they were riding a bicycle and, one after another, they grimaced and dropped to the ground. Sergei Reznichenko, burly and mustachioed, was watching from the edge of the crowd, and when asked whether he wanted to try, he gave an explosive laugh. He was so delighted that he turned to enfold his questioner in an embrace. \u201cYou\u2019re in Odessa,\u201d he said happily. \u201cThis is how they make their money.\u201d April Fools\u2019 Day has become the day that Odessa \u2014 a city weighed down by history \u2014 celebrates its tradition of wry humor and charming scoundrels. The practice began 40 years ago under the wary eye of the Soviet authorities. It has been marked by such episodes as a taxi driver who drove his rickety sedan all the way down the 400-foot staircase that is the city\u2019s most recognizable symbol, where he was greeted by a complement of militiamen. Tourists poured into Odessa on Monday for the festival, called Humorina. Men in bowler hats played Dixieland jazz, and boys circulated through the crowd carrying enormous hawks available for posed photographs. There were characters out of the stories of Isaac Babel, whose Jewish gangster courted his wife in an orange suit and diamond bracelet. There were games of chance everywhere: the \u201cdrunken bicycle,\u201d \u201crailway roulette\u201d and the \u201cbottle trick,\u201d in which the customer tries (and inevitably fails) to set a bottle upright using a loop on a string. Sergei Chudin, who sells jokes for a dollar apiece, regarded the out-of-towners with compassion. He was working the crowd dressed as Ostap Bender , a stylish con artist of mysterious origins who was one of the Soviet Union\u2019s most beloved characters. \u201cEverybody who tries to do it is trying to prove something to somebody \u2014 it is a demonstration of a person\u2019s insufficiency,\u201d Mr. Chudin said, sounding a little like a field anthropologist. As for the Odessites, he said, they live in a resort town and have only a few sunny months in which to support themselves. He shrugged. \u201cWhat can we do if our mamas bore us this way?\u201d he said cheerfully. \u201cIt\u2019s not our fault.\u201d It is impossible to extricate Odessa\u2019s famous wit from the horrors that took place here. Babel was shot by a firing squad in Moscow in 1940, accused of spying. Nazis took control of Odessa the following year, sending Soviet fighters and ordinary citizens to seek refuge in the labyrinth of catacombs underneath the city. Thousands of Jews were moved to a nearby village and killed; thousands more were dispatched to concentration camps. Those who were left emigrated when they could. Odessa\u2019s Jewish population, once 40 percent of the city, was down to 6 percent by the mid-1980s, according to the city\u2019s Jewish Museum. The historian Charles King, who published a book about Odessa in 2011, calls it \u201ca place where fortunes were literally made or lost overnight \u2014 a ship sinks, the locusts eat the wheat, a pogrom upends things \u2014 so there was something useful and even heroic in laughing at the world.\u201d There were some recollections of this on Monday. An elderly man named Igor, who had just been performing comic dances on the sidewalk, climbed on stage at a joke competition and said this: \u201cThey knocked on the door and said, \u2018Is this the home of the widow of Rabinovich?\u2019 She said, \u2018What do you mean, widow? He just left the house on his way to work!\u2019 They said, \u2018OK, this is the right house, bring in the body.\u2019 \u201d The crowd stirred a little; no one laughed. A team of young women in spangles came out to dance. Valentin S. Krainov, 72, his eyes the color of seawater, watched crowds throng the promenade as if he were seeing a ghost. Once, when Odessites were packed in communal apartments, Primorsky Boulevard had been filled with people every evening. But not for years. \u201cCome out here tomorrow,\u201d he said. \u201cThe city will be empty again.\u201d Humorina was born of an act of censorship; in 1972, Soviet authorities decided to take a televised improvisational comedy competition off the air. A team of comics from Odessa had been winning, and local Communist officials, chagrined by the cancellation, supported their proposal to hold a festival, said Valery I. Khait, one of the festival\u2019s founders. \u201cIt was the end of a thaw, and there was some inertia of openness,\u201d said Mr. Khait, who was drinking vodka out of a plastic cup in the elegant, dingy headquarters of his organization, the World-Wide Club of Odessites. Pranks were performed every year on the \u201cPotemkin\u201d steps, made famous in a 1925 film by Sergei Eisenstein that showed a baby carriage hurtling to the bottom. A motorcyclist skidded down, then a skier, then the legendary taxi. Instead of cutting a ribbon one year, Humorina\u2019s organizers sawed through a log, and revelers collected sawdust as a souvenir. \u201cThe roots of Odessa, its traditions, were passed on through us,\u201d Mr. Khait said. Odessa, he said, \u201cwas conceived as a free city, and these roots showed themselves.\u201d These days, the event is huge and joyful, and it is impossible to identify any political message. Children marched beside their grandmothers, wearing matching adhesive mustaches; men indulged in that time-honored sight gag, the fake bust. Konstantin I. Eftodi, who was selling clown noses, ebulliently advertised his homemade moonshine \u2014 \u201cit makes your whiskey look like fruit cocktail!\u201d \u2014 and the beauty of Odessa\u2019s women. \u201cThey are so beautiful that drivers are always turning around to stare at them and crashing,\u201d he crowed triumphantly. \u201cIt causes accident after accident after accident. Especially in the spring!\u201d The parade started then, under the banner \u201cEverything Was Invented in Odessa (and Made in China).\u201d Majorettes and clowns marched by, carrying comic slogans like,\u201cA fire extinguisher is not a toy \u2014 it\u2019s even better!\u201d and \u201cHail to the Customs Union \u2014 Moscow-Odessa-Tel Aviv!\u201d Mr. Chudin, evidently frustrated with his dollar-a-joke rate, foisted two books on his foreign visitor and pocketed the money with satisfaction. America, he said genially, owes a lot to Odessa. \u201cThis is where the humor comes from,\u201d he said. \u201cWise people listen, write it down and then repeat it later.\u201d", "keyword": "Odessa Ukraine;April Fools;Festival;Ukraine"}
{"id": "ny0247810", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/05/17", "title": "Vatican Tells Bishops to Set Procedures Against Sexual Abuse", "abstract": "VATICAN CITY \u2014 The Vatican told bishops worldwide on Monday to make fighting sexual abuse of minors by clerics a priority, telling them to create \u201cclear and coordinated\u201d procedures by next year and cooperate with law enforcement authorities when required. The directives, detailed in a letter , are among the clearest to emerge from the Vatican since a sexual abuse scandal erupted in Europe last year. But the recommendations are not binding in church law and do not spell out any enforcement procedures or punishments for bishops who have been found to have violated church law. The guidelines note that the sexual abuse of minors by clerics is not only an offense punishable by church law, but also \u201ca crime prosecuted by civil law.\u201d Still, they play down the role of the civilian review boards that have investigated abuse in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere \u2014 and that have often faulted bishops for not stopping abuse \u2014 noting that those boards \u201ccannot substitute\u201d for bishops\u2019 ultimate authority in adjudicating abuse cases. The letter\u2019s emphasis on the power of bishops did not go over well with some victims\u2019 advocates, who have said that the bishops themselves have contributed to the problem by being more concerned with protecting priests than with protecting children. \u201cThere\u2019s no enforcement here,\u201d the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a leading victims\u2019 rights group in the United States, said in a statement . \u201cThere are no penalties for bishops who don\u2019t come up with guidelines or who violate their own guidelines.\u201d \u201cUntil that happens \u2014 until top church officials who hide and enable abuse are severely disciplined \u2014 top church officials will continue to hide and enable abuse,\u201d the group said. The Vatican said the letter, signed by its chief doctrinal officer, Cardinal William J. Levada, was essentially aimed at making bishops around the world more responsive \u2014 especially in countries where they had not routinely tackled the problem of sexual abuse of minors or had even dismissed it. \u201cThe aim of the document is to provide a common denominator for principles that everyone can bear in mind in making appropriate directives,\u201d the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Monday. Father Lombardi said the Vatican could not issue universal requirements for mandatory reporting to civil authorities because it also operated in countries with repressive governments. \u201cEach reality is different, culturally and from the point of view of different countries\u2019 laws,\u201d he said. The letter states that bishops are required to investigate all claims and send all cases deemed \u201ccredible\u201d to the Vatican for review. It says that bishops should also listen to victims, create \u201csafe environment\u201d programs for minors and properly screen seminarians. In March 2010, a sexual abuse scandal swept the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with scores of new victims coming forward. And new revelations have revealed weakness in even the toughest \u201czero tolerance\u201d norms put in place by the United States bishops in 2002, which recommend removing a priest from ministry while claims against him are investigated. In February, a grand jury in Philadelphia indicted a church official on charges of child endangerment in connection with the transfer of priests accused of sexually abusing children, and it also indicted four men, including two priests and a former priest, on charges of raping or assaulting children. The grand jury also said it had found \u201csubstantial\u201d evidence of abuse by 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the investigation, and the archbishop of Philadelphia subsequently suspended 21 of them from ministry. A review board made up of lay people accused the archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, of failing to be \u201copen and transparent\u201d because the archdiocese screened the cases that the panel was allowed to examine. In Ireland, a new report by civil authorities is expected this month, after two scathing government reports there in recent years showing extensive abuse and cover-ups by church officials. The Vatican\u2019s letter on Monday incorporated revisions made last year to the church\u2019s procedures on prosecuting sexual abuse, including extending the use of fast-track procedures against priests and doubling the statute of limitations for disciplinary action against priests to 10 years from the victim\u2019s 18th birthday. It said that local bishops did not have to make their guidelines church law, as bishops in the United States have done, but could ask the Vatican for permission to do so. Asked why it took the Vatican more than a year to issue guidelines that did not alter church law, Father Lombardi said the letter had to be vetted by multiple Vatican offices. \u201cObviously, someone can say that at important and urgent moments it\u2019s better to treat the issue quickly and swiftly, but if there are delicate and complex issues to consider, it\u2019s good for there to be consensus,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Roman Catholic Church;Benedict XVI"}
{"id": "ny0195329", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/22", "title": "Time Is the Theme in \u2018Continuous Present\u2019 at Yale Gallery", "abstract": "By my count, it has been more than six years since the curators at the Yale University Art Gallery organized a show of contemporary art in all media. That is difficult to understand, given that the museum collects in this area and primarily serves students, including those studying at the nearby Yale School of Art. The wait, however, has been worth it. \u201cContinuous Present,\u201d which examines how artists are working with ideas of time, presents some terrific contemporary artwork in an engaging yet scholarly way. Organized by Jennifer Gross, the museum\u2019s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition includes the work of 11 well-known contemporary artists installed in the temporary exhibition galleries adjacent to the museum entrance. Some of the works are from the collection, but the bulk of them are on loan from other museums, galleries and collectors. There is a great deal of painting, but also works of film, video, photography, drawing and sculpture. In addition to issues of time, the show inadvertently picks up on other trends in contemporary art. Much of the art lacks finish, or is process oriented, suggesting the influence of conceptualism. And even the less conceptual, more visually appealing pieces here are grounded in ideas that invite viewers to ponder the nature and passage of time. On Kawara evokes the \u201ccontinuous present\u201d in his paintings of the day, month and year of execution, done in white letters on a flat background. The artist has been doing these date pictures since 1966, making this one of the world\u2019s longest running conceptual art projects. The ebb and flow of time is the subject of Francis Alys\u2019s animated video loop of a woman pouring water back and forth between two glasses \u2014 a simple, meditative work that after a while becomes hypnotic, like listening to the tick-tock of an old clock, and the endlessness of time. Other artists try to slow time down. For \u201cCabinet of\u201d (2001), Roni Horn photographed a clown\u2019s face, with long exposure times so as to capture facial gestures and subtle shifts in observation. Rather than a snapshot of a moment, this series of 36 photographs traces her subject\u2019s movement through time. Rodney Graham\u2019s short film \u201cCity Self/Country Self\u201d (2000) is, like a lot of contemporary art films, oblique. Things don\u2019t ever really add up. Mr. Graham is a talented filmmaker with an eye for a sensual image, but this particular work \u2014 a looped sequence that follows two characters and a silk hat \u2014 comes off as visually captivating yet unresolved. \u201cThe Way Things Go\u201d (1987), by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, is more focused. In this entertaining video, the artists have recorded a series of staged and carefully timed chain reactions using ephemeral materials. One event leads to another, and another, and so on, forming an endless narrative of interrelated incidents \u2014 a meditation on the inescapable importance of timing. Instead of dealing directly with ideas of present time, many of the artists in this show work with the past, presenting art traditions in new ways. Franz West subverts the conventions of sculpture in \u201cThe Monster of the Black Lagoon\u201d (2004), three painted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 blobs on metal stands resting on artists\u2019 pedestals that have been tipped provocatively onto their sides. Thomas Nozkowski\u2019s abstract paintings also evince enormous freedom and imagination. They are raw, with a childlike simplicity; several are intriguing combinations of shapes resembling jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Showing here are half a dozen made between 1973 and 2009, each of which is a little gem, redolent with the playfulness and serendipitous quality we have come to expect of him. It has been years since Mr. Nozkowski had a survey show, and this selection proves he deserves one. An exquisite and strange painting of a prostitute by Laura Owens might not at first glance appear to have much to do with the theme, though according to the exhibition catalog it is based on a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Yale\u2019s collection. Here, time is folded back on itself, with the artist subtly transforming a piece of art history into something vibrant and new.", "keyword": "Art;Museums;Yale University Art Gallery;Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0262456", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/06/25", "title": "Britain\u2019s Mervyn King Says Europe Debt Is Major Threat", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 The Bank of England governor, Mervyn A. King, said on Friday that the worsening debt crisis in Greece and other European countries was the biggest threat to Britain\u2019s financial system. Mr. King urged British banks to be especially diligent and clear in disclosing their exposure to European sovereign debt, to avoid a collapse of confidence among investors. He also called on banks to set aside more capital when earnings were strong instead of distributing it to shareholders or employees. \u201cThe most serious and immediate risk to the U.K. financial system stems from the worsening sovereign debt crisis in several euro area countries,\u201d Mr. King said during a briefing on financial stability by the interim Financial Policy Committee, of which he is chairman. The new committee, which includes executives from the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, is a result of Prime Minister David Cameron\u2019s revamp of the country\u2019s financial regulation after the banking crisis. Mr. King\u2019s comments came as European Union leaders met in Brussels to discuss a second bailout for Greece and ways to stabilize the euro zone area. Greece has until the end of the month to meet conditions for its next aid payment of 12 billion euros, or $17 billion, ahead of a finance ministers\u2019 meeting on July 3. Some investors remain concerned that the Greek prime minister, George A. Papandreou, could struggle to gather enough support to push through the necessary budget cuts, which has pushed down the euro and weighed on European stock markets. Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, warned earlier this week that the sovereign debt crisis posed a serious threat to the financial stability of Europe. The Financial Policy Committee warned that \u201cany escalation of stresses could also be transmitted via interconnected global markets, including via the United States, leading to a tightening of bank funding conditions.\u201d It said \u201csuch contagion could be amplified if bank creditors were unsure about the resilience of their counterparties.\u201d Mr. King said he was less worried about British banks\u2019 direct exposure to Greek debt, which he said was \u201cvery small,\u201d than the chances that a lack of transparency and increased risk awareness could paralyze financial markets. \u201cIf there\u2019s uncertainty about exposures and a lack of transparency, there\u2019s always the risk that people may feel it\u2019s just not worth continuing the rollover funding to institutions,\u201d Mr. King said. \u201cGreater clarity about the extent of these exposures would help to limit the transmission of problems to U.K. banks.\u201d The European Banking Authority said Friday that it had adjusted its stress tests of European banks to better account for potential trading losses on sovereign debt from troubled economies, including Greece. The results are due next month. \u201cIt\u2019s necessary that stress tests are credible,\u201d Mr. King said. The hope is that detailed data on the banks\u2019 capital and government debt exposure would calm those investors who fear a Greek default. The committee also warned that British banks should improve their provisioning for real estate loans that are in arrears or had breached some covenants. The committee implied that some banks were not diligent enough in setting aside money to cover such loans, which were mainly for commercial real estate. The committee also said it was increasingly mindful of risks linked to exchange-traded funds , which were now worth $300 billion in Europe, and asked the Financial Services Authority to monitor the industry more closely.", "keyword": "Banking and Financial Institutions;Great Britain;Europe;Greece"}
{"id": "ny0197535", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/10/14", "title": "Spain Arraigns Somalis Suspected of Piracy", "abstract": "MADRID \u2014 Two Somali men were arraigned on kidnapping charges in a Spanish court on Tuesday in a case that underscores the legal ambiguity of trying people suspected of piracy in international waters. The case involves the still-unresolved capture of a tuna fishing ship in the Indian Ocean. The ship, the Alakrana, was taken 12 days ago off Somalia with a crew of 36, including 16 Spaniards. Spanish naval forces captured the defendants two days later as they tried to sail away from the trawler in a skiff. The ship remains anchored off Somalia, where the crew is reported to be well, although a leader of the pirates told Reuters that they would not negotiate until the two defendants were released. Judge Baltazar Garz\u00f3n of National Court ordered the transfer last week of the two men, whom prosecutors identified as Cabdiweli Cabdullahi and Raageggesey Hassan Haji. Mr. Haji was shot once during the Spanish Navy\u2019s assault on their small vessel. In transferring the men to Spain, officials have argued that it has jurisdiction because its citizens are involved and because the detention occurred outside the maritime perimeter agreed upon by the European Union as part of an operation to capture pirates and turn them over to Kenya. On Tuesday, most of the day went to confirming whether the two men were more than 18 years old. Afterward, they were each arraigned on 36 counts of kidnapping, each carrying a penalty up to five years in prison, as well as armed assault. The two claimed innocence and said that they, too, had been taken by the pirates, Jes\u00fas Alonso, the prosecutor in the case, said after interviewing the defendants. When asked about the issue of jurisdiction, Mr. Alonso said each country had to act to protect its interests. \u201cIf you have to act against a crime, you can\u2019t think of the consequences,\u201d he said. The Alakrana case follows similar trials in France, the Netherlands and the United States, but this is the first time Somalis suspected of piracy will face trial while the attacked ship is still being held. This is the second time a Spanish ship has been held for ransom, although the first time the ship was released after less than a week and reportedly after a ransom of more than $1 million was paid. Before an agreement signed in March with Kenya, most piracy cases were tried in the country where a ship is registered. The agreement between Kenya and other parties \u2014 including the European Union, the United States and Denmark \u2014 provides a temporary fix to the lack of an international legal framework to capture, prosecute and jail pirates for crimes on international waters or in countries like Somalia that lack their own working judicial system, analysts said. \u201cThere is a lot of gray area in terms of a legal system and jurisdiction, and obviously with each navy and national laws,\u201d said Cyrus Mody, manager of the International Maritime Bureau, a London-based division of the International Chamber of Commerce. \u201cPirates caught carrying out an attack have to be tried. That is the only agreement. Where exactly the pirates are tried is a matter of individual countries.\u201d Kenya gets financial help to centralize the pirate prosecution program. \u201cIt is a lot cheaper to hand the pirates over to Kenya,\u201d Mr. Mody said.", "keyword": "Spain;Piracy at Sea;Somalia;Fishing Commercial;Courts"}
{"id": "ny0039855", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/04/09", "title": "Bard College Applicants Trade 10,000 Words for Two: You\u2019re In", "abstract": "Helen Chen, a senior at a small public high school in San Francisco, is the kind of student who tries teachers\u2019 patience. \u201cHonestly, in class when I\u2019m not interested in something, because I understand it already, I kind of just stop paying attention,\u201d she said. She is more than smart enough to handle the material \u2014 she did great on her SATs \u2014 but instead of listening to the day\u2019s lessons, she sometimes follows her own curiosity, reading about philosophy, art history and other subjects her school does not offer. Behavior like that earned her a D in English class. It also made her a perfect candidate for the experiment that Bard College conducted this year. In addition to the standard application, which emphasizes measures like grade point average, test scores, extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations, Bard for the first time invited prospective freshmen to dispense with all the preamble, and just write four long essays chosen from a menu of 21 scholarly topics . Very scholarly topics, like Immanuel Kant\u2019s response to Benjamin Constant, absurdist Russian literature and prion disorders. The questions, along with the relevant source materials, were all available on the Bard website . As for the four essays, totaling 10,000 words, they were read and graded by Bard professors. An overall score of B+ or better, and the student got in. Leon Botstein, Bard\u2019s outspoken president, characterized it as \u201cdeclaring war on the whole rigmarole of college admissions,\u201d a way to turn a tiresome chore into an actual learning experience. But it was also a way to seek out students like Ms. Chen, whom the usual admissions process would not favor but who might thrive in an unconventional atmosphere like the one at Bard, a liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. It was also a clever marketing tool, a way for Bard to separate itself from the herd of colleges vying for attention. The only catch was those essays. They were daunting. About 400 people logged on to the website to read the questions, according to Mary Backlund, Bard\u2019s dean of admissions. Only 50 ended up filing the application. Nine of those were not complete, so the actual sample size for this bold experiment turned out to be 41, which, compared with the 6,980 students who applied to Bard overall, is either a rounding error or a harbinger of widespread change, depending on one\u2019s perspective. Bard professors deemed 17 of those who completed these applications worthy of admission, for an acceptance rate that turned out to be just a few percentage points lower than the college\u2019s overall rate, Ms. Backlund said. The essay applicants, from seven countries and 17 states, ranged in age from 14 to 23. (The youngest to be admitted was 15; the oldest, 19.) Ms. Backlund said she had expected many of them to have had unusual educational experiences, but most came from public schools. All three home-schooled essayists got in. One applicant, found to have plagiarized, did not. \u201cThe verdict is that it provided a really wonderful opportunity for kids,\u201d Ms. Backlund said. \u201cUniversally, they enjoyed it, they learned a lot, and that was the purpose. It exists as an example of the risks we\u2019re willing to take but also the intention that the application should be about students\u2019 capacity to think.\u201d Steve Syverson, a trustee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling , said he predicted more students would participate in the program as it became better known. \u201cIt sounds like it would have a really interesting effect on the class, because those are pretty high-initiative kids,\u201d he said. \u201cIt might also have some interesting impact on your yield, because they\u2019re making a pretty powerful statement about their commitment.\u201d Ms. Chen chose to write about game theory, a painting by Kazimir Malevich , and the evolving history of the Constitution. She also composed the music for a new national anthem using the opening text of the Declaration of Independence. It worked. She will be one of about 500 members of the class of 2018 arriving on campus next fall. \u201cI thought about other colleges,\u201d she said, \u201cbut when I started working on the essays, I became sort of obsessed.\u201d", "keyword": "School Admissions;Bard College;College"}
{"id": "ny0112662", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/02/12", "title": "Not Betting a Dime, a \u2018Voucher Vulture\u2019 Cleans Up at the Slots", "abstract": "LIKE a bird of prey, Gary Bemsel swept past thousands of video slot machines, swiftly scanning them, looking for little jackpots \u2014 winnings left by bettors at the vast Resorts World Casino at the Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens. Every minute or two, he spied a terminal with unclaimed credits, its redeem button lighted and its seat empty. He swooped in, punched the button and snatched the cash voucher. He hit for 11 cents, then 22, and later a 50-cent jackpot. \u201cThey add up,\u201d said Mr. Bemsel, who is tall, slim, single and youthful for his 55 years. \u201cIt\u2019s like a big bank \u2014 you\u2019re finding money all the time.\u201d He can scan hundreds of video slots a minute, with an eagle eye honed by the past 15 years making his living as a racetrack stooper \u2014 someone who bends down to gather betting slips off the track floor in the hope of finding a mistakenly discarded winner. Mr. Bemsel has been a fixture at the Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks, making the daily two-train, two-hour trip from Metuchen, N.J., where he grew up and still lives in his sister\u2019s house. But pickings at the tracks got slimmer after the closing of New York City\u2019s Off-Track Betting parlors just over a year ago prompted many OTB parlor stoopers to flood Aqueduct. Shortly after the so-called racino opened next to the track\u2019s betting area in late October, Mr. Bemsel heard from a stooper colleague that one could pick up small winnings on the casino floor without betting a dime on the slots. Soon, Mr. Bemsel was using unclaimed racino winnings to make ends meet and to fuel his horse-playing habit. \u201cIt\u2019s a legitimate living \u2014 the money\u2019s been left behind,\u201d he said on Wednesday. \u201cIt\u2019s surer money than stooping; it\u2019s steadier, and it\u2019s cleaner \u2014 you don\u2019t have to fish through garbage cans.\u201d Mr. Bemsel has not given up stooping. After a loop through the racino, he has enough cash to hit the betting window in the track and then scour the floor and trash for winning tickets. Slipping deftly through crowds of cheering and swearing horseplayers, he can read slips on the ground and tell immediately if they are winners. For face-down slips, he has developed a nimble, soccer-style flip move using both feet \u2014 so he barely has to stoop at all. In the racino, Mr. Bemsel is just one of perhaps 20 regular voucher vultures. Each has his own blend-in technique. The savvy ones pose as gamblers by pinning a betting debit card to their shirt, or clutching a handful of dollar bills. One regular wears a second-hand \u201cSecurity\u201d jacket and marches around authoritatively. Another constantly keeps a cellphone to his ear. Mr. Bemsel goes with the high-roller look, dressing nicely in loafers, slacks and dress shirt, and moves quickly through the crowd, as if headed for the High Limits section. \u201cThe first few weeks you could hit the A.T.M. machines for stray $20 bills lodged up in the dispenser,\u201d Mr. Bemsel said. \u201cBut certain guys caught onto it, and now they stake out a machine all day, snatching them up.\u201d A spokesman for the casino said that there was no specific rule against voucher-gathering, but that it was discouraged. When a bettor leaves a ticket behind, the spokesman added, \u201cwe work with him or her to recover those lost tickets.\u201d Mr. Bemsel has been a devoted horseplayer since getting hooked at Monmouth Park on the Jersey Shore at age 16. After high school, he worked in a warehouse until he was 40, when he saw a man at Freehold Raceway in New Jersey pulling betting slips out of the trash. He became a top stooper, and he still never misses the huge stooping jackpots: the Kentucky Derby, and August in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he and three other stoopers rent a house to work the racing session. On Wednesday, he strode quickly through the two huge casino levels, checking several thousand video terminals \u2014 with optimistic names like Instant Winner, Stinkin\u2019 Rich and Wall Street Winner \u2014 and accumulating a fistful of vouchers, to be redeemed at a nearby window. He works 12-hour days and finds $600 to $1,200 a week, Mr. Bemsel said, but winds up blowing most of it on bad horse picks. \u201cThe whole reason I do this is to feed my gambling addiction,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s an illness.\u201d The racino has been a godsend, he said, because \u201cthe golden years of stooping are over.\u201d In those days, he said, he could make $1,000 a day, and he stayed regularly in Las Vegas and Atlantic City suites. He paused during his racino rounds on Wednesday and said, \u201cI\u2019ll hit a big one, one of these days, and be back on top.\u201d", "keyword": "Casinos;Gambling;Horse Racing;Aqueduct Racetrack;Ozone Park (NYC);Bemsel Gary"}
{"id": "ny0196411", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/10/19", "title": "Running the Health Care Gantlet", "abstract": "Over the next couple of months, a sausage factory will seem tidier than the U.S. Congress. The disposition of the huge health care overhaul will be a messy dance of legislation. There will be more ups, downs, false starts and near deaths than a Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon political drama. And that may make it harder to do. \u201cThe process of putting something together could make it seem more threatening to a lot of people,\u201d says Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University. Nevertheless, he suspects this will be a short-term phenomenon if any bill is finally enacted, as the focus after that will be on its content. With the caveats that the shape of compromises to come is unclear and the process unwieldy, the leading indicators are: Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, remains the single most important member of Congress on this issue. Democrats might be able to pass a bill without her; it will be hard. Rahm Emanuel will be a central figure in crafting any Senate-approved measure and the final bill. The White House chief of staff may have to delegate much of the Afghanistan account and any plans for \u201cstealth\u201d economic stimulus, spending most of his time on health care deliberations. There won\u2019t be a full-fledged government-run program, or public option, though the measure will have a fallback safety net that will put pressure on the private health insurance industry when it comes to premiums and coverage. For all the focus on the public option, ultimately the issue of affordability and how to pay for the overhaul will be more important. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is trying to thread the needle between sharply divergent bills and views. The shape of the product he takes to the Senate floor will be crucial; it will take 60 votes, or a supermajority, to make any major changes. Final passage of any bill will also take 60 votes. Enter, again, Ms. Snowe. Her support could bring along a couple of other Republicans. More important, she provides politically necessary \u201cbipartisan\u201d cover for more conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Moreover, Ms. Snowe, whose popularity in her home state of Maine is such that she has few political constraints, genuinely wants a bill. She cares about the substance of the policy. By contrast, Mr. Reid isn\u2019t deep in the specifics. Amid the dazzling array of estimates and numbers that are tossed about, only two matter to him: 60, the number of votes required for passage, and 51, the percentage he needs in a tough re-election struggle next year. Thus, Mr. Emanuel, a master dealmaker who\u2019s steeped in the substance of health care from his days as a lawmaker from Illinois on the House Ways and Means Committee, will have a leading role in patching together the legislation that goes to the Senate floor and any final compromise with the House. President Barack Obama, who has adopted an above-the-fray approach, will have to get down and dirty on the details now. Mr. Emanuel has some heavyweight help from the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle; the budget director Peter Orszag; and the chief congressional lobbyist, Phil Schiliro, all of whom are versed in both the politics and the policy. Their chief task may be to placate liberals \u2014 some of whom are complaining about Ms. Snowe\u2019s disproportionate influence \u2014 who will have to make painful concessions to get a bill. One such compromise will be abandoning a full public option. The backup will probably be a combination of a \u201ctrigger\u201d that launches a government program if the private insurance industry doesn\u2019t meet certain criteria, along with giving states the flexibility to come up with their own forms of public plans. The bigger issues will be affordability, making the overhaul more attractive and then deciding how to pay for it. Mr. Reid and Mr. Emanuel will have to appease labor by softening the tax on so-called Cadillac insurance plans. A number of union leaders say that too many of their contracts will be affected and that they plan to oppose the bill unless it\u2019s changed. Raising the threshold, currently at about $21,000 for a family, by only several thousand dollars would subtract as much as $50 billion in revenue over 10 years. Making that up would be tough. There\u2019s also pressure from Democratic lawmakers on other potentially costly measures. These range from proposals to ease the almost $40 billion in fees on medical device makers to making the government\u2019s insurance subsidy for low-income people more generous by lowering the maximum they would have to spend on premiums from 12 percent to 10 percent of their income. In the early, private talks, there are two major revenue-raisers being mentioned as having the potential to bring in as much as $100 billion. One is to reduce the $81 billion surplus that the Congressional Budget Office projects the Senate Finance Committee bill passed last week would raise over the next decade. The other is to adopt a long-term individual health care plan promulgated by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the so-called Class, or Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, Act. This would enable individuals to voluntarily put small portions of their paychecks into a government fund that eventually would pick up long-term health care for them. Over the next decade, it would raise money, both because of the fee and because less would be spent on Medicaid and Medicare. There may be other avenues for slapping taxes or fees on the insurance industry, which is more unpopular than ever on Capitol Hill after it issued several broadsides to the Senate Democratic bills last week. None of these considerations will be without political peril. Veteran observers have no doubt that there will be several doomsday moments, and they dismiss the notion that everything will be approved and reconciled by Thanksgiving, the target deadline. The odds are that a measure will pass \u2014 assuming Ms. Snowe stays on board \u2014 with Christmas lights and music in the background when Mr. Obama signs it.", "keyword": "Medicine and Health;Law and Legislation;Snowe Olympia J;Emanuel Rahm;Reid Harry"}
{"id": "ny0086531", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/07/26", "title": "West Wins W.N.B.A. All-Star Game", "abstract": "Maya Moore scored a record 30 points to lead the West to a 117-112 victory over the East in the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game in Uncasville, Conn.", "keyword": "Basketball;All-star game;WNBA;Maya Moore"}
{"id": "ny0284297", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/07/25", "title": "Google Races to Catch Up in Cloud Computing", "abstract": "When it comes to cloud computing, Google is in a very unfamiliar position: seriously behind. Google is chasing Amazon and Microsoft for control of the next generation of business technology, in enormous cloud-computing data centers. Cloud systems are cheap and flexible, and companies are quickly shifting their technologies for that environment. According to analysts at Gartner , the global cloud-computing business will be worth $67 billion by 2020, compared with $23 billion at the end of this year. \u201cThe world\u2019s biggest maker of computer servers is making machines just for these guys,\u201d said John Lovelock, a cloud analyst at Gartner. \u201cIt\u2019s the nexus of things like big data, social networks and mobility, and the next big thing, which is artificial intelligence.\u201d For Google, a loss in cloud computing would be a rare misstep for a company that revolutionized media with its advertising business, and then made the world\u2019s leading smartphone operating system. A victory for Google, however, could change how we work, turning advanced computing into an everyday utility that we use to run factories, interact in virtual reality or read one another\u2019s emotions. Given Google\u2019s track record, it\u2019s worth considering the prospect. But it will be an uphill climb. Amazon Web Services , which began its cloud product a decade ago, remains the leader. The company took in $2.6 billion, 9 percent of Amazon\u2019s sales, in the first quarter of 2016. Profits from the service made up 56 percent of Amazon\u2019s operating income. Those numbers may well be higher when Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings on Thursday. Microsoft styled itself a cloud company, too, and the company said last week that revenue from Azure , its cloud business, which was founded in 2010, rose 100 percent over the last year. Cloud technology also figures in crucial businesses like Office 365 . In contrast, Google Cloud Platform does not even figure in the earnings reports of Alphabet, Google\u2019s parent company. That has to sting, since the company owns perhaps the largest network of computers on the planet, spending close to $10 billion a year to handle services like search, Gmail and YouTube. Google is moving rapidly to change things. Three announcements it made last week show how it hopes to gain ground on Amazon Web Services and Azure. First, the company said it has used artificial intelligence to cut the power use in its data centers 15 percent, a huge decrease considering how efficient these data factories were already. Power is probably the largest single cost for all three of the cloud companies. Google is almost certain to use its savings to reduce prices, much the way it won in search advertising by figuring out its competitors\u2019 costs, then undercutting them. That ability to find energy efficiency may be a powerful tool to sell to others over Google Compute. Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied artificial intelligence at the company\u2019s DeepMind subsidiary, said the techniques could be used at power plants, refineries and other big industrial systems. \u201cThis certainly gives Google an edge,\u201d he said. \u201cOther people focused on narrow problems. We\u2019ve focused on the widest possible problem.\u201d Google also released for public use ways to transcribe and analyze recorded speech for things like meaning, emotional content and whether a speaker was happy or sad. An outside company that worked on the project \u2014 Google would not say which one \u2014 used it to analyze over two billion minutes of customer service calls. It works in 80 languages, Google said. At the same time, the company moved its customers on the United States West Coast from a data center in Iowa to facilities in Oregon. Google\u2019s network, which it claims is larger than the internet, can send the equivalent of 375 hours of video a second. A move like that only makes sense when a company wants to offer the kind of split-second performance needed for virtual reality or instantaneous customer interactions over networks of cellphones and sensors. At a recent conference at Amazon Web Services for software developers, an executive from iRobot , which makes the Roomba vacuuming robot, talked about using the cloud to map homes and human behavior in houses with potentially \u201chundreds\u201d of connected devices. Doing something like that would require instantaneous connections. Can faster networks, lower prices and lots of artificial intelligence put Google ahead? Amazon\u2019s lead seems to give it an edge for at least the next couple of years, as its cloud branch has perfected a method of developing hundreds of new cloud features annually. Yet while the company appears to have some basic artificial intelligence features, called machine learning, it seems to have little in the way of speech recognition or translation. Mr. Lovelock, the Gartner analyst, predicted that Google would offer businesses the insights it has gained from years of watching people online. \u201cAmazon views the customer as the person paying the bill, while Google believes the customer is the end user of a service,\u201d he said. And Microsoft is promoting itself as the company that has products customers already know and use. \u201cEveryone has to play to the strengths the market already sees they have,\u201d Mr. Lovelock said.", "keyword": "Cloud computing;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Artificial intelligence;Data center;Google;Amazon;Microsoft"}
{"id": "ny0195812", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/10/18", "title": "Despite Poor Image, Pedicabs Are Clean Transportation", "abstract": "The bride stood out against the backdrop of Central Park: The temperature was in the 50s, yet she had nothing more on her torso than a lace bustier. Below, her dress was as voluminous as an inflated parachute, dragging as she hobbled along the path. I was gliding along comfortably in the back of a pedicab, with plenty of room next to me on the seat. So I offered her a lift. The look she gave me was not gratitude. After a few more friendly entreaties, the groom caught up to us. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t want to,\u201d he said. With that, they turned off the path and she hobbled onward, juggling various hems. I was stunned. Did she just reject my chivalrous offer? Could I possibly look that weird? Then I thought: Oh wait, she\u2019s seen the video. If you have not caught it on YouTube or the evening news, the video shows a pedicab driver getting into a brawl with a taxi driver on Broadway, and it has given pedicabs \u2014 already viewed as suspect \u2014 an unwelcome moment in the spotlight. In June, one got into an accident after crossing the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn, where pedicabs are not allowed in the first place. By the time a Fox 5 cameraman caught the pedicab driver hurling a garbage can at the taxi driver, the whole fleet was in for a whupping. Now the City Council has passed a law requiring all pedicabs \u2014 there\u2019s no reliable figure for how many are on the road \u2014 to be inspected and registered by Nov. 20. \u201cPedicabs have been for too long acting like they rule the streets ahead of any other mode of transportation,\u201d City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr. told The New York Post. Having never thought to ride one \u2014 any more than one of those ridiculous party bikes (which probably are fun if you\u2019re drunk enough to get on) \u2014 I had to wonder, could pedicabs really be that bad? Worse even than buses, the oblivious, lumbering bullies of the city streets? So I spent a few days being driven around on three wheels, and even on occasion taking the handlebars myself. Let\u2019s just say I do better in the back than in the front. The drivers who congregate at 58th Street and Seventh Avenue said they were delighted someone was finally going to regulate their business. They take their jobs seriously, and say people who don\u2019t should be kept off the road. Bernard Treanor, a driver for six years, has an impeccable pedigree: He trained with George Bliss, an industrial designer, who started one of the city\u2019s first pedicab companies in 1995. \u201cWe were all actors and musicians,\u201d said Mr. Treanor, who recently appeared in an independent film and is writing a novel about Central Park. \u201cWe needed to do this so we could hit our auditions.\u201d Today, many drivers are recent immigrants who rent pedicabs by the week (around $200 in summer, as low as $80 in January). Before, \u201cthe only thing in these guys\u2019 way was maybe, like, a random goat,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd now they\u2019re guiding a family through Times Square?\u201d It\u2019s turning police officers, who used to cheer him on, into enemies, he said. I felt a little silly the first time I climbed into the back seat, but despite the autumn chill I warmed to it quickly. As with riding a bicycle, you see things at that pace that you can\u2019t see from a car, and you get to put your feet up in a way you obviously can\u2019t while walking. If your driver is full of interesting historical information, great, sit back and learn. If not, tell him to shut up (but apologize with a tip). After a few rides, I persuaded a driver to let me try. It\u2019s hard to keep the wheel straight, and during turns I kept thinking it was going to tip over, as a bicycle might. (A girly shriek ensued.) Of course there\u2019s almost no way to tip over: the vehicles are solidly balanced on three wheels, with a lot of ballast keeping them that way. Especially if your driver hops in the back, as mine eventually did, then invites his friend in, too. By that point I was laughing too hard to go very far. I got no tip. More seriously, it\u2019s about as green a conveyance as anyone is ever going to find. But what do the tourists who typically ride them care about keeping our streets and our air clear? Perhaps, I started to think, pedicabs are being wasted on their passengers \u2014 and perhaps that is part of the reason they\u2019re largely reviled. What if New Yorkers exercised eminent domain and reclaimed these overgrown tricycles for our own daily use? To lead the way, I tried hiring a pedicab to run a few errands: dry cleaning, deli, the basics. Fine. But when I thought about visiting Aunt Frances at Mount Sinai Hospital, I found that at about $1 per minute or per block, what would be $15 in a taxi would be a trip to the A.T.M. in a pedicab. Fail. I turned to Mr. Bliss for guidance. \u201cThe goal when I started this was that the pedicabs would actually be less money than a yellow cab,\u201d he said. He began that experiment downtown, where he thought people would be open to the idea, but he found they were too self-conscious to ride in a pedicab. It worked for a while in Midtown, but today, he said, sounding melancholy to the point of despair, the dream is dead. \u201cThe pedicab industry itself became self-marginalizing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt became more and more tourist oriented, less transportation oriented. We need drivers who are educated, fluent in languages. They need to be ambassadors to the city.\u201d We also need stricter regulation of the fleet, he said, and electric-assisted pedicabs \u2014 which he developed with a state grant, but the city does not allow. In short, we need the city to decide that a fleet of law-abiding, low-cost vehicles that consume no gas, is in everyone\u2019s interest. Take that to its logical conclusion and you get people commuting by rickshaw, exchanging newspaper sections with the guy in the next lane at a red light. Kids picked up after school by a parent on three wheels who has already stopped for groceries. A bride in Central Park accepting a lift from a pushy but well-meaning stranger. Wouldn\u2019t you like to live in that city? It seems a lot of people would say no. In 2007, a city councilman was quoted in the Village Voice saying that pedicabs caused pollution by increasing congestion. Perhaps he\u2019s right; perhaps pedicabs and cars cannot coexist in Manhattan. Maybe it\u2019s not safe to have three wheels darting in and out of four-wheel traffic. Maybe the time has come to make a change. How about we get rid of the cars?", "keyword": "Pedicabs (Bicycle Taxis);Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0232295", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/08/18", "title": "Axe Music Brand Introduced With Mystery Concerts", "abstract": "WITH the possible exception of zookeepers trying to breed pandas in captivity, surely no one mentions \u201cmating\u201d more than marketers at Axe, the men\u2019s grooming brand whose racy advertisements promise young men that women will find them irresistible if they use their products. \u201cAxe is all about being a guy\u2019s wingman and helping him as he navigates the mating game,\u201d said Mike Dwyer, a marketing director at Unilever . Now, to promote a new fragrance, Axe Music, which will be available in a body spray, shower gel and shampoo, the brand is staging four mystery concerts in major cities, with the artists and sites announced only shortly beforehand. The first show, featuring the rapper T. I. and unannounced guests who included Mary J. Blige, took place on Monday at Capitale in Manhattan. The brand trickled out the information in the days leading up to the show on its Web site, TheAxeEffect.com , as well as on its Facebook page and through Twitter messages, where followers entered drawings to attend and were encouraged to bring a date. T.I., who has about 4.2 million fans on Facebook, also announced details of the concert shortly before the show on Facebook and on his Web site, Trapmuzik.com . \u201cSomething like 85 of the top 100 songs downloaded from iTunes are about relationships or the opposite sex, and the heart of Axe is about bringing guys and girls together, so the play here is how can we get into lifestyle or popular culture in a way that it connects and is highly relevant with our target?\u201d Mr. Dwyer said. The target demographic for the brand is men ages 18 to 24. \u201cWe hope they bring a girl, because this will be a place for the mating game to happen,\u201d said Heather Mitchell, a Unilever spokeswoman. \u201cThe idea is that we want to inherently be part of a place where the mating game happens because we want to be a lifestyle brand.\u201d \u0095 A television commercial, by the New York office of Razorfish, part of the Publicis Groupe, will have its premiere on Monday and will promote Axe Music products and the mystery concerts. It shows a man in his 20s attending a T.I. concert \u2014 with three attractive women. The scent, described in promotional materials as having \u201cyouthful, fruity and aromatic notes with sexy leather undertones and edgy wood accords,\u201d will carry a suggested retail price of $4.99 for both the deodorant body spray (4 ounces) and shampoo (12 ounces), and $3.99 for the shower gel (12 ounces). It is not the brand\u2019s first appeal to after-hours revelers. This is the second consecutive summer that it has christened a club in Southampton previously known as Dune as the Axe Lounge, a sponsorship akin to naming-rights deals for sports stadiums. The Axe logo is festooned on the venue\u2019s menu, valet tickets and D.J. booth, and clubgoers sample its products in the bathrooms. What the brand calls pop-up versions of the Axe Lounge have been staged elsewhere for shorter durations, including one in Miami in February while the city hosted the Super Bowl . The market for men\u2019s grooming products grew to $4.83 billion in 2009, from $2.38 billion in 1997, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm. Axe is widely credited for driving much of that growth, all but creating the male body spray category and continuing to enter categories that mainstream men\u2019s brands have historically avoided, most recently hair care, with Axe introducing shampoo in 2008. Since it was introduced in the United States in 2002, Axe has grown to dominate the deodorant body spray market, with a 36.7 percent share in 2009, from just 9.9 percent. The current share is far ahead of Tag, a Procter & Gamble brand, with a 9.9 percent share. \u0095 In the shower gel category, however, Axe has been overtaken by Old Spice, also a Procter & Gamble brand. This is partly because of the success of two commercials \u2014 the first released in February and the second in June \u2014 that feature the chiseled actor Isaiah Mustafa as the Old Spice Man and that have garnered more than 31 million views on YouTube combined. In the four weeks ended July 12, 2009, Axe had a 7.7 percent share of the overall liquid body wash market, and Old Spice, 6.2 percent, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. In the four weeks ended this July 11, Axe\u2019s share had slipped to 5.9 percent, and Old Spice\u2019s had climbed to 10.1 percent. Axe spent a total of $125 million on advertising in 2009, and Old Spice spent $36 million, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Coming Axe Music shows will be in Los Angeles in September, Chicago in October and Las Vegas in November, with the brand revealing the performers, sites and dates in stages beginning a few days before each. The brand\u2019s Web site and Facebook page, meanwhile, will feature video from previous shows. \u201cThis is something unique and quite talk-worthy in social media and digital space,\u201d Mr. Dwyer of Axe said. \u201cBut we think that the real sizzle will come from whether you\u2019re at the show or not.\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Axe;Unilever N.V;Music;Axe Music"}
{"id": "ny0104115", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/03/26", "title": "Rushworth M. Kidder, Ethicist, Dies at 67", "abstract": "Rushworth M. Kidder, an academic-turned-journalist who founded a research institute dedicated to mapping approaches to ethical dilemmas and propounded his ideas in books, speeches and seminars, died on March 5 at a nursing home in Davie, Fla. He was 67. His daughter Heather said the cause had not been determined. Mr. Kidder, a Christian Scientist, was not treated by a doctor, she said. Mr. Kidder taught that thorny moral decisions rarely involved choosing right over wrong; rather, he said, they often demanded selecting among various \u201cright\u201d solutions. Making ethical judgments, he said, included balancing considerations like truth versus loyalty and short-term versus long-term effects. He urged that people think through such matters regularly to achieve \u201cethical fitness.\u201d In 1990 he founded the Institute for Global Ethics in Rockport, Me., to spread his message through seminars and workshops at corporations and schools. A nonprofit organization, the institute also opened offices in London and New York. Mr. Kidder was its president. He wrote a dozen books, most about ethical concerns. In one, \u201c How Good People Make Tough Choices ,\u201d published in 1995, he confronted readers with hypothetical workplace situations, asking them to make decisions as a boss (addressing the reader as \u201cyou\u201d). One example: Your office manager confesses that she stole money from the office account to buy medicine for her ailing father. Her father has died, and she offers you a check from the insurance proceeds to pay you back. After you cash the check, do you fire her or forgive her? Mr. Kidder did not give definite answers to his questions, advising that the good of an individual must be weighed against the good of an organization. But he did say that mercy was usually a higher value than justice. Former President Jimmy Carter called the book, which was revised and reissued in 2009, \u201ca thought-provoking guide to enlightened and progressive personal behavior.\u201d Rushworth Moulton Kidder was born in Providence, R.I., on May 8, 1944. His father, George, was a biochemistry professor at Amherst College; his mother, the former Ruth Rushworth, was her husband\u2019s lab assistant. Mr. Kidder graduated with honors from Amherst and earned a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia. He taught English for 12 years at Wichita State University in Kansas. His first two books were about Dylan Thomas and E. E. Cummings. In an interview with the reference book Contemporary Authors, he said he had been interested in their capacity for writing poems of praise without cynicism or sentimentality. After leaving Wichita, he joined The Christian Science Monitor, for which he had already contributed articles. He became the newspaper\u2019s London correspondent and was later a columnist. His interest in ethics was partly inspired by a series of interviews he did for The Monitor with leading thinkers, like the historian Barbara W. Tuchman. Mr. Kidder lived in Naples, Fla., where he and his wife moved last year from Lincolnville, Me. In addition to his daughter Heather, he is survived by his wife of 46 years, the former Anne Elizabeth Davidson, and another daughter, Abby. For all the nuance Mr. Kidder advocated in thinking about ethics, he could be stern in his moral judgments. When former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was awaiting trial on corruption charges in 2010, Mr. Kidder told The New York Times that the governor demonstrated society\u2019s failure to teach morals . \u201cAs such, he\u2019s the perfect outcome of our ethical indifference and a role model for the next generation,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Kidder Rushworth M;Institute for Global Ethics;Ethics (Institutional);Deaths (Obituaries);Ethics (Personal)"}
{"id": "ny0240396", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/12/01", "title": "India's Economy Expands 8.9 Percent", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India\u2019s economy grew 8.9 percent in its fiscal second quarter compared to the same period a year earlier, the Central Statistical Organization said Tuesday, as farm output and manufacturing expanded. The annual gross domestic product figure for the July-September period was far above Reuters analysts\u2019 forecast of 8.3 percent growth and was greater than the 8.8 percent expansion in the fiscal first quarter. The manufacturing sector, in the domestic demand-driven Indian economy, rose 9.8 percent in the second quarter, supported by strong output and rural demand, while the farm sector grew 4.4 percent from a year earlier. Private spending in the quarter was up 9.3 percent from the year-earlier period, from 7.8 percent in the previous quarter, although investment grew at 11.1 percent, slowing from 19 percent in the first fiscal quarter. The strong G.D.P. growth comes despite a series of interest rate increases by the central bank this year to fight inflation, and the latest reading puts more pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to tighten monetary policy again. \u201cGovernor Subbarao has strongly hinted that the R.B.I. will take a break from raising policy rates for the next one or two months, but the strong growth numbers today may change his mind,\u201d said Brian Jackson, strategist at the Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong. \u201cInflation is still the number one policy focus, and we continue to expect more rate hikes in the months ahead, perhaps as soon as the next meeting in December,\u201d he said. But signs of easing inflation, a fragile global economy and weaker industrial output in September were likely to forestall any rise in rates for the rest of 2010, some analysts said. Industrial output, which is a key indicator of growth momentum, rose 4.4 percent in September from the year-earlier period, slowing from 6.9 percent annual growth in August. \u201cUnless the full-year growth looks likely to cross 9 percent, the central bank is unlikely to get aggressive again in raising rates,\u201c said Anjali Varma, an economist at MF Global in Mumbai. \u201cI do not expect any more rate hikes in this fiscal year. We also have to look at how industrial production fares going ahead, as that has started slowing down only now.\u201d Prime Minister Manmohan Singh\u2019s government is under pressure to rein in inflation while keeping the economy on a high growth trajectory. The government, which is hopeful of achieving growth of at least 8.5 percent this fiscal year, which ends March 31, has said it expected headline inflation to ease to around 6 percent by the end of March thanks to easing food prices and higher interest rates. India\u2019s annual headline inflation fell to 8.58 percent in October to its lowest level in 10 months, while food inflation slowed for a sixth consecutive week in mid-November.", "keyword": "India;Gross Domestic Product;Economic Conditions and Trends;Inflation (Economics)"}
{"id": "ny0183608", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/12/24", "title": "Just Don\u2019t Expect Them at the Early-Bird Sale", "abstract": "At 3 a.m. in New York City, there is a lot you can legally do, but it is not exactly a wonderland. You can ride the subway. You can watch your clothes twirl around in a dryer at an all-night Laundromat. You can buy a pack of cigarettes and a bag of chips at a 24-hour deli. So there was something unusual, maybe even thrilling, about walking through the largest department store in the world at that bleary-eyed hour and shopping for designer handbags, children\u2019s clothes, jewelry and perfume. If you wanted to buy those leather Michael Kors wedge-heel boots for $279 at 3:47 a.m., you could. It was at a slightly more reasonable hour (shortly after 2 a.m.) that a Brooklyn man in a Jets T-shirt, Luis Negron, 40, strolled through the first-floor men\u2019s department at Macy\u2019s Herald Square on Saturday. The store was in the middle of an 83-hour holiday shopping marathon, opening its doors Friday at 7 a.m. and keeping them open until Monday at 6 p.m., the first time that Macy\u2019s 105-year-old flagship store on West 34th Street has been open around the clock. Mr. Negron\u2019s shift as a surgical technician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan had ended about 11 p.m. Friday, and now here he was a few hours later with his wife, Betsy, shopping for last-minute gifts with thousands of other New Yorkers and tourists. \u201cI got Granny a juicer, because she\u2019s trying to live to 100,\u201d he said. \u201cI got my father some belts. Nieces, perfumes. My brother-in-law, you know, he just went to D.C. He got a job at the Treasury Department, so we got him some corporate shirts.\u201d Mr. Negron and other shoppers, many of whom said they worked night shifts, seemed appreciative, even downright grateful, that one of the city\u2019s busiest stores was reaching out to their often-overlooked demographic: night-owl procrastinators. They disputed the old saw about the city that never sleeps. \u201cYou can\u2019t go shopping,\u201d Mr. Negron said of New York\u2019s usual nighttime options. \u201cSometimes when you get out of work there is nothing open. Do you know how many times I\u2019ve bought my wife birthday presents at Walgreens or Eckerd? It\u2019s embarrassing. It\u2019s either that or go to the Village, and what am I going to get, a bong?\u201d Throughout the predawn hours Saturday, from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., Macy\u2019s was packed with shoppers. Some happened to be walking by and noticed that the store was open. Some heard about the extended hours on the news and drove in from New Jersey. There were two American Red Cross workers in their red jackets, on their lunch break. There was a group of young men and women who had come from Australia and a couple from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who had come from a Laundromat. As holiday music played on the sound system and sales clerks worked the cash registers, Macy\u2019s seemed a brightly lighted, timeless world unto itself. \u201cThat\u2019s a really classic watch,\u201d a clerk told a woman trying on a watch at 2:43 a.m. A few minutes later, another woman, clutching two shopping bags, talked on her cellphone while stepping onto one of the store\u2019s old wooden escalators. \u201cIt\u2019s the city,\u201d said another shopper with a shrug, as she stood at a bank of cash registers on the seventh floor. \u201cEverybody\u2019s up this late.\u201d Everybody, that is, except for the boy who slept soundly in the stroller she was pushing. Indeed, as the hours passed, the real miracle on 34th Street seemed simply staying awake. Dr. Puneet Nath, a pediatrician from Cambridge, England, leaned his head against the wall outside some fitting rooms on the third floor, where his sister was trying on clothes. He had been visiting for several days and was already accustomed to New York time, which at that moment was 4:37 a.m. \u201cWe\u2019re here since midnight, so don\u2019t ask,\u201d Dr. Nath explained. Macy\u2019s Herald Square was one of eight of the retail chain\u2019s stores in New York City and New Jersey taking part in the marathon. One of those stores, at the Queens Center mall in Elmhurst, stayed open even longer, beginning its promotion one day earlier, on Thursday. At the Queens Macy\u2019s, Saturday\u2019s predawn crowd included a 20-year-old student who said he was just \u201cwasting time\u201d with his friends after they became bored with their poker game, and a uniformed emergency medical technician who offered a suggestion for store management. \u201cThey should give out free coffee when you walk in the door,\u201d said the E.M.T., Sonia Agard, 34, who was at the store about 3 a.m. Amit Mahabir, 28, a doorman at a Manhattan building, was considering taking a sick day from work so he could do his holiday shopping. But he and an elevator operator he works with went to Queens after their shift ended at 1 a.m., and he bought his wife a Coach watch for $431. \u201cShe deserves it,\u201d he said. In Manhattan, the commercial activity \u2014 and the coherence of some of the customers \u2014 seemed to reach a temporary lull around 4 a.m. Some sections of the store, including the floors selling furniture and holiday decorations, had just a handful of shoppers, and though the store was busy, there were none of the long lines and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds typical in the daytime holiday rush. At this hour, there were instances of what might be called B.W.I., or buying while intoxicated. One man with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth had trouble standing while trying to purchase some items at a designer handbag counter. He leaned on his two female friends for support. After the cashier rang up the items, he was told the amount: $884. \u201cWhy?\u201d he muttered. His mood seemed to sour, and he and his friends mumbled to one another and left without buying the handbags. Meanwhile, Michele Harshall stood at a counter near the store\u2019s Broadway entrance. Her husband had told her to wait there while he went shopping for her surprise gift. But there was another reason why she was in Macy\u2019s at 4:15 a.m. \u201cWe kind of had one too many drinks,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Macy's Incorporated;Holidays and Special Occasions;Retail Stores and Trade;Herald Square (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0047871", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/11/26", "title": "U.S.-Led Raid Frees 8 Qaeda Hostages From a Yemeni Cave", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In a predawn raid on Tuesday, United States Special Operations commandos and Yemeni troops rescued eight hostages being held in a cave in a remote part of eastern Yemen by Al Qaeda\u2019s affiliate there, officials from both countries said. The freed captives were six Yemeni citizens, a Saudi and an Ethiopian, who were unharmed, Yemeni officials said in a statement. Earlier reports that an American hostage was freed were incorrect, according to Yemeni and American officials. About two dozen United States commandos, joined by a small number of American-trained Yemeni counterterrorism troops flew secretly by helicopter to a location in Hadhramaut Province near the Saudi border, according to American and Yemeni officials. The commandos then hiked some distance in the dark to a mountainside cave, where they surprised the militants holding the captives. An ensuing shootout left seven of the Qaeda militants dead, the officials said. The hostages were then evacuated in helicopters. The rare and risky dash into Qaeda-infested territory was organized fairly quickly, within two weeks of a request from President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen to help rescue the captives, one American official said. The operation appeared to be at least partly an attempt to bolster the stature of Mr. Hadi, a committed but wobbling United States ally whose authority was badly undermined when a rebel group suddenly seized control of Yemen\u2019s capital in September. In an apparent effort to play down the leading American role in the clandestine operation, the Pentagon referred questions about what had happened to the Yemeni government. \u201cI would just tell you we continue to support Yemeni counterterrorism efforts and would refer you to them to talk to any operations,\u201d Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. A statement from the Yemeni government made no mention of any American role in the hostage rescue, which is one of the principal missions of Joint Special Operations Command troops like the Army\u2019s Delta Force or the Navy\u2019s SEAL Team Six. With militias gaining ground and Yemen\u2019s political order upended, Mr. Hadi has increasingly seemed like a bystander to arguments and violence beyond his control. He came to power two years ago after Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down as part of an internationally brokered deal. Mr. Saleh, who was president for 33 years and remains a powerful political broker, was widely suspected of aiding the ascent of the rebel group, known as the Houthis. The Houthis, whose leaders come from the minority Zaydi sect, a branch of Shiite Islam, had fought six wars against Yemen\u2019s central government before they swept into the capital, Sana, in September. Seizing on popular anger with Mr. Hadi\u2019s government, Houthi fighters took over government buildings, state media facilities and military bases. The military broke apart, some units appeared to side with the rebels, and the prime minister abruptly resigned. Since storming Sana, the Houthis have sought to consolidate their power, including by vanquishing their Islamist political enemies. They have also eclipsed the military at the vanguard of the battle against Sunni extremists of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with the Houthi fighters engaging the extremists on a growing number of fronts across Yemen. The fighting has led to fears of an escalating sectarian war. The Houthis\u2019 ascendance has angered Al Qaeda, which views Shiites as heretics and the Houthis as pawns of Iran. Houthi fighters have been making advances outside Sana, taking over cities, apparently with the agreement of the local authorities. All the while, in southern Yemen, a movement calling for independence for the south has threatened a more forceful effort to press its demands. Earlier this month, in another attempt to bolster Mr. Hadi, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on two Houthi leaders, as well as Mr. Saleh. The United States\u2019 action, though, seemed only to prompt new controversy and further isolate Mr. Hadi. The captives were held in Hadhramaut, Yemen\u2019s largest province and a sparsely populated region where vast spaces outside its cities are beyond the government\u2019s control. Long known for its fierce independence, the oil-rich province has also struggled in recent years with a security vacuum. It has become the stage for a growing number of shadowy militant attacks on the security forces, for which the government blames Al Qaeda. And the province, which stretches from the Gulf of Aden in the south to the desolate Empty Quarter near the border with Saudi Arabia, has also been the site of repeated strikes by missile-firing United States drones. The Supreme Security Committee in Yemen said in a statement carried on the official Saba agency that one of those freed was Khalil al-Mekhlafi, who was kidnapped from the southern province of Bayda in June 2013. Mr. Mekhlafi holds a doctorate in computer science from China and lectures at Al Bayda University. According to Mr. Mekhlafi\u2019s friends, he was abducted along with two of his colleagues after finishing classes last year. Prof. Sailan Al Arami, president of Al Bayda, said Mr. Mekhlafi was installed as a teacher at the university last year after serving for months at a police academy in the capital. But a local journalist who has followed Mr. Mekhlafi\u2019s abduction said that Qaeda militants had kidnapped him because they thought he had expertise in making explosives, and because he had worked as a police officer. \u201cThey think that he would help them making bombs,\u201d said the journalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. The official statement did not say whether the freed Saudi citizen was Abdullah al-Khalidi, a Saudi diplomat who was kidnapped from the port city of Aden in 2012 and has appeared on Qaeda videos, appealing to his government to secure his release. A spokesman at the Saudi Embassy in Washington said he had no information about the Saudi who was reportedly released.", "keyword": "Yemen;Kidnapping and Hostages;Rescue;Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula;Terrorism;US Military;US Special Operations Command;Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi;Houthis;Khalil al-Mekhlafi"}
{"id": "ny0138977", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/02/05", "title": "For Each Side, Outcome Is Difficult to Process", "abstract": "Phoenix Early Monday morning, I received a telephone message from Marlin Briscoe. The Magician simply said, \u201cWe did it.\u201d Briscoe was a receiver on the undefeated Miami Dolphins team in 1972. He and his Dolphins teammates have fiercely guarded their undefeated legacy. They have actively pulled for a Patriots loss. The old Fish got their wish Sunday, although fate made them wait out the final minutes, final seconds and final play to ensure that their legacy was kept intact. What an extraordinary game: a hard-hitting defensive struggle in the first half, a relative offensive burst in the second. Tom Brady and Eli Manning led fourth-quarter scoring drives, and all over the field, players \u2014 heralded and unheralded \u2014 made clutch plays. My heart was with the Giants, but I must confess that in the back of my mind I wanted to see New England make history. I wanted to witness a perfect season. Sports is one of the few areas of endeavor in which perfection can be measured. But achieving perfection is rare because it requires good fortune as well as skill and execution. On a crucial third-down play Sunday, the Patriots nearly sacked Manning; he miraculously got away and threw a pass to David Tyree, who made a circus catch. A month ago, Manning probably would have gone down, or Tyree probably would not have made the catch. \u201cThat play was representative of us not really getting the breaks that we were used to getting,\u201d Patriots safety Rodney Harrison said. \u0095 In the closing seconds of Sunday\u2019s game, I felt as if I\u2019d watched a pitcher carry a perfect game into the bottom of the ninth, then give up a game-winning home run. Perfect game lost; game lost. Worse, the pitcher forfeits any claim to posterity because people rarely remember who finishes second. Ellis Hobbs, the Patriots cornerback who failed to stop the winning touchdown pass, said: \u201cThe season means nothing now. It means nothing to me. When you put a win together, when you continually put wins together with so many people not wanting you to win, to lose at the end just hurts. You know, it is all for nothing.\u201d Who saw this victory coming? The morning after, the Giants and the Patriots walked around here in a daze. People \u2014 fans, reporters, friends and family of players \u2014 were still trying to get their minds around it: a hot, perfectly balanced Giants team lit into the unbeaten Patriots with fury and total irreverence. I felt that the game had the potential to be a classic because of the intersecting realities: a surging Giants team, an undefeated Patriots team simultaneously going for posterity and a fourth Super Bowl championship. Beyond that, this Super Bowl was personal, very personal. The teams had played a few weeks earlier in East Rutherford, N.J., where New England won. The rematch reminded me of one of those A.F.L.-N.F.L. Super Bowl games between 1967 and 1970, when the N.F.L. didn\u2019t think the A.F.L. belonged on the same field. Willie Lanier, a Hall of Fame middle linebacker, was the anchor of a Chiefs defense that mauled heavily favored Minnesota in Super Bowl IV. \u201cWe were underdogs by 13 or 14 points \u2014 like the Giants,\u201d Lanier said Monday in a telephone interview. \u201cThe general feeling \u2014 about our league and our team \u2014 was that we didn\u2019t have the ability to perform. The essence of competition is: Give us a chance to be on the same field and we will show you.\u201d What does this championship mean for the Giants? Are they a team that got hot and simply surprised the field? Or is this the beginning of an era of dominance? At the very least, we know that the Giants \u2014 especially the defensive line that terrorized Brady \u2014 will be the object of every offensive coordinator in the N.F.L. The Giants themselves will receive the Patriots treatment. Every Patriots game this season became the opponent\u2019s Super Bowl. As the Patriots\u2019 victories began to pile up, teams that had nothing to play for played New England as if their season depended on it. New England took everybody\u2019s best shot. They took the Giants\u2019 best shot in the regular-season finale. On Sunday, the Patriots took even harder shots from the Giants, and Brady felt every one of them. The Giants were sky high against the Patriots and shifted into continually higher ranges of intensity. New England, which had been shifting gears all season, simply ran out of emotional gears. When team after team attempts to run down the Giants next season, how many gears will they have? \u0095 In New England, the Patriots\u2019 legacy, moving forward, is a mixed bag. They were 18-0 but stumbled at the finish line. Now there is simmering controversy about allegations of improper taping. Despite that, anyone with heart has to feel a tinge of compassion. New England was undefeated through 18 games this season, but today the team is left with no trophy and a haunting question. How did an otherwise perfect season end so imperfectly?", "keyword": "New England Patriots;Super Bowl;Football;National Football League;Brady Tom;Manning Eli"}
{"id": "ny0225794", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2010/10/10", "title": "Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Reactor Talks Falter", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Constellation Energy said on Saturday that it had reached an impasse in negotiations for a federal loan guarantee to build a proposed third nuclear reactor at its Calvert Cliffs site near Washington. The decision would appear to kill the project unless Congress or the White House steps in. Constellation said in a letter to the Energy Department that the Office of Management and Budget was seeking a fee of $880 million on a guarantee of about $7.6 billion, which it said would doom the project, \u201cor the economics of any nuclear project, for that matter.\u201d The fee is to compensate taxpayers for the risk of default. The company argues that because the plant\u2019s model is being proven in Finland, France and China, and because it has a strong partner, \u00c9lectricit\u00e9 de France, the fee should be 1 to 2 percent. The project had once been hailed as a cornerstone of a nuclear power renaissance. In 2005, President George W. Bush spoke at Calvert Cliffs, the first presidential visit to a nuclear plant in 30 years. \u201cIt is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again,\u201d he said. The last successful groundbreaking for a nuclear reactor in the United States was in 1973. The federal government authorized a loan guarantee program in 2005 intended to spur nuclear power development, and Congress agreed to finance it in 2007. So far, however, only one guarantee has been issued, for two new units at the Southern Company\u2019s Vogtle plant, near Waynesboro, Ga. Ground has been broken there, and also for two more reactors across the Savannah River in South Carolina, a project that is proceeding without loan guarantees. But a variety of utilities around the country have stepped back from plans to build reactors. Constellation, which serves a large area of Maryland and owns generating plants nationwide, announced its decision Saturday after the impasse was reported by The Washington Post. On Saturday, James L. Connaughton, executive vice president of Constellation and an environmental official in the Bush White House, stopped short of saying the project was dead. \u201cWe were in the middle of discussions,\u201d he said. The government had proposed a lower fee if Constellation agreed to buy three-quarters of the power and Constellation and EDF guaranteed completion of the plant, said Mr. Connaughton, but he said those conditions were too onerous. The site in question is 40 miles south of the District of Columbia where Baltimore Gas & Electric, a predecessor to Constellation, finished two reactors in the 1970s. They remain in operation. In a statement, EDF said it was \u201cextremely disappointed and shocked to learn that Constellation has unilaterally decided to withdraw from the Calvert Cliffs 3 project.\u201d It added, \u201cWe were at the finish line with the Department of Energy and were making significant progress.\u201d Constellation said EDF would have to decide whether to proceed alone, although by law it needs an American partner. The companies had hoped to build a series of identical reactors around the United States, with local partners. A spokeswoman for the Energy Department said they were surprised by Constellation\u2019s announcement. Constellation had been hinting for weeks that it had reservations. In September, Mayo Shattuck, the company\u2019s chief executive, speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Washington, referred to the differences in economics between Calvert Cliffs and the Vogtle plant. The Georgia plant, he said, falls under traditional regulations that pass the costs of construction on to power customers; Calvert Cliffs, he said, was in a \u201cmerchant\u201d environment, where companies build at their own risk, and sell power at market rates. Experts have pointed out that the current economic climate is not favorable to nuclear construction, in part because the price of natural gas is so low. Congress has authorized loan guarantees of up to $18.5 billion for new reactors, with $8.3 billion now earmarked for Vogtle. President Obama has proposed an additional $36 billion. The sums are simply guarantees by the government to repay lenders if the builder cannot do so. Their cost to the Treasury is unclear; if the reactors are built as planned and run profitably, the cost would be zero. In fact, the Treasury could make a profit on fees paid by the borrowers. While the negotiations are secret, Constellation has been complaining for months that the fee Treasury sought was too high.", "keyword": "Constellation Energy Group;Nuclear Energy;Energy Department;Office of Management and Budget (US);Maryland"}
{"id": "ny0254120", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/07/29", "title": "Archbishop Pietro Sambi, Vatican Envoy, Dies at 73", "abstract": "Archbishop Pietro Sambi, a career Vatican diplomat who represented the Roman Catholic Church for more than four decades in diplomatically delicate postings around the globe and served as the papal ambassador to the United States since 2005, died on Wednesday in Baltimore. He was 73. The cause was complications of lung surgery he underwent two weeks ago, Vatican Radio said. Archbishop Sambi, a gregarious, silver-haired Italian priest fluent in English, French and Spanish, was one of Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s first appointments after Benedict succeeded Pope John Paul II in 2005. In 2008, when the new pope made his first trip to the United States, Archbishop Sambi became the point man in defending the pope\u2019s controversial decision not to visit Boston, the nexus of the sexual abuse crisis among priests in the United States. Abuse victims and Cardinal Sean P. O\u2019Malley of Boston were urging a visit, but church officials privately feared there was too much danger of public protests. At the same time, Archbishop Sambi helped arrange a private meeting between a select group of victims and the pope at the official papal ambassador\u2019s residence in Washington a few days before the end of his trip. One victim at the meeting was said to have told the pope that he needed to do more about the \u201ccancer in your flock.\u201d Jason Berry, an author who was one of the first journalists to report on sexual abuse in the church, said Archbishop Sambi\u2019s sensitivity to the needs of ordinary people had made him a rare Vatican prelate. In his recent book on church finances, \u201cRender Unto Rome,\u201d Mr. Berry portrayed the archbishop as one of the few high-ranking church officials in the United States who had tried to stop dioceses from closing parishes to pay for sexual abuse court settlements. But Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org , which archives documents from the abuse scandal, said that in recent years Archbishop Sambi had lobbied the Vatican behind the scenes to appoint a number of bishops whom the group considers hostile to victims\u2019 rights. In a statement, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Archbishop Sambi had possessed both \u201ca keen sense of diplomacy cultivated through many years of service in the Vatican diplomatic corps, especially in Israel, and a pastoral sensitivity cultivated through his many years as a faithful and devoted priest.\u201d Pietro Sambi was born on June 27, 1938, in Sogliano al Rubicone, in central Italy. His father was a schoolteacher. After he was ordained a priest in 1964, he studied theology and canon law in Rome and joined the Vatican diplomatic service in 1969. He served in Cameroon, Cuba and Algeria before his appointment as charge d'affaires to Nicaragua in 1979, soon after the overthrow of the repressive government of Anastasio Somoza and the installation of the leftist Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega. Ambassador Sambi was often cast as a mediator between the many Catholic priests who held prominent offices in the Sandinista government and the Catholic bishops of Nicaragua, who opposed the priests\u2019 participation in the apparatus of a socialist state. He became an archbishop in 1985 and served for the next dozen years in Burundi and Indonesia. Archbishop Sambi became Vatican ambassador to Israel and apostolic delegate to Jerusalem in 1998. He was deeply involved in arranging Pope John Paul II\u2019s historic 2000 visit to Jerusalem, the first time any pope had visited the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. In 2007, when he was already ambassador to the United States, he stirred controversy with remarks in which he accused Israel of dragging its feet in carrying out a 1993 treaty with the Vatican over church properties and the treatment of Catholic Arabs in Jerusalem. The Vatican distanced itself from his comments.", "keyword": "Sambi Pietro;Priests;Roman Catholic Church;Deaths (Obituaries)"}
{"id": "ny0077955", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/05/15", "title": "Goodell Says He Will Hear Brady Appeal", "abstract": "Tom Brady formally appealed his four-game suspension on Thursday for his reported role in the deflation of footballs before the A.F.C. championship game in January against the Indianapolis Colts. Commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday night that he would hear the appeal. \u201cCommissioner Goodell will hear the appeal of Tom Brady\u2019s suspension in accordance with the process agreed upon with the N.F.L. Players Association in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement,\u201d Greg Aiello, an N.F.L. spokesman, told The Associated Press. Citing previous overturned punishments, the players\u2019 union had urged Goodell to appoint a neutral party to hear the appeal. \u201cGiven the N.F.L.\u2019s history of inconsistency and arbitrary decisions in disciplinary matters, it is only fair that a neutral arbitrator hear this appeal,\u201d the union said in a statement. If the league and its investigators are truly confident in its case, the union said, \u201cthey should be confident enough to present their case before someone who is truly independent.\u201d The appeal must be heard within 10 days. Brady also hired Jeffrey L. Kessler, an antitrust lawyer, to help in his defense. Kessler has worked successfully on behalf of athletes in several cases involving the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. By rule, Brady\u2019s appeal deals solely with his suspension and does not address the penalties given to the Patriots. The N.F.L. fined the Patriots, the defending Super Bowl champions, $1 million and stripped them of two draft picks, including their first-round choice in 2016. It was unclear whether the Patriots would appeal those penalties.", "keyword": "Football;Cheating;Tom Brady;Roger Goodell;Fines;Patriots"}
{"id": "ny0142276", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/11/07", "title": "Demise of Same-Sex Weddings Disheartens Businesses", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 A week before Election Day, Christopher Burnett\u2019s floral shop filled an order for one of the many same-sex weddings he has worked in the last five months: eight corsages, a dozen boutonnieres and two bouquets for the two brides, each with three dozen roses. Now, Mr. Burnett said, since Tuesday\u2019s voter approval of Proposition 8, which amended the state\u2019s Constitution to recognize only marriages between men and women, that type of business is gone. \u201cI have done a gay wedding every week,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s very disheartening, because other business is very slow.\u201d Even as opponents of the measure officially conceded defeat on Thursday, California business owners \u2014 particularly those in the marriage business \u2014 were trying to determine how many wedding cakes would now go unsold and how many tuxedos unrented. Arturo Cobos, a manager at Kard Zone in the city\u2019s traditionally gay Castro neighborhood, said he had done \u201cbig sales\u201d of same-sex wedding cards and other trinkets since marriages began in June, but had recently stopped stocking new goods. \u201cWe were afraid that they would pass Proposition 8,\u201d Mr. Cobos said, \u201cand that\u2019s exactly what happened.\u201d In Palm Springs, another gay-friendly city, Mayor Steve Pougnet said he had performed 115 same-sex weddings since June, when such ceremonies began, some of which had as many as 180 guests. By contrast, this week the city has canceled eight planned ceremonies. \u201cThat\u2019s a huge economic impact, which is gone in these difficult economic times,\u201d said Mr. Pougnet, who is openly gay and married his partner in September. Another mayor, Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, was blunt. \u201cIt\u2019s a great day for Massachusetts,\u201d Mr. Newsom said, referring to one of only two remaining states to allow same-sex marriage . The other, Connecticut, legalized such unions in October. The approval of Proposition 8 comes even as the state is suffering through another bout of bad economic news. On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who opposed Proposition 8, in part on economic grounds, announced that the state\u2019s budget deficit had already swelled to $11.2 billion for the coming year, and called the Legislature back into session and proposed higher taxes to address the budget problems. David Paisley, a San Francisco-based marketing executive with a specialty in gay tourism, said California had four of the nation\u2019s top 10 destinations for gay travelers: San Francisco, Palm Springs, Los Angeles and San Diego. Mr. Paisley said that it was too early to speculate on the exact economic impact of Proposition 8, but that some public relations damage might have already been done. \u201cCalifornia has always been perceived on the vanguard of gay-friendly destinations,\u201d he said. \u201cWell, when a ballot measure passes says it\u2019s not, it\u2019s terrible publicity for gay and lesbian tourism.\u201d Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind Proposition 8, said any potential impact, or the specter of bad press, was overstated. \u201cThis is an issue of restoring the institution of marriage as it always existed,\u201d said Mr. Schubert, noting that same-sex marriage had only briefly been legal. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that returning to the history of 4,000 years before that is going to cause an economic upheaval.\u201d In June, the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which studies sexual orientation and the law, estimated that legalizing same-sex ceremonies in the state would result in about $63.8 million in government tax and fee revenue over three years. Several civil rights and gay rights groups said Thursday that they had asked the State Supreme Court, which legalized same-sex marriage in May, to bar the carrying out of Proposition 8, which went into effect as soon as the result of the referendum was known. San Francisco tourism officials, meanwhile, said they would continue to push the city as a destination for \u201ccommitment ceremonies and other celebrations of partnership.\u201d All of which gave a small measure of hope to merchants like Mr. Burnett, who said he would miss the extra work. \u201cUnless,\u201d he said, \u201cwe get gay marriages back.\u201d", "keyword": "California;Homosexuality;Marriages;Weddings and Engagements;Economic Conditions and Trends;Referendums"}
{"id": "ny0242051", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/03/29", "title": "Suit Says Jesuit Leaders Ignored Warnings on Abusive Priest", "abstract": "Jesuit leaders in Chicago largely ignored or kept secret numerous reports, spanning four decades, that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage boys, lawyers for victims charged on Monday in a motion for punitive damages in a Chicago court. Included in the motion were more than 65 recently obtained church documents and depositions that, the lawyers said, demonstrated \u201ca reckless disregard for the safety of others in the face of repeated reports of sexual misconduct\u201d on the part of Chicago Jesuit leaders. The former priest, Donald J. McGuire, now 80, was convicted on several counts of sex abuse in state and federal courts in 2006 and 2008, and is serving a 25-year federal sentence. The newly public documents date from the early 1960s, when a concerned Austrian priest, in imperfect English, first observed in a letter to Chicago Jesuits that Father McGuire, newly ordained and studying in Europe, had \u201cmuch relations with several boys.\u201d The reports extend into the last decade, when Father McGuire reportedly ignored admonitions to stop traveling with young assistants, molesting one as late as 2003, as law enforcement was closing in. The legal motion argues that Father McGuire\u2019s superiors in Chicago turned \u201ca blind eye to his criminal actions.\u201d The current case started with a civil suit brought by six men who say they were victims. Three have since settled with the Jesuits, but three others, identified as John Doe 117, John Doe 118 and John Doe 129, are still pursuing the suit against the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus and Mr. McGuire. Most of the newly released documents were obtained in the discovery process for the suit: letters and memos the church was required to produce from its files, and transcripts of depositions. The motion filed on Monday asks the Cook County Circuit Court to take the unusual step of considering additional, punitive damages, given what the motion says is the evidence of a long trail of credible warnings about the priest\u2019s behavior and ineffective responses by church officials. Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org , a victim advocacy group that has long monitored the church\u2019s response to sexual abuse charges, said that the series of warnings given to Jesuit leaders by parents and fellow priests was unusually long and clear. \u201cI have never seen such detailed and frequent notice received by the priest\u2019s superiors, so many \u2018directives\u2019 regarding the priest\u2019s future behavior, and so much evidence presented to his superiors that those directives were being violated, without the priest being removed from ministry,\u201d Mr. McKiernan said. His group has posted a history of the case and many of the key documents . Mariah E. Moran, a lawyer for the Chicago Province, said she could not comment on the motion because she had not had a chance to study it, and a spokesman for the province did not respond to requests for comment. In depositions and settlement meetings over the last three years, senior Jesuit officials have said that until recent years they had not heard firm-enough evidence of sexual abuse to justify stronger action against Father McGuire. Last week, the Jesuits\u2019 Oregon Province agreed to pay $166 million to hundreds of victims of sexual abuse, which occurred decades ago at remote Indian boarding schools. The two cases shed rare light on how religious orders have dealt with charges of sexual abuse, as opposed to the Catholic dioceses and bishops at the center of most recent scandals. The Jesuits are the world\u2019s largest Roman Catholic religious order. The motion filed on Monday charges that the church misled prosecutors in 2006, with its lawyers claiming that they had little information about the priest \u2014 despite the lengthy record of complaints. The case has been acutely troublesome for the Jesuits, an order known for its scholarship and its elite high schools and universities. Father McGuire was by all accounts a mesmerizing teacher, and after he was barred by some Jesuit schools in the 1960s and 1970s for suspicious behavior, including having students share his bedroom, he went on to became a popular leader of eight-day spiritual retreats around the country and the world. For about two decades, starting in the early 1980s, he was a spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, who put him in charge of retreats for the nuns in her worldwide order, Missionaries of Charity. Several times each year, in India, the United States, Russia and other countries, he led retreats for the sisters. In these travels he routinely took along a teenage boy as an assistant, saying he needed help administering his diabetes treatment. In complaints voiced by some parents and priests at the time, and in later depositions, those assistants said their duties often included sleeping in the same bed as Father McGuire, showering and reading pornography together, providing intimate massages and watching him masturbate. The Jesuits have their own administrative structure, with a leader in Rome and regional provinces in the United States, although they also operate with permission from local bishops. On his return from Europe in the 1960s, Father McGuire was assigned to live and teach at Loyola Academy , a high school in Wilmette, Ill. Two boys stayed with him in his room for about two years each, where he constantly abused them, according to the 2006 trial. In 1969 the second of those boys, then 15, ran away and described the abuse to his parish priest, who contacted the Jesuit president of the academy. The school responded by removing Father McGuire, but, according to a letter released on Monday, publicly described his departure as a \u201csabbatical.\u201d In 1991, in another of the many warnings revealed on Monday, the director of a retreat house in California reported to the Chicago Province\u2019s leader that Father McGuire was traveling with a teenage boy from Alaska and sharing a bed with him, and that the boy\u2019s mother had expressed her concern that \u201cher son has in some way changed.\u201d That year, the Chicago Province\u2019s leader, the Rev. Robert A. Wild, imposed the first set of \u201cguidelines\u201d on Father McGuire. In written instructions he said: \u201cI ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21.\u201d But Father McGuire was left to police himself, and Father Wild said in a 2009 deposition that he had regarded the case as \u201ca serious matter\u201d but also \u201cambiguous.\u201d The province sent Father McGuire in 1993 for a psychiatric examination and six months at a treatment center \u2014 but in the week before he was to report for the evaluation, he was allowed to conduct a retreat in Phoenix, where he molested another boy, the documents indicate. As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a letter of \u201cgood standing\u201d for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a diocese, stating that \u201cthere is nothing to our knowledge in his background which would restrict any ministry with minors.\u201d As the reports of abuse accumulated, the Chicago leaders issued one set of restrictions after another on Father McGuire, finally, in 2002, saying he could minister only to nuns in the Chicago region. But none of these directives were enforced, the court motion asserts. Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008 after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued in Illinois.", "keyword": "McGuire Donald J;Roman Catholic Church;Priests;Child Abuse and Neglect;Sex Crimes;Society of Jesus;Chicago (Ill)"}
{"id": "ny0172209", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/07", "title": "Archer Daniels Tops Forecasts", "abstract": "The Archer Daniels Midland Company, a major agricultural processor, reported higher-than-expected quarterly profit yesterday, overcoming weakness in the ethanol business and sending its shares up as much as 9 percent. Earnings rose on strength in sweeteners, starches, oilseed processing and grain merchandising. Those results offset a 48 percent drop in profit from bioproducts, which include ethanol. Profits have plummeted at ethanol plants around the country because of higher prices for corn and lower prices for ethanol, an alternative fuel made from corn. Net income in A.D.M.\u2019s first fiscal quarter, which ended Sept. 30, rose to $441 million, or 68 cents a share, from $403 million, or 61 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding special items, earnings were 71 cents a share, beating analysts\u2019 average forecast of 59 cents, according to Reuters Estimates. Revenue rose 36 percent to $12.83 billion. Analysts on average had expected $10.65 billion.", "keyword": "Archer Daniels Midland Incorporated;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0250144", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/02/11", "title": "Holding Bouquet, Queens Man Kills Ex-Wife and Himself", "abstract": "An armed man holding a bouquet of flowers walked into a Queens pharmacy on Thursday and shot and killed his ex-wife \u2014 who had an order of protection against him \u2014 and then went home and killed himself, the authorities said. They said that the shooter, Alex Figueroa, 38, opened fire about 3:40 p.m. inside Crescent Chemists, a small pharmacy in a row of stores on 34th Avenue near 24th Street in Long Island City. They said that Mr. Figueroa walked in carrying the flowers and started arguing with his ex-wife, Guimmia Villia, 32, a mother of two, before pulling out a gun and shooting her in the head in front of co-workers. He then fled. Ms. Villia died a short time later at Mount Sinai Hospital Queens, the police said. Officers searching for Mr. Figueroa went to his home, at 14-01 26th Avenue in Long Island City, where they found him dead, also shot in the head. Records indicate that Ms. Villia and her ex-husband had a troubled history together. In December 2009, Mr. Figueroa was charged in a domestic violence case against her, but it was dismissed this year and the file sealed, the authorities said. Ms. Villia had a limited order of protection against Mr. Figueroa that expired on Jan. 25. She also had a full order of protection against him, stemming from a domestic violence case in Nassau County, that was set to expire in April, a law enforcement official said. The details of that case were unclear Thursday night, the official said. In New York criminal law, a full order of protection generally requires the defendant to stay away from the person and not try to communicate.", "keyword": "Murders and Attempted Murders;Domestic Violence;Suicides and Suicide Attempts;Long Island City (NYC);Villia Guimmia"}
{"id": "ny0244276", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2011/04/03", "title": "U.N. Vote on Palestinian State Could Force Israel's Hand", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a United Nations vote welcoming the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank , Gaza and East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution. \u201cWe are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September,\u201d said Ehud Barak, Israel\u2019s defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. \u201cIt is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action.\u201d He added, \u201cParalysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel.\u201d With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here. Israel\u2019s offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component \u2014 an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives. But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin. \u201cWe want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements,\u201d said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. \u201cWithout that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September.\u201d Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world. Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution and time before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe the sovereignty of a Palestinian state. The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, for example, said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that \u201clegitimate aspirations cannot be ignored and must be addressed.\u201d He added, referring to Israeli-Palestinian talks, \u201cIt cannot be in anyone\u2019s interests if the new order of the region is determined at a time of minimum hope in the peace process.\u201d The Palestinian focus on September stems not only from the fact that the General Assembly holds its annual meeting then. It is also because Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced in September 2009 that his government would be ready for independent statehood in two years and that Mr. Obama said last September that he expected the framework for an independent Palestinian state to be declared in a year. Mr. Obama did not indicate what the borders of that state would be, assuming they would be determined through direct negotiations. But with Israeli-Palestinian talks broken off months ago and the Middle East in the process of profound change, many argue that outside pressure is needed. Germany, France and Britain say negotiations should be based on the 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps, exactly what the Netanyahu government rejects because it says it predetermines the outcome. \u201cDoes the world think it is going to force Israel to declare the 1967 lines and giving up Jerusalem as a basis for negotiation?\u201d asked a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. \u201cThat will never happen.\u201d While the Obama administration has referred in the past to the 1967 lines as a basis for talks, it has not decided whether to back the European Union, the United Nations and Russia \u2014 the other members of the so-called quartet \u2014 in declaring them the starting point, diplomats said. The quartet meets on April 15 in Berlin. Israel, which has settled hundreds of thousands of Jews inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, acknowledges that it will have to withdraw from much of the land it now occupies there. But it hopes to hold onto the largest settlement blocs and much of East Jerusalem as well as the border to the east with Jordan and does not want to enter into talks with the other side\u2019s position as the starting point. That was true even before its closest ally in the Arab world, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was driven from power, helping fuel protest movements that now roil other countries, including Jordan, which has its own peace agreement with Israel. \u201cWhatever we put forward has to be grounded in security arrangements because of what is going on regionally,\u201d said Zalman Shoval, one of a handful of Netanyahu aides drawing up the Israeli proposal that may be delivered as a speech to the United States Congress in May. \u201cWe are facing the rebirth of the eastern front as Iran grows strong. We have to secure the Jordan Valley. And no Israeli government is going to move tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes quickly.\u201d Those Israelis live in West Bank settlements, the source of much of the disagreement not only with the Palestinians but with the world. Not a single government supports Israel\u2019s settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements are proof that the Israelis do not really want a Palestinian state to arise since they are built on land that should go to that state. \u201cAll these years, the main obstacle to peace has been the settlements,\u201d Nimer Hammad, a political adviser to President Abbas, said. \u201cThey always say, \u2018but you never made it a condition of negotiations before.\u2019 And we say, \u2018that was a mistake.\u2019 \u201d The Israelis counter that the real problem is Palestinian refusal to accept openly a Jewish state here and ongoing anti-Israeli incitement and praise of violence on Palestinian airwaves. Another central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine has been the division between the West Bank and Gaza, the first run by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas. Lately, President Abbas has sought to bridge the gap, asking to go to Gaza to seek reconciliation through an agreed interim government that would set up parliamentary and presidential elections. But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor \u2014 that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood \u2014 has reacted coolly. Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries \u2014 more than 100 \u2014 are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass. What happens then? Some Palestinian leaders say relations with Israel would change. \u201cWe will re-examine our commitments toward Israel, especially our security commitments,\u201d suggested Hanna Amireh, who is on the 18-member ruling board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, referring to cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli troops. \u201cThe main sense about Israel is that we are fed up.\u201d Mr. Shaath said Israel would then be in daily violation of the rights of a fellow member state and diplomatic and legal consequences could follow, all of which would be painful for Israel. In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit, who is a political centrist, drew a comparison between 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, the 1973 war. He wrote that \u201c2011 is going to be a diplomatic 1973,\u201d because a Palestinian state will be recognized internationally. \u201cEvery military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent U.N. member state.\u201d He added, \u201cA diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.\u201d", "keyword": "Israel;Palestinians;United Nations;Palestinian Authority;Politics and Government;Israeli Settlements;Gaza Strip;West Bank;East Jerusalem"}
{"id": "ny0225699", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/10/17", "title": "Carp Invasion May Prompt Changes to Waterways", "abstract": "The battle over closing Chicago-area outlets into Lake Michigan is not only about preventing Asian carp from decimating the $7 billion Great Lakes fishing industry, experts said. It has also prompted efforts to re-engineer a century-old waterway system that Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes , has compared to \u201chaving left Michigan Avenue a dirt road while we built up a modern city around it.\u201d Michigan and four other states have filed suit in federal court demanding the closure of locks that connect rivers and channels to the lake. Closing arguments in the case are scheduled for Monday. The Illinois Chamber of Commerce has countered that Asian carp pose no imminent ecological threat and shutting the locks would mean billions in losses for tour boats, shipping and other industries. Urban planners and environmental groups said there is another way to deal with the Asian carp threat: separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, which were joined a century ago by the man-made reversal of the Chicago River and the building of canals. Separation could also involve overhauling Chicago\u2019s outdated wastewater-treatment system and reduce the city\u2019s controversial diversion of two billion gallons of water a day out of Lake Michigan into the Chicago River. The Army Corps of Engineers is among the groups studying ways to achieve what is formally called \u201cecological or hydrological separation\u201d of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Great Lakes Commission , the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Cities Initiative and others are conducting their own studies on separating the two great drainage basins. Thom Cmar, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said its study, which will be released this week, shows that separation is a series of engineering challenges, but they are all solvable problems. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of unpacking all the issues that need to be addressed and finding the political will and resources to address them,\u201d he said. Environmental experts have proposed building concrete walls or other means to separate the Calumet River from the Cal-Sag Channel and the Chicago River from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. One barrier might be erected in Bridgeport, where the Chicago River meets the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Both the Calumet and Chicago Rivers might also be \u201cre-reversed\u201d to flow into Lake Michigan and halt the diversion of Great Lakes water. The Metropolitan Planning Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council, among other groups, said a break near Bridgeport could still allow tour and recreational boats to move freely north of that point between the Chicago River and Lake Michigan through the locks at Navy Pier. Barges carrying coal, gravel, grain and other low-value bulk commodities could still ply most of the waterway system. Cargo could be transferred to railcars or trucks at the separation point, which the planners said could create hundreds of jobs. In a study commissioned by the State of Michigan, John Taylor, a transportation specialist at Wayne State University, put the cost of transferring goods at $70 million a year. That could ruin river shipping, said Mark Biel, president of Unlock Our Jobs , a coalition of industry groups that use the waterway. Commodities shipped by barge have a low profit margin, and extra transportation costs would probably make them unsellable, Mr. Biel said. Other opponents of separation \u2014 including the Port of Indiana \u2014 agree that even if the canals remain open, cutting off access to Lake Michigan will change the economics of trade enough to seriously harm businesses from corn starch refineries to steel mills to chemical plants. They also said they are afraid it could set a precedent that would allow closure of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Ballast water from ocean-going ships has been a source of invasive species, and environmental groups have proposed closing the seaway unless strict ballast-treatment regulations are imposed. \u201cIf you can shut down the Chicago waterway over Asian carp, you could shut down the St. Lawrence Seaway over an invasive species,\u201d Mr. Biel said. Mr. Brammeier, president of the Alliance for Great Lakes, disputed that notion. \u201cThese are completely different situations except that they both involve protecting the status quo,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing that will paralyze the shipping industry is its unwillingness to talk about improvements.\u201d The Port of Indiana recently released a study that said the O\u2019Brien Lock in southeast Chicago accounted for $1.9 billion a year in economic activity in Indiana. Jody Peacock, the port spokesman, said separation of Chicago-area waterways from the Mississippi would cost Indiana steel mills and Midwestern farmers access to significant portions of their markets. But Mr. Taylor, of Wayne State, said the study exaggerated the probable impact of a separation, noting that the approximately 5,000 barges that move through the O\u2019Brien Lock each year represent only about 1 percent of the lock activity in Illinois and barges carry only 2 percent of the region\u2019s outbound steel. \u201cThere are costs involved, but there are also benefits,\u201d Mr. Taylor said. \u201cFor most companies, we don\u2019t believe the cost increases are enough to make them shut down.\u201d Michigan\u2019s lawsuit, filed in July, was prompted by findings of eDNA \u2014 bits of biological material from Asian carp \u2014 in Calumet Harbor and other spots near the lake. The suit called for the locks at Navy Pier and on the Calumet River to be closed immediately to prevent the carp from establishing a viable population in the lake. But lock closure is not considered a long-term option: closed locks still allow water \u2014 and potentially eggs and juvenile fish \u2014 to pass through screens. Lawyers for the Army Corps of Engineers have disputed the idea that eDNA findings show that the corps\u2019 existing electric barriers on the sanitary and ship canal have failed to block Asian carp. Separation supporters said the corps will likely eventually oppose separation as not feasible and instead favor \u201cacoustic bubble\u201d curtains, low-oxygen zones and other ways to kill or block species. Jo-Ellen Darcy, assistant secretary of the Army (Civil Works), said the corps would consider all options. \u201cWe need to look not only at the aquatic and ecological impact, but also the impact on the economy and the people who depend on this waterway for a living,\u201d she said. Restoring the original flow of the Chicago River could mean several of the area\u2019s northern wastewater-treatment plants would need to be improved. There are stricter water-quality standards for Lake Michigan than the Chicago River and canal system, where the wastewater currently goes, so re-reversing the river to flow back into Lake Michigan would entail a higher level of treatment. \u201cAs the city grows we\u2019re going to need more water,\u201d said Josh Ellis, a water expert with the Metropolitan Planning Council. \u201cIf we clean our water after we use it and return it to Lake Michigan like everyone else does, then we can use more.\u201d", "keyword": "Carp (Fish);Lake Michigan;Michigan"}
{"id": "ny0138799", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/02/03", "title": "Yes, a Giant Can Sprint", "abstract": "FOR investors, the idea that a German industrial giant could also be a nimble stock market star might seem far-fetched, if not outright delusional. Indeed, the very concept of anything nimble and industrial might seem an oxymoron, whether Teutonic or American. But Siemens, the 161-year-old conglomerate based in Munich, has been disproving the skeptics in the last 12 months, while vastly outperforming the shares of its American archrival General Electric as well as the broader market indexes. Despite a recent drop amid the global stock market swoon, the shares of Siemens traded in the United States are up 34 percent since January 2007. And over the last five years, the stock has nearly tripled. Of course, Siemens has a lot of catching up to do. Like G.E. before John F. Welch Jr. took over more than two decades ago and remade it, Siemens was always respected for its industrial expertise but dogged by bloated payrolls and thin profit margins. Simply put, investors regarded it as too big a battleship to turn around. And resistance in Germany from powerful unions as well as political leaders made the kind of job cuts that Mr. Welch made at G.E. in the 1980s virtually impossible. But a restructuring effort by top executives in the past two years has been gathering steam, raising profit margins even as demand for Siemens\u2019s industrial products and medical diagnostic systems has stayed strong. \u201cSiemens has decided it wants to focus on three areas: energy, health care, and automation and industrial systems,\u201d says Simon Smith, an analyst at Citigroup in London. At the same time, Mr. Smith says, the company simplified its management structure while exiting lower-margin businesses like automobile components. \u201cI think they\u2019re moving to a leaner, more flexible business model,\u201d he adds. In a strange twist, investors are also benefiting from a management shakeup last year brought on by allegations by German authorities that Siemens paid nearly $2 billion in bribes to win contracts around the world. (The company has settled part of the German case and is working to settle a related one in the United States.) As a result of the flap, Siemens brought in a new chairman, Gerhard Cromme, as well as a new chief executive, Peter L\u00f6scher, to clean up its reputation and its too-cozy way of doing business. It also marked the first time in the history of the company that the chairman and chief executive were both outsiders, \u201cand they had no legacy to defend,\u201d says Joe Kaeser, the chief financial officer and a member of the company\u2019s managing board. \u201cThat\u2019s never been the case before.\u201d MR. L\u00d6SCHER, in fact, is putting his money where his mouth is. On Jan. 28, Siemens announced that he had purchased 50,000 Siemens shares with his own cash. The rest of the company\u2019s top management also bought shares. While it\u2019s practically expected in the United States that the top brass own stock, the move was \u201cunique in German corporate history,\u201d Mr. Kaeser said. \u201cIt\u2019s a sign that the board really believes in its strategy,\u201d he added. Mr. L\u00f6scher took over in July and outlined in November his plan to bolster margins and profits, a plan that has won praise from analysts. That latest restructuring program \u201chas made the unthinkable believable,\u201d Mr. Smith raved in a recent report. \u201cIt has long been discussed what Siemens could become if it were to achieve profitability comparable to its best-in-class competitors, but this may soon become a reality.\u201d He rates the stock a buy. Last year, global sales of Siemens totaled $96.6 billion, with its United States operations contributing $19.8 billion of that. One of the company\u2019s strongest divisions is its automation unit. Customers for these systems include big automotive and mining companies and food and beverage makers, as well as chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers, all seeking to improve efficiency via automation. In fact, equipment bought from Siemens processes 90 percent of letter mail in the United States for the Postal Service. The biggest risk to the company\u2019s shares would be a global recession, especially if emerging markets like China, India and Brazil followed the lead of the slowing American economy. But with the company trading at only about 11 times estimated 2009 earnings, according to Andreas Willi of JPMorgan, its relatively reasonable valuation should offer some downside protection. Mr. Willi, whose price target on Siemens is 40 percent higher than the stock\u2019s current level, says investors are eager for April, when Siemens plans to announce further cost cuts. \u201cThese conglomerates need a radical catalyst to change,\u201d he says. \u201cIronically, they needed this corruption issue to accelerate the change, and it has. We\u2019ve had more change in governance and structure in the last 12 months than in the last 20 years.\u201d", "keyword": "Siemens AG;Stocks and Bonds;Schwartz Nelson D;Executives and Management;Germany;Munich (Germany)"}
{"id": "ny0107925", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/05/03", "title": "Business Travel Is Rising, but Not Necessarily the Travel Budget", "abstract": "WHILE continuing economic uncertainty around the world has rattled business confidence, it has not stopped companies \u2014 from the smallest widget-maker to the largest financial institution \u2014 from sending their battle-tested travelers back on the road this year. Still, business travelers face a changed world. Corporate travelers are locked between a vexing economic recovery and rising travel costs. They face higher fares, steeper fees and new challenges to navigate, even as their corporations insist that employees stretch travel dollars more than ever. Air travel drops corporate travelers into a land of a thousand perils. Airline mergers in recent years have reduced competition. Many flights have been canceled, forcing more passengers to connect at big and increasingly crowded hubs. With higher demand and higher costs, airlines have increased ticket prices, both in coach and in business class. Hotels, too, have raised rates, and are increasingly following the airline business in charging extra fees for a variety of services, including in-room Wi-Fi and access to business centers. Business travel is still growing this year, but corporations are being more cautious with their travel spending and enforcing greater adherence to travel policies. \u201cMore businesspeople are traveling, but companies are being tighter with their budgets,\u201d said Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and a founder of the Atmosphere Research Group. \u201cTravelers increasingly have to justify their trips, and trips have to be approved by more managers. They have to perform the equivalent of a return-on-investment analysis before they book.\u201d Yet frustrated as corporate travelers may be, they have never been better armed for the hazards of life on the road. Mobile technology provides them with up-to-date information and immediate access to a broad range of resources unimaginable just a few years ago. They can make or change plane, hotel or dinner reservations on the fly and perform a thousand other tasks, from boarding check-in to room checkout, all from digital devices. This access to mobile technology promises in coming years to further change the travel experience and how businesses manage it, corporate travel experts said. \u201cYou can\u2019t say enough about mobile technology and how an expanding and incredible amount of information is provided and available to travelers through their mobile devices and apps,\u201d said Jay Campbell, the editorial director of the BTN Group, which publishes Business Travel News, Travel Procurement magazine, and The Beat, a specialized newsletter, all aimed at corporate travel managers. The last decade has been tough for business travel. Business trips have dropped by 22 percent since 2000, according to a study by the Global Business Travel Association. Yet travel spending has increased by 3.6 percent during that period, largely because travel has gotten more expensive. The association says that business travelers are making fewer trips and opting to stay fewer nights while maximizing their time in one place. \u201cTravel managers have to do more with less,\u201d the association said in its latest market survey report. A report by American Express, released last year, found that American businesses probably cut back on corporate travel a lot more than was necessary in the downturn of 2007 through 2009. And these cutbacks, the report said, probably worsened the recession and \u201clikely hampered business recovery in 2010 and beyond.\u201d Since then, the recovery has been held back by a series of factors, including the Japanese tsunami and nuclear meltdown, the European debt crisis , renewed geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and Persian Gulf and a global rise in energy prices. IHS Global Insight, an economic consulting firm, recently revised its forecast for global economic growth, saying it now expected the world economy to expand by 2.8 percent this year, up from the 2.7 percent rate it predicted in March. Global growth is expected to strengthen to 3.6 percent next year, the firm said, and reach 4.3 percent in 2014. But the forecast optimistically assumes a rebound in China and other emerging markets, a pickup in growth in the United States and the end to the recession in the euro zone. After a timid uptick in 2010, business travel rebounded strongly last year. Airlines welcomed the return of business passengers, who account for the bulk of their revenue and helped the industry return to profitability. And they have fought as fiercely as ever for the company traveler\u2019s loyalty by refurbishing their planes with new seats in business class, renovated business lounges and improved service on board. The International Air Transport Association said premium, or noncoach, travel rose by 6.3 percent in February, for instance, extending a trend that started last year. \u201cThe performance of premium markets is once more being supported by improvements in the business environment, with both trade activity and business confidence increasing in recent months,\u201d the association said. \u201cBetter economic results in the U.S., for example, are supporting traffic across the North Atlantic as well as having positive impacts on trade partners, with revived demand for Asian consumer exports.\u201d Michael W. McCormick, executive director of the Global Business Travel Association, said he expected travel spending by American businesses to grow this year to $260 billion, mostly thanks to domestic growth, while international spending remained relatively flat. That figure compares with $251 billion last year, and $234 billion in 2010. But in a reflection of the mixed outlook for business travel, corporations are expected to take fewer trips in 2012 and 2013, according to the group. In 2010, American businesspeople took a total of 437 million trips. That figure rose to 445 million trips in 2011. But it is expected to drop to 440.4 million this year and 438.5 million next year as a result of fewer domestic trips. (International trips are still expected to grow, according to the forecast.) \u201cFull recovery in business travel spending will require a more sustainable economic environment, rather than the two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern that has prevailed,\u201d the business travel association said in a recent report released with Visa. Mr. McCormick said growth in business travel was stable, though slow. \u201cLast year we were in recovery mode, but everybody was looking for the next bad thing to happen,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t see this kind of concern anymore. Now, it\u2019s steady as she goes.\u201d Travelers are also spending more on each of their trips. The average amount spent in 2000 was $422, and it grew to $564 by 2011. Two-thirds of that increase was because of inflation, and a third was a result of real increases in expenditures. But every dollar invested in business travel has historically brought in $20 in extra profits to American businesses. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing road warriors taking fewer trips but making the most of them, making more stops and spending more on the road,\u201d Mr. McCormick said. \u201cThe productivity explosion is a huge factor, and it\u2019s being brought on by better travel management, better technology and making the most of their time on the road.\u201d At the same time, travelers are facing a world of rising prices. The surge in oil costs this year is once more forcing airlines to raise fares, analysts said. The industry\u2019s recent mergers have also pared competition in some markets and allowed airlines to charge more. The airline industry\u2019s financial outlook remains fragile. High oil prices are the biggest threat to the sector\u2019s profitability. They are forecast to average $115 a barrel this year, the International Air Transport Association said, and a new spike in prices could easily wipe out the industry\u2019s tenuous gains. With slow economic growth, and very low profit margins for the airlines, \u201cit will not take much of a shock to push the industry into the red for 2012,\u201d Tony Tyler, the director general and chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, said in a speech last month. In 2011, average fares on domestic flights rose 10 percent, to $254, according to the American Express Business Travel Monitor. And prices keep on rising. Domestic fares averaged $261 in February, the latest month for which that data is available, compared with $250 in the same month last year, according to American Express. Hotel rooms are also going up: domestic nightly rates rose 3 percent on average, to $155, in February compared with last year. International fares are soaring, too. Corporate fares for international flights from the United States averaged $2,240 in the first quarter this year, up from a recession low of $1,651 in the first quarter of 2009 and nearly double the rate of $1,190 for the same period in 2007, according to Travel G.P.A., which collects travel reservation data from 45,000 companies worldwide and produces scorecards on how well corporations maximize their travel spending. \u201cTravel budgets this year will be similar to last year\u2019s as companies focus on growing their businesses and get their travelers on the road,\u201d said Lane Dubin, a vice president and general manager for American Express Business Travel. \u201cBut prices are up. And this creates a dilemma. Companies need to be increasingly strategic about how they manage their travel.\u201d The Travel Price Index, which includes the key travel components of the Consumer Price Index , measures travel inflation. It had strong growth in 2011, gaining 4 percent from the previous year, reflecting the price rises seen throughout the industry last year. The trend should moderate this year, although travel prices are still expected to rise by 2.2 percent. This price inflation is forcing companies to tighten travel policies, said Rock Blanco, the president of Travel G.P.A. Mr. Blanco said businesses did not pay much attention to travel policy enforcement from 2008 to 2011 because business travel slowed as the economy slowed. But with the return of business travel, companies know they must loosen the purse strings again, even as they are more focused on saving. As a result, they are making sure employees adhere to company policies in booking air travel, which can mean buying tickets at least 14 days in advance, accepting the lowest fare even if it means a longer trip or a connecting flight and booking a lower grade of hotel or car rental . Savings can be substantial, Mr. Blanco said. For instance, travel managers are increasingly asking employees to move down one hotel category, from the so-called Upper Upscale Hotel Tier, which includes brands like DoubleTree, Embassy Suites, Hilton and Hyatt Regency, to the Upscale Hotel Tier, which includes the brands Courtyard, Homewood Suites, Radisson and Residence Inn. A midsize company with an annual travel budget of $5 million, including $1.1 million on hotels, could save $150,000 a year if just 5 percent of its hotel bookings were downgraded by one notch, Mr. Blanco said. \u201cIf companies can get their employees to be more compliant, they can really maximize their savings,\u201d he said. \u201cFor a while, policy enforcement had lost its way. But it is back in vogue now.\u201d Hotel chains have recognized the opportunity, said Mr. Harteveldt, the travel analyst. Holiday Inn, for instance, has completed a top-to-bottom refurbishment of its properties, with business travelers in mind. Likewise, Courtyard by Marriott and Hilton Garden Inn have undertaken redesigns recently, Mr. Harteveldt said. \u201cAll this means that travelers can pretty much get a four-star experience in a three-star hotel,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course it all depends on the kind of travel, and some of these hotels are probably better for a one-night stay than a three-night stay.\u201d A recent report by Business Travel News found that 70 percent of 168 travel buyers surveyed from December 2011 to February 2012 said they had reviewed or tightened their expense policies. Three in five of businesses surveyed said they had introduced an online expense reimbursement system, according to Business Travel News, and more than half of the respondents had increased expense report auditing. Corporations insist that each travel dollar has to go further these days, said Ron DiLeo, the executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. \u201cThat\u2019s always been the biggest topic of conversation: each dollar, each euro, each yen gets scrutinized,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you are a wasteful business traveler, you will not be working at your company for a very long time.\u201d But while emphasizing greater frugality, companies must adapt to new mobile technology and applications for travelers that are making their policies seem dated. New applications and Web sites like Kayak, FlightTrack, GateGuru, OpenTable and TripIt Pro help travelers manage their trips, find deals and look for the best place to dine or the cheapest fare to fly. Corporations must learn how to embrace such innovations, not fight them, Mr. DiLeo said. Some are, notably Google, which allows employees to bank any savings they find on airfare or hotel rates and use them to upgrade a trip or spend an extra night. Mr. Campbell, the BTN Group\u2019s editorial director, said there was a generational divide at play. \u201cThe baby boomers who are still managing the travel departments of many companies don\u2019t feel they quite understand how the younger generation want or don\u2019t want to be connected with their company programs,\u201d he said. Mr. DiLeo said: \u201cYou can\u2019t stop travelers using their apps or device of choice. You have to accept they do it and help them manage it.\u201d", "keyword": "Business Travel;Recession and Depression;Airlines and Airplanes;Economic Conditions and Trends;International Trade and World Market"}
{"id": "ny0196634", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2009/10/07", "title": "NATO to Start Training Afghan Police", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 NATO , criticized by the United States for not doing enough in Afghanistan , will start training the Afghan police in the coming weeks, the alliance\u2019s new leader said. The move by NATO, which said in April that it would take on such a role but did not provide details until now, is aimed at \u201ctransferring the lead responsibility for security to the Afghans themselves,\u201d Anders Fogh Rasmussen , NATO\u2019s new secretary general , said in an interview at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Monday. \u201cThe training mission is absolutely crucial.\u201d The effort is a major shift for NATO, which had kept clear of civilian training missions, fearing they would undermine its military role. NATO said it would also increase training of the Afghan National Army. Mr. Rasmussen said the training was also part of an attempt to make NATO\u2019s contributions more helpful to the United States, which supplies the lion\u2019s share of troops and resources in Afghanistan. NATO has 35,000 troops there, while the United States has 65,000. \u201cFrom the long-term perspective, it is essential to ensure the right military balance inside NATO in order to make sure that the Americans will still consider NATO a military alliance which is relevant for them,\u201d Mr. Rasmussen said. \u201cWe should acknowledge and recognize the huge efforts the Americans are making and in exchange, we need to ensure that the European side of NATO also makes a balanced effort.\u201d NATO\u2019s decision comes as the Obama administration is in the midst of a major review of its efforts in Afghanistan. A three-star American general, who will be appointed this month, will command the police and army training missions. The United States will pay most of the bill for 2009, which will total $7 billion. NATO diplomats said the cost for 2010 would be about $17 billion. Mr. Rasmussen, who spent last week in Washington meeting President Obama and senior Defense and State Department officials, said the current goal was to increase the number of Afghan soldiers to 130,000 by 2011 from about 93,000 today, and the Afghan police force to 84,500 from about 77,000 now. Although no NATO country has called on the alliance to set a date for ending its mission in Afghanistan, there is a consensus building up in European capitals that the sooner the Afghan security forces are trained the sooner NATO troops can be withdrawn. Mr. Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who took over the job of secretary general in August, would not say how many trainers NATO would request from its 28 members. He said NATO was waiting for the full assessment by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, who has been in discussions with Washington over questions of broad military strategy.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Afghanistan War (2001- );Defense and Military Forces;Rasmussen Anders Fogh"}
{"id": "ny0141894", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/11/28", "title": "Mumbai\u2019s Longest Night, With an Abyss of Terror", "abstract": "MUMBAI, India \u2014 For Amit and Varsha Thadani, Wednesday night in the Crystal Ballroom of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel was supposed to be a night they would treasure forever: the lavish start of a life together, with a wedding reception for over 200 family and friends. It may be an anniversary they will dread forever. About 9:45 p.m., as they had just finished dressing for their party in a second-floor room in the Heritage wing of the hotel, they heard the first crackle of gunfire, followed by commotion outside their room and instructions from the hotel front desk to stay put. They did stay put, for more than seven hours, much of it huddling on the floor of their bathroom, trying to keep themselves calm. Their phones rang constantly, with updates and questions. At one point, Mrs. Thadani confessed, she stopped answering. She did not want to talk to anyone. There was more gunfire, along with two loud explosions, one of which flung open their door and windows. Next door, they heard gunmen shoot a female guest and then her screams. \u201cWe could sense she was being dragged around,\u201d Mrs. Thadani recalled. In the Crystal Ballroom, friends had begun trickling in. They, too, were startled by gunfire. Could it be firecrackers? one wondered. A window shattered, sending everyone scampering under tables, and then eventually, led by hotel staff members, into a private, less accessible set of rooms. Ballroom by ballroom, restaurant by restaurant, guests were ushered into what was thought to be a safer cavity of the hotel, a private club called The Chambers. At the Golden Dragon restaurant on the ground floor, a woman could see through the frosted glass the gunmen parade through the lobby of the hotel and open fire, any which way. She had come to celebrate her husband\u2019s birthday, along with both sets of parents. They, too, were led through kitchens and staff stairwells into safer quarters, where they huddled until nearly 4 a.m. She and her parents slipped out through the back staff exit, but with so many cellphones trilling, they drew the attention of the gunmen inside the hotel. They began firing at those trying to flee. Her husband and his parents got left behind. Eight hours later, in the shadow of the hotel, she stood waiting for them to come out. Her husband did not answer his cellphone. She was still dressed in her black dinner blouse. The chaos at the Taj was just one part of the abyss of terror that swallowed the city. At Leopold Cafe, a restaurant popular with foreigners, a Belgian tourist, here to indulge his love of Bollywood, described the sudden awareness of deathly peril and the desperate actions of the staff members to protect their foreigner customers. The tourist, Ronny Quireyns, 44, was seated in the air-conditioned upstairs with friends \u2014 film extras just coming from a shoot \u2014 on Wednesday night. A little before 10 p.m., they heard a loud blast outside; they immediately thought of a bomb, but the noise seemed too faint. But then they heard a series of sharp bangs from downstairs, he said. \u201cA member of the staff rushed upstairs and said there were people shooting downstairs,\u201d Mr. Quireyns said. The waiters pulled the cover off an air-conditioning vent and guided him and about 15 other foreigners to climb inside, he said. After about 10 minutes, Mr. Quireyns said, he crawled out and peered down the stairway to the floor below. He saw people writhing on the ground. Finally, the waiters gave an all-clear, he said, and the foreigners fled the restaurant, where blood now covered the ground floor. Police officers took them to a nearby station to spend the night. \u201cIt was really frightening,\u201d Mr. Quireyns said. \u201cIt seems so surreal. You never think something like this will happen to you.\u201d Gary Samore, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, was staying at the Taj with his wife and daughter, squeezing in a family holiday in Mumbai alongside a lecture that he delivered earlier on Wednesday evening on the nuclear challenge facing the next president of the United States. They, too, stayed in their room and tried to stay calm. The television was not working. He had no local phone. Friends kept him apprised of developments by sending e-mail messages to his BlackBerry. At 3:30 a.m., Mr. Samore recalled, very heavy gunfire began. The American Consulate called to say the hotel was on fire. The family collected their passports, made a set of wet towels to help them get through a smoky corridor and found their way to a service stairwell and then a second-floor terrace, from where they could summon Indian soldiers. \u201cMy BlackBerry,\u201d he said, \u201cmay have saved our lives.\u201d In the kitchen of the Chambers, Raghu Deora, the chef, hid under a table. Four gunmen came before dawn and found him. What do you do? they asked in Hindi, and then they ordered him to stand up and turn around. They shot him from behind, his wife, Nandita, said Thursday afternoon. A bullet entered through one side and came out of the other. There were four gunmen, he told her while recovering in Bombay Hospital, all in their mid-20s, well dressed. Close to dawn, Mr. and Mrs. Thadani, the bride and groom, crept out of the window of their room, and with the help of firefighters, climbed down a ladder and touched ground. On Thursday afternoon, they counted their blessings and ate a homecooked meal.", "keyword": "Mumbai (India);Terrorism;Hostages;Attacks on Police"}
{"id": "ny0029518", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/06/02", "title": "The Chatter for Sunday, June 2", "abstract": "\u201cTalk of a house price bubble seems premature.\u201d Ed Stansfield, an economist at Capital Economics, as the Standard & Poor\u2019s Case-Shiller home price index posted the biggest gains in seven years. \u201cIn relation to incomes, rents or their own past, U.S. home prices still look low,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve gotten concerned by the seeming impotence of federal regulatory agencies.\u201d Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who plans to begin a foundation called the Volcker Alliance aimed at improving how government works. \u201cIt sure looks like the guy who couldn\u2019t shoot straight.\u201d Patrick Healy, chief executive of the Issuer Advisory Group, a consulting firm, talking about Nasdaq\u2019s handling of Facebook\u2019s initial public offering last year. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that the Nasdaq OMX Group would pay $10 million to settle accusations that it had violated numerous rules before and after the I.P.O. \u201cI don\u2019t have any hobbies. This is what I do.\u201d Max Levchin, a co-founder and former chief technology officer of PayPal, who has helped start multiple companies, including a new effort called HVF, which stands for Hard, Valuable, Fun.", "keyword": "US Economy;Real Estate; Housing"}
{"id": "ny0124944", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/08/11", "title": "Dwight Howard Joins Star-Studded Lakers", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 No strangers to stars and their issues, the Los Angeles Lakers landed Dwight Howard on Friday, ending his long search for a home, at least for another season. After asking the Orlando Magic to trade him to the Nets last fall, reversing himself to opt in with the Magic last spring, then again asking to be traded to the Nets even after the Magic fired Coach Stan Van Gundy and forced General Manager Otis Smith to resign, Howard finally got his wish to be dealt, if not to his preferred team. Instead, he went to the Lakers in a four-team, 12-player trade that sent Lakers center Andrew Bynum to Philadelphia, 76ers guard Andre Iguodala to Denver and six players and three No. 1 draft picks to Orlando. Howard, a free agent next summer, gave the Lakers no assurance he would re-sign and avoided the subject at Friday\u2019s news conference at the team\u2019s practice facility. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s about today, and today is the day that I\u2019m here with the Lakers, and that\u2019s the only thing that matters,\u201d Howard said. \u201cWhatever happens a year from now, we\u2019ll wait until that time, but right now it\u2019s all about me starting fresh.\u201d If he said the same thing in Orlando last season, except for the part about starting fresh, the Lakers are counting on the new rules that allow teams to offer 20 percent more to keep their players. The 76ers took Bynum, whose contract is also expiring, on the same assumption. Howard\u2019s arrival in Los Angeles was the culmination of 10 months of twists and turns that began last fall, when Orlando still hoped to win him back. Then came his decision to opt-in on his contract in the spring, followed by July\u2019s breakdown of trade talks with the Nets (who re-signed Brook Lopez, making him ineligible to be traded until January), before the Magic, finally bent on ending the soap opera, found trading partners who would take both Howard and Bynum with no long-term commitment. Howard\u2019s happy-go-lucky image took a beating in the process, leaving him disinclined to discuss it. \u201cFor me, I want to be a great leader,\u201d Howard said, \u201cand I have an opportunity to learn from the best in Kobe on how to lead a team. \u201cIn order to be a great leader, you have to learn how to follow.\u201d Howard also said he wants to learn from Steve Nash, Pau Gasol \u201cand the guys who have been here.\u201d Howard was also disinclined to discuss his yearlong effort to join the Nets. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s all about the Lakers,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m here now. It\u2019s not about any other team.\u201d The newest incarnation of the Lakers seems like a logical successor to a team that has always been fueled by star power, from the misadventures of the Wilt Chamberlain-Jerry West-Elgin Baylor team to the legendary Showtime era of Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy to the more recent feud- and title-filled run starring Shaquille O\u2019Neal and Bryant. Howard has seemed disinclined to follow the career path of O\u2019Neal, who bolted Orlando for Los Angeles (and Hollywood) as a free agent, and there are fears his offensive statistics could suffer in the Lakers\u2019 attack, but his game seems to fit neatly with those of Bryant, a do-everything perimeter player, and Nash, a crack-shooting, floor-spacing playmaker. In that, the new Lakers look more like the ultra-complementary Celtics Big Three of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen than the awkward juxtaposition of the aging Chamberlain, West and Baylor in the 1960s and \u201970s. \u201cI think they will be real good,\u201d said Donnie Walsh, the Indiana Pacers\u2019 newly rehired president, from Indianapolis. \u201cDwight will give Kobe a lot of freedom defensively. And on offense, you\u2019ve got this monster lurking under the basket the defense has to pay attention to. \u201cNash gets shots for everybody he plays with, and they\u2019ve still got Gasol down there.\u201d", "keyword": "Howard Dwight;Los Angeles Lakers;Orlando Magic;Basketball;Trades (Sports)"}
{"id": "ny0132584", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/12/06", "title": "Four 2004 Olympians Stripped of Medals in Doping Retest", "abstract": "While driving to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday, Adam Nelson may have won a gold medal in the shot-put at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. In what could amount to one of the more peculiar outcomes in Olympic history, Nelson ascended to first place more than 3,000 days after the competition when doping officials ruled that the athlete who originally won gold at the Athens Games, Yuriy Bilonog of Ukraine, was guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs. His urine sample had been reanalyzed, and steroids were detected. Nelson\u2019s triumph, as it were, was unceremonious. He did not stand atop a podium, and the national anthem did not play. He was in his Mazda3 hatchback when he heard the news. \u201cI\u2019m still processing this one, but the 2004 Olympics were a really special moment for me,\u201d Nelson, 37, said. \u201cMy wife was there, a bunch of my friends from college, my family. We competed at the birthplace of the Olympic Games. The downside of this is I feel like our country was robbed of a medal at the relevant time. One of the biggest parts of an Olympic career is when you hear your anthem and see your flag when you stand on that podium. That\u2019s something I can never replace.\u201d Doping protocols allow for officials to store samples for eight years and retest them for substances they may not have been able to detect at the time the sample was taken. When Bilonog\u2019s sample was analyzed in 2004 at the Olympics, the results were negative, doping officials said. Eight years later, with new tests at their disposal, officials decided to re-examine about 100 samples from the Athens Games, focusing on certain sports and medalists. The subsequent test on Bilonog\u2019s sample found evidence of the steroid agent oxandrolone metabolite. \u201cAdditional analyses were performed with analytical methods which were not available in 2004,\u201d the International Olympic Committee said Wednesday in a statement. Bilonog was among four track and field athletes stripped of the medals they won at the 2004 Games. The others were Svetlana Krivelyova of Russia, who won bronze in the women\u2019s shot-put; Ivan Tsikhan of Belarus, who won silver in the men\u2019s hammer throw; and Iryna Yatchenko of Belarus, who won bronze in the women\u2019s discus. \u201cAthletes who cheat by using doping substances must understand that just because they get away with it one day, there is a very good chance that they will be caught in the future,\u201d John Fahey, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said in a statement. Track and field\u2019s world governing body now must decide whether to officially alter the standings in light of the penalties or merely void the positions of the offending athletes, an I.O.C. spokesman said. The stripping of Olympic medals is not unprecedented, though it is uncommon so many years later. Tyler Hamilton, the American cyclist, lost his gold medal from the 2004 Athens Games in August after he admitting to using banned substances. The Chinese women\u2019s gymnastics team lost its bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics nearly 10 years later because one of its gymnasts was found to be underage at those Summer Games. Documents, admissions and court testimony revealed after the fall of the Berlin Wall that East Germany had engaged in a state-sponsored system of doping. However, officials of the International Olympic Committee have said they would not strip former East Germans of their medals because of an eight-year statute of limitations imposed by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the impossibility of determining whether all the other medalists were clean at the time. A gold medal, however belated, would be a crowning achievement for Nelson, whose career has been successful by many measures but often seemed snakebitten. He settled for silver at the 2000 Games in Sydney, then appeared to have the gold in his grasp four years later when the event was staged in Olympia, Greece, the site of the original ancient Olympics, and was one of those Games\u2019 iconic events. Nelson was leading, but fouled on each of his five remaining turns. Bilonog tied Nelson on his final attempt, and Bilonog won the gold medal on a tiebreaker based on his second-best throw. Nelson\u2019s parents, Lynne and Will Nelson, were there, sitting under the searing sun on the grass area reserved for spectators. \u201cThe stadium was a big dust bowl,\u201d Lynne Nelson, who now lives in Washington, said Wednesday. \u201cIt was so hot. But we were so excited. We just felt like he was at the top of his career. But when they went into that tiebreaker, I can\u2019t even imagine what our blood pressure must have been.\u201d Missing out on the gold, she added, \u201cwas heartbreaking.\u201d Nelson competed in the 2008 Games in Beijing but did not win a medal. At the United States Olympic trials this summer in Eugene, Ore., he failed to qualify for the London Games. When he returned home to Georgia, Nelson said, he continued to train and was \u201cfull speed ahead\u201d on competing for another four years. But Nelson became concerned that his sponsors might not stick by him as his performance waned. The health insurance policy he had through the United States Olympic Committee was nearing expiration. About three weeks ago, Nelson said, he decided to retire and transition into a different role in the sport. He is an officer of the track and field athletes association, a group that has challenged an I.O.C. regulation that limits how athletes can promote their sponsors. \u201cI felt like I was leaving the sport better than it was when I started,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a big thing. There are ways for me to stay involved without training. I want to help athletes have a voice, and that\u2019s become a real passion for me.\u201d Nelson called his mother to tell her the news about Bilonog\u2019s positive drug test. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bittersweet after eight years,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re just thrilled, but we\u2019re in shock.\u201d Nelson, who also has a gold medal from the 2005 world championships in Helsinki, Finland, said he was not one to show off his hardware. His two Olympic silver medals are stored in a sock drawer, he said. He was unsure what he would do with an Olympic gold. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll have to hoist it on a flagpole or something,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2004);Olympic Games (2004);Doping (Sports);Nelson Adam (1975- );Bilonog Yuriy"}
{"id": "ny0238353", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/06/13", "title": "Posada Finds Comfort in Grand Slam", "abstract": "Jorge Posada \u2019s return from the disabled list has been measured in baby steps. He hoped to play catcher soon after rejoining the Yankees , although the team activated him on June 2 knowing he would not be ready to catch for some time. The only certainty for Posada, who was recovering from a fractured right foot, was his discomfort as the designated hitter. But on Saturday, Posada hit a grand slam that broke open the Yankees\u2019 9-3 win over the Houston Astros at Yankee Stadium, highlighting an afternoon in which the teams combined for five home runs. The grand slam was Posada\u2019s 250th home run, which tied him with Graig Nettles for seventh on the Yankees\u2019 career list. The news got better for Posada after the game: he will catch Sunday, Manager Joe Girardi said, \u201cunless he comes in tomorrow and can\u2019t walk.\u201d \u201cThere was a nice little smile there,\u201d Girardi said of Posada\u2019s reaction. \u201cHe\u2019s been chomping at the bit. It\u2019s nice the way it works out; we\u2019ve got a game here, then a day off, so I thought it was a good time.\u201d Derek Jeter hit two home runs for his ninth career multihomer game and his first since 2006. He hit his 24th career leadoff homer, tying Rickey Henderson for the most by a Yankee, and he also had a three-run shot in the sixth. In his seven innings, Javier Vazquez (6-5) lacked velocity, with his fastball hovering around 88 miles per hour, but he managed to work past the runs and hits he allowed in picking up his third straight victory. He allowed solo home runs to Hunter Pence in the second inning and Carlos Lee in the sixth. \u201cIf I\u2019m locating, I know I can win at throwing 88 or 90,\u201d said Vazquez, who allowed six hits and walked none. \u201cObviously, I would love to get back to what I was last year and years in the past, at 90 to 94. If it\u2019s there, that\u2019s great. I feel pretty good.\u201d Marcus Thames strained his right hamstring and was taken for a magnetic resonance imaging exam, which was negative. Thames awkwardly fielded Jeff Keppinger\u2019s run-scoring double off the wall in the third, then uncharacteristically jogged while flying out to center field in the bottom of that inning, but Girardi said he did not know when the injury occurred. Brett Gardner, who had been limited to pinch-running because of a mild sprain in his left thumb, entered in the fifth to replace Thames as the left fielder. Gardner went 0 for 2. \u201cHe was extremely disappointed he got hurt, I can tell you that,\u201d Girardi said of Thames. \u201cWe\u2019ll wait for the diagnosis to determine what we\u2019re going to do with him.\u201d Posada singled Friday night and said it was an important step for him. On Saturday, Posada\u2019s grand slam off Wandy Rodriguez (3-9) highlighted a five-run third inning. Posada also singled in the fifth. \u201cI needed it,\u201d Posada said, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s all about battling when you\u2019re struggling, trying to get good pitches and work the count.\u201d Posada, who has not caught since returning, said it had been difficult staying in the game mentally as a designated hitter, and he had not been performing well at the plate. He entered the game hitting .133 with one run batted in 30 at-bats since his return. \u201cIt\u2019s tough to do; it\u2019s not easy,\u201d Posada said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a like or a dislike. It\u2019s just not like when you play every day. It\u2019s like pinch-hitting four times. You\u2019ve got to get used to it and learn to be involved and be a part of it.\u201d Posada, who was injured on May 16 after a foul ball struck him on the foot while he was catching, said he did not know how to keep himself occupied between plate appearances. Posada said before the game that he generally tried to stay loose by hitting, stretching or riding a stationary bike. He does not review film of his plate appearances because, he said, \u201cI don\u2019t want to keep getting involved in my at-bats, to tell you the truth.\u201d Posada may want to hold onto the memories of his at-bats from Saturday. His grand slam was a sight for a designated hitter struggling to hit. At least for Sunday, though, Posada will be back behind the plate, exactly where he thinks he belongs. INSIDE PITCH Alex Rodriguez was not in the Yankees\u2019 lineup for a second straight game because of tendinitis in his right hip flexor, but Joe Girardi said Rodriguez was feeling better. Rodriguez is day to day with the injury, which is not thought to be related to his 2009 hip surgery.", "keyword": "Posada Jorge;New York Yankees;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0256796", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/08/15", "title": "Redskins Cut Veteran Kicker Shayne Graham", "abstract": "This was yet another kickoff that had very little return. The Washington Redskins \u2019 duel of the kicking Grahams, which was supposed to provide some special-teams drama throughout the preseason, lasted all of one game thanks to a sudden wild streak from one of the game\u2019s most reliable veterans. Shayne Graham was cut by the Redskins on Sunday, two days after he shanked a 29-yard field-goal attempt and also missed a 49-yarder in Friday\u2019s 16-7 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. The move leaves the incumbent Graham Gano, who ranked last in field-goal accuracy in the N.F.L. last season, as the only kicker in training camp. Gano hit from 32, 34 and 45 yards against the Steelers. \u201cWe haven\u2019t solved our kicking issue,\u201d the special-teams coach Danny Smith said. \u201cHe had a good game at 3 for 3 with a guy that wasn\u2019t very productive. We made a decision to let that guy go. We did find out coming out of that game that Shayne Graham wasn\u2019t the guy. We didn\u2019t prove the point that we\u2019re solid at kicker yet.\u201d Graham would have been a good bet to win the job at the start of camp. His 86 percent field-goal success rate makes him the third-most accurate kicker in N.F.L. history. He went 12 for 12 last year, and 2 for 2 in the playoffs, with New England. But he never found his rhythm with the Redskins. He got a late start because of the rule that kept veteran free agents off the field in the early days after the lockout, and because the holder Sav Rocca had to wait several days for a visa to return to the United States from Australia. \u201cI know that I\u2019m better than I was today,\u201d Graham said after Friday\u2019s game. \u201cI proved it for years, and I just didn\u2019t do it today. I\u2019m trying to win a job, and it just didn\u2019t go down the way I wanted it to.\u201d Gano was the epitome of a hit-or-miss commodity last year in his first full N.F.L. season. He made only 24 of 35 field-goal attempts for a 6-10 team that played a lot of close games \u2014 nine decided by 3 points or fewer. He made overtime game-winners against Green Bay, Tennessee and Jacksonville. A PATRIOTS EMPHASIS Patriots Coach Bill Belichick has made no secret of his intention to upgrade the team\u2019s defensive line and, with it, the pass rush. That\u2019s why there were 18 defensive linemen in camp as of Sunday, including four established veterans who were recently obtained through free agency or trade: Shaun Ellis, Albert Haynesworth, Mark Anderson and Andre Carter. That has led to speculation that the Patriots will employ more of a 4-3 defensive front instead of the 3-4 more commonly seen in recent seasons. COTCHERY PRACTICES The new Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery says he\u2019s ready to win now. Cotchery, a seven-year N.F.L. veteran, signed last week with the Steelers, the defending A.F.C. champions, and participated in his first practice Sunday. Cotchery said he believed Pittsburgh was the best fit for him after he asked the Jets to release him. Cotchery caught 41 passes last year for the Jets, his lowest total since becoming a full-time starter in 2006. He will make his Steelers debut Thursday against Philadelphia. SAINTS\u2019 PORTER RETURNS New Orleans Saints cornerback Tracy Porter has returned to practice for the first time since training camp opened and says his surgically repaired left knee is not bothering him. Porter has been recovering from off-season microfracture surgery. Also at practice were receivers Marques Colston and Robert Meachem. Colston was sidelined by swelling around his surgically repaired right knee cap, while Meachem left Friday night\u2019s preseason opener against San Francisco with a lower back strain. BACKUPS STRUGGLE Colts Coach Jim Caldwell isn\u2019t worried about his backup quarterbacks, despite their struggles in the preseason opener Saturday against the St. Louis Rams. With Peyton Manning out while nursing a neck injury, the reserves Curtis Painter and Dan Orlovsky got the early action in a 33-10 loss. They combined to complete 7 of 16 passes with three interceptions. Caldwell said that Painter had some good moments and that Orlovsky, a free-agent pickup, had not had much time to learn the complicated Colts offense.", "keyword": "Football;Washington Redskins;Graham Shayne;Gano Graham"}
{"id": "ny0287653", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/08/17", "title": "ValueAct\u2019s Bet on Morgan Stanley Bet Goes Only So Far", "abstract": "The activist investor ValueAct Capital Management has paired its new $1 billion-plus stake in Morgan Stanley with support for the bank\u2019s chief executive, James P. Gorman. But ValueAct\u2019s logic for investing in the Wall Street bank goes only so far. Jeffrey W. Ubben, the ValueAct chief executive, thinks shareholders just do not get Morgan Stanley, which now collects 80 percent of its net income from wealth management, investment management and merger advisory services, compared with just 30 percent around a decade ago. Mr. Ubben says other highly regulated businesses hog too much attention. It is not that simple. Trading absorbs most of the $43 billion in capital at Morgan Stanley\u2019s investment bank \u2013 almost two-thirds of the company\u2019s total. Performance in fixed-income trading is volatile and subpar. Other businesses deserve credit, but shareholders fully grasp that. The roughly 82 percent of book value at which the company trades is on the nail for a company that managed an annualized return on equity last quarter of only 8.3 percent. If the businesses Mr. Ubben likes are really better, it is not showing yet. Mr. Gorman is only part of the way through cutting $1 billion of costs, and he is saving $175 million a year buying back expensive trust-preferred securities. These tactics could eventually take the return on equity above 10 percent and warrant the company trading at book value \u2013 a 43 percent improvement from where Mr. Ubben jumped in, bagging his fund around $500 million. Even so, an activist hoping to really shake up Morgan Stanley would agitate for a breakup. A stand-alone wealth- and asset-management unit would probably be worth $50 billion. That assumes the business is worth 20 times its potential $2.5 billion of net income this year, a higher rating than the 16 times that Raymond James commands. The bank\u2019s mergers and acquisitions franchise could fetch more than $5 billion, assuming a 25 percent pretax margin and Greenhill\u2019s valuation multiple of 15 times earnings. Add the two, and the total is not far from Morgan Stanley\u2019s current $59 billion market cap \u2013 and underwriting and trading are still unaccounted for. Selling those units might not be easy, but shutting them down could unlock tens of billions of dollars in capital, a potential bonanza for shareholder returns. Mr. Ubben is not asking for that, but it is a prospect that should keep Mr. Gorman focused on delivering his improvements before someone else does.", "keyword": "Banking and Finance;Morgan Stanley;ValueAct Capital Partners;James P Gorman"}
{"id": "ny0232386", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/08/27", "title": "Jay Mariotti Is Suspended by AOL", "abstract": "Jay Mariotti, the caustic online columnist arrested Saturday and charged with domestic assault after an incident with his girlfriend, was suspended Thursday by AOL , for which he is a columnist for its FanHouse Web site. ESPN, for which Mariotti appears as a panelist on the \u201cAround the Horn\u201d program, has not yet taken any action. \u201cWe are continuing to gather all the facts,\u201d said Caroline Campbell, a spokeswoman for AOL. \u201cIn the meantime, we have suspended Jay Mariotti and are not featuring any new work from him.\u201d She would not elaborate on what AOL had learned since Mariotti\u2019s arrest to prompt the suspension. Mariotti, 51, was arrested at his house and released from jail on $50,000 bail. The Los Angeles Times reported that Mariotti pushed, shoved and grabbed his girlfriend during an altercation at a club in Santa Monica, Calif.", "keyword": "Mariotti Jay;AOL;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations"}
{"id": "ny0235638", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/01/06", "title": "Public Officials Attack New York\u2019s Heroin Pamphlet", "abstract": "If you are going to do drugs, do it right, because even drug addicts deserve to have their lives protected. That was the message New York City health officials said they were trying to convey in a pamphlet on \u201ctips for safer use\u201d of heroin that the city financed and distributed and that has raised the hackles of public officials, including the city\u2019s special narcotics prosecutor, over the last few days. City health officials say the 17-page brochure, which has been in circulation since June 2007, simply recognizes that, realistically, it is impossible to stop every intravenous drug user. It offers \u201c10 Tips for Safer Use\u201d of heroin, like injecting drugs with someone else in case something goes wrong and \u201cshoot correctly to avoid infection and collapsed veins.\u201d But skeptics, including City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Queens Democrat, and Bridget G. Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor, say the brochure is a how-to manual for beginning drug users that \u2014 through tips like \u201cwarm up your body (jump up and down) to show your veins\u201d \u2014 makes drug use seem normal. They said it was misguided public policy and called on the city to withdraw it. Mr. Vallone, chairman of the council\u2019s Public Safety Committee, said on Tuesday that the pamphlet, whose existence was reported in The New York Post this week, offered little of value to experienced users and could encourage novices to take up heroin use by showing them how to do it. \u201cYou\u2019re spending taxpayer money and getting a how-to guide for first-time users,\u201d he said. The city has spent about $32,000 to print and distribute 70,000 copies of the flier, health officials said. Ms. Brennan said Tuesday that she saw a legitimate public purpose in other policies directed at intravenous drug users, like needle exchanges to prevent drug users from spreading H.I.V. and other infections through contaminated needles. But she said that telling drug users to do things like wash their hands was silly. \u201cI think needle exchange, if it\u2019s managed well and it\u2019s targeted and it\u2019s thoughtfully administered, I think that makes a lot of sense, but this doesn\u2019t fall into that category,\u201d Ms. Brennan said. She said that the brochure suggested there was a safe way to inject heroin. \u201cAnytime you intravenously inject drugs you\u2019re taking your life into your hands, no matter how many times you wash your hands or use alcohol,\u201d Ms. Brennan said. \u201cIt\u2019s a poison. And you don\u2019t know what the drug is cut with. When I looked at the brochure, it suggested a normalization.\u201d Mr. Vallone said he did not blame the city\u2019s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, for the pamphlet, which was distributed long before Dr. Farley took office in June, but he said he planned to meet with the commissioner on Wednesday and would ask him to withdraw the pamphlet. Mr. Vallone objected to safety tips like \u201cdrop the cotton directly into the cooker. Don\u2019t touch it!\u201d To him, he said, that sounded like \u201cyou\u2019re going to prevent them from getting a boo-boo.\u201d He also cited the tip about jumping up and down. \u201cThat\u2019s a helpful hint, not advice to prevent any disease,\u201d Mr. Vallone said. Health officials adamantly denied that the pamphlet could be construed as a how-to manual. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d Dr. Adam Karpati, executive deputy commissioner for the health department\u2019s division of mental hygiene, said on Tuesday. Tips like the one about warming up veins, he said, were to protect users from repeated injections, which could lead to bloodstream and skin-borne infections. City health officials said the brochure was aimed at making intravenous drug use \u201csafer,\u201d not \u201csafe.\u201d He noted that the first page of the leaflet urges users to \u201cget help and support to stop using drugs\u201d and that the pamphlet offers 24-hour hotline numbers for them to call. He said the city was trying to prevent overdoses and health risks, like H.I.V. and hepatitis, which are spread by dirty needles. More than 600 New Yorkers die of accidental drug overdoses every year, and one-third of people with H.I.V. in the United States were infected through intravenous drug use, the health department said. \u201cOur primary message, as it is in all our initiatives, is to help people stop using drugs and to provide them with information on how to quit,\u201d Dr. Karpati said. But he said that health officials recognized that quitting was not a realistic expectation for all drug users.", "keyword": "Heroin;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0063131", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2014/01/06", "title": "Under Challenging Conditions, Shiffrin Wins Second Slalom", "abstract": "If this were a trial run for the Sochi Olympics, Mikaela Shiffrin passed with flying colors. Shiffrin fought through soft snow, rain and deep ruts \u2014 exactly the type of conditions she could face next month in Sochi, Russia \u2014 to win her second World Cup slalom of the season Sunday in Bormio, Italy. \u201cIt\u2019s always a big confidence booster to have good skiing in different conditions,\u201d Shiffrin said. Located near the Black Sea, the Alpine resort of Rosa Khutor that will host the skiing races at the Olympics is known for varying weather conditions. \u201cSochi can be challenging with the weather and everything,\u201d said Patrick Riml, the United States Alpine director. He said Shiffrin showed that \u201cshe\u2019s very well prepared.\u201d Shiffrin, 18, led by 0.03 of a second after the opening run and won by 0.13 ahead of Maria Pietilae-Holmner of Sweden for the sixth victory of her career. Nastasia Noens of France moved up from 13th after the first run to finish third, 0.62 behind. The four-time overall winner Lindsey Vonn skipped the race as she continues to rest her injured knee. CELSKI WINS MEN\u2019S 1,000 METERS Apolo Anton Ohno tabbed J. R. Celski as a future star four years ago. With Ohno now retired and doing television commentary, Celski has stepped into the void as the dominant American short track speedskater. Celski won the 1,000 meters at the United States Olympic trials in Kearns, Utah, giving him three individual events to compete in at the Sochi Olympics. Celski heads to his second Olympics looking to add to the two bronze medals he won at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, when Ohno was ending his career as America\u2019s most decorated Winter Olympian. \u201cI\u2019ve gotten the experience, but this time is completely different for me,\u201d Celski said. \u201cMentally, physically, I\u2019m healthy. I\u2019m going to ride that momentum. I look forward to doing some damage over there.\u201d Celski lost just one race during the four-day trials at the Utah Olympic Oval, finishing second by half a blade length to Chris Creveling in the first 1,000 final. Celski came back to easily win the second 1,000 final of the day. He\u2019ll be joined on the men\u2019s team by Eddy Alvarez, Creveling, the 2010 Olympian Jordan Malone and Kyle Carr. Alvarez became the first Cuban-American man to make a United States Olympic speedskating team. Celski and Alvarez qualified for the 500, the 1,000 and the 1,500. GERMAN VICTORY IN BOBSLED Sandra Kiriasis of Germany drove to a World Cup bobsled win on her home track in Winterberg, edging Elana Meyers of the United States by the slimmest of margins. Kiriasis and brakeman Franziska Fritz finished two runs in 1 minute 55.41 seconds \u2014 0.01 of a second ahead of Meyers and Lolo Jones, who likely bolstered her Olympic hopes by helping give USA-1 a huge push in the second heat. Anja Schneiderheinze and Stephanie Schneider were third for Germany, 0.07 seconds back. NORWEGIANS SWEEP TOUR DE SKI Therese Johaug and Martin Johnsrud Sundby became the first Norwegians to win the Tour de Ski as they both claimed victory in the seventh and final stage in Val di Fiemme, Italy. Johaug, 25, clocked 34:19.8 to beat Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen by 20.4 seconds in the overall standings. Heidi Weng finished third as Norway became the first country to grab all three podium places in the Tour. In the men\u2019s event, Sundby crossed the line in 32:49.6 seconds to complete a remarkable day for Norway. Chris Jespersen, also of Norway, was second in his first Tour de Ski attempt, with Johannes Duerr of Austria third. LOCH TAKES LUGE RACE Felix Loch of Germany easily won his third World Cup luge race of the season, posting the fastest heat in both runs and beating Armin Zoeggeler of Italy by nearly a second in Konigssee, Germany. Loch finished in 1:38.266. Zoeggeler\u2019s time was 1:39.129, and Gregory Cariget of Switzerland was third in 1:39.203.", "keyword": "Skiing;Mikaela Shiffrin;2014 Winter Olympics"}
{"id": "ny0102500", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/12", "title": "Judge Denies Bail for Ex-Suffolk County Police Chief: \u2018He Still Has the Power\u2019", "abstract": "CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. \u2014 A federal judge ordered the former police chief of Suffolk County held without bail on Friday, saying he had orchestrated such far-reaching corruption in the department that there was a risk he would continue meddling in the inquiry into his misconduct even after his arrest this week. The hearing, held in Federal District Court here, exposed in vivid detail the degree to which prosecutors believe that the former chief, James Burke, held sway over subordinates as he tried to quash reports that he had bludgeoned a man who stole ammunition and sex toys, among other items, from his car. Comparing his tactics to those of the Soviet-era K.G.B., prosecutors said Mr. Burke had contacted a witness in the middle of grand jury proceedings, asked a colleague to spy on rivals and instructed others to say that he had merely looked in on the interrogation of Christopher Loeb, 29, and did not beat him as prosecutors have contended. They also said police union members, under Mr. Burke\u2019s influence, had tried to silence an officer who knew about his sex toys. Mr. Burke, 51, who left the Suffolk Police Department this fall amid an investigation after nearly three decades there, was arrested on Wednesday on federal charges of violating Mr. Loeb\u2019s civil rights and obstructing the inquiry. In denying him bail, Judge Leonard D. Wexler said he agreed with prosecutors that Mr. Burke was a danger to his Long Island community because of his long-running campaign of coercion and secrecy in one of the country\u2019s largest police forces. Prosecutors described his trying to put a tracking device on a rival\u2019s car to sabotage her career and, on another occasion, paying to erase evidence that he had crashed his car while drunkenly following a state official. \u201cI find the corruption of an entire department by this defendant is shocking,\u201d Judge Wexler said. \u201cThe evidence is clear: He still has the power.\u201d The indictment alleges that after Mr. Burke learned in 2012 that a duffel bag and other items from his car had been found in Mr. Loeb\u2019s mother\u2019s home, he retrieved the stolen bag while investigators were still conducting their search of the home. (Prosecutors said the bag contained a cigar box, humidor and sex toys.) Mr. Burke then drove to an interrogation room where Mr. Loeb was chained to a bolt in the floor, according to the indictment, and punched and kicked him in the head and body. Mr. Loeb ultimately pleaded guilty to the theft. In trying to cover up his brutality, prosecutors said, Mr. Burke exploited a stranglehold on the department so tight that his imprint was not diminished even by his arrest. \u201cIt was a two-minute assault in 2012, and the cover-up has been going on for years,\u201d Lara Treinis Gatz, an assistant United States attorney, told the judge. Ms. Gatz said Mr. Burke had called a witness in October, as grand jury proceedings were underway in the case, to tell the witness to \u201cmake sure your guys get their stories straight.\u201d Prosecutors also pointed to a group text message that they said Mr. Burke sent to 10 police officers, trying to find someone to go to a retirement party for a rival officer. Image James Burke, the former chief of the Suffolk County. N.Y., Police Department. Credit Newsday \u201cWe need a friendly to go to Cuff\u2019s retirement party to take accurate attendance,\u201d Mr. Burke wrote, according to an image of the text message released by prosecutors. \u201cNot sure where. Whoever goes has to be able to recognize faces. Enemies, bosses active and retired and politicians.\u201d And as far back as 2013, shortly after a special prosecutor was assigned to look into reports of a beating, Mr. Burke summoned three officers who were witnesses in the case and instructed them to get their stories straight, prosecutors said. \u201cHe told subordinates that if asked, that yes, he was at the Fourth Precinct but he merely looked in,\u201d said James Miskiewicz, another assistant United States attorney, referring to the station house where the interrogation happened. \u201cTheir boss\u2019s boss\u2019s boss\u2019s boss is telling them, \u2018You lie.\u2019 \u201d In arguing for his release, Mr. Burke\u2019s lawyers said his influence had waned since he left the department. They cited other federal cases, including the one against Bernard L. Madoff, in saying that evidence of past obstruction does not prove a future risk. \u201cHe no longer has the power, ability to intimidate,\u201d one of Mr. Burke\u2019s lawyers, Joseph R. Conway, told the judge. \u201cHe does not have any power to obstruct justice.\u201d But prosecutors said the beating fit a pattern of the former chief\u2019s using his authority to undermine subordinates and conceal reckless behavior. One witness to the alleged beating recalled Mr. Burke \u201cgrabbing the victim by the ear and shaking him violently, screaming things like, \u2018You want to steal from me?\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Miskiewicz, the prosecutor. Another witness told prosecutors that Mr. Burke warned he was going to give Mr. Loeb a \u201chotshot,\u201d a slang term for a fatal dose of heroin. Prosecutors said that was only the most brazen in a string of episodes. On one occasion, they said, Mr. Burke admitted to an officer that he had been drunk when he crashed into the car of a state official he had been following. They said he was never investigated in the case. \u201cHe pays out of pocket,\u201d Mr. Miskiewicz said, \u201cand makes it go away.\u201d On another occasion, prosecutors said, Mr. Burke planned to put a GPS unit on the car of a rival, a high-ranking civilian in the department, in order to \u201cdig up dirt on her\u201d and \u201cdestroy her career.\u201d Mr. Burke\u2019s lawyers said he simply wanted to know whether she was filing false time sheets. Prosecutors called it \u201csomething out of the K.G.B.\u201d Judge Wexler had planned to close the hearing on Friday to the public, but he reversed his decision after a number of news organizations, including The New York Times, signed a letter challenging its legality. Amy Marion, a lawyer for Mr. Loeb, said the hearing offered more evidence of the deep roots of corruption in the Suffolk County Police Department, which has also recently faced accusations of officers\u2019 stealing money from undocumented immigrants . \u201cIt\u2019s so inbred there,\u201d Ms. Marion said.", "keyword": "James Burke;Suffolk County NY;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Corruption;Leonard D Wexler"}
{"id": "ny0143623", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/10/05", "title": "Command for Africa Is Established by Pentagon", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 For decades, Africa was rarely more than an afterthought for the Pentagon. Responsibilities for American military affairs across the vast African continent were divided clumsily among three regional combat headquarters, those for Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East. Commanders set priorities against obvious threats, whether the old Soviet Union and then a resurgent Russia, a rising China or a nuclear North Korea, or adversaries along the Persian Gulf. If deployment of fighting forces is an indicator, that historic focus north of the equator endures. But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new view has gained acceptance among senior Pentagon officials and military commanders: that ungoverned spaces and ill-governed states, whose impoverished citizens are vulnerable to the ideology of violent extremism, pose a growing risk to American security. Last week, in a small Pentagon conference hall, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inaugurated the newest regional headquarters, Africa Command, which is responsible for coordinating American military affairs on the continent. There are barely 2,000 American combat troops and combat support personnel based in Africa, and the new top officer, Gen. William E. Ward of the Army, pledges that Africa Command has no designs on creating vast, permanent concentrations of forces on the continent. \u201cBases? Garrisons? It\u2019s not about that,\u201d General Ward said in an interview. \u201cWe are trying to prevent conflict, as opposed to having to react to a conflict.\u201d Already, though, analysts at policy advocacy organizations and research institutes are warning of a militarization of American foreign policy across Africa. Mr. Gates said the new command was an example of the Pentagon\u2019s evolving strategy of forging what he called \u201ccivilian-military partnerships,\u201d in which the Defense Department works alongside and supports the State Department and the Agency for International Development, as well as host nations\u2019 security and development agencies. \u201cIn this respect, Africom represents yet another important step in modernizing our defense arrangements in light of 21st-century realities,\u201d Mr. Gates said. \u201cIt is, at its heart, a different kind of command with a different orientation, one that we hope and expect will institutionalize a lasting security relationship with Africa, a vast region of growing importance in the globe.\u201d Mr. Gates and General Ward said that this work to complement and support American security and development policies would include missions like deploying military trainers to improve the abilities of local counterterrorism forces, assigning military engineers to help dig wells and build sewers, and sending in military doctors to inoculate the local population against diseases. While that thinking has influenced the work of all of the military\u2019s regional war-fighting commands, it is the central focus of Africa Command. And over the past two years, it has quietly become the central focus of the military\u2019s Southern Command, once better known for the invasions of Grenada and Panama, but now converting itself to a headquarters that supports efforts across the United States government and within host nations to improve security and economic development in Latin America. A number of specialists in African and Latin American politics at nongovernmental organizations express apprehension, however, that the new emphasis of both these commands represents an undesirable injection of the military into American foreign policy, a change driven by fears of terrorists or desires for natural resources. Officials at one leading relief organization, Refugees International, warned of the risk that Africom \u201cwill take over many humanitarian and development activities that soldiers aren\u2019t trained to perform.\u201d In a statement, Kenneth H. Bacon, the president of Refugees International, said that the creation of Africa Command was \u201ca sign of increased U.S. attention to Africa.\u201d But he also said that it was \u201cimportant that Africom focus on training peacekeepers and helping African countries build militaries responsive to civilian control and democratic government.\u201d Mr. Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration, added, \u201cThe military should stick to military tasks and let diplomats and development experts direct other aspects of U.S. policy in Africa.\u201d Refugees International released statistics showing that the percentage of development assistance controlled by the Defense Department had grown to nearly 22 percent from 3.5 percent over the past 10 years, while the percentage controlled by the Agency for International Development dropped to 40 percent from 65 percent. General Ward rejected criticisms that Africa Command would result in a militarization of foreign policy, and he said it was specifically structured for cooperative efforts across the agencies of the United States government. For example, a deputy commander at Africom is Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, a career Foreign Service officer. And General Ward himself previously served in a combined diplomatic and military role, as director of efforts to help reform the Palestinian security services. But concerns remain that whatever arena the Pentagon enters, it has more money, more personnel and more power than any other government organization, American or foreign. \u201cIf we can bring a capability that can be an assist to one of our interagency partners, then I think we ought to do that,\u201d General Ward said. \u201cBut I draw a distinction between leading that effort and supporting that effort. We don\u2019t create policy. This is not the job of a unified command. We implement those aspects of policy that have military implications. And we support others.\u201d Planners abandoned early intentions to base Africa Command in Africa, perhaps with a major headquarters and regional satellite offices. Owing to local sensitivities, security concerns and simple logistics of moving around the vast continent, which often requires routing through Europe, the command will for now have its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. General Ward said that in creating the Africa Command, he had been in close contact with his counterpart atop the military\u2019s Southern Command, Adm. James G. Stavridis, who has received high marks from Pentagon leaders for converting the military presence in Central and South America. Where previously Southern Command emphasized direct military action, it now focuses on programs to train and support local forces, and assist economic development, health services and counternarcotics efforts. \u201cThe more I look at this region over the two years I have been at Southcom,\u201d Admiral Stavridis said in an interview, \u201cthe more convinced I am that the approach we need to take for U.S. national security in the region is really an interagency approach. \u201cThink of the problems that afflict this region \u2014 natural disasters, poverty, the narcotics trade, lack of medical care,\u201d he said. \u201cOur thought at Southcom is, How can we be supportive of an interagency approach? How can we partner with other interagency actors, and then tie that together with our international partners?\u201d Admiral Stavridis said Southern Command was \u201cvery directly and consciously not taking the lead.\u201d \u201cWe are trying to be part of the team, to be a facilitator,\u201d he added. But George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human-rights advocacy organization, said in a statement that \u201cwhile improved delivery of U.S. assistance is certainly an admirable goal,\u201d putting Southern Command into a coordinating role on issues like corruption, crime or poverty \u201cdrains authority from the State Department and resources from the Defense Department.\u201d", "keyword": "Africa;Defense Department;United States Defense and Military Forces;United States Africa Command"}
{"id": "ny0142266", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/11/07", "title": "A Gym Taskmaster With a Knack for Making People Sweat", "abstract": "Terrence Walcott, 25, has worked for two years as a personal trainer at the David Barton Gym at Madison Avenue and East 85th Street. He grew up in Crown Heights and was on the track team at the University of Michigan, where he could long-jump 26 feet. Slogan on work shirt: Look Better Naked Way he knows his workouts are working: I use the spousal test: \u201cSo, has your husband or wife said anything yet?\u201d Everyone you know, the guy on the corner who hits on you, your boss, may be noticing that you\u2019re working out. I was training this woman for two years and she said to me, \u201cYesterday my husband gave me a compliment on my arms,\u201d and I said to myself, \u201cI\u2019m the best trainer in the world.\u201d Loves to hear: \u201cI got down on the floor and picked up my grandson for the first time.\u201d There was a 75-year-old client of mine who went kayaking last week, and before, he could barely walk. I get so much joy from being able to work someone out hard. Hates to hear: \u201cI just got my hair done and I can\u2019t sweat today.\u201d No matter what we do, there\u2019s no way you can be here for an hour and you don\u2019t sweat. It becomes like a chess match. If I know a person needs things, I\u2019ve got to figure out a way so they get the benefit of that exercise. If they didn\u2019t get what I felt they needed, it\u2019s a bad session that weighs on my days sometimes. Typical lunch: A couple of turkey burgers on pita, with grilled sweet potato and a drink. And in an hour and a half, I\u2019ll eat the same thing again. Who comes in when: Some guys get here at 7, get beat up, and they say, \u201cGood morning, Terrence, goodbye, Terrence\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s it. They tend to be the Wall Street finance guys. Once 9 o\u2019clock hits, it changes at 9. At 9 are these guys\u2019 wives. And the wives at 9 are more focused than the ones at 11. Childhood obstacle: I was born bowlegged, and I had braces to correct it, but they were too tight, and the bones fused incorrectly. I had surgery on my right leg as an infant, and I was never supposed to be able to walk again. My mother was ecstatic when I started running track. The road through college: I was planning on going into geriatrics. Halfway through school I realized I didn\u2019t want to be a doctor. It was painful. It was even more painful because I didn\u2019t know what I did want to do. After college, when I couldn\u2019t run or compete anymore, it devastated me. I figured, that\u2019s my passion. After work: When I have a couple of hours I watch documentaries on the Science Channel, and sports. Every so often someone will force me to go to the movie theater. Should a trainer look totally buff? I had this one trainer, she was 4 feet 11 and maybe 90 pounds wet, she beat me down like no one has ever done in my life. It\u2019s all about knowledge.", "keyword": "Health Clubs;New York City;Exercise"}
{"id": "ny0162490", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2006/02/20", "title": "Bonds Says He'll Retire but Then Backpedals", "abstract": "Two days before Barry Bonds was to begin spring training with the San Francisco Giants and resume his pursuit of Hank Aaron's career home run record, he said that he planned to retire after this season. In an article posted yesterday on USA Today's Web site, Bonds said he was tired of playing. \"I'm not playing baseball anymore after this,\" Bonds said. \"The game is not fun anymore.\" Last night, however, in an interview with MLB.com, Bonds seemed to back away from his comments. \"If my knee holds up, I'll keep on going,\" he said. \"I'm playing psychological games with myself right now. So I go back and forth.\" If the 41-year-old Bonds were to retire, he would be giving himself one season to surpass Babe Ruth and then Aaron for what is arguably the most hallowed record in sports. Bonds has 708 home runs. Ruth hit 714, and Aaron hit 755. Bonds has been adamant about his desire to unseat Ruth, but he has been reverential toward Aaron and has seemed hesitant at times about possibly nudging past him. \"I've never cared about records,\" Bonds told USA Today. \"So what difference does it make? Right now, I'm telling you, I don't even want to play next year. Baseball is a fun sport. But I'm not having fun.\" Bonds, a seven-time most valuable player, testified before a federal grand jury in the steroids case against the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in 2003. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2004 that Bonds had testified that he used a clear substance and a cream supplied by a trainer but that he did not know they were steroids. Greg Anderson, Bonds's personal trainer, pleaded guilty last July to steroid distribution and money laundering. He was sentenced in October to three months in prison and three months of home confinement. According to USA Today, Bonds spoke in the phone interview in a fashion that made him sound as if he were feeling sorry for himself. He mentioned the pain pills he takes to be able to play and how he can barely run because of the pain in his knee. He did not play until Sept. 12 last season because of knee injuries, but he hit 5 homers in 14 games. \"Breaking these records aren't a big thing to me,\" Bonds said in the interview. \"It's a great honor to pass Ruth, but it means more to baseball than it does to me.\" Bonds will be paid $18 million in the final year of a five-year, $90 million contract with the Giants. He can become a free agent after the season. If Bonds is close to the record, could the Giants or perhaps a team in the American League, where he could be a designated hitter, persuade him to return for another season? If Bonds remains healthy this season, he will certainly move ahead of Ruth. Whether or not Bonds could hit well enough to pass Aaron and become baseball's most prolific home run hitter is uncertain, especially because of his recent injury history. He has hit more than 48 home runs twice in his 20-year career, with 49 in 2000 and 73 in his record-setting season of 2001.", "keyword": "SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS;BONDS BARRY;BASEBALL"}
{"id": "ny0278472", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/11/08", "title": "A Presidential Campaign\u2019s Toughest Challenge: Coping With Defeat", "abstract": "Shortly after the curtain fell on the 1976 election, Hubert H. Humphrey took his dejected friend Bob Dole, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, out for ice cream to try to improve his mood. Mr. Humphrey, who had lost a presidential race eight years earlier, told him it would get worse before it got better. \u201cToday, people will be second-guessing you,\u201d Mr. Humphrey told Mr. Dole, the running mate of Gerald R. Ford, the incumbent president defeated by Jimmy Carter. \u201cThey\u2019re going to be looking for someone to blame.\u201d Then Mr. Humphrey offered a gesture of kindness, Mr. Dole recalled in an interview, telling him, \u201cLet\u2019s talk about tomorrow and your future and move on.\u201d Mr. Humphrey was speaking to Mr. Dole as a new inductee into an elite but hardly sought-after fraternity: candidates who have endured a failed national political campaign, an experience of loss that some have compared to a death in the family. After Tuesday\u2019s election , Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton will join those ranks. For most failed presidential candidates, it is not their first exposure to the intense emotions that come with such a public defeat. Even so, little else compares to it. President George Bush, who had suffered his share of defeats earlier in his career, wrote in his journal on Nov. 4, 1992, about the exquisite torture of his loss to Bill Clinton: \u201cIt\u2019s hurt, hurt, hurt and I guess it\u2019s the pride too.\u201d He reflected wistfully, too, on his failure to embarrass the pollsters. \u201cI was absolutely convinced we would prove them wrong,\u201d he wrote, \u201cbut I was wrong and they were right and that hurts a lot.\u201d Having lost the 2000 presidential race after the legal battle over the Florida recount, Al Gore effectively disappeared from public life for several years. Mrs. Clinton knows a similar feeling, having lost a drawn-out and contentious primary battle to Barack Obama in 2008. \u201cThis was not going to be easy for me,\u201d she wrote in her memoir \u201cHard Choices.\u201d Yet she took little time to nurse her wounds before becoming Mr. Obama\u2019s secretary of state. In contrast, Mr. Trump is a first-time candidate \u2014 and someone who has built his public persona on the idea that no matter the contest, he always comes out a winner. He was plainly rattled and off-kilter the night of the Iowa caucuses , when, despite aides\u2019 assurances that he was coasting to victory, he lost the Republican contest to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. And Mr. Trump\u2019s behavior on the campaign trail \u2014 exulting in his large crowds, maintaining that he holds a lead even when the polls say otherwise \u2014 suggests he could have an unusually difficult time handling an undesired result Tuesday night. \u201cSomebody coming from a successful business to politics, if he should lose \u2014 I\u2019m not certain what the reaction would be,\u201d Mr. Dole said. \u201cHe must know that somebody\u2019s going to lose.\u201d Whether Mr. Trump has allowed for the possibility is unclear. Advisers said he had spoken of nothing but victory. Former Senator George Allen of Virginia, who lost a close race for re-election in 2006, said both presidential candidates needed to have at least a vague idea of what they would say in the event of a loss. \u201cThat\u2019s the responsible thing to do,\u201d he said. \u201cI do think preparation is important.\u201d Image Hillary Clinton campaigning in Allendale, Mich., on Monday, a day before the presidential election. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times The psychological dimensions of a loss can take a few days to sink in. \u201cIt\u2019s shrouded a bit in the first 24 to 48 hours because you\u2019re recovering from the campaign,\u201d said Rick A. Lazio, the former Republican congressman from Long Island who was the first person to lose to Mrs. Clinton , in the 2000 Senate race in New York. \u201cPretty soon after that, you\u2019re faced with the reality that your status has changed and your life has changed,\u201d said Mr. Lazio, whose dazed mind-set seemed to have been captured by a memorable photograph of him gazing out the window of his campaign plane after his final Election Day event that year, his eyes fixed on the clouds. Mr. Dole\u2019s loss to Mr. Clinton in 1996 was less painful than his 1976 defeat, he said, primarily because he considered Mr. Clinton his friend. They \u201cstill are friends as far as I know,\u201d said Mr. Dole, the only former Republican presidential nominee to endorse Mr. Trump. Mitt Romney said his defeat by Mr. Obama in 2012 was less painful than his loss in a 1994 bid to replace Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense analytically,\u201d Mr. Romney wrote in an email. \u201cI knew I had very little chance of beating him but when the loss actually happened, it was pretty emotional.\u201d Image Donald J. Trump on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times He said he and his wife, Ann, were in a \u201cfunk\u201d for a few months. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to watch the news,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe held back from social engagements. Sometimes emotions don\u2019t make a lot of sense, but that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not real.\u201d Mr. Allen, the former Virginia senator (he also served as governor), recalled an acute sadness that also overtook his family. He recalled that after an earlier race, a legislative contest that was close, he had contemplated hundreds of things that could have been done differently. Mr. Lazio\u2019s first loss was compounded by millions of dollars in campaign debt, which consumed him and made it difficult for him to move on. Gray Davis, who was abruptly forced out of the California governor\u2019s mansion in a recall election in 2003, tried to ignore the sting of defeat by plunging himself into working with his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the transition. \u201cIt hurts,\u201d Mr. Davis said. But not that much, he added hastily. \u201cLet\u2019s not overstate it \u2014 war didn\u2019t break out,\u201d Mr. Davis said. \u201cThe stock market didn\u2019t drop a thousand points. No one died.\u201d \u201cYou have to be stoic, but you also have to handle both victory and defeat with grace and gratitude,\u201d Mr. Davis said, calling it a privilege to have had supporters. \u201cThis is like a mission. And sometimes it\u2019s successful, and sometimes it isn\u2019t.\u201d Mr. Trump has referred to his campaign as a movement, but he has also moaned to his supporters at various points that it would be a \u201cbig, beautiful and, yes, very expensive waste of time\u201d were he to lose. Mr. Lazio said the sudden lack of attention could be most jarring. \u201cI think it\u2019s the crowds that are the major experience that you miss,\u201d Mr. Lazio said. \u201cYou don\u2019t get that again unless you\u2019re a candidate again.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Bob Dole;Rick A Lazio;Mitt Romney;Hillary Clinton;Donald Trump"}
{"id": "ny0251528", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/02/12", "title": "N.Y. Legislators Scarce at Committee Budget Hearings", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Membership in the State Legislature involves a variety of responsibilities, like attending hearings held by legislative committees. These can often be tedious, protracted affairs. Still, the current round of Albany hearings would seem to merit some attention. Many of those testifying are pleading for financial salvation. Such was the case with the college and university officials who traveled here on Thursday to ask for relief from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo\u2019s proposed budget cuts. But if the officials hoped to find allies in the State Senate\u2019s Higher Education Committee , they were in the wrong place. Sixteen of the committee\u2019s 19 members skipped the hearing. Attendance from the Assembly\u2019s Higher Education Committee was little better. Eighteen of the 22 members were absent. A week and a half after Mr. Cuomo unveiled his budget, the annual parade of jointly sponsored budget hearings is well under way, and the absence of many lawmakers has provoked some raised eyebrows at the Capitol \u2014 and a few acid-tongued news releases highlighting the no-shows. The Senate Democratic conference issued five notices to the news media on Thursday naming Republicans who were absent from the higher education hearing, including the chairman of the Senate\u2019s Higher Education Committee, Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, Republican of Suffolk County. \u201cChairman LaValle has an obligation to stand up for New Yorkers who rely on our higher education system,\u201d said Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Senate Democrats. \u201cBut he can\u2019t do that if he doesn\u2019t show up.\u201d Absenteeism, however, was a bipartisan issue. Five of the eight Democrats on the Senate Higher Education Committee did not attend the hearing on Thursday either. Three earlier hearings this week, on matters concerning local government, the environment and public safety, also drew relatively few lawmakers. Anyone who has attended the annual budget hearings could guess why. The hearings \u2014 13 in all \u2014 would be considered dull even by faithful C-Span viewers. For hours on end, officials sit before lawmakers and read long, carefully worded speeches noting the need for shared sacrifice in tight fiscal times. Then, with varying levels of shamelessness, they tend to ask the lawmakers to reverse the governor\u2019s proposed cuts as they pertain to their own institution or agency. The hearings are held in a big auditorium in the Legislative Office Building across the street from the Capitol. Audience members are not allowed bring in provisions like food or coffee. The meetings last for ages \u2014 6 hours 6 minutes in the case of the higher education session. That was actually a big improvement over last year, when the higher education hearing ran into the evening and the last speakers, student government representatives who had traveled from the City University of New York, spoke to a nearly empty auditorium. This year, a digital countdown clock was installed to police speakers who might wander beyond their allotted time, a misdeed that the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee , John A. DeFrancisco , Republican of Syracuse, warned speakers against on Thursday. \u201cIf you can adhere to the clock,\u201d Senator DeFrancisco promised, \u201ceverybody will be so much happier and so much more charitable to your area of the budget.\u201d Mr. DeFrancisco has had the pleasure \u2014 or burden \u2014 of presiding over the hearings, along with Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., Democrat of Manhattan, the chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee . Telephone calls to lawmakers\u2019 offices on Friday asking about their whereabouts for the hearings during the week produced a wide range of excuses. Some aides said they had been sent to attend the hearings in their bosses\u2019 stead. Other legislators were said to have watched the proceedings on the Internet. Mr. LaValle could not make it on Thursday because he was holding an environmental round table in his district, an annual event that had been on his calendar for months, said Scott Reif, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans. \u201cEven the Democrats know that no one works harder or is more passionate about issues related to higher education than Senator LaValle,\u201d Mr. Reif said, adding that Mr. LaValle had met the day before with officials from the State University of New York. Still, no one disputed that the hearings require stamina. By Thursday afternoon, Mr. DeFrancisco could no longer contain his frustration with the long-windedness of some of the people who came to testify. \u201cIt\u2019s so annoying \u2014 and I guess I am offending prior speakers \u2014 for someone to read a six-page, single-spaced letter that we have in front of us,\u201d Mr. DeFrancisco explained. He asked for a summary instead. \u201cYou could do whatever you choose to do,\u201d he added, raising his palms outward, as if to signify he was not trying to pressure anyone. \u201cI\u2019m just telling you what is the most impressive way to present your case.\u201d", "keyword": "New York State;State Legislatures;Budgets and Budgeting;Colleges and Universities;DeFrancisco John A;LaValle Kenneth P"}
{"id": "ny0069918", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/12/25", "title": "Film Shows a Selma Some Would Rather Not Revisit", "abstract": "SELMA, Ala. \u2014 Like many residents here this summer, Josh Wilkerson eagerly signed up to be an extra in the film \u201cSelma.\u201d But when he was asked to play a member of the sheriff\u2019s posse that beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he respectfully declined. \u201cI said, \u2018This is my city, and that\u2019s not in my heart,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Wilkerson, 29, an office administrator, recalled recently. \u201cI knew that would open doors that I\u2019ve shut.\u201d Today, in this small city still struggling to emerge from the shadows of Jim Crow, the attack on the bridge on March 7, 1965, is incessantly rued, revisited, and marketed as a tourist attraction. It was the dramatic apogee of the tense and violent period when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers took to the streets of Alabama to convince lawmakers of the need for a voting rights act. And it is the key moment in the film, which opens Thursday in a nation freshly embroiled in anguish about race and policing. And so, along with excitement and curiosity, the coming release of \u201c Selma \u201d has also stirred a host of complex, though familiar, emotions here, as the city\u2019s 20,000 residents are again forced to consider the relationship between Southern history and the Southern present \u2014 and measure the distance between the two. Image Civil rights marchers joined Dr. King in crossing the bridge en route to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery to convince lawmakers of the need for a voting rights act, which was signed that year. Credit Associated Press For some, \u201cSelma,\u201d the film, will be a moment to celebrate how far the city \u2014 with its black mayor, majority-black City Council and black police chief \u2014 has come since the days of segregation. But others, particularly some white residents, are more wary. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason to make a movie like that,\u201d said Harvey King, 64, a Selma native and the owner of HK Custom Guns, a shop just outside of town. \u201cIt\u2019s like if you cut your hand, and you keep messing with it. It\u2019s not going to heal up.\u201d Such reaction is unsurprising to George Patrick Evans, 70, Selma\u2019s second black mayor. Many of the major players depicted in the film have died, including Jim Clark , who as sheriff led his posse to join state troopers in beating back marchers on the bridge in the confrontation known as Bloody Sunday. But other participants still walk Selma\u2019s streets. \u201cThose were difficult times,\u201d Mr. Evans said. \u201cSome of these families were a part of that difficult time. A lot of them are concerned now about what the movie is going to depict.\u201d Image A water tower in Selma says, \"Selma, a Nice Place To Live.\" Residents have mixed feelings about the movie's release. Credit Meggan Haller for The New York Times Long before the movie cameras arrived in Selma, the city\u2019s past felt inescapable. The bridge over the muddy Alabama River is still the city\u2019s most prominent landmark. On the north bank is Selma\u2019s quaint downtown, which hosts a civil rights interpretive center operated by the National Park Service. On the south bank is the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute , founded by local activists who, since 1993, have hosted a yearly re-creation and commemoration of Bloody Sunday called the Bridge Crossing Jubilee. Like much of the rest of the South, Selma\u2019s story since 1965 has encompassed change and stasis, accommodation and intransigence. Today, 80 percent of the population is African-American, and while blacks dominate local government, white residents retain much of the economic power. Selma High School, once all white, is today nearly all black; this year the local school district was taken over by the state because of poor management. Many white children attend private schools like John T. Morgan Academy, founded three months after Bloody Sunday. The United States senator after whom it was named was also a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Image Faya Rose Toure, a founder of the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee, is intent on keeping Selma\u2019s past linked to the struggles of today. Credit Meggan Haller for The New York Times But even Morgan has some black students now, and well-off black residents can be found living alongside white ones in the handsome, woodsy, suburban-style neighborhoods just beyond downtown. Residents noted other signs of progress: Black and white churches have been forming partnerships and intermingling. Mr. Wilkerson, who eventually took a job playing a National Guardsman in the film, noted that his twin brother, Paul, owner of a local institution called the Tally-Ho Restaurant, is swift to boot out customers who pepper their speech with racial slurs. If the slurs endure in some quarters, so, too, does a grinding destitution: In Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, 36 percent of residents live in poverty, nearly double the statewide rate. The city lacks a dedicated cinema, and as of Tuesday, had not decided where it would host a screening of \u201cSelma.\u201d (The film, d irected by Ava DuVernay , has been talked about as an Oscar contender.) In the long term, many here are hoping that the film, along with the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday this March, will spur a boom in tourism. Image Josh Wilkerson of Selma declined a movie role as a member of the sheriff\u2019s posse, saying it wasn\u2019t \u201cin my heart.\u201d Credit Meggan Haller for The New York Times \u201cWe say it\u2019s harvest time in Selma,\u201d said Faya Rose Toure, a lawyer and activist and a founder of the both the Jubilee march and the voting museum. \u201cWe need a company to come in and say, \u2018You know what? Considering what Selma did for democracy, I\u2019m going to put my industry here.\u2019\u201d Ms. Toure, who is African-American, is intent on keeping the spirit of Bloody Sunday connected to the struggles of the present day. Last week, she walked onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge to draw attention to the fatal shootings nationwide of African-American men by the police \u2014 including one in Selma involving a 74-year-old black man whom officers accused of wielding a hatchet. No officers were charged with a crime. \u201cThis is the bridge where Bloody Sunday took place,\u201d Ms. Toure said. \u201cBecause of that, we\u2019ve got a black district attorney and black judges. But there\u2019s a police culture built upon the premise that black life isn\u2019t valuable.\u201d Many here say Ms. Toure\u2019s outspoken style is one reason that many whites do not participate in the yearly bridge crossing event. There is talk this year of a separate march of blacks and whites, organized by the churches. It remains to be seen if such efforts will lure white Selmians like Jamie Henderson, 65, across the bridge for the first time. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people who recognize the importance of it, but don\u2019t want to be an agitator,\u201d he said. But would he go see the movie? \u201cI doubt it,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it comes on TV, maybe.\u201d", "keyword": "Selma;Civil Rights Movement;Movies;Ava DuVernay;Discrimination;Martin Luther King Jr;Black People,African-Americans;Selma"}
{"id": "ny0030900", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/06/09", "title": "A Review of Modern, in New Rochelle", "abstract": "Modern, New Rochelle\u2019s beloved pizza joint, moved this past winter from cramped quarters to a lofty space that was first a car showroom and later a restaurant supply store. As recorded on various social media sites, loyal patrons were variously elated and scandalized. But no one can dispute that the new home of this Italian-American emporium \u2014 with its vaulted ceiling, giant arched windows and granite floor \u2014 is a knockout. You can get your expectations up. The valet parking, the glamorous room, the bustling bar, the swell soundtrack, the curvy banquettes \u2014 all conspire to make you feel like a million bucks. As one guest noted metaphorically, \u201cThe temperature is just right.\u201d (If only diners dressed for the occasion; the cargo shorts and T-shirts many wore seemed wrong for the place.) Image The shrimp scampi. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times Service at Modern, owned and managed by two cousins, Anthony Russo and Sebastian Aliberti, is top-notch: on our first visit, our waiter, decked out as if for prom night in black shirt and shiny pink tie, promptly offered to fetch drinks; his attentiveness never flagged. At a long table behind us, an extended family celebrated a young man\u2019s Confirmation (we overheard the toast); nearby, five stocky guys took delivery on enough food \u2014 I have never seen a bigger pork chop in my life \u2014 to feed themselves and five more. The expanded menu is a marvel of excess. From baked clams oreganata (made with freshly shucked clams) and scungilli in marinara to spaghetti carbonara and a $38 rack of lamb, the long march of dishes brought to mind my favorite local Columbus Day parade, with its resplendent priests, gleaming dump truck aflutter with tiny tricolore and loaded with Little Leaguers, and buffed Ferraris tied with red and green balloons. Modern takes special pride in its brick-oven pizzas and calzones. A snappy customized pie with mushrooms and prosciutto (not listed as a topping \u2014 you have to ask for it) and drizzled with balsamic vinegar was one of the best things we ate. On a split pie, the margherita half, with pools of fresh mozzarella, was better than the half devoted to sausage, onions and peppers, which was somewhat soggy. Image The individual-size margherita pizza. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times To start, I loved my big stuffed artichoke afloat in chicken broth, straight from a Roman trattoria. Mozzarella sticks were \u201ckiller,\u201d in the words of the young man who had to have them. Crunchy popcorn shrimp were just what you\u2019d expect, with that deep-fried deliciousness that always wins the popularity contest. Fresh mozzarella with sliced tomatoes and roasted red peppers, a lightly dressed Caesar salad, gnocchi with homey Bolognese, and sharp spaghetti puttanesca were all perfectly good, as were entrees of garlicky shrimp scampi and chicken Marsala (entrees come with a crisp house salad dotted with fat black olives and underripe pear tomatoes and a side of spaghetti or French fries). A few dishes inspired regrets: fried zucchini sticks that slid from their crusts on contact; dull, sodden crab cakes; heavy veal parmigiana cloaked in mozzarella; and a side of acrid saut\u00e9ed spinach. For dessert, we fell for the assortment of traditional layer cakes, with their boozy fillings and gobs of whipped cream, in flavors like lemon mascarpone, tiramis\u00f9 and strawberry shortcake. One night, a homemade chocolate layer cake (\u201cmade by an old lady,\u201d according to our waiter) caused a full-blown turf battle, forks clashing to the last bite.", "keyword": "New Rochelle NY;Restaurant;Modern New Rochelle NY Restaurant"}
{"id": "ny0224032", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2010/11/24", "title": "Eviction of Palestinians in Jerusalem Hits a Nerve", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Israeli police officers evicted a Palestinian family from their home in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, and a group of Jewish settlers moved into the property at night. The episode struck one of the more sensitive nerves in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship at a time of increasing tension and as the Obama administration is working to restart stalled peace negotiations. Such evictions have drawn international condemnation in the past. The Palestinian family, the Karains, lost a legal battle for ownership of the house. They said it had been sold to settlers illegally and without their knowledge by a relative, Ali Karain, who was a part-owner of the house, and who has since died. The Israeli courts upheld the sale about six months ago. After the eviction, family members milled about in the street and on a neighboring rooftop, while Israelis protected by armed police officers went about installing security cameras and sealing the windows and balconies of the building with boards and wire mesh. \u201cMy uncle died almost two years ago,\u201d said Fadi Karain, 21, who is studying to be a teacher at an Israeli college in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem. \u201cA month after he died, we heard from the bailiffs that the house had been sold.\u201d He said that the new owners were associated with Elad, a group that promotes Jewish settlement in Arab areas of Jerusalem, and particularly in Silwan. The settler takeover of the Karain house will represent a new point of Jewish settlement in this contested city. The three-story stone building is wedged among other houses on a steep slope in the Farouk section of the Jebel Mukaber neighborhood, with a panoramic view of the Old City, the Aksa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock. Those shrines sit atop the plateau revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and by Jews as the Temple Mount. A stone slab set into the wall of the house is engraved with an image of the Dome of the Rock and the words \u201cAl mulk lillah,\u201d Arabic for \u201cEverything belongs to God.\u201d A Jewish volunteer who was helping to prepare the house for its new inhabitants said he was acting out of \u201cZionism.\u201d Israelis have the right to live and buy property anywhere in Jerusalem, Israel \u2019s capital, he said. The issue of Israeli construction in Jewish sections of East Jerusalem has been a source of tension in recent months between Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. Jewish settlers are increasingly moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods, deepening confusion about the future shape of the city. Israel annexed East Jerusalem shortly after capturing it and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. The annexation was never internationally recognized, and the Palestinians claim the territory as the capital of a future independent state. But many Israelis maintain that Jerusalem belongs entirely to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently had a sharp exchange with the Obama administration in which his office released a statement defending Jewish construction in Jerusalem, saying, \u201cJerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.\u201d In recent years, settlers have evicted Palestinians and taken over several houses in Sheikh Jarrah , a coveted area near the Old City, after the Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, upheld rulings from the 1970s that the properties had originally belonged to Jews. Activists of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group were in Jebel Mukaber on Tuesday, helping the Karain family remove boxes of food and some last belongings from the house. The group issued a statement saying that the objective of the new settlement was \u201cwithout doubt to undercut the rationale of the 2000 Clinton Proposal, namely the division of Jerusalem into two capitals,\u201d referring to an idea put forward by President Bill Clinton. On the upper edge of Jebel Mukaber, dozens of Jewish families now live in a private Jewish development, Nof Zion , built on land that was purchased by an Israeli developer. Udi Ragones, a spokesman for Elad, said the Karain home was purchased a few years ago by a foreign-registered company called Lowell. Mr. Ragones did not acknowledge any direct Elad role in buying the property, but he said that there had been contacts between the group and the purchasers. But groups like Elad, also known as the City of David , are known to use foreign-registered straw companies to buy properties in East Jerusalem. They say that they have to work discreetly in order to protect the Palestinian sellers whose lives are threatened by other Palestinians who oppose such deals.", "keyword": "Israel;Palestinians;Temple Mount (Jerusalem);Israeli Settlements"}
{"id": "ny0024680", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/08/19", "title": "Leaving Military Aid Intact, U.S. Takes Steps to Halt Economic Help to Egypt", "abstract": "CHILMARK, Mass. \u2014 The Obama administration has taken preliminary steps to withhold financial aid to the Egyptian government, officials said on Sunday, though it is curtailing economic assistance, not the much larger military aid on which Egypt\u2019s generals depend. The State Department has put a hold on financing for economic programs that directly involve the Egyptian government, administration officials said, out of a concern that the military-led government might have violated Congressional rules prohibiting aid to countries where there has been a coup. The administration has not declared whether the Egyptian military\u2019s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi constituted a coup. But the State Department is abiding by a complex web of restrictions governing foreign aid, an official said. Those restrictions are tighter than the rules governing the military aid, which has not been suspended. Whether to cut off the remaining $585 million in military aid available to Egypt this year was one of the questions that awaited President Obama as he returned to Washington from a vacation in Martha\u2019s Vineyard that was shadowed by the bloodshed in Egypt that has left hundreds of Islamist protesters dead. For Egypt, the value of the military aid is perhaps less important than the advanced systems it can buy with American support. Already, the United States is considering a delay in the shipment of Apache attack helicopters and repair kits for tanks. That comes on top of decisions to delay the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets and to pull out of a major joint military exercise next month with the Egyptian Army. But the administration has stopped short of suspending the aid, which has served as a foundation of the American relationship with Egypt for more than three decades and is viewed as critical to the region\u2019s stability, not least as a pillar of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Military aid to Egypt dwarfs civilian aid: of the $1.55 billion in total assistance the White House has requested for 2014, $1.3 billion is military and $250 million is economic. The civilian aid goes to such things as training programs and projects run by the United States Agency for International Development. \u201cWe have stopped spending money in areas that would be prevented if it were determined to be a coup,\u201d said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. \u201cWe\u2019ll put a pause on those programs, because we don\u2019t want to flout the law.\u201d Among the programs affected, the official said, would be training programs in the United States for Egyptian government workers, teachers or hospital administrators. Depending on how events in Egypt unfold, and on how lawmakers react when they return from August recess, the economic aid could resume later, the official said. There are fewer legal restrictions on the $585 million in military aid \u2014 the amount remaining from the original $1.3 billion appropriation. This has yet to be deposited in an account in the Federal Reserve in New York, where the Egyptian military could use it to buy weapons and spare parts and to pay for maintenance and training. \"As we\u2019ve made clear, all of our assistance to Egypt is currently under review,\u201d the State Department\u2019s deputy spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said. \u201cAt this point, no additional decisions have been made regarding assistance.\u201d In the past, administration officials have said they were skeptical that halting military aid would persuade the generals to put Egypt back on a path to democracy. They also worry that withdrawing the funds would leave the United States without any leverage. Israel and several Arab counties have lobbied the United States not to cut off aid, arguing that the army is still the best hope to stop Egypt from slipping into chaos and that the need for stability should outweigh, for now, concerns about democracy and human rights. But with the death toll from the week\u2019s violence surpassing 1,000 and little prospect of an end to the standoff, officials said, the administration had begun a debate over what threshold it was willing to bear before it fundamentally rethought its relationship with the military. During his week on Martha\u2019s Vineyard, Mr. Obama tried not to allow the Egypt crisis to intrude on his vacation routine of golf, dinner with friends, and beach and bike outings with his family. But on Thursday, the president held a conference call with members of the National Security Council to discuss options for dealing with the standoff. Back in Washington, pressure on Mr. Obama to do more about Egypt is mounting, but lawmakers remain divided on whether to cut off aid, with a handful of outspoken Republican hawks calling for it, while other Republicans and most Democrats still have qualms. Given the reluctance of many lawmakers to suspend military aid for security reasons, canceling economic aid may be an easier way for them to register their displeasure with the Egyptian government. Senator John McCain of Arizona, who recently traveled to Cairo and took part in a failed diplomatic effort to defuse the standoff, said in a television interview that the administration lost credibility when it did not cut off aid, even after the generals clearly engineered a coup in removing Mr. Morsi. \u201cWe could be cutting off the aid,\u201d Mr. McCain said on the CNN program \u201cState of the Union\u201d \u201cThe spare parts and maintenance of this military equipment we\u2019ve given the Egyptians is important to their capabilities.\u201d Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who accompanied Mr. McCain to Egypt, said the United States should send a powerful message to the Egyptian military leader, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. \u201cSomebody needs to look el-Sisi in the eye and say, \u2018You\u2019re going to destroy Egypt, you\u2019re going to doom your country to a beggar state, you\u2019re going to create an insurgency for generations to come; turn around, General, before it\u2019s too late,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Graham said on the CBS News program \u201cFace the Nation.\u201d But the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, said the United States should \u201crecalibrate\u201d its aid to make its unhappiness clear but not endanger security needs like priority passage through the Suez Canal in a crisis. \u201cI don\u2019t want to cut off our relations,\u201d Mr. Corker said on ABC News\u2019s \u201cThis Week.\u201d Several Democrats echoed Mr. Corker\u2019s sense that overarching American security interests made any aid cutoff problematic. \u201cI think we\u2019ll find that aid that we may withhold is compensated by aid that the Gulf states may provide,\u201d Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said on \u201cFox News Sunday.\u201d In one small but telling way, the relationship between the United States and Egypt has already changed. An administration official said that when the Pentagon finally delivers the four delayed F-16 planes, it will charge the Egyptian Air Force a fee for storing them.", "keyword": "US Foreign Policy;Foreign Aid;Egypt;Barack Obama"}
{"id": "ny0169574", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2007/04/29", "title": "Trying for Balance in Rural Development", "abstract": "Jasper County, S.C. THE Lowcountry area here at the southern tip of South Carolina has long been passed through by people driving to and from Florida on Interstate 95. It has even been overlooked by visitors to Hilton Head, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., both within a half-hour\u2019s drive. But this county\u2019s lush landscape \u2014 rural and marshy, with wetlands and rivers and an abundance of Southern live oak trees draped with Spanish moss \u2014 is finally being discovered by outsiders. Explosive residential development has sprung up nationwide, even in the most unlikely places. But it is only now arriving in Jasper County. With a population of less than 30,000 spread over 600 square miles, an area about twice the size of New York City, Jasper could become the site of 40,000 or so new homes in the coming years, which could more than double the current population, local officials say. Rather than allowing development to overwhelm the county, officials have collaborated on a plan that tries to guide growth and preserve the region\u2019s natural beauty. An estimated 30,000 new homes have already been approved in Hardeeville, which grew in a few years from 5 square miles to more than 50. One large-scale development, called Tradition, broke ground in October, with 9,500 homes in the $500,000 price range. Hampton Pointe, a gated golf community of 1,022 homes by Toll Brothers, is also under way, with prices starting in the mid-$300,000s. The first occupancies are expected this fall. Ridgeland, the largest town in Jasper, has 1,000 homes on the way, according to local officials, not including expected development on an additional 20,000 acres still outside the city limits. \u201cJasper has been waiting for this,\u201d said Edward G. Evans Jr., who has lived here for 30 years with his wife, Diane. Mr. Evans, a principal owner of a land planning and landscape design firm, Wood & Partners, said that he and his wife had recently built a new \u201cpreretirement\u201d home for themselves on land that is still reached by a dirt road. It is in a development area that four years ago was vacant and now has 45 houses. The single-family homes are priced from $300,000 to $600,000. Longtime residents and local officials who want to guide growth, but not hinder it, say they believe that Jasper will benefit from developing later than other parts of the South. Having watched their neighbors, particularly Beaufort County, become overwhelmed by growth that spilled over from Hilton Head, Jasper officials say, they saw what was coming and got together to set some ground rules. \u201cIn areas like ours, where people are starved for development, they\u2019re willing to give away the farm,\u201d said Kevin Griffin, assistant city manager of Hardeeville, who has an advanced degree in urban planning. \u201cBut we\u2019ve really tried to get ahead of the growth, rather than being five years behind and having to catch up.\u201d More than two years ago, local leaders from Hardeeville and Ridgeland got together with county officials to collaborate on a shared growth plan. A five-mile radius was drawn around Ridgeland, and another five-mile radius was set around Hardeeville, delineating where development could occur according to local zoning laws. Any landowners who fall outside of each town\u2019s boundary and want to build have to petition to be annexed and, if they are approved, pay for the installation of sewers, water, and roads. After extensive research, the joint planning committee determined that every new residential unit costs about $6,200 in services. \u201cPeople talk about smart growth, but this is more like fiscal growth,\u201d Mr. Griffin said. \u201cWe don\u2019t say you can\u2019t develop here; it\u2019s a pay-to-play environment. Suddenly, that cheap land doesn\u2019t seem so cheap anymore. But the good developers, the ones who want to be stewards of the land, they are the ones who can adjust their plans and create a quality product.\u201d Not only does the joint planning agreement require impact fees, it also encourages mixed-use development and mandates that land be set aside for public services like parks. \u201cThe boundary acts like a greenbelt,\u201d said Jason Taylor, the administrator for Ridgeland, the county seat. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful area down here, but the problem is, people discover areas like this that have been undiscovered for so long, and they crush it under the weight of new growth. All the land\u2019s been cleared, and wildlife has disappeared, and it\u2019s no longer what it was. Guiding growth will prevent that from happening.\u201d Land that is outside of the two designated boundaries is regulated by the county, which currently has a moratorium on development until an updated zoning plan is put into effect, which is expected to happen in June. \u201cWe want to maintain the rural character,\u201d said Glenn Storck, chairman of the county planning commission \u2014 particularly the pristine land on the northern tip of the county, known as Mackay Point. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful, virgin land up there.\u201d Until recently, Mackay Point was virtually uninhabited, except for the Mackay Point Plantation, an old, private club where Vice President Dick Cheney has hunted. Coming soon is the Settings of Mackay Point, an upscale development on the Pocotaligo River that was already under way before the moratorium was put in place. But the developer\u2019s sensitivity to the landscape won over its very private neighbor and county officials alike. Situated on 327 acres of marsh and wetland, with 40 percent set aside for a natural preserve with hiking trails and open space, the development will have 411 homes built on lots slightly smaller than those on similar upscale developments. Shared boat docks and narrow roadways also help preserve land. Lots were specifically drawn to accommodate the oldest live oak trees, and the developer, the Settings Development Companies, based in Atlanta, has a policy of no clear-cutting. The first phase of the project is nearly sold out, with vacant lots selling for $100,000 to $800,000. Debbie and Tim Phipps, who live in Cincinnati with their three sons \u2014 Kyle, 18, Austin, 15, and Parker, 12 \u2014 came across the Settings after vacationing at Savannah and Hilton Head. They were recently in the area to look at Lowcountry home designs, characterized by wraparound porches, large windows and pitched roofs. It is a style they will use when building on their newly bought lot. \u201cWe just fell in love with the whole area,\u201d Mrs. Phipps said. \u201cIt\u2019s not built up and not in the middle of a big hub of activity, with the huge clubhouse and all of that. It\u2019s simple living but accessible to Savannah and Hilton Head\u201d \u2014 which is a 40-minute boat ride away. \u201cThe landscape to us, it just said \u2018South,\u2019 with the live oaks and Spanish moss, marshes and rivers,\u201d said Mr. Phipps, an operations manager for a packaging firm. \u201cIt just puts us in a soft frame of mind.\u201d BUT for all the efforts at progressive planning and development, growth is still changing the area, creating mixed feelings for a few lifetime residents, like Tommy and Tyler Stanley. The Stanleys are fourth-generation Jasper County residents. They live in a home, which they are now renovating, that had belonged to Mr. Stanley\u2019s grandmother. Mr. Stanley, 37, said he specifically chose a career as a land surveyor so he could stay in Jasper County after graduating from high school. He thought he was going to work for timber companies, which until recently owned much of the land in Jasper County. Instead he is working for developers \u2014 a job that is keeping him busy. \u201cDevelopment is coming like a tsunami,\u201d Mr. Stanley said. \u201cAs a surveyor, you know you\u2019re seeing these properties for the last time as they are. But we\u2019re open-minded enough to know that things change.\u201d", "keyword": "Area Planning and Renewal;Housing;Zoning;Wetlands;South Carolina"}
{"id": "ny0080683", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2015/02/12", "title": "Brian Williams\u2019s and Jon Stewart\u2019s Common Ground", "abstract": "Other than timing, Jon Stewart\u2019s triumphant retirement and Brian Williams\u2019s public and humbling disenfranchisement would seem to have little in common. But begin with the fact that both men went to high school in New Jersey and both began their adult lives without much going for them, other than a sense that the island with all of the tall buildings in the distance suggested there was more to life than volunteering as a firefighter (Mr. Williams) or tending bar (Mr. Stewart). Both men made up for lost time once they got into their careers. Mr. Williams churned through assignments and assumed an anchor chair on MSNBC and at NBC on the weekends while he was in his 30s, and slid into the big chair in 2004 by the time he was 45. Mr. Stewart ground it out in stand-up, working almost nightly at the Comedy Cellar, then landed some TV gigs here and there. After blowing up large on the \u201cLate Night With David Letterman\u201d in 1993, he was thought to be a favorite to replace him, but that job went to Conan O\u2019Brien. It was only when he got his hands on the wheel of \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d that he found his sweet spot and opened up a singular vein in American comedy. Both men spent more than a decade on top of their businesses for good reasons. Mr. Stewart had a remarkable eye for hypocrisy, found amazing writers and executed their work and his own with savage grace, no small feat. Mr. Williams managed to convey gravitas and self-awareness at the same time while sitting atop one of the best television news operations in the business. They were kings of their respective crafts. But now they are both done, at least for the time being. Mr. Stewart, who said Tuesday he would leave \u201cThe Daily Show\u2019\u2019 sometime this year, leaves on top, on his own terms. For all the cynicism assigned to his approach, Mr. Stewart is at heart a patriot and an idealist. Again and again, his indictment of politicians and media figures was less about what they were and more about what they failed to be. It is telling that when he did take time off from hosting his show, he did so to make a feature film called \u201cRosewater,\u201d about Maziar Bahari, an Iranian journalist who was imprisoned shortly after appearing on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d His subject was, in essence, being punished for an act of speech and Mr. Stewart, in spite of his nightly beatdowns of the press, admires the profession. You got the feeling after a while that he had grown tired of pointing out the foibles of the press and the politicians he covered. His version of the news may have started as fake, but it was seeming more and more real all the time. Oddly, Mr. Stewart will leave his desk as arguably the most trusted man in news. And Mr. Williams will find his way back to his desk only if he figures out a way to regain the trust he has squandered. Mr. Williams is now all but locked in his own home \u2014 he might as well have an ankle monitor on. There is no playbook on how to come back from such a fall. Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, said everyone deserved a second chance. I very much agree. I just can\u2019t figure out how that second chance comes at NBC. What is the path to that? At what point will the tabloids and blogs take their boot off his neck and allow him to go to the gym, take a walk, have dinner with friends, let alone begin to resume a kind of active rehabilitation \u2014 whatever that looks like \u2014 in the public eye? When news of his untruths first broke, I think it was commonly believed that Mr. Williams was too big to fail. He seemed to think he would find a way to thread the needle and keep his job. But after a week of management miscues, aided by Mr. Williams\u2019s ham-handed apology and misguided self-exile, NBC executives took firm control of what they came to see as an existential threat to the credibility of their news operation and suspended him. It is difficult to surmise what Mr. Stewart will do next \u2014 he has been plain about the fact that he isn\u2019t sure himself \u2014 in part because his next step is not a natural one. His talents do not fit easily into that of a generic talk show host. His interview skills are intermittent and his interest in that kind of thing would seem to be low. While Mr. Stewart is adept at live television, you get the feeling that his need for its blandishments have diminished over time. He may be that odd celebrity who says he is taking time off to spend with his family and actually means it. \u201cI\u2019m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people,\u201d he said in his announcement, which was a surprise in terms of timing, but not in terms of intention. We all knew he was getting close to done. Mr. Williams is another matter. I visited him at his apartment in 2011 when he was doing promotion for \u201cRock Center,\u201d a newsmagazine that did not pan out. He made the source of his happiness plain. \u201cWhen you see me on television, I am there,\u2033 he said. \u201cThat is where I am.\u201d Gesturing toward the big flat panel on the wall of his apartment, he added, \u201cI am a creature of live television.\u201d Still, it was not enough for him to be the No. 1 anchor of the No. 1 news program in America. Perhaps he sensed that he was king of an entropic kingdom imprisoned by incontinence and cholesterol ads. As the ever more manic news cycle whirred around his evening newscast, it would be hard not to feel a little beside the point. And so came the serial talk show appearances on \u201cLate Night With Jimmy Fallon\u201d and \u201cLate Show With David Letterman.\u201d He appeared several times on \u201c30 Rock,\u201d often as a version of himself, and hosted \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d He was good at all these things, good enough so that when NBC was thinking about a successor for Jay Leno, Mr. Williams raised his hands, a gesture that went over like a box of rocks with his overseers. And, of course, there were appearances on \u201cThe Daily Show,\u201d including a very funny few minutes in August 2012. Mr. Stewart was mocking something that had been on the NBC newscast, and Mr. Williams mentioned that sometimes when he is writing the show, he actually thinks of what Mr. Stewart will do with the same material. \u201cYou don\u2019t write any of that stuff,\u201d Mr. Stewart said, laughing as he said it. \u201cThey take you out of the vegetable crisper five minutes before the show and they put you in front of something that is spelled out phonetically. I know how this goes.\u201d So, everyone is in on the joke. It\u2019s all knowing winks and fake attacks on confected news read by people who are somewhat bored by what they do. It just seems less funny now.", "keyword": "TV;Jon Stewart;Brian Williams;News media,journalism;The Daily Show with Jon Stewart;NBC"}
{"id": "ny0289168", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2016/01/03", "title": "T.C.U. Erases a 31-Point Deficit to Stun Oregon in the Alamo Bowl", "abstract": "Bram Kohlhausen\u2019s 8-yard touchdown run in the third overtime carried No. 11 Texas Christian to a wild 47-41 victory over No. 15 Oregon in the Alamo Bowl on Saturday night in San Antonio after the Horned Frogs had stormed back from a 31-0 halftime deficit behind a backup quarterback. The 31-point comeback for a victory tied the record for a bowl game, matching one by Texas Tech in the 2006 Insight Bowl against Minnesota. Oregon (9-4) stormed to its big early lead behind quarterback Vernon Adams Jr., but he left the game late in the second quarter after taking a hard hit to the head. Oregon gained only 18 yards in regulation in the second half. Kohlhausen started in place of Trevone Boykin, who was suspended after a bar fight two days earlier. Kohlhausen passed for 351 yards and two touchdowns and ran for two more scores. The Ducks were clicking behind Adams, who passed for 197 yards and a touchdown, scrambled out of several sacks and marched Oregon to four consecutive touchdowns and a 28-0 lead. But Oregon stopped in its tracks when Adams was hurt on a run, a rare call for him. T.C.U. (11-2) scored on every one of its possessions in the second half and in overtime. The Horned Frogs started their march back with 17 points in the third quarter, twice scoring touchdowns on fourth down. Kohlhausen threw a touchdown pass to Jaelen Austin, then ran 2 yards for his first score. Jaden Oberkrom\u2019s 22-yard field goal with 19 seconds left tied the game, and T.C.U. scored first in the first overtime when Kohlhausen hit Emanauel Porter for a 7-yard touchdown. Oregon answered with Royce Freeman\u2019s third touchdown run. After the teams exchanged field goals in the second overtime, Kohlhausen sneaked around the right end on an option. T.C.U.\u2019s 2-point conversion attempt failed, but Oregon\u2019s final chance to tie the game and keep it going ended with an incomplete pass on fourth down near the goal line. TAXSLAYER BOWL Terry Godwin, a receiver, lined up in the Wildcat, took the snap and threw a 44-yard touchdown pass that got Georgia going and later caught a 17-yard scoring pass in the Bulldogs\u2019 24-17 win over Penn State in Jacksonville, Fla. The play helped the Bulldogs (10-3) end the season with their fifth consecutive victory. It helped that Penn State (7-6) played more than half of the game without its star quarterback, Christian Hackenberg, who left in the second quarter with a right shoulder injury. A junior and the program\u2019s career leader in passing yards (8,457) and touchdowns (48), Hackenberg completed 8 of 14 for 139 yards against Georgia. LIBERTY BOWL Alex Collins ran for 185 yards and three touchdowns, and Arkansas capped its late-season surge with a 45-23 victory over Kansas State in Memphis. Ranked 18th as the season opened, Arkansas stumbled through a 1-3 start that knocked it out of the Top 25. The Razorbacks (8-5) turned things around won six of their final seven games. Collins overwhelmed Kansas State\u2019s defense in front of an announced sellout crowd of 61,136, the fourth-largest crowd in the game\u2019s 57-year history. Kansas State (6-7) finished a season below .500 for the first time since Bill Snyder began his second stint as coach in 2009. Kansas State\u2019s Kody Cook, starting at quarterback for the first time, went 12 of 24 for 163 yards with a touchdown.", "keyword": "College football;Bowl Games;University of Georgia;Penn State;Texas Christian University;University of Oregon"}
{"id": "ny0230217", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/09/16", "title": "City Agency Concedes It Wasn\u2019t Ready for New Voting Machines", "abstract": "Six days before the primary on Tuesday, state election officials received a request from the city\u2019s Board of Elections: Could it cut short tests on some of its voting machines because of worries that the testing would not be finished before voters went to the polls? State officials granted the request, if a bit warily. \u201cIt was an unusual request,\u201d said Douglas A. Kellner, co-chairman of the State Board of Elections. \u201cIt\u2019s always annoying when someone comes to you at the last minute and says, \u2018Gee, we didn\u2019t know it would take this long,\u2019 and you say, \u2018Well, why did you wait this long to figure it out?\u2019 \u201d For all of the calm assurances that the city\u2019s Board of Elections offered to the state and public about how prepared it was for the transition from mechanical machines to electronic ones, there was no shortage of behind-the-scenes jitters in the run-up to the primary over whether they would actually be ready. And, as it turned out, plenty of things did not go according to plan: some polling places did not receive the optical scanners required to read the new paper ballots by the time the polls were supposed to open at 6 a.m., so they remained closed, in some cases for hours. Some polling sites opened late because no one had the new keys, literally, to the machines. And when some machines failed to work properly, poll workers seemed unsure of how to improvise. A day after the machines\u2019 inaugural run, city election officials conceded that the problems were due, in part, to inadequate preparation, but they said the city was trying to abide by requirements imposed by the state. \u201cThe New York State Board of Elections and the New York City Board of Elections did not fully comprehend the time requirements for the intensive methodology of testing required\u201d by state regulations for primaries, George Gonzalez, executive director of the city\u2019s Board of Elections, said in a statement. \u201cThis caused delays in machine preparation and delivery.\u201d He added: \u201cThese and other issues are being reviewed, and we will provide detailed statistics when we can compile them.\u201d A spokesman for the State Board of Elections did not immediately return an e-mail asking for a response to the city\u2019s statement. The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, and the city comptroller, John C. Liu, said they wanted to investigate the election process and would consider an audit of the process. A spokeswoman for Mr. Liu said that when he went to vote on Tuesday, he was particularly troubled by the sight of marked ballots lying out in the open. \u201cThe problems are significant enough to warrant a closer look,\u201d said the spokeswoman, Sharon Lee. Still, New York is hardly alone in making what is often a bumpy transition to electronic democracy. Washington also rolled out new electronic voting machines on Tuesday \u2014 for a hotly contested mayoral race \u2014 and similar problems were reported, said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization at the Lawyers\u2019 Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is part of the national nonpartisan Election Protection coalition. John S. Groh, senior vice president of Elections System and Software, which manufactured the voting machines used in New York, said he believed that, in general, the process worked well in New York. \u201cFrom my perspective, New York did way more than a lot of other places\u201d to prepare for the new system, Mr. Groh said. \u201cBut I also recognize that there\u2019s nothing else like New York that\u2019s ever been done.\u201d In particular, he said there were three factors that could have been improved upon. One was delivering the machines, which was complicated, he said, by the fact that Rosh Hashana occurred the Thursday and Friday before the primary. \u201cThe holiday probably throws a little wrinkle into it,\u201d he said. \u201cThey would have been all done by Saturday night if everything had been a normal weekend and a normal Friday.\u201d Mr. Groh also said that poll workers should receive more-extensive training than they did and that they should be required to show up at their polling sites before voters do \u2014 not at the same time \u2014 to have time to prepare and deal with problems. \u201cPoll workers coming in at 6 o\u2019clock is too late,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople need to be there at 5:30.\u201d But even if election officials remedy the problems from the primary, a new one could emerge in November: a quirk called \u201cdouble voting.\u201d That occurs when a voter checks more than one box for the same candidate running on more than one party line. When that happens, the major party \u2014 Democrat or Republican \u2014 gets the full vote and the minor party gets no credit. Under the old lever-machine system, it was impossible to vote for the same candidate on more than one party line. But that is not the case with paper ballots that are part of the electronic system. So on Tuesday, two strange bedfellows \u2014 the Conservative Party and the Working Families Party \u2014 filed a suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan challenging the constitutionality of such a rule.", "keyword": "Voting Machines;Elections;Board of Elections (NYC);New York City"}
{"id": "ny0102766", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/12/14", "title": "Facing Trap, Ruthless Jets Refuse to Tiptoe", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 After his team celebrated its overtime victory against the Giants last week, after the owner Woody Johnson danced in the locker room and the Empire State Building started to twinkle in green and white, Jets Coach Todd Bowles found a text message waiting on his phone. \u201cEverybody\u2019s talking playoffs,\u201d Bowles said the message read. \u201cJust coach your team and worry about the next game.\u201d The sender was Bill Parcells, the former Jets coach who has mentored Bowles since hiring him as a defensive backs coach in 2000. Challenges like the one the Jets faced Sunday against the Tennessee Titans were anathema to Parcells. As the Dallas Cowboys\u2019 coach, he hung mousetraps from shoelaces in the locker room before a game to remind his players not to fall into the trap of overlooking their next opponent after an emotional victory. After the Jets dismantled Tennessee, 30-8, at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, there was no \u201cI told you so\u201d message waiting on Bowles\u2019s phone. He never needed to warn his players to keep their focus from straying. They assured him they were not going to be trapped. \u201cWe didn\u2019t hear that word all week,\u201d receiver Brandon Marshall said. Against a clearly outmatched opponent, the Jets displayed some ruthless efficiency early in Sunday\u2019s game. Their opening drive included a 19-yard scramble by quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, a 12-yard pickup by Marshall that featured a ferocious stiff arm and a 16-yard touchdown catch by Eric Decker. There was more explosiveness out of the backfield from Bilal Powell, who caught five passes in the game, one of them for a touchdown, and more thundering runs from Chris Ivory, who finished with 101 rushing yards. Muhammad Wilkerson had three sacks and forced a fumble, and Buster Skrine snagged his first interception of the year. And then there was a play that defied explanation. With less than two minutes left in the first half, the Titans failed to realize until far too late that Marshall (all 6 feet 4 inches of him) was left to roam unguarded at the line of scrimmage. Marshall waved his arm, and Fitzpatrick quickly checked out of a shotgun formation and rushed to take the snap under center Nick Mangold. He then fired the ball to Marshall, who ran down the sideline for a 69-yard touchdown, the Jets\u2019 longest scoring play of the season, making it 27-0 after the extra point. Image Jets receiver Brandon Marshall with Ryan Fitzpatrick, left, and Bilal Powell after he turned a short pass into a 69-yard touchdown. The Titans were not covering Marshall at the line of scrimmage. Credit Al Bello/Getty Images \u201cFitz and Brandon have been around awhile, so they saw something,\u201d Bowles said. \u201cLuckily, Brandon didn\u2019t get caught by a defensive tackle.\u201d Marshall said, \u201cI\u2019ll take it.\u201d He had another monster game. Decker did, too. Together they are establishing one of the league\u2019s most dangerous tandems, and it seems that their interchangeability is rubbing off on Ivory and Powell, who are having a similar effect in the running game. Together, the four of them generated 388 of the team\u2019s 439 total yards Sunday, with three scores. There may have been other skill players on the field for the Jets, but it was hard to notice them. Fitzpatrick, who finished 21 for 36 for 263 yards and three touchdowns, could sprinkle the ball to any of the four and still leave the defense fearing where it was going next. \u201cYou want guys cheering for each other and pushing each other,\u201d Marshall said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we have here.\u201d Image Brandon Marshall beat the Titans\u2019 B.W. Webb for a first down in the first quarter. Marshall also scored a 69-yard touchdown. Credit Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Fitzpatrick credited the team\u2019s chemistry with recognizing and exploiting the Titans\u2019 mistake on the Marshall touchdown, which he said was not a situation the team regularly practiced (or, for that matter, expected to see in a game). \u201cIt\u2019s just three guys \u2014 me, Nick and Brandon \u2014 being on the same page,\u201d Fitzpatrick said. Whatever the Jets were doing offensively, the Titans (3-10) did the opposite. Their chemistry was not going to impress at a fourth-grade science fair. The rookie quarterback Marcus Mariota, coming off a record-setting performance against Jacksonville in which he became the first player in N.F.L. history to throw for at least 250 yards and three touchdowns and rush for at least 100 yards, struggled to find any rhythm. The Jets spent the week focusing on his explosive scrambling ability, and they blitzed the pocket from all directions. \u201cHe\u2019s really a pocket passer who\u2019s able to run,\u201d linebacker David Harris said of Mariota. \u201cOne of our goals was to keep him in the pocket, because everybody knows how dangerous he is when he gets to the perimeter.\u201d Image Eric Decker making a 16-yard touchdown catch in the first quarter. The Jets improved to 8-5. Credit Julio Cortez/Associated Press The Jets held Mariota to three rushing attempts for 3 yards, with no touchdowns and one interception. \u201cI can do a better job moving our protections or getting us out of things to help those guys up front,\u201d Mariota said. \u201cI\u2019ve just got to do a better job of getting us in better plays.\u201d Mariota did show just how versatile his athleticism could look with a 41-yard reception on a pass from running back Antonio Andrews late in the third quarter. But for the most part, his activity was limited to fleeing pressure from a defense that sacked him five times and hit him seven times. \u201cWe know he\u2019s an elusive guy,\u201d Wilkerson said. \u201cBut our job as pass rushers is to have precise rushing lanes, and I think we did that pretty well today.\u201d The Jets (8-5) have kept pace with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Kansas City Chiefs, both winners Sunday, in a battle for the two wild-card spots in the A.F.C. The Jets had the same record at this stage in 2011, and they wound up missing the postseason. It was a similar story in 2008, 2000, 1997 and 1993. So there was a cautious optimism after Sunday\u2019s victory \u2014 a convincing blowout, but one that leaves the Jets still reaching for the postseason from the same distance as before. \u201cWe understand what\u2019s on the line,\u201d Marshall said. \u201cAll these games down the stretch are big.\u201d EXTRA POINTS The rookie Jets receiver DEVIN SMITH was carted off the field in the third quarter with an injury to his right knee, and the punt returner JEREMY KERLEY left the game with a calf injury.", "keyword": "Football;Jets;Titans;Ryan Fitzpatrick;Brandon Marshall;Marcus Mariota;Bill Parcells;Todd Bowles"}
{"id": "ny0026628", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/01/20", "title": "After 4 Years, Friends See Shifts in Obamas", "abstract": "Barack and Michelle Obama have spent more than a thousand days on display before the nation\u2019s eyes, but the personal changes they have undergone can be hard to detect. Up close, though, those who know the Obamas say they can see an accumulation of small shifts in the president and the first lady since they walked the inaugural parade route four years ago. The man who wanted to change the nature of Washington now warns job candidates that it is hard to get anything done there. Not so long ago, he told others that he did not need a presidential library, a tribute to himself costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Now a former aide, Susan Sher, is quietly eyeing possibilities for him in Chicago. The first lady who wanted to forge connections with her new city found that even viewing the cherry blossoms required a hat, sunglasses and wheedling the Secret Service. In a demonstration of how difficult it can be for any president or first lady to sustain relationships, Mrs. Obama stopped taking on girls in a mentorship program she founded because of concerns that other teenagers would envy the lucky advisees, according to an aide. When the president returned from consoling families of teachers and children killed in the Newtown, Conn., massacre \u2014 he wept as they handed him photos and told him stories of victim after victim \u2014 aides could see in his face the toll of absorbing the nation\u2019s traumas. \u201cThis is what I do,\u201d Mr. Obama told them. \u201cThis position has perhaps cost him more on a personal, and even energic, level than most of his predecessors, because he was most entirely an outsider,\u201d observed the playwright Tony Kushner, a supporter who recently dined with Mr. Obama to discuss the film \u201cLincoln,\u201d for which Mr. Kushner wrote the screenplay. Image The first lady, Michelle Obama, greeted her husband after introducing him at a campaign event in Iowa last year. Those who know the Obamas say they can see a number of small shifts in the president and the first lady since they walked the inaugural parade route four years ago. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The Obamas have gained and lost in their four years in the White House, becoming seasoned professionals instead of newcomers, more conventional, with a contracted sense of possibility. They are steady characters, not given to serial self-reinvention. Yet in interviews, current and former White House and campaign aides, donors and friends from Chicago said they could see how the president and the first lady had been affected by their roles. Describing them, they used phrases like: more confident but more scarred. More isolated. Less hesitant about directing staff members, whether butlers or highest-level advisers. Gratified by re-election, which the Obamas view as sweet vindication, and bloodier-minded when it comes to beating Republicans. And Mr. Obama has learned that his presidency will be shaped by unanticipated events \u2014 \u201clocusts,\u201d one former aide called them, for the way they swarm without warning. Mr. Obama never wanted to be an ordinary politician \u2014 there was a time when Mrs. Obama could barely use that noun to describe her husband \u2014 and his advisers resist the idea that he has succumbed to standard Washington practice. Some donors and aides give an \u201cif only\u201d laugh at the idea that the couple now follows political ritual more closely: this is a president who still has not had Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton to dinner but holds lunches to discuss moral philosophy with the fellow Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. \u201cHe thinks about destiny in human terms,\u201d Mr. Wiesel said in an interview. Still, others say the Obamas have become more relaxed schmoozers, more at ease with the porous line between the political and social, more willing to reveal themselves. They have recently begun inviting more outsiders into their private living quarters, including Mr. Kushner, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis at the \u201cLincoln\u201d dinner. At a dinner in late November to thank top campaign fund-raisers, the first couple was like a bride and groom, bantering and traveling from table to table to accept congratulations and good wishes for the years ahead, making sly jokes that guests would not repeat for publication. Even Mr. Obama\u2019s speech has changed a bit, close observers say. Though he still disdains Washington, he often sounds less like a disapproving outsider and more like a participant. One former aide was startled to hear Mr. Obama use \u201cimpact\u201d as a verb, a particular tendency in the capital. Another longtime adviser said he was struck during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations when Mr. Obama grew offended that House Speaker John A. Boehner did not return his multiple phone calls. The old Barack Obama would have thought the who-calls-whom protocol was stupid, the adviser said, but \u201cthe world that he inhabits now is the world of inside-the-Beltway maneuvering.\u201d In video footage of Mr. Obama as president, the contrasts can be subtle but amusing. At his first Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony in 2009, the president played along, but then paused to distance himself from what he was doing and hint that he found the tradition ridiculous. \u201cThere are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then there are moments like this \u2014 where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland.\u201d Cut to the same ceremony, three years later, and cue Mr. Obama promoting a contest over which bird to pardon and giggling just a little. \u201cYou can\u2019t maintain your day-to-day cynicism about that stuff,\u201d said Arun Chaudhary, the former White House videographer, because many Americans cherish White House rituals. What Mr. Obama wants to achieve this term is pretty clear: a fiscal deal and overhauls of gun and immigration laws, steps to address climate change and less restrictive voter identification laws. But what Mrs. Obama wants is more of a mystery. In almost every appearance, she sounds warm, unpretentious notes; on Friday, she continued her Twitter banter with Ellen DeGeneres over who could do more push-ups. Video Jodi Kantor examines how the Obamas' first four years in the White House have affected and changed them. That informal tone can mask how disciplined she is. Though many surrounding the Obamas say she has changed far more than her husband, mastering a role she initially found uncomfortable, she still treats the job of first lady like a dangerous country through which she must navigate safe passage. The woman who never wanted to live in the bubble now uses it to protect herself, according to friends and former aides, preparing her public activities in 6- and 12-month strategic plans, rarely saying anything unscripted. First ladies are often figures of comfort, but she did not address the Newtown tragedy, beyond two brief letters she published, even though some of her fans were clamoring for the self-described \u201cmom in chief\u201d to do more. In recent weeks, Mrs. Obama and her advisers have been discussing whether to expand her work beyond childhood obesity and military families and how to capitalize on her popularity. On Friday, she threw herself into her husband\u2019s new effort to organize supporters, introducing the group, Organizing for Action, in an announcement video . (The effort did not seem to garner as much attention as her new hairstyle, which set off headlines like \u201cMichelle Obama\u2019s Bangs Are a Total Shock to the System.\u201d) Mrs. Obama cannot wait too long to set out on a new course: the Obamas will soon have more time behind them in the White House than in front of them. The rituals they introduced are now matters of tradition instead of innovation. At their White House Seder, the small group of mostly African-American and Jewish attendees reads the Emancipation Proclamation right before welcoming Elijah, just as the year before. The president played basketball on Election Day 2012, as he did on most of the voting days in 2008. But this time it felt different: the men older, the action slower, a reunion game with everyone talking about the old days, said John Rogers Jr., a longtime friend who joined in. Mr. Obama\u2019s entire career has been about getting to the next stage: if he could only become a lawyer, and then a public official, and then a United States senator, and then president, he could create real change. But soon there will be no higher job to reach for, and aides say there is an all-business quality to the Obamas now, a contrast with the sense of possibility that hung over the first inauguration. Early in the presidency, Mr. Obama would sometimes spend hours polishing ceremonial speeches, like one for Abraham Lincoln\u2019s bicentennial; now, the president has a more finely honed sense of how to use his precious time, said Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter. When Mr. Obama walked off the stage on election night, he did not pause to exult; instead, he wanted to talk about the impact of outside spending in that night\u2019s Congressional races, said Patrick Gaspard, the director of the Democratic National Committee. But Mr. Obama also knows now that he is not fully in control of his fate, that the presidency will continue to bring tasks that no one could ever anticipate. Mr. and Mrs. Obama were supposed to spend the evening of Dec. 16 enjoying their daughter Sasha\u2019s \u201cNutcracker\u201d recital. Instead, the president was making condolence calls in cordoned-off rooms at Newtown High School. \u201cWords don\u2019t exist\u201d to describe the grief on his face as he approached the families, said Sarah D\u2019Avino, whose sister Rachel died protecting her students. The president asked each family to describe the relative who died, paying special attention to the victims\u2019 mothers. Mourning parents handed him pictures to carry back to the White House, and he told them that the children were beautiful, that the teachers were national heroes. Moments later, he was smiling, on cue. One of his photographers was on hand, as always, and despite everything, the bereaved wanted pictures with the president.", "keyword": "Barack Obama;Michelle Obama;President of the United States;2012 Presidential Election;2008 Presidential Election;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0084157", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/10/01", "title": "Shaken by Taliban Victory in Kunduz, Afghans Flee Another Provincial Capital", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 The test facing the Afghan government now is not just whether it can quickly mount a counterattack and retake all of Kunduz, the northern city that fell to the Taliban on Monday, but whether it can prevent a nearby provincial capital from falling as well. Accounts from the neighboring province of Baghlan on Wednesday showed that the collapse of government forces in Kunduz against less numerous Taliban forces was prompting a crisis of confidence in the province, where wealthier citizens and those with government connections have been leaving for the relative safety of their hometowns. In the midst of one of the gravest moments for the American-backed government in Kabul, military leaders spoke Wednesday about launching a decisive counterattack against the Taliban in Kunduz. But it was becoming clear that most of the reinforcements for such an attack had been waylaid in Baghlan. The reinforcements \u201cwill not be able to reach Kunduz without a big fight,\u201d said Ted Callahan, a Western security adviser based in northeastern Afghanistan. But early Thursday, reports from the area suggested that the promised counteroffensive might be underway. Afghan officials, speaking to the BBC and Reuters, said the Afghan military had retaken some areas of the city. Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for the Kunduz police chief, told BBC Afghan that the military had regained control of the governor\u2019s office, the police chief\u2019s office and the building housing the intelligence agency. It was unclear which Afghan forces were involved in the counteroffensive, and details of the fighting were not immediately available. More Than 14 Years After U.S. Invasion, the Taliban Control Large Parts of Afghanistan At least one-fifth of the country is controlled or contested by the Taliban. The Taliban have proved in the last few days just how tight a grip they hold on a part of northern Baghlan that abuts Kunduz Province. Reinforcements from either Kabul or the government stronghold in Mazar-i-Sharif must pass through the area to reach Kunduz City, and some convoys have been ambushed there. It was not clear on Wednesday whether the front line in the north was still in Kunduz or was rapidly shifting south into Baghlan. That, at least, was how residents of Baghlan\u2019s provincial capital, Pul-i-Kumri, were feeling. \u201cIt is true, people are evacuating the city today,\u201d Zabihullah Rustami, a former member of the provincial council, said by phone. He had done so himself, he said, moving to his rural district to the east. \u201cPeople who are enemies of the Taliban are leaving,\u201d he said, and the city was rife with \u201crumors that the Taliban might attack and take over the city.\u201d Pul-i-Kumri, about 90 miles north of Kabul, could become the next flash point if the Taliban\u2019s momentum in the north is not checked in the next few days. Taliban fighters have been creeping up to the city\u2019s outskirts over the last six months. Gun and mortar fire are often heard, and skirmishes have become regular occurrences on near the city. \u201cIn Pul-i-Kumri, the situation is not in the favor of the government,\u201d Mr. Rustami said. \u201cIf any Taliban come out and shout \u2018Allahu akbar,\u2019 the city will fall. The Taliban are close to the city.\u201d In a worrisome sign, two units of the Afghan Local Police surrendered their bases just outside Pul-i-Kumri to the Taliban on Wednesday and joined the insurgents, while a third base there was overrun, said Mohammad Leqaa, a former general who commanded police forces in several provinces. Other military units in the area were also said to have fled. Mr. Leqaa estimated that as much as 10 percent of the city\u2019s population left on Wednesday alone. \u201cThe residents were influenced by waves of people fleeing Kunduz by way of Baghlan,\u201d he said. \u201cWe tried to announce to people not to panic and don\u2019t leave. They weren\u2019t listening.\u201d Video Residents of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan fled Wednesday after the Taliban took over the city on Monday. Afghan security forces are trying to regain control. Credit Credit Ajmal Omari/European Pressphoto Agency Mr. Callahan, the security adviser, said he expected government forces to put up more of a fight in Pul-i-Kumri than they did in Kunduz. \u201cI think you\u2019ll see much more resistance\u201d from the police and pro-government militias, Mr. Callahan said. \u201cMind you, Baghlan is big, and most of the security forces are drawn from the eastern parts of the province, so there is a big pool of potential reinforcements.\u201d Even so, he said, a strong defense could not be taken for granted because if panic took root in Pul-i-Kumri, a Taliban victory could be \u201ca self-fulfilling prophecy,\u201d and a small Taliban force could sow enough fear \u201cto more or less walk in\u201d as security forces retreated. \u201cIt would be the same movie we\u2019ve seen in Kunduz,\u201d Mr. Callahan said. The Taliban\u2019s resurgence in Baghlan over the past two years is a complicated story of ethnic rivalry and local politics as much as ideology. Baghlan\u2019s sprawling and populous northern district, known as Baghlani Jadid, is largely Pashtun, Afghanistan\u2019s largest ethnic group \u2014 from which Taliban members are traditionally drawn. Pashtuns live in settlements across the north, but they are outnumbered in the region by Afghanistan\u2019s second-largest group, the Tajiks. In Baghlan, many Pashtuns have felt left out of the provincial power structure, especially after a leading Pashtun candidate failed to win the provincial council chairmanship in last year\u2019s election. Since then, Pashtun support for the government appears to have waned in northern Baghlan and insecurity has been rising, especially along the stretch of national highway running through the province. On Tuesday and Wednesday, convoys of reinforcements headed toward Kunduz were fighting pitched battles with the Taliban in two areas, said Abdul Shaker Urfani, a member of a community council in northern Baghlan. By his count, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers bound for Kunduz were stuck in the province on Wednesday. \u201cThey can\u2019t break through the Taliban resistance,\u201d Mr. Urfani said. The capture of Kunduz, a city of 300,000 people, three days ago appeared to be the Taliban\u2019s largest victory in a war that has gone on for more than a decade. Kunduz is the first urban center the Taliban have held since 2001. Image Afghan soldiers at the Kunduz airport prepared on Wednesday for a counteroffensive to try to retake the city from the Taliban. Credit Nasir Waqif/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images Soon after the city fell, Afghan military officials spoke of using its airport, five miles to the south, as a staging ground for a swift counterattack. Now, though, the airport is imperiled as well, caught between Taliban forces approaching from Kunduz and the insurgent-controlled countryside in every other direction. By Tuesday night, Taliban fighters had pushed through the airport perimeter, threatening several hundred soldiers and at least as many civilians who had fled to the airport from the city. One police officer was killed and at least 17 were wounded defending the area, officials said. Their situation improved somewhat when American jets struck Taliban positions at 11:30 p.m. and at 1 a.m., an American spokesman said. The Afghan Air Force also fired weapons. Around the same time, American Special Forces soldiers and Afghan commandos left the airport headed for Kunduz, according to Afghan government officials. Whether the Americans were there to take Taliban positions or to call in airstrikes was not known. By morning, the Americans appeared to have returned, said people there who spoke by telephone. An American military spokesman refused to discuss the matter. It appeared that at least one American operation in the city ended in failure. An Afghan security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that a group of 100 or more Afghan soldiers, trapped in a fortress north of the city, had held the Taliban off for more than two days. But when American forces tried to airdrop arms and ammunition to them, the official said, \u201cthey missed the base and dropped the weapons in the river.\u201d It was not clear whether the weapons actually landed in the water of the nearby Kalagaw River or had merely missed the defenders\u2019 position by a long distance. That position fell Wednesday morning, and about 60 soldiers surrendered or were captured by the Taliban, although at least a few dozen managed to escape, the official said. Questions about how thousands of army, police and militia defenders could continue to fare so poorly against a Taliban force that most local and military officials put only in the hundreds were hanging over President Ashraf Ghani\u2019s government and its American allies. The government forces and militiamen defending Kunduz Province were said to number more than 7,000 when the city fell. Some fell back to the airport, some fled to their homes, and some are unaccounted for.", "keyword": "Afghanistan War;Taliban;Kunduz;Afghanistan;US Military;Afghan Air Force;Afghan National Security Forces"}
{"id": "ny0216265", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/04/26", "title": "90,000 Protest U.S. Base on Okinawa", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 More than 90,000 Okinawans rallied Sunday to oppose the relocation of an American air base on their island, adding to the pressure on Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to resolve an issue that has divided Tokyo and Washington. The demonstrators, in one of the largest protests on Okinawa in years, demanded that Mr. Hatoyama scrap a 2006 agreement with the United States to move the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to a different site on the island. Many of the protesters wore yellow to signal they were giving Mr. Hatoyama a warning for appearing to waver on election promises to move the busy base off Okinawa altogether. Since his party\u2019s landmark election victory last summer, Mr. Hatoyama has promised to come up with an alternative plan that would reduce the heavy American presence on the southern Japanese island, home to nearly half of the 50,000 United States military personnel in Japan. He has given himself until the end of May to put together such a plan that would also be acceptable to Washington. So far, his efforts to find a new location for the base have not appeased Washington; it initially demanded that Tokyo adhere to the original 2006 deal but has recently signaled greater flexibility. The 2006 deal calls for moving the base from its current location, in the center of the city of Ginowan, to Camp Schwab, an existing Marine base in less-populated northern Okinawa. The perception that Mr. Hatoyama has mishandled the relationship with the United States, Japan\u2019s longtime protector, has contributed to his falling approval ratings, which have dropped below 30 percent. Opposition leaders and media commentators have begun calling on him to resign if he fails to find a compromise by the end of May. While Mr. Hatoyama has remained tight-lipped about what his plan may look like, officials from his government have made repeated visits to Okinawa to sound out local leaders. Okinawan politicians and the local news media have described the emerging plan as a modified version of the 2006 agreement. They said the government was considering building a smaller airbase at Camp Schwab than under the 2006 agreement and moving at least part of Futenma\u2019s functions \u2014 most likely some of its training operations, and perhaps some of its helicopters \u2014 to Tokunoshima, a smaller island about 120 miles north of Okinawa. Japanese news media have interpreted this proposal as a token gesture to appease Okinawans by moving at least some of the Marines off the island. Okinawan leaders and local media reports have also said the government is considering constructing a new air base on an artificial island to be built off the Okinawan city of Uruma. Japanese media reports have said the island could take decades to build and would serve as a longer-term home for the Marines. However, on Sunday, local leaders told the demonstrators that they rejected any plan that kept the air base on Okinawa. Toshio Shimabukuro, the mayor of Uruma, said he opposed the construction of the island, which he said would turn his city in \u201ca major military site,\u201d according to Japan\u2019s Kyodo News . The governor of Okinawa, Hirokazu Nakaima, who dropped his earlier support for the 2006 plan to join a rising movement against the base, called on the rest of Japan to share more of the burden of the American military presence. \u201cThis is not a problem that concerns only Okinawans,\u201d he said, according to Kyodo.", "keyword": "Military Bases and Installations;Okinawa and Other Ryukyu Islands (Japan);United States Defense and Military Forces;Hatoyama Yukio"}
{"id": "ny0260110", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/06/02", "title": "Virulent E. Coli Strain Hits Germany and Puzzles Officials", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 An unusually lethal strain of E. coli bacteria has infected more than 1,500 people in Germany , mystifying public health officials, ravaging Spain \u2019s agricultural heartland, and touching off panic in Europe as people weighed whether it was safe to eat raw vegetables. The source of the outbreak, which has killed at least 16 people \u2014 15 in Germany and a Swede who visited there recently \u2014 remained unknown. Public health officials are alarmed because a startlingly high proportion of those infected suffer from a potentially lethal complication attacking the kidneys, called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can provoke comas, seizures and stroke. Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of food-borne disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta , said the rate of cases of acute kidney failure in the outbreak was unprecedented. \u201cThat makes this an extraordinarily large and severe event,\u201d he said. While most of the infections were among people who had traveled to northern Germany, the authorities acknowledged that the outbreak had spread to virtually every corner of the country. Shoppers and vegetable sellers in Berlin expressed a blend of confusion, anger and stoicism; about 20 cases of E. coli infection have been reported in the capital city. \u201cA lot of people are afraid or worried,\u201d said Nursan Usta, 43, who runs a fruit and vegetable stall in Berlin\u2019s blue-collar Neuk\u00f6lln district. \u201cThey aren\u2019t even buying cherries\u201d \u2014 even though the authorities have mentioned only cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes as potential sources of infection. In Motril, a town in Spain\u2019s agricultural heartland, greenhouses were empty of workers as demand for vegetables collapsed after the German authorities initially \u2014 and most likely mistakenly \u2014 pointed to Spain as a source of the outbreak. \u201cWorking in a greenhouse can be tough, but I\u2019ve never felt more exhausted and empty inside than now,\u201d said Miguel Rodr\u00edguez Puentedura, who had been picking cucumbers until Monday, when the greenhouse that employed him shut down. Health officials in Hamburg , the center of the outbreak, appealed Wednesday for donors to contribute blood. Scientists are at a loss to explain why this little-known organism, identified as E. coli 0104:H4, has proved so virulent. The European authorities have reported several differences from previous outbreaks, including that women make up more than two-thirds of those affected and that young and middle-aged adults account for a very high percentage of the most severe cases. Dr. J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute of the University of Florida , said that the German strain might have undergone genetic changes or mutations to make it more potent. The high number of cases of acute kidney failure represents a much higher percentage of the total number of illnesses than in previous outbreaks associated with different strains of E. coli. Generally, 5 to 10 percent of E. coli illnesses result in this complication. Among the confirmed cases, according to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany\u2019s disease control agency, 470 people had been diagnosed with the kidney syndrome. That could be because German doctors are using a broader definition of kidney failure that captures more cases. Or it could mean that the total number of illnesses is much greater than has so far been revealed, which ultimately would lower the percentage of acute cases. Or it could be a signature of this form of E. coli. There are many types of E. coli, most of which are harmless. But a small number have come under increasing scrutiny as dangerous pathogens. These all produce a poison known as shiga toxin and generally have the ability to cling to a person\u2019s intestinal wall, allowing them to release the poison in large enough amounts to make people sick. Dr. Phillip Tarr, a professor of microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis , said that there were two main forms of shiga toxin found in E. coli, and that the strain detected in the outbreak in Germany appeared to have the more potent version. But he said the organism appeared to have other quirks that made it unusual, and potentially difficult to detect by conventional means. \u201cThis outbreak is still evolving, and everyone is still in the fog of case definition,\u201d Dr. Tarr said. With the source of the contagion unknown, the Robert Koch Institute on Wednesday warned against eating \u201c raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuces to prevent further cases ,\u201d particularly in northern Germany. European and German officials pledged to track down the cause of the outbreak and to pinpoint where in the food supply chain the contamination had taken place. \u201cHundreds of tests have been done,\u201d the German agriculture minister, Ilse Aigner , said in a television interview. So far, those tests had determined that \u201cmost of the patients who have fallen ill ate cucumbers, tomatoes and leaf lettuce primarily in northern Germany.\u201d Two people in the United States were hospitalized with kidney failure after returning from travel to Hamburg, said Dr. Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control. He said tests were being done to see if they were sick with a strain of E. coli that matched the German strain. Dr. Tarr said the outbreak in Germany pointed to a basic gap in public health systems worldwide. If samples from sick patients were routinely tested for the presence of shiga toxin, it could lead to much faster identification of problems. After a lethal outbreak of E. coli in 1993, Dr. Tauxe said the United States created a government database that gathered information on laboratory testing of pathogens and shared it with health officials around the country. He said no similar system existed in Europe that would allow separate countries to quickly share lab results. \u201cThis could be an important game-changing event in Europe,\u201d he said. John Dalli, the European Union health commissioner, told a news conference in Brussels that the outbreak was on the decline, with fewer hospitalizations in recent days. \u201cWe would therefore consider a ban on any product as disproportionate,\u201d Mr. Dalli said. Tests by the German authorities on Spanish cucumbers had identified some E. coli, Mr. Dalli said. But those tests had not identified the highly virulent strain that had led to such serious health problems. \u201cThere is no proof at this point in time that the Spanish cucumbers are the cause of this contamination in Germany,\u201d he said. Still, some shoppers remained wary. In a store specializing in organically grown produce in the upscale Wilmersdorf area of the capital, Miriam Sch\u00e4fer, a sales attendant, said Spanish cucumbers had been removed from the shelves \u2014 even though they were no longer the direct suspects \u2014 and replaced by locally grown ones. \u201cPeople are buying less,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are asking a lot of questions about what is safe.\u201d But some shoppers insisted that the risk was minimal. The cause of the outbreak \u201cis not yet proven,\u201d said Corinna Kasper, 24. \u201cFirst they say it\u2019s one thing and then another.\u201d European farmers sought to pre-empt economic damage caused by the outbreak. \u201cIt is totally unacceptable to impose trade bans when the source of contamination remains unknown,\" said Pekka Pesonen, the secretary general of Copa-Cogeca, a group representing European farmers and cooperatives. Major growers in Germany are losing up to $7 million daily and two-thirds of all vegetables, including lettuce and tomatoes, produced by his members were being destroyed, according to Karl Schmitz, the director of the German Federal Association of Producers of Fruit and Vegetables. In Spain, the damage is much broader, estimated at about $286 million a week.", "keyword": "Germany;E Coli;Food Safety"}
{"id": "ny0128268", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/06/20", "title": "After Taking Early Lead, Liberty Beat the Atlanta Dream", "abstract": "Cappie Pondexter had 14 points and a season-high 13 assists, and Essence Carson added 14 points in the Liberty\u2019s 73-60 victory over the Atlanta Dream on Tuesday night. The Liberty never trailed after Leilani Mitchell pulled up for a 15-foot fast-break jumper to make it 13-12 late in the first. The Liberty (4-7) had plenty of incentive after last Friday\u2019s debacle, a 42-point loss at Connecticut that was the worst in team history and included a 34-point halftime deficit that was the largest in league history.", "keyword": "Basketball;New York Liberty;Atlanta Dream;Pondexter Cappie;Carson Essence"}
{"id": "ny0222672", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/11/11", "title": "Defector Finds Niche in South", "abstract": "SEOUL \u2014 Choi Se-woong\u2019s day is just like that of many other businessmen here. He wakes up at 5:30 a.m., checks the news headlines with a cup of coffee and then drives to work in the financial district of Yeouido. What makes Mr. Choi different is the unusual path he took in his life. He defected from North Korea in 1995 and has since built a reputation as one of the most prominent North Korean entrepreneurs in the South. \u201cI have Kim Jong-il to thank for finding the job of my life,\u201d said Mr. Choi, 49, referring to the North Korean leader. He spoke between puffs on a cigarette at a coffee shop in a Seoul hotel recently. Growing up, Mr. Choi was one of the privileged few, eventually studying German literature at Kim Il-sung University. His family had connections to the government \u2014 his father is Choi Hee-byeok, who was North Korea\u2019s de facto finance minister as director of the finance and accounting department of the Workers\u2019 Party. It was Kim Jong-il who suggested to the elder Mr. Choi that his son should learn finance. Today, Mr. Choi is a managing director of foreign exchange marketing with NH Investment & Futures, a futures brokerage house in Seoul. He lives with his two children and wife, Shin Yeong-hee, who was once a dancer at Mansudae Art Theater, a prestigious art troupe in North Korea. Mr. Choi\u2019s first encounter with capitalism was in 1984, when he went to work in Vienna at the Golden Star Bank, which at that time was the only North Korean bank abroad. (The bank eventually shut down in 2004, long after Mr. Choi\u2019s time there, as international suspicion about illegal activities at the bank rose.) Several years after he arrived in Vienna, Mr. Choi moved on to London and worked at Development Investment Bank, a foreign exchange trading firm that has since closed and was set up by Daesong Bank of North Korea and a British entrepreneur. \u201cThe education I got associated capitalism with imperialism and aggression,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought it would be cold, like lacking humanity and loyalty among friends.\u201d While in London, Mr. Choi ended up lending the money he had made to the North Korean Embassy. \u201cThe embassy didn\u2019t get much support from the regime in the \u201990s,\u201d he said. It was while in London that Mr. Choi decided he would not go back to North Korea. He said that he had become \u201cfed up\u201d with the system and did not want to raise his children there. He declined to be more specific because he feared retaliation against family members still in the North. Before his defection, his father lost his position in a political reshuffle, meaning that Mr. Choi\u2019s life upon return would be less privileged. He arrived in South Korea on Dec. 12, 1995, via a route he declined to disclose to prevent a crackdown on potential defectors. Now, 15 years later, Mr. Choi is still fighting. \u201cIt\u2019s a constant battle,\u201d he said. In 2009, 2,927 North Koreans defected to the South, up from 1,000 in 2002. The number is rising each year, and the Unification Ministry predicts that the total number of defectors will soon exceed two million. Getting a job is a big challenge for North Korean defectors, in part, observers say, because of education and in part because of prejudice. A recent survey showed that 13.7 percent of defectors between 15 and 64 years old were jobless as of last November, about four times the unemployment rate for South Koreans. Those who landed jobs earned an average of just 1.27 million won, or about $1,100, a month last year, which is less than half of the average income in Seoul. Mr. Choi has had more luck, thanks to his education and experience. Soon after he arrived in South Korea, he got a job at Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute, a company that manages payment systems between banks. At the height of the Asian financial crisis, Mr. Choi tried his luck in the restaurant business. In 1998, he opened a restaurant named Jinadallaegak, specializing in North Korean-style naengmyeon, or cold noodles. The restaurant gave him enough capital by the year 2000 to set up SN Bank, a company providing 24-hour online foreign currency trading for individuals and small businesses. It was believed to be the first such service in South Korea. SN Bank was having financial problems and he sold it in 2006. He held several other finance jobs, increasing his pay all the while. Most recently, he joined NH in October, having been recruited after conducting a training course for employees there. Not all has been smooth. He was once sued by an employee at his restaurant when he refused to give the worker a raise. And when he developed the 24-hour online foreign currency trading service, his business partner tried to take credit for it. There are certain things anybody doing business in Korea should learn, he said: drinking and golf. Kim Jong-il ordered all North Koreans living overseas to stop drinking alcohol. So when he arrived in the South, he flatly refused to drink. Only later did he realize it was considered rude, and he now drinks alcohol. As for golf, Mr. Choi joked that his game had gotten so good that no one could tell anymore that he came from the North. Kim Hyung-eun is a business reporter at Korea JoongAng Daily.", "keyword": "South Korea;North Korea;Defectors (Political);Entrepreneurship"}
{"id": "ny0055066", "categories": ["business", "mutfund"], "date": "2014/07/13", "title": "Jockeying for Position in the Bond-Fund Sweepstakes", "abstract": "AS he came to early prominence in the 1980s, Bill Gross was sometimes called the Peter Lynch of bonds, after the better-known manager of the Fidelity Magellan stock mutual fund. But Mr. Lynch\u2019s reign as the king of stock investors was brief compared with that of Mr. Gross as king of bonds. When Mr. Lynch stepped down in 1990 at the age of 46, Magellan had been the largest stock fund for just seven years. The Pimco Total Return bond fund run by Mr. Gross, 70, has been the largest bond mutual fund for 17 years. But how much longer will he reign? Lately, the bond king has been under siege. Mr. Gross\u2019s management style was questioned after the departure this year of Mohamed A. El-Erian, former chief executive of the Pacific Investment Management Company. Bad bets, bad press and a mid-2013 spike in interest rates led investors to pull $64 billion, or 22 percent of the fund\u2019s $293 billion in peak assets, from May 2013 through June this year. The good news for Mr. Gross is that two of his top rivals, Michael Hasenstab of Franklin Templeton Investments and Jeffrey E. Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital, also had investor outflows at their funds, according to a tally by Morningstar. The bond funds that have been getting the most inflows are still relatively small, and some of them have already faltered this year. And so, even now, none of his taxable-fund competitors are anywhere near the size of Pimco Total Return. \u201cMany people have been drawing conclusions about Bill Gross; they thought he lost his touch,\u201d said Eric Jacobson, co-head of bond fund research at Morningstar. But Mr. Gross remains \u201ca titan in the world of investing,\u201d and \u201cone of the best around,\u201d Mr. Jacobson added. Though he has trailed the market slightly this year, he has outperformed the bond market over the long run \u2014 in his case, the 27-year history of the fund. Two Vanguard index funds \u2014 one with $118 billion and the other with $82 billion \u2014 could well move up in the next few years. But the nearest actively managed rival, the $72.5 billion Templeton Global Bond fund, suffered a slight, 1.7 percent outflow in the 14 months through June. Managed by Mr. Hasenstab, 41, the fund generated returns of 10.6 percent, annualized, in the 10 years ended in 2012, based on bold bets on out-of-favor debt such as emerging markets, compared with 6.8 percent for the flagship Pimco fund. For example, Mr. Hasenstab loaded up on bonds of Ireland and Hungary during the eurozone debt crisis of 2011. But since 2012, the fund\u2019s returns have moderated. Although its return of 2.2 percent last year still beat the Pimco fund and both domestic and global indexes by more than four percentage points, its holdings of Ukraine bonds alarmed some investors this year. The fund\u2019s return of 3.3 percent this year through June trailed the Citigroup World Government Bond Index, at 5 percent, and Mr. Gross\u2019s Pimco fund, at 3.7 percent. In recent interviews, Mr. Hasenstab said that the bond market\u2019s \u201cperiodic panic\u201d over Federal Reserve policies was overstated, and that his Ukraine bet should pay off, even if it takes a few years. He declined to comment for this article, as did Mr. Gross. Image Jeffrey Gundlach, of DoubleLine Capital, runs a rival fund. Credit Eduardo Munoz/Reuters Another competitor, the $33.5 billion DoubleLine Total Return Bond fund, has an outspoken manager with his eyes on the bond throne, according to some fund watchers. That manager, Mr. Gundlach, 54, was actually called \u201cthe king of bonds\u201d by Barron\u2019s in early 2011, a little over a year after he broke away from his former employer, Trust Company of the West, or TCW. In its first two full years of operation, 2011 and 2012, this mortgage-heavy flagship fund had an annualized return of 9.3 percent, compared with 6 percent for the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index and 7.2 percent for Pimco Total Return. But last year, the same DoubleLine fund came back to earth, eking out a barely positive return of 0.02 percent. While that beat both Mr. Gross\u2019s fund and the Barclays index by about two percentage points, the fund still suffered from the same stampede by investors frightened of losses to rising interest rates, with a net outflow of 17 percent, or $7 billion, in the 14 months through June this year. But flows actually started turning positive in February, and returns have improved to 4.5 percent for the first six months of this year, as Mr. Gundlach correctly predicted falling rates. In a statement, Mr. Gundlach indicated that he would limit the DoubleLine fund\u2019s size before it reaches $100 billion to avoid the risk of \u201casset bloat,\u201d which, he said, could impair the ability of a \u201cmegafund\u201d to find \u201cenough undervalued securities to move the performance needle.\u201d A number of other actively managed funds in the same size range gained assets in the same 14-month period ended in June. The $37.1 billion Pimco Income fund pulled in $7 billion; its two managers don\u2019t include Mr. Gross. The $35.9 billion Lord Abbett Short Duration Income fund, led by Robert A. Lee, pulled in $3.6 billion. And the $30.3 billion Metropolitan West Total Return Bond fund had inflows of $4.4 billion. Among exchange-traded funds, inflows have been dominated by funds that specialize in safer short-term debt and other narrow categories, such as loans, high-yield bonds and floating-rate debt, a Morningstar tally said. The three leaders are the $7.2 billion PowerShares Senior Loan Portfolio , which pulled in $3.4 billion, and the $5.1 billion Pimco 0-5 Year High Yield Corporate Bond Index E.T.F. and the $4.3 billion SPDR Barclays Short Term High Yield Bond E.T.F. , both of which added $3.1 billion. Among actively managed bond funds with more than $20 billion, two of the fastest-rising are new \u201cunconstrained\u201d funds that aren\u2019t tied as closely to the Barclays index. One of them, Goldman Sachs Strategic Income , a four-year-old fund led by Jonathan Beinner and Michael Swell, has mushroomed from $3.9 billion in April 2013 to $24 billion. Its annualized return of 9.6 percent for 2012-13 beat the index by more than eight percentage points with heavy doses of risky low-rated corporate and mortgage debt. But this year, the fund stumbled when it bet on rising rates, and its return of 0.2 percent through June trailed the index by more than three percentage points. As Mr. Jacobson of Morningstar put it, \u201cone of this fund\u2019s greatest advantages thus far \u2014 its use of tactical bets \u2014 is also a potentially powerful weakness.\u201d The second big fund in the unconstrained category is the $26.5 billion JPMorgan Strategic Income Opportunities fund, run by William Eigen, 46. The fund had a huge return of 18.7 percent in 2009, its first full year. But since then, it has trailed the Barclays index by nearly a percentage point, with an annualized return of 3.5 percent. While Mr. Eigen avoided losses in 2013 by curbing his interest-rate risk, his fund, like Goldman\u2019s, has trailed the index this year as rates fell. It pulled in $10.4 billion in the 14 months ended in June. JPMorgan officials say the fund seeks positive annual returns in all markets, and it has managed that feat so far. In 2013, it gained 2.8 percent, according to Morningstar, compared with a 2 percent loss for the Barclays index. With a hefty cash position of 60 percent in June, Mr. Eigen says he doesn\u2019t want to be stuck holding bonds at current \u201cdangerous\u201d price levels. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be trying to sell high-yield bonds\u201d when prices start falling, he said in mid-June. \u201cI have to go where the puck is going to be.\u201d", "keyword": "Stocks,Bonds;Mutual fund;PIMCO Pacific Investment Management Company;William H Gross;Jeffrey E Gundlach;Michael Hasenstab"}
{"id": "ny0028294", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2013/01/01", "title": "Stanford\u2019s Kevin Hogan is Focused on Winning, Like Andrew Luck", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Kevin Hogan simply stood there, his eyes despondent, fixated on something in the distance. Hogan and Stanford had just upset Oregon, on the road, in Hogan\u2019s second career start, and a television reporter was trying to elicit excitement, or at least a grin, during a postgame interview. This was the same player who, as his teammates were screaming and searching for someone to hug in the moments after the game, had found his coach and apologized for a now-meaningless fumble that a teammate had recovered. For the reporter, no excitement would come. A few teammates watched the interview on the flight home. Back at Hogan\u2019s suite, they watched again, laughing and debating whether Hogan was a robot. \u201cYou would think he just lost a high school football game,\u201d said Kevin Reihner, a backup center and one of Hogan\u2019s roommates. \u201cWe always joke, Kevin Hogan is probably the least interesting person you\u2019ll ever meet in your life.\u201d Of course, they used to say the same thing about Hogan\u2019s predecessor, Andrew Luck, the top pick in this year\u2019s N.F.L. draft. But Hogan is no Luck, Stanford Coach David Shaw said. He laughed, adding, not even close. Maybe someday, Hogan will get there, Shaw hoped. The reason Hogan started and won Stanford\u2019s last four games, and the reason the Cardinal will play in Tuesday\u2019s Rose Bowl against Wisconsin, is that he plays and behaves like Luck. During his redshirt year, Hogan had been told to emulate Luck, mimic his every move, said Pep Hamilton, Stanford\u2019s offensive coordinator. He watched how Luck rolled out and evaded would-be tacklers and improvised; how he read defenses and chose plays; and how he showed poise in the huddle. Those skills would be expected of any Stanford quarterback thereafter. Josh Nunes tried to be like Luck. He beat out Brett Nottingham, Luck\u2019s backup last season, to be Luck\u2019s successor. With Nunes, Stanford beat Southern California but lost to Washington and Notre Dame. Then the offense sputtered against lowly California and Washington State. Nunes could not run like Luck, or Hogan, for that matter. At first, Hogan could not play like Luck, either. It took Hogan a season and a half to emulate Luck, until Shaw trusted him enough to split time with Nunes against Colorado on Nov. 3. \u201cOf all the guys we had in the quarterback room, his skill set was more like Andrew\u2019s than anybody else,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cThe system had evolved and really had been built around Andrew\u2019s talents. So why not give a guy with similar talents an opportunity?\u201d Watch how and when Luck runs, Hogan had been told. At 6 feet 4 inches and 224 pounds, Hogan stands tall and is sturdy, like Luck. His teammates knew Hogan had long been ready physically. They had played pickup basketball with him and watched him throw down windmill dunks with ease. \u201cHe\u2019ll hit a jump shot and not stop talking trash all the way down the court,\u201d Reihner said. Colorado quickly learned, too. Stanford scored touchdowns on each of Hogan\u2019s first four drives. On a third-and-9, Hogan recognized man-to-man defense, which left him unaccounted for. He rolled right and took off down the sideline for 20 yards. Hamilton reintroduced the quarterback rollouts and runs that he had set aside when Nunes was starting. The offense resembled what Luck had mastered. On third down, Hogan threw or ran as he pleased. Before the Colorado game, Stanford had converted 34.5 percent of its third downs. Since then, the Cardinal have converted 45.2 percent. Shaw had no choice but to play Hogan, who led Stanford to victories over three ranked teams \u2014 Oregon State, Oregon, and U.C.L.A \u2014 before he helped to beat U.C.L.A. again in the Pacific-12 championship game Nov. 30. Watch how Luck studies film, Hogan had been told. With Stanford, the quarterback is often given a choice of three or four plays and the freedom to choose which one he likes based on how the defense is aligned. Training a quarterback to think like a Stanford quarterback takes time. Hogan devoured film on his tablet device while going to and from class, on the way to practice and before he went to bed at night. Some nuances still escaped him. It helped when Hamilton walked Hogan through hypothetical plays in practice. Hogan memorized the choreographed footwork for each play, practicing as if dancing in a ballroom. Sometimes, Hogan hears Luck\u2019s voice explaining a concept while he is executing it. In his first career start, against Oregon State, ranked 11th then, Hogan audibled from a run to a pass with Stanford trailing, 23-21, in the fourth quarter. He stood in the pocket and threw a tight spiral to tight end Zach Ertz for a 13-yard touchdown. \u201cFor him it was so matter of fact like, \u2018Yeah, of course I did it, because that\u2019s what we\u2019re supposed to do,\u2019 \u201d Shaw said. \u201cThat gives a coach such a comfort level, that we can put the game in this young man\u2019s hands, that he can get us in the right play and make the throw to win the game.\u201d Watch how Luck leads, how he wins, Hogan had been told. Hogan has completed nearly 73 percent of his passes, thrown for 973 yards and 9 touchdowns, and once in a while he might halfheartedly pump his fist. His r\u00e9sum\u00e9 already includes four game-tying, or winning, drives in the fourth quarter. Sam Schwartzstein, the fifth-year center who snapped for Luck and now Hogan, said Luck had a demanding, physical presence in the huddle. Hogan\u2019s style is more one of quiet confidence, like when he led an 11-play, 78-yard drive to tie Oregon, which was ranked second, and send the game to overtime. \u201cWhen you see that fire in Kevin\u2019s eyes, that\u2019s what gets you going,\u201d Schwartzstein said about the late drive against Oregon. He said he felt like, \u201cWe\u2019re definitely going to win this game, the way this kid looks right now.\u201d It is hard for those who know Hogan and Luck to determine who is more competitive. They speak regularly; Luck is clearly excited about Stanford\u2019s season. He never won a Pac-12 championship. He never played at the Rose Bowl. He, too, used to play basketball with his teammates. Ertz called Luck \u201ca hustle player,\u201d a rebounder not a shooter. Whenever Hogan plays, he is a star. Asked who would win a game of one-on-one, Hogan smiled wider than he did after Stanford beat Oregon. \u201cOh, that\u2019s a tough one,\u201d Hogan said. \u201cHe\u2019s bigger, stronger, but I don\u2019t know if he has the ball-handling skills or the jump shot. That\u2019s a tossup.\u201d Maybe Hogan was just being nice. \u201cI don\u2019t think either one of them wants the spotlight,\u201d Ertz said.", "keyword": "College football;Stanford;Kevin Hogan;Andrew Luck"}
{"id": "ny0248885", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/05/24", "title": "Visions of the Past Propel Colts\u2019 Taj Smith Forward", "abstract": "NEWARK \u2014 Bernadine Smith raised eight children here, five boys and three girls, 13 years separating the oldest from the youngest. Her boys were inseparable, and she tried to keep them together, keep them home, with board games and cooking lessons and movie nights. \u201cIf I could have kept my kids in a bubble,\u201d she said, \u201cI would have.\u201d Instead, she has already buried the two oldest. One burned to death in 2004 at age 22 in a murder that remains unsolved. The other shot himself in 2009 at 30 as the police burst into his hotel room. Tajiddin, once third, is now her oldest, and the tattoos that decorate his skin show he has not forgotten two brothers swallowed by these streets. His five N.F.L. games with the Indianapolis Colts last season \u2014 after three itinerant years as an undrafted free agent \u2014 are also evidence he could get out of and beyond Newark, perhaps taking his family with him. Smith, then, needs football, needs more than five games, needs a real career. In three N.F.L. seasons, spent mostly on the practice squad of the Colts, Smith banked little of his earnings. He helped his family, paid rent in Indianapolis and bought some 70 pairs of sneakers. His mother has had health problems, and his car windows need repairs. Smith\u2019s agent, Wes Bridges, said Smith is in the second year of a three-year contract, little of which is guaranteed. His window of opportunity in professional football, which opened later than most, is small to begin with, so every paycheck, every workout bonus matters for his family and his future. But of course Smith now resides in the limbo created by the N.F.L. lockout, hopeful but uncertain. No games. No organized practices. No paychecks. Nothing to be done that could secure his future in the game. Back in Newark, as the sport\u2019s labor dispute moves slowly through the federal court system, Smith has driven through the familiar, rough streets of his childhood, reacquainting himself with all that he wants to leave behind, including the building where he was robbed at gunpoint and the alley where his friend was killed. The \u201cPSP\u201d inked on his right forearm refers to Smith\u2019s old neighborhood, the Prince Street projects, where he said another eight friends had died. The \u201cBMLS\u201d on his right hand, the one he kisses before games, stands for \u201cBrothers\u2019 Memories Live Strong.\u201d The death that most affected Smith, the one he said that still kept him awake at night, that served as the impetus for giving back, took place 12 years ago. That night, according to Smith, an armed man stopped his friends as they walked home and told them to remove their sneakers. When Smith\u2019s friend balked, he was shot, and his blood splattered across Smith\u2019s face. He washed it off at the nearest gas station, went home and curled up in bed. He told neither his parents, nor the police. Instead, he repeated to himself: \u201cThat could have been me.\u201d In the coming years, Smith would make plenty of trouble of his own. He admits to playing his own part in perpetuating the dead-end pathology of violence begetting violence. He says he is not looking for sympathy. Just work. Nicknamed Taj, Smith estimated he fought 25 to 30 times in high school. After one brawl his junior year, in which Smith said he broke another student\u2019s nose and jaw, he was expelled and charged with aggravated assault. In another instance, Smith said he fought six combatants, one after another, in a local parking lot. But at a school for juvenile offenders, Smith\u2019s personal file crossed the desk of Ian Scott, who was a consultant for the school. Even among arsonists and murderers, Smith was deemed dangerous, high risk, Scott said. Yet in walked this skinny, scraggly, unassuming kid with glasses. Scott said Smith rarely even spoke. Smith\u2019s background \u2014 liked football, came from Newark \u2014 resonated with Scott, a local kid who played in the N.F.L. for Tampa Bay. To get Smith back into football, Scott had to meet with the principal at Weequahic. He said she told him Smith and his older brother were the reason she was retiring. Scott talked Smith onto the team, but under one condition: he could not enter any building on school property, even the locker room. He dressed and spent halftimes in the parking lot. His senior year marked his first real football season, and he played everywhere from defensive end to quarterback. He also won two state championships in basketball. While Smith fought to finish high school, one older brother, Al-Mutakabbir Smith, moved to Atlantic City. He sold drugs there, Smith said, everything from cocaine to heroin to prescription pills. And so Smith, who worked at a local T-shirt shop after high school, decided he needed to leave Newark, and he landed at Bakersfield College in California in 2004. \u201cDo not come back until you graduate,\u201d Scott told him. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing for you here.\u201d Smith switched to receiver from cornerback there, but not before he was kicked off the team at least once. Early on, Jeff Chudy, the coach at Bakersfield, said Smith \u201cwas kind of flopping around\u201d and that \u201chis purpose for being here was debatable.\u201d In October 2004, his mother called one game day and pleaded with Smith to speak to an assistant. Smith knew, from the coach\u2019s reaction, something had happened, something bad. When he returned home, his mother said she saw him cry for the first time as an adult. They sat on the bathroom floor in silence. The senior investigator in the case, Ronald Moten of the Camden County Prosecutor\u2019s Office, said the police found Al-Mutakabbir Smith burning in an alley, his body wrapped in an oversize black plastic trash bag, duct taped around his midsection. \u201cIn 10 years in homicide, that case stands out,\u201d Moten said. \u201cIt broke my heart, man. It will always stay with me.\u201d The police identified the body after the girlfriend watched a news story that mentioned a lion tattoo on the burned man\u2019s right biceps. Bernadine Smith identified her son that way, and during her conversations with Moten, she mentioned another son, a college football player. In his second year at Bakersfield, Smith met a teacher, DeAnn Sampley, who taught him sign language and took Smith and other students to Romania, where they visited orphanages. Smith, at long last, started to meaningfully mourn his brother\u2019s death. Chudy said he sensed a real leap in maturity in Smith. \u201cHonestly, it shocked me,\u201d Chudy said. After Bakersfield, Smith went to Syracuse, which he chose over Rutgers because it was too close to home. A broken collarbone ended his first season after four games, and he left in 2008 with a year of eligibility remaining. Smith bounced around the N.F.L. before he clawed his way onto the Colts\u2019 practice squad. He was there when his mother called in tears again in November 2009. Another brother, Fuquan Wilson, Smith\u2019s chess partner and confidant, had died, under circumstances Smith still struggles to accept. The police account sketched out the particulars this way: Wilson, married with two children, wound up in an argument with his brother-in-law, a fight that ended when Wilson slashed his relative\u2019s throat and shot him in the head. Wilson then fled to Virginia, where the police said he shot himself as they entered his hotel room seeking his arrest. \u201cI\u2019m still trying to figure out what happened,\u201d Smith said. \u201cI can\u2019t see my brother just killing himself like that.\u201d After Wilson died, Smith said he turned to alcohol, and he was arrested for suspicion of drunken driving in January 2010. Early into the next preseason, he tore his hamstring on the final play of the final practice. Yet Smith kept training, kept hoping, and late in the season, the Colts signed him once again. In Smith\u2019s first N.F.L. game, in December against his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, he blocked a punt and recovered it in the end zone. Bernadine Smith, who watched the Cowboys game by herself at home, said her landlord thought 50 people were partying in the apartment. Through his face mask, she saw relief on her son\u2019s face. \u201cLike he had made it,\u201d she said. \u201cFor him. For his brothers. For all of us.\u201d Last month, Smith spoke to teenagers in his hometown. He scheduled a camp for July and worked to establish what he hopes will be his own nonprofit foundation. As Smith drove through his old neighborhood, he pointed to the T-shirts hanging from fence posts, surrounded by flowers and candles, to commemorate the dead. His mother is not sure she wants to leave. She has lived in Newark her entire life. She says she loves it here, and yet, she believes her recent health problems stem from her sons\u2019 deaths. Taj serves as the family\u2019s inspiration, lockout or no lockout. \u201cWhat he\u2019s gone through, most young men would never recover from,\u201d Scott said. \u201cThis is not a \u2018Blind Side\u2019 story. This is way deeper than that. He had people that played roles in his life. But he walked the walk alone.\u201d While home, Smith stopped by Weequahic, with its new stadium, new field and new track, a school as transformed as the student it once kicked out. He laughed. Here he had traveled all over to reach the N.F.L. at 27, and yet he found himself back where it all started, the lockout in effect, the dream held up. He glanced at his right hand. Brothers\u2019 memories live strong.", "keyword": "Football;Smith Taj;Newark (NJ);Indianapolis Colts;National Football League;Lockouts;Organized Labor"}
{"id": "ny0261118", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/06/21", "title": "Bloomberg\u2019s Recollections of a Lifetime of Motherly Advice", "abstract": "As the sun set over a Staten Island community meeting last month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sped through questions about budget cuts, wind power and, inevitably, ferry service. But when a woman thanked him for helping save a popular local Boy Scouts camp, he slipped into unscripted territory. \u201cI don\u2019t know why it just occurred to me,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said. \u201cI went up to Boston to see my mother yesterday, who\u2019s failing. She\u2019s 102 years old and never had a bad day in her life.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg, 69, smiling widely, then recounted his own return from summer camp decades earlier, when he told his mother, Charlotte Rubens Bloomberg, that the food at camp was better than home cooking. \u201cGo back! I don\u2019t want to be a cook,\u201d his mother told him, he recalled. Mrs. Bloomberg, who died on Sunday in her home in Medford, Mass., was a touchstone for her son as he rose from a modest childhood to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. Mr. Bloomberg often worked his mother into speeches. Earlier this month, while announcing a plan to offer wireless Internet service in city parks, he used one of his favorite lines, \u201cMy mother remembers when the telephone came in,\u201d and then last week, when asked about an education issue, he spoke about driving by his elementary school recently while visiting his mother. And during this spring\u2019s round of commencement speeches, the mayor often offered some variation of his favorite piece of parental advice: \u201cCall your mother.\u201d It is advice he took to heart \u2014 throughout his adult life, he called his mother every day. His mother nurtured him as he moved from Boston to New York, from working class to billionaire, from anonymous to ubiquitous. In recent months, as Mrs. Bloomberg\u2019s health worsened, Mr. Bloomberg took time in meetings to reflect on her life and regale assistants with stories. And he traveled to his mother\u2019s home in Medford much more frequently to visit her, his daughter Georgina said. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t have a TV downstairs, so they sit there and talk,\u201d she said in an interview last month. \u201cShe always asks questions.\u201d Like her son, Mrs. Bloomberg was candid and pragmatic. But she largely shunned the spotlight. When strangers asked if she was related to \u201cthe Bloomberg,\u201d she sometimes said no, hoping to avoid the attention. When reporters showed up at her doorstep, she told them she had more pressing things to do. While Mr. Bloomberg lavished other family members with multimillion-dollar residences, Mrs. Bloomberg declined, choosing to stay in the simple two-story home that she and her husband, William, bought more than 60 years ago. When her son sent limousines to pick her up, she sent him back a check. When his private jets arrived, she groaned. Their relationship was defined in the aftermath of William Bloomberg\u2019s death, of heart failure , when his son was 21. Mrs. Bloomberg did not let her husband\u2019s sudden health problems slow her down; instead, she devoted herself to learning to use a manual gearshift so she could chauffeur the family. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t get upset when things are beyond her control,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg wrote in his memoir. \u201cShe never complains. I think I\u2019ve inherited that \u2018just do what you can do and go on to the next thing\u2019 approach.\u201d Mary Kay Shartle-Galotto, a college friend of Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s, recalled his devastation, and resolve, in the days after his father died. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m the man of the family now, and I\u2019ll always take care of my mother,\u2019 \u201d recalled Dr. Shartle-Galotto, one of several friends of the Bloomberg family interviewed for this article in recent weeks. \u201cShe\u2019s really an independent lady and she\u2019s been a source of strength for him all his life.\u201d And Sharon E. Baum, a former girlfriend of Mr. Bloomberg, said he could be obsessive about checking in with his mother. \u201cHe was always very attentive to her,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was a fabulous son.\u201d As Mr. Bloomberg rose to prominence on Wall Street, Mrs. Bloomberg was the humbling voice in the back of his mind. After each bit of good news, she would say, \u201cDon\u2019t let it go to your head,\u201d the mayor recalled in his memoir. In 2002, Mrs. Bloomberg held the family Bible as her son was sworn in. She appeared on the campaign trail (senior centers were her specialty) and accompanied him on trips to Israel in 2003 and 2007. Ethel Nanes, a friend of Mrs. Bloomberg\u2019s for 50 years, said Mrs. Bloomberg was proud of her son, especially for his philanthropy, but sometimes seemed skeptical about politics. \u201cI think she wonders why he needs it or why he wants it,\u201d Ms. Nanes said. \u201cShe believes that sometimes people do things to see if they can do things.\u201d Mrs. Bloomberg, who was born in Jersey City, seemed most comfortable in Medford, where her routine was predictable: services at Temple Shalom, chocolate ice cream at Brigham\u2019s, lunch at Legal Sea Foods and piano-playing in the quiet of her home. She participated in a book club, played Scrabble and read two daily newspapers, The Boston Globe and The New York Times . In Medford in recent years, she was considered something of a wonder, the diminutive centenarian who still ate steak dinners and sat through hours of religious services in a metal chair, although her attendance at services waned along with her health. She took a keen interest in local politics and education, giving her son\u2019s home telephone number to Medford\u2019s mayor, Michael J. McGlynn, in case he needed advice. \u201cShe walks around like he\u2019s just her little boy,\u201d Mr. McGlynn said. In Medford, friends and neighbors reacted with disbelief on Monday. \u201cI thought she was going to stay around forever,\u201d said June Klein, a friend. \u201cShe was just so tenacious and gracious and everything good you could say about a person.\u201d And Mr. Bloomberg, it turned out, was not the only Bloomberg renowned for financial management. His mother, who earned an accounting degree from New York University in 1929, devoted a decade to overseeing the bingo operations at the synagogue, ultimately making the contentious decision to end the games because they were too costly. \u201cShe was able to handle all the pitfalls of the bingo management,\u201d said Herb Sandberg, who ran the games with her. \u201cIt\u2019s like running a little country. Everybody\u2019s coming to you with little complaints.\u201d When she was 93, Mrs. Bloomberg was elected as a co-president of Temple Shalom, where a wing is named for her and William Bloomberg, courtesy of a $1 million donation from her son. Mr. Bloomberg returned to Medford for Jewish holidays, and his mother visited New York several times a year. Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s sister, Marjorie B. Tiven, the mayor\u2019s liaison to the United Nations , visited Medford more often, and was Mrs. Bloomberg\u2019s frequent companion. Mr. Bloomberg has donated millions in his mother\u2019s name, to hospitals, to Hadassah and to the mayor\u2019s alma mater, Johns Hopkins University , which will open a children\u2019s hospital named for Mrs. Bloomberg next year. In a birthday letter to the actress Kitty Carlisle in 2003, Mr. Bloomberg imparted his mother\u2019s advice for longevity: \u201cNever eat anything that tastes good,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhen you lean over to pick something up, see if there is anything else you can do while you\u2019re down there.\u201d", "keyword": "Mike Bloomberg;NYC;Boston"}
{"id": "ny0105673", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/04/04", "title": "Kentucky Built a Title Team on Underclassmen Expected to Leave Early for the N.B.A.", "abstract": "NEW ORLEANS \u2014 Rarely has a national title seemed to yield so little to celebrate. The starting five for the champion Kentucky Wildcats \u2014 a mix of freshmen and sophomores \u2014 are expected to enter the N.B.A. draft , and never again play for the college they ever so briefly attended. Mark Emmert, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association , had already expressed regret that the N.B.A. \u2019s so-called \u201cone-and-done\u201d rule allows universities to recruit athletes who show little interest in getting an education. That said, Emmert was not going to be forfeiting any of the tens of millions of dollars his organization made as a result of the tournament the Kentucky team was so spectacular in winning. For his part, John Calipari , the Kentucky coach, said he did not like the state of affairs, either. But he said he nonetheless was going to hit the recruiting trail this week to seal deals with the best high school players in the country, and see if he could repeat the feat: persuade talented teenagers to spend seven months or so with him in pursuit of a college title and maybe National Basketball Association riches. The confetti inside the Louisiana Superdome on Monday night, then, showered a remarkable basketball team, but also fell with a certain joylessness on a college sport many believe has been cynically compromised. \u201cJohn Calipari is doing what the system allows him to do,\u201d said David Ridpath, an assistant professor of sport administration at Ohio University. \u201cI guess in that sense, congratulations. Anyone who thinks that this has anything to do with the collegiate or educational model is flat-out wrong.\u201d Calipari is not the first coach to recruit and win with freshmen so talented that the minute they step on campus, it is assumed they will stay only one season. Syracuse, for instance, won the 2003 men\u2019s basketball national title behind the freshman Carmelo Anthony, who promptly left for the N.B.A. Yet Calipari has become synonymous with the phrase \u201cone-and-done,\u201d in the same way Tom Izzo\u2019s Michigan State teams are known for playing formidable defense or Mike Krzyzewski is known for populating Duke\u2019s roster with great shooters. (Duke guard Austin Rivers, the son of Boston Celtics Coach Doc Rivers, will also leave college for the N.B.A. after just one season.) The rule is actually enforced by the N.B.A., which has no plans to change it. It was put in place in 2005 as part of the league\u2019s collective bargaining agreement, after teams spent years investing in athletic but unproven teenagers who were jumping straight to the N.B.A. from high school. Some, like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett, turned into stars. Others flopped. Technically, the rule does not force talented players like Kentucky\u2019s Anthony Davis to go to college, but it states that they must be one year removed from their graduating high school class to be eligible for the N.B.A. draft. Academics have criticized the rule and the N.C.A.A. has complained, but neither had the power to make any changes. Even a former Kentucky president, Lee T. Todd Jr., has expressed uneasiness with the situation, one which can give players little incentive to attend class, let alone excel academically, after a certain point in the season. \u201cIf you don\u2019t recruit them, you\u2019ll play against them very likely,\u201d Todd told The Herald-Leader in 2010. \u201cIt\u2019s a system problem, I think.\u201d N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern told The associated Press on Tuesday that while he would like to see star players return after their freshman season, he was happy that the rule has kept N.B.A. scouts away from high school gyms. Calipari, who throughout the tournament cited his team\u2019s grade point average, refuses to apologize for how he built the team that earned him his first national title. He has complained about the rule in the past, but has no problem utilizing it to build top-ranked teams. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good rule,\u201d Calipari said Monday night. \u201cI hope we can change it before this week\u2019s out so all these guys have to come back.\u201d Louisville Coach Rick Pitino, a longtime Calipari rival whose team lost to Kentucky in the semifinals, said he marveled at the way Calipari operated at Kentucky. But he added: \u201cI couldn\u2019t do it. I can\u2019t say hello and goodbye in seven months. It\u2019s just not me.\u201d Few could argue the on-court benefits of Calipari\u2019s approach. Six of his last seven teams at Memphis and at Kentucky advanced at least to the regional final of the N.C.A.A. tournament, among the final eight teams remaining. The seventh, Memphis in 2009, lost in the regional semifinals. (Two teams that Calipari led to the Final Four \u2014 Memphis in 2008 and Massachusetts in 1996 \u2014 later had their victories vacated by the N.C.A.A., although Calipari was never implicated in any wrongdoing.) Calipari has also had 13 players selected in the first round of the N.B.A. draft, with Derrick Rose and John Wall being selected first over all. Davis, the most outstanding player in this Final Four, is expected to be taken first over all in this summer\u2019s draft. That history, in turn, will help Calipari recruit another round of fabulous freshmen for next season and the season after that, for as long as Calipari chooses to remain in the college ranks. Calipari rankled basketball purists when he said that the day in 2010 when five of his players were picked in the draft\u2019s first round ranked among the greatest in the history of the storied Kentucky program. Up to six of his players from this year\u2019s team could be drafted, including the senior Darius Miller, who started a few games early in the season. During the Final Four, Calipari mocked the notion that players going to school for just a year undermined the educational mission of the university, invoking the names of famous college dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. \u201cThe integrity of their schools were at stake when they left,\u201d Calipari said. \u201cThey should have stayed and not changed the world.\u201d Ridpath, a member of the Drake Group, a network of professors who lobby for academic integrity in college sports, and the author of \u201cTainted Glory: Marshall University, the NCAA and One Man\u2019s Fight for Justice,\u201d does not blame Calipari. Nor does he blame the players. Nor the N.B.A., which essentially benefits from a free farm system. He blames the N.C.A.A. \u201cThe one and done is not about an education,\u201d Ridpath said. Calipari has been able to determine how his players can do the minimum amount of work so Kentucky\u2019s Academic Progress Rate, the metric used by N.C.A.A. to measure how well universities are educating their athletes, is not adversely affected. \u201cI think he represents the refinement of the system, that\u2019s what he does,\u201d William C. Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina, said of Calipari. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to be perfectly open and honest about it, we know what we\u2019re doing is acting as a farm club for the commercial advancement of the N.C.A.A.\u201d Ridpath recommended adopting the model used in baseball, in which players who do not enter the draft directly out of high school and choose to attend college are not eligible again until after they turn 21 or complete their junior season. For years, basketball stars skipped college altogether, Ridpath noted, and college basketball thrived anyway. Until then, Ridpath said: \u201cCalipari will have another team loaded with freshmen next year, and they\u2019ll do a darn good job. It\u2019s an excellent business model but a travesty on all sides. Everybody knows it\u2019s a complete facade.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Kentucky;National Collegiate Athletic Assn;National Basketball Assn;Draft and Recruitment (Sports);Calipari John;Emmert Mark;Basketball;College Athletics;NCAA Basketball Championships (Men);Basketball (College)"}
{"id": "ny0177987", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/09/01", "title": "Fire Commissioner Faces Challenge in Fatal Blaze", "abstract": "The party was a large affair, held in a private room of the Russian Tea Room in Midtown, celebrating the career of the outgoing commissioner of the Administration for Children\u2019s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta . It was early December 2001, the horrifying events of Sept. 11 still close behind. The commissioner was 69 years old and had served five years, and he said he was looking forward to going into teaching. It was no small shock to the guests, then, when a few weeks later, the new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, announced his choice for commissioner of the New York City Fire Department: Mr. Scoppetta. \u201cWhat do you know about fires?\u201d one close friend recalled asking him, although using language more colorful. It is a question Commissioner Scoppetta has, in a way, been struggling to answer ever since. Now 74, Commissioner Scoppetta is faced with what is widely considered to be the greatest crisis of his career with the Fire Department. On Aug. 18, two firefighters died on the burning upper floors of the former Deutsche Bank building , trapped in a maze of demolition equipment and blocked stairwells and cut off from water by a disconnected standpipe. It has since been revealed that the dead men\u2019s fellow firefighters might have played some role in making the building a needlessly more dangerous site to fight a fire: not having conducted building inspections or created a detailed plan to combat a blaze at the site, 130 Liberty Street. This week, Commissioner Scoppetta announced the reassignment of three fire officers responsible for those duties. \u201cWe have more questions than we have answers at this point,\u201d the commissioner said in an interview on Thursday in his office at department headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. Stressing that it was \u201cgrossly unfair to judge them or their conduct\u201d this early in the investigation, he said, \u201cI\u2019m the ultimate judge of what happens to them.\u201d But the problems for Mr. Scoppetta and the department may go well beyond the tragic circumstances at the former bank building. The city has ordered, in effect, a complete review of the department\u2019s program for inspecting buildings of all sizes and complications across the city. Some in the department fear what that inquiry might reveal about its diligence in recent years. And so Mr. Scoppetta finds himself in the harsh light of scrutiny from without and within, an outsider who has never completely ingratiated himself into the deeply traditional and insular agency he leads. But his allies from more than three decades of public service in New York City say that it is just this sort of crisis that brings out the best in Commissioner Scoppetta, a former state and federal prosecutor known for staying levelheaded and sticking to facts at times like this. \u201cTo be willing to do that, you have to have a clear head, a good mind,\u201d said Robert Leuci, 67, a former police officer who testified against fellow officers in corruption cases in the 1970s. His story became the basis of the book and film \u201cPrince of the City,\u201d and Mr. Scoppetta was the prosecutor at his side. \u201cHe grew up in a very tough environment,\u201d Mr. Leuci said, \u201cand he comes away one of the most gentle guys you could meet.\u201d Commissioner Scoppetta was born in 1932 and was abandoned, along with his two brothers, by his parents when he was 5 and living on Spring Street in Little Italy. He spent several years in foster care, a period of his life that he guarded for many years before he was named commissioner of children\u2019s services in 1996. He called the job an \u201cemotional fit, given my history, as a kid,\u201d but said his place as an outsider of that agency had people wondering about his effectiveness, given his background working as, among other jobs, a prosecutor and as the commissioner of the Department of Investigations. \u201cIt was, \u2018Why do you have a prosecutor here?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t worry too much about that. Do the job. Everyone will see this is genuine; you can be effective.\u201d Linda I. Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services, who worked under Commissioner Scoppetta at children\u2019s services, said he relished difficult jobs. \u201cAnyone who takes a job like this knows they\u2019re going to be constantly under fire,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can\u2019t be defined by what others say about you.\u201d It was later in December 2001, after the party at the Russian Tea Room, when Commissioner Scoppetta was summoned before Mayor-elect Bloomberg, three days before the inauguration, and asked to lead the Fire Department. \u201cThat was a little bit of a surprise,\u201d Commissioner Scoppetta recalled with typical understatement. \u201cI said: \u2018I\u2019ve been a prosecutor. I know something about the Police Department, and I\u2019ve worked with the police. This is something new to me, the Fire Department.\u2019 \u201d But he said the idea thrilled him. \u201cIt seemed irresistible, post-9/11, to be connected to the Fire Department and do whatever any of us could to help rebuild,\u201d he said. Peter Madonia, 53, was Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s chief of staff, and remembered thinking that Commissioner Scoppetta\u2019s temperament was what the battered department needed. \u201cNick was really an elder statesman,\u201d he said. \u201cAlmost like a father figure.\u201d But those who serve under Commissioner Scoppetta have been less kind during his time at the department. He is frequently described by some within the department as being out of touch with its nuts-and-bolts workings, and has appeared to some to be ineffectual in ways that his counterpart at the Police Department, Raymond W. Kelly, is not. In 2005, Mr. Bloomberg adopted Mr. Kelly\u2019s view in a dispute over who should control the scene at terrorist attacks and other emergencies, further cementing the perception that the Police Department stands in front of firefighters in line for money and responsibility. Mr. Scoppetta remains unruffled by these beliefs. \u201cI don\u2019t know that people who have been fire commissioner who grew up in the department got any better reception than people who came from the outside,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really unusual culture in the Fire Department, and a lot of it is much to our benefit.\u201d A common complaint, he said, is low morale among firefighters. \u201cFrom time immemorial, you\u2019ll hear that morale has never been lower,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen that is said to me, I just can\u2019t help but have this reaction: \u2018Compared to who? Compared to what?\u2019 \u201d Of firefighters, he said, \u201cEvery one of them looks forward to coming to work.\u201d \u201cIt is traditional at the department to take their shots at headquarters,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I was in the Army for two years, we felt the same way about officers. No matter what you do, the commissioner is always headquarters, is identified with the mayor. I think the mayor has been extremely helpful.\u201d When the fire began in the former Deutsche Bank building, Commissioner Scoppetta was at his home in Amagansett, in Suffolk County, preparing to have dinner with John E. Zuccotti, the former first deputy mayor. \u201cI told my wife: \u2018I\u2019m sorry, I can\u2019t do it. I\u2019ve got to get out of here,\u2019 \u201d he said. He speeded to Manhattan with police escorts and visited the hospital where the dead men lay, the burning building and the stricken firehouse in SoHo. \u201cThat\u2019s always the hardest part of all this,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to be at one of these things to appreciate the emotion, the bond between the men.\u201d In the days that followed, it was revealed that a battalion chief, William Siegel, had outlined his concerns about the building in memos, calling for a specific firefighting plan for the building and recommending weekly inspections. \u201cIn the week following the fire, I learned that there had been this review of the building and there was a memo written to the division commander,\u201d he said, declining to discuss specifics while the investigation was active. \u201cThere was no prefire plan. Perhaps that building deserved it.\u201d On Monday, he and Mr. Bloomberg announced the reassignment of the three officers, Deputy Chief Richard Fuerch, 55, who is the Division 1 commander; Battalion Chief John McDonald, 52, the commander of Battalion 1; and Capt. Peter Bosco, 48, of Engine Company 10, the company responsible for conducting the inspections. Since then, Captain Bosco\u2019s brother, John M. Bosco, has said there was a policy understood by firefighters to have been approved up the chain of command to not enter the building because of the toxic substances inside. Others, including union leaders, have called the officers scapegoats and accused the commissioner of protecting the higher-ups at headquarters. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s fair. It seems clear the inspections weren\u2019t done,\u201d the commissioner said. \u201cIt\u2019s prudent to remove them from operations until the investigation is done.\u201d He said he hoped this latest crisis would lead to improvements in the department. \u201cOut of every crisis I\u2019ve been involved with in government, as terrible as it might be, there is an opportunity,\u201d he said. \u201cOpportunity to address what might have gone wrong that\u2019s created the crisis. I think building inspection, for example, may be considered a mundane activity by some. It\u2019s enormously important. We have this example at the Deutsche Bank.\u201d", "keyword": "Fires and Firefighters;Scoppetta Nicholas;Deutsche Bank Building (NYC);Accidents and Safety;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0211125", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2017/01/18", "title": "Third Round Awaits After 2 Years for Former No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki", "abstract": "MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Caroline Wozniacki, once the No. 1 player in the world, advanced to the third round at the Australian Open for the first time in three years with a 6-1, 6-3 win over Donna Vekic on Thursday. Wozniacki, who reached the semifinals here in 2011, lost in the second round in 2015 and in the first round last year. Wozniacki, who was a semifinalist at the United States Open last year, will face Johanna Konta in the next round. Konta, who made it to the semifinals last year before losing to the eventual champion Angelique Kerber, advanced over Naomi Osaka, 6-4, 6-2. Konta, who was voted the WTA Tour\u2019s most improved player of 2016 after moving from 48th to 10th in the rankings, opened the season by winning the Sydney International title last week. Like Konta, Karolina Pliskova is riding a hot streak after winning a warm-up event, the Brisbane International. She has dropped just four games in the first two rounds and beat the 18-year-old Russian qualifier Anna Blinkova, 6-0, 6-2, in less than an hour. She will next play Jelena Ostapenko, who beat No. 31 Yulia Putintseva, 6-3, 6-1. On the men\u2019s side, No. 18 Richard Gasquet beat Carlos Berlocq, 6-1, 6-1, 6-1, and No. 32 Philipp Kohlschreiber beat Donald Young, 7-5, 6-3, 6-0. No. 30 Pablo Carre\u00f1o Busta beat Kyle Edmund, 6-2, 6-4, 6-2, to earn a third-round match against either the six-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic or Denis Istomin. One player attracted plenty of attention without the benefit of a match: top-seeded Andy Murray, who took to the practice court under the watchful eye of his coach, Ivan Lendl. Murray, a five-time runner-up here, was apparently untroubled by the ankle he had rolled in a second-round victory over Andrey Rublev.", "keyword": "Tennis;Australian Open;Karolina Pliskova"}
{"id": "ny0119734", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/07/17", "title": "Hope, Growth and Opportunity Shows Limits of Disclosure Rules", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In early 2010, a new organization called the Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity filed for nonprofit, tax-exempt status, telling the Internal Revenue Service it was not going to spend any money on campaigns. Weeks later, tax-exempt status in hand as well as a single $4 million donation from an anonymous benefactor, the group kicked off a multimillion-dollar campaign against 11 Democratic candidates, declining to report any of its political spending to the Federal Election Commission, maintaining to the I.R.S. that it did not do any political spending at all, and failing to register as a political committee required to disclose the names of its donors. Then, faced with multiple election commission and I.R.S. complaints, the group went out of business. To Democrats and some campaign finance watchdogs eager to force more transparency in spending by independent groups, Hope, Growth and Opportunity stands out as the kind of \u201cpop-up\u201d organization that operates in virtual secrecy, with legal impunity. \u201cI still don\u2019t know who they are,\u201d said John Spratt, the former chairman of the House Budget Committee, who lost his 2010 re-election bid after facing a deluge from the group. \u201cIt\u2019s a classic case.\u201d Efforts to require more public accounting of campaign money hit a new roadblock Monday evening in the form of a Republican filibuster that stopped the Senate from formally debating it. The measure fell 9 votes short of the 60 required to clear the procedural hurdle, with no Republicans voting in favor. But Democratic senators planned to keep discussing the bill \u2014 the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act \u2014 into the night, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted no so that under Senate rules, he could bring it up for a second vote on Tuesday to highlight Republican opposition. Republicans blasted the effort as grandstanding at a time when the nation faces far more pressing challenges. \u201cThis amounts to nothing more than member and donor harassment and intimidation, and it\u2019s all part of a broader government-led intimidation effort by this administration,\u201d said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who once advocated broader disclosure but has become the legislation\u2019s fiercest critic. Advocacy groups say the lesson of the Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity is that the nation\u2019s campaign finance laws are in tatters, and without changes, such organizations will proliferate. \u201cC.H.G.O.\u2019s story is a tutorial on how to break campaign finance law, impact elections, and disappear \u2014 the political equivalent of a hit and run,\u201d Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington , a watchdog group, wrote in a new report. Since the Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens United decision, prominent nonprofit organizations like Priorities USA, which supports Democrats, and Crossroads GPS, which backs Republicans, have pulled in tens of millions of dollars from anonymous donors to focus on high-profile contests, like the presidential race. But groups like Hope, Growth and Opportunity can serve as a conduit for large donors focused on races beneath the radar. The main donor behind Hope, Growth and Opportunity appeared intent on knocking off Mr. Spratt, a House veteran from South Carolina and one of only three committee chairmen who lost in the 2010 Republican tsunami. The group\u2019s initial spokesman was Scott Reed, a prominent Republican strategist who managed Bob Dole\u2019s 1996 presidential campaign. Its officers included Steven Powell, a Republican media consultant; James Warring, a Maryland certified public accountant; and William B. Canfield, a longtime Republican lawyer. Its application to the I.R.S. said it did not plan to spend any money trying to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of any person to federal, state or local public office. Instead, it would exist to advance \u201cthe principle that sustained and expanding economic growth is central to America\u2019s future.\u201d The group raised $4.8 million, $4 million from one contributor. Mr. Reed, now a senior strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce\u2019s political efforts, declined to discuss Hope, Growth and Opportunity. Mr. Canfield called the group a client, not an employer, and said he had not had contact with it since signing its 2010 tax return early last year. The group\u2019s other officers did not respond to phone calls. But the promotion of economic growth was at best indirect. Within weeks of winning the I.R.S.\u2019s designation as a \u201csocial welfare organization,\u201d the group began running the first of nearly a half-million dollars in ads in South Carolina depicting Mr. Spratt as a profligate spender. It encouraged voters to join his Republican opponent, Mick Mulvaney, in his \u201cfight against the big spenders in Washington.\u201d", "keyword": "Campaign Finance;Commission on Hope Growth and Opportunity;Nonprofit Organizations;United States Politics and Government;Tax Credits Deductions and Exemptions;Political Action Committees"}
{"id": "ny0213627", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/03/16", "title": "Toyota Questions Case of Runaway Prius", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 Toyota said on Monday that the account given by a San Diego man who claimed his Prius hybrid car accelerated out of his control for 30 miles was \u201cinconsistent\u201d with the findings of its initial examination of the car. The company statement followed a similar one from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which said its investigators could not find evidence explaining the incident and that they might never know what happened. While Toyota executives did not accuse the man, James Sikes, of lying or staging the incident, they did say that their examination showed that the car would have stopped when the driver firmly applied the brakes. Engineers found no evidence of friction in the accelerator pedal or that the pedal could have been pinned down by the floor mat. The front brakes were severely worn, but Toyota said that could have resulted from continual light pressure on the brake pedal. The car\u2019s self-diagnostic system showed evidence of \u201cnumerous, rapidly repeated on-and-off applications of both the accelerator and the brake pedals,\u201d a Toyota spokesman, Mike Michels, said. The car\u2019s braking system, which cuts power to the engine when the brake pedal is moderately depressed, \u201cwas working as designed and would have easily stopped the vehicle,\u201d Mr. Michels said. Mr. Sikes\u2019s lawyer, John H. Gomez, said he would not comment until investigations were completed. The incident on Monday, March 8, on a rural stretch of Interstate 8 east of San Diego has been widely publicized and has hindered Toyota\u2019s efforts to reassure customers about the safety of its vehicles. The next morning, a woman in Harrison, N.Y., said the Prius that she was driving accelerated suddenly before it crashed into a rock wall. That driver, who was not seriously injured, was on the way to a Toyota dealership to have the vehicle inspected. Toyota said it was sending engineers to examine the Prius involved in the New York crash on Wednesday. Federal regulators are looking into both incidents, as well as whether Toyota acted quickly enough in recalling more than eight million vehicles worldwide. James Bell, an automotive analyst with Kelley Blue Book, said that while Toyota\u2019s investigation might cast some doubt on Mr. Sikes\u2019s story, it left many questions unanswered. \u201cIt is still not clear if it is possible that their cars may momentarily malfunction and work inconsistently to design,\u201d Mr. Bell said. \u201cWe appreciate that such an issue is difficult to replicate and test, but we don\u2019t believe this press conference has put the public\u2019s mind at ease just yet.\u201d Mr. Sikes told a 911 operator that he was unable to slow the car, which reached a speed of 94 miles an hour, by pressing the brakes and that he was afraid to put the car into neutral. He stopped the car about 30 miles from where he said the problem began after a California Highway Patrol officer pulled alongside and gave instructions through a loudspeaker. Mr. Sikes, 61, has said he does not plan to sue Toyota. Many other Toyota owners, along with relatives of people killed in crashes, have filed suit against the carmaker. A conference for lawyers who intend to sue Toyota is scheduled to take place next week in San Diego, which has become a focal point of the company\u2019s problems after a crash there in August that killed four people, including an off-duty highway patrol officer.", "keyword": "Automobile Safety Features and Defects;Toyota Motor Corp"}
{"id": "ny0020783", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/09/05", "title": "Weiner vs. Heckler in a Brooklyn Bakery", "abstract": "Just when Anthony D. Weiner seemed to be fading from public view \u2014 his poll numbers sagging, his entourage of supporters dwindling \u2014 he walked into a bakery in Brooklyn. Mr. Weiner, a Democratic candidate for mayor, was nibbling on a cheese danish during a campaign stop on Wednesday when a man began hurling insults in his direction. The man said Mr. Weiner was a \u201cscumbag\u201d and went after Mr. Weiner\u2019s wife, Huma Abedin, saying Mr. Weiner was \u201cmarried to an Arab.\u201d Several times, he called Mr. Weiner \u201cdisgusting\u201d for sending lewd pictures to women online. Mr. Weiner, still chewing, turned irate. \u201cYou\u2019re a perfect person?\u201d he said, pointing his finger in the man\u2019s face. \u201cWhat rabbi taught you that you\u2019re my judge?\u201d The man interjected. \u201cYou\u2019re a bad example for the people,\u201d he said. \u201cYour behavior\u2019s deviant.\u201d He advised Mr. Weiner to \u201cstay out of the public, go home and get a job.\u201d Mr. Weiner, however, would not let up. \u201cI\u2019ve fought very hard for this community and delivered more than you will ever in your entire life,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know nothing. Your ignorance is being shown to the entire world.\u201d The quarrel, which went on for more than two minutes, spread quickly across the Internet after a blogger, Jacob Kornbluh, posted a video online. Critics took aim at Mr. Weiner for engaging in a screaming match just hours before the start of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. But shortly after the encounter, he defended his behavior. \u201cStood up to a heckler,\u201d he wrote on Twitter. \u201cThat\u2019s what mayors have to do sometimes.\u201d", "keyword": "Anthony Weiner;Mayoral races;Brooklyn"}
{"id": "ny0196164", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/10/16", "title": "Goldman Earns $3.19 Billion, Beating Estimates", "abstract": "Just a year after surviving the financial crisis with billions in federal aid, the banking giant Goldman Sachs reported strong results Thursday that beat expectations and promptly went on the defensive about its bonuses. In part to allay criticism of its profits and bonuses, Goldman announced a $200 million contribution to its foundation, which promotes education. The bank said that it earned $3.19 billion in the third quarter, powered by strong trading and gains on its own corporate investments. Revenue was $12.37 billion. The earnings of $5.25 a share easily exceeded analysts\u2019 estimates of $4.18 a share or $2.34 billion. Earnings in the corresponding quarter a year ago were $845 million on revenue of $6 billion. \u201cAlthough the world continues to face serious economic challenges, we are seeing improving conditions and evidence of stabilization, even growth, across a number of sectors,\u201d the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, said in a statement . Goldman also disclosed how much it had set aside for its annual bonus pool. It said that it had earmarked $5.35 billion in compensation and benefits, an increase of 84 percent from the year earlier period, putting it on course for a record payout to its executives by the end of 2009. During a conference call, the chief financial officer, David A. Viniar, rejected criticism that the bank\u2019s high bonus levels ignored the tougher times experienced by other people elsewhere in the economy. By paying the bonuses, Mr. Viniar said, the bank was trying to make a difficult \u201ctrade-off\u201d between \u201cbeing fair to our people who have done a remarkable job\u201d and \u201calso what\u2019s going on in the world.\u201d \u201cWe are very focused on what is going on in the world,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are focused on the economic climate. We are focused on what is going on with other people.\u201d Mr. Viniar also rejected criticism that Goldman was paying out bonuses while receiving an implicit guarantee of its survival from the government, after the federal aid and guarantees on its debt it received in the last year.\u201cWe don\u2019t think we have a guarantee,\u201d he said. \u201cWe certainly don\u2019t operate the company that way. We operate the company as an independent financial institution that stands on its own two feet.\u201d On Wednesday, another big bank that accepted federal assistance, JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion in profit for the third quarter. The latest profit for Goldman continues a turnaround for the bank, which has emerged as one of the stronger of the big Wall Street institutions. In the second quarter, Goldman posted the richest quarterly profit \u2014 $3.44 billion \u2014 in its 140-year history. The latest three months are slightly down on the record second quarter because of the seasonally slower summer period. But they continue the string of blowout periods for Goldman since it recorded a single loss in the final quarter of last year, triggered by the financial crisis. As it has recovered, Goldman\u2019s share price has soared 128 percent this year, closing at $192.28 on Wednesday. The stock is still off its record high of $250.70, reached in 2007. Goldman said its bonuses reflected performance and were necessary to retain top staff. But the return to big profits and hefty bonuses will raise questions for Washington policy makers. They come even as memories are still fresh that just a year ago taxpayers had to step in to save Goldman and other banks on Wall Street. Earlier this year, Goldman paid back $10 billion in federal aid that it received last fall under the government\u2019s Troubled Asset Relief Program . But in addition, Goldman, along with other banks, benefited from a government program that allowed it to issue debt cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And it received money from the government\u2019s bailout of the American International Group, the insurance giant, receiving 100 cents on the dollar for its $13 billion counterparty exposure to the insurer. Amid the crisis, it converted from an investment bank to a more regulated bank holding company. Bonuses have become a hot topic again recently. The special federal paymaster is trying to persuade the American International Group to reduce a coming bonus payment of $198 million. And there is also anger over Bank of America\u2019s failure to adequately disclose to its shareholders the bonuses that were paid by Merrill Lynch before its merger with Bank of America. Wall Street\u2019s culture of excessive bonuses in the last decade is widely perceived as having encouraged some of the risk-taking that triggered the financial crisis. In its statement, Goldman said fixed income, currency and commodity units generated quarterly revenue of $5.99 billion, a significant increase from the third quarter of 2008, reflecting \u201cstrong performances in credit products and mortgages.\u201d Equities generated $2.78 billion, 78 percent higher from a year earlier, helped by gains in global indexes. And the tier-1 capital ratio, a common measure of financial strength, was 14.5 percent as of Sept. 25, up from 13.8 percent in late June. Still, there was some evidence of weaker performance in the report. Overall net revenue from investment banking was $899 million, down 31 percent on the same quarter a year earlier, while revenue from asset management was $1.45 billion, a decline of 29 percent from a year earlier, \u201cprimarily reflecting the impact of changes in the composition of assets managed.\u201d The bank said it would pay a dividend of 35 cents a common share at the end of the calendar year.", "keyword": "Goldman Sachs Group;Company Reports;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0122731", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2012/09/19", "title": "Rangers\u2019 Nash Intends to Play in Switzerland During Lockout", "abstract": "Forward Rick Nash, the Rangers \u2019 top off-season acquisition, is headed to Switzerland to play for H.C. Davos during the N.H.L. lockout, his agent confirmed Tuesday. Nash\u2019s agent, Joe Resnick, said reports that Nash had signed with the Swiss club were inaccurate but that Nash intended to sign with Davos once issues involving insurance and transfer papers were resolved. At Davos, Nash will skate alongside the San Jose Sharks star Joe Thornton. Nash and Thornton formed a powerful scoring partnership for Davos during the 2004-5 N.H.L. lockout, helping the club to its 27th championship in the National League A, Switzerland\u2019s top tier. Nash scored 46 points in 44 games, and Thornton, with 54 points in 40 games, won the league\u2019s Most Valuable Player award. After returning from Davos in 2005, Nash said: \u201cIt turned out to be the best experience you could have besides actually playing in the N.H.L. I just got to experience a whole different side of the game, a whole different side of the world.\u201d Thornton\u2019s agent, his brother John, confirmed that Thornton had signed with Davos and that another client, San Jose\u2019s Logan Couture, had signed with Geneve-Servette of the Swiss N.L.A. The Islanders captain Mark Streit will return to his native Switzerland to play for S.C. Bern , the club announced. The Rangers acquired the high-scoring Nash in a trade with Columbus in July, sending Brandon Dubinsky, Artem Anisimov and Tim Erixon and a first-round pick to the Blue Jackets in exchange for Nash, a minor league player and a third-round pick. Nash has scored 289 goals in 674 N.H.L. games, giving the Rangers a second goal-scoring threat to go along with Marian Gaborik.", "keyword": "Nash Rick;Hockey Ice;New York Rangers;Lockouts"}
{"id": "ny0120842", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/07/24", "title": "West Bank: 103-Day Hunger Strike Ends", "abstract": "The longest-ever Palestinian hunger strike has ended after 103 days in exchange for Israel \u2019s pledge that it would release the protesting prisoner five months early, said Kadoura Fares, the leader of a Palestinian advocacy group for prisoners. Sivan Weizman of the Israel Prison Authority confirmed that the prisoner, Akram Rikhawi, ended his hunger strike on Monday. Mr. Rikhawi, 39, stopped eating on April 12 and demanded to be released on medical grounds; he is said to be suffering from asthma and diabetes. Mr. Rikhawi is serving a nine-year sentence for transporting suicide bombers. His official release date is next June. Mr. Fares said that in exchange for ending the strike, Mr. Rikhawi would be released in January.", "keyword": "Hunger Strikes;Israel;Palestinians;Rikhawi Akram;Prisons and Prisoners"}
{"id": "ny0144854", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/31", "title": "Exxon\u2019s Profit Jumped to a Record in Quarter", "abstract": "In what may prove to be a high-water mark for corporate profits, the oil giant Exxon Mobil reported another blowout quarter on Thursday, thanks to record oil prices this summer and gasoline prices that rose above $4 a gallon. With nearly $15 billion in profit, Exxon once more set a record for most profitable American corporation, during the three months that ended in September, when prices were at their highest. Oil prices have dropped sharply in recent weeks, falling more than 50 percent from their peak just three months ago, as oil consumption slows in the economic downturn. Exxon\u2019s report came as the Commerce Department said the economy shrank on an annual basis by 0.3 percent in the third quarter. The contraction, as consumers curbed their spending, signaled that the United States was probably in a recession. Still, the last quarter extended a staggering run for Exxon, which has routinely set records only to beat them. Exxon\u2019s profit has exceeded $10 billion in 9 of the last 12 quarters. The third quarter was no exception as Exxon\u2019s profit rose 58 percent, to $14.8 billion, exceeding its previous quarterly record by more than $3 billion. While the record earnings were well above analysts\u2019 expectations, they also masked a growing problem for Exxon. Its production has dropped because of contractual terms in places like Nigeria, falling output from mature fields, and disruptions caused by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Exxon\u2019s combined oil and gas output fell 8 percent in the third quarter compared with the year-earlier period, to the equivalent of 3.5 million barrels a day. But Exxon, which prides itself on its long-term view of the business, appeared unfazed by the decline. Thanks to seven major new projects starting this year, including offshore fields in Angola and Malaysia, and a large gas project in Qatar, the company expects its production to pick up in the fourth quarter and next year, according to Kenneth Cohen, the company\u2019s vice president of public affairs. Excluding the effect of hurricanes and the impact of specific contracts that reduce its production when oil prices rise, Exxon\u2019s output would have dropped by 2 percent in the last quarter. \u201cThese are uncertain and challenging times, and these are the times that our company is built to handle,\u201d Mr. Cohen said on a conference call. \u201cWe understand we operate in a commodity business. We understand that the cycle will go up, and it will go down. We don\u2019t get excited in the highs; we don\u2019t panic in the lows.\u201d Exxon is the latest oil giant to report stellar earnings. Royal Dutch Shell, Europe\u2019s biggest oil company, said earlier Thursday that its third-quarter profit rose 22 percent, to $8.45 billion, from $6.9 billion in the period a year ago. At the same time, Shell\u2019s crude oil and natural gas output declined 6.6 percent. Earlier this week, BP, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum reported big jumps in their earnings for the quarter. Chevron reports its earnings on Friday. Exxon\u2019s profit has been frequently mentioned during the presidential campaign. With less than a week before the elections, the latest report provided more fodder for the company\u2019s critics. Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming , estimated that the top five oil companies would earn $150 billion this year, and accused them of failing to invest enough in alternative fuels. \u201cFor these oil companies, there are hundreds of billions of reasons why they want to keep the status quo intact,\u201d Mr. Markey said in a statement. But as prices fall, oil company profits are set to shrink in future quarters. During the third quarter, oil prices in New York have averaged $118 a barrel, compared with $75 a barrel in the same quarter last year. Since then, however, prices have plummeted from their peak above $145 a barrel in July. Some analysts say global oil demand could fall this year for the first time in a quarter-century. Oil prices fell $1.54, to $65.96 a barrel, on Thursday as the government\u2019s report on economic growth kindled concern. After being down throughout the day, Exxon\u2019s shares were unchanged at the end of the trading session at $74.65. The turnaround in oil prices has been surprisingly swift and could have a long-lasting impact on the world\u2019s energy supplies as some companies cut their spending and slash costs. Clarence P. Cazalot Jr., the president and chief executive of Marathon Oil, said his company would cut its capital expenditures by 15 percent next year. Marathon is also considering a potential breakup of the company\u2019s businesses, Mr. Cazalot said. \u201cGiven the fall in the oil price, an issue for all oil and gas companies is current levels of capital expenditure,\u201d said Tony Shepard, an analyst at the broker Charles Stanley, based in London. Shell\u2019s chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said the company had decided to delay a decision to invest in the second expansion phase of its Athabasca oil sands project in Canada to wait for labor and raw material prices to fall. \u201cWe are watching the world economic situation closely,\u201d Mr. van der Veer said in a statement. \u201cShell is robust across a wide range of energy prices.\u201d But Exxon said it had no plans to cut back its investment program this year, which is projected to reach $25 billion. So far this year, the company has spent $19.3 billion on exploration, including $6.9 billion in the last quarter. Exxon also continued to reward its shareholders generously. It gave back $10.1 billion in the third quarter \u2014 dividends of $2.1 billion and share buybacks of $8 billion. The company said it had $37 billion in cash. \u201cOur investment strategy is consistent through business cycles, which has led to industry-leading returns in the past, and we believe we will continue to do so in the future,\u201d Mr. Cohen said.", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Company Reports;Exxon Mobil Corp"}
{"id": "ny0025721", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/08/23", "title": "These Walls Speak, Recalling Victims of Violence", "abstract": "MEXICO CITY \u2014 The memorial to Mexico\u2019s victims of violence looks like it has been dropped from the sky by an angry God. Welcoming it is not, with its rusted slabs the size of movie screens standing next to a busy intersection. Nor is its mission clear. Even before it was inaugurated in April, the monument had set off debate over whether it should be a tribute to all the drug war\u2019s killed, missing, kidnapped and extorted \u2014 or just those subjected to human rights abuses by the Mexican authorities. But then, you walk a little closer and the slabs begin to speak. \u201cPinta lo que sientes ... expresa lo que piensas.\u201d The graffiti scribbled in white paint across the hunk of steel introducing the memorial \u2014 \u201cPaint what you feel ... express what you think\u201d \u2014 is not vandalism. It\u2019s a request: Share. Remember. Grieve. By design, the metal panels are blank pages. Quotations chosen by the architects, from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and others, appear in the corners, cut out like stencils. The rest is open to public expression. \u201cDon\u2019t Kill Our Dreams.\u201d Some of the messages, like those calling for protecting dreams or legalizing drugs, are in English. All but a few inscriptions are drawn and scratched by Mexican relatives or friends of those lost to violence. The police officers guarding the memorial say people come from all over Mexico, but cities where the back alleys have seen more blood are better represented. Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez. Torre\u00f3n. Tijuana. Usually, it is just one person or two who visit with something to add. Many, the guards say, sob as they write or carve a message into the metal with their keys. Image By design, the metal panels are blank pages. Quotations chosen by the architects appear in the corners. The rest is open to public expression. Credit Rodrigo Cruz-Perez for The New York Times \u201cCu\u00e1ntos muertos?\u201d The question \u2014 How many dead? \u2014 hangs above a large portrait of a crying heart with hands drawn on its sides as if waving for help. Spartan and direct, it is a question that haunts all of Mexico. An honest answer is hard to find. The most recent government report, released in January 2012, showed that 47,515 had died in drug war violence between Dec. 1, 2006, and Sept. 11, 2011, but that does not include the thousands who are missing. And the definition of \u201cdrug-related\u201d has also never been clear. This year The New York Times submitted public records requests with the attorney general\u2019s office, the Interior Ministry and 10 states with the highest murder rates in an effort to review case files with basic data on the dead: age, gender, place and cause of death. The goal was to explore details of cases that were defined as drug-related and those that were not. Only one state delivered information. Every other entity refused, mostly citing privacy exemptions, though one state admitted that it was \u201cnot competent on the matter.\u201d Now even the federal government has decided to broaden its tally: On Aug. 9, officials announced that all murders would be included, whether drug-related or not. \u201cAlfonso Arqui Medina te extra\u00f1amos!\u201d The memorial\u2019s reddish walls include a handful of names, but their stories are nowhere to be found. The message to Mr. Medina \u2014 \u201cWe miss you\u201d \u2014 could refer to the death of an architect named Alfonso Medina who was killed in his Ford pickup five years ago, just a few blocks from the home of Tijuana\u2019s mayor. Or it may not. The stories of most victims will never be known. State and local authorities increasingly keep information about violence to themselves, saying they must protect their communities\u2019 image from sensationalism, even though many Mexican news media outlets have become so intimidated by organized crime that they no longer cover the murders corroding their own communities. Even the families that come to write on the memorial seem scared to share; there are far more first names than full names. An exception is Marcela Geovana Mendoza. A steel slab in the middle of the monument has been turned over to a message of love for her, and more discreet iterations of \u201cte amo Marcela\u201d appear elsewhere in white, like soft whispers heard from behind. But that is all there is. She cannot be found in the databases of Mexican newspapers. A Google search for her full name turns up nothing. Another for just Marcela and Mendoza leads to a single lead: Fanny Marcela Mendoza Rodr\u00edguez, 19, a college student in Honduras who was shot in the head at home last September. Image The mission of the memorial \u2014 and exactly whom it honors \u2014 is not fully clear, months after it was inaugurated. Credit Rodrigo Cruz-Perez for The New York Times \u201cMenos monumentos, menos minutos de silencio. M\u00e1s acci\u00f3n.\u201d Many of the memorial\u2019s messages are not for individuals, but for Mexico as a whole, for \u201cfewer monuments, fewer moments of silence. More action.\u201d They plead for and demand more justice in a country with so much going for it: resources, history, culture. Those who visit say the memorial has a lot of potential. \u201cThe messages surprised me,\u201d said Salvador Enriquez, 43, a visitor on Saturday. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful idea.\u201d But even here on the walls, it is a struggle to keep the focus where it belongs. One recent afternoon, on the panel farthest from the entrance, a man in gray quietly drew a face with white chalk, suggesting a lost brother. Then he added a mane of hair, a guitar and a long tongue. It was Gene Simmons, from Kiss. \u201cI work in maintenance here,\u201d the man said, nodding toward a broom near his celebrity portrait. \u201cWhen I get bored, I draw.\u201d Over a fence, a giant Mexican flag hung, as limp as a broken arm, at the military base next door \u2014 a jarring juxtaposition in a country where the military has been implicated in many cases of death and disappearance. To the right, one of the memorial guards could be seen using chalk to outline the ears of a rabbit in what appeared to be a child\u2019s version of heaven. To the left, car horns wailed in clogged traffic along Paseo de la Reforma \u2014 Boulevard of Reform \u2014 as a mime with a cherry-red nose performed for laughs and change from drivers. Closest to the entrance, the first panel held more messages than all the rest, from \u201c shal\u00f3m \u201d to \u201c quiza la reina mala nos prot\u00e9ga \u201d \u2014 maybe the bad queen protects us. There were also names here (Lupita y Jerry) that could represent love or loss. Hidden among them all was a simple phrase in small handwriting. As confounding or clear as the memorial itself, it exhorted Mexicans to look inward for a way out, and to acknowledge that all of society plays a role in both violence and peace. \u201cSi sabes lo que vales. Ve y busca la que mereces.\u201d \u201cIf you know what you\u2019re worth,\u201d it said, \u201cgo find what you deserve.\u201d", "keyword": "Monuments and Memorials;Drug Abuse;Mexico City;Murders;Kidnapping;Human Rights;Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0104341", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2012/03/07", "title": "Devils Find Way to Beat Rangers\u2019 Lundqvist", "abstract": "NEWARK \u2014 The Rangers traveled a short distance, just across the Hudson River, to learn what might happen if their willingness to check opponents and their pursuit of the puck do not match their opponents\u2019. Their 4-1 loss to the Devils on Tuesday night at Prudential Center was a rare lapse in effort and execution. \u201cA little bit of both,\u201d Coach John Tortorella said. \u201cSome details, some turnovers were just ridiculous. It catches up to you.\u201d With the game tied at 1-1, David Clarkson and Ryan Carter scored goals 1 minute 54 seconds apart early in the third period to carry the Devils to victory. Patrick Elias scored an empty-net goal with 1:53 left. The lessons came early for the Rangers. The last time the teams played, on Feb. 27, the Devils took 13 shots on goal and failed to score. On Tuesday, Ilya Kovalchuk scored 49 seconds into the game. As the Rangers mangled a line change, Zach Parise flipped the puck to Kovalchuk with his backhand. Defenseman Ryan McDonagh, the only Ranger with any hope of confronting Parise, lost his edge and fell to the ice. Breaking in alone, Kovalchuk ripped a wrist shot by Henrik Lundqvist to give the Devils an early lead in this battle of tight-checking rivals. Derek Stepan tied the score when, positioned in the slot, he slapped a pass from behind the net from Carl Hagelin by Martin Brodeur at 6:56 of the second period. The Rangers, kept in the game by a pair of superb saves by Lundqvist on Kovalchuk on a power play late in the first period, were excellent throughout the second, outshooting the Devils, 14-7. But their sharpness lasted only 20 minutes. In the four previous meetings this season, the Rangers outscored the Devils in the third period, 6-2. But the Devils were the far stronger team when it counted most Tuesday. After Clarkson scored on a deflection of a Petr Sykora shot at 2:27 of the third period to give the Devils the lead, Carter made the score 3-1 when he converted a crossing feed by Jacob Josefson at 4:21. Both goals were scored with the Rangers outmanned in the defensive zone. The Rangers managed only three shots on goal in the final period. \u201cIn the third, we have to kick it up a notch and we didn\u2019t,\u201d Ryan Callahan, the Rangers\u2019 captain, said. \u201cThey looked more desperate. We have to work harder.\u201d Brodeur, who made 25 saves, was outstanding. \u201cWe made some tough mistakes that cost us,\u201d Lundqvist said. \u201cThe reason why we\u2019ve been winning is that we haven\u2019t made those mistakes.\u201d The Rangers lost a key forward when Brandon Dubinsky injured a hand during a fight with Carter 3:33 into the game. The team announced during the second period that Dubinsky would not return to the game and said it would not have an update until Wednesday. After a 9-1-1 streak after the All-Star break, the Devils had lost five of six games. But the victory evened the season series with the Rangers at 2-2-1 and solidified the Devils\u2019 position for a playoff berth in the Eastern Conference at 37-24-5. \u201cBig win for us,\u201d Devils Coach Peter DeBoer said. \u201cWe came out really well, they kind of grabbed momentum back in the second, but I really liked our push in the third.\u201d In the visitors\u2019 locker room, the Rangers were disgusted with their performance in the final period, especially their failure to equal the Devils\u2019 intensity. \u201cThey hated us tonight,\u201d Rangers forward Brian Boyle said. \u201cThey wanted to kill us. We didn\u2019t match their passion. We expect more of ourselves. That\u2019s the way it\u2019s going to be the rest of the season, so it was a very good lesson we learned tonight.\u201d", "keyword": "Hockey Ice;New York Rangers;New Jersey Devils;Kovalchuk Ilya;Lundqvist Henrik"}
{"id": "ny0183675", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/12/23", "title": "Sylvan Fox, 79, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies", "abstract": "Sylvan Fox, the first \u201crewrite man\u201d to be singled out for a Pulitzer Prize, died on Saturday at New York University Medical Center. Mr. Fox, who also worked as a reporter and editor for The New York Times, was 79 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications from pneumonia, his wife, Gloria Fox, said. Mr. Fox was a reporter at The New York World-Telegram & The Sun when, on March 1, 1962, he was part of a team assigned to cover an airplane crash on Long Island that killed all 95 passengers. While his fellow reporters at the paper rushed to the crash site and phoned him with their unprocessed notes, Mr. Fox calmly worked the facts into order and delivered an article within a half-hour of the accident. He then rewrote the article for seven editions of the paper, adding new details as they came in. Within 90 minutes of the crash, he had produced a 3,000-word article. The Pulitzer was awarded to Mr. Fox and two colleagues in the now-obsolete category of \u201clocal story, edition time.\u201d From 1967 to 1973, Mr. Fox worked as a reporter and editor at The Times. Mr. Fox grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and was a classically trained pianist. He spent four years at the Juilliard School of Music, but left without a degree because of his decision to change his major from piano to musical composition. It was at Juilliard that he met the woman who became his wife, Gloria Endleman, a fellow piano student. They married when he was 20 and she was 17. Mr. Fox graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in philosophy, then earned a master\u2019s degree, in musicology, from the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Fox worked as a reporter at several newspapers in upstate New York before he came to The World-Telegram as a rewrite man. He left the paper over a salary dispute in 1966 and took a job as the New York Police Department\u2019s deputy commissioner in charge of press relations. But he returned to journalism a year later when Arthur Gelb, The Times\u2019s metropolitan editor, offered him a job. On Mr. Fox\u2019s first day at the paper, according to Mr. Gelb\u2019s memoir, news broke of a bank robbery in Brooklyn, and Mr. Fox was instructed to \u201cforget about orientation and get to work on the story, which was tailor-made for him,\u201d Mr. Gelb wrote. The following morning\u2019s edition of The Times carried Mr. Fox\u2019s byline on the front page. Mr. Fox held several other jobs at The Times, including a stint as the Saigon bureau chief in 1973. He then spent 15 years at Newsday, where he was editorial page editor from 1979 to 1988. Besides his wife, Mr. Fox is survived by a daughter, Erica.", "keyword": "Deaths (Obituaries);Newspapers;Pulitzer Prizes"}
{"id": "ny0002829", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/03/22", "title": "Maurice Barbash, a Builder Who Fought for Fire Island, Dies at 88", "abstract": "Maurice Barbash, a homebuilder and environmental activist who was instrumental in blocking two giant projects that threatened to radically alter Long Island\u2019s environment \u2014 a $6 billion nuclear power plant near completion on the North Shore, and a four-lane highway that Robert Moses proposed building along the spine of Fire Island \u2014 died on March 13 in Bay Shore, N.Y. He was 88. His death, several weeks after undergoing heart surgery, was confirmed by his daughter Susan Barbash. When he took on Mr. Moses and later the Long Island Lighting Company over its nuclear plant in Shoreham, Mr. Barbash had already established an unusual reputation among developers as the builder who loved trees. Beginning in the 1950s, he often clustered houses in a development to maximize green space \u2014 a concept decades ahead of its time \u2014 and to maintain the character of the landscape. Probably the fullest expression of that idea was Dunewood, a development of 100 identical cottages-in-the-woods that his company, Barbash Associates of Babylon, shoehorned into a leafy section of Fire Island. Mr. Barbash himself owned a Dunewood house. Mr. Moses, the powerful master planner, had long talked of building a highway on Fire Island, the slender, 32-mile-long barrier beach on Long Island\u2019s South Shore. In 1962, having transformed much of metropolitan New York with bridges, tunnels, parks and parkways, he revived the notion as president of the Long Island State Park Commission. He envisioned a highway running about five miles along the center of the island, between two existing bridges to Long Island, that would stimulate its economy, offer motorists a scenic drive and help protect its beaches from further erosion. A storm that year had washed away huge scoops of the beach and taken many houses with it. Summer residents recoiled at the thought of a highway in their paradise, which in places is little more than a sandbar only several hundred feet wide. But public officials and the local newspapers largely endorsed the plan as an economic boon. Mr. Barbash told interviewers that he could not have beaten Mr. Moses head-to-head. Mr. Moses had bulldozed neighborhoods and dispatched almost every opponent. Instead, Mr. Barbash and a group of Fire Island residents, including Irving Like, a lawyer who was also his brother-in-law, seized on a little-noticed proposal in a federal publication recommending that Fire Island\u2019s seashore be considered for designation as a national park. Image Maurice Barbash with his wife, Lillian, in 1998. Credit Vic DeLucia/The New York Times The group, the Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore, outflanked Moses in a two-year grass-roots lobbying campaign. They spoke at Kiwanis Clubs, mounted petition drives and gained support from Stewart L. Udall, the interior secretary. Eventually they turned local opinion, and even the opinion of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Moses\u2019 boss, in favor of establishing the national park . It was dedicated on Sept. 11, 1964. \u201cMurray\u2019s idea was that if you wanted to win people over to your side, you had to be for something, not just against something,\u201d Mr. Like said in an interview. Mr. Barbash applied the same principle when he joined efforts in the 1970s to stop the Long Island Lighting Company from completing the nuclear power plant at Shoreham. Citizens to Replace Lilco, the group he formed, brought together many core members of the Fire Island campaign, including Mr. Like. The group proposed an end to construction and a public takeover of Lilco. The company went ahead with its plans despite widespread opposition from Long Island residents. This was a much longer fight than the one for Fire Island. By the late 1980s, the plant was being shuttered and a state takeover of Lilco had been negotiated, a deal Mr. Barbash disowned as overly generous to stockholders and burdensome to rate payers. (The utility is now the Long Island Power Authority .) Still, he was credited for promoting the takeover idea and showing a new generation of activists how to battle giants. Maurice Barbash, who was known as Murray, was born on May 10, 1924, in the Bronx, the only child of Shep and Sadie Barbash. His father, a butcher, died two weeks after Murray\u2019s bar mitzvah. Afterward, Mr. Barbash and his mother spent a lot of time in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where they had relatives, and where family members believe he acquired his love of nature. Mr. Barbash enlisted in the Army during World War II before finishing his studies at City College, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1946. His first jobs were in advertising, and many of his clients were homebuilders. He went on to build about 700 homes throughout Long Island. In addition to his daughter Susan, he is survived by his wife, Lillian; another daughter, Cathy Barbash; a son, Shepard; and six grandchildren. Mr. Barbash and his wife, who were married in 1947, shared a love of classical music. In 1979, they were among the founding organizers of the Long Island Philharmonic. For their 40th wedding anniversary, they commissioned a cello concerto for a friend, having known him since the 1970s, when he played in the student orchestra at Harvard with their daughter Cathy. The friend was the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; the concerto, \u201cMusic for Cello and Orchestra,\u201d was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Leon Kirchner. Mr. Ma performed the concerto\u2019s premiere in 1992 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. \u201cWe\u2019re not do-gooders,\u201d Mr. Barbash said in 1998 in an interview with The New York Times. \u201cWe\u2019ve just done what was interesting to us, and if it contributed to the happiness of people in the area, fine.\u201d", "keyword": "Maurice Barbash;Fire Island;Obituary"}
{"id": "ny0182176", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2007/12/18", "title": "Iraq Leaders Denounce Bombings by Turkey", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 Iraqi leaders criticized Turkey on Monday for bombing Kurdish militants in northern Iraq with airstrikes that they said had left at least one woman dead. The Turkish attacks in Dohuk Province on Sunday \u2014 involving dozens of warplanes and artillery \u2014 were the largest known cross-border attack since 2003. They occurred with at least tacit approval from American officials. The Iraqi government, however, said it had not been consulted or informed about the attacks. Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, condemned the assaults as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty that had undermined months of diplomacy. \u201cThese attacks hinder the political efforts exerted to find a peaceful solution based on mutual respect,\u201d he said in a statement. At a news conference in Najaf, he went further, declaring that \u201cthe Americans are responsible because the Iraqi sky is under their full control.\u201d The bombing raids focused on an area where some commanders for the Kurdish militant group, the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, known by its Kurdish initials, P.K.K., were believed to have been hiding. The Turkish military said on its Web site that it had conducted \u201ccasualty and damage analysis\u201d of the areas it hit in the airstrikes, and it concluded that \u201call intended targets have been successfully hit.\u201d Reports in the Turkish news media said the United States had detected movement by the Kurdish militants and, suspecting a meeting of the group, had given the information to Turkey. One Turkish official said the attack would help to persuade the militants to consider a surrender. \u201cIt has international backing,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe hit specific targets. We\u2019ll do it again if we have to.\u201d Turkey, a NATO member, has thousands of troops at the Iraqi border and was threatening a military operation into northern Iraq. But it appears to be using a more limited offensive, as the United States requested. The assault was the second set of strikes against the Kurdish militant group since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with President Bush in Washington last month. In the first strikes, on Dec. 1, artillery was fired from Turkish territory. Elsewhere in Iraq, more than 20 people were killed or found dead in and around Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province. The police said a suicide motorcycle bomber had killed at least seven people and wounded 24 in one of the city\u2019s markets. Six were killed in two separate shootings. Two died from roadside bombs, and the authorities found six bodies in two locations on the city\u2019s western outskirts. Farther north near the Mosul dam, a truck bomb severely damaged a bridge over the Tigris River, killing at least one member of the Iraqi security forces. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden\u2019s lieutenant in the Qaeda terrorist network, Ayman al-Zawahri, warned of \u201ctraitors\u201d among insurgents in Iraq. In a video posted Monday on the Web, he called for Iraqi Sunni Arabs to purge those who help the Americans. Mr. Zawahri\u2019s comments were aimed at undermining the Iraqi \u201cawakening councils,\u201d groups of Iraqi Sunni tribesmen that the United States military has backed to help fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia \u2014 the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. Some Sunni insurgent groups have fought alongside American forces. The United States military has promoted the councils as a major factor in reducing violence. In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed two people in a minibus and wounded seven others, police and hospital officials said.", "keyword": "Iraq;Turkey;Kurds;Kurdistan Workers Party;North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia;Erdogan Recep Tayyip;Bush George W"}
{"id": "ny0150333", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/09/14", "title": "For Jets and Family, Future Is in Cotchery\u2019s Hands", "abstract": "FLORHAM PARK, N.J. \u2014 Jerricho Cotchery drove in circles around the airport last September, stealing glances at the brand-new car seat in the back, attempting to soothe his frayed nerves. Eventually, his wife, Mercedes, came into view outside of baggage claim. She wore a shoulder harness, and as he put the car in park, she lifted a newborn girl \u2014 their newborn girl \u2014 with both hands. The infant\u2019s size struck Cotchery more than anything. Entering his fourth season as a Jets receiver, Cotchery had carved a career from hands both sure and strong. As he cradled his daughter for the first time, those hands trembled, and he worried he might crush her accidentally. \u201cThat feeling of just, wow,\u201d Cotchery said, trying to explain and failing. \u201cIt was indescribable.\u201d Cotchery never, not in the wildest fancies of his imagination, pictured a year like the one that he had just lived through. He never imagined the lows, like when the couple\u2019s first attempt at adoption fell through in August 2007 or when the Jets\u2019 season fell apart in the months that followed. He never imagined this preseason, when he became the Jets\u2019 top option at receiver, catching passes delivered from the heralded right arm of their new quarterback, Brett Favre. Mostly, though, he never imagined that everything would fall into place so quickly, that he would become a household name and the head of the kind of household he always wanted, all in 12 months. \u201cFrom a quiet kid from Birmingham all the way to this,\u201d Cotchery said during an extended interview last week. \u201cI went through a lot last year. And everything this year has gone just the exact opposite.\u201d Confirmation came a few weeks back when Cotchery took his family to a local fast-food restaurant. Earlier in his career, which he started as a fifth receiver used mainly on special teams, he went unnoticed by the public. Yet here came a man, midmeal, looking for a handshake. Cotchery thanked him but wondered silently, did that just really happen? The transformation \u2014 from the bottom of the depth chart to the top of it, from childless to doting dad \u2014 took time. Cotchery never rushed. Blessed with deceptive speed and a personality so laid back that it qualifies as recliner, he returned kickoffs his rookie season in order to force his way onto the field. Never mind that he had never returned kicks before. Slowly, surely, he rose up the depth chart, until he secured a starting receiver spot before the 2006 season. One year later, Cotchery caught more passes (82) than all but seven receivers in the American Football Conference. Coach Eric Mangini points to Cotchery\u2019s path as a model of career development, one marked by incremental progress. Asked to describe the key to that development, Mangini answered with one word repeated twice \u2014 work. Reminded that dozens of players on dozens of teams are noted for having a solid work ethic, Mangini said: \u201cIt\u2019s better than solid. It\u2019s hard to get better than Jerricho Cotchery. He works every single day exactly the same way.\u201d Teammates have taken notice. The second-year receiver Chansi Stuckey tries to spend as much time around Cotchery as possible, mimicking his preparation and approach in hopes of replicating his career path. The best piece of advice Cotchery gave him? Nothing he ever spoke, Stuckey said, but \u201cthe way he carries himself, the things he does on the field.\u201d Running back Leon Washington said: \u201cThere are not enough things you can say about Jerricho. He\u2019s the ultimate, ultimate teammate.\u201d Something was always missing, though, until September 2007. The Cotcherys met at North Carolina State, and they married a month after the Jets selected Jerricho in the fourth round of the 2004 draft. At that point, because they knew Mercedes could not carry a child, they began looking at adoption. Cotchery struggled with the concept at first. The second youngest of 13 children, he knew little about adoption. Something about it felt inauthentic. \u201cI was kind of against it,\u201d he said. \u201cI was stuck on this fact of being able to have something I could call my own.\u201d Cotchery has made a career of changing other people\u2019s minds. But before he could embrace adopting a newborn, he first needed to change his own mind. It happened at a religious retreat in February 2007, when Cotchery, to the surprise of everyone, even himself, stood at a microphone and told hundreds of strangers that he wanted to adopt a child. The process proved more difficult than expected. The Cotcherys were set to adopt a newborn in mid-August, only to have the birth mother change her mind. Cotchery found out before the Jets\u2019 second preseason game, and he played with uncharacteristic anger, making uncharacteristic mistakes. A few weeks later, another adoption opportunity came. A few weeks after that, Cotchery was circling the airport, glancing at the car seat. When he saw his daughter for the first time, his reservations faded and he felt silly for even having them. \u201cIt was the best decision I ever made,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is my daughter. She\u2019s definitely my seed.\u201d The couple named the child Jacey, a play on the initials in Dad\u2019s name. She has brown hair and big, probing eyes, just like Dad. Her smile, Cotchery swears, lights up a room, just like Mom. \u201cHis daughter changed him,\u201d receiver Brad Smith said. \u201cEvery time I see him, every time he talks about her, he smiles.\u201d Cotchery celebrated his first Father\u2019s Day in June and his new quarterback in August. In between, Cotchery went to Arizona to work out with Ken Croner of Athletes\u2019 Performance, who also trains Favre. Cotchery and Favre hooked up for a 56-yard touchdown pass in the Jets\u2019 season-opening victory against the Dolphins. Cotchery has emerged as Favre\u2019s go-to receiver early in the season, and if the Jets are to unseat the New England Patriots as division champions, the chemistry between Cotchery and Favre will be important. But the biggest instrument of change in Cotchery the last 12 months remains the smallest person in his life. He gravitates toward Jacey after arriving home each day, and she shows him her purse and which toys go where inside. The other day, she grabbed a banana from his hand, a 1-year-old eating like a grown-up. \u201cFootball is a great sport, it\u2019s my life, but you can\u2019t get lost in it,\u201d Cotchery said. \u201cYou can\u2019t get down about everything that goes along with football. You need to remember what\u2019s important.\u201d", "keyword": "Cotchery Jerricho;Football;New York Jets"}
{"id": "ny0230213", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/09/16", "title": "Attorney General Candidates Step Up Attacks", "abstract": "Daniel M. Donovan Jr. was born and raised on Staten Island, worked his way through law school at Fordham University and has spent most of his professional life as a local prosecutor. Eric T. Schneiderman is a native Upper West Sider and a Harvard law school graduate who abandoned a lucrative career in private practice to work as a public-interest lawyer, leading lawsuits against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over subway fare increases. Mr. Donovan is a product of the Staten Island Republican organization, a former deputy borough president twice elected district attorney and a social conservative who opposes same-sex marriage . He is also against abortion, except in cases of rape or incest. Mr. Schneiderman emerged from the Democratic political clubs of Manhattan to become a state senator, an outspoken liberal recently endorsed by The Nation. Mr. Schneiderman, who leads the Senate committee that oversees New York\u2019s criminal justice system, also led successful efforts to reduce prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. While Mr. Donovan was president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, he led a statewide campaign by prosecutors to try to block that overhaul. Few general election campaigns like the ones that began on Wednesday offer as stark a choice as the race between Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Donovan to become the next attorney general of New York State. \u201cThe question is whether you\u2019re going to have an activist attorney general who goes after not just street criminals but also white-collar crime, who is a consumer and environmental advocate, or a more traditional law-and-order enforcement person,\u201d said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College. On Wednesday, each candidate sought to sharpen those distinctions, exchanging attacks intended to shape the statewide battlefield and pigeonhole his rival. Mr. Schneiderman began by challenging Mr. Donovan to a debate over the attorney general\u2019s role in policing Wall Street, questioning statements Mr. Donovan had made in recent months suggesting that he would de-emphasize the high-profile securities fraud cases that defined the tenures of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer. \u201cWhile you\u2019ve suggested in recent interviews that you would seek to relax the focus of the attorney general\u2019s office when it comes to cracking down on these crimes, vowing not to \u2018disturb the garden,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Schneiderman said in an open letter to his opponent, \u201cI intend to make protecting homeowners and consumers from bad actors on Wall Street a key concern.\u201d Mr. Donovan did not agree to a debate about Wall Street, but aggressively questioned Mr. Schneiderman\u2019s law-enforcement credentials. \u201cI have spent my career as a prosecutor, putting criminals in jail and protecting New York families from crime and violence,\u201d Mr. Donovan responded in his own letter. \u201cPossibly because you have never prosecuted a case, you have taken a different approach, starting with fighting for laws to reduce oversight of sex offenders, letting drug dealers out of jail and advocating for the rights of criminals ahead of the needs of law enforcement.\u201d The Democratic primary went down to the wire on Tuesday, making it difficult for Mr. Donovan to know whether he would be facing Mr. Schneiderman or the second-place finisher, Kathleen M. Rice, the Nassau County district attorney. But with returns showing Mr. Schneiderman in the lead, Mr. Donovan leaked word late Tuesday that he would be endorsed by former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat. While Mr. Koch has often endorsed Republicans, Mr. Donovan said he believed such endorsements would help establish him as an independent figure free of political entanglements, in contrast to Mr. Schneiderman, who won his primary with the support of powerful labor unions like S.E.I.U. 1199, which represents health care workers, and the endorsements of an array of Democratic leaders. Mr. Schneiderman, of course, has also been backed by nonpartisan government watchdog groups like Citizens Union, and has won endorsements from newspapers that praised his commitment to the public financing of campaigns and the wider disclosure of lawmakers\u2019 outside income. Mr. Donovan, meanwhile, is not without powerful allies. His first endorsement came from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a move that some saw as an effort by the mayor to broaden his influence in Albany. \u201cThe Republican candidate is going to say that Eric Schneiderman is not part of the solution but part of the problem,\u201d said Norman Adler, a political consultant who has worked for Republicans and Democrats. \u201cEric Schneiderman is going to say that he has got the experience and the credentials to run an attorney general\u2019s office that represents the people.\u201d For Mr. Schneiderman, Mr. Donovan in some respects represents a rematch \u2014 like Ms. Rice, he is a popular district attorney whose signature cause is prosecuting drunken drivers \u2014 but on a far bigger stage, with the burden of trying to persuade independent and Republican voters rather than simply turn out the Democratic base. The two candidates do have a few things in common. Like Mr. Schneiderman, Mr. Donovan is from New York City, so he begins the race without the suburban or upstate base that many Republicans have used to vault to statewide office. Both have also advocated aggressively for stricter regulation of illegal guns. Mr. Schneiderman, the national co-chairman of Legislators Against Illegal Guns, sponsored legislation this year to equip handguns sold in New York with so-called microstamping technology to help police officers trace the guns from which bullets are fired at crime scenes. Mr. Donovan helped lobby this year for the bill in Albany. \u201cWe probably disagree on 90 percent of things, but here\u2019s one thing that both he and I agree on,\u201d Mr. Donovan said jokingly at a news conference in Albany in June that both men attended. \u201cI looked at the bill and believed the bill was the right bill before I realized that Eric was the sponsor.\u201d", "keyword": "Elections;Attorneys General;Schneiderman Eric T;Donovan Daniel M Jr;Politics and Government;Democratic Party;Republican Party;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0026957", "categories": ["science", "earth"], "date": "2013/01/11", "title": "Extreme Weather Grows in Frequency and Intensity Around World", "abstract": "WORCESTER, England \u2014 Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace. Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing \u2014 minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting \u2014 that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk. Bush fires are raging across Australia , fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September . A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began. \u201cEach year we have extreme weather, but it\u2019s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,\u201d said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. \u201cThe heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East \u2014 it\u2019s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.\u201d Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds. Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life\u2019s computer screen \u2014 an omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012. Image RUSSIA In Siberia, a man braved temperatures of 47 degrees below zero last month. Credit Viktor Everstov/Reuters Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Mevagissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two months. It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain\u2019s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954). The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of \u201cextreme weather events\u201d \u2014 defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said. The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country\u2019s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record. Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.) Image AUSTRALIA A bush fire, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave, killed dozens of sheep at a farm near Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. Credit Lukas Coch/European Pressphoto Agency In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines. Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring. Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city\u2019s highest temperature since official records began in 1915. At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed. Israel and the Palestinian territories are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone. Amir Givati, head of the surface water department at the Israel Hydrological Service, said the storm was truly unusual because of its duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and hail fell not just in the north, but as far south as the desert city of Dimona, best known for its nuclear reactor. From Freezing to Burning: Extreme Weather Across the World 25 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Kevin Frayer/Associated Press In Beirut on Wednesday night, towering waves crashed against the Corniche, the seaside promenade downtown, flinging water and foam dozens of feet in the air as lightning flickered across the dark sea at multiple points along the horizon. Many roads were flooded as hail pounded the city. Several people died, including a baby boy in a family of shepherds who was swept out of his mother\u2019s arms by floodwaters. The greatest concern was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Lebanon, taking shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible, with local families. Some refugees are living in farm outbuildings, which are particularly vulnerable to cold and rain. Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University\u2019s department of earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically. \u201cThe intensity of the cold is unusual,\u201d Mr. Lynn said. \u201cIt seems the weather is going to become more intense; there\u2019s going to be more extremes.\u201d In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream \u2014 a ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems \u2014 may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still recovering from the December floods. In Worcester last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with playing fields buried under water. In the shop at the Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to the new uncertainty. \u201cFor the past seven or eight years, there\u2019s been a serious incident in a different part of the country,\u201d Mrs. Smith said. \u201cWe don\u2019t expect extremes. We don\u2019t expect it to be like this.\u201d", "keyword": "Weather;Climate Change;Global Warming"}
{"id": "ny0122937", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/09/07", "title": "Their Food Scarce From Drought, Animals Dine in Town", "abstract": "DENVER \u2014 People move to the mountains to be closer to nature. But not this close. At least two candy stores have been burglarized this summer by ravenous, drought-starved bears. They are being struck by cars as they roam dark highways, far from their normal foraging grounds. Growing numbers are invading campsites and kitchens in search of food. One even tried to storm a hotel bar in Telluride, Colo. In addition to destroying crops, this summer\u2019s record-breaking drought has also killed off the wild acorns, berries and grasses that sustain animals like mule deer, elk and bears. Without that food, the great outdoors is pushing its way inside, looking for calories wherever they can be found. Elk and mule deer are stealing into farmers\u2019 corn and alfalfa fields more aggressively, and in greater numbers, than usual, wildlife officials say. Bears have been spotted lumbering through alleys, raiding garbage cans and scooting into people\u2019s homes through open windows and unlocked kitchen doors. \u201cMy God, they\u2019re everywhere,\u201d said Sheriff Bill Masters of San Miguel County, in the mountains of southwest Colorado. \u201cA lot of them just don\u2019t seem to care anymore. They\u2019re just wandering around.\u201d Similar stories abound, from ranches in Montana to tourist towns in New York\u2019s Catskills, to the Appalachians in Kentucky. With their natural food sources ruined by drought, animals are descending from mountains and mesas, desperate to eat whatever they can find before the winter freeze comes. There isn\u2019t much to go around. In Utah, officials are hoping to cull part of the state\u2019s elk herd this fall to prevent wintertime competition over the shrunken and brittle patches of grasses. They have issued an additional 1,450 hunting tags for female elk, in the hopes that smaller herds of elk, which are relatively hardy, would enable more of the deer to survive. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of an emergency,\u201d said Lowell Marthe, a state wildlife biologist. \u201cIf there\u2019s not enough food on those winter ranges, we\u2019re looking at potential for heavy die-offs in our deer.\u201d Bears are even more visible. One wandered through a farmer\u2019s market in downtown Aspen, Colo., this summer. Others have broken into cars after sniffing out fast-food leftovers, or ransacked people\u2019s kitchens. One woman in Eagle, Colo., told ABC News that her home had been bear-burgled five times. Officials at the Grand Canyon made a rare black bear sighting this summer. In Kentucky, officials closed two campsites in late July after a family spotted a young bear rummaging through a trash can \u2014 an unusual sight for the area. \u201cIt\u2019s just been bear call after bear call,\u201d said Perry Will, the wildlife manager in Glenwood Springs, Colo. \u201cRight now, they\u2019d eat about anything.\u201d And there is little relief in sight. The remnants of Hurricane Isaac soaked parts of the Midwest enough that the federal government was able in its weekly drought report Thursday morning to downgrade much of Missouri from extreme to severe drought. But the same report elevated wide swaths of the central and southern Great Plains to extreme drought, and said that roughly 63 percent of the continental United States remained in a state of moderate to extreme drought. The rash of drought-related bear encounters is part of a long trend of increasing run-ins between humans and wildlife (which, it should be said, was here first). States passed more restrictive hunting regulations and natural predators dwindled at the same time that homeowners built deeper and deeper into the forests, their homes climbing from valley floors to elevations where mountain berries ripen and animals like bears find their food. Wildlife officials in Colorado said that they had to euthanize 133 \u201cproblem bears\u201d last year and that they have killed 80 so far this year. With autumn approaching, the run-ins are growing more common as the bears race to find the 20,000 daily calories they need for hibernation. Local residents sometimes protest the state\u2019s \u201ctwo strikes\u201d policy for bears that wander into civilization (first encounter, it\u2019s tranquilized, tagged and released; second time, it\u2019s bear meat) but wildlife officials say they have few other options. \u201cWe don\u2019t have this utopia tucked away that we can take all our problem bears to,\u201d said Renzo DelPiccolo, the wildlife manager in Montrose, Colo. \u201cIt\u2019s tough.\u201d In Choteau, Mont., Lane Yeager settled things himself. He came home one recent night to find a 2-year-old black bear eating peanut butter, bread and flour from his pantry. The bear had apparently climbed a fence outside Mr. Yeager\u2019s house and pushed a window open. Mr. Yeager got his gun and shot the bear twice \u2014 once to kill it and once, he said, to make sure. \u201cThis is private property,\u201d he said. Towns have urged homeowners to minimize the allure for bears by storing their dog food inside and taking down bird feeders. Several require that all garbage be kept in bear-proof trash cans, which have thick sides and lockable lids. But homeowners and officials say people still find claw marks and gouges in the trash cans, and paw prints under their kitchen windows. Or at a local bar. One evening last month, Peter DePrez was working the door of the New Sheridan bar in Telluride when he noticed \u201cthe biggest dog I\u2019d ever seen in my life.\u201d Just after he realized it was a 400-pound black bear, the animal made a run at the door. \u201cI think it just wanted to come in,\u201d he said. Mr. DePrez slammed the door and began yelling and clapping to shoo the bear away from the bar, and from an unlucky beagle that was tied up just outside. The bear complied, he said, and wandered west down the main drag, toward another saloon at the other end of town.", "keyword": "Animals;Drought;Colorado;Bears"}
{"id": "ny0125008", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/08/29", "title": "France Opens Homicide Inquiry in Arafat\u2019s Death", "abstract": "A French court will open a homicide investigation into the 2004 death of the former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat , left, French news media reported Tuesday. Mr. Arafat\u2019s widow, Suha, petitioned French authorities to investigate last month after findings by a Swiss laboratory suggested that Mr. Arafat may have been exposed to polonium 210, the same radioactive isotope used to poison a dissident Russian former spy in London in 2006. Mr. Arafat died in a French military hospital on Nov. 11, 2004, after an infection that was never identified, according to medical records. There have long been suggestions, however unspecific, that he may have been the victim of foul play. The Palestinian Authority, which has agreed to exhume the body for analysis, welcomed the French decision, Saeb Erekat, an aide to the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, told Agence France-Presse.", "keyword": "Arafat Yasir;Deaths (Fatalities);Palestinians;France;Poisoning and Poisons;Radiation"}
{"id": "ny0155110", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/01/12", "title": "Ailing District to Get Grant for Schools", "abstract": "Legislative leaders announced on Friday that they had reached an agreement for an $8 million bailout of the financially troubled, 2,800-student Roosevelt school system in Nassau County after earlier efforts stalled last fall. The State Senate and the Assembly are expected to pass legislation next week to provide a one-time state grant of $8 million to the district to settle an accumulated debt that has threatened to cripple its daily operations. District officials have said that without a bailout they would run short of money to pay salaries, busing costs and utilities. In addition, the legislation would increase an annual state grant to the district for academic improvement to $12 million, from $6 million. Legislative leaders said the measure was intended to allow the district, whose students are largely poor and members of minorities, to raise its per-pupil spending. \u201cFor far too long, the Roosevelt School District has been shortchanged,\u201d said the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver. \u201cThis compromise measure effectively brings per-pupil spending for the Roosevelt School District on par with the rest of Nassau County.\u201d The legislation will be sponsored by two Long Island legislators, Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr., a Republican, and Assemblywoman Earlene Hooper, a Democrat. The district was taken over by the State Education Department in 2002 after decades of mismanagement and weak student performance, the first takeover in New York State. Since then, the state has poured $200 million into the district for improvements, including new buildings. But financial problems have drawn sharp criticism from parents and teachers over what they see as a failed effort to turn around the district. The education commissioner, Richard P. Mills appointed a new superintendent, Robert-Wayne Harris, who took over the district on Oct. 15. \u201cAs we have stated in the past, we are excited and anxious about any and all assistance and support for our students, district and school community,\u201d Mr. Harris said on Friday. \u201cWe are eagerly awaiting the outcome. It would be a great victory for this wonderful community.\u201d", "keyword": "Roosevelt School System;Finances;Education and Schools;Legislatures and Parliaments;Education Department;Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0247078", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/05/02", "title": "Many Japanese Factories Have Recovered From Quake", "abstract": "SHIBATA-MACHI, Japan \u2014 When the ground shook violently on the afternoon of March 11, the ceiling collapsed in part of the huge Ricoh copier factory here, exposing the vents and wires above. The ceiling is still not fixed. But employees are back at their posts, working under temporary lighting and wearing hard hats to protect themselves in case debris falls. The factory may be a case study for the can-do recovery of Japan\u2019s manufacturing industry. Only seven weeks after the huge earthquake in northeastern Japan collapsed the ceiling, toppled a huge water tank and upended assembly line equipment, the Ricoh factory here is nearly back to full production. And so, for the most part, is all of Ricoh, a nearly $25 billion company that makes copiers and other office equipment. \u201cThe influence of this disaster is not as large as the world thinks,\u201d Shiro Kondo, Ricoh\u2019s president, said in an interview at the company headquarters in Tokyo. At varying speeds, Ricoh\u2019s story is being played out all over the quake-affected parts of Japan. The pattern suggests that whatever the long-term effect of the natural and nuclear disasters on this country, manufacturing \u2014 the most important cog in Japan\u2019s export-oriented economy \u2014 might largely rebound within a few months. Without doubt, things are not back to normal yet. And some sectors, particularly automobile manufacturing, are suffering more than others. Still, almost every day companies are reporting progress on some of the hundreds of factories knocked out of commission by the quake or ensuing tsunami. The government estimates that 7 percent of Japanese factories were in the region heavily affected by the earthquake. A survey of 70 damaged factories released last week by Japan\u2019s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found that nearly two-thirds of them had recovered while most of the rest in the survey group expected to do so by summer. Shin-Etsu Chemical, a leading producer of silicon wafers used to make computer chips, said last week that it expected to return to pre-earthquake production levels by July. Sony has resumed operations at nine of its 10 halted factories, with the 10th expected to come online in phases from May to July. Masatomo Onishi of Kansai University, who studied the recovery after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, said that when a disaster strikes, Japanese companies tend to cooperate with one another and workers rally to the cause. That seems to be the case at the Ricoh factory here. Even many of the Ricoh workers who lost family members to the tsunami came to work. Some whose homes were destroyed or flooded slept on blankets on the floor of a factory conference room. With gasoline scarce, many rode bicycles. And with bathrooms not working because of blocked sewer lines, employees improvised with plastic bags. Still, the disaster exposed vulnerabilities that simply restoring any one factory\u2019s assembly line cannot fully resolve. The biggest susceptibility for Ricoh and many other companies has proven to be parts shortages. Although Japanese manufacturers have spread their factories around the world \u2014 Ricoh makes 70 percent of its products outside of Japan \u2014 many of those overseas plants often still depend on parts made in Japan. For example, Tohoku Ricoh, as this plant is known, is the company\u2019s only factory making a particular motor used in copiers. When the factory here went down, a giant Ricoh plant in Shenzhen, China \u2014 which supplies most of the Ricoh copiers sold in the United States \u2014 had to stop production for a full week. (Mr. Kondo said he did not think Ricoh\u2019s sales in the United States would be affected much.) Ricoh is also dependent on parts from various suppliers in Japan, some of which suffered their own damage from the earthquake. That is forcing Ricoh to live off its inventory of certain computer chips and connectors. If production of those parts does not resume in the next couple of months, Ricoh might have to slow or halt production. Another weakness was in emergency planning. Tohoku Ricoh, for instance, had 200 metric tons of backup water for cooling and ink production, in case water service was disrupted. But when the power also went out, it could not pump the water to where it was needed. Workers had to deliver the water, one ton at a time, by truck. The emergency plan at Ricoh\u2019s headquarters was designed to cope with a big earthquake in Tokyo, not one in northeastern Japan. \u201cWe had a manual of what to do in such cases, but things did not go as written,\u201d said Toshihiro Kenmoku, a leader of the recovery task force at headquarters. When the earthquake occurred, powder started coming out of the walls and ceilings of the office of Hiroshi Tsuruga, the president of Tohoku Ricoh. \u201cI felt like I would be crushed with the building and die,\u201d Mr. Tsuruga recalled. Neither Mr. Tsuruga nor any of the other 1,270 Tohoku Ricoh employees were killed at the factory, which is about a 20-minute drive from the coast. But one employee, sleeping at home to prepare for the night shift, was swept away by the tsunami. A Ricoh sales and service employee was also killed by the wave while calling on a customer near the coast. Some 26 family members of factory workers perished or are missing, 42 homes were partly or completely destroyed and another 37 flooded. The day after the quake, 70 factory employees gathered in the gym to plan the recovery, posting the plans on the walls. A similar scene was taking place at headquarters in Tokyo, where a conference room was converted into a war room for a recovery task force. The table soon became covered by phones, documents and packages of instant noodles. One of the first tasks was to send 10,000 bottles of water, as well as food, blankets and other supplies, to Ricoh\u2019s stricken factories using the company\u2019s own trucks. Besides Tohoku Ricoh, three other Ricoh factories making a variety of products and one research center were damaged. But Tohoku Ricoh \u2014 which accounts for about $60 million in annual revenue, or one-fortieth of Ricoh\u2019s total \u2014 posed the biggest challenge. The priority was to restore production of ink and the motors made only at the Tohoku plant. Finally, by April 6, all the production lines were back in operation, with the exception of toner manufacturing. (Toner is used for machines that can print, copy and scan, while ink is used for some copiers.) Then, On April 7, an aftershock of magnitude 7.1 jolted the region. Electricity and water were knocked out again and many repairs undone. \u201cProduction went back to zero again,\u201d said Hiroyuki Murakami, a general manager. It took until April 15 to restore motor production. Mr. Kondo, Ricoh\u2019s president, said it would probably take half a year for the company to be fully back to normal. He declined to say how much the lost production and the lower economic activity expected in Japan this year would hurt the company\u2019s sales and profits. \u201cWe have many problems, so it\u2019s very difficult to think about the results of this year,\u201d he said. His main concern was that a drop in industrial and consumer spending would mean less photocopying. Japan accounts for about 45 percent of Ricoh\u2019s sales. On April 12, Masahiro Nakanomyo, an analyst at Barclays Capital, cut his estimate of operating profit for the fiscal year ending next March to 85 billion yen, or $1.05 billion, from 93 billion yen, or $1.14 billion. Last week Ricoh reported sales for the year that ended March 31 of 1.94 trillion yen, or $23.9 billion. That was about 3.9 percent below the forecast the company made on Feb. 2. Operating profits were 60.2 billion yen, or $740 million, 29 2 percent below the forecast. The company attributed part of the shortfall to the earthquake. Ricoh predicted that operating profits for the year that ends next March would be 70.0 billion yen, or about $860 million. Based on that revised forecast, Mr. Nakanomyo at Barclays further reduced his estimate of operating profit for the year, to 63 billion yen. At Ricoh headquarters, the war room has reverted to a conference room. But a new challenge looms. Because of the power plants disabled by the earthquake and tsunami, big companies like Ricoh will have to cut their use of electricity by up to 25 percent in the summer, which could also disrupt production. Another task force has gone into action.", "keyword": "Ricoh Company Ltd;Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Factories and Manufacturing;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0185542", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/03/09", "title": "As Olmert\u2019s Time in Office Nears End, Captive Soldier\u2019s Saga Gains Urgency", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 For the family of the captive Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit , the waning days of the Olmert government represent a time of dwindling hope and growing despair. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has as little as two weeks left in office as his probable successor tries to form a new government. By then, Corporal Shalit, who turned 22 in captivity, will have been a hostage of Hamas for about 1,000 days. The parents and friends of Corporal Shalit are pressing Mr. Olmert to clear his desk, and his conscience, by reaching an 11th-hour deal for the soldier\u2019s return. \u201cWe think there is still a last chance before the prime minister ends his term,\u201d Noam Shalit, Corporal Shalit\u2019s father, said Sunday as he and the rest of his family began a sit-in at a protest tent near the prime minister\u2019s residence in Jerusalem. \u201cWith a new government we do not know what will happen,\u201d he said. \u201cThey could do a reset and start another three-year nightmare.\u201d The Shalit saga has gripped the Israeli soul. In a small country where 18-year-olds are conscripted into the army, complete strangers feel intimately connected with the Shalits. But people here also remember the names of youths who were blown up on buses by terrorists, and they are debating the morality of releasing those convicted of such attacks in exchange for Corporal Shalit, part of a list of prisoners Hamas wants freed. On Sunday, across the street from the Shalits\u2019 protest tent, families of terrorism victims began a vigil of their own. They set up placards on the sidewalk outside the former Caf\u00e9 Moment, where a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up about seven years ago, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 54. One of those opposing the release of the convicted Palestinians is Yossi Mendellevich, an engineer whose son Yuval died at the age of 13 in a bus bombing in Haifa in March 2003. \u201cFor a father to bury a boy of 13 and a half \u2014 it should be the other way round,\u201d Mr. Mendellevich said. \u201cHis voice was changing, he was getting the beginnings of a mustache, and he got killed in a most brutal way.\u201d Mr. Mendellevich argues that Israel has not fully examined other options for freeing Corporal Shalit. \u201cIt is clear that if Gilad Shalit was my son, I\u2019d be ready to give back Tel Aviv,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have to also think of the parents of the kids who could yet be killed by those to be released.\u201d Corporal Shalit was seized from Israeli territory by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in a cross-border raid and was dragged into Gaza, wounded, in June 2006. He has been allowed no visits by the Red Cross. The last sign that he is alive was a handwritten letter to his parents last June. Despite the pain involved, many Israelis across the political spectrum seem ready to release the Palestinian prisoners to secure his return. \u201cFrom a personal perspective,\u201d said Yael Barkai, 52, a teachers\u2019 trainer and a mother of four from Pardes Hanna in northern Israel, \u201ceveryone here has or had or will have a child in the army, or a cousin or a nephew or niece.\u201d Ms. Barkai said she and her sister, Ruthi, 48, were bothered by Corporal Shalit\u2019s fate, to the point of dreaming about it at night. Feeling the need to do something, they decided to set up the Jerusalem protest tent six months ago. The sisters e-mailed their friends, who passed the message on. Within five hours, Ms. Barkai said, they had replies from 300 Israelis prepared to sit in the tent in two-hour shifts from morning to night, seven days a week. With Israel balking at releasing all the prisoners on the Hamas list and negotiations apparently stuck, members of the Shalit family came from their small Galilee village to join the volunteers on the sidewalk here in a last-ditch attempt to get their son freed. Drivers honked their horns in solidarity, and children passing by in fancy dress costumes for the Purim holiday joined in a chant. Mr. Olmert spoke out over the weekend against the public displays of sympathy for Corporal Shalit, saying they only raised Hamas\u2019s expectations and raised the price for his release. But that did not stop a 15-year-old girl from Tel Aviv, who gave her name as Shir, from showing up at the tent on Sunday to show her support; nor Yehudit Mahlu, 72, from the Negev Desert city of Beersheba; nor Yaakov Milo, 57, from a village near Eilat, at Israel\u2019s southernmost point. \u201cThree years is enough,\u201d Mr. Milo said. \u201cOtherwise, we\u2019ll end up with another Ron Arad.\u201d Mr. Milo was referring to an Israeli airman whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. Mr. Arad was taken alive, but negotiations for his release collapsed in 1988. He never came back. Indictment Looms for Ex-Leader JERUSALEM \u2014 Israel\u2019s attorney general announced plans on Sunday to indict the country\u2019s former president, Moshe Katsav, on charges of rape and indecent assault against women who worked for him when he was the tourism minister and president. Mr. Katsav, who stepped down from the presidency in mid-2007, first faced an accusation of indecent assault in 2006 when he said he was being blackmailed by a former female employee. After her story was made public, other women came forward and the case grew more serious with the addition of the rape charge. Mr. Katsav then struck a plea bargain under which he would pay compensation and admit his guilt to the lesser charges in exchange for the dropping of the rape charge. But in a turnaround in April, he pulled out of the deal, saying he preferred to stand trial. The original charges have now been restored.", "keyword": "Shalit Gilad;Israel;Hamas;Olmert Ehud;Prisons and Prisoners;Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0241123", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/12/22", "title": "Yankees Assessed Lowest Luxury-Tax Bill Since 2003", "abstract": "Not much has gone the Yankees \u2019 way this off-season, but some relatively good news arrived Tuesday, when they were assessed their lowest luxury tax bill since 2003. The Yankees must pay $18 million \u2014 nearly $8 million less than 2009, when they won the World Series \u2014 as a penalty for surpassing the $170 million luxury-tax threshold, according to The Associated Press. The Yankees have exceeded the threshold in all eight years since the tax was imposed, topping out at $33.98 million in 2005 and owing more than $191 million in all for regularly having the highest payroll in baseball. Last season, their payroll for luxury-tax purposes was $215,053,064. Since 2003, three other teams have paid the competitive-balance tax, as it is formally known, including the Boston Red Sox, the only other club this year to owe money. The Red Sox, who missed the playoffs for the first time in four seasons, must pay $1.5 million, their first penalty since 2007. The Detroit Tigers were billed $1.3 million in 2008, while the Angels were taxed $927,059 in 2004. LOCAL TALENT About a year ago, Leonel Vinas was, by his own admission, finding trouble along the streets of Freeport on Long Island. In two weeks, he is slated fly to Tampa, Fla., to begin a new phase of his life \u2014 as a professional baseball player. Vinas was the ace of Hank\u2019s Yanks, the team established by the Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner to give 15- to 18-year-old boys new opportunities. Vinas, a 19-year-old right-hander, signed a minor league contract with the Yankees on Tuesday. Vinas recently had three private tryouts at the Yankees\u2019 facility in Tampa, pitching in front of Damon Oppenheimer, the team\u2019s vice president for amateur scouting, and Billy Connors, the vice president for player personnel. \u201cThey told me, \u2018You\u2019ve got a chance to be a Yankee,\u2019 \u201d Vinas said at a news conference. \u201cWhen they first told me that, I didn\u2019t believe it. I didn\u2019t think it was true.\u201d Vinas, who will work as a reliever, was 12-0 with a 1.12 earned run average and 168 strikeouts in 84 innings for Hank\u2019s Yanks. He pitched four no-hit innings against Adelphi and five no-hit innings against Suffolk Community College, but he said the highlight of his season came Aug. 26, when he led Hank\u2019s Yanks to a 3-2 victory over a team sponsored by Mariano Rivera in the first Boss\u2019 Cup at Yankee Stadium. \u201cI\u2019ve been to China and Japan to bring back some players, and it\u2019s great also to show that we can look around the corner in our backyard and find players, too,\u201d General Manager Brian Cashman said. At first, finding Vinas was difficult. Herman Hernandez, the general manager of Hank\u2019s Yanks, said Vinas, who moved from the Dominican Republic when he was 11, was a superb pitcher at Freeport High School. But after Vinas graduated, in 2009, \u201che just fell off the map,\u201d Hernandez said. He tracked him down and called his childhood friend Ray Negron, a longtime adviser for the Yankees, who introduced Vinas to Steinbrenner. \u201cThis team has given him a life,\u201d Negron said. HELP FOR BURNETT Until Brian Cashman hears otherwise \u2014 and he said he had little hope that he would \u2014 he does not expect Andy Pettitte to pitch for the Yankees in 2011. But A. J. Burnett will, and Cashman said that the new pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, was scheduled to visit Burnett in late January at his Maryland home for a troubleshooting session. Whether or not Pettitte returns, it is imperative that Burnett corrects his mechanical flaws and move past his dreadful 2010 season. \u201cWe need A. J. to come back to his previous form, there\u2019s no doubt about it,\u201d Cashman said. \u201cI believe he will. But we need that to happen, too.\u201d The Yankees are also searching for a right-handed reliever to complement Joba Chamberlain and Dave Robertson and a right-handed hitter off the bench, but there are not many options in free agency. \u201cThere\u2019s not much available, to be quite honest,\u201d Cashman said, \u201cbut if something\u2019s there for the taking that we like and we can match up, then we\u2019ll strike.\u201d HARDEN RETURNS TO A\u2019S The right-hander Rich Harden, who has been plagued by injuries for much of his career, is rejoining the Oakland Athletics, his first major league team. Harden, 29, and the Athletics completed a one-year, $1.5 million deal after he passed a physical. He went 5-5 with a 5.58 earned run average in 20 appearances last season for the Texas Rangers before being released. (AP) COSTLY KOUFAX JERSEY A game-worn Sandy Koufax Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, which he had signed, sold Sunday for $80,000 on the Lelands auction house Web site. Lelands did not identify the buyer. A glove used by Yankees catcher Thurman Munson in 1969, his rookie year, sold for $54,000 as part of the same sale. (BLOOMBERG NEWS)", "keyword": "New York Yankees;Baseball;Taxation;Vinas Leonel;Oakland Athletics;Brooklyn Dodgers;Uniforms;Auctions"}
{"id": "ny0064523", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/06/18", "title": "7 Killed as Pakistan Police Clash With Preacher\u2019s Followers", "abstract": "LAHORE, Pakistan \u2014 At least seven people have been killed and about 100 wounded in Lahore in violent clashes between the police and followers of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a fiery preacher turned political activist who has called for a mass movement against the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. It was the deadliest political confrontation in Lahore, Mr. Sharif\u2019s hometown, since a short-lived but turbulent period of emergency rule under the military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf in late 2007. And it came at a critical time for Mr. Sharif, who is marshaling public support as the army begins a perilous offensive against the Taliban in the tribal district of North Waziristan. The clashes started about midnight on Monday, when a large contingent of police officers reached the headquarters of the Pakistan Awami Tehrik, Mr. Qadri\u2019s party, and demanded that his supporters remove barricades that they called illegal outside the office and an adjoining residence. The barricades were set up four years ago after Mr. Qadri, who is in Canada but has said he will return to Pakistan next Monday, issued a decree against the Taliban and received death threats from the militants. Mr. Qadri\u2019s supporters resisted the police demands, and the situation turned violent, with clashes through the night. By morning, police reinforcements, including bulldozers and armored vehicles, had arrived to disperse the crowd. Several women and men lay down in front of barriers on the road, challenging the police to run the bulldozers over them. The police fired tear gas and charged with batons, then fired bullets into the air. Mr. Qadri\u2019s supporters accused the police of firing directly into the crowd. The Lahore police chief, Chaudhry Shafique, accused the protesters of instigating the clashes. Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab Province and a brother of the prime minister, said at a news conference that of the 97 people reported wounded, 27 were police officers. Later, he removed Mr. Shafique from his position as police chief. In January 2013, Mr. Qadri, who has been based in Canada, led a march of thousands of followers to Islamabad to demand electoral overhauls and the removal of the previous government, which was led by the Pakistan Peoples Party. Under Pakistan\u2019s Constitution, Mr. Qadri is barred from participating in elections because of his dual Pakistani and Canadian citizenship, and critics accused him of being a proxy for political interference by the military\u2019s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Mr. Qadri said he would land in Islamabad on Monday and had urged the Pakistani military to provide him with protection. But given the suddenly precarious security situation, with the authorities in major cities stepping up security in anticipation of Taliban reprisals for the North Waziristan operation, it seems doubtful that the military will allow him to hold mass street rallies. Mr. Sharif\u2019s government has hinted that Mr. Qadri might be arrested if he tries to return to Pakistan next week, and has warned that the courts could bring money-laundering investigations against him. In a telephone address to supporters on Tuesday, Mr. Qadri accused the Lahore police of firing on unarmed protesters. On Twitter, he said that Mr. Sharif had ordered the attack because he was \u201cgripped by fear of my arrival.\u201d", "keyword": "Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri;Lahore;Civilian casualties;Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0062229", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/01/17", "title": "Sabathia and Cano Reunite, via Jay Z", "abstract": "Pitcher C. C. Sabathia became the latest professional athlete to join Roc Nation Sports, the agency that represents Robinson Cano, Sabathia\u2019s former teammate on the Yankees. Roc Nation announced the deal Thursday and sent out a photograph of Sabathia signing his contract with Jay Z, the head of the company, which negotiated a 10-year, $240 million contract for Cano with the Seattle Mariners in free agency last month. Sabathia, a left-hander who was 14-13 last season, is signed through 2016 with a vesting option for 2017 based on the health of his left shoulder. \u25a0 Catcher Francisco Cervelli and the Yankees agreed to a one-year, $700,000 contract. Cervelli was limited to 17 games last season. He broke his right hand April 26 when hit by a foul tip and then was suspended for 50 games on Aug. 5 for violating the league\u2019s antidoping rules. (AP)", "keyword": "C C Sabathia;Baseball;Roc Nation;Yankees;Jay Z;Robinson Cano"}
{"id": "ny0042489", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2014/05/10", "title": "Henry Leads by 2 in the Fog", "abstract": "Scott Henry shot a five-under-par 67 to take a two-shot clubhouse lead in the first round of the fog-affected Madeira Islands Open.", "keyword": "Golf;Scott Henry"}
{"id": "ny0035354", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/03/02", "title": "Troubles at Women\u2019s Prison Test Alabama", "abstract": "WETUMPKA, Ala. \u2014 For a female inmate, there are few places worse than the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women . Corrections officers have raped, beaten and harassed women inside the aging prison here for at least 18 years, according to an unfolding Justice Department investigation . More than a third of the employees have had sex with prisoners, which is sometimes the only currency for basics like toilet paper and tampons. But Tutwiler, whose conditions are so bad that the federal government says they are most likely unconstitutional, is only one in a series of troubled prisons in a state system that has the second-highest number of inmates per capita in the nation. Now, as Alabama faces federal intervention and as the Legislature is weighing its spending choices for the coming year, it remains an open question whether the recent reports on Tutwiler are enough to prompt reform. \u201cYes, we need to rectify the crimes that happened at Tutwiler, but going forward it\u2019s a bigger problem than just Tutwiler,\u201d said State Senator Cam Ward, a Republican from Alabaster who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. \u201cWe\u2019re dealing with a box of dynamite.\u201d The solution, Mr. Ward and others say, is not to build more prisons but to change the sentencing guidelines that have filled the prisons well beyond capacity. Just over half the state\u2019s prisoners are locked up for drug and property crimes, a rate for nonviolent offenses that is among the highest in the nation. \u201cNo one wants to be soft on crime, but the way we\u2019re doing this is just stupid,\u201d Mr. Ward said. Still, in many corners of Alabama, a state where political prominence is often tied to how much a candidate disparages criminals, the appetite for change remains minimal. The Legislature is in the middle of its budget session, working over a document from Gov. Robert Bentley that includes $389 million for the state\u2019s prisons. That is about $7 million less than last year\u2019s budget. The Department of Corrections argues that it needs $42 million more than it had last year. Alabama prisons are running at almost double capacity, and staffing is dangerously low, said Kim T. Thomas, the department\u2019s commissioner. He said he would use about $21 million of his request to give corrections officers a 10 percent raise and hire about 100 officers. Image Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. Credit Bob Miller for The New York Times The odds of approval for that much new money are not great, but they are better this year than they have been in a long while, said Stephen Stetson, a policy analyst with Arise Citizens\u2019 Policy Project , a liberal policy group. Even so, \u201cfor the average legislator, it\u2019s still, \u2018These bodies don\u2019t matter,' \u201d he said. There is no ignoring the prison crisis. Even Stacy George, a former corrections officer who is challenging Mr. Bentley in the June Republican primary by promising to be \u201cthe gun-toting governor,\u201d this past week issued a plan for prison reform. It calls for changing sentencing rules, rescinding the \u201cthree-strikes\u201d law for repeat offenders, releasing the sick and elderly, and sending low-level drug offenders into treatment programs instead. The federal government has stepped in to fix Alabama\u2019s prison problems before, but it has been years since the state has faced a situation as serious as that uncovered by a series of damning investigations into Tutwiler. \u201cWe think that there is a very strong case of constitutional violations here,\u201d said Jocelyn Samuels, the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights for the Justice Department, who sent a 36-page report to the governor in January. The toxic, highly sexualized environment, she said in an interview, has been met by \u201ca deliberate indifference on the part of prison officials and prison management, who have been aware of the conditions for many years and have failed to curb it.\u201d The prison was built in 1942 and named after Julia Tutwiler, a woman called the Angel of the Stockades for her work trying to improve conditions for inmates in Alabama. More than 900 women live there, including some on death row, although the original building was designed for about 400. The prison\u2019s abysmal staffing levels, abundant blind spots and only three cameras created a situation where sex among prisoners and with guards was rampant, the report said. Male guards have routinely watched women showering and once helped prisoners organize a strip show. Sex is sometimes exchanged both for banned items like drugs and for basic needs like clean uniforms. At least six corrections employees have been convicted of sexual crimes since 2009. The Justice Department is still investigating Tutwiler, scrutinizing medical and mental health care there. \u201cIt is just a culture of deprivation and abuse, not just at Tutwiler but in institutions across Alabama,\u201d said Charlotte Morrison, a senior lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative , a legal organization that represents indigent defendants and prisoners. In 2012, the organization asked the federal government to step in after its own investigation into Tutwiler showed rampant sexual abuse. The Department of Corrections says conditions at Tutwiler were beginning to improve well before the Justice Department began its investigation in April 2013. Six months after the Equal Justice Initiative report came out in May 2012, the longtime warden and other top prison officers were replaced, said Mr. Thomas, the corrections commissioner. He also asked the National Institute of Corrections to review practices and policies at Tutwiler. Using those findings, he issued a wide-ranging plan in January 2013 that included recruiting more female corrections officers, pressing the Legislature for more money and changing several policies and procedures. Among them was a system to better investigate and track reports of assaults and abuse. Image A picture of Monica Washington with her two children, including KaMyrrie, right. She said that despite a federal investigation, prisoners were still fearful and that conditions remained bad. Credit Bob Miller for The New York Times \u201cThat report came about because I wanted an abundance of caution and to be transparent,\u201d Mr. Thomas said. But women recently released and still inside say life at Tutwiler has improved only marginally. Monica Washington, who is serving 20 years for armed robbery, said she had been raped by a prison guard and gave birth to a daughter who is now 3 and living with relatives near Montgomery. The guard, Rodney Arbuthnot, served six months in jail for custodial sexual misconduct. He has since moved to Texas. The courts only recently tracked him down, and the family is finally getting about $230 a month in child support. In a telephone interview, Ms. Washington said that prisoners were still fearful and that conditions remained bad. \u201cRight now, for me personally, it\u2019s still the same as far as the officers,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an act of Congress to get the things you need just to live. It\u2019s inhumane for inmates to be here, period.\u201d Marsha Colby, a mother of six, served almost 10 years of a life sentence without parole for a murder conviction. Her premature son had been stillborn, and she buried him in a marked grave near her home. A medical examiner said the child had been drowned in a bathtub, but the conviction was overturned after a court agreed that the autopsy had been botched. She was released in December 2012. She remains in contact with some Tutwiler prisoners, who she said were split on whether attention from the federal government was a good thing. Sex is an important commodity there, Ms. Colby said. The inmates use it to get better treatment and secure contraband items that they can then sell to get food and other basics. \u201cThe women do it for favors,\u201d she said. \u201cThey get makeup, cologne, anything that\u2019s stuff that is resellable. That\u2019s how they make their money.\u201d She and others believe it will take a larger overhaul at the top of the Department of Corrections to fix the prison\u2019s problems. \u201cIt\u2019s a primitive, very backward prison system,\u201d said Larry F. Wood, a clinical psychologist who was hired at Tutwiler in 2012. He quit after two months, appalled at the conditions and what he said was the administration\u2019s lack of support for mental health services. \u201cI\u2019ve worked in prisons for most of 30 years, and I\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to back up and look at it with fresh eyes. The people who are running it don\u2019t have the perspective to see what can change.\u201d", "keyword": "Prison;Women and Girls;Rape;Security guard;Justice Department;Tutwiler Prison for Women;Alabama"}
{"id": "ny0199374", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/07/06", "title": "Obama Raises Concerns About Freedom and Judicial Independence in Russia", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Ahead of his departure for Moscow on Sunday night for a visit aimed at repairing strained relations with Russia , President Obama vowed not to sacrifice American support for greater freedom here and questioned the politically charged prosecution of a prominent Russian businessman. Mr. Obama raised concerns about the treatment of the businessman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky , who along with his partner has been put back on trial six years after they were first arrested. Critics say the new trial seems aimed at keeping Mr. Khodorkovsky, an opponent to the government who was once Russia\u2019s richest man, in prison. \u201cWithout knowing the details, it does seem odd to me that these new charges, which appear to be a repackaging of the old charges, should be surfacing now, years after these two individuals have been in prison and as they become eligible for parole,\u201d Mr. Obama said in written answers to questions posed by a Russian opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, over the weekend. \u201cNonetheless, I think it is improper for outsiders to interfere in the legal processes of Russia.\u201d But Mr. Obama called on President Dmitri A. Medvedev to follow through on his promise \u201cto strengthen the rule of law in Russia, which of course includes making sure that all those accused of crimes have the right to a fair trial and that the courts are not used for political purposes.\u201d In a television interview that was broadcast in Russia on Saturday night, Mr. Obama did not repeat critical comments that he had made about Vladimir V. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, who is widely considered Russia\u2019s dominant leader. Mr. Obama plans to conduct negotiations with Mr. Medvedev on Monday and have breakfast with Mr. Putin on Tuesday. In the interview on Russian state television, Mr. Obama was asked why it was important to meet both men. Mr. Obama noted that he had never met Mr. Putin, but added, \u201cObviously, he has been a very strong leader for the Russian people.\u201d The interview with Russian television was conducted on Thursday shortly after Mr. Obama offered a different view of Mr. Putin in an interview with The Associated Press. In the A.P. interview, Mr. Obama said Mr. Putin had \u201cone foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.\u201d Mr. Obama said that it was time to move forward and that Mr. Medvedev \u201cunderstands that.\u201d The comment was seen as provocative, and some American officials worried that Mr. Obama may have been too sharp in taking on Mr. Putin while others argued that it let the president come in a position of strength. On Sunday, the Kremlin released the text of an interview in which Mr. Medvedev once again suggested that the United States needed to compromise on its proposed antimissile system in Eastern Europe in order to obtain a broader agreement on cutting nuclear arsenals. Mr. Khodorkovsky\u2019s case is one of three that have come up as Mr. Obama heads here. Supporters want him to press Russia not only to free Mr. Khodorkovsky but also to do more to pursue the killers of two journalists, Anna Politkovskaya , a crusading war correspondent , and Paul Klebnikov, an editor for Forbes magazine . Ms. Politkovskaya held dual Russian and American citizenship while Mr. Klebnikov was an American of Russian heritage. Mr. Obama is sending top advisers to a memorial service to be held in Moscow on Tuesday for the fifth anniversary of Mr. Klebnikov\u2019s death, and offered a show of support for Ms. Politkovskaya\u2019s colleagues by answering written questions posed by her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Novaya Gazeta\u2019s editors, Dmitri Muratov and Andrey Lipsky, asked Mr. Obama if he would ratchet back American attention to liberty issues in Russia. \u201cOf course not,\u201d Mr. Obama wrote, adding: \u201cI agree with President Medvedev when he said that \u2018freedom is better than the absence of freedom.\u2019 So, I see no reason why we cannot aspire together to strengthen democracy, human rights, and the rule of law as part of our \u2018reset.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Khodorkovsky, who led Yukos, Russia\u2019s most successful oil company at the time, was arrested in 2003 when he challenged Mr. Putin. He was convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in prison, while his oil company was effectively taken over by the state. He is back on trial on new charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Mr. Khodorkovsky\u2019s parents hoped that Mr. Obama\u2019s interest would prompt Mr. Medvedev to stop the trial and free their son. \u201cI liked very much what Obama said,\u201d his father, Boris Khodorkovsky, said in an interview. But Mr. Medvedev dismissed the possibility of a pardon, at least for now, comparing the case to the recent conviction of Bernard L. Madoff in the United States. \u201cSome businessmen have been given very long sentences, 150 years in the United States of America,\u201d Mr. Medvedev said in his interview with Italian news media. \u201cWhy is it that somehow no one is unduly upset about this case?\u201d", "keyword": "Russia;United States International Relations;Khodorkovsky Mikhail B;Freedom and Human Rights;Politkovskaya Anna;Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0127892", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/06/03", "title": "Dickey Pitches a Shutout as Mets Beat Cardinals", "abstract": "R. A. Dickey saw the ninth inning of Johan Santana\u2019s no-hitter with a towel wrapped around his head, because he could not bring himself to watch what was unfolding. The ninth inning was too much, Dickey said, so he focused on Santana and his reactions, wanting the no-hitter so badly for both Santana and the city of New York. \u201cI went to bed last night, reminding myself to bring what I bring, whatever that is,\u201d Dickey said. \u201cAnd try to be me. I can\u2019t be Johan.\u201d What Dickey was Saturday was one half of a dominant, odd-couple 1-2 punch that the Mets can now flaunt around the National League. Allowing seven hits more than Santana, Dickey still threw a 100-pitch shutout, and the Mets beat the Cardinals, 5-0 , at Citi Field. It was not a no-hitter, but it was close to Dickey\u2019s best; he struck out nine and did not walk a batter. His manager, Terry Collins , pointed out that there was still room for improvement as Dickey\u2019s knuckler was not its sharpest because of the wind. Dickey\u2019s ceiling may be Santana. Of course, the Mets\u2019 top two pitchers could not be more different. \u201cR. A. throws a knuckleball, Johan\u2019s conventional,\u201d said their catcher, Josh Thole, who went on to point out that \u201cone\u2019s right-handed, one\u2019s left-handed; if anything, they\u2019re complete opposites.\u201d What they can bond over, Dickey said, is a friendly competition between teammates, a sort of anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better relationship. \u201cYou sit over there and watch a guy do what he did, and you watch him continually do it, and you know you have to follow it every time because he\u2019s the No. 1 guy,\u201d Dickey said. After Dickey\u2019s gem Saturday, Collins was asked if these friendly rivals are one of the better pitching duos in the National League. \u201cWell, they\u2019re sure showing it,\u201d Collins said. \u201cThey can stop anybody.\u201d Santana has a 2.38 earned run average, has thrown back-to-back shutouts, including the no-hitter, and has proved he can be a dominant pitcher even though his fastball has lost some of its velocity. Dickey\u2019s record improved to 8-1, and he has a 2.69 E.R.A. He has helped the Mets win six straight games in which he has started, and has baffled hitters to the tune of 38 strikeouts with just two walks and four runs in his past four games. The Cardinals, just like the Reds, the Pirates and the Padres, did not stand a chance because, as Dickey explained, he has been controlling his knuckleball, throwing it for strikes, forcing hitters to swing at what he throws. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do about it,\u201d Carlos Beltran, who went 1 for 4 with a double, said about preparing to face Dickey. \u201cYou have to actually go out there and be aggressive.\u201d Dickey\u2019s counterpart, Lance Lynn, looked younger, sturdier and scarier than Dickey, but it made no difference. Lynn left the game with two outs in the fifth inning, while Dickey needed only 49 pitches during that stretch to make believers of the Cardinals. Lynn labored; Dickey lobbed, to much better effect. The Mets got all the runs Dickey needed in the second inning, when they scored three runs with only one ball \u2014 Ike Davis\u2019s leadoff single \u2014 leaving the infield. Another run scored on a wild pitch in the seventh, and David Wright hit a solo shot, his sixth home run, in the eighth. Dickey struck out the side in the eighth, a scene punctuated by the Cardinals\u2019 Tyler Greene swinging, missing and dropping his bat in disgust. By then, a shutout was still possible, even if a no-hitter was not. \u201cLook, I try and throw a no-hitter every time that I go out there,\u201d Dickey joked afterward. He praised shortstop Omar Quintanilla for one nifty diving stop; second baseman Daniel Murphy for his glove work; and Thole for catching most of his knuckleballs. The shutout, it was made clear, belonged to the team. But, just as Dickey could not explain how he controlled an uncontrollable pitch, he could not explain the Mets\u2019 new winning ways. \u201cIt\u2019s organic,\u201d he said. INSIDE PITCH Terry Collins announced that Mike Baxter would be placed on the disabled list and could be out for up to six weeks. Baxter has a displacement of his right collarbone and fractured rib cartilage after running into the left-field wall to make a catch during Johan Santana\u2019s no-hitter. ... Ramon Ramirez strained his hamstring while running from the bullpen to celebrate with Santana, and he will be placed on the disabled list. \u201cNo, I haven\u2019t seen that stuff before,\u201d Collins said of Ramirez\u2019s injury. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of stuff that happens here that I haven\u2019t seen.\u201d", "keyword": "Dickey R A;New York Mets;St Louis Cardinals;Collins Terry L;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0049843", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2014/10/02", "title": "Stars Sue Organizers of Women\u2019s World Cup Over Use of Turf", "abstract": "A group of the world\u2019s best female soccer players sued FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association on Wednesday, arguing that the plan to play next summer\u2019s Women\u2019s World Cup in Canada on artificial turf amounts to gender discrimination under Canadian law. According to the players\u2019 filing with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario in Toronto, World Cup organizers are violating Section 1 of Canada\u2019s human rights code , which states that \u201cevery person has a right to equal treatment with respect to services, goods and facilities, without discrimination.\u201d The filing seeks an order requiring that the tournament, scheduled to begin June 6, be played on natural grass fields. It also proposes possible resolutions that include installing grass fields on top of artificial ones and even relocating games to stadiums with grass surfaces. \u201cMen\u2019s World Cup tournament matches are played on natural grass while C.S.A. and FIFA are relegating female players to artificial turf,\u201d a lawyer for the players, Hampton Dellinger, said in a statement. \u201cThe difference matters: Plastic pitches alter how the game is played, pose unique safety risks and are considered inferior for international competition.\u201d The group of players named in the filing consists of national team players from approximately a dozen countries, including the former world players of the year Abby Wambach of the United States and Nadine Angerer of Germany. Nearly every top contender for next year\u2019s World Cup title is represented, although the filing does not name any players from host Canada\u2019s national team. The players have been threatening to sue FIFA and the C.S.A. since July but have expressed a clear preference for a negotiated solution. That now seems unlikely. A top FIFA official told reporters in Canada this week that there were no plans to accede to the players\u2019 demands. \u201cWe play on artificial turf, and there\u2019s no Plan B ,\u201d said Tatjana Haenni, FIFA\u2019s head of women\u2019s competitions. The concept of a player boycott also seems to be a nonstarter: The World Cup is a rare global stage for women\u2019s soccer, and many players, even some of the plaintiffs in the current case, are reluctant to surrender it. Still, when the group received no response after setting a deadline of Sept. 26 for negotiations to begin, Dellinger said, the players had \u201cno choice\u201d but to go to court. They have requested an expedited hearing because the tournament begins in less than nine months, and installing grass fields or relocating games \u2014 if ordered \u2014 could take time.", "keyword": "Soccer;Canada;Discrimination;Women and Girls;FIFA Women's World Cup;FIFA;Canadian Soccer Assn;Lawsuits"}
{"id": "ny0259092", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/01/23", "title": "Consumption of Buffalo Meat at an All-Time High", "abstract": "DENVER \u2014 The nation\u2019s buffalo ranchers have no catchy marketing slogan about what\u2019s for dinner, and no big trade association budget to pay for making one up. What they have these days are people like Joe and Matt Gould, an ambitious father-and-son team from western Kansas who branched out after 100 years of traditional cattle ranching by their family, and bought their first buffalo herd last year. The Goulds, with 40 animals as a start, made their first delivery of buffalo meat, also known as bison, to friends here in Denver last week. They are opening a themed restaurant on the Kansas-Colorado border supplied by the ranch, and planning bison hunts for tourist-visitors. \u201cPeople want the high omega-3s,\u201d which are healthy fats, said Joe Gould, 61, as he scribbled notes at a mentoring session for buffalo-ranching newcomers at the National Bison Association\u2019s winter conference at a hotel here last week. With prices and American consumption of buffalo at all-time highs \u2014 though still minuscule in volume compared with beef, chicken or pork \u2014 a new chapter is clearly beginning for one of the oldest animal-human relationships on the continent, dating back millennia before the first Europeans arrived. New ranchers are coming in. Older ranchers are straining to build up herds, holding back breeding females from slaughter and thus compounding what retailers say is already a supply crunch. Buffalo meat prices, meanwhile, have soared \u2014 up about 28 percent last year for an average rib-eye steak cut, according to the federal Department of Agriculture. At Tony\u2019s Market here in Denver, that surge is even steeper, up 25 percent just last week for a New York strip buffalo steak, to $24.98 a pound, $10 more per pound than premium beef for the same cut. What happened, producers and retailers say, is that the buffalo, the great ruminant of the Plains \u2014 once endangered, now raised on ranches by the tens of thousands \u2014 has thundered into an era of growing buyer concern about where food comes from, what an animal dined on and how it all affects the planet. Trendsetting consumers and restaurants on the East and West Coasts caught on. Grass-fed, sustainable and locally grown, obscure concepts to most people 15 years ago or so when the buffalo meat market first emerged, became buzzwords of the foodie culture. Nutritional bean counters, obsessing over lipid fats and omegas, found in buffalo a meat they could love. \u201cFor the last two years, it\u2019s been one of the fastest-growing categories in our meat department,\u201d said Theo Weening, the global meat coordinator for Whole Foods Market, one of the nation\u2019s largest retailers of buffalo at its chain of stores. Mr. Weening said buffalo benefited from a kind of synergy: customers started embracing the idea of grass-fed beef, and from there it was a short leap to bison. \u201cBoth categories went hand in hand,\u201d he said. But this new moment, buffalo ranchers and retailers say, is also loaded with risk that growth could come too fast or prices could surge so much that buyers or retailers back away. It is also spiced with a debate about what people really want. Many of the new ranchers, like the Goulds, say the future of buffalo can be summed up by one term: grass-fed. Feeding animals only on grass, with no grain in their diet at all, is more natural for the animal and produces the kind of low-fat, environmentally sustainable product that they say best competes with beef for a place on the nation\u2019s dinner table. Many veteran ranchers, though, say that what consumers and retailers really want is consistency \u2014 one cut of buffalo tasting about the same as the next in both flavor and texture. And only grain-feeding, with some grain \u2014 often corn \u2014 in the diet in the last months before slaughter, can do that, they say. Crucially, they say, grain-finished buffalo is what most people have probably tasted, bought at Whole Foods or off a restaurant menu. Purely grass-fed buffalo, they say, is harder to find and can vary in taste and tenderness from region to region and season to season. However it is raised, buffalo meat has much less fat than beef. \u201cWe want no surprises for our customers,\u201d said Russell Miller, the general manager at Turner Enterprises, which owns the chain of buffalo ranches owned by the media mogul and conservationist Ted Turner. Turner Enterprises, by far the nation\u2019s largest buffalo rancher, with more than 50,000 animals, supplies some of the buffalo at Whole Foods, as well as the meat for Mr. Turner\u2019s buffalo-themed restaurant chain, Ted\u2019s Montana Grill. When it comes to the question of grass-fed versus grain-fed, the answer from David E. Carter, the executive director of the National Bison Association, is a Buddha-like wisdom of abstention. \u201cI\u2019m not going to say one is better than the other,\u201d he said in an interview between meetings at the association\u2019s conference, where straight-leg jeans and boots was the uniform du jour. \u201cPeople are moving forward from here in different ways, and we\u2019ll let our customers tell us the answer.\u201d Mr. Weening at Whole Foods said his company was trying a third way, of sorts. It is in discussions with its three suppliers to end feed-lot finishing for buffalo \u2014 still feeding the animals a partly grain-based diet to build up a little fat in the final months of life, but doing so in a pasture setting instead of in confined lots. But with all the hand-wringing and hope about the future, the fact remains that buffalo is still barely a footnote. The average American ate about 65 pounds of beef last year but not even a Quarter Pounder\u2019s worth of bison, according to the Bison Association. The numbers of animals in the food chain reflect that disparity \u2014 about 70,000 buffalo slaughtered for their meat last year, according to the association, compared with more than 125,000 cattle every day. But for newcomers like the Goulds, Lesson 1 is that buffalo are not anything like cattle. While cattle can be easily herded along, their wild genes muted by generations on a treadmill to the slaughterhouse, buffalo might decide to turn and charge. When they do, they can outrun a track star, up to 30 miles per hour. And while a cattle herd will usually respect a fence, a buffalo herd will not. \u201cWe\u2019ve figured out some things already, mostly by doing them incorrectly,\u201d said Matt Gould, 32. \u201cBut it\u2019s a pretty steep learning curve.\u201d", "keyword": "Bison;Meat;Ranches"}
{"id": "ny0150900", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/08/18", "title": "Roller Skaters Revel in a New Rink in New York City", "abstract": "The skies over Coney Island put on a spectacular show on Saturday evening, with the sunset casting violet hues and a fat yellow moon disappearing and reappearing through clouds. But for a row of spectators lined up along a lonely section of the Boardwalk, the real entertainment was happening opposite the beach, inside an ornate yet decrepit building. There, under disco lights and mirror balls, and displaying varying degrees of agility, roller skaters were circling, circling around a makeshift rink that offered a taste of the glory years of indoor roller-skating in New York City. \u201cSkaters have been so horribly sad, being orphans,\u201d said Beth Emerson, who was one of the original roller-skate dancers at the Roxy, the beloved nightclub in Manhattan and one of two popular roller rinks to close in the city in 2007. \u201cNow, we\u2019re not going to be orphans anymore.\u201d The site of Saturday night\u2019s roller-skating was Lola Staar\u2019s Dreamland, the brainchild of Dianna Carlin, an entrepreneur who runs a tiny and bustling souvenir shop on Coney Island\u2019s Boardwalk. Lola Staar is Ms. Carlin\u2019s alter ego, and this year Ms. Carlin\u2019s dream came true when she won a contest sponsored by Glamour magazine and the designer Tommy Hilfiger that helped her open a roller rink in Coney Island. Ms. Carlin is also the founder of the Save Coney Island organization, formed to stave off overdevelopment, and she wants to help breathe new life into a blighted area of the Boardwalk. Roller-skating, she believed, would be the ideal fix. The rink opened in March in the Childs Restaurant building, an 80-plus-year-old terra-cotta landmark that has spent much of the past half-century closed to the public. A floor of interlocking plastic tiles was laid and about 200 pairs of roller skates were donated, Ms. Carlin says, by \u201ca family whose grandfather was active in the roller-skating world.\u201d The plan, at first, was to open the rink for just one night, but the response from the public, and the city\u2019s legions of bereft roller skaters, was so overwhelming that Ms. Carlin resolved to reopen the place on a semi-permanent basis. \u201cIt was amazing,\u201d Ms. Carlin said of the rink\u2019s inaugural night, which drew luminaries like the singer Ashanti and the actress Marisa Tomei. \u201cOver 1,000 people RSVP\u2019d for the party, but we could only allow 300 people in. It showed how passionate people are for roller-skating.\u201d It took nearly four months for Ms. Carlin to navigate a thicket of building permits and insurance needs to reopen the rink, but finally, in July, she did. The rink is scheduled to open every weekend until October, at least. Longtime roller skaters who showed up at Dreamland on Saturday night said they had yet to find a new home since the Roxy and the Empire roller-skating rink in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, closed within a month of each other last year (a third rink, Skate Key in the Bronx, closed in 2006). Some make their way to rinks in New Jersey and on Long Island and Staten Island. Some skate on the weekends in Central Park, though several said they avoided outdoor skating because they did not like rolling on asphalt. Yet no rink, the skaters said, has filled the void left by the Roxy and Empire. \u201cEmpire was the love of our life,\u201d said Yvonne Blugh, who showed up at Dreamland shortly past sunset on Saturday with her husband, Ian \u2014 the two met and fell in love at Empire. The night\u2019s theme at Dreamland was \u201cPurple Rain,\u201d the 1984 movie starring Prince, and the Blughs dressed accordingly: she in a shiny black leather minidress and fishnet stockings, and he in a purple velour pantsuit with leopard-print flares. Alex Kirby, a 63-year-old who wears 38-year-old custom-made roller skates, drives on most weekends to rinks in New Jersey. But Mr. Kirby, who polished his roller-dancing technique over decades at the Roxy and other rinks in the city, finds the New Jersey skaters too fast. Irving Rollins, 52, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said he had not been able to find a rink that equaled the Roxy\u2019s all-inclusive vibe. \u201cPeople from all over the world, upper-end people, lower-end people, there was no place like Roxy\u2019s,\u201d he said. And Angela Pinder, who showed up at Dreamland with her friend Lecia Williams, finds the New Jersey rinks too far away, the Long Island skaters standoffish and the Staten Island rink too hard to find. \u201cWe need something in New York,\u201d said Ms. Pinder, who used to skate at Empire. \u201cUrban children have nowhere to skate.\u201d It remains to be seen whether Lola Staar\u2019s Dreamland will fill the void. Attendance has been erratic, possibly because people are unaware that the rink is there. Ms. Carlin is hoping to build enough momentum to open a permanent rink in Coney Island after Taconic Investment Properties, which holds the lease on the Childs Restaurant space, reoccupies the building. She also envisions finding a sponsor and laying a wooden floor in the rink. The place might see some competition from a new rink being planned by Lezly Ziering, a 75-year-old roller-skating teacher who plans to start a skating night called \u201cCrazy Legs\u201d in September at an old gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant. But Mr. Ziering, who showed up at Dreamland on Saturday, said his skating nights would be on Wednesdays, and Ms. Carlin\u2019s rink is open only on weekends. Indeed, Julio Estien, who was the D.J. at the Roxy, was spinning at Dreamland on Saturday night, and suggested that there was enough demand to fill both venues. \u201cThey\u2019re still broken-hearted,\u201d Mr. Estien said of the city\u2019s skaters. \u201cBut now they have Lola Staar\u2019s Dreamland.\u201d", "keyword": "Roller Skating;Coney Island (NYC);Carlin Dianna"}
{"id": "ny0101841", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2015/12/08", "title": "Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 In the hours after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino, Calif., a familiar voice celebrated the attacks on Twitter: \u201cCalifornia, we have already arrived with our soldiers. Decide how to be your end, with knife or bomb.\u201d That comment was posted from the 335th Twitter account of a pro-Islamic State group that calls itself Asawitiri Media. Twitter has repeatedly tried to cut off the authors of the account, most recently known to its thousands of followers as @TurMedia335, @TurMedia334 and @TurMedia333. As soon as Twitter suspends one account, a new one is created. After the group\u2019s 99th account was suspended, it taunted Twitter by creating @IslamicState100, posting images of birthday candles, cake, trophies and fireworks. Politicians and even some technologists say that account, and hundreds just like it, show how Silicon Valley\u2019s efforts to crack down on the use by terrorists of social media have been toothless. And Washington is using the latest terrorist attacks to renew its calls for Silicon Valley to roll back the encryption in their products. On Sunday, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, called on tech companies to become more aggressive. \u201cResolve means depriving jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory,\u201d she told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington. \u201cThey are using websites, social media, chat rooms and other platforms to celebrate beheadings, recruit future terrorists and call for attacks. We should work with host companies to shut them down.\u201d But as the 335 versions of the pro-Islamic State Twitter account demonstrate, technology companies are dealing with a tenacious adversary. Also, when it comes to terrorists using encryption technologies to hide their communications \u2014 a frequent complaint of law enforcement \u2014 technology companies are quick to point out that of the top five encryption apps recommended by the Islamic State, none are American-made. Indeed, members of the Islamic State used technology created by a company in Germany to claim credit for last month\u2019s attacks in Paris , and text messages discovered on one of the attackers\u2019 phones suggested that the attackers were not even using encryption. Still, while the tech industry cannot block all terror content on the web, people who have battled other online threats say it could be doing more. They point to technology that has successfully eradicated large swaths of child pornography on the web, or even older tools for spotting computer viruses, as potential guideposts for blocking terror-related content. \u201cWhen Twitter says, \u2018We can\u2019t do this,\u2019 I don\u2019t believe that,\u201d said Hany Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College, who co-developed the child pornography tracking system with Microsoft. The actual task of identifying child pornography is managed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Mr. Farid said the same technology could be applied to terror content, so long as companies were motivated to do so. \u201cThere\u2019s no fundamental technology or engineering limitation,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided that they just can\u2019t be bothered.\u201d The 335th pro-Islamic State account certainly did not escape the notice of executives at Twitter after it carried simultaneous death threats against Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, Twitter\u2019s current and former chief executives. And its recent naming convention \u2014 adding one digit to a new account after the last one is suspended \u2014 does not seem as if it would require artificial intelligence to spot. Asawitiri Media also uses the same photo of a bearded man\u2019s face over and over again, said Rita Katz, the director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists\u2019 communications. \u201cThe bottom line is that Twitter is not doing enough,\u201d Ms. Katz said. \u201cWith the technology Twitter has, they can immediately stop these accounts, but they have done nothing to stop the dissemination and recruitment of lone wolf terrorists.\u201d In response, Twitter said it actively investigated potential terrorist threats. \u201cViolent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter, and our rules make that clear,\u201d a Twitter spokesman said. \u201cWe have teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, and they work with law enforcement entities around the world when appropriate.\u201d Image Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Facebook has removed some posts. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The White House on Monday also urged the technology industry to do more. \u201cThere should be common ground the government and tech can find to address this concern and make sure the American people are safe,\u201d said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, echoing comments made earlier by President Obama. Conversations between government officials and tech companies have been going on for more than a year, but since the mass shootings in San Bernardino and Paris, \u201cthere has been a reintensified or reinvigorated engagement,\u201d according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But some who advocate free speech argue that relying on companies like Twitter and Facebook to be more aggressive arbiters of what constitutes free speech puts those companies in a difficult spot. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that law enforcement should delegate their responsibilities to private enterprise,\u201d said David Greene, director for civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u201cEspecially ones that haven\u2019t sought out that role.\u201d In some cases, Internet companies have been criticized for not taking down websites that belong to the Islamic State, only to have it discovered later that the sites were critical of it. Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, a San Francisco company, said that in one case Internet activists criticized his company for keeping several Islamic State websites online when, in fact, the sites in question were pro-Kurdish. \u201cIt\u2019s particularly risky to take a bunch of tech companies that are not certified policy experts and insert them into Middle East politics,\u201d Mr. Prince said. Pulling all terror-related content is not always preferred by law enforcement. In several cases, tech executives say, they have been asked to keep terror-related content online so that law enforcement agents can monitor terrorist networks or because the content was created by law enforcement agents to lure terrorists into divulging information. The issue is thornier for companies like Facebook, in which the bulk of posts are meant to be private. \u201cDo you want Facebook looking at over 1.5 billion people\u2019s posts?\u201d said Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor in technology policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. \u201cAnd if so, then for what?\u201d Facebook primarily relies on user reports to ferret out terrorist accounts, but recently it has gone further. If the company is informed of specific terrorist activity, Facebook will take down the account as well as others similar to the one reported. Last week, it went a step further. Tashfeen Malik, one of two terrorists involved in the San Bernardino attacks, posted her public allegiance to ISIS on Facebook just minutes before the shootings occurred on Wednesday. The post did not initiate any user reports to Facebook, and until now it had been unclear how the authorities were able to tie Ms. Malik to the post. According to law enforcement officials, the Facebook account that Ms. Malik used was linked to an email account she had used for many years. Facebook found the posting, reported it to the F.B.I., and removed it on Thursday. \u201cWe work aggressively to ensure that we do not have terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any content that praises or supports terrorism,\u201d said Monika Bickert, head of global product policy at Facebook. A spokeswoman for YouTube said that it had policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content meant to incite violence and that it quickly removed those videos when flagged by users. A trickier issue is presented by the encryption deployed by Apple, Facebook, Google and a range of smaller services that thwart law enforcement\u2019s ability to access a target\u2019s communications, even with a court order. Companies say that weakening the encryption in their products would only make regular users more vulnerable to cybertheft and set a bad precedent for other countries to follow. What\u2019s more, they note, there are plenty of encryption options not made by American companies and many of them are free. Addressing the topic on Monday, the White House urged Silicon Valley to find a compromise. \u201cWe are going to resist the urge to trample a bunch of civil liberties,\u201d Mr. Earnest said in the White House briefing. But he added, \u201cWe don\u2019t want terrorists to have a safe haven in cyberspace.\u201d", "keyword": "ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Terrorism;Social Media;Silicon Valley;Freedom of speech"}
{"id": "ny0255499", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/09/08", "title": "Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to Find Its Way", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Yahoo has been one of the most-visited sites on the Internet since its glory days as a Web portal. Yet as the rest of the Internet moved on to social networks and mobile devices, Yahoo has failed to keep up. That became painfully clear Tuesday when Yahoo\u2019s board abruptly fired its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz . She focused on bolstering Yahoo\u2019s online media and original reporting, but neglected to develop the new social networking tools, video services or mobile apps that people now prefer to use. In that way, the tale of Yahoo\u2019s misfortunes is not just one of management woes, but a vivid illustration of the transition from Web sites that publish professional content to a new digital world dominated by mobile phones and sites where the users are the content creators. Yahoo\u2019s problems are shared with another Internet pioneer, AOL. Both astutely capitalized on the first huge shift in how people read \u2014 moving online from paper \u2014 but they failed to follow Internet users and advertisers to cellphone screens and social networks. Both companies have tried to become media companies. Meanwhile, the next generation of companies, like Google and Facebook, have happily satisfied the demand for information and entertainment \u2014 not by creating content but by building mobile and social networking services that attract users and, increasingly, valuable advertisers. \u201cYahoo hangs on to the pieces that made it a giant years ago,\u201d said Shar VanBoskirk, a digital marketing analyst at Forrester Research. \u201cIt assumes people will come to its Web site, and what users are looking for now is a much more syndicated experience that allows them to go to mobile devices and co-create content.\u201d As the way people use the Internet changed, she said, Yahoo and AOL \u201chit the wall and didn\u2019t continue to evolve as the rest of the market did.\u201d Yahoo\u2019s sites, like its home page, e-mail service and sites for finance and entertainment, still have a huge audience \u2014 177.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore \u2014 second only to Google\u2019s but more than Facebook\u2019s. But while Yahoo\u2019s traffic has flattened, both Google and Facebook are growing in popularity. And people spend about half as much time on Yahoo as they do on Facebook. Advertisers are chasing what they say is more profitable prey \u2014 users of smartphones, video sites and social networks, and the companies that cater to them. Yahoo has always led in one of the most important corners of the advertising marketing: display ads, those that show images and video. But Facebook and Google are closing in on Yahoo, in large part because they can offer advertisers more personal information about users. Yahoo\u2019s slice of the display advertising pie has shrunk for three years in a row, according to eMarketer, a digital-marketing research firm. Last year, its share of display ads was 14.4 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for Facebook and 8.6 percent for Google. But this year, Facebook will surge ahead of Yahoo with 17.7 percent to Yahoo\u2019s 13.6 percent, eMarketer predicts. And by next year, Google will have nearly caught up to Yahoo, too, with 12.3 percent of display ads compared with 12.5 percent at Yahoo and 19.4 percent at Facebook. \u201cYahoo still has an enormous amount of traffic,\u201d said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. \u201cBut more and more ad buys are being made in a more targeted way.\u201d Advertisers are attracted to information that Facebook has about a user\u2019s friends or Google has about a user\u2019s search queries, he said. Mr. Hallerman compared Yahoo and its audience to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1960s, like Life and Look. Those publications were done in by the shift among advertisers to magazines aimed at specific groups like celebrity news or golf. \u201cThe idea of a portal trying to be everything to everybody is outdated,\u201d he said. Advertising executives also criticized Yahoo for the shortcomings of its advertising technology as well as executive turnover that meant that every few months, ad agencies had to teach a new Yahoo executive about their accounts. \u201cWhen you look at Yahoo, there\u2019s a lot of distractions,\u201d said Christian Juhl, president of the Western region at Razorfish, a digital ad agency owned by the Publicis Groupe. In 2007 Google bought DoubleClick, a display advertising company, to compete with Yahoo. Two years later Google had developed DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which was more efficient for buyers and sellers of ad space. It invested heavily to acquire or create tools for targeting, serving and optimizing online display ads. It has also invested in YouTube, its video site, to try to lure TV advertisers to display ads. \u201cYou see the likes of Facebook and Google eating their lunch,\u201d said Julie Berger, vice president and managing director for digital at the Los Angeles office of Horizon Media, a leading media agency. \u201cConsumers\u2019 habits are changing,\u201d and Yahoo executives have not sufficiently realized that, she said. But even as Internet users began to surf the Web differently \u2014 reading bits and pieces on different sites and devices \u2014 Yahoo and AOL dug in, creating content as they had in their heyday in the 1990s. Tim Armstrong, AOL\u2019s chief executive since 2009, is investing heavily in news and original reporting. His biggest bet was to buy The Huffington Post, the news and aggregation site founded by Arianna Huffington, for $315 million earlier this year. He also bought the tech blog TechCrunch and is pushing into local news with Patch, which has reporters in more than 800 towns writing about city council meetings, neighborhood crimes and civic events. But like Yahoo, Mr. Armstrong is dealing with unhappy shareholders and calls to break the company into pieces and sell them off. AOL has an investment bank and lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisition on retainer. A steady decline in its Internet access business makes increasing its overall advertising business difficult. In the latest quarter, AOL reported a 5 percent gain in global advertising sales, its first increase since spinning out of Time Warner in 2009, but it remains a money loser. Ms. Bartz took a parallel approach at Yahoo, hiring dozens of journalists and bloggers and buying Associated Content, which enlists amateur journalists to write about a variety of topics. Its first social network, Yahoo 360, introduced in 2005, never caught on. Inside Yahoo on Thursday, the management team held an all-hands meeting with employees to try to reassure them about the company\u2019s future. Jerry Yang, Yahoo\u2019s co-founder, who was pushed out as chief executive before Ms. Bartz was hired, said the decision to remove Ms. Bartz was a difficult one but the company should be growing faster. \u201cWe\u2019re at a critical time in Yahoo\u2019s history,\u201d he said. It may not have been what advertisers want to hear. \u201cWhat advertisers want is an innovator, a partner that is going to help them know the next best place to reach their customers,\u201d said Ms. VanBoskirk of Forrester. \u201cYahoo\u2019s problem is they look like a legacy player that\u2019s not thinking about the next thing.\u201d", "keyword": "Yahoo! Inc;Computers and the Internet;Search Engines;Social Networking (Internet);Cellular Telephones;Bartz Carol A;Executives and Management;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations"}
{"id": "ny0157907", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/12/20", "title": "Bloomberg Retreats on Overhaul of Programs for the Elderly", "abstract": "Under pressure from the City Council, the Bloomberg administration is backing down from a contentious proposal to revamp the city\u2019s sprawling system of senior centers , officials said on Friday. In a victory for the Council, the administration said that it would hold off on plans to consolidate up to $20 million in financing for the centers, which serve as a home away from home for thousands of older residents. In a conciliatory statement, three officials said that they planned to re-evaluate the overhaul. The statement came from Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services; Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, the city\u2019s new commissioner on aging; and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had argued that the current system needs to be modernized to appeal to a new generation of active, longer-living residents, who crave programs like yoga classes and live musical performances. And they are trying to introduce corporate-style accountability standards into a system operated by a patchwork of neighborhood providers. City records show that the roughly 300 senior centers, which are largely financed through taxpayer dollars, are used by 2 percent of the city\u2019s elderly population. But council members chafed at the changes, saying that their constituents were happy with the system as it is \u2014 and they privately grumbled that the mayor\u2019s proposal would diminish their influence over the program. This month, as the plan for the senior centers became public, Ms. Quinn angrily denounced it, declaring it belongs \u201cin the garbage can.\u201d Even as aides to the mayor backed away from the plan, they said they would still push to modernize the senior centers. The overhaul is vital, city officials say, to keep pace with a projected 46 percent surge over the next 25 years in the number of people above age 60, the city\u2019s fastest-growing group. Ms. Quinn and her colleagues in the Council said they agreed that the system needed to be modernized, but wanted time to review how best to accomplish that goal. \u201cI am pleased that today we are moving forward in a collaborative manner to ensure our seniors receive quality services,\u201d Ms. Quinn said.", "keyword": "New York City;Elder Care;Finances;Bloomberg Michael R;Elderly;City Councils"}
{"id": "ny0025932", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/08/13", "title": "Bulger Guilty in Gangland Crimes, Including Murder", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 James (Whitey) Bulger, the mobster who terrorized South Boston in the 1970s and \u201880s, holding the city in his thrall even after he disappeared, was convicted Monday of a sweeping array of gangland crimes, including 11 murders. He faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. The verdict delivers long-delayed justice to Mr. Bulger, 83, who disappeared in the mid-1990s after a corrupt agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation told him he was about to be indicted. He left behind a city that wondered if he would ever be caught \u2014 and even if the F.B.I., which had been complicit in many of his crimes and had relied on him as an informer, was really looking for him. \u201cThis was the worst case of corruption in the history of the F.B.I.,\u201d said Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated Mr. Bulger\u2019s associates. \u201cIt was a multigenerational, systematic alliance with organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the murders of government witnesses, or at least allowing them to occur.\u201d The trial was the final reckoning for a man small in stature but large in legend, who ruined hundreds of lives and deepened the stain on Boston\u2019s already corrupt federal law enforcement bureaucracy. Mr. Bulger was on the run for 16 years, until the authorities found him in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., with an arsenal of weapons and $822,000 in cash in the walls of his retirement apartment. The trial also offered a glimpse of a time and a place that has all but disappeared. The South Boston of Mr. Bulger\u2019s day has been transformed from a parochial, mostly Irish-American working-class enclave into part of Boston\u2019s booming innovation economy. Old triple-deckers have given way to glassy condos for young professionals. The dilapidated waterfront of Mr. Bulger\u2019s era, where he once imported 36 tons of marijuana, is now a showcase harbor dotted with pleasure craft and rimmed by the soaring glass walls of the federal courthouse where he had stood trial since June 12, with his former partners in crime parading to the witness stand to testify against him. Image Whitey Bulger, in 1953, left, and 2011. Credit Boston Police, left, U.S. Marshals Service, right \u201cWhen you hear about those days, it\u2019s as if all that took place in another century, on another planet,\u201d said Thomas J. Whalen, an associate professor of social science at Boston University. \u201cThose were the bad old days of Boston, and there is nothing to be nostalgic about. There was brutality at every level.\u201d June Barry, a 79-year-old who has lived in South Boston her entire life, and who used to joke with her friends about Mr. Bulger\u2019s grip on the neighborhood, greeted the verdicts with relief. \u201cIt\u2019s good to be over,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m glad they got him, and they got him alive. He has to pay for it now,\u201d she added. \u201cWe always said, \u2018Well, Whitey might be listening, we\u2019d better behave ourselves.' \u201d As a clerk read the verdicts in the lengthy and complicated list of charges, Mr. Bulger looked away from the jury and showed no reaction. He was found guilty of 31 of 32 counts of his indictment, the one exception involving an extortion charge. While the jury of eight men and four women convicted him of 11 murders, they found the government had not proved its case against him in seven others, and in one murder case it made no finding, leading to gasps inside the courtroom by relatives of those murder victims and explosive scenes outside the court. \u201cMy father just got murdered again 40 years later in that courtroom,\u201d said the son of William O\u2019Brien, who is also named William. When he was led from the courtroom, Mr. Bulger gave a thumbs-up sign to a few family members seated behind him, prompting a woman sitting with the relatives of victims to yell out, \u201cRat-a-tat Whitey.\u201d His sentencing is set for Nov. 13. His lawyer J. W. Carney Jr. vowed to appeal. He said the basis for an appeal would be that Judge Denise Casper had not allowed Mr. Bulger to mount the defense he wanted: that he was given immunity for his crimes \u2014 in essence, that he had a license to kill. Image The United States attorney in Boston, Carmen M. Ortiz, spoke outside court after Mr. Bulger was convicted on 31 of 32 counts. Credit Darren Mccollester/Getty Images Others said such an argument was ludicrous and had little chance of success, particularly since Mr. Bulger maintained he was never an informant. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult enough to persuade a court of appeals that you were immunized for proven murders if you were an informant,\u201d said Martin Weinberg, a prominent Boston criminal defense lawyer. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to make that argument when you say you were never an informant.\u201d Perhaps one glimmer of gratification for Mr. Bulger was that the jury reached \u201cno finding\u201d in the death of Debra Davis, one of two women he was accused of strangling. He has long maintained that his personal code of honor did not allow for the killing of women, although the jury did determine that he had killed the other woman, Deborah Hussey. Ms. Davis was the longtime girlfriend of Stephen Flemmi, Mr. Bulger\u2019s former partner in crime who testified against him. Ms. Hussey was the daughter of another of Mr. Flemmi\u2019s longtime girlfriends. Mr. Bulger had spent much of the trial scribbling on a yellow legal pad, perhaps for an appeal or a memoir, or maybe just for something to do. Some of the witnesses, particularly those who testified against him, had made him bristle with anger, and on a few occasions he exchanged obscenities with them, as if the courtroom were a schoolyard. In his last few appearances in court, after deciding that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Mr. Bulger seemed defeated. He slumped more in his chair. He did not take notes as vigorously. Mr. Weinberg said the seven murders that the government had not proved Mr. Bulger had committed were the oldest of the murder charges and were based on uncorroborated testimony. But, he noted, the jury also rejected the defense\u2019s argument that \u201cbecause the F.B.I. was corrupt, Mr. Bulger deserved to be exonerated.\u201d Image Steve Davis, Debra Davis\u2019s brother, on Monday. The jury reached \u201cno finding\u201d in her death. Credit Brian Snyder/Reuters Mr. Bulger\u2019s defense lawyers, Mr. Carney and Hank Brennan, described a culture in which agents took bribes, alerted criminals in advance to wiretaps and pending indictments, and gave them information about informants that led to their murder. But they produced almost no evidence that Mr. Bulger could not have committed the crimes of which he was accused. Mr. Bulger seemed to view the trial as more about his legacy than his guilt or innocence. He maintained he was not an informant, though that would have been no crime and was not part of the indictment against him. Though previous courtroom proceedings \u2014 notably those presided over by Judge Mark L. Wolf in Federal District Court in 1998 \u2014 exposed the symbiotic relationship between Mr. Bulger\u2019s Winter Hill Gang and the F.B.I., this trial focused more on Mr. Bulger\u2019s criminal actions while under the bureau\u2019s protection. Fred Wyshak, the assistant United States attorney who was the lead prosecutor, maintained that some victims were killed because the F.B.I. had told Mr. Bulger they were informants who were going to testify against him. Others were rival hoodlums or innocent bystanders. Some were lured into traps and shot. Others were felled in a hail of bullets. Some were bound in chains and shot at close range. Ms. Hussey and Ms. Davis were strangled. Afterward, Mr. Bulger would routinely take a nap while others cleaned up the mess, which included removing the teeth of victims so their bodies could not be identified. The corpses were shoveled under the dirt floor of a basement or tossed into a car trunk and dumped in a shallow grave. Beyond the murders, there were guns in people\u2019s faces and in their crotches. There were threats, shakedowns, demands for \u201crent\u201d for the privilege of doing business on Mr. Bulger\u2019s turf. \u201cThe depth of depravity is stunning \u2014 the killing of weak people, the women, the treachery against their own friends, shooting them in the back of the head,\u201d said Anthony Cardinale, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented mobsters and who first exposed Mr. Bulger as an F.B.I. informant. \u201cIt\u2019s almost Toscaesque in terms of the treachery that went on, and in the end, everyone winds up dead.\u201d", "keyword": "Whitey Bulger;Organized crime;Boston;FBI;Murders;Racketeering"}
{"id": "ny0217552", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/05/03", "title": "Empathetic Judge in 9/11 Suits Seen by Some as Interfering", "abstract": "Over nearly three decades as a litigator at a downtown law firm, Alvin K. Hellerstein shared a view of the World Trade Center towers with dozens of other colleagues in an office building on Maiden Lane. Yet as a United States District Court judge in Manhattan, he has had a singular perspective on the towers \u2014 specifically, the suffering that has lingered long after the terrorist attacks that leveled them in 2001. As the federal judge who has overseen the wrongful death, property damage and personal injury lawsuits arising from 9/11, Judge Hellerstein, 76, has developed a visible empathy for both the families of the victims and for the workers who fell ill after the rescue and cleanup efforts. \u201cHe had my clients in his chambers for over one hour to listen to them,\u201d said Norman Siegel, a lawyer for families seeking to recover human remains from the debris that was carted off to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. \u201cHe, more than anyone, understands deeply the pain.\u201d Yet in eight years of 9/11 oversight, many who have appeared before him say that Judge Hellerstein has also grown determined to put his own stamp on financial settlements reached between a plaintiff and defendant. And recently the city and lawyers have been smarting over his clout. On March 19, the judge stunned lawyers on both sides by rejecting a $657.5 million settlement reached in individual suits brought against New York City by more than 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers who say their health was damaged at ground zero. Saluting the workers as \u201cheroes,\u201d he said that the compensation was inadequate, the terms were poorly understood by the plaintiffs and lawyers should not expect to extract their fees from the $657.5 million payout. He would also reduce those fees. While some plaintiffs cheered, their lawyers and those for the city were dismayed to see a settlement that was two years in the making fall apart. What is more, Judge Hellerstein had waded into untested legal waters: such intervention is not the norm in cases that are not a class action, legal experts say. Last month the city filed an appeal challenging his authority, even as it returned to the table to negotiate new terms. The struggle over control of the settlement has underscored two different, but not necessarily contradictory views of the judge: the compassionate jurist driven by a sense of social responsibility and with a wealth of experience with victims\u2019 suffering, and the aggressive judge unwilling to cede ground on cases he has shepherded for years. Judge Hellerstein declined repeated requests for an interview. Still, his decisions and remarks on the bench appear to shed some light on his philosophy. A Bronx native and Columbia Law School graduate who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998, Judge Hellerstein has shown independence and a strong adherence to the First Amendment and to transparency, for example. He ordered the government to release videos and photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the American Civil Liberties Union sued under the Freedom of Information Act. In a 1999 decision against the New York Police Department that was later overturned, he ruled that members of the Ku Klux Klan could wear their traditional masks at demonstrations. Charles G. Moerdler, a friend and former co-partner at the firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said that Judge Hellerstein, an Orthodox Jew who has been active on the board of several Jewish organizations, was motivated by \u201ca very high standard of morality and decency.\u201d As a litigator representing banks and large corporations, he said, the judge was willing to tell a bank client being sued by an investor over money losses to reconsider its position. \u201cHe\u2019d say, I can litigate this, and I can fight this, but in fairness, this person was injured,\u201d Mr. Moerdler said. Judge Hellerstein lost several former clients in the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. But legal experts suggest that he has a bigger motivation for championing the ground zero victims: he may see his handling of the 9/11 cases as his legacy. \u201cThis is history for him,\u201d said Arthur Miller, a professor at New York University School of Law who specializes in federal procedure. \u201cThis is an awesome responsibility. He wants to be the person who brought peace to this entire situation. He would not be human if he didn\u2019t feel a personal interest in this.\u201d At the March hearing, Judge Hellerstein called the ground zero cases he had handled his \u201cgreatest challenge.\u201d \u201cThis is different,\u201d he told the lawyers in spurning the settlement terms. \u201cThis is 9/11.\u201d But lawyers who have sparred with Judge Hellerstein suggest that his moral compass and commitment to doing what he thinks is right have sometimes led him to overreach. Just as he rejected the settlement in the workers\u2019 case for giving too little, he has spurned settlements of individual suits filed by survivors of the airline passengers killed on 9/11 for giving too much in comparison with similar cases, some noted. Donald A. Migliori, a lawyer for survivors in airline-related cases whose settlement amounts were reduced, said that such intervention was unusual in a non-class-action suit. \u201cIt\u2019s a very frustrating thing for lawyers,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s guided by a concept of fairness that\u2019s not in the law.\u201d Mr. Migliori said he did not appeal Judge Hellerstein\u2019s stance because his clients wanted to put the litigation behind them. But lawyers for New York City are more determined. They went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to try to challenge Judge Hellerstein\u2019s authority for blocking the settlement. They argue that the judge has no legal basis to try to approve, reject or modify a private, hard-won deal that took about two years to broker and that both sides consider fair. The city was particularly alarmed that Judge Hellerstein was trying to get the city\u2019s insurer to pay the contingency fees for the plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers, which would sharply raise the ultimate cost of the settlement by tens of millions of dollars. And the lawyers for the plaintiffs now face a tougher time trying to sell the settlement to their clients, 95 percent of whom must approve the agreement if it is to take effect. \u201cWe have extracted every penny from the city that we can get,\u201d said Marc J. Bern, one of the lawyers. But now both sides are trying to hammer out modifications to the settlement to try to satisfy the judge and ensure that it will be accepted by most plaintiffs. In advocating for more money, Judge Hellerstein has emerged as their chief protector, some of the 9/11 workers say. \u201cHe\u2019s keeping it fair,\u201d said one plaintiff, Ernest Vallebuona, 45, a retired police detective who developed lymphoma after 9/11. Some plaintiffs disagree with the judge. Joe Greco, 41, a retired police detective who said he needed to use a breathing machine up to five times a day for his asthma, said that he appreciated Judge Hellerstein\u2019s effort to look after his interests but that he wished the judge had not interfered. People struggling with serious illness need to ensure their families\u2019 financial well-being, he explained. They \u201cwant this thing settled,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re on borrowed time right now.\u201d But John Feal, who works as an advocate for the 9/11 workers through his FealGood Foundation , counters that Judge Hellerstein himself has emerged as a ground zero hero. \u201cThe judge is now like Elvis in the 9/11 community,\u201d he said. \u201cFor years these guys have been neglected, and now there\u2019s someone who cares.\u201d", "keyword": "September 11 (2001);Suits and Litigation;Hellerstein Alvin K;World Trade Center (NYC);Decisions and Verdicts;Legal Profession"}
{"id": "ny0073246", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/04/03", "title": "Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of The New York Times", "abstract": "68 YEARS AGO Pin some Peeps on your felt fedora and head to the Avenue \u2014 that\u2019s Fifth Avenue \u2014 on Sunday for the Easter Parade. You might find like-hatted strollers enjoying what might actually be a springlike day. There won\u2019t be as many parading as there once were. The informal fashion show is less of a draw than it was back in, say, 1947, when a front-page article in The New York Times reported that well over a million people \u2014 a record \u2014 watched or participated in the parade. The article noted that the event was something of a return to the gaiety that had attended it before the war: \u201cMost noticeable was the fact that, with wartime restrictions off fashions, the styles yesterday were like the mood of the day, free and easy. For the first time in long years fabric was used plentifully in the long, coachmen-styled jackets flaring gracefully over hips and in the longer skirts.\u201d Nylons were \u201cin blue, black and pastel shades,\u201d the article continued, \u201cand startled eyes saw even one pair of fuchsia stockings.\u201d There was the inevitable anthropomorphizing: \u201cAn ambitious woman dolled up a live bunny in a miniature duplicate of her own flowered hat. Several dogs were doomed to tulle and flowers as frames for their ears.\u201d Here are excerpts from other years\u2019 Easter Parade accounts in The Times, starting with the first article to describe the event in the paper. 1879 \u201cThe beautiful weather of the morning tempted those who had provided themselves with Spring attire to indulge in the luxury of taking part in the annual display, and the clouds which afterward gathered were not sufficiently threatening to reconcile the feminine heart to a disappointment once the feminine mind had been made up.\u201d \u201cBows and plaits, and piping and beads, and laces and fringes, and all the other pretty devices known to the forefathers as furbelows, appeared, tacked on to the skirt in every imaginable spot below the waist, leaving only here and there a glimpse of the material forming the groundwork.\u201d 1887 \u201cEverybody and his cousin were on the pavement yesterday. For was it not Eastertide, Fifth-avenue\u2019s brilliant day of days in all the length of the year!\u201d \u201cIt is a beautiful custom that of the Easter bonnet. It is, in the words of St. Thingam \u00e0 Thingamy, surnamed the Considerate, that when the days of mourning shall have passed the daughters of Eve shall put upon themselves raiment that maketh the hair curl and upon their heads such garniture as wooeth the sunbeam and maketh other women wild.\u201d 1889 \u201cIt was a gay throng, happy in its possessions and easy in its conscience, for the most of it had just been to church, although it seemed to have momentarily forgotten that fact in the excitement of the parade.\u201d", "keyword": "The New York Times;Parade;Easter;Hats;Fashion"}
{"id": "ny0055984", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/09/18", "title": "New \u2018Genius Grant\u2019 Winner Alison Bechdel to Write New Graphic Memoir", "abstract": "The cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel was in a castle in Umbria as part of an artist\u2019s residency in Italy when she learned that she had been selected as one of 21 MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d grant recipients this year. She bought a case of prosecco to share with the other artists in residence. Ms. Bechdel, 54, has even more to celebrate these days. Her 2006 memoir, \u201cFun Home,\u201d which detailed her coming-out story and her life growing up with a closeted gay father, inspired a musical that is headed to Broadway in the spring. And she recently sold her next book, \u201cThe Secret to Superhuman Strength,\u201d to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for publication in 2017. \u201cThe Secret to Superhuman Strength\u201d is Ms. Bechdel\u2019s third graphic memoir and chronicles her decades long obsession with various fitness and exercise fads, including downhill skiing, uphill skiing, rollerblading, martial arts, running, hiking, weight lifting and home workout videos and currently, yoga. The book will also explore the history of American fitness fads, and Ms. Bechdel\u2019s efforts to rekindle her creativity through exercise, and it is shot through with her signature darkness. \u201cAlison Bechdel\u2019s sheer talent \u2014 now I guess we can say \u2018genius\u2019 \u2014 built on her once-strange pursuit of cartooning about lesbian subculture has changed the world just a little bit,\u201d Deanne Urmy, a senior executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement announcing the acquisition. \u201cOr at least the world has changed enough to recognize just how much of the universal there is in Alison\u2019s fierce, close looks at her own family and greater culture and at her own becoming.\u201d", "keyword": "Books;Houghton Mifflin Harcourt;John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation;Alison Bechdel;Fun Home"}
{"id": "ny0164351", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2006/11/01", "title": "Generic Copy of a Blood Thinner Lowers Profit at Sanofi-Aventis", "abstract": "PARIS, Oct. 31 (AP) \u2014 Sanofi-Aventis said Tuesday that its third-quarter profit fell 12 percent, blaming competition from a generic copy of its top-selling blood thinner Plavix and government health spending cuts in France and Germany. The company said net profit fell to 1.7 billion euros ($2.16 billion), or 1.26 euros ($1.60) a share, compared with 1.92 billion euros, or 1.44 euros a share, in the period a year earlier. Sales fell 4 percent, to 6.9 billion euros ($8.77 billion), after a Canadian generic drug maker, Apotex, flooded the market with cheap copies of Plavix in August. Plavix sales rose 2.5 percent, to 543 million euros ($689 million). Analysts had expected Sanofi to report sales of 7.35 billion euros ($9.33 billion). Shares of Sanofi fell 3 percent, to 66.6 euros. Sanofi, which is based in Paris, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, which markets Plavix in the United States, both cut their earnings forecasts on Sept. 1, the day after a judge ordered Apotex to stop selling its Plavix copy, but did not order it to recall any of the product that had already been shipped. Sanofi said then that Apotex might already have sold enough of the cut-price medicine to satisfy demand in the United States through the end of the year.", "keyword": "Sanofi-Aventis;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals);Company Reports;Medicine and Health;Paris (France)"}
{"id": "ny0252734", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/11/14", "title": "Health Law Debate Puts Focus on Limit of Federal Power", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 If the federal government can require people to purchase health insurance , what else can it force them to do? More to the point, what can\u2019t the government compel citizens to do? Those questions have been the toughest ones for the Obama administration\u2019s lawyers to answer in court appearances around the country over the past six months. And they are likely to emerge again if, as expected, the Supreme Court , as early as Monday, agrees to be the final arbiter of the challenge to President Obama \u2019s signature health care initiative. The case focuses on whether Congress overstepped its constitutional authority in enacting parts of the law. Lower courts have reached divergent conclusions. Even judges in lower courts who ultimately voted to uphold the law have homed in on the question of the limits of government power, at times flummoxing Justice Department lawyers. \u201cLet\u2019s go right to what is your most difficult problem,\u201d Judge Laurence H. Silberman , who later voted to uphold the law, told a lawyer at an argument in September before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. \u201cWhat limiting principle do you articulate?\u201d If Congress may require people to purchase health insurance, he asked, what else can it force them to buy? Where do you draw the line? Would it be unconstitutional, he asked, to require people to buy broccoli? \u201cNo,\u201d said the lawyer, Beth S. Brinkmann. \u201cIt depends.\u201d Could people making more than $500,000 be required to buy cars from General Motors to keep it in business? \u201cI would have to know much more about the empirical findings,\u201d she replied. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who ended up in dissent, then jumped in. \u201cHow about mandatory retirement accounts replacing Social Security ?\u201d he asked. \u201cIt would depend,\u201d Ms. Brinkmann replied. Ms. Brinkmann was cut off before she could elaborate on her answers. In other settings, she and other administration lawyers have described what they see as the constitutional limits to government power, though not typically using concrete examples. They have said, for instance, that laws authorized by the Constitution\u2019s commerce clause must be economic in nature, must concern interstate commerce and must address national problems. They have also said that the health care market is unique. And they have suggested that questions about constitutional limits can miss the point. The only question actually before the courts, they said, is whether the particular law under review was within Congress\u2019s authority. Other cases, they said, can be decided as they arise. But there is reason to think that at least some Supreme Court justices will want to hear what a ruling in favor of the health care law implies and what precedent it sets. In 1995, when the court struck down a federal law that prohibited people from carrying firearms in school zones , Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that \u201cwe pause to consider the implications of the government\u2019s arguments\u201d in defending the law \u2014 that stopping activities that could lead to violent crime relates to interstate commerce because it affects \u201cnational productivity.\u201d Under that reasoning, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, \u201cIt is difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power,\u201d adding that \u201cif we were to accept the government\u2019s arguments, we are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without power to regulate.\u201d Chief Justice Rehnquist died in 2005, but three of the justices who joined his majority opinion \u2014 Justices Antonin Scalia , Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas \u2014 are still on the court. The concerns expressed by Chief Justice Rehnquist amount to what lawyers call the slippery slope. Many judges are reluctant to issue rulings without some sense of what their consequences will be in other cases. But defenders of the health care law say that such concerns are not a reason to doubt its validity. \u201cSlippery slope arguments are themselves often slippery,\u201d Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the administration of President Bill Clinton , told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February . He gave an example. \u201cIf it is within the scope of regulating commerce to set a minimum wage,\u201d he said, \u201cone might argue, then Congress could set the minimum wage at $5,000 an hour.\u201d But that would never happen, he said, for practical, political and legal reasons. When a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta , struck down in August the mandate that individuals purchase and maintain health insurance from private companies, slippery slopes were very much on the minds of the judges in the majority. \u201cThe government\u2019s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual\u2019s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life,\u201d Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina and Judge Frank M. Hull wrote. On Tuesday, on the other hand, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law . Judge Silberman, who had grilled Ms. Brinkmann so aggressively, wrote the majority opinion, and his discussion of the limits of Congressional power may have handed the administration a bigger victory than it wanted, because it presumably did not want to win on the grounds that Congress could do anything at all. Judge Silberman said he remained troubled by what he called \u201cthe government\u2019s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting Congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.\u201d Then he adopted a version of Mr. Dellinger\u2019s argument. \u201cThat a direct requirement for most Americans to purchase any product or services seems an intrusive exercise of legislative power,\u201d Judge Silberman wrote, \u201csurely explains why Congress has not used this authority before \u2014 but that seems to us a political judgment rather than a recognition of constitutional limitations.\u201d Judge Silberman said there were Supreme Court decisions on issues like regulating the use of medical marijuana that had endorsed broad Congressional power to legislate in the name of commerce. \u201cIt certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty,\u201d he wrote of the health care law, \u201cbut it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race , that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain , or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family .\u201d In dissent, Judge Kavanaugh praised the majority for its honesty in describing what followed from its ruling. \u201cThe majority opinion here is quite candid \u2014 and accurate,\u201d he wrote, adding: \u201cThe majority opinion\u2019s holding means, for example, that a law replacing Social Security with a system of mandatory private retirement accounts would be constitutional. So would a law mandating that parents purchase private college savings accounts.\u201d Within hours of the decision on Tuesday, opponents of the health care law were issuing statements, and their theme was predictable. \u201cLike the government,\u201d said Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, \u201cthe majority could identify no limit to an unprecedented power of Congress.\u201d", "keyword": "Supreme Court;Barack Obama;Legislation;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;Health Insurance;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0175777", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/10/22", "title": "CNN\u2019s Cooper Is Not Pushing an Airline, Just His Network", "abstract": "New magazine advertisements for Delta Air Lines are meant to promote an in-flight entertainment system that shows live television programs. But the screen depicted in one ad has a big picture of Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, perhaps leading readers to wonder: Is Mr. Cooper endorsing Delta? As it turns out, sticklers for the separation between news and advertising can relax. CNN says it has not changed its policies that prohibit employees from peddling products. (The exception is Larry King, who has long served as a pitchman both on and off CNN, part of Time Warner .) A CNN spokesman, Sal Petruzzi, said the network has always let cable companies, cellphone services and satellite TV and radio providers \u201cuse our talent and programs in ad campaigns that showcase how they distribute programming offered on our networks.\u201d He added: \u201cDelta\u2019s in-flight campaign is another example of one of our distribution partners showcasing our programming.\u201d Other ads in the Delta campaign show the cast of the HBO series \u201cEntourage\u201d to promote the presence on the in-flight system of programs from HBO, also owned by Time Warner. CNN ran into trouble in 1997 when a young correspondent, Jonathan Karl, was featured in a Visa print ad about consumers in Generation X. Although he had received permission from a senior manager, CNN said at the time, his ad work was nevertheless a policy violation. The policy was tightened after the incident, and Visa agreed to stop running the ads. Mr. Karl is none the worse for wear: he is still on television as the senior national security correspondent for ABC.", "keyword": "Cable News Network;Advertising and Marketing;Television;Delta Air Lines Incorporated;Time Warner Inc;Cooper Anderson"}
{"id": "ny0063824", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/01/22", "title": "Vatican Monsignor Suspected of Money Laundering", "abstract": "A Vatican monsignor already on trial for plotting to smuggle $26 million from Switzerland to Italy was arrested Tuesday in a separate case, suspected of using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money. The financial police in Salerno said Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, known as \u201cMonsignor 500\u201d for his purported favored bank notes, had transferred millions in fictitious donations from offshore companies through his accounts at the Vatican\u2019s Institute for Religious Works. Acting on evidence provided by the Vatican bank, the police said, they seized real estate and assets in Italian bank accounts on Tuesday, including Monsignor Scarano\u2019s luxurious Salerno apartment. Police said that in all, 52 people were under investigation. Monsignor Scarano\u2019s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client had merely taken donations from people he thought were acting in good faith to fund a home for the terminally ill. He conceded, however, that Monsignor Scarano had used the money to pay off a mortgage.", "keyword": "Nunzio Scarano;Vatican Bank;Catholic Church;Money laundering"}
{"id": "ny0222740", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2010/11/29", "title": "Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds", "abstract": "When a product manager at Google told his bosses this year that he was quitting to take a job at Facebook, they offered him a large raise. When he said it was not about the money, they told him he could have a promotion, work in a different area or even start his own company inside Google. He turned down all the inducements and joined Google\u2019s newest rival. \u201cGoogle\u2019s gotten to be a lot bigger and slower-moving of a company,\u201d said the former manager, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. \u201cAt Facebook, I could see how quickly I could get things done compared to Google.\u201d Google, which only 12 years ago was a scrappy start-up in a garage, now finds itself viewed in Silicon Valley as the big, lumbering incumbent. Inside the company some of its best engineers are chafing under the growing bureaucracy and are leaving to start or work at smaller, nimbler companies. Recent departures include low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers like Lars Rasmussen, who helped create Google Maps and Wave before he left for Facebook, and Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob who was vice president for mobile ads at Google and is now looking for his next project. At least 142 of Facebook\u2019s employees came from Google. Corporate sclerosis is a problem for all companies as they grow. But a hardening of the bureaucracy and a slower pace of work is even more perceptible in Silicon Valley, where companies grow at Internet speed and pride themselves on constant innovation \u2014 and where the most talented people are often those with the most entrepreneurial drive. Much of Silicon Valley\u2019s innovation comes about as engineers leave companies to start their own. For Google, which in five years has grown to 23,000 employees from 5,000 and to $23.7 billion in revenue from $3.2 billion, the risk is that it will miss the best people and the next great idea. \u201cIt\u2019s a short step from scale to sclerosis,\u201d said Daniel H. Pink, an author and analyst on the workplace. \u201cIt becomes a more acute problem in Silicon Valley, where in a couple years, you could have some competitor in a garage ready to put you out entirely.\u201d Google\u2019s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, says that people who think Google faces brain drain are \u201cfundamentally wrong.\u201d The company\u2019s attrition rate for people it wished would stay has been constant for seven years, he said. Nevertheless, Google\u2019s maturation worries him. \u201cThere was a time when three people at Google could build a world-class product and deliver it, and it is gone,\u201d Mr. Schmidt said. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s absolutely harder to get things out the door. That\u2019s probably our biggest strategic issue.\u201d As a result, Google is taking aggressive steps to retain employees, particularly those with start-up ambitions. Google has given several engineers who said they were leaving to start new companies the chance to start them within Google. They work independently and can recruit other engineers and use Google\u2019s resources, like its code base and servers, according to half a dozen employees. Google Wave, a way for people to work together online, was one example. The engineering team, based in Sydney, Australia, worked independently and got equity in the project, according to three people briefed on the agreement. But Google shut down Wave this year, and Mr. Rasmussen, who led the project, quit for Facebook soon after. Google is considering opening a start-up incubator inside the company, according to two people briefed on the plans. Other big companies have made similar attempts with varying success. Cisco Systems\u2019s program has given birth to new businesses like TelePresence, a videoconferencing service, but Yahoo\u2019s incubator was shut down in 2008, a year and a half after it started. From the beginning, Google\u2019s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have tried to prevent atrophy. That is one reason Google gives everyone time \u2014 called 20 percent time at the company \u2014 to work on their own projects. The company tries to limit groups of engineers working on projects to 10. But in reality, engineering groups quickly swell to 20 or even 40, several Google product managers said. And new products created during 20 percent time are less likely to get anywhere these days. Popular Google products like Gmail grew out of 20 percent time, for instance. But engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones, like the terrain layer on Google Maps. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of these cool features that are very hidden, and a lot of people worked very hard on them and they were kind of sad that they spent a year of their life on something that gets 0.1 percent usage,\u201d said another product manager who is considering leaving for a start-up. Part of Google\u2019s problem is that the best engineers are often the ones with the most entrepreneurial thirst. Google loaded up on that type in its early hiring. Some of those go-getters now want to leave as they become frustrated with the processes and procedures. Josh McFarland, a former Google product manager who left last year and started TellApart, which helps retailers advertise online, said he knew it was time to leave as the number of people he had to copy on e-mail messages ballooned. \u201cI think that there is a class of person who is able to walk away from this relatively easy, consistent money because they are so dissatisfied with the processes of a big company,\u201d he said. For others, it is about making more money elsewhere. Start-ups have a riskier and potentially more rewarding lure: shares in a company before an initial public offering. Google, which has always been generous with salary, stock options and benefits like massages, dry cleaning and free food, is going a step further to keep employees happy. This month, Google gave every employee a raise of 10 percent or more. The motivation was, in part, the \u201cwar for talent,\u201d Mr. Schmidt said. People who have other job offers have been persuaded to stay with seven-figure bonuses. Google says 80 percent of people who get a counteroffer stay put. Of those who leave, employees going to Facebook get the most attention. According to r\u00e9sum\u00e9s posted on LinkedIn, 142 of Facebook\u2019s 1,700 employees came from Google. Mr. Schmidt dismissed the idea that Facebook was poaching Google\u2019s best people, saying, \u201cWe hire more people in a week than go to Facebook in its lifetime.\u201d Despite Google\u2019s growing pains, it remains remarkably innovative when it wants to be. Last month, for instance, it unveiled robotic cars that drive themselves. And like many big companies, Google has been acquiring new technologies, like Android, instead of inventing them. While he worries about the consequences of becoming a big company, \u201cPeople are dying to come here and they\u2019re staying,\u201d Mr. Schmidt said. \u201cSo I guess they\u2019re putting up with the complexity.\u201d", "keyword": "Google Inc;Start-ups;Engineering and Engineers;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0175720", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2007/10/14", "title": "Giants Are Finding That Kickoff Coverage Has Some Holes in It", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Oct. 12 \u2014 If football really boils down to a battle of field position, the Giants seem to have surrendered the equivalent of Mount Everest. They rank second to last in the N.F.L. in kickoff coverage, allowing the opposition\u2019s offense to start, on average, at the 32-yard line. \u201cIt has to stop,\u201d safety Gibril Wilson, a regular on special teams, said Friday. \u201cThe bleeding has to stop this week.\u201d The best team in the N.F.L. is the Minnesota Vikings, who usually stop their opponents at the 21-yard line on kickoffs. Lawrence Tynes has kicked off 27 times this season. So if the Giants had somehow managed to save 11 more yards on each kickoff, they would have backed up their opponents by a combined 297 yards. There is no telling how many points that may have prevented. So, what is wrong when the Giants kick off? There appear to be several factors, any one of which can cause a breakdown and give the other team\u2019s offense a shorter field. Sometimes the offense does not even take the field. In the third quarter last Sunday against the Jets, Tynes kicked to Leon Washington, who scampered 98 yards for a touchdown. \u201cOh man, every aspect of our coverage needs improvement, starting with me,\u201d Tynes said. \u201cI got to be more consistent with hang time and direction. \u201cAnd obviously, we got to run down field and make tackles. There\u2019s really not one thing that sticks out.\u201d Tynes said he strived for a hang time of four seconds. His ideal kick will land near the 5 and on or outside of the numbers on the field. The Giants will sometimes kick up the middle if the other team is having success along the sidelines, Tynes said. But wouldn\u2019t the problems be eliminated if he kicked the ball out of the end zone each time? \u201cThat\u2019s impossible,\u201d Tynes said. \u201cThere\u2019s no one in the world that can do that.\u201d If Tynes does his job, the challenges essentially just begin. The other special-teamers must sprint down the field, absorb or avoid blocks and attempt to tackle the ball carrier, who is often the fastest player on the field. Kickoffs usually appear to be the most chaotic plays during a game. Washington, who leads the league in kickoff returns with a 36.2-yard average, had a running start on his touchdown return Sunday, said Reggie Torbor, a backup linebacker who plays on special teams. The Giants angled their coverage in a manner that enticed Washington to run up the middle of the field. But no one came close to making a solid tackle. \u201cThe guys who were being single-blocked didn\u2019t get off the blocks,\u201d Torbor said. \u201cAnd the guys who ran into their wedge didn\u2019t destroy. So once he came through and the hole opened up, he shot through it. As simple as that.\u201d Torbor added that the toughest aspects of kickoff coverage were bouncing off blocks and not running out of position, which creates holes. Under the guidance of their first-year special-teams coordinator, Tom Quinn, the Giants regularly practice their kickoff coverage. But several players said it was difficult to duplicate the speed and force they see on game day. The next test will come Monday night, when the Giants face the Falcons in Atlanta. The Falcons\u2019 kickoff returner, Jerious Norwood, leads the National Football Conference with a 30.8-yard average. \u201cVery fast,\u201d David Tyree, an All-Pro special-teams specialist, said, referring to Norwood. \u201cHe\u2019s a straight-line runner. That\u2019s how it is week in and week out. This is the N.F.L., so you got to expect people to do some positive things on their side.\u201d There is nothing more deflating, Tyree said, than watching the offense score a touchdown, then give points back on the ensuing kickoff. But Tyree noted that the news on kickoffs was not all bad. Tyree and Torbor are among a core group of special-teamers who have excelled when the Giants are on the receiving end of kickoffs. The Giants rank 12th in the N.F.L., getting the ball, on average, to the 28. Does that take the sting out of being ranked so low in kickoff coverage? \u201cNo,\u201d Tyree said. \u201cWe\u2019ve just been getting beat. It\u2019s nothing I\u2019ve been a part of since I\u2019ve been here. And it\u2019s nothing I\u2019m looking forward to getting used to. So we got to journey back.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Giants;Football;Wilson Gibril;Tyree David;Tynes Lawrence"}
{"id": "ny0296834", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/12/14", "title": "For China\u2019s State Media, Trump Victory Can\u2019t Cure \u2018American Disease\u2019", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Donald J. Trump isn\u2019t Mr. Popular in Beijing lately. But China\u2019s ruling elite seems to be consoling itself with the idea that the American president-elect will take charge of a country staggering into decline and disunion. A flow of articles in Communist Party publications in recent weeks has argued that the United States\u2019 tumultuous past year showed it to be dysfunctional and dissolute, and blighted by corruption, social and political polarization, reckless debt and an enfeebled news media. \u201cCan an American Dream sick with the American Disease last for long?\u201d read a headline in the latest issue of Red Flag Papers, a party journal that has enjoyed renewed prominence in recent years. \u201cAmerica\u2019s political problems have long been the instigator of its other problems,\u201d said the accompanying essay, by a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , one of the government\u2019s main think tanks. \u201cThe clear and unequivocal slide in the public\u2019s belief in the \u2018American dream\u2019 directly reflects their lack of optimism in the country\u2019s future and their own prospects,\u201d wrote the researcher, Liu Weidong. \u201cThe American political system that once was their greatest pride has constantly proven powerless to restrain the despicable conduct of incompetent politicians.\u201d Some of the comments appeared before Mr. Trump irked the Chinese government by having a phone call with Taiwan\u2019s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and then throwing into doubt his adherence to the longstanding One China policy. The Chinese government says that policy, which keeps Taiwan diplomatically isolated, is a bedrock of relations with Washington. A spokesman for the Chinese government\u2019s Taiwan Affairs Office reinforced that warning on Wednesday. \u201cIf this basis suffers from meddling and destruction, then the healthy and stable development of Sino-American relations is out of the question, and the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait will suffer a serious impact,\u201d the spokesman, An Fengshan, told a news conference in Beijing. The strait is the body of water between Taiwan and mainland China. Dim views of America\u2019s prospects are, of course, not only found in China. The rancorous election and Mr. Trump\u2019s victory have stirred up plenty of gloomy commentary from critics on the left and the right in the United States as well as around the world. And even before Mr. Trump\u2019s victory, the Chinese state news media used the election to argue that the United States was a political mess that showed why one-party rule was right for China. But these postelection jeremiads suggest that researchers and ideologues who shape and reflect official Chinese views of the United States put little store in Mr. Trump\u2019s vow to \u201cmake America great again.\u201d In China, there has for years been debate between researchers who see the United States as in decline and those who believe that the country\u2019s strength and capacity for renewal remain formidable. Image A Chinese magazine featuring Mr. Trump at a Shanghai newsstand on Wednesday. Credit Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The first view is more prevalent now, especially as President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, has focused intensely on what he sees as the threat from Western liberal values. \u201cMainstream Chinese views of the United States have shifted from admiration to doubt, especially after the financial crisis, and now increasingly to rejection of its values,\u201d Shi Yinhong , the director of the Center for American Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview. \u201cAmong elite scholars, fewer and fewer voice awe of the United States,\u201d Mr. Shi said. \u201cTrump\u2019s victory, like \u2018Brexit,\u2019 is seen as an opportunity for the official media to teach the public they have no reason to envy the West.\u201d People\u2019s Daily, the chief newspaper of the Communist Party, has for the past three Sundays devoted one of its broadsheet pages to dissecting America\u2019s maladies. \u201cCurrently, America is facing major domestic reforms that require someone who is farsighted and shrewd,\u201d said an article in the first part of the series, which was published in late November along with three other articles on the same theme. \u201cIs Trump the man for this? People have different views,\u201d said the writer, Ye Zicheng , a professor at Peking University . \u201cMany Americans worry whether their leader is up to the task. If not, doesn\u2019t that mean that America\u2019s domestic political decline will worsen?\u201d The second part of the series excoriated the American news media, including The New York Times, for failing to anticipate and explain Mr. Trump\u2019s rise, especially among blue-collar voters. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for such a media to reflect the realities of America,\u201d read one commentary in that issue. \u201cHow much it can contribute to the development of American democracy is also doubtful.\u201d The latest in the series argued that Mr. Trump\u2019s policies would take the United States\u2019 already dangerous budget deficit to even more perilous heights. \u201cIt will be hard to avoid a snowballing increase in debt levels,\u201d one of the articles said. \u201cWithout doubt, the American government\u2019s debt situation is unsustainable.\u201d There is some irony in all this \u2014 not least, in a heavily censored party-run paper that faithfully echoes official views scolding the American news media for failing to take on the powerful. China\u2019s own problems with debt have also raised alarm with investors, and Mr. Xi\u2019s crackdown on official corruption has revealed levels of plunder that have no equivalent in Washington. And while Chinese politicians like to criticize the United States, they also often send their children there to study. Mr. Xi\u2019s own daughter, for example, attended Harvard. How long and intensely the criticism persists will depend on Mr. Trump\u2019s policies after he takes office, said Qiao Mu, a liberal commentator and researcher at Beijing Foreign Studies University . \u201cThey always have two faces. One is talking up the friendship between China and the United States, but there is also the criticism and suspicion of America and its political system,\u201d Mr. Qiao said. \u201cWhen a leader is preparing to visit, there\u2019ll always be upbeat reports.\u201d", "keyword": "US Politics;Communist Party of China;Donald Trump;Xi Jinping;China;US;US Foreign Policy"}
{"id": "ny0231301", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2010/09/06", "title": "Jason Day Leads Deutsche Bank by a Stroke", "abstract": "NORTON, Mass. \u2014 The way the roars reverberated through the trees and across the golf course at T.P.C. Boston on Sunday, it almost sounded as if Tom Brady and the Patriots were pouring on the points up the road in Foxborough. But all this exuberance was generated by a day of chip-ins, hole-outs, back-nine 30s, eagles and double eagles at the Deutsche Bank Championship \u2014 where Jason Day, Brandt Snedeker, Luke Donald, Steve Stricker, Phil Mickelson and a host of others put on an extraordinary show in the PGA Tour\u2019s FedEx Cup playoffs. When Snedeker holed the last pitch for an improbable par and a 67 from off the green at the 18th and Day holed the last putt for birdie and a 66 to tie the tournament 54-hole scoring record of 17-under-par 196, that one stroke separated the pair who had come into the day tied for the lead. Donald (66) was a stroke further back at 198. Day, a 22-year-old Australian, had only one bogey and a chance to eagle the 18th from 25 feet above the hole. Snedeker, who hit his second shot into a hazard at the par-5 18th and chunked his fourth from short of the green, staved off bogey with a 40-foot chip for par that ignited a roar from the grandstand and a smile from Day. \u201cI was thinking he was going to just get up and down and make bogey, and I was going to make an eagle or birdie,\u201d Day said. \u201cThat would have gave me a nice little cushion going into tomorrow. But Brandt is a competitor, and he stuck it out until the end and made a really good par save. I\u2019m going to look forward to tomorrow. It\u2019s going to be really, really enjoyable.\u201d It should be that, and for more than just the final pairing. Stricker, who shot a 67 in his fourth straight round without a bogey dating to the Barclays, can supplant Tiger Woods as the No. 1 golfer in the world rankings if he wins and Mickelson finishes out of the top three. Mickelson shot a 67 and is five strokes back. \u201cI\u2019m going to have to shoot something really low, I imagine, to catch the leaders,\u201d Stricker said. \u201cBut it\u2019ll be fun to try, and we should have a good day.\u201d Mickelson can also knock Woods from the top spot he has occupied for 273 weeks by winning, finishing second (with Woods out of the top three) or fourth, if Stricker does not win and Woods \u2014 who shot a 69 and was tied for 23rd \u2014 finishes out of the top 24. A right-hander who plays golf left-handed and is sometimes known as Phil the Thrill, Mickelson gave the crowd plenty of what it came to see. In one highlight, he hit the flagstick on his approach from 134 yards at the 15th hole, and after the ball bounced back 46 feet from the cup, he drained a birdie chip from off the green. His day was set up by his driver, which he hit straight \u2014 12 of 14 fairways \u2014 and long, with half his tee shots exceeding 300 yards. When Mickelson drives the ball in the fairway with regularity, he is a threat to win. As for the race for No. 1, this is his best chance to grab it since the W.G.C.-Bridgestone last month, where he closed with a 78. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to getting in the hunt tomorrow and seeing if I can get off to a good start and make some birdies and move up that leader board,\u201d he said. Mickelson saw how fast that can happen here. Vijay Singh, playing in the twosome ahead of Mickelson on Sunday, took aim at the back pin position at No. 2, a 567-yard, par-5 playing dead downwind. After a drive of 337 yards, Singh had 230 remaining and hit a 5-iron on the front of the green. His ball rolled up the shelf, hit the middle of the flagstick and went in for golf\u2019s rara avis, the double eagle. It was that kind of day, a setup for a finish in which anything can happen.", "keyword": "Golf;Deutsche Bank Championship;Day Jason;Snedeker Brandt"}
{"id": "ny0030280", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/06/28", "title": "U.S. Unveils Gold Cup Roster", "abstract": "Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach of the United States national soccer team, released his 23-man roster Thursday for next month\u2019s Concacaf Gold Cup tournament. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a roster where you have to go player by player and evaluate each situation to see where they are at and see how strong they are, but we are excited about a roster for the Gold Cup that really has a shot of winning it,\u201d Klinsmann said in a statement. \u201cThis tournament gives us a huge opportunity to see where a lot of the players are. Even though we don\u2019t have the European-based players that were part of our World Cup qualifying process, we put together the strongest team possible for this huge opportunity at the Gold Cup.\u201d Perhaps the most notable player on the roster is Landon Donovan, 31, who has not played for Klinsmann\u2019s \u201cA\u201d team since August 2012 after taking a sabbatical from soccer over the winter. Donovan has played in 28 Gold Cup games and scored 13 goals, both national team records. Another national team veteran, Oguchi Onyewu, will return for the first time since June 2012. Thirteen on the roster play in leagues outside the United States that are on summer breaks. Six of those \u2014 DaMarcus Beasley, Edgar Castillo, Joe Corona, Herculez Gomez, Michael Orozco Fiscal and Jose Torres \u2014 play in Mexico. Tijuana sends three players to the United States team, as does Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer. Two M.L.S. players \u2014 defender Corey Ashe and striker Jack McInerney \u2014 are seeking their first national team cap. McInerney is the league\u2019s leading goal scorer with 10 goals. All of the tournament\u2019s first-round games are part of doubleheaders. The same goes for the quarterfinals (in Atlanta and Baltimore) and the semifinals (in Arlington, Tex.). The final is scheduled to be played at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 28. The United States begins play in the Gold Cup with a game against Belize in Portland, Ore., on July 9. It will then play Cuba in Sandy, Utah, on July 13 and close out the first round against Costa Rica in East Hartford, Conn., on July 16. If the United States finishes first or second in Group C, it will advance to the quarterfinals at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. Mexico, which won the 2011 Gold Cup, returned recently from the Confederations Cup in Brazil, where it represented Concacaf. Now, however, the sport\u2019s regional governing body has changed the format. The winners of the 2013 and 2015 tournament will engage in a playoff for the right to represent Concacaf in the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia. The roster (M.L.S. unless otherwise noted): Goalkeepers Bill Hamid (D.C. United), Sean Johnson (Chicago), Nick Rimando (Real Salt Lake) Defenders Corey Ashe (Houston), DaMarcus Beasley (Puebla/Mexico), Tony Beltran (Real Salt Lake), Edgar Castillo (Tijuana/Mexico), Clarence Goodson (Brondby/Denmark), Oguchi Onyewu (Malaga/Spain), Michael Orozco Fiscal (Puebla/Mexico), Michael Parkhurst (Augsburg/Germany) Midfielders Kyle Beckerman (Real Salt Lake), Alejandro Bedoya (Helsinborg/Sweden), Joe Corona (Tijuana/Mexico), Mix Diskerud (Rosenborg/Norway), Joshua Gatt (Molde/Norway), Stuart Holden (Bolton), Jose Torres (Tigres/Mexico) Forwards Will Bruin (Houston), Landon Donovan (Los Angeles), Herculez Gomez (Tijuana/Mexico), Jack McInerney (Philadelphia), Chris Wondolowski (San Jose).", "keyword": "Soccer;CONCACAF Gold Cup;US Men's Soccer Team;Landon Donovan;Jurgen Klinsmann;Jack McInerney"}
{"id": "ny0012554", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/11/29", "title": "Flynn\u2019s Encore Features Little to Applaud", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 To most of the N.F.L., Matt Flynn is just another journeyman quarterback, moving from team to team, starting a game here and there. His name hardly signals fear. The thought that Flynn would be at the helm of the Green Bay Packers for a crucial Thanksgiving game at the Lions, however, sent an extra chill through Detroit in recent days. After all, Flynn was transcendent in a spot start against the Lions in the final game of the 2011 regular season, carving out a place in the Packers\u2019 record book alongside superstars like Aaron Rodgers, Brett Favre and Bart Starr by throwing for franchise bests of 480 yards and 6 touchdowns. On Thursday, the Lions quickly put to rest any hopes that Flynn, starting this time because of an injury to Rodgers, would have a magical encore. By game\u2019s end, Flynn\u2019s ugly statistical line included no touchdowns, two fumbles, an interception and seven sacks, including one for a safety late in the third quarter. The Lions chased and harassed Flynn to the point that he said he was \u201cembarrassed,\u201d and his career day appeared only a distant memory. \u201cThat game a couple years ago, that was just one of those days where everything was working, and we were hitting on everything,\u201d Flynn said after the Packers\u2019 40-10 loss Thursday. \u201cI know, personally, that not every game is going to be like that.\u201d Flynn\u2019s inability to recreate his stellar performance was quite a relief for the Lions, who won their first Thanksgiving game in a decade \u2014 a key victory in the N.F.C. North race. Lions fans were particularly concerned about Flynn, debating on Detroit sports radio shows whether he would strike again. After the game, Flynn spoke about how he knew this time around would be different. \u201cI wasn\u2019t trying to go out there and duplicate anything,\u201d he said. Much has happened for Flynn, 28, since his record-setting performance nearly two years ago. In that game, Flynn started in place of Rodgers as the Packers rested their starters before the playoffs. Green Bay lost its first playoff game to the Giants, and the Seattle Seahawks signed Flynn, who had backed up Rodgers for four years, to a three-year contract that March worth about $25 million, positioning him to be a starter for the first time in his career. Flynn\u2019s effort against Detroit was widely credited as one of the reasons he got that payday. Flynn, though, lost Seattle\u2019s starting job in training camp to a rookie, Russell Wilson. Flynn did not play a snap until Week 14, when he came in for mop-up duty during a 58-0 blowout of the Arizona Cardinals. With Russell entrenched as the Seahawks\u2019 starter, Flynn was traded in the off-season to the Oakland Raiders, with whom he again competed for \u2014 and lost out on \u2014 a chance to be the starter. Flynn started one game for Oakland, in Week 4, in place of the injured Terrelle Pryor, losing two fumbles and throwing an interception as the Raiders lost to the Washington Redskins, 24-14. Flynn ended up being cut by the Raiders and signing with Buffalo, where he briefly sat on the bench before being released again. With the 2013 season slipping away from him, Flynn returned to the Packers, his old team, in early November. The Packers desperately needed quarterback options after injuries sidelined Rodgers and his backup, Seneca Wallace. Flynn was expected to back up Scott Tolzien, a third-year player who had not taken a snap in a regular-season game until a couple of weeks ago. But Tolzien struggled in his second start, against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, with the Packers falling behind, 20-7. That is when Flynn got the call. Away from the Packers for a season and a half, Flynn seemed more at ease with the offense, leading Green Bay back and forcing overtime and then a tie. His stat line included 21 completions, 218 passing yards and a touchdown \u2014 not record-shattering numbers, but good enough for the Packers to make him the starter for the key Thanksgiving game. All of that set up another big, but improbable, moment for Flynn, this time at Detroit instead of at home. This time, he said, he knew that he would face a \u201cdifferent defense\u201d and that he just had to try to execute the offense. \u201cI did a pretty poor job of that,\u201d he said after the loss. Flynn\u2019s coach, Mike McCarthy, stuck with him throughout the game, even as his offense recorded only seven first downs and 126 net yards. It was unclear whether Flynn would return to the bench on Dec. 8, when the Packers host the Atlanta Falcons, but McCarthy was not overly critical after the game. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just one person\u2019s problem today,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cThey dared us to throw the football at them. We tried, and they won.\u201d", "keyword": "Football;Packers;Matt Flynn;Detroit Lions"}
{"id": "ny0093829", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/08/22", "title": "Escaping a Meeting With the Indians\u2019 Ace, the Yankees Can\u2019t Take Advantage", "abstract": "Masahiro Tanaka is not recognized as a superstitious pitcher. There is no rabbit\u2019s foot or unusual talisman in his locker. Unlike some players, he freely walks on the first-base line when entering and exiting an inning. Perhaps a little luck was what he needed on Friday night as the Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians, 7-3, at Yankee Stadium. The loss dropped the Yankees to 1-4 this season against the Indians, who entered the day in last place in the American League Central. \u201cThey\u2019ve given us trouble,\u201d Manager Joe Girardi said. \u201cThe one thing about baseball is, I\u2019ve said it doesn\u2019t always make sense.\u201d Image The Yankees\u2019 Brendan Ryan forced out the Indians\u2019 Yan Gomes at second base and threw to first to complete a double play in the second inning. Credit Andy Marlin/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Even though they will not face the reigning A.L. Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber this weekend, the Yankee will have dealt with a collection of Indians starters with some of the most vibrant young arms in the majors. And with their defense lapsing, an Indians starter stymied the Yankees for a second straight game. Carlos Carrasco held the Yankees to one run and five hits, striking out 11 over six and two-thirds innings. In his two previous outings in the Bronx \u2014 both victories \u2014 Carrasco combined for 12 scoreless innings and 11 strikeouts. He began the day \u2014 along with Kluber and Saturday\u2019s scheduled starter Danny Salazar \u2014 ranked in the top 10 in a bevy of pitching categories. \u201cHe was extremely tough on us,\u201d Girardi said. Tanaka kept the Yankees in the game early. After an eight-pitch first inning, Tanaka skated past trouble in the second. With two runners on, Tanaka snagged a scorching one-hopper off the bat of Abraham Almonte to turn a double play. But the breaks began to shift toward the Indians in the third. With two outs and Jose Ramirez on third base by way of a triple, Francisco Lindor sent a 2-2 pitch just past the glove of third baseman Chase Headley and into left for a single. The Yankees scratched out a run to tie the game in the fourth on a single by Greg Bird, but a matter of inches once again put Tanaka in a deficit in the fifth. Almonte led off with another comebacker to Tanaka, but this time the ball deflected off his glove. Shortstop Brendan Ryan barehanded the ball, but his throw to first was late. Tanaka tried to work his way out the jam, notching two outs and allowing only one base runner, before Lindor stepped to the plate. Tanaka appeared to be out of the inning when Lindor hit a soft grounder to Ryan, but he bobbled the ball transferring it from his glove to his throwing hand. As Ryan looked up to the sky in disbelief, Almonte scored. Girardi said it was a play Ryan would normally make 99 times out of 100. \u201cI didn\u2019t really want to look at it, I was too upset,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cI\u2019m not really sure what to say. Probably the easiest play you could possibly have and it cost us a run.\u201d It got worse for Tanaka an inning later. Leading off, Carlos Santana fouled off a 3-1 pitch behind the plate. Catcher Brian McCann gave chase, reaching over the wall just right of the Indians dugout, only to have the ball pop out of his mitt and roll into the stands. On the next pitch, Santana homered to right field for a 3-1 lead. \u201cErrors are obviously part of the game,\u201d Tanaka said through an interpreter. \u201cThey\u2019ve been playing great defense all throughout the season. Plus, if I had been throwing the ball better, that maybe would not have happened. It\u2019s part of the game.\u201d One reason for the Indians\u2019 strong starting pitching but less than stellar record is their bullpen performance this season. Once Carrasco exited, the Yankees almost overcame a three-run deficit. In the eighth, with one run in and the Yankees mounting a rally with runners on first and second, Bird hit a slow grounder to second base where Ramirez lifted his glove a split second too soon, allowing the ball to roll into right field and bring home another run. Jacoby Ellsbury walked to load the bases, but Stephen Drew flew out to left field to end the threat and the Indians tacked on three insurance runs in the ninth. INSIDE PITCH MICHAEL PINEDA threw 62 pitches for Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in his second rehab start since going on the disabled list on July 30 with a right flexor forearm muscle strain. Pineda lasted four and two-thirds innings, allowing one run on three hits with three strikeouts.", "keyword": "Baseball;Masahiro Tanaka;Cleveland Indians;Yankees"}
{"id": "ny0038170", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/03/25", "title": "Taiwan Stands Behind Use of Force Against Protesters", "abstract": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Taiwan\u2019s prime minister said on Monday that the government had been justified in using force to remove demonstrators from the cabinet building earlier in the day, as students continued to occupy the nearby legislature in a protest against a trade bill with China. \u201cWhat happened yesterday wasn\u2019t police suppressing a street march,\u201d Prime Minister Jiang Yi-huah said. \u201cIt was protesters breaking into the Executive Yuan, trying to occupy this building and paralyze our administrative workings,\u201d he added, referring to the cabinet building. At least 174 people, including 119 police officers, were wounded as the police wielded wooden clubs and later used water trucks to block the growing protest. In a statement posted online, the protesters who have occupied the legislature, or Legislative Yuan, since last week said that they \u201cstrongly condemn the violence against the unarmed, weaponless students.\u201d Mr. Jiang said that 61 people were arrested when the police cleared the building Monday morning, and that 35 of them faced possible prosecution. The government faces broadening concerns, as some student groups have now called for a work and school strike across this self-governed island of 23 million to allow more to attend the demonstrations in Taipei, the capital. Video Taiwanese riot police used water cannons on protesters in Taipei as demonstrations continued against a controversial trade pact with mainland China. Credit Credit Stringer/Taiwan/Reuters In an hourlong news conference on Monday at the Executive Yuan, just hours after it had been cleared of demonstrators, Mr. Jiang urged students not to push for a strike. \u201cThe nature of this matter is that all levels of society have different views as to the signing of the service trade agreement, but that is no reason to use as a pretext for a national work and school strike,\u201d he said. The China trade bill, which would allow cross-strait investment on dozens of service trades ranging from banking to funeral parlors, has touched deep roots of concern, including Taiwan\u2019s own history of authoritarian rule and its uneasy relationship with China, an emerging giant that considers the island part of its own territory that must eventually be reunited. While many of the student demonstrators opposed the deal outright, others said they supported lowering trade barriers on some industries. Their most fundamental objection, they said, was to the way the deal was moved through Taiwan\u2019s legislature. Members of Kuomintang, the governing party, forced the motion through to the legislative floor without a promised item-by-item review. The opposition Democratic Progressive Party cried foul. Many demonstrators have described the moves by the Kuomintang as \u201cauthoritarian,\u201d a pointed reference to the party\u2019s all-powerful role in Taiwan before democratization in the 1980s and \u201990s. \u201cSpread propaganda and ignore the opinion of the public, this is neither democracy nor rule of law,\u201d a student leader, Lin Fei-fan, chanted from the rostrum of the occupied legislature on Sunday. The Kuomintang holds a comfortable margin in the legislature, meaning it can eventually ratify the trade pact, which was signed by semiofficial organizations representing Taiwan and China last June. Image Students in Taipei, Taiwan, opposed to a government trade deal with China resumed their protest on Monday, a day after a clash with riot police officers erupted at the Executive Yuan. Credit Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images \u201cWhat the government has been doing is trying to play this as low-profile as possible,\u201d said Lin Jih-wen, a political science research fellow at Academia Sinica , a state-funded research institution in Taipei. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t want society to discuss this and wanted to just pass this in a short period of time. That exposed not only the outrage of the students but also the general public.\u201d President Ma Ying-jeou, who has made closer relations with China a crucial goal, said the accord was necessary for Taiwan to maintain its economic competitiveness. He said that without this pact, which was a follow-up agreement to the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between the two sides, Taiwan will be unable to pursue agreements with other countries and trade organizations, like the United States-led Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trade between China and Taiwan has rapidly expanded during Mr. Ma\u2019s six years in office, nearly doubling to reach $197 billion last year. But some of the debate over the trade pact revolves around concerns that China may use economics to further its claims to Taiwan. \u201cSovereignty lurks behind this at all times,\u201d said Titus C. Chen, an associate research fellow at the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University in Taipei. \u201cIt\u2019s a unique Taiwan concern. I think this service agreement is just one more building block for President Ma to inch toward a peace agreement or fundamental relations with China.\u201d The students occupying the legislature said they will continue their protest until the trade bill is returned to committee for an itemized review, and they have asked for passage of a law that will allow for closer scrutiny of agreements with China. Unlike the protest in the Executive Yuan, the government has expressed a willingness to tolerate the occupation of the legislature for the time being. \u201cThe Legislative Yuan is a place for the people\u2019s representatives to discuss laws and governmental affairs, and sometimes, because there isn\u2019t consensus, things stop for several days,\u201d Mr. Jiang said.", "keyword": "Taipei;China;Kuomintang,Chinese Nationalist Party;Taiwan"}
{"id": "ny0149709", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/09/08", "title": "Minutes In, Brady\u2019s Season Is in Jeopardy", "abstract": "FOXBOROUGH, Mass. \u2014 Although the possibility of quarterback Tom Brady \u2019s being injured has hung over the New England Patriots since the Super Bowl , the worst of the Patriots\u2019 fears appeared to be realized Sunday after Brady left the season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs with a knee injury that will probably end his season. Brady was knocked from the game in the first quarter after an awkward hit by Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard, a blow that made the Patriots\u2019 17-10 victory seem irrelevant. Officially, the Patriots had no statement. But according to a person who was briefed on the injury, it is a major ligament injury that jeopardizes the season for Brady. The Patriots are apparently holding out hope that further tests will reveal something less severe and that Brady may be able to return before the season ends. After the game, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick claimed he knew nothing, including where Brady was or who was evaluating him. \u201cWe\u2019ll see what happens,\u201d Belichick said. \u201cI am not sure what we are dealing with yet.\u201d The Patriots will turn to the little-used Matt Cassel as their starter \u2014 he played well enough for the Patriots to hold off the Chiefs \u2014 but will clearly be in the market for veteran help because the team\u2019s third-string quarterback, Kevin O\u2019Connell, is a rookie. They could pursue the recently retired Daunte Culpepper, whose best seasons were as Randy Moss\u2019s quarterback in Minnesota, or the 44-year-old Vinny Testaverde, who played for Carolina last season and the Patriots in 2006. Also in the market for a job is Chris Simms, who was released by Tampa Bay on Aug. 30. The injury came on a day that was supposed to answer all the questions about the mysterious right ankle injury that hung over the Super Bowl loss to the Giants at the end of last season. That injury kept Brady out for all four preseason games. But on the second drive of the game, Pollard lunged at Brady while he was releasing a pass and caught Brady\u2019s left leg extended and planted. Brady limped off the field to an uncertain future \u2014 for him and for the Patriots. \u201cTom being who he is, the competitor it is, it hurts, to be honest with you,\u201d Moss said. \u201cEvery time the fans cheered, I looked over at that door. I was like a little kid at the candy store, just hoping you would see that No. 12 come out those doors.\u201d But Brady did not come back. Without him, the Patriots soldiered on behind Cassel, but they needed a defensive stand in the final minute to keep the Chiefs out of the end zone. The Patriots were supposed to roll into this season on a mission to redeem the last one. This is largely the same team that marched to a perfect regular season in such dominant fashion that the Giants\u2019 victory in the Super Bowl is considered one of the sport\u2019s great upsets. The question that hung over the redemption story line was Brady\u2019s health. He has never answered how much his ankle injury hampered him in that loss to the Giants. Pollard had already been blocked by running back Sammy Morris and was on the ground when he took one more lunge at Brady, who was releasing a pass to Moss. Pollard caught Brady\u2019s leg extended forward, and Brady crumpled to the turf with 7 minutes 27 seconds left in the first quarter. He rolled around, holding his knee with both hands. The Patriots did not deviate from the script in reacting to the injury, saying they had to keep going no matter who was hurt and who was playing. \u201cYou\u2019re so wrapped up in what you have to do, you really don\u2019t have time to think about it,\u201d center Dan Koppen said. \u201cYou\u2019ve just got to move on.\u201d Cassel had a few shining moments in his first extended action. Brady has started 127 straight games, not missing one since he took over for Drew Bledsoe as the starter in the 2001 season, and rarely leaves games. Cassel had grand 70 passing yards over the last two seasons. Cassel started well, digging the Patriots out of a hole when they were pinned on their 2 by a Chiefs punt. On third-and-11, Cassel dropped back into his end zone and lofted a 51-yard pass that Moss caught in stride. Cassel finished that drive with a 10-yard touchdown pass to Moss, and the Patriots seemed to stave off disaster. \u201cThis is something I\u2019ve been preparing for a long time,\u201d Cassel said. It did not seem to hurt the Patriots\u2019 cause when Kansas City had injury trouble of its own, with quarterback Brodie Croyle separating his right shoulder early in the third quarter. He was replaced by Damon Huard. But the Patriots could not quite put the Chiefs away. Kansas City was trailing by 7 late in the final minute of the fourth quarter when Huard lofted a 68-yard pass to receiver Devard Darling. But the Chiefs could not score from the 5, and the Patriots survived. How they handle the rest of the season is another question.", "keyword": "Brady Tom;New England Patriots;Football;Kansas City Chiefs"}
{"id": "ny0042759", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/05/21", "title": "Second Time Around, Cubs Hand Tanaka His First Loss in Majors", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 After 21 months and 42 starts in which he never lost in the regular season, Masahiro Tanaka finally felt the sting of defeat. Perhaps it was the rain that poured down upon him, or the fact that for the first time this year his opponent had seen him once before. Or maybe it was just because his teammates could not supply enough offense to bail him out of a substandard effort. Whatever the cause, Tanaka took the loss Tuesday night as the Chicago Cubs beat the Yankees, 6-1 , at Wrigley Field, and for the first time in a regular-season game since Aug. 19, 2012, Tanaka was the loser. Including an impressive 6-0 opening to the season that captivated fans on both shores, Tanaka had amassed a 34-0 combined record in those 42 regular-season starts and one relief appearance. The streak began on Aug. 26, 2012, when he was with the Rakuten Golden Eagles, and it included eight starts with the Yankees. Before the Cubs, the last team to beat Tanaka in a regular-season game was the Seibu Lions in Japan. He also lost Game 6 of the Japan Series to the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants in October, but he refused to go down easily in that game, throwing 160 pitches. He returned to the mound the next night to earn the save for Rakuten in Game 7, an example of the dogged competitiveness that helped him go unbeaten for such a long stretch. After the 2012 loss to the Lions, he won four more games that year and went 24-0 in 2013 before signing with the Yankees for seven years and $155 million, and stretching the streak deep into May. \u201cI was able to get the streak going because of the support of my teammates,\u201d he said through his interpreter, referring to the Golden Eagles as well as the Yankees. \u201cI am a little bit disappointed, because a lot of the fans were looking for me to keep on winning. So next time out, I\u2019ll try to get a win and get it going again.\u201d On a wet night, Tanaka (6-1) struggled with all his pitches, he said, but mostly with his signature split-finger fastball. He left it up in the zone too frequently, and he was punished for it. The Cubs were the first American team to see him twice, and ever since his arrival in the United States, Tanaka had come with a caveat: Once teams get a second look at his windup, his timing and his stuff, they might get a bead on him. Tanaka dominated the Cubs on April 16, holding them to two hits in eight scoreless innings as the Yankees won, 3-0. But on Tuesday he allowed four runs, three of them earned, and eight hits. Three of the hits were by Luis Valbuena, who had two doubles and scored two runs. On April 16, Valbuena went 0 for 3 with two strikeouts. Mike Olt struck out three times in three at-bats in April, but against Tanaka on Tuesday he had a hit and two runs batted in. Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, however, was dubious of the notion that a second crack at Tanaka had improved the Cubs\u2019 chances. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t make too much of that,\u201d Girardi said. \u201cI just think he didn\u2019t have his good split.\u201d Also at issue was the rain and a gooey mound, from which Tanaka kept slipping. At one point, Larry Rothschild, the pitching coach, came running out of the dugout along with Tanaka\u2019s interpreter to request that the grounds crew manicure the mound. But even after that, Tanaka still slipped. \u201cI can\u2019t make the weather my excuse,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it was the first time I got rained on since I came here. But that happens. I need to be able to adjust to that.\u201d Tanaka, who threw 88 pitches, also made two fine (and nearly identical) defensive plays to prevent runs from scoring. Twice in the fourth inning, with runners on third base, Tanaka charged off the mound and fielded balls with his glove, shoveling them to catcher Brian McCann, who applied the tag both times. The Yankees did not score until the sixth inning, when Brett Gardner led off with a double to left field. Gardner moved to third on Derek Jeter\u2019s grounder to short and eventually scored on Mark Teixeira\u2019s single to center. The Yankees loaded the bases with two outs in the ninth, but as the rain began to fall again, Jeter grounded out against reliever Hector Rondon to end the game. Jeter, who is in his final season as a player, was honored before the game by the Cubs. Starlin Castro, the Cubs\u2019 shortstop, who has always admired Jeter, presented him with a green and white No. 2 plate from the Wrigley Field scoreboard. Although he has played only four games here, Jeter said before the game that when he was a boy, his family made regular trips to Chicago from their home in Kalamazoo, Mich., about two and a half hours away. He recalled driving to Wrigley after his last day of classes at Kalamazoo Central High School shortly before the 1992 amateur draft, in which the Yankees selected him with the No. 6 pick. \u201cYou\u2019re just sitting there, looking out, hoping you\u2019ll get the opportunity to play in the major leagues,\u201d Jeter said. He did, of course, and with two hits on Tuesday, he has 3,355. Because Wednesday is a day game after a night game, Jeter may not play, which would make his last game at Wrigley Field the first game Tanaka lost. INSIDE PITCH Carlos Beltran, who is on the 15-day disabled list with a bone spur in his right elbow, is scheduled to swing a bat Monday, Joe Girardi said Tuesday. If Beltran feels no pain, he will continue in his rehabilitation. If he feels any pain, the next likely step is surgery, Girardi said. An operation to remove the spur would probably keep Beltran out another eight to 10 weeks. \u201cIf he can take his A swing and not have the pain and not have to hold back, then he\u2019s a player,\u201d Girardi said. ... Derek Jeter spent time with the Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks. \u201cHe treated me well when I was coming up and I had an opportunity to meet him,\u201d Jeter said. \u201cYou always remember how it makes you feel when you first meet them.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Yankees;Chicago Cubs;Masahiro Tanaka"}
{"id": "ny0175456", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2007/10/15", "title": "Cream Rises in Chase, but One Driver Doesn't Seem to Belong", "abstract": "CONCORD, N.C., Oct. 14 \u2014 As the Bank of America 500 Nascar race came to a calamitous end Saturday night at Lowe\u2019s Motor Speedway, only three drivers in the 12-car playoff field emerged with a realistic chance of driving away with the Nextel Cup championship. Jeff Gordon, the race winner, has stood atop the points standings almost exclusively since March in his bid for a fifth series title. After surviving a finish that was nearly a disaster for him, Gordon has a 68-point lead over Jimmie Johnson, his Hendrick Motorsports teammate and the defending Cup champion. That is to be expected; Gordon and Johnson have been the class of Nextel Cup this season. But what makes this Chase so strange is the third driver still in the mix with five races left. It is not Tony Stewart, the two-time champion, who dropped 198 points back with a seventh-place showing at Lowe\u2019s. Matt Kenseth? He is in 12th after wrecking three times Saturday night. The shocking answer is Clint Bowyer, who is well in range, 78 points back, after finishing second Saturday night. Going into the playoff, Bowyer could have been voted least likely among the 12 to have his name on the list of contenders. Bowyer is in his second year of Cup competition and his first playoff. He was the last to qualify and he was among the most inexperienced of make the 12-car field, which includes five former series champions. Before making the Chase, Bowyer\u2019s most memorable moment in Nascar came this year in the season-opening Daytona 500. His No. 07 Chevrolet slid across the finish line upside-down with sparks flying \u2014 in 18th place. Bowyer was perhaps the third-best contender on his own Richard Childress Racing team, behind Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton. Bowyer had never even won a Cup race before the Chase began. He remedied that by capturing the first race in the Chase at New Hampshire on Sept. 16. Five weeks later, Harvick and Burton are all but mathematically out of the Chase, as are six other drivers. Yet Bowyer is still standing right next to Gordon and Johnson, who have 120 career victories and 5 titles between them. \u201cWell, it\u2019s very gratifying,\u201d Bowyer said early Sunday after the race. \u201cYou know, only our second year together, we\u2019re running up front and doing what we\u2019re paid to do. You know, we won a race, we\u2019re running for a championship. It\u2019s been an awesome year so far.\u201d While Gordon gives every indication he will win the championship, he cannot disregard Bowyer. Bowyer led three times for 79 laps Saturday night. When the race resumed with five laps to go after a red-flag stop to clear oil from the track, Bowyer was third behind Gordon and Kyle Busch. Gordon had a fuel problem and his car sputtered momentarily, allowing Ryan Newman to surge into the lead. On the way to the checkered flag, however, Newman blew a tire, and Gordon had one more shot in a two-lap finishing sprint. He held on to the lead this time, with Bowyer right behind. \u201cHe\u2019s impressing a lot of people right now,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cTo me, a real key to one of the top drivers is when the moment comes, when the Chase for the championship is on the line, is are you capable of stepping up? And we see it every year, you know, guys step it up, take it to the next level, and they are the guys to beat. And he\u2019s doing that.\u201d So is Gordon, who is having a charmed finish to a season highlighted by the birth of his first child in June. After the ending Saturday night, even Gordon is wondering if this is meant to be. \u201cWell, I\u2019m going to tell you right now, I don\u2019t care what happens with the championship, this is my year just because of being a father,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cAnd even with the wins that we\u2019ve had so far and the kind of year on and off the racetrack for me personally, it\u2019s just been the most incredible year.\u201d Should he win the championship, Gordon said, \u201cIt would be just one of those dream years that I don\u2019t think I could ever even touch again.\u201d", "keyword": "Automobile Racing;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing;Bank of America Corp;Bowyer Clint"}
{"id": "ny0030378", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/06/10", "title": "Edward Snowden, Ex-C.I.A. Worker, Says He Disclosed U.S. Surveillance", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A 29-year-old former C.I.A. computer technician went public on Sunday as the source behind the daily drumbeat of disclosures about the nation\u2019s surveillance programs, saying he took the extraordinary step because \u201cthe public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.\u201d During a 12-minute video interview that went online Sunday, Edward Joseph Snowden calmly answered questions about his journey from being a well-compensated government contractor with nearly unlimited access to America\u2019s intelligence secrets to being holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, the subject of a United States investigation, with the understanding that he could spend the rest of his life in jail. The revelation came after days of speculation that the source behind a series of leaks that have transfixed Washington must have been a high-level official at one of America\u2019s spy agencies. Instead, the leaker is a relatively low-level employee of a giant government contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that has won billions of dollars in secret government contracts over the past decade, partly by aggressively marketing itself as the premier protector of America\u2019s classified computer infrastructure. The episode presents both international and domestic political difficulties for the Obama administration. If Mr. Snowden remained in China, the White House would have to navigate getting him out of a country that has been America\u2019s greatest adversary on many issues of computer security. Then the United States must set up a strategy for prosecuting a man whom many will see as a hero for provoking a debate that President Obama himself has said he welcomes \u2014 amid already fierce criticism of the administration\u2019s crackdown on leaks. The court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who released a vast archive of military and diplomatic materials to WikiLeaks, resumes Monday. Mr. Snowden, who said he was seeking asylum abroad, perhaps in Iceland, gave the interview to The Guardian, the British newspaper and global Web site that during the past week published a string of articles about classified National Security Agency programs. Both The Guardian and The Washington Post, which also published articles disclosing the surveillance programs, identified Mr. Snowden on Sunday as the source for their articles. In his interview with The Guardian, Mr. Snowden said his job had given him access to myriad secrets that the United States government guards most jealously, including the locations of Central Intelligence Agency stations overseas and the identities of undercover agents working for the United States. But he said he had been selective in what he disclosed, releasing only what he found to be the greatest abuses of a surveillance state that he came to view as reckless and having grown beyond reasonable boundaries. He was alternately defiant and resigned, saying at one point that the C.I.A. might try to spirit him out of China, and speculating that it might even hire Asian gangs to go after him. \u201cIf you realize that that\u2019s the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn\u2019t matter what the outcome is,\u201d Mr. Snowden said. Some outside experts said the push in recent years to break down barriers between spy agencies and share information across the government had greatly expanded the universe of government employees and outside contractors with access to highly classified intelligence. \u201cIn past years, someone like Snowden may not have had access to briefings detailing these collection programs,\u201d said Cedric Leighton, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, \u201cbut now with the push from a \u2018need to know\u2019 to a \u2018need to share\u2019 philosophy, it\u2019s far more likely for an I.T. contractor like him to gain access to such documents.\u201d Mr. Snowden\u2019s disclosures prompted some calls from Congress on Sunday to hold hearings about the surveillance programs or reopen debate on portions of the Patriot Act. The disclosures also were published just as the Obama administration was grappling with the fallout from its many investigations into leaks to the news media. After it was revealed in May that the Justice Department had secretly obtained phone logs for reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, criticism of the administration\u2019s leak investigation was heightened. Mr. Obama said he was \u201ctroubled\u201d by those developments, and ordered Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to review the Justice Department\u2019s procedures for investigating reporters. As part of that review, Mr. Holder and senior department officials have met with editors and media lawyers to try to assuage their fears that the administration is trying to silence the press. A day before The Guardian published its first article on how the government was collecting Americans phone data, Mr. Holder met with lawyers for several media outlets about legislation and other measures that may help protect reporters. Image President Obama has ordered Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to conduct a review. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times A White House spokesman declined to comment on Sunday. A spokesman for James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, referred questions to the Justice Department. In a statement, the department said it was in the initial stages of an investigation into the matter, though it did not name Mr. Snowden. In a weekend interview with NBC News, Mr. Clapper warned that the revelations could create serious risks to national security. \u201cWe\u2019re very, very concerned about it,\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, it is literally \u2014 not figuratively \u2014 literally gut-wrenching to see this happen, because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.\u201d Mr. Snowden, a native of North Carolina, told The Guardian that he signed up in 2003 for an Army Special Forces training program because he wanted to fight in Iraq. \u201cI felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,\u201d he said. But he said he had quickly become disillusioned with the military. \u201cMost of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,\u201d he said. After breaking his legs during a training accident, Mr. Snowden was discharged from the Army and took a job as a security guard at an N.S.A. secret facility on the University of Maryland\u2019s campus, according to The Guardian, which said it had confirmed his story. Despite not having a high school degree, he was later hired by the C.I.A. to work on information technology security, serving in Geneva. In 2009, he joined the N.S.A. as a contractor at a facility in Japan, where, he said, he watched \u201cas Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.\u201d Most recently, Mr. Snowden has been part of a Booz Allen team working at an N.S.A. facility in Hawaii. Three weeks ago, he made final preparations to disclose the classified documents, The Guardian said. It said he had copied the documents and told a supervisor that he needed to take a few weeks off to deal with medical problems. He then flew to Hong Kong. While it was not clear whether Mr. Snowden had remained in Hong Kong, if he had, his presence could complicate any possible American effort to extradite him for prosecution. A British colony until its return to China in 1997, Hong Kong retains autonomy from the mainland in its immigration system and its rule of law. Hong Kong has an independent immigration system, but it is part of China for purposes of foreign policy. Hong Kong has an extradition agreement with the United States, in case American officials can provide a legal basis for seeking Mr. Snowden\u2019s transfer to the United States. Hong Kong also has a very long tradition, dating back to British control, of close cooperation with the United States on criminal and criminal intelligence issues. There was no indication in the Guardian article that Mr. Snowden had ever acquired legal residency in Hong Kong, so he would appear to be subject in principle to the 90-day limit that all American passport holders have for visa-free stays there. Another complexity for Mr. Snowden is that the new administration of President Xi Jinping of China is pursuing better relations with the United States, including a meeting with Mr. Obama on Friday and Saturday in California, and may be more inclined than usual to put pressure on officials in Hong Kong to hand over Mr. Snowden. On Sunday evening, Booz Allen released a statement confirming Mr. Snowden\u2019s employment. \u201cNews reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,\u201d the statement said . \u201cWe will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.\u201d The revelation that Mr. Snowden worked for Booz Allen is perhaps the most awkward for Mike McConnell, a former head of the N.S.A. and director of national intelligence who in 2011 was promoted to vice chairman at Booz Allen. He is now responsible for driving Booz Allen\u2019s cybercapabilities and advancing its relationship with his former agency. Mr. McConnell said in an interview last year that the United States was not using its full capabilities to address threats from foreign cyberattacks because of privacy concerns. \u201cIf you harness all the capabilities of our nation, you could have a better understanding of foreign threats,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what makes it hard is that everyone has an opinion. There\u2019s very little appreciation for the threat, and there are so many special interests, particularly civil liberty groups with privacy concerns. That mix keeps us from getting to the crux of the national issue.\u201d", "keyword": "Edward Snowden;Government Surveillance;NSA;Classified Information;Barack Obama;Guardian British Newspaper;Washington Post;Booz Allen Hamilton;John Michael McConnell;Hong Kong"}
{"id": "ny0027073", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2013/01/29", "title": "Bomb in Yemen Kills 11 Soldiers", "abstract": "A car bomb exploded Monday next to a military checkpoint in the central town of Radda, killing 11 soldiers, security and military officials said. The bombing came on the same day that the military launched a wide offensive against militants in surrounding Bayda Province, which has become an stronghold of Al Qaeda. (AP)", "keyword": "Bombs;Yemen;Al Qaeda;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0097174", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/06/05", "title": "12 Hours Before Yangtze Disaster, Tourists Enjoyed a Morning on Land", "abstract": "CHIBI, China \u2014 The tourist park here beside the Yangtze River was bustling on Monday with cruise ship passengers on a port of call. They strolled through the lush grounds, laughing and taking pictures. Some sat next to a lake and a line of toy cannons pointed over the water. \u201cThere were more than 400 people here that day in the park,\u201d said a man sitting next to the cannons on Thursday who gave only his surname, Zhou. \u201cSome of them fired off these cannons. They were happy playing here.\u201d Those were the among the final peaceful moments in the lives of about 440 people who are now presumed dead after their ship, the Oriental Star, capsized 12 hours later, farther upstream by the town of Jianli. The ship, also called the Eastern Star, tipped upside down during a raging thunderstorm that struck after 9 p.m. There were 456 people on board, and only a handful are known to have survived. Their last port of call was this small town in Hubei Province on the southeastern bank of the Yangtze, about 72 nautical miles from where the boat capsized, or 95 miles by car. Chibi is known across China as the site of the pivotal Battle of Red Cliffs in the ancient legend of the Three Kingdoms. Many Chinese learn about the battle from childhood. Chibi is a regular stop on riverboat tours of the Yangtze ; it lies east of the famous Three Gorges and the large dam built in that area, considered the highlight of such tours. Years ago, Chibi was turned into a tourist park with fake ramparts, watchtowers and battlefield tents. This is where the dead and missing tourists of the Oriental Star walked on land for the last time on Monday, taking photographs of one another posing next to battlements and statues of ancient warriors. Investigating Why the Oriental Star Capsized on the Yangtze River At about 9:20 p.m. that evening, the Oriental Star had passed a cargo ship that had anchored to wait out the storm. At the time, park employees did not know they would be the last outsiders to see most of the tourists alive. \u201cThey fired off a lot of shots,\u201d said Mr. Zhou, who charges tourists about $5 to fire 13 white balls from the toy cannons at paper targets standing in the lake. \u201cThey liked the cannons.\u201d A shopkeeper in the park, Jiang Siqiang, 35, said many of the tourists had looked at his souvenirs: goose-feather fans, small figurines of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms and cakes of tea leaves. \u201cThey didn\u2019t buy much,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there was one man who bought fried dough sticks to eat. He was hungry.\u201d Mr. Jiang said another cruise ship from Jiangsu Province, where the Oriental Star also began its journey, had arrived at Chibi about half an hour before the Oriental Star on Monday morning. It then left half an hour earlier. \u201cIf the Oriental Star had left here a half-hour earlier or a half-hour later, it would have been safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have been caught in the storm.\u201d A website that tracks global ship movements, MyShips , shows the Oriental Star stopping at Chibi at 5:01 a.m. and setting off again at 11:38 a.m. Employees here said the tourists had entered the park around 7:30 or 8 in the morning. They had just spent the night aboard the ship after a stop in Wuhan, a city of 10 million that is one of the major ports on the Yangtze. Chibi was the last scheduled stop on land before the ship was to reach another city, Jingzhou, late that night or the next day. A security guard said the hundreds of tourists disembarked on a floating dock in the river, then walked past a row of empty reconstructed battlefield tents facing the water. They ascended stairs to fake ramparts with a view of the Yangtze. Then many of them walked down wet steps to a platform at the river\u2019s edge where they could see, just dozens of meters away, the word for \u201cred cliffs\u201d written in red on a rock jutting from the water. It is the iconic image of the site, known to many Chinese. People often pose for photos on the viewing platform. Mr. Jiang, the shopkeeper, said he did not think the accident would deter people from taking the cruises. \u201cThese boats are safe,\u201d he said. \u201cPlanes go down all the time, and people still fly in planes.\u201d", "keyword": "Boat Accidents;Yangtze River;Chongqing Oriental Ferry Company;Chibi;Cruises"}
{"id": "ny0216010", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/04/17", "title": "Private School Girls Stampede to Scouting", "abstract": "Two dozen fourth graders from the Chapin School, all in regulation green vests that were dotted with badges, popped up from their chairs to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the Girl Scout promise : \u201cOn my honor. ...\u201d The girls, members of Troop 3157 of the Junior Girl Scouts , had a snack \u2014 string cheese \u2014 and discussed the troop\u2019s closing ceremony in June, where they would present the fruits of their \u201ccreate your own business\u201d projects. These include custom pillows, knitted iPod cases and baked goods for people with food allergies . Then it was on to the day\u2019s outing: a trip to a local landmark. \u201cO.K.,\u201d said the troop leader, Alyssa Moeder . \u201cWho knows what Gracie Mansion is?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s where the mayors used to live,\u201d answered a petite, curly-haired 10-year-old named Grace. \u201cBut Mayor Bloomberg doesn\u2019t live there,\u201d she confided. \u201cWhy?\u201d asked Missy Rice, co-leader of the troop. \u201cBecause,\u201d Grace said, \u201che has a much better house.\u201d Scouting has come to New York\u2019s private schools, a world known more for couture and expensive co-ops than for cookies and campcraft. Besides Chapin, schools with newly formed troops include Berkeley Carroll, Brearley, Dalton, Packer Collegiate, Spence and Trinity. There are now 550 Brownies (first to third grade) or Junior Girl Scouts (fourth and fifth grade) in 25 Manhattan and Brooklyn private school troops, up from 200 girls and 9 troops last year, and from just a few dozen participants the year before. This growth, helped along by mothers who were scouts themselves, caught the Girl Scout leadership by surprise. \u201cWe were living with a false assumption,\u201d said Dolores Swirin, the chief executive of the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York. \u201cIt was sort of an inferiority complex on our part. The thinking was that there were too many competing activities.\u201d The push has paid off in increased membership, prestige and visibility for the Girl Scouts, and has also produced a nice little dividend. In New York, cookie sales are up 11 percent so far this year, while they are flat or up only slightly in other parts of the country. Of the five New York City scouting districts, the East River \u201cservice unit,\u201d which includes most of the private schools, \u201chas the highest sales rate this year,\u201d said Dina Rabiner, a project specialist for the scouts. Recruitment efforts began five years ago with Ms. Moeder, who had been a Brownie during her childhood in Queens and whose mother had been a scout leader. She was looking for a troop for her daughter Nicole, who was a kindergartner at Chapin. At the invitation of a friend who was on the Girl Scout Council board, Ms. Moeder attended the organization\u2019s annual tribute dinner, \u201cand it was quite moving to see all they were doing with the programming,\u201d she said. So Ms. Moeder, a first vice president in Merrill Lynch \u2019s private banking and investment group, joined the board, too. Soon after, Ms. Moeder said, when she sent fellow kindergarten parents an e-mail message to generate interest in establishing a Brownie troop the following school year, \u201cwe were full within 48 hours and had a waiting list.\u201d Ms. Moeder has just sent out e-mail registration forms for a Brownie troop at Chapin that will include her younger daughter, Sarah, who is 6. \u201cWe\u2019re already oversubscribed,\u201d she said. Madelyn Adamson, a onetime Campfire Girl (a group like the Scouts), had a similar experience when she started a troop at Columbia Grammar for her daughter Elissa. \u201cWe thought we\u2019d get 10 girls, and we got 25,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only issue that came up was parents saying, \u2018My daughter doesn\u2019t like wearing uniforms. Does she have to wear a uniform?\u2019 We let them choose between a sash and a vest.\u201d In fact, Ms. Swirin said, the uniform is optional. \u201cYou\u2019re considered in uniform,\u201d she said, \u201cjust wearing the membership pin.\u201d The New York Girl Scouts, who have 22,356 members across six levels ranging from Daisies (generally kindergarten and sometimes first grade) to Ambassadors (11th and 12th grade), have long had troops in public and parochial schools. But Ms. Swirin said, \u201cGirl scouting had not had a presence in the independent schools for generations.\u201d Sensing the beginnings of a revival, the organization realized the gold that could be mined and hired Ms. Rabiner about 18 months ago to spearhead the expansion in private schools. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a courting process,\u201d she said. \u201cThe progressive schools have been less willing, but they\u2019re starting to come around. Some schools just told me, \u2018We don\u2019t do Girl Scouts.\u2019 \u201d She declined to name the schools. Not surprisingly, the Boy Scouts are hoping to follow the girls\u2019 lead. \u201cWe\u2019ve identified neighborhoods where there\u2019s a heavy concentration of kids and not enough troops to support them,\u201d said William Kelly, spokesman for the Greater New York Councils, Boy Scouts of America. \u201cThe Upper East Side is one of those target areas.\u201d While otherwise staying uninvolved, some schools, including Trinity, Columbia Grammar and Chapin, have made classrooms \u2014 and sometimes snacks \u2014 available for troop meetings. These gatherings, which in some instances occur only monthly, make scouting a relatively easy sell for students juggling homework, piano lessons and sports. \u201cThe activities are very appealing to this age level, and the girls get a finished product, whether it\u2019s a badge or the sale of a box of cookies,\u201d said Stanley Seidman, the director of the lower school at Columbia Grammar. Scouting\u2019s newfound popularity among the private schools, he suggested, is a reaction against life lived on the Internet. \u201cThere\u2019s a wholesomeness about scouting that should be encouraged,\u201d he said. \u201cIt may not be quite the thing in the view of our more sophisticated parents, but I think it\u2019s great.\u201d Troop leaders play a significant role in organizing activities. One mother, a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, organized a special tour there; another, a yoga instructor, led her troop in a yoga class. Last year, Ms. Moeder\u2019s troop did their own version of \u201cProject Runway,\u201d an activity that involved a trip to the garment district, the purchase of fabric and the creation of patterns, and that culminated in a fashion show. \u201cI also had my dermatologist come and talk to the girls about skin care,\u201d Ms. Moeder said. \u201cAfterward, she told me there was nothing she could tell them they didn\u2019t already know.\u201d Ultimately, cookie selling and tent pitching are great equalizers. Like other Girl Scouts, the scouts in private schools busily push thin mints, Samoas and Do-Si-Dos and brave overnight trips to Camp Kaufmann in Dutchess County , a local scouting tradition. \u201cThey had to clean the bathroom at Girl Scout camp,\u201d Ms. Moeder said. \u201cFor a lot of them, it was the first time they had to clean a bathroom.\u201d", "keyword": "Girl Scouts;Private Schools;Chapin School;null;null;Women and Girls"}
{"id": "ny0125523", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2012/08/26", "title": "Apple-Samsung Case Shows Smartphone as Lawsuit Magnet", "abstract": "The smartphone in your hand is a marvel of innovation, packing sophisticated computing and communications technologies into a sleek digital device. It is also a litigation magnet. In the last few years, the companies in the smartphone industry have spent billions of dollars buying patents and hundreds of millions suing one another. On Friday, that battle reached a peak with the decision by a federal jury in San Jose, Calif., to award Apple $1.05 billion in damages from Samsung for infringing on just six patents. The case underscores how dysfunctional the patent system has become. Patent litigation has followed every industrial innovation, whether it is steam engines, cars, phones or semiconductors, but the smartphone wars are bigger, global and unusually complex. And it is the courts, rather than the patent office, that are being used to push companies toward a truce. In the end, consumers may be the losers. \u201cIt is hard not to see all the patent-buying and patent lawsuits as a distortion of the role of patents,\u201d said Josh Lerner, an economist and patent expert at Harvard Business School. \u201cThey are supposed to be an incentive for innovation.\u201d By one estimate, as many as 250,000 patents can be used to claim ownership of some technical or design element in a smartphone. Each patent is potentially a license to sue. Samsung says it will challenge the jury\u2019s decision, which covered design basics like the shape of the iPhone itself and its array of small on-screen icons. So the courtroom conflict could continue for years, and even then, the case is but one of dozens of suits and countersuits in 10 countries between Apple and Samsung, the world\u2019s two leading smartphone makers. But Apple has more than Samsung in its sights in its litigation campaign against the Korean electronics giant. Samsung is the leader among companies using Google\u2019s Android mobile operating system. So while Apple may be suing Samsung in courtrooms from Germany to Australia, the real enemy is up the road from Apple\u2019s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Ultimately, the Apple-Samsung roadshow is just the main attraction in the global smartphone patent wars. The roster of litigants includes Microsoft, Nokia, HTC, Google\u2019s Motorola Mobility subsidiary and others. In a recent case between Apple and Motorola, Judge Richard A. Posner, a prominent federal appeals court judge in Chicago, said in court that the use of patents in the smartphone industry showed a system in \u201cchaos.\u201d In June, Judge Posner dismissed the case, chastising both sides. He heaped scorn on Apple\u2019s broad claims for its user-experience patents and on Motorola\u2019s claim that Apple should pay a rich royalty on its basic communications patents. Both companies have appealed. The disputes are fueled, legal experts say, by companies rushing to apply for patents as both defensive and offensive weapons, and by overburdened government examiners granting patents too easily. \u201cThe smartphone patent battles are enabled by lots of trivial patents that never should have been granted in the first place,\u201d said James E. Bessen, a patent expert and lecturer at the Boston University School of Law. \u201cThat\u2019s where Judge Posner was coming from in his ruling.\u201d To the winners of the patent wars, the rewards will be rich. Mobile computing, or smartphones and tablets, is the most lucrative and fastest-growing market in business. It has made Apple the most valuable company in the world. As Samsung passed Apple in the last year to become the largest smartphone maker, its profits surged along with its sales. Despite the hostilities, experts say the smartphone patent wars will eventually end in an industrial armistice. The California court decision, if it holds up on appeal, could have that effect. \u201cThis ruling sends a message to all the handset makers that you have to make truly differentiated products that look different,\u201d said Colleen V. Chien, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the message Apple wanted to send with its litigation.\u201d Most legal experts thought Apple would have the most trouble winning infringement judgments on its design patents, which are generally considered weaker than engineering patents for hardware or software, known as utility patents. But the jury found that Samsung infringed on three of the four design patents in the case. The fourth was a patent for shape of a tablet computer \u2014 a rectangle with rounded corners. \u201cThis could open up a whole new front in the patent wars, as companies race to file applications for design patents,\u201d said Kevin G. Rivette, a Silicon Valley consultant and former vice president of intellectual property strategy for I.B.M. Yet Mr. Rivette is convinced that the smartphone patent wars will subside and an accommodation will be reached. The sheer number of smartphone patents and the speed of innovation in product development undermine the power of the patents. That is very different than the role patents play in an industry like pharmaceuticals, where a blockbuster drug may be covered by a single patent or a few. In chemistry, the molecule is the patentable idea. Smartphones are very different. An infringement ruling can slow a rival down for a few months, but not block it. Samsung engineers, for example, have already devised an alternative to one of the patents found to have been infringed upon in the California decision \u2014 the \u201cbounce\u201d feature. Pull a finger from the top of the iPhone\u2019s touch screen to the bottom and the page bounces. On the newest Samsung smartphones, the same downward finger stroke brings a blue glow at the bottom on the touch screen, not a bounce. \u201cIn this industry, patents are not a clean weapon to stop others,\u201d Mr. Rivette said. \u201cThe technology, like water, will find its way around impediments.\u201d", "keyword": "Inventions and Patents;Smartphones;Software;Suits and Litigation;Apple Inc;Samsung Group"}
{"id": "ny0228030", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/07/11", "title": "Day 81: The Latest on the Oil Spill", "abstract": "N.A.A.C.P. Critical of BP\u2019s Hiring The N.A.A.C.P. has sent a letter to BP expressing concerns that minority members helping with the Gulf of Mexico cleanup tend to be assigned tougher, lower-paying jobs than whites. Benjamin T. Jealous, the civil rights organization\u2019s president, said in the letter dated Friday that he wanted to meet with BP\u2019s chief executive. The N.A.A.C.P. also says minority contractors are not receiving equal consideration for work. And it claims that contractors are busing in workers from out of state instead of hiring local residents who have lost their livelihoods because of the spill. Louisiana Governor Says Berm Is Working Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the sand berm the state built in front of the Chandeleur islands has stopped oil from going farther inland. The governor said Louisiana National Guard troops had collected 500 pounds of oiled debris on the sand berm. He said on Friday that a dredge had renewed work on the berm after bad weather and high waves battered Louisiana in recent days. Environmentalists and coastal scientists have questioned how well the sand berm would work. They say it will be washed out quickly and do little to stop oil. Mr. Jindal is pushing for more natural coastal defenses, like rock barriers and sand barriers. An interactive map tracking the spill and where it has made landfall, live video of the leak, a guide to online spill resources and additional updates: nytimes.com/national .", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Offshore Drilling and Exploration;Accidents and Safety;BP Plc;Gulf of Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0152229", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/08/01", "title": "Japan Lifts Its Ban on Lobster Imports", "abstract": "PORTLAND, Me. (AP) \u2014 Japan has lifted a ban on imports of North American lobster that had been linked to a misunderstanding over safety, industry officials said Thursday. The ban took effect this week after the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers not to eat the green substance known as tomalley that is found in the body cavity of lobsters. Tomalley can be contaminated by red tide even though lobster meat remains safe to eat. In place of the ban, lobster from areas with known red tide contamination will be tested for paralytic shellfish poisoning, which is caused by red tide, said Bonnie Spinazzola, executive director of the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen\u2019s Association in New Hampshire. Lobster found to be below a certain threshold will be allowed into the country, she said.", "keyword": "Lobsters;Recalls and Bans of Products;Food and Drug Administration;Japan"}
{"id": "ny0191761", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2009/02/11", "title": "Intel Chief Calls on Peers to Invest in U.S.", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Paul S. Otellini , the chief executive of Intel , made an uncharacteristic lunge toward the limelight on Tuesday, holding up his company\u2019s $7 billion investment in new computer chip factories as a patriotic gesture for other businesses to follow. Although he had already told shareholders and Wall Street analysts of the company\u2019s investment plans, Mr. Otellini used the opportunity of a speech before the Economic Club in Washington to vow that Intel would spend more money than ever to expand chip factories in the United States. He made that promise despite a precipitous decline in sales and profits of computer chips, the layoffs of at least 5,000 workers and the closing of older chip plants in Asia and the United States. He also urged companies trying to survive the recession to follow Intel\u2019s model of investing in future products. Such a message comes from a company that earned $11 billion in cash last year and uses its manufacturing prowess and financial strength as an edge over rivals. \u201cI thought it was very important for Intel, who is clearly a bellwether company, to be able to make this announcement in an environment where, quite frankly, there is a lot of doom and gloom,\u201d Mr. Otellini said in a telephone interview after the speech. The severity of the economic decline prompted Mr. Otellini to make a rare speech tied to investing in the United States, he said. \u201cThis is all about confidence,\u201d he said. \u201cEconomic cycles are about confidence.\u201d Intel\u2019s investment will go toward chip plants in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico, not the factories overseas. \u201cWe believe in the company and in this country,\u201d Mr. Otellini said. These facilities will produce a new line of cheaper and more energy-efficient chips late this year. Historically, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has invested in the plants, which cost more than $3 billion each, even during lulls in demand for computers. As a result, the company believes that the more advanced chip-making technology gives it more than a year\u2019s lead over rivals. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel\u2019s main competitor, has found the cost of building chip factories so prohibitive that it is trying to turn over that part of its operation to a newly created company to stay focused on design. On Tuesday, A.M.D. said it would need to delay a shareholder vote on the creation of the company, jointly owned by A.M.D. and an investment firm based in Abu Dhabi, until next week.", "keyword": "Intel Corp;Computer Chips;Company Reports;Otellini Paul S"}
{"id": "ny0168945", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/12/07", "title": "A Big Deal, Even in Manhattan: A Tower Goes for $1.8 Billion", "abstract": "Records are still being broken as fast as they can be set in New York real estate. Tishman Speyer Properties, the company that bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village for $5.4 billion last month in the biggest real estate deal in the country, has agreed to sell the 41-story skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street for $1.8 billion to a New Jersey real estate family, the Kushners. The price is more than three times what a group led by Tishman Speyer paid for the building six years ago and the highest price ever paid for a single office building in the United States. The Kushners, who own 22,000 apartments and more than five million square feet of office and industrial space in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, are relatively unknown as real-estate players in Manhattan . But they are making a head-turning splash buying a tower that has served as a symbol of corporate power and elegance since it opened in 1957. Brooks Brothers has a store on the ground floor. Tenants include high-powered law firms and bankers. At the top of the building is the Grand Havana Room, an exclusive cigar bar that offers stunning views to the politically connected and the fabulously wealthy who are its members. \u201cThis is a great acquisition for our company,\u201d said Jared Kushner, 25, a principal at Kushner Companies, who signed the contract to buy the building Monday night. \u201cWe are upping our presence in Manhattan. It\u2019s a logical expansion for us.\u201d Kushner also owns the Puck Building downtown. Earlier this year, Mr. Kushner paid an estimated $10 million for a majority stake in The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper with a small but influential readership in New York\u2019s real estate, political and media circles. Mr. Kushner\u2019s father, Charles B. Kushner, is a company founder and a newsmaker in his own right. A major Democratic fund-raiser, Charles Kushner was convicted last year of 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. He was released from prison earlier this year. Now the Kushners have acquired a major trophy. \u201cThis\u2019ll wind up being the highest price in the country for a single building,\u201d said Dan Fasulo, director of market analysis for Real Capital Analytics, a research and consulting firm. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing. But nothing surprises me anymore in this market.\u201d With vacancy rates low, rents rising and few new buildings coming on line, local and international tycoons, pension funds and other investors have lined up with billions of dollars to buy New York real estate. The sale of 666 Fifth Avenue will surpass the previous record for an office building, which was set last year when Tishman Speyer bought the MetLife Building for $1.72 billion. But while Tishman Speyer bought the MetLife Building for $604 per square foot, the company sold 666 Fifth for twice that, or $1,200 per square foot. In 2000, Tishman Speyer led a group that bought Rockefeller Center, a commercial and retail complex, for $1.85 billion. \u201cNew York City is the greatest place in the world to own real estate,\u201d said Rob Speyer, a senior managing director at Tishman Speyer. \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled with the outcome and wish the Kushners great success.\u201d Mr. Speyer said the partnership, which includes TMW, a German investment firm that also owns the Chrysler Building in partnership with Tishman Speyer, had always planned to acquire the tower, improve it and then sell it off. He said deal was unrelated to a separate partnership\u2019s purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, a collection of 11,200 apartments in 110 buildings overlooking the East River. But the Tishman family\u2019s history is intertwined with 666 Fifth. The 1.5 million-square-foot tower was developed by Tishman Realty and Construction and was originally known as the Tishman Building. The firm broke up in 1976, and the building was sold two years later for $80 million. Tishman Speyer and TMW bought it in 2000 for $518 million. They expanded and upgraded the retail portion of the tower and allowed Citigroup to put its corporate logo at the top of the building, for an undisclosed seven-figure annual rent.", "keyword": "Real Estate;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties;Tishman Speyer Properties;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0252317", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2011/11/10", "title": "Apple and Android Note-Taking Apps Make Paper a Memory", "abstract": "Like a lot of people in the \u201980s, I bought a microcassette recorder to capture great ideas the way Michael Keaton\u2019s character did in \u201cNight Shift.\u201d (\u201c Idea to eliminate garbage: edible paper .\u201d) My recorder quickly gathered dust because it was much easier to retrieve ideas and reminders from good old inedible paper. So when I first saw apps like Evernote (free on Apple and Android ), PhatPad ($5 for iPad ) and Notability ($1 for iPad) for note-taking and organizing, they struck me as software versions of those old recorders: places where ideas go to die. I was wrong. These and other apps make it so easy to record, circulate and retrieve your most important thoughts that they\u2019re worth far more than the few bucks you\u2019ll spend on them. As for the other mobile software on this list, they\u2019re headed by the new girl on the block, Siri, and she\u2019s available only to those who bought her shiny new chariot, Apple\u2019s iPhone 4S. If you\u2019ve written off Siri as a cocktail party prop, as I initially did, give it another shot. Moments after a conversation in which a friend told me his e-mail address, I knew I\u2019d eventually forget it. I opened Siri and told it to send me an e-mail with my friend\u2019s address in the subject line. Siri didn\u2019t render the address I spoke with perfect accuracy, but when I tapped the screen I was able to edit the e-mail draft before sending. I told Siri to remind me to be at home when my son got off the bus, and it set up an alert that reached my mobile devices and appeared on my desktop version of Apple\u2019s iCloud service . Siri also helps with less time-sensitive notes. I\u2019m a longtime user of the Notes app, but instead of tapping out a missive, I\u2019m now getting accustomed to saying \u201cwrite a note to myself\u201d and then dictating the text. The text immediately appears in Notes, and if I want to export it later, I can e-mail it from within the app. As a free-standing app on all of Apple\u2019s mobile devices, Notes is nimble but rudimentary. The same goes for the free Android app that I use for the same purposes, Freenote . For a more comprehensive note-taking and organizing system, I\u2019ve found nothing better than Evernote. Here, Android users actually have an advantage over Apple users, but I\u2019ll get to that. Evernote holds all your digital ephemera and helps you with the filing. You create notes in the form of text, audio clips or photos, and as soon as they\u2019re entered into the app, you can retrieve them from any other Web-connected device. Likewise, if you enter a note on the Web version of the service, it appears in the app or on Evernote\u2019s free desktop version. That synchronization is a trick Apple\u2019s iCloud service can also perform, but on Evernote you can quickly get access to a wider range of your stuff. You can label your notes and sort them by subject matter or date, among other things, and you can search them by keyword. The app\u2019s description suggests that if you take a picture of text, that text will be searchable, but this feature did not work for me. Heavy users of Evernote might want to consider upgrading to the service\u2019s paid version ($5 a month, or $45 annually), which offers more storage. Given Evernote\u2019s all-around quality, I was puzzled by its failure to include a user-friendly alerts system. The Evernote Corporation, creator of the app, released a feature in June that lets users copy a link to a note into a calendar application, but it\u2019s a flawed approach. Where, for instance, would you paste a link into Google Calendar? So when I want to set up an alert, I instead use Apple\u2019s Calendar app in conjunction with its iCloud service and, on Android, Google\u2019s calendar. When I typed a reminder into Apple\u2019s Calendar, my Apple devices received alerts. And as long as I kept Calendar in an open tab on my laptop\u2019s browser, the alerts reached me there too. On Android, Google Calendar sent text and e-mail alerts to any device that was logged on to Google. Since most Android users log on to the service to use various features \u2014 not the least of which is the Android Market, which Google owns \u2014 alerts are essentially automatic. If you own a Macintosh computer and an Android, you\u2019re probably best off using the Google calendar, since that will push alerts to your mobile device as well as the desktop, whereas the Apple calendar will not. Some people remain wedded to the idea of handwritten notes \u2014 even when the writing appears on a touch screen \u2014 and for them, the best apps I\u2019ve found so far are Notability and PhatPad. From a sketching and handwriting standpoint, PhatPad is smoother, and unlike many similar apps, it lets you lean your wrist on the screen and write without problems. Notability\u2019s audio features, on the other hand, are better than those of PhatPad. With Notability, if you record a lecture or a presentation and take notes simultaneously, you can touch a word and hear what was said when you wrote the word. For students, doctors and coaches, among others, this feature will be highly useful. On Android, I\u2019d recommend Skitch (free on Android and Apple ), a slick sketchpad that lets you decorate and share snapshots, or just doodle on a blank page. Evernote this year bought Skitch, but so far that has helped only Android users, who can drop their Skitch creations into the Evernote service and organize them accordingly. One assumes that the same connection will eventually reach the Apple version. If Evernote could manage to buy a calendar app in the meantime, its service might be all things to all people. Quick Calls The Professional Chef iPad Edition ($50), an interactive textbook for aspiring chefs, is extremely comprehensive and highly polished, with videos, text and slide shows. Google Translate (free on Android), an amazingly nimble translator, recently expanded its conversation mode to encompass 14 languages.", "keyword": "Mobile Applications;Android (Operating System);Translation"}
{"id": "ny0255588", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/09/06", "title": "Mets Go Quietly in Loss to Vazquez and Marlins", "abstract": "MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. \u2014 With huge swaths of seats unfilled, Sun Life Stadium was eerily quiet Monday night. So were the Mets \u2019 bats. The Mets had 10 hits, but three of them came in the final inning, as they were routed by the Florida Marlins, 9-3 . For the second time in a week, the Mets were subdued by Marlins starter Javier Vazquez , who beat them, 6-0 , at Citi Field on Aug. 30. Vazquez was almost as good Monday. He allowed six hits and one run, struck out seven and walked none in seven innings. He easily outshined his counterpart, Chris Capuano, who was pulled after four innings, having given up six runs and eight hits. \u201cThe ball was up, and it was flat,\u201d Capuano said of his pitches. \u201cIt was another one of those nights I could not make the adjustment.\u201d The Mets scored their first run in the fourth inning, when David Wright hit a triple and scored on Angel Pagan\u2019s groundout. Jason Bay added a two-run homer to left in the ninth. \u201cIt\u2019s great for Jason,\u201d Manager Terry Collins said of Bay, who had two hits and raised his average to .233. \u201cI hope he does finish strong.\u201d Capuano threw a wild pitch in the first that allowed Emilio Bonifacio to score and gave up a run-scoring single to Logan Morrison later in the inning. Jose Lopez homered in the third, making it 3-0, and the Marlins ended Capuano\u2019s night with a three-run fourth, highlighted by a two-run single by Bonifacio. D. J. Carrasco, who replaced Capuano, did not fare much better, allowing three runs and seven hits in two innings. Carrasco gave up a run in the fifth and two more in the sixth, when Gaby Sanchez hit a two-run single to left.", "keyword": "Baseball;New York Mets;Florida Marlins;Vazquez Javier"}
{"id": "ny0253106", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/10/11", "title": "Cardinals, Minus an Ace, Were Able to Piece Together a New Plan", "abstract": "MILWAUKEE Sometimes, the plan works. That is how the Milwaukee Brewers arrived in the National League Championship Series. They added important pieces along the way, but mostly, the players they counted on produced the way they hoped. The St. Louis Cardinals came to spring training with two ace starters, and a week later, they were down to one. Adam Wainwright, the runner-up for the National League Cy Young Award last season, felt a sensation in his elbow the first day he threw to hitters. An examination revealed the worst: Wainwright needed reconstructive elbow surgery and would miss the season. \u201cIt was devastating,\u201d said John Mozeliak, the Cardinals\u2019 general manager. \u201cBut we knew that after about a 24-hour pity party for the club, it had to end. Then it had to be, what can we do to right this? We had to adapt.\u201d There was no way, Mozeliak decided, to directly replace Wainwright, who had earned 39 victories the previous two seasons. At the time, the Cardinals could not have known that another right-hander, Edwin Jackson, who started their 12-3 victory in Game 2 on Monday, would become available in a trade in July. The Cardinals\u2019 best hope was that a reliever, Kyle McClellan, could hold down Wainwright\u2019s spot while they figured out how to contend. The Cardinals had another ace starter, Chris Carpenter, but they lost 11 of his first 15 starts. Yet even if Carpenter had started as well as he finished, losing Wainwright was bound to sting. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody ever replaces the loss of a No. 1,\u201d Manager Tony La Russa said. \u201cI don\u2019t care if you have another No. 1 like Chris; that\u2019s a major hit. But what is one of the subjects all coaches, all managers cover every year? Nobody goes through a season where everything falls into place. Adversity, slumps.\u201d The Cardinals had more than their share. Mozeliak said they planned to outslug other teams, and to a large extent, they did. The team led the league in runs, weathering injuries to David Freese and Allen Craig and shorter disabled list stints by Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday. Lance Berkman rewarded Mozeliak for gambling $8 million that he could handle right field. As he started on his slow road to recovery, Wainwright liked what he saw. He knew firsthand that injuries do not have to be devastating. As a rookie in 2006, he took over the closer\u2019s role from the veteran Jason Isringhausen, who missed the postseason with a hip injury. Wainwright responded by closing out the Mets in the N.L.C.S. and the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. \u201cIn a way, we lost our closer this year, too,\u201d Wainwright said, referring to Ryan Franklin, who lost his job after blowing four of his first five save chances. \u201cJason Motte stepped up. So the teams are similar in that regard. It\u2019s just a very strong-willed group.\u201d Wainwright said La Russa and the pitching coach, Dave Duncan, never allowed players to feel sorry for themselves. Even when the Cardinals fell 10 \u00bd games behind the Atlanta Braves in the wild-card race, on Aug. 25, Wainwright still believed the team was good enough for October. \u201cI\u2019ve had so much fun watching them and cheering them on,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of fun doing interviews, telling reporters how good we were and then getting killed for it when we weren\u2019t playing good. But I had tremendous faith in this team, and the guys in that locker room never wavered.\u201d Mozeliak also praised the team\u2019s attitude, but by the end of July, he said, it was clear the roster was not deep enough. For the second summer in a row, Mozeliak turned to his major league roster, not his minor league depth, to make a major trade. The Cardinals, it turned out, had so much offense that they could spare a bat while keeping their best prospects. A year after trading Ryan Ludwick in a deal for starter Jake Westbrook, Mozeliak shipped off another outfielder for pitching. Colby Rasmus and three others went to the Toronto Blue Jays. The Cardinals got a left-handed reliever (Marc Rzepczynski), a right-handed reliever (Octavio Dotel) and Jackson, a starter the Blue Jays had obtained from the Chicago White Sox. \u201cI think it was just a couple of pieces that they needed to fill in to what they already had, and it just made one complete piece,\u201d said Jackson, who allowed two runs in four and a third innings Monday. \u201cWe came over, and definitely the guys made it easy on us.\u201d Jackson was 5-2 down the stretch and beat Philadelphia in the division series. Dotel, Rzepczynski and the left-hander Arthur Rhodes, who was signed after Texas released him, stifled the Phillies at pivotal moments. Rafael Furcal, acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers for a prospect, also did damage. The Cardinals, a work in progress without an ace, have made it all work. And although Wainwright is limited to throwing in the bullpen, he said he would not miss the ride. \u201cYou weren\u2019t going to keep me away,\u201d Wainwright said. \u201cNo way was I going to be anywhere besides where these guys are.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;St Louis Cardinals;Wainwright Adam;Mozeliak John;Carpenter Chris"}
{"id": "ny0278430", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2016/11/30", "title": "Derek Jeter Takes a Swing, and Steps Into Tiger Woods\u2019s Spotlight", "abstract": "NASSAU, Bahamas \u2014 The isolated, low-key setting at Albany Golf and Beach Resort Club was the perfect place for the superstar to make his debut. Not Tiger Woods, who will make his first competitive start of 2016 on Thursday, but Derek Jeter, the retired Yankees shortstop who played in a group with Rickie Fowler on Wednesday in the Hero World Challenge pro-am. Jeter has known Woods since the late 1990s, when they both were in the nascent stages of their Hall of Fame-worthy careers. Jeter has had a standing invitation to play in this tournament, which Woods hosts, but he never felt comfortable enough with the state of his game to unveil it in public. Even when Jeter hosted a charity golf tournament, he limited his playing to hitting one shot with every group because he did not want to embarrass himself, he said. \u201cI embarrassed myself a lot through my career, but never intentionally,\u201d he said Wednesday. \u201cSo I stayed away from it.\u201d Since retiring from baseball after the 2014 season, Jeter has poured his competitive juices into golf, lowering his handicap to a 10. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the most frustrating thing I\u2019ve done, because the ball\u2019s not moving, right?\u201d Jeter said with a laugh. \u201cI can hit it, but it just doesn\u2019t go where I want it to go. So I\u2019ve gotten addicted to trying to improve.\u201d He added, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to find something that sort of quenches that competitive thirst after you retire.\u201d The reason he chose golf, he said, is that with the exception of pro-am rounds, he can play with friends in peace. \u201cYou go out with three or four people that you know and nobody bothers you or interrupts you, and you have fun,\u201d he said. \u201cI love the game.\u201d As a youngster, Jordan Spieth was a promising left-handed pitcher and shortstop in Dallas before he decided to focus on golf. He could not help rooting for Jeter, except when the Yankees were playing against his hometown Rangers. \u201cI cursed the guy plenty of times for what he\u2019s done against us,\u201d Spieth said. \u201cAt the same time, it was with full respect, obviously.\u201d He added: \u201cYou\u2019re not kind of in the presence of a sports figure like Derek Jeter very often. There\u2019s not that many alive \u2014 you think of Michael Jordan, you think of Tiger, Jack\u201d \u2014 a reference to the 18-time major winner Jack Nicklaus. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty special.\u201d Spieth, 23, who has thrown out the ceremonial first pitch before a Rangers game, can relate somewhat to Jeter\u2019s reluctance to play golf in front of a crowd. He said he would not relish taking fielding practice before a Rangers game. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t necessarily surprise me doing something uncomfortable to you with a lot of people watching and all they\u2019ve seen you do is your skill to the highest level,\u201d Spieth said. He added: \u201cIt\u2019s interesting, because you think the guy\u2019s been on the biggest stage, performing the best and very clutch, and then he does something so silly as playing in a pro-am and the fact that a few people are watching makes him nervous. But that\u2019s I guess how it works.\u201d Spieth was looking forward to talking to Jeter, and vice versa. \u201cIt\u2019s just fun getting an opportunity to meet a lot of these guys that you admire from afar,\u201d Jeter said. \u201cIt\u2019s always fun to see these guys who are the best in the world at what they do.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Derek Jeter;Tiger Woods"}
{"id": "ny0084068", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2015/10/08", "title": "Ending an Albania-Serbia Game and Inciting a Riot, With a Joystick", "abstract": "TIRANA, Albania \u2014 After investing thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours meticulously planning for his moment, Ismail Morina realized he had made a rookie mistake. It was 9:25 p.m. last Oct. 14, and Morina, a 33-year-old Albanian crane operator, was standing in one of the towers of the Church of the Holy Archangel Gabriel in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia . From there he could see into Partizan Stadium, where the soccer teams of Serbia and Albania were playing a tense qualification game for the 2016 European Championship. The match was scoreless as halftime approached. In Morina\u2019s hands was a remote control piloting a four-rotor drone, which at that moment was gliding across the rim of the stadium trailing a large nationalist flag bearing the double-headed black Albanian eagle. That flag was about to incite a riot , a diplomatic incident between two Balkan countries, and headlines across the world. But there was one problem: Morina did not know which team was which. \u201cSerbia was wearing red and Albania white,\u201d he said. \u201cI was expecting it to be the other way around!\u201d As the drone hovered above the field, players, officials and fans looked to the sky in confusion. \u201cI remember how quiet it went,\u201d Morina recalled. \u201cAnd then they saw the black eagle. ...\u201d Morina\u2019s problem was that he had flown his drone too close to a player in red, Serbia defender Stefan Mitrovic, and Mitrovic grabbed the flag and pulled the device to the ground. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize he wasn\u2019t Albanian until it was too late,\u201d Morina said. Image Kosovar troops on Saturday with Ismail Morina, who piloted the drone that stopped the 2014 Albania-Serbia match. On any given day, dozens of people stop him to pose for pictures. Credit James Montague As the Albanian and Serbian players fought for control of the flag, Serbian ultras and others invaded the field , and flares and other missiles rained down from the stands. The Albanian players ran down a tunnel, the match officials followed, and the game was abandoned. Conspiracy theories were offered as to the identity of the pilot. Initially it was reported in Serbia that the culprit was the brother of Albania\u2019s prime minister , Edi Rama. The Albanian dressing room was searched by Serbian police officers looking for evidence, but they came up empty-handed. In fact, at that moment, the drone\u2019s real pilot was moving through the back streets of Belgrade, hiding from the police as he tried to escape the country. The remote control was on the floor in the church tower. The fallout was intense. The Serbian government considered the drone and the flag a provocation. \u201cIf someone from Serbia had unveiled a flag of Greater Serbia in Tirana or Pristina, it would already be on the agenda of the U.N. Security Council,\u201d Serbia\u2019s foreign minister, Ivica Dacic, told the newspaper Blic. UEFA, European soccer\u2019s governing body, initially ruled the game a forfeit by Albania, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport reversed that decision in July , awarding a 3-0 victory to Albania and docking Serbia 3 points for failing to control the crowd. The sanctions ended any chance Serbia had of qualification for next year\u2019s Euro 2016 tournament in France. But on Thursday, Albania and Serbia will meet again , in the central Albanian city of Elbasan. Nearly a year later, the drone incident \u2014 and Morina \u2014 remain the talk of the town. The seeds for it were planted in 2010, he said. He had finished his shift working on a crane in Milan, where he had lived for the six years with his Italian wife and two children. When he went home and turned on his TV, he saw Italy playing Serbia in a 2012 European Championship qualification game. The match was abandoned after seven minutes because of crowd violence, but in the disturbances, two Serbian supporters wearing masks scaled a fence and used a flare to burn an Albanian flag. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d Morina said. \u201cIf I had gone for a shower, I would probably have missed it. But I didn\u2019t.\u201d A Drone Remembered 7 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Marko Djurica/Reuters UEFA frequently separates teams that have political issues. Armenia and Azerbaijan are separated during UEFA tournaments because of their unresolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Ukrainian and Russian club teams were separated during last season\u2019s Europa League and Champions League draws over the conflict in East Ukraine. Yet when the draw for the Euro 2016 qualification campaign was made in February last year, Albania and Serbia were allowed to be placed in the same group because, a UEFA official said , they have not been directly at war. (Significant numbers of ethnic Albanians live throughout the Balkans, most significantly in Kosovo, where in 1999 Serbia tried to crush an uprising. Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, but Serbia does not recognize it.) When Morina saw the draw for the 2016 tournament, and that the first Albania-Serbia game would be in Belgrade, he decided the setting would be \u201cperfect.\u201d After seeing a drone in a Milanese shop window, he bought several and began to practice flying them, destroying one in the process. \u201cI got used to it quickly because it was like when I drive my crane; I had a joystick,\u201d he said. A reconnaissance trip to Belgrade was wasted because he believed \u2014 incorrectly \u2014 that the game would take place at the home to Red Star Belgrade, known as Marakana stadium. When Morina realized his error, he used Google Maps to choose five or six new sites. In the end, he decided on the Church of the Holy Archangel Gabriel, which was across the street from Partizan Stadium. \u201cIt was easy,\u201d he said. \u201cQuiet, with a park all around. There was no one to stop me.\u201d After his drone was pulled from the sky, Morina made his escape on foot, trying to get back to the car he had parked almost a mile away. When he saw two policemen, he said, he rolled under a parked car and waited for them to pass. Soon he was on the highway south, and a few hours later he had crossed into the safety of Kosovo. \u201cI still thought I had failed at this point,\u201d he said. \u201cThen I got a call from a friend in Italy. He told me, \u2018Man, you\u2019re famous.\u2019 \u201d Morina\u2019s mission, he said, had been to send a message. The flag he attached to the drone bore the double-headed black Albanian eagle, a map of Greater Albania \u2014 a nationalistic concept that also includes territory in Macedonia, Greece and Serbia \u2014 and the date Albania won independence from the Ottomans in 1912. At the bottom was the word Autochthonous, an obscure English word that means indigenous, or native. \u201cI am a patriot, not a nationalist, and I chose it to say to the Serbs that it is the Albanians that are native to the Balkans,\u201d he said last week, sitting in a cafe in the Albanian capital, Tirana. \u201cThat is not to say the Serbs can\u2019t live here,\u201d he added. \u201cBut they have to respect our flag.\u201d In Albania, the drone has made Ismail Morina a national hero. On any given day, dozens of people \u2014 students, war veterans, even the police \u2014 stop him to pose for pictures. His actions are still discussed on Albanian television regularly, although not always favorably. \u201cOne analyst on TV said I was both from ISIS, because the flag was black, and that I was paid by the Serbian secret service!\u201d he said. Thursday\u2019s rematch could be a significant moment. Assured of at least a third-place playoff spot, Albania can move to the verge of qualifying for its first major international tournament by beating Serbia. But the Albanian soccer federation has told Morina not to come; the match has been deemed high risk by UEFA, meaning no Serbian supporters \u2014 aside from 70 students \u2014 will be allowed to attend. But even after the game, life will not be the same again for Morina. He is now back in Albania permanently, having left Italy three days after the drone incident because, he said, \u201cpeople knew where me and my family lived.\u201d He knows of the threats made against him online and has even heard tales that there is a reward for his capture. \u201cI\u2019m not worried about the Serbian state, but extremist groups,\u201d he said. He pulled out a gun that he bought recently. He says he keeps it with him, loaded, at all times. It is a Zastava pistol. Made in Serbia. A few days later, Morina was flipping through his private messages on Facebook at a restaurant outside Tirana. There were a number of threats. One picture, sent from a Serbian who claimed to be a former member of the country\u2019s special forces, displayed an arsenal of guns and knives. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll send a picture of my Zastava,\u201d Morina joked, clearly worried. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Morina was arrested. The police reportedly seized the pistol and about 30 tickets to Thursday\u2019s match. More important, they said Morina did not have a permit for the gun. It is unlikely that he will be allowed to watch the match in jail.", "keyword": "Soccer;Drones;Serbia;Albania;Flags;Civil Unrest;Euro 2016 UEFA European Championship"}
{"id": "ny0257100", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/01/04", "title": "Hungary Faces Criticism Over Corporate Tax", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Already under attack over controversial new media laws, Hungary faced new criticism on the first working day of its presidency of the European Union \u2014 this time being accused of discriminating against big foreign investors. Following complaints from more than a dozen West European corporations, the European Commission , the bloc\u2019s executive, said it would investigate whether Hungary was breaking the law by levying a new crisis tax that will hit foreign companies hard. A country of 10 million, Hungary faces six months of unusually close scrutiny while it takes charge of E.U. business. Critics say the center-right Hungarian government is centralizing power and adopting populist policies with a nationalist edge, a charge rejected by the government in Budapest. The rotating presidency of the E.U. is less important following the creation of a full-time E.U president and foreign policy chief by the Lisbon Treaty. But it retains significant power for a variety of policies, from the environment to fisheries. Hungary is only the third East European nation to take over the presidency since the Union was enlarged, first in 2004 and then in 2007. Although Slovenia\u2019s six-month term was largely uneventful, the Czech Republic\u2019s presidency proved prone to accidents, and critics say Hungarian leadership could prove equally controversial. A landslide election victory last April brought the ruling Fidesz party to power, returning Viktor Orban to the post of prime minister. Mr. Orban, who held the job from 1998 to 2002, has now struck a nationalist tone, criticizing foreign banks and speculators and spurning further help from the International Monetary Fund. The media law places broadcast, print and online media under a new regulatory authority that can impose heavy fines and whose independence has already been questioned by the European Commission. The law has been criticized by the German government and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. \u201cSuch concentration of power in regulatory authorities is unprecedented in European democracies, and it harms media freedom,\u201d its media freedom representative, Dunja Mijatovic, said in a statement issued late last year. Criticism from Fidesz of the governor of the Hungarian National Bank, Andras Simor, whose salary was cut, have prompted fears that his independence is being undermined. Dimitar Bechev, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Fidesz was causing concern because it was a mainstream center-right party that was moving \u201cin a more radical direction.\u201d \u201cThere is a common thread running across these policies, a desire to reassert a sense of national identity and national control,\u201d he said. European corporations from outside Hungary believe they are being targeted by the crisis tax, which will be imposed on the telecommunications, retail and energy sectors. The companies made an official complaint, saying that the legislation discriminates against European businesses from outside Hungary, which is forbidden by the bloc\u2019s rules. They argue that, because of the threshold at which they will be imposed, these taxes will largely affect foreign companies. The Hungarian government says that the tax is needed because further austerity measures would hurt growth prospects and undermine hopes of recovery. A Hungarian government briefing document on the tax suggests that it would raise around \u20ac1.8 billion, or $2.4 billion, over three years. One Hungarian official, not authorized to speak publicly, said that at least one large corporation headquartered in Hungary would have to contribute as well as foreign companies. The companies that made the complaint include the energy firms RWE and E.ON, Deutsche Telekom and the Dutch bank ING. Economics Minister Rainer Br\u00fcderle of Germany has been among the critics of the Hungarian law. \u201cTaxes that are primarily directed at foreign companies are problematic in principle in the European internal market,\u201d he told the Munich newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung. Olivier Bailly, spokesman for the European Commission, said the commission wrote to the Hungarian government in October asking for information and had received a response even before the companies sent their complaint. \u201cWe are now looking at the formal complaint and the letter from the Hungarian government,\u201d Mr. Bailly said.", "keyword": "Hungary;European Union;European Commission;Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0280034", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/10/16", "title": "Stampede Kills at Least 24 at Hindu Ceremony in India", "abstract": "LUCKNOW, India \u2014 At least 24 people were killed and 20 others were injured in a stampede that occurred Saturday as worshipers were crossing a crowded bridge to reach a Hindu religious ceremony in northern India, the police said. The stampede took place on the outskirts of Varanasi, a city in Uttar Pradesh, a state known for its temples. Organizers were expecting 3,000 people at the ceremony, but more than 70,000 crowded into the ashram of a local Hindu leader on a bank of the Ganges River, a police officer, S. K. Bhagat, said. \u201cWe were not prepared for such a large crowd,\u201d said Raj Bahadur, a spokesman for the organizers. The stampede happened as the police started turning people back from the overcrowded bridge, Mr. Bahadur said, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. That set off a rumor that the bridge had collapsed, and people started running for safety, he said. Nineteen people were killed at the scene, and five others died at a hospital, said Daljit Chaudhary, another police officer. Four of the 20 injured people were still in serious condition, he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was deeply saddened by the episode. \u201cI have spoken to officials and asked them to ensure all possible help to those affected,\u201d he wrote in a Twitter post . Deadly stampedes are fairly common at Indian religious festivals, where large crowds gather in small areas.", "keyword": "Stampede;Fatalities,casualties;Varanasi;Hinduism"}
{"id": "ny0182827", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/12/19", "title": "Goldman\u2019s Record Year Ends With Modest Gain", "abstract": "Goldman Sachs did it again. Now the question is whether the Wall Street bank can do it again and again. The company capped another record year on Tuesday with a modest gain in fourth-quarter earnings, prospering amid the financial tumult that has hurt many of its rivals. But investors are growing increasingly worried that Goldman, which raced ahead as the mortgage crisis tore through Wall Street, will fail to match its 2007 performance next year. David A. Viniar, Goldman\u2019s chief financial officer, reinforced those concerns on Tuesday by saying he was \u201ccautious\u201d about the short-term outlook although bullish for the longer term. Goldman stock slumped even though the latest results topped analysts\u2019 forecasts. For now, Goldman and its employees have much to celebrate. Helped by big one-time gains, fourth-quarter earnings increased 2.2 percent, to $3.2 billion, or $7.01 a share, handily beating the $6.61 a share expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. That put the company\u2019s earnings for the year up 21 percent, to $11.4 billion, or $24.64 a share. The record annual showing will mean a record payday for Goldman\u2019s employees. The company set aside $20.2 billion for bonuses this year, or $661,490 an employee. That is up 6 percent from 2006. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive, is expected to take home about $70 million. But during the latest quarter, many of Goldman\u2019s core businesses were battered along with those of its competitors. And while analysts applauded the company\u2019s ability to weather the mortgage market crisis, many focused on how hard it will be to replicate these successes in 2008. \u201cIt certainly looks like Goldman Sachs is not immune to the laws of gravity,\u201d said Brad Hintz, a securities industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who noted that Goldman\u2019s fixed-income and equities businesses suffered during the fourth quarter, while new investment banking deals were smaller than those that closed during the previous quarter. David A. Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights, a securities research firm, said that the firm\u2019s bearish bets on mortgages, which buoyed its third-quarter results and cushioned the pain in the fourth quarter, carried too many risks. \u201cThey got through it this time, but we think a better posture is to not load up on the risk so you don\u2019t have to rely on the Houdini hedge escape, which is what they did,\u201d Mr. Hendler said. For the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $10.7 billion in net revenue, an increase of 14 percent from a year earlier and down 13 percent from the previous quarter. Compared with the period a year ago, Goldman reported a 98 percent increase in financial advisory revenue, a 26 percent decline in principal investments and a 39 percent surge in equities, which Mr. Viniar said came from Goldman\u2019s clients\u2019 business and its proprietary trading. But the fourth quarter paled compared with the third quarter, when profit surged 79 percent. Revenue from financial advisory fell 12 percent during the fourth quarter while overall investment banking revenue was down 8 percent compared with the third quarter. Fixed-income, currencies and commodities fell 32 percent, even though that unit was helped by an $800 million gain from the sale of Goldman\u2019s stake in Cogentrix Energy Inc. Equities fell 17 percent, corporate and real estate investments decreased 29 percent and asset management revenues stumbled 3 percent. The latest results were helped by $1 billion in private equity gains, as well as by gains on leveraged loans the firm was able to sell at a profit. Goldman did not disclose any mortgage write-downs but said they were modest for the year and were offset by the firm\u2019s bearish bet on the mortgage sector. Value-at-risk, a common gauge of the amount of risk a firm is taking by measuring the amount of money the firm could lose on a given day with a certain measure of confidence, skyrocketed to $151 million from $106 million for the fourth quarter of 2006. Investors are now focused on 2008. Mr. Viniar, the chief financial officer, emphasized that November was a tough month, with many clients sitting on the sidelines. He predicted that there would not be any huge leveraged buyouts in the near future but suggested strategic investments could pick up if the economy continued to grow and the markets started to recover \u2014 two big ifs. Goldman\u2019s stock fell $7.12, or 3.4 percent, to $201.51 in New York trading on Tuesday.", "keyword": "Company Reports;Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated;Mortgages;Banks and Banking;Stocks and Bonds;Finances;Wall Street (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0258478", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/01/07", "title": "German Foreign Minister Defends Merkel\u2019s Coalition", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 Defying calls for his resignation, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle went on the offensive Thursday in a speech aimed at quashing dissent while warning of a drift leftward if supporters failed to rally around his Free Democrats party. In a spirited 80-minute speech punctuated by applause but also by heckling, Mr. Westerwelle sought to bolster Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s center-right coalition, which has been dragged down in opinion polls by the Free Democrats, her partners since October 2009. \u201cWe liberals will fight. I will fight because Germany deserves better than a left-wing majority,\u201d Mr. Westerwelle, who is also deputy chancellor, told delegates at the party\u2019s annual New Year\u2019s assembly in the opera house in Stuttgart, the regional capital of Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg. Opinion polls show a significant rise in support for the opposition Greens and Social Democrats while the Left Party, which is socialist in outlook, retains a large following in eastern Germany and has made inroads in the western states. The Free Democrats, who won almost 15 percent in the 2009 federal elections, have since plummeted to below 5 percent in the latest opinion polls. This in turn has damaged overall support for Mrs. Merkel\u2019s government, with her backing declining to about 37 percent, a 10 percentage point drop since her re-election in 2009. But Mr. Westerwelle, praised even by his political opponents as a gifted orator, hit back Thursday. \u201cPublic opinion is not the measure of our policies,\u201d he said. \u201cOur policies are measured by our ideals, our beliefs and our values.\u201d With his eye on crucial regional elections in the coming months, which will test the popularity of the party but particularly Mrs. Merkel\u2019s coalition, Mr. Westerwelle defended his party\u2019s record in the government. Responding to criticism that extends to his own party members that he has failed to carve out a prominent identity and role for the Free Democrats, he told delegates that the Free Democrats remained Germany\u2019s only genuine liberal party \u2014 in the traditional, 19th-century sense of a commitment to smaller government, a simplified tax system and reward for achievement, in contrast with the opposition parties. \u201cGermany is doing better today than before the last national election,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is no country in the world that has come out of the financial crisis as well as Germany. We liberals had the courage to do what was right, even if we weren\u2019t congratulated for it every day.\u201d However, since joining the government in 2009 after 11 years in opposition, the Free Democrats have supported more state supervision over the banks. The party has expanded the Development Ministry, which it leads, after saying in its 2009 election campaign that it wanted to abolish it or merge it with the Foreign Ministry in order to reduce bureaucracy. And it has failed to push through any major tax reforms. Analysts said one of the main reasons Mr. Westerwelle had become so unpopular was that he had been unable to fulfill the expectations of his voters, the majority of whom are middle-class professionals or entrepreneurs. \u201cThe expectations were just so high when the Free Democrats entered the government in 2009,\u201d said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Free University in Berlin. \u201cNo wonder the disappointment among its supporters is so great. It is all very well attacking the opposition and raising the specter of a left-wing government, but what about the substance? The forthcoming regional elections will show if Mr. Westerwelle can reverse the party\u2019s fortunes.\u201d", "keyword": "Westerwelle Guido;Germany;Politics and Government;Free Democratic Party (Germany)"}
{"id": "ny0093928", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2015/08/25", "title": "Reform Chief Questions United States Involvement in FIFA, Defends Sepp Blatter", "abstract": "Somebody needs to tell Fran\u00e7ois Carrard, the Swiss lawyer recently named to lead FIFA\u2019s reform committee , that he should really stop being so annoyingly impartial and tell the public how he really feels. In an interview published Sunday in the Swiss newspaper Le Matin \u2014 one of his first interviews since he was named to lead the reform committee \u2014 Carrard shared his thoughts on a number of topics that have hung in the air since United States prosecutors rudely interrupted FIFA\u2019s longstanding dance with corruption and started arresting people. Among his most notable remarks to American ears was his questioning why Americans should even be involved in FIFA at all when football, baseball and basketball are so much more popular in the United States. He said, in French, that soccer was not \u201ca true American sport.\u201d \u201cThere, it\u2019s just an ethnic sport for girls in schools,\u201d he said. Let\u2019s see him repeat those comments to Abby Wambach, Carli Lloyd or Hope Solo, or any of the other members of the United States team that just won the Women\u2019s World Cup. Or to Clint Dempsey and Tim Howard, who helped lead the United States men\u2019s team to the Round of 16 at last year\u2019s World Cup. (That is the same round the Swiss men reached, by the way.) Image Sepp Blatter, right, in Switzerland this month. He is giving up the presidency of FIFA. Credit Laurent Gillieron/Keystone, via Associated Press Carrard\u2019s words were fighting words, if fighting 77-year-old Swiss lawyers is your thing. But it\u2019s disturbing that those comments weren\u2019t the worst of what Carrard said to Le Matin. Even more troubling was how Carrard \u2014 the man charged by FIFA with overseeing reforms at FIFA \u2014 characterized the organization and its tainted president, Sepp Blatter , who announced in June that he would give up the presidency he has held since 1998. Carrard implied that ensuring FIFA survived the reform process was a top priority, declaring that without FIFA, \u201csoccer would die.\u201d As for the United States\u2019 criminal case against the 14 soccer and marketing executives arrested in May on the eve of FIFA\u2019s annual congress, Carrard said he was sure the matter involved only \u201ca few rogues\u201d on the executive committee. Blatter? Well, Carrard could almost be heard sniffling with sympathy when describing how the FIFA president has suffered as this corruption scandal has unfolded. \u201cThis man is being treated unfairly,\u201d Carrard said of Blatter, noting that his fellow Swiss was not named as a target in the indictments. \u201cUnfortunately, it\u2019s always like that when somebody stays too long \u2014 the negative takes over.\u201d (Carrard neglected to point out that \u201cthe negative\u201d is actually accusations of a decades-long criminal conspiracy, and that \u201ctoo long\u201d includes being at the helm of global soccer at a time when at least half of FIFA\u2019s executive committee has been tarnished by ethics or corruption charges. And is it \u201ctoo long,\u201d or just \u201cthe negative\u201d again, when a large group of the president\u2019s associates are hauled out of their hotel rooms in handcuffs?) Sadly, Carrard\u2019s words do not sound like declarations of a man serious about cleaning up FIFA. They sound like words from a man out to defend FIFA. That\u2019s too bad. Carrard had so much potential. He came to the job as the former director general of the International Olympic Committee, an executive who had helped clean up the mess of the bribery scandal involving the bidding for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Those revelations shook the I.O.C. as deeply as the recent charges are shaking FIFA today. This time, though, Carrard appears to be such an efficient investigator that he didn\u2019t even need to investigate to come up with opinions on how FIFA operates, and who is at fault, and \u2014 most important \u2014 who is not. He said, \u201cI do not want to judge,\u201d but already, he has judged Blatter and his associates and the entire game of soccer in the United States. He even judged the United States justice system, criticizing Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch for holding a news conference to announce the charges when \u201ccrimes like this happen in the U.S. every day.\u201d And then was brazen enough, or foolish enough, to go on the record about it. It\u2019s clear that Carrard knows how to land punches. It\u2019s just as clear that he doesn\u2019t know much about which he speaks. Any roster full of girls on a school soccer team could tell you that. But here\u2019s what everyone should know: There is such a thing as Swiss neutrality. Unfortunately, in this case, the investigator has already hinted at his conclusion, before he has even seen much of the evidence.", "keyword": "Soccer;FIFA;Francois Carrard;Sepp Blatter;Corruption;United States Soccer Federation"}
{"id": "ny0075035", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2015/04/15", "title": "Blackwater\u2019s Legacy Goes Beyond Public View", "abstract": "By the time four former Blackwater security guards were sentenced this week to long prison terms for the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 civilians in Iraq, the man who sent the contractors there had long since moved on from the country and the company he made notorious. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a former member of the Navy SEALs and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune, has spent the last few years searching for new missions, new fields of fire and new customers. He has worked in Abu Dhabi and now focuses his efforts on Africa, with ties to the Chinese government, which is eager for access to some of the continent\u2019s natural resources. Mr. Prince\u2019s current firm, Frontier Services Group, provides what it describes as \u201cexpeditionary logistics\u201d for mining, oil and natural gas operations in Africa, and has the backing of Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company. The private security industry that Mr. Prince helped bring to worldwide attention has fallen from public view since the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two conflicts sped the maturation of security firms from bit players on the edge of global conflicts to multinational companies that guard oil fields in Libya, analyze intelligence for United States forces in Afghanistan, help fight insurgents in parts of Africa and train American-backed militaries in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Video Iraqis reacted to the sentences given in the trial of four former Blackwater guards who opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square in 2007. Many believe the sentences are too lenient. Credit Credit Associated Press \u201cThis industry is now truly global,\u201d said Sean McFate, author of \u201cThe Modern Mercenary,\u201d a book on the private security industry. \u201cThat\u2019s the legacy of Blackwater \u2014 they didn\u2019t really make the business, but they\u2019ve symbolized it. They\u2019ve become the hood ornaments for an industry that was for centuries pretty much illegal, and now it\u2019s pretty much re-emerged.\u201d Security companies say they have taken steps toward ensuring that their guards are well trained and behave professionally. Industry officials say that one of the consequences of the 2007 shooting has been to impose more rigorous controls on contractors handling diplomatic security for the State Department, as Blackwater was doing when its security guards fired into Baghdad\u2019s crowded Nisour Square, killing unarmed Iraqis, enraging the country. \u201cThose sort of reckless days with contractors running around like cowboys are over,\u201d said one senior industry executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity. \u201cIt is 180 degrees different. There is a lot more oversight and regulation.\u201d Others, including Ryan Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, agree that there are more controls over contractors. Still, there are calls for greater transparency. Just tracking the growth of the industry as it has expanded beyond work for the United States government has proved exceptionally difficult. In Africa and the Middle East, most governments do not publicize the companies they hire, and private businesses are similarly tight-lipped. As a result, there are no solid numbers on how many armed contractors are currently working around the world, and estimates of industry revenues range from a few billion dollars to $100 billion. Video Why the case of four Blackwater guards, charged with murdering 14 Iraqis in Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007 (the Iraqi government had originally accused them of killing 17), took so long to reach a verdict. Credit Credit Michael Kamber for The New York Times Even determining how many private security contractors are employed by the United States government is nearly impossible because the contracts are often opaque, subcontractors do much of the work on the ground and some of the business is classified. State Department officials refused on Tuesday to provide statistics on how many contractors it uses today. The United States Central Command, which is in charge of military forces in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, reported in January that 54,700 private contractors worked for the Defense Department in its areas of responsibility. In Afghanistan alone, where about 9,800 American troops are deployed, the Pentagon is paying for almost 40,000 private contractors, more than a third of whom are American, according to the Centcom report. Only a few hundred, though, are involved directly in security, with others doing everything from serving food to conducting intelligence work. Last year, the United States also sought to hire private military contractors in Iraq to buttress the small number of American troops there to help stop the advance of the Islamic State. The contractors\u2019 tasks would involve assisting the Iraqi military, including administrative tasks, public affairs and operational planning, according to the Pentagon. Experts believe that private security contractors are likely to remain a permanent part of the American presence overseas. \u201cYou are going to keep having contractors for security,\u201d said Mr. Crocker, the former ambassador. \u201cYou can\u2019t do things in Iraq or Afghanistan without them. You just can\u2019t.\u201d Image Nisour Square in Baghdad, where company security guards shot and killed unarmed Iraqis in September 2007. Four former guards were sentenced to prison Monday in the shootings. Credit Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images Ann Hagedorn, the author of \u201cThe Invisible Soldiers,\u201d a 2014 book about security contractors, agreed that contractors would have plenty of work. \u201cIraq has been called the first contractors\u2019 war,\u201d she said. \u201cWith an increasing dependence on these companies worldwide, we could easily be going into another contingency operation that will be another contractors\u2019 war.\u201d Blackwater, the company Mr. Prince built into a corporate symbol of the American war in Iraq, never really recovered from the Nisour Square shootings and its many other controversies and legal woes. In addition to the prosecution of the guards in the 2007 shooting, five top Blackwater executives were indicted on weapons-related charges, the company was forced to pay millions of dollars in fines to the State Department for export law violations, and it faced costly civil lawsuits from the families of the victims of Nisour Square and the families of four guards killed in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004. Blackwater was eventually blocked from providing diplomatic security in Iraq. Meanwhile, Afghanistan banned private security companies in 2012 after years of allegations of guards killing civilians and other abuses. Foreign military and diplomatic missions were exempted, however. In response to the controversies surrounding Blackwater, Mr. Prince first renamed the company and then sold it in 2010. Now known as Academi, it has since been resold and merged, along with one of its main competitors, Triple Canopy, into the Constellis Group. The consolidated company is still a major player in security contracting for the American government and other customers, while Blackwater\u2019s sprawling facility in Moyock, N.C., is now one of Academi\u2019s major assets as a training center. Mr. Prince emerged from the wreckage of Blackwater relatively unscathed, never facing any criminal charges from the multiple government investigations into the company. But he was embittered by the legal scrutiny and negative publicity, all part of what he believed were unfair political attacks on him and his firm. He moved his family to Abu Dhabi in 2010, when one former colleague told The New York Times that Mr. Prince \u201cneeds a break from America.\u201d In his 2013 memoir, \u201cCivilian Warriors,\u201d Mr. Prince defended the actions of Blackwater as well as the guards who fired in Nisour Square, protesting that \u201cshifting political tectonic plates crushed my company as an act of partisan theatrics.\u201d", "keyword": "Mercenaries Private Military Contractors;Blackwater Worldwide;US Military;Iraq War;Afghanistan War;Erik D Prince;State Department"}
{"id": "ny0251933", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/02/25", "title": "Some Baseball Stories Can\u2019t Be Told in Numbers", "abstract": "Jim Edmonds\u2019s recent retirement announcement didn\u2019t draw much notice in Chicago, even though that unfailingly stylish center fielder was a Cub in 2008. Wrigleyville never took to him. The 19 home runs that Edmonds hit and the fielding gems he contributed to a division winner could not undo the damage he caused the Cubs over eight years of distinguished service to Tony La Russa\u2019s hated Cardinals. Speaking for the minority, I\u2019m going to miss him. I loved the way Edmonds played center field He always seemed to have a shot at catching any ball that stayed in the park, as well as some that were leaving if they lacked proper clearance. Sure, he embellished a little, diving when it might not have been necessary, but drama was part of the package. And nobody ran on him. That left arm did not dispense laser beams, but it was uncommonly accurate, always dialed in to the right base. Edmonds was dangerous at the plate, too, though not really a good enough hitter to make the cut for Cooperstown. Still, his glove work embodied excellence at his position and served as a daily reminder of how much defense matters in baseball. Somewhere there\u2019s a number that quantifies how good Edmonds was in the outfield, a number more esoteric than fielding percentage, putouts, assists \u2014 the usual suspects. There\u2019s just as likely a number that will suggest he wasn\u2019t any good at all, that other metrics like his range factor or his total zone runs or his win-probability-added don\u2019t measure up to the immortal Willie Tasby . Numbers. They are the lifeblood of baseball, but I fear we have gone too far in our attempts to quantify everything that happens on the diamond, from a pitcher\u2019s ground-ball frequency to a hitter\u2019s productivity when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars. It started with \u201cMoneyball,\u201d Michael Lewis\u2019s 2003 best seller chronicling how the financially ailing Oakland A\u2019s came to rely on cold statistical analysis to shape their baseball decisions. I read it and liked it. Now I hate it, because the numbers revolution that it touched off has overtaken the game and threatens to squeeze the life from it. The other day, an occasionally reasonable radio host shouted down caller after caller, insisting that there was no such thing as a \u201cclutch\u201d hitter, that statistical probability could determine the best man for the job with two on and two outs in the late innings of a tight game. \u201cThat guy never had to face George Brett,\u201d said Steve Stone, the White Sox\u2019s television analyst and an 11-year major league pitcher. \u201cI\u2019m probably prejudiced, because George hit about .470 off me, but there were times when you just didn\u2019t want to face him if you couldn\u2019t pitch around him. Thurman Munson was the same way. Reggie Jackson may have been the straw that stirred the drink, but every pitcher I knew would rather go through a lineup full of Reggies than face Thurman Munson with the game on the line.\u201d Stone, one of the most astute analysts in baseball, looks at numbers as part of his preparation, but he\u2019s more reliant on what he sees and what he has learned over 38 years in the game. He had no problem with Derek Jeter\u2019s winning his fifth Gold Glove in 2010, even if it was symbolic, a lifetime achievement award for Jeter, the 36-year-old Yankee shortstop. \u201cI don\u2019t need numbers to tell me Derek Jeter\u2019s range has declined. I can see that,\u201d Stone said. \u201cI also see him positioning hitters so well that he only has to take three steps to get to a ball, whereas a shortstop with better range, so to speak, might need six steps. And I know Derek is going to pick up the hard two-out grounder in the eighth inning. You want the ball hit to him. He wants the ball hit to him. Not everybody is like that.\u201d Sox fans are hoping the free-agent slugger Adam Dunn is like that; their centerpiece off-season acquisition is expected to add some left-handed thunder to a potent lineup. \u201cThe projections will say we can expect 35 to 40 homers, 110 to 120 R.B.I.\u2019s and about a .390 on-base percentage,\u201d Stone said. \u201cThose are impressive numbers that have made Adam Dunn a very wealthy man. But I defy Bill James or any computer expert anywhere to tell me how Adam Dunn is going to do in the heat of a pennant race. I don\u2019t know, the Sox don\u2019t know, and Adam Dunn doesn\u2019t know, because he\u2019s never been through one. How do you measure that?\u201d Gary Hughes, a special assistant to the Cubs\u2019 general manager, Jim Hendry, has been scouting baseball talent for 43 years. A prospect\u2019s \u201cmakeup\u201d \u2014 his emotional and psychological stability, along with his self-confidence \u2014 is as much a part of the assessment process as his physical tools, and it\u2019s an intangible. \u201cWe\u2019re in the information business, and numbers can be helpful in terms of learning about a guy, providing there\u2019s some context to them,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cBut there\u2019s no way to measure what\u2019s inside a guy\u2019s heart, and if you\u2019re going to last in this business, you\u2019d better be able to tell.\u201d Or invent a number that does.", "keyword": "Baseball;Statistics"}
{"id": "ny0184078", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2007/12/14", "title": "Gore Joins Chorus Chiding U.S. at Climate Talks", "abstract": "NUSA DUA, Indonesia \u2014 Amid growing frustration with the United States over deadlocked negotiations at a United Nations conference on global warming , the European Union threatened Thursday to boycott separate talks proposed by the Bush administration in Hawaii next month. Humberto Rosa, the chief delegate from Portugal, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said the discussions next month would be meaningless if there were no deal at the conference here this week on the resort island of Bali. Germany\u2019s environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, told reporters, \u201cNo result in Bali means no Major Economies Meeting.\u201d He was referring to the formal name of the proposed American-sponsored talks. The goal of the Bali meeting, which is being attended by delegates from 190 countries and which is scheduled to end Friday, is to reach agreement on a plan for a future deal to reduce greenhouse gases. The escalating bitterness between the European Union and the United States came as former Vice President Al Gore told delegates in a speech that \u201cMy own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.\u201d Mr. Gore arrived at the conference from Norway, where he, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to alert the world to the danger of global warming. He urged delegates to agree to an open-ended deal that could be enhanced after the Bush administration leaves office and the United States policy changes. \u201cOver the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now,\u201d Mr. Gore said to loud applause. \u201cYou must anticipate that.\u201d There appears to be broad consensus among the delegates that a new agreement on climate change should be ready by 2009, in time to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the current agreement that limits emissions by all wealthy countries except the United States, which signed the Kyoto agreement but has refused to adopt it. Gaping differences remain between countries over how to share the burden of switching from types of energy that contribute to global warming. The United States and the European Union remain at odds on many major points, including whether an agreement signed here should include numerical targets, a move that the United States and a few other countries, including Russia, oppose. The emerging economic powers, most notably China and India, also refuse to accept limits on their emissions, despite projections that they will soon become the dominant sources of the gases. \u201cI\u2019m very concerned about the pace of things,\u201d Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is playing host to the meeting, said Thursday. The United Nations released fresh data on Thursday confirming what it called the planet\u2019s continued and alarming warming. The 10 years ending in 2007 were the warmest on record, said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, citing data taken since the late 1800s from a global network of weather stations, ships and buoys. \u201cIt\u2019s very likely the warmest period for at least the last 1,000 or 1,300 years,\u201d he told reporters. The data did not surprise scientists \u2014 every recent decade has been warmer than the previous one \u2014 but in releasing the numbers here the agency hoped to spur the 190 deadlocked governments into reaching a deal that would set a deadline for a global climate change agreement. Disagreements exist across a wide range of issues and between numerous blocs of countries but the United States has come under especially strong criticism here by countries rich and poor and by its own domestic critics. \u201cThe best we hoped for was that the U.S. would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward,\u201d said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit American organization. \u201cOur delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation.\u201d Paula Dobriansky, the head of the American delegation, said Thursday that she was committed to obtaining an \u201cenvironmentally effective and economically sustainable\u201d agreement by 2009. \u201cWe are working very hard to achieve consensus,\u201d she told reporters. Delegates here have seen two faces of America: the cautious negotiators, who have sought to water down the more ambitious goals of the European Union; and the more activist voices, from people like Mr. Gore and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who gave a speech on the sidelines of the conference. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg criticized both the Bush administration and Congress for not being aggressive enough in addressing global warming. \u201cThere\u2019s a belief that the United States should not do anything until all the other governments are willing to go along and do it at the same time,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg said. \u201cWe should be doing this regardless of whether the world is following or not.\u201d The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that the world\u2019s average surface temperature had risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius, or 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit, since the start of the 20th century. To the general public that may seem a modest rise, but scientists consider it alarming in the context of historical shifts in temperature. The difference between temperatures today and an ice age is only 5 or 6 degrees Celsius (9 or 10.8 Fahrenheit), according to Mr. Jarraud of the World Meteorological Organization. Several weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation\u2019s leading scientific body on the topic, released its gloomy assessment of warming that is being cited by European delegates here as a clarion call. Climate change was \u201cunequivocal,\u201d the report concluded. \u201cAverage Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years,\u201d the report said. Greenhouse gases were very likely the dominant force driving up temperatures now, it said. The panel, made up of hundreds of scientists, releases its assessment of the data and science on climate change every five years.", "keyword": "Global Warming;International Relations;Politics and Government;United Nations;Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;Bush George W;Gore Al"}
{"id": "ny0115532", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/11/13", "title": "China's Job Market Tightens for Young Foreigners", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Michal Sliwinski decided to buy a one-way ticket to China in 2010 after reading a newspaper article about the Asian giant\u2019s breakneck economic growth. He had just graduated with a political science degree in his native Poland, could not find a job and feared that his prospects at home were not going to improve soon. \u201cI didn\u2019t give it a second thought,\u201d said Mr. Sliwinski, now 26 and living in Beijing. \u201cI checked into a hostel, and I found a job in like five days and started to teach English.\u201d Two years later, Mr. Sliwinski says he is tired of teaching English, but is having trouble securing other work. That is how he found himself among the 1,200 expatriates searching through about 60 booths at the Job Fair for Foreigners, which was held in Beijing at the end of October. The fair also has annual events in Shanghai and Guangzhou. To his disappointment, most of the companies represented were looking for English teachers. \u201cThere are probably some jobs that are really good,\u201d Mr. Sliwinski said. \u201cBut there is huge competition among foreigners, and it is not like they will give you a job just because you are white.\u201d There is a perception among some graduates from economically struggling Western countries that China is the new land of opportunity. But strong economic growth there might not mean good employment prospects for everyone. Foreigners, particularly those who do not have specialized technical skills or Mandarin fluency, may only be able find teaching jobs that pay less than what they might at home. Even those with quite good qualifications might have a hard time. \u201cThere is this idea that China is up-and-coming so it is the place to go,\u201d said Adam Clark, 23, who is currently in an exchange program at Nankai University in Tianjin as part of a master\u2019s of Chinese studies degree at the University of Edinburgh. His program also covers international business, as well as Chinese politics, culture and media; but that still might not be enough. \u201cIn reality, I think it is a lot more difficult than that,\u201d he said. \u201cHaving two degrees \u2014 one in Mandarin and another in something else \u2014 and then only to be able to teach English is not entirely desirable.\u201d According to the 2010 national census, there were about a million expatriates living in mainland China, although almost half of those counted were residents from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau who had moved to the mainland. Of the 593,000 \u201cforeigners,\u201d large numbers came from the rest of Asia: 120,000 from South Korea, 66,000 from Japan and almost 40,000 from Myanmar. Westerners made up a smaller portion, with 71,000 from the United States, almost 20,000 from Canada, 15,000 from France, 14,000 from Germany and 13,000 from Australia. According to George Xu, chief executive of eChinacities.com , a Web site that provides employment and lifestyle tips for expatriates, 65 percent of their job postings were for English-teaching positions. The others were mostly related to information technology, sales and procurement management. The site has 50,000 r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from expatriates in a database available to recruiters. Mr. Xu said that the site had 20,000 daily visitors. \u201cFor foreigners to find a job in China, there are still many obstacles,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t speak Chinese and want to work in this country, it will be quite difficult.\u201d For positions that do not involve teaching English, near fluency in Mandarin is no longer an added bonus, but a prerequisite. A generation or two ago, fluent English and overseas experience were considered special skills. Today, there are more qualified applicants on the market, particularly Chinese students returning with overseas university degrees, multiple languages and an international outlook. According to the Chinese Education Ministry, more than 70 percent of Chinese students who went overseas to study have returned home. There were 186,200 such returnees last year. \u201cThe competition against local graduates or Chinese with a little bit of work experience is intense,\u201d said Andy Bentote, managing director for China at Michael Page, a recruitment agency. \u201cThe entry-level jobs or maybe second-jobber opportunities, there are just not as many of them. If you don\u2019t speak Mandarin and you don\u2019t have any Chinese work experience, it will be very difficult.\u201d Outside of teaching positions, the jobs at the Beijing fair tended to be highly specialized, requiring specific technical skills and years of experience. A young recent graduate with shaky Mandarin as a second language would have a hard time trying to break out of the so-called English-teaching trap. \u201cAll of the people who came here are very nice,\u201d said Zhu Yujiao, a recruiter with Beijing Wellintech Development, which makes software monitoring systems for manufacturers. \u201cBut they are not very suitable for our positions.\u201d Wellintech, which had openings for international sales representatives and software engineers, hoped to find candidates with at least five years experience and a background in technology. Beijing Meidan Food was looking for people to help expand its cracker export business to Africa and Southeast Asia. Fluent Mandarin was required, as most of their staff did not speak English, a recruiter said. Himin Solar, a manufacturer in Shandong Province, had positions for designers and installers of high-end energy-efficient windows and doors. Brett Edman, who moved to Beijing in February after studying Chinese and engineering in Australia, said he approached Himin and had no luck. \u201cI can understand if they are looking for specific things, but they didn\u2019t seem interested in talking to me anyway,\u201d Mr. Edman, 25, said. \u201cEven my major is directly related to their business, so that was a bit surprising.\u201d \u201cI was hoping to find some companies that would be like, \u2018Oh, you are looking to be here for a while. We can give you experience while you learn about China at the same time,\u201d\u2019 Mr. Edman said. \u201cBut those opportunities don\u2019t seem to be there. Maybe I might have to go home and get some work experience for a while and then come back. But that is not ideal.\u201d Max Scholl, 23, who studied environmental engineering at the University of Vermont, has been in China for 10 months teaching English at a kindergarten. His salary is 10,000 renminbi, or $1,600, a month. Most of that is sent home to pay off student loans , and he is concerned that he cannot find employment in his chosen field. \u201cIt is a little frightening, the situation I am in,\u201d he said. Those who have taken extra time and effort to learn Chinese language and culture seem to have an easier time. Bart Bucknill arrived in China in 2009 after getting a philosophy and politics degree from the University of Sheffield in England. For two years, he taught English and also studied Chinese at Yanshan University in Hebei Province. Last year, at the Beijing job fair, he found a position as the business development manager for Zhuzhou Times New Material Technology, a manufacturer of engineering products based in Hunan Province. He was back at the fair this year \u2014 as a recruiter himself. Now 26, he says he has a higher position and more responsibility than he would have in his native Britain. \u201cI guess I impressed them with my Chinese level and also my ability to kind of fit into a Chinese organization,\u201d he said. \u201cThose were my qualifications. They are soft skills, you could say, but they are very important for working in a Chinese company.\u201d Elisa Conterio, 25, arrived in China a few weeks ago with a bachelor\u2019s degree in Chinese language and culture from a university in Venice and a master\u2019s degree from a university in Lyon. \u201cIt is difficult to find a job in Italy, so I decided to come to China,\u201d she said. \u201cI will probably stay here for one or two years and see how things are going.\u201d While she did not find anything at the fair, she managed to secure an internship at an event-planning company she contacted before arriving in Beijing. \u201cI was pretty surprised,\u201d she said about her reaction to their initial salary offer of 2,500 renminbi a month. (They have since doubled it to 5,000 renminbi.) \u201cIt\u2019s a start,\u201d she added.", "keyword": "Education;Colleges and Universities;Unemployment;Beijing (China);Labor and Jobs;China"}
{"id": "ny0226861", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/10/24", "title": "After Hurricanes, Louisiana\u2019s South Cameron Still Standing", "abstract": "CREOLE, La. \u2014 They waited five years for a new school at South Cameron High, five years for a weight room, lockers in the hallway and plates in the cafeteria instead of plastic trays. All that waiting seemed like forever \u2014 playing football on the road for three seasons, taking classes for a semester in a bingo hall, returning from a second hurricane to find an alligator stranded in the coaches\u2019 office. Finally, high school was beginning to feel the way it was supposed to feel. The Federal Emergency Management Agency people showed up Oct. 14 for a ribbon cutting at the new $28 million building with two gyms and three elevators. But football season was nearly gone as six senior players walked arm in arm with their parents Thursday night before their final home game, celebration tinged with a sense of absence and departure. Everybody knew what Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 to New Orleans and southeast Louisiana. Fewer cameras and headlines recorded the pummeling that Hurricane Rita gave to sparsely populated southwest Louisiana a few weeks later. Houses were pushed into the marshes; refrigerators and freezers, too, where some old-timers who did not trust banks kept their money. Little but cement slabs remained along the 70-mile coastline of Cameron Parish, Louisiana\u2019s largest county. Hurricane Ike drowned this rural place again in 2008, a half-century after Hurricane Audrey killed more than 400 people in 1957, when snakes hung in the trees like Spanish moss and survivors floated on their broken homes until they could be rescued. Football, as much as anything, illustrates the resiliency of the Cajuns here and the challenge of maintaining a lifestyle dependent on the bounty and vagary of nature. It is a place where shrimp can be bought straight off the boat and blue-jeaned men work in oil and gas, and egrets and brown pelicans nest along the narrow roads that serve as nature trails and evacuation routes. As recently as 1996, South Cameron High reached the state championship game. Before Rita, 70 or 80 players filled out the roster each season, stretching down the sideline like a marching band. But the high school has since lost more than half its enrollment. Its 98 students are the third fewest among Louisiana schools that play football. Only 23 players suited up Thursday as the Tarpons lost their eighth game in eight weeks without a victory. \u201cThey tell us not to use the hurricanes as an excuse, but we just don\u2019t have the numbers,\u201d said Brendan Trahan, 17, a senior center and defensive tackle. The new school feels oddly empty even with kindergarten through 12th grade housed in one building, so few students that everyone gets a locker on the top row. School is held four days a week, from 7:45 a.m. to 4 p.m., to entice teachers to commute from nearby towns and to help parents save gas money. Trahan, a straight-A student, has six classmates in his advanced math class. That is six more than in physics, where it is just he and the teacher. \u201cYou set the curve in there?\u201d Ginger Boudreaux, his math teacher, joked before Thursday\u2019s game. \u201cTop of my class,\u201d Trahan said. He was in seventh grade when Rita struck, gutting the local schools, stripping metal buildings to their skeletons, scouring churches of everything but the kneelers on the pews. Trahan and his family evacuated eastward, to the other side of Baton Rouge, but he was desperate to return home, for football, for everything a kid could do outdoors with a shotgun and fishing pole. \u201cYou can go where you want; I\u2019m going home,\u201d he told his mother, a teacher. \u201cIt\u2019s 5 minutes from my duck blind, 5 minutes from my deer stand, 10 minutes from anyplace I want to go fishing. And I don\u2019t want to be anything but a Tarpon.\u201d There was not much to return to. Stands on the visitors\u2019 side of the field disappeared in the storm. A state runner-up trophy from 1986, dented and rusted, was fished out of the marsh. \u201cThey found one helmet 40 miles away,\u201d Trahan said. \u201cIn a tree, I think.\u201d South Cameron played an abbreviated 2005 season at a borrowed field, using borrowed equipment, 45 minutes north in Lake Charles. As nomadic as herdsmen, the Tarpons played home games in Lake Charles again in 2006 and in 2008 after Ike, when players bused to practice every day after class at a bingo hall. Somehow, South Cameron remained a playoff team, but all the interruption, the uncertainty, the temporary fields and temporary classrooms took their toll. Parry LaLande, the head coach for 28 years including those state runner-up seasons in 1986 and 1996, retired after the 2009 season, in part weary from the hurricanes. \u201cI don\u2019t mind getting beat; I just want an equal chance,\u201d LaLande said. \u201cTeams didn\u2019t beat us, Rita and Ike beat us.\u201d This season, a kind of posttraumatic stress caught up with South Cameron football. It seemed inevitable. As many as 7,000 of the 10,000 previous residents of Cameron Parish have returned, according to Tina Horn, the parish administrator. But only about half of the coastal residents are back on homesteads where many lived for generations on inherited land. Former residents feel thwarted, parish officials said, by the new requirements of building codes and flood insurance, and are unable or unwilling to pay costs that can reach $30,000 to $80,000 to elevate their homes 12 to 19 feet above sea level on pilings or mounds of dirt. Mole hills, the mounds are called here in the flat countryside. \u201cThe ones who should be back, the elderly who have lived their whole lives here, many can\u2019t come back because they can\u2019t afford elevators,\u201d said Theos Duhon, the sheriff of Cameron Parish. The parish courthouse still stands as a defiant bulwark against three destructive hurricanes. The community hospital is back up and running. Fishing camps and residential homes stand high, as if on giraffe\u2019s legs. But football is struggling to its feet. Only now does the team have a weight room for the first time in five years. \u201cWe have no muscle on our kids,\u201d said Sethie Trosclair, South Cameron\u2019s assistant principal. \u201cWe had meat on our line pre-Rita.\u201d Cameron Parish\u2019s population has shifted inland, toward slightly higher and presumably safer ground. Some, including LaLande, the former coach, favored a consolidation with nearby Grand Lake High, arguing that it would save money, allow for a broader range of classes to be taught and provide a reliable stream of athletes. \u201cWe built something down there,\u201d LaLande said. \u201cI hate to see everything washed away by two hurricanes. I fear it will.\u201d The school board did not seriously consider a merger, said Stephanie Rodrigue, the superintendent of Cameron Parish. Instead, a counterargument prevailed, that a community\u2019s lifeblood flows from its schools and churches. A loss of those means a loss of identity. And anyway, few places are entirely safe from virulent nature, whether it be earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes. \u201cWe can leave ahead of a hurricane; you can\u2019t leave ahead of a tornado,\u201d Rodrigue said. Now that South Cameron High has been rebuilt, the school is attempting to reconstruct its football team. Local competition will arrive in 2013, when Grand Lake plans to begin fielding a varsity squad. It seems inconceivable to many that football would end at South Cameron, but sustainability depends on students. There are only 10 children in second grade, 13 in third grade, 18 in fifth grade. \u201cIt\u2019s a good, hard question,\u201d said Steve Barnett, South Cameron\u2019s athletic director and offensive line coach. \u201cOur numbers are so low. We\u2019ve got a beautiful school but no kids in it.\u201d James Marcantel, in his first season as South Cameron\u2019s head coach, plans to begin a junior high team that will prepare players for the varsity. A soft-spoken man, he is shepherding his players with encouragement instead of criticism. Thursday\u2019s game against Oberlin High, a state power, did not end in victory, but not in humiliation, either. The Tarpons played relentlessly and after the 38-6 defeat, Marcantel told his team: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to hang your head about. They were just a better team. One day, we\u2019ll be the better team.\u201d Brandon Leboeuf, a seventh-grade water boy, said he hoped for a victory in one of the final two road games, \u201cso I can pour some cold water on our coach\u2019s head.\u201d Leaving the field, Trahan showed where an alligator had sauntered into the gym during the flooding from Ike. \u201cSomebody came to get their stuff, and it was waiting,\u201d he said with a laugh. His senior season had not gone as planned, but for him, it had been the right decision to return after the hurricanes. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t change a thing,\u201d Trahan said. \u201cExcept maybe a few wins.\u201d", "keyword": "Hurricane Ike;Louisiana;Football;Interscholastic Athletics;Hurricanes and Tropical Storms;Creole (La);South Cameron High School;Education (K-12)"}
{"id": "ny0261260", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/06/07", "title": "Where Do Flies Go at Night?", "abstract": "Q. Where do flies go at night? In summer in Australia, flies are everywhere in the daytime but seem to disappear at night. A. Most species of flies, with mosquitoes one notable exception, are indeed just daytime fliers, said David A. Grimaldi, a curator in the division of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They require polarized light to guide them visually. \u201cAs the day turns to dusk, flies take refuge under leaves and branches, on twigs and tree trunks, on the stems of tall grass and other plants,\u201d Dr. Grimaldi said. \u201cThey typically will not overnight on the ground. \u201cLight/dark cycles are the primary determinant in flight times of flies,\u201d Dr. Grimaldi said, \u201caffected a bit by temperature.\u201d Certain types of biting midges, including mosquitoes and sand flies, are crepuscular feeders, preferring dawn and dusk, while others prefer night, he said. Black flies and no-see-ums, which are closely related to mosquitoes, are active only during the day or twilight periods. The kinds of flies that most people think of as flies, including houseflies and bluebottle flies, are truly day fliers, Dr. Grimaldi said. Some, like the fruit fly Drosophila (the name means \u201cdew lover\u201d), prefer cool, damp mornings and evenings. C. CLAIBORNE RAY", "keyword": "Insects;Science and Technology;American Museum of Natural History"}
{"id": "ny0031850", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2013/06/13", "title": "Tennis Channel Executive Rants After Losing a Court Ruling", "abstract": "Ken Solomon, the chief executive of Tennis Channel, thought until late last month that he was on his way to winning a big and lengthy legal battle \u2014 one that would greatly enhance the channel\u2019s business. He believed that Comcast would soon make Tennis Channel as widely available on its cable systems as Golf Channel and NBC Sports Network, which it owns. But last month, a three-judge panel of a federal appellate court ruled that Comcast had not discriminated against Tennis Channel by giving it far less distribution than Golf Channel and NBC Sports Network, and was not obliged to expand its availability. Solomon was in Paris for the French Open when the decision was handed down. Hours later, frustrated at the dramatic reversal in the case, he sent his staff an angry, meandering e-mail that was punctuated with the language of sexual assault. Solomon likened the judges\u2019 decision \u2014 and, apparently the difficulty of dealing with Comcast \u2014 to \u201cbeing raped by a brutal captor, finally winning in a long and painful public court trial,\u201d and, \u201con appeal years later from a pre-decided Mad Hatter of a court asking you, the victim, to produce video to prove that it ever happened.\u201d The e-mail was published by Deadspin. The ruling, Solomon wrote, was \u201ca travesty of justice, wholly wrong and unfair, and just plain hard to believe.\u201d His vituperative response went far beyond the polite statement issued by the channel, which expressed respectful disagreement. Image Ken Solomon, the chief executive of Tennis Channel, in 2010. Credit Fred Mullane/Camerawork USA. Solomon has raised millions of dollars for President Obama\u2019s presidential campaigns as one of his top bundlers of contributions and has reportedly been considered for an ambassadorship. He was not available for an interview on Wednesday. In a statement, he said: \u201cI regret several ill-chosen, excessively colorful and inappropriate words in a private e-mail to colleagues a few weeks ago reflecting my disappointment with a legal decision. The e-mail dealt with an issue that we are obviously passionate about, but the words do not accurately reflect my thoughts about the case or those involved, and I am very sorry that I used them.\u201d Vince Wladika, a consultant to Tennis Channel, said: \u201cIt was a brain meltdown that occurred late at night in Paris. Maybe a little too much red wine. This is nothing that ever reflects what Ken Solomon stands for, and I\u2019m sure he is beyond embarrassed about it.\u201d Solomon\u2019s optimism about the case had been fueled by Tennis Channel\u2019s successful advancement of the discrimination argument at various levels of the Federal Communications Commission. By a 3-2 vote, the commissioners had ruled for the network. But last month, Comcast got the ruling it wanted from the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which stayed the F.C.C.\u2019s decision. In his e-mail, Solomon wrote that \u201cthree Lone Ranger judges walked in the court with a mission ... looking for one thing, to teach the FCC a lesson.\u201d And, he wrote, \u201cTonto-Comcast, who spends more than Exxon and Boeing in DC on lobbyists and God knows what else. They bought this unholy decision, one way or another.\u201d A Comcast spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. The importance of getting broad distribution on Comcast is important to Tennis Channel, as it is for most networks. With more subscribers, a network reaps more monthly fees and can generate more advertising revenue. Golf Channel and NBC Sports Network are available to more than 20 million Comcast customers; Tennis Channel is available to the few million who pay extra for a sports tier. Tennis Channel, with 35 million subscribers, is owned by a group of investors that includes private equity firms, the United States Tennis Association and the former players Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.", "keyword": "Tennis;Golf Channel;Ken Solomon;Deadspin"}
{"id": "ny0279244", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/10/03", "title": "2 Friars\u2019 Mission: Reviving a Brooklyn Church in a Religious \u2018Dead Zone\u2019", "abstract": "The two Franciscan friars, complete with floor-length robes, stood behind the bar outside the 100-year-old church taking cash and slinging cans of Coors and Lime-A-Ritas in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Drinks in hand, over 200 people, many wearing black chokers, macram\u00e9 bikini tops and denim overall shorts, crowded into the pews on a recent Thursday night, the pop of beer cans punctuating their arrival. But they were not waiting for a sermon \u2014 they were waiting for Josiah Wise, who goes by the name serpentwithfeet, an R&B singer whose songs have heavy gospel overtones . This was not a typical church meeting, but the San Damiano Mission is no longer a typical church. On the brink of closing the church, the Diocese of Brooklyn called in the friars, Nicholas Spano, a deacon, and the Rev. Raphael Zwolenkiewicz, who are reintroducing Catholicism to the neighborhood in unconventional ways. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to be an invisible presence, but something very tangible,\u201d Father Zwolenkiewicz, 65, said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s services in the church or out in front of the church just hanging out, or even on the corner, we\u2019ll be in our vestments and saying hello to people as they walk by.\u201d Image The San Damiano Mission is not a typical church. On a recent Thursday night, it became a concert space. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times On the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where Sunday Mass often takes a back seat to brunch and shopping, the church had seen its membership dwindle. \u201cThat area in Brooklyn, like many other areas in the Brooklyn Diocese, is undergoing a dynamic change in demographics,\u201d the Rev. Msgr. Joseph Grimaldi, the Brooklyn vicar for the diocese, said last month. \u201cWilliamsburg is one of the largest areas that many millennials have settled in, and a good number of them are baptized Catholics, but have not really practiced their faith.\u201d \u201cWith 30 people, you can\u2019t sustain a church,\u201d Father Grimaldi said, \u201cbut in this case we came up with a novel approach.\u201d The friars, members of the First Order of St. Francis, took over the former Holy Family Slovak Church on Nassau Avenue in 2015. First, they changed its name to the San Damiano Mission. Image Josiah Wise, an R&B singer who goes by the name serpentwithfeet, performing at San Damiano Mission. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Then they looked around. Masses were still being celebrated when most of the neighborhood was asleep, and the oak doors were chained and padlocked much of the time. \u201cAll of our images said, \u2018We\u2019re gone and closed,\u2019\u201d Mr. Spano, 35, said. They replaced the oak doors with glass ones. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of foot traffic here Wednesday through Sunday between 10:30 p.m. and 4 a.m.,\u201d Mr. Spano said. \u201cTo have the church not look its best at that time doesn\u2019t help us.\u201d On a good Sunday, as many as 50 people now attend Mass. It is not a huge number, \u201cbut it is a difference,\u201d he said. Image Mr. Spano, left, and Father Zwolenkiewicz at a vigil. On the brink of closing the church, the Diocese of Brooklyn called in the friars, who are reintroducing Catholicism to the neighborhood. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times St. Francis of Assisi was called upon by God to \u201crebuild my church for it is in ruin,\u201d Father Zwolenkiewicz said. \u201cSo it\u2019s the same idea that we were invited to come here and to reach out to the neighborhood and people who are here, to rejuvenate and to restore part of this community.\u201d Mr. Spano developed proposals to turn the church into an arts hub and a focal point for the community. The friars wear their robes in public and can often be found running errands and grabbing their morning coffee in the neighborhood. Many are surprised to see the friars, they said, and some even mistake them for actors from a nearby film and television studio. They frequently attend the concerts put on by the Lot Radio station, which operates out of a converted shipping container across the street. The groups have joined forces to raise money to restore a $226,000 pipe organ for the church by holding shows inside the mission, like the one featuring serpentwithfeet. Image Anna Walsh, 29, a member of the parish, during a vigil. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times Sabrina Tamar, 27, has lived near the mission for 10 years. \u201cMost people weren\u2019t aware of this at first, but there\u2019s definitely a sense of community I feel hasn\u2019t been in this neighborhood in a while,\u201d she said before taking her seat at the concert. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful. The friars are so tolerant and welcoming.\u201d Other residents agreed. \u201cThe friars know religion is a dead zone in this neighborhood, so if you want people to participate, you have to not preach,\u201d one resident, Nikki Cohen, 30, said. She said she discovered the church through the radio station and the concert series. \u201cThis is a social place,\u201d she said, \u201ca community place you can come and hang out.\u201d For Aaron Sutula, the church beckoned. Mr. Sutula, 34, attends church only on Christmas. But he said he walked by one night and the mission was empty, but its lights were on, so he stepped inside and lit a candle. \u201cMy grandfather had just died the year before,\u201d Mr. Sutula said. \u201cThey don\u2019t have real candles because it\u2019s New York City, so you just hit a button and it turns on the light. But it was nice.\u201d The friars have also paired with a Lutheran church to offer some services to homeless people, including making showers and barbers available every other Monday at the mission. At a recent Sunday Mass, only about 25 people were in the pews. On this particular Sunday, a party at the Lot Radio the night before had kept some parishioners home from services, Mr. Spano said. Toward the end of the Mass, Mr. Spano made several announcements, including an update on the pipe organ. They hope to have it back by Easter, he said, though once the organ is reinstalled, the fog machine used for concerts will have to go.", "keyword": "church,churches;Catholic Church;Greenpoint Brooklyn;Nicholas Spano;Raphael Zwolenkiewicz;Williamsburg Brooklyn;The arts"}
{"id": "ny0163843", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2006/02/14", "title": "Livedoor Founder Is Charged With Securities Violations", "abstract": "TOKYO, Feb. 13 - Takafumi Horie, the founder of an Internet company whose brash tactics challenged Japan's business establishment, was charged Monday with violating securities law by spreading false information to inflate a subsidiary's stock price. The formal filing of charges by Tokyo prosecutors marked the latest chapter in the downfall of Mr. Horie, 33, who seemed to personify the bare-knuckles, individualistic brand of capitalism that many here say Japan needs. In a statement on Monday, Tokyo prosecutors said they had charged Mr. Horie and three other former executives of his company, Livedoor, with inflating the sales and profit figures of a subsidiary, Livedoor Marketing, to push up its stock price. Prosecutors also said that Mr. Horie and the others had issued press releases containing false information about the subsidiary, which was called ValueClick Japan until Livedoor took it over two years ago. If found guilty, Mr. Horie faces up to five years in prison or a fine of five million yen ($42,300). \"The key to Livedoor's rapid growth was actually criminal activities that damaged the fairness of securities trading,\" the statement said. \"This case is just the tip of the iceberg,\" it continued. \"We will continue a thorough investigation to bring everything to light.\" Though prosecutors did not elaborate Monday, the major Japanese news media, who are routinely briefed by prosecutors, said the authorities were preparing new charges against Mr. Horie for reportedly inflating the profits of the parent company, Livedoor, as well. Mr. Horie resigned as chief executive of Livedoor after his arrest on Jan. 23. Since then he has been in jail, insisting, during interrogations running as long as eight hours a day, that he was unaware of any wrongdoing and vowing to have his say in court, according to Japanese news media reports. He reportedly spends his free time in a tiny cell reading an encyclopedia. Since Tokyo prosecutors raided Livedoor's luxurious central Tokyo offices last month, Mr. Horie's business empire has started coming apart at the seams. Livedoor's share price has plunged 90 percent, to 61 yen (52 cents), since then, wiping out more than $5 billion in market value. Business partners have canceled alliances, employees have begun jumping ship and, according to media reports, Mr. Horie's girlfriend, a television star, has canceled plans to become engaged. The T-shirt-clad entrepreneur built the company over the last decade, turning a college project into one of Japan's most popular Internet portals and acquiring dozens of smaller Internet companies. Along the way, though, he stepped on many influential toes, especially last year, when he tried a hostile takeover of a powerful media company, Fuji Television. After the raid, some outraged followers posted messages on Mr. Horie's blog saying he was singled out for political reasons. Others expressed bitter disappointment for believing in a man now accused of criminal misdeeds.", "keyword": "JAPAN;LIVEDOOR;HORIE TAKAFUMI;SUSPENSIONS DISMISSALS AND RESIGNATIONS;FRAUDS AND SWINDLING;FINES (PENALTIES);SECURITIES AND COMMODITIES VIOLATIONS;FALSIFICATION OF DATA;ETHICS;COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET"}
{"id": "ny0202880", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2009/08/28", "title": "U.N. Officials Turn Focus to Sudan\u2019s South", "abstract": "UNITED NATIONS \u2014 As the fighting in Darfur diminishes after years of conflict, senior United Nations officials say they are focused increasingly on the deteriorating situation in another part of Sudan : the south. The shift in alarm has been building for months, but was reinforced late Wednesday when Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the departing commander of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, told reporters that the war in Darfur was essentially over. \u201cAs of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,\u201d Reuters quoted him as saying. \u201cMilitarily, there is not much. What you have is security issues more now. Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.\u201d Senior United Nations officials said that while General Agwai was basically correct, they did not want to play down the dire consequences some three million displaced people face in Darfur. Still, they noted, the escalating skirmishes in the south could reignite the civil war there, which in years past proved far more deadly than the conflict in Darfur. \u201cWhether it is characterized as a war or not, the reality is that threats against civilians do remain\u201d in Darfur, said Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping. Though the level of fighting has diminished there, he said, an additional 140,000 people have sought refuge in camps since January. \u201cIt is still far from peaceful,\u201d he said. Factors contributing to the diminished fighting include a splintering of opposition groups and reduced outside support, officials said. Most current deaths in Darfur come from criminal activity, United Nations officials said, while hundreds of people have been killed in recent months in clashes in the south. The peace agreement between Khartoum and southern rebels signed in 2005 ended more than 20 years of fighting that killed some two million people. Since then, fighting has renewed along the possible border between north and south, an area rich in oil, as the 2011 deadline approaches for a referendum on southern independence. The Obama administration has been publicly divided over how to characterize the Darfur conflict. Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has continued to call the conflict in Darfur genocide, and officials said she upbraided Rodolphe Adada, the departing civilian head of the peacekeeping forces, after he described Darfur as a \u201clow-intensity conflict\u201d this year. Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, \u201cWhile the nature of the violence in Darfur may have changed, the crisis over all remains serious and unresolved.\u201d Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration , a retired Air Force officer who is President Obama\u2019s special envoy for Sudan, has described the situation in Darfur as the \u201cremnants of genocide.\u201d He issued a statement Thursday saying he was focused on \u201censuring that any government-backed militias are disarmed, displaced persons can ultimately return to their homes, and the people of Darfur who have suffered so much can live in peace and security.\u201d Mr. Adada resigned after sustained criticism that he was too soft on the Khartoum government. General Agwai is rotating out, to be succeeded by another officer. Some United Nations officials and Darfur activists called it self-serving of the departing peacekeeping leaders to describe the conflict as settled. \u201cIt undermines international urgency in resolving these problems if people are led to believe that the war in Darfur is over,\u201d said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide campaign. The United Nations has long been criticized for failing to fulfill its mandate for some 26,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. It currently has 18,462 uniformed troops there, and predicts a 95 percent deployment by the end of the year, said Nick Birnback, the spokesman for peacekeeping operations.", "keyword": "Darfur (Sudan);War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;Sudan;United Nations;Gration J Scott"}
{"id": "ny0041768", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/05/18", "title": "No Cleanup for Bay in Rio de Janeiro", "abstract": "Brazil will not fulfill its commitment to clean up Rio de Janeiro\u2019s sewage-filled Guanabara Bay, where the Olympic sailing events are to be held, by the 2016 Olympics, state environmental officials acknowledged in a letter.", "keyword": "2016 Summer Olympics;Brazil;Rio de Janeiro"}
{"id": "ny0055454", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/09/03", "title": "Obama to Visit Estonia to Reassure Baltic Allies Over Russia", "abstract": "KEFLAVIK, Iceland \u2014 With concerns rising about Russia\u2019s intervention in Ukraine, President Obama will use a visit to neighboring Estonia on Wednesday to reassure fretful allies that the United States and Europe are serious about defending them from a newly aggressive Russia. Just over a year after Mr. Obama told Baltic leaders at the White House that NATO\u2019s commitment to their security was \u201crock-solid,\u201d his visit to Estonia is an effort to reinforce that message, while telegraphing to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he should refrain from further meddling in the region. On the eve of a NATO summit meeting in Wales where members are expected to endorse a rapid-reaction force capable of deploying quickly to Eastern Europe \u2014 their most concrete response yet to Russia\u2019s stealth military intervention in Ukraine \u2014 Mr. Obama is seeking to solidify assurances to the alliance\u2019s new front line, including nations with large Russian-speaking populations, that no member is too small to be protected. The president said last week that his stop in Estonia was intended \u201cto let the Estonians know that we mean what we say with respect to our treaty obligations.\u201d It will include a meeting with President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who has been outspoken about calling for a firmer Western response to Mr. Putin, as well as Latvia\u2019s president, Andris Berzins, and the president of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaite. Mr. Obama \u201cwants to send the signal that these three Baltic states are as central and important to the way we look at European security and defense as any other NATO member, that there\u2019s no difference between Estonia or Great Britain when it comes to the security of Estonia or Great Britain,\u201d said Ivo H. Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO who is now the head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In sessions with the Baltic presidents, a speech to students, young professionals and civil society and political leaders, and a visit to American and Estonian troops here, Mr. Obama will also demonstrate to the world, and Russia in particular, that the former Soviet republics are wrapped securely within NATO\u2019s protective embrace. \u201cThe other message that\u2019s being sent is to Vladimir Putin, to say, \u2018Don\u2019t even think about it, because these guys are part of this alliance.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Daalder said. Taavi Roivas, the Estonian prime minister, with whom Mr. Obama will meet on Wednesday, said the American president\u2019s very presence \u2014 far afield from the Wales summit meeting, which was the original purpose of his European trip \u2014 would be an important signal in light of Russia\u2019s recent moves. \u201cI\u2019m definitely confident that President Obama brings a clear message on the American side,\u201d Mr. Roivas said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s really important for us that he comes, so others see the U.S. commitment in the region.\u201d Even before this week\u2019s expected agreement on a rapid-response force, Mr. Roivas said NATO was moving in the \u201cright direction,\u201d bringing more air policing over the Baltics and more exercises in Estonia. \u201cI have rock-solid confidence in NATO\u2019s Article 5,\u201d he said, referring to the principle of collective defense that undergirds the alliance. At the same time, the trip is a chance for Mr. Obama to showcase the kind of financial commitment he is seeking from other NATO members as the alliance grapples with an eroded defense capability because of shrinking military budgets. The United States is responsible for 75 percent of NATO military spending, and only a handful of European countries meet the alliance\u2019s target of having military budgets of 2 percent of gross domestic product. Estonia is the only one of the Baltic States to meet that goal. Mr. Obama\u2019s visit underscores the degree to which Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine have \u201cbrought us closer together,\u201d said R. Nicholas Burns, a former American ambassador to NATO and State Department official during George W. Bush\u2019s administration, who now teaches international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. The United States quickly recognized the Baltic States\u2019 independence in 1991, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has had strong ties with them for three decades. \u201cWe always kept faith with them, and they have always remembered that it was the U.S. that stood up for them,\u201d Mr. Burns said. \u201cThe American president has huge credibility in Tallinn and in Riga, and it\u2019s a great opportunity for President Obama to, in the most clear way, say that when we took you in in 2002, we meant it, and now that there\u2019s a crisis, I\u2019m here.\u201d Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, and Riga the capital of Latvia. But leaders in the Baltic States and elsewhere in Europe are also looking to Mr. Obama and to NATO for concrete assurances that the commitment to defending them will be lasting, and are eager to hear a longer-term strategy toward Russia to address the challenges it is posing to the postwar order. \u201cThey\u2019re concerned this is temporary, that we have so many things going on \u2014 we\u2019re already being pulled away from Ukraine because of Iraq and Syria, can they count on our commitment and our engagement for the long term?\u201d said Heather A. Conley, a State Department official under Mr. Bush who now directs the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington. \u201cA speech will get you a little bit,\u201d Ms. Conley added, \u201cbut it\u2019s the physical, it\u2019s the U.S. soldier that\u2019s in Estonia, it\u2019s the F-16 that\u2019s flying over Baltic air space, it\u2019s the Marine presence, that really will make the difference.\u201d", "keyword": "NATO;Barack Obama;Estonia;Russia;Ukraine;Vladimir Putin;US Foreign Policy;Toomas Hendrik Ilves;Dalia Grybauskaite"}
{"id": "ny0257636", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2011/01/11", "title": "ESP Report Sets Off Debate on Data Analysis", "abstract": "They should have seen it coming. In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception. The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts. Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings \u2014 often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: \u201ceffective\u201d therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless. By incorporating statistical techniques that are now widely used in other sciences \u2014 genetics , economic modeling, even wildlife monitoring \u2014 social scientists can correct for such problems, saving themselves (and, ahem, science reporters) time, effort and embarrassment. \u201cI was delighted that this ESP paper was accepted in a mainstream science journal, because it brought this whole subject up again,\u201d said James Berger, a statistician at Duke University . \u201cI was on a mini-crusade about this 20 years ago and realized that I could devote my entire life to it and never make a dent in the problem.\u201d The statistical approach that has dominated the social sciences for almost a century is called significance testing. The idea is straightforward. A finding from any well-designed study \u2014 say, a correlation between a personality trait and the risk of depression \u2014 is considered \u201csignificant\u201d if its probability of occurring by chance is less than 5 percent. This arbitrary cutoff makes sense when the effect being studied is a large one \u2014 for example, when measuring the so-called Stroop effect. This effect predicts that naming the color of a word is faster and more accurate when the word and color match (\u201cred\u201d in red letters) than when they do not (\u201cred\u201d in blue letters), and is very strong in almost everyone. \u201cBut if the true effect of what you are measuring is small,\u201d said Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University , \u201cthen by necessity anything you discover is going to be an overestimate\u201d of that effect. Consider the following experiment. Suppose there was reason to believe that a coin was slightly weighted toward heads. In a test, the coin comes up heads 527 times out of 1,000. Is this significant evidence that the coin is weighted? Classical analysis says yes. With a fair coin, the chances of getting 527 or more heads in 1,000 flips is less than 1 in 20, or 5 percent, the conventional cutoff. To put it another way: the experiment finds evidence of a weighted coin \u201cwith 95 percent confidence.\u201d Yet many statisticians do not buy it. One in 20 is the probability of getting any number of heads above 526 in 1,000 throws. That is, it is the sum of the probability of flipping 527, the probability of flipping 528, 529 and so on. But the experiment did not find all of the numbers in that range; it found just one \u2014 527. It is thus more accurate, these experts say, to calculate the probability of getting that one number \u2014 527 \u2014 if the coin is weighted, and compare it with the probability of getting the same number if the coin is fair. Statisticians can show that this ratio cannot be higher than about 4 to 1, according to Paul Speckman, a statistician, who, with Jeff Rouder, a psychologist, provided the example. Both are at the University of Missouri and said that the simple experiment represented a rough demonstration of how classical analysis differs from an alternative approach, which emphasizes the importance of comparing the odds of a study finding to something that is known. The point here, said Dr. Rouder, is that 4-to-1 odds \u201cjust aren\u2019t that convincing; it\u2019s not strong evidence.\u201d And yet classical significance testing \u201chas been saying for at least 80 years that this is strong evidence,\u201d Dr. Speckman said in an e-mail. The critics have been crying foul for half that time. In the 1960s, a team of statisticians led by Leonard Savage at the University of Michigan showed that the classical approach could overstate the significance of the finding by a factor of 10 or more. By that time, a growing number of statisticians were developing methods based on the ideas of the 18th-century English mathematician Thomas Bayes . Bayes devised a way to update the probability for a hypothesis as new evidence comes in. So in evaluating the strength of a given finding, Bayesian (pronounced BAYZ-ee-un) analysis incorporates known probabilities, if available, from outside the study. It might be called the \u201cYeah, right\u201d effect. If a study finds that kumquats reduce the risk of heart disease by 90 percent, that a treatment cures alcohol addiction in a week, that sensitive parents are twice as likely to give birth to a girl as to a boy, the Bayesian response matches that of the native skeptic: Yeah, right. The study findings are weighed against what is observable out in the world. In at least one area of medicine \u2014 diagnostic screening tests \u2014 researchers already use known probabilities to evaluate new findings. For instance, a new lie-detection test may be 90 percent accurate, correctly flagging 9 out of 10 liars. But if it is given to a population of 100 people already known to include 10 liars, the test is a lot less impressive. It correctly identifies 9 of the 10 liars and misses one; but it incorrectly identifies 9 of the other 90 as lying. Dividing the so-called true positives (9) by the total number of people the test flagged (18) gives an accuracy rate of 50 percent. The \u201cfalse positives\u201d and \u201cfalse negatives\u201d depend on the known rates in the population. In the same way, experts argue, statistical analysis must find ways to expose and counterbalance all the many factors that can lead to falsely positive results \u2014 among them human nature, in its ambitious hope to discover something, and the effects of industry money, which biases researchers to report positive findings for products. And, of course, the unwritten rule that failed studies \u2014 the ones that find no effects \u2014 are far less likely to be published than positive ones. What are the odds, for instance, that the journal would have published Dr. Bem\u2019s study if it had come to the ho-hum conclusion that ESP still does not exist?", "keyword": "Psychology;Statistics;Psychic;Journal of Personality and Social Psychology;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0064623", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/06/27", "title": "\u2018Urban Adult\u2019 Station to Join New York Airwaves", "abstract": "A new entrant to New York\u2019s evolving black radio market will arrive over the Fourth of July weekend, with a focus on adult women. WFAS, at 103.9 FM, an adult contemporary station that broadcasts from Westchester County in New York, will change to an \u201curban adult\u201d format and relocate to the Bronx under the brand Radio 103.9, the station\u2019s owner, Cumulus Media, announced on Thursday. The format will change \u2014 or \u201cflip\u201d in radio jargon \u2014 over the holiday and the station will officially take on its new identity on July 7, Cumulus said in an announcement. The station will feature shows with popular black hosts like Tom Joyner and D.L. Hughley. The new station will compete with WBLS (107.5 FM), which two years ago absorbed its chief competitor at the time, WRKS, known as Kiss FM (98.7 FM). But Cumulus believes it has a competitive angle by programming its station primarily for grown-up women. \u201cWomen ages 35-44 who enjoy urban format music and stars from the last few decades through today are underserved in the Big Apple and we\u2019re changing that now with an urban radio renaissance,\u201d Kim Bryant, a Cumulus executive, said in a statement. The greater New York radio market reaches 16 million listeners, 17 percent of them African-American, according to Nielsen. Cumulus says that by relocating its transmitter to the Bronx it will reach 80 percent of that potential audience. The announcement of WFAS\u2019s new format comes a week after one of the most high-profile changes in New York\u2019s black radio market, when Angie Martinez , the longtime personality at the hip-hop station Hot 97 (WQHT, 97.1 FM), owned by Emmis Communications, left Hot 97 for its biggest rival, Power 105.1 (WWPR, 105.1 FM), owned by Clear Channel.", "keyword": "Radio;Urban area;Cumulus Media;Tom Joyner;Angie Martinez;Bronx;D L Hughley"}
{"id": "ny0221744", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/02/22", "title": "Paterson in Washington, Determined to Stay in Race", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Arnold Schwarzenegger bounded over to David A. Paterson and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. \u201cHow are you holding up?\u201d the governor of California asked the governor of New York in a basement hotel ballroom here, sounding like a friend offering condolences to someone who had just suffered a loss. \u201cMe?\u201d Mr. Paterson said with a self-assured pitch in his voice. \u201cI\u2019m the Teflon governor.\u201d One day after defiantly declaring that he would run for governor despite having little support from his party and a diminutive campaign account, Mr. Paterson arrived in the nation\u2019s capital on Sunday for two days of meetings with the nation\u2019s governors and President Obama . His appearance here, a few hours after a campaign stop at a diner outside Buffalo, suggested that the governor was as determined as ever to let his detractors know that he would not be forced from the race. In the first extended encounter between the governor and the president since September, when word leaked out that the White House had asked the governor not to seek a second term, Mr. Paterson and his wife attended a dinner with other governors and Mr. Obama on Sunday evening. Asked before the dinner if he believed that the encounter would feel somewhat awkward given that he had just kicked off a campaign that the White House had expressed deep reservations about, Mr. Paterson seemed at ease and offered support for the president. \u201cI don\u2019t feel any discomfort,\u201d he said, sounding hoarse from delivering campaign speeches on Long Island, in Rochester and in Buffalo over the weekend. Drawing a parallel between the political struggles that he and Mr. Obama have each faced as first-term chief executives, Mr. Paterson said he empathized with the president. \u201cIn your second year of office, unfortunately, your opponents try to make you own some problems caused by them years ago,\u201d Mr. Paterson said. \u201cAnd I think the president needs to know we\u2019re all behind him.\u201d During his first day on the campaign trail, Mr. Paterson said, he found voters supportive and sympathetic. \u201cThey tell me to stand strong,\u201d he said in a brief interview at a Marriott hotel in downtown Washington, where he attended meetings on Sunday, accompanied by a coterie of aides and security personnel. \u201cWhen I\u2019ve been most effective as governor is when I\u2019ve been direct, honest and to the point. And so I think I\u2019ve got to reinvigorate myself with that passion.\u201d Mr. Paterson\u2019s campaign kickoff speech on Saturday from his boyhood hometown on Long Island offered both a rebuke to his opponents and a frank assessment of how far his political fortunes had fallen since he became governor two years ago. Acknowledging that there were many people encouraging him to quit the race, he drew comparisons to his childhood and young adult life, when he was told that there were many things he would never be able to accomplish as a legally blind person. \u201cI was very pleased by how it was received,\u201d Mr. Paterson said of his overall campaign message. Indeed, the size of the turnout at the governor\u2019s events upstate this weekend seemed to surprise his staff members. At the Buffalo event, the campaign arranged for a site that held 50 people, said Richard Fife, Mr. Paterson\u2019s campaign manager. About 200 showed up, he said. Still, the lack of support from the Democratic Party establishment was clear on Sunday. No members of Congress attended his event outside Buffalo, nor did the mayor of Buffalo, Byron W. Brown, a Democrat who is frequently mentioned as a possible candidate for statewide office. Mr. Fife said he expected high-profile endorsements to roll in soon, beginning next weekend with an event in Harlem that will feature, among other Democratic leaders, David N. Dinkins, the former New York mayor. \u201cWe will keep building supporters as we go,\u201d said Mr. Fife, declining to name others who have signed on to endorse the governor.", "keyword": "Paterson David A;Elections;Governors (US);Obama Barack;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0125006", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/08/29", "title": "Malcolm W. Browne, Covered Vietnam War, Dies at 81", "abstract": "Malcolm W. Browne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose four-decade career included covering the Vietnam War \u2014 and taking one of the most memorable photos of the conflict \u2014 and a lively second act as a science writer who explained chemical weapons and described the rise of synthetic body parts, died on Monday in Hanover, N.H. He was 81. The cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease, said his wife, Le Lieu Browne. Mr. Browne, who lived in Thetford Center, Vt., and Manhattan, spent most of his career writing for The New York Times, which sent him to Argentina, Vietnam, Bosnia, Pakistan and wherever else his curiosity called him after he became a science writer in the late 1970s. \u201cMy life is terrific,\u201d Mr. Browne said in a 1993 interview. \u201cIt affords the greatest possible variety of experience. That, after all, is why I became a journalist.\u201d But his career path was something of an accident. Mr. Browne had been working as a chemist in New York in the 1950s (among his tasks: finding a substitute for chicle, then the main ingredient in chewing gum) when he was drafted to go to Korea in 1956. He drove a tank for a time, but the Army later assigned him to write for Stars and Stripes, a decision he said was their idea, not his. After he was discharged, Mr. Browne found a job in Baltimore with The Associated Press. Less than a year later, in 1961, The A.P. made him their Saigon bureau chief. Mr. Browne was among several reporters who became skeptical of the American effort to prop up the Saigon government. Neil Sheehan, who joined The Times after serving as Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said Tuesday that Mr. Browne was a \u201cfierce competitor\u201d but also a friend. Mr. Browne often wore a gold belt buckle and carried a money belt so he would have cash \u201cto get out of a tight situation.\u201d \u201cBut,\u201d Mr. Sheehan added, \u201cI don\u2019t think he ever had to use it.\u201d While reporters in Vietnam often clashed with American officials, Mr. Browne later singled out Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in 1963 as the United States ambassador to South Vietnam, as \u201cmore honest than most of the U.S. officials that I had known.\u201d It was Mr. Lodge who told Mr. Browne that he had played an important role in elevating awareness of the problems in Vietnam to the highest levels at the White House through a photograph he took in 1963. When a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in public that year in protest of the government of South Vietnam, Mr. Browne was there, and he captured the stunning moment in a photograph. Several papers, including The Times, chose not to run the disturbing image, but Mr. Lodge told him he had seen a copy of it on President John F. Kennedy\u2019s desk. In 1964, while working for The A.P., Mr. Browne shared the Pulitzer for international reporting with David Halberstam , who was covering the war for The Times. Mr. Browne returned to the United States and later joined The Times, which eventually sent him back to Vietnam. He continued to find that the sources he had developed on the front lines refuted the Saigon government\u2019s optimistic accounts. \u201cA South Vietnamese military spokesman said at a briefing in Saigon yesterday afternoon that sizable elements of airborne soldiers, supported by tanks, had entered Quangtri city early yesterday morning,\u201d he wrote in a 1972 report. \u201cBut authoritative sources at the front said that was not true.\u201d Mr. Browne also worked for The Times in South America, Europe, South Asia and elsewhere before he began writing about science. He had studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His assignments ranged widely: the dangers posed by toxic debris from the crash of the space shuttle Challenger; an effort to build a robotic flying pterosaur ; an effort to rid Antarctica of garbage accumulating there. He left The Times in the 1980s to work at Discover magazine but returned a few years later and continued writing about science. Malcolm Wilde Browne was born in Manhattan on April 17, 1931. His mother was a pacifist Quaker, and Mr. Browne attended Quaker schools through college. His grandfather\u2019s first cousin was the writer Oscar Wilde and Mr. Browne, like Wilde, was something of a wit. His autobiography, \u201cMuddy Boots and Red Socks,\u201d takes its title from the socks he started wearing while serving in Korea as a break from the Army\u2019s olive drab. Besides his wife, whom he met in 1961 when she was working in the information ministry for the Saigon government and married in 1966, his survivors include a daughter, Wendy Sanderson; a son, Timothy; a brother, Timothy; a sister, Miriam Poole; and two grandchildren. Two previous marriages ended in divorce. In 2000, after retiring to Vermont, Mr. Browne wrote an essay for The Times on the dual nature of his journalistic career. \u201cAfter a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhen that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, there is always something new under the sun.\u201d", "keyword": "Browne Malcolm W;Photography;Vietnam War;Deaths (Obituaries);News and News Media"}
{"id": "ny0132303", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/12/30", "title": "UConn Snaps Stanford\u2019s 82-Game Home Win Streak", "abstract": "STANFORD, Calif. \u2014 For the viewing public, this was a matchup between the nation\u2019s top-ranked teams. For Connecticut, there was also the small matter of revenge. Two years ago, almost to the day, Stanford ended Connecticut\u2019s winning streak at 90 games. On Saturday, the No. 2 Huskies returned the favor, with their 61-35 victory at Maples Pavilion making them the first visitor to win on Stanford\u2019s court since 2007, a span of 82 games. Ultimately, the game was even more lopsided than the score indicated. Connecticut (11-0) held No. 1 Stanford (11-1) to 19.3 percent shooting, including 14.3 percent from 3-point range. Many of Stanford\u2019s shots seemed driven by desperation, with the Cardinal unable to penetrate, and even those shots that Stanford got off cleanly were often off target. The Huskies racked up 15 points off turnovers, compared with Stanford\u2019s 4, and the Cardinal had only three assists. \u201cConnecticut came in here on a mission,\u201d Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer said. \u201cMission accomplished.\u201d During the first half, Connecticut smothered the Cardinal as the Huskies contested almost every shot and forced Stanford into a frantic series of poor decisions and awkward attempts. In the rare moments in which the Cardinal had a numbers advantage in transition, they frequently paused to reset rather than attack the basket, allowing the defense to recover. The sophomore forward Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis led Connecticut with 19 points, and the junior center Stefanie Dolson had 10 points and 14 rebounds while playing a prime role in limiting Stanford\u2019s Chiney Ogwumike. Although Ogwumike, a preseason all-American, led the Cardinal with 18 points, she did so on 6-of-22 shooting. \u201cChiney is a little quicker than me,\u201d Dolson said, \u201cbut I was able to keep her in front of me and make her take hard shots \u2014 shots she didn\u2019t want to take.\u201d The rest of Stanford\u2019s starters combined to score 8 points. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to be a very good team, like Connecticut is, when you have two starters who don\u2019t even score,\u201d VanDerveer said. Bria Hartley and Kelly Faris each contributed 10 points for Connecticut. In building a 31-13 halftime lead, Connecticut limited the Cardinal to five field goals on 15.2 percent shooting. Stanford reacted to Connecticut\u2019s relentless pressure with tentative play. For a span of nearly six minutes in the first half, Connecticut held Stanford scoreless and extended its lead to 22-7, from 10-7. At that point, the game was effectively over. When Ogwumike hit a jumper in the paint to end the run, the home crowd erupted more in relief than with any sort of joy. \u201cThat Connecticut team was the standard,\u201d Ogwumike said after the game. \u201cNow we\u2019ve experienced the standard.\u201d This was the fourth time that Connecticut and Stanford had squared off as the nation\u2019s top-ranked teams; the previous three meetings occurred between April 5, 2009, and April 6, 2010. The Huskies won those games, two of them in Final Fours. \u201cWhen we played them two years ago, it was a national event,\u201d Huskies Coach Geno Auriemma said. \u201cThis time, I don\u2019t think it was. I didn\u2019t get so excited about us winning 90, so I\u2019m not going to get too worked up over them winning 82 in a row at home.\u201d It was the Cardinal\u2019s worst defeat at home since a 96-51 loss to Long Beach State in 1983. BAYLOR 106, SE LOUISIANA 41 Jordan Madden scored all 13 of her points in the first half and third-ranked Baylor thumped visiting Southeastern Louisiana. The Lady Bears (10-1) have won 46 consecutive games at home, now the longest active streak in women\u2019s college basketball. Brandi Simmons had 12 points to lead Southeastern Louisiana (7-4). (AP) NOTRE DAME 74, PURDUE 47 Kayla McBride scored 18 points and Skylar Diggins shook off early foul trouble to finish with 16 points to help No. 5 Notre Dame (10-1) rout visiting Purdue. Courtney Moses led the Boilermakers (11-2) with 13 points. (AP) MARYLAND 72, HARTFORD 40 Alyssa Thomas had 22 points and 11 rebounds, helping No. 9 Maryland (10-2) cruise to a victory over visiting Hartford (9-4) in the championship game of the Terrapin Classic. Daphne Elliott had 9 points for Hartford in the first meeting between the teams since December 1997. (AP) OKLA. 79, CAL ST. NORTHRIDGE 57 Aaryn Ellenberg scored 24 points to lift No. 18 Oklahoma (10-2) over Cal State Northridge at home (6-5). Janae Sharpe and Jianni Jackson scored 12 points each for the Matadors. (AP) S. CAROLINA 66, W. CAROLINA 44 Tiffany Mitchell scored 12 points to lead No. 19 South Carolina (12-2) to a win over visiting Western Carolina. Ieasia Walker had 9 points for South Carolina (12-2). Makensey Campbell and Lindsay Simpson scored 9 points each for the Catamounts (3-9). (AP) COLORADO 84, NEW MEXICO 39 Lexy Kresl scored 20 points to lead No. 23 Colorado (11-0) over visiting New Mexico. Antiesha Brown led New Mexico (8-5) with 10 points. (AP)", "keyword": "Basketball (College);Stanford University;University of Connecticut;Mosqueda-Lewis Kaleena;Dolson Stefanie"}
{"id": "ny0170851", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2007/11/03", "title": "Lawmakers in Venezuela Approve Expanded Power for Ch\u00e1vez", "abstract": "CARACAS, Venezuela , Nov. 2 \u2014 The National Assembly approved a constitutional overhaul on Friday that would enhance President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez \u2019s authority, allowing him to be re-elected indefinitely and giving him the power to handpick rulers, to be called vice presidents, for various new regions to be created in the country. The 69 amendments still need to be approved by voters in a Dec. 2 referendum before they take effect. Tensions ahead of that vote are increasing; protesters clashed with the police on downtown streets here this week and capital flight is accelerating. The currency, the bol\u00edvar, touched a low value of 6,800 to the dollar on Friday in unregulated trading, compared with the official rate of 2,150. In addition to potentially strengthening Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s grip on power, the measures approved by lawmakers on Friday have heightened economic uncertainty. The new amendments would facilitate expropriations of private property. Managers at private companies are also alarmed about a proposed reduction in the workday, from eight hours to six. \u201cVenezuelan democracy was buried today,\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez, the president of Fedecamaras, Venezuela\u2019s main business association. Still, some political analysts here say the changes proposed by Mr. Ch\u00e1vez would not significantly alter political life in the country. Followers of the president, after all, already control the legislature, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy, the oil industry, every state-owned company and nearly every state government. Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, moreover, has carried out nationalizations of foreign companies with ease this year. The new Constitution would end the central bank\u2019s autonomy, but that institution effectively stopped being independent some time ago. The breadth of Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s proposed Constitution, however, has given pause to human rights groups. One measure creates new rules for declaring states of emergency, allowing security forces to round up citizens without legal protections. Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s supporters hailed the National Assembly\u2019s vote as a step toward creating a socialist society. Just a handful of the body\u2019s 167 lawmakers declined to approve the amendments, reflecting the president\u2019s support in the legislature, which has drawn scorn here for its hesitance to engage in debate with the president\u2019s critics. But the vote also reflects a bumbling political opposition, which boycotted assembly elections in late 2004, ceding their space to Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s followers in what might be the country\u2019s most important forum for discussion. Even today, members of the opposition are divided as to whether they should vote or abstain in the referendum. As rising oil prices strengthen Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s ability to give subsidies to the poor, even opponents of the new Constitution see it winning approval. With an air of resignation, Roman Catholic leaders here called the changes \u201cmorally unacceptable.\u201d With his customary flourish, Mr. Ch\u00e1vez accused the bishops of forgetting their principles. \u201cIf Christ was alive, was here physically,\u201d the president said this week, \u201che would drive them away with the crack of a whip.\u201d", "keyword": "Venezuela;Chavez Hugo;Demonstrations and Riots;Constitutions"}
{"id": "ny0063326", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/01/23", "title": "New Push Is Made to Free an American While Iran Is at the Negotiating Table", "abstract": "Advocates for a former Marine imprisoned in Tehran more than two years ago are seeking to use a diplomatic window created by the temporary nuclear agreement with Iran to gain his release. In a letter to President Obama released on Wednesday, four top former American defense and security officials urged \u201cimmediate action\u201d to expedite the release of the Marine, Amir Hekmati, who has been held in Evin Prison with no publicly disclosed charges against him. \u201cMr. Hekmati has committed no crime,\u201d read the letter, signed by William S. Cohen, a former secretary of defense; Gen. Peter Pace, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. James L. Jones, a former national security adviser; and Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, a former allied commander in Europe. They wrote that Mr. Hekmati had \u201cconducted his life with unyielding honor and courage.\u201d The letter followed the official start on Monday of a six-month accord between Iran and world powers in the protracted dispute over the country\u2019s nuclear energy program, which the Iranians insist is peaceful despite widespread suspicions that it is a cover for developing a nuclear weapons capability. Under the temporary agreement, Iran halted most uranium enrichment in exchange for limited relief from Western sanctions. The accord was intended to allow diplomats time to negotiate a permanent solution to the dispute, one of the biggest obstacles to improvement in an Iranian-American relationship fraught with decades of mutual hostility. \u201cAs Iran and the United States attempt a formal accord in the next six months, now is the perfect time for the release of Mr. Hekmati,\u201d the letter reads. \u201cFreeing him is indeed in both nations\u2019 best interests.\u201d Mr. Hekmati, 30, an American of Iranian descent from Flint, Mich., was taken into custody while on a visit to see his maternal grandmother and other relatives in 2011. He was accused of espionage, tried and sentenced to death , but the verdict was overturned and a new trial was ordered in March 2012. That trial has never happened, and the Iranian judiciary has never explained why he remains incarcerated. His family has repeatedly said Mr. Hekmati is innocent and has pleaded for his release so he can return home while his father, stricken with brain cancer, is alive. Dan Kildee, Mr. Hekmati\u2019s Democratic congressional representative, who has made the effort to free him a priority, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the letter was part of a broader effort to raise attention to the plight of Mr. Hekmati, whose lack of access to legal counsel in Iran has illustrated what critics call its harsh and blatantly arbitrary justice system. The United Nations Human Rights Council\u2019s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has said Mr. Hekmati has been deprived of his rights. Timeline on Iran\u2019s Nuclear Program Whether Iran is racing toward nuclear weapon capabilities is one of the most contentious foreign-policy issues challenging the West. \u201cThis letter is another important statement that there are people across the country who feel strongly about this,\u201d Mr. Kildee said. Mr. Hekmati is one of two, and possibly three, Americans in Iranian custody. The others are Saeed Abedini , a pastor who was sentenced in January 2013 to an eight-year prison term, accused of unlawfully creating a network of Christian churches in private Iranian homes, and Robert A. Levinson , an American intelligence operative and retired F.B.I. agent who has been missing for seven years. American officials have said privately they believe that Mr. Levinson is in the custody of a group tied to Iranian religious leaders. Iran\u2019s government has maintained it knows nothing of his whereabouts or fate. American officials have also said that the imprisonment of United States citizens in Iran is among the issues that have been raised in the negotiations over the nuclear dispute, which are expected to resume in the coming weeks. Iran has given no indication that it is prepared to release Mr. Hekmati, although his Iranian relatives have been allowed to visit him in prison. There has been a modest increase in optimism about the Hekmati case since the election last year of President Hassan Rouhani, considered a relative moderate whose overtures helped create the basis for the nuclear diplomacy. Mr. Rouhani has said he wants to end Iran\u2019s isolation and ease the severe restraints on personal freedoms that shaped the tenure of his conservative predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nonetheless, human rights activists and other critics of Iran say Mr. Rouhani\u2019s government has done little, so far, to change Iran\u2019s reputation for judicial abuses and heavy punishment of criminals and dissidents. In Geneva on Wednesday, United Nations human rights experts reported a surge in Iranian executions this year, with 40 people hanged in the first two weeks of January, 33 of them in the past week. \u201cWe are dismayed at the continued application of the death penalty with alarming frequency by the authorities, despite repeated calls for Iran to establish a moratorium on executions,\u201d said Ahmed Shaheed , the special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, and Christof Heyns , the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Iran is second only to China in the application of capital punishment, and most Iranian executions are of drug offenders. Although there has been much discussion on possible changes to Iran\u2019s penal code since Mr. Rouhani took office, Mr. Shaheed said, \u201cit looks as if his pledges of reform have fallen on deaf ears in Iran.\u201d", "keyword": "US Foreign Policy;Iran;Prison;Amir Mirzaei Hekmati;Nuclear weapon;Sanctions;US Marines;US Military;Spying and Intelligence Agencies"}
{"id": "ny0113275", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/11/05", "title": "Milt Campbell, Olympic Decathlon Champion, Dies at 78", "abstract": "Milt Campbell, an outstanding all-around athlete who was the first African-American to become an Olympic decathlon champion, died on Friday at his home in Gainesville, Ga. He was 78. The cause was prostate cancer, said his companion, Linda Rusch. Campbell, who won the decathlon at the 1956 Summer Olympics and had also played football professionally, sometimes expressed frustration that he was less well known than the four other Americans who became Olympic decathlon champions from 1948 to 1976: Bob Mathias (twice), Rafer Johnson, Bill Toomey and Bruce Jenner. Each of those four was acclaimed the world\u2019s greatest athlete and received endorsement contracts and acting roles. Mathias became a five-term congressman, Johnson a confidant of the Kennedy family. Campbell, in contrast, remained relatively unknown. \u201cI\u2019ve probably been the greatest athlete this country has ever seen,\u201d he said, immodestly but perhaps not inaccurately, in a 1980 interview with The New York Times. And yet, he added, he had not been invited to appear at a recent televised tennis tournament that featured Toomey, Johnson and others billed as \u201cAmerica\u2019s greatest athletes.\u201d \u201cI guess I sound angry about it,\u201d he said. \u201cI think I have a right to be. I\u2019ve paid my dues, but the advertising and commercial worlds don\u2019t call me.\u201d There are various explanations for Campbell\u2019s relative lack of glory after his victory at the 1956 Melbourne Games. One is that the Olympics were not televised as extensively as they would later be. Another is that he spent a large part of his career playing football in Canada. Yet another is that he alienated some people with his outspokenness about racial discrimination. Campbell, who stood 6 feet 3 inches and weighed about 220 pounds, spent 1957 in the National Football League with the Cleveland Browns. He was a backup to his fellow rookie running back Jim Brown, who would go on to become one of professional football\u2019s most celebrated players. Just before the opening game in 1958, he later recalled, he was called in to the office of Paul Brown, the team\u2019s coach, who wanted to know why Campbell had just married a white woman. Campbell said he told Brown that was not the coach\u2019s business. The Browns cut Campbell the next day. He went to Canada, where he played pro football with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, the Montreal Alouettes and the Toronto Argonauts until 1964. Before that, at Plainfield High School in New Jersey, Campbell was world class in track and a champion swimmer. At Indiana University, where his career was interrupted by Navy service, he starred in track and football. He also excelled in tennis, bowling, judo, karate and wrestling. The Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan once said, \u201cCampbell was, to me, the greatest athlete who ever lived.\u201d Campbell\u2019s first decathlon came in 1952 in the United States Olympic trials. He finished fifth in the hurdles but made the team in the decathlon. (Later in his career, Campbell returned to the hurdles, setting world records in the indoor 60-yard high hurdles and the outdoor 120 high hurdles in 1957.) His second decathlon came weeks later: while still in high school, he finished second to Mathias in the Helsinki Olympics. In 1956, two days before Campbell\u2019s Melbourne competition began, he was visited by Johnson, his teammate and the Olympic favorite. As Campbell recalled for The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2011: \u201cRafer sat on the bed and said, \u2018So how do you think this is going to turn out?\u2019 And I just said: \u2018This is a bad year for you to show up. Because this could be your two best days, but I\u2019m still going to walk away with it.\u2019 And Rafer looked at me like I had hit him with a bat.\u201d Campbell\u2019s prediction was correct. He won that gold medal and set an Olympic record of 7,937 points for the 10 events. Johnson won the silver medal that year; without Campbell as competition, he won the gold in 1960. Milton Gray Campbell was born on Dec. 9, 1933, in Plainfield. When race riots broke out in Newark in 1967, he returned from Canada, where he had been living and working, to help quell the tension in New Jersey. In 1968, he co-founded a community center and an alternative school there. He later became a motivational speaker, with failure in business as his own motivation. \u201cWhen I lost all my money in the meat-trucking business in 1976,\u201d he told The Times in 1980, \u201cI realized that I understood about success and failure. I realized that it had nothing to do with anyone else, only me.\u201d Campbell\u2019s marriage of 25 years ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Rusch, he is survived by a daughter, Julie Campbell; two sons, Justin and Milton III; a granddaughter; a great-grandson; and a sister, Sandra Smith. His son Milton Jr. died in 1987. Campbell was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1989 and the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1992 . In his 2011 Star-Ledger interview, Campbell recalled a conversation he had with his high school track coach when he was 14. \u201cHe asked me what I wanted to be. I told him, \u2018The best athlete in Plainfield.\u2019 Then it became \u2018the best in New Jersey,\u2019 and \u2018the best in America,\u2019 and \u2018the best in the world.\u2019 \u201d He became, he said, \u201cdetermined to be the greatest.\u201d", "keyword": "Campbell Milt;Olympic Games;Decathlon;Deaths (Obituaries);Football;Blacks"}
{"id": "ny0068270", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/12/10", "title": "Supreme Court Rules Against Worker Pay for Screenings in Amazon Warehouse Case", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously that a temp agency was not required to pay workers at Amazon warehouses for the time they spent waiting to go through a security screening at the end of the day. The workers say the process, meant to prevent theft, can take as long as 25 minutes. Justice Clarence Thomas , writing for the court, said the screenings were not \u201cintegral and indispensable\u201d to the workers\u2019 jobs, which involved retrieving products from warehouse shelves and packaging them for delivery to Amazon\u2019s customers. That meant, he said, that no extra pay was required. The decision was a big loss for workers challenging the security checks, which are common among retailers. According to a brief filed by the agency, there have been 13 class-action lawsuits against Amazon and other companies involving more than 400,000 plaintiffs and seeking hundreds of millions of dollars. The case that the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday turned on the meaning of a 1947 law, the Portal-to-Portal Act , which says that companies need not pay for \u201cpreliminary\u201d or \u201cpostliminary\u201d activities, meaning ones that take place before and after the workday proper. The Supreme Court interpreted the law in 1956 in Steiner v. Mitchell to require pay only for tasks that are an \u201cintegral and indispensable part of the principal activities for which covered workmen are employed.\u201d The case decided Tuesday was brought by Jesse Busk, who worked in a Las Vegas warehouse, and Laurie Castro, who worked at one in Fenley, Nev. They sued Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temp agency, seeking to represent a class of workers and to be paid for the time it took to remove their wallets, keys and belts and to pass through metal detectors. The plaintiffs said the screenings would not have taken long had the agency added more security screeners or staggered the ends of work shifts. In practice, they said, the waits approached half an hour. Amazon has disputed that assertion. In a statement in October, when the case was argued, an Amazon spokeswoman said \u201cemployees walk through postshift security screening with little or no wait.\u201d The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, had allowed the case to proceed , saying the screenings were for the company\u2019s benefit and were a necessary part of the workers\u2019 jobs. That was enough, the appeals court said, to make the screenings \u201cintegral and indispensable.\u201d Image Jesse Busk, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, helped start the case that the court decided on Tuesday. Credit Isaac Brekken for The New York Times Justice Thomas disagreed, saying the appeals court had \u201cerred by focusing on whether an employer required a particular activity.\u201d The right test, he said, was whether the activity \u201cis tied to the productive work that the employee is employed to perform.\u201d Justice Thomas said Tuesday\u2019s ruling was required by the 1947 law, which was a reaction to Supreme Court decisions that had required pay for a broad range of work-related activities and gave rise to \u201ca flood of litigation\u201d seeking nearly $6 billion. Congress responded by tightening the standards, saying the alternative would have been the \u201cfinancial ruin of many employers.\u201d Since then, Justice Thomas said, the court has required pay for activities that were \u201can intrinsic element of the job\u201d and could not be skipped. Under that test, battery-plant workers had to be paid for the time spent showering and changing clothes because the materials they worked with were toxic. And meatpackers had to be paid for the time it took to sharpen their knives because dull knives would slow production. Security screenings are different, Justice Thomas wrote. \u201cIntegrity Staffing could have eliminated the screenings altogether,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwithout impairing the employees\u2019 ability to complete their work.\u201d Justice Thomas noted that the Obama administration had sided with the temp agency, adding that the administration\u2019s position was consistent with a 1951 letter from the Labor Department that did not require pay for screenings at a rocket-powder plant. Workers there were screened for matches and lighters on the way in and to prevent theft on the way out. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the court\u2019s opinion but added a concurrence to stress its limited scope. Activities related to worker safety and efficiency remained covered, she said. But in the warehouse case, she wrote, \u201cemployees could skip the screenings altogether without the safety or effectiveness of their principal activities being substantially impaired.\u201d She added that, as its name suggests, the Portal-to-Portal Act was \u201cprimarily concerned with defining the beginning and end of the workday.\u201d \u201cThe searches were part of the process by which the employees egressed their place of work, akin to checking in and out and waiting in line to do so,\u201d she wrote, adding that those were activities that Congress clearly meant to make noncompensable. Justice Elena Kagan joined Justice Sotomayor\u2019s concurrence in the case, Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, No. 13-433.", "keyword": "Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Amazon;Wages and salaries;Jobs;Clarence Thomas;San Francisco"}
{"id": "ny0261178", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/06/21", "title": "Libya Rebel Leader to Visit China in Setback to Qaddafi", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 The chairman of the Libyan opposition\u2019s executive board, Mahmoud Jibril, will visit Beijing for talks on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced on Monday, in the latest sign that China is hedging its bet on the survival of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi \u2019s government in Tripoli. The Chinese government has criticized NATO\u2019s air campaign in Libya as excessive and called for a cease-fire, although China abstained instead of exercising its veto when the United Nations Security Council voted in March to authorize the NATO action. China has a record of insisting on international respect for the sovereignty of all countries, including pariah governments in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea, all of which are trading partners for China. The Chinese government has long resented foreign criticism of its own human rights record, particularly the Tiananmen Square military crackdown in 1989, and generally opposes criticism of what other countries do within their borders as well. Chinese official news media have produced a steady drumbeat of reports from Tripoli that give prominence to the government\u2019s claims that NATO warplanes have hit many civilian targets in the city. Other foreign reporters in Tripoli have been skeptical of many of the claims, pointing to signs that some of the damage may have been caused by the Libyan\u2019s own ordnance. Chen Xiaodong, the director general of the West Asian and North African Affairs Department of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had said on June 9 that China would welcome a visit by Libyan opposition envoys, while China\u2019s ambassador to Qatar, Zhang Zhiliang, met another opposition leader in Doha on June 2.", "keyword": "Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );International Relations;China;Libya;Jibril Mahmoud;Qaddafi Muammar el-;Transitional National Council (Libya)"}
{"id": "ny0166814", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/01/20", "title": "Man Found on Q Train; Probably Died Hours Earlier", "abstract": "A 64-year-old man was found dead during the morning rush yesterday inside a subway train, the authorities said, and had apparently been riding for more than six hours before anyone noticed. The man, whom the police identified as Eugene M. Reilly of Midwood, Brooklyn, was a mail handler who had worked for the Postal Service for 35 years. Mr. Reilly's body was found in the last car of a northbound Q train near the 14th Street-Union Square station at 7:11 a.m., according to New York City Transit. The passengers were let off, the police and emergency medical workers were called, and the train was moved to Times Square at 7:28 a.m. while the authorities investigated. Northbound N and Q trains were rerouted to the local track, slowing those lines and also the R and W lines, which use the same track. At 9:40 a.m., the Q train in which Mr. Reilly had been found was moved to an unused track north of 57th Street, and normal service resumed. If Mr. Reilly boarded a Brooklyn-bound Q train at 34th Street at 1 a.m. after going straight to the station from work, as was his routine, he could have traveled back and forth on the line six times before someone realized he had died, according to the published schedule for the subway line. It takes 50 to 54 minutes for the Q to travel between its northern terminus, at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, and its southern terminus, at Stillwell Avenue-Coney Island. The police said there was no sign of trauma or foul play. An autopsy is scheduled for today. Mr. Reilly was overweight and had had heart bypass surgery about a decade ago, said his wife, Patricia Reilly. Mr. Reilly worked on weekdays, from 4 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., at the Morgan Processing and Distribution Center, a huge mail center on Ninth Avenue between 28th and 30th Streets, a Postal Service spokeswoman said. His wife said he always went straight home from work. The ride on the Q train from 34th Street in Manhattan to Kings Highway in Brooklyn usually takes 35 minutes. Mrs. Reilly said in a telephone interview that she did not usually wake up when her husband came home. When she awoke about 7 a.m. to prepare for work and noticed his absence, she said, she panicked and called several hospitals. In the afternoon, she identified her husband's body at Bellevue Hospital Center. \"I didn't even get to say goodbye to him,\" she said. Mr. Reilly grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn. He served in the Army from 1963 to 1965 and was a military policeman in Vietnam, his wife said. He is survived by two daughters, 21 and 20, and a son, 16. Yosef Y. Zaklikowski, who lived next door to the Reillys until November, described Mr. Reilly as quiet and private. \"He kept his property very clean,\" Mr. Zaklikowski said. Compared with deaths on the tracks, deaths inside subways and on buses are quite rare. In June 1999, Ignacio Mendez, 36, a migrant farm worker from Ecuador, was found dead on a No. 1 train on the Upper West Side during the morning rush. His body was not identified for three days.", "keyword": "NEW YORK CITY;REILLY EUGENE M;SUBWAYS;TRANSIT SYSTEMS"}
{"id": "ny0213786", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2010/03/17", "title": "How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time", "abstract": "If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address? Probably not. Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook , Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae \u2014 birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched. Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person\u2019s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number. \u201cTechnology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,\u201d said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission\u2019s privacy division. \u201cYou can find out who an individual is without it.\u201d In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male. So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers. But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue. Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix\u2019s recommendation software by at least 10 percent. On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest \u2014 bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be \u201cde-anonymized\u201d by statistically analyzing an individual\u2019s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations. In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual\u2019s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet. You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing. \u201cPersonal privacy is no longer an individual thing,\u201d said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. \u201cIn today\u2019s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.\u201d Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive \u201csocial signature,\u201d researchers say. The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix\u2019s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University . By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses. \u201cWhen you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying,\u201d Mr. Shmatikov said. Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University . In a paper published last year , Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 \u2014 nearly five million individuals. Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions. The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people \u2014 birthdates and city or state of birth. That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn\u2019t disclose, although they were related to when the person applied for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government\u2019s number-assignment system. To be sure, the work by Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk. But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could use similar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes. More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear \u201conline redlining,\u201d where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior. The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a \u201cdo not track\u201d list, similar to the federal \u201cdo not call\u201d list, to stop online monitoring. But Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: \u201cWhen you\u2019re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you\u2019re doing it in public \u2014 because increasingly, it is.\u201d", "keyword": "null;Privacy;Computers and the Internet;Identity theft"}
{"id": "ny0240786", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2010/12/15", "title": "Flyers\u2019 Victory Ends Penguins\u2019 Winning Streak at 12", "abstract": "Scott Hartnell\u2019s power-play goal broke a 2-2 tie midway through the third period, and the host Philadelphia Flyers ended the Pittsburgh Penguins \u2019 12-game winning streak with a 3-2 victory Tuesday night. The Penguins, who fell a point behind the Flyers atop the Atlantic Division, had not lost since a 3-2 overtime defeat to the Rangers in Pittsburgh on Nov. 15. A playoff atmosphere pervaded the sellout crowd of 19,824. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how many you win \u2014 losing is not where you want to be,\u201d Penguins Coach Dan Bylsma said. \u201cWe\u2019re disappointed in the first period in particular. Philadelphia dictated the pace.\u201d Pittsburgh center Evgeni Malkin returned after missing four games with a knee injury and scored his 9th and 10th goals. Sidney Crosby assisted on both those goals, extending his point streak to 19 games. Crosby has 20 goals and 18 assists in matching his career-long streak from Oct. 6 to Nov. 17, 2007. In the third period, less than a minute after Malkin was called for interference, a wrist shot by Chris Pronger from just outside the face-off circle was deflected by Hartnell over Marc-Andre Fleury\u2019s shoulder. \u201cI parked myself in front of the net and I was able to get my stick on it,\u201d Hartnell said. Claude Giroux and Nikolay Zherdev also scored for the Flyers, who have won five of six games. MAPLE LEAFS 4, OILERS 1 Kris Versteeg had a goal and an assist as Toronto won the first of three games on a trip through Western Canada. Dion Phaneuf, Mikhail Grabovski and Phil Kessel also scored for the Leafs, who have won two in a row and four of their past six. Toronto moved into a three-way tie for 10th in the Eastern Conference with Buffalo and Carolina. Jordan Eberle scored for Edmonton, which has lost three of four and remains in last place in the West. DEVILS WAIVE ROLSTON The Devils, who have lost five straight, placed the veteran left wing Brian Rolston on waivers. If he is not claimed by noon Wednesday, the Devils can assign him to their American Hockey League affiliate in Albany or keep him on the roster for Wednesday night\u2019s game against Phoenix. The Devils would get no salary-cap relief in sending the 37-year-old Rolston to the minors. He was older than 35 when he signed his contract, so his $5 million salary will count against the Devils\u2019 cap whether he plays for them or heads to the minors. His salary would come off the cap only if another team claimed him, and that seems unlikely.", "keyword": "Hockey Ice;Philadelphia Flyers;Pittsburgh Penguins;National Hockey League;Hartnell Scott;Malkin Evgeni;Crosby Sidney;Rolston Brian;McDonald Andy"}
{"id": "ny0170887", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/11/04", "title": "Elections Could Shift Power in Nassau", "abstract": "THE balance of power in the Nassau County Legislature is at stake in the elections on Tuesday. The Democrats hold a 10-9 majority in the Legislature, but that could easily change. In an election year of local races only, which political experts predict will bring a turnout of 25 to 30 percent, both the Democrats and the Republicans have been stepping up their efforts to get their voters to the polls. Because the county executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, is a Democrat, if the majority in the Legislature were to change, it would probably mean political gridlock, said Lawrence C. Levy, executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. \u201cThis would be a good or bad thing, depending on which side you\u2019re on,\u201d he said. In an election expected to have a low turnout, getting the Independent line is a key, Mr. Levy said. He referred to three races: the 3rd, 13th and 18th Districts, where John J. Ciotti (Republican), Norma L. Gonsalves (Republican) and Diane Yatauro (Democrat), respectively, have also won spots on the Independent ticket. \u201cIf the Republicans win back the Legislature, it will be either because they did a better job at turning out voters or that there is more energy behind the issues of immigrant licensing and tax assessments,\u201d Mr. Levy said. \u201cThey may call it a rejection of Tom Suozzi, but I don\u2019t believe that\u2019s the case.\u201d There are several races to watch. In the 14th District, where the Republicans have a 3-2 edge in registration, the G.O.P. candidate, Joseph Belesi, a retired Nassau County police sergeant from Farmingdale, is challenging the incumbent, David L. Mejias, a Democrat from Massapequa, who is a close political ally of Mr. Suozzi. Joseph N. Mondello, the state and Nassau Republican Party chairman, said: \u201cWe expect it to be a very competitive race. We have a great candidate, have put up a lot of money and think the issues are connecting with Republican voters.\u201d But the county\u2019s Democratic chairman, Jay S. Jacobs, said that the Republicans were focusing the race on freezing the property tax assessment for five years, which he said would violate a state court order that mandates an annual reassessment. \u201cThey know it\u2019s a phony promise, but it\u2019s selling, and giving us a difficult challenge to make a complicated rebuttal to a simple issue,\u201d Mr. Jacobs said. In the Third District, the incumbent Republican, Mr. Ciotti, faces a rematch from 2005 against Ali Mirza, a special assistant to Mr. Suozzi. The district includes many newly registered Democrats, who do not have a history of turning out in off-year elections, said Mr. Jacobs, calling that a possible \u201csaving grace\u201d for Mr. Ciotti. But Mr. Mondello said of Mr. Ciotti, \u201cHe won the Conservative ticket as a write-in candidate, and while the Democrats have moved heaven and earth to beat him, they haven\u2019t been able to, and won\u2019t again.\u201d In the 18th District, in Glen Cove, the Democratic incumbent, Ms. Yatauro, faces the Republican Elizabeth Faughnan, and in the 7th District in the Five Towns, Howard Kopel, a Republican, is challenging the incumbent Democrat, Jeffrey Toback. There is one open seat, in the 10th District, where Lisanne G. Altmann, a Democrat, decided not to run again. Judi Bosworth is the Democratic candidate; her Republican opponent is Harry Demell. In the Fourth District, Denise Ford is running unopposed on all party lines.", "keyword": "Long Island (NY);Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0131831", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/12/26", "title": "Tea Party, Its Clout Diminished, Turns to Narrower Issues", "abstract": "The Tea Party might not be over, but it is increasingly clear that the election last month significantly weakened the once-surging movement, which nearly captured control of the Republican Party through a potent combination of populism and fury. Leading Congressional Republicans, though they remain far apart from President Obama , have embraced raising tax revenues in budget negotiations, repudiating a central tenet of the Tea Party. Even more telling, Tea Party activists in the middle of the country are skirting the fiscal showdown in Congress and turning to narrower issues, raising questions about whether the movement still represents a citizen groundswell to which attention must be paid. Grass-roots leaders said this month that after losing any chance of repealing the national health care law , they would press states to \u201cnullify\u201d or ignore it. They also plan to focus on a two-decade-old United Nations resolution that they call a plot against property rights, and on \u201cfraud\u201d by local election boards that, some believe, let the Democrats steal the November vote. But unlike the broader, galvanizing issues of health care and the size of the federal government that ignited the Tea Party, the new topics seem likely to bolster critics who portray the movement as a distraction to the Republican Party. \u201cPeople in positions of responsibility within the Republican Party tolerated too much of this,\u201d said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. He blamed a backlash against \u201ctinfoil hat\u201d issues pushed by the Tea Party-dominated legislature in New Hampshire for the loss of a Republican majority in the State House last month and a near loss in the State Senate. Republican leaders \u201clooked the other way too often,\u201d he said. \u201cThey sort of smiled, winked and nodded too often, when they should have been calling \u2018crazy, crazy.\u2019 \u201d The movement is not going away \u2014 most Republicans in the House have more to fear from primary challengers on their right than from Democratic challengers. An unpopular budget deal could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts. But surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, federal spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House. The House members elected with Tea Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to spending and changes to entitlement programs, embodied by the budget blueprints of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt Romney\u2019s running mate. And some of those lawmakers led the revolt last week that prompted Speaker John A. Boehner to cancel a House vote on a plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by raising tax rates on household income above $1 million. \u201cThe Tea Party put a lot of steel in the spine of the Republican Party,\u201d said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. But the Tea Party activists have not been front and center in the fiscal fight. And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did not recognize political reality. \u201cThese guys want instant success,\u201d said Mr. Cole, a member of the House Republican leadership. \u201cIf they want to see a better result, they\u2019ve got to help us win the United States Senate. We\u2019ve thrown away some seats out of political immaturity.\u201d But a number of Republican leaders said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political faction, not a broad movement. It may rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said. \u201cI think the Tea Party movement is to the Republicans in 2013 what the McGovernites were to the Democrats in 1971 and 1972,\u201d said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida Senate. \u201cThey will cost Republicans seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.\u201d Because the Tea Party comprises thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks shrank after the many electoral defeats last month, which activists said caused grief and deep frustration. Greg Cummings, the leader of the We the People Tea Party in rural Decatur County, Iowa, said his group had picked up 12 members since the election, for a total of about 50. \u201cIf you were in a fight and someone gave you a good left hook, it doesn\u2019t mean the fight is over,\u201d he said. But Everett Wilkinson, the chairman of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach County, said the number of active Tea Party groups statewide \u201chas diminished significantly in the last year or so, certainly in the last couple of months,\u201d with only a third of what there once was. \u201cA lot of people gave their heart and soul to trying to get Obama out; they\u2019re frustrated,\u201d he added. \u201cThey don\u2019t know what to do. They got involved with the electoral process, and that didn\u2019t work out.\u201d FreedomWorks, a national group that has played a crucial role in organizing Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the House. Mr. Armey said in news accounts that he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others told of a power struggle. He was eased out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. FreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost their House seats, including Allen B. West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois. One notable success for the Tea Party was the Senate victory by Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Cummings, who is the Midwest coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a national group, said a major issue he would be focusing on now was Agenda 21, a United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development. It has no force of law in the United States, but a passionate element of the Tea Party sees it as a plot against American property rights. Billie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama\u2019s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate. \u201cSome people say it\u2019s just a conspiracy theory, but there\u2019s rumbling all around,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s all kinds of data, and no one\u2019s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.\u201d Another issue boiling is the \u201cnullification\u201d of the Affordable Care Act. Angry that Mr. Obama\u2019s re-election means that the health care law will not be repealed, some activists claim that states can deny the authority of the federal government and refuse to carry it out. At a Florida State Senate meeting this month, two dozen Tea Party activists called the law \u201ctyrannical\u201d and said the state had the right to nullify it. Mr. Gaetz, the Senate president, a conservative Republican, said in an interview that he, too, disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. But he called nullification \u201ckooky.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not a banana republic,\u201d he said. It is \u201cdangerous to the foundation of the republic when we pick and choose which laws we will obey.\u201d", "keyword": "Tea Party Movement;Presidential Election of 2012;Republican Party;FreedomWorks;House of Representatives;Federal Budget (US);Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0107876", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/04/25", "title": "Leaders of N.B.A. Players Union in Power Struggle", "abstract": "Five months after settling a damaging lockout, the N.B.A. players union is facing a more existential threat: an internal power struggle that has thrown the association into chaos. Derek Fisher, the elected president of the Players Association, is demanding a far-ranging audit of its finances, staffing and business practices \u2014 a move that is viewed as an assault on Billy Hunter , the union\u2019s longtime executive director. The audit was rejected by the eight other players on the union\u2019s executive committee, who in turn have asked Fisher to resign. Fisher is standing firm, leaving a vast rift that is consuming the union\u2019s attention just as the N.B.A. is wrapping up a surprisingly successful regular season after the 149-day lockout. \u201cI think the relationship has suffered seriously, suffered a severe injury,\u201d Hunter, referring to himself and Fisher, said in an interview. \u201cAnd the question is whether or not we\u2019ve suffered irreparable damage. And it may very well be that that\u2019s the case. \u201cI\u2019m sure he doesn\u2019t trust me,\u201d Hunter continued, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be in a situation where I got to look over my back every five minutes.\u201d The remarks were Hunter\u2019s first since reports of union infighting surfaced last week, starting with a Yahoo Sports article that revealed Fisher\u2019s push for a so-called business review . Fisher declined to comment for this article. He has been largely silent, other than issuing a statement in which he rejected the call for his resignation. Fisher, a 16-year veteran and five-time champion with the Los Angeles Lakers who is now with the Oklahoma City Thunder, has been the union president since 2006. Hunter has been the union\u2019s executive director since 1996. In an hourlong interview Monday night at the union\u2019s Harlem offices, Hunter was by turns relaxed, defiant, feisty and defensive. He alternately welcomed the audit and dismissed the need for it. He denied any role in the board\u2019s vote of no-confidence in Fisher (\u201cI had nothing to do with that\u201d). Hunter also defended himself against charges of nepotism stemming from the union\u2019s employment of his daughter and daughter-in-law, and of two outside firms that employ his son and another daughter. Each hiring was vetted and approved by the executive committee, he said. \u201cLet me say this to you: My children are highly credentialed,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cIn many instances, they\u2019re being paid at or below the market.\u201d Fisher has never raised the nepotism charge publicly and has generally remained mum on his motives for the audit. But Maurice Evans, a union vice president, provided some insight last week when he referred to nepotism and \u201cmisappropriation of funds\u201d as issues that the committee had addressed with Hunter in response to Fisher\u2019s concerns. \u201cBilly answered those questions to our satisfaction,\u201d Evans told reporters in Washington. Those remarks triggered a flurry of articles detailing the employment of Hunter\u2019s children. \u00b6 Robyn Hunter, his daughter, is the union\u2019s director of player benefits. \u00b6 Megan Inaba, his daughter-in-law, is the union\u2019s director of special events and partnerships and a lawyer who was involved in the labor talks. \u00b6 Todd Hunter, who is married to Inaba, is a principal at Prim Capital, a Cleveland-based firm that provides financial-planning seminars for N.B.A. players. \u00b6 Alexis Hunter, another daughter, is special counsel at Steptoe & Johnson, a Washington law firm that handled the union\u2019s unfair-labor-practice charge against the N.B.A. last year. She was among the lawyers who worked on the case. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing illegal,\u201d Hunter said, \u201cand you\u2019re not going to find anything illegal, you or anybody else, if that\u2019s what you\u2019re looking for. I\u2019m not afraid of that.\u201d Hunter explained in detail the qualifications of each relative and how each one came to be employed by the union. Prim \u2014 the firm that employs Todd Hunter \u2014 has been working with the union since the early 1990s and was originally retained by Charles Grantham, the union\u2019s previous executive director. Todd Hunter has worked for Prim for 10 years, and has worked on the union account for the last four, Billy Hunter said. He said that Inaba joined the union\u2019s staff in 2000 \u2014 six years before she married his son. Robyn, who holds an M.B.A. from Syracuse, worked for the Dallas Mavericks before joining the union staff in 2008. At Steptoe & Johnson, Alexis works for a partner, James Hibey, who has served as an outside counsel to the union, both with Steptoe and a previous firm, Howrey, where Alexis also worked. Hunter said the executive committee had not raised any concerns over the years, with one exception: Pat Garrity, then with the Orlando Magic, lodged the only vote against hiring Robyn. Hunter said the union had administrative \u201cfirewalls\u201d to prevent any conflicts stemming from his relatives\u2019 employment. \u201cMy kids have been vetted; the players have seen them,\u201d Hunter said, adding, \u201cThey\u2019re probably more competent than most of the people on my staff.\u201d Roger Mason Jr., a union vice president, said that he was aware of the family connections but that \u201cI never paid much mind to it, to be honest with you.\u201d There is nothing illegal or perhaps even unethical about Hunter\u2019s hiring family members, as long as he received approval from the executive committee, said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University, who specializes in corporate governance and white-collar crime. Still, Coffee called it \u201cpoor governance\u201d and said, \u201cI think this does deserve some attention.\u201d Regarding the audit, Hunter said the union already submitted to annual financial audits and conducted a more thorough audit of its operations after each of the previous two labor deals, in 1999 and in 2005. \u201cAnd every audit\u2019s been clean,\u201d he said. But the business review that Fisher is seeking would be more exhaustive, covering not only finances but staffing, procedures, the hiring of third-party vendors and even the union\u2019s bylaws. Patton Boggs, a firm hired by Fisher, planned to begin its review April 16, but the executive committee voted that day to cease the effort. Hunter and other committee members say that Fisher did not receive proper authorization to hire the firm. But a quorum of the board \u2014 five members \u2014 voted unanimously during an April 13 conference call to proceed with the audit, according to the minutes of that meeting, a copy of which was distributed to all committee members and obtained by The New York Times. That day, Fisher sent an e-mail to all eight members confirming what they had decided. The other players on the April 13 call contend they did not approve anything, and they are distributing a memorandum with their version of events to the 30 player representatives. That memo asserts that Keyon Dooling left the call before a vote was taken, that Mason and Chris Paul abstained, and that James Jones voted only to appoint a subcommittee to review the matter. Hunter said he sent an e-mail to the committee stating that he would not oppose an audit, \u201cBut I urged them to investigate Derek\u2019s motives.\u201d Three days after the initial meeting, the board voted unanimously to kill the audit and asked Fisher to resign. \u201cNobody is saying it\u2019s not right to audit,\u201d Mason said. \u201cNobody is saying it\u2019s not right to look at whatever Derek is charging Mr. Hunter with. What we\u2019re saying is, there\u2019s a certain way it has to be done.\u201d", "keyword": "National Basketball Players Assn;Hunter Billy;Fisher Derek;Labor and Jobs;Hiring and Promotion;Nepotism;Basketball;Organized Labor;Finances"}
{"id": "ny0007647", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/05/09", "title": "Undercover Video Targets Abortion Doctor", "abstract": "An anti-abortion group released an undercover video on Wednesday showing what it says were offensive and inhumane remarks about abortions by one of the country\u2019s most prominent abortion doctors. The release, by the activist group Live Action, is part of a new effort by abortion foes to portray clinics that perform later abortions, in the second or third trimester of pregnancy, as being riddled with illegal or cruel practices. They also assert that the grisly and illegal practices alleged at the trial of Dr. Kermit B. Gosnell in Philadelphia, which include evidence of unsterile tools and untrained workers and charges that he killed babies born live by snipping their spines, are typical more widely. The new video captures the doctor, LeRoy H. Carhart, using some imprudent phrases while discussing the process of a late-term abortion with women posing as patients. At one point he describes a fetus that has died after an injection in the womb as softening like \u201cmeat in a Crock-Pot.\u201d But the video provides no evidence of illegal action or subpar medical techniques. Other medical experts as well as defenders of abortion rights said the comparison with Dr. Gosnell, who seemed to show blatant disregard for his patients and the law, was misleading and unfair. \u201cComparing an offensive and inappropriate comment to Gosnell\u2019s horrific crimes is politics at its worst,\u201d said Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the tape of two visits to a Nebraska clinic run by Dr. Carhart, dated Dec. 7 and March 28, a woman described as 22 weeks pregnant and another described as 26 weeks pregnant tell him that they want abortions, and they question him in detail about how it would be done. Both secretly taped the conversation and did not intend to have abortions. Dr. Carhart did not respond to a request on Wednesday for comment. Dr. Carhart is known for his widely reported vow to carry on the work of Dr. George R. Tiller, who performed late-term abortions in Kansas and was killed in 2009. In part to prevent Dr. Carhart from doing late-term abortions, Nebraska banned them after 22 weeks from a woman\u2019s last menstrual period, with few exceptions. He has continued to practice in Nebraska, performing earlier abortions, but he also opened a clinic in Germantown, Md., where the rules for late-term abortions are less stringent. In the video, Dr. Carhart repeatedly emphasizes that he must abide by the law, telling both women that at their late stages, they would have to travel to Maryland for him to help them. He makes it clear that in the extremely unlikely event that a fetus emerges alive, the law requires trying to save it. He describes his procedure for second- and third-trimester abortions, which take two to four days and involve first giving an injection to kill the fetus, then dilating the cervix, trying to induce labor and, if that fails, pulling out the fetus \u201cin pieces.\u201d But in a few spots, Dr. Carhart seems to be trying to find simple metaphors, and uses language that his critics called grossly inappropriate and revealing. When asked what tools he uses to extract a fetus, he first tries to joke, saying, \u201cA pickax, a drill bit,\u201d but then becomes serious and says, \u201cNo ... there\u2019s just instruments that have been developed.\u201d \u201cThe abortion lobby claims that the Gosnell clinic is an outlier, but the footage released this morning by Live Action reveals once more that the abortion industry treats women and children as mere pieces of meat,\u201d said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. Tracy Weitz, a medical sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who viewed the video, said people should not be quick to pass judgment on a doctor based on a few phrases on a videotape. \u201cDoctors struggle to find terminology to help a client understand what\u2019s happening, and while it may seem wrong to us, it may be appropriate for that conversation,\u201d she said. In the video, Dr. Weitz said, Dr. Carhart shows compassion for the women and concern for their medical safety. \u201cThat\u2019s so different from what Dr. Gosnell is accused of,\u201d she said. Dr. Carhart at one point counsels a woman that \u201cit\u2019s your life that\u2019s going to be affected by this pregnancy and be affected by the termination.\u201d \u201cI mean, this baby is a part of you forever,\u201d he says. The president of Live Action, Lila Rose, called Dr. Carhart a \u201cgrave threat to women and children,\u201d citing the death in February of a 29-year-old patient who was having an abortion at later than 30 weeks, apparently because the fetus had severe deformities. The Maryland medical examiner said the woman had died of natural causes from a rare complication of delivery. The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue filed a complaint with the Maryland Board of Physicians, charging that Dr. Carhart had mismanaged the case and should lose his license. The board, according to a letter on Operation Rescue\u2019s Web site , said it would undertake a preliminary inquiry to see if a full investigation was warranted. The board, reached Wednesday, said its activities were confidential.", "keyword": "Abortion;LeRoy H Carhart;Live Action;Video"}
{"id": "ny0237263", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/06/10", "title": "Ruben Diaz Jr. Building Profile Beyond the Bronx", "abstract": "As Ruben Diaz Jr. stepped onto a sidewalk in the South Bronx, his shiny black shoes the color of his air-conditioned Tahoe, a flock of violins began to play. Mr. Diaz, the Bronx borough president , beamed as rows of second-grade girls standing outside their charter school serenaded him during a recent visit. He stood just blocks from the housing project where he used to hang out in the courtyard in a neighborhood far more welcoming today than when Mr. Diaz would sweep glass off a basketball court as a youth. But while the Bronx is no longer the symbol of urban blight it was a generation ago, it remains mired in poverty. That is why Mr. Diaz is leading a campaign for legislation requiring that workers at all development projects receiving city subsidies be paid at least $10 an hour with benefits, well above the minimum wage. The bill , before the City Council, faces an uncertain fate \u2014 Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the real estate industry and business leaders all say it would scare off employers. But the battle, no matter the outcome, provides Mr. Diaz a high-profile platform to promote his political appeal and talents beyond the confines of the borough president\u2019s office. And though he has been in power only since May 2009, Mr. Diaz is already being talked about in some political circles as a candidate for higher office, including as a potential mayoral candidate in 2013. Mr. Diaz has raised eyebrows by taking on Mr. Bloomberg and winning, helping to defeat a plan last year to turn the long-vacant Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx into a shopping mall because the mayor and the project\u2019s developer refused to require all prospective employers to pay more than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. \u201cTo the members of my union who are clamoring for attention by city government, Ruben Diaz Jr. is becoming a rock star,\u201d said Stuart Appelbaum, who leads a powerful retailing workers\u2019 union . City Hall may be a long way from the Grand Concourse, where Mr. Diaz has his office, but political analysts say Mr. Diaz\u2019s record of advocating for low-income, minority communities, his largely progressive politics and his appetite for political scuffles make him someone to watch. \u201cHe\u2019s handsome, he likes to campaign, he\u2019s got a good field organization, and he\u2019s smart,\u201d said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who worked on Mr. Diaz\u2019s campaign for borough president. \u201cHe understands the streets, and he can raise money. It means he can run for anything he wants.\u201d Mr. Diaz, 37, was predictably coy when asked about running for a citywide position. \u201cHaving ambition for higher office, it can\u2019t be some self-fulfilling drive or ambition,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has to come from the fact that you\u2019ve done well.\u201d With his hair always neatly trimmed, his mustache just so, and his demeanor unflappable, he exudes something of a feline swagger. On a recent whirlwind day, he visited a kindergarten class, spoke to an auditorium of middle-school students, danced with senior citizens and posed for countless photos \u2014 all before lunch. Mingling with constituents is required of all elected officials, but Mr. Diaz seems to relish it. Mr. Diaz, a Democrat, served 12 years in Albany as an assemblyman representing Hunts Point and Soundview before winning a special election for borough president last year. In New York\u2019s political world, the office can seem like a distant outpost, a position more about ribbon-cuttings and proclamations than actual power. But Mr. Diaz has managed to use the office as a pulpit to draw attention to pet causes \u2014 and to himself. In April, he held a \u201cgreen jobs\u201d conference to discuss the viability of a local environmental conservation industry. In May, he hosted workshops and other meetings to address obesity in the borough and its ties to health and employment problems. Along the way, Mr. Diaz has attracted powerful opponents. Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said Mr. Diaz\u2019s stance on the Kingsbridge Armory would hurt his political prospects in the long run, saying, \u201cI think it\u2019s going to be difficult for him to attract support from the business community if he\u2019s going to be taking these types of positions.\u201d Whatever Mr. Diaz\u2019s aspirations, they will undoubtedly be complicated by his father, the Rev. Rub\u00e9n D\u00edaz, a well-known evangelical preacher and a Democratic state senator from the Bronx who revels in his reputation as a political troublemaker. The relationship between father and son is immensely complicated, their points of disagreement abundant. The son, who is often referred to as Rubencito, has worked to build bridges; the father is known for setting them on fire. The elder Mr. D\u00edaz, with a reputation for fervent sermons and an impolitic tongue, is one of Albany\u2019s most outspoken opponents of abortion and gay marriage. He once likened stem cell research to Hitler using \u201cthe ashes of the Jews to make bars of soap.\u201d In a reversal of the usual history of political families, the younger Mr. Diaz won his first election, in 1996, for an Assembly seat, five years before his father won his first election, for the City Council. Since entering political life, the two have maintained a tricky balance that has kept them personally close \u2014 they recently got together to see Ruben Diaz III off to his high school prom \u2014 but politically distant. \u201cI love my father,\u201d Mr. Diaz said. \u201cMy father and I disagree on social and moral issues. He\u2019s not going to change my stance. We have a split household.\u201d His father said his son should be judged on his own merits. \u201cIt would be unfair and unjust for people to take it out on my son what they have against me,\u201d said the father. Ruben Diaz Jr. grew up in politics, so steeped in it that he now ticks off the names of Bronx titans from generations past as if he were listing the Knicks\u2019lineup. \u201cGilberto Gerena-Valent\u00edn, Louis Nine, Bobby Garcia, Ram\u00f3n Velez,\u201d he said while driving through the South Bronx. \u201cThis was their area.\u201d He was 7 the first time his father ran for office, and he remembers licking envelopes, knocking on doors and pasting campaign posters on to street poles. \u201cThere were summers when we ate White Castle every night,\u201d he said. \u201cCampaigns are expensive.\u201d He first won public office at a tender age. He was 23 when he took his seat in the Assembly in 1997, already married to his high school sweetheart and the father of two boys. In Albany, he focused on health and environmental issues \u2014 he cites asthma legislation and laws promoting green roofs among his biggest accomplishments. But it was his role as a spokesman for the family of Amadou Diallo, the man killed in a fusillade of police bullets in 1999 in the vestibule of an apartment building in Mr. Diaz\u2019s district, that gained him widespread attention. At the time, some critics accused him of being too shrill, but he says he has always supported most police officers \u2014 his sister, after all, is a police sergeant. In Albany, he sat next to Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, one of the Legislature\u2019s more experienced hands, and the two worked together on legislation. \u201cHe\u2019s smart and he gives a damn,\u201d Mr. Brodsky said. \u201cWhen you start with those two things, you can acquire the rest of the skills, and that\u2019s what he\u2019s doing.\u201d", "keyword": "Diaz Ruben Jr;Politics and Government;Elections;City Councils;Minimum Wage;South Bronx (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0166615", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/01/03", "title": "How's Business? Picking Up, With a Smile", "abstract": "IT'S not just his flashy white-rimmed sunglasses, his sparkling dice earrings or the way he makes the sidewalks as neat as his crisp blue uniform. What makes Cortez Jackson stand out on this stretch of the Upper East Side is his I-just-won-the-lottery attitude toward a job many people take for granted. Mr. Jackson, a street cleaner, moves efficiently up the block, working his well-worn dustpan and broom across the gray sidewalk. He is focused, and his fluid movements hint at the athlete he once was. Despite the wind, he manages to dig out the cigarette butts from crevices, sweep them into the pan and transfer the unruly pile into his trash barrel on wheels. Every now and then, a familiar face greets him or a passer-by compliments his work, breaking his meditative spell. He responds with a wide smile and an easy laugh. \"You would think that this is a menial job, but it's really not,\" said Mr. Jackson, 48, leaning over his matching blue barrel near 82nd Street and Second Avenue. For him, it is a path to redemption. Less than two years ago, he was in a cell at the Attica State Correctional Facility, reflecting on what had gone wrong with his life. After a knee injury in high school dashed hopes kindled by a basketball scholarship to the University of Florida, Mr. Jackson wound up dealing drugs on New York's streets in the 1970's. Addiction took over, and he lurched between prison terms and homelessness for almost 20 years. \"I made a conscious decision that I need to get my life together,\" he said. In prison, he stopped using drugs and found out about Ready, Willing and Able, a program run by the Doe Fund that emphasizes self-sufficiency to homeless men and women, many who have histories of jail time and drug addiction. He owes his job to the charity. \"As much dirt as I've done in New York City, it's about time I pick up a little,\" he said, now near the end of the nine-month program, which tries to instill self-respect and a sense of community. \"It's more than a bunch of guys just sweeping the streets,\" Mr. Jackson said, halfway through a final inspection of his 10-block domain. \"The feeling you get having this blue suit on, it's deep.\" A bus pulled away from a curb, blowing some papers on the sidewalk he had just cleaned. Without a hint of frustration, he went back to pick them up.", "keyword": "NEW YORK CITY;LABOR"}
{"id": "ny0233875", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/08/22", "title": "Small Investors Flee Stock Market Even as Companies Recover", "abstract": "Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans\u2019 generation-long love affair with the stock market. Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds. If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked. Small investors are \u201closing their appetite for risk,\u201d a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday. One of the phenomena of the last several decades has been the rise of the individual investor. As Americans have become more responsible for their own retirement, they have poured money into stocks with such faith that half of the country\u2019s households now own shares directly or through mutual funds, which are by far the most popular way Americans invest in stocks. So the turnabout is striking. So is the timing. After past recessions, ordinary investors have typically regained their enthusiasm for stocks, hoping to profit as the economy recovered. This time, even as corporate earnings have improved, Americans have become more guarded with their investments. \u201cAt this stage in the economic cycle, $10 to $20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds\u201d rather than the billions that are flowing out, said Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the investment institute. He added, \u201cThis is very unusual.\u201d The notion that stocks tend to be safe and profitable investments over time seems to have been dented in much the same way that a decline in home values and in job stability the last few years has altered Americans\u2019 sense of financial security. It may take many years before it is clear whether this becomes a long-term shift in psychology. After technology and dot-com shares crashed in the early 2000s, for example, investors were quick to re-enter the stock market. Yet bigger economic calamities like the Great Depression affected people\u2019s attitudes toward money for decades. For now, though, mixed economic data is presenting a picture of an economy that is recovering feebly from recession . \u201cFor a lot of ordinary people, the economic recovery does not feel real,\u201d said Loren Fox, a senior analyst at Strategic Insight, a New York research and data firm. \u201cPeople are not going to rush toward the stock market on a sustained basis until they feel more confident of employment growth and the sustainability of the economic recovery.\u201d One investor who has restructured his portfolio is Gary Olsen, 51, from Dallas. Over the past four years, he has adjusted the proportion of his investments from 65 percent equities and 35 percent bonds so that the $1.1 million he has invested is now evenly balanced. He had worked as a portfolio liquidity manager for the local Federal Home Loan Bank and retired four years ago. \u201cLike everyone, I lost\u201d during the recent market declines, he said. \u201cI needed to have a more conservative allocation.\u201d To be sure, a lot of money is still flowing into the stock market from small investors, pension funds and other big institutional investors. But ordinary investors are reallocating their 401(k) retirement plans, according to Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm that tracks pension plans. Until two years ago, 70 percent of the money in 401(k) accounts it tracks was invested in stock funds; that proportion fell to 49 percent by the start of 2009 as people rebalanced their portfolios toward bond investments following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. It is now back at 57 percent, but almost all of that can be attributed to the rising price of stocks in recent years. People are still staying with bonds. Another force at work is the aging of the baby-boomer generation. As they approach retirement, Americans are shifting some of their investments away from stocks to provide regular guaranteed income for the years when they are no longer working. And the flight from stocks may also be driven by households that are no longer able to tap into home equity for cash and may simply need the money to pay for ordinary expenses. On Friday, Fidelity Investments reported that a record number of people took so-called hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter. These are early withdrawals intended to pay for needs like medical expenses. According to the Investment Company Institute, which surveys 4,000 households annually, the appetite for stock market risk among American investors of all ages has been declining steadily since it peaked around 2001, and the change is most pronounced in the under-35 age group. For a few months at the start of this year, things were looking up for stock market investing. Optimistic about growth, investors were again putting their money into stocks. In March and April, when the stock market rose 8 percent, $8.1 billion flowed into domestic stock mutual funds. But then came a grim reassessment of America\u2019s economic prospects as unemployment remained stubbornly high and private sector job growth refused to take off. Investors\u2019 nerves were also frayed by the \u201cflash crash\u201d on May 6, when the Dow Jones industrial index fell 600 points in a matter of minutes. The authorities still do not know why. Investors pulled $19.1 billion from domestic equity funds in May, the largest outflow since the height of the financial crisis in October 2008. Over all, investors pulled $151.4 billion out of stock market mutual funds in 2008. But at that time the market was tanking in shocking fashion. The surprise this time around is that Americans are withdrawing money even when share prices are rallying. The stock market rose 7 percent last month as corporate profits began rebounding, but even that increase was not enough to tempt ordinary investors. Instead, they withdrew $14.67 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in July, according to the investment institute\u2019s estimates, the third straight month of withdrawals. A big beneficiary has been bond funds, which offer regular fixed interest payments. As investors pulled billions out of stocks, they plowed $185.31 billion into bond mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, and total bond fund investments for the year are on track to approach the record set in 2009. Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs, a funds researcher, said it was no wonder people were putting their money in bonds given the dismal performance of equities over the past decade. The Dow Jones industrial average started the decade around 11,500 but closed on Friday at 10,213. \u201cPeople have lost a lot of money over the last 10 years in the stock market, while there has been a bull market in bonds,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the financial markets, there is one truism: flow follows performance.\u201d Ross Williams, 59, a community consultant from Grand Rapids, Minn., began to take profits from his stock funds when the market started to recover last year and invested the money in short-term bonds, afraid that stocks would again drop. \u201cWe have a very volatile market, so we should be in bonds in case it goes down again,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the market is moving up, I realized we should be taking this money and putting it into something more safe rather than leaving it at risk.\u201d", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;United States Economy;Mutual Funds;Personal Finances"}
{"id": "ny0002833", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/03/22", "title": "Commuter Cycling in New York Stays Flat in 2012", "abstract": "After years of growth in bike ridership, commuter cycling in New York remained flat in 2012 during the typical riding season, according to counts conducted by the city at six commuter locations last year. From April through October, an average of 18,717 people were recorded , at the locations on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., down slightly from 18,846 in 2011. Over the three previous years, cycling had increased by 26 percent, 13 percent and 8 percent in the same period. But the city\u2019s Transportation Department pointed to the bike ridership from December of last year through February, when the figures suggest an increase of 23 percent over the previous year, as evidence that cycling in the city had continued to grow. \u201cIt\u2019s just a different kind of growth,\u201d Ryan Russo, the department\u2019s assistant commissioner for traffic management, said in a phone interview on Thursday. Amid the Bloomberg administration\u2019s aggressive expansion of bike lanes, the question of how many cyclists use the infrastructure has remained at the center of the mayor\u2019s transportation legacy. In the past, the cyclist counts have often been released in the fall, and are relied upon to demonstrate growing demand for a robust bike network. Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, said Hurricane Sandy had contributed in delaying the 2012 figures\u2019 release. The report was published online on Monday, he said, though the department did not announce its release publicly. In a statement, Janette Sadik-Khan, the city\u2019s transportation commissioner, lauded cycling as \u201cfour-season transportation\u201d and noted that \u201cmore and more New Yorkers are building bikes into their everyday routines.\u201d Officials suggested that with the introduction of a bike share program, scheduled for the coming months, the figures were likely to increase again this year. The city also noted that the counting locations \u2014 the Staten Island Ferry, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge and the Hudson River Greenway at 50th Street \u2014 did not include many newly built bike passages where ridership had increased. But even among some advocates, the stalled momentum during the traditional riding season appeared to signal a change. \u201cThe fabulous increase in cycling in the past half-dozen years has leveled off,\u201d said Charles Komanoff, a transportation economist and longtime cycling advocate. \u201cTo some extent, the D.O.T. has done or is doing everything it can do.\u201d Expanding cycling, he said, was now largely incumbent on the Police Department, which has faced persistent criticism from advocates over its inconsistent enforcement of traffic laws.", "keyword": "Biking;Commuting;NYC Transportation Dept;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0017905", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/07/04", "title": "Hernandez\u2019s Apartment Is Searched by Police", "abstract": "A police search of a secret $1,200-a-month apartment in Franklin, Mass., rented by the former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez turned up ammunition and clothing that the police believe could be evidence in the murder case against him, according to documents at Wrentham District Court. The police said they learned of the apartment from Carlos Ortiz, who prosecutors say was with Hernandez the night he is suspected of arranging the shooting of Odin Lloyd.", "keyword": "Murders;Patriots;Hernandez; Aaron;Massachusetts;Football;Odin Lloyd"}
{"id": "ny0079019", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/02/18", "title": "Texas: Prosecutors in Sniper\u2019s Death Rest", "abstract": "Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday in the trial of a Marine veteran charged with killing the \u201cAmerican Sniper\u201d author Chris Kyle and another man. The defendant, Eddie Ray Routh, is accused of killing Mr. Kyle, a former member of the Navy SEALs, and Mr. Kyle\u2019s friend Chad Littlefield at a rural shooting range in February 2013.", "keyword": "Eddie Ray Routh;Murders and Homicides;Chris Kyle;Chad Littlefield;Texas;American Sniper"}
{"id": "ny0026007", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/08/13", "title": "Getting on Base a Lot Helps a Team Only So Much", "abstract": "Every batter approaches the game differently, but in the end, a solid goal for every at-bat is not to make an out. In August, no one in baseball has been better at not making outs than Mets first baseman Ike Davis. He reached base in eight consecutive plate appearances over the course of his last two games before striking out in the ninth inning Sunday, and entered Monday leading the major leagues for the month with an unimaginable .706 on-base percentage. To say that this turn of events is unexpected would be an understatement. In the first half of this season, Davis had gone from being one of the team\u2019s building blocks \u2014 a young, homegrown power hitter who had rebounded from some tough times in 2012 \u2014 to a punch line who was sent down to the minor leagues to find his swing, if that was even possible. The prodigal son has returned, and although there are signs that his hot streak might be a mirage, the Mets must be happy to have anything positive to say about him. When Davis returned from his 25-day stint with Class AAA Las Vegas on July 5, he predicted that a change in his approach would shake up his season, and he was right. \u201cIt\u2019ll be noticed,\u201d Davis told reporters. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s not like I\u2019m standing on my head. It\u2019s going to look remotely close, but there are just little things that we changed.\u201d Since his promotion, Davis\u2019s batting average had climbed 44 points (to .205 from .161) through Sunday, and his on-base percentage had increased 83 points (to .325 from .242). He had reached base safely in each of his previous 12 starts. His ability to draw walks, once a strength of his game, one that disappeared last season, has returned: through Sunday, his 14 walks since Aug. 1 were second in the majors to Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout. He has even turned on a little speed, stealing three bases in 31 games, tying his career high. But two things the Mets should be concerned about are his lack of home runs \u2014 he has one in 110 plate appearances since returning from Las Vegas after averaging one in every 23 plate appearances in his first three seasons \u2014 and his batting average on balls in play, which has been an unsustainable .414. Through Sunday, his B.A.B.I.P. in August was a ridiculous .667. When luck starts to even out on the balls he puts into play, Davis\u2019s batting average is very likely to take a hit. For now, Davis can hardly be blamed for a cautious approach that is getting him on base. At some point, however, the Mets will need him to trade in some of that patience and placement for good, old-fashioned home runs. When he does, if he does, they will have a player who would again seem to be a part of their future, a status he does not quite have at the moment.", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Ike Davis"}
{"id": "ny0183702", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/12/23", "title": "Santa? Don\u2019t Be Silly. But Still ...", "abstract": "MY husband, Frank, and I had been waiting for The Question for a few years already, and while our son Sean may have thought of it a year or two before he finally asked it, he did not bring it up until he was nearly 10. \u201cSome kids at school say it just can\u2019t be true,\u201d Sean said one evening in early December. \u201cI mean, the whole world in one night, in a sleigh, with reindeer \u2014 that\u2019s just unbelievable. Right, Mom?\u201d Sean waited for me to answer. I swung my head around the corner to be sure his 6-year-old brother, Paul, was still playing a computer game, earphones on. I knew I had to say something. Yet I was pricked with sadness that my first-born was already too old for childish pleasures. I also recalled with chagrin that this was, after all, what I had lobbied for years ago when Frank and I had discussed \u2014 heatedly \u2014 whether to spin the Santa tale for our children: Total honesty at all times, I had na\u00efvely declared. Frank called me a Scrooge, I relented and Santa moved in. Now, I took a breath \u2014 and hedged, in the most modernist parenting-speak. \u201cWell, Sean, what do you think?\u201d I asked, willing Frank to come through the door from work early, hoping the soup might boil over and need attention. \u201cI get what I want every year, and once there was ash all over the living room carpet from the fireplace,\u201d Sean began. \u201cAnd lots of strange things do go on in the world \u2014 right, Ma?\u201d \u201cYes, lots of things are not easily explained,\u201d I agreed emphatically as Paul charged in, asking what was for dinner. Sean went silent and gave me a knowing look that made me wonder if he had already thrown in with the children at school. Two weeks went by, and the subject did not come up again. The stockings went up. We saw Santa at Willowbrook Mall in New Jersey, and greeted Santa when he came around our Cedar Grove streets on the fire truck as usual, but even Paul understood that these were \u201cSanta-helpers,\u201d not the real thing. \u201cSanta is way too busy at the North Pole in December,\u201d he explained to a younger cousin. Paul wanted a Lego train set. Sean was counting on a weather station. And both were rabidly overinvested in getting the Arkansas state quarter to complete their commemorative quarter map for that year. In the four years that special state quarters had been issued, we had never had any trouble snaring the newly released coins every few months. But not Arkansas. I had asked everyone I knew to study their change, pestered my local bank and even called my mother in coin-rich Las Vegas to be on the lookout, but no luck. I promised myself that if it did not show up by the 15th, I would have to pay that questionable Web site I had found the full $1.25 for the quarter, plus $5.50 for shipping. Sean took to giving me wise, sideways glances whenever Paul talked about Santa, as if he and I were members of some secret club. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, I won\u2019t tell Paul,\u201d he whispered one day. I kept silent. A formless sorrow descended, yet at the same time, an equally puffy pride, as Sean suddenly seemed to add another reason to be, in his little brother\u2019s eyes, right up there with the moon and Spiderman. \u201cLet\u2019s go to William Street,\u201d Frank suggested one evening. Ever since Frank and I had been children ourselves, the family on William Street in nearby Little Falls had annually transformed their suburban home into a holiday paradise. The oversize double garage was propped open to reveal a vista of crisscrossing trains and miniature villages, battery-powered figures, animatronic reindeer, artificial snow scenes, robotic elves, snowmen, polar bears and cable cars. Colored lights of every size and from every decade adorned the house, and the lawn was covered with life-size plastic lighted figures. In the glassed-in side porch, an enormous tree and boughs of pine glinted with sparkly lights. Inside the garage, on a velvet armchair, at precisely 7:30 each evening, a traditionally clad Santa welcomed children onto his lap. \u201cHe\u2019s the only one that really is the real Santa,\u201d Paul said as we drove over. \u201cHe looks exactly right, and I know he\u2019s not one of the helpers \u2014 right, Dad?\u201d Frank nodded gravely. \u201cHe\u2019s the real deal.\u201d Sean gave me a smirk. Paul was first to take a turn in Santa\u2019s lap, snagging a candy cane, and then looked expectantly at his older brother. \u201cIt\u2019s your turn, Sean,\u201d he said. \u201cCome on, hurry.\u201d Sean grinned, gave a slight shake of the head, and then sat down. Reluctantly? \u201cWell, son, what are you hoping for this year?\u201d \u201cI want the Arkansas state quarter,\u201d Sean challenged, arms crossed, jaw set. Santa looked at me, eyebrows raised. I held out my hands, palms up, shrugged and shook my head slightly. \u201cArkansas you say?\u201d \u201cYeah, we have all the others,\u201d Sean explained. \u201cArkansas is impossible to get.\u201d Santa gently pushed Sean off his lap, gestured for us to wait and mounted three steps from winter wonderland to suburban kitchen. He returned seconds later, hand behind his back. \u201cTell me, son, do you believe in me?\u201d he asked Sean, and before he even got an answer, he was handing Sean something small and silvery. \u201cThe Arkansas quarter! Wow, is it for me?\u201d \u201cOf course it\u2019s for you. Already had it set aside, son.\u201d Santa winked at me, and Sean stared at his palm. \u201cPaul, look, the Arkansas quarter. Can you believe it?\u201d Sean asked. \u201cSure, he\u2019s Santa,\u201d Paul said solemnly. Sean put the quarter under the tree, and on Christmas Day, he showed it to each newly arrived relative, relating his Santa story. \u201cSure are lots of strange things in the world \u2014 right, Mom?\u201d he said at bedtime. I agreed. \u201cMore than you know.\u201d", "keyword": "Families and Family Life;Christmas"}
{"id": "ny0221324", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2010/02/01", "title": "Unmet Vows Tied to Ebb of a Truce in Nigeria", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 A militant group\u2019s announcement that it was ending a cease-fire in Nigeria is linked to the government\u2019s failure to keep promises to the oil -producing region, analysts and activists said Sunday. Despite pledges of retraining for thousands of militants and development aid for the impoverished Niger Delta region, little has been done since the government announced an amnesty program for militants in August, they said. The militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, warned that it would resume attacks on oil company pipelines and personnel, a threat analysts said was credible. On Sunday, Royal Dutch Shell announced that a crude oil pipeline in the delta had been sabotaged the day before. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. \u201cIt is a quite predictable but unfortunate development,\u201d said Ledum Mitee, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, an activist group in the region. \u201cThere has been a growing frustration as to a lack of any discernible program. No attempt has been made to deal with the fundamentals.\u201d Thousands of fighters from MEND and other militant groups ostensibly laid down their weapons last fall in return for cash payments from the government. But now, analysts said, there is a risk they will return to the 43,000-square-mile region, from which as much as 12 percent of United States crude oil comes, to continue crippling attacks on the oil industry. The analysts put much of the blame on the prolonged absence of President Umaru Yar\u2019Adua, who is being treated in Saudi Arabia for a heart ailment and has been gone since late November. \u201cThe amnesty agenda of the federal government is neither here nor there,\u201d said Anyakwee Nsirimovu, executive director of the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in the delta\u2019s main city, Port Harcourt, and a former member of a special government committee set up to study the region\u2019s problems. \u201cSince the departure of the president, nothing has happened. No progress has been made.\u201d Bestman Nnwoka, a member of the presidential amnesty panel, said the program was \u201cstill being worked out\u201d when the president left the country. \u201cWe are faced now with the absence of the president, which has delayed implementation,\u201d he said. He called for MEND and other militant groups to \u201cbe a little more patient.\u201d \u201cAny resumption of hostilities would be uncalled for and may prejudice other attempts on resolving militancy in the region,\u201d he said. Attacks on oil company facilities and kidnappings of workers have been going on for years in the restive region; MEND is one of the newer groups, and it is unclear how many militants it controls, or whether nonaffiliated groups are also considering resumption of attacks. Perhaps as many as 15,000 militants may never have disarmed at all. In a statement issued late on Friday, the group warned of more pipeline attacks, saying that if oil companies did not halt operations, \u201cany operational installation attacked will be burnt to the ground.\u201d The statement also chastised the government for doing too little for the region. \u201cIt is sufficiently clear at this point in time that the government of Nigeria has no intentions of considering the demands made by this group for the control of the resources and land of the Niger Delta,\u201d it said. Last summer\u2019s peace overtures by government and rebels aside, little has changed in the delta\u2019s underlying conflict, activists in the region said in interviews on Sunday. \u201cThe so-called repentant militants, they can be tempted to go back to their former life because of the failure of the amnesty process,\u201d said Patrick Naagbanton of the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development, in Port Harcourt.", "keyword": "Nigeria;Amnesties Commutations and Pardons;Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare;Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta"}
{"id": "ny0061134", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/08/25", "title": "McCann\u2019s Dramatic Homer Is Welcome Sight for Yankees", "abstract": "Just before Brian McCann left the dugout for the on-deck circle in the 10th inning, he handed Brett Gardner his sleek red-and-white sunglasses. For good luck, Gardner promptly put them on and watched perhaps the best moment of the Yankees\u2019 season through McCann\u2019s lenses. And yes, they were actually rose-colored. McCann, signed during the off-season in part to hit home runs over the short right-field wall at Yankee Stadium, has not had the season he was hoping for. But on Sunday against the Chicago White Sox, he produced one of the signature hits of his career. The Yankees had blown a lead in the ninth inning, but in the 10th, with the team hoping to extend its winning streak to four games before a crucial trip, McCann came to the plate to pinch-hit for Francisco Cervelli with two outs. He worked the count full and then drilled a changeup from White Sox reliever Jake Petricka that was up in the strike zone and that cut back over the plate just enough. The ball sailed over that right-field wall, just inside the foul pole, for a three-run homer and a 7-4 Yankees victory. \u201cA few days ago, I said that was our biggest win,\u201d Gardner said. \u201cBut this is our biggest win.\u201d McCann rounded the bases with as much vigor as he has had all season. He pumped his fist numerous times, tossed his batting helmet down in delight and then jumped into a pile of his teammates at home plate. As the celebration continued, Gardner came up behind him and doused him with a bucket of Gatorade. Then he took off the sunglasses and put them back on McCann\u2019s face \u2014 although at that point nothing could shade the sparkle in McCann\u2019s eyes. \u201cThat was so big, not only for the team but also for him,\u201d Gardner said. \u201cHe hasn\u2019t had the season that maybe he envisioned. But he hasn\u2019t stopped working hard and never stopped playing hard and pulling for his teammates, so I know it was really special for him.\u201d The home run was McCann\u2019s 15th of the season \u2014 his first game-ending homer for the Yankees and the third of his career \u2014 and it helped the Yankees keep pace in the American League wild-card standings. Video The Yankees retired Joe Torre\u2019s number in a ceremony at Yankee Stadium. The New York Times\u2019s Tyler Kepner recently interviewed Torre about his long baseball career. Credit Credit Reuters \u201cRounding the bases, that was definitely a moment I\u2019ll never forget,\u201d McCann said. \u201cI\u2019ve been able to do some cool things in the game, and that ranks right up there at the top.\u201d It was a buoyant way to finish a homestand that began with two miserable losses to the Houston Astros. Now the Yankees, who are three and a half games behind the Seattle Mariners for the second American League wild-card spot, play seven games on the road, mostly against playoff contenders. They travel to Kansas City for a game against the A.L. Central-leading Royals on Monday (a makeup for a rainout June 9) and then play three games at Detroit and Toronto. \u201cIt\u2019s a good feeling going on the road,\u201d Manager Joe Girardi said. \u201cYou\u2019re going on a strange trip where you\u2019re going into a city to play one day, but it\u2019s a much better feeling when you\u2019re leaving.\u201d That good feeling did not arrive, though, until after David Robertson had blown his third save opportunity. He also had a loss on the homestand. The Yankees trailed, 3-0, against Chris Sale, the White Sox\u2019 ace left-hander, who is particularly tough on left-handed hitters. That is why Girardi had only one left-handed batter \u2014 Ichiro Suzuki \u2014 in the starting lineup, with McCann, Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury and Stephen Drew all left on the bench (although all but Gardner played). Suzuki, though, had two hits, including a two-out, two-run single off Sale in a four-run sixth that gave the Yankees the lead. They kept it until the ninth, when Avisail Garcia homered to left off Robertson. David Huff came in for the Yankees in the 10th. With runners on first and second and two outs, he struck out the rookie Jose Abreu, who has 33 home runs and 94 runs batted in. Huff acknowledged he was trying to pitch around Abreu, but he got the benefit of a called third strike. In the bottom of the 10th, Petricka struck out Martin Prado and Mark Teixeira, but Carlos Beltran hit a hustling double to the gap in left-center field. Petricka intentionally walked Chase Headley, and the next batter was McCann, his focus set and his eyes clear. \u201cPinch-hitting is not the easiest thing to do,\u201d McCann said. \u201cTo lay off some tough pitches and get a pitch up in the zone with the game on the line was pretty special.\u201d INSIDE PITCH Brett Gardner, who fouled a ball off his right ankle Saturday, was not available Sunday because of the injury, but he hoped to be able to play Monday at Kansas City. ... Masahiro Tanaka, who is trying to return from a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, will pitch another simulated game Thursday in Detroit.", "keyword": "Baseball;Brian McCann;Ichiro Suzuki;Yankees;White Sox"}
{"id": "ny0259952", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/06/05", "title": "Theater Adapts a Show for Families With Autistic Children", "abstract": "When Lisa E. Cooney, director of education for the Paper Mill Playhouse , called a meeting last November to discuss the particulars of \u201cStone Soup and Other Stories,\u201d a children\u2019s show to be presented June 11, there was crying at the conference table. The attendees moved to tears were two Maplewood mothers who had contacted Paper Mill, in Millburn, last spring about adapting a show for autistic children, said Ms. Cooney, 45, of Woodbridge. \u201cJust the idea that we were asking, \u2018What can we do to help prepare your kids for this performance? How can we be helpful?\u2019 meant so much to them that they got very emotional,\u201d she said. \u201cThese are people who would love to bring their children out, but they hold back.\u201d Together with Linda Meyer, executive director of Autism New Jersey, which is based in Robbinsville, Ms. Cooney held the meeting to piece together a program to encourage children on the autism spectrum, or with developmental disabilities, to go see live theater in a nonjudgmental environment. Challenges multiply for parents who receive a diagnosis of autism for their child. \u201cNot only do you have to deal with the emotional stress, you become like a business manager,\u201d said Ms. Meyer, 57, of Fair Lawn. \u201cYou have to make so many decisions about the various systems and agencies that will or will not support your child. For those parents, having Paper Mill listen to them and respond was just such a gift, because this is going to be an opportunity for them to come out and enjoy something with their entire families.\u201d Such opportunities, Ms. Meyer said, were few and far between. She knew of no similar performances that had been held anywhere, she added. To meet the needs and quell the anxieties of up to 1,200 ticketholders, the Pushcart Players of Verona, which has collaborated with Paper Mill to put on the show, adjusted the script of its \u201cStone Soup,\u201d which presents tales from around the world, to make it more literal. \u201cKids with autism don\u2019t necessarily get sarcasm and innuendo, and they\u2019re not great with body language,\u201d Ms. Cooney said. The day before the show, Paper Mill will hold an open house called \u201cMeet Your Seat\u201d to help those uncomfortable in new environments get familiar with the theater. And during the matinee, the lights will be left halfway up, the volume in the theater will be lowered, and children will be free to leave their seats at any time under parental supervision. The show will be broken up into two 20-minute halves, with a 20-minute intermission. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to shush people or put any restrictions on them that aren\u2019t safety-related,\u201d Ms. Cooney said. \u201cSensory-friendly\u201d shows with the Pushcart Players have also been scheduled for October and for next April, despite the fact that ticket sales so far have not been robust, Ms. Meyer said. \u201cBut Paper Mill has made a commitment, and they\u2019re going forward with these shows,\u201d Ms. Meyer said. \u201cI have to give them so much credit.\u201d TAMMY LA GORCE", "keyword": "Art;Millburn (NJ);Paper Mill Playhouse;Theater;Autism;Children and Youth"}
{"id": "ny0030075", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/06/29", "title": "FIFA President Pledges $100 Million to Brazil", "abstract": "Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, soccer\u2019s governing body, has responded to protesters criticizing the high cost of staging the World Cup in Brazil by pledging to give at least $100 million in profits back to the country. FIFA gave South Africa $100 million for development projects after the 2010 World Cup but had not said it would establish a similar \u201csocial fund\u201d after the 2014 tournament to Brazil. The Confederations Cup, a World Cup warm-up event, has been marred by protesters denouncing the cost of hosting the World Cup \u2014 money some say should be going toward improving services.", "keyword": "Soccer;Sepp Blatter;FIFA;Confederations Cup"}
{"id": "ny0048403", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2014/11/08", "title": "Marin Cilic Is on the Upswing", "abstract": "There will be three newcomers at this year\u2019s ATP World Tour Finals in London: Marin Cilic, Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori. But the only rookie with a Grand Slam title is Cilic. It came all in a rush in September at the United States Open , where Cilic swept over the final three hurdles \u2014 Tomas Berdych, Roger Federer and Nishikori \u2014 without so much as a stumble or a lost set. It did not emerge from nowhere, though. Cilic, a tall and thoughtful Croatian, broke into the top 10 back in 2010, the same year he reached the semifinals of the Australian Open. But even with his improved serving under his new coach, Goran Ivanisevic, it was still quite a surprise in the oligarchic age of Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, who beat Cilic this year at the French Open and Wimbledon. The victory in New York also came with a subtext, as Cilic became the first man to have served a doping suspension before winning a Grand Slam singles title. Cilic was suspended for nine months after testing positive for the stimulant nikethamide in May 2013 at a tournament in Munich. But he convinced the authorities that he had inadvertently ingested the substance in a glucose tablet because of linguistic confusion and that there was no intent to cheat. The Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced the suspension on appeal to four months. In London, the 9th-ranked Cilic plays in a group with Berdych and Cilic\u2019s fellow Grand Slam singles champions Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka, opening against Djokovic on Sunday. He spoke recently with Christopher Clarey of The International New York Times. Q. After all the ups and downs, what does making it to London and the final eight mean to you? A. I think it ranks in the top two achievements of my career. First one is definitely the U.S. Open victory, and the second one is this. It shows that I was playing really well throughout the season, not just for two weeks. Q. Have you spoken with your former coach, Bob Brett, since winning in New York? A. I called Bob straight after I came home from Davis Cup after the U.S. Open. I had a great relationship with Bob, and he taught me many things in my tennis and my life. He is a big part of this success. I know how much effort Bob put into it, and I felt, and he always talked about, his belief that I had this in me. It happened now with Goran, but it was also a big part from him, too. Q. Goran, who won Wimbledon, was also coached by Brett for many years. So it must be a similar philosophy, right? A. Absolutely. That\u2019s what I felt a lot. All the things that Bob was teaching me, he was teaching Goran. And Goran knew what things I was going through, and if I had some difficulties with the things Bob was teaching me, Goran already understood. So there was no need for conversation about that. He already was introduced to the situation. Bob had spoken to him many times. It was, I think, a perfect match for me. Q. One that seems to prove again that having a former Grand Slam champ as a coach is the way to break through at a Grand Slam. A. I had a really good balance. Bob taught me many things about the game, and now I\u2019m working with Goran who brought me these small details that helped me to take this to another level. So it\u2019s a tricky question. I feel of course that the ex-players are going to be the best coaches but not necessarily would they be the best ones from an early age for players to teach them everything and have the patience. Q. You were born in Medjugorje, in what is now Bosnia, and you represented Bosnia as a young junior but later switched to Croatia. Why? A. It\u2019s a little bit of a political thing. Because Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country with Serbians, Bosnians and Croatians, and I\u2019m in a part that is called Herzegovina, which is 95 percent populated by Croatians. We all have Croatian passports, Croatian TV. We have Croatian program in our school, so I was all the time Croatian with all my tendencies to Croatia. But my first year under 14, I played for Bosnia and Herzegovina as it was a good opportunity for me to play in the Europeans. But all the time I was Croatian and there wasn\u2019t even a hard transition. It was the normal way, let\u2019s say. Q. Are you at peace with your suspension and how the situation is now perceived? A. Well, I still don\u2019t feel that people really understand what actually happened, and I don\u2019t want to talk about it. I don\u2019t want to raise any more stuff in the media about doping, because it just triggers the alarm only by using that word. Q. Has it changed how you conduct your career? A. I\u2019m much more careful now. At a tournament, I always carry my bottle around of water or whatever. If I don\u2019t have it by my side, I take a new bottle. I check the sun cream with the ingredients to see what is there. Things like that become a little bit of a worry now.", "keyword": "Marin Cilic;US Open Tennis;Doping;Assn of Tennis Professionals"}
{"id": "ny0175994", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/07/02", "title": "Al Gore\u2019s Top-Secret Access for the Final \u2018Sopranos\u2019 Episode", "abstract": "Who knew that tree-hugging ex-politicians loved \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d? It turns out that Al Gore is a die-hard fan, but when the series finale loomed in early June, he and his wife, Tipper, had to be on a plane for an appearance in Istanbul. So Mr. Gore, now better known as the star of \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d than as the former vice president of the United States, called Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount whose studio distributed his documentary, for a favor. Mr. Grey is also an executive producer of \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d from his previous incarnation as a Hollywood manager. Could Mr. Gore get an advance copy of the final episode, he wanted to know? No way, said Mr. Grey. \u201cI\u2019ve turned down everyone who\u2019s asked,\u201d he recalled telling Mr. Gore. That episode was the holy grail, and he couldn\u2019t risk it being leaked. But after a night of tossing and turning, Mr. Grey had a change of heart. On the Sunday of the finale, he had a Halliburton -made steel case, containing a copy of the episode, delivered to the tarmac where Mr. Gore\u2019s plane sat in Chicago. The case was locked with a code (some might call it a \u201clockbox\u201d). Mr. Gore could not open it until the plane was in the air, when he was instructed to call Mr. Grey\u2019s office for the numeric code. Mr. Gore sent Mr. Grey a photo of himself trying to pry open the case, which Mr. Grey now keeps on his desk. And unlike that final episode, this story had a postscript. After the tale of Mr. Gore\u2019s special delivery made the rounds of Hollywood political circles, the Republican candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani called Mr. Grey, a longtime friend, to complain. Why didn\u2019t he get a special \u201cSopranos\u201d delivery, too?", "keyword": "Gore Al;Documentary Films and Programs;The Sopranos;Television;United States Politics and Government;Halliburton Co;Grey Brad;Giuliani Rudolph W;United States"}
{"id": "ny0153597", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/01/27", "title": "Red Sox-Yankees Rivalry Wears Suits", "abstract": "Wayne, N.J. The general managers of the Yankees and the Red Sox form a striking couple, though mainly for their contrasts, which seem to capture the respective stations of their ball clubs, in addition to outside perceptions of their executive standing. Smaller in physical stature than Theo Epstein, his Boston counterpart, Brian Cashman tends to speak with an earnestness and an eagerness to explain himself fully, and with the permanently furrowed brow of a man regularly dealing with vocational stress. With careful grooming and impeccable posture, Epstein comes across as more spit-shined, with the self-assurance of a young master of his universe, and with the glint of realization that the joke is never on him. At least not since he has presided over two curse-eviscerating World Series titles in the last four years, a span in which the Yankees have failed to advance beyond one round in the postseason. \u201cI didn\u2019t have to clear it with Hank either,\u201d Epstein snapped after Cashman was asked if he had sought Hank Steinbrenner\u2019s permission to partner up with the chief architect of the Yankees\u2019 sworn enemy for a lecture program Friday night at William Paterson University. No note of consent from the new boss was required, Cashman assured us. But who would argue that Steinbrenner doesn\u2019t aspire to become the singular voice of the Yankees \u2014 having already replaced his once-loquacious father, George, Cashman and eventually perhaps John Sterling, Michael Kay and Bob Sheppard \u2014and wouldn\u2019t have preferred the lecture gig for himself? That is, if Steinbrenner wasn\u2019t already busy writing a column for The New York Post as a celebrity commentator on the Super Bowl , which happens to be the sport George Steinbrenner was infamous for referencing back in his prime as the Yankees\u2019 self-appointed motivational mastermind. Until Friday night, Cashman in recent months had seemed to disappear into a Yankees witness-protection program, while Hank Steinbrenner provided round-the-clock updates on everything from matters within the ownership realm to Joba Chamberlain\u2019s role in 2008. After hearing Steinbrenner tell a reporter, \u201cI\u2019m not going to waste Joba as a setup guy, period,\u201d what general manager with one year remaining on his contract would have believed it career-advantageous to play the public contrarian? Cashman acknowledged Steinbrenner\u2019s \u201cactive role with the press,\u201d but also said, not referring exclusively to the Chamberlain decision, \u201cI don\u2019t feel that I have to necessarily reinforce that position.\u201d In other words, he didn\u2019t make the climb from intern to general manager and survive for almost a decade by being a yes (or YES) man. Cashman and Epstein, 31 and 28 when they ascended to their current positions, have proved to be savvy beyond their years, and more than the sum of their abundant organizational resources. A crowd of almost 1,000 jammed the university\u2019s Shay Center to hear them discuss the rivalry that is biding its time, allowing the Giants and the Patriots another week to settle their own regional hostilities. Then it\u2019s back to the Roger Clemens and Johan Santana watches, pitchers and catchers, Yankees and Red Sox. No question, the Super Bowl in general, and this coming one in particular, dwarfs anything baseball may respond with as a national event. But for sheer soap-operatic drama from central New Jersey to northern New England, Yankees-Red Sox will not soon be supplanted, as long as both teams remain at or near the top of baseball\u2019s revenue-generators and don\u2019t make calamitous spending decisions. Along those fault lines, Cashman and Epstein addressed the difficulties of resisting the temptations of immediate gratification (without mentioning Santana by name) and the desire to hold to the blueprint more than make moves for the sake of keeping up with the other. Granted, Cashman said, sustaining a championship-caliber team is even more challenging than building one. Epstein agreed, admitting he consulted the Patriots after the World Series in 2004 for advice on how to meet the challenges of success. \u201cIf you don\u2019t manage it properly, things can get away from you, even if you have the same type of talent,\u201d Cashman would have told Epstein, if there weren\u2019t subjects that are off-limits between the respectful rivals. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous, slippery slope.\u201d On top of the baseball world and especially the Yankees, Epstein is pretty much where Cashman was at the turn of the century, with three straight Series victories (and four in five years) before the team-first philosophy that created the core of championship players was abandoned. Cashman made his share of personnel blunders, especially in the acquisition of starting pitchers, but did he really have an alternative to overpaying and praying when the mandate from above was to win now, yesterday and tomorrow? While Hank Steinbrenner has said that he supports the developmental plan Cashman embarked on a couple of years ago after he won a power struggle with the people surrounding George Steinbrenner in Tampa, you wonder how long he will fight the urge to meet Minnesota\u2019s steep price for Santana. And how much self-control he will exert if Epstein\u2019s Red Sox continue to have their way. New owner. Same family. Old meddling habits? \u201cFrankly, I wish they were doing things the way they were five years ago,\u201d Epstein said, referring to the rash of signings that brought the Yankees many big names and no World Series titles. In Boston, the funniest joke of all.", "keyword": "Cashman Brian;Epstein Theo;Boston Red Sox;New York Yankees;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0240905", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/12/13", "title": "The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 How did a 153-year-old magazine \u2014 one that first published the \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic\u201d and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements \u2014 reinvent itself for the 21st century? By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive. The Atlantic, the intellectual\u2019s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money. Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue. \u201cWe imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,\u201d said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, who arrived at the magazine\u2019s offices in the Watergate complex in 2007 with a mission to stanch the red ink. \u201cIn essence, we brainstormed the question, \u2018What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?\u2019 \u201d What that meant more than anything else was forcing one of the nation\u2019s oldest magazines to stop thinking of itself as a printed product. Separations between the digital and print staffs in both business and editorial operations came down. The Web site\u2019s paywall was dismantled. A cadre of young writers began filling the newsroom\u2019s cubicles. Advertising salespeople were told it did not matter what percentage of their sales were digital and what percentage print; they just needed to hit one sales target. A robust business around Atlantic-branded conferences took off. The strategy is not a cure-all template for troubled media companies, of course. The Atlantic, a tiny enterprise compared with vast corporate magazine empires like Time Inc. and Cond\u00e9 Nast , has only about 100 business and editorial employees and a circulation of 470,000. A scale that small means that a few million dollars could push the company over the top \u2014 an amount that would barely register on the balance sheets of many other publishers. Since 2005, revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled, reaching $32.2 million this year, according to figures provided by the company. About half of that is advertising revenue. But digital advertising \u2014 projected to finish the year at $6.1 million \u2014 represents almost 40 percent of the company\u2019s overall advertising take. In the magazine business, which has resisted betting its future on digital revenue, that is a rate virtually unheard of. It did not always appear The Atlantic would get here. The magazine has long enjoyed a certain intellectual cachet. It was the kind of publication devotees knew made them well read (\u201cDid you see that piece in The Atlantic?\u201d), and a destination for writers that burnished a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 like few others (\u201cAs I said in my Atlantic piece ...\u201d). But what it enjoyed in prestige it lacked in business success. Efforts to turn even a modest profit failed, with some setbacks the result of management decisions and others the result of tragic misfortune. \u201cI thought, \u2018How hard could magazine management be?\u2019 \u201d said David G. Bradley, who made The Atlantic his second magazine purchase in 1999, two years after he bought the National Journal Group from the Times Mirror Company. He paid Mortimer B. Zuckerman $10 million for the privilege. Mr. Bradley, an exceedingly polite man who carries himself with a gentility that can make it seem as if he comes from a different era, ruefully recalled in an interview that buying the magazine quickly began to look like a mistake. \u201cImmediately it was turmoil for me,\u201d he said, the panorama of Georgetown and the Potomac River providing the backdrop to his eighth floor corner office. The Atlantic lost $4.5 million in its first year under Mr. Bradley\u2019s ownership, and that figure grew worse. Grappling for a solution, Mr. Bradley went through what he called his Inspector Clouseau phase, likening himself to the hapless Pink Panther detective. He tried going out on sales calls with his advertising staff, only to find that his presence in meetings was a distraction. He sank money into printing the magazine on higher quality paper, only to find that it was a waste. He raised the price of a subscription. He lowered the price of a subscription. Then, in 2003, the magazine\u2019s celebrated editor, Michael Kelly, was killed while on assignment in Iraq . Two years later, with losses approaching $7 million a year, Mr. Bradley decided to move the magazine to Washington from Boston , its ancestral home. Mr. Bradley, ever self-effacing and independently wealthy from the public offering of a corporate research firm he founded at age 26, said he finally realized he had run out of ideas. \u201cAtlantic had so serially failed,\u201d he said, \u201cthat it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail.\u201d He credited two moves as seminal in turning the magazine around: hiring the editor James Bennet from The New York Times in 2006 and Mr. Smith from The Week in 2007. Mr. Bennet, a former foreign correspondent with a clean-shaven bald head, a goatee and a passion so intense for The Atlantic that he can recite the founders\u2019 1857 mission statement from memory (\u201cThe Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique\u201d), began refocusing the magazine\u2019s efforts in print and online. He and Mr. Bradley set out to assemble a team of bloggers who were known quantities and could attract a devoted following. They lured Andrew Sullivan away from Time.com in what proved to be a major coup. Today Mr. Sullivan\u2019s blog, The Daily Dish , accounts for about a quarter of TheAtlantic.com \u2019s monthly unique visitors, which reached 4.8 million in October. A year earlier, traffic to the site was three million unique visitors. Another experiment, an aggregator of online opinion columns called The Atlantic Wire , exploded to nearly a million unique monthly visitors in the year since its start. For a publication as refined as The Atlantic, such a rapid refocusing toward the very uncivil world of the Web did not come without anxiety. \u201cIf what you produce is a highly polished, absolutely beautiful, totally fact-checked error-free magazine, the kind of anarchic, often raw environment of the Web was pretty scary,\u201d Mr. Bennet said. \u201cBut it turned out our 150-year-old magazine could make that transition very naturally.\u201d On the business end, there was an equal sense that the company needed to be run like a digital enterprise. The online marketing and sales staffs were merged with their print counterparts \u2014 a move many magazines are making just now. All sales representatives were moved to New York from Washington. Mr. Smith set out to eliminate $2 million in costs in his first year, in part by reducing the head count. Mr. Smith also hired away the publisher of Wired, Jay Lauf, who did something fairly radical for the magazine business: He told his staff they did not have to meet separate targets for print and digital ad sales. \u201cIf you do $1.8 million in digital and $200,000 in print, that\u2019s fine.\u201d In the last year, digital advertising revenue at The Atlantic rose almost 70 percent while print revenue climbed more than 25 percent. The Atlantic\u2019s leaders have become something of a marvel in the publishing world. David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, who during his time at Cond\u00e9 Nast led The New Yorker back from the brink, said The Atlantic\u2019s turnaround was truly a feat. \u201cJustin and Jay proved the cynics wrong, that the Atlantic would never work as a business,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are terrific managers and marketers.\u201d Another major ingredient for growth has been Atlantic-branded conferences. The company started hosting events in 2006, and they now make up more than 14 percent of its total revenue. An annual conference in Aspen , Colo., a joint project with the Aspen Institute, draws 1,200 people who pay $2,700 for a four-day pass. Profitability is a new enough concept at The Atlantic that some there seem almost giddy about it. Mr. Bradley asked his accounting department to find out which subscriber\u2019s check officially put the company into the black. They pinpointed a woman from Livingston, Tenn., who sent in a $29.95 check for her renewal on Oct. 1. Mr. Bradley got her phone number off the check and called her to say thank you. At first she mistook him for a telemarketer and almost hung up on him, but not before he promised to pay for her subscription for the next 10 years.", "keyword": "Atlantic Monthly;Magazine;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0263503", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/12/10", "title": "John Hurt\u2019s Roles Befit His Name - Nocturnalist", "abstract": "Lantern-bearers led the crowd through the darkened streets of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on Tuesday night to a lavish dinner after a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music \u2019s Next Wave Gala. It was opening night for Samuel Beckett \u2019s \u201cKrapp\u2019s Last Tape,\u201d a terrifically unsettling one-man show starring John Hurt , known for his craggy, melancholic appearance and portrayals of the same. But at the post-performance dinner at Skylight One Hanson, an Art Deco bank-cum-banquet hall near the theater, Mr. Hurt was upbeat, not to mention ravenous \u2014 even though he\u2019s required to down bananas on stage as part of his performance. Would his repertory of the forlorn and troubled have been different if, say, he were named \u201cJohn Smile\u201d? we asked. His surname \u201cis a name of destiny,\u201d he replied. Typecasting may not trouble him, but phone-toting theatergoers do. \u201cI don\u2019t know why you\u2019d keep it on vibrate; you can still hear it,\u201d he said. \u201cSince when is everyone a heart surgeon?\u201d Earlier in the evening, we had mingled with a quite pregnant Maggie Gyllenhaal and Alex McCord , a former cast member of \u201cThe Real Housewives of New York City.\u201d At one point, Ms. McCord\u2019s husband, Simon van Kempen , grabbed an hors d\u2019oeuvre off a passing waiter\u2019s tray. He pretended to shove it in his wife\u2019s mouth to stop her from speaking. Mamie Gummer , the actress and daughter of Meryl Streep, and her husband, Benjamin Walker , who starred in the musical \u201cBloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,\u201d seemed more civil. Mr. Walker said he had been in many a one-man show: \u201cIn my dreams. In my bathroom.\u201d Providing for a Billionaire Portraits of New Yorkers like David Rockefeller, William F. Buckley Jr. and Brooke Astor \u2014 then 89, and still mustering a come-hither look \u2014 graced the walls at the Hearst Tower on Wednesday night, at a photography exhibition and party for Town & Country magazine. The most prominent work was a photo of the face of Jay Fielden , the magazine\u2019s editor. We flipped over the program. Mr. Fielden, it said, had curated the exhibit. The photos were by Harry Benson , the famed celebrity photographer. The guest list included many of the city\u2019s financial and social heavyweights. Wilbur L. Ross Jr. , who has a net worth of $2.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, was there supporting his wife, Hilary Geary Ross , who wrote the text in a new book of Mr. Benson\u2019s work titled \u201cNew York New York.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have somebody bringing some money into the household for a change,\u201d Mr. Ross said, laughing. We tore our gaze away from Mr. Fielden\u2019s giant, beaming face and saw Anne Hearst propping up the bar. Is the Hearst Tower a Hearst hangout, an extension of the family\u2019s living room? The party \u201chappened to be at the same time as the board meetings,\u201d Ms. Hearst clarified. We turned to the Hearst-in-law Jay McInerney . What was he up to? \u201cI\u2019m writing a new novel,\u201d he said. \u201cUntil then I plan to be incredibly frivolous and nocturnal.\u201d Us, too. The Walking Dead The same night that protesters occupied the set of \u201cLaw & Order: SVU\u201d at Zuccotti Park, we found ourselves in what seemed like an episode of the show. At a book party on Thursday night for \u201cKill Switch\u201d \u2014 a thriller by Neal Baer and Jonathan Greene , two former producers of \u201cSVU\u201d \u2014 nearly every guest was a TV cop or bad guy. We had seen many onscreen \u2014 when they died a gory death. \u201cPeople are obsessed with death,\u201d Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland , the author of \u201cHow We Die,\u201d told us during the party. \u201cThey approach it like a moth approaches a flame: come right up to it, realize how dangerous it is and step back, but sometimes, of course, they are singed by it.\u201d Guests, including the actors Mike Doyle , Eriq La Salle and Jennifer Ehle, assembled in the narrow lobby of the New York Institute of Technology on the Upper West Side. Seeing \u201cdead\u201d people, we were spooked. \u201cI got my cuffs, baby; don\u2019t worry about it,\u201d Mariska Hargitay told us. Our chills dissipated before we remembered that she was not, in fact, Detective Olivia Benson. (It didn\u2019t help that Capt. Donald Cragen \u2014 uh, we mean Dann Florek \u2014 was nearby.) On occasion, Ms. Hargitay said, \u201cI find myself sort of stepping up and taking charge just because I go into automatic pilot.\u201d \u201cI was at a movie theater once, and this lady fainted, and people were standing around, and I started yelling to call a bus,\u201d she said. \u201cSometimes I get a little confused.\u201d But \u201cI think I can handle emergencies pretty well: I have 13 years of training,\u201d Ms. Hargitay added. We felt better, for a moment. \u201cAnd if I can\u2019t really do it,\u201d she said, \u201cI can certainly fake it.\u201d", "keyword": "Brooklyn Academy of Music;Parties (Social);Hurt John;New York City;Hargitay Mariska;Fort Greene (NYC);Theater;Beckett Samuel;Krapp's Last Tape (Play)"}
{"id": "ny0033966", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2013/12/30", "title": "Brazil Forging Economic Ties With Cuba, While Hiring Its Doctors", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 The conditions around the public health clinic in the vast slum of Jacarezinho are precisely what most Brazilian doctors prefer to avoid: dealers of crack cocaine ply their trade along dilapidated train tracks, and the odor from a crematory for stray dogs overwhelms patients and medical workers. \u201cOf course I knew this mission wouldn\u2019t be easy,\u201d said Idarmis Gonz\u00e1lez, 45, one of the more than 4,500 Cuban doctors the Brazilian government is hiring to work in far-flung villages in the Amazon and slums in major cities. \u201cWe go where other doctors do not,\u201d said Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez as she examined an infant suffering from dehydration and diarrhea. Faced with a wave of street protests in 2013 over deplorable public services, President Dilma Rousseff has made the hiring of Cuban doctors a cornerstone of her response to the turmoil, overriding the resistance of doctors\u2019 unions to sending the Cubans, trained in a Communist country that says it has a surplus of doctors, into neglected parts of Brazil\u2019s public health system. But the project also points to a broader ambition of Brazil\u2019s government, which is vying to exert influence in Cuba as the authorities in Havana slowly expose the island nation\u2019s economy to market forces . Brazilian exports to Cuba are surging, quadrupling over the past decade to more than $450 million a year. The inroads made by Brazilian companies in Cuba, relying on loans from Brazil\u2019s national development bank and aid projects that share Brazil\u2019s expertise in tropical agriculture, reflect a sophisticated projection of soft power in a country where Washington\u2019s influence remains negligible. \u201cThis is Brazil playing the long strategic game in the Caribbean,\u201d said Julia E. Sweig, director for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Cuba benefits, too. Its medical diplomacy, established decades ago with the export of doctors to developing countries, is reaping a major dividend with Brazil\u2019s new project, worth as much as $270 million a year to Cuba\u2019s government. The medical alliance bolsters ties between the countries, a prospect that Brazilian leaders have been vigorously cultivating since the 1990s. For Brazil, the payoff is obvious: It now ranks among Cuba\u2019s largest trading partners, behind Venezuela and China. For Venezuela, Cuba\u2019s top ally and the supplier of about 100,000 barrels a day of subsidized oil, ideology forms the basis for stronger ties; for Brazil the relationship is more about finding opportunities for Brazilian companies. For instance, a Brazilian soap opera produced by the Globo network, \u201cAvenida Brasil,\u201d now appears on Cuban state television, offering viewers a taste of life in Rio de Janeiro\u2019s gritty suburbs. Building on Brazilian assistance programs to lift Cuban farm yields, Brazilian soybean and rice farmers are also emerging as top suppliers of food to Cuba. But Brazil\u2019s top project in Cuba is the $900 million upgrade of the Port of Mariel by the construction giant Odebrecht, the same company that has carried out various infrastructure projects in South Florida. While Washington\u2019s prolonged economic sanctions prevent most American companies from doing business with Cuba, Brazil\u2019s efforts to gain a foothold in Cuba come at a time when the island\u2019s economic relations are in a state of flux. Venezuela remains Cuba\u2019s top benefactor, but it is unclear whether Venezuela can sustain such largess as it confronts economic troubles of its own. Venezuela and Cuba recently delayed a $700 million nickel venture, and talk of other cooperation projects has died down. At the same time, Chinese exports to Cuba have climbed sharply. Chinese tourist buses can be seen outside big hotels, Chinese-built Geely cars have become de rigueur for Cuban officials and thousands of students studying the Spanish language fill hostels and Havana\u2019s tiny strip of Chinese-Cuban restaurants. Brazil\u2019s profile within Cuba remains far more subtle, but the arrival of thousands of Cuban doctors, many of whom are black, has made a big splash here, shaking Brazil\u2019s medical establishment and revealing some painful tensions over race and privilege. \u201cThese doctors from Cuba are slave doctors,\u201d said Wellington Galv\u00e3o, director of the physicians union of Alagoas in northeast Brazil, repeating an assessment of the project by critics who contend that the conditions faced by the Cubans in Brazil are degrading. Under terms of the program, which is managed in part by the Pan American Health Organization, the Cubans are not allowed to bring their families to Brazil and receive only a fraction of their monthly salary of about $4,255. The rest is paid to Cuba\u2019s government, providing it with a new source of hard currency. Supporters of the project in Brazil retort that the description of the Cuban doctors as slaves is a sign of thinly veiled racism and class bias among the medical establishment. Ms. Rousseff herself has lashed out at what she called \u201cprejudice\u201d against the Cubans. Brazil ranks well below neighboring Argentina and Uruguay with just 1.8 doctors per 1,000 people, according to the World Bank, so hiring the Cubans could be seen as a savvy political move by Ms. Rousseff, who is running for re-election next year. \u201cI\u2019m just happy to have a doctor, period, whether he\u2019s Cuban or not,\u201d said Sthefani Nogueira, 21, after a gynecological exam at a public clinic in the Rio neighborhood of Realengo, performed by Israel Fern\u00e1ndez, 47, a Cuban doctor who arrived here in October. With the project in its infancy, pitfalls could still emerge. After Venezuela began hiring Cuban doctors in 2003, hundreds of them fled their posts to request asylum in the United States. In Brazil, Latin America\u2019s largest democracy, confusion has persisted over whether the Cuban doctors arriving here will be able to request political asylum. A spokeswoman for the Justice Ministry said that the Cubans would be able to request refugee status if they said that they were being persecuted for their political beliefs, though she said none had taken that step in 2013. Brazil\u2019s efforts to deepen ties with Cuba have encountered other problems. Dealing a blow to Cuba\u2019s ambitions of increasing oil production, the Brazilian oil company Petrobras halted an offshore exploration operation in Cuban waters after drilling produced disappointing results. And Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant, has had to wage legal battles with some Cuban-Americans in Florida over its activities in Cuba. But the doctors who return to Cuba from Brazil may carry with them the seeds of new perspectives after witnessing Brazil\u2019s efforts to respond to the recent street protests and other forms of political dissent. \u201cBrazil is a model for Cuba in that it has managed to develop its economy with peace and consensus,\u201d said Roberto Veiga, the editor of a Cuban magazine funded by the German Bishops\u2019 Conference.", "keyword": "Brazil;Cuba;Doctor;Dilma Rousseff;Economy;Medicine and Health;International relations"}
{"id": "ny0076780", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/05/26", "title": "Letters to the Editor", "abstract": "Animal Behavior Nature\u2019s Alarm Bells TO THE EDITOR: Re \u201c Sentinels of the Forest \u201d (May 19): Once while napping along the Porcupine River, hundreds of miles from civilization deep inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I was awakened by an annoying burst of squawks from a flock of crows. It turned out they were announcing the arrival of a grizzly bear. I looked over at my wife, who had meant to stay awake and on guard, asleep beside me. Thanks to the crows, we were able to climb into our raft and enter the flow of the mighty river, undisturbed by the bear. One would hope the human quest to better hear and understand nature\u2019s living alarm bells will succeed before it\u2019s too late. Tom Martinez Brooklyn Oncology Making Cancer Extinct TO THE EDITOR: Re \u201c Turning Nature Against Cancer \u201d (Raw Data, May 19): George Johnson correctly observes that immunotherapy for cancer relies on \u201cDarwinian principles,\u201d but the essential importance of evolutionary biology for understanding and treating cancer extends far beyond this. Cancer in an individual should be thought of as an \u201cinvasive species\u201d disrupting an ecosystem, a population of cells with extraordinary genetic diversity, possessing the ability to eventually adapt to nearly every therapy oncologists apply. The goal, in Darwinian terms, should be to reduce the genomic diversity in the cancer cell population by strategically targeting the key pathways of growth and survival which have allowed it to develop. Genomic sequencing of tumors, circulating tumor cells and cell-free DNA is providing us with the necessary information to do so. Targeting these pathways with combinations of non-cross-resistant drugs to overcome the adaptive potential of the population may produce a population \u201cbottleneck\u201d with low diversity \u2014 the key requirements for driving a species to extinction. While this may seem a daunting task, we may have confidence in the human species in this regard \u2014 no force of nature, other than an extraterrestrial asteroid, has driven more species to extinction than mankind. Surely we can apply this unique skill to conquering cancer. M. William Audeh, M.D. Los Angeles The writer is a medical oncologist with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine. Breast Cancer More Information, Please TO THE EDITOR: \u201c Study Suggests Dense Breast Tissue Isn\u2019t Always a Cancer Risk Requiring Extra Tests ,\u201d (May 19) confirms our nonprofit\u2019s core belief: that discussions with health care providers about a woman\u2019s breast screening protocol must take into account her breast tissue composition along with any other risk factors. State legislation to standardize the communication of dense breast tissue to women, advocated predominantly by those for whom that knowledge came too late, is a first step in educating women about this critically important breast health information. Women can now take this information to the examining room and discuss its impact on the reliability of their mammography screening results. Women can truly take control of their breast health only when the strongest predictor of the failure of mammography to detect breast cancer \u2014 dense breast tissue \u2014 is disclosed to them as part of their mammography report. Nancy Cappello Woodbury, Conn. The writer is the founder of Are You Dense, an advocacy group.", "keyword": "Birds;Bear;Breast cancer;Mammography;Cancer;Evolution"}
{"id": "ny0272800", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2016/05/07", "title": "Nairobi Demolition Starts as Death Toll Rises in Collapse", "abstract": "NAIROBI, Kenya \u2014 As emergency workers retrieved four bodies from a building that collapsed a week ago, raising the death toll to 41, hundreds of Nairobi residents were evicted Friday from nearby buildings that are being torn down to prevent other disasters. The demolitions began even as rescuers continued digging through debris from the collapsed seven-story building, which fell during a period of heavy rain. Four survivors were rescued Thursday but one later died. A pregnant woman among the four people who were rescued also lost her baby. At least 70 people remain missing. As rescue work continued in the rain on Friday, hopes dimmed of finding more survivors. Image In the same neighborhood, this building was deemed not as vulnerable to collapse as others and will not be torn down. Credit Ben Curtis/Associated Press After eight buildings collapsed in the country last year, killing 15 people, an audit of Kenya\u2019s buildings found that 58 percent in Nairobi were unfit for habitation. Following this building collapse, authorities are taking action by tearing down condemned buildings. But residents evicted from buildings in the Huruma neighborhood complained they were not given enough time to find alternative housing. \u201cSince our neighbors\u2019 building collapsed we were given less than a week\u2019s notice to leave which is not enough,\u201d Anna Kaloki said. \u201cSometimes the government does things without considering the people, and we are not the ones who have done wrong we are just tenants,\u201d she said. \u201cThe people who constructed these substandard buildings should be forced to get us alternative accommodation and we should not pay for it.\u201d", "keyword": "Nairobi;Accidents and Safety;Demolition;Buildings"}
{"id": "ny0075777", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/05/02", "title": "At Long Last, a Kentucky Derby Only About the Horses", "abstract": "LOUISVILLE, Ky. \u2014 This is an altogether different Kentucky Derby . It hasn\u2019t been hijacked by bombastic owners. There has been no need to manufacture story lines. No, for the first time since I have been coming here, the horses are the genuine stars and there is a sense that the 141st running of America\u2019s signature race is going to be one for the ages. Much of it has to do with the two colts trained by Bob Baffert, American Pharoah and Dortmund. All week, horsemen and -women have been trekking to his barn as if it were the Louvre to take a look at what they consider to be the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo of a deep and talented crop of 3-year-olds. These are hard boots who know that even the great horses lose, and who declare it often, but they have fallen like schoolboys for American Pharoah, the 5-2 morning-line favorite. The loquacious D. Wayne Lukas, 79, a trainer who has won four of these things, usually is the first to tamp down high hopes by grumbling, \u201cDon\u2019t bronze him yet.\u201d But Lukas has predicted American Pharoah will sweep the Triple Crown . \u201cHe\u2019s special,\u201d Lukas, who will saddle Mr. Z, said. Image American Pharoah was last year\u2019s 2-year-old champion and has won four of his five races. Credit Rob Carr/Getty Images American Pharoah was last year\u2019s 2-year-old champion and has won four of his five races in effortless fashion. But it is the way the colt has floated like a cloud around this racetrack each morning that has burnished him with an aura of invincibility. \u201cHe is a notch above everybody \u2014 he glides along so easily, like there isn\u2019t any effort,\u201d said Elliott Walden, president and chief executive of WinStar Farm, which is an owner of Carpe Diem. His colt has also won four of his five starts, and $1.5 million in purses. Like American Pharoah, Carpe Diem has decimated the fields he has faced. Unlike the favorite, Carpe Diem is a son of Giant\u2019s Causeway and bred to go the mile and a quarter. \u201cIn any of the last 10 years, we would be the favorite,\u201d Walden said. Instead, Carpe Diem is the third betting choice at a generous 8-1. A Sports Fan\u2019s Guide to a Delicious Saturday A fan\u2019s guide on what to watch and what to eat and drink on the biggest sports Saturday in years. Even more perplexing is how the strapping and accomplished colt Dortmund (3-1) has been totally eclipsed by his stablemate. At 6 for 6, he is one of two undefeated horses in the field. His sire, Big Brown , captured the 2008 Derby, and Dortmund has won on this track before, blitzing 11 rivals by nearly eight lengths in November in a mile race. Better, Dortmund is the only contender who has been challenged in the stretch when the race was on the line \u2014 twice \u2014 by a colt here named Firing Line. \u201cWe know that Dortmund is probably more battle-tested,\u201d Baffert conceded. \u201cHe\u2019s been in a fight.\u201d Gary Stevens, 52, rides Firing Line. He first rode in the Derby in 1986, and has won it three times \u2014 with Winning Colors in 1988, Thunder Gulch in 1995 and Silver Charm in 1997. After Firing Line lost those head-to-head duels with Dortmund, he was shipped to New Mexico for the Sunland Derby, which he won by 14 lengths. Stevens likes his colt \u2014 a lot. He also understands why Firing Line is 12-1. \u201cThis is the best bunch of horses assembled for this race since I\u2019ve been coming here,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s even better is most of them haven\u2019t seen each other before.\u201d Image At 6 for 6, Dortmund is one of two undefeated horses in the field. Credit Charlie Riedel/Associated Press He\u2019s right. There are others, too, who cannot be thrown out. Materiality (12-1) is 3 for 3 and bested a tough Florida Derby field. Frosted (15-1) won the Wood Memorial by two lengths. Mubtaahij (20-1) is here from Dubai, where he ran away with four of his five starts on the dirt. \u201cI am very impressed by what I see, and I probably picked one of the worst years to try to come to the Derby from another country,\u201d Mubtaahij\u2019s South African trainer, Mike de Kock, said. \u201cThere\u2019s some very serious horses. There\u2019s not only American Pharoah, there\u2019s some proper horses there, so, you know, a healthy respect for them, there\u2019s no doubt.\u201d Between the star power of American Pharoah and the depth and talent of his challengers, even the most practical horsemen and cynical horseplayers are finding it hard to shake the feeling that something magical is about to happen along this year\u2019s Triple Crown trail. \u201cSome Derbys, horses that win, no one thought they could,\u201d John Moynihan, a longtime bloodstock agent, said. \u201cThat isn\u2019t going to happen this year. I don\u2019t know if it will be American Pharoah, but a very good horse is going to win. And hopefully, when we get done with the Triple Crown, there\u2019s going to be three or four horses that are considered warriors.\u201d It would be thrilling, of course, if this year\u2019s winner was fast and strong enough to become just the 12th Triple Crown champion and the first since Affirmed in 1978. It would be great if like Silver Charm, Real Quiet, Charismatic, War Emblem, Funny Cide, Smarty Jones, Big Brown and California Chrome, the winner got to the Belmont Stakes with a chance at history. What\u2019s nice now, however, is that horses are front and center for the right reasons in an industry in which that is not often the case. Let\u2019s get them around the track safely on Saturday and perhaps see most of them again two weeks from now in Baltimore.", "keyword": "Horse racing;Horse;Bob Baffert;Gary Stevens;Elliott Walden;Horse Jockeys and Trainers;Kentucky Derby"}
{"id": "ny0129115", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/06/26", "title": "Aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg Begin to Eye the Exits", "abstract": "As New York City mayors go, Michael R. Bloomberg has enjoyed an unusual degree of fidelity among the ranks. His inner circle, mostly unchanged after a decade in office, has avoided the churning disputes and abrupt exits that typically plague political administrations. But even three-term tenures must come to a close, and City Hall is now starting to experience a phenomenon rarely seen in the loyal pastures of Bloombergland: the exodus. In recent weeks, Mr. Bloomberg has lost his counsel, his chief procurement officer and his leading legislative aide, among other officials. Last Monday, he announced the departure of Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner since the start of the Bloomberg administration. Other key figures are said to be pondering their next, potentially lucrative steps. For a mayor who prides himself on hiring the best, a migration of City Hall talent can be worrying. Mr. Bloomberg has made no secret of the fact that he wishes to make maximum use of his remaining 18 months in office, squeezing in ambitious programs and cementing his legacy \u2014 a task that would be made more difficult with a missing or distracted staff. \u201cThe saying goes, at City Hall, you don\u2019t want to be the last guy to turn out the lights,\u201d said George Arzt, who served as press secretary during the final days of Mayor Edward I. Koch\u2019s administration. \u201cYou have one eye on your next job and one eye on doing your job at City Hall.\u201d Micah Lasher, who had served as Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s chief lobbyist in Albany, left in April to help run a group that promotes the mayor\u2019s education policies. Marla G. Simpson, the chief procurement officer, left in March. In February, Anthony Crowell, the mayor\u2019s counselor, decamped to New York Law School, and he will be joined there by Carole Post, the city\u2019s chief technology officer, who left in April. Mr. Bloomberg has survived the loss of top aides in the past. But hiring top-quality replacements, particularly from outside government, may be impossible when the job will barely last a year, according to several former and current city officials. Randy M. Mastro , a former deputy mayor for operations under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, put it bluntly: \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to see nationwide searches,\u201d he said. Instead, City Hall is now likely to turn to in-house talent to fill openings. \u201cBecause you\u2019re promoting from within, there\u2019s a tendency for a lame-duck administration to become stale,\u201d Mr. Arzt said. \u201cThere\u2019s no new thinking. It\u2019s a continuation of the existing programs.\u201d Already, the administration has faced some criticism for replacing Mr. Benepe, the parks chief, with Veronica M. White, a longtime public servant who has overseen antipoverty initiatives for the mayor, but has little experience running parks. Henry Stern, an outspoken former parks commissioner, issued a skeptical assessment of the mayor\u2019s choice, comparing Ms. White\u2019s lack of relevant expertise to that of Cathleen P. Black, Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s short-lived pick to run the city school system. But Ms. White has many champions, including another former parks commissioner, Gordon Davis, who say she is well-prepared for her new role. In public, Mr. Bloomberg has sounded an unruffled note about the departures. \u201cThere\u2019s turnover all the time,\u201d the mayor said at the news conference where he announced Mr. Benepe\u2019s exit. \u201cLook, the bottom line is if you\u2019re going to have great people, then you should expect somebody to come along and try to take them away. And in fact, if they don\u2019t, it\u2019s sort of an insult.\u201d \u201cWe have a plan for everybody, what happens if they decide to go on, or if, unfortunately, they have an accident or something,\u201d Mr. Bloomberg added. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what good management is all about.\u201d Mr. Benepe, who described his decision to leave as \u201cwrenching,\u201d said he spoke with Mr. Bloomberg earlier this year after he was offered his new job, a position focusing on urban park development at a national conservation group. \u201cThere was an understanding that this position was attractive,\u201d he said. \u201cTiming-wise, I would have loved to have stayed till next December, but this is when the job was open.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019d like to fantasize you can stay in a particular job like this forever, but that\u2019s not the reality,\u201d Mr. Benepe added. There is one such fantasy, however, that could encourage some staff members to hold out until the end. While previous mayors could offer a letter of recommendation at best, Mr. Bloomberg controls a Fortune 500 corporation and a multibillion-dollar charity, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, both of which could be the source of long-term, high-paying employment for some valued aides. \u201cHe certainly will be more successful than any typical end-of-termer in keeping people,\u201d said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City . \u201cEverybody knows that with Bloomberg, there\u2019s life after the mayoralty.\u201d Many believe that only a few slots will ultimately be available at the foundation, and Patricia E. Harris, the first deputy mayor and chief executive of the charity, is expected to play gatekeeper. Some commissioners are gauging the strength of their relationship with Ms. Harris as a guide to whether they could be considered for a position. \u201cThis is going to be like the list for Noah\u2019s Ark,\u201d said one person who deals frequently with City Hall and was granted anonymity to avoid straining any relationships. \u201cThe fact is, there are only two giraffes and only two elephants. There are a lot of giraffes and elephants who are going to be disappointed.\u201d There are some key members of Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s inner circle who do not need to worry about lining up another job, because of their own personal wealth, or because they are of retirement age. Among those expected to stay are Amanda M. Burden, the influential director of the New York City Planning Department, and Robert Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, who are leading several of Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s more significant third-term initiatives, including the redevelopment of office buildings around Grand Central Terminal. Other powerful staff members, including Thomas A. Farley, the health commissioner; Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner; and Salvatore J. Cassano, the head of the Fire Department, are also likely to remain, aides said. Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, who is overseeing the rollout of the city\u2019s ambitious bicycle-sharing program, is expected to stay, barring an invitation to take a powerful job in Washington, colleagues said. Many commissioners are said to relish their work under Mr. Bloomberg, who allows his cabinet members an unusual degree of autonomy. Mr. Benepe described his own job as \u201cenchanting.\u201d \u201cYou never want to leave, you want to stay on forever,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like Peter Pan. It\u2019s either leaving the nursery, or leaving Never-Never Land. Sometimes you have to grow up and realize you can\u2019t always have an office in Central Park.\u201d", "keyword": "Bloomberg Michael R;New York City;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations;Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0233102", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2010/08/09", "title": "Growth of Jets\u2019 Edwards Can Be Seen on His Face", "abstract": "CORTLAND, N.Y. \u2014 Braylon Edwards has turned his beard into a person. Over the past week alone, The Beard traveled here to Jets training camp, conducted interviews and considered making T-shirts. Edwards started growing his new friend months ago, and it now juts some six glorious inches from his chin. The Beard represents Edwards\u2019s most obvious growth since the Jets traded for him last season. It also underscores his continuing revival, away, Edwards hopes, from the perceptions that have plagued him, toward potential again fulfilled. \u201cHe has a sense of renewal,\u201d his mother , Malesa Plater, said. \u201cHe came from a team that was always looking for a savior to a team that knows how to win. No one would understand what he\u2019s been through unless you\u2019ve been drowning.\u201d Inside a Manhattan lounge last month, Edwards, 27, sipped white wine and explained how the Jets, the N.F.L.\u2019s boldest team, in its biggest market, returned serenity to his life. He gushed about his year-old son, Braylon Jr., about the improved relationship with his offensive coordinator, about his mother\u2019s recent wedding vow renewal, attended by Edwards and The Beard. Plater remains her son\u2019s closest confidante, his best friend, their bond such that they can communicate without words. She saw in her son this off-season something that had vanished \u2014 a level of happiness last evident in his senior year at Michigan. \u201cThis is all I ever needed,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cAnd all I never had.\u201d Never had, he means, in Cleveland, with the organization that selected him with the third overall pick in 2005. Edwards glanced at the roster immediately after the Browns drafted him. He did not recognize many names. Edwards arrived at his first news conference clad in a tailored Italian suit, head high, driving a Bentley coupe. Instantly, he said, this left the wrong impression. Here was a Michigan man about to play professionally in Ohio, a young, rich, outspoken athlete driving a car that cost as much as a house. Blue-collar Cleveland, Plater said, never forgot that, despite the $1 million worth of scholarships she said her son endowed. She described him as \u201cthe most hated man\u201d there. Edwards added: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing going on in Cleveland. There\u2019s no real estate. There\u2019s no social life, no social networking. All the people who have something going on leave Cleveland. So Cleveland has nothing, and I came in there with a New York-type of essence. So what? That was the attitude I came in with. Like, this is who I am. They didn\u2019t like the flash.\u201d Edwards made the Pro Bowl in his third season , with 16 touchdowns and 1,289 receiving yards. But he was criticized in 2006 for arriving late to a team meeting after chartering a helicopter to attend a college football game. In 2008, after catching passes from four quarterbacks during the season, he told his mother he might retire when his contract expired. That would have been after this season. Each year, it seemed, brought new coaches, or new coordinators, but expectations never changed. He felt burdened by the constant shuffling, the upheaval, the idea that he could, that he should, fix all of it. Edwards felt, \u201cI\u2019d be stuck in a less than mediocre team, organization, system, forever.\u201d The low point came in a 23-20 overtime loss to the Cincinnati Bengals last Oct. 4, when Edwards went without a catch for the first time in his career. On the ride home, Plater had never seen him so depressed. He looked tired, beaten, miserable. Everybody, even his neighbors, Edwards said, could see that. \u201cMy career is over,\u201d he told Plater. \u201cI\u2019m going to be stuck here for the rest of my career.\u201d Later that night, or early the next morning, Edwards got into an altercation at a nightclub. The man he is accused of punching, Edward Givens, was a friend of LeBron James, who claimed Edwards was jealous of his success. That week, Cleveland traded Edwards to the Jets, unloading an athletically gifted receiver less than two years removed from the Pro Bowl and still in the middle of his prime. Edwards said he thought his story existed in the gulf between perception and reality. Perception, in his words: flashy, talkative, selfish, arrogant and, worst of all, prone to dropped passes, a statistic his mother said was \u201ccreated because of him.\u201d Reality, also in his words: pretty much the opposite. This subject remains complicated, more gray than black and white. He said he expected the kind of scrutiny he has faced, but admitted that it bothered him. He said he wanted to change perception but worried that by addressing those notions, he gave merit to them. He said that last year, he changed at least some perceptions. And he said that he would probably be seen as another petulant wide receiver until the Jets won the Super Bowl . With the Jets, Edwards landed in an offensive system he already knew, in a city he already loved. The perfect timing, he said, the perfect fit. But Cleveland left Edwards guarded. He admitted initial hesitation in developing a relationship with the offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer. Too many previous coaches, he said, too many broken relationships. Schottenheimer allowed the relationship to grow slowly. At least until Edwards criticized the play-calling after the Jets lost to Indianapolis in the A.F.C. championship game (Edwards said he was misunderstood). Regardless, Schottenheimer said \u201cthe comments, quite honestly, blindsided me.\u201d Rather than fire back, Schottenheimer requested a meeting and told Edwards he wanted to improve their rapport. The two had lunch several times this spring, and recently, Schottenheimer said Edwards \u201ccame to me\u201d and \u201csaid he never had this type of relationship with a coordinator before.\u201d This spring, Edwards learned both outside receiver positions. He drew Coach Rex Ryan\u2019s attention when he repeatedly beat the All-Pro cornerback Darrelle Revis during minicamp practices. The Jets traded for another No. 1-caliber receiver , Santonio Holmes, in the off-season. In his first meeting with Schottenheimer, Holmes said he thought Edwards had the talent to be the top receiver in the N.F.L. Henry Ellard, their position coach , said Edwards should reach the top five, at least, this season. Tight end Dustin Keller said he thought that no receiver blocked better last season, and that no teammate worked harder this spring, than Edwards, who bench-pressed as much as offensive linemen. Still, questions linger. Can Edwards catch consistently? Will he be content with pedestrian statistics on a winning team? Edwards insisted that he expected a \u201chuge\u201d season, but clarified that huge could mean 700 receiving yards, 5 touchdowns and that elusive Super Bowl ring. Ellard noticed an increased consistency from Edwards, built over this off-season. \u201cHe reminds me of Torry Holt,\u201d Ellard said. \u201cBoth have the gift of grab. Braylon has shown he can make the dramatic catch, the spectacular catch. This year, he will be more consistent. People forget how young he is.\u201d Plater said Edwards turned down photo shoots, magazine covers and marketing opportunities over the past year to focus on his football resurgence. She said they rarely, if ever, discussed Cleveland anymore. Ryan found Edwards at once unselfish and self-aware, even if he never read or heard that. In this case, no news was good news. Growth was evident, especially all over his face. The Beard could not be reached for comment.", "keyword": "Edwards Braylon;New York Jets;Football"}
{"id": "ny0118994", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/07/05", "title": "Pakistan: Mob Kills and Burns Man Suspected of Desecrating the Koran", "abstract": "Thousands of people dragged a Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran from a police station in central Pakistan , beat him to death and then set his body on fire, a police official said Wednesday. The episode highlighted the highly charged nature of Pakistan\u2019s blasphemy laws, under which anyone found guilty of insulting the Prophet Muhammad or the Koran can be sentenced to death. A senior police officer, Mohammed Azhar Gujar, said the killing took place Tuesday in Bahawalpur, a city in a deeply conservative part of central Pakistan. Officer Gujar said the victim, who appeared to be mentally unstable, was arrested after residents said he threw pages of the Koran into the street.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Koran;Murders and Attempted Murders;Demonstrations Protests and Riots"}
{"id": "ny0185854", "categories": ["nyregion", "connecticut"], "date": "2009/03/01", "title": "Connecticut Fines and Sues Insurer of Hole-in-One Prizes", "abstract": "LAST September, when Lou Montello made a hole in one at the Marine Corps League\u2019s golf tournament in Stamford and won $20,000, he called his wife, Rosemarie, from the course. \u201cGuess what, Sweetheart? You\u2019re going to get that bracelet you wanted,\u201d he told her. But a week later, before he could buy the $5,000 piece of jewelry, Mr. Montello got a call from the apologetic organizer of the charity tournament, who told him he would not be getting his money. That, state officials say, is because Kevin Kolenda, the Norwalk man who owns the company that sold hole-in-one insurance to the tournament, refused to pay the $20,000 to Mr. Montello, as well as an additional $20,000 that was to go to the Marine Corps League in the event of a hole in one. The league, a nonprofit organization, had planned to use the money to help Marines overseas and those who return home with injuries. Lux Bond & Green, the West Hartford-based jewelry store chain, said the same thing happened in 2007 with the par-3 16th hole it sponsored at the PGA Tour\u2019s Travelers Championship in Cromwell. Bo Van Pelt, a professional golfer, aced the hole and won $20,000 in jewelry from the Italian designer Roberto Coin. Lux Bond & Green made good on the prize but was unable to collect on its insurance policy with Mr. Kolenda. Now, the Connecticut Insurance Department has fined Mr. Kolenda $5.9 million for failing to pay claims on coverage he sold on prizes at golf tournaments, other sporting events and advertising promotions. Thomas R. Sullivan, the state insurance commissioner, had accused Mr. Kolenda of operating without a license and engaging in unfair business practices and appealed for those \u201cwho have been duped by Mr. Kolenda and his sham organizations\u201d to contact him. Connecticut\u2019s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Marine Corps League chapter in Stamford, has also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Kolenda and his firm, Hole-In-Won Worldwide. \u201cIf Hole-In-Won\u2019s illegality is allowed to stand, the losers will be wounded warriors whom the Marine Corps League sought to benefit through its golf tournament,\u201d Mr. Blumenthal said. \u201cHole-in-Won made the worst possible choice in victims by scamming the Marines. The company betrayed its promise and dropped the ball when a hole in one happened.\u201d Mr. Kolenda, who continues to operate Hole-in-Won Worldwide, said Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Blumenthal are \u201cbullying a mom-and-pop business\u201d that has been operating for 25 years with hundreds of satisfied customers. He said he had paid out a million dollars in prize money. Mr. Kolenda said Lux Bond & Green did not pay him until two days after the tournament while the Marine Corps League did not pay him at all. League officials said Mr. Kolenda told them they did not have to pay until after the tournament and when they sent him a check for $350 to pay for the insurance, he refused to accept it. Mr. Kolenda also said there is no state law that says he has to be licensed to sell hole-in-one insurance. Seven years ago, the State Insurance Department ordered Mr. Kolenda to stop selling the insurance and fined him $9,000. A department spokeswoman, Dawn McDaniel, said her agency thought Mr. Kolenda had been complying until it received the most recent complaints, from Lux Bond & Green and the Marine Corps League. During the seven years since it fined him, the Insurance Department said, Mr. Kolenda has negotiated at least 41 similar contracts in the state. He has also been the subject of similar complaints and fines in other states, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina and Washington State among them. Mike Loughran, the Marine Corps League member who organized the tournament, said he hired Mr. Kolenda because he had seen that his firm was used in other tournaments in which he had played. \u201cIt takes a real special person to rip off troops in a time of war,\u201d said Mr. Loughran, a retired Stamford police detective. The experience was not as troubling for Lux Bond & Green, which had used Mr. Kolenda for years to insure the prizes it offers on two of the par-3 holes in the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands. The company said Mr. Kolenda kept asking for more information but then did not respond to its request for the money. \u201cIt didn\u2019t affect our financial condition, but you never want to lose that kind of money,\u201d said Dave Bonney, Lux Bond & Green\u2019s chief financial officer. \u201cHopefully we\u2019ll be able to collect someday.\u201d Mr. Montello, meanwhile, is not blaming the Marine Corps League, but he still hopes to get his money and buy that bracelet for his wife. \u201cI know all these guys. What are you going to do?\u201d he said. \u201cYou let them do the best they can. I\u2019m sure they can come up with a solution.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Insurance;Stamford (Conn);Frauds and Swindling"}
{"id": "ny0018629", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/07/16", "title": "A Low-Tech Mosquito Deterrent", "abstract": "Over the Fourth of July holiday, my wife and I joined some friends for a barbecue in their backyard. The guests were lively and the space was lovely \u2014 grassy and open but shady and surrounded by lots of shrubs and trees. In other words, it was perfect for mosquitoes \u2014 and indeed, closer inspection showed that they were thriving in all that greenery. But our friends had come up with a solution that saved us from having to deal with bug repellents or, worse, bites and itches. On a low table, they set up a small electric fan, perhaps 12 inches high, that swept back and forth, sending a gentle breeze across the grassy area where people were sitting. That was it. No citronella candles, no bug zappers, no DEET, nothing expensive or high-tech. Yet amazingly, it worked. As far as I could tell, no mosquitoes flew into the vicinity of the simulated wind; nobody was bitten. As we left, I asked our hosts about the fan idea; they credited a mutual friend at the barbecue. He, in turn, paid tribute to a friend of his : Frank Swift, president of Swift Food Equipment Inc. in Philadelphia. So I reached out to Mr. Swift, who replied by e-mail. \u201cThe solution came from trying to think like a bug,\u201d he explained, \u201cand realizing I don\u2019t like flying into a 15 m.p.h. wind.\u201d Outsmarting bugs with a fan may be a poorly known strategy. But the method, it turns out, is endorsed by the American Mosquito Control Association, a nonprofit group based in Mount Laurel, N.J., that publishes a journal bearing its name. Image Credit Tim Bower \u201cMosquitoes are relatively weak fliers,\u201d it says on its Web site , \u201cso placing a large fan on your deck can provide a low-tech solution.\u201d The group says mosquitoes fly slowly \u2014 from roughly 1 to 1.5 miles per hour, depending on the species. Scientists have identified another factor. The breeze from a fan disperses the human emanations that allow female mosquitoes to zero in on us. (The guys are innocent! Honest! Females need the stolen blood for egg making.) Humans exhale lots of carbon dioxide \u2014 the most widely recognized of the many likely mosquito attractants, including body heat and odors. When a female mosquito senses the invisible gas, she typically flies a zigzag path within the plume to track down its source. In a wetland swarming with mosquitoes, entomologists from Michigan State University did an experiment that demonstrated not only the attractive power of a carbon dioxide trap but the effectiveness of plume disruption. \u201cFan-generated wind strongly reduced the mosquito catches,\u201d the scientists wrote in The Journal of Medical Entomology. \u201cWe recommend that fan-generated wind should be pursued as a practical means of protecting humans or pets from mosquitoes in the backyard setting.\u201d The recommendation has penetrated the blogosphere \u2014 a bit. \u201cSit near an electric fan while you are outside,\u201d eHow.com advises . \u201cAn oscillating fan works best, but a regular box fan will do. Mosquitoes aren\u2019t strong enough to fly through the wind.\u201d In my experience, that kind of homey advice is lost amid all the ads and pitches for mosquito repellents and traps, which can cost hundreds of dollars. As for other popular remedies, the mosquito control association says repellent-infused mosquito coils provide only \u201csome protection\u201d at best, and it dismisses the candles with a shrug, saying their mild repellent action offers no significant advantage over other candles that give off lots of smoke. By contrast, the simple fan seems like a sure thing. In the world of journalism, we call this news you can use.", "keyword": "Mosquito;Home appliance"}
{"id": "ny0224895", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2010/10/05", "title": "With Tagline, MSNBC Embraces a Political Identity", "abstract": "MSNBC, once the also-ran but now the No. 2 cable news channel, has a new tagline that embraces its progressive political identity. The tagline, \u201cLean Forward,\u201d will be publicly announced Tuesday, opening a planned two-year advertising campaign intended to raise awareness of the channel among viewers, advertisers and distributors. The tagline \u201cdefines us and defines our competition,\u201d said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, his implication being that the Fox News Channel, which is No. 1 in cable news and a home for conservatives, is leaning backward. Fox\u2019s best-known tagline is \u201cFair and Balanced.\u201d Some of the new MSNBC ads include shots of President Obama on his election night; others, directed by the filmmaker Spike Lee, showcase hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow preparing for their nightly programs; and still others feature quotes like \u201cthe future belongs to the fearless.\u201d The multimillion-dollar campaign is a long time coming for the 14-year-old MSNBC, and particularly for Mr. Griffin, who has complained for years about not having more money to market the channel. With \u201cLean Forward,\u201d MSNBC is following other cable channels that have found success by building easy-to-identify brands \u2014 like Bravo, TBS, HBO or, Mr. Griffin freely acknowledges, Fox News. \u201cWhen you\u2019re clear about who you are, you actually make money,\u201d said Sharon Otterman, the chief marketing officer for MSNBC, who started work there one year ago. MSNBC\u2019s brand was unclear for its first full decade. A creation of NBC News and Microsoft in 1996, the channel bounced from one programming idea to another before Mr. Olbermann, the host of \u201cCountdown,\u201d and Chris Matthews, the host of \u201cHardball,\u201d seized on antiwar, anti-Republican sentiments in the latter part of the Bush administration. The channel identified itself as \u201cThe Place for Politics\u201d \u2014 a catchphrase that it will continue to use alongside \u201cLean Forward\u201d \u2014 and added liberal hosts like Ms. Maddow and Ed Schultz, and a lively morning show, \u201cMorning Joe.\u201d \u0095 The campaign is a coming-out of sorts. At an event Monday at Rockefeller Center, where the new ads were screened for employees, Mr. Griffin said the campaign encapsulated \u201cthe next era\u201d of MSNBC. A marching band from East New York punctuated his points. MSNBC has been encroaching on CNN for years, and last year it beat that channel among 25- to 54-year-old viewers in prime time. This year, for the first time, it is on track to beat CNN in both prime time and the entire day. Even so, awareness of MSNBC remains far below that of CNN or Fox, according to the company\u2019s recent research, which found that only 51 percent of respondents said they were very or somewhat familiar with the channel. Ninety-five percent said they were familiar with CNN, and 90 percent with Fox. Sixty-four percent said they were familiar with HLN, the sister channel to CNN. Ms. Otterman\u2019s lesson from that research: \u201cAll we have to do is tell our story to more people.\u201d She added in an interview, \u201cIt\u2019s not that the look is changing. It\u2019s not that the programming is changing. It\u2019s that we\u2019re going out and telling people about it now.\u201d The resulting ads are not day-and-date promotions for specific programs; rather, they are emotional set pieces about the national debate that moves America forward. The MSNBC brand \u201cis about ideas and change and making the country a better place,\u201d Mr. Griffin said. \u201cIt\u2019s an umbrella that\u2019s pretty wide, but that does have a progressive sensibility,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe\u2019re confident. We\u2019re strong. Let\u2019s not live in the past, let\u2019s not live by fear.\u201d Two 60-second television commercials that introduce the message are patriotic and poignant. One begins with a child learning how to walk and intersperses scenes of war, rescues in the wake of Hurricane Katrina , a peace protest and the moon landing. \u201cWhen we understand the world around us, we lose our fear and we move ahead,\u201d the narrator says. The other 60-second commercial says, \u201cStarting today, may the ideas that advance our country, no matter who or where they come from, win.\u201d The remaining commercials feature individual hosts like Mr. Olbermann, who is shown in his office writing one of his trademark commentaries, and Lawrence O\u2019Donnell, the new 10 p.m. host, who is overheard saying, \u201cWe deserve answers, so we don\u2019t ask the same questions tomorrow.\u201d \u0095 Starting next Tuesday, the commercials will be shown on MSNBC, but more important, they will also be shown on NBC Universal\u2019s other channels, and on outside channels as well. In addition, ads will appear at train stations, bus shelters and phone kiosks in the Northeast; in newspapers, including The New York Times; and on Slate, The Daily Beast and other Web sites. Mr. Obama is shown only briefly in the two 60-second commercials. He is both seen and heard in a video about the ad campaign that was screened for MSNBC employees on Monday, coincidentally summing up the channel\u2019s progressive message. \u201cWe can go backward, or we can keep moving forward,\u201d the president was shown saying in a June speech at Carnegie Mellon University. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t know about you, but I want to move forward.\u201d", "keyword": "MSNBC;Advertising and Marketing;News and News Media;Cable Television"}
{"id": "ny0252571", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/11/06", "title": "James Van Doren Dies at 72; Created Vans Canvas Shoes", "abstract": "James Van Doren, who designed the tenacious shoe that became a mainstay of California skateboard culture \u2014 and touched off a national fad after Sean Penn wore a black-and-white-checked pair in the movie \u201cFast Times at Ridgemont High\u201d \u2014 died on Oct. 12 at his home in Fullerton, Calif. He was 72. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Char. With his brother Paul and two others, Mr. Van Doren started the Van Doren Rubber Company in 1966. Based in Anaheim, Calif., it made rubber-soled canvas leisure shoes. Not long afterward, the company developed an especially high-grip shoe, conceived as a boat shoe, that would hold the wearer firmly to a pitching deck. Mr. Van Doren collaborated with a chemist to develop the rubber recipe used in the sole. A mechanical engineer by training, he also devised its characteristic tread pattern : diamonds interrupted by a band of tiny six-pointed stars at the ball of the foot. Together, rubber and tread made the sole clingy. What the company had not foreseen was that in Southern California, pitching decks were also found on skateboards. Embraced by West Coast skateboarders in the 1970s and afterward, the shoes helped their wearers avoid the fate of Icarus as they performed aerial moves that put the feet well above the head. The shoes \u2014 and the company \u2014 became known in popular parlance simply as Vans. Then came \u201cFast Times at Ridgemont High.\u201d A comedy released in 1982, it starred Mr. Penn as the resolutely dissolute Jeff Spicoli. On his feet was a pair of checkerboard Vans slip-ons. James Van Doren was born in Weymouth, Mass., on March 20, 1939. In high school and afterward, while studying engineering at Northeastern University, he worked for a rubber and shoe-manufacturing concern in Massachusetts. When the company moved to California in the 1960s, Mr. Van Doren and his brother Paul moved with it before leaving to start Van Doren Rubber. Paul ran the company until 1976, when he was succeeded by James. As president, James Van Doren expanded production facilities and extended the product line to include athletic shoes of many kinds. But foreign competition and the waning of the \u201cFast Times\u201d fad caused the company to seek bankruptcy protection in 1984. Paul Van Doren was brought in to replace his brother; in 1988 Van Doren Rubber was sold to McCown De Leeuw & Company, a private equity firm. Today, Vans, which also makes shoes for surfers and BMX riders, is based in Cypress, Calif. It is owned by the VF Corporation , a North Carolina apparel company whose brands include Wrangler and Lee jeans. Mr. Van Doren\u2019s first marriage, to Kathleen Ann Belcher, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, Char, he is survived by two brothers, Paul and Robert; a sister, Bernice Chute; three sons from his first marriage, James Jr., Mark and Eric; and five grandchildren.", "keyword": "Shoes and Boots;Deaths (Obituaries);Van Doren James"}
{"id": "ny0004153", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/04/17", "title": "Italy Orders Seizure of $2.4 Billion in Siena Bank Inquiry", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 Italian officials on Tuesday broadened their investigation into whether the Japanese investment bank Nomura had helped hide losses at the troubled lender Monte dei Paschi di Siena by ordering the police to seize assets worth $2.35 billion. They also named Nomura\u2019s former top European executive, Sadeq Sayeed, as a suspect. Mr. Sayeed, who retired in 2010, denied any wrongdoing and said he had not learned of the accusations until asked about them by reporters on Tuesday. Another senior Nomura executive, Raffaele Ricci, is also a target of the inquiry, prosecutors said. Mr. Ricci could not be reached for comment. The unusual move to seize such a large sum, and go after prominent bankers, underlined the importance of the case in Italy and Europe, where it has contributed to anxiety about the country\u2019s ability to rebuild its economy and survive the financial crisis. By intensifying the pressure on Nomura, Italian prosecutors are signaling that they are not letting up in their efforts to find out who bears criminal responsibility for transactions that left Monte dei Paschi in need of a $5.25 billion bailout by the Italian government. The bank, founded more than five centuries ago, is the oldest in the world and the third-largest bank in Italy. It has served a traditional role as benefactor to Siena, a small Tuscan city. A foundation that was the bank\u2019s main shareholder used its share of profits to help pay for services like day care, ambulances and even the Palio, the bareback horse race that is the picturesque city\u2019s trademark. But the scandal surrounding the bank has reverberated well beyond the medieval streets of Siena and its roughly 55,000 residents. The bank\u2019s problems, and the questions of who was to blame, played a role in the election campaign this year that left Italy so factionalized that a new national government has still not been formed. The lack of a strong government in Italy remains a risk to the euro zone. Furthermore, the country\u2019s struggling banks are unable to provide enough credit to support an economic recovery that Italy badly needs. Nomura has been sued by the new management of Monte dei Paschi for helping to design transactions that may have allowed previous managers at the bank to hide losses from regulators and shareholders. In a statement, Nomura said that no assets had been seized yet. \u201cWe will take all appropriate steps to protect our position and will vigorously contest any suggestions of wrongdoing in this matter,\u201d the bank said, declining to elaborate further. The Siena prosecutor\u2019s office said in a statement that most of the assets to be seized were collateral that Monte dei Paschi had posted with the Italian unit of Nomura in return for a loan. The operation was carried out by the Italian financial police in Siena, Rome, Milan and Bologna, as well as in the southern Italian city of Catanzaro, prosecutors said. In addition, the authorities ordered the freezing of assets in accounts of three former executives of Monte dei Paschi who are also under investigation: Giuseppe Mussari, former chairman of the bank; Antonio Vigni, a former chief executive; and Gianluca Baldassarri, the former chief financial officer. Mr. Baldassarri has been under arrest since February. Prosecutors said they suspect Mr. Mussari, Mr. Vigni and Mr. Baldassarri had obstructed the functions of regulators and misrepresented corporate assets, as well as other possible misdeeds. No formal charges have been filed against any of the people under investigation. Speaking by telephone from London on Tuesday, Mr. Sayeed said, \u201cI completely and absolutely and vigorously deny any allegations,\u201d which he said had \u201cno basis in fact.\u201d Mr. Sayeed said he would not comment on individual transactions, but added that all transactions were carefully vetted and proper while he was head of Nomura in Europe. Before he retired in 2010 as head of Nomura in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Mr. Sayeed, 59, was credited with engineering the Japanese bank\u2019s acquisition of the European assets of Lehman Brothers. The deal greatly expanded Nomura\u2019s reach in Europe, but eventually proved costly. Mr. Ricci, the other executive named in a statement by the Siena prosecutor Tuesday, has worked as a top executive in Nomura\u2019s business involving bonds and other fixed-income products. Nomura would not comment on Mr. Ricci\u2019s current status with the bank. The complex transactions enabled Monte dei Paschi to transfer risk to the other banks, generating both profit and losses. But while Monte dei Paschi recorded the gains, it did not disclose all the losses. The questionable transactions came to light after Fabrizio Viola, Monte dei Paschi\u2019s new chief executive, in October found an exchange of letters with Nomura hidden in a safe. The bank consequently started a review of its financial portfolio, which led to a revision of its 2012 final results . Monte dei Paschi\u2019s problems began in 2008, when it acquired a regional lender, Banca Antonveneta, for $11.7 billion, a sum that analysts at the time regarded as excessive. Short of cash, Monte dei Paschi then tried to raise money without compromising its capital base and concealed certain features of the transaction, according to the Bank of Italy, the country\u2019s central bank. The Siena magistrates are now looking into allegations of bribery related to the Antonveneta deal.", "keyword": "Nomura Holdings;Monte dei Paschi di Siena;Deutsche Bank;Siena;Search and seizure;Banking and Finance;Lawsuits;Italy;Fraud"}
{"id": "ny0113835", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/11/29", "title": "U.S. and Israel Look to Limit Impact of U.N. Vote on Palestinian Authority", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 After failing to head off a vote in the United Nations on Thursday that would upgrade the Palestinian Authority \u2019s status, the United States and Israel are looking ahead to how they can contain the damage from the approval of a resolution that even some European allies have signaled they will support. The draft resolution calls on the United Nations General Assembly to upgrade the Palestinian Authority to a nonmember observer state. It is virtually certain to pass, despite the opposition of the United States and a handful of other nations. On Wednesday, two senior American diplomats \u2014 William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, and David Hale, the special envoy to the Middle East \u2014 met at a hotel in New York with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to register American concerns. \u201cNo one should be under any illusion that this resolution is going to produce the results that the Palestinians claim to seek, namely to have their own state living in peace next to Israel,\u201d Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said Wednesday. \u201cWe thought it was important to make our case one more time.\u201d A major concern for the Americans is that the Palestinians might use their new status to try to join the International Criminal Court . That prospect particularly worries the Israelis, who fear that the Palestinians might press for an investigation of their practices in the occupied territories. Another worry is that the Palestinians might use the vote to seek membership in specialized agencies of the United Nations, a move that could have consequences for the financing of the international organizations as well as the Palestinian Authority itself. Congress cut off financing to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2011 after it accepted Palestine as a member. The United States is a major contributor to many of these agencies and plays an active role on their governing boards. \u201cTo my knowledge, there\u2019s no legislative impact that is triggered in the same way that there was with regard to Unesco,\u201d Ms. Nuland said on Monday. \u201cHowever, as you know, we also have money pending in the Congress for the Palestinian Authority, money that they need to support their regular endeavors and to support administration of the territories. So, obviously, if they take this step, it\u2019s going to complicate the way the Congress looks at the Palestinians.\u201d Anticipating approval of the resolution, Western diplomats have pushed for a Palestinian commitment not to seek membership in the International Criminal Court and United Nations specialized agencies after the vote. Another step would be an affirmation by the Palestinians that the road to statehood was through the peace process. And a third could be a Palestinian commitment to open negotiations with the Israelis. Such assurances do not appear to have been provided. Israeli officials, aware that a harsh reaction would only isolate their country further, have begun playing down the significance of the draft resolution, and have toned down threats of countermeasures if it is approved. Israel\u2019s response will be \u201cproportionate\u201d to how the Palestinians act after the vote, said an Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev. The Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, said there would be no automatic response from Israel. \u201cWe\u2019re going to see where the Palestinians take this,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they use it to continue confronting Israel and other U.N. bodies, there will be a firm response. If not, then there won\u2019t.\u201d As the vote approached, a handful of European nations moved away from the American camp \u2014 a trend that accelerated after the cease-fire agreement between the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel over Gaza, which was widely viewed as a victory for Hamas over its rival, the Palestinian Authority. France and Spain have said they will vote for the resolution. Britain has signaled it would be prepared to support the measure if the Palestinians provided assurances that they would not join the International Criminal Court, among other steps. Germany has said that it will vote against the resolution, as, of course, will Israel. The vote is scheduled to take place on the anniversary of the General Assembly vote in 1947 to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Only the Security Council, in which the United States holds a veto, can approve formal, voting membership. Some Middle East experts said the administration\u2019s determination to vote against the Palestinian Authority\u2019s motion was self-defeating, since it would accelerate the weakening of the authority as a voice for the Palestinian people and as a partner in peace negotiations. A better strategy, said Robert Malley, the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, would be for the United States and Israel simply to \u201cshrug their shoulders,\u201d recognizing it as a desperate bid for political legitimacy, not a threat to Israel or to the prospects for a peace agreement. \u201cHe really, politically, has no choice,\u201d Mr. Malley said of Mr. Abbas, during a panel at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. \u201cThis is less an act of confrontation than an act of survival.\u201d", "keyword": "Palestinians;Palestinian Authority;International Criminal Court;Israel;Hale David;Burns William J;General Assembly (UN);United Nations;United States International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0112946", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/02/22", "title": "South Korea Cracks Down on Match-Fixing Epidemic", "abstract": "SEOUL \u2014 The South Korean government on Tuesday announced \u201cno-mercy\u201d measures, including harsh prison terms and life-time bans from sports, to fight match-fixing scandals that have already tainted some of the nation\u2019s most popular professional leagues and have threatened to implicate more. South Korea, which will host the 2018 Winter Olympics, has been rocked by a snowballing match-rigging scandal since last spring. It started last May when prosecutors began hauling in professional soccer players on suspicion that they had manipulated game outcomes in return for bribes from middlemen, often their retired colleagues, who worked for criminal rings running illegal Internet gambling sites. So far, nearly 80 active and retired soccer players and brokers have been indicted in or convicted of match-fixing. In the worst crisis to hit the K-League in its 29-year history, about 50 players were banned from the sport for life. One coach was indicted for blackmailing a player to share his match-fixing profit with him. Another player committed suicide. But the scandal did not end there. Pursuing tips from brokers who confessed to reaching out to athletes in other sports, prosecutors have expanded their investigation. And what they have found so far was enough to bear out a widespread suspicion that match-fixing had become endemic in South Korea. \u201cWe believe the recent turn of events has created a state of emergency that threatens to shake the foundation of sports,\u201d Choe Kwang-shik, minister of culture, sports and tourism, said during a news conference Tuesday. In early February, prosecutors announced that they were investigating 15 professional volleyball players, including two women, as well as five brokers, on charges of rigging matches. The Korean Volleyball Federation banned four players for life, including three from the Kepco 45 club. Another team, Sangmu Shinhyup, which is filled by athletes doing their mandatory military service and is run by the Defense Ministry, pulled out of the season after one of its players was implicated. Also this month, prosecutors in Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, arrested a motorboat racer. The 36-year-old racer was charged with taking cash from a gambling broker in exchange for sending him cellphone text messages predicting the results of a coming race. Now the investigators are zeroing in on the country\u2019s most popular professional league, baseball, after a broker confessed that he had contacted some athletes there. Meanwhile, the Korean Basketball League said that after an internal investigation, it had determined the league was clean. An early sign of match-fixing spreading in South Korea came in 2010, when four professional \u201ce-sport\u201d players, who play online computer games for prize money, were given suspended prison terms for fixing their matches. The professional \u201ce-league\u201d games are watched by thousands of fans gathered at e-sports arenas fitted with large screens. There are cable channels dedicated to these matches. In South Korea, which has one of the world\u2019s fastest and most widespread Internet networks, online gaming has become a popular pastime, making gaming addiction a serious social problem. So, apparently, is illicit online gambling. Sports Toto, overseen by the government, is the only legal sports gambling service in the country. But according to the government-run Korea Institute of Criminology, there were about 1,000 illicit sports gambling sites in operation on the Internet last year, their spread helped in part by an economic slump that the institute said was driving people to seek quick and easy money. Unlike Sports Toto, the illegal sites allow gamblers to bet unlimited amounts of money. But they are hard to crack down on because their owners keep their server computers overseas and frequently shut down their operations and open new sites. They also let people place odds on seemingly minor plays, like the number of first-inning walks yielded by a starting pitcher. That system makes it easier to fix the wager, prosecutors said. They were investigating at least two pitchers. The value of illegal online sport gambling is estimated at 3.5 trillion won, or $3.1 billion, according to the South Korean police. The anti-match-fixing measures unveiled by the government on Tuesday targeted the illicit gambling Web sites. Last week, a new law went into effect, punishing anyone using such a Web site with a heavy fine and as much as five years in prison. The government also promised stern punishments for players and clubs implicated in match-fixing, including expulsion from their leagues. It also introduced undercover \u201csupervisors\u201d to find signs of match-fixing. As an incentive, it promised a cash reward for whistle-blowing players and leniency for those who confess to the crime. The government also decided to double the minimum annual salary for all pro-league athletes to 24 million won, in the expectation that the added pay will reduce the temptation for the lowest-paid players to take bribes. Allegations of corruption and physical abuse have dogged South Korean sports for years, with parents of young athletes often reporting demands for \u201ccash donations\u201d from coaches and injuries inflicted by senior teammates or coaches.", "keyword": "South Korea;Athletics and Sports;Corruption (Institutional);Gambling"}
{"id": "ny0197874", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/07/05", "title": "So Many Foreclosures, So Little Logic", "abstract": "LAST week, the stock market tumbled on news that housing foreclosures and delinquencies rose again in the first quarter. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that among the 34 million loans it tracks, foreclosures in progress rose 22 percent, to 844,389. That figure was 73 percent higher than in the same period last year. But the comptroller\u2019s office also said that amid the gloom, there was promising data about loan modifications: they rose 55 percent in the quarter. That growth came on a very low base, of course, but the move encouraged John C. Dugan, head of the comptroller\u2019s office. \u201cAs the administration\u2019s \u2018Making Home Affordable\u2019 program gains traction and helps offset the impact of this very difficult economic cycle,\u201d he said in a statement, \u201cwe should continue to see progress in future reports.\u201d A glimpse of second-quarter mortgage data, however, indicates that the progress Mr. Dugan and his colleagues in Washington are hoping for may take longer to emerge \u2014 raising questions about whether policymakers and banks are moving quickly or intelligently enough on the foreclosure problem. Foreclosures remain one of the great financial ills for the economy. The Bush administration largely overlooked foreclosures affecting average homeowners, focusing instead on propping up elite, troubled financial institutions with taxpayer funds. The Obama administration has said it wants to wrestle the foreclosure issue to the ground by encouraging mortgage loan modifications, but its efforts have gotten little traction. Loan modifications occur when a lender agrees to change terms of a troubled borrower\u2019s mortgage; the most common approach is to reduce the loan\u2019s interest rate. Cutting the amount of principal owed \u2014 an option that could be of more help to a borrower \u2014 is rare because it means homeowners pay less money back to the bank over time. Lenders and their representatives, however, don\u2019t like to modify loans through interest rate cuts or principal reductions because, of course, it reduces the income they receive from borrowers. No surprise, then, that loan modifications have been a trickle amid the recent foreclosure flood. Enter the government, with the program it announced in March to encourage modifications. It offers incentives to loan servicers to change mortgage terms, providing $1,000 for each loan they modify. The program focuses on making payments more affordable through lower interest rates, but delinquent amounts and late fees are typically tacked onto the mortgage balance. \u201cMaking Home Affordable\u201d does not compel lenders to reduce mortgage balances. Servicers signed on to the program in April. The program\u2019s early months were not covered by the O.C.C.\u2019s first-quarter report. But other figures on modifications conducted in April, May and June are available. And they show a decline in modifications, not an increase as the government hoped. Alan M. White, an assistant professor at the Valparaiso University law school in Indiana, analyzed data on 3.5 million subprime and alt-A mortgages in securitization pools overseen by Wells Fargo. The loans were written in 2005 through 2007; data on their performance is provided to the trusts\u2019 investors. Mortgages handled by five of the nation\u2019s largest loan servicing companies \u2014 Bank of America, Chase Home Finance and Litton Loan Servicing among them \u2014 are contained in the Wells Fargo data. Mr. White found that mortgage modifications peaked in February and have declined in all but one month since. While servicers modified 23,749 loans in these trusts in February, they changed only 19,041 in May and 18,179 in June. This is exactly when servicers were supposed to be responding to the government\u2019s loan modification urgings. Foreclosures, meanwhile, keep rising. In June, 281,560 were in process, slightly above the 277,847 in May. Last January, there were about 242,000 foreclosures in the pipeline among the Wells Fargo trusts. \u201cI was hoping we would see some impact in June of the government\u2019s program,\u201d Mr. White said. \u201cIs \u2018Home Affordable\u2019 working? My short answer is no.\u201d To be sure, the government\u2019s data differs from that which Mr. White analyzed, and its loan modification figures for the second quarter may look better as a result. The O.C.C. includes prime loans as well as subprime, for example, while the Wells Fargo data contains no prime loans. Nevertheless, Mr. White has collected the figures since November 2008, and he said that in the months since, the performance of the 3.5 million mortgages that he analyzes tracked the O.C.C. data pretty closely. THE Wells Fargo data is illuminating. It shows that in June, 58 percent of modifications cut the payments that the borrower has to pay, a slightly smaller percentage than in April or May. The average reduction in June was $173 a month. But the most fascinating, and frightening, figures in the data detail how much money is lost when foreclosed homes are sold. In June, the data show almost 32,000 liquidation sales; the average loss on those was 64.7 percent of the original loan balance. Here are the numbers: the average loan balance began at almost $223,000. But in the liquidation sale, the property sold for $144,000 less, on average. Perhaps no other single figure shows how wildly the mortgage mania pumped up home prices. It also bodes poorly for the quality of the mortgage-related assets lurking in banks\u2019 books. Loss severities, like foreclosures, are rising. In November, losses averaged 56.1 percent of the original loan balance; in February, 63.3 percent. Given losses like these, Mr. White said he was perplexed that lenders and their representatives were resisting reducing principal when they modify loans. His data shows how rare it is for lenders to reduce principal. In June, for example, 3,135 loans \u2014 just 17.2 percent of the total modified \u2014 involved write-downs of principal, interest or fees. The total loss from these write-downs was just $45 million in June. And yet, the losses incurred in foreclosure sales involving loans in the securitization trusts were a staggering $4.59 billion in June. \u201cThere is 100 times as much money lost in foreclosure sales as there was in writing down balances in modifications,\u201d Mr. White said. \u201cThat is not rational economic behavior.\u201d If banks have written down the value of these loans to the 40 cents on the dollar that they are fetching on foreclosures \u2014 the only true value for these homes right now \u2014 then why don\u2019t they bite the bullet and reduce the loan amount outstanding for the troubled borrowers? That type of modification would be far more likely to succeed than larding a borrower who is hopelessly underwater with yet more arrears. \u201cYou can reduce payments with a lot of gimmicks similar to those built into subprime loans \u2014 temporary rate reductions that defer a lot of principal, balloon payments,\u201d Mr. White said. \u201cTo me that leads to a situation where American homeowners are paying 50 to 60 percent of their incomes for mortgages which reset in 2011 and 2012. That is not solving the problem.\u201d Certainly not for borrowers, that is. And because many of these losses will ultimately be passed on to taxpayers, it\u2019s not solving our problem, either.", "keyword": "Mortgages;Foreclosures;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Housing and Real Estate"}
{"id": "ny0225703", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/10/17", "title": "After Service, Veteran Deaths Surge", "abstract": "In the six years after Reuben Paul Santos returned to Daly City from a combat tour in Iraq, he battled depression with poetry, violent video games and, finally, psychiatric treatment. His struggle ended last October, when he hung himself from a stairwell. He was 27. The high suicide rate among veterans has already emerged as a major issue for the military and the families and loved ones of military personnel. But Mr. Santos\u2019s death is part of a larger trend that has remained hidden: a surge in the number of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who have died not just as a result of suicide, but also because of vehicle accidents, motorcycle crashes, drug overdoses or other causes after being discharged from the military. An analysis of official death certificates on file at the State Department of Public Health reveals that more than 1,000 California veterans under 35 died between 2005 and 2008. That figure is three times higher than the number of California service members who were killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts over the same period. The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs said they do not count the number of veterans who have died after leaving the military. The figures, according to the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, legislators and experts in post-traumatic stress, underscore how veterans in Bay Area communities and across the state engage in destructive, risky and sometimes lethal behaviors. The data show that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were two and a half times as likely to commit suicide as Californians of the same age with no military service. They were twice as likely to die in a vehicle accident and five and a half times as likely to die in a motorcycle accident. \u201cThese numbers are truly alarming and should wake up the whole country,\u201d said United States Representative Bob Filner, Democrat of San Diego, who is the chairman of the House Veterans\u2019 Affairs Committee. \u201cThey show a failure of our policy.\u201d The coroners\u2019 reports do not indicate whether each veteran was deployed to a war zone. But the ages at which they died \u2014 18 to 34 \u2014 match the ages of at least two-thirds of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the veterans in this cohort who did not see combat served in support functions, often at locations like Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, caring for those who were wounded on the front-lines. The analysis was conducted by New America Media, a non-partisan news organization, in partnership with The Bay Citizen. It examined the most recent death certificates filed by coroners, medical examiners, physicians and funeral homes from California\u2019s 58 counties. According to the data, veteran fatalities exceeded the number of combat deaths involving service members from almost every county from 2005 through 2008. In the Bay Area, 114 young veterans died after returning home, nearly three times the number of Bay Area service members who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts over the same period. Suicides represented approximately one in five deaths of young veterans, the data showed. Many other deaths resulted from risky behaviors that psychologists say are common symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist who counseled Vietnam veterans for more than 20 years and has taught at the U.S. Army War College, said the high number of deaths shows how the combat experience can create psychological damage that manifests itself in a range of dangerous and nihilistic activities. Veterans with post-traumatic stress often try to re-create the rush of combat, Dr. Shay said. \u201cThere is definitely an inclination of danger seeking,\u201d he said, \u201cseeking out fights, living on the edge, fast motorcycle riding, anything to get that adrenaline rush.\u201d The Department of Veterans Affairs only began to track suicides committed by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in 2008. Kerri Childress, a V.A. spokeswoman, said the analysis conducted by New America Media and The Bay Citizen was more accurate than figures available from the federal government. She described the figures as \u201cextremely high and extremely devastating.\u201d Paul Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran and executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that the V.A. and Department of Defense are not serious about slowing the death rate of returning soldiers. These government agencies could monitor this information on a regular basis, Mr. Sullivan said, adding that many other states in addition to California report a veteran\u2019s status on death certificates. \u201cV.A. and D.O.D. appear to have a policy for veterans called \u2018Don\u2019t look, don\u2019t find,\u201d Mr. Sullivan said. Ms. Childress said the V.A. had begun efforts to monitor stateside casualties. The agency has started numerous outreach campaigns focusing on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, she said. But less than half of returning veterans turn up at a V.A. facility for treatment. On Sept. 24, Berkeley police found Alex Lowenstein, an Iraq veteran who was months from earning his degree in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of California at Berkeley, dead in his room at the Delta Upsilon fraternity house. Mr. Lowenstein, a Mill Valley native who was 24, died of a bullet wound to the head from his own gun. The police initially concluded that his death was a suicide, but now say it may have been accidental. According to the police report, Mr. Lowenstein had been drinking and smoking marijuana on the night he died. No suicide note was found. He was the second Iraq war veteran to die while attending Berkeley over the past two years. In 2008, Elijah Warren, a 26-year-old political science student who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, shot himself in the head. \u201cThese deaths are a difficult thing for everybody because of the preventative nature of it,\u201d said Trevor Harris, the secretary of the veterans club at the university. Mr. Harris, a former marine who served two tours in Iraq, said he personally knew three veterans who had died from suicide or motor vehicle accidents. \u201cWe all understand that in war people get shot, but this doesn\u2019t have to happen,\u201d he said. Neither Mr. Lowenstein nor Mr. Warren had visited V.A. health centers before their deaths, Ms. Childress said. Stephen Xenakis, a retired brigadier general who formerly served as Commanding General of Southeast Army Regional Medical Command, said he expected the stateside death toll to increase because the psychological wounds associated with combat may not emerge right away. \u201cWhat you\u2019re seeing is young men and women who saw combat in their early 20s as well as everything else that went on in the theater and then in their late 20s they get symptomatic,\u201d he said. When Mr. Santos, the Daly City veteran, first returned from Iraq in October 2003, his family thought he was fine. \u201cHe still had his sense of humor,\u201d his mother Paula, a secretary at a local elementary school, said in an interview. Mr. Santos, who was known as Chip, was the son of Native American parents. He left Westmoor High School early with a G.E.D. to join the Army. It was before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Santos never thought he would go to war, according to his parents. After he returned from Iraq, he slowly began to lose his spark and wit, his friends and family said. He rarely worked, and he could not keep a job. He would take a class at City College of San Francisco, then drop out. Mostly, he stayed home and played violent video games for most of the day and into the night. His fixation on the video games infuriated his parents, but in a poem published after his death by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Mr. Santos described the games as a way of \u201cholding onto denial that is burning cancer into hope.\u201d Mr. Santos met his girlfriend, Waci Lone Hill, at the institute. The two were enrolled in the same creative-writing program. Ms. Lone Hill said she was attracted to Mr. Santos by his intelligence, his sense of humor and his old-fashioned style of courtship. But, as early as 2005, Mr. Santos would \u201cwake up in the middle of the night hollering\u201d from nightmares, his girlfriend said. Sometimes, Mr. Santos would hold her so tight that she felt like she was being strangled. He started to drive erratically, sometimes at more than 120 miles an hour. \u201cIf there was a lot of traffic, I could see the sweat break out on his forehead and hear the shallow breathing,\u201d Ms. Lone Hill said. \u201cHe\u2019d get this completely stone face, and I\u2019d get scared and just be quiet.\u201d Not until five years after his return from Iraq did Mr. Santos see a social worker or a psychiatrist from the V.A. At first, his mother said, Mr. Santos did not want to admit that he had a problem. Then, after three years passed, he erroneously thought he was no longer eligible for V.A. health care. When Mr. Santos finally applied, Ms. Lone Hill said it was difficult for him get regular appointments. He was only able to see a therapist once a month, she said. The therapists were often different, so Mr. Santos was forced to tell his story over and over. Six months before his death, Mr. Santos enrolled in a study overseen by Charles Marmar, an expert in post-traumatic stress who recently left the V.A. to become chairman of the department of psychiatry at New York University. As part of the study, Mr. Santos was able to get treatment every week from the same therapist, who administered cognitive behavioral therapy, in which the veteran relives the traumatic experiences in an effort to overcome them. Dr. Marmar described the therapy as \u201cthe gold standard\u201d for treating post-traumatic stress. Nine weeks into the treatment, Mr. Santos left the study, Dr. Marmar said. His therapist rated him as having \u201cno clinical anxiety at that time.\u201d Dr. Marmar said the V.A. tried repeatedly to contact Mr. Santos after he withdrew from the study, but he did not respond. Three months after leaving the program, Mr. Santos hung himself in his Santa Fe apartment. In an e-mail to his brother and his girlfriend that he said took him almost a month to complete, Mr. Santos wrote: \u201cI\u2019m tired of fighting this. I feel like I\u2019ve tried everything but electro shock therapy.\u201d By the time his brother opened the e-mail, Mr. Santos was dead.", "keyword": "Veterans;United States Defense and Military Forces;Iraq War (2003- );Afghanistan War (2001- );San Francisco Bay Area (Calif)"}
{"id": "ny0007008", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/05/17", "title": "Speaker to Seek Expulsion of Assemblyman Over Harassment Scandal", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York Assembly, said on Thursday night that he would seek the expulsion of Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the once-powerful Brooklyn Democrat, over accusations of sexual harassment by multiple women who worked for the Legislature. Mr. Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, had rejected suggestions that Mr. Lopez be expelled last year, after the allegations of harassment first became public. But he reversed course on Thursday amid a firestorm of criticism not only of Mr. Lopez\u2019s behavior toward women, but also of the Legislature\u2019s handling of the allegations. The Assembly leadership, with Mr. Silver\u2019s approval, had secretly settled two harassment allegations against Mr. Lopez without referring the conduct to a legislative ethics committee for investigation. Only after two more women said that they, too, had been harassed did Mr. Silver censure the lawmaker and make some allegations public. Mr. Lopez has denied the charges against him and was re-elected last year after the charges became public. But anger over his behavior, and the Assembly\u2019s reaction to it, intensified after a 68-page report by the state\u2019s Joint Commission on Public Ethics was released on Wednesday. The report shocked many with its descriptions of female employees saying that Mr. Lopez had demanded they massage him, travel with him, stay in hotel rooms with him or write fawning messages to him. Earlier on Thursday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, said Mr. Lopez should be expelled if he did not resign. Mr. Silver, an Orthodox Jew, announced his decision to seek expulsion late Thursday night, after concluding his observance of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. \u201cSpeaker Silver intends to draft and introduce a resolution tomorrow to be voted on Monday to ask the Ethics & Guidance Committee to consider the full JCOPE report and to recommend appropriate sanctions including expulsion of Assemblymember Lopez,\u201d Mr. Silver\u2019s spokesman, Michael Whyland, wrote in an e-mail. \u201cGiven that an exhaustive investigation has already occurred by two public agencies, he expects the committee to be able to act quickly and to bring this matter back to the full Assembly with its recommendations for prompt resolution.\u201d Expulsion is exceedingly rare. The Legislature has expelled only a handful of members since it was established, and the Assembly has not expelled any of its members since the early 1920s. At that time, it ousted all five members of the Socialist Party delegation in a chaotic (and reportedly alcohol-fueled) vote that was essentially repudiated when several of the ousted assemblymen won their seats back in the next election. (One of the assemblymen was expelled again after it turned out he was living in New Jersey when he was elected.) The Senate expelled one of its members, Hiram Monserrate, in 2010, after he was convicted of domestic assault. Mr. Silver\u2019s announcement came after a day in which multiple elected officials from both parties called for Mr. Lopez to leave the Legislature. Reaction to Mr. Silver\u2019s handling of the allegations was divided largely along party lines. Republicans called for his ouster, while Democrats generally said they accepted the speaker\u2019s acknowledgment of his mistakes and his pledge to handle future allegations more forthrightly. Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, suggested that the Assembly should reconsider its leadership. She called on the speaker \u201cto provide justification for why he should continue to lead the conference.\u201d And Jane L. Corwin, a Republican assemblywoman from the Buffalo area, echoed the view of her party, saying: \u201cThe only person I\u2019m more appalled by than Vito is Speaker Silver. I don\u2019t know who he was trying to serve by doing this quietly or under the table, but it\u2019s tantamount to condoning that behavior.\u201d The criticism of Mr. Silver was far more muted among Assembly Democrats, and probably with good reason: Mr. Silver, a Manhattan Democrat who was first elected to the Assembly in 1976, has served as speaker since 1994; he leads a sizable majority in the Assembly and rules his caucus with near complete authority. The last time Mr. Silver\u2019s leadership was seriously challenged was in 2000, and the coup attempt not only failed but also proved disastrous for some of those who supported it; Mr. Silver removed them from leadership positions and cut their pay. Edward C. Sullivan, a former Democratic assemblyman from Manhattan who for a time supported the 2000 challenge, said criticizing Mr. Silver would not be a productive exercise, particularly because no viable challenger had emerged. \u201cThere\u2019s a political saying: You can\u2019t beat somebody with nobody,\u201d Mr. Sullivan said. \u201cI don\u2019t see the person who\u2019s going to beat Shelly Silver, frankly.\u201d Even if Mr. Lopez leaves the Legislature, he may have another life in politics. He has filed papers that would allow him to run for the City Council in New York this fall.", "keyword": "Sexual harassment;Vito J Lopez;Andrew Cuomo;New York;State legislature;Sheldon Silver"}
{"id": "ny0096819", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2015/01/25", "title": "Human Rights Groups Press Obama on India", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A year after the arrest of an Indian diplomat accused of exploiting a domestic worker in New York ruptured relations, India and the United States have put the episode behind them, and President Obama arrived here Sunday to hail a new era of cooperation. During his visit, the president plans to seek common ground on climate change, civilian nuclear power, trade and security. But human rights groups worry that Mr. Obama, in his eagerness to make diplomatic breakthroughs, will brush aside serious issues that may stand in the way. Human rights advocates say they suspect that Indian diplomats are still circumventing American law to exploit domestic workers in the United States and have asked the State Department to investigate. They have voiced concern over forced labor and human trafficking inside India as well. And they say they hope Mr. Obama raises questions about free expression, gay rights and political intimidation. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of issues bubbling under the surface that they\u2019re not talking about publicly,\u201d said John Sifton, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization based in New York. Mr. Obama has raised none of those issues explicitly before the visit. Instead, he has emphasized the improvement in ties, citing rising trade, more joint military exercises and cooperation on counterterrorism and counterproliferation issues. \u201cWhile it\u2019s true that progress has not always come as fast as we would have liked, we\u2019ve succeeded in deepening the U.S.-India relationship across the board,\u201d Mr. Obama said in written answers to questions submitted by India Today, the country\u2019s leading weekly newsmagazine. To the extent that he touched on issues raised by human rights groups, it was only obliquely, as when he said each country was working at \u201ccreating more opportunities, including for girls and women.\u201d The president\u2019s priorities for the trip were exemplified by the officials he invited to join him, including Penny Pritzker, the commerce secretary; Michael B. Froman, the trade representative; and John D. Podesta, the presidential counselor who focuses on climate issues. Also joining the president will be several congressional Democrats: Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Ami Bera of California and Joseph Crowley of New York as well as Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. In addition to attending the Republic Day parade, Mr. Obama will meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and attend a state dinner. He will also participate in a wreath-laying and tree-planting ceremony at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, and he will host a meeting of American and Indian corporate executives. Mr. Obama, who visited in 2010, is the first sitting American president to travel to India twice. In effect, the visit is part of an effort to get the relationship back to where it was before the arrest of the Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade. American authorities arrested Ms. Khobragade, the deputy consul general in New York, in December 2013 after she was accused of submitting false documents to obtain a work visa for an Indian housekeeper, whom she paid less than $1.42 an hour and forced to work longer than what was allowed. India was outraged not at the treatment of the housekeeper but at the fact that Ms. Khobragade was strip-searched as part of the arrest, which is policy for processing suspects. India retaliated with investigations into several American institutions in New Delhi, and ultimately the American ambassador, Nancy Powell, resigned early. Ms. Khobragade was allowed to leave the United States on diplomatic immunity. As it happened, it took a man with a checkered human rights record of his own to revive relations between the countries. Prime Minister Modi had been denied a visa to the United States in 2005 on human rights grounds, stemming from his time as chief minister for Gujarat when more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in sectarian riots. Mr. Modi denied wrongdoing. After being elected last year, Mr. Modi proved to be far more pro-American than expected, and he and Mr. Obama forged a working relationship during a visit to Washington last fall. Mr. Obama sent a new ambassador, Richard R. Verma, and the two sides moved past the diplomatic dispute. But a coalition of organizations like the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking and the Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center pressed the Obama administration not to forget about the issue of domestic workers. In a letter last month, they asked Secretary of State John Kerry to make sure that India was not breaking American law in its treatment of domestic workers. What Do You Expect From Obama\u2019s Visit to India? The New York Times would like to hear from readers in India about what President Obama\u2019s visit means to you. Citing Indian news reports, the groups said it appeared that India was sending domestic workers to the United States on A-2 visas meant for administrative workers, who are not protected from exploitation under American law, rather than the A-3 or G-5 visas that are required. Tiffany Williams of the National Domestic Workers Alliance said the administration did not seem eager to look into the matter. \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re looking the other way,\u201d Ms. Williams said, \u201cbut I think they know they can\u2019t prove it. So I don\u2019t know if they want to open that can of worms to try to figure that out.\u201d The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to messages seeking comment. The State Department said that to guard against fraud, it scrutinized any applications for A-2 visas from individuals formerly in A-3 status. \u201cAs part of our discussions with Indian officials, we highlighted the differences between visa classifications and requirements for different categories of staff that perform official activities for the Indian government as opposed to individuals employed in a domestic or personal capacity in the homes of diplomatic and consular staff,\u201d said a State Department spokesman, who was not permitted to be identified without approval from a superior and had not yet received it. Additional groups pressed Mr. Obama on other issues. Amnesty International urged him to address efforts by Dow Chemical to avoid Indian court action to hold its subsidiary responsible for the chemical disaster in Bhopal that killed thousands more than 30 years ago. (Dow bought the subsidiary, Union Carbide, after the disaster and says a 1989 settlement with the government resolved liability.) Human Rights First said Mr. Obama should raise the issue of the reinstatement of a colonial-era law criminalizing sexual activity between men. In a letter to Mr. Obama, Elisa Massimino, the group\u2019s president, also cited the forced labor of tens of millions of Indians. \u201cMore people are enslaved in India than in any other country in the world,\u201d she wrote. Mr. Sifton said he hoped Mr. Obama would press Mr. Modi to rein in his own supporters, who Mr. Sifton said had been intimidating political rivals. \u201cThere\u2019s a heckler\u2019s veto where Modi\u2019s supporters can shout down their opponents,\u201d Mr. Sifton said. \u201cThe argument is that Modi isn\u2019t doing enough to tamp down his own supporters.\u201d", "keyword": "India;Barack Obama;US Foreign Policy;Human Rights;Narendra Modi;AFL-CIO;Human Rights Watch"}
{"id": "ny0185380", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/03/21", "title": "In the Bronx, Tracking an Arrow to a Distant Time", "abstract": "In the mid-19th century, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, \u201cI shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where.\u201d The mystery facing the police this week was the opposite. They knew where the arrow landed on Sunday afternoon \u2014 in the abdomen of a woman standing in a nursing home driveway in Riverdale. What they did not know was who had shot it into the air. After five days of searching rooftops, eyeing potential trajectories and using a classic \u201cgood cop, bad cop\u201d strategy, the answer they came up with was this: The 2 \u00bd-foot arrow that struck the woman, Denise Delgado Brown, 51, came from the ramshackle house next to the nursing home that a plumber named Eric Collins was moving into. How Mr. Collins came to be there leads to a tale of that place in another time. In 1949, Charles and Ethel Collins, already the parents of a 2-year-old and living in a cramped apartment, had quadruplets . The newspapers said the four babies were the first quads in Bronx history. All four survived, and after a barrage of publicity, the Collinses moved into a brand-new house built with donated labor on donated land on Independence Avenue in Riverdale. The Dionne quintuplets stopped by on their way to Gracie Mansion when they visited New York the following year. Then the Collinses faded from the headlines. The family had backyard cookouts. The parents voted at the nursing home after it was built in the 1980s. The quadruplets, grown up and married, had children of their own, one of whom was Eric Collins. Nothing more was heard from 3001 Independence Avenue until Sunday. Then the arrow hit Ms. Brown, who was standing in the driveway of the Schervier Nursing Care Center next door. She had just dropped off a friend who lives at the home. On Thursday, the police arrested Mr. Collins, 27, a plumber who works for the Westchester County parks department, on charges of assault, reckless endangerment and weapons possession. The police said he had shot one of six arrows in his possession. \u201cThis is the freakiest thing I ever heard of because he\u2019s a family guy, a normal guy,\u201d said Joe Amici, who owns a deli in Yonkers, near the apartment that Mr. Collins was leaving. He said Mr. Collins was a regular customer whose daily routine revolved around walking his dachshunds, going to work and looking after his wife and 18-month-old daughter. Mr. Collins was moving into the house that had been built for his grandparents \u2014 his grandmother, the mother of the quadruplets, died in December at 88. He had told his across-the-hall neighbor in the Yonkers apartment he was vacating that he wanted to look after his grandfather, who is 89. He also confided that, like his grandparents in 1949, he needed the space. His wife is in her second pregnancy. The police said Mr. Collins was shuttling boxes in and out of the house on Sunday. Around 2 p.m., said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department\u2019s chief spokesman, \u201che stopped, picked up a bow and arrow and shot it at the fence\u201d separating his grandfather\u2019s yard from the nursing home. They police said that when it pierced the plastic fence about 10 inches from the ground, its trajectory changed, putting it on a collision course with Ms. Brown. They said that Ms. Brown had not been a target, and that her being wounded was accidental. Ms. Brown said on Monday that the arrow was in so deep that she decided not to risk pulling it out. She was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital for emergency surgery. A woman who answered the telephone at her home on Friday said that she had just come home and was doing fine but was too tired to talk. Mr. Collins, a stocky man in a green T-shirt and tan pants, was arraigned on Friday before Judge Doris M. Gonzalez in Bronx Criminal Court. His lawyer, Victor N. Piacente, entered a plea of not guilty. Mr. Collins was released on $5,000 bail. Neither family members nor Mr. Piacente would discuss details of the case. Mr. Browne said that the Collins house was the first place detectives went when they began their investigation on Sunday. He said Mr. Collins told them he had been inside all day and had not seen or heard anything. \u201cIt was a quick interview,\u201d Mr. Browne said. The detectives went on to interview at least 50 others in the neighborhood that day. They also searched two nearby parks. On Thursday, Mr. Browne said, Sgt. James Foley, the detective squad commander of the 50th Precinct, went back to Independence Avenue with Detective Brian Bartlett. They noticed something that had apparently been overlooked: a hole in the white plastic fence between the Collins yard and the nursing home. That led the sergeant to conclude that the arrow had come from much closer than the police had initially believed. The sergeant and the detective went back to the Collins house. There was no answer, but they saw two men in the street. One was Mr. Collins, walking his three dachshunds. Mr. Browne said that Mr. Collins repeated what he had told the detectives on Sunday, that he had not seen or heard anything. But the detectives kept the conversation going. \u201cThey say, \u2018Hey, did you happen to see that hole in the fence over there? Any idea what caused that?\u2019 \u201d Mr. Browne said. Mr. Collins, he said, suddenly seemed \u201ceager to end the interview.\u201d After the detectives took his telephone number, he went in the house and the sergeant and the detective went toward the nursing home. The sergeant called in two more detectives, Chris Burke and Paul Sullivan. They huddled at the nursing home before going back to the Collins house to ask Mr. Collins for a formal statement. Detectives Burke and Sullivan went to the door, with Sergeant Foley and Detective Bartlett about 20 feet away. Detective Burke made the request. \u201cYou could just see the breath leave his lungs,\u201d Mr. Browne said. \u201cYou could see this large exhale of \u2018Oh, no.\u2019 \u201d At the station house, Mr. Browne said, Mr. Collins told the detectives that he had spoken to his real estate agent, who had urged him to get a lawyer. Though no fingerprints were found on the arrow that struck Ms. Brown, a search warrant turned up five other arrows that belonged to Mr. Collins, Mr. Browne said. At the nursing home on Friday, the mood brightened at the news of the arrest and arraignment. \u201cEveryone is relieved,\u201d said Jim Carroll, 62, as he pushed his mother Sarah, 96, in a wheelchair in the parking lot. \u201cThe uncertainty had really gotten to us all.\u201d", "keyword": "Collins Eric;Bronx (NYC);Archery;Brown Denise Delgado;Multiple Births;Families and Family Life;Babies"}
{"id": "ny0030169", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2013/06/16", "title": "N.H.L. Players Watch as a Young Prospect Grows Before Their Eyes", "abstract": "TORONTO \u2014 Michael Peca met a newborn Justin Bailey in the summer of 1995. Peca and several Sabres teammates, including Rob Ray and Matthew Barnaby, lived in the same town house complex as Bailey\u2019s mother, Karen Buscaglia. They stayed in touch with Buscaglia while living in Buffalo, attending Bailey\u2019s birthdays and mentoring him. Bailey, now 17, is a playmaking forward with the Kitchener Rangers of the Ontario Hockey League. A 6-foot-3, 186-pound right wing, Bailey is projected to be a second-round selection in the N.H.L. draft on June 30 at Prudential Center in Newark. He is the son of the former N.F.L. linebacker Carlton Bailey but considers his childhood experience with the Sabres as the reason he plays hockey. \u201cJust watching them and being able to see them, on a personal level, I just wanted to be like them,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cGot into hockey and loved it ever since.\u201d Peca, who attended numerous community relations events throughout his 14-year N.H.L. career, was never certain of the influence he had. \u201cSeveral years later, you come to realize the impact you had on people,\u201d said Peca, who spent five seasons with the Sabres before joining the Islanders for three seasons. \u201cIt\u2019s always great to know you had a positive impact on somebody\u2019s life. We got to see him a lot when he was a young boy, and it\u2019s amazing to see the big young man he\u2019s become.\u201d Bailey spent much of the 2011-12 season playing for the under-16 Long Island Royals, coached by the former Islanders and Sabres star Pat LaFontaine, with whom he also lived. Peca endorsed the arrangement with LaFontaine, a Hall of Famer, saying, \u201cGetting a sense of what it\u2019s like from a guy who\u2019s been where you want to get to \u2014 there wasn\u2019t anybody that handled it and dealt with it better than Pat LaFontaine.\u201d With LaFontaine\u2019s guidance, Bailey said, he learned more of the mental side of the game, the way to watch hockey and break down game film. But the toughest part of living with the LaFontaines had nothing to do with hockey. Image Justin Bailey, right, of the Kitchener Rangers grew up around Buffalo Sabres players and may be an early N.H.L. draft pick. Credit Terry Wilson/OHL Images \u201cTheir family eats very healthy,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cI was a pretty picky eater before I went there. The whole family would get on me a bit to try some new things, and so I was able to do that.\u201d Kitchener\u2019s coach and general manager, Steve Spott, had a chance to watch Bailey when he played in a Buffalo tournament with the Royals. The Kitchener Rangers selected Bailey in the 2011 O.H.L. priority draft. Despite Bailey\u2019s commitment to attend Michigan State, Spott persuaded him to visit Kitchener and learn about the program. \u201cHis confidence in me and the way that he said he\u2019d help me develop as a player, that was definitely that was something of interest to me,\u201d said Bailey, who had 17 goals and 36 points in 57 games with the Rangers this season. Spott speaks highly of Bailey, saying that his skating, puck handling and shooting are at the N.H.L. level. \u201cI think whoever drafts him in New Jersey is just going to get a tremendous talent to work with,\u201d Spott said. \u201cThe only thing that Justin lacks is experience. That\u2019s going to come over the next couple of years here in Kitchener and then obviously in the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League.\u201d McKeen\u2019s Hockey ranked Bailey 40th among N.H.L. draft prospects. David Burstyn, McKeen\u2019s director of scouting, was more critical of Bailey. \u201cHe just struggled a little bit with consistency,\u201d Burstyn said. \u201cThere were times where you were like, \u2018Wow, this guy is unstoppable.\u2019 But then there were other games where you were like, \u2018Is Bailey even playing?\u2019 \u201cI think everything with this player right now is about projection, and it\u2019s about what kind of player, not that he is today, but where he will be in about five years.\u201d Bailey, who is scheduled to graduate June 22 from Williamsville South High School in suburban Buffalo, is thinking beyond hockey. \u201cI still want to get into some communications,\u201d he said. \u201cI look at the guys that are on the panels: ex-N.B.A., N.F.L. players. That wouldn\u2019t be something that\u2019s bad for me. That\u2019s something I look forward to doing while I\u2019m playing in Kitchener, whether it\u2019d be next year or after my career.\u201d", "keyword": "Ice hockey;NHL;Sports Drafts and Recruits;Buffalo Sabres;Justin Bailey"}
{"id": "ny0012994", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/11/19", "title": "Casual Casualties (3 Letters)", "abstract": "TO THE EDITOR: Natalie Kitroeff confirms what I have learned over my professional career as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Manifest sexual behavior may be seemingly casual, yet the emotional underpinnings in these and all relationships are more complex than meets the eye. Close relationships are serious, complicated, and take time to mature. Those who take intimacy too casually are at risk for casualty. Bruce J. Levin, M.D. Plymouth Meeting, Pa.", "keyword": "Sex;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0067650", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2014/12/18", "title": "In U.S.-Cuba Embrace, Rusty Gears of Cold War Diplomacy Finally Move", "abstract": "Alan Gross was the obstacle that would not be moved: the American contractor whose imprisonment kept relations between the United States and Cuba locked in place, as paralyzed as a seized transmission. Now, in both Washington and Havana, the obstacle has been removed, and the rusty gears of Cold War diplomacy have begun to move. Mr. Gross\u2019s release on Wednesday , along with the release of another person held in Cuba and three convicted Cuban spies held in the United States, amounts to a collective break from more than 50 years of distrust, anger and inertia. Though President Obama and Ra\u00fal Castro, the president of Cuba, will find their own ways to describe what they have done, it is clear that they have both taken a chance on pursuing reconciliation. How America\u2019s Relationship With Cuba Will Change Some trade and travel restrictions will be eased. Others depend on congressional action. The prisoners held by each country have been a central complaint raised by hard-liners in both Washington and Havana who favored the status quo. But Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro have now gone against the hard-liners, engaging in a simultaneous release of prisoners who have been used and reused, over and over, by critics who have long known \u2014 and favored \u2014 distance and enmity. Both leaders now have victories to trumpet and concessions that they will have to explain. But the steps they have taken so far, and the broader policy changes the White House announced on Wednesday, have the potential to transform relations between the United States and Cuba, perhaps in ways not seen since a rebel named Fidel came down from the Cuban mountains. \u201cWhat this set of measures can do is to overcome well over 50 years of unproductive and unfortunate hostility between us and Cuba, which has worked to the detriment of both countries,\u201d said Eric Hershberg, director of the American University Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, who is in Havana for a conference. Video Excerpts from a speech by President Ra\u00fal Castro of Cuba, following the release of Alan P. Gross and the announcement of a restoration of full diplomatic relations with the United States. Credit Credit Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images It will not be easy. The practical policy options open to Mr. Obama are relatively limited. Even lawyers who interpret the president\u2019s executive powers quite broadly say he cannot just lift the trade embargo against Cuba. But he can work around the edges, and that is what he promised on Wednesday. The changes Mr. Obama is announcing include allowing Americans to send up to $2,000 to Cuba each quarter, four times the current ceiling of $500; allowing Americans to travel to Cuba for a wider range of reasons, including travel in \u201csupport for the Cuban people\u201d; and allowing goods and supplies to be sold directly to Cubans from America, to help spur and expand the growing number of small and medium-size private businesses on the island. Mr. Obama also said he would allow expanded sales of information technology to Cuba, with the aim of helping the Cuban people \u201ccommunicate freely.\u201d Video The president outlined the steps the United States would take to \u201cend an outdated approach\u201d and begin to normalize relations with Cuba. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times In turn, Cuba will be pressed to allow more freedom of expression, release domestic dissenters from prison and open up access to information and technology \u2014 one of the major demands of young Cubans on the island. In their eyes, if Cuba and the United States are talking again and no longer just enemies, then the Cuban government\u2019s logic of limiting information to protect against American intrusion begins to break down. Old habits and cultures will not be easy to update. Cuba has seen the United States for decades through the lens of sovereignty. Cubans are raised to be proud of the country\u2019s ability to thumb its nose at the United States, and the island\u2019s history is filled with examples of Cuban heroes fighting to throw off the yoke of foreign powers, starting with Spain, followed by the \u201cYanquis.\u201d One important way Washington could help reset the relationship would be removing Cuba from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism. President Obama said he had instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin that process. In the coming months and years of discussions between Cuban and American officials over the issues that divide them, they will have to work around these and other third rails of past conflicts. Releasing Mr. Gross and the other prisoners allows for access, for discussion, for diplomatic therapy as a precursor for improving relations. But navigating through the old slights and new challenges will require a deftness that no leader from either country has managed to exhibit in decades of confused, intense relations.", "keyword": "US Foreign Policy;Cuba;Raul Castro;Barack Obama;Alan Gross;Embargoes Sanctions"}
{"id": "ny0071608", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/03/26", "title": "Among Germanwings Crash Victims, Opera Singers and Newlyweds", "abstract": "BARCELONA, Spain \u2014 Outside the Liceu opera house in Barcelona on Wednesday, staff members gathered at noon for two minutes of silence to honor two singers who had recently performed there. The singers \u2014 Oleg Bryjak, a bass baritone, and Maria Radner, a contralto, who had spent about a month and a half in Barcelona rehearsing and then performing Wagner\u2019s \u201cSiegfried\u201d \u2014 were among the 150 people believed to have died on Tuesday when a Germanwings jet en route from Barcelona to D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany , crashed in the French Alps . \u201cWhen you are in an opera, it means working very hard and a lot together, so you become a mini-family,\u201d said Christina Scheppelmann, artistic and production director of the Liceu. \u201cThese were not only great singers but also wonderful colleagues.\u201d As the two singers were mourned in Barcelona, details about other passengers, from at least 15 countries, began to emerge on Wednesday. The dead included a couple who had just married three days earlier, an Australian hoping to start teaching English in France , the wife of a prominent Catalan politician and a mother and daughter from suburban Washington. Thomas Winkelmann, the managing director of Germanwings, a Lufthansa subsidiary, confirmed that as of 11 a.m., the families of 123 victims \u2014 including 72 Germans and 35 Spaniards \u2014 had been notified. Citizens of Australia, Argentina, Iran, Venezuela, Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel were also on board. Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, confirmed that three Americans had been killed and identified two of them as Yvonne Selke, 58, of Nokesville, Va., and her daughter, Emily Selke, 22. Ms. Psaki said the department was not identifying the third American. Victims of Germanwings Flight 9525 Passengers from at least 15 countries were aboard the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany, including 72 Germans and 35 Spaniards. Here are profiles of some of the 123 victims whose families have been notified. In a family statement, Raymond Selke, Ms. Selke\u2019s husband, said: \u201cOur entire family is deeply saddened by the losses of Yvonne and Emily Selke. Two wonderful, caring, amazing people who meant so much to so many.\u201d Ms. Selke, who was taking a European vacation with her daughter, was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, the technology consulting firm, in Washington for nearly 23 years. \u201cYvonne was a wonderful co-worker and a dedicated employee who spent her career with the firm supporting the mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,\u201d which coordinates satellite-based mapping for the Pentagon, said a company statement. The younger Ms. Selke was a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts, according to her LinkedIn page , and an alumna of Drexel University, majoring in the music industry and graduating in 2013. She worked at Carr Workplaces in Washington, which helps companies find office space. At school she was also a member of a sorority, Zeta Gamma Sig, that named her \u201cmember of the week\u201d i n May 2014 and said she was \u201ca great friend, a caring member, and able to make us all smile.\u201d Emily Selke graduated summa cum laude from Woodbridge High School, said Phil Kavits, a spokesman for the Prince William County public school district. \u201cShe was a very high achiever,\u201d he said. Mr. Bryjak, 54, a native of Kazakhstan, had been a member of Deutsche Oper am Rhein, a German opera house, since the 1996-97 season. \u201cWe have lost Oleg Bryjak, a great artist and a great man,\u201d the opera house\u2019s general director, Christoph Meyer, said in a statement. \u201cWe are stunned.\u201d The baritone sang at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival last year and was expected to perform there again in August. Ms. Radner , a rising star of Wagnerian opera, made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in \u201cG\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung\u201d in January 2012, and at La Scala in Milan in \u201cDie Frau Ohne Schatten\u201d in March 2012. She had been expected to perform at Bayreuth this summer, according to her management company\u2019s website. Ms. Radner, who was traveling with her husband and baby, was \u201cone of the few contralto voices that we now have,\u201d Ms. Scheppelmann said. Image A memorial of flowers and candles drew people to a school in Haltern am See, Germany, where some crash victims had lived. Credit Rolf Vennenbernd/DPA, via Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The victims included a class of 16 German high school students returning from a study program near Barcelona, along with their two teachers. Ariadna Falguera, the wife of a politician active in the Catalan campaign to secede from Spain , was also a passenger, according to Esquerra Republicana, a party leading the movement. Her husband, Llu\u00eds Junc\u00e1, is a high-ranking member of the party. Ms. Falguera worked for a fashion company and was traveling to Germany for business. A Spanish-Moroccan woman, Asmae Ouahhoud el-Allaoui, 23, was moving to D\u00fcsseldorf to live with her Moroccan husband, Mohamed Tehrioui, 24, whom she had just married on Saturday, according to Juan Jos\u00e9 Maestre, a town hall official at La Llagosta, outside Barcelona. Another person from La Llagosta, Francisco Javier Go\u00f1alons, 42, was on the flight, according to the town hall. Carles Milla Misanas, the general manager of Mimasa, a Spanish supplier of equipment to the food industry, was among a handful of Spanish executives believed to have been flying to a trade show in Cologne. Marina Bandr\u00e9s L\u00f3pez-Bel\u00edo, a Spanish citizen living in Manchester, England, was killed in the crash, along with her 7-month-old son, Julian Pracz-Bandres, her husband, Pawel Pracz, said. Another Briton on the plane, Paul Andrew Bramley, 28, of Hull, England, had just finished his first year at C\u00e9sar Ritz College in Lucerne, Switzerland, studying hospitality and hotel management, his family said in a statement. His mother, Carol Bramley, said, \u201cHe was the best son, he was my world.\u201d Two Australians were aboard the flight. They were identified on Wednesday by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop as Carol Friday, a 68-year-old registered nurse, and her son Greig Friday, 29, a mechanical engineer, both from the state of Victoria. Mr. Friday had hoped to soon start teaching English in France, and the two were spending a few weeks together in Europe beforehand, their family said in a statement. Two Iranian sports journalists who traveled to Barcelona to cover Sunday\u2019s Cl\u00e1sico clash between the two giants of Spanish soccer, F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid, were among the victims. One, Milad Hojjatoleslami, worked for the Tasnim News Agency, while the other, Hossein Javadi, was a reporter for Vatan-e Emruz, a daily newspaper, Tasnim reported on its website, saying their deaths had also been confirmed by Iran\u2019s Foreign Ministry. What Happened on the Germanwings Flight Maps and timeline of what is known about the crash. In Tokyo, the Foreign Ministry identified the two Japanese passengers onboard as Satoshi Nagata, a man in his 60s, and Junichi Sato, a man in his 40s. Israeli news media identified the Israeli victim as Eyal Baum, 39. Two Colombians were killed in the crash, that country\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Mar\u00eda del Pilar Tejada, 33, was studying economics in Germany and was returning from a visit to see her husband in Barcelona, according to Colombian news reports. Luis Eduardo Medrano, 36, had worked in Equatorial Guinea as an architect since 2009, according to a statement from Fundaci\u00f3n Universitaria de Popay\u00e1n, the Colombian university he attended. At least one victim was from Belgium, the country\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Twitter, but it released no names. Mexico said as many as three of its citizens might have been aboard, but it cautioned that the information had not been confirmed. Two Spanish employees of Delphi, an American automotive company, were killed in the crash, the company said. Rogelio Oficialdegui, 62, was human resources director in Spain and was set to retire soon. Manuel Rives Salinas, 51, was a labor union representative. Both men, who worked at Delphi\u2019s diesel systems factory in Sant Cugat, near Barcelona, were traveling to Delphi\u2019s German headquarters for a meeting, according to Marie-Pierre Ygri\u00e9, a spokeswoman for Delphi. Bayer, the German chemical company, said at least one of its employees, as well as the wife of another employee, were among the passengers. The company did not name them. Mr. Winkelmann, of Germanwings, said there would be two special flights Thursday, one from D\u00fcsseldorf and another from Barcelona, to take relatives to the area where the crash occurred. He and Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Lufthansa, plan to fly to D\u00fcsseldorf and then on to Barcelona to speak with relatives of victims. \u201cThe individual care for each relative left behind is our top priority,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Plane Crash;Germanwings;France;Germany;Spain;Prads-Haute-Bl\u00e9one"}
{"id": "ny0033128", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2013/12/28", "title": "U.N. Budget Trims Staff and Spending", "abstract": "UNITED NATIONS \u2014 The United Nations General Assembly on Friday approved a budget of $5.53 billion to cover the organization\u2019s regular operations in 2014-15, cutting it for a second successive time. But the 193-member body again delayed action on proposals that would allow greater mobility of the United Nations staff and the strengthening of arrangements for partnerships with the private sector. After lengthy negotiations, the General Assembly voted to reduce the budget by 1 percent from the final spending level set for 2012-13. It also approved a 2 percent reduction of staff positions, or 221 jobs, and a one-year freeze of compensation for staff members. The regular operating budget does not include the United Nations\u2019 far-flung peacekeeping operations, which are financed by a separate budget that is currently more than $7 billion a year. The United States pays 22 percent of the organization\u2019s regular budget. The American Mission at the United Nations said it welcomed the \u201cfiscal discipline.\u201d", "keyword": "UN;UN General Assembly;Budget"}
{"id": "ny0013724", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/11/01", "title": "Fantasy Football: Week 9 Matchup Breakdown", "abstract": "In a season in which Knowshon Moreno, who was undrafted in some leagues, is fantasy football\u2019s No. 2 running back and Doug Martin, who was supposed to be fantasy\u2019s No. 2 running back (based on average draft position), is probably available on your league\u2019s waiver wire, nobody should be surprised that the rookie Marvin Jones (CIN) is suddenly a top-15 wide receiver. We could dedicate a lot of space to highlight the many fantasy surprises of the first eight weeks, but Jones\u2019s emergence is among the most shocking. Before you become too excited, let\u2019s look closer at the numbers. His 8-catch, 122-yard, 4-touchdown breakout performance occurred on only 19 snaps against the Jets. The fact that he took part in just 32 percent of the Bengals\u2019 offensive plays suggests that he could struggle to churn out consistent fantasy numbers, but an injury to Mohamed Sanu could be just the opening he needs to start seeing first-team playing time. A Miami secondary that ranks as the third-worst matchup for receivers (14 fantasy points per game) is on deck, but the Dolphins\u2019 elite cornerback, Brent Grimes, figures to be assigned to A. J. Green, so Jones still projects to be a solid WR3 in Week 9. If you have a tough lineup question for Week 9, you can ask us on Twitter. Follow us at @5thDownFantasy. Favorable Matchups Quarterback Tony Romo (DAL) vs. Minnesota \u2014 A pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns saved Romo\u2019s owners from what was shaping up to be another mediocre fantasy outing in a very favorable matchup. The dysfunctional Cowboys offense travels home to take on the Minnesota Vikings, and for a fourth consecutive week, Romo\u2019s matchup is desirable (24 fantasy points allowed per game, seventh-best QB matchup). Terrelle Pryor (OAK) vs. Philadelphia \u2014 Pryor got off on the right foot against an imposing Steelers defense with a 93-yard touchdown run on the first play. Sadly, the 15 fantasy points he earned on the play were all he would get for the game. Even a modest amount of success in the air to go along with the read-option would go a long way in Week 9, and that is very possible against the Eagles (ninth-best QB matchup). Cam Newton (CAR) vs. Atlanta \u2014 With Newton rushing for 76 yards and a touchdown over the last two weeks, it is safe to assume that the running quarterback is here to stay. That\u2019s great news for his fantasy owners and bad news for the 2-5 Falcons, who have permitted a 23-point fantasy average to quarterbacks this season (fifth-best QB matchup). Philip Rivers (SD) vs. Washington \u2014 Rivers will be well rested after the bye week and should continue his outstanding season against a Redskins defensive unit that has surrendered the ninth-most passing yards (1,916) and fifth-most passing touchdowns (15) this season (23 F.P.P.G., sixth-best QB matchup). Russell Wilson (SEA) vs. Tampa Bay \u2014 Opposing quarterbacks have pinned a 31-point fantasy average on the Bucs over the last three weeks, which ties them with Buffalo for the most points allowed to the position during that time (eighth-best QB matchup). Image If Zac Stacy is healthy enough to play this week, he should be in fantasy lineups. Credit Tom Gannam/Associated Press Running Back Zac Stacy (STL) vs. Tennessee \u2014 Stacy seems to have avoided the dreaded high-ankle sprain and is tentatively expected to play this week. If he plays, he is a must-start against the Titans, who have been burned on the ground for an average of 28 fantasy points per game over their last three contests. Daryl Richardson will get the start if Stacy cannot go, but he would only be considered a flex start because we have seen his act before (3.1 yards per carry, 0 touchdowns). Ryan Mathews (SD) vs. Washington \u2014 Mathews strung together consecutive 100-yard rushing games before his bye week, and he is set up nicely this week: nobody has allowed more fantasy points on the ground this season than the Redskins (24 F.P.P.G., best RB matchup). DeMarco Murray (DAL) vs. Minnesota \u2014 Considering Jerry Jones thought Murray, his best running back, could have suited up last weekend, we will assume he will on Sunday. He will have a great opportunity to pick up where he left off before the injury. The Vikings have been run over for a 25-point fantasy average over their last three games by the likes of Peyton Hillis, Mike Tolbert and Eddie Lacy (second-best RB matchup). Giovani Bernard (CIN) vs. Miami \u2014 A Thursday night meeting with the Dolphins is just the matchup Bernard needs to get back on track. The Dolphins have held an opposing back to fewer than 13 fantasy points just once this year and have allowed the fourth-most fantasy points on the ground over all (21 F.P.P.G.). Eddie Lacy (GB) vs. Chicago \u2014 The Bears\u2019 defense had permitted 20-plus fantasy points to running backs in four straight weeks before their bye week. The beneficiaries included the time-share warrior Pierre Thomas, the veteran Brandon Jacobs, and Washington\u2019s second-string option, Roy Helu (sixth-best RB matchup). Wide Receiver Denarius Moore (OAK) vs. Philadelphia \u2014 One might assume that Steelers cornerback Ike Taylor could be blamed for Moore\u2019s poor Week 8 showing (32 yards on two receptions), but the fact that the Raiders were sporting a 21-3 lead in the first half and his quarterback attempted only 19 passes needs to be factored in as well. Moore should bounce back against a generous Eagles secondary that has permitted the second-most fantasy points to the position this year (32 F.P.P.G.). Andre Johnson (HOU) vs. Indianapolis \u2014 The Colts have surrendered a 31-point fantasy average to opposing receivers over the last three weeks and are dealing with a banged-up secondary (safety Delano Howell, neck; cornerback Josh Gordy, groin). The Texans also have two injured running backs, which could lead to a greater reliance on Johnson and the passing game. Kendall Wright (TEN) vs. St. Louis \u2014 Wright is coming off a career-high nine catches for 98 yards against the 49ers and has a much friendlier matchup this weekend (25 F.P.P.G, 10th-best WR matchup). Keenan Allen (SD) vs. Washington \u2014 WR1s have averaged 86 yards and totaled four touchdowns against Washington in seven games this season. Allen, Philip Rivers\u2019s new go-to receiver, carries WR1 upside this weekend against the third-best matchup for receivers (29 F.P.P.G.). Terrance Williams (DAL) vs. Minnesota \u2014 The standout rookie brings a four-game scoring streak into a home game with the Vikings, who have allowed at least one receiver to score in six straight games (26 F.P.P.G., ninth-best WR matchup). Image Tom Brady has been a major disappointment for fantasy owners in 2013. Credit Steven Senne/Associated Press Tight End Martellus Bennett (CHI) vs. Green Bay \u2014 The Packers have surrendered the fifth-most fantasy points to opposing tight ends this year (77), but the uncertainly of Bennett\u2019s role in a Josh McCown-led offense will limit his value. Antonio Gates (SD) vs. Washington \u2014 A week of rest and a date with the Redskins (9 F.P.P.G., 10th-best TE matchup) is the perfect remedy for a two-week slump. Defense/Special Teams New England vs. Pittsburgh, Tennessee vs. St. Louis, Carolina vs. Atlanta, Dallas vs. Minnesota Unfavorable Matchups Quarterback Tom Brady vs. Pittsburgh \u2014 Brady\u2019s forgettable Week 8 was the third time he was held to fewer than nine standard fantasy points in the last four weeks, and astonishingly enough, he enters Week 9 as the 20th-ranked fantasy quarterback (114 F.P.s). Brady\u2019s numbers are bound to improve as he gets reacquainted with a healthy Danny Amendola and Rob Gronkowski, but feel free to sit him until that happens, especially this week against a tough Steelers secondary that is coughing up just 13 fantasy points a week to quarterbacks in 2013 (third-worst QB matchup). Ben Roethlisberger (PIT) vs. New England \u2014 It is starting to look as if the Steelers\u2019 offensive line is cursed (as if Roethlisberger hadn\u2019t been wearing a \u201csack me\u201d sign around his neck to begin with): three more linemen went down against the Raiders. Coming off his lowest passer rating of the season (70.1) and with just one multitouchdown day to his name in 2013, Roethlisberger is nothing more than a middling QB2 against a Patriots team allowing 15 points a week to opposing passers (sixth-worst QB matchup). Ryan Tannehill (MIA) vs. Cincinnati \u2014 Tannehill\u2019s offensive line continues to fail him: he was sacked six times Sunday against New England. He also lost a reliable pass catcher in Brandon Gibson for the season with a ruptured patella tendon. He will have a short week to regroup against the Bengals, who have been pretty tough against the position this year (17 F.P.P.G., tied for seventh-worst QB matchup). Matt Ryan (ATL) vs. Carolina \u2014 The absence of the top receivers Julio Jones and Roddy White was bound to catch up with Ryan, who had an 11-point performance against the Arizona Cardinals last weekend. Ryan is in for another rough week against Carolina\u2019s shutdown secondary. The Panthers have yet to give up more than 17 points to a quarterback in 2013 (12 F.P.P.G., second-worst QB matchup). Geno Smith (NYJ) vs. New Orleans \u2014 Smith is going through the ups and downs of being a rookie. Last week was a downer, with 2 interceptions returned for touchdowns, 159 passing yards and a seat on the bench early in the fourth quarter. While he has typically followed down weeks with good ones, it is hard to imagine that trend sticking in Week 9, considering the Saints have allowed just 14 fantasy points per week through the air in 2013 (fourth-worst QB matchup). Running Back Darren Sproles (NO) vs. Jets \u2014 Pierre Thomas and Khiry Robinson are getting the early-down work in the Saints\u2019 backfield, and the red-zone looks just have not been there for Sproles this year. He will continue to be an asset in P.P.R. formats, but the Jets\u2019 run defense is yielding just 16 receiving yards per game to the position this season (fifth-worst RB matchup). Chris Ivory (NYJ) vs. New Orleans \u2014 Ivory\u2019s six carries to Bilal Powell\u2019s 10 on Sunday could be attributed to the Bengals\u2019 28-6 lead by halftime because Ivory does not pay his bills at all in the Jets\u2019 passing game. A similar situation could be brewing this week if Drew Brees and the Saints jump ahead to a big lead early. Image Tony Romo has another favorable matchup in Week 9. Credit Gregory Shamus/Getty Images Steven Jackson (ATL) vs. Carolina \u2014 Arizona has been tough against the run, but Jackson\u2019s 11 carries for 6 yards in Week 8 evoked visions of Michael Turner. Don\u2019t expect a major bounce back from Jackson this week against the N.F.L.'s top rushing defense (555 total yards allowed). Lamar Miller (MIA) vs. Cincinnati \u2014 Miller carried the ball 18 times to Daniel Thomas\u2019s eight last week. Whether that happens for a second consecutive week is anybody\u2019s guess, but both backs will have a tough time against a Bengals front that has limited opposing backs to a 12-point fantasy average over the last four weeks. Mike James (TB) vs. Seattle \u2014 Last week James managed 39 yards on 10 carries against a Carolina defense allowing 3.7 yards per rushing attempt. Seattle is also yielding 3.7 yards per carry. Basic math gives the crystal ball a much needed rest on this one. Wide Receiver Antonio Brown (PIT) vs. New England \u2014 New England\u2019s ace cover man, Aqib Talib, was close to a return last week and is likely to be back against the Steelers. Regardless, Pittsburgh\u2019s offense is more than capable of imploding on its own. Vincent Jackson (TB) vs. Seattle \u2014 The Seahawks rank third in the N.F.L. against the pass, but in fantasy, WR1s have managed a 7-point fantasy average against them this year, which keeps Jackson very startable in Week 9. Harry Douglas (ATL) vs. Carolina \u2014 We keep waiting for the wheels to fall off the Harry Douglas fantasy express, but despite games against two solid defenses, so far so good. He has another tough test this week against the Panthers, who have held opposing WR1s to a 5.7 fantasy average (sixth-worst WR matchup). Danny Amendola (NE) vs. Pittsburgh \u2014 Three receptions on six targets in his return from a concussion was underwhelming, to say the least, but he managed to stay injury-free. It does not get any easier against the Steelers, who have yielded more than 8 fantasy points to a receiver just once this season. Tight End Jordan Reed (WAS) vs. San Diego \u2014 Fifty-three yards in garbage time rescued a very mediocre Week 8. Next up are the Chargers, who have not surrendered a double-digit fantasy day since Week 1. Coby Fleener (IND) vs. Houston \u2014 With Reggie Wayne on the shelf for the rest of the season, Fleener\u2019s role in the Colts\u2019 offense should expand. It is worth noting, though, that just one tight end has reached double-digit fantasy points against the Texans this year (Vernon Davis). Defense/Special Teams Chicago vs. Green Bay, Jets vs. New Orleans, Houston vs. Indianapolis, Buffalo vs. Kansas City", "keyword": "Football;Fantasy sport;Vincent Jackson;Tom Brady;Tony Romo"}
{"id": "ny0219957", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/02/03", "title": "Appeals Court Throws Out Sentence for Millennium Bomber, Calling It Too Light", "abstract": "A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out the 22-year prison sentence imposed in 2005 on Ahmed Ressam , known as the Millennium Bomber, who plotted to set off explosives at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year\u2019s Eve in 1999. The court said the sentence was too light. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said Mr. Ressam did not deserve the \u201csubstantial reduction\u201d in his sentence from the minimum of 65 years in federal sentencing guidelines because he backed out of his agreement to cooperate with investigators. The court also took the unusual step of calling for a new trial judge to consider the next sentence, because the federal judge who issued the original decision had already once declined to increase Mr. Ressam\u2019s prison term. It was the second recent ruling in which an appeals court called for consideration of tougher sentencing in a terrorism-related case. In November, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, sent the case of Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer found guilty in 2005 of aiding terrorism by smuggling information from an imprisoned client to his violent followers in Egypt, back to a trial judge to determine whether she should receive more than her 28-month sentence. Experts in national security law said the Ressam decision on Tuesday showed that the federal courts could handle terrorism issues, in the face of recent criticism that plea deals and defendant protections could make it difficult to convict and sentence terrorists. \u201cSome might have pointed to the relatively low sentence Ressam received as evidence that somehow civilian prosecution does not pack enough of a punch in these cases,\u201d said Robert Chesney, an expert on national security law at the University of Texas Law School. \u201cThis reversal shows that the appellate process can police for such things, to at least an extent.\u201d During two years of cooperation under his plea agreement, Mr. Ressam provided information on Al Qaeda\u2019s organization, recruitment and training, and also testified against one of his co-conspirators, Mokhtar Haouari. But he stopped working with investigators in 2003 and later recanted his previous testimony. In 2005, after a long delay, Judge John C. Coughenour of Federal District Court sentenced him to 22 years in prison with five years of supervised release. Both Mr. Ressam and the government appealed the decision, with the government asking for a tougher sentence. In 2007, the Court of Appeals struck down the 22-year sentence and sent the case back to Judge Coughenour for resentencing. But in December 2008, the judge handed down the 22-year sentence once again. The appeals court, taking up the case once more, demanded another round of resentencing, and in the opinion issued Tuesday concluded that the lower court erred in not justifying the sentence. \u201cIt is unclear what reason there is to reward a defendant at all for cooperation, at the same time that the defendant is disavowing having intended to cooperate and loudly proclaiming that his statements should not be believed,\u201d Judge Arthur L. Alarcon wrote for the majority of the panel. Judge Coughenour\u2019s previously expressed views, he wrote, \u201cappear too entrenched to allow for the appearance of fairness.\u201d In a dissent, Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez wrote that the court had overstepped its authority and should defer to lower court sentencing decisions. \u201cEven if we have to grit our teeth to do so, we should let it be,\u201d he wrote. Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has tried terrorism cases and who has been critical of the Obama administration\u2019s decision to try terrorism suspects in civilian courts, said Mr. Ressam\u2019s case was one that was properly channeled through the criminal justice system \u2014 especially since he was arrested in 1999, before the Sept. 11 attacks and thus before Congress passed the authorization for the use of military force that put the nation on a war footing. Mr. McCarthy said defendants facing life sentences might be happy to take a deal at first, but after years of being asked for additional information and testimony might ask, \u201cWhen does this ever end?\u201d But, Mr. McCarthy said, \u201cThe fact is, it never ends \u2014 because it\u2019s very valuable to get out from under a life sentence.\u201d", "keyword": "Ressam Ahmed;Terrorism;Sentences (Criminal);Appeals Courts (US);Los Angeles (Calif)"}
{"id": "ny0068427", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/12/19", "title": "Fantasy Football: Week 16 Player Tiers", "abstract": "In this statistical model, I apply a clustering algorithm called the Gaussian mixture model to an aggregation of expert ranking data provided by Fantasypros.com . The algorithm finds natural tiers and clusters within the data. The charts that result visualize the tiers and help you decide your starting lineup each week. Quarterback Matt Ryan was off to a slow start this season. But after three consecutive games of 300 passing yards and two touchdowns, experts have him back in Tier 2 this week against New Orleans. This is a rare week where Peyton Manning (Tier 2) is not in the top tier. Unlike Ryan, Manning has been off his game in the last three weeks, averaging only 195 yards in that stretch. Most teams should still be starting Manning, though. Fantasy Football: Tiered Player Ranking Charts Charts resulting from a statistical algorithm find natural tiers and clusters within fantasy football player ranking data. Running Back C.J. Anderson breaks into Tier 1 this week facing Cincinnati, who have been better defending the pass than the run. Anderson has been running so well that Manning\u2019s numbers have suffered. Arian Foster is also in Tier 1, where he arguably should normally be as long as he\u2019s healthy. Mark Ingram has averaged 13.5 touches and 51 yards in the last two weeks. But after a few weeks of ranking in the middle tiers, Ingram is back up to Tier 2, facing a helpless Atlanta defense. Tre Mason (Tier 3) has also been cold the last two weeks, but most expect him to bounce back against the Giants this week. Daniel Herron (Tier 5) has been filling in well for the injured Ahmad Bradshaw. Herron significantly outclasses Trent Richardson (Tier 9), who he\u2019s splitting carries with. Wide Receiver Odell Beckham Jr. is now a lock for Tier 1 status, with 509 yards and six touchdowns over the last four weeks. Despite Jimmy Clausen starting at quarterback and a tough matchup against Detroit, Alshon Jeffery ranks in Tier 3. Jeffery\u2019s fantasy value is benefitting greatly from an injured Brandon Marshal. Julio Jones (Tier 3) is questionable as of Thursday, but watch his status and he should be starting on most fantasy teams if he plays. Josh Gordon has not lived up to his WR1 status from last year, and is in Tier 5 this week coming off a season-low four catches. Tight End Jimmy Graham has been struggling a bit with shoulder issues and played on only 65 percent of snaps last week, but he\u2019s too talented to sit. He\u2019s still likely to score more than anyone besides Rob Gronkowski and Greg Olsen. Both of the Colts tight ends, Dwayne Allen and Coby Fleener, rank in Tier 3 this week, as both have been running passing routes. The Colts are expected to be in a shootout against the Cowboys, in the highest projected scoring game of the week at 55.5 points, according to Vegas. Tiers 5 and 6 are very close, but if you\u2019re in the championship game, the chances are this is not relevant to you.", "keyword": "Football;Fantasy sport;Odell Beckham Jr.;Matt Ryan"}
{"id": "ny0249267", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2011/05/13", "title": "Federer Falls in Rome", "abstract": "Roger Federer \u2019s French Open preparation hit a roadblock with a 4-6, 7-6 (2), 7-6 (4) loss to Richard Gasquet in the third round of the Italian Open in Rome. Novak Djokovic extended his winning streak to 36 matches with a 6-4, 6-1 win over 14th-seeded Stanislas Wawrinka. Top-seeded Rafael Nadal considered withdrawing, but overcame a virus to beat Feliciano Lopez, 6-4, 6-2.", "keyword": "Tennis;Federer Roger;Gasquet Richard;Djokovic Novak"}
{"id": "ny0057302", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/09/30", "title": "U.S. and Philippines Hold Joint Military Exercises", "abstract": "SUBIC BAY, Philippines \u2014 Joint military exercises between the United States Navy and its Philippine counterpart kicked off on Monday in Palawan, the island closest to contested areas of the South China Sea. The war games, involving thousands of sailors and marines, will go on for 11 days at the former United States naval base at Subic Bay, which is now a commercial port, as well as in other areas in the northern and western part of the country. Such exercises between the United States and its former colony have been taking place since 1954 but are now being conducted amid a tense dispute over islets and rocky outcroppings in the South China Sea claimed by both the Philippines and China. The Philippines has filed a case with a United Nations arbitration panel seeking to stop China from occupying the areas in the South China Sea. China claims most of the South China Sea, and the Philippine government has released aerial photos purportedly showing Chinese reclamation of land to build islands and runways in the disputed areas. In April, the United States and the Philippines signed an agreement to expand military cooperation that would involve stationing American military ships, planes and troops in the country on a rotating basis. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement would allow the Philippine armed forces, among the weakest in Southeast Asia, to bolster their maritime security in coordination with the advanced capabilities of the United States military. Three petitions have been filed with the Philippine Supreme Court, by labor and other groups, seeking to declare the agreement unconstitutional. The Philippine Constitution prohibits the establishment of foreign bases in the country unless they are approved by a Senate treaty. The April agreement was undertaken by executive action and was not presented to congress. The government has responded that the new United States military facilities will not be fixed bases and are not covered by the treaty requirement. The public affairs office of the Philippines\u2019 Department of National Defense declined on Monday to comment on the status of the agreement while it is being considered by the Supreme Court. There is no temporary restraining order that would block the agreement, but according to one defense analyst, the government is holding off on implementation for now. \u201cAccording to the defense officials I have spoken to, they want to resolve the constitutional issues in court first, before implementation,\u201d said Renato Cruz De Castro, an international studies professor at Manila\u2019s De La Salle University, who specializes in the strategic relationship between the United States and the Philippines. It is not clear when the Supreme Court might hear the case, although Mr. De Castro estimated it could be within a few months. In other high-profile cases, including one involving contraception for poor women that faced multiple court challenges, the Supreme Court ruled in less than a year. Those who oppose the agreement, and the war games, say that the increased United States military activity in the Philippines inflames the situation in the South China Sea. \u201cFor over three decades now, the U.S. and the Philippines have conducted the annual war games supposedly to improve our nation\u2019s military prowess,\u201d said Terry Ridon, a Philippine congressman who opposes the agreement. \u201cYet our armed forces remain weak and out of step from modernity. The promised benefits of the annual military exercises have yet to be seen, but now we have E.D.C.A., which will allow for unhampered military presence in the country.\u201d The exercises that began Monday include about 5,000 sailors and marines from the two countries, who will practice working together on humanitarian activities, such as disaster response, as well as military procedures, including beach assaults. The U.S.S. Peleliu and the U.S.S. Germantown, ships used for beach assaults, are in Subic Bay for the exercises. The U.S.S. Halsey, a guided missile destroyer, also arrived on Monday for a routine port call.", "keyword": "US Military;Philippines;China;South China Sea;Military Bases;International relations"}
{"id": "ny0290156", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/01/17", "title": "Young Republicans in New York", "abstract": "On a recent Wednesday evening, a young woman wandered, alone, into the dimly lighted basement of the Penny Farthing, a bar in the East Village, and cautiously asked one of the few people there, Jen Saunders, 36, if she was a Republican. She nodded; the woman looked relieved. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like we\u2019re a secret society,\u201d Ms. Saunders said later, laughing. Soon enough, the group swelled to around 60 for the New York Young Republican Club\u2019s monthly social. It was an informal, meet-and-greet-style networking event with political undertones, as strangers in suits mingled and debated candidates over drinks. (Other subjects overheard during the happy hour: Barry Goldwater, and the New York Jets.) The millennials (members\u2019 ages ranged from about 18 to 40) who turned out know they are not typical New Yorkers. According to recent Board of Elections data , of the 8.4 million residents of New York City, the number of registered Republican voters hovers just over 470,000 \u2014 compared with 3.1 million Democrats. The state is undeniably blue: In 2012, nearly 63 percent of New York voters chose President Barack Obama, and in New York City his re-election tally was even higher . Interviews with a dozen or so members of the club, the oldest Young Republicans chapter in the country, made it clear that being so outnumbered can pose serious challenges. Some believe that they have ruined job interviews by disclosing their Republican leanings; others said they lie about their political beliefs to avoid confrontation. Out of fear of retribution in their industries, several members refused to be interviewed or would give only their first name. Image Joseph Pinion, 32, works in the nonprofit sector and supports Jeb Bush. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times One attendee, Andy, 30, said he had lost friends after \u201ccoming out\u201d as conservative. \u201cWhen I told my mom,\u201d he recalled, \u201cshe said, \u2018I failed you as a mother.\u2019\u201d This presidential race brings to this group another complication: Donald J. Trump, New York Republican. While the club waits until the general election to endorse the Republican Party\u2019s nominee, many in attendance expressed frustration with Mr. Trump\u2019s status as front-runner and voiced concern as to what the 69-year-old billionaire businessman\u2019s candidacy could do to their party\u2019s political brand come November. \u201cI\u2019m very worried about it,\u201d said Ms. Saunders, who works as a publicist and handles public relations for the club. \u201cWhen people ask me at work about him, I tell them he doesn\u2019t represent all of us.\u201d Ms. Saunders, who comes from a \u201cbig family of conservatives\u201d in Connecticut, described herself as a libertarian and an atheist. She was involved with the College Republicans as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked for Republican politicians in the past \u2014 which is something she has stopped telling employers. Image Jaime Sanders, 28, who is currently running for Congress in Brooklyn\u2019s 9th District. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times \u201cWe\u2019re normal, middle-of-the-road people,\u201d she said. \u201cTrump is pushing this stereotype of Republicans, that we\u2019re all wearing camo and hunting deer, or men smoking cigars and drinking Scotch.\u201d Now that former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York has left the race, Ms. Saunders said, she is inclined to support Senator Marco Rubio of Florida or Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. If Mr. Trump is her party\u2019s nominee, she said, she would consider voting for Hillary Clinton. \u201cBut only if she moves a little bit back to the right,\u201d Ms. Saunders added. Steven Ballew, a student at Brooklyn Law School, said Mr. Trump\u2019s hometown credentials did not affect his vote. \u201cI\u2019m from a middle-class family on Staten Island,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo coming from a rich family in Queens doesn\u2019t do much for me.\u201d Instead, he believes that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Mr. Rubio, who are both Latinos in their mid-40s, are the \u201ctwo best ideological spokespersons\u201d for the party. Image Alexandra Fasulo, 22, a freelance writer and Carly Fiorina supporter. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times \u201cBecause of Trump, you have people saying, \u2018That\u2019s what the Republican Party is,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Ballew, 24, said. \u201cIt\u2019s not. \u201cA lot of younger Republicans are not for him. He\u2019s not an ideological purist; he\u2019s a firebrand. And that resonates less with people my age.\u201d Therein lies a conundrum for the Republican Party. Data from the Pew Research Center shows an incoming generation of voters that is more culturally liberal, and demographically diverse, than any previous age group. For many younger Republicans, their libertarian-leaning stances on social issues , such as abortion and gay rights, have made them outsiders in their own party. \u201cShow me someone under the age of 30 who is against same-sex marriage,\u201d said Alexandra Fasulo, 22, who during her time at the State University of New York in Geneseo worked as a social media intern for Republican representatives in Albany. \u201cIt\u2019s tough! \u201cI have friends who are Muslim. I have friends who are black, and Latino,\u201d she continued. \u201cFor me, I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like for them to hear what Trump has to say.\u201d Image Steven Ballew, 24, studies at Brooklyn Law School and supports Sen. Marco Rubio. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times Even on gun control, members seemed more willing to break from their party\u2019s common ideology. \u201cWe grew up with Columbine and Sandy Hook in the news,\u201d Ms. Saunders said. \u201cSo we\u2019re a bit more open-minded on these topics.\u201d In the crowded Republican field, which, Ms. Fasulo pointed out, includes 10 men and one woman, she sees trouble. \u201cI\u2019ve been worried about the party\u2019s future long before Trump,\u201d she acknowledged. \u201cEven when I worked in Albany, it was all men.\u201d Her support lies with the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, \u201ceven though I know she doesn\u2019t stand a chance,\u201d she said. If Mr. Trump is the eventual nominee, she said she will vote for him. \u201cHe plays the game, ruthlessly,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he plays the game.\u201d Just after 10 p.m., the social came to an end and the crowd shuffled upstairs. With less than a month until the Iowa caucuses, the polls were not to be trusted, members said. And though the New York primary in April tends to have little impact on the race\u2019s outcome, the nomination, in their minds, is still up for grabs. \u201cThey say in New York you have to be a strong conservative, because you live in such a liberal city,\u201d said Joseph Pinion, 32, a Bronx native who supports former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. \u201cBut it\u2019s the same thing nationally, for our party: In tested conditions, we have to hold tested convictions.\u201d", "keyword": "Republicans;NYC;Youth;2016 Presidential Election;Donald Trump;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0273898", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/05/25", "title": "Florida Democratic Race Echoes Top of Ticket: Progressive vs. Establishment", "abstract": "Two years after a little-known college professor pulled off a stunning upset by defeating the House majority leader, Eric Cantor , in a Republican primary contest, another obscure professor is hoping to replicate that feat in Florida, riding a wave of progressive fervor that seeks to upend the Democratic Party\u2019s leadership. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, frustrated by how he has been treated by Democratic Party officials in his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, bolstered that effort over the weekend when he endorsed Tim Canova , a law professor at Nova Southeastern University. Mr. Canova is hoping to unseat Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, in a primary contest in August. The support of Mr. Sanders led to an infusion of more than $250,000 into Mr. Canova\u2019s campaign in less than two days, arming him for a more vigorous fight against the veteran congresswoman. \u201cShe\u2019s certainly out of touch with the grass-roots of the Democratic Party,\u201d Mr. Canova, 56, said of Ms. Wasserman Schultz in an interview. \u201cShe has been a very out-of-touch political insider and she has not been representing her constituents well.\u201d The contest is in many ways a microcosm of the national Democratic race, in which an insurgent progressive candidate is taking on an establishment figure, mirroring the debate occurring within the party across the country. Mr. Canova, who has never run for political office before, was once a legislative aide to former Senator Paul Tsongas, the Democrat from Massachusetts. He went on to practice law, fighting to strengthen he Glass-Steagall Act, before shifting to academia and settling in South Florida in 2012. He was active in the Occupy Wall Street movement and was tapped by Mr. Sanders to serve on an advisory committee on Federal Reserve changes after the financial crisis. Sensing that Ms. Wasserman Schultz was vulnerable, Mr. Canova embarked on his campaign in January and has now raised more than $1 million. These days he often echoes Mr. Sanders as he rails against the influence of big money in politics and predatory lending practices while calling for more government action to improve the nation\u2019s infrastructure. There is even a green banner on his campaign website that reads \u201cJOIN THE REVOLUTION\u201d \u2014 a favorite rallying cry of Mr. Sanders. As Mr. Sanders has done to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Canova expressed doubts about whether Ms. Wasserman Schultz is a true progressive. He criticized her for supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and opposing the use of medical marijuana, and accused her of allowing corporate money to have excess influence in the Democratic Party. \u201cThis is a party that has gone way too corporate in recent years,\u201d Mr. Canova said. \u201cIt\u2019s turned its back on the working class.\u201d Mr. Canova is also unimpressed with the performance of Ms. Wasserman Schultz on the national stage. He accused her of struggling to keep the party together and showing favoritism to Mrs. Clinton, whose progressive credentials he also questions. \u201cShe has been very divisive,\u201d Mr. Canova said of his Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who has not faced a primary challenger since being elected to Congress in 2004. \u201cIf the Democrats are able to unify at the convention, apparently it will not be because of her. It will be in spite of her.\u201d A spokesman for Ms. Wasserman Schultz\u2019s campaign, Ryan Banfill, pushed back against Mr. Canova and said that her constituents know that she is \u201ca compassionate and effective voice who has always been there for them and provided strong, results-oriented, progressive leadership at home.\u201d He also noted that in the Florida primary Mrs. Clinton outperformed Mr. Sanders in the 23rd Congressional District, which Ms. Wasserman Schultz represents, suggesting that Mr. Canova faces a steep uphill battle. Mr. Canova acknowledged that Ms. Wasserman Schultz holds advantages over him in fund-raising and name recognition, but he has faith in the campaign playbook of Mr. Sanders. With a robust social media strategy, a flood of small donations and a growing team of volunteers, Mr. Canova thinks he can win in a district that is reliably Democratic. And the recent history of the Republicans adds to his optimism. \u201cLook at what happened two years ago to Eric Cantor losing to a college professor,\u201d Mr. Canova said. \u201cWhen any long shot candidate goes up against an entrenched incumbent there are usually grass-roots movements that these challenges are riding.\u201d", "keyword": "Timothy A Canova;House races;Congressional elections;Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders;2016 Presidential Election;Political endorsement;DNC;Democrats;Debbie Wasserman Schultz;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0032267", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/12/04", "title": "Illinois Legislature Approves Retiree Benefit Cuts in Troubled Pension System", "abstract": "SPRINGFIELD, Ill. \u2014 The Illinois legislature on Tuesday ended a day of emotional debate and fierce back-room arm-twisting by passing a deal to shore up the state\u2019s debt-engulfed pension system by trimming retiree benefits and increasing state contributions. With one of the nation\u2019s worst-financed state employee pension systems \u2014 some $100 billion in arrears \u2014 Illinois has been the focus of intense attention across the country as states and municipalities struggle to come to grips with their own public pension problems. The compromise reached in Illinois, a staunchly blue state with a strong labor movement that had successfully resisted previous efforts to trim pensions, could provide a template for agreements elsewhere. The top leaders of both legislative houses, Democrats and Republicans, had cobbled together the bill and pushed strenuously for its passage, supported by the state Chamber of Commerce and the Illinois Farm Bureau. Union leaders and some Democratic lawmakers opposed it, just as strenuously, arguing that the bill fell too harshly on state workers who had paid into their pension plans over the years with the understanding that the benefits would be there when they retired. Some Republicans also opposed the bill, saying it did not trim enough to solve the state\u2019s pension troubles. \u201cToday, we have won,\u201d Gov. Pat Quinn, who made overhauling the pension system a focus of his administration, said in a statement after the vote. \u201cThis landmark legislation is a bipartisan solution that squarely addresses the most difficult fiscal issue Illinois has ever confronted.\u201d He is expected to sign the legislation on Wednesday. We Are One Illinois, a coalition of labor unions that opposed the bill, issued a very different assessment. \u201cThis is no victory for Illinois,\u201d it said in a statement, \u201cbut a dark day for its citizens and public servants.\u201d The battle now turns to the courts, where union leaders have promised to take the legislation. Some opponents have asserted that it violates the State Constitution by illegally lowering pension benefits. Image Representative Elaine Nekritz of Northbrook. Credit Seth Perlman/Associated Press The plan\u2019s architects said it will generate $90 billion to $100 billion in savings by curtailing cost-of-living increases for retirees, offering an optional 401(k) plan for those willing to leave the pension system, capping the salary level used to calculate pension benefits and raising the retirement age for younger workers, in some cases by five years. In exchange, workers were to see their pension contributions drop by 1 percent. The measure also calls for the state to increase state payments into the system by $60 billion to $70 billion. The legislature opened late Tuesday morning, and almost immediately recessed so both parties could go into closed-door caucus and leaders could count votes. The fruit of those efforts became clear through the afternoon, as the measure passed by 30 to 24 in the Senate, with three members voting \u201cpresent,\u201d and in the House by 62 to 53, with one voting \u201cpresent.\u201d In both chambers, the debate was fiercely emotional. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult work we have to do and a difficult vote we have to take,\u201d said State Senator Kwame Raoul, a Chicago Democrat who was a co-chairman of the conference committee that passed the legislation. \u201cWe cannot continue to be the embarrassment of the nation.\u201d There was no cheering or celebration when the bill passed in the Senate. \u201cI don\u2019t take any joy in this action today,\u201d said Representative Elaine Nekritz, a supporter of the legislation. \u201cBut it is the responsible thing to provide for a pension system that gives workers retirement security without bankrupting our state.\u201d Opponents were even more emphatic. \u201cThis is more than a vote, this is defining the future of American workers,\u201d said Senator William Delgado, a Democrat. \u201cThis is morally corrupt. We are robbing the benefits of these hard-working people.\u201d The break in the negotiations came last week when the Democratic and Republican leaders in the legislature ended months of wrangling and agreed on a plan that they said would save $160 billion and erase the state\u2019s pension debt by 2044. It was the first time that top leaders from both parties had been able to reach a deal. Negotiations had been particularly difficult in a state with a strong labor tradition. And Mr. Quinn, a Democrat, was also under pressure put the matter to rest before next year\u2019s election. Image Senator William Delgado of Chicago voiced his views. Credit Seth Perlman/Associated Press The vote on Tuesday came one day after the deadline for candidates to file to run for state office in next year\u2019s primary, so legislators could know whether they faced a primary opponent. Democrats hold a solid majority in the State Senate. Many states have already voted to trim pension payments and make other adjustments to address skyrocketing retirement costs, but Illinois had thus far avoided doing so, with unions arguing that members should not be punished for mismanagement of the fund. Meanwhile, its pension mess got steadily worse, helping give Illinois the lowest credit rating of any state. Opposition to the plan rose swiftly, particularly from union leaders who found it too draconian. But two of the governor\u2019s Republican challengers also denounced the deal, as too lenient. The state Chamber of Commerce also said it preferred even stronger measures to trim back state pensions. \u201cThe truth is that the savings in this bill are both insufficient and will make true, comprehensive reform more difficult,\u201d said one challenger, Bruce Rauner, a wealthy business executive. Another challenger, the state treasurer, Dan Rutherford, said Monday that he also opposed the bill and that he did not believe it would survive a court challenge. Facing them in next year\u2019s Republican primary will be State Senator Bill Brady, who supported the bill, and State Senator Kirk Dillard, who said that he would oppose the legislation. Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, whose city has retirement issues of its own \u2014 payments to the local pension fund are expected to more than double to almost $1.1 billion starting in 2015 \u2014 said he hoped the compromise would provide a template for Chicago, as well. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Emanuel said \u201cthe work is far from finished.\u201d \u201cThe pension crisis is not truly solved until relief is brought to Chicago and all of the other local governments across our state that are standing on the brink of a fiscal cliff because of our pension liabilities,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Pensions and Retirement Plans;State legislature;Illinois;Civil service"}
{"id": "ny0125115", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/08/16", "title": "Red Sox\u2019 Latest Turmoil Centers on Valentine \u2014 Leading Off", "abstract": "With everything that changes each season in baseball, it is nice to have a constant, a touchstone that reminds you what era one is in. To that end, the Red Sox are performing a public service, their dysfunction so consistent that it is almost comforting. Only the details change, from booing Nomar Garciaparra out of town to Manny being Manny to fried chicken and beer to whatever has popped out of Bobby Valentine\u2019s mouth today. The latest brouhaha involves the Red Sox players running to management for a meeting to vent their anger at Valentine, Jeff Passan has reported on Yahoo.com, which earns them some extra credit because full-scale mutiny had not yet been on the franchise\u2019s list of greatest hits. Second baseman Dustin Pedroia responded to the news by claiming the players did not ask for Valentine to be fired (but did they beg?) and everyone was backtracking and trying to make it sound as if players meet with owners over coffee all the time to complain about the manager. Didn\u2019t the Yankees text George Steinbrenner all the time? No? The Red Sox players certainly seem to be staying in character in this episode, but as John Tomase writes in The Boston Herald , Valentine has certainly precipitated this with his penchant for unwise comments. Of course, unwise comments are pretty much the top line of Valentine\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9, so it did not require tarot cards to see this coming. The rest of baseball isn\u2019t nearly so colorful, but it is humming toward the playoff race stretch drive. The Yankees added a shutout victory over the Rangers, although the Rangers still look like awfully strong contenders, writes Joe Lemire on SI.com . In the National League, the Nationals are mired in the debate over shutting down Stephen Strasburg, but Thomas Boswell argues in The Washington Post that it proves the franchise is serious, and confident about its future. The N.F.L., meanwhile, is all about being a serious business, which is why receiver Chad Johnson is out looking for another job. Not only did the Dolphins cut him, but his wife, Evelyn Lozada, has filed for divorce after accusing him of head-butting her. The whole fiasco might end up being a boon for the Dolphins\u2019 new head coach, Joe Philbin, Don Banks writes on SI.com , and it is certainly doing wonders for HBO\u2019s \u201cHard Knocks\u201d series, which is on hand to show all the fireworks . Maybe after they are done with the Dolphins, those cameras can follow Gregg Williams, the disgraced defensive coordinator, as he tries to keep in touch with the game while hoping for reinstatement by the league, as Jason LaCanfora writes on CBSSports.com . There are certainly enough cameras on Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, who has a photo shoot in GQ magazine , which people will go nutty over for whatever reason suits them. Mexico has a chance Wednesday night to go nutty over its national team, which will flex its superior muscles in an exhibition game against the United States, writes Jeff Carlisle on ESPN.com . Mexico\u2019s leap ahead in this rivalry, however, will only help the United States in the long run because the Americans will have to respond, writes Grant Wahl on SI.com . The strangest soccer story of the day, however, is the one about the Russian soccer player/drug smuggler imprisoned in Chile who has turned his fate into a soccer career there . That\u2019s a story you likely have not read before, unlike everything the Red Sox seem to come up with. Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt", "keyword": "Baseball;Boston Red Sox;Valentine Bobby;Johnson Chad;Williams Gregg;Philbin Joe;Strasburg Stephen;Washington Nationals"}
{"id": "ny0266002", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2016/03/29", "title": "Jill Abramson, Former New York Times Editor, to Write Guardian Column", "abstract": "Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, will formally join The Guardian as a political columnist, the newspaper said Monday. Ms. Abramson, who has written articles for The Guardian about the American elections in recent weeks, will write biweekly as part of its coverage of the presidential race this year. \u201cFor over 40 years, Jill has been a trailblazer for women in journalism, and brings an unparalleled knowledge of the relationship between politics and the media in the U.S.,\u201d Lee Glendinning, editor of Guardian US, said in a statement. \u201cWe\u2019re delighted to add her experience, depth and gravitas to our distinct take on this fascinating election.\u201d Ms. Abramson was dismissed from The Times in the spring of 2014, after less than three years in its top job. She had previously served as managing editor for eight years.", "keyword": "Newspaper;Jill Abramson"}
{"id": "ny0168336", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2006/01/25", "title": "Ford Ad Draws Criticism Even Before It Is Shown", "abstract": "DETROIT, Jan. 24 - On Monday, William Clay Ford Jr., chief executive of Ford Motor, made his case to employees, analysts and the media for how his company could survive. On Wednesday, he starts making that case to consumers. Whether they will buy it is another issue. In a new television commercial Ford timed for broadcast just two days after it said it would close as many as 14 factories and cut up to 30,000 jobs over the next six years, Mr. Ford says his company is \"determined to retake the American roadway.\" The ad, titled \"Rebirth,\" echoes much of the restructuring plan that Mr. Ford presented on Monday and candidly acknowledges the company's recent difficulties. Details of the plan continued to unfold Tuesday as Ford shook up its top management ranks. Its chief marketing and sales executive, Stephen G. Lyons, and its head of investor relations, Barbara L. Gasper, will both leave the company, Ford said. Ford also eliminated four corporate officer positions and shuffled other high-ranking managers. Anne Stevens, Ford's chief operating officer, said in an interview that if Ford was to overcome the perception it was not doing enough to address its problems, candor was the best way to do that. \"We recognize the reality of the marketplace,\" she said. \"We're fighting to win, and that's what we're going to do. This is not the time to hide.\" The 30-second commercial will appear on national television and in some select markets, including Detroit, New York and Washington, during the next three months. But analysts said the commercial, intended as a marketing component of its restructuring plan, was risky because it reminds consumers of Ford's problems even as it asks them to buy Ford vehicles. \"What they're trying to say is, we have problems, but we're trying to innovate our way out of our problems,\" said Jack Trout, president of the marketing firm Trout & Partners in Greenwich, Conn. \"But the next question is, show me the innovation. And that will make or break Ford. I think it's very important for them to come up with some good product to talk about.\" Clive Chajet, president of the Chajet Consultancy, a brand-imaging firm in New York, said the new advertisement shifted focus away from Ford's brands and placed it on the automaker's problems. \"I don't think people care about a corporation so much as they care about the car they drive,\" he said. \"Consumers want to hear about the brand, how much it costs, how many miles per gallon it gets and the features. Focusing on their problems cannot avoid sounding defensive.\" This is not the first time that Mr. Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, has taken up the role of company spokesman. His first starring role in Ford commercials was in 2002, shortly after he became chief executive and began his first corporate turnaround plan. Those ads, titled \"Ford on Ford,\" featured Mr. Ford talking about his family's imprint on American culture. Most recently, Mr. Ford has appeared in a series of ads that began last fall and that focus on the company's safety and hybrid technologies. Using an executive as a corporate spokesman works well only when the executive fits the image of the company, said Andrew Gershoff, a professor of marketing at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. \"The decision to use the C.E.O. shouldn't just be about, let's get the top guy to say something. It should be more about, how does this person and their personality fit with the brand image we are trying to convey?\" This tactic has worked for executives like Dave Thomas of Wendy's, Frank Perdue of Perdue Farms (\"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken\") and Victor Kiam of Remington, who said in commercials that he liked Remington's shaver so much, he bought the company. In Detroit, the quintessential executive pitchman is the former Chrysler chairman, Lee A. Iacocca, who famously said in ads in the 1980's, \"If you can find a better car, buy it.\" The success of the new Ford commercial hinges largely on the extent to which consumers see Mr. Ford as someone who, like Mr. Iacocca, can rebuild a troubled automaker. \"He can take advantage of the fact that we might be able to think about him representing the history of the Ford Motor Company, and that might make him a more trustworthy source than any other Ford C.E.O.,\" Mr. Gershoff said. While Mr. Ford's blood ties to the company may work as an asset, his stewardship of the company during times of financial distress may work against him, analysts said. \"I can think of no one who is more associated with management than Bill Ford,\" Mr. Chajet said. \"So why would you choose the person most responsible to be the spokesman?\"", "keyword": "DETROIT (MICH);FORD MOTOR CO;FORD WILLIAM CLAY JR;REFORM AND REORGANIZATION"}
{"id": "ny0276913", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/11/03", "title": "Black Church Burned in Mississippi, With \u2018Vote Trump\u2019 Scrawled on Side", "abstract": "GREENVILLE, Miss. \u2014 A predominantly African-American church here was badly burned on Tuesday evening, with the words \u201cVote Trump\u201d spray-painted on the side of the building, an episode that comes amid rising concerns over possible violence in the final days of a polarizing and racially charged presidential race. Mayor Errick D. Simmons of Greenville said that firefighters, responding to a call around 9:15 p.m., discovered the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church \u201cengulfed in flames.\u201d Fire Chief Ruben Brown said the blaze took about an hour to fully extinguish. The church sanctuary was heavily damaged by heat, fire and smoke, he said. By Wednesday evening, Mr. Brown said investigators had concluded that the fire was \u201cdefinitely arson\u201d after discovering \u201csome type of solvent or flammable substance\u201d inside. And Police Chief Delando Wilson said a \u201cperson of interest\u201d was being interviewed by authorities \u201cto see if this person was an active participant in this crime, or to rule them out from being a participant.\u201d The 200-member church has been a fixture for more than 110 years in Greenville, a Mississippi Delta city of about 32,000. \u201cOur hearts are broken but are not angry,\u201d Carolyn Hudson, the church pastor, said at a news conference called Wednesday by city officials. \u201cBut hearts are broken, and we are saddened by what has happened.\u201d No one was injured in the attack. At the news conference, Chief Wilson said the episode was being investigated as a hate crime. \u201cWe feel that the quote that was placed on the church was basically, it\u2019s an intimidation of someone\u2019s right to vote whatever way they choose to vote,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that would be definitely considered a hate crime.\u201d But \u201cas far it being a racial issue,\u201d he added, \u201cI can\u2019t say that.\u201d The F.B.I. office in Jackson, the state capital, released a brief statement saying that it was \u201cworking with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to determine if any civil rights crimes were committed.\u201d The state fire marshal and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also assisting with the investigation. Mississippi\u2019s secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, said Wednesday that he had been in contact with \u201cauthorities in Greenville\u201d and the state Highway Patrol about the attack. Those discussions led him to believe that the burning and vandalism were not committed by \u201csomebody of a political nature,\u201d he said. \u201cThe initial work here indicates this is not of a political nature even though there may be something that says \u2018Vote Trump\u2019 on the side of the church,\u201d said Mr. Hosemann, a Republican. \u201cSo everybody needs to calm down here until we get to the bottom of this.\u201d Image Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives surveyed the damage on Wednesday. Credit Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press In a Wednesday evening phone interview including the mayor, the fire chief and the police chief, Mr. Simmons said none of them had been in contact with Mr. Hosemann or his staff about the matter. Mr. Wilson said investigators were keeping all possible motives on the table. The attack occurred a little more than two weeks after a local Republican headquarters in Hillsborough, N.C., was firebombed , and graffiti were discovered with a swastika and the message \u201cNazi Republicans leave town or else.\u201d No one has been arrested in that attack. It also follows months of racially charged campaign speech from Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Though Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as a friend of African-Americans and has vowed to make their lives better, he has garnered the support of many white supremacists and white nationalists. Some of his supporters have darkly predicted riots and even revolution if he loses to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on Tuesday. His campaign this week disavowed support from The Crusader, a Ku Klux Klan newspaper. Mr. Trump is heavily favored to win in Mississippi, a state where about 60 percent of the population is white. At the news conference, Mayor Simmons, an African-American, called the racial climate in Greenville \u201cfairly good,\u201d though he noted a racial slur had been found painted on a boat ramp Sept. 11. Like much of the Mississippi Delta, Greenville has struggled economically and has worked to overcome the legacy of slavery. In the mid-20th century, as African-Americans struggled to integrate the Deep South, church bombings were among the ugliest acts of retaliation by recalcitrant white racists. Greenville today is about 20 percent white and 78 percent black, and the public schools are virtually all black. But Mr. Simmons noted that blacks and whites now pray together every fifth Sunday as part of an event he created. The mayor said he visited church members Wednesday. \u201cI talked to folks who were fearful,\u201d he said. \u201cI talked to people who were intimidated. I talked to people who, quite frankly, were saddened and crying last night. This should not happen in 2016. It happened in the \u201950s. It happened in the \u201960s. But we\u2019re in 2016.\u201d In a separate phone interview on Wednesday, the mayor said race relations in the city had not really changed with the rise of Mr. Trump. But he blamed the Republican candidate for coarsening the national mood, and said extremists were using his remarks \u201cas an excuse to show their true colors.\u201d Also on Wednesday, about three dozen people gathered in a park along the Greenville waterfront to pray and speak about healing and the primacy of faith over politics. Joining a Methodist preacher, an Episcopal priest and a synagogue president in the cool of the night was Alice Washington, a member of Hopewell. \u201cWe had good church on Sunday,\u201d she said, saying it had been some time since she remembered such a good service. \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to figure out who would do something like this to our church,\u201d she said. \u201cWhoever done it, may God bless them.\u201d", "keyword": "Black People,African-Americans;Arson;Hate crime;Greenville Mississippi;church,churches;2016 Presidential Election;Donald Trump;Fires"}
{"id": "ny0105543", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/04/03", "title": "In Ohio, F.T.C. Bans ProMedica-St. Luke\u2019s Merger", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Trade Commission has blocked an Ohio hospital merger in a closely watched case that could slow the consolidation of health care providers around the country. In the Ohio case, the commission ruled that the merger of the ProMedica Health System and St. Luke\u2019s Hospital would \u201csubstantially lessen competition\u201d in the Toledo area, allowing the hospitals to charge higher prices. The merger, justified by the hospitals as a way to prepare for \u201c health care reform ,\u201d will probably result in \u201chigher health care costs for patients, employers and employees,\u201d the commission said. ProMedica had argued that the merger would advance the type of collaboration promoted by President Obama under the new health care law. The commission rejected this argument. The ruling serves notice that such cooperation runs the risk of being seen by regulators as anticompetitive behavior in violation of antitrust law. The 2010 health care law has prompted a frenzy of activity as hospitals buy up doctor practices or form joint ventures to coordinate care, with the prospect of earning government bonuses for controlling costs. By a 4-to-0 vote, the commission last week found the Ohio merger illegal and ordered ProMedica to sell St. Luke\u2019s within 180 days. Jeffrey C. Kuhn, the general counsel of ProMedica, said Monday that the company intended to appeal the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. In an interview, Mr. Kuhn said the merger would have \u201cno substantial impact on competition,\u201d and he added that another health care system, Catholic Health Partners, was still \u201ca formidable competitor.\u201d Thomas L. Greaney, an expert on health and antitrust law at St. Louis University, said, \u201cThis decision sends a signal, a warning, to hospitals: You will be scrutinized extremely closely if you undertake a merger with a close competitor.\u201d Melinda R. Hatton, senior vice president and general counsel of the American Hospital Association, said, \u201cThe F.T.C. decision, if upheld on appeal, could slow the pace of mergers and joint ventures needed to achieve the ambitious goals being set for health care providers by the government, employers and insurers.\u201d The commission cited internal company documents and testimony from dozens of witnesses to support its conclusion that the merger \u201cwill significantly increase ProMedica\u2019s bargaining leverage,\u201d allowing it to negotiate higher payment rates from Aetna, Humana and other insurers. Before the merger in 2010, the commission said, \u201cProMedica had by far the highest prices for general acute-care inpatient services in Lucas County,\u201d which includes Toledo, and its rates were among the highest in Ohio. By contrast, the agency said, rates at St. Luke\u2019s were the lowest in the county. The commission analyzed the market for general inpatient hospital services in Lucas County. The merger would reduce the number of competitors to three from four, it said, and the combined entity would control 58 percent of the market. Concentration in the market for inpatient obstetrical services would be even greater because the merger would reduce the number of competitors to two from three, and the combined entity would control 80.5 percent of the market, the commission said. In its decision, the agency cited testimony by Prof. Robert J. Town, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania, who estimated that prices would increase by 38 percent at St. Luke\u2019s Hospital and by 11 percent at other ProMedica hospitals in Lucas County. \u201cSt. Luke\u2019s clearly anticipated that its rates would increase,\u201d the commission said, and \u201cProMedica\u2019s superior negotiating clout with managed care organizations was among the primary reasons St. Luke\u2019s joined the ProMedica system.\u201d Explaining the decision, Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the commission, said: \u201cHospitals are a big driver of health costs. No matter what happens in the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act \u2014 and I hope it is upheld \u2014 competition will play a vital role in ensuring that health costs don\u2019t continue to rise as fast as they have in the past.\u201d", "keyword": "Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues;Federal Trade Commission;St Luke's Hospital (Maumee Ohio);ProMedica Health System;Toledo (Ohio);Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010);Health Insurance and Managed Care"}
{"id": "ny0256676", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/08/06", "title": "Immigration Officials to Continue Fingerprint Sharing Program", "abstract": "Federal immigration officials announced Friday that they were terminating the joint agreements with state and local governments that have been at the center of a controversy surrounding a national fingerprint-sharing program, although they said they would continue setting up the program unilaterally. In a letter to 40 governors and local officials who had signed the agreements, John Morton , the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement , said the change was intended to eliminate widespread confusion, which has plagued the program since its kickoff in 2008, over whether the agreements were necessary to initiate it. The move also seemed intended to remove political pressure from local officials who felt uneasy about appearing to collaborate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement. The decision was met with a chorus of angry criticism from immigrant groups. More than 200 immigrant advocacy groups recently signed a letter demanding that the Obama administration suspend the program until changes are made to ensure that illegal immigrants who are not criminals are not deported. But Friday\u2019s move made clear that the administration had no intention of suspending or even slowing the pace of the program. The agreements, called memorandums of agreement, laid out the guidelines for setting up the program, known as Secure Communities , which is being rolled out across the country and is scheduled to be in effect nationwide by 2013. Under the program, a cornerstone of the Obama administration\u2019s enforcement strategy, the fingerprints of everyone booked into a local or county jail are automatically sent to the Department of Homeland Security and compared with prints in the agency\u2019s files, which record immigration violations. Immigration officials insist that the program is intended to identify and deport the most serious noncitizen criminals as well as those who threaten national security. But critics have argued that the program has resulted in the deportations of a disproportionate number of foreigners guilty only of low-level offenses, like traffic infractions, or immigration violations. This year, the governors of Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, in the belief that Secure Communities was voluntary, announced they were suspending or canceling their participation in the program. But since at least last fall, federal officials have insisted that the program was never voluntary and could be carried out across the country without the consent of local or state officials. In a letter to Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware on Friday, Mr. Morton said that his agency was canceling the agreements because it had determined that they were \u201cnot required to activate or operate Secure Communities.\u201d \u201cWe are going to bring to an end any questions about whether or not we are requiring any state involvement in immigration enforcement,\u201d a senior official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in an interview on Friday. Obama administration officials have explained that as long as local jurisdictions continue to share fingerprints with the F.B.I. \u2014 a routine procedure \u2014 then the fingerprints will automatically flow into a general federal database accessible to Homeland Security Department officials.", "keyword": "Immigration and Emigration;Immigration and Customs Enforcement (US);Morton John;Deportation;Illegal Immigrants"}
{"id": "ny0193322", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2009/02/25", "title": "House Backs Ban on Primate Sales", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (Reuters) \u2014 Prompted by the mauling of a Connecticut woman by a pet chimpanzee, the House voted 323 to 95 on Tuesday to ban interstate trade of apes and monkeys. \u201cImages of Curious George and Koko may lead us to believe that these creatures are cuddly and harmless,\u201d said Representative Nick J. Rahall II, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, referring to the famous children\u2019s book chimpanzee and a gorilla who learned sign language. \u201cBut last week\u2019s tragedy and other similar attacks stand as evidence that this is not the case \u2014 that they are in fact wild animals and they simply must not be kept as pets,\u201d said Mr. Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat. Last Tuesday, a 200-pound chimpanzee that had once starred in television commercials attacked and severely injured a woman in Stamford, Conn. The chimp was shot dead by the police. The bill would prohibit interstate sale or purchase of monkeys and apes, including chimpanzees, orangutans, marmosets and lemurs. It would have no impact on the use of primates by zoos or researchers or disabled people.", "keyword": "Monkeys and Apes;Law and Legislation;Pets"}
{"id": "ny0180058", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/31", "title": "In Response to a Rider Survey, More Trains on the 7 Line", "abstract": "Is it worth getting up 20 minutes earlier if it means your train to work will be less crowded? Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit , said yesterday that he planned to add extra trains on the No. 7 line before and after the peak commuting period, to address rider complaints about overcrowded trains. The added trains mean that if riders are willing to travel a little earlier or a little later than they currently do, they may be rewarded with a less crowded ride. The new measure, which will begin in December, was Mr. Roberts\u2019s response to a survey of riders on the No. 7 line that named overcrowding as the top priority for improvement. The survey drew 16,000 responses. Mr. Roberts has sought to project an image of greater openness to riders since he took over the transit agency in April. And he has said that the surveys, which he calls rider report cards, are a prime tool in getting to know what riders think and convincing them that they are being heard. No. 7 was the first line to be surveyed, and Mr. Roberts said he expected to complete surveys on all the lines by November. \u201cThis is our prescription,\u201d Mr. Roberts said of the survey results, which he announced yesterday at a news conference. \u201cIf we want to persuade our riders that we are making the system better, here\u2019s the road map.\u201d Mr. Roberts said that he could not add more trains during the busiest period in the morning and evening, which lasts roughly an hour, because the line was already running at capacity then. But by adding trains before and after, he said, he hoped to be able to \u201cspread the peak\u201d and change the habits of some riders. He was unable to provide details, however, about how many trains would be added or what time they would run. The additional service cannot begin until December because of union work rules on how train crews are assigned, he said. During the busiest times on the No. 7, trains arrive about every two minutes at express stations. Mr. Roberts said he would aim to reach that frequency of service during a more extended period in the morning and evening. The riders, who mailed in the surveys or submitted them online, gave overall service on the No. 7 line a C-minus. Asked about individual aspects of service, they gave the lowest mark, a D, to lack of room on the trains at rush hour. On another part of the survey, they listed overcrowding as their top priority for improvement. The riders also gave a D-plus for hard-to-understand announcements in stations and on trains and a C-minus for cleanliness. Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group, said that asking riders for their opinions was a significant change. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of unthinkable that they would have done this in the last regime,\u201d he said, referring to the survey and the response. Mr. Russianoff added: \u201cI think some people will take advantage of more frequent service on the off-peak periods. The reason people like rush hour so much, in addition to the fact that it meets their work schedule, is that the trains come so often.\u201d Mr. Roberts also said he would change the way trains are cleaned on the 7 line. Now the trains are cleaned when they arrive at the Main Street station at the end of the line in Queens. That means they accumulate trash all the way to Manhattan and back again before anyone sweeps them out. He said additional crews at Times Square, the Manhattan terminus, would clean the trains before they head back to Queens. And to address garbled announcements, he said he would have workers make daily checks of the speaker system in trains and stations and make repairs when problems are found. Asked if he was disappointed by the low marks in the survey, Mr. Roberts said he was not. \u201cThe purpose of the whole exercise is to find out what the riders think,\u201d he said. \u201cUp to this point in time we didn\u2019t know what the riders thought, and now we know.\u201d", "keyword": "New York City Transit;Transit Systems;Commuting"}
{"id": "ny0268127", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2016/03/22", "title": "James Patterson Has a Big Plan for Small Books", "abstract": "People already read James Patterson\u2019s books \u2014 and in staggering numbers. Last year, he and his team of writers had 36 books land on the New York Times best-seller list . To date, he has published 156 books that have sold more than 325 million copies worldwide. But Mr. Patterson is after an even bigger audience. He wants to sell books to people who have abandoned reading for television, video games, movies and social media. So how do you sell books to somebody who doesn\u2019t normally read? Mr. Patterson\u2019s plan: make them shorter, cheaper, more plot-driven and more widely available. In June, Mr. Patterson will test that idea with BookShots, a new line of short and propulsive novels that cost less than $5 and can be read in a single sitting. Mr. Patterson will write some of the books himself, write some with others, and hand pick the rest. He aims to release two to four books a month through Little, Brown, his publisher. All of the titles will be shorter than 150 pages, the length of a novella. Mr. Patterson said the books would be aimed at readers who might not want to invest their time in a 300- or 400-page novel. And he hopes they might even appeal to people who do not normally read at all. If it works, it could open up a big new market: According to a Pew Research Center survey released last fall , 27 percent of American adults said they had not read a book in the past year. \u201cYou can race through these \u2014 they\u2019re like reading movies,\u201d he said during a recent interview in New York. \u201cIt gives people some alternative ways to read.\u201d It could also open up new avenues for selling books, something that publishers have struggled with as big bookstore chains have closed down stores. At first, BookShots will appear in the usual venues for commercial fiction \u2014 Barnes & Noble, Amazon, big-box stores and independent bookstores \u2014 and will be available in digital and audio versions. But eventually, Mr. Patterson and his publisher want to colonize retail chains that don\u2019t normally sell books, like drugstores, grocery stores and other outlets. They envision having BookShots next to magazines in grocery store checkout lanes, or dangling from clip strips like a bag of gummy bears. \u201cThose venues are very inhospitable to traditional publishing, but we think this is a type of book that could work very well there,\u201d said Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette Book Group, which publishes Mr. Patterson\u2019s books in the United States through its Little, Brown imprint. \u201cHe has enough recognition that his name can make it work.\u201d Image James Patterson at home in Palm Beach, Fla. He is working with other writers on a series of short novels to be priced below $5. Credit Ryan Stone for The New York Times In some ways, Mr. Patterson\u2019s effort is a throwback to the dime novels and pulp fiction magazines that were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, when commercial fiction was widely available in drugstores. The category seems ripe for a modern-day revival. Many readers have already developed a taste for shorter digital works. BookShots is like an analog version of digital publishing programs like Amazon\u2019s Kindle Singles, Byliner, The Atavist or Nook Snaps, Barnes & Noble\u2019s experiment with shorter digital content. Publishers and writers have tried to engage fickle readers with bite-size digital fiction in various ways, from unbundling short stories and selling them for 99 cents apiece, to serializing novels as short, plot driven e-books. Still, no one has tried to apply the same bite-size commercial fiction model to print, at least not in a sustained way. It is tough to sell a single short story in print. And while some of the most beloved American literary classics are novella-length works \u2014 John Steinbeck\u2019s \u201cOf Mice and Men,\u201d F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d and Truman Capote\u2019s \u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u201d \u2014 the format has largely fallen out of favor with publishers, who make much of their money from hardcover books, which have higher profit margins and tend to get better store placement. \u201cLittle tiny books don\u2019t stand out in the store,\u201d Mr. Pietsch said. \u201cThey\u2019re hard to see, and they\u2019re hard to get media attention for. They\u2019re economically difficult.\u201d Hachette is betting that Mr. Patterson is famous enough to overcome those obstacles. The company is planning to publish 21 BookShots in 2016, including thrillers, science fiction, mysteries and romances. The first two, out in June, are \u201cCross Kill,\u201d a book by Mr. Patterson starring his popular recurring character Alex Cross, and \u201cZoo II,\u201d a science-fiction thriller written by Mr. Patterson and Max DiLallo. All the books will be written or partially written by Mr. Patterson, except the romances, which will be labeled \u201cJames Patterson Presents.\u201d Later this year, Mr. Patterson plans to expand BookShots to include nonfiction, with a focus on short, newsy books that play off current events. As an example, he mentioned a book pegged to the presidential election. He wouldn\u2019t elaborate on the content or reveal the author\u2019s name, but the working title makes the subject matter pretty obvious: \u201cTrump vs. Clinton.\u201d", "keyword": "James Patterson;Books;Publishing;EBooks EReaders"}
{"id": "ny0028861", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2013/01/13", "title": "French Soldier Killed in Somalia Commando Raid", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 French special forces failed early Saturday in a hostage rescue mission in southern Somalia. President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, in a brief, somber televised statement on Saturday evening, said that two French soldiers had died in the mission and that the hostage, a French intelligence officer, was \u201cassassinated\u201d by his Islamist captors despite the militants\u2019 claims that he was still alive. French officials had earlier been cautious about the fate of the hostage, an agent using the name Denis Allex, and had said that one soldier had died and another was missing. France\u2019s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, insisted that the rescue mission was unconnected to the French military action in Mali that began Friday against Islamist radicals who were threatening to seize more of that country. But Islamist groups holding up to eight French hostages in northern Africa have threatened to kill them if the French intervened militarily on the continent. Mr. Hollande called the mission in Somalia a failure and took responsibility for ordering it. Mr. Allex was taken hostage on July 14, 2009, Bastille Day, from a hotel in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, along with a colleague who later escaped. The French said the two had been working as security consultants to the transitional government in Somalia. Image Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister, at press conference in Paris on Saturday. Credit Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto Agency The rescue operation, using helicopters, was a significant one that met \u201cvery strong resistance,\u201d Mr. Le Drian said at a morning news conference. Mr. Le Drian said that Mr. Allex was in the location raided, and that 17 Shabab fighters had been killed in the operation. In a statement later Saturday, the Shabab movement said that Mr. Allex was still alive and was being held in a different place, and that they were holding an injured French soldier. The militant group \u201cwill give its final verdict\u201d regarding Mr. Allex within two days, the group said in a statement in English linked to a post on its Twitter account, but Mr. Hollande said unequivocally that he had been killed. The president did not say how he knew Mr. Allex had died. The movement also had said that the raid was carried out at about 2 a.m. by five French helicopters in the southern Somali town of Bula-Marer and that it lasted about 45 minutes. \u201cInstead of rescuing them, such ill-advised operations only further imperil the lives of the hostages,\u201d the statement said. French military officials would not confirm those details or the name of the town. Mr. Le Drian said that the rescue operation had been planned for some time and had been delayed by weather. The Defense Ministry statement justified the raid, saying, \u201cFaced with the intransigence of the terrorists, who refused to negotiate for three and a half years and who were holding Denis Allex in inhumane conditions, an operation was planned and carried out.\u201d", "keyword": "Military;France;Somalia;Francois Hollande"}
{"id": "ny0250149", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/02/11", "title": "Chibots Prepare for Debut in \u2018Heddatron\u2019", "abstract": "An hour before the start of Tuesday night\u2019s penultimate dress rehearsal, half the cast of Sideshow Theatre Company \u2019s \u201cHeddatron\u201d was making a lot of noise \u2014 lunging and stretching, their voices swooping through a range of warm-up exercises. Downstage, the cast members Billy-bot and Hans stood apart, occasionally flexing an arm or a neck joint, winking at curious onlookers and, when provoked, beeping loudly. Appearances to the contrary, Billy-bot and Hans are not divas. They are robots, preparing for their debut Friday at the Chicago premiere of Elizabeth Meriwether\u2019s dystopian fantasy. Part of Steppenwolf Theatre Company\u2019s second annual Garage Rep series , which highlights \u201cinnovative, young companies,\u201d \u201cHeddatron\u201d tells the story of Jane Gordon, a disconsolate Michigan housewife whose existential spiral into suicidal depression is rudely interrupted by a rogue band of self-aware robots. They spirit her off to Ecuador and force her to perform scenes from Henrik Ibsen\u2019s \u201cHedda Gabler.\u201d Billy-bot and Hans have the most time onstage, but they are only 2 of the 10 robots created for the show by members of the Chicago Area Robotics League, or Chibots . Five large robots are controlled remotely by cast members sitting offstage, and the remaining five are very small, autonomous \u201ccritter-bots,\u201d which basically just zip around the stage for the last five minutes of the play. Last year, when it was decided that Sideshow would perform \u201cHeddatron,\u201d Jonathan Green, the director, knew he had to address the robot issue. \u201cThe script calls for real robots, so I Googled \u2018Chicago\u2019 and \u2018robots,\u2019 and I found Chibots,\u201d Mr. Green said. \u201cI e-mailed them and tried not to sound insane \u2014 I mean, it\u2019s such a preposterous idea.\u201d But the next day, he had a reply. \u201cThey responded very calmly,\u201d he said, \u201cand said it sounded like an interesting project.\u201d Bruce Phillips, a member of the Sideshow company, controls Billy-bot (think Wall-E crossed with E.T.). \u201cThis guy needs to do a lot of things,\u201d Mr. Phillips said. \u201cWe kept going to the engineers, asking, \u2018Can you make him do this? Or this?\u2019 And almost every time, they said, \u2018Yeah, sure.\u2019 \u201c Now, Mr. Phillips said, the engineers have a soft spot for Billy-bot because they spent so much time working on him. Eddy Wright, an engineer and member of Chibots, agreed, saying, \u201cBilly is very expressive, and it took a lot of work to get his eyes and ears to a point where he could express emotion.\u201d But only to a point. \u201cPeople asked us whether we were going to make them autonomous,\u201d Mr. Wright said. \u201cBut we thought maybe having giant six-foot robots running around on their own wasn\u2019t the best idea.\u201d If the technical glitches during Tuesday\u2019s dress rehearsal were any indication, robot actors are not much easier to work with than their human counterparts. \u201cI\u2019ve worked with some robotic actors before, but never actual robots,\u201d Mr. Green said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really interesting process \u2014 you think the robots are going to do the same thing every time. But they\u2019re operated by remote control, by humans, many of whom are performers themselves.\u201d Designing and creating 10 robots is not cheap. In this case, it cost roughly $5,000, which Sideshow is trying to raise online at kickstarter.com . As of Wednesday, supporters had pledged $3,315. Megan Smith, Sideshow\u2019s managing director, said the company had also gotten help from the electronics stores and warehouses where Chibots\u2019 engineers buy robot parts. \u201cWe got some really great pricing because it was for a nonprofit,\u201d Ms. Smith said. \u201cAnd everyone thought the project sounded cool.\u201d Mr. Wright also designed the control boards used to maneuver the robots around the stage. After Tuesday\u2019s dress rehearsal, he pronounced himself \u201cvery happy\u201d with their performances. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a few kinks to work out,\u201d he said. \u201cThe floor needs to be really clean, because otherwise the robots tend to get stuck.\u201d The biggest challenge, Mr. Wright said, was \u201cmaking the way they act and move convey more than just a box moving around on stage.\u201d \u201cHeddatron,\u201d which is by turns raucously funny and crushingly bleak, has been performed only once before professionally, in 2006, by Les Fr\u00e8res Corbusier company of New York. That five-year lapse gives the robots in the Chicago production a certain advantage, Mr. Green said. \u201cWe\u2019re using the next generation of robots,\u201d he said Tuesday as he leaned in to examine Billy-bot\u2019s mechanical eyes. \u201cThey\u2019re a little bit more functional, and safer.\u201d Was he referring to the tantalizing possibility that the robots, inspired by the play, might become sentient and take over the production? No, Mr. Green said. \u201cI just mean they\u2019re less likely to tip over.\u201d", "keyword": "Chicago (Ill);Robots and Robotics;Theater"}
{"id": "ny0220464", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/02/27", "title": "Switzerland Unruffled by Qaddafi\u2019s Call for \u2018Jihad\u2019 in Wake of Its Ban on New Minarets", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The Swiss government reacted blandly on Friday to the latest rhetorical sally from the eccentric Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi , who called on Thursday for a \u201cjihad\u201d against Switzerland . The two countries have been sparring since the Swiss arrested one of Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s sons and his wife in 2008 on suspicion of beating their servants. On Thursday, in a rambling address in Benghazi, Libya , before a gathering to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, Colonel Qaddafi called for jihad, or a holy war, against Switzerland because of its ban on new minarets for mosques and urged Muslims to boycott Swiss products and ban Swiss planes and ships. \u201cThose who destroy God\u2019s mosques deserve to be attacked through jihad, and if Switzerland was on our borders, we would fight it,\u201d Colonel Qaddafi was quoted as saying by Libya\u2019s official news agency. Libya does not border Switzerland, however. Instead, after his son Hannibal\u2019s arrest and detention for two days, Colonel Qaddafi recalled diplomats from Switzerland, interrupted oil shipments, withdrew money from Swiss banks and, more controversially, prevented two Swiss businessmen from leaving Libya. One was released only this week after 19 months in detention. But Max G\u00f6ldi, an engineer, remains in Libya, serving a \u201creduced sentence\u201d of four months in jail. Last week, Libya barred citizens from 25 European countries from visiting Libya in retaliation for Swiss travel restrictions on Colonel Qaddafi, his family and his ministers. On Friday, the Swiss government refused to comment on the latest Qaddafi comments and the call for jihad. Muslims in Switzerland, who are mostly European in origin and represent about 6 percent of the population, shrugged off the Qaddafi threat but were anxious that his words could further harden Swiss public opinion. Last November, Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on building new minarets on mosques. It \u201cdid not shock us, as he often says such nonsense,\u201d Yasar Ozdemir, member of the Zurich-based Swiss Federation of Muslim Associations, told Agence France-Presse. Omar el-Sanie, the director of Geneva\u2019s mosque, told The Associated Press: \u201cIn my opinion, this is a purely political matter between Libya and Switzerland, and has nothing to do with Islam or with Muslims.\u201d United Nations officials called Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s comments unacceptable, as did individual countries, like France. A spokesman for the European Union foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton , said the comments \u201ccome at an unfortunate moment when the European Union is working closely with Switzerland to reach a diplomatic solution\u201d to its squabble with Libya.", "keyword": "Switzerland;Libya;Qaddafi Muammar el-;Ashton Catherine;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0263833", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/12/07", "title": "Tiny Tax on Financial Trades Gains Advocates", "abstract": "They call it the Robin Hood tax \u2014 a tiny levy on trades in the financial markets that would take money from the banks and give it to the world\u2019s poor. And like the mythical hero of Sherwood Forest, it is beginning to capture the public\u2019s imagination. Driven by populist anger at bankers as well as government needs for more revenue, the idea of a tax on trades of stocks , bonds and other financial instruments has attracted an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany , the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros , former Vice President Al Gore , the consumer activist Ralph Nader , Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury. \u201cWe all agree that a financial transaction tax would be the right signal to show that we have understood that financial markets have to contribute their share to the recovery of economies,\u201d the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel , told her Parliament recently. On Sunday, Mario Monti , the new prime minister of Italy , announced plans to impose a tax on certain financial transactions as part of a far-reaching plan to fix his country\u2019s budgetary problems, and he endorsed the idea of a Europewide transactions tax. So far, the broader debt crisis engulfing the euro zone nations has pushed discussion of the tax into the background. But if European leaders can agree on a plan that calms the financial markets, they would be in a stronger position to enact a levy, analysts said. \u201cThere is some momentum behind this,\u201d said Simon Tilford, chief economist of the Center for European Reform in London . \u201cIf they keep the show on the road, they probably will attempt to run with this.\u201d The Robin Hood tax has also become a rallying point for labor unions, nongovernmental organizations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which view it as a way to claw back money from the top 1 percent to help the other 99 percent. Last month, thousands of demonstrators, including hundreds in Robin Hood outfits with bright green caps and bows and arrows, flooded into southern France to urge the leaders of the Group of 20 nations to do more to help the poor, including passing a financial transactions tax. Enacting such a tax still faces many hurdles, however \u2014 most notably, skepticism from leaders in the United States and Britain , home to some of the world\u2019s most important financial exchanges. The day after the Robin Hood protest, for example, Mr. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and one of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, presented a report to a closed-door meeting of the G-20 leaders that laid out his ideas on how rich countries could aid poor ones. One of his proposals was a modest tax on trades of financial instruments that could generate $48 billion or more annually from the G-20 countries. Ms. Merkel and France\u2019s president, Nicolas Sarkozy , quickly piped up, enthusiastically endorsing the tax. But Britain\u2019s prime minister, David Cameron , expressed serious reservations, saying Britain would embrace it only if it were adopted globally. British officials fear that unless the tax is worldwide, trading will flee London\u2019s huge markets to countries with no tax. The Obama administration has also been lukewarm, expressing sympathy but saying it would be hard to execute, could drive trading overseas and would hurt pension funds and individual investors in addition to banks. Administration officials say they would prefer a tax on the assets of the largest banks as a way to discourage them from risky activities. \u201cThe president is sympathetic to the goals that a financial transactions tax is trying to achieve and he is pushing for a financial crisis responsibility fee and closing other Wall Street loopholes as the best and most feasible way to achieve those goals,\u201d an administration official said. Still, support is growing for the idea, which has been largely dormant since the 1970s, when a version was first proposed by the economist James Tobin, later a Nobel Prize winner. \u201cThe tax is a good idea because banks are where the money is. It\u2019s the same reason Jesse James robbed banks,\u201d said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, which recently held demonstrations at the offices of 60 members of Congress in support of the levy. \u201cThe thing about the financial transactions tax is it\u2019s stunning how quickly people get it and how fast they embrace it.\u201d Labor groups like the nurses\u2019 union and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. see the tax as a way to finance job creation programs to fight high unemployment in the United States and Europe . Other advocates hope it will slow the speculation that many blame for undermining the euro and causing wild swings in financial markets. Mr. Gates and Mr. Sarkozy would like to use the money to finance development in the world\u2019s poorest nations. And leaders like Ms. Merkel and some members of Congress are eyeing it as a relatively painless source of money to help plug government deficits. On Nov. 16, the French Senate passed a bill supporting a financial transactions tax. And the European Commission in Brussels has said it would like to put a tax of $10 per $10,000 of transactions in place throughout the European Union by 2014, predicting it would raise 57 billion euros ($77 billion) a year in European countries alone. Last month, Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, and Senator Tom Harkin , an Iowa Democrat, proposed an American version of the tax that they said could raise $350 billion over 10 years. Their legislation would impose $3 in taxes for each $10,000 in transactions. Other proposals, including those from the nurses\u2019 union, call for a tax of $50 per $10,000. Mr. DeFazio said his tax plan would \u201craise money to invest in the real economy,\u201d but he acknowledged that it faced an uphill battle in Washington , especially within the antitax Republican caucus. Opponents say that even at the rate in the DeFazio-Harkin bill, the tax would add significantly to the cost of trading, exceeding what institutional investors pay in commissions. \u201cAt a time when we face a slow economic recovery, such a tax will impede the efficiency of markets and impair depth and liquidity as well as raise costs to the issuers, pensions and investors who help drive economic growth,\u201d Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., executive vice president for public policy at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said in a statement. George Osborne, the British chancellor of the exchequer, described the proposed tax as \u201ceconomic suicide\u201d for Europe. In this time of economic crisis, he said, the European Union \u201cshould be coming forward with new ideas to promote growth, not undermine it.\u201d And Glenn Hubbard, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush , said the Robin Hood tax is a \u201cmonstrously bad idea.\u201d \u201cSuch a tax isn\u2019t really going to get at the banks,\u201d added Mr. Hubbard, who is now an adviser to the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney . \u201cIt\u2019s going to hit the people who own the assets that are traded,\u201d like investors. Supporters of a financial transactions tax note that Britain already imposes a levy of $50 per $10,000 of stocks traded, while Hong Kong and Singapore , with fast-growing financial markets, impose fees of $10 to $20 per $10,000 of the value of certain transactions. The United States imposed a tiny tax on stock trades from 1914 to 1966. The British actor Bill Nighy , who has made online videos promoting the tax , calls it a beautiful idea. \u201cIt would raise enough money to solve problems at home and overseas, and it could do it without hurting ordinary people,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Tax;Stocks and Bonds;Banking and Finance;Labor Unions;Occupy Wall Street;Transfer tax"}
{"id": "ny0113148", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/11/04", "title": "A Review of Havana Central, in Yonkers", "abstract": "OVER two visits to Havana Central, the Cuban restaurant that opened in April in the new Ridge Hill Shopping Center in Yonkers, I was surprised by the number of times waiters gathered to sing \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d Bearing candlelit desserts, they repeatedly grouped around diners and gave spirited versions of the song with clapping and a loud \u201cwoo, woo\u201d at the end of each line. It was kind of fun, but it turns out it there was probably something fake about it, too. The restaurant gives a free flan to anyone who says it is his or her birthday, a waiter told me, so people often claim it is their birthday even when it isn\u2019t. That sense of harmless inauthenticity characterizes this Havana Central over all. A sister to Manhattan\u2019s two versions of the restaurant, on the Upper West Side and near Times Square, the Yonkers Havana Central is the most like a theme park. Designed to evoke pre-revolutionary Cuba, there is loud Latin music, tropical-style dark fans hanging from the ceiling and blown-up posters of old Carteles magazine covers on the walls. But look closely and you\u2019ll find that the large potted plants are plastic, and at least some of the food might as well be. Tamales served as an appetizer, one chicken and the other pork, were bland and dry though the accompanying mojo (garlic sauce) helped make them edible. The chicharrones were tasty and nicely rendered, but the other two components of the \u201cpork lovers combo\u201d \u2014 a pork chop and pernil \u2014 were drowning in sauces that didn\u2019t quite hit the mark. The chop came doused in an oversweet teriyakilike gravy and the pernil, which works best as a mixture of tender meat with a bit of crunchy skin, was all mush with an overwhelming vinegar taste. On one visit, the entrees arrived before we had even made a dent in our appetizers, and though the waiter took them back to the kitchen without complaint, it was obvious on their return that they had just been sitting on a shelf somewhere. The shrimp in garlic sauce, in particular, was lukewarm and the sauce, though not unpleasant in taste, had become gelatinous. Even worse, on another visit, two desserts \u2014 the chocolate rum cake and the dulce de leche cheesecake \u2014 both had a distinctly chemical flavor. That is not to say one cannot have a good meal at Havana Central. The picadillo was rich and satisfying, made with both green olives and raisins (some places will skimp on one or the other). The classic paella was delicately seasoned and bursting with a subtle but delicious chorizo, chicken, clams, mussels and shrimp. The best tastes come from the appetizers menu. If I were to return to the restaurant, I would take a seat at the bar, order one of the many tropical drinks (the pineapple mojito with agave and the red sangria were both winners) and then request the lobster-stuffed avocado, which came with crispy, well-salted tostones. The empanadas were good, particularly the Cubano with its pickles and roasted pork. The queso fundido, ordered with ropa vieja, was a tasty meal in itself. And fried calamari were light and tender though the accompanying \u201ctomato salsa\u201d tasted like oversweet tomato paste from a can. The children\u2019s menu is clever. There are the usual chicken fingers, but no pizza to be found. Instead, children may have a half order of arroz con pollo, roast chicken, an empanada or delicious little sliders. At least two desserts were worth ordering: the house-made churros \u2014 doughnut sticks rolled in sugar and served with caramel and chocolate sauces \u2014 and the tres leches cake, which, unlike the other desserts, is made off-site and was airy with a sweet meringue topping. Though the hot chocolate was thin and seemed to have more cinnamon and nutmeg than chocolate, the pressed coffee was robust and plentiful. As for the popular flan, I never got to try it \u2014 it was sold out on both of my visits. It seems clear that Havana Central, with its chainlike approach to Cuban food (another restaurant is in the works for Roosevelt Field on Long Island), is meeting some kind of need. But those craving the joys of down-home Cuban cuisine might want to look elsewhere. Havana Central Ridge Hill Shopping Center 238 Market Street Yonkers (914) 423-5500 havanacentral.com O.K. THE SPACE A big, open space with high ceilings and terra-cotta-colored walls. The design is meant to evoke pre-revolutionary Cuba, with dark ceiling fans, enlarged posters of covers of the 1930s magazine Carteles and Latin music. There\u2019s a back room for a more intimate setting, an enclosed area like a porch out front and outside seating if weather permits. Wheelchair accessible. THE CROWD A mix of casually dressed young and old (there is an appealing children\u2019s menu), families, friends and dates. The restaurant is loud, but that appears to be part of the fun for many. THE BAR Long, sometimes crowded and situated right at the front of the restaurant. There\u2019s a mojito menu ($9.50 to $12 a glass; $40 to $55 a pitcher), red or white sangria ($10 to $12 a glass; $40 to $45 a pitcher), margaritas ($9 to $12 a glass; $40 to $55 a pitcher), many other tropical drinks and a decent sampling of beers ($5 to $7 a glass or bottle) and wines ($9 to $14 a glass; $28 to $48 a bottle). Fresh-muddled, agave-sweetened lemonade is a good nonalcoholic choice ($4 a glass). THE BILL Entrees run from $15 to $29. Major credit cards accepted. WHAT WE LIKED Chicken sofrito, spinach and goat cheese, and Cubano empanadas, lobster stuffed avocado, plantain chips with avocado salsa and mojo, queso fundido, fried calamari, pork chicharrones, picadillo, classic paella, tres leches cake, churros. IF YOU GO Open Sunday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Reservations recommended, especially on weekends. Metered parking on the street or in a nearby lot. RATINGS Don\u2019t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don\u2019t Bother.", "keyword": "Restaurants;Yonkers (NY);Havana Central (Yonkers NY Restaurant);Havana Central (Yonkers NY)"}
{"id": "ny0019439", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/07/09", "title": "Pollution Leads to Drop in Life Span in Northern China, Research Finds", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Southern Chinese on average have lived at least five years longer than their northern counterparts in recent decades because of the destructive health effects of pollution from the widespread use of coal in the north, according to a study released Monday by a prominent American science journal. The study, which appears in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , was conducted by an American, an Israeli and two Chinese scholars and was based on analyses of health and pollution data collected by official Chinese sources from 1981 to 2001. The results provide a new assessment of the enormous cost of China\u2019s environmental degradation, which in the north is partly a result of the emissions of deadly pollutants from coal-driven energy generation. The researchers project that the 500 million Chinese who live north of the Huai River will lose 2.5 billion years of life expectancy because of outdoor air pollution. \u201cIt highlights that in developing countries there\u2019s a trade-off in increasing incomes today and protecting public health and environmental quality,\u201d said the American member of the research team, Michael Greenstone , a professor of environmental economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \u201cAnd it highlights the fact that the public health costs are larger than we had thought.\u201d Mr. Greenstone said in a telephone interview that another surprising result of the study was that the higher mortality rates were found across all age groups. The study is the first measuring this kind of impact that relies purely on data collected within China. Its conclusions are based on analyses of population groups living in areas north and south of the Huai River. The Chinese government has for years maintained a policy of free coal for boilers to generate winter heating north of the river, which runs parallel to and between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. That policy and the ubiquity of northern coal-fired factories have contributed to the vast gap between the coal pollutants emitted in north and south. Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, said a \u201cstrong point\u201d of the study was its basis in the \u201cnatural experiment\u201d resulting from China\u2019s disparate coal policies. \u201cThe results are biologically plausible, and consistent with previous research,\u201d he said. Image Pollution from widespread coal use in northern China has led to an average decrease in life span, research shows. Credit Donald Chan/Reuters For every additional 100 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter above the average pollution levels in the south, the life expectancy at birth drops by three years, the researchers found. Mr. Greenstone said that estimate could be roughly applied to other developing nations where the baseline level of pollutants was high. \u201cThis adds to the growing mountain of evidence of the heavy cost of China\u2019s pollution,\u201d said Alex L. Wang, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies Chinese environmental policies. \u201cOther studies have shown significant near-term harms, in the form of illness, lost work days and even risks to children beginning in utero. This study suggests that the long-term harms of coal pollution might be worse than we thought.\u201d Mr. Wang said the new study could \u201chelp to build the case for more aggressive environmental regulation\u201d \u2014 for example, a previous order by Chinese leaders to shut down coal-fired boilers in some areas could be widened, and faster shutdown times could be required. The health statistics recorded through the two-decade period by Chinese officials and examined by the study\u2019s researchers showed that the 5.5-year drop in life expectancy in the north was almost entirely due to a rise in deaths attributed to cardiorespiratory diseases or related health problems. The pollution data, also recorded by officials, indicated that the concentration of particulates north of the Huai was 184 micrograms per cubic meter higher than in the south, or 55 percent greater. Several recent scientific studies have revealed the toll that China\u2019s outdoor air pollution is taking on humans. This spring, new data released from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study revealed that such pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010, or nearly 40 percent of the global total. Some Chinese officials have sought to quash reports that link premature deaths to pollution. According to news reports, Chinese officials excised parts of a 2007 report called \u201cCost of Pollution in China\u201d that had concluded that 350,000 to 400,000 people die prematurely in China each year because of outdoor air pollution. The study was done by the World Bank with the help of the Chinese State Environmental Protection Administration, the precursor to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. This year, many Chinese have expressed fury and frustration over the surging levels of air pollution, especially in the north, which in January had record levels of particulate matter. Pollution levels have remained high this summer, and many foreigners and middle- or upper-class Chinese with children are looking to leave the country rather than tolerate the health risks. Mr. Greenstone said he did not have a basis for comparing pollution levels now with those during the period covered by the study, 1981 to 2001. During that time, the method of measuring particulate matter was different. Mr. Greenstone also said he did not know how pollution in northern China affected the life expectancy for people not living there for their entire lives, or for residents of northern China who made frequent or long trips to less polluted areas.", "keyword": "Coal;Air pollution;Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America;Michael Greenstone;China;Longevity"}
{"id": "ny0207672", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2009/06/09", "title": "Qwest Ends Auction of Its Long-Distance Network", "abstract": "DENVER \u2014 Qwest Communications International , the telecommunications company, said on Monday that it was calling off the auction for its nationwide long-haul data and telephone network. The company, based in Denver, said the network was more valuable to the company than the amount it would raise in a sale. Qwest did not say how much the bids it received were worth. News reports last week indicated Qwest received bids far below the $2 billion to $3 billion it wanted. Qwest has a debt load of $13.3 billion, and the sale of the network at the right price could have given it some breathing room. However, the network is also useful in supporting its two other main businesses: local phone service in 14 states and nationwide services for government and corporations. Level 3 Communications, which also operates a long-haul network, was mentioned as a potential buyer. Revenue has been declining in the wholesale business for some time, as competition is pushing down prices. Shares of Qwest fell 24 cents to close at $3.93 on Monday.", "keyword": "Qwest Communications International Inc;Telephones and Telecommunications;Auctions"}
{"id": "ny0268613", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/04/02", "title": "Hamas Releases Photographs Said to Show Captured Israelis", "abstract": "JAFFA, Israel \u2014 The armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas showed photographs on Friday of four Israelis, two of whom it said were captives being held in Gaza. Two others were Israeli soldiers who were killed during the 2014 conflict in Gaza, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul . The images of Mr. Goldin and Mr. Shaul were included in an announcement by the Qassam Brigades , Hamas\u2019 military wing, on Al Aqsa, a Hamas-run satellite channel. The identities of the other two people pictured were not immediately clear. The announcement was the first time the group had released photographs of the people it said it had been holding captive. The spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, who goes by his nom de guerre, Abu Obeida, referred to all four of them as Israeli soldiers. Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians, including Avraham Mengistu, an Israeli of Ethiopian descent . Mr. Mengistu, who is believed to be in his mid to late 20s, crossed an Israeli-constructed fence that surrounds much of Gaza on Sept. 7, 2014. His family has said that he has psychiatric problems. Hamas is also holding an Arab citizen of Israel who has not been identified. In the announcement, the Hamas spokesman said that the group was not negotiating with the Israeli government for the return of Israelis held in Gaza. He did not offer any more details on the condition or identities of the captives. The Israeli government has conducted prisoner exchanges with Palestinian militants for soldiers held captive and for the remains of dead Israelis. Those deals have often proved politically contentious, not least because of the large numbers of Palestinian prisoners that Israel has released for the return of its soldiers. David Keyes, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had no comment on the announcement. Israel was long traumatized by the capture of Gilad Shalit , a soldier who was seized in a cross-border raid in 2006 and held captive by Hamas in Gaza for five years. After a broad public campaign pressuring the Israeli government, he was freed in 2011 in exchange for the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been convicted of deadly attacks against Israelis.", "keyword": "Hamas;Kidnapping and Hostages;Israel;Hadar Goldin"}
{"id": "ny0003599", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2013/04/18", "title": "Hardaway to Enter Draft", "abstract": "Tim Hardaway Jr. said Wednesday that he would forgo his senior season at Michigan and enter the N.B.A. draft. He is the second Michigan player to declare early for this year\u2019s draft; Trey Burke, a sophomore and the national player of the year, announced his departure last Sunday. Hardaway\u2019s father played in the N.B.A. from 1989 to 2003. Michigan lost to Louisville in the N.C.A.A. title game.", "keyword": "Sports Drafts and Recruits;College basketball;University of Michigan;Tim Hardaway Jr"}
{"id": "ny0144347", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/10/10", "title": "Joint Chiefs Chairman Is Gloomy on Afghanistan", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 With security and economic conditions in Afghanistan already in dire straits, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday that the situation there would probably only worsen next year. \u201cThe trends across the board are not going in the right direction,\u201d the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen , told reporters. \u201cI would anticipate next year would be a tougher year.\u201d Admiral Mullen said Afghanistan was likely to continue what a nearly completed intelligence assessment called \u201ca downward spiral\u201d unless there were rapid, major improvements. Those improvements include curbing Afghanistan\u2019s booming heroin trade, bolstering district and tribal leaders to offset a weak central government in Kabul , breathing life into a flagging economy and stemming the flow of militants who are carrying out increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan . Admiral Mullen struck a pessimistic note when asked whether it was likely such reversals would take place. \u201cBoth the trends and the status specifically of where we are on those other things right now would indicate that the trends are going to continue,\u201d he said. The sobering forecast comes as a draft report by American intelligence agencies has cast serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban \u2019s influence there, and as the Bush administration has initiated a major review of its Afghanistan policy. Part of the review will address increased troop levels. Gen. David D. McKiernan , the top American commander in Afghanistan, has said he needs as many as 15,000 combat and support troops beyond the 8,000 additional troops that President Bush recently approved for deployment early next year. But Admiral Mullen underscored a point he has made repeatedly in the past: the military can be only one part of the solution in Afghanistan. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to impact pretty significantly, pretty fast on the poppy issue,\u201d he said referring to the heroin trade, a scourge that by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan\u2019s economy and pours $100 million a year into the Taliban\u2019s coffers. General McKiernan said last week that NATO forces would be authorized to attack narcotics bosses, their foot soldiers and their infrastructure if they were linked to the movement of weapons, improvised explosives or foreign fighters into Afghanistan. But Admiral Mullen said a broader counternarcotics solution involving the 42 countries with a presence in Afghanistan had so far proved maddeningly elusive. \u201cThere isn\u2019t universal agreement on how we should approach this,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re all not in agreement on how to attack this problem.\u201d In Thursday\u2019s breakfast session with reporters, he seemed slightly less hopeful that the negative trends could be reversed anytime soon. Admiral Mullen cited, for instance, the need to \u201cmove forward\u201d and increase engagement with tribal leaders in Afghanistan, an acknowledgment that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai . He also expressed concern over the growing violence stemming from attacks by militants based in Pakistan\u2019s unruly tribal areas, a threat the United States has responded to with a growing number of missile strikes and even a Special Operations ground raid early last month. A senior administration official said the increased airstrikes by remotely piloted Central Intelligence Agency Predator aircraft, as well as the ground raid on Sept. 3, were having some impact on Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who are using the tribal areas as a sanctuary. \u201cThe people on the ground realize that the safety they\u2019d grown accustomed to wasn\u2019t so safe,\u201d said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing operations. \u201cIt puts them on the move. It has them talking on their networks. They may devote more manpower to posting guards and sentries. They move around and move away from the border, and don\u2019t stay in one location as long.\u201d Admiral Mullen praised recent Pakistani Army operations against militants in Bajaur and Swat, and the recent leadership shake-up in Pakistan\u2019s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. But he expressed concern that Pakistan\u2019s domestic financial crisis, with increasing fuel and food costs, could hamper the government\u2019s ability to stage and finance sustained and effective counterterrorism operations. Bush administration officials are trying to gear up international support to guard against a downturn in Pakistan\u2019s already fragile economy. Higher oil prices this year put a deep strain on Pakistan\u2019s oil subsidy program, and the government has raised oil and energy prices some 70 percent, a move that has not sat well with Pakistani people. Beyond that, there has been a flight of foreign investment from the country, particularly in the weeks since the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad, the capital, on Sept. 20. The worsening economic outlook in Pakistan has left administration officials scrambling to find aid for the country before things get worse. There may be one ray of sunshine amid the gloom, administration officials said. They said that the recent fall in the price of oil that had come about as the global financial crisis had worsened could actually be a boon to Pakistan, by easing the pressure on the Pakistani government, which still subsidizes energy costs in the country.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Michael G Mullen;Afghanistan War;David D McKiernan;Hamid Karzai;Joint Chiefs of Staff;NATO;Taliban"}
{"id": "ny0264074", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/12/30", "title": "California: Court Allows Elimination of Redevelopment Agencies", "abstract": "The State Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature had the right to eliminate local redevelopment agencies, redirecting more than $1 billion to help close a huge budget gap. The state began authorizing the agencies in the 1940s to subsidize construction in rundown areas. After the Legislature voted to abolish them this summer, several cities and agencies sued, saying the state had no right to the funds. The court said that abolishing the agencies was \u201ca proper exercise of the legislative power vested in the Legislature\u201d and that the government could \u201cestablish or dissolve local agencies and subdivisions as it sees fit.\u201d The Legislature also approved a plan allowing cities to reorganize the agencies if they agreed to use the money for state obligations this year, but the court ruled that plan invalid, effectively eliminating the nearly 400 agencies.", "keyword": "California;Brown Edmund G Jr;State Legislatures;Budgets and Budgeting;Decisions and Verdicts"}
{"id": "ny0218885", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/05/09", "title": "Fighting the Deficit, With Military Land Policy", "abstract": "IN a previous column, I introduced the concept of a \u201cpaid lunch.\u201d It\u2019s better than a free lunch \u2014 which is often thought not to exist \u2014 because you\u2019re paid to devour it. But what qualifies as a paid lunch for the government? The answer is a proposal that will stimulate the economy and create tangible benefits while \u2014 drum roll, please! \u2014 reducing the deficit. My initial suggestion was to sell off some of the radio spectrum now used for television broadcasts. And I\u2019m happy to say that the Federal Communications Commission recently proposed a version of this idea to support its national broadband initiative . So here\u2019s another paid-lunch idea. This one is intended to increase the efficiency of the military and its ability to serve the country \u2014 all while reducing military spending. Similar in spirit to the spectrum proposal, it boils down to a simple principle: To allocate resources efficiently, decision makers must make choices based on true market values. For the military, that means taking land prices into account in choosing sites for bases. It may be time to sell off some prime real estate. After the cold war, deciding which bases to shut down was a political hot potato. The job went to the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which started in 1988 and had its last round in 2005. Guess which factor the commission didn\u2019t focus on? The money you could get for selling a particular piece of land. Bases were given away or sold below market price. The military didn\u2019t have much incentive to sell its crown jewels, and it still doesn\u2019t. To see what\u2019s wrong here, consider another example of military inefficiency: the draft. Under the old Selective Service System, the military did not have to pay market wages to entice workers to enlist. As you might expect, the armed forces used too much labor and conscripted people who didn\u2019t want to serve, a problem that became acute during the unpopular war in Vietnam . Today, people in the military are there by choice, and labor is no longer considered a free good. (As a result, military personnel are no longer assigned to \u201cKP\u201d; civilians are hired to peel the potatoes and wash the dishes.) When it comes to land use, however, the military is like other areas of government. It doesn\u2019t have incentives to make good decisions about where to put its facilities. It doesn\u2019t have to pay fair market rent for the land it occupies. In fact, it pays no rent or taxes , and, just as bad, has no incentive to move from highly valued land to someplace cheaper. Indeed, if the military wants to shift more than 1,000 civilian employees from one location to another, it has to receive permission from Congress. And we have had plenty of recent reminders that Congress isn\u2019t a place from which rational choices are likely to emerge. It is time for a change. Politicians on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree that we face a long-term budget problem. A better land-use policy for the military could make a difference. The Defense Department has vast land holdings, some in prime locations \u2014 including the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere. (Of course, land prices are lower than they once were, and it wouldn\u2019t be a good idea to dump a lot more on the market right now. But reducing the budget deficit is a long-term problem anyhow.) The Marine Corps seems to have particularly good taste in base location. For example, it has Camp Pendleton, about 40 miles north of downtown San Diego . The base sits on 200 square miles of land, including 17.5 miles of Pacific shoreline. About 60,000 people work there. Of course, I am not in a position to say whether the Marines need all the land at Camp Pendleton, but I can say with some assurance that the land is very valuable. Think ocean views with what many people regard as the country\u2019s best climate. Even in the current real estate market, a ballpark estimate is that the land would fetch at least $5 billion from a developer. Furthermore, the Marines have other bases, like Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert . That base covers more than 900 square miles of land that is considerably less valuable. You can\u2019t practice amphibious landings in the desert, but other operations could be done at either place. Is it really necessary to conduct tank-training exercises on land with an ocean view? Do the Marines really need all those miles of beach? On the other hand, you can\u2019t blame the Marines for preferring to live at Camp Pendleton, or Hawaii , for that matter. HOW could we give the various military branches an economic incentive to use land rationally? First, include real estate prices explicitly in land use evaluations, along with factors like environmental and economic effects on local communities. Second, give the armed forces some skin in the game. Right now, the Defense Department has no financial incentive to consider the value of alternative land use. Even when officials can sell land, they can be instructed to take less than market value. Affected communities also need to share potential windfalls \u2014 and somehow be prevented from delaying changes for decades. We need to overcome the constant political fighting about issues like urban sprawl, employment and retaining open spaces. Perhaps I am being na\u00efve, but the current economic environment might provide a background that could stimulate rational discourse, especially in a nearly bankrupt state like California . The point I am making is perfectly general. If we were starting from scratch, it is unlikely that we would decide to devote so much valuable land to its current uses. The government is sitting on valuable pieces of property (and radio spectrum, for that matter). As we think about how to deal with the long-term deficit, we need to devise ways to encourage rational economic decisions \u2014 and tell government agencies that their funding will depend on their ability to make them.", "keyword": "Economy;Rationing"}
{"id": "ny0137602", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/05/21", "title": "Foster Rules on Medicine Are Key in Child\u2019s Death", "abstract": "Foster parents are supposed to check with the foster-care agency before administering even routine medication to children in their care, but the Harlem woman charged Monday with criminally negligent homicide of a 6-year-old girl apparently did not do so before placing a strong medicinal patch on her injured neck or giving her Motrin earlier. The girl, Taylor Webster, died Sunday afternoon, one day after the foster mother, Joanne Alvarez, a 54-year-old home health aide, placed the pain-relieving medication, known as a fentanyl transdermal patch, on her neck. Law enforcement officials said Ms. Alvarez told them the patch had been prescribed to her five months ago for chronic pain that she has suffered since 2000, but a search of her apartment showed that it was in someone else\u2019s name, according to a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office, Barbara Thompson. The patch, which delivers a narcotic drug more powerful than morphine through the skin, is typically used to treat severe pain in adults, often cancer patients. According to the city\u2019s Administration for Children\u2019s Services, before giving a child any medication, foster parents are required to first contact their private foster-care agency, which contracts with the city to recruit parents and monitor families in the system. \u201cThere\u2019s a way to reach the foster-care agency 24/7,\u201d said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children\u2019s Services. Ms. Stein would not say whether Ms. Alvarez had contacted the foster-care agency, which was identified by child-welfare advocates as Good Shepherd Services. But those familiar with the system said a nurse or health care professional never would have authorized the use of such a patch on a 59-pound child; weight helps determine dosage, and the patch is usually prescribed only after the use of other narcotics. Dr. Lara Gordon, director of the Child Protection Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical College, said she had no knowledge of this specific case but that a pediatrician should certainly have been consulted before \u201cmaking such a drastic move\u201d as administering a fentanyl patch. \u201cThat\u2019s a big, big, big no-no,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something we would prescribe for a normally healthy child. You put these patches on people who are going through chemotherapy and have bone pain. It\u2019s not just for a routine muscle spasm or neck pain.\u201d At Ms. Alvarez\u2019s arraignment on Monday, prosecutors said that Taylor had started complaining of neck pain Saturday afternoon. Ms. Alvarez told investigators that she gave Taylor some Motrin before going out that evening to a concert, leaving the girl with Ms. Alvarez\u2019s adult daughter. When Ms. Alvarez returned home, the girl was still in pain, so she gave her more Motrin around midnight and put the patch on her neck in the area of her carotid artery, she told investigators. The next day, the authorities say, Ms. Alvarez went to work and at 3 p.m., her 23-year-old daughter called her to say Taylor was unconscious. Taylor was pronounced dead at a hospital at 5:10 p.m. Ms. Alvarez, who has five biological children and two adopted children and had been caring for Taylor for several years, had drawn the attention of child welfare officials three times before. Two of those instances involved accusations of excessive corporal punishment against Taylor, Penelope Brady, an assistant district attorney, said on Monday. One of those inquiries is still open. The third instance, which Ms. Brady did not describe in nature, has been closed. Ms. Stein, the children\u2019s services spokeswoman, refused to discuss the complaints against Ms. Alvarez, saying the agency never comments on investigations or their outcomes. But she said that many reports of child abuse each year turn out to be unfounded. Foster parents are \u201cstrictly forbidden\u201d to discipline children in their care by hitting or spanking, Ms. Stein added. \u201cThis is the standard,\u201d she wrote in an e-mail message. \u201cFoster parents receive training on how to discipline children safely without using physical force.\u201d Ms. Stein said that the city could take a number of steps if it is determined that a foster parent has used corporal punishment, depending on the circumstances. The parent could be referred to a parenting course if investigators believed it was a one-time slap, for instance, and that the child was otherwise well cared for. But a more serious finding would result in the child\u2019s removal from the foster home. Bill Baccaglini, executive director of the New York Foundling, one of the oldest child-welfare agencies in New York, said the tragedy would likely make agencies more vigilant about working with foster parents on administering medication. \u201cMy gut tells me, thankfully, that this is very, very rare,\u201d Mr. Baccaglini said. \u201cBut this story, certainly for any of us in this business, gives us cause to pause and reexamine our own internal procedures.\u201d", "keyword": "Children and Youth;Foster Care;Child Abuse and Neglect;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0178685", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2007/08/05", "title": "Rats, Roaches and the Naked Man With the Gun", "abstract": "IN 1979 and 1980, my father, Esteban Torres, worked under an exterminator\u2019s license setting traps in and fumigating businesses and homes throughout the Bronx and Manhattan. I won\u2019t bore you with roach and rodent stories \u2014 those could run on forever. Instead, I\u2019ll tell you about some of the people my father worked for, the ones he called crazy or knuckleheads. I\u2019ll start with two incidents in which clients put guns to my father\u2019s head and he proceeded to fumigate their apartments anyway, after talking them into lowering their weapons. In one apartment building on East 14th Street in Manhattan, a woman in a first-floor apartment wished him luck as he went up the stairs to the first apartment he was going to work in. That seemed a strange thing to say to an exterminator. After all, my dad was carrying a tank of chemicals that could stop a charging rhino; the roaches might be tough, but the deck was stacked in my dad\u2019s favor. When he stood knocking at the door for a few minutes, minutes during which he was sure he heard someone inside, he thought he\u2019d figured out the woman\u2019s meaning. People made appointments they didn\u2019t want to keep but never bothered to cancel. You needed good luck just to get some customers to actually open the door. This looked like one of those cases, so he climbed down a flight to the next apartment on his list. This one seemed to be truly empty. As my father waited for a response, he felt cold steel pressed against the back of his head. \u201cWhat are you doing here?\u201d the man holding the gun wanted to know. \u201cI\u2019m the exterminator,\u201d my father answered. The man wanted to see ID. My father held up the tank of chemicals, along with the gas mask he used in hopes of avoiding cancer. It took a while, but the man with the gun relented and escorted my father back to the apartment upstairs. When my father was finished, he waited patiently for the man with the gun to produce a check for $25, which was the charge for an apartment back then. When my father finally left the building, the woman on the first floor asked if anything had happened. When my dad mentioned the whole gun thing, she just laughed. \u201cThat guy\u2019s crazy,\u201d she said. \u201cHe says he\u2019s training to be in the C.I.A., has to sneak up on people. Take them by surprise.\u201d My father left the building without bothering to look back. He didn\u2019t want to know if the C.I.A. trainee was aiming at him from his window. The other incident took place in a building on East Fourth Street, and the fellow in question was more straightforward. When my father knocked, the door was opened by a man with a gun. No clothes on, just a gun. \u201cExterminator,\u201d my father said. The man lowered the gun. My father did the standard spraying along the perimeter of the living room walls as the man sat there naked, an array of joints on the coffee table. As my father headed toward a closed bedroom door, the man jumped up and ordered him to leave it alone. So my father, having finished his work, just stood there. \u201cWhat?\u201d the man demanded. \u201cThe money,\u201d my father replied. Another check for $25 changed hands. I\u2019ve often wondered what might have been behind the closed door if the man wasn\u2019t afraid to show my dad the drugs or the gun or his own naked body. But these questions never concerned my father. Neither did the barely clothed women, or the spouses who argued as he set traps, or the parents who screamed at their children while he put out poisons. To him, they were all just crazy. What concerned my father was leaving the Bronx. Then, as now, the Bronx had very nice neighborhoods, places with tree-lined streets, excellent schools, million-dollar homes. We didn\u2019t live there. We lived in East Tremont, the place where Hollywood came when it needed a set for the opening of the gritty crime drama \u201cFort Apache, the Bronx.\u201d In addition to being an exterminator, my father was the custodian for the Tremont branch of the New York Public Library on Washington Avenue. The job included a rent-free apartment, which was where we lived. About 20 other custodians had similar accommodations, but ours came with a view of abandoned, burnt-out and gutted buildings in just about every direction. Across the street was an abandoned building where heroin addicts went to shoot up, stumbling out in a daze. Sometimes they left candles burning, and mattresses caught fire. The fire trucks came, but the flames were never serious enough to harm the squatters who lived on the top floor. Besides, the fire station was only two blocks away. PART of my father\u2019s job at the library was to keep the exterior of the building free of gang graffiti. As with exterminating, this also required the use of harsh chemicals. My father being an asthmatic, both his jobs were tough on his lungs, but health issues were not going to force him out of work. A free apartment, a salary from the library, my mother\u2019s salary earned as a library clerk in an even worse neighborhood and whatever he could make from the exterminating business were all too much to pass up. He had a plan, and he intended to do everything he could to make it work. His plan was to move the family to the countryside in Puerto Rico. This wasn\u2019t an original idea. My father had left Puerto Rico as a 12-year-old and had met my mother, Carmen, who was also from Puerto Rico, in New York. My parents had deep roots on the island. To them, leaving behind the dirt and danger of the big city for the quiet and calm of island life seemed natural. My sisters and I hated the idea. We\u2019d been to the island but barely spoke a word of Spanish. We had friends in the Bronx \u2014 never mind that we weren\u2019t allowed out on the streets to play with them. As fate would have it, the move to Puerto Rico lasted only a year. A recession brought us back to the city. My mother took up her old job as a library clerk, my sisters and I made new friends, and my father found work as part of a crew that cleaned a bank overnight. He could have taken up his gas mask again and made more money as an exterminator, but the idea didn\u2019t appeal to him. He had liked most of his customers. He could handle the rats and the roaches. It was the crazies and the knuckleheads that kept him away.", "keyword": "Pesticides;Bronx (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0019015", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/07/19", "title": "Google Results Show Struggle With Mobile", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 For more than a year, Google has been struggling to solve this riddle: Even though people are using Google on their mobile devices more than ever, how does Google make more money on mobile ads? Despite a range of efforts by Google, the riddle remains unsolved, its financial report Thursday revealed. Google reported second-quarter results that missed analysts\u2019 expectations for revenue and profit. They showed that its desktop search business continues to slow and ad prices continue to fall as it struggles to make as much money on mobile devices. The report was particularly incongruous given how Google\u2019s share price climbed 27 percent this year. It is a vexing problem for every company that has generated revenue through advertising, be it a century-old magazine with a mobile app or a new Web site aggregating the news. Mobile ads do not command the premium that Web advertising does (and Web ads do not make as much as print ads). Colin W. Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Partners, wrote a haiku before the earnings announcement: \u201cThe results should be/ pretty as a picture to/ justify the stock.\u201d They were not. Shares, which fell 1 percent ahead of the report on Thursday, fell another 4 percent in after-hours trading. \u201cOne of the reasons why people like Google is you can look forward and see what they\u2019re doing with Glass and laying fiber and driverless cars and Chrome, chasing after new revenue streams,\u201d Mr. Gillis said. \u201cBut those are still pretty far away. Google\u2019s core business is all about advertising and clicks, and the core business is absolutely maturing.\u201d Mobile ads, he added, are inexpensive yet \u201coverpriced because the conversion rates are so low.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s still too hard to transact on a phone,\u201d Mr. Gillis said. Google had seemed to have finally found a solution to the riddle, by making the biggest-ever change to its AdWords advertising product. The new program, called enhanced campaigns, which was introduced in February and will be mandatory for all advertisers on Monday, gives advertisers less choice about advertising on mobile devices by automatically including desktop, tablet and cellphone ads for all campaigns. Advertisers can choose not to buy cellphone ads but are required to buy tablet ads. Google says that this simplifies the process for advertisers and makes it easier to reach customers who use devices indiscriminately. More important than the type of device, the company says, is whether someone is at a desk or on the sofa, in the mood to shop or eat. But it also means that the price of mobile ads, which has been about half that of desktop ads, will most likely increase. Google\u2019s ads are sold at auction, and one reason mobile prices have been low is that there has been less demand. Enhanced campaigns should change that. For example, the cost per ad click, known as C.P.C., for clients of the Search Agency, a search ad firm, rose 22 percent in the quarter, largely because of Google\u2019s ad-buying changes. It was the first time that tablet ads cost more than those on desktops, and advertisers increased spending on smartphones 25 percent, the most of any device category. \u201cThere used to be a discount you would get for going after traffic on tablets instead of desktops,\u201d said Keith Wilson, vice president for agency products at the Search Agency. \u201cNow that is disappearing. That is what is going to drive up C.P.C.\u2019s in the mobile space. This has been a catalyst for prioritizing mobile.\u201d But it was too early for the results of the new ad program to show up in Google\u2019s financial report, company executives said Thursday. The price that advertisers pay when Google users click on their ads decreased 6 percent from last year and 2 percent from the previous quarter, declining for the seventh quarter in a row and at a steeper annual rate than in the previous quarter. Mobile ad pricing is \u201cone of the many factors at work\u201d affecting click prices, said Nikesh Arora, Google\u2019s chief business officer. Google is in the early stages of enhanced campaigns and it will most likely take a year for the results to become apparent, he said. He added that another important metric at Google, the number of clicks on ads, is up 23 percent over last year, partly because of increased mobile use. Larry Page, Google\u2019s chief executive, said that six million advertisers had already switched to enhanced campaigns. American Apparel, according to Google , doubled its mobile conversion rate with the new ads, and M&Ms, the Mars candy brand, increased it by 41 percent. In addition to enhanced campaigns, Google is doing other things to improve its mobile offerings and its profits from mobile ads. It has been encouraging Web sites to improve their mobile versions, and last month it said Web sites without easy-to-use mobile versions could fall in search rankings. And it introduced its product listing ads, for shopping, to mobile devices. Google reported second-quarter revenue of $14.11 billion, up 19 percent from $11.8 billion a year ago. Net revenue, which excludes payments to ad partners, was $11.1 billion, up from $9.2 billion. Net income rose to $3.23 billion, or $9.54 a share, from $2.79 billion, or $8.42 a share. Excluding the cost of stock options, Google\u2019s second-quarter profit was $9.56 a share. Analysts had expected net revenue of $11.33 billion and earnings, excluding the cost of stock options, of $10.78 a share. Adding to the disappointing results was a $342 million operating loss at Motorola Mobility, which is expected to introduce a new phone, the Moto X, this summer. As shareholders and analysts wait for Google to find the next product to reignite revenue growth as the core search business slows, Mr. Page acknowledged the challenges of building new products that reach people on the same scale as search. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty easy to come up with ideas,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to make them real and get them to billions of people. And that\u2019s to me what\u2019s so exciting.\u201d", "keyword": "Google;Earnings Reports;Online advertising"}
{"id": "ny0175514", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2007/10/12", "title": "Legal or Not, Abortion Rates Compare", "abstract": "ROME, Oct. 11 \u2014 A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it. Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women\u2019s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said. The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet. \u201cWe now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,\u201d Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. \u201cWhat we see is that the law does not influence a woman\u2019s decision to have an abortion. If there\u2019s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.\u201d But the legal status of abortion did greatly affect the dangers involved, the researchers said. \u201cGenerally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner,\u201d Dr. Van Look said. \u201cAnd the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.\u201d The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute. In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. \u201cIn the past we didn\u2019t have this kind of data to draw on,\u201d Ms. Camp said. \u201cContraception is often the missing element\u201d where abortion rates are high, she said. Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. \u201cThese numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,\u201d said Randall K. O\u2019Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington. He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. \u201cThey have equated the word \u2018safe\u2019 with \u2018legal\u2019 and \u2018unsafe\u2019 with \u2018illegal,\u2019 which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,\u201d he said. The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal. The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries. The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception. The Bush administration\u2019s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V. /AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning. Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal. Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found. Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.", "keyword": "Abortion;Birth Control and Family Planning;World Health Organization"}
{"id": "ny0025018", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/08/09", "title": "\u2018Like\u2019 This Article Online? Your Friends Will Probably Approve, Too, Scientists Say", "abstract": "If you \u201clike\u201d this article on a site like Facebook, somebody who reads it is more likely to approve of it, even if the reporting and writing are not all that great. But surprisingly, an unfair negative reaction will not spur others to dislike the article. Instead, a thumbs-down view will soon be counteracted by thumbs up from other readers. Those are the implications of new research looking at the behavior of thousands of people reading online comments, scientists reported Friday in the journal Science. A positive nudge, they said, can set off a bandwagon of approval. \u201cHype can work,\u201d said one of the researchers, Sinan K. Aral, a professor of information technology and marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, \u201cand feed on itself as well.\u201d If people tend to herd together on popular opinions, that could call into question the reliability of \u201cwisdom of the crowd\u201d ratings on Web sites like Yelp or Amazon and perhaps provide marketers with hints on how to bring positive attention to their products. \u201cThis is certainly a provocative study,\u201d said Matthew O. Jackson, a professor of economics at Stanford who was not involved with the research. \u201cIt raises a lot of questions we need to answer.\u201d Besides Dr. Aral (who is also a scholar in residence at The New York Times research and development laboratory, working on unrelated projects), the researchers are from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University. They were interested in answering a question that long predates the iPhone and Justin Bieber: Is something popular because it is actually good, or is it popular just because it is popular? To help answer that question, the researchers devised an experiment in which they could manipulate a small corner of the Internet: reader comments. They collaborated with an unnamed Web site, the company did not want its involvement disclosed, on which users submit links to news articles. Readers can then comment on the articles, and they can also give up or down votes on individual comments. Each comment receives a rating calculated by subtracting negative votes from positive ones. The experiment performed a subtle, random change on the ratings of comments submitted on the site over five months: right after each comment was made, it was given an arbitrary up or down vote, or \u2014 for a control group \u2014 left alone. Reflecting a tendency among the site\u2019s users to provide positive feedback, about twice as many of these arbitrary initial votes were positive: 4,049 to 1,942. The first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score. There was no change in the likelihood of subsequent negative votes. Over time, the comments with the artificial initial up vote ended with scores 25 percent higher than those in the control group. \u201cThat is a significant change,\u201d Dr. Aral said. \u201cWe saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.\u201d Meanwhile, comments that received an initial negative vote ended up with scores indistinguishable from those in the control group. The Web site allows users to say whether they like or dislike other users, and the researchers found that a commenter\u2019s friends were likely to correct the negative score while enemies did not find it worth their time to knock down a fake up vote. The distortion of ratings through herding is not a novel concern. Reddit, a social news site that said it was not the one that participated in the study, similarly allows readers to vote comments up or down, but it also allows its moderators to hide those ratings for a certain amount of time. \u201cNow a comment will more likely be voted on based on its merit and appeal to each user, rather than having its public perception influence its votes,\u201d it explained when it unveiled the feature in April . Duncan J. Watts, a scientist at Microsoft Research, said the overall findings fit with \u201ccumulative advantage,\u201d the idea that something that starts slightly more popular will build upon that popularity until it is far ahead of its competitors \u2014 and conversely, something that does not catch on will usually fade away whether or not it is good. He cited the new crime novel \u201cThe Cuckoo\u2019s Calling,\u201d by Robert Galbraith, which received good reviews but tiny sales when it was released in April. When it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling , the book suddenly had the cumulative advantage conferred by the Harry Potter series and jumped to the top of best-seller lists. \u201cThe biggest obstacle to success is just being noticed,\u201d Dr. Watts said. But opinions do not invariably follow popularity. In an earlier experiment by Dr. Watts, people listened to a list of songs ranked by popularity and were asked to rate them. But for some, the list was inverted \u2014 what they were told was the most popular song was actually the least popular. The incorrect list did affect how listeners rated the songs \u2014 the good songs never achieved the same popularity as among listeners who were given the correct list, and the bad songs did better than they would have otherwise. \u201cBut we also found, in a result that was somewhat consistent with the result here, that sometimes the songs were able to recover their sort of real ranking in spite of the manipulation,\u201d Dr. Watts said. The listeners, he said, \u201cin effect noticed that the song was better or worse than we had made it seem.\u201d", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Research;Social Media;Science Journal"}
{"id": "ny0016682", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/10/08", "title": "Iowa Wrestler Receives Illegal-Hunting Citation", "abstract": "Ethen Lofthouse, a wrestler at Iowa, was cited by the police on a charge of shooting a duck with a bow and arrow outside his home in Iowa City on Friday. This is the second incident involving Iowa wrestlers and illegal hunting in less than a year. Connor Ryan and Alex Meyer were suspended from the team last November after they were arrested on charges of illegally hunting rabbits on campus.", "keyword": "University of Iowa;Wrestling;Hunting;College"}
{"id": "ny0129622", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/06/08", "title": "Ex-Ensign Aide Pleads Guilty in Scheme That Snared Only Him", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Douglas Hampton came to the Capitol from Nevada six years ago on the coattails of his best friend, Senator John Ensign , to serve as Mr. Ensign\u2019s senior political aide. On Thursday, a somber Mr. Hampton returned to Washington and pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal lobbying in a scandal that left him in bankruptcy, ended his marriage and forced Mr. Ensign to resign his Senate seat last year under threat of expulsion by fellow senators. \u201cI plead guilty,\u201d Mr. Hampton, 50, told Judge Beryl A. Howell of United States District Court as he stood in her courtroom, less than a mile from the Senate building where he used to work. If Mr. Hampton\u2019s plea deal with federal prosecutors provides a cautionary tale about the abuse of political power, it is a complicated one that has left a number of legal and political observers befuddled by the Justice Department\u2019s contrasting treatment of Mr. Hampton and his onetime boss. Mr. Hampton faces up to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine after admitting that he lobbied Mr. Ensign, a Nevada Republican, within days of leaving his Senate staff \u2014 in violation of a federal \u201ccooling off\u201d period that prohibits such contacts for a year. Mr. Ensign, for his part, has returned to his veterinary practice in Nevada and told an interviewer in February that he was \u201chaving a ball\u201d caring for animals again. He has not been charged by the Justice Department, despite findings last year by Senate ethics investigators that his own role in directing the lobbying scheme broke the law. Indeed, Mr. Ensign \u2014 a onetime presidential hopeful before the scandal \u2014 was not even mentioned during Thursday\u2019s hearing, and he is referred to in the plea documents only as \u201cSenator A.\u201d Evidence first disclosed by The New York Times in 2009 showed that Mr. Ensign, after having an affair with Mr. Hampton\u2019s wife, Cynthia, arranged tens of thousands of dollars in lobbying contracts for Mr. Hampton through Nevada political allies as a means of finding income for the aggrieved aide and containing the damage from the affair. Mr. Ensign\u2019s parents also gave the Hamptons $96,000 after the senator fired Mr. Hampton from his Senate staff and dismissed Cynthia Hampton from his campaign staff. The Justice Department, without explanation, initially declined to prosecute Mr. Ensign in late 2010. But last year the Senate Ethics Committee found that Mr. Ensign was at the center of the lobbying scheme, and it referred the case back to the Justice Department. The ethics investigation found Mr. Ensign had \u201cused his office and staff to intimidate and cajole constituents into hiring Mr. Hampton.\u201d A top aide warned Mr. Ensign that his continued lobbying contacts with Mr. Hampton might violate the law, but the senator ordered them to continue anyway, the report found. The ethics report also found that Mr. Ensign appeared to have given false or misleading statements to the Federal Election Commission about the $96,000. When the Ethics Committee referred the Ensign case back to prosecutors last year, the Justice Department said it would investigate thoroughly and \u201ctake any necessary and appropriate steps.\u201d The Justice Department declined to discuss the case Thursday, as did lawyers for Mr. Ensign. \u201cI cannot comment on a specific investigation,\u201d said Alisa Finelli, a Justice Department spokeswoman. But in general, she said, \u201cif there is evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed, we will not hesitate to bring charges.\u201d While the department has not formally notified Mr. Ensign\u2019s lawyers that the case has been dropped \u2014 through what is known as a \u201cdeclination letter\u201d \u2014 it appears to have effectively shut down the investigation, people involved in the case said. \u201cI think it\u2019s an absolute outrage that Doug Hampton was the one prosecuted here while John Ensign has had nothing happen to him criminally or otherwise, except for having had to resign,\u201d said Jon Ralston, a political commentator in Las Vegas who has followed the story from the beginning. Mr. Hampton cooperated for a time with Justice Department officials, giving detailed recollections of the lobbying scheme and providing e-mails and handwritten notes during hours of interviews in 2010 in Las Vegas, people involved in the case said. He apparently hoped to help prosecutors bring a case against his former boss after the bitter falling out that followed the senator\u2019s affair with Ms. Hampton. Instead, Mr. Hampton\u2019s own admissions appear to have provided prosecutors with a road map to charge him alone. Kenneth Gross, a top government ethics lawyer in Washington who is not involved in the case, said the Justice Department\u2019s inaction against Mr. Ensign was particularly odd in light of its recent failed prosecution of former Senator John Edwards in another sex-and-money scandal. Mr. Gross said he considered the evidence that had emerged against Mr. Ensign to be much stronger than what prosecutors presented in the Edwards matter. \u201cThe whole thing is curious,\u201d he said. Justice Department prosecutors allowed Mr. Hampton to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor instead of the original seven felonies. His public defender, A. J. Kramer, said he would seek no prison time under federal guidelines that call for zero to six months of incarceration. A sentencing hearing was set for Sept. 5. As they left the courtroom, Mr. Hampton and Mr. Kramer declined to discuss the case with reporters. Asked whether he thought Mr. Ensign should also have been charged, Mr. Hampton smiled but said nothing. \u201cHe has no comment,\u201d his lawyer said.", "keyword": "Hampton Douglas;Ensign John;Ethics (Institutional);Lobbying and Lobbyists;Senate;Justice Department;Nevada;Senate Committee on Ethics;United States;Congress"}
{"id": "ny0150521", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2008/08/03", "title": "Flooded Apartment Makes Brooklynite a Tourist", "abstract": "TELL me if you\u2019ve heard this one. A man from Minsk decides he wishes to visit the neighboring town of Pinsk. He packs a bag, bids farewell to his wife and boards the train, where he promptly falls asleep. When he awakens, he is struck by the astonishing likeness of Pinsk to Minsk. He walks the streets noting that everything looks just the same as his home town, \u201conly somehow different.\u201d Never does it occur to him that the strangely familiar shopkeepers and street merchants who greet him, or even the woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his wife, are the very same people he has known all along. I was reminded of this classic Jewish tale a few weeks ago, when my Brooklyn Heights apartment was flooded, my carpet spattered with rust-infused rainwater and chunks of gooey drywall, and I was temporarily relocated to a nearby Holiday Inn. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge by cab, lugging my bags to the lobby, checking in at the front desk behind a line of international guests, I could already feel myself becoming disembodied from my once-familiar surroundings, a de facto tourist in my own town. The hotel sits at the southwest corner of Lafayette and Howard Streets, an area real estate agents call SoHo, but one that otherwise bears little resemblance to the district we associate with that name. This row of three or four blocks is something of a no man\u2019s land, a sliver of negative space cloistered between four brand-name quadrants \u2014 SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and TriBeCa \u2014 with no token identity of its own. It was refreshing, if a bit disorienting, to walk through the ageless shadowlands of a city that seems to grow slicker and more anemic each day. Unlike the ultrahip greasy spoon just north, a place like the Landmark diner on Grand Street, one block from the hotel, retains its unself-conscious, Old World charm, with its checkerboard tiles, Formica tables and exposed ducts. There are no glossy photographs of itself on the walls, no skinny-jeaned 20-somethings hunched at the bar with silver laptops. Howard Street in particular has a quality reminiscent of city outskirts, a sort of \u201cfunctioning ruins,\u201d similar to the landscape one finds in a Ben Katchor strip. This is particularly true at night. The crude industrial sprawl of Canal Street, with its foam rubber outlets and major appliance bargains, washes seamlessly into the artsy glitter of design stores and vintage boutiques on Grand. I saw a red neon sign reading Pe Pai, which I assumed to be a Chinese transliteration. On closer inspection, I realized that the text actually spelled Pearl Paint, or would have if the other bulbs had been working. On my second day at the hotel, I tightened my gut and ventured into SoHo proper. Though I\u2019d been there dozens of times in the past, my experience had always been circumscribed by whatever menial activity I was there to perform. I\u2019d barrel across Prince Street, head down, iPod blasting, never bothering to appreciate the jostle and flux of life around me. Now that I had no task but to observe, I found myself giddy with stimulation. Before long, I was behaving like the very tourists that New Yorkers notoriously revile, which is to say both overly alert and completely oblivious \u2014 squinting up at the buildings, stepping through vagrant urine, standing idly at crosswalks, craning my neck at every passing beauty. I inhaled the dizzying chorus of scents: exhaust from Laundromats, sizzling pretzels, fresh sawdust from construction sites, astringent fumes from the sudsy cleaning agents rolling down the sidewalk. Finally, I surrendered. Why not own the experience, I thought, and capitulate fully to the traveler mindset? I swallowed my pride and bought a fanny pack. I also called friends and had them take me through various neighborhoods, pointing out their favorite bars and parks and regaling me with tales of late-night debauchery. I sampled as many independent bookstores as I could find, hunting for hard-to-find authors and out-of-print editions. (The grand prize goes to St. Mark\u2019s Bookshop on Third Avenue.) I shopped at high-end outlets on West Broadway, procuring, among other things, an $89 T-shirt. I ate like a king in NoLIta, wolfing down pulled-pork sandwiches on toasted sourdough and glorious baked eggs with fresh cilantro. I sucked down mojitos and bellinis in the afternoon. I browsed the upscale galleries. The highlight of my stay was a walking tour through the East Village. A frizzy-haired grad student delivered an unapologetically leftist history of Lower Manhattan, full of robber barons, negligent landlords, bloody protests and glamorous unionizations. It was thrilling to imagine fin de si\u00e8cle New York with its dirt roads and unbearable stench, the swells lining up outside the theater, middle-class women congregating in smoke-filled parlors, the madness of the Bowery with its decaying horse carcasses and clamoring el. For the rest of the day, I couldn\u2019t help seeing things in grainy black and white. BUT eventually, perhaps inevitably, the exotic spell began to wear off. I\u2019d learned the names of the obscure streets, the marvelous old businesses with their heartbreaking clearance sales. I\u2019d started to recognize the inhabitants, the routes to the best coffee shops. At the same time, I longed for my own New York, the quotidian city of MetroCards and Leonard Lopate on the radio and free concerts in the park. When I received word that my ceiling had finally been repaired, I checked out of my drab suite at the Holiday Inn and heaved my bags toward the No. 6 train. Suddenly, the sky darkened and a fierce squall lashed the streets. In a heartbeat, the environment was transformed. Models scurried under awnings, makeup drizzling down their cheeks. Men in Paul Smith pinstripes and D & G aviators stumbled into hydrants, tripped over dog leashes. Puddles formed, windows fogged. In the gloomy rush, New York could have been any other city: Warsaw, Tokyo, Minsk. Then, just as suddenly, the thunderclouds parted and the rain came to a halt. The sun reappeared. The mist cleared, and within moments the neighborhood looked just as it did before. Only somehow different.", "keyword": "Housing;Writing and Writers;SoHo (NYC);New York City"}
{"id": "ny0293274", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/06/10", "title": "Where Coyotes, Foxes and Bobolinks Find a New Home: Freshkills Park", "abstract": "The world\u2019s largest landfill is slowly becoming a park \u2014 very slowly. The conversion of Freshkills on the western shore of Staten Island into a verdant expanse of green is now in its second decade, with two more to go before it is finished. Yet largely out of the public eye, a site that once received 29,000 tons of trash a day is undergoing a more rapid and remarkable transformation. Fifteen years since the landfill closed, the regeneration of Freshkills, which at 2,200 acres encompasses a site two and a half times larger than Central Park, is altering New York City\u2019s ecological landscape: Mountains of garbage have become a vast grassland, a habitat that has been in decline across eastern North America. \u201cIt\u2019s done a complete 180,\u201d said Mike Shanley, a naturalist and president of the Friends of Blue Heron Park, a group dedicated to the nearby park. \u201cIt looks like a prairie you\u2019d see in the Midwest somewhere.\u201d The amount of new habitat and its relative remoteness \u2014 the site is closed to the public most of the year \u2014 has attracted nearly a dozen animal species that are considered rare in the city. The site was always known for its bird life: Tens of thousands of scavenging gulls lived happily at the landfill. But now Freshkills hosts an array of at-risk species, many of which need grasslands to thrive. Researchers at the site have found three bird species considered endangered in New York State, nine classified as threatened and seven more the state deems \u201cof special concern.\u201d Several others are breeding within the city limits for the first time in decades. \u201cUp until 1928 there were no bridges connecting Staten Island, and open grassland species were common,\u201d said Ed Johnson, a former director of science at the Staten Island Museum. \u201cIf you look back at the records, we have more breeding species now than we did back then.\u2019\u2019 On a recent day, during a public tour of Freshkills, bald eagles soared over the wetlands while bobolinks sang from electrical wires. \u201cIt was like a complete escape into somewhere that seemed like nowhere close to Staten Island,\u201d said Ian Gutch, a Staten Island resident who also spotted hawks and falcons on the tour. \u201cIt felt more like Jurassic Park with the number of raptors flying so low.\u201d The star of the ecological revival might well be the grasshopper sparrow, a species whose population in the state has plummeted significantly. Dick Veit, a researcher with the College of Staten Island, discovered a colony of 60 adult grasshopper sparrows, named for their insectile song, at Freshkills last summer. \u201cThat\u2019s basically unheard-of in New York City,\u201d Debra Kriensky, a biologist with New York City Audubon, said. The group produced about 40 juveniles, making it the largest colony in the state. They returned this year to much excitement among bird enthusiasts. \u201cBefore this, most were up in farmland in the Adirondacks or the Catskills,\u201d said Cait Field, manager of science and research development for the Freshkills Park Alliance, a nonprofit working with the city on the transition. \u201cThey need at least 350 acres of grass. They are one of the reasons why we\u2019re able to explain now why these grasslands are so important.\u201d Other new breeding species include the eastern meadowlark, known for its sharp call; the blue grosbeak, a striking blue relative of the cardinal; and the bobolink, a bumblebee-colored blackbird that migrates 12,500 miles annually. Image Eloise Hirsh, the park administrator. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to remain alive in the public\u2019s imagination, so the perception is this is a park, not a landfill,\u201d she said. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times On the mammal side, coyotes, red foxes and hundreds of white-tailed deer \u2014 which many Staten Islanders consider a nuisance \u2014 can be found. A site next to Freshkills features the city\u2019s only pair of resident beavers. This spring, environmentalists have been buzzing about the discovery of a pair of upland sandpipers, potbellied shorebirds that are extremely rare in this part of the state. \u201cIt\u2019s like being transported back into the 19th century again,\u201d said Howard Fischer, a leading bird expert on Staten Island. \u201cThese are birds that have actually come out of extinction, in a sense. They are that rare on the East Coast.\u201d As Freshkills undergoes its prolonged metamorphosis into a public park, the Freshkills Park Alliance provides several tours a month, offering visitors a tantalizing look at this wild sprawl within view of the Manhattan skyline. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to remain alive in the public\u2019s imagination, so the perception is this is a park, not a landfill,\u201d Eloise Hirsh, the park administrator, said. Still, aside from the tours, the park remains largely off limits, which is frustrating to many eager to witness the site\u2019s evolution. \u201cI don\u2019t think they need to be so protective of allowing people in,\u201d Mr. Shanley, the naturalist, said. \u201cMy concern is, people have a lot of excitement around the park right now. If they don\u2019t allow access, it\u2019ll wear off.\u201d", "keyword": "Fresh Kills Landfill Staten Island;Parks;Endangered Species;NYC;Birds;Animals"}
{"id": "ny0044496", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/02/02", "title": "Major Volcanic Eruption Kills at Least 14 in Indonesia", "abstract": "JAKARTA, Indonesia \u2014 An active volcano on Indonesia\u2019s Sumatra Island unexpectedly erupted again on Saturday, killing at least 14 people and spreading toxic clouds of hot ash that hampered search and rescue teams, officials said. The teams planned to resume searching Sunday morning for more victims and survivors of the eruption of the volcano, Mount Sinabung. Three people were reported injured, and officials warned that the volcano could erupt again and that the death toll was likely to rise. Among the victims were local residents checking on their homes after the eruption, a journalist and a group of high school students and their teacher who were trying to get a closer look at the volcano, said Yopie Haryadi, a spokesman for Indonesia\u2019s National Search and Rescue Agency. He said that there were no reports of anyone missing but that it was possible more people were in the area when Mount Sinabung, which lies in North Sumatra Province and has been erupting for weeks, spewed hot ash again around 10:20 a.m. on Saturday. The 14 victims were recovered on Saturday, the agency spokesman said. \u201cNo one is reported missing, but we don\u2019t know for sure,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes people can come and go to check on their homes. We will try to search again, but we have to wait until the situation is clear, given the hot clouds.\u201d He said the victims were found in the village of Suka Meriah, which lies within a three-mile exclusion zone around the volcano\u2019s crater. Around 30,000 people have been evacuated from the area in the weeks after Mount Sinabung resumed erupting in November. In January, the volcano was erupting dozens of times a day, but it had quieted down in recent days. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a visit to the disaster zone on Jan. 23 to comfort displaced residents camped out in evacuation centers and discuss reconstruction efforts. On Friday, local authorities allowed nearly 14,000 people living outside the three-mile danger zone to return home after volcanic activity decreased, The Associated Press reported. Others living close to the peak have been returning home over the past four months despite the dangers. On Saturday, a series of huge blasts and eruptions from the 8,530-foot-high volcano sent lava and rock flows up to nearly three miles away, according to news reports. Local television reports during the weekend showed giant gray clouds cloaking Mount Sinabung\u2019s crater, and farms and roads around the volcano covered in ash. Television news footage showed people bringing the bodies of some of the 14 victims down the mountain in makeshift rescue vehicles and on motorbikes. After the eruption, all those who had been allowed to return home on Friday were ordered back into evacuation centers, The A.P. reported.", "keyword": "Indonesia;Volcano;Fatalities,casualties;Mount Sinabung Indonesia"}
{"id": "ny0124884", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/08/11", "title": "Romney Team Steps Up Attacks on Pro-Obama Ads", "abstract": "Mitt Romney \u2019s campaign on Friday sought to take advantage of a backlash against negative campaigning by President Obama \u2019s allies, even as it tried to deny what new polls suggest \u2014 that the full-throated assault on Mr. Romney\u2019s character may be working. Top advisers to Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign spent a third day lashing out at an ad from Priorities USA Action , a pro-Obama \u201c super PAC ,\u201d in which a steelworker tells how he and his cancer-stricken wife lost their health insurance when Mr. Romney\u2019s private equity firm closed his plant. The worker all but blames Mr. Romney for his wife\u2019s death, even though he lost his job years before her cancer was diagnosed. \u201cI don\u2019t think a world champion limbo dancer could get any lower than the Obama campaign right now,\u201d said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney. \u201cWhen you start running ads accusing your opponent of killing people, then you have lost your credibility.\u201d His comments followed a torrent of criticism, including an editorial in The Chicago Tribune that called it a \u201cvicious, shameful ad.\u201d In an effort to capitalize on that criticism, the Romney campaign quickly released a new television ad of its own asking: \u201cWhat does it say about a president\u2019s character when his campaign tries to use the tragedy of a woman\u2019s death for political gain?\u201d But even as the Priorities USA ad \u2014 which has not yet appeared on a television screen \u2014 picked up steam on the Internet, Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign scrambled to play down the results of new national polls that showed Mr. Obama\u2019s lead widening, in one case to nearly double digits. In a national Fox News poll conducted Sunday through Tuesday, Mr. Obama led Mr. Romney by nine percentage points, 49 to 40. A CNN/ORC poll conducted Tuesday and Wednesday found Mr. Obama with an advantage, 52 percent to 45 percent, a seven-point difference, which is within the poll\u2019s margin of error of plus or minus four points. Both polls showed Mr. Romney\u2019s favorability has been pummeled, especially among independent voters. Advisers to Mr. Romney dismissed the results in a briefing with reporters at the campaign\u2019s Boston headquarters. But they conceded that they could not explain what they called a \u201chuge shift\u201d in the numbers. \u201cGuys, it\u2019s the middle of the summer. It\u2019s the doldrums,\u201d said a senior adviser to Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign, who asked not to be identified. \u201cIt\u2019s the middle of the Olympics. There has not been any national news, anything that would push these numbers from minus three to minus nine points.\u201d In fact, the last several weeks has been dominated by increasingly acerbic television commercials by Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney and their supporters. The back and forth over the Priorities ad highlights the opportunities and the dangers of the intensely negative campaign. Advisers to Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign have repeatedly pointed out that they are prohibited by law from having any contact with Priorities USA Action and its founders, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, who both worked in the White House before starting the group. On Friday, Jay Carney , the White House press secretary, deflected questions about the Priorities ad. \u201cWe do not control third-party ads,\u201d Mr. Carney said, referring all questions about the ad to Mr. Obama\u2019s Chicago-based campaign. And Mr. Carney and others tried to shift the focus by complaining about the Romney campaign\u2019s recent ad accusing the president of gutting welfare reform, a charge that has drawn wide criticism for being false. Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, accused Mr. Fehrnstrom of \u201cfaux outrage\u201d and said Mr. Romney has been the one leveling false attacks. \u201cHis campaign has questioned whether the president understands what it is to be American, attacked his patriotism,\u201d Ms. Smith said. \u201cWhen the Romney campaign finally reaches the high ground, we look forward to greeting them there.\u201d Advisers to Mr. Romney drew a distinction between the two campaigns, insisting that the president\u2019s attacks \u2014 and those from his allies \u2014 have been more personal. They predicted that Mr. Obama\u2019s once-successful brand of \u201chope and change\u201d will suffer because of the attacks. \u201cThey are accusing him of culpability in the death of a woman,\u201d Mr. Fehrnstrom said. \u201cThese attacks are so outrageous and over the top that it has squandered one of the most vital attributes that Obama had, which is he was a different kind of politician, who was going to change the state of our politics. He has changed it, but he\u2019s changed it for the worse.\u201d But Mr. Burton said his group\u2019s ad will eventually run on television and has already become a hit on the Web, especially in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. \u201cWhen people actually watch the ad, and don\u2019t just listen to the cable chatter, they understand exactly the point,\u201d Mr. Burton said.", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2012;Political Advertising;Obama Barack;Romney Mitt;Priorities USA Action;Fehrnstrom Eric;Carney Jay;Burton Bill"}
{"id": "ny0235677", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2010/01/06", "title": "U.S. Reopens Its Embassy After Raids in Yemen", "abstract": "The United States reopened its embassy in Yemen on Tuesday, a day after Yemeni security forces killed two people suspected of being members of Al Qaeda and linked to the threats against several diplomatic outposts. The United States and Britain had closed their embassies in Sana, Yemen\u2019s capital, on Sunday, citing continuing threats against targets in the city. At the British Embassy, workers returned Tuesday, but the building was closed to visitors. The French, German, Czech and Japanese Embassies were also largely or entirely closed to the public, according to news reports. A counterterrorism operation by Yemeni forces on Monday had \u201caddressed a specific area of concern,\u201d according to a statement posted on the American Embassy\u2019s Web site. But the statement warned that \u201cthe threat of terrorist attacks against American interests remains high\u201d and urged Americans in Yemen to be \u201cvigilant and take prudent security measures.\u201d On Monday, Yemeni forces were tracking a man they suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group tied to the attempt to bring down an international flight into Detroit on Christmas Day, when they came under fire from militants in the town of Arhab, officials said. Two bodyguards of the suspect, Nazih al-Hanq, were killed in the firefight; Mr. Hanq escaped. The United States, which is increasing aid to Yemen, praised the operation. Arhab was the site of one of several strikes made against militants on Dec. 17 that American officials said killed three men suspected of planning suicide attacks on Western targets in Sana. A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office, speaking under standard rules of anonymity, said that embassy employees were at work on Tuesday, but that the building was still closed to the public and was not providing visa services. Yemen, long a roost for terrorist groups, has said it stepped up its campaign against Al Qaeda in recent months, carrying out raids against militant hide-outs. On Tuesday, government officials quoted by Reuters said that Yemen had sent \u201cthousands\u201d of troops to combat militants in the provinces of Shabwa, Marib and Abyan, thought to be havens for militants. Last month, after Yemen\u2019s broadest attack on Qaeda members in years, Yemeni authorities said that their security forces killed at least 34 suspected militants in raids on Qaeda hide-outs in Sana, in the south and in Arhab, which was the site of Monday\u2019s firefight.", "keyword": "Yemen;Foreign Service;Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula;Terrorism;United States"}
{"id": "ny0027950", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/01/31", "title": "Huntley, Ex-State Senator, Pleads Guilty in Fraud", "abstract": "A former state senator pleaded guilty on Wednesday to funneling over $87,000 in taxpayer money through a nonprofit agency that she was running to cover shopping for herself and her relatives. At her appearance in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, the former senator, Shirley L. Huntley , a Democrat who had represented Queens and had fiercely denied any wrongdoing, softly recounted her crimes to a courtroom filled with family members and other supporters. Judge Jack B. Weinstein addressed her in disappointment: \u201cI\u2019m sorry to see you here.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry to be here,\u201d Ms. Huntley responded. Ms. Huntley, 74, had claimed the agency she founded, Parents Information Network Inc., was focused on giving parents more of a voice in their local schools. Instead, prosecutors said, she siphoned the money she received as \u201cmember items,\u201d or grants for legislators to support social causes, from the State Education Department. For a three-year period beginning in 2005, Ms. Huntley wrote more than $21,000 in checks to herself from the agency\u2019s account, made more than $34,000 in A.T.M. withdrawals and wrote almost $25,000 in checks to others who later returned the money to her in cash, according to court records. As part of her plea agreement, Ms. Huntley will pay the state the full amount she stole, $87,700. She faces up to two years in prison under the federal sentencing guidelines for the charge, conspiracy to commit mail fraud. A sentencing date has not been set. Ms. Huntley still faces state corruption charges in connection with a scheme to steal from a related nonprofit agency she founded, Parents Workshop Inc. She is expected to plead guilty to one felony charge of tampering with evidence, said a person with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was continuing. Ms. Huntley was a state senator for nearly six years until she lost a re-election bid in the 2012 Democratic primary. She joins a long line of former New York State senators recently indicted or convicted of a felony .", "keyword": "Shirley L Huntley;Embezzlement;State legislature;New York;Jack B Weinstein;Queens;Fraud"}
{"id": "ny0119168", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2012/07/20", "title": "2012 British Open \u2014 Bunkers Make Royal Lytham Hazardous", "abstract": "LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England \u2014 It would be difficult to find a better day for avoiding big trouble at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. Soft after an early summer of rain and with barely a breath of wind to play tricks on shots, minds and yardage books, the course was ripe for the picking in Thursday\u2019s first round of the British Open. But those who ended up with the lowest scores did not shake the tree with abandon. Instead, men like Zach Johnson proceeded with methodical, surgical care. However benign the conditions, there were still those 206 bunkers. \u201cI was really trying to avoid them; I played pretty conservative off the tee,\u201d Johnson said after his five-under-par round of 65 left him one shot off Adam Scott\u2019s lead. \u201cI think if you get it inside a pot bunker greenside, you can get it up and down. You get it in a pot bunker fairway side, you are going to have a really, really difficult time making pars. So I think the tee shot in this Open championship is as important as any tournament I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d If Johnson needed reassurance that his bunker mentality was the right mentality, he needed only observe the misadventures of one of his playing partners, Darren Clarke. A year ago, Clarke \u2014 the sentimental favorite from Northern Ireland \u2014 finally won the British Open at age 42. He treasured the moment, treasured the claret jug and the autumnal sense of fulfillment. But this is another year, another stretch of English coastline and another soundtrack. Instead of hearing the roars of Royal St. George\u2019s, the big, ruddy-faced Clarke played to sympathetic silence or collective groans. One of the low points came at the 11th when Clarke hit into a fairway bunker and then mis-hit his next shot out of the sand into another bunker on the opposite side of the fairway. Despite its compact layout, Lytham has more bunkers \u2014 by far \u2014 than any of the other eight courses on the Open rotation: enough to cause confusion over the official count, which the club professional Eddie Birchenough insists is 206. \u201cI think the nearest to that is Muirfield with about 150, so that is really the defining characteristic of the course,\u201d Birchenough said in his modest office filled with packages and a still-wrapped portrait of Seve Ballesteros, a two-time winner at Lytham who died last year. Ballesteros\u2019s two Open victories here remain a testimony to the ability of a gifted scrambler to find a way. But improvising out of trap after trap is hardly the recommended approach to Lytham. Consider Phil Mickelson , the American star who found himself in a fairway bunker on No. 8 and managed to blast out, only to see his ball plop into a thicket of rough just beyond the bunker\u2019s lip. After searching feverishly, his hands disappearing in the thick grass, Mickelson finally determined that he had an unplayable lie and took a penalty drop. Consider (again) Clarke, who found a fairway bunker on No. 14 and did not even try to advance the ball, blasting out sideways while looking grim and then leaning on his club although he probably would have preferred to snap it over his knee. \u201cThe bunkers all essentially have a red line around them,\u201d said Tony Jacklin, who won the 1969 Open at Lytham. \u201cI mean, they\u2019re a one-shot penalty. Getting the ball off the tee in play is paramount.\u201d With all the bunkers about, there is certainly variety. There are the pot bunkers: the deep traps shaped like sunken pots. There are the shallower or less uniform varieties that seemed nickname-ready: a boomerang-shaped bunker on 17, and one in the shape of a bear\u2019s paw print on 13 with thick grass growing on the lip that actually obscures much of the front wall. A would-be Open champion would definitely not want to land in there. What the bunkers share is coarse sand that bears little resemblance to the fine Caribbean-style white sand you might find on the PGA Tour. Lytham\u2019s sand could never be raked smooth. Its bunkers also share the classic British Open face: layers of stacked sod that appear rather like a bonsai version of a terraced paddy field. That seems an appropriate metaphor considering that conditions have been soggy enough to grow rice here this week. Some of the fairway bunkers on 16 even featured standing water. That was good news for John Daly, the former Open champion who has long projected more power than accuracy. He was able to seek relief and a free drop after splashing down during his round of 72. Others had to live with the consequences. And the question is why Lytham St. Annes, a seemingly peaceful place, chooses to inflict such angst on those who choose to play on a course with 206 bunkers throughout the year. \u201cI think what happened is that originally if you see pictures of when Bobby Jones played here, there was lots of sandy scrub,\u201d said Birchenough, referring to Jones\u2019s victory in 1926. \u201cI think you\u2019d call it waste areas in America.\u201d Those areas, according to Birchenough, made it difficult to know where players could and could not ground their club. \u201cThat\u2019s because they were so ill defined,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it brought a lot of doubt or questions into lies: where a ball is lying and how to play it. And I think by defining the bunkers more clearly, they\u2019ve taken that element out of it. But of course the bunkers were always in dips. Traditionally, that was just where the sheep lay at the bottom of the dune, wasn\u2019t it? So all our bunkers are into lowland.\u201d No matter how rich the history, there are days when the regulars simply decline the honor of a round full of dangers. \u201cSometimes in the early spring,\u201d Birchenough said, \u201cwhen the rough is up and the wind is blowing, the members will say, \u2018I\u2019ll just let this one go and play next week.\u2019 \u201d Those playing in the Open do not have that option. Best that they stick to the straight and narrow and hope the wind does not start howling.", "keyword": "British Open (Golf);Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club;Golf;Mickelson Phil;Johnson Zach;Ballesteros Seve;Scott Adam;Birchenough Eddie"}
{"id": "ny0028031", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2013/01/31", "title": "Lessons From a LeBron James Hug", "abstract": "Brook Lopez cackled when asked if he could imagine his 7-foot frame rolling on the floor with a celebrating fan who had just hit a halfcourt hook shot. Sure he could. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of basketball,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything is so close.\u201d Lopez was newly minted as an All-Star on Wednesday, but when the world\u2019s consensus best player bolts from the sideline and revels in the good fortune of the common man \u2014 as LeBron James did last Friday in Miami when Michael Drysch of McHenry, Ill., won $75,000 in conjunction with James\u2019s charity foundation \u2014 that\u2019s a teachable moment to help bridge the yawning gap between the ever-strapped sports consumer and the chosen few. Or in this case, he who bears the tattooed inscription on his back : Chosen 1. \u201cYou could see that LeBron was really excited for the guy,\u201d Lopez said before the James-led (as usual) Heat outclassed the Nets, 105-85, at Barclays Center. \u201cIt was cool.\u201d It was also quite a week for James and his fully repaired reputation as the N.B.A.\u2019s leading man-child, so to speak, after the 2010 fracture resulting from his grand pronouncement, or Decision, upon departing Cleveland for South Beach. After communing with Drysch, James consorted at the White House with \u201cPrez,\u201d as he called Barack Obama when the Heat got their grip-and-grin welcome for winning the championship last June. On Wednesday night, James and company made their first appearance in Brooklyn, the last stop on the James tour of locations he rejected two and a half years ago (though the Nets were still in New Jersey at the time). Doesn\u2019t it now seem like 20? Back when the free-agent King finished with fawning suitors, he was convicted in the court of public opinion, more or less of insensitivity that was very likely the residue of immaturity. But recent events watched round the world made you think: thank goodness that James has retained his sense of youthful spontaneity that occasionally borders on silly. Better that than the programmed genius of advisers and television executives in search of the extra buck in the way James looks for the open man. \u201cFor a while there he was playing to prove people wrong, but what you\u2019re seeing now is a guy who understands that you get a lot more accomplished playing for the love of it than for hate,\u201d Dru Joyce II, James\u2019s high school coach, said in a telephone interview from Akron, Ohio. Given what we know about other transcendent athletes like Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez and, yes, Ray Lewis, did America really expend that much vitriol on a young man who wanted to play on a better team? Did the news media really mercilessly hound James for the none-too-felonious act of promising multiple championships to Miami before coming up small in the 2011 finals against Dallas? Image LeBron James\u2019s reaction to a fan\u2019s halfcourt shot in a charity promotion. He tackled the man at midcourt in celebration. Credit Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images Joyce \u2014 who still coaches the St. Vincent-St. Mary team from which James vaulted to the N.B.A., as well as James-sponsored teams in Akron \u2014 has never been shy in admitting that his disciple was in on a few questionable judgment calls. But was a little context to soften the contemptuousness too much to ask? Joyce\u2019s son, Dru III \u2014 now playing professionally in Germany \u2014 was James\u2019s close friend on youth and scholastic teams that were more like family than traveling showcase. But speaking as a coach, the elder Joyce said that what has impressed him most about James\u2019s growth was how he took the criticism of the 2011 finals to heart and went to work on his game, more than his brand. \u201cWhen \u2019Bron was in high school, we always got what we needed from him in the post,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cIn the pros, he couldn\u2019t do what he did in high school. He needed to refine his game, improve his skills. That\u2019s what he did.\u201d The narrative, of course, is continuing, open to interpretation and apparently re-evaluation. James no doubt will be reminded at some point that he used both hands when forecasting the number of titles the Heat would win. The Nets\u2019 Reggie Evans weighed in Wednesday with the opinion that even last season\u2019s title was tainted because it came in a lockout season. James\u2019s pointed answer was that the Nets shouldn\u2019t have quit on the departed coach Avery Johnson, and that zinger was punctuated by 24 points, 9 rebounds and 7 assists. However nonsensical and self-sabotaging Evans\u2019s claim was \u2014 and James said he was motivated by it \u2014 the Heat, even while narrowly leading the Eastern Conference, have at times played unevenly, short a defensive big man and leading them to try out the bizarre if exuberant Chris Andersen. Opponents have to hang their hopes on something. But if not this time around, there is the matter of James\u2019s opt-out clause after next season, Year 4 of what so far has to be considered a better first term than Obama\u2019s. Whoever James\u2019s teammates will be, it is unlikely that his critics will have to question his commitment to them. While Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony are deified when they are moved to share the ball, James has mostly been called out for passing too much \u2014 which makes Joyce proud. \u201cI have a kid I\u2019m coaching now, a freshman, one of the top 10 in the country for his age,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cI tell him: \u2018Right now you can do everything to make yourself feel good, but you can\u2019t do things to make other guys on your team feel good. It\u2019s not that you\u2019re selfish \u2014 you just don\u2019t know, and you have to learn.\u2019 \u201d What we learn from James, one hopes, is not to exaggerate the self-aggrandizement of runaway fame. Even Drysch, who made one miracle shot and rose from having James land on him with the force of his 240 pounds richer and ready for his 15-plus minutes. Contacted via Twitter Wednesday for an interview, Drysch \u2014 a 50-year-old computer technician \u2014 messaged back: \u201cHi, Patrick has been helping me on media requests. Give him a call.\u201d We rest LeBron\u2019s case.", "keyword": "LeBron James;Basketball;Miami Heat;Brooklyn Nets"}
{"id": "ny0226705", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/10/01", "title": "As N.C.A.A. Gets Tough on Enforcement, Coaches Take Notice", "abstract": "SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. \u2014 Last week, dozens of college coaches from elite programs like Kansas, Duke and Texas rolled into this small town. This scene is not uncommon during the so-called open period of the college basketball recruiting season, when coaches can evaluate all manner of prospects \u2014 from inner-city schools in Los Angeles to junior colleges in Oklahoma. Private planes land, coaches settle into wooden bleachers and suddenly Rick Barnes and Mike Krzyzewski are chatting about Kevin Durant hundreds of miles from their campuses. But the buzz on the recruiting trail this autumn has taken a different tone as a spate of N.C.A.A. investigations and penalties has put football and basketball coaches on edge. \u201cThey have beefed up,\u201d Virginia basketball Coach Tony Bennett said. \u201cThere\u2019s honest mistakes, but then there\u2019s the blatant ones. I think that\u2019s what this is all about, catching people who are being blatant in trying to get advantages.\u201d Notorious among many for its perceived apathy in ignoring problems ranging from agents to amateurism, the N.C.A.A. is no longer a punch line in the giant revenue-generating sports of football and basketball. With its larger staff, as well as the transparency offered by social networking tools and numerous news media investigations, the N.C.A.A. is no longer toothless. The proof is in the punishments. The N.C.A.A. recently handed down penalties to programs ranging from Southern California (Reggie Bush taking improper benefits) to Harvard (secondary violations for illegal recruiting tactics in basketball). \u201cThis is my 11th year coaching Division I college basketball and I was surprised, when I first changed careers, I was surprised at how it mirrored corporate America on the negative side,\u201d Oregon State\u2019s Craig Robinson said. \u201cNow, when you see the N.C.A.A. being aggressive like this, it\u2019s going to make the people who aren\u2019t doing the right thing be very concerned, as they should be.\u201d The latest scandal involves the North Carolina football program. The Tar Heels\u2019 defensive coordinator, John Blake, resigned and more than a dozen players were suspended because of problems with agents and academics. Yahoo Sports reported on Wednesday that there were financial ties between Blake and the agent Gary Wichard. Yahoo reported that Blake was wired money from Wichard\u2019s bank and that Blake had a credit card from his firm, Pro Tect Management. The N.C.A.A. has talked about stopping a so-called runner \u2014 someone who obtains clients for an agent. How will it act if the runner is a university employee? North Carolina is not the only target. Questions about agents have had a significant impact this season on South Carolina and Georgia football. The Gamecocks threw the star tight end Weslye Saunders off the team because of problems involving agents, and the star Georgia receiver A. J. Green missed four games because he sold a game jersey for $1,000 to someone the N.C.A.A. determined was an agent. The college basketball trail has heated up, too. Connecticut is awaiting its fate regarding eight major violations after revelations in a Yahoo Sports investigation. The N.C.A.A. is also looking at the Oregon basketball program because of suspicion of agent activity with former players. But the situation most discussed this fall surrounds Bruce Pearl, the Tennessee men\u2019s basketball coach whose job status appears tenuous. Pearl had a teary news conference in September, apologizing for making illegal phone calls, improperly hosting recruits in his home and lying to the N.C.A.A. The university imposed strong recruiting restrictions on itself. \u201cI should be made an example of, and I am \u2014 I\u2019m embarrassed,\u201d Pearl told SI.com . \u201cBut I hope that the things we did don\u2019t rise to the level of termination.\u201d Pearl has been docked $300,000 per year for five years. Still, even with $1.5 million taken from his salary, Pearl is still among the highest-paid coaches in the Southeastern Conference. \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate, and we wish the best for all parties,\u201d Kansas basketball Coach Bill Self said. \u201cIt definitely defines the climate in which college athletics are in, as do the suspensions in football.\u201d Pearl\u2019s biggest mistake may have been lying to the N.C.A.A., which made it clear in the case of Oklahoma State receiver Dez Bryant, who was ruled ineligible last season, that making false statements will not be tolerated. \u201cAs long as I\u2019ve been in this business, the one thing I heard about the N.C.A.A. is that you don\u2019t lie to them,\u201d said Barnes, the Texas basketball coach. \u201cMy whole life, that\u2019s all I\u2019ve heard. When they come in, the worst thing you can do is lie.\u201d Many have snickered at Pearl\u2019s getting caught. Pearl turned over an audiotape of a star recruit saying he was offered $80,000 and an S.U.V. by Jimmy Collins, then an assistant at Illinois. The 1989 incident became romanticized after Pearl got his break at Tennessee after coaching at colleges like Southern Indiana and Wisconsin-Milwaukee. \u201cThe irony is that you have a guy like Bruce Pearl who is a whistle-blower, and now he\u2019s being whistle-blown,\u201d said Pete Strickland, an assistant coach at North Carolina State. \u201cI mean, who do you trust?\u201d In college football and basketball, in which tales of corruption have long been as much a part of their lore as on-field heroics, nervous coaches around the country are evidence that the N.C.A.A.\u2019s investigative apathy has ended.", "keyword": "College Athletics;Draft and Recruitment (Sports);Coaches and Managers;National Collegiate Athletic Assn"}
{"id": "ny0092934", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/08/08", "title": "Maryan Stevens, Ex-Justice\u2019s Wife, Dies at 84", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Maryan Mulholland Stevens, the wife of former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, died on Friday. She was 84. A spokeswoman for the court, Kathy Arberg, said the cause was complications following hip surgery. Ms. Stevens, a dietitian, married Justice Stevens, who survives her, in 1979. He had joined the court in 1975 and retired from it in 2010, at 90. Ms. Stevens graduated from St. Mary\u2019s College in Notre Dame, Ind. Besides her husband, she is survived by five children, three stepchildren, eight grandchildren, nine step-grandchildren and 13 step-great-grandchildren. The couple split their time in recent years between Arlington, Va., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.", "keyword": "Obituary;John Paul Stevens;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Maryan Stevens"}
{"id": "ny0179490", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/10", "title": "Judge Spotlights Shortage of Interpreters for the Deaf", "abstract": "The prevailing custom in the New York courts is for sign language interpreters to work in tandem: one translates the rapid-fire arguments of courtroom life, while the other gets to rest weary hands. There is, however, a shortage in the courts of sign language interpreters, so this buddy system does not always work, according to court officials. Yesterday, a judge in Queens took note of the shortage, writing a memorandum that explained why he had awarded an interpreter who was forced to work alone twice his daily rate of pay. The judge, Justice Charles J. Markey of State Supreme Court, gave the higher rate to Gabriel Grayson, a certified American Sign Language interpreter. It was after Mr. Grayson had translated for a deaf plaintiff at a six-day civil trial in June involving a personal injury case. Mr. Grayson had told the judge and other court officials in Queens of the normal two-interpreter setup, but agreed to work alone, for a bit more money, after officials could not find another interpreter to relieve him. The judge\u2019s memo was entirely self-motivated. No one at the trial \u2014 not the plaintiffs, Farrah and Bibi Wahid, nor the defendant, the Long Island Rail Road \u2014 disputed that Mr. Grayson should receive the higher rate. In fact, in his 13-page decision quoting experts on the deaf (and a former lord chief justice of England and Wales), Justice Markey explicitly said that he was trying to call attention to what he considers a worthy cause. The memorandum, the judge wrote, is intended to explain the court\u2019s decision in signing the order for the increased pay \u201cand to throw a spotlight on the disturbing lack of skilled A.S.L. interpreters in the courts.\u201d That lack, according to research laid out in the judge\u2019s memo, has a number of causes. First, he wrote, the court interpreters must often wait months to schedule an examination with their certifying body, the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. The exams are expensive, the judge wrote, as are the dues that interpreters must pay or else risk losing certification. The court\u2019s rate of $250 a day is not competitive compared with pay rates for similar duties in the private sector, he explained. Justice Markey also pointed out that interpreters are rarely given cancellation fees when they work in the courts, where hearings can be called off without notice at any given time. Justice Markey noted the \u201cexplosion of employment opportunities\u201d for the certified interpreters at video conferencing events \u2014 a much gentler form of work than the nonstop world of the courts. While there are no official studies of sign language interpreters in the New York legal system, Justice Markey quoted a study from Nebraska that said 65 percent of all assignments for American Sign Language interpreters in that state\u2019s courts went unfilled. Back in New York, he said, even in Rochester, which has the largest per capita deaf population in the country (the National Technical Institute for the Deaf is there), only a limited number of certified court interpreters are available. Justice Markey made specific mention of Kathleen Rozanski, a deaf woman in Rochester who filed a federal complaint in 2002 related to the handling of her divorce. Justice Markey wrote that Ms. Rozanski\u2019s lawyer did not hire a certified interpreter, but instead relied on notes, telecommunications devices for the deaf and family members familiar with sign language to communicate with her in court. In her complaint to the Justice Department, Ms. Rozanski said these alternate methods of communication had led to higher legal fees. Federal officials agreed, finding in a settlement with the lawyer that attorneys must provide interpreters to communicate with the deaf. Gordon Hewart, the lord chief justice of England and Wales from 1922 to 1940, once wrote, \u201cA long line of cases shows that it is not merely of some importance, but it is of fundamental importance, that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.\u201d Justice Markey wrote, \u201cWith increasing societal awareness and sensitivity to the plight of deaf persons in the courts, we can add to Hewart\u2019s famous dictum that justice, in the form of courtroom proceedings, must also be clearly heard and, for the hearing-deprived, must be unmistakably interpreted so as to be undeniably understood.\u201d", "keyword": "Deafness;Sign Language;Courts"}
{"id": "ny0062981", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2014/01/08", "title": "UConn\u2019s Stewart Honored", "abstract": "Connecticut\u2019s Breanna Stewart earned her second USA Basketball female athlete of the year honor. Stewart, a sophomore, also was player of the year in 2011, joining Diana Taurasi, Dawn Staley, Lisa Leslie, Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards as the players to win the award more than once.", "keyword": "College basketball;University of Connecticut;Awards;Breanna Stewart"}
{"id": "ny0196621", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2009/10/07", "title": "E.P.A. to Study Health Risks of the Herbicide Atrazine", "abstract": "The Environmental Protection Agency plans to conduct a new study about the potential health risks of atrazine, a widely used weedkiller that recent research suggests may be more dangerous to humans than previously thought. Atrazine \u2014 a herbicide often used on corn fields, golf courses and even lawns \u2014 has become one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water. For years, the E.P.A. has decided against acting on calls to ban the chemical from environmental activists and some scientists who argued that runoff was polluting ecosystems and harming animals. More recently, new studies have suggested that atrazine in drinking water is associated with birth defects , low birth weights and reproductive problems among humans, even at concentrations that meet current federal standards. The E.P.A. is expected to announce on Wednesday that it will conduct a new evaluation of the pesticide to assess any possible links between atrazine and cancer , as well as other health problems, such as premature births. The E.P.A. may determine that new restrictions are necessary. The decision by E.P.A.\u2019s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, who took over the agency in January, is a significant departure from the policies of the E.P.A. under President George W. Bush. For years, agency officials said that atrazine in drinking water posed almost no risk to humans or the environment. As recently as this summer, E.P.A. staff members argued that current regulations were adequate. \u201cWe\u2019re going to use our scientific resources in a new and more aggressive way regarding atrazine,\u201d said Stephen A. Owens, who was recently confirmed as E.P.A. assistant administrator for prevention, pesticides and toxic substances. \u201cThere are new scientific findings that deserve attention, and we\u2019re going to engage our scientific panels in actively reviewing the work of this office under previous administrations,\u201d he added. \u201cWe have a question: Did the decisions made in previous administrations use all the available science?\u201d A representative of atrazine\u2019s largest manufacturer, the Swiss company Syngenta, said that she had not been fully briefed on the E.P.A.\u2019s announcement. However, the spokeswoman, Sherry Ford, said, \u201cwe expect a positive outcome for atrazine at the end of this process.\u201d Ms. Ford added that the company \u201cstands behind the safety of atrazine, which has undergone extensive testing. We are a science-based company, and we expect the E.P.A. to make sound decisions based on science, no matter which administration is currently in power.\u201d Observers say the E.P.A.\u2019s announcement signals a significant shift. \u201cThis is a dramatic change,\u201d said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. \u201cThere is growing evidence that atrazine could be a hazard to human health. This is a strong signal that the world is changing for some of the most widely used chemicals.\u201d Atrazine has become a lightning rod in disputes over how the E.P.A. has used scientific findings to regulate chemicals and toxins. The agency was sued in 2003 by an environmental advocacy organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, amid claims that regulators had ignored studies showing that atrazine was dangerous to some animals. In August, The New York Times reported on recent epidemiological studies that suggested small amounts of atrazine in drinking water, including levels considered safe by federal standards, might be associated with birth defects \u2014 including skull and facial malformations and misshapen limbs \u2014 as well as premature births and low birth weights in newborns. E.P.A. officials said those studies, as well as recent papers reviewing numerous studies that showed that atrazine interferes with the development and hormone systems of some animals, played a role in their decision to re-evaluate the chemical. A Times analysis of E.P.A. records also found that in some American towns, atrazine concentrations in drinking water had spiked sharply, sometimes for as long as a month. Though the E.P.A. and Syngenta were aware of those spikes, they often did not promptly warn local water systems, and the reports produced by local regulators and distributed to residents often failed to reflect those higher concentrations. Interviews with local water officials indicated that many of them were unaware that atrazine concentrations sometimes jumped sharply in their communities. But officials in other communities have grown concerned. Water systems in six states \u2014 Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi and Ohio \u2014 recently sued atrazine\u2019s manufacturers to force them to pay for removing the chemical from drinking water. The E.P.A. is expected to announce on Wednesday four meetings over the coming year of the agency\u2019s independent scientific advisory panel that will focus on atrazine.", "keyword": "Environmental Protection Agency;Water;Environment;Atrazine"}
{"id": "ny0259742", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/01/25", "title": "Packers\u2019 and Steelers\u2019 Wins Reflect Up-and-Down Seasons", "abstract": "Even amid the revelry, minutes after the Pittsburgh Steelers had finished off the Jets to secure their meeting with the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl on Feb. 6, Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin did not skirt a fundamental truth about how his team played. \u201cWe kind of limped home, but we aren\u2019t going to complain about style points,\u201d Tomlin said. The Packers and the Steelers did not so much roar as scratch their way to the Super Bowl. If this were college football, these two teams might not be meeting for the championship at all. Both teams looked dominant early in their conference championship games. The Steelers outrushed the Jets\u2019 ground-and-pound offense, 135 yards to 1, in a first half in which they raced to a 24-0 lead. The Packers shredded the Bears on a seven-play touchdown drive that included four completions on four pass attempts. And then the best parts of their teams \u2014 the Packers\u2019 offense and the Steelers\u2019 defense \u2014 flailed. An interception return by a 337-pound defensive lineman, B.J. Raji , who had dropped into pass coverage, to secure the Packers\u2019 victory over the Bears ? Ben Roethlisberger completing a third-down pass to a rookie receiver to keep the Jets from having one more comeback chance? Who are these people and what have they done with Aaron Rodgers and the Steel Curtain? \u201cFrankly, the first drive was the way we anticipated coming into the game,\u201d Packers Coach Mike McCarthy said. \u201cWe lost Chad Clifton on the touchdown, and we really didn\u2019t get back into the balance and rhythm we clearly had on the first drive.\u201d So neither team will arrive in the Dallas area looking invincible. Does it matter? No. Last year the New Orleans Saints lost two second-half leads and had to win in overtime in the N.F.C. championship game before winning the Super Bowl. Three years ago, the New England Patriots took the lead early in the second quarter and never lost it in the A.F.C. championship game, then lost their perfect season in the Super Bowl. The lesson: momentum in the N.F.L. \u2014 particularly in this season of unpredictable results \u2014 is illusory, if it exists at all. It depends less on what happened Sunday than it will on whether the Steelers\u2019 Pro Bowl center, Maurkice Pouncey, can play after sustaining a high ankle sprain early in the game (he says he will) and if the cornerbacks who looked as vulnerable as they have all season in the second half against the Jets can lock down the N.F.L.\u2019s best receiving corps. It will also depend on whether Rodgers can regain the touch that helped the Packers win their first two playoff games but which eluded him against Chicago (two interceptions, and 17 of 30 passing). The difference between blowouts and nail-biters Sunday was as small as an Ike Taylor slip that allowed a Santonio Holmes touchdown, and a Disney-movie moment by Caleb Hanie. \u201cI was telling my guys the whole time, we\u2019re going to try and restore this thing,\u201d Steelers linebacker James Farrior said. \u201cWe felt like it was shifting a little bit. I just wanted the guys to stay in position and don\u2019t even think about it.\u201d The fits and starts of Sunday\u2019s games were microcosms of both teams\u2019 seasons. The Packers had no running game for much of the year, and when Rodgers sustained a concussion and the Packers lost to the Patriots in December, their postseason hopes seemed doomed. They had to win on the final day of the season to make the playoffs, and they will now try to become the first N.F.C. sixth seed to win the Super Bowl. The Steelers were given little chance when Roethlisberger was suspended for the first four games of the season, and even less chance when his top two backups were injured. These were not the Colts and the Saints of last year, who were clearly the best teams in their conferences the entire season. These teams dealt with ebbs and flows, and late on Sunday night, Roethlisberger spoke of the tenacity of the Steelers. Hines Ward noted that the Steelers had traditionally gone up and down \u2014 winning a Super Bowl, then not making the playoffs, winning another, then missing the playoffs again before making a run now. For two franchises steeped in football history, then, their next shot at a championship will be defined not by their current-day quarterbacks who throw deep passes, but by dipping into the well of grittiness that has long been part of their lore. They just got started Sunday. \u201cYou never go into a season and think you are not going to face adversity,\u201d Packers wide receiver Donald Driver said. \u201cEverybody stepped up and played the way they were supposed to play, and that\u2019s what you have to have. The comfort level hasn\u2019t been big since March, and it\u2019s not going to change. We have four more quarters to go.\u201d", "keyword": "Pittsburgh Steelers;Green Bay Packers;Football;Super Bowl"}
{"id": "ny0094592", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/01/11", "title": "He Zhenliang Dies at 85; China\u2019s Olympic Crusader", "abstract": "He Zhenliang, a key figure in returning China to the Olympics in the 1980s after an absence of almost three decades and in securing the 2008 Summer Games for Beijing, died on Jan. 4 in Beijing. He was 85. The Chinese Olympic Committee announced his death without specifying a cause. Mr. He\u2019s death came two days before Beijing entered a formal bid with the International Olympic Committee to host the 2022 Winter Games. If successful, it would make Beijing the first city to hold both the Summer Olympics and the Winter Olympics. \u201cHe was the bridge between China and the outside world and, in particular, between China and the I.O.C.,\u201d said Susan Brownell, who translated the biography \u201cHe Zhenliang and China\u2019s Olympic Dream\u201d into English. \u201cI just don\u2019t know if there was anybody else who had the international understanding and the political commitment it would have taken to be that bridge all those years.\u201d As a member of his country\u2019s official delegation, Mr. He attended the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, Finland \u2014 the first Olympics in which Communist China participated, and the last for nearly 30 years. Because of a tense and protracted dispute over the status of Taiwan, which now competes as Chinese Taipei, China did not participate again in the Olympics until the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. When China, with a fifth of the world\u2019s population, fully re-engaged with the international sports world, twice bidding on the Summer Games \u2014 the second time successfully \u2014 Mr. He was credited with playing a pivotal role in making the country more open to the world. He had been educated by Westerners in high school and college in Shanghai, spoke the official Olympic languages of French and English, and had an approachable personality and an engaging sense of humor, Olympic officials said. That helped him build trusting, long-term relationships within the insular, Eurocentric world of international Olympic politics. \u201cIn those days, the I.O.C. was a club,\u201d said Anita DeFrantz, a longtime committee delegate from the United States. \u201cYou had to get to know people. He was very serious about his role, and also a delightful person.\u201d In 1979, Mr. He, then a high-ranking official with the Chinese Olympic Committee, signaled at an I.O.C. meeting that China could compromise if Taiwan agreed to compete in the Games as Chinese Taipei. China then returned to the Olympics, and in 1981, Mr. He was named the first delegate to the international committee from the People\u2019s Republic of China. The committee\u2019s president at the time, Juan Antonio Samaranch, a former Spanish diplomat, had worked to resolve the China-Taiwan issue. By bringing Mr. He into the I.O.C., Mr. Samaranch demonstrated his desire to unify the Olympic movement and make it universal, said Richard Pound, a committee delegate from Montreal. \u201cOne way to do that with a stroke of a pen is to add a billion Chinese people,\u201d Mr. Pound said. Mr. Samaranch may also have intended to curtail the boycotts that would disrupt Olympic participation from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s. China participated in the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, ignoring a Soviet boycott, and also competed in the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, declining to join boycotts by North Korea, Cuba and Ethiopia. Mr. He remained a delegate for nearly three decades, until 2010, serving three terms on the Olympic committee\u2019s powerful executive board. He was also a prominent figure in Beijing\u2019s bids to host the 2000 and 2008 Summer Games. According to Dr. Brownell, an anthropologist and expert on Chinese sports at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Mr. He established his political and athletic credentials by becoming an underground member of the Communist Party in Shanghai before the 1949 revolution; serving as a translator for Premier Zhou Enlai; gaining positions of authority in China\u2019s gymnastics and table tennis federations; and participating in the so-called Ping-Pong diplomacy of the early 1970s, which helped lead to improved relations with the United States and countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He Zhenliang was born in 1929 in coastal Zhejiang Province, south of Shanghai, according to China Vitae, a biographical website. (Information on his survivors was not available.) Educated by French Jesuits in Shanghai, Mr. He became fluent in the French language and culture, Dr. Brownell said. He moved comfortably among Westerners with his wife, Liang Lijuan, a journalist who spoke English and worked with her husband. Beijing\u2019s attempt to host the 2000 Summer Games fell excruciatingly short; the city lost by two votes to Sydney, Australia. China\u2019s record on human rights was cited by many as the reason for the narrow and unexpected defeat. Mr. He was said to be angry and frustrated and to weep privately. But while some Chinese officials reacted stridently, Mr. He \u201cstayed calm and strong,\u201d said Ms. DeFrantz, the American Olympic delegate. Having endured stints of hard labor during China\u2019s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, and having spent nearly 30 years trying to return China to the Olympics on its terms, Mr. He took a long view in helping to develop Beijing into a serious candidate to host the Summer Games, Dr. Brownell said. \u201cHe just really had the long-term perspective, which was a case of never give up,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cTime didn\u2019t mean a lot to him.\u201d Mr. He\u2019s persistence paid off when Beijing resoundingly defeated Toronto for the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. While China\u2019s human rights record remained a polarizing issue and the atmosphere sometimes felt a bit soulless, the Games offered an extravagant opening ceremony, breathtaking stadiums, and mesmerizing competition that featured eight gold medals by the American swimmer Michael Phelps and startling world records by the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. China led all nations with 51 gold medals.", "keyword": "Obituary;He Zhenliang;Olympics;China"}
{"id": "ny0090015", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/09/30", "title": "New Ralph Lauren Chief Revived Old Navy After Successes at H&M", "abstract": "At first, the ascension of Stefan Larsson to chief executive of Ralph Lauren\u2019s fashion house might seem an odd fit. Mr. Larsson is widely credited with vastly expanding H&M\u2019s cheap chic fashion business and then rescuing Old Navy, transforming the retailer from a dowdy discount brand into a symbol of affordable fast fashion. And while the customer base for those two retail companies may have a lot in common, the upper end of the Lauren brand still sought to capture a far more aristocratic country club clientele. But over all, the Lauren brand has struggled to remain relevant in a rapidly changing retail world, and has recently suffered from a slumping share price and increased competition. And that\u2019s where Mr. Larsson is viewed as being able to step in and manage the company. Dressed in a well-pressed blue suit, Mr. Larsson joined Mr. Lauren at the label\u2019s sprawling Midtown Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday to discuss the appeal of making the transition. \u201cHere is somebody who has done something that few people will ever do in their whole lifetime, speaking about the future, speaking about how the best things are ahead,\u201d Mr. Larsson said. \u201cIt was just very intriguing to me.\u201d In 2012, when Mr. Larsson joined Old Navy, a subsidiary of Gap Inc., it was already troubled. Sales had fallen by more than $1 billion from 2006 to 2008. The recession had hurt retail spending, even at lower-end brands. And Old Navy could not keep up with nimbler competitors, like H&M, that had figured out how to respond more quickly to fickle fashion trends. Mr. Larsson has said that he frequently felt unfashionable growing up in a small town in Sweden, where trends took time to arrive from the big cities. As a retail executive, he helped change that model. Mr. Larsson spent 15 years at H&M before joining Old Navy and oversaw the company\u2019s global expansion into a fast-fashion empire. \u201cUsing what he learned at H&M, he did a better job of matching supply and demand,\u201d said Bridget Weishaar, a retail analyst with Morningstar. \u201cHe realized that people who were buying cheap clothes still wanted to look good.\u201d Mr. Larsson, 41, eschewed what he called the \u201cclothes by the pound\u201d approach favored by many discount retailers. Instead, he focused more on design, and on cutting down how long it took to get clothes from the design stage onto the shelves. The strategy worked. Last year, Old Navy took in nearly $6 billion in sales in the United States, making up nearly 40 percent of Gap Inc.\u2019s global revenue \u2014 nearly as much as the Gap and Banana Republic brands combined. \u201cUnfortunately, their sister division, the Gap, doesn\u2019t seem to have either read the memo or can\u2019t seem to get organized,\u201d said Mark A. Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University\u2019s business school and former chief executive of Sears Canada. \u201cAllegedly, Gap is trying to do the same, but it remains to be seen whether they can do it or not.\u201d Gap Inc. stock fell 3 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday. \u201cGiven Mr. Larsson\u2019s strong leadership and contribution to the Old Navy division, we see this as a loss for Gap,\u201d John Morris, a retail analyst with BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a note shortly after the Lauren announcement. \u201cThe Old Navy team really coalesced behind his leadership, at a time when the division needed it, and morale significantly improved.\u201d Jill Stanton, Old Navy\u2019s executive vice president for global product, will take over Mr. Larsson\u2019s duties as the company hunts for a permanent replacement. Art Peck, Gap\u2019s chief executive, repeatedly emphasized his confidence in Ms. Stanton\u2019s abilities and said he expected \u201cno change\u201d in operations as Old Navy heads into the all-important holiday season. \u201cStefan\u2019s leaving,\u201d Mr. Peck said. \u201cPeople do what they do, and that happens.\u201d", "keyword": "Stefan Larsson;Old Navy;Ralph Lauren;Retail;Fashion"}
{"id": "ny0138637", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2008/05/22", "title": "Making Opponents See Double", "abstract": "The Final Four on Saturday in Foxborough, Mass., will showcase a Duke team that is considered one of the best ever, a revitalized Syracuse club that did not qualify for the postseason last year and a Johns Hopkins team that overcame a five-game losing streak. But the players who could generate the most buzz at Gillette Stadium are two Virginia midfielders. Rhamel and Shamel Bratton, identical twins from Huntington, N.Y., were perhaps the most hyped lacrosse recruits ever. The Brattons are a rarity, African-Americans playing in a mostly white sport who combine diverse skills, sublime athleticism and spontaneous creativity. \u201cI\u2019m sure that people who have never seen them play have expectations for them,\u201d Johns Hopkins Coach Dave Pietramala said. The Brattons will step on the biggest stage of their careers Saturday when the No. 2 Cavaliers play No. 3 Syracuse. The rivalry is considered one of the most riveting in the sport because of the wide-open play, which should fit the Brattons\u2019 style. This season, they have had blips of brilliance and stretches of inconsistency. Shamel, a left-hander who plays in the first midfield, has scored 13 goals and had 4 assists. Rhamel, a right-hander who plays in the second midfield, has 9 goals and 6 assists. Shamel is the Cavaliers\u2019 seventh-leading scorer, Rhamel the eighth. \u201cOn the field, everyone expected them to come in and be the LeBron James of lacrosse in their freshman year, which is unrealistic,\u201d said Vernon Manuel, the twins\u2019 older half brother, who serves as a father figure. \u201cWhat I\u2019m proud of is that they listen to their coaches and all they care about is winning. They have learned to become role players.\u201d Their best game came against Johns Hopkins, in which Shamel scored three goals and assisted on the winner in overtime, and Rhamel had two goals. In a quarterfinal match against Maryland, Rhamel scored a key third-quarter goal and forced a turnover in the comeback overtime win. Shamel Bratton struggled at times in that game, seeming tentative with the ball in scoring position. \u201cThe biggest difference has been just because I\u2019m a freshman and we have so many great scorers, I\u2019m used to getting a lot more shots,\u201d Shamel Bratton said. \u201cYou have to focus on sticking the shots that you get. In high school, I took way more than that and I didn\u2019t worry too much when I did miss a shot.\u201d Rhamel Bratton added about the jump to the college game: \u201cIt\u2019s just much faster and guys are stronger and opportunities don\u2019t come as much. You definitely have to capitalize on the opportunities that you have.\u201d Coach Dom Starsia has clearly enjoyed the energy and verve the twins have brought to the program. They are \u201cbouncing off the walls\u201d in the locker room every day, he said. Starsia recalled with a laugh when the twins heard him hollering at game-day decibels at the first scrimmage of the season. Starsia felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see Rhamel holding a cup of water. \u201cHere,\u201d Rhamel said. \u201cYou need this.\u201d Just like on the field, there have been bumps adjusting to college life. The brothers live in the same dorm room, and Rhamel jokes that he has had to deal with Shamel\u2019s being messy. The Brattons have experienced the normal hiccups that come with the demands of being a freshman athlete. Starsia recalled Shamel going to his office in tears saying, \u201cI want to do better in school.\u201d He said Rhamel got in a spot of trouble in class for acting up, something indicative of the twins\u2019 outgoing personalities. Both have completed 30 hours of courses and have improved their grades. Starsia has marveled how they have handled the attention. They are often as recognized on campus as a football or basketball recruit would be. They have twice been on the cover of Inside Lacrosse magazine. \u201cAll of the attention on them bothers them least of anyone else in the universe,\u201d Starsia said. \u201cIt rolls off their back like nothing that you\u2019ve ever seen. Everyone else, including me, worries about it a lot more than they do.\u201d One of their fans is New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick. He talked to them after the Face-Off Classic in Baltimore and after the quarterfinals in Annapolis, Md. Manuel said Belichick told the twins that they had crossed paths with his son, Stephen Belichick, a freshman defenseman at Rutgers, during their youth sports days. Belichick lived on Long Island when he was the Jets\u2019 defensive coordinator. \u201cIt\u2019s just a little overwhelming,\u201d Rhamel Bratton said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been watching the Final Four since grade school. It\u2019s weird playing in one. I\u2019m really happy and excited to get on the field and perform on the greatest stage in lacrosse.\u201d notes In the other semifinal, No. 1 Duke will face No. 4 Johns Hopkins in a rematch of last year\u2019s final, which Johns Hopkins won, 12-11.", "keyword": "University of Virginia;Lacrosse;College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0252368", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/11/26", "title": "A Voice Suggests Door-Busters Can Wait a Day", "abstract": "Anthony Hardwick never thought of himself as an activist or even much of an organizer. He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., graduated from Park University in Missouri in 2009, and looked for a job by scouring the Internet for cities with low unemployment rates. He settled on Omaha, where he found two \u2014 as a shopping cart attendant at Target and a printing supervisor for OfficeMax. There he met his fianc\u00e9e, Denise Holling. \u201cBasically, I just wanted to pursue the American Dream,\u201d Mr. Hardwick told me this week, as the bearded, burly 29-year-old emerged as the unlikely hero of a nationwide movement to roll back the start of the holiday shopping season to the day after Thanksgiving . Late last month, Mr. Hardwick\u2019s supervisor at Target told him he would be needed at 11 p.m. Thanksgiving night in order for Target to open its doors at midnight for Black Friday , which the discount retailer was doing for the first time this year. \u201cI\u2019d have to be at Target from 11 p.m. until 4:30 a.m., then I\u2019d have 30 minutes to scurry down to OfficeMax, where I was starting at 5 a.m.,\u201d he said. Mr. Hardwick makes $8.50 an hour at Target, and between his two jobs earns about $25,000 a year. \u201cI used to be able to pull 24-hour shifts,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d drink Red Bull. But now I\u2019m 29, and I\u2019m starting to feel it. I\u2019d have to nap.\u201d This didn\u2019t sit well with Mr. Hardwick, who figured he\u2019d be sleeping while his fianc\u00e9e and future in-laws gathered for the traditional turkey dinner. Although a Target spokeswoman told me the company did its best to accommodate employees who wanted the day off, this often isn\u2019t possible, and Mr. Hardwick said he wasn\u2019t given the option. Mr. Hardwick turned to the Internet and discovered the Web site Change.org , best known for a recent online petition to get banks to roll back debit card fees. \u201cA midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,\u201d he posted on Nov. 3. \u201cA full holiday with family is not just for the elite of this nation \u2014 all Americans should be able to break bread with loved ones and get a good night\u2019s rest on Thanksgiving!\u201d He asked the Web site\u2019s visitors to join him in calling for Target retail stores to restore the 5 a.m. opening time on Black Friday. But a \u201cfull holiday with family\u201d has become increasingly elusive as competition from 24/7, 365-days-a-year Internet shopping has caused retailers to throw open their doors on a day once sacrosanct \u201cas a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,\u201d as Abraham Lincoln put it when he established the national holiday in 1863. Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday to the fourth Thursday in November (from the last Thursday) in an overt attempt to lengthen the holiday shopping season and bolster retail sales during the Depression. And the holiday\u2019s demise as a no-shopping interlude is the culmination of a steady retreat from pervasive blue laws that once banned shopping not only on Thanksgiving and other major holidays but also on Sundays. Today Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the last states to restrict shopping on Thanksgiving, and Paramus, N.J., the site of several major malls, may be unique in banning shopping on Thanksgiving and Sundays. \u201cThe blue laws began in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims, so I guess it\u2019s fitting that we still have them,\u201d Jon B. Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said. \u201cChristmas is sacrosanct. But there\u2019s been a bill proposed to permit shopping on Thanksgiving. It hasn\u2019t moved. We endorse it every year, but do I have members beating down my door to push this? No.\u201d Among national retailers, Target is hardly the worst offender. Although some Target stores are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving before reopening at midnight, Wal-Mart, the nation\u2019s largest retailer, has been open all day on Thanksgiving for years, and this year moved up its Black Friday door-buster specials to 10 p.m. Thursday. K-Mart and many Gap and Old Navy stores are also open all day, and a wave of stores, including Macy\u2019s and Best Buy, opened this year at midnight on Friday with special holiday promotions. Some retailers are now talking about \u201cBlack Thanksgiving.\u201d \u201cFor many people Black Friday shopping is now as much a part of the holiday tradition as the turkey,\u201d the Target spokeswoman said. \u201cBlack Friday has an exciting, euphoric feeling. A lot of our team members get very excited. Months of hard work have gone into preparing for this.\u201d She said Target moved up its store openings to midnight only after much deliberation, and the move had been \u201coverwhelmingly popular\u201d with both customers and employees. Mr. Hardwick said he was aware of all this, and had modest expectations for his petition. \u201cI promoted it on Facebook and figured I\u2019d sign up some friends and family,\u201d he said. \u201cAt first it just sat there.\u201d But gradually comments piled up on the Change.org Web site. \u201cI\u2019m sick and tired of these attempts to brainwash us into thinking Christmas is about how much money we spend,\u201d Deborah Schwartz posted. From Bryce Allison: \u201cIt\u2019s a national holiday, not a national shopping day ... maybe try giving thanks for your employees that bring you so much money.\u201d Scotty Brookie wrote, \u201cEncouraging people to shop in the middle of the night is bizarre.\u201d The Rev. Dr. David Breeden, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Minneapolis, saw Mr. Hardwick\u2019s petition in the broader context of the holiday. \u201cThanksgiving is one of the few civil holidays,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of people don\u2019t celebrate Christmas. But Thanksgiving is a national holiday and it\u2019s a day for giving thanks for what we have. What\u2019s wrong with stores opening at 10 a.m. on Friday? Everything will still be on the shelves when you unlock those doors. How about letting everyone breathe for a day and just relax? That\u2019s a spiritual issue, too.\u201d New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford mentioned Mr. Hardwick in a recent article in which others expressed their dismay that Thanksgiving was turning into another shopping day. Other media contacted him. \u201cI\u2019ve been on TV,\u201d he said. \u201cI spoke to NBC; I spoke to MSNBC, CNN, the Christian Broadcasting Network.\u201d People at Change.org helped him manage the attention, and he finally got to put his college degree in public relations to use. Thousands of online supporters flocked to the petition. \u201cI was overjoyed and flabbergasted,\u201d he said. He also drew his share of critics, most saying he should stop whining and give thanks that he has a job at all. \u201cThat was the same argument that was used when 7-year-olds were working in coal mines,\u201d he said. He doesn\u2019t belong to any unions or expect to join one, but \u201cIt hasn\u2019t been that long in our history that workers have had a voice,\u201d he said. \u201cTo give that up does my forefathers a disservice and I\u2019m not going to do that.\u201d Target has been handling Mr. Hardwick gingerly. \u201cWe have a great belief and understanding that team members should express their feelings,\u201d the Target spokeswoman said. As Mr. Hardwick\u2019s petition gained momentum, his holiday hours disappeared. He said his supervisor told him there had been a misunderstanding and \u201cthey were able to meet their staffing needs without my services.\u201d Earlier this week, the Rev. Dr. Breeden led a small group to Target headquarters in Minneapolis where he presented officials with Target shopping bags bulging with nearly 200,000 signed copies of Mr. Hardwick\u2019s petition. They had called ahead, and security guards in blazers and a Target official met them in the lobby. \u201cIt was all very polite and civil,\u201d he said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t carrying bullhorns or trying to disrupt anything.\u201d On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Hardwick joined his fianc\u00e9e and future in-laws \u2014 and six newborn puppies \u2014 for a dinner of bacon-wrapped turkey, ham and side dishes before heading to bed around 9 p.m. At OfficeMax, a customer had recognized him. \u201cYou\u2019re the Save-Thanksgiving guy!\u201d He said he hoped that next year, Target would reconsider its early opening, or at least allow employees to opt out of Thanksgiving duty and hire additional workers from the ranks of the unemployed. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t really about me,\u201d he told me on Thanksgiving. \u201cIt\u2019s about my co-workers, my team members and anyone else in retail.\u201d By 10 p.m. Thanksgiving night a line had formed outside Target\u2019s Bloomington, Minn., store, a scene that a spokeswoman said was repeated at their stores around the country. As the line grew to about 1,500 people, employees gathered inside, chanted and then counted down the seconds to midnight. They clapped and cheered as shoppers poured in. Supplies of a Westinghouse 48-inch flat-screen HDTV, offered at $298, sold out in six minutes.", "keyword": "Black Friday (Shopping);Shopping and Retail;Holidays and Special Occasions;Hardwick Anthony;Target Corporation;Thanksgiving Day"}
{"id": "ny0202215", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/08/04", "title": "The Link Between Health Costs and National Savings Rates", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Guo Yonggang from Xi\u2019an in western China suffered serious spinal injuries in an accident while driving an agricultural vehicle last year. His impoverished family scraped together 30,000 yuan, or $4,400, for emergency treatment but cannot afford the additional 70,000 yuan for the surgery that might save the 20-year-old from permanent paralysis. Stories like Mr. Guo\u2019s, which was reported by state media, help explain the high savings rates that are one facet of the imbalances plaguing the world\u2019s third-largest economy behind the United States and Japan. Households squirrel money away because China is too big and still too poor to provide comprehensive public services. People have to fork out for hefty school fees. They know they will get at best a flimsy pension. And, if they are unlucky, they could face catastrophic medical bills. So it is no wonder that between 1995, around which time state-owned firms stopped providing cradle-to-grave welfare, and 2008 the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 11 percentage points to about 28 percent of disposable income. \u201cIt\u2019s a long-term issue, and it can\u2019t be solved overnight even though there\u2019s huge determination,\u201d the central bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, said of the task of raising welfare provision. The good news is that Beijing is finally making some progress, especially in health care. A long-awaited blueprint unveiled in April aims to provide universal access to essential health care by 2020 and to cover more than 90 percent of the population with some sort of basic medical insurance by 2011. The government will allocate an extra 850 billion yuan for the scheme, which includes building 29,000 community clinics. \u201cIf all that is planned is implemented, it will be a major step forward,\u201d said Vivek Arora, the International Monetary Fund\u2019s chief representative in Beijing. Those and other steps to beef up social security would have an effect, but more would need to be done. \u201cTo sustain a substantial increase in private consumption, it\u2019s going to be important to go further, to lessen the motivation for precautionary savings,\u201d Mr. Arora said. Private consumption contributed just 2.8 percentage points of China\u2019s annual average gross domestic product growth of 10.2 percent from 2000 to 2008. Spending growth was strong in fact, but investment was much stronger. As a result, the share of private consumption in G.D.P. fell over the same period to just 35 percent from 46 percent. For the world economy, which is counting on China to take up the spending slack created as indebted American consumers rebuild their savings, the stakes are high. After Taiwan introduced comprehensive national health insurance in 1995, researchers found that the average level of household savings fell by 9 percent to 14 percent. The problem is that even though insurance coverage is being broadened in China, it will be far from extensive. People will still have to dig deep into their own pockets. Since the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme was started in 2003, coverage has expanded to 830 million people and the average reimbursement rate of hospital bills has increased to 41 percent from 25 percent, according to Nie Chunlei, a Ministry of Health official in China. In a new study of China\u2019s rural health reforms, the World Bank said total out-of-pocket spending on health care in the countryside fell from 80 percent in 2004 to 69 percent in 2006. But the report said the share financed out of pocket was unlikely to drop much below 60 percent. Tan Zhonghe, a researcher with a think tank under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said that by 2020, seeing a doctor ought no longer be a difficult and expensive business. But he said that for now, rural health insurance was still very basic. Given the realities of rural China and peasants\u2019 spending habits, it was hard to see much of an effect on consumption in the countryside. \u201cThe schemes are not sufficient to prevent, only to relieve, poverty brought about by sickness,\u201d he wrote in an e-mail message. Cao Liqun, a researcher at the Ministry of Agriculture, added that the rural medical program had failed to live up to the propaganda. \u201cYes, it covers a lot of people,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the money is too little to cover real medical expenses in rural areas.\u201d Moreover, reimbursement procedures were too complicated, Mr. Cao said: Outpatient treatment, common in rural China, was usually excluded, and bills from nonlocal hospitals were not easy to claim back. \u201cIf China wants to improve health care in the countryside,\u201d he added, \u201cgovernment spending has to increase massively.\u201d China spends almost 5 percent of G.D.P. on health services, but the government accounts for less than a fifth of that, according to the United Nations Development Program. Medical and health care takes up just 2.3 percent of this year\u2019s central government budget, compared with 4.4 percent for education and 2.9 percent for environmental protection. If China spends too little on health, the United States spends too much \u2014 a staggering 17.6 percent of G.D.P. Yet in one respect, Chinese leaders are grappling with the same conundrum President Barack Obama is: How do you expand medical insurance, thereby enabling people to make use of services they could not afford before, without encouraging doctors and hospitals to gold-plate the treatment they prescribe? \u201cAt this very moment, the American government is struggling with exactly the same problem: the difficulty of paying providers in a way that encourages them to treat patients and do so well, but not in a way that encourages them to overtreat them,\u201d said Adam Wagstaff, a World Bank economist who was the main author of the report on China\u2019s rural medical program. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to get this right.\u201d", "keyword": "Medicine and Health;Economic Conditions and Trends;China"}
{"id": "ny0024454", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2013/08/28", "title": "Libya: Ex-Officials and Son of Qaddafi to Stand Trial", "abstract": "The son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi and his spy chief were among those charged on Tuesday with murder in relation to the country\u2019s 2011 civil war, the general prosecutor said. The trial, scheduled to start on Sept. 19, will center on allegations of crimes committed during Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s 42-year rule and the eight-month civil war that deposed him. A total of 28 former members of his government will face trial, including the former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senoussi and Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the only son of the former dictator who is in custody. The charges include murder, forming armed groups in violation of the law, inciting rape and kidnappings. The prosecutor\u2019s aide said Mr. Senoussi had confessed to collaborating on producing car bombs in the city of Benghazi, the birthplace of the 2011 uprising. Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s son, Seif al-Islam, has been charged by the International Criminal Court with murder and persecution of civilians during the early days of the uprising. The court has ruled that Libya cannot give Mr. Qaddafi a fair trial and asked that he be handed over to The Hague. It is unclear how he could be tried in either place: he remains held by a militia that captured him in the western mountain town of Zintan after rebel forces took Libya\u2019s capital.", "keyword": "Libya;Muammar Kaddafi;Seif al-Islam el- Qaddafi;Murders;Arab Spring;War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity"}
{"id": "ny0231041", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/09/30", "title": "House Votes for Greater Tariff Powers", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The House of Representatives sent an unusually confrontational signal to the Chinese leadership on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to give the Obama administration expanded authority to impose tariffs on virtually all Chinese imports to the United States. The move, which could affect more than $300 billion in goods this year, was made in retaliation for the country\u2019s refusal to revalue its currency. The bill passed 348 to 79 and included the support of 99 Republicans, a highly unusual bipartisan vote at a time when large numbers of House Republicans have rarely joined Democrats on an economic issue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has long pressed China trade issues, personally gaveled the vote closed. Nonetheless, prospects for Senate approval are unclear. The action was intended to hand President Obama new leverage in what has become a major flashpoint between the world\u2019s two largest economies. While tariffs have been placed on specific products, like steel and tires, because of evidence of unfair export subsidies, the threat of putting sizable tariffs on a country\u2019s entire line of exports to the United States is highly unusual \u2014 and, some argue, of dubious legality under international trade law. It reflects both election-year politics over a loss of American jobs and great frustration over unfulfilled promises by China to allow its currency to rise in value, which would make Chinese goods less competitive in the United States. The Obama administration never took an emphatic position on the legislation and some officials say that, if passed, signed into law and challenged at the World Trade Organization, it might well be struck down. But this is a case where the symbolism may be more important than the legal niceties, and for that reason, the White House has been of two minds about the bill. Mr. Obama has tried to use the rising public anger over China\u2019s trade advantage to argue to Chinese leaders that the United States would no longer tolerate deliberate currency manipulation, a point Mr. Obama made repeatedly in a meeting last week with Wen Jiabao, China\u2019s prime minister. He did so again on Wednesday in Des Moines, where one businessman asked the president about the issue. \u201cThe reason that I\u2019m pushing China about their currency is because their currency is undervalued,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cPeople generally think that they are managing their currency in ways that make our goods more expensive to sell and their goods cheaper to sell here. And that contributes \u2014 that\u2019s not the main reason for our trade imbalance \u2014 but it\u2019s a contributing factor to our trade imbalance.\u201d But in conversations with Congress, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and other officials have warned of the danger of touching off a trade war, in which China blocks American goods in retaliation, that could hurt both economies. The risks go beyond trade. Mr. Obama is pressing China for help on cutting exports to Iran, managing a dangerous leadership transition in North Korea and some kind of accord on curbing carbon outputs that contribute to global warming . He is also coming up with what one senior administration official called on Tuesday \u201cnew rules of the road\u201d over disputed maritime territory. But in Beijing, and on Capitol Hill, all that pales in comparison to the currency dispute, which is often portrayed in the Chinese news media as an effort to curb China\u2019s growth, and thus its power. Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell, called the legislation \u201ca shot across the bow that indicates a clear escalation from overheated rhetoric about Chinese currency policy to more substantive action.\u201d While it is unlikely there will be a trade war, he said, \u201cthere is now a real risk that a cycle of tit-for-tat trade sanctions could spin out of control and cause some real, if not lasting, damage.\u201d Under the bill, Mr. Obama would not have personal control to turn sanctions on or off. The legislation would make it easier for the Commerce Department to place duties on imports from countries that have \u201cfundamentally undervalued\u201d currencies \u2014 defined as \u201cprotracted, large-scale intervention\u201d in foreign exchange markets; an undervaluation of at least 5 percent; persistent global current account surpluses; and \u201cexcessive\u201d foreign asset reserves. Traditionally, only direct subsidies to an industry, rather than the indirect help that comes from an undervalued currency, have been considered a reason for retaliatory tariffs. Because so many countries have managed their currency rates for so long, it is unclear that the W.T.O. would uphold any American efforts to make the manipulation of a currency a justification for action. While the bill did not mention China by name, the criteria were clearly written with China, the largest creditor of the United States, in mind. In response, the official Xinhua news agency quoted China\u2019s commerce ministry spokesman, Yao Jian, as saying: \u201cStarting a countervailing investigation in the name of exchange rates does not conform with relevant W.T.O. rules.\u201d But later in the day the Chinese Foreign Ministry was more emphatic about its displeasure, saying the House effort could harm economic ties between the two countries. \"We firmly oppose the U.S. Congress approving such bills,\" Jiang Yu, a ministry spokeswoman told reporters in Beijing. \"We urge the U.S. congressmen to be clearly aware of the importance of China-U.S. trade and economic relations, resist protectionism so as to refrain from any damage to the interests of both peoples and people around the world.\" So far the administration has been reluctant to pursue retaliation against China. The Treasury Department has repeatedly declined to formally declare China a currency manipulator. And last month, the Commerce Department decided not to investigate allegations that China\u2019s currency practices amounted to an improper export subsidy. \u201cThe United States does not gain leverage in these negotiations by doing things China doesn\u2019t find credible,\u201d said Marc L. Busch, a political scientist at Georgetown. \u201cThe Chinese are aware that this is just not going to fly.\u201d But the Obama administration may have few other options and few allies. Europeans are largely uninterested in the problem: the euro has weakened because of the sovereign debt crisis, limiting European incentives to get involved. Japan is intensely interested, and this month intervened in the currency markets for the first time since 2004, moving to devalue the yen unilaterally. But in the House, the politics of the moment seemed more important than the long-run economic strategy of managing economic relations with China. Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that \u201cChina\u2019s persistent manipulation of its currency\u201d had resulted in a \u201ctilted field of competition\u201d and the loss of as many as 1.5 million American jobs. \u201cThis manipulation is one of the causes of outsourcing of our jobs \u2014 manufacturing and other good jobs,\u201d he said. \u201cTalk hasn\u2019t worked.\u201d The top Republican on the committee, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, said that the Obama administration had been insufficiently engaged in securing international pressure on the Chinese; that the bill would not promote Mr. Obama\u2019s goal of doubling American exports over five years; and that other issues \u2014 like China\u2019s tolerance for violations of intellectual property rights \u2014 were as significant as the currency undervaluation. Even so, Mr. Camp said, \u201cI will vote for this bill because it signals to China that Congress\u2019s patience is running out.\u201d", "keyword": "Yuan (Currency);House of Representatives;China;International Trade and World Market;Customs (Tariff);Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0057963", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/09/12", "title": "Hit by Pitch, the Miami Marlins\u2019 Giancarlo Stanton Is Taken to Hospital", "abstract": "The Miami Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton was hit under the left eye by a fastball and was bleeding from the face as he was taken off the field in an ambulance during Thursday night\u2019s game against the host Milwaukee Brewers. The Marlins said Stanton, the major league leader in runs batted in, was being treated at a hospital for a facial cut. He was also undergoing X-rays and a CT scan. Stanton was struck by an 88-mile-per-hour pitch from Mike Fiers. The Brewers won the game, 4-2, with home runs from Matt Clark and Ryan Braun. It was ruled that Stanton swung at the pitch. Reed Johnson pinch-hit for Stanton and was hit in the hand by Fiers\u2019s next pitch. Casey McGehee was in the on-deck circle and started yelling at Fiers, and both benches and bullpens emptied. The umpires ejected McGehee and Marlins Manager Mike Redmond. WHITE SOX 1, ATHLETICS 0 Chris Sale got the better of Scott Kazmir in a pitchers\u2019 duel, Marcus Semien homered for the game\u2019s only run, and Chicago topped visiting Oakland. The A\u2019s lost for the 11th time in 14 games. They still lead the American League wild-card race, a game ahead of the Detroit Tigers and a game and a half in front of the Seattle Mariners. PIRATES 4, PHILLIES 1 Francisco Liriano struck out a season-high 12 batters in eight innings as Pittsburgh defeated host Philadelphia. The Pirates have won seven of eight to strengthen their hold on the second wild-card spot in the National League. GIANTS 6, DIAMONDBACKS 2 Jake Peavy struck out eight with no walks to win his third start in a row, and San Francisco defeated Arizona for its ninth straight home victory. San Francisco, which leads the N.L. wild-card standings, closed its gap in the N.L. West to two games. REDS 1, CARDINALS 0 Johnny Cueto pitched eight scoreless innings as host Cincinnati handed St. Louis, the N.L. Central leader, its third consecutive defeat. INDIANS SWEEP TWINS The rookie T. J. House pitched seven sharp innings, Carlos Santana homered and drove in two runs, and Cleveland completed a doubleheader sweep with a 2-0 victory over visiting Minnesota. Santana also homered in the first game, and Corey Kluber came within two outs of his second straight complete game as the Indians won, 8-2. The Indians trail the Tigers by three and a half games for the second A.L. wild-card spot. SELIG SAYS LEAGUE WEIGHED DOMESTIC VIOLENCE POLICY Commissioner Bud Selig said that Major League Baseball and the players union had discussed during collective bargaining the idea of a blanket policy regarding domestic violence. Selig declined to address the N.F.L.\u2019s handling of the Ray Rice case and said he could not remember the last domestic violence case involving a baseball player.", "keyword": "Baseball;Giancarlo Stanton;Pittsburgh Pirates;Phillies;Diamondbacks;San Francisco Giants;Bud Selig;Miami Marlins;Brewers"}
{"id": "ny0049326", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2014/11/22", "title": "Saturday\u2019s College Football Games to Watch", "abstract": "24 U.S.C. at 11 U.C.L.A. 8 p.m., ABC There is a lot at stake in one of college football\u2019s best rivalries. Oregon has clinched the Pacific-12 North, but the South is still up for grabs and both teams are in the hunt. U.C.L.A. has the easiest path to a championship. If the Bruins beat the Trojans and then Stanford next week, they will play the Ducks for the conference title and maybe even a spot in the College Football Playoff. For U.S.C., it is a little more complicated. The Trojans need to win and hope that Arizona State loses once to capture the division. Arizona State will host Washington State this week and then travels to Arizona next week. U.C.L.A. quarterback Brett Hundley\u2019s 70 career touchdowns are a university record. In Hundley\u2019s two victories over U.S.C., he has thrown for 442 yards and a score and added 90 yards rushing and four touchdowns. A win would put him in elite company. Cade McNown won four against the Trojans. On the U.S.C. side, Carson Palmer, Matt Barkley and Matt Leinart each beat the Bruins three times. All those players were drafted into the N.F.L. In the preseason, U.C.L.A. was a trendy pick to win the Pac-12 and Hundley was a popular Heisman candidate. But the Bruins struggled early to put away mediocre teams, slid in the rankings and lost back-to-back games against Utah and Oregon. They fell out of the top 25 and Hundley fell out of the Heisman race. But the Bruins rallied, winning their next four. The stakes are just as big for the Trojans and their first-year coach, Steve Sarkisian. It has been an inconsistent season for U.S.C. The Trojans gave up 452 yards on the ground in a surprising loss at Boston College and then blew big leads and lost in heartbreaking fashion at home to Arizona State and on the road at Utah. A win at the Rose Bowl would go a long way toward saving this season. Quarterback Cody Kessler has thrown 29 touchdowns and only 3 interceptions, but is flying under the radar because of those three losses. A win here would get him some recognition and might make him a Heisman candidate for next year. The game features the top two running backs in the Pac-12. U.S.C.\u2019s Javorius Allen leads the conference, averaging 118.4 yards per game. U.C.L.A.\u2019s Paul Perkins is right behind, averaging 117.2 yards per game. One of the keys to beating U.C.L.A. is pressuring Hundley. Keep an eye on defensive lineman Leonard Williams (6 sacks) and safety Su\u2019a Cravens (5 sacks and 14 tackles for a loss). The Trojans could get a boost from the return of cornerback Josh Shaw, who missed the first 10 games after lying about how he sprained both ankles. (He said he was rescuing a drowning nephew, but instead he jumped from a balcony after an argument with his girlfriend.) Middle linebacker Eric Kendricks is the key to the Bruins\u2019 defense with 110 tackles. During their four-game winning streak, the Bruins have done a better job of getting after quarterbacks, thanks to linemen Owamagbe Odighizuwa and Takkarist McKinley and linebacker Deon Hollins. The offensive line was one of the Trojans\u2019 weaknesses entering the season but has held together. The Bruins will be a big test. YALE at HARVARD 12:30 p.m., NBC Sports Harvard is 9-0. Yale is 8-1. The Elis can share the Ivy League title for the first time since 2006 with a win. ESPN\u2019s College GameDay is broadcasting from Cambridge, Mass. \u201cThe Game\u201d does not get much bigger. Image Zach Hodges of Harvard has 25 career sacks. Credit Gregory Payan/Associated Press The Elis are trying to turn the tables on a rivalry that has been very one-sided lately. Harvard has won the last seven and 12 of their last 13. The last time one of these colleges won eight in a row against its rival? In the 19th century. Yale can take solace in the fact that it leads the series, 65-57-8. The Crimson are riding a 13-game winning streak, dating back to last season, a streak that is second only to Florida State in all of college football. A victory would give Harvard its 17th perfect season. (And don\u2019t forget Dartmouth, which beat Yale, and would gain a share of the league title with a victory over Princeton and a Yale win.) Harvard linebacker Zach Hodges has 25 sacks in his career, the most in university history, and is the leader of a defense that allows 11 points per game, least in the Football Championship Subdivision. Hodges might be playing on Sundays in the N.F.L. someday. On the other side, Yale\u2019s offense is at the top of the F.C.S., averaging 587.2 yards per game and 43 points. Keep an eye on quarterback Morgan Roberts (2,925 yards and 21 touchdowns) and running back Tyler Varga (1,296 yards and 20 touchdowns). This is one of the greatest rivalries in college football, and this year\u2019s edition is easily the most intriguing in recent memory. 14 WISCONSIN at IOWA 3:30 p.m., ABC/ESPN2 (Regional) Badger running back Melvin Gordon made a huge statement last week, setting a Football Bowl Subdivision record with 408 yards rushing (in only three quarters) and finding the end zone four times in a victory over then-No. 11 Nebraska. Wisconsin moved up eight spots in the rankings and can wrap up the Big Ten West with a win and a Nebraska victory over Minnesota. The Hawkeyes, however, would still be alive in the West if they can find a way to knock off the Badgers. Iowa also needs Nebraska to beat Minnesota and would need to beat Nebraska next week. Lost in all the attention Gordon has received is how good Wisconsin\u2019s defense has looked lately. The play of linebackers Joe Schobert, Vince Biegel, Derek Landisch and Marcus Trotter is a huge part of why the Badgers lead the nation in total defense, allowing only 244 yards per game. 8 MISSISSIPPI at ARKANSAS 3:30 p.m., CBS The Rebels are still alive in the SEC West and still in the hunt for a spot in the College Football Playoff. Despite being off last week, losses by Mississippi State, Auburn and Arizona State helped the Rebels move up in the rankings. To keep those slim hopes alive, Mississippi will have to find a way to win in Fayetteville against an Arkansas team that is riding high after shutting out then-No. 20 L.S.U., 17-0, last week. Arkansas will look to grind it out on the ground, with rushing backs Jonathan Williams and Alex Collins running behind a big offensive line. Mississippi\u2019s defense leads the nation, allowing only 11.9 points per game, but gave up 248 yards rushing to Auburn and 264 yards rushing to L.S.U. in their two losses. This is not a great matchup for the Rebels. 15 ARIZONA at 20 UTAH 3:30 p.m., ESPN Both teams have fairly convoluted ways to win the Pac-12 South, but obviously any potential path involves a win this week. Arizona quarterback Anu Solomon is having an excellent freshman season and is one of the more underrated players in college football. He has thrown for 3,058 yards (eighth in the nation) and 25 touchdowns. Utah\u2019s defense is a tough, physical unit that loves to make life miserable for quarterbacks. The Utes lead the nation with 47 sacks on the season, and lineman Nate Orchard\u2019s 16.5 sacks are tied for the most in college football. 19 MISSOURI at TENNESSEE 7:30 p.m., ESPN Thanks to a victory over Texas A&M last week, the Tigers need to win their remaining two games to clinch their second straight SEC East title. Missouri\u2019s lone conference loss came against Georgia on Oct. 11. The Tigers also lost a shocker at home to Indiana earlier in the season. The Hoosiers have one victory since then and are without a victory in Big Ten play. Tennessee has been a different team since Joshua Dobbs took over at quarterback on Oct. 25. The team is 2-1 over that span, and Dobbs has accounted for more than 1,000 total yards. BOSTON COLLEGE at 1 FLORIDA STATE 3:30 p.m., ABC/ESPN2 (Regional) The Seminoles keep tempting fate, but they keep winning. If they can win here and win next week against Florida, they are all but assured a spot in the College Football Playoff and a chance to defend their national title. FRED BIERMAN", "keyword": "College football;USC;University of California; Los Angeles;Yale;Harvard;Steve Sarkisian;Cody Kessler"}
{"id": "ny0107549", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/04/12", "title": "North Korean Leadership Solidified as Launching Nears", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 North Korea neared completion of the hurried transition to its young new leader, Kim Jong-un , on Thursday, as a confrontation with the United States loomed over the North\u2019s intent to launch a long-range rocket. The governing Workers\u2019 Party, during the country\u2019s first major political gathering in a year and a half, declared Mr. Kim \u201csupreme leader\u201d on Wednesday and awarded him the title of first secretary. On Thursday, North Korea also said that Mr. Kim had been elevated to chairman of the party\u2019s central military commission and granted membership in the Politburo and its presidium. The inevitable elevation of Mr. Kim later this week to the top defense commission post will cap his rise to the pinnacle of party, military and state leadership. The speed of his elevation, analysts in the region said, reflected the insecurity of the young leader\u2019s status as much as it did the secretive leadership\u2019s need to have a solid power center in place immediately. The country\u2019s Unha, or Galaxy, rocket is expected to blast off within days. The North says the rocket\u2019s purpose is peaceful \u2014 to put a satellite in orbit \u2014 but the United States and other countries see the event as a test of long-range missile technology. North Korea is trying to use the political celebrations to project the image of what its propaganda commonly refers to as a \u201cstrong and prosperous nation\u201d and inspire national pride in its hunger-stricken people. The national flag and the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the Workers\u2019 Party fluttered across Pyongyang, The Associated Press said, as party delegates toured historic sites. Among them was the place where the new supreme leader\u2019s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the revered national founder, was born. His centenary will be celebrated on Sunday, and workers scrambled to spruce up the city and plant roadside flowers. The Workers\u2019 Party conference gives the young leader \u2014 or the senior power elite surrounding him \u2014 an opportunity to shuffle party and military leadership, gradually retiring stalwarts from the days when his father, Kim Jong-il , was leader and elevating younger loyalists. Such a generational change has been unfolding since Mr. Kim, who is believed to be in his late 20s, was officially designated as his father\u2019s successor in the last party meeting, in September 2010. More signs of the shift came at the party conference on Wednesday, when a group of officials were promoted. Mr. Kim\u2019s aunt Kim Kyong-hee became a party secretary, and her husband, Jang Song-taek, became a Politburo member. The couple were considered to be among Mr. Kim\u2019s mentors. Vice Marshal Kim Jong-gak, a key military political officer widely believed to be Mr. Kim\u2019s promoter among the military elite, was named a Politburo member, a day after the North Korean news media revealed that he had been made defense minister. The most eye-catching rise, however, was that of Choe Ryong-hae, a party secretary who became a member of the presidium of the Politburo, said Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute in Seoul. Mr. Choe, who, at 62, is relatively young among the top North Korean leaders, was also made vice chairman of the party\u2019s central military commission. His rise also showed that the dynastic transfer of power was not just for the Kim family but was often for the rest of the elite as well \u2014 a factor that analysts often cite to help explain the cohesion of the Kim rule. Mr. Choe\u2019s father fought alongside Mr. Kim\u2019s grandfather when he led Korean guerrillas during Japanese colonial rule, from 1910 to 1945. The families of many of those guerrillas remained key members of the ruling class. However, Kim Jong-il, who died in December 2011, never achieved the revered status of his father. On Wednesday, the party decided to leave the previous top post \u2014 general secretary \u2014 vacant, designating Kim Jong-il \u201ceternal general secretary.\u201d Similarly, when Kim Il-sung died in 1994, he was upheld as \u201ceternal president.\u201d \u201cKim Jong-un wanted to show respect to his father, and so created a new top job for him,\u201d said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. Mr. Cheong, the Sejong Institute analyst, said that one of the most important qualifications for Mr. Kim as successor was to demonstrate loyalty to his father and grandfather. The move illustrated the long shadows of his forefathers under which the young leader must operate. Choi Myeong-hae, a North Korea analyst at the Samsung Economic Research Institute in Seoul, said: \u201cKim Jong-un is an avatar of his father. This may indicate that it\u2019s still his father\u2019s people who make key policy decisions in Pyongyang and that his control of power is incomplete and his position less than secure.\u201d Mr. Choi said those engineering Mr. Kim\u2019s rise to power were those handpicked by his father, rather than his own selections, indicating that it would take longer for him to establish his own authority.", "keyword": "North Korea;Politics;Workers' Party of Korea"}
{"id": "ny0131359", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2012/12/11", "title": "Stephen Gionta of Devils Playing in A.H.L. During Lockout", "abstract": "TROY, N.Y. \u2014 The Times Union Center was occupied by Carrie Underwood and the Siena men\u2019s basketball team last week, so the Albany Devils practiced at their backup rink, the Knickerbacker Ice Arena, up Interstate 787 and across the Hudson. Stephen Gionta, a 29-year-old center generously listed at 5 feet 7 inches, joined the Devils last week, but he knows all about The Knick, having played most of the last two seasons for the New Jersey Devils\u2019 top farm team. That was before his hockey career, quite unexpectedly, took off in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Gionta thought he would be playing hockey this season in New Jersey. But because of the lockout, Gionta, who lives with his wife and children in West Orange, N.J., was working out with about 10 Devils veterans at the Devils\u2019 practice rink in Newark. \u201cIt was just the normal summer routine of skating and training and spending time with the little ones,\u201d Gionta said. \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate that time has come because of the lockout, but it\u2019s nice to get that time that I haven\u2019t had in previous years. It was good to be around them.\u201d This time, at least, Gionta seemed happy to be sent down to the minors. The American Hockey League has become a refuge, its rosters fattened during the lockout with young N.H.L. stars, players like Gionta, and veterans like the former Rangers, Devils and Islanders defenseman Mike Mottau, who have signed 25-game professional tryout contracts. The Albany Devils\u2019 roster has 30 players, perhaps four or five more than usual. The ice is crowded for practices. Twenty players dress for games, so there are plenty of healthy scratches. \u201cIt\u2019s not to the point where it\u2019s uncomfortable,\u201d said Chris Lamoriello , the general manager in Albany (and son of Lou Lamoriello, the New Jersey Devils\u2019 general manager). \u201cIt\u2019s something you acclimate yourself to because of the situation, knowing what you\u2019re dealing with.\u201d Gionta was able to hop to the A.H.L. because in March, he was one of 22 Albany Devils included on the league\u2019s \u201cclear day\u201d rosters. Those players were eligible to play in Albany for the rest of the regular season and the Calder Cup playoffs. But when center Jacob Josefson broke his wrist in April, the Devils called up Gionta. He was placed on the fourth line with Steve Bernier and Ryan Carter, and the results were astounding. Carter had five playoff goals, Gionta three and Bernier two as the Devils reached the Stanley Cup finals. \u201cHe knows what it takes,\u201d Josefson said of Gionta. \u201cIf he just plays like we\u2019re used to, it will be great to have him.\u201d The Albany Devils also had Adam Henrique, the 22-year-old center who was spectacular as a rookie for the N.H.L. Devils, and Adam Larsson, the 20-year-old defenseman who was the team\u2019s No. 1 draft choice last year. But despite having Josefson, Henrique and Larsson, the Albany Devils won only 5 of their first 18 games. Then Henrique injured a ligament in his left thumb late last month. Gionta\u2019s phone rang. \u201cHe\u2019s a prime example to always be prepared,\u201d Rick Kowalsky , Albany\u2019s third-year coach, said. \u201cHe\u2019s been in the organization six or seven years. I\u2019ve only been here for two of them, but it\u2019s been the same thing every year. He\u2019s played in the top six for me at times, but he\u2019s a role player. And he has no problem with that. \u201cHe\u2019s a perfect example to guys at this level that if you stick with it, that opportunity could come. It\u2019s about preparation meeting opportunity. The way he practices every day, it\u2019s no nonsense, regardless of where he\u2019s been in the lineup or how he\u2019s feeling. I really believe that\u2019s why he went in there and did what he did.\u201d Play in the A.H.L. is more ragged than in the N.H.L. Larsson, for example, is playing much more in Albany than he would in New Jersey, but he has struggled at times, Kowalsky said, because plays do not develop exactly as they are drawn up. \u201cIn the N.H.L., you can draw up a forecheck and say, \u2018This is how they\u2019re going to come.\u2019 And it\u2019s to the letter,\u201d Kowalsky said. \u201cHere, you\u2019ve got the odd guy deviating, and he\u2019s struggled with that. The inconsistency we see from other teams has affected him. \u201cHe has to focus on the little things: playing hard, being good defensively, not worry about making the perfect pass all the time. Here and at the N.H.L. level, you sometimes just have to get it in and get it out. Put pucks to areas.\u201d Larsson said: \u201cIt\u2019s so different down here than it is up there. You have to adjust to the speed and everything. But it\u2019s been a lot of fun, and it feels like I\u2019m better every day. I feel like I\u2019m stronger and faster. That\u2019s helped my game.\u201d Larsson and Gionta say that playing in Albany will help them make a smoother transition to the N.H.L. when or if the lockout ends. For now, they are happy to have teammates and a sheet of ice on which to practice. Gionta had an assist in his first game with Albany, a 3-1 victory over Bridgeport on Saturday, and the Devils beat Connecticut on Sunday. \u201cThe first practice, I felt better than I thought I would,\u201d Gionta said. \u201cIt was the first time I had contact since the season ended, and that\u2019s always the biggest unknown.\u201d", "keyword": "Albany Devils (A.H.L. Hockey Team);American Hockey League;Gionta Stephen;Lockouts;Hockey Ice;National Hockey League;New Jersey Devils"}
{"id": "ny0048662", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/11/24", "title": "Debate Persists Over Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders, Long After \u2018Sybil\u2019", "abstract": "The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote \u201cStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,\u201d a novella that provided us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound. Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating personas. But few instances of the phenomenon captured Americans\u2019 collective imagination quite like \u201cSybil,\u201d the study of a woman said to have had not two, not three (like the troubled figure in the 1950s\u2019 \u201cThree Faces of Eve\u201d), but 16 different personalities. Alters, psychiatrists call them, short for alternates. As a mass-market book published in 1973, \u201cSybil\u201d sold in the millions. Tens of millions watched a 1976 television movie version. The story had enough juice left in it for still another television film in 2007. Sybil Dorsett, a pseudonym, became the paradigm of a psychiatric diagnosis once known as multiple personality disorder. These days, it goes by a more anodyne label: dissociative identity disorder. Either way, the strange case of the woman whose real name was Shirley Ardell Mason made itself felt in psychiatrists\u2019 offices across the country. Pre-\"Sybil,\u201d the diagnosis was rare, with only about 100 cases ever having been reported in medical journals. Less than a decade after \u201cSybil\u201d made its appearance, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally recognized the disorder, and the numbers soared into the thousands. People went on television to tell the likes of Jerry Springer and Leeza Gibbons about their many alters. One woman insisted that she had more than 300 identities within her (enough, if you will, to fill the rosters of a dozen major-league baseball teams). Even \u201cEve,\u201d whose real name is Chris Costner Sizemore, said in the mid-1970s that those famous three faces were surely an undercount. It was more like 22, she said. As retold in this latest video documentary from Retro Report , part of a series exploring past news stories and their consequences, the phenomenon burned most intensely for roughly a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s. Then it faded from public view, partly the result of lawsuits brought successfully against some psychiatrists, who were found by the courts to have used dubious methods to lead their patients down the path of false memories. When an unusual disorder draws so much attention, as this one did for a time, the public may become understandably confused about how prevalent it truly is. Even with medical conditions that are less controversial and far more familiar to most Americans, questions arise. Consider a developmental disorder like autism or Asperger syndrome. A federally supported study in 2013 found that the likelihood of a school-age child\u2019s receiving such a diagnosis had risen 72 percent in just five years. Cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have increased so starkly that it is now said to affect, at some point, 11 percent of Americans from ages 4 to 17. In 2007, researchers reported a 40-fold increase in the number of children and adolescents being treated for bipolar disorder. Do these striking statistics signal that the disorders are indeed increasing explosively, or have doctors simply gotten better at recognizing existing problems? Or, less reassuringly, are some of these conditions perhaps being overdiagnosed? Medical professionals themselves continue to debate such questions. The \u201cSybil\u201d story began in the mid-1950s. At its center were the Minnesota-born Ms. Mason and her intense relationship, first in the Midwest and later in New York, with a psychoanalyst, Cornelia B. Wilbur. Dr. Wilbur\u2019s determination that Ms. Mason had 16 personalities \u2014 people of varying manner and ages, including two who were male \u2014 did not come about in a vacuum. She was well aware of \u201cThe Three Faces of Eve,\u201d a 1954 report by two psychiatrists who worked with a woman said to have had three distinct personalities. (As Eve in a 1957 film based on that study, Joanne Woodward won an Academy Award for best actress. Years later, she did a neat Hollywood pivot by playing the psychiatrist in the first movie version of \u201cSybil,\u201d with Sally Field as the patient.) Dr. Wilbur did not write up her findings in some dry professional journal. Instead, she went looking for a large audience, and enlisted a writer, Flora Rheta Schreiber, to produce what became a blockbuster. But as the years passed, challengers began to speak up. One was Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who said that he had treated Ms. Mason when Dr. Wilbur was on vacation. Dr. Spiegel described his patient not as a sufferer of multiple personality disorder but, rather, as a readily suggestible \u201chysteric.\u201d A harsher judgment was rendered in the 1990s by Robert Rieber, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a New York City school where Ms. Schreiber taught English. After listening to tape recordings that he said Ms. Schreiber had given him, he concluded that \u201cit is clear from Wilbur\u2019s own words that she was not exploring the truth but rather planting the truth as she wanted it to be.\u201d Debbie Nathan, a writer interviewed for this Retro Report documentary, piled on still more skepticism in her 2011 book, \u201cSybil Exposed.\u201d Perhaps inevitably in a dispute of this sort, counter-revisionists then emerged to denounce the doubters and to defend \u201cSybil\u201d as rooted in reality. Overwhelmingly, those receiving a diagnosis of the disorder have been women. They typically had rough childhoods. A pattern to their stories \u2014 Ms. Mason fell squarely within it \u2014 was that they endured horrific physical and sexual abuse when they were little. More than a few claimed to have been the victims of torture at the hands of satanic cults. In many cases, their memories were brought to the surface through hypnotism or with injections of so-called truth serums like sodium pentothal. But were those recollections real? The \u201cSybil\u201d phenomenon went arm in arm with a reassessment of certain psychiatric techniques. Some studies concluded that people may have become less inhibited with pharmacological intervention, but not necessarily more truthful. Other research found that hypnosis sometimes creates false memories. Those who dismiss Dr. Wilbur\u2019s work as hokum say that induced false memories lay at the heart of her work with Ms. Mason. All the principals in \u201cSybil\u201d \u2014 Ms. Mason, Dr. Wilbur, Ms. Schreiber \u2014 are dead. So is Herbert Spiegel. His son, David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, played an important role in his profession\u2019s adoption of dissociative identity disorder as the preferred term for this condition. \u201cMultiple personality carries with it the implication that they really have more than one personality,\u201d Dr. Spiegel said. Not so. \u201cThe problem is fragmentation of identity, not that you really are 12 people,\u201d he said, \u201cthat you have not more than one but less than one personality.\u201d", "keyword": "Mental Health;Psychiatry;Dissociative identity disorder;Shirley Mason;Flora Rheta Schreiber;Cornelia Wilbur;David Spiegel;Sybil"}
{"id": "ny0025554", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/08/06", "title": "Cruz Suspension Leaves Rangers With Huge Hole", "abstract": "ANAHEIM, Calif. \u2014 The Texas Rangers \u2014 like seven other teams that on Monday had players suspended by Major League Baseball for their ties to the defunct Biogenesis clinic \u2014 had to make contingency plans. But the Rangers are perhaps the team whose playoff fate was most dependent on the player they lost, right fielder Nelson Cruz, who received a 50-game suspension. They began play Monday against the Los Angeles Angels a half-game behind the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cleveland Indians for the final American League wild-card berth. Cruz, with a team-leading 27 home runs and 76 runs batted in, has been a middle-of-the-lineup force and carried a strong arm to the outfield. The Detroit Tigers, who also lost an All-Star in Jhonny Peralta, are also in the heart of the playoff race, entering Monday with a three-game lead in the A.L. Central. But they recently acquired a solid defensive replacement in Jose Iglesias and with Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder and others, they do not lack big bats. The task of replacing Cruz appears taller, and will fall to less inexperienced players: Engel Beltre, who had played only 13 games before he started in left and hit ninth on Monday, and fellow rookie Joey Butler who was called up from Class AAA. Beltre will play against right-handers and Butler against left-handers, but between them they have not hit a home run in the majors. \u201cIt\u2019s a shame that it has to happen at all,\u201d catcher A. J. Pierzynski said. \u201cBut we\u2019re all grown men here and we all make decisions, and at the end you have to pay for your decisions, good or bad. It\u2019s sad because we\u2019ll miss Nellie.\u201d Image Nelson Cruz, with a team-leading 27 home runs and 76 runs batted in, has been a middle-of-the-lineup force for the Rangers. Credit Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Cruz addressed the team for about 15 minutes before the clubhouse was open to the news media, saying he was sorry he had put the team in a bad position. In a statement, he added that after the 2011 season he had a virus that resulted in him losing 40 pounds, and he was not sure if he would be able to report to spring training. \u201cFaced with this situation, I made an error in judgment that I deeply regret, and I accept full responsibility for that error,\u201d the statement said. \u201cI should have handled the situation differently, and my illness was no excuse.\u201d Earlier Monday, multiple outlets reported that Cruz had fired his agents, Sam and Seth Levinson. Cruz had the public support of many of his teammates, who were mostly nonjudgmental about Cruz\u2019s decision not to appeal the suspension. If Cruz had appealed, he might have been able to help the Rangers in their playoff push \u2014 as the Yankees hope Alex Rodriguez can do for them. But Cruz is also a free agent at the end of the season, and if he hits the market with a suspension looming, it would seem certain to cost him on his next contract. \u201cThat\u2019s not anyone else\u2019s decision here beside Nellie,\u201d second baseman Ian Kinsler said. \u201cIt\u2019s up to him.\u201d After Cruz spoke to his teammates, outfielder David Murphy stood up to express his support. Soon others followed. It was reminiscent of a team meeting in 2010 when Manager Ron Washington acknowledged that he had tested positive for cocaine. Michael Young, then a team leader, told Washington that he would be behind him, and soon the rest of the team followed. \u201cPeople can tell when you\u2019re sincere in what you\u2019re saying and I think that\u2019s what comes over, the honesty,\u201d Washington said Monday. \u201cWe\u2019re all human beings, and we all make mistakes. There\u2019s a consequence for when you make mistakes. You\u2019re not looking for sympathy. You\u2019re looking for them to understand that you\u2019re human, and the understanding has to come from their heart.\u201d", "keyword": "Nelson Cruz;Texas Rangers;MLB;Doping"}
{"id": "ny0044735", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/02/27", "title": "Police Officer Is Shot in Legs in Brooklyn", "abstract": "A first-year New York City police officer was shot in the legs on Wednesday evening in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by a man he and his partner had just pulled off a bus for failing to pay the fare, the police said. The officer, James Li, 26, was taken to Kings County Hospital Center, where he was listed as stable. Officers arrested a suspect, Rashaun Robinson, 28, in a building near the shooting, which occurred in the area of Utica Avenue and Empire Boulevard, Chief Philip Banks III said at a news conference at the hospital. Mr. Robinson had a loaded .45-caliber handgun on him, the police said. \u201cThis was just a great piece of police work,\u201d Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said at the news conference with Chief Banks and Mayor Bill de Blasio. He added that the suspect \u201cshowed no compunction whatsoever\u201d in \u201cfiring three times at the officers.\u201d About 5 p.m., Officer Li and his partner, Randy Chow, had just removed Mr. Robinson and another man from a B46 bus traveling south on Utica Avenue after they saw the men board a bus through a back door without paying the fare, the police said. Mr. Robinson ran, and when Officers Li and Chow gave chase, he fired on the officers, Chief Banks said. Officer Li was injured in the left thigh, right thigh and groin, he said. In return, Officer Li fired five shots and Officer Chow fired twice, he said. Mr. Robinson was not hit. Bystanders \u2014 including two off-duty emergency medical technicians \u2014 provided Officer Li with first aid while Officer Chow radioed for help and continued to chase the suspect, according to fire and police officials. With help from local residents, officers found Mr. Robinson in a fifth-floor hallway of an apartment building at 445 Schenectady Avenue and took the handgun from him, Mr. Banks said. Mr. Robinson had previously been arrested six times, and there was an active warrant for his arrest in Lebanon, Pa., on charges of narcotics manufacturing and distribution, Chief Banks said. The other suspect who was pulled off the bus had not been found, he said. Officer Chow, 30, and a female officer whose name was not released were treated for minor injuries, the police said. Officer Li was the first officer shot on the force this year, according to the police. Officers Li and Chow, who both graduated from the police academy in December, were assigned to the area as part of Operation Impact, a program that puts new officers in high-crime areas. \u201cThey did everything a good cop does, and they\u2019ve only been on the job for a few months,\u201d Mr. de Blasio said. \u201cYet, they responded like seasoned veterans.\u201d Operation Impact was a signature tool of Mr. Bratton\u2019s predecessor, Raymond W. Kelly. But Mr. Bratton is seeking fundamental changes to the program that would see those young officers placed first in traditional patrol assignments and then replaced in the high-crime areas with veteran officers. The shooting happened at a busy intersection at the start of the evening rush. The bus line is one of several that the police had begun monitoring at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority because of an increase in assaults on bus drivers and other crimes. After the shooting, dozens of officers arrived at the scene, near a White Castle restaurant on Empire Boulevard near Utica Avenue. In front of the restaurant\u2019s parking lot, beverage cups marked the places where the bullet shells had fallen. Patrice Washington, who works at a nearby clothing store, said police officers often waited in front of the store to watch for people hopping on the back of a bus. Cecil Henningham, a worker at a dry cleaner nearby, said he saw many officers descend on the area and then place a young man into a police car. \u201cI didn\u2019t hear anything,\u201d he said. \u201cI just saw police cars coming from north, west, east and south. And then they ran into this building and took this guy out.\u201d", "keyword": "NYPD;Crown Heights Brooklyn;James Li;Rashaun Robinson;Randy Chow;Attacks on Police"}
{"id": "ny0268384", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/04/04", "title": "A Bronx Church Where Landmark Status Would Be More Burden Than Honor", "abstract": "The bronze doors of Immaculate Conception Church are always open during the day, a welcoming gesture to the surrounding Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx. Decorated with figures of the Virgin Mary, the doors are graceful \u2014 and heavy. \u201cMy main issue is trying to open them in the morning,\u201d the Rev. Francis Skelly, the church\u2019s pastor, said. \u201cThey keep me in shape.\u201d The bigger challenge is keeping them open: The parish is poor, and money for repairs and maintenance is tight. Twenty years ago, the church\u2019s copper steeple had to be dismantled after pieces began to crash onto East 150th Street. It has yet to be restored because parish leaders have other priorities for the congregation\u2019s 1,200 members \u2014 most of them Latinos and immigrants \u2014 who turn to it not just as a place to worship, but also for help with things such as citizenship classes and preparing tax returns. Immaculate, as the faithful call it, has always been a church for newcomers, starting with the German immigrants who filled its pews when the current structure opened in 1888, replacing a wooden building that had stood there before. After decades of doing hard and unheralded work, the church is being recognized by New York City\u2019s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has proposed that the exterior be designated as a landmark. As much as Father Skelly appreciates the nod, it is the last thing he needs: Landmark status, he said, would create financial and bureaucratic burdens if parts of the 128-year-old structure required repairs or renovation, making any alterations complicated and expensive. \u201cThis was the worst possible news I could have heard,\u201d he said recently, before having to dash off to deal with a flood in a church bathroom. \u201cThe landmarks commission doesn\u2019t care about people, they care about buildings. We are an immigrant parish. Financially, we break even. But we\u2019re always a boiler explosion away from being in financial trouble.\u201d The designation \u2014 on which the commission is scheduled to vote this month \u2014 is itself steeped in history, since it was originally proposed in 1980 before being set aside amid local opposition. It languished for decades, until the commission decided last year to start eliminating its lengthy backlog. Thirty properties, including Immaculate, are under consideration, said Damaris Olivo, a spokeswoman for the commission. Designating the church as a landmark, Ms. Olivo said, is part of an effort to ensure that areas of the city outside Manhattan are recognized for noteworthy structures. She added that while landmark status would require the approval of repairs and renovations to safeguard the building\u2019s integrity, the commission had staff members who could expedite requests, and that some state funds and private grants were available to help defray costs. \u201cThe commission is aware that the changing nature of the city\u2019s neighborhoods has had an impact on religious institutions,\u201d Ms. Olivo said. \u201cThis is a national phenomenon in cities across the country grappling with these same challenges. Our approach to saving these buildings is to collaborate with religious organizations to find solutions that benefit them and the public interest.\u201d Nevertheless, the Archdiocese of New York, which includes the Bronx, and the Diocese of Brooklyn oppose the designation of Immaculate and three other Roman Catholic Church properties as landmarks, saying the classification would strain limited resources that could be better used to help the needy. When Father Skelly learned of the proposal, he recalled the experience of St. Cecilia\u2019s Church in East Harlem, where he was assigned in 1976, when it was designated a landmark. The Rev. Peter Mushi, who is now the chuch\u2019s pastor, has mixed feelings about the designation. Three years ago, Father Mushi embarked on a project to fix the church\u2019s roof and masonry. The original budget for the work was $1.2 million; the cost of using the appropriate material and specialized contractors, he said, pushed it to $3.3 million. Father Mushi said he was forced to borrow $2 million from the Archdiocese of New York when a preservation grant from the state provided only $200,000. He was irked that the church still had not been able to install a handicap-accessible ramp that would satisfy landmark requirements. \u201cThis parish is 60 percent senior citizens,\u201d Father Mushi said. \u201cWe have a lot of senior citizens who cannot climb the stairs. We\u2019re still looking for the money to put a ramp in.\u201d Father Skelly knew all about that struggle: After serving at other parishes, he returned to St. Cecilia\u2019s as pastor from 1999 to 2005, and he had tried, without success, to install an acceptable ramp. \u201cThey made it so restrictive in that they wanted it not to be seen by the public and take away from the original design,\u201d Father Skelly recalled. \u201cWhat I said was the church was for the people, it was not a museum. We\u2019re trying to get people into it.\u201d With an April 12 vote on the landmark designation for Immaculate approaching, Father Skelly and parish leaders plan to give a commission representative a tour of the church this week and to express their concerns. They worry that it may be for naught since the designation has the support of several preservationists and historians. Maria Caban, a lay leader, understands that landmark status would help preserve local history and culture. But she fears it might serve as another step toward gentrification if developers used it as a selling point. \u201cImmaculate is a church of the people and for the people,\u201d she said. \u201cIt really is the one institution that unifies all the different ethnic groups in the community. I don\u2019t want to see that go away. If anything, that is what needs to be preserved.\u201d", "keyword": "Immaculate Conception Church;Bronx;Historic preservation;church,churches;Restoration and Renovation;Landmarks Preservation Commission;South Bronx"}
{"id": "ny0112201", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/02/09", "title": "Spain: Judge Speaks at His Trial", "abstract": "Baltasar Garz\u00f3n , a high-profile Spanish judge, told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that his decision to investigate killings committed during the Spanish Civil War had been motivated by \u201cthe helplessness of the victims.\u201d With arguments finished, the Supreme Court would normally be expected to rule within about 20 days, although no deadline has been set. If found guilty, Mr. Garz\u00f3n, 56, could be suspended as a judge for as long as 20 years, a sanction that would effectively end his career. His 2008 attempt to investigate killings from the Spanish Civil War was brought to a swift end because of the political controversy that it set off. But right-wing groups started legal action against him, charging that he had overreached his authority and knowingly contravened a 1977 general amnesty that covers crimes perpetrated during the war.", "keyword": "Garzon Baltasar;Courts and the Judiciary;Spain;Decisions and Verdicts;Spanish Civil War (1936-39)"}
{"id": "ny0009180", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/02/04", "title": "Hispanic Parishioners Grapple With Church Scandal", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 At Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, there was no shrinking from the news reverberating through the pews. The Rev. Scott Santarosa spent time usually reserved for the homily talking instead about what he called \u201creally painful stuff.\u201d After Mass, over menudo and pan dulce, parishioners tried to make sense of the events that cascaded at the end of last week. First, the release of thousands of documents detailing decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups, then the current archbishop reprimanding his predecessor , Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who responded with an angry missive of his own. Known for his outspoken views on immigrants\u2019 rights, Cardinal Mahony was seen as a tireless ally here among Latinos, who make up about 70 percent of the four million Catholics in the country\u2019s largest archdiocese. He could celebrate Mass in flawless Spanish, and was at times affectionately referred to as \u201cRogelio.\u201d But with the release of documents that make it increasingly clear that Cardinal Mahony shielded priests accused of child abuse from investigations by law enforcement officials, his legacy as a champion of immigrants may soon be overshadowed. Conversations with dozens of parishioners at three largely Spanish-speaking churches here illustrate how divided the faithful still are over the abuse and the way church officials have handled the scandal. There is internal conflict even among the parishioners themselves: Is Cardinal Mahony the hero they once thought, or is he someone who deserves to be punished? Is abuse a thing of the past, or does the church need to make even more radical changes? And, many added with a visible wince, what will happen to the victims? Rafael Flores, 64, recalled seeing pictures of Cardinal Mahony marching for immigrants\u2019 rights and appearing on Spanish television news countless times. For years, he said, it appeared that Cardinal Mahony was markedly different from others in power, a man who was willing to be with ordinary people. \u201cHe did so many things right, but this is the thing that is most difficult and the most important, and he didn\u2019t do the right thing,\u201d Mr. Flores said. Like many others, Mr. Flores said he believed that Archbishop Jos\u00e9 H. Gomez did the right thing in removing Cardinal Mahony from public duties. If nothing else, Mr. Flores said, it shows the outside world that the church is taking action, even if belatedly. For Concepcion Guizarnotegui, 43, of Boyle Heights, the details in some way do not matter. That Cardinal Mahony did not do more is difficult to understand. But, she tells herself, perhaps that was the best he knew to do at the time. \u201cPeople try to do what they believe is right \u2014 how can I not think he did the same thing?\u201d she said. Still, even as she spoke, she stopped to consider the issue. \u201cHe was supposed to be the one taking care of everybody, of the city\u2019s children, and he did not do that. So how can he be trusted?\u201d For some, the legacies Cardinal Mahony leaves behind can coexist. \u201cAs a leader, he failed, but that doesn\u2019t mean he was all bad,\u201d said Angelica Morales, 50, who was attending an early morning Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle. \u201cA person isn\u2019t entirely bad or entirely good.\u201d Many Catholics praised Archbishop Gomez, who wrote a letter criticizing Cardinal Mahony and relieving him of any administrative or public duties. Archdiocese officials instructed that the letter be read at every Mass this past weekend. In some circles, there was a pervasive sense that Cardinal Mahony and church officials were victims themselves. After the Rev. Marc Rougeau read the letter from Archbishop Gomez at the end of Mass at St. Mary\u2019s Church in Boyle Heights, he added that \u201cthe media these days is having a feast of all the details and embellishments and adding on to things.\u201d After the service, several parishioners interviewed declined to give their names. They defended the church and criticized the accusers and their parents. In many ways, the soul-searching almost felt familiar, as reports of sexual abuse have steadily trickled out here and in other cities over the year. But even as Father Santarosa spoke of the \u201csame pain we have lived with as we have come to know about the abuses,\u201d he warned that there would be \u201cmuch more detail\u201d about specific cases in the coming days. \u201cThis is really painful stuff \u2014 it\u2019s hard to read, hard to understand how it could happen and wasn\u2019t reported,\u201d Father Santarosa said before reading the letter from Archbishop Gomez during one Mass, offering the same sentiments he would repeat at each of the four other Sunday Masses. \u201cAlmost every sector did not respond appropriately, including families,\u201d he said. \u201cThe church is guilty for that as well \u2014 there is no other way to say it.\u201d Giovanni Fascio, 49, and his wife, Sofia, 46, have attended Mass weekly for most of their lives and consider their faith almost unshakable. There was almost a sense of relief, they said, with the records released. \u201cFinally, we can all know what went on,\u201d Mr. Fascio said. But Ms. Fascio said she could not help but think that the latest revelations were another sign of hypocrisy or double standards by church officials. \u201cPeople get divorced, and they are not allowed to receive communion, but they covered up crimes and are still allowed to celebrate Mass,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard not to feel very let down by that.\u201d", "keyword": "Child Abuse;Catholic Church;Roger M Mahony;Jose Horacio Gomez;Rape;Cardinal Catholic;Priest;Hispanic Americans;Los Angeles"}
{"id": "ny0161122", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2006/04/29", "title": "A Life Filled With Trouble Comes to a Sad End", "abstract": "SLIGHTLY more than 16 years apart, Steve Howe and Billy Martin, two troubled baseball souls whose most notorious times occurred with the Yankees, died in similar accidents while riding in their pickup trucks. Martin, who died on Christmas in 1989, had a stormy tenure as the manager of the Yankees and was most notoriously known for his departures. He resigned under pressure once, and George Steinbrenner fired him four other times. Baseball commissioners suspended Howe seven times, the last time when he was pitching for the Yankees. Both are baseball records. Howe was killed yesterday, the authorities said, when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, Calif., about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, at 5:55 a.m. Pacific time. In 1997, when Howe was trying to make a comeback in an independent league, he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident in Montana. In that instance, he was charged with drunken driving. There was no immediate word on the cause of Howe's fatal accident. Howe, who turned 48 last month, was addicted to cocaine and alcohol. Even his biggest supporters, including his baseball agent, Richard Moss, acknowledged that he had problems. Howe preceded the steroids era, but he underwent more tests for drugs than any player ever will for steroids. Fay Vincent, the baseball commissioner who issued Howe's seventh suspension, which an arbitrator overturned, recalled yesterday that when Howe was out of baseball after suspension No. 6, he appealed to Vincent to be reinstated. \"He wanted one more chance,\" Vincent said in a telephone interview. \"He begged me to give him one more chance. He got religion and had cleaned up his life. I sent him to the minors and had him tested. He passed all the tests. The Yankees brought him up. He almost immediately bought drugs from an undercover agent.\" Vincent suspended Howe for life in June 1992. The players association challenged the suspension, and in a departure from usual practice, Moss, the union's former general counsel, argued the case before an arbitrator, George Nicolau. \"He was misdiagnosed,\" Moss said in a telephone interview. \"He was sent to programs that had nothing to do with his disease.\" Howe, Moss argued, had attention deficit disorder, and that caused his addictions. Yankees officials strongly supported Howe, an effective relief pitcher. \"George Steinbrenner was not sympathetic to Howe,\" Vincent recalled of the Yankees' principal owner, whom Vincent had suspended for other reasons. \"When I called him and told him what I was doing, he said: 'You won't have any problem from me.' But I had problems with Michael and Showalter.\" Gene Michael, the Yankees' general manager, argued that baseball's drug policy was bad. Vincent strongly reminded Michael that as a club executive he was obliged to support the policy, not fight it. It's difficult to believe that any club executive today would criticize baseball's steroids testing policy. He wouldn't be around long if he did. The Mets, for example, issued a statement yesterday after one of their minor leaguers was suspended for 50 games for testing positive for use of an illegal performance-enhancing substance. \"The Mets,\" the statement said, \"are obviously disappointed that a member of our organization has tested positive. The Mets are fully supportive of Major League Baseball's joint drug policy.\" Nicolau agreed with Moss's argument on attention deficit disorder, finding that \"an underlying psychiatric disorder\" had contributed to Howe's cocaine addiction, and overturned the suspension, reducing it to time served. Howe pitched for the Yankees into the 1996 season, and they released him in June. Howe's troubles didn't end there. Two days after he was released, he was arrested at Kennedy Airport when security officers found a loaded .357 Magnum in his suitcase. He subsequently pleaded guilty to gun possession and was sentenced to three years' probation and 150 hours of community service. Moss said he hadn't seen Howe in a long time, but had last talked to him just before Christmas. \"He told me his daughter was going to get married,\" Moss said. Moss, who generally felt very highly of all of his clients, said Howe was a good person despite his problems. \"He got vilified in the press and got this reputation for being a bad guy,\" Moss said, \"but talk to any player on the team he played for, and they'll tell you he was a wonderful guy. He was a sick guy and misdiagnosed.\" Moss added, \"One of the proudest moments in my professional life was being able to get him back into baseball, seeing what his disease was and having him treated.\" The grievance victory had to be a highlight of Moss's career. Any time a lawyer can use something like attention deficit disorder to extricate a player from his seventh baseball suspension, he has to feel good. Howe, however, needed more than a good lawyer.", "keyword": "NEW YORK YANKEES;VINCENT FAY;STEINBRENNER GEORGE M. 3D;MARTIN BILLY;HOWE STEVE;ACCIDENTS AND SAFETY;BASEBALL"}
{"id": "ny0150798", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2008/08/02", "title": "Olympic Organizers to Weigh Unblocking More Web Sites", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have agreed to discuss making available certain Internet sites that have been blocked for journalists working at the Olympic Village, an official from the International Olympic Committee said Saturday. A handful of sites, including Amnesty International and the BBC\u2019s Chinese language edition, were opened to reporters on Friday. A working group of Olympic organizers and I.O.C. officials is now examining other sites, one by one, to determine if other sites should be available. \u201cWe believe we are moving to a point where you will be moving toward a point where you can report in an unfettered way,\u201d Kevan Gosper, the press commission chief of the I.O.C., told reporters at a news conference Saturday. Sites regarding delicate issues like Tibet, Taiwanese independence, the 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong were among those initially blocked. Mr. Gosper said the process of obtaining access to sites like those was \u201ca work in progress,\u201d but that Internet access it is still not unfettered, as Olympic organizers promised the I.O.C. when the Games were awarded to China in 2001. The fact is that China\u2019s authoritarian government restricts access to some politically delicate sites, and it may remain that way, he said. \u201cYou\u2019ll always find sites concerning pornography closed, subversive sites or sites that might jeopardize national interest,\u201d he said. \u201cThat goes with the turf and varies from country to country.\u201d \u201cThere will be some debate,\u201d he said. \u201cThe line between what could be considered a national interest issue might be a bit blurred.\u201d He added that journalists who feel a site should be unblocked can raise the issue with I.O.C. officials. Mr. Gosper acknowledged that he was taken by surprise on Tuesday, when he learned that some sites had been blocked. He was not sure if the initial agreement between the Olympic organizers and the I.O.C. had changed, perhaps because of political issues like unrest in Tibet, which had intensified as the Games approached. On Friday, he finally met with the I.O.C. president, Jacques Rogge, and was assured that no shift of policy had been made. Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee, had said in an interview in Beijing in March: \u201cThe commitment we have obtained from the authorities is that there will be no restrictions for the media. You will have the same Internet access as you\u2019d have at home.\u201d", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2008);Censorship;News and News Media;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0120525", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/07/08", "title": "A Review of the Patio at the Roundhouse at Beacon Falls", "abstract": "AS summer heats up, diners like to take it outside, scouting shaded tables at restaurants where the food is easygoing, the drinks are chilled, and the fireflies stay out late. On a lark, we drove north on a fair June evening to the year-old Patio at the Roundhouse at Beacon Falls in search of above-average alfresco dining, our fingers crossed. Seated in racy black Italian wicker chairs under a wheat-colored market umbrella, we sipped tinto de verano \u2014 tempranillo wine refreshed with orange-and-vanilla soda \u2014 and ate smart appetizers of tuna ceviche with pistachios and crispy shrimp with spicy pink mayonnaise. A hundred yards away, beyond tumbling rapids, a single-story drop in Fishkill Creek created a glistening scrim, like a mini-Niagara. We uncrossed our fingers and asked to see the menu again. The Patio is the casual opening act at this complex of rescued brick factory buildings where lawn mowers and hats were once made; the project comprises a formal restaurant called Swift, scheduled to open this month, as well as hotel rooms, a luxury spa, artist lofts and a catering space. Also open now is a spiffy lounge called 2EM, where framed photographs taken before the restoration began show the abandoned roundhouse, minus a roof, with a tree growing through the floor. What a difference a few LEED standards and principles of high design can make! The drum-shaped roundhouse now stands as a counterpoint to Dia: Beacon , the dazzling contemporary art museum that occupies an old Nabisco factory at the opposite end of town. Brandon Collins, the executive chef, worked as sous chef at Valley at the Garrison, in Garrison, when I gave it a rating of excellent in 2004; he later served as co-executive chef there. His gently priced, seasonal menu at the Patio features light fare suited to summer: snacks, salads, sandwiches and ceviches. Almost everything is prepared in an open outdoor kitchen that can be viewed from the sidewalk above. Dishes are attuned to the moment, most accented with local produce and executed with a certain pizazz. There\u2019s a lovely salad of warm, olive-oil-poached shrimp with precision-cut, soy-laced watermelon and dabs of black garlic and sorrel pur\u00e9e; and a very good burger cloaked with smoked Gouda and flanked by excellent twiggy fries. We also fell for the pho noodles with dark wood-ear mushrooms and slips of red radish, and a tumbled salad of fris\u00e9e, creamy fava beans, English peas, cauliflower buds, tiny potatoes and a Champagne and vanilla vinaigrette. There was room for improvement. A lobster roll was a beautiful thing to behold, its snowy meat mounded on golden brioche bun and sprinkled with snipped chives, but the amount of salt in the mix bordered on malpractice. The banh mi sandwich, featuring a very tasty pork terrine and pickled vegetables, came on an anemic roll. And a striking tableau of pan-seared scallops, asparagus spears and painterly swipes of magenta beet-and-carrot nage and yellow corn and brown butter pur\u00e9e would have been brilliant if the scallops had been properly caramelized. Imaginative desserts, too, suffered from indifferent execution. Chocolate pizzelles were scorched at the edges, and rice pudding with rhubarb compote lacked sweetness and verve. Pell Farms strawberries, usually jammy and crimson red, were underripe. (We were happy to eat the whipped cloud of yogurt and granola dust that topped them.) One dessert was better than the rest: pretty oval beignets, dusted with powdered sugar and sweetened with yuzu curd. The Patio at the Roundhouse at Beacon Falls 2 East Main Street Beacon (845) 765-8369 roundhousebeacon.com WORTH IT THE SPACE A stylish patio outfitted with black wicker chairs, latticed wooden table tops and market umbrellas, with splendid views of Beacon Falls. Outdoor zinc bar. Arching trees, oak-leaf hydrangeas and ornamental grasses add to the idyll. The patio can be breezy, so dress with that in mind. THE CROWD All ages, peppered with local artists and patrons of the arts. On one visit, our waitress was friendly but idle and inattentive; on a second visit, service was ideal. THE BAR Full bar, with specialty cocktails and East Coast craft brews on tap (try the delicious Captain Lawrence Kolsch, $6). Short, well-priced wine list (we liked the zesty 2010 Terminus ros\u00e9 from Jacques Lagrange, $8 a glass). Patrons can sit at the handsome bar or stand at tall tables overlooking Fishkill Creek. THE BILL Snacks, $4 to $9; sandwiches, $9 to $13; ceviches, $10 to $14; desserts, $6. Children\u2019s menu available. WHAT WE LIKED Crispy shrimp with spicy mayonnaise; tuna ceviche with orange, pistachios and avocado; fris\u00e9e salad with peas, cauliflower and potatoes; rice noodles with local vegetables; olive-oil-poached shrimp salad; beef burger with smoked Gouda; beignets with yuzu curd. (Menu changes frequently.) IF YOU GO Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, noon to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Parking on the street or in a lot on the east side of the creek. RATINGS Don\u2019t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don\u2019t Bother.", "keyword": "Restaurants;Westchester County (NY);Patio at the Roundhouse at Beacon Falls (Beacon NY Restaurant);Beacon (NY);Patio at the Roundhouse at Beacon Falls (Beacon NY)"}
{"id": "ny0030340", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/06/17", "title": "Greek Leaders to Meet in Effort to Save Government", "abstract": "ATHENS \u2014 The leaders of Greece\u2019s increasingly fragile coalition are to meet Monday in an effort to mend a deepening rift over the closing of the country\u2019s state broadcaster that could force early elections if no compromise is found. The surprise decision last week by the conservative prime minister, Antonis Samaras, to close the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, known as ERT, was vehemently opposed by his two coalition partners and by labor unions, and was unpopular with many Greeks. Speculation has been rife that the dispute could fracture the coalition. The dispute intensified over the weekend when Mr. Samaras gave a speech defending his decision to close ERT \u2014 which he called \"sinful\" because of its spending \u2014 and to crack down on \"the privileged\" as part of a cost-cutting drive demanded by Greece\u2019s international creditors. It was a year ago that Greeks went to the polls amid political upheaval and the specter of a messy debt default that shook the countries that use the euro. The elections were inconclusive, leading to the cobbling together of the governing coalition. Mr. Samaras is supposed to serve a four-year term, but few expect it to last that long. \u201cSome believe that they will trap us in an election dilemma,\u201d Mr. Samaras said Sunday, speaking to members of his New Democracy party in the southern town of Nafplio. \u201cThe dilemma is not over who will provoke elections, because nobody wants them. The dilemma is who will be responsible for blocking reforms.\u201d The socialist party known as Pasok, the second member of the coalition, condemned the prime minister for his \u201cprecocious pre-election tone.\u201d \u201cThis is not the appropriate way to address his government partners,\u201d Pasok said in a statement, adding that a three-way coalition \u201ccan only operate on the basis of mutual respect.\u201d The smallest partner, the Democratic Left, sounded a similar note. \u201cIf in actions and in words \u2014 as in today\u2019s incendiary speech by Mr. Samaras \u2014 the government partners are sidestepped, then the government\u2019s cohesion is at risk,\u201d the party said in a statement. Early elections would derail economic reforms and would almost certainly lead foreign rescue loans to be frozen. With so much at stake, most political analysts say, the coalition\u2019s leaders are under great pressure to thrash out a compromise. Although the junior coalition partners have insisted that they do not want early elections \u2014 and it would be a huge gamble for Mr. Samaras to call them himself \u2014 there are doubts about whether the socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis of the Democratic Left will be able to muster the political will to keep the government running and settle their differences with Mr. Samaras over the closing of ERT. The prime minister also faces the opposition of unions representing about 650,000 civil servants who have been relatively untouched by the deepening recession, which has crippled the private sector as a succession of Greek governments have avoided politically contentious layoffs among public employees. The possibility of early elections dominated the front pages of Greek newspapers on Sunday that went to press after several news media organizations decided to break a rolling strike that was called by the Greek journalists\u2019 union in solidarity with the dismissed ERT employees. An open-ended strike by television station workers continued Sunday. Some Greek blogs and Web sites interpreted the debate as political theater, aimed at getting Greeks to accept the closing of ERT as a far better alternative than early elections. Two opinion polls published over the weekend suggested that up to 65 percent of Greeks disagreed with the sudden closing of ERT \u2014 although it is widely condemned as wasteful and overstaffed \u2014 with the remainder of those polled supporting the shutdown. Mr. Samaras has pledged to replace ERT with a leaner operation this summer. Polls also indicated that 6 out of 10 Greeks do not want early elections. And there remained a chance that the deadlock would be solved, at least temporarily, by the Greek judiciary. A top court weighing an appeal by more than 2,600 ERT employees against the shutdown is expected to rule on Tuesday, Greek news media reported. A decision in favor of the workers, who have been producing underground news broadcasts via satellite streams since ERT was pulled off the air on Tuesday night, could lead to the broadcaster\u2019s signal being restored temporarily until the decision is reviewed in a hearing scheduled for September. More significantly, such a ruling would relieve the government of the challenge of seeking a difficult compromise on ERT, allowing the coalition government to remain intact, at least for now. The main leftist opposition party, Syriza, said Sunday that ERT\u2019s closing had put the government in jeopardy. \u201cThe prime minister is trying, with threats and lies, to justify the culmination of his despotic policies, the closure of the state broadcaster,\u201d the party\u2019s leader, Alexis Tsipras, said. \u201cHe knows, though, that he is isolated.\u201d", "keyword": "Greece;Euro Crisis;ERT Hellenic Broadcasting;Antonis Samaras;Election;Closings"}
{"id": "ny0221515", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/02/15", "title": "Europe Pressured on British Airways-American Airlines Deal", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The approval by United States regulators of a deal to expand the alliance between British Airways and American Airlines puts added pressure on Europe\u2019s new antitrust boss to follow suit before a new round of trans-Atlantic aviation talks on the so-called Open Skies agreement , analysts said Sunday. The United States Transportation Department said late Saturday that the two carriers could jointly price, market and schedule international flights in their Oneworld alliance without fear of antitrust prosecution, provided that they agreed to cede to rival airlines four pairs of takeoff and landing slots at Heathrow Airport near London. Regulators also gave tentative approval to a separate joint venture of British Airways and American Airlines with the Spanish flag airline Iberia, which is merging with British Airways. \u201cFrom the European point of view, there is very little grounds for this deal to be terminated now,\u201d said Saj Ahmad, an independent airline industry analyst in London. \u201cThey will need to make some kind of a decision before the end of this month, when talks on Phase 2 of Open Skies are set to begin.\u201d A spokeswoman for the European Union\u2019s new competition commissioner, Joaqu\u00edn Almunia, declined to comment on Sunday. American Airlines and British Airways are already members of the Oneworld airline alliance, the smallest of several big groupings of international airlines. But they are seeking permission to deepen this existing partnership by sharing revenue and coordinating flight marketing and scheduling on routes in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the European Union, as well as Switzerland and Norway. Virgin Atlantic, which is owned by the Virgin Group, controlled by Richard Branson, and by Singapore Airlines, has been among the most vocal critics of a deeper alliance between British Airways and American Airlines. On Saturday, Mr. Branson said of the pact that consumers would be \u201cpaying the price for it for years to come\u201d in the form of higher fares.", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;British Airways PLC;American Airlines;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Antitrust Actions and Laws;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry"}
{"id": "ny0177395", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2007/09/17", "title": "Greek Governing Party Wins a 2nd Term", "abstract": "ATHENS, Monday, Sept. 17 \u2014 The center-right party of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis won a second term in power in Greek parliamentary elections on Sunday. The vote seemed to be an endorsement of the social and economic changes he has carried out, despite widespread anger over his handling of recent disastrous wildfires that left more than 60 people dead and burned half a million acres of farmland. With more than 94 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Karamanlis\u2019s party, New Democracy, had 42.2 percent. The rival Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or Pasok, which was defeated in 2004 after almost 20 years of uninterrupted rule, had 38.2 percent. Under a complex new voting system that awards most seats on the basis of the proportion of the vote the party receives, New Democracy was expected to win at least 153 seats in the 300-seat Parliament. The Socialist leader, George A. Papandreou, conceded defeat early Monday, six hours after the first results signaled that his party would lose. \u201cThe people have decided,\u201d he said. \u201cThe verdict will be respected.\u201d Three minutes later, a beaming Mr. Karamanlis, 51, arrived at the election headquarters, claiming a victory that he described as \u201ca strong mandate for a new and more dynamic beginning.\u201d Voting is compulsory in Greece and turnout among the estimated 10 million voters was high despite forecasts of voter apathy. For decades, Greece has gone back and forth between the two main parties, each dominated by a political dynasty to which its leader belongs, and each on a system that favored patronage and party interests. In recent years, and as Greece anchored its interests more firmly to the European Union and Western alliances, the parties have found it difficult to differentiate themselves ideologically. A far-right party, the Popular Orthodox Rally, had 3.7 percent of the vote. If the final results give it enough votes to pass the 3 percent minimum for entry into Parliament, it would be the first time a far-right party has entered Parliament since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. The party\u2019s leader, Giorgos Karatzaferis, a former conservative stalwart whom Mr. Karamanlis expelled from his party in 2000 for making extremist statements, benefited from voters who were unhappy with both parties, based on what voters on the streets said. A canny, cigar-chomping lawyer, Mr. Karamanlis retained a consistent lead against the Socialists despite a bond-trading scandal and relatively austere economic changes made by his government since he took office nearly four years ago. The catastrophic fires, however, and accusations that the government\u2019s response to them was slow and inept, put him on the defensive. In response, he put into effect a compensation plan for the victims, and promised to rebuild homes. He also proposed new measures for bigger pensions and tax breaks and threatened to call another election if his party did not win an outright majority.", "keyword": "Greece;Elections;Politics and Government;Karamanlis Kostas"}
{"id": "ny0095815", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/01/08", "title": "F.A.A. Orders Airlines to Devise Plans to Identify Risks", "abstract": "Federal regulators said on Wednesday that airlines would be required to develop new safety management programs by 2018 to help identify potential hazards and prevent accidents. The Federal Aviation Administration said airlines would have six months to submit these risk-based plans, known as safety management systems. Most airlines already have programs to identify safety problems, but the agency wants to establish a process that applies to the entire industry. Michael P. Huerta, the F.A.A.\u2019s administrator, said that the system would allow regulators and the airlines to be more proactive in addressing hazardous patterns. For instance, Mr. Huerta said, it might help identify airports with higher incidences of rejected takeoffs across various carriers. That could reveal operations procedures that needed to be changed, he said. The approach is common around the world and is recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization , an arm of the United Nations. Under a safety management system, common in other industries, airlines would set up a formal process to analyze data collected from various parts of their operations. In developing the rule, the F.A.A. examined more than 100 accidents between 2001 and 2010, and said that many could have been avoided, or their causes identified beforehand, if the airlines had adopted safety management systems. Airlines already share a huge amount of information with regulators. They have voluntary systems to encourage employees to highlight hazards or problems without fear of retribution. Still, industry representatives said they welcomed the new system. \u201cWe\u2019ve long endorsed a risk-based approach to both safety and security,\u201d said Nicholas E. Calio, president of Airlines for America , the industry\u2019s trade group. \u201cData helps drive better decision-making,\u201d he added, and described the new system as \u201ca very good program.\u201d The safety record of the airline industry has improved in the past years, and accident rates in both the United States and around the world have fallen. In part, these improvements have been the result of more reliable airplane engines and technology. Despite a number of crashes and accidents last year, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine and the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 in the Java Sea, 2014 had the lowest number of commercial jet crashes in modern history, according to figures compiled by the nonprofit Aviation Safety Network. Fatal accidents in the United States are also rare. In 2013, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport, killing three people. In 2009, a regional passenger plane crashed near Buffalo, killing 50 people. After that accident, Congress ordered the F.A.A. to require airlines to act swiftly to adopt safety management systems. The systems are intended to foster \u201ca safety culture to improve the overall performance of the organization,\u201d the F.A.A. said. \u201cAviation is incredibly safe, but continued growth means that we must be proactive and smart about how we use safety data to detect and mitigate risk,\u201d said Anthony Foxx, the United States transportation secretary.", "keyword": "Plane Crash;Regulation and Deregulation;FAA"}
{"id": "ny0199863", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/07/22", "title": "Throgs Neck Bridge Fire Reveals New York\u2019s Traffic Vulnerabilities", "abstract": "When a worker\u2019s blowtorch started a fire on scaffolding beneath the Queens approach to the Throgs Neck Bridge early on July 10, there were immediate consequences. Nearly 140 firefighters were called in to battle the blaze, and the authorities had to close the bridge to traffic in both directions, cutting off a major artery between the Bronx and Queens that carries 112,000 vehicles on an average day. But nearly two weeks later, the fire\u2019s aftermath is still being felt: one major entry point, via the Cross Island Parkway, remains closed, and trucks are still not allowed to use the bridge from Queens. Susan Kupferman, president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority\u2019s bridges and tunnels division, said at a news conference on Tuesday that interim repairs would reopen the Throgs Neck Bridge to most truck traffic by Saturday and that the Cross Island entrance would reopen by Aug. 10. The continuing problems underscore the fragility of New York\u2019s interconnected transportation infrastructure \u2014 and the vulnerability of the city\u2019s aging bridges. \u201cIn terms of how sensitive the network is, it is incredibly sensitive,\u201d said Samuel I. Schwartz , a former chief engineer for the city\u2019s Department of Transportation who is president of his own engineering firm. \u201cMost bridges are operating at capacity.\u201d There are 2,027 bridges, large and small, in New York. The city\u2019s Department of Transportation is responsible for 789 of them; the others are overseen by agencies like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A 2007 report by the Department of Transportation found that 3 bridges maintained by the city were rated \u201cpoor,\u201d down from 24 in 1998; the number rated \u201cvery good\u201d was 111, up from 75 in 1998. And New York\u2019s bridges are getting old. The Brooklyn Bridge celebrated its 125th birthday last year, and the most recently built crossing, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, opened in 1964. Anil K. Agrawal, a professor of civil engineering at City College, said that many of the bridges were approaching the end of their design lives. \u201cTypically we design bridges for a 75-year life,\u201d he said. \u201cAs you approach the 75 years, the trend becomes clear that maintenance costs start going up.\u201d Professor Agrawal added that older bridges not only require more work, but become harder to maintain at a given standard. The law requires inspections at least every two years, and bridges are graded on a numerical scale. A new bridge would receive a score of seven \u2014 very good condition. But, Professor Agrawal said, \u201cIf you have a 60-year-old bridge, you\u2019ll need a huge amount of effort to maintain the bridge at five.\u201d The size of the expenditure involved in bridge maintenance was apparent on a recent Wednesday, at a groundbreaking for the rehabilitation of the 46-year-old Alexander Hamilton Bridge, which crosses the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx. The cost of the project was listed at $407 million. The various types of bridges in the city also present different maintenance challenges. Mr. Schwartz said structures like the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges bear the hallmarks of the design philosophy of their time. Monumental structures, they were deliberately over-engineered. \u201cOur East River bridges were built to last,\u201d he said. By contrast, Mr. Schwartz said, post-World War II highway bridges were not built with the same standards, and so \u2014 although they are much younger \u2014 they are now a more pressing concern. \u201cThey are all going to be failing in the next 20 years,\u201d Mr. Schwartz said. Outside the city, the Tappan Zee Bridge, which crosses the Hudson between Westchester and Rockland Counties, is a reminder of the decisions planners must make when faced with postwar highway bridges. The Tappan Zee was built in the 1950s. Yet last year, state officials announced a plan to replace the structure and make repairs in the meantime. The new bridge is to be wider and able to accommodate more cars; currently, traffic in peak hours can result in logjams six miles long. An accident or spill can create havoc. When there is a problem on a bridge, the cause is nearly irrelevant in terms of the traffic impact, said Neville A. Parker, director of the Institute for Transportation Systems at the City University of New York. But the amount of disruption is influenced by other factors, notably the time it takes for the authorities to detect a problem, and then the time it takes to clear the obstruction. Since last year, a new joint traffic management center in Long Island City has brought together police officers and technicians from the city and the state. And when the fire broke out on the Throgs Neck Bridge, officials were able to post alerts on highway signs around the region and recommend the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge as an alternative.", "keyword": "New York City;Bridges and Tunnels;Infrastructure (Public Works)"}
{"id": "ny0134133", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/03/14", "title": "Taxpayer Advocate Says Outsourcing at I.R.S. Is Inept", "abstract": "The use of private debt collectors by the Internal Revenue Service is ineffective, the national taxpayer advocate told Congress yesterday, and the program should be canceled. The advocate, Nina E. Olson, the government-appointed watchdog of the I.R.S., said that private debt collection cost the government at least $81 million a year in revenue. She repeated her call for the I.R.S. to end the practice. Congress authorized private debt collection in 2004 as a way to bring in easy-to-collect tax debts. But it has come under scrutiny by Ms. Olson and others because of its costs and concerns about abuses. The issue may figure in the confirmation of Douglas H. Shulman, the vice chairman of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, whose nomination as I.R.S. commissioner is pending in the Senate. When questioned about private debt collection in a confirmation hearing in January, Mr. Shulman said that he was aware of concerns. In a letter in January to the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, 17 senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential contender, said that they would withhold support for Mr. Shulman\u2019s confirmation unless he dropped the program. Private debt collection, according to the letter, has cost the I.R.S. $71 million in start-up costs through last year and has lost $50 million. Ms. Olson\u2019s testimony, before the House Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight, is likely to renew discussion of whether the outsourcing to three companies makes sense. The program costs $7.65 million to run each year, she said, and the I.R.S. also pays private collectors $4.6 million in commissions, or around 25 cents on each dollar they bring in. That puts the cost of the program to more than $12 million a year. Private debt collectors brought in $32 million in 2007, Ms. Olson said, but are expected to bring in as little as $23 million this year. When the costs are subtracted, the I.R.S. program may have less than $11 million in net revenues for 2008. But there is a far greater cost, Ms. Olson argued. If the more than $7 million in operating costs were put into the I.R.S.\u2019s automated debt collection system \u2014 an existing program \u2014 the agency could bring in at least $91.8 million in net revenues, and possibly as much as $145 million \u2014 a much bigger return. Those figures do not include the commissions. Ms. Olson argued that when calculated against that backdrop, private debt collection cost the government at least $81 million a year in revenue. \u201cSince the purpose of the P.D.C. program was to raise revenue, the fact that it is costing the government $81 million or more each year destroys whatever thin rationale might remain for its existence,\u201d she said in her written testimony. \u201cI believe it is time to end the P.D.C. program.\u201d The I.R.S., in 2004 estimates, originally thought the program would bring in $1.5 billion to $2.2 billion over 10 years, or $150 million to $220 million a year. The agency, however, has drastically scaled back those estimates. The I.R.S., which complains that it is underfinanced by Congress, says that it turned to outsourcing because it does not have enough money to hire more revenue officers to collect tax debts. The agency prefers to go after bigger delinquencies itself. In what one I.R.S. source called a \u201cCoke versus Pepsi\u201d test, the agency is now testing the effectiveness of private debt collectors by taking back in-house certain cases sent out to private collectors and comparing the results. Representative Jim Ramstad, Republican of Minnesota, said during the hearing that private debt collection was worth it because it brought in money that the I.R.S. otherwise would not have. He also said that internal officers would not be used for these types of collections, and that the program\u2019s costs would be recovered by late 2010. Separately during the hearing, the acting I.R.S. commissioner, Linda Stiff, said that the agency was looking at whether foreign executives met their tax obligations. She also said that the I.R.S. was looking at potential payroll tax abuses. Last week, reports surfaced that Kellogg Brown & Root, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, was using subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands to skirt American payroll taxes on its Iraq-based employees. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly familiar with the issue surrounding that case,\u201d Ms. Stiff said. A company spokeswoman said Thursday that the Cayman entities had been set up in compliance with I.R.S. regulations.", "keyword": "United States Politics and Government;Federal Taxes (US);Taxation;Tax Evasion;Internal Revenue Service"}
{"id": "ny0191464", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2009/02/02", "title": "Justice Dept. Under Obama Is Preparing for Doctrinal Shift in Policies of Bush Years", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Justice Department, probably more than any other agency here, is bracing for a broad doctrinal shift in policies from those of the Bush administration, department lawyers and Obama administration officials say. Eric H. Holder Jr. , whom the Senate is expected to confirm on Monday as the nation\u2019s 82nd attorney general, plans to take the oath of office that evening to demonstrate a quick start, which will include overseeing the creation of a new detention policy for terrorism suspects. Mr. Holder will have to contend with that and other issues rapidly. Lawyers inside and outside the department say he will face crushing time constraints. Chief among them is a pledge by President Obama to close the detention facility at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, within a year. Mr. Holder and a department task force must find a solution to the question of what to do with the remaining prisoners there and any apprehended in the future. \u201cThis will be a sea change of what went on before,\u201d said an Obama administration lawyer, noting that the principal authority over detention policies will move from the Defense Department under the Bush administration to the Justice Department. Under Mr. Obama\u2019s recent executive order, the Justice Department will be required to review the files of the 245 detainees at Guant\u00e1namo and draw up a proposal on their fate that will fulfill the pledge to close the facility. \u201cThe idea that it has to be closed within a year will drive the timing of many things,\u201d said the Obama administration lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Mr. Holder had not yet taken office. Mr. Holder will also have to make several quick decisions because of court-imposed deadlines. And he will have to do so with many of the senior positions in the department not yet filled. The department has to decide by next month whether it will reverse course from the Bush administration, which had repeatedly invoked the so-called state secrets doctrine to shut down legal challenges to several lawsuits dealing with national security. Officials also face a February deadline on whether to extend habeas corpus rights to detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine a more challenging time to come in as attorney general,\u201d said Walter Dellinger, a legal scholar who was an acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. \u201cThe number of legal issues left behind to be resolved is really staggering.\u201d In the Justice Department, there is considerable restiveness as employees await new direction. The civil rights division, which had been reshaped in a conservative direction under President George W. Bush, is ripe for sharp change, administration officials said. \u201cMany of us cannot wait for the changes,\u201d said one career lawyer in the division, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the atmosphere. The lawyer said there were expectations that the division would be restored to its historic role of largely enforcing prohibitions against racial and ethnic discrimination. Under the Bush administration, the division significantly diminished its involvement in those areas and shifted resources to fighting instances of religious discrimination. Several Bush political appointees in the civil rights division have recently resigned. But some of the Bush policies were enforced with alacrity by nonpolitical career lawyers who saw their careers flourish. \u201cA lot of us are waiting to see what happens to them now,\u201d the lawyer said. The shift is expected to be more stark than that of a transition from one party to another. It may resemble the start of the Reagan administration, with its promise of wide philosophical change to be put into effect by a cadre of enthusiastic outsiders and academics, whose views on how to run the department have simmered after years of watching from the outside. The case dealing with the state secrets doctrine, which allows the government to rebuff lawsuits by invoking national security concerns, involves al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. A federal trial judge in San Francisco ruled that the government could not invoke the doctrine to block a lawsuit by al-Haramain, which has asserted that the government illegally listened in on its conversations. The Bush administration used the doctrine to block more than two dozen lawsuits. In timing that was a bit of a surprise, the Justice Department lawyers who have handled the lawsuit filed a motion with the court an hour before Inauguration Day that held to the same position. Some Obama administration figures regarded the filing before midnight on Jan. 19 as a rear-guard action to make it more difficult to reverse course. The Justice Department has to file a new brief by Feb. 13. Jon B. Eisenberg, who represents al-Haramain, said the schedule meant that \u201cHolder and company have to decide pretty quickly if they want to keep opposing this case with the state secrets doctrine.\u201d The case also provides an opportunity to have a court assess the Bush administration\u2019s domestic wiretapping program. The Justice Department under Mr. Holder would also have to take a stand soon in a case involving four former Guant\u00e1namo detainees who sued former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others for damages they say they had suffered as a result of torture and religious persecution at the facility. In December, the Supreme Court revived the lawsuit and asked a federal appeals court to revisit its earlier action in dismissing the suit in light of the justices\u2019 ruling that Guant\u00e1namo prisoners could challenge their detentions in federal court. The Supreme Court also granted the Justice Department a 30-day delay, until March 23, to say where it stood in the case of Ali al-Marri. The Bush administration has made the far-reaching claim that it may indefinitely hold Mr. Marri, a legal resident of the United States, on suspicion of terrorism in a military brig without charging him with a crime. The new administration is also supposed to decide by Feb. 20 what position to take on whether detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan should be allowed to challenge their detentions in federal court, as Guant\u00e1namo detainees can. While the Justice Department has rapidly grown in recent decades to more than 110,000 employees, there are only about 150 spots for political appointees who will steer policy. Only about 21 have begun work. Several of the most senior of the political appointees require confirmation by the Senate, and Mr. Holder was the first to be considered.", "keyword": "Holder Eric H Jr;Justice Department;Detainees;Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0047750", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/11/19", "title": "New YouTube Music Plan Faces Challenge", "abstract": "YouTube unveiled its long-awaited subscription music plan last week, giving the music industry a potentially big new source of revenue. But it has already run into an obstacle named Irving Azoff. Mr. Azoff, a powerful artist manager who is the former executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, has asked YouTube to remove thousands of songs by the Eagles, John Lennon and a few dozen other songwriters who are associated with Global Music Rights , Mr. Azoff\u2019s new venture in music publishing. Global Music Rights competes with the two giant music clearing houses, Ascap and BMI, in representing the performing rights of songs \u2014 how royalties are paid when songs are played online or on the radio \u2014 on behalf of songwriters. YouTube\u2019s new service, called Music Key, upgrades many aspects of its free site, and adds a paid subscription tier that will allow people to pay up to $10 a month to eliminate ads and gain other perks. YouTube, which said it attracts more than one billion users worldwide each month, is owned by Google. According to a letter dated Monday from Howard King, a lawyer for Global Music Rights, YouTube has not complied with two requests last week from the company \u201cdemanding the immediate cessation from public performance of almost 20,000 songs.\u201d The brief letter does not list those songs or even the composers, but Global Music Rights has signed deals with more than 40 writers, including pop stars and major songwriters like Bruno Mars, Pharrell Williams and Smokey Robinson. YouTube confirmed that it had received the letters, but that they did not follow the standard procedure for take-down requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the federal law that protects websites that host copyrighted content from third parties. In a statement, YouTube said it would \u201ckeep working with both the music community and with the music fans invited to our beta phase,\u201d which is set to begin this week. The letter from Global Music Rights may set up a dispute over exactly what rights the company can enforce. Many of its clients\u2019 songs are still covered under licensing deals made while those writers were still with Ascap and BMI, a process known as \u201clicenses in effect.\u201d Randy Grimmett, a former Ascap executive who now works with Mr. Azoff at Global Music Rights, said that the company fully represented its writers\u2019 songs when it came to the new service. \u201cYouTube\u2019s recently launched Music Key, as far as Global Music Rights is concerned, is not covered by existing licenses in effect because it is a service that has yet to launch,\u201d Mr. Grimmett said in an interview on Tuesday. News of Global Music Rights\u2019 letters to YouTube first appeared on the website of The Hollywood Reporter .", "keyword": "Copyrights;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;YouTube;Irving Azoff"}
{"id": "ny0226210", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/10/07", "title": "U.S. Indexes Find Little Reason to Rally", "abstract": "Stocks were mixed on Wednesday after a private sector jobs report renewed concerns about the pace of the economic recovery, particularly in the labor market. There was little sign of the enthusiasm that drove the market in recent days, when speculation about widespread quantitative easing measures by central banks suggested there would be fresh liquidity. On Tuesday, that speculation propelled the Dow Jones industrial average to rise nearly 2 percent for its best close since May 3. Instead, Wall Street wavered on Wednesday after the payroll company ADP reported that private employers shed 39,000 jobs last month, the first downturn in several months. The Labor Department\u2019s report on the job markets, scheduled for Friday, is expected to show that the private sector added 75,000 jobs in September and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent. Overall job growth is expected to be flat. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 22.93 points, or 0.21 percent, closing at 10,967.65, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 19.17 points, or 0.8 percent, to 2,380.66. The Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index dropped less than a point, to 1,159.97. After Tuesday\u2019s rally, \u201cyou would expect a little bit of a retracement,\u201d Uri Landesman, president of the Platinum Partners hedge fund, said of the market moves on Wednesday. The United States market defied the trend set by indexes in Asia and Europe, which closed higher as speculation grew that the Federal Reserve might soon take additional moves to stimulate the economy after a similar effort by Japan\u2019s central bank. Analysts said that the prospect of easing by the Fed at its November meeting affected the bond market. The 30-year bond rose almost 1.5 points and the yield dropped. The benchmark 10-year note rose 21/32, to 101 31/32, and the yield fell to 2.40 percent, from 2.47 percent late Tuesday. \u201cThe big picture is the quantitative easing anticipated on the part of the Fed,\u201d said Alan Schankel, director of fixed-income research at Janney Montgomery Scott. The Bank of Japan unexpectedly lowered its benchmark interest rate to a range of zero to 0.1 percent on Tuesday, a tiny change but a symbolic shift back into an age of zero interest rates. The Japanese central bank also plans to set up a fund of $60 billion to buy Japanese government bonds, commercial paper and other asset-backed securities amid concerns about weakening growth in the economy, the world\u2019s third-largest after those of the United States and China. The Japanese move, the likelihood of the Fed\u2019s quantitative easing and even expectations of action by the Bank of England, which meets on Thursday, have helped spur stocks. The European Central Bank also meets on Thursday. Traders are also starting to take in the latest financial results, with the aluminum maker Alcoa, which traditionally kicks off the earnings season, reporting on Thursday. Mr. Landesman said the coming earnings season, the potential for further mergers and acquisitions and the results of the midterm elections were potential market movers looking ahead. On Wednesday, General Electric said it had agreed to buy Dresser , a privately held energy infrastructure and services company, for $3 billion as the industrial conglomerate seeks to bolster its offerings in the sector. G.E. shares were up 39 cents, to $16.90. Energy and materials shares were up slightly, while technology shares slipped more than 1 percent. The prospect for weak jobs data in Friday\u2019s monthly national report, as well as the continued news of Europe confronting its own banking crisis, suggested additional future moves to ease monetary policy to some market analysts.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Japan;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0169626", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2007/04/17", "title": "Four Shuttle Flights Planned for 2007", "abstract": "NASA will try to launch four space shuttle flights in 2007 to continue building the International Space Station, managers for the agency said. The launching dates will be June 8 for the Atlantis; Aug. 9 for the Endeavour; Oct. 20 for the Discovery and Dec. 6 for the Atlantis. NASA officials also announced dates for two of next year\u2019s flights, although more shuttle missions are expected in 2008, including one to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The Endeavour is scheduled to be launched on Valentine\u2019s Day in 2008 and the Discovery is set to fly again on April 24, 2008. NASA managers had hoped to squeeze five shuttle flights into 2007, but a postponement in launching the Atlantis made that impossible and created launching delays for the rest of the year.", "keyword": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Space Shuttle;International Space Station"}
{"id": "ny0148467", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/09/20", "title": "Iran\u2019s Chief Cleric Says Country Is Not a Friend to Israelis", "abstract": "TEHRAN \u2014 Iran \u2019s supreme religious leader on Friday rejected the notion that his country was a friend to the Israeli people, but he also called on critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stop using the issue to undermine him. \u201cWe have to put an end to such small and petty issues,\u201d said the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , referring to the public anger that boiled over after one of Mr. Ahmadinejad\u2019s senior officials said that Iran had no hostility toward the Israeli people. \u201cThe enemy is trying to increase tension, and unfortunately some people inside the country are unknowingly helping,\u201d Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to the ISNA news agency. Ayatollah Khamenei\u2019s comments appeared to be a fresh sign of support for Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has come under increasing pressure for remarks by his vice president for tourism, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, who said last month for a second time that Iran was a friend of the Israeli people. Mr. Ahmadinejad backed up Mr. Mashai on Thursday, saying that his remarks were the position of the government, and that \u201cWe have no problem with people and nations\u201d despite Iran\u2019s opposition to the state of Israel . Ayatollah Khamenei has publicly backed Mr. Ahmadinejad several times in recent months, and his comments Friday were expected to ease the pressure on Mr. Ahmadinejad to fire Mr. Mashai. Several senior clerics and some 200 members of Parliament had urged the president to dismiss Mr. Mashai for making the remarks, arguing in a statement that the Israeli people \u201chave occupied the homes of millions of innocent and oppressed Palestinians and have created the army of the Zionist regime.\u201d But after Ayatollah Khamenei\u2019s comments on Friday, Ali Mottahari, one of the members of Parliament who urged the president to fire Mr. Mashai, told the Fars news agency that Parliament would no longer pursue the issue. Animosity toward Israel was one of the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Mr. Mashai\u2019s remarks have set off more protests from legislators than the scandal over a fake degree involving another one of Mr. Ahmadinejad\u2019s senior officials, Ali Kordan. Mr. Kordan, the interior minister, had claimed to hold an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. But there were no public calls for the president to dismiss him, even after it became clear this month that he had lied about his credentials and that his real education amounted to a degree from a midlevel college. Without referring to Mr. Mashai by name, Ayatollah Khamenei also lashed out against Israel on Friday, saying that \u201cit is wrong to say that we are friends with Israeli people like people in other parts of the world.\u201d \u201cThey are partners to occupying the land and possessions of Palestinian people and are the instruments of the Zionist authorities,\u201d he said, according to ISNA. \u201cThey are the occupiers of Israel, and this is the Islamic republic\u2019s firm and official position,\u201d he said. Mr. Mashai responded by writing to Ayatollah Khamenei, saying \u201cI declare that I am a follower of your notion regarding the occupied land and consider myself a soldier to implement the policies of the country,\u201d the Fars news agency reported. Ayatollah Khamenei\u2019s comments came before Mr. Ahmadinejad\u2019s trip to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly. Jewish groups have said that they will hold a rally against him.", "keyword": "Iran;Israel;Khamenei Ali;Ahmadinejad Mahmoud;International Relations;Politics and Government;Zionism;Islam;Palestinians"}
{"id": "ny0104332", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/03/07", "title": "With Penn\u2019s Loss, Harvard Reaches N.C.A.A. Tournament", "abstract": "PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 For the 18th consecutive year, Penn and Princeton met on the last Tuesday night of the Ivy League season. The two have combined for 51 men\u2019s basketball championships in a league known as the Ancient Eight, and so it has not been unusual for this final matchup in downtown Philadelphia or suburban New Jersey to settle the league title and an automatic bid to the N.C.A.A. tournament. This Tuesday at Jadwin Gymnasium was no different. With stifling defense on Penn\u2019s best player, Zack Rosen, Princeton won, 62-52 , leaving the Quakers\u2019 bid to tie Harvard for the Ivy League title one game short and sending the Crimson to the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1946. \u201cWe are thrilled and honored to have an opportunity to compete in the 2012 N.C.A.A. tournament,\u201d Harvard Coach Tommy Amaker said in a statement. \u201cThis is a tremendous moment for Harvard University, our basketball program and our community.\u201d Penn (19-12), which had won seven consecutive games, finishes 11-3 in league play. For Princeton (19-11), the victory was the Tigers\u2019 17th straight at home. Keeping Penn from its 26th Ivy League championship, even if it was as a co-champion, was important motivation for Princeton. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel right letting Penn share the title by winning on our court,\u201d said Tigers point guard Douglas Davis, whose buzzer-beating jumper in a one-game playoff last season kept Harvard from the N.C.A.A. tournament. Princeton\u2019s Patrick Saunders agreed, although he was not entirely happy helping Harvard either. \u201cWe don\u2019t have much love for either of them,\u201d Saunders said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough to swallow knowing that we put Harvard in the N.C.A.A. tournament and let them win the Ivy title.\u201d For Penn, the disappointment was deep and surprising, especially since Rosen had carried the team with superlative play for the past month. A senior guard, he made just 8 of 24 shots Tuesday and had seven turnovers to go with 19 points. \u201cWe blew an opportunity,\u201d Rosen said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t play as hard as we could have and lost.\u201d Rosen\u2019s shooting problems began early, when he missed his first three shots as Princeton took a 10-2 lead. Princeton used its size advantage to force Penn into difficult shots, mostly from the perimeter, as the Quakers missed eight of their first nine shots. Princeton gave the 6-foot-1 Rosen trouble with the long-armed 6-7 Ian Hummer often covering him man-to-man or in a box-and-1 defense. \u201cIan is a terrific player on defense because he has size but can stretch to smaller players,\u201d Princeton Coach Mitch Henderson said of Hummer, who finished with 18 points, 10 rebounds, 4 assists and 4 blocked shots. But Rosen, who came into the game with an 18.5-point scoring average , could not be held down completely. He did not hit his first jump shot of the night until Penn was down, 23-8, but his 12-foot fall-away jumper with three seconds left in the half cut Princeton\u2019s lead to 27-17 at intermission. Penn started fast in the second half, but Princeton, behind Hummer, Saunders and Brendan Connolly, kept the Tigers\u2019 lead at or around 10 points. The game\u2019s final 12 minutes, unlike its nervous, sloppy beginning, were intense and fast-paced, pitting the team\u2019s best players and 3-point shooters. Rosen came alive and helped the Quakers cut their deficit to 34-31. But Princeton had the bigger and more versatile frontcourt and continued its dominance on the boards, scoring the next 7 points. When Davis sank a long 3-pointer, Princeton\u2019s lead was restored to double digits, 41-31. Rosen answered with successive 3-pointers. Princeton continued to feed the ball to its big men, which had a steadying influence and sent the Tigers to the foul line often \u2014 Princeton took 17 more free throws than Penn, which attempted just three. The Princeton lead was 50-41 with a little more than two minutes remaining. Rosen missed another 3-point attempt from the corner, and as Princeton grabbed the rebound, Penn\u2019s stirring midseason surge had noticeably lost its magic.", "keyword": "NCAA Basketball Championships (Men);Harvard University;Ivy League;Basketball;Princeton University;University of Pennsylvania;Basketball (College)"}
{"id": "ny0116623", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/10/29", "title": "Hurricane, and Other Worries, Buffet Presidential Race", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In the dark of night, when they get what little sleep they get these days, the people running the campaigns for president have more than enough fodder for nightmares. Worse, come daybreak, they realize their worst fears may yet come true. Dancing in their heads are visions of recounts, contested ballots and lawsuits. The possibility that their candidate could win the popular vote yet lose the presidency. Even the outside chance of an Electoral College tie that throws the contest to Congress. Now add to that parade of potential horrors one more: a freakish two-in-one storm that could, if the more dire forecasts prove correct, warp an election two years and $2 billion in the making. Despite the meticulous planning, careful strategies, polling, advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, the election could produce the sort of messy outcome that defies expectation and prognostication. Polls show such a tight race between President Obama and Mitt Romney heading into this final week that the two sides are playing out any number of wild possibilities. The approach of Hurricane Sandy reminded them just how out of their control democracy can be. \u201cObviously, we believe the more people participate in the election, the better,\u201d said David Axelrod, the president\u2019s senior strategist, \u201cand the storm can be disruptive. But to the 50 million people in its path, there are more immediate and potentially grave concerns that transcend politics. We\u2019ll have to wait and see its impact.\u201d The storm forced both candidates to scrap campaign stops and, with eight days until Election Day, will require Mr. Obama to balance the roles of president in an emergency and candidate. That could benefit or hurt him, depending on how voters view his performance, and distract from efforts by both camps to advance a closing argument. Early voting, which Mr. Obama has counted on to bolster his chances of a second term, will most likely grind to a halt in some places along the Eastern Seaboard, while power failures could last much of the week and conceivably until Election Day in some places. It went unnoticed by no one that Virginia, among the most tightly contested states, may be among the most affected. Meteorology is only one wild card facing the campaigns in the final week. On Election Day, the winner may not be known right away; results in one or more states may be close enough to merit recounts. In Ohio, which could decide the election, so many provisional ballots may be cast \u2014 and by law are not counted right away \u2014 that it may be mid-November before a winner is declared. \u201cThe Boy Scout motto comes in handy \u2014 be prepared,\u201d said Bradley Blakeman, a Republican strategist and veteran of George W. Bush\u2019s recount fight in Florida. \u201cI know that lists of local lawyers and national legal talent are amassed and will be deployed if need be. After the recount in 2000 and the nail-biter in 2004, the G.O.P. is ready with multiple scenarios already modeled.\u201d The campaigns are so worried about every electoral vote that a pro-Romney \u201csuper PAC\u201d even invested in ads in Maine, a largely Democratic state, because it allocates some electoral votes by Congressional district and Republicans have a chance of picking up a single vote there. Of all the messy outcomes, the one that seems likeliest is a candidate\u2019s winning the presidency through the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, as Mr. Bush did in 2000. If it happens again, it might be in the opposite way, with the Republican, Mr. Romney, in range of a popular plurality and the Democrat, Mr. Obama, with an apparently easier route to an Electoral College victory. Charlie Cook, a well-known political handicapper, said the chance of that happening was 10 to 15 percent. Stanley B. Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster, put the odds at \u201cone in three.\u201d \u201cNot trivial,\u201d Mr. Greenberg said of the chances. \u201cIf that happens, it is because the anti-Obama vote, mostly in the South, turns out in big numbers,\u201d while the pro-Obama vote is not as overwhelming in Democratic states but pulls him over the top in vital places like Ohio, Iowa and Nevada. If Mr. Obama wins a second term while losing the popular vote, it would again throw a harsh spotlight on the Electoral College, an artifact of the 18th century. Each state has one elector for each of its members in the House and Senate. With 538 electors, it takes 270 to win. If no one does, the House decides who will be president. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of electoral votes. The House sided with Jefferson. In 1824, none of four candidates received an electoral majority, and John Quincy Adams won in the House although he trailed Andrew Jackson in both the popular and the electoral votes. Two other presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888, won in the Electoral College even though they lost the popular vote. The Electoral College has been attacked almost from the start. Over 200 years, more than 700 proposals to eliminate or revise it have been introduced in Congress, and more constitutional amendments have been proposed to change the system than on any other subject, according to the National Archives. A Gallup poll last year found that 62 percent favored a constitutional amendment making the popular vote decisive. \u201cIf you were to have a repeat of that except the popular vote winner was the Republican and the Electoral College winner was the Democrat this time, then you would have had each party burned by the Electoral College over the course of 12 years, and that might be conducive to a serious look at reform,\u201d said Robert W. Bennett, a Northwestern University law professor who has written extensively on the Electoral College. Less likely is a tie, 269 to 269. If that happened, strategists envision an intense postelection campaign of state-by-state recounts, lawsuits, qualification challenges, efforts to flip electors, horse trading and pressure on members of Congress. The result would be a highly volatile 11-week obstacle course to Inauguration Day that would leave the country uncertain for a time about its next president and potentially undermine the credibility of the winner. \u201cIf this election does require some extra innings, we have plans in place to deal with that,\u201d said Bill Burton, a former Obama aide and co-founder of a super PAC supporting the president. \u201cBut the odds of that are infinitesimally small.\u201d If recounts did not change any Electoral College votes, both sides could lobby electors to switch before they met in state capitals on Dec. 17. While more than half the states have laws intended to force electors to cast ballots for the popular vote winner in their states, there have been \u201cfaithless electors.\u201d In 2004, a Democratic elector in Minnesota wrote in John Edwards\u2019s name instead of John Kerry\u2019s. If no electors flipped, the issue would go to the newly elected House. Each state gets one vote, meaning that Delaware has the same power as California. In the current House, Republicans control 33 delegations, while Democrats have 16 and 1 is split. Few analysts believe the election will change the House enough to shift that balance. That would give Mr. Romney the advantage, although pressure would intensify if Mr. Obama won the popular vote. But even if Mr. Romney wins in the House, there is an extra wrinkle: The vice president would be chosen by the Senate, which may remain in Democratic hands. If the Senate is deadlocked, the tie could be broken by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., presumably voting for himself. And the nation could wind up with President Romney and Vice President Biden.", "keyword": "2012 Presidential Election;Hurricane Sandy;Voting"}
{"id": "ny0186466", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/03/14", "title": "Medtronic Links 13 Deaths to Faulty Heart Device", "abstract": "Medtronic said Friday that at least 13 people might have died in connection with a heart device that it recalled in 2007 but was still in widespread use, including four patients whose deaths were related to efforts by doctors to surgically remove the product. The new data reflect the first fatality update by Medtronic since October 2007, when it recalled the device \u2014 a thin electrical cable that connects an implanted defibrillator to a patient\u2019s heart. The company cited five deaths when it recalled the product, saying fractures in the cable could cause a defibrillator to fail to deliver a lifesaving shock to an erratically beating heart, or to fire for no reason. Separately, a previously undisclosed Food and Drug Administration report indicates that Medtronic began receiving reports soon after the device reached the market in late 2004 that the cable, known as the Sprint Fidelis, was fracturing. The company also revised its manufacturing process in the months before withdrawing the Sprint Fidelis from the market, according to the F.D.A. report, which was provided to The New York Times by lawyers suing Medtronic. A top Medtronic official said in an interview on Friday that the manufacturing change in question was unrelated to the reasons for the recall and that even at the time of the recall internal data did not suggest it was fracturing at a significantly higher rate than other company leads. When Medtronic may have known the Sprint Fidelis posed safety problems, and how it responded to that information, could be significant factors if patient lawsuits over the product were to start moving forward again. This month, top Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation that would effectively nullify a Supreme Court decision last year that has blocked lawsuits against medical device makers like Medtronic. The company recently said that about 2,000 legal claims involving the Sprint Fidelis had been filed against it. The death statistics Medtronic released Friday underscore both the scope of the Sprint Fidelis problem and the difficult choices that doctors and patients face in deciding what to do about it. About 150,000 people in this country still have the Sprint Fidelis leads in their bodies. Along with fatalities, the F.D.A. has received about 2,200 reports of serious injuries related to the leads. Medtronic officials said they believed that reflected the number of people who had undergone surgery to have a failed lead replaced with a new one. Dr. David Steinhaus, Medtronic\u2019s medical director, said the updated figures, which the company distributed Friday to doctors, was based on a review of available data by company officials and a panel of five outside physicians. He said that the outside panel was particularly concerned with the four deaths related to surgical efforts to remove the lead. Doctors often choose to leave a fractured heart device lead in place when implanting a new one. In the advisory to physicians on Friday, the panel urged that doctors who think a patient would benefit from having a failed lead extracted have the procedure performed by a physician skilled in doing so. \u201cIf you are going to have it done, you ought to go to a place where they are doing a lot of them,\u201d Dr. Steinhaus said. Besides the deaths related to the surgeries, the panel appears to have concluded that the nine other deaths may have been tied to the device\u2019s failure to function properly. The F.D.A. report is based on a visit by regulators to a Medtronic facility in Mounds View, Minn., soon after the device was removed from the market, where the officials interviewed executives and inspected records. The report shows that by late 2005 the company had received 30 complaints about device fractures and had identified several possible ways in which the lead might be failing. About that time, the company opened an internal investigation into the problem, according to the report. What happened next is not clear, because the F.D.A. redacted portions of the report before releasing it. But the document indicates that Medtronic engineers met often about the problem throughout 2006 and that they performed a \u201cstatistical analysis of the three failure modes\u201d of the lead in October of that year, the report states. It was in February 2007 that Dr. Robert G. Hauser, a cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute, met with Medtronic officials and informed them that his database of heart patients showed that the Sprint Fidelis was fracturing at a troubling rate. In a telephone interview this week, Dr. Hauser said Medtronic officials said nothing to him then about the company\u2019s internal investigation. Asked to respond Friday, Medtronic issued a statement saying that fractures of heart device leads were not unusual and that at the time of the Hauser meeting it \u201chad no data to demonstrate that there was a statistically significance difference\u201d in failure rates between the Sprint Fidelis and the company\u2019s other leads. Soon after meeting with Dr. Hauser, Medtronic sent a letter in March 2007 to doctors informing them of his data and saying it was investigating the issue. Two months later, Medtronic took steps to change how it manufactured the Sprint Fidelis, the F.D.A. report shows. Tim Samsel, the company\u2019s vice president for quality and regulatory, said in a telephone interview that the manufacturing change was intended to address \u201cacute\u201d lead fractures at the time of implant, not the chronic fractures that eventually led Medtronic to recall the device. Between the company\u2019s meeting with Dr. Hauser and its recall of the Sprint Fidelis, it is estimated that tens of thousands of additional patients received the device. Asked this week to review the F.D.A. report, Dr. William H. Maisel, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said it suggested that Medtronic long knew there were issues with the Sprint Fidelis. \u201cIn 2006, the company recognized there was a problem,\u201d said Dr. Maisel, who has been critical of Medtronic\u2019s handling of the lead.", "keyword": "Medtronic Inc;Medical Devices;Recalls and Bans of Products"}
{"id": "ny0237221", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/06/17", "title": "Opel to Go Ahead Without Government Aid", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 General Motors \u2019 Opel/Vauxhall unit, expressing frustration with the slow pace of government decision making, said Wednesday it was no longer seeking aid from European countries and would finance a five-year, new-product drive with help from the parent company. Germany\u2019s federal government last week turned down Opel \u2019s request for \u20ac1.1 billion, or $1.4 billion, in loan guarantees, amid a drive to cut government spending in response to Europe\u2019s debt crisis. Opel\u2019s plans call for an investment of \u20ac11 billion over five years in developing new products and for restructuring. Though the company might still have won backing from German states that have Opel factories, as well as Spain and Britain, the company said it could not afford to spend months in negotiations. \u201cWe would have had to go through some pretty long bureaucratic processes,\u201d Nick Reilly, president of G.M. Europe, said during a conference call. \u201cWe just can\u2019t afford that any longer.\u201d He said he did not expect Opel to return to profit until next year. Going without government aid will require an additional \u20ac1.4 billion from G.M. above money the parent company has already committed, Mr. Reilly said. Because G.M.\u2019s financial position has improved, the rate it pays to borrow the money may not be much different from what it would have been with government loan guarantees, Mr. Reilly said. Last month G.M., which is majority owned by the U.S. government after a bailout, reported first-quarter earnings of $865 million. The European operations lost $500 million. Opel\u2019s cost-cutting plans were not tied to the receipt of aid and will proceed, Mr. Reilly said. Opel had already planned to close a plant in Antwerp, Belgium, and cut 8,300 jobs around Europe. Opel said it had 45,000 workers at the end of March. Some analysts have questioned whether Opel would be able to revive sales after years of bad publicity about its travails, which predate the financial crisis and economic downturn. Sales of Opel brand cars, sold as Vauxhalls in Britain, are down 6 percent this year in Western Europe to 404,000 vehicles at the end of May, largely because of the expiration of a cash-for-clunkers program in Germany. But Opel\u2019s market share has also fallen, to 7 percent this year from 7.6 percent in the same period of 2009. \u201cThe automotive crisis is still not over in Europe,\u201d said Christoph St\u00fcrmer, a director at IHS Automotive in Frankfurt, a market research firm. \u201cThe volume guys are getting a beating now.\u201d Mr. St\u00fcrmer said that Opel could be successful if it took better advantage of the cost savings possible from being part of a huge international carmaker. The shift to hybrids, all- electric cars and other new technologies require huge expenditures in research and development, which are easier for larger carmakers. \u201cThere are so many new technologies on the horizon,\u201d Mr. St\u00fcrmer said. \u201cGuys with a better cost position now have a pretty good opportunity.\u201d", "keyword": "Opel Adam AG;General Motors;Credit and Debt;Automobiles;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0124280", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/08/03", "title": "House Passes Short-Term Farm Relief Bill", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 An effort to provide emergency aid for American ranchers and farmers reeling from a year of drought, frost and other calamities collapsed on Thursday as members of Congress departed for their five-week August recess, leaving behind a pile of unfinished legislation as they go home to campaign for re-election. After refusing to consider a sweeping five-year farm measure, House Republican leaders jammed through a short-term $383 million package of loans and grants for livestock producers and a limited number of farmers. The measure passed 223 to 197, a narrow margin for a bill that has an impact on so many states. But Democrats balked in protest over the way the farm legislation has been handled and some Republicans objected to the costs. Democratic leaders in the Senate, which had already passed a bipartisan five-year bill, refused to take up the House measure, faulting House Republican leaders for failing to consider the broader legislation in time. \u201cI\u2019m not passing a bill that only covers some producers,\u201d said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Moments after the House passed its bill, Ms. Stabenow took to the Senate floor to say that lawmakers would instead work informally over the August recess to try to put together a new measure to present to Congress when it meets in September. The White House would have considered the House measure, but she resisted, Senate aides said. Ms. Stabenow, who worked for months to arm-twist resistant Senate colleagues on both side of the aisle to usher her bill through her chamber , said she would begin meeting with House agriculture leaders on Thursday night. \u201cI am extremely hopeful that we can get together around what really needs to be done, which is a five-year farm bill ,\u201d she said. The failure to advance the farm bill or the emergency aid was all the more striking given the extent of the continuing drought, with county after county across the nation having been declared an agricultural disaster area . The farm bill, which has historically appealed to members on both sides of the aisle, was one of a series of measures that fell victim to partisan fighting \u2014 and occasionally infighting \u2014 in recent weeks. On Thursday, a bipartisan cybersecurity bill that would have established standards for the computer systems that oversee the country\u2019s critical infrastructure was stopped by a filibuster as some leading Republicans yielded to the concerns of major business interests. The renewal of a measure to protect women from domestic violence \u2014 an issue that has also generally enjoyed bipartisan support in both chambers \u2014 stalled and routine spending bills and tax measures were also languishing, even as Congress faces a year-end pileup of expiring tax laws and spending cuts. \u201cIt\u2019s not only the failure to take on the biggest single threat to our country right now, that of cyberattacks,\u201d said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a co-author of the cybersecurity bill. \u201cOr to complete the farm bill. But also, we\u2019ve yet to pass a single appropriations bill. Tax issues remain completely unresolved, as well. I think it\u2019s really disappointing.\u201d For lawmakers in states with large agriculture industries, August may be the longest month, as farmers, ranchers and producers clamor for a bill to extend programs that begin expiring in September. The relief bill sought to continue programs that have already expired, ones that indemnify livestock and forage programs and provide some assistance to producers of a handful of other crops, paid for by placing caps on conservation programs in the current farm law. Without the aid, livestock producers will now have no government safety net programs to aid them in their losses of feed. Without them there is little they can do except find another source of feed or start selling or killing off animals. Crop insurance will take care of growers of corn, soybeans, wheat and most other crops. Republicans criticized the Senate for declining to take up their measure. \u201cIt would appear this is the only vehicle,\u201d said Representative Frank D. Lucas of Oklahoma, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, who has patiently endured his Republican leadership\u2019s abandonment of his bill, the first time the House has declined to bring its own committee\u2019s bill to the floor. \u201cNo matter what happens in the farm bill process, nothing can happen for months and months. If you want to leave people hurting, I guess that\u2019s your choice.\u201d Senator Roy D. Blunt, Republican of Missouri, expressed a similar view. \u201cThe idea that we would decide that we would put this off another month,\u201d he said, \u201cthat we can put these families in jeopardy for another month, not knowing what their solution is, just seems to me to be totally unacceptable.\u201d Many members of both parties said they felt they were returning home for the recess with little to show for their efforts and with the election just three months off. \u201cCongress has a job to do and that among other things is to pass a farm bill,\u201d said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who is trying to use a petition to force the farm bill to the floor against the wishes of leadership, a difficult procedural maneuver that will require Republican help. But he said scores of Republicans had signed already. \u201cPeople are pretty fed up about it,\u201d Mr. Welch said, \u201cand understandably so.\u201d Despite the multiple impasses, Congress has made progress in some areas. Both chambers quickly agreed this week to tighten sanctions against Iran. House and Senate leaders reached a tentative agreement that would keep the government operating after the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, without the partisan drama that has almost caused a government shutdown in the past. But that measure must still pass the House and Senate next month. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got some good things,\u201d said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. \u201cWe did the transportation bill , the student loan bill, but I think we could have done more. I would have much preferred to have a full farm bill. But we\u2019re not going to be able to make a lot of decisions that need to be made until the American people decide who the decision makers are going to be. And that\u2019s the biggest challenge to legislating right now.\u201d", "keyword": "Farm Bill (US);United States Politics and Government;Agriculture and Farming;House of Representatives;Law and Legislation;Elections;United States;Congress"}
{"id": "ny0129615", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/06/08", "title": "Florida A&M University President Loses Vote", "abstract": "The board of trustees of Florida A&M University voted 8 to 4 on Thursday that it did not have confidence in the leadership of the university president, James Ammons. The trustees who voted against Dr. Ammons said they did not believe he could steer them out of a crisis that followed the hazing death of a drum major, Robert Champion, in November. More than a dozen people, mostly students, have been charged in the death. The university also remains embroiled in an inquiry into financial irregularities. Dr. Ammons, whose contract runs through June 2016, vowed to do better. \u201cYou have my commitment to fix them and get this job done,\u201d Dr. Ammons said.", "keyword": "Florida A&M University;Ammons James H;Florida;Colleges and Universities;Champion Robert;Hazing"}
{"id": "ny0146413", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2008/07/27", "title": "New Mexico Filly Challenges Citation\u2019s Record", "abstract": "Cigar could not do it. Neither could Citation. No horse in modern times has won 17 straight races, but now the record appears ready to fall, taken down by an unlikely source. Peppers Pride, a New Mexico-bred 5-year-old who has never left her native state, is far from the best thoroughbred around today, but a combination of her consistency and durability and her connections\u2019 cautious nature has put her on the verge of racing history. She is expected to be heavily favored to win her 17th in a row, on Sunday in the $55,000 Lincoln Handicap at Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico. The Triple Crown winner Citation established the recognized record for consecutive victories with 16 from 1948 to 1950. It was assumed that the first horse to reach 17 straight would be another Citation, a superior animal who routinely bossed around stakes competition. Cigar seemed ready to fit that bill, but his winning streak was stopped at 16 when he was beaten in the 1996 Pacific Classic at Del Mar. Mister Frisky and Hallowed Dreams also flirted with the record in recent times but were defeated when vying for No. 17. For Peppers Pride, that does not figure to be a problem. She has never lost and routinely beats up on the same group of overmatched New Mexico-breds she will face Sunday. There has been nothing adventurous or daring about her campaign, but it has paid off. Taking advantage of purses fattened by profits from slot machines at the New Mexico racetracks, she has earned $861,665. \u201cIt\u2019s real hard for us to leave New Mexico because of the purse structure here,\u201d said her owner and breeder, Joe Allen, who owns a barbecue restaurant in Abilene, Tex. \u201cI know that\u2019s hard for a lot of people to understand. I\u2019m not a wealthy man by any means. I can\u2019t afford to do the things that some people can. It would be asinine for us to pay $5,000 or $6,000 to ship somewhere to run. I have to look at it from the economic side.\u201d Allen said that he planned to run Peppers Pride five more times this year, all in races for New Mexico-breds, before she is retired and bred. That would mean she would never be asked to face off against the top-class fillies and mares who compete at places like Saratoga and Del Mar. \u201cIf we ever tried something like that, all I can tell you is that she would run the best possible race she could run,\u201d Joel Marr, her trainer, said. \u201cShe would give 110 percent. Everybody has their own opinions about what would happen. I think she\u2019d run well. I know other people disagree. It\u2019s not something that concerns me.\u201d Marr and Allen are quick to point out that they understand Peppers Pride does not belong in the same class as Cigar and Citation, but they also say it would be unfair to dismiss what she has done. \u201cIt would be a record, but you can\u2019t compare what she\u2019s done to Cigar or Citation,\u201d said Michael Paulson, whose father, Allen, owned Cigar. \u201cThey won top-class races and received worldwide acclaim. \u201cBut should they get the record, they should be very proud of it. It\u2019s very significant for any horse to win 16 or 17 in a row. I wish them well and hope they appreciate the accomplishment.\u201d By an unraced stallion named Desert God out of the mare Lady Pepper, Peppers Pride was put up for sale before her debut by Allen, who let local owners know that she could be had for $12,500. After no one would meet his asking price, he placed her in a 2-year-old race at Ruidoso in 2005, which she won by four and a half lengths. Peppers Pride has since crisscrossed the state, also racing at Zia Park, Sunland Park and SunRay Park. At the least, she has proved that she has an innate determination to win. In her closest call, a 2006 race at Zia Park, she was passed by another horse near the top of the stretch and appeared beaten, only to battle back and win by a nose. \u201cWhatever it is, she has it,\u201d Marr said. \u201cThere are some nice horses around here. She\u2019s just always able to find the wire.\u201d Some, though, do not seem impressed. Allen said that he had been told a number of times that if she set a record, she would deserve to have an asterisk next to her name. Marr came across a thread in a racing blog that was initiated by the Peppers Pride Haters Club. \u201cThere are people out there who don\u2019t know what it takes or how hard it is to win all these races in a row,\u201d Marr said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to let them bother me. I don\u2019t care who you\u2019re running against, it\u2019s not easy.\u201d", "keyword": "Horse Racing;Horses;New Mexico"}
{"id": "ny0143751", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/10/20", "title": "Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You", "abstract": "Consumers need a voice in these tough times. And that voice is coming from Ivanka Trump. Ms. Trump \u2014 daughter of Donald, owner of a diamond jewelry boutique, executive overseeing multimillion-dollar hotel developments and star of \u201cCelebrity Apprentice 2\u201d \u2014 has taken to blogging about saving money on lunch. Last week, Ms. Trump began posting items at blog.ALunchTrade.com . She did not define what, exactly, a lunch trade was, saying only that on Oct. 21, she and a corporate partner would conduct one of them. But she did try to connect with the masses of office workers out there. \u201cWith gas and food prices on the rise, more and more people are skipping the deli line and bringing lunch to work to save money,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThis is great, but all I hear is how boring a brown-bag lunch can get.\u201d The drudgery of office lunches, Ms. Trump wrote, was \u201csomething I completely relate to.\u201d Ms. Trump, as it turns out, was promoting a new line of microwave meals for ConAgra Foods . The meals are called Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers, available in varieties like Szechwan Beef and Southwestern Chicken, and they can be stored in a desk for up to a year with no refrigeration required. The link between Ms. Trump and ConAgra was not immediately revealed, a ConAgra executive said, so that they could drum up interest in the promotion. (However, there were only 20 responses to her five blog posts last week.) The lunch trade that Ms. Trump alluded to will happen on Tuesday, when ConAgra representatives will offer samples of the meals in two office buildings: the Grace Building on 42nd Street in New York, and 1 South Wacker Drive in Chicago. While it is difficult to imagine the former model lunching on processed chicken from a plastic tub, ConAgra executives said she was an ideal promoter. \u201cWe wanted somebody who would appeal to a younger office worker who\u2019s technology-savvy,\u201d said Michael Locascio, vice president at ConAgra. \u201cWe wanted someone they could identify with, someone they knew, but also not somebody that was on the front of every tabloid.\u201d Ms. Trump, possibly slicing baloney for her sandwich at home, was not available for comment. Asked whether Ms. Trump was the best choice to discuss budgeting, Mr. Locascio said that \u201cwe want to have her talk in a way that\u2019s credible, which is why we\u2019re talking about this as a business venture for her.\u201d \u201cBecause obviously, she has resources some don\u2019t,\u201d Mr. Locascio said. STEPHANIE CLIFFORD", "keyword": "Trump Ivanka;Blogs and Blogging (Internet);ConAgra Foods Incorporated;Food"}
{"id": "ny0028523", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2013/01/23", "title": "U.S. Home Sales in 2012 Highest in 5 Years", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Sales of existing homes dipped in December from November, in part because of a limited supply of available housing. But the total number of sales in 2012 rose to its highest level in five years. The National Association of Realtors said on Tuesday that home sales declined in December to an annual rate of 4.94 million. That rate was down from 4.99 million in November, which was revised lower but was still the highest in three years. Total home sales last year increased to 4.65 million. That is 9.2 percent higher than 2011 and the most since 2007. Sales finished below the roughly 5.5 million that is consistent with a healthy market. Still, most economists say that home sales are improving steadily and that the gains should continue this year. Stable hiring, record-low mortgage rates and a tight supply of homes available for sale have helped increase sales and prices in most markets. \u201dWe remain convinced that the housing recovery is well under way and should continue through 2013,\u201d said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, an institutional brokerage. Image The market is being held back by the shrinking supply of homes for sale. The inventory of available homes on the market dropped to 1.82 million in December, the lowest in 12 years. And first-time buyers, who are critical to a housing recovery, made up only 30 percent of sales in December. That is down slightly from a year ago and well below the 40 percent that is typical in a healthy market. Since the housing bubble collapsed six years ago, banks have tightened credit standards and are requiring larger down payments. Many would-be buyers are unable to qualify for the lowest mortgage rates on record. The rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 3.66 percent in 2012, the lowest annual average in 65 years, according to Freddie Mac. Sales are rising faster for more expensive homes, the Realtors group said. Sales of homes priced $1 million or more surged 62 percent in 2012, while sales of homes below $100,000 fell 17 percent. Home prices rose 7.4 percent on an annual rate in November, the real estate data provider CoreLogic reported. That is the biggest annual increase since 2006, when the housing bubble burst. CoreLogic forecasts that home prices will rise 6 percent nationally this year.", "keyword": "Real Estate; Housing;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0139200", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2008/02/18", "title": "Proven Winner Finally Finishes First at Daytona", "abstract": "Daytona Beach, Fla. Roger Penske has been in the racing business for 50 years, even drove himself for a while. He has won the Indianapolis 500 as an owner 14 times, but everybody knows that Nascar racing is where the action is this generation, and Penske had never won at Daytona. He\u2019s a reserved man, who will turn 71 Thursday, and he has his scars. His first Indy champion, Mark Donohue, crashed in a Formula One race in Austria in 1975 and died of a brain hemorrhage the next day. Several other drivers of his have been killed. He\u2019s a businessman, with 40,000 employees and fortunes in several automotive companies. His racing crews call him the Captain because of his attention to detail. He\u2019s not the kind of owner to exhort his people to win one for the Captain. Finally it happened Sunday after the sun had gone down. After sending out 35 drivers in 23 Daytona races, Penske won the biggest event in racing these days. Ryan Newman gunned ahead in the final lap, and nobody could catch him. They do things backward in Nascar, running the event they dare to call the Great American Race at the very start of the season, like a Super Bowl on Labor Day, when football is just back from vacation. Yet somehow it works. Strange things happen at Daytona, like the confusion on the final lap last year, and terrible things happen, like Dale Earnhardt\u2019s dying in a crash on the final lap in 2001. Now Newman\u2019s spurt has made the austere Penske a champion of Daytona. \u201cYou needed to win the race to get in this class,\u201d Penske said. \u201cCertainly our races at Indy are important to us,\u201d he continued. \u201cFor me to come and have the opportunity, this certainly goes to the top of the charts for Penske Racing.\u201d \u0095 Penske keeps a diversified stable, finding room for Newman, with his Purdue degree in vehicular structural engineering, and Kurt Busch, a mercurial type who wore down Jack Roush, his previous owner. Penske makes suggestions, Busch said, and the drivers and the crew chiefs know they are something more than suggestions. \u201cRoger never puts extra pressure on us,\u201d Kurt Busch said when somebody mentioned that his boss had never won here. Then Busch added, \u201cHe does put a nice bonus in our contract if we do win.\u201d Maybe the Penske attention to detail instilled the teamwork evident in the final lap, when Newman burst into the lead and Busch had two options \u2014 in the Super Bowl vernacular, either block or gamble for the end zone. There was a bit of a history behind the decision. Last week, Busch and Tony Stewart were rumored to have had a fistfight while speaking with officials after they had locked fenders on the Daytona track. For whatever reason, Busch hunkered down in Stewart\u2019s path, and his stablemate Newman won Daytona. \u201cI was doing what Kurt Busch needed to do,\u201d Busch said, not gloating. Speaking of Stewart, he added: \u201cIf he would have jumped up ahead of me, I would have pushed him. Maybe he did think twice that that was me up there.\u201d Newman later spoke of the tactics of Busch in the stretch: \u201cHe could have gone up the middle and made a mess of it.\u201d \u0095 They had a mess here last year when officials ignored a nasty crash, failing to flash the customary yellow flag as Kevin Harvick caught the popular veteran Mark Martin at the end. Things happen here \u2014 like Earnhardt\u2019s first Daytona 500 victory in 1998, or his son\u2019s first 500 victory in 2004, or his deadly crash in 2001. Nascar has seen its television ratings drop in recent years, and it has lost some of the sheen of the past generation, when the sport moved into major population centers and abandoned some of the old haunts in North Carolina and elsewhere. In the process, Nascar has attracted refugees from open-wheel racing, including Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish Jr., the third Penske driver. Hornish made his debut at Daytona on Sunday, after winning the Indy 500 in 2006. Although he would never say so, Penske is probably still an Indy guy, but he nodded when somebody noted there were coaches and athletes who were forever judged for never winning a Super Bowl or a World Series. \u201cComing down here has been tough,\u201d Penske said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been open-wheel champions.\u201d \u201cRick Hendrick is a guy I look up to,\u201d Penske said long after the race, referring to one of the owners who has been successful at Daytona. He said he had spoken with Hendrick early Sunday and said, \u201cIf I get in the victory circle, I want one of those H hats,\u201d meaning a souvenir of the Hendrick stable. Champ that he is, Hendrick produced a cap for Penske after the race. And what would have happened if one of Penske\u2019s drivers had not won Daytona on Sunday? \u201cWe would have come back,\u201d Penske said softly. He\u2019ll come back anyway. The Captain is a fixture here. But now he has won Daytona.", "keyword": "Penske Roger;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing;Automobile Racing;Newman Ryan"}
{"id": "ny0199671", "categories": ["business", "mutfund"], "date": "2009/07/12", "title": "Emerging Markets Regain Their Footing", "abstract": "ONE of the more startling developments of recent months has been the near-vertical recovery of emerging stock markets. Despite the collapse of those markets late last year, investors\u2019 sentiment toward them has quickly switched from hate to love, with nothing in between. Emerging markets have soared above almost all others this year, especially in the second quarter, even as those other markets were swiftly gaining altitude themselves. The outperformance carried a broad-based MSCI Barra index of shares in the developing world close to record highs, relative to the firm\u2019s broadest index of stocks in mature economies, after touching a three-year comparative low last fall. The rally provided an opportunity for shareholders in emerging-market funds to dig out of a very deep hole. The average portfolio specializing in them rose 35.1 percent in the second quarter, after falling 54.4 percent in 2008 and an additional 1.7 percent in the first quarter this year. Corresponding second-quarter returns were 17.5 percent for domestic stock funds; 27 percent for funds investing in Europe and 27.8 percent for Asia funds. You might think that after such stunning outperformance, investment advisers who comparison-shop would lighten up on emerging markets and spread the cash around mature markets. But they haven\u2019t; the consensus seems to be that emerging markets remain the better bet, although it may be prudent not to place it just yet. Investors trying to fathom the enormous run-up in emerging markets should have their minds on something else, as one portfolio manager sees it. \u201cThe question to ask is: Why did they fall last year?\u201d said Giles Conway-Gordon, co-chief investment officer at Cogo Wolf Asset Management in San Francisco. \u201cThat was the exceptional event, and now we\u2019re seeing a return to normality in emerging markets.\u201d Many developing economies are enduring the global recession and financial crisis in relatively solid shape, and their stock markets suffered more than others through little fault of their own, international fund managers say. One factor was a sudden scarcity of credit that forced many Western investors to sell assets to raise cash. \u201cYou had to sell what you owned, and that\u2019s what everybody owned,\u201d said John Maxwell, manager of the Ivy International Core fund. One reason markets like those of India, China and Brazil were so popular until the bear market is that sound government policy had become commonplace in the developing world. Officials \u201chave learned from past mistakes,\u201d said Kirk Brown, who runs foreign portfolios in the American Beacon fund family. \u201cMany of these markets are running surpluses, and inflation is under control.\u201d By contrast, fiscal and trade surpluses and other signs of sound economic management are hard to spot in many mature countries. \u201cWe think there are serious question marks\u201d about the long-term prospects of developed economies, Mr. Conway-Gordon said. \u201cGrowth is going to be uninspiring. Japan is a country in decline. Europe has not faced facts about its financial system and is overbureaucratized.\u201d Mr. Maxwell cited some uninspiring details of his own. Industrial production in Germany and Japan is running at 60 percent to 80 percent of prerecession levels, declines \u201cthat would have been unfathomable in the past\u201d and are well below previous troughs, he said. Stock markets in mature countries have risen in the hope that their economies will stabilize, but he contends that the weakness is so severe that stability won\u2019t do. \u201cThings can\u2019t stay that way without skyrocketing unemployment,\u201d Mr. Maxwell said. \u201cStabilization isn\u2019t good enough at this level. They have to see improvement, not a plateauing.\u201d The ability to conduct business unfettered by the lingering effects of financial and economic imbalances should help emerging markets recover faster and keep a competitive edge, said Jason Hsu, chief investment officer at Research Affiliates, an asset management firm in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cEconomies that won\u2019t have to deleverage will consume more and employ more capital,\u201d Mr. Hsu said. \u201cThat\u2019s a definite positive. Those economies are going to be in positions of relative strength, and you\u2019re going to see investment flow reacting to that.\u201d But doesn\u2019t the rally mean that the reaction has already occurred? It\u2019s possible that the choices open to international investors have been greatly curtailed \u2014 and that the low-hanging fruit, as well as a lot of the produce much higher up, has already been picked in emerging markets. \u201cWhen you see a great run like you\u2019ve seen in emerging markets, you\u2019ve got to ask whether you want to keep riding the ride,\u201d Mr. Maxwell said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be sure you\u2019re going to come out of this in good shape\u201d before buying at these levels, he advised. \u201cI\u2019m not 100 percent ready to bet on that at this point.\u201d The growth prospects he perceives for mature international economies, as well as the less dramatic yet sizeable rally they have already experienced, mean that they may not offer much of an alternative. One approach that Mr. Maxwell favors is buying companies in mature countries that do a lot of business in developing ones, like Nestl\u00e9, the Swiss food producer; Total, the French oil company; and Nissin Kogyo, a Japanese company that makes car parts. Others find emerging-market stocks tempting, if pricey. Mr. Brown at American Beacon acknowledges that valuations appear somewhat stretched, but says he expects higher long-term earnings growth to remedy the condition. His largest holdings lately have included PetroChina, HDFC Bank in India and Ita\u00fa Unibanco Holding, a Brazilian bank. HARRY HARTFORD, president of Causeway Capital Management in Los Angeles, likewise foresees stronger earnings growth, although he would not be surprised by a pullback in the short run. \u201cI would argue that if you have anything other than a three-month investment horizon, you need to have emerging markets in your portfolio,\u201d Mr. Hartford said. \u201cIt\u2019s na\u00efve to think that a number of these markets will not continue to do well and that companies don\u2019t have the wherewithal to continue growing.\u201d Mr. Hsu expressed similar sentiments. \u201cAfter they\u2019ve gone up this far, we\u2019re more than likely to see a larger correction,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s hard not to argue that over a longer horizon they offer more opportunity and fewer problems to deal with.\u201d", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;International Trade and World Market;emerging markets"}
{"id": "ny0024531", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/08/17", "title": "Britain: Court Approves Vasectomy for Disabled Man", "abstract": "A British court has ruled for the first time that a man who lacks the capacity to give informed consent should have a vasectomy because it is in his best interests. The 36-year-old man, who has not been identified, has an I.Q. of 40, lives with his parents and has a long-term girlfriend who also has severe learning disabilities. In 2009, the man\u2019s girlfriend became pregnant and had a child. According to the court decision, the man had insisted that he did not want any more children. His doctors and parents applied to the court for the vasectomy, arguing that he does not have the mental capacity to reach an independent decision.", "keyword": "Vasectomy;Medical Sterilization;Disability;Great Britain"}
{"id": "ny0233560", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/08/23", "title": "After Close Australia Vote, Parties Seek Coalition", "abstract": "SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 The two main candidates in Australia\u2019s cliffhanger election began scrambling Sunday to win the support of three independent lawmakers and a newly elected Greens party representative who will decide which party forms a minority government in one of the tightest races ever seen here. By late Sunday, with nearly 80 percent of the vote counted, neither the governing center-left Labor Party nor a conservative opposition coalition had captured enough votes to claim a majority in the 150-member House of Representatives. About two million mail ballots have not yet been counted, and it could take at least a week before the final result is known. Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her conservative rival, Tony Abbott, began what many analysts expect to be a lengthy period of negotiations to win over the crucial bloc. Australia has not had a minority government since 1940. \u201cWe are clearly at a historic moment in our country,\u201d Ms. Gillard said in Melbourne. Labor, which held 83 seats before the election on Saturday, lost at least 13 and is at risk of becoming the first government in nearly 80 years to be turned from office after just one three-year term. Talks were expected to begin in earnest in Canberra, the capital, on Monday. The Greens drew a record number of votes, mainly from traditional Labor supporters angry about the government\u2019s decision to suspend its cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions until 2013. The three independent lawmakers represent rural constituencies and have links to parties within the conservative coalition.", "keyword": "Australia;Elections;Gillard Julia;Abbott Tony"}
{"id": "ny0133111", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/12/14", "title": "Nurse in Royal Prank Call Was Found Hanged, British Inquest Is Told", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 A nurse who apparently committed suicide after being tricked by a prank call from an Australian radio station involving the pregnant Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was found hanging by a scarf and had left several notes, a preliminary inquest hearing was told on Thursday. The details were the first to emerge of how the nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, 46, had died. The episode transfixed many in Britain and Australia , seeming to combine a fascination with the royal family, particularly the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, with horror at the outcome of what two Australian disc jockeys pretending to be Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles have said began as a harmless stunt. The radio hosts convinced Ms. Saldanha that they were members of the royal family, and persuaded her to pass on their call to another nurse whom they duped into disclosing medical information about the duchess, who was being treated for acute morning sickness at the King Edward VII hospital. The call was broadcast on Australian radio and went around the world. Police officials initially declined to offer details of what had happened to Ms. Saldanha, who was married and had two children, beyond saying that an ambulance crew had found her body. Detective Chief Inspector James Harman told the preliminary inquest hearing at Westminster Coroner\u2019s Court in central London on Thursday that Ms. Saldanha \u201cwas found by a colleague and a member of security staff. Sadly, she was found hanging.\u201d There also \u201cinjuries to her wrist,\u201d and three notes were found \u2014 two in her room and the third among her possessions. Details of the notes were not disclosed. \u201cAt this time there are no suspicious circumstances,\u201d Mr. Harman said, meaning the police did not suspect the involvement of other people. Ms. Saldanha had been found hanging by a scarf from a wardrobe in her room in the nurses\u2019 quarters at the hospital, the coroner, Fiona Wilcox, was told. The hearing lasted a matter of minutes and will resume next March 26, Ms. Wilcox said. Between now and then, Mr. Harman said, he expected officers from Scotland Yard to be in touch with police detectives in Australia to interview witnesses so as to \u201cput the best evidence before you\u201d when the inquest resumes. British inquests are supposed to determine the cause of death but do not apportion blame. The family of Ms. Saldanha, who was born in India, did not attend Thursday\u2019s hearing. The events leading up to the nurse\u2019s death are also unclear. The hospital where she worked \u2014 an upscale private facility favored by the British royal family \u2014 said it had not disciplined her after the hoax but rather had been \u201csupporting her during this difficult time.\u201d The royal family also indicated that it had not raised a fuss about the prank by the D.J.\u2019s, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, whose impersonations of the duchess\u2019s in-laws seemed unconvincing to many listeners. The queen is the grandmother of Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge; Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, is his father. Australian regulators are investigating whether the 2DayFM station breached the terms of its license to broadcast or the code of practice adopted by Australian broadcasters.", "keyword": "Royal Family;Hoaxes;Great Britain"}
{"id": "ny0004764", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/04/09", "title": "Jurors Hint at Deadlock in Tarloff Murder Case", "abstract": "The jury considering murder charges against David Tarloff , a schizophrenic man accused of killing a psychologist in her Upper East Side office five years ago, sent a note to the judge Monday afternoon suggesting they might not be able to reach a verdict. The note requested \u201cclarification of the consequences of a hung jury,\u201d Justice Edward J. McLaughlin of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said. The note continued, \u201cWe are at risk.\u201d The judge instructed the jurors not to speculate on the consequences or definition of a hung jury and directed them to continue deliberations on Tuesday morning. The jury has deliberated for four days since receiving the case on Wednesday at noon, but Monday was the first full day the jurors spent deliberating. They spent much of Thursday in the courtroom, hearing testimony of mental health experts reread. Friday was a shortened day because of a juror\u2019s scheduling conflict. Mr. Tarloff, 45, is charged with murdering the psychologist, Kathryn Faughey, 56, and assaulting a psychiatrist, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, with whom she shared an office suite, on Feb. 12, 2008. Mr. Tarloff later told doctors that God had approved his plan to rob Dr. Shinbach so he could care for his mother in Hawaii. During the trial, Mr. Tarloff\u2019s lawyers did not contest that he had attacked the two. They presented an insanity defense , which, if successful, would result in Mr. Tarloff being sent to a secure psychiatric facility, possibly for life. He faces up to life in prison if found guilty. Late Monday, the jurors asked the judge to repeat his explanation of the requirement that the defense must prove insanity.", "keyword": "Murders;David Tarloff;Kathryn Faughey;Manhattan;Edward J McLaughlin"}
{"id": "ny0119542", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2012/07/29", "title": "N.B.A. Reassessing Its Olympic Involvement", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Often obscured in the haze of celebration of the Dream Team is this fact: The United States actually voted against allowing N.B.A. players to participate in the Olympics in 1992. As it turned out, American self-interest was trumped by global embrace. The outcome was hugely beneficial. Basketball soared internationally and now can rightfully claim to be the world\u2019s second-most-popular sport behind soccer. Two decades ago, the N.B.A. was viewed in 88 countries. Now it is 217 nations and territories. On opening day of the 1991-92 season, N.B.A. rosters featured 23 international players from 18 countries. As last season began, it was 74 players from 35 countries. Yet, as the United States opens play Sunday at the London Games, and corks pop on the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team , the N.B.A. is reassessing its involvement in the Olympics with an eye toward an even bigger and more popular international sporting event: soccer\u2019s World Cup. Several trial balloons are being floated. One would mirror soccer\u2019s age restriction and make Olympic basketball an under-23 tournament. Another would place the age limit at, say, 26. A third might place a limit of two Olympic appearances regardless of age. The N.B.A.\u2019s concerns relate to player health, broadening the sport\u2019s appeal, finances and perceived arrogance of the International Olympic Committee. At this point, any change seems more likely to occur for the 2020 Summer Games, yet to be awarded, than for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. \u201cIt might be time to step back and, if nothing else, to satisfy the owners so they can begin studying it,\u201d David Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in a telephone interview from New York. \u201cFrankly, the more I whistled a little tune, the more I said, \u2018Maybe you stumbled onto something.\u2019 I\u2019m not sure this changes anything, but it\u2019s time to take a look.\u201d Team owners, having invested hundreds of millions of dollars, worry that their star players will become fatigued and injured. The 12 United States players here are perhaps less of a concern than the 26 global N.B.A. players, who often face enormous nationalistic pressures to represent their countries at the Olympics and in continental tournaments, even when hurt. It is widely believed that Yao Ming\u2019s career was shortened by foot problems developed from a grueling schedule of playing for the Houston Rockets and the Chinese national team. In 2008, the prime minister of Lithuania phoned Stern, asking him to help persuade Zydrunas Ilgauskas of the Cleveland Cavaliers to play at the Beijing Games. The country was considering allocating public money to provide insurance for the fragile Ilgauskas, whose pre-existing injuries left him less than fully covered for the Olympics. Stern declined to pressure Ilgauskas, and he did not play in Beijing. Increasingly, Stern has grown intrigued by soccer\u2019s 32-team World Cup, held every four years, extending for an entire month, unencumbered by simultaneous competition from other sports. By contrast, Olympic basketball is limited to 12 teams over 17 days and must share the limelight with two dozen other sports. The N.B.A. and its players are also severely restricted in leveraging marketing opportunities with sponsors not associated with the Games. FIBA, basketball\u2019s international governing body, does conduct a world championship every four years. Although that tournament is more popular than the Olympics in some countries, the Summer Games dwarf the world championships as a basketball showcase in the United States. Recently, the name of the tournament was changed to the World Cup in an attempt to broaden its appeal. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, wants the N.B.A. to stage its own World Cup, without FIBA\u2019s involvement. That way, money would be more equitably shared with various national basketball federations and N.B.A. players, Cuban wrote in an e-mail. He has also grown impatient with the I.O.C., which he views as supercilious, greedy and exploitative of the league\u2019s players as Olympic programming for NBC. \u201cThey are risking their futures so that the Olympics organization can maximize sponsorship and TV deals,\u201d Cuban wrote. \u201cThere is no good reason for the N.B.A. to risk our athletes so they can profit.\u201d Stern is more diplomatic. He prefers not to simply decree that the N.B.A. will no longer release players older than 23 for the Olympics. He has spent 20 years engendering good will with FIBA and does not want to be viewed as a heavy-handed, ugly American. FIBA is also in a sensitive position. A number of countries fear that the United States, given its population and depth, would have a greater advantage in an under-23 Olympic tournament than it does now with N.B.A. players. FIBA\u2019s secretary general, Patrick Baumann of Switzerland, is also an I.O.C. delegate and is said to be torn. On one hand, he wants to make the basketball World Cup more relevant. On the other hand, Baumann knows that an under-23 Olympic basketball tournament would be severely devalued, like the soccer competition. (Sepp Blatter, the president of soccer\u2019s governing body, FIFA, is also an I.O.C. member, but he operates from a position of much greater strength, given soccer\u2019s unmatched popularity.) Some Olympic officials would welcome reduced N.B.A. involvement in the Summer Games. Athletes in individual sports, effectively seen only once every four years, would have a greater chance to gain attention. But other officials see risks for the league in an under-23 format: accusations of hubris and lack of patriotism, a decline in global visibility of the sport, a threat to international development. \u201cMaybe not in America, but in the rest of the world, the Olympics might be the only time people will see basketball at that level,\u201d said Michael Payne, a former marketing director for the I.O.C. \u201cIf you suddenly think you\u2019re so strong and no longer need that, well, how many other brands, how many other entertainment properties, think they\u2019ve arrived and then, poof?\u201d Expanding the basketball World Cup might also put greater physical demands on N.B.A. players. Soccer is locked in a continual struggle between club and country. Would the N.B.A. be willing to do what FIFA does, set aside dates during the season when clubs must release players for national team games, often requiring brutal travel? If the N.B.A. does maintain its current Olympic involvement, it may be for this reason: The players say they love it. They attract a global audience. They rub shoulders with top athletes from other sports. They have fun in a festival atmosphere while playing for a gold medal. According to USA Basketball, the national governing body, the performance of Olympic players often increases in subsequent N.B.A. seasons. Kobe Bryant dismissed the under-23 idea as stupid. Carmelo Anthony said players should be allowed to decide on their own, regardless of age, whether to represent their country. \u201cDavid Stern\u2019s views are based on him protecting his players,\u201d said Pops Mensah-Bonsu, a British forward who formerly played for the Mavericks and the New Orleans Hornets. \u201cBut it\u2019s the Olympics. If you put age limits, you\u2019ll take away from what it really means.\u201d", "keyword": "Olympic Games (2012);Basketball;National Basketball Assn;United States;Soccer"}
{"id": "ny0049761", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/10/02", "title": "Kansas: Democrats Win Right to Skip Race", "abstract": "A court ruled Wednesday that Democrats can go without a United States Senate candidate after their nominee dropped out of the race against the Republican incumbent, Pat Roberts. A panel of three Shawnee County judges said state law did not require Democrats to fill the vacancy. Some Democrats pushed out the former nominee, Chad Taylor, because they saw the independent candidate, Greg Orman, as stronger and did not want to split the anti-Roberts vote. Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who tried to block Mr. Taylor\u2019s removal from the ballot, said ballot printing must start Thursday.", "keyword": "Chad Taylor;Kansas;Pat Roberts;Senate races;Greg Orman;2014 Midterm Elections"}
{"id": "ny0134573", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/04/20", "title": "Piling On: Borrowers Buried by Fees", "abstract": "SLOWLY but surely, a handful of public-minded bankruptcy court judges are drawing back the curtain on the mortgage servicing business, exposing, among other questionable practices, the sundry and onerous fees that big banks and financial companies levy on troubled borrowers. It isn\u2019t a pretty sight, if you are a borrower. But shining a light on this dark corner certainly qualifies as progress. The cases come out of bankruptcy courts in Delaware, Louisiana and New York, and each one shows how improper, undisclosed or questionable fees unfairly penalize borrowers already struggling with mortgage debt or bankruptcy. Given the number of new borrowers falling daily into the foreclosure mire, dubious practices by servicers are beyond troubling. Foreclosure filings rose 57 percent in March over the same period in 2007, according to RealtyTrac, the real estate and foreclosure Web site. It also said that banks repossessed more than 50,000 homes last month, more than twice the amount of one year earlier. If even one of those repossessions was owing to improper fees or practices, that would be one too many. The case out of the Eastern District of Louisiana, overseen by Judge Elizabeth W. Magner, is especially depressing. It involves Dorothy Chase Stewart, an elderly borrower and widow whose original loan of $61,200 was serviced by Wells Fargo. Judge Magner cited \u201cabusive imposition of unwarranted fees and charges,\u201d and improper calculation of escrow payments, among other things. She found Wells Fargo negligent and assessed damages, sanctions and legal fees of $27,350. The heart of the case is that Wells Fargo failed to notify the borrower when it assessed fees or charges on her account. This deepened her default and placed her on a downward spiral that was hard to escape. And Wells Fargo\u2019s practice of not notifying borrowers that they were being charged fees \u201cis not peculiar to loans involved in a bankruptcy,\u201d the court said. During a 12-month period beginning in 2001, for example, Well Fargo assessed 13 late fees totaling $360.23 without telling Ms. Stewart or her late husband, whose name was on the loan before he died. Even though the terms of the mortgage required that Wells Fargo apply any funds it received from the Stewarts to principal and interest charges first, the late fees were deducted first. This meant that the Stewarts\u2019 mortgage payments were insufficient, making them fall further behind \u2014 and keeping them subject to more late fees. Then there were the multiple inspection fees Wells Fargo charged the borrowers. Because its computer system automatically generates a request for property inspections when a borrower becomes delinquent \u2014 to make sure the property is being kept up \u2014 the $15 cost of the inspections piled up. The court noted that the total cost to the borrower for one missed $554.11 mortgage payment was $465.36 in late fees and property inspection charges. FROM late 2000 and 2007, Wells Fargo inspected the property on average every 54 days, the court found. But the court also determined that inspections charged to Ms. Stewart had often been performed on other people\u2019s properties. Of the nine broker appraisals charged to Ms. Stewart from 2002 to 2007, two were said to have been conducted on the same September day in 2005 when Jefferson Parish, where the Stewart home was located, was under an evacuation order because of Hurricane Katrina . The broker appraisals were conducted by a division of Wells Fargo that charged more than double its costs for them, the court found. It concluded that the charges were an undisclosed fee disguised as a third-party vendor cost and illegally imposed by Wells Fargo. The bank also levied substantial legal fees and failed to credit back to the borrower $1,800 that had been charged for an eviction action but that had been returned by the sheriff because it never occurred. While Wells Fargo claimed that the borrower owed $35,036, the judge said the actual figure was $24,924.10. The judge ordered Wells Fargo to provide a complete loan history on every case pending with her court after April 13, 2007. A Wells Fargo spokesman said the bank \u201cstrongly disagrees with many aspects of the recent bankruptcy rulings in New Orleans and plans to appeal these matters. Wells Fargo continuously works to enhance its bankruptcy procedures to comply with the requirements of the bankruptcy courts throughout the country.\u201d The second illuminating case emerged in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware and involved a problem that lawyers representing troubled borrowers say they often encounter: fees levied after a borrower has satisfied all obligations under a Chapter 13 bankruptcy and the case is discharged. Mortgage lenders argue that their contracts allow them to recover all the fees and costs they incur when a borrower files a Chapter 13 bankruptcy plan, even those not approved by the court and charged after a case is resolved. But borrowers contend that because such charges have not been approved, they should be disallowed. Judge Brendan Linehan Shannon put forward this example: If a lender imposed $5,200 in charges on a borrower to cover weekly property inspections and the court disallowed $4,000 of it, lenders still contend that they have the right to try to collect fees after the case concluded that the court did not approve. \u201cThis cannot be,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cIf the court and the Chapter 13 Trustee fully administer a case through completion of a 60-month Chapter 13 plan, only to have the debtor promptly refile on account of accrued, undisclosed fees and charges on her mortgage, it could fairly be said that we have all been on a fool\u2019s errand for five years.\u201d Finally, borrowers can be cheered by an opinion written this month by Cecilia G. Morris, bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York. The case involved Christopher W. and Bobbi Ann Schuessler, borrowers who had $120,000 of equity in their Burlingham, N.Y., home when their bank, Chase Home Finance, a unit of JPMorgan Chase , moved to begin foreclosure proceedings. The couple had filed for personal bankruptcy protection, which automatically prevents any seizure of their home. But the bank moved for a so-called relief from the bankruptcy stay, and claimed the couple had no equity. The Schuesslers got into trouble because Chase had refused a mortgage payment they tried to make at a local branch. Testimony in the case revealed a Chase policy of accepting mortgage payments in branches from borrowers who are current on their loans but rejecting payments from borrowers operating under bankruptcy protection. The Schuesslers did not know this. When Chase rejected their payment, they briefly fell behind on their mortgage, according to the court documents. Then Chase moved to begin foreclosure proceedings. \u201cWithout informing debtors, Chase Home Finance makes it impossible for JPMorgan Chase Bank branches to accept any payments,\u201d Judge Morris wrote. \u201cIt appeared that Chase Home Finance intended to commence an unwarranted foreclosure action, due to \u2018arrears\u2019 resulting from Chase Home Finance\u2019s handling of the case in its bankruptcy department, rather than any default of the debtors.\u201d COURT documents also state that Chase was unable to show that it had tried to communicate with the borrowers before it began efforts to seize their home. The judge concluded that the way Chase deals with bankruptcy debtors is an abuse of the process. She instructed Chase to pay the borrowers\u2019 legal fees. Thomas Kelly, a Chase spokesman, conceded that the bank had made some mistakes in the Schuessler case, especially the fact that the branch teller had not advised the borrowers where to send their payment when it was rejected. \u201cPayments from customers in bankruptcy require special handling under bankruptcy law so tellers are requested to tell customers to mail in the payment or call the toll-free number on the back of the form,\u201d he said. \u201cIn light of the judge\u2019s concerns we are reviewing our practices.\u201d He also said the bank had followed industry practice in moving to foreclose quickly \u201cso we could meet the guidelines for servicing loans for investors.\u201d \u201cThese cases clearly indicate that bankruptcy courts are no longer being fooled by the maze of fees, firms and flim-flams of the mortgage servicing industry,\u201d said O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer who represents borrowers in Shelby, N.C. \u201cThe servicers and their lawyers should recognize the clear and present danger of these decisions while they still have time to turn their ships around and do the right thing.\u201d", "keyword": "Mortgages;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Housing;Ethics;Foreclosures;Morgan J P Chase & Co;Finances"}
{"id": "ny0146382", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2008/07/27", "title": "Can Hank Paulson Defuse This Crisis?", "abstract": "IF Henry M. Paulson Jr. hadn\u2019t left Wall Street for Washington to become Treasury secretary in 2006, he would still be making tens of millions of dollars a year as the chairman of Goldman Sachs . He would be comfortably zipping around the globe on a corporate jet. He would be presiding over the only big Wall Street firm that hasn\u2019t lost billions on bad debt. He wouldn\u2019t be answering rounds of questions at meandering Congressional hearings. He wouldn\u2019t be at the center of the Bush administration\u2019s struggle to contain a potential financial meltdown the likes of which the world hasn\u2019t seen since the Great Depression. And he certainly wouldn\u2019t be openly (and with a grin) comparing himself to Job, the Bible\u2019s best-known punching bag. Still, he insists that he doesn\u2019t regret leaving his perch atop Goldman Sachs when the president called. \u201cI don\u2019t look back,\u201d he told New York Times editors and reporters in a meeting last Monday. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my first choice, ever. I enjoyed what I was doing. I thought it was the right thing to do.\u201d Whether Mr. Paulson has actually done the right things during his two uneven years in office has been a matter of intense debate in financial and political circles. That debate reached a boiling point last week as Congress moved toward approval of a taxpayer-financed rescue package that Mr. Paulson advocated for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants that appear to be powder kegs. Even Mr. Paulson, for all his Wall Street experience and market savvy, occasionally appears flummoxed by the scale and complexity of the current crisis. \u201cWhen I talk to people, there are a whole lot of them that say: \u2018I don\u2019t like this,\u2019 \u2018I don\u2019t like that,\u2019 \u2018I don\u2019t like the other thing,\u2019 \u201d he said in the Times meeting. \u201cI say: \u2018Neither do I. What idea do you have? What do you think we should do?\u2019 \u201d Mr. Paulson is leading the Bush administration\u2019s struggle to contain an economic contagion stemming from a disintegrating housing sector, volatile financial markets and frozen credit, skyrocketing energy and food prices , widening job losses, and a precipitous fall in the dollar. As he scrambles to find solutions to these myriad and interconnected challenges he has earned plaudits for how quickly he has recently marshaled federal resources. Yet he\u2019s also been roundly criticized as having not grasped the threat and severity of the crisis when it began to snowball about 18 months ago. Moreover, a Treasury secretary who initially preached against \u201cexcessive regulation\u201d of the financial sector is presiding over a sweeping government intervention in the economy, one that conceivably marks the end of a federal deregulatory push that began in the late 1970s and accelerated in subsequent decades. And an administration that has rarely had conflicts with its allies in Congress discovered that the Fannie and Freddie legislation is opposed by most Republicans in the House of Representatives, some of whom claim it smacked of socialism. Critics on the right also accuse Mr. Paulson and Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, of panicking and over-reaching, keeping interest rates low, which they say has fanned inflation and caused the dollar to skid. Facing the possibility of even worse economic news in the months to come, Mr. Paulson \u2014 whose nickname \u201cThe Hammer\u201d comes from his days as an offensive lineman on the Dartmouth football team in the \u201960s \u2014 has won praise on Wall Street and Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats, for his role in fashioning solutions to economic difficulties this year. \u201cHe has handled this crisis extremely well,\u201d said Representative Barney Frank, the acerbic Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and customarily a scathing critic of the Bush administration. \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that he and almost everybody else failed to anticipate some of these problems. We all underestimated it. What I give him credit for is how rapidly he adapted.\u201d But other observers say they still aren\u2019t convinced that Mr. Paulson\u2019s overall performance has been up to speed, seeing it as overly reactive rather than proactive. \u201cI\u2019m afraid there\u2019s much more Treasury could have done much earlier in this process,\u201d says Thomas H. Stanton, an author and expert on mortgage finance. \u201cOnce the financial markets showed signs of panic, Treasury had to act.\u201d And, Mr. Stanton adds, \u201cit\u2019s almost as if Treasury was panicked as well.\u201d Still, say others, Mr. Paulson and his Treasury team can\u2019t shoulder all of the criticism aimed at the federal government over its handling of the financial crisis. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just the Treasury; it was a problem throughout the federal government that everyone was asleep at the wheel,\u201d said Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. \u201cThey let the subprime market and housing bubble expand without any controls. They believed in risk-management models,\u201d he said, thinking that \u201cmarket discipline would be better than regulation. But the lesson we have learned is that self-regulation means no regulation.\u201d WHEN Mr. Paulson accepted the Treasury job, he sought advice from Robert E. Rubin, another former Goldman Sachs chief, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The two sat together in the library of Mr. Rubin\u2019s Manhattan home as Mr. Paulson peppered him with questions about how Washington works. \u201cSome people from business or law go down to Washington and they go with the view that they\u2019ve done very well in whatever they\u2019ve done and they can take that same way of functioning and apply it in Washington,\u201d says Mr. Rubin. \u201cVery often that doesn\u2019t work. Others say, \u2018I\u2019ve had a lot of experience, but this world operates in different ways and I have to learn how this world works.\u2019 That\u2019s a much more effective approach, and that\u2019s my impression of what Hank has done.\u201d In Washington, where politicians and policy wonks can feel in their bones when a Cabinet member does or doesn\u2019t have clout, Mr. Paulson\u2019s stock is riding high. It was the Treasury chief, for example, who persuaded Mr. Bush to go along with a $168 billion economic stimulus package in cooperation with Democrats early this year. As markets fell precipitously in March, he worked with Federal Reserve officials to orchestrate the fire sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase, encouraging the Fed to financially back the deal and open its coffers to other ailing investment firms. Bear Stearns complained that it was being forced to accept a low-ball price for its ailing shares; Mr. Paulson demanded a rock-bottom price so the public didn\u2019t have the impression that Bear\u2019s shareholders were getting a life raft paid for by Main Street taxpayers. And this month, as Mr. Paulson helped hammer out emergency legislation authorizing the federal government to potentially inject hundreds of billions of dollars into Fannie and Freddie if the government-sponsored mortgage makers weaken further, he spent long hours with lawmakers of both parties. Although the White House made clear its distaste for parts of the legislation, especially increased federal spending for homeowners, it said that Mr. Bush was taking the Treasury secretary\u2019s advice not to veto the bill. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat and a critic of the White House, praised Mr. Paulson for changing Mr. Bush\u2019s mind. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the Senate banking committee, is also singing \u201cKumbaya.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve watched him grow in the last year, not in terms of intellectual capacity but in his appreciation of how this town works,\u201d says Mr. Dodd. Then again, in an environment where financiers and public-policy makers have temporarily tried to forge a bipartisan front to address the most severe economic tempest in a generation, few people are willing to speak critically of Mr. Paulson for attribution \u2014 recognizing, they say, a need for a nervous public and queasy financial markets to believe that the federal government is in charge, is capable, and knows exactly how to confront the downturn. \u201cThere\u2019s reluctance to be critical because they understand that to be critical would further erode investor confidence and therefore cause the markets to dive deeper,\u201d says James D. Cox, a corporate law professor at the Duke University School of Law. \u201cWe are at a point where it\u2019s difficult to determine how much of this is being driven downward by psychology or the excesses of the past working themselves out. Most people think it\u2019s excesses of the past, but they hope no one else realizes that.\u201d Moreover, Mr. Paulson has especially endeared himself to the denizens of Wall Street by using federal power and the public purse to rescue the financial industry from its own, outsize mistakes and prevent the meltdown from getting out of control. \u201cHe\u2019s saved their bacon,\u201d Mr. Cox says. Truth be told, Mr. Paulson is not an easy person to stage manage anyway. Colleagues and acquaintances say he can be forceful and candid in his arguments, even if he is sometimes hot-tempered and prone to impulsive table-pounding. While Mr. Paulson\u2019s weak communication skills make him a notoriously hobbled public speaker, in private he still can be a good listener. \u201cHe lacks the fluidity of a Bob Rubin, but he can be very persuasive,\u201d Mr. Dodd says. For his part, Mr. Paulson has the confidence and self-awareness to cop to some of these faults. \u201cI\u2019m not an inspirational leader,\u201d he told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2003. \u201cI\u2019m just not.\u201d IF Mr. Paulson, 62, has been something of a fish out of water in Washington, he was sometimes that way on Wall Street as well. At Goldman Sachs he didn\u2019t golf or drink, and he often left dinners with senior executives at 8:45 p.m. so he could go to bed. He shunned the Hamptons scene, spending free weekends in Barrington, Ill., where he and his wife, Wendy, built a house in 1974, down the road from his mother, Marianna. He has impeccable Republican credentials and raised funds for George W. Bush. Friends are quick to point out that both he and Wendy, a Democrat, are ardent bird watchers and environmentalists. (Mr. Paulson, who wanted to be a forest ranger before he chose a financial career, was chairman of the Nature Conservancy until he took the Treasury job.) He shuns the trappings of great wealth in other ways as well. He donated $100 million of his Goldman stock to a family foundation dedicated to conservation and environmental education and has said he would give the remainder of his fortune, which stood at about $500 million in 2006, to charity when he dies. He told one reporter that he loved his children too much to leave them money. MR. PAULSON was raised as a Christian Scientist in Barrington, studied English at Dartmouth, landed a Pentagon job, and then worked in the Nixon administration as a liaison to the Treasury and the Commerce Department. After that, he attended Harvard Business School and joined Goldman\u2019s Chicago office as an investment banker after graduating. He made an early impression. \u201cHe was very smart, he had the best people in corporate finance working on his team \u2014 they recognized his talent \u2014 and when I went on client visits, the most important business people in Chicago looked to him personally for his advice,\u201d said Stephen Friedman, a former Goldman Sachs chairman who was President Bush\u2019s top economic adviser from 2002 to 2005. Inside Goldman, Mr. Paulson was known for his bulldog intensity and direct manner. \u201cHe used to say that he runs fastest toward problems, and it was true,\u201d said Eric Schwartz, a former Goldman executive who worked closely with Mr. Paulson. \u201cInstead of avoiding conflicts \u2014 which is what a lot of managers do \u2014 he goes headlong into them.\u201d In 1999, he snared Goldman\u2019s top job after leading a palace coup to push out Jon Corzine, his co-senior partner. (Mr. Corzine, a Democrat, is now the governor of New Jersey.) Mr. Paulson presided over Goldman as it successfully made the transition to public company, expanded aggressively into international markets, and shifted from a more advisory-focused business to one that takes more principal risk in trading and investing. He also defied conventional wisdom among critics and competitors who thought the firm was too small to go it alone. After the repeal of federal laws separating commercial and investment banking in 1999, it was widely accepted that new, sprawling megabanks like Citigroup would crush smaller firms like Goldman. But Mr. Paulson repositioned the business as one built on superior brainpower and the generation of heady profits through judicious risk-taking. Today, Goldman stands alone as the only bank that has yet to take huge write-downs in the credit crisis. Goldman, however, was also an integral part of a money-hungry Wall Street culture that helped build, oil and maintain the securitization and derivatives machinery underlying the current mortgage-fueled problems. Mr. Paulson\u2019s tenure wasn\u2019t without scars. His bluntness \u2014 or \u201cbrain-to-mouth,\u201d as he has described it \u2014 has been a liability at times. In 2002, at an investment conference, he said that 15 percent to 20 percent of the people in each of Goldman\u2019s businesses added 80 percent of the value. It violated Goldman\u2019s cultlike approach to team work. He immediately apologized to all the firm\u2019s employees. He was also deeply embroiled in the 2003 ouster of the former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard A. Grasso over complaints about Mr. Grasso\u2019s compensation. And Mr. Paulson sat at Goldman\u2019s helm during the excesses of the dot-com bubble, selling vast numbers of subpar companies that promptly crashed with the market. Goldman wasn\u2019t the worst of the offenders, but it wasn\u2019t an exception either. WHEN Mr. Bush struggled to right his listing administration in 2006, his chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, recruited Mr. Paulson to replace John W. Snow at Treasury. Neither Mr. Snow nor his immediate predecessor, Paul H. O\u2019Neill, was viewed in Washington as having much clout in the Bush administration \u2014 Mr. O\u2019Neill went embarrassingly public with his criticisms after he left office \u2014 and Mr. Paulson demanded that he be given the authority they lacked if he were to take the job. According to administration officials and others close to Mr. Paulson, he asked to be named as the administration\u2019s chief economic official and that he have a direct line to Mr. Bush. Upon taking office, Mr. Paulson had something of a rude awakening. He said he intended to direct a bipartisan effort to overhaul Social Security and Medicare , but Democrats balked. He tried to improve economic relations with China but met with limited success. Although the Chinese let their currency appreciate in value, they continued to resist opening their markets to American goods, services and investments. Meanwhile, the financial crisis has swirled around the White House in ever more violent waves. But each sign of economic trouble brought assurances from regulators, Mr. Paulson and others in the Bush administration that the housing sector was experiencing a \u201ccorrection\u201d or a \u201crepricing of risk\u201d that would work its way through the system without throwing the economy into a steep downturn. Each assurance soon ran aground as more bad economic news poured in. At the same time, Mr. Paulson began echoing the line of many in the financial industry that the real problem facing Wall Street was a welter of cumbersome regulations. Warning that private equity firms and others were raising capital in markets outside the United States, Mr. Paulson said in November 2006 that although he had no wish to lift regulations altogether, \u201cexcessive regulation slows innovation, imposes needless costs on investors and stifles competitiveness and job creation.\u201d Accordingly, Mr. Paulson set up a presidential working group to come up with a new regulatory blueprint that would simplify if not lift government regulations. What he didn\u2019t anticipate was that the financial crisis would redefine that mandate. Last fall, he declared that \u201cthe ongoing housing correction is not ending as quickly as it might have appeared late last year.\u201d He repeatedly said that the problem wasn\u2019t bad credit but market fears, so he encouraged banks to raise more capital and recommended other forms of financial engineering that didn\u2019t gain traction. Most notably, he advocated bundling bad loans into off-balance-sheet entities that theoretically would allow banks to improve their financial standing. The plan was a total flop and yet another signal that Mr. Paulson underestimated the severity of the problem. Another initiative from Mr. Paulson was a program called the Hope Now Alliance, which the administration says has helped hundreds of thousands of homeowners stay in their homes through voluntary renegotiations with banks of mortgage payments. But the markets weren\u2019t reassured. And then came the heart-stopping events this year, beginning with Bear Stearns and mushrooming into the Fannie and Freddie messes. Treasury has been \u201creactive and not proactive,\u201d said George Soros, the financier and philanthropist. \u201cYou can see it on the compromise on Fannie Mae \u2014 it\u2019s a halfway house. It remains part of the problem instead of becoming part of the solution.\u201d Some associates of Mr. Paulson say he is handicapped by a lack of a strong bench at Treasury, although government analysts consider the caliber of the midlevel professionals there to be high. Mr. Paulson wound up relying more in the current crisis on Robert K. Steel, a former Goldman executive who left Treasury abruptly earlier this month to become chief executive at Wachovia Bank. Although there has been speculation that Mr. Steel\u2019s departure hinged on a failure to grasp the problems at Fannie and Freddie and keep Mr. Paulson more fully apprised, people close to the situation at Treasury strongly deny that. Rather, they say, Mr. Steel left in part because he realized he wasn\u2019t going to be promoted to a deputy position at Treasury. Mr. Steel says that he and Mr. Paulson foresaw the economic and housing problems much earlier than they are given credit for, and that they made early forays to reform Fannie and Freddie. \u201cWhen Hank came to Washington, he went to the president and said we\u2019d had a long period of time with no disruptions in the marketplace, and that there was a lot of dry tinder out there,\u201d Mr. Steel recalls in an interview. \u201cI think it\u2019s pretty amazing that in August of \u201906, he began to prepare for financial challenges.\u201d Executives close to Mr. Paulson say the administration, including Mr. Steel, were stunned by the magnitude of Fannie\u2019s and Freddie\u2019s internal financial problems. Mr. Paulson says he was not late to the game. \u201cI\u2019ve had a number of people say to me, \u2018You should have pushed this harder earlier.\u2019 And I almost don\u2019t get it. Because I came down here and from the day I showed up in Washington I looked at that problem; there is no doubt there is systemic risk,\u201d he said when speaking at The New York Times last week. \u201cThe idea of working hard to get a regulator with powers to address some of these systemic issues is important.\u201d Nonetheless, earlier this year Mr. Paulson\u2019s hopes for reform consisted mostly of enhanced oversight of Fannie and Freddie. That effort also ran into Congressional opposition and demands that the two agencies expand their lending activities. Mr. Paulson\u2019s associates say that he has also been frustrated at how hard it has been to convince the White House and other parts of the administration that quick action was essential in the Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie debacles. The Bear Stearns crisis happened so fast that Mr. Paulson didn\u2019t bother following inter-agency protocols and simply briefed Mr. Bush and two top aides on the matter. The Treasury chief has also tried to avoid overstating or understating the dangers ahead. \u201cI think we\u2019ll be dealing with the housing issue in one way or another for months, maybe years after I\u2019ve left,\u201d he said at The Times. But he added that the \u201cbiggest part\u201d of the crisis will be \u201clargely over by year-end\u201d and that progress \u201cisn\u2019t in a straight line.\u201d Mr. Paulson has quietly tried to tell members of Congress that the whole world is watching how America deals with its housing problems, including Fannie and Freddie. Even so, he is quick to say how uncomfortable he is overseeing a huge, government-led intervention in the financial industry. \u201cI would rather not be in the position of asking for extraordinary authorities to support\u201d Fannie and Freddie, Mr. Paulson said during a speech at the New York Public Library. \u201cBut I am playing the hand that I have been dealt.\u201d Some on Wall Street welcome his response. \u201cHe\u2019s done a spectacular job balancing free-market ideology with strong government actions,\u201d said Thomas Nides, chief administrative officer at Morgan Stanley and a Washington veteran. \u201cAnd as a Democrat that\u2019s not an easy thing to say. He\u2019s a Republican and a free market guy \u2014 but he\u2019s not making decisions based purely on ideology.\u201d All of which is why Mr. Paulson has been working overtime to try to contain the financial mess. What the White House isn\u2019t publicly emphasizing is that overseas governments and investors hold a considerable amount of securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. If they sell off those securities it could spark a huge market disruption. To that end, backing up Fannie and Freddie is imperative, says Mr. Paulson. \u201cThe credit facility is like a lender of last resort and what I believe Congress wants to do \u2014 will want to do \u2014 is to increase the confidence in our capital markets and in these organizations,\u201d he said at the Times meeting, discussing the proposed rescue package for the mortgage giants. \u201cIt will be used as a last resort and it will be used to protect the taxpayer.\u201d", "keyword": "Paulson Henry M Jr;United States Politics and Government;Treasury Department;Economic Stimulus Act of 2008;Finances;Economic Conditions and Trends;Banks and Banking;Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated;Housing;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry"}
{"id": "ny0151837", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/08/07", "title": "AOL Weighs on Time Warner; Earnings Fall 26%", "abstract": "Second-quarter earnings at the media conglomerate Time Warner fell 26 percent on declining subscriber fees at its AOL online unit and lower ad revenue at the Time publishing business, the company said Wednesday. It affirmed its full-year financial targets after revenue rose at its film, cable and networks segments. The company, based in New York, said that net income was $792 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with $1.07 billion, or 28 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, profit rose to 24 cents a share, from 22 cents a share last year, when gains from the sale of assets bolstered earnings. The adjusted result was a penny better than analyst expectations, according to Thomson Financial. Revenue rose 5 percent, to $11.56 billion, surpassing Wall Street\u2019s estimate of $11.46 billion. The AOL online business remained a burden on the company\u2019s bottom line. Subscription revenue fell 29 percent, pushing operating income down 36 percent. AOL scrapped fees for its e-mail service in favor of an ad-supported revenue model two years ago. The service still has 8.1 million subscribers. But ad revenue rose only 2 percent, to $530 million, in the quarter. Display advertising fell 14 percent, as automotive, telecommunications and financial services companies curbed spending in a slowing economy, the chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, told investors in a conference call. Mr. Bewkes called the second quarter a low-water mark and said he expected over all and display advertising growth rates at AOL to improve in the second half. Time Warner has made no secret of its plans to sell AOL to focus on content production. Mr. Bewkes said the company had \u201cmade the key decisions that will enable us to run AOL\u2019s access and audience businesses separately beginning in 2009.\u201d The Internet service provider EarthLink has been named as a potential bidder for the dial-up access business. Both Yahoo and Microsoft are thought to be interested in AOL\u2019s Web sites, which could bolster either company\u2019s viewer traffic and ad revenue. Time Warner previously announced it would sell the 84 percent of its cable operations that it still owns to shareholders later this year, giving Time Warner $9.25 billion from a special Time Warner Cable dividend. Mr. Bewkes said the spinoff was on pace to close by year\u2019s end. Shares of Time Warner fell 5 cents, to $14.83, Wednesday. Time Warner still expects earnings from continuing operations for the year of $1.07 to $1.11 a share, excluding any proceeds from the sale of a unit.", "keyword": "Time Warner Inc;AOL;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0096751", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2015/01/22", "title": "Argentine Phone Calls Detail Efforts to Shield Iran", "abstract": "BUENOS AIRES \u2014 Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994. The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. But the intercepted telephone conversations he described before his death outline an elaborate effort to reward Argentina for shipping food to Iran \u2014 and for seeking to derail the investigation into a terrorist attack in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people. The deal never materialized, the complaint says, in part because Argentine officials failed to persuade Interpol to lift the arrest warrants against Iranian officials wanted in Argentina in connection with the attack. The phone conversations are believed to have been intercepted by Argentine intelligence officials. If proved accurate, the transcripts would show a concerted effort by representatives of President Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner\u2019s government to shift suspicions away from Iran in order to gain access to Iranian markets and to ease Argentina\u2019s energy troubles. The contacts came at a time when Iran was seeking to raise its profile in Latin America. In recent years, Iran has forged close ties with leftist governments in Venezuela and Bolivia, while also turning to large commodities producers like Brazil for food imports and as a counterweight to its isolation by the West over its nuclear program . Officials in Mrs. Kirchner\u2019s government have lashed out at Mr. Nisman and his assertions before and after his death, saying that he had been manipulated by Antonio Stiusso, a former senior intelligence official ousted by the president in December. An\u00edbal Fern\u00e1ndez, the presidential secretary, described Mr. Nisman\u2019s complaint on Wednesday as \u201cabsolutely feeble.\u201d The complaint asserts that the negotiators included Argentine intelligence operatives and Mohsen Rabbani, a former Iranian cultural attach\u00e9 in Argentina charged with helping to coordinate the bombing . In one transcript from 2013, an Argentine union leader and influential supporter of Mrs. Kirchner said he was acting on the orders of the \u201cboss woman,\u201d adding that the government was open to sending a team from the national oil company to advance the negotiations. \u201cHe\u2019s very interested in exchanging what they have for grains and beef,\u201d said the union leader, Luis D\u2019El\u00eda, referring to a powerful Argentine minister with whom he had just met. Another intercept shows negotiators talking about ways to place blame for the bombing on right-wing groups and activists. Yet another transcript includes a discussion about swapping not just Argentine grains, but weapons as well, for Iranian oil. \u201cThe publication of Nisman\u2019s complaint is a first step that can contribute to the transparency of an investigation plagued by mystery and frozen for 20 years in a tomb of impunity,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndo Gonz\u00e1lez, an editor at the newspaper El Cronista, wrote on Wednesday, arguing that it would pave the way for new investigators and for Mrs. Kirchner to defend herself. Mr. Nisman asserted for years that Iran had helped plan and finance the bombing , and that its Lebanese ally, the militant group Hezbollah, had carried it out. His body was found at his apartment on Sunday with a gunshot wound to his head in a murky episode that government officials have called a suicide. An investigation by a prosecutor is underway. Some experts, including a former American F.B.I. agent who helped the Argentines in their investigation, have questioned the claims of direct Iranian involvement in the bombing. Still, Argentina had limited relations with Iran for years, partly because of the investigation\u2019s importance to the nation\u2019s large Jewish population. Then, in 2013, Argentina announced that it had reached an agreement with Iran to establish a joint commission to investigate the attack. The move was backed by Argentina\u2019s Congress but faced stiff resistance by some who feared that it would make an impartial investigation unlikely. An Argentine court declared the agreement unconstitutional last year, and the government pledged to appeal. Image Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner Credit Enrique Marcarian/Reuters Just last week, Mr. Nisman, 51, raised tensions further by accusing top Argentine officials, including Mrs. Kirchner, of conspiring with Iran to cover up responsibility for the bombing. He said the effort seemed to begin with a secret meeting in Aleppo, Syria, in January 2011 between H\u00e9ctor Timerman, Argentina\u2019s foreign minister, and Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran\u2019s former foreign minister. At the meeting, the complaint contends, Mr. Timerman informed his Iranian counterpart that Argentina was no longer interested in supporting the investigation into Iran\u2019s possible role in the attack. Instead, Argentina initiated steps toward a d\u00e9tente, with an eye on improving trade between the two countries. After this meeting, Mr. Nisman said a covert team of Argentine negotiators, including Mr. D\u2019El\u00eda, who has publicly asked whether Israel was to blame for the 1994 bombing, tried in vain to exchange Iran\u2019s immunity for oil. Mr. Nisman said the negotiators, including intelligence agents, were given the task of \u201cconstructing a false hypothesis, based on invented evidence, to incriminate new authors\u201d of the 1994 bomb attack. Mr. D\u2019El\u00eda declined to comment on Wednesday night. Mr. Timerman, the foreign minister, has rejected Mr. Nisman\u2019s accusations, emphasizing that Argentina had not asked Interpol to lift the warrants. Mrs. Kirchner\u2019s cabinet chief, Jorge Capitanich, also sought to discredit the findings, saying that Argentina had not imported crude oil from Iran. Separately, Tel\u00e1m, the official news agency, called the complaint a \u201clabyrinth of inconsistencies,\u201d contending that an operative identified by Mr. Nisman as an intelligence agent was not linked to Argentina\u2019s intelligence secretariat. It also said that grain exports were carried out by agribusiness companies, arguing that the government could not have reached a deal without them. While the complaint made it clear that a deal did not reach fruition, contending it fell apart because of frustrations on the Iranian side, other countries have pursued oil-for-food exchanges in the region. In the Caribbean, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, then the president of Venezuela, agreed to supply oil to the Dominican Republic partly in exchange for imports of food like black beans . But a deal with Iran would carry additional risks. A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department in Washington declined to comment on whether oil shipments from Iran to Argentina would be in violation of the sanctions enacted over Iran\u2019s nuclear program. But on its website, the Treasury Department explains that bartering for Iranian oil could result in sanctions . Either way, during the period in which the secret negotiations were unfolding, Iran re-emerged as an important trading partner for Argentina, at a time when the country was seeking new markets for its commodities in the Middle East and Asia. \u201cTrade improved significantly between Argentina and Iran since 2010 with large surpluses in Argentina\u2019s favor, before dropping off in 2014,\u201d said Juan Gabriel Tokatli\u00e1n, an international relations expert at Torcuato di Tella University in Buenos Aires, pointing to annual trade volumes of more than $1 billion a year this decade, compared with negligible levels in the previous decade. Beyond trade, the warming relations between Argentina and Iran extended into the diplomatic realm, according to the intercepted calls. \u201cWe\u2019re doing very well,\u201d Ram\u00f3n H\u00e9ctor Bogado, who is identified in the complaint as an Argentine intelligence operative, said about the signing of the 2013 memorandum on a joint investigation into the bombing. \u201cWe have to work calmly,\u201d Mr. Bogado told a man identified in the complaint as go-between on the Iranian side. \u201cWe have a job to do for the next 10 years.\u201d But in just a few months, the transcripts suggested, the mood had changed as it became clear that Interpol would not lift the arrest warrants on the Iranians. \u201cIt looks like\u201d Argentina\u2019s foreign minister \u201cmessed up,\u201d the go-between for Iran is quoted as saying in the complaint after returning from Tehran in May 2013, when it was becoming clear that Interpol would not remove the warrants.", "keyword": "Argentina;Iran;Alberto Nisman;Oil and Gasoline;Wiretapping Eavesdropping;Judaism;Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner;Spying and Intelligence Agencies;International relations;Bombs"}
{"id": "ny0008111", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/05/01", "title": "Household Spending in Japan Soars at Fastest Pace in 9 Years.", "abstract": "TOKYO (Reuters) \u2014 Japan\u2019s household spending surged in March at the fastest pace in nine years in a sign that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe\u2019s bold efforts to end two decades of stagnation are lifting consumer confidence and setting the stage for an economic revival. Household spending soared 5.2 percent in March from a year earlier in price-adjusted terms, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said on Tuesday, as some individual investors cashed in on stock gains to increase spending on cars and home repairs. The figure far exceeded the median estimate for a 1.8 percent annual increase and was the fastest gain since a 5.3 percent rise in the year to February 2004. Such a big increase in spending is unlikely to be sustained, and some worry that wages have been slow to improve. Still, analysts said they expect consumer spending to continue to expand at a more reasonable pace as investors cash in on stock market gains. A recent run of data has provided encouraging early hope that Mr. Abe\u2019s push for aggressive fiscal and monetary policies can get the country\u2019s economy, the world\u2019s third-largest, moving again. Household spending is crucial to reigniting growth, and in this respect the data should come as a relief to Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan, who hopes to see the economy generate 2 percent inflation in roughly two years. On the whole, the figures suggest that expectations for Mr. Abe\u2019s combination of fiscal spending, monetary stimulus and structural change, known as Abenomics, are having a positive impact on Japanese households, though the corporate sector is lagging. \u201cI expect first-quarter gross domestic product growth to exceed an annualized 2 percent, and if the corporate sector catches up with households, the pace of growth could accelerate,\u201d said Yoshiki Shinke, senior economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute. Mr. Abe\u2019s policy mix has driven the yen to a four-year low against the dollar and led to a 50 percent rally in Japanese share prices from last November, which has helped buoy consumer sentiment.", "keyword": "Consumer behaviour;Japan;Economy"}
{"id": "ny0194212", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/11/17", "title": "Libyan Leader in Italy Seeks Tall, Leggy and Pious", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 The 200 women who answered a Rome modeling agency\u2019s advertisement for tall, attractive party guests thought they would be attending an elegant soir\u00e9e on Sunday. They were \u2014 only the host turned out to be the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi , and instead of hors d\u2019oeuvres he offered them copies of the Koran and urged them to convert to Islam, the Italian news media reported Monday. The women, all between the ages of 18 and 35, assembled in a Rome hotel before being screened by both metal detectors and the fashion police, who turned away anyone in a miniskirt or provocative clothing, according to Paola Lo Mele, a journalist for the ANSA news agency, who answered the modeling agency\u2019s request and went undercover to the event. The women were each paid $75 to attend. Colonel Qaddafi and other world leaders are in Rome for the World Summit on Food Security of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The women who made the cut were bused to a villa in Rome, ANSA reported, where they waited an hour, unsure of what was to follow, before the famously late Libyan leader arrived. \u201cAll the girls expected a party with a gala dinner,\u201d Ms. Lo Mele reported. Instead, Colonel Qaddafi \u201cmade a 45-minute speech on Islam and women\u2019s role in Islam.\u201d He gave the women a copy of the Koran and said that he would pay for them to visit Mecca, the duty of every Muslim, if they converted. \u201cIt was a bit of an indoctrination session,\u201d Ms. Lo Mele added. Colonel Qaddafi, who has ruled Libya since 1969, also gave the women a copy of his Green Book, which outlines his political philosophy. Last year, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi signed an agreement to give Libya $5 billion over 20 years to compensate for Italy \u2019s colonial occupation of the country in the early 20th century. In exchange, Libya will give Italy the chance to secure oil contracts and will crack down on illegal immigrants, who often go through Libya on their way to Europe from Africa. In June , at Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s request, the equal opportunities minister of Italy assembled hundreds of Italian women from different fields to have an audience with the Libyan leader when he visited Rome, one of his first visits to the West since economic sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2003. This week, Colonel Qaddafi is expected to hold similar events with other groups of women, ANSA reported.", "keyword": "Qaddafi Muammar el-;Islam;Models (Professional);Italy"}
{"id": "ny0145479", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/10/15", "title": "Novel About India Wins the Man Booker Prize", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Aravind Adiga, 33, won the 40th Man Booker prize on Tuesday night for his debut novel, \u201cThe White Tiger,\u201d a vivid exploration of India \u2019s class struggle told through the story of a village boy who becomes the chauffeur to a rich man. Mr. Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the award; Ben Okri was 32 when he won for \u201cThe Famished Road\u201d in 1991. Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year\u2019s panel of judges, praised Mr. Adiga\u2019s novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of \u201cextraordinarily readable page-turners.\u201d However, Mr. Adiga\u2019s book had prevailed, he said, \u201cbecause the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.\u201d Mr. Adiga said his book was an \u201cattempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India \u2014 the voice of the colossal underclass.\u201d \u201cThis voice was not captured,\u201d he added, \u201cand I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually.\u201d When he accepted the award, Mr. Adiga dedicated it to \u201cthe people of New Delhi where I lived and where I wrote this book.\u201d When asked what he would do with the money, Mr. Adiga joked, \u201cThe first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in.\u201d The Man Booker prize, Britain \u2019s best-known and most generous literary award, is given annually to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth nations and is accompanied by a check for \u00a350,000 \u2014 about $86,000 \u2014 as well as an inevitable increase in sales. This year\u2019s list of finalists was one of the least star-studded in recent years. It included two first-time novelists, and several of the favorites were snubbed by judges. Joseph O\u2019Neill\u2019s critically acclaimed \u201cNetherland\u201d was omitted from the short list, as was \u201cThe Enchantress of Florence\u201d by Salman Rushdie. As a result, bookmakers were divided over the likely winner, oscillating between Mr. Adiga and the Irish writer Sebastian Barry, 53, whose book \u201cThe Secret Scripture\u201d is the story of an Irish patient in a mental hospital sharing her shocking family history with her psychiatrist. The other books on the shortlist were \u201cSea of Poppies\u201d by Amitav Ghosh, \u201cThe Clothes on Their Backs\u201d by Linda Grant, \u201cThe Northern Clemency\u201d by Philip Hensher and \u201cA Fraction of the Whole\u201d by Steve Toltz.", "keyword": "Books and Literature;Man Booker Prize;India;Adiga Aravind;Great Britain;Writing and Writers;Awards Decorations and Honors;White Tiger The (Book)"}
{"id": "ny0224930", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2010/10/05", "title": "Brad Smith of the Jets Is Man of Many Talents", "abstract": "In nearly three decades of coaching, Mike Westhoff has taught thousands of players with hundreds of different skill sets. He thought he had seen them all. At least until he met Brad Smith. The Jets list Smith as a wide receiver, which is a laughably incomplete description, as misleading as the Swiss Army knife, which has a dozen or so functions but is named after only one. Technically, Smith is a receiver. But he also returns kickoffs, blocks on punts, plays quarterback, runs the option, covers kickoffs, covers punts and forces opponents to spend extra time preparing for his varied deployments each Sunday. \u201cBrad leaves,\u201d Westhoff said last week, \u201cI\u2019m leaving.\u201d Westhoff, one of the N.F.L.\u2019s foremost special-teams coaches, remains a tough, no-nonsense coach, both brutal in his criticism and sparing in his praise. That is why players hold so much respect for him. So his compliments of Smith last week spoke volumes. He called Smith \u201ca good football player\u201d \u2014 which ranks among Westhoff\u2019s highest compliments \u2014 who \u201cenables us to do a lot of things.\u201d He said that Smith performed so well in so many roles, all of which require film study and meetings, that he often felt fatigued. Westhoff termed Smith tough and versatile and credited him with setting up Eric Smith for a blocked punt this season. \u201cIf you saw what Brad Smith did, wow,\u201d Westhoff said, adding: \u201cBrad Smith gives us a lot of weapons. We haven\u2019t used them all yet. But we\u2019ve got \u2019em.\u201d Those words rang true Sunday, when LaDainian Tomlinson, Mark Sanchez and the Jets\u2019 defense \u2014 the usual suspects \u2014 stole the headlines, and Smith turned in a typically understated performance that was equally important in a 38-14 victory over the Buffalo Bills. Smith\u2019s most obvious contribution came midway through the third quarter, with the Jets leading, 17-7. He took a direct snap near the goal line and rolled right, with five confused defenders in pursuit. There was mostly open space between Smith and the end zone. He took both his time and then two steps forward, indicating he might run before firing a tight spiral to tight end Dustin Keller, who caught the ball for a 3-yard score that put the game out of reach. It was Smith\u2019s first N.F.L. touchdown pass in five seasons, but certainly not his first score. Previously, he caught two touchdown passes, ran for another touchdown and returned a kickoff for a touchdown in the A.F.C. championship game last season. After the Jets dismantled the Bills, Coach Rex Ryan joked that he had a quarterback controversy on his hands. Against the Bills, Smith returned the opening kickoff 38 yards and had 84 return yards over all. He carried the ball three times \u2014 an option in the first quarter, a reverse option in the second quarter and an end around in the fourth quarter \u2014 for 11 yards. His presence forced the Bills\u2019 defense to take a timeout in the first half. He also made a tackle on a kickoff return. Smith took the field for every Jets special-teams play, his presence as indispensable as Tomlinson, or Sanchez, but with less fanfare. The Jets expected his versatility when they drafted Smith in the fourth round in 2006 out of Missouri, where he became the first quarterback in N.C.A.A. history to pass for more than 8,000 yards and rush for more than 4,000 yards. On Sunday, Smith talked about the friends and family from his hometown, Youngstown, Ohio, who traveled to the game. He detailed his touchdown pass to Keller (his first instinct was to run, but the play called for a pass). But when the subject turned to his job, or jobs, as the case may be, he shrugged. \u201cMy job is, when I step on the field, to do what I\u2019m asked to do,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThat\u2019s my focus, and that\u2019s my goal, just to do my job well.\u201d If that continues, Smith will keep two people employed. Him and Westhoff. EXTRA POINTS Cornerback Darrelle Revis and linebacker Calvin Pace worked out Monday, and Rex Ryan is expecting both to play against Minnesota next Monday night ... Mark Sanchez has thrown eight touchdown passes with zero turnovers in the past three games. ... The Jets released wide receivers David Clowney and Patrick Turner. They re-signed defensive tackle Howard Green and will use the other spot for wide receiver Santonio Holmes, who returns this week from suspension.", "keyword": "New York Jets;Smith Brad;Football"}
{"id": "ny0116736", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/10/16", "title": "Euro Here to Stay", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union arrived just as a realization was dawning that Europe\u2019s single currency \u2014 the Union\u2019s most ambitious project \u2014 had survived three years of incessant financial turmoil and was not going to break up. But having narrowly avoided an acrimonious divorce and the loss of some of its errant children, the euro zone risks a future as an unequal, loveless marriage with frequent rows and the prospect of separate bedrooms. Two things have become clearer in the past few weeks that had been widely disputed: Contrary to prevailing opinion earlier this year, the euro is here to stay; and it could very well keep all its 17 members and add more. But the euro zone has not yet found a way out of the doldrums of economic stagnation, unemployment and social dislocation that are widening the gap between northern and southern Europe and fueling euro-skeptical populist movements in many countries. Three events have changed the outlook for the euro area. First, the European Central Bank put a floor under the euro zone by agreeing last month to buy unlimited quantities of bonds of any troubled member state that accepted the conditions of a bailout program. The E.C.B. president, Mario Draghi, made it clear that the bank would use all its tools to defeat anyone betting on a breakup of the monetary union. Second, the euro zone\u2019s permanent rescue fund became operative last week after months of wrangling and legal challenges, providing a backstop of \u20ac500 billion, or $645 billion, for countries that risk losing access to capital markets. Third, the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, signaled by visiting Athens that the Union\u2019s most powerful economy wanted Greece to stay in the euro area; she drew a line after months of debate in Berlin, notably in her own coalition, about ejecting the Greeks. As a result of those developments, a flood of scenarios for the explosion and breakup of the euro, which had spewed for months from banks and political risk consulting firms in London and in New York, has suddenly dried up. In currency markets, short bets against the euro have subsided. Bond yields have fallen and bank shares have recovered. Spanish banks are having to borrow less from the E.C.B. as some of them regain access to the money markets. In another indication of a changed climate, economists at Citigroup have revised their view that Greece would almost certainly leave the euro, saying that important euro zone players seem to have decided that a Greek exit would do more harm than good. The U.S. bank lowered the probability of a Greek exit to 60 percent from 90 percent, although it still believes Greece is more likely than not to leave the euro within 12 to 18 months, arguing that European governments are unlikely to agree to waive part of the country\u2019s huge debt to make it sustainable. Do not write off a write-off, though \u2014 especially if it can be delayed until after the German general election next year. It may then seem a more rational, albeit unpopular, option than a disorderly Greek default and exit, with all the disastrous economic and social consequences for Greece and Europe. One voice last week contrasted with the easing of European existential anxiety: The International Monetary Fund said the Union\u2019s policy response remained \u201ccritically incomplete, exposing the euro area to a downward spiral of capital flight, breakup fears and economic decline.\u201d In its role as a teller of uncomfortable truths, the I.M.F. is trying to jolt the euro zone, especially Germany, into moving ahead faster with a banking union, as well as closer fiscal integration and an altering of the policy mix between austerity and growth. In a candid acknowledgement, the I.M.F. said it had underestimated the damage to growth wrought by budget cutting and urged Europe to ease up on austerity, drawing an indignant rebuff from the German finance minister. The shift in perceptions about the euro zone is more noticeable in the financial markets than on the streets, where the effects of the sovereign debt crisis will continue to cause damage for years to come. Public spending cuts and recession are tearing at the fabric of societies in places like Athens and Madrid, casting many middle-class families and retirees into poverty and more unemployed and young people into precarious situations. The crisis has changed the balance of power in Europe, giving Germany and its north European allies a superior say in euro zone decision-making that is commensurate with their credit ratings, while making southern states weaker and more dependent. A two-speed Europe, in which everyone was heading in the same direction at different paces, may now be turning into a two-tier Europe, with the euro zone becoming a tighter inner core with its own budget and stricter rules, while Britain, Sweden and some others form a looser outer circle. Germany, determined to limit its taxpayers\u2019 liabilities for other euro states, has rejected the issuing of common euro zone bonds or providing a guarantee for joint bank deposits. The German, Dutch and Finnish finance ministers are trying to rule out any retroactive use of euro zone rescue funds. Yet Berlin supports the emerging idea of a separate euro zone budget to cope with asymmetric economic shocks. Its backing for a single banking supervisor will surely open the door to some greater risk mutualization, where members receive dividends for doing business in a cooperative setting, in the longer term. As the euro area becomes a more integrated federal bloc, E.U. members outside the single currency zone face awkward choices. Those like Poland, Hungary and Latvia that aspire to join the monetary union as soon as possible are trying to hug the euro zone as tightly as possible, demanding seats and votes in a new banking supervisory authority that makes decisions on banks operating on their soil. Poland tried unsuccessfully last week to push into the inner sanctum of euro zone finance ministers by offering to join a group of E.U. states establishing a financial transaction tax in return for a seat at the Eurogroup table \u2014 the regular meetings of finance ministers of the euro zone countries. It was told only euro members could attend. Britain, which has no intention of joining either the euro or the banking union, is demanding a veto right to protect its large financial sector from decisions taken by the others, while aiming to use closer euro zone integration as an opportunity to negotiate a loosening of its own European ties. Sweden, with a pro-euro political establishment that lost a referendum on joining the currency in 2003, seems more uneasy and conflicted about the euro zone\u2019s moving ahead without it. All of this means Europe faces a tense period of reshaping that will severely test its Nobel-recognized powers of building peace and prosperity on a fractious continent. Paul Taylor is a Reuters correspondent.", "keyword": "European Monetary Union;Euro (Currency);European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- )"}
{"id": "ny0224249", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2010/11/15", "title": "Arsenal Nudges Ahead of Manchester Into 2nd Place", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Arsenal climbed into second place in the Premier League on Sunday as goals by Bacary Sagna and Cesc F\u00e0bregas secured a 2-1 victory at Everton. Sagna scored a rare goal in the 36th minute when the defender smashed a high shot in at the near post from 10 yards. F\u00e0bregas doubled Arsenal\u2019s lead three minutes into the second half after exchanging passes with Marouane Chamakh before steering a low shot into the far corner. Everton applied pressure in the final 20 minutes and reduced the deficit in the 88th minute when midfielder Tim Cahill bundled in from close range. On Saturday, Nemanja Vidic preserved Manchester United \u2019s unbeaten start to the season with a late equalizer at Aston Villa. Vidic\u2019s 85th-minute header secured a 2-2 tie for United at Villa, four minutes after Federico Macheda\u2019s powerful strike started Manchester\u2019s comeback. United had conceded two goals in four minutes earlier, with Ashley Young scoring from the penalty spot and Marc Albrighton netting from close range in the 76th minute. \u201cWe came back well, but it was too late and we shouldn\u2019t have been in that position,\u201d United Manager Alex Ferguson said. \u201cOur passing was poor. Normally we can control the match. We didn\u2019t control it.\u201d Liverpool wasn\u2019t so fortunate, with goals from Ricardo Fuller and Kenwyne Jones earning a comprehensive 2-0 victory for Stoke that sent the Reds back into the bottom half of the standings. Also Saturday, Gareth Bale\u2019s two goals led Tottenham to a 4-2 victory that put the team three points behind fourth-place Manchester City, which slumped to its second successive 0-0 tie at home, to Birmingham. Manchester City has won just one of its last five league matches. Tottenham had not won in the league for a month as it struggled to cope with campaigns at home and in the Champions League. But Gareth Bale headed in Rafael Van der Vaart\u2019s corner kick in the 16th, and Roman Pavlyuchenko netted four minutes before the break after missing a penalty kick. Peter Crouch added a third in the 68th minute \u2014 the England striker\u2019s first league goal since May \u2014 and Bale scored his second from Alan Hutton\u2019s cross in the 75th minute. Italian Serie A Mauro Zarate and Sergio Floccari scored a goal apiece to give Lazio a 2-0 victory over Napoli on Sunday. Lazio lost the Serie A league leadership after losing its last two matches, but was in control throughout the game. Zarate opened the scoring in the 15th minute, and Floccari doubled the lead from Zarate\u2019s pass in the 61st minute. On Saturday, Francesco Totti\u2019s first-half injury time penalty let A.S. Roma tie Juventus, 1-1. Totti netted his first league goal of the season after Vincenzo Iaquinta opened the scoring 10 minutes earlier. German Bundesliga Bayer Leverkusen kept pace with league leader Borussia Dortmund with a hard-fought 1-0 victory at St. Pauli to leapfrog Mainz for second place. Renato Augusto scored the winner in the 81st minute for Leverkusen, which stood seven points behind Dortmund. Mainz lost, 1-0, at home against 10-man Hanover and fell to third behind Leverkusen on goals scored. Fourth-place Eintracht Frankfurt also lost ground after being held to a 0-0 tie by Werder Bremen. French Ligue 1 Moussa Sow\u2019s hat trick helped Lille rout Caen, 5-2, and climb to within a point of leader Brest in the standings on Saturday.", "keyword": "Arsenal Football Club;English Premier League;Sagna Bacary;Fabregas Cesc;Everton;Manchester United"}
{"id": "ny0135099", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/04/17", "title": "Did Ending Regulation Help Fliers?", "abstract": "Thirty years ago, airline deregulation was supposed to fulfill two main goals: spurring competition and bringing down airfares. Now the number of airlines may be shrinking, as the planned merger between Delta and Northwest is likely to encourage other big airlines to pair off. Reduced competition will probably mean higher fares, particularly as the airlines shrink their fleets and cut flights to reduce costs. All of which raises anew the question: Has deregulation really worked out? By some measures, it has. By others, not so much. Before the industry was deregulated in 1978, there were 10 big carriers \u2014 referred to as trunk lines, they controlled 90 percent of the American market \u2014 and 8 smaller regional carriers. The airlines were tightly controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regulated routes and set fares that guaranteed airlines a 12 percent return on flights that were 55 percent full. Service was limited. American, for example, flew to only 39 cities, and Continental had to wait eight years for approval to fly from San Diego to Denver. Discounts were rare, too. When some airlines tried to offer cheaper fares in 1974 for charter flights, the president of the Air Transport Association trade group said it would be \u201cthe beginning of the end of the nation\u2019s air transportation system as we know it today.\u201d It is a much different industry today, but not all of it is better. Flying is less expensive, as fares have fallen steadily, adjusted for inflation, and there are more flights to more cities. The barrier to entry is lower. Over the last 30 years, more than 150 airlines have sought bankruptcy protection or disappeared, but more keep springing up as investors continue to put hope over experience, said Denis O\u2019Connor, managing director with AlixPartners, a restructuring firm. \u201cPeople don\u2019t understand how easy it is to start an airline,\u201d Mr. O\u2019Connor said, because of a ready supply of pilots and other employees, as well as used airplanes. \u201cWhy would you put capital in something if you can\u2019t make a go of it? Southwest is an example of why you would.\u201d But the industry incurred losses of more than $30 billion from 2001 to 2006 and has gleaned only scarce profits since then. Persistently high fuel costs are driving airlines into bankruptcy court, or one another\u2019s arms, something proponents of deregulation did not foresee, said Alfred E. Kahn, who led the air board when deregulation took place. The Delta-Northwest merger plan, announced Monday, may lead to a deal between United and Continental, which would push other leading carriers like American to pursue partners of their own. Meanwhile, smaller carriers like Aloha and Frontier have sought bankruptcy protection in recent weeks. As anybody who has flown recently knows, the level of comfort and reliability today bears no relation to that of the regulated days. The naysayers at the time of deregulation predicted that \u201cjobs would be gone, cities would lose service, and customers would pay higher fares,\u201d said Mark H. Rose, a professor of history at Florida Atlantic University and a co-author of \u201cThe Best Transportation System in the World,\u201d which examined deregulation of airlines, trucking and railroads. They were partly right. After a big industry buildup through the 1990s, more than 100,000 jobs have been lost since the beginning of the decade. Former hub airports like Pittsburgh and St. Louis are now far less busy as hometown airlines have merged with other carriers and their replacements have pulled back service. Fares have fallen, on average, but they often rise when an airline leaves a city. What the architects of deregulation did not predict at the time was the rise of frequent-flier programs and the hub-and-spoke system. Both have the effect of a kind of regulation, since they create incentives for consumers to stick with one airline, rather than shop solely on price. And fortress hubs, as their name implies, were intended to keep competitors at bay, giving the dominant airline in the city more control over pricing. Alliances between big carriers are meant to offer bigger route networks, but they also provide another reason for travelers to shop around less. All that would seem to spell less competition, not more. But Southwest\u2019s transformation from a Texas puddle jumper to the biggest airline in terms of domestic traffic (at least until the Delta-Northwest merger is completed) would not have happened without deregulation. That airline\u2019s evolution is what some experts point to as the best proof of why deregulation, for all its troubles, ultimately is better than a regulated environment. \u201cThis is the free market at work, and we\u2019re not used to it,\u201d said Mo Garfinkle, a lawyer and a longtime airline industry consultant. \u201cThe idea of deregulation was to allow entry, whether it was successful or not.\u201d Mr. Garfinkle, who has advised many airlines involved in merger talks, says he believes that the industry is only now winding up the first phase of deregulation, in which industry practices had to be established. Indeed, the federal government still regulates safety and the air traffic control system, and it steps in whenever either seems threatened, as passengers were reminded when American, Southwest and others grounded hundreds of flights this past month to reinspect aircraft. On Wednesday, the Transportation Department announced two ideas for solving perennial delays at La Guardia Airport. One would call for the government to reduce the number of flights; the other would have airlines rein themselves in by selling some of the slots that give them the right to fly there. Both ideas, now up for discussion, are meant to encourage growth by new airlines, which might otherwise have a hard time establishing service from La Guardia, said D. J. Gribbin, the department\u2019s general counsel. \u201cIf you block out a market, you block out competition,\u201d Mr. Gribbin said. \u201cThis benefits new entries.\u201d Beyond that, the next phase of deregulation will take place when airlines are truly globalized, flying freely inside other countries\u2019 borders as well as their own, Mr. Garfinkle said. The merger between Delta and Northwest would be a major step toward that end, given their broad American network and extensive list of cities in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, he said. However, the prospect of American carriers trying to compete against healthier foreign airlines, some of them still government-owned, is daunting to James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota, who heads the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. \u201cIt\u2019s a very bad idea,\u201d said Mr. Oberstar, whose state is home to Northwest\u2019s headquarters. He said he expected \u201ca cascade of carriers finding partners\u201d if the Delta-Northwest combination is allowed to go forward, leading to fewer choices and higher prices for consumers. Even if that happens, Mr. Garfinkle says he doubts that Congress will take up any serious re-regulation efforts. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to re-regulate fares, and you\u2019re not going to re-regulate service,\u201d Mr. Garfinkle said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something where you can be half pregnant.\u201d But Mr. Rose says members of Congress will have to discuss re-regulation, if only to seem as if they are looking out for their constituents\u2019 interests. No city or state with an airline hub wants to see it vanish. \u201cIt\u2019s like losing a major league ball club,\u201d he said. Airline hubs are \u201cthe kind of things you need to be major league, for your corporations and for yourself.\u201d", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Northwest Airlines Corp;Air Transport Assn;Frontier Airlines Inc"}
{"id": "ny0052013", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/10/15", "title": "C.D.C. Says It Should Have Responded Faster to the Dallas Ebola Case", "abstract": "DALLAS \u2014 The director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that the agency planned a more robust response to any future Ebola cases in American hospitals, saying for the first time that quicker and more concerted action on its part might have kept a Dallas nurse from becoming infected by the virus. The acknowledgment came on a day when a nurses\u2019 union released a scathing statement that it said was composed by nurses at the Dallas hospital where the nurse, Nina Pham, 26, contracted Ebola. The statement told of \u201cconfusion and frequently changing policies and protocols,\u201d inadequate protection against contamination and spotty training. \u201cWere the protocols breached?\u201d asked Deborah Burger, a co-president of the union, National Nurses United, reading the statement. \u201cThe nurses say there were no protocols.\u201d Officials at the hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, defended their efforts to \u201cprovide a safe working environment,\u201d but said they would review any concerns raised by nurses. C.D.C. officials, responding earlier to the broader criticisms about their handling of the Ebola cases in Dallas, pledged to dispatch within hours a newly created response team to any hospital that had a confirmed case of Ebola, and they increased the amount of expertise, oversight and training at the hospital where the nurse treating Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, who had Ebola, became infected. Image Nina Pham is being treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where she works. Credit Jennifer Joseph They have sent some of the world\u2019s leading experts on Ebola to Dallas, as well as two nurses from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta who cared for Ebola patients safely and who will train hospital staff members on infection control and the use of protective gear. \u201cI wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient, the first patient, was diagnosed,\u201d Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said at a news conference Tuesday. \u201cThat might have prevented this infection. But we will do that from today onward with any case, anywhere in the U.S.\u201d He added, \u201cWe could have sent a more robust hospital infection-control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from Day 1.\u201d Officials said they were now monitoring daily 76 health care workers at Presbyterian Hospital who treated or cleaned up after Mr. Duncan or might have handled blood specimens from the time he was admitted to the hospital on Sept. 28 to his death last Wednesday. \u201cThere were 76 people who had some level of contact and therefore are being actively monitored,\u201d Dr. Frieden said. An additional 48 people were already being watched because they had possible contact with Mr. Duncan before he was hospitalized. One contact of Ms. Pham was also being monitored. The total under observation is now 125. Is the U.S. Prepared for an Ebola Outbreak? A look at the government agencies and private entities that were involved in the case of the first person found to have Ebola in the United States. Mr. Duncan, a Liberian who arrived in America last month, was initially sent home from the hospital although he had a fever and reported coming from Africa. His case was diagnosed on Sept. 30, two days after he was admitted and put in isolation. At some point, Ms. Pham contracted Ebola after having extensive interactions with him. The hospital said she was in \u201cgood condition,\u201d and for the first time on Tuesday, Ms. Pham made a public statement, as the hospital said the costs of her care would be covered and would not be a financial burden on her or her family. \u201cI\u2019m doing well and want to thank everyone for their kind wishes and prayers,\u201d she said. At the same time, Dr. Frieden said that the 48 people whom officials started monitoring two weeks ago had passed a critical period and were now unlikely to contract the disease. They were more than 14 days into the 21-day maximum incubation period. One of them is Mr. Duncan\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, Louise Troh, 54, who has been under state-ordered quarantine with her 13-year-old son and two other young men. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re O.K.,\u201d she said in a phone interview from the house where she and the others have been staying, in an undisclosed location. \u201cI\u2019m healthy. Everybody\u2019s fine. God is in control.\u201d The Rev. George Mason, Ms. Troh\u2019s pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church, drove on Tuesday to pick up an application for a new apartment for Ms. Troh. He said she would be starting over with almost nothing as her old apartment was shut by officials and decontaminated. \u201cShe lost everything,\u201d Mr. Mason said. \u201cIt\u2019s like she had a fire.\u201d Officials with the nurses\u2019 union that issued the statement Tuesday night said it had been prepared by Presbyterian nurses who had knowledge of the care provided to Mr. Duncan and to Ms. Pham. They refused to identify the nurses or their departments, saying the Presbyterian nurses feared retaliation, and they refused to say whether any nurses who prepared the statement had been involved in treating Mr. Duncan. The Presbyterian nurses are not members of the National Nurses United union. How Hospital Workers Are Supposed to Treat Ebola Safely A look at the C.D.C. guidance on protective clothing for workers treating the disease. The statement asserted that when Mr. Duncan arrived by ambulance with Ebola symptoms at the hospital\u2019s emergency room on Sept. 28, he \u201cwas left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present.\u201d At some point, it said, a nurse supervisor demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit \u201cbut faced resistance from other hospital authorities.\u201d The nurses who first interacted with Mr. Duncan wore generic gowns, three pairs of gloves with no taping around the wrists, and surgical masks with the option of a shield, the statement said. \u201cThe gowns they were given still exposed their necks, the part closest to their face and mouth,\u201d the nurses said. \u201cThey also left exposed the majority of their heads and their scrubs from the knees down. Initially they were not even given surgical bootees nor were they advised the number of pairs of gloves to wear.\u201d The statement said hospital officials allowed nurses who interacted with Mr. Duncan at a time when he was vomiting and had diarrhea to continue their normal duties, \u201ctaking care of other patients even though they had not had the proper personal protective equipment while providing care for Mr. Duncan that was later recommended by the C.D.C.\u201d Told of the statement, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C. said the agency would not be looking at the situation from a regulatory perspective. \u201cThat oversight comes from the health department at the state level,\u201d the spokeswoman said. Dr. Frieden said the agency\u2019s Ebola response teams would be deployed anywhere in the country starting on Tuesday. \u201cWe will put a team on the ground within hours, with some of the world\u2019s leading experts in how to take care of and protect health care workers from Ebola infection,\u201d he said, adding it would include specialists in other fields. It was unclear what, if any, monitoring the C.D.C. performed of the precautions hospital workers took as they went in and out of Mr. Duncan\u2019s room. Officials said Ms. Pham had worn a gown, mask and other protective gear when she came into contact with Mr. Duncan, but they said she appeared to have breached safety protocol, possibly when removing the protections. The Texas health commissioner, David L. Lakey, said she was working with investigators to try to pinpoint when she may have been exposed.", "keyword": "Ebola;CDC;Thomas Eric Duncan;Dallas;Protective Clothing;Hospital;Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital;Nina Pham;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0022269", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2013/09/07", "title": "Knicks\u2019 Smith Given Five-Game Suspension", "abstract": "J. R. Smith will serve a five-game suspension next season for violating the N.B.A.\u2019s antidrug policy, adding one more blemish to a checkered r\u00e9sum\u00e9. The N.B.A. announced the suspension Friday afternoon and did not disclose details, in accordance with league policy. The length of the suspension indicates that Smith tested positive for marijuana use for a third time. A third positive test for marijuana triggers an automatic five-game suspension. No other drug-policy violations in the N.B.A. carry a suspension of that length. The Knicks declined to comment on the matter. Smith\u2019s absence might be even longer than five games. He was in jeopardy of missing opening night, based on his rehabilitation schedule from a July knee operation. Under league rules, his suspension will start once he is medically cleared to play. The Knicks open the season Oct. 30 against the Milwaukee Bucks at Madison Square Garden. Games against the Chicago Bulls and the Minnesota Timberwolves follow, before two games against the Charlotte Bobcats. Smith, 27, was the sixth man of the year last season and the Knicks\u2019 second-leading scorer, averaging a career-best 18.1 points per game. His considerable skills have always come with a barrel of caveats, for infractions both on and off the court. Image J. R. Smith will be suspended five games. Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press In April, Smith drew a one-game suspension for elbowing Boston\u2019s Jason Terry in the chin in a playoff game. Without Smith, the Knicks faltered, blowing their chance at a sweep. Smith was never the same after he returned, and his erratic play contributed to the Knicks\u2019 six-game loss to the Indiana Pacers in the second round. At the time, Smith was also drawing scrutiny for his late-night activities, which were underscored when the singer Rihanna, on her Instagram account, called out Smith for \u201cclubbing every night\u201d during the playoffs. It was not until July that the Knicks revealed that Smith had been playing on an injured left knee, which surely contributed to his struggles. Smith had surgery on July 16 to repair damage to his patella tendon and a tear in the lateral meniscus. His recovery schedule was estimated at 12 to 16 weeks. Four days before the operation, the Knicks re-signed Smith to a three-year, $17.95 million contract. Smith continued to raise eyebrows this summer with a series of hair-color changes \u2014 red at one point, blond at another \u2014 showing off the new looks on his Twitter account. Last weekend, Smith all but guaranteed a Knicks championship in 2014, telling children at a summer camp, \u201cI\u2019m 100 percent sure.\u201d More often, Smith has made headlines for his volatile behavior and legal infractions. He has served suspensions for reckless driving (seven games), fighting on the court (10 games) and fighting at a nightclub (three games). His driver\u2019s license has been suspended multiple times. In the 2011-12 season, his first with the Knicks, Smith drew a $25,000 fine from the league for posting a lewd photo on his Twitter account. The latest five-game suspension suggests that Smith has been cited at least twice for marijuana use. Under N.B.A. policy, a first infraction forces a player to enroll in a league program. A second infraction \u2014 typically, either a positive test or an arrest \u2014 triggers a $25,000 fine. First and second infractions are not announced by the league.", "keyword": "Basketball;Knicks;J R Smith;Drug Abuse;Doping"}
{"id": "ny0008770", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/05/14", "title": "North Jersey Data Center Industry Blurs Utility-Real Estate Boundaries", "abstract": "The trophy high-rises on Madison, Park and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan have long commanded the top prices in the country for commercial real estate, with yearly leases approaching $150 a square foot. So it is quite a Gotham-size comedown that businesses are now paying rents four times that in low, bland buildings across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Why pay $600 or more a square foot at unglamorous addresses like Weehawken, Secaucus and Mahwah? The answer is still location, location, location \u2014 but of a very different sort. Companies are paying top dollar to lease space there in buildings called data centers, the anonymous warrens where more and more of the world\u2019s commerce is transacted, all of which has added up to a tremendous boon for the business of data centers themselves. The centers provide huge banks of remote computer storage, and the enormous amounts of electrical power and ultrafast fiber optic links that they demand. Prices are particularly steep in northern New Jersey because it is also where data centers house the digital guts of the New York Stock Exchange and other markets. Bankers and high-frequency traders are vying to have their computers, or servers, as close as possible to those markets. Shorter distances make for quicker trades, and microseconds can mean millions of dollars made or lost. When the centers opened in the 1990s as quaintly termed \u201cInternet hotels,\u201d the tenants paid for space to plug in their servers with a proviso that electricity would be available. As computing power has soared, so has the need for power, turning that relationship on its head: electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary. A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker \u2014 making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility. Even though a single data center can deliver enough electricity to power a medium-size town, regulators have granted the industry some of the financial benefits accorded the real estate business and imposed none of the restrictions placed on the profits of power companies. Some of the biggest data center companies have won or are seeking Internal Revenue Service approval to organize themselves as real estate investment trusts, allowing them to eliminate most corporate taxes. At the same time, the companies have not drawn the scrutiny of utility regulators, who normally set prices for delivery of the power to residences and businesses. While companies have widely different lease structures, with prices ranging from under $200 to more than $1,000 a square foot, the industry\u2019s performance on Wall Street has been remarkable. Digital Realty Trust, the first major data center company to organize as a real estate trust, has delivered a return of more than 700 percent since its initial public offering in 2004, according to an analysis by Green Street Advisors. Image The Equinix data center in Secaucus has fuel for backup power systems. In the company\u2019s leases, \u201cpower, cooling and space are very interrelated,\u201d a spokeswoman said. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The stock price of another leading company, Equinix, which owns one of the prime northern New Jersey complexes and is seeking to become a real estate trust, more than doubled last year to over $200. \u201cTheir business has grown incredibly rapidly,\u201d said John Stewart, a senior analyst at Green Street. \u201cThey arrived at the scene right as demand for data storage and growth of the Internet were exploding.\u201d Push for Leasing While many businesses own their own data centers \u2014 from stacks of servers jammed into a back office to major stand-alone facilities \u2014 the growing sophistication, cost and power needs of the systems are driving companies into leased spaces at a breakneck pace. The New York metro market now has the most rentable square footage in the nation, at 3.2 million square feet, according to a recent report by 451 Research, an industry consulting firm. It is followed by the Washington and Northern Virginia area, and then by San Francisco and Silicon Valley. A major orthopedics practice in Atlanta illustrates how crucial these data centers have become. With 21 clinics scattered around Atlanta, Resurgens Orthopaedics has some 900 employees, including 170 surgeons, therapists and other caregivers who treat everything from fractured spines to plantar fasciitis. But its technological engine sits in a roughly 250-square-foot cage within a gigantic building that was once a Sears distribution warehouse and is now a data center operated by Quality Technology Services. Eight or nine racks of servers process and store every digital medical image, physician\u2019s schedule and patient billing record at Resurgens, said Bradley Dick, chief information officer at the company. Traffic on the clinics\u2019 1,600 telephones is routed through the same servers, Mr. Dick said. \u201cThat is our business,\u201d Mr. Dick said. \u201cIf those systems are down, it\u2019s going to be a bad day.\u201d The center steadily burns 25 million to 32 million watts, said Brian Johnston, the chief technology officer for Quality Technology. That is roughly the amount needed to power 15,000 homes, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Mr. Dick said that 75 percent of Resurgens\u2019s lease was directly related to power \u2014 essentially for access to about 30 power sockets. He declined to cite a specific dollar amount, but two brokers familiar with the operation said that Resurgens was probably paying a rate of about $600 per square foot a year, which would mean it is paying over $100,000 a year simply to plug its servers into those jacks. While lease arrangements are often written in the language of real estate,\u201cthese are power deals, essentially,\u201d said Scott Stein, senior vice president of the data center solutions group at Cassidy Turley, a commercial real estate firm. \u201cThese are about getting power for your servers.\u201d One key to the profit reaped by some data centers is how they sell access to power. Troy Tazbaz, a data center design engineer at Oracle who previously worked at Equinix and elsewhere in the industry, said that behind the flat monthly rate for a socket was a lucrative calculation. Tenants contract for access to more electricity than they actually wind up needing. But many data centers charge tenants as if they were using all of that capacity \u2014 in other words, full price for power that is available but not consumed. Image Bradley Dick, standing, chief information officer for Resurgens Orthopaedics in Atlanta, with Charlie Parker, supervisor of the tech call center. It uses a giant data center for patient records, schedules and calls. Credit Rich Addicks for The New York Times Since tenants on average tend to contract for around twice the power they need, Mr. Tazbaz said, those data centers can effectively charge double what they are paying for that power. Generally, the sale or resale of power is subject to a welter of regulations and price controls. For regulated utilities, the average \u201creturn on equity\u201d \u2014 a rough parallel to profit margins \u2014 was 9.25 percent to 9.7 percent for 2010 through 2012, said Lillian Federico, president of Regulatory Research Associates, a division of SNL Energy. Regulators Unaware But the capacity pricing by data centers, which emerged in interviews with engineers and others in the industry as well as an examination of corporate documents, appears not to have registered with utility regulators. Interviews with regulators in several states revealed widespread lack of understanding about the amount of electricity used by data centers or how they profit by selling access to power. Bernie Neenan, a former utility official now at the Electric Power Research Institute, said that an industry operating outside the reach of utility regulators and making profits by reselling access to electricity would be a troubling precedent. Utility regulations \u201care trying to avoid a landslide\u201d of other businesses doing the same. Some data center companies, including Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros Technology, charge tenants for the actual amount of electricity consumed and then add a fee calculated on capacity or square footage. Those deals, often for larger tenants, usually wind up with lower effective prices per square foot. Regardless of the pricing model, Chris Crosby, chief executive of the Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, said that since data centers also provided protection from surges and power failures with backup generators, they could not be viewed as utilities. That backup equipment \u201cis why people pay for our business,\u201d Mr. Crosby said. Melissa Neumann, a spokeswoman for Equinix, said that in the company\u2019s leases, \u201cpower, cooling and space are very interrelated.\u201d She added, \u201cIt\u2019s simply not accurate to look at power in isolation.\u201d Ms. Neumann and officials at the other companies said their practices could not be construed as reselling electrical power at a profit and that data centers strictly respected all utility codes. Alex Veytsel, chief strategy officer at RampRate, which advises companies on data center, network and support services, said tenants were beginning to resist flat-rate pricing for access to sockets. \u201cI think market awareness is getting better,\u201d Mr. Veytsel said. \u201cAnd certainly there are a lot of people who know they are in a bad situation.\u201d The Equinix Story The soaring business of data centers is exemplified by Equinix . Founded in the late 1990s, it survived what Jason Starr, director of investor relations, called a \u201cnear death experience\u201d when the Internet bubble burst. Then it began its stunning rise. Image Credit The New York Times Equinix\u2019s giant data center in Secaucus is mostly dark except for lights flashing on servers stacked on black racks enclosed in cages. For all its eerie solitude, it is some of the most coveted space on the planet for financial traders. A few miles north, in an unmarked building on a street corner in Mahwah, sit the servers that move trades on the New York Stock Exchange; an almost equal distance to the south, in Carteret, are Nasdaq\u2019s servers. The data center\u2019s attraction for tenants is a matter of physics: data, which is transmitted as light pulses through fiber optic cables, can travel no faster than about a foot every billionth of a second. So being close to so many markets lets traders operate with little time lag. As Mr. Starr said: \u201cWe\u2019re beachfront property.\u201d Standing before a bank of servers, Mr. Starr explained that they belonged to one of the lesser-known exchanges located in the Secaucus data center. Multicolored fiber-optic cables drop from an overhead track into the cage, which allows servers of traders and other financial players elsewhere on the floor to monitor and react nearly instantaneously to the exchange. It all creates a dense and unthinkably fast ecosystem of postmodern finance. Quoting some lyrics by Soul Asylum, Mr. Starr said, \u201cNothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.\u201d By any measure, Equinix has attracted quite a crowd. With more than 90 facilities, it is the top data center leasing company in the world, according to 451 Research. Last year, it reported revenue of $1.9 billion and $145 million in profits. But the ability to expand, according to the company\u2019s financial filings, is partly dependent on fulfilling the growing demands for electricity. The company\u2019s most recent annual report said that \u201ccustomers are consuming an increasing amount of power per cabinet,\u201d its term for data center space. It also noted that given the increase in electrical use and the age of some of its centers, \u201cthe current demand for power may exceed the designed electrical capacity in these centers.\u201d To enhance its business, Equinix has announced plans to restructure itself as a real estate investment trust, or REIT, which, after substantial transition costs, would eventually save the company more than $100 million in taxes annually, according to Colby Synesael, an analyst at Cowen & Company, an investment banking firm. Congress created REITs in the early 1960s, modeling them on mutual funds, to open real estate investments to ordinary investors, said Timothy M. Toy, a New York lawyer who has written about the history of the trusts. Real estate companies organized as investment trusts avoid corporate taxes by paying out most of their income as dividends to investors. Equinix is seeking a so-called private letter ruling from the I.R.S. to restructure itself, a move that has drawn criticism from tax watchdogs. \u201cThis is an incredible example of how tax avoidance has become a major business strategy,\u201d said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense , a nonpartisan budget watchdog. The I.R.S., she said, \u201cis letting people broaden these definitions in a way that they kind of create the image of a loophole.\u201d Equinix, some analysts say, is further from the definition of a real estate trust than other data center companies operating as trusts, like Digital Realty Trust. As many as 80 of its 97 data centers are in buildings it leases, Equinix said. The company then, in effect, sublets the buildings to numerous tenants. Even so, Mr. Synesael said the I.R.S. has been inclined to view recurring revenue like lease payments as \u201cgood REIT income.\u201d Ms. Neumann, the Equinix spokeswoman, said, \u201cThe REIT framework is designed to apply to real estate broadly, whether owned or leased.\u201d She added that converting to a real estate trust \u201coffers tax efficiencies and disciplined returns to shareholders while also allowing us to preserve growth characteristics of Equinix and create significant shareholder value.\u201d", "keyword": "Commercial Real Estate;Data center;Electric power;Equinix;Digital Realty Trust;New Jersey;REIT;Banking and Finance"}
{"id": "ny0100484", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/12/27", "title": "As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short", "abstract": "GREENVILLE, S.C. \u2014 A sign in a classroom here at Berea High School, northwest of downtown in the largest urban district in the state, sends this powerful message: \u201cFailure Is Not an Option. You Will Pass. You Will Learn. You Will Succeed.\u201d By one measure, Berea, with more than 1,000 pupils, is helping more students succeed than ever: The graduation rate, below 65 percent just four years ago, has jumped to more than 80 percent. But that does not necessarily mean that all of Berea\u2019s graduates, many of whom come from poor families, are ready for college \u2014 or even for the working world. According to college entrance exams administered to every 11th grader in the state last spring, only one in 10 Berea students were ready for college-level work in reading, and about one in 14 were ready for entry-level college math. And on a separate test of skills needed to succeed in most jobs, little more than half of the students demonstrated that they could handle the math they would need. It is a pattern repeated in other school districts across the state and country \u2014 urban, suburban and rural \u2014 where the number of students earning high school diplomas has risen to historic peaks, yet measures of academic readiness for college or jobs are much lower. This has led educators to question the real value of a high school diploma and whether graduation requirements are too easy. \u201cDoes that diploma guarantee them a hope for a life where they can support a family?\u201d asked Melanie D. Barton, the executive director of the Education Oversight Committee in South Carolina, a legislative agency. Particularly in districts where student achievement is very low, she said, \u201cI really don\u2019t see it.\u201d Image Students at Berea High School in Greenville, S.C. Some South Carolina business leaders worry that not enough students learn what they need for higher-skilled jobs. Credit Sean Rayford for The New York Times Few question that in today\u2019s economy, finishing high school is vital, given that the availability of jobs for those without a diploma has dwindled. The Obama administration has hailed the rising graduation rate, saying schools are expanding opportunities for students to succeed. Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced that the national graduation rate hit 82 percent in 2013-14, the highest on record . But \u201cthe goal is not just high school graduation,\u201d Arne Duncan, the departing secretary of education, said in a telephone interview. \u201cThe goal is being truly college and career ready.\u201d The most recent evaluation of 12th graders on a national test of reading and math found that fewer than 40 percent were ready for college level work. College remediation and dropout rates remain stubbornly high, particularly at two-year institutions, where fewer than a third who enroll complete a degree even within three years . In South Carolina, even with a statewide high school graduation rate of 80.3 percent, some business leaders worry that not enough students have the abilities they need for higher-skilled jobs at Boeing, Volvo and BMW, which have built plants here in recent years. What is more, they say, students need to be able to collaborate and communicate effectively, skills they say high schools do not always teach. \u201cIf you look at what a graduation diploma guarantees today,\u201d said Pamela P. Lackey, the president of AT&T South Carolina, \u201cthe issue is we have a system of education that prepares them for a different type of work than we have as a reality today.\u201d Still, there is no single reason these rates have increased. Economists point to a decline in the teenage pregnancy rate, as well as a reduction in violent crime among teenagers. Some districts use data systems to identify students with multiple absences or failed classes so educators can better help them. And an increasing number of states and districts offer students more chances to make up failed credits online or in short tutoring sessions without repeating a whole semester or more. Image A calculus assignment at Berea. According to college entrance exams administered to every 11th grader in South Carolina last spring, only one in 14 of Berea\u2019s students were ready for college-level work in math. Credit Sean Rayford for The New York Times States also vary widely in diploma requirements. In California, South Carolina and Tennessee, the authorities have recently eliminated requirements that students pass exit exams to qualify for a diploma. Alaska, California, Wisconsin and Wyoming demand far fewer credits to graduate than most states, according to the Education Commission of the States , although local school districts may require more. According to one analysis of requirements for the class of 2014, 32 states did not require that all graduates take four years of English and math through Algebra II or its equivalent, which is often defined as the minimum to be prepared for college. \u201cStudents and their families rely on and trust the high school diploma as a signal of readiness,\u201d said Alissa Peltzman, the vice president of state policy at Achieve , a nonprofit that performed the study. \u201cIt needs to mean something. Otherwise, it\u2019s a false promise for thousands of students.\u201d Over the past decade in California, several large urban districts adopted coursework guidelines aligned to entrance requirements at the state\u2019s public universities. Los Angeles initially required that students earn at least a C in those classes, but the number of students on track to graduate plummeted. Now grades of D or higher are accepted. \u201cIt\u2019s a push and pull between rigorous standards that are harder to meet,\u201d said Russell W. Rumberger, a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, \u201cand less rigorous standards that are easier to meet but don\u2019t necessarily ensure that you know that much.\u201d In South Carolina, students must take four years of English and math and three years of social studies and science. Last year, the legislature voted to eliminate the exit exam. Parents of students with disabilities argued that the test made it difficult for their children to graduate, while business leaders said it did not indicate that students were ready for work. Image The principal of Berea, Mike Noel, in the halls before lunch. Administrators at the school are proud of the rising graduation rate. Credit Sean Rayford for The New York Times \u201cQuite honestly, it had become very easy, and it didn\u2019t mean a lot,\u201d said Molly Spearman , the state superintendent of education. Last year, the legislature required all 11th graders to take a test assessing college and career readiness, as well as an exam that measured academic skills needed for most jobs. The first results, from the ACT college admissions tests, showed that only about a quarter of students statewide were ready for either college-level math or reading. Just 6 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students scored ready for college in math , with only slightly higher rates for reading. In one poor rural district where most of the students are African-American, graduation rates have risen to more than 85 percent, yet not one student scored high enough on the ACT to be deemed ready for college in reading or math. Even on simpler tests of the cognitive skills needed for many jobs, fewer than two-thirds of South Carolina 11th graders could show sufficient skills in both math and reading. Here at Berea High School, a rare, racially integrated campus with similar numbers of African-American, Hispanic and white students, administrators are proud of the rising graduation rate. Addressing the low scores on the ACT, administrators said many 11th graders had not yet learned the material covered when they took the test. And some educators say such tests do not accurately predict whether students will do well in college or in the workplace anyway. Imari Nicholson, a 17-year-old student at Berea, has expressed interest in sports therapy or dentistry. After he failed chemistry his junior year, his counselor reminded him that he would need the course to qualify for a college program in his chosen fields. He is retaking it this semester. This time, he is getting an A. But he said he was not satisfied with his scores on the ACT, which indicated that he was not yet ready for college. \u201cI expect better of myself,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Graduation Rates;K-12 Education;US states;Reading and Writing Skills;Greenville SC;US Department of Education;ACT test;College;Mathematics"}
{"id": "ny0025448", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2013/08/01", "title": "Karrie Webb Gets Another Chance to Savor the Fame", "abstract": "On an L.P.G.A. circuit ruled largely by twentysomethings, the story of Karrie Webb\u2019s first Women\u2019s British Open victory must seem like it ought to be bordered in sepia tones. When the Australian romped to victory by six strokes in 1995 at the Woburn Golf Club in England, the event wasn\u2019t considered a major championship. The L.P.G.A. had just started co-sanctioning the event a year earlier. Eighteen years later, Webb hasn\u2019t lost her winning ways. Her triumph at the Ladies European Masters last weekend gave her three in 2013, each on a different continent. As attention rightly centers this week \u2014 at the British Open on the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland \u2014 on Inbee Park\u2019s quest to become the first woman to capture four majors in a calendar year, the list of those most likely to spoil the attempt just might begin with the revitalized Hall of Famer. \u201cI hold the majors as the five most important tournaments of the year,\u201d Webb, 38, said recently. She said she wanted to add to her title count \u201cbefore I finish up.\u201d Webb\u2019s last major title came in 2006, when she won the Kraft Nabisco Championship on the first hole of a playoff against Lorena Ochoa. It was her seventh major victory, a total that now stands alongside Juli Inkster\u2019s as the most among active players. An eighth major not only would break that tie \u2014 and move Webb into a tie with Betsy Rawls for sixth on the all-time list \u2014 but would also give her a chance to savor success in a way she couldn\u2019t during her meteoric rise. \u201cI want it so that I can enjoy it more than I did when I was winning a lot,\u201d acknowledged Webb, who also won her eighth Australian Ladies Masters in February and the Classic in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in June. When she came from three shots back on Sunday to win the Ladies European Masters in England, it pushed Webb\u2019s victory total to 51 worldwide, including 39 under L.P.G.A. authorization. Not since that 2006 season has she won three in a calendar year. \u201cKarrie is in my top five of greatest players that have ever played on the L.P.G.A. Tour,\u201d said the four-time major championship winner Meg Mallon. The victories came almost too fast, though, for Webb to truly enjoy them. She was 20 when she captured the 1995 Women\u2019s British Open, adding four victories during her L.P.G.A. rookie season and three more in 1997. She, along with Annika Sorenstam and Se Ri Pak, became the focal point of the L.P.G.A.\u2019s new generation. When Webb won six events in 1999 and seven more the following year, the spotlight turned on her. When the golf questions ran out, reporters wanted to know more about the small-town Australian lass who took the tour by storm. In one instance, questions about a broken engagement to her coach\u2019s son moved her to tears. Image Karrie Webb has won three L.P.G.A. Tour titles this year, each on a different continent. Credit Gregory Shamus/Getty Images \u201cI didn\u2019t handle the off-course stuff very well at all,\u201d Webb acknowledged. \u201cAt 21, I was supposed to be the face of the L.P.G.A. and a personality that everyone wanted to ride with, and I apparently wasn\u2019t.\u201d \u201cI was quite a shy person when I came over here, so it was a huge adjustment for me,\u201d she said. \u201cMy desire to play golf got me through most of those years, but at some point I started wishing to be No.1 \u2014 and not No.1.\u201d Before long, Sorenstam raised the ante with eight victories in 2001 and 11 the following year. The L.P.G.A. tried to build a campaign around a blossoming Annika-Karrie rivalry, but it never took off. When Sorenstam expressed an interest in testing herself at a P.G.A. Tour event, eventually accepting an invitation from the Colonial tournament in 2003, the spotlight shifted again. Webb didn\u2019t seem to mind. Though she never had a winless season until 2005, when she became the Hall of Fame\u2019s youngest inductee at age 30, Webb never found that push to keep pace with Sorenstam. \u201cI would like to have continued to play the golf I played,\u201d Webb said. \u201cBut I think subconsciously I backed off the pedal a little bit, because I wasn\u2019t really enjoying everything that came with it.\u201d That\u2019s why Webb could relate this year when Yani Tseng, the L.P.G.A.\u2019s dominant force in 2010-11, voiced a certain relief at having lost the No.1 world ranking to Stacy Lewis. But there is an unspoken warning there, Webb said. \u201cI was in the back of my mind saying, \u2018Be careful what you wish for,\u201d\u2019 she said. Tseng hasn\u2019t had a top-15 finish since February and comes to St. Andrews on a slide of three straight missed cuts. Webb, meanwhile, is enjoying something of a renaissance. Though she may not be a constant presence at the top of leader boards, she is a threat to be in the hunt on any given weekend. After notching up two victories in 2011, a 2012 without a victory was tempered by seven top-10 finishes. The three victories this year have been accompanied by a tie for fifth at the Kraft Nabisco, the year\u2019s first major. Webb hasn\u2019t missed a cut in her previous 57 L.P.G.A. starts \u2014 a streak dating from September 2010 that stands as the tour\u2019s active leader. \u201cAs I\u2019ve gotten older, I have a better understanding of my abilities and what I\u2019m capable of,\u201d she said. \u201cWhether I\u2019m firing on all cylinders or I\u2019m not quite there, I have an understanding of how I\u2019m going to be able to put together a score that day.\u201d That savvy could prove especially valuable if the elements come into play on the Old Course. She chased down Shanshan Feng during a windblown final round in the Atlantic City tournament in June, and the closing 65 on Sunday at the Ladies European Masters was three shots better than anyone else in the final four groupings. \u201cIt\u2019s fun to watch her, watch how she prepares,\u201d Lewis said. Both are South Florida residents and frequently team up for practice rounds. \u201cI\u2019ve been fortunate,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cShe\u2019s been a mentor and she\u2019s been a friend to me. I\u2019ve learned so much that the more you play with her, I think you learn something every time.\u201d Webb still has a couple of targets in sight, not the least of which is representing her homeland when golf returns to the Olympics in 2016. If things come together at St. Andrews this week, she just might have another major to show the younger generation.", "keyword": "Women's British Open Golf;LPGA"}
{"id": "ny0195756", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/10/20", "title": "Beijing Goes After U.S.-Made Nylon", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Toothbrushes and nylon socks have become the latest projectiles in the continuing trade skirmish between the China and the United States. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a preliminary ruling Monday that imposed a 36 percent tariff on American-made Nylon 6, a synthetic filament that ends up in a wide array of products, including toothbrushes, auto parts, socks and the handles of Glock handguns. Nylon 6 from Taiwan and Russia would also be taxed, but at much lower rates. In making its announcement, the ministry said it would begin collecting the tariff immediately, though the money would be kept as a deposit and returned, should the decision be reversed. The ruling was the latest in a series of punitive measures that started last month, when the administration of President Barack Obama imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese-made tires. Beijing quickly followed up with a threat to increase tariffs on American exports of chicken meat and car parts. The trade dispute has become an irritant in relations between the countries as they grapple with a number of pressing issues, including the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran and efforts to revive the global economy. The latest tit-for-tat gesture came less than a month before Mr. Obama is expected in Beijing for his first visit to China. He Maochun, a professor of economics and diplomacy at Tsinghua University, said China had no choice but to combat American protectionist measures with its own. \u201cWe have learned our bad behavior from other countries,\u201d he said. \u201cChina\u2019s actions in this area will serve as a deterrence and warning to other nations.\u201d According to the Commerce Ministry\u2019s Web site, imports of Nylon 6 more than doubled from 2005 to 2007; in the first nine months of 2008, the Web report said, imports grew by nearly 21 percent, much of them from the United States. The ministry said the increased imports had harmed six Chinese enterprises. The dispute over a relatively obscure synthetic fiber pales by comparison with larger unresolved economic issues, including a trade imbalance between the two countries and pressure from the United States to get China to strengthen its currency. The trade imbalance has helped China accumulate $2 trillion in foreign reserves, much of it in U.S. Treasury bonds. Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a founder of the Evian Group, a free trade advocacy organization in Switzerland, said that taken on their own, such small-scale retaliatory acts would have minimal impact on trade relations, but that in the long term, they could build into something more perilous. \u201cIt\u2019s worrisome because the overall environment for trade is fragile and potentially explosive,\u201d he said. \u201cThese incidents don\u2019t constitute a major conflict, but there\u2019s a risk they\u2019ll accumulate and then you\u2019ll get the proverbial straw that breaks the camel\u2019s back.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Protectionism (Trade);Nylon"}
{"id": "ny0099018", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/06/06", "title": "Nepal: More Victims Reported in Helicopter Crash", "abstract": "An American military helicopter that crashed last month in the mountains east of Kathmandu, the capital, was carrying five more passengers than had previously been reported, the Nepalese Army said Friday. Eight people \u2014 six United States Marines and two Nepalese soldiers \u2014 were initially reported to have been killed during a relief mission in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in April. But Nepal\u2019s Army said in a statement Friday that five additional passengers, all Nepalese civilians, had also been on the flight and had been killed. It has not been determined why the helicopter went down on May 12. The wreckage was found on a ridge at an altitude of 11,200 feet, the army statement said, close to the epicenter of a second major earthquake.", "keyword": "Nepal;Helicopter;Plane Crash;US Military;Earthquake;US Marines"}
{"id": "ny0006320", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/05/02", "title": "Year After Resignation, Virginia Quarterly Review Names an Editor", "abstract": "More than a year after Ted Genoways resigned as the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, the literary journal has named a successor. The new editor, W. Ralph Eubanks, is currently the director of publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington. His most recent book is \u201cThe House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South.\u201d He will begin at the magazine on June 3. \u201cRalph Eubanks is a gifted editor, acclaimed author and respected publishing industry leader,\u201d Jon Parrish Peede, the publisher of Virginia Quarterly Review, said in a statement. \u201cWe are fortunate to hire a seasoned editor with such enthusiasm for new technologies as well as a steadfast commitment to literature and exceptional journalism. Having come from the highest level of book culture, Ralph is devoted to creating works of permanence.\u201d The tiny journal, with a staff of five people, is housed on the campus of the University of Virginia and has been published since 1925. In 2010, after the suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, the university suspended publication while it investigated complaints from staff members that Mr. Genoways had created a hostile work environment. University officials later said they would keep Mr. Genoways on as editor, but last year he said he would leave the position of editor to focus on his work as a writer.", "keyword": "Virginia Quarterly Review;Ted Genoways;University of Virginia;Books"}
{"id": "ny0142057", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2008/11/19", "title": "Now Comes the Hard Part as Yahoo Wrestles With a Question of Direction", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 There\u2019s a new parlor game in Silicon Valley: guessing who will replace Jerry Yang at the helm of the troubled Internet giant Yahoo . Mr. Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, said on Monday that he would give up the chief executive role once a successor is named and revert to being \u201cchief Yahoo,\u201d the strategy position he held before his 18 turbulent months running the company. But even before its new boss is selected, Yahoo has an even more fundamental decision to make, say analysts and other Internet watchers. Does it want to remain an independent company, trying to expand in a range of businesses while it combats Google in the crucial arena of Web search? Or should it finally listen to the devotees of deal-making and sell some or all of itself to another Internet player, most likely Microsoft? Yahoo shareholders are clearly rooting for a deal. Shares of Yahoo rose 8.7 percent, or 92 cents, Tuesday to $11.55, largely on hopes that Mr. Yang\u2019s departure might help push the company into the arms of an acquirer. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft\u2019s chief executive, has said he has no interest in making another bid for Yahoo, but he has expressed repeated interest in buying the company\u2019s search business. Many observers and Internet veterans agree that this remains the company\u2019s most attractive option. \u201cYahoo is still in many ways the definitive brand of the consumer Internet, but I don\u2019t think they can or should compete with Google any longer,\u201d said Ross Levinsohn, the former president of Fox Interactive Media. \u201cThat game is over.\u201d If the Yahoo board agrees, it will want an experienced chief executive with a history of deal-making who is also capable of running the online media properties that are left behind. Potential candidates who could embrace this vision of Yahoo include Peter Chernin, the president of the News Corporation; Jonathan F. Miller, the former chief executive of AOL; and John Chapple, the former chief executive of Nextel who joined the Yahoo board this summer along with the activist investor Carl C. Icahn. But some observers think Yahoo\u2019s board could forgo any kind of deal with Microsoft and select a leader who stabilizes the company, unifies its employees and tries to capitalize on its broad technological assets. Potential candidates that fit with this strategy have strong technical backgrounds and include Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, and Jeff Jordan, a former eBay executive who runs the online reservations start-up OpenTable. Susan L. Decker, Yahoo president, will also be considered for the job, although analysts say anyone from Yahoo\u2019s current leadership would encounter significant skepticism from investors. The Madison Avenue advertising industry is one constituency rooting for Yahoo to remain independent and intact. It often looks at Google and Microsoft as competitive threats that increasingly seek to broker the sale of ads in all media formats, and even in some cases to help advertisers create their own Internet spots. Yahoo, on the other hand, remains a largely unthreatening friend. \u201cThe ad community doesn\u2019t want another big Internet player sitting in the hands of someone that competes with them,\u201d said Mike Leo, the chief executive of Operative, a digital advertising technology firm. To avoid deals that would break up Yahoo, a new chief executive would need to finally tackle some of the well-chronicled cultural problems that former employees said seemed to get worse under Mr. Yang. They include a climate of indecision, constant, interminable meetings and widespread overlap of responsibilities. The new chief executive will also have to deal with a legacy of head-scratching management moves \u2014 like Yahoo\u2019s announcement last month that it would lay off 10 percent of the company but only announce who was being cut in December. That put Yahoo employees under a two-month cloud of uncertainty. Whatever the Yahoo board decides to do, it still has some considerable assets with which to work. The company still attracts 500 million users a month, is the leading Web e-mail service, and has other profitable Internet franchises in news, sports and video. It also remains one of the top brands on the Internet, even if the exclamation point at the end of its name now looks wildly overexuberant. \u201cThis isn\u2019t like AOL. They actually have a big loyal audience that isn\u2019t going away,\u201d said David Card, an analyst at Forrester. \u201cThey just need to pick their battles more sensibly.\u201d", "keyword": "Yahoo Inc;Yang Jerry;Appointments and Executive Changes;Search Engines;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0271431", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/05/05", "title": "U.S. Warns North Carolina That Transgender Bill Violates Civil Rights Laws", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Justice Department warned the State of North Carolina on Wednesday that its new law limiting bathroom access violated the civil rights of transgender people, a finding that could mean millions of dollars in lost federal funds. In a letter to Gov. Pat McCrory, Vanita Gupta, the top civil rights lawyer for the Justice Department, said that \u201cboth you and the State of North Carolina\u201d were in violation of civil rights law, and gave him until Monday to decide \u201cwhether you will remedy these violations.\u201d A Justice Department official said that federal officials hoped that the state would agree to comply voluntarily with federal civil rights law by abandoning the measure. But the department has a number of tools it can use to try to force compliance, including denying federal funds or asking a court to do so, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The ultimatum escalated a contentious national debate over North Carolina\u2019s new legal stance on transgender and gay people, and set up what could be a lengthy showdown between the state and the Obama administration. In a statement, Mr. McCrory, a Republican, said: \u201cThe right and expectation of privacy in one of the most private areas of our personal lives is now in jeopardy. We will be reviewing to determine the next steps.\u201d Phil Berger, the president pro tempore of the State Senate, accused the Justice Department of \u201ca gross overreach\u201d that he said \u201cdeserves to be struck down in federal court.\u201d Tim Moore, the speaker of the House, called the letter an attempt to \u201ccircumvent the will of the electorate and instead unilaterally exert its extreme agenda.\u201d The state measure, House Bill 2, known as HB2, was signed into law in March and says the bathroom a person uses is determined by his or her biological gender at birth. That requirement \u201cis facially discriminatory against transgender employees\u201d because it treats them differently from other employees, Ms. Gupta wrote. As a result, \u201cwe have concluded that in violation of Title VII, the state is engaged in a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of Title VII right by employees of public agencies,\u201d she said. The letter was first reported by The Charlotte Observer. The law has become an issue in the presidential campaign and has prompted boycotts of North Carolina from celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, as well as calls for repeal by a number of businesses, some of which have canceled plans to create new jobs in the state. Opponents cheered the Justice Department\u2019s move. \u201cI think it makes clear what we\u2019ve known all along, which is that HB2 is deeply discriminatory and violates civil rights law in all kinds of manners,\u201d said State Representative Chris Sgro of Greensboro. Matt McTighe, executive director of Freedom for All Americans, an L.G.B.T. rights group, said in a statement Wednesday that \u201cactions have consequences, and Governor McCrory and his legislative allies are now paying the price for this anti-transgender law that they so hurriedly enacted. \u201cHB2 is a solution in a search of a problem that simply doesn\u2019t exist, and lawmakers must take immediate action to fully repeal it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe state\u2019s economy and reputation have suffered enough, and now students all across the state stand to lose out on nearly $1 billion in critical funding because of HB2. The livelihoods of North Carolina\u2019s families are at stake, and there is no excuse for inaction.\u201d In December 2014, the attorney general at the time, Eric H. Holder Jr., directed the Justice Department to begin including gender identity \u2014 including transgender status \u2014 as a basis for discrimination claims under federal civil rights law. That decision reversed a policy at the Justice Department that specifically excluded transgender people from federal protection. Mr. Holder called the decision \u201can important shift,\u201d meant to affirm the Justice Department\u2019s commitment \u201cto protecting the civil rights of all Americans.\u201d In addition, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission held last year that \u201cequal access to restrooms is a significant, basic condition of employment\u201d and that denying access to transgender individuals was discriminatory, Ms. Gupta noted, in her letter to Mr. McCrory. The Justice Department\u2019s threat was not the only front opened Wednesday in the battle over transgender bathroom rights. In Illinois, a group calling itself Students and Parents for Privacy filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education, the Justice Department, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and the school directors of Township High School District 211 in Cook County, Ill., seeking to stop the district from \u201cforcing 14- to 17-year-old girls to use locker rooms and restrooms with biological males.\u201d In November, federal education authorities ruled that the school district, near Chicago, violated Title IX, the federal law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sex in public education, when it did not allow a transgender student who said she identifies as a girl to change and shower in the girls\u2019 locker room without restrictions. The fact that the student, who is biologically male, now uses the bathroom and locker rooms at William Fremd High School, the lawsuit states, creates an \u201cintimidating and hostile environment\u201d for girls, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in the United States District Court in the Northern District of Illinois. The suit also asks the court to set aside a Department of Education rule in which transgender students are covered under Title IX. Meanwhile, in Oxford, Ala., the City Council on Wednesday rescinded an ordinance it had passed the week before that forbade people to use a public restroom that did not match their gender at birth, according to the Alabama news website al.com. The news service reported that at least one of the three members who voted to rescind the ordinance in the 3-2 vote was influenced by a city attorney\u2019s opinion that the ordinance might be illegal under Title IX.", "keyword": "Pat McCrory;Transgender,Gender Dysphoria;North Carolina;Bathrooms;Justice Department;Civil Rights;House of Representatives;Congress;Discrimination;Gay and Lesbian LGBT"}
{"id": "ny0261010", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/06/19", "title": "NATO Says It Mistakenly Hit Libyan Rebels Again", "abstract": "TRIPOLI, Libya \u2014 NATO acknowledged Saturday that its aircraft had mistakenly hit a column of rebel military vehicles last week near the Libyan oil port of Brega, and early Sunday morning the Qaddafi government showed reporters a destroyed cinder-block house that neighbors and the government said was hit by an errant NATO airstrike in the capital. Two bodies were pulled from the rubble, and at the Tripoli Central Hospital, government officials showed reporters three others, including an infant and a child, who they said were killed in the house. It was the first time in three months of airstrikes that the Qaddafi government has presented credible evidence of what appeared to be direct civilian casualties of NATO attacks. Although the government has often claimed large numbers of civilian deaths, it has never previously presented bodies or consistent facts about the dead. The destroyed building was far from any obvious military facility, in the Souq al Juma area, which is known for its hostility to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and some neighbors who said they opposed him nonetheless confirmed the government\u2019s account of an airstrike. Still, journalists visiting the site found no pieces of a bomb. NATO could not be reached for comment, and it was impossible to rule out another explanation. Neighbors said that three or more families lived in the building, and government officials said it housed 15 people in an extended family with the last name al-Ghrari. Moussa Ibrahim, a Qaddafi government spokesman, called the leaders of the NATO countries criminals and said they were \u201cplanting the seeds of hatred for generations to come.\u201d The number of casualties from the strike on the convoy of vehicles, meanwhile, could not be determined. \u201cWe regret any possible loss of life or injuries caused by this unfortunate incident,\u201d NATO said in a statement. The attack was at least the third such episode since the air campaign began three months ago. The strike, which occurred Thursday, took place against a backdrop of blurry battle lines as the rebels challenging Colonel Qaddafi pushed against his forces near Brega in the east, outside Zlitan in the midcoast, and in the Nafusa Mountains to the west. The fighting on each of the three fronts has been mired in a back-and-forth pattern without much movement for about five days, and Qaddafi forces have been using civilian vehicles like pickup trucks, just as the rebels do, in an apparent effort to confuse NATO. In this case, NATO said in its statement, its surveillance had spotted the column of military vehicles, which included tanks, in an area where Qaddafi forces \u201chad recently been operating.\u201d The statement added, \u201cIn a particularly complex and fluid battle scenario, it was assessed these vehicles were a threat to civilians.\u201d In April, NATO admitted its planes twice hit rebel positions, killing more than a dozen men. Around the same time as Thursday\u2019s mistaken strike, rebels based in the city of Misurata were complaining that NATO had been telling their fighters to hold back from the battlefront near Zlitan to avoid getting caught in attacks on Qaddafi forces there. The rebels said NATO had failed to deliver the promised attacks on the Qaddafi forces and in the process slowed the rebel advance. \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t for NATO, we could have moved the combat line much further from Misurata,\u201d said Mohamed, a rebel spokesman, though it is far from clear that the rebels could have held their ground without NATO support. The spokesman\u2019s full name was withheld to protect his family.", "keyword": "Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );North Atlantic Treaty Organization;Libya;Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0197172", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/10/24", "title": "Czechs Accept Modified Missile Shield Role", "abstract": "PRAGUE \u2014 The Czech Republic agreed on Friday to host elements of the reformulated American missile defense system after Vice President Joseph R. Biden flew here to patch up relations damaged when President Obama canceled plans to deploy a sophisticated radar station on Czech soil. Jan Fischer, the Czech prime minister, said his country would participate in the new anti-missile shield, although neither he nor Mr. Biden gave details about how. Poland agreed during an earlier stop in Mr. Biden\u2019s swing through the region to accept some of the mobile SM-3 interceptors at the heart of Mr. Obama\u2019s reduced plan. \u201cI used the opportunity to express our readiness as a NATO member to participate because the new architecture is going to be NATO-based and the Czech Republic is ready to participate,\u201d Mr. Fischer said at an appearance with Mr. Biden. The vice president said a senior defense team would visit Prague next month to discuss how to structure that participation. The deals securing Polish and Czech involvement in the new system may go a long way toward reassuring Eastern Europe of America\u2019s continuing commitment to its security. Many in this region interpreted Mr. Obama\u2019s decision to scrap former President George W. Bush\u2019s missile defense system, which was to have been based in Poland and the Czech Republic, as appeasement of Russia, which had strongly objected to it as a threat to its own nuclear arsenal. Mr. Obama denied that, but his administration did not inform Polish and Czech leaders of the policy shift until just before the announcement, fueling the discontent. As news of his decision was beginning to leak last month, Mr. Obama scrambled to reach Mr. Fischer by telephone after midnight to tell him first. The Bush plan called for stationing 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and a so-called X-band radar in the Czech Republic as part of a system aimed at shooting down any future Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles. A new assessment last spring concluded that Iran was not advancing quickly in developing such long-range missiles but had made considerable progress in building short- and medium-range missiles. The plan advanced by Mr. Obama would use smaller, mobile SM-3 interceptors to counter short- and medium-range missiles, based at first aboard Aegis-equipped ships and later on land in Eastern Europe. Although Mr. Obama attributed the switch to the changing assessment of the Iranian threat and the availability of new technology, the decision was welcomed in Russia as a concession and bemoaned in Eastern Europe for the same reason. That dismay was reflected by a statement issued here by former Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who worked closely with Mr. Bush on missile defense despite public opposition at home. Mr. Obama\u2019s efforts to improve ties with Russia, Mr. Topolanek said in the statement, reported by The Associated Press, raised questions about \u201cwhether the United States is stepping back from the region of Central and Eastern Europe in exchange for better relations with Russia.\u201d How firm Mr. Fischer\u2019s commitment will be remains to be seen. The new prime minister took over as a caretaker in April until national elections next spring. The missile defense system and the question of Czech participation could be a factor in the campaign. Mr. Biden\u2019s stop here was the last of three in the region following visits to Poland and Romania. After a day of meetings, the vice president planned to return to Washington on Friday evening.", "keyword": "Czech Republic;Missiles and Missile Defense Systems;United States Defense and Military Forces;Biden Joseph R Jr"}
{"id": "ny0282877", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/07/26", "title": "For Yahoo, Question Is What to Do With $40 Billion in Leftovers", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Yahoo has agreed to sell the bulk of what people know as Yahoo \u2014 its mail services, its news sites, the Tumblr social network \u2014 to Verizon for nearly $5 billion. So what\u2019s left? A lot of more financially valuable pieces that Yahoo has yet to figure out what to do with. Assuming shareholders and regulators bless the sale of the core Yahoo businesses to Verizon, what will stay are a 15 percent stake in the Alibaba Group, the Chinese internet giant; a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo\u2019s Japanese affiliate; the company\u2019s cash; and a collection of noncore patents that will eventually be sold off. The total value of the so-called RemainCo, as company officials refer to the rump: more than $40 billion. But the sticking point for Yahoo, as was the case in the past, is the fact that selling the Alibaba stake in particular will generate a huge tax bill. That\u2019s why Yahoo had previously explored permutations of a spinout of its core business, leaving the Alibaba stake in a separate publicly traded company of some kind. Monday\u2019s deal effectively does that, although it also leaves behind the Yahoo Japan stake and a few other assets. Where does that leave the company? Thomas McInerney, the Yahoo board member who led the company\u2019s sales process, said on a call with investors that RemainCo would essentially exist as a publicly traded investment company \u201cwith no current intent.\u201d Of the remaining assets, the Alibaba stake is the trickiest one to manage. Yahoo would incur an enormous tax bill if it sold the stake outright \u2014 to the tune of billions of dollars \u2014 since its initial investment in the Chinese e-commerce titan has skyrocketed in value. Yahoo\u2019s previous attempts at dealing with the Alibaba stake were aimed at minimizing the tax bill. But the Internal Revenue Service dealt a blow to the company\u2019s plans last year when it refused to deem such a move tax-free. It\u2019s possible for a buyer to come in and purchase the Alibaba stake without incurring a huge tax bill, though Yahoo executives on Monday didn\u2019t enumerate all the possibilities. Mr. McInerney did raise one potential situation, however: Alibaba itself buying RemainCo, but essentially keeping it whole and not reabsorbing the shares. RemainCo would become what the director referred to as a \u201chook stock.\u201d It\u2019s not quite clear that either side would be interested in pursuing such a transaction. Other parts of RemainCo are much easier to deal with. The Yahoo Japan stake isn\u2019t subject to as nearly a contentious tax bill as the Alibaba holdings, though for the moment the rump company will hold on to that stake. (The majority owner of Yahoo Japan, SoftBank, has the right of first refusal if RemainCo decides to sell those shares.) And Mr. McInerney said that the rump company would return virtually all of the remaining cash and continue to work on selling the patents. In case investors and analysts did not grasp the message, he added during the call: \u201cWe\u2019re not intending to make new investments with the cash out of RemainCo. The intent is to return it.\u201d", "keyword": "Yahoo!;Alibaba;SoftBank;Mergers and Acquisitions;Federal Taxes"}
{"id": "ny0022579", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/09/01", "title": "Advocate\u2019s Post Gave de Blasio Platform for Political Ambitions", "abstract": "The anxious executive cornered Bill de Blasio in an elevator, with an urgent plea. New York City was planning to allow thousands of new taxis to operate outside Manhattan, directly threatening his car and limousine business. Would Mr. de Blasio, the city\u2019s public advocate, help block it? It was hard to imagine Mr. de Blasio, a Brooklynite who built his reputation on standing up for the boroughs beyond Manhattan, opposing a proposal to improve transportation for his chronically taxi-starved neighbors. But soon after the elevator encounter that day in 2011, the car service executive, Avik Kabessa, heard back from the public advocate\u2019s office. The message, Mr. Kabessa recalled, was clear: \u201cBill is looking to help.\u201d Mr. de Blasio would emerge as the taxi plan\u2019s most prominent opponent, leading sidewalk rallies and using his office to fight it in court \u2014 and confounding allies who found his stance incongruous with his typical stands. \u201cI was flabbergasted,\u201d said David S. Yassky, the taxi and limousine commissioner whose former City Council district borders Mr. de Blasio\u2019s. \u201cAfter hearing all his rhetoric about standing up for the outer boroughs, here\u2019s a program that actually would help 80 percent of New York City, and he did everything he could to stop it.\u201d The powerful taxi and limousine industry, which bitterly opposed the city\u2019s plan, made its gratitude clear, sending about $200,000 in contributions to Mr. de Blasio\u2019s mayoral campaign in the last two years, far more than his rivals received. And Mr. Kabessa, the chief executive of Carmel Car and Limousine Service, now sits on the campaign\u2019s finance committee and was a host of a fund-raiser for Mr. de Blasio this spring. Before becoming a Democratic front-runner in this year\u2019s race for mayor, Mr. de Blasio was an ambitious Park Slope City Councilman who scrambled into the public advocate job in 2009, looking to turn the often-overlooked office into a fierce champion of neglected communities and the downtrodden. But a review of his years as public advocate shows that the office often served another aim: Elevating Mr. de Blasio\u2019s political ambitions and his profile in anticipation of a run for mayor. Aides to Mr. de Blasio say he kept a sharp focus on bettering the lives of his least-empowered constituents. Despite a meager budget and a small staff of 40, his office has handled some 20,000 complaints from residents, helping tenants avoid eviction and assisting small-business owners with disputes over utility charges and city fees. But early on, Mr. de Blasio, a former strategist who cut his teeth on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s political campaigns, also showed a shrewdness in identifying issues that would yield political benefits and sometimes connect with financial backers. His most visible advocacy work was on an issue far removed from the kind of workaday complaints that the office typically grapples with: campaign finance reform, a cause that earned Mr. de Blasio enormous media attention, especially on liberal outlets like MSNBC, despite doubts from financial experts about its impact. And even as he gained acolytes by warning of the excesses of Wall Street, Mr. de Blasio nurtured a relationship with George Soros, the billionaire financier, whose foundation became the single biggest benefactor of an obscure nonprofit organization that paid for Mr. de Blasio to promote his advocacy work around the country. In an interview on Friday, Mr. de Blasio said he approached the office not only as a community organizer, seeking to empower residents to correct injustices in their neighborhoods, but also as a strategic consultant, finding new ways to maximize the impact of a position with few pre-existing powers. \u201cThe office needed a lot more creativity, a lot more strategic innovation if it was going to have a meaningful role,\u201d Mr. de Blasio said. About the bill to expand taxi service to boroughs outside Manhattan, Mr. de Blasio said he initially supported the idea, but became concerned after meeting with Mr. Kabessa\u2019s trade association and other members of the taxi and car service industry. He also objected to the bill being considered in Albany, rather than the City Council. He did not offer an alternative plan, saying in the interview: \u201cI want to make sure it\u2019s done in a way that doesn\u2019t undermine the economics of the current industry.\u201d Mr. de Blasio emerged from a crowded field in 2009 to win the job of public advocate, a post created in 1993 to serve as a watchdog over city government but frequently considered as a target for elimination because of its ill-defined mandate and the usurping of its services by the city\u2019s 311 phone system. His aides said he re-energized the office, creating a watch list of negligent landlords, organizing rallies against school and hospital closings, and helping residents receive medical attention and relief funds after Hurricane Sandy. Among his proudest accomplishments, Mr. de Blasio said, was pushing for new protections for at-risk children after the death of Marchella Pierce , a 4-year-old Brooklyn girl who was beaten and starved by family members, in 2010. Mr. de Blasio helped lead an effort to overhaul city services for vulnerable children, winning accolades even from some of his sparring partners in the Bloomberg administration. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to turn things into a three-ring circus,\u201d said John B. Mattingly, a former children\u2019s services commissioner. \u201cHe was willing to listen and work together to get results, rather than simply to grandstand and get public attention.\u201d Image Bill de Blasio last year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he had served as a councilman. Credit \u00c1ngel Franco/The New York Times But it was an effort Mr. de Blasio undertook on a national issue that brought him to the attention of influential figures in the world of liberal politics. After the Supreme Court ruled in January 2010 in the Citizens United case that corporations could spend unlimited amounts to influence elections, Mr. de Blasio seized on the issue and began an effort that he predicted would have broad impact on corporate involvement in politics. \u201cI just literally found myself on a human and ideological level fundamentally unwilling to be silent,\u201d he recalled. His office had no oversight over campaign finance regulation. Still, in 2010, he sought meetings with major investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, and later announced that four of the banks would voluntarily refrain from taking advantage of the ruling. But virtually no major American corporation has made the type of unfettered independent political expenditures permitted by Citizens United, and officials at the banks said that \u2014 even before Mr. de Blasio asked \u2014 there was never an intention to do so. A former Goldman official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about private deliberations, said the bank was fully aware of the public criticism it would confront if it engaged in \u201csuper PAC\u201d-style spending; the official recalled Mr. de Blasio\u2019s staff seeking a statement from Goldman that acknowledged the role of the public advocate, which the bank declined to provide. Roy Smith, a professor of finance at New York University and a former Goldman partner, said the pledges announced by Mr. de Blasio\u2019s office amounted to grandstanding. \u201cIt\u2019s giving up nothing, because they weren\u2019t doing this anyway,\u201d Mr. Smith said. \u201cIt would be completely stupid for a large bank to be an active political donor in a hostile public-relations context.\u201d Mr. de Blasio dismissed the criticism, saying that, at the time, no one knew for sure how the banks would behave. \u201cI am sure that from this remove, it looks like, \u2018Oh, there was nothing that could have happened,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cI never assumed that.\u201d Mr. de Blasio\u2019s crusade on Citizens United \u2014 and the savvy choice of Wall Street as a target \u2014 earned headlines. He became a regular on the media circuit, delivering scathing critiques of the Supreme Court decision and earning praise on MSNBC and from Mother Jones, which described him as the \u201cCitizens United Avenger.\u201d Since 2010, he has held more than 80 meetings on the topic with aides, activists and other officials, according to records of his schedule. His advocacy brought him into contact with a powerful ally: Mr. Soros, who had long deplored the influence of corporations in the political system, even as he poured millions of his own fortune into campaigns. The billionaire banker and the Brooklyn activist met on an autumn evening in 2010, when Mr. de Blasio spoke on a panel about Citizens United held in Mr. Soros\u2019s grand Fifth Avenue home. The two chatted afterward, and Mr. de Blasio promised to stay in touch. Four months later, Mr. Soros\u2019s foundation pledged $400,000 to the Fund for Public Advocacy , a sleepy nonprofit group created in 2002 to support the work of the public advocate\u2019s office. The donation was the largest single contribution to the fund, a tax exempt 501(c)(3), during Mr. de Blasio\u2019s tenure. And by last year, more than half of the fund\u2019s spending was dedicated to issues related to campaign finance reform. It was a marked shift for the nonprofit organization that, under Mr. de Blasio\u2019s predecessor, Betsy Gotbaum, had focused mostly on local issues, like public school governance. But Mr. de Blasio was thinking bigger. One of his first actions was to bring in an old friend and mentor as the fund\u2019s president: Harold M. Ickes, a prominent figure in the Clinton White House. Mr. Ickes, who resides in Washington, was initially skeptical of Mr. de Blasio\u2019s entreaties. \u201cI said, \u2018Do you really want a non-New Yorker?\u2019 \u201d Mr. Ickes recalled in an interview. But Mr. de Blasio was insistent. \u201cHe thought it would be an asset,\u201d said Mr. Ickes, who also advises Mr. de Blasio\u2019s mayoral campaign. The infusion from Mr. Soros\u2019s group expanded the ambitions of the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending, an entity Mr. de Blasio created to organize officials around the country to rein in corporate influence. Mr. de Blasio predicted big changes would follow: he called for pledges from a quarter of the nation\u2019s leading 100 companies to restrict campaign spending; a dozen states to pass legislation limiting such expenditures; and expanding his coalition to at least 100 elected officials across the country. Other backers of Mr. de Blasio\u2019s political operation joined the cause. One was Bernard L. Schwartz, a retired communication executive who had given the maximum $4,950 to his mayoral bid, then poured $25,000 into the Fund for Public Advocacy. But despite the generosity of wealthy supporters and the hours spent by Mr. de Blasio and his staff, the effort has fallen short of his goals. Only a few companies have made the pledge. The group\u2019s social media, never robust to begin with, all but ceased last year. And as of Friday, the coalition counted only 12 public officials as members.", "keyword": "Bill de Blasio;Mayoral races;Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission;Campaign finance;NYC;Fund for Public Advocacy"}
{"id": "ny0135376", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/04/21", "title": "United Nations Agency Criticizes Treatment of Refugees Seeking Asylum in Greece", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The United Nations refugee agency has advised European Union countries to stop sending asylum seekers to Greece until further notice, a step that amounts to a condemnation of Greece\u2019s treatment of people fleeing conflict and persecution. In a sharp response, Greece called the agency\u2019s criticism unfair and said other countries needed to share the burden of tackling irregular migration into the European Union. Meanwhile, lawyers for refugees said they were concerned that the United Nations\u2019 advice would result in Greece\u2019s neighbors in the union taking even tougher measures to push people away at their borders. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Friday in a statement that asylum seekers faced \u201cundue hardships\u201d in Greece, often lacking \u201cthe most basic entitlements, such as interpreters and legal aid, to ensure that their claims receive adequate scrutiny from the asylum authorities.\u201d The United Nations agency and human rights organizations have been concerned for some time about the treatment of refugees in Greece, where migration routes carry economic migrants and asylum seekers from Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia into the union. The refugee agency described Greece\u2019s recognition rate for refugees as \u201cdisturbingly low.\u201d The overall protection rate for refugees of all nationalities in 2006 was 1 percent in Greece, compared with 24 percent in Britain, 45 percent in Italy, 19 percent in Spain and 50 percent in Sweden. The agency also said detention conditions in Greece continued to fall short of international and European standards. Greece routinely arrests all illegal immigrants and asylum seekers found in its territory and detains them for three months; last year, the agency urged Greece to close a detention center on the island of Samos because conditions there were so bad. For these reasons, the agency advised governments \u201cto refrain from returning asylum seekers to Greece under the Dublin Regulation until further notice.\u201d The regulation is intended to deter multiple asylum claims by ensuring that such requests are fairly examined in the first member country the refugee enters. The accord, however, puts a disproportionate burden on countries that lie on the union\u2019s border, like Greece, Italy and Spain. They not only have to deal with illegal immigrants, but also have to accept the return of asylum seekers who have crossed into neighboring member countries. The Greek interior minister, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, on Friday called the agency\u2019s criticism \u201cnot only unfair but unfounded.\u201d Mr. Pavlopoulos said Greece, one of the union\u2019s smallest and poorest nations, was \u201cin favor of revising the Dublin system so that countries with adequate infrastructure take the lead in the reception and handling of asylum requests.\u201d", "keyword": "Greece;Immigration and Refugees;European Union;United Nations;Asylum (Political);Illegal Immigrants"}
{"id": "ny0101071", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2015/12/17", "title": "Braden Holtby Stays Hot as Capitals Prevail", "abstract": "Braden Holtby made 26 saves to help the Washington Capitals beat the visiting Ottawa Senators, 2-1. Holtby lowered his N.H.L.-best goals against average to 1.83 and improved to 20-4-1. He has allowed three goals in his last three games. \u25a0 Tuukka Rask made 34 saves for his fourth shutout, Jimmy Hayes ended a 15-game goal-scoring drought, and the Boston Bruins beat visiting Pittsburgh, 3-0, keeping the Penguins\u2019 new coach, Mike Sullivan, winless in two games. (AP)", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Braden Holtby;Ottawa Senators;Washington Capitals;Bruins"}
{"id": "ny0047794", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/11/19", "title": "A Steeler\u2019s Early Departure Becomes a Permanent Exit", "abstract": "Pittsburgh released running back LeGarrette Blount on Tuesday less than 24 hours after Blount left the field early in a victory at Tennessee on Monday night. Blount was in for one play during the Steelers\u2019 27-24 win and watched his teammate Le\u2019Veon Bell run for 204 yards and a touchdown. The Steelers signed Blount to a two-year deal in the off-season hoping he would provide power near the goal line. He rushed for 118 yards and a touchdown in a Week 3 win over Carolina, but his playing time diminished recently. Blount also ran into trouble off the field. He was cited for marijuana possession during a traffic stop in August. COLTS\u2019 BRADSHAW ON I.R. Indianapolis has signed the former Pro Bowl return specialist Josh Cribbs and tight end Weslye Saunders after it placed running back Ahmad Bradshaw on season-ending injured reserve with a fractured left leg. Cribbs worked out with the Colts (6-4) last week but has not played since being injured late last season. He is third in N.F.L. history with 10,505 career kickoff return yards. Bradshaw was injured Sunday night against New England. He rushed for 425 yards and had a career-best six touchdown catches. HARDY \u2018PROBABLY\u2019 DONE Carolina Coach Ron Rivera said he had \u201cprobably\u201d given up hope that Greg Hardy would play again this season after the N.F.L.\u2019s decision to suspend Vikings running back Adrian Peterson for the remainder of the year. Hardy, a Pro Bowl defensive end, was placed on the exempt commissioner\u2019s permission list Sept. 17, two months after being convicted on two counts of domestic violence. Hardy is appealing. His court date was recently pushed back to next year. BAILEY MAKES IT OFFICIAL Champ Bailey said goodbye to the N.F.L. on Tuesday after signing a one-day contract with the Denver Broncos. Bailey retired with a dozen Pro Bowl selections, 52 interceptions and no regrets. Dozens of current players joined his former teammates John Lynch, Brandon Stokley, Brian Dawkins, Jake Plummer and Rod Smith in celebrating Bailey\u2019s career. Bailey became the Broncos\u2019 most decorated defensive player and helped them reach the Super Bowl last season. BENGALS CLEAR MCCARRON Cincinnati cleared the rookie quarterback A. J. McCarron to practice on Tuesday, saying he has recovered from a sore shoulder that has sidelined him since training camp. A fifth-round draft pick, he has not practiced or played because of the injury. He was put on a nonfootball injury list and will get three weeks to practice before the Bengals have to decide whether to activate him. The Bengals want to develop him as a backup to Andy Dalton. CARDINALS LOSE NIKLAS Arizona has placed the rookie tight end Troy Niklas on season-ending injured reserve and signed tight end Matthew Mulligan. Niklas, a second-round pick from Notre Dame, missed much of the early season with an ankle injury, then sustained a high ankle sprain in last Sunday\u2019s win over Detroit. Niklas appeared in seven games with three receptions for 38 yards.", "keyword": "Football;LeGarrette Blount;Steelers"}
{"id": "ny0042444", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2014/05/10", "title": "Washington: Lawsuit Challenges Authority to Tax Marijuana", "abstract": "A federal lawsuit is challenging Washington State\u2019s authority to tax marijuana as long as marijuana remains illegal under federal law. The case arises from the state\u2019s attempt to collect sales taxes from a medical marijuana dispensary. Douglas Hiatt, who filed the suit late Thursday on behalf of a dispensary owner, said it could throw a wrench in Washington\u2019s plans for collecting taxes on recreational marijuana, too. Mr. Hiatt\u2019s client, Martin Nickerson, is simultaneously being prosecuted criminally for marijuana distribution and targeted by the State Department of Revenue for not paying taxes on the marijuana he was accused of distributing.", "keyword": "Washington;Marijuana,Pot,Weed;Federal Taxes;Tax"}
{"id": "ny0184017", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/12/13", "title": "A Source Takes the Day Off as the Heat Builds", "abstract": "Kirk Radomski had the day off Wednesday. Radomski\u2019s black chair inside the office of Pro Touch Detail Center in St. James, N.Y., was empty. Vinny Greco, Radomski\u2019s business partner, stressed that Radomski\u2019s absence had nothing to do with the impending release of George J. Mitchell \u2019s steroid report Thursday. \u201cThat\u2019s just the way we scheduled it,\u201d Greco said. As reporters visited Pro Touch or called the office, some leaving messages on the hour, to try to interview Radomski, he was nowhere to be found. Greco said Radomski had planned to take his wife and their 8-year-old daughter to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. When Mitchell\u2019s 20-month investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball is made public, Radomski\u2019s words will be a crucial component in the report. Radomski, a former Mets batboy and clubhouse attendant, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution last April and faces up to 25 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, he consented to cooperating with Mitchell. Greco, who was the Mets\u2019 assistant clubhouse manager, said Radomski will open the glass door to Pro Touch at 8 a.m. on Thursday and start cleaning and customizing cars. That is six hours before Mitchell is scheduled to have a news conference in Manhattan, where names that Radomski gave Mitchell will be released. In Radomski\u2019s plea agreement, he said that he provided dozens of players with steroids, human growth hormone and stimulants from 1995 to 2005. Radomski and Greco share an office inside a one-story cinder-block building that is also home to an automobile body shop. Greco, whose 26-year tenure with the Mets overlapped Radomski\u2019s 10-year stint with the club, said he had no knowledge of anything that Radomski told to investigators. Federal authorities asked Radomski to refrain from speaking about his case. It can be tricky to find Pro Touch, off Middle Country Road, because it is located behind the far side of the building. There are advertising sheets by the entrance offering detailing jobs that run from $44.99 for the Simonize Express to $229.99 for the Super Complete Detail. A toy basketball hoop is attached to the office wall, and a scuffed baseball sits atop a file cabinet. \u201cThat\u2019s from Dave LaPoint, the manager of the Long Island Ducks,\u201d Greco said. \u201cHe\u2019s one of our customers.\u201d While driving to work Wednesday, Greco saw a photographer parked outside Radomski\u2019s house in Manorville, N.Y. Greco called Radomski\u2019s wife, Christine, and alerted her. Because the pursuit for Radomski\u2019s reaction to the Mitchell report will increase Thursday, Greco, who does not work the same days as Radomski, was ready to adjust the schedule. \u201cIf he calls me and says he doesn\u2019t want to come in on Thursday, I\u2019ll do it,\u201d Greco said. \u201cI\u2019ll work for him.\u201d Greco had known Radomski since they were youngsters playing stickball together in the Bronx. Radomski worked for the Mets from 1985 to 1995; Greco was with the team from 1981 until he was let go in 2006. Greco\u2019s father and brother also worked in the clubhouse. Inside the yellow walls of Pro Touch, Greco tapped away on one of the two computer keyboards, answered the telephone and answered questions about Radomski in a careful manner. Behind Greco, employees had finished detailing a black Hummer and had moved on to a maroon Jeep. Another car was expected in a few minutes. When a television producer arrived and asked for Radomski, Greco told her Radomski was off and would return to work Thursday. The producer asked Greco what Radomski looked like. Greco described him as a big kid with short hair. When she produced a photograph of Radomski in the Mets\u2019 clubhouse from the late 1980s, Greco said, \u201cYeah, take that and add 20 years.\u201d Before the producer departed, she thanked Greco for being polite. A few minutes later, she called Greco and asked him for Radomski\u2019s cellphone number. Greco said no, then hung up and stared at his computer screen. In less than two months, Radomski will be sentenced. \u201cI just want it to be over for him,\u201d Greco said. \u201cHe\u2019s got a wife and a daughter. He\u2019s been through a lot. He\u2019s got a lot ahead of him. I just want it to end.\u201d INSIDE PITCH The Mets did not tender contract offers to catcher Johnny Estrada, outfielder Ben Johnson and pitcher Juan Padilla.", "keyword": "Radomski Kirk;Steroids;Mitchell George J;Major League Baseball;Baseball;Athletics and Sports"}
{"id": "ny0258715", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2011/01/30", "title": "Mexico\u2019s Universal Health Care Is Work in Progress", "abstract": "YAUTEPEC, Mexico \u2014 When her twin girls were born seven weeks early, Azucena Mora D\u00edaz did not have to worry about how she would pay for expensive hospital care, even though her husband has only a low-wage job as a construction worker\u2019s assistant. Under a government insurance plan for the poor, the girls were treated at the Women\u2019s Hospital here and continue to receive follow-up care to monitor their development. The couple pays nothing. \u201cWe owe everything to this,\u201d Ms. Mora said as one of the twins , now 13 months old, squirmed in her arms, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a single word: \u201cSmile.\u201d A decade ago, half of all Mexicans had no health insurance at all. Then the country\u2019s Congress passed a bill to ensure health care for every Mexican without access to it. The goal was explicit: universal coverage. By September, the government expects to have enrolled about 51 million people in the insurance plan it created six years ago \u2014 effectively reaching the target, at least on paper. The big question, critics contend, is whether all those people actually get the health care the government has promised. Under the plan, children with leukemia have been cured, women receive breast cancer treatment, elderly people get cataract operations and people with H.I.V. are assured their drugs. Usually at no cost. Even critics who argue that the government is failing to live up to the promise of universal health coverage acknowledge that Mexico \u2019s program saves lives and protects families from falling into poverty in many cases of catastrophic illness. But the task of covering so many people\u2019s care, with a budget of about $12 billion this year, is enormous. Still, Salom\u00f3n Chertorivski, who is in charge of the government\u2019s system of social protection for health, believes it is possible. \u201cIt\u2019s an ideal moment for the transformation that we\u2019re carrying out,\u201d he said, arguing that because only 9 percent of Mexicans are over 60, health costs for the country\u2019s relatively youthful population are low. \u201cEasy it isn\u2019t. And it shouldn\u2019t just be sufficient, but it should also have the quality that you would expect.\u201d In Mexico\u2019s poorer states and among its most destitute, that quality is still lacking. A study by Mexico\u2019s National Institute for Public Health questioned how well the plan was being carried out at the state and local levels, saying their contributions and lack of transparency \u201cleave much to be desired.\u201d This month, Mexico\u2019s health minister, Jos\u00e9 \u00c1ngel C\u00f3rdova, acknowledged the gaps, noting that 8 percent of the country\u2019s municipalities still lacked any kind of health facility. \u201cThere is still first-, second- and third-class medicine,\u201d he said in a speech. While the undertaking is relatively young, the Health Ministry\u2019s own statistics show that it is behind its own targets in reducing infant and maternal mortality \u2014 key health indicators \u2014 in the poorest states. But 10 years ago, only about half the population was covered by insurance. A small sliver at the top have private insurance, and most salaried workers are treated in a giant, but fraying, public health system known as the Mexican Social Security Institute. Because that system links coverage to employment, much like in the United States, it leaves out tens of millions of people: workers getting by on odd jobs, farmers, the self-employed, street vendors. A health safety net for those people did exist, with clinics and hospitals run by state governments. Treatment often came with a fee, and once patients were discharged from the hospital, they had to buy their own medication. Unable to afford it, many simply gave up. This rickety infrastructure served as the base of the new Seguro Popular, or popular insurance, which was begun in 2004. Any Mexican can sign up. A broad package of basic medical services is guaranteed, along with medicine and coverage for some catastrophic illnesses. The program was designed to charge a yearly fee based on income, but in practice hardly anybody pays because, the government argues, most of the participants are too poor. Dr. Julio Frenk, the former health minister who designed the effort, says it ties government spending directly to how many people enroll. \u201cWe changed the budgeting logic,\u201d said Dr. Frenk, now dean of the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health. In that respect, the program has met one of its basic goals, increasing public health spending \u2014 by an additional 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, Mr. Chertorivski said. But that still leaves it below developed nations and some other Latin American countries, like Chile and Costa Rica, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Pan American Health Organization. Analysts question how the government came up with a budget of about $200 per patient, arguing that it is too low, and they ask how efficiently the money is being spent. \u201cIt is probably true that the Seguro Popular has increased people\u2019s access to health care,\u201d said Jason Lakin , an expert at the International Budget Partnership in Washington. But \u201cthe system was not efficient before,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s unclear whether the Seguro Popular has made it more efficient.\u201d The money goes from the federal government to state governments, depending on how many people each state enrolls. From there, it is up to state governments to spend the money properly so that patients get the promised care. That, critics say, is the plan\u2019s biggest weakness. State governments have every incentive to register large numbers, but they do not face any accountability for how they spend the money. \u201cYou have people signed up on paper, but there are no doctors, no medicine, no hospital beds,\u201d said Miguel Pulido, the executive director of Fundar , a Mexican watchdog group that has studied the poor southern states of Guerrero and Chiapas. Mr. Chertorivski acknowledges that getting some states to do their work properly is a problem. \u201cYou can\u2019t do a hostile takeover,\u201d he said. The result is that how Mexicans are treated is very much a function of where they live. Lucila Rivera D\u00edaz, 36, comes from one of the poorest regions in Guerrero. She said doctors there told her to take her mother, who they suspected had liver cancer , for tests in the neighboring state of Morelos. Ms. Rivera\u2019s mother has been admitted to the main public hospital in the Morelos state capital, Cuernavaca. Meanwhile, Ms. Rivera has been living in the waiting room for two weeks with her 13-month-old son, sleeping on blankets stretched out over metal chairs and guarding a few possessions crammed into plastic bags. Her case suggests the contradictions of the new plan. Better access to doctors led the family to seek treatment, but they received none in their own state. And while the overstretched hospital in Cuernavaca has gotten new money and hired more doctors, it is also receiving patients who might never have turned up before. Morelos State officials point out the successes, like the women\u2019s hospital where Ms. Mora\u2019s twins were born. Opened three years ago, it handles high-risk pregnancies, treats breast cancer and offers birthing classes and neonatal intensive care for premature babies . \u201cThe Seguro Popular was really a watershed for us because with it came resources,\u201d said Dr. Ludmila Vite Torres, the hospital\u2019s director. But the standards seem to fall at local clinics. \u201cThere is hardly any medicine there,\u201d said Ms. Mora, the mother of the twins. \u201cIt\u2019s just good for vaccinations .\u201d The lack of medicine is a complaint that pops up frequently, and has been confirmed by government reports. \u00c1ngela Casarrubias Crespo, 69, says she often buys her diabetes medicine herself because there is none in the local clinic, leading her husband, Roque Nava, 77, a farmer, to view the Seguro Popular program with skepticism. \u201cThey are just trying to grab more votes for the elections,\u201d he said. But that did not stop the couple from coming to a diagnostic center the state health service set up for a week to offer free mammograms and pap smears, along with tests for glucose and cholesterol , advice on depression and addiction, and testing for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Mobile centers like that are at the center of Mr. Chertorivski\u2019s plans for 2011 , to focus on prevention and patients\u2019 rights. But he acknowledged that ambitions and reality sometimes diverged. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019m telling the story of what should be.\u201d", "keyword": "Mexico;Health Insurance and Managed Care;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0020835", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/09/05", "title": "Falling Economic Tide in India Is Exposing Its Chronic Troubles", "abstract": "MUMBAI \u2014 India had seemed tantalizingly close to embarking on the same dash for economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China and across East Asia. Its economy now stands in disarray, with the prospect of worse to come in the next few months. Vinod Vanigota, a Mumbai wholesaler of imported computer hard drives, said sales dropped by a quarter in the last two weeks. The rupee, India\u2019s currency, has been so volatile in recent days that he began revising his price lists every half-hour. Business activity at Chip Com Traders, where he is the managing director and co-owner, has slowed so sharply that trucking companies plead for business. \u201cOne of the companies called today and said, \u2018Don\u2019t you have a parcel of any sort for us to deliver today?\u2019 \u201d Mr. Vanigota said. The economic decline has laid bare chronic problems, little remarked upon during the recent boom. An antiquated infrastructure, a sclerotic job market, exorbitant real estate costs and bloated state-owned enterprises never allowed manufacturing, especially manufacturing for export, to grow strong. The rupee fell further and faster in August against the dollar than any of the world\u2019s 77 other internationally traded currencies as investors in affluent countries took their money home for higher returns. It was down 20 percent since May, a period in which the stock market followed suit and fell almost 8 percent. The real estate market is teetering after soaring to vertiginous heights over the last few years. Cranes on Mumbai\u2019s skyline perch nearly immobilized as developers struggle for cash. The things the emerging middle class coveted, Chevrolets, iPhones and foreign vacations, have all jumped sharply in price in recent weeks. The price increases threaten to worsen consumer price inflation \u2014 already among the highest in Asia at an annual rate of almost 10 percent \u2014 and widen the country\u2019s already large international trade deficit and government budget deficit. India\u2019s government is now bracing the country for a swift increase in the price of diesel fuel and other imported necessities priced in dollars. Diesel is the lifeblood of the Indian economy, from the trucks that crawl along the country\u2019s jammed, potholed roads to the backyard generators that struggle to compensate for the high-cost yet unreliable electricity grid. Some economists say that they hope India will have only a V-shaped economic downturn, with a rebound starting by early next year if a weak rupee rejuvenates India\u2019s struggling exporters. \u201cIndia is not Greece \u2014 we never binged on debt on a grand scale,\u201d said Ajay Shah, a prominent economist at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi. The root of the problem is India\u2019s failure to create a vibrant industrial base with the strength to export. As Western buyers scour Asia for alternatives to increasingly expensive Chinese factories, India and its enfeebled manufacturing sector are mostly ignored. Soeb Z. Bandukwala, a managing director of Ansons Electro Mechanical Works, a maker of water pumps and electric motors, wonders how a recovery can arrive, given India\u2019s structural problems. He runs a business that has been in his family since 1967 and has grown to four factories. Yet he keeps each factory at fewer than 50 workers and has maintained some metal grinding machines and other equipment in use since the 1970s without replacement. His worry is that if he exceeds 50 workers or surpasses certain benchmarks for total investment, he will become subject to extensive labor legislation. Image Ansons Electro Mechanical Works in Mumbai has kept fewer than 50 workers at each factory to avoid regulations. Credit Santosh Verma for The New York TImes \u201cThere is a fear, and the fear is the labor laws,\u201d said Mr. Bandukwala, who is also a regional leader in the Confederation of Indian Industry. Infrastructure is also a problem. Ansons is only 35 miles from the port through which it exports machinery to Europe. Yet trucks require four to seven hours to reach the port because promised expressways have never been built. Speeds barely faster than walking at least help protect pumps and motors from harm. \u201cIf the speed is greater, damage will take place because of the potholes,\u201d Mr. Bandukwala said. Poor infrastructure has also driven up costs for industrial real estate in India, which are high compared with China\u2019s. Just in the last five years, China has opened 5,800 miles of high-speed rail routes and 400,000 miles of highways of two or more lanes. That has allowed tens of thousands of factories to move to smaller towns in the interior with much lower land costs. India has been unable to open up its interior the same way, building half as many miles of highways over the same period and no high-speed rail routes. At the same time, rent control and other land regulations make it extremely difficult to tear down and replace even the most dilapidated buildings. So cities like Mumbai have ended up with dozens of square miles of mold-stained, low-rise buildings with spots of bright green fungus, interspersed by the occasional skyscrapers that were somehow built. Remote, outer fringes of factories and office buildings have sprouted on what was once farmland. The acute shortage of real estate less than a day\u2019s drive from ports has produced steep real estate prices and rents. Challenge Overseas, a trousers manufacturer, paid $1.3 million five years ago to buy the 20,000-square-foot top floor of a decrepit, four-story factory building with blocked fire escapes on a muddy alley on the outskirts of Mumbai, and sold it for $2.7 million last month. The floor underneath, the company\u2019s 60-employee factory, sold for $410,000 in 2003 and is now valued at $1.2 million. Roads and bridges to inland towns are not the only infrastructure problem. Shakti Industries, which thins and cuts aluminum wires for jewelry manufacturers, pays the equivalent of 15 to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. In China, even after a round of price increases coming in late September to pay for more clean energy, factory owners will pay half as much. Shakti has only seven employees. Yet it is regulated by more than a dozen government agencies, each of which sends a separate inspector each year before issuing licenses for things as diverse as electricity use and water pollution. Many of the inspectors demand bribes, said Vipul S. Kamani, the managing director of Shakti. High real estate and electricity costs leave businesses with very little money to pay workers and remain competitive in the global markets for garments and other manufactured goods. Arun Prajapati, 21, a migrant worker at a fabric fusing machine at Challenge, said that he earned about $100 a month, just a fifth of what Chinese workers earn these days. He pays $9 a month for rent and electricity for his sleeping space on the floor of a 10-foot-by-10-foot room that he shares with five other migrant workers in a nearby shanty. He spends $38 a month for a subsistence diet of roti bread, lentils and, once a week, some chicken or eggs. He sends his meager savings to his widowed mother in their home village in central India. \u201cWith expenses rising each month, things are only getting harder and harder,\u201d he said. \u201cI am just trying to get through life.\u201d One private sector industrial giant that bet heavily on an economic takeoff in India is the Essar Group, based in Mumbai. In the last five years it has invested nearly $18 billion to build one of the world\u2019s largest refineries and one of the world\u2019s biggest steel mills in northwestern India while tripling capacity at its ports and quadrupling the output of its power plants. But the company now plans to collect income from these projects instead of building more, and it is even selling three steel-related businesses to pay down debt. Haseeb A. Drabu, a former government economic planner and bank chairman who is now Essar\u2019s chief economic adviser, said that at Essar and across India, \u201cI don\u2019t see any fresh wave of investment.\u201d", "keyword": "India;Economy;Indian rupee;Infrastructure,public works;International trade"}
{"id": "ny0261829", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2011/06/24", "title": "3 Blasts at a Baghdad Market Kill 21", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 Three explosions ripped through a public market on Thursday evening, killing at least 21 people and leaving a gruesome scene of scattered body parts and bloodied shoppers. The attack, in a largely Shiite neighborhood, was notable in that it struck at civilians in the heavily fortified capital and left a high death toll. Many of the large-scale attacks lately have been against government institutions, like the police, as well as local officials. Earlier in the day, an attack on an American convoy killed a civilian working for U.S.A.I.D. The victim, Dr. Stephen Everhart, was working with Baghdad University to develop a new business curriculum, according to a statement from the State Department. One witness to the market attack, a dentist who owns a clinic nearby, described what he saw in the street after he heard two blasts. \u201cEveryone was screaming and crying, and everyone was covered in blood,\u201d said the dentist, Mustafa Saoih. Mr. Saoih, a Sunni, added that he had endured the sectarian strife of 2006 and 2007 but until Thursday had \u201cnever seen such things.\u201d He said that he feared a return of rampant violence, and that he would not go back to his clinic for at least two weeks. \u201cIt\u2019s all about sectarian war,\u201d he said. A couple hours after the explosions, an official in the Interior Ministry put the casualty toll at 21 dead and more than 100 wounded. The official said that improvised explosive devices had been hidden among the groceries at the market. The Associated Press, citing police officials, reported that 34 people had been killed. The bombing was the latest in a particularly violent week for Iraq , and it came two days after two suicide bombers detonated vehicles packed with explosives near a provincial governor\u2019s house in the southern part of the country. That attack left at least 27 people dead. Just after the market explosions, a car bomb detonated in another southwest Baghdad district. The early report from the Interior Ministry was that two people had been killed and that five people had been wounded. In the northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday, at least five people were hurt when two police patrols were attacked with improvised explosive devices, according to a local official. The spurt of violence on Thursday occurred as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in a speech rebuked his ministries and promised to dismiss many incompetent officials. The speech came after the expiration of a 100-day deadline that Mr. Maliki had imposed on his ministries to improve their performance. The deadline, which passed weeks ago, was prompted by street protests this year by people demanding improved services.", "keyword": "Iraq;Terrorism;Civilian Casualties"}
{"id": "ny0283963", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/07/12", "title": "Japan Election, a Landslide for Abe, Could Allow a Bolder Military", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 The Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has governed Japan in one way or another for all but four of the past 61 years, a winning record that reflects the political inertia of a society that values stability and tradition. But even by the standards of Japanese politics, Mr. Abe\u2019s landslide victory in national elections on Sunday was stunning. For the first time, voters gave the Liberal Democrats and their allies more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament \u2014 a supermajority that could allow Mr. Abe to realize his long-held ambition of revising the clause in the Constitution that renounces war and make Japan a military power capable of global leadership. Opinion polls show only lackluster support for Mr. Abe\u2019s security agenda or even his program to revitalize the Japanese economy, but the public appeared unwilling to take another chance on the opposition Democratic Party, which stumbled badly in its last, rare stint in power , most notably in its response to the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster . The vote for stability at home, though, is likely to provoke unease across Asia, where memories of Japanese militarism in World War II endure and the prospect of a more assertive Japan will add to worries over China\u2019s territorial ambitions and North Korea\u2019s nuclear program . In China, Xinhua, the state news agency, warned in a commentary on Monday that the election results \u201ccould pose a danger to Japan and regional stability.\u201d Experts say that Mr. Abe\u2019s governing coalition will not be able to push through constitutional revisions immediately, given that some of the partners have differing opinions on what needs to be amended and how. For example, the Liberal Democrats\u2019 main ally, a small Buddhist party, has said that it opposes changes to the clause that renounces war. At a news conference on Monday, Mr. Abe said that he intended to press for debate on constitutional revision, though he acknowledged that \u201cit\u2019s not so easy\u201d and added, \u201cI expect the discussion will be deepened.\u201d Mr. Abe\u2019s party, in a draft proposal of a revised Constitution, has also recommended amendments to the clause on freedom of speech and the press that could limit these rights in cases deemed dangerous to the public interest. Another proposal would expand emergency powers for the prime minister. Any revision would need to be approved by a majority in a public referendum. But the party\u2019s victory on Sunday appears to have less to do with its proposals and more to do with the disarray in the opposition Democratic Party. \u201cThe people\u2019s distrust towards the Democratic Party is very high,\u201d said Lully Miura, a lecturer on international politics at Tokyo University. \u201cIn 2009, the Democratic Party won the government, but they failed and failed and failed, and even once-supporters of the Democratic Party now distrust them.\u201d Some analysts said the opposition may have overestimated the public\u2019s worries about Mr. Abe\u2019s constitutional agenda at a time when so many remain concerned about Japan\u2019s weak economy. Mr. Abe, for his part, spent most of his time on the campaign trail exhorting voters to allow his economic plan \u2014 called Abenomics \u2014 to continue, and he barely mentioned the Constitution. \u201cProbably the opposition parties pushed too much on the constitutional issue as a political agenda,\u201d said Koji Murata, a professor of international relations at Doshisha University in Kyoto who supports constitutional changes. \u201cBut people didn\u2019t care about the constitutional agenda in this upper-house election.\u201d Toshio Ogawa, an opposition candidate from Tokyo who narrowly won a seat, said voters might have had a hard time understanding how his party\u2019s economic plans differed from those of the Liberal Democrats. But, he said, \u201cI knew that Abe\u2019s real goals were security and the Constitution. So I thought I had to point it out clearly.\u201d Critics said Mr. Abe\u2019s party deliberately played down its agenda on constitutional change. Some also accused the Japanese news media, particularly the public broadcaster, NHK, of conspiring to help the governing party and failing to air enough information about the issues at stake in the election. Voters seemed more interested in staying the course and giving Mr. Abe\u2019s economic policies more time to yield results than in the debate over rewriting Japan\u2019s pacifist policies. \u201cI want them to accelerate their economic policy to increase more jobs and improve social welfare,\u201d said Akemi Machida, 29, who voted for Liberal Democratic candidates at a polling station in Sagamihara, a suburban town southwest of Tokyo. As for the opposition, she said, \u201cThere were no particular alternatives besides the L.D.P., whose policies sounded more convincing.\u201d Opinion polls show a majority of respondents in Japan oppose Mr. Abe\u2019s security policies. But when the news media conducts these surveys, the questions are often vague. \u201cThe opinion polls ask whether there is a need to revise the Constitution at all,\u201d said Yasuo Hasebe, a constitutional scholar at Waseda University. \u201cThis is quite a strange question. People can\u2019t answer that question before knowing which clause and in what way this change will be made.\u201d The very language used to describe constitutional revision may also confuse voters. \u201cIn Japanese, the word for revise, \u2018kaisei,\u2019 gives an impression that something is improved or made better,\u201d said Minako Saigo, 28, a mother of three children in Kyoto who founded Mothers Against War last July to protest legislation that gave the military some powers to fight in foreign conflicts for the first time since World War II. \u201cPeople stop thinking,\u201d Ms. Saigo added. \u201cThey don\u2019t question what will happen next.\u201d Outside Japan, Mr. Abe\u2019s new supermajority is likely to further unsettle an increasingly tense region. South Korea defied China last week by announcing that it would deploy an advanced American missile defense system to protect itself against North Korea. And many in Asia are waiting to see how China and the United States respond to a ruling expected on Tuesday in a complaint brought by the Philippines challenging Beijing\u2019s territorial claims in the South China Sea. \u201cThe Chinese will fear that Abe will find a way to work the system to his advantage,\u201d said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia and a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. At a regular news briefing on Monday, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Lu Kang, said that China and other Asian countries were \u201cconcerned about political moves in Japan\u201d because of its past military action in the region. In South Korea, an editorial in Munhwa Ilbo, a right-leaning newspaper, said the election results \u201copened the door for a Japan that can go to war,\u201d though it added that a rearmed country \u201cwill also help deter North Korea\u2019s nuclear threat and check the rising military power of China.\u201d The White House had no immediate comment on the election, but Jonas Stewart, a spokesman for the United States Embassy in Tokyo, said the Japanese government remained \u201ca steadfast ally across our broad agenda of regional and global issues.\u201d The United States supported Mr. Abe last year in the passing of the security bills that enable the military to participate more fully in foreign actions. While constitutional change may be a long way off, some analysts said they worried the consequences of Sunday\u2019s election were more fundamental. \u201cDemocracy needs a system of checks and balances,\u201d Gerald L. Curtis, a professor of political science at Columbia University, wrote in an email. \u201cBut if the opposition parties are impotent and the L.D.P. is firmly under Abe\u2019s control, that system will be weakened to an unprecedented degree.\u201d", "keyword": "Election;Shinzo Abe;Liberal Democratic Party Japan;Japan;US Constitution,United States Constitution;Military"}
{"id": "ny0247550", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/05/29", "title": "France\u2019s View of Strauss-Kahn Case Tinted by Courts\u2019 Differences", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn , which continues to crowd out much other news here, is becoming something of a civics lesson in American justice \u2014 one that has inspired both biting criticism and some respect. Legal experts say much of the consternation here over what many consider rough treatment in the news media and the courts is rooted in a general unfamiliarity with an American justice system that differs profoundly \u2014 in procedure, tone and philosophy \u2014 from the French model. \u201cThere is an aspect of pageantry that we don\u2019t have in our country,\u201d said Judge Marie-Blanche R\u00e9gnier, who is national secretary of a French magistrates trade union. While the American justice system has its origins in British common law and involves ordinary citizens at almost every level, the French judicial system is rooted in the Napoleonic Code and is largely conducted behind closed doors. Suspects are typically ushered into courthouses through discreet side entrances, out of view of the public. State-appointed magistrates prosecute and pass judgment in most trials without the oversight of citizen jurors, who serve only in the most serious cases. In such cases, formal charges come \u2014 if they come \u2014 only after a lengthy inquest by an investigating judge, who collects evidence on behalf of both the prosecution and defense before determining if a trial is warranted. And in further contrast to the American system, investigating magistrates are legally bound to secrecy during an inquest. All too often, critics say, the French system allows cases against well-known people to go nowhere or result in reduced charges without explanation. \u201cFor the powerful,\u201d Judge R\u00e9gnier said, \u201cthere is a treatment that can be different.\u201d Because the magistrates are considered impartial investigators, and are tasked with seeking the truth without bias, the defense typically does not conduct a separate investigation. Building their arguments primarily on evidence collected by investigating magistrates, and only rarely introducing significant evidence of their own, French lawyers seldom attack the credibility of witnesses or plaintiffs, a common tactic in American court cases. \u201cWe\u2019re going to see the man who could have been the embodiment of the French left obligated \u2014 because it\u2019s the American judicial system that wants it \u2014 to crush this woman,\u201d Jean-Dominique Merchet, a deputy editor at the weekly magazine Marianne, said on France Info radio. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be terrifying.\u201d Much also has been made here of the 74-year sentence that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who stepped down as the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, could face if convicted on all counts. American audiences pay little heed to such numbers. But French law puts far stricter limits on sentencing, and discrepancies between maximum terms and sentences as they are handed down are often less drastic. Noting that the Manhattan district attorney is elected, many French also see the influence of politics in the muscular approach taken toward Mr. Strauss-Kahn, accused by a hotel housekeeper of attacking her in his room. The \u201cdeliberate destruction\u201d of Mr. Strauss-Kahn would probably be a \u201cvery winning\u201d electoral strategy, Robert Badinter, a Socialist senator and former justice minister, said on France Inter radio. Bradley D. Simon, a New York defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said some American lawyers also disliked the \u201ctheatrics of the criminal justice system.\u201d But he rejected French assertions that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been unfairly singled out. Rather, Mr. Simon said, he is being \u201ctreated as badly as everyone else.\u201d The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly criticized the French judiciary as lacking independence. Writing on his blog after Mr. Strauss-Kahn was arrested, the respected Paris magistrate Philippe Bilger praised the diligence of an American system that \u201cdoes not hesitate to apprehend even the most emblematic personalities with lightning speed.\u201d In France, he said, such people \u201cwould have had the time to prepare their truth or their lie.\u201d", "keyword": "Strauss-Kahn Dominique;France;Politics and Government;Courts and the Judiciary"}
{"id": "ny0208970", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/12/27", "title": "For Homeless Families, Christmas at the Temple", "abstract": "It is Christmas time at the synagogue, and the social hall is ringed with more mattresses and sheets-that-pass-for-curtains than in other years. Newly homeless families will bunk here for two weeks before moving to another house of worship \u2014 and then another and another. In the Oneg Shabbat room at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, children hooked angels on a tall Christmas tree. Volunteers taught excited girls how to knit while other girls squealed with delight as they shaped papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 balloons. A man galloped by with a laughing boy on his back. With Candy Land, PlayDoh, a miniature motor scooter \u2014 and teenage girls bubbling with good intentions \u2014 there is almost everything here to please a child. For the adolescents though, the toys and attention cannot obscure what is not there. A 14-year-old boy with a nervous smile misses his TV, computer and a bed, and he does not like being confined to a few rooms. His younger brother has his own worries: \u201cSome of the kids who come help here I hope are not people I know.\u201d These suburban families reflect a growing nationwide population of the homeless, who have shed jobs and housing. They couch-surf and sleep in cars until, alternatives exhausted, they come to rest at a shelter. Last year the federal government estimated there were 1.6 million homeless in the United States, of which one-third were families. The number of individuals in shelters dropped by 2 percent, thanks to the Bush administration\u2019s efforts to house the chronically homeless, while the number of people in families increased by 9 percent. The Obama administration is spending close to $3 billion on preventing homelessness and putting people into permanent housing. Contra Costa County will receive $3 million over three years. While local experts concur that they are overwhelmed with the needs of homeless families this year, local surveys do not reflect the increase. A once-every-other-year snapshot survey shows a decline in the number of homeless families from 2007 to 2009 in most Bay Area counties. But Tim O\u2019Keefe, executive director of Shelter Inc., which provides shelter for families in Contra Costa County, disagreed with the statistics. \u201cThose numbers are not what we\u2019ve experienced,\u201d Mr. O\u2019Keefe said. \u201cOur numbers are going through the roof.\u201d Throughout the nation, cities rely on religious institutions to shelter homeless families on a rotating basis. While no one doubts that moving from congregation to congregation is better than sleeping in a car, rotating shelters are criticized as denying children a sense of place. \u201cThey are very disruptive to a child\u2019s development to move all the time,\u201d said Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. With budget tightening five years ago, Contra Costa County handed over responsibility for housing families to nonprofit and interfaith groups. \u201cWe would go to county meetings and say, \u2018As people of faith, we ask you to increase the number of beds,\u2019 \u201d said Gwen Watson, who is founder and president of Winter Nights, an organization that represents over 100 congregations and provides shelter from October through April. It operates on a $127,000 budget. After the City of Concord refused access to the local armory, Ms. Watson learned that the old Orinda library building was available. \u201cWe thought we had died and gone to heaven,\u201d she said. But the issue nearly provoked a municipal civil war. Some residents said they moved to escape city life and the homeless; others worried that children might find hypodermic needles in their park sandbox. It was during those debates that Ms. Watson heard opponents shout, \u201cLet the churches handle it!\u201d Volunteers at Temple Isaiah and at 25 other congregations cook spaghetti casseroles, tutor and take families on outings. Responsibilities are shared among houses of worship that take the families for two weeks at a time. While it might be better for the families to stay in one church for months, that would not work \u201cbecause of Nimby,\u201d Ms. Watson said, referring to the not-in-my-backyard attitude. Monday through Friday, the families must leave the church or temple after dawn and not return until after 5 p.m. Volunteers drive children to school, and for parents and young children with no place to go during the day, they offer \u201cthe oasis,\u201d a St. Vincent De Paul facility in Pittsburg with a computer, a shower and a play area for preschool children. By spring, it is hoped that everyone will have a home. Failing that, they will be sent to another shelter. Traditional homeless shelters rarely allow minors. With children now making up one-fourth of the county\u2019s 5,000 homeless, Winter Nights is therefore crucial. This Christmas, as in years past, Temple Isaiah agreed to host homeless families, Ms. Watson said, because the people at the temple \u201cknow the Christians are so busy getting ready for Christmas.\u201d Sandy Anderson, who runs the temple program, said: \u201cAs Jews, we don\u2019t know how to celebrate this time of year. This is our way.\u201d More than 300 families help provide meals, tutors, and the Christmas tree, carolers, a jovial Santa and toys. With 10 families, Winter Nights is at capacity; eight families are on the waiting list, and there are extraordinary requests. A woman scheduled to give birth on Christmas Eve appealed to a local church for housing this week, because the singles shelter where she resides was adults only. \u201cI can\u2019t think of anything sadder than when a baby is born into homelessness,\u201d Ms. Watson said. \u201cHow can we refuse?\u201d Every venue is the same, with blue, red, yellow and white sheets strung from irrigation pipes encircling each family\u2019s patchwork of mattresses. A family\u2019s belongings are stuffed into tall, dented cardboard boxes, which volunteers cart to each new location. The fastest-growing population of homelessness in the country remains invisible. \u201cIt\u2019s not like San Francisco, where you are walking over bodies,\u201d said Cynthia Belon, director of Contra Costa County\u2019s homeless program. Fearful that their children will be put in foster care , homeless families tend to hide from public view. Shelter operators say families are staying longer because finding work is so much more difficult. \u201cThe front door is open,\u201d said Mary Kay Sweeney, executive director of Homeward Bound, a residential service program in Marin County. \u201cWe can\u2019t find the back door.\u201d With the recession , the image of homelessness \u2014 \u201cthe man with a beard and smelling bad\u201d \u2014 changed, Tim O\u2019Keefe of Shelter Inc. said. Homeless families do not suffer as much from substance abuse and mental illness as homeless individuals; they are more likely to be victims of foreclosure and the recession. All of the adults at Winter Nights who were interviewed said they did not mind moving from place to place, but critics contend that the merry-go-round model is designed from the perspective of the volunteers. \u201cPeople are trying to do the best they can,\u201d said Barbara Poppe, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness. But, Ms. Poppe said, the moveable shelter \u201cis not a stabilizing environment\u201d for children. \u201cThe best solution is to get them into an apartment as quickly as possible,\u201d she said, adding that congregations could pay the first month\u2019s rent. \u201cIf there is no housing available, Ms. Poppe said, homeless families are better served if they can \u201cstay in the same place and have their own room and have volunteers come to them.\u201d But doing good is never simple. \u201cIf the families were at one site, we would not get the active participation from volunteers,\u201d Ms. Anderson said. The volunteers want to remain where they are, she said: \u201cThat\u2019s part of what makes it attractive.. They\u2019re comfortable in their home church.\u201d", "keyword": "Homeless Persons;San Francisco Bay Area (Calif);United States Economy;Temple Isaiah"}
{"id": "ny0128396", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/06/27", "title": "Jewish Settlers Begin Evacuation of Ulpana", "abstract": "BEIT EL, West Bank \u2014 The rooms are much smaller, with kitchens running along a wall of the salon rather than in a separate space. But freshly potted flowers and trees awaited the new residents on each doorstep. There are no hilltop views, no grassy yards, though neighbors share courtyard patios of the same red brick that formed a path behind the old place. Gas, sewage, water, air-conditioning and electricity \u2014 including timers for Shabbat \u2014 were all in place on Tuesday as families ousted from the disputed neighborhood known as Ulpana made their way to their new homes down the hill here. The relocation was the most peaceful evacuation of a Jewish settlement from the occupied territories in memory. \u201cYou can see they\u2019re making an effort,\u201d Michal Kitay, 23, said of the government as she told movers where to put bookcases and beds. \u201cBut it hasn\u2019t got memories. Our home is in Ulpana. We brought both of our babies back from the hospital there.\u201d After months of legal wrangling, political infighting, threats of violence and marathon negotiations, the Ulpana families moved quietly if not willingly on Tuesday, resentful of losing homes they love but grateful that the government had agreed to build 10 times their number in this sprawling religious settlement near the Palestinian city of El Bireh. The evacuation was ordered by Israel\u2019s Supreme Court because 5 of Ulpana\u2019s 14 buildings, housing 30 families, sit on private Palestinian land. Wary of enraging the international community, yet eager to appease the settlers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that the Israeli government would add 300 homes here in Beit El and 500 more at settlements elsewhere in the West Bank . And on Tuesday, the government petitioned the court to delay by several months the scheduled July 1 removal of the buildings at Ulpana, in hopes of finding a way to relocate rather than demolish them. So while Palestinians and their supporters saw the court ruling as a moral victory, the practical result is an expansion of the settlement enterprise. Several experts said the agreement further diminishes the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and some saw the deal as a sign that Mr. Netanyahu was leaning toward a unilateral rather than bilateral approach to the issue, with Israel essentially defining the borders of a future Palestinian state. \u201cNetanyahu is pushing toward a de facto annexation, but without paying the diplomatic price of such blatant violation of international consensus,\u201d Michael Manekin, director of policy for a new research group, the Center for Renewal of Israeli Democracy, wrote in a paper on the subject. \u201cIf this position constitutes a move to the center, how exactly does the center differ from the right wing?\u201d Most of the international community considers all the settlements in the West Bank territory that Israel captured in the 1967 war to be illegal. But Israel distinguishes between those built with permits on state land and those constructed on private plots or without authorization. Beit El, about 15 miles from Jerusalem, is seen by most experts as one of the settlements that would be removed if a peace agreement were reached with the Palestinians, making its expansion now more significant. \u201cThere is no two-state solution with Beit El,\u201d said Tzaly Reshef, a Jerusalem lawyer who was among the founders of Peace Now, a left-wing group that opposes the settlements. \u201cWhile Netanyahu may say from here to eternity that the Israelis will negotiate, the Israelis will compromise, what he does on the ground shows his real intentions.\u201d Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said the prime minister in fact did see Beit El, which was founded in 1977 and now has about 7,000 residents, as \u201cone of those communities that will remain part of Israel,\u201d but he said the Ulpana deal should be seen as separate from the stagnant peace process. \u201cHe thinks the fate of these communities must be determined in negotiations,\u201d Mr. Regev said of Mr. Netanyahu. \u201cFrom the point of view of the prime minister and the government, the fact that we could implement the Supreme Court decision peacefully and avoid violence \u2014 that\u2019s a major achievement.\u201d Despite early threats from his right flank that lawmakers would bolt from the governing coalition if Ulpana was evacuated, Mr. Netanyahu seems to have navigated the politics of the situation successfully. But the matter has produced strife within the settler movement. Hard-liners urged confrontation with the Defense Ministry workers who were sent to evacuate the residents, and a veteran settler leader had his tires slashed during a meeting over the weekend. On Tuesday, pamphlets circulated criticizing Beit El\u2019s chief rabbi, Zalman Melamed, who helped negotiate the agreement, and teenage boys hung signs saying \u201cSupreme Court is Sodom\u201d and \u201cBibi is destroying our country\u201d on construction containers in the new neighborhood. In the evening, about 10 youths tried to occupy one of the evacuated apartments, but Ulpana residents removed them. Dani Dayan, the head of the settlers\u2019 Yesha Council, has called for a vote of confidence in his pragmatic strategy on July 9. \u201cThere is, you can call it, a leadership crisis,\u201d said Israel Harel, the founding chairman of Yesha and now a senior fellow at the Institute for Zionist Strategies. \u201cIn the general arena, the settlers\u2019 movement made a big victory. But there is a big inner debate about if this compromise should be accepted.\u201d Here in Beit El, that debate played out writ small, as tearful families watched more than 100 workers pack their Talmudic texts and toddlers\u2019 toys into boxes. The movers arrived around 7 a.m., while the men of the settlement were in the middle of morning prayers, their heads covered in prayer shawls. \u201cIt is not the first time in history that evil rulings turned into blessings,\u201d Rabbi Melamed told the congregation. \u201cWe pray here that this evil will turn into a blessing, with many more homes built on the land of Israel.\u201d The mood through the morning was a mix of somber and frenzied, as cranes hoisted steel cages crammed with furniture and boxes. On the side of one, someone had written, \u201cWe are not evacuating by choice, we are evacuating under imposition.\u201d Residents, including months-old babies, wore black T-shirts declaring, \u201cWe will be back.\u201d Around noon, the trucks headed down the hill about two miles to a military base that was hastily converted into a neighborhood over the past 21 days. Workers were still connecting telephone lines, and a tractor was still finishing a patio as women wiped down kitchen shelves in the modular yellow stucco buildings known here as \u201ccaravillas.\u201d They are about two-thirds the size of the apartments the settlers left behind, and are single-level cottages rather than three-story walk-ups; each is scheduled to have another room added by Aug. 15. Neighbors from Ulpana mostly found themselves side by side in the yet-unnamed new spot, where each front door bore a handwritten welcome sign. Mrs. Kitay, who emigrated from Australia in 2009, said she would first make sure that the cribs and changing table were set up before her 2-year-old daughter and 5-month-old son returned from day care in midafternoon. Then, after bedtime, she would confront the rest of the job, deciding which pieces of their furniture would fit, and which would have to wait in storage until more permanent homes are built. \u201cI made aliyah, I moved to Israel, because of something deep down I didn\u2019t quite understand,\u201d Mrs. Kitay said. \u201cNow I understand. The minute someone tries to take something that you love, you go crazy. I\u2019m going crazy for this land.\u201d", "keyword": "West Bank;Palestinians;Israel;Israeli Settlements"}
{"id": "ny0199842", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2009/07/14", "title": "Clinton Says Candidate for Aid Agency Is Tangled in Vetting", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In a rare burst of public frustration with the White House, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that she could not announce a new director for the United States Agency for International Development because the candidate was stuck in a lengthy vetting process. \u201cIt\u2019s frustrating beyond words,\u201d she declared at a town hall meeting of agency employees. \u201cI pushed very hard, when I knew I was coming here, to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly.\u201d \u201cI was unable,\u201d Mrs. Clinton said. \u201cThe message came back: \u2018We\u2019re not ready.\u2019 \u201d The White House declined to comment on the matter. The exhaustive vetting process has left posts unfilled across the Obama administration, but the international development agency has been hit particularly hard, with no director since President Obama took office. The administration is expected to name Paul Farmer, a Harvard physician who is also an anthropologist and who has run public health programs in Haiti and Rwanda. Mrs. Clinton said several people had declined the job, now filled by an acting director, because the financial and personal reporting requirements were so onerous. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s ridiculous,\u201d she said. \u201cSome very good people just didn\u2019t want to be vetted.\u201d The process has become more demanding in the Obama administration, with candidates required, for example, to list every place they have lived since age 18.", "keyword": "Clinton Hillary Rodham;United States International Relations;United States Politics and Government;United States Agency for International Development (USAID);Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0128934", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/06/10", "title": "Looking for Reasons for David Dewhurst\u2019s Failure to Win Big", "abstract": "Ross Ramsey, the managing editor of The Texas Tribune, writes a regular column for the Tribune. Even with nine candidates in the Republican primary to replace United States Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, just about everybody bet on Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to win outright. Instead, he is in a runoff against Ted Cruz, the former state solicitor general, an energetic opponent who tapped into the anti-establishment vein in the Texas Republican Party . Mr. Dewhurst is still the front-runner, but he is no longer the inevitability presented throughout the spring. And now the spotlight is brighter. Mr. Dewhurst and Mr. Cruz don\u2019t have to compete for attention with a presidential race or contests in other states. National political reporters looking for things to cover are more likely than normal to be planning visits to the Texas barbecue trail. They \u2014 like the people they cover \u2014 are trying to connect the dots this election year, to figure out whether there is any theme or trend in the results. Did Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, a six-term United States Senator, lose his seat because of some conservative uprising or did he just fall out of sync with the state that elected him? Was that a result of the Tea Party \u2019s support of Richard Mourdock or was it about some idea that the guy representing the state ought to have a house there? What about Nebraska? Did Deb Fischer win the Republican nomination for United States Senate because she was more conservative than the two statewide officeholders she beat? Or was it because those two front-runners knocked each other\u2019s brains out and she was the only candidate still standing at the end? Does the recall election in Wisconsin mean anything? Gov. Scott Walker faced down an effort by the state\u2019s unions and Democrats to undo his 2010 election. Some see that as a reaffirmation of the conservative movement that put him in office. Is the Texas race connected? Are there signs that the establishment is crumbling and that insurgent conservative partisans are taking over the Republican Party? Maybe. The folks in the Cruz control room are hoping so, and you can certainly expect them to hype that story line. Mr. Cruz \u2014 who had never previously sought public office and acquired most of his experience as a lawyer in government service \u2014 received more advertising and organizing support, in terms of spending, from the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks than from his own campaign. If he can keep those and other outside groups interested through the July 31 runoff, he may have the resources to compete with Mr. Dewhurst. History is on Mr. Dewhurst\u2019s side. Statewide candidates who collect votes as he did \u2014 44.6 percent in the first round \u2014 almost always win their runoffs in Texas elections. But Mr. Dewhurst ran like an incumbent. He skipped most of the candidate forums around the state this year, opting instead to speak on his own and in his advertising. To someone paying less than full attention, he appeared to be an officeholder seeking another term. That story line about the insurgents isn\u2019t a great one for him. The Dewhurst camp will point to the nine candidates on the ballot, to the fact that three of them \u2014 Mr. Dewhurst, Mr. Cruz and former Mayor Tom Leppert of Dallas \u2014 advertised heavily. And they will point to the relative prominence of a fourth candidate, Craig James, who played professional football and worked as an ESPN analyst. It\u2019s worth noting that Mr. Cruz, Mr. Leppert and Mr. James snagged a combined 51 percent of the primary vote. This is even more interesting: In early voting, Mr. Dewhurst got 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Cruz\u2019s 30 percent. On Election Day, Mr. Dewhurst\u2019s advantage was skinny; he received 41.5 percent while Mr. Cruz got 38.1 percent. One more: The non-Dewhursts \u2014 Mr. Cruz, Mr. James and Mr. Leppert \u2014 received a combined 47.6 percent during the two weeks of early voting; on May 29, they got 54.4 percent. Put another way, Mr. Dewhurst tied his three chief rivals in early voting, but they clobbered him on Election Day. Maybe the connecting dots that matter here don\u2019t go through Indiana, Nebraska and Wisconsin. It\u2019s worth looking at the timeline instead of the map. After delayed primary dates and months of campaigning and advertising, Texans finally got to vote. From the middle of May, when voting began, to May 29, Mr. Dewhurst\u2019s numbers got worse. Mr. Cruz\u2019s got markedly better. Now they are both in a position to find out what will happen over an extra nine weeks.", "keyword": "Dewhurst David;Cruz Ted;Elections;Texas;United States Politics and Government;Republican Party;Senate"}
{"id": "ny0183469", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/12/01", "title": "Wall St. Sees Silver Lining in Economy", "abstract": "As Wall Street rallied this week, it seemed that investors were taking comfort in the notion that the economy had become so imperiled by the crumbling housing market that it was forcing the government to finally mount an aggressive rescue effort. Investors found reassurance yesterday in talk that the White House was brokering a deal with banks that could diminish a looming tidal wave of home foreclosures. Soothing words from the Federal Reserve earlier this week revived the hope that more interest rate cuts are on the way, drowning nervousness in a din of buying. \u201cThe market now feels comfortable that the Fed has come to appreciate the severity of the situation,\u201d said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage and advisory firm ITG. \u201cThe bad news gives you the blessing of lower interest rates.\u201d But even as investors took heart in palpable signs that the government was preparing to dole out more medicine for the ailing economy, a number of economists cautioned that the pain itself was still unfolding, with its ultimate magnitude far from known. Signs point to a slowdown in the creation of jobs and investments by companies. Consumers are clutching their wallets more tightly. Banks are denying loans to many businesses, unwilling to bet scarce capital in a time of risk and uncertainty. A glut of unsold homes keeps prices falling and the construction industry in distress. And even the sharp fall in the price of oil, which offered the comfort that higher energy costs might be easing, reflects a broader fear that global economic activity may slow as growth falters in the United States. Looming large over the landscape is uncertainty about the size of losses still confronting banks and other financial institutions as they reckon with bad mortgages along with credit card debts, auto loans and the complex detritus of an era of loose money now over. \u201cIt\u2019s a sucker\u2019s rally,\u201d said Nouriel Roubini, a former Treasury official who runs an economic consultancy, RGE Monitor. \u201cThe market is essentially hoping the Fed can rescue the economy. But they are discounting the onslaught of really lousy economic news.\u201d The price of oil, which only last week threatened to break through $100 a barrel, closed yesterday at $88.71, completing its steepest weekly plunge in the last two years. Cheaper oil blunts the threat of inflation, adding to the sense that the Fed has room to take interest rates lower without worrying about setting off an upward price spiral. But the lower price also reflects the view of investors who now expect a substantial American economic slowdown, which would ease the pressure of the rising demand for energy. \u201cThe market is realizing how much of a train wreck the economy is right now,\u201d said John Kilduff, an energy analyst at MF Global in New York. There are plenty of reasons, of course, to count on the economy\u2019s inherent countervailing forces to ultimately help restore it to health. Lower interest rates should indeed spur more economic activity. A falling dollar has helped spur American exports and curb imports, contributing to a narrower trade deficit. And if the banks really do sign on to the deal the Bush administration is pushing to keep lower rates in place for subprime mortgages, that should keep a lot of people from losing their homes. Yet many of the forces gnawing at the economy remain in place, and actually appear to be intensifying. The trajectory was reinforced by data released yesterday, which showed that Americans now have less money in their pockets and are less inclined to spend. Personal income grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 0.2 percent in October compared with September, the Commerce Department reported. That was only half the rate expected. Consumption grew a paltry 0.2 percent, dropping from the 0.3 percent increase registered in September. Construction spending plummeted at double the anticipated pace. Perhaps more ominously, a government report released yesterday suggested that the number of jobs created in the spring was far smaller than previously assumed. The economy generally needs about 125,000 new nonfarm jobs each month to absorb newcomers entering the labor force and employ those who have lost work, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody\u2019s Economy.com . In 2006, the economy was still creating about 200,000 positions a month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But in the first 10 months of this year, the number slipped to 125,000. On Friday, the government is to disclose how many nonfarm jobs were created in November. Mr. Zandi and many economists expect the number to fall to about 75,000. \u201cThat will erode confidence in the economy,\u201d he said. \u201cIt becomes self-reinforcing, and the economy will slide into recession.\u201d If the economy does land in recession, \u201cthat would mean we\u2019re going to lose a million jobs over a two-year period,\u201d predicted Alan D. Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price Associates in Baltimore. Whether the economy can avoid that fate, Mr. Levenson suggested, may ride on whether the words of comfort the market heard this week turn out to be sincere. The Fed has to drop rates enough to break the financial logjam and encourage businesses and households to borrow and spend anew. The White House has to deliver a deal that really will prevent millions of families from losing their homes, he said. \u201cIf the president puts his seal on it, that would tell me the grown-ups are in charge,\u201d Mr. Levenson said.", "keyword": "United States Economy;Economic Conditions and Trends;Interest Rates;Credit;Stocks and Bonds;Federal Reserve System"}
{"id": "ny0233373", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2010/08/01", "title": "Pocono Raceway Becomes Solar-Powered", "abstract": "LONG POND, Pa. \u2014 Doc Mattioli is 85 and does not get around his racetrack in the mountains quite as well as he used to. Even 10 years ago, he would hop into a bulldozer to take care of a rough spot. Now he must use a wheelchair, and his once-booming voice seems several decibels softer. But there he was on Friday, on a muddy, 25-acre patch outside Pocono Raceway, celebrating an accomplishment with his great-grandchildren. Pocono Raceway, carved out of a former asparagus farm 40 years ago, became what it says is the world\u2019s largest solar-powered sports facility. In the background, stock cars buzzed around the racetrack, practicing for Sunday\u2019s 500-mile Nascar Sprint Cup race. Mattioli\u2019s unique, triangular track has been criticized by drivers over the years \u2014 even later Friday afternoon \u2014 but they keep returning. \u201cWhen I hear these negative reports, I say, \u2018Well, then, why do you come back? If you don\u2019t like it, why are you coming back?\u2019 \u201d Mattioli said. \u201cThere\u2019s always somebody criticizing when you\u2019re in a business like this.\u201d He paused, smiled and said: \u201cI\u2019ve been hearing this for 30 years. I just laugh.\u201d The solar farm, which The Associated Press reported cost $16 million, will power the racetrack and 1,000 nearby homes. This was not the brainstorm of Mattioli, a former Philadelphia dentist who is rarely called by his given name, Joseph; it was the idea of his 34-year-old grandson, Brandon Igdalsky, now the track president. But Igdalsky had to get Mattioli\u2019s blessing. Igdalsky and George Ewald, the track superintendent, said they were thinking about a much more modest solar project until Mattioli said they could use a cleared parcel of land once used as parking lots for the track. Other work is about to begin at Pocono. After Sprint Cup cars race around the track on Sunday for the 66th time, obsolete steel guardrails will be removed. Soft walls known as Safer barriers will be erected. Igdalsky said the renovation would have been done faster had the Sprint Cup Series not just been here in June. Before practice on Friday, Kevin Harvick, the Sprint Cup points leader, said he was glad to learn that Pocono planned a renovation. A week earlier, before a race at Indianapolis, Harvick said Pocono had the worst barriers of any Sprint Cup track. Igdalsky is not shaken by remarks like that. \u201cYou can\u2019t get better if you don\u2019t get criticism,\u201d he said. And Harvick had something positive to say about the aging, bumpy racetrack at Pocono. \u201cIt\u2019s not like Indy, where everything is dead smooth,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have some character in the racetrack to work on this week.\u201d The drivers would also welcome having more of the infield paved, especially after witnessing what happened to Kasey Kahne\u2019s car on June 6 in the last race here . Kahne\u2019s car, which was blocked entering a corner, lost traction on the infield grass and skipped back onto the track. It was hit hard by several other cars and nearly flipped over the outside wall at the track, which is lined with a row of short trees. Kahne was not injured, but the driver Greg Biffle said in a July interview with Sports Illustrated, \u201cThey\u2019re going to kill someone there.\u201d On Friday, Jimmie Johnson, the four-time Sprint Cup champion, said of Kahne, \u201cI mean, he could have been out there in the trees.\u201d Johnson also said: \u201cNot just this track, but I don\u2019t think grass has any purpose inside the walls of a racetrack any more. There\u2019s no friction to slow down the vehicle, and then the cars just hammer the wall when that\u2019s the case.\u201d Pocono is hardly the only pincushion for drivers\u2019 complaints. And drivers seem to be grumbling a little less than they did even earlier this season. Part of the reason is that word leaked last week that Nascar fined two drivers , Ryan Newman and Denny Hamlin, for making detrimental comments about the sport, which has been hit hard by the poor economy. At a news conference Friday afternoon, Tony Stewart, an owner and driver who has been critical in the past, said, \u201cWe\u2019re all shooting ourselves in the foot because we\u2019re convincing some people this stuff is bad.\u201d Igdalsky said that criticisms of the track were, in a way, appreciated. When he and Mattioli were asked in separate interviews how often they thought about improving the facilities, they had the same answer: constantly. Nascar is expected to return for two more races in 2011. Ticket sales for this weekend\u2019s race, Igdalsky said, were good. On Friday, Mattioli had a cutting-edge solar farm to show the public. Maybe that would not improve the racing on Sunday, but he said it would make an impression on the four generations of his family that attended. \u201cAnd that, to me, makes it worth the whole thing,\u201d Mattioli said.", "keyword": "Solar Energy;Automobile Racing;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing;Pocono Raceway"}
{"id": "ny0088991", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/09/29", "title": "As Online Data Theft Escalates, Banks Look to Retailers to Bear the Losses", "abstract": "On Sept. 1 last year, the website Rescator, known as the \u201cAmazon.com of the black market,\u201d alerted its customers that huge quantities of stolen debit and credit card data would go on sale the next day. \u201cLoad your accounts and prepare for an avalanche of cash!\u201d the website urged. The next day, two batches of cardholder data were reportedly sold, according to legal documents. The website claimed the cards were 100 percent valid and working. Demand was so high that the website temporarily crashed. Over the next few days, several more batches of card data were sold. On Sept. 8, Home Depot issued a news release admitting its data systems had been breached. By then, the damage had been done. Approximately 56 million sets of card data had been stolen, some of which were sold on the black market and remained valid for several days. At a small credit union in California, fraudulent charges of more than $100,000 were posted in just three minutes after the card information was sold on the black market. A bank reported $300,000 in suspicious charges in two hours to the security blog Krebs on Security , which connected Home Depot with the stolen cards before the retailer did. \u201cWith the Home Depot data breach, we weren\u2019t even told for days that it existed. That it had happened,\u201d said Diana Dykstra, the chief executive of the California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know that the cards had been sold on the black market. It hit credit unions and small banks really hard.\u201d A year later, the full tally of the Home Depot data breach remains unknown. Some estimate the fraudulent charges total well into the billions of dollars. Over the last couple of years, retailing has been a rich hunting ground for online criminals. They hacked into numerous companies, including Neiman Marcus, Sally Beauty and the crafts store Michaels. But the orchestrated theft at Target in late 2013, followed a few months later by the Home Depot data breach, eclipsed all of the others. So far, there have been no arrests in the Target and Home Depot breaches. As the size and scope of such attacks at retailers has grown, so have the losses, which have been largely shouldered by financial institutions. Now some small banks and others want Home Depot and those companies that suffer data breaches to pay. One front of the battle is a federal lawsuit winding through the courts, filed by a number of small community banks and credit unions that contend Home Depot long ignored internal and external warnings from security experts that its systems were vulnerable to attack. A similar lawsuit against Target claims that its security protocols were \u201cso deficient that the breach continued for nearly three weeks while Target failed to even notice it.\u201d That lawsuit was given class-action status this month by a federal judge in Minnesota. But even as the lawsuits move forward, retailers are scrambling to meet a deadline to install machines to read E.M.V. microchips \u2014 the small metallic rectangles increasingly found on the front of credit and debit cards, named after Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the original backers of the standard. After Thursday, retailers that have not upgraded their systems to read the new chip-enabled cards will be liable for any charges from counterfeit cards. \u201cEssentially, whoever has the lower level of security will be the one who will be responsible for the unauthorized transaction,\u201d said Doug Johnson, a senior vice president of payments and security policy at the American Bankers Association. For now, that\u2019s likely to remain the banks. By some estimates, only 19 percent of credit and debit cards in circulation will be chip-enabled by the deadline. \u201cIt cuts both ways,\u201d Mr. Johnson acknowledged. \u201cIf we don\u2019t deploy the chip cards, we maintain the liability that we have currently.\u201d Image A Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, N.J. Retailers are supposed to be able to handle the new chip cards by Thursday. Walmart was ready almost a year ago. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times Retailers and banks are spending billions of dollars to upgrade to the new chip cards . While they hope the cards will slam the door on criminals obtaining financial data that can be used to create and sell counterfeit cards, they warn that other windows for fraud will remain wide open. \u201cThe expectation is that organized criminals are going to move from the physical world to the online world,\u201d said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, which tracks card industry data. Credit card fraud losses totaled $8 billion last year, but many consumers may see it as a victimless crime. Certainly there is a high hassle factor around reporting suspicious transactions to the bank or waiting for a reissued card to be mailed, but consumers are generally not held responsible for the fraudulent charges that occur. (Furthermore, experts say while consumers were nervous after the Target and Home Depot data breaches, there is no evidence that they shifted their spending patterns to use cash rather than plastic.) Instead, a majority of the fraud losses are absorbed by financial institutions, which have become increasingly concerned as the sweep of data breaches at retailers widens. Historically, when a credit or debit card number was stolen and used to buy goods elsewhere, the banks or financial institutions digested the losses. Then, in cases where the retailer was found to be in breach of security standards, Visa and MasterCard would seek reimbursement for costs associated with the fraud and disburse that money back to the affected financial institutions through a preset formula. In 2007, for instance, TJX Companies, the owner of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores, settled with Visa and others for $40.9 million to cover costs associated with a large data breach. But small community banks and credit unions say the disbursement of any money collected from retailers rarely, if ever, makes it to their doors. Most goes to large banks. \u201cWe\u2019ve not received any payments at all for any fraudulent activity,\u201d said Marques Doppler, the chief executive of Profinium, a 140-year-old family-owned bank with four branches in Southern Minnesota and around $350 million in assets. Mr. Doppler declined to say how much Profinium, which is one of the plaintiffs in the Home Depot litigation, lost to fraudulent charges. For small community banks like Profinium or nonprofit credit unions, a little fraud can hurt in a big way. \u201cA $100,000 fraud loss to a large financial institution is nothing. But a lot of credit unions have annual net income that is less than $1 million. If you take a couple of big fraud hits, that\u2019s substantial for them,\u201d said Bill Hampel, chief policy officer and chief economist with the Credit Union National Association. Moreover, it can cost small banks or credit unions much more to reissue cards involved in a data breach. The average cost to reissue cards affected by the Target breach, according to a survey of banks conducted by the A.B.A. last summer, ranged from $2.70 per card for large banks to $12.75 for banks with less than $1 billion in assets. So a number of community banks and credit unions filed lawsuits against Target and Home Depot, seeking bigger payouts. How Many Times Has Your Personal Information Been Exposed to Hackers? Find out which parts of your identity may have been stolen in major hacking attacks over the last four years. In the case of Home Depot, the lawsuit alleges that the retailer had ignored multiple warnings about its vulnerabilities since 2008. The suit says Home Depot failed to turn on a feature of the 2007 version of Symantec antivirus software specifically designed to spot malware that attacks point-of-sale terminals. Symantec\u2019s contractors grew so concerned about Home Depot\u2019s approach to security that three of them refused to continue to work for the company and Symantec threatened to cease doing business with Home Depot, according to the lawsuit. When an employee in 2010 discovered a major security flaw that allowed unauthorized access to Home Depot\u2019s network through devices used by its in-store sales force, the employee was ignored for months. Then he was fired, the lawsuit alleges. Starting around April 2014, hackers gained access to Home Depot\u2019s computer systems using the credentials of a third-party vendor. Targeting the self-checkout registers, the hackers installed malware that siphoned off the information from a payment card when it was swiped on a checkout terminal. The malware remained on Home Depot\u2019s terminals for five months, until around Sept. 7, 2014. Home Depot has broadly denied the allegations. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of misinformation out there about this, much of it based on speculation, rumors and opinion by individuals who don\u2019t have the facts, and we\u2019ll address them in the proper forum,\u201d said Stephen Holmes, a spokesman for Home Depot. But the data breach has been costly for the retailer. In regulatory filings, Home Depot said expenses tied to the breach so far total $232 million, partly offset by $100 million in insurance proceeds. Lawyers say a good insurance policy will cover expenses related to investigating the data breach, public relations, call-center services and credit monitoring services as well as costs arising from lawsuits. The challenge for retailers is buying enough of it. \u201cIf you\u2019re a retailer, it\u2019s hard to buy more than $125 million in coverage in today\u2019s market,\u201d said Roberta D. Anderson, a co-founder of the Cyber Law and Cybersecurity practice group at the K&L Gates law firm. \u201cObviously, the potential liability is so much more.\u201d Even as the lawsuit against Home Depot moves forward, the retailer and others are spending billions of dollars \u2014 $100 million at Target alone \u2014 to upgrade their registers to accept chip-enabled cards. Home Depot says all of its stores will be ready to read chip cards by the Thursday deadline. The retailing giant Walmart says its stores were chip-ready almost a year ago. Everyone is hoping that the new chip cards will be much tougher for counterfeiters to copy. Among the new security features is a cryptogram, a security code that changes every time the card is used. But retailers, who have a longstanding feud with Visa and MasterCard over fees, are not happy to be bearing the brunt of the costs to install the new chip readers at their stores (some estimate retailers will spend upward of $30 billion over the next few years) to solve what they see as the bank\u2019s problem. Moreover, they say they do not know why the financial industry in the United States is largely issuing chip-and-signature cards rather than the safer chip-and-PIN cards that have been widely adopted in Europe. \u201cSignature is worthless as a form of authentication\u201d at the point of sale, Mike Cook, an assistant treasurer and senior vice president at Walmart, told attendees during an electronic transactions conference in San Francisco this spring. In the cases of the Target and Home Depot breaches, he said, \u201cnot a single PIN debit card needed to be reissued in those breaches. The card number was worthless to the individual thief and fraudsters, because they didn\u2019t know the PIN.\u201d The card payment industry argues the new cards will offer better protection against counterfeiting, which they say accounts for the bulk of the fraudulent transactions. \u201cThey also don\u2019t want you to have to remember PINs,\u201d said Mr. Robertson of The Nilson Report. \u201cThe reality of the U.S. market, which is distinct from everywhere else in the world, is that we have an average of 4.5 credit cards per person. That\u2019s a lot of PINs to remember.\u201d", "keyword": "Hacker (computer security);Computer security;Banking and Finance;Retail;Credit card;Home Depot;Identity Theft;Debit card"}
{"id": "ny0243730", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/03/15", "title": "Pro-Qaddafi Forces Press Rebels East and West of Tripoli", "abstract": "AJDABIYA, Libya \u2014 Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi cranked up military and psychological pressure on the rebels on Monday, offering amnesty to those who surrendered their weapons but bombing a strategic linchpin in the east and invading a rebel-held town in the west. Government warplanes launched fresh strikes against this anxious town on the doorstep of the opposition capital, Benghazi, and almost abreast of a highway crucial to recapturing the eastern border and encircling the rebels with heavy armor and artillery. Residents of Zuwarah, an isolated city near the Tunisian border in the west, told Reuters that the pro-Qaddafi forces that surrounded them three days before had taken control. \u201cZuwarah is in their hands now,\u201d said one resident, Tarek Abdallah. \u201cThey control it and there is no sign of the rebels. They are now in the center \u2014 the army and the tanks.\u201d The developments came against a background of quickening diplomatic debate over possible outside help for the Libyan rebels, who have made increasingly anxious pleas for intervention that have, so far, produced none. The United Nations Security Council took up the contentious question of a no-flight zone on Monday, but no decision was reached. In recent days, the rebels have asserted that the retreat of their forces is a tactical choice rather than a desperate measure, and that they are reorganizing to inject more experienced fighters into the ranks. At the same time, their unrelenting calls for the no-flight zone \u2014 at news conferences, on banners and even in the face paint of protesters \u2014 have made clear that the rebel leadership holds out little hope of its ragtag army defeating the colonel\u2019s loyalists on its own. In a welcome turn for the rebels, who have asked for military assistance, including airstrikes, from Western powers, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with unnamed opposition leaders in a Paris hotel room after a meeting of the foreign ministers of the countries in the Group of 8 \u2014 the first such high-level meeting. In Benghazi, the vice chairman of the interim opposition ruling council, Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, said a rebel representative would use the meeting with Mrs. Clinton to demand quicker intervention. Inaction, Mr. Ghoga warned, \u201cwould have negative results on our future relations with the West.\u201d Apparently seeking to undermine the rebels\u2019 determination to continue their fight, government authorities on Monday repeated an offer of amnesty for combatants who give up their weapons, Reuters said, quoting state television. The response was not immediately clear. West of Tripoli, loyalists appeared to be tightening their siege of other rebel-held areas, following a brutal week of battle in which they recaptured \u2014 and nearly demolished \u2014 the strategically important town of Zawiyah. The legacy of that battle haunted the residents of Zuwarah, a Berber town of about 40,000 people. \u201cWe know what happened in Zawiyah, and we think that the same thing is going to happen here soon,\u201d one resident said, speaking anonymously to protect himself and his family from retribution. \u201cThey say that if you take down the flag, we will let you live,\u201d he added. \u201cMaybe we will fight, but we will have a lot of casualties.\u201d On the eastern front, amid conflicting claims by the rebels and loyalist forces, the battle lines were hard to locate. The government said on state television that its troops controlled Brega, The Associated Press reported. At the same time, Mr. Ghoga said that rebel soldiers were still fighting in the city, particularly at night, and that on Sunday they had captured more than two dozen loyalist fighters there. But he did not provide any proof of that claim. As the fighting nears Benghazi, Libya \u2019s second-largest city, rebel leaders, reacting to criticism of their battlefield performance, have contended that they may still have a chance: Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s forces, they contend, are overextending their lines as they push rebels back and might be running short of fuel. Mr. Ghoga said the rebels were not facing a similar fuel shortage. And in an interview on Sunday evening, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, the country\u2019s former interior minister and now the head of the rebel army, said the rebels still retained a sizable fighting force, though he said a no-flight zone was still a necessity. General Younes, the former commander of the special forces, said thousands of officers from that unit were now being recalled and mobilized. He said the rebels also had about 100 working tanks that had not yet been deployed. \u201cThe time will come,\u201d he said. There was an eerie calm in Ajdabiya, a strategic town about 100 miles south of Benghazi that has braced for an attack by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. Some lines formed at bakeries, and a few cars were seen transporting residents out of the city. Soviet-made warplanes struck a military barracks at the edge of Ajdabiya that has housed the rebels, who seem, at least anecdotally, to be making an effort to bring discipline to their unruly ranks. One blast struck a guard post at the barracks, spraying shards of green glass around the entrance. The other detonated just feet away from a pile of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades, which did not go off. Hospital officials said five people were wounded, one of them seriously. At the entrance to Ajdabiya, marked by two metal arches, rebels have built dirt fortifications and filled hundreds of sandbags. Ammunition boxes scattered around a courtyard were moved inside or toward fighting near Brega. Rebel leaders repeatedly urged the civilians to leave the entrance, where reporters\u2019 access was limited. \u201cIf he takes Ajdabiya, he will win,\u201d said Yunes Mohammed, an oil safety official milling about with a crowd at the town\u2019s edge, where strong winds swept up sand. \u201cHis people can go from here to Benghazi. But the people of Ajdabiya will fight because we know that if he takes the area, he will kill us all, and we know he has done this before.\u201d", "keyword": "Libya;Arab Spring;Military;Muammar Kaddafi"}
{"id": "ny0136945", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/05/18", "title": "Stock Gains Defy Reports of Weakness", "abstract": "The stock market gained ground last week, despite surging oil prices and sharp declines in consumer confidence and in the construction of single-family homes. Consumer confidence in May was at the lowest level since June 1980, according to a survey by Reuters and the University of Michigan. The Commerce Department said construction of single-family homes in April was at its lowest monthly level since January 1991, although construction of multifamily units rose significantly. Oil futures in New York rose to $126.29 a barrel, a new high, up from $125.96 the previous week. Alcoa gained 10.5 percent for the week, the biggest gain in the Dow Jones industrial average. For the week, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 240.92 points, or 1.9 percent, to close at 12,986.80. The Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index climbed 37.07 points, or 2.7 percent, to close at 1,425.35. The Nasdaq composite index gained 83.33 points, or 3.4 percent, to close at 2,528.85. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 3.84 percent from 3.77 percent the previous week. JEFF SOMMER", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Consumer Behavior;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline"}
{"id": "ny0252114", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/11/18", "title": "Giants\u2019 Tuck Fights Off Frustration", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 Justin Tuck does not like what he sees when he looks in the mirror these days, and part of it, admittedly, is the beard. Tuck, a defensive end for the Giants, is locked into what he referred to as \u201cno-shave November,\u201d so there is a certain grizzled quality to his chin and cheeks that was missing before. \u201cI can\u2019t wait until Dec. 1,\u201d Tuck said Thursday, chuckling as he rubbed his face. Still, there is a larger issue beyond Tuck\u2019s stubble. A year ago, Tuck was the star of the Giants\u2019 defense, totaling 11 \u00bd sacks and 48 solo tackles in 16 games. He went to the Pro Bowl. He was a second-team All-Pro. Now, as the Giants prepare to face the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night, Tuck has spent most of this season as a shell of that player. Tuck has been hindered by injuries to his groin and neck (he has made only four starts), but allowing for his absence does not fully explain his production; he has recorded only two sacks and eight tackles, putting him on pace for his lowest totals since 2006. In a lengthy interview with reporters Thursday, Tuck initially used strong language in describing his poor play and then, later, turned more introspective. \u201cI\u2019m not a very good player right now,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not the effort. I feel like I\u2019m putting forth the effort, but it\u2019s just some things are not allowing me to play my style of football.\u201d He added: \u201cI\u2019m not me. I\u2019m not.\u201d The drop-off has been glaring. With Tuck and defensive end Osi Umenyiora dealing with injuries earlier this season, the second-year player Jason Pierre-Paul enjoyed a breakout beginning. But there were concerns about how many snaps Pierre-Paul was playing, and once Tuck and Umenyiora returned to full action, it was expected that the Giants would exploit their depth and resume being the dominant unit they have been in years past. That has not happened. Statistically, the Giants are below average this season at stopping the run (ranked 20th out of 32 N.F.L. teams) and are mediocre in yards allowed per game (17th). For Tuck, though, his self-evaluation is based on more than statistics. When it was pointed out that he nearly sacked San Francisco 49ers quarterback Alex Smith last Sunday \u2014 a play that, had he completed it, might have colored his overall performance differently \u2014 he seemed unmoved. \u201cIt\u2019s more than that,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve had games where stats have been great\u201d and he played poorly, and vice versa. Usually a player who combines speed and power to break into the backfield or chase down tacklers, Tuck has seen his injuries limit him because they have lingered. Tuck did not play in four of the first six games this season in hopes of getting completely healthy, but he said Thursday he had determined that was almost impossible while the Giants were still playing. Because of his neck, Tuck is perpetually cognizant of opposing players grabbing or pushing on his face mask \u2014 lest his neck get tweaked. His groin injury is not overwhelming anymore but remains a factor, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019m afraid to do things,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just, some things I can\u2019t do.\u201d Perry Fewell, the defensive coordinator, said the team understood what Tuck was dealing with and that \u201cit is just taking him a little more time than he and we expect.\u201d Fewell added that Tuck\u2019s presence still drew attention away from the Giants\u2019 other ends (Umenyiora and Pierre-Paul have combined for 16 \u00bd sacks), so Tuck is still contributing. \u201cHe was playing at a high level in the preseason before his injury,\u201d Fewell said. \u201cHas he been able to jump back on the bicycle and ride as fast as we want him to ride? No, but I think it is coming.\u201d Tuck, obviously, would prefer it come sooner than later. And with the Giants facing shifty weapons Sunday like running back LeSean McCoy and, perhaps, quarterback Michael Vick, the defense will again be in the spotlight. Tuck \u2014 beard and all, at least for another few weeks \u2014 would like to be more than just an emotional leader. Victories, he said, help ease his pain. \u201cOn days when you lost, the injuries feel a whole lot worse than on days when you win,\u201d he said. EXTRA POINTS The rookie cornerback Prince Amukamara (foot) was not limited in practice for the first time this season, indicating that he could be active for his first game Sunday. ... Eagles quarterback Michael Vick (ribs) did not practice for a second straight day, so the Giants\u2019 defense is preparing for Vick as well as the backups Vince Young and Mike Kafka.", "keyword": "Tuck Justin;New York Giants;Sports Injuries;Football"}
{"id": "ny0213359", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2010/03/18", "title": "An Apparel Underdog, Crons, Outfits a No. 15 Seed, Robert Morris", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 Amid the Nike swooshes and Adidas three stripes that dominate the N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments, it may be hard to spot the logo of a little-known company that is squeezing its foot in the door of the $4 billion sports-apparel industry. Crons, which created its name as an acronym from the phrase \u201c Come ready or never start ,\u201d is based in Pittsburgh and describes what it sells as \u201cmotivational apparel.\u201d It is supplying the uniforms and practice gear for Robert Morris University, which is one of only six teams not wearing Nike or Adidas uniforms. Robert Morris, a small, private university of 5,000 students located just outside Pittsburgh, is seeded 15th in the South Region and plays No. 2 Villanova on Thursday. The Colonials are making their second straight appearance in the N.C.A.A. tournament after again winning the Northeast Conference tournament and the automatic bid that went with it. Crons\u2019s founder and owner is Pat Cavanaugh, 42, who played in the N.C.A.A. tournament three times as a walk-on starter at Pittsburgh in the late 1980s. He points out that Robert Morris\u2019s run of success under Coach Mike Rice coincides with their relationship. \u201cAll I know is they\u2019ve been making the tournament wearing our uniforms for the past two years,\u201d Cavanaugh said. Cavanaugh may have a hard time proving a direct correlation between new uniforms and a team\u2019s on-court success. But the surprising thing is that Crons \u2014 whose name Cavanaugh came up with 15 years ago \u2014 is supplying the uniforms and practice gear at all. Two years ago, the university went looking to buy new uniforms. It found that the bigger companies were not willing to do much more than give it different-colored models of uniforms they were already providing to larger programs \u2014 and wanted to charge Robert Morris about 30 percent more than Crons. \u201cWe get the booklets these other companies produce, and when you look for a new uniform, it\u2019s usually a Syracuse or Kentucky style, and if you choose it, you\u2019re basically wearing their uniform,\u201d Rice said. It also did not hurt that in the intertwined world of college basketball, Rice had a tie to Cavanaugh. Rice was an assistant coach at Pittsburgh before going to Robert Morris three years ago, and had met Cavanaugh there and seen the line of clothing his company made for local Amateur Athletic Union teams. So when Rice asked him what he could do for Robert Morris, Cavanaugh offered a custom look that completely revamped the team\u2019s red, white and blue tops and bottoms, and added red, white and blue horizontal stripes down the sides \u2014 a look the team\u2019s players instantly liked. \u201cThe guys liked it and people have talked about it, so, yeah, it\u2019s gotten some buzz,\u201d said Rice, who points out that the team still wears Nike sneakers. All but 12 of the other 64 teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament are wearing sneakers from Nike or its Jordan division. And while it may be only anecdotal, other smaller programs also describe similar situations that demonstrate why companies like Crons \u2014 beyond its founder\u2019s kinetic personality \u2014 are making inroads with teams that previously would have never considered going with anyone but Nike, Adidas, Russell Athletic or even Under Armour. \u201cThe landscape of uniforms and shoes is changing,\u201d said Ryan Marks, the coach of Texas-Pan American, which last year became Crons\u2019s second Division I basketball client. \u201cMajor schools are bound by the shoe contract of whether the coach is a Nike guy or an Adidas guy, and we never were. But schools like ours also don\u2019t get the shoe allotments or discounts we used to on uniforms.\u201d Rice said, \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the haves and have-nots these days, and Crons is taking advantage of that, making quality apparel that\u2019s affordable.\u201d Both Nike and the universities peg that to the economy. In recent years, as the economy has constricted and budgets have become tighter at smaller places in particular, programs have started to look to save wherever they can. At the same time, companies like Nike are putting more emphasis on larger, more visible programs, while giving fewer free goods and smaller discounts to the smaller guys. \u201cWith the economy, we\u2019re not immune to it like everyone else,\u201d said Kejuan Wilkins, a Nike spokesman. That is red meat to career salesmen and entrepreneurs like Cavanaugh, who started his first company when he was 21 while he was at Pitt, and has built the Cavanaugh Marketing Network into a $10-million-a-year company. He created Crons in 1996 , and thought initially he would go straight into retail, so he offered his line to Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods, which is based in a Pittsburgh suburb. \u201cThey said: \u2018Pat, great product. But come back when you have a track record,\u2019 \u201d Cavanaugh said. So, over the last four years, Cavanaugh has ignored retail sales and focused on selling to high schools, athletic organizations, then small colleges, smaller professional teams and now bigger colleges and conferences. Last fall, he secured a contract to provide league gear \u2014 though not individual team uniforms \u2014 for all of the teams in the Big South conference. In all, the company has gone from about 20 clients in 2006 to more than 400. It had revenue of more than $2 million last year, which Cavanaugh believes will grow to nearly $8 million this year. Should Nike ($19 billion in revenue last year) and Adidas ($15 billion) be worried? \u201cOh, no,\u201d said Jim Hartford, chief executive of SportSourceOne, which publishes the trade journal SGB Update. \u201cBut then, Nike wasn\u2019t worried about Under Armour until it was too late.\u201d", "keyword": "NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);Sporting Goods;Robert Morris University;Crons;Sneakers;Uniforms;Colleges and Universities;National Collegiate Athletic Assn;Basketball"}
{"id": "ny0143855", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2008/10/18", "title": "Marian Hossa Still Trying to Adjust to Red Wings", "abstract": "DETROIT \u2014 Red Wings defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom said he had been following the summer\u2019s free-agency period closely, reading articles on the Internet about all the teams that wanted to sign Marian Hossa, the best forward available. Lidstrom said he was as stunned as anyone to find out that Detroit was among them, news he received in a phone call from General Manager Ken Holland when the Red Wings signed Hossa on July 2. It was the kind of deal that seemed unlikely to happen in the era of salary-cap parity. The Red Wings are the defending Stanley Cup champions, already stocked with a dazzling array of talent. They are supposed to lose the best players in the game, not add them. But Lidstrom remains entrenched as the N.H.L.\u2019s best defenseman on the league\u2019s best team, on the same squad as the sublime forwards Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. Datsyuk is signed through 2013-14. Zetterberg\u2019s contract is up after this season. That left the Red Wings with some money available until Zetterberg signs a new deal. Hossa decided to forsake longer, more lucrative offers to accept the Red Wings\u2019 offer of one year at $7.45 million. \u201cThere are lots of great players, Hall of Famers, so much experience on this team,\u201d Hossa said. \u201cI said, If I have a chance to be on this team, with those players, when are you going to have a chance to play with them? Maybe they will be finished with their careers next time around. That inspired me.\u201d Hossa, 29, steered his journey to Detroit to chase a championship. He is known for his breathtaking offensive skill \u2014 he scored 45 goals in 2002-3 and finished with 100 points two seasons ago. But he is also respected for his defensive diligence. He declined to sign a long-term deal with Atlanta last season because of its organizational sputtering and was sent to Pittsburgh at the trade deadline in February. He became instrumental in the Penguins\u2019 push to the Stanley Cup finals, in which they lost to Detroit. His 26 points put him second in scoring for the postseason, only a point behind the leaders, Sidney Crosby and Zetterberg. As inspired as Hossa was by the players who won that series, his new teammates had been impressed by him, too. \u201cHe has explosiveness, speed, and he\u2019s got great hands to go with his speed,\u201d Lidstrom said. \u201cWhen we first signed him, I was thinking about all the great line combinations we could put out there, if we\u2019re going to split Zetterberg and Datsyuk or keep them together. It gives our team another dimension, adding a player of his caliber.\u201d The Red Wings are not off to a blazing start. They are 2-1-1 entering Saturday\u2019s game against the Rangers. They have already lost twice at home, including their opener after the Stanley Cup banner was raised. Their other loss came Thursday, in overtime against Vancouver. Detroit lost only 12 home games last season. But Datsyuk missed most of the preseason with a groin injury and now Zetterberg is out for an estimated 10 days with a similar injury. The Red Wings have learned that it takes time to add such a major piece to their offense, no matter how talented he may be. At its best, Detroit\u2019s offense looks choreographed. The Red Wings play long stretches without giving up the puck; their passes are made with instinctive knowledge of where every player will be. \u201cIt takes time to know the system, to get to know how your linemates are playing,\u201d Zetterberg said, referring to Hossa. \u201cHe\u2019s been working hard and he\u2019s getting to the right spots. That\u2019s what you have to do when you play with Pavel. He will find you when you\u2019re open. You have to have patience and be in the right spot.\u201d So far, the Red Wings have decided to put Datsyuk, a center, with Hossa at right wing and Tomas Holmstrom on the left. Zetterberg, who spent last season playing on a devastatingly successful line with Datsyuk, was moved to another line, giving the Red Wings new depth they hardly seemed to need. Detroit has everyone back from its championship team, except for goalie Dominik Hasek and forward Dallas Drake, who both retired. It is a veteran-laden group that knows it must keep complacency at bay. \u201cIt\u2019s a new season and we will see what we do now,\u201d Datsyuk said. \u201cYesterday is yesterday. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Let\u2019s work on now.\u201d Opponents can hardly take solace if Hossa and Datsyuk have not created immediate magic. When Hossa joined the Penguins in late February, he was placed on Sidney Crosby\u2019s line, but they struggled to connect for more than a month. Neither Hossa nor Datsyuk has scored a goal, but Holmstrom leads the team with four; Hossa and Datsyuk have combined for seven assists. \u201cThere is always an adjustment point,\u201d Hossa said. \u201cWith Sid, it didn\u2019t click right away. It took us a little bit of time to get used to each other.\u201d He added: \u201cObviously, Pavel is an excellent player, Holmer is an excellent player. We\u2019re just learning how to play together. With a little more luck we would have more goals, but I think it\u2019s coming. Every game is better.\u201d And that sparks fear in the rest of the N.H.L.", "keyword": "Hossa Marian;Hockey Ice;Free Agents (Sports);Detroit Red Wings;National Hockey League"}
{"id": "ny0156500", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/06/21", "title": "Ford Delays New Pickup in Sign of Retreat on Big Vehicles", "abstract": "DEARBORN, Mich. \u2014 The Ford Motor Company said on Friday that it would delay introducing its new pickup, a vehicle critical to its plan to become profitable, and that it would probably lose money for a fourth consecutive year in 2009 because of a precipitous drop in demand for large vehicles. Ford said it would begin selling the highly anticipated 2009 version of the F-150 pickup in late fall, two months later than intended, because dealers needed more time to clear out the current model, which had been deeply discounted. In addition, the company announced its second significant production cut in a month, saying it would build 90,000 fewer pickups and sport utility vehicles in the second half of the year than it had previously planned. It is increasing production of more fuel-efficient cars and crossovers, but over all, Ford plans to build 25 percent fewer vehicles in the third quarter than it did in the same period of 2007. Ford said it expected industry sales of 14.4 million to 14.9 million light vehicles, down from its previous projection of up to 15 million. \u201cAs gasoline prices average more than $4 a gallon and consumers worry about the weak U.S. economy, we see June industry-wide auto sales slowing further and demand for large trucks and S.U.V.\u2019s at one of the lowest levels in decades,\u201d Ford\u2019s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said in a statement. \u201cFord has taken decisive action to respond to this accelerating shift in customer demand away from large trucks and S.U.V.\u2019s to smaller cars and crossovers.\u201d Two debt-rating services, Standard & Poor\u2019s and Moody\u2019s, warned on Friday that they might downgrade Ford, along with the other Detroit automakers. Bruce Clark, a senior vice president at Moody\u2019s, said Ford\u2019s ability to finance its reorganization was becoming a concern. Ford said cash outflows would be larger than expected and that its automotive business would lose more money this year than in 2007, the opposite of its previous guidance. \u201cFord is going to burn a considerable amount of cash until it adequately expands its fleet of fuel-efficient cars and convinces consumers that these vehicles offer competitive value relative to Japanese product,\u201d Mr. Clark said. A liquidity crisis could allow Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor, to gain influence at Ford. On Thursday, Mr. Kerkorian said he had increased his stake in the company to 6.49 percent and offered to infuse additional capital. Ford took another step back from its long-held goal of returning to profitability by 2009, saying it would have difficulty breaking even, which is the projection that executives made in late May. Ford lost $2.7 billion over all in 2007 and has not earned a full-year profit since 2005. The automaker said the market had deteriorated to such a degree that its financing arm, Ford Motor Credit, which had been a dependable source of profit, would lose money this year and was no longer planning a distribution payment to Ford in 2008. Ford Credit will have a pretax loss \u2014 excluding any potential payment related to Ford\u2019s profit maintenance agreement \u2014 primarily because of further weakness in large truck and S.U.V. auction values. Brian Johnson, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, projected that both Ford and General Motors might have to write down the value of their financing arms by at least $1 billion because of falling used-car prices. Shares of Ford declined more than 8 percent Friday, closing at $5.81, and have fallen 31 percent since May 1. G.M. shares were down nearly 7 percent, to $13.79. The F-150 delay increases the likelihood that the F-series will lose its distinction as the best-selling vehicle in the United States after 26 consecutive years. In May, four Japanese sedans, led by the Honda Civic , outsold the F-series, the first time in 16 years that a pickup truck was not the nation\u2019s top seller in any given month. Sales of the F-series fell 33 percent last month and were down 20 percent so far this year. Ford has spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, overhauling the F-150, which has generated huge profits and is responsible for a large part of Ford\u2019s image. It is one of two new full-size pickups scheduled to go on sale this fall, along with Chrysler\u2019s 2009 Dodge Ram. Chrysler said it had no plans to delay the Ram\u2019s release. \u201cThere\u2019s no better way to fight a slower pickup market than to introduce what we think is a game-changing truck,\u201d a Chrysler spokesman, Bryan Zvibleman, said. G.M., meanwhile, has indefinitely halted plans to revamp its pickups and S.U.V.\u2019s in order to focus on smaller cars. Earlier this month, G.M. announced plans to close four truck plants in North America. Ford is idling its truck plant in Wayne, Mich., for nine weeks starting Monday, though the adjacent car plant is adding workers. The company will eliminate a shift at each of the two plants that build the F-150 and plans to shut one of them for most of the third quarter before starting to build the new F-150. \u201cWe view the move to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles as permanent, and we are responding to customer demand,\u201d Mr. Mulally said.", "keyword": "Ford Motor Co;Sales;Automobiles;United States Economy;Utility Vehicles and Other Light Trucks;Layoffs and Job Reductions;Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0232579", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/08/16", "title": "Bypassing Resistance, Brazil Prepares to Build a Dam", "abstract": "ALTAMIRA, Brazil \u2014 For Raimunda Gomes da Silva, the impending construction of a huge hydroelectric dam here in the Amazon is painful d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. About 25 years ago, the building of another dam more than 200 miles east of here flooded her property, driving a plague of poisonous snakes, insects and jaguars onto her land, she said, before submerging it completely. Now, after starting a new life in Altamira, the government is telling her she needs to leave again, this time to make way for the Belo Monte dam, which will flood a large swath of this city, displacing thousands of people. \u201cThis dam is a threat to me because I no longer have the energy I once did,\u201d said Mrs. da Silva, 53, whose family of 11 shares a three-bedroom home with banana trees in the back. \u201cWe can no longer invest and build another house like this one. For me, this is like throwing away a lot of hope.\u201d But she will have little choice. Initial construction on the Belo Monte dam, which will be the third largest in the world, is slated to begin by next year. Persistent opposition by environmental and indigenous groups , even with help from high-profile figures like the Canadian-American movie director James Cameron , failed to stop the $11 billion project, which will produce electricity for big cities like S\u00e3o Paulo while flooding about 200 square miles of the Xingu River basin. Indigenous communities say the dam will devastate their lands and force about 12,000 from their homes. They say it will reduce the river level, destroying their traditional fishing industry. The city of Altamira, above the dam, faces the opposite problem, with about a third of it to end up under water. Thousands of residents will be relocated. Last week, regional indigenous leaders met here to plan a dramatic occupation of the dam\u2019s construction site, but after four days of discussion failed to produce a consensus, the protest was called off. Members of nongovernmental groups trying to stop the dam are starting to sound resigned. \u201cThe groups are still divided,\u201d said Christian Poirier, the Brazil campaign leader for Amazon Watch , who attended the meeting. \u201cThere are a lot of political considerations right now for the indigenous leaders. Some have been neutralized by handouts or threats.\u201d The government has pushed hard to ensure that construction on the dam, decades in the planning, would begin before President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva leaves office at the end of this year. When some of Brazil\u2019s most important private construction and civil engineering companies grew jittery about the financial risks earlier this year, the government raised its investment stake and is now financing more than three quarters of the project. Valter Cardeal, director of engineering for Eletrobr\u00e1s, Brazil\u2019s state electricity company, said the project would have no negative economic impact on any indigenous community. He acknowledged that there would be reduced water flow downstream, but not enough, he said, to affect fishing. He said Belo Monte would bring \u201cimprovements and advances\u201d to indigenous people, including sanitation, better health and education services, and \u201cterritorial security\u201d for their lands. As to Altamira, he said people forced to relocate would be compensated and most would benefit. In the low-lying neighborhood of about 700 homes where Mrs. da Silva lives, for instance, some homes are built on stilts to avoid seasonal flooding. Mr. Cardeal said the relocation would lift those residents out of such \u201cprecarious, subhuman conditions.\u201d He said that the government would provide assistance to small farmers and that the construction companies had agreed to put $280 million in a sustainable development plan for the region. Such assurances are disputed by dam opponents and many residents. At a meeting in March, indigenous leaders waved bows and arrows, and threatened to go to war to stop the construction. But two tribes, the Xikrin-Kayap\u00f3 and the Parakan\u00e3, have since dropped their opposition, citing concerns about losing government handouts, Mr. Poirier said. He and others involved in the discussions accuse the government utility Eletronorte of trying to divide the indigenous groups by buying off leaders with gifts or threatening to deny their communities health or other services. Mr. Cardeal and a spokesman for Electronorte denied those accusations. Altamira residents are divided. Some are hopeful that the dam will bring jobs and money to this lightly populated municipality, Brazil\u2019s largest. During construction, the dam is expected to provide an estimated 20,000 jobs, although initially, at least, many of the workers will have to come from elsewhere, said Elcirene de Souza, the head of the Altamira federal employment office. She said 90 percent of the work force in Altamira was not qualified for the skilled jobs the project needs. She said she was concerned that the influx of workers would usher in gangs, drugs and crime, as has happened in the building of other dams. Government officials, though, have told residents that they hope to avoid such problems by not creating a separate village for workers, as they have in the past, but incorporating the workers into the city. Already r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from applicants are flooding in, about 8,200 in the first four months of the year, from at least five Brazilian states, Ms. de Souza said. Residents like Mrs. da Silva, skeptical of government promises of subsidies and relocation packages, are mainly concerned about where they will live. She said the government badly underpaid her for her last house, paying only the cost of construction materials, not the market price. She fears the same will happen again. \u201cWhen they arrive, they come with a price table showing what they will offer for our house, and we either accept that price or they won\u2019t offer anything else,\u201d she said. \u201cThey will tell me how much my house is worth and will not relocate me anywhere else.\u201d She fears for her husband, a fisherman. \u201cHe only has two more years left to get his retirement plan, but we aren\u2019t sure if he will be able to fish for another two years,\u201d she said. \u201cDo you think the fish will hang around here? The fish know where to escape to, but us, we need to go where they throw us.\u201d", "keyword": "Brazil;Indigenous People;Politics and Government;Levees and Dams;Hydroelectric Power;Environment"}
{"id": "ny0051091", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/10/07", "title": "A Gulf in Ocean Knowledge", "abstract": "Scientists probably have significantly underestimated how much the world\u2019s oceans have warmed since the 1970s, according to a new study. The finding may force researchers to revise their gauges of some climate change effects, including the rate of sea-level rise. The study , by Paul J. Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others, found that the underestimation was the result of decades of spotty sampling of water temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, home to three-fifths of the world\u2019s oceans. Until 2004, when a worldwide system of autonomous floats, called Argo, became operational, there were relatively few temperature measurements south of the Equator. While atmospheric warming because of the trapping of heat by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has most of the public\u2019s attention, the oceans store far more of this heat. The study showed that the amount of heat absorbed by the top 2,200 feet of the oceans from 1970 to the mid-2000s may be as much as 58 percent higher than previously estimated. \u201cWe potentially may have missed a fair amount of heat that the ocean has been taking up,\u201d Dr. Durack said. The researchers looked at global climate models, partitioned between north and south, and found a strong correlation between these simulations and data on sea-surface height as measured by satellites. But the models were not a good match for temperature, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. This suggested that the problem was not with the models so much as with the lack of temperature data before 2004. The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Sea-level rise linked to climate change is related in part to increased melting of ice sheets and in part to the fact that water expands as it warms. So the finding that more heat has been taken up by the oceans may lead to revisions in estimates of the rate of sea-level rise. The finding also may affect assessments of how sensitive the climate is to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the researchers said.", "keyword": "Oceans and Seas;Climate Change;Global Warming;Nature Climate Change Journal;Greenhouse gas;Paul J. Durack"}
{"id": "ny0222755", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2010/11/29", "title": "A Note to Readers: The Decision to Publish", "abstract": "The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. The New York Times and a number of publications in Europe were given access to the material several weeks ago and agreed to begin publication of articles based on the cables online on Sunday. The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match. The Source of the Material The documents \u2014 some 250,000 individual cables, the daily traffic between the State Department and more than 270 American diplomatic outposts around the world \u2014 were made available to The Times by a source who insisted on anonymity. They were originally obtained by WikiLeaks , an organization devoted to exposing official secrets, allegedly from a disenchanted, low-level Army intelligence analyst who exploited a security loophole. Beginning Sunday, WikiLeaks intends to publish this archive on its Web site in stages, with each batch of documents related to a particular country or topic. Except for the timing of publication, the material was provided without conditions. Each news organization decided independently what to write about the cables. Reporting Classified Information About 11,000 of the cables are marked \u201csecret.\u201d An additional 9,000 or so carry the label \u201cnoforn,\u201d meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries, and 4,000 are marked \u201csecret/noforn.\u201d The rest are either marked with the less restrictive label \u201cconfidential\u201d or are unclassified. Most were not intended for public view, at least in the near term. The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times\u2019s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online. After its own redactions, The Times sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information that, in the official view, would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials \u2014 while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material \u2014 suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all. The Times is forwarding the administration\u2019s concerns to other news organizations and, at the suggestion of the State Department, to WikiLeaks itself. In all, The Times plans to post on its Web site the text of about 100 cables \u2014 some edited, some in full \u2014 that illuminate aspects of American foreign policy. The question of dealing with classified information is rarely easy, and never to be taken lightly. Editors try to balance the value of the material to public understanding against potential dangers to the national interest. As a general rule we withhold secret information that would expose confidential sources to reprisals or that would reveal operational intelligence that might be useful to adversaries in war. We excise material that might lead terrorists to unsecured weapons material, compromise intelligence-gathering programs aimed at hostile countries, or disclose information about the capabilities of American weapons that could be helpful to an enemy. On the other hand, we are less likely to censor candid remarks simply because they might cause a diplomatic controversy or embarrass officials. Government officials sometimes argue \u2014 and the administration has argued in the case of these secret cables \u2014 that disclosures of confidential conversations between American diplomats and their foreign counterparts could endanger the national interest by making foreign governments more wary of cooperating with the United States in the fight against terrorists or other vital activities. Providing an Analysis Of course, most of these documents will be made public regardless of what The Times decides. WikiLeaks has shared the entire archive of secret cables with at least four European publications, has promised country-specific documents to many other news outlets, and has said it plans to ultimately post its trove online. For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public. But the more important reason to publish these articles is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations \u2014 and, in some cases, duplicity \u2014 of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name. In the coming days, editors and reporters will respond to readers on the substance of this coverage and the decision to publish. We invite questions at askthetimes@nytimes.com .", "keyword": "United States International Relations;State Department;Wikileaks;Classified Information and State Secrets;New York Times"}
{"id": "ny0123250", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/09/08", "title": "Pennsylvania: Feud Ends in Arrests", "abstract": "A man who was angry about a photo of his girlfriend on Facebook took revenge against the former boyfriend who posted it, making a hoax call to the police that set off a terrorism scare and ended with the ex-boyfriend being taken off an airliner at gunpoint, the authorities say. Kenneth W. Smith Jr. was arrested Friday on charges of making a false threat to the Philadelphia police, who recalled a flight bound for Dallas and marched the former boyfriend, Christopher Shell, off the plane on Thursday. The episode led to Mr. Shell\u2019s own arrest on drug warrants after he finally reached Texas to celebrate his 29th birthday. Both men posted bond on Friday. US Airways Flight 1267 was about 90 miles into its flight when the plane was turned around on Thursday morning. After it landed in Philadelphia, heavily armed officers removed Mr. Shell. During questioning, he told the authorities of the romantic feud, which involved hostile text messages with his ex-girlfriend and encounters with Mr. Smith, according to a federal affidavit. Mr. Smith acknowledged calling the police to say Mr. Shell was carrying liquid explosives, the affidavit said.", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;Bombs and Explosives;Threats and Threatening Messages;Smith Kenneth W Jr;US Airways Group Inc"}
{"id": "ny0104116", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/03/26", "title": "Waiting in Line to See Supreme Court Argue Health Law", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Time becomes an abstract concept after you have spent 47 hours sitting on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court . Searching her memory, Kathie McClure, a 57-year-old trial lawyer from Atlanta, struggled to recall when the fight broke out over the fourth and fifth spots in line to attend this week\u2019s arguments in a constitutional challenge to the health care law . It was sometime on Saturday, she remembered. But was it before or after the \u201cRoad to Repeal\u201d Tea Party rally, which started at noon? And when was it that she ducked into a Starbucks to warm up after being out in the rain? Heading into the first of three days of Supreme Court arguments on Monday, the pavement occupied by the approximately 15 people in line Sunday morning was among the most coveted real estate in Washington. Tickets are scarce even for those connected to the case. And for everyone else, there\u2019s the line. It started with two people who were in line by 9:30 a.m. on Friday, waiting to score one of at least 60 seats made available to the general public for each day of arguments, said Kathy Arberg, a Supreme Court spokeswoman. Monica Haymond, a 23-year-old legal assistant who passed the time by watching episodes of \u201cDr. Who\u201d on her laptop, lined up after work Friday \u2014 63 hours before arguments were to begin. \u201cWe were hoping to be the first people here, but apparently it was more competitive than we had ever imagined,\u201d she said. The first two in line declined to be interviewed, and others identified them as paid placeholders. In Washington, anyone who wants to attend a judicial or Congressional hearing and can afford to spend $36 to $50 an hour can hire professional \u201cline standers\u201d through companies like Washington Express to do the waiting for them. LineStanding.com , which had people waiting outside the court over the weekend, lets customers choose how early they want their surrogate to arrive, including an option labeled \u201cplease put us at the front of the line.\u201d Witnesses say the fight Saturday was over a couple of placeholders\u2019 spots. According to Ms. McClure, who was just behind the placeholders, a supervisor for one of the companies discovered that two workers had abandoned the line, leaving his prime fourth and fifth spots unattended. He began arguing with the others in line and with the court police, a heated exchange that included \u201csome mild threats,\u201d Ms. Haymond wrote on her blog . Ms. McClure said the police threatened to remove the supervisor\u2019s employees from the line. He managed to negotiate the return of one of his lost seats, moving Ms. McClure up to No. 5 and, according to Ms. Haymond, prompting the creation of an unofficial roster. As Ms. Arberg, the spokeswoman, noted, nobody is assured a seat until Monday morning, at which point those in line can either go in or stick around for Tuesday\u2019s or Wednesday\u2019s arguments. For the most part, the line standers police themselves, generally sticking to a friendly code that allows for bathroom breaks and food runs. Though only a few people joined the line between Friday night and Sunday morning, the faces changed from hour to hour. Most were paid placeholders and volunteers who worked in shifts. John Winslow, the manager of LineStanding.com , said he paid his placeholders $18 an hour, half the company\u2019s fee of $36 an hour. Rev. Rob Schenck, president of Faith and Action, a Christian group that opposes the law\u2019s requirement that employers cover contraception , said that a team of staff members, others the group was compensating and some volunteers were holding spots in line for him and three others. Among the volunteers were his three adult children. \u201cNo matter what kind of puny compensation they would receive, it\u2019s way above and beyond the call of duty,\u201d he said of the placeholders. As one might expect during an overcast weekend on a Washington sidewalk, there were ups and downs. The group was upbeat on Friday night when temperatures were in the 50s, but by 2 a.m. Sunday, they were huddled under ponchos and tarps in the pouring rain, struggling to sleep while observing the \u201cno camping\u201d rule that prohibited tents. Faith and Action, which occupies a row house near the court, opened its doors, offering free food and access to its two showers. And as those in line emphasized, there was a congenial atmosphere that disregarded opinions on the case\u2019s outcome as people shared food and offered to pick up extra sleeping bags for those without. But Ms. McClure, who has two children with chronic health problems and has traveled the country in a purple bus to drum up support for the law, said they should not have had to wait in line at all, arguing that the court\u2019s proceedings should be televised. \u201cThis is a momentous case,\u201d Ms. McClure said. \u201cInsurance coverage for 30 million people is on the line, and we\u2019re having to sleep on the sidewalk to get a peep at what goes on in there?\u201d", "keyword": "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010);Supreme Court;Sidewalks;Washington (DC)"}
{"id": "ny0131835", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/12/26", "title": "Even Cupid Wants to Know Your Credit Score", "abstract": "As she nibbled on strawberry shortcake, Jessica LaShawn, a flight attendant from Chicago , tried not to get ahead of herself and imagine this first date turning into another and another, and maybe, at some point, a glimmering diamond ring and happily ever after. She simply couldn\u2019t help it, though. After all, he was tall, from a religious family, raised by his grandparents just as she was, worked in finance and even had great teeth. Her musings were suddenly interrupted when her date asked a decidedly unromantic question: \u201cWhat\u2019s your credit score?\u201d \u201cIt was as if the music stopped,\u201d Ms. LaShawn, 31, said, recalling how the date this year went so wrong so quickly after she tried to answer his question honestly. \u201cIt was really awkward because he kept telling me that I was the perfect girl for him, but that a low credit score was his deal-breaker.\u201d The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates. It\u2019s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That\u2019s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40. \u201c Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,\u201d said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. \u201cIt\u2019s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone\u2019s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person\u2019s sexual past.\u201d It\u2019s difficult to quantify how many daters factor credit scores into their romantic calculations, but financial planners , marriage counselors and dating site executives all said that they were hearing far more concerns about credit than in the past. \u201cI\u2019m getting twice as many questions about credit scores as I did prerecession,\u201d Ms. Thakor said. Executives who run online financial advice forums say that topics about credit and dating receive hundreds of responses within minutes of being posted. Alexa von Tobel, founder and chief executive of Learnvest.com , a financial planning firm, said that members are more interested in credit scores than ever before. \u201cIt\u2019s the only grade that matters after you graduate,\u201d she said. Josephine La Bella, 25, who works at a payroll company, likes to tackle the delicate subject head on. Ms. La Bella, who has vigilantly monitored her credit score ever since graduating from Rutgers in 2009, has found that broaching the topic of her own credit score causes her suitors to open up, too. In August, Ms. La Bella recalled, while at dinner in Bayonne, N.J., a date blurted out his credit score on the first outing. Instead of making things more awkward, she said, a really productive discussion followed. Since then, Ms. La Bella tries to bring up the topic soon after meeting someone. \u201cI take my credit score seriously and so my date can take me seriously,\u201d she said. A handful of small, online dating Web sites have sprung up to cater specifically to singles looking for a partner with a tiptop credit score. \u201cGood Credit Is Sexy,\u201d says one site, Creditscoredating.com , which allows members to view the credit scores of potential dates who agree to provide the numbers. On another site, Datemycreditscore.com , a member posted on the Web site\u2019s home page that others should to \u201cstop kidding\u201d themselves and realize that credit scores do matter. Dating someone with poor credit can have real implications. Banks remain wary of making loans to borrowers with tarnished scores, typically 660 and below; the best scores range from 800 to 850, and scores above 750 are considered good. A low score could quash dreams of buying a house, and result in steep interest rates, up to 29 percent, for credit cards, car financing and other unsecured loans. A middling credit score can also torpedo an application for an apartment and drive up the cost of cellphone plans and auto insurance . And while eight states, including California , Illinois and Maryland , have passed laws limiting employers ability to use credit checks when assessing job candidates, 13 percent of employers surveyed by the Society of Human Resource Management in July performed credit checks on all job applicants. Lauren Dollard, a 26-year-old assistant at a nonprofit in Houston , said her low credit score had helped to stall her romantic plans. Her boyfriend is wary of marrying her until she can significantly pay down the more than $150,000 she owes in student loans and bolster her credit score, she said. Ms. Dollard\u2019s credit score is so low, around 600, that she hasn\u2019t been able to qualify for a car loan. She sympathizes with her boyfriend\u2019s position because he \u201cdoesn\u2019t ever want to be accountable for the irresponsible financial decision I made,\u201d she said. Her boyfriend declined to be interviewed. John Hendrix, a 33-year-old chemist in San Francisco , said he worried that the vast disparity between his girlfriend\u2019s credit score and his own low one could create tension in their relationship. When the couple leased a car in October, Mr. Hendrix had to leave his name off the contract because his poor credit scuttled his chances for the bargain interest rate that his girlfriend qualified for. Mr. Hendrix said he resented that his credit score, which he said was marred by a single contested cable bill, has limited his access to credit. \u201cI always pay my bills so it\u2019s pretty ridiculous that a billing error can ruin your score,\u201d he said. His girlfriend declined to be interviewed. Sarah Klein, who manages myFICO Forums, an online discussion group, likens credit scores to dieting because both affect dating but often are shrouded in secrecy. To motivate members to openly discuss and rehabilitate their credit scores, the site runs an online contest called the myFICO Fitness Challenge , where participants try to increase their scores. ( FICO is a name derived from Fair Isaac Corporation.) Last year, more than 24,000 members participated. In a post on the forum, one member asked for advice after finding out that her boyfriend\u2019s credit score hovered around 400. Some members denounced the member as petty and materialistic while others counseled her to run away from him. Ms. LaShawn, the flight attendant from Chicago, said that she was still shocked that her credit score could sabotage a potentially great date. She had accumulated credit card debt and sporadically fallen behind on bills, and explained that she wasn\u2019t sure of her credit score, but was positive that it wasn\u2019t very good. Days after her failed date, she said, she got an apologetic text message. Her date reiterated that the problem \u201cwasn\u2019t me, it was my credit score.\u201d", "keyword": "Dating;Debt;Credit score"}
{"id": "ny0021491", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2013/09/16", "title": "An Unusual Public Battle Over an Energy Nomination", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The coal industry, feeling threatened by federal efforts to promote wind and solar power, has opened a counterattack by opposing President Obama\u2019s nomination of a renewable electricity advocate to head the federal agency with jurisdiction over power lines. The Senate Energy Committee is expected to hold a hearing Tuesday on the nomination of Ronald J. Binz to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Mr. Binz, 64, headed the Colorado Public Utility Commission from 2007 to 2011, where he was known for promoting renewable energy and efficiency, and for helping to draft a law that encouraged closing some old coal plants and cleaning up newer ones. The fight over Mr. Binz has been unusually public, considering that the job at stake is at an agency most people cannot name. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything quite like this,\u201d said James J. Hoecker, an energy lawyer who is a former chairman of the commission. \u201cIt\u2019s an extraordinary show that\u2019s being put on right now.\u201d In April 2012, Mr. Binz was the lead author of a paper favoring \u201crisk-aware energy regulation,\u201d which argued for building wind farms and other sources of renewable energy as a hedge against future fossil fuel price increases and costly new pollution rules on burning coal or gas. He argued that renewable sources should be pursued even if they cost more than conventional ones. But the coal industry maintains that Mr. Binz\u2019s nomination is part of an administration strategy to further reduce the use of coal. \u201cFERC is the last piece of the puzzle,\u201d said Benjamin Cole, the spokesman for the American Energy Alliance, which is financed by coal and other fossil fuel industries. The administration\u2019s goal, he said, was a low-carbon energy strategy that could not win the approval of Congress. Environmental groups have rushed to Mr. Binz\u2019s defense. Regulatory decisions \u201cshouldn\u2019t just be about cost,\u201d said Dan Bakal, director of the electric power program at Ceres, an environmental advocacy group. \u201cSo often the least-cost mentality dominates, but you really have to think about the risks.\u201d Ceres published Mr. Binz\u2019s paper. Neither Mr. Binz\u2019s supporters nor his opponents have said exactly what he might do as chairman to advance renewable energy. Since Congress has not acted on climate legislation, the driving force for renewable energy is the states; the federal commission is limited to setting rules that enable such development rather than mandating it. Under the current chairman, Jon Wellinghoff, the agency has already created rules to encourage construction of transmission lines to places where renewable energy projects can be built. The agency is also in charge of authorizing natural gas pipelines, and has a say in whether natural gas exports should be allowed. It also has some influence over how utilities prepare for digital attacks and extreme weather. In the weeks before Mr. Binz was nominated in June, there was some speculation that the chairman\u2019s job would go to John Norris, the senior Democrat on the five-member commission after Mr. Wellinghoff. But Mr. Norris told a trade publication, Transmission Hub, last week that the chief of staff of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, told him he would not get the job because he was considered \u201ctoo pro-coal.\u201d Mr. Norris denied being pro-coal, and Mr. Reid\u2019s office denied the exchange. Coal advocates are hoping that some coal-state Democrats, perhaps Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, will not vote for Mr. Binz, creating a tie that could doom his nomination. In an attempt to portray him as radical, they are also raising the idea that Mr. Binz might be opposed to the greater use of cheap and relatively clean natural gas, which he once referred to as a \u201cdead end.\u201d (The reason is that natural gas emits far more carbon dioxide than would be allowed under President Obama\u2019s long-term goal to reduce greenhouse gases.) At the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, which represents large industrial customers, Marc Yacker, a vice president, said that the coal industry had some reason to be worried. The industry believes, he said, that \u201cthe whole idea of socializing the cost of new transmission necessary to get wind to population centers is anti-coal.\u201d", "keyword": "Appointments and Executive Changes;Renewable energy;Federal Energy Regulatory Commission;Coal;US Politics;Regulation and Deregulation;Energy industry"}
{"id": "ny0071478", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/03/19", "title": "Sweden: At Least Two Are Killed as Gunfire Erupts in Restaurant", "abstract": "Several people were shot and at least two died inside a restaurant in a suburb of Sweden\u2019s second-largest city, Gothenburg, on Wednesday night in what the police said might have been an act of gang-related violence. Ulla Brehm, a spokeswoman for the Gothenburg Police Department, said the shootings took place on the island community of Hesingen, an area with a history of \u201cdifficulties with youth gangs, drugs and violent criminals.\u201d She said two people died in the shooting and several more were wounded and taken to hospitals. Ms. Brehm added that there was \u201cnothing indicating that this was terrorism at all. Not at all.\u201d The police said the shooting occurred around 10 p.m. in a popular local restaurant called Var Krog och Bar, which means \u201cour tavern and bar\u201d in Swedish, that is on a bustling square.", "keyword": "Murders and Homicides;Sweden;Gothenburg"}
{"id": "ny0295566", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2016/12/28", "title": "Gen. Gregorio Alvarez, Last Uruguayan Dictator, Dies at 91", "abstract": "MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay \u2014 Gen. Gregorio Alvarez, the last leader of Uruguay\u2019s brutal dictatorship of the 1970s and \u201980s, died here on Wednesday while serving a prison sentence for human rights abuses. He was 91. The military\u2019s health service said he died at the Central Hospital of the Armed Forces. Under General Alvarez, Uruguay was part of the secret alliance of South American dictatorships known as Operation Condor , in which military leaders cooperated in persecuting and killing one another\u2019s dissidents. General Alvarez, himself the son of a general, participated in the 1973 coup that dissolved Uruguay\u2019s legislature amid a government crackdown on the Marxist Tupamaro rebels, who were trying to seize power. One of General Alvarez\u2019s brothers had been killed by Tupamaro attackers in 1972. General Alvarez became chief of the army in 1978 and president in 1981. His government imprisoned democratic critics and censored the news media. He agreed in 1984 to hand over power to an elected civilian government as the wave of dictatorships in the region was starting to recede. Argentina\u2019s military rule had ended a year earlier, and Brazil\u2019s ended a year later. Hundreds of suspected leftists were arrested and tortured during the dictatorship, and historians say an estimated 180 Uruguayans were killed, most of them while in the custody of the government\u2019s Argentine allies. Gregorio Conrado Alvarez Armelino was born on Nov. 26, 1925, in Montevideo. There was no immediate information on survivors. In 2009, General Alvarez was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the deaths or disappearances of 37 Uruguayans under Operation Condor. During his trial, he said he knew nothing of illegal abductions and forced disappearances. Prosecutors argued that he had been in a position to know what had happened to the political prisoners, first as army chief and later as president.", "keyword": "Gregorio Alvarez;Obituary;Uruguay;Operation Condor"}
{"id": "ny0207663", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/06/09", "title": "From Uzbekistan to a Desk at a Queens Library", "abstract": "With 49,000 loans a month, the Queens Library at Broadway is a busy place in the busiest public library system in the nation \u2014 circulating more books, tapes and videos (23 million a year) from its 63 branches than its Brooklyn counterpart or the combined branches of the separate New York Public Library . The library, at 40-20 Broadway, where Astoria meets Long Island City, is scheduled to reopen Wednesday after nine months of renovation. In charge is Tatyana Magazinnik, 53, pianist, \u00e9migr\u00e9 from Uzbekistan and a librarian since 1996, like her husband, David. How she arranged the perfect name: It\u2019s my husband\u2019s name. It sounds like \u201cmagazine,\u201d but in Russian it means \u201cstore.\u201d Maybe somebody wanted me to be a librarian. Other parallels to \u201cThe Music Man\u201d: I graduated from conservatory and was teaching piano. I performed sometimes until my daughter was born. My husband was a professor of piano in the Tashkent conservatory. Transplantation: When perestroika started, the future of our child was not there. We came as refugees in 1993. My husband had a sister here. She invited us. When we came to the country, we were looking for information. We came to the library. Learning the language: My daughter didn\u2019t know English well; I didn\u2019t know English. I was trying to teach her myself. The library was my life at the time. We took out children\u2019s books to hear that language. We learned 30 words a day. We memorized them, put them on the wall. The next day, another 30 words. After half a year she didn\u2019t need English as a second language anymore. I learned with her. She just graduated from Vassar, Phi Beta Kappa. The library was everything for us. We were in the library every day, me and my husband. The making of a librarian (couple): We went to Pratt for library science . It took me two and a half years, my husband two years \u2014 well, he didn\u2019t sit with the child. I graduated in 1996, and in August I got the job at the library in Lefrak City. In \u201999 I became manager of a small branch, in Maspeth. I loved Maspeth. I still have customers that still send me cards at Christmastime. Biggest relief: Before I got this position, people told me all those homeless people will come. I was starting to prepare myself so I\u2019d be ready for something disastrous. But fortunately I don\u2019t see that many problems. During the day they just sit there and read the newspaper. What she does, exactly: I make out a lot of reports, time sheets, assignments to staff. Also work with customers. I\u2019m still a librarian. My office is in the children\u2019s room. I call myself librarian. I like it. I can go to 641.5 and get you a cookbook. Proudest moments: At Maspeth, there was a lady with no job. I would give her books and talked to her, and after two months she said she got a job and brought me flowers. So touching. I had a kid whose first book was a graphic novel. He started to read every book. He became a writer. I had a Russian customer who didn\u2019t speak the language. She took an E.S.L. program in the library. You don\u2019t even pay for it. She went through two programs, spring and fall. After that she got a job in Tiffany\u2019s and then became a secretary. What a librarian hates: People who don\u2019t return books. I call them book-keepers. How she keeps fit: I run four miles every day. I run my stairs at work. It\u2019s a free exercise machine.", "keyword": "Queens Borough Public Library;Libraries and Librarians;Refugees;Uzbekistan;Astoria (NYC);Long Island City (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0292422", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/06/05", "title": "California Senate Race Is a Tale of Diversity and a Flailing G.O.P.", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Kamala Harris made history when she became the first black woman to be elected attorney general in California. Now she is vying for the United States Senate, and she has managed to stay the front-runner in the race ever since she announced last year, just days after Senator Barbara Boxer, a fellow Democrat, said she would leave the seat she won in 1992. With the help of allies, Ms. Harris nudged aside other prominent Democratic contenders, including Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, and United States Representative Xavier Becerra. But as Tuesday\u2019s open primary for the seat approaches, Ms. Harris\u2019s chief rival is from her own party \u2014 Loretta Sanchez, a congresswoman from Southern California. And their competition says as much about California as it does about the candidates. In a state with one of the most diverse electorates in the nation, where Latinos are the largest ethnic group, a victory by either woman would be a milestone: Ms. Harris would be the first black woman in the United States Senate since Carol Moseley Braun , an Illinois Democrat who served from 1993 to 1999, and Ms. Sanchez would become the first Latina elected to the Senate. A recent Field poll shows the two leading a crowded ballot, including a pack of Republicans. The open primary \u2014 approved by voters in 2010 \u2014 will send the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, to the November election. That contest will offer insight into just how diminished the Republican Party is in this state. Polling suggests that none of the many Republicans in the race can draw enough votes to even make the final ballot. In a recent interview, Ms. Sanchez said she knew she faced a formidable obstacle because many of the state\u2019s leading Democrats would back Ms. Harris \u2014 who, like most statewide elected officials, comes from the Bay Area. \u201cI knew that I would not have the establishment with me \u2014 they sent a message to all of us in Southern California,\u201d Ms. Sanchez said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been told \u2018no\u2019 many times, and go on to make it work.\u201d Ms. Sanchez surprised many in the political world when she was elected to the House of Representatives 20 years ago, beating a Republican incumbent in Orange County, which for decades had been a Republican stronghold. Now, as then, Ms. Sanchez is counting on deep support from Latinos. Latino voter registration in California has nearly doubled this year, according to the secretary of state\u2019s office, as voters also prepare to choose presidential nominees. Many believe those newly registered voters will turn out on Tuesday, driven in large part by anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Republicans\u2019 presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump. In a poll released in late May , Ms. Sanchez had the support of roughly 48 percent of Latinos, compared with 19 percent for Ms. Harris. \u201cWhat\u2019s the one thing that can motivate more Latino voters than ever before? Donald Trump,\u201d said Dan Schnur , the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. \u201cThe question will be how strong those loyalties are.\u201d Far from ceding any ethnic voting bloc, Ms. Harris has spent much of her energy courting Latinos. She secured endorsements from Hilda Solis, a Los Angeles County supervisor who was President Obama\u2019s first labor secretary, and Dolores Huerta, a farmworkers advocate who appears in a Spanish-language commercial for Ms. Harris. Image Representative Loretta Sanchez campaigned at the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles last week. Ms. Sanchez is trying to become the first Latina in the United States Senate. Credit Andrew Cullen for The New York Times Speaking recently to a crowd of union officials in Commerce, a city east of Los Angeles, Ms. Harris emphasized her own family\u2019s immigrant roots and her support for overhauling immigration law. \u201cLatino voters are my voters,\u201d she said. \u201cThey care about people\u2019s commitment to their issues, and I\u2019d match my record against anyone when it comes to looking at my longstanding commitment to all communities, including the Latino community. I reject the notion that this race is going to come down to ethnicity. It\u2019s going to come down to what you\u2019ve actually done and what you\u2019ve demonstrated you can get done.\u201d For much of the race, Ms. Harris has largely ignored the rest of the field. She relies on the phrase \u201csmart on crime\u201d to convey her views on criminal justice and uses the label \u201cfearless\u201d in campaign advertisements . While her experience as the state\u2019s top law enforcement official is her most important credential, she has never taken a position on a 2014 voter-approved measure to release thousands of inmates and reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders. Ms. Sanchez, who is running her first statewide campaign, points to her work in Congress to portray herself as the candidate most prepared to deal with national security. She has promoted her support from colleagues in the House, campaigning with several of them in recent appearances. Representative Filemon Vela, Democrat of Texas, released a statement late last month calling the California Democratic Party\u2019s support for Ms. Harris \u201cinsulting to Latinos all across this country.\u201d \u201cNot one single Democratic Latina has ever been in the United States Senate,\u201d Mr. Vela said in the statement, adding that the party\u2019s position is \"a disrespectful example of wayward institutional leadership, which on the one hand \u2018wants our vote\u2019 but on the other hand wants to \u2018spit us out.\u2019 \u201d Though both women have aired commercials in the expensive media markets of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Ms. Harris has raised more than three times as much money as Ms. Sanchez \u2014 $11 million compared with about $3.5 million as of Friday, according to the Center for Responsive Politics . In the two televised debates, the three leading Republicans in the race focused much of their attacks on Ms. Harris. For them, the path to November relies on uniting Republican voters and a significant chunk of independents, who make up about a third of the state\u2019s registered voters. \u201cWe have two people at the top of the national ticket who are really divisive,\u201d said Duf Sundheim , a Republican candidate and a former chairman of the state party, who has not said whether he will back Mr. Trump in the fall. \u201cI think it\u2019s really important to have someone in the Senate who can really do things in the middle.\u201d Tom Del Beccaro , another Republican candidate and former chairman of the state party, has called for a flat federal income tax and said Congress should focus on setting stricter immigration laws. Just as often as he talks about his positions on issues, Mr. Del Beccaro discusses the mechanics of Tuesday\u2019s primary ballot. With 34 names spread across two columns, he said, the ballot is too complicated, making it more likely that voters will not check boxes correctly. \u201cThe top-two primary drives down participation and creates a lot of guess work,\u201d Mr. Del Beccaro said. Though he has raised hardly any money and has spent little time on the campaign trail, perhaps no other candidate has more directly pursued supporters of Mr. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders than Ron Unz , a software engineer and political writer who has endorsed both an increase in the federal minimum wage and more limits on legal immigration. Mr. Unz rose to prominence here more than a decade ago when he backed a ballot initiative opposing bilingual education. \u201cThe Republican Party in this state has almost been annihilated,\u201d Mr. Unz said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be embarrassing for Republicans if they don\u2019t even have a candidate in the fall, but this shows some enormous dissatisfaction with our respective parties that we will have to deal with in the future.\u201d", "keyword": "California;Kamala D Harris;Loretta Sanchez;Hispanic Americans;Senate races;Black People,African-Americans"}
{"id": "ny0095247", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2015/01/26", "title": "Mike Krzyzewski Earns 1,000th Win as Duke Tops St. John's", "abstract": "No record was at stake Sunday afternoon. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski had already taken care of that, eclipsing Bob Knight\u2019s mark for wins by an N.C.A.A. Division I men\u2019s basketball coach, 902, in 2011 and chugging steadily onward. Still, an announced crowd of 19,812 at Madison Square Garden on Sunday had the chance to see four little digits align to represent one big, round number \u2014 and with it, a breakthrough into another echelon of the sport. Krzyzewski vaulted across the threshold of 1,000 wins \u2014 a faraway figure to all but a few coaches at any level of men\u2019s or women\u2019s college basketball \u2014 although it required some struggle by No. 5 Duke against a St. John\u2019s team feeling somewhat slighted to be the afterthought in a nonconference game on its home court. A 15-1 run by the Blue Devils late in the second half sealed a 77-68 victory, and for the 1,000th time in his career, Krzyzewski shook hands with, and offered consolation to, a losing opponent at midcourt. A swarming contingent of cameras shadowed him as he went from one on-court interview to the next. The Duke players slipped on white T-shirts with \u201cCoach K\u201d on the front and \u201c1,000 Wins and Kounting\u201d on the back. They danced and huddled, then chanted, \u201cFamily!\u201d \u201cI\u2019m honored,\u201d Krzyzewski, 67, said. \u201cI\u2019m a lucky guy who has been at two great institutions, West Point and Duke. I\u2019ve had unbelievable support. I\u2019ve never had a day in 40 years where I\u2019ve worried about my back. Not many people can say that.\u201d Only two other men\u2019s basketball coaches (Harry Statham of McKendree University, an N.C.A.A. Division II program, and Danny Miles of Oregon Tech, in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) and one women\u2019s coach (Pat Summitt, the former coach at Tennessee) have reached 1,000 wins. Herb Magee of Division II Philadelphia University, with 997 victories, will almost certainly be the next. But Krzyzewski, with a career winning percentage above .760 and four N.C.A.A. tournament titles, has come to redefine excellence and longevity in the modern era, even as the recruiting process has changed drastically and star prospects have begun to dash off campuses in a matter of months. One year with Krzyzewski, it is Kyrie Irving; another year, Jabari Parker; another year, Jahlil Okafor, a freshman who commanded the attention of more than a few of the 209 news media members to receive credentials for Sunday\u2019s game. The 6-foot-10-inch Okafor, halfway through his first collegiate season, is already drawing comparisons to Tim Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon. He is a tantalizing prospect for Knicks fans, which was most likely why the Knicks\u2019 president, Phil Jackson, and forward Carmelo Anthony were on hand to watch him play. Okafor, 19, seemed to sense his opportunity to audition. He soared into the air for an offensive rebound, spun and softly deposited the ball through the rim for the game\u2019s first basket. With Okafor scoring 8 points in the first eight minutes, the Blue Devils (17-2) built an 11-point lead. St. John\u2019s (13-6) charged back. The Red Storm have beatific memories of playing Duke at the Garden; the last time the team faced the Blue Devils there, in January 2011, St. John\u2019s won, 93-78. Image Krzyzewski, left, and the assistant Jeff Capel after Krzyzewski earned his 1,000th win as the Blue Devils beat St. John\u2019s. Credit Anthony Gruppuso/Reuters That has stood as perhaps the biggest win of Coach Steve Lavin\u2019s tenure. On Friday, St. John\u2019s guard D\u2019Angelo Harrison explained that the motivation to win this game was greater than usual. \u201cWe just don\u2019t want them to celebrate on our court,\u201d Harrison said. A layup and free throw by Rysheed Jordan with 3 minutes 40 seconds left in the first half gave St. John\u2019s a lead, and after a Harrison 3-pointer with two seconds remaining, the Red Storm bounded into the locker room at halftime ahead, 43-39. The lead swelled to 10 early in the second half, with the team propelled by Sir\u2019Dominic Pointer, who finished with 21 points, and Jordan (18). But Duke rallied. Krzyzewski inserted the bruising forward Marshall Plumlee alongside Okafor, a rotation he said had not been used all season. \u201cI thought we made a mistake right away and we were going to lose by 30,\u201d Krzyzewski said. \u201cAnd then, boom. It just, boom. It was great.\u201d A 3-point play by Okafor capped a 9-0 Blue Devils run that cut the Red Storm\u2019s lead to 1. A 3-pointer by Quinn Cook gave Duke a lead. And a 3-pointer by Tyus Jones with 1:15 left made it a 7-point game, one that the Blue Devils could salt away. Okafor had 17 points and 10 rebounds, while Jones scored 22 points. Image Duke's Jahlil Okafor was defended by St. John's Chris Obekpa. Okafor scored 8 of Duke\u2019s first 21 points, helping the Blue Devils build an 11-point lead in the opening eight minutes. Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press \u201cDuke made the decisive final run or final blow,\u201d Lavin said. \u201cWe were not able to answer.\u201d On Friday, Lavin looked to pop culture to summarize Krzyzewski\u2019s achievement in coaching. Lavin mentioned the singer Tony Bennett and the television host Johnny Carson as comparable models of routine excellence \u2014 men at the pinnacles of their professions who kept performing, night after night, for decades. \u201cThat\u2019s what puts him at the top,\u201d Lavin said of Krzyzewski. Krzyzewski was asked how his energy remained, unwavering, after so many years. \u201cEnergy is not a matter of age,\u201d Krzyzewski said. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of commitment to your position, to what you do.\u201d Sunday\u2019s game, he said, was a perfect example. He called the Garden\u2019s atmosphere \u201cmagical.\u201d And the game took on the likeness of a three-act play. \u201cI\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever been a part of a game like that,\u201d Krzyzewski said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of nuts, huh? You\u2019re involved with 1,400 games or whatever I\u2019ve been involved in, and to have one that\u2019s different, that\u2019s what makes the game so good.\u201d Among the few people granted access to visit with Krzyzewski in the locker room before the game was Lou Carnesecca, the coach with the most wins in St. John\u2019s history, the eponym of the Red Storm\u2019s on-campus arena, and a cherished figure in New York college sports. Carnesecca, 90, brushed his hand against Krzyzewski\u2019s cheek. He joked, \u201cJust don\u2019t take the chandeliers.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;Mike Krzyzewski;Duke;St John's;Jahlil Okafor"}
{"id": "ny0234305", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/01/20", "title": "Yogi Berra Calls \u2019Em as He Sees \u2019Em on McGwire", "abstract": "LA QUINTA, Calif. \u2014 Yogi Berra , the host of the 2010 Bob Hope Classic, spent part of Tuesday squinting into television lights, smiling for cameras and shaking hands. His golf game is lousy, Berra said, but on the eve of the first round of the tour\u2019s only five-day pro-am, the Yankees great handled reporters\u2019 questions the way he did pitches from Whitey Ford some 50 years ago \u2014 deftly. Jackie Robinson did not steal home plate on him in the 1955 World Series. \u201cHe was out!\u201d Berra said with emphasis. The home run by Pittsburgh\u2019s Bill Mazeroski in the bottom of the ninth to win the 1960 World Series might not have happened if Manager Casey Stengel had not started Art Ditmar in Game 7. \u201cHe shoulda started Whitey,\u201d Berra said. And should Mark McGwire , who last week admitted he used steroids during his record-breaking home run season of 1998, get into the Hall of Fame? \u201cI think it\u2019s going to be pretty rough for him to get in the Hall of Fame, I really do,\u201d Berra said. \u201cJust like Pete Rose, you know, he\u2019s got tough sledding.\u201d At 84, Berra moves slower, but his mind does not. Almost 12 years of denial by McGwire were just too many, Berra said. \u201cI think he waited a little too long to announce it,\u201d Berra said. \u201cIf he\u2019d done it at the beginning, he might have a chance to get in.\u201d Berra pointed to the Yankees left-hander Andy Pettitte and the former Yankee Jason Giambi, who were forgiven after timely admissions of drug use. \u201cSay, like Pettitte did,\u201d Berra said. \u201cHe admitted it. If you admit it, it would be all right. Like Giambi, the same way. You admit it right away.\u201d Berra cheered when the Yankees won the World Series last year. He was circumspect about any comparisons to Yankees teams on which he played. \u201cWe won five in a row there,\u201d he said. \u201cI played 17 years, and I was in 14 of them. So we must have had pretty good teams.\u201d Few people know that Berra was among members of the naval forces that fought at the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. He has never said much about it, but remembers it well. \u201cIt was like Fourth of July,\u201d he said. \u201cNo kidding. I was only 18 years old. And the invasion was going and there was only five men and an officer on the boat. And we went in first.\u201d Berra was a gunner\u2019s mate in the Navy, and was based aboard the USS Bayfield, APA-33, which was the flagship for the landing at Utah Beach, according to Navy documents. \u201cI know my officer told me, \u2018You better get your head down here.\u2019 \u201d Berra said. \u201cI was looking up and it looked like the Fourth of July. I thought nothing could happen to me.\u201d What happens to Berra most these days is that people come up to him and remind him of what he meant to them when they watched him play baseball. He does not mind this at all, he said, and he looks as though he means it. He was asked if he is remembered more these days for his appearances in television commercials for insurance companies, like Joe DiMaggio was for coffee commercials. When Berra smiled, it was genuine, and it was easy to see the gap between two front teeth that anchor a set that has never been capped. \u201cOh, maybe,\u201d he said. \u201cThey certainly like to \u2014 I had fun doing that. That\u2019s a live duck that was in front of me, too. They train them.\u201d That elicited laughs from the reporters, but that was not his intent. \u201cI\u2019m not kidding you now,\u201d he said. \u201cHe stops. They ring the bell and he stops. They train him for six months. And they had a couple of them, if you don\u2019t do it right, they would bring the other duck in.\u201d He would notice something like that about the ducks, because Yogi Berra came from an era in which ballplayers had to be versatile if they were going to stick around. That is something that still stands out to him about the old Yankees teams that played for Stengel. It was why Berra was standing in front of the left-field wall, instead of behind the plate, at Forbes Field in 1960 in the iconic black-and-white photograph of Mazeroski\u2019s series-winning home run that said it all. \u201cYou love when guys can play different positions,\u201d Berra said. \u201cAnd we had three catchers. We all played the outfield and we all caught. We played three catchers in one game his last year. He liked that. Gil McDougald, he made the All-Star team in three positions: second, short, and third. And he could play all three of them.\u201d Berra noted that Tony Kubek could play the outfield and the infield. \u201cIf you get a guy that can play a couple positions, it helps you out a real lot,\u201d Berra said. \u201cAnd I played right field and left field. When I first came up, I was an outfielder and catcher, but I was a lousy catcher. Until Bill Dickey came over in \u201949 and he taught me \u2014 I owe a lot to him \u2014 he worked my butt off. And I enjoyed it.\u201d Someone wondered what Berra was thinking about that afternoon in Pittsburgh in 1960. \u201cI thought the ball was going to hit the wall,\u201d he said. \u201cI was waiting to play the bounce.\u201d On Tuesday, he seemed more like everybody\u2019s favorite uncle who is running for mayor, shaking hands, posing for pictures and signing everything he was handed during a ceremony at which the tournament distributed checks for $1.538 million to local charities. \u201cWell, it makes me feel pretty good,\u201d he said. \u201cIt does. I\u2019m pretty good at that. I never seen so many pictures being taken, I know that. \u201cBut I get a lot of kick out of sometimes, at the airport, a guy comes up to me, says, \u2018Boy, you look just like Yogi Berra.\u2019 And I say, \u2018Yeah, a lot of people tell me that.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Berra Yogi;McGwire Mark;Baseball;New York Yankees"}
{"id": "ny0129513", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/06/30", "title": "Ex-Leader of Naral Pro-Choice New York Faces Civil Action on Misused Money", "abstract": "ALBANY (AP) \u2014 The state attorney general\u2019s office has accused the former leader of a prominent abortion-rights group of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of charitable money on shopping sprees, a Hamptons vacation rental, fine dining, hotels and other personal luxuries. The accusation is included in a civil complaint filed in Manhattan on Thursday against Kelli Conlin, 54, who pleaded guilty a year ago to falsifying business records, a felony. Her criminal case closed without jail time after she repaid $75,000 in restitution to Naral Pro-Choice New York and its affiliated foundation, which she led from 1992 through 2010. But David Nachman, enforcement section chief of the attorney general\u2019s Charities Bureau, said Ms. Conlin\u2019s spending actually amounted to \u201chundreds of thousands of dollars in improper benefits.\u201d The attorney general\u2019s office is requesting that she repay all of it, with interest, and reimburse its own legal and investigative costs. Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has recused himself because his father, Irving, was the treasurer for a time of Naral Pro-Choice New York. His office appointed an outside counsel to investigate Ms. Conlin in March 2011. Naral and other abortion-rights groups were among Mr. Schneiderman\u2019s supporters in his 2010 campaign for attorney general. Naral Pro-Choice New York and the National Institute for Reproductive Health said Friday that they applauded the civil action and had put new financial controls in place since Ms. Conlin was terminated in January 2011. The group said that it did an internal investigation and that it had cooperated with the attorney general\u2019s investigation. Calls to Ms. Conlin\u2019s attorney were not immediately returned on Friday.", "keyword": "Conlin Kelli;Naral Pro-Choice America;Frauds and Swindling;Embezzlement;Attorneys General;New York State;Abortion"}
{"id": "ny0224264", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/11/12", "title": "Underbelly Project Visitors at Ghost Subway Station Risk Arrest", "abstract": "The New York City police have arrested 20 people for trying to enter an abandoned subway station housing the formerly secret guerrilla exhibition of underground street art that was revealed to the public this month. The clandestine gallery has attracted urban explorers eager to catch a glimpse of dozens of provocative, large-scale installations created by more than 100 street artists who sneaked into the station over the course of a year. Several of these spelunkers, however, have encountered something else: a team of police officers, some in plainclothes, assigned by the city to monitor the site. Most of those arrested were charged with trespassing and a few were caught carrying spray cans and other graffiti paraphernalia, the authorities said. While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away \u2014 \u201cThis is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,\u201d one officer said \u2014 the paintings in what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they had no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hoped nobody ever got to see it again. \u201cWe have no intention of disturbing the works,\u201d said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit . Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. \u201cIt\u2019s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,\u201d she said. The organizers of the project, who did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, have refused to disclose its location. So have transit officials. But first-person accounts, photographs and speculation around the Internet focus squarely on an abandoned station built in the 1930s atop the existing Broadway stop on the G line, near South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The exhibition was the subject of an article in The New York Times on Nov. 1, but without specifying the location. A comparison of current and historical photographs makes a convincing case for the Williamsburg station, and a spokesman for the police acknowledged that the site is in Brooklyn. But subway officials would not divulge the exact spot. \u201cThere are some bloggers who can pinpoint these places because they eat and sleep transit lore,\u201d Ms. Parker said, \u201cbut officially, no, we\u2019re not confirming anything.\u201d So far, efforts by the authorities to secure the space appear to have been only partly successful. Evidence of recent visits to the site has been published on the Internet, including photographs that suggest some of the artwork has been defaced by graffiti. One blogger from Brooklyn, who said he explored the site in the early hours a week ago, posted photographs on his Web site that appeared to show vandalized works. \u201cIt does seem to only have been tagged by one person, and it\u2019s actually kind of sad since some of the works are so amazing,\u201d the blogger wrote in an e-mail. (He requested anonymity to avoid drawing attention from the authorities.) The blogger said part of a chain-link fence put up by the police had already been peeled open. \u201cIf you are industrious enough, you can still get up there,\u201d he wrote. The South Fourth Street station was intended as a primary transfer point for subway lines that would have stretched from Lower Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens, part of an ambitious expansion of the subway system planned by the city in 1929. The Great Depression forced officials to abandon the proposal, but not before bits and pieces of the proposed network had been built. Transit officials reiterated this week that getting to the site could be dangerous. \u201cWe really don\u2019t want to encourage anyone to go near these places,\u201d Ms. Parker said. She said the Police Department and transit officials were \u201cworking closely together to come up with short- and long-term solutions to the security problem.\u201d Detectives have been looking into the project\u2019s origins, a Police Department spokesman said, but the police often find it difficult to link individuals to cases of illegal street art.", "keyword": "Art;Subways;New York City Transit Authority;Brooklyn (NYC);Underbelly Project"}
{"id": "ny0281621", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/10/25", "title": "Plan to Bail Out \u2018Too Big to Fail\u2019 Banks Raises Skepticism", "abstract": "In recent weeks, we have received the latest installment in the long-running \u2014 and some would say quixotic \u2014 attempt to explain how certain supersize American financial institutions would be addressed under the bankruptcy code if they were to fail. The Dodd-Frank Act, enacted in 2010 in response to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and all other near failures of 2008 and 2009, requires all large financial institutions, including the American units of foreign financial institutions, to prepare plans explaining how they would face their own \u201cLehman moment.\u201d This exercise is consistent with the notion that Dodd-Frank\u2019s \u201corderly liquidation authority,\u201d an insolvency system in which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would act as a receiver of a distressed financial institution, is to act only as a backstop to normal bankruptcy procedures. Some, particularly those abroad, consider this a fool\u2019s errand. Banking regulators in particular seem to be skeptical about the role of a bankruptcy judge, who will obviously not have a pre-existing relationship with the financial institution, in the resolution process. The new plans are mostly notable for injecting intermediate holding companies into the banks\u2019 organizational structure. This new holding company addressed the obvious bankruptcy law problems that would result from previous plans to have the bankrupt holding company transfer money to its venerable subsidiaries just before filing for bankruptcy. Nonetheless, there is something odd about trying to solve this problem by adding yet another legal entity to the already complex corporate structure of banks. But at heart, the new bankruptcy plans are quite similar to the prior drafts. They all turn on the notion that a large financial institution can be saved by efforts that focus only on the holding company at the top of the financial institution. The basic model involves the holding company issuing a lot of debt that is used to fund the operating subsidiaries. Because these new funds come in the form of long-term bonds, they cannot be subject to a run like bank deposits in the 1930s or repo or commercial paper in 2008. These bonds, called total loss absorbing capacity , would be exchanged for shares in the financial institution. Old shareholders would be wiped out. The \u201csingle point of entry\u201d approach to financial institution bankruptcy posits that fixing the holding company\u2019s balance sheet \u2014 by canceling debt, and thus rebalancing the balance sheet \u2014 would stabilize the entire corporate group. In a recent paper with Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr. of George Washington University, and forthcoming in The Florida Law Review , I argued that there are good reasons to be skeptical about this approach to financial institution failure. In short, we ask two crucial questions. First, who is going to buy these new bonds? And second, how likely it is that forcibly converting bondholders to shareholders will do the trick in a financial crisis? On the first point, the worry is that retail investors might be the ones most likely to hold this new debt. That means that the taxpayer may be left holding the bag once again. At the least, we will want to make sure that investors understand this up front and demand an appropriate return. On the question of the \u201csingle point of entry\u201d approach, the basic issue is whether it is reasonable to think that the near failure of the American International Group in 2008, to take but one example, could have been contained by restructuring its holding company. We are doubtful and argue that the \u201csingle point of entry\u201d approach is better viewed as one tool in the resolution toolbox. Thus, we reject pending \u201cChapter 14\u201d proposals that would tie financial institution resolution under the Bankruptcy Code to the use of that approach.", "keyword": "Bankruptcy;Dodd Frank;FDIC"}
{"id": "ny0295470", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/12/16", "title": "Daily Report: Facebook Joins Fight Against Fake News", "abstract": "Pope Francis endorsed Donald J. Trump for president. Hillary Clinton ran a child trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. Both of these were actually fake news articles that circulated widely online, including on the world\u2019s biggest social network, Facebook. Facebook is now taking steps to limit the misinformation on its site. On Thursday, Mike Isaac reports , the company began a series of experiments to better identify, flag and reduce the prominence of false articles, as well as making ad changes to hurt the bottom lines of fake news purveyors. If the tests are successful, they will be rolled out to a bigger audience, the company said. Image The new measures include partnering with groups that can help fact-check articles. If an article is deemed fake, it will carry a \u201cdisputed\u201d designation on Facebook. If people still want to share it, they will see a pop-up that reminds them that the veracity of the information is in question. In an interview , James Goldston, the president of ABC News, which is one of the groups that will be doing the fact-checking, explained how the partnership would work. Facebook\u2019s efforts are unlikely to stem the mushrooming of fake news, which also proliferates beyond the social network. And the company is walking a fine line of potentially discarding its position as a neutral player by intervening to ferret out fake news, some critics said. A Breitbart News article accused Facebook of working with \u201c partisan fact-checkers .\u201d Facebook acknowledged the balancing act. \u201cI think of Facebook as a technology company, but I recognize we have a greater responsibility than just building technology that information flows through,\u201d Mark Zuckerberg, the company\u2019s chief executive, wrote in a post on Thursday. \u201cWe have a responsibility to make sure Facebook has the greatest positive impact on the world.\u201d", "keyword": "News media,journalism;Social Media;Facebook;ABC News"}
{"id": "ny0165842", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/09/15", "title": "Bridgeport: Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met Online", "abstract": "A Bridgeport man was charged on Wednesday with raping a 12-year-old girl he met through the MySpace Web site, the police said yesterday. The man, Bienvenido Garcia, 19, was arrested by United States marshals at his apartment at the P. T. Barnum complex, said Lt. James Viadero. The investigation, reported yesterday in The Connecticut Post, began last month when the girl\u2019s mother presented the Bridgeport police with 16 pages of computer correspondence that was \u201csexual in nature,\u201d Lieutenant Viadero said. Mr. Garcia was charged with first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor, the police said. MySpace officials said they did not comment on investigations in progress.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;MySpace.com;Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0220598", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/02/16", "title": "Fertilizer Maker Buys Rival for $4.1 Billion", "abstract": "OSLO (Reuters) \u2014 A Norwegian fertilizer producer, Yara International, agreed on Monday to buy Iowa-based Terra Industries for $4.1 billion to increase its presence in the United States, as rivals look to join forces to gain size and reach. Last month, CF Industries Holdings withdrew its yearlong hostile bid to buy Terra. That battle, along with other acquisitions and speculation about mergers, has kept the fertilizer sector in the investor spotlight, despite a sharp fall in prices last year as the global economic crisis hit. Analysts and producers expect a major rebound in demand in 2010 as farmers rush to replenish their soil nutrient levels, which could lead to more mergers or acquisitions. The chief executive of Yara, Joergen Ole Haslestad, said on Monday that the all-cash acquisition of Terra \u201cwill create a clear global No. 1 in the fertilizer industry.\u201d Energy-intensive fertilizer producers in North America have become increasingly attractive, Yara said, because of \u201cstructural changes\u201d in American energy markets as a boom in unconventional gas output curbs natural gas prices in the United States. Yara\u2019s offer values Terra at $41.1 a share and represents a premium of 23.6 percent compared with Friday\u2019s closing price. The enlarged company will have about 30 percent share in the United States fertilizer market and a 8 percent global market share. Yara said it expected some $60 million annual savings from the deal. The chief executive of Terra, Michael L. Bennett will become an executive vice president of Yara and head the Norwegian company\u2019s North America division.", "keyword": "Terra Industries Incorporated;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Fertilizer;Yara;United States;Norway"}
{"id": "ny0252971", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2011/10/20", "title": "Big East Coaches Talk About Realignment, Not Basketball", "abstract": "Notre Dame\u2019s Mike Brey stood in a corner of an ornate banquet room on the ninth floor at the New York Athletic Club on Wednesday morning and attempted to talk about the Big East basketball season, even though few people seemed to be asking about it. The hot topic of conversation was how the Big East \u2014 which sent 11 teams to the N.C.A.A. tournament last season, including the eventual champion, Connecticut \u2014 would, or even could, survive the coming and potential defections of universities with Football Bowl Subdivision-level programs. Brey gestured toward another corner of the room, where Jim Boeheim, the 66-year-old Syracuse coach, was seated behind a table, framed by a large window that looked out on a gloomy Central Park \u2014 its treetops, fittingly, shrouded by rainclouds. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I can picture the league without him,\u201d Brey said of Boeheim, who has been the coach at Syracuse since 1976, three years before the Big East\u2019s inaugural basketball season. The Atlantic Coast Conference last month accepted Syracuse and Pittsburgh as new members, and Louisville and West Virginia are said to be candidates to jump from the Big East to the Big 12 as conference realignment continues its unpredictable shifting. The departures of Syracuse and Pittsburgh are not imminent, and Boeheim (whose team was picked to share first place with Connecticut in the coaches\u2019 preseason poll ) said he planned to coach this season like any other. He said he would talk about a conference change afterward. \u201cAll I know is that we\u2019re playing in the Big East,\u201d he said. Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun said, \u201cLine them up, and whoever\u2019s there, we\u2019ll play them.\u201d But he also said it was hard not to pay attention to speculation about realignment. It was an odd media day. The 16 coaches essentially were spokesmen for their universities\u2019 athletic agendas. The players mostly sat off to the side, leafing through media guides or listening to their coaches talk about conference alignments. A day after he said on a teleconference that the Big East was looking to replace Syracuse and Pittsburgh, John Marinatto, the conference commissioner, stood in front of reporters and said, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how happy I am to be talking about basketball this morning.\u201d Five minutes later, he was talking about conference alignment again. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s expected what\u2019s happened over the last several months,\u201d he said. Pittsburgh Coach Jamie Dixon sounded almost apologetic about leaving the Big East, saying the Panthers would not bolt until the time was right for everyone. \u201cIf you want to look for a bad guy, you can\u2019t,\u201d Dixon said, adding, \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t get this opportunity to join another conference except for the Big East.\u201d Dixon knows how important Big East basketball has become over the last three decades. He said his father, Jim, was upset when he heard that Pittsburgh was leaving the conference, and he needed to explain the reasons for leaving before his father settled down. \u201cI hope I can settle down a few other people,\u201d Dixon said, smiling. Louisville Coach Rick Pitino sat in front of a large fireplace, not far from a painting of a champion fencer, and drew the largest crowd of reporters. He said reports of Louisville\u2019s uncertain future had not affected recruiting. He said he liked competing in the Big East, but he also said he understood there were factors other than basketball, or even tradition, that determined whether a conference had a strong future. He said he heard that the Liberty Bowl drew a larger television audience than a North Carolina-Duke basketball game. \u201cTen years ago, the Big East was all about basketball,\u201d he said. Pitino sounded as if he did not like it that that was no longer true, but he had an idea of how to soften the blow. Double the $5 million penalty for universities that leave the conference, he said with a smile, \u201cand each coach who stays gets a million each.\u201d Boeheim would not be eligible for such a windfall because Syracuse is leaving, but he sounded as if he had other things on his mind \u2014 basketball being one of them. \u201cNo distractions,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Basketball;College Athletics;Big East Conference;Boeheim Jim;Calhoun Jim;Syracuse University;Basketball (College);Football (College)"}
{"id": "ny0084354", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/10/24", "title": "Thomas G. Stemberg, Who Joined a Rival to Found Staples, Dies at 66", "abstract": "In 1985, Thomas G. Stemberg was looking for a new business venture, having just been fired as vice president of a supermarket giant. That Fourth of July weekend, he was also looking for a printer ribbon. A computer chain had none in stock. Most stationery stores were closed. The one that was open offered only an overpriced replacement. For want of a ribbon, a retailing behemoth was born. Not long afterward, Mr. Stemberg and a former grocery industry archrival, Leo Kahn, teamed up to found Staples , which would become the world\u2019s largest discount supplier of office products. They opened their first store in Brighton, Mass., in May 1986, using money from a venture capital firm, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney. Two decades later, when Mr. Stemberg retired as chairman, Staples had nearly 1,780 stores around the world, almost 70,000 employees and sales of $16 billion. He died on Friday at 66 at his home in Chestnut Hill, Mass. The cause was stomach cancer, his son William said. \u201cI envisioned a Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us or Home Depot for office supplies,\u201d the elder Mr. Stemberg told The New York Times in 2004. \u201cThat\u2019s how Staples was born.\u201d Through his dealings with Bain Capital, Mr. Stemberg also forged a long personal relationship with Mr. Romney. When Mr. Romney went into politics, Mr. Stemberg became a financial supporter and an adviser. He was credited with persuading Mr. Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, to create an affordable health insurance program. \u201cHe came to me and said, \u2018If you really want to help people, you\u2019ve got to get everybody health insurance \u2014 you can find a way,\u2019\u201d Mr. Romney recalled in a telephone interview on Thursday. \u201cHe was insistent. He pushed me.\u201d Mr. Stemberg applied the same zeal when, at 39, he teamed up with Mr. Kahn, a marketing master who was 70 at the time and had competed with Mr. Stemberg in Boston\u2019s supermarket wars. (Mr. Kahn was also a fellow Harvard alumnus.) The new partners did not immediately settle on office supplies in their hunt for a specialty retailing opportunity. First they combed New England shopping centers to discover which niches were most underserved and offered the greatest potential. They considered telephones, pantyhose, orthopedic products and pet provisions before deciding on office supplies \u2014 inspired in part by that pivotal Independence Day weekend, by Mr. Stemberg\u2019s account \u2014 and selling them for as little as half the price that local stationers charged. \u201cI\u2019m thinking about names,\u201d he recalled in an interview with Fortune Small Business in 2002. \u201cPencils? Pens? 8 \u00bd-by-11? Staples? Staples! Staples the Office Superstore. That was it. The bad thing about the name was that when we started out, we had to explain to everybody what it was.\u201d In its first two years, Staples opened 16 superstores in the corridor between Boston and Washington, which has the nation\u2019s highest concentration of office workers. Staples spawned imitators, but the partners dominated through skillful marketing. They discounted prices for Staples cardholders to reward customer loyalty. They built mammoth warehouses to cut distribution costs. They charged for delivery to keep cash-and-carry customers from subsidizing shoppers who ordered from home or businesses. And they seized the opportunity presented by the Internet to woo online buyers. Mr. Stemberg was nothing if not adaptable, and ever the nonconformist. He majored in organic chemistry at Harvard but decided to pursue something else after managing only a C+ average. He considered law school and took a course but fell asleep in his first lecture. In the end, he decided on a business career. When his fellow students shaved their beards for job interviews, he grew one. Mr. Stemberg thought so far outside the box that after bypassing wholesalers, he even persuaded office supply manufacturers to repackage their stock so that consumers in his self-service superstores would not have to search through identical cartons to find, say, a particular variety of paper clips or envelopes. (Before big-box stores, those supplies would typically be shipped in bulk from a retailer to an office manager\u2019s stockroom.) Thomas George Stemberg was born in Newark on Jan. 18, 1949, the son of Austrian immigrants who had fled Europe as the Nazis rose to power before World War II . His father, Oscar, a Jew, managed the restaurants in Vienna\u2019s Hotel Imperial. His mother, the former Erika Ratzer, was a Roman Catholic who had been disinherited by her father for marrying a Jew. To obtain visas, the couple persuaded the authorities that Oscar Stemberg was a vital employee of a Canadian insurance company. They moved to Orange, N.J., where he opened a restaurant named Zig\u2019s. After the elder Mr. Stemberg died when Thomas was 11, he and his mother returned to Vienna, where he attended the American International School and was junior all-Austria in basketball \u2014 \u201cprobably the only place in the world I could have been all-anything,\u201d he later recalled. He won a scholarship to Harvard, graduated in 1971 and got a degree from Harvard Business School. He supplemented the scholarship by washing dishes; later, he endowed scholarships for Harvard students who had lost a parent, and he became an avid supporter of the university\u2019s basketball team. After school, he was hired by the Jewel Companies, a Chicago grocery chain, where he became a vice president when he was 27 and introduced no-name generic brands. \u201cMy mother was incredibly offended that her son was trimming lettuce while learning how to help run the operation,\u201d he told The Times. \u201cShe hadn\u2019t spent all that money sending me to Harvard so that I\u2019d end up in the produce section.\u201d His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Katherine Chapman; six sons, William, Michael, Clyde and Thomas McDermott Stemberg, as well as Rylan Hamilton and Darrell Williams; three stepdaughters, Madison Eisler and Meghan and MacKenzie O\u2019Gara; and three grandchildren. Mr. Kahn, his Staples partner, died in 2011. Before starting Staples and becoming chairman and chief executive, Mr. Stemberg was president of the eastern division of First National grocery stores. He was fired after he objected to the sale of the warehouse division, which he headed. It was sold to the Supermarket General Corporation, of which Mr. Kahn was chairman at the time. \u201cHis prior employer said he was fired because he was too bullheaded,\u201d Mr. Romney said of Mr. Stemberg, \u201cbut he said he would invest in him because he was brilliant and would go through walls.\u201d After leaving Staples, Mr. Stemberg founded the Highland Consumer Fund, which invested in start-ups, including Lululemon Athletica and David\u2019s Tea. Mr. Stemberg, though a consummate salesman, was unable to persuade the Federal Trade Commission in 1996 to approve a proposed merger with Office Max, which briefly overtook Staples as the industry leader in 1993. He urged young entrepreneurs to find growing markets in which they could distinguish their new ventures, but he also urged them to learn people skills and management fundamentals, like motivating their employees, from a well-run company. \u201cThere are the rare birds like Bill Gates who have the talent to succeed without experience,\u201d he told Inc. magazine last year. \u201cBut they\u2019re like the guys who go straight to the N.B.A. out of high school. Works for some, but for the vast majority, it doesn\u2019t.\u201d", "keyword": "Obituary;Staples;Office Supplies;Thomas G Stemberg"}
{"id": "ny0015246", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/10/18", "title": "Seahawks Pick Up Road Win", "abstract": "Russell Wilson threw three touchdown passes, Steven Hauschka kicked two field goals, Marshawn Lynch scored on a 2-yard run, and the Seattle Seahawks beat the host Arizona Cardinals, 34-22, on Thursday night. The Cardinals (3-4) used a second-quarter rally to close their gap to 17-10 at halftime, but the Seahawks (6-1) started to pull away in the third quarter. After Arizona\u2019s Jay Feely kicked his second field goal, from 52 yards, Seattle scored on a 1-yard pass from Wilson to Kellen Davis. Brandon Browner had an interception on Arizona\u2019s next drive, stepping in front of Michael Floyd, and he returned it 49 yards to the Arizona 1. That set up Lynch\u2019s touchdown, which put Seattle ahead by 31-13. The Cardinals sacked Wilson for a fumble deep in Arizona\u2019s end for the second time late in the third quarter, but they had to settle for another field goal by Feely in the fourth. Hauschka matched that one to put Seattle ahead, 34-16. Arizona then scored on an 8-yard pass from Carson Palmer to Jaron Brown with 4 minutes 40 seconds remaining but failed to complete a pass for a 2-point conversion. Seattle dominated Arizona in the teams\u2019 last meeting, in 2012, and picked up where it left off, with Wilson hitting Sidney Rice on a 31-yard touchdown pass and connecting with tight end Zach Miller on a diving 15-yard score in the back of the end zone in the second quarter. Arizona finally gained some momentum after Wilson was stuffed on a fourth-and-1 near midfield by Calais Campbell, who was back after being carted off the field with a next injury against San Francisco last week. Feely capped the ensuing drive with a 49-yard field goal. Two plays later, a Wilson fumble was recovered by Campbell at Seattle\u2019s 3. Rashard Mendenhall then scored through a huge hole off right tackle for the Cardinals. A tight road game was nothing new for the Seahawks. Seattle has won 11 straight games at home, but its games have been a little tougher on the road. KEENUM TO MAKE DEBUT Case Keenum, who has not played in a meaningful game since January 2012, when he was in college, will start at quarterback Sunday for the Houston Texans in place of Matt Schaub, who has injuries to his right ankle and foot. In his first appearance in an N.F.L. regular-season game, Keenum will face the rugged defense of the undefeated Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium. He will try to help Houston (2-4) snap a four-game losing streak. \u201cWe\u2019re struggling, and we\u2019re looking for a spark,\u201d Coach Gary Kubiak said. PETERSON BACK AFTER FUNERAL Adrian Peterson rejoined the Minnesota Vikings after attending the funeral for his 2-year-old son, describing the situation as devastating. Peterson was in Sioux Falls, S.D., on Wednesday for the private service for the boy, Tyrese Robert Ruffin, who died last week in what the authorities have called a case of child abuse. Peterson said that he did not know the child was his until about two months ago. Peterson saw Tyrese for the first time when he visited the boy in the hospital last Thursday. Tyrese died the next day, after the arrest of a man the mother was dating, Joseph Patterson, 27, who was being held on charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery in the case. Peterson plans to play Monday night against the Giants.", "keyword": "Football;Case Keenum;Houston Texans;Adrian Peterson;Minnesota Vikings;Michael Vick;Philadelphia Eagles;Arizona Cardinals;Seahawks"}
{"id": "ny0197427", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2009/10/13", "title": "Kosmos Says It Sold Ghana Oil Stake to Exxon Mobil", "abstract": "Kosmos Energy, an oil explorer backed by private equity firms, confirmed on Monday that it had agreed to sell assets in Ghana to the Exxon Mobil Corporation . Greg Dunlevy, the chief financial officer of Kosmos, confirmed the agreement. He declined to disclose the price, but a person familiar with the matter said last week that the price was $4 billion. The sale requires the approval of Ghana\u2019s government, whose state oil company said in July that it was interested in buying the assets. They include Kosmos\u2019s 23.49 percent stake in the Jubilee oil field off the coast of Ghana, as well as its other assets in the West African nation. Ghana is set to become an oil exporter when Jubilee begins producing in late 2010. The Jubilee field may hold 1.8 billion barrels of oil and will produce 120,000 barrels of crude a day, according to Tullow Oil of London.", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Offshore Exploration and Installations;Exxon Mobil Corp;Ghana"}
{"id": "ny0216634", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/04/30", "title": "Rachel Alexandra Returns to Churchill Downs in Search of Her Magic", "abstract": "LOUISVILLE, Ky. \u2014 A year ago Friday, a buzz built throughout the afternoon about an extraordinary filly that was destined to do something spectacular in the Kentucky Oaks. Her name was Rachel Alexandra , and for weeks she had produced workouts that were both ethereal and supersonic and had put to shame the colts getting ready for the Kentucky Derby . And when the gates sprang open for the Oaks, a crowd of 104,867 barely caught its breath as Rachel Alexandra roared to a record 20 \u00bc-length victory. A star was not exactly born at that moment; after all, it was her fourth victory in a row. But a queen was given a proper coronation. Three hundred and sixty-four days later, Rachel Alexandra, now 4, remains the most compelling horse on the grounds at Churchill Downs, even with the 136th Derby about to be run. From that Oaks triumph, Rachel Alexandra went on to stamp herself as a superstar with four victories that were as momentous as they were stirring to behold. She beat the Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird , in the Preakness Stakes two weeks after the Derby, then ran away from two other fillies in June in the Mother Goose Stakes with a 19 \u00bc-length victory that broke a record for that race set by the great Ruffian. In August, Rachel Alexandra whipped the colts again in the Haskell Invitational . In September, she turned back older male horses in the Woodward Stakes to end one of the most imaginative campaigns in modern thoroughbred history. It earned her Horse of the Year honors. \u201cIt was an arc of beauty,\u201d her co-owner Jess Jackson said. But perhaps it was a costly one. In the sixth race here Friday, Rachel Alexandra will try to conjure her magic once more in the Grade II La Troienne Stakes . It will be her second start of the year, and among her five rivals is a mare named Zardana, who beat Rachel Alexandra by three-quarters of a length in the New Orleans Ladies Stakes last month at the Fair Grounds. It wasn\u2019t so much that Rachel Alexandra lost her first race in 17 months, but it was how she lost it. When Zardana roared up to her in the stretch, Rachel Alexandra did not have that extra gear that last year took her into overdrive as she dared any rival to challenge her. That unsettling moment has raised a pair of questions that may well be answered in the La Troienne: Did Rachel Alexandra do too much last year? And can she ever return to the otherworldly form she held over eight flawless races in 2009? \u201cSure, I have a sliver of doubt over whether she can duplicate a year that I\u2019m not sure any other horse has ever had,\u201d her trainer, Steve Asmussen, said. Both Jackson and Asmussen take blame for the way Rachel Alexandra began training this year. After the undefeated mare Zenyatta dismantled the best male horses in the world in the Breeders\u2019 Cup Classic last November, there was a clamoring for the two of them to finally meet on the track. Two months later, Oaklawn Park in Arkansas offered a $5 million purse if Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta both showed up for the Apple Blossom Handicap in early April. Jackson accepted, and Rachel Alexandra\u2019s training was pushed into high gear. She got in seven timed workouts, but Asmussen said he was unhappy with all of them. \u201cWe tried to pick the race for the horse rather than let her tell us when she was ready to run,\u201d he said. After Zardana ran by Rachel in the Ladies Stakes, the filly\u2019s camp became even more disheartened when she turned in two workouts that Asmussen kindly describes as subpar. They decided Rachel Alexandra needed a change of venue and brought her here to the racetrack where she has won three of six starts, including that romp in the Oaks . Almost immediately, she perked up, dragging her exercise rider Dominic Terry to the track each day like an old soul returning to her corner of heaven. \u201cShe\u2019s back,\u201d said the Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert , who has watched Rachel Alexandra turn in four timed workouts in recent weeks, each better than the last. \u201cIt was just a matter of fitness, and horses can sense stress, and she knew she was under pressure.\u201d Jackson pleads guilty of trying to do too much with Rachel Alexandra too soon this year. He is confident she will run well in the La Troienne, but says she is perhaps two or three starts from her top form. \u201cWe need to run her into top shape,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd what we worry about is that she\u2019s such a competitor, so eager to run, that she can push herself beyond her level of fitness. We\u2019re a team here \u2014 Steve and his barn and me and Calvin Borel,\u201d a reference to her jockey. \u201cBut Rachel is part of that team, too,\u201d Jackson added, \u201cand she has something to say about what we do. We need to listen to her.\u201d Jackson will not concede that last year\u2019s campaign might have been too taxing for Rachel Alexandra, especially her final race in the Woodward at Saratoga, where Borel went to the whip liberally in the stretch to withstand a late charge from Macho Again. Jackson did say, however, that this year\u2019s campaign will be managed more like that of Zenyatta, in the hope the two could meet here in the Breeders\u2019 Cup Classic toward the end of the year . Zenyatta, who is 6, has averaged about five races a year over a three-year span to reach an undefeated career mark of 16-0. Rachel Alexandra, by comparison, has run 15 times in two years. So no matter what happens in the La Troienne, Rachel Alexandra will race less this year and be rested for longer periods. As for last year, Jackson says it is in the books and there is no reason to look back. \u201cI didn\u2019t overwork her,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was in peak condition and up to everything we threw her way and she handled it beautifully. No regrets.\u201d", "keyword": "Rachel Alexandra (Race Horse);Horse Racing;Kentucky Derby;Churchill Downs Incorporated;Oaklawn Park;Baffert Bob;Asmussen Steve"}
{"id": "ny0126744", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/08/14", "title": "On Wall Street, the Rising Cost of High-Speed Trading", "abstract": "For several years, the Wall Street wizards who built a faster, more fragmented stock market justified their creation by pointing to the benefits it yielded for investors in the form of lower trading costs. But as the speed and complexity of the markets have continued to change at a rapid pace \u2014 with trade times now measured in millionths of a second \u2014 a growing number of studies and market participants suggest that those benefits to investors have stalled or even started to reverse. Research from the broker Abel/Noser indicates that the total cost for an investor to get into and out of a single share of stock fell by more than half between 2000 and 2010, to 3.5 cents. Since then, though, the cost has leveled off and then ticked up in the most recent quarter to 3.8 cents, confirming a trend that has also been visible in recent data from Credit Suisse Trading Strategy and from Celent, a consulting firm specializing in financial markets. The advantages of the nation\u2019s increasingly high-speed stock market are under the microscope after a number of recent trading malfunctions underscored the risks and instability that have come with the rapid changes. This month, one of Wall Street\u2019s most important trading firms, Knight Capital , lost $440 million in 45 minutes after installing faulty software designed to keep up with an evolving market. As the battle to introduce more sophisticated technology continues, raising the specter of more problems like Knight\u2019s, the diminishing returns flowing back to investors are making even longtime proponents of innovation question whether the competition to make the market faster and more efficient is now doing more harm than good. \u201cThey\u2019ve reached the point where the competition is measured in microseconds and there are essentially no benefits to the public at that level,\u201d said Lawrence E. Harris, the former chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission , and now a professor at the University of Southern California . High-speed trading firms have thrived in the computerized markets and now account for more than half of all stock trading, up from 26 percent in 2006, according to the Tabb Group, a financial markets research firm. But even many of them acknowledge that they are engaged in an arms race that is delivering diminishing returns. Manoj Narang, the founder of Tradeworx, said that the competition had become \u201ca tax \u201d on computerized trading firms like his. Mr. Narang says he thinks that his competitors are dedicating fewer resources to the race as they see there is little more to be gained. But Mr. Narang said that investors had already enjoyed enormous benefits from the market\u2019s increasing sophistication and were likely to see more in the future in ways that might not be immediately obvious. \u201cThe march of technology does not happen one step forward every year,\u201d Mr. Narang said. The concerns about an evolving market have been around since the invention of the telegraph allowed cross-continental trading. But they entered another level with a series of regulatory changes beginning in 1998 that opened the market to computerized trading and new exchanges. When the so-called specialists on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had to compete with computers, they had to lower their prices to stay in business, and the cost of trading for investors immediately went down. Technology also facilitated a sharp jump in the number of shares traded on a daily basis \u2014 a concept known in the industry as liquidity \u2014 making it easier for mutual funds to get in and out of stocks. Even the harshest critics of the current system say that many of the developments over the last two decades came with advantages for wide parts of the investing community. \u201cNo one is saying that we go back to the floor specialists,\u201d said Clive Williams, the head of stock trading at T. Rowe Price Group . But the pace of innovation has not slowed. The new software that Knight rolled out so disastrously was only the most obvious sign of the feverish competition that is continuing to reshape the markets. Trading firms are constantly rewriting their software to keep up with the evolving rules of the nation\u2019s stock exchanges. The exchanges, in turn, are making changes to the rules and systems to keep up with the dozens of unorthodox trading platforms that have sprung up as a result of the regulatory changes. All the industry players are also racing to update their physical infrastructure. The exchanges are consolidating their servers in data warehouses run by companies like Equinix so that the cables between them can be as short as possible and the trade data can travel faster. For trades that have to move between the financial centers of Chicago and New York, some firms have found that data moves too slowly through fiber optic cables. In response, several companies are currently developing networks to transmit data by microwave. The length of time that it takes to execute a trade on the New York Stock Exchange\u2019s most popular platform has dropped from 3.2 seconds to 48 milliseconds, according to Celent. There have been obvious beneficiaries of these developments. There are the high-speed trading firms, which use fast data connections to detect tiny differences between stocks on different exchanges and can act much faster than long-term investors on market-moving news. The companies producing the cables and computers have also made profits, and the traditional exchanges have made more money by selling their own trading technology. But the risks of making such frequent changes have become increasingly evident. Before Knight\u2019s problem, the third-largest exchange, BATS Global Markets, gave investors a jolt in March when new software for bringing companies public failed on the day BATS took its own stock public. When problems do occur they can spread more quickly, as they did during the so-called flash crash of 2010. These perils have been one factor scaring investors away from American stocks. They have also been put off by a market that has delivered almost no returns over the last decade because of asset bubbles and instability in the global economy. When attention has turned to the risks of the computerized market, the new trading sites and high-speed trading firms have managed to fend off critics by pointing to benefits that long-term investors have derived from the sophisticated markets. One of the most popular ways to gauge how investors are doing is the difference between the price at which a stock can be bought and sold at a given moment \u2014 the so-called bid-ask spread. When this goes down, day traders, mutual funds and other institutional investors pay less to move in and out of stocks. Credit Suisse Trading Strategy has tracked a long decline in the spreads paid on American stocks, except in periods of volatile trading, when spreads tend to temporarily rise. Several reasons have been given for the declining spreads, but much of the credit has been given to the competition between exchanges for customers, and the competition between high-speed trading firms to offer the best price. In recent months, however, Credit Suisse has found that spreads have been rising even under calm trading conditions. Studies of transaction costs, like the one conducted by Abel/Noser, incorporate both the bid-ask spread and the commission charged by brokers. Over time, these have generally moved down in tandem but they have leveled off recently. Analysts have only just begun to consider why these costs to investors have stopped going down, and do not have clear answers. Terrence Hendershott, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley , said he had been an advocate for technological innovation in the past, but had begun to wonder if the continuing battle for technological superiority had become too much. \u201cYou\u2019ve got arguably too many people, in too small a space, and they just keep spending enormous amounts of money,\u201d Professor Hendershott said. \u201cCan I convince myself that we are really seeing a lot of benefits? No.\u201d", "keyword": "High Frequency Trading Flash Orders;Regulation and Deregulation;Knight Capital Group;NYSE;BATS Global Markets;Stocks and Bonds"}
{"id": "ny0296583", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/12/15", "title": "\u2018Brexit\u2019 Talks Could Stretch 10 Years, British Official Warns", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Struck off the guest list for dinner at a European Union summit, Britain\u2019s prime minister, Theresa May, faced a second embarrassment on Thursday, over warnings that trade talks on quitting the bloc could last a decade, and even then might fail. Despite the June 23 referendum decision to leave the European Union, Britain remains a full member until the end of negotiations on British exit, known as Brexit, which Mrs. May aims to complete by the spring of 2019. Britain\u2019s ambiguous, and increasingly isolated, position was underscored by the format for the gathering in Brussels on Thursday in which the other 27 leaders were to debate their own strategy for Brexit over dinner \u2014 and without Mrs. May. The awkwardness Mrs. May faced when she was politely asked to leave the room was compounded by a leaked warning from her own top aide in Brussels, highlighting the mind-numbing complexity of undoing four decades of European integration. According to the BBC, the advice, given to ministers in October by Ivan Rogers, Britain\u2019s ambassador to the European Union, suggested that completing talks on a new trade relationship with the bloc could take 10 years \u2014 and even then might not survive a process of ratification by each of the 27 other nations. Mrs. May\u2019s office did not deny the substance of the report, but said that the ambassador was reflecting the views of other member countries, not his own assessment of the situation. Nevertheless, it presents a stark contrast to some British assertions that a new relationship could be struck within the two-year timetable envisaged under the formal process for withdrawal, which Mrs. May intends to begin by the end of March. Even this timetable may be optimistic, because Michel Barnier, one of the European Union\u2019s lead negotiators, has said that in reality, a deal would have to be done within 18 months to allow time for ratification. In the meantime, Britons remain fiercely divided over Brexit, with supporters encouraged by the fact that the economy has so far not suffered the dire fate predicted by some ahead of the referendum. Their opponents say the negative effects will become visible next year, after being delayed by the post-referendum stimulus injected into the economy by the Bank of England and a competitive edge gained by the depreciation of the pound sterling. While some of those who favor Brexit fret that they could be cheated of their referendum victory, many businesses worry about the apparent lack of a coherent government strategy, almost six months after the referendum. Their big fear is that two years of negotiation will fail to yield a trade deal, leading to a \u201ccliff edge\u201d plan in which import and export tariffs are applied with little time to prepare. On Wednesday David Davis, the minister responsible for negotiating British exit, suggested that a transitional arrangement might be possible to overcome the risk of such economic disruption, providing that the broad outlines of the final deal are settled by the end of the two-year period. \u201cIf you build a bridge, you need to have both sides established before you build the bridge,\u201d he told lawmakers, while adding that it was \u201cperfectly possible to know what the end game will be in two years.\u201d Alongside the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, Mr. Davis is emerging as a more pragmatic force in the internal British cabinet discussions, for example, keeping open the option that Britain might be willing to continue making some budget contributions to the bloc after Brexit, in exchange for privileges. More surprisingly, Mr. Davis also referred to the possibility that Britain might, legally, be able to revoke its decision to quit the European Union, once it had ignited exit talks under Article 50 of the European Union\u2019s treaty \u2014 though he added that this was not something he anticipated. Until now, the government has argued that once started, the process could not be reversed. Inside the British government, civil servants are working frantically to assess the potential economic impact of Brexit on different sectors of the economy, as their political masters struggle to assemble a strategy for Brexit talks. So far Britain has not said formally that it wants to leave the European Union\u2019s customs union, which provides for tariff-free trade, or its single market, which removes non-tariff barriers, and Mrs. May argues that there need be no \u201cbinary choice\u201d between being on the inside or the outside. Last week the government promised that it would present its outline plan for Brexit to lawmakers before the exit negotiations are triggered. But on Wednesday Mr. Davis said that this would not emerge before February. Moreover, it remains unclear whether this plan will yield real detail, or merely present a wishful opening bid that suggests Britain could jettison the things it dislikes about the European Union, such as the free movement of people, while keeping free trade in goods and services, for important sectors at least. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, once articulated this view, arguing that \u201cmy policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.\u201d That notion has been rejected by a variety of European politicians, including Mr. Barnier and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, both of whom have warned that Britain will not be allowed to cherry pick. There were some early signs of discord Thursday on the European Union side, with the European Parliament\u2019s main negotiator on Brexit, Guy Verhofstadt, threatening to start parallel talks with Britain unless his institution is given a greater role in the Brexit talks. The European Parliament must approve a final deal but, in a Twitter post , Mr. Verhofstadt, a former prime minister of Belgium, accused the member governments of planning to \u201csideline\u201d his fellow European lawmakers, adding, \u201cIf they want us to talk straight to British authorities, they\u2019ve got it.\u201d On the substance of the negotiations, the national governments of the 27 are trying to close ranks. In June, soon after the referendum, they declared that any agreement concluded with Britain \u201cwill have to be based on a balance of rights and obligations,\u201d and that \u201caccess to the single market requires acceptance of all four freedoms,\u201d which include the free movement of people as well as goods, capital and services. A similar refrain was expected to emerge Thursday from the informal dinner meeting of the 27. That sets the stage for the difficult negotiations predicted by Mr. Rogers. On Thursday his former colleague, Gus O\u2019Donnell, once Britain\u2019s most senior civil servant, and now a member of the House of Lords, supported that assessment, telling the BBC that it would take \u201cat least five years,\u201d to reach a final deal. Asked if he agreed that a transitional arrangement would be needed to smooth Britain\u2019s exit from the bloc, Mr. O\u2019Donnell replied: \u201cI think that\u2019s a statement of the completely, blindingly, obvious.\u201d", "keyword": "Brexit;Theresa May;Referendum;House of Lords Great Britain;Legislature;Great Britain;EU"}
{"id": "ny0062061", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/01/28", "title": "Wintry Blast Chills Sales of Houses", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Sales of new single-family homes fell more than expected in December, but lean inventories and steady price gains suggested the housing market recovery remained intact. Economists did not appear to be too concerned about the second monthly decline in home sales, attributing it to frigid weather in parts of the United States. Home sales for the full year hit their highest level since 2008. \u201cIt\u2019s cold out there for the economy,\u201d said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. \u201cThe drop in new-home sales is not a sign the economy at large is starting to slow in a worrisome manner.\u201d The Commerce Department reported on Monday that new-home sales fell 7 percent, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 414,000 units. Sales were at a 445,000-unit pace in November and economists had expected them to slow to only a 457,000-unit rate in December. Apart from the bitterly cold weather, last month\u2019s decline in sales was most likely a continuation of a slowdown after October\u2019s outsize 14.9 percent increase. Sales in the Northeast, which was hard hit by cold weather, tumbled 36.4 percent to their slowest pace since June 2012. Home sales are usually weak during the winter, but a cold snap last month could have exaggerated the scale of the slowdown. New-home sales stumbled in the summer after mortgage rates jumped, but economists said a lack of supply could also be curbing activity. \u201cThere has been some pause in sales, some of that may be supply-related rather than demand-related,\u201d said Samuel Coffin, an economist at UBS. \u201cIf you look at the inventory data for new and existing homes, they don\u2019t look consistent with a big falloff in demand.\u201d Last month, the supply of houses on the market fell 2.8 percent to 171,000 units. That was the lowest since July. At December\u2019s sales pace it would take five months to clear the supply of houses on the market. That was up from 4.7 months in November. A supply of six months is considered healthy. Housing is expected to have contributed significantly to economic growth last year, through residential investment and rising home prices that have increased the net worth of households, allowing for greater discretionary spending. \u201cWe expect new home sales activity should pick up in the coming year along with improving economic growth,\u201d said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. For all of 2013, a total of 428,000 new single family homes were sold, a 16.4 percent increase from 2012. The median price of a new home last month rose 4.6 percent from December 2012. For the year as a whole, prices were up 8.4 percent, the most since 2005.", "keyword": "Real Estate; Housing;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0052803", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/07/05", "title": "An Online Shift in China Muffles an Open Forum", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 For the past few years, social media in China has been dominated by the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, a microblogging service that created an online sphere of freewheeling public debate, incubating social change and at times even holding politicians accountable in a country where traditional media outlets are severely constrained. But in recent months, Weibo has been eclipsed by the Facebook-like WeChat, which allows instant messaging within self-selected circles of followers. The shift from public to semiprivate communication, accelerated by a government crackdown on Weibo, has fundamentally reordered the social media landscape for the country\u2019s 600 million Internet users, curbing what had been modern China\u2019s most open public forum. \u201cThis is a new phase for social media in China,\u201d said Hu Yong, a journalism professor at Peking University. \u201cIt is the decline of the first large-scale forum for information in China and the rise of something more narrowly focused.\u201d WeChat has its advantages and its defenders. It is less censored than Weibo, and some users say it allows them to speak more freely, knowing that their conversations are private. Many users relish its added functions, including voice messaging. In May, though, the government announced that WeChat would be more heavily monitored. Saying that instant messaging services were being used to spread \u201cviolence, terrorism and pornography,\u201d the agency charged with policing the Internet said it would \u201cfirmly fight infiltration from hostile forces at home and abroad,\u201d according to a government statement. In its heyday, Weibo promised much more. It came to prominence in 2011 after a high-speed rail crash killed 40 people. Weibo users detailed the mayhem and government shortcomings that led to the accident. It was a signal moment in the Internet\u2019s coming of age in China, a reminder of how the medium could challenge even a formidable authoritarian government. Weibo is still important. Boundary-pushing news and commentaries are still more easily found there than in the more tightly controlled world of government newspapers and magazines. It also remains popular for following celebrities and gossip. It reported in March that it had 66 million daily users, up 37 percent over a year earlier. But government figures show that the overall number of microblog users, including those using Weibo and services from other providers, fell by 9 percent last year, with many migrating to WeChat. That shift, along with a general decline in technology stocks, contributed to a disappointing New York stock market listing in April for Weibo, which raised $286 million instead of the anticipated $500 million . \u201cIt\u2019s far from what it used to be,\u201d said He Weifang, a prominent lawyer and onetime heavy blogger on Weibo with more than a million followers. \u201cYou can still find facts on Weibo, or news reports, but the comments aren\u2019t as interesting or deep.\u201d One reason is the government crackdown on the so-called Big V accounts \u2014 prominent commenters, with verified accounts, who often had millions of followers. After hundreds were detained, most stopped posting on Weibo. Others quit because of the sharp tone of commentary on Weibo, which often devolved into nasty, ad hominem attacks. Some grew tired of the dizzying list of banned terms and the cat-and-mouse games with censors to evade them. For example, \u201cJune 4,\u201d the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, was banned, so creative minds came up with \u201cMay 35\u201d (which would work out to June 4), until that was also banned. Such wordplay amused hard-core users but confused ordinary readers. Image Li Bo uses WeChat to rally opposition to damaging infrastructure projects. A chat account QR code is reflected in his glasses. Credit Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times WeChat seized on the frustration. Its parent company, Tencent, claims 355 million active monthly users . The company does not make public the number of daily users, making a direct comparison to Weibo difficult. But few people disagree that WeChat is now more popular. \u201cJune 4\u201d is banned on WeChat too, but other terms routinely blocked on microblogs, such as the name of the former security czar Zhou Yongkang, are allowed. Most observers ascribe this leniency to the fact that WeChat messages have a limited readership. More important, activists say, WeChat allows them to dig deeper into issues with like-minded people. The veteran environmentalist Li Bo has used WeChat for more than two years to rally opposition to damaging infrastructure projects, such as a controversial plan to dam the Nu River . Mr. Li is a participant in one WeChat group called Environmental Policy Advocacy that has more than 300 members, including, he said, open-minded government officials. Although officials rarely participate, they see the traffic and occasionally invite members to their offices to chat about policies. Some groups are smaller and narrower, such as one focused on a county in eastern China damaged by pollution. Others are task-specific, such as small committees for various campaigns and projects. These groups can be powerful as long as they are not too overtly political. In late April, factory workers used WeChat to organize strikes against a Taiwanese company that had failed to pay into a retirement fund. Around the same time, however, churchgoers trying to use WeChat to prevent their church from being torn down found that their WeChat circles were being used to track down opponents of the government\u2019s action. A broader problem for activists, however, is that WeChat can become an echo chamber. When a charity for coal miners was trying to raise $500 this year to buy oxygen pumps for a miner dying of black lung disease, its initial appeal fell flat. On a hunch, an employee, Xue Yinhu, appealed to followers on WeChat and raised the money in an hour. \u201cThese people know you better, so they\u2019re more willing to support you,\u201d he said. \u201cBut sometimes you\u2019re talking only to the same people.\u201d WeChat also has built-in constraints that hobble its ability to replicate Weibo\u2019s public sphere. WeChat allows the creation of public accounts that anyone can follow, but limits posts to one a day. In addition, access to public accounts is not possible on cellphones, making it more difficult, for instance, to launch an incriminating photo of a public official into the blogosphere. Comments are also deleted after a few days, making long-term discussions challenging and erasing a historical record. The government also monitors these accounts and recently deleted some covering social news and politics. Tencent declined to comment on how it decided which functions to offer users. Still, WeChat remains a powerful tool for activists, even if Weibo\u2019s promise of an open online society has been frustrated. Hu Jia, who has worked on environmental and public health causes for 15 years, said that the advent of social media, despite its limitations, had produced a better-informed society. \u201cWeibo and WeChat are gifts from God,\u201d he said. \u201cDespite all the government surveillance, the benefits we get are even greater for people trying to organize society.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Sina Weibo;Social Media;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Censorship"}
{"id": "ny0124907", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/08/11", "title": "South Korean President Visits Disputed Islets", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea flew to a set of islets locked in a territorial dispute with Japan on Friday, dismissing protests from Tokyo and making a trip that was bound to heighten diplomatic tensions between Washington\u2019s two key Asian allies. Japan called Mr. Lee\u2019s visit \u201cunacceptable\u201d and recalled its ambassador from Seoul in protest, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told reporters in Tokyo. Adding drama to the simmering historical hostility that Mr. Lee\u2019s surprise trip magnified, South Korea and Japan were set to clash in London on Friday for the Olympic bronze medal in men\u2019s soccer, a game to be watched by millions of people in both countries. South Korea won, 2-0. Although South Korean cabinet ministers and national legislators had previously visited the barely inhabitable volcanic outcroppings in the sea between Korea and Japan, Mr. Lee was the first South Korean president to travel there to highlight his country\u2019s territorial control. A squadron of armed South Korean police officers have manned the islets, called Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan, since the 1950s. An elderly fishing couple also lives there with government support. \u201cDokdo is truly our territory, and it\u2019s worth defending with our lives,\u201d Mr. Lee told the police officers, according to the national news agency Yonhap, whose reporter accompanied the presidential entourage. With his popularity plummeting amid corruption scandals implicating his associates, Mr. Lee is badly in need of a boost to his political leverage. Opposition politicians were quick to accuse him of making the unprecedented presidential trip to tap South Koreans\u2019 deep-seated nationalistic sentiments against Japan for gains in domestic politics. Although Mr. Lee is banned by law from seeking re-election in the presidential vote scheduled for December, his governing party feared being labeled \u201cpro-Japanese\u201d so much that it forced his government in June to postpone the signing of an agreement to share classified military data with its rival. The dispute over the islets remains one of the most contentious unresolved issues from Japan\u2019s often brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until its World War II defeat in 1945. Mr. Lee made Friday\u2019s trip by helicopter, staying 70 minutes on the main islet and sharing pizza and chicken with the police guards, Yonhap reported. His trip came after Japan angered South Koreans by reconfirming its territorial claim to the islets in its new defense white paper published late last month. Mr. Lee is scheduled to deliver his last major national speech as president on Wednesday, which South Korea celebrates as a major national holiday observing Japan\u2019s World War II surrender and Korea\u2019s liberation. The islets are surrounded by rich fishing grounds and natural gas deposits. South Koreans also hold deep emotional attachment to the rocks. To them, Japan\u2019s territorial claim epitomizes Japan\u2019s early 20th-century aggression and what they consider its refusal to atone for its colonial occupation of Korea, during which Koreans were banned from using their Korean names and language. The two countries are also divided over compensation for Korean women who historians said were forced or cheated into working as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. In July, a South Korean man rammed his light truck into the main gate of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Mr. Lee\u2019s government said his trip was intended to counter Japan\u2019s increasingly pronounced campaign to highlight its territorial claim to the islets. Last year, three Japanese lawmakers who wanted to visit the islets to advertise their country\u2019s claim were denied entry to South Korea. \u201cWe encourage good relations between both of our allies,\u201d said Patrick Ventrell, acting deputy spokesman of the United States State Department.", "keyword": "Lee Myung-bak;South Korea;Japan;Dokdo Islands"}
{"id": "ny0192673", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/02/06", "title": "California Scrambles to Prepare for Furloughs", "abstract": "SACRAMENTO (AP) \u2014 State agencies scrambled Thursday to institute the first employee furloughs in California history, ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to save money in the face of a budget crisis. Many agencies tried to determine whether some employees might be working on Friday, the first day of the scheduled two-a-month furloughs. Others had not issued notices on their Web sites about their closings. The office of Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said about 90 percent of the state\u2019s 238,000 employees were supposed to be off Friday. A Sacramento County Superior Court judge upheld the governor\u2019s executive order last week. But on Thursday, the same judge said his previous ruling did not apply to employees of state constitutional offices, like the attorney general and treasurer. That decision came in response to an inquiry from the state controller, John Chiang, who wanted to clarify whether Mr. Schwarzenegger had the authority to force the furloughs on elected officials. The judge, Patrick Marlette, said his previous order did not address that question because the elected officials were not party to the lawsuit. All of the seven constitutional officers, other than the governor\u2019s office, have said they will not comply with the furlough order. Mr. Schwarzenegger\u2019s office has estimated the furloughs will save the state $1.4 billion through June 2010. For employees, the furloughs will amount to a 9.2 percent pay cut. Public safety and some other employees were exempt. Some workers will be on the job on Friday but will be required to take unpaid days off in the future.", "keyword": "Government Employees;Layoffs and Job Reductions;California;furloughs;Budgets and Budgeting;Schwarzenegger Arnold"}
{"id": "ny0237950", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/06/06", "title": "Wild Hive, a Farm Where Grain Is Milled", "abstract": "DON LEWIS, the owner of Wild Hive Farm , rolled open a door to reveal his milling machinery and shoved a somewhat aggressive goat named Annabelle aside. Inside stood a modern Amish-style stone-burr mill, with 20-inch pink granite grinding stones. \u201cIt\u2019s basically the same machine that was used 100 years ago, with a few more bells and whistles,\u201d he said. Mr. Lewis, a former professional beekeeper, has slowly built a modest empire of whole grains and organic flours amid the waves of grain in the rolling terrain of Dutchess County, in the mid-Hudson Valley. A rambling barn, still in the midst of renovations, marks a major expansion of his small-batch milling operation in Clinton Corners (\u201cWe\u2019re about to bloom,\u201d he said). Mr. Lewis is also planning a nonprofit program to educate the public about sustainable agriculture. His operation, properly called the Wild Hive Farm Community Grain Project, also includes a bakery, a store and a cafe showcasing his goods. Hard red spring wheat, soft white winter wheat, rye, spelt, triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye), oats and corn are all grown nearby, with the bulk coming from Lightning Tree Farms, 10 miles away in Millbrook. Mr. Lewis also sells his neatly packaged goods at regional farmers\u2019 markets and specialty food shops; a few restaurants devoted to local sources are loyal customers. To hear Mr. Lewis describe the scope of his business brings to mind the children\u2019s story of the Little Red Hen, who could find no volunteers to help plant a grain of wheat \u2014 except that Mr. Lewis has more help than the hen did. \u201cCommunity is very important to me,\u201d said Mr. Lewis, who provides jobs to farmers, millers, carpenters, welders, drivers, salespeople, bakers, cooks, waitresses and dishwashers. \u201cThe best way to promote community is through food, and a meeting place.\u201d The Wild Hive Store and Caf\u00e9, whose covered porch and banging screen door are reminders of the general store built on the site in 1901, is just such a place. On a recent Saturday morning, locals and weekenders happily tucked into cheesy yellow grits and praline challah French toast at tables draped with mismatched tablecloths. A refrigerator case was crowded with local bounty: milk in glass bottles, cheeses, radishes and mint. Cinnamon rolls, strawberry scones and raisin-walnut bread beckoned at the bakery counter. In the food world, \u201cfarm to table\u201d is sometimes something of a ruse, but at Wild Hive, the commitment to the philosophy shows. The mill, of course, comes between the farm and the table. Before Mr. Lewis got his hands on it, the dairy barn and mill had been converted into a luxury home \u2014 with marble baths, hardwood floors and stainless-steel kitchen appliances \u2014 by a speculator who had hoped to subdivide the surrounding paddocks and pastures. \u201cHe went bust,\u201d Mr. Lewis said matter-of-factly. A nearby landowner acquired the parcel, secured a conservation easement and agreed to lease the acreage to Mr. Lewis. That the land will revert to agricultural use suits Mr. Lewis just fine. Mr. Lewis plans to add cows and pigs to the chickens and goats that he grazes there now. The expansion, which Mr. Lewis hopes will be finished in the fall, includes rooms for wheat storage, dehulling, cleaning, grinding, sifting, packing and shipping (the site of the future loading dock is now a favorite hangout for Mr. Lewis\u2019s goat herd). It also includes two 16-inch mills that are standing by, and a new 30-inch mill on its way from North Carolina. For advice on weight distribution and other milling matters, Mr. Lewis and his team of contractors relied on B. W. Dedrick\u2019s book \u201cPractical Milling,\u201d first published in 1924. Mr. Lewis expects to double or triple his output, to 100 or 150 tons of grain, up from 50, and he is using his persuasive powers on local dairy farmers who, he hopes, will see the wisdom and profitability in cultivating some grain for human rather than bovine consumption. \u201cThis isn\u2019t intended to grow into a giant processing center,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m expecting it to be more of an example of what can be done. I\u2019m doing it on a shoestring \u2014 that\u2019s how I do things \u2014 but it will be efficient.\u201d The sleek kitchen and adjoining conference room will be dedicated to educating the public, especially schoolchildren. \u201cKids will be able to see the process and then bake a batch of biscuits with fresh-milled flour,\u201d Mr. Lewis said. \u201cI sometimes take a little mill to festivals, and when kids catch the grain in their hands, you can see the light bulbs go on. I want people to understand more about farming and where their food comes from, and there\u2019s no better place to start than with children.\u201d Wild Hive\u2019s best-selling product is its all-purpose soft white winter wheat flour. Bran separated from the flour goes into the cafe\u2019s muffins, and to a pastured flock of Cornish cross chickens, a sideline for Mr. Lewis, who was raised on a chicken farm in Orange County. \u201cBran is a great feed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt makes the most beautiful broilers \u2014 moderate fat, juicy meat.\u201d If bread flour is Mr. Lewis\u2019s staple, coarse-ground polenta might just be his breakout fare. In recent weeks, the quality of the polenta, made with an old-fashioned variety of open-pollinated corn, has been noted in both the Dining section of The New York Times and \u201cThe Food Schmooze,\u201d on Connecticut Public Radio. John Sharp, an owner at the two-month-old Birdsall House , in Peekskill, which uses Wild Hive Farm breads and grains, has discovered the upside of forging relationships with local producers. Mr. Lewis told him that the chef Mario Batali wanted to buy his polenta, Mr. Sharp said in a phone interview. But, he said, Mr. Lewis \u201csaid he\u2019d always have enough for me. I was really touched.\u201d At the Valley Restaurant at the Garrison , which has a zeal for local products, the pastry chef, Laura DiGiorno, uses Wild Hive Farm\u2019s polenta to make a dessert called a cheesecake corn dog, a sweet salute to that beloved staple of carnivals and country fairs. \u201cWe discovered the polenta at a local farmers\u2019 market,\u201d Ms. DiGiorno said. \u201cIt has great texture, great flavor, great everything. I make a New York-style cheesecake in a sheet pan and freeze it, then cut it into rectangles, put it on a stick, dip it in polenta batter and deep-fry it. It sounds crazy, I know, but it tastes amazing, actually.\u201d Her corn dogs are on the menu, just in time for summer, by popular demand.", "keyword": "Grain;Agriculture;Westchester County (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0057462", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/09/01", "title": "Tom Durkin, the Voice of New York Horse Racing, Retires", "abstract": "SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. \u2014 It was noon, and Tom Durkin was marking up his program with pastel colors for a final time, matching a kaleidoscope of jockey silks to the appropriate horses in each race. His binoculars were within arm\u2019s reach, as was the coat hanger with a makeshift clipboard that holds his program and hangs around his neck as the thoroughbreds he describes make their way around the racetrack. No matter how crude or simple, these are instruments of a track announcer, and over the last 43 years, no one has coaxed a more beautiful symphony from them than Durkin. In his hands, they are transformed into a Stradivarius violin, and a two-minute horse race becomes a deeply felt movement of sweeping emotion and hard-earned triumph. Durkin, 63, has lent his mellifluous baritone voice and his vivid imagination to more than 80,000 races run at county fairs in Wisconsin and harness tracks in Illinois, as well as to the most famous race in America, the Kentucky Derby. For the last 25 years, he has been not only the voice of New York racing, but on telecasts of the Triple Crown and Breeders\u2019 Cup races, he has provided the real-time oral history of modern thoroughbred racing. On Sunday, after the 10th race here at the oldest racetrack in the United States, Durkin walked out of the cramped, splintered crow\u2019s nest that is his office and into the uncertain life of a retiree. His last call of the 123rd running of the Spinaway Stakes was, of course, a beauty, mustering all his showmanship to brighten a bittersweet afternoon punctuated by showers. \u201cCondo Commando is splish-splashing down the stretch in the Spa, and she\u2019s all alone for the final furlong of the Spinaway,\u201d Durkin roared before putting his binoculars down and leaning into a final flourish of a distinguished career. \u201cCondo Commando was splash-tastic.\u201d On cue, the rain stopped, and the roar of more than 38,000 appreciative horse enthusiasts washed over the man widely considered the greatest race caller in the history of thoroughbred racing. It is an abrupt change for Durkin and an unwelcome one for those who believe he is still at the top of his game and is ending his career prematurely. \u201cIt\u2019s better to be a year too early than a year too late,\u201d Durkin said. He will no longer start his day poring over the more than 2,000 words and phrases he has compiled in a notebook, embedding just the right image in his subconscious in the hope it can be retrieved as he stares through his binoculars, glances at his program and describes the drama of a herd of thoroughbreds running at 35 miles per hour. He will no longer open the file in his computer, called \u201cOn Race Calling,\u201d that contains essays he has written to himself about his craft, helping him transform himself into an artist. \u201cThe key in good race calling and storytelling is see the conflict, build the tension and then knock \u2019em dead with the release,\u201d begins one essay on plot and narrative. Durkin can also fire his hypnotist, ditch the medication and discontinue the breathing exercises that he has used to hold crippling performance anxiety at bay for more than 20 years. Three years ago, Durkin was so distraught that he did not renew his contract as NBC\u2019s announcer for the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes , racing\u2019s Triple Crown events. In the approach to his final day, Durkin sat for hours of news media interviews and tributes. He endured with good humor a popular online video clip of a younger, thinner and far more dashing version of himself matching wits with the comedian Jimmie Walker on the game show \u201cMatch Game.\u201d Video Tom Durkin inside his booth at Belmont Park in 2014 during his eighth and final chance to narrate the crowning of a Triple Crown winner. For the last two days here, the sound and fury of some of Durkin\u2019s signature calls flickered on the big screen in the infield and across televisions around the track. They showed him at his most whimsical \u2014 doing a hearty pirate imitation as he brought home a horse called Arrrrr and out-von-Trapping the von Trapps with a melodic and on-key scale for a horse named Doremifasolatido down the stretch. Scores of calls from Durkin have been memorialized in racing lore, but perhaps one of the most stirring happened here at the Spa, as Saratoga Race Course is known, in the town he calls home. That was the 1994 Travers Stakes , where Durkin crystallized a determined performance from the great Holy Bull. \u201cAnd Mike Smith \u2014 lets the Bull roll!\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s in front by five as they come to the quarter pole, but there is Cause For Concern! Concern comes on, second on the outside!\u201d Then, a few seconds later: \u201cMike Smith\u2019s asking Holy Bull for everything he has. Concern is coming hard under Jerry Bailey. It\u2019s still Holy Bull, desperately trying to hold! Concern a final threat, but it is Holy Bull, as game as a race horse could be, coming down to the wire. Holy Bull wins! What a hero!\u201d When pressed, Durkin says his favorite call came in the 1995 Breeders\u2019 Cup Classic when the great Cigar was trying to close out an undefeated season of 10 victories and his first Horse of the Year title. The tremor in his voice and his clear admiration for the horse\u2019s grit were giveaways as to how much Durkin loved the sport of horse racing. \u201cAnd here he is: the unconquerable, invincible, unbeatable Cigar!\u201d he said as the horse came to the finish line. Eight times in his career, a horse entered the gate for the Belmont Stakes with a chance to win the Triple Crown and to allow Durkin to be the voice of an immortal achievement. Silver Charm, Real Quiet, Charismatic, War Emblem, Funny Cide, Smarty Jones, Big Brown and, most recently, California Chrome all came up empty. \u201cNo regrets,\u201d said Durkin. \u201cI owe my life to this game.\u201d What\u2019s next? Durkin said he had no idea. He mentioned voice work, some personal writing and perhaps work as a tour guide in Italy, a country he has spent extensive time exploring. No matter what he does, horse racing will still be a part of his life. \u201cI live six blocks from the racetrack here,\u201d he said. \u201cI love the game. This will afford me the opportunity to handicap a lot more. Maybe after calling 80,000 races, something has sunk in.\u201d Fittingly, it was Durkin himself who lent the perfect words for his own run across the finish line. Standing in the winners\u2019 circle with everyone who was anyone in New York racing, Durkin welled with tears as he addressed the crowd one final time. \u201cThere is one person that is completely responsible for this wonderful life that I\u2019ve had the privilege to live in horse racing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat person is here in Saratoga today. Right now he\u2019s in the backyard sitting at a picnic table under a pine tree looking at this image on the television. She\u2019s at the top of the stretch leaning over the rail, and she\u2019s in a box seat or at a simulcast center in Syracuse or a track in Ohio or in front of a computer terminal in California.\u201d Then, his voice caught and the tears tumbled. \u201cThe person that I owe an inexpressible gratitude is you,\u201d he said. \u201cThe racing fan, the horseplayer. Thank you.\u201d", "keyword": "Horse racing;Saratoga Race Course;Tom Durkin"}
{"id": "ny0143417", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/03", "title": "A Curious Coalition Opposed Bailout Bill", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Senators who voted against the $700 billion financial rescue plan make up one of the most curious coalitions of lawmakers ever to share common ground. It included arch-conservative Republicans like Jim DeMint of South Carolina, liberal Democrats like Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Bernard Sanders , independent of Vermont, who is regarded as the Senate\u2019s resident socialist. Taken together, the speeches of the 25 senators who voted against the plan on Wednesday amount to the Congressional equivalent of a dissenting opinion by the Supreme Court \u2014 impassioned, well reasoned, carefully articulated views on a landmark question of public policy that ultimately reflected the position of a minority of their fellow arbiters. If the bailout plan flops, they are the lawmakers who will be positioned to engage in a chorus of \u201cI told you sos.\u201d Their concerns spanned a panorama of issues: frustration over the lack of long-term regulatory changes in the legislation; alarm that $700 billion in taxpayer money would be at risk; anger that the Treasury secretary would not be subject to more stringent oversight; skepticism that executives of firms that seek help would face limits on their pay; and dismay that such an important bill was being rushed through Congress. And, perhaps most pointedly, they expressed skepticism that the bailout proposal would be able to restore liquidity to the credit markets, prevent the collapse of additional banks and safeguard the economy from a long recession. \u201cThis package is just a very costly Band-Aid for big banks that will do very little to help patients who need major surgery,\u201d Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, said in his speech on the Senate floor. \u201cHad Congress been able to use the regular committee process to craft a bipartisan and comprehensive legislation, the resulting bill may have gained my support,\u201d Mr. Enzi said. \u201cUnfortunately, Congress has been pressured into passing this bill in two weeks by Treasury and Wall Street. A rescue plan of this scale requires a clear plan of action with a substantial chance of success. This plan has neither.\u201d Some of the harshest criticism was leveled by Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate banking committee, who normally would have been his party\u2019s lead negotiator on the bailout bill but removed himself because he opposed the administration\u2019s proposal at its very core. \u201cThe choice we faced was between pursuing an informed response or panic,\u201d Mr. Shelby said. \u201cUnfortunately, we chose panic and are now about to spend $700 billion on something we have not examined closely. Yes, in the end, we will have \u2018done something.\u2019 At the same time, however, we will have done nothing to determine whether it will accomplish anything at all.\u201d Mr. Shelby, in his speech, laid out a modern history of the American housing, mortgage and securitization markets, explaining how a bubble in home values was fueled by loose lending standards, exotic mortgage products and complex financial instruments, pushed by financial firms that were leveraged heavily to maximize profits. And in many ways, he was already dishing out \u201cI told you sos.\u201d \u201cWe did not get to where we are today by accident, it was a path we chose,\u201d he said. \u201cMy warnings about the risk of basing credit decisions on well-intended social mandates rather than sound, fact-based underwriting were dismissed. My concerns about the inadequacy of the regulatory structure put in place in the financial modernization legislation went unacknowledged. My efforts to ensure that bank capital standards were designed to ensure safety and soundness, rather than industry concerns, were conducted largely alone.\u201d Mr. Sanders, the Vermont independent, complained that the bill did not put any limits on the types of distressed debt the Treasury could buy, that it did not provide enough oversight, that it did not include adequate provisions to limit home foreclosures, that it did not really limit executive pay at firms that seek help. \u201cUnder this bill, the C.E.O.\u2019s and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. He said the bill also did not do anything to prevent financial institutions from becoming \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d effectively leaving open the potential need for future bailouts. Mr. Sanders also said he could not fathom giving Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. such broad authority over so much money. \u201cMaybe I am the only person in America who thinks so, but I have a hard time understanding why we are giving $700 billion to the secretary of the Treasury, who is the former C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, which, along with other financial institutions, actually got us into this problem,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe I am the only person in America who thinks that is a little bit weird, but that is what I think.\u201d He added: \u201cThis bill does not address the major economic crises we face \u2014 growing unemployment, low wages and the need to create decent-paying jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure and moving us to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.\u201d In one of the more remarkable colloquies of the day\u2019s discourse, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, and one of the most conservative members of Congress, took to the floor to express solidarity with Mr. Sanders. \u201cI would like to say to Senator Sanders a couple things,\u201d Mr. Sessions said. \u201cFirst, I think it is indeed breathtaking that this Senate would authorize basically one person with very little real oversight, a Wall Street maven himself, and allocate $700 billion in America\u2019s wealth, which I would have to say would be the largest single authorization of expenditure in the history of the Republic.\u201d Mr. Sessions added: \u201cSo I have to say, fundamentally, I think we have not done a good enough job in creating an oversight mechanism that will work, so I am not going to vote for the bill; I am not.\u201d Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said he opposed the bill because it did not do enough to help average Americans. \u201cThis bill sends a message to Wall Street that if they play fast and loose in the name of short-term profits, the government will actually make up for their losses,\u201d Mr. Nelson said. \u201cAnd the bill does very little to help individual homeowners. Until we stabilize the housing market, which is the underlying ability to restructure the economy from this crisis \u2014 until we stabilize the housing market, and until we stem the record number of foreclosures, our market simply is not going to improve.\u201d Mr. Nelson continued: \u201cThe bottom line is, ultimately, this bill forces taxpayers to bail out investment banks that caused the crisis in the first place, and it does nothing to address the real problem, which is home foreclosures.\u201d", "keyword": "Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008);Senate;Feingold Russell D;Sanders Bernard;Shelby Richard C"}
{"id": "ny0029621", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2013/06/20", "title": "Optimistic Fed Outlines an End to Its Stimulus", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Reserve, increasingly confident in the durability of economic growth, expects to start pulling back later this year from its efforts to stimulate the economy, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said on Wednesday. Mr. Bernanke, offering new details, said the central bank intends to scale down gradually its monthly purchases of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed bonds beginning later this year and ending when the unemployment rate hits 7 percent, which the Fed expects to happen by the middle of next year. The central bank would then take several more years to unwind the rest of its extraordinary stimulus campaign, slowly raising short-term interest rates from essentially zero to more normal levels after the jobless rate has fallen to 6.5 percent or lower. He emphasized, however, that the timing of the retreat depends on the health of the economy; if growth falters, the central bank would slow, or even reverse, the process. The expectations of Fed officials for the next several years, published Wednesday, are more optimistic than the consensus of private forecasters. Pulling back \u201cwould basically say that we\u2019ve had a relatively decent economic outcome in terms of sustained improvement in growth and unemployment,\u201d Mr. Bernanke said. \u201cIf things are worse, we will do more. If things are better, we will do less.\u201d Mr. Bernanke\u2019s comments, which followed a two-day meeting of the Fed\u2019s policy-making committee, appeared to disappoint investors on Wall Street who had hoped that the central bank would do more for longer. Stocks fell, with the broad Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index dropping 1.39 percent; interest rates rose. The impact on the economy will take longer to judge. The Fed\u2019s goal is to pull back as the economy gains strength so its departure is barely felt, like a parent who lets go of a bike at the moment a child is ready to ride. But the Fed has removed its hands too soon several times in recent years. On the other side of the equation, the central bank, at some point, runs the risk of pushing too hard for too long, which can also cause crashes. Image Of the Fed's bond-buying program, Ben S. Bernanke, the central bank's chairman, said, \"If things are worse, we will do more. If things are better we will do less.\" Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Gennadiy Goldberg, an analyst at TD Securities, described the market\u2019s reaction as \u201cemblematic of the lumpy path toward normalization,\u201d illustrating the limits of the Fed\u2019s ability to control the way that the economy will respond to its retreat. The housing market is an example. The Fed, deciding last year that it needed to do more, began to buy mortgage bonds in an effort to drive down borrowing costs. The lower rates spurred a wave of refinancing and home buying. But now, as the recovery gains momentum and the Fed signals that it plans to pull back, interest rates are beginning to rise and mortgage refinancing is beginning to wane. Mr. Bernanke said on Wednesday that the rate increases were a \u201cgood thing,\u201d a sign that the economy is returning to health. But Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the Fed still runs the risk of withdrawing its extra support for the economy too soon. \u201cLater in the cycle, we will be happy to take that view too,\u201d Mr. Shepherdson wrote Wednesday. \u201cBut not now, and it is very odd coming from a Fed chairman who has placed so much emphasis on the role of housing in the recovery. We do not think the market is yet ready to absorb higher rates.\u201d The Fed, in a statement released after the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee , sounded notes of increased optimism about the economy, but unusually, the statement did not describe the bond-buying timeline. Mr. Bernanke said he had been \u201cdeputized\u201d to share the details at the news conference. The statement said that the economy was expanding \u201cat a moderate pace\u201d and that the job market was improving. Most significantly, it noted that risks to growth had \u201cdiminished since last fall,\u201d an important assertion because the Fed has been trying in part to shield the economy from the consequences of reductions in federal spending. Those consequences have been milder than expected. In a separate forecast released at the same time, Fed officials predicted that the unemployment rate would decline more quickly than they had projected, dropping to between 6.5 percent and 6.8 percent by the end of 2014. In March, they predicted that the rate would fall by the end of next year to between 6.7 percent and 7 percent. The Fed said that it would continue for now to buy $85 billion a month in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed bonds, in addition to holding short-term interest rates near zero. Both policies are intended to ease financial conditions, to encourage economic activity and to increase the pace of job creation. Video The Times\u2019s David Gillen on market gyrations as Wall Street and world economies try to guess when the Federal Reserve will slow, or taper, its extraordinary measures to bolster the economy. Two of the 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented. Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, reiterated her concern that the Fed was doing too much. James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, broke with the majority for the first time this year to express concern about the sagging pace of inflation. Economic conditions have improved modestly since the Fed began its latest round of asset purchases last September. The economy has added about 197,000 jobs a month, and the unemployment rate has fallen slightly to 7.6 percent in May from 7.8 percent in September. But the economic damage of the recession remains largely unrepaired. Job growth is basically keeping pace with population growth. The share of American adults with jobs has not increased in three years. Moreover, the Fed\u2019s preferred measure of inflation has shrunk to an annual pace 1.05 percent, the lowest level in more than 50 years, as the economy continues to operate below capacity. The Fed would prefer annual inflation to run closer to 2 percent, diminishing the risk of outright deflation, or a general fall in the level of prices, which can paralyze economic activity as buyers wait for lower prices. Despite the fact that unemployment remains high and inflation remains low, the Fed has shown no sign of interest in expanding the pace of its stimulus campaign. Officials say that they are doing as much as they can. The debate instead has focused on how soon the Fed can afford to start buying fewer bonds. Mr. Bernanke said on Wednesday that even as the Fed pulls back, it still would be increasing its total bond holdings each month, and therefore that the stimulating effect also would continue to increase. He also emphasized the Fed\u2019s intent to hold short-term rates near zero well beyond the end of the asset purchases, a policy that the Fed regards as significantly more potent. \u201cOur intent from the beginning was to use asset purchases as a way to achieve some near-term momentum and then to allow the low interest rate policy to carry us through,\u201d he said. The Fed has said that rates would remain near zero at least as long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent. Mr. Bernanke said the Fed might well hold rates low for longer, particularly if inflation remained weak. He added that the Fed would consider adopting a lower threshold. The goal, he said, was to stabilize unemployment between 5 percent and 6 percent. Mr. Bernanke is unlikely to preside over those decisions. His second term as chairman ends next January, and President Obama reinforced expectations Monday that Mr. Bernanke would not be nominated by the White House to serve a third term. Mr. Bernanke declined to answer several questions about the president\u2019s remarks and his own plans at his news conference on Wednesday, insisting that Fed policy should be the sole focus.", "keyword": "Ben S Bernanke;Federal Reserve;US Economy;Interest rate;Quantitative easing"}
{"id": "ny0051188", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/10/09", "title": "Return to Traditions Spurs Optimism at J. C. Penney", "abstract": "J. C. Penney has brought back its cheerful coupons. It has revived familiar brands, like St. John\u2019s Bay and Cooks. And now the retailer, which just two years ago appeared to be teetering on the brink of collapse, is back on sound footing, its chief executive, Myron E. Ullman III, told analysts on Wednesday. \u201cWe\u2019re back. We\u2019re driven. We\u2019re once again competing effectively,\u201d Mr. Ullman said at J. C. Penney\u2019s first analyst conference since he returned as chief 18 months ago. \u201cAnd we\u2019re definitely back in the consumer\u2019s mind-set.\u201d But on a difficult day for retailers on Wall Street, investors were not impressed, sending J. C. Penney shares down 10.88 percent by the end of the day to $8.19. Reports of supplier trouble at Sears, another struggling retailer, sent its shares down almost 5 percent. Also weighing on investor sentiment were more immediate figures for J. C. Penney: Its third-quarter sales would be in the low-single-digit growth range, the retailer said, compared with its original guidance of mid-single-digit growth. The retailer blamed \u201csofter selling than anticipated during the month of September\u201d and a difficult environment for retailers over all, because of warmer than usual weather. \u201cHopefully we have seasonal weather soon, and gas prices low, and the consumer will feel good about the family budget, and will come out to shop,\u201d Mr. Ullman said. There are longer-term challenges, too. Retailers like J. C. Penney and Sears have been suffering as e-commerce rivals like Amazon generate more and more sales and as middle-class consumers that make up the bulk of their shoppers continue to struggle in an uneven economic recovery. Neely Tamminga, a retail analyst at Piper Jaffray, said she was optimistic about J. C. Penney. The retailer\u2019s \u201cturnaround is very much underway,\u201d she wrote in a note to investors after the analyst conference. \u201cIndications for a soft September are likely to remain a dark cloud,\u201d she added. Even some skeptics acknowledge that J. C. Penney has come a long way from a disastrous spell under its previous chief executive, Ronald B. Johnson, whose attempt to make the retailer slicker by introducing designer boutiques and stable prices instead of coupons flopped. Mr. Ullman, who returned to J. C. Penney in April 2013, has since undone most of those changes. On Wednesday, he laid out strategies that he said would add $2 billion to the retailer\u2019s sales over the next three years, a figure he called \u201cconservative.\u201d The strategies included a refocusing on private brands like its Arizona jeans line and St. John\u2019s Bay women\u2019s wear. Mr. Ullman said J. C. Penney would also play catch-up in its online offerings, including same-day pickup and delivery, and would also invest in its home store and in services like its beauty salons, which he said were profitable and brought in shoppers. \u201cYou can\u2019t get your hair done online,\u201d Mr. Ullman said. During its most recent quarter, J. C. Penney reported a net loss of $172 million. But it said net sales rose to $2.8 billion from $2.66 billion from the same period the previous year. Over all, J. C. Penney\u2019s road back to profitability is likely to be a long one. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that at its current rate of growth, it will take over eight years for the retailer to return to the over $17 billion in annual sales that it enjoyed in the mid-2000s. \u201cBack with the old, out with the new,\u201d the Goldman analysts said. \u201cWhat\u2019s next?\u201d", "keyword": "JC Penney;Myron E Ullman III;Retail;Earnings Reports"}
{"id": "ny0212227", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2017/01/06", "title": "\u2018It Is Over\u2019: Democrats\u2019 Efforts to Deny Trump Presidency Fail", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 One by one, the Democratic lawmakers stepped to the microphone on Friday, holding on to their letters and an impossible dream: denying the presidency to Donald J. Trump, two weeks before his inauguration. And one by one, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. \u2014 presiding over a joint session of Congress to validate the Electoral College results in Mr. Trump\u2019s victory \u2014 turned back their challenges with a stoic message, pounding his gavel without hesitation. \u201cIt is over,\u201d Mr. Biden said at one point, as Republicans rose to their feet to cheer. After weeks of fitful grumblings about the long-shot maneuvers that might obstruct Mr. Trump\u2019s path to the White House, the proceedings on Friday appeared to close the book. Lawmakers are permitted to make objections to both individual and state tallies, but they must be submitted in writing and signed by at least one member of both the House and the Senate. No senator chose to join the cause of the half-dozen or so House Democrats who raised complaints. The result was a parade of clipped protests from House members, drowned out quickly by the questioning of the vice president, who also serves as the president of the Senate. The members spoke of voter suppression, of Russian interference and of the bracing fear consuming many Americans. \u201cMr. President, I object because people are horrified,\u201d began Representative Barbara Lee of California. Repeatedly, Mr. Biden asked if anyone could produce an objection that was joined by a senator. \u201cIn that case,\u201d he said, to Republican applause, when no one could, \u201cthe objection cannot be entertained.\u201d As the exercise neared its end, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, stepped forward. \u201cI do not wish to debate,\u201d she said. \u201cI wish to ask: Is there one United States senator who will join me?\u201d Mr. Biden reached for his gavel. For Republicans, the state-by-state recap supplied a heartening reminder of November\u2019s great surprises: victories for Mr. Trump in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When the results in Colorado, a rare swing state victory for Hillary Clinton, were read aloud, a faint voice could be heard from the Democratic side: \u201cYea, Colorado.\u201d But as Mr. Biden read the final numbers \u2014 including a single vote from an elector in Washington State for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American tribal leader who has led opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 more conspicuous demonstrations against Mr. Trump erupted among visitors to the gallery \u201cI rise to defend our democracy. We reject this electoral vote,\u201d one woman shouted as she was escorted out. \u201cI rise to defend free and fair elections,\u201d a man cried a moment later. \u201cDonald Trump as commander in chief is a threat to American democracy.\u201d A spokeswoman for the United States Capitol Police said two men and one woman had been arrested.", "keyword": "US Politics;2016 Presidential Election;Democrats;House of Representatives;Congress;Senate;Congress;Republicans;Donald Trump;Joe Biden"}
{"id": "ny0015981", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/10/19", "title": "G.E. Beats Expectations With Help of Industrial Units", "abstract": "General Electric posted lower overall revenue and profit in the third quarter, but improving sales of complex industrial equipment gave hope to investors that the company\u2019s transformation of its business was succeeding. G.E. said on Friday that net income fell 9 percent to $3.19 billion and revenue fell 1 percent to $35.73 billion in the third quarter. In last year\u2019s comparable quarter, the company earned $3.49 billion on revenue of $36.3 billion. G.E.\u2019s earnings per share dropped to 31 cents, from 33 cents last year. Still, the company\u2019s results exceeded Wall Street expectations on the strength of 11 percent growth in profit at its industrial divisions \u2014 those that make aircraft engines, CT scanners, gas turbines, locomotives and oil and gas drilling equipment. Adjusted to remove the effects of restructuring and other charges, the company said it earned 40 cents a share. Analysts had expected G.E. to earn 35 cents a share, on average, according to FactSet. Shares of G.E. rose 3.6 percent, to close at $25.57 on Friday. Since 2008, G.E. has sold or reduced the size of its banking operations and other nonindustrial businesses like NBCUniversal. The company has not yet fully replaced the lost revenue and profit. GE Capital\u2019s revenue slipped 5 percent in the third quarter, pulling down the company\u2019s overall revenue. But G.E. has worked to expand the parts of its business that build and service equipment, products and services sold to utilities, hospitals, oil and gas drillers and aircraft manufacturers around the world. Sales and profit from its industrial units \u2014 which both G.E. and investors are most concerned about \u2014 have improved. \u201cOur business lines are in big infrastructure, the stuff that companies and countries are investing in,\u201d said Jeff Bornstein, the chief financial officer. \u201cWe\u2019re getting to the point where we have the mix of businesses we want to go forward with.\u201d G.E. had predicted that its industrial operations would show strong growth later this year. Industrial segment profit rose 11 percent to $3.97 billion in the third quarter. \u201cWe\u2019re doing double-digit growth in a world that isn\u2019t growing double digits,\u201d Mr. Bornstein said. G.E.\u2019s aviation, oil and gas, transportation and home and business solutions divisions all had profit of more than 10 percent. The company\u2019s power and water division, which had been hurt earlier in the year by lower sales of wind turbines, posted a 9 percent rise in profit. Health care grew 7 percent, but profit at the company\u2019s energy management division declined by 57 percent. \u201cThey are going to have to deliver on better expectations for the (fourth) quarter, but they are making good progress toward that,\u201d said Christian Mayes, an analyst at Edward Jones. G.E.\u2019s global operations give it a close look at the pace of economic growth around the world. The company said its orders improved in Europe, Asia, North America, the Middle East and North Africa, suggesting continued widespread growth, though Latin America and India were relatively weak. The company said orders rose 19 percent in the quarter to $25.7 billion and that its backlog of future orders hit a record $229 billion. Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive, said that would help the company stay on track to improve its profit margin by 0.7 percentage points for the year, and continue to grow in 2014. \u201cWe should see earnings growth accelerate in the fourth quarter,\u201d Mr. Immelt said in a conference call with investors.", "keyword": "General Electric;Earnings Reports;Oil and Gasoline;Natural gas;Stocks,Bonds;International trade"}
{"id": "ny0190909", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2009/05/12", "title": "The Truth, Revealed by Bugs: The Case of Brookey Lee West", "abstract": "When Brookey Lee West\u2019s mother, Christine Smith, disappeared from her Las Vegas apartment in 1998, Ms. West had a convincing explanation: She had sent Ms. Smith to stay with her son, Ms. West\u2019s brother, in California. The story seemed to hold up at first, but by February 2001, when the police found Ms. Smith\u2019s body stuffed into a garbage can in a Las Vegas storage unit, the situation smelled undeniably foul. The authorities suspected Ms. West of killing her alcoholic mother, with whom she had frequently sparred since childhood. Nevertheless, it seemed that time was on Ms. West\u2019s side. So many months had passed that a medical examiner testified that he was unable to determine how Ms. Smith died. Ms. West said that her mother had died peacefully of natural causes, and that she had panicked and crammed the decaying remains into the garbage can. That might have been the end of it, if not for the testimony of Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist at St. Joseph\u2019s College in Rensselaer, Ind. Dr. Haskell determined that blow flies, insects that usually appear on corpses right after death, were nowhere to be seen on Ms. Smith\u2019s body. Instead, most of the larvae Dr. Haskell found came from scuttle flies, or \u201ccoffin flies,\u201d insects that cannibalize dead bodies after they have undergone initial decomposition. \u201cWe knew it was a long time since Mom had been seen, and I thought, \u2018If we have the blow flies, we can tell what season she went missing,\u2019 \u201d Dr. Haskell said. \u201cWhen I got the insect specimens, I was really disappointed.\u201d But then Dr. Haskell realized the significance of the blow flies\u2019 absence: Ms. Smith had to have been put into the garbage can either directly after she died or while she was still alive, barring the blow flies\u2019 access to the corpse. (Coffin flies, on the other hand, could have gotten to the body because they often tunnel through tiny nooks and crannies.) \u201cThat showed me that West had to have lied about what she did with her mother,\u201d Dr. Haskell said. After only two hours of deliberation, a jury pronounced Ms. West guilty of her mother\u2019s murder. Ms. West is serving a life sentence at a prison in southern Nevada.", "keyword": "Forensic Science;Insects;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0034639", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/12/12", "title": "N.C.A.A. Change Is Coming, Maybe", "abstract": "Throughout Wednesday morning, some of the most important people in college sports settled into ballrooms on the seventh floor of the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan. There was talk and talk and more talk, forums and discussions and presentations. There were athletic directors and administrators and N.C.A.A. officials. Everyone seemed to agree on a basic premise: N.C.A.A. change is coming, perhaps as soon as next summer. The more everyone talked, though, the less grand potential reforms seemed. One commissioner, Karl Benson of the Sun Belt Conference, said during a panel discussion that he expected changes would look more like \u201ctweaks.\u201d He was not alone in that sentiment. But it seemed like a step back from the supposed impending \u201chistoric moment\u201d detailed by officials in recent months. The discussions took place at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, which featured a question-and-answer session with Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president; a panel of commissioners from the five major conferences; and a separate panel of five other conference commissioners. If the N.C.A.A. collected $1 for every time the term \u201cstudent-athlete\u201d was used, it could have afforded to pay all players in all sports a significant stipend. At least enough for pizza. There was plenty of the usual: calls for a more streamlined process of governance, for more direct involvement by athletic directors, for a thinning of the thickest rule book known to sports. Some of that will happen. The N.C.A.A. will change. But seismic, or even systemic, change seemed less likely than a day before. Instead, three takeaways emerged. \u25a0 The N.C.A.A. will not pay players, will not consider paying players and will not entertain the notion of paying players \u2014 never, ever, no matter how much revenue is generated. This notion came up a few hundred times, until it became clear that \u201cstudent-athletes\u201d would be paid only when, if , the N.C.A.A. is forced to do so by legislators or the courts. \u25a0 Reform would probably not include a new N.C.A.A. division, but instead would grant more autonomy in making decisions to the universities in the five major conferences. This came up a few dozen times and tied directly into athletic directors\u2019 being more involved. (The right idea, opposed by few.) \u25a0 The N.C.A.A., the conference commissioners and officials from member universities feel unfairly picked on, or inaccurately characterized. They kept saying they had done a poor job of communicating what they do well, that they allowed the negative aspects of the narrative to overwhelm a greater body of work. This came up a few times. On the last point, it was hard to sympathize. The reason the N.C.A.A. has come under more criticism than normal in recent years has little to do with a lack of attention to women\u2019s golf, as one panelist suggested. The N.C.A.A. earned its critics, one botched investigation or unnecessary rule complication at a time. It was hard, then, to tell whether the power brokers considered the system broken. They said it needed reform. And they said they would defend it and its honor and what worked. We also heard a lot about student-athletes and how happy they were and how much they benefited from their scholarships. We heard about this from men in tailored suits who profit handsomely off college sports and whose universities and conferences cull revenue from the same. \u201cThe countervailing voices of this notion that student-athletes are being taken advantage of has been the dominant theme and had played out pretty loudly,\u201d Emmert said. \u201cThe reality is schools are spending in between $100,000 and $250,000 on each student-athlete.\u201d The forum lacked one important voice on this subject: the voice of the student-athlete, like those who wrote \u201cAll Players United\u201d on their gear this season. Or the football team at Grambling that boycotted a game. Contradiction dominated. There was much talk about how football teams would continue to build palaces for facilities, with rugs from Nepal and waterfalls in locker rooms; how that arms race could be explained by market forces, even as the markets for players continue to be suppressed. \u201cIt was a lot of more of the same,\u201d David Ridpath, an assistant professor in sports administration at Ohio University and a member of the Drake Group, a network of professors who lobby for academic integrity in college sports, wrote in an email from his office. \u201cStill too much rhetoric and not enough action.\u201d There is a subcommittee of university presidents looking at changes, and there will be meetings next month, including two days set aside at the annual N.C.A.A. convention to discuss change. What kind of change is what\u2019s important for the future of college sports. At the heart of that is the notion of amateurism, of student-athletes. Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner, said asking colleges to pay players was tantamount to asking professional teams to require their players to enter into full-time study. The N.C.A.A. does appear willing to budge here. Their argument trends toward the idea that amateurism should be upheld because if it\u2019s not, so much else would need to change. That\u2019s circumspect, not about right or wrong, but about logistics. To go to an Olympic model, in which players endorse products relative to their value on the open market, would affect recruiting. To pay players beyond an increased stipend for the cost of tuition would strike at the heart of the idea that they\u2019re students first. It would reinforce that the billions generated by college football and men\u2019s basketball, in particular, demonstrate that they might be something else. Those are the arguments, anyway. \u201cIf college athletics establishes an employer-employee relationship, we will truly have lost our way,\u201d said Bob Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner. Perhaps, with another round of grand reform either impendent or oversold, they already have.", "keyword": "College Sports;NCAA;Mark Emmert"}
{"id": "ny0289748", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/01/11", "title": "A Beat and a Bike: The First Lady\u2019s Candlelit Habit", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The first lady arrives without fuss or fanfare, although her armored sport utility vehicle and Secret Service detail set her apart from the usual Lululemon-clad throng. Michelle Obama is here to work out. She has come to put on professional cycling shoes, clip in to a stationary bicycle and engage in the steamy, heart-pounding, candlelit fitness obsession known as SoulCycle. \u201cI love it when my girls join me for a little SoulCycle,\u201d Mrs. Obama said of her daughters in a video posted to Twitter last year, when she talked about her favorite ways of staying active with her family. \u201cWe all are in the dark, moving to the beat on the bikes. We love it.\u201d That was Mrs. Obama\u2019s first public admission of her SoulCycle habit, and since then the White House has guarded details about it not quite as vigilantly as it does the nuclear codes. Mrs. Obama\u2019s East Wing staff declined to comment for this story. But over the past two years, as the TriBeCa-based fitness chain has expanded its footprint in the nation\u2019s capital, the first lady has made stealthy trips to at least three SoulCycle studios in downtown Washington \u2014 one in the West End near Georgetown, another on 14th Street and yet another in Mount Vernon Square. Mrs. Obama arranges for private sessions, held outside normal class hours and away from security risks and photo opportunities, with friends, aides and sometimes her daughters. She is not the only political figure to seek sweaty solace at the trendy, high-end cycling boutique, where 45-minute classes average $28 ($32 if you are riding in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut) and the walls are emblazoned with slogans like \u201cinhale intention and exhale expectation.\u201d Chelsea Clinton announced last week that she would hold a fund-raiser for her mother\u2019s presidential campaign on Jan. 27 at SoulCycle\u2019s flagship TriBeCa studio, where donors will pay $2,700 for a \u201cpremium reserved bike\u201d to ride with Chelsea and her \u201cpack,\u201d and pose for a photograph with her. The younger Ms. Clinton is a longtime devotee of SoulCycle, where she and former President George W. Bush\u2019s daughter Jenna Bush Hager have been spotted cycling in the same crowded New York classes. For Mrs. Obama, who has made healthy eating and fitness a policy focus and a personal brand, SoulCycle is the rare workout that takes her outside the confines of the White House and into what the chain\u2019s disciples like to call a \u201ccardio dance party.\u201d SoulCycle is known for its style of studio cycling, which combines the intensive cardio of a spin session, core-toning moves such as the \u201ctap back\u201d \u2014 standing on the bike and pedaling while touching one\u2019s derri\u00e8re to the seat behind \u2014 and the meditative aura of a yoga class. It unfolds in a nightclublike atmosphere: a dark room with candles burning (some with SoulCycle\u2019s signature grapefruit scent), rhythmic music pulsing and meticulously groomed instructors sporting skulls and flywheels on their outfits while shouting instructions and inspirational mantras from an elevated bike in front. Image For Michelle Obama, at the White House in December, SoulCycle provides a chance to work out away from home. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Megan Kelly, an instructor whose sessions Mrs. Obama is known to have frequented, shouts, \u201cYes, you can! ... Yes, you can!\u201d \u2014 a mantra from President Obama\u2019s political campaigns \u2014 to get her riders through steep climbs and fast sprints. Wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt that says \u201cSpiritual Gangster\u201d and black spandex capri pants, as well as a full face of makeup and a manicure, Ms. Kelly packs her playlist with hip-hop music like \u201cStand Up\u201d by Ludacris and \u201cPower\u201d by Kanye West. Ms. Kelly declined to comment for this article, in line with a confidentiality policy that prevents the company from discussing any of its clients, said Gabby Etrog Cohen, a spokeswoman. But the company has become close to the first lady. Its founders and instructors have been invited to holiday parties at the White House, said Julie Rice, who co-founded the chain in 2006. \u201cWe\u2019re enormous fans of her,\u201d she said of Mrs. Obama. Ms. Rice said riders, and public figures like Mrs. Obama, sought out the sessions for their \u201csanctuary\u201d-like atmosphere. \u201cIt definitely delivers a workout \u2014 you\u2019re guaranteed to have results with your body \u2014 but it\u2019s also an escape,\u201d Ms. Rice said in an interview. Riders \u201cknow it\u2019s safe and anonymous, and they can actually engage in a group activity as part of a community.\u201d Not that Mrs. Obama gets complete anonymity. She is routinely spotted by riders and passers-by when she is arriving or leaving one of the three studios for her private classes. \u201cJust spotted my girl Michelle at Soul Cycle!!\u201d @kayjulers wrote on Twitter in September, adding Mrs. Obama\u2019s Twitter handle, @FLOTUS, which stands for first lady of the United States. Jodi Richardson, who estimates she rides three or four times a week at the Mount Vernon Square studio, said she \u201cfreaked out\u201d on a recent Monday night when she walked out of what she thought was the final class of the night and happened upon Mrs. Obama, who was striding in for a session. \u201cNobody else was freaking out,\u201d said Ms. Richardson, 30, a lobbyist. \u201cI\u2019m a Republican, and I still freaked out. I mean, it\u2019s the first lady within feet of you.\u201d Ms. Richardson said she had run to the front desk to check the bike manifest and see if she could reserve a bike to pedal with the first lady. \u201cThey grabbed the clipboard and were like, \u2018No! This is a private class,\u2019 \u201d she said.", "keyword": "Michelle Obama;SoulCycle;Exercise,Fitness;Biking;First Ladies;Washington DC"}
{"id": "ny0128797", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/06/28", "title": "Mets Erupt From Slump Against Cubs", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 Under slightly different circumstances, the Mets \u2019 17-1 victory against the Chicago Cubs , as impressive as it was, would not have carried such importance. But the Mets had sleepwalked through the first two games of their series here, dropping two in a row to the owners of baseball\u2019s worst record. Suddenly, a getaway game on a hot afternoon at Wrigley Field became loaded with meaning. Lackadaisical play can infuriate a manager. But it can also be a spring of gratification, depending on what immediately follows. After the Mets\u2019 sloppy loss Tuesday night, Terry Collins\u2019s skin seemed to simmer as he described the bevy of mistakes his players had made. Late Wednesday afternoon, he appeared to be glowing with pride. \u201cIf this was a team that had huge expectations, it could bother you,\u201d Collins said. \u201cBut because we weren\u2019t expected to be very good, you can let some of the stuff go because you know you\u2019re dealing with young guys that are learning on the job here.\u201d Collins added, \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s fun about these guys.\u201d The young Mets responded to Collins\u2019s unspoken challenge with emphasis, exposing every Cubs weakness without mercy. Their 17 runs was a high mark for the season, as was their 4 home runs. They had 16 hits and drew 7 walks. The margin of victory was the Mets\u2019 largest since 1999. There were positive individual contributions up and down the lineup. Daniel Murphy, who entered the game with the most at-bats this season of any player who had not hit a home run, smacked his first one of the season and then added his second just an inning later. Ike Davis had two doubles and a home run, raising his batting average above .200 for the first time this season. Scott Hairston hit his second career grand slam. And David Wright had a season-high five runs batted in while lifting his average to .357. \u201cWe\u2019ve haven\u2019t had a lot of days where we\u2019ve had multiple guys in the lineup come up big,\u201d Collins said. \u201cWe kind of thought during spring training we\u2019d have more of those. I\u2019m hoping that\u2019s something that continues.\u201d Wright got the Mets started with a sacrifice fly in the first inning. The Cubs tied the score in the second when Luis Valbuena\u2019s two-out double scored Darwin Barney from first base. But that would be the only run allowed by Jon Niese, who pitched seven innings. \u201cJon, you could tell even before the game, had that edge to him,\u201d Collins said. \u201cIn the second inning, he was furious that he gave up the run. I thought the way he approached the game today was great.\u201d Niese, who gave up eight hits and one walk while striking out six, said his job was made easier by the offense, which began to creep away in the fourth, when Davis drove a double to right field to score Lucas Duda from first base for a 2-1 lead. One out later, Cubs starter Jeff Samardzija tried to bury a cutter low and inside to Murphy, but Murphy whipped it well over the wall in right-center field. After hitting a home run last July 16, Murphy had gone 352 at-bats without another. \u201cHome runs are a bonus,\u201d said Murphy, telling reporters he had not been affected by the drought and thus was not relieved to end it. \u201cI don\u2019t know the at-bats, but apparently it was a long time because you guys asked me a lot of questions about it.\u201d The next inning, Murphy, who had never hit multiple home runs in a game, walloped another one, this time to left-center field, to put the Mets ahead, 10-0. The blast capped an explosive inning that included a two-run double by Wright and a three-run homer to left-center by Davis, whose average climbed to .201 by the end of the game. Davis, who called the milestone a \u201cstep in the right direction,\u201d said he still imagined he was batting .150 as a motivational tool. The Mets kept going. Wright bounced a bases-loaded single through the middle of the infield in the sixth, scoring two. After the Mets reloaded the bases, Scott Hairston cleared them, blasting the first pitch from Casey Coleman into the left-field stands. Soon after, the Mets prepared to board a flight to Los Angeles to face the first-place Dodgers \u2014 lessons learned and disasters averted. INSIDE PITCH Terry Collins was disappointed to hear that Vinny Rottino, who was designated for assignment earlier this month, had been claimed off waivers by the Cleveland Indians. \u201cIt does sting a little bit,\u201d Collins said of Rottino, who could play multiple positions, including catcher. \u201cHe\u2019s a good little player.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Mets;Davis Ike;Baseball;Chicago Cubs;Murphy Daniel (1985- )"}
{"id": "ny0226809", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/10/24", "title": "At La Cocina de Marcia in Freeport, Dominican Fare", "abstract": "LA COCINA DE MARCIA \u2014 Marcia\u2019s Kitchen \u2014 is named for one of its owners, Marcia Beltre. But the name does not tell the whole story: Marcia\u2019s mother, Angela Beltre, is in the kitchen as well. The Dominican restaurant, in a sunny storefront on Merrick Road in Freeport, has a warm, accommodating staff, huge portions of good food and very low prices. Ms. Beltre and her husband, Irving Ramirez, opened Marcia\u2019s Kitchen in July. The restaurant is casual with a centerpiece take-out counter, bare tables and paper napkins. Our amiable waitress warmed up the atmosphere. One night a diner at our table misheard the waitress and thought that mashed potatoes were among the choices of side dishes. They were not, but our waitress insisted that the kitchen would be happy to make them. They were creamy and delicious. Another night we ordered a rib-eye steak that turned out to be overcooked, dry and tough. We didn\u2019t eat it, but we said that it was O.K. and we were just full. That same savvy waitress didn\u2019t believe us and took the entree off our bill. As that steak indicates, not every dish here hits a home run, but many do. The best appetizer was the flavorful chicken soup, with big chunks of meat (on the bone), fine noodles, carrots and potatoes. On Fridays, a seafood soup is a possibility. It was equally good, with chunks of lobster and whole crab claws among the tasty ingredients. The beef empanada ($1.50) was a fine start to the meal. The half-moon of pastry was flaky, its filling of shredded meat tender. Not at all Dominican but right on the mark were fried mozzarella sticks, gooey inside and crisp outside, and a standout shrimp cocktail ($7.95) that contained six firm jumbos. All entrees come with a salad . It was saucer-size and mainly iceberg lettuce, but the ingredients were cold and crisp and the house-made lemon-olive oil dressing was light and appealing. My favorite entree was a combination plate of barbecued chicken and ribs. The half chicken was succulent; the two ribs were not delicate baby backs but big ones that included cartilage. Nevertheless, they were tender and tasty and had us licking our fingers and wishing for more. Another hit was the plate of chopped roast pork, which included soft meat and crunchy skin. Shrimp in garlic sauce was also good. The baked salmon was moist and flaky, and a better bet than the whole grilled red snapper, which was dry. The side dish of rice and beans is the one to order. Diners choose between yellow or white rice and red or black beans. We got a platter of fluffy white rice and a bowl of very tasty red beans in sauce. Crispy tostones (fried green plantains) were well turned out, too. The crinkle-cut French fries are best forgotten, as are the waterlogged broccoli and cauliflower, served lukewarm. Desserts are homemade and include a moist tres leches cake and a silken flan. Two of the desserts were unfamiliar to us. One consisted of dulce de leche granules that Marcia said her mother made by boiling milk, sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice for four hours. A second, similar dish, boiled for five hours, included coconut in the mix. Both were interesting but too sweet for our tastes. A thick banana shake ($3.45) was the best dessert of all. La Cocina de Marcia 77 B West Merrick Road Freeport (516) 442-2462 lacocinademarcia.com O.K. THE SPACE Sunny storefront with yellow, gold and burnt-orange walls decorated with bright paintings. Wheelchair accessible. THE CROWD Very casual. A mix of couples and small groups. The smiling staff includes at least one top-notch waitress. THE BAR No actual bar, but wine ($5 a glass) and beer ($4) are sold. THE BILL Sandwiches: $2.95 to $6.95. Dinner entrees are $5.45 to $22.95 (combination plate); some lobster dishes are higher, but most entrees are under $10. Portions are huge and prices low. MasterCard, Visa and Discover are accepted. WHAT WE LIKED Chicken soup, seafood soup, beef empanada, fried mozzarella sticks, shrimp cocktail, roast pork, barbecued chicken and ribs, shrimp in garlic sauce, baked salmon, rice and beans, tostones, flan, tres leches cake, banana shake. IF YOU GO Open daily from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Reservations are not needed. There is a parking lot behind the restaurant. RATINGS Don\u2019t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don\u2019t Bother.", "keyword": "Restaurants;Freeport (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0106300", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/04/16", "title": "Trust Acts to Open Research Findings to the Public", "abstract": "The trend toward open access scientific publishing gained strength last week when the Wellcome Trust, the second-largest nongovernmental funder of scientific research in the world, said it was considering sanctions against scientists who do not make the results of their research freely available to the public. The London-based trust, which funds \u00a3650 million, or about $1 billion, of medical and scientific research every year, already has a policy requiring researchers to \u201cmaximize the opportunities to make their results available for free\u201d and a presumption in favor of publication in open access journals available on the Internet. But Sir Mark Walport, the trust\u2019s director, told the Guardian newspaper that only 55 percent of Wellcome-funded researchers comply. Scientists often prefer to publish in journals that refuse to make the work available without paying a fee. One option reportedly under consideration is to withhold the last installment of a grant until the research is publicly available; another option would be to make grant renewal contingent on open access publication. The open access movement arose in response to the high subscription fees for scientific journals, which in some cases can amount to thousands of dollars a year. Initiated by scientists, the movement has grown rapidly in recent years, partly because of support from university librarians who saw their acquisitions budget swallowed up by rising subscription costs. The success of journals such as PLoS One, an on-line journal that began by publishing 138 articles in 2006 and is now the largest scientific publication in the world, has also encouraged imitation. Last year the Wellcome Trust announced that it would begin a new open-access journal, eLife, aimed at competing with prestigious subscription-based publications such as Science and Nature. \u2014 D. D. GUTTENPLAN  E.U. to upgrade research ties with Mediterranean states The European Commission is re-affirming its commitment to fostering research and development ties among universities, research centers and other institutions of the European Union and the southern Mediterranean states, participants at a recent conference said. \u201cThe events of the Arab Spring called for a new vision for cooperation in research and innovation,\u201d M\u00e1ire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Union\u2019s commissioner for research, innovation and science, said in Barcelona early this month. \u201cOur agenda should mobilize all the relevant stakeholders and participants, such as universities, research centers, industry, organizations that promote innovation, financial institutions and investors,\u201d said Ms. Geoghegan-Quinn in opening remarks at the Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Research and Innovation. The European Union, which according to the commissioner is already funding such cooperation measures, with \u20ac40 million, or $52.5 million, is looking to fund additional joint innovation and research projects. Starting in 2014, part of the additional funding will come from the European Union\u2019s proposed Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation, with its budget of \u20ac80 billion over seven years. \u201cWe had a partnership, but we need to up participation from southern Mediterranean countries,\u201d said Michael Jennings, spokesman for the Commission. Though cooperation projects have been ongoing over the years, said Mr. Jennings by telephone last week, the recent conference was the first such meeting since political revolt began its sweep of the Arab region more than a year ago. \u2014 CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE", "keyword": "Education;Colleges and Universities;Research;European Commission;Great Britain;European Union"}
{"id": "ny0022870", "categories": ["sports", "cycling"], "date": "2013/09/24", "title": "Alonso\u2019s Bid for Team Is in Doubt", "abstract": "The Formula One driver Fernando Alonso\u2019s plan to buy the Spanish cycling team Euskaltel-Euskadi has collapsed. The team said it would shut down.", "keyword": "Car Racing;Euskaltel-Euskadi;Biking"}
{"id": "ny0101851", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2015/12/08", "title": "Electric Scooters, and a Network", "abstract": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Across Asia, motorized two-wheeled vehicles provide mobility for the masses, but emissions from hundreds of millions of scooters and motorcycles are responsible for more than half of traffic pollution in many cities, choking the air with hazardous levels of benzene and particulate matter, in addition to greenhouse gases. This year, a Taiwan-based startup called Gogoro has been using the scooter-filled streets of Taipei to test its Smartscooter, an electric scooter with an efficient all-electric drive train, sleek design and Internet of Things ingenuity. But Gogoro doesn\u2019t want to be called a scooter company. It sees itself as an energy services company at heart. \u201cWhat technology has done to content, it can also do to energy,\u201d said Horace Luke, Gogoro\u2019s chief executive. The company operates a 4G-connected network of 90 battery-swapping stations around metropolitan Taipei serving a fleet of 2,000-plus smartscooters that are challenging their gasoline-powered rivals in performance \u2014 zero to 30 in just over 4 seconds \u2014 convenience, and environmental impact. The Smartscooter is quickly gaining market share. As of late November, Gogoro\u2019s flagship vehicle accounted for 95 percent of Taipei\u2019s electric vehicles and 5 percent of scooters overall, Mr. Luke said. Gogoro scooters are powered by two lithium-ion batteries that use the same Panasonic cells as Tesla batteries, with one charge enabling travel of up to 60 miles. When it\u2019s time to swap in fresh batteries, a smartphone app offers directions to the closest station with available batteries (one is a 7-eleven convenience store). In seconds, the user replaces used batteries \u2014 which send vehicle diagnostics to the Gogoro network via Bluetooth \u2014 with the newest and most-charged batteries at the station. Panasonic has bought into Gogoro\u2019s vision. In November, Gogoro announced that the Japanese company had joined the Taiwan government and the billionaire Samuel Yin as Series B, or second round, investors in Gogoro, making it the second electric vehicle maker to attract Panasonic capital, the other being Tesla. Shortly after raising $130 million in Series B funding, Gogoro announced that it would expand into Europe, beginning with Amsterdam. \u201cThe fundamentals of how people live changed in a decade with the smartphone,\u201d Mr. Luke said. \u201cIf we put the same effort into how energy is consumed, how much can we change things in 10 years?\u201d Mr. Luke speaks from experience. He was chief innovation officer at the Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC from 2006 to 2011, helping transform the company from one that made products for other companies to a global brand. While at HTC, Mr. Luke and a colleague, Matt Taylor, began discussing their vision for a new company that would leverage technology for social impact. Being based in Taiwan \u2014 where 14 million scooters serve a population of 23 million \u2014 scooters seemed like a good place to start. \u201cThe scooter hasn\u2019t seen much evolution in the last 20 years,\u201d Mr. Taylor said. \u201cWe asked ourselves if we could apply modern technology to something we see buzzing in the streets every day and make a better product in the process.\u201d In 2011, the two men co-founded Gogoro, with Taylor as chief technology officer. They decided to rebuild the scooter from the ground up. Their initial focus was on performance and innovation, but minimizing environmental impact quickly became important. In Taiwan, pollution from scooter exhaust is a public health concern. Studies have found correlations between higher measurements of the fine particulate matter classified as PM2.5 in the air and increased cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in local hospitals. During peak traffic hours, exhaust hangs heavy on the city\u2019s scooter lanes, also affecting air quality for nearby pedestrians. The amount of pollutants found in emissions from a new gas scooter exceeds the pollution found in new car emissions by a factor of 100 to 1,000, said Andr\u00e9 Pr\u00e9v\u00f4t of the Switzerland-based Paul Scherrer Institut. Scooters using two-stroke engines are the worst culprits, he said. \u201cThe two-stroke engine scooter is the first vehicle to think about in terms of going all-electric, even before larger vehicles, because the pollution is much worse,\u201d said Mr. Pr\u00e9v\u00f4t, who researched scooter emissions from 2010 through 2014. \u201cIt\u2019s the logical next step in reducing traffic pollution in many Asian cities.\u201d Image As of late November, Gogoro\u2019s scooter accounted for 95 percent of Taipei\u2019s electric vehicles and 5 percent of scooters overall, said Horace Luke, the company\u2019s chief. Credit Sean Marc Lee for The New York Times The Taipei government agrees, and is actively promoting electric scooter purchases. The city\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection offers replacement subsidies of around $45 for residents who retire their two-stroke scooters. A subsidy of up to $800 is available to those who replace their gas motorcycles with electric scooters. Gogoro Smartscooters currently cost between $2,200 and $2,375. In Gogoro\u2019s most recent round of funding, the government also invested $30 million via its Taiwan Development Fund. The company appeals to a government concerned by the vulnerability of its semiconductor industry, an economic pillar that faces increasing competition from China. \u201cThey see Gogoro as a huge opportunity for furthering the tech sector,\u201d Mr. Luke said. Taiwanese themselves have welcomed Gogoro. Elaine Kuan, a 29-year-old corporate accountant in Taipei, said she bought her Smartscooter in late July for its ease of riding and convenient technology, but also for its low environmental impact. \u201cI have asthma, so air pollution is a big deal to me,\u201d Ms. Kuan said. \u201cI hope that starting with myself I can slowly influence others and make the planet a place without vehicle emission pollution.\u201d Performance and convenience were the two main reasons Darren Liu, a 31-year-old pastry chef, bought his Smartscooter. \u201cThe riding experience and acceleration are much better than my previous gas-powered bike,\u201d Mr. Liu said. \u201cIt\u2019s the first electric scooter I\u2019ve seen that can get up into the hills.\u201d The battery swap model was also a big selling point. His previous experience using a relative\u2019s electric scooter required hours of charging, compared with 30 seconds to swap his Gogoro batteries. As it expands beyond greater Taipei to Taoyuan \u2014 where it is headquartered \u2014 and the tech hub Hsinchu, Gogoro is exploring the possibilities offered by a growing network of battery stations. \u201cAt our core, we\u2019re an energy company,\u201d Mr. Taylor said. \u201cOnce the mix is actually working, it\u2019s readily scalable.\u201d The stations cost less than $10,000, have a small footprint and require only an outlet and Internet access, he said. Mr. Luke said his company envisions an open system in which other companies develop products that can use Gogoro\u2019s batteries. Many companies \u2014 in fields as diverse as robotics, logistics and appliances \u2014 have inquired, he said. But he added that Gogoro\u2019s longer-term vision was focused on \u201chow to take energy and give it back to the grid when it needs it most.\u201d Gogoro\u2019s entrance into the market this year comes as car companies including General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Benz are beginning to view themselves as service providers rather than manufacturers. \u201cThere\u2019s a transformation in the market where companies are being expected to expand into energy services,\u201d said John Gartner of the consultancy Navigant Research. Companies that get involved in electric-powered mobility will naturally move toward stationary storage, he said. \u201cThey\u2019re looking to expand both markets by getting to economies of scale faster,\u201d Mr. Gartner added. Mr. Luke said that taking the scooter to Amsterdam in the first half of 2016 would provide a platform for demonstrating the role of Gogoro\u2019s scooters and battery stations to new markets. \u201cIf you think about smart cities in the world today, Amsterdam comes up in the top three, if not the top one,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot of success in Taipei. We\u2019re taking that momentum and building on that to move into Europe quickly.\u201d", "keyword": "Vehicle Emissions;Motorcycles; electric bikes; electric scooters;Taipei;Batteries"}
{"id": "ny0232201", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/08/20", "title": "A Simple Gesture Between Husband and Wife Says More Than Words", "abstract": "Journalists see many things in high-profile court cases that never get reported. Jurors fall asleep. Lawyers roll their eyes. Family members shake their heads. The hand-holding of Rod and Patti Blagojevich as they walked into and out of court would normally fall into that category. The difference is that several of us noticed it \u2014 the one constant in the news media frenzy surrounding Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s comings and goings. On many days his wife pulled him away from the crowds and the cameras that always seemed to lure him as the couple made their way back to the car waiting outside the courthouse. On other days, he tugged her hand as he led the way into the building. When Mr. Blagojevich stepped out of the car each morning and started to shake supporters\u2019 hands, his other hand was almost always searching for hers. But when they entered the 25th-floor courtroom on most days, it appeared that he was pulling her hand to lead her inside. When court was in session and the Blagojeviches were out of reach of each other, she often knitted in the front row of the gallery and the couple kept in contact with an occasional glance or whisper. Mrs. Blagojevich was not at the trial just as a spectator or as a companion. Her voice was heard through the courtroom speakers on the dozens of wiretapped telephone conversations played at the trial. Outside the courthouse, however, she had little to say to the reporters or spectators crowded at the door. Jos\u00e9 Mor\u00e9, a veteran photographer whose job it is to capture nuance, noticed the pattern. He focused on this image as the couple headed to their car outside the courthouse on Aug. 12, the day Judge James B. Zagel told jurors to continue working toward a verdict after the jury told him they had not reached agreement on several counts. JIM KIRK", "keyword": "Blagojevich Rod R;Decisions and Verdicts"}
{"id": "ny0201461", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/09/01", "title": "Son to Succeed Father as an Iraqi Shiite Leader", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 One of Iraq \u2019s leading Shiite political parties moved quickly on Monday to fill the vacuum left by the death of its influential leader last week, nominating his son to take over a party now poised to challenge Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in national elections next year. The nominee, Ammar al-Hakim , the scion of a respected political and religious family that fought Saddam Hussein\u2019s government from exile and emerged as a political force after its fall, was widely expected to take over the party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council . His father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim , who died of cancer in Tehran last week , provided for the succession in his will, heading off any potential leadership challenges. The party\u2019s television network announced the nomination, and a spokesman said it would be ratified by the party\u2019s leadership on Tuesday. Mr. Hakim\u2019s ascension came as Iraq and Syria intensified their clash over claims that the catastrophic attack on two government ministries in Baghdad on Aug. 19 was organized by Iraqis living in Syria. Iraqi officials have demanded that Syria turn over two men it says masterminded the attacks, which killed at least 132 people and raised doubts about the ability of Mr. Maliki\u2019s government to provide basic security, a liability in his campaign for re-election. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria responded angrily to Iraq\u2019s assertions on Monday, saying that Iraq had provided no evidence for its claims. \u201cThe least that can be said about this accusation is that it\u2019s immoral,\u201d Mr. Assad said, saying that Syria was host to 1.2 million refugees from the war in Iraq, The Associated Press reported from Damascus, the Syrian capital. Mr. Maliki, for his part, claimed that 90 percent of foreign fighters involved in attacks inside Iraq passed through Syria. Officials have long accused Syria of failing to halt the flow, though American military officials have recently said the number of fighters had dwindled, perhaps as a result of diplomatic entreaties from the Obama administration. On Sunday, Iraq\u2019s state television network broadcast remarks from a second suspect officials said had been trained in Syria, one week after a similar video confession was shown. \u201cSince 2004, Iraq has given to Syria the names, addresses, information, documents and evidence on the activities of terrorists and some known extremist groups, their locations and methods of infiltration across Syrian territory,\u201d Mr. Maliki said after meeting Turkey\u2019s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who arrived in Baghdad on Monday in an effort to mediate. The younger Mr. Hakim takes over at a time when the once-dominant Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council has lost ground among Shiites, largely at the expense of Mr. Maliki\u2019s Dawa party, which prevailed in provincial elections with a less overtly sectarian appeal based on restoring security. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Hakim can command the same authority as his father, who led the party from 2003 until illness forced him from active participation. Though the son has long been groomed for the party\u2019s leadership and served as the head of its social organization, which builds and runs hospitals, libraries, schools and food banks , he was not instrumental in the party\u2019s transition from an exiled opposition group to a major force in Iraq after Mr. Hussein was toppled. \u201cIt\u2019s not his age, per se,\u201d Kenneth Katzman, who follows Iraqi politics for the Congressional Research Service in Washington, said of Mr. Hakim\u2019s challenge in leading the party. \u201cIt\u2019s because he was not involved in the big decisions,\u201d he said, including the party\u2019s founding in Iran in 1982 and its cooperation with the United States before and after the 2003 invasion. Only days before the death of its leader, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council joined a new coalition of mostly Shiite parties that hopes to prevail in elections now scheduled for January. Mr. Maliki refused to join , splintering Iraq\u2019s largest electoral bloc. At one of several eulogies for his father over the weekend, Mr. Hakim called on Mr. Maliki and others to reconsider their decisions not to join the new coalition, the Iraqi National Alliance. Despite his new position, Mr. Hakim is not expected to take over the alliance and thus run as its candidate for prime minister. The alliance has not yet signaled who will lead it in the elections, though the leading contenders are Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a member of the party Mr. Hakim now leads, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a former prime minister. In Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb killed at least 4 and wounded 17, most of them civilians, Monday evening. The bombing, in the Qara Taba district north of Baquba, occurred on a street of markets as Iraqis broke the Ramadan fast.", "keyword": "Hakim Abdul Aziz al-;Iraq;Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council"}
{"id": "ny0090157", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/09/08", "title": "Usain Bolt Withdraws From Meet", "abstract": "Usain Bolt pulled out of Friday\u2019s Van Damme Memorial in Brussels, unwilling to risk injuries before next year\u2019s Olympics.", "keyword": "Track and field;Usain Bolt"}
{"id": "ny0186331", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/03/12", "title": "Senior Aide to Hussein Sentenced to 15 Years", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 Tariq Aziz, the senior aide to Saddam Hussein who gained international renown as the public face of Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday for crimes against humanity. It is the second verdict to be issued in a case involving Mr. Aziz, 73. Earlier this month he was acquitted on charges of ordering a brutal crackdown against Shiite protesters after the assassination of a revered cleric. He still faces charges in a third trial involving a massacre of Kurds in 1983. Two of Mr. Hussein\u2019s half brothers, Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan and Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, were sentenced to death in the same case, the 1992 executions of 42 Baghdad merchants accused of speculating on the price of food while the country was under severe international sanctions after its invasion of neighboring Kuwait. Also sentenced in the case was Ali Hassan Majid, known as Chemical Ali , who received 15 years in prison. One of Mr. Hussein\u2019s most notorious henchmen, Mr. Majid has been sentenced to death in three trials. However, while Mr. Hussein\u2019s death sentence was swiftly carried out, it remains unclear when Mr. Majid will be executed. Mr. Aziz has said he is not guilty of any wrongdoing in any of the cases against him, and one of his lawyers said he would appeal. \u201cThe decision was surprising and a shock for me as lawyer and for all lawyers and legal experts in the world,\u201d said the lawyer, Badea Araf Azzit, speaking by telephone from Jordan. \u201cTariq Aziz had nothing to do with the security issue under Saddam. He was in charge of only a diplomatic and political portfolio.\u201d At the time of the executions, he said, Mr. Aziz was on an official mission to Europe. As Mr. Hussein\u2019s longtime confidant, Mr. Aziz played a prominent role in all of Iraq\u2019s wars, including its 1980-88 conflict with Iran. In the gulf war, he rejected a last-minute overture from President George Bush for talks, citing what he called the American leader\u2019s humiliating tone. In 2003, two weeks after Mr. Hussein\u2019s government was toppled, Mr. Aziz turned himself over to coalition forces. There was scattered violence across the country on Wednesday, including a car bomb attack in Mosul that killed three Iraqi soldiers and another car bomb in Kirkuk that left at least one person dead and a dozen wounded, security officials said.", "keyword": "Iraq;Aziz Tariq;Hussein Saddam;Majid Ali Hassan al-;Iraqi Army;Persian Gulf War;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;Iraq War (2003- )"}
{"id": "ny0100739", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/12/29", "title": "Matt Barnes Suspended After Clash With Knicks\u2019 Derek Fisher", "abstract": "The N.B.A. suspended forward Matt Barnes of the Memphis Grizzlies for two games Monday for his role in a physical altercation in October with Derek Fisher, the coach of the Knicks. Barnes, 35, confronted Fisher, 41, on Oct. 3 at the Redondo Beach, Calif., house of Gloria Govan, Barnes\u2019s estranged wife and a star of the \u201cBasketball Wives\u201d reality television series. The quarrel became physical and Barnes threatened Fisher, according to the N.B.A. The police were called, but no charges were filed. The league conducted its own investigation of the events before issuing the penalty. The N.B.A. did not discipline Fisher on Monday. Fisher and Barnes played together on the Los Angeles Lakers from 2010 to 2012. The Knicks are scheduled to play the Grizzles on Jan. 16 in Memphis. Barnes\u2019s suspension is likely to begin Tuesday night, when the Grizzlies play the Miami Heat. He would then miss another game Saturday night against the Utah Jazz. NETS 111, HEAT 105 Wayne Ellington tied a career best with seven 3-pointers and scored 26 points, Brook Lopez added 26 points and 12 rebounds, and the Nets rallied from 16 points down in the third quarter to beat host Miami. Shane Larkin was inserted into the second-half starting lineup and had seven assists in the third quarter to ignite the comeback. Chris Bosh was a career-best 5 for 5 from 3-point range and finished with 24 points and 12 rebounds for Miami, which got 24 more points from Dwyane Wade. Miami scored the first 2 points of the second half to go up by 60-44. By the time the quarter ended, the Heat were down. Ellington made a 3-pointer late in the third to cap a 32-14 run and give the Nets the lead, and his seventh of the night \u2014 with 1 minute 11 seconds remaining in the game \u2014 put the Nets up, 103-93. (AP) PACERS 93, HAWKS 87 Monta Ellis scored 26 points as host Indiana ended Atlanta\u2019s six-game winning streak. (AP)", "keyword": "Basketball;Derek Fisher;Matt Barnes;Gloria Govan;Memphis Grizzlies;Knicks"}
{"id": "ny0153945", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/01/10", "title": "Great Lawn Just Got Better, Park Visitors Agree", "abstract": "One day after the city rescinded a regulation that had limited the size of the crowds allowed on the Great Lawn in Central Park, there were no blankets, no tents, no fans with picnic baskets \u2014 and no picnic baskets, either. And no Paul Simon, no giant stages and no giant video monitors, as there were when Mr. Simon appeared there in 1991. On a day that felt more like June than January \u2014 temperatures in the 60s, far too warm for the heaviest coat in the closet but far too blustery for shorts \u2014 there was the fence. There were the 13 acres of Kentucky bluegrass. And there was talk of the court settlement on Tuesday under which the city dropped a limit that had held the size of crowds allowed on the lawn to 50,000. There was also Sofie, who, the person with her said happily, is developing a beard. That makes Sofie sound like an aspiring circus sideshow act. An up-and-coming bearded lady? No. Sofie is a 5-month-old bloodhound who was born in France, and she was on the right side of the fence, the wrong side being the side where the grass is. The idea is to give the grass a rest in the winter, unless there is enough snow for cross-country skiing. The person with Sofie, Heather Conley of the Dog House NYC, a walking-and-boarding service, had struck up a conversation with Robin Grieves, who used to live on West 60th Street. He now lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, and teaches at the University of Otago. He said he and his wife, Jane, were celebrating 40 years of marriage. Mrs. Grieves said they had moved 13 times in those 40 years. They were asked about the settlement agreement, in which the city not only stepped back from the crowd-limitation policy, but also raised the maximum number of people permitted on the lawn to 75,000. The city had said the rule had been adopted to protect the lawn. But under the rule, antiwar demonstrators were denied permits. The Partnership for Civil Justice, a public interest organization, took the city to federal court on behalf of two antiwar groups, the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, which had been denied permits for a rally in 2004. Under the agreement, an independent committee will now study \u201cthe optimum and sustainable use of the Great Lawn for large events.\u201d Mr. Grieves did not need to wait for the study. \u201cOne answer is, you post a bond if you\u2019re going to use the lawn\u201d for a large event, he said. \u201cWhen you leave, if the lawn just needs to be picked up, fine \u2014 the cost is nearly zero. If it\u2019s torn up, the money you posted is used to clean up the lawn.\u201d Ms. Conley nodded. \u201cYou should be able to have a rally here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a public space, with the caveat that if you open it to one, you open it to others. Freedom of speech, the right to gather.\u201d She said she remembered when the case had first been in the headlines. \u201cI supposed at the time that there was a political reason,\u201d she said. They passed a man with baseball cap that had a \u201cC\u201d and a \u201c1956\u201d above the brim, 1956 being the year the man, Dr. Alan Miller, graduated from Columbia University. \u201cThey have, I think, five kinds of grass in there,\u201d said Dr. Miller, a retired nephrologist. \u201cI\u2019m not an authority, but they\u2019ve done a phenomenal job.\u201d (In fact, a Parks Department spokeswoman said later that there are only three kinds of grass in that part of the park.) \u201cThe park as a whole is an extraordinary place,\u201d Dr. Miller said. \u201cIt\u2019s private money that\u2019s resurrected it. The money didn\u2019t come from the city, and the park is what makes Manhattan what it is. If you put another 150 apartment houses in here, that wouldn\u2019t do anybody any good.\u201d Like Ms. Conley, he remembered the court case about events on the Great Lawn, and he had an opinion: \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t discriminate because of political leanings.\u201d", "keyword": "Central Park (NYC);Demonstrations and Riots;Great Lawn;Parks Department;Parks and Other Recreation Areas"}
{"id": "ny0008323", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/05/24", "title": "Ukraine: Gay Pride Rally Banned", "abstract": "A Ukrainian court on Thursday banned what would have been Ukraine\u2019s first gay pride demonstration, upholding a suit by city authorities in Kiev who argued that the rally would disturb the annual Kiev Day celebrations and could prompt violence. The highly influential Orthodox Church strongly opposes the gay rights movement. Amnesty International said in a recent report that gay Ukrainians suffer attacks and abuses as well as widespread discrimination.", "keyword": "Kiev;Homosexuality;Discrimination;Human Rights;Ukraine"}
{"id": "ny0215037", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/03/25", "title": "Attorney General Moves to Forefront of Virginia Conservative Resurgence", "abstract": "RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 In campaigning to become Virginia\u2019s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II made no secret of his conservative views, winning enthusiastic endorsements from the National Rifle Association and the National Coalition for Life. But since taking office in January, Mr. Cuccinelli, a former state senator from Fairfax County, has surprised even his most ardent supporters with several high-profile legal actions that have ignited political firestorms extinguished only with help from Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, a fellow Republican more moderate in style if not beliefs. This month, Mr. Cuccinelli instructed the state\u2019s public colleges to end policies that banned discrimination against homosexuals, spurring angry protests and forcing the governor to issue a statement that workplace discrimination is illegal. This week, Mr. Cuccinelli said he planned to sue the federal government over the health care reform law\u2019s requirement that everyone carry health insurance. \u201cWe are in the minority in Washington and here in Virginia because Republicans abandoned their core principles,\u201d Mr. Cuccinelli said as he accepted his party\u2019s nomination in front of a Revolutionary War-era yellow flag with a coiled snake and the words \u201cDon\u2019t tread on me\u201d that have become the symbol of the Tea Party movement. \u201cIf you want an A.G. with a record of defending the Constitution as it was written,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019m your candidate.\u201d Mr. Cuccinelli is quickly and deliberately moving to the forefront of a conservative resurgence in Virginia, which just two years ago was hailed by Democrats as a symbol of their party\u2019s ability to capture the South. But his toughest challenge may be to position himself among his Republican peers. Outspoken and unwavering in his opposition to abortion and homosexuality and in support of property and gun rights, Mr. Cuccinelli is a purist among pragmatists. He stands out as a pugnacious culture warrior in a party more eager to court moderate and fiscal conservatives, and in a state whose governor hopes to portray himself as a consensus builder. \u201cKen was a tea partier before there was a Tea Party,\u201d said David B. Albo, a Republican delegate from Fairfax County and close friend of the attorney general. \u201cI tend to take my job responsibility as doing what a majority of my constituents want me to do. Ken sees his job as setting a path and trying to explain to his constituents that this is the way we want to go.\u201d  In recent weeks, though, some of Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s hard stands have become a headache for Governor McDonnell. Last week, the governor was left to respond to questions about his attorney general after an audio clip surfaced on the Web in which Mr. Cuccinelli, in a recorded telephone conversation. offered a legal strategy for testing the notion, popular among certain conservatives, that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States and therefore lacked eligibility to run for president. It was \u201cpossible,\u201d Mr. Cuccinelli said, that a person could \u201cchallenge\u201d a federal law as illegitimate because \u201csomeone qualified to be president didn\u2019t sign it.\u201d The governor quickly made clear that he had no doubts Mr. Obama was born in this country, and later so did Mr. Cuccinelli, in a statement that explained he had given a hypothetical answer to a question. Still, stylistic differences aside, Mr. McDonnell and Mr. Cucinnelli agree on many policy matters. (Both men declined to be interviewed for this article.) Mr. McDonnell has resisted legal protections for gay state employees, and in 2006 he described as unconstitutional part of an anti-bias order issued by the governor at the time, Tim Kaine, a Democrat. Nevertheless, Mr. McDonnell was blindsided and deeply annoyed by the legal opinion Mr. Cuccinelli issued to colleges about homosexuals. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say that the governor and lieutenant governor are not happy that the attorney general opened this new front in the culture wars while they\u2019re focused on a terrible fiscal situation,\u201d said Larry J. Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s action also jeopardized the governor\u2019s efforts to lure the defense giant Northrop Grumman, which has gay-friendly employee policies, to move to Fairfax County from Los Angeles, said a staff assistant to Mr. McDonnell who is not authorized to speak to the press and insisted on anonymity Some people did not see that as such a bad thing. \u201cKen is in tune with typical family people, people who work in this state,\u201d said Robert G. Marshall, a Republican delegate from Prince William County. Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s popularity, he said, derives from his sharp legal mind and steadfastness to his principles regardless of what others think. \u201cWhen others make him seem controversial, it just raises his name recognition,\u201d Mr. Marshall said. Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s former law partner, Chris Day, described him as headstrong and contrarian. Mr. Cuccinelli insisted that his law office phone extension and suite carry the number 13, to thumb his nose at superstitious people who think the number brings bad luck, Mr. Day said. When lawyers suggested that Mr. Cuccinelli replace his \u201chideously purplish jalopy\u201d \u2014 a 1999 Dodge Intrepid with more than 200,000 miles \u2014 Mr. Cuccinelli refused. He preferred its more humble image. As a lawmaker from one of the state\u2019s most liberal regions, Mr. Cuccinelli proudly described himself as \u201cthe most aggressive pro-life leader in the Virginia Senate.\u201d He favored legislation granting legal rights to fetuses at conception and voted against a bill stating that contraception is not abortion. He also sponsored bills requiring regulations so strict they would have put most abortion clinics out of business. More recently, he has been channeling the fears and frustrations many tea partiers feel toward the federal government. While campaigning last year, he told a crowd he was considering not registering his son for a Social Security number because \u201cit is being used to track you.\u201d Still, Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s rhetoric has had some subtle political upsides for the governor, burnishing his image as a moderate on social issues and softening the fallout from Mr. McDonnell\u2019s 1989 master\u2019s thesis in which he described working women and feminists as \u201cdetrimental\u201d to the family and criticized government policies that support \u201ccohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.\u201d Noting that \u201cpolitics works in strange ways,\u201d Mr. Sabato, the political science professor, said, \u201cMr. Cuccinelli is proving to be one of the most unusual statewide officials Virginia has ever had.\u201d", "keyword": "Politics and Government;Conservatism (US Politics);Virginia;Cuccinelli II Kenneth T.;Republican Party;Tea Party Movement"}
{"id": "ny0255921", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/08/04", "title": "Pressed by White House, Treasury Chief Expected to Stay On", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Timothy F. Geithner , the Treasury secretary and dean of President Obama \u2019s economic team, is expected to stay through the president\u2019s term after intense White House pressure, according to officials familiar with the discussions. But Mr. Geithner has not yet notified the White House of his intentions, and family considerations could still win out, advisers say. Speculation from Washington to Wall Street has intensified because Mr. Geithner, the only holdover at the center of Mr. Obama\u2019s original economic circle, said a month ago that he would decide on his future after the White House and Congress reached a deal to increase the nation\u2019s debt ceiling . Mr. Obama signed that deal into law on Tuesday. Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, William M. Daley , have been urging Mr. Geithner to stay, administration officials say, not only for continuity when the economy has weakened and to avoid an all-but-certain confirmation fight in the Senate over a successor, but also because Mr. Obama has developed a close rapport with Mr. Geithner. Whether the president persuades Mr. Geithner to stay will be a central development for the White House as it girds for a re-election race expected to turn on the economy and the continuing battle of the budget with Republicans. Mr. Geithner has been considering an exit since early this year, administration officials say. None would speak directly on what Mr. Obama has said to his Treasury secretary because the two men have private meetings alone once a week. On Monday, after the previous night\u2019s announcement of the debt accord, Mr. Geithner convened advisers to talk about his future agenda, including dealing with the European debt crisis , housing and overhauling the corporate tax code. Aides say they took that as a clue he was staying, only to wonder on Tuesday, when a photographer came in to capture Mr. Geithner watching the final vote for the debt deal, if the photos were intended as a record of Mr. Geithner\u2019s final days. Especially in recent weeks, the issue has become a running joke, officials say: Mr. Geithner and Mr. Daley tease about the ankle bracelet that the White House makes him wear, or Mr. Geithner asks if Mr. Daley has yet read his resignation letter, to which Mr. Daley answers in unprintable language. But the pressure from the top on Mr. Geithner was more serious one day about two weeks ago, officials say. Mr. Daley has also told Mr. Geithner\u2019s top lieutenants \u2014 Deputy Secretary Neal S. Wolin and Mark A. Patterson, the chief of staff \u2014 that he wants them to remain, though Jake Siewert, Mr. Geithner\u2019s counselor, is returning to New York as soon as this week. Neither Mr. Geithner nor Mr. Daley would comment. \u201cI haven\u2019t made that decision yet,\u201d Mr. Geithner said Tuesday in an interview with ABC. He added, \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of challenges, president\u2019s got a lot of challenges, and, you know, I got other pressures on me, too.\u201d Chief among those pressures are his family. Mr. Geithner\u2019s wife and son moved back to New York in June so his son could complete high school there. And Mr. Geithner has been working at a breakneck pace since the early days of the financial crisis in 2007. Formerly president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York , he has been among the three top stewards of the economy, along with Ben S. Bernanke , the Federal Reserve chairman, and the Bush administration Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson . \u201cHe\u2019s had a tough job during a tough time, and I think he\u2019s really slogged through and made some really tough choices,\u201d said Senator Mark Warner , Democrat of Virginia . \u201cI can understand why he might want to cash it in.\u201d But, he added, \u201cMy fear is not only who would you get that would have the experience to grapple with another crisis but also, do we really need a massive confirmation fight?\u201d From the start, Mr. Geithner\u2019s biggest critics have been on the left. But Jared Bernstein , a former member of the administration\u2019s economic team and a liberal economist close to some of the critics, said: \u201cTo the extent people vilify Tim as only caring about banks , they\u2019re way off. He\u2019s always understood that Main Street depends on credit from Wall Street, and I know for a fact that he advocated the steps we took for that reason, not to preserve anyone\u2019s capital or profits. I\u2019ve actually heard him say some pretty nasty stuff about those guys.\u201d The prospects of being drawn into an election-year confirmation brawl could deter some who might be considered as Mr. Geithner\u2019s successor. Among those named by people familiar with administration thinking are Jamie Dimon , the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase ; Jeffrey R. Immelt , the chairman of General Electric and of Mr. Obama\u2019s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness; Roger Altman, a deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration; and Erskine Bowles , a former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and co-chairman of Mr. Obama\u2019s fiscal commission in 2010. Some Democrats say Mr. Bowles might be one of the few people who could surmount the opposition of Senate Republicans, given his good relations with some of them after his work on the bipartisan fiscal commission. \u201cIn rational times, absolutely\u201d Mr. Bowles would be confirmed, Mr. Warner said. \u201cBut I\u2019m not sure we\u2019re in rational times.\u201d", "keyword": "Timothy F Geithner;Treasury Department;US Politics;Appointments and Executive Changes;US Economy;Barack Obama"}
{"id": "ny0213991", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2010/03/19", "title": "Northern Iowa Ekes One Out Against U.N.L.V.", "abstract": "OKLAHOMA CITY \u2014 Northern Iowa had plenty of time to break a tie with one final shot, and for a few shaky moments as the Nevada-Las Vegas defense converged, it looked as if the Panthers might turn the ball over. Then the ball sailed to Ali Farokhmanesh. Farokhmanesh was about 30 feet from the basket, but he was open and he had not been bashful about shooting even when covered. His shot swished through the net with 4.9 seconds left, and Northern Iowa advanced in the N.C.A.A. tournament with a 69-66 victory over U.N.L.V. The victory for the Panthers (29-4), seeded No. 9 in the Midwest Region, moved them into a second-round game against the winner of the Kansas-Lehigh game. Northern Iowa stayed close to the Runnin\u2019 Rebels through the first half, which ended with U.N.L.V. holding a 36-35 lead. Jordan Eglseder, the 7-foot, 280-pound Northern Iowa center, was a particular challenge for U.N.L.V. He scored nine first-half points on 4-of-7 shooting and wrestled down 7 rebounds. Farokhmanesh, a senior from Iowa City, had 8 points for Northern Iowa. U.N.L.V. made nearly 45 percent of its shots and often sprinted past the Northern Iowa players to drop in layups, dunks and short jump shots. Northern Iowa struggled to keep up. But then U.N.L.V. lost its shooting touch, and with 8 minutes 40 seconds left in the second half, Farokhmanesh scored a 3-point basket from the left corner, giving the Panthers a 53-48 lead. Northern Iowa extended its lead to 58-51 with 6:31 left. Just when it looked as if the Panthers would build a lead too big for a Rebels\u2019 comeback, U.N.L.V. rallied, scoring 8 of the next 10 points. Chace Stanback hit a 3-pointer from the corner and followed a missed shot with 4:08 left to trim the deficit to 62-61. When Northern Iowa broke the U.N.L.V. press and Kwadzo Ahelegbe hit a contested shot with 2:11 left, the Panthers had a 3-point lead. Oscar Bellfield tied the score for U.N.L.V. by calmly sinking a 3-pointer. But Northern Iowa had the ball one more time, making it count.", "keyword": "NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);University of Northern Iowa;University of Nevada;Farokhmanesh Ali"}
{"id": "ny0136129", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/04/12", "title": "Investigations Into Spending Lead Speaker to Hire Lawyer", "abstract": "Christine C. Quinn , the speaker of the New York City Council, has hired a criminal defense lawyer to represent her in federal and city investigations into Council spending practices, an aide said on Friday. The move comes a week after disclosures that Ms. Quinn\u2019s office had appropriated millions of dollars to organizations that do not exist, instead routing the money to organizations favored by individual council members. The lawyer retained by Ms. Quinn, Lee S. Richards III, a former federal prosecutor, will be paid with city funds, as will Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm that the Council has hired to assist in responding to the investigations. Asked why the speaker felt she needed her own lawyer, Jamie McShane, a Quinn spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the lawyer would assist \u201cthe speaker in her cooperation\u201d with inquiries by the city\u2019s Department of Investigation and the United States attorney\u2019s office. Lawyers not involved with the matter said it was common for anyone approached in an investigation of this type, including witnesses, to hire a lawyer. \"When individuals are asked to speak to agents or to testify before a grand jury, they typically desire counsel who can guide them through the process and ensure their interests are protected,\" said Michael G. Considine, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner with the firm of Day Pitney. At a news conference on Friday called to announce proposed changes in the Council\u2019s budgeting procedures, Ms. Quinn did not mention Mr. Richards\u2019s hiring and emphasized that she was not a target of the inquiries. She has said that the Council\u2019s use of fictitious organizations to hold money in reserve dated to 2001, five years before she became speaker, and that when she learned of the practice last year, she ordered that it be stopped. Appropriating the money to fake organizations allowed council members to later tap the funds for projects without getting approval from the mayor. Ms. Quinn called the news conference to unveil an overhaul that she said would impose new controls and oversight on how the Council spends its discretionary funds. The changes would significantly limit the speaker\u2019s latitude over her own discretionary funds \u2014 which total $20 million to $25 million annually \u2014 by allocating grants through a competitive, merit-based process. The process would be overseen by the mayor\u2019s Office of Contracts, which would have final say over the allocations, with input from the speaker and the Council. \u201cThey are a set of reforms I believe will give New Yorkers a full sense of faith in the idea that their taxpayer dollars are being distributed in an apolitical manner, a transparent manner and a manner which assures that their money is going to qualified organizations that are serving New Yorkers,\u201d Ms. Quinn said. Under Ms. Quinn\u2019s changes, individual council members\u2019 items, known as earmarks, which last year totaled about $340,000 per member, would not be subject to competitive bidding. Ms. Quinn said that the earmarks are often doled out in relatively small amounts of $5,000 to $10,000 and that requiring competitive bidding for them would create too onerous a demand on the Little Leagues, churches and other community organizations that receive them. Ms. Quinn said the council members\u2019 earmarks would, however, be subject to a more thorough review and certification process developed in consultation with the office of the New York State attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. A searchable database would also be created that could be reviewed by the public to easily identify how all member items are allocated. An independent compliance officer would be hired to ensure that the Council adheres to procurement rules and follows proper accounting practices; Ms. Quinn said she would seek a change in the City Charter to make the position permanent. To ensure independence, the speaker would appoint the compliance officer to a four-year term that would overlap speakers\u2019 terms, and the officer could be removed only for cause. Many of the groups that criticized Ms. Quinn last week praised her proposed changes, some of which will require approval from the full Council. \u201cOut of the public disclosure of this years-old inappropriate practice has come a good thing,\u201d said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a government watchdog group. The changes, he said, \u201cwill bring an even greater level of transparency to the Council\u2019s review, discussion and enactment of the city budget, particularly as it relates to the often unknown process by which member items have been rewarded over the years.\u201d The competitive process, however, would also not apply to Council initiatives, a much larger pot of money given out primarily at the speaker\u2019s discretion that goes to programs that reflect the Council\u2019s broader priorities. The amount budgeted for those initiatives was $300 million last year, with the largest portion, $42 million, used to expand library service across the city to six days a week. But some of the money was distributed very much like earmarks were, eventually ending up with nonprofit groups chosen by council members for programs like anti-gang and immigrant assistance initiatives. For instance, the Council allocated $4 million last year for a domestic violence initiative. The speaker then distributed shares of that money to council members, in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $175,000, to give to organizations in their districts that deal with domestic violence. Mr. Richards, the lawyer hired by the speaker, is a founding member of the firm of Richards Kibbe & Orbe.", "keyword": "Quinn Christine C;City Councils;Budgets and Budgeting;New York City;Frauds and Swindling"}
{"id": "ny0134454", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2008/04/02", "title": "Senior Executive Leaving Google", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Douglas Merrill, a vice president of engineering at Google , is leaving the Internet search company to become a president of digital at EMI Music, the recorded music division of EMI Group, according to an executive briefed on his move. Mr. Merrill is the second senior executive to leave Google in two months. In March, Sheryl Sandberg, who was vice president for global sales and operations, left to become chief operating officer at Facebook. Their departures, as well as those of several high-profile engineers and senior managers in recent months, are heightening concerns that as the company grows in size and its stock swoons, it risks losing a larger number of important employees. \u201cIt is very difficult to preserve the same kind of culture and energy that Google had as a startup,\u201d said Scott Kessler, an equity analyst with Standard & Poor\u2019s. \u201cIt is increasingly difficult for Google to be able to keep all the great people it has hired over the years. These people have a wide variety of great options at their disposal and a number of those people are seizing them.\u201d The company dismissed concerns that it was threatened by an employee exodus. \u201cWe have a deep bench and work hard to grow leaders within the company,\u201d Google said in a statement. \u201cWe are attracting immensely talented people around the world, every day.\u201d Mr. Merrill did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment. EMI Group declined to comment. At EMI, Mr. Merrill will assume a newly created role, the executive briefed on his move said. He is likely to report to Guy Hands, the chairman of EMI and the chief executive of Terra Firma Capital Partners, the London-based private equity firm that bought EMI in September. The company is going through the middle of a wrenching restructuring that, among other things, will put more emphasis on digital distribution. Mr. Merrill joined Google in 2003 as senior director of information systems. He was responsible for all internal engineering efforts and was involved with several other technology projects, including initiatives related to the company\u2019s I.P.O. and the introduction of Checkout, an online payment system. Another senior Google executive, the chief financial officer, George Reyes, announced last August that he would retire. At the time, Google said it hoped to find a replacement for him by the end of the year but has yet to appoint a new C.F.O.", "keyword": "Google Inc;Executives and Management;Merrill Douglas;EMI Music;Computers and the Internet;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations"}
{"id": "ny0227568", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/07/03", "title": "Papers Show Moynihan in Full Voice Under Nixon", "abstract": "He complained about the \u201cSchrafft\u2019s in the basement\u201d color scheme proposed for the White House mess. He warned of the alienation of American blacks. He predicted the potential impact of global warming . He scoffed that anyone could seriously think the public still supported the Vietnam War. And he repeatedly chided his White House colleagues, saying they were making policy on the basis of unproved assumptions. In 90,000 pages of letters and memorandums released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library, Daniel Patrick Moynihan , counselor and assistant to the president for urban affairs from January 1969 through December 1970 and a future senator from New York, prodded the president and his White House colleagues to deliver on a domestic agenda and expressed exasperation over the government\u2019s entropy. He contended that Southern governors who doled out largess to poor whites and welfare rights leaders who supported poor blacks opposed the proposed Family Assistance Plan, which included a form of guaranteed income, for the same reason: they would be put \u201cout of business.\u201d In his memorandum suggesting that discourse on race would benefit from a period of \u201cbenign neglect,\u201d he also warned about \u201cthe incidence of antisocial behavior among young black males,\u201d and added: \u201cApart from white racial attitudes, this is the biggest problem black Americans face, and in part it helps shape white racial attitudes.\u201d He apologized to Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader, who had been criticized by a departing government official. \u201cThe issue is the intimidation by government of a private citizen because of his holding disapproved opinions,\u201d Moynihan wrote. \u201cI recall from my youth the observation that if fascism should ever come to the United States it would be in the guise of antifascism. I very much fear we see the tendency in this squalid enterprise.\u201d On Oct. 1, 1969, he recalled that at an official meeting where he described the war in Vietnam as an unpopular political disaster, \u201cthere were at least a few persons who seem to think the war is some kind of presidential prerogative which we must not allow college boys or effeminate professors to infringe.\u201d He was appalled by a British official who belittled the famine in Biafra because the rate of \u201cmalnutrition\u201d was only 5 or 10 percentage points above the normal rate. \u201cI really did feel I was talking to Sir Charles Trevelyan 122 years ago,\u201d Moynihan wrote, \u201cassuming all was well in Connaught, that the new potato crop was coming along nicely, and that in any event the Irish always were a bit disorganized.\u201d And complaining that he was being demeaned in leaks, he wrote: \u201cThere is no great harm in having a few character assassins on the White House staff, but we should keep the number of madmen to a minimum.\u201d", "keyword": "Moynihan Daniel Patrick;Nixon Richard Milhous;United States Politics and Government;Race;Nixon Richard Library and Birthplace"}
{"id": "ny0170201", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/05/30", "title": "Deal for Big REIT Startles Some Experts", "abstract": "First real estate specialists were surprised by the deal. Then they were surprised by the price. Archstone-Smith, a national apartment building real estate investment trust based in Englewood, Colo., confirmed yesterday that it had agreed to be acquired by Tishman Speyer of New York and its financial partner, Lehman Brothers , for $22.2 billion in what would be the largest public-to-private transaction to date in the multifamily sector. Though other apartment REITs have been mentioned as potential acquisition targets, few real estate specialists had expected the highly regarded Archstone-Smith \u2014 the second largest apartment real estate investment trust (after Equity Residential Properties) in terms of real estate value and market capitalization \u2014 to be among them. The all-cash deal of $60.75 a share, unanimously approved by Archstone\u2019s board, represents a 22.7 percent premium over the stock price last Thursday, just before Barry Vinocur, the editor of REIT Wrap, a newsletter, reported that a merger might be imminent. Archstone-Smith\u2019s shares closed yesterday at $61.42 a share, up $6.19 from Friday\u2019s close. But several analysts said that while the price covered the value of Archstone-Smith\u2019s buildings, it did not account for the high caliber of its management, its innovative computerized leasing system and its $4.4 billion development pipeline. In their announcement, Tishman Speyer and Lehman said that R. Scot Sellers, the chairman and chief executive of Archstone-Smith, had agreed to work for the new partnership. Some analysts suggested that Mr. Sellers might have a conflict of interest in pushing for approval. Craig Leupold, a multifamily REIT analyst at Green Street Advisors, a research company in Newport Beach, Calif., pointed out that Archstone-Smith shares reached their 52-week high, $64.77, in January. In the past, \u201cthe public market has had this company trading at premium,\u201d he said, referring to the earlier price, which exceeded the value of the buildings alone. \u201cI\u2019m surprised that management and board are endorsing this deal.\u201d Louis W. Taylor, a senior real estate analyst at Deutsche Bank, suggested that shareholders were likely to scrutinize the offer carefully, especially given the plan to retain Mr. Sellers. \u201cAt this price, we would not rule out other bidders,\u201d Mr. Taylor said. But whether a bidding war will take place may depend on the size of the breakup fee that any new suitor would have to pay Tishman Speyer and its financial partner. Details like that were not disclosed yesterday, and both Tishman Speyer and Archstone-Smith declined requests for interviews. In its statement, Archstone-Smith said the transaction, which is subject to approval by shareholders, was expected to be completed by September. So far this year, 14 mergers and public-to-private transactions have been announced or are pending, compared with 23 for all of last year, according to SNL Financial, a research company in Charlottesville, Va. Since 2000, there have been 84 such transactions. Though this year appears to be keeping pace with last year, he said, the pool of available companies is shrinking. \u201cUnless we think the REIT market is going away completely, it\u2019s got to slow down at some point,\u201d said Keven S. Lindemann, the director of real estate for SNL Financial. In buying Archstone-Smith, Tishman Speyer would be acquiring a company with a similar approach to real estate investing, concentrating on places that are attractive to educated workers and where available land is limited. As of March 31, Archstone-Smith had interests in 344 apartments buildings or complexes, with 86,014 units. Its portfolio is concentrated in some of the best neighborhoods in Washington, Southern California, New York, the San Francisco Bay area, Boston and Seattle. Tishman-Speyer owns office building in all those markets. Tishman-Speyer last year paid $5.4 billion for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two sprawling apartment complexes along the East River in Manhattan with 11,232 apartments in 110 buildings. The company, which owns the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center, has acquired, developed and operated more than 230 properties totaling more than 100 million square feet and manages a property portfolio in excess of $40 billion in total value across the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Archstone-Smith is itself the product of a merger. In 2001, Archstone spent $2.5 billion to buy Charles E. Smith Residential, a portfolio of apartment buildings in the Washington area. It recently won approval to develop 686 apartments in a mixed-use development on the site of Washington\u2019s former convention center in a long-awaited project with Hines, a developer in Houston. Last year, Archstone-Smith greatly increased its presence in New York by buying five high-rise apartment buildings, with 1,382 units, making it the largest public owner of apartments in Manhattan, where many major landlords are private firms. Its buildings include the Gershwin on Eighth Avenue at 50th Street, with 550 apartments, and the recently completed 627-unit Archstone Clinton, on West 52nd Street, near the Hudson River. Mr. Leupold said that Archstone-Smith was known for innovations like its Internet-based system for checking a prospective tenant\u2019s credit rating on the spot and for adapting the type of pricing used by airlines and hotels to the apartment market. Despite its reputation, Archstone-Smith\u2019s stock has been battered recently, as investors have turned away from REITs on the theory that values cannot keep rising indefinitely, analysts say. Rod Petrik, a REIT analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said that Tishman Speyer was likely to hold onto most of the Archstone buildings, unlike Blackstone, which wasted no time dismantling much of the portfolio it acquired when it recently bought Equity Office Properties for $39 billion. Mr. Petrik estimated the average value of an Archstone apartment \u2014 excluding the company\u2019s investments in Germany and the units under development \u2014 was $262,000. Replacing them would cost about $500,000 a unit, he said. Though apartment REIT shares have been down for the past two quarters, James S. Corl, the chief investment officer for real estate at Cohen & Steers, a major holder of Archstone-Smith shares, said \u201cthe stock market has gotten it wrong on this one.\u201d As home ownership increased in the early part of the decade, largely in response to low interest rates, apartment buildings struggled. But home ownership is now leveling off. \u201cIt\u2019s the reverse of what happened in the early 2000s,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich was terrible for apartments.\u201d", "keyword": "Archstone-Smith Trust;Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties"}
{"id": "ny0111728", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2012/02/17", "title": "Sad Performance Could Mark End for Wenger", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Ars\u00e8ne Wenger\u2019s once magnificent, now forlorn, course with Arsenal is almost run. After his team capitulated to a 4-0 Champions League defeat against A.C. Milan in the San Siro on Wednesday, even the urbane Frenchman could not find excuses. \u201cWhat is more difficult to take,\u201d he said, \u201cis the performance we produced tonight. \u201cIt\u2019s a big shock. We were never in the game. Very poor offensively and defensively. Slow to read the game, slow to respond, beaten in the challenges.\u201d And his eyes, red around the edges, told the story. Milan\u2019s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a player often derided by professionals and experts in the English game, was far and away the most effective man on the field. He overpowered Arsenal\u2019s meager defenses. He bullied them with his height, outwitted them with his touch, made them pay for all the taunts of the past. Wenger had told his men to look not at what the critics said about Ibrahimovic\u2019s temperament, but to look instead at what he has won. With Ajax in Amsterdam, with Juventus, Inter and Milan in Italy, and in his one season at Barcelona, the 6-foot-5, or 1.95-meter tall, Swede has been on a league-championship winning side for each of the past eight seasons. Yes, he is mercurial. Yes he can sway from apparent disinterest to rebelliousness. But his good days, in Italy at any rate, outnumber his bad, and the younger players now being introduced into Milan\u2019s team appreciate that he is the focal point of their attack. \u201cIf we are in trouble,\u201d midfielder Antonio Nocerino said before the game Wednesday, \u201cwe give the ball to Zlatan. He holds it for us, gives us rest, makes us stronger.\u201d Arsenal either didn\u2019t pick up his movement, or fell about at his feet. It was already evident that Milan, itself a team in transition and in some financial downturn, simply had more structure, more certainty, and most surprising of all, more physicality than Arsenal. The first goal was a giveaway. The Arsenal goalie Wojciech Szczesny carelessly played the ball straight to Nocerino, who in the blink of an eye lobbed it forward to Kevin-Prince Boateng. Boateng turned that pass into an opportunity to show his own incredible improvement as an athlete and a striker since four years ago, when he left barely any mark on English soccer as a Tottenham Hotspur player. He controlled the ball on his chest, let it bounce on the ground, then struck a sudden, ferocious shot that cannoned down from the crossbar behind the beaten goalkeeper. From there it became the Ibrahimovic and Robinho show. The big man strode down the left flank and turned the ball back for the little Brazilian to ghost beyond sleeping defenders to nod the second goal. And Robinho scored again after Thomas Vermaelen slipped to the turf. The San Siro\u2019s field was an eyesore unbefitting to top soccer. But if Arsenal could not stand up on it, Milan was creating enough chances to have doubled its score. Finally, Ibrahimovic worked himself into a one-against-one situation inside the penalty box with the hapless Johan Djourou. Two tall men, but one was nimble on his feet, the other clumsy. Djourou brought down Ibrahimovic, a clear penalty claimed, and scored, by the Swede. The contest, in theory, is unfinished. But even Wenger knows that his long attempt to win Europe\u2019s most coveted trophy in his 16th season with Arsenal is dead and buried. So, alas, might be his time with the London club. In the beginning, and for the first seven years, he gave Arsenal a style and a beauty that was rare to behold on English fields. He imported talents, some barely out of school, and blended them in a fashion totally contrary to the old, grindingly efficient, Arsenal. However, when the club moved to a new stadium, with double the seating capacity and more than double the financial income from corporate boxes, the nature of Arsenal changed. It went up-market, it sold out to Russian and American shareholders. But it did not compete in the transfer market the way that big clubs, like Milan, like Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Barcelona and Real Madrid do. Thierry Henry\u2019s presence on the field on Wednesday was a sorry reminder of his former glory. He was hired for a short stay, from his New York sinecure with the Red Bulls. Although Henry had produced match-winning goals in two of his brief appearances, this was no longer the young Thierry who could outpace almost any defender. It was an elderly soccer player, lending his experience but making a desperate last appearance in a lost cause. Arsenal lost Cesc F\u00e0bregas and Samir Nasri to clubs that would pay more last summer. It lost Jack Wilshere, its emerging Englishman, to injury that has so far lasted this whole season. That represents its entire midfield creative unit. Replacements signed in haste last summer are but shadows of the past greatness. Henry produced one back-heeled pass that prompted the otherwise dormant Robin van Persie to force Milan\u2019s goalkeeper, Christian Abbiati, into his one decent save of the night. The rest was embarrassing. Arsenal might not sack Wenger after the 16 years he has supervised. But he said himself, after the team\u2019s 8-2 hammering against Manchester United last August, that he might have to go if his team was substandard by the end of the season. That call looks imminent.", "keyword": "UEFA Champions League (Soccer);Arsenal (Soccer Team);Milan (Soccer Team)"}
{"id": "ny0264077", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/12/30", "title": "Judge Blocks California\u2019s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 A federal judge on Thursday blocked enforcement of a California regulation favoring producers of gasoline, diesel fuel and biofuels whose methods generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The ruling by the judge, Lawrence J. O\u2019Neill of United States District Court in Fresno, said the rule unconstitutionally discriminates against out-of-state producers and tries to regulate activities that take place entirely outside state boundaries, from producers\u2019 choice of farming methods to refiners\u2019 use of coal -fired electricity. By granting a preliminary injunction, which had been sought by ethanol producers, the judge dealt a blow to the state\u2019s much-trumpeted effort to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The low-carbon fuel rule had been expected to account for 10 percent of the overall reduction in emissions, or about 16 million metric tons. California\u2019s fuel standard \u201cimpermissibly treads into the province and powers of our federal government, reaches beyond its boundaries to regulate activity wholly outside of its borders,\u201d the judge said. The federal Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, and court rulings over the decades have interpreted that language to restrain states from interfering with interstate commerce. Judge O\u2019Neill said that California\u2019s fuel standard rule \u201coffends\u201d that doctrine, referred to as \u201cthe dormant commerce clause.\u201d A spokesman for the California Air Resources Board , which issued the rule in 2009, said it would appeal the decision. The California rule is one of the first in the country to use a \u201clife cycle\u201d analysis to determine the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the course of producing and transporting a fuel, or its \u201ccarbon intensity.\u201d By setting a carbon intensity standard, producers and distributors who emit less are rewarded with marketable credits; those who exceed the standard must buy credits, driving up the costs of their fuel. Separate lawsuits against the California regulation were brought by the ethanol producers and by refiners and truckers. The Air Resources Board had asked Judge O\u2019Neill to dismiss the claims, saying that provisions of the Clean Air Act give California special authority to control air pollution. These provisions shield the state from any claim of interference with interstate commerce, the regulators argued. In three separate rulings issued Thursday, Judge O\u2019Neill rejected the regulators\u2019 defense, accepting the refiners\u2019 claim that the state acted unconstitutionally and granting the injunction. The fuel refining industry welcomed the judge\u2019s action. \u201cToday\u2019s decision is a victory for the millions of Californians,\u201d said Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association . \u201cCalifornia\u2019s low-carbon fuel standards would have raised gasoline and diesel fuel costs for all Californians, who already pay the highest fuel prices in the nation.\u201d", "keyword": "Greenhouse Gas Emissions;Interstate Commerce;California Air Resources Board;Regulation and Deregulation of Industry;California;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Biofuels"}
{"id": "ny0185811", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/03/08", "title": "Afghan Leader Deflects Talk of Future", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 President Hamid Karzai on Saturday deflected calls from political rivals to cede authority to an interim government before an election in August, and refused to even say whether he would run for re-election \u2014 the latest signs that the country may be headed for a constitutional crisis even as the Taliban insurgency continues to gain strength. Afghanistan now faces the critical question of who will run the government between May 21, when Mr. Karzai\u2019s term expires, and the presidential election on Aug. 20. The Taliban usually stage their most intense offensives during those months. Under the Afghan Constitution, an election is supposed to be held 30 to 60 days before the end of Mr. Karzai\u2019s term. But the country\u2019s election commission has instead set the date for August, saying poor security and the bitter early spring weather usual in April would disenfranchise many voters. The United States, NATO and the United Nations have all endorsed the August date. A week ago, Mr. Karzai abruptly issued a decree calling for an election by late April. But on Saturday he said he would accept the election commission\u2019s decision for an August ballot. Now, leading opposition politicians say that Mr. Karzai should step aside in May and be replaced temporarily by some sort of executive authority agreed to by a consensus of political and judicial leaders. They say they fear that Mr. Karzai\u2019s continued rule would be illegitimate and that he might try to use his power to gain unfair advantage in the election. But in a confusing stream of comments to reporters at the presidential palace on Saturday, Mr. Karzai dismissed the notion of a transitional government. \u201cThe transitional term does not exist in the Constitution,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Constitution says the election should be held in order to elect the new president. No other circumstance has been anticipated in the Constitution.\u201d He also stated that \u201cit is clear as long as there is no election, the president will stay.\u201d Yet he also said that he wanted a national consensus about a post-May 21 government and that he would not stay president if doing so made him an illegal leader. At one point he declared he would run again only if he could be a \u201cfactor for stability.\u201d But as he walked out of the news conference, he said he had decided whether to run, but did not say what that decision was. In the past, Mr. Karzai had said he intended to run for a second term. Other leading politicians expected to run for president said Mr. Karzai should declare whether he would run and agree to step aside in May if he did run. \u201cThe Constitution does not give the president the authority to interpret the Constitution,\u201d said Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghan finance minister under Mr. Karzai. \u201cThere is not trust in a level playing field,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to create the mechanism for a campaign where, if the president is a candidate, there is a level playing field, where the machinery of government is not used for or against the other players.\u201d", "keyword": "Karzai Hamid;Afghanistan;Politics and Government;Elections"}
{"id": "ny0077057", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/05/07", "title": "Report\u2019s Author Is Former Football Player Known Best as Trial Lawyer", "abstract": "Over the course of his nearly 40-year legal career, Theodore V. Wells Jr. has defended a cross section of Washington politicians and Wall Street financiers, becoming one of the best-known trial lawyers in public corruption and insider trading cases. In recent months, his focus shifted to a much different sort of wrongdoing: deflated footballs. On Wednesday, Wells and his colleagues at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison released their much-anticipated report on the New England Patriots\u2019 deflated footballs, concluding that team personnel intentionally deflated them to gain an advantage in the A.F.C. championship game last season. Wells and Paul Weiss \u2014 perhaps best known for defending the likes of I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney; Michael Espy, the former agriculture secretary; and Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire Wall Street investor \u2014 might not seem the obvious choice to lead an investigation into, of all things, deflated footballs. Even in his personal life, Wells has emphasized politics and civil rights, having served as national treasurer for former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley\u2019s presidential campaign, chairman emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and as pro bono general counsel to the New Jersey N.A.A.C.P. But the N.F.L., which has hired Paul Weiss on and off since the 1980s, has recently become one of the firm\u2019s biggest clients. It hired the firm to investigate accusations of bullying on the Miami Dolphins, which led to a 144-page report from Wells, and negotiate a settlement with former players who accused the league of hiding the dangers of concussions. In the case of the deflated footballs, Wells worked alongside Paul Weiss\u2019s chairman, Brad S. Karp, and a former senior federal prosecutor, Lorin L. Reisner. Although Wells wrote the report along with his colleagues, who also happen to be fellow Harvard Law School graduates, the report is synonymous with his name. Wells, himself a towering figure who played offensive and defensive line on a football scholarship at Holy Cross, was name-checked throughout the Super Bowl broadcast, with the announcers referencing the looming \u201cWells Report.\u201d \u201cNormally you see him in these high-profile financial cases, but Ted is no stranger to these types of sports investigations,\u201d said Tony West, the former high-ranking Justice Department official who squared off against Wells in a number of cases. \u201cWhat makes Ted so good is he\u2019s able to strike a very difficult balance between being a hard-charging advocate for his client while also engendering respect and even admiration from his adversaries.\u201d The N.F.L. cases highlight a push at Paul Weiss \u2014 and in the broader legal world \u2014 to capture a piece of the lucrative market for sports litigation. Once a cottage industry of entertainment firms and labor specialists, these cases now attract New York\u2019s biggest white-shoe firms. Investigative Report on A.F.C. Championship Game Footballs The investigative report into accusations that the New England Patriots improperly deflated game balls in last January\u2019s A.F.C. championship game. That dynamic reflects the changing economics of sports leagues, which have become multibillion-dollar enterprises thanks to lucrative television and merchandise deals. It can also be traced to a heightened awareness of concussions \u2014 and the litigation that results \u2014 as well as public blunders by teams, leagues and even players associations. Paul Weiss, for example, represented the National Basketball Players Association in an internal investigation into the union\u2019s chief. And in addition to handling the N.F.L. concussion litigation, the firm is representing FIFA, soccer\u2019s international governing body, in its concussion cases. The work is not limited to litigation; the firm handled the acquisition of the N.B.A.\u2019s Milwaukee Bucks by Wall Street executives. It helps the firm\u2019s cause that, as one government official put it, \u201cBrad Karp is the most connected lawyer in the country.\u201d Yet all these billable hours could translate into potential conflicts when the firm is asked to investigate a scandal like the deflated balls. The firm must maintain the integrity of the investigation without losing a client like the N.F.L. The inquiry was particularly fraught with challenges. The owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft, is a close ally of Commissioner Roger Goodell. And it took more than three months to finalize the report, in part because of the exhaustive nature of the review. Paul Weiss conducted interviews, pored over text messages and consulted scientific experts. At one point, a Columbia professor posted the firm\u2019s request for a physics expert onto Facebook, causing a brief stir in the legal and academic worlds. But the involvement of Wells helped mitigate concerns about the outcome of the investigation. Reisner, known as an aggressive former prosecutor before joining Paul Weiss as a partner last year, did the same. As head of the criminal division at the United States attorney\u2019s office in Manhattan, Reisner helped oversee some of the biggest investigations into Wall Street banks and hedge funds. In one of his biggest cases \u2014 the investigation into Cohen and his hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors \u2014 one of the defense lawyers was Wells.", "keyword": "Theodore V Wells Jr;Football;Cheating;Paul Weiss;NFL; Super Bowl; Super Bowl 2015;Patriots"}
{"id": "ny0144416", "categories": ["nyregion", "westchester"], "date": "2008/10/19", "title": "Collage Show in Newburgh Appropriates Sounds as Well as and Sights", "abstract": "In Newburgh, art galleries are few and far between. Though there is some noticeable upscale development along the river, much of the city, with its blocks of rundown working-class homes and storefronts, remains a far cry from its 19th-century status as \u201cthe gem of the Hudson.\u201d The architecture here dates back to the 1600s; this was once a beautiful place. Ann Street Gallery is the city\u2019s only nonprofit art space. Two years old, it occupies a portion of the basement of a 19th-century hotel recently renovated by a local nonprofit group, Safe Harbors of the Hudson, which is devoted to providing affordable housing for the indigent, veterans and artists. Safe Harbors also sponsors the gallery. The gallery is small but nicely fitted-out, with polished concrete floors and crisp white walls. There is a main gallery and a back room used for video and sound art. The emphasis is on emerging and midcareer artists from the Hudson River Valley, but works by artists from New York and further afield are also shown here. The current exhibition at the gallery is \u201cCollage Logic,\u201d a group show of 13 artists from New York and the wider region. It explores \u201cthe use of collage techniques and methodologies in contemporary art,\u201d according to Virginia Walsh, the exhibition\u2019s curator and gallery director. This is a rich and fertile area of artistic expression. What is so interesting about this show is that few of the artists selected by Ms. Walsh make conventional collages. John Morton, for instance, has made an arresting sound installation using appropriated sounds from along the Hudson River. You hear fishermen talking, pipes clanging, water lapping, even a train speeding by. Joel Carreiro appropriates images from art history and medieval manuscripts to create pastiche paintings. The source material is printed on heat-transfer paper, which he cuts into little strips and squares and then recombines to form interesting patterns. I like these works a lot, as much for their formal ingenuity as for their obvious beauty. Thomas Weaver presents a terrific conceptual collage made of paintings, stencils, drawings, watercolors and writing, mostly on paper, bunched together on a wall. Across them, he has painted the outline of the frame of a house, suggesting a collection of ideas and thoughts gathered together under one roof, a metaphor for the artist\u2019s mind. Other artists work with found materials. Jackie Shatz fuses together ceramics, paint, cloth and other found materials to make colorful, abstract wall sculptures. Imelda Cajipe Endaya collages together maps, candy wrappers and a variety of textiles to create works that reflect on childhood and, somewhat more obliquely, feminist issues. The term collage comes from the French word coller, which means to glue. Not surprisingly, the show includes work by some artists who affix paper or other objects to a two-dimensional surface \u2014 the traditional form of collage. Among them are Jonathan Talbot and Vivien Collens, both of whom have clearly mastered the technique. Mr. Talbot appropriates mostly black and white imagery from old books and magazines which he pastes together to create scenes that look like historical photographs. \u201cThe Stationmaster\u201d and \u201cThe Bachelors Visit New York\u201d depict arrangements of people against hybrid architectural structures. They are about dreams as much as memories. Pablo Picasso probably produced the first modern collage, \u201cStill Life With Chair Caning\u201d (1912), consisting of a piece of oilcloth printed with a caning pattern and glued onto a canvas. By incorporating real objects into his picture, he blurred the distinction between painting and sculpture and opened up a whole new area for art making. Collage has been put to many uses since then, as this show testifies. Perhaps the most ambitious use of it is Yeon Jin Kim\u2019s video \u201cDreams,\u201d which might be described as a travelogue of the subconscious. Much of the imagery was taken with a spy camera inserted inside an elaborate paper model of a city, also on display. All told, this show contains a remarkably diverse and thoughtful group of works by artists who, though not household names, probably deserve to be better known. Collage may be a century old, but this show suggests that it will be around for a lot longer.", "keyword": "Art;Westchester County (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0064884", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/06/16", "title": "Six Are Killed in a House Fire in Newark", "abstract": "NEWARK \u2014 An 11-year-old boy and five of his relatives died on Sunday in an early morning fire that swept through the family\u2019s house here, killing everyone inside and leaving a neighborhood in mourning. Throughout the afternoon, congregants from a nearby church and people who lived on the surrounding blocks gathered on South 15th Street to take stock of the home\u2019s charred frame and to pay homage to a family whose generosity was well known. One neighbor proudly lifted a red plastic truck that one of the fire\u2019s victims had given to her children. Another neighbor listed items, such as pencils, books, toys and a skateboard, donated by one of the victims who would load her van with supplies for schoolchildren. On Sunday evening, what was known to neighbors became official, as the Essex County prosecutor\u2019s office released the identities of the six victims. The three who lived in the house were Reginald Stewart, 58; his wife, Salome Stewart, 58; and her daughter, Natasha Kinsale, 35. The other three were Zion Forbes, 11, who lived in nearby East Orange, and Noreen Johnson, 43, and her son, Stephen Sydney, 15, who were visiting from Crawford, Ga. Their bodies were found inside the wreckage of the three-story single-family home at 818 South 15th Street after the fire was reported around 4 a.m., said Anthony Ambrose, the chief of detectives for the prosecutor\u2019s office, which is investigating the fire. As flames engulfed the front of the home, neighbors tried to come to the family\u2019s aid and went to the back door, said a neighbor named Leo, 47, who declined to give his last name. But they found the door blocked by a cabinet or some other obstruction, he said. Hours later, firefighters were still surveying the scene, occasionally tossing debris into the yard where a charred couch frame had already been deposited. The white siding of the home had melted and peeled to reveal a blackened interior. Residents of the neighborhood stood outside the police tape. They recalled the bright artificial flowers and welcome signs that cluttered the home\u2019s porch and brought a bit of cheer to the block. \u201cIt\u2019s a very tragic and sad situation on Father\u2019s Day,\u201d said Thomas Ellis, a minister at God\u2019s Deliverance Praise and Outreach Center in Newark. \u201cThere\u2019s a father somewhere that lost his kids.\u201d A witness, Carol Valentine, said her fianc\u00e9 lived next door to the home that caught fire. When they saw the fire early Sunday, her fianc\u00e9 was among those who tried to break down the back door of the home. His home also sustained damage from the fire, she said. Leo, the neighbor, said the fire station is only about a block away from the home, giving the Fire Department quick access. \u201cOf course they\u2019re going to be here quick,\u201d he said of the firefighters, \u201cbut the fire\u2019s quicker than them.\u201d Standing cater-corner from the scorched home, Leo added: \u201cI feel like it\u2019s my house. It\u2019s so close.\u201d", "keyword": "Fires;Fatalities,casualties;Newark NJ"}
{"id": "ny0096636", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/01/14", "title": "Charlie Hebdo\u2019s Defiant Muhammad Cover Fuels Debate on Free Speech", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Immediately upon unveiling its new cover \u2014 a depiction of Muhammad \u2014 the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Tuesday reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities that has embroiled Europe since 12 people were killed during an attack on its Paris offices by Muslim extremists a week ago. The cover shows the bearded prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign saying, \u201cI am Charlie,\u201d the rallying cry that has become synonymous with support of the newspaper and free expression. Above the cartoon on a green background is the headline \u201cAll is forgiven.\u201d While surviving staff members, at an emotional news conference, described their choice of cover as a show of forgiveness, most Muslims consider any depiction of their prophet to be blasphemous. Moreover, interpretations quickly swirled around the Internet that the cartoon also contained disguised crudity. One of Egypt\u2019s highest Islamic authorities warned that the cartoon would exacerbate tensions between the secular West and observant Muslims, while death threats circulated online against staff members. A preacher, Anjem Choudary, the former leader of a radical group that was banned in Britain, was quoted by a British newspaper, The Independent, as saying that the image was \u201can act of war\u201d that would be punishable by death if judged in a Shariah court. Beyond new threats \u2014 and the potential for more violence after a week in which both mosques and Jewish sites were attacked \u2014 the persistence of what many Muslims see as continuing provocations opened complaints about a double standard in European countries, whose bans on hate speech some see as seeming to stop short of forbidding ridicule of Islam. \u201cIf freedom of expression can be sacrificed for criminalizing incitement and hatred, why not for insulting the Prophet of Allah?\u201d Mr. Choudary wrote last week on Twitter on the same day as the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, during which the attackers indicated they were avenging Muhammad for the newspaper\u2019s insults. Supporters of the iconoclastic newspaper defended the cover as a fitting and defiant tribute to Charlie Hebdo\u2019s slain cartoonists. \u201cI have no worries about the cover,\u201d the cartoonist who drew it, Renald Luzier, who uses the pen name Luz, told assembled reporters at the offices of the newspaper Lib\u00e9ration, which the Charlie Hedbo staff has used since the attack. \u201cWe have confidence in people\u2019s intelligence, and we have confidence in humor. The people who did this attack, they have no sense of humor.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry we\u2019ve drawn him yet again,\u201d he added, \u201cbut the Muhammad we\u2019ve drawn is a man who is crying.\u201d Laurent L\u00e9ger, an investigative journalist with Charlie Hebdo, shrugged off the idea, circulating on social media, that the cartoon contained one or even two hidden renderings of male genitals. \u201cPeople can see what they want to see, but a cartoon is a cartoon,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not a photograph.\u201d Muslim leaders as far away as Egypt condemned Charlie Hebdo, recalling threats received by a Danish newspaper in 2005 after it, too, published cartoons satirizing Muhammad. Elsa Ray, the spokeswoman of the Paris-based Collective Against Islamophobia in France, declined to react specifically to the new cartoon, but said that cartoons that lampooned Muhammad breached the limits of decency and insulted Muslims. \u201cThe freedom of expression may be guaranteed by the French Constitution, but there is a limit when it goes too far and turns into hatred, and stigmatization,\u201d she said. Moreover, she argued that the failure of French courts to clamp down on cartoons satirizing Muhammad was a double standard, given the robustness of action taken when Jews were insulted by cartoonists or artists, including Dieudonn\u00e9 M\u2019bala M\u2019bala, a comedian, who in 2013 came under the scrutiny of courts, which banned a series of his shows . Mr. M\u2019bala M\u2019bala has said it was a shame that a Jewish journalist had not been killed in the gas chambers. He has also come under fire for popularizing a gesture that strongly resembles a Nazi salute. In a statement on his Facebook page after Sunday\u2019s enormous unity march in Paris, Mr. M\u2019bala M\u2019bala expressed his admiration for Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman behind the killings at a kosher supermarket. \u201cAs far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly,\u201d he wrote, alluding to the \u201cI am Charlie\u201d rallying cry. The Paris prosecutor\u2019s office said Monday it had opened an investigation to determine if Mr. M\u2019bala M\u2019bala should be charged with promoting terrorism. Mr. M\u2019bala M\u2019bala said he was being unfairly targeted. French laws safeguard the freedom of speech, but there are many exceptions to the rule. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the National Assembly on Tuesday that \u201cblasphemy\u201d was not in French law and never would be. But he refused to draw any analogy between the satirists of Charlie Hebdo and Mr. M\u2019bala M\u2019bala. \u201cThere is a fundamental difference,\u201d he said. Some cultural observers praised Charlie Hebdo for upholding Western values of liberal democracy, even at risk of violence. Flemming Rose, the former cultural editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, whose 2005 publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad \u2014 including one with his turban depicted as a lit fuse \u2014 drew violent recriminations that reverberated across the world, recalled that the publication of the cartoons resulted in a fatwa against him by a radical cleric, threats against the newspaper and one of its cartoonists , and attacks against Danish embassies in the Middle East. Mr. Rose said in an interview that Jyllands-Posten had decided not to publish the latest Charlie Hebdo caricature for fear the newspaper would be targeted again. Still, he said it was imperative that Western newspapers not surrender to Islamic radicals. \u201cWe aren\u2019t republishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons because we are afraid,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I know well that if you give in to intimidation, it works.\u201d His comments reflect the debate that last\u2019s week attacks have ignited in newsrooms and in the streets and cafes in Europe. J\u00e9r\u00f4me Fenoglio, the managing editor of Le Monde, said his paper had decided to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoon on its cover because \u201cit is an important document that we wanted to show to everybody.\u201d The cartoon, Mr. Fenoglio said, \u201cdidn\u2019t carry any insulting message.\u201d \u201cWe defend our right to be able to publish any cartoon, but never those which would be aggressive,\u201d Mr. Fenoglio said. Though he said that some of Charlie Hebdo\u2019s caricatures were \u201cnot funny\u201d and could \u201cuselessly\u201d offend people, \u201ceach paper makes its own judgment.\u201d \u201cFreedom of the press is an absolute right,\u201d Mr. Fenoglio said, \u201cbut each paper has its own free will, and chooses what seems pertinent or not.\u201d Some American newspapers, including The New York Times, did not reproduce the Charlie Hedbo cartoons that mocked Islam. The Times called the decision an editorial judgment that reflected its standards for content that is deemed offensive and gratuitous. The decision drew criticism from some free-speech advocates who called it cowardly in the face of a terrorist attack, which the newspaper disputed. \u201cActually, we have republished some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, including a caricature of the head of ISIS, as well as some political cartoons,\u201d Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. \u201cWe do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities.\u201d The Washington Post, which published a single previous Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad on its printed op-ed page last Thursday, republished the new cover on its website on Tuesday. Martin Baron, the newspaper\u2019s executive editor, said the images did not violate its editorial standards. \u201cIt has to be deliberately, pointedly, needlessly offensive,\u201d Mr. Baron said. More publications have published or plan to reproduce Charlie Hebdo\u2019s newest cover online. Three million copies of the newspaper will be published on Wednesday in 16 languages. The proliferation of the cartoons is heightening concern that the already precarious climate in Europe will worsen, with the possibility of more violence. Some newspapers that reproduced the cartoons in solidarity after last week\u2019s attack have themselves been threatened or targeted already. A Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, received an anonymous call Sunday from someone threatening that \u201cit\u2019s going to blow in your newsroom.\u201d The same day, in Germany, stones and an incendiary object were thrown through the windows of the headquarters of a newspaper, Hamburger Morgenpost, damaging the archive but causing no injuries. Khalil Charles, spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said free speech had been allowed to defy common sense and had given way to insults. Referring to last week\u2019s attacks, he added: \u201cMuslims are appalled, like everyone, about what happened. But this is criminality that should not be attached to Islam, and the Prophet should not be attacked as a result.\u201d", "keyword": "Charlie Hebdo;Terrorism;Newspaper;France;Freedom of speech;Islam;Freedom of the press;Cartoons;Paris France"}
{"id": "ny0107835", "categories": ["business", "energy-environment"], "date": "2012/04/25", "title": "Ohio Steel Mills Expand to Meet Demand in Energy and Auto Industries", "abstract": "CANTON, Ohio \u2014 The Ohio steel industry, led by a drilling boom in the gas and oil industry and a resuscitated demand for cars and light trucks, is growing again. Steel makers across the state are racing to keep pace with plans to add a total of two million square feet of production space at a cost of $1.5 billion. At the Timken Company \u2019s mill here on Faircrest Street, orders for steel from domestic and export markets plunged so low in May 2009 that the plant operated just four days that month. Nearly three years later, with demand for steel soaring and the Faircrest mill operating around the clock, Timken has started building a $200 million, 83,000-square-foot addition that will increase the plant\u2019s production. \u201cThe need for specialty steel, much of it for oil and natural gas producers, is high in the United States and around the world,\u201d said Salvatore J. Miraglia Jr., the president of Timken\u2019s steel group. \u201cWe see demand in that market continuing to be healthy for quite some time.\u201d That optimism is reflected in Timken\u2019s new building, which will rise 26 stories high and will sharply expand the plant\u2019s capacity to cast steel billets to be made into parts for drilling platforms, heavy equipment, and other oil and gas industry tools. Two other new buildings also are under way at the 27-year-old mill, one of which will house a new forge press and a facility where minerals and other compounds that strengthen finished steel will be added to molten metal. In October, United States Steel opened a $100 million, 325,000-square-foot mill at its Lorain plant to manufacture steel pipe for the drilling industry. Vallourec & Mannesmann , a French company, is completing a $650 million, 1.1 million-square-foot steel pipe mill in Youngstown , and is building a separate 200,000-square-foot mill nearby to add threads to the pipes. Both plants serve the oil and gas sector. United States Steel is collaborating with a Japan-based partner, Kobe Steel , to build a $400 million, 454,000-square-foot addition to what is known as the Pro-Tec plant in Leipsic, south of Toledo, to serve the growing market for high-tensile lightweight steel used by makers of fuel-efficient vehicles. \u201cWe haven\u2019t had this kind of expansion in steel since the 1980s,\u201d said Eric Burkland, the president of the Ohio Manufacturers\u2019 Association . \u201cIt\u2019s a tremendous turnaround.\u201d When all the projects are completed this year and next, those plants alone are expected to add roughly 630 new manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate in Ohio was 7.5 percent in March, below the 8.2 percent national rate in March, and down from a statewide peak of 10.6 percent in July 2009. The projects also will help Ohio\u2019s steel industry, the nation\u2019s second-largest behind Indiana\u2019s, to exceed the annual production figures of 14 million to 15 million tons that were achieved in the years before 2009, when production dropped to 4.8 million tons and investment in plants was just $166 million, according to the Ohio Steel Council , a state trade group. One reason for the industry\u2019s revival, said Mr. Burkland, was anticipated: the recovery of the auto industry. \u201cPeople feel more confident and they are buying cars again,\u201d he said. Auto manufacturing in the United States is a big buyer of steel. Carmakers expect this year to sell 13.8 million cars and light trucks in the United States, and could reach 14 million to 15 million sales by 2014, according to monthly sales figures and industry estimates. Sales peaked at 17 million vehicles in 2005, but plunged to 10.9 million sales in 2009 in the depths of the recession . The Ohio Department of Development, in a February 2011 report , said 72,000 people were employed in the state\u2019s car and light truck vehicle assembly plants, and dozens of parts manufacturing plants. But the surge in oil and gas drilling and the swift rise in the market for steel pipes and oil field equipment has come as a surprise. The clanging of long lengths of steel pipes being heated and cooled, pounded and straightened inside a new finishing plant at United States Steel in Lorain provides a rare inside view of the industry\u2019s revival in Ohio. The bright lights and charged furnaces, the powerful hiss of cold water on hot steel, and the jarring din that makes ear plugs mandatory safety equipment describe a company and an industry making investments few thought possible only a few years ago. \u201cWe\u2019re shipping pipe to drilling operations in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Texas, China,\u201d said John Wilkinson, United States Steel\u2019s interim plant manager. \u201cAll over the country. All over the world. Some of it is being used here in Ohio.\u201d New production practices have made it practical to tap the dense and deep hydrocarbon-rich shale beneath much of the Great Plains, the Gulf Coast, the Rocky Mountain West and the mid-Atlantic states, and they are being tapped at a frantic pace. Last year, according to the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy, a monthly average of 1,876 oil and gas rigs were in operation, the highest count since 2008. More than 45,000 oil and gas wells were drilled in 2011, and a third of the nation\u2019s natural gas is now generated from shale. In eastern and central Ohio, drillers focus on two layers of deep gas- and oil-bearing shale, the Marcellus and Utica. Early production results indicate the Utica wells alone are capable of producing millions of cubic feet of gas and hundreds of barrels of oil daily. It takes a lot of steel to tap reserves that generally lie a mile or more beneath the surface. Each of the drilling pipes rolling off the production line in Lorain is 4.5 inches in diameter, 50 feet long and weighs 850 pounds. Drilling vertically to the depth of the shale in Ohio, and horizontally through it to tap gas and oil, typically takes 200 to 250 lengths of pipe \u2014 or some 100 tons of steel. As of April 8, Ohio had issued 207 shale drilling permits. David Mustine, the general manager of JobsOhio , a state economic development group, said that natural gas was a favored fuel for heating steel and that the new supplies were lowering prices, saving steel plants millions of dollars a year. \u201cDrilling for natural gas has given Ohio steel producers a larger market for their products and a competitive advantage on cost,\u201d Mr. Mustine said. In Canton, Timken executives said they expected to complete the Faircrest mill\u2019s additions by 2014, and production will increase to 925,000 tons annually from 750,000 tons this year. Mr. Miraglia said 425 people worked at the plant and that automation in the new buildings most likely meant that few if any jobs would be added. Behind him, long, rectangular slabs of steel the color of the sun were being poured, turned and pounded in a fury of smoke and flame. \u201cThis is the largest investment made in this plant since we built it,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Ohio;Steel and Iron;Automobiles;Economic Conditions and Trends;Drilling and Boring;United States Economy;United States Steel Corporation;Timken Company;Factories and Manufacturing"}
{"id": "ny0284473", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2016/09/04", "title": "Hip Injury Forces Kyrgios to Withdraw; Journeyman Challenges Murray", "abstract": "Nick Kyrgios could not jump and could not move forward, and the hip injury he had struggled with through his first two matches at the United States Open had finally caught up with him. \u201cI guess it\u2019s just a matter of time,\u201d Kyrgios, of Australia, said after retiring from his third-round match Saturday night against Illya Marchenko. The No. 14-seeded Kyrgios was trailing, 6-4, 4-6, 1-6. He had dejectedly muttered about his injury and its effects through much of the third set, but had waited until the set ended to finally concede defeat. \u201cIt\u2019s never easy, of course,\u201d Kyrgios, 21, said of stopping. \u201cI\u2019ve got a lot of belief in my game to still win matches when I\u2019m not feeling great.\u201d Marchenko, a 28-year-old Ukrainian ranked 63rd, had never before reached the third round of a Grand Slam, and is now into a fourth. \u201cNobody wants to win this way,\u201d Marchenko said. \u201cBut I\u2019m still happy to be in next round.\u201d Players who toil away on the lower tiers of tennis are often called journeymen, but few have had as long a journey to reach the upper echelons of the sport as Paolo Lorenzi of Italy. Nick Kyrgios\u2019s Explosive Forehand Nick Kyrgios of Australia combines athleticism and a distinctive technique to deliver one of the most explosive forehands in the current game. Lorenzi, a 34-year-old from Rome, is playing in his 22nd Grand Slam main draw, but he only just reached the third round for the first time at this United States Open. His reward for persevering was an appointment on Saturday night with second-seeded Andy Murray, one of the most in-form players in the sport, at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Lorenzi battled admirably, serving well and pushing Murray in many long rallies, but lost, 7-6 (4), 5-7, 6-2, 6-3. \u201cI was feeling good on the court,\u201d Lorenzi said. \u201cI was focused on the match, and I enjoyed it.\u201d Lorenzi\u2019s perseverance is record-setting. By winning a small tournament in Kitzb\u00fchel, Austria, in July, Lorenzi became the oldest first-time champion in ATP history. The win helped propel him into the top 40 for the first time in August. Lorenzi, who has won 18 tournaments on the sport\u2019s lower Challenger circuit, said his method for success there has been able to translate to victories on larger stages. \u201cMany things are completely different, but in the end it\u2019s the same: You wake up in the morning, you warm up, and you try to win your match,\u201d he said. \u201cThe setting changes, but the life is the same.\u201d Image Andy Murray, seeded No. 2, beat Paolo Lorenzi, 7-6 (4), 5-7, 6-2, 6-3. Credit Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Lorenzi, who used to study medicine in addition to playing tennis, said he hoped his new position higher in the rankings would give him some clout to help improve conditions for lower-ranked players struggling to make ends meet. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult, because there is no money in this type of tournament,\u201d Lorenzi said of the Challenger events. Lorenzi said that although results had been slow to come, his drive and love of the sport have not wavered. \u201cThe key is to try to work, to try to do something more every day,\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, I think the key is that I love tennis. It\u2019s my passion, so I\u2019m happy that I can go train and that I can still enjoy this life.\u201d Murray was impressed by Lorenzi\u2019s tenacity. \u201cTo come out and move like he did and work as hard as he did out there, you know, shows that that\u2019s a huge quality of his,\u201d Murray said. \u201cIt gets you a long way.\u201d Image Third-seeded Stan Wawrinka serving in his 4-6, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (8), 6-2 win over Daniel Evans. Credit Andy Lyons/Getty Images Murray next faces No. 22-seeded Grigor Dimitrov, who beat Jo\u00e3o Sousa, 6-4, 6-1, 3-6, 6-2. Murray\u2019s compatriot Daniel Evans has been weak where Lorenzi is strong, with his commitment to the sport often questioned as his ranking has fluctuated wildly. But Evans came closer than Lorenzi to pulling off the major upset on Saturday, holding match point in the fourth-set tiebreaker against third-seeded Stan Wawrinka before ultimately falling, 4-6, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (8), 6-2. Evans said he felt the pressure. \u201cI\u2019ve never been in that situation before, especially against someone as good as him,\u201d Evans said. \u201cYeah, it\u2019s just not easy, is it? I mean, being that close, I was thinking about winning the match.\u201d The night session was cut short when No. 14-seeded Nick Kyrgios withdrew during the third set of his match against Illya Marchenko because of a hip injury. He was trailing, 4-6, 6-4, 6-1. Marchenko, who had never before reached even the third round of a Grand Slam, will next face Wawrinka. The biggest upset of the day, by rankings only, was delivered by the wild card Juan Mart\u00edn del Potro, the 2009 champion here. With his signature forehand firing, he blasted through the feisty defense of No. 11-seeded David Ferrer, 7-6 (3), 6-2, 6-3. Del Potro next faces No. 8-seeded Dominic Thiem, who won, 1-6, 6-4, 6-4, 7-5, over Pablo Carre\u00f1o-Busta. No. 6-seeded Kei Nishikori beat Nicolas Mahut, who struggled with a wrist injury, 4-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-2. Nishikori next faces No. 21-seeded Ivo Karlovic, who ended the run of the qualifier Jared Donaldson, a Rhode Islander, 6-4, 7-6 (3), 6-3.", "keyword": "Tennis;US Open Tennis;Andy Murray;Paolo Lorenzi;Stan Wawrinka;Daniel Evans;Nick Kyrgios;Illya Marchenko;Sports injury"}
{"id": "ny0286391", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/09/12", "title": "How Countries Like the Philippines Fall Into Vigilante Violence", "abstract": "When campaigning for the Philippine presidency last spring, Rodrigo Duterte promised to kill so many criminals that \u201cfish will grow fat\u201d in Manila Bay from feasting on their corpses. Since taking office on June 30, Mr. Duterte appears to be making every effort to meet that grisly goal. Over 1,800 people have been killed by the police and vigilantes since then, and the wave of killings shows no sign of subsiding. Many of the victims appear to have been innocent by any definition, and none had been proved guilty in a court of law. But the crackdown has struck a chord with the public, and Mr. Duterte\u2019s popularity has been soaring . What drives this explosion of extrajudicial violence \u2014 which, far from unique, bears striking parallels to previous waves of killings in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and elsewhere? It would be tempting to reduce this to a simple story of good versus evil, with the villain \u2014 whether that means enforcers like Mr. Duterte or the criminal elements they claim to be expunging \u2014 solely responsible. But social scientists who study extrajudicial killings say the real story is more complicated, and more tragic. It is often the affected communities themselves that unwittingly help create the circumstances for this violence. It tends to begin, the research suggests, with a weak state and a population desperate for security. Short-term incentives push everyone to bad decisions that culminate in violence that, once it has reached a level as bloody as that in the Philippines, can be nearly impossible to stop. The Spark It might seem that the Philippines\u2019 trouble began when it elected Mr. Duterte, a brash provincial politician who has for decades embraced extrajudicial killings as a legitimate method of crime control. But the true roots of the problem can be traced to the administration of Mr. Duterte\u2019s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III. That is because, experts say, the true cause of this kind of extrajudicial violence is the public\u2019s loss of confidence in state institutions and its turning instead to more immediate forms of punishment and control. Mr. Aquino, elected in 2010 on promises to support the rule of law and human rights, failed to fix the Philippines\u2019 corrupt and ineffective justice system. His administration also faced a series of security-related scandals, including a hostage crisis in Manila in 2010. And, perhaps most critical, Mr. Aquino was perceived as lazy and soft, unwilling to take the necessary steps to solve the country\u2019s problems. Frustration with the government\u2019s inability to provide basic security led to rising public demand for new leaders who would take more decisive action to provide security. \u201cThe fact is that the judicial system, the court system, is broken in the Philippines,\u201d said Phelim Kine, a deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. Image Filipino demonstrators mimicking an extrajudicial killing crime scene as police officers stood guard last month in front of the Philippine National Police headquarters in Camp Crame, Quezon City, northeast of Manila. Credit Mark R. Cristino/European Pressphoto Agency Powerful people, Mr. Kine said, are often able to evade justice entirely. \u201cWhen you factor in elements of corruption, and perceptions that people can buy themselves protection from the police or buy themselves out of trouble,\u201d he said, \u201cthis adds up to a lot of frustration among Filipinos who sense that government and the judicial system is part of the problem, not the solution.\u201d The Demand When people begin to see the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety. Gema Santamaria, a professor at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City who studies lynchings and other forms of vigilante killings, and Jos\u00e9 Miguel Cruz, the research director at Florida International University\u2019s Latin American and Caribbean Center, used survey data from across Latin America to test what leads people to support extrajudicial violence . The data told a very similar story across all of the countries in their sample. People who didn\u2019t have faith in their country\u2019s institutions were more likely to say vigilante violence was justified. By contrast, in states with stronger institutions, people were more likely to reject extrajudicial violence. People turn to vigilante violence as a replacement for the formal justice system, Ms. Santamaria said. That can take multiple forms \u2014 lynch mobs in Mexico, for instance, or paramilitary \u201cself-defense\u201d forces in Colombia \u2014 but the core impulse is the same. \u201cWhen you have a system that doesn\u2019t deliver, you are creating, over a period of time, a certain culture of punishment,\u201d she said. \u201cRegardless of what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it will be rough justice.\u201d Surprisingly, that includes increased support for the use of harsh extralegal tactics by the police themselves. \u201cThis seems counterintuitive,\u201d Ms. Santamaria said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t trust the police to prosecute criminals, why would you trust them with bending the law?\u201d But to people desperate for security, she said, the unmediated punishment of police violence seems far more effective than waiting for a corrupt system to take action. And so, over time, frustration with state institutions, coupled with fear of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for authoritarian violence \u2014 even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed institutions that failed to provide security in the first place. The Supply Leaders like Mr. Duterte have a political incentive to exploit this sentiment, marketing their willingness to go around the system to prove that they are willing to do whatever it takes to solve the country\u2019s problems. \u201cWhen you have a weak government that faces a security crisis and also a crisis of trust of the people, the issue of promising more punishment is a shortcut to gain citizens\u2019 confidence, to gain support,\u201d Ms. Santamaria said. Why not instead promise to fix the real underlying problems? First, because institutional reform isn\u2019t as politically appealing as identifying villains \u2014 in the case of the Philippines, criminal gangs \u2014 and promising to take them down. Second, because the very state weakness that created the problems often means that leaders are incapable of fixing the underlying issues. A number of developing countries struggle to deliver security, said James Robinson, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and an expert on state failure. State weakness creates the \u201cdemand\u201d for better security by any means, he said, \u201cbut there\u2019s also a supply side.\u201d \u201cAnd the supply side,\u201d he continued, \u201cis that the state encourages this kind of informalization of violence, this kind of informalization of security.\u201d A result is that politicians who embrace extralegal violence gain public support, and those who oppose it are often painted as weak and ineffective. \u201cRule of law does not sell well,\u201d Ms. Santamaria said. The Escalation This dynamic can drive leaders like Mr. Duterte to encourage vigilante violence, even if the bloodshed only worsens insecurity and its targets are largely innocent. The point is demonstrating a willingness to go to any length to get results. By portraying the victims as criminals, Mr. Duterte can claim success, and local communities might believe things are improving. But the extrajudicial killings, though intended to provide security, instead end up provoking a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-worsening insecurity and retaliation. Once the government makes it clear that no one will face legal repercussions for extrajudicial killings, Mr. Kine of Human Rights Watch said, \u201cthen anybody with a gun and a grudge has free license to go and victimize people without worrying about the consequences.\u201d That fuels public demand for more extralegal violence to quell the problem. Eventually, the situation spirals out of control. Mr. Kine pointed to the Philippine city of Tagum on the island of Mindanao. There, the city government encouraged off-duty police officers and collaborators to murder petty criminals, including street children, in the name of being tough on crime. Once its ability to operate with impunity was established, Mr. Kine said, that death squad began engaging in contract killings for money. People who opposed the death squad, including some police officers, were deemed enemies and often targeted. The city became more dangerous and lawless, with devastating results for ordinary citizens. The real problem, Ms. Santamaria said, is not just the violence. Rather, it is the way it alters the rules of society itself: what is acceptable, and what is necessary to survive. People whose relatives have been unjustly killed see violence as a legitimate way to right that wrong, Ms. Santamaria said. Once violence becomes an acceptable means for settling disputes and exerting power, it is difficult for people to trust any other system, she added. States, locked in that escalating cycle, struggle to re-establish order. A culture of vengeful punishment takes hold, crowding out the rule of law. State officials have little standing to demand that people follow the rule of law when the state itself has been encouraging lawless violence. In Guatemala, decades of extrajudicial violence have left thousands dead, opened space for ruthless street gangs and sent tens of thousands of child refugees north in search of safety. In Colombia, vigilante \u201cself-defense\u201d groups grew, in the 1970s and \u201980s, into large paramilitary organizations. They joined with state-supported counterinsurgency groups and became major players in the country\u2019s drug trade and a party to its civil war, in which they were known for particularly gruesome attacks on civilians they perceived as enemies. This is perhaps the most worrying lesson of the social scientists\u2019 research: that it does not take evil to destroy a community\u2019s peace and safety. Rather, ordinary human desire for security, coupled with weak institutions and desperate short-term thinking, can lead a country into an escalating disaster.", "keyword": "Vigilante;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings;Rodrigo Duterte;Philippines"}
{"id": "ny0047117", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/11/27", "title": "Polio Crisis Deepens in Pakistan, With New Cases and Killings", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Pakistan\u2019s polio crisis has reached new depths this year, health officials say, intensified by a deadly mix of ruthless militant violence, large-scale refugee displacement and political chaos that has cemented the country\u2019s role as the central global incubator of a disease that other conflict-torn countries have managed to hold in check. The number of new Pakistani polio cases this year hit 260 this week , four times as many as at the same point last year, making a mockery of promises by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and other politicians from across the spectrum to halt the galloping progress of the disease. Even as domestic vaccination drives and extensive international aid have put huge numbers of anti-polio workers in the field, Pakistan\u2019s militants have seen it as an opportunity to strike at symbols of authority, portraying the workers as agents in a sinister Western plot . On Wednesday, four more health workers were gunned down, bringing the death toll among anti-polio workers to 65 since the first targeted attack in December 2012. The attackers, who struck in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, opened fire on the workers\u2019 vehicle after demanding to know if they were involved in the anti-polio campaign. Television footage showed emergency workers carrying three other wounded workers from a van that contained abandoned slippers and blood-smeared iceboxes with polio vaccines. The wounded, and three of the dead, were women, whose greater access to private households in conservative rural areas of Pakistan have put them in high demand as health workers. The attackers escaped, and there was no claim of responsibility, although a Taliban splinter group said it had carried out a gun attack near Peshawar on Monday that wounded a polio worker and a student. Polio vaccinations are \u201cdangerous to health and against Islam,\u201d a spokesman for that group, Jamaat-e-Ahrar, said after the attack, echoing longstanding claims that Western countries are using immunization to sterilize Muslim children. But the power of such conspiracy theories has been diminished by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from Gulf countries and Islamic organizations toward the immunization campaign. Many here believe the militants simply see the attacks as another way to challenge authority. \u201cIt\u2019s not just polio \u2014 they want to disrupt all government activities,\u201d said Aziz Memon, who leads Rotary International\u2019s immunization efforts in Pakistan. War and politics accelerated the surge in polio infections this year. A sweeping military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups in the North Waziristan tribal district caused at least a million civilians to flee into neighboring areas and across the border into Afghanistan. But few of the children in that outpouring of refugees had been immunized for polio, because vaccinators had been unable to reach the area, which for years has been the main target of American drone strikes. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t even an underimmunized area; it was nonimmunized,\u201d said Dr. Elias Durry, the World Health Organization\u2019s polio coordinator in Pakistan. As fleeing families reached refugee camps and then often moved beyond, polio infection rates soared, and the virus spread to new areas, including the country\u2019s largest city, Karachi. The number of districts infected by polio increased to 22 this year, from 10 before, and almost three quarters of the new cases came from the tribal districts of North Waziristan, South Waziristan and Khyber. As the disease has spread, Pakistan\u2019s political leadership has been consumed by security crises and power games. Much of the political chaos has centered on a high-stakes confrontation between Mr. Sharif and his political nemesis, Imran Khan, who since August has helped lead a protest rally in Islamabad that has demanded the prime minister\u2019s resignation and brought the government to a standstill. Mr. Khan and another protest leader, the cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri, have accused Mr. Sharif of corruption and ineptitude, even as they, in turn, have been accused of exploiting chaos for political gain. Mr. Khan intends to hold another rally in Islamabad on Sunday, offering the prospect of fresh political drama. Meanwhile, political and sectarian violence has heightened in Karachi, in the Pakistani heartland of Punjab, and in war-torn Baluchistan Province. The interlocking crises surrounding Pakistan\u2019s polio emergency have had another effect: acute embarrassment among many Pakistanis who, after years of seeking to shake off Western perceptions of their country as an incubator of global terrorism, now also find it painted as a global disease hub. Regulations introduced this year require air travelers from Pakistan of all ages to produce a certificate proving that they have been vaccinated for polio. One newspaper called the epidemic Pakistan\u2019s \u201cbadge of shame.\u201d In contrast, the other two countries where polio is endemic have recorded more modest infection rates. So far this year, Afghanistan has registered 21 new cases, many of which are a result of refugees fleeing Pakistan. And Nigeria, which is battling the Boko Haram insurgency and, more recently, a small outbreak of Ebola, has had just six cases. Meanwhile, officials say Pakistan has exported the polio virus to China, Egypt and Syria \u2014 in some cases, experts believe, via militant families traveling to the battlefields of the Middle East. In a bid to address the problem, Mr. Sharif last month constituted an emergency response committee and administered polio drops to children at a ceremony in Islamabad on Oct. 24. Immunization was an issue of \u201cutmost importance\u201d and the right of every Pakistani child, he said. Mr. Sharif said he hoped that the health authorities and international donors could use the coming six months, considered to be the low season for polio transmission, to reverse the tide of infections. Experts say that, even if militant violence continues, immunization is still possible provided there are adequate security precautions. Since the first death of a polio worker two years ago, health workers have delivered 450 million doses of vaccine, said Dr. Durry of the W.H.O. In an interview, Mazhar Nisar Sheikh, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said the virus was mostly being contained. \u201cNinety percent of cases are limited to parts of the country where security has been compromised,\u201d he said. Still, Baluchistan Province offers a stark illustration of polio\u2019s resurgence. Baluchistan had been polio-free for two years until July, when it recorded a case in Kila Abdullah, a remote district on a route to South Waziristan. Since then health officials have recorded another nine polio cases in the province \u2014 more than in Somalia, which has also suffered an outbreak this year. That caused health experts to start a targeted vaccination drive in 11 districts of Baluchistan this week, including the effort in Quetta, where the health workers were killed Wednesday. Despite the dispiriting numbers and the violence, those at the forefront of immunization efforts in Pakistan say this is one battle the country cannot afford to lose. \u201cWe are committed,\u201d said Mr. Memon, of Rotary International. \u201cThe children of this country should walk, not crawl. We promised to end this, and we will.\u201d", "keyword": "Polio;Pakistan;Vaccines Immunization;Terrorism;Obituary;Taliban;Baluchistan Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0290803", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/01/09", "title": "British Man Admits Past in Terror Cell in Yemen", "abstract": "A man who prosecutors say received military training in Yemen from Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric who was later killed by the United States in a drone strike, pleaded guilty on Friday in Manhattan to three terrorism-related counts. In 2010, prosecutors have said, the defendant, Minh Quang Pham, traveled secretly to Yemen, swore allegiance to Al Qaeda\u2019s affiliate there and also helped the group prepare its online propaganda publication, Inspire. Mr. Pham was extradited to the United States from Britain about a year ago and was scheduled for trial on Feb. 1 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. But on Friday, he pleaded guilty to providing material support to the terrorist group \u2014 Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula , or A.Q.A.P. \u2014 which carries a maximum prison term of 15 years; conspiring to receive military-type training from the group, for which he could face five years; and using a firearm in furtherance of crimes of violence, which carries a maximum life prison term and a mandatory minimum of 30 years. \u201cPham provided material support to the highest levels of A.Q.A.P.,\u201d Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Friday. Mr. Pham, who is in his early 30s, was born in Vietnam, lived in Britain since childhood, converted to Islam and is a practicing Muslim, his lawyer, Bobbi C. Sternheim, has said in court papers. Addressing the judge, Alison J. Nathan, in a soft English-accented voice, Mr. Pham admitted his guilt, saying that at the time he agreed with others to receive training from the group, \u201cI knew that A.Q.A.P. was an organization engaged in terrorist activity.\u201d Image Minh Quang Pham \u201cI entered into this agreement knowingly and willfully,\u201d he said. A prosecutor, Sean S. Buckley, told Judge Nathan that had the case gone to trial, the government would have presented proof that included Mr. Pham\u2019s own statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after he was administered his rights, in which he admitted that Mr. Awlaki taught him how to build an explosive device using household materials. \u201cAnd al-Awlaki directed Pham to return to the United Kingdom, where he was to construct and detonate the device\u201d at Heathrow Airport, in London, specifically \u201ctargeting arrivals from the United States and Israel,\u201d Mr. Buckley said. In court on Friday, Ms. Sternheim said there was \u201cno proof\u201d that Mr. Pham, after he returned to Britain in July 2011, took any steps to cause harm at Heathrow. If true, the allegation that Mr. Awlaki provided explosives training to Mr. Pham would add a new operational element to the government\u2019s case against the cleric, who in September 2011 became the first American deliberately killed in a drone strike. Prosecutors noted in court papers that A.Q.A.P. distributed a 2010 interview with Mr. Awlaki in which he urged his followers to kill American citizens and said that the man who tried to bring down an airplane on Christmas 2009, the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been one of his students. Mr. Pham is to be sentenced on April 14. The case garnered attention recently after Ms. Sternheim argued in a filing that it would be hard to find unbiased jurors for the trial because of inflammatory statements by Donald J. Trump in his Republican presidential campaign, as well as the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. \u201cThe defense believes that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to seat a truly impartial New York City jury in the current climate of Islamophobia and hatred of Muslims,\u201d Ms. Sternheim wrote. Ms. Sternheim asked that each side\u2019s lawyers be allowed 30 minutes of additional questioning, with the goal of \u201crooting out prejudice and bias\u201d among prospective jurors. Typically, federal judges in Manhattan do the questioning themselves. Mr. Bharara\u2019s office opposed the motion, which the judge had not yet ruled upon.", "keyword": "Minh Quang Pham;Terrorism;Yemen;Anwar al-Aulaqi,Anwar al-Awlaki;Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula;Great Britain;US"}
{"id": "ny0259637", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2011/01/22", "title": "Harrison Plays On, but the Fines Still Sting", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 The letter from the N.F.L. is taped to the wall beside James Harrison\u2019s locker, an olive branch that gives no solace. The N.F.L. fined Harrison, the Steelers linebacker and a leading defensive player of the year candidate, four times this season for a total of $125,000 for what it considered dangerous and banned hits to the head. The note, which came at the end of December, told Harrison that the priciest of them \u2014 $75,000 for a hit that knocked Cleveland Browns receiver Mohamed Massaquoi from an October game \u2014 was being reduced to $50,000. Harrison was unmoved. \u201cA token,\u201d Harrison said of the reduction, adding that he took no satisfaction from it. \u201cNot at all. I shouldn\u2019t have been fined a dime for that hit.\u201d Harrison became the face of the league\u2019s crackdown on hits to the head this season, an odd twist for a former defensive player of the year. In recent weeks, as the Steelers have mounted their playoff run, leading to the A.F.C. championship game Sunday against the Jets, the focus has shifted again to Harrison\u2019s play. He had 10 \u00bd sacks this season, making it the third year in a row he had at least 10 sacks, and he finished the regular season with 100 tackles. Harrison, 32, is indisputably one of the best linebackers in the N.F.L., but it is the other reputation he developed this season that troubles him still. Even as the fines have stopped, the smear on his reputation has lingered. \u201cYeah, it bothers me,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cFor the most part, all the way around, more people see and feel that I\u2019m not a dirty player as opposed to those who do. They weren\u2019t concentrating on how I played. I had 100 tackles this year, third year with 10 or more sacks. That\u2019s not something they concentrated on.\u201d Sunday, in a game in which the Steelers have made no secret of the need for more pressure on Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez \u2014 they sacked him just once in the teams\u2019 regular-season game \u2014 Harrison\u2019s play will probably be critical. At 6 feet, he is compact and fearsome, allowing his scowl to paint the public picture of his personality. He does not talk much to the news media. But Harrison is also playful about his persona. When he turned abruptly to face a reporter Thursday, he asked him, with a smile: \u201cDid I scare you? Yeah, I did.\u201d And despite the early bluster that the rules crackdown might force him to retire , Harrison said he knew there was a need to eliminate the head shots. \u201cThere\u2019s a need for rules,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t go in there and hit someone in the head like you\u2019re trying to injure someone. But you have to be able to interpret what is actually happening. When a guy is going to make a hit and he lowers his aiming point, and the guy lowers his head, and you still fine him. ...\u201d His voice trailed off, and then he said: \u201cThe receiver is going to curl up. It\u2019s not real cut and dried.\u201d Harrison then grew tired of talking about his troubles and cut off any more questions about them, demanding only topics relating to the Jets. He would leave the criticism to his teammates Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu, who have both fiercely defended Harrison and decried the N.F.L. Polamalu said player complaints about the fines had fallen on deaf ears. \u201cI think a lot of players have said a lot of things, and I guarantee he heard everything everybody said,\u201d Polamalu told reporters in November. \u201cBut he\u2019s got all the power, and that may be part of the problem, that there needs to be some type of separation of power, like our government.\u201d Later, after the crowd dispersed Thursday, Harrison motioned toward Polamalu\u2019s locker just a few feet away. \u201cTroy has been outspoken, too, but he has that soft voice,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cHe can get away with it. If I said that, they\u2019d be fining me again.\u201d", "keyword": "Steelers;Football;James Harrison"}
{"id": "ny0252028", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/11/05", "title": "Bob Forsch, Former Cardinals Pitcher, Dies at 61", "abstract": "Bob Forsch, who threw two no-hitters and won 163 games for St. Louis, more than any other Cardinals pitcher except the Hall of Famers Bob Gibson and Jesse Haines, died Thursday at his home near Tampa, Fla. He was 61. His death, which was reported on the Cardinals\u2019 Web site, came less than a week after Forsch threw the ceremonial first pitch before the seventh game of the World Series, in which the Cardinals defeated the Texas Rangers in St. Louis. No cause of death was specified. A lanky right-hander \u2014 he was 6 feet 4 inches and weighed about 200 pounds \u2014 Forsch was a durable innings-eater who became a fixture in the rotation for a Cardinals team that went to three World Series (winning once, in 1982) in his 15 years with them. A control specialist who averaged fewer than three walks per game for his career, he had neither a blazing fastball nor befuddling breaking stuff, and he was never an All-Star, but he was capable of sterling performances. He was one of fewer than 30 pitchers to have thrown more than one no-hitter. His first was against the Philadelphia Phillies in 1978; five seasons later he no-hit the Montreal Expos. Forsch\u2019s World Series record was 1-3, but his overall postseason record was 3-4, and in the 1982 National League Championship series he threw a shutout against the Atlanta Braves. Forsch was known for his savvy, tenacity and competitive fire, qualities that made him the kind of pitcher that is always in short supply: a reliable starter. In 10 seasons, he started more than 30 games; in seven he pitched more than 200 innings. He reached double figures in victories 11 times; he won at least 15 games three times; and in his best year, 1977, he won 20 and lost only 7. His career won-lost record was 168-136, with an earned run average of 3.76. Having begun his professional baseball life as a third baseman, he was also, for a pitcher, a good hitter. He slugged 12 home runs in his career and batted higher than .290 in three seasons. Like Matty Alou, the batting champion who died this week, Forsch was part of a baseball brother act. Ken Forsch, four years his senior, pitched 16 years in the big leagues, winning 114 games for the Houston Astros and the California Angels. Although their victory total, 282, trails far behind those of brother tandems like Phil and Joe Niekro (539) and Jim and Gaylord Perry (529), the Forsch brothers won more games than Dizzy and Paul Dean (200). And after Ken held the Atlanta Braves without a hit in 1979, the Forsches became the only pair of brothers in baseball history to each toss an official no-hitter. Robert Herbert Forsch was born in Sacramento on Jan. 13, 1950. He was acquired by the Cardinals in the amateur draft of 1968 and started in the organization as an infielder before beginning the transition to the mound in 1970. He made his major league debut in 1974 and pitched for the Cardinals until 1988. He finished his career with the Houston Astros the next year. For the last three seasons, he was the pitching coach for the Billings Mustangs, a minor league affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. In addition to his brother Ken, who was until recently the assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Angels, his survivors include his wife, Janice, and two daughters, Amy and Kristin.", "keyword": "Forsch Bob;Baseball;Deaths (Obituaries);St Louis Cardinals"}
{"id": "ny0159372", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/12/23", "title": "To Save Fuel, Emirates Airline Takes Polar Route", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO GRANTED, the environmental credentials of a man whose airline features in-flight showers are subject to question. Nevertheless, Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates Airline, said his airline had demonstrated that smarter preparation and flight-routing could help reduce carbon emissions in air travel. \u201cThe whole world is going in this direction\u201d in at least giving consideration to the effects of air travel on the environment, Sheik Ahmed said last week as Emirates introduced nonstop service between Dubai and San Francisco. \u201cAnd everybody should be doing more.\u201d The first Emirates airplane flying the route to San Francisco from Dubai was a Boeing 777-200LR, which landed here after a 8,100-mile flight that took 15 hours and 20 minutes. Emirates said it was the \u201cworld\u2019s first cross-polar green flight.\u201d By that, Emirates meant that the aircraft, already known for having better fuel-efficiency than older long-range planes, was routed near the North Pole to save about 2,000 gallons of carbon-emitting fuel. Making the trip required special clearances from Canada, Iceland, Russia and the United States, and from the Emirates home state of Dubai, where the plane received priority clearance for departure. There is nothing particularly innovative about airlines tracking near the North Pole to save time and fuel on long-haul flights, though the routes can be tricky because communications and navigation technology are not yet as extensive as they are for standard transoceanic flights. For decades, the North Pole routes were scarcely used, partly because of the cold war, a time when the Soviet Union was suspicious about aircraft of any type flying over its far northern airspace. With the end of the cold war, tension abated just as long-haul aircraft became available to serve the growing demand for nonstop travel between cities a half-world apart. United Airlines, for example, had more than 1,400 flights on the polar route last year, up from a dozen in 1999. Emirates is not alone among the world\u2019s airlines in promoting better environmental thinking. Continental Airlines, for example, plans to conduct a demonstration flight in Houston on Jan. 7 using a 737-800 equipped with engines designed to be powered by a special fuel blend that includes some components derived from plants. (The flight will not carry passengers.) Emirates, which depends on long-haul Boeing and Airbus jets and heavily promotes its luxurious business-class and first-class cabins on the 12- to 16-hour flights it is known for, clearly wants to position itself as a leader in the industry\u2019s incipient environmental initiatives. But what about those showers? I\u2019m referring to the latest over-the-top innovation, the recent introduction of two showers for use by first-class passengers on Emirates A380 superjumbo jets. The showers are obviously not an environmental step forward, given the additional fuel needed to carry enough water to let all 14 first-class passengers have two showers, if they want. In fact, said Andrew J. Parker, an Emirates senior vice president whose duties include the carrier\u2019s environmental affairs, first-class passengers have not been using the showers to the extent Emirates originally anticipated when it allotted 500 kilos (slightly more than half a ton) of weight for the additional water. Usually, he said, the first-class cabins have been full. But passengers \u201care using half the allotment\u201d of water. Emirates still carries the full load, but Mr. Parker said that the airline was re-evaluating the requirements and looking into ways to \u201creprocess water\u201d on board to cut down on the weight and the extra fuel required. Emirates, by the way, has three A380s in service and another 55 on order from Airbus. Sheik Ahmed said that the airline intended to fly them all configured into three classes, with no more than 500 passengers. (The A380, if flown in an all-coach configuration, is certified to carry almost 900 passengers, but none of the airlines that have ordered the plane have indicated they were considering doing that.) Meanwhile, it isn\u2019t clear whether the first-class A380 passengers have cut back on showers because of environmental concerns, or merely because they don\u2019t want to take themselves out of their private compartments and away from the free Champagne. Nor is it clear whether they might object to showering in the future with recycled water on that long flight to the other side of the world. But hey, everybody has to sacrifice.", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;Emirates Airlines;Business Travel"}
{"id": "ny0103379", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/03/18", "title": "When You Can Take the Barbecue Out of Texas", "abstract": "Can you take barbecue out of Texas and still call it Texas barbecue? A growing number of restaurateurs born or bred in Texas say you can, and they are opening establishments across America where customers can be indoctrinated into the unique tradition of Lone Star barbecue \u2014 smoked meat ordered by the pound, served on butcher paper, without sauce or utensils. While dozens of restaurants outside our borders claim to serve \u201cauthentic Texas barbecue,\u201d in most cases, the description turns out to be little more than a marketing gimmick. But several places serving legitimate Texas barbecue have popped up around the country \u2014 from Compton, Calif., to New York City \u2014 and the proprietors of these restaurants remain true to the history and techniques of Texas barbecue. Close your eyes, put on some Willie Nelson, and you might not know the difference. Bigmista\u2019s Barbecue Southern California Neil Strawder, who was raised in Galveston, started making barbecue while pursuing a more conventional career in financial management. What began as a hobby soon became an obsession as he researched cooking techniques on barbecue Web sites and eventually joined a competitive barbecue team. He turned his extracurricular activity into a legitimate business by opening Bigmista\u2019s Barbecue in 2008. Mr. Strawder now slings smoked meat at farmers markets in cities like Long Beach, El Segundo and Torrance. His wife, Phyllis, takes care of the business side, while Phyllis\u2019s stepfather, Blondie Croxton, helps out in the booth (and takes credit for Bigmista\u2019s smoked pork ribs). Although Mr. Strawder doesn\u2019t specifically characterize his barbecue as Texas-style \u2014 he calls it \u201cBigmista style\u201d \u2014 his methods appear to be influenced by the regional technique, starting with a signature beef brisket smoked for 12 hours. Various locations. Bigmista.com . Bludso\u2019s BBQ Compton, Calif. Kevin Bludso was born and raised in Compton \u2014 a predominantly Hispanic and black community in South Central Los Angeles \u2014 to parents who moved there from Texas. During the summers of his youth, Mr. Bludso\u2019s family sent him to Corsicana, where he worked for his grandmother, who ran a small barbecue joint. At the time, he viewed the summer job as back-breaking work, but Mr. Bludso admits he soaked up everything his grandmother taught him about smoking meat. After leaving a career as a corrections officer, he began catering full time and eventually opened Bludso\u2019s BBQ in 2008. The offerings here reflect an East Texas-style of barbecue with big portions of meaty ribs and brisket accompanied by traditional Southern sides of collard greens and potato salad . A number of Southern-style barbecue restaurants can be found in this area of Los Angeles, and Bludso\u2019s adds a proud East Texas flavor to the mix. 811 South Long Beach Boulevard, Compton. (310) 637-1342, bludsosbbqandcatering.com Hill Country Barbecue Washington and New York Marc Glosserman has deep roots in Lockhart, a k a, the barbecue capital of Texas. His grandfather was a former mayor, and his father grew up there before moving to Austin to go to college. Although his parents eventually relocated to Washington, where Mr. Glosserman grew up, the family frequently returned to Lockhart. It was during one of those family trips in 2003 that Mr. Glosserman, who was working as a high-tech executive, grabbed lunch at one of the state\u2019s most storied barbecue places: Kreuz Market. A discussion with Rick Schmidt, a friend and the owner of Kreuz, over a plate of barbecue convinced Mr. Glosserman that a career change was in order. He eventually moved to New York City, and in June 2007 opened Hill Country Barbecue Market in the Flatiron District of Manhattan to critical praise. He branched out to Washington in March 2011. Plaudits from East Coast critics are nice, but what do his Texas peers think of his big-city barbecue ventures? \u201cI don\u2019t want to speak for them,\u201d Mr. Glosserman said. \u201cBut I\u2019ll just say that the highest compliment we can get is when a Texan says we make great barbecue.\u201d New York City: 30 West 26th Street, (212) 255-4544. Washington: 410 Seventh Street NW, (202) 556-2050, hillcountryny.com . Podnah\u2019s Pit Barbecue Portland, Ore. Rodney Muirhead, Podnah\u2019s pitmaster, grew up in Waxahachie, attended Texas A&M University and went to culinary school in New York. But it was a series of less-than-secure high-tech jobs that led him to Portland. After being laid off in 2004, Mr. Muirhead started smoking Central Texas-style barbecue and selling it at farmers markets under the name L.O.W. (Laid Off Workers) BBQ. He soon developed a devoted following in the Pacific Northwest city, prompting him to open a brick-and-mortar location in 2006. He changed the name to Podnah\u2019s but did not change the menu, which features the trinity of Texas barbecue \u2014 trimmed spareribs, white oak-smoked brisket and spicy sausage. His food has never been a hard sell in Portland: \u201cThe city\u2019s been great,\u201d Mr. Muirhead said. \u201cNot only is the population diverse \u2014 there are actually quite a few Texans \u2014 but this is the quintessential food city. Portlanders love authentic food of any type.\u201d 1625 NE Killingsworth Street, (503) 281-3700, podnahspit.com", "keyword": "Barbecue;Restaurants;Meat;Cooking and Cookbooks;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0283034", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/07/07", "title": "Agency Clears Mayor de Blasio and Nonprofit of Campaign Finance Violations", "abstract": "The New York City Campaign Finance Board on Wednesday issued a blunt critique of a nonprofit closely linked to Mayor Bill de Blasio that has used unlimited donations to advance his political agenda, denouncing the group\u2019s behavior while clearing it and the mayor of any campaign finance violations. The decision briefly soothed one irritant for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, whose administration is facing several different investigations at once, including federal and local inquiries into the nonprofit\u2019s fund-raising activities. Yet the board appeared to find much that was troublesome, if not illegal, in the behavior of the group, the Campaign for One New York, which has amassed millions of dollars in donations to push for City Hall initiatives, including universal prekindergarten and an affordable housing policy. In a statement at a public meeting, the board said that the nonprofit\u2019s fund-raising \u201cplainly raises serious policy and perception issues,\u201d exposing the limitations of the city\u2019s current campaign finance laws, which strictly curb or ban contributions to political candidates to \u201creduce the appearance that influence can be bought or sold.\u201d Calling on the City Council to pass legislation to tighten limits on contributions to nonprofits that are tied to specific politicians, the board added that \u201cit defies common sense that limits that work so well during the campaign should be set aside once the candidate has assumed elected office.\u201d The heavy skepticism that saturated the board\u2019s report reflected the dismay of government watchdogs, who have characterized the Campaign for One New York\u2019s license to operate outside of campaign finance limits as a major intrusion of money into politics \u2014 an expansion of \u201cpay-to-play culture,\u201d as Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union, put it on Wednesday. More than 95 percent of the funds raised by the Campaign for One New York, which shut down in March amid increasing scrutiny of its finances, would have been banned under the city\u2019s normal campaign finance laws for political candidates, the board found. Most of the gifts far outstripped the $4,950 cap on individual donations to candidates, including a $350,000 donation from the American Federation of Teachers and $500,000 in two contributions from 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East. These were just three among at least a dozen six-figure contributions. Other gifts came from companies or people who did business with the city, including a $100,000 contribution from Two Trees Management Company, a real estate developer that had negotiated with the de Blasio administration over redeveloping the Domino Sugar Factory site in Brooklyn. Mr. de Blasio, who has raised money for the Campaign for One New York, has argued that the activities of the nonprofits tied to him are aboveboard because they voluntarily disclose all of their contributions, despite not being required to do so. \u201cIt\u2019s not dark money if it\u2019s disclosed,\u201d he said in February. But the board said the nonprofit\u2019s disclosures fell short of being \u201ccomprehensive\u201d and fully accessible to the public. On Wednesday, a spokesman for the mayor, Eric Phillips, said that Mr. de Blasio had been a \u201clifelong advocate\u201d of campaign finance reform, though he did not touch on the specifics of the legislation the Campaign Finance Board and watchdogs have suggested. \u201cHe looks forward to continuing the work to help get big money out of politics and to make sure everyone is playing by the same rules,\u201d Mr. Phillips said. The board\u2019s actions were far more muted than its words. Responding to a February complaint from Common Cause New York, a watchdog group, the board determined that because the nonprofit\u2019s activities on behalf of the mayor had focused on his policy goals and took place more than three years before the election, there was not enough information to conclude that the organization had coordinated with the 2017 campaign. The board also clarified rules governing nonprofit advocacy groups that are affiliated with politicians. If such groups coordinate with a politician\u2019s campaign to promote the politician in the run-up to an election, anything they spend will be treated as a donation to the candidate and subject to normal campaign finance limits. Run by former advisers to the mayor\u2019s 2013 campaign, the Campaign for One New York functioned as a policy advocacy group, not a shadow re-election committee. But it checked a few of the other boxes the board outlined on Wednesday: Mr. de Blasio has helped raise funds for the group, and most of its spending has been on political consultants who routinely advise him. A spokesman for the Campaign for One New York, Dan Levitan \u2014 who doubles as one of those consultants \u2014 said the group was \u201cpleased\u201d with the decision. \u201cThe Campaign for One New York was formed to advocate for New York City\u2019s progressive policy agenda,\u201d Mr. Levitan said in a statement. \u201cIt never engaged in any election campaign activity for any candidate and shut down more than a year and a half before next year\u2019s election.\u201d But government watchdogs said the mayor and the nonprofit won a narrow victory on narrow grounds. \u201cI\u2019m looking at the philosophy underlying the campaign finance law, not whether this dollar or that dollar was spent for campaign purposes,\u201d said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. \u201cDon\u2019t give the appearance that you\u2019re selling out. It doesn\u2019t sit right.\u201d", "keyword": "Bill de Blasio;Campaign finance;Campaign for One New York;Campaign Finance Board NYC;NYC;Politics"}
{"id": "ny0177606", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/09/21", "title": "Mets Waste 9th-Inning Comeback With Collapse in the 10th", "abstract": "MIAMI, Sept. 20 \u2014 After the Mets squandered two three-run leads and suffered a devastating 8-7 defeat in 10 innings to the Florida Marlins on Thursday, closer Billy Wagner spoke with bandages around his torso and a concerned look on his face. \u201cWish and hope and pray,\u201d Wagner said. \u201cThat\u2019s all I can do.\u201d He was speaking specifically of the back spasms that kept him out of the game in the ninth inning when he should have been protecting a three-run lead. But his words applied to his reeling team as a whole. Since leading the National League East by seven games on Sept. 12, the Mets have lost six of their last seven games and have seen their lead over the second-place Phillies trimmed to a game and a half with 10 left in the regular season. After the Mets rallied for four runs in the top of the ninth to take a 7-4 lead, the Marlins tied the score, 7-7, in the ninth against relievers Pedro Feliciano and Jorge Sosa, then won the game in the 10th on Dan Uggla\u2019s double off the left-field against Sosa. Tom Glavine, the Mets\u2019 starter, went only five innings, giving up 4 runs on 11 hits, including a three-run blast by Miguel Cabrera that erased the first Mets lead. \u201cA lot of crazy stuff happening,\u201d Glavine said. \u201cSome of it, you can\u2019t believe. We\u2019ve lost every which way. It\u2019s hard to believe it\u2019s happening.\u201d No team has ever had such a large lead so late in the season and failed to make the playoffs. Should the Mets relinquish first place to the Phillies, the Mets could still qualify for the wild-card berth, although they trail the San Diego Padres, the current wild-card leader, by a game. The injuries have been mounting for the Mets. Also missing Friday\u2019s game was Luis Castillo, the second baseman, with a sore knee. Carlos Delgado, the veteran first baseman, hopes to return this weekend after missing more than two weeks. But Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, the veteran starting pitcher, is out indefinitely with a foot injury. Moises Alou, the veteran left fielder, is playing with a sore quadriceps and Paul Lo Duca, the catcher, has a sore right hand. Not all the Mets problems are physical. They seem to be emotionally fragile. For the third time in seven games, a player was ejected for arguing with a home plate umpire. This time it was Lastings Milledge, who started in right field. \u201cI\u2019m not commenting right now,\u201d Milledge said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a good time.\u201d One of the big hits for the Mets was a bases-loaded double by Marlon Anderson, pinch-hitting in the ninth with one out against Kevin Gregg, the Florida closer. Three runs scored and the Mets led, 6-4. Carlos Beltr\u00e1n drove in another run with a single. \u201cI was saying, \u2018Well, we\u2019ve got this one,\u2019 \u201d Beltr\u00e1n said, recalling his mood at that moment. \u201cWe didn\u2019t. They beat us.\u201d Among the strange doings was an incident before the bottom of the eighth when Aaron Heilman, the fifth of seven Mets pitchers, was warming up. A ball sailed out of the stands from behind the Mets\u2019 dugout and hit him on the left wrist. \u201cIt took my by surprise,\u201d Heilman said. \u201cIt hit me square.\u201d Curiously, two of the first six hits given up by Glavine were to Dontrelle Willis, Florida\u2019s starter, and both were somewhat unusual. In the third, Willis reached first on a bunt single that landed on the left side of the infield between Glavine and third baseman David Wright. In the fifth, Willis doubled on what appeared to be a routine grounder to first base. But the ball hit the bag and caromed away from Jeff Conine and out into right field. Willis scored on a double by Hanley Ram\u00edrez to cut the Mets\u2019 lead to 3-1. The rally did not end there. After Ram\u00edrez made the first out while trying to steal third, the Marlins put two more men on with singles. Then Cabrera hit a 2-2 pitch over the left-field fence, putting Florida ahead by 4-3. It was the fifth consecutive Marlins hit. Glavine finished the fifth inning with his pitch total at 107. Joe Smith relieved him to start the sixth. The Mets had taken a 2-0 lead in the first after Willis hit Milledge and Wright with pitches. After Beltr\u00e1n reached first on a fielder\u2019s choice, Alou drove home two runs with a two-out double. The hit gave Alou a 24-game hitting streak, the longest of his career and the longest in the league this season. He is playing despite pain in his left quadriceps. In the ninth, against Gregg, Lo Duca led off with a double and Carlos G\u00f3mez ran for him. When Rub\u00e9n Gotay grounded to shortstop, Ram\u00edrez threw to third base, G\u00f3mez arriving ahead of the tag. Shawn Green walked to load the bases with no outs and the top of the batting order coming up. Reyes struck out swinging. Next came Anderson, a pinch-hitter, who hit a 3-2 pitch off the right-field wall for a three-run double. After the game, players shuffled back and forth from the training room and some filled plates with food. In the manager\u2019s office, Willie Randolph sat behind a desk and spoke so softly that few in the room could hear him. \u201cWe\u2019ll get them tomorrow, guys,\u201d he said. \u201cTough loss.\u201d Around the lockers, General Manager Omar Minaya circulated, smiling at some players, patting others on the back, making light conversation with a few more. On the wall, the digital clock clicked toward midnight.", "keyword": "New York Mets;Florida Marlins;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0004062", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/04/28", "title": "Australian Billionaire Plans New Political Party", "abstract": "SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 An Australian billionaire who is perhaps best known for his efforts to build a seaworthy replica of the Titanic says he will use his vast fortune to form a new political party to compete in federal elections scheduled for September. The tycoon, Clive Palmer, had been a major financial supporter of the conservative Liberal-National Party, from which he resigned last year amid quarrels about his political aspirations. Mr. Palmer says his newly minted United Australia Party, which he announced at a news conference on Friday, will be a serious challenger rather than a vanity project. \u201cI\u2019m running to be the prime minister of Australia,\u201d Mr. Palmer told reporters. \u201cI am standing because I think I can offer better service to the community than anyone else.\u201d Mr. Palmer is a major player in Australia\u2019s natural resource-driven economy. He owns considerable mining assets as well as a nickel refinery that he bought from the mining giant BHP Billiton and large coal and iron ore deposits in the states of Queensland and Western Australia. He made international headlines this year when he unveiled his plans for Titanic II , a $200-million replica of the doomed ocean liner that will be equipped with high-tech engines and modern amenities like air-conditioning. Mr. Palmer says that the ship, which will be built by China\u2019s state-owned CSC Jinling Shipyard, could make its maiden voyage as early as 2016. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the first woman to serve in that post in Australia, has seen her ratings plummet since January, when she announced that federal elections would be held in September. The unusually early announcement kicked off an election season that has been bruising and marked by infighting in Ms. Gillard\u2019s Labor Party, and it remains to be seen what impact Mr. Palmer\u2019s announcement will have on the race. Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition Liberal-National coalition, is widely expected to become the next prime minister, but Mr. Palmer\u2019s deep pockets and conservative stance on issues like climate change and taxes could steal crucial votes from Mr. Abbott, especially in Mr. Palmer\u2019s home state, Queensland. The deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop, urged conservatives not to jeopardize the coalition\u2019s chances by splintering the vote. \u201cIf you want to get rid of the Labor government, if you want to get rid of the waste and incompetence and inability to stop the boats, then you have to vote for the coalition,\u201d she said in an interview with Sky News, referring to the rickety boats used by asylum seekers making the perilous crossing from Indonesia to the Australian territory of Christmas Island. \u201cIt\u2019s got to be a vote for the Liberal Party and the National Party,\u201d Ms. Bishop said, \u201cThat\u2019s how you get rid of this government.\u201d The Labor Party, however, seemed to welcome the announcement, which has the potential to at least partly reverse its flagging fortunes. \u201cI think pretty clearly anyone who votes for a Clive Palmer-led party wasn\u2019t a former Labor supporter, they\u2019ll be a former L.N.P. supporter,\u201d Anthony Albanese, the infrastructure and transportation minister, told the newspaper The Australian . \u201cThat\u2019s his niche market,\u201d Mr. Albanese said. \u201cIf the far-right want to fight with the not-so-far-right in Queensland, then good luck to them.\u201d", "keyword": "Clive Palmer;Australia;Election;Politics"}
{"id": "ny0271638", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/05/20", "title": "BASF Should Steer Clear of Bidding for Monsanto", "abstract": "There is one thing the shareholders of the chemical company BASF should fear more than consolidation between its German rival Bayer and the American seed maker Monsanto: their own board wading in with a counterbid. Bayer\u2019s bid for Monsanto puts BASF\u2019s chief executive, Kurt Bock, on the spot. With agricultural revenue of 5.8 billion euros ($6.5 billion), BASF is one of the world\u2019s big players in an industry where everyone seems to be enthusiastically coupling. Think of Dow Chemical\u2019s merger with DuPont, and Syngenta\u2019s planned takeover by ChemChina. Only BASF would be left on the shelf. Image Kurt Bock, the chief executive of BASF. Credit Uwe Anspach/European Pressphoto Agency Moreover, a Bayer-Monsanto tie-up may put BASF\u2019s collaboration with the Americans at risk. BASF and Monsanto work together on research and development in plant biotechnology, giving a strong reason, perhaps, to spoil Bayer\u2019s plans. Yet the math of a BASF counterbid would be a stretch. A 30 percent sweetener on Monsanto\u2019s undisturbed share price would mean an interloper paying around $51 billion. That\u2019s a premium equivalent to $12 billion. Jefferies analysts estimate that BASF could generate around $720 million of annual cost synergies from merging with Monsanto by 2020, but their $5.4 billion net present value \u2014 what they would be worth as a lump sum today \u2014 falls far short of justifying such generosity. By leveraging up to 3.5 times the combined entities\u2019 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, BASF could comfortably take on only about $30 billion of new debt. Unlike BASF, Bayer sells seeds, which suggests greater room for synergies. Yet Bayer\u2019s chief executive, Werner Baumann, is already struggling to persuade his shareholders that an offer for the American seed group makes sense, even as his company\u2019s shares have fallen 10 percent in a week. Mr. Bock sat on his hands while other potential merger targets like Syngenta and DuPont were snapped up. He can afford to do it again.", "keyword": "Mergers and Acquisitions;Pharmaceuticals;Bayer;BASF;Monsanto"}
{"id": "ny0015651", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/10/16", "title": "Resurgent Wilson Is at Cutting Edge of Baseball\u2019s Beard Movement", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 When the bullpen gates opened and Brian Wilson, bushy black beard and all, made his way to the mound in Game 3, the capacity Dodger Stadium crowd \u2014 itself dotted with dozens of synthetic bushy black beards \u2014 roared with delight. Never mind that the scene had shifted 400 miles to the south from the edge of McCovey Cove. Or that it was the eighth inning and not the ninth. It was like 2010 again. When Wilson anchored the back end of a devastating bullpen that season, the freaky, funky Giants rolled to their first World Series title since moving west. After torn elbow ligaments relegated him to cheerleader status when they won again last year, Wilson has recovered enough to solidify the Dodgers\u2019 bullpen with the same ruthless efficiency he had as a closer. With Wilson once again a major presence in the playoffs and the hirsute Red Sox battling for the American League title, there is the potential for this year\u2019s World Series to turn into, well, a hair-raising one. The Red Sox took the lead in their series with Detroit on Tuesday when Mike Napoli, with a beard resembling a Confederate general\u2019s, belted a home run that delivered Boston\u2019s 1-0 victory. Fear the beard, indeed. Wilson\u2019s hair, quirky personality and interesting observations have somewhat obscured just how good he has been in the playoffs. Going into Tuesday\u2019s game, he had pitched 162/3 innings in his postseason career without allowing an earned run. Even if his fastball no longer tops out at 100 miles an hour, he allowed no runs through the first three games of the National League Championship Series. After a leadoff single to Jon Jay on Monday, Wilson\u2019s late-moving fastball caught Kolten Wong looking at a third strike, and his cutter did the same to Matt Carpenter. In between, he induced Adron Chambers into a forceout. \u201cThe regular season is more or less an audition,\u201d Wilson said after Monday\u2019s victory cut the Cardinals\u2019 series lead to two games to one. \u201cThis is the show. This is where things count. You bring your A game in October and it\u2019s final.\u201d The Red Sox may have grown their beards to foster camaraderie after enduring their share of dysfunction the previous two seasons. Eventually, the beards acquired a certain mojo. Wilson grew his for the same reason he rips off the sleeves and collars of his T-shirts, and has intermittently worn a Mohawk since the age of 7 \u2014 because he can. He grew a beard earlier in his career, but it was not one that anyone noticed. And when he was sent to the minors, Wilson figured it was not appropriate to keep it. Until later, when it was. When Wilson was told recently that Houston Rockets forward James Harden, whose beard is the N.B.A.\u2019s most prominent, had wanted to shave it off at one point but could not, he nodded in agreement. \u201cI think that would be time vested,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cWhether it would be a person, a place an idea or a natural part of you, you become attached.\u201d The Cardinals\u2019 injured reliever Jason Motte has an impressively unkempt beard. But Joe Kelly, the rookie who had a strong start for St. Louis in the series opener, has a playoff growth that is somewhere between stubble and a beard. He laughed at the thought of taking the mound with a growth of Wilsonian proportions. \u201cThat\u2019s a funny question,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cIt\u2019s taken a couple weeks for this. I would probably never know how that felt because my facial hair won\u2019t grow that good.\u201d The Dodgers under Joe Torre did not allow beards or long hair, even requiring Manny Ramirez to trim his dreadlocks. Don Mattingly, though, had no such restrictions when he succeeded Torre. No doubt he remembers the losing battle he fought as a Yankee player with George Steinbrenner to keep his mustache and long hair. As for what the Boss would have thought of these playoffs, Mattingly said, \u201cWell, I\u2019m sure as long as Wilson wasn\u2019t on the Yankees, I\u2019m sure he\u2019d be fine with it.\u201d The Yankees\u2019 policy was once the standard throughout baseball. The former Dodgers great Don Newcombe, dapperly dressed in a suit and fedora, chuckled at how appearances have changed. He and his former Dodgers teammates would tease Roy Campanella when he showed up each year at spring training with a mustache. It would be gone the next day. \u201cSome of the beards are outlandish, but if a player wants it and the manager is O.K. with it, who cares?\u201d said Newcombe, at 87 still a regular at Dodger Stadium. Then he expressed curiosity about what would happen if Wilson were to join the Yankees. \u201cI\u2019d like to be alive to see that,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Baseball;Dodgers;Brian Wilson;Red Sox;Beards and Mustaches"}
{"id": "ny0134688", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/04/27", "title": "Worry on Athletic Turf Prompts Some Digging", "abstract": "Health officials are still trying to figure out whether the lead found in some artificial grass poses a serious health hazard for children who play on the fields. But even as testing and analysis continue, some officials in the New York region have torn up decade-old fields and laid down new lead-free synthetic surfaces. Others have decided that the lead does not pose an immediate health risk and are leaving their fields alone for now. In New Jersey, where health officials this month raised the issue of lead in the nylon fibers of synthetic turf, fields in Ewing, Hoboken and Newark are being replaced. The College of New Jersey in Ewing started ripping up the surface of its football field last week and hopes to lay down lead-free turf before commencement next month. In Newark, where lead was found in artificial grass at a soccer field, city workers have started laying down a new synthetic surface. In Hoboken, Mayor David Roberts said the City Council would vote on Tuesday on an emergency measure to rip up the surface of the waterfront soccer field at Frank Sinatra Park and replace it with a lead-free synthetic surface. The field has been closed since April 14, when state health officials revealed that tests had found lead in the fibers. Mr. Roberts said the city did its own tests and found the lead was not coming loose from the fibers, but decided it would be best to replace the turf anyway. \u201cSomeone would have to literally consume some of the grass fiber\u201d to get enough lead to become sick, Mr. Roberts said. Four children who played there have been tested for lead at Hoboken University Hospital and none was found to have abnormally high levels, Mr. Roberts said. Concerns about lead surfaced this month as the result of testing done in 2007 by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and federal health officials. They were sent to investigate the presence of lead in a contaminated scrapyard in the Ironbound section of Newark. When investigators saw children playing on the St. Charles Street athletic fields nearby, they feared the lead might have been blown there and they took samples. The samples revealed high levels of lead. But further testing showed the source was not the scrapyard but fibers of the artificial turf on the field. Health officials notified the city of Newark and went on to collect turf fiber samples from 12 other fields around the state. Results showed that 10 of the fields\u2019 surfaces that were made from polyethylene had low or undetectable levels of lead. However, two fields with turf made of the same kind of nylon fibers as the field in Newark had lead levels 10 times higher than acceptable state standards. The lead found in the turf was traced back to lead chromate pigments used to color the material green. If the turf fibers degrade because of age and exposure to the sun, they can release a dust containing lead. Health officials say that if a child\u2019s hand touches the dust, it could then be transferred to the child\u2019s mouth. New Jersey health officials are conducting further tests to determine how readily the lead could be absorbed by the body. A spokeswoman for the health department said the results of those tests were expected to be released next month. There has been no rush to replace synthetic turf elsewhere. Nancy Clark, assistant commissioner of New York City\u2019s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the city had identified one field covered in the same kind of nylon turf that New Jersey health officials determined was manufactured with lead. Samples of the turf at the field, at Chelsea Park on 27th Street near 10th Avenue, showed the fibers did contain lead. But subsequent dust samples \u2014 similar to the kind of tests that would be done inside a home to determine whether lead paint dust was present \u2014 showed no hazard. \u201cWe determined that the lead was still embedded in the fibers and had not been reduced to dust that would be accessible to kids by hand or mouth,\u201d Ms. Clark said. The turf will not be replaced. State health officials in Connecticut and New York said they were monitoring the findings from New Jersey but had no immediate plans to conduct their own tests. Although tests by the New Jersey health department have so far been inconclusive about the level of risk that lead in the turf fibers represented, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has started a broad investigation of lead in artificial turf. But Julie Vallese, director of public affairs for the commission, said: \u201cThe presence of lead is not enough for the agency, under our jurisdiction and statutes, to determine that there\u2019s a risk. The lead needs to be accessible at a level of exposure that over a period of time would cause a health risk to children.\u201d The benefits of synthetic turf over grass are obvious. Once installed, the surface never has to be mowed or watered; it has a life of about 10 years and can stand up to prolonged use throughout the year; and it does not have to be fertilized or sprayed with pesticides. Officials find that the initial cost of the fields is often recovered by the savings within a few years. Manufacturers, concerned that questions of health could hurt sales, point out that since synthetic turf was introduced about 40 years ago there have been no reported cases of any athlete getting lead poisoning or a disease linked to exposure to lead. \u201cSynthetic turf poses no health risks, to our perspective, if the chromate is contained within the fibers,\u201d said Michael Dennis, chairman of GeneralSports Venue, the company that is replacing the turf at the Newark soccer field. Still, decisions by local authorities to rip up fields contaminated with lead raise questions and reinforce the convictions of some people who have long been opposed to using synthetic surfaces in place of the real thing. Nancy O. Alderman, president of Environment and Human Health Inc., a nonprofit environmental advocacy group in North Haven, Conn., said that new concerns about lead have momentarily overshadowed longstanding issues about the scorching heat on some artificial fields and the contaminants from ground-up rubber tire granules spread on top of the synthetic turf as a cushion for athletes. \u201cThese issues certainly have a lot of parents around the country concerned and have really pitted parents against school districts, towns or athletic coaches who seem to be less concerned about it than parents,\u201d Ms. Alderman said.", "keyword": "Lead;Hazardous and Toxic Substances"}
{"id": "ny0290295", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/01/10", "title": "Challenging Uber, Lyft Bets on a Road Wide Enough for Two", "abstract": "The word \u201cmonopoly\u201d has a distinctly nefarious ring to it, conjuring up images of thuggish industrialists in smoky rooms, scheming to undermine their rivals. Yet in Silicon Valley, it\u2019s not at all uncommon for one company to dominate a particular field. Google is the runaway leader in online search. Facebook is the largest social network in the world by a wide margin. Amazon is far and away the biggest e-commerce site. Even among so-called unicorns \u2014 private start-ups worth $1 billion or more \u2014 de facto monopolies are already the norm. As the technology writer Om Malik argued in The New Yorker recently, \u201cMost competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner.\u201d Airbnb dominates the apartment rental market, Snapchat is the big player in ephemeral messaging, and Spotify stands out as the major streaming music library. And when it comes to on-demand ride services, Uber, the most valuable private technology company in the world, is the clear leader. But while market dominance is hard to break, that doesn\u2019t stop upstarts from trying. In the case of Uber, it is Lyft that is doing its best to keep up. On Monday, Lyft raised an additional $1 billion from investors including General Motors, increasing its total fund-raising to $2 billion. At the same time, it announced it was developing software for self-driving cars, and teaming up with G.M. to put more drivers on the road. These moves are part of Lyft\u2019s bid to distinguish itself and avoid being muscled aside by the runaway market leader, an all-too-common experience for technology companies. \u201cWe\u2019re gaining share in the United States,\u201d said John Zimmer, Lyft\u2019s president and co-founder. \u201cThat\u2019s not what happens when one player has a complete monopoly.\u201d Regardless of whether Lyft and Uber can both thrive, or if there is only one big winner in the booming ride-hailing industry, dominance in and of itself is not illegal. Problems arise only when a company \u201cunreasonably restrains competition\u201d or gains and holds power \u201cthrough improper conduct,\u201d according to the Federal Trade Commission\u2019s definition of monopolization . Indeed, there is a line of thinking that celebrates monopolies. In a unanimous decision from 2004, the Supreme Court said the ability to create a monopoly was a powerful incentive that should be protected. \u201cThe mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system,\u201d Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in that opinion. \u201cThe opportunity to charge monopoly prices \u2014 at least for a short period \u2014 is what attracts \u2018business acumen\u2019 in the first place; it induces risk-taking that produces innovation and economic growth.\u201d In the book \u201cZero to One,\u201d which he wrote with Blake Masters, the investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel offers tips on how to create monopolies, arguing that once achieved, they lead to more innovation. \u201cMonopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate,\u201d he writes. \u201cThen monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can\u2019t dream of.\u201d And regulators have not been cracking down on Silicon Valley. Given how many big technology companies loom large in their respective markets, there have been relatively few big antitrust actions brought against tech giants. \u201cThis is different from the old monopolies of the industrial age,\u201d Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, said of technology companies. Unlike United States Steel or Standard Oil, two of corporate history\u2019s biggest brutes, today\u2019s tech monopolies are rarely the exclusive provider of an essential commodity. Instead, many achieve their initial dominance by distinguishing themselves in a crowded marketplace, then rapidly taking market share thanks to the power of network effects \u2014 that is, the more people use a service, the more valuable that service becomes to other people, who join in and make the service all the more popular. Network effects helped Google, Facebook and Amazon run away from their competitors, and are helping Uber today. Google wasn\u2019t the first search engine, Facebook wasn\u2019t the first social network, and Amazon wasn\u2019t the first to sell goods online. There are still many other sites for search, social and e-commerce. But despite an array of options, users keep coming back to the market leaders. Image Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer who has battled Microsoft and Google, at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He argues that tech companies have bought their way to dominance. Credit Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times Some argue, however, that the regulatory framework needs to adjust for a new kind of market dominance. \u201c The underlying problem here is that antitrust regulators are only looking at consumer welfare,\u201d Mr. Reich said. \u201cThey aren\u2019t looking at the long-term potential for total dominance of a network, the possibility of predatory behavior once a technology giant becomes entrenched, or political power.\u201d (European antitrust laws are more expansive than those in the United States, resulting in continuing actions against Google and other big tech companies.) Along with network effects, another hallmark of today\u2019s tech monopolies is that, perhaps fearing obsolescence, they diversify. While Microsoft still makes its Windows and Office software, it also owns Skype and has a big video gaming business. Google is now a subsidiary of Alphabet, a new parent company that is also home to a health care company, a self-driving-cars division and a venture capital firm. Amazon is expanding its cloud computing and streaming-media businesses. And Facebook has diversified into messaging with WhatsApp, photos with Instagram, and virtual reality with Oculus Rift. This, too, creates challenges for regulators. When mergers and acquisitions are part of the natural life cycle of start-ups and venture capital, it isn\u2019t easy to block deals that might hypothetically reduce competition down the road. As a result, regulators have blessed many acquisitions that, to critics, appear to be deeply anticompetitive. Gary Reback, a lawyer who helped prompt a landmark antitrust investigation into Microsoft and is now pursuing Google in Europe, makes the case that Google bought its way to dominance in online advertising through the acquisition of DoubleClick, bought its leadership in mobile by purchasing Android and bought its strong mapping franchise in the deal for Waze. Similarly, Facebook bought two of its nearest rivals, WhatsApp and Instagram. If any of those deals had been blocked, Mr. Reback argues, behemoths like Google and Facebook might today be facing more concerted competition. \u201cOnce one of these companies gets a monopoly, it\u2019s easy to spread the monopoly to adjacent markets by acquisition,\u201d Mr. Reback said. \u201cYou would think antitrust enforcers would know this by now.\u201d While monopolies in the tech industry are perhaps easier than ever to achieve, industry experts contend they are also more vulnerable than ever before. The advent of the smartphone and widespread access to broadband Internet connectivity have democratized access to creative new technologies. \u201cSun Microsystems. EMC. Cisco. All these were considered the dominant market players in their category at the time,\u201d said Rich Wong, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners. \u201cThen the vast majority of them got whacked by this thing called the cloud.\u201d And of course, billions of people browse the web without Google, use other social networking apps besides Facebook, and shop on websites besides Amazon. Though no upstarts have replaced them yet, none are immune to disruption. As for Uber, if it\u2019s not a monopoly already, it is the giant in the ride-hailing market, at least in the United States. One rival, Sidecar, shut down last month, and Lyft is its last meaningful competitor on a national scale. (Uber faces a tougher road abroad, where it is tangling with regulators in Europe, recently withdrew from Frankfurt and is fighting against entrenched rivals in China and other international markets.) As the underdog, Lyft is trying to put more drivers on the road and acquire new users. Like Uber, the company is private, and neither shares much information about performance. But Mr. Zimmer said the company was quickly increasing market share in the United States. He also sees the on-demand ride business as different from search or social media and more like telecommunications companies, where several big competitors can compete on service. \u201cJust like AT&T and Verizon need three bars of coverage,\u201d he said, \u201cwe get down to two to three minutes of wait time for a vehicle to arrive. Once it gets to that point, there\u2019s no difference in behavior between services. That\u2019s when you compete on experience.\u201d Still, Lyft will be hard pressed to unseat Uber. \u201cThe network effects hold competition at stiff arm\u2019s length,\u201d said Steve Cheney, an entrepreneur and co-founder of Estimote, a micro-location platform for mobile developers. Or perhaps the ride-hailing market is big enough for both Uber and Lyft. Monopolies don\u2019t necessarily mean there is no competition whatsoever. While a company like Uber may take a huge lead in market share, others, like Lyft, may still have room to profit and even prosper. Even Google has not managed to squash every other search engine. \u201cMicrosoft has a decent search business. A lot of Yahoo\u2019s profits still come from searches on Yahoo properties,\u201d said Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which has investments in WhatsApp and Airbnb. \u201cIt\u2019s more of a \u2018winner takes most\u2019 than a \u2018winner takes all\u2019 phenomenon.\u201d Should that be the case in the ride-hailing industry, Uber and Lyft may become something truly competitive by Silicon Valley standards: a duopoly.", "keyword": "Lyft;Uber;Competition law;Car Service"}
{"id": "ny0059576", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/08/26", "title": "On Long Island, Tiny Plots at Montauk Shores Selling for Close to $1 Million", "abstract": "MONTAUK, N.Y. \u2014 When they were growing up in the 1970s and \u201980s, Cherie and Merry Doughan spent their summers at Montauk Shores, a mobile home park that is about as far east as you can live on the East End of Long Island and still have a roof over your head. Only the Montauk Association Houses, where Andy Warhol and Dick Cavett summered, and the lighthouse keeper\u2019s place lie beyond. \u201cIt was the Wild West back then,\u201d Cherie Doughan said. \u201cOr I guess you\u2019d call it the Wild East. People sure knew how to party.\u201d Both sisters fondly recall the bathtub their father, Alpha, had found who knows where. It sat crookedly on the lawn in front of their white and beige Liberty mobile home, and their father would regularly fill it with suds and climb in with a case of beer or a big jug of Gallo wine. He would invite passers-by to join him for a drink, and many obliged, splashing in beside him. Image The view from a mobile home for sale at Montauk Shores. Credit Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times The tub is gone, replaced by a deck overlooking the Atlantic, but otherwise the home, 12 feet by 48 feet, is almost unchanged since it was trucked in in 1977. With great hesitation and sadness, the sisters are giving it up. \u201cIt was dad\u2019s legacy,\u201d said Merry Doughan, the less eager of the pair to sell. The unsentimental asking price: $1.1 million . A million-dollar mobile home is not an entirely new phenomenon, though it may be an entirely American one. Malibu, Calif., has two mobile home parks populated by rock stars, movie moguls and bedraggled surfers, and Aspen, Colo., has one as well. Image Cherie Doughan, with her mother, Jacqueline, and their dog Bucky hanging out on their first deck in the Park in 1977. Credit Collection of Cherie Doughan For those chasing that last bit of East End authenticity, it seems cedar shingles are out and aluminum siding is in. At the Park, as everyone calls it, lawyers, business people and socialites are beginning to replace the fishermen, farmers, surfers and municipal workers, like Alpha Doughan, a New York City firefighter who died in 2005. (New or old, don\u2019t dare call it a trailer park, or risk excommunication from this white-capped, blue-collar paradise.) \u201cI hate to sell it. I don\u2019t want to sell it, I just don\u2019t, but there it is,\u201d Cherie Doughan said. She and her mother, Jacqueline, live in Placida, Fla., and her sister is in Houston, so they do not spend much time in Montauk anymore. The proceeds will help pay for their mother\u2019s stay at an assisted living home. The family has been in the park since it looked like one. Tents first started popping up in the 1940s, and then trailers \u2014 the Doughans\u2019 among them \u2014 and even five cabooses from the Long Island Rail Road. In 1972, a group of regulars bought the 20 acres overlooking the surfing and fishing hole of Ditch Plains and divided them into 199 parcels. Image The look of Montauk Shores owes much to Alpha Doughan, center, shown at a Fourth of July party in 1985. Credit Collection of Cherie Doughan The look of Montauk Shores owes much to Mr. Doughan, who had a contract with the Liberty mobile home company, and wound up selling its $5,000 trailers to many of his neighbors to put on their $10,000 plots. \u201cHe was kind of the mayor around here,\u201d said Chris Shelby, a construction worker who came to Montauk Shores with his parents and then raised his children here. He recalled that Mr. Doughan collected half-finished kegs of beer and bringing them down to the beach for everyone to enjoy. And they all rave about the giant tuna he caught \u2014 300 pounds in some accounts, 400 in others \u2014 that fed the entire park for days. Image The inside of a mobile home, like the wood paneling, is even reminiscent of the 1970s. Credit Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times With dark wood paneling, two stuffy bedrooms and an intact 1970s kitchen, the Doughans\u2019 mobile home will almost certainly be replaced. The new owners will be basically buying the land, paying more than 100 times what Mr. Doughan did, for one of the primest parcels in Montauk Shores. It may not be one of the plots directly on the bluff over Ditch Plains, but it is on a larger, 2,000-square-foot lot, with room for a double-wide mobile home and a new deck, a luxury the narrower waterfront parcels, each 1,200 square feet, do not enjoy. The added space can mean a lot to someone willing to pay seven figures for a beach retreat. And the Doughans\u2019 plot still has unobstructed ocean views, out over a plaza in the center of the park. Each of the 152 owners at Montauk Shores pays $1,100 a year in condo association fees and about $1,200 in taxes. That money, along with $1,415 a month from 47 leased lots \u2014 a great bargain considering some nearby houses rent for that much a night \u2014 has helped build and maintain paved roads, a recreation center for elderly residents, a playground and a pool. Image A stroll on Deforest Road near Montauk Shores. Credit Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times \u201cIf you think about it, it\u2019s still one of the best deals on the East End,\u201d said Helen Stubbmann, the Corcoran broker selling the Doughans\u2019 property. But the deals are disappearing like hurricane-ravaged sand dunes. When Cherie Doughan moved to Florida in 1990, she sold a separate leased plot and home she had owned with her husband, who also grew up in the park, for $45,000 (the rent was $82 a month back in the late \u201970s). Last year, an oceanfront trailer that had sat vacant for 15 years across from her parents\u2019 home went for $775,000, $25,000 over the asking price. Jimmy Buffett, a longtime renter, tried to buy it years back, but his offer was turned down. Two more on the water sold for $874,000 and $899,000 this year, though one is an old cottage, newly renovated and grandfathered in. Otherwise, park rules dictate that residences must be wheeled in. \u201cThe worst part is, many of the new places are so generic, and not in the generic 1950s style we love so much here,\u201d said Jo Shane, who has been coming to the park as a renter for the past eight years. Among the new owners are J. Darius Bikoff, one of the multimillionaire founders of Vitaminwater, who is helping to turn the neighboring East Deck motel into a private club, and Janet O\u2019Brien, a popular caterer in the Hamptons. \u201cYou should really write about how awful it is,\u201d Ms. Shane said with a wink, \u201csince I\u2019m trying to buy one.\u201d Yet for all the new trailers and new neighbors, everyone still celebrates the community. Everybody knows everybody through barbecues and drinks on the decks, the children roam the dunes and ride bikes unsupervised, and the beach is a few steps away. \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s really changed,\u201d said Joyce Maguire, who bought her trailer for $40,000 15 years ago, \u201cis the cars are a lot nicer.\u201d", "keyword": "Real Estate; Housing;Mobile home;Beach;Montauk NY"}
{"id": "ny0083794", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/10/31", "title": "China Will Feel One-Child Policy\u2019s Effects for Decades, Experts Say", "abstract": "China\u2019s one-child policy, once called the Great Wall of family planning , was among the boldest strategies any nation has deployed in modern times to manage the size of its population. But after 35 years in force, experts say, the policy was having undesirable side effects: It upended traditional structures for supporting older adults and led to a widening imbalance in the number of men and women, one that could sow social unrest. Many in China welcomed the announcement on Thursday that the policy would be changed to allow two children per couple. But experts said that, because having one child has become the social norm in China, the change will have only a limited impact, while the old policy\u2019s legacy will be felt for decades to come. Fertility Rate May Remain Low Demographers agree that around the world, fertility rates generally fall as wealth and women\u2019s educational levels rise. Hazel Denton, a former World Bank economist who teaches demography and development at Georgetown University, predicted that over the long run, this effect would have more impact in China than the policy change. \u201cWhere women have a choice, and they have the opportunity to be educated and employed, they will choose a smaller family,\u201d Dr. Denton said. Many wealthy countries, in fact, are more worried about their populations shrinking than growing. Most have fertility rates below the level needed to maintain a stable population \u2014 about 2.1 births per woman \u2014 and some have tried to create incentives for families to have more babies. Richard Jackson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that China\u2019s neighbors tend to have low fertility rates. In Hong Kong, the rate is about one child per woman, even though Beijing\u2019s one-child policy never applied there. Dr. Jackson said the rate in China was about 1.5 births per woman before the policy change, in part because many exceptions to the one-child rule were made. The rule was most strongly enforced in cities, he said, while families in the countryside whose first child was a daughter were often allowed to try a second time for a son. He predicted that China\u2019s fertility rate would probably climb to only 1.8 children per woman. A Lingering Gender Imbalance In a society with a widespread preference for sons, the one-child policy led to a significantly skewed ratio of men to women: There are now about 120 boys born in China for every 100 girls, Dr. Jackson said. \u201cChina will be living with the pernicious legacy of this gender imbalance for decades to come,\u201d he said. \u201cIt should have lifted the policy years ago.\u201d China\u2019s One-Child Policy A look at how China\u2019s restrictions on the size of families changed over the years. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute noted that human populations will naturally give birth to slightly more male than female babies, but because boys are more likely to die than girls, the gender ratio tends to equalize by the time a generation reaches childbearing age. Demographers say there is a social preference for male children across East Asia, though not to the extremes seen in China. It remains to be seen whether permission to have a second child will make China\u2019s families look more like its neighbors\u2019. Caring for a Rapidly Aging Population While China\u2019s birthrate would probably have fallen as the country developed, the one-child policy brought it down very suddenly. Dr. Jackson, an author of a 2008 report on aging in China , said that brought the unexpected consequence of a dire shortage of younger relatives to care for a rapidly aging population. The median age in China today is about 37, a year younger than the figure for the United States. By 2050, according to United Nations population projections , America\u2019s median age will have climbed to 42 \u2014 but China\u2019s will have shot up to 50. \u201cChinese leaders have probably taken a look at this prospect and decided they need to slow it down,\u201d Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania, said. Dr. Jackson noted that in China\u2019s Confucian culture, it is the duty of a son to support and care for his aging parents \u2014 but as a practical matter, the burden generally falls on his wife. \u201cBy not having daughters,\u201d he said of the gender imbalance, \u201cyou end up not having daughters-in-law.\u201d William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, said: \u201cClearly, China is facing an aging population and increasing elderly dependency.\u201d As for dropping the one-child policy, he added, \u201cIt\u2019s about time.\u201d", "keyword": "Birth control;Population;China;Elderly care,Geriatrics"}
{"id": "ny0266579", "categories": ["sports", "horse-racing"], "date": "2016/03/19", "title": "Thoroughbred Trainer Achieves 4,000th Win", "abstract": "Todd Pletcher became the 10th thoroughbred trainer to reach 4,000 victories when Eagle Scout, with the jockey Luis Saez aboard, won the fifth race at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla. Pletcher already is the No. 1 trainer in earnings, with more than $311 million in purse money.", "keyword": "Horse racing;Horse Jockeys and Trainers;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0096854", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2015/01/25", "title": "Abdullah Leads North in Senior Bowl", "abstract": "Ameer Abdullah of Nebraska rushed for 73 yards and added 40 receiving yards as he led the North to a 34-13 victory over the South in the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala. Abdullah, the Cornhuskers\u2019 No. 2 career rusher, was named the game\u2019s most valuable player. The top passers were Bryce Petty of Baylor for the North and Garrett Grayson of Colorado State for the South. Petty was 9 of 13 passing for 123 yards with an interception, and Grayson completed 8 of 15 passes for 118 yards. \u25a0 Lane Kiffin, who was reportedly a candidate to become the San Francisco 49ers\u2019 offensive coordinator, said in a statement that he would return to Alabama for a second season as its offensive coordinator. (AP)", "keyword": "College football;Lane Kiffin;University of Nebraska"}
{"id": "ny0176387", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2007/07/06", "title": "An Issue That Hits Home for Most of the Candidates", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, July 5 \u2014 When it comes to health care, the personal is political. Presidential candidates may struggle to connect with voters on issues like job losses from a globalized economy or the daily anxiety of having a loved one in Iraq. But to a remarkable degree, almost every candidate in this race can speak from experience with the health care system, having endured his or her own health problems or those of close family members. And as they talk to voters about health care, they often allude to their own stories. Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, talks about sitting at the bedside of his mother, as she lay dying from ovarian cancer at the age of 53, \u201cand she was spending time worrying about whether or not she would have anything left over, if she was able to survive the illness.\u201d She died within six months, exhausting all her resources by the end, he said. Mr. Obama says he had to \u201cspend a lot of time arguing with the insurer about when she had been diagnosed with this ovarian cancer, because they started making arguments that she had a pre-existing condition.\u201d Former Senator John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat and a trial lawyer, describes his struggles with insurance companies after breast cancer was first diagnosed in his wife, Elizabeth, in 2004. \u201cHere you have a former senator, presidential candidate, vice-presidential candidate, and I\u2019m a lawyer. I\u2019d get those statements from the insurance companies, I had no idea what they meant,\u201d Mr. Edwards said in Iowa recently. \u201cI felt like a blooming idiot.\u201d But he and Mrs. Edwards, who is currently battling a recurrence of her cancer, also talk about how fortunate they feel to have access to the best medical treatment and how difficult it must be for families who do not. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, sometimes draws on anecdotes about her husband\u2019s heart surgery in 2004 as a way of empathizing with voters who have their own memories \u2014 and frustrations \u2014 with the medical system, especially its bureaucracy. At one event in New Hampshire, as Mrs. Clinton made the case for a more cost-efficient and modern system of electronic recordkeeping, she recalled checking out of the hospital and confronting bills for medical supplies and treatments for her husband, a huge amount of paperwork created by antiquated accounting procedures. Democrats invoke their experiences as they make the case for a major overhaul of the health care system. But Republicans, like former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who was treated for prostate cancer in 2000, argue that more governmental involvement in health care or any move toward the single-payer systems of Canada or Europe, is not the solution. \u201cWhen is the last time anyone went from America to Europe for health care?\u201d Mr. Giuliani asked recently. Mr. Giuliani said he sometimes fielded calls from people outside the country hoping to be accepted into cancer treatment centers in the United States \u2014 never the other way around. He describes the American system as \u201cthe best health care system in the world,\u201d although he acknowledges it has flaws that he promises to address.", "keyword": "Health Insurance and Managed Care;Presidential Election of 2008"}
{"id": "ny0262875", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/12/20", "title": "E.C.B. Warns of Dangers Ahead for Euro Zone Economy", "abstract": "FRANKFURT \u2014 The European Central Bank warned Monday of a perilous year ahead as the sovereign debt crisis collides with slower economic growth and a dearth of market financing for banks. The dire prediction, contained in the E.C.B.\u2019s twice-yearly report on the risks to the euro area financial system, came as E.U. governments fell short of their target to expand their backup plan for the euro by channeling more resources through the International Monetary Fund. By some measures, the stresses on the European financial system are approaching or even exceeding levels last seen after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. For example, market perception of the risk that two large banks in the euro area could fail in the next year has surpassed the previous peak in 2009, according to the E.C.B.\u2019s Financial Stability Review. \u201cThe transmission of tensions among sovereigns, across banks and between the two intensified to take on systemic crisis proportions not witnessed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers three years ago,\u201d the report said. But the E.C.B. deliberately avoided discussing one risk that clearly weighs on many investors, economists and political leaders: the possibility that the euro zone could break up. \u201cI have no doubt about the euro,\u201d Mario Draghi , the president of the E.C.B., told members of the European Parliament in Brussels. \u201cThe one currency is irreversible.\u201d A teleconference among E.U. finance ministers ended Monday with an agreement by euro zone nations to contribute around \u20ac150 billion, or $195 billion, through the I.M.F. European leaders had committed to contribute \u201cup to \u20ac200 billion\u201d at a summit in Brussels on Dec. 9. Though noneuro members like Poland and Sweden are contributing to the fund, Britain said it would not decide until early in the new year, according to European officials not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the release of an official statement. Before the meeting Monday, Britain made it clear that it would only contribute as part of a broader contribution by the Group of 20 leading economies. It had leeway to loan only \u00a310 billion, or $15.5 billion, without holding a fresh parliamentary vote, officials said. Tensions have been high among E.U. nations since Britain refused at the summit to agree on changes to the European Union \u2019s founding treaty to enable tighter coordination of financial policy. Most of the other 26 E.U. members opted to move ahead with an intergovernmental treaty to accomplish the same goal. Several negative developments are converging to raise tensions even higher than they already are, the E.C.B. said in its report. In the first three months of 2012 banks will need to roll over more than \u20ac200 billion in debt at the same time that governments and corporations also have unusually high financing needs. Yet investors have become pessimistic about Europe, and the market for bonds issued by banks is nearly lifeless. \u201cThe pressure that bond markets will be experiencing is very difficult if not unprecedented,\u201d Mr. Draghi said. At the same time, credit crunches are already visible in some countries like Ireland, V\u00edtor Const\u00e2ncio, the vice president of the E.C.B., said Monday in Frankfurt. Meanwhile, slower economic growth, which could become a recession, is likely to lead to an increase in bad loans, which will further weaken lenders. Despite these threats, and suggestions from some members of European Parliament that the E.C.B. should intervene more forcefully in bond markets to take the pressure off countries like Italy, Mr. Draghi made it clear that E.C.B. sees its role as helping banks and not national treasuries. \u201cThe treaty forbids monetary financing,\u201d he said. The E.C.B. disclosed Monday that it spent \u20ac3.4 billion intervening in bond markets last week, a big increase from the previous week but still far short of the massive intervention that some economists and elected officials would like to see. Instead, Mr. Draghi emphasized measures the E.C.B. is taking to help banks get through what he said would be \u201ca difficult year.\u201d Mr. Const\u00e2ncio said that the bank addressed the bank funding problem when, earlier this month, it announced plans to begin lending money to banks at 1 percent interest for as long as three years. The action was one of a series of moves designed to ensure that banks have the money they need to support economic growth. The measures \u201cwill eliminate all excuses to say that credit could decelerate,\u201d Mr. Const\u00e2ncio said. Mr. Draghi praised what he said was progress by European leaders earlier this month to impose more discipline on members of the euro zone and create a more stable union. \u201cThe E.U. summit received much less recognition by markets and public opinion than it actually deserved,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is a more significant step than what has been appreciated.\u201d But he continued to put pressure on political leaders to swiftly deploy measures they have agreed on to contain the crisis, like the new euro area bailout fund. And he criticized European Union leaders for forcing banks to raise their reserves before mechanisms were in place to help them do so. \u201cWe didn\u2019t do things in the right order,\u201d Mr. Draghi said. \u201cThere is no alternative to banks being recapitalized but there are various ways and time frames of doing so.\u201d European leaders also drew criticism from Mr. Const\u00e2ncio, who said it was a mistake to pressure investors to accept a 50 percent decline in the value of their holdings of Greek bonds. That action this year put markets on notice that default of a euro zone country was not unthinkable, and raised pressure on other countries, Mr. Const\u00e2ncio said. Political leaders have since said that Greece will be a unique case, a statement some investors have taken as an implied guarantee on the debt of other countries. Asked if there was in fact a guarantee, Mr. Const\u00e2ncio put the onus on governments to implement policies \u201cthat will counter the risk of that happening.\u201d In answer to questions from Parliament, Mr. Draghi defended an interview he gave to The Financial Times and published Monday, in which he discussed, and rejected, a euro zone breakup. Even to acknowledge the possibility was a departure from E.C.B. convention. Mr. Draghi said he was correct to discuss the dire consequences of euro zone dissolution. \u201cThe one currency is irreversible,\u201d Mr. Draghi said in Parliament. \u201cBut you have a lot of people outside the euro area who spend a lot of time on what I think is morbid speculation.\u201d Mr. Draghi played down the consequences if ratings agencies follow through on warnings to downgrade France and other countries. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t make too much of these ratings changes by credit rating agencies ,\u201d he said. Stephen Castle reported from Brussels.", "keyword": "European Union;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );European Central Bank;Euro (Currency);European Parliament;Draghi Mario"}
{"id": "ny0153124", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/01/04", "title": "New Face and a Call for Change Shake Up the Democratic Field", "abstract": "DES MOINES \u2014 They rolled the dice. Whether it was because they were eager to leave behind the bitter divides of the last two decades or because they wanted to send a message that a small white state could transcend the issue of race, Iowa voters handed Senator Barack Obama a victory here Thursday and supported his improbable candidacy in defiance of those who warned he was too inexperienced in world affairs. Instead, what seemed to drive them was the idea that Mr. Obama would present a new face for America in the world, with a coalition of Democrats and independents dispelling skepticism and flooding caucuses in all corners of the state to support a man who came to Washington only three years ago. \u201cWe are one people,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cAnd our time for change has come.\u201d It was only a year ago that Mr. Obama, 46, a first-term senator from Illinois, formally decided to seek the Democratic nomination, which even some of his closest advisers feared could diminish his long-term potential. As he learned to become a presidential candidate on the fly, seasoned political hands worked to build an organization here unlike any other, which ultimately helped to nearly double the turnout from the caucuses four years ago. Mr. Obama praised Iowa voters for casting away a litany of concerns that his rivals had aired about his candidacy, like too little experience and questions of electability. But he conceded that his victory was only a beginning. \u201cThis was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cWhen we finally united people of all parties and ages.\u201d The strength of his performance \u2014 and a strong finish by former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina \u2014 shook the confidence of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s campaign and created fresh uncertainty in the Democratic nominating contest. Even before Mr. Obama\u2019s victory had been formally declared, the Clinton campaign announced that former President Bill Clinton would be dispatched to New Hampshire for a five-day blitz before the primary there on Tuesday. (It was Mr. Clinton who suggested that Mr. Obama\u2019s candidacy would be a roll of the dice, a phrase that Mr. Obama turned into a mantra in recent days, often when appearing before overflowing crowds.) \u201cI congratulate Senator Obama and Senator Edwards,\u201d Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said to supporters, with her husband and her daughter, Chelsea, behind her. \u201cTogether we have presented the case for change.\u201d With a confident smile, she added, \u201cWe\u2019re going to get up tomorrow and keep pushing as hard as we can.\u201d After a yearlong campaign built upon a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign and a network of grass-roots organizers, Mr. Obama was supported Thursday evening by younger voters, voters looking for change, independents and very liberal Democrats. At the same time, he was the first choice of one-third of female voters. In fact, the poll of Democrats as they entered the caucuses suggested that women were closely divided between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. Among men, Mr. Obama did better, according to the poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press. While Mr. Obama\u2019s candidacy gained steadily throughout the year, he also has capitalized on an unsteady electorate craving change. One of the largest applause lines he receives continues to be when he declares that President Bush will be out of office in only a year. \u201cThe huge difference was that we had the greatest organization ever built in this state,\u201d said David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign. \u201cAnd it was built on the backs of idealistic kids who came in here not just because they believed in Obama, but they wanted to change the course of history and the world.\u201d The Iowa caucuses winnowed the field of Democratic presidential candidates. Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware dropped out of the race after the caucuses. \u201cOne of the charges against Iowa is that we don\u2019t really represent the rest of the country, and here\u2019s a chance to make a statement about the inclusiveness of Iowa,\u201d said Jon Muller, 42, who voiced his support for Mr. Obama at Precinct 73. \u201cI\u2019m just ready for a change, as opposed to a Clinton or Bush.\u201d At his caucus site at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Des Moines, supporters of Mr. Obama spilled out of the room, as they did in locations across the state. The results of the Iowa caucuses, with Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton in a narrow fight for second place, heightened the importance of the New Hampshire primary, where a trove of independent voters were already leaning toward Mr. Obama. Mr. Edwards promised that his candidacy would continue. With his wife, Elizabeth, standing behind him, Mr. Edwards spoke to supporters at in Des Moines. \u201cThe one thing that\u2019s clear from this result here tonight is that the status quo lost and change won,\u201d Mr. Edwards said. Even though the Clinton advisers began lowering expectations for Mrs. Clinton\u2019s performance weeks ago, saying that she had faced hardened, negative perceptions among Iowa voters that stemmed from her partisan and secretive image as first lady, the results raised new questions about her candidacy. Indeed, in the closing days of the race here, some of her advisers began recalling that Mrs. Clinton\u2019s deputy campaign manager recommended in May that she skip the caucuses altogether, after internal polling found that she had high negative ratings in the state. She decided to compete here in spite of the fact that neither she nor her husband had deep political roots in the state. Still, Mrs. Clinton\u2019s supporters had expected her to win. \u201cI expected her to be first,\u201d said Mario Gandelsonas, 68, an architect from New York who supports Mrs. Clinton and was in Des Moines on a work project. \u201cBut this is just the beginning. I know Hillary. She\u2019ll be first, and she\u2019ll beat them all in New Hampshire. This will give her incentive to fight even harder.\u201d", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2008;Obama Barack"}
{"id": "ny0111869", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/02/19", "title": "China Ambivalently Affirms Dalai Lama\u2019s Popularity", "abstract": "HONG\u2019AI, China \u2014 Despite the absence of road signs or promotional Web sites, a dozen or so people each day manage to find their way to this sleepy hamlet that sits in the fold of a dusky mountain in northwestern Qinghai Province. They congratulate themselves for having found the place \u2014 and for evading the police \u2014 but then come face to face with Gonpo Tashi, a squat, no-nonsense barley farmer who guards the entrance to the house where his uncle, the 14th Dalai Lama , was born 76 years ago. If the traveler speaks Tibetan, Mr. Tashi, 65, will peer warily out into the road before swinging open the heavy wooden doors and allowing entry to the modest home where China\u2019s most reviled and revered spiritual leader spent the first three years of his life. If the visitor is Han Chinese, the country\u2019s dominant ethnic group, the gatekeeper might grumble vaguely about \u201cthe rules\u201d but then relent. But if the supplicant bears patently Western features, Mr. Tashi can be relied upon to throw up his hands with dramatic effect and shoo the interloper back toward the vehicle that made the hourlong drive from the provincial capital. \u201cLeave, leave now,\u201d he will shout. \u201cIf they come, you will be in trouble.\u201d \u201cThey\u201d refers to the local public security personnel who occasionally block the road to Hong\u2019Ai or stand outside the Dalai Lama\u2019s ancestral home, especially when there is trouble brewing somewhere on the expansive plateau where most of China\u2019s 5.4 million ethnic Tibetans live. That this state-financed shrine to the Dalai Lama exists at all highlights Beijing\u2019s complex and contradictory attitude toward a man it frequently describes as a terrorist, a separatist and \u201ca wolf in monk\u2019s robes.\u201d Since relations between the exiled Tibetan leader and the Chinese government took a nose dive in the mid-1990s, even possession of the Dalai Lama\u2019s picture is considered a crime. The government\u2019s official line is that the Dalai Lama is agitating for an independent Tibet , even as he insists that he is seeking only meaningful autonomy. In recent months, the government has sought to blame him for the self-immolations of about two dozen Tibetans, a ghastly act of protest against Chinese rule that he has condemned. Hong\u2019Ai, or Taktser as it is known in Tibetan, has long been on the receiving end of that official ambivalence. In the mid-1980s, when talks were proceeding reasonably well, the government rebuilt the Dalai Lama\u2019s birthplace , which had been destroyed during the antireligious fervor of the Cultural Revolution. In 2010, the local Communist Party poured 2.6 million renminbi, or about $410,000, into Hong\u2019Ai, upgrading the town\u2019s 54 residences, including the Dalai Lama\u2019s homestead, with the aim of turning the place into a lucrative tourist attraction. The improvements included tall, white-tile gates for every home and a colorfully painted but imposing wall in front of the Dalai Lama\u2019s home that prevents visitors from peering inside. In an article about the town in 2010, the official Xinhua news agency boasted that the improvements to each house had cost more than 10 times as much as the average villager\u2019s annual income. \u201cEveryone was enthusiastic,\u201d a township official was quoted as saying about the renovations. Mr. Tashi, the caretaker, made out particularly well, having received a modern toilet to replace an arrangement that involved two planks over a trench. \u201cMaybe when I am too old to squat, the flush toilet will be useful,\u201d Xinhua reported him as saying. Other official news accounts were slightly disparaging , calling him a \u201cbig shot\u201d and pointing out that his family owns a car paid for with a handsome government salary augmented by visitor donations. Two of his three children, one article said, are Communist Party members. That same account said that Mr. Tashi had visited his uncle twice in the 1990s in India and that he yearned for his return. \u201cI miss him very much,\u201d he said. According to official figures, a majority of the town\u2019s 274 residents are Han, and even those who describe themselves as Tibetan cannot speak their ancestral tongue. In a lengthy published interview with the author Thomas Laird, the Dalai Lama said that when he was a boy, his family spoke no Tibetan, only a dialect of Mandarin. It was not until he and his family moved to Lhasa \u2014 after high-ranking lamas identified him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama \u2014 that he learned the Tibetan language. In his 1990 autobiography \u201cFreedon in Exile,\u201d the Dalai Lama described his hometown in bleak terms, recounting the crop failures and the harsh winters. His last visit was in 1955, four years before he fled to India during a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Those who make it past Mr. Tashi\u2019s temperamental door policy report that there are a few utilitarian rooms surrounding a courtyard, its center anchored by a pole draped in multicolored Tibetan prayer flags. Just as eye-catching is the late model Volkswagen, covered by plastic drop cloth, that sits in one corner. One room contains a bed, another a yellow throne and a Buddhist shrine. Most of the two-story house is off limits to visitors, and the only nod to the Dalai Lama is a small painting of him on the ceiling. Photographs are forbidden. Those villagers willing to speak to foreign visitors were proud of their connection to a man who, under different circumstances, might have been the most powerful religious figure in the land. A 46-year-old woman who gave her name as Chobai and described herself as a distant cousin said she had once traveled overland to India to visit him. \u201cWe are all waiting for him to come back one day,\u201d she said with a smile. Another woman a few doors down offered a tour of her home and the shrine that includes two photographs of the Dalai Lama, a distant relative. After a trio of Dutch tourists pounded on the front gate and refused to retreat, Mr. Tashi\u2019s 45-year-old nephew stepped outside and watched with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. When the police failed to materialize, he seemed to relax as one of the tourists, Lisanne de Wit, described a recent visit to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives. Ms. de Wit, a 19-year-old theology student, then made one last plea for entry, describing how she had endured a weeklong bus ride from Sichuan Province to reach this corner of Qinghai. The nephew shrugged and offered a sympathetic smile. \u201cThe order has come from above,\u201d he said before shutting the door. \u201cAnd there\u2019s nothing you or I can do about it.\u201d", "keyword": "Dalai Lama;China;Communist Party of China;Politics and Government;Travel and Vacations;Tibet"}
{"id": "ny0119738", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/07/17", "title": "Unhappy Travelers Can Swap Out of Hotel Loyalty Programs", "abstract": "I DON\u2019T much like my bank. Yes, I know, welcome to the club. Also, I am not particularly fond of any airline. Yes, I know, welcome to that club, too. Nevertheless, I\u2019m wedded to my bank, if only because it would take enormous effort to untangle all the various auto-pay deductions, direct deposits and other arrangements. And airline service? I wish I had real choices, but with capacity and route cuts, mergers and the overall commoditization of air service, none of us do anymore. But hotels? That\u2019s where we do have a veritable cornucopia of choice. Business travelers who used to trade expertise about airline mileage loyalty programs are now more likely to swap advice and anecdotes on the ins and outs, and especially the considerable perks, of hotel loyalty programs. That is why a management consulting firm called CG42 will be publishing this week a study that surveyed more than 3,200 high-volume travelers belonging to various loyalty programs at the nine leading hotel companies. The study looks at \u201cbrand vulnerability\u201d among hotel loyalty programs. It ranked them by which are judged to be the most vulnerable to members\u2019 switching to competitors\u2019 programs. Most business travelers have a decided preference in hotel companies but also tend to belong to multiple hotel loyalty programs. Last year, the first brand-vulnerability report by CG42 received considerable publicity when it evaluated loyalty attitudes in retail banking. In that report, \u201cthe frustration levels with banks were off the charts, but the switching dynamics in that category are very difficult,\u201d said Stephen Beck, managing partner of CG42. Hotels are significantly different. In short, you may only wish you knew how to quit your bank, but you sure do know how to quit your hotel brand. In all, travelers frustrated with their primary hotel programs are projected to move more than $10 billion in spending this year to competing programs, Mr. Beck said. The study evaluated frustration levels at each hotel program in five main areas: dealing with incompetent staff and service; not having loyalty points properly credited; not having a promotional deal honored as advertised; difficulty redeeming loyalty points; and difficulty maintaining status level because points expire too quickly. Other frustrations included unsatisfactory physical condition of properties, billing mistakes and being nickel and dimed with extra fees for services like Internet access. \u201cSome of the basic frustrations, like not having my points properly credited, create a floor upon which something like dealing with incompetent or unprofessional staff just adds fuel to the fire,\u201d Mr. Beck said. \u201cI am a frequent traveler, and when I have a problem with getting credits and I can\u2019t resolve it on the Web site, I then pick up the phone and find myself frustrated, trying to explain my problem to somebody who doesn\u2019t understand the program as well as I do,\u201d he added. \u201cSo now I\u2019m probably saying, \u2018Gee, I have a pretty big point base here with this program, but I also have all the other hotel programs in my wallet. So where is my next stay going to go?\u2019 \u201d Each of the nine companies in the study has numerous hotel brands in its management portfolio, of course. Here, ranked from the companies deemed to have the highest brand vulnerability in their loyalty programs to the lowest, are the CG42 standings: Carlson, Best Western, Wyndham, Marriott, Hyatt and Choice are in the higher vulnerability categories; Hilton, Starwood and InterContinental Hotels are on the least-vulnerable end of the scale. An abstract of the study will be posted Tuesday on its Web site, CG42.com , the company said, and I suggest consulting that for more detail. I described the gist of the report to the various hotel companies. There will be a follow-up column with more on their responses, as well as reader responses about hotel programs. While airline loyalty programs are diminishing in popularity, hotel loyalty programs are increasingly valued by travelers and by hotel companies themselves. Some responses in general: A Carlson spokeswoman pointed to the \u201crelatively new\u201d Club Carlson program, and a money-back guarantee for any guest who is not fully satisfied. She noted that there are no blackout dates on awards, and that loyalty points do not expire. A Wyndham spokeswoman also said there are no blackout dates on award redemptions. A spokeswoman for Choice said that the CG42 rankings \u201cappear to be consistent\u201d with industry trends but noted that the Choice Privileges program was judged \u201cthe second-best program over all\u201d this spring at the annual Freddie Awards, which rank travel loyalty programs of all sorts. A Marriott spokeswoman said the company could not comment until it saw the full report. But I might note that the Marriott Rewards program has won a Freddie Award for best hotel loyalty program for five years straight. And I haven\u2019t heard back from the other hotel companies. Yet.", "keyword": "Customer Loyalty Programs;Travel and Vacations;Hotels and Motels;Business Travel;CG42 LLC"}
{"id": "ny0269363", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/04/17", "title": "At the Boston Marathon, Leading the Way for Women Fifty Years Ago", "abstract": "In 1965, the year I first ran the Boston Marathon, there were no women in the field of about 400 participants. On Monday morning, more than 13,000 women will start the 120th Boston Marathon. The women\u2019s running boom is one of the most revolutionary stories in sports, yet it is underchronicled. Running serves as the foundation for many other sports, and women began running before they poured into tennis, soccer and basketball. They also learned many profound lessons from their successes in running. The Boston Marathon gender barrier fell 50 years ago, on April 19, 1966. That\u2019s when Roberta Gibb, 23, crossed the finish line in 3 hours 21 minutes 40 seconds \u2014 in front of more than two-thirds of the male runners that day. To honor her breakthrough, Boston Marathon organizers have named Gibb, who is known as Bobbi, grand marshal of this year\u2019s race. Two months before the 1966 marathon, Gibb had written race officials to request an entry form. She received a curt reply: Sorry, we are an A.A.U. event, and A.A.U. regulations forbid women to compete in any race longer than 1.5 miles. Furthermore, \u201cwomen are physiologically incapable of running 26.2 miles.\u201d Gibb was stunned. Shy and artistic, she had no interest in sports per se, no athletic heroes and no penchant for protest. She knew only that she loved running for hours at a time. And that she had been handed an unusual opportunity. \u201cIt dawned on me that if I could run Boston, I could erase other false beliefs about women\u2019s limitations,\u201d she said. Image Gibb, after the Boston Marathon, completed the race in 3 hours 21 minutes 40 seconds. Credit Fred Kaplan/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images On marathon day, Gibb disguised herself in a large blue hoodie and hid behind the forsythia bushes near the start line, concerned that the police might arrest any female runner they spotted. After creeping into the race, she feared that male runners would bulldoze her off the road. To the contrary, they were pleased to see her. When she told them she was worried that spectators and race security might interfere, the men responded that she shouldn\u2019t worry. That they would take care of her and that she had as much right to run on a public road as they did. At the finish, Gibb was escorted to a brief but raucous news conference. The news media tried to goad her into saying she was a man-hater, but she refused to take the bait. \u201cI said simply that I loved running, loved men, and believed in men and women doing things together,\u201d she said. Gibb returned to Boston the next two Aprils, and was the first female finisher both years. Boston didn\u2019t allow women to run officially until 1972, when Long Island\u2019s Nina Kuscsik became the first official women\u2019s champion. It was in 1967 that the marathon\u2019s race director, Jock Semple, body-blocked Kathrine Switzer while the cameras clicked, producing one of running\u2019s most famous, and harrowing, photo sequences. For the last three years, I have been researching and writing about the pioneers of women\u2019s running, profiling 22 women from the late 1950s to the early \u201990s. I call them the first ladies of running. The situations they faced \u2014 often laughable, sometimes infuriating, always daunting \u2014 today seem hard to believe. A good example: In the mid-1960s, the Indianapolis board of education ruled that a high school student, Cheryl Pedlow, shouldn\u2019t run anywhere within sight of the boys and their teams. She might prove too great a \u201cdistraction\u201d to them. Fortunately, Pedlow stuck with it, and in 1971 she set a marathon world record \u2014 2:49:40. In mid-February, her daughter Shalane Flanagan qualified for her fourth consecutive United States Olympic team. Shalane\u2019s mother never had a shot at the Olympics; she was too far ahead of her time, as there were no Olympic distance events for women. Among the 22 first women in my book, Grace Butcher, the only one I haven\u2019t met, may be my favorite. A farm girl and poet from Chardon, Ohio, Butcher won the national championship for 880 yards in 1958. In 1976, just past her 40th birthday, she made a solo 2,500-mile motorcycle trip through New England, and wrote a feature article for Sports Illustrated. In it she noted, \u201cWhat life is for, if it is for anything, is to find out what you do well, and then do it, for heaven\u2019s sake, before it\u2019s too late.\u201d Like Butcher, other first ladies of running did many things well. Gibb is an accomplished painter and sculptor who also worked in the lab of the famed M.I.T. neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin. Julia Chase, the first woman to run a road race in the United States, in 1961, received a Ph.D. in zoology, studying bats and chimpanzees in the field. A quarter-century later, she earned a medical degree at 53 and switched to psychiatry. Switzer turned her attack by Semple into a personal drive to promote women\u2019s running. It was her work with the Avon International Running Circuit that helped persuade the International Olympic Committee to hold the first Olympic marathon for women in 1984. Joan Benoit won that long-awaited race. The pioneer women\u2019s runners were remarkably diverse \u2014 a fact worth celebrating. They included an 88-pound Japanese-American (Miki Gorman), a firebrand American (Mary Decker), a Southern belle (Gayle Barron) and a Norwegian legend (Grete Waitz). And yet they shared certain core traits. Most ran to affirm themselves and to explore their talents, not to protest rules or regulators. They simply wanted more and better chances to test their limits. All loved exercise, independence and nature. Long before studies linked fitness to cognitive health, they intuitively understood that running helped them feel and perform better. Oprah Winfrey set a standard, not for speed but for willpower. In 1994, more or less by happenstance, I ran the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon several yards behind Winfrey. Her effort was among the bravest I have ever witnessed in a marathon. In addition to the endless backslapping from thousands of fellow marathoners, she bore the burden of her personal weight struggles and a nonathletic history. Yet she trudged on. Determined. Oh, so determined. When we finally reached the last half-mile, with its steep climb to the finish line at the Iwo Jima Memorial, Winfrey actually picked up the pace. She chugged smoothly past other fatigued runners and finished in 4:29:20. \u201cLife is a lot like a marathon,\u201d she said later. \u201cIf you can finish a marathon, you can do anything you want.\u201d Her example and her quotation launched the current and still-expanding boom in women\u2019s running \u2014 a movement that was begun by Bobbi Gibb and the other first ladies of running.", "keyword": "Boston Marathon;Roberta Gibb;Women and Girls;Marathon"}
{"id": "ny0045862", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/02/23", "title": "Hollywood and the City, Take 2", "abstract": "By the early 1970s, New York\u2019s reign as a television and filmmaking capital seemed to be over. The transplanting of Johnny Carson and the \u201cTonight\u201d show to California, coupled with the demise of \u201cThe Ed Sullivan Show\u201d the year before, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, \u201cmarked the end of Manhattan\u2019s parity with Hollywood as a glitz capital for a national audience.\u201d What a difference a few decades make. In \u201cScenes From the City: Filmmaking in New York\u201d (Rizzoli), James Sanders masterfully revises and expands on his original book of the same title to capture the surge in movie and television production since 2006 (26 series today, from six in 2001), in 60 additional pages and about 120 new images (from \u201cAmerican Gangster\u201d to \u201cThe Devil Wears Prada\u201d). Don\u2019t flatter yourself. The tectonic return to filmmaking\u2019s roots \u2014 crowned by last week\u2019s return of the \u201cTonight\u201d show from Burbank \u2014 was not just a case of a city with another pretty face. In his chronological, lavishly illustrated backstage tour, Mr. Sanders, an architect and filmmaker himself, details how assiduously Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his predecessors wooed Hollywood with tax breaks and branding, and reaped not only revenues but also an intangible reward: the \u201cpower to convert the daily reality of the city into a magical transcendent realm.\u201d Mr. Sanders also explains how the movies did not simply rediscover Midtown Manhattan and expand studios in Brooklyn and Queens, but focused their cameras on largely unexplored locations, including City Island and Floyd Bennett Field. A significant figure in Off Broadway theater in the 1960s is the subject of Jeremy Gerard\u2019s \u201cWynn Place Show: A Biased History of the Rollicking Life and Extreme Times of Wynn Handman and the American Place Theater\u201d (Smith and Kraus). \u201cThese were artists who may never have given much thought to working in the theater until prodded to do so by a fevered coalition of Manhattan literati, left-leaning religious and political agitators and, especially, disaffected theater partisans, all of whom had come under the spell of an unlikely breaker of molds named Wynn Handman,\u201d Mr. Gerard writes. Mr. Handman nurtured budding playwrights and trained fledgling actors, like John Leguizamo and Frank Langella. In this overdue biography of an outstanding teacher and an adventurous company, Mr. Gerard, a former Broadway reporter for The New York Times, engagingly recounts Mr. Handman\u2019s long and storied career \u201cas a force against mediocrity and complacency.\u201d Still debating where the Super Bowl was held? New Jersey typically gets short shrift in the credit department, a slight that Linda J. Barth hopes to rectify in \u201cA History of Inventing in New Jersey: From Thomas Edison to the Ice Cream Cone\u201d (The History Press). Edison\u2019s legacy has pretty much survived intact. Some of the Garden State\u2019s other claims to innovation may be subject to challenge. In any case, Ms. Barth, a teacher, has produced charming back stories for the development of a wide variety of things we take for granted, from M&M\u2019s to Bubble Wrap and bar codes. The reasons? So many communications and pharmaceutical firms. So densely populated. So close to Philadelphia and New York.", "keyword": "NYC;Books;Jeremy Gerard;James Sanders;Linda J Barth"}
{"id": "ny0054476", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/07/01", "title": "Life Outside the Hospital; Consequences of Cool; You\u2019re So Far Away", "abstract": "Long-Term Care TO THE EDITOR: \u201c Where Recovery Is Rare \u201d (June 24) suggests that for individuals who are dependent on ventilators, the only choice is death or living in an institution, such as a long-term acute care hospital. In fact, there are many people who use ventilators who live at home. For individuals 21 and under who are eligible for Medicaid, Medicaid pays for nursing care so children can live at home and go to school. For other children, there are waiver programs that allow them to receive nursing care and other Medicaid services outside the hospital. The waivers are named after Katie Beckett , who wound up living a full life until she died at 34. Even though she spent 12 hours a day on a ventilator and received nursing care, she graduated from college and worked. Our medical system should provide the services and supports to enable individuals who depend on ventilators to live in the community, with family and friends. Ellen Saideman Barrington, R.I. Social Mobility Re \u201c Cool at 13, Adrift at 23 \u201d (June 24): I wonder if simple complacency has anything to do with the cool kids ending up adrift in adulthood. I grew up in a small town in the \u201980s. Many of the cool, attractive kids never left town after high school. They didn\u2019t attend college and just continued their high school lives as adults in the safe cocoon of coolness. If they hadn\u2019t been so cool and popular, perhaps they would have been unsatisfied with small-town life, gone to college or moved away. In other words, they likely would have experienced a much wider slice of life and maybe become actually cool and interesting. Giantjonquil, of St. Paul, posted to nytimes.com Good article to read before going to summer class reunions. Shirley Brantingham, posted to Facebook Neurology TO THE EDITOR: Re \u201c A Rare Visual Distortion \u201d (June 24): As a child, I very frequently experienced micropsia. As an adult, I had it only on rare occasions of extreme emotional stress. One time, I was sitting at a table with the man with whom I was breaking up. I rationally knew I could reach out and touch his hand, yet he had receded visually to such a great distance that to touch him seemed utterly impossible. I have been a visual artist all my life. When I first saw the portrait paintings and drawings by Alberto Giacometti , I was startled to see that he had captured that sensation \u2014 the seated lower bodies of the portrait subjects seemed very massive and near, but the upper bodies and faces had the appearance of being far, far away. This made me feel he had had this same distancing phenomenon and had captured it incredibly well. Jenny Badger Sultan San Francisco Wow, and here I thought I was the one who coined the term! I\u2019ve always referred to this as my Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I even told my doctors that I sometimes felt like Alice. I got the usual raised eyebrow and a prescription for more antidepressants. LM, of Detroit, posted to nytimes.com Very interesting to learn that these visual phenomena are now at least partially understood. These experiences may be much more common (at least in childhood) than previously thought, because they often go unreported. I had a few episodes of micropsia in elementary school, usually associated with a fever, but I never bothered to tell anyone about them, as they weren\u2019t at all frightening. In fact, they were oddly enjoyable. Julie, of New York, posted to nytimes.com", "keyword": "Medicine and Health;Letters"}
{"id": "ny0279404", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/10/05", "title": "Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 It has been six months since the Justice Department backed off on demands that Apple help the F.B.I. break the security of a locked iPhone. But the government has not given up the fight with the tech industry. Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of the year for subscriber information and other details associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia. The subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year. Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications \u2014 often too wide \u2014 in their investigations. Justice Department officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets. The officials say that they are simply following leads where they take them. Through a spokesman, the Justice Department declined to comment on the case. The information request made of Open Whisper Systems is particularly sensitive, since its encryption app is used around the world, and it is often recommended to journalists and human rights activists. Microsoft sued the Justice Department over the gag order practice in April, arguing that law enforcement was relying on these orders too often. Specifically, the software giant said the gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property and also the company\u2019s First Amendment right to speak to its customers. Microsoft also complained that the orders often came without time limits, unlike the Open Whisper Systems order. Dozens of other technology, media and civil liberties groups filed briefs supporting Microsoft last month, and the case is pending. Part of the gag order on Open Whisper Systems was lifted after a court challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, and redacted versions of documents related to the information request were made public last week. But the small San Francisco company was still not allowed to tell specific account holders about the investigation. The documents made public show that the government asked Open Whisper Systems to turn over data associated with two telephone numbers, including web browsing histories and data stored in the tracking \u201ccookies\u201d of the web browsers attached to those accounts. But one of Signal\u2019s biggest draws is that it does not collect most of that information. \u201cThe Signal service was designed to minimize the data we retain,\u201d said Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems. Mr. Marlinspike said Signal uses a technology called end-to-end encryption that kept the service from gaining access to the contents of its users\u2019 messages. The company also does not store information on those with whom its users are communicating. Civil liberties lawyers argue the Justice Department request fell well outside the bounds of what is typically covered by a subpoena, including basic subscriber information. Additional information, such as computer logs or content, would require a search warrant under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. \u201cThe Justice Department is pushing the envelope,\u201d said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Big companies like Apple and Microsoft have the wherewithal to push back, she said. But smaller companies may cave, rather than risk an expensive fight. The Justice Department came to Open Whisper Systems with a menu of information needs, including subscriber details, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and method of payment. The request went on to demand information on internet addresses, browsers and internet providers that the account holders could have used, according to court records. One of the phone numbers the government was investigating was not a Signal user after all. For the other phone number, Open Whisper Systems turned over the only pieces of data it could: the time the user\u2019s account had been created and the last time it had connected to the service \u2014 far less than the government sought. In other circumstances, the government has tried to force companies via court order to re-engineer their services to collect missing pieces of information, as it did with Apple earlier this year and in a similar case in 2013 against Lavabit, a small encrypted messaging service used by the former defense contractor Edward J. Snowden. The government did not make that request of Open Whisper Systems. \u201cThey need to pick those cases carefully,\u201d Ms. Granick said. \u201cThey are only picking cases where they think they\u2019re going to have the people on their side.\u201d The Justice Department and F.B.I. tried to force Apple to break its own software security in the case of an iPhone used by a gunman in last year\u2019s San Bernardino terrorist attacks, she said. Companies are having some success in getting courts to lift gag orders. Last year, Nicholas Merrill, the owner of a now-defunct internet service provider, got a gag order lifted, though it took more than a decade. After the court decision in Mr. Merrill\u2019s case, a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York denied gag orders in more than a dozen cases related to Facebook subpoenas last May. And in June, Yahoo was successful in getting a court to lift gag orders on a number of law enforcement information requests. \u201cGag orders should be used in exceptional cases,\u201d said Brett M. Kaufman, the staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. who represented Open Whisper Systems. \u201cThis one demonstrates that the exception has become the rule in routine proceedings.\u201d", "keyword": "Government Surveillance;Search and seizure;Signal;Justice Department;FBI;ACLU;Subpoena;Privacy;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry"}
{"id": "ny0143262", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/11/22", "title": "Nebraska Revises Child Safe Haven Law", "abstract": "DECATUR, Neb.\u2014 The Legislature on Friday revised an unusual law permitting parents to hand children up to age 18 over to state custody without prosecution, instead limiting its reach to infants up to 30 days old. The original law, enacted earlier this year, was intended to protect newborns from being abandoned or killed by panicked young mothers. But since Sept. 1, to the shock of officials and the public in Nebraska , 35 older children, many from 10 to 17 years in age, have been dropped off at hospitals. Most were left by desperate parents who said the children were uncontrollable and violent and needed more counseling or psychiatric services than they could find or pay for. The specter of parents\u2019 giving up their children prompted national soul-searching about the limits of parental responsibility. It has also highlighted what child welfare experts say is a widespread shortage of public and private aid, especially mental health services, for overstressed families and teenagers \u2014 a shortage that is likely to worsen in the current economic crisis as state governments cut budgets. The Legislature on Thursday established a commission to propose new measures to help people like Lavennia Coover, a 36-year-old divorced mother of three and kindergarten teacher who was at the end of her rope, financially and emotionally, when she made the wrenching decision to hand over her son. \u201cI still cry every night,\u201d Ms. Coover said Friday in an interview at her home in Decatur, a speck of a farm town on the Missouri River, about 60 miles north of Omaha. \u201cWhat parent wouldn\u2019t feel guilty doing this?\u201d Ms. Coover\u2019s husband left her alone with three children, including an older bipolar daughter and a 12-year-old boy who is doing well. But her 11-year-old son, Skylar, is bipolar, abusive and violent, she said, and after three years of spotty, expensive and ineffective psychiatric care she could see no other way to get him the intensive help he needs. In September, when he refused to get out of bed and go to school, she physically dragged him out for a few days, then gave up trying. On Sept. 24, after he had become more aggressive and begun throwing food and trashing the house, she told the boy that they were going for a drive to Omaha. Instead she drove to the Alegent Health-Immanuel Medical Center and left Skylar there, invoking the safe-haven law. Skylar suspected what was up. On Labor Day weekend, after a particularly bad spell, he had spent three days \u2014 the maximum her insurance would cover \u2014 in that hospital\u2019s psychiatric unit, and as she turned in its direction that day, he said: \u201cYou\u2019re taking me back there, aren\u2019t you? You lied to me.\u201d \u201cI promise I\u2019ll behave,\u201d he wailed. \u201cI promise I\u2019ll go to school.\u201d \u201cI said, \u2018Skylar, you need help that I just can\u2019t give you,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Coover recalled. She wept in the emergency room. On Sept. 26 child welfare officials in Douglas County, which includes Omaha, filed a petition accusing Ms. Coover of neglect. She is working to have that changed to a \u201cno fault\u201d transfer of custody. Being officially declared neglectful could jeopardize her teaching credential and future parental rights. The abrupt handovers in Nebraska are striking examples of an ongoing, more orderly phenomenon that exposes the shortage of psychiatric help for children. A 2003 report by the General Accounting Office, compiling responses from only 19 states and 30 counties, found that 12,700 children in one year had been placed in child welfare or juvenile justice systems simply so they could receive mental health care. As the drop-offs continued through the fall in Nebraska, including five cases in which children were driven in from other states, Gov. Dave Heineman called an emergency session of the Legislature this week to revise the law. Earlier this year, Nebraska was the last of the 50 states to adopt a safe-haven law. But instead of specifying that it applied only to infants up to a certain age, as in other states, Nebraska\u2019s version used the word \u201cchild,\u201d opening the door to handovers of children up to age 18. Many legislators and advocates for children said the desperate actions by caretakers had exposed serious gaps in services, especially for families with troubled older children. The findings of the new commission are sure to be scrutinized by other states where the same unmet needs are rumbling. As in most states, Nebraska offers a patchwork of hot lines, private agencies like Boys Town and public programs that offer counseling and respite shelters to distressed families and runaway children. Some Nebraska officials have said that ample services exist, including free counseling for the poor, but that parents are not fully using them. Many legislators and advocates disagree. Ms. Coover said that her son had received psychiatric care off and on, with limited coverage by her insurance plan, but that he often refused to take prescribed medications. When he refused to go to school, she could not afford a sitter and did not know where to turn. She has spoken out, she said, because newspaper descriptions made her family easily identifiable in their town of 640 and because she resented the way state officials described parents like her as irresponsibly \u201cabandoning\u201d their children. Far from abandoning Skylar, she said, she gave her phone number to the hospital and state agencies, has visited him weekly \u2014 he is still in the same hospital but will soon move into a therapeutic foster home with specially trained parents and services \u2014 and hopes he can return home at some point. It was easy for officials to talk of available counseling and mental health services, Ms. Coover said. But in a rural area like hers, such aid is rare, and when she did find it, the offices were distant. \u201cGood luck finding a counselor \u2014 they\u2019re all filled up,\u201d she said. \u201cYou call a psychiatrist and have to wait three months for an appointment.\u201d Once during a snowstorm, she said, after she drove 25 miles to pick up the boys at school, then 45 miles to a psychiatric appointment, she arrived 15 minutes late. \u201cThey said we\u2019d have to make a new appointment for six weeks later,\u201d she said. The short-lived law has yielded many poignant scenes. The same night that Ms. Coover took Skylar in, a father went into another hospital in Omaha and dropped off nine children, saying that since his wife died last year, he could not cope with raising them. Those children, like some others handed to the state, have moved in with relatives, but most are in foster care or group homes. Courtney Anderson, a social worker at Immanuel Hospital, said that some of the children taken to the emergency room cried and begged their parent or guardian not to leave them. Some did not realize what was happening. \u201cSome knew, but were just numb,\u201d Ms. Anderson said. Nine of the 35 drop-offs occurred at Immanuel Hospital, but at least as many more families arrived intending to leave a child but were talked out of it by social workers who offered respite care, parenting classes and referrals to other aid that, Ms. Anderson said, the parents had not known about. Even with children suffering more severe psychiatric problems, Ms. Anderson said, state child welfare and other agencies \u201ccame together quickly\u201d to offer help. \u201cEveryone wants the families to stay together,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we are looking forward to the solutions that the new commission proposes.\u201d", "keyword": "Nebraska;Abandonment;Children and Youth"}
{"id": "ny0152040", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2008/08/31", "title": "Victory by Japanese Teenager Highlights Day of Upsets", "abstract": "During the points, Kei Nishikori showed no signs of distress, his movements flowing like silk. The effort it required Nishikori, an 18-year-old from Shimane, Japan, to make history at the United States Open on Saturday became painfully obvious afterward when he hobbled on quivering legs to the interview podium and appeared so exhausted he could barely keep himself upright in his seat. Nishikori, 126th-ranked player in the world, pulled off the men\u2019s upset of the first week when he defeated the No. 4 seed, David Ferrer of Spain, 6-4, 6-4, 3-6, 2-6, 7-5. The third-round match started during the day session and was rumbling toward its dramatic conclusion after the first match of the evening session had ended. The final match of the day also ended in an upset, with Mardy Fish defeating his close friend and fellow American, ninth-seeded James Blake, 6-3, 6-3, 7-6 (4). Blake, who had advanced at least as far as the fourth round at the Open the previous three years, arrived at the tournament in particularly high spirits after beating the former No. 1, Roger Federer, at the Beijing Olympics. Fish, who had never made it past the second round in eight previous Open appearances, recorded 55 winners against 28 unforced errors and broke Blake five times. It took Nishikori 3 hours 32 minutes and three match points to put away Ferrer, a veritable human backboard. Ferrer erased the first match point with a backhand passing shot with Nishikori serving at 5-3 in the fifth. Nishikori sealed the win by breaking Ferrer with his 28th forehand winner. When Ferrer could not return the ball, Nishikori let go of his racket and fell to the court on his back. With the victory, Nishikori became the first Japanese man to reach the fourth round of the Open and the first to advance to the Round of 16 in a Grand Slam event since 1995, when Shuzo Matsuoka made it to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon. \u201cI was already happy to play U.S. Open main draw,\u201d said Nishikori, who attempted to qualify for the Open last year but lost in the second round of qualifying. Ferrer and Nishikori finished with the same number of points won (155), and each broke the other eight times. Nishikori had played only one other five-set match. He started cramping in the third set, and late in the fifth set, Nishikori required medical treatment. His malady was essentially exhaustion. He took off his sneakers and sat back while a trainer kneaded his legs, then Nishikori sat forward so his back could be rubbed. He also cramped during his four-set victory against the No. 29 seed, Juan Monaco, in the first round. \u201cI was tired, but I tried to think, \u2018I am playing David.\u2019 He\u2019s No. 4 in the world, and playing five sets with him I felt kind of happy and think more positive,\u201d Nishikori said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I think I could fight through everything.\u201d But he acknowledged that after the match everything was hurting. \u201cMy ankle and my legs are sore and my back,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t even move after the match.\u201d At Wimbledon in 1995, Matsuoka was 27 and ranked 108th in the world when he defeated the American Michael Joyce, who was ranked 119th, in straight sets. The match took place on Court 13, which was intimate enough to enable Matsuoka to walk around shaking the hands of the fans in the stands who had cheered him on. The setting was much grander for Nishikori, who was bidding to become the youngest man to advance to the fourth round at the Open since Marat Safin in 1998. He was playing on one of the show courts, Louis Armstrong Stadium, and as word of his upset bid spread through the grounds of the National Tennis Center, curious fans filled the stands. By the end, Nishikori\u2019s cheering section included his countrywoman, Ai Sugiyama, a veteran who made her way to Armstrong after losing to Serena Williams in straight sets in another day match at Arthur Ashe Stadium. \u201cI think that was the most important thing today,\u201d Nishikori said, referring to the crowd that he won over with his fearlessness. \u201cThat helped me so much. I get so excited today.\u201d Ferrer, who had only three forehand winners in the fifth set, said, \u201cI fight a lot, and Nishikori plays better than me, I think.\u201d He added, \u201cHe\u2019s a good player, no?\u201d Matsuoka\u2019s feat at Wimbledon made the front pages of the sports dailies in Japan. Nishikori was asked if he had a clue how his victory would be treated at home. He said he already had received some feedback. \u201cIs it huge?\u201d somebody asked. Nishikori, looking embarrassed, replied: \u201cI think. I don\u2019t know. Yeah.\u201d NOTES Appearing under the lights at Arthur Ashe Stadium for the third time in seven Open visits, Dinara Safina played as if she had much to lose, and she did, namely a shot at the No. 1 world ranking and a $1 million United States Open Series bonus for winning the tournament. After a rocky start, the sixth-seeded Safina steadied her emotions, and her serve and ground strokes followed in a 3-6, 7-5, 6-2 victory over Timea Bacsinszky. Safina improved her record in singles this year to 35-4. ... The hottest male player right now, Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, ran his consecutive victory streak to 22 by staving off Gilles Simon of France, 6-4, 6-7 (4), 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 in a third-round match on the Grandstand court that lasted 3 hours 47 minutes. Del Potro has not lost since falling to Stanislas Wawrinka in the second round at Wimbledon.", "keyword": "United States Open (Tennis);Tennis;Nishikori Kei;Fish Mardy"}
{"id": "ny0190614", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/05/06", "title": "U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates Asks Saudis for Help in Pakistan", "abstract": "RIYADH, Saudi Arabia \u2014 As the Obama administration prepares for talks this week with senior leaders from Afghanistan and Pakistan , Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates flew to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to seek help in pushing back Taliban advances in Pakistan that, he said, threaten the very existence of the government in Islamabad. Mr. Gates said Saudi Arabia \u201cclearly has a lot of influence throughout the region,\u201d and he cited its \u201clong-standing and close relationship with Pakistan.\u201d The defense secretary called on Pakistan\u2019s allies across the region to assist in countering insurgent successes that represent a growing danger to Pakistan, and Mr. Gates said a goal of this week\u2019s meetings with Afghan and Pakistani leaders in Washington would be to reach consensus on the nature of the threat. In the past, the Pakistani government and its military have been far more focused on their traditional adversary, India, than on the domestic insurgency. As Mr. Gates concluded talks in Egypt earlier Tuesday, the shadow of Iran\u2019s regional ambitions prompted the defense secretary to declare that efforts by the Obama administration to seek better ties with Tehran would not jeopardize its relations with allies in the region. He stressed that historic American partners in the Middle East would be kept fully informed of Washington\u2019s diplomatic efforts toward Iran. The Obama administration was undertaking that effort to reach out to Iran \u201cwith its eyes wide open,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we encounter a closed fist when we extend our open hand, then we will react accordingly,\u201d Mr. Gates said. \u201cConcerns out here of some kind of a \u2018grand bargain\u2019 developed in secret are completely unrealistic and, I would say, are not going to happen.\u201d", "keyword": "Gates Robert M;Saudi Arabia;Taliban;Pakistan;Afghanistan War (2001- );International Relations;United States Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0104061", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/03/19", "title": "How \u2018Hunger Games\u2019 Built Up Must-See Fever", "abstract": "SANTA MONICA, Calif. \u2014 Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC\u2019s Thursday night lineup with ads. Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online techniques to pull off what may be the marketer\u2019s ultimate trick: persuading fans to persuade each other. The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but in truth Hollywood\u2019s new promotional paradigm involves a digital hard sell in which little is left to chance \u2014 as becomes apparent in a rare step-by-step tour through the timetable and techniques used by Lionsgate to assure that \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d becomes a box office phenomenon when it opens on Friday. While some studios have halted once-standard marketing steps like newspaper ads, Lionsgate used all the usual old-media tricks \u2014 giving away 80,000 posters, securing almost 50 magazine cover stories, advertising on 3,000 billboards and bus shelters. But the campaign\u2019s centerpiece has been a phased, yearlong digital effort built around the content platforms cherished by young audiences: near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere. By carefully lighting online kindling (releasing a fiery logo to movie blogs) and controlling the Internet burn over the course of months (a Facebook contest here, a Twitter scavenger hunt there), Lionsgate\u2019s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen, appears to have created a box office inferno. Analysts project that the \u201cThe Hunger Games,\u201d which cost about $80 million to make and is planned as a four-movie franchise, could have opening-weekend sales of about $90 million \u2014 far more than the first \u201cTwilight\u201d and on par with \u201cIron Man,\u201d which went on to take in over $585 million worldwide in 2008. Along the way the studio had to navigate some unusually large pitfalls, chief among them the film\u2019s tricky subject matter of children killing children for a futuristic society\u2019s televised amusement. The trilogy of novels, written by Suzanne Collins, is critical of violence as entertainment, not an easy line for a movie marketer to walk, even though the movie itself is quite tame in its depiction of killing. \u201cThe beam for this movie is really narrow, and it\u2019s a sheer drop to your death on either side,\u201d said Mr. Palen, during an unusually candid two-hour presentation of his \u201cHunger Games\u201d strategy at the studio\u2019s offices here last month. A built-in fan base for \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d certainly helps its prospects. More than 24 million copies of \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d trilogy are in print in the United States alone. About 9.6 million copies were in circulation domestically when the movie\u2019s marketing campaign intensified last summer, so Lionsgate\u2019s efforts appear to have sold the book as well as the movie. Lionsgate has generated this high level of interest with a marketing staff of 21 people working with a relatively tiny budget of about $45 million. Bigger studios routinely spend $100 million marketing major releases, and have worldwide marketing and publicity staffs of over 100 people. The studio has been able to spend so little largely because Mr. Palen has relied on inexpensive digital initiatives to whip up excitement. The irony is that all of this may still not be enough to save Mr. Palen\u2019s job. In a corporate twist on \u201cThe Hunger Games,\u201d Mr. Palen is being forced to fight for his professional life following Lionsgate\u2019s acquisition in January of Summit Entertainment, which controls the \u201cTwilight\u201d franchise. That means Lionsgate now has two marketing chiefs, and there is only room for one. Mr. Palen declined to comment on his job status, but it is clear that Ms. Collins is perplexed at the possibility of a future without him. \u201cHe\u2019s a generous collaborator,\u201d she said in an e-mail. \u201cHis work is so exceptionally good, I rarely had any notes. If he keeps his e-mails, he must have about 50 from me that say, \u2018That looks amazing!\u2019 \u201d Early promotion for \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d started in spring 2009, when Mr. Palen flew to New York to meet with publicity executives from Scholastic to learn about the book franchise. Rubber didn\u2019t hit the road, however, until last March, when the Lionsgate team, including Julie Fontaine, executive vice president of publicity, started methodically pumping out casting news via Facebook. They assigned one team member to cultivate \u201cHunger Games\u201d fan blogs. Danielle DePalma, senior vice president for digital marketing, drafted a chronology for the entire online effort, using spreadsheets (coded in 12 colors) that detailed what would be introduced on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute, basis over months. (\u201cNov. 17: Facebook posts \u2014 photos, Yahoo brand page goes live.\u201d) One important online component involved a sweepstakes to bring five fans to the movie\u2019s North Carolina set. Notably, Lionsgate invited no reporters: The studio did not want consumers thinking this was another instance of Hollywood trying to force-feed them a movie through professional filters. \u201cPeople used to be O.K. with studios telling them what to like,\u201d Ms. DePalma said. \u201cNot anymore. Now it\u2019s, \u2018You don\u2019t tell us, we tell you.\u2019 \u201d Last summer, the Lionsgate team, including Nina Jacobson, a producer, and Joe Drake, then the studio\u2019s top movie executive, started debating how to handle the movie\u2019s subject. The usual move would have been to exploit imagery from the games in TV commercials. How else would men in particular get excited about the movie? But Mr. Palen was worried. \u201cThis book is on junior high reading lists, but kids killing kids, even though it\u2019s handled delicately in the film, is a potential perception problem in marketing,\u201d he said. One morning, he floated a radical idea: what about never showing the games at all in the campaign? Some team members were incredulous; after all, combat scenes make up more than half the movie. \u201cThere was a lot of, \u2018You\u2019ve got to be kidding. I don\u2019t see how we can manage that,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Palen recalled. Eventually, he prevailed. \u201cEveryone liked the implication that if you want to see the games you have to buy a ticket,\u201d he said. Boundaries were also established involving how to position plot developments; in the movie, 24 children fight to the death until one wins, but \u201cwe made a rule that we would never say \u201823 kids get killed,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Palen said. \u201cWe say \u2018only one wins.\u2019 \u201d The team also barred the phrase \u201cLet the games begin.\u201d \u201cThis is not about glorifying competition; these kids are victims,\u201d Mr. Palen said. A few months later, when a major entertainment magazine planned to use \u201cLet the Games Begin\u201d as the headline on a \u201cHunger Games\u201d cover, Ms. Fontaine, traveling in London, frantically worked her cellphone until editors agreed to change it. In August came a one-minute sneak peek, introduced online at MTV.com . People liked it but complained \u2014 loudly \u2014 that it wasn\u2019t enough. \u201cWe weren\u2019t prepared for that level of we-demand-more pushback,\u201d Mr. Palen said. The footage did include a Twitter prompt through which fans could discover a Web site for the movie, TheCapitol.pn . (The Capitol is where the Hunger Games take place.) The site allowed visitors to make digital ID cards as if they lived in Panem, the movie\u2019s futuristic society; more than 800,000 people have created them. October included another Twitter stunt, this time meant to allow those ID makers to campaign online to be elected mayor of various districts of Panem. November marked the iTunes release of the main trailer, which received eight million views in its first 24 hours. On Dec. 15, 100 days before the movie\u2019s release, the studio created a new poster and cut it into 100 puzzle pieces. It then gave digital versions of those pieces to 100 Web sites and asked them to post their puzzle piece on Twitter in lockstep. Fans had to search Twitter to put together the poster, either by printing out the pieces and cutting them out or using a program like Photoshop. \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d trended worldwide on Twitter within minutes. \u201cIt was a silly little stunt, but it worked \u2014 bam,\u201d Mr. Palen said. More movie hubs went live on sites like PopSugar, Moviefone and The Huffington Post in January, which also was the start of a lavish Tumblr blog called Capitol Couture dedicated to the movie\u2019s unique fashions. Fifty more Web sites coordinated a ticket giveaway. Capitol TV \u2014 movie footage, user-generated \u201cHunger Games\u201d videos \u2014 arrived on YouTube in February and has since generated almost 17.7 million video views. This week, remembering it is operating in the attention deficit era, Lionsgate will introduce a new Facebook game and, separately, a virtual tour of the Capitol in a Web partnership with Microsoft. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to constantly give people something new to get excited about, but we also had another goal in mind,\u201d Ms. DePalma said. \u201cHow do we best sustain online interest until the DVD comes out?\u201d", "keyword": "Movies;Social Networking (Internet);Advertising and Marketing;Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation;Hunger Games The (Movie);Collins Suzanne (1962- )"}
{"id": "ny0108216", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/05/02", "title": "Pfizer Profit Declines 19% After Loss of Lipitor Patent", "abstract": "For years, drug companies have known that their days of plenty were numbered, that the moment would arrive when the best-selling drugs that had driven two decades\u2019 worth of profits would lose their patent protection and succumb to competition from generic alternatives. Without new blockbusters to replace them, profits would tumble. For Pfizer , that day has arrived. Pfizer profited from hits like Lipitor and Viagra , and swallowed up smaller companies from the 1990s onward. But it has no immediate successor to Lipitor, the best-selling drug in history, which lost patent protection last fall. The problem was punctuated on Tuesday when the company said that profit declined 19 percent last quarter, largely because of declines in Lipitor sales. Pfizer \u2014 once the Big in Big Pharma \u2014 is making a radical shift, one being watched closely by the rest of the industry. It is getting smaller. Last week the company announced it was selling its infant nutrition business to Nestl\u00e9 for $11.85 billion, and it is expected to divest its profitable animal health business by next year. At the same time, the company is slashing as much as 30 percent of its research budget as part of a plan to focus on only the most promising areas, like cancer and Alzheimer\u2019s disease . \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily smaller per se, it\u2019s focused,\u201d Ian C. Read, Pfizer\u2019s chief executive, said in an interview Tuesday. \u201cWe are at our heart a biopharmaceutical company focused on applying science to improving people\u2019s quality of life. That is what our core is. That is what will determine our success.\u201d Pfizer is one of many pharmaceutical companies racing to reinvent itself. This year alone, at least 19 drugs \u2014 including the antistroke drug Plavix \u2014 are scheduled to lose patent protection, a potential $38.5 billion in lost sales, according to an analysis by Barclays . Drug executives are asking themselves: \u201cWhat is it that we now face, given that in the past decade \u2014 when everything was going right \u2014 we didn\u2019t build with this future in mind?\u201d said Jeremy Levin, who oversaw a similar reorganization of Bristol-Myers Squibb and is about to take over as chief executive at Teva Pharmaceuticals. At Pfizer, skeptics have questioned the decision to shed some of its most profitable units in favor of doubling down on the risky pharmaceutical business. Pfizer\u2019s nutrition unit grew by 15 percent and animal health by 17 percent in 2011 , while its pharmaceutical sales dipped by 1 percent. And Pfizer has suffered some notable flops over the last several years, including the failure of an experimental cholesterol treatment that was seen as a potential successor to Lipitor and poor sales of an inhaled insulin drug that the company eventually abandoned. \u201cIt\u2019s a high-risk plan,\u201d said Erik M. Gordon, who teaches business at the University of Michigan . \u201cThey\u2019re focusing on what they don\u2019t have the best track record in and they\u2019re spinning off things that are doing pretty well.\u201d Pfizer spent the last decade buying other big companies. In 2000, it acquired Warner Lambert and with it the rights to Lipitor, which Pfizer had been co-marketing with the company. In 2003, it merged with Pharmacia and added the painkiller Celebrex to its lineup. It acquired Wyeth in 2009 in a $68 billion deal that brought a portfolio of biologic drugs. Last year, Pfizer bought King Pharmaceuticals, a maker of pain drugs. The acquisitions, some said, turned Pfizer into a Frankenstein\u2019s monster \u2014 a giant stitched together from the scraps of smaller companies that lurched forward with little purpose. \u201cI think the company sort of lost their way in the years before the Wyeth acquisition,\u201d said Catherine J. Arnold, an analyst for Credit Suisse . Mr. Read said he agreed. \u201cI think it was broken \u2014 I think we were spending huge amounts of money,\u201d said Mr. Read, who took over as chief executive in late 2010 after Jeffrey B. Kindler resigned abruptly . \u201cWe weren\u2019t producing the drugs we needed and frankly that was seen in the marketplace.\u201d Analysts said Pfizer\u2019s nutrition deal and the divestiture of the animal health business is a way to tide over shareholders while it undertakes more substantial changes to its business model. The company has said it plans to use most of the cash from the deals to buy back stock, though studies have repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of such moves by corporations. Pfizer said Tuesday that it had repurchased $1.7 billion in stock in the first quarter, and expects to buy back about $5 billion by the end of the year. The company reported earnings of $1.79 billion last quarter, or 24 cents a share, compared to $2.22 billion, or 28 cents a share over the same period last year. Investors seem to be buying into the company\u2019s strategy so far: Pfizer stock has risen nearly 8 percent over the last year. Pfizer\u2019s stock closed at $22.78 on Tuesday, down 12 cents, or less than 1 percent. Even so, the company\u2019s decision to cut research budgets as it is planning to recommit to its pharmaceutical core struck some as risky. Mr. Gordon, the Michigan business professor, called it a \u201cmagic trick.\u201d It\u2019s a magic trick, however, that most major pharmaceutical companies are also trying. \u201cThe question is how do you remain successful and sustain your operations if you\u2019re investing less and less in R&D?\u201d said Kenneth I. Kaitin, a professor and director of Tufts University \u2019s Center for the Study of Drug Development. \u201cThe answer to that is to try to find a new way and a more efficient mechanism for discovering and developing drugs.\u201d Pfizer plans to reduce its research budget from $9.4 billion in 2010 to $6.5 billion to $7 billion this year. It closed a research center in Britain and has been trimming its facility in Groton, Conn., and moving resources to areas closer to universities in Boston and Cambridge , England . In 2011, the company ended 91 projects, canceling programs aimed at treating bladder infection , for example, as well as one to treat nasal symptoms from allergies . Company executives have also said they will be on the lookout for smaller acquisitions to fill gaps in their portfolio, and will expand partnerships with academic institutions. Mr. Read said the cuts would not affect the areas that the company has prioritized. \u201cMost of what I cut had a low probability of success,\u201d he said. While Pfizer does not have another Lipitor, analysts say several drugs seem promising. On May 9, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel is to consider recommending approval of an oral pill for rheumatoid arthritis . In June, the agency is expected to weigh approval of Eliquis, an antistroke drug that Pfizer is developing with Bristol-Myers Squibb. In corporate strategy, Pfizer is following the path of Bristol-Myers, which in 2009 announced plans to spin off the nutrition company Mead Johnson to focus on acquiring small biotech companies . The company has since fared well despite the loss of patent protection for Plavix on May 17. \u201cSo long as the blockbuster game was working, people kept playing it,\u201d Mr. Gordon said.", "keyword": "Pfizer;Pharmaceuticals;Inventions and Patents;Research;Lipitor;Budget;Earnings Reports"}
{"id": "ny0181989", "categories": ["business", "yourmoney"], "date": "2007/12/02", "title": "If the Shoe Fits, Wear It. If Not, Design One That Does.", "abstract": "EVEN for the most dedicated shopper, finding just the right pair of shoes can be elusive. A store-to-store search \u2014 whether on the Web or at the mall \u2014 can take hours. Shoppers may think they\u2019ve found the perfect pair, only to be stymied by a problem with fit, style or color. It\u2019s not that retailers don\u2019t try, as the huge shoe sections in department stores like Saks and Nordstrom, and Web sites like Zappos and Shoes.com , attest. But for those with very individual or exacting tastes \u2014 and with money to spare \u2014 some Internet retailers offer design-it-yourself options in footwear. Customization is more common with athletic shoes, but fashion footwear is beginning to catch up. Makers like Vans and Nike are among the companies that offer customized shoes, allowing both women and men to create their own look from existing styles, colors and materials. Cale Valdez, a college student in Huntington, Calif., went to vans.com to find a memorable look for his wedding last month. He designed some red and black canvas slip-ons for the wedding party, including matching lace-ups for his father-in-law. \u201cMy groomsmen had black tuxes and red vests, so we thought it would look great to have red shoes,\u201d he said of the slip-ons, which cost $40 a pair. Nikeid.com , which attracts almost as many women as men, has customers who order hundreds of pairs. The hip-hop disc jockey known as Clark Kent, of Brooklyn, has designed 350 pairs of shoes on the site, including his favorite, a pair of purple, black and teal Air Force 1\u2019s, which cost him about $275. \u201cThe biggest attraction is the ability to shock,\u201d he said. \u201cYou want a pair that people notice so they ask you: \u2018Where did you get those?\u2019\u201d While customized sneakers are available on many athletic shoe Web sites, fashion shoes are harder, although not impossible, to find. For women who are willing to spend a hefty sum, there is Tupli, started three years ago by two women who were leaving careers in banking. \u201cThis is ideal for the woman who can imagine the perfect shoe but can\u2019t find it,\u201d said Kathy Myczowski, 34. She went into the individual shoe design business with Tamara Chubinidze, 26, who is from the Republic of Georgia, where such shoemaking is more prevalent and where Tupli\u2019s shoes are made. Clients can browse tupli.com for ideas and then send in their measurements, or be measured personally in New York. Tupli had a by-appointment shop in Manhattan for a couple of years, but switched to online last year because its customers were far flung, Ms. Myczowski said. Amolyn Peart, a banking manager who has purchased three pairs of shoes from the company, became intrigued with the idea after spotting a woman wearing Tupli footwear (a name derived from the Russian word for shoe) at a business gathering. \u201cThe shoes were so gorgeous and unusual, so I immediately asked her where she got them,\u201d said Ms. Peart, of West Orange, N.J. Like many people, she is hard to fit: her shoe size is between 8 1/2 and 9, and ready-made shoes are often too tight in the toe. Tupli\u2019s clients \u2014 who include the actress Susan Sarandon \u2014 have a choice of leather and suede, as well as embellishments like rhinestones and personal logos, and initials on the upper or even on the sole, said Ms. Myczowski. The first made-to-measure Tupli shoe that Ms. Peart designed for herself was a black and red pump for an event at work. \u201cEveryone noticed it, especially because they were all wearing black shoes,\u201d she recalled. Since then, she has ordered another pair of shoes and a pair of boots. Prices for Tupli shoes start at a hefty $750 for shoes and $1,450 for boots, and customers must wait six to eight weeks for them. Those who want a less expensive made-to-order shoe that won\u2019t take as long to arrive can turn to Stevemadden.com . Steven Madden, founder of the company, says more than 100,000 pairs of design-your-own shoes have been sold through the site, where the prices range from $90 to $170. That\u2019s what Robert Klemm, 27, a loan officer in Bethpage, N.Y., did last summer after he learned about Steve Madden Ltd.\u2019s \u201cDesign Your Own Collection.\u201d A shoe aficionado \u2014 he owns 60 pairs \u2014 he wanted to create some shoes to surprise his girlfriend, Kate Feehan, for her birthday. Starting with her size, 9, he clicked through the site to select a style, heel and color, putting together a navy gingham open-toe pump with a cork heel and sole that Mr. Klemm thought \u201cwould look good with everything from jeans to dresses.\u201d He spent $150 plus shipping and tax. The site charges a 20 percent premium for made-to-order shoes, which are assembled in China and are not returnable. The turnaround time is three weeks, according to the site. RIGHT now, Stevemadden.com has almost no online competition. But Jeffrey Van Sinderen, apparel analyst for B. Riley & Company in Los Angeles, predicted that other makers would not be far behind, despite the large investment needed to set up a factory to make the shoes and a system to distribute them. Made-to-order shoes are profitable, he said, and \u201cit answers the question of how you make the product more compelling to the consumer, and that\u2019s to give them the power to design it.\u201d In shoes, passion often trumps the practical. To Mary A. Johnson, 22, online design is about owning something unique. Ms. Johnson, a student at West Los Angeles College, owns 200 pairs of shoes, but that didn\u2019t stop her from going to Stevemadden.com recently to design some ballet flats in a purple shade and trimming them in red. \u201cThis is something you make yourself,\u201d she said, \u201cinstead of settling for what\u2019s out there.\u201d", "keyword": "Shoes and Boots;Computers and the Internet;Retail Stores and Trade;Design"}
{"id": "ny0256911", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2011/08/22", "title": "Zone Near Fukushima Daiichi May Be Off Limits for Decades", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday. The formal announcement, expected from the government in coming days, would be the first official recognition that the March accident could force the long-term depopulation of communities near the plant, an eventuality that scientists and some officials have been warning about for months. Lawmakers said over the weekend \u2014 and major newspapers reported Monday \u2014 that Prime Minister Naoto Kan was planning to visit Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is, as early as Saturday to break the news directly to residents. The affected communities are all within 12 miles of the plant, an area that was evacuated immediately after the accident. The government is expected to tell many of these residents that they will not be permitted to return to their homes for an indefinite period. It will also begin drawing up plans for compensating them by, among other things, renting their now uninhabitable land. While it is unclear if the government would specify how long these living restrictions would remain in place, news reports indicated it could be decades. That has been the case for areas around the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine after its 1986 accident. Since the Fukushima accident, evacuations have been a sensitive topic for the government, which has been criticized for being slow to admit the extent of the disaster and trying to limit the size of the areas affected, despite possible risks to public health. Until now, Tokyo had been saying it would lift the current evacuation orders for most areas around the plant early next year, when workers are expected to stabilize Fukushima Daiichi\u2019s damaged nuclear reactors. The government was apparently forced to alter its plans after the survey by the Ministry of Science and Education, released over the weekend, which showed even higher than expected radiation levels within the 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant. The most heavily contaminated spot was in the town of Okuma about two miles southwest of the plant, where someone living for a year would be exposed to 508.1 millisieverts of radiation \u2014 far above the level of 20 millesieverts per year that the government considers safe. The survey found radiation above the safe level at three dozen spots up to 12 miles from the plant. That has called into question how many residents will actually be able to return to their homes even after the plant is stabilized. Some 80,000 people were evacuated from communities around the plant, which was crippled by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and towering tsunami on March 11. Many of those residents now live in temporary housing or makeshift refugee shelters, and are allowed back to their homes only for brief, tightly supervised visits in which they must wear protective clothing.", "keyword": "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan);Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011);Radiation;Accidents and Safety"}
{"id": "ny0052222", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/10/13", "title": "The Week Ahead: Apple iPad Upgrades, France\u2019s Budget Review and Wall Street Bank Results", "abstract": "FRANCE TO SUBMIT BUDGET FOR EUROPEAN REVIEW Finance ministers from countries using the euro will meet on Monday in Luxembourg, where the focus is expected to be on France, which must formally submit its draft budget to the European Commission by Wednesday. The commission could reject the budget this month, but reach an agreement with the French government that avoids a prolonged confrontation. On Tuesday, finance ministers from countries outside the eurozone will join the meeting to discuss an agreement aimed at curbing tax evasion and other measures. JAMES KANTER Image Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images APPLE EXPECTED TO OFFER HARDWARE UPGRADES FOR IPAD Apple\u2019s iPhone sales continue to grow year after year, but its iPad sales have gradually shrunk. Analysts say competition from cheaper tablets and larger smartphones is eroding iPad sales. In an effort to lift sales, Apple\u2019s executives, including Timothy D. Cook, plan a media event on Thursday on Apple\u2019s campus in Cupertino, Calif., where upgrades for iPads are expected, including one with an extra thin body. BRIAN X. CHEN WALL ST. BANKS TO REPORT THIRD-QUARTER RESULTS Wall Street banks report third-quarter results this week. On Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase will release results, the first since it disclosed that a cyberattack had touched 76 million households. Citigroup and Wells Fargo also will report on Tuesday, followed on Wednesday by Bank of America, often seen as a bellwether for consumer banking. Investors will watch Goldman Sachs\u2019s earnings on Thursday for signs of a turnaround in trading revenue amid volatility in the markets. MICHAEL CORKERY EUROPEAN COURT TO HEAR CASE ON BOND PURCHASE PLAN Judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union will hear arguments on Tuesday in a case brought by German academics challenging a 2012 pledge by the European Central Bank to buy sovereign bonds, claiming the bank had exceeded its authority. The case has drawn attention because the pledge greatly eased the debt crisis in Europe, even though bond purchases were never made. The German Constitutional Court cast doubt on aspects of the pledge in February, but referred the case for further clarification to the Court of Justice, Europe\u2019s top court, which meets in Luxembourg. JAMES KANTER and JACK EWING", "keyword": "Banking and Finance;iPad;Apple;EU;France;Budget"}
{"id": "ny0055910", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/09/20", "title": "Judges Question Bonds Verdict", "abstract": "Judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Cicruit on Thursday questioned the soundness of Barry Bonds\u2019s conviction for obstruction of justice stemming from his rambling response to a grand jury in 2003 and left open the possibility that they could throw out the verdict. During oral arguments, the judges asked a lawyer for the federal government how an evasive answer could be obstructive, since the Supreme Court has ruled that it is a prosecutor\u2019s duty to pin down a witness who gives an evasive answer. \u201cI don\u2019t see how there is sufficient evidence where the question was re-asked immediately and answered repeatedly,\u201d Judge Susan P. Graber said. \u201cSo it\u2019s as if someone says, \u2018Well, I can\u2019t remember what time it was. Oh, yeah, it was seven o\u2019clock.\u2019 It just doesn\u2019t make sense to me that a jury could find the elements as instructed given the specifics of this case.\u201d The jury at Bonds\u2019s trial in 2011 failed to reach a verdict on three charges, later dismissed, of making false statements. Bonds has served his sentence of 30 days of home confinement and paid a $4,000 fine. A decision by the 11-judge panel is not expected until next year.", "keyword": "Fines;Decisions and Verdicts;Barry Bonds;Judiciary"}
{"id": "ny0011954", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/11/05", "title": "Parking Rules", "abstract": "Because of Election Day, alternate-side street-cleaning regulations will be suspended in New York City on Tuesday. Other regulations will remain in effect.", "keyword": "NYC;Parking"}
{"id": "ny0206798", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2009/06/18", "title": "White House Defends Inspector General\u2019s Firing", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The White House said Wednesday that President Obama had dismissed a government agency\u2019s internal watchdog because he was incompetent and had behaved bizarrely, disputing accusations that he was fired because he had uncovered embarrassing problems in the AmeriCorps program. Last week, Mr. Obama abruptly fired the watchdog, Gerald Walpin, the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who was a holdover from the Bush administration, saying little except that he had lost confidence in Mr. Walpin. But the president quickly encountered resistance from the Senate, including from a fellow Democrat, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who said Mr. Obama had not provided sufficient reason for the dismissal, as required under a recent law intended to protect the independence of the corps of inspectors general. Mr. Walpin suggested in interviews that his dismissal was connected to two recent reports in which he was critical of programs that received money from AmeriCorps, which provides living allowances and education grants to volunteers for community groups. One program in California was run by an Obama supporter, Kevin Johnson, a former N.B.A. star who is now the mayor of Sacramento. The other was run by the City College of New York and involved a teacher-training program. \u201cMy firing came after we had issued these two very substantial reports,\u201d Mr. Walpin said in an interview. He said the board of the service corporation, whose chairman is Alan Solomont, a major Democratic fund-raiser, was very unhappy about the reports. After complaints about the dismissal grew, the White House fired back on Wednesday, releasing a letter from a senior counsel to the president sharply criticizing Mr. Walpin\u2019s record. The letter, sent to Senators Joseph I . Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, justified the dismissal on several grounds, including what it said was Mr. Walpin\u2019s \u201cconfused, disoriented\u201d behavior at a meeting of the agency\u2019s board on May 20, when, according to the letter, he was unable to respond to questions. The letter, from Norman L. Eisen, the special counsel to the president who handles ethics matters, also noted that a career federal prosecutor in Sacramento had filed an ethics complaint about Mr. Walpin\u2019s actions in the case involving Mayor Johnson. And the Eisen letter said that Mr. Walpin chose to work in New York, not in Washington, over the board\u2019s objections and that he \u201chad become unduly disruptive to agency operations.\u201d Mr. Walpin issued a rebuttal late Wednesday in which he charged that the board of the corporation wanted his dismissal because he was doing precisely what he is supposed to do \u2014 aggressively probing how money is being spent. He also said he felt ill at the May 20 meeting and might not have been at his best. But he said that was only one meeting of many in which he had performed admirably. He said he believed that working from New York and \u201ctelecommuting\u201d was working well. The most significant issue appeared to be Mr. Walpin\u2019s actions in connection with St. Hope Academy of California, which was run by Mr. Johnson and Dana Gonzalez. St. Hope Academy received federal money from 2004 to 2007 from AmeriCorps. Mr. Walpin said a large amount of the money was spent improperly, some of it on personal expenses. Mr. Walpin made a referral to the United States prosecutor in Sacramento, recommending that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gonzalez face criminal charges and be banned from future contracts. The acting United States attorney, Lawrence G. Brown, complained in a letter to the ethics officer for inspectors general that after he decided to settle the case without criminal charges, Mr. Walpin acted improperly. Mr. Walpin, he said, continued to campaign via news releases for a prosecution and barring the two men from receiving contracts. Mr. Walpin, he said, \u201csought to act as the investigator, advocate, judge, jury and town crier.\u201d He also said that Mr. Walpin had been given testimony that showed some of the money had been properly spent but that the evidence was deliberately excluded from his report. In his final report, issued on June 4, Mr. Walpin concluded that AmeriCorps grants to the Research Foundation for the City University of New York were inappropriate because they did not fill a community need, as required. He wrote that \u201ctaxpayers are not getting their money\u2019s worth\u201d because there was no need to grant education awards to ensure there were enough teachers in New York City, as there had already been an abundance of qualified applicants for teaching jobs. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who has taken up Mr. Walpin\u2019s complaints, has asked the Obama administration to provide further information about the dismissal. On Wednesday, Mr. Grassley asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to look into whether Mr. Brown\u2019s complaint was appropriate. He also wrote to Gregory B. Craig, the White House counsel, asking questions raised by Mr. Eisen\u2019s letter.", "keyword": "Obama Barack;Walpin Gerald;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0037151", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2014/03/08", "title": "Ivy Title and N.C.A.A. Berth for Harvard", "abstract": "Siyani Chambers scored 17 points as Harvard captured the Ivy League title and became the first team to clinch a berth in this year\u2019s N.C.A.A. tournament with a 70-58 win over Yale in New Haven. Steve Moundou-Missi added 16 points for the Crimson (25-4, 12-1). Harvard will make its third straight trip to the N.C.A.A. tournament, after a drought that dated to 1946. \u25a0 No. 2 Wichita State (32-0, 18-0) stayed unbeaten with an 80-58 romp over Evansville in the quarterfinals of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament in St. Louis. Cleanthony Early and Ron Baker scored 17 points apiece, and Wichita State set a tournament record with 11 blocked shots. (AP) \u25a0 With the Harvard women\u2019s 69-65 victory at home against Yale, Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith surpassed the record for the most basketball victories by an Ivy League coach with 515. The Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril won 514 as the men\u2019s coach at Princeton from 1967 to 1996. (NYT)", "keyword": "College basketball;Ivy League;Harvard;Kathy Delaney-Smith"}
{"id": "ny0248124", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/05/26", "title": "Blue Jays Among Teams Said to Be Eyeing Mets\u2019 Reyes", "abstract": "Fred Wilpon\u2019s recent published comments and the Mets \u2019 financial distress paint a dreary picture for the team\u2019s prospects of re-signing Jose Reyes . But there are other teams that have the resources and interest to land him, one of which presents a surprising possibility. The Toronto Blue Jays contacted the Mets in spring training to find out their plans regarding several of their players, including Reyes, according to two baseball officials aware of the situation. It is believed that Alex Anthopoulos, Toronto\u2019s general manager, made only exploratory contact and that no trade proposals were made. Anthopoulos is an aggressive general manager who values athletic players like Reyes, and he is expected to have a lot of money to spend in free agency. Toronto is monitoring Reyes\u2019s progress and could become involved if, as seems likely, Reyes reaches free agency after this season. Yunel Escobar is the Blue Jays\u2019 shortstop, but he could be moved to another position, like third base. Other teams have also been connected to Reyes, most notably the San Francisco Giants, who need a shortstop. Brian Sabean, the Giants\u2019 general manager, was not believed to have contacted the Mets about Reyes, and there has been no substantial interest in him around baseball because the trade deadline is more than two months away. The St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Nationals are among several teams that could be interested in acquiring Reyes as a free agent. Reyes, immensely popular with Mets fans for his talent and flair, has been healthy all season and is having a strong start. In Wednesday\u2019s rain-shortened game against the Chicago Cubs, he went 2 for 5 and scored a run as the Mets won, 7-4 , after the game was called with two outs in the top of the seventh after a 41-minute rain delay on a frigid and soggy night at Wrigley Field. Mets starter Dillon Gee had a wobbly beginning, allowing four runs in the first inning, but he stood fast the rest of the way. Trailing by 4-1, the Mets scored five times in the second in part because of Carlos Beltran, who hit a two-run double to score Gee and Reyes. Beltran also had a triple in the Mets\u2019 12-hit attack. Reyes is batting .316. Going into Wednesday\u2019s game, he was at or near the top of the National League in many offensive categories, including hits (second with 66), triples (first with six), stolen bases (second with 17) and doubles (tied for third with 14). Many observers believe Reyes, who turns 28 on June 11, could command a contract similar to the $142 million, seven-year deal the Red Sox gave to Carl Crawford, who was 29 when he agreed to that deal in December. But in an interview with The New Yorker, Wilpon, the Mets\u2019 principal owner, said that Reyes would not get a deal like Crawford\u2019s, reinforcing the notion that the Mets would not give him such a contract. Then, in an interview in Sports Illustrated, Wilpon indicated that the Mets\u2019 payroll would be around $100 million next year, which would all but preclude the possibility of re-signing Reyes. Sandy Alderson, the Mets\u2019 general manager, contradicted the notion that the payroll will be below $100 million. \u201cFrom my standpoint, that\u2019s not a number we have discussed,\u201d he said, \u201cand I would expect our payroll to be somewhere above that number and somewhat below where we are now,\u201d which was $142 million on opening day. Alderson said a factor that could increase the payroll is the cash injection the Mets are hoping to get from a new investor. At some point before the July 31 trade deadline, Alderson said he would reach out to Reyes to get a sense of where he is, and could even make him an offer. If he learns Reyes is not willing to take what the Mets can afford, the team may trade him, although its position in the standings may dictate its approach. \u201cWe\u2019re still in the first third of the season,\u201d Alderson noted, \u201cbarely past the quarter mark.\u201d On Tuesday, Alderson addressed the comments that Wilpon made in The New Yorker that were critical of several of the Mets\u2019 star players, including David Wright, Beltran and Reyes. At that point, he said he had not read the Sports Illustrated article, and playfully asked reporters to wait a day until he could read it and then respond to its content. On Wednesday he said there was nothing in the Sports Illustrated article that made him cringe, but defusing multiple controversies surrounding Wilpon wasn\u2019t something he expected to be doing on back-to-back days. \u201cIf the world had ended on Saturday, as it was supposed to,\u201d Alderson said, referring to the predictions about Judgment Day, \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t have to deal with any of this.\u201d INSIDE PITCH David Wright was flying back to New York on Wednesday after seeing Dr. Robert Watkins, a back specialist in Los Angeles. Watkins confirmed the original diagnosis of a stress fracture in the back. Wright\u2019s return from the disabled list is not imminent.", "keyword": "Baseball;Free Agents (Sports);New York Mets;Reyes Jose;Trades (Sports);Toronto Blue Jays"}
{"id": "ny0205457", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2009/01/09", "title": "9 in Senegal to Be Jailed for 8 Years", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 Nine men were handed harsh sentences of eight years in prison after being tried on charges of conspiracy and \u201cunnatural acts,\u201d a term used to criminalize homosexuality, according to their lawyers and gay rights groups here on Thursday. The men were arrested on Dec. 19 at the home of Diadji Diouf, a prominent gay activist who works with AIDS organizations to prevent the spread of the disease in the largely clandestine gay community in Senegal, according to J\u00f6el Nana, a program associate for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Mr. Diouf, who was among those arrested and sentenced, runs an organization that provides condoms and counseling to gay men in Senegal, a largely Muslim country that has become increasingly intolerant of homosexuality in recent years despite its reputation for liberalism and openness. The arrests took place just a few weeks after a conference on AIDS in Africa was held in Dakar. Antigay sentiment has been on the rise across Africa in recent years. Nigeria\u2019s Parliament tried to pass a law last year that would restrict the rights of homosexuals to even meet to discuss their rights. Gambia\u2019s president threatened to behead any homosexuals found in his country. And even in Senegal, one of the most liberal and tolerant countries in Islamic Africa, tensions over homosexuality have been on the rise. Last year, a group of men were arrested after a magazine printed photographs of what purported to be a gay wedding. One of the men who was arrested, a popular singer, was forced to flee the country and seek asylum in the United States. Mr. Nana, speaking in an interview from Cape Town, said that such episodes were extremely worrying and symptomatic of a growing problem. \u201cIt is really sending the wrong message to a community that needs help and protection,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Senegal;Homosexuality;International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission"}
{"id": "ny0045765", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2014/02/06", "title": "Hurdles Ahead for Beckham and M.L.S. in Miami", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 The soccer star David Beckham delivered a long-awaited but in many ways provisional commitment to Miami on Wednesday when he confirmed it as the future home of a Major League Soccer expansion team that he will own \u2014 alongside partners not yet named \u2014 and run. Beckham made the announcement during a somewhat giddy news conference overlooking a sunny Biscayne Bay, an event punctuated by vigorous chants from fans who have been without a top-flight team since 2001, when M.L.S. folded the Miami Fusion. \u201cThis is an exciting time for myself, for my family and friends,\u201d Beckham told the crowd while perched on a stool between the M.L.S. commissioner, Don Garber, and the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos A. Gimenez, who is on record as opposing the use of public money for privately owned sports facilities. As if to assure Gimenez of his access to deep pockets elsewhere, Beckham made a point of saying that \u201ca lot of great people want to invest in this team and this club,\u201d a remark greeted with cheers. \u201cWe don\u2019t want public funding,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will fund the stadium ourselves.\u201d But the news conference raised more questions than it answered. There is no deal in place for the financing to build a stadium, or to buy or lease the land on which to put it. The team has no name, and there seems to be only a vague notion of when the team might start playing in M.L.S. \u2014 perhaps in 2016, more likely 2017. Nor was it clear where the team might play, temporarily, until its own stadium is completed. The Miami team would be the 22nd in M.L.S. The league currently has 19 clubs, but it will add two more \u2014 in New York City and Orlando \u2014 next year. Beckham had inserted the right to buy a team for $25 million into his original playing contract when he joined the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007, but he had to exercise that option before Dec. 31, 2013. Wednesday\u2019s announcement was merely confirmation that he had done so by the deadline. In an interview after the news briefing, Garber said that in the last month or so he had personally looked at three properties in downtown Miami that might be suitable stadium sites for Beckham\u2019s team. \u201cWe want that stadium to be downtown,\u201d Garber said, mentioning in particular a site in Miami\u2019s seaport near the arena where the N.B.A.\u2019s Miami Heat play. Asked why he had chosen Miami for his new venture, Beckham replied, \u201cI mean, why not?\u201d More concretely, he said Miami had become a truly international city that was especially appealing to visitors and immigrants from Latin America and Europe. Those audiences, he said, flock to soccer games, as evidenced by huge turnouts to matches in recent years featuring teams like Real Madrid, A.C. Milan, Chelsea and national teams from Brazil and Honduras. Those games were played in the Sun Life football stadium in Miami Gardens, a suburb northwest of downtown. \u201cIn this market, if you put a soccer team together, you have a lot of sophisticated soccer fans who will go,\u201d said Norb Ecksl, who was general manager of the Miami Freedom soccer team in the early 1990s and is now the editor of Sunshine Soccer News. \u201cIf you put a good product on the field and promote it properly, it\u2019s going to work. And you have to have a state-of-the-art stadium that people will be willing to come to. It\u2019s all about entertainment.\u201d Beckham, he said, \u201chas got to have the money, and cooperation from the government\u201d to make the venture succeed. \u201cWe\u2019ll see,\u201d Ecksl added, the failure of previous teams in South Florida fresh in his mind. During the news briefing, Beckham and Garber insisted that things had changed since the Fusion folded, and that it was time for Miami to take its place in the booming business of soccer. \u201cMiami is a vibrant city, a city with a lot of passion,\u201d Beckham said. \u201cIt\u2019s ready for football, for soccer. And I\u2019m looking forward to spending a lot more time here.\u201d Asked whether he had any players in mind as potential hires, Beckham demurred, although he acknowledged that some prominent players had already contacted him. Beckham, 38, is a former captain of England\u2019s national team. He began playing for Manchester United when he was 17 and went on to become one of soccer\u2019s most prominent players. He said he was \u201cliving the dream\u201d by starting his own team. \u201cFor me, I wanted to create a team that we can start from scratch,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to create a team that\u2019s very personal.\u201d Beckham mentioned two potential partners in the venture: the Bolivian billionaire Marcelo Claure, founder of the Miami-based wireless distributor Brightstar Corporation, and the \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d producer Simon Fuller, both of whom, he said, were \u201cvery excited\u201d about the project. For the soccer fans who attended Wednesday\u2019s announcement, the possibility of a return to regular local play by a first division professional team was more than welcome. Jonathan Urbaez, a 20-year-old student at Miami-Dade College and one of about 150 members of the Southern Legion , a soccer supporters\u2019 group formed expressly to push for a new M.L.S. team in Miami, said that when he heard that Beckham might start a team here, it \u201csounded too good to be true.\u201d \u201cOnce I heard that the wheels were rolling,\u201d Urbaez said, \u201cI knew it was something I had to be a part of.\u201d", "keyword": "Soccer;MLS;David Beckham;Miami-Dade County FL"}
{"id": "ny0137360", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/05/17", "title": "F.B.I. Gets Mixed Review in Interrogation Report", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A new Justice Department report praises the refusal of F.B.I. agents to take part in the military\u2019s abusive questioning of prisoners in Guant\u00e1namo Bay , Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also finds fault with the bureau\u2019s slow response to complaints about the tactics from its own agents, people with knowledge of the still-secret report said. The department inspector general\u2019s office is expected to conclude that no agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation took part in the military\u2019s rough interrogations, a key validation for the bureau, officials said. \u201cThe F.B.I. should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations in the military zones,\u201d the inspector general said in one section of the report, which is likely to be released publicly next week. At the same time, however, the report is also expected to say that the F.B.I. was sometimes too slow to respond to what were often serious misgivings from its agents about interrogation tactics, officials said, and that it lacked clear guidelines and training on how such complaints should have been handled. The F.B.I. stationed agents at Guant\u00e1namo Bay and other military detention sites to assist in the questioning of detainees taken into custody after Sept. 11, but the rough tactics by military interrogators soon became a major source of friction between the bureau and sister agencies. F.B.I. agents complained to superiors beginning in 2002 that the tactics they had seen yielded little actual intelligence, prevented them from establishing a rapport with detainees through more traditional means of questioning and might violate F.B.I. policy or American law. One F.B.I. memorandum spoke of \u201ctorture techniques\u201d used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women\u2019s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold. Ultimately, the F.B.I. ordered its agents not to participate in or remain present when such tactics were used. But that directive was not formalized until May 2004, and it governed only the F.B.I. Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., told Congress that he was not made aware of his agents\u2019 concerns until 2004. The inspector general\u2019s report is expected to focus on the questions of what the F.B.I. agents observed, how their complaints were handled internally and whether agents were involved in any improper interrogation tactics themselves. The review is limited to the F.B.I. because the inspector general does not have jurisdiction over the Defense Department or the Central Intelligence Agency , which led the interrogations at various sites. Beyond the tactics used by military interrogators, it is not clear whether the report will address interrogations by the C.I.A. that may have been witnessed by F.B.I. agents. An F.B.I. official with knowledge of the criticisms in the report said: \u201cCould we have done more, more quickly? Or could we have provided better guidance?\u201d The answer, the official said, was probably yes, but he added, \u201cIt was difficult to tell agents what the rules were because we didn\u2019t know ourselves.\u201d The inspector general\u2019s office refused to comment on the investigation, which was started in late 2004, and many details of the report remain unknown. The inspector general\u2019s office has produced a series of often blistering reports about key counterterrorism policies in the Bush administration. In contrast, one Congressional staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the criticisms of the F.B.I. in the report are expected to be relatively mild. But Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which unearthed many of the F.B.I.\u2019s internal e-mail messages on the Guant\u00e1namo tactics through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said: \u201cWe\u2019re anticipating some very significant findings. It would not have taken three and one-half years to issue a clean bill of health.\u201d Mr. Romero said the key question to be answered in the inspector general\u2019s report was how senior officials at F.B.I. headquarters responded to the uncomfortable issues raised by lower-level agents. \u201cDid they turn a blind eye to the reports by their own agents?\u201d he asked. A military investigation in 2005 examining the complaints of F.B.I. agents at Guant\u00e1namo Bay concluded that the treatment was sometimes degrading, but did not qualify as inhumane or torture. Nonetheless, lingering tensions have continued to dog both the Defense Department and the F.B.I. Just three weeks ago at a House hearing, Mr. Mueller was pressed on whether the F.B.I. had moved quickly enough to answer its agents\u2019 complaints. \u201cIf we received allegations from our people,\u201d he said, \u201cit was then over a period of time passed on to the authorities responsible for the investigation of such allegations, which at Guant\u00e1namo would have been D.O.D.,\u201d or the Department of Defense. In an appearance Friday at the National Press Club, Mr. Mueller said once again that the F.B.I.\u2019s policy was \u201cnot to use coercion\u201d in interrogations. Asked whether interrogation policy should be made clearer through a national policy, Mr. Mueller paused a moment and said, \u201cI will speak for the F.B.I.\u201d", "keyword": "Torture;Washington (DC);Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba);Prisons and Prisoners;Federal Bureau of Investigation;Defense Department;Central Intelligence Agency"}
{"id": "ny0193181", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/02/14", "title": "Several Big Banks Halt Foreclosures Until March", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Several big banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup , are expanding efforts to halt home foreclosures while the Obama administration develops a plan to help struggling homeowners. The White House said President Obama would outline his plan to spend at least $50 billion to prevent foreclosures in a speech on Wednesday in Arizona, one of the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. \u201cIt\u2019s not intended to be measured by one day\u2019s market scorekeeping, but instead to ensure that the 10,000 Americans each day that have their homes foreclosed on \u2014 and the millions more that are barely getting by \u2014 are protected,\u201d the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Friday. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announced a revised effort to stabilize the financial system on Tuesday. It included outlines of a foreclosure relief effort. Although lenders have bolstered their efforts to aid borrowers over the last year, their action has not kept up with the worst housing recession in decades. More than 2.3 million homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year, an 81 percent increase from 2007, and industry analysts say that number could soar as high as 10 million in the coming years, depending on the severity of the recession. JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and the Bank of America said Friday that they were halting foreclosures through March 6. And Citigroup said it would halt foreclosures until the Obama administration completed the details of the loan modification program or until March 12, whichever is earlier. Citigroup\u2019s action expands on a similar effort that it started in November. The banks\u2019 pledges apply to owner-occupied homes, not those owned by investors. Mr. Obama\u2019s announcement is expected to include details about how the administration plans to prod the mortgage industry to do a better job of modifying the terms of home loans so borrowers can have lower monthly payments. Howard Glaser, a mortgage industry consultant who served in the Clinton administration, said that if the payments of two million borrowers were lowered by $500 a month, it would cost the government and lenders $6 billion each year \u2014 assuming lenders match half the cost. Unlike previous loan modification plans, borrowers would not have to be in default to qualify, according to people briefed on the plan. Figuring out who would qualify would be a challenge, especially as foreclosures continue to soar. More than 274,000 American households received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing service.", "keyword": "Morgan J P Chase & Co;Citigroup Inc;Foreclosures;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0134511", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/04/20", "title": "A Populist Shift Confronts the U.S. Catholic Church", "abstract": "To say she was a practicing Catholic would be an understatement. For years, Maria Aparecida Calazans was a mainstay at her Long Island church, joining dozens of fellow Brazilian immigrants for the Portuguese language Mass on Sunday mornings. She and her husband, Ramon, were married at the church. Their two daughters were baptized there, and every Friday she attended a prayer meeting that she had helped organize. But six years ago, her husband went to a relative\u2019s baptism at a Pentecostal church in a warehouse in Astoria, Queens, and came home smitten. The couple made a deal. \u201cWe would go to the Pentecostal service on Thursdays and to Mass on Sundays, and then we would decide which one we felt most comfortable with,\u201d Mrs. Calazans said. Within 40 days, they had given up Roman Catholicism and embraced Pentecostalism, following the path of the estimated 1.3 million Latino Catholics who have joined Pentecostal congregations since immigrating to the United States, according to a survey released in February by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. \u201cI feel whole here,\u201d Mrs. Calazans, 42, said one recent Sunday in the Astoria sanctuary, the Portuguese Language Pentecostal Missionary Church, as she swayed to the pop-rock beat of a live gospel band. \u201cThis church is not a place we visit once a week. This church is where we hang around and we share our problems and we celebrate our successes, like we were family.\u201d As Pope Benedict XVI completes his visit to the United States on Sunday with a Mass at Yankee Stadium, in a borough that has been home to generations of Latinos, he does so facing something of a growing challenge to the church\u2019s immigrant ranks. For if Latinos are feeding the population of the church, many have also turned to Pentecostalism, a form of evangelical Christianity that stresses a personal, even visceral, connection with God. Today, it has more Latino followers in the United States than any other denomination except Catholicism; they are drawn, they say, by the faith\u2019s joyous worship, its use of Latino culture and the enveloping sense of community it offers to newcomers. As the Pew survey revealed, half of all Latinos who have joined Pentecostal denominations were raised as Catholics. They are part of a global shift. Pentecostalism, the world\u2019s fastest-growing branch of Christianity, has made such sharp inroads in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, that in an address to bishops there last year, Pope Benedict listed its ardent proselytizing as one of the major forces the Catholic Church must contend with in the region. Catholic leaders and experts on the church in the United States say that the impact of Pentecostalism has been less dramatic here. Still, the pope has urged the nation\u2019s bishops to make every effort to welcome immigrants \u2014 \u201cto share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials, and to help them flourish in their new home.\u201d And any number of Catholic clergy and laypeople have conceded that the church needs to work harder at reaching, and keeping, its Latino flock. \u201cThat some of the newly arrived Latinos are drawn to Pentecostalism is certainly reason for concern,\u201d said the Rev. Allan Figueroa Deck, the executive director of the Office for Cultural Diversity, which was created last June by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to help the church adjust to its changing ethnic makeup. \u201cBut we can counter that with the kind of music we use, with the sense of celebration that we bring to our worship, the spontaneity and some of the popular customs that are not part of the official liturgy of the church. We\u2019re doing some of that, but we could do better.\u201d The Pentecostal church in Astoria vividly shows what Catholicism is up against. It offers enough activities to fill a family\u2019s calendar: services on Sunday and Thursday, youth group meetings on Friday, a Bible study group on Wednesday and all-night prayer vigils throughout the year. Then there are the birthday and engagement parties, to which every congregant is invited. The church, on the second floor of a stucco building opposite a nightclub and three blocks from the subway, is half house of worship and half community center. It ministers primarily to a single immigrant group, Brazilians, in the group\u2019s language, Portuguese \u2014 much as the ethnic urban parishes founded by European Catholics did more than a century ago. The Sunday service starts at 4 p.m., but the front door opens at least two hours earlier, and families trickle in. One recent Sunday, children giggled and ran around while mothers greeted one another with a kiss on each cheek, as is the custom in Brazil. The pastor, Zeny Tinouco, himself a former Catholic, preached to about 100 people from a pulpit framed by American and Brazilian flags. Arms rose into the air and hands were turned to the ceiling as a guitar-and-drums band tore through pop-inflected hymns. Over and over in his sermon, the pastor exclaimed, \u201cAlleluia!\u201d and the congregants fervently responded, \u201cGl\u00f3ria a Deus!\u201d (\u201cPraise the Lord!\u201d). \u201cThe first thing I tell the newcomers is that there are no lambs without a shepherd in our church; no one is a stranger,\u201d said Pastor Tinouco, 62, who has a high school education and 11 churches \u2014 three each in New York City, Portugal and his native Brazil; one in Switzerland; and one in Newark. \u201cOur mission is to welcome the immigrant and be his guide and his support,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they need money to pay the rent, we\u2019ll raise the money for them. If they need work, we\u2019ll find them work. If they need someone to talk to, they can come to me.\u201d He counts more than 500 members among his churches in the United States \u2014 more than half of them, by his estimate, former Catholics. They include people like Renato C. Silva, who converted to Pentecostalism right after he immigrated in 2005, then met his wife at Pastor Tinouco\u2019s church. And there are others like Tatiana DeMauro, who said her conversion in 2000 had strained her marriage. \u201cMy husband is American and he is Catholic, and he won\u2019t come here with me,\u201d Ms. DeMauro, 40, said as she fed pretzels to her 2-year-old twin daughters. \u201cHe says I\u2019ve changed and that this church has brainwashed me, but he doesn\u2019t get it. I have friends here. Some of the strongest relationships I have I made at this church.\u201d The Rev. Virgil Elizondo, a professor of pastoral and Hispanic religions at the University of Notre Dame, said that Latinos who practiced a populist, emotional brand of Catholicism in their home countries experienced a cultural clash when they encountered the more traditional, low-key ways of the church in the United States. \u201cTo Latinos, the church is a place for socializing,\u201d Father Elizondo said. \u201cEven people with the deepest of Catholic beliefs, if they\u2019re in a foreign country and they can\u2019t find a church where they can experience companionship, they will look elsewhere.\u201d Father Deck, of the Office for Cultural Diversity, said the Catholic Church was making progress. Latinos now make up about 15 percent of all seminarians. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve had an explosion in what we call lay ministry,\u201d he added. \u201cThere are thousands of Latinos who are lectors during Mass, do outreach work, are catechism teachers, and we have some who are administering parishes.\u201d Latinos have also fueled the growth of the church\u2019s charismatic movement, whose high-energy Masses are reminiscent of Pentecostal services. Many parishes, particularly in the South and the West, have introduced mariachi Masses, colorful processions, and communal meals after the liturgy. Lu\u00eds D. Le\u00f3n, a professor of American religions at the University of Denver, said many of those gestures toward Latinos were \u201ctoken changes.\u201d \u201cLatino immigrants still find some kind of solace and connection with their home country through Catholicism, and they\u2019re looking for a reason to hang on to the church in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cBut for that to happen, they need to feel that their culture is being understood and recognized. They need to feel that the church is their caretaker in a much more profound and personal way than it is today.\u201d Adriara Mello, who came from Brazil in 1996, said many of her Brazilian friends began attending Pentecostal churches after immigrating. But she has remained faithful to Corpus Christi Church in Mineola on Long Island \u2014 the same parish that Mrs. Calazans and her family left to join the Pentecostal congregation in Astoria. In fact, the two women had started a series of prayer meetings, which Ms. Mello has continued. Corpus Christi is a mainly English-speaking parish, but it has a long history of catering to immigrants. Aside from its Portuguese Mass, which has been celebrated by the same Brazilian priest for 35 years, the church has a Portuguese ministry offering translation services and tutoring for immigrant students who attend the parish\u2019s school. Ms. Mello said Brazilian parishioners have also raised money for compatriots facing financial difficulties, and have cooked and cleaned for a man who had to raise his children alone after his wife\u2019s death. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to be a faith community and a support community,\u201d Ms. Mello added. \u201cWe\u2019re here to help.\u201d Still, just a few minutes after the 8:30 a.m. Mass ended last Sunday, the Portuguese-speaking faithful had dispersed, to make way for the English language service that followed. \u201cI can see how people might get turned off by that,\u201d Ms. Mello said. \u201cI mean, if you\u2019re alone in this country, there goes an opportunity to make the church part of your life. There goes a chance to make friends.\u201d", "keyword": "Roman Catholic Church;Hispanic-Americans;Benedict XVI;United States;New York City;Christians and Christianity"}
{"id": "ny0192132", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/02/19", "title": "Bankruptcy Could Be More Costly", "abstract": "Businesses filing for bankruptcy need loans to work out their troubles, or face liquidation. But General Motors and its smaller rival, Chrysler , have threatened that they will need $125 billion, in what would be the largest bankruptcy financing packages ever, if they do not receive the additional federal aid they are requesting. G.M. alone has said that it needs $100 billion to finance its bankruptcy. To many, that figure seems far too high, and may be a negotiating tactic to keep the companies out of bankruptcy. Several bankruptcy experts doubted that G.M. would need to draw upon anywhere near that amount to get court protection from creditors. \u201cThat could be a ploy so they will not be forced to file,\u201d said Edward I. Altman, a bankruptcy expert and a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Chrysler has said that it needs up to $25 billion, which would put the combined aid at $125 billion. Even in ordinary times, pulling together such financing from private lenders alone would be nearly impossible. But with the troubles disrupting the economy, some of the financiers who specialize in so-called debtor-in-possession, or DIP, loans have been skittish. That would leave the Treasury Department responsible for the vast majority of any financing for the carmakers. The largest DIP loan on record, made to Lyondell Chemical last month, was $8 billion, and that was obtained only after three weeks of breakneck negotiations. Mr. Altman had earlier thought that G.M. would need $50 billion in DIP financing to survive. Yet others contend that having that much financial cushion could assuage the fears of the creditors to the companies, leaving the carmakers with the cash necessary to keep the lights on and the factories running. DIP loans are actually relatively safe for the banks that make them, said Andrew O\u2019Brien, co-head of syndicated and leveraged loans at JPMorgan Chase. That is because these loans typically mature within two years and must be paid back before other loans. Most professionals can recall only one big DIP loan, to Winstar Communications, that failed to be paid back. In fact, some experts, including Mr. Altman, have advocated pushing G.M. and Chrysler into bankruptcy with the government providing the DIP financing. That would help ensure that taxpayers are repaid first. The Treasury Department has already hired the investment bank Rothschild and the law firms Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal as advisers, largely to work on this very issue. Mr. Altman\u2019s plan would most likely work by the government providing money through a bank or a financial firm like GE Capital. That, in turn, would be doled out in portions after G.M. hit certain milestones. He also suggested strong-arming banks that have received federal bailout money into contributing to the DIP package. The government could also benefit from the fees it would earn by providing DIP loans. According to lenders like GE Capital, the average interest rate on DIP loans has nearly doubled in the last two years, to 6.5 to 9.5 percent above benchmark interbank rates. Lenders have also doubled their fees. Lyondell, for instance, is paying more than 20 percent for its financing, a rate normally seen on credit cards. G.M. and Chrysler also have other options to a full-fledged Chapter 11 filing. The government could provide more bailout money or other aid while the companies try to restructure themselves outside of bankruptcy, a prospect that many see as an endless abyss. Another alternative is what is known as a prepackaged bankruptcy, in which the carmakers would line up restructuring agreements with their creditors and use the courts to make these accords binding. Yet such a plan would still require billions of dollars in financing, most of which would certainly come from the government. Some parts of the credit markets have begun to revive, but the market in bankruptcy loans remains a big worry for many. Despite the safety of DIP financing, many lenders are pulling back as they grapple with their own problems. \u201cDIPs are no longer taken for granted,\u201d said Deryck A. Palmer, the co-chairman of the financial restructuring practice at Cadwalader, which is representing Lyondell in its bankruptcy proceedings. The same financial turmoil that has pushed companies into bankruptcy is also taking a toll on the DIP market. Companies that gorged on debt in good times are struggling to pay that money back. Many pledged virtually all their assets as collateral on those debts, leaving little left to back DIP loans. \u201cWe haven\u2019t changed the parameters by which we do a deal,\u201d said Rob McMahon, the managing director of restructuring at GE Capital. \u201cBut companies have higher leverage and decreasing cash flow. They have more troubling prospects.\u201d Some big players in DIP loans have run into trouble themselves. One big DIP financier was Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt last September. Two others, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia, have sold themselves to other banks to avoid a similar fate. Hedge funds and private equity firms that also arrange such financing are suffering as well. Many of the biggest DIP lenders insist they are open for business. JPMorgan Chase, for example, is actively involved in the market, Mr. O\u2019Brien said. GE Capital says it is too. But virtually everyone in the field says that the majority of loans are what are known as defensive DIPs, in which a company\u2019s existing lenders provide new loans to protect their investment and their position in the capital structure. Companies and their bankers are more likely to piece together lending from existing lenders than seek fresh capital, or offensive DIPs, for some time.", "keyword": "Automobiles;Bankruptcies;General Motors Corp;Chrysler LLC;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0278044", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/11/26", "title": "Alabama Stays Undefeated Behind a Defensive Wall Auburn Can\u2019t Breach", "abstract": "TUSCALOOSA, Ala. \u2014 Alabama\u2019s defense still seemed to have a wall erected at the goal line, and quarterback Jalen Hurts remained unflappable enough to shrug off his mistakes. The combination has been good enough in every game so far. Hurts rebounded from two early interceptions, and the defense of the top-ranked Crimson Tide did the rest in a 30-12 victory over No. 16 Auburn on Saturday to finish an undefeated regular season. It may be just the start for the Crimson Tide, who will face Florida in the Southeastern Conference championship game for a second consecutive year. \u201cWe have bigger goals in mind,\u201d tight end O. J. Howard said. The Tide (12-0, 8-0) led at halftime by just 13-9, dominating the stat sheet but taking over on the scoreboard only in the second half. The defense pushed its string of quarters without allowing a touchdown to more than 14 and shut down Auburn\u2019s potent running game. Auburn (8-4, 5-3) failed to muster much offense without the injured quarterback Sean White and could not reach the end zone despite starting several drives in Alabama territory. \u201cWe had some really, really challenging field-position situations in this game, and our players responded really well to it,\u201d Alabama Coach Nick Saban said. Hurts, in overcoming his two first-half interceptions, displayed the kind of poise that has helped him lead the Tide to the top of the SEC West. He completed 27 of 36 passes, mostly on short and midrange throws, for 286 yards and two touchdowns as Alabama won a third straight Iron Bowl for the first time since 1992. Saban said, \u201cAt halftime, I guess everybody thought I was going to throw a fit, but I told them, \u2018Look, guys, all we\u2019ve got to do is go out there and play with some poise and confidence.\u2019\u201d Hurts also ran for 37 yards and a score, leading two straight touchdown drives in the third quarter to all but put the game away after a first half marred by mistakes. He capped a 57-yard drive with a 4-yard touchdown run to give Alabama a 20-9 lead. Then, after Auburn missed a field-goal attempt on the next drive, he hit ArDarius Stewart on a fourth-and-4, and Stewart spun away from a defender en route to a 38-yard touchdown and a 27-9 lead for the Crimson Tide. Stewart had 10 catches for 127 yards, and Bo Scarbrough ran for 90, including 83 after halftime. Auburn\u2019s Jeremy Johnson, who started a second straight game in White\u2019s place, completed 4 of 13 passes for 34 yards. Another quarterback, John Franklin III, connected on two downfield passes in the second half that totaled 85 yards. The Tide\u2019s defense held the Tigers to 182 total yards and kept Auburn from getting a first down until nearly 25 minutes into the game. Kamryn Pettway, Auburn\u2019s leading rusher, ran 12 times for just 17 yards after missing the two previous games with a leg injury. The only real bright spots for Auburn were Daniel Carlson\u2019s four field goals, including one from 52 yards. \u201cOffensively, we just didn\u2019t get first downs; we just didn\u2019t get it done,\u201d Tigers Coach Gus Malzahn said. \u201cTwo of 12 on third downs \u2014 I really think that caused the problem. Third downs, didn\u2019t hit explosive plays, defense was on the field too long, was really the story of the day.\u201d He added: \u201cObviously, we\u2019ve got players in there that are hurting, coaches that are hurting. This is a tough one.\u201d", "keyword": "College football;University of Alabama;Auburn"}
{"id": "ny0269373", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2016/04/17", "title": "Baseball Has Yet to Deliver Greatest Tribute to Jackie Robinson", "abstract": "For me, Jackie Robinson day is a celebration of struggle and perseverance, a reminder that hope and progress in civil rights are often mistimed allies. There are steps forward, then back, with incremental advances to show for them. The process is frustrating and frequently demoralizing, and it shaves years off the lives of the pioneers and activists who have been compelled by conscience or circumstance to challenge the status quo. Created by Major League Baseball to recognize one of the most important individuals in United States history, Jackie Robinson day commemorates April 15, 1947, the day he broke the major league color barrier. It resonates more deeply this year, thanks to Ken Burns\u2019s four-hour film on Robinson\u2019s life, showing on PBS. The documentary tells a familiar story with great depth, though this time Robinson\u2019s wife emerges as the heroic pillar of strength for the Robinsons and their three children. Rachel Robinson, now 94, has been the keeper of the flame and a paragon of strength from the time she met her husband at U.C.L.A. to the morning he collapsed in her arms from a fatal heart attack at their home in Connecticut on Oct. 24, 1972. I have spoken formally and informally with Rachel Robinson several times over the years, and still recall sitting down with her in her office not long after Barack Obama had become the Jackie Robinson of politics with his election as president of the United States. She talked about how her husband, by the end of his life, had become disillusioned by baseball\u2019s intransigence, not just over the thinning ranks of black American players but the league\u2019s blatant failure to promote diversity among its managerial and executive ranks. Image Jackie Robinson, center, appeared with demonstrators in a civil rights march on the capitol in Frankfort, Ky., in March 1964. Credit Associated Press \u201cHe was getting so discouraged at the end of his life that change would not take place, that it would not be permanent, that it would not be expansive,\u201d she said. Statements from that period, included in his autobiography, reflect Robinson\u2019s disillusionment. On one occasion, he said: \u201cI cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know I never had it made.\u201d In each of our conversations, and convincingly in the new documentary, Rachel Robinson took pains to point out that her husband was not bitter and did not feel that the game of baseball owed him anything. There was a larger, more universal disappointment that Major League Baseball had gone only part of the way \u2014 and had done only the part that benefited baseball, namely the procurement of black players. \u201cIt hadn\u2019t made the changes that would have allowed for change of attitude going all the way through to ownership,\u201d she said when I spoke with her. \u201cThey were still in control, they were still dominating and they were still excluding.\u201d The Jackie Robinson story makes everyone feel good. All but the most ardent racists can look at Burns\u2019s documentary and agree that Robinson was mistreated, that he was courageous, and aren\u2019t we glad we have overcome? We in the United States are prone to self-congratulation, and the annual commemoration has become the perfect vehicle for gushing. Players wear Robinson\u2019s No. 42, and everyone from the commissioner on down speaks of Robinson\u2019s impact on the nation. This year, the city of Philadelphia officially apologized for the racist taunts that members of the Phillies rained on Robinson when the Dodgers played them. Yet the game, with few black or Latino managers over the years, and only an executive of color here and there, remains an old-boys\u2019 network and has resisted the changes Robinson hoped for in 1972, when, after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a World Series game, he said: \u201cI am extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon, but must admit I\u2019m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third-base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.\u201d (Team managers then typically positioned themselves at third base.) Last week, Tony Clark, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, sent a proposal to the baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred. Clark is proposing a joint initiative, the Career Preparation Project. It is designed to bring more black Americans into the game and promote the growing number of Spanish-speaking players to the ranks of coaches, managers and baseball executives. \u201cDespite incremental progress, there remains a lack of diversity in the ranks of the management of baseball,\u201d Clark wrote in the proposal. He continued: \u201cThe fact that the business of baseball fails to reflect the diversity of those who play or even the social diversity of the United States is undermining the growth of the game and creating the impression that those in charge are increasingly isolated from players and the fan base.\u201d The genesis of the initiative was a conversation Clark had about 12 years ago with the general manager of a team about Clark\u2019s own ambitions to become a baseball executive. He was told he would need, for starters, a degree from a reputable institution of higher learning. When Clark asked him whether his 20 years in the game counted for anything, he was told yes, perhaps an entry-level position. Among other things, Clark said, the joint venture would provide players with access to education and degrees and remove \u201ceducational and workplace barriers that disproportionately impact minorities within baseball.\u201d He added, \u201cThere is a career transition program, a job placement program and a program to help players leverage their careers into entrepreneurial opportunities.\u201d Jackie Robinson day is, indeed, a great, well-intentioned celebration. But an industry that relies so much on relationships and networks must be compelled to go beyond the annual backslapping, ceremonial first pitch and jersey-wearing \u2014 the distinguishing features of the day. It is especially important in this period of racially charged debate across the country. \u201cThis is dealing with things that we\u2019re talking about now,\u201d Burns told me in a recent interview. \u201cThis is driving while black, this is stop-and-frisk , this is the Confederate flag, this is Black Lives Matter, this is burned churches.\u201d Rachel Robinson expressed a similar sentiment when she wrote an essay commemorating yet another anniversary honoring her husband. \u201cThe fundamental questions that faced Jack in 1947 are abounding today,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to go beyond celebrating the past and use our emotions, sentiments, ideas and analysis to move forward. This would be the greatest tribute to Jackie Robinson.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;MLB;Jackie Robinson;Minorities;Black People,African-Americans;Ken Burns;Rachel Robinson;Jackie Robinson;Race and Ethnicity"}
{"id": "ny0018228", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2013/07/18", "title": "Ruling Expected On Key Charge In Leaks Case Against Soldier", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The military judge in the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning is expected to decide Thursday whether to drop a charge accusing Private Manning of \u201caiding the enemy\u201d that could put him in prison for life. Civil liberties advocates said the judge\u2019s decision could set a precedent for whistle-blowers who leak information that gets posted on the Internet. \u201cThe real danger is that it equates leaks to the press in the public interest with treason against the country, and that is an extremely dangerous precedent to set,\u201d Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union \u2019s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said Wednesday. \u201cThere are dozens of bloggers for the military. This says every single one could be charged with aiding the enemy.\u201d In February, Private Manning, a 25-year-old Army intelligence analyst, admitted to having leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. He denied that he was guilty of 12 counts, including aiding the enemy, but pleaded guilty to 10 lesser offenses that could have put him in jail for up to 20 years. The government has said it will not pursue the death penalty against Private Manning, but if he is found guilty of the aiding the enemy charge, he faces a life sentence in military custody with no chance of parole. The decision of the judge, Col. Denise Lind, will center on the prosecution\u2019s evidence that some of the classified documents Private Manning admitted giving to WikiLeaks were posted on the Internet and later reached Osama bin Laden. The judge heard a request from the defense on Monday to drop the charge. David E. Coombs, the lead defense lawyer, argued that Private Manning did not have \u201cactual knowledge\u201d that by leaking the documents to WikiLeaks he was aiding the enemy. In the past, the government had argued that through his extensive training, Private Manning should have known that the information could end up with groups that wanted to harm American military personnel. But the government acknowledged Monday that \u201cshould have known\u201d was not enough to define \u201cactual knowledge.\u201d Mr. Wizner said that despite the arguments, he does not think \u201cactual knowledge\u201d is enough to charge Private Manning with aiding the enemy. \u201cThere has to be specific intent,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "WikiLeaks;Denise R Lind;Classified Information;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0200407", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/09/18", "title": "In His Book, Fritz Peterson Discusses Pranks, Teammates and Swapping Wives", "abstract": "On a cool late-season evening before a Yankees game earlier this week, across the street from the old and abandoned stadium, Fritz Peterson sat behind a table on a sidewalk filled with passing fans and flattened cigarette butts. He was beneath the shadow of the elevated tracks and under the rumble of the trains. When cars stopped for the red light in front of him, Peterson smiled and waved at drivers and passengers, who quizzically gazed back. Peterson, a former Yankees pitcher, was signing copies of his new book, \u201cMickey Mantle Is Going To Heaven\u201d (Outskirts Press, $19.95). Eventually, Peterson says, he plans to meet Mantle there and talk about old times. At age 67, Peterson is fighting prostate cancer for a second time. He is intensely religious in his philosophy of life and death, and blunt about his predicament. His humor is macabre. For instance, he said he wanted to return to New York during next month\u2019s playoffs to sign copies from a casket. \u201cWouldn\u2019t that be fun?\u201d Peterson said. \u201cIf I were to die now, I\u2019d be a very happy camper.\u201d He looks relatively happy, a stocky man in glasses with a little white beard and longish white hair peeking out from the back of his blue Yankees\u2019 cap. Peterson, a left-hander, pitched from 1966 through 1976, most of it with the Yankees, and went 133-131. His presence in New York served as an unusual counterpoint to the fanfare that Derek Jeter created last week as he passed Lou Gehrig\u2019s record for most base hits by a Yankee. Gehrig and Jeter are about Yankee tradition and championships. Peterson? He never got to the postseason with the Yankees and played before a lot of empty seats. \u201cMediocre at best,\u201d Peterson said of those Yankee teams that followed the Mantle-Maris era. \u201cPathetic at worst.\u201d In his best season, 1970, he won 20 games for the Yankees, and he was the starting pitcher for Cleveland in 1975 on 10 cent beer night, when that riotous promotion ended in a forfeit. But Peterson is best known for one of baseball\u2019s strangest trades. In 1973, Peterson and Mike Kekich , also a left-handed Yankees pitcher at the time, revealed in spring training that they had exchanged families, like something out of a John Updike novel. Peterson moved in with Kekich\u2019s wife; Kekich moved in with Peterson\u2019s wife. Although Marilyn Peterson did not stay long with Kekich, Fritz married Susanne Kekich. The Yankees and Peterson stayed together for one more year after the swap was disclosed; Fritz and Susanne have remained together for 35. But one of many strange things about Peterson\u2019s quirky book is that he does not mention his spouse by name, only as \u201cmy new wife.\u201d She opposed his book, he said. \u201cShe\u2019s pretty sensitive about that stuff,\u201d Peterson said. \u201cShe read the first three chapters and then stopped.\u201d In the book, Peterson treated the exchange of wives in a peripheral way and complained about how the story was handled in the news media. He said he still communicates occasionally with Kekich by e-mail. \u201cIf I saw him at an Old-Timers\u2019 game, we\u2019d have some great laughs,\u201d Peterson said. Peterson said he rushed the book into publication before his wife could talk him out of it, and critical readers will notice misspellings and rambling repetitions. And Yankees fans might be taken aback by some of Peterson\u2019s judgments of others. He is an evangelical Christian who used to work with the Baseball Chapel, a man not without sin who is casting a few stones. In some respects, the Peterson book echoes the \u201cBall Four\u201d tell-all by Jim Bouton. Coincidentally, Peterson and Bouton roomed together, but Peterson said he had not read Bouton\u2019s book and was offended that Bouton never told him he was keeping a diary. Peterson is also not a fan of Joe DiMaggio, describing him as arrogant and stubborn. Curiously, a photograph in the middle of the book shows a young Peterson standing next to DiMaggio. It was taken on Old-Timers\u2019 Day in 1967. Both are smiling. Another picture shows Whitey Ford and an inscription, \u201cFritz, if you only would have listened to me.\u201d Friendly enough, but in the book Peterson tells of how Ford doctored the ball to make trick pitches and how Ford warned Peterson not to send Christmas cards to his teammates until he was on the Yankees for at least five years. When asked whether he feared his book would burn bridges with the franchise\u2019s former players, Peterson replied: \u201cYou know, I am. But if they get mad at me, that\u2019s O.K. I hope they get serious with the Lord.\u201d Much of the book is lighthearted, recounting pranks. An appendix shows a letter Peterson wrote to the former Yankee first baseman Moose Skowron on a fake letterhead from the Baseball Hall of Fame, asking Skowron to donate his pacemaker after he dies. Another page shows a letter Peterson faked on Yankee stationery requesting Clete Boyer\u2019s participation for what he purports to be an official drinking contest against Don Larsen and Graig Nettles. In the book, Peterson tells of getting arrested for drunken driving in 1995 and how his wife took a picture of him emerging from jail to shame him. But Peterson said he still enjoyed drinking. He has homes in Colorado and New Jersey and often travels in a camper. He worked briefly as a hockey announcer and has held various sales jobs. \u201cI stunk,\u201d he said. \u201cI hated sales.\u201d His best post-baseball job, he said, was when he worked for years as a casino dealer. \u201cI don\u2019t condone gambling,\u201d Peterson said. \u201cBut it was fun.\u201d He seems comfortable revealing himself as an imperfect man of contradictions, a Yankee who created headlines but never sipped championship Champagne.", "keyword": "Baseball;Books and Literature;New York Yankees;Peterson Fritz;Mickey Mantle Is Going To Heaven (Book);Ball Four (Book)"}
{"id": "ny0047012", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/11/18", "title": "Seeing Jupiter\u2019s Red in the Lab", "abstract": "Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot is a result of chemicals being broken down by sunlight, researchers report. The scientists, at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, blasted ammonia and acetylene gases, both found on Jupiter, with ultraviolet light. This produced a reddish material with light-scattering properties similar to those of the spot.", "keyword": "Jupiter;Light;Jet Propulsion Laboratory;Space;NASA;Chemicals"}
{"id": "ny0231794", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/09/22", "title": "Near Cuba, Wary Kin Wait for Proof of a New Path", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 Fashion boutiques, restaurants, a bank \u2014 Jorge Gomez plans to help his relatives in Havana open whatever business they want. But when? Like many Cubans on and off the island, Mr. Gomez has been scrutinizing the Cuban labor federation\u2019s announcement last week that 500,000 public sector workers would soon be laid off and expected to find jobs in small private enterprises, possibly reshaping Cuba \u2019s state-dominated economy. That declaration, though, was not yet enough for Mr. Gomez; not enough to offset the memory of previous economic openings that Fidel and Ra\u00fal Castro later slammed shut. \u201cYou start something and they just tell you to stop,\u201d said Mr. Gomez, 40, the owner of a money transfer business here, as he waited for his flight to Havana. \u201cIt\u2019s a system designed not to function.\u201d Cuba, it seems, is still being watched with wary eyes here \u2014 and the nation\u2019s plan to step toward an unknown economic hybrid could hang in the balance. The expatriate community in South Florida, often so vehemently at odds with the Castro government, is a natural \u2014 and perhaps necessary \u2014 source of capital for the private sector Cuba says it must expand to resuscitate its economy. A growing number of Cuban-Americans are already reconnecting with the island, making use of the Obama administration\u2019s decision last year to abandon restrictions on their ability to travel there and send money to relatives. What many people now ask is whether Cuba is being forced by economic hardship to respond with its own halting, vague form of welcome. Just over a month has passed since President Ra\u00fal Castro told the National Assembly that the state\u2019s \u201cinflated rosters\u201d would be trimmed, opening the door to self-employment in jobs like carpentry or rabbit-raising, and for more workers to form cooperatives. Experts say that the changes proposed by Cuban officials are far greater in scope than previous ones; for instance, the government has said that for the first time in decades Cubans will be allowed to hire workers who are not relatives. But at this point, according to business owners and analysts, the government\u2019s intentions do not appear to have led to any clear spike in money sent to the island by relatives, or of goods that might help entrepreneurs get started. The evolutionary plan, yet to be fully outlined, has instead raised as many questions as it answers. Where will businesses buy supplies? Will an influx of capital to some, but not others, foster new class and racial tensions, since Cuban-American wealth is largely concentrated among the white exiles here? What taxes will these new businesses pay, and how much profit will be allowed before the government steps in? \u201cThings move very slowly in Cuba because they are very, very concerned about breaking the balance of power with economic reforms,\u201d said Jorge Sanguinetty, president of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, a research group. \u201cThis is the reality. They don\u2019t want to emulate Gorbachev when he started making reforms in Russia and the whole thing came down.\u201d Mr. Sanguinetty, who served as a senior economic official with the Cuban government until he resigned in June 1966, said that Cuba might be just beginning the long, painstaking process of rebuilding the most basic economic relationships. He noted that Cuba even eliminated accounting schools in the first decade after the 1959 revolution because officials thought money would be unnecessary, and that many Cubans had no experience with credit cards, banks or checks. Now, he said, the government must move forward \u2014 with import-export licenses, with clearer communication about rules \u2014 if it hopes to make entrepreneurs a vital element of the economy. Mr. Gomez said he wanted some legal reassurance that investments would not be lost to a government crackdown. Serafin Blanco, owner of \u00d1ooo! \u00a1Que Barato!, a huge discount store where recent arrivals stock up on $1.99 flip-flops and other items for relatives to resell in Cuba, said the American ban on tourist travel to the island would need to end before businesses could take off. \u201cThat is when there will be enough money circulating to support these small stores,\u201d he said. Other Cubans have told their relatives that they need to see neighbors succeed under the new system before they dive in. Many people in Cuba are surviving already with their own underground capitalism, with government employees often working outside their actual jobs, as they try to supplement their state paychecks of about $20 a month. Maria Garcia, a bank teller in Miami, said she bought her grandmother a blender in April to help her sell fruit shakes from her patio in Cuba. Ms. Garcia, who also sends her grandmother packets of artificial sweetener for the drinks, along with toys so they can be resold, said her family was in no hurry to leave the black market. \u201cWe have to wait and see,\u201d she said. She added that a friend of her mother\u2019s in Havana offered just one example of the challenge Cuba faced in experimenting with another limited dose of capitalism. The woman, named Olga, sews bras and underwear out of fabric sent to her from relatives in New Jersey. She got a government license several years ago after Cuba began to allow for more cuenta propistas, as self-employed business owners are called, but her sales to neighbors did not always cover the monthly cost of the license she needed to operate legally. So Olga stopped getting the license \u2014 but not making the bras. All over Cuba, such experiences are common. At the peak of the licensing process in January 1996, there were about 209,000 licensed cuenta propistas , according to the World Bank. Now there are around 144,000 in a work force of 5.1 million. Some experts and business owners with ties to Cuba \u2014 like John Cabanas, owner of C & T Charters in Miami \u2014 predict that this time private enterprise will grow without as much government interference. Mr. Sanguinetty said Cubans should expect \u201crigid flexibility,\u201d suggesting that the island would evolve even as internal elements resisted. He said that the construction industry would be one test of the government\u2019s commitment because it was primed for significant growth \u2014 if leaders, bureaucrats and older Cubans all allowed for it. Yet even as he imagined Cuba with a small finance industry again, providing loans to small businesses and the impetus for shiny new office towers in crumbling Havana, the minds of many Cubans are still stopping short of that. For now, those who travel back regularly are still seeing the future through the lens of past disappointment. \u201cIt\u2019s just something to show the world that they\u2019re getting better,\u201d said Ernis Rodriguez, 36, just before heading back for a visit to the country he left seven years ago. \u201cBut it\u2019s not true.\u201d", "keyword": "Cuba;Florida;Economic Conditions and Trends;Cuban-Americans;Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0231431", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/09/23", "title": "Chief of Staff Pick Would Offer a View on Obama\u2019s Strategy", "abstract": "By all knowledgeable accounts, Rahm Emanuel hasn\u2019t yet decided whether he will leave his job as White House chief of staff to run for mayor of Chicago . But that hasn\u2019t dampened the intense speculation in Washington on the question of who might replace him. This is largely because the selection of a chief of staff signals the direction of a presidency. Whether Democrats lose control of Congress this November or simply emerge weakened, President Obama will likely confront a changed political environment. And so Mr. Obama\u2019s potential choice for a second chief of staff would say a lot about the kind of strategy he intends to pursue for the rest of his term \u2014 and whether he is ready, perhaps, to challenge the worldview that permeates his White House. Modern presidencies tend to unfold in chapters, after all. Don Baer, who served as communications director in the Clinton White House, points out that there were four distinct phases in Bill Clinton \u2019s presidency: the initial legislative phase, the post-Republican takeover phase, the impeachment phase and the post-impeachment phase. These phases corresponded roughly, though not exactly, with Mr. Clinton\u2019s four chiefs of staff, all of whom came with attributes that seemed to fit the particular moment. Given his Chicago ties and his experience in both the legislative and executive branches, Mr. Emanuel was perhaps an ideal choice for Mr. Obama\u2019s young presidency. Mr. Emanuel has presided over a string of significant legislative victories, and there is no sign that Mr. Obama is inclined to send his chief of staff packing, no matter what happens in November. And yet, should Mr. Emanuel leave soon, whether to run for mayor or simply from exhaustion, it would create an opportunity for Mr. Obama to signal that he is opening a new chapter in his administration. The departures of many of his top economic aides, including Lawrence H. Summers , who announced Tuesday that he would return to Harvard by the end of the year, has already set that process in motion. \u201cI happen to be a big Rahm fan,\u201d says David Gergen, a senior advisor to four previous presidents. \u201cBut going forward, I think the president can make a choice that can help revive and reposition his presidency.\u201d Perhaps the pivotal choice that will face Mr. Obama, should he need to name a new chief of staff, is whether to select someone from inside or outside his circle of advisors. Most of the potential picks whose names keep popping up in Washington speculation are aides on whom the president already relies. These include personal loyalists like Valerie Jarrett , the president\u2019s senior advisor and longtime friend, and David Plouffe , his former campaign manager, as well as such experienced Washington hands as Tom Donilon, a top national security aide, and Robert Bauer, Mr. Obama\u2019s White House counsel. The argument here is that an administration insider would already have a rapport with the president and his senior staff, which might be important, since the last thing the president would need, as he settles in for a protracted struggle with congressional Republicans, is a lot of internal strife. And yet, advisors from previous administrations will tell you that one of the great perils for a White House, as for any powerful institution in trying times, is that its leaders tend to share the same insular perspective on how they got were they are. They become, in a sense, prisoners of their own narrative. Lyndon Johnson and his advisors, for instance, found themselves trapped inside their shared view of how to fight the Vietnam War. It was only after Johnson brought in advisors grounded in outside thinking \u2014 most notably Clark Clifford \u2014 that the White House began to bend to reality and seek new approaches to the conflict. In Mr. Obama\u2019s case, the administration\u2019s groupthink is more subtle. Talk to any senior White House aide, and you will hear the same essential narrative of the past 18 months \u2014 how President George W. Bush and his Wall Street friends bequeathed to Mr. Obama crises of unforeseen proportions, how Republicans tried to derail efforts to address them, how none of the president\u2019s predicaments are of his own making. Even when they acknowledge missteps, Mr. Obama\u2019s aides tend to see them, to borrow a legal term, as fruit of the poisonous tree \u2014 that is, missteps that would not have occurred were it not for the misery they inherited. The problem with this interpretation of events isn\u2019t that people don\u2019t believe it. In the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll, a clear majority of Americans, 58 percent, blamed either Mr. Bush or financial institutions for the current economic morass, compared with only 5 percent who blamed Mr. Obama. Rather, the danger in such a worldview is that it seems to have created a aggrieved mentality inside the White House that probably isn\u2019t very helpful. Voters may not believe it was Mr. Obama who caused their current travails, but neither do they seem interested in the question of who did. They are judging the administration solely now on the effectiveness of its response to crises, rather than on its culpability. If he ends up choosing a new chief of staff, then, Mr. Obama could opt for someone who may be more attuned to recent shifts in the public\u2019s attitude, perhaps a former governor who has executive mindset and doesn\u2019t share the experience of his inner circle. Among the names I heard suggested in recent weeks are Virginia \u2019s Tim Kaine , who runs the Democratic National Committee , and Ed Rendell , the soon-to-be former governor of Pennsylvania . Of course, Mr. Obama could try to pursue both the inside and outside paths at once, by bringing in new advisors in senior positions while also replacing Mr. Emanuel \u2014 if and when he leaves \u2014 with a current aide. If Mr. Obama has established any management pattern to this point, it is that he generally seeks to broaden his options even while preserving continuity \u2014 to demonstrate that he is, in effect, less intractable than Mr. Bush but also less politically malleable than Mr. Clinton. Such a dual strategy would not exactly open a new chapter in Mr. Obama\u2019s presidency. But it might at least signal a willingness to turn the page.", "keyword": "Rahm Emanuel;Barack Obama;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0257379", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/01/20", "title": "Ivory Coast: U.N. to Send More Peacekeepers", "abstract": "The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved sending an additional 2,000 peacekeepers to the Ivory Coast , citing the lack of security facing the more than 9,000 troops and police officers already there. So many soldiers are required to protect the Golf Hotel, home to Alassane Ouattara, the recognized president, as well as senior United Nations officials, that there are none to spare elsewhere in the country. The new troops are expected to deploy by June. Raila Odinga, Kenya\u2019s prime minister, announced after two days of meetings that the latest African attempt to resolve the crisis had failed.", "keyword": "Ivory Coast;United Nations;Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0110941", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/02/04", "title": "New Haven Has Divided Loyalties in Super Bowl", "abstract": "NEW HAVEN \u2014 Their trails crossed along the city\u2019s main drag, like two passing ships, if ships could exchange menacing glares. Here was Andre Bright, 29, draped in the blue New York Giants hoodie he said he had removed only once, to wash, since the team\u2019s last game. And there was the man approaching him, his face obscured by a hat with this Connecticut city\u2019s other emblem of the gridiron: a New England Patriots logo. The two drew closer. Their eyes locked. They traded sober nods of the head. \u201cHe was looking at me,\u201d Mr. Bright said. \u201cI was looking at him.\u201d And then off they went on Wednesday, four days before their teams were to meet in the Super Bowl, to trudge through a city (population 130,000) with a rooting interest more complicated than most others. There are many towns and cities along the Connecticut coast that have different proportions of divided loyalties between teams from New York and Massachusetts, with geographic proximity generally a barometer of where the line falls. But while this waterfront city might appear to ooze New England \u2014 more than a dozen businesses in New Haven include \u201cNew England\u201d in their names, while New York\u2019s presence seems limited to an insurance company \u2014 the city has its own peculiar dynamic: for two years, the Giants played their home games at the Yale Bowl on Central Avenue. In broad demographic strokes, residents say New Haven\u2019s fandom can be condensed to a simple formula. Younger fans, especially those reared in the Tom Brady era, tend to root for the Patriots. Older generations gravitate toward the Giants, who predate the Patriots by decades; trained in nearby Fairfield for much of the 1960s; and called this city home in 1973 and 1974 while their new stadium in New Jersey was being built. \u201cIt added to the sense that we were part of New York Giants territory,\u201d said Richard Hanley, 55, a New Haven resident and an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University. Even the team\u2019s dreadful home record, 1-11, during its two seasons at the Yale Bowl helped establish a camaraderie among local Giants fans, said Mr. Hanley, who worked as an usher for the games in 1974. \u201cLosers do add to the affection,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a test of loyalty that you were a Giants fan when they were so terrible.\u201d Still, subsequent generations do not seem to have objected to the Giants\u2019 recent string of successes. Victor Casanova, 30, a former Bronx resident and the manager of a RadioShack in New Haven, recently posted two newspaper articles celebrating the Giants\u2019 Super Bowl appearance in the store\u2019s front windows, facing passers-by near New Haven Green. \u201cThey said to put a display up,\u201d Mr. Casanova said of RadioShack\u2019s corporate office. He would not be entertaining customer or employee requests for a more equitable Super Bowl display, he added. Eric Bailey, a student at Southern Connecticut State University, did not notice the display as he walked past with a group of friends on Wednesday. But he made clear that a repeat of the teams\u2019 previous Super Bowl clash \u2014 a Giants victory that ruined the Patriots\u2019 perfect record in 2008 \u2014 would not sit well. \u201cI didn\u2019t want it to be true,\u201d he recalled, saying that the result had left him so depleted that the next morning his mother let him take a sick day and stay home from high school. \u201cNo tears,\u201d Mr. Bailey added, nodding grimly in a backwards Red Sox cap. \u201cJust depression.\u201d Of course, the intensity of local interest in the game can vary. Atop the soft dirt plot of the Occupy New Haven encampment, where sporting goods like bats, a helmet and three-quarters of a golf club have been repurposed as security equipment, protesters said the camp\u2019s seven-inch television was rarely tuned to sports. \u201cYou might want to talk to the kids at Yale,\u201d said Justin Sabatino, 21, taking a smoke break from sorting through recyclables. \u201cWe have other things to worry about here.\u201d The city\u2019s Ivy Leaguers had, in fact, been following the sport in recent weeks, though team preferences in one case appeared, perhaps, to be rooted in a deeper historical or psychological truth. Sitting with classmates along the edge of a campus walkway at Yale, Kristin Zaichkin, 23, from Tacoma, Wash., said that for her, having two older siblings had forged a kinship with Eli Manning, the Giants\u2019 quarterback, long overshadowed by older brother Peyton of the Indianapolis Colts. \u201cI want him to have his moment,\u201d Ms. Zaichkin said of the younger Manning, who with a victory on Sunday would surpass his brother in Super Bowl victories. For businesses here, the two teams\u2019 successes have presented opportunities. Originally from Ireland, Patrick Hogan, the owner of Kelly\u2019s Gastro Pub on Crown Street, said he had marketed his restaurant as a \u201cGiants house\u201d despite no particular affinity for the team \u2014 nor any semblance of its colors in the pub, save for three posters waiting to be unfurled on Sunday. Long before that was to happen, though, the city\u2019s collective attire seemed to skew blue anyway: Giants shirts and sweaters; hats with the interlocking \u201cNY\u201d of the New York Yankees; even a pullover with the logo of the struggling Knicks. But around noon on Wednesday, a Patriots fashion rebuttal appeared in the works. Nelson Jordan, 57, approached New Haven Green in a heavy coat, with the minuteman\u2019s face from the New England logo splashed, in profile, across the front. Mr. Jordan was asked to predict a winner on Sunday. \u201cI don\u2019t really like football,\u201d he said with a smile. He patted the jacket as he fumbled for a cigarette. \u201cIt keeps me warm,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "New Haven (Conn);New York Giants;New England Patriots;Football;Super Bowl"}
{"id": "ny0253715", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/10/13", "title": "Barbara Sheehan Is Jailed After Weapons Conviction", "abstract": "The Queens woman who shot her husband 11 times but was acquitted of murder was taken into custody Wednesday to await sentencing on a weapons possession charge. Court officers slapped handcuffs on the woman, Barbara Sheehan, 50, and led her away after a brief proceeding before the acting Supreme Court justice, Barry Kron, who presided at her trial. Ms. Sheehan, dressed in a dark jogging suit, appeared shaken, but did not otherwise show much emotion while in court. From the gallery of the courthouse, in Kew Gardens, Ms. Sheehan\u2019s daughter, Jennifer Joyce, 25, sobbed quietly, mouthing, \u201cWe love you, Mom.\u201d She was comforted by family members and Ms. Sheehan\u2019s supporters, who wore purple to show solidarity with victims of domestic violence. Ms. Sheehan\u2019s defense asserted that she had been abused for years. Ms. Sheehan\u2019s lawyer, Michael G. Dowd, immediately applied for a continuation of her $1 million bail. He hopes to have her freed pending her sentencing, which is scheduled for Nov. 10, and an appeal of the gun possession conviction, which he said could take as long as a year to resolve. Appearing before the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Ms. Sheehan\u2019s defense team argued that she was not a flight risk, noting that she had surrendered her passport, made all of her court appearances and was now something of a public figure. Justice John M. Leventhal gave the prosecution until Monday to submit written arguments, saying he would rule on the defense\u2019s request to extend bail by the end of next week. During a monthlong trial that drew international attention and was viewed as a test of the battered-woman defense, Ms. Sheehan, a school secretary, said she shot her husband, Raymond Sheehan, a former police sergeant, in self-defense after he pointed a gun at her after a vicious argument. She said she had faced years of relentless abuse, including having boiling pasta sauce thrown at her, being locked out of the house in the cold in her pajamas, and having a phone smashed in her face when she tried to call 911. But the prosecution argued that Ms. Sheehan was a manipulative fabulist who had killed her husband to escape a sexless and dysfunctional marriage and then claimed she was abused to escape prison. On the day of the killing in February 2008, Ms. Sheehan shot her husband five times with a pistol after he had been shaving in their Howard Beach home. Then, when he went to grab a second gun that had been sitting on the bathroom vanity, she said, she reached it first, and used it to shoot him six times. His body was found on the bathroom floor, the faucet still running. After nearly three days of deliberations, a jury of nine women and three men on Thursday found Ms. Sheehan not guilty of second-degree murder, but guilty of possessing the second weapon. The reasoning, the jurors said, was that Mr. Sheehan was already very badly wounded and no longer posed a threat when Ms. Sheehan shot him with the second gun. Ms. Sheehan could face a sentence of 3 1/2 to 15 years. Mr. Dowd informed the judge on Wednesday that Ms. Sheehan would require medical attention in prison for high blood pressure and angina, the result, he said, of an anxiety disorder after 17 years of brutal verbal and physical abuse. Outside the courtroom, Ms. Joyce, Ms. Sheehan\u2019s daughter, broke down in tears. \u201cMy mom was defending herself,\u201d she said. \u201cShe shouldn\u2019t have to be in jail. We are doing a lot of praying.\u201d But Vincent Sheehan, Mr. Sheehan\u2019s twin brother, said the verdict had been unjust. \u201cI believe she got away with murder,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI don\u2019t understand how the jury came to the conclusion they came to, given that there was no evidence of her abuse. The weapons charge is better than nothing. But it is now up to the judge to hold her accountable for her crimes.\u201d During the discussion on whether to extend bail, Justice Leventhal of the Appellate Division, who has extensive experience adjudicating domestic violence cases, appeared receptive to the defense\u2019s argument that it had legal scope to appeal the gun possession verdict. The judge indicated that the fact that Ms. Sheehan did not appear to have harbored the second gun for a prolonged period could potentially be an issue on appeal. The judge also indicated that Ms. Sheehan\u2019s sentence could be reduced if the defense successfully argued that she was a battered woman. But he allowed that the jury\u2019s decision to acquit Ms. Sheehan of murder but find her guilty of possessing the second gun did raise questions.", "keyword": "Sheehan Barbara;Sheehan Raymond;Domestic Violence;Murders and Attempted Murders;Decisions and Verdicts;Jury System;Dowd Michael G"}
{"id": "ny0042928", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/05/09", "title": "Jobless Claims Fall More Than Expected", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, indicating that the labor market was strengthening despite a run-up in initial applications in previous weeks. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits declined 26,000 to a seasonally adjusted 319,000 for the week ended May 3, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The decline reversed three weeks of increases in jobless claims. Economists had forecast first-time applications for jobless benefits falling to 325,000 last week. The four-week moving average for new claims, considered a better measure of underlying labor market conditions as it irons out week-to-week volatility, rose 4,500, to 324,750. It remained at levels consistent with an improving labor market. Employment growth averaged more than 200,000 jobs per month in the first four months of the year, with employers in April adding 288,000 jobs to their payrolls, the most since January 2012. \u201cClaims, in conjunction with Friday\u2019s employment number, show that we continue to see an incremental improvement in the labor market,\u201d said Ron Sanchez, director of fixed-income strategies at Fiduciary Trust Company International, referring to the Labor Department\u2019s May 2 report on April employment figures. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent last month, compared to 6.7 percent at the end of 2013. The decline has also been aided by people dropping out of the labor force. The Federal Reserve\u2019s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, said on Wednesday that conditions in the labor market had improved \u201cappreciably,\u201d but she added they still remained far from satisfactory. Economists said starting May with a downward trajectory in jobless claims raised the chances of another month of employment gains above the 200,000-job threshold. \u201cIn fact, we expect the level of filings to fall back to the 300,000 mark within the next few weeks, which will be broadly consistent with the economy creating jobs in the 200,000-to-225,000 range on a sustained basis,\u201d said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities. The report showed the number of people still receiving unemployment benefits after an initial week of aid fell 76,000, to 2.69 million, in the week ended April 26.", "keyword": "Jobs;Unemployment benefits;US Economy;US"}
{"id": "ny0055089", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/07/13", "title": "French Olympian Retires From Swimming", "abstract": "Camille Muffat of France, an Olympic champion in the 400-meter freestyle at the 2012 London Games, is retiring. Muffat, 24, had planned to compete in the 2016 Rio Games, but she told the French daily L\u2019\u00c9quipe: \u201cI knew becoming an Olympic champion in 2016 would be 100 times more complicated.\u201d", "keyword": "Swimming;2012 Summer Olympics;Camille Muffat"}
{"id": "ny0199194", "categories": ["technology", "companies"], "date": "2009/07/08", "title": "After 5 Years, Google Removes \u2018Beta\u2019 Label From Gmail", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 What took Google so long? Like many software products, Google\u2019s Gmail service was first released with a \u201cbeta\u201d label on it \u2014 meaning that while it was polished enough for public use, it was still in a testing phase, so any glitches were to be excused. Beta versions, which are sandwiched between internal \u201calpha\u201d versions and final \u201crelease\u201d versions, typically have a lifespan of weeks or months. But Gmail was different. Released on April 1, 2004, it was still in beta five years and tens of millions of users later. That changed on Tuesday, when Gmail finally shed the beta label, signaling that Google considered the product to be fully baked. Google is also removing the beta label from Calendar, Docs and Talk, three other applications that are part of a package of online software called Google Apps . So why the wait? The official answer doesn\u2019t entirely clarify things. \u201cObviously we haven\u2019t had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta,\u201d Matthew Glotzbach, a director of product management at Google, said in an interview. Mr. Glotzbach said that different teams at Google had different criteria for what beta meant, and that Google felt a need to standardize those. \u201cIt was time to address the issue and bring the products out of beta,\u201d he said. Practically speaking, the change will mean little to Gmail\u2019s millions of users. But it could help the company\u2019s efforts to get the paid version of Google Apps adopted inside big companies, where Google is trying to compete with rival offerings from Microsoft and others. Corporate technology managers tend to shy away from beta products, and Google wants to remove any barriers to adoption that it can. \u201cFor business customers, it is an important sign in terms of the maturity of our product offering and commitment to this business,\u201d Mr. Glotzbach said. \u201cI\u2019ve had C.I.O.\u2019s tell me that they would not consider a product labeled beta.\u201d Google began marketing Apps to companies early in 2007, saying that its online software would be cheaper than competing systems like Microsoft Office and Exchange, which require customers to purchase costly software packages. Microsoft has since introduced its own online packages of business software, and Google\u2019s forays into the market have proceeded in fits and starts. Mr. Glotzbach said Google Apps was being used by roughly 1.75 million businesses, though most have little more than a handful of users. In all, Google claims that about 15 million people are using the service and that several hundred thousand of those pay for it at a cost of $50 a year for each user. By comparison, Microsoft Office has more than 450 million paid customers. While Google says that a few dozen corporations, including Genentech and Fairchild Semiconductor, have adopted Google Apps, some analysts say the service has been largely confined to small businesses, universities and government agencies. \u201cOnce you get outside those areas, the successes have been few and far between, and the beta label has not helped,\u201d said David M. Smith, an analyst with Gartner, a research firm. \u201cGoogle needs to go beyond the beachhead they have. The fact that they made this change is an indication that they are getting a bit more serious about the enterprise business.\u201d Mr. Smith said Google probably retained the beta label for so long because it had a coolness factor that appealed to the digerati. But he said that the company finally got rid of it because of pressure from its enterprise group, which is charged with selling Google Apps to businesses. Some businesses have shied away from online business software like Google Apps because of fears about security and reliability. Gmail and other online Google applications have recently suffered well-publicized outages. Of course traditional corporate e-mail systems are also susceptible to outages, which don\u2019t rate a mention in the news media. Mr. Glotzbach readily admitted that Google Apps did not account for \u201can appreciable percentage\u201d of the business software market. He took no issue with the description of Google\u2019s market share as a \u201cspeck.\u201d But he added: \u201cWe are a fast-growing speck.\u201d", "keyword": "Google Inc;Electronic Mail;Computers and the Internet;Software"}
{"id": "ny0059086", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/08/29", "title": "Conservative Party Lawmaker Defects to Anti-Europe Party in Britain", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 A British lawmaker with strongly anti-European views defected from the governing Conservative Party on Thursday to join the U.K. Independence Party, dealing an embarrassing blow to Prime Minister David Cameron. The legislator, Douglas Carswell, 43, said that he was resigning his seat in Clacton, in southern England, and would run in the by-election for the seat as a candidate of the fiercely anti-European UKIP, led by Nigel Farage . Clacton was already considered prime territory for UKIP to win its first parliamentary seat. Mr. Carswell said he believed that Mr. Cameron \u201chas made up his mind, he wants to stay\u201d in the European Union. A spokesman for the Conservative Party called the defection regrettable and said that the best way to ensure a nationwide referendum on continued British membership in the European Union was to ensure a Conservative victory in the general election of May 2015.", "keyword": "Douglas Carswell;Conservative Party;Great Britain;United Kingdom Independence Party;EU;Election"}
{"id": "ny0063726", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/01/14", "title": "Extremist Militant Group in Syria Retakes Ground Lost to Rival Rebels", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon \u2014 Making good on threats to contest attacks by former allies on its power and claimed turf, the extremist militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has retaken significant parts of the territory in northern Syria that rival insurgent groups had wrested away last week, rebel representatives said on Monday. There were signs, too, that government forces were beginning to exploit the rebel infighting, by pushing toward insurgent-held eastern Aleppo and threatening to cut rebel supply routes from Turkey to the divided city, which is Syria\u2019s largest. The developments dampened hopes of the insurgents opposed to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, that they could quickly subdue or co-opt the group, which has tried to establish itself as a government in many rebel-held areas. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has aroused widespread resentment from other insurgents for imposing strict Islamic rules, killing rival rebels and distracting from the fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad \u2014 the underlying reason behind the nearly three-year-old civil war in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry, who on Monday met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, in Paris, said that the Syrian government was considering carrying out localized cease-fires and unblocking humanitarian aid routes ahead of international peace talks, known as Geneva II, planned for Switzerland on Jan. 22. It was unclear how a localized cease-fire would be achieved in Aleppo, where rebel groups are fighting among themselves. Mr. Assad\u2019s opponents are skeptical of any promises of access to aid from the government, which has blockaded parts of the Damascus suburbs for months and has drawn accusations of using starvation as a weapon of war amid dozens of reported deaths from malnutrition. The government says it cannot reach those areas because of security concerns. The death toll from the insurgent infighting, which began more than a week ago, now exceeds 700, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain that tracks the conflict through sources in Syria. The northeastern city of Raqqa, the only provincial capital to fall completely to rebels, was mostly back in the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on Monday, said Abu Raed, an antigovernment activist there, in a Skype interview. He said that the Tawhid Brigade and the Army of Islam, two of the Syrian Islamist groups that expelled the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria from Raqqa last week, had handed over their weapons to the group in a deal to stop the bloodshed there. A spokesman for a group that is against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Ahrar al-Sham, said it had also reached a truce in Raqqa with the group, but added that 100 of its fighters had been killed by the group in an ambush and buried in a mass grave. \u201cThis is a major betrayal,\u201d he said. Activists in Aleppo reported tense anticipation after the group retook parts of the city where its ejection had been celebrated days earlier and where civilian activists and citizen journalists \u2014 who had faced arrests and killings from the group \u2014 had come back out into the open. In the Aleppo neighborhood of Al Bab, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fighters established checkpoints, demanded identification cards and examined cellphones in a search for \u201csuspects who are operating or collaborating with the rebels,\u201d said Mohammed Wissam, an activist with the antigovernment Aleppo Media Center. Such activities have contributed to a belief by many opponents of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that the group is serving the government. \u201cISIS took over the area earlier today after rebels pulled out,\u201d Mr. Wissam said. \u201cISIS told the residents that they came to fight the corrupt insurgents and apply God\u2019s law, calling on everyone to cooperate.\u201d While the group\u2019s fighters warned that any attack on them would bring \u201cbrutal retaliation,\u201d he said, there had been no documented arrests or killings. \u201cA lot of people are fleeing the area,\u201d he said. During the infighting, government forces retook part of an important Aleppo industrial neighborhood, the Aleppo Media Center said, and if they are successful in reclaiming the remainder, \u201cthe whole liberated area of Aleppo would be isolated and besieged.\u201d Separately, the Foreign Ministry in Italy said that the Italian port chosen for the transfer of Syrian chemical weapons to an American naval vessel equipped to neutralize them at sea would be announced on Thursday. In a statement , the ministry said the announcement would be made by Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group that is collaborating with the United Nations to oversee the destruction of Syria\u2019s chemical munitions. That collaboration, which began in early October after Syria\u2019s government agreed to renounce chemical weapons and join the treaty that bans them, has resulted in a high level of assistance from other governments, regardless of their views on the Syrian conflict. China and Russia, for example, are providing security for the export of the most dangerous chemicals, and a Danish vessel will be transporting them to Italy from Syria. Germany agreed last week to help destroy waste from the chemicals to be neutralized by the American vessel, the Cape Ray. Britain\u2019s foreign secretary, William Hague, announced on Monday that his country would provide additional equipment to the Cape Ray to help speed the process for rendering the chemicals harmless.", "keyword": "Syria;Fatalities,casualties;Bashar al-Assad;Military;Arab Spring"}
{"id": "ny0002572", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/03/12", "title": "U.S. Demands China Crack Down on Cyberattacks", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The White House demanded Monday that the Chinese government stop the widespread theft of data from American computer networks and agree to \u201cacceptable norms of behavior in cyberspace.\u201d The demand, made in a speech by President Obama\u2019s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was the first public confrontation with China over cyberespionage and came two days after its foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, rejected a growing body of evidence that his country\u2019s military was involved in cyberattacks on American corporations and some government agencies. The White House, Mr. Donilon said, is seeking three things from Beijing: public recognition of the urgency of the problem; a commitment to crack down on hackers in China; and an agreement to take part in a dialogue to establish global standards. \u201cIncreasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyberintrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,\u201d Mr. Donilon said in a wide-ranging address to the Asia Society in New York. \u201cThe international community,\u201d he added, \u201ccannot tolerate such activity from any country.\u201d In Beijing, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, did not directly say whether the government is willing to negotiate over the proposals spelled out by Mr. Donilon. But at a daily news briefing Tuesday she repeated the government\u2019s position that it opposes Internet attacks and wants \u201cconstructive dialogue\u201d with the United States and other countries about cybersecurity issues. Until now, the White House has steered clear of mentioning China by name when discussing cybercrime, though Mr. Obama and other officials have raised it privately with Chinese counterparts. In his State of the Union address, he said, \u201cWe know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.\u201d But as evidence has emerged suggesting the People\u2019s Liberation Army is linked to hacking, the China connection has become harder for the administration not to confront head-on. The New York Times three weeks ago published evidence tying one of the most active of the Chinese groups to a neighborhood in Shanghai that is headquarters to a major cyberunit of the People\u2019s Liberation Army. That account, based in large part on unclassified work done by Mandiant, a security firm, echoed the findings of intelligence agencies that have been tracking the Chinese attackers. American officials say raising the issue with the Chinese is a delicate balancing act at a time when the United States is seeking China\u2019s cooperation in containing North Korea\u2019s nuclear and missile programs, and joining in sanctions on Iran. Yet they have been expressing their concerns about cyberattacks with Chinese officials for years. Starting in 2010, they invited P.L.A. officials to discuss the issue \u2014 a process that has only just started \u2014 and last November, Mr. Obama broached the subject at a summit meeting with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, a senior administration official said. Since then, the official said, there has been a \u201cperfect storm\u201d of media coverage and protests from the corporate world. Still, he said, Mr. Donilon chose not to mention the P.L.A. in his speech because he did not want to engage in finger-pointing. \u201cWhat we are hoping to do,\u201d another senior official said, \u201cis force the Chinese civilian leadership to realize that the P.L.A. is interfering with their foreign policy.\u201d The Chinese have insisted that they are the victims of cyberattacks, not the perpetrators. On Saturday, the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi , issued his own call for \u201crules and cooperation\u201d on cybersecurity and said reports of Chinese military involvement in cyberattacks were \u201cbuilt on shaky ground.\u201d \u201cAnyone who tries to fabricate or piece together a sensational story to serve a political motive will not be able to blacken the name of others nor whitewash themselves,\u201d Mr. Yang told reporters at the National People\u2019s Congress, which was preparing to ratify the ascension of Xi Jinpingto the Chinese presidency. Mr. Donilon said the threats to cybersecurity had moved to the forefront of American concerns with China, noting that he was not \u201ctalking about ordinary cybercrime or hacking.\u201d That distinction, a senior administration official said, was meant to separate the theft of intellectual property by Chinese state entities from small-scale hacking by individuals, or the use of cyberweapons by a state to protect its national security. But the distinction between cyberattacks aimed at intellectual property theft and those aimed at disabling a military threat is largely made by Western officials devising legal arguments, not one the Chinese have embraced. Even as he emphasized the need for international rules to guide cyberactivity, Mr. Donilon made no reference to the billions of dollars the American military and intelligence agencies are spending to develop an arsenal of offensive cyberweapons \u2014 to be used against military targets, officials insist, not economic ones. The most famous of these operations was the covert cyberattack mounted by the United States and Israel to disable the centrifuges that Iran uses to enrich uranium at its site in Natanz. Mr. Donilon sketched out a vigorous agenda in Asia, insisting the United States would keep pursuing its \u201cstrategic pivot\u201d toward the region, despite cuts in military spending. He announced that the Treasury Department would impose sanctions on a North Korean bank specializing in foreign-exchange transactions \u2014 ratcheting up the pressure on the North Korean government on the day that Pyongyang announced it would no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War. With fears about North Korea\u2019s increased nuclear and missile capabilities causing considerable anxiety in Seoul and Tokyo, Mr. Donilon restated a \u201cdeclaratory policy\u201d that was first formulated by President George W. Bush after the North\u2019s first nuclear test, in 2006. He warned that the United States would reserve the option to retaliate against the North, not just if it used nuclear weapons but if it allowed the \u201ctransfer of nuclear weapons or nuclear materials to other states or nonstate entities.\u201d That formulation did not appear to cover, however, the transfer of technology to build nuclear facilities, as North Korea did in Syria. That reactor was destroyed by Israel in 2007. \u201cIt\u2019s understandable that the people of South Korea would be concerned about the threat they face from the North,\u201d Mr. Donilon said, apparently alluding to talk in the South of building the country\u2019s own nuclear arsenal, a move the United States halted decades ago. Mr. Donilon added that the United States had assets in place \u201cto insure that South Korea\u2019s defense is provided for.\u201d", "keyword": "US Foreign Policy;China;Hacker (computer security);Cyberwarfare;Chinese People's Liberation Army;Sanctions;Thomas E Donilon;Barack Obama;North Korea"}
{"id": "ny0271111", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/04/22", "title": "Israel Names Palestinian as Bomber in Jerusalem Bus Attack", "abstract": "BETHLEHEM, West Bank \u2014 Israeli officials named on Thursday the Palestinian who they say carried out a bus bombing in Jerusalem on Monday that rattled a country on edge after months of violence. Even as the Israeli domestic intelligence agency identified Abdul-Hamid Abu Srour, 19, his family praised him for the act, and relatives distributed posters of the clean-shaven young man, praising him as a \u201chero.\u201d The bombing, in which nuts and bolts were packed into an explosive device, wounded more than a dozen people, including Mr. Abu Srour, who died of his injuries in an Israeli hospital on Wednesday, said his parents. One girl, 15, was badly burned. The shattered, charred frame of the bus, the wailing sirens and the television interviews with survivors revived for many Israelis the memory of the second Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000. Then, suicide bombers blew up buses in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities, killing scores. Attacks on buses have been rare in recent years. It also reminded many Palestinians of the same era. Some lauded Mr. Abu Srour as a young man who had taken a current, waning uprising dominated by stabbings to a new level of violence. \u201cI\u2019m proud that Aboud did this,\u201d said his mother, Azhar Abu Srour, referring to her son by his nickname. \u201cAboud used to say, \u2018Either do something that\u2019s worth it, or nothing at all,\u2019\u201d she said at her son\u2019s wake, where women sat on plastic chairs in a leafy courtyard. \u201cWe are a people who have been abandoned and nobody is defending us,\u201d she said, defending her son\u2019s act, and ticking off a list of attacks against Palestinians, including a July arson attack by Jewish extremists that killed a baby , and later his parents, in Duma, a West Bank village. \u201cThey have left us no other way.\u201d Videos uploaded to YouTube showed loud demonstrations of Palestinian youths in Bethlehem, cheering Mr. Abu Srour . The bombings came as a six-month wave of stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks by Palestinians appeared to have abated, but not before it had killed about 30 Israelis. Israeli forces killed more than 200 Palestinians during that period, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most of the Palestinians were killed while carrying out, or attempting, attacks. While individuals undertook most of the attacks, senior Israeli military officials have said in recent weeks that small cells of Palestinians are trying to undertake more organized, deadly assaults, including by making homemade bombs and guns. Mr. Abu Srour apparently idolized a notorious Hamas bomb maker, Yahya Ayyash , who was assassinated by Israel in 1996. The teenager frequently posted images of Mr. Ayyash on Facebook, alongside other assassinated Hamas leaders, said his uncle, Humam Abu Srour. Suggesting that Mr. Abu Srour was not acting alone, the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, known as the Shin Bet, said in a statement that other Hamas activists had been arrested a day after the attack. \u201cThey are suspected of involvement and participation in the planning and execution of the attack,\u201d said the statement Hamas issued a terse news release on Wednesday, after Mr. Abu Srour was confirmed dead, acknowledging he had been a member of the militant Islamic group. At the men\u2019s section of the wake, the family sought to connect Mr. Abu Srour to his extended clan, famed for its militant activities against Israel. One of the banners showed Mr. Abu Srour\u2019s grandfather. He was also killed, in 1981 in Lebanon, during an Israeli bombing, the family said. The banner showed their photographs side by side, one in black and white and the other in color.", "keyword": "Jerusalem;Palestinians;Abdul-Hamid Abu Srour;Bombs;Bus;Terrorism;Israel"}
{"id": "ny0035962", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/03/16", "title": "In Debate on Charter Schools, Hybrids Offer an Answer", "abstract": "In recent days, as the debate over education has produced so many glowering expressions on so many faces all over the city, I have heard people say, in a spirit of both bafflement and confession, that they \u201cdon\u2019t know what to think about charters.\u201d In one sense, the befuddlement itself is a part of the problem, a suggestion that charter schools, like graphic wallpaper or adventurous restaurants in Brooklyn, constitute a matter about which one should have an opinion. When he was campaigning for mayor, Bill de Blasio had an enlightened formulation \u2014 that charter schools, though they educate only 6 percent of the city\u2019s children, had usurped nearly all the conversation, and that this was an unhealthy proportion. And yet since he was elected he has been too lost in the morass to reframe and reorient the discussion. The mayor has allowed charter school advocates, whose public-relations machine would seem to rival the operations of Paramount in the 1940s, to continue to leave too many people believing that if you are against charter schools you are against \u201cchange,\u201d and thus by default a friend of laziness and mediocrity. To even question the motives or practices of charter schools is to be a supplicant in the cult of the teachers\u2019 union, which is its own absurdity, just as it is a disgrace that the term \u201ceducation reform\u201d has come to refer almost exclusively to the charter movement, belying the innovation that can happen within regular public schools. If the mayor\u2019s messaging were more robust, determined and aggressive, he might draw attention to hybrid schools , which strive to offer poor children something like the experience of a private education within the context of the traditional public system, using union teachers. The Eagle Academy schools, for example, are a consortium of five schools, four of them in New York and one in Newark (a sixth is scheduled to open on Staten Island in the fall), that educate boys, most of them black and poor, from sixth grade through 12th. The schools operate in conjunction with their own foundation, which raises about $1 million annually to help pay for the staff required to hold longer school days, offer intensive college counseling, provide mentoring programs and so on. Foreign travel and the broadening of worldview are promoted; this spring\u2019s class trip at the Eagle Academy in the Bronx is to Greece and Turkey. Students raise money for the trips, and parents are encouraged to save to help pay for them. \u201cMost of our kids have expensive sneakers and iPhones,\u201d Jonathan Foy, the school\u2019s principal, said. \u201cChoices can be made.\u201d Last year, 17 students went to China. When teachers haven\u2019t done well for him, he has gotten rid of them, he said, explaining that in his school environment it is crucial for teachers to make emotional connections with students, whose home lives are often chaotic. \u201cThey want to know who you are, and then they will buy into the curriculum,\u201d he said. Black boys make up a particularly challenging cohort for educators. Last year, on standardized math and English tests for students in the sixth to eighth grades, only about 13 percent of them scored as proficient, as opposed to just under 30 percent for students citywide. In very poor neighborhoods, like Brownsville and Ocean Hill in Brooklyn, the rates are even lower, including at Eagle\u2019s school in the area. But across its network, Eagle sent 82 percent of last year\u2019s graduating class to college, a rate significantly higher than college enrollment for black male students across the country. This year, the Eagle school in the Tremont section of the Bronx has one of its first Ivy League candidates, a student who is waiting to hear about admission to Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Another student, in 11th grade, who has grown up in a shelter, recently learned that he had made the first cut for admission to Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, known as LEDA, a program that prepares high-achieving low-income students for entry to elite colleges. Donald Ruff, who works on college admissions and college retention for the Eagle schools, recognizes that the greatest challenge is keeping his population of students in college. This is the kind of grand goal that charter and traditional schools ought to be working on in concert. Three years ago, the well-regarded KIPP charter-school network conducted its own study , which revealed that only a third of the students who had completed a KIPP middle school within the previous decade had graduated from a four-year college. Although this was a rate much higher than the rate for comparable students from low-income schools across the country, KIPP acknowledged that it was far short of its goal. KIPP of course has been in receipt of tens of millions of dollars over the years. The Eagle Academy Foundation has a much harder time raising money. \u201cA lot of the Wall Street, hedge fund guys are not pro-union guys,\u201d David C. Banks, the Eagle Academy Foundation\u2019s president and chief executive told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not the world they come from. They see charters as places of innovation, and that\u2019s the narrative the business community wants to support. I\u2019ve had people say to me, straight up, \u2018We\u2019re not just funding a school, we\u2019re funding a philosophy, and that philosophy is anti-union.\u2019 \u201d If the system needs anything, it\u2019s for everyone\u2019s philosophies to be a lot more elastic.", "keyword": "K-12 Education;Charter school;Bill de Blasio;NYC;Eagle Academy Schools"}
{"id": "ny0179727", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/08/26", "title": "The Artwork Runs Hot, With Infusions of Cool", "abstract": " When word got out that the celebrated painter and East End resident Eric Fischl was organizing an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Long Island art community was gripped with expectation. Almost 25 years had passed since Mr. Fischl arrived on the New York art scene with provocative pastiche paintings combining popular cultural imagery and sexually charged nudes. Mr. Fischl approaches curating as he approaches composition. He strives for images that are free, poetic, full of imaginative ambiguities and, at the same time, characterized by intimacy. And the subject matter? Suffice it to say that Mr. Fischl has not lost his appreciation of the nude female form. Yet the show, titled \u201cAll the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy\u201d and organized in collaboration with Merrill Falkenberg, the museum\u2019s adjunct curator, combines two distinct if not entirely cohesive groups of artwork. One is devoted to Mr. Fischl\u2019s explicit and painterly preoccupations, the other to Ms. Falkenberg\u2019s preferences for more modest, cooler imagery. Since the show is heavy on images of female nudity, it is reasonable to assume that Mr. Fischl had the upper hand. It is also reasonable to assume that Mr. Fischl had a strong hand in the hanging, which aside from being elegant and spare is arranged to suggest the gradual transformation of the body from birth to death. It begins with a group of paintings that includes Alice Neel\u2019s loosely brushed portrait of a pregnant woman sitting on a bed, followed by Ron Mueck\u2019s photorealist sculpture of a naked woman and a newborn baby. From this opening the curators go on to present an engaging if highly idiosyncratic history of the body in art. The novelty of the exhibition is the mix of contemporary and historical artwork. These days it is rare to see multigenerational art exhibitions, let alone one encompassing the work of artists as distant in time (if not temperament) as Lucien Freud, Egon Schiele, Chuck Close, Tom Friedman, Emily Eveleth, Vito Acconci, Cindy Sherman, Joan Semmel and Catherine Opie, to name a few of the more than 30 artists whose work is included. The curators have done a marvelous job of assembling high-caliber artists and works. Several more paintings, photographs and sculptures of babies (Diane Arbus, Jeff Hesser, James Croak) are followed by imagery of early childhood and adolescence. It seemed to me that the show\u2019s sensibility began to fluctuate at this point, with the introduction of more ironic, even detached imagery of the body alongside the visceral stuff like graphic nudity. No doubt Ms. Falkenberg had a hand in this selection, especially the inclusion of Loretta Lux\u2019s austere, almost robotic photographs of children innocently gazing at the camera as if posing for a family portrait. They are prim and proper. The next section is filled with compositions that juxtapose painterly images of voluptuous naked female figures (by Jenny Saville, Cynthia Westwood and Mr. Freud) with images of food and fruit evoking the female anatomy; for example, Joan Goldin\u2019s photograph of two large melons poised against a sensual ochre background. There is no male nudity in this part of the show, unless you want to count a Robert Gober sculpture, an unlighted candle placed on a square base embedded with black hair. The final room is a grab bag but perhaps the most interesting area, full of thoughtful images and objects whose aesthetic origins can be traced mostly to realism. Some of the works are concerned with the technique of realism (including those by Evan Penny, Alexandra Moore and Tim Gardner), while others have more to do with expressing intimacy and empathy (Karel Funk, Do-Ho Suh, Y. Z. Kami, Mr. Close, Ms. Sherman), capturing a gesture, look, mood or moment that otherwise might have gone unseen. In art, that\u2019s what it means to be all the more real.", "keyword": "Fischl Eric;Parrish Art Museum;Art"}
{"id": "ny0023430", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/09/25", "title": "Rutgers Updates Its Anthem to Include Women", "abstract": "No one song could ever capture all the motivations that bring students to a college campus, all the experiences they have there or all the ways those experiences changed their lives. But \u201c On the Banks of the Old Raritan ,\u201d the alma mater of Rutgers University, is particularly inadequate. \u201cMy father sent me to old Rutgers,\u201d the song proudly began, \u201cAnd resolved that I should be a man.\u201d Stirring as it may have been, that lyrical formulation from 1873 left a few members of the modern Rutgers community unsung. Those whose mothers sent them to Rutgers, for example. Those whose fathers forbade them from going to Rutgers, but who went anyway. And the women who currently make up half of the Rutgers student body. Women were first allowed to enroll at the college in 1972. For some years, people tried singing, \u201cMy father sent me to old Rutgers and resolved that I should be a man \u2014 or a woman,\u201d but though the line was more inclusive, it made less sense. So this past Saturday, the Rutgers football team was accompanied for the first time by a new version of those lyrics, retooled by Patrick Gardner, the university\u2019s director of choral studies. \u201cFrom far and near we came to Rutgers,\u201d the song now begins, \u201cand resolved to learn all that we can.\u201d Rutgers is the latest formerly all-male college to bring its alma mater in line with its new demographics. \u201cMen of Dartmouth\u201d made sense in the 19th century when men were the only students, but not in 1988, when the words were changed to \u201cDear old Dartmouth.\u201d A year before that, Princeton\u2019s president changed the lyrics of \u201cOld Nassau\u201d over the objections of students, who voted to keep it in its all-male form. At Davidson College in North Carolina, \u201cOur fathers loved thee\u201d and \u201ctheir loyal sons undaunted\u201d morphed nicely into \u201cThy founders loved thee\u201d and \u201cthy loyal sons and daughters.\u201d West Point updated its alma mater in 2008, more than three decades after it began admitting women. As for Penn State, it had been educating women for decades when it adopted an official song that told of standing \u201cat boyhood\u2019s gate,\u201d waiting to be \u201cmolded into men.\u201d The words were not changed until 1975. Rutgers\u2019s new lyrics were first performed at the university\u2019s convocation, in August, but this past Saturday marked a debut in a much tougher venue. Professor Gardner said the football fans responded \u201cvery well.\u201d \u201cThere are some alumni who will be concerned and alarmed and upset, and we encourage them to sing whatever words are near and dear to them,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m glad that people are passionate about Rutgers and want to put that in a song.\u201d (Rutgers beat Arkansas, 28-24.) Someone started a \u201cChange Back the Rutgers Alma Mater\u201d petition online. As of Tuesday night, it had one signature.", "keyword": "Rutgers;Music;Women and Girls;Patrick Gardner;College"}
{"id": "ny0204880", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/01/16", "title": "Peter E. Fleming Jr., 79, Dies; Defense Lawyer Who Relished the Limelight", "abstract": "Peter E. Fleming Jr., a prominent criminal-defense lawyer whose client list over more than three decades included high-ranking politicians, flamboyant celebrities and a cast of characters from outbreaks of corporate crime, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 79 and lived in Greenwich, Conn. The cause was complications of lung surgery, his son Peter said. Among Mr. Fleming\u2019s clients were John N. Mitchell, the former United States attorney general; Don King, the boisterous boxing promoter; John J. Rigas, the founder of what was once the nation\u2019s sixth-largest cable company; and companies operated by Marc Rich, the commodities trader, who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton. High-profile names also brought Mr. Fleming out of the courts into public service. In 1991, the United States Senate named him as a special counsel to investigate the disclosure of sexual-harassment allegations made by Anita F. Hill against Clarence Thomas during proceedings leading up to Judge Thomas\u2019s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. The investigation raised anew the volatile question of whether reporters have a constitutional right to conceal confidential sources. The Senate eventually chose not to seek contempt citations against the reporters who had refused to cooperate. Mr. Fleming also received national attention in 1974 when he successfully defended Mr. Mitchell, President Nixon\u2019s attorney general. Mr. Mitchell, along with Nixon\u2019s commerce secretary, Maurice H. Stans, was accused of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with an investigation of Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier. Both Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Stans were acquitted. (Mr. Mitchell went to prison in a different case for his role in the Watergate scandals, serving 19 months for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying under oath.) \u201cWe pitched a no-hitter,\u201d Mr. Fleming told The New York Times in a 2002 interview in which he recalled the thrill of being barraged by reporters as he descended the steps of the federal courthouse in Manhattan 28 years earlier after the acquittal. He did not mind the limelight. A rangy 6-foot-6, typically attired in custom-made suits and French-cuffed shirts, Mr. Fleming could capture a courtroom with a booming voice, an occasional tear or a quip. A People magazine profile of him during the Mitchell trial described how, \u201cwhile interrogating former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman G. Bradford Cook, a pivotal prosecution witness, Fleming was asked by Judge Lee Gagliardi how much longer he planned to continue. \u2018Till he cracks,\u2019 snapped Fleming.\u201d In 2004, Mr. Fleming represented Mr. Rigas, the chief executive of the cable company Adelphia Communications. Mr. Rigas had started Adelphia in 1952 with a $300 purchase of a single franchise in the small Pennsylvania town of Coudersport. Mr. Rigas and his son Timothy were eventually convicted of conspiracy, bank fraud and securities fraud involving $2.3 billion. But Mr. Fleming succeeded in his defense of Mr. King, the boxing promoter. In 1998, Mr. King was acquitted of charges of defrauding Lloyd\u2019s of London, the insurer, by submitting fake expenses and a fake contract from a canceled title fight. \u201cThe guy saved my life,\u201d Mr. King said of Mr. Fleming on Wednesday. \u201cIf everything went against me, I was facing 63 years in prison. I think that Clarence Darrow will be standing there welcoming Peter to lawyer\u2019s heaven.\u201d Peter Emmet Fleming Jr. was born in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., on Aug. 18, 1929, one of six children of Peter and Anna Sullivan Fleming. Besides his son Peter, he is survived by three other sons, William, James and David; a daughter, Jane Fleming; a sister, Joan Fleming Sexton; and 11 grandchildren. Mr. Fleming\u2019s wife of 34 years, the former Jane Breed, died in 1990. Mr. Fleming graduated from Princeton in 1951. After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, he graduated from Yale Law School in 1958. For three years, he was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell. In 1961, Robert M. Morgenthau, then the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, hired Mr. Fleming as one of 15 new assistant attorneys. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Morgenthau, who has been Manhattan district attorney for 34 years, called Mr. Fleming \u201cone of the best lawyers around,\u201d and recalled his independent streak: \u201cBobby Kennedy comes up, goes around the room asking, \u2018Why did you want to be an assistant U.S. attorney?\u2019 Others say, \u2018To do public service.\u2019 Peter says, \u2018I did it for the money, general.\u2019 Peter\u2019s making a third of what he was making in private practice, but he\u2019s no sycophant.\u201d Mr. Fleming won 49 out of 50 cases in his nine years as a prosecutor. In 1970, he joined the firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, where he remained for the rest of his career. \u201cI never had a client I thought was guilty,\u201d Mr. Fleming said in 2002. \u201cEveryone may deserve a defense, but they don\u2019t deserve my defense.\u201d", "keyword": "Fleming Peter E Jr;Suits and Litigation;Celebrities;Deaths (Obituaries)"}
{"id": "ny0202450", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/08/20", "title": "In German Party Dispute, East-West Split Is Renewed", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 In today\u2019s Germany there are hardly any traces of the wall that divided the city of Berlin or the barbed wire fences that straddled the length of the divided country. Twenty years after the wall fell, cities and towns across Eastern Germany have been renovated. And in a bid to seal the unity of the country, the government continues to spend billions on social welfare programs. For all the outward signs of reunification, different historical experiences continue to divide the older generation of Eastern and Western Germans. The Easterners, while valuing their new freedom, resent that a way of life based on order and safe jobs was replaced by unemployment and uncertainty. The Westerners blame the Easterners for an increase in rightist extremism and the continuing drain on public finances. But it is in politics, in the Die Linke, or the Left Party, that the divide runs deepest. The Easterners resent not only attempts by Westerners to take over the party\u2019s leadership, they resent the way the Westerners are radicalizing the party. The Left Party was established two years ago when Eastern Germany\u2019s Party of Democratic Socialists, or P.D.S., and Western Germany\u2019s Labor and Social Justice Party, or W.A.S.G., merged out of expediency: They need each other to survive. But it has been a marriage made in hell. Politicians from both sides are quarreling over strategy and personalities, weeks before crucial state and federal elections. \u201cThis is a real East-West cleavage,\u201d said Everhard Holtmann, a political science professor at Halle University. \u201cThe big ideological differences are about strategy.\u201d Neither time nor geography favors the P.D.S., the successor to East Germany\u2019s Socialist Unity Party \u2014 the former ruling Communist party. The P.D.S. has the oldest membership among German political parties, and little more than 76,000 remain, mostly in the five eastern states, down from 2.3 million before reunification. Still, ever since reunification, the P.D.S. has been consistently successful in regional elections. It governs Berlin with the Social Democrats, with no qualms in slashing the public sector to reduce the budget deficit. It has had stints in government in other Eastern states as well. The success of the P.D.S. rests partly with its wide political network, inherited from the Communist era, its discipline, and the fact that it is a genuinely Eastern German party. It also plays an important social function, providing, for example, advice to the elderly about pension or tenant rights. And unlike the smaller opposition Green and pro-business Free Democrats, the P.D.S. has become a \u201cVolkspartei,\u201d a broad-based people\u2019s party, in Eastern Germany. \u201cWe have become more pragmatic about our goals. We want people to vote for us,\u201d said Bodo Ramelow, leader of the Left Party in the Eastern state of Thuringia. \u201cBut we want to gain a foothold in Western Germany. That is why the W.A.S.G./P.D.S. merger was so important for both sides.\u201d The W.A.S.G., founded by Oskar Lafontaine, appeared on the political stage in 2005 after Gerhard Schr\u00f6der, the former Social Democrat chancellor, introduced unpopular economic reforms aimed at modernizing the country\u2019s social welfare system. Disgruntled trade unionists and traditional leftist voters left the Social Democratic Party in droves to establish the W.A.S.G., claiming it was the only genuine leftist party. Mr. Lafontaine was once leader of the Social Democrats, premier in the small Western state of Saarland, and then finance minister in Mr. Schr\u00f6der\u2019s cabinet in 1998. As a protest against Mr. Schr\u00f6der\u2019s reformist course, Mr. Lafontaine quit after just six months, eventually going on to build the W.A.S.G. Ironically, when Mr. Lafontaine ran as chancellor for the Social Democrats in 1990, he had opposed quick reunification with the East. Now he is turning to the East to bolster his party\u2019s chances. The W.A.S.G. has rallied a motley array of left wingers, including former Maoists, Trotskyists and orthodox Communists, with a strong nostalgia for the old West Germany, which did not have to deal with globalization or the necessity of labor market reforms. Mr. Lafontaine has called for the overthrow of the capitalist system. He wants high minimum wages, extremely generous social benefits and an enlarged public sector \u2014 hardly surprising since many of his supporters are trade unionists whose jobs and pensions are guaranteed. On the surface, the East-West merger has been successful. The Left Party has managed to substantially weaken the Social Democrats, who share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s conservatives. According to opinion polls, the Social Democrats would win only 22 percent of the vote compared to over 34 percent in 2005, despite the fact that politically they have moved to the left by abandoning Mr. Schr\u00f6der\u2019s reforms. As for the Left Party, it could win 10 per cent of the vote in next month\u2019s federal elections. Eastern Germans know that they cannot achieve such a result alone. But their suspicion of Mr. Lafontaine and his radicalism runs deep, revealing a fear that one of the last genuinely Eastern German institutions has been taken over. \u201cWe know that Lafontaine is clever but he is also a polarizing figure,\u201d said Mr. Ramelow from Thuringia. Mr. Lafontaine wants the Left Party to have one leader \u2014 himself \u2014 instead of continuing a power-sharing arrangement, with an Easterner and a Westerner at the helm. But Eastern Germans are determined to preserve their influence over the party\u2019s strategy. \u201cThis is a big issue. We have to have a dual leadership,\u201d said Axel Troost, a member of the German Parliament. Mr. Troost has an interesting twist on this East-West divide. He had represented the W.A.S.G. in the northwestern port city of Bremen. But he became so disillusioned with its sectarianism that he moved to the Left Party in the Eastern state of Saxony. With such infighting, the otherwise irrelevant regional election in Saarland in 10 days\u2019 time in the very west of Germany has become important for the future direction of the Left Party. In Saarland, Mr. Lafontaine is standing as premier and hoping to win at least 20 percent, which, if he succeeded, would silence his critics inside the party. Should he fail, a leadership fight between East and West seems certain, dimming the party\u2019s chances at future success on the federal level. Now wouldn\u2019t that please the Social Democrats, who have never forgiven Mr. Lafontaine\u2019s desertion and the damage he has wrought on their party?", "keyword": "Politics and Government;Elections;Germany;East Germany"}
{"id": "ny0073164", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/03/25", "title": "A Water Dilemma in Michigan: Cloudy or Costly?", "abstract": "FLINT, Mich. \u2014 Depending on the day, Melissa Mays says, the water flowing out of her home\u2019s faucets might have a blue tint. Or it might smell like mothballs. Or it might fill her home with the scent of an overchlorinated swimming pool. Lately, Ms. Mays, who is 36 and works in marketing, has not been turning on her tap much at all. After Flint changed the source of its drinking water last spring, Ms. Mays said, she noticed a change in the water\u2019s color and odor. Then she started having rashes, and clumps of her hair fell out. When the city issued a boil order, she stopped using the water for drinking and cooking. Now her family spends roughly $400 a month on bottled water. \u201cMy cat gets bottled water, our plants get bottled water, our fish gets bottled water,\u201d said Ms. Mays, who has helped organize marches to protest the water conditions and is on a city commission seeking input on how to move forward. \u201cIt takes four to five bottles of water to fill up a pot for spaghetti.\u201d Flint officials insist that the city\u2019s water is safe. They say that the issues of odor and color are separate from the question of whether the water meets federal standards, and that no link to health problems has been proved. Image Tony Palladeno Jr., escorted from a water advisory committee meeting for outbursts, says that the water in this bottle came out of his tap in January. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times \u201cWe understand the concerns about discoloration and odors,\u201d said Gerald Ambrose, Flint\u2019s state-appointed emergency manager. \u201cWe tell everyone who complains that we would be more than happy to come out to their house and test their water.\u201d Mr. Ambrose\u2019s position hints at deeper issues in Flint. Though the city has not declared bankruptcy, it has been in state receivership since 2011 and has deep-seated financial problems, which Mr. Ambrose was appointed to help untangle. Add to that a plummeting population and violent crime rates that rank among the nation\u2019s worst, and the water question becomes one headache among many. The problems, almost everyone agrees, started shortly after the city, in an effort to save money, switched from the supply of treated Lake Huron water it had long purchased from Detroit and started drawing water from the Flint River, treating it locally. On Monday, Flint\u2019s City Council voted to \u201cdo all things necessary\u201d to reconnect to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. Mr. Ambrose\u2019s response was swift. Flint water today is safe by all federal and state standards, he said in a statement Tuesday. \u201cWater from Detroit is no safer than water from Flint,\u201d he said. \u201cUsers also pay some of the highest rates in the state because of the decreased numbers of users and the age of the system.\u201d A sign downtown still refers to Flint as Vehicle City. Older residents recall growing up in a place that 200,000 people called home, where good-paying jobs in the General Motors factories were plentiful. Today, many of the auto plants are gone, the population is below 100,000, and once-prosperous neighborhoods are dotted with abandoned homes and vacant lots. Image Tim Bednarski checking water at the treatment plant. Flint has increased chemical monitoring and hired a consulting firm to suggest improvements. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times As Flint has shrunk, its network of water pipes built for a much larger metropolis has deteriorated. With fewer customers, water sometimes languishes in the system, becoming discolored. Moreover, water bills in Flint are far higher than those in neighboring communities. Officials say the switch away from Detroit water saves the city $12 million a year. \u201cIt\u2019s a very sore point, particularly when you have a population with a high degree of low-income folks,\u201d Mr. Ambrose said. \u201cTo me, the conversation we need to be having is, how do we lower those rates?\u201d Some residents say they would rather not debate the cost until they are confident that the water is safe. When fecal coliform bacteria showed up in parts of the city last summer, residents were told to boil their water before using it. Officials addressed the issue by pumping extra chlorine into the system, but in solving one problem, they created another. The high chlorine levels led to elevated levels of total trihalomethanes or T.T.H.M., which required another public notice in January. Residents will again receive a notice of elevated T.T.H.M. levels in the mail later this month, Mayor Dayne Walling has said. Long-term consumption of water with high T.T.H.M. levels can lead to liver or kidney troubles and an increased risk of cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some here say Flint had been on the verge of a rebound when the water problems started. The walkable downtown area, just steps from the University of Michigan\u2019s campus here, is now home to the Flint Crepe Company and other new restaurants. And perhaps most significant, the emergency manager was expected to leave office in the coming weeks, handing power back to the elected mayor and City Council. Image Melissa Mays said that after Flint changed its water source last spring, she developed rashes and clumps of her hair fell out. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times \u201cWe continue to deal with a number of longstanding challenges with concentrated poverty and high crime and expensive, old infrastructure,\u201d said Mr. Walling, a Flint native who returned to his hometown after studying at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. \u201cBut we\u2019re now 30 years past the major General Motors plant closings in the 1980s, and people are ready to move forward, so the new problems with water have been a huge setback.\u201d Mr. Walling said he and his family drank city water. Mr. Walling and Mr. Ambrose conceded that communication should have been better when water problems emerged. But they say the city is reaching out to residents and answering questions. Officials installed a T.T.H.M. monitor at the treatment plant and hired a consulting firm to suggest improvements there, and they have asked state and federal officials for help. They also note that the switch to the Flint River is not permanent. A new pipeline connecting Flint to Lake Huron is expected to be completed next year. Many in Flint, though, seem unconvinced. Saterra Hill, 17, a health sciences major at the University of Michigan-Flint, said she and her father purchased several gallon jugs of water each month instead of drinking tap water. Vernon White, 57, said he often bought soda to avoid the water. For many, the water issue stirs emotions. On a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of people filled the basement of the city\u2019s transportation center for a meeting of a water advisory committee. Tony Palladeno Jr., who arrived at the meeting in a red Flint baseball cap, was escorted out by a police officer for repeated outbursts. Mr. Palladeno, 53, keeps a bottle of yellowish water with a layer of sediment that he said came out of his tap in January. He said local officials had not acted quickly enough to fix the problems. \u201cI don\u2019t feel hopeful,\u201d Mr. Palladeno said. \u201cAt one time, I loved this town. I still love it. There\u2019s good people here. But the governing is killing us. I think we need a federal intervention.\u201d", "keyword": "Flint Michigan;Water;City council;Infrastructure,public works;EPA;Lake Huron"}
{"id": "ny0278097", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/11/21", "title": "Melania and Barron Trump Won\u2019t Immediately Move to White House", "abstract": "President-elect Donald J. Trump\u2019s wife, Melania, and their 10-year-old son, Barron, will not immediately move to the White House after Mr. Trump takes office in January, out of concern for uprooting Barron in the middle of the school year, transition officials said on Sunday. Ms. Trump and Barron will remain in New York for at least another six months, the officials said. Speaking to reporters on Sunday at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump said they would join him \u201cvery soon \u2014 after he\u2019s finished with school.\u201d Mr. Trump said he would move to the White House. Still, with his family remaining at Trump Tower, the likelihood may increase that Mr. Trump will spend part of the week in New York. Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said, \u201cNo official statement has been released by the Trump family regarding transition timing, but like any parents, they are concerned about pulling their 10-year-old son out of school in the middle of the year.\u201d Mr. Miller urged that \u201cthe same privacy and security considerations given to previous first families with regard to minor children be extended to the Trumps as well.\u201d The New York Times previously reported that Ms. Trump was planning to move to the White House eventually but was concerned about disrupting her son\u2019s routine. The New York Post reported on Sunday that she and Barron would not join her husband immediately after the inauguration. For all of the enthusiasm that the president-elect displayed on the campaign trail, Ms. Trump, a former model, never shared in it. She did not join her husband other than for major events like the Republican National Convention, and she granted few interviews. She is the main caregiver for their son, who attends a private school in Manhattan and is taken there most days by his mother. She is said to be concerned not just about the potential disruption to her son\u2019s life, but also about bringing him closer to the news media spotlight. People who know her have said she plans to revisit the issue at the end of the school year. The situation is similar in ways to the one Michelle Obama faced in 2008 after her husband was elected. Mrs. Obama also did not care for the attention that came with the campaign, and she was said to be considering remaining in Chicago with their two daughters. But she ultimately made the move with their children. Mr. Trump and his aides have not said whether he plans to move to the White House full time. But he has told aides he would like to be in New York when he can. Keeping Trump Tower as a residence for the incoming president\u2019s family will create security and logistical hurdles for the Secret Service and the Police Department. The tower is on Fifth Avenue, a major thoroughfare.", "keyword": "Melania Trump;Barron Trump;Donald Trump;White House;Trump Tower;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0237051", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/06/16", "title": "Obama, in Speech on Spill, Calls on Americans to Reduce Oil Dependence", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama summoned Americans on Tuesday to a \u201cnational mission\u201d to move away from reliance on oil and develop alternative sources of energy, casting the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an imperative for Congress to act quickly to overcome \u201ca lack of political courage and candor.\u201d Speaking to a national television audience for the first time from the Oval Office , Mr. Obama also promised a long-term plan to make sure that the gulf states suffering from the oil spill are made whole again. He said he was appointing Ray Mabus , the secretary of the Navy and the former governor of Mississippi , to develop a Gulf Coast restoration plan in cooperation with states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, conservationists and gulf residents. Even as Mr. Obama was preparing his speech, the government on Tuesday released a new estimate of the amount of oil flowing from the well. It said as much as 60,000 barrels could be spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, a sharp increase over the estimate last week of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day. The new estimate, reflecting the increased oil flow that began after a pipe was deliberately cut to help capture some of the oil coming from the well, continues a pattern in which every new estimate has been sharply higher than the one before. With the broken well\u2019s owner, BP , capturing roughly 15,000 barrels a day, the new estimate suggests that as much as 45,000 barrels a day is escaping into the gulf, punctuating the scale of the substantive and political problems facing Mr. Obama. \u201cToday, as we look to the gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cWe cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.\u201d Mr. Obama\u2019s 18-minute address, delivered at his desk, took place in an atmosphere far different from the crowded campaign rallies and international university halls where he has produced some of his most soaring speeches. This time, Mr. Obama, wearing a dark blue suit and light blue tie, struck a solemn but hopeful tone, invoked military terminology to create a sense of urgency around his response to the crisis, and spoke of the American ingenuity he said was needed to help the country rein in its reliance on oil. He said he had authorized the use of 17,000 National Guard members to help with the cleanup effort, but only a small number have actually been dispatched by the governors in the region even though Mr. Obama has said that BP will pick up the cost. He also continued to strike an adversarial tone toward BP. \u201cWe will fight this spill with everything we\u2019ve got for as long as it takes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever is necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.\u201d Seizing on the widening calamity in the Gulf of Mexico to push for legislation he has advocated since his campaign, Mr. Obama said he was willing to look at approaches from Republicans as well as Democrats, including raising efficiency standards for buildings as well as cars and trucks. He said progress had been blocked time and time again by \u201coil industry lobbyists,\u201d and he suggested that achieving energy independence was an issue of national security, saying the time has come for the United States to \u201cseize control of our own destiny.\u201d But, he warned: \u201cThe one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet.\u201d Mr. Obama delivered the speech the evening before he was to meet at the White House with the top executives of BP to demand that they agree to establish an independently administered escrow account of billions of dollars to pay claims stemming from the disaster. He said he would inform the chairman of BP\u2019s board, Carl-Henric Svanberg , \u201cthat he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company\u2019s recklessness.\u201d Lawyers at the White House and for BP have been negotiating for days about an escrow account. While Mr. Obama has not put a figure on the account, Senate Democrats have called for $20 billion. BP released a statement after Mr. Obama\u2019s address. \u201cWe share the president\u2019s goal of shutting off the well as quickly as possible, cleaning up the oil and mitigating the impact on the people and environment of the Gulf Coast,\u201d the company said from London . \u201cWe look forward to meeting with President Obama tomorrow for a constructive discussion about how best to achieve these mutual goals.\u201d Mr. Obama also moved to address one of the weaknesses exposed by the spill, lax oversight from the agency with the most direct authority to regulate offshore drilling , the Interior Department \u2019s Minerals Management Service . He said he had named Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department prosecutor and inspector general, to restructure the agency to make it a tougher regulator. Administration officials said the speech marked \u201can inflection point\u201d in the nearly two-month-old crisis: the end of a phase in which BP tried and failed to stop the leak using the quickest available options, and the beginning of the \u201cnew reality\u201d that plugging the leak could take months and the cleanup months or even years past that. The new estimate for the amount of oil spewing from the well is far above the figure of 5,000 barrels a day that the government and BP clung to for weeks after the spill began. It reflects a possible increase in the flow rate that occurred after BP cut an underwater pipe called a riser on June 3 to install a new device to capture part of the oil. It is based on new information, including high-resolution video made after the riser cut, and on pressure readings taken by a device that was inserted this week into the equipment at the sea floor. Energy Secretary Steven Chu , a Nobel Prize -winning scientist, was personally involved in using those pressure readings to help make the latest calculation. \u201cThis estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP\u2019s well,\u201d Secretary Chu said in a statement. \u201cAs we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change.\u201d The company has proven in recent days that it can capture roughly 15,000 barrels of oil a day, though the operation was interrupted briefly on Tuesday by a small fire after the Discoverer Enterprise drilling ship was apparently struck by lightning. BP has outlined plans to deploy new equipment so that it can capture a minimum of 40,000 barrels a day by the end of June, and a minimum of 60,000 barrels a day by mid-July. If the new range of flow estimates proves correct, and if BP is ultimately found guilty of gross negligence in actions it took that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that would mean the company could be assessed fines of up to $258 million a day. Those fines could come on top of payments for cleanup costs and economic damage to Gulf Coast businesses. Fearful that the spill could ultimately cost BP tens of billions of dollars, investors have driven the company\u2019s market valuation down by 48 percent since the spill began, erasing $91 billion of shareholder value. BP shares rose more than 2 percent during regular trading on Tuesday, but then gave up all that gain and more in after-hours trading. Mr. Obama has said all along that BP will pay for everything. People close to BP said that as asset-rich as the global oil giant is, its holdings are not so liquid that it can instantly set aside as many billions of dollars as the White House and leaders in Congress are seeking. Also being worked out are the terms by which BP would have to replenish the fund as it is drawn down. BP officials are adamant that the company should not be liable for the lost wages of oil workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium that the Obama administration imposed on deepwater offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and other administration officials repeatedly have cited idled oil workers as among those who could press claims.", "keyword": "Barack Obama;Oil and Gasoline;Minerals Management Service;Offshore drilling;Speeches;BP;Accidents and Safety;Gulf of Mexico;Renewable energy"}
{"id": "ny0074997", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2015/04/23", "title": "Senators Stay Alive With a Third-Period Goal", "abstract": "Mika Zibanejad gave Mike Hoffman the opening he needed to help keep the Ottawa Senators alive. With Zibanejad screening Montreal goalie Carey Price, Hoffman scored midway through the third period and the host Senators beat the Canadiens, 1-0, on Wednesday night. \u201cMore times than not if he sees the puck, he\u2019s probably going to save it,\u201d Hoffman said of Price. \u201cMika did a great screen for me there, and if he wasn\u2019t there it would probably not go in.\u201d Craig Anderson made 28 saves to help the Senators cut Montreal\u2019s lead to 3-1 in the Eastern Conference first-round series. Game 5 is Friday night in Montreal. \u201cWe weren\u2019t going to win four games here tonight,\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cIt\u2019s one. We\u2019re moving on to the next one now.\u201d Senators Coach Dave Cameron moved Hoffman from the fourth line to the second unit with Zibanejad and Bobby Ryan during the first period. It paid off in the third when Cody Ceci kept Tom Gilbert\u2019s clearing attempt in at the point and fed Hoffman in the left circle for a quick shot that beat Price at 9 minutes, 5 seconds. \u201cIt was a big hockey game,\u201d Montreal Coach Michel Therrien said. \u201cIt was very close. The two teams played very hard. They got the last word tonight, but we have no reason to be embarrassed about our performance. I think we worked very hard as well.\u201d For the fourth straight game, the Senators scored first, but this time the Canadiens did not answer. An anemic power play that has gone 1 for 16 in the series has not helped their cause. \u201cThey came out with that urgency tonight,\u201d Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty said. \u201cThey were the better team in the third period tonight and you have to give them credit.\u201d Price stopped 31 shots for the Canadiens. RANGERS 2, PENGUINS 1 Kevin Hayes scored at 3 minutes 14 seconds of overtime to give the Rangers a victory in Pittsburgh in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference first-round series. The Rangers lead the series, 3-1, heading back to Madison Squre Garden for Game 5 on Friday night. In overtime, Martin St. Louis started a goal-mouth scramble when he threw the puck in front on a wraparound attempt. The puck pinballed to Carl Hagelin and went across the crease for Hayes to flip it past the fallen goalie Marc-Andre Fleury. The point was Hayes\u2019s first in the postseason. The Rangers\u2019 Derick Brassard tied the score at 1-1 with 2:45 left in the second period with his third goal of the series. Patric Hornqvist opened the scoring at 2:22 of the first period. Fleury and the Rangers\u2019 Henrik Lundqvist each made 22 saves. The Penguins are a loss away from elimination after dropping consecutive home playoff games to the Rangers, the N.H.L.\u2019s best regular-season road team. The Rangers have won 12 of their last 13 on the road, allowing 15 goals. Nine of the last 11 playoff games between the teams have been decided by two or fewer goals, including four one-goal games in this series. Hornqvist nearly ended it in the final minute of regulation, but Lundqvist denied him with a sliding save and Dan Girardi swept the rebound away from a gaping net. DUCKS 5, JETS 2 Ryan Kesler scored twice in the third period on Wednesday, and the Ducks won at Winnipeg to sweep the Western Conference first-round series. Andrew Cogliano, Emerson Etem and Sami Vatanen also scored, and Frederik Andersen made 25 saves for Anaheim. The Ducks are the first team to advance to the second round. Anaheim will face Calgary or Vancouver in the second round. Calgary leads that series, 3-1. BLUES 6, WILD 1 Vladimir Tarasenko scored twice, and the revived Blues sent Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk to an early exit and thoroughly dominated Minnesota to even the Western Conference quarterfinal series, 2-2, in St. Paul. Game 5 is Friday night in St. Louis.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Playoffs;Montreal Canadiens;Ottawa Senators"}
{"id": "ny0015323", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/10/27", "title": "In Mumbai Case, a Group of Assault Suspects Had Little Fear of the Law", "abstract": "MUMBAI, India \u2014 At 5:30 p.m. on that Thursday, four young men were playing cards, as usual, when Mohammed Kasim Sheikh\u2019s cellphone rang and he announced that it was time to go hunting. Prey had been spotted, he told a friend. When the host asked what they were going to hunt, he said, \u201cA beautiful deer.\u201d As two men rushed out, the host smirked, figuring they did not like losing at cards. Two hours later, a 22-year-old photojournalist limped out of a ruined building. She had been raped repeatedly by five men, asked by one to re-enact pornographic acts displayed on a cellphone. After she left, the men dispersed to their wives or mothers, if they had them; it was dinnertime. None of their previous victims had gone to the police. Why should this one? The trial in the Mumbai gang-rape case has opened to a drowsy and ill-attended courtroom, without the crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi in which a woman died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The accused, barefoot, sit on a bench at the back of the courtroom, observing the arguments with blank expressions, as if they were being conducted in Mandarin. All have pleaded not guilty. They are slight men with ordinary faces, nothing imposing, the kind one might see at any bus stop or tea stall. But the Mumbai case provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the top of the state\u2019s agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in. An editor at the photographer\u2019s publication, who was present when a witness identified the first of the five suspects, a juvenile, said the teenager dissolved in tears as soon as he was accused. \u201cIt was exactly like watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something,\u201d said the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim, who cannot be identified according to Indian law. \u201cIt\u2019s like a bunch of kids who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent, what happened.\u201d In spots Mumbai is an anarchic jumble, its high-rise buildings flanked by vest-pocket slums and vacant properties that have reverted to near-wilderness. One such place is the Shakti Mills, a ruin from the prosperous days of Mumbai\u2019s textile industry. When night falls, it is a treacherous span of darkness lined with sinkholes and debris, but still in the middle of the city, still close enough to look up and watch the lights flicker on in the Shangri-La Hotel. Image Suspects in the rape of a photojournalist in Mumbai. The photographer and her colleague, a 21-year-old man, were interns at an English-language publication and had decided to include this spot \u2014 the backdrop for any number of fashion shoots \u2014 as part of a photo essay on the city\u2019s abandoned buildings, the editor said. On that Thursday last August, they reached the ruined mill about an hour before sunset. The five men they encountered there later came from slums near the mill complex, claustrophobic concrete warrens where electrical wires tangle at one\u2019s head and acrid water flows in open gutters around one\u2019s feet. None of the men worked regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand \u2014 a hot, stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking. Luxury was pressed in their faces in the sinuous form of the Lodha Bellissimo , a 48-story apartment building rising from an adjacent lot. \u201cEvery boy in this neighborhood, including myself, would look at those buildings and say, \u2018One day, I will own a flat in that building,\u2019 \u201d said Yasin Sheikh, 22, who knew two of the accused men from the neighborhood. Because of his work helping find slum locations for film crews, he sometimes has a chance to interact with wealthy people, he said, and it fills him with yearning. \u201cI feel really sad around them, because I want to sit at the table with them,\u201d he said. Only Kasim Sheikh, 20, the card player who took the call, seemed to have shaken off the drag of poverty. A plump man in a neighborhood of the half-starved, he wore flashy shirts and hooked up his friends with catering jobs at weddings. He had been convicted of theft \u2014 iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site \u2014 and occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai\u2019s joint police commissioner, Himanshu Roy. Some people steered clear of Mr. Sheikh. The grandmother of one of the accused men, a 16-year-old whose name is being withheld because of his age, had forbidden Mr. Sheikh to cross their threshold. But her grandson craved nice things; that was his weakness, his grandmother said. Mr. Sheikh \u201cwore good clothes, he had a nice mobile, obviously he would, because he was a thief,\u201d said Yasin Sheikh, the neighbor. When another of their friends, a 27-year-old father of two named Salim Ansari, spotted the interns in the mill that day, the first thing he did was call Kasim Sheikh to tell him that their prey had arrived. Image The Shakti Mills, a ruin from the days of Mumbai\u2019s textile industry, where a photojournalist was raped by five men. Credit Sami Siva for The New York Times Nothing to Lose During the year since the Delhi gang rape, sexual violence has been discussed endlessly in India, but there are few clear answers to the questions of how much is it happening or why. One problem is that perpetrators may not view their actions as a grave crime, but something closer to mischief. A survey of more than 10,000 men carried out in six Asian countries \u2014 India not among them \u2014 and published in The Lancet Global Health journal in September came up with startling data. It found that, when the word \u201crape\u201d was not used as part of a questionnaire, more than one in 10 men in the region admitted to forcing sex on a woman who was not their partner. Asked why, 73 percent said the reason was \u201centitlement.\u201d Fifty-nine percent said their motivation was \u201centertainment seeking,\u201d agreeing with the statements \u201cI wanted to have fun\u201d or \u201cI was bored.\u201d Flavia Agnes, a Mumbai women\u2019s rights lawyer who has been working on rape cases since the 1970s, said the findings rang true to her experience. \u201cIt\u2019s just frivolous; they just do it casually,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is so much abject poverty. They just want to have a little fun on the side. That\u2019s it. See, they have nothing to lose.\u201d The photographer and her colleague reached the mill but, visually, it was not what they wanted. That is when two men approached them, the victim told the police later, offering to show them a route farther in. There the images were better, and the two had been working for half an hour when the two men returned. \u2018The Prey Is Here\u2019 This time they came back with a third, Mr. Sheikh, who told them something odd \u2014 \u201cOur boss has seen you, and you have to come with us now\u201d \u2014 and insisted they take a path deeper into the complex. As they walked, she called an editor, who said to leave immediately, but it was too late for that. \u201cCome inside, the prey is here,\u201d Mr. Sheikh called out, and two more men joined them. The men said that the woman\u2019s colleague was a murder suspect, asked the pair to remove their belts and used them to tie the man up. After that, the woman told the police, \u201cthe third person and a person who had a mustache took me to a place that was like a broken room.\u201d Image The grandmother of one of the accused, a 16-year-old. Credit Sami Siva for The New York Times The men had done the same thing a month before, said Mr. Roy, the police commissioner, taking turns raping an 18-year-old call-center worker who, accompanied by her boyfriend, had sprained her ankle and was trying to take a shortcut through the mill. They had done the same thing with a woman who worked as a scavenger in a garbage dump, and a sex worker, and a transvestite, Mr. Roy said. Mr. Sheikh took the broken neck of a beer bottle out of his shirt pocket and thrust it at the young woman, telling her: \u201cYou don\u2019t know what a bastard I am. You\u2019re not the first girl I\u2019ve raped,\u201d she told the police later, according to the charge sheet filed in the case. On the other side of the wall, her friend heard the woman cry out. \u201cAn inquiry is going on,\u201d the man guarding him said. They went in to her and returned, one by one. \u201cDid you inquire properly?\u201d Mr. Sheikh said to one as he came out. \u201cNo, she\u2019s not talking,\u201d he replied. So Mr. Sheikh said he would \u201cgo inquire again,\u201d and the rest of them laughed. At last they brought her out, weeping, and told the two to leave along the railroad tracks. Before releasing her, they threatened to upload video of the attack onto the Internet if she reported the crime, a strategy that had worked with previous victims. But this one did not hesitate. The two caught a cab to the nearest hospital. There they reported the crime, and the woman\u2019s mother arrived. \u201cI went inside. I saw her there crying,\u201d her mother told the police later. \u201cShe told me in English, \u2018Mummy, I\u2019m vanished.\u2019 \u201d The woman did not respond to a request for an interview. Mr. Sheikh, too, saw his mother for a few moments that night. He discussed the rape with her, she said, and tried to explain why it had happened. Image Chandbibi Sheikh, the mother of another suspect, who told her about the rape after it happened. Credit Sami Siva for The New York Times \u201cI asked Kasim, \u2018Son, why did you do this to her? If it happened to your sister, would you come here and tell me or would you beat him?\u2019 \u201d said his mother, Chandbibi Sheikh. He told her that his friends had come upon the couple embracing in the mill, and \u201cthey thought: \u2018What is she doing with this boy here? She must be loose.\u2019 \u201d She related this exchange from the family\u2019s home, a sort of shelf wedged between a gas station and a garbage dump; as she spoke, a rat the size of a kitten clambered over containers stacked in a corner. She said far too much onus was being put on the men. \u201cObviously, the fault is the girl\u2019s,\u201d she said. \u201cWhy did she have to go to that jungle? It\u2019s her fault, too. Also, she was wearing skimpy clothes.\u201d She did not deny that he had done it. \u201cHe must have,\u201d she said. \u201cHe told me that they tied up the boy who was doing bad things to her and said, \u2018Madam, let us also do it.\u2019 The madam said, \u2018Don\u2019t do it to me, take my mobile, take my camera, but don\u2019t do it to me.\u2019 Her body was uncovered. How could he control himself? And so it happened.\u201d High-Level Response Though the men in the mill may not have known it, rape had become a matter of great public import in India, a gauge of a city\u2019s identity. Mumbai\u2019s top officials, who had told themselves that the Delhi gang rape could not have happened here, were horrified and initiated a broad, high-level response, as if an act of terrorism had taken place. The police lighted up their networks of slum informants and all five were arrested and gave confessions in quick succession. Several made pitiful attempts to escape. Mr. Sheikh went to the visitor\u2019s room of a nearby hospital and covered himself with a blanket, trying to blend in with a crowd of relatives. He was caught with 50 rupees, or about 81 cents, in his pocket. When the police asked him to sign his confession, he told them he could not write, so he signed it with a thumbprint. \u201cIt is incredible how quickly the whole thing unraveled,\u201d said the editor, who was present when the photographer\u2019s colleague picked the first of the five men out of a lineup. A second victim, the call-center worker, came forward, inspired by the first, and said she was ready to testify. The suspects confessed to the other rapes under questioning, the police said. Image Indian police officers in August escorted the fifth and last suspect arrested in the gang rape in Mumbai. Credit Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The public prosecutor selected for the case is famous for prosecuting terrorists, with a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of 628 life sentences, 30 death sentences and 12 men, as he put it, \u201csent to the gallows.\u201d Much news coverage over the next days zeroed in on the defendants\u2019 poverty, but Mr. Roy shrugged off that line of inquiry. After interrogating the five accused men personally, he said they were \u201csocial outcasts,\u201d not indicative of any deeper tensions in the city. \u201cThey were deviants, sociopaths, predators,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf there was a larger socioeconomic framework, these crimes would be happening again and again. It was only these guys. I\u2019m 100 percent sure that this kind of crime doesn\u2019t happen in Mumbai. I\u2019ve been here all my life and have been born and brought up here.\u201d But in a constellation of neighborhoods around Mumbai, people are still trying to match up the crime with the ordinary men they knew. Shahjahan Ansari, the wife of the oldest accused man, Salim Ansari, looked terrified when a stranger appeared at her door, at a hulking, trash-strewn public housing complex beside a petroleum refinery on a distant edge of the city. The neighbors had started to shun the family since Salim\u2019s arrest became public, and she dreaded the extra attention. \u201cWe can\u2019t even walk on the street. You don\u2019t understand,\u201d she said. Inside the apartment, she calmed down a little. The whole story baffled her; she said she had no idea who her husband\u2019s friends were or what he did during the day when she went to work cleaning houses. All she knew was that until his arrest, he came home for dinner every night, \u201cHe was to me like any husband is to his wife,\u201d she said. \u201cHow do I know how he got into this mess? It must be the Devil,\u201d murmured Salim\u2019s mother, who was sitting on the floor, one eye blind, cloudy white. Ms. Ansari was remembering better days before her husband lost his job, at a factory that made cardboard boxes. He was so proud of the factory, with its big machines, that he brought his sons to watch him on Sunday shifts. Tonight the younger one was streaked with dust; the older one watched from a cot, glassy-eyed and much smaller than his 10 years, bony limbs folded under his chin. She would try, Ms. Ansari said, to move them somewhere else, to a place where no one knew who their father was. \u201cI want my children to grow up to be good human beings, that\u2019s all,\u201d the mother said.", "keyword": "Mumbai,Bombay;Rape;Mohammed Kasim Sheikh;India"}
{"id": "ny0058610", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/08/05", "title": "Abreu\u2019s Stint as a Met Ends After Pinch-Hitting Struggles", "abstract": "About 50 minutes after the Mets\u2019 loss Monday, Bobby Abreu sauntered through the clubhouse and started his goodbyes. He approached Bartolo Colon, Jenrry Mejia and Jeurys Familia in a corner. He spoke to Wilmer Flores. Soon, others around the clubhouse, having gotten word, approached to pay their respects. After the game, the Mets designated Abreu for assignment. Because he is 40 years old, it was fair to wonder whether this might be his last day in the majors. Surrounded by members of the news media, Abreu shrugged and said, \u201cWell, there\u2019s nothing I can do, you know?\u201d He spoke for about six minutes, thanked the Mets and shook hands with a few members of the news media. A year ago, this moment seemed improbable. After the 2012 season Abreu decided to take a year off. He spent his time training. He played winter ball in Venezuela and compiled a .416 on-base percentage. Dave Hudgens, the Mets\u2019 hitting coach at the start of this season, was his manager there. He recommended that the Mets give Abreu a chance. The Philadelphia Phillies, Abreu\u2019s old team, snatched him up first. But when they released him just before the season, the Mets signed him to a minor league deal. Around mid-April, they called him up, expecting him to be a part-time player and pinch-hitter. Every so often, he reminded the Mets of his brilliance. He homered in his fourth game. He batted .450 over a six-game stretch near the end of May. He went 4 for 4 one night against the San Diego Padres in mid-June. Then he slowly started to decline. He never truly adjusted to being a pinch-hitter. In 34 games as a substitute, he batted .118 and did not drive in a single run. Although he batted .284 and drove in 14 runs in 28 games as a starter, the Mets were wary of playing him for stretches. He was a liability in the field and was not that threatening at the plate. Such a drop-off was to be expected, though. Abreu\u2019s career has spanned 18 years. If he never plays in the majors again, he will have finished with two All-Star appearances, 288 home runs, 1,363 runs batted in, 574 doubles, 400 stolen bases and a .395 on-base percentage. His last at-bat was Friday, when he came on as a pinch-hitter, saw two pitches and grounded out to second. \u201cIt\u2019s not that easy coming off the bench,\u201d he said Monday. The Mets felt that Kirk Nieuwenhuis, who was recalled from Class AAA Las Vegas, would be better in that role. Abreu did sound optimistic about the Mets\u2019 future. He had taken on a mentorship role with three young players: Juan Lagares, Ruben Tejada and Wilmer Flores. Abreu said he had told them: \u201cGo out there, be aggressive, but look for a good pitch to hit. And don\u2019t ever be afraid to fail. Just go out there, do your thing that you already know how to do. You\u2019re here, in the big league, for a reason. You\u2019re not here for nothing. They have such good talent.\u201d Lagares and Tejada appear to have improved this season. Tejada has proved to be a serviceable shortstop, and Lagares has shown signs of budding into a star. During Monday\u2019s game, he batted 3 for 4, bringing his average to .283, and he threw out a runner at the plate. \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you, I keep saying it,\u201d Manager Terry Collins said. \u201cThis kid\u2019s going to be a really, really good player.\u201d Abreu plans to play winter ball in October in his native Venezuela, and he hopes to become a hitting coach. \u201cI want to keep playing,\u201d Abreu said. \u201cI love this game, you know. But I just got to see if there\u2019s going to be any offer or something. I just have to keep working hard and wait to see what\u2019s going on.\u201d He added: \u201cLet\u2019s wait. Let\u2019s see.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Bobby Abreu;Terry L Collins;Dave Hudgens;Kirk Nieuwenhuis"}
{"id": "ny0286985", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/08/05", "title": "Roma Women\u2019s Business Plan: Cook Their Way to a Better Life", "abstract": "ROME \u2014 On a muggy July evening, a handful of Italian hipsters milled around a food stand at an alternative music festival in Rome, trying to decipher some of the exotic offerings: mici, sarmale and dolma. These Balkan delicacies \u2014 barbecued meatballs, cabbage wraps and stuffed peppers \u2014 are the basic ingredients of an entrepreneurial scheme cooked up by a group of Roma women looking to better their lives and leave the overcrowded and insalubrious camp in Rome where they currently live. They call themselves the Gipsy Queens . \u201cCooking? I\u2019ve been cooking practically since I was born,\u201d said one of the chefs, Florentina Darmas, 33, a mother of three, who is originally from Romania. Like many Roma women, Ms. Darmas was raised to adopt the traditional role of wife, mother and caregiver in the predominantly patriarchal society. But nowadays she is trying to break down some of the barriers faced by her traditionally marginalized group using the universal language of food. \u201cI can learn from you, and you can learn from us,\u201d she said, fanning puffs of thick smoke over dozens of tightly rolled pork mici sizzling on a charcoal barbecue. \u201cWe realized there was unexpressed potential in the community, especially on the part of women,\u201d said Mariangela De Blasi, a social worker with Arci Solidariet\u00e0 Onlus , a Rome-based nonprofit organization that works with marginalized people, and manages the burgeoning catering business. Their \u201cdreams are often suppressed by the cultural conditioning of their society and by external prejudices,\u201d Ms. De Blasi said, adding that \u201cRoma women face a double discrimination.\u201d Indeed, feeding hundreds of hungry customers, as they did at the Rome music festival, was nothing compared with the other challenges they face. Those challenges include a deeply ingrained prejudice against Roma people prevalent in Italian society, xenophobia stirred by ultraright groups across Europe, and resistance from the more tradition-minded members of the Roma community. In theory, Italy\u2019s national policy aims to integrate the Roma, in accordance with European Union recommendations. In practice, results have been negligible, and municipal governments instead fund and maintain the construction of Roma camps in major cities throughout the country. The camps have drawn criticism for violating Roma rights . They not only fail to meet minimum standards for adequate housing, but also reinforce Roma segregation, said Carlo Stasolla, the president of Associazione 21 Luglio , a nonprofit organization that works for Roma people. Despite proclamations to better integrate the Roma, Rome\u2019s newly instated Five Star Movement government has allocated 1.2 million euros (about $1.3 million) to build a new camp, he said. Image Florentina Darmas prepared sarmale, a Roma delicacy of cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and ground meat, for the Gipsy Queens food stand. Credit Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times \u201cIt\u2019s a paradox to build camps to overcome camps,\u201d Mr. Stasolla said. The money would be better spent inserting Roma families in public housing and work programs, he said. The municipal tender, in fact, has a second phase that calls for the progressive social inclusion of the camp\u2019s residents. Though fewer than 10,000 Roma live in camps throughout Rome, they were a prominent issue in the mayoral election here in June. The outsize issue \u201cdemonstrated how Roma are always the object of the public and political debate in an exaggerated manner,\u201d said Roberto Bortone, an adviser with Italy\u2019s national antidiscrimination office. \u201cThe Roma question is always posed as an emergency in the public debate.\u201d When an article appeared on the website of a local paper about the Gipsy Queens, the comments were full of racist insults. \u201cIt was shocking. People speculated on whether they cooked rats, or went food shopping in garbage cans,\u201d Ms. De Blasi, the social worker, said. \u201cWe discussed it with the women, and even turned it into a joke,\u201d she added. \u201cBut it also made us all reflect on the image that people have about Roma, and we discussed the difficulties that they would face. It\u2019s good that they know what they are up against.\u201d Image Mihaela Miclescu relaxed after preparing pita dough for the music festival. She said she was happy to join the Gipsy Queens catering business. \u201cI hope it turns into a real job.\u201d Credit Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times Even the Roma community has not universally backed the Gipsy Queens\u2019 ambitions. Older women complained that the Gipsy Queens were neglecting their traditional roles by working long hours outside the home. One husband came to a meeting to drag his wife away. Out of an initial group of 20 women, only five now make up the catering team. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re taking this slowly,\u201d Ms. De Blasi said, describing the camp as a small town with its prejudices and limitations. The hope is \u201cto not create too many culture shocks and create an enormous distance between the inside and the outside.\u201d The inside, for the Gipsy Queens, is the Via Candoni camp, one of Rome\u2019s eight authorized \u201csolidarity villages\u201d for Roma. Just seven miles from the Colosseum, the rat- and garbage-infested camp might as well be on another planet. Ms. Darmas has lived in the camp on Via Candoni since arriving from Romania 15 years ago. She said that even if conditions are not as bad as some make them out to be, living in the camp bears a stigma that is hard to shake. \u201cWe have to leave,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen people hear that we live there, they don\u2019t want to hire us.\u201d That has been the experience, too, for Codruca Balteanu, 23. Six months pregnant with twins, and with a 3-year-old at home, she got a diploma to work in the restaurant and hotel business, but has found it hard to find a job. \u201cWhen we apply for jobs, we dress in jeans, normally,\u201d but prospective employers can usually tell she is Roma, she said. \u201cThen they pretend they don\u2019t have work.\u201d So the Gipsy Queens have taken it upon themselves to create jobs of their own, in hopes of getting out of the camp. All of the Gipsy Queens dream of leaving Via Candoni, which was intended to hold 500 people when it was established 16 years ago but holds twice that many today. If their entrepreneurial plans pan out, the Gipsy Queens hope to buy a food truck or rent a kitchen on a more permanent basis \u2014 foundations for steady work that will bring in rent money. \u201cGetting out is my first priority,\u201d said Hanifa Hokic, 31, a divorced mother of five children between 8 and 12 years old, who is originally from Bosnia. They briefly made it out of the camp once before. Her children will have better chances outside the camp, she said, so she insists that they go to school. The catering business is a step toward the outside world, she said. \u201cWe\u2019re determined to go forward.\u201d Maria Miclescu, a 20-year-old mother of two, agreed that to give her children \u201ca better future,\u201d she had to leave. Her husband is trying to establish a small-appliance repair business, another start-up project that has the support of Arci Solidariet\u00e0 Onlus. The oldest member of the group, Mihaela Miclescu, 49, who is a grandmother, was happy to join the Gipsy Queens. \u201cI wanted to show Italians that we are not bad people, that we want to work, not to beg,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a good project. I hope it turns into a real job.\u201d", "keyword": "Roma;Women and Girls;Discrimination;Jobs;Cooking;Segregation;Rome"}
{"id": "ny0286903", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2016/08/04", "title": "Trying to Recognize America in a Wild Campaign", "abstract": "Something, it seems, is off in America. What is it? I recently attended the Republican and Democratic conventions, where there were moments of unscripted drama \u2014 high dudgeon, low cuts and poignant testimony \u2014 typical of this year\u2019s unusually polarized presidential race. Not only do the two main candidates, Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton, offer starkly different prescriptions for the United States, but their supporters are divided , too. Schisms among rival groups of Republicans and Democrats played out openly during the conventions, as rival factions booed and jeered one another. Another fault line opened when Khizr Khan, a Muslim immigrant whose son was killed on military duty in Iraq, made an impassioned critique of Mr. Trump, electrifying the Democratic convention audience. Mr. Khan\u2019s emotive testimony reverberated through the national conversation for days. Now, less than 100 days until the vote, the campaigns are expanding to focus on the voters outside their core supporters who are likely to decide this election. What drives their choices? Where will the contest be hardest fought? Which issues will tilt the final result? As a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, I set out to write about the campaign with our broad global readership in mind. I\u2019m approaching it much as I would any foreign assignment, bringing a correspondent\u2019s curiosity and, hopefully, some of the fresh-eyed wonderment of a recently arrived outsider. This series is called Abroad in America \u2014 I\u2019m from Ireland and normally based in Cairo, where I cover the Middle East. My aim is to try to cut through the political duststorm to find the stories that reveal the essence of this strange yet momentous election. The material is rich, largely thanks to Mr. Trump and his machine-gun mouth . But that doesn\u2019t mean it will be easy: Among other things, the success of Mr. Trump\u2019s unorthodox campaign suggests a society in flux. \u201cI pity you,\u201d one American friend told me. \u201cBecause right now we all feel like we are abroad in America. We\u2019re having trouble recognizing ourselves.\u201d In the coming weeks, I will explore the battleground states and pressure points on America\u2019s shifting political map. As I take to the road, I am humbly soliciting your help: What puzzles, frustrates or amazes you about this election? Where should I go, or whom should I meet? What am I missing? International readers might see telling comparisons with their own countries. Some might have a story tip or an insight that can help to make sense of it all. More than ever, this American election is connected to broader global trends: rising frustration with globalization; surging nationalism and xenophobia; growing popularity of insular policies that seek to close borders and build walls. In the past, the United States has stood out for its restless, boundless sense of optimism. If, as some fear, that outlook is now dimming, this election may help determine what perspective will replace it. Ultimately, every question boils down to just one: What shapes the choices that American voters make on Nov. 8? Please share with me your questions, guidance and comments \u2014 or just come along for the ride.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Donald Trump;Democrats;Republicans"}
{"id": "ny0235782", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2010/01/24", "title": "Federer and Williams Sisters Bring Their Everyday Game", "abstract": "MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Perhaps because the Australian Open heralds the arrival of a new season with new challenges for the world\u2019s top tennis players, one line of questioning is persistent: \u201cHow\u2019s your form? How\u2019s your fitness? Are you playing well enough to win?\u201d On Saturday, after taking apart Albert Monta\u00f1\u00e9s, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, Roger Federer showed the slightest bit of impatience. \u201cI don\u2019t want to say I\u2019m playing the best tennis of my life, because I haven\u2019t had to so far,\u201d he said. He might as well have been speaking for the Williams sisters, who also moved into the fourth round at Melbourne Park without having to reach for their A game. Serena Williams overpowered Carla Su\u00e1rez Navarro, 6-0, 6-3, and Venus Williams disposed of Casey Dellacqua, 6-1, 7-6 (4). In fact, Serena Williams, who is seeded No. 1, had to manufacture a bit of drama and motivation for herself. She was up, 5-0, in the first set when Su\u00e1rez Navarro forced deuce 13 times in a game that lasted longer than the previous five combined. So Williams took a moment, sitting on the court with a look of dismay. \u201cI thought, O.K., Serena, don\u2019t put too much pressure on this,\u201d she said. \u201cWorst-case scenario it will be 5-1. But way to keep fighting.\u201d Venus Williams, seeded sixth, was ahead, 4-2, in the second set of her match when she lost concentration, letting Dellacqua, an Australian, and a raucous crowd back into the match. But after 1 hour 47 minutes, Williams ended it emphatically with an ace on her fourth match point. \u201cCasey played well and raised her game,\u201d she said. \u201cShe has a deep ball and can mix it up.\u201d Venus Williams said that neither her form nor her fitness was at peak level after three months of not playing a tournament. \u201cI\u2019m trying, but it\u2019s not easy,\u201d she said. But it was Federer who signaled to his rivals that he is not getting out of the way anytime soon. Two of them, No. 3 Novak Djokovic and No. 6 Nikolay Davydenko, won in straight sets to advance. Federer\u2019s everyday game was on display against Monta\u00f1\u00e9s, and it was plenty good . He won 88 percent of his first-serve points, converted 80 percent of his net points and captured 50 percent of his baseline points. The win was his 50th at the Australian Open, a tournament record. Afterward, he tipped his cap to some of his rivals, acknowledging that Andy Murray; Juan Mart\u00edn del Potro, the United States Open winner; and Djokovic, the 2008 Australian Open champion, had matured into dangerous players. \u201cI definitely think we have guys now \u2014 as they get older as well \u2014 they\u2019re going to win bigger tournaments and have more experience,\u201d Federer said. \u201cBefore, the group was Del Potro, Murray, Djokovic, and all those guys, they were just coming out of their teens. You can\u2019t expect them right away to win Slams. Now they\u2019re all in a good age where normally you either make your move or, you know, you definitely have a chance.\u201d But Federer, the top-ranked player in the world, made it clear that neither he nor No. 2 Rafael Nadal was ready to relinquish his place. \u201cSo that\u2019s what we\u2019re looking at the moment,\u201d he said. \u201cA few guys have already won Slams. That\u2019s not an easy thing to do, because, I mean, Rafa and myself are still around and making it extremely hard for guys to take home any Slams. Because over five sets in two weeks, I think we know best how it works.\u201d If there is any doubt, a look at Federer\u2019s numbers should erase it. Federer, 28, has made it to the last 16 of every Grand Slam tournament since the 2004 French Open . He has collected 3 of his record 15 major titles at Melbourne Park. He wants another, and a couple of more Grand Slam titles after that. Despite rivals\u2019 questions about his motivation after an eventful year in which he married, became a father of twin daughters and captured his first French Open, Federer knows where he has been and where he is going. \u201cI think you can always find ways to motivate yourself,\u201d Federer said. \u201cI obviously loved the time when I was dominating and winning 10 to 12 tournaments a year and not losing to any top-10 player. I mean, those were fantastic times for me, of course. But then again, it was also nice going through the time with the incredible rivalry I had with Rafa. \u201cBefore that, being able to play against guys like Sampras and Agassi and so forth and being the up-and-coming guy. So I think you take it as it is and try to make the best out of it. That\u2019s the way I looked at it. I think today it\u2019s a completely different situation. I\u2019m still at the top of the rankings and I like to be challenged. That\u2019s what makes me better.\u201d", "keyword": "Australian Open (Tennis);Tennis;Federer Roger;Williams Serena;Williams Venus"}
{"id": "ny0162391", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/02/02", "title": "Board Accepts Resignation of Medical University Leader", "abstract": "NEWARK, Feb. 1 - Trustees of New Jersey's financially troubled medical university voted on Wednesday to accept the resignation of its president, Dr. John J. Petillo, but only after he agreed that his $600,000 severance package could be revoked if a federal investigation of the university finds evidence that he should have been fired. Dr. Petillo, who was appointed to the board of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 2003 and became the university's interim president a year later, announced his resignation last month after an assortment of revelations that the institution had overbilled Medicaid by nearly $5 million, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on no-bid contracts, and lavished perks on board members, administrators and their political allies. The University of Medicine and Dentistry's widely publicized financial irregularities have attracted scrutiny from an array of government officials, including Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who last week demanded the resignation of 25 senior administrators. In the United States Senate, leaders of the Finance Committee this week demanded a briefing on how the university has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, saying they were \"alarmed and deeply troubled\" by the allegations. Investigators have now added to their list questions about $36.8 million in state funds that were sent to the university last year but are not accounted for. The United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, has been investigating the allegations for nearly a year, and in December threatened to indict the university for Medicaid fraud unless administrators agreed to let a federal monitor oversee its finances. It was that monitor, Herbert J. Stern, a former federal judge, who urged trustees not to approve Dr. Petillo's severance package unless he agreed to cooperate with the federal inquiry and forfeit the $600,000 if it uncovered any evidence of conduct that might have led to his dismissal. John P. Inglesino, who represented the monitor at the board meeting, said there had been no evidence of any wrongdoing by Dr. Petillo. Governor Corzine, who in his first day in office pressed Dr. Petillo to step down, also issued a statement praising his recent efforts to improve the university. But the pressure exerted on Dr. Petillo from the state and federal levels offers the clearest indication yet that the institution, which describes itself as the nation's largest health sciences university, is in the early stages of a drastic overhaul. Eric S. Pennington, the interim board chairman, told the university's faculty members, employees and patients this week to brace themselves for upheaval. \"We want to uncover as many problems now, address them, take care of them and move forward,\" he said after the meeting.", "keyword": "NEW JERSEY;UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND DENTISTRY OF NEW JERSEY;CHRISTIE CHRISTOPHER J;SUSPENSIONS DISMISSALS AND RESIGNATIONS;WAGES AND SALARIES;FINANCES;COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES;BOARDS OF DIRECTORS;ETHICS;BUDGETS AND BUDGETING"}
{"id": "ny0170591", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/02/19", "title": "Music Labels Offer Teasers to Download", "abstract": "For all the disquiet the Internet has fostered in the music business, almost every rock star and record executive is intrigued with the prospect of marketing to music fans directly instead of wrangling for exposure with radio programmers or retailers. But the expansion of the online marketplace, coupled with ever-worsening CD sales, is now all but forcing the music companies to tread on ground they once viewed as off limits. Starting this week, Suretone Records, a label distributed by the Universal Music Group, plans to distribute video files featuring popular acts like Weezer and new bands like Drop Dead Gorgeous on file-sharing networks that the industry has long viewed as illicit bazaars for pirates. Unlike the music audio and video files that major labels sell at services like iTunes, the video files will not be wrapped in protective software to limit copying, executives say. But they will also be incomplete: users who download them will see perhaps half the video and will be directed to the label\u2019s own Web site to watch the complete version \u2014 and the advertising planned to run alongside. The plan represents one of the latest signs that, after years of suing individual users and file-swapping services, the recording industry is recognizing that it might have to loosen its control to attract the giant audience found in largely unregulated corners of the Internet. And there is new reason for urgency. The music business has been buckling beneath the pressure of widespread piracy and plunging sales. Album sales declined 5 percent last year, and the scarcity of hits after the holidays has put the industry on a course to fall behind even last year\u2019s lackluster performance. Sales for the year so far are down more than 15 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. That has brought a profit warning from one music corporation, the EMI Group, and prompted dire forecasts industrywide. Digital sales are increasing, but not nearly enough to offset the drop. As a result, many executives are searching for other ways to reach the people who are trafficking in music and other media files in free file-sharing networks and on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. But how far the industry should go to appeal to them is now the subject of intense debate. One big issue is whether the four music conglomerates that dominate the industry should drop copy protection software, known as digital rights management, from the music files they license for sale online. The industry has already been dabbling in unprotected content, allowing the sale of songs from artists like Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson and Jesse McCartney on Yahoo and other sites. An array of online music retailers has called for doing away with the software completely. Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, whose iTunes music store is the most powerful of the those retailers, recently added his voice to the chorus, arguing that digital rights management has not halted piracy and that the industry\u2019s main format, the compact disc, carries unprotected files. EMI has discussed the idea of distributing unprotected music files with certain retailers, but there is little indication that the four companies, which control more than 70 percent of the world\u2019s music sales, will be willing to offer much of their catalogs without such software anytime soon. Still, there are indications that the record labels are re-examining their practices. RCA Records, for example, plans to advance its promotional campaign for Avril Lavigne\u2019s new album with the first in a series of short manga \u2014 Japanese comic-book episodes \u2014 in a storyline featuring the singer. The video clips, which run two to three minutes each, are expected to be released in unprotected form as free podcasts on iTunes, among other outlets. Fans will also be able to use special software, probably offered on a label\u2019s Web site, to take snippets of the episodes and rearrange them, executives said. Terry McBride, a longtime talent manager who represents Ms. Lavigne and other performers, said the campaign was a rare instance of a major label\u2019s agreeing to an uncontrolled release, and that he fully expected fans to post the clips on file-sharing networks. \u201cThis becomes public property,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to tell the consumer how to consume.\u201d But Mr. McBride predicted that sharing the files would promote the album and set the stage for other ventures, including the sale of higher-quality versions of the video clips, or possibly advertising to go along with them. In any event, he added, the more CD sales suffer, the more pressure will build on record labels to rethink the rules of distribution and to drop limits on copying digital music. \u201cAt the end of the day the whole object should be, let\u2019s fix the problem,\u201d said Jordan Schur, who set up the Suretone label last year as a joint venture with Universal after leaving another Universal label, Geffen Records. \u201cWe know people are stealing music. We\u2019re not going to sit in judgment of them and say, \u2018Well, they\u2019re bad.\u2019 \u201d The label\u2019s files are being distributed online in an arrangement with ArtistDirect\u2019s MediaDefender unit, which is better known as a contractor hired by labels to place fake, or decoy, versions of songs or other media files on file-sharing networks to thwart would-be pirates. Before the Suretone video deal, the company had also begun planting fake files containing promotional messages for advertisers like Coca-Cola. ArtistDirect separately runs one of the most popular music Web sites on the Internet, ArtistDirect.com , and plans to have a channel there devoted to Suretone\u2019s video clips. Record labels are not shifting their view toward file-sharing across the board. Executives at Geffen recently found themselves at odds with the rap star Snoop Dogg, for example, after he started selling songs in unprotected form on his MySpace page, in a partnership with a San Francisco-area rap entrepreneur. Snoop Dogg also offered to sell other performers\u2019 songs on his page for a fee, a complete \u201cpush and promote\u201d package costing $1,500. The offer was removed last week after The New York Times inquired whether it conformed to MySpace\u2019s terms and conditions, which generally prohibit users from selling space on their pages to outsiders. A number of independent artists offer their songs on MySpace. The reggae act Shaggy charges 99 cents a song, for example, and the band Barenaked Ladies charges 83 cents.", "keyword": "Recordings and Downloads (Audio);Music;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0038845", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/04/27", "title": "Yonkers as Gallery", "abstract": "A video installation in a pop-up gallery, a fashion show in a garden, artist studio tours \u2014 these and more are part of the first Yonkers Arts Weekend. Organized by the City of Yonkers , the event next weekend aims to showcase the breadth of artistic activity throughout the city with exhibitions, performances and public art. Programming will take place at four locations, accessible via free shuttle buses. YoHo Artist Studios , in the old Alexander Smith carpet mills, is hosting the 11th annual YoHo Artists Open Studio. Fifty artists will welcome guests, among them Catherine Latson , who uses organic materials to make garmentlike sculptures, and Librado Romero, a painter (and former photographer for The New York Times) whose sprawling work space teems with fanciful landscapes. The natural landscape sets the stage at the historic and glorious Untermyer Gardens . In an amphitheater flanked by sphinxes sculpted by Paul Manship, Marshall Field and Company, a bluegrass band of Sarah Lawrence College students will perform on Saturday, and \u201cFashion as Art: A Runway Exhibit,\u201d organized by the Fashion Institute of Technology \u2019s Urban Studio, will take place on Sunday. Garden tours will be offered both days. The shuttle stops farther south at the Hudson River Museum , where the exhibition \u201cThe Art of Video Games,\u201d investigates the games\u2019 evolution over four decades. Also on view are selected Hudson River School paintings and \u201cThe Bookstore,\u201d the multimedia artist Red Grooms\u2019s topsy-turvy, room-size installation. Downtown, exhibitions include paintings by Satish Joshi at Blue Door Gallery and YonkersArts\u2019 \u201cSixth Annual Yonkers Artist Showcase\u201d at the Riverfront Library . Works by Urban Studio and Torche\u2019 Galerie artists will fill 10,000 square feet at the iPark Hudson office complex, and Vinnie Bagwell\u2019s \u201c Enslaved Africans\u2019 Rain Garden ,\u201d at Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site , will feature maquettes of five life-size figures who will inhabit the artist\u2019s proposed sculpture garden commemorating the manor\u2019s former slaves. Visitors can wander through Van der Donck Park, where the recently unearthed, or \u201cdaylighted,\u201d Saw Mill River flows, and along the riverfront, where sculptures adorn the esplanade. Or they can climb inside Isra Abdo \u2019s sculpture of a largemouth bass at the Center for the Urban River at Beczak and experience the Hudson from a fish\u2019s point of view.", "keyword": "Yonkers NY;Art"}
{"id": "ny0045055", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/02/28", "title": "Gunmen Seize Government Buildings in Crimea", "abstract": "SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine \u2014 Masked men with guns seized government buildings in the capital of Ukraine\u2019s Crimea region on Thursday, barricading themselves inside and raising the Russian flag after mysterious overnight raids that appeared to be the work of militant Russian nationalists who want this volatile Black Sea region ruled from Moscow. Police officers sealed off access to the buildings but said that they had no idea who was behind the assault, which sharply escalated tensions in a region that serves as home to Russia\u2019s Black Sea Fleet and also to a number of radical pro-Russia groups that have appealed to Moscow to protect them from the new interim government in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Adding to the confusion, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the ousted president of Ukraine, declared on Thursday that he remained the country\u2019s lawful leader and appealed to Russia to \u201csecure my personal safety from the actions of extremists.\u201d Russian news agencies reported that he had already arrived in Russia, but officials did not immediately confirm that. In the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev, lawmakers dismissed Mr. Yanukovych\u2019s statement as irrelevant and a reflection that he had lost touch with political reality. \u201cYanukovych is no longer president,\u201d Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, who was overwhelmingly approved as acting prime minister by the Parliament on Thursday, told the Ukrainska Pravda news site. \u201cHe is a wanted person who is suspected of mass murder and crimes against humanity.\u201d In an interview outside the Parliament chamber, Kateryna Vashchuk, a lawmaker from the Volyn region in western Ukraine, said, \u201cIt shows once again that this person does not evaluate the situation objectively as it is.\u201d Amid the turmoil in Crimea, Arsen Avakov, Ukraine\u2019s acting interior minister, called for calm in a posting on his Facebook page, saying that unspecified measures were \u201cbeing taken to counter the extremist actions and prevent an escalation of an armed conflict in the center of the city.\u201d But it was unclear how much authority Mr. Avakov has over the police and other state services in Crimea, where a heavily ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population mostly views the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup. \u201cProvocateurs are on the march,\u201d Mr. Avakov added. \u201cIt\u2019s a time for cool heads, the healthy consolidation of forces, and careful action.\u201d Outside the occupied legislature building, columns of several hundred pro-Russia protesters forced their way through police lines chanting \u201cRossiya, Rossiya\u201d \u2014 \u201cRussia, Russia\u201d \u2014 and waving Russian flags. The leader of a group called the Russian Movement for Crimea read out Mr. Yanukovych\u2019s reported statement declaring himself to be the legitimate president. \u201cWe agree, we agree,\u201d the crowd shouted. One man shouted through a bullhorn: \u201cWe are not separatists. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are one country.\u201d As the standoff unfolded, the entrance to the Crimean Parliament was barricaded with wooden boxes, metal garbage skips and other objects. Most streets in Simferopol were empty of traffic after the authorities ordered a citywide holiday, and the Crimean legislature called an emergency session for Friday afternoon. Video Scuffles erupted outside the regional Parliament in Crimea as thousands of pro-Russia demonstrators confronted Muslim Crimean Tatars backing the new Ukrainian leadership. Credit Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Refat Chubarov, a member of the assembly and a leader of Crimea\u2019s ethnic Tatar minority, said he had not been informed about the session and warned that any vote to separate Crimea from Ukraine would be \u201cvery dangerous.\u201d Asserting that Russian armored vehicles were waiting outside the city, he called for calm but also urged Tatar residents to form \u201cself-defense\u201d units to protect their interests. He blamed pro-Russia forces for the overnight seizure of government buildings, describing the action as \u201ca direct interference in the affairs of Crimea and of Ukraine.\u201d The overnight raids left Simferopol residents stunned and took place just hours after thousands of Crimean Tatars, the region\u2019s minority indigenous Turkic population, and a separate throng of ethnic Russians staged dueling rallies Thursday outside Crimea\u2019s regional legislature. The rallies, which ended in a chaotic melee and left several people injured, disrupted a session of the regional Parliament that hard-line pro-Russia groups had hoped would declare Crimea\u2019s secession from Ukraine. \u201cThis is the first step toward civil war,\u201d said Igor Baklanov, a computer expert who joined a group of anxious residents gathered in a cold drizzle at a police line near the seized regional legislature. Rumors swirled of Russian troops on the way from Sevastopol, the headquarters of Russia\u2019s fleet, of Russian nationalists arriving in force to reinforce the blockaded government buildings and of negotiations between the local authorities and the unidentified gunmen. \u201cNobody knows who, what or why,\u201d said a resident who identified himself only as Gennady and who voiced alarm that the armed action could set off a spiral of violence in a region riven by political, ethnic and religious differences. The developments came as the authorities in Kiev and Moscow traded bellicose warnings. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia was quoted as saying that his country would defend its compatriots in Ukraine \u201cuncompromisingly,\u201d and officials in Kiev were said to tell the Russian military to remain within its Crimean naval base. Failure to remain on the base \u201cwill be considered a military aggression,\u201d Ukraine\u2019s acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, told the national Parliament, news reports said. Russian news agencies quoted military officials as saying Russian warplanes had been ordered onto \u201ccombat alert,\u201d although that appeared to be in connection with large-scale military exercises announced earlier this week. As the crisis deepened, Reuters said, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry summoned the ranking Russian representative in Ukraine to call for immediate consultations with Moscow after the seizure of the Crimean regional government and Parliament buildings. A diplomatic note handed to the Russian envoy, Andrei Vorobyov, requested that the Russian military based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol stay on base, Reuters reported. The events came a day after thousands of protesters in Simferopol, the capital of Ukraine\u2019s Crimea region and a tinderbox of ethnic, religious and political divisions, clashed in the tumultuous struggle for Ukraine that drove the president from power last weekend and that has pushed Russia and the West into a face-off reminiscent of the Cold War. Image President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered surprise military exercises on Wednesday. Credit Mikhail Metzel/RIA Novosti, via Associated Press Eight hundred miles away, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a surprise military exercise of ground and air forces on Ukraine\u2019s doorstep on Wednesday, adding to the tensions with Europe and the United States and underscoring his intention to keep Ukraine in Moscow\u2019s orbit. Taken together, the events illustrated the continuing challenges that the new government in Kiev faces in calming separatism at home and placating a frustrated Russian leader who sees Ukraine as a vital part of his strategy to rebuild Russian influence not along the lines of the former Soviet Union, but of the czars. While few analysts expected a Russian military intervention in Ukraine, most said that Mr. Putin was likely to respond in some fashion to such a stinging geopolitical defeat. The question was how, and on Wednesday he provided a first answer, when Russia\u2019s military put tens of thousands of troops in western Russia on alert at 2 p.m. for an exercise scheduled to last until March 3. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, also announced unspecified measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia\u2019s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean Peninsula. Senior defense and government officials later said that the exercise was not related to the events in Ukraine, which officials here have watched with growing alarm, but they also said that there was no reason to postpone them either, and the geopolitical message was clear. The orders came as thousands of ethnic Russians gathered outside the regional Parliament in Crimea\u2019s capital, Simferopol, to protest the political upheaval in Ukraine\u2019s capital, Kiev, that felled the government of Mr. Yanukovych over the weekend and turned him into a fugitive. Crimea was Russian territory until the Soviet Union ceded it to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1954, and Russians there have already pleaded for the Kremlin\u2019s intervention to protect the region from Ukraine\u2019s new leadership. The military maneuvers were widely seen as saber-rattling by a Kremlin that has spent a decade or more trying to extinguish separatist sentiments in the North Caucasus and elsewhere. They nevertheless elicited new warnings from Western governments, notably the United States, which reminded Russia of its own admonishments to the West about its military interventions in Libya and other nations. Speaking to a small group of reporters in Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was important for the Russians \u201cto heed those warnings as they think about options in the sovereign nation of Ukraine.\u201d Mr. Kerry did not specify what the United States was prepared to do in response to a Russian military intervention, focusing instead on what he said the Russians would sacrifice. \u201cI think it would cost them hugely in the world, where they are trying to assert a sort of greater legitimacy with respect to their diplomacy,\u201d he said. Mr. Kerry also said that the United States was considering a $1 billion package of loan guarantees to Ukraine, as well as direct aid to the Ukrainian government, to help address the deepening economic crisis there. Russia has refused so far to recognize the legitimacy of the new political powers in Ukraine\u2019s Parliament, and denounced their actions since Mr. Yanukovych\u2019s flight as inflammatory and divisive, including what the Foreign Ministry described on Wednesday as discrimination toward Russian Orthodox believers. Two days earlier Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said the turmoil posed \u201ca real threat to our interests and to our citizens\u2019 lives and health.\u201d Mr. Putin himself has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, but senior officials have vowed not to interfere directly and called on the United States and Europe to do the same. Even so, the public clamor of ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has raised fears that Russia could be provoked to intervene.", "keyword": "Viktor F Yanukovych;Ukraine;Black Sea;Crimea;Vladimir Putin"}
{"id": "ny0091951", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2015/08/29", "title": "Solid Consumer Spending Expected to Help U.S. Push Past Market Sell-Off", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Consumer spending rose in July as American households stepped up vehicle purchases, but consumer sentiment dipped in August. Though confidence remains at levels consistent with solid spending growth, many households have been fretting over a recent stock market sell-off. The Commerce Department said on Friday that consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity in the United States, increased 0.3 percent last month, after a similar gain in June. Spending on long-lasting goods like automobiles increased 1.1 percent, reversing June\u2019s decline. Auto purchases accounted for about half of the increase. When adjusted for inflation, consumer spending rose 0.2 percent; it was flat in June. \u201cWe score this report as a solid adjunct to yesterday\u2019s strong G.D.P. report that should encourage members of the Fed\u2019s policy-making committee that income and spending fundamentals remain in good shape,\u201d said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York. Economists say that underlying strength \u2014 also highlighted by a rebound in business spending, and buoyant housing and labor markets \u2014 gives the economy muscle to weather the fallout from the market rout. The economy grew at a 3.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, according to revised data released on Thursday. The consumer spending data was the latest report indicating momentum in the economy as it confronted global markets turbulence, sparked by concerns over a slowing Chinese economy, which has diminished the chances of an interest rate increase next month. The personal consumption expenditures index, excluding food and energy, rose 1.2 percent in the 12 months through July, the smallest rise since March 2011. In another report, the University of Michigan said its consumer sentiment index fell to 91.9 this month from a reading of 93.1 in July. Still, the index remained at levels consistent with a 2.9 percent growth pace in consumer spending this year. The University of Michigan survey showed a mild decline in buying intentions for durable goods and an increase in home purchase expectations. \u201cWe continue to see relatively stable buying intentions as a positive for consumer spending activity in the months to come. And as the global equity markets have rebounded, we expect consumer confidence to pick up over the next few months,\u201d said Cheng Chen, an economist at TD Securities in New York. Consumer spending should be supported by steady income growth and higher savings. Last month, personal income increased 0.4 percent in July. Income has risen by that same percentage for four straight months. Savings increased to a $651.1 billion annual rate, from $627.3 billion in June. \u201cThe economy has built up a huge amount of steam to push it forward in the months to come with the substantial cash reserves that consumers are holding,\u201d said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York.", "keyword": "US Economy;Consumer behaviour;Economy;Consumer Confidence"}
{"id": "ny0030665", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/06/21", "title": "Albanese Takes Mayoral Bid Underground", "abstract": "\u201cHi,\u201d Sal Albanese said the other day, greeting a commuter on the Seventh Avenue line. \u201cI\u2019m Sal Albanese.\u201d The salutation lingered, curdling. The man did not look up. Mr. Albanese, a Democrat running for mayor, trudged off to another corner of the No. 2 train. He had been working the rails for a while now, nodding politely at talk of malodorous subway cars, insufficient underground restrooms and why the Yankees ought to invest in some younger players. Then the man, apparently realizing that the bespectacled guy in a suit was neither a beggar nor an evangelist, returned. \u201cSorry I didn\u2019t shake your hand,\u201d he told Mr. Albanese as he alighted. \u201cI thought you were a Mormon.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got to change my shirt,\u201d Mr. Albanese replied. Politicians are keen for the public to know basic units of information about them \u2014 for instance, their names. This is an area where Mr. Albanese, a former city councilman from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has struggled. In a Marist poll released last month , more than half of Democratic voters surveyed said they had never heard of him or were unsure how to rate him. So Mr. Albanese, already under the radar, went underground on a recent morning to meet the electorate. He added a masochistic twist: Mr. Albanese chose to ride the city\u2019s worst subway lines in terms of rider satisfaction, per a Straphangers Campaign study \u2014 including an A train at Rockaway Boulevard and a No. 4 train from Harlem to City Hall \u2014 and ask riders what they disliked about them. This was no easy task: he was hoping to meet voters in a space at once overstuffed and antisocial. But if he occasionally breached subway protocol \u2014 tapping riders on the shoulder or speaking to those listening to music \u2014 most travelers appeared forgiving. On the No. 3 train, Mr. Albanese joked with two veteran riders about the subway system\u2019s old ceiling fans inside cars, though it seemed unlikely that he had secured any votes. \u201cIt\u2019s such an interesting primary,\u201d one of the riders said after Mr. Albanese left, \u201cbetween Christine Quinn and Weiner,\u201d referring to two leading Democrats, Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and former Representative Anthony D. Weiner. Mr. Albanese eagerly detailed his positions on mass transit, which include the creation of a national Mayors for Mass Transit program modeled on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg\u2019s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and a bid for city control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Waiting for a train at Fulton Street, Hugh Pinkett, 62, from Canarsie, Brooklyn, had been more thoroughly convinced \u2014 flattered that the candidate had agreed with his critique of subway air as too \u201cheavy.\u201d \u201cSal Alba-nee-nese,\u201d Mr. Pinkett said, thumbing at a handout he had been given. \u201cI\u2019ll remember it.\u201d", "keyword": "Subway;Mayoral races;NYC;Sal F Albanese"}
{"id": "ny0276931", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/11/03", "title": "Updated Uber App Will Connect Your Calendar With Your Ride", "abstract": "Uber has redesigned its app with new features that anticipate more of a passenger\u2019s needs as the company works to differentiate its ride-hailing service in a crowded field of rivals. Uber introduced the changes on Wednesday. They include letting people connect their calendars to the app so the company can fill in a rider\u2019s destination. People who have synced their contacts with Uber\u2019s app can also enter a person, rather than a place, into the destination field of a ride. The app then sends that person a one-time request to use his or her location and directs the car there. Uber has also teamed up with Pandora, Snapchat and Yelp so that riders can more easily get information about the places they are going, learn more about the music their drivers are playing and send messages to friends. People can also use the new app to order food through UberEats, Uber\u2019s food delivery service, while they are on the road. While Uber regularly updates its app, the changes are the most significant since 2012, when the company last redesigned its app. Even as Uber has become a huge business whose brand is synonymous with ride services, it remains vulnerable to price competition from competitors like Lyft, which offers a similar service of similar quality. James Currier, a managing partner of NFX Guild, a start-up investment firm in Silicon Valley, said that to stay relevant, the most successful technology companies rely on some combination of branding and size, and they become more convenient the more that people use them. \u201cNow the company can be your meeting app that is embedded with your calendar, your scheduling and your daily life,\u201d Mr. Currier said of Uber. \u201cIt\u2019s a smart move for a company that wants to find new defenses against competitors.\u201d In a briefing with reporters, Uber executives described many features of the new app as fun, interesting bets. \u201cUber\u2019s ultimate goal is to save you time and to know what you want before you want it,\u201d said Didier Hilhorst, Uber\u2019s design lead for the new app. Uber, which has been working on the redesign for the better part of this year, has begun introducing the new features globally. The company said it would study how people interact with them. The Uber app now also loads faster and will work better in places with slower network speeds. Information has been reorganized so that each screen is less cluttered. Uber also streamlined its logo, which is now black and white rather than a wallpaperlike swirl of blue lines on a dark teal background. That logo was gently mocked by Vanity Fair\u2019s editor in chief, Graydon Carter, when he interviewed Uber\u2019s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, at a conference last month. Uber is not the only company adding new features to keep users more engaged with its app. On Tuesday, Instagram said it had teamed up with 20 retail brands based in the United States to let users shop directly in its photo-sharing app.", "keyword": "Uber;Car Service;Mobile Apps;Logo"}
{"id": "ny0234260", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/01/20", "title": "G.O.P. Senate Victory Stuns Democrats", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 Scott Brown , a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts. By a decisive margin, Mr. Brown defeated Martha Coakley , the state\u2019s attorney general, who had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win just over a month ago after she easily won the Democratic primary. With all precincts counted, Mr. Brown had 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Coakley\u2019s 47 percent. \u201cTonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,\u201d Mr. Brown told his cheering supporters in a victory speech , standing in front of a backdrop that said \u201cThe People\u2019s Seat.\u201d The election left Democrats in Congress scrambling to salvage a bill overhauling the nation\u2019s health care system, which the late Mr. Kennedy had called \u201cthe cause of my life.\u201d Mr. Brown has vowed to oppose the bill, and once he takes office the Democrats will no longer control the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome filibusters . There were immediate signs that the bill had become imperiled. House members indicated they would not quickly pass the bill the Senate approved last month. And after the results were announced, one centrist Democratic senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, called on Senate leaders to suspend any votes on the Democrats\u2019 health care legislation until Mr. Brown is sworn into office. The election, he said, was a referendum on both health care and the integrity of the government process. Beyond the bill, the election of a man supported by the Tea Party movement also represented an unexpected reproach by many voters to President Obama after his first year in office, and struck fear into the hearts of Democratic lawmakers, who are already worried about their prospects in the midterm elections later this year. Mr. Brown was able to appeal to independents who were anxious about the economy and concerned about the direction taken by Democrats, now that they control both Beacon Hill and Washington. He rallied his supporters when he said, at the last debate, that he was not running for Mr. Kennedy\u2019s seat but for \u201cthe people\u2019s seat.\u201d That seat, held for nearly half a century by Mr. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, will now be held for almost three full years by a Republican who has said he supports waterboarding as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants unless they leave the country. It was a sharp swing of the pendulum, but even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction. \u201cI\u2019m hoping that it gives a message to the country,\u201d said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. \u201cI think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it\u2019s a message of \u2018that\u2019s enough.\u2019 Let\u2019s stop the giveaways and let\u2019s get jobs going.\u201d Mr. Brown ran strongest in the suburbs of Boston, where the independent voters who make up a majority in Massachusetts turned out in large numbers. Ms. Coakley did best in urban areas, winning overwhelmingly in Boston and running ahead in Springfield, Worcester, Fall River and New Bedford, but her margins were not large enough to carry her to victory. In a concession speech before cheering supporters, Ms. Coakley acknowledged that voters were angry and said she had hoped to deal with the concerns. \u201cOur mission continues, and our work goes on,\u201d she said, echoing well-known remarks by Mr. Kennedy. \u201cI am heartbroken at the result, as I know you are, and I know we will get up together tomorrow and continue this fight, even with this result tonight.\u201d The crowd at Mr. Brown\u2019s victory rally, upset by reports that Democrats might try to vote on the health care bill before he takes office, chanted, \u201cSeat him now!\u201d Mr. Brown, for his part, noted that the interim senator holding the seat had finished his work, and that he was ready to go to Washington \u201cwithout delay.\u201d And he effusively praised Mr. Kennedy as a big-hearted, tireless worker, and said that he hoped to prove a worthy successor to him. Ms. Coakley\u2019s defeat, in a state that Mr. Obama won in 2008 with 62 percent of the vote, led to a round of finger-pointing among Democrats. Some criticized her tendency for gaffes \u2014 in a radio interview she offended Red Sox fans when she incorrectly suggested that Curt Schilling, a beloved former Red Sox pitcher, was a Yankee fan \u2014 while others criticized a lackluster, low-key campaign. Mr. Brown presented himself as a Massachusetts Everyman, featuring the pickup truck he drives around the state in his speeches and one of his television commercials, calling in to talk radio shows and campaigning with popular local sports figures. The implications of the election drew nationwide attention, and millions of dollars of outside spending, to the race. It transformed what many had expected to be a sleepy, low-turnout special election on a snowy day in January into a high-profile contest that appeared to draw more voters than expected to the polls. There were reports of traffic jams outside suburban polling stations, while other polling stations had to call for extra ballots. The late surge by Mr. Brown appeared to catch Democrats by surprise, causing them to scramble in the last week and a half of the campaign and hastily schedule an appearance by Mr. Obama with Ms. Coakley on Sunday afternoon. \u201cUnderstand what\u2019s at stake here, Massachusetts,\u201d Mr. Obama said in his speech that day, repeatedly invoking Mr. Kennedy\u2019s legacy. \u201cIt\u2019s whether we\u2019re going forwards or backwards.\u201d He all but pleaded with voters to support Ms. Coakley, to preserve his agenda. As voters went to the polls, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made it clear that the president was \u201cnot pleased\u201d with the situation Ms. Coakley found herself in. \u201cHe was both surprised and frustrated,\u201d Mr. Gibbs said. Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor. Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill. On Capitol Hill, the fate of the health care legislation was highly uncertain as Democratic leaders quickly gathered to plot strategy in the wake of the Republican victory. Sentiment about how to proceed was mixed, with several lawmakers saying the House would not accept the Senate-passed plan. Top officials had said that approach was the party\u2019s best alternative, and many members said they still believed it was crucial that Democrats pass a plan. \u201cIt is important for us to pass legislation,\u201d said Representative Baron P. Hill, a conservative Democrat from Indiana.", "keyword": "Senate;Coakley Martha M;Brown Scott P;Voting and Voters;Elections;Massachusetts"}
{"id": "ny0232192", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/08/20", "title": "Dance Dance Party Party: A Freestyle Workout", "abstract": "IN a room no different from many rehearsal spaces \u2014 small, bare, air-conditioned \u2014 some 20 women dance as if no one is watching. The room, in the 440 Studios in the East Village, is rented by the hour and equipped with little more than an iPod dock, an (unused) upright piano in the corner and a plastic rotating disco ball lamp plugged into the wall. All the other lights are off, and the women are dancing together or by themselves, often goofily but rarely self-consciously, as the Ramones, Michael Jackson and, during the cooldown, Wilson Phillips\u2019s \u201cHold On\u201d play. This is Dance Dance Party Party, an unusual freestyle workout started by Glennis McMurray and Marcy Girt in 2006. There are three rules: \u201cNo boys, no booze, no judgment.\u201d Ms. McMurray and Ms. Girt, actresses who have been friends since taking an Upright Citizens Brigade class in New York, came up with the idea after going to a bar in the city that didn\u2019t have a cabaret license and would not allow them to dance. They decided that night to find a space for women to let loose without the hassle of a nightclub. \u201cIt was about not feeling inhibited and not feeling like in order to dance we had to go out and drink and get hit on by guys and wear uncomfortable shoes,\u201d Ms. McMurray explained. \u201cIt was about being able to express yourself without feeling like you\u2019re being judged.\u201d A regular participant volunteers as guest D.J., coming up with a 90-minute mix of fast songs and one slow one. Women show up wearing whatever they want, pay $10, and dance however they want. The group meets two Sundays a month, and participation is on a drop-in basis. The party has caught on, with chapters all over the country, including Chicago (where the coordinators have taken over the administration of D.D.P.P., as the founders Ms. McMurray and Ms. Girt have stepped down); Austin, Tex.; and Portland, Ore. Although they do not explicitly begin with a workout in mind, for many of the women, the dance is clearly the fitness class of choice. In an era of pricey gyms offering classes like Crunch\u2019s \u201cTurning Tricks,\u201d which combines pole dancing with cardio strip (and encourages participants to \u201cshow some skin\u201d and wear heels), some women say Dance Dance Party Party provides refuge from the constant objectification and the feeling of being checked out while they exercise. \u201cThe mirror culture and the class culture and the women who are out-yogafying each other is something that I really don\u2019t respond to,\u201d said Jennifer Brandel, one of the Chicago chapter coordinators. Instead, the sessions give women the freedom to work up a sweat without worrying about how they\u2019re presenting themselves, and without the goal of changing the way they look. \u201cThere just seems to be a premise that all these classes rest on that there\u2019s something wrong with you,\u201d Ms. Brandel said. \u201cI think at D.D.P.P., the premise is, \u2018We\u2019re all awesome; let\u2019s have fun together.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Women and Girls;Exercise"}
{"id": "ny0274435", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2016/02/02", "title": "Killing of Pilot Highlights Tanzania\u2019s Struggle With Poachers", "abstract": "ARUSHA, Tanzania \u2014 Roger Gower, an experienced British helicopter pilot, was flying low over a wildlife reserve near the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania on Friday, searching for signs of poaching, when he spotted an elephant carcass. He circled back for a closer look. Then gunshots rang out from below. Apparently he had happened on the carcass just after the elephant had been killed, and the poachers were still on the scene. A bullet punctured the underside of the helicopter and sliced through Mr. Gower\u2019s leg and shoulder. He managed to crash-land the helicopter, but died of his injuries soon afterward. \u201cIt\u2019s tragic, what happened, but this is the reality of what\u2019s going on,\u201d said Frank Pope, the chief operations officer for Save the Elephants , a prominent wildlife organization in neighboring Kenya. \u201cYou\u2019ve got desperate people who are armed and committing a crime. When you\u2019re doing antipoaching operations, you\u2019re on the sharp end.\u201d Dozens of wildlife rangers have been killed in recent years across Africa, as elephant poaching has reached a frenzied pitch. Tens of thousands of elephants have been slaughtered for their ivory by the poachers, who have grown increasingly militarized and more ruthless. Tanzanian officials said on Monday that they were closing in on the poachers who shot at Mr. Gower\u2019s helicopter, and that they had already arrested several accomplices, including two who the authorities said had helped hide the poachers. According to Pratik Patel of the Friedkin Conservation Fund , a nonprofit wildlife charity that employed Mr. Gower as a pilot, the suspects in the shooting are Tanzanian and have poached in the area before. \u201cWe know their names,\u201d Mr. Patel said. Tanzania\u2019s elephant population has declined drastically because of poaching, to just 43,000 in 2014 from 109,000 in 2009. The country\u2019s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit has arrested several high-profile suspects recently, including Yang Feng Glan, a Chinese woman who Tanzanian officials say is \u201cthe ivory queen,\u201d responsible for exporting thousands of tons of ivory to China. She is awaiting trial in Dar es Salaam, the country\u2019s largest city. Both poachers and wildlife rangers across Africa have turned to military-style tactics. In October, poachers killed three rangers and a military officer who were conducting an antipoaching operation in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wayne Lotter, the director of the PAMS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports antipoaching efforts in Tanzania, said that elephant poaching there decreased in 2015 but that it remained a serious problem. \u201cThe more you go after them,\u201d Mr. Lotter said, \u201cthe more situations where confrontation between poachers and rangers will take place. There are going to be risks.\u201d Mr. Gower, originally from Birmingham, England, had spent much of the last decade working in East Africa, often flying antipoaching patrols, a mission his friends said he believed in deeply. \u201cVery reliable, very safe pilot,\u201d said Tom Lithgow, who knew him from a previous wildlife job. \u201cHe was a special character, he had a great sense of humor, he loved cricket and he loved his family.\u201d", "keyword": "Tanzania;Poaching;Plane Crash;Roger Gower;Elephant;Ivory;Serengeti National Park"}
{"id": "ny0246347", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2011/04/12", "title": "Renovation of a Terminal, Keyed to San Francisco", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 If the prospect of flying holds all the appeal of a cross-country bus trip, the $6,500, lipstick-red leather Egg chairs at San Francisco International Airport\u2019s Terminal 2 are intended to return some long-lost glamour to air travel. More Standard Hotel than standard airport gateway, T2, as it is known here, is one of the few terminals renovated top to bottom since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and represents an ambitious attempt by the airport and airlines to take both stress and carbon out of air travel. The $383 million renovation gutted a drab 1950s-era building that last served as the international terminal before being shuttered more than a decade ago. Even compared with more contemporary terminals at San Francisco International, T2 represents a new approach to airport design. It opens on Thursday. \u201cIt\u2019s about the intersection between passenger delight and bringing back the joy of flying with the high-performance building aspects,\u201d said Melissa Mizell, a senior associate with Gensler, the San Francisco firm that designed the renovation. \u201cThat really guided a lot of our decisions, even with sustainability.\u201d The words delight, joy and flying do not usually appear in the same sentence. But airport officials, airlines and architects said that they put as much emphasis on redefining the travel experience as on lessening its environmental impact. \u201cWe wanted this to feel like a San Francisco terminal and not a terminal anywhere else in the world,\u201d Raymond Quesada, an airport project manager, said as he stood in the soaring, light- and art -filled ticket lobby shared by Virgin America and American Airlines , the terminal\u2019s two tenants. Those San Francisco values include a city mandate to achieve at least LEED Silver status for the renovation. LEED \u2014 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design \u2014 is a rating system administrated by the United States Green Building Council that ranks structures according to points earned for energy efficiency, water conservation and other environmentally beneficial attributes. Airport officials intend to apply for LEED Gold certification, and if it is awarded, T2 will be the first airport terminal in the United States to achieve such a ranking, according to Ashley Katz, a spokeswoman for the building council. Drivers of hybrid and electric cars get preferential parking in the nearby garage, and there are vehicle-charging stations for the electric cars. Cool air seeps from perforated white wall panels in the terminal rather than being forced down from the ceiling. The system, called displacement ventilation, cuts energy use by 20 percent because the air does not need to be cooled as much since it displaces the rising warmer air, Mr. Quesada said. Reclaimed water is pumped into the restrooms, reducing water consumption by 40 percent. The abundant natural light through walls of windows makes most daytime artificial lighting unnecessary. Passengers are encouraged to carry reusable bottles and fill them at blue \u201chydration stations\u201d in the terminal rather than buy throwaway bottled water. \u201cOriginally, we were considering banning the sale of bottled water, but we got a lot of pushback from the concessionaires,\u201d Mr. Quesada said. \u201cBut they are required to sell more environmentally friendly plastic bottles. But again, we\u2019re hoping they won\u2019t have to do that and people will bring their own bottles to the airport.\u201d Under their leases, food sellers must use utensils and packaging that can be composted, and compost bins are prominently displayed in the terminal. The airport scores more LEED points for making the green experience educational through signs and even a mobile phone tour. But passengers will probably pay most attention to the terminal\u2019s food, fashion and flow, all of which reflect the esthetic of Virgin America, which has its headquarters in San Francisco. The neon mood lighting found on Virgin planes is mirrored in the lobbylike ticketing area, where pods of those high-backed, Danish-designed Egg chairs are clustered around sculptures and paintings by local artists. The security checkpoint has six lanes to expedite screening and passengers exit into an airy \u201crecompose area\u201d that features colorful ottomans, installed with the Transportation Security Administration dispensation in place of the government\u2019s usual utilitarian benches. That area opens into a food hall modeled after the one in San Francisco\u2019s Ferry Building and offers some of the same upscale Bay Area restaurants, including Cowgirl Creamery, Acme Bread, Napa Farms Market and Lark Creek Grill. Travelers hungering for a Burger King or Dunkin\u2019 Donuts are out of luck. \u201cThe whole idea is that you feel like you\u2019re in San Francisco, with an emphasis on local, organic produce,\u201d Mr. Quesada said. Beyond the food hall are the gates, arrayed in two wings. \u201cThe concept was to make this area very much like a lounge,\u201d he said. \u201cYou could be in the food area and still be within ear- and eyeshot of your check-in podium and thus minimize stress.\u201d Free Wi-Fi and the presence of some 350 power outlets \u2014 available on work tables and every few seats in the gate areas \u2014 may well also be a major stress reducer for travelers accustomed to sprawling on terminal floors with their laptops. Virgin does not plan on having a separate airport lounge. \u201cWe feel like the gate area is the lounge,\u201d Ross Bonanno, Virgin\u2019s vice president for airports and guest service, said as he rested an arm on an Egg chair. (American Airlines has built a dedicated lounge, which will seek LEED Silver status.) David Cush, Virgin America\u2019s chief executive, said he was hoping the green-tinged amenities would give the airline an edge with sustainable-minded travelers. \u201cCertainly for San Francisco and people who live in the Bay Area, this is a top-of-mind issue,\u201d said the tan and long-haired Mr. Cush, who could be mistaken for a local surfer. \u201cIt\u2019s becoming a bigger and bigger top-of-mind issue for corporate America in terms of travel policies.\u201d But how much impact can a low-carbon terminal really have on the most carbon-intensive form of transportation? \u201cNot traveling is really not an option, so the real question is how do we make it more sustainable,\u201d Mr. Cush said, noting that in January Virgin America placed an order for 30 Airbus A320neo jetliners, which will be 15 percent more efficient than current models while emitting far fewer pollutants. \u201cIt can be green and fun,\u201d he added. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to choose one or the other.\u201d", "keyword": "Airports;San Francisco (Calif);Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED);United States Green Building Council;Virgin America;Gensler;American Airlines"}
{"id": "ny0136839", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2008/05/20", "title": "Eating Junk Food May Help Stressed-Out Monkeys Cope", "abstract": "The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don\u2019t seem to stigmatize obesity \u2014 there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke \u2014 and they certainly don\u2019t turn themselves into Social X-Rays. In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu. But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets \u2014 not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.) Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark. These results may not surprise any stressed-out wage slave who has polished off a quart of H\u00e4agen-Dazs at midnight while contemplating the day\u2019s humiliations. But the experiment intrigues scientists studying human junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many confounding factors. Monkeys\u2019 cravings aren\u2019t so complicated. The female monkeys weren\u2019t dieters who tasted one forbidden food and then couldn\u2019t stop themselves from binging. They were not rebelling against the thin mandate from tyrannical fashion magazines. They weren\u2019t choosing junk food because they couldn\u2019t find healthier fare. They weren\u2019t seduced by commercials telling them they deserved a break today. For the monkeys the situation seems simple. They get some sort of comfort that is particularly appealing to the subordinate monkeys. One possibility is that the fatty foods help block the monkeys\u2019 stress responses. Studies with rodents have shown that high-calorie foods cause a metabolic change that tamps the release of stress hormones like cortisol . Another possible explanation, the one favored by the Yerkes researchers, is that the snacks activated the reward pathways in the brain. They may have provided the same sort of dopamine reward as cocaine, which was studied in a previous experiment with monkeys by researchers at Wake Forest University. In that experiment, the dominant monkeys didn\u2019t show much interest in pressing a lever that administered an intravenous dose of cocaine. But the subordinate monkeys, who started off with compromised dopamine receptors, kept pushing the lever to get more cocaine, just as the subordinates in the new study kept munching on the fatty pellets. Dr. Wilson suggests that the snackers are reinforcing the dopamine systems that had been diminished by stress. \u201cEssentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation,\u201d Dr. Wilson said. \u201cThe subordinates don\u2019t get beat up, but they get harassed by high-ranking monkeys. If they\u2019re sitting somewhere and a dominant monkey comes over, they give up their seat and move away. They\u2019re always looking over their shoulders.\u201d These results seem to jibe with the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems. The new monkey data also jibe with an American study that looked at women\u2019s snacking tendencies. After they worked on puzzles and recorded a speech, the women were tempted with an array of chocolate granola bars, potato chips, rice cakes and pretzels provided by the research team, led by Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The women who seemed most stressed by the tasks, as measured by their levels of cortisol, ate more of the sweet, high-fat snacks, the same pattern observed in the subordinate monkeys with high cortisol levels. But as Dr. Wilson and others caution, there are plenty of other factors besides status and stress that affect humans\u2019 diets and waistlines. Debra A. Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair State University, tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams. The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat. Dr. Zellner says these gender patterns are probably because of a simple difference between the sexes: more of the women were on diets. Previous studies have shown that such \u201crestrained eaters\u201d are more likely than nondieters to keep scarfing snacks once they yield to temptation. This might be because they\u2019re hungrier, but it might also be because all restraint disappears once a diet is broken \u2014 the \u201cwhat the hell\u201d theory of binging. Humans are not as lucky as monkeys in one way. \u201cFemale humans report that they eat high-calorie foods to make themselves feel better when stressed,\u201d Dr. Zellner says, \u201cbut they actually don\u2019t feel better after eating them. Instead, because they are restrained eaters, they feel guilt and actually feel worse. Female monkeys don\u2019t have that cognitive baggage.\u201d Only the monkeys, it seems, find comfort in comfort foods.", "keyword": "Monkeys and Apes;Psychology and Psychologists;Food;Weight;Obesity;Snack Foods;Cortisol (Hormone)"}
{"id": "ny0235277", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2010/01/07", "title": "Tennis Channel Takes Its Feud With Comcast to the F.C.C.", "abstract": "The Tennis Channel filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission late Tuesday accusing the cable giant Comcast of keeping it on a digital sports tier while making the Golf Channel and Versus, channels that Comcast owns, more widely available. In its filing, the Tennis Channel said that Comcast\u2019s \u201cdiscriminatory refusal\u201d to treat it fairly \u201cis harming the network\u2019s ability to compete in the cable marketplace.\u201d Comcast said in a statement that its 2005 contract with the Tennis Channel allows it to carry the network \u201con many different tiers, including the Sports Entertainment Package, where we currently offer it to our customers.\u201d Comcast said it was \u201cfully honoring the terms of our agreement\u201d with the Tennis Channel, and called the complaint groundless. The sports tier also includes the CBS College Sports Network, Fox College Sports and the NFL Red Zone. The Tennis Channel\u2019s complaint is similar to one filed with the F.C.C. by the NFL Network against Comcast in 2008 after the cable operator dropped it from a broadly distributed level to its sports tier. The case was dropped when the league and Comcast came to an agreement that made the network more widely available. Distribution on Comcast, which has about 24 million customers, is crucial for networks eager to maximize their revenue from monthly subscriber fees. The sports tier is bought by about 2.3 million Comcast customers who pay $5 to $8 a month while Golf and Versus, older networks, are distributed to virtually all of Comcast\u2019s subscribers. The Tennis Channel wants to expand well past its full-time universe of 25 million subscribers, but does so substantially only during the Grand Slam tournaments. For the French and the United States Opens, special previews make the network available to more than 50 million people. For Wimbledon and the Australian Open, it is available to about 30 million. The complaint says that Comcast refused to broaden the Tennis Channel\u2019s availability during negotiations last year despite having added coverage of all four Grand Slam tournaments and creating a high-definition channel since the original contract with Comcast was signed. In trying to prove its case of \u201cdifferential treatment,\u201d the network cited a statement by Stephen B. Burke, Comcast\u2019s president, saying that Comcast views its own networks like \u201csiblings\u201d but networks it does not own as \u201cstrangers.\u201d Last summer, a feud over the Tennis Channel\u2019s distribution on Cablevision prevented the network from being seen by the cable operator\u2019s customers during the United States Open . Cablevision won the acrimonious battle and carries the channel on its digital sports tier.", "keyword": "Tennis;Cable Television;Tennis Channel The;Comcast Corp"}
{"id": "ny0179523", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/08/10", "title": "Democratic Commissioner to Leave S.E.C.", "abstract": "Roel C. Campos, a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission who sparred with agency Republicans over how best to penalize companies for securities law violations, will depart in a month for the private sector, the commission said yesterday. Mr. Campos, 58, is one of two Democrats on the five-member panel. During his tenure, the S.E.C. presided over the biggest overhaul of market regulation since the 1930s, responding to scandals at Enron and WorldCom. President Bush will nominate Mr. Campos\u2019s successor, who under law cannot be a Republican.", "keyword": "Securities and Exchange Commission;Appointments and Executive Changes;Democratic Party"}
{"id": "ny0174263", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2007/10/28", "title": "Afghan Ex-Militia Leaders Hoard Arms", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan , Oct. 27 \u2014 Many former militia commanders and residents in northern Afghanistan have been hoarding illegal weapons in violation of the country\u2019s disarmament laws, giving the excuse that they face a spreading Taliban insurgency from the south that government forces alone are too frail to stop, Afghan and Western officials say. After years of moderate success for government disarmament programs, rumors of widespread defiance in the north have arisen recently among government officials and intelligence agencies in Kabul and elsewhere. Although there is little hard evidence that commanders are greatly enlarging their arsenals, officials say, some have been thwarting government programs, refusing to disarm and possibly even remobilizing militias. The talk of rearming underscores a deepening north-south ethnic divide that some diplomats and Afghan officials privately worry could lead the way toward a shift of power back to warlords \u2014 and toward a countrywide armed conflict \u2014 if left unchecked. And the situation poses a major challenge for President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, whose administration has failed to win the confidence of many non-Pashtun leaders and northerners. Prices on the weapons black market in the north have skyrocketed as residents, governed by suspicion and foreboding, have kept their firearms, driving down the supply. \u201cThere is an environment of mistrust\u201d in the government, Brig. Gen. Abdulmanan Abed, a Defense Ministry official who works with the government\u2019s demilitarization program, said in an interview this month in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province. \u201cThere is a fear of the return of the Taliban.\u201d A prominent political leader from the north, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it this way: \u201cThe Taliban are coming toward us. What should we do? Who will defend us? Who will protect us? This is in the minds of the people in the north.\u201d Col. Mats Danielsson, the Swedish commander of a 450-man military unit helping to provide security in four northern provinces, said the Karzai administration and its international allies must find a way to roll back the Taliban threat and reassure northerners. \u201cWe have to keep the window of opportunity open, but I feel that the window is closing,\u201d he said. The Taliban insurgency is strongest in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And while it has been able to bedevil Afghan and international troops in some other regions of the country, before this year its reach rarely stretched into the northern provinces. But government officials report an increase in Taliban activity in the north this year, particularly in the northwest. The number of Taliban attacks on Afghan and international security forces in Balkh and the other relatively peaceful provinces of north-central Afghanistan has risen from last year, the authorities say. Residents here in Balkh Province and elsewhere in north-central Afghanistan say they are beginning to feel encircled. \u201cThe Taliban is trying to start up its old networks here,\u201d Colonel Danielsson said in an interview in early October at his headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif. \u201cWe have to figure out how to stop this influence.\u201d Afghan and Western officials also say that in addition to an increase in Taliban activity, there has been an escalation in crime and, in some areas, tensions among rival northern political factions. These officials say it is often difficult to determine who is to blame for specific violent acts. The most apparent signs of rearming, officials say, are in Faryab Province, in the northwest, where commanders have organized an armed militia to fend off a growing Taliban presence in neighboring Badghis Province that has gone largely unchecked by Afghan and international security forces. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview in Kabul that he had received unconfirmed intelligence reports that small shipments of weapons had been smuggled across the border \u201cfrom one or two countries to the north\u201d and delivered \u201cto receivers in some of the northern provinces.\u201d But he declined to provide further details. Afghan government officials also say that in certain northern districts, militia commanders have evaded government weapons inspectors by breaking down their stockpiles of illegal firearms and redistributing them throughout their communities, making them harder to find. Afghan and Western officials say that weapons are hidden everywhere: in grain silos and closets, in mountain caves and in holes in the ground. And though the government\u2019s demobilization programs have gone some way toward dismantling many of the hundreds of illegal militias, and have removed nearly all the heavy weapons from those factions, former warlords still hold considerable sway. \u201cThey have the power of a phone call to put hundreds, or thousands, in arms,\u201d Colonel Danielsson said. \u201cThere are a lot of weapons up here.\u201d All the weapons in Afghanistan were supposed to be in the government\u2019s hands by now, all the private militias were to be a thing of the past. After the Taliban fell in 2001 and fighting erupted among rival warlords, the Afghan government began the first of two disarmament and demobilization programs that were principally intended to dismantle warlords\u2019 militias and other illegal armed groups. In three decades of war, weapons had poured across the borders and authority was often established by the rule of the gun. The programs, which are voluntary, have dismantled at least 274 paramilitary organizations, reintegrated about 62,000 militia members into civilian life and recovered more than 84,000 weapons, including thousands of heavy arms that had fallen under the control of regional warlords. Afghan and NATO forces have confiscated and destroyed many other weapons, officials said. But Afghan and international officials acknowledge that hundreds of illegal armed groups still operate in Afghanistan. And hundreds of thousands \u2014 maybe millions \u2014 of weapons remain in private hands, although they are mostly small arms rather than heavy weapons, the officials say. Of the weapons that have been collected, they say, at least 40 percent were not functional. \u201cThere is at least one weapon in each house,\u201d said General Abed, who was an officer in the anti-Taliban mujahedeen. Government officials note that the demilitarization programs were not intended to collect arms and were instead focused on disbanding armed groups. \u201cI think it will take many, many years\u201d to disarm the population, said Hameed Quraishi, manager of the government\u2019s demilitarization program in the north. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how hard you try. It\u2019s the level of confidence the people have in the government.\u201d But the talk about rearming is not entirely military. It also appears to be a means of pressing the Karzai government, which many northern leaders have accused of favoring the south, a region mostly populated by members of his Pashtun ethnicity. \u201cWe selected Karzai to unify the country,\u201d said a prominent politician from the north and former member of the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban. \u201cBut people who joined him have pushed him to being a Pashtun leader, not a national leader.\u201d Disproportionate amounts of aid money and weapons have flowed to the south to prop up the regional leadership and battle the Taliban. As part of this effort, the government has been trying to build an auxiliary police force among southern Pashtun tribes to confront the insurgency. Many northern leaders say that they have been shortchanged in the distribution of development aid and worry about the militarization of the south as they are being asked to disarm. \u201cNorthern commanders are saying: \u2018We can\u2019t disarm. This guy is trying to unite all Pashtuns. We have to defend ourselves!\u2019 \u201d a European diplomat said in Kabul. General McNeill doubts some of the northern claims. \u201cThere\u2019s no question that there\u2019s a hell of a lot of political posturing in the northern sectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere they think they\u2019re ignored in the reconstruction process, there often is a report: \u2018They\u2019re here! The Taliban! They got us surrounded!\u2019 \u201d In interviews, northern Afghan leaders said that in spite of their concerns about the central government, they were standing by Mr. Karzai. And most of them denied that any stockpiling of weapons was occurring. \u201cIf we take up arms, it means the democratic process is defeated,\u201d said Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the National Front, a political coalition mainly composed of non-Pashtun leaders from the north. \u201cWe want this government to survive its entire term because we don\u2019t want the process to be defeated.\u201d", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Armament Defense and Military Forces;Taliban"}
{"id": "ny0227491", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/10/25", "title": "At De La Salle Academy, Tough but Tender Teaching", "abstract": "It is 8:30 a.m. at De La Salle Academy , a private school in Manhattan for academically talented poor children, and classical music is humming through a boom box that harks back to the 1980s. Children are streaming up four flights of stairs and surrounding the school\u2019s founder and principal, Brother Brian Carty, like moths fluttering around a light. They want to tell him something. They want one of his bearhugs. They want to be in his orbit for a few minutes. If the students\u2019 attraction to Brother Carty suggests that he is a teddy bear of an administrator, consider a few of his rules. Gossip is an expellable offense. Makeup \u2014 even lip gloss \u2014 is prohibited. Dating is outlawed. Parents are instructed on rules regarding parties and cellphone and Internet use. Teaching fads are generally dismissed, memorization is encouraged and smart boards are nowhere to be seen. \u201cI\u2019m not going to spoon-feed them,\u201d he said. \u201cTaking notes is a skill.\u201d At a time when everything about education seems to be in flux \u2014 the role of testing, the expectations for teachers, the impact of technology \u2014 Brother Carty is something of a throwback. For more than a quarter-century, he has been the guiding force and gatekeeper of one of the city\u2019s most selective, if not most heralded, private schools. More than half of its students come from families with incomes of less than $35,000, and most move on to the city\u2019s top private high schools or elite boarding schools in New England. De La Salle, a middle school on West 97th Street, is nonsectarian, but there is a faith component, including prayers at the beginning of the day and the start of each class. \u201cI ask the parents to raise them in their faith and to practice it,\u201d Brother Carty said. And though he holds an administrative role, he clearly views his position pastorally. \u201cI was not so sure you had the soul to make it here,\u201d Brother Carty wrote in the autograph book of a student who graduated from De La Salle in May, Cassandra Raimundi. She said she was into boys and into gossip when she arrived at the school. \u201cBrother Brian had me sit in his office, and we had a long conversation and it was very emotional,\u201d she said. \u201cBut that was the minute I decided to grow up.\u201d His tough-as-nails attitude toward behavior that falls short of expectations \u2014 at a funeral for a student who drowned over the summer, he told some of the student\u2019s friends that they risked a spiritual death \u2014 does not easily fit the image of a man who has more than 1,300 friends on Facebook, and whom children flock to hug. A towering figure, at 6-foot-4, with a deep belly laugh, he considers it his mission to be deeply involved in their lives. He chooses all of the students who are accepted, helps guide eighth graders through the high school admissions process and even consults with them four years later when they are applying to college. He seems to know everything about every one, about 150 each year, of his students, like whose father lost his job or whose mother is ill, and he still keeps up with students he had as early as the 1970s. He has set up volunteer counseling with social workers and psychologists to help students work through problems at home. \u201cIt\u2019s O.K. to struggle, but they have to learn to cope,\u201d he said. \u201cPity parties are not allowed here.\u201d His graduates win scholarships to some of the city\u2019s most prestigious schools that are eager to increase minority enrollment, including Dalton , Trinity and Fieldston , as well as boarding schools like Hotchkiss and Taft. (Brother Carty takes parents on a field trip to visit boarding schools since many of the parents, he said, have no idea what the schools are.) \u201cHe remembers every kid, details about their families and the areas where they need to grow,\u201d said Stephen M. Clement, headmaster of the Browning School , which has taken many of Brother Carty\u2019s students. Dorothy A. Hutcheson, head of the Nightingale-Bamford School , an all-girls school in Manhattan, said De La Salle alumnae come academically prepared and with a thirst for learning that stands out. \u201cIt\u2019s a great way to get diversity without having to work for it because they come so prepared,\u201d she said. Brother Carty, 66, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, a steamfitter, died when Brother Carty, the middle child of three, was 9, and he took on more family responsibilities. He attended parochial schools, taught by the De La Salle Christian Brothers in the Lasallian tradition, named after a French Roman Catholic saint who founded a system of Christian schooling for the poor in the 17th century. \u201cI had fabulous teachers,\u201d Brother Carty said. \u201cThey were good men.\u201d He started teaching in 1965 at the Monsignor Kelly School, a private school whose enrollment was made up of academically talented children from public schools that could not focus on them. \u201cI was suddenly in a group \u2014 they seemed like old guys; they were probably in their mid- to late-20s \u2014 of adult males who took you under their wing and nurtured you spiritually, academically and athletically,\u201d said Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, and a 1971 graduate of Monsignor Kelly. \u201cIt was an across-the-board adoption in a positive way.\u201d The school was shut in 1972 as a result of financial problems. In 1984, with a group of Kelly alumni, Brother Carty founded De La Salle. He soon noticed that girls were excelling, signing up for study-abroad programs, getting into top colleges and becoming doctors, but boys were not. He worried that the school was getting to boys too late \u2014 after they had been lured into a street culture where being smart was ridiculed. \u201cWe had to get to them sooner,\u201d Brother Carty said. \u201cThis is their healing.\u201d So he decided to intervene sooner. In 2003, he founded the George Jackson Academy in the East Village, again seeking academically talented, economically underprivileged children, but this time at the fourth- and fifth-grade levels. Both schools run on a shoestring budget. De La Salle, which admits about 60 students a year from about 450 applicants, has no air-conditioning, the students are the maintenance crew, Spanish textbooks are outdated enough to refer to loading film into cameras, and Brother Carty refers to himself as the chief plumber. While families must pay something, on average they contribute 15 percent of the $14,500 tuition. Most of the financing comes from foundations \u2014 which have generally cut back. Last year, De La Salle posted a deficit of about $150,000, and the projected deficit for this year is $450,000. For the first time, the school will have to dip into its $8.5 million endowment, Brother Carty said. Much of the endowment comes from the estate of a graduate who died in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and whose mother gave some of her settlement to the school. Mr. Clement, the Browning headmaster, said that with all Brother Carty\u2019s fund-raising, he wondered how he slept at night. \u201cI say it\u2019s the Holy Spirit,\u201d Brother Carty said. \u201cI trust.\u201d When they arrive in the fall, new students have a two-day orientation, after which they are required to take an oath to the community. \u201cYou are our business,\u201d Brother Carty said at the orientation last month. \u201cYou go out as part of this family, and you represent me. I take this representation personally.\u201d", "keyword": "De La Salle Christian Brothers;Carty Brian;Education (K-12);Private and Sectarian Schools;Endowments"}
{"id": "ny0174649", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2007/10/26", "title": "Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert", "abstract": "JIDDA, Saudi Arabia , Oct. 25 \u2014 On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology. Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion. Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country\u2019s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom\u2019s cultural and religious limits. This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom\u2019s religious establishment, which severely limits women\u2019s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable. For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners. Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world. \u201cThere are two Saudi Arabias,\u201d said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. \u201cThe question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.\u201d The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation. \u201cThere is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,\u201d said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. \u201cWe are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.\u201d Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions. Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah\u2019s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled \u201cLaw of God Versus Law of Man,\u201d leaving a jagged edge. Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics. \u201cGetting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,\u201d said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. \u201cThat will make it or break it.\u201d Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert. \u201cYou have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,\u201d said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. \u201cYou cannot work in isolation.\u201d He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia. Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels. Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches. From a laconic monarch known for his austerity, the pomp, along with a rare speech by the king himself, was intended to send a strong signal, according to the team charged with building and staffing the new campus within two years. The king is lavishing the institution not only with money, but also with his full political endorsement, intended to stave off internal challenges from conservatives and to win over foreign scholars who doubt that academic freedom can thrive here. The new project is giving hope to Saudi scholars who until the king\u2019s push to reform education in the last few years have endured stagnant research budgets and continue to face extensive government red tape. \u201cBecause Aramco is founding the university, I believe it will have freedom,\u201d said Abdulmalik A. Aljinaidi, dean of the research and consultation institute at King Abdulaziz University, Jidda\u2019s biggest, with more than 40,000 students. \u201cFor Kaust to succeed, it will have to be free of all the restrictions and bureaucracy we face as a public university.\u201d Even in the most advanced genetics labs at King Abdulaziz, the women wear full face coverings, and female students can meet with male advisers only in carefully controlled public \u201cfree zones\u201d like the library. Scientists there tread carefully when they do research in genetics, stem cells or evolution, for fear of offending Islamic social mores. Even in Jidda, the kingdom\u2019s most liberal city, a status rooted in its history as a trading outpost, change comes slowly. This month the governor allowed families to celebrate the post-Ramadan Id al-Fitr holiday in public, effectively allowing men and women to socialize publicly on the same streets for the first time. The religious police were accused of beating a man to death because he was suspected of selling alcohol. Conservatives have fended off efforts by women to secure the right to drive or to run for office, although women have made considerable gains in access to segregated education and workplaces. Against this backdrop, said Mr. Khashoggi, the newspaper editor, the king has conceived of the new university as a liberalizing counterweight, whose success depends on how much it engages the rest of Saudi society. \u201cNobody wants to live in a ghetto, even a nice one,\u201d Mr. Khashoggi said. \u201cAs a Saudi, I say, let\u2019s open up.\u201d Upon completion, the energy-efficient campus will house 20,000 faculty and staff members, students and their families. Social rules will be more relaxed, as they are in the compounds where foreign oil workers live; women will be allowed to drive, for example. But the kingdom\u2019s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol. The university president will be a foreigner, and the faculty members and graduate students at first will be overwhelmingly foreign as well. Generous scholarships will finance the 2,000 graduate students; planners expect the Saudi share of the student body to increase over the years as scholarships aimed at promising current undergraduates help groom them for graduate studies at the new university. The university\u2019s entire model is built around partnerships with other international universities, and faculty members are expected to have permanent bases at other research institutions abroad. The university will also rely on a new free-market model. The faculty members will not have tenure, and almost all of them will have joint appointments. While the university will initially be awash in money, its faculty and graduate students will still have to compete with top international institutions for the limited pool of private money that underwrites most graduate research. Suhair el-Qurashi, dean of the private all-female Dar Al Hekma College, often attacked as \u201cbad\u201d and \u201cliberal,\u201d said a vigorous example of free-thinking at the university would embolden the many Saudis who back the king\u2019s quest to reform long-stagnant higher education. \u201cThe king knows he will face some backlash and bad publicity,\u201d Ms. Qurashi said. \u201cI think the system is moving in the right direction.\u201d", "keyword": "Saudi Arabia;Colleges and Universities;Science and Technology;Education and Schools"}
{"id": "ny0144158", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/10/16", "title": "Jason Varitek, Who Will Be a Free Agent, May Not Return to the Red Sox", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 Jason Varitek was booed for popping out at Fenway Park on Monday, and he is still waiting to collect his first hit against the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Championship Series. As time runs out on the Red Sox , it may also be running out on Varitek. When Varitek, Boston\u2019s fading team captain, crouches behind the plate to catch in Game 5 on Thursday night, it could be his final game with the Red Sox. Unless they extend their season by defeating the Rays , Varitek\u2019s season will end, too, and he will soon become a free agent. Varitek, 36, is valuable in handling a pitching staff, but he had a brutal offensive season this year, and that has created uncertainty about whether he will return to Boston. With the Red Sox trailing Tampa Bay, three games to one, in the best-of-seven series, Varitek dismissed a question about potentially playing his last game at Fenway. \u201cThat\u2019s totally irrelevant right now to what this team is facing,\u201d Varitek said Wednesday. \u201cSorry about that.\u201d Varitek has been in Boston full-time since 1998. He has two World Series rings and is desperately hoping the Red Sox can continue competing for a third. Still, regardless of how the rest of Boston\u2019s postseason unfolds, this has been a frustrating season for Varitek. He started the season as a defending champion and is ending it as a proud player who looks a lot older than he ever did. On the field, Varitek hit a career-low .220 with 13 homers and 43 runs batted in. Manager Terry Francona considered pinch-hitting for Varitek, who had a .157 average in June and July, during the regular season, but waited until the playoffs to do so. Off the field, Varitek filed for divorce from his wife, Karen, whom he married in 1996. After the Rays humiliated the Red Sox on Tuesday night, 13-4, Varitek noted how the Red Sox had rallied from daunting deficits in the postseason twice since 2004, so that should tell them they can do it again. But, a few seconds after Varitek\u2019s remarks, he was asked if he said the Red Sox could use their previous comebacks as motivation. Instead of repeating himself or expanding on his comments, Varitek offered an interesting qualifier. \u201cI was asked that question,\u201d Varitek said. \u201cI didn\u2019t state that.\u201d The Red Sox rebounded from a 3-1 deficit to thwart the Cleveland Indians in the 2007 A.L.C.S., and stunned the Yankees by climbing out of a 3-0 ditch to win the 2004 A.L.C.S. Once Varitek supplied his qualifier, he said the past could help Boston. \u201cIt always leads to a sense of belief,\u201d Varitek said. The Red Sox had an optional workout Wednesday that lasted about an hour. David Ortiz would not discuss being 1 for 14 in the A.L.C.S., but he mentioned how \u201cI got two rings in my house.\u201d Varitek, who is 0 for 10 against the Rays, strengthened his words from Tuesday. \u201cOnce you\u2019ve been able to do it, it leaves an overriding belief,\u201d Varitek said. \u201cAnd I believe. I believe that, if we execute what we can do, we\u2019re going to present ourselves with a great chance to win.\u201d Varitek has blue binders containing scouting reports on each team aligned in his locker. Not surprisingly, the Rays\u2019 binder was in a prominent position on Tuesday. For the Red Sox to stop the Rays, Varitek said, \u201cWe have to pitch,\u201d and stop an offense that has scored 22 runs in the past two games. The Red Sox had a 3.66 earned run average when Varitek caught this season, the third lowest for a catcher in the A.L. In the opener of this series, winning pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka took a no-hitter into the seventh inning. Even Matsuzaka, who will start Thursday, dipped into history while recalling how Josh Beckett went 4-0 to help guide the Red Sox to the 2007 title. \u201cI\u2019m not Beckett, but if I can pitch like he did last year and hand the ball off to the guys behind me, that would be great,\u201d Matsuzaka said. Before Varitek\u2019s disappointing season, Scott Boras, Varitek\u2019s agent, could have tried to use Jorge Posada\u2019s four-year, $52.4 million contract with the Yankees as a barometer for his client. Both catchers have been important pieces on championship teams, and both were 36 in their free agent year. But, even if the Red Sox somehow win another title, it is doubtful that Boras would be bold enough to pursue a four-year deal at that price. Varitek, who is finishing a four-year, $40 million contract, could receive a two-year offer from Boston. Since Posada required season-ending shoulder surgery this year, the Red Sox could cite that injury as another reason not to sign an aging catcher for four years. Every time Varitek flashes his fingers and gives a sign, Francona said the pitchers threw the pitch \u201cwith conviction.\u201d Because of Varitek\u2019s preparation and knowledge, Francona said, pitchers trust him and rarely second-guess him. Varitek will be giving signs for Boston on Thursday, perhaps for the last time. \u201cI\u2019ve given no thought to this being his last game, not out of disrespect for Tek,\u201d Francona said. \u201cBut we don\u2019t want this to be his last game.\u201d", "keyword": "Varitek Jason;Boston Red Sox;Tampa Bay Rays;Baseball;Playoff Games"}
{"id": "ny0132480", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2012/12/01", "title": "Co-Founder Is Bullish on Grand Prix in Texas", "abstract": "Bobby Epstein is the chairman of the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, the new track where the U.S. Grand Prix was staged on Nov. 18. Epstein attended his first Formula One race at the age of 19 in 1984, in Dallas, where he was living with his family. He is now the majority owner of Prophet Capital, a private investment company based in Austin that he founded in 1995. He is also the promoter and co-founder of the U.S. Grand Prix, having signed the 10-year deal to bring Formula One to Austin this year. Despite a decades-long history in the United States, the U.S. race had not been run since 2007, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where it had been held since 2000. The first race in Austin, won by the British driver Lewis Hamilton, was a public success, with 117,000 fans attending. Epstein spoke recently with Brad Spurgeon of the International Herald Tribune. Q. What was the biggest challenge to being ready for the U.S. Grand Prix? A. The construction guys did a phenomenal job. They built everything in less than eight months. We owe so much to the work that they did. The amount of time was not a worry. They hit every deadline when they said they would. The challenges were in gathering support from so many different entities, so many moving parts to put together when you are simultaneously working with F.O.M. [Formula One Management] and with Bernie [Ecclestone, promoter of the series] and obtaining the proper contracts and at the same time balancing that with the local politics and the dynamics of working with the city, the county and the state \u2014 they operate very independently of each other \u2014 as well as keeping the investment teams together to get this project through. Q. How does the city of Austin feel about the event? Has there been resistance? A. This is where I think we have a terrific platform to build and, maybe, I think, we have the opportunity to create a better experience here than many other places, from the experience of the city standpoint. Austin is small enough to embrace the event in its entirety, citywide. And the economic impact on the city here \u2014 if you think about bringing $200 million to $300 million to a community, when you bring it to a community this size it\u2019s a tremendous impact. If you are in a city of 3 million to 5 million or larger, it may be one of many other big events happening that weekend. We don\u2019t have any other pro sports in Austin. This is one of the big reasons why I think Austin is really excited. I think sports are really part of the fabric of the community. Q. When was the first time you heard of Formula One? A. It might have been when Mario Andretti drove, when I followed IndyCar as a kid. Then I grew up in Dallas. We had an event there that was less than ideal, in 1984. Then I disconnected for a long while, until it was brought to my attention that it was possible that Formula One was looking at Austin. That was less than three years ago. Q. Can Formula One succeed in Austin, having failed in Indianapolis? A. That is one of the first questions I asked. Why is Austin on the radar to have an event like that ? Why does it make sense for us as a city? Why would people come here? But most of all, I think the answer to the question is in why would people come back ? Why will the sport be embraced? And I think there are a multitude of reasons. I think there are a number of qualities that you need to possess and that have to work together well, and I think one without the other doesn\u2019t make a complete experience. This track is the first one purpose-built for Formula One [in the United States]. We are not modifying a street or street circuit or an existing facility. This was built for cars and bikes of this variety. One of the things that makes racing exciting is overtaking, and we have at least four obvious areas to pass. So from the driver\u2019s standpoint, we had to say, \u201cLet\u2019s make a course, use the topography here, make it something unique that the drivers will walk away and say, \u2018That was challenging, that was exciting, I look forward to coming back.\u201d\u2019 And it makes for great competition. From the other standpoint \u2014 and I think equally important \u2014 is the fan experience. One does not come at the expense of the other, the driver and the fan experience are not mutually exclusive. I think both can have the best experience. So we\u2019ll have some diehard, huge fans. Particularly because of our proximity to Latin America, and the influence that Latin America already has on our state. We were once Mexico, where we stand here, right now. So I think we have some amount of fans who visit; but how do we convert more into F1 fans? The on-site fan experience. I would say one of my criticisms in my previous experience is that I couldn\u2019t see a lot. At a Nascar race, you are elevated and you see so much of the racing. Clearly, the American fan is used to being able to see a race. Here, from the seats you will see 5 to 10 turns out of our 20 turns. This has been one of the most intentional parts of the design process, so that the diehard race fan comes and says, \u201cThis is the greatest experience in the world.\u201d And the one who is the casual fan, who doesn\u2019t recognize how great it is, comes but they are engaged by the sport because of their experience. And beyond that, the race is part of a festival of the whole weekend. So we have really tried to create a campus here of experiences. Q. To popularize Formula One in the United States, some problems look insurmountable, such as the fact that most of the season\u2019s races held elsewhere in the world run in the middle of the night or early morning U.S. time. And you really need a winning American driver to fire people\u2019s imaginations, don\u2019t you? A. I heard that about this circuit even existing and getting built last fall: People said there are insurmountable problems. I saw Alexander Rossi out on the track a little while ago. I would hope that we see an American driver whether it is Alexander or others. But [the Mexican driver] Sergio P\u00e9rez, we certainly embraced him \u2014 and if you look at the Hispanic population in Texas alone... I\u2019m very happy for him to be \u2014 as you call it \u2014 an American driver, or as I might think, a North American driver. We certainly think Mexico counts. We are not far down the road. San Antonio is an hour away.", "keyword": "Formula One;Austin (Tex);Automobile Racing;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing;Indianapolis 500 (Auto Race)"}
{"id": "ny0098430", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/06/21", "title": "An App Offers Up-to-Date Schedules for Bus and Train Lines", "abstract": "If you\u2019re lucky, you\u2019re reading this somewhere other than Manhattan. For all that it\u2019s been celebrated in song, summer in the city is often a miserable affair. (The lyrics of that Lovin\u2019 Spoonful hit are worth a second listen.) Best to get away, and any app that can help you do that as quickly as Wanderu is worth the space it takes up on your home screen. Not unlike travel websites like Kayak, Wanderu is a service for finding buses and trains to get you from here to there. It was launched two years ago in the Northeast, then gradually expanded its range before releasing iPhone and Android apps earlier this year. The service is now available in most of the United States. The Wanderu app\u2019s home screen asks \u201cWhere to?\u201d and the temptation to type in all your dream destinations (New Orleans! Arches National Park!) is strong. You can enter the name of a city, but also an exact address or even a landmark. Wanderu is set up to find you a travel option that will get you as close as possible to a specific place. Results can be sorted by time (earliest and latest buses and trains on a given day) and price. Every time someone purchases a trip on Wanderu, the company takes a percentage of the sale from the bus or train company. It doesn\u2019t charge users or use advertising. Buses are plentiful on the East Coast. But comparison-shopping has long been difficult: There are so many bus lines and their schedules and prices seem to shift constantly. According to Wanderu\u2019s chief executive, Polina Raygorodskaya, a major difficulty was building a middle layer of technology that could gather all the separate companies\u2019 schedules and keep them up-to-date. Now that Wanderu has that data, and can track user demand, it can actually help companies update and optimize their planning. \u201cWe\u2019ve had some partners add schedules and additional stops because of demand that was brought by our users,\u201d Ms. Raygorodskaya said. Train schedules, which are far more predictable, are also available through Wanderu. Given the differences between the two modes of travel, it can be a little odd to see a comfortable Amtrak regional train to Boston listed between bus lines. Even the travel experiences between companies \u2014 say, the BoltBus and Greyhound \u2014 can be vastly different. So it\u2019s somewhat frustrating that Wanderu doesn\u2019t rank trips based on comfort, either by sourcing that information from users or by applying its employees\u2019 knowledge of different companies. Ms. Raygorodskaya said that because people aren\u2019t prone to leaving positive reviews for bus companies, Wanderu has been loath to incorporate ratings from sites like Yelp. She said that Wanderu plans to solicit feedback from its users, and that it may start offering more information on the quality of trips with specific services. But even if you can\u2019t quite be sure of how comfortable you\u2019ll be while on the road, Wanderu ensures that you can make a quick getaway. And in the summer, that\u2019s what matters most.", "keyword": "Mobile Apps;Travel,Tourism;Public Transit;Bus;Railroads;Transportation;Amtrak;BoltBus;Greyhound Lines"}
{"id": "ny0146008", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/07/04", "title": "U.S. Pushes U.N. Sanctions on Zimbabwe and Mugabe", "abstract": "UNITED NATIONS \u2014 Seeking to force President Robert Mugabe into negotiations with the opposition, the United States on Thursday formally proposed United Nations Security Council sanctions on Zimbabwe . The proposed sanctions include an international arms embargo and punitive measures against the 14 people the United States deemed most responsible for undermining Zimbabwe\u2019s presidential election through violence. Aside from Mr. Mugabe, those singled out in the draft resolution to be subject to an international travel ban and a freeze on personal assets include the chiefs of the various branches of the armed forces, the governor of the central bank, the head of the Justice Department and the presidential spokesman. \u201cWe want to respond to the situation and respond in a way that encourages a move towards resolving the legitimacy crisis without negatively impacting the people of Zimbabwe, who are suffering a great deal at the hands of the regime,\u201d said Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to the United Nations. The United States expects to bring the resolution to a vote as early as next week, he said. The mood around the Council chamber was noncommittal, with even previously outspoken opponents to further United Nations interference, particularly South Africa, saying they would have to consult with their governments. Although passage is not assured, the United States has apparently mustered enough support to garner the 9 of 15 votes needed to approve the resolution. China and Russia, which have generally supported the position that this is an African problem that ought to be dealt with locally, could still veto it. Russia is considered unlikely to do so, diplomats noted, and China may feel pressured to avoid vetoing sanctions because criticism of its own human rights record in the prelude to the Olympics. Mr. Mugabe won election to his sixth term last week after his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of a runoff election because state-sponsored enforcers were beating and killing his followers. Mr. Tsvangirai had won 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe\u2019s 43 percent in the March 29 election. Even if the United States does not press a final vote, supporters believe having the threatened sanctions on the table serves as a useful prod. \u201cLet\u2019s have it out there as a cloud over the situation which people have to take into consideration as the mediation goes forward,\u201d said one Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity according to his ministry\u2019s rules. The resolution also seeks to force the resumption of humanitarian aid work, which Zimbabwe\u2019s government ordered suspended during the runoff campaign, and calls for the appointment of a special representative to Zimbabwe by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The representative would be expected to assist in mediation efforts between the opposition and the government and to monitor human rights. Mr. Ban is expected to discuss the possibility of a United Nations official participating in mediation efforts with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa on the fringe of the Group of 8 summit meeting of industrialized nations in Japan next week. Mr. Mbeki, the sole mediator thus far, has been criticized as being overly indulgent of Mr. Mugabe. Zimbabwe\u2019s United Nations ambassador, Boniface G. Chidyausiku, bristled Thursday at the idea of sanctions. The resolution \u201cis undermining the efforts of the African Union and President Mbeki,\u201d he said. The 13 people identified for sanctions along with Mr. Mugabe include key military and security chiefs: Constantine Chiwenga, the overall military commander; Perence Shiri, the head of the air force; Augustine Chihuri, the police commissioner; Happyton Bonyongwe, the director of central intelligence; Didymus Mutasa, the national security minister; and Sidney Tigere Sekeramayi, the minister of defense. Also on the list are: Patrick Chinamasa, the minister of justice; Gideon Gono, chief of the Central Bank; and George Charamba, the president\u2019s spokesman.", "keyword": "Zimbabwe;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions;Mugabe Robert;Security Council"}
{"id": "ny0224284", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/11/12", "title": "The Winning Strategy in Oakland: Concentrate on Being 2nd or 3rd Choice", "abstract": "As cameras flashed Wednesday night, Jean Quan stood on the steps of Oakland City Hall and studied the results from the mayor\u2019s race. \u201cShe\u2019s checking to make sure it\u2019s real,\u201d said Ms. Quan\u2019s husband, Floyd Huen. Ms. Quan had just pulled off an upset of the heavily favored Don Perata, 51 percent to 49 percent, a margin of 2,058 votes. The results \u2014 on the 31-column spreadsheet that Ms. Quan held in her hands \u2014 testified to the power of finishing second in a ranked-choice election. Mr. Perata, the former State Senate president, received 40,224 first-place votes but fell 16 percentage points short of the majority needed to win outright. Ms. Quan, a city councilwoman, received 29,206 first-place votes. She surged to victory behind 24,572 second- and third-place votes that were distributed to her when other candidates fell out of the race. Campaign strategists said Ms. Quan had taken advantage of a ranked-choice system that was used in Oakland for the first time. She singled out Mr. Perata, a conservative Democrat who had outspent everyone, and aligned herself with the other nine candidates, particularly the other major challenger, Rebecca Kaplan. She came to be seen as the leader of the \u201canybody but Don\u201d coalition, appealing to voters who were wary of Mr. Perata. \u201cWe talked to everybody, and if you had a sign for Joe Tuman or Rebecca Kaplan or Don Perata, we wanted their No. 2\u201d or to convince them to switch, said Ms. Quan, who will become Oakland\u2019s first woman and Asian-American mayor. Jim Ross, a consultant for Ms. Kaplan, the councilwoman who finished third, said Ms. Quan\u2019s strategy had worked well. \u201cShe ran a very focused campaign to be the second-place candidate for a lot of candidates,\u201d Mr. Ross said. \u201cShe never spoke ill of anyone except Don Perata, and she really became the leader of the \u2018not Don Perata\u2019 sentiment in Oakland, and that\u2019s how she became everybody\u2019s second choice.\u201d In contrast, Mr. Ross said, Mr. Perata\u2019s campaign did not seek out second- and third-place votes as aggressively, using the traditional strategy of a front-runner. \u201cHe ran a very focused campaign on voting for him,\u201d Mr. Ross said. Mr. Perata\u2019s campaign manager, Larry Tramutola, attacked the ranked-choice voting system as causing confusion and accused Ms. Quan and Ms. Kaplan of \u201ccolluding\u201d and \u201cgaming the system.\u201d In a short concession speech Thursday morning in East Oakland, Mr. Perata took a more measured tone, saying, \u201cIf this were a normal election, I would\u2019ve won in a landslide.\u201d Mr. Perata said he would not contest the results of the election. When asked if he would support any efforts to do so, he said, \u201cI won\u2019t be leading the charge.\u201d Ranked-choice voting is still in its infancy in the Bay Area and around the country. The system here allows voters to rank their top three choices. If no candidate wins a majority, the candidate who received the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and second and third choices are counted to determine the winner. San Francisco adopted ranked-choice voting in 2004. Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro used it for the first time this year. Proponents argue that ranked-choice voting saves money by eliminating the need for expensive primary and run-off elections. The system also evens the playing field, they say, by helping candidates who are not as well known or well financed. In most cases, winners of the first round go on to win the election, even if they fall short of a majority. But in Oakland \u2014 and in two San Francisco supervisor races \u2014 the first-round leaders fell behind. That result concerns some political experts who say it underscores a flaw in the system. The system exposes the possibility of someone who\u2019s leading the first round not being elected, said Francis Neely, a San Francisco State University political science professor who has studied ranked-choice voting. \u201cIt\u2019s feasible that a third-place candidate in the first tally can win the whole thing, and when that happens people will have a good complaint to make.\u201d Steven Hill, a co-founder of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that promotes proportional voting and helped implement ranked-choice voting in San Francisco and the East Bay, said the system worked to limit the strength of a \u201cpolarizing candidate\u201d like Mr. Perata. \u201cWhen it comes time to win the majority, those types of candidates can\u2019t broaden their base,\u201d Mr. Hill said. \u201cCandidates who can build a coalition using those ranked ballots are going to do well.\u201d Critics cite voter confusion as a main problem. An analysis by FairVote found that out of 106,000 ballots cast in Oakland, 72 percent of voters ranked three candidates, 13 percent voted for two candidates and 15 percent voted for one candidate. Only a tiny percentage of ballots were thrown out because voters had failed to follow the instructions. Mr. Perata\u2019s camp pointed to the 28 percent who did not cast ballots ranking three candidates as a sign of confusion. \u201cThe chaos of R.C.V.: We knew it was bad; we didn\u2019t know it was so bad,\u201d Mr. Tramutola said. But Mr. Hill said voting for one or two candidates did not necessarily mean voters were confused. It could be a preference, he said. And some candidates in the race asked their supporters to vote only for them. Ms. Quan said: \u201cI\u2019ve been seeing the snarky remarks about ranked-choice voting. People in Oakland are not stupid. It was very, very clear in this race that people understood it.\u201d The first time that San Francisco used ranked-choice voting, 59 percent of voters used all three choices, according to a study co-written by Mr. Neely, the political science professor. The system played out differently in various districts in San Francisco. In District 6, where two progressive candidates, Jane Kim and Debra Walker, battled Theresa Sparks, a moderate, Ms. Kim was able to widen her lead over Ms. Walker through successive rounds of elimination. But the result was different in a crowded field like District 10, where 21 candidates vied to succeed Sophie Maxwell as supervisor. The current leader, Malia Cohen, initially received only 1,757 first-place votes, placing her fourth. Ms. Cohen picked up dozens of second-place votes during several elimination rounds, eventually putting her in first place. Ms. Quan\u2019s camp said it believed she would have won even if ranked-choice voting had not been used. The conventional wisdom was that Mr. Perata would have been able to outspend Ms. Quan in primary and run-off elections, but Ms. Quan countered that in a head-to-head race with him, she would have received votes from Ms. Kaplan\u2019s supporters \u2014 as the ranked-choice results suggested. As of mid-October, Mr. Perata \u2014 and the independent committees that supported him \u2014 had spent nearly $1 million compared with the $275,000 that Ms. Quan had spent. Ms. Quan said ranked-choice voting helped her in an election in which she was outspent. \u201cThis is going to be a race that people are going to be studying for a long time,\u201d she said. \u201cIt gives hope to people who are outspent. It gives hope to people as long as you can organize your neighborhoods and you get volunteers that you can win. \u201cAnd in a democracy if you win by one vote, you win.\u201d", "keyword": "Elections;Voting and Voters;Quan Jean;Perata Don;Politics and Government;Oakland (Calif)"}
{"id": "ny0103713", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/03/16", "title": "Texas Culture Roundup", "abstract": "Our quirky, discerning picks for the most interesting things to do around the state this week. AUSTIN Duly Noted At the heart of the Texas Music Roadtrip exhibition is the holy grail of electric guitars: Stevie Ray Vaughan\u2019s No. 1 Stratocaster. The guitar \u2014 the one with the SRV sticker on it \u2014 has not been in the public eye since Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in 1990. It joins more than 200 other items in what is billed as the largest-ever exhibition on Texas music, including a notebook from a 10-year-old Willie Nelson that is filled with love songs, the accordion Flaco and Santiago Jimenez learned to play on, and old Scott Joplin piano rolls. \u201cI\u2019ll bet 90 percent of Texans don\u2019t know Joplin\u2019s from Texas,\u201d said Gary Hartman, the author of \u201cThe History of Texas Music\u201d and the exhibition\u2019s curator. \u201cYet here\u2019s a guy who was a leading figure in ragtime, which laid the foundation for jazz.\u201d Travel to five different regions \u2014 perhaps the east, with its melting pot of blues and Cajun, or the south, with its hybrid of conjunto and polka \u2014 and learn how Texas became an incubator for many of the genres that we now take for granted. \u201cYou can stand in the middle of Texas,\u201d Mr. Hartman said, \u201cand look around and see all these ethnic groups who have retained their culture through music.\u201d The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, March 17-Oct. 14, various times thestoryoftexas.com DALLAS The Weary One Returns Ryan Bingham represents a new wave of country musicians who operate out of the Americana genre, purveying a twangy mix of folk, blues and rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. Mr. Bingham, who rode bulls in Texas before winning an Oscar in 2010 for his song \u201cThe Weary Kind,\u201d from the \u201cCrazy Heart\u201d soundtrack, now lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on a new album built on great expectations. To get him to drop what he is doing and trek to Texas for a one-off show, as The Dallas Observer has done for the St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade on Greenville Avenue, must mean he is itching to test some new material live. And what better place to shred his raspy voice than in front of a crowd of people who will already be in high spirits? The songs may be untested, but it\u2019s easy to excuse Mr. Bingham\u2019s rough drafts in return for a scorching take on, say, the song \u201cBread & Water,\u201d during which audience participation is required in name-checking various Texas cities. Energy Square Parking Lot, March 17, 12 p.m., binghammusic.com HOUSTON Watercolor World Norm Wigington prefers watercolors because of their spontaneity. \u201cThere are accidents that happen that are much more exciting than what you could plan for,\u201d he said. \u201cA watery wet spot can be fractured like a piece of marble and a damp spot can be spread like a hairy tail.\u201d While watercolors may seem like a medium for a Sunday afternoon artiste, their proper application on a canvas requires great skill. Mr. Wigington demonstrates this through his assemblage of the Watercolor Art Society-Houston \u2019s 35th International Exhibition. The display of 100 paintings selected from almost 400 submissions includes a score of landscapes, portraits and Oriental works. \u201cWatercolors have always been considered the secondary format to oil,\u201d Mr. Wigington said, \u201cbut everyone did watercolors to learn how to paint oil.\u201d Watercolor Art Society-Houston, March 16-April 20, 10 a.m., watercolorhouston.org SHAMROCK Seeing Green Shamrock, like Marfa in West Texas, is one of those far-out destinations that make our state distinctive. This tiny town, on old Route 66 in the Panhandle, has become a cultural touchstone: the movie \u201cCars\u201d used the likeness of its Art Deco Tower Conoco Station and U-Drop Inn Cafe, left over from the oil boom in the 1920s and \u201930s. And its Donegal beard contest inspired a documentary, \u201cGrowin\u2019 a Beard,\u201d with songs by the Gourds, the popular Austin junkyard band. Not surprisingly, however, Shamrock is best known for its St. Patrick\u2019s Celebration (with the beard contest at the center). Since 1938, this weekend affair of a parade, music and free golf has grown into an event where a leprechaun would feel at ease. Various locations, March 16-18, various times, shamrocktexas.net SAN ANTONIO Potential Hat Trick Jeb Bush, son of George Herbert Walker and brother of George Walker, may one day want to get back into politics to complete his family\u2019s presidential hat trick, so use his talk \u201cLeading in Climate of Change\u201d to find out how he would do things differently if he were in charge. Trinity University, March 22, 7:30 p.m., trinity.edu FORT WORTH The Keys to Peace Van Cliburn won over the Russians during the cold war with his piano stylings, birthing the Van Cliburn Foundation, whose 50th anniversary you can toast with the first show in the Cliburn Concerts series . Bass Performance Hall, March 20, 7:30 p.m., cliburn.org", "keyword": "Bingham Ryan;Music;Art;Texas;St Patrick's Day;Parades"}
{"id": "ny0093453", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2015/08/15", "title": "Matt Kenseth Wins Pole", "abstract": "Matt Kenseth won the Nascar Sprint Cup pole in Brooklyn, Mich., and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Carl Edwards finished second and third. The team nearly swept the top four spots, but Kyle Busch qualified sixth.", "keyword": "Car Racing;Matt Kenseth;Sprint Cup Series;Joe Gibbs Racing;Michigan"}
{"id": "ny0226915", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/10/23", "title": "Democrats Back Third Parties To Siphon Votes From the G.O.P.", "abstract": "ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 Seeking any advantage in their effort to retain control of Congress, Democrats are working behind the scenes in a number of tight races to bolster long-shot third-party candidates who have platforms at odds with the Democratic agenda but hold the promise of siphoning Republican votes. The efforts are taking place across the country with varying degrees of stealth. And in many cases, they seem to hold as much risk as potential reward for Democrats, prompting accusations of hypocrisy and dirty tricks from Republicans and the third-party movements that are on the receiving end of the unlikely, and sometimes unwelcome, support. In California, Republicans have received recorded phone calls from a professed but unidentified \u201cregistered Republican\u201d who says she is voting for the American Independent Party\u2019s candidate for a House seat, Bill Lussenheide, not for the incumbent Republican, Mary Bono Mack. The caller says she is voting that way because \u201cit\u2019s time we show Washington what a true conservative looks like.\u201d The recording was openly paid for by the Democratic candidate for the seat, Mayor Steve Pougnet of Palm Springs. In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate for a suburban Philadelphia House seat, Bryan Lentz, admitted this week that his volunteers helped Jim Schneller \u2014 a prominent skeptic of President Obama\u2019s citizenship \u2014 collect petitions to run against Mr. Lentz and his Republican opponent, Pat Meehan. In Nevada, conservative radio listeners have heard an advertisement promoting the Senate campaign of a \u201cTea Party of Nevada\u201d candidate, Scott Ashjian . The ads criticize Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee and favored candidate of the actual Tea Party movement in the race against Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader. The ad was sponsored by a group backed by unions and casino and mining companies supporting Mr. Reid. Nevada is one of several states, including Florida, where \u201cTea Party\u201d political committees have appeared on ballot lines without the knowledge or support of leading Tea Party activists, who have generally chosen not to support third-party candidacies. In most of those cases, local bloggers, reporters and lawyers have traced connections to local Democrats, drawing lawsuits, complaints and, in a couple of cases, admissions of involvement. \u201cIt is one of the dirtiest moves,\u201d said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, a vice chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. \u201cIt\u2019s not as though the Democrats are playing to compete against the third party \u2014 they\u2019re helping to build the third party up to make those votes not count.\u201d Calling it \u201ca concerted effort,\u201d Mr. McCarthy added, \u201cIn Congressional races, it could steer the tide for the majority.\u201d In response to questions about whether the efforts were being coordinated on a national level, the Democratic National Committee said in a statement, \u201cRepublicans have no one to blame but their own ideological intolerance for the bloody civil war on their side.\u201d Stealth support for third-party candidates who have the potential to cut into the other side\u2019s votes is a time-tested political tradition for both parties . But this year\u2019s efforts are striking for the potency of the grass-roots movement that Democrats are trying to use to their advantage \u2014 that is, the Tea Party \u2014 and for the sometimes brazen nature of the attempts. Mr. Pougnet, the Democrat running for Ms. Bono Mack\u2019s House seat in Palm Springs, openly discloses his sponsorship of the telephone calls and mailings he is directing to conservative voters labeling Mr. Lussenheide as \u201cthe Tea Party candidate\u201d and Ms. Bono Mack as a \u201craging liberal\u201d by comparison. \u201cIt\u2019s the strangest thing I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Ms. Bono Mack said. \u201cIt\u2019s desperate, and I think the voters see right through it.\u201d Mr. Pougnet\u2019s campaign manager, Jordan Marks, said, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with pointing out to voters who are more conservative that there\u2019s a more conservative alternative on the ballot.\u201d In other efforts, Democrats have tried to keep a lower profile, though they have not always succeeded. In Michigan, local Republicans and Tea Party activists were immediately suspicious when a \u201cTea Party\u201d ballot line appeared with candidates running for two competitive House seats and several state offices. The ballot line was thrown out on a technicality last month, but only after a series of blog and newspaper reports uncovered the hidden hand of two Oakland County Democratic officials. Both men resigned. Mr. Lentz\u2019s admission this week that his supporters had a role in placing Mr. Schneller on the ballot in the Pennsylvania House race followed months of suspicion that Mr. Lentz was somehow involved. He had avoided questions until this week, when he told the editorial board of The Delaware County Daily Times , \u201cIf somebody\u2019s already made the decision to run, I didn\u2019t think that \u2018helping\u2019 with the process of signature petitions was improper.\u201d Here in Florida, local Republicans and grass-roots Tea Party activists continue to press the case that \u201cTea Party\u201d candidates on the ballot are stalking horses for Democrats, an assertion denied by Democrats. Polls and independent analysts suggest that the incumbent Democrat in Orlando, Representative Alan Grayson, a firebrand liberal whose defeat is eagerly sought by conservatives, faces an uphill fight to keep his seat in what has been a bitterly fought campaign against his Republican rival, Daniel Webster. But the candidate running on the \u201cTea Party\u201d ballot line in Orlando, Peg Dunmire, could prove pivotal if Mr. Grayson is to pull off a squeaker. The \u201cTea Party\u201d in Florida was formed and registered with the state in 2009 by an Orlando-area lawyer, Frederic B. O\u2019Neal, with help from a longtime client, Doug Guetzloe, an activist, radio host and Republican operative in a running feud with his party, who has earned a reputation as a political trickster. (On Friday, Mr. Guetzloe was sentenced to 60 days in prison for a misdemeanor campaign violation relating to an anonymous political flier he sent four years ago, but his sentence does not start until after the election.) Tea Party activists in the state said they were flabbergasted to learn of the existence of a \u201cTea Party\u201d ballot line and Mr. Guetzloe\u2019s involvement with it. \u201cI didn\u2019t know who the heck these people were,\u201d said Everett Wilkinson, a grass-roots activist who has tangled with Mr. Guetzloe and Mr. O\u2019Neal in separate lawsuits. The grass-roots Tea Party activists and state Republicans, have homed in on a number of connections between Mr. Grayson and Mr. Guetzloe that have become fodder in the local news media, especially in reports on the CBS affiliate, WKMG-TV. Mr. Guetzloe serves on two business advisory boards set up by Mr. Grayson. A son of Mr. Guetzloe worked as an intern in Mr. Grayson\u2019s Congressional office last year. Federal Election Commission filings show that Mr. Grayson has paid nearly $50,000 to a polling firm that was incorporated in late 2008 by an on-and-off employee of Mr. Guetzloe, Victoria Torres, who is now herself running as a state candidate on the \u201cTea Party\u201d ballot line that Mr. Guetzloe helped create. In his most recent campaigns, Mr. Grayson advertised on Mr. Guetzloe\u2019s local radio program before it was canceled this year, with some proceeds going directly to Mr. Guetzloe\u2019s company, including, at least in June, a modest commission, station records show. Mr. Guetzloe played down his connections to Mr. Grayson, saying that he is one of scores of people on Mr. Grayson\u2019s advisory panels and that his son secured his internship at Mr. Grayson\u2019s office through his school. \u201cThis has nothing to do with the Democratic Party ; it has nothing to do with Alan Grayson,\u201d said Mr. Guetzloe in an interview. In an interview outside his house, Mr. Grayson dismissed as \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d suggestions that he had any contact with Mr. Guetzloe regarding the \u201cTea Party\u201d ballot line. \u201cThe Republican Party of Florida wants people to think that there\u2019s something here,\u201d he said. \u201cThe old saying where there\u2019s smoke there\u2019s fire? Here there\u2019s not even any smoke.\u201d Late last month, in a legal battle between Mr. Guetzloe and grass-roots Tea Party activists who accuse him of hijacking their movement, Wade C. Vose, a local election lawyer representing them, issued a subpoena for Mr. Grayson to sit for a deposition. Mr. Grayson was also ordered to share all written or electronic communications he had had with Mr. Guetzloe, members of the registered \u201cTea Party\u201d and others. That deposition was to take place on Thursday. Last week, however, Mr. Guetzloe dropped his defamation suit, filed in May, citing procedural wrangling with Mr. Vose \u2014 scuttling the order for Mr. Grayson to answer questions.", "keyword": "Democratic Party;Elections;United States Politics and Government;Third-Party Moves (US);Republican Party"}
{"id": "ny0195773", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2009/10/20", "title": "How Tongues Taste the Carbonation in a Fizzy Beverage", "abstract": "Aside from the natural and artificial flavors and sweeteners, soda and other fizzy beverages have a distinct carbonated taste. It is difficult to describe, but you know it is there when tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide go crazy all over your tongue. Scientists once thought that all the bubble popping, in fact, is what accounted for the tingly taste of carbonation. But that idea was disproved by studies in which carbonated beverages consumed in a pressurized environment, in which no bubbles formed, produced the same taste. So the mystery of carbonation remained, until now. In a paper in Science, researchers report that carbonation is tasted on the tongue by the same receptors that detect sourness. Jayaram Chandrashekar of the University of California, San Diego, Charles S. Zuker, formerly of U.C.S.D. and now at Columbia, and colleagues used mice in their studies, implanting electrodes in a nerve leading from taste receptor cells in the tongue. When the tongue was exposed to club soda or even just to gaseous CO2, there was a measurable response in the nerve. This suggested that taste receptors were responsible. But there are receptors for five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (sometimes termed savory). They repeated the experiment using mice that had been genetically engineered without one type of receptor. Those without sour receptors showed no response to the carbonation, indicating that those receptors were responsible. The researchers also looked at the genes in sour taste receptors, and identified one, called Car4, that encodes an enzyme that is known to be involved in sensing carbon dioxide in the body. The enzyme helps convert CO2 into bicarbonate ions and free protons. Since bicarbonate does not stimulate taste receptors, the researchers said, it is probably the protons that are responsible. But the researchers note that carbon dioxide doesn\u2019t really taste sour. So the ultimate perception of carbonation may involve other senses as well, including the mechanical stimulus of all those popping bubbles.", "keyword": "Carbon Dioxide;Taste;Soft Drinks;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0207675", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/06/09", "title": "Drawing On a Hobby During Flight Delays", "abstract": "I HAVE a lot of solitary interests. I like to listen to music . I like to read. And I love to draw. So if there is a two-hour flight delay, that means I get to indulge my passions. I\u2019m kind of like a kid when it comes to travel. I like everything about it. I\u2019m still amazed planes fly and that people actually pay me to go to their businesses and tell them how they can capitalize on their brands. I don\u2019t care where they are located, since I could find something interesting to do anywhere. I always laugh when colleagues say it\u2019s too bad that I have to travel to some small town out in the middle of nowhere. I say it\u2019s good for business, so bring it on. I studied the trumpet and play in two bands in my spare time. But I don\u2019t travel with my trumpet. I travel with about a dozen harmonicas. I can blame my love affair with the harmonica on business travel . A friend gave me some harmonica music, and then later, when I was in Charlotte, N.C., waiting for a plane I wandered into a small gift shop and found a harmonica instruction book that was packaged with an actual harmonica. The price was right, so I figured why not give it a try? When I do speaking engagements, I tape a harmonica under each audience member\u2019s seat. I ask them to look under the seat, and most people think they are going to get a winning ticket for a car or something. Instead, they find a harmonica. It\u2019s a great little instrument even if you don\u2019t have a musical bone in your body. Everybody can do something with it. I\u2019ll even invite people up on stage to play since it\u2019s a great way to get people to interact. When I was in Heathrow recently, I actually had a little jam session with two fellow travelers who were playing guitars. I whipped out the harmonica and asked if I could join them. I think we sounded pretty good. But even if we didn\u2019t, it was still a lot of fun. I\u2019m an artist by training. So when I\u2019m not playing the harmonica, you can find me sketching my fellow travelers. Actually, these drawings are more caricatures than portraits. I look for interesting faces or people interacting, like a mother trying to entertain her children while they are waiting for a plane. I always travel with a sketchbook, but sometimes I draw on the back of napkins or whatever I can find. I usually give my drawings away. Often subjects are thrilled. But it\u2019s not unusual for some people to say things like, \u201cHey, my nose isn\u2019t that big.\u201d Or \u201cHey, I\u2019m not that round.\u201d My favorite is, \u201cHey, I\u2019m not that bald.\u201d People, relax. It\u2019s a caricature. But even if someone is an art critic, that person usually wants the doodle as a keepsake. Sometimes I post some of them on my blog, www.turkeldoodles.com . My drawings have some good side benefits, too. Recently, I did a quick caricature of a flight attendant. I got free drinks the rest of the trip. I think my colleagues were a little jealous. Some people contact me later to see if I could do their caricatures on a quality paper stock, rather than on a napkin. I always say sure, if they cough up $500 for a charity of their choice. I don\u2019t check to see if they actually send a check to their favorite charity. I don\u2019t think people would lie about it. And if they do, well, I wish I would have made their noses bigger.", "keyword": "Business Travel;Airlines and Airplanes;Hobbies;Turkel Bruce"}
{"id": "ny0217718", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/05/05", "title": "A Suspect Leaves Clues at Every Turn", "abstract": "Here is a quest for the invisible life, rendered in less than 50 words. Buy a used Nissan Pathfinder with cash; decline a bill of sale or any other paperwork; communicate about the deal on a prepaid cellphone, registered to no one. Then strip the vehicle identification number, or VIN, from the dashboard. Add a stolen license plate. Tint the windows. And here, it seems, is the very definition of futility. These were the tactics that prosecutors say were used by Faisal Shahzad , the man pulled off a plane late Monday night and charged with trying to blow up the Pathfinder in Times Square on Saturday evening, when tens of thousands of people were jammed into the streets. It was the precise map of the fanatic heart drawn by Yeats: Great hatred, little room. At virtually every turn, the evasive steps Mr. Shahzad took left digital footprints, a trail that ultimately led to his seat on an Emirates flight that was bound for Dubai, the authorities say. Mr. Shahzad did not make it into court on Tuesday; he is said to be talking, and the authorities seemed unwilling to interrupt the stream of his consciousness. If Mr. Shahzad is indeed responsible, he would not be the first car-bombing suspect arrested in a matter of days because of the things he left behind. With every breath of modern life, people leave a vast series of markings that are unseen and, usually, unnoticed. Nearly two decades ago, the first \u2014 and so far, only successful \u2014 car bomb in the modern history of New York was planted in the basement garage of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993. Six people were killed. The explosion left an immense crater. Climbing through the rubble a few days later, Joe Hanlin, a federal explosives investigator, and Donald Sadowy, a detective with the Police Department\u2019s bomb squad, found bits and pieces of a vehicle that had been torn apart, including a severely twisted section of the frame. That section appeared to have been quite close to the explosion. As they began to swab it for chemical residue, a series of raised dots emerged. They formed letters and numbers. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t read all the numbers,\u201d Mr. Hanlin testified later that year, \u201cbut we knew they were numbers and could be used to trace the vehicle.\u201d It turned out that particular fragment had been stamped with the vehicle\u2019s 17-digit VIN, the automotive equivalent of DNA. Each vehicle is assigned a unique series of numbers that shows where it was manufactured and when, and describes in code its body type, make, model, options. The VIN showed that the demolished vehicle had been a Ford Econoline van, owned by the Ryder Truck and Rental Company, which reported that it had been rented a few weeks earlier in Jersey City by a man named Mohammed A. Salameh. In fact, by the time the van was linked to the bombing, Mr. Salameh had already reported it stolen. While others who were part of the bomb plot had fled the country, Mr. Salameh was left behind, nearly penniless. As federal investigators descended on the rental company, Mr. Salameh was haggling with Ryder for the return of a $400 deposit. ON Saturday, when police seized the Nissan Pathfinder left in Times Square, the VIN plate on the dashboard had been removed. But the VIN is also stamped on engine parts and on the frame, and these were intact. That identification quickly led to a 19-year-old Connecticut woman who had sold the Pathfinder a few weeks ago to a man for $1,300 in cash. The man who bought it had declined the offer of a bill of sale. He had, however, called the seller several times from the prepaid cellphone to arrange the purchase, according to a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday. That same phone had been used for calls to and from a \u201cPakistani telephone number associated with Shahzad,\u201d the complaint said. With Mr. Shahzad\u2019s name, investigators searched his home in Connecticut on Monday, and solved another tiny mystery: The police had found keys in the Pathfinder, and one of them opened the door to Mr. Shahzad\u2019s home. In his garage, they found fertilizer and fireworks, similar to what had been left in the Pathfinder in Times Square. Later that night, in a seat on board Emirates Flight 202, they found Faisal Shahzad. Another invisible man, thwarted by a VIN.", "keyword": "Times Square and 42nd Street (NYC);Bombs and Explosives;Shahzad Faisal;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0202067", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/09/25", "title": "In Need of Cash, Arizona Puts Offices on Sale", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 Here in one of the most embattled real estate markets in the country, 1700 West Washington Street stands out, even beyond its nearly $40 million price tag. It has 205,901 square feet, terrazzo floors, a big chunk of chrysocolla displayed in the lobby and a long-term tenant who wants to stay put for 20 years \u2014 leasing the building back from a buyer for more than its assessed value. Bonus feature: There is a nifty gun locker for any potential buyer or their guests who arrive packing heat. The office building houses most of the State of Arizona\u2019s government and was recently put on the market to help this broke state close its budget deficit. It is looking like a pretty good deal, if the state can prove it is credit worthy. \u201cPeople are calling from all over the country,\u201d said Alan Ecker, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Administration, who estimates that his office has taken 60 calls of inquiry since Gov. Jan Brewer approved the sale on Sept. 3 as part of a still-unresolved budget plan. \u201cThe balls are rolling.\u201d Selling a building that the owner wishes to continue to occupy \u2014 known as a sale and lease-back \u2014 is an oft-used strategy for businesses looking to shore up cash flow, but it is less common for governments to do so. But these are uncommon times for states gasping under piles of Medicaid bills, unemployment claims and pension payouts, and fewer tax dollars rolling in. \u201cEverything is on the table for a lot of states right now,\u201d said Robb Willis, a lobbyist for H&W Development, a developer in Mableton, Ga., that is considering buying the executive office building here. \u201cArizona just seems to be a hotbed right now.\u201d If the people of the proudly independent state of Arizona would be the least bit despondent to have the owners of their state buildings hail from the Peach State, that may just be the cost of doing business right now. To help close a $3.2 billion revenue shortfall, lawmakers allowed the sale and lease-back of the executive office tower, the buildings that house offices for both chambers of the State Legislature, as well as 10 prison complexes, a state mental hospital and other buildings. (For now, the historic Capitol, with its grand dome and aging interior, is not for sale, though state officials continue to ponder the possibility.) All told, the assets are valued at $735 million. They are expected to cost the state $1.5 billion in lease-back fees over the next two decades, after which ownership of the buildings would revert to the state. It is sort of like renting to own new furniture. Except the state already owns the furniture. For a state looking to preserve its credit rating and in need of a quick infusion of cash, and for an investor looking for a modest but easy return on an investment \u2014 better than treasuries, say, but not as exciting as equities \u2014 it could be a convenient marriage. \u201cThere are a lot of empty buildings around these days,\u201d said Lee Hunter, a principal of H&W, the Georgia firm. \u201cSo a fully leased building in this environment is attractive, and it is going to be extremely competitive.\u201d The centerpiece of the sale plan is the executive office tower, which holds the executive functions of government as well as the secretary of state, the state treasurer and the state mine inspector, and is valued at $39,511,240. State lawmakers have cut their way through the rest of the budget, which remains unsolved months after the fiscal year ended because of an impasse over a sales tax increase sought by the governor but disliked by her fellow Republicans, who are a majority in the Legislature. Yet more cash is still desperately needed to get through this year and next. So prisons, historical societies, a visitor\u2019s center at a revered state park and the Legislature building all must go. Democratic lawmakers have little fondness for any of it. \u201cIt\u2019s a bad loan that makes no fiscal sense for the state,\u201d said Kyrsten Sinema, the ranking Democrat on the State House Appropriations Committee. \u201cWe have to start paying interest in the very next fiscal year, when we\u2019ll still be stuck in a massive deficit. So it\u2019s definitely a penny-wise, pound-foolish plan.\u201d As real estate goes, the property surrounding the executive office tower is not quite as exciting as the visitor\u2019s center attached to Kartchner Caverns, the state\u2019s famous limestone caves at the base of the Whetstone Mountains near Tucson, which is also on the market. But a buyer of the building would get a display box of the state\u2019s minerals, including the big chunk of chrysocolla, and that might beat an extra half-bath.", "keyword": "Arizona;Office Buildings and Commercial Properties;Budgets and Budgeting;Renting and Leasing;Brewer Jan"}
{"id": "ny0257280", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/01/02", "title": "Boxing Injuries Neglected", "abstract": "To the Sports Editor: I am saddened and frustrated that boxing is being neglected and forgotten in relation to the head injuries that happen in the Kid Gloves, Golden Gloves, collegiate and professional ranks. Unlike players in the N.F.L., the N.H.L. and Major League Baseball, the average boxer has no agent, no advocate and no money for medical advice and treatment. Anthony Parisi Gloucester City, N.J.", "keyword": "Sports Injuries;Boxing"}
{"id": "ny0293715", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/06/09", "title": "Drummer Defends Stanford Student Convicted in Rape Case. Her Band Pays a Price.", "abstract": "Good English is a small-time band from Oakwood, Ohio, three sisters with a garage rock vibe. In Brooklyn, this week, they became pariahs. The women have found themselves at the center of a debate about sexual assault after a pre-sentencing letter written to a judge a few months ago by one of the sisters, Leslie Rasmussen, involving the case of a Stanford University student who was convicted of sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman, was made public. Ms. Rasmussen, in her letter, described the student, Brock Allen Turner, as a childhood friend and an elementary school classmate, and defended him. In rapid succession, Good English has been dropped from several Brooklyn venues where they were scheduled to play, as well as the Northside Festival, a weeklong music festival that began on Monday. Other festivals have also announced that the band will no longer be performing. \u201cWhen people choose to defend something, then I think they should be held accountable for it,\u201d said Daniel Stedman, a founder of the Northside Media Group, which runs the Brooklyn festival. After Mr. Turner\u2019s sentencing last week, Mr. Stedman said he found himself moved to tears as he read the graphic courtroom statement from the woman whom Mr. Turner sexually assaulted. The statement has been widely distributed since, describing the attack and what followed. \u201cHow does the average person who is really upset and troubled about the Brock story, how does somebody participate in that, making right of a wrong?\u201d Mr. Stedman said. \u201cWe are really just one tiny, infinitesimal part of that puzzle, but I think it was a no-brainer for us.\u201d In her letter, Ms. Rasmussen, 20, says that there was a distinction between rape and Mr. Turner\u2019s case, and suggested that alcohol was to blame for his actions. Mr. Turner, 20, a swimmer at Stanford, was found by two passers-by, partially clothed behind a trash bin on campus, on top of the 23-year-old woman, who was incapacitated by alcohol, according to the authorities. The passers-by stopped the assault and held Mr. Turner down as he tried to flee. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn\u2019t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him,\u201d Ms. Rasmussen, who plays drums in the band, wrote. \u201cBut where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campus isn\u2019t always because people are rapists.\u201d Mr. Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault for the attack, which took place in January 2015. This week the judge in the case, Aaron Persky of Superior Court in Santa Clara County, Calif., came under withering criticism from the public for the sentence he imposed: six months in jail and probation. Ms. Rasmussen\u2019s letter was part of a package of letters sent to the judge on behalf of Mr. Turner before his sentencing, a standard practice in which people seek to influence a sentencing decision by sharing their experiences of the defendant. His father also sent a letter that had an even more explosive effect when it was made public this week; he said that the episode had affected his son\u2019s appetite and that, in particular, he no longer enjoyed rib-eye steaks. Following the firestorm her letter provoked, Ms. Rasmussen said that her words were being twisted and that she was being unfairly stigmatized. \u201cThis appeal has now provided an opportunity for people to misconstrue my ideas into a distortion that suggests I sympathize with sex offenses and those who commit them or that I blame the victim involved,\u201d she said in a statement. Ms. Rasmussen also believed that the letter to the judge was private. But a spokesman for the court said she was wrong \u2014 such letters, like most documents entered into the court, are a matter of public record. Within hours of Ms. Rasmussen\u2019s letter being made public by New York magazine, Good English was removed from a roster of Brooklyn venues where they were scheduled to perform in the coming days, including Rock Shop in Gowanus, Industry City Distillery in Greenwood, Gold Sounds in Bushwick, and Bar Matchless in Greenpoint. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to be affiliated with anyone that\u2019s going to try to victim-blame or even just downplay rape,\u201d said Larry Hyland, an owner of Bar Matchless. Mr. Hyland said he had received over 50 emails and posts on the bar\u2019s Facebook page demanding that the band\u2019s show be canceled. Some of the messages, he said, included threats to confront the band members if they did perform. \u201cWe didn\u2019t cancel the show because of censorship,\u201d he said, adding that while he disagreed with the content of Ms. Rasmussen\u2019s letter, he understood the impulse to want to help a childhood friend. \u201cI wanted to avoid an unsafe environment.\u201d On Tuesday, the Dayton Music Art and Film Festival near the band\u2019s hometown announced that it, too, was removing the band from its September lineup. \u201cSuch actions should not be defended, friend or not,\u201d the festival wrote on its Facebook page . On Wednesday, Behind the Curtains Media, the public relations firm that represented Good English, dropped them from its client roster. In her statement, Ms. Rasmussen attributed the fallout from her initial letter not to what she wrote, but to \u201cthe overzealous nature of social media.\u201d In particular, she lamented the \u201cuproar of judgment and hatred unleashed on me\u201d and the effect it was having on her musical aspirations.", "keyword": "College;Brock Allen Turner;Leslie Rasmussen;Music;Rape;Northside Festival;Aaron Persky;Brooklyn;Stanford;Good English"}
{"id": "ny0093832", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2015/08/22", "title": "Undermanned Sevilla Salvages a Tie", "abstract": "Sevilla tied host M\u00e1laga, 0-0, despite losing Steven N\u2019Zonzi in a mistake-filled match that opened the Spanish league season. N\u2019Zonzi, a former Stoke City midfielder, had a forgettable Liga debut, being needlessly booked for impeding a throw-in before being sent off with a second yellow card for a foul in the 69th minute. \u25a0 Werder Bremen claimed its first point of the Bundesliga season when a goal by Anthony Ujah gave it a 1-1 draw at Hertha Berlin. \u25a0 Paris St.-Germain, seeking a fourth successive title, eased to a 1-0 win at Montpellier in the French league. Blaise Matuidi scored the only goal just after the hour mark to make it three wins out of three for P.S.G.", "keyword": "Soccer;Paris St-Germain FC Soccer Team;Sevilla Soccer Team;Malaga Spain"}
{"id": "ny0079964", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2015/02/07", "title": "Open-Skies Agreements Challenged", "abstract": "For more than two decades, domestic airlines and successive administrations have pushed for, and achieved, broad international agreements that have fostered greater competition, lower airfares and more flights to hundreds of destinations like Tokyo, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro. But now, with the rise of Persian Gulf airlines and other nimble foreign carriers, those pacts, called open-skies agreements, are under attack from an unlikely alliance of domestic airlines and unions. The chief executives of American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines recently joined together to quietly lobby the Obama administration to restrict access by fast-growing rivals based in the Persian Gulf. They cited unfair competition from the Middle East carriers Emirates, Etihad Airlines and Qatar Airways, which they say receive large government subsidies that put domestic carriers at a disadvantage. This comes as another foreign airline, Norwegian Air Shuttle, is facing opposition from pilot unions and some domestic airlines to expand low-cost flights from Europe and Asia. The Transportation Department is reviewing Norwegian\u2019s application, but delays have prompted a complaint by European Union officials. Legacy airlines, which have traditionally backed open-skies policies to expand their markets, are now rebelling against the sort of competition that these policies are meant to bring about. The push has gained their rivals\u2019 attention. Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, said their attacks threaten \u201cthe bedrock of the modern-day aviation system.\u201d \u201cBy challenging open skies, you are not just challenging the aero-political situation, you are challenging the very essence of economic liberalization that the U.S. has championed for decades,\u201d Mr. Clark said in an interview. \u201cI hope the administration will not stand for this nonsense.\u201d Last week, the top executives from Delta, American and United met with several government officials, including Anthony Foxx, the transportation secretary, and Penny Pritzker, the commerce secretary, and requested that existing open-skies agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar be renegotiated. \u201cWe welcome robust competition provided the playing field is level,\u201d all three airlines said in similar statements. \u201cA reopening of those open-skies agreements is the first step and the right step to ensure competition is preserved and enhanced.\u201d This is the latest skirmish in a long-running battle that Western airlines have been waging against the fast-growing Middle East carriers. Some European countries curtail flights from the United Arab Emirates, and Canada has placed restrictions on the number of flights from there as well. The three gulf carriers have expanded their operations into the United States in recent years, though they do not compete directly with domestic airlines. Emirates flies to nine United States cities from its hub in Dubai. Delta and United have only one daily flight each to Dubai and none to Abu Dhabi. Gulf carriers are more threatening to the European allies of United States carriers, which have had more direct competition for a lot longer. Through their partnerships, all three big United States airlines have business ventures with a major European airline, sharing revenue and profits on trans-Atlantic flights: Delta with Air France, American with British Airways, and United with Lufthansa, the German carrier. The domestic airlines\u2019 change of heart about open-skies agreements is an abrupt shift after decades of pushing for them. Since 1992, the United States has signed more than 100 open-skies agreements, a policy that usually gets the strongest backing from the domestic carriers. Last year, Delta\u2019s chief executive, Richard Anderson, called on Japan\u2019s government to expand competition. Image Flight attendants serve the business class section of an Emirates A380 jet at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The head of the airline criticized those who once backed but are now opposed to open-skies agreements. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times But it is the stunning ascent of the Persian Gulf carriers \u2014 Dubai\u2019s airport is now the world\u2019s busiest international air travel hub \u2014 that now concerns the domestic airlines. Mr. Anderson has become their most vocal critic, championing what he calls \u201cfair skies\u201d instead of open skies. Last year, Delta sought to block gulf carriers from receiving American loan guarantees through the Export-Import Bank to buy new jets from Boeing. It also tried to block Emirates from flying a new route between New York and Milan, and took the matter before an Italian court. Mr. Clark said Emirates did not receive any subsidies from the Dubai government. And in a sharp retort to Mr. Anderson, Mr. Clark warned that focusing on government subsidies could backfire since many airlines around the world were supported by governments. \u201cIf you go down this minefield, you must ask yourself,\u201d he said, \u201cto what extent all the foreign carriers serving the U.S. are subsidized? Take China, take Thailand, take Malaysia, take Japan, take New Zealand. I could go on forever.\u201d Gulf carriers have succeeded by creating new markets that domestic airlines were not serving, Mr. Clark said. Emirates, for instance, offers connections between Seattle and Hyderabad in India, with a single stop in Dubai. The service is popular among the large population of technology workers with Indian origins. \u201cLook at where these people are going and ask yourself where was Delta, where was United, where was American when the world was becoming more globalized?\u201d he said. The latest talk of restricting flights has also divided the industry. Consumer advocates point out that opening new markets benefited travelers in the United States and abroad. Airports in the United States also welcome the extra traffic from the Middle East and beyond. \u201cHistorically, shifts toward protectionism have ended up hurting markets and choking off growth and job creation,\u201d the United States Travel Association said in a statement this week. \u201cTravel to and within the United States has lately been under assault from protectionist, anti-competitive forces, and the move against open skies is the latest example.\u201d Not all domestic airlines are pushing against open skies. Robin Hayes, JetBlue\u2019s chief executive, expressed strong support in a letter to three cabinet members, including Secretary of State John Kerry. The first open-skies agreements between the United States and the U.A.E. and Qatar were signed in 1999. Both countries are major United States allies in the Middle East. Last year, in a move that angered domestic carriers, the United States established a customs and immigration pre-clearance facility in the Abu Dhabi airport, which allows passengers flying into the United States to clear immigration before the flight. Supporters of open skies point out that United States carriers have received government support in the past. Delta, American and United, for example, have been granted far-reaching antitrust immunity to set up joint ventures with rival carriers on some specific routes to Europe and Asia. \u201cNow that U.S. airlines have secured antitrust immunity, industry consolidation and concomitantly rising airfares and ancillary fees, and are achieving record unprecedented profits, some carriers shamelessly seek to close off U.S. markets to competition from foreign carriers,\u201d Kevin Mitchell, the chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, a trade group, wrote in a letter to various government officials. A spokesman for the Transportation Department, Brian Farber, said the administration was taking the airlines\u2019 concerns seriously and was reviewing them. Still, he said that the administration \u201cremains committed to the open-skies policy which has greatly benefited the traveling public, the U.S. aviation industry, American cities and the broader U.S. economy through increased travel and trade, and job growth.\u201d", "keyword": "Airlines,airplanes;Competition law;International trade;International relations;Protectionism"}
{"id": "ny0193952", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2009/11/11", "title": "Mildred Cohn, Biochemist, Is Dead at 96", "abstract": "Mildred Cohn, a biochemist who overcame religious and sex discrimination to advance the study of metabolic processes, research that contributed to the development of medical technologies like M.R.I. \u2019s, died on Oct. 12 in Philadelphia. She was 96. The University of Pennsylvania announced her death. Dr. Cohn, whose honors included the National Medal of Science, helped develop sophisticated techniques and instruments to measure how enzymes and other proteins behave in the body. She used magnetic forces, for example, to examine the atomic nucleus in order to study the shapes of molecules and identify compounds. Variations on the approach led to the development of magnetic resonance imaging, which is used to create images of internal tissues. Indeed, her work in developing powerful research instruments was one of her major contributions, the Chemical Heritage Foundation said in a biography of her. \u201cWhen the right instruments weren\u2019t available, she built her own,\u201d the foundation said. Moreover, by shedding light on how chemicals produced by the body are processed, her research helped lead to better diagnoses of illnesses, said Nick Zagorski, a senior writer for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Cohn achieved success only after repeatedly encountering prejudice, from the college professor who told her that being a chemist would not be \u201cladylike,\u201d to chemical company recruiters who explicitly refused to interview women or Jews, to university departments that would not allow a woman on the track to be a tenured professor. She had to wait 21 years after receiving her Ph.D. to receive her first tenure-track appointment. Dr. Cohn eventually became the first woman appointed to the editorial board of The Journal of Biological Chemistry and the first woman to become president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. A biography prepared by Washington University in St. Louis, one of the institutions where Dr. Cohn taught and researched, said she had worked in laboratories or written papers with six Nobel laureates. She wrote 160 published papers in all. Mildred Cohn was born on July 12, 1913, in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her father was a tailor who invented a machine for cutting cloth more accurately. She graduated from high school at 14 and moved on to Hunter College, then an all-women\u2019s school, where she majored in chemistry, minored in physics and graduated at 17. The teacher who advised her against being a research chemist urged her to become a chemistry teacher instead. Afterward, she enrolled in Columbia University\u2019s doctoral program, only to find that she would not be accepted as a teaching assistant because the position was reserved for men. She earned a master\u2019s degree. She then took a research job at a NASA forerunner, where she was the only woman who worked on a project with 70 men to develop fuel-injection airplane engines. Though she was able to publish two papers there, one as senior author, she left when told that she would not be promoted. She then returned to Columbia, where she worked on the team of Harold C. Urey, a Nobel laureate, and earned her Ph.D. She studied ways of using the different weights of carbon and other atoms to trace the atoms\u2019 movement in cells. Dr. Urey helped her join the research team of Vincent du Vigneaud, a biochemistry professor at George Washington University Medical School. There she helped develop methods of tracing isotopes as they move through bodily processes. The tracing methods opened the way for much broader medical research at the molecular level. In 1946, her husband, Dr. Henry Primakoff, a physicist, joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Cohn accepted a research position there with the husband-and-wife team of Carl and Gerty Cori, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1947. Dr. Cohn went to Penn in 1960 and became a full professor the next year. In 1964, the American Heart Association chose her to be a career investigator, making her the first woman to hold the position. She did so for 14 years. Dr. Cohn was also the Benjamin Rush professor of physiological chemistry at Penn and a senior scientist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. She retired in 1985, but continued working in her lab at Penn. At Washington and at Penn, her research contributed to the understanding of the structure of ATP, a molecule that stores energy for cellular functions. The growing body of knowledge about ATP has had an impact on fields including neuroscience and biotechnology. Dr. Primakoff, her husband, died in 1983. Dr. Cohn is survived by her daughters, Nina Rossomando and Laura Primakoff; her son, Paul; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. The Women\u2019s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y., inducted Dr. Cohn the day after she died. She had learned beforehand that she would receive the honor. \u201cWhen I saw that Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey were also members,\u201d she said in an interview with ASBMB, the magazine of the biochemistry society, \u201cI decided this could be a good place for me.\u201d", "keyword": "Cohn Mildred;Biology and Biochemistry;Magnetic Resonance Imagers;Deaths (Obituaries);Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0180370", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2007/08/01", "title": "Hub of Halfpipes Rises in Corner of California", "abstract": "CARLSBAD, Calif., July 31 \u2014 Ten years ago Bucky Lasek moved west with his wife, newborn daughter and commitment to a career in skateboarding, settling in this laid-back seaside community in northern San Diego County. Lasek had been living in Baltimore, commuting an hour to the nearest skate ramp on weekends. In bad weather, he drove to an indoor ramp in Philadelphia. \u201cIf you want to be a movie star, you have to move to Hollywood,\u201d Lasek said. \u201cTo be a top professional skateboarder, I had to move out here because skating on the weekends wasn\u2019t cutting it for me. Out of sight was literally out of mind, as far as sponsors go.\u201d This week Lasek, 34, will compete in vertical skateboarding, in which riders pull tricks on a massive halfpipe, at the X Games in Los Angeles and Carson, Calif. Lasek has won seven X Games gold medals. About his success, he said, \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have happened if I didn\u2019t move out here.\u201d Carlsbad is part of a region in northern San Diego County known as North County, which includes communities like Encinitas, Oceanside, Vista and Rancho Santa Fe. They make up an area that is to vertical skateboarding what Hollywood is to the movie and television industry, without the tour buses and the maps to the stars\u2019 homes. Seven of the 10 skaters who will compete Sunday in the men\u2019s skateboard vert discipline at the X Games live in the North County region, as do at least four of the female skateboarders. The other three male skateboarders live within an hour\u2019s drive. There are several reasons skaters are concentrated in the area. For one, most skateboard companies are nearby. There are also several large ramps for training, similar to those used in competition. But perhaps most important is the presence of other top skaters. Bob Burnquist, a four-time X Games gold medalist from Brazil, lives in rural Vista with the professional skateboarder Jen O\u2019Brien and their daughter. Their backyard has a sprawling complex of ramps, where other professional skaters often ride together. \u201cAs far as the vert skating world, there\u2019s not many of us that can ride good,\u201d Burnquist said. \u201cIf you ride alone in your own world, you can only get so good.\u201d \u201cYou want to surround yourself with talent,\u201d he added. \u201cUsually you want to surround yourself with people who are better than you so you can get somewhere.\u201d Shaun White, who grew up in Carlsbad, said, \u201cIf you want to know what your biggest competitor\u2019s new trick is, you\u2019ve got to be down there watching him skate and skating with him.\u201d This spirit of competition and the presence of some of the world\u2019s best ramps lured Mathias Ringstrom to the region from Stockholm 13 years ago. \u201cAt that point, if you wanted to make it in skateboarding, you had to be here,\u201d he said. Although a growing number of top professional skateboarders have their own private ramps, several still use public skate parks, particularly at the Y.M.C.A. in Encinitas, which features a 13-foot-tall halfpipe used in the X Games. When Lasek is not skating at the private ramp of the icon Tony Hawk, he goes to the Y.M.C.A. or three other public skate parks within a 30-minute drive of his home. Hawk grew up in the area. So did Danny Way, who launched over the Great Wall of China on his skateboard in 2005. Hawk settled in Carlsbad; Way in Encinitas. \u201cIt\u2019s a very skate-oriented culture,\u201d Lasek said. \u201cIt\u2019s a small spot where everyone lives. \u201cI\u2019ll go into the Coffee Bean and they\u2019ll be like, \u2018Tony was just in here,\u2019 \u201d he said, referring to Hawk. With skateboarding increasing in prominence on television through events like the X Games, skaters have attained new levels of fame, making the area like Hollywood in at least some respects. White, 20, was catapulted to international stardom when he won the gold medal in halfpipe snowboarding at the 2006 Winter Olympics. He has since bought a house in Rancho Santa Fe. Before he put up a fence, White said, strangers would knock on his front door and introduce themselves. At grocery stores, families have followed him to see what he\u2019s buying. \u201cYou would think it\u2019s mellow, but it\u2019s not at all because everyone knows you,\u201d White said. Lasek\u2019s fame and family have grown, too. He and his wife, Jen, have two daughters, ages 10 and 7, and a third on the way. Three years ago they moved into a spacious stucco house in the hilly horse country outside Encinitas. A swimming pool sits outside his living room\u2019s large picture window. Lasek plans to build another, larger pool, but not for swimming. He showed off designs for a kidney-shaped concrete pool that would serve as his private skate park. It would be 13 feet deep and roughly 60 feet long and 40 feet wide. One estimate for the project was $200,000. Ringstrom, who slept on couches or in his car when he arrived in the area, lives in a house in a subdivision of cul-de-sacs. The professional skateboarder Colin McKay lives across the street. Neither of their small yards has room for a skateboard ramp. But Lasek\u2019s house is a short drive away. And when he builds his backyard pool, his professional skater peers will be welcome. Contemplating all the nearby places he could skate, Ringstrom said, \u201cThere is no better place for a vert skater.\u201d", "keyword": "Skateboards;X Games;California;Hawk Tony;White Shaun"}
{"id": "ny0254363", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/07/21", "title": "Start-Up Handles Social Media Background Checks", "abstract": "Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check. A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence , scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years. Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity. \u201cWe are not detectives,\u201d said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara , Calif. \u201cAll we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today.\u201d The Federal Trade Commission, after initially raising concerns last fall about Social Intelligence\u2019s business, determined the company is in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but the service still alarms privacy advocates who say that it invites employers to look at information that may not be relevant to job performance. And what relevant unflattering information has led to job offers being withdrawn or not made? Mr. Drucker said that one prospective employee was found using Craigslist to look for OxyContin. A woman posing naked in photos she put up on an image-sharing site didn\u2019t get the job offer she was seeking at a hospital. Other background reports have turned up examples of people making anti-Semitic comments and racist remarks, he said. Then there was the job applicant who belonged to a Facebook group , \u201cThis Is America. I Shouldn\u2019t Have to Press 1 for English.\u201d This raises a question. \u201cDoes that mean you don\u2019t like people who don\u2019t speak English?\u201d asked Mr. Drucker rhetorically. Mr. Drucker said his goal was to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates. For example, he said the reports remove references to a person\u2019s religion, race, marital status, disability and other information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews. Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found. He argues the search reduces the risk that employers may confuse the job candidate with someone else or expose the company to information that is not legally allowable or relevant. \u201cGoogling someone is ridiculously unfair,\u201d he said. \u201cAn employer could discriminate against someone inadvertently. Or worse, they are exposing themselves to all kinds of allegations about discrimination.\u201d Marc S. Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center , based in Washington , said that employers were entitled to gather information to make a determination about job-related expertise, but he expressed concern that \u201cemployers should not be judging what people in their private lives do away from the workplace.\u201d Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker\u2019s firm comes from such major social platforms as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace . He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from deep Web searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites, like Tumblr, the blogging site, as well as Yahoo user groups, e-commerce sites, bulletin boards and even Craigslist. Then there are the photos and videos that people post \u2014 or find themselves tagged in \u2014 on Facebook and YouTube and other sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, Yfrog and Photobucket. And it is photos and videos that seem to get most people in trouble. \u201cSexually explicit photos and videos are beyond comprehension,\u201d Mr. Drucker said. \u201cWe also see flagrant displays of weapons. And we see a lot of illegal activity. Lots and lots of pictures of drug use.\u201d He recalled one man who had 15 pages of photos showing himself with various guns, including an assault rifle. Another man included pictures of himself standing in a greenhouse with large marijuana plants. Given complex \u201cterms of service\u201d agreements on most sites and Web applications, Mr. Rotenberg said people do not always realize that comments or content they generate are publicly available. \u201cPeople are led to believe that there is more limited disclosure than there actually is, in many cases,\u201d he said, pointing out that Facebook\u2019s frequent changes to its privacy settings in recent years may have put some people at risk in getting a job now because of personal information they might have inadvertently made public. \u201cWhat Facebook was doing was taking people\u2019s personal information that they made available to family and friends and make that information available more widely to prospective employers,\u201d said Mr. Rotenberg, whose organization has several pending complaints at the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook\u2019s privacy settings. Joe Bontke, outreach manager for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission \u2019s office in Houston , said that he regularly reminds employers and human resource managers about the risks of violating federal antidiscrimination employment rules and laws by using online research in hiring decisions. \u201cThings that you can\u2019t ask in an interview are the same things you can\u2019t research,\u201d he said, which includes the gamut of information covering a person\u2019s age, gender, religion, disability, national origin and race. That said, he added that 75 percent of recruiters are required by their companies to do online research of candidates. And 70 percent of recruiters in the United States report that they have rejected candidates because of information online, he said. Dave Clark, president of Impulse Advanced Communications, a telecommunications company in Southern California , began relying on Social Intelligence for background screening because he said the company needed a formal strategy and standards before assembling online information about job candidates. \u201cThey provided us with a standardized, arm\u2019s-length way of using this additional information to make better hiring decisions,\u201d he said. About half of all companies, based on government and private surveys, now use credit reports as part of the hiring process, except in those states that limit or restrict their use. As with social media background checks, there are concerns about information that is surfaced. The equal employment agency filed a lawsuit last December against the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, accusing it of discriminating against black job applicants in the way it used credit histories in its hiring process. But it is not unusual for senior-level executives in many companies to undergo even more complete background checks by a private investigating firm. \u201cWe are living in a world where you have an amazing amount of information and data on every executive,\u201d said Ann Blinkhorn , an executive recruiter in the converging technology, media and communications industry. \u201cI think that puts the burden on the recruiter and the hiring manager to be really thoughtful about what is important and not important when making the hiring decision.\u201d", "keyword": "Job Recruiting and Hiring;null;Privacy;Startup"}
{"id": "ny0163586", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2006/02/23", "title": "Nets Honor Their Past by Ignoring Defense", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Feb. 22 - The Nets honored Julius Erving, the greatest player in franchise history, on his 56th birthday Wednesday night by wearing throwback uniforms from his glory days in the long-defunct American Basketball Association. As if in tribute, the Nets turned in a first-half performance at Continental Arena befitting the run-and-gun A.B.A., which was never known for its defense, then rallied from a 13-point deficit in the second half for a 96-93 victory over the Orlando Magic. A night after coming back from a 16-point second-quarter deficit to win in Milwaukee, the Nets allowed the undermanned Magic to shoot a sizzling 67.6 percent from the floor in the first half -- the highest first-half percentage against the Nets this season. The Magic led by 10 points at halftime and 13 early in the third quarter before the Nets' Jason Kidd took things into his own hands. Kidd, who scored 7 points in the final 2 minutes 29 seconds (including 5 straight to break an 85-85 tie), finished with a game-high 28 points and added 11 assists and 7 rebounds. The Nets (30-23), who received 23 points from Richard Jefferson and 22 points from Vince Carter, sent the reeling Magic (19-34) to its eighth consecutive defeat. Orlando's Carlos Arroyo missed a 3-pointer with 3 seconds left that would have sent the game into overtime. \"Vince might have been a little tired because we put so much weight on him last night,\" Kidd said of Carter, who scored 45 points Tuesday against the Bucks. \"I don't want him to feel he has to do it every night. Vince was getting so much attention that other guys had to step up.\" The Magic was playing just hours after trading guard Steve Francis to the Knicks for Penny Hardaway and Trevor Ariza. As a result, Orlando, which was also without the oft-injured Grant Hill (abdominal strain), suited just 10 players. Before the game, Nets Coach Lawrence Frank said he did not know what to expect from the Magic, which had lost 11 of 12 games, or from the Nets, who had won 6 of 8 going into Wednesday' game. \"It all depends on our approach,\" Frank said. \"I think if we're not focused, like anything else, then we're going to be vulnerable to getting beat.\" That was apparent early, as Orlando hit 12 of 19 field-goal attempts in the first quarter (63.2 percent) en route to a 29-25 lead. The Magic, which had come in shooting 45.7 percent from the field, was even hotter in the second quarter, knocking down 11 of 15 (73.3 percent) on its way to a 56-46 lead at the half. \"I think in the first half, we were just going through the motions,\" Kidd said. But as they did in Milwaukee, the Nets rallied in the second half, when Orlando shot just 38.2 percent from the floor (13 for 34). And unlike Tuesday, when Carter scored 38 of the Nets' 55 second-half points, this was more of a team effort, in part because the Magic double- and triple-teamed Carter instead of covering him one on one as the Bucks had. \"That's the beauty of having a three-headed monster,\" Carter said, referring to himself, Kidd and Jefferson. \"Just at any given time, I could do it. I did it last night. J. Kidd did it tonight. It could be R. J. on Friday. Our goal is to make teams figure: who are you going to stop?\" REBOUNDS With less than 24 hours before Thursday's 3 p.m. trading deadline, Nets President Rod Thorn did not sound optimistic about pulling off a deal. \"We've had some conversations,\" Thorn said before the game Wednesday. \"But we're not close to doing anything.\" ... As part of the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Nets' 1975-76 A.B.A. championship, Julius Erving was honored at halftime. Erving was presented with a framed No. 32 jersey signed by the current Nets, a watch and a birthday cake.", "keyword": "ORLANDO MAGIC;NEW JERSEY NETS;ERVING JULIUS;BASKETBALL"}
{"id": "ny0145476", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/10/15", "title": "In Tajikistan, Debt-Ridden Farmers Say They Are the Pawns", "abstract": "SHAARTUZ DISTRICT, Tajikistan \u2014 Farhod, a farmer in this dusty southwestern spit of land pushed up against the Afghan and Uzbek borders, said that he had committed a subversive and potentially punishable act this growing season. He planted watermelons in addition to the usual cotton. Such is the precarious position of growers throughout this impoverished republic of seven million that Farhod refused to be photographed or to give his real name. He fears the authorities will destroy his crop, even though they had assured him that he could plant whatever he wanted this year. \u201cThey press down on us from all sides,\u201d said Farhod, a father of eight, as he looked out on his neatly planted rows of millionaire, shakira and maistros watermelons. Cotton is king in Tajikistan, at least as far as the government is concerned. In fact, say agricultural experts, the regal metaphor is apt: the system is close to feudal. Farmers are shackled to the land \u2014 \u201clike slaves,\u201d one European official says \u2014 and forced to grow cotton through a complex system of debts and obligations. The fact that cotton is often grown to the exclusion of other crops could have catastrophic implications this winter. After a dry summer, Tajikistan and possibly other Central Asian countries are facing severe food shortages, and international aid organizations are girding for a possible crisis. Cotton is at the core of Tajikistan\u2019s economy and, reportedly, corruption. Companies associated with President Emomali Rahmon\u2019s inner circle monopolize the business, diplomats and industry experts say, paying taxes that account for 25 percent of the country\u2019s annual budget. The cozy arrangement contributes to what the International Crisis Group, a private research organization, called in a 2005 report \u201cpolitical repression, economic stagnation, widespread poverty and environmental degradation.\u201d Cotton growing, the group said, is \u201csimple and exploitative.\u201d For instance, Tajikistan\u2019s and Uzbekistan\u2019s governments have traditionally mobilized tens of thousands of university students and children as young as 10 to pick the harvest by hand, since many men from the work force emigrate to other countries for seasonal work. For Farhod, as for other Tajik farmers, the problems began from his first days as an independent farmer three years ago, when the local collective farm, which dated from the Soviet era, was broken up. He was allotted, but does not own, 40 acres of land and a $5,000 debt carried over automatically from the farm\u2019s arrears. Each year most of his profits go to working off the debt, which was assumed by a cotton trading company. The company maintains a monopoly over all cotton trade in the Shaartuz region and sells Farhod his supplies on credit \u2014 at inflated prices, he said \u2014 and then buys his production at below market prices. Under this system the farmers are perpetually strapped, as they never see any cash. Farhod and others say that what little they earn goes for food and other essentials, but since they have no money in hand, they are forced to buy from the trading company at inflated prices. \u201cThey pay us, but only 14 months later when they sell the cotton,\u201d Farhod said. \u201cEach year the debts get bigger and bigger.\u201d The government works in tandem with the trading companies, say Western experts, who spoke off the record because they need to work with Tajik officials. Until recently, officials enforced an unwritten law requiring farmers to devote 80 percent to 90 percent of their arable land to cotton production. When farmers have tried to grow something else, officials and the companies have claimed breach of contract and plowed the field under, farmers say. Cotton\u2019s significance was underlined early this year when the International Monetary Fund revealed that the Tajik government had secretly diverted its hard currency reserves to use as collateral for $240 million in foreign loans for the cotton trading companies. The scandal broke just as the country was paralyzed last winter by a heat and electricity crisis, which laid bare what many Western experts saw as the Tajik government\u2019s ineptitude and inadequacy. Following a crippling civil war in the 1990s, international donors funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the country, but now are beginning to question this policy. Carlos Pinerua, an International Monetary Fund official formerly responsible for Tajikistan, said in a telephone interview that the bar was set high for the Tajiks to regain the trust of the international multilaterals, which are multinational organizations that finance development. Noting that the Tajiks had lied to the I.M.F. over a 10-year period, he said, \u201cWe will have to look at how to help the country \u2014 they are an I.M.F. member \u2014 but financing will be very hard.\u201d With Tajikistan\u2019s currency reserves now close to zero, the country is highly vulnerable to economic shocks, like the current credit crisis , Western diplomats say. Also complicating the picture is Tajikistan\u2019s endemic governmental dysfunction and corruption. A case in point is the fate of one of the government officials at the heart of the loan scandal, the governor of the central bank, Murodali Alimardon. Far from being fired, Mr. Alimardon was promoted to deputy prime minister, and put in charge of agricultural reforms. This year the Tajik government issued a decree guaranteeing farmers the right to cultivate their land as they see best. Farhod says that he has been planting about 30 acres of the 40 acres in cotton and the rest in other crops. Other farmers say that the cotton quota remains in effect, though slightly lower at 70 percent. But few here place much trust in a decree. \u201cSo far, they\u2019re not against the melons, but we\u2019ll see,\u201d Farhod said.", "keyword": "Tajikistan;Cotton;Agriculture;Farmers;Politics and Government;Economic Conditions and Trends;International Monetary Fund"}
{"id": "ny0155078", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/01/15", "title": "Bomb in Pakistan Market Kills 10 and Wounds 45", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 A powerful bomb hidden underneath a fruit cart detonated among shoppers at a market in the southern port city of Karachi on Monday evening at rush hour, and officials and local news reports said it killed at least 10 people and wounded at least 45, four of them critically. The blast coincided with a visit to Karachi by President Pervez Musharraf. A spokesman for Mr. Musharraf ruled out a connection. \u201cNo symbolism should be read in the blast,\u201d the spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, a retired major general, said in a telephone interview on Monday evening. \u201cIt was in a different part of the city. Nothing to do with the president.\u201d Karachi, the country\u2019s commercial and industrial hub, has a history of sectarian and extremist violence. There were no immediate claims of responsibility. The bomb was planted under a fruit cart, Chief Azhar Farouqi of the Karachi police was quoted as saying by the state-run news media. The bombing was in a crowded industrial neighborhood in northern Karachi. It ripped through a throng of people gathered around fruit stalls during the evening rush hour. Local television news channels showed the wreckage of a motorbike, its mangled parts scattered on the asphalt. Fruit and vegetables splattered with blood were spread about the area. Police officers cordoned off the area after the bombing, and the ensuing panic and chaos caused a traffic jam in parts of the city.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Bombs and Explosives"}
{"id": "ny0203136", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/08/26", "title": "Afghan Bombing Strikes at Foreign Agencies", "abstract": "KANDAHAR, Afghanistan \u2014 A huge bomb detonated on Tuesday night in a part of Kandahar where international aid agencies and United Nations offices are clustered, in an attack assumed to be by the Taliban on foreigners in the country. At least 31 people were killed and 56 wounded in the blast, which shook the entire city just after dusk at 7 p.m., when Afghans were gathered for the festive evening meal that breaks their daily Ramadan fast. Officials said most of the dead and wounded were civilians. The explosion flattened the headquarters of Saita, a Japanese company engaged in reconstruction efforts , destroyed at least 20 homes and set off raging fires. A witness, Muhammad Anwer, said the devastation was immense. \u201cI thought it was doomsday,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw dead men and children lying on the road.\u201d Provincial officials in this southern Afghan city initially said that five car bombs had been involved, but later said the explosion appeared to be from a single truck bomb outside the building used by Saita. Officials said that the attack appeared to be aimed at the company, which employs mostly Pakistani workers. The toll was expected to rise. More people appeared to be trapped in the rubble of the destroyed buildings, and fires burned in dozens of nearby shops. At the Marwais hospital in central Kandahar, injured children lay in hospital beds, some missing limbs. \u201cWe have received 30 bodies,\u201d said Dr. Mohammed Daoud Farhad, the hospital\u2019s director. \u201cMost of them are civilians, including women and children. And still there are more coming.\u201d Kandahar has been relatively quiet over the last several months, and witnesses said that this explosion was the largest in the city in years. There was no initial claim of responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of the Taliban, who have been carrying out attacks of increasing complexity and brutality in Kandahar against Afghan and international forces and those allied with them. The Taliban also mounted a campaign of violence and intimidation against potential voters in Thursday\u2019s presidential election. During the voting in Kandahar, 20 rockets hit the city, many near polling stations, and four people were killed, hospital officials said.", "keyword": "Afghanistan War (2001- );Bombs and Explosives;Kandahar (Afghanistan)"}
{"id": "ny0233284", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2010/08/08", "title": "Freddie, Fannie and the Third Rail of Housing Policy", "abstract": "WHILE Congress toiled on the financial overhaul last spring, precious little was said about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance companies that collapsed spectacularly two years ago. Indeed, these wards of the state got just two mentions in the 1,500-page law known as Dodd-Frank: first, when it ordered the Treasury to produce a study on ending the taxpayer-owned status of the companies and, second, in a \u201csense of the Congress\u201d passage stating that efforts to improve the nation\u2019s mortgage credit system \u201cwould be incomplete without enactment of meaningful structural reforms\u201d of Fannie and Freddie. No kidding. With midterm elections near, though, there will be talk aplenty about dealing with the companies precisely because Dodd-Frank didn\u2019t address them. Unfortunately, if past is prologue, this talk is likely to be more political than practical. Fannie and Freddie amplified the housing boom by buying mortgages from lenders, allowing them to originate even more loans. They grew into behemoths because they lobbied aggressively and played the Washington political game to a T. But after both companies bought boatloads of risky mortgages, they required a federal rescue. The Treasury\u2019s study on Fannie, Freddie and housing finance must be delivered to Congress by the end of January 2011. In a speech last week, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, told a New York audience that resolving the companies isn\u2019t \u201crocket science.\u201d But attaining genuine remedies for our housing finance system could actually be harder than rocket science. That\u2019s because it would require an honest dialogue about the role the federal government should play in housing. It also requires a candid conversation about whether promoting homeownership through tax policy and other federal efforts remains a good idea, given the economic disaster we\u2019ve just lived through. Alas, honest dialogues on third-rail topics like housing have proved to be a bridge too far for many in Washington. So, what we may hear instead about Fannie and Freddie before the elections is a lot of sound and fury signifying a stealthy return to the status quo. This would be unfortunate, not only because the financial crisis presents a rare opportunity to reassess the supposed benefits of homeownership but also because there was a lot not to like about the way these companies operated and the ways their friends in Congress enabled that behavior. Outwardly, Fannie and Freddie wrapped themselves in the American flag and the dream of homeownership. But internally, they were relentless in their pursuit of profits from partners in the mortgage boom. One of their biggest and most steadfast collaborators was Countrywide, the subprime lending machine run by Angelo R. Mozilo. Countrywide was the biggest supplier of loans to Fannie during the mania; in 2004, it sold 26 percent of the loans Fannie bought. Three years later, it was selling 28 percent. What Countrywide got out of the relationship was clear \u2014 a buyer for its dubious loans. Now the taxpayer is on the hook for those losses. But what was in it for Fannie? An internal Fannie document from 2004 obtained by The New York Times sheds light on this question. A \u201cCustomer Engagement Plan\u201d for Countrywide, it shows how assiduously Fannie pursued Mr. Mozilo and 14 of his lieutenants to make sure the company continued to shovel loans its way. Nine bullet points fall under the heading \u201cFannie Mae\u2019s Top Strategic Business Objectives With Lender.\u201d The first: \u201cDeepen relationship at all levels throughout CHL and Fannie Mae to foster alignment and collaboration between our companies at every opportunity.\u201d (CHL refers to Countrywide Home Loans.) No. 2: \u201cCreate barriers to exit partnership.\u201d Next: \u201cDisciplined Risk/Servicing Management\u201d and \u201cAchieve Fannie Mae Profitability Goals.\u201d (Later in 2004, by the way, the Securities and Exchange Commission found that Fannie had used improper accounting and ordered it to restate its earnings for the previous four years. Some $6.3 billion in profit was wiped out.) The engagement plan also recommends ways that Fannie executives should mingle with Countrywide\u2019s top management, because \u201cfostering more direct senior level engagements with key influencers throughout their organization will be beneficial in ensuring strategic alignment and building organizational loyalty.\u201d RECOMMENDATIONS included conferring with Mr. Mozilo at Habitat for Humanity golf tournaments and Mortgage Bankers Association conventions. Franklin D. Raines, then Fannie\u2019s C.E.O., and Daniel H. Mudd, then its chief operating officer, were advised to see Mr. Mozilo twice a year. \u201cWe will be successful when Angelo influences the industry or his organization on our behalf,\u201d the document says. Mr. Raines didn\u2019t respond to e-mails requesting comment last Friday; he left Fannie in December 2004. The memo advised pursuing other Countrywide executives: \u201cDeep Rapport\u201d should be the goal with David E. Sambol, the lender\u2019s president, but because he did not \u201cheavily attend outside events\u201d Fannie executives should \u201clook for opportunities for meetings\u201d at Countrywide headquarters. \u201cWe will be successful if we can foster ongoing communication channels that allow us to understand and leverage Sambol\u2019s priorities and demonstrate our commitment to making him successful,\u201d the memo stated. Mr. Sambol and Mr. Mozilo could not be reached for comment. For his part, Mr. Mudd, now the chief executive of the Fortress Investment Group, said Fannie\u2019s courting of Countrywide was not unusual. \u201cWe tried to build a program that was based on having multiple strong relationships with our main customers,\u201d he said. \u201cYou want to be sure that the first call is not the last call, that a customer is not doing business with you anymore.\u201d But Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he has concerns about such mating dances. \u201cLost in the debate over how best to legislate the aftermath of the financial crisis has been the necessity to conduct an inward examination of the too-cozy relationship between government enterprises and private industry,\u201d Mr. Issa said. \u201cThe true nature of this strategic partnership between Countrywide and Fannie-Freddie should be exposed so we can measure the extent to which it fostered the conditions leading to the financial meltdown.\u201d Understanding how these companies operated is crucial if we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of our recent past. So, when you hear about Fannie and Freddie reform this fall, remember that we still don\u2019t know the half of it.", "keyword": "Reform and Reorganization;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Federal National Mortgage Association;Mortgages;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0079492", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/02/17", "title": "Crossed Legs, Heightened Worries?", "abstract": "Q. Does sitting with one leg crossed over the other lead to circulatory problems? A. \u201cContrary to popular belief,\u201d it does not cause vascular problems, especially varicose or spider veins, said Dr. Darren B. Schneider , chief of vascular and endovascular surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. In fact, Dr. Schneider said, most varicose veins are caused by a problem intrinsic to the veins, characterized by weakening of the vein walls and failure of the valves that control blood flow. Genetics probably has much more do with the development of varicose veins than the sitting position, Dr. Schneider said, adding, \u201cYou\u2019re at greater risk of developing them if other family members also have them.\u201d Anything that increases pressure within the veins combines with the existing vein problem to cause pooling of blood and bulging of the vein walls to form what are called varicosities, he said. Things that lead to chronic elevation of the pressure within the veins in the abdomen and lower extremities can aggravate the condition. \u201cThat\u2019s why pregnancy, obesity and standing for long periods of time are associated with the development of varicose veins,\u201d Dr. Schneider said. Wearing tightfitting clothing or high heels may also make them worse. Exercise can improve the condition, since muscle contractions in the legs help circulation, he said. Finally, it is true that an aneurysm or the placement of arterial stents in the lower legs can mean that sitting with legs bent or crossed for long periods could cause problems, Dr. Schneider warned, so anyone with these conditions should check with a doctor about the risks of crossed legs.", "keyword": "Leg;Varicose veins;Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0115393", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/11/12", "title": "The Techniques Behind the Most-Accurate Polls", "abstract": "As Americans\u2019 modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seem to be changing as well. In Tuesday\u2019s presidential election, a number of polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called land lines only or took other methodological shortcuts, performed poorly, showing a more Republican-leaning electorate than actually turned out. Our method of evaluating pollsters involves looking at all the polls that an organization conducted over the final three weeks of the campaign \u2014 rather than only its very last poll. For each of the two dozen polling firms that issued at least five surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, counting both state and national polls, I have calculated an average error and an average statistical bias. The bias calculation measures the direction, Republican or Democratic, that a firm\u2019s polls tended to miss. The estimate of the average error in the firm\u2019s polls measures how far off the polls were in either direction, on average. Among the more prolific polling firms, the most accurate by the error measure was TIPP, which conducted a national tracking poll for Investors\u2019 Business Daily. Relative to other national polls, its results seemed to be Democratic-leaning at the time they were published. However, it turned out that most polling firms underestimated Mr. Obama\u2019s performance, so those with seemingly Democratic-leaning results were often closest to the final outcome. Among telephone-based polling firms that conducted a significant number of state-by-state surveys, the best results came from CNN, Mellman and Grove Insight. The latter two of these firms conducted most of their polls on behalf of liberal-leaning organizations. Several polling firms got notably poor results. For the second consecutive election \u2014 counting 2010 \u2014 Rasmussen Reports polls had a statistical bias toward Republicans, overestimating Mr. Romney\u2019s performance by about four percentage points, on average. Polls by American Research Group and Mason-Dixon also largely missed the mark. One of the most well-known polling firms, Gallup, had among the worst results. Gallup has now had three poor elections in a row . In 2008, its polls overestimated Mr. Obama\u2019s performance, while in 2010 they overestimated how well Congressional Republicans would do. Some of the most accurate polling firms this year conducted their polls online. The final poll by Google Consumer Surveys had Mr. Obama ahead in the national popular vote by 2.3 percentage points \u2014 very close to his actual margin of 2.6 percentage points, as of Saturday morning. Ipsos, which conducted online polls for Reuters, and the Canadian online polling firm Angus Reid also fared well. Looking more broadly across the 90 polling firms that conducted at least one likely-voter poll in the final three weeks of the campaign, polling firms that conducted their polls wholly or partially online outperformed others on average. Among the nine in that category, the average error in calling the election result was 2.1 percentage points. That compares with a 3.5-point error for polling firms that used live telephone interviewers and 5.0 points for \u201crobopolls,\u201d which conducted their surveys by automated script. The traditional telephone polls had a slight Republican bias on the whole, while the robopolls often had a significant Republican bias. (Even the automated polling firm Public Policy Polling, which often polls for liberal and Democratic clients, projected results that were slightly more favorable for Mr. Romney than he actually achieved.) The online polls had little overall bias, however. The difference between the performance of live telephone polls and the automated polls may partly reflect the fact that many of the live telephone polls call cellphones along with land lines, while few of the automated surveys do. (Legal restrictions prohibit automated calls to cellphones under many circumstances.) Research by polling firms and academic groups suggests that polls that fail to call cellphones may underestimate the performance of Democratic candidates. The roughly one-third of Americans who rely exclusively on cellphones tend to be younger, more urban, less well-off financially and more likely to be black or Hispanic than the broader group of voters, all characteristics that correlate with Democratic voters. In my view, there will always be an important place for high-quality telephone polls, like those conducted by major news organizations, which place calls to cellphones. And there may be an increasing role for online polls, which can have an easier time reaching some of the voters, especially younger Americans, that telephone polls are prone to miss. I am not as certain about the future for automated telephone polls. Polls that place random calls to land lines only, or that try to estimate who will vote based on models that were developed decades ago, may be behind the times. Perhaps it will not be long before Google, not Gallup, is the most trusted name in polling.", "keyword": "Polls and Public Opinion;Presidential Election of 2012;Voting and Voters;Cellular Telephones;Wireless Communications"}
{"id": "ny0059315", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/08/17", "title": "Events in New Jersey for Aug. 17-23, 2014", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events in New Jersey. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to njtowns@nytimes.com. Comedy NEW BRUNSWICK State Theater Terry Fator, ventriloquist. Aug. 26 at 8 p.m. $45 to $85. Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo. Aug. 28 at 8 p.m. $35 to $85. State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue. (732) 246-7469; statetheatrenj.org. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Joan Rivers. Aug. 29 at 8 p.m. $35 to $145. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. (732) 842-9000; countbasietheatre.org. Film ENGLEWOOD Englewood Public Library \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally\u201d (1989), romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner. Aug. 20 at 7:30 p.m. Free. \u201cBlazing Saddles\u201d (1974), comedy directed by Mel Brooks. Aug. 27 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Englewood Public Library, 31 Engle Street. (201) 568-2215; englewoodlibrary.org. HIGHLAND PARK Highland Park Public Library \u201cWadjda\u201d (2012), written and directed by Haifaa al-Mansour. Aug. 19 at 6:30 p.m. Free. Highland Park Public Library, 31 North Fifth Avenue. (732) 572-2750; hpplnj.org. SOUTH ORANGE Meadowland Park Free Movies in the Park: \u201cBack to the Future\u201d (1985), directed by Robert Zemeckis. Aug. 27 at 7:45 p.m. Free. Meadowland Park, North Ridgewood Road. (973) 378-7754; sopacnow.org. For Children BEACH HAVEN Surflight Theater Disney\u2019s \u201cBeauty and the Beast.\u201d Through Aug. 31. $13. Surflight Theater, 201 Engleside Avenue. (609) 492-9477; surflight.org. CAMDEN Adventure Aquarium \u201cHippo Haven,\u201d with Nile hippos, Button and Genny. Continuing. $18.95 and $25.95; children under 2, free. Adventure Aquarium, 1 Riverside Drive. (856) 365-3300; adventureaquarium.com. SOUTH ORANGE Meadowland Park \u201cFrozen\u201d (2013), animated film. Aug. 20 at 7:45 p.m. Free. Meadowland Park, North Ridgewood Road. (973) 313-2787; sopacnow.org WEST ORANGE Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center \u201cThe Incredibles\u201d (2004), animated superhero film written and directed by Brad Bird. Aug. 19 at 7:30 p.m. Free. \u201cDespicable Me 2,\u201d animated film. Aug. 26 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center, 4 Boland Drive. (973) 669-7385; ospac.org. Music and Dance ASBURY PARK Wonder Bar Billy Hector Birthday Bash, with the Billy Hector band and the Midnite Horns. Aug. 30 at 9 p.m. $15. Wonder Bar, Ocean and Fifth Avenues. wonderbarasburypark.com; (732) 502-8886. BYRAM The Salt Stage Albert Lee, guitarist. Aug. 19 at 8:15 p.m. $27. The Salt Stage , 109 Highway 206. (973) 347-7258; saltgastropub.com. EAST RUTHERFORD Izod Center Austin Mahone, pop singer-songwriter. Aug. 20 at 7 p.m. $40.35 to $76.60. Izod Center, 50 Route 120. izodcenter.com; (201) 935-3900. EAST RUTHERFORD MetLife Stadium The Monster Tour: Eminem and Rihanna. Aug. 17 at 7:30 p.m. $83.80 to $282.15. MetLife Stadium, 1 MetLife Stadium Drive. (201) 559-1500; metlifestadium.com. ENGLEWOOD Bergen Performing Arts Center Christopher Cross, singer-songwriter. Aug. 20 at 8 p.m. $45.45 to $88.65. Deep Purple, rock band. Aug. 25 at 7:30 p.m. $50.30 to $193.50. Bergen Performing Arts Center, 30 North Van Brunt Street. (201) 227-1030; bergenpac.org. HOLMDEL PNC Bank Arts Center Brad Paisley: Nation World Tour, with Randy Houser, Leah Turner and Charlie Worsham. Aug. 22 at 7 p.m. $42.60 to $108.05. Drake vs Lil Wayne, Hip-hop concert. Aug. 26 at 7 p.m. $53.25 to $171.50. PNC Bank Arts Center, Garden State Parkway, Exit 116. (732) 203-2500; livenation.com. MADISON Shanghai Jazz Restaurant and Bar Freddy Cole Quartet, performing the music of Freddy Cole, Nat King Cole and beyond. Aug. 22 and 23 at 6:30 and 8:40 p.m. $59 and $69. Shanghai Jazz Restaurant and Bar, 24 Main Street. (973) 822-2899; shanghaijazz.com. MONTCLAIR Wellmont Theater Elvis Tribute Artist Spectacular. Aug. 22 at 7 p.m. $30.25 to $79.25. Get The Led Out: The American Led Zeppelin. Aug. 23 at 7 p.m. $29 and $42. Wellmont Theater, 5 Seymour Street. thewellmonttheater.com; (973) 783-9500. MORRISTOWN Mayo Performing Arts Center Deep Purple, rock. Aug. 24 at 8 p.m. $69 to $159. Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street. (973) 539-8008; mayoarts.org. MORRISTOWN The Minstrel, Morristown Unitarian Fellowship Christine DeLeon, folk, with Mike Del Vecchio. Aug. 22, 8 to 11 p.m. $9; 12 and under, free. The Minstrel, Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, 21 Normandy Heights Road. (973) 335-9489; folkproject.org. NEW BRUNSWICK Boyd Park \u201cHub City Sounds Summer Series,\u201d with performing artists at several locations, including Boyd Park, State Theater and Crossroads Theater. Through Sept. 27. Free. Boyd Park, Route 18. newbrunswickarts.org; (732) 729-0320. Image PRINCETON A highlighted map detail from Pieter van der Aa\u2019s \u201cNouvelle Hollande\u201d (1729) is in \u201cNova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888,\u201d an exhibition at the Firestone Library at Princeton University, 1 Washington Road, through Jan. 25. For information: (609) 258-1470; library.princeton.edu . Credit Historic Maps Collection, Princeton University NEWARK New Jersey Performing Arts Center Horizon Foundation Sounds of the City: Living Colour, rock. Aug. 21 at 5 p.m. Free. New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. (888) 466-5722; njpac.org. NEWARK Prudential Hall, New Jersey Performing Arts Center Beres Hammond, featuring Chaka Demus and Pliers, reggae. Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. $59 to $119. Prudential Hall, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. (888) 466-5722; njpac.org. OCEAN GROVE Ocean Grove Great Auditorium Johnny Mathis. Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. $50 to $65. Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, 21 Pilgrim Pathway. (800) 590-4064; oceangrove.org. PRINCETON Paul Robeson Center for the Arts \u201cCafe Improv,\u201d music, poetry, and comedy. Aug. 23 at 7 p.m. $1 and $2. Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, 102 Witherspoon Street. artscouncilofprinceton.org; (609) 924-8777. RAHWAY Union County Performing Arts Center Southside Johnny and the Poor Fools. Aug. 21 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Amy Helm, singer-songwriter. Aug. 28 at 7:30 p.m. Free. Union County Performing Arts Center, 1601 Irving Street. (732) 499-8226; ucpac.org. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. Aug. 19 at 8 p.m. $30 to $99.50. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. (732) 842-9000; countbasietheatre.org. SUMMIT Reeves-Reed Arboretum \u201cReggae Rocks Reeves-Reed Arboretum,\u201d Massive Reggae Band. Aug. 20 at 7 p.m. $5 and $10 donation for non-members; Free for members. Reeves-Reed Arboretum, 165 Hobart Ave. (908) 273-8787; reeves-reedarboretum.org. WEEHAWKEN Lincoln Harbor Park Lisa Fischer, R&B, and Grand Baton. Aug. 27 at 7 p.m. Free. Lincoln Harbor Park, 1500 Harbor Boulevard. hrpac.org; (201) 430-6881. Theater BEACH HAVEN Surflight Theater \u201cMonty Python\u2019s Spamalot,\u201d musical by Eric Idle and John Du Prez. Through Aug. 24. $45. Surflight Theater, 201 Engleside Avenue. (609) 492-9477; surflight.org. CAPE MAY Cape May Stage, the Robert Shackleton Playhouse \u201cBlithe Spirit,\u201d comedy by No\u00ebl Coward. Through Sept. 19. $15 to $35. Cape May Stage, the Robert Shackleton Playhouse, 405 Lafayette Street. capemaystage.com; (609) 770-8311. CAPE MAY East Lynne Theater Company \u201cZorro!,\u201d action drama adapted by James Rana. Through Aug. 30. $15 to $30. East Lynne Theater Company, 500 Hughes Street. (609) 884-5898; eastlynnetheater.org. HACKENSACK Hackensack Cultural Arts Center \u201cLost in Yonkers,\u201d comedy-drama by Neil Simon. Through Aug. 17. $10 to $15. Hackensack Cultural Arts Center, 39 Broadway. (201) 692-0200; go-tnt.org. HAMMONTON Eagle Theater \u201cI Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett,\u201d singers and a jazz quartet. Through Aug. 23. $30 and $40. Eagle Theater, 208 Vine Street. (609) 704-5012; theeagletheatre.com. JERSEY CITY Merseles Studios \u201cSo What If I Loved You,\u201d a multimedia one-woman show by Summer Dawn Hortillosa. Aug. 21 through 24. $12 and $15. Merseles Studios, 339-345 Newark Avenue. sowhatifilovedyou.com; (917) 239-8865. MANASQUAN Algonquin Arts Center \u201cGlory Crampton: From Broadway to Abbey Road.\u201d Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. $22 to $41. Algonquin Arts Center, 173 Main Street. (732) 528-9211; algonquinarts.com. METUCHEN Dragonfly Multicultural Arts Center, Old Franklin Schoolhouse \u201cThe Coarse Acting Show,\u201d three one-act spoofs of classic plays. Aug. 22 and 23. $15 to $20. Dragonfly Multicultural Arts Center, Old Franklin Schoolhouse, 491 Middlesex Avenue. (908) 930-3210; dragonflyartsnj.com. NEWARK Prudential Center Cirque du Soleil Varekai. Aug. 27 through 31. $54.30 to $170.50. Prudential Center, 25 Lafayette Street. prucenter.com; (973) 757-6000. RED BANK Two River Theater \u201c2014 Crossing Borders Festival,\u201d new plays by Latino writers. Through Aug. 17. Free. Two River Theater, 21 Bridge Avenue. (732) 345-1400; trtc.org. SUMMIT Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater at Oakes Center A reading of \u201cGrounded,\u201d by George Brandt, with the actress Harriett Trangucci. Aug. 27 at 8 p.m. $20. Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater at Oakes Center, 120 Morris Avenue. dreamcatcherrep.org; (908) 514-9654. Museums and Galleries BERNARDSVILLE Bernardsville Public Library \u201cSomething\u2019s In My Eye,\u201d photography by Arthur Krasinsky. Aug. 30 through Sept. 30. Bernardsville Public Library, 1 Anderson Hill Road. bernardsvillelibrary.org; (908) 766-0118. CAPE MAY Cape May Artists\u2019 Cooperative Gallery Works in wood along with pastels of southern New Jersey locations by Michael Terenik. Through Aug. 31. Daily, 10.m. to 6 p.m. Cape May Artists\u2019 Cooperative Gallery, 122 Sunset Boulevard. (609) 435-5253; capemayartistcoop.com. CLINTON Hunterdon Art Museum \u201cSwept Away: Translucence, Transparence, Transcendence in Contemporary Encaustic.\u201d Through Sept. 7. \u201cArtist Founders of the Hunterdon Art Museum.\u201d Through Sept. 7. \u201cDarren McManus: Tangents,\u201d 3-D paintings. Through Sept. 7. \u201cSky Pape: Traces of Places,\u201d unconventional uses of traditional drawing materials. Through Sept. 7. Suggested donation, $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street. (908) 735-8415; hunterdonartmuseum.org. HOBOKEN Hoboken Historical Museum \u201cHoboken, Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience, 1892-1924.\u201d Through Dec. 23. $2; members, free. \u201cArtworks by Tracie Fracasso,\u201d multimedia compositions. Through Sept. 14. $2. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 2 to 7 p.m.; Fridays, 1 to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Hoboken Historical Museum, 1301 Hudson Street. (201) 656-2240; hobokenmuseum.org. Image OCEAN GROVE Johnny Mathis is scheduled to sing at the Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, 21 Pilgrim Pathway, on Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $50 to $65. Information: (800) 590-4064; oceangrove.org . Credit Jeff Dunas HOBOKEN Monroe Art Center \u201cAbstracting Nature,\u201d expressionist artwork by Alberte Bernier and Olga Guerra. Through Sept. 7. Monroe Art Center, 720 Monroe Street. (201) 319-1504; hob-art.org. LAMBERTVILLE The Artists\u2019 Gallery \u201cOil & Water,\u201d recent watercolors and oil paintings by Charles David Viera and Eric Rhinehart. Through Sept. 1. Thursdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; evening hours until 9 p.m. on Saturdays in August. The Artists\u2019 Gallery, 18 Bridge Street. (609) 397-4588; lambertvillearts.com. MADISON Museum of Early Trades and Crafts \u201cThe American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Homefront.\u201d Through Feb. 13. $3 to $13; members, free. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, 9 Main Street. metc.org; (973) 377-2982. MAHWAH Mahwah Museum The Old Station Museum and Caboose. Through Sept. 14. $3 to $5; members and children under 5, free. Sundays, 2 to 4 p.m. Mahwah Museum, 201 Franklin Turnpike. (201) 512-0099; mahwahmuseum.org. MONTCLAIR BrassWorks on Grove \u201cLooking Back, Looking Forward: Expressive Colorful Abstractions by R M Cimini.\u201d Through Sept. 19. BrassWorks Gallery, 105 Grove Street. (973) 744-5100; brassworksongrove.com. MORRISTOWN Gallery at 14 Maple \u201cCapturing Nature,\u201d paintings by Natalia Margulis and Joseph Losavio. Through Aug. 27. Mondays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; and by appointment. Gallery at 14 Maple, 14 Maple Avenue. morrisarts.org; (973) 285-5115. MORRISTOWN Macculloch Hall Historical Museum \u201cThomas Nast Brings Down Boss Tweed,\u201d political cartoons. Through Aug. 17. \u201cMade in New Jersey: A Celebration of Decorative and Fine Arts.\u201d Through Oct. 1. $8; seniors and students, $6; children ages 6 to 12, $4; children 5 and under, free. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, 45 Macculloch Avenue. maccullochhall.org; (973) 538-2404. MORRISTOWN Morris Museum \u201cLegacy in Clay: Contemporary American Indian Pottery.\u201d Through Sept. 28. \u201cIndustrial Photography by Laurie Ann Orlovsky.\u201d Through Sept. 14. $7 to $10. \u201cPortrait of an Athlete: Special Olympics of New Jersey & United States Paralympics,\u201d photographs by Pete Byron. Through Nov. 16. $7 to $10. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road. (973) 971-3700; morrismuseum.org. MORRISTOWN Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth \u201cCompiled and Composed: Sculptural Formations,\u201d 3-D pieces by 15 contemporary artists of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Through Sept. 14. Tuesdays through Sundays, 5 to 8 p.m., or by appointment. Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road. (973) 290-4315; maloneyartgallery.org. NEW BRUNSWICK Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum \u201cOdessa\u2019s Second Avant-Garde: City and Myth,\u201d trends in art from the 1960s to the \u201980s. Through Oct. 19. \u201cBugs & Frogs & Toads! Oh My!\u201d Children\u2019s book illustrations by Nancy Winslow Parker. Through June 2015. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street. zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu; (848) 932-7237. NEW BRUNSWICK Museum of American Hungarian Foundation \u201cEva Zeisel: Life, Design and Beauty,\u201d modern industrial design. Through Sept. 30. \u201c40th Anniversary of Rubik\u2019s Cube,\u201d a selection from the Rubik\u2019s Cube collection of Andre Farkas. Through Jan. 31. $5. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Museum of American Hungarian Foundation, 300 Somerset Street. ahfoundation.org; (732) 846-5777. NEW BRUNSWICK Rutgers University, Douglass Library \u201cMomentum: Women/Art/Technology,\u201d works by Grimanesa Amor\u00f3s, current artist-in-residence. Through Nov. 7. Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m. to midnight; Fridays, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays, noon to midnight. Rutgers University, Douglass Library, 8 Chapel Drive. (732) 932-3726; iwa.rutgers.edu. NEWARK The Newark Museum \u201cReady or Not,\u201d works by 40 New Jersey artists. Through Sept. 7. \u201cCity of Silver and Gold From Tiffany to Cartier.\u201d Through 2015. \u201cGone Fishin\u2019: Aquatic Imagery in Asian Art,\u201d folding screens, hanging scrolls, ceramics and sculpture. Through March 1. $7 and $12; members, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. The Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street. newarkmuseum.org; (973) 596-6550. OCEAN CITY Ocean City Arts Center Oil paintings by Heather Lynn Gibson. Through Aug. 31. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Ocean City Arts Center, 1735 Simpson Avenue. oceancityartscenter.org; (609) 399-7628. PATERSON Lambert Castle \u201cPancakes, Patties and Pies: The History of the Silk City Diner Company of Paterson.\u201d Through Oct. 6. Admission, $3 to $5. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Lambert Castle, 3 Valley Road. (973) 247-0085 ext. 201; lambertcastle.org. PRINCETON Morven Museum and Garden \u201cMicah Williams: Portrait Artist.\u201d Through Sept. 14. $5 and $6. Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Morven Museum and Garden, 55 Stockton Street. (609) 924-8144; morven.org. PRINCETON Princeton University Art Museum \u201cLee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds,\u201d retrospective exhibition of drawings. Through Sept. 21. \u201cRothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting From the Collection of Preston H. Haskell.\u201d Through Oct. 5. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Princeton University campus. artmuseum.princeton.edu; (609) 258-3788. PRINCETON Princeton University Library \u201cNova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888,\u201d an exhibition featuring first wall maps and atlases of a number of New Jersey counties at the Main Gallery of Firestone Library and Museum. Through Jan. 25. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, Noon to 5 p.m. Princeton University Library, 1 Washington Road. (609) 258-1470; library.princeton.edu . RED BANK Oyster Point Hotel New Art Exhibition. Through Aug. 31. Oyster Point Hotel, 146 Bodman Place. (732) 530-8200; theoysterpointhotel.com. SHREWSBURY Guild of Creative Art \u201cShrewsbury and Surrounding Area,\u201d multimedia artwork by guild exhibiting members. Through Aug. 20. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Guild of Creative Art, 620 Broad Street. (732) 741-1441; guildofcreativeart.org. SOUTH ORANGE South Orange Performing Arts Center \u201cA Conversation,\u201d paintings, drawings and constructs by Ann Vollum and Russell Christian. Through Sept. 18. South Orange Performing Arts Center, 1 Sopac Way. (973) 313-2787; sopacnow.org. TRENTON Artworks Trenton \u201cHUN-ted,\u201d Endre Kis. Through Aug. 30. Artworks Trenton, 19 Everett Alley. (609) 394-9436; artworkstrenton.org. TRENTON New Jersey State Museum \u201cNano,\u201d interactive exhibition of nanoscience. Through Aug. 17. \u201cAljira at 30: Dream and Reality,\u201d examining the role the Aljira art center has played in the state and the region. Through Sept. 28. Suggested admission, $5. \u201cDrawn to Dinosaurs: Hadrosaurus Foulkii,\u201d with a 25-foot cast of a dinosaur and a life-size illustration. Through Dec. 31. \u201c New Jersey on Display: World\u2019s Fairs and the Garden State,\u201d stories of pioneering entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison who promoted their products at world\u2019s fairs. Through Jan. 4. Suggested admission, $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street. statemuseum.nj.gov; (609) 292-6464.", "keyword": "New Jersey;The arts"}
{"id": "ny0171225", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/18", "title": "Sergeant Fled Army, but Not the War in His Head", "abstract": "EAST ORANGE, N.J., Nov. 15 \u2014 The psychotherapist remembers the strapping young soldier, slouched in a chair in her office one morning last month, asking if God could be punishing him because he had once thought it would be exciting to fight in a war. By then, the soldier, Sgt. Brad Gaskins, had been absent without leave for 14 months from his post at Fort Drum in northern New York State, waging a lonely battle against an enemy inside his head \u2014 memories of death and destruction that he said had besieged him since February 2006, when he returned from a second tour of combat in Iraq . \u201cI asked Sergeant Gaskins whether he thought about death,\u201d the psychotherapist, Rosemary Masters, said in an interview on Thursday. \u201cHe said that death seemed like a good alternative to the way he was existing.\u201d On Tuesday, Sergeant Gaskins, 25, traveled almost 300 miles from his home here to the Different Drummer Internet Cafe near Fort Drum. He planned to surrender to military authorities, and his lawyer had notified commanders at the base. But before he could turn himself in, two officials from Fort Drum, accompanied by a pair of police officers from Watertown, showed up at the cafe and placed him under arrest. Sergeant Gaskins has been hospitalized for his psychiatric problems and could be discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He could be court-martialed, which could land him in prison and prevent him from receiving veterans\u2019 benefits. \u201cI just put faith in God that everything is going to work out according to his plan,\u201d he said during a telephone interview on Thursday from a veterans\u2019 hospital in Syracuse, where he was taken after his arrest. (On Friday, he was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, said Benjamin Abel, a civilian spokesman at Fort Drum.) \u201cI just want it all to go away, and I want to get my life back,\u201d Sergeant Gaskins said. He had always spoken with pride about his military service, his relatives said. He enlisted in the Army at 17, while still a senior at Orange High School, where he was starting quarterback for the Orange Tornadoes. He used to wear his olive-green dress uniform, lock arms with his paternal grandmother, Bernice Murray, and strut inside New Hope Baptist Church in Newark for Sunday services. \u201cHe joined the military because he wanted to improve his life, to have a career,\u201d said Mrs. Murray. \u201cHe wanted to help his family and to serve his country, and we were all supportive.\u201d No one knows for sure when Sergeant Gaskins\u2019s troubles started. He is, by all accounts, tough and reserved, and he said that he was reluctant to share his emotional distress because he feared his superiors would label him as weak \u2014 or, worse, as crazy. But after he returned home on leave in August 2006 and decided he would not go back to Fort Drum, his relatives began to notice signs that something was seriously wrong. He started biting his nails compulsively, a new habit, one of his aunts said. He slept little, and often woke up screaming and drenched in sweat. He became reclusive, locking himself in a darkened room at his grandmother\u2019s apartment in Newark whenever her friends stopped by. His legs trembled as he watched images from Iraq on television. He yelled at his 2-year-old son for no apparent reason, his wife, Amber Gaskins, said. And once, she said, he placed a knife at her throat, as if he did not know who she was. Even before Sergeant Gaskins came home, there were hints of distress. In a letter from Iraq in September 2005 to Sonia Murray, an aunt who helped raise him, Sergeant Gaskins asked, \u201cWill God forgive me for the people I\u2019ve killed?\u201d Sergeant Gaskins, who first went to Iraq in 2003, transferred to Fort Drum, home of the Army\u2019s 10th Mountain Division, after his second deployment, and he said he sought help at the base for his problems. He stayed for two weeks at a psychiatric ward at Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, and was prescribed a cocktail of drugs \u2014 Zoloft and trazodone for depression, and Ambien to help him sleep. But he said he received no psychotherapy or follow-up care. He was discharged from Samaritan and returned to the base, but he said the nightmares and flashbacks about Iraq would not go away. At Fort Drum, the tanks, marching soldiers and gunfire became too much to bear. So when he came home on a two-week leave in August 2006, he decided not to go back. Ms. Masters, the Manhattan psychotherapist who evaluated Sergeant Gaskins on Oct. 18, said his symptoms were consistent with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression. The sergeant said he did not receive a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Watertown hospital, and the Army would not discuss his medical history. An Army report released on Tuesday found that soldiers suffer more mental distress in the transition to life at home than they show upon leaving Iraq. The report also estimated that one in five active duty soldiers and as many as 40 percent of reservists are in need of treatment. The Army has said that it employs about 200 mental health workers in the field. There are 31 mental health workers at Fort Drum, and there are plans to add 17 more, Mr. Abel said. The base is home to 17,000 troops. For years, researchers have debated the definition and extent of post-traumatic stress. Many of the experts believe that the frequency of the disorder reported among Vietnam veterans has been inflated. \u201cI don\u2019t know what Brad had when he came home,\u201d Mrs. Gaskins said. \u201cAll I know is that he had changed. I didn\u2019t recognize it; nobody recognized it as post-traumatic stress disorder. He just needed help.\u201d Sergeant Gaskins and his wife had been classmates since the seventh grade, she said, but it was not until their senior year in high school, after she asked him to be her date at a Sadie Hawkins dance, that they started dating. After graduation, she went to college and he joined the military. They married at Fort Stewart, Ga., on May 9, 2002. Sergeant Gaskins went to Iraq as a member of the Third Infantry Division. At the end of his first tour, he re-enlisted and transferred to Fort Irwin, Calif., where he was deployed again to Iraq, this time with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. His son, Brandon, was just a month old when Sergeant Gaskins left. \u201cThe first time, he was excited,\u201d said Mrs. Gaskins, 25. \u201cHe\u2019d say, \u2018I swear, baby, I\u2019m going to fight hard and get a medal.\u2019 But when he came back after the second time, I asked him how it was, and he told me he didn\u2019t want to ever talk about it, so I didn\u2019t ask anymore.\u201d Last year, after Sergeant Gaskins decided not to return to duty, he sought work in construction and at a warehouse, but could not hold jobs for long, Mrs. Gaskins said. One night, she said, she woke up to find her husband holding a kitchen knife against her throat. She soothed him, and eventually he let go of the knife, but she was scared. She said that she called Fort Drum, and that a victim\u2019s advocate at the base advised her to contact the police and get a restraining order against her husband. She acted on the advice that same day. Sergeant Gaskins was arrested and spent almost two weeks in the Essex County jail, until his grandmother cobbled together $3,000 for his bail. He went to live with a cousin and then disappeared for several months. \u201cHe went into hiding,\u201d said Sonia Murray, his aunt. \u201cNo one really knows where he was or what he did.\u201d In September, Sergeant Gaskins called his aunt and asked her for help. \u201cHe reached a breaking point,\u201d she said. Sergeant Gaskins started going to church again, and he also approached Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, a veterans\u2019 advocacy group, for advice. Mr. Ensign persuaded him to see Ms. Masters for a psychological evaluation and encouraged him to turn himself in. \u201cI\u2019m not a deserter. I\u2019ve served my country, but now I need help,\u201d Sergeant Gaskins said on Thursday. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the Army is going to do to me. I\u2019m just hoping to get treated, to get better, to be back to who I was before the war.\u201d", "keyword": "Mental Health and Disorders;United States Armament and Defense;Fort Drum (NY);Iraq"}
{"id": "ny0111656", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/02/17", "title": "Injunction a Reprieve for Churches Worshiping in Schools", "abstract": "Days before the city was to close public schools to religious groups that have been holding services there, a federal judge issued a ruling on Thursday that reopened the schools for worship, caught city officials off guard, and could set the stage for years of legal battles. The judge, Loretta A. Preska , issued a terse temporary order that provided no explanation but directed the city not to proceed with its plan to eject dozens of churches and religious organizations this weekend. The decision was greeted with elation by some of the churches that had been pressing the Legislature to intervene, and with dismay by city officials, who said they immediately filed an appeal as they seek to press the argument of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that the Constitution requires strict separation of church and state. Legal experts said the case demonstrated the difficulties of balancing religious-expression protections against the principle that government cannot endorse specific religions. In her three-page ruling, Judge Preska, of United States District Court in Manhattan, recited the tangled history of the case. Then she simply said the evangelical congregation that had been fighting its case for 16 years, the Bronx Household of Faith, had \u201ca likelihood of success\u201d on its claim that the Constitution required the schools to be open to them. Judge Preska \u2014 whose injunction against the same prohibition of worship in schools 16 years ago began the litigation \u2014 said that her injunction would last 10 days. She could then make the order more permanent. The city\u2019s legal department called the injunction a \u201clast-minute decision\u201d and noted that in a June ruling , the federal appeals court in Manhattan had \u201cagreed with the city that worship in schools raised legitimate concerns about First Amendment violations.\u201d The Supreme Court declined to review the case in December, leaving the appeals court ruling in place. But Jordan W. Lorence, the lawyer for the Bronx Household of Faith, said the appeals court\u2019s June decision, which rejected the church\u2019s free-speech claims, did not resolve all the church\u2019s arguments. He said that the constitutional provisions protecting free exercise of religion and barring the establishment of religion provided additional legal grounds for allowing services in school buildings. \u201cThey can\u2019t step in and determine what is acceptable worship and what is not,\u201d Mr. Lorence said. Mr. Lorence also argued that a widely noted Supreme Court decision in a different case last month opened broad new areas of religious protection. In that case, the justices said there was a \u201cministerial exception\u201d that permitted a church to fire a teacher who had filed an employment discrimination suit. The case was seen as giving churches wide legal latitude. Around the city, groups that have been meeting in schools said the injunction was a reprieve that offered them new hope. \u201cThis is a meaningful victory,\u201d said Jeremy Del Rio, a minister at Abounding Grace Ministries. He said the congregation\u2019s leaders would intensify their lobbying on behalf of a bill to reverse the city\u2019s no-church rule. Some experts on religious-expression law said they had been surprised that the Supreme Court last year had declined to review the appeals court ruling, and that a new round in the case could draw wide interest. But some experts said they were perplexed by Judge Preska\u2019s ruling. Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo Law School, said the Supreme Court\u2019s \u201cministerial exception\u201d decision did not seem to provide new arguments concerning the use of public buildings for regular church services. \u201cThe question here,\u201d she said, \u201cis whether a school building can be transformed into a church every week.\u201d Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University, said, \u201cThey\u2019ve already litigated this out to the end.\u201d", "keyword": "Preska Loretta A;New York City;Religion-State Relations;Education (K-12);Decisions and Verdicts;Education Department (NYC);Bloomberg Michael R"}
{"id": "ny0144226", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/10/17", "title": "Tishman Speyer to Build Tower for Health Department in Long Island City", "abstract": "The Bloomberg administration and Tishman Speyer Properties have struck a deal to move the city\u2019s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and 2,700 of its employees to a planned $316 million office building in Long Island City, the first phase of a large-scale project designed to bolster a nascent business district in Queens. The project, called Gotham Center, has been in the planning stages for more than three years. It is near Queens Plaza, at 28th Street and Thomson Avenue, where a six-story municipal garage now sits. Work has begun on demolishing that garage, widely considered to be an eyesore. Tishman Speyer completed the financing for the 21-story building last week and signed a lease with the health department. \u201cI\u2019m so pleased we finally got here,\u201d said Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber. \u201cI think this is going to be huge for Long Island City. Hopefully, it will bring a vibrancy and more people to the area and catalyze the development\u201d of more retail and service businesses. The city has wanted to create an office district in Long Island City for companies unwilling to pay higher Midtown Manhattan rents. It is using government offices to anchor the project with the hope that private companies will follow. The move would also be enable the health department to consolidate some of its operations in more modern space, officials said. Citigroup built a 48-story tower nearby in the 1980s, and a second, smaller tower was recently completed across the street. But Long Island City has not quite caught on as an alternate commercial district. The new building would be the first step in Tishman Speyer\u2019s plan for 3.5 million square feet of housing, office and retail space. The Modell sporting goods family, which had owned some of the land, is a partner. The Bloomberg administration has been eager to promote new development projects, especially now that the economy has slowed after a long boom and developers are finding it almost impossible to get financing, delaying a number of projects. Tishman Speyer obtained financing from Wells Fargo for the Long Island City building, which will be occupied solely by the health department under a 20-year lease. The city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., said on Thursday that two municipal pension funds were also investing a total of $18.6 million as part of an ongoing agreement with Tishman Speyer to back some of Tishman\u2019s New York projects. He said the deal had benefited the city and the pension funds. \u201cWe applaud the city\u2019s commitment to development, especially in this environment,\u201d said Rob Speyer, co-chief executive of Tishman Speyer.", "keyword": "Health and Mental Hygiene Department (NYC);Relocation of Business;Long Island City (Queens);Queens (NYC);Tishman Speyer Properties"}
{"id": "ny0086795", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/07/09", "title": "An Offline N.Y.S.E. Makes Barely a Ripple in a Day\u2019s Trading", "abstract": "Investors who wanted to buy and sell shares of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, such as I.B.M. or Target, were still able to do so with ease on Wednesday. In years past, a shutdown of the N.Y.S.E. might have stopped Wall Street dead in its tracks, with a broad range of companies\u2019 shares sitting frozen until all technical problems were unwound. But as the lengthy stoppage on Wednesday showed, the modern world of stock trading is much quicker, more complex and reliant on sophisticated computers \u2014 and in many cases able to adapt to issues that could have proved disastrous to the financial markets and the investors\u2019 holdings. Now, an immense amount of trading takes place on so-called off-exchange venues, including the private stock trading platforms known as \u201cdark pools\u201d that let investors buy and sell shares without tipping their hands to the broader markets. Those alternative markets have multiplied as big investment banks like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have waded into the business. Dark pools now make up roughly 40 percent of all stock trading volume, having drawn away huge volumes from traditional stock markets. That means that customers can still find plenty of other alternative venues to do business. Such complexity has drawn criticism from analysts and investors who have complained that fragmentation of the stock market world has made the business much more fragile and has provided opportunities for so-called high-frequency trading firms that can execute trades in milliseconds. Yet, that splintering has also provided investors with something of a safety net against many problems. The diversification of trading has been blamed for an array of problems that have bedeviled the markets over the years. But analysts say that spider web of systems has also made issues like the N.Y.S.E.\u2019s less catastrophic than they once might have been. \u201cIt\u2019s much more complicated, but much more robust,\u201d said Larry Tabb, the founder of the Tabb Group, a financial market research firm. A History of Stock Exchange Failures Stray squirrels, security breaches and, more commonly, technical glitches have caused exchanges around the world to halt. Long gone are the days when the only exchanges around were the Big Board and the Nasdaq, with floor traders handling huge percentages of stock trading by hand. A monthslong shutdown of the New York exchange in 1914, at the onset of World War I, virtually eliminated stock trading in the country until the exchange reopened. Now there are 11 exchanges, including three owned by the N.Y.S.E., three by the Nasdaq and four by BATS Global Markets, one of the biggest electronic markets around. And the average E-Trade or Charles Schwab customer, for instance, should not have even noticed that there was any problem, because many of these brokerage firms use those other exchanges. \u201cThis is negative for those who complain that market fragmentation is hurting liquidity and small investors,\u201d Jaret Seiberg, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, wrote in a research note on Wednesday. \u201cYet fragmentation also means there is still robust trading even when a major exchange experiences a technical glitch. To us, this makes it harder to fight against.\u201d The N.Y.S.E. itself is now a subsidiary of the Intercontinental Exchange, which began in Atlanta as a way to buy and sell electricity. It has commanded more than 24 percent of public stock trading volume over the last month, according to data from its competitor BATS . BATS said that it handled about 20 percent, and Nasdaq oversaw under 19 percent. It is a far cry from 1997, when the N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq handled 80 percent of stock trading volume, according to Bloomberg data. Gone, too, are the days when N.Y.S.E.-listed stocks could be traded only on the Big Board, and Nasdaq-listed shares on that exchange. Now each of the 11 stock exchanges can handle trades in any issuer. Thus, if one market goes down, others are able to pick up the slack. Such was the case on Wednesday, making the halt of the N.Y.S.E. less severe than it could have been otherwise. (The stoppage did affect indexes that rely on the prices originating from primary listing markets, though with the Big Board having resumed trading by late afternoon, that was less of an issue.) Still, more serious problems can grind trading to a halt altogether. Seared into many traders\u2019 minds is the 2010 flash crash , when a cascade of technical errors prompted huge swoons in the market before prices rebounded within a half-hour. Then two years ago, system problems shut down the Nasdaq for three hours, stopping trading in huge names ranging from Google to Apple in what became known as the \u201cflash freeze.\u201d Investors, however, need not rely on traditional exchanges to trade their shares at all. Before, orders would flow to the brokers on the N.Y.S.E. floor, who would then turn to specialists who hand-matched would-be sellers with interested buyers. Now, many Wall Street firms execute trades within their own systems. \u201cThere are many other alternative places to trade,\u201d Mr. Tabb said. The only ones who suffer from that, he added, are the exchanges themselves.", "keyword": "NYSE;Stocks,Bonds;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Network Outages"}
{"id": "ny0098409", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/06/26", "title": "Grant Hill Becomes a Hawks Executive", "abstract": "Grant Hill was introduced as vice chairman of the Atlanta Hawks, one day after the franchise and arena rights were bought for $850 million. Hill has a stake in the ownership group, led by the billionaire Tony Ressler, who said Coach Mike Budenholzer had an agreement with the team to become president of basketball operations.", "keyword": "Basketball;Grant Hill;Mike Budenholzer;Atlanta Hawks"}
{"id": "ny0026269", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2013/08/25", "title": "Guru of the Long Snap", "abstract": "AUBURN, Mass. \u2014 Chris Rubio was dissecting the art of long snapping for the benefit of 23 teenagers and their parents on an unseasonably cool morning last month. He used words like \u201cbalance\u201d and \u201cextension\u201d as he dabbled in the minutiae of a craft that he considers a science. \u201cWhat\u2019s he going to do after this?\u201d Rubio asked his audience as one of his campers demonstrated the proper technique for hiking a football between his legs at an alarmingly high rate of speed. \u201cHe\u2019s going to sit down on the toilet. There it is. Oh, this is gorgeous.\u201d Rubio, 38, who has a goatee and the stocky build of a steamer trunk, is one of the country\u2019s foremost instructors of an unusual skill. He spends a good chunk of the year traveling the country to stage clinics like this one at Auburn High School, just outside of Worcester, Mass., where he preached the gospel of long snapping to young players whose abilities are being valued by college coaches now more than ever. \u201cTry sleeping the night before a game without one,\u201d said Paul Chryst, the coach at Pittsburgh. Long snappers have exactly one job: snap the ball on extra points, field goals and punts. And while a long snapper will never win the Heisman Trophy, the role is a trapeze act. The only time anyone notices a snap is when it rockets past the punter or the holder. Anything short of a 100 percent success rate is catastrophic. The very best long snappers, though, can send the ball spiraling in a sharp arc at 52 miles per hour. \u201cA coach once told me that long snapping is like brain surgery,\u201d Rubio said during a quiet moment at his camp, a daylong affair that included on-field instruction, a recruiting seminar and film analysis. \u201cAs long as everything goes right, you\u2019re good. You mess up one time, you\u2019re dead.\u201d Not so long ago, college coaches would not have dreamed of putting long snappers on full scholarship. A lineman could moonlight at the position. Why waste a scholarship on a long snapper? Conventional wisdom was that coaches were better off recruiting an extra quarterback, or three. The landscape has changed. Paul Johnson, the coach at Georgia Tech, cited the redshirt sophomore Sean Tobin as the first long snapper he had ever signed to a scholarship out of high school. Johnson knew he would eventually need a replacement for Tyler Morgan , and he could not afford to gamble. Image Chris Rubio demonstrated how to hold the ball in one of his drills and coached a player on his grip. Credit Samantha Alyn Goresh for The New York Times \u201cA bad snap can change the game faster than anything,\u201d Johnson said in a recent interview. Boston College Coach Steve Addazio said innovative punting schemes had also underscored the position\u2019s importance. More teams have adopted spread formations that put a premium on having a long snapper who can sprint downfield and help cover the return. \u201cYou need a guy who can snap well but is also an athlete,\u201d Addazio said. \u201cIt\u2019s a field-position game. The fewer return yards you give up, the better your starting position is. The better your starting position is, the better chance you have to score.\u201d Rubio, a former long snapper at U.C.L.A., began his business about 10 years ago with Chris Sailer, his best friend from college. Sailer was the team\u2019s place-kicker, so the two have always been especially close. At last month\u2019s camp, Sailer instructed his kickers and punters on one side of the field while Rubio used the other. Rubio was prone to describing Sailer\u2019s students as morons, though it was a calculated move. \u201cRubio does a good job of making long snappers feel important,\u201d said Clayton Jackson, a Rubio acolyte from Cottonwood Falls, Kan. (population: 903), where he is a senior at Chase County High School. \u201cBefore I got involved, you just felt like you were on your own. You didn\u2019t know there were other people who did it. You didn\u2019t know there were people who were supportive.\u201d Rubio is known simply as Rubio. He does not respond to \u201cChris.\u201d (Even his wife calls him Rubio.) His obsession with long snapping is such that he never watches games live on television, he said. Instead, he records them so he can scan them in three minutes. He skips ahead a lot. \u201cFourth down, fourth down, fourth down,\u201d he said. The ideal long snapper, Rubio said, has long arms and a substantial backside. \u201cLook at that big old butt,\u201d Rubio said of one camper. \u201cAll the power comes from the butt. Boom!\u201d With college scholarships suddenly available, the secret is out: being a good long snapper, or even an adequate one, can pay off. Enter Rubio, who is something of a power broker. Each camper receives a ranking, which Rubio posts on his Web site. Because long snapping is such an esoteric skill, many college coaches lean on Rubio\u2019s rankings as a primer for recruiting. Image Clayton Jackson, on floor, and Zach Hubbard faced off to determine the long-snapping champion at a Chris Rubio camp last month in Auburn, Mass. Credit Samantha Alyn Goresh for The New York Times This is not something Rubio attempts to shield from his campers, or from their parents. In fact, he broadcasts it. While his camps are primarily about instruction, he said, they also provide an opportunity to get noticed by someone who has connections. \u201cMaximum exposure,\u201d Rubio calls it. One parent asked Rubio if it was too late in the recruiting process for a college to offer a scholarship to his son, a senior. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cYou\u2019re being seen by me now, and coaches are going off my lists.\u201d Bill Vaughn, whose 14-year-old son, Jake, was attending his second Rubio camp in two weeks, found that other parents were frosty toward him until they learned that Jake was only a high school sophomore. He was not vying for a scholarship, at least not yet. \u201cAfter that, they opened up to me a little bit more,\u201d Bill Vaughn said. Rubio said campers often asked how frequently they should see him. The short answer: there is no such thing as too much Rubio. \u201cRight after a lesson, I\u2019ve got you all cleaned up,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re a big boat. I\u2019m going to set you off to sea. The longer you wait to come back to me, the more barnacles and crap I need to clean off before I can add the flames and the new engines and stuff like that.\u201d There is an economic side to the equation, of course. Long snapping is Rubio\u2019s livelihood, and he typically charges each of his campers about $300 to attend his camps. Many of the boys who traveled to Auburn came from out of state, and the entire enterprise can get expensive in a hurry. Rubio organizes roughly 35 camps over the course of the year. He also offers private lessons at his home in Lewiston, Idaho. \u201cWhen you go to a Rubio camp, you get Rubio,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a big-time thing. If you\u2019re paying top dollar, you better get Grade A meat.\u201d Rubio\u2019s path to self-styled guru happened more or less by accident. As a teenager growing up outside Los Angeles, he was a quarterback until he reached high school. The problem, he said, was his size \u2014 specifically, the 270 pounds he was hauling around on his 6-foot-2 frame. His coach turned him into a lineman, but Rubio saw little action as a sophomore. He said he was not particularly enamored with his role or with his coach. Image Mary Jackson, Clayton\u2019s mother, worked with him on another drill. Credit Samantha Alyn Goresh for The New York Times \u201cHe was a yeller,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI\u2019m not a yeller.\u201d The following summer, Rubio was throwing the football around when a friend decided to snap a few from 15 yards. Rubio tried it and liked it. He seemed to have a natural feel for the skill. He spent the next two seasons as his high school\u2019s long snapper and drew mild interest from college coaches. He enrolled at U.C.L.A., where he earned a spot on the team as a walk-on. Everything that Rubio understood about the position was self-taught, he said. He studied video and devised drills for himself in his dorm room. As a sophomore, Rubio began to wonder why Terry Donahue, the team\u2019s head coach, had never said a word to him. Did Donahue even know his name? Rubio said he finally worked up the nerve to ask. \u201cRubio,\u201d Donahue told him, \u201cif I never speak to you again, you\u2019ve done a fine job.\u201d Donahue never spoke to him again, a fact Rubio regards as a point of pride. These days, Rubio markets the entire Rubio experience as entree into the long-snapping fraternity. Each camper gets his e-mail address and cellphone number \u2014 \u201cIf I don\u2019t respond right away, I\u2019m either on a plane, sleeping or at a camp,\u201d he said \u2014 along with an evaluation and that all-important ranking. The country\u2019s top-ranked senior, according to Rubio, is Tanner Carew, a 6-foot-2, 215-pound wizard from La Verne, Calif., who has orally committed to play at Oregon on a full scholarship. Carew said he had attended more Rubio camps than he could remember. \u201cColleges look at his rankings,\u201d Carew said in a telephone interview. \u201cHe knows people. I wouldn\u2019t be in this position without him.\u201d Last month\u2019s camp concluded with an accuracy contest. The finals pitted Jackson against Zach Hubbard, a 6-foot-5, 240-pound senior from Tampa, Fla., who had arrived that day hoping to improve his Rubio ranking. Hubbard said his goal was to use long snapping to enhance his college choices and then parlay it into a career. \u201cI want to make $800,000 doing nothing in the N.F.L.,\u201d he said. After ousting Jackson, Hubbard was happy to settle for a Camp Champion T-shirt. Rubio was off to his next stop in Chicago.", "keyword": "College Sports;Football;College football"}
{"id": "ny0230118", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2010/09/11", "title": "Zvonareva Stands in Way of Clijsters\u2019 Title Defense at U.S. Open", "abstract": "Kim Clijsters has an opportunity Saturday night to do what no woman has done since 2001: successfully defend her United States Open title. Although Clijsters is the defending champion, the No. 2 seed and has beaten her opponent, Vera Zvonareva, twice already this year, this could be a very competitive match. No one doubts that Zvonareva has the game to win a Slam event. But she can often lose focus, as she did at the Open last year in spectacular fashion against Flavia Pennetta. That version of Zvonareva has not made an appearance here. But on Saturday, Zvonareva will be playing on her favorite surface in prime time, a position she has never been in before. And while Caroline Wozniacki, her semifinal opponent, has built her game around placement, spin and variety, Clijsters is about hitting the ball hard, really hard. In other words, Clijsters will be able to hit past Zvonareva in much the same way she did to beat Venus Williams in the semifinals. The marquee men\u2019s semifinal pits Roger Federer against Novak Djokovic. Every year here it seems that Federer\u2019s road to the final goes through Djokovic, and 2010 is no exception. For the fourth straight year, the two will meet in Arthur Ashe Stadium, with the winner gaining a place in Sunday\u2019s final. Each of their three previous matches has been competitive, but each has ultimately ended in a Federer win. Is 2010 the year Djokovic breaks through? If this were the vulnerable Federer of earlier this year, Djokovic would have a good chance. But so far in the tournament, Federer, a five-time Open champion, has been dominant. Against Robin Soderling, Federer played as if the near gale-force winds were blowing only on his opponent\u2019s side of the court. He had 18 aces and put 64 percent of his first serves in play, incredible statistics given the conditions. Not only has Federer not lost a set so far, only one player, J\u00fcrgen Melzer, has even come close to winning one. Djokovic has a chance, but only if Federer suddenly reverts to the shaky form he displayed earlier this year. The other semifinal pits Rafael Nadal against Mikhail Youzhny, who is having his best Open as a professional. Unfortunately for him, Nadal is, too, which makes it hard to see this match as anything but an amusing prelude to what should be an epic Nadal-Federer final showdown. Youzhny is a former top-10 player who, after a couple of years of foundering, seems to have rediscovered his game. A crafty, consistent baseliner who can finish points at the net, he is the sort of player who might have given Nadal trouble on hardcourts in previous years. But through five matches, Nadal has been nearly as dominant as Federer, reaching the semifinals without dropping a set and seeming to get stronger as his competition improved. If Nadal continues to play as well as he has been, he should have no trouble getting past Youzhny and into his first final here.", "keyword": "United States Open (Tennis);Tennis;Clijsters Kim;Zvonareva Vera;Federer Roger;Soderling Robin;Nadal Rafael;Youzhny Mikhail"}
{"id": "ny0191962", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2009/02/17", "title": "BMW Cuts Jobs at Plant That Makes the Mini", "abstract": "BMW , the German luxury car maker, announced Monday that it would eliminate 850 jobs at a plant that makes the iconic Mini car in Oxford, England, in response to the slump in demand. At the beginning of March, the Oxford plant will switch to two shifts a day from three, BMW said in a statement, operating five days a week instead of seven. \u201cThe company regrets that this change will result in the release of around 850 agency workers from the business,\u201d BMW said in the statement. Mini cars are made at three plants in Britain \u2014 Oxford, Hams Hall and Swindon \u2014 which together employ 6,300. The Hams Hall plant also makes engines for the BMW group. The carmaker said it had also identified 150 workers at another plant in Swindon who would be offered a transfer to Oxford. The Mini workers had returned to work on Jan. 5 after an extended four-week Christmas holiday. \u201cSacking an entire shift like this, and targeting agency workers who have no rights to redundancy pay, is blatant opportunism on BMW\u2019s part and nothing short of scandalous,\u201d Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of Unite, the biggest union in Britain, said in a statement. Mr. Woodley said the union would oppose the cuts and would \u201calso be keeping up the pressure on our government to do more to protect jobs in this country.\u201d The carmaker is the latest in Britain to announce plant closures and job cuts. Honda has closed its plant in Swindon for four months from February to May. Nissan Motor said in January that it would cut 1,200 jobs at its plant in Sunderland. At the same time, governments are taking steps to try to ease the pain of restructuring. Last month, Britain offered auto manufacturers and suppliers access to \u00a31.3 billion, or $1.9 billion, in loan guarantees from the European Investment Bank, topped with an additional \u00a31 billion from the Treasury, the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, said. The British auto industry adds about \u00a310 billion a year to the economy and employs more than 800,000. But government aid to automakers is more controversial in Britain than in other countries because many manufacturers are foreign-owned. For example, Jaguar Land Rover, which employs 15,000 in Britain, is owned by Tata Motors of India, while General Motors owns Vauxhall. The governments in France, Germany, Italy and Spain have also recently announced aid plans for the auto sector. And Washington announced late last year a $14 billion plan to help G.M. and Chrysler. The classic Mini was first released in 1959 by the British Motor Corporation, the former state-owned automaker, and was subsequently sold under the Austin brand. Its small size and unusual design, with its wheels pushed all the way to the corners, helped make it the best-selling British car by the 1970s. BMW bought Mini in 1994 from the struggling British carmaker Rover and subsequently remodeled it and re-released the car in 2001. BMW sold Rover in 2000 but retained Mini as well as some other parts of the company. For the 10 months to October 2008, BMW said Mini sales climbed 10.5 percent, to 202,302 around the world. For January, Mini sales were down 34.5 percent from a year earlier, although BMW attributed this in part to a lack of availability of the Mini Convertible, which went out of production in mid-2008. A new model is scheduled to be released by late March. But BMW said this month that business globally had \u201cdeteriorated sharply again\u201d in the fourth quarter, leading full-year revenue to drop 5 percent, to 53.2 billion euros. In January, BMW said it was cutting hours for 26,000 workers to reduce production by 10 percent. It had already cut its work force by 7 percent last year, to 100,041 employees at the end of the year. At Mini, 380 workers were laid off before Christmas.", "keyword": "Bayerische Motorenwerke AG;Mini;Automobiles"}
{"id": "ny0195761", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2009/10/20", "title": "The Dilemma of Aging Nuclear Plants", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 From the time the world\u2019s first commercial nuclear power plants were switched on in the late 1950s, installed generating capacity rose rapidly over two decades. It leveled off in the 1980s as new building programs were scrapped in the wake of the accident at Three Mile Island, among other factors. Contractors generally designed plants to last for 40 years \u2014 a standard enshrined in the United States in the adoption by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or N.R.C., of a 40-year licensing regime. A large part of the world\u2019s installed nuclear power capacity is now coming to the end of that designed life span. Caught between approaching retirement deadlines and public opposition to new plants, industry operators are pushing to extend the life of their plants to 60 or even 80 years \u2014 and this despite problems of premature aging of major components that have already obliged many to replace their plants\u2019 steam generators at heavy capital expense. Running plants longer is one way to recoup the extra cost and raise returns on investment over the full life of the plant. But it has safety implications. The 40-year life span was a design specification, said Guillaume Wack, director for nuclear plants at the Autorit\u00e9 de S\u00fbret\u00e9 Nucl\u00e9aire, or A.S.N., the French nuclear regulator. \u201cIt\u2019s like a car,\u201d Mr. Wack said in an interview. \u201cThe manufacturer says it will run for 100,000 kilometers\u201d \u2014 60,000 miles \u2014 \u201cand last two years. That\u2019s the theoretical life. After that, it depends on how you run it. If you drive carefully with regular checkups, it could last much longer. If you drive recklessly and don\u2019t maintain it, it will wear out more quickly.\u201d Extending plant life rests on the premise that operators run their plants abstemiously. But utilities, under pressure to maximize short-term profit, are constantly tempted to operate at high output, raising the burn-up of nuclear fuel. Since the 1970s, regulators and operators have identified premature aging problems including vibrations in pipes, with consequent cracking, leaks and ruptures that in turn cause severe corrosion, leading to worse leaks and ruptures. Some of these result from high fuel burn rates, Mr. Wack said. Stopgap measures like plugging some of the thousands of tubes in the steam generator are allowed by regulatory bodies. But no more than 20 percent can be plugged without impeding the circulation of the steam \u2014 and less in some cases \u2014 before the generator has to be changed. The problem is further complicated by the fact that each reactor heats three or four generators. Anything done to one must also be reproduced on the others in order to avoid pressure imbalances: If one generator has to be changed, all the others must be swapped out, Mr. Wack said. Most plants worldwide have, in fact, already replaced their generators, at a cost of around $50 million for each new generator, after operating for 20 years or less, according to Steve Kerekes, press officer for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group. While extending the operating life beyond 40 years may help to amortize that cost, it intensifies another problem \u2014 finding replacements for other components. Manufacturers are few, and the backlog for many parts is long. The French company Areva, the world\u2019s largest supplier of nuclear products and services, has, for example, traditionally supplied \u00c9lectricit\u00e9 de France, the state-run utility that operates the world\u2019s largest nuclear park. But because of rising demand, E.D.F. is now going farther afield, ordering equipment from Mitsubishi of Japan. G\u00e9rard Petit, a senior safety adviser at E.D.F., says this is more a business cost issue than a safety one: The reactor vessel in which the nuclear reaction takes place, like the containment building in which it is housed, is built to last, he says. \u201cThe problem is to keep everything else at the same level.\u201d Still, there is no proof that the reactor vessel or the containment building is sufficiently robust to last beyond 40 years. Cracks in vessel heads, the lids that cover reactor vessels, were discovered in various reactors around the world as long ago as 1991, French and U.S. regulatory documents show. That led E.D.F. to decide to change the heads on most of its reactor vessels \u2014 a replacement program that is ending just this year, Mr. Petit said. Replacement heads cost about $5 million each, Mr. Kerekes said. U.S. operators, on the other hand, did not systematically make the change. As a result, corrosion of a cracked lid at the Davis-Besse plant, in Ohio, came within a centimeter, or less than half an inch, of causing a serious coolant leakage accident in 2002, according to an N.R.C. report. In addition, N.R.C. documents show, design flaws identified in 1991 raise the specter of possible long-term fatigue degradation in the reactor vessels themselves due to the heat and high radiation to which they are subjected. A leak in the reactor vessel would result in a core meltdown \u2014 the most serious accident possible \u2014 with an inevitable release of radioactive materials, Mr. Wack said. This year, some plants in the United States will hit the 40-year mark but will continue to operate under licenses that have already been renewed. An elaborate and complex U.S. license renewal program introduced by the N.R.C. in 1991 was scathingly criticized in 2007 by the commission\u2019s in-house safety auditor, the Office of the Inspector General, for lacking proper documentation and failing to independently verify operator-supplied data. In response, the review process was revised and expanded. But the license renewals of 52 plants \u2014 half the U.S. nuclear park \u2014 that were already processed before the revision will not be re-examined, said Travis Tate, a senior official in the commission\u2019s license renewal division. Reconsideration was not needed, Mr. Tate said, because the revisions merely \u201cclarify the scope of the inspections and reviews necessary,\u201d without calling into question the adequacy of the previous process. Also, Mr. Tate said, failure to implement an appropriate age management program would not be a ground for denying a new license. It would simply become a future operating issue, along with other commitments required by the N.R.C for license renewal. As long as relicensed plants operate without accidents, the regulatory commission will have met its obligation to ensure that operators run their plants safely, he said. This position has prompted some concern, not least because relicensing approvals have been granted in several cases as much as 20 years before the original licenses expired. Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, in opposing the 2001 renewal of two licenses for the Catawba, South Carolina, nuclear plant, due to expire in 2024 and 2026, asked how the regulators could be certain that the plant would meet requirements that far ahead. In fact, the N.R.C. relies for its decisions on operator-supplied computer models and projections. The problem with those, said Mr. Petit, the E.D.F. safety adviser, was that they might \u201clook good on paper, but you never really know until you actually try it.\u201d In France, which has 58 reactors, plants are submitted to relicensing inspections every 10 years. The first of the 30-year inspections began this year. The inspections, by the A.S.N., take two to three months compared with a typical one-month renewal inspection by the U.S. regulatory agency. But even that does not necessarily mean that French plants operate more safely. Efforts by E.D.F. to cut costs by centralizing procurement have led to a years-long dearth of spare parts on the ground, said Pierre Wiroth, who until he retired in July was for seven years E.D.F.\u2019s inspector general, or top safety official. E.D.F. reports around 750 minor \u201cevents\u201d every year, classifying them according to an established grid, and a third are subsequently upgraded to a more serious level because they are recurrent, Mr. Wiroth said. In addition to the slow replacement of worn and aging parts, obsolescence is a growing problem. Many control room commands \u2014 a nuclear plant\u2019s nerve center \u2014 rely, said Scott Burnell, press officer for the U.S. regulator, \u201con technology that society has moved beyond.\u201d The technology is typically analog rather than digital because \u201cwith analog, we have a lot of experience\u201d and know how it functions, he said. But the downside of that is that graduates coming out of engineering schools are no longer familiar with analog technology. Areva and other suppliers are pushing to replace analog with digital systems, perhaps partly because they can charge more for new technology, Mr. Wack said. But that also raises an issue of reliability, said Mr. Burnell. \u201cWith the digital system, instead of having dedicated wires going to a particular place, you can have a small-scale version of Internet where you can have a single set of wires going all around the plant.\u201d That could raise the risk of bugs in the system and complicate problem-solving, he said. Meanwhile, as more and more nuclear engineers reach retirement age, finding replacements to run the plants is problematic. \u201cWhen you\u2019ve been trained on the latest technology, the idea of working on outdated equipment or retraining is unappealing,\u201d Mr. Wack said. Retiring engineers are increasingly being replaced by outsourcing deals with subcontractors, whose qualifications and competence are less rigorously controlled, said Elizabeth Pozzi, an operating technician at the Dampierre nuclear plant, near Orl\u00e9ans, and a local union official. \u201cIn the field, it seems that keeping the plant on line is more important than safety,\u201d Ms. Pozzi said. A report by Mr. Wiroth last year warned E.D.F. that it should better plan, carry out and supervise subcontracted work. E.D.F., said Ms. Pozzi, is \u201cnot doing anything illegal, but they\u2019re using every loophole to push the maintenance boundaries as far as possible. If that\u2019s already the case at 30 years, what will it be like at 60?\u201d In 2006, the attorney general of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, requested that the N.R.C. not renew the license for the Indian Point nuclear power plant, located 34 miles north of New York City, when it expired in 2013. \u201cAt Indian Point nuclear power plant, operators have compiled an unacceptable record of abject, repeated, multiyear failure to effectively address vital safety and security issues,\u201d he said in testimony to Congress, a view shared by the regulator\u2019s own safety auditor in a 2000 report. Mr. Blumenthal also cited growth in the region\u2019s population since the plant opened as a reason to shut it. Two months ago, the N.R.C. issued a safety evaluation report for the plant as part of the renewal process. Of the 87 parts of the reactor vessel and related elements examined, all but three showed aging damage, as did 39 out of 44 steam generator components and 57 of 59 structural elements. Still, the report concluded that Indian Point met regulatory standards for license renewal.", "keyword": "Nuclear Energy;Nuclear Regulatory Commission;Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant (NY);France"}
{"id": "ny0036722", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/03/07", "title": "Republican\u2019s Tax Plan Awkwardly Aims at Rich", "abstract": "Tax the rich. What do you think a Republican congressman would say about a tax proposal that contained numerous provisions to take away benefits from some taxpayers simply because they made too much money? The proposal in question would force some high-income taxpayers to pay taxes on municipal bonds that have so far been tax-free. They would lose the tax break available to others when they sell their homes. They would have to pay taxes on the value of their employer-provided health insurance and would lose the deduction for contributions to 401(k) retirement plans. Furthermore, everyone who has taken advantage of the \u201ccarried interest\u201d tax dodge that lets private equity partners treat their pay as capital gains would lose it. That provision allowed Mitt Romney to pay an effective tax rate of less than 15 percent on millions of dollars. This particular proposal would also hit high-income taxpayers by phasing out some deductions and other tax provisions for couples making more than $450,000. Other benefits would vanish for those making more than $517,500. The interplay of all these complicated provisions would \u2014 for a few taxpayers \u2014 lead to marginal tax rates as high as 67 percent. If this were President Obama\u2019s tax proposal, you can be assured that there would be cries about \u201cclass warfare.\u201d But it\u2019s not. Instead, it describes some of the proposals in the Tax Reform Act of 2014 proposed last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican. The Camp proposal seems unlikely to go anywhere, in no small part because the House Republican leadership has gone out of its way to distance itself from the proposal, praising Mr. Camp for his diligence and calling it worthy of consideration but not getting close to an endorsement. The proposal is fascinating, as much for what it does and does not contain as for its inability to accomplish either of Mr. Camp\u2019s two stated goals. He promised a greatly simplified tax code but instead clutters it up with detailed ways to only partly confront assorted tax advantages that were handed out to various groups over the years. The summary of the bill takes up 194 pages. He wanted to reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent but could not do that without taking away many more tax goodies than he does. So he has a special 35 percent bracket that applies to couples with incomes of more than $450,000 but picks and chooses what income above that level is taxable. Municipal bond interest can be taxed at a 10 percent rate, but there is no extra tax on manufacturing income. There is also a special tax on big banks. That is something you might expect from a liberal Democrat, and there are reports that some Wall Street organizations are so angry they are threatening to withhold donations to Republican candidates this year. There was a time when any proposal by the Ways and Means Committee chairman would be viewed as a blueprint for legislation that would most likely become law. In those days, chairmen sometimes seemed to serve forever, and they knew how to work across the aisle to get deals done. Wilbur Mills, an Arkansas Democrat, was committee chairman from 1958 to 1974, during five presidential administrations. In the press, it often sounded as if his title were truly \u201cPowerful Chairman.\u201d He had the power to grant, or withhold, tax provisions that individual members sought for favored constituents. A legislator who offended him might face problems for years. Only scandal could bring him down, and it did. There were two episodes involving alcohol and a stripper who went by the name of Fanne Foxe , and he was forced to give up his chairmanship. Mr. Camp, on the other hand, is a lame duck. Next year, under the rules of the House Republican Caucus, he will have to step down after four years as chairman. I had hoped that his eagerness to accomplish something would overcome inertia, but it appears it will not. The last thing the House Republican leadership wants is votes that will call attention to splits within the party. Seniority no longer calls the shots when new chairmen are named, and the campaigning to replace Mr. Camp is already underway. One man who wants the job is said to be Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who was Mr. Romney\u2019s running mate. In the talk about tax reform, there has been a general agreement that top rates should be reduced and loopholes closed, something Mr. Ryan has loudly endorsed. But there has been a great reluctance to get specific. This proposal does get specific, and in doing so it makes clear that much more needs to be done to reduce tax preferences and loopholes if we want both to finance the government and to lower tax rates. Within the community of tax policy wonks, the Camp proposal has garnered admiring reviews just by providing something to analyze. \u201cIn a world where policy makers actually wanted to make policy, it would be a good starting point for discussion,\u201d said Len Burman, the director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and a professor at Syracuse University. Even with the efforts to soak the rich, Mr. Camp comes up well short of making the proposals revenue-neutral, although some artful dodges enable him to claim that is true over the next 10 years. To make the limited progress he does, Mr. Camp has to attack many tax preferences. Some are easy (did you know that for some reason the National Football League is tax-exempt?), but many are not. Americans who work overseas lose a tax break. The tax credit for buying electric cars goes away. So does the credit for adopting a child. A lot of tax provisions to provide aid for higher education costs are consolidated. The dodge of avoiding taxes through a \u201clike-kind\u201d exchange would end. Clever ways that some self-employed people have found to avoid paying payroll taxes on their income would be barred. He would change the way we save for retirement, something that prompted outrage from the retirement industry. He would do that by limiting the amount of pretax money that can be saved. Traditional individual retirement accounts would vanish (for new contributions, that is.) The amount of pretax money that could go into 401(k) accounts would be reduced. Instead, Roth I.R.A.s would be encouraged and made available to high-income taxpayers who cannot use them now. The money you put into a Roth I.R.A. is money on which you have paid taxes. But it then accumulates tax-free and you don\u2019t pay taxes on the money you withdraw after you retire. Normal I.R.A.s, like 401(k) accounts, produce taxable income when it is withdrawn after retirement. Similarly, the bill would put an end to so-called deferred compensation at many companies, where the money is put into a savings plan but not paid out until years later, when the employee may be in a lower tax bracket. The effect would be to raise tax revenue now and reduce it in the later years when the deferred compensation would have been paid. There is no logical reason employees should be taxed on the money they are paid but not on the value of the fringe benefits the employer provides. Mr. Camp touches that on the margin, with the provision on extremely wealthy people, but not for the rest of us. He reduces the mortgage interest deduction, but only for those with the most expensive homes. The bill also would force companies to take depreciation expenses over a longer period. That makes sense economically, but it would also push corporate taxes up in the next few years, though not over the long term. All of those things combine to make the estimate that the bill is revenue-neutral suspect. It may be neutral over the 10-year period they count, but not over a longer period. It is good to see some specifics. It is too bad that nothing is likely to come from it. \u201cTax reform is never going to happen without bipartisan cooperation,\u201d said Mr. Burman, who worked on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as an economist in the Treasury Department\u2019s Office of Tax Analysis and later served as a senior Treasury Department official under President Bill Clinton. \u201cA significant number of people in both parties will have to believe getting things done is more important than scoring points.\u201d", "keyword": "Federal Taxes;David Camp;US Economy;Republicans;Tax;HNWI,Wealth,Billionaires,1 Percent"}
{"id": "ny0145357", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/10/23", "title": "A Charm to Take Little Pixies Off the Web and Home to Play", "abstract": "Everything these days seems to have some kind of computer chip \u2014 car keys, credit cards and now your daughter\u2019s charm bracelet. A collaboration between the Walt Disney Company and the toy maker Techno Source, Clickables are a line of toy jewelry items made to interact with Disney\u2019s Pixie Hollow Web site. Clickable toys connect to your PC and allow your child to interact with and download certain elements on the Pixie Hollow site, like fairy images, for offline viewing. The bridge between online and offline activity is a special charm that can also be played with separately, away from a computer connection. The charms are sold in sets of three for $6, but using them requires the additional purchase of a special USB dock that comes in the form of a bracelet ($20) or a jewelry box ($30). Your child will have to be adept at creating passwords, managing an online account, downloading and installing software on your Windows computers and managing a USB connection. Hey, perhaps this is educational after all. WARREN BUCKLEITNER", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Toys;Disney Walt Co"}
{"id": "ny0051880", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/10/24", "title": "The Royals' Terrance Gore Excels as a Pinch-Runner", "abstract": "KANSAS CITY, Mo. \u2014 Clusters of reporters pushed and nudged for elbow room in a packed Kansas City clubhouse Wednesday night in the aftermath of the Royals\u2019 7-2 win over the San Francisco Giants. The victory reinvigorated a fan base that had been shaken by the Royals\u2019 loss in Game 1 of the World Series. Reporters flocked around Lorenzo Cain and his always quotable outfield partner, Jarrod Dyson. They hovered near first baseman Eric Hosmer. Seemingly oblivious to the flurry of activity, Terrance Gore changed into his civilian clothes. Gore, whose role on the Royals is to create havoc on the basepaths, had just achieved two milestones: He had appeared in his first World Series game and had scored his first Series run. \u201cIt feels pretty good,\u201d Gore, 23, said as he dressed. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing, actually.\u201d Gore\u2019s big moment in Game 2 came in the bottom of the sixth inning after Billy Butler singled to give the Royals a 3-2 lead. Gore, one of the fastest runners in baseball, replaced Butler. The two have become something of a tandem, with Gore often being sent into the game to pinch-run for Butler, the bulky designated hitter who outweighs the 165-pound Gore by about 80 pounds. So Gore was on first base. Down at second was Hosmer. After they both advanced on a wild pitch, they came around to score on a double by Salvador Perez. As they crossed home plate, Hosmer looked back at Gore and said, \u201cGood job, G Baby.\u201d \u201cWhen I got out there, I didn\u2019t think, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m in the World Series,\u2019 \u201d Gore said. \u201cI was just telling myself, \u2018Don\u2019t run over Hos.\u2019 \u201d He added: \u201cBut now, it\u2019s actually just coming down to me: Wow, I really just played in the World Series.\u201d Gore\u2019s journey to this point began in Macon, Ga. He was 5 years old, maybe 6, and was playing left field in a T-ball league. \u201cSome kid hit the ball to right field, and you could see me from left field go all the way to right field before the kid in right field got the ball,\u201d Gore said, laughing. \u201cAnd then I got the ball and ran all the way to home. I almost had him, but I couldn\u2019t get him. So I threw the ball at him.\u201d That was the first hint of speed. The real revelation came when he was a high school junior. Gore, who is 5 feet 7 inches, never had a growth spurt. He had a speed spurt. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d he said. \u201cI literally got out of bed, and I was so much faster than everyone else.\u201d Although Gore played high school football, he never seriously considered playing the sport in college. Basketball was unrealistic. \u201cBaseball has always been my No. 1 priority,\u201d he said. \u201cMy heart was always with baseball. Always.\u201d After playing baseball at Gulf Coast State College in Panama City, Fla., Gore was picked in the 20th round of the 2011 draft. Then came a climb through the minors that was anything but rapid. There were stops in Burlington, N.C.; Lexington, Ky.; Wilmington, Del.; and Omaha. Gore, an outfielder, did not hit much, but he could run. And by the end of August, he was with the Royals, the call-up coming just as he was re-evaluating his career. \u201cGuys in the minor leagues probably thought, like I thought, I\u2019m in hiatus; there is not a chance I\u2019m going to get to the big leagues,\u201d he said. \u201cNow they see me and can figure, \u2018He got there; I can get there.\u2019 \u201d The Royals, of course, didn\u2019t want Gore\u2019s bat; they wanted his legs. They wanted him to amplify an already potent running attack. Gore stole a base in his major league debut on Aug. 31 and stole four more bases in September. In the playoffs, he stole a base against the Oakland Athletics in the American League wild-card game and stole two more against the Los Angeles Angels in a division series. After nearly two months in the majors, he has eight stolen bases without being caught, one at-bat, no hits and seven runs scored. All but one of the steals came when he was pinch-running for Butler. Gore is sharing a dream that resonates to Macon and to Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, Mo., where his older brother, Staff Sgt. Dexter Gore, is stationed. \u201cWatching him go from this little brother who I picked on and played with to being a major league baseball player is pretty incredible,\u201d Dexter Gore said. Outside the Royals\u2019 clubhouse on Wednesday night, their mother, Theresa Gore, was among those waiting for Terrance to make his appearance. She said she was still having a hard time wrapping her mind around his achievement. \u201cSometimes I have to ask, \u2018Is this really real?\u2019 \u201d she said. Her son is no longer anonymous. He walked into a mall here recently and saw a collection of \u201cThat\u2019s What Speed DO\u201d T-shirts. \u201cI actually saw my face on one of them,\u201d Gore said. \u201cI was like, \u2018How is my face on a shirt I don\u2019t even have?\u2019 \u201d Welcome to the life of a celebrity. His unexpected rise symbolizes the exuberance of a franchise that has returned to the playoffs after a 29-year absence. While he appreciates the attention, he hasn\u2019t fully absorbed it. \u201cI\u2019m just a regular guy from Macon, Ga., who can run a little bit,\u201d Gore said. There is a part of him that still sees himself as that speedy T-ball left fielder who ran down a ball in right field and then chased the runner home.", "keyword": "Baseball;Terrance Gore;Kansas City Royals;World Series"}
{"id": "ny0162735", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2006/02/16", "title": "Brown Hasn't Stopped Believing", "abstract": "MY favorite slogan from the 1960's is Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s exhortation: \"Keep the faith, baby.\" More than \"I have a dream\" or \"Power to the people,\" \"Keep the faith\" is hip, timeless wisdom that embraces perseverance, toughness and hope in a brighter tomorrow. The Knicks family -- all you who have suffered since November and will continue to suffer until April -- should adopt this slogan as your mantra. You're going to have to keep the faith. The Knicks (15-37) are young, demoralized and, on many nights, disoriented. But nights like last night offer a glimmer of hope when the Knicks play well from start to finish and actually win. The blame game is played at no higher level than in New York: we climb over each other for credit and are quick to point fingers. Madison Square Garden is up to the rafters in accusations, but for now, let's just deal with the Knicks. Most of the blame for their woes has been aimed at Isiah Thomas, the team president. In fact, the responsibility for victories and losses falls on Larry Brown. From November to April, Brown is the maestro, the alchemist. He is the master teacher and Hall of Fame coach who can beat you with his players, then turn around and beat you with your own. We'll deal with Thomas's performance at the season's end. \"We're 14-30-something and playing terribly, and nobody talks about people being out, nobody talks about how young this team is,\" Brown said yesterday. \"But it's my responsibility. I've said 100 times: I got to coach them better, and I believe that. You can look at my track record: I've been in a lot of situations like this but not in this environment. The reality is that there's enough blame to go around.\" I'll give Brown and Thomas the benefit of the doubt. Thomas won an N.C.A.A. championship at Indiana and won two N.B.A. championships with the Detroit Pistons. He has run the Continental Basketball Association, had an ownership share with the Toronto Raptors and coached the Indiana Pacers. Brown won an N.C.A.A. championship at Kansas and an N.B.A. championship with the Pistons. Between them they have an idea of what it takes to win. These Knicks are part of an evolving picture. \"I'm hopeful that this thing gets over, because it's never any fun to go through a period like this and read your names in the paper,\" Brown said. \"You lack confidence. It's a hard thing to fight through, but that's the reality -- we've lost all these games and we just got to fight back.\" Every losing season needs a face, and the face of the Knicks' free fall has become Eddy Curry, a 6-foot-11 center. Curry was the fourth pick of the 2001 draft. The Knicks obtained him from the Bulls for a 2006 first-round pick and a package of players and other picks. Thomas gambled that the 23-year-old Curry had an ocean of talent he hadn't begun to tap; Curry feels he has been letting the organization down, and to an extent he has. But there are nights like last night against Toronto when you can see a glimmer of potential. Curry was a beast inside, scoring 18 points, including a much-needed basket with 30.6 seconds left that gave the Knicks a 96-93 lead en route to a 98-96 victory. \"I try to talk to him all the time,\" Brown said. \"Obviously, when we traded for him there was the talk that, 'Hey, you're getting a young center who's the future of your team.' I can see that he's taking a lot of this pretty hard, that he feels a responsibility for the problems we're having. And I tell him all the time, this is about 15 guys and a coaching staff, it's not about one guy, and he's just got to keep trying to get better. He's got to keep competing and not give in.\" Brown said: \"The thing I got to make him understand -- he's 22 years old. I told him every day it's like his freshman year. He's in a market that they look at him and realize what we gave up and the expectations are pretty great. \"It's tough, but I do believe there's a real chance here, and I like that, I like that the expectations are high. I like that they love this sport here and expect excellence. That's why you're so miserable. Not that you're not miserable in other places that you coach, but coming here I felt like if we ever played the right way, an appealing way, it would help our sport, because there is no better place to do it than in New York.\" Before Brown left yesterday's shoot-around, he said he looked forward to the last two months of the season. The pattern for many of Brown's teams is that by midseason either everybody has bought in or been shipped out. It will be curious to see what happens to these Knicks. I'd be surprised if they continue to be terrible. Expect effort but not miracles. \"As a player you got to keep believing that things are going change,\" Curry said after last night's game. \"If we give up, it's only going to get worse. We always got to believe that things are going to change.\" Keep the faith, baby. Sports of The Times E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com", "keyword": "TORONTO RAPTORS;NEW YORK KNICKS;NEW YORK KNICKERBOCKERS;BROWN LARRY;SPORTS OF THE TIMES (TIMES COLUMN);COACHES AND MANAGERS;BASKETBALL"}
{"id": "ny0259317", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2011/01/12", "title": "WikiLeaks Founder Said to Fear \u2018Illegal Rendition\u2019 to U.S.", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Lawyers for Julian Assange , the founder of the WikiLeaks antisecrecy group, said on Tuesday that they would oppose his extradition to Sweden because he might subsequently face \u201cillegal rendition\u201d to the United States, risking imprisonment at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, or even the death penalty. They made the assertion in defense documents released after Mr. Assange made a brief appearance in a British high-security court for a largely procedural hearing concerning his resistance to demands for his extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexual misconduct. The documents for the first time publicly named the two WikiLeaks volunteers who have accused Mr. Assange of forcing them to have sex with him without a condom in Sweden last August, in one case while the woman was asleep. In keeping with Sweden\u2019s policy of anonymity for those involved in such cases, they had been referred to only as Ms. A and Ms. W. Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutors\u2019 office, could not immediately say whether the disclosure of the women\u2019s names was a crime, but she said that possibility would be investigated. Jennifer Robinson, one of Mr. Assange\u2019s London lawyers, said that the inclusion of the women\u2019s names in the defense documents was an oversight that would be corrected. The court scheduled the extradition hearing for Feb. 7-8. The sexual accusations, which Mr. Assange denies, have overlapped with the WikiLeaks publication of about 2,000 State Department documents \u2014 from a trove of about 250,000 in its possession \u2014 exposing confidential or secret communications to broad scrutiny on its Web site and in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian in Britain , Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El Pa\u00eds in Spain. \u201cOur work with WikiLeaks continues unabated, and we are stepping up our publishing for matters relating to Cablegate and other materials,\u201d Mr. Assange said after the 10-minute hearing, using his group\u2019s term for the State Department documents. \u201cThose will shortly be appearing through our newspaper partners throughout the world,\u201d he said, without elaborating on the content. In recent weeks, the flow of documents has slowed to a trickle. Mr. Assange was jailed in Britain in early December after a Swedish prosecutor issued a European arrest warrant seeking his extradition to be questioned about the sexual accusations. He was released on $370,000 bail nine days later, on Dec. 16. In a 35-page outline of their case against extradition, released on the WikiLeaks Web site, Mr. Assange\u2019s lawyers said, \u201cIt is submitted that there is a real risk that, if extradited to Sweden, the United States will seek his extradition and/or illegal rendition to the U.S.A., where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guant\u00e1namo Bay or elsewhere.\u201d The document also cited statements by calling for the execution of those who leaked the State Department documents. \u201cIndeed, if Mr. Assange were rendered to the U.S.A. without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty,\u201d the lawyers said. Mr. Assange\u2019s lawyers released their outline within minutes of the court hearing. They said they would also argue that Swedish law did not permit their client to be extradited on \u201cthe mere suspicion\u201d that he had committed a crime. The lawyers argued that Swedish prosecutors had said publicly that they were seeking his extradition solely to question him about the sexual misconduct accusations. The defense said Mr. Assange had been \u201cthe victim of a pattern of illegal or corrupt behavior\u201d by Swedish prosecutors, whom they accused of making a series of procedural and other errors in their handling of the case. Previous hearings have been held in central London courts. But the one on Tuesday was set for the Belmarsh high-security court in the southeast of the city, which often handles terrorism cases. Britain\u2019s court service said the move was intended to accommodate reporters and camera crews who had scrimmaged for position at the other courts. Wearing a gray duffle coat over a dark suit and tie, Mr. Assange arrived with his British lawyer, Mark Stephens. Once in court, he gave a thumbs-up to associates in the public gallery. The WikiLeaks disclosures have angered officials in Washington, and Justice Department officials are seeking to determine whether they can bring charges against him. Prosecutors have gone to court to demand Twitter account records of several people linked to WikiLeaks, including Mr. Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public on Friday. The subpoena is the first public evidence of a criminal investigation, announced last month by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that has been urged by members of Congress from both parties but is fraught with legal and political difficulties for the Obama administration. It was denounced by WikiLeaks, which has so far made public only about 1 percent of the quarter-million diplomatic cables in its possession. It has threatened to post them all on the Web if criminal charges are brought. When Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was released from jail last month, his bail conditions required him to stay in Ellingham Hall, a luxurious house on a 650-acre estate in eastern England; wear an electronic tag; and report to local police officers every day. He has described the conditions as \u201chigh-tech house arrest.\u201d He recently said he had signed deals to publish an autobiography that, he told a British newspaper, might be worth $1.7 million. On Tuesday, the court agreed to allow him to move to central London for two days during the full extradition hearing next month. He will be staying at the Frontline Club, founded by Vaughan Smith, the owner of Ellingham Hall.", "keyword": "Assange Julian P;Wikileaks;Great Britain;Sweden;Extradition;International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0256630", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/08/01", "title": "Uproar Over Allowing Weldon Marc Gilbert, Rape Suspect, to View Pornography", "abstract": "TACOMA, Wash. \u2014 When Weldon Marc Gilbert was a wealthy jet pilot, prosecutors say, he spent much of his time and money manipulating young boys. He used his high-priced toys, including a sea plane, a helicopter and a boat, to lure them, they say, then molested them and beat them. He captured much of the sexually explicit action with his video camera. Mr. Gilbert created more than 100 videos of the boys, sometimes turning the camera on himself. In 2009, he pleaded guilty in federal court to 31 counts of producing child pornography involving 17 victims and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. While Mr. Gilbert sits in jail here, he is preparing for another trial next month, this time on state charges of rape and molestation. In this case, he is acting as his own lawyer. And as such, he is allowed to review the evidence against him \u2014 including the pornographic videos \u2014 and watch them as often as he likes. Restricting his access could result in a mistrial. Local law enforcement officials are furious, but there is not much they can do about it. \u201cIt\u2019s absurd and maddening,\u201d said Mark Lindquist, the prosecutor for Pierce County, which includes Tacoma, where the state trial is to begin Sept. 19. While defendants normally can view evidence against them, Mr. Lindquist said, they are not usually allowed to possess it, particularly when it is contraband like pornography. \u201cDefense attorneys typically ask to see some portion of the pornography that will be used as evidence, review a nominal amount of it and leave,\u201d Mr. Lindquist said. \u201cI have never had a case where a defense attorney wanted to possess the pornography. We don\u2019t turn cocaine over to defendants for them to personally check out.\u201d After a local television station, KOMO, reported the situation last month, there was a public protest at the jail here where Mr. Gilbert is being held. Many state legislators have vowed to change the law but they cannot do so in time to affect Mr. Gilbert\u2019s case. Mr. Lindquist said his office would draft language that would \u201cpass constitutional muster,\u201d though he expects challenges from defense lawyers concerned about the rights of defendants. Unlike most inmates, who follow their lawyers\u2019 advice not to discuss their cases with the news media, Mr. Gilbert, 50, who flew for U.P.S., is speaking out from behind bars. He sent a four-page handwritten letter to Mr. Lindquist early last month, denouncing him and others for stirring up the outcry against him. He blamed officials for giving the public the impression that he was reviewing the tapes for his own prurient interests and noted that this was \u201cludicrous\u201d since he had to look at them in a separate room monitored by corrections officers and with his private investigator present. He told Mr. Lindquist to drop the charges because he was not guilty. He also suggested that Mr. Lindquist was pursuing the case for his own political advantage. \u201cWho, beside yourself, benefits from the second round of prosecution?\u201d Mr. Gilbert asked. In response, Mr. Lindquist said he did not give \u201ca free pass\u201d to criminals just because they were already serving time. Then last week, Mr. Gilbert gave a jailhouse interview to KOMO, demonstrating, perhaps, why most lawyers tell their clients to stay silent. \u201cThis whole issue should have never happened,\u201d Mr. Gilbert told KOMO. \u201cI caused it. I\u2019m guilty of it. I truly wish I could have taken it back. What I saw is a lot of fun, reliving the teenage years, absolutely loving my time around these young men.\u201d But, he added, \u201cWrong behavior, shameful behavior is not necessarily the same as illegal behavior that deserves a life prison sentence.\u201d Federal prosecutors have described Mr. Gilbert, who lived in an expensive house in Lake Tapps, just east of Tacoma, as a \u201cmaster manipulator\u201d who would groom his victims to gain their trust before abusing them. \u201cGilbert saw each of the dozens of boys that he sexually abused as sex objects he could obtain by giving them things,\u201d federal prosecutors wrote a few years ago. He gave them money, cellphones, flying lessons, trips overseas, strippers and alcohol, they said \u2014 even help with their homework. \u201cHis sexual sadism and his fascination with boys was the center of his life,\u201d they wrote. John Henry Browne, a lawyer from Seattle who represented Mr. Gilbert on the federal charges and helped arrange the deal under which Mr. Gilbert pleaded guilty, is acting as standby counsel in the state case. He said in an interview that Mr. Gilbert was exercising his constitutional rights and that they should be protected. Mr. Browne also said that he \u2014 and Mr. Gilbert \u2014 had watched the videos a few years ago in preparing for the federal case. He said 90 percent of them were \u201csilly\u201d and described them as \u201cbirthday spankings.\u201d The remaining 10 percent, he said, were \u201cproblematic.\u201d A Pierce County Superior Court judge has ruled that in any pretrial interviews Mr. Gilbert cannot directly ask questions of the young men involved, some of whom were under 16, the age of consent, at the time of the episodes, which began in 2001. Mr. Lindquist is asking that during the trial Mr. Gilbert be barred from directly cross-examining them on the witness stand. But Mr. Gilbert argued in his television interview that he would be more sensitive in his questioning than anyone else because he knew the young men. \u201cThe last thing I want to do is embarrass and humiliate them,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Sentences (Criminal);Decisions and Verdicts;Pornography;Sex Crimes;Men and Boys;Child Abuse and Neglect"}
{"id": "ny0239206", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2010/12/27", "title": "Giants\u2019 Postseason Hopes Are in Jeopardy After Loss to Packers", "abstract": "GREEN BAY, Wis. \u2014 Tailback Brandon Jacobs received a handoff from quarterback Eli Manning and took off running the way the Giants needed him to if they were going to win a critical game in December. Jacobs, a human Hummer, crossed into Green Bay Packers territory in the third quarter Sunday and kept going for a 21-yard gain that turned into a microcosm of another devastating loss. While being tackled, Jacobs was stripped of the ball, and as it bounced free, the Giants\u2019 grip on the playoffs became looser. So too, perhaps, did Coach Tom Coughlin\u2019s grasp on his job. Tight end Kevin Boss tried to pick up the ball instead of falling on it and came away empty-handed. Safety Nick Collins recovered the fumble for the Packers, who went on to hand the Giants a 45-17 loss by capitalizing on six Giants turnovers, including four interceptions by Manning. By the time of Jacobs\u2019s turnover, Coughlin had run out of answers. In desperation, he challenged the fumble, which was upheld. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a whole lot of evidence,\u201d he conceded, \u201cbut it was an opportunity.\u201d In general, Coughlin added: \u201cThere\u2019s no denying what took place. The facts are the facts. They\u2019re responsible for it. I\u2019m responsible for it, and so we have to live with it and turn around and line up next week.\u201d During a speech he delivered at a players-only meeting last week, Manning suggested that the sun would come up for the Giants on the Sunday after their 21-point fourth-quarter collapse against the Philadelphia Eagles in a 38-31 defeat. The warming trend was literal, not metaphorical. The temperature at Lambeau Field was 25 degrees with a negligible breeze, conditions that were downright tropical compared with the minus-23 wind chill three seasons ago when the Giants, led by Manning, beat the Packers in overtime in the N.F.C. championship game. In the end, this was the dawning of a new season for the Packers (9-6), who kept alive their playoff hopes. The Giants (9-6) can still emerge from the darkness of their third two-game losing streak of the season, but they no longer control their postseason destiny. They need to win their regular-season finale against the Washington Redskins and receive plenty of help: they need the Packers to lose or they must finish in a three-way tie with the New Orleans Saints and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Although there may be brighter days immediately ahead for the team, Coughlin\u2019s long-term security took a turn for the bleak. It was not just that the Giants lost but how discombobulated they appeared in the process: they never led and were outscored in the second half, 24-3. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who had missed the previous game after sustaining his second concussion of 2010, sliced and diced the vaunted Giants defense for 404 yards passing, and Green Bay\u2019s offense netted 515 yards. Rodgers, who completed 25 of 37 passes and threw for four touchdowns and no interceptions, was as sharp as the Giants\u2019 defense was not. A miscommunication in the secondary resulted in the first touchdown, an 80-yard pass play from Rodgers to Jordy Nelson, whom he hit in stride. Nelson was able to slice through the secondary because one safety, Antrel Rolle, was in zone coverage and the other, Deon Grant, was playing man-to-man. The reception, the longest of Nelson\u2019s three-year N.F.L. career, upset Coughlin, who stood with his gloved hands on his hips and a sour look on his face. On the Giants\u2019 ensuing possession, Manning, who passed for 301 yards, made an error that had to be equally as hard for his coach to digest. Throwing into a thicket of green-and-gold jerseys, Manning had his pass intercepted by cornerback Tramon Williams. That set up the Packers\u2019 second touchdown, a 3-yard pass from Rodgers to James Jones. Manning led the Giants back with two quick scoring strikes. The first, to Hakeem Nicks, covered 36 yards; the other was an 85-yard pass to Mario Manningham that tied the score at 14-14. The momentum gained by the Giants did not snowball; cornerback Terrell Thomas made sure of that by slapping Packers receiver Donald Driver on the helmet at the end of a 6-yard pass play. Thomas drew a personal foul that gave the Packers the ball on the Giants\u2019 16. Rodgers completed an 8-yard pass to Jones, then called the number of fullback John Kuhn, who ran it in for the first of his three touchdowns. Rodgers sustained his second concussion on Dec. 12 against the Detroit Lions when he stubbornly tried to scramble for more yards instead of sliding to avoid contact. The first time Rodgers was flushed out of the pocket Sunday, deep in Giants territory on the Packers\u2019 third possession, he took off running, and everybody who had a rooting interest in the game held his breath. Green Bay fans did so because the Giants\u2019 defense has knocked six quarterbacks out of games this season, at least briefly. Giants fans did so because Michael Vick\u2019s 130-yard rushing effort for the Eagles the previous week was a nightmare not easily laid to rest. Rodgers ran for 15 yards before sliding at the 6, an act that earned him an ovation from the crowd of 70,649. \u201cHe played very well,\u201d Coughlin said of Rodgers, adding, \u201cI thought his accuracy was outstanding, and he had good control of what they were trying to do.\u201d For the Giants, there seemed no end to their suffering. They were not able to fly home, their flight grounded Sunday night by the snowstorm in the New York metropolitan area. After the game, Jacobs was going nowhere in a hurry. As he strode toward the locker room exit, wheeling his carry-on luggage behind him, Jacobs was asked if he had any response for those who will pin this loss on Coughlin. \u201cI ain\u2019t got nothing to say about that,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can put it wherever they want to.\u201d", "keyword": "New York Giants;Green Bay Packers;Football"}
{"id": "ny0135213", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/04/19", "title": "Sect\u2019s Children to Stay in State Custody for Now", "abstract": "SAN ANGELO, Tex. \u2014 A judge on Friday ordered that all 416 children seized by Texas authorities in the raid on a polygamist religious sect be held in protective custody by the state pending further investigation into whether they had been abused, or were at risk of abuse in their community. After hearing two days of testimony, the judge, Barbara Walther, issued a terse statement from the bench at Tom Green County Court saying that she had also ordered maternal and paternal testing on all the children, who range in age from infants to 17-year-olds, and expedited DNA and fingerprint testing of their parents as well. Judge Walther emphasized that her decision was preliminary and that \u201ca safe environment\u201d for the children was paramount, now and in the future. The next hearing to update the status of the children and the investigation will be held on or before June 5, the judge said. The case, arising from a raid beginning April 3 at the Yearning for Zion ranch , about 45 miles from here in the small town of Eldorado, has gripped legal experts and child welfare authorities for its scale \u2014 the largest raid on a polygamist group in more than 50 years \u2014 and for the tangle of law and logistics raised by the questions of custody and religion. The ranch, really a self-contained community, has been operated since 2003 by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , or F.L.D.S., which broke off from the mainstream Mormon Church when the Mormons disavowed polygamy more than a century ago. But questions about the raid itself and what prompted it have continued to deepen as well, even as the first round of hearings was resolved. On Friday, the Texas Rangers said in a statement that they were investigating a Colorado woman, Rozita Swinton, 33, as a \u201cperson of interest\u201d in calls placed to a crisis center hot line here in late March. The authorities have said they launched their raid after a girl\u2019s phone call to an abuse hot line. They said that she gave her name as Sarah and that she said she was 16, pregnant and being abused by her 50-year-old husband. But they have been unable to locate the girl after two weeks, and the F.L.D.S. families have said they think the call was a hoax. The police statement on Friday said items found in Ms. Swinton\u2019s Colorado Springs home through a search warrant produced \u201cseveral items that indicated a possible connection between Swinton and calls regarding the F.L.D.S. compounds.\u201d Ms. Swinton has an unlisted number, and other efforts to reach her were unsuccessful. The judge\u2019s decision to continue holding the children for now produced a mostly quiet reaction outside the courthouse. A lawyer for four of the mothers, Tim Edwards, said that his clients would comply with the court\u2019s orders and \u201cdo everything in our power to turn the situation around and return the children back to their parents, which we firmly believe it is in their best interest to be.\u201d A spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Marleigh Meisner, said she thought the judge had done a good job, and emphasized that the raid had not been about religion. \u201cThis is a situation that involved the protection of children,\u201d Ms. Meisner said. \u201cThis is about children, keeping children safe from abuse and neglect.\u201d The families and their lawyers, almost from the beginning, have said the complete opposite: that the raid was all about religion. And in making their argument to Judge Walther on Friday, they kept with that message. Lawyers for the families said the state\u2019s justification for the raid was flimsy and tainted by bias against the F.L.D.S. community. Evidence that older men had married or had sex with girls as young as 15 \u2014 in violation of Texas law, and a core plank of the state\u2019s decision to remove the children \u2014 was inconclusive, they said. That a teenage girl becomes pregnant is by itself not evidence of child abuse, they said, let alone an indictment of the entire community where she lives. \u201cC.P.S. is trying to put the church on trial,\u201d said Rod Parker, a lawyer and spokesman for the church, referring to the Texas Division of Child Protective Services. \u201cIn reality what it\u2019s turning into is that C.P.S. is on trial for their high-handed and precipitous tactics in removing these children.\u201d The first witness for the families, William John Walsh, who described himself as a theological expert, said the church did not hold as part of its written theology that under-age girls should marry older men. The church\u2019s prophets, Mr. Walsh told the court, decide when a couple is ready, but the liturgy itself takes no position. Mr. Walsh said the breakaway sect did not teach, \u201cah, let\u2019s marry an under-age girl.\u201d The second witness, a mother from the community, Merylin Jeffs, 29, told Judge Walther that she was willing to move away from the ranch if necessary to protect her 7-year-old daughter, Marva. Ms. Jeffs said she and Marva had never been separated until the raid. Ms. Jeffs said she would not allow her daughter to marry before age 18, \u201cno matter the consequences.\u201d Neither side presented detailed evidence about the individual children seized in the raid. \u201cThere is a culture of young girls being pregnant by old men,\u201d said Angie Voss, an investigator with Child Protective Services, who participated in the raid and interviewed girls at the ranch. Ms. Voss told the court she found evidence that \u201cmore than 20 girls, some of whom are now adults, have conceived or given birth under the age of 16 or 17.\u201d Judge Walther was not asked to determine final custody for the children. Under Texas law, further hearings must be held in 60 days \u2014 the June 5 hearing date in this case \u2014 and then again at six months if a child is removed from the home. In that case, a trial, possibly by a jury, would decide final custody after a year. Though this is hardly an ordinary case, data from the Texas child protective system show a preference for keeping children in the care of families or relatives. In about two-thirds of custody cases, children ultimately return to families or relatives, according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Austin. Children from roughly the remaining one-third of cases end up in long-term foster care or are adopted. But the center\u2019s executive director, Scott McCown, a former judge, said the percentages of children returned to families were lower in abuse cases, and lower still in instances of sexual abuse.", "keyword": "Child Abuse and Neglect;Polygamy;Texas"}
{"id": "ny0150662", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/08/05", "title": "Hospital Plans to Build Over F.D.R. Drive, but Foes Fear Traffic and a Ruined View", "abstract": "To the opponents of a $235 million construction project on the Upper East Side planned by the Hospital for Special Surgery, traffic congestion, horn-honking and vehicle emissions in their neighborhood are already intolerable. They say trucks loading supplies or removing trash at the prestigious 145-year-old hospital are unable to fit into loading berths, so they block the street, creating gridlock. \u201cTraffic is idling \u2014 and air quality is already worsening in the whole neighborhood,\u201d said Dennis C. Alex, who has led residents of a nearby apartment building at 530 East 72d Street in opposing the new construction. \u201cAnd now,\u201d he added, \u201cthey want to build yet another giant building with more trucks and more traffic.\u201d That structure is the hospital\u2019s River Building, a planned 12-story outpatient center on a deck over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive between East 71st and 72d Streets. The hospital also plans to add three floors to its existing building just to the south. The controversy is yet another demonstration of the friction that institutional expansion engenders in the city\u2019s compact residential neighborhoods. This time the battleground is in the northern portion of Bedpan Alley, the two-mile string of medical and research complexes at the far East Side of Manhattan, and the institutional combatant is the celebrated Hospital for Special Surgery, which performs more than 20,000 operations a year. The hospital was recently named the nation\u2019s top hospital for orthopedic medicine for the second year in a row by U.S. News & World Report. Several of the hospital\u2019s doctors are the physicians for city sports teams, and two staff members have been invited to minister to United States athletes at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. And the proposed River Building\u2019s architecture and design firms recently won a design excellence award in a ceremony presided over by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at the 26th Annual Art Commission Awards in Manhattan. \u201cWe are at capacity here, and the need is growing,\u201d said Deborah M. Sale, an executive vice president at the hospital, at 535 East 70th Street. She said that aging baby boomers, new surgical techniques and the hospital\u2019s renown were swelling its patient ranks. Though opponents say that an outpatient building could be constructed somewhere else in the neighborhood, Ms. Sale said the hospital had fruitlessly pursued alternative locations nearby. \u201cThe real-estate market made it impossible,\u201d she said, adding that building over the F.D.R. Drive \u201cis currently our only option.\u201d Many opponents of the building live in two structures overlooking the East River: 530 East 72d Street, a 21-story white-brick postwar cooperative called the Edgewater, and the so-called \u201cblack and whites,\u201d a row of charming five-story 1894 walkups from 527 to 541 East 72d Street. Their name is derived from the houses\u2019 distinctive brick exteriors, painted black with white trim. Critics charge that the River Building will make the neighborhood increasingly unlivable. \u201cWhen is enough enough?\u201d asked Sarah Dudley Plimpton, who was married to the author George Plimpton until he died at age 76 in 2003. She has lived in the black-and-whites since 1976, \u201cbut George was here since 1959,\u201d she said, \u201cwhen it was a sleepy neighborhood. George loved it the way it was.\u201d He lived in 541 East 72d Street and edited the Paris Review from an office there. She has helped organize a group of about 100 opposing the project. Although generations ago the neighborhood was an enclave of tenements, cigar factories and malt houses, \u201cit used to be like TriBeCa here,\u201d Ms. Plimpton said. \u201cThen they threw up high rise after high rise. Adding another building would be impossible. Medical personnel, garbage trucks, ambulances, many more people, all in this fragile little area.\u201d In arguments before the New York City Planning Commission, opponents have claimed that the River Building would violate codes that protect residential areas, and say that the building would be inconsistent with the city\u2019s effort to encourage access to the water. Specifically they charge that the new building, which would rise 168 feet over the roadway, will alter a rare public view from the crescent-shaped, 10-bench overlook park at 72nd Street and the East River. Currently visible is the entire sweep of the river from the Triborough Bridge south to the Queensboro Bridge. Ms. Plimpton said the River Building would \u201cclose off the river panorama forever,\u201d chopping it in two. Ms. Sale said the hospital \u201chas tried to be sensitive to that issue,\u201d explaining that its architects tried to accommodate the residents of the Edgewater by setting the building back from East 72nd Street, reducing the surface area of its floors. \u201cIt would be lovely if it were possible to preserve all the views in many neighborhoods in Manhattan,\u201d Ms. Sale said, \u201cbut it isn\u2019t possible.\u201d Some opponents acknowledge that they have a self-serving motive: the protection of their river views, and the value of their apartments. \u201cI get what I deserve, here in Manhattan,\u201d Mr. Alex said of the transience of scenic vistas. \u201cBut that\u2019s not the issue. They aren\u2019t complying with the rules that govern residential neighborhoods.\u201d The hospital\u2019s environmental impact statement says that the project will produce \u201cno significant traffic impacts,\u201d but opponents have argued before the commission that traffic congestion already exposes the local community to \u201cincreased potential exposure to hazardous substances.\u201d The opponents argue that the hospital\u2019s loading docks are traffic-jam instigators, since they do not have the dimensions common for such facilities. One berth on East 71st Street is blocked by a trash compactor on a concrete slab. Another, nearby, which the hospital says accommodates two standard trucks, is not big enough to fully contain even one. \u201cSo the hospital has turned 71st Street itself into a loading bay,\u201d Mr. Alex said. \u201cTrucks are constantly parking in the middle of the street.\u201d This brings about a Rube Goldberg-like chain of nasty consequences, he said: Traffic blocked by the trucks creates gridlock at the East 71st Street exit from the F.D.R. Drive down the street, then backs up for long distances on the highway\u2019s exit road. Those cars in turn block the entrance to the F.D.R. Drive two blocks northward at East 73d Street, spilling gridlock into the neighborhood. Ms. Sale said the hospital\u2019s loading docks \u201care in compliance with the law.\u201d Of the traffic bottleneck on East 71st Street, she said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe this institution is the sole cause of that condition.\u201d She added that the hospital had been trying to schedule deliveries to prevent overlapping, and has attempted to divert trucks to East 70th Street to minimize disruption, adding, \u201cWe feel we can manage this.\u201d But the current design of the River Building has no new loading docks planned because the structure \u201cwill not add a significant number of trucks per day,\u201d she said. The Planning Commission is expected to issue its ruling on the proposed building soon; then it will go to the City Council. The local community board voted in favor of the River Building plan in May, and the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, has also announced conditional approval of the project. There are also neighbors who welcome the River Building. To M. Barry Schneider, president of the East Sixties Neighborhood Association, which counts some 800 members east of Third Avenue, the hospital \u201chas made a compelling case,\u201d he said. \u201cThey need new space.\u201d", "keyword": "Hospital for Special Surgery;Building (Construction);Upper East Side (NYC);Roads and Traffic;Hospitals"}
{"id": "ny0270413", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/04/06", "title": "UConn Wins Record Fourth Straight Title", "abstract": "INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Before Breanna Stewart had even played a game for Connecticut, she said her goal was to win four national titles in her four years. By that point, the Huskies had won seven championships, but for all the stars who had cycled through the program, none of them \u2014 not Sue Bird or Swin Cash, not Diana Taurasi or Tina Charles or Maya Moore \u2014 had been able to win four straight. In fact, no women\u2019s team in history had. As UConn raced through this season, however, Stewart\u2019s ambition began to look more like an inevitability. And with 24 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists on Tuesday night, she made it official, lifting the Huskies to an 82-51 win over Syracuse in the N.C.A.A. tournament final at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Stewart was named the Final Four\u2019s most outstanding player, and even that was not a surprise: She had won the same honor in each of her previous postseason appearances. Video The University of Connecticut\u2019s women\u2019s basketball team held a press conference following their fourth consecutive title win. Coach Geno Auriemma attributed the team\u2019s continued success to his players. Credit Credit Aj Mast/Associated Press No player had accomplished that feat, either. No player had won even three. Aiding Stewart\u2019s quest were two fellow senior stars: Morgan Tuck, who had 19 points, and Moriah Jefferson, who had 13. They leave Connecticut (38-0) having completed the sixth undefeated season in team history, with a 75-game streak over all. The Huskies went 151-5 over their four years \u2014 the most wins over a four-year stretch in N.C.A.A. history. \u201cThere\u2019s three ingredients that go into this kind of success: 1-2-3,\u201d Coach Geno Auriemma said on ESPN\u2019s broadcast as he pointed to Stewart, Jefferson and Tuck. \u201cI\u2019ve never been around a better group of great players that really love the game.\u201d As the seniors left the court together, Jefferson said later, \u201cwe just kept saying, \u2018Oh, man, oh, man, four in a row.\u2019 \u201d Tuck is widely expected to enter the W.N.B.A. draft, but she still has the opportunity to pursue one more title: She has an extra year of eligibility, having gained a medical redshirt for her sophomore season. Asked on ESPN\u2019s broadcast after the game if she planned to leave UConn, she awkwardly laughed before Stewart rushed over and shouted, \u201cIt\u2019s a secret!\u201d Soon after, it was revealed that the long, brown box that Stewart had carried into the locker room before the game had contained a Marine\u2019s sword. Stewart, Jefferson and Tuck used it to tap one another on the shoulder and ceremoniously knight themselves. Breanna Stewart Completes Her Run of Dominance Breanna Stewart\u2019s four-year record with UConn was 151-5, and every victory but one was by 10 or more points. \u201cOur three seniors have done something incredibly special,\u201d Auriemma said, adding, \u201cI can\u2019t describe what this is like, but if you ever felt like you loved something more than anything in the world, that\u2019s what this feels like.\u201d The victory was meaningful for another senior, too: Briana Pulido, who joined the team as a walk-on but scored the final points of the game, sinking a jumper with about 13 seconds left after UConn\u2019s starters had been pulled. The title secured a record for Auriemma, who, with his 11th title, surpassed the U.C.L.A. legend John Wooden for the most in college basketball history. Auriemma has never lost an N.C.A.A. championship game. Asked about his passing Wooden, Auriemma said: \u201cFirst thing I thought about was last night, there was something like 20 of my former players all in one room, and I remember taking a step back and saying, \u2018This is unbelievable.\u2019 With 11 championships, there\u2019s been a lot of great players I\u2019ve been able to coach.\u201d Stewart grew up in North Syracuse, minutes from Syracuse\u2019s campus, and on Monday, she said it was fitting to end her college career against the Orange, whose games she frequently attended throughout high school. Image Connecticut\u2019s Morgan Tuck shooting against Syracuse\u2019s Briana Day in the first half of Tuesday\u2019s game. Credit Michael Conroy/Associated Press She also said she was proud of their tournament run. But on Tuesday, it was her job to stop them. Syracuse, which had never reached the round of 16, made its surprising journey to the final with high-pressured defense and volume 3-point shooting that neutralized traditional powers like seventh-seeded Tennessee and top-seeded South Carolina. On Sunday, the Orange made a Final Four-record 12 3-pointers in an 80-59 rout of Washington. But they were 24-point underdogs against UConn, and from the start, it was obvious why. Syracuse\u2019s full-court press was made largely obsolete by the Huskies\u2019 speed, and UConn\u2019s own full-court press, which helped it force eight first-half turnovers \u2014 a jarring turn of events for Syracuse, which had had the top turnover margin in the country. At one point in the second quarter, Stewart snagged a rebound and tossed a precise outlet pass to Kia Nurse speeding down the floor for a layup. As Syracuse called timeout and the UConn players jogged back to their bench, Stewart shouted at her teammates, \u201cLet\u2019s go,\u201d spiced with an expletive. They led by 23 at the time. Syracuse, which made only 2 of 12 3-point attempts in the first half, trailed by 50-23 at the break, having been on the wrong side of three runs of at least 9-0. On the rare occasion the Orange converted a long-range attempt \u2014 they finished 2 of 19 \u2014 the Huskies had an equally decisive answer, and they stretched their lead to 33 points in the third quarter before Syracuse closed the gap with a 16-0 run. Image Morgan Tuck (3), Kia Nurse (11) and Breanna Stewart at the end of Tuesday\u2019s game. The Huskies finished 38-0. Credit Michael Conroy/Associated Press UConn again extended its lead in short order, though. After playing 38 minutes, and emerging from that 16-0 run unscathed, Stewart took her final order from Auriemma, who was frantically signaling to his players to call timeout. Leaving the court, Stewart jumped into a group hug with Jefferson and Tuck, closing in on that championship she had dreamed of. \u201cThis is the perfect ending for all three of us,\u201d Stewart said, adding, \u201cThere\u2019s no other way to end it.\u201d On the floor, Bird, Charles and Moore were among the former Huskies to join the celebration. They had each won multiple championships in their college days \u2014 but not four. \u201cNow there\u2019s nothing else,\u201d Stewart said. \u201cWe did exactly what we wanted.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;Records and Achievements;Geno Auriemma;Breanna Stewart;Coaches;NCAA Women's Basketball;Syracuse University;University of Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0112385", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/02/06", "title": "Robert B. Cohen Dies at 85; Founded the Hudson News Chain", "abstract": "Robert B. Cohen, whose chain of Hudson News shops at airports, bus terminals and railroad stations across the country has offered untold numbers of people a respite from the tedium of travel, died on Feb. 1 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 86. The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a Parkinson\u2019s-like neurological disorder, according to his son James, who succeeded his father as president of the company. Mr. Cohen was president of the Hudson County News Company, a major newspaper distributorship, when it went into the retail field in the mid-1970s by taking over a bankrupt newsstand at the Newark airport. In those days, newsstands at passenger terminals were almost all closetlike operations with a handful of publications on the shelf below the cash register. Mr. Cohen envisioned a more welcoming place, and in 1987 the company opened a large, brightly lit store at La Guardia Airport. Its wide aisles, with hundreds of magazines and newspapers, some in foreign languages, fully displayed rather than fanned on top of each other, became the company standard. The one at Grand Central Terminal is approximately 1,000 square feet. There are now about 600 Hudson News outlets across the country. Some have cafes. In 2008, Hudson News was sold to Dufry, a company based in Switzerland that is one of the largest owners of duty-free stores in the world. James Cohen is no longer president. Before going into the newsstand business, Robert Cohen built one of the largest newspaper distributorships in the country, serving the New York and Boston areas. In 1985, in partnership with The New York Times, he acquired the Metropolitan News Company, the distributor of The Times and The Wall Street Journal. He later acquired Newark Newsdealers, also in partnership with The Times. His interest in the companies was sold to The Times in 1994. Mr. Cohen had legal troubles in 1981 when, after a federal investigation, he pleaded guilty to making $37,000 in payoffs to officials of the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union in exchange for favored treatment. He was fined $150,000. Robert Benjamin Cohen was born in Bayonne, N.J., on May 26, 1925, to Isaac and Lillian Goodman Cohen. His father, who once operated a newsstand and a home-delivery route in Brooklyn, started what was then called the Bayonne News Company in the early 1920s. Robert Cohen joined the business after graduating from New York University in 1947, the same year he married Harriet Brandwein, who survives him. Besides his wife and his son, Mr. Cohen is survived by his sister, Rosalind Stone, and six grandchildren. His daughter, Claudia Cohen, who wrote the gossip column, \u201cI, Claudia,\u201d for The Daily News of New York in the early 1980s, died of ovarian cancer in 2007 . His son Michael died in 1997. Mr. Cohen, who also owned a home in Englewood, N.J., owned racehorses. One of them, named Hudson County \u2014 for which Mr. Cohen had paid $6,700 \u2014 finished second to Cannonade in the 1974 Kentucky Derby.", "keyword": "Cohen Robert B.;Newspapers;Deaths (Obituaries);Shopping and Retail;Cohen Robert B"}
{"id": "ny0038812", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2014/04/18", "title": "South Sudan: U.N. Base Attacked", "abstract": "A group of people dressed in civilian clothes pretending to be peaceful protesters who wanted to deliver a petition forced their way into a United Nations base sheltering about 5,000 civilians on Thursday and opened fire, United Nations officials said. At least 20 people were killed and 60 were wounded in the attack on the base in Bor in Jonglei State, a United Nations official said. The exact number of people killed or wounded was not immediately clear, said a United Nations spokesman, St\u00e9phane Dujarric. Two United Nations peacekeepers were wounded repelling the armed mob, he said. More than one million people have fled their homes since fighting erupted in the South Sudan in December between troops backing President Salva Kiir and soldiers loyal to Mr. Kiir\u2019s ousted vice president, Riek Machar. Thousands of people have been killed and tens of thousands have sought refuge at United Nations bases around the country.", "keyword": "Terrorism;South Sudan;UN;Murders"}
{"id": "ny0169057", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2006/12/22", "title": "Nasa Watches Weather for a Landing Site", "abstract": "NASA watched the weather in three time zones as it struggled to pick a landing site for the space shuttle Discovery. The agency plans to bring the ship home today. But showers were in the forecast at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and crosswinds were expected at the next-best option, Edwards Air Force Base in California. At the third-best choice, White Sands, N.M., the weather looked favorable, but that could change and New Mexico is considered inconvenient for transporting the shuttle back to Florida. NASA said that if one of the sites had favorable weather today, it would bring the shuttle home. The shuttle does not have enough fuel to remain in orbit beyond Saturday.", "keyword": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Space Shuttle"}
{"id": "ny0076289", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2015/05/16", "title": "Google to Test Bubble-Shaped Self-Driving Cars in Silicon Valley", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 The world is one step closer to the day when people can, in good conscience, drive to work while sipping coffee, texting with a friend and working on a laptop computer. On Friday, Google announced that sometime this summer several prototype versions of its self-driving cars are set to hit the streets of Mountain View, Calif., the search giant\u2019s hometown. The move is still just another round of testing but it is a significant step toward a pilot program in which regular consumers could ride in self-driving cars. Google has long been testing its self-driving car technology with a fleet of Lexus sport utility vehicles that have driven about a million miles on public roads, and that continue to put in 10,000 miles each week. Traditional automakers are also pushing the envelope of driverless tech with on-the-road testing of their own autonomous prototypes, and the industry predicts that by 2020 those dreams could come true. Getting there is now much more about software than hardware. The systems of radar, lasers and cameras currently used by Google and automakers have grown so sophisticated that the vehicles can easily monitor the road in all directions \u2014 even beyond what the eye can see. The tough part is figuring out what to do with all that information. In essence, the cars need an electronic brain that knows how to drive in a world where human drivers, as well as pedestrians and bicyclists, often do unpredictable things. They also need to understand regional differences. Drivers in Boston, for instance, often behave differently than those in Atlanta or Los Angeles, where unspoken rules of the road and cultural cues can vary. City environments are particularly challenging, and require software with much more flexibility and power. That\u2019s one of the reasons Google (and its rival, Apple) hope their software acumen can help them solve the puzzle. And now that Google will be testing its new bubble-shaped cars on public roads near its Mountain View headquarters, it\u2019s getting one step closer to honing its predictive technology for urban settings. Video The first autonomous vehicle Google has made will hit public roads in northern California for tests this summer, reports Phil LeBeau of CNBC. Unlike the fleet of self-driving Lexuses that are already on the road, Google\u2019s prototype, which looks like a golf cart with doors , is designed to be a fully autonomous car in which people get in, set their destination and relax as the car does the work. The prototypes cannot go faster than 25 miles per hour and, for now, have a steering wheel and pedals so that a \u201csafety driver\u201d could take over. The steering wheel is a legal requirement, but Google\u2019s plan is to take the driver out of driving completely. Earlier this year, during a presentation at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Astro Teller, head of the Google X research division that created the self-driving car, said that in autumn 2012 the company started allowing Google employees to take the Lexus version home and self-drive on the freeway, so long as they kept paying attention in the event of an emergency. Despite this, the employees got used to self-driving and stopped paying attention. \u201cThe assumption that humans can be a reliable backup for the system was a total fallacy,\u201d Mr. Teller said in the presentation . \u201cOnce people trust the system, they trust it.\u201d Google realized the best thing to do \u201cwas to make a car that has no steering wheel, that has no brake pedal, that has no acceleration pedal \u2014 that drives itself all the time, from point A to point B, at the push of a button.\u201d Of course, nothing is accident-proof. Earlier this week, Chris Urmson, director of Google\u2019s Self-Driving Car Project, disclosed that self-driving cars had been in 11 \u201cminor accidents \u201d in which there was only light damage and no injuries, and that \u201cnot once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.\u201d This included seven rear-end collisions, a couple of wrecks in which cars were sideswiped and one crash in which the self-driving car was hit by a driver who rolled through a stop sign. The challenge of city driving is one reason driverless technology has first arrived on highways. In the coming months, Tesla Motors has promised to introduce an \u201cautopilot\u201d feature that can take over highway driving in certain conditions. Next year, other automakers will do the same, such as General Motors\u2019 \u201cSuper Cruise,\u201d which will allow hands-off-the-wheel, foot-off-the-pedals highway driving. Parking is another area that is poised for an overhaul. Companies like Ford already offer cars that pull into parking spaces automatically. The French supplier Valeo, which works with multiple automakers, is now working on technology aimed at parking garages where you can pull up to a garage and get out, leaving your car to find an available space and park itself. When you\u2019re ready to leave, the car acts like a robotic valet as it unparks and meets you out front.", "keyword": "Google;Driverless Cars,Self-Driving Cars"}
{"id": "ny0234918", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/01/10", "title": "Neighbors Challenge Energy Aims in Bolivia", "abstract": "LA PAZ, Bolivia \u2014 President Evo Morales \u2019s leftist government, which has asserted greater control over some of South America\u2019s most coveted natural gas reserves, is facing a challenge as neighboring countries move to achieve energy security by cutting their dependence on Bolivian gas supplies. New gas projects in Brazil and Argentina have come on line at a time when Mr. Morales is winning plaudits for a strong economy. It grew 3.7 percent last year, enabling him to consolidate control over energy resources, including natural gas, South America\u2019s second-largest such reserve after Venezuela\u2019s, and huge lithium deposits. But even as Mr. Morales has emerged as one of the region\u2019s strongest leaders, bolstered by a landslide re-election victory in December, concern is surfacing here over Bolivia \u2019s long-term financial underpinnings as its neighbors start importing gas from distant sources like Qatar, and not so distant ones, like Trinidad and Tobago. The reorganization of South America\u2019s energy relationships is being closely followed by countries trying to limit their reliance on energy-rich nations that are in political flux or that use their resources as a political lever, as Russia\u2019s state energy company has bullied former Soviet republics and Europe . \u201cThe new projects in South America offer a striking example of how countries can cut their umbilical dependence on pipelines,\u201d said Carlos Alberto L\u00f3pez, an energy secretary in a previous administration here. \u201cWe are awakening to the reality that our energy nationalism is shooting us in the foot.\u201d The new gas-import ventures in Brazil and Argentina, as well as two in Chile, once a potential market for Bolivian gas, all use ship-borne imports, in which the fuel is cooled into liquefied natural gas for transport from exporting countries and reheated on delivery. This increasingly common transport method has provided substantial competition with pipelines in some markets. Bolivia itself once had plans to export liquefied gas by sending it first to a Chilean port, from where it would be shipped north to Mexico or the United States. But the plan caused so much outrage \u2014 driven in part by historical tensions with Chile and by resentment of the political elite here who had championed the project \u2014 that it was a major factor in an uprising by Bolivia\u2019s indigenous population in 2003. Mr. Morales, 50, helped lead those protests and announced the nationalization of the energy industry after he became president in 2006. He sent soldiers to occupy gas installations, raised royalties on foreign energy companies and bolstered nationalistic institutions like the navy, which patrols rivers and lakes, and pines for sea access in this landlocked country. While these policies intensified fears in neighboring countries over Bolivia\u2019s ability and willingness to export its gas at certain prices, they hold wide appeal among Bolivia\u2019s voters, reflected in the election victory here last month of Mr. Morales, the country\u2019s first indigenous president. \u201cWe\u2019ve been ransacked for so long,\u201d said Domitila Mora, 46, a fruit seller in El Alto, the city of slums located above the capital, La Paz. \u201cThe nationalization gave us back our dignity, and now things are better. Brother Evo Morales is taking care of our natural resources for us.\u201d The symbolism of his energy policies permeates El Alto\u2019s bleak cityscape in the form of state advertising. One billboard paid for by YPFB, the national energy company, extols social spending made possible by higher royalties. \u201cThere is no development without nationalization,\u201d it says, showing Mr. Morales holding a schoolgirl in his arms. Relatively sound economic stewardship, particularly compared with Venezuela, Bolivia\u2019s top ally, makes a sudden crisis over losing gas-export markets unlikely. Bolivia\u2019s growth last year contrasted with Venezuela\u2019s 2.9 percent economic contraction, as Venezuela struggled with high inflation and a dearth of private investment. Brazil, the region\u2019s rising power, is also not eager to see Bolivia, a major producer of cocaine and still one of South America\u2019s poorest nations, lose its hard-won economic stability. While trying to avoid confrontation with Mr. Morales, Brazil has reassured Bolivia that it will keep importing its gas, even as Petrobras , Brazil\u2019s national energy company, has cooled to large new investments here. And private Brazilian companies like HRT have made breaking dependence on Bolivian gas a central mission. Meanwhile, cracks are already emerging in Bolivia\u2019s energy industry as the focus of international energy companies in South America shifts decidedly to Brazil, which is developing its own new discoveries of offshore oil and gas , and away from Bolivia and Venezuela. Prices for Bolivia\u2019s gas fell sharply in 2009, with income from gas exports declining 39 percent to $2.1 billion, according to the Bolivian Hydrocarbons Chamber, an industry group. As foreign companies slow investments here, drilling for new fields is almost at a standstill, Bolivian energy consultants said. YPFB, the national energy company, also faces a scandal involving a kickback scheme and the recent killing here of an energy executive who was carrying $450,000 in cash, events that Mr. Morales attributed to infiltration of the company by the Central Intelligence Agency. But the liquefied gas projects in neighboring countries, including two in Brazil and one in Argentina, loom as a bigger challenge. Two more liquid projects in Chile, which does not import Bolivian gas, would alter the region\u2019s energy dynamic further. Gas from those projects could also be shipped by pipeline to Argentina, a top Bolivian market. For now, the possibility of Bolivian energy exports to Chile seems increasingly remote as Chile remains resistant to aspirations by Bolivia, reiterated here last month by Adm. Jos\u00e9 Luis Cabas, the commander of Bolivia\u2019s armed forces, to regain coastline from what is now Chilean territory. \u201cEvo\u2019s nationalization was an astute move politically in the short term,\u201d said Roger Tissot, a specialist in South American energy politics at Gas Energy, a Brazilian consulting firm, citing the increase in social spending made possible here by higher revenues. \u201cBut in the long term Bolivia is boxing itself in.\u201d Miguel Yague, a senior energy official in Mr. Morales\u2019s government, said that Bolivia remained optimistic about maintaining exports to its neighbors and possibly establishing pipeline routes to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. \u201cLooking at Brazil,\u201d he said, \u201cit is a market of almost limitless potential.\u201d Still, Brazil is now drawing up plans of its own to tap its newly discovered gas reserves and build its own separate liquefied natural gas terminal to possibly export the fuel during months of low demand. And Peru, Bolivia\u2019s northwestern neighbor, is preparing to export liquefied gas, potentially shipping to markets that could have been Bolivia\u2019s. At the same time, Bolivia is focused on smaller projects like expanding a pipeline to Argentina. Fanfare followed a recent announcement by Repsol, the Spanish energy giant, that it would increase investments in Bolivia. But skepticism persists as to whether the move was similar to those by foreign companies in Venezuela, where they seek to keep a seat at the negotiating table in a country with large energy reserves but rarely follow through on talk of large projects. \u201cA decade ago Bolivia was preparing to be the energy nerve center of South America,\u201d said Gonzalo Ch\u00e1vez, an economist at this city\u2019s Catholic University. \u201cNow a loop of energy-security projects is going up around us.\u201d", "keyword": "Bolivia;Natural Gas;Morales Evo;South America;International Trade and World Market"}
{"id": "ny0130713", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2012/12/03", "title": "Alabama-Georgia Classic Merely a Warm-Up to the Main Event", "abstract": "ATLANTA \u2014 In the aftermath of a college football classic as close and tense as any game this season, as good or better than any Southeastern Conference final that came before, Alabama lingered on the Georgia game, on what just happened. The Crimson Tide topped the Bulldogs on Saturday, but barely, victory not assured until the game clock read all zeros. Everyone else lingered on Alabama and Notre Dame , two of college football\u2019s most storied programs now set to meet in the Bowl Championship Series finale. The hype machine, sure to overheat between now and when they play on Jan. 7, had already started to warm up. For as much as defeat stung Georgia, which finished 5 yards from a completely different script, all of college football, its advertisers and sponsors and broadcast partners, stood to benefit from Alabama\u2019s inclusion. Perhaps that is unfair to Georgia, which played like a national champion Saturday \u2014 and probably fell from B.C.S. bowl contention, an incredible injustice. Still, facts are facts. Alabama will draw more money, more eyeballs, more interest. Simply because Alabama is Alabama. And Notre Dame is Notre Dame. These are the college football teams that Hollywood makes movies about. On Saturday, the sport\u2019s dream final materialized: the SEC champion in Alabama against undefeated Notre Dame, tradition vs. tradition, Roll Tide meets Touchdown Jesus. The teams last faced off in 1987, a fact sure to be repeated thousands of times before they meet again. Hype? Of course. Large doses. Ad nauseam. The whole deal started Saturday, and immediately. Even then, a notion more pertinent to the national championship game itself continued to surface. It concerned Alabama and the SEC, winner of the past six national championships, the King Kong conference of college football, and how that related to Notre Dame, a very good team that this season mostly took advantage of a fairly weak schedule. Afterward, Alabama Coach Nick Saban went on and on about his conference: the impossible schedule; the long list of contenders, each with at least one loss; the rosters filled with so much N.F.L. talent that Alabama and Georgia could nearly stock a competitive professional roster by themselves. The SEC, Saban correctly noted, \u201cwill test your mettle.\u201d His sister, Saban continued, did the math: SEC teams made up 60 percent of the top 10 and only 20 percent of B.C.S. bowl teams. All the reporters laughed. But Saban had a point. And so, the question lingered. Does Notre Dame, the country\u2019s No. 1-ranked team, have any sort of chance? Would the dream final end up in a blowout? Notre Dame did win that game in 1987. The Fighting Irish do lead the series, 5-1. They did topple top-ranked Alabama in the Sugar Bowl in 1973, did defeat No. 2 Alabama in the Orange Bowl in 1975. This, of course, is not 1973 or 1987. Notre Dame has more than a slight chance in 2012, a good one even, but it might want to start on the prayers this week. Just in case. Saban, forever clinging to his famous \u201cprocess\u201d like a toddler to a blanket, claimed afterward he would not really look at Notre Dame for weeks. His Crimson Tide had a banquet Sunday night, and he wanted to properly acknowledge his team\u2019s accomplishments. He insisted he did not know the date of the national title game. It is doubtful that even his wife believed him. Already, experts predicted that Alabama-Notre Dame would shatter previous ratings. Brad Adgate, research director at the media services company Horizon Media, said in an e-mail Saturday he expected a \u201cminimum average of 30 million viewers,\u201d which would break the cable audience record by several million. An exciting, close game, Adgate added, could lift that average toward 35 million viewers, a mind-boggling number. The matchup, he said, \u201cis the best ESPN could have hoped for\u201d and \u201cmost compelling since U.S.C.-Texas in 2006.\u201d Saban, meanwhile, continued on the stage. It was semicomical to hear him sell his current team, the defending national champion, as anything other than another mighty Alabama squad. Yet he did, sort of, go there, painting Alabama as this Little Engine that Could (a successful, well-funded, well-stocked version). But again, he had a point. In his first meeting this season, Saban said he told his players: \u201cYou are not a national championship team. If you played on that team, that team is gone.\u201d This team, talented but young (relative), capable but inexperienced (again, relative), exceeded even Saban\u2019s expectations, despite, he said, losing more players for the season to injury than any team he had ever coached. Its triumph over Georgia typified the 2012 campaign, in that Alabama won with force and willpower and talent. Always, talent, but less than in recent seasons (again, relative). Georgia Coach Mark Richt said Alabama did what Alabama does best Saturday. The Crimson Tide handed the ball off and ran inside, no gimmicks, just power football, SEC football, straight ahead. \u201cThey ran the ball good,\u201d Richt said. \u201cI can figure that one out.\u201d Saban continued on about the conference, about how Georgia was unlikely to play in a B.C.S. bowl game, while 8-5 Wisconsin will. Some system, huh? Ridiculous, Saban called it. Still, typical B.C.S. mess or not, college football got the title game, the most important game, correct. If it happened largely by circumstance, so be it. The sport got Notre Dame and Alabama, two formidable defenses, two iconic programs. Richt said he would vote Notre Dame No. 1 and Alabama No. 2 this week, and while that is fair, it also hardly mattered. Alabama will enter the contest a clear favorite, no matter what Saban says or how Richt votes. Now, all college football needs is a quality game to match the hype, some fight from the Fighting Irish. The sports world will be watching.", "keyword": "University of Alabama;University of Notre Dame;Bowl Championship Series;College Athletics;Football;Football (College)"}
{"id": "ny0008166", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/05/06", "title": "E.P.A. Plan to Clean Up Gowanus Canal Meets Local Resistance", "abstract": "Almost everybody wants the Gowanus Canal cleansed of its toxic gunk. But a $500 million plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to do just that has run into protests from otherwise environmentally conscious residents in several Brooklyn neighborhoods. They want the canal purged of pollutants like PCBs, lead, mercury and raw sewage, but are fighting the methods the agency has chosen. One neighborhood fears that the sludge taken out from the canal would poison the air over their ball fields, and others worry that the location of a sewage-processing site needed for the cleanup would destroy a beloved swimming pool. The disputes illustrate a predicament that often crops up in environmental remediation: those affected see the cure as worse than the disease. One part of the E.P.A.\u2019s plan for the 1.8-mile canal would require the city to build an eight-million-gallon sewage storage tank so that the area\u2019s combined waste and rainwater sewers would not overflow during heavy storms and contaminate the canal. But the site the agency has chosen for the tank would place it under a park that has a popular 3-foot-9-inch-deep swimming pool, fondly known as the Double D pool because it is between Douglass and DeGraw Streets. Sabine Aronowsky, a local activist and mother, said the pool was not just a place for children to cool off during sweltering summer days, but \u201cone of the last remaining bastions of Brooklyn as I know it, a real community gathering place.\u201d Children from Park Slope, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens mingle with those from three nearby housing projects. Image Sabine Aronowsky opposes a plan to clean the Gowanus Canal. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like getting into a bathing suit for neutralizing class lines,\u201d said Holly White, a mother of two young children who learned to swim at the Double D and caper there much of the summer. The Bloomberg administration tried to close the pool in 2010 for budgetary reasons, but neighborhood outrage succeeded in saving it. Construction of the sewage storage tank would close the pool, and possibly an adjoining playground, basketball court and skate park, for years; officials have not said whether they would come up with a temporary alternative. Residents have gathered 700 signatures opposing the tank\u2019s location and have suggested an empty Consolidated Edison lot a few blocks away as a more suitable spot. The E.P.A. says that in any case, the pool will one day have to be dug up since it was built above the remnants of a plant that manufactured natural gas from coal and left behind a residue of toxic coal tars. \u201cSomething has to happen to it, and the question is what is that something,\u201d said Walter Mugdan, a regional Superfund director for the E.P.A. \u201cDoes it include excavation of all the soils in the area? And if it includes excavation, there\u2019s going to be a temporary closing of the pool in any event.\u201d The E.P.A. finished taking comments from the affected neighborhoods late last month and plans to publish its final plan before the end of the year. Dredging could begin in 2015 and be completed by 2020. Once dredging begins, the canal sediment would have to be \u201cdewatered\u201d nearby, on barges or on land. Then, most of the toxic sludge would be shipped out of state for treatment, but some of the leftover could be treated in Brooklyn and blended into concrete to be used as landfill. Image The plan would include closing a swimming pool and building a plant near ball fields and public housing. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The location of the proposed Brooklyn treatment plant is the subject of another protest, this time in Red Hook. The neighborhood has been slowly gentrifying, but gritty industry still has a large presence; it is perennially considered for unpopular uses like garbage-transfer stations. The chief idea the E.P.A. has been considering is to build the dewatering and treatment plant on a parking lot that is part of the sprawling Gowanus Bay Terminal. But the terminal sits next to ball fields, a large swimming pool and the Red Hook Houses, public low-income housing. Some residents, as well as the owners of popular Latin American food trucks that congregate there, fear the plant \u2014 known as a Confined Disposal Facility \u2014 could create a noxious stench. \u201cWe\u2019re not saying we\u2019re opposed to dredging,\u201d said Bea Byrd, a longtime resident of the Red Hook Houses. \u201cBut how can you have a sludge plant on the other side of where children are playing ball? Never mind the Red Hook Houses where we have to breathe the air. We have residents with asthma and cancer.\u201d John Quadrozzi Jr., who owns the terminal, says the least toxic portion of the sediment would be transported a short distance in enclosed barges to be processed in an enclosed plant and would emerge as a safe concrete mixture. Mr. Quadrozzi wants to use the concrete products in the construction of a pier, near the end of Columbia Street, where oceangoing ships could dock. He and the E.P.A. have tried to build support by offering training at the plant for eventual jobs and promising to build a maritime park, complete with an Intrepid-like museum on a freighter. But neighborhood activists like John McGettrick, a chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association, have accused the E.P.A. of trying to enrich Mr. Quadrozzi, the owner of several city concrete plants and someone they say has been cited by New York State\u2019s environmental agency for illegally dumping in Gowanus Bay. Mr. Quadrozzi said that after years of waiting for state permits to repair a bulkhead, he paid $60,000 to settle accusations brought by the New York agency when the bulkhead collapsed into the bay. The E.P.A. does have an alternative plan for treating the sludge: Shipping it all to states like Idaho and Texas where existing plants can process it. But that remedy is more expensive. In an interview, Mr. Mugdan said the agency would not dispose of sludge in Red Hook \u201cunless there is community acceptance.\u201d He added, \u201cSo far, there\u2019s been pretty vigorous opposition.\u201d", "keyword": "EPA;Gowanus Canal Brooklyn;Water pollution;Brooklyn;HazMat;Superfund"}
{"id": "ny0083401", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/10/21", "title": "Biden Says He Didn\u2019t Oppose Raid That Killed Bin Laden", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 If Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. decides to run for the presidency again, his best chance may well be to present himself as President Obama \u2019s third-term successor. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden took the first step, describing himself as Mr. Obama\u2019s most essential partner while taking subtle swipes at his would-be rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Along the way, Mr. Biden sought to recast his role in the raid to kill Osama bin Laden , arguably the most picked-over moment of Mr. Obama\u2019s presidency and one that might hurt Mr. Biden\u2019s presidential chances. Mr. Biden had previously said that he had advised the president against launching the special forces raid on the Abbottabad compound where Bin Laden was suspected of hiding. At a Democratic congressional retreat in January 2012 , Mr. Biden said that almost every other official in the Situation Room had hedged on a response when asked by the president whether he should order the raid. \u201cI said, \u2018We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is, don\u2019t go. We have to do two more things to see if he\u2019s there,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Biden said then. It was a potential weakness that Mrs. Clinton has signaled she might exploit. At a debate last week in Las Vegas, Mrs. Clinton boasted she was one of the few advisers to support \u201cthe tough decision that President Obama had to make about Osama bin Laden.\u201d But by January 2013, Mr. Biden had begun hedging on whether he had opposed the raid. \u201cI remember walking up to his office and saying: \u2018Look, follow your instincts. Follow your instincts,\u2019 \u201d he said in a January 2013 interview. When asked specifically whether he had advised against the raid, Mr. Biden said: \u201cLet me put it this way: My advice was, follow your instincts, knowing what his instinct was.\u201d On Tuesday, Mr. Biden\u2019s evolution continued. Before an audience at George Washington University, Mr. Biden said he never gave Mr. Obama definitive advice on controversial issues in front of other officials, mindful that he did not want the rest of the team to see a difference between his opinion and that of the president. With others around them, Mr. Biden said he suggested one more pass over the Abbottabad compound with an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone . After the meeting in the Situation Room, though, Mr. Biden said he privately gave the president his real view. \u201cAs we walked out of the room and went upstairs, I told him my opinion, that I said that I thought he should go but to follow his own instincts,\u201d Mr. Biden said Tuesday. William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama\u2019s chief of staff at the time and was present in the Situation Room when the Abbottabad raid was discussed, said shortly after Tuesday\u2019s forum that the meeting occurred as Mr. Biden described it. The description of the meeting about the Abbottabad raid was one of several moments when Mr. Biden seemed to take swipes, at least indirectly, at Mrs. Clinton. He did not mention Mrs. Clinton as among those who had definitively supported the Abbottabad raid, although she and Mr. Daley said she had been. In a wide-ranging conversation with former Vice President Walter F. Mondale about his vice presidency, Mr. Biden mentioned that he had flown more than one million miles to speak to world leaders. \u201cWe\u2019ve had two great secretaries of state,\u201d he said, \u201cbut when I go, they know that I am speaking for the president. There is nothing missed between the lip and the cup. Whatever I say, the president is saying.\u201d At another point in the discussion, Mr. Biden mentioned that he was the administration\u2019s primary interlocutor with Capitol Hill. \u201cAnd I still have a lot of Republican friends,\u201d Mr. Biden said, adding for the second time in two days, \u201cI don\u2019t think my chief enemy there is the Republican Party. This is a matter of making things work.\u201d Later, at another event honoring the 87-year-old Mr. Mondale on Tuesday night, Mr. Biden went even further, calling it \"na\u00efve\" to think that the country can be governed without bipartisan cooperation. In last week\u2019s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton was asked which enemies she is most proud of making. \u201cWell, in addition to the N.R.A., the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians,\u201d she responded to laughter, \u201cprobably the Republicans.\u201d Mr. Biden\u2019s subtle digs could presage the kind of negative primary campaign that has so far largely been confined to the Republican side. Even if he does not enter the race, the vice president\u2019s comments suggested that he is unhappy with Mrs. Clinton and unlikely to get behind his former Senate and administration colleague any time soon. Either possibility \u2014 testy rival or sideline critic \u2014 is not pretty for Democrats and particularly Obama loyalists. Political analysts have pointed out that Mr. Biden\u2019s best and perhaps only chance to secure his party\u2019s nomination would be to persuade center-left Democrats, particularly blacks and Hispanics, that he and not Mrs. Clinton is Mr. Obama\u2019s true heir. Mr. Obama remains wildly popular among those groups. A Washington Post/ABC News poll this week put the president\u2019s approval rating at 78 percent among nonwhite voters. Mr. Biden was not the only one seeming to eye Mr. Obama\u2019s voters on Tuesday. A few hours before the event here, Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign released a list of more than 50 black mayors supporting her campaign, more than half of them from South Carolina, an early nominating state where Mr. Biden is expected to compete aggressively should he run. So far, Mr. Obama has done nothing to signal that he would bestow such a blessing on either his vice president or his former secretary of state. But Mr. Biden did his best to suggest that he and the president are all but joined at the hip. He said the two of them spent four to seven hours every day together, that the president had given him veto authority over every cabinet pick, that he never disagreed with the president ideologically, only tactically, and that even their families were close. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that while four to seven hours together \u201cis not a daily occurrence\u201d the claim was \u201cgenerally accurate.\u201d", "keyword": "Joe Biden;2016 Presidential Election;Osama bin Laden;Barack Obama;Walter F Mondale"}
{"id": "ny0058201", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/09/22", "title": "The Week Ahead: Citizens Financial Stock Offering, and a New BlackBerry", "abstract": "CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP TO HOLD I.P.O. IN NEW YORK Citizens Financial Group, a retail bank with 1,230 branches and $130 billion worth of assets, is scheduled to price its initial public offering this week. The firm is being spun off from the Royal Bank of Scotland, the British lender that has been under pressure to slim itself down following its government bailout during the financial crisis. Citizens Financial is hoping to raise as much as $3.5 billion from its offering in the first half of this week. It will then begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CFG. MICHAEL J. de la MERCED Image Mario Draghi Credit Matteo Bazzi/European Pressphoto Agency BLACKBERRY TO INTRODUCE ITS LATEST SMARTPHONE BlackBerry is returning to its roots in what may be the company\u2019s last chance to re-establish itself in the smartphone market. On Wednesday it will introduce a phone known as the Passport, which BlackBerry hopes will appeal to users in the sectors that first embraced the brand: financial services, health care, law enforcement and government. The new phone will feature an unusual square display and a physical keyboard that doubles as a trackpad. On Friday, investors will see how far the company has to go when it releases its second-quarter results. John S. Chen, the company\u2019s chief executive, announced during the period that a protracted series of layoffs and cutbacks at the company had come to an end. IAN AUSTEN DRAGHI TO VISIT LITHUANIA BEFORE ITS EUROZONE ENTRANCE Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, will appear on Thursday at a conference in Vilnius on Lithuania\u2019s plans to join the eurozone on Jan. 1. The event will underline Lithuania\u2019s ever-closer integration with Europe at a time when many citizens in the former Soviet republic feel threatened by Russia. JACK EWING", "keyword": "Lithuania;European Central Bank;IPO;Smartphone;Royal Bank of Scotland;Citizens Financial Group;BlackBerry"}
{"id": "ny0116366", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2012/10/18", "title": "Rachael Ray Promotes Nutrish Dog Food With a Truck", "abstract": "IN a novel effort to woo pet owners to her Nutrish line of high-end dog food, the television chef Rachael Ray is turning to something usually reserved for human gourmets: a food truck. Ms. Ray will begin handing out samples of the newest addition to her product line from a \u201cPup-Up Food Truck for Dogs\u201d in Manhattan on Thursday. Depending on the response, she may take the truck to other cities to draw attention to pet adoptions and to shelters crowded with cats and other animals that people do not want or cannot keep \u2014 and to promote her dog food. Each year, Ms. Ray donates her portion of the proceeds from the brand \u2014 her total contributions are expected to reach $4 million by the end of 2012 \u2014 to animal welfare organizations. She modeled Nutrish\u2019s charitable giving on that of Yum-o, a nonprofit organization she founded in 2006 to help children and their families learn about healthy food and cooking, which is financed by sales of cookbooks and other items. \u201cWe wanted to come up with a dedicated product, like we did for children,\u201d she said. \u201cSo there are no galas, no celebrity concerts, but a product that builds awareness of a problem and generates income.\u201d Even though bad economic times mean more animals are landing in shelters, people who can afford it are spending increasing amounts on better quality food for their pets. Nutrish, which made its debut in October 2008, is tapping into that trend. Manufactured by the family-owned Ainsworth Pet Nutrition , in Meadville, Pa., Nutrish was the fastest-growing dry dog food brand in grocery stores for the 26 weeks ending Sept. 29. Sales were $22.6 million, up 45.4 percent from the same period last year, according to Ainsworth. The line is expected to reach $100 million in retail sales by January 2013. The Rachael Ray Nutrish line includes dry and wet dog food and treats that contain no artificial preservatives, flavors or colors. Ms. Ray\u2019s truck will serve several varieties of her newest product, Nutrish Naturally Delish wet dog food, which comes in plastic tubs, including flavors like \u201cChicken Paw Pie\u201d and \u201cChicken Muttballs.\u201d \u201cDogs will be served their choice on a dish, and they can go home with samples and a bottle of pup water,\u201d Ms. Ray said in an interview this week after the filming of her daytime syndicated talk show, \u201cRachael Ray.\u201d Samples have been an important factor in Nutrish\u2019s success, said Beth Nigro, a senior vice president at the marketing agency Engauge. Its Pittsburgh office has worked with Ainsworth for 30 years, and oversaw Ms. Ray\u2019s pet food introduction with a \u201cSwitch to Nutrish\u201d campaign that has given away 1.5 million six-ounce samples since January 2009. \u201cWe found that 50 percent of the people who tried a free sample converted to the brand,\u201d Ms. Nigro said. The line includes Nutrish; Just 6 food and treats, which are made from only six ingredients; and Nutrish Healthy Weight. Ms. Ray, who also has a lifestyle magazine called \u201cEvery Day With Rachael Ray,\u201d best-selling cookbooks and a line of cookware, said her blend of advocacy and commercial success helped to support shelters and animal organizations across the country. \u201cI\u2019ve been an advocate for them all my life,\u201d said Ms. Ray, who dotes on her red-nose pit bull, Isaboo, and previously adopted another pit bull, Boo, who died about seven years ago. She said her mother cared for more than a dozen rescue cats. On average, pet owners spent $254 on dog food and another $70 on treats last year, according to an American Pet Products Association survey. Some 46.3 million households owned a dog, and 38.9 million owned a cat. Most owners preferred premium dog food, a trend that has gained traction since the 2007 recalls of adulterated dog and cat food. \u201cNutrish is made to human standards. I\u2019ve tried the kibble myself,\u201d Ms. Ray said, adding that real meat was the top ingredient in three varieties. \u201cAnd the wet food looks like real food, not brown mush.\u201d Helping to increase awareness, she said, is the 2012 Rachael Ray $100K Challenge . The goal of the initiative, begun in August with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, is for 50 animal shelters to save at least 300 more dogs and cats from August through October than they did during the same three-month period last year. The most successful shelter will win $100,000, and other shelters can win lesser amounts for their efforts. The average age of Nutrish customers is 45, and the average household income is $135,000. But the brand is vying with established market giants like Purina for a share of the $9.5 billion in annual sales of dry dog food in grocery stores and mass-market locations like Walmart, according to 2011 figures from Nielsen ScanTrack. (Sales increased from $7.1 billion in 2007.) Nutrish claimed a 2.8 percent share, $22.6 million, of the $823 million in dry dog food sales in grocery stores in the four weeks ending Sept. 29. In comparison, Purina One had $90.4 million in sales over the same period, up 4.4 percent from last year; Beneful had $141.7 million, up 3.3 percent; and Iams had $99.7 million, a 1.6 percent drop, according to Nielsen. Ms. Ray worked with Engauge to create the green, yellow and brown truck she calls the \u201cWoof Wagon.\u201d She plans to post to Facebook and Twitter from the truck, which will be at Columbus Circle on Thursday before moving to Union Square. Best Friends Animal Society, a Rachael Ray partner, and two local rescue organizations will have puppies available for adoption at the truck site. The Nutrish campaign \u2014 which also includes print ads in pet specialty publications and in major home magazines like Ladies\u2019 Home Journal and Country Living, as well as online ads \u2014 increased its spending on advertising to $4 million in the first six months of 2012, compared with $874,000 in the same period last year, according to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP. \u201cFor some people, pets are as important as anyone in the family,\u201d Ms. Ray said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have more Nutrish products this year and next. And we\u2019ll have food for cats, too, because of my mom.\u201d", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Ray Rachael;Pet Foods;Food Trucks"}
{"id": "ny0176417", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/07/24", "title": "United Rentals Takes Cerberus Cash Offer", "abstract": "GREENWICH, Conn., July 23 (AP) \u2014 The private equity group Cerberus will acquire United Rentals for about $4 billion in cash, United Rentals said Monday. Including about $2.6 billion in assumed debt, the transaction is valued at $6.6 billion. Shares of United Rentals, one of the largest players in the construction-equipment rental industry, have risen more than 16 percent since April 9, the day before the company said it might put itself up for sale. On Monday, stock in United Rentals climbed 61 cents, almost 2 percent, to $32.98 a share. United Rentals has about 700 rental locations in 48 states, Canada and Mexico, and has more than 12,000 employees. It serves construction and industrial customers, utilities, municipalities and homeowners, according to the company\u2019s Web site. The $34.50-a-share purchase price represents a 7 percent premium over United\u2019s closing price of $32.37 on Friday. United Rentals, whose board approved the transaction, said it can seek other offers through Aug. 31. United Rentals is based in Greenwich. Cerberus Capital Management, based in New York, has about $25 billion under management in funds and accounts.", "keyword": "Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures;Cerberus Capital Management;United Rentals Incorporated"}
{"id": "ny0219351", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/05/24", "title": "Ailing Spanish Lender Gets a \u20ac550 Million Bailout", "abstract": "MADRID \u2014 Weaknesses in the Spanish financial sector were exposed over the weekend when the central bank rescued CajaSur, a savings bank that was crippled by losses related to real estate and was unable to agree on a merger with a bigger rival. The Bank of Spain, the central bank, announced Saturday that it had taken over management of CajaSur, appointing a team of administrators and injecting about \u20ac550 million, or $691 million, from a special restructuring fund to keep the bank, based in C\u00f3rdoba, in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. The central bank\u2019s intervention followed the collapse of merger negotiations between CajaSur, which has been under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, and a larger savings bank, Unicaja, based in Malaga. CajaSur had a loss of \u20ac596 million last year. Like many Spanish savings banks, known as cajas, it has been hit by mounting defaults on real estate loans as a result of the collapse of the construction sector. The Bank of Spain said that its goal was to ensure CajaSur \u201ccan continue to function normally and meet all its obligations toward third parties.\u201d It said that depositors and creditors could feel \u201ctotally at ease,\u201d and emphasized that CajaSur accounted for only 0.6 percent of the assets of the country\u2019s banking sector. CajaSur could still end up in liquidation but the central bank and government were likely to renew their efforts to ensure a takeover instead. Still, CajaSur\u2019s demise comes only two weeks after Prime Minister Jos\u00e9 Luis Rodr\u00edguez Zapatero agreed to work with leader of the main center-right opposition Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, to speed up consolidation among the weakened cajas. The party leaders said they would propose new legislation to require the cajas to increase their capital by issuing shares with voting rights, which should also help dilute the control that political interests exert on some of the saving banks. CajaSur started merger talks with Unicaja last July, but the negotiations dragged on and were finally broken off Friday, reportedly over how to share control and implement job cuts among CajaSur\u2019s 3,100 employees. In March, Finance Minister Elena Salgado of Spain warned that a third of Spain\u2019s cajas faced solvency problems and needed to consolidate rapidly. The government has told the cajas to present details of their merger plans by the end of June, which was also the deadline set to benefit from a \u20ac99 billion restructuring fund created to help banks pay for job cuts and branch closures resulting from mergers. The fund was tapped Saturday to provide the \u20ac550 million in emergency aid to CajaSur. The central bank also left the door open for an additional injection of money to help increase the bank\u2019s liquidity. The cajas bankrolled a construction boom that added about 2.8 million homes over five years, of which only 1.5 million were sold, according to Morgan Stanley research. The cajas also used real estate lending to establish a consumer banking presence in new residential areas, leaving them with a combined exposure of \u20ac175 billion to real estate developers, Morgan Stanley estimated.", "keyword": "Spain;Zapatero Jose Luis Rodriguez;Banks and Banking"}
{"id": "ny0168043", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2006/01/15", "title": "Traveling Takes Toll on Nets, as Do Turnovers", "abstract": "DALLAS, Jan. 14 - If the Nets, with their long-forgotten 10-game winning streak, had established themselves as one of the Eastern Conference's elite teams, then perhaps the past three games were an indication that their N.B.A. title hopes lacked a crucial ingredient: success against the Western Conference's elite. With a resounding 110-77 loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday night, the Nets suffered their third consecutive loss to a top team from the West. It was the Nets' worst loss of the season and it followed sound defeats at the hands of the Southwest Division's other leading teams -- the San Antonio Spurs and the Memphis Grizzlies. \"They're obviously disappointing losses,\" Nets forward Cliff Robinson said. \"We played some good teams on this trip and, to me, it just lets us know where we need to go. We didn't play them as well as we would like. We have to get back in the lab and try to improve on some things.\" The Nets face another tough challenge Monday when they play host to the Indiana Pacers. Saturday night's game was all but over by halftime, with the Mavericks leading by 23 points. Dallas's good fortune in the first half had an unexpected catalyst: the former Net Keith Van Horn. Van Horn was a perfect 7 for 7 in the first half and he finished the game with a season-high 23 points on 8-of-9 shooting. Josh Howard, the Mavericks' pliable swingman, gave them just about everything else they needed, leading all scorers with a season-high of 29 points. Point guard Jason Kidd was the only Net to make a significant impact. He scored 19 points, shooting 8 for 11, and had 5 assists. \"Dallas just imposed their will and totally played at a much higher level,\" Nets Coach Lawrence Frank said. \"We're all accountable for this type of performance and it's embarrassing.\" The Mavericks appeared much quicker and stronger than the Nets, seeming to get to the basket when they wanted (they had 34 points in the paint) and were hitting all kinds of shots (52.6 percent over all and 53.3 percent on 3's) even when guarded closely. The gritty team defense and the offensive dominance of the swingman Vince Carter, both of which epitomized the Nets' nearly month-long winning streak, have been absent the past two games. Carter finished with 17 points Saturday night. Richard Jefferson, another swingman and the Nets' second-leading scorer, has missed the past three games because of a back injury he sustained last Sunday against Toronto, the final victory of the winning streak. Though Jefferson's absence likely contributed to the Nets' deficiencies, his injury is something the team cannot harp on, forward Scott Padgett said. \"I think that's a problem,\" he said. \"Maybe you're tapping your feet, waiting for Richard to come back and you're not going out there and taking care of business.\" Dallas wasted little time pulling away from the Nets, who did not hold a lead the entire game. Mavericks forward Josh Howard converted a fastbreak layup with 2:29 left in the first quarter to give his team a double-digit lead for good. From there, Van Horn asserted himself, scoring 21 of the Mavericks' next 30 points. In fewer than 10 minutes, Van Horn surpassed his season-high of 19 points. He hit a driving layup, then a hook shot, then he scattered five consecutive 3's before capping his first-half scoring with a pair of free throws. By then, the Mavericks had outscored the Nets, 30-14, for a 55-29 lead, their largest of the first half. \"I felt in great rhythm tonight,\" said Van Horn, who played with the Nets from 1997-2002. \"Once I hit a couple, my teammates really looked for me. I just let my shot go.\" Howard opened the second half with a personal clinic that buried the Nets even deeper into submission. Howard scored 9 of the Mavericks' first 16 points of the second half as Dallas outscored the Nets by 16-4. Howard scored 12 points in the third quarter alone and surpassed his season high of 26 points with a tip-in with 5:15 remaining in the third. His free throw with 1:12 left in the quarter gave the Mavericks a 38-point lead, their biggest of the game. The Nets did little to help themselves with 25 turnovers, which the Mavericks turned into 36 points. The Nets could not seem to find the fastbreak opportunities that helped them establish their winning streak. If they are to reverse their fortunes to the direction that had them winning with ease just a week ago, the Nets must start with better defense, Kidd said. \"The big thing for us is to get back to winning and look at what we're not doing,\" Kidd said. \"That's taking care of the ball and having a better first quarter, defensively.\" REBOUNDS Guard Jeff McInnis left the game in the second quarter after playing just under five minutes because of an injured left knee.", "keyword": "NEW JERSEY NETS;NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSN;DALLAS MAVERICKS;BASKETBALL"}
{"id": "ny0043028", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/05/31", "title": "Drug Saves Fertility for Women With Cancer", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 A commonly used drug can help young women with breast cancer retain the ability to have babies, apparently protecting their ovaries from the damage caused by chemotherapy, researchers reported here on Friday. The treatment could provide a new option for dealing with one of the painful dilemmas faced by young cancer patients \u2014 that doing the utmost to save their lives might impair or even ruin their fertility. Researchers said the drug, goserelin, which temporarily shuts down the ovaries, appears to protect women from the more permanent premature menopause that can be induced by chemotherapy. In a clinical trial, women who were given goserelin injections along with chemotherapy had less ovarian failure and gave birth to more babies than women receiving only the chemotherapy. \u201cPremenopausal women beginning chemotherapy for early breast cancer should consider this new option to prevent premature ovarian death,\u201d the study\u2019s lead author, Dr. Halle Moore of the Cleveland Clinic, said at a news conference here at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Dr. Ann H. Partridge, a breast cancer specialist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and another author of the study, said about 16,000 American women under age 45 get breast cancer each year. Impaired fertility from chemotherapy is also a problem for women and men with other types of cancer and for children who survive the disease, though it is not clear if the results of this study would apply to them, she said. Goserelin is sold by AstraZeneca under the brand name Zoladex. Global sales of the drug were about $1 billion in 2013. Goserelin and similar drugs, known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists, are commonly used as hormonal therapies to treat breast and prostate cancer. They are also used at fertility clinics to control the timing of ovulation. The main option now for young breast cancer patients wanting to increase their chances of having babies is to have multiple eggs removed from their ovaries, as is done for in vitro fertilization. The eggs can be frozen or used to create embryos, which are then frozen. But that is an invasive procedure and can cost $10,000 or more. And in some cases women have to start chemotherapy so quickly they do not have the two to three weeks needed to undergo the egg retrieval process. Once-a-month injections of goserelin during chemotherapy could be a less expensive and easier alternative. In the study, each goserelin injection costs about $500 to $600, including the costs of giving the shot, said Dr. Kathy S. Albain of Loyola University Chicago, the senior author of the study. In the study, women typically needed four injections. Image Dr. Halle Moore, the study\u2019s lead author, spoke on Friday during a news conference in Chicago. Credit Scott Morgan/ASCO But until now, studies testing goserelin and similar drugs have reported inconsistent results. The oncology society\u2019s guidelines say there is insufficient evidence that the approach is effective and that it \u201cshould not be relied on to preserve fertility.\u201d Dr. Partridge, who is on the committee that developed the guidelines, said she thought they would have to be reviewed in light of the new study. The trial, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, involved 257 premenopausal women up to age 49 undergoing chemotherapy before or after having their tumors removed surgically. Two years after starting chemotherapy, only 8 percent of the women who had received the monthly goserelin injections experienced ovarian failure, compared to 22 percent of those who did not. Twenty-one percent of the women in the goserelin group became pregnant and 15 percent had babies, while in the control group, only 11 percent became pregnant and 7 percent gave birth. Researchers said that difference could not be explained by a difference in the numbers of women who tried to conceive in each group. In an unexpected finding, the researchers reported that the women receiving goserelin also had a significantly lower risk of dying after four years. Dr. Jennifer Litton, a breast medical oncologist who was not involved in the study, said that was not enough survival data to recommend that goserelin be used to treat the cancers, but it at least suggested that it would not worsen the cancer outcomes if used to preserve fertility. Still, Dr. Litton, who is with the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the trial was fairly small and the chances of a pregnancy were higher with egg retrieval, though the use of one technique would not preclude use of the other. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be the only thing I\u2019m going to offer for fertility preservation,\u201d she said of goserelin. Dr. Partridge said there were differences between the new study and many of the previous ones, some of which had shown that the approach was not effective in preserving fertility. This new trial, she said, measured pregnancy and birthrates, which are better indications of fertility than the loss of menstrual periods, a less direct measure used in many of the previous studies. Some women can lose fertility even if they continue having periods, while others can be fertile even though they do not have periods, she said. Some of the previous studies also included women with hormone-receptor-positive cancer, meaning tumor growth is fed by estrogen. Women with that type of cancer typically take tamoxifen, which itself can cause loss of menstruation, she said. The new study included only women with hormone-receptor-negative cancer. Women with hormone-positive cancer take drugs to suppress estrogen or block its effects and are typically advised not to try to get pregnant for a number of years. It is not clear why goserelin would protect the ovaries. There is some speculation that making the ovaries less active protects them from chemotherapy. The downside is that goserelin induces a temporary postmenopausal state, which can bring with it hot flashes and other symptoms.", "keyword": "Breast cancer;Pharmaceuticals;Pregnancy;AstraZeneca;Halle Moore;Cleveland Clinic"}
{"id": "ny0036489", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/03/26", "title": "Despite Quarterly Drop, Investors Lift Walgreen Shares", "abstract": "The fiscal second-quarter earnings for Walgreen, the nation\u2019s largest drugstore chain, slipped from a year ago as it reaped a smaller benefit from generic drugs and took a $60 million hit because of severe winter weather. But the company\u2019s underlying performance appeared to impress investors, and its shares rose, approaching the nominal high reached last month. Walgreen executives said on Tuesday that a wave of new generic drug introductions peaked in last year\u2019s quarter, which made comparisons difficult for this year\u2019s quarter. Over all, Walgreen earned $754 million, or 78 cents a share, in the quarter that ended Feb. 28. That\u2019s down from $756 million, or 79 cents a share, a year ago. Adjusted earnings were 91 cents a share. Analysts had expected 93 cents a share, FactSet said. Revenue rose to about 5 percent, to $19.61 billion.", "keyword": "Pharmaceuticals;Earnings Reports;Walgreen"}
{"id": "ny0108140", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/05/05", "title": "Suicide Attack in Khar, Pakistan, Kills at Least 26", "abstract": "PESHAWAR, Pakistan \u2014 Dozens of people, including two senior security officers, were killed and scores were wounded in a suicide attack on a government checkpoint in a tribal district along the Afghan border, hospital and government officials said. A bomber, described by witnesses as a teenager who arrived on foot, killed the commander and deputy commander of the Bajaur Levies, a security force drawn from local Pashtun tribesmen, according to an official with the local tribal administration. As of Friday night, Pakistani health officials reported that 26 people had been killed and 75 wounded. The Pakistani Taliban took credit for the attack and a spokesman said the two officials had been targeted in retaliation for the death of Sheik Marwan, a Qaeda commander killed by security forces in Bajaur last year. \u201cWe will continue to attack government-sponsored militias and security forces,\u201d the spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan, said in a statement delivered through an intermediary. The attack came one day after the United States released 17 letters seized from the compound of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by American forces in May 2011. Some of the letters indicated the Qaeda leader\u2019s concern for the high civilian toll from Pakistani Taliban attacks. Friday\u2019s attack took place in Khar, the capital of Bajaur District. Witnesses said the bomber struck at a crossroads just before 8 a.m. as markets were opening. The two senior security officers were visiting the area in response to intelligence reports of a possible assault. \u201cThey were checking up on their men. There had been a security high alert due to an intercept about an impending attack,\u201d the tribal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. The explosion ripped through more than a dozen shops in the local market; afterward the streets were littered with debris and the belongings of the dead and wounded, reporters at the scene said. At least five members of the security forces were among the dead. It was the first major militant attack in Bajaur since December 2010, when a suicide bomber killed at least 40 people in an attack on a food distribution point run by the United Nations World Food Program. The Pakistani Army has been operating in the region, which borders Afghanistan, since 2008 in a bid to oust fighters loyal to the local warlord, Faqir Muhammad, a former deputy leader of the main Taliban group in Pakistan, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Fierce fighting drove Mr. Muhammad across the border into Kunar Province in Afghanistan, where his fighters have taken advantage of the vacuum left by departing American troops to coordinate attacks inside Pakistan. In recent months Mr. Muhammad has been seen as a declining force inside the Pakistani Taliban after he was deposed as second in command. Militant sources said Mr. Muhammad has been replaced in Bajaur by Dadullah, a Taliban commander who goes by one name, and who was believed to be responsible for Friday\u2019s attack.", "keyword": "Pakistan;Peshawar (Pakistan);Taliban;Pashtun (Ethnic Group);Defense and Military Forces;Bombs and Explosives;Bajaur (Pakistan)"}
{"id": "ny0171368", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/27", "title": "Sears Bids $269 Million for Restoration Hardware", "abstract": "ATLANTA, Nov. 26 (Reuters) \u2014 Sears Holdings has proposed buying the furnishings retailer Restoration Hardware for $6.75 a share, or a total of $269 million, according to a regulatory filing on Monday. The offer, made in a letter to Restoration dated Friday that Sears included in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, would top a management-led buyout valued at $6.70 a share, or $267 million, that Restoration agreed to this month. Shares of Restoration Hardware fell 6 cents, to $7.00, while Sears declined 4 percent, to $107.77. Sears Holdings, which operates the Kmart and Sears, Roebuck chains, disclosed last week that it owned a 13.7 percent stake in Restoration and had initially proposed a $4-a-share bid after being informed in late October that Restoration was weighing a management buyout. Sears, based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., asked a special committee of Restoration\u2019s board for confidential information to submit a binding proposal, but the request was denied, according to the letter to a special panel of Restoration\u2019s board attached to the S.E.C. filing. The proposed $6.75-a-share tender offer was based solely on publicly available information, Sears\u2019s executive vice president, William C. Crowley, said in the letter. Restoration announced on Nov. 8 that it had agreed to a buyout in a deal that included the private equity firm Catterton Partners. It is soliciting competing proposals from third parties during a 35-day period that ends Dec. 13. A representative for Restoration Hardware and a spokesman for Sears Holdings both declined to comment.", "keyword": "Stocks and Bonds;Sears Holdings;Restoration Hardware;Securities and Exchange Commission"}
{"id": "ny0073330", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/04/04", "title": "The Importance of Naming Your Emotions", "abstract": "\u201cHow are you feeling?\u201d Those are the four deceptively simple words with which my colleagues and I regularly begin our meetings and our training sessions at other organizations. People ask the question to each other, one at a time. We don\u2019t mean, \u201cHow are you?\u201d or even \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d because the rote responses to these questions are usually some version of \u201cFine.\u201d What we mean is, \u201cHow are you really feeling?\u201d Although our emotional state profoundly influences the quality of our work, many of us aren\u2019t aware of how we\u2019re feeling at any given moment or what the impact may be. Most employers don\u2019t give emotions much attention either, preferring that we park them at the door in the morning so they don\u2019t get in the way during the workday. Unfortunately, that isn\u2019t possible for human beings. We\u2019re not machines, nor robots. Think about how you feel when you\u2019re performing at your best. What adjectives come to mind? My colleagues and I have asked this question to thousands of people over the years, and the answers have been remarkably consistent. At our best, we feel positive, happy, confident, calm, focused, enthusiastic, open and optimistic. That\u2019s when we\u2019re most productive and get along best with others. At our worst, we\u2019re typically experiencing the opposite feelings: negativity, unhappiness, self-doubt, impatience, irritability, defensiveness and pessimism. Our sense of value feels at risk, our vision narrows, and our energy gets consumed in self-protection. Imagine that you sense a serious threat to your physical well-being lurking in the shadows. Then you\u2019re asked to solve a complex problem. How will you perform? In this \u201cfight or flight\u201d state, you would struggle to think clearly or imaginatively, and it would be difficult to collaborate effectively. Most of us move along the spectrum between our best and our worst all day long, depending on what\u2019s going on around us. The most prevalent unexpressed emotions in the workplace revolve around suffering. It\u2019s not that suffering is a modern phenomenon or that it\u2019s the only thing we feel at work. What seems to have changed is the pervasive impact of increased demand in our lives, leading to anxiety, uncertainty and a sense of feeling overwhelmed. So what\u2019s the value of getting people to express what they\u2019re actually feeling, rather than keeping things relentlessly light and bland? The answer is that naming our emotions tends to diffuse their charge and lessen the burden they create. The psychologist Dan Siegel refers to this practice as \u201cname it to tame it.\u201d It\u2019s also true that we can\u2019t change what we don\u2019t notice. Denying or avoiding feelings doesn\u2019t make them go away, nor does it lessen their impact on us, even if it\u2019s unconscious. Noticing and naming emotions gives us the chance to take a step back and make choices about what to do with them. Emotions are just a form of energy, forever seeking expression. Paradoxically, sharing what we\u2019re feeling in simple terms helps us to better contain and manage even the most difficult emotions. By naming them out loud, we are effectively taking responsibility for them, making it less likely that they will spill out at the expense of others over the course of a day. Several weeks ago, one of my colleagues was facilitating a session with a group of senior leaders for whom this exercise was way outside their comfort zone. As it turned out, the first person who got asked how he was feeling said: \u201cActually, I\u2019m feeling kind of anxious and distracted. I just heard this morning that the roof of my house completely collapsed last night and my wife and children were inside.\u201d Thankfully, no one was hurt, but is there any doubt that sharing this news, and his resulting concerns, was healthy and appropriate, not least because it was such a significant event? The impact on one of his colleagues was transformational. He had been highly skeptical about the value of sharing feelings, which he usually kept close to the vest. \u201cIt just dawned on me,\u201d he told his colleagues, \u201chow much likely goes unsaid between us and what the cost of holding that in must be.\u201d As the chief executive of my company, I\u2019m acutely aware that whatever I happen to be feeling at work is disproportionately contagious, for better and worse. Mostly, I\u2019ve learned to simply notice my emotions without feeling compelled to act on them. To my chagrin, I still have occasions when negative emotions rise up in me outside of my awareness. The impact shows up in the tone of my voice or my choice of words, and my solution has been to turn to colleagues for help. Any time they sense that I might be feeling negative emotions, I\u2019ve asked that they simply ask me, \u201cHow are you feeling?\u201d That\u2019s usually all it takes for me to notice. By noticing, I\u2019m almost always able to manage whatever is going on inside me more gracefully. So, how are you feeling?", "keyword": "Work-Life Balance;Workplace;Emotion"}
{"id": "ny0159034", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/12/30", "title": "Teaching Toddlers in Manhattan", "abstract": "Holly Wilson, 22, teaches babies, toddlers and preschoolers music and movement at Gymboree in Manhattan. With a voice a little like Cindy Lauper\u2019s and thick socks for romping on the mats, she blows bubbles, shakes out brightly striped parachutes and generally plays for a living. How she landed here: I was a sophomore in college when I started. I had a friend who worked here and said I should try it. I said no, I\u2019m too shy, I won\u2019t be any good at it. It turned out to be so much fun, and I was kind of good at it. Degree: I just finished up at N.Y.U., majoring in Italian and linguistics, with minors in creative writing and African studies. Most unusual college course: Figure drawing, in Italian. All nude Italian men and women. That was sort of fun. I almost majored in art. Her lyrics to the tune of \u201cThe Flintstones\u201d theme song: Clean up! Time to clean up! Most poetic lyric: If all the raindrops were lemon drops or gumdrops, what a rain that would be. Youngest student: 3 weeks old. Ever make them cry? I picked up a kid, who started screaming, and for the rest of the class stayed so upset. Some kids you can\u2019t pick up. Work perks: I get a lot of hugs, I see first words, I get babies crawling over to say hi. If I come to work in a bad mood, I can\u2019t stay in a bad mood. It\u2019s so much better than working at a desk, doing the same thing every day. This boy, Ryan, said his first word once here, and his first word was Holly. I almost cried. His mom said, \u201cWhen he\u2019s 18, he\u2019ll ask what his first word was.\u201d They\u2019re always changing. Every week they\u2019ve grown up, but not that much. Post-work perks: I\u2019ll be such a good mom, I\u2019ll know all the songs. My mom says to me, you know all these things I wish I knew when I had babies. How to tell the toddler triplets apart: This is Benjamin, the one with dimples. He\u2019s my boyfriend. The flirt, we call him. A good day: That\u2019s when I get a lot of hugs, and nobody cries too much, when the kids are feeling it, when the grown-ups are feeling it. It\u2019s all about grown-up participation. When the grown-ups are listening to you, they\u2019re right there with the kids. Chatty moms: It\u2019s a problem sometimes. At first I was too shy to go up and ask them not to talk during class. Working among runny noses: The first winter, me and everybody else I work with got sick. The first two winters. We sanitize all the toys. We clean all the equipment. But we can never avoid everything. Other bodily fluids: I got spit up on really good the other day. There\u2019s a lot of drool; I have no problem with that. I don\u2019t change diapers, because the classes are all mommy-and-me. That\u2019s what\u2019s so great about it: I only do the fun stuff. It\u2019s like being an aunt. On the nightstand: \u201cSex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.\u201d It\u2019s a cultural manifesto on pop culture.", "keyword": "Babies;Gymboree"}
{"id": "ny0013549", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/11/08", "title": "Pine Bush, N.Y., School District Faces Accusations of Anti-Semitism", "abstract": "The swastikas, the students recalled, seemed to be everywhere: on walls, desks, lockers, textbooks, computer screens, a playground slide \u2014 even on a student\u2019s face. A picture of President Obama, with a swastika drawn on his forehead, remained on the wall of an eighth-grade social studies classroom for about a month after a student informed her teacher, the student said. For some Jewish students in the Pine Bush Central School District in New York State, attending public school has been nothing short of a nightmare. They tell of hearing anti-Semitic epithets and nicknames, and horrific jokes about the Holocaust. They have reported being pelted with coins, told to retrieve money thrown into garbage receptacles, shoved and even beaten. They say that on school buses in this rural part of the state, located about 90 minutes north of New York City and once home to a local Ku Klux Klan chapter president, students have chanted \u201cwhite power\u201d and made Nazi salutes with their arms. The proliferation and cumulative effect of the slurs, drawings and bullying led three Jewish families last year to sue the district and its administrators in federal court; they seek damages and an end to what they call pervasive anti-Semitism and indifference by school officials. The district \u2014 centered in Pine Bush, west of Newburgh, and serving 5,600 children from Orange, Sullivan and Ulster Counties \u2014 is vigorously contesting the suit. But a review of sworn depositions of current and former school officials shows that some have acknowledged there had been a problem, although they denied it was widespread and said they had responded appropriately with discipline and other measures. \u201cThere are anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred that we need to address,\u201d John Boyle, Crispell Middle School\u2019s principal, said in a deposition in April. In 2011, when one parent complained about continued harassment of her daughter and another Jewish girl, Pine Bush\u2019s superintendent from 2008 to 2013, Philip G. Steinberg, wrote in an email, \u201cI have said I will meet with your daughters and I will, but your expectations for changing inbred prejudice may be a bit unrealistic.\u201d Mr. Steinberg, who, along with two other administrators named as defendants, is Jewish, described the lawsuit in recent interviews as a \u201cmoney grab.\u201d He contended that the plaintiffs had \u201cembellished\u201d some allegations. Nonetheless, reports of anti-Semitism have persisted, with at least two recent complaints made to the Jewish Federation of Greater Orange County. The New York Times has reviewed about 3,500 pages of deposition testimony by parents, children and school administrators, which were provided by the families\u2019 lawyers on the condition that the identities of the children, some of whom are still enrolled, be protected. Limited redactions were also made to protect student privacy. The children, in their depositions, accuse at least 35 students, who are identified by their initials, of carrying out anti-Semitic acts; other offenders are identified less specifically. Whatever the number of students involved in such activity, its impact was felt by the Jewish children, said Ilann M. Maazel, a lawyer for the families. \u201cThere were multiple children who just did not feel safe going to school day after day,\u201d he said. A Hostile Environment In 2008, T.E., then a fifth grader at Pine Bush Elementary School, told her mother that two boys had made drawings in school that she did not understand, adding, \u201cI think it was something bad.\u201d The mother, Sherri E., 48, asked her daughter to draw what she had seen, and realized it was a swastika. The mother testified that during a subsequent meeting, the elementary school principal at the time, Steve Fisch, agreed to talk with the boys but added: \u201cWhat\u2019s the big deal? They didn\u2019t aim it towards her.\u201d Mr. Fisch, in his deposition, denies saying that. Not long afterward, the mother said, one of the boys called T.E. \u201cJew\u201d on the bus and made an offensive gesture toward her and her daughter. Sherri E. withdrew her daughter from Crispell Middle School last year, and is now educating her at home. Image Crispell Middle School in the Pine Bush School District. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Some of the affected students saw their grades suffer, and felt socially isolated and depressed, the depositions show. One said he contemplated suicide. The swastikas, drawn or carved onto school property, or even constructed by students out of pipe cleaners, caused much of the anxiety. Sometimes they were accompanied by messages like \u201cDie Jew,\u201d the children testified. \u201cI actually started to hate myself for being Jewish,\u201d D.C., a Pine Bush High School graduate who now attends college, said in an interview. He recalled that around the time of the Jewish holidays, teachers would ask if there were Jewish students in the class. \u201cI learned very, very quickly not to raise my hand,\u201d he said. D.C., now 18, testified that he was \u201coverwhelmed\u201d by the number of swastikas he saw. In eighth grade, he said, he reported one that was about a foot in diameter, which he found in a bathroom; it was removed, but it reappeared quickly. He testified that he stopped reporting swastikas because \u201cnobody was doing anything about them.\u201d His sister, O.C., now 15, testified about a more direct message from a sixth grader who formed his hand into the shape of a gun and \u201csaid he was killing Jews.\u201d In seventh grade, O.C. said, she saw a girl holding her hands up to hide a swastika on her face. The girl explained that a student had restrained her while another drew the insignia; the school said it had disciplined the two students. O.C. said she heard slurs like Christ killer, stupid Jew, dirty Jew, disgusting Jew. \u201cJew was kind of an insult,\u201d she explained. Her father, David C., an adjunct instructor at Orange County Community College, recalled telling his daughter\u2019s teachers that she lacked focus because of the harassment and swastikas. He had even stumbled upon one, he testified, describing how he saw a \u201csmall swastika on one of the stalls\u201d in a school bathroom. The children testified about hearing crude jokes about the Holocaust and the killing of Jews. \u201cHow do you get a Jewish girl\u2019s number? Lift up her sleeve,\u201d went one. D.C. remembered a student telling him that his ancestors had died in the Holocaust. The student then blew on his flattened hand, and said, \u201cYou are just ashes.\u201d \u201cEvery day at the high school,\u201d D.C. testified, \u201cI would go in, and I would just have the worst day of my life.\u201d \u2018So Many\u2019 Accused Mr. Steinberg said in his deposition that his challenge as superintendent was that \u201cso many\u201d students were being accused of anti-Semitic behavior. \u201cThe issue is not three students doing it all the time; the question is if you have 30 students doing it,\u201d he said. \u201cHow do you undo the years of inbred prejudice?\u201d At the edge of town, a big red barn is painted with a patriotic yellow ribbon. Across the street, a yard decorated with military equipment has a bomb painted with the words, \u201cGod Bless Our Troops.\u201d Billboards advertise 4-H clubs; stores sell tractors, snow blowers and soft-serve ice cream. Most people interviewed \u2014 from a bagel shop owner to McDonald\u2019s clerks, adults and teenagers alike \u2014 said they had not heard of the swastikas. But some said they were aware of bullying or hate-fueled teasing, including a middle-school student who said she knew a boy who had drawn swastikas on the back of their school. \u201cIt\u2019s just hate,\u201d she said outside after school last month. \u201cAnd just being kids.\u201d At that point, a pickup truck pulled up nearby, and a man emerged. The man, John Barker, 42, a mechanic, cautioned that \u201ceverybody watches out for everybody.\u201d When asked about the presence of Jewish families, he blurted out, \u201cWe don\u2019t want them in our town.\u201d \u201cThey can\u2019t drive, for number one \u2014 and they already have Sullivan County. Who really wants them here? They don\u2019t belong here.\u201d Bullies on the Bus The bus was a particularly difficult place for Jewish students. On April 19, 2010, T.E., then in sixth grade, told her mother that students on her bus had made Nazi salutes and discussed how to celebrate the anniversary of Hitler\u2019s birthday, which was the next day. Sherri E., who knew the date was also the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, said she reported the episode to school officials, telling them her daughter would stay home the next morning. Image \u201cI have said I will meet with your daughters and I will, but your expectations for changing inbred prejudice may be a bit unrealistic.\u201d PHILIP G. STEINBERG , superintendent of the Pine Bush Central School District from 2008 until his retirement this year, in an email to a parent who complained about continuing harassment. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times No violence followed, but the harassment continued, T.E. said in an interview. \u201cI finally said, \u2018I\u2019m not going back to school,\u2019 \u201d she said. She withdrew in early 2012. D.R. was in sixth grade when a school-sponsored ski trip turned ugly. A boy on the bus ride home asked if he was Jewish, and when D.R. answered yes, a group of students began taunting him with slurs, he testified. One boy then repeatedly punched him in the stomach \u201cuntil I was ready to throw up,\u201d D.R. said in his account. His father, Jerrold R., 52, an aircraft leasing executive, testified that his son cried uncontrollably that night. \u201cThat was the worst experience he had ever been through,\u201d he said. Pine Bush said it had disciplined the student who led the episode, requiring him to write an apology note and contacting his mother. D.R., now 16 and a junior, testified that early this year, he saw four or five Pine Bush students goose-stepping and high-fiving with Nazi salutes in the hallway. The school district has sharply disputed claims that swastikas were \u201ceverywhere\u201d in the high school, and said it responded diligently to reports of anti-Semitic behavior. Laura Wong-Pan, a lawyer for the district, said Pine Bush had taken many steps to address \u201cthe plaintiffs\u2019 complaints and deal with bullying in general,\u201d like disciplining students in a manner that was \u201creasonably calculated to prevent a recurrence.\u201d Ms. Wong-Pan said that in some cases, that \u201cincluded counseling, detentions, suspensions, letters to parents and meetings.\u201d She said the district had also held antibullying assemblies and classroom discussions; brought Holocaust survivors and experts to address students on issues like bullying, anti-Semitism and tolerance; and provided staff training on such topics. Trouble Seeking Help The families say their conversations with school officials led nowhere. They were told that their complaints were isolated, and were not informed that other families had raised similar issues. T.E. testified that when she was in seventh grade, she and O.C. were reporting anti-Semitic graffiti and other behavior to a Crispell administrator, who discouraged them at one point. \u201cWe would write it down and bring it to him, usually at the end of the week,\u201d she said. \u201cHe told us we were now just looking for trouble and that we were causing our own problems.\u201d Jerrold R. said that he once asked an assistant principal why his older son, A.R., then in middle school, was disciplined for defending himself against a student who had grabbed him after taunting him about the Holocaust. The school official replied, \u201c \u2018We have a zero-tolerance policy on fighting,\u2019 \u201d the father recalled. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018How about a zero-tolerance policy on anti-Semitism?\u2019 \u201d In a court filing, the families cited eight cases of slurs or coin-throwing in which one child received two hours of detention, one was counseled, and six received no discipline. \u201cI was lied to, to my face, repeatedly, by the schools,\u201d Jerrold R. recalled in an interview. The assurances, he said, \u201ckept us from doing something that would have protected our kids, taking a more aggressive stance.\u201d Two parents testified about meeting with Mr. Steinberg in spring 2011. \u201cWe told him about the swastikas,\u201d David C. said. \u201cWe told him about the name-calling. We told him about the insidious Holocaust jokes. We showed him the pictures of four or five or six of the swastikas that the girls had taken. We told him about being singled out and being bullied for being Jewish.\u201d Sherri E. testified that Mr. Steinberg once told her how his own son had experienced anti-Semitism, leading him to move his family and send him to a different school. \u201cMy response to him was, \u2018Well, in a better economy that might be nice, but I can\u2019t sell my house and move from here right now,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cSomething needs to be taken care of at the school level.\u201d History of Racism Mr. Steinberg, 65, who retired as superintendent in the summer, worked as a teacher, principal and superintendent in New York City\u2019s schools before taking the Pine Bush position in 2008. Image FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT A Pine Bush High School graduate, now 18, testified in a March deposition about his experiences in the school system. He said in his deposition that when he was being considered for the post, members of the Pine Bush school board cautioned him about the community\u2019s history of anti-Semitism and Klan activity, and that it \u201cwas not a Jewish area.\u201d He said his hiring was an example of how far the district had come. In the 1970s, Pine Bush was the home of the grand dragon of a Klan chapter that became embroiled in a legal dispute with the state attorney general\u2019s office, which had demanded that it reveal its membership list. The group, Independent Northern Klans Inc., which was represented by the American and New York Civil Liberties Unions, successfully rebuffed the effort. The Klan leader\u2019s wife had been a member of Pine Bush\u2019s school board. The Anti-Defamation League, which said then that the chapter had about 200 \u201cactivists\u201d in the region, says today there has been little evidence of organized Klan activity in the state in recent years. Mr. Steinberg, in interviews, said he asked the parents who had sued why they chose Pine Bush. \u201cI said to them, \u2018If being Jewish is so important to you, why would you move into a community that does not have a synagogue?\u2019 \u201d \u201c \u2018If you want your kids to hang out with more Jewish children or have more tolerance,\u2019 \u201d he added, \u201c \u2018why would you pick a community like Pine Bush?\u2019 \u201d He had experienced anti-Semitism as a child and as a parent, he said, elaborating on how he moved his own family within Nassau County after his young son was told by a classmate that she would not eat lunch with him because he was Jewish. \u201cA 7-year-old doesn\u2019t learn that except from her parents,\u201d Mr. Steinberg remembered thinking. \u201cWe don\u2019t teach them hate in school, but yet we have to undo the hate and the intolerance,\u201d he said. Mr. Steinberg said he and his staff followed up on all complaints about anti-Semitic behavior, but substantiated fewer than a dozen examples of swastikas and other offensive graffiti. He said that through the assemblies, staff training and visits from Holocaust experts, he had sought to \u201ctry and change behaviors one student at a time.\u201d A Continuing Fight In a September court hearing in White Plains, the district\u2019s lawyer, Ms. Wong-Pan, told Judge Kenneth M. Karas that Pine Bush officials did not condone anti-Semitism. She accused the plaintiffs of distorting the facts. \u201cI mean, the way they describe it, it sounds like it\u2019s the Third Reich in those schools,\u201d she said. At the local McDonald\u2019s recently, a worker sweeping the floor, Corey Kyles, 25, said that his brother, Tyler, used to draw swastikas outside the town\u2019s Boys and Girls Club, and also carve them into the high school\u2019s wrestling mats. \u201cGod only knows why he did it,\u201d Mr. Kyles said of Tyler, who died in a car accident in 2009. \u201cHe probably was just stupid.\u201d The experiences of other Pine Bush alumni have varied. Sherri Kravitz-Donnell, the board president of Congregation Beth Hillel in nearby Walden and a longtime high school English teacher in Pine Bush until she retired in 2008, said she did not witness anti-Semitic behavior, nor did she hear about it from her son or daughter, who attended the schools. But after they graduated, she said, her children, now in their 20s, said that they had experienced anti-Semitic teasing and slurs but had kept it from her, not wanting her to intervene. Since 2011, at least two complaints about such behavior in Pine Bush\u2019s Circleville Middle School have been received by the Jewish Federation in Orange County, said Susan Notar, a federation volunteer. The first was from a parent about a boy on the school bus who said he had dressed up as a Hasidic Jew for Halloween because he \u201cthought it was funny,\u201d and whose brother had wanted to dress up as Hitler. Ms. Notar said she emailed Circleville\u2019s principal, Lisa Hankinson, who replied that she was \u201cdeeply troubled\u201d and invited Ms. Notar to speak to the faculty. Ms. Notar said she offered the teachers resources to fight anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of intolerance. The federation received another complaint last spring. Ms. Notar said that she again emailed Ms. Hankinson, and at her invitation returned two weeks ago to speak to an assembly of students. Ms. Notar said Ms. Hankinson had responded appropriately. \u201cI teach about the Holocaust,\u201d Ms. Notar said. \u201cI know what can happen when people look the other way.\u201d", "keyword": "Judaism;Antisemitism;Lawsuits;Discrimination;Bullying;School discipline;K-12 Education;Pine Bush NY"}
{"id": "ny0070620", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2015/03/18", "title": "C. C. Sabathia, Pitching for Yankees, Has Nerves but \u2018No Complaints\u2019", "abstract": "TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 C. C. Sabathia had not stood atop a mound in a major league game since last May, so there were manifold questions and concerns on Tuesday night: about his surgically repaired right knee, his arm strength, his control, his velocity, his stamina. And it was not surprising that Sabathia felt jittery. \u201cI was really nervous, more so than normal,\u201d said Sabathia, a former Cy Young Award winner and a six-time All-Star. \u201cIt was kind of weird.\u201d Sabathia pitched two unspectacular innings for the Yankees against the Toronto Blue Jays, a stint he said was not long enough to calm his nerves. \u201cI never really settled in,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it was just being a big league game again. Being out there with my teammates. I hadn\u2019t been out there in a big league game in almost a year.\u201d Since May 10, 2014, to be exact. It was after that start when a 15-day stint on the disabled list led to a 60-day stay that eventually led to season-ending arthroscopic knee surgery on July 23. Sabathia\u2019s first-inning performance was solid. He induced the leadoff hitter, Jose Reyes, to ground out to shortstop, struck out Josh Donaldson swinging and got Jose Bautista to also ground out to short. \u201cI was really pleased,\u201d Manager Joe Girardi said. \u201cI liked the way the ball was coming out of his hand.\u201d However, in the second inning, Sabathia unraveled. He yielded four hits, although the first was a grounder between third and shortstop that a younger Alex Rodriguez, who was playing third, might have had the range to get to. Sabathia surrendered three more hits, two of them doubles, which led to two earned runs. \u201cI\u2019m not worried about giving up runs,\u201d Girardi said after the Blue Jays\u2019 4-2 victory. \u201cHe\u2019s still working on things. This was a first step.\u201d A first step that Sabathia, aside from the nervousness, said he was pleased with. \u201cI felt good,\u201d Sabathia said. \u201cNo complaints. I want to work on my changeup a little more and get that down. I want it to be my No. 2 pitch instead of my cutter. My fastball command was pretty good.\u201d His fastball, which once resided in the upper-90-mile-per-hour range, consistently registered 90 to 92 against the Blue Jays. \u201cMy velocity is what it is,\u201d Sabathia said with a resignation in his voice that clearly conveyed he was weary of discussing the topic. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be in the 80s some days, and some days, hopefully, it\u2019ll be higher than 92. I don\u2019t really care.\u201d Clearly, Sabathia, who turns 35 on July 21 and has two years plus a vested year remaining on his contract, is not the pitcher he once was. His streak of six consecutive opening day starts for the Yankees \u2014 he has made 11 over all \u2014 will most likely end next month. \u201cI can\u2019t say that\u2019s going to make or break me,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to be there in September, or for Game 1 of any playoff series.\u201d After Sabathia went 3-4 last season and appeared in only 46 innings, which was the first year he did not pitch 200 or more innings since 2006, it also is what the Yankees would like to see. INSIDE PITCH Center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury sat out the game and was not expected to play Wednesday because of a mild abdominal strain. Neither Ellsbury nor Joe Girardi believes the injury is serious, though Girardi could not say when the center fielder would return to the lineup. ... Mark Teixeira hit his first home run of the spring, an opposite-field shot to left-center to lead off the bottom of the fourth. ... Before the game, the Yankees optioned catcher Gary Sanchez to Class AA Trenton and reassigned him to minor league camp. ... After the game, the Yankees optioned the right-hander Domingo German to Class A Tampa and the right-hander Branden Pinder to Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and reassigned both to minor league camp. They also reassigned the infielders Greg Bird and Kyle Roller to minor league camp.", "keyword": "Baseball;C C Sabathia;Yankees;Jacoby Ellsbury"}
{"id": "ny0196984", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2009/10/01", "title": "An Easier-to-Understand Photoshop for Amateurs", "abstract": "Adobe recently announced a new version of its popular Photoshop Elements 8 picture-editing software. As you might expect, Photoshop Elements uses the same algorithms as Adobe\u2019s professional-level Photoshop software, but the features are much more accessible to users. Think of it as Photoshop for very smart dummies. The Organizer in Elements can now check for problems like blurry focus or poorly lighted photos. The Smart Tags tool can flag and suggest fixes to these images. Adobe has also improved its face-recognition technology to make it a bit faster to verify the correct association of names with faces. Adobe has enhanced its Quick Fix feature by making it easier to understand photo-editing terms. The company says many users have not taken advantage of certain adjustments, like temperature, because they simply didn\u2019t understand the language. To help, the Quick Fix tool displays changes to the main image as you edit, a useful addition for more casual users. The Windows versions of Photoshop Elements 8 is available now for $100. The Mac version will be available in October for the same price. RIK FAIRLIE", "keyword": "Software;Computers and the Internet;Adobe Systems Inc;Photography"}
{"id": "ny0216347", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/04/21", "title": "Dispute Flares After NATO Kills 4 in Afghanistan", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 A NATO military convoy in eastern Afghanistan shot to death four unarmed civilians in a vehicle early Monday evening, including a police officer and a 12-year-old student, Afghan officials said Tuesday. The killings in Khost Province, near the border with Pakistan, led to a dispute almost immediately between local Afghan leaders and NATO officials. Deaths of civilians from shootings by NATO forces near convoys and at checkpoints have emerged as a particular flash point with the Afghan public and government. \u201cThe civilians\u2019 vehicle was driving on the road when the coalition forces opened fire on them,\u201d said the governor of Gurbuz District, Mohammad Akbar Zadran. \u201cThere was a 12-year-old schoolboy among the dead, and a police officer named Maiwand who was also killed.\u201d Without offering proof, NATO described the dead as two insurgents and their \u201cassociates.\u201d In a statement on Tuesday , NATO said the vehicle ignored warning shots and accelerated toward the military convoy. But the statement did not challenge the Afghan account that no weapons were found in the vehicle. At least 35 civilians have been killed since last summer by NATO and American troops in such incidents \u2014 but military officials say that in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops. One week ago, American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar, killing 5 civilians and wounding as many as 18, igniting angry anti-American demonstrations. In Khost, local officials said the four were slain at 6 p.m. Monday as they drove home in a Toyota. One official identified the men as Maiwand, a police officer; Faizullah, a 12-year-old student; and two shopkeepers at the Khost bazaar, Amirullah and Nasratullah. The governor of Khost, Abdul Jabar Naimi, also described the four as a policeman, a student and two shop owners. \u201cWe are still doing our investigation to see if they were involved in any criminal activities against the government,\u201d he said. The American-led NATO military command in Kabul said two of the dead men were identified after the fact as \u201cknown insurgents.\u201d A NATO spokesman in Kabul said identification was made using \u201cbiometric data\u201d but could not say how that specifically tied the men to militancy. NATO said the military convoy was returning to its base after defusing a roadside bomb when the vehicle approached from the opposite direction. The troops \u201cattempted to flag the vehicle down, and flashed its lights,\u201d a NATO statement said, but the \u201cdriver of the unidentified vehicle responded by turning off the vehicle\u2019s headlights and accelerating toward the convoy.\u201d Troops fired warning shots, but the vehicle continued to accelerate, the statement said. \u201cSeveral rounds were fired in an attempt to disable the vehicle, and finally shots were fired into the vehicle itself.\u201d", "keyword": "Afghanistan War (2001- );Civilian Casualties;Defense and Military Forces;United States Defense and Military Forces;Afghanistan;North Atlantic Treaty Organization"}
{"id": "ny0123609", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/09/23", "title": "Eels, Worms and Baitfish Are Kim Zatto\u2019s Business", "abstract": "IT was still dark Thursday morning when Kim Zatto, 46, arrived at a bait shop on City Island. The other customers wore flannel shirts and fish-slimy jeans, but Ms. Zatto showed up with her blond coif and purple manicure done just so. She bought a couple of dozen crates of sandworms and bloodworms from a delivery truck out back, just in from Maine, and she loaded them into her minivan. She held a tiny handbag and a purple rhinestone-studded cellphone, which now began ringing. It was a Long Island bait store owner. \u201cHow are you doing on clams?\u201d she asked. \u201cWhat about bunker? You O.K. with bunker?\u201d It is safe to say that providing baitfish to anglers in the New York area is a niche business, and this niche has been a livelihood for Ms. Zatto, 46, and her family: the Seaman clan of Rosedale, Queens. The Seamans are perhaps the last New York City eeling family. Ms. Zatto belongs to the fifth generation of Seamans scooping bait out of Jamaica Bay and selling it to tackle shops spread from the East End of Long Island to the Jersey Shore. Ms. Zatto lives in a house between those of her father, Larry Seaman, 69, and his younger brother, Bob, in a ramshackle neighborhood that gets swallowed regularly by high tides and heavy rains. The houses are on a creek along the edge of Kennedy International Airport, and the Seaman brothers have been catching eels, crabs and baitfish like killies and spearing in these waters since they were children \u2014 a trappers\u2019 life in view of the Manhattan skyline. Ms. Zatto\u2019s husband, Victor, has a landlubbing job at the airport, but their son, Victor, 14, is already catching bait the way Ms. Zatto has since she was 10, when her father made her a flat-bottomed skiff so she could set killie traps in the bay and then deliver the fish by boat to the shops in Howard Beach. As a teenager, she helped tend the family\u2019s roadside seafood stand and its bait shack, which has a hand-scrawled sign \u2014 \u201cPark here for bait only. No IHOP people\u201d \u2014 a reference to the International House of Pancakes nearby on Rockaway Boulevard. Ms. Zatto has been delivering, and doing some trapping, since graduating from high school, she said, returning home with her worms \u2014 which she typically buys from bait wholesalers, along with other items that her family members do not typically catch themselves, including squid, clams and bunker. Often, she is racing around buying and selling, with a van full of cargo that starts to either thaw, die or smell after a couple of hours. \u201cI don\u2019t even smell it anymore,\u201d she said, backing her 1994 minivan into her father\u2019s yard. Live bait is kept in pens submerged off the docks in the creek, and frozen bait is kept in a walk-in freezer converted from an old delivery truck. The family members gather regularly to package barrels of spearing into small plastic bags for Ms. Zatto to deliver, along with the crabs and eels they trap and the worms they dig. On Thursday morning, she filled the minivan with bait and slipped in her fishing rod, in case of an emergency fishing stop. The Seamans\u2019 bait business has declined since the 1990s, when they had a fleet of bait trucks run by Ms. Zatto\u2019s mother, Lois, who died of cancer in 1998. Ms. Zatto blames government restrictions, the cost of gas and technological distractions that keep people from the water. Indeed, Thursday was a slow day. The summer rush was over, and striper season had not yet kicked in. \u201cI got all these worms and I got no one to sell them to,\u201d Ms. Zatto said. \u201cI\u2019m not happy.\u201d Ms. Zatto stopped at the Launch Pad bait shop in Inwood and sold sandworms and bunker. The next two shops, Crossbay Fishing Station in Howard Beach and Bernie\u2019s bait shop in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, placed orders for the weekend. Ms. Zatto then checked on some fishing buddies in a shopping-center parking lot in Far Rockaway, where you can stand next to your car and cast into a deep channel for striped bass. Ms. Zatto\u2019s bait tales are better than fish tales. \u201cOne time, the van was stolen with $1,000 worth of bait in it,\u201d she said. \u201cThe cops found it in Brooklyn, and all the bait was gone.\u201d Then there was the time she was driving her aunt home on the Belt Parkway and a sharp turn sent two large barrels of eels tumbling over. Ms. Zatto calmly drove home with eels and ice water flooding the minivan like an aquarium. She has been known for cutting off customers who grouse about the size of the worms or the condition of the fiddler crabs. \u201cIf they get on my nerves too much, I tell them, \u2018No spearing for you,\u2019 and I don\u2019t come back,\u201d she said. \u201cI got enough people annoying me in my life.\u201d", "keyword": "Fishing Sport;City Island (NYC);Zatto Kim"}
{"id": "ny0249501", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/05/25", "title": "Wilpon Apologizes to Mets Players for Comments", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 With his public-relations campaign backfiring, Fred Wilpon , the Mets \u2019 principal owner, apologized to Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran via speaker phone in a cramped office in the clubhouse at Wrigley Field on Tuesday. The usually restrained Wilpon had done a series of interviews with weekly magazines in the hope of presenting his side of the Bernard L. Madoff scandal, only to ignite a fresh controversy. No one around the Mets appeared particularly surprised at the need for apologetic phone calls, team meetings and the seemingly unrelenting requirement of addressing negative off-field issues. \u201cIn the years that I\u2019ve been here, this is not the first time that I\u2019m in a situation where I have to answer questions about what somebody said about me or this or that,\u201d Beltran said. In addition to Beltran and Reyes, Wilpon reached out to David Wright, who is not with the team because of a back injury, after he criticized all of them and disparaged the team as a whole in an interview in The New Yorker that was published this week. Wilpon said that Wright was not a superstar, even though the team markets him that way, and that Reyes has had \u201ceverything wrong with him,\u201d and he used an expletive to describe the team as lousy. He considered coming to Chicago to apologize in person, but it was decided that his presence would only inflame the situation. As it was, Manager Terry Collins felt compelled to hold a team meeting in the tiny clubhouse to tell the players to ignore the situation flaring around them and to focus strictly on baseball. But then the Mets went out and played one of their worst games of the season, losing to the Cubs, 11-1 . General Manager Sandy Alderson spoke to reporters after the loss and said it was time to move on. \u201cEveryone was surprised by the comments, but there\u2019s nobody who is more passionate about the Mets, has more empathy for the players than Fred,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that we all get caught up in the emotion from time to time, and perhaps say some things that on reflection probably were not well chosen.\u201d Although Beltran and Reyes took a mostly forgiving and gracious tone with reporters, they seemed to suppress some resentment. The most visibly agitated was Beltran, who said he had become far too experienced at answering questions about ownership\u2019s criticisms of him. Beltran had also incurred the wrath of the owners when he had surgery on his knee against their wishes in January 2010, and after he missed an optional team visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center last year. Beltran directly rebutted Wilpon\u2019s assertion in The New Yorker that he was 65 to 70 percent of the player he once was. \u201cWhat is important is that I\u2019m healthy and I\u2019m back playing, I\u2019m enjoying the game,\u201d Beltran said. \u201cI don\u2019t feel 70 or 65, I feel 100 percent.\u201d Beltran went into Tuesday\u2019s game with a .910 on-base plus slugging percentage, the eighth best in the National League, and is now batting .279 with 8 homers and 25 runs batted in . Reyes, likewise, is having an excellent season, batting .314 with a major-league-high 6 triples, and 17 stolen bases, second in the majors. But both players can be free agents after the season, and whatever hope remained that they might return next year appears to have been answered in the negative by Wilpon\u2019s public comments. Wilpon said in The New Yorker that Reyes would not command a contract similar to the $142 million deal Carl Crawford received from the Boston Red Sox last winter. (Reyes has not made public any contract demands.) Perhaps Wilpon simply meant he would not get it from the cash-deficient Mets. In fact, based on another article, it appears the Mets would not pay Reyes even half that amount. In an article in Sports Illustrated , Wilpon confirmed what had been widely assumed, that next season\u2019s payroll would be below $100 million. That would mean a roughly 30 percent drop from this season, all but ensuring the departure of Beltran and Reyes. Alderson said he was not told that the payroll would necessarily dip that low, then playfully alluded to Wilpon\u2019s recent media campaign. \u201cLook, I haven\u2019t read Sports Illustrated, I haven\u2019t read Mechanics Illustrated, Men\u2019s Health,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what stories are out there, so until I\u2019ve read those stories I can\u2019t comment.\u201d He added with an exasperated smile, \u201cLet\u2019s focus on getting past the New Yorker article.\u201d As for the remorseful phone call from Wilpon, Beltran and Reyes said they told him that they were not losing sleep over it, but seemed to appreciate his contrition. \u201cHe just said sorry it happened, sorry it got out,\u201d Collins explained of the call, \u201cand we certainly said don\u2019t worry about it, we\u2019re going to move forward. We\u2019re big leaguers. We\u2019re men. It\u2019s a big league baseball team, our job is to play baseball.\u201d In addition to his father\u2019s calls, Jeff Wilpon, the Mets\u2019 chief operating officer, reached out to some players Monday to explain. If he tried to contact Reyes, though, the call never got through. Asked if Jeff Wilpon had called him, Reyes said: \u201cNo, I mean, probably. But I don\u2019t answer. I was in bed all day yesterday, so I don\u2019t know. A lot of people called me. I don\u2019t know, maybe.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Apologies;New York Mets;Wilpon Fred;Beltran Carlos;New Yorker"}
{"id": "ny0079444", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2015/02/28", "title": "Princeton Women Pull Away in Rout and Move 4 Games From Goal of 30-0", "abstract": "PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 Inside the locker room of the season\u2019s last undefeated team in women\u2019s college basketball is a hastily written checklist. It names the other seven teams in the Ivy League, with two underscore marks next to each abbreviated name. This is how Princeton is taking inventory of its season. There is a giant \u201c10-0\u201d written with a big, bold, black marker, and circled twice. \u201cThis is our little challenge board throughout the season,\u201d Princeton Coach Courtney Banghart said. \u201cEvery time we played a different team from a different conference, we\u2019d say our record against that conference. \u2018We\u2019re 2-0 against the A.C.C. We\u2019re 1-0 against the Big East. We\u2019re 1-0 against the A-10.\u2019 It\u2019s silly, but it\u2019s our thing.\u201d Slowly but surely, it is becoming a thing for the rest of the country as well. After Friday night\u2019s 67-49 pummeling of Yale, Princeton is 10-0 in the Ivy League. Most important \u2014 and most notable \u2014 the Tigers are 26-0 over all, and they rank alongside the Kentucky men\u2019s program as the only Division I teams without a loss this season. \u201cIt still feels a little surreal to me,\u201d the junior forward Annie Tarakchian said. \u201cEach and every day, I\u2019ve just been enjoying the girls next to me and having a good time.\u201d Starting with Saturday\u2019s senior night send-off against Brown, four games separate the Tigers from perfection. While the last three of those games are on the road, they will be played against teams \u2014 Cornell, Columbia and Penn \u2014 that Princeton has already beaten by an average margin of 32 points. Entering the N.C.A.A. tournament with an unbeaten record is certainly within the Tigers\u2019 reach, and exactly what they are aiming for. Banghart \u2014 who set the program\u2019s career record for victories on Friday night, winning her 164th game in just her eighth season \u2014 confessed that she was gunning for 30 wins (with no losses, of course) because it would give her Tigers the most wins ever by a team in Ivy League history \u2014 men\u2019s or women\u2019s. Currently, the record for wins in a season is held by the 1970-71 Penn men\u2019s team, which started 28-0 before falling in the N.C.A.A. tournament. \u201cYou better believe that I want these guys to be in the record books,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be very hard to beat 30-0,\u201d because teams are supposed to play 29 games. The Tigers were allowed an extra game this season because they played a game in Cancun, Mexico. Princeton\u2019s offense is rooted in three things opposing defenses have found increasingly difficult to guard against: speed, physicality and finesse. With guard Blake Dietrick, who scored 18 points to lead the Tigers against Yale, racing up and down the floor, Princeton is able to open lanes for its powerful forwards. Tarakchian, who averages almost 10 rebounds a game, causes matchup problems for other forwards because of her ability to shoot. The game against Yale on Friday was the latest case in point. Two weeks ago in New Haven, the Tigers had their closest decision of the season, winning by 6 against the Bulldogs. Ahead by 16 at the half on Friday, Princeton rode a 19-4 run at the start of the second half to turn the game into a rout. \u201cWe knew that game was an aberration,\u201d Dietrick said of the previous contest against Yale. Princeton\u2019s biggest problem could occur off the court: convincing the selection committee that it is worthy of a seed high enough to give the Tigers two home games to begin the tournament. Banghart\u2019s team might make that the next item on the dry-erase board. \u201cI\u2019m enjoying every second of it,\u201d Banghart said. \u201cI know how hard it is to win. It\u2019s hard to win any game you play. I\u2019ve been enjoying every day of it.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;NCAA Women's Basketball;Ivy League;NCAA;Princeton;Yale"}
{"id": "ny0279345", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2016/10/04", "title": "America\u2019s Gray Ghosts: The Disappearing Caribou", "abstract": "BONNERS FERRY, Idaho \u2014 The only caribou left in the contiguous United States are here in northern Idaho where they number about a dozen and live deep in the forests of the jagged Selkirk Mountains , near the Canadian border. Because they are so rarely seen, the caribou \u2014 America\u2019s version of reindeer \u2014 are known as gray ghosts. They may very soon become real ghosts: These animals are among the most endangered species in the lower 48 states. \u201cRight now, predation is the biggest problem, primarily wolves and cougars,\u201d said Norm Merz, a wildlife biologist with the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho , which has contracted with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to create a plan to revive the population. Not that long ago, hundreds of the animals lived in the United States. Part of the problem is that the Selkirk herd is international. The caribou can be found in the snowy old-growth forests of Idaho and extreme northeast Washington, but spend about 90 percent of their time in southern Canada. The threat to the animals there is so serious that Canadian government sharpshooters began killing wolves from helicopters . In the Selkirk Mountains, they have killed just 19 so far. Widespread wolf culls further north in Alberta are credited with saving the Little Smoky caribou herd in the Peace River region. But the price was high: About 1,000 wolves were killed over a decade. Image Behind a mountain caribou in B.C., a clear-cut section of forest. Habitat destruction from logging, mining and resource extraction activities threaten the animals. Credit David Moskowitz The Selkirk herd is not the only one so greatly imperiled. At last count, there were some 1,354 mountain caribou in 15 subgroups in southern British Columbia. Ten years ago, there were thousands. Today, all are in steep decline and listed as endangered in Canada, primarily because of wolves. Wolf predation, though, is a symptom of a much bigger and far more difficult problem. The fundamental cause of the caribou decline is the unanticipated ecological consequences of development. The steep mountain forests where the caribou dwell are part of an inland temperate rain forest, a unique ecosystem characterized by frequent precipitation and the only one inland. The centuries-old cedar and hemlock trees, and the lodgepole and whitebark pines in the high country, are home to a lichen that the southern herds of so-called deep-snow caribou depend on. For decades, the forest has been fragmented by clear-cutting, road building, oil development and mining. Where the forest has grown back, it is dominated by willows and other small trees favored by moose, deer and elk. In 2009, wolf numbers began surging in southern British Columbia, northern Idaho and northeastern Washington, drawn to the abundant prey. The population of mountain caribou dived, including the Selkirk herd, which then numbered about 50. Wolves focus primarily on moose and deer, but in the last two years, wolves have killed two caribou in the Selkirks; cougars killed another one. Yet another was killed by a car on Highway 3 in Canada, where salt on the road lures wildlife. Image A large bull mountain caribou in late fall in British Columbia, Canada. Known as gray ghosts, the animals are among the most endangered species in the continental United States. Credit David Moskowitz Canadian government hunters have killed entire wolf packs in the caribou\u2019s range to keep the species from extinction. Government experts and some environmentalists say the wolf populations can easily withstand such aggressive hunting; some research suggests the culling actually stimulates wolves to reproduce more. Drastic measures to protect the mountain caribou have also led to \u201cmaternity penning\u201d \u2014 pregnant caribou are moved into a fenced enclosure that keeps predators out until the calves are old enough to fend for themselves and, hopefully, escape the wolves. There are many other caribou around the polar region, among them the famous herds of tundra caribou that thunder across the Arctic. But the caribou at risk in southern British Columbia and northern Idaho are the last known to climb the wintry peaks of the Rocky Mountains in search of dangling strands of lichen called Old Man\u2019s Beard . Deep-snow caribou are burly, muscular ungulates , in shades of gray, white and dark brown, with unusually large antlers sweeping backward. They weigh as much as 600 pounds and have hooves the size of dinner plates, specially adapted keep them atop the many feet of snow at these elevations, where there are no predators. Protection for the caribou is controversial in the United States partly because snowmobilers want to ride on the public lands that were to have been set aside for the endangered species. In 2012, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to set aside more than 375,000 acres of critical habitat for the caribou. Opposition to the plan forced officials to reduce that to some 30,000 acres. The Pacific Legal Foundation , on behalf of the Idaho Snowmobile Association , has petitioned the federal government to have the 12 remaining animals delisted as endangered on the grounds that there are others in Canada and that these are not genetically distinct. But the Selkirk population is cut off from the hundreds of relatives farther north, primarily by roads, environmentalists say. Restrictions on snowmobile use and development in caribou habitat, they add, should be more rigorously enforced. \u201cIt seems to me the U.S. federal and state governments have written off caribou,\u201d said Joe Scott, the director of international programs at Conservation Northwest , an environmental group in Washington State. \u201cIf you are serious about protecting and restoring caribou, why are you shrinking their habitat down to the size of a postage stamp?\u201d As it stands, the Selkirk herd will not survive, and biologists say augmentation of the population is desperately needed. But with caribou in steep decline throughout their range, officials elsewhere don\u2019t want to give up animals. And mountain caribou in the northern part of British Columbia simply don\u2019t know how to travel to the high country to find lichen. When British Columbia caribou were exported to another endangered herd in the 1980s, 18 of the 19 animals died. Biologists who work with the Kalispel and Kootenai Native American tribes are concerned that the caribou will disappear before they can act, and urge more aggressive support from the public and agencies. \u201cWolves and grizzly bears suck up a lot of the money,\u201d said Bart George, a biologist with the Kalispel tribe. \u201cWhere is the support for this charismatic species?\u201d", "keyword": "Wolves;Reindeer;Endangered Species;Lichens;Fish and Wildlife Service;Idaho"}
{"id": "ny0118739", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/10/25", "title": "Dalli Resignation Leaves E.U. With a Mystery", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 The top health official for the European Union suddenly resigns. His plans to place marketing curbs on tobacco companies are put aside. The offices of antitobacco groups are burglarized. There is talk of cash payments of tens of millions of dollars by Big Tobacco. The swirl of rumors here around events inevitably called \u201cTobaccogate\u201d has a noirish tone that is unfamiliar in Brussels, the European Union capital better known for turgid debates about fish quotas. And much still remains mysterious and tangled in unproven accusations. The one certainty: The fall from grace last week of John Dalli, the commissioner for health and consumer protection, was remarkably sudden. It came after investigators concluded that he had probably known about an attempt by a lobbyist to solicit a multimillion-dollar payoff in exchange for easing a ban on snus, a form of tobacco sold in small pouches and placed between the gum and lip. In his latest public comments on the matter, Mr. Dalli denied the allegations on Wednesday, saying at a packed news conference that the European Commission president, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso , had given him 30 minutes to resign. Mr. Dalli said that he had requested 24 hours, so he could seek legal advice, and that resigning might have been an error because it suggested guilt. But Mr. Dalli insisted that he had to do so, because Mr. Barroso has the authority to dismiss any member of the commission. \u201cI had no choice,\u201d Mr. Dalli said. \u201cThe door was open, and it was simply walk out or be thrown out.\u201d Mr. Dalli said he would meet with a lawyer to assess whether to file suit, including at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, saying that his civil rights had been violated and that he wanted to clear his name. \u201cI have never been offered any money by anyone to alter any issue that I am responsible for, including this case of snus, either directly or indirectly,\u201d he said at the news conference. The European Commission, the executive arm of the union, said Mr. Barroso had no choice but to demand Mr. Dalli\u2019s resignation. Commission officials have said that Swedish Match, a company that makes snus, complained to the commission in May that a Maltese entrepreneur had asked for money in return for using his contacts with Mr. Dalli. The aim, officials suspect, was to influence a legislative proposal on tobacco products \u2014 and in particular to seek an end to the ban on snus sales that covers all countries in the bloc except for Sweden . After the complaint by Swedish Match, the commission asked the European Anti-Fraud Office to investigate. Mr. Barroso received the fraud office\u2019s report on Oct. 15 and presented Mr. Dalli with some of the findings at their meeting the next day. \u201cIt was politically untenable for Mr. Dalli to remain in this sensitive function,\u201d Olivier Bailly, a spokesman for Mr. Barroso, said Monday. Mr. Bailly said Mr. Dalli \u201chad several unofficial contacts with elements of the industry of tobacco through a private intermediary, the Maltese entrepreneur, without there being any discernible or legitimate reasons to involve this intermediary.\u201d Angered by Mr. Dalli\u2019s public remarks since his departure, Mr. Barroso published a letter he sent to Mr. Dalli on Wednesday to remind him of his \u201cobligation, as a former commissioner, to behave with integrity.\u201d Snus is popular in Sweden, where some people consider it a safer alternative to smoking. So important is the product in Sweden that it won the exemption from a European Union ban on oral tobacco as part of its joining the union in 1995. Swedish Match was asked for nearly $80 million by the Maltese middleman to use his influence with Mr. Dalli to end the snus ban, Rupini Bergstrom, a spokeswoman for the company, said Wednesday. The middleman told Swedish Match it should be prepared to hand over the first $13 million directly to Mr. Dalli, Ms. Bergstrom said. Mr. Dalli is from Malta , where politics is a rough-and-tumble affair and where he had risen near the top of the political ladder after serving as a cabinet minister for the center-right Nationalist Party in several governments. Mr. Dalli said his ouster had jeopardized the revised tobacco law that he had planned to begin circulating within the European Commission. Under Mr. Dalli\u2019s proposals, cigarette manufacturers could be forced to put health warnings that cover most of the surface of their boxes, and there would be an option for some countries to require plain packaging. Commission officials had given little indication that they were about to ease the ban on snus in the European Union outside Sweden. Mr. Dalli warned Wednesday that representatives of the tobacco industry \u201chave been lobbying all the commission, and they have been meeting all the commission and their staff over the past months.\u201d He described an \u201conslaught in the commission by the tobacco lobby.\u201d Adding to the intrigue are burglaries that took place late on Oct. 17, or early the next morning, just two days after the dismissal of Mr. Dalli, at the shared offices of the Smoke Free Partnership and the European Respiratory Partnership, and at the office of the European Public Health Alliance. All those organizations work in tobacco control. The partnerships reported the theft of four laptops, three of which belonged to people working on tobacco control. The alliance reported two stolen laptops belonging to the policy team and a senior staff member and the removal of confidential documents.", "keyword": "Smoking and Tobacco;Bribery and Kickbacks;Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations;European Union;European Commission;Dalli John;Barroso Jose Manuel Durao;Malta;Brussels (Belgium);Sweden"}
{"id": "ny0016302", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/10/09", "title": "School Bus Drivers in Boston Stop Work, Surprising the City", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 School bus drivers infuriated parents and city officials on Tuesday morning with a surprise work stoppage that left thousands of the city\u2019s 57,000 schoolchildren stranded at home or at bus stops. The stoppage appeared to have been set off in a roundabout way by the shutdown of the federal government. The bus drivers\u2019 union had lodged several complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. But after union members discovered Monday that the board was not operating and could not hear their grievances, drivers said, they decided on the spur of the moment Tuesday to walk off the job \u2014 with no notice to city or school officials. \u201cThis morning we decided enough is enough,\u201d said Macaire Dupuy, 47, a driver for 20 years. The walkout, which a seething Mayor Thomas M. Menino called an illegal strike, threw thousands of families into chaos, with many parents forced to skip work to take their children to and from school, and others scrambling with last-minute alternatives and day-care plans. Jose Ramos, 30, a Dorchester resident and a chef, was among those who skipped work. \u201cI\u2019m not going to be an irresponsible parent,\u201d he said. Mayor Menino said the bus drivers\u2019 union had \u201calways been rebellious.\u201d \u201cToday\u2019s actions are a result of a group of angry people who don\u2019t like to follow the rules,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cThey\u2019ve agreed to a contract, a very good contract, and now they don\u2019t want to live up to that contract.\u201d The mayor ordered Boston police officers to check bus stops, pick up stranded students in their patrol cars and take them to school. All after-school athletic events were canceled. The work stoppage surprised not only city officials but also the United Steelworkers, which represents the drivers; the union disavowed the action and urged the drivers to go back to work. \u201cThis here is wrong,\u201d Albert Polk, the assistant to the director for United Steelworkers District 4, said through a bullhorn after he pushed to the center of a group of about 100 drivers across the street from a bus depot. \u201cYou needed to address this through the grievance procedures,\u201d he said. \u201cYou need to get back to work.\u201d He was drowned out by the workers\u2019 cries of \u201cNo! No!\u201d Image A Boston police van delivered children to William Blackstone Elementary School on Tuesday, when a school bus driver strike left students scrambling to get to class. Credit Mark Garfinkel/Boston Herald, via Associated Press The bus company sought an injunction ordering the drivers back to work, but it was denied by Judge George A. O\u2019Toole Jr. of Federal District Court. He said that because the steelworkers\u2019 union had urged the drivers to go back to work, a court order would be inappropriate. It was not clear what would happen Wednesday. After the injunction was denied, the mayor said schools would open an hour earlier Wednesday to allow parents to drop their children off and still get to work, and he said the subway and bus system would offer students free rides. He added that 82 percent of students made it to school on Tuesday. \u201cThe union can\u2019t stop us from educating students,\u201d Mr. Menino said. \u201cThe only thing in jeopardy is their own livelihood.\u201d Steve Kirschbaum, chairman of the grievance committee for United Steelworkers Local 8751, said the drivers would go back only after they had a chance to meet with city officials and with Veolia Transportation of Illinois, the city\u2019s new transportation partner. Mr. Menino said the city would talk only after the drivers went back to work. The bus drivers were protesting measures taken by Veolia that they said violated their contract and impinged on their ability to do their jobs. Mr. Kirschbaum said Veolia had created a more complicated payroll procedure, for example, and made it more difficult for drivers to take bathroom breaks. And drivers now have to check in before work, as opposed to taking the vehicle\u2019s keys home with them at night. Drivers also objected to a new GPS system that allows parents to track the buses through an app on their smartphones; they did not object to parents following the buses but, they said, to the company\u2019s using the system to map new routes that drivers said led to overcrowding and delays. On their Web site, drivers called the GPS units \u201cspy devices.\u201d Such tracking devices are relatively new for school buses. They are not mandated now in New York City, for example, but will be in September 2014, under new contracts with private companies. The mayor said he had heard \u201crumblings\u201d of dissatisfaction but had not known if or when drivers would walk off the job. That lack of warning seemed to distress some parents the most. Myisha Johniken, 25, said she waited with her autistic son for half an hour at the special bus stop in front of her home in the Dorchester section, unaware of the strike. She had to take him to school on a city bus, which distressed him. \u201cHe\u2019s all discombobulated because of this,\u201d the boy\u2019s grandmother Kathleen Brown said. \u201cBecause of his autism, if you break his routine, he\u2019s messed up the rest of the day.\u201d", "keyword": "Strikes Labor;Boston;Bus;K-12 Education;Veolia Transportation"}
{"id": "ny0110252", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/05/23", "title": "Putin Moves Confidants to the Kremlin", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 With the unveiling of his Kremlin cabinet on Tuesday, President Vladimir V. Putin made it clear that power would be concentrated in his hands for the next six years, and gave no quarter to opposition demands to bring new voices into the highest levels of government. Mr. Putin\u2019s presidential administration \u2014 an organ whose influence reaches into every corner of the state \u2014 will be dominated by the confidants who have surrounded him for a decade, including fellow veterans of the intelligence and security services. A handful of especially unpopular ministers were removed from their government posts on Monday, suggesting that the authorities were heeding recent calls to punish officials for corruption and inefficiency. But Mr. Putin hates to fire people, even if they have become liabilities, and he announced Tuesday that most of the ousted ministers would receive new posts as presidential aides or advisers in the Kremlin. One who did not receive a Kremlin post was Igor I. Sechin, the former deputy prime minister, who has advocated greater state control over the energy sector. Mr. Sechin was appointed to lead the country\u2019s largest oil company, Rosneft. Shares in Rosneft rose on the news, which puts an influential political figure in a position to lobby for the oil sector. It hopes to cut taxes and attract Western partners to explore fields in rugged frontier territory like the Arctic. Under a plan for the oil industry through 2020, Russia intends to hold output at about 10 million barrels a day, tied with Saudi Arabia for now but gradually sliding into second place. Former Finance Minister Aleksei L. Kudrin, a Putin ally who left the government last year, said the new configuration suggested that Mr. Putin had moved on from his \u201ctandem\u201d with Dmitri A. Medvedev and was returning to the highly centralized style of his first two presidential terms. \u201cPutin in the past, in particular, took all the key questions on himself,\u201d Mr. Kudrin told Kommersant-FM. \u201cI think that now he is going to take all key questions on himself. Perhaps a little bit less; I think he\u2019ll give the government some defined space in some decisions, but all the same he\u2019ll be making the key decisions.\u201d As if to underscore the hard-line trend, Mr. Putin\u2019s party, United Russia, moved Tuesday to increase fines sharply for citizens participating in illegal protest actions to one million rubles, or $32,000, from 5,000 rubles, or $160 \u2014 more than three times the average salary in Russia. The bill narrowly passed on the first of three readings, with 236 deputies supporting and 207 in opposition. Under pressure, including from Mr. Medvedev, the bill\u2019s proponents are planning to reduce the maximum fines for citizens to 300,000 rubles, or about $9,600. The penalty would apply to a range of street actions that have become common in Moscow in recent months, like the ebullient \u201ctest stroll\u201d led by a dozen prominent writers two weeks ago. If it passes in second and third readings, it could be in force before a large march planned for June 12. The initiative has met with staunch resistance from the legislature\u2019s minority parties, two of which threatened a walkout during the vote. On Tuesday, deputies in the faction A Just Russia wore the white ribbons that have become a symbol of the protest movement, and which Mr. Putin derided on national television as resembling limp condoms. Several dozen protesters picketed Parliament on Tuesday, some carrying signs that read, \u201cA ban on demonstrations is the path to revolution.\u201d", "keyword": "Russia;Putin Vladimir V"}
{"id": "ny0141206", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/11/04", "title": "Obama Pays Tribute to His Grandmother After She Dies", "abstract": "CHARLOTTE, N.C. \u2014 Madelyn Dunham , who watched from afar as her only grandson rapidly ascended the ranks of American politics to the brink of the presidency, did not live to see whether he was elected. Mrs. Dunham, 86, Senator Barack Obama \u2019s grandmother, died late Sunday in Hawaii after battling cancer, which Mr. Obama announced upon arriving here on Monday for a campaign stop on the eve of Election Day. \u201cShe has gone home,\u201d said Mr. Obama, his voice tinged with emotion as he briefly spoke of her death at a campaign rally here. \u201cShe died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, so there\u2019s great joy instead of tears.\u201d Mr. Obama learned of his grandmother\u2019s death at 8 a.m. on Monday, aides said, but appeared at a morning rally in Florida without making an announcement. A written statement was issued around 4:30 p.m., in the name of Mr. Obama and his sister, before he spoke at an evening rally in Charlotte. The delay was intended to allow his sister, who was six hours behind in Hawaii, time to take care of a few details before the death became public. Mrs. Dunham was the final remaining immediate family member who helped raise Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii. He called her Toot, his shorthand for \u201ctutu,\u201d a Hawaiian term for grandparent. Mr. Obama left the campaign trail late last month to travel to Honolulu to bid his grandmother farewell. He spent part of two days with her, as she lay gravely ill in the small apartment where he lived from age 10 to 18. While Mrs. Dunham was too sick to travel to see her grandson on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama and other family members said that she closely followed his bid for the presidency through cable television. Yet she became a figure in his campaign, seen through images in television commercials intended to give him a biographical anchor. Mrs. Dunham, who grew up near Augusta, Kan., moved with her husband, Stanley Dunham, to Hawaii. In the early stages of his candidacy, Mr. Obama spoke wistfully about his grandparents, whose all-American biography was suddenly critical to establishing his own American story. He spoke of how his grandmother worked on B-29s at a Boeing plant in Wichita. For Mr. Obama, the loss came on the final full day of his presidential campaign against Senator John McCain. Campaigning in New Mexico, Mr. McCain offered his condolences and said: \u201cHe is in our thoughts and prayers. We mourn his loss, and we are with him and his family today.\u201d The illness of Mr. Obama\u2019s grandmother had been weighing on him in recent weeks, friends said, which is why he insisted on interrupting his schedule to visit her late last month. While she was gravely ill, aides said, he carried on a limited conversation with her. He kept the visit to one day, advisers said, partly out of her own insistence that people not create a fuss. \u201cShe was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cThey\u2019re not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard. \u201cThey aren\u2019t seeking the limelight. All they try to do is just do the right thing. In this crowd there are a lot of quiet heroes like that.\u201d", "keyword": "Dunham Madelyn;Obama Barack;Presidential Election of 2008"}
{"id": "ny0296671", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2016/12/12", "title": "N.F.L. Concussion Settlement Payments Can Begin After Supreme Court Defers", "abstract": "The United States Supreme Court on Monday denied a request to review the N.F.L.\u2019s settlement with retired players who had accused the league of hiding the dangers of head trauma, paving the way for some players with brain ailments to begin receiving payments of as much as $5 million. The decision ends a contentious five-year fight between the league and many former players, some of whom are suffering from Alzheimer\u2019s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other debilitating conditions. The settlement, worth perhaps as much as $1 billion, covers nearly every former player for the next 65 years; the league\u2019s actuaries estimated that just under 30 percent of them could develop Alzheimer\u2019s or other conditions covered in the settlement. The agreement is by far the largest concussion-related settlement, and a landmark in light of the league\u2019s repeated denials, made over many years, of the links between repeated head trauma and brain disease. The N.C.A.A. agreed to a far smaller settlement, while the N.H.L. is still fighting its former players, who have filed a suit largely similar to the one brought by the retired N.F.L. players. \u201cThis decision means that, finally, retired N.F.L. players will receive much-needed care and support for the serious neurocognitive injuries they are facing,\u201d Christopher Seeger, one of the lead lawyers for the retired players, said in a statement. \u201cThese courageous men and their families, who in the face of great adversity took on the N.F.L., have made history.\u201d The Supreme Court was asked to review the settlement by a subset of retired players who believed, among other things, that the agreement unfairly excluded players who received a diagnosis of a severe brain disease linked to head hits, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, after Judge Anita B. Brody of United States District Court approved the settlement last year. They also argued that the settlement did not adequately account for scientific innovations that may allow for C.T.E. to be diagnosed in people while they are alive. Currently, the disease can be confirmed only in autopsies. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit already rejected those arguments, and the Supreme Court, without comment, followed suit by refusing to review the case. \u201cWe are pleased that the Supreme Court has decided not to review the unanimous and well-reasoned decisions of Judge Brody and the Third Circuit approving the settlement of this litigation,\u201d the league said in a statement. \u201cWe look forward to working with class counsel and Judge Brody to implement the settlement and provide the important benefits that our retired players and their families have been waiting to receive.\u201d Cullin O\u2019Brien, the lawyer who represented the former N.F.L. player Cookie Gilchrist in the petition to the Supreme Court, had no comment. He and other lawyers representing players who petitioned the court could ask the court to reconsider its refusal, but legal experts said that would be a long shot. Still, the agreement did not come easily. For several years, the N.F.L. insisted that arbitrators, not the courts, should be used to settle disputes between players and the league. The players would likely have had to prove that the concussions they received in the N.F.L. led directly to their current conditions. After Judge Brody questioned whether the initial agreement, worth $765 million, would be enough to cover every player, the league agreed to pay an unlimited amount of damages. Some estimates suggest that the league could pay $1 billion to cover all claims. Critically, the players will not have to prove that they sustained any concussions while playing in the N.F.L., or whether those concussions led to their ailments. The N.F.L., faced with the potentially damaging possibility of players testifying on the stand about their brain injuries and ailments, agreed to settle the case in August 2013. Judge Brody still must rule on the status of more than 100 former players who opted out of the settlement. She also must rule on the $112 million payment that the N.F.L. has agreed to pay the plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers. Starting next month, the league must make six monthly deposits of $20 million into a special account for players covered by the settlement. By April, the plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers must set up the apparatus to allow players to start filing claims. Mr. Seeger said players with diseases that have already been diagnosed should receive checks within weeks after filing their paperwork. Mr. Seeger said he was negotiating with Medicare, which is allowed in class-action cases of this kind to recoup its medical expenses already spent. As he is negotiating on behalf of a large group of about 20,000 ex-players, Mr. Seeger said, he expects Medicare to offer a substantial discount. Those so-called medical liens would be deducted from any lump-sum settlements.", "keyword": "Chronic traumatic encephalopathy;NFL; Super Bowl; Super Bowl 2015;Concussion;Football;Lawsuits;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Anita B Brody"}
{"id": "ny0048010", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2014/11/21", "title": "Fernando Alonso Out, Sebastian Vettel In, for Ferrari Next Season", "abstract": "ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates \u2014 The Ferrari racing team on Thursday announced the end of one era and the beginning of another as it said goodbye to a two-time world champion and welcomed a four-time world champion. Fernando Alonso, who has driven for the team since 2010, will be replaced next season by Sebastian Vettel, who has driven for the Red Bull team since 2009, the team said in separate statements. The two drivers are also the most successful drivers now racing in the series, with Alonso, 33, having 32 victories and two drivers\u2019 titles, and Vettel, 27, having 39 victories and four drivers\u2019 titles. Lewis Hamilton, who is competing for the 2014 drivers\u2019 title against Nico Rosberg, his teammate at Mercedes, in the final race of the series in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, also has 32 victories, but he has won the title only once, in 2008. Vettel won the title in the previous four seasons, while Alonso barely missed the title three times at Ferrari, finishing second in 2010, 2012 and 2013. Alonso won both of his world titles while driving for the Renault team in 2005 and 2006. The announcement had been rumored for weeks, after Red Bull announced on Oct. 3, at the Japanese Grand Prix, that Vettel was leaving the team at the end of this season. \u201cThe success we have had with Red Bull racing over the last four years has been an incredible journey,\u201d Vettel said in a press conference in Abu Dhabi, \u201cbut at some point you want a new challenge to take on and to do something different, and Ferrari is the dream team in the sport.\u201d Alonso still had two seasons left on his contract at Ferrari, but he said the team had agreed to let him leave without dispute. \u201cI had some doubts already last year about 2014,\u201d said Alonso, also in the press conference, and referring to the new regulations requiring teams to build downsized, hybrid engines, which Ferrari has failed to do as well as Mercedes. \u201cWe agreed that if we were not competitive this year I could think of some other options, and so at the summer break I decided.\u201d Alonso has not yet announced where he will drive next year, but he may return to the McLaren team, where he raced in 2007, and which will start a new era using engines from Honda, as the Japanese constructor returns to the series after a six-year absence.", "keyword": "Car Racing;Sebastian Vettel;Formula One;Ferrari;Fernando Alonso"}
{"id": "ny0275250", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/02/10", "title": "Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona Shifts Focus From Immigration Debate", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 When Doug Ducey ran for governor of this border state, he accused President Obama of \u201cdithering far too long\u201d on immigration and vowed to \u201cfight back\u201d against illegal border crossers, pledging to use every resource at his command: \u201cfencing, satellites, guardsmen, more police and prosecutors.\u201d Now in his second year as the governor of Arizona \u2014 a state at the forefront of immigration and border issues, with a growing Latino population \u2014 Mr. Ducey, a Republican, has done none of that. He has avoided pressures from his party\u2019s presidential candidates even after one of them, Donald J. Trump, twice visited the state to promote the \u201cbig\u201d and \u201cbeautiful\u201d wall he said he would build to keep illegal immigrants away if he was elected. \u201cI want this state to be known for what it is, the land of opportunity,\u201d Mr. Ducey said in an interview. \u201cSo our main focus is our economy and our education system.\u201d But he may soon have to wade into the divisive immigration debate, which is again coloring Arizona\u2019s legislative session and bringing angry crowds of protesters to the Capitol\u2019s lawn and hearing rooms. One bill would punish communities that offer sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants facing deportation; those communities\u2019 share of state revenues would be withheld. Another measure would require judges to sentence undocumented immigrants to the fullest possible term in prison for whatever crime they committed. A Senate committee approved both on Feb. 3 in party-line votes. A third bill, which would impose citizenship and legal residency requirements for municipal identification cards, cleared three Senate committees in three weeks with blanket support from Republican lawmakers, underscoring their priorities here in an election year. \u201cIt\u2019s tough to propose new illegal immigration bills in Arizona, because we\u2019ve pretty much done them all,\u201d said State Senator John Kavanagh, a retired Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer who found a second calling as a leading conservative in Arizona. Image State Senator Mart\u00edn J. Quezada spoke at a rally protesting immigration legislation last month outside the Capitol in Phoenix. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times Already, the state has one of the nation\u2019s toughest stances on illegal immigration. It has battled in state and federal courts to deny driver\u2019s licenses and in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants who were granted deferred deportation by Mr. Obama. It is home to Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County , who made a name for himself as an unapologetic pursuer of unauthorized migrants. And it ushered in a harsh new wave of immigration enforcement when it gave the police broad powers to question anyone suspected of being in the country illegally \u2014 passing the \u201cshow me your papers\u201d law in 2010. Mr. Kavanagh was among the crucial supporters of the measure, which Mr. Ducey\u2019s predecessor, Jan Brewer, approved. The legislation divided a state already scarred by years of targeted enforcement against Latinos, who make up one-third of the population. The municipal identification bill, which Mr. Kavanagh also sponsored, \u201cis primarily to protect the integrity of government ID cards,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it does have an impact on illegal immigration, because it prevents illegal immigrants from getting one of those cards.\u201d Mr. Ducey has not said a word about this or the other immigration bills. But people on both sides of the immigration debate are eagerly awaiting any action he might take on the measures. They could serve as a litmus test for his positions on the subject, which, as governor, he has deftly avoided articulating. If the bills hit Mr. Ducey\u2019s desk, \u201cwill he sign them?\u201d asked State Senator Mart\u00edn J. Quezada , a Democratic leader in the Republican-controlled Legislature, whose district includes the Maryvale section of Phoenix, where three in four residents are Latino. \u201cRemember, just because he can, it doesn\u2019t mean that he should.\u201d Mr. Ducey is \u201cfocused on the priorities he laid out in his State of the State address \u201d on Jan. 11, said his spokesman, Daniel Scarpinato. They include overhauling Arizona\u2019s beleaguered foster care system and opening a corrections center to offer intensive drug treatment and other services to certain inmates in Maricopa County, the state\u2019s most populous. He also proposed spending $31.5 million to send 200 state troopers after drug smugglers along the border, the only border-related program he has championed so far. The scope of the effort is a far cry from the $800 million that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, also a Republican, secured from his state\u2019s Legislature last year to extend indefinitely the deployment of National Guard troops and air and ground surveillance along the Rio Grande Valley, which has faced questions over its cost and results. \u201cOur goal, because of limited resources, was going after what was most hurtful, and that was why we went after the drug cartels,\u201d Mr. Ducey said in the interview, drawing a distinction between his and Mr. Abbott\u2019s approaches. And while Mr. Abbott explained his plan as necessary to counter the federal government\u2019s \u201c apathetic response to border security ,\u201d Mr. Ducey characterized his plan for state troopers to target drug smugglers as \u201cadding state muscle\u201d to the 4,000 federal Border Patrol agents in Arizona. Image United States Border Patrol agents at a border fence in Nogales, Ariz., in 2014. Credit John Moore/Getty Images \u201cWhere there\u2019s an opportunity to work together to get results for the citizens of the state of Arizona, to increase public safety,\u201d he said, \u201cI think that\u2019s my responsibility as governor to take advantage.\u201d Mr. Ducey had the Customs and Border Protection commissioner, R. Gil Kerlikowske, an Obama appointee, by his side when he announced the border program from the State Capitol in November. That was a clear departure from Ms. Brewer, who is still well remembered for wagging a finger at Mr. Obama on an airport tarmac. In an interview, Ms. Brewer said her successor should use his bully pulpit to \u201ctell the federal government to secure our border, then we can deal with all the other problems that are upon us as a country.\u201d He has been handing out olive branches instead. When Mr. Ducey met Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson early last year, he said by way of introduction, \u201cThis is a new administration, and I\u2019d like a fresh start.\u201d In June, Mr. Ducey led a trade mission to Mexico City, the first Arizona governor to do so in a decade, then traveled to Sonora, Mexico, three months later to attend the inauguration of his counterpart across the border. Immigration advocates have been cautiously watching from the sidelines, unsure what to make of him just yet. \u201cAt least he isn\u2019t using the hate speech we heard so often from Governor Brewer,\u201d said Viridiana Gonz\u00e1lez, who leads a coalition of community groups opposing Mr. Kavanagh\u2019s bill, after a protest of the legislation last month. State Representative Bruce Wheeler, a Democrat from Tucson who is assistant minority whip, said in an interview, \u201cI don\u2019t know if what we\u2019re witnessing is a change in substance or a change of style, but I\u2019m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.\u201d Mr. Ducey made no mention of illegal immigrants as he outlined his border proposal, which he carefully framed around the heavy toll heroin addiction has exacted in Arizona. \u201cThis is not Arizona\u2019s problem,\u201d Mr. Ducey said. \u201cThis is America\u2019s problem.\u201d", "keyword": "Illegal Immigration;Doug Ducey;Arizona;Legislation"}
{"id": "ny0185992", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/03/06", "title": "Official Says Suspects Are Arrested in Cricket Attack", "abstract": "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan \u2014 The governor of Punjab said Thursday that Pakistani police had made a number of arrests in the commando-style attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team in the city of Lahore, but he offered no details, saying that a full report would be presented on Friday. The governor, Salmaan Taseer, also said investigators had found a large amount of weapons and that the attackers were fully trained. It was unclear from his remarks whether any of the gunmen were among those arrested. Also on Thursday, authorities distributed police sketches of four of the gunmen to reporters. The sketches, generated from witness reports and closed-circuit television images from the attacks, depicted relatively cleanshaven men who inspectors said appeared to be between 25 and 30 years old. The sketches were widely shown on Pakistani television. The police have been struggling to explain the security lapses that allowed the March 3 attack, in which a dozen gunmen ambushed vans carrying the cricket team and officials as they passed through a central square in the Punjabi city of Lahore before an international cricket match at the city\u2019s central stadium. The attack has deeply embarrassed Pakistan. Mr. Taseer, the governor, has only been in his position since last week, when the nation\u2019s highest court ruled that the province\u2019s former chief executive, Shahbaz Sharif and his brother, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, could no longer hold political office. Mr. Taseer is an ally of the president, Asif Ali Zardari. Opposition leaders, including leaders of the political party headed by the Sharif brothers, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, have blamed the political shakeup as contributing to the security situation that allowed for the attack. \"The security system in Pakistan under this regime has collapsed because this government is too busy doing other things, they are too busy in their quest for power,\" said Mushahid Hussain, an opposition leader, in a televised news conference on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. Two Australian umpires and an English referee caught up in the attack have criticized the security arrangements and said they were abandoned by Pakistani security forces once the shooting began. During the attack, the driver of the van they were traveling in to the stadium was killed, leaving the match officials to cower on the floor of their disabled van as the bus carrying the players sped off in front of them to the relative safety of the cricket stadium. Police had previously said that eight people \u2014 six policemen and two bystanders \u2014 had been killed, but appeared to revise the death toll over the past days. The Pakistani government has not yet released an official death toll. Lashkar-e-Taiba has never been known to strike inside Pakistan, but there was some speculation the attackers wanted to hijack the cricketers\u2019 bus and hold the players hostage in exchange for the Lashkar leaders.", "keyword": "Lahore (Pakistan);Cricket;Sri Lanka;Terrorism;Lashkar-e-Taiba;Pakistan"}
{"id": "ny0097705", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/06/11", "title": "Marguerite Patten, 99, Dies; Tutored Food-Rationed Britons in Home Cooking", "abstract": "Marguerite Patten, a home economist who told ration-pinched British families how to make a satisfying meal out of nothing during World War II, and later became one of the country\u2019s first television chefs and the author of more than 170 cookbooks aimed at average Britons, died on June 4 in Richmond, Surrey. She was 99. Her death was announced by her family. Known as the queen of ration-book cuisine, Ms. Patten worked in the advice division of the Ministry of Food, which was created in 1939 to oversee food distribution during the war. She went to markets, hospitals and factory canteens, offering tips and giving demonstrations on how to make something out of virtually nothing, with wartime creations like \u201cmock cream\u201d and \u201cmock duck.\u201d She also dispensed advice and recipes on \u201cThe Kitchen Front,\u201d a morning radio program on the BBC. In the austerity years after the war, with rationing still in force, Ms. Patten continued to help British housewives desperate to put a meal on the table, introducing them to the pleasures of Spam and other exotica. When rationing came to an end in 1954, she incorporated new ingredients like olive oil and avocados into sensible, low-cost dishes that required a minimum of effort and time, primarily through her cookbooks, which sold some 17 million copies all told. \u201cHer name is still instantly recognizable to several generations of British people,\u201d said Nicola Humble, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London and the author of \u201cCulinary Pleasures,\u201d a history of British cookbooks. \u201cHer books were determinedly unstylish \u2014 practical and unshowy \u2014 with lots of recipes for family supper dishes and well-described basics that people actually wanted to cook. Hers were, above all, the cookbooks that lived in people\u2019s kitchens, rather than the ones in the living room.\u201d Hilda Elsie Marguerite Brown was born in Bath, Somerset, on Nov. 4, 1915, and grew up in High Barnet, Hertfordshire. After leaving school, she took a cooking course and found work as a junior home economist for an electrical company. Stage-struck, she joined an acting company and appeared under the name Marguerite Eve for a season before being hired by Frigidaire to do demonstrations aimed at convincing housewives that they needed a refrigerator. In 1942, she joined the Ministry of Food, initially working in Lincoln. That year, she married Charles Patten, known as Bob, who was serving nearby with the Royal Air Force. A fruit importer after the war, he died in 1997. Survivors include their daughter, Judith; a sister, Elizabeth; two step-grandchildren; and a great-grandson. The ministry later posted Ms. Patten to the East End of London and to its bureau at Harrods department store, which had a kitchen that allowed her to give cooking demonstrations. After the war, she demonstrated appliances for Harrods, which published her first cookbook, \u201cRecipes by Harrods,\u201d in 1947. Many more followed, including one of the first British cookbooks to use color, \u201cCookery in Colour: A Picture Encyclopedia for Every Occasion,\u201d which was published in 1960 and eventually sold two million copies. Most of her books were aimed at ordinary cooks with minimal skills in the kitchen, as their titles suggest: \u201cMarguerite Patten\u2019s Family Cookbook,\u201d \u201cThe How-To Cookbook,\u201d \u201cClassic Dishes Made Simple.\u201d \u201cI believe that my audience is those who must cook but don\u2019t necessarily like doing it,\u201d The Daily Telegraph quoted her as saying in its obituary. \u201cThey want positive, straightforward advice, a feeling that someone understands they would like to cook and serve delicious food but it is a task.\u201d Ms. Patten made her first television appearance in 1947, demonstrating an eight-minute recipe for doughnuts on the BBC television program \u201cDesigned for Women,\u201d where she remained the resident chef until the 1960s. In the 1980s and after, nostalgia for the war years and ration-book cuisine inspired such collections as \u201cVictory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940-1954,\u201d \u201cMarguerite Patten\u2019s Post-War Kitchen,\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ll Eat Again: A Collection of Recipes from the War Years\u201d and, most improbable of all, \u201cSpam: The Cookbook.\u201d \u201cThe war taught us to manage with rations, not only not to waste but to be thrifty,\u201d she told The Daily Telegraph in 2011. \u201cI\u2019d like us to go back to the common sense of war years, being clever about using up food.\u201d", "keyword": "Obituary;Cooking;Rationing;World War II;Chef;Writer;Great Britain;Marguerite Patten"}
{"id": "ny0213824", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2010/03/17", "title": "Fordham Is Investing in Basketball, but Winning May Require More", "abstract": "Soon after Fordham\u2019s trustees announced last month that the university would infuse a significant amount of money into its men\u2019s basketball program, Athletic Director Frank McLaughlin received an e-mail message from a former classmate. The writer said he had stopped donating to the team because he was disappointed with its lack of progress . But upon hearing the news, he changed his mind. \u201cThere\u2019s a check in the mail today,\u201d he wrote. It is impossible to know whether money will translate into victories, but Fordham\u2019s quest for success on the court is being cheered by several rivals in the Atlantic 10 Conference whose institutional profiles resemble Fordham\u2019s. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to just flip a switch, but it\u2019s certainly trying to get positive momentum,\u201d said Richmond\u2019s athletic director, Jim Miller, whose men\u2019s basketball team is a No. 7 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament. A Jesuit university of 8,000 undergraduates that counts men\u2019s basketball as its flagship program, Fordham has had only one winning season since joining the Atlantic 10 in 1995. The Rams were 5-51 the last two seasons. Dereck Whittenburg was fired as the coach on Dec. 3, the day after Jio Fontan, a star guard, said he would transfer to Southern California. The interim coach, Jared Grasso, 29, won only one game and finished 0-16 in conference play and 2-26 over all. Fordham did not make the conference tournament. \u201cThe basketball community has thought we could do better,\u201d McLaughlin said, adding: \u201cThe amount of funding is not exorbitant, but it will make us competitive. This is not win at all costs.\u201d McLaughlin said he believed Fordham could compete with its Jesuit peers St. Louis, Xavier and St. Joseph\u2019s for bids to the N.C.A.A. tournament. The extra money, he said, will raise the Rams\u2019 expenditures from \u201cthe lower third to the top third\u201d in the Atlantic 10. McLaughlin declined to give specific numbers but said the allocation would go mainly to assistants\u2019 salaries and recruiting. Men\u2019s basketball is already Fordham\u2019s best-financed sport, but it has not had a Final Four run like that of St. Joseph\u2019s, which was built on coaching and recruiting, or a successful coaching hire like Rick Majerus at St. Louis to rally supporters. Fordham\u2019s challenges are unusual in part because of the university\u2019s unwillingness to bend academic standards or build a new facility. The Rams have instead changed coaches and shifted conference affiliations over the years. Fordham\u2019s renewed commitment comes in the context of a national search for a coach. \u201cI believe it was an O.K. job a month ago,\u201d McLaughlin said during a recent interview. \u201cWe\u2019ve changed the perception now that it is a very good job.\u201d St. Joseph\u2019s Coach Phil Martelli said getting the right coach was a major factor in a program\u2019s success. \u201cIt comes to a point in time where people think money solves all the issues, but it\u2019s the infrastructure and the personnel on the sideline and on the court,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone is rooting for them to hit a home run hire.\u201d With three teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament, the Atlantic 10 has become more competitive, making Fordham\u2019s shortcomings more glaring. McLaughlin has cited \u201ca lack of institutional commitment,\u201d including staying in Rose Hill Gym, a 3,400-seat arena that opened in 1925, when other programs were building arenas. Xavier\u2019s Cintas Center , which opened in 2000, holds 10,250, and St. Louis University opened the 10,600-seat Chaifetz Arena in 2008. Fordham has no plans to change Rose Hill, and its answer has been to schedule games at Izod Center in New Jersey \u2014 one this season and a few in the future \u2014 and bus students to games. \u201cThese projects have to be thought of as using athletics as a vehicle to bring people to the school,\u201d said Chris May, the athletic director at St. Louis. \u201cThen you see the dividends.\u201d Attracting prospects has been a problem for Fordham. Fontan, who played for powerhouse St. Anthony in Jersey City, was considered a steal when he committed, and his departure left a thin roster. Emanuel Richardson , an assistant at Arizona who has coached Amateur Athletic Union ball with the New York Gauchos and at Xavier, said part of the attrition at Fordham could be attributed to the New York recruiting scene. He considered it a trickle-down effect from St. John\u2019s, which plays in the Big East and has also struggled in recent years. \u201cWhen St. John\u2019s is getting the best players, then Fordham can get the right ones for their level,\u201d Richardson said. \u201cBut St. John\u2019s inability to get them means Fordham has to go after different guys, too.\u201d Coaching and conference changes have not helped. In 1987, Nick Macarchuk took over. In his first season, the Rams reached the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament final and played in the National Invitation Tournament. Fordham then left for the nonscholarship Patriot League and won the inaugural conference championship. In 1992, the Rams made the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1971. Three years later, McLaughlin moved Fordham from the Patriot League to the Atlantic 10. After Macarchuk resigned, McLaughlin hired Bob Hill, who had been a coach for three N.B.A. teams, to a 10-year contract, but Hill failed to adjust to the college game. After four seasons and a 36-78 record, the Rams bought out the last six years of his contract. \u201cThey are in the wrong conference,\u201d said Tom Konchalski, an alumnus who publishes High School Basketball Illustrated, which evaluates recruits. \u201cThey should have stayed and become the MAAC\u2019s flagship, but now they would be behind Siena and Fairfield. Kids choose levels, not schools.\u201d Another prominent alumnus, the former N.B.A. and Seton Hall coach P. J. Carlesimo, who played at Fordham under Digger Phelps, said that if the Rams had made a commitment earlier, much of the decline would not have happened. \u201cIt\u2019s a grind, but you can\u2019t just do it with mirrors,\u201d he said. \u201cThe alumni will be there for support. It\u2019s going to take more than money. It\u2019ll take time, too.\u201d", "keyword": "Fordham University;Basketball;NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0146040", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/07/05", "title": "If It\u2019s Wooden and Old and Once Kept Time, Call Him", "abstract": "HARRINGTON, Me. \u2014 For nearly all of Robert Coffin\u2019s life, the passing of time has been marked by the ticking of many, many clocks. Mr. Coffin, now 90, first repaired a clock while a pupil at the grammar school in this seaside village of 900 people. He has collected, sold, made and fixed clocks \u2014 only those that run on cogs and springs, \u201cnothing electric\u201d \u2014 ever since, and is now known as the man to call in eastern Maine if a clock needs fixing. \u201cClocks are second to my wife, and I mean that,\u201d Mr. Coffin said before settling into his workshop, which is filled with clocks, miniature figurines and hundreds of tools and parts. \u201cIt\u2019s almost my life, if you will.\u201d Mr. Coffin is among a dwindling number of craftsmen who repair antique wooden clocks. The work requires patience and painstaking skill, including an ability to replicate wooden pieces that have not been manufactured for centuries. \u201cThe business is rare,\u201d said Alexander H. Phillips, a clockmaker in Bar Harbor, Me., who is a friend of Mr. Coffin. \u201cYou just don\u2019t have that element of craftsmanship anymore.\u201d Mr. Coffin has always \u201cloved to make stuff,\u201d starting with a birdhouse when he was 5. His passion for all things mechanical led him to the University of Maine, then to the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, which he got to, he said, by hitching a ride on the back of a turnip truck. He earned a degree in engineering, then served in the Army during World War II. After the war he started working in Torrington, Conn., at the Torrington Company, a leading maker of antifriction bearings, where a co-worker who repaired clocks further stoked a desire to work with them. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m going in the clock business one way or another,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Coffin said. For years, however, clocks remained just a hobby, though a compelling one. At one point, he estimates, he owned at least 2,000 clocks. Many were accumulated on trips and during the seven years he spent in Portugal, where he oversaw the opening of a factory for Ingersoll-Rand, which bought the Torrington Company in 1968. Mr. Coffin went to a flea market twice a week in the Portuguese village where he lived with his second wife, Eleanor, and three children. There he would buy clocks, often in various states of disrepair and almost always American-made because those were cheaper and Mr. Coffin knew how to fix them. He borrowed about $3,000 from the company credit union while in Portugal to buy 300 clocks all at once at the flea market. He repaired them, then immediately sold them to a collector in Philadelphia. Despite the sale, he accumulated so many clocks and other antiques in Portugal that it cost $10,000 to ship the family\u2019s belongings back home, though the rate was only 17 cents a pound. \u201cI bought clocks wherever I saw them,\u201d he said. Mr. Coffin retired in 1974 and moved with Eleanor back here to his hometown. He bought an old shipyard and opened an antiques store there, all the while repairing clocks and making furniture and his other love, miniature figurines, which line the shelves of his home. He closed the antiques shop about 10 years ago and started fixing clocks exclusively. He now spends each day in his workshop, a small space off his garage that his wife says is far too cluttered. While dozens of clocks tick, he tells time on an electric one in his shop. \u201cI don\u2019t have to wind it,\u201d he said. Age has slowed him \u2014 he has two artificial knees that themselves must be replaced, and his hands are not as steady as they once were \u2014 but he knows where every tool, die and tiny wooden wheel is. \u201cHe\u2019s very good,\u201d said George Bruno, 86, a fellow clock repairer from Torrington. \u201cHe has the tenacity of a pit bull dog. When he starts something, he finishes it. I refer to him as the second-best clock repairer in New England.\u201d Mr. Phillips, the clockmaker in Bar Harbor, called Mr. Coffin a few years ago when a rare clock made in 1790 arrived at the Phillips store. The clock was in dozens of pieces, and Mr. Phillips, who had seen one like it only in a museum, was not sure how to proceed. Mr. Coffin not only did the job but also made a replica for himself, which hangs in his living room. Mr. Coffin has done an especially thriving business in the last week, ever since an article about him was published in The Bangor Daily News. He will still drive to a job \u2014 he charges $45 an hour, door to door \u2014 though he prefers that a customer bring the clock to his home. Either way, he does not plan to stop making or fixing clocks any time soon. \u201cI love to make them, I love to own them, and they\u2019ve been my livelihood,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter I stopped working for the company, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done. I\u2019ve done clocks.\u201d", "keyword": "Watches and Clocks;Coffin Robert;Antiques;Maine"}
{"id": "ny0044216", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/05/22", "title": "Media Companies Join to Extend the Brands of YouTube Stars", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Simon & Schuster is making a big bet on YouTube stars, an undertaking that could either open up a blockbuster new publishing market or reveal the limitations of Internet celebrity. In the latest mash-up of old and new media, a division of Simon & Schuster, the Atria Publishing Group, has teamed with Hollywood\u2019s United Talent Agency to create a new imprint to publish books by Internet entertainers. Five deals have already been made with YouTube stars like Shane Dawson and Justine Ezarik. Keywords Press, as the new endeavor is called, aims to release six to 10 titles annually, both in print and digital formats, ranging from \u201cserious to comedic, fiction to nonfiction, practical advice to personal memoir,\u201d said Judith Curr, president and publisher of Atria. \u201cNot to be too grand about it, but books are coming to YouTube for the first time,\u201d she said. \u201cIt gives us access to a whole new talent pool.\u201d The deal represents an acknowledgment by traditional media companies that YouTube celebrities are more than just niche entertainers with quirky appeal, and can be marketed to a broader audience. For the video stars, a publishing platform adds a touch of gravitas, not to mention the financing that comes with it. In addition to Mr. Dawson and Ms. Ezarik, who is better known as iJustine , Keywords Press has made deals with Connor Franta , Joey Graceffa and Shay Butler , the creator of \u201cThe ShayTards.\u201d Together, the five entertainers have about 20 million YouTube subscribers and have posted videos generating two billion views. After successfully trawling the blogosphere for new authors, the big publishing houses \u2014 obsessed with finding writers with a built-in audience and encouraging reading among young consumers \u2014 are turning to Google\u2019s YouTube and Twitter\u2019s Vine. But this is still untested ground: Although video stars have shown that they can direct their fans to TV, print is an entirely different medium. Early efforts have largely been disappointing. A recent cookbook from the creators of \u201cEpic Meal Time,\u201d a YouTube extreme cooking show , is a prominent example. It was published in March by Gallery Books, another division of Simon & Schuster, to ho-hum early results. For United Talent, which operates a respected and aggressive digital division, Keywords Press is about finding new ways to make money by helping YouTube clients like Mr. Dawson and Ms. Ezarik expand their brands. For instance, Mr. Dawson, known for comedic oversharing that leans toward vulgarity, has successfully released music on iTunes, sold a comedy pilot to NBC and is working on a movie. Publishing a book seemed like a natural extension. \u201cI\u2019ve almost done books before, quite a few times, actually, but there were always so many hoops to jump through, and it always all centered on my single best idea,\u201d Mr. Dawson said. \u201cIt always ended up not being very interesting because it didn\u2019t allow for fan interaction to the degree that my fans expect and I want.\u201d To that end, most Keywords books will be crowdsourced, meaning that Mr. Dawson and his fellow authors will directly involve their followers in storytelling decisions from the earliest stages. That is a big change from the traditional book publishing model, which is centered on formal written proposals. Keywords also aims to get books into the marketplace much faster than a traditional imprint could. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a publishing apparatus out there that could really take advantage of the unique nature of online stars and their relationship with fans,\u201d said Brent Weinstein, head of United Talent\u2019s digital division. \u201cSo we decided to go out and create one.\u201d The upshot: Keywords represents a bending by old-line publishers to the work practices of the YouTube generation. \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to write a book, but the proposal process is kind of crazy,\u201d said Ms. Ezarik, who has parlayed YouTube stardom into an acting, endorsement and fashion career. \u201cI would say, \u2018Why can\u2019t I just do it?\u2019 That\u2019s what we are used to doing online.\u201d What will Ms. Ezarik\u2019s book be about? The details are still fuzzy. \u201cI have so many random, behind-the-scenes stories to tell, and I really want it to be inspirational,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I also want to know what my fans want my book to be like.\u201d With any luck, she added, \u201cthe book will be successful, and we can turn it into a movie or a TV series.\u201d Atria, whose traditional authors include Brad Thor (\u201cThe Last Patriot\u201d) and Rhonda Byrne (\u201cThe Secret\u201d), and United Talent, whose movie star clients include Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, provided little information about the Keywords business model. It involves an advance payment, but authors are meant to share in profits to a larger degree than is typical. Keywords authors do not necessarily need to be United Talent clients. Keywords Press is only one example of increased digital innovation at United Talent and Simon & Schuster, which is owned by the CBS Corporation. United Talent, for instance, helped incubate AwesomenessTV, a fast-growing YouTube empire focused on preteenage girls. DreamWorks Animation bought Awesomeness last year in a deal valued up to $117 million and brokered by the agency. And on Wednesday, Simon & Schuster announced that it would make some 10,000 backlist titles available on the emerging e-book subscription services Oyster and Scribd, becoming the second of the five major publishing houses to test those waters, after HarperCollins. Some publishers worry that subscription services like these, which provide broad access to a digital library for a monthly fee, will puncture single-copy sales. \u201cConsumers have clearly taken to subscription models for other media, and we expect that our participation in these services will encourage discovery of our books,\u201d Carolyn Reidy, the Simon & Schuster chief executive, said in a statement.", "keyword": "Books;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Publishing;Celebrity;YouTube;Simon & Schuster;United Talent Agency"}
{"id": "ny0024464", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/08/28", "title": "Boo Rodriguez or Cheer Him? It\u2019s Oh So Complicated", "abstract": "Booing Alex Rodriguez has become so reflexive that it\u2019s easy to forget what exactly we\u2019re booing him for. Because he cheated? He\u2019s not alone in that, certainly not in recent Yankees history and not even among his current teammates. Because he lied about cheating? Other athletes have ferociously denied allegations, and pursued their accusers, for far longer and with far more false indignation. Because, despite receiving the baseball equivalent of a death sentence (a 211-game suspension), he simply refuses to disappear? Or because in his return to action that few wanted \u2014 not Major League Baseball, certainly, or his team\u2019s top officials \u2014 Rodriguez is actually lifting the faltering Yankees back into playoff contention? Make no mistake: The prospect of a defiant Rodriguez leading the Yankees into the playoffs or, heaven forbid, to another World Series must haunt Bud Selig\u2019s most harrowing nightmares. Imagine this tableau. World Series, Game 7. Yankees versus the St. Louis Cardinals. Bottom of the eighth. Two outs, two on. A Rodriguez home run, deep into the night, puts the Yankees ahead. Then, in what will be his final career appearance, Mariano Rivera marches on one last time to \u201cEnter Sandman.\u201d And promptly blows the save. Yankees lose. Yet the saga of Rodriguez \u2014 prodigy, superstar, cheat, pariah \u2014 has been such a strange one that we shouldn\u2019t be surprised if it ends in the strangest possible way. If you need any more evidence that black is white, up is down and cats and dogs are cohabitating, just look to the Boston star David Ortiz, who spoke out publicly against the punitive plunking of Rodriguez by a Red Sox pitcher. For Yankees fans, cheering for Rodriguez has always been a complicated matter, but it was possible as long as he contributed to one thing: Yankees victories. Now, in true Rodriguez fashion, he has gone and complicated even that. I\u2019m not from Seattle, I don\u2019t follow the Texas Rangers and I\u2019ve never really been a Yankees fan, so I\u2019ve had occasion to root for Rodriguez exactly once. It was back in 1995, a strike-shortened season, when the upstart Seattle Mariners beat the fabled Yankees in the first American League wild-card series. Rodriguez had hit only five home runs that season; at 19, he was the youngest player in the major leagues. The next year, 1996, he put up one of the greatest offensive seasons in baseball history and lost the American League Most Valuable Player award by 3 voting points. But in 1995, he was nothing but a promise. That Mariners team, with Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and this skinny teenager named Rodriguez, glowed bright with possibility \u2014 it was enough to make any baseball fan, regardless of affiliation, cheer. Griffey and Johnson were traded, and Rodriguez eventually left for Texas, and in the end, it was the Yankees and their own skinny rookie shortstop who won the World Series in 1996 and three more times in the next four years. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Yankees and Rodriguez would meet again \u2014 in 2004, when the Yankees acquired him. At the time, the Yankees\u2019 dynastic run was nearly a decade old and there was still much talk of the Yankee Way: those values of teamwork, hard-nosed discipline and selfless sacrifice, as personified by fan favorites like Bernie Williams, the sainted Derek Jeter and even Paul O\u2019Neill, who by then was retired. Yet the Yankee Way was already being stained by disclosures that linked two players \u2014 Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield \u2014 to a federal drug investigation. Other Yankees \u2014 Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, Mike Stanton \u2014 would later be cast under a similar shadow. Rodriguez\u2019s presence on the team, in a sense, ran counter to that trend: he was simply the all-world talent playing for the all-world team. Later, the hope was that he would surpass Barry Bonds for the career home run record and, in doing so, cleanse baseball of that stain as well. He would set the record straight, literally. And he would do it as a Yankee for life. Only the Yankee-for-life part has panned out, and there are many people, from the Yankees\u2019 front office to the Yankees\u2019 bleachers, who wish it hadn\u2019t. (Just ask the bodega owner in Brooklyn who years back named his store A-Rod Grocery and is now searching for a new name.) And Yankees fans, so well-versed in booing, are now faced with something much weirder: cheering a player they no longer like because he\u2019s boosting the team they still love. It was another New York pariah, Anthony D. Weiner, who set the tone for this season, whether you\u2019re talking about baseball or politics. \u201cQuit isn\u2019t the way we roll in New York City,\u201d he calmly proclaimed when besieged on all sides by opponents and allies pleading with him to just go away. What\u2019s so cunning and infuriating about his statement is that he\u2019s using something New Yorkers are justifiably proud of (their resilience) to validate something they\u2019re ashamed of (Anthony D. Weiner). Quit is an especially dirty word in sports, and apparently it\u2019s not how Rodriguez rolls, either. At any other time, this quality would be celebrated, especially in a superstar who\u2019s never exactly been known for resilience. But for the Yankees, over the past 18 seasons, what started as a commitment to winning has turned into an unspoken credo to win at all costs, whether those costs entailed flouting the rules or simply acquiring every flawed superstar in sight. Rodriguez personifies both. So it\u2019s fitting his return should be the exclamation point to that era. The team\u2019s recent history has featured a proud tradition of winning. This season, without Rodriguez, it looked as if Yankees fans would finally have to become used to losing. Instead, they\u2019re confronted with something even more unfamiliar and much uglier: winning without pride.", "keyword": "Alex Rodriguez;Yankees;Baseball;Doping"}
{"id": "ny0018729", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2013/07/28", "title": "A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA", "abstract": "CLEWISTON, Fla. \u2014 The call Ricke Kress and every other citrus grower in Florida dreaded came while he was driving. \u201cIt\u2019s here\u201d was all his grove manager needed to say to force him over to the side of the road. The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state\u2019s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida\u2019s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments. \u201cO.K.,\u201d he said finally on that fall day in 2005, \u201clet\u2019s make a plan.\u201d In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who supply most of the nation\u2019s orange juice poured everything they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening. To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained. They scoured Central Florida\u2019s half-million acres of emerald groves and sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de Le\u00f3n. But such a tree did not exist. \u201cIn all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,\u201d the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said. In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida\u2019s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange\u2019s DNA \u2014 with a gene from a different species. Oranges are not the only crop that might benefit from genetically engineered resistance to diseases for which standard treatments have proven elusive. And advocates of the technology say it could also help provide food for a fast-growing population on a warming planet by endowing crops with more nutrients, or the ability to thrive in drought, or to resist pests. Leading scientific organizations have concluded that shuttling DNA between species carries no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested. But the idea of eating plants and animals whose DNA has been manipulated in a laboratory \u2014 called genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.\u2019s \u2014 still spooks many people. Critics worry that such crops carry risks not yet detected, and distrust the big agrochemical companies that have produced the few in wide use. And hostility toward the technology, long ingrained in Europe, has deepened recently among Americans as organic food advocates, environmentalists and others have made opposition to it a pillar of a growing movement for healthier and ethical food choices. Mr. Kress\u2019s boss worried about damaging the image of juice long promoted as \u201c100 percent natural.\u201d \u201cDo we really want to do this?\u201d he demanded in a 2008 meeting at the company\u2019s headquarters on the northern rim of the Everglades. Mr. Kress, now 61, had no particular predilection for biotechnology. Known for working long hours, he rose through the ranks at fruit and juice companies like Welch\u2019s and Seneca Foods. On moving here for the Southern Gardens job, just a few weeks before citrus greening was detected, he had assumed his biggest headache would be competition from flavored waters, or persuading his wife to tolerate Florida\u2019s humidity. But the dwindling harvest that could mean the idling of his juice processing plant would also have consequences beyond any one company\u2019s bottom line. Florida is the second-largest producer of orange juice in the world, behind Brazil. Its $9 billion citrus industry contributes 76,000 jobs to the state that hosts the Orange Bowl. Southern Gardens, a subsidiary of U.S. Sugar, was one of the few companies in the industry with the wherewithal to finance the development of a \u201ctransgenic\u201d tree, which could take a decade and cost as much as $20 million. An emerging scientific consensus held that genetic engineering would be required to defeat citrus greening. \u201cPeople are either going to drink transgenic orange juice or they\u2019re going to drink apple juice,\u201d one University of Florida scientist told Mr. Kress. And if the presence of a new gene in citrus trees prevented juice from becoming scarcer and more expensive, Mr. Kress believed, the American public would embrace it. \u201cThe consumer will support us if it\u2019s the only way,\u201d Mr. Kress assured his boss. Image To avoid spreading a scourge further, orange trees infected by disease are burned in Clewiston, Fla., at groves owned by Southern Gardens Citrus. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times His quest to save the orange offers a close look at the daunting process of genetically modifying one well-loved organism \u2014 on a deadline. In the past several years, out of public view, he has considered DNA donors from all over the tree of life, including two vegetables, a virus and, briefly, a pig. A synthetic gene, manufactured in the laboratory, also emerged as a contender. Trial trees that withstood the disease in his greenhouse later succumbed in the field. Concerns about public perception and potential delays in regulatory scrutiny put a damper on some promising leads. But intent on his mission, Mr. Kress shrugged off signs that national campaigns against genetically modified food were gaining traction. Only in recent months has he begun to face the full magnitude of the gap between what science can achieve and what society might accept. Millenniums of Intervention Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh-squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat. Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk. The orange, for its part, might never have existed had human migration not brought together the grapefruit-size pomelo from the tropics and the diminutive mandarin from a temperate zone thousands of years ago in China. And it would not have become the most widely planted fruit tree had human traders not carried it across the globe. The varieties that have survived, among the many that have since arisen through natural mutation, are the product of human selection, with nearly all of Florida\u2019s juice a blend of just two: the Hamlin, whose unremarkable taste and pale color are offset by its prolific yield in the early season, and the dark, flavorful, late-season Valencia. Because oranges themselves are hybrids and most seeds are clones of the mother, new varieties cannot easily be produced by crossbreeding \u2014 unlike, say, apples, which breeders have remixed into favorites like Fuji and Gala. But the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA, a technique for accelerating evolution that has yielded new varieties in dozens of crops, including barley and rice. Its proponents argue that genetic engineering is one in a continuum of ways humans shape food crops, each of which carries risks: even conventional crossbreeding has occasionally produced toxic varieties of some vegetables. Because making a G.M.O. typically involves adding one or a few genes, each containing instructions for a protein whose function is known, they argue, it is more predictable than traditional methods that involve randomly mixing or mutating many genes of unknown function. But because it also usually involves taking DNA from the species where it evolved and putting it in another to which it may be only distantly related \u2014 or turning off genes already present \u2014 critics of the technology say it represents a new and potentially more hazardous degree of tinkering whose risks are not yet fully understood. If he had had more time, Mr. Kress could have waited for the orange to naturally evolve resistance to the bacteria known as C. liberibacter asiaticus. That could happen tomorrow. Or it could take years, or many decades. Or the orange in Florida could disappear first. Plunging Ahead Early discussions among other citrus growers about what kind of disease research they should collectively support did little to reassure Mr. Kress about his own genetic engineering project. \u201cThe public will never drink G.M.O. orange juice,\u201d one grower said at a contentious 2008 meeting. \u201cIt\u2019s a waste of our money.\u201d \u201cThe public is already eating tons of G.M.O.\u2019s,\u201d countered Peter McClure, a big grower. \u201cThis isn\u2019t like a bag of Doritos,\u201d snapped another. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about a raw product, the essence of orange.\u201d The genetically modified foods Americans have eaten for more than a decade \u2014 corn, soybeans, some cottonseed oil, canola oil and sugar \u2014 come mostly as invisible ingredients in processed foods like cereal, salad dressing and tortilla chips. And the few G.M.O.\u2019s sold in produce aisles \u2014 a Hawaiian papaya, some squash, a fraction of sweet corn \u2014 lack the iconic status of a breakfast drink that, Mr. Kress conceded, is \u201clike motherhood\u201d to Americans, who drink more of it per capita than anyone else. Image A rally against Monsanto, which dominates the crop biotechnology business, in Los Angeles in May. Consumers who believe that genetically modified crops are harmful protested in hundreds of cities. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images If various polls were to be believed, a third to half of Americans would refuse to eat any transgenic crop. One study\u2019s respondents would accept only certain types: two-thirds said they would eat a fruit modified with another plant gene, but few would accept one with DNA from an animal. Fewer still would knowingly eat produce that contained a gene from a virus. There also appeared to be an abiding belief that a plant would take on the identity of the species from which its new DNA was drawn, like the scientist in the movie \u201cThe Fly\u201d who sprouted insect parts after a DNA-mixing mistake with a house fly. Asked if tomatoes containing a gene from a fish would \u201ctaste fishy\u201d in a question on a 2004 poll conducted by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University that referred to one company\u2019s efforts to forge a frost-resistant tomato with a gene from the winter flounder, fewer than half correctly answered \u201cno.\u201d A fear that the genetic engineering of food would throw the ecosystem out of whack showed in the surveys too. Mr. Kress\u2019s researchers, in turn, liked to point out that the very reason genetic engineering works is that all living things share a basic biochemistry: if a gene from a cold-water fish can help a tomato resist frost, it is because DNA is a universal code that tomato cells know how to read. Even the most distantly related species \u2014 say, humans and bacteria \u2014 share many genes whose functions have remained constant across billions of years of evolution. \u201cIt\u2019s not where a gene comes from that matters,\u201d one researcher said. \u201cIt\u2019s what it does.\u201d Mr. Kress set the surveys aside. He took encouragement from other attempts to genetically modify foods that were in the works. There was even another fruit, the \u201cArctic apple,\u201d whose genes for browning were switched off, to reduce waste and allow the fruit to be more readily sold sliced. \u201cThe public is going to be more informed about G.M.O.\u2019s by the time we\u2019re ready,\u201d Mr. Kress told his research director, Michael P. Irey, as they lined up the five scientists whom Southern Gardens would underwrite. And to the scientists, growers and juice processors at a meeting convened by Minute Maid in Miami in early 2010, he insisted that just finding a gene that worked had to be his company\u2019s priority. The foes were formidable. C. liberibacter, the bacterium that kills citrus trees by choking off their flow of nutrients \u2014 first detected when it destroyed citrus trees more than a century ago in China \u2014 had earned a place, along with anthrax and the Ebola virus, on the Agriculture Department\u2019s list of potential agents of bioterrorism. Asian citrus psyllids, the insects that suck the bacteria out of one tree and inject them into another as they feed on the sap of their leaves, can carry the germ a mile without stopping, and the females can lay up to 800 eggs in their one-month life. Mr. Kress\u2019s DNA candidate would have to fight off the bacteria or the insect. As for public acceptance, he told his industry colleagues, \u201cWe can\u2019t think about that right now.\u201d The \u2018Creep Factor\u2019 Trim, silver-haired and described by colleagues as tightly wound (he prefers \u201cfocused\u201d), Mr. Kress arrives at the office by 6:30 each morning and microwaves a bowl of oatmeal. He stocks his office cabinet with cans of peel-top Campbell\u2019s chicken soup that he heats up for lunch. Arriving home each evening, he cuts a rose from his garden for his wife. Weekends, he works in his yard and pores over clippings about G.M.O.\u2019s in the news. For a man who takes pleasure in routine, the uncertainty that marked his DNA quest was disquieting. It would cost Southern Gardens millions of dollars just to perform the safety tests for a single gene in a single variety of orange. Of his five researchers\u2019 approaches, he had planned to narrow the field to the one that worked best over time. But in 2010, with the disease spreading faster than anyone anticipated, the factor that came to weigh most was which could be ready first. To fight C. liberibacter, Dean Gabriel at the University of Florida had chosen a gene from a virus that destroys bacteria as it replicates itself. Though such viruses, called bacteriophages (\u201cphage\u201d means to devour), are harmless to humans, Mr. Irey sometimes urged Mr. Kress to consider the public relations hurdle that might come with such a strange-sounding source of the DNA. \u201cA gene from a virus,\u201d he would ask pointedly, \u201cthat infects bacteria?\u201d But Mr. Kress\u2019s chief concern was that Dr. Gabriel was taking too long to perfect his approach. A second contender, Erik Mirkov of Texas A&M University, was further along with trees he had endowed with a gene from spinach \u2014 a food, he reminded Mr. Kress, that \u201cwe give to babies.\u201d The gene, which exists in slightly different forms in hundreds of plants and animals, produces a protein that attacks invading bacteria. Image Shoots grown in a laboratory to resist the disease citrus greening are grafted onto normal orange trees in a test plot. The shoots are endowed with a gene from spinach that produces a protein that attacks invading bacteria. Florida growers turned to transgenic trees after citrus greening began infecting millions of orange trees. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Even so, Dr. Mirkov faced skepticism from growers. \u201cWill my juice taste like spinach?\u201d one asked. \u201cWill it be green?\u201d wondered another. \u201cThis gene,\u201d he invariably replied, \u201chas nothing to do with the color or taste of spinach. Your body makes very similar kinds of proteins as part of your own defense against bacteria.\u201d When some of the scientist\u2019s promising trees got sick in their first trial, Mr. Kress agreed that he should try to improve on his results in a new generation of trees, by adjusting the gene\u2019s placement. But transgenic trees, begun as a single cell in a petri dish, can take two years before they are sturdy enough to place in the ground and many more years to bear fruit. \u201cIsn\u2019t there a gene,\u201d Mr. Kress asked Mr. Irey, \u201cto hurry up Mother Nature?\u201d For a time, the answer seemed to lie with a third scientist, William O. Dawson at the University of Florida, who had managed to alter fully grown trees by attaching a gene to a virus that could be inserted by way of a small incision in the bark. Genes transmitted that way would eventually stop functioning, but Mr. Kress hoped to use it as a stopgap measure to ward off the disease in the 60 million citrus trees already in Florida\u2019s groves. Dr. Dawson joked that he hoped at least to save the grapefruit, whose juice he enjoyed, \u201cpreferably with a little vodka in it.\u201d But his most promising result that year was doomed from the beginning: of the dozen bacteria-fighting genes he had then tested on his greenhouse trees, the one that appeared effective came from a pig. One of about 30,000 genes in the animal\u2019s genetic code, it was, he ventured, \u201ca pretty small amount of pig.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no safety issue from our standpoint \u2014 but there is a certain creep factor,\u201d an Environmental Protection Agency official observed to Mr. Kress, who had included it on an early list of possibilities to run by the agency. \u201cAt least something is working,\u201d Mr. Kress bristled. \u201cIt\u2019s a proof of concept.\u201d A similar caution dimmed his hopes for the timely approval of a synthetic gene, designed in the laboratory of a fourth scientist, Jesse Jaynes of Tuskegee University. In a simulation, Dr. Jaynes\u2019s gene consistently vanquished the greening bacteria. But the burden of proving a synthetic gene\u2019s safety would prolong the process. \u201cYou\u2019re going to get more questions,\u201d Mr. Kress was told, \u201cwith a gene not found in nature.\u201d And in the fall of 2010, an onion gene that discouraged psyllids from landing on tomato plants was working in the Cornell laboratory of Mr. Kress\u2019s final hope, Herb Aldwinckle. But it would be some time before the gene could be transferred to orange trees. Only Dr. Mirkov\u2019s newly fine-tuned trees with the spinach gene, Mr. Kress and Mr. Irey agreed, could be ready in time to stave off what many believed would soon be a steep decline in the harvest. In the fall of 2010, they were put to the test inside a padlocked greenhouse stocked with infected trees and psyllids. The Monsanto Effect Mr. Kress\u2019s only direct brush so far with the broader battle raging over genetically modified food came in December 2010, in the reader comments on a Reuters article alluding to Southern Gardens\u2019 genetic engineering efforts. Some readers vowed not to buy such \u201cfrankenfood.\u201d Another attributed a rise in allergies to genetic engineering. And dozens lambasted Monsanto, the St. Louis-based company that dominates the crop biotechnology business, which was not even mentioned in the article. \u201cIf this trend goes on, one day, there will be only Monsanto engineered foods available,\u201d read one letter warning of unintended consequences. Mr. Kress was unperturbed. Dozens of long-term animal feeding studies had concluded that existing G.M.O.\u2019s were as safe as other crops, and the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization and others had issued statements to the same effect. Image \u201cThe consumer will support us if it\u2019s the only way,\u201d said Ricke Kress, President of Southern Gardens Citrus, who believes the only way to save Florida\u2019s entire citrus crop is to alter the orange trees\u2019 DNA. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times But some of his researchers worried that the popular association between G.M.O.\u2019s and Monsanto \u2014 and in turn between Monsanto and the criticisms of modern agriculture \u2014 could turn consumers against Southern Gardens\u2019 transgenic oranges. \u201cThe article doesn\u2019t say \u2018Monsanto\u2019 anywhere, but the comments are all about Monsanto,\u201d Dr. Mirkov said. It had not helped win hearts and minds for G.M.O.\u2019s, Mr. Kress knew, that the first such crop widely adopted by farmers was the soybean engineered by Monsanto with a bacteria gene \u2014 to tolerate a weed killer Monsanto also made. Starting in the mid-1990s, soybean farmers in the United States overwhelmingly adopted that variety of the crop, which made it easier for them to control weeds. But the subsequent broader use of the chemical \u2014 along with a distaste for Monsanto\u2019s aggressive business tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate profits \u2014 combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used Monsanto\u2019s soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered to prevent pests from attacking it. In response, companies including McDonald\u2019s, Frito-Lay and Heinz pledged not to use G.M.O. ingredients in certain products, and some European countries prohibited their cultivation. Some of Mr. Kress\u2019s scientists were still fuming about what they saw as the lost potential for social good hijacked both by the activists who opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of G.M.O. corn even during a 2002 famine. \u201dIt\u2019s easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy anything they need to be against G.M.O.\u2019s,\u201d said Dr. Jaynes, who faced such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a synthetic gene. To Mr. Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto \u2014 whose large blocks of patents he had to work around, and whose thousands of employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak harvest times \u2014 seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major biotechnology companies had pursued. He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their production. And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied Mr. Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees, which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond Southern Gardens\u2019 headquarters. A Growing Urgency In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had showed symptoms of disease, Dr. Mirkov\u2019s trees with the spinach gene had survived unscathed for more than a year. Mr. Kress would soon have 300 of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough. Dr. Mirkov assured him that the agency\u2019s requirements for animal tests to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would be minimal. \u201cIt\u2019s spinach,\u201d he insisted. \u201cIt\u2019s been eaten for centuries.\u201d Other concerns weighed on Mr. Kress that spring: growers in Florida did not like to talk about it, but the industry\u2019s tripling of pesticide applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and Florida\u2019s citrus growers\u2019 association was petitioning one company to lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees \u2014 increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest. Others in the industry who knew of Mr. Kress\u2019s project were turning to him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in California, where the greening disease had just been detected. \u201cWe need to hear about the transgenic solution,\u201d said Ted Batkin, the association\u2019s director. But Mr. Kress worried that he had nothing to calm their fears. Image In Southern Gardens groves, trees that are infected with citrus greening are marked, cut down and burned. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically engineered ingredients to carry a \u201cG.M.O.\u201d label had made him uneasy. Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency \u2014 but their advertisements often implied the crops were a hazard: one pictured a child about to take a joyful bite of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question mark and the caption \u201cCorn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.\u201d Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural insecticide. Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on food containing G.M.O.\u2019s, one leader of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, cited \u201cpink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys and BPA in our soup.\u201d Mr. Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-G.M.O. alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all G.M.O.\u2019s into one stigmatized category. And when the E.P.A. informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the protein made. It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice. \u201cSeems excessive,\u201d Dr. Mirkov said. But Mr. Kress and Mr. Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear. Rather than wait for Dr. Mirkov\u2019s 300 trees to flower, which could take several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach gene shoots to mature trees to hasten the production of pollen \u2014 and, finally, their first fruit, for testing. Wall of Opposition Early one morning a year ago, Mr. Kress checked the Agriculture Department\u2019s Web site from home. The agency had opened its 60-day public comment period on the trees modified to produce \u201cArctic apples\u201d that did not brown. His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form. He skimmed through the company\u2019s 163-page petition, showing how the apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple varieties and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit. Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple \u2014 though transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology. \u201cApples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,\u201d it warned. \u201cGenetically engineered apples are neither.\u201d Others voiced a general distrust of scientists\u2019 guarantees: \u201cToo many things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered it was untrue,\u201d wrote one woman. \u201cAfter two cancers I don\u2019t feel like taking any more unnecessary risks.\u201d Image Test trees are covered in Southern Gardens groves. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled. That morning, Mr. Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself. Mr. Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the E.P.A. wanted tested had produced no ill effect. But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Mr. Kress so hard. \u201cWill they believe us?\u201d he asked himself for the first time. \u201cWill they believe we\u2019re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we\u2019re making sure it\u2019s safe? Or will they look at us and say, \u2018That\u2019s what they all say?\u2019 \u201d The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their orange juice \u2014 perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Mr. Kress viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to grow faster was still awaiting F.D.A. approval. A study pointing to health risks from G.M.O.\u2019s had been discredited by scientists, but was contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous. And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Vermont, New Mexico, Missouri and many other states. In the heat of last summer, Mr. Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen. Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Mr. Kress considered how to answer critics. Maybe even a blanket \u201cG.M.O.\u201d label would be O.K., he thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so. Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease, more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new slide into his standard talk. On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of pesticides: \u201cWe\u2019re using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re using more than we\u2019ve ever used before.\u201d Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read \u201cConsumer Acceptance.\u201d He looked out at the audience. What these growers wanted most, he knew, was reassurance that he could help them should the disease spread. But he had to warn them: \u201cIf we don\u2019t have consumer confidence, it doesn\u2019t matter what we come up with.\u201d Planting One recent sunny morning, Mr. Kress drove to a fenced field, some distance from his office and far from any other citrus tree. He unlocked the gate and signed in, as required by Agriculture Department regulations for a field trial of a genetically modified crop. Just in the previous few months, Whole Foods had said that because of customer demand it would avoid stocking most G.M.O. foods and require labels on them by 2018. Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world had joined in a \u201cMarch Against Monsanto\u201d \u2014 and the Agriculture Department had issued its final report for this year\u2019s orange harvest showing a 9 percent decline from last year, attributable to citrus greening. But visiting the field gave him some peace. In some rows were the trees with no new gene in them, sick with greening. In others were the 300 juvenile trees with spinach genes, all healthy. In the middle were the trees that carried his immediate hopes: 15 mature Hamlins and Valencias, seven feet tall, onto which had been grafted shoots of Dr. Mirkov\u2019s spinach gene trees. There was good reason to believe that the trees would pass the E.P.A.\u2019s tests when they bloom next spring. And he was gathering the data the Agriculture Department would need to ensure that the trees posed no risk to other plants. When he had fruit, the Food and Drug Administration would compare its safety and nutritional content to conventional oranges. In his office is a list of groups to contact when the first G.M.O. fruit in Florida are ready to pick: environmental organizations, consumer advocates and others. Exactly what he would say when he finally contacted them, he did not know. Whether anyone would drink the juice from his genetically modified oranges, he did not know. But he had decided to move ahead. Late this summer he will plant several hundred more young trees with the spinach gene, in a new greenhouse. In two years, if he wins regulatory approval, they will be ready to go into the ground. The trees could be the first to produce juice for sale in five years or so. Whether it is his transgenic tree, or someone else\u2019s, he believed, Florida growers will soon have trees that could produce juice without fear of its being sour, or in short supply. For a moment, alone in the field, he let his mind wander. \u201cMaybe we can use the technology to improve orange juice,\u201d he could not help thinking. \u201cMaybe we can find a way to have oranges grow year-round, or get two for every one we get now on a tree.\u201d Then he reined in those thoughts. He took the clipboard down, signed out and locked the gate.", "keyword": "Genetic engineering;Oranges;Southern Gardens Citrus;Ricke Kress;Food;Florida"}
{"id": "ny0009682", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/02/27", "title": "France Will Not Deal With Kidnappers", "abstract": "The French military said Tuesday that it would not negotiate with gunmen claiming to be from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram who have taken a French family of seven hostage in retaliation for French military intervention in Mali. The three adults and four children were kidnapped in northern Cameroon near the Nigerian border last week. In a video posted online, the gunmen said France had declared war on Islam with its campaign in Mali, and they threatened to kill the hostages unless the authorities in Nigeria and Cameroon freed militants there. \u201cWe do not negotiate on that kind of basis, with these kind of groups,\u201d the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told RTL radio. \u201cWe will use all possible means to ensure these and other hostages are freed.\u201d", "keyword": "Hostage;Boko Haram;Mali;France;Kidnapping"}
{"id": "ny0021403", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/09/29", "title": "George Washington Library Opens at Mount Vernon", "abstract": "MOUNT VERNON, Va. \u2014 George Washington\u2019s Mount Vernon estate has opened a $47 million library dedicated to the study of America\u2019s first president, with plans to host a series of scholars who will examine the lives of Washington and the other founding fathers. Since 1853, the Mount Vernon Ladies\u2019 Association has been dedicated to preserving and promoting Washington\u2019s legacy. But with the opening on Friday of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon is committing itself to sponsoring a formal level of scholarship about Washington, and Mount Vernon officials say they have no intention of insisting on a glossy interpretation. \u201cThere is this vision of Washington as a man on a pedestal,\u201d said Curt Viebranz, Mount Vernon\u2019s president and chief executive. \u201cI actually think if you take him down off the pedestal, it\u2019s an even more compelling story. We\u2019re not going to try to control the message.\u201d The library\u2019s director, Douglas Bradburn, said there was a trend among historians now who might be more likely to look at the American Revolution through a more cynical lens, resurrecting arguments from a century ago that Washington and the other founding fathers were motivated more by their own economic interests than by any lofty notions of liberty and self-governance. Mr. Bradburn said the beauty of a library like Mount Vernon\u2019s was that historians and researchers from various schools of interpretation could come together, collaborate and commiserate. Sandra Moats, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, who will be one of the first seven visiting scholars at the estate, will research Washington and the advent of American neutrality after the Revolution. She said she was looking forward to delving into \u201cthe nitty-gritty policy in the way a historian would with any president.\u201d She expects her work to be neither critical nor glowing, but a more straightforward examination. \u201cHe\u2019s not someone with a lot of scandals or problems,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s not someone where I\u2019m expecting to find a lot of skeletons.\u201d The library also gives Mount Vernon an opportunity to hold seminars and retreats for political and military leaders and others who want to understand Washington\u2019s values. Mount Vernon has often hosted small gatherings like these, but it never had the facilities to accommodate such larger meetings to the degree it would have liked.", "keyword": "Library;Mount Vernon Ladies' Assn;Mount Vernon Va Home of George Washington;American Revolutionary War"}
{"id": "ny0165707", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/09/07", "title": "Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster", "abstract": "Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live. In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed. The population grew by more than 134,000 from 2000 to 2005, the city\u2019s latest Planning Department calculations show. In that time, 645,416 babies were born and 304,773 people died. A half-million more people came from other countries than departed for them, and 800,000 more people left for the 50 states than came wide-eyed from them. The meaning in the math is that today a great many New Yorkers lack firsthand knowledge of the city\u2019s critical modern moment. Five years on, New York is a city of newcomers and survivors. And between them runs a line. The line makes for no conflict, no discernible tension; it works a quieter breach. Borne of the routine comings and goings of urban life, of births and deaths, the line divides views of a singular moment. Across the line, consummately familiar events can appear contorted. On one side, the newcomer side, a man seeks accounts of that day; on the other side a man withholds his account. On the newcomer side, a woman visits the absent towers to feel some connection; on the other side a woman feels connected, and then some. On the side of those who lived in New York, you can share a sense of trauma both layered and ill-defined. \u201cIt\u2019s like someone who has been in a war zone,\u201d said William Stockbridge, 50, a finance executive who was working downtown during the attack. \u201cIt\u2019s different.\u201d On the other side, you can feel like the new boyfriend at your girlfriend\u2019s family reunion the year somebody died \u2014 somebody young, somebody you never met. \u201cYou feel like you\u2019re on the outside,\u201d said Matthew Molnar, 26, a waiter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who lived in Middlesex County, N.J., in 2001. \u201cYou feel like you missed out on a little bit of history.\u201d Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can\u2019t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky. The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below \u2014 the ones who were here on Sept. 11 \u2014 flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase \u201cand then Sept. 11 happened,\u201d as though a date on the calendar could \u201chappen.\u201d The line\u2019s contours emerge in conversations. Ask about the attack, and people will describe a sense of ownership. \u201cYou either experienced it firsthand,\u201d said Amanda Spielman, 30, a graphic designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, who was in the city, \u201cor you didn\u2019t.\u201d Others describe that sense differently, but draw the line in the same place. \u201cI think for the people that seen it on TV, it is more painful than for the people who saw it here,\u201d said Paolo Gonzalez, 29, who manages a parking lot under the Brooklyn Bridge and who saw the attack. \u201cFor the other people it was real. If you was here, when the buildings came down the only thing you were thinking was, \u2018Run.\u2019 \u201d Across the line, the new arrivals recognize that sense of ownership. \u201cI\u2019ve been told that I just don\u2019t get it and that I could never understand what it was like to be there in New York on Sept. 11,\u201d said Laura Bassett, 27, who moved to the city from North Carolina after 2001. \u201cI hate that five years later, people still debate which bystander is allowed to be more upset, the New Yorker or the American.\u201d The line emerges perhaps most powerfully around the fallen towers, 2.06 acres of concrete known as ground zero. Because of the line, the site is a paradox, an emotional contradiction, a mass grave and a tourist attraction. Some people feel so strongly about the place they cannot agree on an arrangement for listing the names of the dead; others feel so strongly about the place that they make sure to visit between Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Between those emotional poles is a middle ground, and the line runs through its center. \u201cPeople who moved to New York, everyone wanted to go down and see it,\u201d said Dede Minor, 51, a real estate broker who was in her office in Midtown on the day of the attack. \u201cFor New Yorkers, it was too real.\u201d Jose Martias, 57, a construction worker who was drinking coffee near the East River when the attack began, said he knew why the newcomers visit the site. \u201cThey don\u2019t understand it so they go down there to see the hole,\u201d Mr. Martias said. \u201cIt\u2019s an attraction to them, like going to the circus.\u201d But across the line there is genuine emotional curiosity, a feeling that people in less cynical times used to call empathy. \u201cI\u2019d didn\u2019t think I\u2019d be that affected,\u201d said Leah Hamilton, 24, a logistics consultant who moved to Manhattan from Washington State last year. \u201cBut when I went to ground zero, it was the first time I\u2019ve felt an emotional reaction like that to something I wasn\u2019t a part of. You feel the energy and you could feel the sadness.\u201d The line can reach into the future, forging perceptions of New York and its destiny. Some new arrivals speak of the attack as a reason to come to the city. \u201cWe felt like there was a lot of energy here,\u201d said Meg Glasser, 26, a student who moved to the East Village from Boston this year. \u201cWe wanted to be a part of it in some way.\u201d But across the line, that sense of energy is tempered by standards for comparison. \u201cI know people who have been here a year or two, and they find New York fantastic,\u201d said Father Bernard, 67, a Roman Catholic monk who was born in Brooklyn and who goes by only that name. \u201cThey\u2019re right, but they didn\u2019t know the New York before.\u201d The line reaches into the past as well, dividing memories. Each generation tells the next where they were when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed or when a space shuttle exploded, but a major act of destruction in a major American city creates more firsthand accounts. Psychological studies suggest those accounts have played a role in drawing the line. After the attack, a group of academic researchers interviewed 1,500 people, including 550 in New York City, to gauge memories of detail, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Proximity to Lower Manhattan during the attack, Dr. Phelps said, \u201cincreases your confidence in your memories, and your accuracy as well.\u201d In a separate study, the researchers measured activity in parts of the brain connected to memory. With verbal cues, subjects were asked to conjure visions of the terror attack and of personal events from the summer of 2001. Only half registered a difference in neural activity. \u201cThose who did show a difference were, on average, in Washington Square Park,\u201d Dr. Phelps said. \u201cThose who didn\u2019t were, on average, in Midtown.\u201d Among those who have come to the city since 2001, the line dividing memories is undisputed. \u201cI had been there as a tourist to the World Trade Center, so I have memories,\u201d said Marielle Solan, 22, a photographer who moved to the city from Delaware this year. \u201cBut obviously I can\u2019t have any sense of what it was like. Every Sept, 11, you get a sense of fear and depression, but in terms of actual visceral reactions, I don\u2019t really have that.\u201d The new arrivals have found a conspicuous void of shared memory. \u201cI\u2019m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,\u201d said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. \u201cWhen you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.\u201d Across the line, many of those who lived in the city hold their memories close. \u201cThe people I already knew know my stories from that day, so there\u2019s no need to repeat them,\u201d said Ms. Spielman, the graphic designer. \u201cThe new people I\u2019ve met don\u2019t ask me. It\u2019s not something I bring up.\u201d But each year the calendar brings it up. Alexandria Lambert, 28, who works as an administrative assistant, sees the line run through the center of her office. Each year, a co-worker who witnessed the attack asks for the day off, and each year a boss who did not declines the request. \u201cHis point of view is, \u2018Don\u2019t let it get you down,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Lambert said, \u201cbut she just doesn\u2019t want to be here.\u201d", "keyword": "World Trade Center (NYC);Terrorism;New York City;Psychology and Psychologists"}
{"id": "ny0114584", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/11/07", "title": "Germany: Merkel Comment Draws Fire", "abstract": "Opposition lawmakers and rights groups in Germany criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday for saying that Christianity was \u201cthe most persecuted religion worldwide.\u201d Jerzy Montag, a lawmaker with the Green Party, said Ms. Merkel\u2019s comments were \u201cmistaken\u201d and \u201cnot very helpful.\u201d Rights campaigners said ranking faiths according to persecution was pointless. Ms. Merkel made the comment at a meeting of the German Protestant Church on Monday, in which she said that Germany needed to protect Christian minorities abroad.", "keyword": "Merkel Angela;Germany;Christians and Christianity"}
{"id": "ny0032479", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2013/12/02", "title": "Gloomy Numbers for Holiday Shopping\u2019s Big Weekend", "abstract": "It was a cold, clear day in Leesburg, Va., and a security guard at an outlet mall there said the midmorning crowd was similar to that of a typical busy Saturday. But an ordinary day it was not. It was Black Friday, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year. With the economy bumping along at a lackluster pace, and this year\u2019s shorter-than-usual window between Thanksgiving and Christmas, sales and promotions began weeks before Thanksgiving Day, making this holiday shopping season more diffuse than ever. That left Black Friday weekend itself, the season\u2019s customary kickoff, looking a bit gloomy. Over the course of the weekend, consumers spent about $1.7 billion less on holiday shopping than they did the year before, according to the National Retail Federation, a retail trade organization. \u201cThere are some economic challenges that many Americans still face,\u201d said Matthew Shay, the chief executive of the retail federation. \u201cSo in general terms, many are intending to be a little bit more conservative with their budgets.\u201d More than 141 million people shopped online or in stores between Thursday and Sunday, according to a survey released Sunday afternoon by the retail federation, an increase of about 1 percent over last year. And the average amount each consumer spent, or planned to spend by the end of Sunday, went down, dropping to $407.02 from $423.55. Total spending for the weekend this year was expected to be $57.4 billion, a decrease of nearly 3 percent from last year\u2019s $59.1 billion. The holiday season generally accounts for 20 to 40 percent of a retailer\u2019s annual sales, according to the federation, and Thanksgiving weekend alone typically represents about 10 to 15 percent of those holiday sales. This year, in the scramble to get to shoppers early, retailers tempted buyers with pre-Thanksgiving deals, both in stores and online. On Walmart.com, for example, the holiday season started Nov. 1. And according to the retail federation, 53.8 percent of shoppers surveyed in the first week of November said they had already started their holiday shopping. Image Shoppers browsing coats on Black Friday at a Macy\u2019s store in Chicago. The day\u2019s overall retail sales fell compared with 2012. Credit Andrew Nelles/Associated Press John D. Morris, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said that aggressive promotions the day before Thanksgiving may also have taken some sales from the Black Friday weekend. \u201cThere were a lot of advertised sales that were bleeding into Wednesday this year,\u201d Mr. Morris said. \u201cSales were being pulled forward.\u201d On Sunday, the retail federation pointed to the season\u2019s early start, with holiday sales going as far back as October, and said it still expected that sales this holiday season would grow 3.9 percent over last year, despite the year-over-year decline of Black Friday weekend. They also said that altercations involving shoppers in stores on Black Friday seemed to decline this year, despite a number of videos of physical confrontations that attracted widespread attention online and in various news media reports. Many retailers have been warning of a muted holiday shopping season. Walmart and Target both trimmed their yearly forecasts recently, citing economic factors like slow wage growth, unemployment and sliding consumer confidence. Executives at Best Buy cautioned that intense price competition on some items during the holidays was likely to affect their bottom line, despite its healthier performance recently. Data from the research firm ShopperTrak, which collects data from more than 700 retailers, painted a more optimistic picture of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. (The data, released Saturday, did not include shopping online or any shopping done over the weekend.) ShopperTrak found that sales were off 13.2 percent on Black Friday. But more stores were open on Thanksgiving this year, and for longer hours, and the combined sales on Thursday and Friday were actually up 2.3 percent over the same two days last year. \u201cThe Thursday store openings did well,\u201d said Bill Martin, ShopperTrak\u2019s founder. \u201cBut a lot of it was at the expense of Black Friday.\u201d And while sales increased for the two-day period, he continued, there are additional costs associated with being open on Thanksgiving, like holiday pay for employees. \u201cThursday is going to be a tough day to make any profit,\u201d Mr. Martin said. The retail federation\u2019s survey found that Black Friday shopping grew a bit, rising to more than 92 million people this year from nearly 89 million people last year, including online and physical stores. Image Shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally retailers\u2019 busiest day, in Troy, Mich. Credit Joshua Lott/Getty Images Online sales grew substantially on both Thanksgiving and Friday this year, up nearly 20 percent Thursday and almost 19 percent on Friday, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks about 800 retail websites in the United States. Mobile traffic was also up substantially, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all online activity on Friday, said Jay Henderson, the strategy director for IBM Smarter Commerce, which put out the online retail data. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty staggering,\u201d he said. \u201cYou hear a lot about the year of mobile, and this is probably the fifth annual year of mobile. But 40 percent of all traffic feels like a tipping point.\u201d Mobile sales accounted for about 26 percent of total online sales on Thursday and nearly 22 percent on Friday. On both days, IBM saw a late surge in online shopping, presumably as people finished spending time with their families and snuggled up on the couch with their credit cards. Smartphones accounted for about 25 percent of traffic on Friday, in contrast to over 14 percent from tablets. But actual purchasing came predominantly from elsewhere. Tablets made up about 14 percent of online sales, compared with about 7 percent for smartphones. \u201cYou tend to see that a lot of smartphone traffic is predominantly during the day,\u201d Mr. Henderson said. \u201cPeople are out and about in stores, comparing prices and looking for ratings and reviews. Tablets start to take hold late in the afternoon and in the evening.\u201d Despite all this growth, online purchases remain a very small portion of retail sales. Mr. Martin of ShopperTrak said that more than 90 percent of all United States retail commerce still takes place in physical stores. While many people proved perfectly willing to head to the mall on Thanksgiving Day, for some, two days in a row of Black Friday-style shopping was just a bit too much. Melvina Bolston, 48, ventured to a Walmart on Thanksgiving, waited 85 minutes in a checkout line, and was back in the fray on Friday at her sister\u2019s behest, at an open-air shopping center in Norcross, Ga. \u201cYou can pretty much put it in the books: I will never do it again,\u201d Ms. Bolston said. \u201cThis is like torturing yourself on purpose.\u201d Perhaps next year, she will just shop online instead.", "keyword": "Black Friday,Cyber Monday;E Commerce;Economy;Retail"}
{"id": "ny0143016", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2008/11/15", "title": "Mixed Martial Arts Sees Past and Future in Title Fight", "abstract": "A classic matchup of youth versus experience will be on display Saturday when Brock Lesnar faces Randy Couture for the Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight title in Las Vegas. But the fight also represents a generational shift for both mixed martial arts and amateur wrestling. Couture, 45, is the crafty mixed martial arts veteran, the standard-bearer for the sport for more than a decade. Lesnar, 31, is the up-and-coming star, a former World Wrestling Entertainment fan favorite whose popularity prompted the U.F.C. to grant him a shot at the title after only three bouts. Couture is also a member of the old guard of amateur wrestlers who turned to fighting when doing so offered little money or fame. Lesnar is part of a growing trend of amateur wrestlers who hope to make top dollar as professional fighters. Today\u2019s fighters have to be well versed in wrestling, submissions and striking, but since the U.F.C. began 15 years ago, many with stellar wrestling backgrounds have found success. In the 1990s, amateur wrestling standouts like Couture, Mark Coleman, Don Frye, Kevin Randleman and Dan Severn fought their way to U.F.C. titles. Part of the reason is that wrestlers can often control where the fight takes place, by bringing it to the ground. The rigorous conditioning and training of college and Olympic wrestlers also prepares them for the grueling preparation for mixed martial arts. Couture has found success for both of those reasons. In 1992, he finished his wrestling career at Oklahoma State and opted for a low-paying coaching job at Oregon State while he trained for the Olympics. (He was an alternate on four Olympic teams.) Five years later, after Frye, a former college teammate, won the U.F.C. tournament in 1996, Couture decided to test himself in the Octagon. \u201cI saw the direct application of years of wrestling training and wrestling technique in the sport,\u201d he said. \u201cI also heard about the type of paychecks the guys were making.\u201d Couture won two fights in one night and earned $20,000, nearly his entire year\u2019s salary as a college wrestling coach. Now the economic incentives of mixed martial arts are much larger. Entry-level fighters can still make as little as $3,000 a bout in the U.F.C., but top stars command millions of dollars a year for their fights and endorsement deals. Over the past four years, the U.F.C.\u2019s success has brought the sport to a mass audience. In 2000, when Lesnar won an N.C.A.A. wrestling championship, the U.F.C. \u2014 then under different ownership \u2014 was an unregulated fringe sport with limited money and limited visibility. Lesnar wanted to continue his athletic career, but saw only two options: trying to make the Olympic wrestling team or playing football, a sport he had not played since high school. \u201cGoing to the Olympics, there\u2019s really no money in that,\u201d he said. \u201cI was a guy from Webster, S.D., who didn\u2019t even have two nickels to rub together.\u201d Instead, Lesnar opted to turn to professional wrestling and became a star. Last year, after five years of \u201cwrestling-entertainment,\u201d a number of injuries and a failed stint with the Minnesota Vikings, he realized his dream of becoming a professional athlete. While Lesnar is still developing his fighting skills, the influx of young, top-level wrestlers is certain to increase the talent pool in mixed martial arts. \u201cA higher caliber athlete is coming,\u201d said Marc Laimon, the coach of Team Takedown, a management company that recruits top wrestlers and tries to mold them into mixed martial artists and that is the owner of Cobra Kai Jiu-Jitsu in Las Vegas. \u201cThe guys who fight in the U.F.C. to get chicks in the clubs, those guys are going to fade away.\u201d Ted Ehrhardt, one of Team Takedown\u2019s founders, said he received 20 to 30 e-mail messages a week from fighters asking about management. \u201cI\u2019m taking the very top wrestlers in the world,\u201d he said. Among the company\u2019s clients are Jake Rosholt, a three-time N.C.A.A. champion; Johny Hendricks, a two-time N.C.A.A. champion; and Shane Roller, a three-time all-American. Ehrhardt said he was also interested in signing Henry Cejudo, an Olympic gold medalist, and Muhammed Lawal, a former N.C.A.A. champion and Olympic hopeful. Despite the increased financial incentives, and the success of fighters like Couture and Lesnar, not every wrestler is looking to follow in their footsteps. \u201cIt\u2019s not for everyone,\u201d Ehrhardt said. \u201cA lot of guys who like to wrestle might not necessarily like getting punched in the face.\u201d But if wrestlers continue to succeed, wrestling at all levels could reap the benefits. \u201cMixed martial arts and its recent success have put a spotlight on wrestling,\u201d said Gary Abbott, a spokesman for USA Wrestling, the amateur sport\u2019s governing body. Regardless of who wins on Saturday, that spotlight seems likely to expand.", "keyword": "Mixed Martial Arts;Lesnar Brock;Couture Randy"}
{"id": "ny0275460", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/02/26", "title": "University of Missouri Fires Melissa Click, Who Tried to Block Journalist at Protest", "abstract": "A University of Missouri professor whose shout of \u201cI need some muscle over here,\u201d to remove a student journalist from a demonstration sparked an international debate over the limits of protest and a free press, has been fired, the university announced Thursday. Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communications, was captured on video on Nov. 9 trying, with dozens of others allied with the protesters, to prevent photographers from approaching the protesters\u2019 encampment on the flagship campus in Columbia. When a young man making a video recording identified himself as a journalist, she told him to leave, grabbed at his camera and called out, \u201cHey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.\u201d Later, it emerged that she had been involved in a confrontation with the police in October, along with students who were trying to block a homecoming parade. The university\u2019s governing body, the Board of Curators, began an investigation, and suspended her last month. The board voted Wednesday night to dismiss her \u2014 a decision it said she could appeal. \u201cThe board believes that Dr. Click\u2019s conduct was not compatible with university policies and did not meet expectations for a university faculty member,\u201d Pam Henrickson, the board chairwoman, said in a statement released Thursday. \u201cThe circumstances surrounding Dr. Click\u2019s behavior, both at a protest in October when she tried to interfere with police officers who were carrying out their duties, and at a rally in November, when she interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students, we believe demands serious action.\u201d Dr. Click had no immediate response, according to Status Labs, a public-relations firm that has been working for her. But in an interview last week , she offered something of an explanation for her conduct on the video, saying it represented just one moment in her career. \u201cWhen I watch it, I am embarrassed and sorry,\u201d she said. \u201cI see someone dealing with a high-stress situation who gets flustered. I see a moment where I feel like I\u2019m not representing my best self, and I see somebody who\u2019s trying to do her best to help marginalized students.\u201d After the November clash, she quickly apologized for her conduct toward photographers. And the group organizing the protests, ConcernedStudent1950, released a statement endorsing the right of the news media to enter the site. But prosecutors brought a misdemeanor assault charge against her, which will be dropped as part of a deal , if she completes community service and probation. The episode diverted attention from the subject of the protests, racism experienced by black students, which they said the university had not taken seriously and had done nothing to combat. A series of racist incidents , including death threats against protesters that resulted in arrests, increased tension on a campus already roiled by unrelated conflicts, including a dispute over graduate teaching assistants\u2019 health care and their attempt to unionize, and the university\u2019s decision, under pressure from conservative lawmakers, to sever ties to Planned Parenthood. The students and university employees protesting racism considered themselves part of the growing Black Lives Matter movement, and many of them had taken part in demonstrations in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, after a white police officer there killed an unarmed black man. The campus conflict came to a head when the university football team threatened to boycott a game unless the president of the university system, Timothy M. Wolfe, resigned. Mr. Wolfe did step down , along with R. Bowen Loftin, the chancellor of the Columbia campus. Protesters had set up camp and at times, their supporters formed a cordon around the site, blocking and pushing those who tried to get in, insisting that even on a public quad, the protesters had a right to privacy and to be left alone, and that journalists and others had no right to enter. Because of the video, Dr. Click became the public face of the upheaval, to the dismay of some of the protesters. She was publicly scolded by journalists who said she had failed to grasp the basics of the First Amendment \u2014 at a university famed for its journalism school, no less \u2014 and held up by conservatives as a symbol of intolerance in academia.", "keyword": "Civil Unrest;Melissa Click;College;News media,journalism;Freedom of the press;Columbia MO;University of Missouri"}
{"id": "ny0214438", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/03/30", "title": "Officers Sued by Michael Mineo Seek to Add Defendant", "abstract": "Lawyers for three police officers named in a civil rights lawsuit by a man alleging sexual abuse filed a motion on Monday in federal court in Brooklyn that seeks to make an officer likely to testify against them a defendant in the case as well. The man, Michael Mineo , has said he was sodomized on a Brooklyn subway platform by Officer Richard Kern as he and other officers arrested Mr. Mineo for smoking marijuana in October 2008. In a criminal trial last month, Officer Kern and two other officers, Alex Cruz and Andrew Morales, were acquitted of all charges. The filing seeks to include as a defendant Officer Kevin Maloney, a prosecution witness in the criminal case who testified that he saw Officer Kern place his police baton between Mr. Mineo\u2019s buttocks. In the motion, lawyers for Officers Kern, Morales and Cruz say that because Officer Maloney was involved in arresting Mr. Mineo, he is jointly responsible for any claims against the others. If Officer Maloney, who is still on active duty, is named as an additional defendant, city lawyers may have to defend him and thus take a more active role in the case. A lawyer for Officer Maloney said he had not yet seen the filing. Mr. Mineo\u2019s federal lawsuit names the three officers accused in the criminal trial and another officer, Noel Jugraj. It also names the city, unnamed police officers and police supervisors. A federal judge split the case in two, so that any claims against the city will be heard only if a jury finds the four officers liable for damages.", "keyword": "Mineo Michael;Suits and Litigation;Police"}
{"id": "ny0013109", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/11/26", "title": "Obama\u2019s Visiting Security Adviser Tells Karzai to Sign Agreement", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 President Obama\u2019s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, told President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Monday to stop his delay in signing a security agreement or potentially face the complete and final pullout of American troops by the end of 2014, according to American and Afghan officials. But while Mr. Karzai was said to have assured her he would sign the deal at some point, he gave no time frame for it. And he insisted on difficult new conditions as well, including the release of all inmates at the American prison camp at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, adding to the perception of crisis between the two nations, officials from both countries said. \u201cAmbassador Rice reiterated that, without a prompt signature, the U.S. would have no choice but to initiate planning for a post-2014 future in which there would be no U.S. or NATO troop presence in Afghanistan,\u201d according to a summary of the meeting released by the White House. The meeting came a day after Mr. Karzai rejected a recommendation from his own handpicked assembly of Afghan leadership figures, a loya jirga, that by year\u2019s end he should sign the bilateral security agreement, which would allow for an extended American military presence in Afghanistan after 2014. Mr. Karzai told the loya jirga that he wanted to wait to sign it until after the Afghan presidential elections next April, while continuing to negotiate with the Americans. In response, the White House summary said, \u201cAmbassador Rice stressed that we have concluded negotiations and that deferring the signature of the agreement until after next year\u2019s elections is not viable, as it would not provide the United States and NATO allies the clarity necessary to plan for a potential post-2014 military presence.\u201d Ms. Rice arrived in Afghanistan under a cloak of secrecy on Saturday, and the White House did not confirm she was here until after she was already meeting with Mr. Karzai on Monday evening, along with other top officials from both Washington and Kabul, and Mr. Karzai\u2019s senior aides. A senior administration official said, however, that the primary purpose of her visit had been to meet American officials and troops before the Thanksgiving holiday, not to speak to Mr. Karzai, and that the apparent secrecy was only related to security concerns. The meeting lasted two hours, and it continued into what Aimal Faizi, Mr. Karzai\u2019s spokesman, who was there, described as a working dinner at the presidential palace. And while the tone was said to be generally diplomatic and polite, the president at one point became angry at the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham voiced objection to an extra demand by the loya jirga: the release of all Guant\u00e1namo inmates. He insisted that United States law governs the release of the prisoners and that the issue had no bearing on the bilateral security agreement, or B.S.A. \u201cThat made the president very angry; his reaction was very strong and intense,\u201d Mr. Faizi said. \u201cThe president said we cannot separate the recommendations of the loya jirga from the B.S.A. now \u2014 we cannot pick and choose. All those recommendations have to be taken seriously.\u201d He was referring to all 31 recommendations issued by the loya jirga on Sunday, the main one being that the Afghan president should sign the agreement within one month. Nearly all 50 committees of the jirga recommended that deadline. The other recommendations, from various committees, ran the gamut from allowing Afghan observers to attend American military trials to banning Christian religious observances on American military bases. Another recommendation was for an American military base in the remote province of Bamian, the most peaceful place in the country. For her part, Ms. Rice warned Mr. Karzai that his refusal to sign the agreement would jeopardize Western aid to Afghanistan, including an annual $4 billion to support its military, which is entirely dependent on American aid. \u201cThe lack of a signed B.S.A. would jeopardize NATO and other nations\u2019 pledges of assistance,\u201d she told Mr. Karzai. She added that the United States would \u201ccontinue to work with Afghanistan to support a smooth security transition and to help ensure free and fair elections.\u201d But the senior administration official made it clear there was still hope that Mr. Karzai would sign the agreement. \u201cReally what it was was us emphasizing that we\u2019re ready to sign, and that we\u2019ve seen the Afghan people say that they\u2019re ready to sign, so now we\u2019re waiting for President Karzai,\u201d the official said. Mr. Karzai\u2019s strongest language was again said to be over American counterterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Despite having approved in principle a security agreement that allowed for such missions, with limits, in his address to the loya jirga on Sunday, he insisted the raids should be banned immediately and completely or he would cancel the security agreement. Such raids are the main combat activity remaining to American forces in Afghanistan now, and have been identified by American commanders as a crucial, continuing mission. \u201cThe president insisted on the stance: a total ban on home raids since yesterday,\u201d Mr. Faizi said. \u201cHe assured Madame Rice they will get the B.S.A. signed \u2014 you will get a B.S.A. signed, but give the Afghan people time to see that the U.S. has changed its behavior, that home raids are banned in practical terms.\u201d He said Ms. Rice deferred that issue to the American military commander, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. , who assured that he had given instructions to his forces to \u201ctake all necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties and that the commanders will be acting in accordance to the recommendations of the loya jirga and what is said in the B.S.A.,\u201d Mr. Faizi said. But the Afghans were not satisfied with that reply. The only point of agreement from the talks, according to Mr. Faizi\u2019s account, was on another demand that Mr. Karzai made during the security negotiations: transparency in elections. Mr. Karzai was referring to what he has called American interference in the 2009 presidential vote, when pressure by American officials in response to allegations of election irregularities led Mr. Karzai to agree to a second round of elections. Ms. Rice\u2019s visit to Afghanistan is her first foreign trip since taking over as Mr. Obama\u2019s national security adviser in July. She was scheduled to leave Tuesday. Mr. Karzai expressed his hope that Ms. Rice would convey his views to President Obama and then return to negotiate the issues further, Mr. Faizi said. But the White House summary made no mention of any further talks on the issue with Mr. Obama, and made it clear the negotiations were considered closed.", "keyword": "US Military;Afghanistan War;Susan Rice;Hamid Karzai;US Foreign Policy;Afghanistan"}
{"id": "ny0183241", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2007/12/31", "title": "U.S. Urges North Korea to Fulfill Deal", "abstract": "WASHINGTON (Reuters) \u2014 North Korea has not met its commitment to account fully for its nuclear activities by the end of 2007 under a disarmament agreement, the United States said Sunday, urging North Korea to comply with its obligations. North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in 2006, is facing a deadline at 11 a.m., Eastern time, on Dec. 31 to disclose details of its nuclear program under a disarmament-for-aid deal it reached with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. \u201cIt is unfortunate that North Korea has not yet met its commitments by providing a complete and correct declaration of its nuclear programs and slowing down the process of disablement,\u201d a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said in a statement. \u201cWe urge North Korea to deliver a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear weapons programs and nuclear weapons and proliferation activities and complete the agreed disablement.\u201d American and South Korean officials have called on North Korea to say how much plutonium it has produced \u2014 about 110 pounds by the United States\u2019 estimates \u2014 and respond to American suspicions about a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons.", "keyword": "North Korea;Atomic Weapons;United States Armament and Defense"}
{"id": "ny0121301", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/07/14", "title": "Tough Talk From Nets at Brooklyn Rally", "abstract": "On a stage of marble, between Roman columns that stretched toward the sky, the Nets declared an identity and made an audacious claim: New York is officially a two-team town. Officially, Friday\u2019s pep rally on the steps of Brooklyn\u2019s Borough Hall was dedicated to Deron Williams and Joe Johnson, the newly united All-Stars who were introduced as \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Backcourt.\u201d Unofficially, it served as a shot across the bow of the city\u2019s other N.B.A. franchise. \u201cFor nearly 40 years, the Manhattan Knicks have shown that they can\u2019t bring the championship home to New York City!\u201d Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, bellowed to a crowd of about 1,000. \u201cSo it\u2019s going to take the Brooklyn Nets to get the job done!\u201d Williams, Johnson and Nets officials could only smile sheepishly. The Nets know they are not contenders yet, but they made a leap in the right direction over the last two weeks. In retaining Williams and trading for Johnson, the Nets secured a little star power to open the Barclays Center next fall. With the additional signings of Brook Lopez, Gerald Wallace, Mirza Teletovic and Reggie Evans, the Nets have enough talent to make a playoff push in the Eastern Conference. Much work remains to be done. The Nets need viable backups at point guard, center and small forward, and they need more rebounding and defense throughout the roster. They are working to re-sign Kris Humphries, their starting power forward, who appears likely to return after flirting with the Charlotte Bobcats. General Manager Billy King said a deal with Humphries was \u201cclose,\u201d but added, \u201cIt\u2019s a process.\u201d He also confirmed that the Nets were working on a deal with Jerry Stackhouse, the veteran guard. The Nets left most of the hyperbole to Markowitz, but they held nothing back in promoting their star-studded new backcourt. Banners featuring Williams\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s faces hung outside Borough Hall and in the interior room where the team held a pre-rally news conference. At separate points, King and Coach Avery Johnson each unabashedly referred to the two All-Star guards as \u201cthe best backcourt in the N.B.A.\u201d \u2014 a heady proclamation to make in the same week that Steve Nash joined Kobe Bryant. \u201cThey\u2019re good,\u201d King said of the Lakers\u2019 guards, who have three most valuable player trophies between them. \u201cI like them. But I think ours is better.\u201d Bryant, naturally, assigned the Nets\u2019 backcourt a slightly lesser ranking. \u201cThey\u2019re probably right behind us,\u201d he said earlier this week. \u201cSteve\u2019s got a couple M.V.P.\u2019s. I got a couple finals M.V.P.\u2019s, regular M.V.P. and multiple championships, so I think that gets the nod right now.\u201d Both Williams and Joe Johnson can score, pass and defend. Both will draw double-teams. Either one can score 20 points on a given night. Johnson, a six-time All-Star, has averaged at least 18 points a game in each of the last seven seasons, and more than 20 points a game in the first five years of that stretch. He also has career averages of 4.4 assists and 4.2 rebounds, making him one of the more well-rounded shooting guards in the league. Williams, a three-time All-Star, has averaged at least 18 points a game for five straight seasons and more than 20 points a game in each of the last two. He is perennially among the league leaders in assists and is widely regarded as one of the top point guards in the game. \u201cThere are a lot of good backcourts, but I don\u2019t think there are backcourts that can do that,\u201d King said, \u201ctwo guys that can get you 18 and 20 every night and they can defend their positions.\u201d The Nets had visions of a three-superstar lineup, but their pursuit of Orlando\u2019s Dwight Howard stalled when they could not provide the Magic with enough talent and draft picks. The talks were finally suspended on Wednesday, when King instead re-signed Lopez, who would have been the centerpiece of a deal. Although talks could potentially be revisited on Jan. 15 \u2014 when Lopez is eligible to be traded \u2014 King spoke as if the pursuit was over for good. \u201cI\u2019m just glad now that we have a direction,\u201d King said, referring to the Nets\u2019 new core. King said he recently apologized to Lopez for \u201cwhat\u2019s been going on\u201d \u2014 a reference to the trade talks \u2014 and told him, \u201cNow it\u2019s behind you.\u201d The Nets\u2019 party on Friday would surely have been bigger and louder had Howard been standing on the marble steps with Johnson and Williams. But Avery Johnson spoke optimistically of a \u201cBig 4\u201d that included an improving Lopez \u2014 whom he called a potential All-Star \u2014 and the sturdy Wallace. Outside, the celebration was buoyant but modest, perhaps tempered by the sweltering heat. The rally began with a remix of M.O.P.\u2019s \u201cAnte Up,\u201d which declares, \u201cRespect mine, we Brooklyn-bound\u201d \u2014 the lyrics interspersed with play-by-play calls featuring Williams and Johnson. David Diamante, the Nets\u2019 new public-address announcer, declared it \u201ca momentous day for the borough and your hometown team, the Brooklyn Nets!\u201d The crowd cheered at every mention of the word \u201cBrooklyn\u201d and roared when Williams and Johnson appeared between two columns at the top of the Hall\u2019s marble steps. Some fans were draped in official black-and-white Nets apparel. That sea was broken by a lone patch of orange \u2014 the crown of a Knicks cap. Markowitz kept up the taunts. \u201cMove over, Manhattan \u2014 enough air balls!\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve had your chance.\u201d", "keyword": "Kris Humphries;Gerald Wallace;Billy King;Knicks;Basketball;Joe Johnson"}
{"id": "ny0291500", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/01/23", "title": "Dire Warnings Along East Coast as Snow Piles Up", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A massive winter storm that threatens to dump two feet of snow on the nation\u2019s capital began pummeling the East Coast on Friday afternoon, as millions of people from the Carolinas to New York braced for a weekend of severe winds, power losses and coastal flooding. Thousands of flights were canceled; governors and mayors warned people to stay indoors and off the roads. Governors in at least 10 states declared states of emergency, and travel was disrupted in at least five major airport hubs, with 6,300 flights canceled on Friday and Saturday and 4,675 more delayed. In North Carolina, more than 114,000 homes lost power. The Washington region\u2019s mass transit system took what an official called an \u201cexceedingly rare\u201d step of shutting down for the weekend. Cities from Nashville to New York started emergency operations to respond to what the National Weather Service deemed a \u201cpotentially crippling winter storm.\u201d In Virginia, where snow began falling Friday morning in the southern part of the state, Gov. Terry McAuliffe put 700 National Guard members on standby; by Friday evening, hundreds of accidents had been reported. In Baltimore, shelters added hundreds of extra beds to accommodate the homeless. Officials throughout the Mid-Atlantic region warned that it could be days, or even a week, before residents will be able to dig out. In New York, where blizzard conditions are expected to hit early Saturday and bring 18 to 24 inches of snow, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to use mass transit and to stay home as much as possible. \u201cUnless it is urgent, stay off the roads,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d With Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York all in line for blizzard conditions \u2014 and winds of up to 50 miles an hour \u2014 forecasters predicted a storm of historic proportions. Here in Washington, where wet, heavy snowflakes began falling in the early afternoon, officials told residents to get indoors by 3 p.m., and warned of the potential not only for power losses and treacherous roads, but collapsed roofs. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the storm has \u201clife-and-death implications.\u201d At a late afternoon news conference, her director of emergency operations, Chris T. Geldart, urged drivers to get off the roads. A Picture of the Blizzard\u2019s Aftermath A satellite image from NASA shows the extent of the huge winter storm that blanketed the East Coast with snow on Saturday. \u201cThis is a dangerous storm, and it\u2019s coming fast,\u201d Mr. Geldart said. \u201cThis is deteriorating quickly; we need folks to get where they are going to be.\u201d Meteorologists said the dire warnings were appropriate. \u201cTemperatures are going to be into the upper 20s into the low 30s,\u201d Rich Otto, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said in an interview. \u201cWhen you combine that with extremely heavy snow, blowing wind \u2014 which will generate whiteout conditions \u2014 if you are trying to venture outside, it could be life or death.\u201d The storm \u2014 called Snowmaggedon2016 on Twitter, and named Winter Storm Jonas by the Weather Channel \u2014 could approach the 28 inches in January 1922 that ranks as Washington\u2019s snowiest storm and is likely to easily surpass the highest recent snowfall, 17.8 inches that fell in February 2010. Image Jeff Sheehan, left, and Brandon Snyder were equipped with shovels and salt for clearing storefronts in downtown Asheville, N.C., on Friday. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times But Mr. Otto said the region west of Washington, including parts of Virginia, West Virginia, southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, will form the \u201cbull\u2019s-eye\u201d of the blizzard, with as much as 30 inches of snow expected there. In Charleston, W.Va., near-whiteout conditions appeared on Friday afternoon as snow piled high enough to hide the curbs on the sidewalk. City snowplow drivers reported abandoned cars blocking the roads. On the Jersey Shore and southern Long Island, there was concern about possible wind-driven flooding. Given the region\u2019s history with Hurricane Sandy , Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said he was more worried about flooding than snow. Image Snow fell Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C. Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times \u201cFlooding can do tremendous, tremendous damage, as we\u2019ve learned the hard way,\u201d Mr. Cuomo said. By Friday night, nine deaths \u2014 five in North Carolina, one in Virginia, one in Kentucky and two in Tennessee \u2014 had been attributed to bad road conditions and ice. Governors in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky had declared states of emergency. Schools throughout the region, including some universities, were closed Friday, as were many government offices. Many businesses instructed people to telecommute, and countless activities were postponed. President Obama put off a White House ceremony where he was to award medals to scientists and technology innovators. In Baltimore, the country music star Garth Brooks postponed two sold-out shows. At the Capitol, lawmakers wrapped up their business early and rushed to get out of town. And Speaker Paul D. Ryan offered a social-media worthy alternative to streaming television: He set up a live stream from the balcony of his office, just off the Capitol rotunda, so Americans can watch the blizzard hit the National Mall. There were long lines to get gas in the Washington area \u2014 some stations ran out of regular gas on Friday. In suburban Bethesda, traffic was clogged with cars trying to squeeze into the parking lot of Strosnider\u2019s, a local hardware store. People in knit caps and puffer coats crowded the aisles in search of batteries, flashlights, salt and snow shovels. One woman, Susan Schwartz, gave up and left, going to another store in nearby Kensington, which was by then devoid of storm supplies. \u201cThere were no shovels and no salt to be found,\u201d she said. In Baltimore, where an estimated 3,000 people are homeless, more somber preparations were underway. Deputy Mayor Dawn Kirstaetter said the city had deployed teams of mental health specialists to bring homeless people in from the storm. City employees planned to work overnight to staff shelters with expanded bed space; officials at Catholic Charities of Baltimore said they were expecting hundreds to show up for meals on Saturday. \u201cFive years ago, 400 people showed up for lunch,\u201d said Bill McCarthy, the group\u2019s executive director, referring to the region\u2019s last major blizzard, in February 2010. \u201cI\u2019m expecting the same thing \u2014 and they will be served.\u201d In Virginia, Mr. McAuliffe told CNN that if conditions deteriorate, he would consider closing a major rural thoroughfare, Interstate 81. \u201cThe second the state police call me and inform me that Interstate 81 is not safe for traffic, I will pull the trigger immediately,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will shut it down immediately. This is a major snow event for us.\u201d Perhaps the most extraordinary step here in Washington was the closing of the Metro system, the bus and rail service that serves Washington and its Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs. Trains were to stop running at 11 p.m. Friday and were not expected to resume until at least Monday morning. Dan Stessel, a spokesman for Metro, said the early decision to shutter the system \u2014 announced Thursday \u2014 was highly unusual. Amid the preparations, at least one event did go on as planned on Friday in Washington. Even as snow started falling early in the afternoon, what appeared to be more than a thousand anti-abortion activists \u2014 albeit fewer than most years \u2014 rallied beneath the Washington Monument for their annual march commemorating the anniversary of the Supreme Court\u2019s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. The crowd heard from Carly Fiorina, a Republican presidential candidate, and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who thanked them for braving the cold and \u201cputting on your coats, your mittens and your gloves to fight for life.\u201d", "keyword": "Snow Snowstorms;East Coast US"}
{"id": "ny0194025", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/11/29", "title": "Villagers Rushed to Help in Frigid Russian Crash", "abstract": "LYKOSHINO, Russia \u2014 Rudolf Denyayev climbed over a small ridge on Friday night and saw the whole disaster spread out before him: train passengers wandering blindly, luggage tossed in all directions, screams coming from the derailed cars. These were the frozen hours after a bomb devastated a luxury train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing more than 25 people, and before the country rushed to help. The explosion took place deep in the forest, as the train sped past a power station and a small painted wooden house where an elderly woman lives alone. Because the area is so remote, people from nearby towns got to the site hours before rescue workers, and some of the grimmest work \u2014 sorting the dead from the living \u2014 fell to them. By the time Mr. Denyayev was down the hill, some passengers had straggled out of three derailed cars, some barefoot and some barely dressed, as if they had just gone to sleep to the quiet rhythm of the train. They didn\u2019t seem to know what was going on, Mr. Denyayev recalled in an interview on Saturday night. Anatoly Myagchenkov, a tractor driver who made it to the site with two friends, noticed that he was stepping on passports, money and cellphones as he approached the overturned train cars. He held onto the back of a friend\u2019s sweater. It took all his concentration to keep from stepping on a body. \u201cEveryone thought no one was coming,\u201d said Mr. Myagchenkov, 30. \u201cThe passengers thought I was one of them. Those who couldn\u2019t stand, we took out the window. We put the living on one side, the corpses on the other.\u201d The next 24 hours would bring wave upon wave of strangeness to this village near the crash site where weathered wooden houses evoke another century. Around 30 rescue cars were immobilized in the mud as they struggled to reach the wounded over country roads; reporters made the two-mile trek from a nearby road, walking along the train tracks. Then federal agents began visiting residents of Lykoshino one by one, asking them if they had seen anyone unusual \u2014 in particular, anyone who appeared to be from the Caucasus region in southern Russia, which includes Chechnya. Muslim extremists from the Caucasus have for years been waging an insurgency and have been responsible for many, but not all, terrorist acts elsewhere in Russia in recent years. Rumors circulated all day, said Mr. Denyayev, 38. Some said four young men from the Caucasus had been renting a room from a local man \u2014 something that would stand out in Lykoshino, which has dwindled to a population of 600, most of them pensioners. The work, for those first hours, was agonizingly slow. Mr. Myagchenkov spent three hours taking apart train seats, and he estimates that he withdrew 13 bodies in that time. While trying to clear a car of shards of twisted metal, he bent down and realized that what he was looking at was a piece of a human brain. When he headed home, spent, he met the first column of ambulances to arrive, he said. But even in his warm house \u2014 where earlier in the day he had celebrated his daughter\u2019s second birthday \u2014he could not shake the picture of the train car from his mind, and he lay awake until morning. A day later, Mr. Myagchenkov\u2019s face was still slack with shock from what he had seen. Asked what should happen to the people who bombed the train, he answered quickly and quietly. \u201cThey should be shot,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Russia;Bombs and Explosives;Railroads;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0149811", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2008/09/06", "title": "Microsoft Works to Perfect Windows Vista", "abstract": "An advertising blitz intended to help Microsoft polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system began this week with a head-scratcher of a commercial. The ad features Jerry Seinfeld flexing some new shoes, Bill Gates adjusting his shorts and no mention of Vista. Microsoft says the ad is meant to get people talking, and that other parts of the marketing campaign will actually get into what its software can do. But the advertising, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, is really just \u201cair cover,\u201d according to Bill Veghte, the Microsoft executive who is responsible for sustaining Windows, probably the most lucrative franchise in history. For more than a year, Mr. Veghte and his team have been developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software. Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less crash-prone. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never has before, offering training and advice \u2014 and even paying to put hundreds of \u201cWindows gurus\u201d in stores. By now, Microsoft insists that most of the frustrating technical problems with Vista, which was introduced in January 2007 after repeated delays, have been resolved \u2014 and many industry executives and analysts agree. Yet Vista\u2019s image problems have opened the door to alternatives to Windows as never before. Windows still commands more than 90 percent of the market for personal computer operating systems. But Apple\u2019s Macintosh operating software \u2014 which runs only on Apple machines \u2014 is gaining ground, especially in the United States. Microsoft\u2019s stumbles have also given momentum to the shift of software away from the PC and onto the Web. Web-based programs for e-mail, spreadsheets and other tasks can be run in a browser, undermining the value of the underlying operating system. Indeed, Google\u2019s entry into the browser market this week is an implicit declaration that the browser is increasingly supplanting the PC operating system as a strategic computing gateway. Microsoft makes much of its living from Windows, and a very good living it is. In the year ended in June, Microsoft\u2019s Windows group generated revenue of nearly $16.9 billion and operating profits of more than $13 billion, a phenomenal 77 percent margin. To keep that business humming, Microsoft needs to have consumers and corporations upgrade to new versions of Windows \u2014 something that has not been so easy with Vista. \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing with Vista is that for the first time some significant portion of consumers and business customers have decided it\u2019s not worth upgrading,\u201d said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. \u201cIf they don\u2019t, the end of the franchise is at hand.\u201d The main problem with Vista, Microsoft said, was that given the delays, uncertainty and significant changes in the software, the rest of the industry was not ready when Vista finally arrived. There are one billion worldwide users of the various versions of Windows. Hundred of thousands of hardware devices and software applications run on it, and they need connecting programs, called drivers, to work smoothly with it. Vista represented a big shift from its predecessor, XP, so it required a lot of new drivers \u2014 and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft said, an older driver still worked with Vista, but it slowed down the PC or made it crash unpredictably. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components are compatible with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced. \u201cWe are in a very different position with Vista than we were even six months ago,\u201d said Mr. Veghte, senior vice president for Windows strategy and marketing. \u201cAnd there are a lot of people holding forth with criticism of Windows Vista that have not used Vista, or not recently.\u201d Just after Vista shipped, Steven A. Ballmer , Microsoft\u2019s chief executive, tapped Mr. Veghte, 41, to move to the Windows business. In his 18 years at Microsoft, Mr. Veghte has had a wide-ranging career in sales, marketing and software development (he holds two patents). Vista\u2019s troubles were seen within Microsoft\u2019s management ranks, characteristically, as an opportunity. Mike Nash, who had worked with Mr. Veghte before, signed up to join him. \u201cThere was so much we could do better,\u201d said Mr. Nash, who is vice president for Windows product management. \u201cOur task was to shake things around and make the Windows business much more sustainable over the years.\u201d In a meeting in July 2007, Mr. Ballmer signed off on Mr. Veghte\u2019s plan to step up investment in the Windows business. In broad terms, the strategy was to work more closely with PC makers and retailers, and change perceptions of the Windows brand with a multiyear marketing campaign that Mr. Veghte called \u201ca sustained conversation about what Windows is.\u201d The team called its mission FTP 168, short for Free the People 24x7 \u2014 meaning the freedom to do all manner of things with Windows on a PC, a cellphone or over the Web, at any time. The campaign is meant to move the Windows brand decisively beyond the PC, so the business can thrive even if the PC becomes less important. Microsoft believes that its broad reach gives it the upper hand against rivals like Apple or Google. \u201cIt\u2019s about the PC, phone and the Web, and Microsoft and Windows can connect those for customers in a way no other company or technology can,\u201d Mr. Veghte said. To set more detailed plans, Mr. Veghte plucked 10 other managers from across the company, and the group set up offices away from headquarters in Redmond, Wash., in an office building in nearby Bellevue, which they called \u201cthe Bunker.\u201d In their opening meeting, Mr. Veghte, according to team members, began by saying three things: Your personal reputations are on the line. We won\u2019t automatically respect what Microsoft has done in the past. And we\u2019ll try to test things quickly, in rolling pilot projects. In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a \u201cretail experience center\u201d to test ideas about the behavior of shoppers. With retailing now accounting for 40 percent of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies. \u201cWe weren\u2019t coming in with the tools and people to help them,\u201d said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft. Microsoft is sharing its research with retailers. It is also paying for a few hundred Windows experts to talk to shoppers in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These Windows gurus technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits and trains them. Manny Gouveia, 30, is a Windows guru in Orlando, Fla. A college graduate and technology enthusiast, Mr. Gouveia went through a seven-day training program at Microsoft and gets regular online training. He also participates in two conference calls a week to share information and tips with Microsoft and other gurus. He works at a Circuit City, where he demonstrates how to use a Vista PC to edit movies, post family photos online and record television shows. \u201cWe\u2019re there to give people a sense of the great experiences they can have with a PC, not just e-mail and Web browsing,\u201d Mr. Gouveia said. \u201cPeople do come in with the view that Windows Vista is not up to par. But I can turn that perception around in five minutes.\u201d Mr. Gouveia himself needed some convincing at first. \u201cBefore this project, I had never used Vista,\u201d he said. \u201cI had not seen a compelling reason to upgrade.\u201d He has since bought two Vista PCs. With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and fine-tuning of software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the start-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60 percent. At Sony, 20 percent of its Vaio consumer models have gone through the Vista Velocity program so far, and the goal is to cover them all, said Mike Abary, senior vice president for marketing in Sony\u2019s Vaio PC business. The result, Mr. Abary said, has been improved performance that should make for a \u201cmore compelling why-to-buy proposition.\u201d \u201cThere has been hesitation in the marketplace,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Microsoft Corp;Software;Computers and the Internet;Advertising and Marketing;Gates Bill;Seinfeld Jerry;Ballmer Steven A"}
{"id": "ny0285559", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/09/07", "title": "All Eyes Are on Chris Christie as Trial in Bridge Scandal Starts", "abstract": "It might be easy to forget, now that he has endorsed and defended Donald J. Trump to the ridicule and anger of fellow Republicans he called friends, that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was himself once a leading, if not the leading, presidential hopeful in his party. Then came revelations of a scheme so preposterous that it was hard to believe: Aides to the governor had deliberately created a traffic jam at the world\u2019s busiest bridge as political payback. The trial in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal, which is scheduled to open on Thursday with jury selection, will play out like a documentary on the rise and fall of Mr. Christie\u2019s presidential ambitions, a tell-all tale of how he and his aides built his administration and his 2013 re-election campaign with an eye to winning the White House, then scrambled to contain the damage as inquiries into the lane closings began to wreck those hopes. Image Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press Mr. Christie has not been charged. But he will loom large in the story laid out by both sides in the courtroom. The governor is expected to be on a list of people who federal prosecutors say knew about the scheme to create gridlock in order to punish a mayor who had declined to endorse him. And while prosecutors have fought back against a defense lawyer\u2019s assertion that the case is \u201ccriminalizing normal politics,\u201d their argument in court filings is that the lane closings were precisely that: normal politics. At least, normal Christie politics \u2014 aggressively transactional and focused above all on winning. Image Mark Sokolich, a Democrat and the mayor of Fort Lee. Credit Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times In the prosecutors\u2019 portrayal \u2014 and defense lawyers do not really disagree \u2014 the Christie administration treated the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the $8 billion-a-year bistate agency that operates the bridge, as an arm of the governor\u2019s campaign for a second term, using it to cajole mayors into endorsing Mr. Christie and to discipline them if they did not. An entire department of the governor\u2019s office was focused on gaining the support of local officials, as Mr. Christie sought the sort of landslide victory that would allow him to argue that he was the Republican best able to take the White House. \u201cIt offers a glimpse at the kind of machinations that went into shaping a candidate with national ambitions,\u201d said Brigid Callahan Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University. \u201cNot just all of the kind of back-room inside politics that many people find really distasteful, but the enormous extent to which the administration would flex its muscles to paint Chris Christie as this candidate that had such broad appeal.\u201d Nearly three years after the mystery of the lane closings captivated New Jersey, the trial will finally answer big questions. Perhaps biggest of all: When and how did Mr. Christie know about the plan, as the prosecution\u2019s star witness has said he did? And who else was involved? A Timeline for the George Washington Bridge Scandal Events in the scandal that has settled around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey regarding the motives behind the shutdown of some traffic lanes to the George Washington Bridge. Mr. Christie was always expected to coast to victory in his 2013 re-election bid. But he wanted to break the record set by his mentor, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who won re-election with 69 percent of the vote. And he wanted to demonstrate to national Republicans that he could win crossover support from women, Hispanics, black voters and Democrats, even in a state where they far outnumber Republicans. Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, the town on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, was 47th on a list of 100 Democratic mayors that the Christie administration was especially hoping to win over. On Aug. 13, 2013, after confirming with an aide who had tried to court the mayor that he was not going to support Mr. Christie, Bridget Anne Kelly, a deputy chief of staff to the governor, sent an email to David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority: \u201cTime for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.\u201d Image Bridget Anne Kelly, a deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, at a court hearing in 2014. Credit Pool photo by Mel Evans They waited a month \u2014 to achieve maximum impact, prosecutors say \u2014 until the first day of school, in a week that included Yom Kippur and the Sept. 11 anniversary, and closed two of the three access lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge. They did not tell local officials, who were soon overwhelmed by traffic, with ambulances, school buses and commuters gridlocked for hours. Mr. Wildstein went to the bridge to admire his handiwork in person, and texted Ms. Kelly about children stuck on buses. \u201cIs it wrong that I am smiling?\u201d she replied. Image David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, during a hearing at the Statehouse in Trenton in 2014. Credit \u00c1ngel Franco/The New York Times As drivers fumed, the Port Authority police instructed them to call Mayor Sokolich, who in turn called, emailed and texted Bill Baroni, Mr. Christie\u2019s top appointee at the Port Authority. Mr. Baroni refused to respond, as did the governor\u2019s office. \u201cRadio silence,\u201d Mr. Wildstein wrote to Mr. Christie\u2019s campaign manager. The lanes were closed for four days, until the executive director of the Port Authority, an appointee of New York\u2019s governor, discovered a query from a traffic columnist about the delays and ordered the lanes reopened. That November, Mr. Christie won his huge margin of victory , with 60 percent, though he fell short of Mr. Kean\u2019s record. In his victory speech, he urged Washington to learn from his electoral success. Image Bill Baroni, Mr. Christie\u2019s top appointee at the Port Authority, in 2013. Credit Chris Pedota/The Record, via Associated Press But reporters, and the State Legislature, which Democrats control, continued to press questions about the bridge. The governor\u2019s office and Port Authority officials said the lane closings were part of a traffic study; Mr. Baroni told a legislative committee that not telling the mayor or local police had been a \u201ccommunications breakdown.\u201d That story came apart in January 2014, when a legislative subpoena revealed Ms. Kelly\u2019s email. Mr. Wildstein began to cooperate with federal prosecutors, and pleaded guilty in May 2015 to conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy against civil rights. Ms. Kelly and Mr. Baroni were indicted later the same day. Mr. Wildstein will be the witness to watch during their trial, at the federal courthouse in Newark. Once the author of a widely read and widely feared (and anonymous) political blog, he was hired to be a kind of enforcer at the Port Authority, as New Jersey sought to take back some of the power Mr. Christie believed had been shifted to New York. Image Christina Renna, a Christie campaign aide, at a hearing in 2014. Credit Kena Betancur/Getty Images Court filings suggest that Mr. Wildstein will help the government establish the traffic jam as part of a pattern of retribution. Christie officials had punished another Democratic mayor , Steven Fulop of Jersey City (No. 34 on the administration\u2019s list of 100 mayors), after he reneged on what they thought was a deal to support the governor. Mayor Fulop had represented a Port Authority tenant in its bid to get a lease extension. Mr. Wildstein and Mr. Baroni had helped him get the terms he wanted and Mr. Christie\u2019s campaign manager urged them to \u201ccontinue throwing the Gov/my name around when discussing this with him,\u201d so the mayor would understand that the governor had helped him, and expected help in return. When Mr. Fulop told the Christie campaign he would not give his endorsement, the administration canceled a special \u201cmayor\u2019s day\u201d of meetings between Mr. Fulop and high-ranking Port Authority and Christie administration officials. Mr. Wildstein also said early on that \u201c evidence exists \u201d that Mr. Christie knew about the lane closings as they were happening. Court filings suggest that at least part of that evidence may be photographs of Mr. Christie laughing with Mr. Baroni and Mr. Wildstein at a Sept. 11 memorial service that week, during which, Mr. Wildstein has said , the lane closings were discussed. Image Bill Stepien, who was Mr. Christie\u2019s campaign manager. Credit Amy Newman/The Record, via Associated Press \u201cThe photos will provide corroboration,\u201d a court filing explains, before proceeding into a lengthy redaction. The names of other unindicted co-conspirators \u2014 people who joined in the conspiracy but are not charged \u2014 are likely to come out at the trial. There is another list, of people who knew about the conspiracy but did not join in it, which almost certainly includes Mr. Christie. It was unclear whether that means the governor knew about the plot before it began, as he has strenuously denied, or while it was going on, which he has vacillated about in his public comments. Mr. Christie did not respond to requests for comment about the list. And lawyers for Mr. Baroni and Ms. Kelly have said the two were hardly alone in planning the scheme or covering it up. In court papers, Mr. Baroni\u2019s lawyer pointed out that Mr. Christie acknowledged, in an internal report on the lane closings, that canceling the meetings with Mr. Fulop had been his idea. The lawyer also revealed a text from another witness expected to testify for the government, Christina Genovese Renna, to a Christie campaign aide, sent during a January 2014 news conference when the governor said his senior staff and campaign chief, Bill Stepien, did not know about the lane closings. \u201cHe just flat-out lied about senior staff and Stepien not being involved,\u201d Ms. Renna wrote. (Mr. Christie and Mr. Stepien\u2019s lawyer say this does not prove any involvement.) Ms. Kelly, in her only public statement after the indictment, said it was absurd to suggest that she would act on her own to order the lane closings or cover them up. In her lawyer\u2019s telling, the governor\u2019s office was less worried about figuring out what had happened with the lane closings \u2014 the senior staff all knew exactly what happened, they say \u2014 and more concerned with figuring out what evidence existed, and how it might damage Mr. Christie\u2019s national ambitions. It did. Significantly. Mr. Christie\u2019s approval ratings in New Jersey, commanding when he was re-elected in 2013, fell, and they have lagged at record lows since the bridge scandal. Speaking to reporters last month, Mr. Christie played down the importance of the trial. \u201cI know you guys all hope for this story to go on forever,\u201d he said. \u201cBut unfortunately for you, I suspect by the time we get to October or so, it will finally be over.\u201d Opening arguments are scheduled for Sept. 19.", "keyword": "Bridgegate George Washington Bridge Scandal;Port Authority;Chris Christie;Bridget Anne Kelly;David Wildstein;Bill Baroni;GW Bridge;Fort Lee NJ;New Jersey"}
{"id": "ny0000564", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/03/27", "title": "State Budget Nears Approval in Albany", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 The spending plan tops $141 billion. It pays for things like expanded prekindergarten programs and a marketing plan promoting the state\u2019s beer, wine and Greek yogurt industries. And this week, after weeks of haggling with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the State Legislature is poised to approve it. Lawmakers are hoping to finish voting on the bills that make up the budget on Thursday. The approval would be a week later than lawmakers had intended, but still before the start of the state\u2019s next fiscal year, which begins on Monday. This year would be the third in a row that the state budget has been on time, the best streak in decades. Over all, spending under the new budget would increase by about 4 percent over the current one, although much of that increase is the result of federal aid to help rebuild areas damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The increase in state operating funds would be less than 2 percent. Here is a look at some of the highlights of the budget \u2014 and some of the issues that Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers agreed to postpone until later in the legislative session in order to ensure they could complete the spending plan by the Monday deadline. TAXES AND OTHER REVENUE In the biggest surprise of the budget deal, Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders decided to extend the use of a high-tax bracket on the state\u2019s top incomes. The bracket, which lawmakers approved on a temporary basis in late 2011, had been set to expire at the end of 2014, which is an election year. The new budget would extend the high-tax bracket through 2017. The extension, which Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, did not include in his original budget proposal, has drawn criticism from business groups, who warn that New Yorkers with high incomes might relocate to lower-tax states, a claim that some dispute. The budget also creates a new $350 tax rebate for families with incomes between $40,000 and $300,000 and who have at least one child. The first rebate check would be mailed by mid-October next year just before voters go to the polls to decide whether to re-elect Mr. Cuomo and members of the Legislature. (The Assembly is controlled by Democrats, the Senate by a coalition of Republicans and independent Democrats.) Lawmakers rejected a proposal by Mr. Cuomo to expand the Quick Draw lottery game. They also rejected a proposal to make it more difficult for drivers to reduce the severity of speeding tickets through court pleadings, but put in place a $25 surcharge for speeding tickets that are pleaded down to a low-level traffic offense. They also set a $50 minimum fine for texting or using a hand-held cellphone while driving, as well as higher maximum fines \u2014 as much as $400 \u2014 for repeat offenders. MINIMUM WAGE The budget would raise the state\u2019s minimum wage to $9 per hour, from $7.25, by 2016. The increase would be gradual: the wage would rise to $8 at the end of this year, $8.75 at the end of 2014 and $9 at the end of 2015. The minimum wage would not be tied to inflation, as Democrats in the Legislature had hoped. The increase would also not apply to tipped workers, who receive a lower minimum wage, although the budget will require the State Labor Department to review whether those wages should be increased. The budget also provides relief for businesses that would face higher labor costs as a result of the minimum wage increase: they would receive a refundable tax credit for their costs above the current minimum wage for workers they employ who are ages 16 through 19. LOCAL GOVERNMENTS Mr. Cuomo abandoned his plan to allow local governments to defer a portion of their pension costs by choosing a fixed contribution rate below the current one. But the budget includes an alternative plan that was supported by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, who had veto power over the governor\u2019s original proposal. The existing pension-deferment plan was approved in 2010 and permits public employers to borrow from the pension fund to pay their pension costs. The new alternative program would allow more money to be deferred in the near term, while extending the maximum payback period to 12 years, from 10. The budget does not restore about $250 million in school aid that is being withheld from New York City. The city was penalized for missing a January deadline to reach an agreement with the teachers\u2019 union to put in place a teacher evaluation system. Mr. Cuomo would not agree to eliminate the penalty, but the budget ensures that the city does not continue to be penalized in future budget years, as some lawmakers and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had feared. HEALTH CARE The budget restores $30 million of the $120 million that Mr. Cuomo had proposed to cut from the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities to help plug a budget hole created by a change in how the federal government will reimburse the state for its care of those people. Despite the wishes of some lawmakers, the budget does not include money to help the financially troubled SUNY Downstate Medical Center. Instead, the budget asks SUNY to submit a restructuring plan for the hospital by June. GUN CONTROL The spending plan suspends a ban on the sale of gun magazines with a capacity larger than seven rounds, which was a centerpiece of the package of new gun laws enacted by the Legislature in January in response to the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. The state had an existing ban on magazines larger than 10 rounds, and Mr. Cuomo said the more restrictive ban, which had been set to take effect April 15, was a problem because few seven-round magazines are manufactured. Gun owners will still be permitted to load only seven rounds into their magazine unless they are at a firing range or a competition. The budget also includes $28 million to pay for a statewide database of handgun licenses that was created as part of the gun law. STILL TO COME Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers had hoped to resolve several other policy debates. A proposal to cut down on low-level marijuana arrests stemming from police stops in New York City was put off until later in the session. So was a proposal to specify the locations of new casinos that could be built if the state legalizes Las Vegas-style casino gambling, and another proposal that would legalize mixed martial arts.", "keyword": "Budget;Legislation;State legislature;Tax;Gun Control;Health Insurance;Minimum wage;New York"}
{"id": "ny0170870", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/04", "title": "In Land of Spitzer, a Vile Season of Frost and Fury", "abstract": "ALBANY, Nov. 2 \u2014 Gov. Eliot Spitzer promised early on to spend his time \u201cbreaking some china,\u201d proclaimed himself a \u201csteamroller\u201d and often invoked a favorite saying: \u201cYou can\u2019t change the world by whispering.\u201d So give the man credit. Rarely has state politics been more fraught with feuds and fury than in his first year in office. Two weeks ago, a special legislative session ended bitterly, with agreements brokered months ago on issues like campaign finance falling apart. And in the last week, the governor seems to have angered all political stripes by shifting his plans to offer driver\u2019s licenses to illegal immigrants \u2014 and he may have tripped up Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s presidential push for good measure. Because the Spitzer effect has emboldened lawmakers to fire their own slings and arrows and form increasingly complicated alliances, some CliffsNotes are required to keep track of Albany\u2019s enemies and \u201cfrenemies.\u201d GOV. ELIOT SPITZER , Democrat: No feud is more fiery than the one between the governor and Joseph L. Bruno, the state\u2019s top Republican, who have not spoken in months. Where to begin? The governor has accused Mr. Bruno of \u201cduplicity\u201d and has said he is addicted to \u201chorrendous\u201d pork-barrel spending \u201cdripping with fat.\u201d One senator said the governor told him Mr. Bruno was \u201csenile,\u201d a charge the governor has denied. Mr. Bruno has said the governor once told him, \u201cI\u2019m going to knock you down so that you will never get up.\u201d But that was all an appetizer. In July, a report by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo found that the governor\u2019s staff misused the State Police to gather information on Mr. Bruno\u2019s use of state helicopters and police cars. The governor apologized, but last month his administration considered sending a letter to the Internal Revenue Service urging an investigation of Mr. Bruno for not paying taxes on the flights. The governor also once proclaimed himself \u201ca [expletive] steamroller\u201d to the top Assembly Republican, James N. Tedisco; Mr. Tedisco recently returned the favor by saying Osama bin Laden was in a cave toasting the governor\u2019s new license policy. The governor once said of the Assembly\u2019s top Democrat, Sheldon Silver: \u201cNobody should be under the illusion it will be easy for me to work with Shelly Silver.\u201d There is also no love lost between Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Cuomo. Asked last month if he and Mr. Cuomo were friends, Mr. Spitzer would say only, \u201cI have a lot of friends.\u201d JOSEPH L. BRUNO, Senate majority leader, Republican: Mr. Bruno, a former Army boxing champion, can give as good as he gets. He has called the governor a \u201cdictator\u201d and a \u201crich spoiled brat\u201d and described the governor\u2019s staff as \u201choodlums\u201d and \u201cthugs\u201d whose conduct \u201cshould send shivers up the spine of every New Yorker.\u201d Mr. Bruno, 78, is also not fond of his Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Malcolm A. Smith, and once told the governor \u2014 during one of their more memorable blowups \u2014 that Mr. Smith was close to the governor\u2019s posterior. \u201cI don\u2019t respect him for being such a wimp,\u201d Mr. Bruno said of Mr. Smith in a recent radio interview, \u201cfor being a wholly owned subsidiary.\u201d SHELDON SILVER , Assembly speaker, Democrat: After years of feuding with Gov. George E. Pataki, Mr. Silver is relishing \u2014 some critics say too much \u2014 playing the role of negotiator between the warring Spitzer and Bruno camps. \u201cI kind of feel like Henry Kissinger used to feel in the Middle East, doing shuttle diplomacy between the two of them,\u201d he said in a recent WNBC-TV interview. Mr. Bruno chafed at that suggestion. \u201cSilver has not been a go-between,\u201d he said. \u201cIf he has, he\u2019s a dismal failure. All he is doing is feathering his own nest, making excuses for his own inactivity.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s a peacemaker? That\u2019s news to me,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019re at peace?\u201d Mr. Silver rebutted the next day, saying, \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t successful, he\u2019s the reason I wasn\u2019t successful.\u201d ASSEMBLY DEMOCRATS: The majority party in the Assembly, the Democrats were elated when the governor was elected, giving them a fellow Democrat in the executive branch for the first time in a dozen years. And now? Not so much. The governor called out Assembly Democrats for a \u201cstunning lack of integrity\u201d in February when they picked one of their own, Thomas P. DiNapoli of Long Island, as state comptroller. Mr. Spitzer even brought the criticism home to some legislators\u2019 districts, telling The Syracuse Post-Standard that local Assemblyman William B. Magnarelli \u201cjust raises his hand when he\u2019s told to do so.\u201d Returning the favor, Democratic lawmakers now openly bemoan the governor\u2019s bellicosity. \u201cWe\u2019ve been to hell,\u201d Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow, a Westchester Democrat, said in a recent interview, \u201care we coming back?\u201d ATTORNEY GENERAL ANDREW M. CUOMO , Democrat: The governor is not the only top Democrat rankled by Mr. Cuomo, whose office is conducting a sweeping investigation of Mr. DiNapoli\u2019s office. The investigation is focused on the tenure of Mr. DiNapoli\u2019s predecessor as comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, but Mr. Cuomo\u2019s investigators have strained relations by questioning Mr. DiNapoli\u2019s communications director, Dennis Tompkins, for several hours under oath. With Republicans, meanwhile, Mr. Cuomo appears to be getting along swimmingly. \u201cHe has been fair and diligent and doing a really good job on a lot of fronts,\u201d Mr. Bruno told The New York Sun of Mr. Cuomo. Such warmth has irritated the Spitzer camp, which views Mr. Cuomo with wariness. And some Democrats are wondering whether he will challenge the governor in a primary. MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG , Unaffiliated: All the money in the world \u2014 or at least enough to rank 25th on the Forbes list of the richest Americans \u2014 does not seem to help the mayor much in Albany. A former Republican, he has been the largest individual contributor to Senate Republicans. Mr. Silver, the Democrat, keeps throwing roadblocks in front of the mayor\u2019s projects \u2014 from the West Side football stadium to, more recently, his congestion pricing plan. Mr. Silver, who is from Lower Manhattan, has said the mayor \u201cinsists that he is the city.\u201d More recently, the mayor\u2019s generally peaceable relationship with the governor was breached. After the mayor voiced some concerns about Mr. Spitzer\u2019s controversial proposal to give driver\u2019s licenses to illegal immigrants, the governor said Mr. Bloomberg was \u201cwrong at every level \u2014 dead wrong, factually wrong, legally wrong, morally wrong, ethically wrong.\u201d Mr. Bloomberg seemed to warm up last weekend when the governor revised his plan so it would include three kinds of licenses, with one available to illegal immigrants, calling it a \u201cstep in the right direction.\u201d The bonhomie lasted four days. On Thursday, the mayor said that after further consideration the new plan was still not \u201cwhere we should be.\u201d And in the unkindest cut, when asked if he agreed with the governor\u2019s bitter nemesis on the issue, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, the mayor said; \u201cLou is an old friend of mine that I agree with seldom, but nevertheless in this case, Lou happens to be right.\u201d", "keyword": "Politics and Government;Spitzer Eliot L;New York State"}
{"id": "ny0146326", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/07/27", "title": "Norman Dello Joio, Prolific and Popular Composer, Is Dead at 95", "abstract": "Norman Dello Joio, a composer who achieved wide popularity in the mid-20th century with a proliferation of essentially tonal, lyrical works, died on Thursday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 95. His death was announced by Carl Fischer Music, one of his publishers. Mr. Dello Joio wrote dozens of pieces each for chorus, orchestra, solo voice, chamber groups and piano, as well as scores for television and three operas. Church music, the popular tunes of the jazz age and 19th-century Italian opera were all influences on his style, which could be both austere and colorful. In defining his musical approach, Mr. Dello Joio cited the advice of a teacher, the composer Paul Hindemith, that he should never forget that his music was \u201clyrical by nature.\u201d That meant, \u201cDon\u2019t sacrifice necessarily to a system,\u201d Mr. Dello Joio said on his Web site. \u201cIf it\u2019s valid, and it\u2019s good, put it down in your mind. Don\u2019t say, \u2018I have to do this because the system tells me to.\u2019 No, that\u2019s a mistake.\u201d He said he took the advice to heart, and jokingly called himself an \u201carch-conservative.\u201d A strong spiritual bent emerged in his composing, and the story of Joan of Arc became a major theme. He wrote an opera called \u201cThe Triumph of Joan,\u201d which he withdrew after a student performance in 1950 at Sarah Lawrence College, saying he was dissatisfied with the work. In its wake came \u201cThe Trial at Rouen,\u201d a new St. Joan opera written for television. He revised it for the New York City Opera, under the title \u201cThe Triumph of St. Joan,\u201d and later derived a symphonic piece from the first version. Mr. Dello Joio said he was first drawn to the subject by a children\u2019s book on the lives of the saints, which he found in an organ loft at age 12. \u201cThe timelessness and universality of Joan as a symbol lay in the eternal problem of the individual\u2019s struggle to reconcile his personal beliefs with what he is expected to believe,\u201d Mr. Dello Joio wrote in a 1956 article in The New York Times. \u201cDaily, for ages, she has challenged men to have her courage.\u201d Mr. Dello Joio won awards throughout his career, gathering a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his piece \u201cMeditations on Ecclesiastes\u201d for string orchestra and an Emmy in 1965 for a TV series, \u201cThe Louvre,\u201d on NBC. He also wrote works for ballet; Martha Graham choreographed a number of them. The jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw commissioned a concerto from him. Mr. Dello Joio taught variously at Sarah Lawrence, the Mannes College of Music and Boston University, where he was a dean of the School of Fine and Applied Arts. He also helped to establish a program at the Ford Foundation that placed young composers in residence in high schools. Mr. Dello Joio was born on Jan. 24, 1913, and reared in New York City. His father was a vocal coach, a church organist and his first keyboard teacher. (He recalled that he used to see Metropolitan Opera stars arrive in Rolls-Royces at his house for coaching.) At 12, he was substituting for his father at the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Manhattan. By 14, he was organist and choir director at St. Mary Star of the Sea Church on City Island. He also studied organ with his godfather, Pietro Yon, who was the organist at St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral. He studied composition at the Juilliard School and with Hindemith at Yale and the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood . Mr. Dello Joio\u2019s first marriage, to Grayce Baumgold, ended in divorce. In 1974 he married Barbara Bolton, who survives him, along with his sons, Justin Dello Joio, a composer, and Norman Dello Joio, a champion equestrian jumper; his daughter, Victoria Dello Joio, a martial arts master teacher; two stepchildren, Ned Costello and Kathleen Bar-Tur; and three grandchildren.", "keyword": "Joio Norman Dello;Classical Music;Deaths (Obituaries);Music"}
{"id": "ny0216487", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/04/09", "title": "The Pulse: Prime Parking Space Is Opening Up", "abstract": "Mayor Richard M. Daley \u2019s administration is planning to remove rush-hour parking restrictions on some of Chicago\u2019s busiest streets. City officials say the move will help businesses and make those streets safer, but it also appears likely to slow traffic and generate more money for the private company that runs the city\u2019s parking meters. Transportation Department officials sent letters to aldermen last month informing them of the change. In a letter to Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), the city said rush-hour restrictions would end on stretches of North Clybourn and Lincoln Avenues that have meters and \u201cpay and display\u201d parking fee boxes. The restrictions had prevented motorists from parking at the metered spaces from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays. In the letter, Thomas H. Powers, the acting transportation commissioner, said the change would make those streets safer for pedestrians. \u201cOn-street parking has been shown to reduce vehicle travel speeds, as parked cars create a visual narrowing of the roadway for drivers,\u201d Mr. Powers wrote. \u201cPedestrian safety is improved because of the lower travel speeds, and because the parked cars act as a buffer between the sidewalk and the active travel lane.\u201d Mr. Waguespack remained unconvinced after meeting this week with Transportation Department staff members. \u201cIs this about safety or about increasing revenue for the parking company?\u201d he said. Mr. Waguespack was one of only five City Council members who cast a dissenting vote when the Council approved the $1.15 billion, 75-year parking meter privatization deal in 2008. Brian Steele, the Transportation Department spokesman, said the city studied traffic patterns before deciding where rush hour restrictions are no longer needed. ", "keyword": "Parking;Roads and Traffic;Daley Richard M;Waguespack Scott;Feller Bob;Chicago White Sox"}
{"id": "ny0050058", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/10/27", "title": "Christians of Mosul Find Haven in Jordan", "abstract": "AMMAN, Jordan \u2014 They were among the final holdouts. Even as many of their neighbors fled the violence that engulfed Iraq after the American invasion, the three men stayed put, refusing to give up on their country or their centuries-old Christian community. Maythim Najib, 37, stayed despite being kidnapped and stabbed 12 times in what he believed was a random attack. Radwan Shamra, 35, continued to hope he could survive the sectarian war between his Sunni and Shiite countrymen even after losing two friends shot by an unknown gunman who left their bodies sprawled in a Mosul street. And a 74-year-old too frightened to give his name said he remained despite the trauma of spending three anguished days in 2007 waiting to learn if his kidnapped 17-year-old son was dead or alive. Now all three men from Mosul, Iraq\u2019s second-largest city, and its environs have fled with their families to Jordan , forced out by Islamic State fighters who left them little choice. After capturing the city in June , the Sunni militant group gave Christians a day to make up their minds: convert, pay a tax, or be killed. It was \u201cthe last breath,\u201d said Mr. Shamra, one of 4,000 Iraqi Christians from Mosul who have come to Jordan in the past three months and one of more than 50 people sheltering in St. Ephraim Syrian Orthodox Church in Amman. \u201cWe waited as long as possible until we knew we would die if we remained.\u201d Their flight is part of a larger exodus of Christians leaving those Arab lands where religious intolerance is on the rise, a trend that has caused concern among Christians outside the region \u2014 including the pope. It has also captured the attention of King Abdullah II of Jordan, a close American ally who has made the need for the continued presence of multiple religions in the Middle East a major talking point in recent years. So when fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, stormed into Mosul, the Jordanian government threw open the country to Iraq\u2019s Christians despite rising tensions in Jordan over waves of Syrian refugees whose presence has increasingly burdened ill-prepared communities. Hasan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian political analyst, said the government\u2019s decision was both humanitarian and strategic, at a time when Jordan is edgy over Islamist militants on its borders and anxious to keep its bonds with the West strong. \u201cThe government can show the world that Jordan has a policy that seeks to protect minorities, unlike its neighbors,\u201d he said. The Iraqi Christians also benefited from the fact that Jordan\u2019s small Christian community maintains good relations with its majority Sunni neighbors and mobilized quickly to help the refugees, many of whom were crammed into camps in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Also crucial was the intervention of Caritas , an international Christian charity that has spent years in Jordan serving displaced Palestinians , poor Jordanians and others. The group worked to let Iraq\u2019s Christians know that Jordan was opening up to them. Payment for visas was waived, and Caritas and Jordan\u2019s churches said they would provide for refugees\u2019 basic needs. Refugees did, however, have to pay for their own flights on Royal Jordanian Airlines from Erbil, in Iraq, to Amman. About 500 of the new and often traumatized Christian refugees now live in community halls in seven churches in Amman and nearby Zarqa, trying hard to make do in places with little privacy or even enough basic necessities like toilets. Many of the other refugees are living several families to an apartment or house, paying the rent with their own money or with aid from Caritas. Still, they are relatively lucky, aid workers say. One of the lures to come here was the promise of being able to more quickly obtain refugee status that might allow them to leave the region. At the Mary, Mother of the Church in Amman, where dozens of the Christian refugees reside, suitcases lay on top of each other to save space. Thin mattresses with floral designs are spread across the floor and wet garments hang from windows to dry. The children, still afraid of their new surroundings, rarely wander off without their parents, even to play. \u201cI ask them to tell me what they saw, how they feel now,\u201d said Khalil Jaar, a priest in the parish. \u201cI try to give them hope by telling them about the resilience of refugees in the past.\u201d Besides providing shelter, the church feeds the refugees, doling out hearty portions of rice and vegetables paid for by charities or from donations from Jordanians. Like the approximately 620,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan and more than 30,000 other Iraqi refugees , the latest arrivals are not allowed to work \u2014 an attempt to ensure they do not stay forever in a country that previously granted citizenship to a large population of displaced Palestinians. To while away the time, the men play backgammon, drink tea together or help with chores at the church\u2019s school. The women spend their time mainly caring for their children and helping prepare meals. Mostly, they are haunted by the abrupt end to their lives in Iraq, and to a Christian tradition that had survived in Mosul for more than 1,700 years. Saif Jebrita, a photographer, said he knew it was time to leave when he went to open his shop days after ISIS declared victory and found a notice from the militants demanding that he abandon his profession. The group claims that images are against Islam. \u201cIt\u2019s the only thing I know how to do, and they wanted to destroy it,\u201d he said recently as his two young sons stood next to him, fidgeting with broken toy dinosaurs. At St. Ephraim, the 74-year-old who was too anxious to give his name said his greatest worry was the safety of his older son, who remains in Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. A younger son, the one who had been kidnapped, is with him, having survived that earlier ordeal. To show what the family had been through, the elderly man carefully laid out photos of his old home on one of the only flat surfaces he has, next to the toothpaste and a small broken mirror. A neighbor sent the photos after the family fled. A letter N for Nazrene, a term used for Christians in the Quran, is spray painted twice on the stone wall surrounding the home, which also is now marked Property of the Islamic State. Mr. Najib, the man who survived the stabbing, said his 8-year-old daughter did not understand that there was nothing to go back to, and had been crying a lot recently, asking to go home. He bemoaned the loss of Mosul\u2019s Christian community. Under the Islamic State, \u201cdiversity is dead or at least dying,\u201d he said. Mr. Jebrita, the photographer, shared his despair. \u201cWe are very much part of the Arab culture, we are citizens of Iraq,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat do we go back to? There is no home, and if this continues, there will be no country.\u201d", "keyword": "Jordan;Refugees,Internally Displaced People;Christianity;ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State;Iraq;King of Jordan Abdullah II"}
{"id": "ny0047716", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/11/19", "title": "Washington: F.A.A. Rules Found to Apply to Unmanned Aircraft", "abstract": "The National Transportation Safety Board ruled Tuesday that the Federal Aviation Administration has the authority to apply to unmanned aircraft its longstanding rules against \u201creckless or careless use\u201d of aircraft. In making the decision, the safety board sent its first case involving an F.A.A. fine against a drone back to an administrative law judge to determine whether the flight in question was \u201ccareless or reckless.\u201d The case involved the use of an unmanned aircraft in 2011 to make a video for the University of Virginia. The F.A.A. said the remote pilot, Raphael Pirker, had, among other maneuvers, flown his model aircraft directly toward a person standing on a sidewalk, \u201ccausing the individual to take immediate evasive maneuvers.\u201d", "keyword": "Drones;FAA;NTSB;Airlines,airplanes"}
{"id": "ny0083314", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2015/10/26", "title": "Start-Ups Take On Challenge of Nuclear Fusion", "abstract": "A group of start-ups is promising a new and virtually unlimited source of power, one that produces none of the gases scientists say contribute to global warming. The only problem? A way to harness the energy source, nuclear fusion \u2014 the reaction that gives birth to sunlight \u2014 still needs to be invented. Such an achievement has long evaded government scientists and university researchers, despite decades of work and billions of dollars in research. But backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and some of the wealthiest people in the technology industry, a handful of young companies say they can succeed where government has fallen short. Nuclear fusion is one of many areas of science and energy now getting the backing of venture capitalists . The investor dollars coming into fusion start-ups, like those in many areas of science, still pale in comparison with the money spent by governments. But signs of progress, including some results that have eclipsed government projects, have generated hope among some scientists that the companies could help develop a fusion reactor within their lifetimes. At the very least, they talk a confident game \u2014 even though the history of fusion science is littered with frustration and false starts. Some fusion scientists, unable to evaluate the start-ups\u2019 unpublished scientific results, doubt the companies\u2019 chances. \u201cThe fusion era is here and coming,\u201d said William D. Lese, a managing partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm with a stake in General Fusion, one of the leading start-ups in the field. \u201cThe increase in activity in this space is perhaps a sign of that.\u201d Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms are squeezed together so tightly that they merge. That single, larger atom releases a tremendous amount of energy. This happens naturally at the center of the sun, where gravity easily crushes hydrogen into helium, spewing forth the sunlight that reaches Earth. But on Earth, making hydrogen hot and dense enough to sustain a controlled fusion reaction \u2014 one that does not detonate like a thermonuclear bomb \u2014 has been a challenge. The potential upsides of the power, though, provide a huge incentive. Fusion reactions release no carbon dioxide. Their fuel, derived from water, is abundant. Compared with contemporary nuclear reactors, which produce energy by splitting atoms apart, a fusion plant would produce little radioactive waste. The possibilities have attracted Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com . He has invested in General Fusion , a start-up in British Columbia, through Bezos Expeditions , the firm that manages his venture capital investments. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is betting on another fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles, through his venture arm, Vulcan Capital. Peter Thiel \u2014 the co-founder of PayPal, who once lamented the superficiality of the technology sector by saying, \u201cWe were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters\u201d \u2014 has invested in a third fusion start-up, Helion Energy , based near Seattle, through Mithril Capital Management. Government money fueled a surge in fusion research in the 1970s, but the fusion budget was cut nearly in half over the next decade. Federal research narrowed on what scientists saw as the most promising prototype \u2014 a machine called a tokamak, which uses magnets to contain and fuse a spinning, doughnut-shape cloud of hydrogen. Today\u2019s start-ups are trying to perfect some of the ideas that the government left by the wayside. After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1990s, Michl Binderbauer had trouble securing federal funds to research an alternative approach to fusion that the American government briefly explored \u2014 one that adds the element boron into the hydrogen fuel. The advantage of the mixture is that the reaction does not fling off neutrons that, like shrapnel, can wear down machine parts and make them radioactive. Mr. Binderbauer, along with his Ph.D. adviser, Norman Rostoker, founded Tri Alpha Energy, eventually raising money from the venture capital arms of Mr. Allen and the Rockefeller family. The company has raised over $200 million. Image The C-2U machine at Tri Alpha Energy in California was used to superheat a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and hold it for five milliseconds, a milestone in fusion technology. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times \u201cWe basically said, \u201cWhat would an ideal reactor look like?\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Binderbauer, who is now the company\u2019s chief technology officer. Mr. Rostoker died late last year . General Fusion is pursuing an approach that uses pistons to generate shock waves through the hydrogen gas. Compressed hard enough, the hydrogen atoms will begin to fuse. General Fusion has raised about $74 million from private investors and another $20 million from the Canadian government. Its reactor concept, like that of Tri Alpha Energy, would yield power plants much smaller than a commercially viable tokamak, which would need to be larger than many stadiums are in order to work. General Fusion\u2019s idea to compress a ball of hydrogen, too, is borrowed from a government project aborted decades ago. The company\u2019s innovation on that approach is to use cannon-size pistons for the compression. Critics in the nuclear physics field say it is unlikely start-ups will succeed with these alternative approaches. \u201cThey just keep pounding on the same dead horse,\u201d said Edward C. Morse, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. \u201cWhat happens in fusion is that the same ideas pop up every two decades. It\u2019s like a game of Wac-A-Mole.\u201d In addition, private funds cannot match those of the most ambitious government fusion energy project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER , a stadium-size tokamak being built in France by the European Union, along with the United States and five other nations, for about $14 billion. The United States is committed to funding about 9 percent of the project. Still, the Energy Department is also hedging its bet, granting $30 million to alternative fusion projects, including Helion Energy, which received $4 million. \u201cIn all of our selections, it\u2019s not about a start-up versus something else,\u201d said Eric A. Rohlfing, deputy director for technology of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the government agency that made the grants. \u201cIt\u2019s about the quality of the idea.\u201d The start-ups counter critics by saying that they can be more efficient than government projects. When Tri Alpha Energy\u2019s panel of outside advisers visited the construction site of the company\u2019s lab in 2007, the concrete was still being poured. Some advisers doubted the company would be conducting experiments within a year, as Mr. Binderbauer said they would. But by the following year, the machine was ready. \u201cWhen I walked these guys out there to see that, their jaws dropped,\u201d Mr. Binderbauer said. \u201cI do recall being surprised by how fast they said they would get the facility ready,\u201d said Burton Richter, a professor emeritus at Stanford and Nobel laureate in physics who advised Tri Alpha Energy. This past June, Tri Alpha reached a new milestone: Its machine superheated a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and held it for five milliseconds \u2014 much longer than government projects achieved using the same method. \u201cYou may ask: \u2018Five milliseconds? That\u2019s nothing.\u2019 Certainly, that\u2019s the blink of an eye to a layperson,\u201d Mr. Binderbauer said. \u201cBut in our field, that\u2019s half an eternity.\u201d His next goal is to increase that temperature tenfold. Other fusion efforts have set even more ambitious goals. When Lockheed Martin announced its own fusion project last year, the company said it expected to build a prototype within five years. But history would suggest that struggles lie ahead. For example, the American government\u2019s other major approach to fusion, used by a California lab that fires 192 giant lasers at a container holding hydrogen to compress and fuse it, missed a 2012 deadline for achieving ignition, the point at which a reaction produces more energy than was used by the lasers that began it. (The researchers did achieve an intermediary step toward ignition in September 2013.) That checkered past is not stopping the start-ups. \u201cWe\u2019re moving very quickly,\u201d said Michael Delage, vice president for strategy at General Fusion. \u201cIs it two years away? Three years away? Four years away? Maybe. We\u2019ll let you know when we get there.\u201d", "keyword": "Nuclear energy;Venture capital;Nuclear fusion;Startup;Research"}
{"id": "ny0166406", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/08/01", "title": "Brooklyn: Ferry Captain's Suit Dismissed", "abstract": "Judge I. Leo Glasser of Federal District Court dismissed a lawsuit against the city yesterday filed last year by the captain of the Staten Island ferry that crashed in October 2003, killing 11 passengers. The captain, Michael J. Gansas, who was fired after he refused to talk to investigators about the crash, asserted in legal papers that he had been made a scapegoat for the accident and sought reinstatement to his job with back pay or a city agreement to arbitrate his claims. He contended that city officials falsely claimed that he had violated regulations requiring two captains in the pilot house when a ferry is docking. A lawyer for Mr. Gansas did not return a call seeking comment.", "keyword": "Suits and Litigation;Battery Park City Authority;Brooklyn (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0159831", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/12/25", "title": "Former Iraqi Parliament Speaker Spreads Blame", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 The former speaker of the Iraqi Parliament on Wednesday blamed political infighting for his downfall, as the Parliament\u2019s leading Sunni coalition appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The former speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, whose resignation on Tuesday ended a stormy tenure of nearly three years, also criticized the United States, saying it had \u201chanded us a ruined state.\u201d During a wide-ranging news conference, Mr. Mashhadani said his bloc in Parliament, the National Dialogue Council, would immediately pull out of the Iraqi Consensus Front, the coalition of Arab Sunni groups in Parliament. Also known as Tawafiq, the front has been a crucial counterweight to the Shiite majority in Parliament. Another Sunni group in Parliament, the Independence Bloc, also announced Wednesday that it would leave the Consensus Front. The withdrawal of the two groups would reduce membership in the front to 27 from roughly 40 in the 275-member Parliament. But a spokesman for the Consensus Front, Salim al-Joburi, said Wednesday that the coalition would remain vibrant. \u201cWe express our regret for the withdrawal, but we maintain that our front is solid and active,\u201d said Mr. Joburi, who is also a member of Parliament. Mr. Mashhadani said during Wednesday\u2019s news conference that he had been forced to resign as part of a plot by several parliamentary blocs to depose Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki \u2019s Shiite-led government. During an interview afterward, he named the groups as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is Shiite, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is Sunni, and the Kurdish Alliance. The prime minister leads Dawa, another Shiite party. \u201cThey are hoping that after my resignation, it will be easier for them to dismiss Maliki,\u201d Mr. Mashhadani said. But Yasin Majid, the press adviser to the prime minister, dismissed that assertion. \u201cWe don\u2019t agree with Mashhadani\u2019s analysis about an attempt to force Maliki to step down,\u201d he said. Fuad Ma\u2019sum, leader of the Kurdish Alliance in Parliament, also rejected the notion of a plot. \u201cOur relationship with Prime Minister Maliki and the Dawa Party is good in spite of some political disagreement,\u201d Mr. Ma\u2019sum said. \u201cPrime Minister Maliki\u2019s government has our trust.\u201d Mr. Mashhadani, known as an outspoken and mercurial figure among his colleagues, quit during a heated parliamentary session last week, but hours later rescinded his resignation. He had quit as speaker and changed his mind at least once before. But this week, his colleagues threatened to depose him by majority vote if he did not leave. Mr. Mashhadani had particularly harsh words for the United States\u2019 performance in Iraq . He had not previously been known as a strong critic, but on Wednesday, Mr. Mashhadani described American troops as \u201chateful occupation forces\u201d who were \u201cdestroying everything in Iraq.\u201d \u201cThey handed us a ruined state,\u201d he said, blaming the American occupation for the subsequent sectarian violence that Iraq has only recently begun to emerge from. The former speaker added, however, that the status of forces agreement signed between Iraq and the United States in November had been a significant embarrassment for the United States. \u201cThe Iraqi people forced the American forces to sign a humiliating withdrawal agreement,\u201d he said. Finally, Mr. Mashhadani had harsh words even for himself and his former party, which he said had \u201cachieved nothing\u201d except to arrange for him to live in \u201ca palace\u201d and to \u201cprovide bodyguards that close roads for us.\u201d", "keyword": "Iraq;Politics and Government;Maliki Nuri Kamal al-;Status of Forces Agreements;Iraq War (2003- );Sunni Muslims;Shiite Muslims;United States Armament and Defense"}
{"id": "ny0119520", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/07/29", "title": "France Reflects on Role in Rounding Up Jews for Death Camps", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 Early on a Thursday morning in July 1942, more than 4,000 police officers set out in pairs through the streets of occupied Paris, carrying arrest orders for scores of Jewish men, women and children. Within days, 13,152 people had been rounded up for deportation to death camps. No more than 100 would survive. The mass arrests, the largest in wartime France , were planned and carried out not by the Nazi occupiers but by the French. That difficult reality, for years denied, obscured, willfully ignored or forgotten, is now increasingly accepted here, historians and French officials say, part of a broader reckoning with France\u2019s uncomfortable wartime past. The 70th anniversary of that dark episode \u2014 known as the Vel d\u2019Hiv roundup, after the arena where many of those arrested were taken \u2014 has brought a flurry of commemorations this month, with official ceremonies, museum exhibits, wide news media coverage and an address by President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande . Perhaps most telling, though, is a modest installation at the municipal hall of the Third Arrondissement in central Paris, where the national police are exhibiting for the first time the documents that record the operation in cold administrative detail. For decades after the war, historians say, the police resisted a public accounting of their actions under the German occupation and the collaborationist Vichy government, restricting access to their archives as they struggled with the same tangle of pride, guilt and shame that marked much of French society. The police were especially reticent, said Tal Bruttmann, a scholar of the Vichy period, \u201cbecause it was they who conducted the arrests.\u201d The exhibit in the municipal hall is symbolic of a memory that has been largely \u201csoothed,\u201d Mr. Bruttmann said. \u201cIt means that they are taking responsibility for this history.\u201d Beneath the hall\u2019s marble pillars and gilded cupola, visitors can examine the nine-page police circular, marked secret, that specified non-French Jews as the targets of the operation, men ages 16 to 60 and women 16 to 55. \u201cChildren of less than 16 years will be led away at the same time as the parents,\u201d the yellowing paper reads. \u201cThe teams charged with the arrests will have to proceed with the most possible speed, without useless words and without comment,\u201d the directive said. \u201cFurthermore, at the moment of the arrest, the well-foundedness or ill-foundedness of this arrest is not to be discussed.\u201d Buses were to take those arrested to the transit camp at Drancy or to the V\u00e9lodrome d\u2019Hiver, the cavernous indoor bicycle arena in the 15th Arrondissement. The circular took care to insist that the bus windows \u201cmust remain closed.\u201d Also on display is a note dated July 21, 1942, five days after the roundup began, pronouncing a grim arithmetic: \u201cMen: 3,118; women: 5,919; children: 4,115; or in total: 13,152 arrests.\u201d Despite the scale of the Vel d\u2019Hiv operation, researchers have found few official papers that document it. In the name of national unity, the postwar French government ordered all documents linked to the treatment of Jews during the occupation destroyed, a sort of imposed national forgetting. (Another display case shows a 1946 directive to prefects across the country, instructing that \u201cthere must no longer remain any trace of the exceptional legislation instituted under the occupation, and all the documents based upon the Jewish status must be destroyed.\u201d) For reasons that are not clear, though, the records of two police commissariats in the Third Arrondissement were spared and apparently forgotten. They were rediscovered by chance about a decade ago. The display is largely the work of Charles Tremil, 77, a retiree who heads a local historical association and who petitioned the police administration to allow the documents to be shown. His mother and older brother were arrested on July 16, 1942; they died at Auschwitz. Mr. Tremil, then a young boy, hid outside Paris during the war. The police administration is \u201cconscious of the duty of memory that is incumbent upon it,\u201d Bernard Boucault, the Paris police prefect, said at the inauguration of the exhibit this month. Mr. Tremil, speaking of the display, said: \u201cThe police prefecture had the courage to do it. A few years ago, it would not have been possible.\u201d Police ties to difficult wartime realities are not limited to the Vel d\u2019Hiv roundup. Maurice Papon , for instance, a former Vichy administrator, served as Paris police prefect after the war, before being convicted in 1998 of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity. The first official recognition of broad French culpability for the Vel d\u2019Hiv roundup came only in 1995, when President Jacques Chirac , on the anniversary of the operation, spoke of the nation\u2019s \u201ccollective wrongdoing.\u201d Since then, France has taken pains to address that dark chapter. A government commission set up in 1999 has paid compensation to tens of thousands of families whose property was seized during the war, for instance. \u201cTo the Jewish martyrs of the V\u00e9lodrome d\u2019Hiver, we owe the truth about what happened 70 years ago,\u201d Mr. Hollande said last Sunday at the site of the arena, the Winter Velodrome, which was demolished long ago. \u201cThe truth is that the crime was committed in France, by France.\u201d In doing so, Mr. Hollande broke with his mentor and the hero of the French left, Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand , who refused to acknowledge broad French responsibility for the operation. Mr. Mitterrand, who worked as a low-level Vichy administrator before joining the resistance, declared when he was president in 1992, \u201cLet us not ask for an accounting from the Republic.\u201d Mr. Mitterrand insisted on a distinction between an ideal, irreproachable Republic and a traitorous wartime \u201cFrench state,\u201d and the semantics remain contentious. Mr. Hollande\u2019s references simply to \u201cFrance\u201d drew criticism from some opposition politicians who said he was assigning guilt too broadly. Pascale Hassoun, 69, a psychologist, visited the police exhibit the day it opened. \u201cIt authenticates things,\u201d she said softly in the echoing marble hall. Ms. Hassoun\u2019s family \u201cdid not want to be completely aware\u201d of the horrors carried out during the war, she said. \u201cThe first reflex is to not know,\u201d Ms. Hassoun said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a denial, it\u2019s rather a willful ignorance. \u201cWe need to learn to live with this stain,\u201d she said, as the country\u2019s past cannot be expiated. \u201cWe will never be able to do enough.\u201d", "keyword": "France;Jews and Judaism;Hollande Francois;Deportation;Holocaust and the Nazi Era"}
{"id": "ny0205136", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2009/01/10", "title": "Giants Liven Up Final Practice Before Playoff Game Against Eagles", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 Early in practice Friday morning at Giants Stadium, the defensive linemen gathered in a shady corner for drills near a newly mounted metal sign that said \u201cNFL Playoffs.\u201d Everything was quiet \u2014 too quiet. Suddenly, there came the rattling sound of a dozen big fists pounding the metal sign as if it were a punching bag. \u201cWe just like making a loud noise,\u201d said Justin Tuck , a defensive end. \u201cIt was cold outside and guys were kind of down at first. So we just wanted to hype it up and get some spirit going.\u201d This was the Giants \u2019 last long workout before they begin their defense of their Super Bowl title on Sunday by hosting Philadelphia in an N.F.C. divisional playoff game. The Giants do not usually practice on the main field, but Coach Tom Coughlin wanted his players to have a feel for the weather with cold and snow in the weekend forecast. Over all, the mood seemed chipper, the drills as crisp as the air. As the team began work, a helicopter hovered over the stadium, circling a little, dipping and twisting. Antonio Pierce, the veteran linebacker, took notice. \u201cWho was that, was that Andy Reid again?\u201d Pierce said, referring to the Eagles\u2019 coach. COUGHLIN PICKS A SLOGAN Tom Coughlin gave his players T-shirts this week bearing the message \u201cCut It Off.\u201d It is a reference to a scene in the adventure movie \u201cMen of Honor\u201d in which a hero has to have his leg amputated. Coughlin said the thought was to motivate players to do whatever is needed to succeed. TUCK WANTS TO PLAY Justin Tuck said he would play on Sunday against the Eagles, but said that his injured lower right leg had not healed. \u201cIt would be an all-perfect world if I could be healthy, but I\u2019m not,\u201d Tuck said. \u201cI\u2019m playing Sunday and that\u2019s all that matters. Obviously, I\u2019m not injured. Obviously, I\u2019m banged up. I\u2019m looking forward to the opportunity.\u201d Defensive tackle Fred Robbins, who missed the final regular-season game with a sore shoulder, is expected to play. Zak DeOssie (sore back), a backup linebacker and punt snapper, was listed as probable. Offensive tackle Jon Runyan of the Eagles was listed as questionable and did not practice on Friday. Running back Brian Westbrook was listed as probable. GETTING READY FOR SNOW Jim Minish, executive vice president for facilities of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, said Friday that about 300 snow-shovelers would report to Giants Stadium beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday to clear seats. While the Giants practiced Friday, stadium workers tossed salt on the concrete steps and aisles. NO DECISION ON KICKER After practice Friday, Lawrence Tynes was asked if he would share kicking duties with John Carney. Because Carney\u2019s kickoffs have been growing shorter, Coach Tom Coughlin has considered using Tynes for kickoffs and long field goals and Carney for extra points and short field goals. \u201cI would love to know today, but I won\u2019t know until 10:30 on Sunday,\u201d Tynes said. \u201cI would like to contribute, even if it\u2019s just kicking off.\u201d After adding that he did not think he would play, Tynes said: \u201cI thought there would be some indicators and there really hasn\u2019t been. I\u2019m not anticipating it. If I am told I\u2019m playing, I\u2019m 100 percent healthy.\u201d After recovering from a preseason knee injury shortly before midseason, Tynes dressed for only two games, handling just kickoffs in one and both kickoffs and placekicks in the other. Tynes and Carney talked Friday about how cold weather affected a kicked ball. Referring to the tricky winter wind patterns of Giants Stadium, Carney said: \u201cIt was different today than it was yesterday. Almost the opposite.\u201d Tynes said cold weather shortened kickoffs by seven to eight yards. \u201cIt also affects hang time,\u201d he said. \u201cThe ball is not going to compress off your foot like it would if it\u2019s warm.\u201d SOME TURNED DOWN TICKETS Pat Hanlon, the Giants\u2019 vice-president for communications, said a few thousand tickets for Sunday\u2019s game were turned down by season-ticket holders who had the right to buy them. Instead, they were sold to fans on the waiting list for season tickets. When asked whether this was a sign of declining economic conditions, Hanlon said it was not unusual for tickets to be sold that way for a playoff game.", "keyword": "Football;New York Giants;Tuck Justin;Coughlin Tom"}
{"id": "ny0122469", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/09/28", "title": "An Oxonian Challenges Euro-Skeptics", "abstract": "WOODSTOCK, ENGLAND \u2014 The setting was quintessentially English: the library of Blenheim Palace, one of the loveliest old stately homes and birthplace of Winston Churchill. Hundreds of diners admiring the lofty ceilings, portraits and stacks of books had arrived from a two-day conference at Christ Church, Oxford, another venerable station of England\u2019s heritage. The speaker for the occasion had the rounded vowels and rich tones of the well-educated, well-to-do Englishman. Indeed, as he reminded his audience, he had himself studied at Oxford. But this was no Englishman, in fact, and his message was distinctly unrepresentative of what a sizable slice of the English political class would like to think of as its creed. Radek Sikorski, foreign minister of Poland , and a former award-winning journalist for The Times of London, had come, he said, to reflect \u201con a subject of considerable British domestic sensitivity: the U.K.\u2019s membership in the European Union .\u201d And, as he boldly put it, \u201cI want to try to change some minds.\u201d Just days earlier, Mr. Sikorski and his German counterpart, Guido Westerwelle, had laid out \u2014 in the International Herald Tribune, and in a later published paper \u2014 a vision of what an even more integrated Europe might be. They talked of a European Monetary Fund, a strengthened European foreign and diplomatic service, the removal of national vetoes over E.U. foreign policy decisions, and plenty more. But Mr. Sikorski, whose trajectory has mirrored that of his country in terms of its growing stability and embrace of Europe, and who could be an obvious candidate for a larger European office, chose not to advance that European agenda in advocacy terms. Instead, he seemed genuinely worried that Britain , the country that harbored him, an outcast from martial-law Poland, in the 1980s, is carelessly turning its back on Europe, regardless of its need for European ties. Mr. Sikorski started out by noting that the latest YouGov survey indicated that 67 percent of Britons supported holding a referendum on E.U. membership \u2014 a step further than the vote on relations with the Union that Prime Minister David Cameron has dangled before restive euro-skeptics in his party. \u201cDon\u2019t do it,\u201d Mr. Sikorski stressed, noting that as a refugee from Soviet-era Poland, a reporter from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, a former scholar at \u201cthe right-wing American Enterprise Institute\u201d and a fan of free markets and Margaret Thatcher, \u201cI tick every box required to be a lifelong member of London\u2019s most powerful euro-skeptics\u2019 club.\u201d Yet, \u201con the contrary, I believe in the logic and justice of the modern European project. And my country, Poland, will do its utmost to help it succeed.\u201d Mr. Sikorski rebutted what he called eight British myths about the European Union: that Britain is drowning in E.U. bureaucracy, directives and laws from Brussels, for example, or bankrupting itself by funding the Union. He stressed that those in favor of quitting Europe would not necessarily be able to negotiate some kind of free trade agreement, because E.U. members would have the upper hand and begrudge such selfishness. Nor would any freedom to maneuver that was gained compensate for the loss of power and influence, he argued. For the moment, Mr. Sikorski took note, his fellow Oxford graduate, Mr. Cameron, \u201ccertainly gets it,\u201d quoting the Conservative leader as telling euro-skeptics: \u201cIf your vision of Britain was that we should just withdraw and become a sort of greater Switzerland, I think that would be a complete denial of our national interests.\u201d But for how long? Perhaps the most interesting thing about the reaction to what Mr. Sikorski termed his reckless interference in British affairs was that it garnered scant attention in Britain. Mr. Sikorski was seated next to David Miliband, the former foreign secretary whose brother now leads the Labour opposition in Britain. Mr. Miliband \u2014 like some top European officials \u2014 congratulated him on the speech, Mr. Sikorski said later by e-mail. He admitted, however, that \u201che was not the one I wanted to convince.\u201d \u201cI wanted to give some arguments to those who want Britain to be an active E.U. member,\u201d Mr. Sikorski wrote. At least some Conservative members of Parliament and others in the party welcome such arguments. One pro-Europe Tory, requesting anonymity, noted bluntly: \u201cWe are in grave danger of putting ourselves on a mindless glide path to exit\u201d Europe. How these Conservatives regain the political initiative as Europe confronts its debt and currency crisis is not clear. Virtually daily reports of unrest in places like Greece and Spain seem to comfort even squeezed Britons, whose aloofness from the euro currency certainly has not insulated them from hard economic times. \u201cAt least we made our own mess\u201d seems the modern echo of Churchillian spirit. Mr. Sikorski had a darker interpretation. \u201cSince I came to these shores over 30 years ago, Britain has become much more European,\u201d he told the dinner audience in Blenheim Palace, a mix of the global crowd mostly inclined to endorse his multilateral case. As evidence, he offered the widespread British adoption of European quilts, double glazing, the Channel tunnel and even better cuisine. \u201cYet your public opinion and your politics is more euro-skeptic than ever,\u201d he added, recalling his Oxford study of \u201cfalse consciousness, which is when the ideological superstructure is out of sync with the economic base.\u201d \u201cBritain today is living with false consciousness,\u201d he intoned. \u201cYour interests are in Europe. It is high time for your sentiments to follow. Your leaders need to make a more vocal case for your European interests. Britain is famous through the ages for its practical good sense and policies based on reality, not myths. We hope you can return to this tradition soon.\u201d", "keyword": "Great Britain;European Union;European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );Euro (Currency);Oxford University;Poland"}
{"id": "ny0027564", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2013/01/19", "title": "Notre Dame Handled Te\u2019o and Seeberg Cases Differently, Some Say", "abstract": "SOUTH BEND, Ind. \u2014 Tom Seeberg, a commercial insurance broker from suburban Chicago, has watched the Manti Te\u2019o case unfold with great interest. What stands out to him, he said, is the level of engagement with which Notre Dame officials dug into the case, even hiring a private investigative firm to determine whether Te\u2019o, the university\u2019s star linebacker, had been the victim of a hoax. In September 2010, Seeberg\u2019s daughter, Lizzy, then a 19-year-old freshman at St. Mary\u2019s College, also in South Bend, accused a Notre Dame football player of sexually assaulting her. Ten days after her accusation, she committed suicide. In a telephone interview, Seeberg said Friday while he was reluctant to draw comparisons between the Te\u2019o tale and his daughter\u2019s case, he, among others, is wondering why Notre Dame began an immediate investigation over a matter that seems to be nothing more than a very embarrassing situation for its star football player. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of amazing that Notre Dame\u2019s done a pretty good job of keeping the lid on Lizzy\u2019s story the last two years,\u201d Seeberg said. \u201cIt\u2019s really because of the B.C.S. championship and now this \u2014 it just sort of amazes me. Now it\u2019s out there again.\u201d When Te\u2019o told Notre Dame officials on Dec. 26 that he had been the victim of a hoax \u2014 that his purported girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, with whom he said he had an online relationship, never actually existed \u2014 the university reacted within hours, hiring an investigative company to look into the matter. It reported its findings after nine days. \u201cOur investigators through their work were able to discover online chatter among the perpetrators that is sort of the ultimate proof of this, the joy they were taking,\u201d Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said this week at a news conference at which he grew emotional. Dennis Brown, a spokesman for Notre Dame, said the university\u2019s approach in the two cases was consistent. He said the campus police investigated the Seeberg complaint immediately and sent a detective to the hospital to interview her as soon as she reported it. \u201cWe\u2019ve acknowledged that we could have acted more quickly in interviewing the accused student,\u201d Brown said Friday, \u201cbut we also felt it was important to be thorough rather than fast, and to avoid a rush to judgment.\u201d According to Brown, \u201cWe began investigating the case as soon as she reported it and shared the information with the prosecutor\u2019s office the next day.\u201d Image Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick discussing the Manti Te\u2019o case at a news conference this week. Credit Joe Raymond/Associated Press The Rev. John Jenkins, the university\u2019s president, refused to have any contact with the family, saying it might compromise his ability to serve as the final arbiter in a disciplinary hearing, according to a March 2012 investigation by the National Catholic Reporter. After Seeberg\u2019s death, the district attorney did not pursue the case. Notre Dame clearly made efforts to collect evidence about the Te\u2019o hoax, including text messages and other electronic communications. Tom Seeberg said that during the course of the investigation into his daughter\u2019s accusations, the university did not try to seek evidence that he said would have been crucial in corroborating her account that she had been lured into the room where the sexual assault reportedly took place. \u201cIt would have been even more important in Lizzy\u2019s case,\u201d Seeberg said. \u201cNever did the police say, \u2018We want to look at the communications records to prove whether or not what she said about the orchestration had occurred.\u2019 \u201d Seeberg underscored what he saw as stark differences in the way each case was handled. \u201cThey hear this guy\u2019s story,\u201d he said, referring to Te\u2019o, \u201cand within seconds they\u2019re like, \u2018We need a private investigator.\u2019 And what does the private investigator say? \u2018We need to get communications records.\u2019 \u201d One similarity between the two cases is that Notre Dame chose to keep both in-house. In Te\u2019o\u2019s case, the university chose not to contact law enforcement officials, a step Swarbrick said he deemed unnecessary because it was not apparent any crime had been committed. With Seeberg, Notre Dame used the campus police to investigate the case. \u201cIs it not ridiculous,\u201d Seeberg said, \u201cthat we sit here in 2013, and a woman who presents what could be a felony battery allegation to a law enforcement agent has to think about whether that law-enforcement agency could be compromised because their paycheck\u201d comes from the university? Kathy Redmond, the founder of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, who has been openly critical of Notre Dame\u2019s treatment of women, said she found Swarbrick\u2019s news conference \u201cshocking.\u201d \u201cAnd I\u2019m listening to the athletic director sound so shaken up by the fact that this football player, who is so trusting, will never be able to trust again,\u201d Redmond said. She added, \u201cTo prey on the sympathy of people by using a dead woman \u2014 a nonexistent dead woman \u2014 seems kind of sick to me.\u201d", "keyword": "University of Notre Dame;Manti Te'o;Football;Suicide;Rape;Jack Swarbrick;College football;Hoax;Lizzy Seeberg"}
{"id": "ny0225125", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/10/18", "title": "New York Local-Food Movement Quietly Thrives", "abstract": "Suffern, N.Y. Tom Sleight remembers the advice his father gave him in case he wanted to take over the family\u2019s farm in Dutchess County: Don\u2019t do it. It was the 1970s. Family farms were being sold to developers left and right. His family, he said, had been farming in the Hudson Valley since 1640, but his father had concluded that the certainty of cashing in their real estate was worth more than the uncertainty of farming it. Mr. Sleight is now executive director of the New York Farm Viability Institute , which awards grants for applied agricultural research projects, and he\u2019s well past the age where getting back into farming makes sense. Still, looking back, he sounds a bit wistful. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen this kind of excitement about agriculture as a career since I\u2019ve been alive,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s really a time when farmers with good ideas can reinvent themselves. It\u2019s inspiring to see that people can do it. I half wish that I were doing it.\u201d Well, jumping out of airplanes can be exciting too, hence, perhaps, the half wish. But you could see both sides the other day at a hard-to-define assemblage of farmers, would-be farmers, academics, sustainable-agriculture and farmland-preservation types, and others. The gathering, this year\u2019s program on environmental themes by a consortium of Hudson Valley colleges and universities, was a discussion of regional foodsheds, a buzzy term denoting that communities, at least in part, can be fed by local farmers just as they are sustained by local watersheds. But the underlying issue was the essential conundrum of the local version of the local-food movement. Being so close to the New York metropolitan area is providing almost endless opportunities for enterprising local farmers amid the vogue for local food . But being so close to the New York metropolitan area has made the price of land, even land supposedly protected in perpetuity by the sale of development rights, out of the reach of farmers. Few think of New York as an agricultural state, but in many ways it still is. According to David Haight, New York State director of the American Farmland Trust, farmland makes up around 7 million acres of the 30 million acres in New York State, and almost 30 percent of privately owned land. Agriculture is a $4.5-billion-a-year business. New York is in the top three nationally in production of dairy goods, maple syrup, corn, wine, apples, pumpkins and cabbage. As always, it\u2019s a very mixed picture \u2014 witness the plight of hundreds of dairy farmers trying to survive the severe price drops of recent years, the fact that a farm in New York disappears every third day, or the looming issue of gas drilling upstate. Still, there is optimism, much of it a reflection of the success \u2014 albeit a niche success \u2014 of the local-food movement in farmers\u2019 markets and other direct sales to consumers and restaurants. \u201cWe began this 20 years ago, and it seemed like a totally crazy idea; people said that\u2019s a New York scheme they hadn\u2019t heard about before,\u201d said Jean-Paul Courtens, whose Roxbury Farm began in 1990 supplying food directly to 30 families and now supplies about 1,400 in New York City, Westchester and Columbia Counties and the Capital District. \u201cWe\u2019ve come a long way.\u201d Benjamin Shute is an example of how much the dynamic has reached beyond traditional farmers. In college at Amherst, he got interested in the kinds of food issues raised by the author Michael Pollan. He decided to go into farming. \u201cIt felt like something that was real, honest and productive,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be repackaging mortgages and questioning my role in society.\u201d At 32, he is co-owner of the Hearty Roots Community Farm in Red Hook, N.Y., now in its seventh growing season. It mostly grows mixed vegetable crops, and it serves 600 households in three towns in the Hudson Valley and three neighborhoods in Brooklyn. He\u2019s a founding board member of the National Young Farmers Coalition and wants to make agriculture his life\u2019s work. But he\u2019s doing it on 25 rented acres. The first property Mr. Shute farmed on was sold for nonfarm purposes, and there\u2019s no guarantee his current arrangement will go beyond its five-year lease. These days, Mr. Courtens and Mr. Shute have no problem selling everything they grow. But they agree that the single biggest issue facing farmers, particularly in the mid-Hudson Valley and the Catskills, is the availability of land \u2014 whether current farm families can afford to keep their land growing crops rather than McMansions, or prospective farmers can find a place to farm. There is plenty of buzz in the air about new farming models. That\u2019s the easy part. Figuring out the land issues that translate to something on the ground and under it, that\u2019s a lot harder.", "keyword": "Farmers;Local Food;Hudson River Valley (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0111763", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/02/10", "title": "Romney Tries to Woo Conservatives at CPAC", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 For more than an hour Thursday afternoon, Mitt Romney huddled with a small gathering of leaders in the conservative movement, potential emissaries to those who have so far proved most wary of embracing him as the Republican Party \u2019s nominee. About three dozen evangelical organizers, conservative writers and Tea Party activists were in the room at the Marriott Wardman Park, and the largely friendly group politely grilled him over nuts and soda about his positions on social issues and pressed him on his surprising losses during Tuesday\u2019s presidential contests. Not in attendance: many of those in the conservative movement who have questioned Mr. Romney\u2019s commitment to their causes \u2014 their absence underscoring the challenge he faces in winning them over. Several said Thursday that they had been invited, but declined. Others said Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign had not reached out to them this week. The private meeting, which the campaign described as an opportunity for Mr. Romney to \u201creconnect\u201d with social conservatives after a grueling period of campaigning, was the closed-door prequel to a public effort that will come on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when Mr. Romney and his opponents in the Republican nominating fight will address a Washington gathering of nearly 10,000 activists. In a speech to the broader group Friday afternoon, Mr. Romney will seek to reassure social conservatives, deficit and national security hawks, and evangelical voters that they are a crucial part of the coalition he is building. \u201cAs he tries to bring this party together, it\u2019s critical that he reaches out to them, that he is there to address those issues that they might have some questions about,\u201d said Bay Buchanan, a longtime conservative activist who is helping Mr. Romney court the party\u2019s right wing and who attended the private meeting. \u201cYou have to do something to bring them aboard.\u201d The effort to assuage conservatives could not come at a more critical time for Mr. Romney, who watched on Tuesday as hard-core Republican activists in three states shouted their preference for what they considered Rick Santorum \u2019s authentic brand of conservatism. The triple-state loss to Mr. Santorum was an embarrassment to Mr. Romney just as he was trying to pivot away from his Republican rivals toward a general election matchup with President Obama . And it was a reminder of the weakness that he has demonstrated among conservative voters in the early contests this year. The CPAC conference will likely be another stark reminder. The halls of the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington are once again filled with the most fervent believers in conservative causes. And Mr. Santorum\u2019s surprising victories on Tuesday have many of them buzzing with anticipation for his appearance, which precedes Mr. Romney\u2019s. Supporters flew in from as far away as California to register their support for Mr. Santorum as his campaign sought to use the momentum from Tuesday\u2019s victories to charge his campaign. Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for Mr. Santorum, said Thursday in a Twitter posting that the campaign had registered its second straight day of million-dollar fund-raising. \u201cNumbers keep pouring in,\u201d Mr. Gidley wrote. Jennifer Jones , 27, said Thursday that she had joined about 50 others from Los Angeles to support Mr. Santorum, taking an overnight flight after being inspired by the candidate\u2019s Tuesday victories. Jason Jones, 40, a film producer and anti- abortion activist from Glendale, Calif., said he \u201ccalled all my friends to urge them to come.\u201d Several conservatives said Mr. Santorum\u2019s victories this week have quickly turned around the skepticism that many felt about his rag-tag campaign, which has struggled to raise money and build an organization. \u201cThe only concern that most conservatives have about Rick is whether he could win. He\u2019s rapidly dispelling that concern,\u201d said Richard Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention . By contrast, Mr. Land, who has not endorsed a candidate, said Mr. Romney would be greeted warmly \u2014 but with lingering suspicion \u2014 by the conservatives at CPAC. \u201cYou can\u2019t undo what you\u2019ve done,\u201d Mr. Land said. \u201cHe was a governor of Massachusetts . He did run against Ted Kennedy . And in both cases, he was a moderate.\u201d \u201cThere are still conservatives who wonder if in his heart of hearts he really loves them.\u201d Mr. Land added. \u201cThey are not going to wonder that about Rick Santorum.\u201d On Saturday, activists attending the conference will be invited to cast ballots in a straw poll to determine their preference for a presidential candidate. For the last two years, supporters of Representative Ron Paul of Texas have managed to overwhelm the other contenders to come out on top. This time, Mr. Paul is skipping the conference for a campaign stop in Maine . Aides to Mr. Romney shrugged off the straw poll, saying it was a meaningless exercise. The campaign said it was taking its usual approach to nonbinding, unofficial preference surveys \u2014 mostly ignoring them. Mr. Romney plans to use his speech to highlight his social and conservative credentials even as he contrasts his own leadership style with that of Mr. Obama and his Republican rivals, aides said. He will also push back against attacks \u2014 like those that have come from Newt Gingrich and Mr. Santorum \u2014 that he is a moderate. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to let those false attacks stand,\u201d said Gail Gitcho, the communications director for Mr. Romney\u2019s campaign. \u201cGovernor Romney will go there and make the case for his campaign \u2014 that he is a conservative businessman and the only one who can beat Barack Obama .\u201d But the results of the CPAC balloting \u2014 which will be announced on Saturday \u2014 could provide another psychological boost for Mr. Santorum, and, if Mr. Romney loses, could be a blow to him just when he needs help changing the narrative from Tuesday\u2019s losses. James Bopp Jr., a veteran social conservative who endorsed Mr. Romney last week, dismissed his candidate\u2019s losses this week as the result of a \u201ctactical decision\u201d not to campaign in those states. And he said Mr. Romney has done better than any of his rivals at achieving \u201cbroad acceptability\u201d in the Republican Party. \u201cThe vast majority of Republicans and conservatives, their purpose is to defeat President Obama and replace him with a conservative,\u201d Mr. Bopp said. \u201cI think there\u2019s an increasing consensus that Romney is the most acceptable and electable candidate.\u201d But that view is not shared by some in the conservative movement. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, predicted that Mr. Romney will be \u201creceived cordially\u201d at the conference on Friday, but added that \u201cwhether it will be enthusiastic or not, I\u2019m not so sure.\u201d Mr. Perkins, who is not endorsing anyone in the race, said that Tuesday\u2019s victories by Mr. Santorum had reinforced for conservatives the idea that the race is far from over. He predicted that the Republican campaign might not be finished until the August convention. \u201cA week ago, the thought would have been that Romney comes here to close the deal,\u201d Mr. Perkins said. \u201cInstead, now his conservative credentials have to be on display. Instead of getting the activists to sign on the dotted line, he\u2019s still trying to get his foot in the door.\u201d", "keyword": "Mitt Romney;2012 Presidential Election;Rick Santorum;Conservatism in the United States"}
{"id": "ny0178029", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2007/09/01", "title": "Mired Talks on Trade to Resume", "abstract": "PARIS, Aug. 31 \u2014 Negotiators in Geneva are set to resume talks on world trade on Monday at the start of another crucial period for the stalled negotiations, which began in 2001 and have been on the verge of collapse for months. Discussions will focus on agriculture, one of the main obstacles to an accord, with negotiations on industrial issues and the trade of manufactured goods scheduled for the week after. The director general of the World Trade Organization , Pascal Lamy, will meet with trade ministers from the Asia and Pacific region in Sydney, Australia, from Wednesday through Friday. Over the next two months, Mr. Lamy will have to decide whether enough progress has been made in negotiations to merit a full ministerial meeting on the so-called Doha round, named after the capital city of Qatar where the talks began. In July, the chairmen of the negotiating committees in Geneva published draft proposals on the scope of cuts in tariffs and subsidies, as the basis for a possible agreement, which backers say would increase economic growth and lift more people in developing countries out of poverty. To achieve that, they are seeking to lower customs duties around the world, cut the level of subsidies to farmers in the United States and force the European Union to reduce tariffs and get rid of export subsidies. While officials say that the gap has been narrowed in the negotiations, it remains unclear whether there will be enough political impetus to close a deal by the end of the year. In a speech in mid-August, Mr. Lamy argued that, \u201cgiven what is already on offer on the negotiating table, and what remains to be done, my sense is that concluding this negotiation is both necessary and doable.\u201d That analysis was disputed by France\u2019s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, on Thursday. \u201cThe gap among the parties is too wide,\u201d she said during a speech to executives near Paris, according to Bloomberg News. \u201cFor now, I don\u2019t see it.\u201d", "keyword": "International Trade and World Market;Agriculture;World Trade Organization;Lamy Pascal;Geneva (Switzerland)"}
{"id": "ny0196579", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2009/10/21", "title": "From Blocking Sled to Bobsled for Football Players", "abstract": "LAKE PLACID, N.Y. \u2014 Caleb Campbell received curious glances and furrowed eyebrows \u2014 just like other athletes before him. He is the latest in the lineage of football players turned bobsledders. The Detroit Lions selected Campbell, a safety from Army, in the seventh round of last year\u2019s college draft. As the N.F.L. season drew near, the Lions received a letter from the Army stating that its professional athlete policy had been revised . It wanted Campbell to serve a two-year commitment. As he drove from Detroit back to West Point, Campbell received a call from the assistant United States bobsled coach Bill Tavares, asking him to try out for the team. Campbell\u2019s only familiarity with the sport came from watching \u201c Cool Runnings ,\u201d a Disney movie loosely based on a Jamaican bobsled team. \u201cI did it last year and saw some of my friends, and they would look at me and say: \u2018I heard a funny joke the other day. Somebody told me you were bobsledding,\u2019 \u201d Campbell said. \u201cNobody really knows the correlation between football and bobsledding and how much of a relationship there is until they understand the sport of bobsled.\u201d Although the two sports share little in common \u2014 there are no violent collisions between bobsledders \u2014 there is a kinship that had never been as evident as now when the United States team gathered here last week to participate in trials for the 2010 Olympic Games. Seven athletes vying for slots played college football. Nearly all played high school football. Football/bobsled synergy dates back almost 25 years. Brian Shimer , the United States men\u2019s bobsled coach, played football at Morehead State and piloted a sled with the former Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker in the 1992 Winter Olympics. Willie Gault , a wide receiver who played in the N.F.L. for 11 seasons, was on the team at the Olympic Games four years earlier. Nearly all converted football players are bobsled pushers, who thrust the sled down the hill as fast as they can at the start of the race before hopping in. Their frames are nearly uniform \u2014 around 6 feet 2, 220 pounds. \u201cWe can\u2019t get the real big guys,\u201d Tavares said. \u201cThey just won\u2019t fit in the sled.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re heavier guys, explosive and strong,\u201d said Jesse Beckom III , a former Iowa State linebacker. \u201cMoving a 400-pound sled across the ice, you need some powerful, fast guys. You can hit the sled. You miss hitting people, but it\u2019s definitely still an adrenaline rush.\u201d The surge is present in both sports. In football it is sustained over a few hours. In bobsled, it is a spiked rush that many athletes said reached higher proportions and is an overload of senses and blurs. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re on a roller coaster and you\u2019re going downhill real fast, it just kind of sucks at you and wants to pull you out of the sled,\u201d Campbell said. Both sports are highly technical. Athletes search for optimal angles. The training is similar, with each reliant on weight lifting and sprinting. A large difference is that the movement in bobsled is vertical instead of in all directions. And, of course, bobsledders travel at speeds that can hit 5 g-forces. \u201cIt\u2019s not the craziest thing, well, it may be the craziest thing I\u2019ve done,\u201d said Curt Tomasevicz , a former linebacker at Nebraska, who placed sixth in four-man at the 2006 Olympics. Jamie Moriarty was intrigued watching Tomasevicz perform. He read the backgrounds of bobsledders and discovered that many had football dotted on their athletic r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. Four members of Moriarty\u2019s family played in the N.F.L., including his father, Tom, and uncle, Pat, who is the Baltimore Ravens\u2019 vice president of football administration. At Cornell, Jamie Moriarty played safety. If other athletes could make the switch, he figured he could as well. He finished fifth at the 2009 United States National Bobsled Push Championship. \u201cYou can\u2019t really play pickup football at the same level as maybe pickup basketball or something,\u201d Moriarty said. \u201cThis is a great outlet to still compete at a high level.\u201d Shimer was part of the first wave of football players who crossed over to bobsledding in 1985. Some European countries had already started recruiting players from track and field and soccer. They further advanced the sport from its humble beginnings. The origin of the sport\u2019s name stems from how athletes originally started bobbing back and forth on the sled \u2014 there were no pushers \u2014 to gain momentum. John Morgan, a former United States bobsled executive director, sent out his own pitch to college athletes. One of his letters fell on the desk at Morehead State\u2019s athletics department. Morgan asked Shimer to try it out. With a free plane ticket and the chance to travel, Shimer agreed and has not looked back. \u201cWithin three years, I was competing in my first Olympic Games,\u201d Shimer said. \u201cI never thought that could ever happen like if you didn\u2019t have skates on your feet by the age of 2, you couldn\u2019t be a great hockey player or figure skater. \u201cBut bobsledding is a unique sport,\u201d Shimer said. \u201cWe can take great athletes and make them exceptional bobsledders in a few years.\u201d Campbell is a novice and is a long shot to make the team; there will be another trial later this week in Park City, Utah. His athleticism and strength are there. And, more important, it has been an outlet for Campbell. He questioned if he wanted to continue with athletics after he could not go straight to the N.F.L. After Tavares\u2019s phone call, he returned to West Point and helped coach the football team. The competitive juices were still there. He hopes to sign with an N.F.L. team when his military commitment expires. \u201cI wore the uniform and I was excited to wear the uniform,\u201d Campbell said of his duties. \u201cIn a way, it would have been a blessing to play football. But it was also a blessing not to play. I\u2019m maturing as a man and I\u2019m maturing as an athlete.\u201d", "keyword": "Bobsledding;Football;College Athletics;Campbell Caleb;Shimer Brian"}
{"id": "ny0179009", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/08/27", "title": "\u2018To Catch a Predator\u2019 Is Falling Prey to Advertisers\u2019 Sensibilities", "abstract": "In the last 18 months, NBC\u2019s investigative segment \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d has received wide attention, rejuvenating ratings for the network\u2019s \u201cDateline NBC\u201d newsmagazine and making a celebrity of Chris Hansen, the show\u2019s host, who confronts men trolling online chat rooms hoping to meet teenagers for sex. So why does NBC seem to be scaling back its commitment to \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d? The network has filmed only one sting operation so far this year, compared with seven in 2006. In several ways, the high ratings for \u201cPredator\u201d have come at a high price for NBC. Some advertisers say they are wary of being associated with the show\u2019s content, in which men lured to a house by the promise of a sexual encounter are instead surprised by Mr. Hansen and then arrested. Critics have also raised ethics questions about the series because NBC coordinates the investigations with a private watchdog group and local police departments. And two lawsuits are pending against the network, one by a former producer and another by the sister of a man who committed suicide as police officers approached his house, accompanied by NBC camera crews. But the show\u2019s success underlines a growing problem for television executives looking to push the envelope of good taste in search of hits: how to pursue high ratings without alienating advertisers or provoking negative public opinion. In 2005, similar concerns prompted ABC to cancel a reality show called \u201cWelcome to the Neighborhood,\u201d in which conservative couples selected new neighbors from a pool of diverse contestants. The criticism and lawsuits directed at \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d have led to negative news coverage of the show, online and in magazines like Esquire and Rolling Stone. ABC News recently confirmed that its prime-time newsmagazine program \u201c20/20\u201d is preparing a report about \u201cTo Catch a Predator.\u201d An NBC producer denied that the network was trying to distance itself from \u201cPredator.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re really proud of it,\u201d David Corvo, executive producer of \u201cDateline,\u201d said in a telephone interview. \u201cWe\u2019re not running away from it.\u201d Officially, the network said it is \u201cdiscussing future investigations\u201d and declined to comment further. Some media buyers were hesitant about buying ads on the series even before the recent spate of bad press reports. Andy Donchin, director for national broadcast for the advertising agency Carat USA, said advertisers could be wary of the show\u2019s unsavory theme. \u201cWe\u2019re all concerned with what content we\u2019re associating ourselves with,\u201d he said. The most recent \u201cPredator\u201d episode, on July 25, included six national spot ads, significantly fewer than at other hours during NBC\u2019s prime-time periods. \u201cNBC\u2019s probably thinking about what their return on investment is, and might be thinking it\u2019s better to move on,\u201d said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at the ad-buying agency Horizon Media. \u201cDateline\u201d first explored the idea of Internet predators in 2004. \u201cThere was a time not long ago when stories about Internet crimes were a tough sell for TV newsmagazines,\u201d Mr. Hansen said. \u201cExecutive producers were wary because images of people typing on keyboards and video of computer monitors did not make especially compelling TV, even when combined with emotional interviews with victims.\u201d But the network discovered that face-to-face conversations with would-be predators did make compelling television. The program\u2019s producers work with a pedophile watchdog group, Perverted Justice. Members of the group pose as underage Web surfers and chat with adults and, if the conversation turns sexual, agree to meet in person. When the adults arrive at the meeting place, they are confronted by Mr. Hansen and then arrested. The first sting, filmed on Long Island in 2004, was startlingly successful, as 18 men came to the decoy house. NBC almost immediately began planning additional investigations, Mr. Hansen said. The third sting, in February 2006, was the first to involve a local police force. That year, \u201cDateline\u201d produced a total of eight multiday stakeout shows in Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Florida and California. The 2006-7 television season\u2019s 11 episodes of \u201cPredator\u201d have attracted an average of 7 million viewers, compared with 6.2 million for other \u201cDateline\u201d programs. The series has also been a boon for MSNBC, NBC\u2019s cable news channel, which replays episodes in prime time and on weekends. In July, 19 of MSNBC\u2019s 25 highest-rated hours were late-night \u201cPredator\u201d reruns. The confrontations and arrests made for dramatic television and \u201cPredator\u201d quickly became a favorite water cooler topic of conversation. The format \u2014 Mr. Hansen waiting with a crew as the unsuspecting man approaches \u2014 has been parodied endlessly on late-night television and on YouTube. But after the cameras stopped rolling, the men charged with felonies made their appearances in court \u2014 and those were often decidedly less dramatic. As a result of three-day sting last September in Long Beach, Calif., for example, 38 men were arrested on camera \u2014 the most of any sting that year. Judge Bradford Andrews in Superior Court, who heard 30 of the cases, said most of the men entered a plea and were placed on probation. \u201cMost of them had no prior criminal record whatsoever, not even traffic citations,\u201d he said. Under California law, they are now registered as sex offenders. Over all, 256 men have been arrested in the operations, NBC said. Slightly fewer than half have been convicted of a crime. A four-day sting in Texas last November led to 25 arrests and involved one death. Louis Conradt, a local prosecutor, Perverted Justice alleges, engaged in sexual conversations with minors online but did not show up to the decoy house, so the police obtained a warrant for his arrest. As officers and camera crews approached Mr. Conradt\u2019s home in Terrell, Tex., he shot himself in the head. Last month, his sister, disputing the Perverted Justice transcripts, filed suit against NBC, seeking $105 million in damages. None of the men arrested in the investigation have been prosecuted. \u201cDateline\u201d has participated in two stings since the Texas one, most recently in New Jersey in March. The investigation was broadcast in July and averaged 7.1 million viewers. While remaining popular, the program is also expensive to produce. NBC spent tens of thousands of dollars on each sting, installing hidden cameras and microphones. It has also paid Perverted Justice a consulting fee of roughly $70,000 for each episode. Questions about the network\u2019s relationship with Perverted Justice are raised in a lawsuit filed in May by a former \u201cDateline\u201d producer, Marsha Bartel, who contends that she was fired because she opposed what she called the program\u2019s unethical production practices. Her suit said that Perverted Justice did not keep accurate, verifiable transcripts of conversations with potential predators. Lawyers for some of the men arrested in the stings have focused on this point, claiming entrapment. Ms. Bartel\u2019s lead lawyer, Roger Simmons, said NBC had violated \u201cone of the fundamental canons of journalism. \u201cThe line between what journalists do and what law enforcement officers do got fuzzy,\u201d Mr. Simmons said. \u201cThe difference between what these reality shows do and what \u2018To Catch a Predator\u2019 does got fuzzy, too.\u201d NBC has said it will defend itself vigorously in both suits. Perhaps hoping to capitalize on the distinctive \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d format while softening the show\u2019s unpleasant edge, \u201cDateline\u201d producers are applying the show\u2019s hidden camera style to a variety of other topics. In March, Mr. Hansen investigated e-mail swindles in \u201cTo Catch a Con Man.\u201d In April and again in July, he hunted for criminals who exploit personal data in \u201cTo Catch an ID Thief.\u201d The most recent iteration, titled \u201cTo Catch an iJacker\u201d and broadcast Aug. 1, tracked down missing iPods. Mr. Corvo said \u201cDateline\u201d has an unofficial unit working with Mr. Hansen on other projects incorporating the \u201cTo Catch\u201d concept. Half a dozen investigative pieces are in the pipeline, exploring adoption, insurance ploys and financial fraud. \u201cWe feel like we\u2019ve raised awareness of this issue a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to make sure that, going forward, we complement what we\u2019ve done in the past, not just repeat it.\u201d NBC viewers, meanwhile, are beginning to see other takes on Mr. Hansen\u2019s investigations. Two weeks ago, the late-night host Conan O\u2019Brien imagined the evolution of the brand: he presented mock commercials for \u201cTo Catch a Soda Refiller\u201d and \u201cTo Catch a Cold.\u201d", "keyword": "Television;Dateline (TV Program);Advertising and Marketing;Computers and the Internet;National Broadcasting Co;Sex Crimes"}
{"id": "ny0234314", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/01/18", "title": "Luster of New York\u2019s Plaza Hotel Dims as Economy Pinches the Rich", "abstract": "When an Israeli billionaire bought New York\u2019s storied Plaza Hotel for $675 million, he envisioned turning the plucky grande dame with the globally recognized name into mainly a luxury condo tower that would cater to the world\u2019s wealthiest buyers and offer stores to satisfy their every desire. But now, six years later, with the city in an acute recession, the grandest aims of the new owner, Isaac Tshuva, and the excitement of the new Plaza\u2019s first residents seem to have dimmed, according to sales data. The last 11 owners to sell their luxury condos at the Plaza Hotel sold them at a loss, including the owner of Apartment 409, which sold for $8.5 million less than it cost 16 months before. The Plaza\u2019s underground luxury stores are struggling to attract shoppers, and one expert broker is consequently advising clients not to take space there. And this spring, steps below where F. Scott Fitzgerald found his muse for \u201cThe Great Gatsby,\u201d the hotel is opening an upscale food court offering burgers and pizza. The Palm Court, the Plaza\u2019s famous restaurant, has been closed. \u201cIt\u2019s gone from being a landmark to being just a building,\u201d Clark Wolf, an independent restaurant consultant, said of the situation. \u201cIn an era without a Tavern on the Green or a Cafe des Artistes, we need something. New York City is screaming for a landmark.\u201d But the 102-year-old Plaza still has cachet. To many New Yorkers and tourists, the Plaza is still the place where Eloise, the fictional 6-year-old, treats the hotel as her playground, and Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman share late-afternoon drinks at the Oak Bar. And the Plaza\u2019s overall financial picture means little to prospective brides: The Grand Ballroom is still booked every Saturday night in May. In the heady first couple of years after Mr. Tshuva acquired the Plaza in 2004, he reaped the rewards of a real estate boom. After a $450 million makeover was complete, Mr. Tshuva\u2019s real estate firm sold all 181 units sight unseen for a total of more than $1.3 billion. The prices for these apartments were so high that real estate brokerage firms started separating the Plaza\u2019s sales figures from their overall data reporting because they distorted the market. But Mr. Tshuva would also fight with the hotel union, battle with the owners of the rights to Eloise\u2019s image and even endure cries of protest about the possible loss of the Plaza. The actress Sarah Jessica Parker held her 40th birthday party there in a show of support for the hotel. According to data tracked by Streeteasy.com , Earl McEvoy, a mutual fund manager who paid $4.79 million for an apartment in October 2007, sold it last summer for $4 million. Guy Wildenstein, president of the Wildenstein & Company gallery on the Upper East Side and owner of a large private art collection, sold Apartment 409, and another unit he bought in August 2008 for $9.6 million went for $6 million 15 months later. Then there was Oscar S. Schafer, a managing partner at the hedge fund O.S.S. Capital Management, who took a hit on No. 1709. He bought the three-bedroom unit for $14.6 million in May 2008 and sold it for $8.5 million in July 2009. And 9 of the 28 apartments in the building on the market have slashed their asking prices. Some context: Lawyers and brokers say that 15 Central Park West, a new property whose condos were sold at roughly at the same time as the Plaza\u2019s, had its last 10 transactions sell for well over their asking price. Edward Mermelstein, a real estate lawyer who represented more than two dozen buyers of apartments at the Plaza and 15 Central Park West, said that since both properties opened, his clients preferred 15 Central Park West apartments for its bigger windows and bigger-name residents. It is possible, then, that his buyers want to live near the chief executive of Goldman Sachs at 15 Central Park West, not the former chief executive of Bear Stearns at the Plaza. \u201cYou have the perception at this point that 15 Central Park West is very much a private club,\u201d Mr. Mermelstein said. \u201cThe Plaza has very much of a feeling of a hotel.\u201d But even the most serious skeptics of the relative value of the Plaza condos say that once the residential real estate slowdown passes, the building will be desirable to some buyers. \u201cWith its uniqueness in the world, and its name in the world, it\u2019s going to be a sought-after address,\u201d said Noel Berk, a real estate broker who lives in and has sold apartments at 15 Central Park West. \u201cThe Plaza is the Plaza.\u201d One of the central struggles at the Plaza involves the shopping center Mr. Tshuva\u2019s firm, Elad Properties, created in the hotel\u2019s basement. It now includes several luxury retailers like the Viennese p\u00e2tisserie Demel, Maurice Fine Jewelry and Krigler perfumes. But a shirt maker, Eton of Sweden, has closed. Alan Victor, president of the retail brokerage firm Lansco, said that while two of his brokers made deals there, he was advising clients not to set up shop there because of the location off Fifth Avenue and the recession. \u201cIt\u2019s just too risky to put our tenants there,\u201d he said. Plaza executives responsible for the hotel and events divisions say that while the market has been tough, it is slowly getting better. Business for events booked in the Grand Ballroom dropped 20 percent in 2009, from 2008, said Liz Neumark, principal of CPS Events, which has a 25-year lease to manage the hotel\u2019s event spaces. She credits the drop to a decline in corporate meetings and the tighter budgets of nonprofit organizations. Shane Krige, general manager of the 282-room hotel that still operates at the Plaza, said that occupancy for hotel rooms followed similar trends. But Plaza executives also see some hopeful signs. Ms. Neumark predicts a 30 percent jump in wedding bookings this year. The hotel\u2019s occupancy rate rose to 90 percent in December, according to Mr. Krige. The hotel also just received its first five-diamond rating from AAA, and several princes and princesses stayed there last week. It remains to be seen whether the mix of restaurants in the building will meet the standards of truly highbrow guests. The Edwardian Room remains closed except for private events. The Palm Court, which reopened briefly, closed again in December 2008. Mr. Krige said that Fairmont, which manages the hotel, plans to reopen the Palm Court this spring, and he is posting job openings there. The Oak Bar, the Oak Room, the Champagne Bar and the Rose Club remain open. The celebrity chef Todd English is sorting out construction details for a 5,400-square-foot food hall next to the basement stores. Mr. English\u2019s spokeswoman on this project, Willie Norkin, dismissed any questions that the market\u2019s food offerings \u2014 they will range from sushi to dumplings to pizza \u2014 may not be up to the Plaza\u2019s reputation. \u201cI don\u2019t think the goal here is to have offerings that are going to be exclusive,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to have offerings that are inclusive and appealing.\u201d Joey Allaham, a part owner in the Oak Room and owner of three other restaurants, said that even in the face of the recession, there is a history about the Plaza that still draws customers. He described a 97-year-old man who recently visited the Oak Bar. He ordered a Macallan Scotch and gazed at the newly restored murals around him. \u201cHis wife passed away,\u201d Mr. Allaham said. \u201cHe came in to remember their first date.\u201d", "keyword": "Plaza Hotel;Hotels and Motels;Manhattan (NYC);Housing and Real Estate"}
{"id": "ny0005580", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2013/04/12", "title": "Masters \u2014 Sergio Garc\u00eda and Marc Leishman Share Lead at 66", "abstract": "AUGUSTA, Ga. \u2014 Last year, the mere sight of the Augusta National Golf Club left Sergio Garc\u00eda disconsolate and wondering if he would ever win a major championship. On Thursday, Garcia was tied for the Masters first-round lead with the Australian Marc Leishman. Another year, another Sergio, who at 33 remains golf\u2019s dark prince, a mercurial talent haunted by recurring self-doubt while being simultaneously buoyed by innate and nurtured skill. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s not my most favorite place,\u201d Garc\u00eda said after he shot a six-under par 66 and was asked about his complaints last year about Augusta National. \u201cBut, you know, sometimes it comes out better than others. And let\u2019s enjoy it while it lasts.\u201d Garc\u00eda had also declared last year at Augusta that he did not have the capacity to win a major. \u201cThose were my words,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cIt was a frustrating few hours.\u201d Augusta National on Thursday was not just kind to the impulsive and sensitive Garc\u00eda. Moments of frustration were more rare than usual throughout the field, and the result was a powerhouse congregation of the world\u2019s best players at the top of the leader board. The weather forecast was for rain; instead, a moist haze enveloped Augusta National, softening greens and creating benign course conditions that had most everyone firing at pins and putting with relative courage. It is said that no one wins the Masters on the first day, but some lose their chance to win. The first round played to that maxim and then some, as players positioned themselves for the weekend and only a couple of notable players slipped from contention. Twenty-one of the top 30 players in the world golf rankings, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, were within six strokes of Garc\u00eda and Leishman. Eleven major champions were within five strokes. \u201cThe goal is to stay alive until the back nine on Sunday,\u201d said Dustin Johnson, who was one stroke behind the leaders. \u201cWe all know that.\u201d Johnson, who grew up about an hour from Augusta, has long been considered a player with a game well suited to the Masters competition. But he has never placed higher than a tie for 30th in three Masters appearances. Thursday was just his second Masters round in the 60s. \u201cThere are things you need to know here,\u201d Johnson said, \u201cand it takes a little while to learn them.\u201d Among those at four under par and two strokes back was the 53-year-old Fred Couples, who has finished no worse than tied for 15th at the Masters since he turned 50. The 1992 Masters champion, Couples has played his last 13 rounds at Augusta National in 19 under par. Now playing his 29th Masters, he has had five top five finishes and 11 top 10 finishes. Round 1: Masters Replay 13 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Charlie Riedel/Associated Press \u201cI know where to miss here,\u201d Couples said, \u201cand I know where not to miss.\u201d Couples was tied with five others, including the Georgia Tech graduate and local favorite Matt Kuchar, the former Masters champion Trevor Immelman, Rickie Fowler, David Lynn and Gonzalo Fern\u00e1ndez-Casta\u00f1o. Fern\u00e1ndez-Casta\u00f1o played recent practice rounds with his countryman from Spain, Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Olaz\u00e1bal, who has won the Masters twice. \u201cHe knows this place like his backyard,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez-Casta\u00f1o said. Olaz\u00e1bal is also responsible for the unusual putting stance used by Fern\u00e1ndez-Casta\u00f1o, who keeps his feet pressed together. \u201cHe suggested it, and it worked,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez-Casta\u00f1o said. \u201cI will listen to anything a two-time Masters champ says.\u201d Leishman is a 29-year-old Australian who was little known in the United States until he shot a final-round 62 to win last year\u2019s Travelers Championship. He had been in 20th place after the third round of the event. On Thursday, Leishman bogeyed the first hole before running off a string of 7 birdies and 10 pars, including a stretch of four consecutive birdies from the par-5 13th hole to the par-3 16th, where he sank a putt of more than 50 feet. \u201cThat was a bomb,\u201d Leishman said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how far that putt was, but it was in a different ZIP code.\u201d Woods played his first competitive round in the company of his girlfriend, the Olympic skiing champion Lindsey Vonn. He played cautiously but finished at two under par. \u201cIt was a good, solid day,\u201d Woods said. \u201cI\u2019m pleased. You keep the ball in play on the first day and get yourself ready for the rest of the tournament. I\u2019m still right there.\u201d It is the fifth time Woods has shot 70 in the first round of the Masters; three of the other times he won the tournament. Woods was one of 10 players at two under. McIlroy was two shots back with a 72. The youngest player in the history of the Masters, the 14-year-old Guan Tianlang, charged back from a two-over 38 in his first nine holes to shoot one under par on the back nine, finishing at one over par. There were a couple of notable players who posted somewhat high scores, like Bubba Watson, the defending champion, who shot 75. Nick Watney shot 78, as did Padraig Harrington. But in the end, it was Garc\u00eda\u2019s brilliant play that caused the biggest stir, when expectations for him at Augusta National could not have been lower. \u201cI hope for the best, and if I manage to do that I will have a chance at winning,\u201d Garc\u00eda said with an odd, off-kilter smile. \u201cIf my best is not that good, then, you know, I\u2019ll struggle a little bit. Today my best was pretty good, and I\u2019m looking forward to doing the same thing the next three days. But we\u2019ll see.\u201d", "keyword": "Golf;Masters Golf,Masters;Augusta National Golf Club;Marc Leishman;Sergio Garcia"}
{"id": "ny0062442", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/01/19", "title": "A Monster of the Dunk Shows Finesse as a Playmaker", "abstract": "After the Los Angeles Clippers\u2019 109-95 destruction of the Knicks on Friday night, a reporter was moving through the visiting locker room, asking each Clippers player for his favorite Blake Griffin dunk. The variety of answers testified to Griffin\u2019s inescapable reputation as the N.B.A.\u2019s most formidable dunker. But as fearsome as Griffin is in midair, it is not the highlight-fodder dunks that have kept the Clippers\u2019 offense humming in the absence of the N.B.A.\u2019s leading assist man, Chris Paul, who injured his shoulder on Jan. 3. With Paul out of the lineup, the Clippers are 5-2 and have actually elevated the efficiency of their already top-five offense. Griffin, who scored 32 points against the Knicks, has been on a rampage during this stretch. He has done more, and done it better, increasing his scoring and assist averages while also shooting a higher percentage from the field. His play has refuted the oft-repeated belief that Griffin is solely an athletic freak, incapable of doing more than finishing, albeit with thunder, what Paul starts. Paul is something of a contradiction as an elite pass-first point guard. According to the N.B.A.\u2019s SportVu database, which uses cameras in the rafters to track player movement, only one player makes more passes than Paul each game. But only three players touch the ball more, too. And there is a paradox: Paul is at once immensely controlling of possessions and one of the great sharers of the ball. With Paul sidelined, the Clippers\u2019 offense naturally becomes a more equal-opportunity affair. Darren Collison has stepped in admirably as the nominal point guard, but Griffin, who is 6 feet 10 inches, has assumed a substantial share of Paul\u2019s duties. \u201cYou can\u2019t replace him,\u201d Griffin said of Paul. \u201cWe just need to elevate our game a little bit.\u201d Antawn Jamison, a Clippers veteran who has seen a lot in 15 seasons, said Griffin\u2019s skills were unlike anyone else\u2019s. \u201cI\u2019ve never see a guy with so much athleticism and so much power be so finesse as far as being smart about delivering the ball,\u201d Jamison said. Because Griffin has a power forward\u2019s frame and appetite for contact, how he runs the offense looks quite different from that of a typical playmaker. Griffin makes the smart pass out of the low post, but without Paul, he also takes more responsibility for general maintenance of the offense. He sets screen after screen to free shooters, and moves the ball swiftly and with purpose, a task far less flashy than a behind-the-back pass, but no less valuable to an offense. Now in his fourth season (he sat out 2009-10 with a knee injury), Griffin understands how to handle a double team. If there is not a quick outlet, Griffin patiently absorbs pressure from the second defender, all the while reading the back line of the defense to determine where to pass. \u201cWe have certain spots we got to be at if they double-team,\u201d Jamison said. Like a quarterback eluding the pass rush, Griffin hangs in the pocket before zipping the ball across the court, or to a cutter flashing down the middle of the lane. For all the work Griffin has done to become a better half-court player, the fast break is still where he best displays his rare combination of athleticism and skill. \u201cOn the break, he\u2019s a second point guard,\u201d his teammate Jared Dudley said. Indeed, without Paul calling for the outlet pass, Griffin often forgoes the outlet, opting to push the ball with his head up and the ball on a string. His most impressive ball-handling display Friday came in the first half, when he faked a lob pass while simultaneously sidestepping a defender on his way to the rim. Putting so much mustard on the hot dog can occasionally get Griffin into trouble, as when he tried a tricky pass that missed J. J. Redick when a simple chest pass would have sufficed. But Griffin on the break is still the Clippers\u2019 best option, even if it is an impossible play to draw up. \u201cYou watch some of these games, he\u2019s going behind his back,\u201d Jamison said. \u201cAnd Coach said, \u2018As long as you don\u2019t turn it over, I have no problem with it.\u2019 He\u2019s real confident as far as being able to do those things that technically a guard or a passing forward would do.\u201d With more license to handle the ball, Griffin has taken the opportunity to exhibit the breadth of his talent. As if for good measure, he tossed in a rare 3-point shot as the Clippers put the game out of reach in the second half. The numbers indicate that the Clippers have not missed Paul, though that is not the same as saying they are better without him. Their recent competition has been relatively weak; the Clippers have beaten only one team with a winning record since Paul was injured. \u201cHe\u2019s an M.V.P. candidate,\u201d Jamal Crawford said of Paul, \u201cso we understand that everybody has to step up and continue to trust each other and lean on each other. That\u2019s when we\u2019re at our best.\u201d As long as he retains his spectacular leaping ability, Griffin will always be known as a dunker. When you do something better than anyone in the world, that thing will inevitably define you. Griffin nourished that reputation Friday with a monster two-handed alley-oop slam that also drew a foul. It was a play no one else could make, but it was everything else he did Friday that made him a superstar.", "keyword": "Blake Griffin;Clippers;Knicks;Basketball;Chris Paul"}
{"id": "ny0180813", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2007/08/12", "title": "On the Road (and in the Water) With Richter", "abstract": "One weekend during the 1994-95 N.H.L. lockout, Mike Richter \u2014 who helped the Rangers win the Stanley Cup the season before \u2014 put his goaltending gear on ice, slipped on his running shoes and participated in a half-marathon in Duluth, Minn. In early summer 1996, weeks before Richter led the United States to a gold medal in the World Cup of Hockey, he and defenseman Brian Leetch participated in a sprint triathlon on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. \u201cWe really didn\u2019t know what we were doing,\u201d Richter said at the Midtown Manhattan offices of Environmental Capital Partners, the private equity firm in which he is a partner. \u201cBut Brian and I were having a great time anyway.\u201d Richter, 40, has been a fan of endurance sports long before a career with the Rangers that began in the 1989 playoffs and ended in November 2002, after he learned that he had fractured his skull. Richter said he has always had respect and admiration for endurance athletes like Paula Newby-Fraser, an eight-time winner of the Ironman Triathlon, and Lance Armstrong, a seven-time winner of the Tour de France. He ranks Tegla Loroupe, who won consecutive New York City Marathons in the mid-1990s, as one of his favorites. \u201cI\u2019ve always been into fitness, and so I\u2019ve kept a close eye on all these runners and bikers and swimmers who put their bodies through these amazing training regimens and participate in these incredible races,\u201d Richter said. Richter, who lives with his wife, Veronica, and their three young sons in Guilford, Conn., is close to completing a bachelor\u2019s degree in ethics, politics and economics at Yale. He began training seriously the last few years to compete in \u201ca different kind of physical and emotional arena I knew as a hockey player.\u201d Richter said the training was slow at first, especially in the months after his official retirement in September 2003, while he was still recovering from his head injuries and reconstructive surgery on his knees. \u201cThe knees didn\u2019t hurt when I played,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they don\u2019t hurt when I run.\u201d Last summer, Richter competed in his first half-Ironman. Last month in Lake Placid, N.Y., he took part in his first Ironman: He swam 2.4 miles, cycled 112 miles and ran 26.2 miles in 12 hours 49 minutes 10 seconds. To help prepare for the grueling event, Richter sent an e-mail message to Newby-Fraser, who lives and trains in San Diego. Newby-Fraser said: \u201cIt said something like: Hi, my name is Mike Richter and I used to be a hockey player. I would like to do the race in Lake Placid this year. Would you help me out? \u201cIt was quite a humbling e-mail,\u201d she said, \u201cespecially from a player as great as Mike Richter was.\u201d The two got together for a few days in Lake Placid, where Richter owns a home. \u201cThe goal was to turn a hare into a tortoise,\u201d Newby-Fraser said. \u201cPart of it was to chip away at all that muscle and get Mike chiseled down to the point where he looks like one of those skinny Kenyans.\u201d Richter said he would run in the New York City Marathon on Nov. 4 as a spokesman for ING\u2019s Run for Something Better program, which encourages boys and girls to participate in physical activities as a way of fighting obesity. \u201cSports, in its best light, is about challenging yourself and improving yourself as a person,\u201d Richter said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about looking for a medal at the end of an event; it\u2019s about a journey in which your physical and mental well-being improves through physical activity.\u201d", "keyword": "Richter Mike;Hockey Ice;Running;New York Rangers;New York City Marathon"}
{"id": "ny0050121", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2014/10/11", "title": "Supreme Court Allows Same-Sex Marriage in Idaho", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court on Friday allowed same-sex marriages to proceed in Idaho , lifting a temporary stay issued two days earlier by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy . The developments capped a busy week for gay rights. It started with the court\u2019s refusal on Monday to hear appeals from decisions striking down same-sex marriage bans in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The next day, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, struck down bans in Idaho and Nevada. The Supreme Court\u2019s orders this week allowed same-sex marriages to proceed in all seven states, raising the number of states in which such unions are lawful to 26, along with the District of Columbia. The legal ripple effects from the various appeals court rulings the Supreme Court tacitly sustained should soon raise that number to 35. Those ripples reached Colorado and West Virginia this week, where same-sex marriages have already started, and North Carolina, where a federal judge on Friday struck down the state\u2019s ban based on one of the appeals court decisions that the Supreme Court had let stand on Monday. Justice Kennedy, the member of the court responsible for hearing emergency applications from the Ninth Circuit, entered a temporary stay on Wednesday morning on very short notice after a last-minute request from officials in Idaho. He acted so quickly that he included Nevada in his order. A few hours later, Justice Kennedy issued a revised order, limiting the stay to Idaho. In seeking the emergency stay, Idaho officials argued that the Supreme Court should block the Ninth Circuit\u2019s decision because there was \u201ca very strong likelihood that four justices will consider the issue presented here sufficiently meritorious to warrant this court\u2019s review.\u201d That assertion was hard to reconcile with Monday\u2019s developments, according to lawyers for the gay couples who had brought the suit. Every recent appeals court to rule on the question in the past year found that the Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage, they said, and the Supreme Court turned away seven petitions seeking review of the question just days before. The couples\u2019 lawyers added that a stay would inflict deep harm. \u201cIf a stay issues,\u201d they said, the couples \u201cwill continue to be denied the right to enter into or have recognized the most important relation in life; they will continue to lack critical legal protections for their families, such as spousal-visitation and medical-decision-making rights in hospitals, that different-sex couples have long enjoyed; and their children will continue to be deprived of the security of knowing that their parents\u2019 relationships are recognized by the state where they live.\u201d In a response on Friday morning, the Idaho officials said that a denial of their application would send a message. \u201cIf the court wishes to signal that its recent denials of various marriage-related petitions was intended to finally and conclusively resolve the constitutionality of state laws defining marriage as a union of man and a woman,\u201d they wrote, \u201cthe court should deny Idaho\u2019s application.\u201d The court\u2019s denial of the application was two sentences long and contained no reasoning.", "keyword": "Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage;Idaho;Supreme Court,SCOTUS;Anthony M Kennedy"}
{"id": "ny0082019", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/10/05", "title": "Flooding Cripples South Carolina Where Some Areas See Over a Foot of Rain", "abstract": "NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. \u2014 Flooding from days of relentless, saturating rains paralyzed much of South Carolina on Sunday, as vehicles were submerged, dams were pushed to their limits, electricity was cut off to thousands and emergency officials staged hundreds of swift-water rescues. Officials attributed at least five deaths in South Carolina to the flooding. The menacing weather, an agonizingly powerful blend of a low-pressure system and some of the moisture from Hurricane Joaquin as it spun over the Atlantic Ocean toward Bermuda, was expected to last into the week, raising fears that conditions could worsen. In a response that evolved and expanded by the hour, the authorities deployed the National Guard, opened shelters, imposed curfews, closed schools and shut major thoroughfares, including more than 70 miles of Interstate 95. Image Vehicles detoured around downed power lines in Columbia. Thousands in South Carolina lost electricity. Credit Sean Rayford/Getty Images \u201cThis is not going to clear up until at least Tuesday or Wednesday,\u201d Gov. Nikki R. Haley said at a Sunday afternoon news conference at the state\u2019s emergency operations center near Columbia, South Carolina\u2019s flooded capital. \u201cGive us the space we need.\u201d Although other states along the Eastern Seaboard \u2014 including Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia \u2014 faced weather-related troubles on Sunday and had emergency declarations in effect for at least part of the day, none of their problems rivaled what unfolded here. The crisis, the governor said, stemmed from a weather event that might happen only every 1,000 years. In a single weekend, many cities in the state recorded more than a foot of rain, and some gauges showed higher totals. In the Bahamas on Sunday, the Coast Guard continued to search for El Faro, a 790-foot cargo ship missing since Thursday morning. Thirty-three people were aboard the American-flagged ship when its crew said Thursday that it had partly flooded and lost propulsion as Hurricane Joaquin pounded the region and its seas. On Sunday, the Coast Guard said search crews had found an oil sheen, containers and life preservers, but officials cautioned that the items had not been definitively linked to El Faro. The Air Force and the Navy were assisting in the search, which has covered more than 70,000 square nautical miles and which the Coast Guard expected to continue overnight. Video Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina confirmed that nine people had died in the extreme weather in the state and urged residents to be careful. Credit Credit Gerry Broome/Associated Press Rescuers were locked in a similar scramble here, where by Sunday morning the floodwaters had already overwhelmed some nearby neighborhoods and fishing villages. State officials were warning residents not to travel. But Brian Hinton, the deputy chief of the Charleston County Volunteer Rescue Squad, waited outside a fire station and tried to determine how he and his colleagues could go to the besieged neighborhoods and towns by truck and boat \u2014 and how they would get back. Two or three feet of water covered a stretch of highway that led to Awendaw, one of the fishing villages. High tide was coming. He feared he would get stuck. \u201cI\u2019ll put it this way: For us, this is a biblical event,\u201d said Mr. Hinton, 32, a big man in an orange wet suit. \u201cThis is a historical-type deal.\u201d Mr. Hinton\u2019s team of about three dozen volunteers had been conducting rescues through the night, sleeping only in brief shifts. Image Residents and emergency workers launched rescue boats on Sunday as flooding trapped people in their homes in Columbia, S.C. Credit Sean Rayford/Getty Images Their work was dangerous and often disgusting. Mr. Hinton said he and his men had waded through raw sewage from busted septic tanks, and through floating clumps of fire ants. The water had been fast-moving in some areas and still in others. And the rescuers had been called out to help people who found themselves stranded through no fault of their own, as well as others who had put themselves at risk. But the crisis that enveloped the state extended beyond dramatic rescues, some of which the National Guard conducted from the air. The toll and wear of the storm quickly found their way into Midtown Charleston, a low-income neighborhood of one of the state\u2019s most regal cities, where the Gadsden Green apartment complex sometimes felt cut off from the world on Sunday afternoon. Pools of floodwaters, some of them knee-deep, blocked main roads. Few cars were on the streets, but there were people holed up in some of the tiny apartments on Norman Street. Demetrius Scott, 26, a restaurant worker, was sweeping \u2014 and sweeping \u2014 the tile floor of his home with a bright red broom. As much as three inches of water had seeped in since 10 p.m. Saturday. \u201cIt got through the cracks in the walls,\u201d he said. Image Waves crashed onto the shore along Stingray Point in Deltaville, Va., on Sunday. Credit Steve Helber/Associated Press A few doors down, Nikita Heyward, a stay-at-home mother, hoped a portable fan would dry out the moisture. Her big sofa, soaked through at the base, was propped up against a back wall, and an N.F.L. game played on a small television. She hoped to stay with relatives who had a dry place across the Ashley River. But she said she was not sure if she was even allowed to leave. In Columbia, too, conditions were dire. At one point on Sunday, the city\u2019s Police Department said it had 200 pending calls for rescues. Street signs were nearly covered by floodwaters. Interstates in the area were closed. But on a day when Mayor Steve Benjamin used Twitter to plead with residents to stay in their homes , he also wrote, \u201cThis flood is something unlike anything we\u2019ve ever dealt with before, but we will get through it.\u201d Image Charlene Stennis and her son, Christian Hoo-Fong, who had been stranded in a vehicle by flood water in Columbia, S.C., on Sunday. Credit Sean Rayford/Getty Images President Obama signed a federal disaster declaration for the state on Saturday. By late Sunday, North Carolina had agreed to send helicopters to its southern neighbor, and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management warned that travel through South Carolina could be dangerous. But as South Carolina grappled with floodwaters on Sunday, conditions were stable enough in other states that some were able to regard the weather as a source of fascination, not fear. In Virginia Beach, some people took selfies as large, white-capped waves crashed into the shore. But as high tide approached and the sea\u2019s mist became more of a splash, many retreated to nearby homes and restaurants. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen the bay like this before; this is insane,\u201d Matthew Story, a visitor from North Carolina, said as he stood yards from the Chesapeake Bay. \u201cIf I had a house out here, I\u2019d probably be a little concerned.\u201d Image A house that collapsed into an inlet during overnight storms on Sunday in North Wildwood, N.J. Credit Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images In New Jersey, the authorities said a driver died in Colts Neck Township when a falling tree struck a Mustang convertible on a day of strong winds and rain. And North Carolina officials said they had recorded a second weather-related death in their state, pushing the nationwide total in recent days to at least eight. Here in North Charleston, where the mayor described the flooding as \u201castronomical,\u201d Mr. Hinton was dispatched late in the afternoon to a subdivision street called Peppercorn Lane, which had been overtaken by water. He walked an inflatable rescue boat down the road, deeper and deeper into the standing water, accompanied by an amphibious vehicle and a huge, khaki-colored military troop truck. The residents soon emerged. Some walked out of the muck, and some left on the amphibious vehicle. Nine others gripped luggage and boarded the troop truck. As a group, they were alternately grateful and annoyed. Someone asked Valerie Pearson, who said the water was knee-deep in her house, whether she was O.K. \u201cNo,\u201d she replied. A police officer responded, \u201cDo you have everything out of your place?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t have anything out of my place,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "South Carolina;Flood;Hurricanes"}
{"id": "ny0140255", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/02/08", "title": "Lagging in New Mexico", "abstract": "They are still counting ballots in New Mexico to determine the winner of Tuesday\u2019s Democratic caucuses. According to preliminary results posted on the party\u2019s Web site, with all precincts reporting, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was leading Senator Barack Obama by fewer than 1,100 votes. But more than 17,000 provisional ballots had yet to be counted. Brian S. Colon, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said that he did not know how soon those ballots would be counted but that the party had until Feb. 15 to certify the election. Provisional ballots are given to people who show up at the wrong site or are not on the registration rolls. New Mexico is the only state of the 22 that held Democratic contests on Tuesday where the outcome remains in doubt. At stake are 26 delegates, who are to be allocated proportionately; the state has an additional 12 so-called superdelegates who are not bound by the caucus results. On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton won 67,011 votes, or 43.4 percent of those cast, compared with Mr. Obama\u2019s 65,945 votes, or 42.7 percent. There were reports Tuesday of chaos at some caucus sites, with some voters waiting in line for more than three hours as more than three times the normal number showed up to vote. Some sites also ran out of ballots. (Although the process is a caucus, it uses paper ballots.) But Mr. Colon said in an interview Thursday that the problems on Tuesday were unrelated to the counting of the provisional ballots and the undetermined outcome. As part of the certification process of the election, all ballots cast \u2014 more than 150,000 in this case \u2014 are being put through a scanner and essentially recounted, but this is not the same thing as a legal \u201crecount.\u201d Once the results are certified, someone could demand a recount, but Mr. Colon said that at this point, neither campaign had signaled its intentions. KATHARINE Q. SEELYE", "keyword": "New Mexico;Voter Registration and Requirements;Primaries"}
{"id": "ny0065733", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2014/06/09", "title": "Free Music, at Least While It Lasts", "abstract": "Late last Thursday, I stopped at the fruit stand and some big, vivid red grapes caught my eye. The vendor said a two-pound bunch would be $6, which seemed steep. I was about to tell him as much, and then came to my senses and gave him the money. I wondered why I hesitated when it came time to pony up and realized that, as just one more participant in the Something for Nothing economy, I\u2019d grown accustomed to getting all sorts of lusciousness for the price of zero. Throughout that day, I used a suite of services from Google \u2014 email, contacts, documents \u2014 for a price of nothing. I deployed a free app called HopStop to plot my subway route to Brooklyn to meet my daughter for dinner, then used free mapping built into my iPhone to navigate to the restaurant. Along the way, I listened to song after song on the free version of Spotify. There were some nominal charges for the data services, but in general, I was free-riding. The outbreak of free is being felt all over the economy, but music is an industry that has produced the soundtrack of contemporary American life. Artists are singing the blues about the crippling effects of streaming, and no one wants to be part of the day the music died. Music has been free for decades through the miracle of ad-supported radio, but streaming services feel different because I can listen to what I want, whenever I want. The implicit promise of radio has been that consumers will hear a song they love and buy it. But when I love something on Spotify, my response is to listen to it some more on Spotify. I could pay $10 a month for the premium version and have done so in the past, but for now, I\u2019m sticking with the free service and put up with an occasional commercial. With scarcity now gone, songs are in the air, a mist we move through like so much department store perfume. We are no longer collecting music; it is collecting us on various platforms. Spotify has doubled its number of subscribers, paid and unpaid, in the last 18 months and reached a milestone of 10 million paid subscribers worldwide last month. In May, Pandora served up 1.73 billion hours of music, up 28 percent over the previous year. The two services have important differences, but they both have premium pay options as well as ad-supported free models. And Amazon, Apple and YouTube are all moving swiftly into the streaming space. It is a very new world with behemoths crashing in, looking for a place to profit in a regulatory environment that hasn\u2019t evolved much since before the Rolling Stones made a good record. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it would review the 73-year-old agreements that govern Ascap and BMI, which oversee licensing for radio stations, public spaces and websites. The agencies collect close to $2 billion a year in royalties, but operate under consent decrees that they say do not give them the flexibility to negotiate workable deals in an age of streaming. Many labels and the musicians and songwriters they work with say streaming outfits risk wiping them out by paying tiny royalties, but the people who make all that yummy music are actually being loved to death by fans who expect it to be free. And it\u2019s only going to become worse. Hand a music CD to a 10-year-old and ask her what it\u2019s for. Most will never see a song as something that was imprisoned on a disc or a download that you had to pay for. And it\u2019s not just tweens. A few weeks ago, we had a garage sale at our house and I was willing to part with only about half my books. But when I looked over my collection of CDs and thought about what I wanted to keep, my answer was, um, nothing. There were hundreds of them, carefully collected for more than a decade, some of them gifts, some of them even recorded by friends or bands I had written about, but they\u2019ve been idle for years. I priced them at a quarter each and then some guy offered $35 for the whole bunch and we caved. We even threw in the rack. Books have retained some value in an evolving personal media ecosystem, partly because the physical artifact is more attractive than the plastic CD case (which can be opened only with a crowbar). CD collections no longer signify cultural identity. (LPs, which are making a niche comeback, are a different matter.) Music\u2019s jailbreak began almost as soon as songs could be rendered in ones and zeros. When Steve Jobs of Apple decided that the price for a song was 99 cents, he \u201csaved\u201d a record industry besieged by piracy by burning about half of it down. People ceased buying albums and bought only the songs they wanted, a disaggregation that wiped out inefficiency \u2014 which is profit by another name. Between what I bought and what I burned, I ended up with about 7,000 songs. But guess what? I don\u2019t listen to those, either. Why would I when I can mindlessly push a single button? I wrote a profile of Neil Young a while ago in which he railed about the loss of sound quality, but as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University\u2019s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has said, \u201cgood enough is good enough.\u201d The convenience of pushing a button on a handheld device that streams wirelessly to a speaker is always going to trump hunting down a CD with marginally better sound and plopping it into a player. Think I\u2019m the only lazy one? Sales of digital downloads dropped a whopping 13 percent in the first quarter of this year after falling 5 percent in 2013, which was the first year since the debut of iTunes that sales of digital music dropped. Apple has certainly noticed; Less than two weeks ago, it announced it would buy Beats Electronics in a $3 billion deal that includes a fledgling streaming music service. The acquisition also included the expensive Beats headphones \u2014 $300 and up in a variety of colors so they also serve as fashion accessory. People will still pay large money for devices, and this weekend, thousands of people will spend at least $250 for three-day access to the Governor\u2019s Ball Music Festival in New York. It\u2019s a curious disconnect: Fans will pay top dollar for a music accessory or a music event. They just won\u2019t pay for, oh yeah, music. Writing in The Daily Beast last week, the musician Van Dyke Parks said that in the good old days, a song he recently wrote with Ringo Starr would have provided him \u201cwith a house and a pool.\u201d But at current royalty rates, he estimated that he and the former Beatle would make less than $80, which means he will have to choose between a dollhouse and a kiddie pool and then share it with Mr. Starr. Superstars like Beyonc\u00e9 can drop an unannounced bomb on iTunes and sell a million copies in under two weeks, but most artists are having trouble treading water in the stream. Streaming services argue that as their subscriber base grows, musicians will be able to survive on many small slices of a very big pie. On the bus ride home from dinner last week, I streamed most of the wonderful new album from Parquet Courts, courtesy of the Something for Nothing paradox. The $6 grapes were delicious, by the way, but I consumed them slowly and consciously, each one carrying not only lusciousness, but the knowledge that I had paid for them.", "keyword": "Music;Audio Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;Price;Compact Disc;Royalties;Pandora Media;Google;Spotify;Beats Electronics"}
{"id": "ny0279763", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2016/10/27", "title": "Rise in Sales of New Homes Surprises Economists", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Sales of new single-family homes unexpectedly rose in September, pointing to sustained demand for housing even as data for the previous three months were revised with lower figures. Other reports suggested a stronger pickup in economic growth in the third quarter than is currently anticipated. The goods trade deficit narrowed sharply, while wholesale and retail inventories increased in September. \u201cA lot of the pieces of the puzzle have come back together in a positive direction, with a pickup in the export of goods to the rest of the world and new-home sales,\u201d said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York. The Commerce Department said new-home sales increased 3.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 593,000 units last month, pulling them closer to a nine-year high reached in July. However, the pace for the previous three months was revised down by a total of 85,000 units from past estimates. New-home sales, which are derived from building permits, are volatile and subject to large revisions. Economists had forecast single-family home sales, which account for about 9.8 percent of overall home sales, falling to a rate of 600,000 units last month. \u201cThe housing market may not be booming but it is clearly moving forward at a steady pace,\u201d said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa. \u201cBut the big problem is still the lack of inventory.\u201d", "keyword": "Real Estate; Housing;GDP;Economics;Commerce Department;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0294071", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2016/06/01", "title": "3 Palestinians Executed in Gaza Soon After Call by Hamas to Resume Death Penalty", "abstract": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Three Palestinians convicted of murder were executed in the Hamas-controlled coastal territory of Gaza on Tuesday, less than a week after Hamas lawmakers called for the resumption of capital punishment. The three men had exhausted their appeals, and the families of the victims refused a last-minute request to spare the men, who were executed at police headquarters in Gaza City, according to Alresalah, a pro-Hamas website, and Maan, a Palestinian news agency. The executions, the first approved by a court in nearly two years, were \u201cmeant to deter those who may think of committing such crimes,\u201d the Gaza general prosecutor\u2019s office said in a statement, according to a translation published in Maan. No one at the office was immediately available for comment. Two men were hanged, one after being found guilty of beating another man to death with a hammer in August, Alresalah reported, and the other on a murder conviction. A third man was executed by a firing squad after he shot and killed a man in 2014 who was trying to collect a debt. \u201cNo one should be put to death, certainly not as a part of a legal system in which torture and coercion are common,\u201d Sari Bashi, the Human Rights Watch director for Israeli and Palestinian issues, said in a statement. Hamas officials have carried out the death penalty at least 67 times since taking control of the territory in 2007, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. That figure does not include extrajudicial killings by Hamas of people suspected of collaborating with Israel during the three wars of the past decade. Most Palestinians approve of the death penalty for those convicted of spying for Israel, a crime that is viewed as deeply shameful in a society long under the shadow of a military occupation. \u201cThe Palestinian people want this, and we are doing what they asked for,\u201d said Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas lawmaker. Long-established tribal laws among Palestinians in Gaza allow a family to accept compensation for the killing of a loved one, to pardon the killer or to demand retribution. Hamas leaders had halted the use of the death penalty for convicted collaborators and murderers in June 2014, but lawmakers argued that it should be revived to help address concerns about rising crime.", "keyword": "Hamas;Gaza Strip;Capital punishment;Palestinians"}
{"id": "ny0037966", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/03/14", "title": "Bob Crow, Firebrand at Helm of British Union, Dies at 52", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 He called his dog Castro and quit the Communist Party because it was \u201ctoo moderate.\u201d Bob Crow, a confrontational and charismatic British trade union leader, died here on Tuesday. He was 52. His death was announced by the union he led for the last 12 years, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. It did not specify a cause, though newspaper reports said he might have had a heart attack. Mr. Crow, the left\u2019s favorite firebrand and the right\u2019s favorite villain, was that rare thing in post-Thatcher Britain: a working-class hero. His union exasperated many London commuters with its strikes, including a 48-hour walkout by subway workers in February that forced management to halt planned job cuts. But at a time when other unions were losing members and salaries were stagnant or declining, Mr. Crow increased his membership to 78,000 from 59,000. Subway engineers have been given raises regularly and will soon see their pay increase to \u00a352,000 (roughly $86,000), nearly twice the national average. As a former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, put it, \u201cThe only working-class people who still have well-paid jobs in London are his members.\u201d Even his enemies grudgingly respected his gritted-teeth militancy and East London wit. Boris Johnson, the current mayor of London, who sparred with Mr. Crow over the recent strikes and once called him \u201cdemented,\u201d paid tribute to him this week, calling him \u201ca fighter and a man of character.\u201d Robert Crow was born on June 13, 1961, in East London. He left school at 16 and became a track worker, then rose through the ranks of the National Union of Railwaymen, which later merged with the National Union of Seamen to form the Rail, Maritime and Transport union. He was proud of his working-class heritage: his cockney accent, his life in public housing and the lessons he learned from his father, a dockworker who told him to read The Financial Times as a boy and believe the opposite of everything it said. Later, during tense salary negotiations, he would become known for his quick mental arithmetic, calculating percentages in an instant \u2014 and usually rejecting offers out of hand. Survivors include his partner, Nicola Hoarau; their three children; and a daughter from his marriage to Geraldine Horan, which ended in divorce. If he was sharp and shrewd, sensitive he was not. As one commentator in The Independent said, \u201cHe was straight out of a P.R. textbook: the bit on how not to do it.\u201d When Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who broke union power in the 1980s, died last year, Mr. Crow was typically undiplomatic: \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned she can rot in hell,\u201d he said. In the run-up to last month\u2019s strike, he went on a cruise from Barbados to Brazil and was photographed by tabloid paparazzi on Copacabana Beach. On his return, a sun-tanned Mr. Crow was unrepentant. \u201cWhat do you want me to do?\u201d he asked. \u201cSit under a tree and read Karl Marx all day?\u201d", "keyword": "Bob Crow;Labor Unions;Great Britain;Obituary"}
{"id": "ny0295666", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/12/19", "title": "Obama Expected to Ban Offshore Drilling in Some Federal Waters", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama is expected to announce as soon as Tuesday that he will use his executive authority to permanently ban new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned waters off the Atlantic coast and in the Arctic Ocean, according to people familiar with the decision. Mr. Obama, who is searching for ways to bolster his environmental legacy in the last days of his administration, is expected to use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to ban the drilling, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because plans for the announcement were not yet final. The 1953 law, which governs how the executive branch uses and leases federal waters for offshore energy exploration, includes a provision that allows presidents to put those waters off-limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades. It is possible that Mr. Obama could use the law to try to permanently protect far wider areas from drilling, said people familiar with his plans, but they stressed that his plans were not yet final. The use of his executive authority would come as President-elect Donald J. Trump speaks of aiming to undo much of Mr. Obama\u2019s environmental legacy, particularly Environmental Protection Agency rules to combat climate change and Interior Department rules to slow or more heavily regulate drilling, mining and hydraulic fracturing on public lands. Mr. Trump could easily roll back executive orders and a handful of new environmental regulations, but some protections will be far more difficult to undo. Environmental advocates have urged Mr. Obama to use the existing authority of the 1953 offshore drilling law to create new environmental protections in federal waters, saying that it would come with the weight and authority of law, rather than an easily reversible executive action. Under that law, every president puts forth periodic five-year plans laying out how the waters of the nation\u2019s outer continental shelf may be leased for drilling or protected. Mr. Obama\u2019s most recent five-year plan put the entire Atlantic and portions of the Arctic coast off-limits to drilling. But Mr. Trump could easily open them up in his five-year plan. Using a separate provision of the law to block drilling for far longer would be subject to lawsuits.", "keyword": "Offshore drilling;Barack Obama;Executive Orders;Arctic Ocean;Atlantic Ocean;Donald Trump;Oceans and Seas"}
{"id": "ny0227989", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/07/27", "title": "Move to Limit Cantonese on Chinese TV Is Assailed", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 Protests over land grabs, industrial pollution and poor work conditions often rattle the Chinese authorities. Now add to that outrage over language policy. More than 1,000 people gathered Sunday in Guangzhou, in southern China , to demonstrate against a local politician\u2019s proposal to force a major local television network to stop broadcasting in Cantonese and switch to the country\u2019s official language, Mandarin. The protest, which was raucous and impassioned, ended peacefully after the police broke up the crowd. But any mention of the demonstration was wiped from many Internet forums on Monday, and only one national newspaper carried a detailed report, indicating that the pro-Cantonese groundswell had become a politically delicate matter. Cantonese is widely spoken in Hong Kong, Guangdong Province \u2014 whose capital is Guangzhou \u2014 and neighboring areas. Some call it a dialect of Mandarin, a language spoken commonly in the north, but a growing number of linguists say Cantonese is a separate language. Northerners generally do not understand it, but are used to its strongly pitched sounds because of the ubiquity of Hong Kong movies and Cantonese pop songs. Concern over the loss of languages and dialects in China is growing. In Tibet and Xinjiang, some ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs say the use of Mandarin as the official teaching language in schools has weakened the fluency of the local languages among many young people. Officials say mastering Mandarin is important for students to compete for jobs and university slots. Two weeks ago, notices began popping up online telling people to gather at 5:30 p.m. on July 25 at the Jiangnanxi subway station in Guangzhou to oppose a proposal that was presented this month by the local politician, Ji Kekuang. Mr. Ji, a member of the local committee of the Chinese People\u2019s Political Consultative Conference, suggested that the programs on Guangzhou Television\u2019s news and satellite channels start using Mandarin instead of Cantonese. He said the change would help accommodate tourists and athletes visiting for the Asian Games in November. The protesters on Sunday gave passionate speeches to cheering crowds about the worth of Cantonese and sang Cantonese songs, one news report said. Young people wore T-shirts with \u201cI Love Guangzhou\u201d written in characters common to Cantonese script but absent from Mandarin script. (Most characters overlap between the languages, but there are notable exceptions.) The English-language edition of Global Times, aimed at foreigners living in China, carried the one detailed report . It quoted Su Zhijia, a deputy party secretary of Guangzhou, as he rebutted rumors that the government planned to completely reject the use of Cantonese. \u201cThe city government has never had such a plan to abandon or weaken Cantonese,\u201d Mr. Su said. Most of the protesters appeared to be in their 20s or 30s. The owner of a restaurant by the demonstration site said in a telephone interview that the protesters had yelled out \u201cSupport Cantonese!\u201d and \u201cProtest!\u201d The protesters clogged the roads and stopped traffic, said the restaurant owner, who gave his name only as Mr. Liao because of sensitivities about discussing protests in China. \u201cI couldn\u2019t do business at all,\u201d he said. \u201cThey all blocked up my door.\u201d Lines of police officers formed human barricades to try to keep the crowd from swelling, witnesses said. The Cantonese-versus-Mandarin debate is fierce even in Chinatowns in the United States, where many residents traditionally spoke Cantonese or a related dialect, Taishanese, because their families came from Guangdong Province. But in recent years, the number of immigrants from other parts of China has grown, and Mandarin is now becoming the dominant language.", "keyword": "China;Chinese Language;Demonstrations and Riots"}
{"id": "ny0174350", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/10/17", "title": "MySpace and Skype to Announce Partnership", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 \u2014 In a deal that will connect two of the largest Internet services, MySpace , the social network owned by the News Corporation, will announce on Wednesday that it is teaming up with Skype, the Internet telephone service owned by eBay. In November, MySpace will add the Skype features and brand to its instant-messenger software, which allows MySpace users to conduct text chats with each other. MySpace users who download the newest version of that software will also be able to make free calls from their computers to each other, and to anyone else on the Skype network. \u201cWe are interconnecting the world\u2019s largest voice network and the world\u2019s largest video and social network,\u201d said Michael van Swaaij, interim chief executive of Skype. \u201cIt feels like an obvious fit.\u201d The companies hope that the combination will accelerate the growth of two already robust online networks. MySpace has 110 million active users around the world, but its members are mostly concentrated in the United States. Skype has 220 million users, most of them outside of this country. There is little overlap, particularly in the United States, where, according to Nielsen NetRatings, only 6.7 percent of Skype users are also users of MySpace\u2019s instant-messenger software. The two companies say they will split the revenue when MySpace members use Skype\u2019s pay features, like voice mail boxes and calling to and from Skype accounts and regular landlines and mobile phones. They have not disclosed the exact ratio of that split. The deal could be beneficial to both companies. MySpace\u2019s instant- messenger software, used by about 25 million people, trails rival services from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft in popularity and features. Those services already let people make voice calls in addition to conducting text chats. MySpace says the Skype deal helps it catch up. The partnership gives Skype increased exposure at a difficult time. EBay recently acknowledged that it overpaid by more than a billion dollars in its $3.1 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005.", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;MySpace.com;Skype Technologies;San Francisco (Calif);Software"}
{"id": "ny0033479", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/12/19", "title": "Astros the Most Frugal", "abstract": "While the Yankees set another salary record, the Houston Astros had the lowest average in the major leagues in 14 years. The overall big-league average rose 5.4 percent last season to a record $3.39 million, according to the annual report released by the Major League Baseball Players Association. The Yankees had the highest average for the 15th consecutive season at $8.17 million, breaking the mark of $7.66 million when they won the World Series in 2009. Houston\u2019s average of $549,603 was the smallest since the 1999 Kansas City Royals at $534,460. \u25a0 Pitcher Roberto Hernandez and the Phillies agreed to a one-year, $4.5 million deal. Hernandez, 33, formerly known as Fausto Carmona, was arrested in January 2012 on charges of falsifying his identity, which were later dropped. He was 6-13 with a 4.89 earned run average for the Rays last season. (AP)", "keyword": "Baseball;Yankees;Astros;Wages and salaries"}
{"id": "ny0203199", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/08/21", "title": "South Korea Agrees to Visit by North", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 The South Korean government has agreed to allow North Korean diplomats to travel to Seoul on Friday to bring a funeral wreath for the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung . Several North Korean envoys are due to fly to Seoul on Friday and depart on Saturday, according to Seon Mi-kim, a press official with South Korea \u2019s Unification Ministry. The timing of the trip suggests the North Koreans will not attend the state funeral, which has been scheduled for Sunday afternoon. Instead, they are expected to meet with Mr. Kim\u2019s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and other relatives, and perhaps visit a memorial altar at the National Assembly. Following a series of recent conciliatory gestures, including a personal message of condolence from the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, the North floated the idea of a cross-border trip on Wednesday. The South agreed to the proposal on Thursday. Kim Dae-jung, who died Tuesday at age 85, had traveled to North Korea for a landmark summit meeting in 2000 \u2014 including a now-famous handshake with Kim Jong-il. As president from 1998-2003, his \u201csunshine policy\u201d achieved a rare rapprochement with the North. Those policies have essentially been reversed by the current South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak. South Korea canceled the first satellite launching from its own territory on Wednesday only seven minutes before the planned liftoff, momentarily averting new friction with North Korea. The North, which was widely denounced for launching a rocket this year, was angered by subsequent United Nations sanctions and has said the same punitive standards should be applied to the South. But North Korea has taken steps in recent weeks, including releasing two American journalists and a South Korean worker, that have calmed tensions somewhat with the United States and on the Korean Peninsula. In the last several days, North Korea declared its intention to reopen its highly militarized border to groups of tourists and to pursue possible new business ventures with the South. In the latest sign of a thaw, two diplomats from North Korea met Wednesday with Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who twice went to North Korea in the 1990s to secure the release of Americans. Mr. Richardson declined to comment on the substance of the talks or say why North Korea requested the meeting, but he called it a \u201chopeful sign\u201d of improving relations, The Associated Press reported.", "keyword": "North Korea;South Korea;Kim Dae Jung;International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0232473", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/08/29", "title": "Chronicling the Hamptons, Even on His Day Off", "abstract": "Dan Rattiner, 70, the Hamptons\u2019 most prolific Boswell, is the founder, executive editor and lead writer of the free weekly Dan\u2019s Papers and the author of a dozen books. In his newest, \u201cIn the Hamptons Too,\u201d his second memoir, each chapter recreates an encounter with a notable Hamptonite. Mr. Rattiner lives in East Hampton with his wife, Chris Wasserstein, a psychotherapist. They have a wheaten terrier, Moo; a turtle, Dribble; and a city cat, Hank, who house-sits full time at their Upper East Side apartment. ROBIN FINN NO ALARM I\u2019m up around 6 a.m., no alarm clock. First thing I do is check to see if it\u2019s a beach morning; if it is, and I\u2019m feeling wide awake and mobile, I try to get to Main Beach in East Hampton for dawn. I take Moo with me, and I stop at Hampton Bagels on North Main for a hot plain bagel with nothing on it. PARK ON THE BEACH I drive on the beach via the employee parking lot, go about 200 or 300 yards west and park on the beach in front of Mort Zuckerman\u2019s home. I drive a Tahoe with a fishing pole on the roof; nobody ever bothers me on the beach. I write sitting in a folding chair midway between the truck and the water. Around 8:45, I go back home. BREAKFAST, WORKOUT By 9, my wife is up and she\u2019s already exercised, so we eat breakfast together out on the deck under a trellis. I have grapefruit juice and Special K with 2 percent milk, and either bananas or blueberries. After that I go up to the exercise room and work out for 20 minutes while watching a movie; the last one was \u201cThe Day the Earth Stood Still.\u201d I exercise three times a week, always on Sundays. A BREAK FROM GOLF I usually go play nine holes of golf, but this June I hurt my back lifting a box of books \u2014 yeah, they were my books, a work-related injury. So Chris goes to the Atlantic in Bridgehampton without me. She\u2019s a member there; I\u2019m just related by marriage. I plan to return to active golfing duty within a couple of weeks. EDITING BY THE POOL I actually love being around the house in the afternoon. I\u2019ll go out by the pool and sit under the jet of water that arches out from the second floor of the house and edit whatever story I wrote on the beach that morning. NAP AND A WALK If I was out late on Saturday, I\u2019ll set the app on my iPhone and take a 20-minute nap. And then I take the dog for a walk down at the docks. There\u2019s a lot of boat action. Chris takes care of bathing the turtle. We have a special trough for him. Then he goes and wanders around the front lawn, which is fenced. ONE DRINK, DINNER OUT We go out to dinner around 7. Depending on what month it is, we may stay home and watch the sunset first. And I will have one drink: rum and Coke with fruit. This summer we\u2019ve been going to this new place, Rugosa, or we go down the road to East Hampton Point or to Nick & Toni\u2019s. We might go to see something at Guild Hall; if not, we\u2019re home by 10. BOXING, MAYBE NPR Chris will go up to bed and I\u2019ll usually stay downstairs for 20 minutes or so and watch something I\u2019ve TiVo\u2019d, like a piece of a boxing match. I like boxing. She does not. Then I\u2019ll go upstairs, and maybe we\u2019ll listen to NPR for a bit. Almost always, everyone\u2019s asleep by 11:30.", "keyword": "Dan's Papers;Rattiner Dan;Writing and Writers;Hamptons (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0271161", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/04/25", "title": "Emails Deepen Criminal Cases in Flint, but Charges May Be Tough to Prove", "abstract": "As Bill Schuette, the attorney general of Michigan, announced criminal charges against three government workers in Flint\u2019s water crisis, he pledged there would be more charges soon, saying, \u201cWe\u2019ll go wherever the truth takes us \u2014 and, in this case, wherever the emails take us.\u201d Thousands of email messages, which were made public in the months since state authorities acknowledged lead contamination in the city\u2019s water last fall, are at the center of the state\u2019s case, and more messages may yet come to light as prosecutors appear likely to weigh possible charges against higher-level officials. But even with an array of written evidence, legal experts and environmental lawyers say the 13 criminal charges announced last week in Flint are extremely rare, and some said prosecutors may face significant challenges proving them in court. The charges \u2014 which include accusations of conspiring to manipulate water monitoring reports, tampering with reports on lead in the water, and misleading local and federal authorities about the safety of the water \u2014 are highly unusual because they were filed not only against a city employee who worked at Flint\u2019s water plant but also against state water regulators who were assigned to keep track of what Flint was doing. \u201cIn 40 years of working in this field, I cannot think of another time when a regulator was charged in this way \u2014 they are prosecuting the people who are supposed to be the watchdogs,\u201d said Jane F. Barrett, a professor and director of the environmental law clinic at the University of Maryland, who has previously worked as a state and federal prosecutor on environmental cases. Image Michael Glasgow, at his lab in 2013, is the only Flint employee charged in the crisis. Mr. Glasgow, the water quality supervisor, is accused of evidence tampering and willful neglect of duty. Credit Jake May/The Flint Journal-MLive.com, via Associated Press \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to say they were sloppy or negligent. But in terms of proving the conspiracy count, they have to have evidence that the defendants deliberately agreed to cover-up the seriousness of the problems with the drinking water supply,\u201d she said. Some legal experts suggested that the charges may have an effect beyond Flint or Michigan, raising a specter of criminal charges for regulators. \u201cPeople are going to sit up straighter in their chairs,\u201d said Mark N. Templeton, an associate clinical professor of law and director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. \u201cThey may need additional resources and training as well,\u201d he added. Some of the emails would appear to lay out a stark case. They include assurances that the water in Flint was being treated with an anti-corrosion chemical, when it was not. The failure to add that chemical allowed lead to leach from the pipes, resulting in dangerously high levels of lead in the water that led officials to finally advise residents to stop drinking it last fall. Officials said unfiltered water was still not safe to drink, and the long-term effects of drinking the tainted water for more than a year remain a worry, particularly for parents of small children. The only city worker charged so far in the Flint crisis is Michael Glasgow, the city\u2019s laboratory and water quality supervisor, who is accused of tampering with evidence \u2014 lead testing reports \u2014 and willfully neglecting his duty. The arrest of Mr. Glasgow, 40, came as a surprise to some, largely because he had cooperated with authorities, and had personally sought water samples last year from a home that was reporting high levels of lead. Mr. Glasgow also had voiced early concerns about switching the city\u2019s drinking water away from Detroit\u2019s water system to a new source in 2014, the event that set off the crisis that left residents drinking odd-smelling, foul-looking, lead-tainted water for months. Robert Harrison, a lawyer for Mr. Glasgow, said he could not comment on the specific charges, but described his client as \u201can honest, decent person\u201d who had spent years working for the city of Flint and had worked his way up from the bottom. \u201cCriminal charges against Mike are difficult to understand, given what Mike did in this case,\u201d Mr. Harrison said. \u201cNot only was Mike strongly and publicly opposed to the transfer of the water system away from the Detroit system, but Mike voluntarily met with, and spoke with, numerous investigators from the attorney general\u2019s office and the Genesee prosecutor\u2019s office on several occasions.\u201d In an email Mr. Glasgow sent to state regulators a little more than a week before Flint was to switch from its water supply to a new source, the Flint River, he expressed doubts about the monitoring of water safety and the training of workers at the Flint water plant. Michael Glasgow Expresses Concerns on Water Source Switch This April 2014 email, sent by Michael Glasgow just days before Flint made the switch to a new water source, suggests that the system was not ready and that he had concerns. (Source: Michigan Senate Democrats) Days after Mr. Glasgow\u2019s 2014 warnings about switching sources, the city went ahead with its plans, and Mr. Glasgow was quoted reassuring residents in a news release, drafts of which were emailed around the city and state. In the draft release, Michael Prysby, a state worker charged in the Flint case, promised that whatever doubts residents had about the river \u2014 seen among residents historically as a grimy dumping place for Flint industries \u2014 the state had deemed its water safe to drink. Draft of Press Release on Flint Water Source Switch This draft of a Flint press release, about the switch to a new water source, is dated several days after Michael Glasgow's note of concern. No signs of concern are noted in the release. (Source: Michigan Senate Democrats) Mr. Prysby, a water engineer with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, has entered a not guilty plea in the case, as has Stephen Busch, a water supervisor with the state environmental quality department. Lawyers for both men did not return phone messages. Charges against Mr. Prysby, 53, and Mr. Busch, 40, include misconduct in office, accusing them of knowingly misleading federal and county officials about whether the water was safe, as well as conspiring to tamper with evidence and tampering with reports on lead. The pair also are charged with failing to require the city of Flint to add chemicals to its new water supply to prevent lead from leaching from service lines, which is standard protocol for dealing with aged water systems; with improperly manipulating water-testing samples by directing residents to \u201cpre-flush\u201d their taps, which would decrease lead levels; and with failing to collect enough samples from homes that were known to have lead service lines. Records show that lead tests were sometimes conducted on homes that were described on reports as having lead service lines \u2014 the lines most vulnerable to contamination and the best test of a system\u2019s safety \u2014 but that actually had service lines made of materials other than lead. Such testing could have given other authorities and residents a false sense of security about lead levels. As residents and some authorities were voicing alarm about the water supply in early to mid-2015, emails from Mr. Busch and Mr. Prysby suggested they were assuring others that all was well. In February 2015, Mr. Busch told a concerned Environmental Protection Agency official, who was asking about some high lead findings, that Flint was indeed using chemicals to prevent leaching from the pipes, a process known as corrosion control, though the state now acknowledges that no such controls were in place at the time. Stephen Busch Email Responding to E.P.A. Concerns on Corrosion Control Here is an email from February 2015 in which Stephen Busch is responding to worries from the Environmental Protection Agency and stating that the city had a corrosion control program, or added chemicals that prevent leaching of dangerous metals like lead, in place. This turned out to be false. (Source: FlintWaterStudy.org) A day earlier, Mr. Prysby seemed to play down high levels found at one Flint house, which belongs to LeeAnne Walters, offering explanations for why the alarming results may not have reflected a broader, Flint-wide problem, and suggesting that Ms. Walters flush her taps before retesting, a move that would temporarily lessen lead levels. Michael Prysby Email on Lead Levels at LeeAnne Walters's Home Michael Prysby seems to play down federal concerns about some high lead readings at the home of LeeAnne Walters, suggesting that the sample was an outlier and that the tap should be flushed -- a method that lowers the appearance of lead -- before retesting. (Source: FlintWaterStudy.org)", "keyword": "Flint Michigan;Water;Lead;Michael Glasgow;Michael Prysby;Stephen Busch;Civil service;Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance;Water pollution;Bill Schuette"}
{"id": "ny0206616", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/06/05", "title": "Airbus Warns of Speed Problems Before Crash of Air France Jet", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In the first hint that malfunctioning airspeed indicators might have played an important role in the crash of an Air France jet bound for Paris early this week, Airbus issued a warning on Thursday to all its customers to follow established procedures when pilots suspect the devices are not working right. The message, approved by French investigators, said that the reminder had been sent \u201cwithout prejudging the final outcome of the investigation,\u201d but clearly it pointed to the possibility that mismanaging the plane\u2019s speed had been one step in a cascade of on-board failures, leading to the crash northeast of Brazil on Monday and the death of all 228 people on board. The message noted that \u201cthere was inconsistency between the different measured airspeeds\u201d in the Airbus 330 that crashed, one of several error messages that were sent by the plane\u2019s automatic systems to an Air France maintenance base. The Brazilian military said early Thursday that it had recovered the first piece of floating debris from the plane, a structural support piece about eight feet long that might have come from the jet\u2019s cargo hold. But on Thursday evening, the military said that information had been incorrect, and that the debris had probably come from a ship or another source. Based on the initial reports from the military, experts postulated that the plane had broken up in flight, an idea for which there is now less evidence. Airspeed on jets is measured by the combination of a tube that faces forward, called a Pitot tube, and an opening on the side of the plane known as a static port. The plane\u2019s speed is determined by comparing the pressure in the Pitot tube that is created by the oncoming wind with the pressure from the static port. The model that crashed, an A330, has three pairs of tubes and static ports. But other instruments can also be involved in calculating air speed, and the notice to airlines, called an Accident Information Telex, did not specify the nature of the inconsistency. The message went to airlines that operate all Airbus models, from narrow-body A318 models to the double-decker jumbo A380. Failure to manage an inconsistency properly has been cited in several crashes of big jets from various manufacturers. In 1996, a Boeing 757 taking off from the Dominican Republic crashed because the airspeed indicators of the captain and the first officer disagreed, and the crew mismanaged the problem. Mud wasps had nested in one of the Pitot tubes. A plane that flies too slow can lose lift and crash; too fast and it can break up in the air. The Airbus notice referred to the Quick Reference Handbook and the Flight Crew Operating Manual, which is a more detailed volume that is also kept in the cockpit. For all the models, however, the advice is the same: keep the plane level and keep the throttle setting in place while troubleshooting. The ability to fix the problem in flight would depend, of course, on its source. With only limited information available, and without the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder, experts around the world could not do much more than speculate. A series of system failures could be set off by an on-board fire, by a failure that allowed ice buildup on a critical instrument, or by a variety of other causes, experts said. The Airbus notice pointed out that the airplane was crossing an area of multiple thunderstorms at the time of the accident early Monday. Severe thunderstorms can cause crashes, although it is not clear whether the conditions that the flight encountered, on its planned route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, were unusual. At AccuWeather.com , a commercial weather service, forecasters calculated that thunderstorms in the region of the crash could have generated updrafts in the range of 100 miles per hour, although Daniel G. Kottlowski, a senior meteorologist, conceded that this was not unusual weather. He noted that one message sent out automatically by the plane indicated the cabin had depressurized, and he suggested perhaps this had forced the crew to descend into breathable air \u2014 and a more intense part of the storm.", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;Accidents and Safety;Airbus Industrie;Air France-KLM;Brazil;France"}
{"id": "ny0182995", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2007/12/21", "title": "Scientists Weigh Stem Cells\u2019 Role as Cancer Cause", "abstract": "Within the next few months, researchers at three medical centers expect to start the first test in patients of one of the most promising \u2014 and contentious \u2014 ideas about the cause and treatment of cancer . The idea is to take aim at what some scientists say are cancerous stem cells \u2014 aberrant cells that maintain and propagate malignant tumors . Although many scientists have assumed that cancer cells are immortal \u2014 that they divide and grow indefinitely \u2014 most can only divide a certain number of times before dying. The stem-cell hypothesis says that cancers themselves may not die because they are fed by cancerous stem cells, a small and particularly dangerous kind of cell that can renew by dividing even as it spews out more cells that form the bulk of a tumor . Worse, stem cells may be impervious to most standard cancer therapies. Not everyone accepts the hypothesis of cancerous stem cells. Skeptics say proponents are so in love with the idea that they dismiss or ignore evidence against it. Dr. Scott E. Kern, for instance, a leading pancreatic cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said the hypothesis was more akin to religion than to science. At stake in the debate is the direction of cancer research. If proponents of the stem-cell hypothesis are correct, it will usher in an era of hope for curing once-incurable cancers. If the critics are right, the stem-cell enthusiasts are heading down a blind alley that will serve as just another cautionary tale in the history of medical research. In the meantime, though, proponents are looking for ways to kill the stem cells, and say that certain new drugs may be the solution. \u201cWithin the next year, we will see medical centers targeting stem cells in almost every cancer,\u201d said Dr. Max S. Wicha, director of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the sites for the preliminary study that begins in the next few months (the other participating institutions are Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston). \u201cWe are so excited about this,\u201d Dr. Wicha said. \u201cIt has become a major thrust of our cancer center.\u201d At the National Cancer Institute , administrators seem excited, too. \u201cIf this is real, it could have almost immediate impact,\u201d said Dr. R. Allan Mufson, chief of the institute\u2019s Cancer Immunology and Hematology Branch. The cancer institute is financing the research, he said, and has authorized Dr. Mufson to put out a request for proposals, soliciting investigators to apply for cancer institute money to study cancer stem cells and ways to bring the research to cancer patients. The institute has agreed to contribute $5.4 million. \u201cGiven the current fiscal situation, which is terrible, it\u2019s a surprising amount,\u201d Dr. Mufson said. \u201cWe actually asked for less,\u201d he added, but the cancer institute\u2019s executive committee asked that the amount be increased. Proponents of the hypothesis like to use the analogy of a lawn dotted with dandelions: Mowing the lawn makes it look like the weeds are gone, but the roots are intact and the dandelions come back. So it is with cancer, they say. Chemotherapy and radiation often destroy most of a tumor, but if they do not kill the stem cells, which are the cancer\u2019s roots, it can grow back. Cancerous stem cells are not the same as embryonic stem cells, the cells present early in development that can turn into any cell of the body. Cancerous stem cells are different. They can turn into tumor cells, and they are characterized by distinctive molecular markers. The stem-cell hypothesis answered a longstanding question: does each cell in a tumor have the same ability to keep a cancer going? By one test the answer was no. When researchers transplanted tumor cells into a mouse that had no immune system, they found that not all of the cells could form tumors. To take the work to the next step, researchers needed a good way to isolate the cancer-forming cells. Until recently, \u201cthe whole thing languished,\u201d said Dr. John E. Dick, director of the stem cell biology program at the University of Toronto, because scientists did not have the molecular tools to investigate. But when those tools emerged in the early 1990s, Dr. Dick found stem cells in acute myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer. He reported that such cells made up just 1 percent of the leukemia cells and that those were the only ones that could form tumors in mice. Yet Dr. Dick\u2019s research, Dr. Wicha said, \u201cwas pretty much ignored.\u201d Cancer researchers, he said, were not persuaded \u2014 and even if they had accepted the research \u2014 doubted that the results would hold for solid tumors, like those of the breast, colon, prostate or brain. That changed in 1994, when Dr. Wicha and a colleague, Dr. Michael Clarke, who is now at Stanford, reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients. \u201cThe paper hit me like a bombshell,\u201d said Robert Weinberg, a professor of biology at M.I.T. and a leader in cancer research. \u201cTo my mind, that is conceptually the most important paper in cancer over the past decade.\u201d Dr. Weinberg and others began pursuing the stem-cell hypothesis, and researchers now say they have found cancerous stem cells in cancers of the colon, head and neck, lung, prostate, brain, and pancreas. Symposiums were held. Leading journals published paper after paper. But difficult questions persisted. One problem, critics say, is that the math does not add up. The hypothesis only makes sense if a tiny fraction of cells in a tumor are stem cells, said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a colon cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins who said he had not made up his mind on the validity of the hypothesis. But some studies suggest that stem cells make up 10 percent or even 40 percent or 50 percent of tumor cells, at least by the molecular-marker criterion. If a treatment shrinks a tumor by 99 percent, as is often the case, and 10 percent of the tumor was stem cells, then the stem cells too must have been susceptible, Dr. Vogelstein says. Critics also question the research on mice. The same cells that can give rise to a tumor if transplanted into one part of a mouse may not form a tumor elsewhere. \u201cA lot of things affect transplants,\u201d Dr. Kern, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said, explaining that transplanting tumors into mice did not necessarily reveal whether there were stem cells. Other doubts have been raised by Dr. Kornelia Polyak, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Polyak asked whether breast cancer cells remain true to type, that is, whether stem cells remain stem cells and whether others remain non-stem cells? The answer, she has found, is \u201cnot necessarily.\u201d Cancer cells instead appear to be moving targets, changing from stem cells to non-stem cells and back again. The discovery was unexpected because it had been thought that cell development went one way \u2014 from stem cell to tumor cell \u2014 and there was no going back. \u201cYou want to kill all the cells in a tumor,\u201d Dr. Polyak said. \u201cEveryone assumes that currently-used drugs are not targeting stem cell populations, but that has not been proven.\u201d \u201cTo say you just have to kill the cancer stem cell is oversimplified,\u201d she added. \u201cIt\u2019s giving false hope.\u201d The criticisms make sense, Dr. Weinberg said. But he said he remained swayed by the stem cell hypothesis. \u201cThere are a lot of unanswered questions, mind you,\u201d he said. \u201cMost believe cancer stem cells exist, but that doesn\u2019t mean they exist. We believe it on the basis of rather fragmentary evidence, which I happen to believe in the aggregate is rather convincing.\u201d Dr. Wicha said he was convinced that the hypothesis was correct, and said it explained better than any other hypothesis what doctors and patients already know. \u201cNot only are some of the approaches we are using not getting us anywhere, but even the way we approve drugs is a bad model,\u201d he said. Anti-cancer drugs, he noted, are approved if they shrink tumors even if they do not prolong life. It is the medical equivalent, he said, of mowing a dandelion field. He said the moment of truth would come soon, with studies like the one planned for women with breast cancer. The drug to be tested was developed by Merck to treat Alzheimer\u2019s disease . It did not work on Alzheimer\u2019s but it kills breast cancer stem cells in laboratory studies, Dr. Wicha says. The study will start with a safety test on 30 women who have advanced breast cancer. Hopes are that it will be expanded to find out if the drug can prolong lives. \u201cPatient survival,\u201d Dr. Wicha said, \u201cis the ultimate endpoint.\u201d", "keyword": "Cancer;Stem Cells;Tumors;Science and Technology;Research;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals);National Cancer Institute"}
{"id": "ny0096633", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/01/14", "title": "State in India Plans to Help Gay Youth \u2018Get Over Same-Sex Feelings\u2019", "abstract": "NEW DELHI \u2014 The government of Goa, on India\u2019s western coast, is setting up a program to get young gay people to lead \u201ca normal life,\u201d according to the state\u2019s minister for sports and youth affairs. \u201cWe will tell them what to do and how to get over same-sex feelings,\u201d the minister, Ramesh Tawadkar, said on Tuesday in a telephone interview. Mr. Tawadkar called homosexuality a \u201cbig problem\u201d in Indian society, where same-sex relations are illegal. Mr. Tawadkar revealed the plans on Monday in Panjim, the state capital, as he announced Goa\u2019s state youth policy for 2015. The new policy treats gay youths as a problem group to be addressed with government action, along with drug addicts, dropouts, migrants and others. Mr. Tawadkar confirmed in the interview Tuesday that the state government, run by the Bharatiya Janata Party, intended to set up \u201ccamps\u201d to treat gay, bisexual and transgender young people. He gave few specifics, but said that the program would include counseling. \u201cThey are that part of our society who have not yet experienced the true pleasures and bliss of life,\u201d Mr. Tawadkar said. \u201cWhat does a normal life feel like? Do they know? No.\u201d The first step, he said, would be to identify such young people through a statewide survey. But it was not clear how candidly people might respond, given that gay sex has been a crime in India since colonial times; the Supreme Court upheld the law in 2013 . Mr. Tawadkar did not say whether any young people identified as gay would be prosecuted, but he did say, \u201cWe will definitely use law as a tool to teach them what is right and what is wrong.\u201d Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, on a visit to India on Monday, condemned the criminalization of homosexuality. \u201cI speak out because laws criminalizing consensual, adult same-sex relationships violate basic rights to privacy and to freedom from discrimination,\u201d he said at a United Nations event on Monday in New Delhi. \u201cEven if they are not enforced, these laws breed intolerance.\u201d Claims that homosexuality is a disease that can be \u201ccured\u201d or that people can be \u201creprogrammed\u201d to change their sexual orientation have received no scientific support, and supposed methods for doing so, known as reparative therapy, have been widely discredited, especially in the West. Even so, taboos against homosexuality remain widespread in India, and conservative political and religious figures continue to call for government action against homosexuality. A prominent yoga guru, Baba Ramdev , will apparently be involved in the Goa state program. Baba Ramdev spoke out in 2013 in support of the Supreme Court decision, saying that homosexuality was a \u201cbad habit,\u201d and he invited gay people to his yoga institute, where \u201cthey will be free from this habit most definitely.\u201d Mr. Tawadkar, the youth minister, said that Baba Ramdev\u2019s \u201cexpertise\u201d in yoga instruction would be used to counsel gay people and drug addicts. According to Indian news reports, Mr. Ramdev will also be involved in a government program announced last year to expand the teaching of yoga in schools in Goa.", "keyword": "Goa;Gay and Lesbian LGBT;India;Bharatiya Janata Party;Ramdev"}
{"id": "ny0062450", "categories": ["sports", "skiing"], "date": "2014/01/19", "title": "Swiss Triumphs in Downhill, and Miller Finishes Fifth", "abstract": "Patrick K\u00fcng gave his countrymen a lot to cheer Saturday by winning the shortened Lauberhorn downhill in Wengen, Switzerland. K\u00fcng clocked 1 minute 32.66 seconds on a course in which more than a minute\u2019s worth of racing and signature features were eliminated because of strong wind. He earned his second World Cup victory \u2014 and first in the downhill. Hannes Reichelt of Austria finished second, 0.06 of a second behind, and the overall World Cup leader, Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, was third. Bode Miller of the United States finished fifth, 0.35 back. Miller\u2019s teammate Jared Goldberg was 12th. Svindal leads Marcel Hirscher by 82 points in the overall standings. In the downhill rankings, Svindal leads with 360 points, Reichelt is next with 260, and K\u00fcng is third with 221. U.S. TEAM WINS IN BOBSLED Steven Holcomb drove to victory in a World Cup two-man bobsled race in Igls, Austria \u2014 his first win outside North America in a two-man race since February 2007. With the fastest time in each heat, Holcomb and the brakeman Steve Langton finished two runs in 1:43.72. (AP) RANDALL OF U.S. WINS AGAIN Kikkan Randall of the United States won her second straight freestyle sprint at a World Cup cross-country event in Szklarska Poreba, Poland, to bolster her status as a medal favorite at the Sochi Olympics. (AP) U.S. NAMES SKELETON TEAMS Katie Uhlaender and Noelle Pikus-Pace were named to the United States women\u2019s Olympic skeleton team. The men\u2019s roster spots went to Matt Antoine, John Daly and Kyle Tress. (AP) GERMAN CLINCHES POINTS TITLE Felix Loch of Germany clinched his third straight World Cup season points championship in the luge. Loch wrapped up the title in Altenberg, Germany, with one race left, getting his fifth win in eight races over all by rallying past Russia\u2019s Albert Demchenko and finishing two runs in 1:48.921. (AP) SPANIARD SKATES TO VICTORY Javier Fern\u00e1ndez of Spain successfully defended his European figure skating title in Budapest. Fern\u00e1ndez scored 267.11 points and is the first repeat champion since Russia\u2019s Evgeni Plushenko in 2005 and 2006. (AP)", "keyword": "Patrick Kung;World Cup Skiing;Luge;Skeleton Sport;Skiing"}
{"id": "ny0181924", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2007/12/02", "title": "Much More Than a Roof Overhead", "abstract": "GARDEN CITY THE second graders swarming onto the deck of the Malaysian home on display at the Long Island Children\u2019s Museum may have been unfamiliar with the environment, but they quickly adapted to hunting and gathering. \u201cPretend I\u2019m a cat,\u201d shouted one as she swatted at a school of fish from the deck of the stilt house overlooking the sea. Another decided to dive in to pursue her catch, a method that brought a warning from Richard Driver, a teaching assistant. \u201cHey, watch out,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s water.\u201d Actually, it was a blue plastic mat sprinkled with plastic bass. The Malaysian seaside habitat was only a facade, of course, an example of dwellings from around the world represented in the \u201cYour House, My House\u201d exhibition at the museum here. Several of the children from the Jackson Annex Elementary School in Hempstead who were touring that day showed potential as fishermen, especially when it came to bragging prowess. \u201cI bet I caught a hundred fish,\u201d 7-year-old Jazmine Campos said above the din in the museum\u2019s lunchroom. The homes, on display until Jan. 6, are a traveling exhibition created by the Children\u2019s Museum of Memphis to demonstrate how things like culture, environment and materials determine the way a dwelling is designed. They include a full-scale ger (a yurt or tent used by Mongolian herdsmen) and a thatched-roof hut from Fiji. At the exhibit\u2019s entrance, the children had a chance to create their own dream home at two computer stations. \u201cNow, I\u2019m going to make one in the snow,\u201d said Monse Rosales, 7, flipping through several habitat options. At a crafts table inside the Fijian bure made of woven palm, the children used a series of rubber stamps to adorn paper (and sometimes themselves) with traditional cloth patterns. Gathered into a circle inside the ger, they listened to an instructor explain how the dome-shaped dwelling is constructed to withstand the area\u2019s extreme winters and hot summers. Recorded music from an instrument called a horse-head fiddle filled the air as the children examined a huhur, a goatskin bag used to make cheese and other dairy products. They laughed hearing that visitors do not knock at the entrance \u2014 it\u2019s considered rude \u2014 but simply enter after yelling out \u201cNokhoi Khor!\u201d That\u2019s Mongolian for \u201cHold the dog!\u201d Ronald Hernandez, 7, looked surprised when asked if he would like to live in one. \u201cNo,\u201d he said, emphatically. He much preferred his brick home, he said. But he did admire the ger\u2019s handy fold-up design. \u201cIt\u2019s made like a fence, you know? Like the one around my house.\u201d Monse Rosales thought it might be fun for a while. She noted that it did have shortcomings. \u201cMy mom and dad might be a little big for it,\u201d she said. The tacit lesson of the bilingual exhibit \u2014 the ingenious ways people adapt for survival \u2014 begins to soak in after awhile, said Helen Basile, a museum educator. The children come to see how, for example, the cramped quarters of the ger might be an advantage in frigid climates where human warmth is appreciated. \u201cI ask them if it feels comfortable sitting in a circle in here and they say, \u2018Yes, it does.\u2019 They get it,\u201d she said. Another educator, Jennifer Estrada, said several children had told her they wouldn\u2019t mind living, at least temporarily, in some of the technologically deprived homes. \u201cThey liked the idea of being in a place without a television or an Xbox,\u201d she said. \u201cThat kind of took me off guard.\u201d One of the most popular attractions, designed by the Long Island museum to complement the Memphis exhibit, was an interactive theater program that explores the history of bay houses on the South Shore of Nassau County. Using a slide show, a narrator explained how the marshland homes, which can be reached only by boat, once were a way of life for baymen. Today, only about 30 of the bay shacks remain. Jordy Duron, 7, liked the fact that you could walk out the door and go fishing off the deck. \u201cThat\u2019s something I could do with my dad,\u201d he said. But as far as playing around the house, he definitely preferred his own home sweet home to one perched above the water. Why? \u201cBecause you could fall off,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Art;Long Island Children's Museum;Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0290036", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/01/28", "title": "Manhattan Construction Worker Injured in Fall Down Elevator Shaft", "abstract": "A worker was critically injured at a construction site in Manhattan on Wednesday after he lost his balance on a ladder and fell into an elevator shaft, plummeting four stories and landing on metal bars, the authorities said. The worker, a 55-year-old man, was preparing to hang drywall on a ceiling at 34 West 17th Street when he fell, shortly after 8 a.m., the police said. According to the police, the worker was impaled by three metal bars that protruded from the base of the shaft, piercing his torso, a leg and an arm. Cinder blocks also fell on him. The metal bars had to be cut so he could be taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was listed in critical condition on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said. The New York City Buildings Department said on Wednesday that it had initiated an investigation. In a statement, the department said the man was not wearing safety equipment, such as a harness, at the time of the fall. A full stop-work order was issued for the site, where a 10-story commercial building, near Avenue of the Americas, is being converted into condominiums. The work was properly permitted, officials said. But the site was fined $1,000 for a violation in August that involved safeguarding the building\u2019s elevator shafts, according to department records. The contractor at the site, New Empire Builder Corporation, did not immediately return messages for comment on Wednesday. The city is in the midst of a building boom, and there has been a surge in the number of deaths and injuries of construction workers, many of whom are undocumented laborers. But the rise in such cases has outpaced the rate of new construction, leading to concerns about a lack of training and adequate safety measures.", "keyword": "Accidents and Safety;Construction;Manhattan;NYC;Buildings Department NYC"}
{"id": "ny0154487", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/01/31", "title": "City Catholic School League Makes National Impact", "abstract": "After several years of steady if unspectacular play, New York City\u2019s Catholic High School Athletic Association Class AA boys basketball league has returned to prominence \u2014 as much for its talent as for its depth. Four of the league\u2019s nine teams have been ranked in nationwide polls this season, and at least eight players are expected to join N.C.A.A. Division I programs next season. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like the Big East,\u201d said Oliver Antigua, the coach at St. Raymond in the Bronx. \u201cIf you\u2019re not playing your A game, you get knocked off.\u201d His team is among five from the league considered contenders for the city championship. The others are the defending league champion, Christ the King in Queens; Holy Cross in Queens; Rice in Harlem; and Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn. It is the first time that Tom Konchalski, a scout who publishes a recruiting pamphlet distributed to college coaches, said he could remember such balance in the league. \u201cThe strength of the Catholic league is not based on having the best players, best teams, best coaches, but it\u2019s the best league,\u201d he said. The five top teams all have at least one league loss, and four of their games against one another have gone into overtime. On Friday, Christ the King (14-4) topped Holy Cross (12-6) in double overtime, 92-87. Christ the King forward Ryan Pearson, a George Mason University recruit, sent the game into overtime by catching a long pass and hitting a 3-pointer off the glass at the buzzer. His coach, Bob Oliva, said the play summoned the image of Christian Laettner\u2019s shot that lifted Duke past Kentucky and into the Final Four of the 1992 N.C.A.A. tournament. Mike Quick, the host of \u201cHigh School Weekly\u201d on the MSG Network, said the last time the league was this deep was in 1999, when point guards Omar Cook (Christ the King) and Andre Barrett (Rice) dominated the competition. \u201cYou can say with conviction: it\u2019s the best league in America,\u201d said Quick, who has covered high school sports since 1987. \u201cLook at when these teams go around America, how well they play.\u201d Earlier this month, Christ the King won the Bass Pro Tournament of Champions in Springfield, Mo., winning the final in overtime against LeFlore, a nationally ranked team from Mobile, Ala. The Rice Raiders captured the McDonald\u2019s Classic trophy in Erie, Pa., by knocking off powerful St. Patrick of Elizabeth, N.J. They also claimed the Iolani Classic in Hawaii and the Bay Ball Classic in Delaware. St. Raymond won the Gatorade International Shootout in Puerto Rico, and Holy Cross captured the Stop-DWI Holiday Classic in Binghamton, N.Y. Among the projected college talent is the 6-foot-1 point guard Kemba Walker of Rice, who has committed to play for Connecticut, and two Bishop Loughlin players: the 6-7 power forward Kevin Phillip (Drexel) and the 6-foot point guard James Johnson (Quinnipiac). Others include the 6-1 shooting guard Darryl Bryant of St. Raymond (West Virginia), the 5-8 point guard Erving Walker of Christ the King (Florida) and the 6-6 swingman Sylven Landesberg of Holy Cross (Virginia). Landesberg is his school\u2019s career scoring leader and the league\u2019s reigning most valuable player. The league has remained strong despite an exodus of players to top programs in New Jersey and to prep schools elsewhere. One reason is the coaching, according to Providence\u2019s associate head coach, Steve DeMeo. Coach Jack Curran of Archbishop Molloy is four victories short of 900 for his career. \u201cYou get a kid from a C.H.S.A.A. program, you know you\u2019re getting a guy who is ready to compete at a high level,\u201d DeMeo said. After a game last week, Erving Walker said every game tested the stamina, resolve and poise of league players. Players in some other leagues, he said, compile enviable statistics by breezing through the regular season. But he said he would not trade in his high school basketball experience. \u201cYou get better,\u201d he said, \u201cby playing the best.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball;Interscholastic Athletics;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0028883", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/01/13", "title": "N.F.C. \u2014 Falcons\u2019 Tony Gonzalez Narrows Focus", "abstract": "FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. \u2014 For Michael Palmer, breakfast consists of oatmeal with blueberries and cinnamon. Why not a higher-calorie meal for a strapping, energy-burning N.F.L. tight end? Because Tony does it. Off to the side at each Atlanta Falcons practice, Palmer, an understudy whose chief duty is blocking, catches about a hundred passes. Why? Because Tony does it. In the team\u2019s fitness area, Palmer devotes increased time to stretching because ... Tony does it. For 16 seasons, Tony Gonzalez, 36, has done it better than most tight ends. But amid the glittering career numbers that would make a statistician swoon \u2014 1,242 receptions for 14,268 yards and 103 touchdowns \u2014 one protrudes like a rotten apple in a bushel full of Red Delicious: zero. Gonzalez spent 12 seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs and went 0-3 in playoff games, their extended postseason doldrums portending a limited future. So he negotiated a trade to the Falcons \u2014 the franchise with the worst N.F.L. postseason history (six victories since its inception in 1966). Yet with Atlanta, Gonzalez saw promise at the administrative and coaching levels and in quarterback Matt Ryan and wide receiver Roddy White, players he speaks so highly of he could preside over their fan clubs. With the Falcons for four years, Gonzalez has celebrated 45 regular-season victories, more than any other team during that time except for Green Bay and New England. Yet in the playoffs, he is 0-2 with them. With retirement looming \u2014 Gonzalez lists the odds of his playing next year at 19 to 1 \u2014 his desire for his first playoff victory falls well short of obsession. But, asked if a loss Sunday to the Seattle Seahawks would leave a hole in his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, he responded tersely. \u201cThat\u2019s a tough question,\u201d he said. \u201cAsk me after the game.\u201d Gonzalez has been around long enough to recognize that players are judged significantly on their postseason fortunes. \u201cObviously, in the playoffs, it steps up more because that is really kind of where your legacy comes in,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat you do in the playoffs is what a majority of people remember.\u201d To Falcons Coach Mike Smith, one of Gonzalez\u2019s many fans, there should be no win-for-Gonzalez sentiment in the locker room. Team-driven motivation should suffice. Image The 36-year-old tight end Tony Gonzalez has had an impressive season, leading the Falcons to the postseason. Yet he has an 0-5 record in the playoffs. Credit John Bazemore/Associated Press \u201cEverybody needs to put individual thoughts behind them,\u201d Smith said. That might be more challenging for the Falcons than containing Russell Wilson in the pocket. Palmer is among Gonzalez\u2019s teammates who have told him how much they want to win for him. \u201cIt\u2019s no secret,\u201d Palmer said of the sentiment. The figure most associated with Gonzalez lately is 95, as in the percentage that he invokes on the likelihood of his retirement. The number appears to reflect reality. Gonzalez says his longtime companion and three children have similar leanings. Yet he intends to mull it over deep into the off-season, which partly explains why he has no intention of mimicking linebacker Ray Lewis\u2019s moves in Baltimore last weekend during his final home game. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to see me dance,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a pretty thing.\u201d Gonzalez evidently has not disclosed his intentions to his coaches or teammates. He and the tight ends coach Chris Scelfo, in fact, agreed in training camp that the topic would stay off-limits. If he does retire, Gonzalez will become part of a select group of players who quit before their production began tailing off. His reception and touchdown totals this season surpassed those of his previous seasons in Atlanta, even after, by Scelfo\u2019s estimate, Gonzalez confronted bracket coverage in six or seven games. \u201cFrankly, I think he\u2019s gotten better,\u201d said Scelfo, who has been Gonzalez\u2019s position coach from the outset in Atlanta. Gonzalez has offset any physical regression with a strict diet and a tweaked training regimen that features workouts with a kettlebell. Scelfo has reduced Gonzalez\u2019s load at practice, telling him: \u201cWe don\u2019t need you on Wednesday or Thursday. We need you Sunday.\u201d Broad shouldered, Gonzalez is a master at applying to football the craft of blocking out a defender that he honed as a ferocious rebounder for the University of California basketball team. An innate sense of impending contact enables Gonzalez to protect himself, minimizing injuries. \u201cI feel fine,\u201d he said. \u201cHonestly, probably a little bit healthier than I did the last few years.\u201d Still, the probability of retirement sounded closer to certain with this comment: \u201cThere is no tomorrow. There is no saying, \u2018We\u2019ll get them next year.\u2019 It\u2019s about going out there and trying to finish on the right note.\u201d If Gonzalez heads into retirement, Palmer\u2019s playing time figures to grow next season should the Falcons bring him back. Nonetheless, the increased workload would be bittersweet. \u201cAs long as he wants to play,\u201d Palmer said, \u201cI\u2019m all for it.\u201d", "keyword": "Tony Gonzalez;Atlanta Falcons;Football;Seahawks;Playoffs"}
{"id": "ny0137963", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/05/08", "title": "Casio Solar-Powered MTG-1000 Stopwatch", "abstract": "Next to the plastic pocket protector, there is probably no better-known artifact of the nerd than the Casio G-Shock watch. But the chunky digital watch, created in 1983, has become a fashion item on the wrists of those who aren\u2019t necessarily technologically inclined. To celebrate the brand\u2019s longevity, Casio has created a number of multifunction watches, some with analog faces. They include the solar-powered, water-resistant MTG-1000, a stopwatch that tells time in 27 cities and features what Casio calls \u201cmultiband atomic timekeeping.\u201d It is available at certain Macy\u2019s stores and from Casio at www.gshock.com . Casio continues to engineer watches the way it has for a quarter-century, adding features and rarely removing any. One thing remains constant, though: programming the $400 watch by pushing its four buttons in a precise order is the true test of whether you are smart enough to wear it. For those who give up, leave the radio-controlled watch on a windowsill anywhere in the United States (or in Japan and most of Western Europe), and the next morning it will tell the correct time. DAMON DARLIN", "keyword": "Casio Computer Co;Watches and Clocks"}
{"id": "ny0253521", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/10/08", "title": "N.L.D.S.: Brewers Beat Diamondbacks in 10th to Advance", "abstract": "MILWAUKEE \u2014 The man of many personas, Nyjer Morgan, flitted from euphoria to sadness in the aftermath of the most important hit of his career. Morgan\u2019s ground single through the middle delivered Carlos Gomez from second base in the 10th inning Friday, enabling Milwaukee to overcome closer John Axford\u2019s first blown save in six months and eliminate Arizona, 3-2, in Game 5 of the teams\u2019 National League division series. After Morgan ran around the field, traded his batting helmet for one that read T Plush (after Tony Plush, one of his three alter egos) and accepted Champagne and beer baths from teammates, he walked to an unoccupied place in the clubhouse, sat cross-legged on the floor and began to cry. \u201cMy grandfather, man \u2014 I wish he was here to see this,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cHe was the only one who played in my family. And I lost him in May.\u201d Morgan held a can of beer in his left hand and slowly dumped a little on the blue carpeting, until white foam bubbled. \u201cI\u2019ll pour one out for him,\u201d he said. \u201cHere ya go, bud. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Pretty solid. Pretty solid.\u201d Morgan\u2019s hit set off a thunderous celebration from the sellout crowd of 44,028 at Miller Park and a shower of blue and gold confetti and fireworks. It also rendered the excitable Morgan so out of control he yelled an off-color phrase to the crowd that the TBS microphones picked up live. The rally completed a game that had been tense throughout, as Milwaukee \u2014 which led the majors with 57 home victories \u2014 avoided becoming the first N.L. team to lose a division series after taking a two-games-to-none lead. Instead, the Brewers will face St. Louis in the N.L. Championship Series beginning Sunday. The Brewers had not won a playoff series since 1982, when the franchise was in the American League. \u201cThat was incredible, the intensity,\u201d said Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun, who had two hits and batted .500 in the series (9 for 18). \u201cYou could feel the crowd. Everybody was nervous. Everybody was excited. I think everybody in the stands was waiting for a moment to go crazy like they did, and it was pretty cool.\u201d Or, as the Milwaukee owner Mark Attanasio put it, \u201cIt was the most exquisite torture you could have, I guess.\u201d The Brewers cobbled together the winning run against J. J. Putz in the 10th after a one-out single by Gomez, a defensive replacement in center field. With Morgan squaring to bunt, Gomez took off for second. Catcher Henry Blanco, who entered the game two innings before after starter Miguel Montero left for a pinch-runner, jumped from his crouch to throw but missed the pitch, allowing Gomez to steal easily. \u201cWhen I got to second base, I said, if he hits it on the ground, I\u2019m going to try to score,\u201d Gomez said. \u201cNobody\u2019s going to stop me. \u201cI know Nyj. In those kind of moments, he\u2019d be so big. I\u2019ve had that feeling before, and I know he\u2019s going to drive me in.\u201d The Milwaukee ace Yovani Gallardo held the Diamondbacks to one run in six innings in his rematch with the 21-game winner Ian Kennedy, whom he outpitched to win Game 1. Neither figured in the decision, leaving Gallardo undefeated against Arizona this season (6-0, 1.23 earned run average). Gallardo allowed only a homer by Justin Upton in the third, the Diamondbacks\u2019 10th homer of the series. Gallardo would have been the winning pitcher if Axford, who had converted 44 consecutive save chances since April 18, had held the lead in the ninth. Axford found instant trouble when Gerardo Parra led off with a double and Sean Burroughs blooped a single into short left, putting runners at the corners. Willie Bloomquist dropped a squeeze bunt single toward first base to score Parra, as Axford accidentally tripped the charging first baseman Prince Fielder, who had hoped to throw home. \u201cWe talked about it a little bit,\u201d Axford said. \u201cThat ball was just perfect. I didn\u2019t know if I was going to get to it. If I did, I wasn\u2019t going to have much of a shuttle throwing it home. I don\u2019t know if got into Prince\u2019s way, whether he was going to have a shot. \u201cIt worked out the way it did, and everyone pulled through.\u201d Especially Morgan, who had been 1 for 11. Manager Ron Roenicke stuck with him, and Morgan rewarded that faith by doubling in the fourth and scoring a run to tie the game, 1-1. Yuniesky Betancourt put the Brewers in front with a sixth-inning single after center fielder Chris Young raced back to rob Jerry Hairston Jr. of an extra-base hit. Morgan likes to call himself an entertainer. He alternately refers to himself as Tony Plush, Tony Gumbel or Tony Tombstone. His interviews as the bubbly Plush, a persona he crafted with two friends back home in San Jose, Calif., endeared him to Brewers fans, though some of his quirks have tested Roenicke\u2019s patience. \u201cPeople have lost sight of how great he\u2019s been for us on the field,\u201d Braun said. \u201cHe\u2019s obviously entertaining off it. He comes to the ballpark with a different personality every day. He\u2019s a character, but he\u2019s been so successful on the field. Tonight was as big as it gets.\u201d Braun revealed a fourth Morgan persona, one that may stick. \u201cThe other day I started calling him Tony Clutch,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was Tony Clutch that came through.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Playoff Games;Milwaukee Brewers;Arizona Diamondbacks;National League;Roenicke Ron;Axford John;Blanco Henry;Gallardo Yovani"}
{"id": "ny0084725", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/10/13", "title": "Hazing and Drinking Deaths at Asian-American Fraternities Raise Concerns", "abstract": "Syracuse University students trying to join Nu Alpha Phi, an Asian-American fraternity, were given demerits when they made mistakes during pledging, and a way to work them off . There were push-ups and situps in the attic of the fraternity house, according to investigators and students. There were extended periods in a sitting position \u2014 knees bent, backs to the wall \u2014 that tested their physical strength and resolve. And on one frigid night in March, there were exercises outdoors in a park, with three pledges crawling and rolling in the snow with no gloves. One of them got frostbite on both hands and faced losing several fingers. The number of Asian-American fraternities and sororities has grown over the last generation as the children and grandchildren of immigrants, feeling shut out of existing Greek organizations, began to create their own. And as those groups have spread across the country, some have replicated not only the social networking of other fraternities, but also their excesses. Last month, prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced that they planned to charge members of an Asian-American fraternity, Pi Delta Psi, in connection with a hazing-related death of a freshman at Baruch College in Manhattan during a retreat in the Poconos in December 2013. At least three other students have died during activities at Asian-American fraternities since 2005, and many more have been injured, resulting in a spate of criminal prosecutions, lawsuits and school disciplinary actions against fraternities and their members. Image Chun Hsien Deng It is difficult to say whether abuses are more common in Asian-American organizations than in others. There are no official statistics on fraternity deaths and injuries across the United States. But people who have studied the issue say they have been surprised by the number of episodes, given that Asian-American fraternities occupy just a small corner of the collegiate Greek world. \u201cThere shouldn\u2019t be this many deaths, this many cases, for this small number of organizations, chapters and members, \u201d said Walter M. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University in New Orleans, who is leading a task force on hazing prevention for the North-American Interfraternity Conference. Across the country, there are more than 65 Asian-American fraternities and sororities, by some estimates, though most have small memberships and operate without permanent headquarters, professional staff or campus housing for students. Lambda Phi Epsilon International Fraternity , one of the largest with dozens of chapters, has experienced the most problems, including three deaths. Peter Tran, 18, a student at San Francisco State University, died after attending a fraternity party in 2013; the fraternity was subsequently expelled by university officials. Phanta Phoummarath, 18, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, died after drinking at a fraternity party in 2005; his family received a $4.2 million settlement in a lawsuit against Lambda Phi Epsilon and its members. In a third case, in 2005, Kenny Luong, 19, a student at Cal Poly Pomona in California, died from head injuries after playing football against Lambda Phi Epsilon members from the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Luong and his schoolmates were trying to start a chapter at their own college, and as a requirement, they had to face off against the existing chapter at Irvine in a game without any helmets or pads, the authorities said. In a lawsuit against the fraternity that ended with a $1.7 million settlement, Mr. Luong\u2019s family said the game was simply hazing in disguise, with the Irvine players often gang-tackling members of Mr. Luong\u2019s outnumbered team, even when they did not have the ball. In the Baruch case, Chun Hsien Deng, 19, died after a ritual known as the \u201cglass ceiling,\u201d in which he was tackled by fraternity members while blindfolded and weighed down with a sand-filled backpack as he tried to cross a frozen yard, prosecutors said. After he was knocked out, they said, fraternity members delayed getting help and sought to cover up their involvement. Five of the 37 defendants are facing third-degree murder charges; the rest face charges that include assault, hindering apprehension and hazing. Amid growing concerns over hazing, members of Lambda Phi Epsilon and other Asian-American fraternities and sororities say their organizations have actively promoted no-hazing policies, increased training for members and replaced potentially abusive pledging rites, such as strenuous runs around campus, with talks on Asian-American issues and walks for cancer. Image A Syracuse University student seeking to join the Nu Alpha Phi fraternity suffered frostbite during pledging. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times Alex Huang, 21, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, who belongs to Lambda Phi Epsilon, said that students who want to join his fraternity go to workshops, including one on \u201cLambda Man training,\u201d where they are told to stand up for themselves and to know what is right. \u201cNow there\u2019s not much of anything that happens,\u201d he said. Still, problems continue to crop up. Mr. Huang\u2019s chapter was cited by university officials for hazing and serving alcohol to a minor in 2013. It was placed on probation and barred last year from holding social activities and recruiting new members. The Lambda Phi Epsilon chapter at Rutgers University was suspended this year over hazing. In the Syracuse case involving frostbite, Nu Alpha Phi was banned from campus and two of its members, Tae Kim and Jeffrey Yam, who served as pledge masters, are awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge of hazing. If convicted, they face up to a year in jail. A lawyer for Mr. Yam could not be reached. James Hopkins, a lawyer for Mr. Kim, described him as a good student from a humble background who had no prior record and teaches chess to children. While he said it was unfortunate that the pledging student suffered frostbite, he said, \u201cwe are adamant that the same was not the result of criminal conduct on the part of Tae Kim.\u201d (Ultimately, the student did not lose any fingers.) Richard Cohn, a lawyer who represented the family of Mr. Luong, the student who died after the football game, said that hazing continues even when students are told they do not have to take part. Pledges are intimidated and fear they will be rejected by the fraternity if they do not participate in the rites, he said. \u201cIn practice, what is really happening is flat-out hazing despite the fact that they put together all kinds of legal documents that set forth rules against hazing and all the members are supposed to sign off on it,\u201d he said. The leaders of Lambda Phi Epsilon, Nu Alpha Pi and Pi Delta Psi did not respond to emails or calls seeking comment. Image Randall Sorrels, the lawyer for the family of Phanta Phoummarath, 18, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, who died after drinking at a fraternity party in 2005; his family received a $4.2 million settlement in a lawsuit against Lambda Phi Epsilon and its members. Credit Kevin Fujii/Houston Chronicle Brian Gee, the director of risk reduction for another Asian-American fraternity, Pi Alpha Phi, says that any time there is a hazing-related death or injury \u201cit\u2019s a huge setback\u201d for leaders who are trying to make positive changes within their organizations and reinforces negative perceptions of them. \u201cWe\u2019re always trying to do our best,\u201d Mr. Gee said. \u201cEvery fraternity out there, Asian or not, has had setbacks. We do have very high expectations of our memberships to follow our policies. When violations are found, we do our best to hold chapters accountable. Sometimes that comes in the form of educational programming. Other times, it\u2019s sanctions or suspensions of chapters.\u201d The history of Asian-American fraternities and sororities can be traced back to Rho Psi, which was started in 1916 at Cornell University by Chinese men who found themselves excluded from all-white fraternities. Several Asian-American fraternities and sororities took root in California, where they thrived primarily on state university campuses. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next two decades, many more Asian-American fraternities and sororities were founded across the country as the Asian population grew. The organizations are open to non-Asian students as well. Today, the groups remain relatively unknown, partly because, like many fraternities and sororities, their members are often secretive about the organizations\u2019 inner workings. When Lambda Phi Epsilon and Pi Alpha Phi brawled in a park in San Jose, Calif., in 2003, leaving one man dead and others injured, Dr. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, noted that some police officers initially mistook them for Asian gangs. Julie J. Park, an assistant education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has studied national data on college freshmen, estimated that approximately 2 percent of Asian-American students join Asian-American fraternities and sororities. For those who do, she said, those organizations add diversity to Greek life and can give Asian-Americans a more prominent role in campus social life. \u201cI think when they are at their best, there\u2019s a lot of good potential,\u201d she said. Image The reports of hazing among Asian-American fraternities prompted Minh Tran, a director of curriculum and academic enrichment at U.C.L.A. School of Dentistry, to conduct his own field research in 2009. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times The reports of hazing among Asian-American fraternities prompted Minh Tran, a director of curriculum and academic enrichment at U.C.L.A. School of Dentistry, to conduct his own field research in 2009. Mr. Tran, who had joined Lambda Phi Epsilon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1997, was allowed to conduct focus groups at Asian-American fraternities on three California campuses after agreeing not to use names. Many members said they joined because they were looked at as nerds rather than leaders by non-Asians, and felt stereotyped as socially and athletically inferior to other men, he recalled. Mr. Tran, 37, concluded that some men were taking hazing too far as \u201ca form of hyper-masculinity.\u201d Often, the hazing grew worse from year to year as members tried to outdo one another, and the worsening reputation of their fraternities attracted what he called \u201clower quality recruits\u201d who tended to perpetuate that behavior. He added that there was inadequate oversight and support from national fraternity leaders, often recent graduates with little idea about what was going on in local chapters. Instead, these chapters relied on university-provided advising and support services, only to be cut off when they got in trouble and were suspended. Kai Tan, the national president of Xi Kappa Fraternity, with 300 members at three campuses in Georgia and at one campus in Boston, said that his organization was working with college administrators and outside consultants; participating in workshops to prevent hazing, alcohol use and sexual assault; and offering support to local chapters. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to show we want to be part of the movement away from what happened in the past,\u201d Mr. Tan, 27, said. He said that Xi Kappa\u2019s \u201cnew member education process\u201d \u2014 the term \u201cpledging\u201d is no longer used \u2014 focused on shared cultural identity through rituals such as the \u201cprivilege walk,\u201d in which students line up and either take steps backward or forward, depending on successes or setbacks, such as whether their parents could vote, or whether they were racially profiled. Other activities, such as r\u00e9sum\u00e9 workshops, emphasize personal growth. Justine Chang, 20, a member of Sigma Phi Omega at the University of California, Berkeley, said that more Asian-American fraternities and sororities needed to have frank discussions about hazing problems and their recurrence. Too often, she said, no one wants to talk about the issue. \u201cWhen we hear about a horrible incident in the news, the immediate reaction for a lot of Asian Greeks is, \u2018It\u2019s a one in a million chance,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cThat chapter did something that no one ever thinks would happen in their own chapter. But I think that\u2019s a big mistake. A lot of the processes are similar. It could really happen anywhere.\u201d", "keyword": "Fraternities,Sororites;Asian American;Hazing;College;Lawsuits;Baruch;Chun Hsien Deng;Alcohol abuse"}
{"id": "ny0276446", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/02/12", "title": "Oregon Standoff Ends as Last Militant Surrenders", "abstract": "PRINCETON, Ore. \u2014 They implored the last holdout in the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge here to think about the Holy Spirit. They explained that the First Amendment was about freedom of speech and the Second was about the right to bear arms, and said that they were in that order for a reason. They asked him what he thought Jesus would have done in his situation. He, in turn, asked for pizza and marijuana, criticized a government that condoned abortion and drone strikes, and talked about U.F.O.s and dying rather than going to prison. In the final moments, a standoff fed by big ideas about the role of government came down Thursday morning to the grievances and fears of one troubled young man, and the tense but successful efforts of his sympathizers and F.B.I. agents to coax him to surrender, ending the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. \u201cI\u2019m actually feeling suicidal right now,\u201d said David Fry, 27, of Blanchester, Ohio, the last of the remaining protesters to leave the wildlife sanctuary, during telephone negotiations over his surrender. \u201cI will not go another day as a slave to this system. I\u2019m a free man. I will die a free man.\u201d In an extraordinary conclusion to the 40-day occupation, the four final holdouts, in a conversation streamed live online to tens of thousands of listeners, spoke with supporters trying to persuade them to give up, including Gavin Seim and KrisAnne Hall, both antigovernment activists; Michele Fiore, a Republican state legislator from Nevada; and the Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist. Three of the occupiers emerged in quick succession, hands raised in surrender, but Mr. Fry at first refused. For the next hour and a quarter, sitting alone in a tent, hugging a blanket, he veered between resignation and agitation, rambling across a wide range of issues and conspiracy theories, as the audience listening on the live stream, operated by Mr. Seim, climbed as high as 30,000. Mr. Fry said that bankers caused wars, and that the government suppressed breakthrough inventions and was \u201cchemically castrating everybody,\u201d and occasionally he could be heard talking on another phone with the F.B.I. Then, suddenly, it was over. \u201cOne more cookie, one more cigarette,\u201d he said, just before leaving his hide-out. \u201cAlrighty then.\u201d With the end of the standoff \u2014 which left one protester dead and 25 others indicted \u2014 the movement behind the occupation moved to a new phase. Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the brothers who spearheaded the occupation and now sit in a Portland jail, have vowed to escalate their fight, using the court as a platform. Image Thomas Wagner waved a flag near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Thursday. Credit Rebecca Boone/Associated Press \u201cNow we go from the refuge to our next battleground, which is the court system and legislation,\u201d Ms. Fiore told reporters. She and Mr. Graham accompanied F.B.I. agents to the refuge Thursday, reassuring the holdouts as they gave themselves up, and she said she hugged each of them and the F.B.I. negotiators. The occupation highlighted longstanding grievances over federal government ownership and management of vast acreage in the West. The Bundy brothers\u2019 father, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher, was arrested Wednesday on charges related to the armed standoff in 2014 between his supporters and federal agents. He and his supporters, like the Oregon occupiers, maintain that the federal government does not have the legal right to own so much land and is too restrictive on ranchers using it. From the start, the Malheur standoff had a foot firmly planted in unfiltered live media, bypassing mainstream journalists, whom the protesters called tools of the government. Pete Santilli , who has an online talk show, was a frequent presence, interviewing and supporting the occupiers on his YouTube channel; he is among the jailed. Mr. Fry live streamed videos of the occupation and posted them online, while other protesters gave interviews on talk radio. The occupiers repeatedly called on people from around the country to join them at the refuge. But the mass movement they hoped for never materialized. Critics said the protesters relied on a strained reading of the Constitution that the courts have rejected. And many experts argued that, in fact, ranchers \u2014 along with loggers, miners and others \u2014 get the use of federal land at bargain prices, heavily subsidized by taxpayers. But Western lands experts and supporters of the occupation\u2019s goals said that however quietly the standoff ended, and however garbled its message was at times, the deeper meaning will continue to resonate, because the occupiers in some ways reframed one of the nation\u2019s oldest and thorniest arguments. The question of who should control land in the West \u2014 often a dry matter of economics in the past \u2014 has now been pulled into the polarized political terrain that has already made the nation a house divided. In the 1980s and early \u201990s, in what is now called the Sagebrush Rebellion, ranchers in the West protested higher prices that the federal government wanted to charge to let cattle graze on public lands. That fight, said David J. Hayes, a former deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior \u2014 the agency that oversees hundreds of millions of acres of Western lands \u2014 was largely over money. The new argument, as the occupiers said repeatedly, is not overtly about money at all \u2014 rather, it is a much broader fight about the role of government and what constitutes federal overreach. \u201cThe claim is that the land belongs to private parties, and that public ownership is a foreign concept in our Constitution,\u201d said Mr. Hayes, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now teaches law at Stanford University. \u201cThat\u2019s a relatively new one,\u201d he added, \u201cand it finds no credible support in the U.S. Constitution.\u201d However alien their arguments might seem to people in the East and in urban areas, where the federal government holds relatively little acreage, it has power in the rural West, where Washington controls more than half the land. But in this region, opinions were bitterly divided over the occupation; many people who supported its aims opposed its methods, and resented what they saw as interference and grandstanding by outsiders like the Bundys. Image A family waved a flag on Thursday in support of the last of the occupiers at Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. Credit Rob Kerr/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The occupation of the refuge, about six hours\u2019 drive from Portland, began on Jan. 2. Armed militants demanded the release of two local ranchers who were imprisoned on arson charges for burning public lands. They also called for federal lands that had been in private hands, generations ago, to be turned over to ranchers or to local government. The standoff appeared to be faltering in late January, when several prominent occupiers \u2014 including Ammon and Ryan Bundy \u2014 were arrested while venturing out of the refuge. A spokesman for the group, LaVoy Finicum, was killed , and several of the remaining occupiers heeded calls by the Bundys to go home. But four of them held out for another two weeks, before revealing in a live-streamed conversation Wednesday that they intended to surrender on Thursday. They invoked the death of Mr. Finicum as evidence that the government did not want a peaceful conclusion, saying that they feared being killed, too. On Thursday morning, Ms. Fiore urged the last four militants to surrender so they could continue to spread their message. \u201cA dead man can\u2019t talk, a dead man can\u2019t write,\u201d she told them. \u201cWe have to just stay together, stay alive.\u201d Sean Anderson, his wife, Sandy, and Jeff Banta emerged after 9:30 a.m. But Mr. Fry, still on the phone with Mr. Seim, Ms. Hall and an F.B.I. agent, resisted until almost 11 a.m. \u201cI\u2019m paying taxes, and it\u2019s going for abortion,\u201d Mr. Fry said, and also for \u201cmurder of millions in the Middle East.\u201d Later, he said, \u201cMy concern is that if I go to prison, I\u2019ll probably be raped.\u201d In a telephone interview, Mr. Fry\u2019s father, William Fry Jr., 56, said he had spoken with his son after the arrest. \u201cHe said, \u2018Hi, I\u2019m O.K., I\u2019m going to be fine.\u2019 \u201d The two had been in contact during the occupation, and the elder Mr. Fry said he supported his son in \u201ctrying to make a change, to save our country from the problems that we\u2019ve got.\u201d About 50 or 60 cars were parked at the roadblock outside the sanctuary on Thursday, where protest sympathizers mixed with journalists. Thomas Wagner, 32, an unemployed security guard from Christmas Valley, Ore., stood atop his pickup truck in full military fatigues, and said, \u201cI came here to support these four patriots, to let them know that they are not being abandoned.\u201d In Burns, the town closest to the refuge, people raised American flags up and down the main street to celebrate the occupation\u2019s end. \u201cThis is better than the Fourth of July,\u201d said Bekka Riess, 15, beaming as she put flags up. \u201cMaybe now we can finally get our town back.\u201d", "keyword": "Malheur National Wildlife Refuge;Civil Unrest;Federal lands;Ammon Bundy;Ryan Bundy;FBI;Cliven Bundy;Oregon"}
{"id": "ny0142983", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/11/15", "title": "After Loss, Freddie Mac Seeks Aid", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Freddie Mac , the mortgage finance giant, is asking for an initial injection of $13.8 billion in government aid after posting a large quarterly loss. The mortgage finance company is making the first request to tap the $200 billion promised by the Treasury Department to keep it and its sibling company, Fannie Mae, afloat after the two were seized by federal regulators more than two months ago. Freddie Mac said it expected to receive the money by Nov. 29. The company, which is based McLean, Va., posted a loss Friday of $25.3 billion, or $19.44 a share, for the third quarter. The results compared with a loss of $1.2 billion, or $2.07 a share, in the year-ago period. Analysts were looking for a loss of 89 cents a share for the latest quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. The loss was mainly because of a $14.3 billion charge to reduce the value of tax assets, but also was driven by $9.1 billion in write-downs on mortgage securities, and $6 billion in credit losses because of soaring mortgage delinquency rates and foreclosures. Freddie Mac said that rising unemployment rates, tightening credit and deteriorating economic conditions \u201ccontributed to a substantial increase in the number of delinquent loans,\u201d including prime loans made to borrowers with strong credit. \u201cContinuing home price declines and growing unemployment are now affecting behavior by a broader segment of mortgage borrowers,\u201d the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Freddie Mac\u2019s overall delinquency rate rose to 1.22 percent, from 0.9 percent at the end of June, and 0.5 percent a year earlier. The number of foreclosed properties that Freddie Mac holds rose to 28,000, from 22,000 in June. On Monday, Fannie Mae posted $29 billion loss in the third quarter as it took a tax-related charge. While Fannie Mae said it might have to seek the government\u2019s help in the coming months, it has not yet done so. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which own or guarantee around half of the $11.5 trillion in outstanding home loan debt, operate in a conservatorship that enables the government to inject up to $100 billion in each company in exchange for ownership stakes of almost 80 percent. Both Fannie and Freddie have changed their accounting for their deferred-tax assets, which can emerge from operating losses, and can be used to reduce future tax expenses. Companies must be able to show they will be profitable if they intend to use the tax assets for earnings in later periods. Freddie Mac\u2019s net worth \u2014 the value of its assets minus the value of its liabilities \u2014 fell to negative $13.8 billion at the end of September.", "keyword": "Freddie Mac;Company Reports;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0212841", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2017/01/25", "title": "A Political Jolt at a Literary Festival, but Courtesy Wins Out", "abstract": "JAIPUR, India \u2014 Every year at this time, India\u2019s beau monde rearranges itself in Jaipur for a spectacularly popular five-day literary festival. There are Punjabi princesses in Jackie Onassis sunglasses, book club aunties in top-shelf homespun, parboiled-looking Englishmen, men of letters with Oxbridge accents and the occasional well-buffed South Delhi influence peddler. At night, they gather for cocktails in floodlit palaces. To be liberal, if not leftist, is as proper as a quilted handbag. So it was a startling sight this year to see the Jaipur Literature Festival feature a panel by two leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh , the far-right group that gave rise to India\u2019s current prime minister, Narendra Modi. The R.S.S., which maintains that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, has been barreling toward drawing-room respectability for some time. Left-leaning Congress governments banned it three times in the last century, saying its ideas risked inciting violence against minority groups. These days state television carries its leader\u2019s speeches live. But there are few invitations in Indian public life more coveted than one to appear at the festival in Jaipur, that Mount Olympus of panel discussions. The two R.S.S. men took their seats on a podium, where a minute before, an author had been asking rhetorical questions about the existence of beauty. How would the audience greet them: As India\u2019s version of the Tea Party, giving voice to ideas that have taken on extraordinary force in the electorate? Or as India\u2019s version of the Ku Klux Klan, propagating \u201cextremism and bigotry,\u201d as one author put it in a letter withdrawing from the event? In the end, arm\u2019s-length politeness reigned. \u201cWe are acknowledging that the intellectual nerve center has shifted, and the seat of cultural power has shifted, because no one was interested in inviting these guys before 2014,\u201d said Supriya Nair, a writer and editor who has attended the festival for the last six years. In any case, she said, the shift rightward had already taken place in the larger society. \u201cThis is a last bastion,\u201d she said. The R.S.S., for its part, savored its moment. \u201cR.S.S. was allowed entry into this space for the first time,\u201d said Prafulla Ketkar, who edits Organiser, the group\u2019s in-house magazine. \u201cFor whatever reason, now they are compelled to recognize the fact that R.S.S. is a force to reckon with, and one which cannot be ignored at panel discussions.\u201d Image Most of the people cramming into the festival discussions were neither haughty leftists nor right-wing polemicists, but ordinary people, and thousands of students. Credit Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times Not everyone was handled with such delicacy. Among the festival\u2019s designated victims was Suhel Seth, a ubiquitous man about town and one of Delhi\u2019s master bloviators. Even by Bengali standards, Mr. Seth, the author of the self-help book \u201cGet to the Top,\u201d is skilled at drowning out other speakers, deflecting all contenders with sonorous repetitions of \u201cone minute, one minute, one minute\u201d until they retreat into dejected silence. On Monday, he appeared on the panel \u201cManelists, Misogyny and Mansplaining,\u201d next to a row of female writers who turned on him with gusto, asking why he kept interrupting. He tried, haltingly, to discourage them from viewing this phenomenon through the lens of gender. \u201cIn Calcutta, we didn\u2019t know misogyny or mansplaining,\u201d he said starchily at one point. \u201cAll that we knew was the idea of \u2018gentleman\u2019 and \u2018gentlemanly.\u2019 \u201d Pressed on these terms, he fluffed himself up. \u201cYes,\u201d he said, \u201cgentleman is what we use. I\u2019m sorry if it doesn\u2019t stand up to the rigors of today\u2019s understanding.\u201d At this, Bee Rowlatt, author of a book about Mary Wollstonecraft , an 18th-century crusader for women\u2019s rights, took the microphone and asked why he was onstage at all. The audience cheered. Mr. Seth, at this point, fell silent for several consecutive minutes, a fact so remarkable that an anonymous gossip blogger known as JLF Insider publicly invited Ms. Rowlatt for coffee. Among the great draws of the Jaipur festival, of course, is that it is possible to be excluded. At a party thrown by Penguin Random House India, in a palace once occupied by a maharajah, guests were led through a gate where dancing girls whirled giddily on the ramparts and over a red carpet across an expanse of gardens, dark except for thousands of tiny flickering candles and liveried servants offering Champagne. \u201cWe almost got run over by horses,\u201d one partygoer said blandly, drifting off toward the gin. JLF Insider observed a well-known journalist, young women in tow, frantically mining his contacts to get through the door. \u201cIt\u2019s important,\u201d the blogger said. \u201cIf you make the right impression with the right person, you will perhaps be in a panel next year.\u201d Indeed, there is a category of Delhi writers who spend much of the year angling for an invitation to speak, through assiduous attendance at other writers\u2019 book launches. Rosalyn D\u2019mello, who had waited fruitlessly for an invitation for two years after the publication of her memoir, \u201c A Handbook for My Lover ,\u201d wrote despairingly on Facebook about the experience, describing it as \u201cso, so painful to watch so many random so-called authors, who seemed to be invited more because of their networks than any real talent.\u201d Her complaint seemed to penetrate a fourth wall, and William Dalrymple , a historian and one of the festival\u2019s co-directors, offered her a spot on a panel. But the real gatekeeper for Indian writers is the festival\u2019s other co-director, Namita Gokhale, the writer and publisher, and she is not easily moved. Image The Jaipur Literature Festival runs for five days and is extremely popular. Credit Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times \u201cI never appease anybody,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I don\u2019t want to call someone I can be quite cussed.\u201d Mr. Dalrymple, who selects non-Indian writers, said he felt fortunate that Ms. Gokhale handled this part. \u201cShe is constantly avoiding people at Delhi parties, people who have written self-published memoirs and think they should be there,\u201d he said. Among those who did not appear was Raghu Karnad, the author of a well-received recent history, \u201c Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War .\u201d In a letter explaining his withdrawal as a moderator, he said that he had watched as right-wing politics suffused other popular literary festivals, and that inviting the R.S.S. was \u201cbeyond the pale.\u201d Mr. Dalrymple sounded genuinely sad at the mention of Mr. Karnad. He said the rise of right-wing politics had posed a dilemma for organizers of events like his, because India\u2019s elite universities and publishing houses are so overwhelmingly left-liberal. \u201cIt\u2019s like captaining a slightly listing boat, that is kind of toppling to one side,\u201d he said. He said the R.S.S., which was founded in 1925 in imitation of European fascist movements , had become too important to ignore in intellectual forums. The invitation did not convey any particular imprimatur, he argued, \u201cbecause they run the country.\u201d \u201cThis is an organization that controls the ruling party,\u201d he said. \u201cTo exclude this element would be to relegate us to a left-liberal bubble with ourselves.\u201d In the end, most of those cramming into the festival were neither haughty leftists nor right-wing polemicists, but ordinary people afflicted with book love. At a discussion on Hindu scripture, a man in a plaid scarf rose to ask, after a moment of hesitation, \u201cWhat is the best way for an old man to try and learn Sanskrit, and enjoy it before he dies?\u201d And there were students, thousands of them, subsisting on 30-rupee cups of sweet tea. Some of them spent five days sleeping in the train station because they did not have enough money to rent a room, said Payal Rajawat, 20. For her part, she said, she craved the free-ranging discussion of art and literature, something not available at the Vivekananda Institute of Technology, which she attends. \u201cI am a totally freaky lover of language,\u201d she said. As for the inclusion of the R.S.S., Ms. Rajawat saw no problem. Like her friends, she celebrates the rise of Mr. Modi, saying he had elevated India\u2019s standing to the point that \u201ceven America is paying attention.\u201d One of her friends this year had rejected a Happy New Year greeting because he said it was a holiday imposed on India by Western colonizers. This line of thinking gave her an idea, which she suggested passing on to the organizers of next year\u2019s literary festival. \u201cMr. Modi is a mesmerizing speaker,\u201d she said. \u201cBelieve me, ma\u2019am, the whole world would come into this place.\u201d", "keyword": "Books;Politics;Publishing;India;Writer;Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh India;Jaipur"}
{"id": "ny0114693", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2012/11/09", "title": "Alderson, Mets\u2019 G.M., Assesses Team With Humor", "abstract": "INDIAN WELLS, Calif. \u2014 Laughter may often be the best medicine for the Mets , who face a catalog of serious tasks this winter, and Sandy Alderson , the team\u2019s cerebral general manager, demonstrated again Thursday that he has the comic chops to elicit it. Holding court inside the hotel lobby Thursday morning at baseball\u2019s annual general managers meeting, Alderson deadpanned his way through a question-and-answer session. The pack of reporters was eager for clues on how he might try to improve a financially challenged team that has finished a combined 22 games under .500 in the two seasons he has been in charge. Alderson has serious issues to address these days \u2014 the foremost one at the moment may be whether to trade the 38-year-old knuckleballer R. A. Dickey rather than try to sign him to a contract extension \u2014 but that did not stop him from poking fun at his problems, of which there are many. One reporter asked Alderson for his assessment of the Mets\u2019 outfield, which presently resembles a wasteland, without a single everyday player. \u201cWhat outfield?\u201d Alderson replied, spurring a burst of laughter from those gathered around him. That quickly led to another quip. \u201cWe\u2019re going to bring those fences in another 150 feet,\u201d he said, playing off the fact that a season ago he shortened the dimensions of spacious Citi Field in a bid to help the team\u2019s power hitters. Two jokes are a lot for a general manager speaking on the record, but Alderson was just getting started. Asked from where the team\u2019s new outfielders would be acquired, he grinned. The reporters waited. \u201cA cardboard box?\u201d he said, finally. Not even his current players were spared. Alderson affirmed that, at present, Lucas Duda, who is blessed with power but not with defensive skills, was the team\u2019s best option in left field. But he then took the opportunity to tweak Duda, who fractured a bone in his right hand while moving furniture at his apartment in Southern California last month. \u201cHe does come with a lot of furniture, though,\u201d Alderson said. \u201cI mean baggage. I\u2019m sorry.\u201d As the laughter died down, Alderson added, \u201cWe\u2019re counting on him at this point.\u201d Alderson\u2019s sense of humor has surfaced often enough as he has wrestled with the daunting assignment of reviving the Mets. The team has been too often overmatched on the field and is still trying to regain its balance financially after its entanglement with the Bernard L. Madoff fraud scheme. During last year\u2019s winter meetings, Alderson shot down a line of questioning about whether he had tried hard enough to re-sign shortstop Jose Reyes, who ended up joining the Miami Marlins on a six-year, $106 million deal. \u201cIf you\u2019re asking whether I should have sent him a box of chocolates, perhaps I should have done that,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, the box of chocolates would have cost $106 million.\u201d A little while later, Alderson opened a Twitter account, @MetsGM , which he then used in February to poke fun at his organization\u2019s financial difficulties. His first message \u2014 \u201cGetting ready for Spring Training-Driving to FL but haven\u2019t left yet. Big fundraiser tonight for gas money. Also exploring PAC contribution.\u201d \u2014 was reposted 410 times on the site, and he proceeded to post in real time about his drive to Port St. Lucie with a similar spirit of satire. At one point, he posted : \u201cWill have to drive carefully on trip. Mets only reimburse for gas at a downhill rate. Will try to coast all the way to FL.\u201d This summer, when Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants beat out David Wright in fan balloting for third base on the National League All-Star team, Alderson went at it again. \u201cWright vs. Sandoval,\u201d he wrote on Twitter . \u201cA city of 8 million was outvoted by a city of 800,000.\u201d Alderson\u2019s counterpart on the Yankees, Brian Cashman, has become noticeably more direct in recent seasons, often saying exactly what he is thinking and occasionally using some humor, too, although not to the degree that Alderson does. Cashman has also taken to rappelling down a building in Stamford, Conn., during the holiday season, a feat that Alderson, a former Marine who will turn 65 in two weeks, has not shown any desire to match. But Alderson has his own heights to scale simply in trying to make the Mets competitive again. Amid the jokes on Thursday remained the question of whether the team would be able to sign both Dickey, a surprise 20-game winner in 2012, and Wright to contract extensions. Alderson said discussions with both players were continuing and said of Dickey, who is signed through 2013: \u201cWe\u2019d love to retain him. We\u2019re trying to.\u201d But Alderson, his humor put aside, also acknowledged that trading a member of the Mets\u2019 fairly deep starting rotation might be the best way to acquire talented players to fill some of the holes in the Mets\u2019 lineup. He also said that while it might be \u201ca little unusual\u201d to trade someone now favored to win the Cy Young Award, it was not inconceivable that Dickey would be sent elsewhere. \u201cIt happens,\u201d Alderson said. If it does, Mets fans will not be laughing. But Anderson will not be, either. After all, he knows that the jokes only go so far.", "keyword": "Baseball;Alderson Sandy;New York Mets;Dickey R A;Trades (Sports);Wright David"}
{"id": "ny0031990", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/06/22", "title": "Disappointing Fall for \u2018Rock Center,\u2019 a News Program With Big Ambitions", "abstract": "If \u201cRock Center With Brian Williams\u201d has proved anything in the last year and a half, it is this: However hard it is to gather an audience for any kind of show in prime time, for news programming, the task is even harder. The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment \u2014 not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days. To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of \u201cRock Center,\u201d said in an interview: \u201cI hope that\u2019s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.\u201d \u201cRock Center\u201d was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added \u201c60 Minutes II\u201d in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of \u201cNBC Nightly News,\u201d had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to \u201cRock Center\u201d was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired. The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS\u2019s \u201c48 Hours\u201d and NBC\u2019s \u201cDateline,\u201d which are mainly about crimes and court cases, \u201cRock Center\u201d presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to \u201c60 Minutes\u201d were rarely complimentary; \u201cIt\u2019s a very hard standard to match,\u201d Mr. Hartman said. More important, \u201c60 Minutes\u201d was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand. \u201c60 Minutes II,\u201d on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And \u201cRock Center\u201d was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of \u201cRock Center.\u201d At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with \u201cRock Center\u201d may have simply overestimated the public\u2019s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: \u201cYou can\u2019t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they\u2019re around, they\u2019re watching cable news.\u201d There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, \u201cVice,\u201d and OWN has \u201cOur America,\u201d hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine. Video In 2013, Brian Williams sat down with The Times\u2019s Bill Carter to discuss the ever-changing news industry. If the decision to cancel \u201cRock Center\u201d was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday\u2019s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network\u2019s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity. An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program\u2019s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of \u201cRock Center.\u201d Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled \u201cMormon in America.\u201d) \u201cThere\u2019s a feeling of loss for the practice of long-form journalism, as hokey as that sounds,\u201d said another staff member, who cited \u201c60 Minutes\u201d and another CBS program, \u201cCBS Sunday Morning,\u201d as two places where in-depth reporting could still be found on commercial television. Mr. Hartman, who was replaced in the fall but stays in touch with former co-workers at \u201cRock Center,\u201d said, \u201cEveryone, from Brian to the correspondents to producers, feels like they\u2019re glad they did it, even though it didn\u2019t end the way they wanted it to.\u201d The reason most often cited by employees for the show\u2019s struggles was out of the staff\u2019s control. It was the series of time slot changes, from Monday to Wednesday to Thursday and finally Friday, that robbed the program of any real consistency. \u201cThey moved it around so much; they treated it like filler,\u201d said the former NBC executive. Mr. Hartman noted that \u201c60 Minutes II\u201d had suffered from the same problem. Some television critics pointed to a different reason: the program\u2019s sometimes confusing mix of high and low, serious and silly. (Debates about news programming frequently center on such questions.) Critics also pointed to the hiring of Chelsea Clinton, who was a \u201cspecial correspondent,\u201d as evidence that the show was not up to the challenge of a high-quality newsmagazine. The show had only two full-time correspondents, Kate Snow and Harry Smith, several fewer than \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d raising a question about whether the network had devoted the necessary resources to the program. Many other NBC correspondents, including Ann Curry and Meredith Vieira, also contributed. Some staff members said they wished they had generated more nights like Nov. 14, 2011, when Bob Costas scored a news-making live interview with Jerry Sandusky, who then stood accused of sexual abuse. Alexandra Wallace, who replaced Mr. Hartman, declined to be interviewed about the end of \u201cRock Center,\u201d but said in a statement: \u201cOur gifted staff and correspondents have told unbelievably important stories \u2014 from Sandusky to Scientology to the Boston bombing survivors \u2014 and Brian was also able to show a looser side of his personality and sense of humor. We\u2019re proud of every minute of television we put on air and thankful to the viewers who tuned in.\u201d", "keyword": "TV;NBC News;Comcast;Brian Williams"}
{"id": "ny0128420", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2012/06/27", "title": "A.N.C. Weighs How to Lift South Africans", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 During apartheid, in the coastal municipality of Overstrand, just east of Cape Town, whites lived in plush, seaside enclaves whereas blacks and mixed race people lived in ugly townships and shacks. Whites owned almost all the businesses, and had access to the best jobs, health care and schools. Eighteen years after the end of apartheid, not much has changed, said Maurencia Gillion, a local politician who grew up and still lives in Overstrand. \u201cThe rich white people live in their beautiful holiday homes,\u201d Ms. Gillion said. \u201cThe rest are in slums, in squatter areas. Even after 18 years, in reality apartheid remains.\u201d That would seem a harsh critique of the party that has governed South Africa since the end of minority rule in 1994, the century-old African National Congress . It came not from an opposition leader, but one of the party\u2019s own. Ms. Gillion is a senior A.N.C. leader in her province, and her words were simply an echo of what the party\u2019s leader, President Jacob Zuma, said in a speech minutes earlier. \u201cThe structure of the apartheid economy has remained largely intact,\u201d Mr. Zuma said, in a speech to thousands of delegates to the A.N.C.\u2019s policy conference, held every five years, before the presidential election, to work out the party\u2019s platform. \u201cThe ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, as it has always been.\u201d The four-day conference here, which began Tuesday, has been devoted to considerable soul-searching about what the A.N.C. has, and has not, achieved in 18 years in power. With unemployment at 25 percent, and much higher for young blacks, and corruption widespread, there is a growing perception that the A.N.C. has become the party of a small black elite interested only in its own enrichment. To counter this perception, the party has released a set of back-to-basics policy proposals that it claims will help deliver on its old election slogan: \u201cA better life for all.\u201d The party\u2019s own analysis had this to say about South Africa\u2019s predicament nearly two decades after the end of apartheid: \u201cToo few people work; the standard of education of most black learners is of poor quality; infrastructure is poorly located, under-maintained and insufficient to foster higher growth; spatial patterns exclude the poor from the fruits of development; the economy is overly and unsustainably resource-intensive; a widespread disease burden is compounded by a failing health system; public services are uneven and often of poor quality; corruption is widespread; and South Africa remains a divided society.\u201d Officials were quick to say that 18 years is a short time to reverse centuries of discrimination under colonial and apartheid rule that left black South Africans ill equipped to compete in a liberalized economy. And Mr. Zuma ticked off a list of major achievements: millions of new houses for the poor; millions more connected to the electric grid and piped water systems; and a growing and vibrant black middle class. Embedded in the policy documents and Mr. Zuma\u2019s remarks is an argument that the process of transforming the country\u2019s economy to put more wealth in the hands of blacks was hampered by the need to make peace with the former white rulers. \u201cWe had to make certain compromises in the national interest,\u201d Mr. Zuma said. \u201cWe had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time. Thus the economic power relations of the apartheid era have remained intact.\u201d The party is thus proposing what it calls a \u201csecond transition,\u201d this one focused on economic, rather than political, change. The policy proposals take a hard look at some of the most difficult issues facing South Africa, and at the A.N.C.\u2019s internal struggles. One asks whether the government should dispense with the current policy of land redistribution and replace it with a more aggressive one. Another contemplates nationalizing the country\u2019s mines. Taken together, the proposals would, if adopted, represent a sharp leftward shift for the A.N.C., which despite its roots has largely backed a free-market economy with minimal state intervention. The proposals are being discussed this week and will be decided upon when the party holds its convention in December. Some A.N.C. members have been pushing for a more radical program of redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks. The party\u2019s Youth League, under the firebrand leader Julius Malema , had demanded that gold, platinum and diamond mines be nationalized. Cosatu, an alliance of trade unions that is one of the A.N.C.\u2019s main allies, has pushed for banks to be nationalized. Yet, according to the A.N.C.\u2019s own analysis , its failure to deliver economic progress may be its own fault. The party has experienced \u201ca silent shift from transformative politics to palace politics wherein internal strife and factional battles over power and resources define the political life of the movement,\u201d a far cry from its founding as a liberation movement built on socialist principles. For all the fears of a leftward shift that could lead to the repossession of white-owned land, as happened in Zimbabwe, or the nationalization of mines, such moves are highly unlikely, said Steven Friedman , a political analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg. \u201cThere is going to be lots of fairly radical rhetoric, and the actual proposals are going to be actually quite meek and mild,\u201d Mr. Friedman said. \u201cThis has been the pattern all along.\u201d Indeed, some delegates at the conference advocated a go-slow approach. \u201cI support the sharing of wealth, but I don\u2019t think we should go for a radical approach,\u201d said Tim Mkhari, a delegate from Limpopo, a province on the country\u2019s northern edge. \u201cWe should not take the Zimbabwe route,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "South Africa;African National Congress;Apartheid (Policy);Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0172168", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/11/07", "title": "F. Maynard Sundman, Stamp Dealer, Dies at 92", "abstract": "F. Maynard Sundman, a stamp and coin dealer whose innovative mail-order marketing, using everything from comic books to matchbook covers, introduced millions to the once exclusive worlds of philately and numismatics, died Oct. 31 in Littleton, N.H. He was 92. The cause was heart failure, said his youngest son, Donald. It was Mr. Sundman\u2019s advertising acumen that set his companies apart. Reaching beyond trade publications, he squeezed little ads onto matchbook covers and splashed big ones \u2014 \u201cFree! 30 Much-Wanted Foreign Stamps!\u201d \u2014 in Sunday supplements, comic books, TV Guide, Parade magazine and National Geographic. As early as the 1950s, his commercials were on late-night radio, coast to coast. Mr. Sundman\u2019s breakthrough came in 1952, when a nationwide ad in Sunday supplements offered a free set of 10 stamps from Bohemia and Moravia depicting Adolf Hitler. \u201cThe mail just flooded in,\u201d recalled Mr. Sundman\u2019s oldest son, David \u2014 a total of half a million orders, exhausting the world\u2019s supply of the stamps. A stamp collector since childhood, Mr. Sundman started his second company, the Littleton Stamp Company, in 1945, after returning from Army service in World War II. Within 10 years the company had branched out into collectible coins. Mr. Sundman widely expanded the practice of shipping items \u201con approval\u201d \u2014 trusting prospective customers either to buy the collectibles or to send them back. Over the years he sent hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of stamps and coins to a diverse clientele. \u201cIt just shows you that the average person is honest,\u201d Mr. Sundman said in a 1992 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. \u201cHe became a master at mail order,\u201d said Q. David Bowers, a co-chairman of Stack\u2019s, a New York coin dealer, explaining that Mr. Sundman used a scientific approach to learn which ads increased sales. \u201cHis theory was that if this ad showed a 5 percent improvement, and if something else was 4 percent, the next ad would multiply all those factors and be even better.\u201d Mr. Bowers likened the Littleton Coin Company to Wal-Mart, because of its versatility and its huge stock of popular collector coins. \u201cFor people in the hinterland, it\u2019s easy to order by mail,\u201d he said. \u201cAlso, there\u2019s something very special about receiving a package in the mail. People like to open them.\u201d Mr. Sundman has had \u201ca huge impact in the stamp industry, primarily with the marketing to nonestablished collectors,\u201d said Ken Martin, deputy executive director of the American Philatelic Society. \u201cMost people aren\u2019t going to start off paying a thousand dollars for a postage stamp. A collector starting out at $5 a month may become a customer for $50, $100 a month in a year or two.\u201d Frederick Maynard Sundman was born on Oct. 17, 1915, in New Britain, Conn., the only child of Frederick William Sundman and Floy Rae Maynard. He graduated from Bristol High School in 1935; that year, operating out of his parents\u2019 house with $400 and a small line of credit from a prominent stamp dealer in Boston, he started the Maynard Sundman Stamp Company. He shut the company a few years later and, from 1941 to 1945, served in North Africa and Italy with the Fifth Army, earning a Bronze Star. After the war, Mr. Sundman moved to Littleton and started the Littleton Stamp Company with his first wife, Fannie Kasper of Terryville, Conn., whom he married in April 1941. The company started in a one-room office on Main Street in Littleton; the couple lived down the street, over an A.&P. store. Today the company employs about 350 people and occupies 85,000 square feet. In 1974 Mr. Sundman bought the Mystic Stamp Company of Camden, N.Y., now the country\u2019s largest stamp dealer. His earlier firm, which had been called the Littleton Stamp and Coin Company until the mid-1970s, was renamed the Littleton Coin Company. Until recently, Mr. Sundman reported to work almost daily, using a 1948 Royal typewriter to correspond with collectors around the country, his friends and family said. Mr. Sundman\u2019s first wife died in 1993. He remarried in 1994 and is survived by his wife, Dorothy; his sons from his first marriage, David and Frederick, both of Littleton, and Donald, of Skaneateles, N.Y.; his stepdaughter, Jeanne Joslin of Canterbury, N.H.; his stepson, Richard Joslin of Littleton; eight grandchildren; and four stepgrandchildren. His sons David, president of the Littleton Coin Company, and Donald, president of the Mystic Stamp Company, have endowed a lecture series in his name at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and another at the World\u2019s Fair of Money, the American Numismatic Association\u2019s annual convention.", "keyword": "Deaths (Obituaries);Sundman F Maynard;Collectors and Collections;Numismatics"}
{"id": "ny0171164", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/20", "title": "Amazon Reading Device Doesn\u2019t Need Computer", "abstract": "Jeff Bezos knows that the world is not exactly clamoring for another way to read electronic books. \u201cIf you go back in time, the landscape is littered with the bodies of dead e-book readers,\u201d Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com , said yesterday. Mr. Bezos is hoping that Kindle, an ambitious $399 e-book device that he introduced in New York, will avoid that fate. Kindle, which Amazon spent three years developing, lets users wirelessly download best sellers for $9.99 each, and it is designed to be simpler to use and more comfortable to hold than similar devices. Most significant, Amazon has made it easy to shop for and buy books through Kindle without using a computer. The device connects to a high-speed wireless data network from Sprint, and wireless delivery is included in the cost of books and other products. Downloading a book takes less than a minute. Mr. Bezos said Kindle was most likely to appeal to travelers and others who want to carry several books with them. \u201cAnyone who is reading two, three, four books at the same time should have one of these,\u201d he said in an interview. Kindle can store 200 books at once. Mr. Bezos added that he thought Kindle would be more comfortable for people to curl up with than previous reading devices. It weighs 10.3 ounces and uses so-called electronic ink technology licensed from the company E Ink, based in Cambridge, Mass. The screen reflects light, making it easier to read in a bright room, and it uses less power and generates less heat, because there is no backlight to the display. Kindle will also download and display newspapers, magazines and blogs. Among the newspapers available are The New York Times for $13.99 a month and The Wall Street Journal for $9.99 a month. Some 300 blogs are available for 99 cents or $1.99 a month. Amazon shares some of that fee with newspaper and blog publishers. The device will only be available at Amazon. Amazon, which is one of the world\u2019s largest booksellers, reached agreements with all the major publishers to sell their wares on Kindle. It has about 90,000 titles so far and 90 percent of current best sellers. Sony, which introduced an e-book reader a year ago, has about 20,000 titles for sale. Publishing executives said they were optimistic about Kindle. \u201cYou kind of understand why it has been three years in development because it offers so much in an uncomplicated way,\u201d said David Young, the chief executive of the Hachette Book Group USA, which owns Little, Brown. \u201cThe big challenge, of course, is that it is still relatively expensive,\u201d he added. \u201cYou have to be a very committed book person to get a repay on that investment.\u201d The publishers themselves are concerned about return on investment; most have been spending a great deal to digitize their libraries for electronic readers, with little to show for it so far. \u201cIf it does contribute to the many millions of dollars we have invested as an industry, that\u2019s great,\u201d Mr. Young said. Amazon and the publishers declined to discuss the specifics of their financial arrangements. But several publishing executives said the industry practice was to sell an electronic version of a hardcover with a list price of $27 for about $20. While deals vary, the wholesale price of a $20 e-book is about $10, and most retailers have been selling them for about $16. The publishers said Amazon was paying about the same wholesale price as Sony and other e-book vendors. By offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon is leaving no profit margin, and it will have the expense of paying Sprint for the data transmission. Amazon says it hopes to make money on older titles that have better profit margins. Digital distribution of books would seem to have a lot of benefits for publishers. So far there is not much book piracy online (although there have been some high-profile leaks, most notably that of the latest Harry Potter book). There also is not much pressure to break books into smaller pieces, in the way that people want to buy songs, not albums. And there are no conflicts with distributors of the sort that complicate the online video business. Indeed, e-books have the potential to save publishers the cost of printing, distribution and returns. But publishers said their biggest hope was that Kindle would expand sales of books to a new generation of gadget lovers. \u201cWe have great authors, and we want to get our books to readers, and this is another channel to us,\u201d said Kate Tentler, senior vice president for digital media at Simon & Schuster.", "keyword": "Books and Literature;Computers and the Internet;Amazon.com Inc;Bezos Jeffrey P"}
{"id": "ny0086448", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/07/19", "title": "Raptors Add Bismack Biyombo", "abstract": "The Toronto Raptors signed Bismack Biyombo, a free agent who played last season with the Charlotte Hornets, to a one-year contract. The Raptors did not disclose terms of the deal.", "keyword": "Basketball;Bismack Biyombo;Raptors"}
{"id": "ny0072409", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/03/24", "title": "Expected Benefits of Renewed Brooklyn Sewage Station Include a Creek Less Foul", "abstract": "The jewel-like brick structure stands unmarked in a jumbled corner of Brooklyn, amid housing projects and plain rowhouses and elevated train tracks and the headquarters of the Aardvark Amusements carnival ride company. Soaring ornamented columns frame arched windows 15 feet high. Eye-pleasing rhythms in the Beaux-Arts style abound. A golden eagle gleams atop a flagpole. For all the building\u2019s splendor, though, many in the neighborhood have no idea what goes on inside. \u201cI would think a library, or hopefully some kind of center for youth?\u201d guessed A. J. Malone, 24, who was walking by on a recent afternoon. Taylor Jones, 23, admired the facade. \u201cI\u2019m thinking it\u2019s some kind of sort of mausoleum\u201d for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he ventured. \u201cIt looks very secluded in there.\u201d It is a sewage pumping station. Not just any sewage pumping station. It is the Avenue V pumping station in Gravesend, near Coney Island, the largest in New York City, a nearly 100-year-old testament to the majesty of public works that conveys the daily waste of 300,000 residents to a treatment plant in Bay Ridge. Image The station was designed in a neo-Classical style. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times It has just had an $8 million face-lift intended to bring it back to its original glory. But the real upgrade, which goes into full operation this month, is beneath the surface: $200 million worth, of new equipment at the station and pipes leading out of it, part of New York\u2019s continuing $10 billion effort to stop dumping untreated sewage into waterways like Coney Island Creek, just half a mile from the plant. \u201cThis investment will go a long way toward restoring ecological health to Coney Island Creek,\u201d said Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection. The plant was built in 1917, before there was even such a thing as sewage treatment. Back then, the city\u2019s sewers simply transported waste to a convenient dumping point. As Brooklyn developed, its waters became unswimmable. \u201c Bathing in Filth ,\u201d a 1914 editorial headline in The New York Times read. The first pumping stations were commissioned to redirect the effluent to less desirable places, like Coney Island Creek , a brown slash mark separating Coney Island from the rest of Brooklyn that had already been turned into a watery dead-end, its flow blocked off by trash and ashes. For the building to house the plant, said Vincent Sapienza, the environmental department\u2019s deputy commissioner for design and construction, \u201cthe city fathers wanted our municipality to be one of the great cities of the world, and we wanted to compete with Vienna and Paris.\u201d Image Glazed green wall tiles inside the plant repeat motifs of lanterns and leaves. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times \u201cAnd so the thought was, \u2018Hey, why not make even the humble sewage pumping stations look beautiful?\u2019 \u201d he continued. Thus dawned the city\u2019s brief golden era of sewage pumping-station design. A public servant named Albert Martin drew up plans for the Avenue V plant and four others in Brooklyn. Avenue V was done in a neo-Classical style often seen in libraries of the era , with symmetrical facades and terra cotta details. When the Owl\u2019s Head treatment plant opened in the 1950s in Bay Ridge, the Avenue V station sent its sewage there. But the city\u2019s 19th-century sewer system, still largely intact, has a built-in problem. It sends wastewater from buildings and storm runoff from the streets through the same pipes. When there is a big storm, it is more than the system can handle, and the excess is simply flushed into the nearest waterway in what is called a combined sewer overflow. Each year, more than 20 billion gallons of this mix of untreated sewage and polluted storm water are discharged. Avenue V\u2019s contribution was 300 million gallons a year dumped into Coney Island Creek, nowadays a forlorn backwater known mostly for its collection of spavined ships and a rotting yellow submarine . But under state and federal mandates to reduce sewer overflow, in 2005, the upgrade of Avenue V began. Image Discharge into Coney Island Creek is expected to fall by nearly 90 percent. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Six new 350-horsepower pumps were installed and hooked up to six miles of new, widened pipes, some of them four feet across, running to Owl\u2019s Head. Ancient switches and banks of equipment were replaced. (The station is now fully automated and controlled remotely; on a typical day, the only discernible sound is the muffled hum of pump motors.) Avenue V can now pump more than twice as much sewage, and the discharge into Coney Island Creek is expected to fall by nearly 90 percent. While the city was at it, it gave the building, which was falling apart, a full renovation. Inside the plant now, a balcony with fine bronze rails looks down at a maze of fat pipes. Glazed green wall tiles, bathed in light from the picture windows, repeat motifs of lanterns and leaves. Mr. Malone, the man who thought the building might be a youth center, was disappointed to learn what the city had been sprucing up. \u201cTo be honest, wow,\u201d said Mr. Malone, who works at a BJ\u2019s Wholesale Club and lives in the nearby Marlboro Houses. \u201cA sewage building.\u201d Yes, but a sewage building that is part of the city\u2019s history, Mr. Sapienza said. \u201cD.E.P. believes that we should try to restore great public works as best we can,\u201d he said. \u201cWe think it\u2019s worth the effort and a little bit of extra money.\u201d \u201cRecognizing the uniqueness of the facility,\u201d said Ted Timbers, a department spokesman, \u201cwe will consider public tours.\u201d", "keyword": "Sewers Sewage;NYC;Water pollution;Gravesend;New York;Water;Waste management;Restoration and Renovation;Department of Environmental Protection NYC;Brooklyn"}
{"id": "ny0165806", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/09/06", "title": "Couple Charged in Killing of Girl\u2019s Mother", "abstract": "A 16-year-old girl and her boyfriend were arrested yesterday in the killing of her mother, who was found on Sunday in her Brooklyn apartment with her throat slit, the police said. The girl, Vintarra Martin, and the boyfriend, Damasoh Kelly, 24, of Columbus Avenue in Upper Manhattan, had fought with Ms. Martin\u2019s mother, Sharon Taylor, 41, at the apartment on Rogers Avenue in East Flatbush where both mother and daughter lived, the police said. The fight turned violent and, the police said, Mr. Kelly used a stun gun on Ms. Taylor, a secretary with the New York Police Department. When she was down, her daughter slit her throat with a house knife, the police said. The police, following tips, were led to the teenager and her boyfriend about 1 a.m. yesterday in the Bronx. The two were charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. Ms. Taylor had worked as a police administrative aide since 1993. Most recently, she was assigned to the Brooklyn transit division. Investigators believe that the killing was the result of a fight over the girl\u2019s possible pregnancy. There was no history of domestic disputes reported at the home, the police said.", "keyword": "Brooklyn (NYC);Murders and Attempted Murders"}
{"id": "ny0147705", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2008/07/15", "title": "Packer Is Leaving CBS After Calling 34 Final Fours", "abstract": "Billy Packer\u2019s 34th Final Four was his last. Packer, the occasionally controversial CBS Sports college basketball analyst, is leaving the network after 27 seasons and will be replaced by Clark Kellogg, who has been CBS\u2019s top studio analyst. \u201cThis is a decision that was made more than a year ago,\u201d Packer said Monday from his home in North Carolina. \u201cCBS has a relationship with the N.C.A.A. long beyond the number of years I can do the tournament, and I have things I want to do. They have to have plans for the future, and I\u2019m not doing the tournament when I\u2019m 75.\u201d Packer, who started his network career at NBC, is active in real estate and other businesses and is working on a major college basketball project that he hopes to announce by September. \u201cIt involves Web sites and interactive games,\u201d he said. Packer, 68, said he had worked for CBS under a series of one-year contracts that gave him the freedom to depart when he felt he had lost his motivation to continue to call games. \u201cI wanted to have the guts to say to myself, \u2018Billy, you didn\u2019t really prepare for this game and you ought to be somewhere else,\u2019 and I\u2019d know it\u2019s time to leave,\u201d he said. He said that time never came and that the new project was his primary reason for leaving. He said he still enjoyed calling the N.C.A.A. men\u2019s tournament, \u201cbut it\u2019s a challenge like 34 others.\u201d Still, CBS officials decided a year ago that the time had come to make the transition to Kellogg. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have to make the transition, but, intuitively, it felt right,\u201d said Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports. \u201cBilly understood the rationale for it. It was a cordial discussion.\u201d Packer\u2019s involvement in college basketball has at times been overshadowed by controversial incidents. In 1996, he called Allen Iverson, then with Georgetown, a \u201ctough little monkey\u201d to praise his style of play; in 2000, he apologized for making allegedly sexist comments to two female Duke students who were checking his credentials before a game; and in 2004, he argued on the air with St. Joseph\u2019s Coach Phil Martelli over the university\u2019s No. 1 regional seed. McManus said that the Kellogg-for-Packer move had nothing to do with Packer\u2019s opinions, performance or expertise. Greg Anthony is in talks with CBS about replacing Kellogg in the studio.", "keyword": "Basketball;NCAA Basketball Tournament;College Athletics;CBS Corp;Packer Billy"}
{"id": "ny0151294", "categories": ["business", "worldbusiness"], "date": "2008/08/28", "title": "U.S. Moves Toward International Accounting Rules", "abstract": "The Securities and Exchange Commission moved Wednesday to allow some large American companies to begin using international accounting standards as early as next year, and to require all American companies to do so by 2016. The commission voted unanimously to propose for comment a \u201croad map\u201d for conversion, with eventual adoption depending in part on revised provisions for financing the group that writes the international standards. The adoption of international accounting standards by the United States would move the world toward one set of standards, which should make it easier for investors to compare companies operating in differing regions, and make it easier for firms to raise capital in whatever market seems most attractive. \u201cThe proposed road map is cautious and careful,\u201d said the chairman of the S.E.C., Christopher Cox . Under the proposal, a small group of large companies, which the S.E.C. estimated at about 110 firms, would be allowed to use the international rules in financial statements issued after Dec. 15, 2009. This means companies on a calendar-year basis could use the international rules for their 2009 annual reports. To be allowed to do that, the company would have to be among the 20 largest companies in its industry around the world, and a large number of its competitors would have to already be using the international standards. The commission said it would consider requiring large American companies to move to the international standards for their 2014 financial statements, with smaller ones required to make the move in 2015 and the smallest \u2014 but largest number \u2014 allowed to delay until 2016. Under the plan, a final decision on those companies would be made in 2011. That decision would be made by an S.E.C. whose chairman would have been appointed by a new president. But by allowing some American companies to stop using American rules before that, the current commission would make it difficult for a new chairman to reverse course. While there is widespread agreement that one set of standards would have advantages for investors, there are concerns about the transition and about how uniform the accounts will be. American companies and auditors will have to learn new accounting rules. The European Union has asserted the right to approve or modify each standard issued by the International Accounting Standards Board, and did allow banks to ignore part of one standard. In an effort to deal with that issue, the S.E.C. has said it would accept filings using international standards only if they complied fully with the standards as issued by the board. That decision, however, could raise its own problems if, in the future, the international board were to issue a standard that the S.E.C. believed was wrong. Now, if the United States rule maker, the Financial Accounting Standards Board , considers such a rule, the S.E.C. can block it, or effectively overrule it. The international authorities are considering establishing a new monitoring body that would include regulators from many countries, which might have the power to approve or reject appointments to the board. If that group also had power to reject standards, it would raise fears that political considerations could damage the independence of the rule makers. Mr. Cox said he thought that body could help to protect the board from politics and special interests, but some Europeans have praised the idea in the hope it would make the standard setters accountable to government officials. There would also be the question of uniform application of the rules. Early this year, the French regulator evidently approved a decision by a French bank, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, which moved losses from a scandal from 2008, when they occurred, to the previous year. That move outraged some members of the international accounting board, and some regulators, but nothing was done about it. If the road map is eventually adopted, the result will be a wholesale change in American accounting rules. While the international board and the American board are working to bring convergence of the rules, there remain differences, as well as entire areas on which the international rules are silent. While it is often said that the international rules are based on standards, and the American ones on rules, the differences are more in degree than nature. Still, in many cases the international rules will require more professional judgment from auditors. Some auditors have liked rules, because they enable them simply to tell a company that a proposed accounting treatment violates a rule. Also, rules ostensibly provide a defense if the accounts are later challenged in a lawsuit. In a world with more professional judgment, the auditors would be expected to tell companies that a given accounting treatment violates a standard because it produces a misleading result. Whether they would be willing to do that, and whether all would be equally willing, could become an issue. The major accounting firms have broadly endorsed the move. The international standards provide \u201cthe best opportunity to achieve the goal of a single set of high quality standards\u201d around the world, said David Kaplan, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. \u201cThe commission took a significant step today toward that objective.\u201d The S.E.C. previously decided that, beginning this year, companies that follow international accounting rules and have securities registered to trade in the United States, will no longer have to reconcile their books to American standards. The S.E.C. said it would seek comments from the public on how much information will need to be provided by American companies making the shift. It could be as little as reconciling the numbers for only the first year that the new rules are used. Another issue is the financing of the International Accounting Standards Board, which now comes from contributions from companies and accounting firms. The Financial Accounting Standards Board used to be financed in the same way, but the Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in 2002 changed that, instead giving it the right to levy charges on public companies. That was viewed as necessary to assure its independence. Conrad Hewitt, the chief accountant of the S.E.C., said he was confident that within five years the international board would have secured a stable financing mechanism. In another action, the S.E.C. approved a rule requiring that foreign companies registered with it file their annual reports within 120 days of the end of their fiscal year, rather than the current requirement of 180 days.", "keyword": "Accounting and Accountants;Financial Accounting Standards Board;United States;Securities and Exchange Commission;European Union;International Accounting Standards Board;Cox Christopher;Finances"}
{"id": "ny0069712", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2014/12/13", "title": "Dallas Cowboys at Philadelphia Eagles Matchup", "abstract": "Cowboys (9-4) at Eagles (9-4) 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Line: Eagles by 3 \u00bd DeMarco Murray has rushed for 100 yards or more in 11 of 13 games for Dallas, but even this season, Philadelphia has proved to be his Kryptonite. In four games against the Eagles in his career, Murray has never gained 100 yards, and on Thanksgiving they held him to a season-low 73. He bounced back quickly, rumbling for a season-high 179 yards in a Dec. 4 win over Chicago. The big game gave Murray a 375-yard lead over Pittsburgh\u2019s Le\u2019Veon Bell in his pursuit of his first rushing title, and leaves him on pace for 1,977 yards for the season. But if Murray has any hopes of breaking 2,000, he will need a big game against Philadelphia. The key to that will be the lackluster Dallas defense, which must do a better job of limiting the scoring so the Cowboys do not deviate from the run-heavy attack that has enabled Murray to thrive. Counting on the Eagles, coached by the offensive mastermind Chip Kelly, to struggle to put up points for a second consecutive game would be unwise. Pick : Eagles", "keyword": "Football;Dallas Cowboys;Philadelphia Eagles"}
{"id": "ny0036808", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/03/09", "title": "Events in New Jersey for March 9-15, 2014", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events in New Jersey. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to njtowns@nytimes.com. For Children MADISON Museum of Early Trades and Crafts Lucky Leprechaun Day. Participants will participate in crafts and other hands-on activities while they learn about the history of the Irish and St. Patrick. March 14, 4 to 5 p.m. $3. Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, 9 Main Street. (973) 377-2982; metc.org. MORRIS TOWNSHIP Bickford Theater \u201cStone Soup and Other Stories,\u201d with original music and lyrics by Carole Wechter, presented by the Pushcart Players. March 15 at 1:30 p.m. $10 and $12. Bickford Theater, 6 Normandy Heights Road. (973) 971-3706; morrismuseum.org. MORRISTOWN Haggerty Education Center, Frelinghuysen Arboretum \u201cGarden Sprouts,\u201d preschool nature program. Mondays at 11 a.m. Through March 31. $5 and $7. Haggerty Education Center, Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 353 East Hanover Avenue. (973) 326-7600; arboretumfriends.org/events. NEW BRUNSWICK State Theater Milk and Cookies Series: Julie Pasqual: Animal Tales, storytelling. March 15 at 10 a.m. and noon. Free. State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue. (732) 246-7469; statetheatrenj.org. NEWARK Prudential Center Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Presents: Legends. March 13 through 16. $30 to $75. Prudential Center, 165 Mulberry Street. (973) 757-6000; prucenter.com. RAHWAY Union County Performing Arts Center \u201cSleeping Beauty,\u201d sensory-friendly theater featuring the New Jersey Ballet. March 16 at 2 p.m. $8. Union County Performing Arts Center, 1601 Irving Street. (732) 499-8226; ucpac.org. SOUTH ORANGE South Orange Performing Arts Center \u201cDiary of a Worm, a Spider and a Fly,\u201d musical. Ages 5 and up. March 16 at 2 p.m. $18 and $25. South Orange Performing Arts Center, 1 Sopac Way. (973) 313-2787; sopacnow.org. SUMMIT Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater The Stages Festival: \u201cCuentos Del Arbol (Tree Tales),\u201d presented by the Pushcart Players. March 16 at 2 p.m. Free; reservations are required. Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater at Oakes Center, 120 Morris Avenue. (908) 514-9654; dreamcatcherrep.org. Music and Dance ENGLEWOOD Bergen Performing Arts Center Travis Tritt, country music, with Lyndsey Highlander. March 9 at 7 p.m. $35 to $75. Celtic Night, music and dance. March 13 at 8 p.m. $39 to $99. Cassandra Wilson and the Harriet Tubman band, \u201cBlack Sun,\u201d jazz, pop and rock. March 14 at 8 p.m. $35 to $65. Bergen Performing Arts Center, 30 North Van Brunt Street. (201) 227-1030; bergenpac.org. MONROE Monroe Twp. Public Library Princeton Symphony Orchestra\u2019s Chamber Series: Roomful of Teeth, vocal octet. March 10 at 1 p.m. Free. Monroe Township Public Library, 4 Municipal Plaza. (732) 521-5000; monroetwplibrary.org. MORRIS TOWNSHIP College of St. Elizabeth U.S. Army Jazz Band Concert. The Jazz Ambassadors, the official touring big band of the United States Army, will perform big band, swing, Latin, contemporary jazz and patriotic selections. March 15, 7 to 9 p.m. Free. College of St. Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road. cse.edu; (973) 290-4000. MORRISTOWN Mayo Performing Arts Center Hanover Wind Symphony, with special guest Stanley Drucker, clarinetist. March 9 at 3 p.m. $20 to $25. The Irish Rovers, Irish music. March 13 at 8 p.m. $29 to $59. New Jersey Ballet with Jazz House Kids \u2014 Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. March 15 at 8 p.m. $29 to $59. \u201cThe Firebird,\u201d presented by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, performing with Hilary Hahn, violinist, and led by Yan Pascal Tortelier. March 16 at 3 p.m. $20 to $90. For tickets: (973) 624-3713; njsymphony.org. Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street. (973) 539-8008; mayoarts.org. NEW BRUNSWICK State Theater Trisha Yearwood, singer, author and actress. March 12 at 8 p.m. $35 to $85. The Oak Ridge Boys, gospel, rock, blues and country. March 13 at 8 p.m. $35 to $65. Rutgers Latin Knights, Rutgers Symphony Band and Boston Brass, conducted by Darryl Bott. March 14 at 8 p.m. $15 to $25. State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue. statetheatrenj.org; (732) 246-7469. NEWARK Prudential Hall, New Jersey Performing Arts Center \u201cThe Firebird,\u201d presented by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, performing with Hilary Hahn, violinist, and led by Yan Pascal Tortelier. March 13 at 1:30 p.m.; March 15 at 8 p.m. $20 to $85. For tickets: (973) 624-3713; njsymphony.org. Prudential Hall, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. (888) 466-5722; njpac.org. NEWARK Victoria Theater, New Jersey Performing Arts Center Lou Gramm: The Voice of Foreigner, rock, with special guest Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane/Starship. March 14 at 8 p.m. $95. Victoria Theater, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street. (888) 466-5722; njpac.org. PATERSON Ivanhoe Wheelhouse Diane Moser, avant-jazz pianist, solo at musiXplore. March 16 at 1 p.m. $5 suggested donation. Ivanhoe Wheelhouse, 4 Spruce Street. musixplore.org; (201) 666-1881. PRINCETON McCarter Theater Center \u201cThe Producers,\u201d Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan\u2019s adaptation of Brooks\u2019 classic 1968 film. Through March 12. $15. McCarter Theater Center, 91 University Place. (609) 258-2787; mccarter.org. PRINCETON Richardson Auditorium Princeton University Concerts, C. K. Williams, poet, and Richard Goode, pianist. March 9, 3 to 5 p.m. $5 to $45. \u201cThe Firebird,\u201d presented by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, performing with Hilary Hahn, violinist, and led by Yan Pascal Tortelier. March 14 at 8 p.m. $20 to $90. For tickets: (973) 624-3713; njsymphony.org. Princeton University Concerts presents Meet the Music: \u201cLeave It to Ludwig,\u201d an exploration of Beethoven\u2019s chamber music. Hosted by Bruce Adolphe, director of family programs at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. March 15, 1 to 2 p.m. $5 and $10. Richardson Auditorium, in Alexander Hall on the Princeton University Campus. (258) 258-2800; princetonuniversityconcerts.org. RAHWAY Hamilton Stage Ravi Coltrane, post-bop jazz saxophonist, and Luis Perdomo, jazz pianist and composer. March 14 at 8 p.m. $10 and $25. Hamilton Stage, 360 Hamilton Street. (732) 499-8226; ucpac.org. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Monmouth Civic Chorus, \u201cAmerican Songbook,\u201d a concert led by Ryan Brandau. March 9 at 4 p.m. $20 to $30. Lonestar, country music quartet. March 13 at 8 p.m. $25 to $45. Glen Burtnik\u2019s Summer of Love Concert, a tribute to the music of the Woodstock generation. March 15 at 8 p.m. $20 to $99. The Golden Dragon Acrobats present \u201cCirque Ziva.\u201d March 16 at 7 p.m. $15 to $35. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. countbasietheatre.org; (732) 842-9000. SOUTH ORANGE South Orange Performing Arts Center Jazz in the Loft: The Vince Ector Quartet. March 14 at 7 p.m. $15. Richard Thompson, songwriter and guitarist. March 16 at 7:30 p.m. $38 to $50. South Orange Performing Arts Center, 1 Sopac Way. (973) 313-2787; sopacnow.org. UNION Wilkins Theater, Kean University The Moscow Festival Ballet, \u201cSwan Lake.\u201d March 15 at 7:30 p.m. $20 and $30. Wilkins Theater, Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue. keanstage.com; (908) 737-7469. Image UNION Members of the Moscow Festival Ballet, which presents \u201cSwan Lake\u201d at the Wilkins Theater, Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue, on March 15 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 and $30. keanstage.com ; (908) 737-7469. Credit Courtesy of the Moscow Festival Ballet WEST ORANGE Luna Stage Dyad Plays Puccini, with Eric Olsen, pianist, and Lou Caimano, alto saxophonist. March 9 at 7 p.m. $18. Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road. (973) 395-5551; lunastage.org. Spoken Word MONTCLAIR Montclair Historical Society \u201cMontclair\u2019s Suburban Architecture: A Magical History Bus Tour,\u201d Susan Nowicki, an architect and Montclair resident, highlights the architecture of the town in the late 19th and early 20th century. March 16, 1 to 3 p.m. $25 to $30. Montclair Historical Society, 205 Claremont Avenue. (201) 509-4955. RED BANK Count Basie Theater Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, in a live show. March 12 at 8 p.m. $29.50 to $115. Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street. countbasietheatre.org; (732) 842-9000. Theater CAMDEN South Camden Theater Company, Waterfront South Theater \u201cGemini,\u201d dramatic comedy by Albert Innaurato, presented by the South Camden Theater Company. Through March 16. $20. Waterfront South Theater, 400 Jasper Street. southcamdentheatre.org; (866) 811-4111. CHATHAM Chatham Playhouse \u201cSherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure,\u201d mystery by Stephen Dietz. Through March 22. $18 and $20. Chatham Playhouse, 23 North Passaic Avenue. (973) 635-7363; chathamplayers.org. HACKETTSTOWN Centenary Stage Company, Lackland Center \u201cThe Liar,\u201d by Pierre Corneille, adapted by David Ives. Through March 9. $25 to $27.50. Centenary Stage Company, Lackland Center, 715 Grand Avenue. (908) 979-0900; centenarystageco.org. HAMMONTON Eagle Theater \u201cNext to Normal,\u201d a rock musical with book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey and music by Tom Kitt. Through March 29. $30 and $40. Eagle Theater, 208 Vine Street. (609) 704-5012; theeagletheatre.com. HAMPTON Hunterdon Hills Playhouse \u201cBusybody,\u201d comedy-mystery by Jack Popplewell. Through May 22. $50.50 and $63.50; includes a choice of served entrees and unlimited homemade desserts. Hunterdon Hills Playhouse, 88 Route 173 West. hhplayhouse.com; (800) 447-7313. LONG BRANCH New Jersey Repertory Company, Lumia Theater \u201cDate of a Lifetime,\u201d musical comedy. Through April 6. $25 to $42. New Jersey Repertory Company, Lumia Theater, 179 Broadway. (732) 229-3166; njrep.org. MILLBURN Paper Mill Playhouse \u201cThe Other Josh Cohen,\u201d musical by David Rossmer and Steve Rosen. Through March 16. $35 to $90. Paper Mill Playhouse, 22 Brookside Drive. papermill.org; (973) 376-4343. MONTCLAIR Studio Playhouse \u201cThe Importance of Being Earnest,\u201d comedy by Oscar Wilde. March 14 through 29. $17 and $20. Studio Playhouse, 14 Alvin Place. (973) 744-9752; studioplayhouse.org. NEW BRUNSWICK George Street Playhouse \u201cI Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti,\u201d adapted by Jacques Lamarre from the memoir by Giulia Melucci. March 11 through April 6. $20 to $102. George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue. (732) 246-7717; gsponline.org. PARSIPPANY Parsippany Community Center \u201cWorking,\u201d musical by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso. Through March 23. $20 and $25. Parsippany Community Center, 1130 Knoll Road. (973) 263-7352. RED BANK Two River Theater \u201cPinkolandia,\u201d drama by Andrea Thome. Through March 23. $20 to $45. \u201cThe Music Man,\u201d a musical by Meredith Willson, featuring an all-African-American cast. March 13 through 16. $20 to $50. Two River Theater, 21 Bridge Avenue. (732) 345-1400; trtc.org. UNION Premiere Stages at Kean University 10th Annual Spring Reading Series, featuring free readings of the four finalists for the 2014 Premiere Stages Play Festival. March 13 through 16. Free. Premiere Stages at Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue. kean.edu/premierestages; (908) 737-4092. WEST CAPE MAY East Lynne Theater Company \u201cSherlock Holmes Adventure of the Copper Beeches\u201d and \u201cNick Carter and the Strange Dr. Devolo,\u201d performed as radio-style broadcasts, with live sound effects and commercials. March 14 and 15 at 8 p.m. $15 and $25. East Lynne Theater Company, 121 Fourth Avenue. eastlynnetheater.org; (609) 884-5898. Museums and Galleries BOUND BROOK Hamilton Street Gallery \u201cThe New Scroll,\u201d examining the traditional format of the scroll in light of 21st-century technologies. Through April 10. Thursdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 5 to 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m.; and by appointment. Hamilton Street Gallery, 6 Hamilton Street. hamiltonstreetgallery.com; (732) 748-2092. CAMDEN Fine Arts Complex, Rutgers \u2014 Camden campus \u201cCompulsive Narratives: Stories That Must Be Told, the Graphic Novel as Confession and Inspiration.\u201d Through April 26. Mondays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Rutgers-Camden campus, Fine Arts Complex, on Third Street between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. (856) 225-6245; rcca.camden.rutgers.edu. CHATHAM TOWNSHIP Lundt-Glover Gallery \u201cBold Impressions,\u201d monoprints and paintings on paper by Andrea Epstein. Through March 11. Lundt-Glover Gallery, 58 Meyersville Road; (201) 532-5637; andreaepstein.com. CLINTON Hunterdon Art Museum \u201cGlass! From the Wheaton Arts Museum of American Glass.\u201d Through May 11. \u201cSondra Sherman: Found Objects.\u201d Through March 9. \u201cMia Brownell: Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting,\u201d oil paintings. Through March 9. $5 suggested donation. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street. (908) 735-8415; hunterdonartmuseum.org. ENGLEWOOD One River Gallery \u201cMesh Point,\u201d new paintings by Jay Gaskill. Through March 22. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. One River Gallery, 49 North Dean Street. (201) 266-5244; onerivergallery.com. FREEHOLD Monmouth County Historical Association Museum and Library \u201cProperly Dressed: Art and Reality in 18th- and Early-19th-Century Dress in Monmouth.\u201d Through Aug. 2. $5 regular admission, $2.50 seniors and students. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monmouth County Historical Association Museum and Library, 70 Court Street. (732) 462-1466; monmouthhistory.org. GLASSBORO Rowan University Art Gallery \u201cJoyce Kozloff: Cradles to Conquests, Mapping American Military History.\u201d Through March 15. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Rowan University Art Gallery, 201 Mullica Hill Road. (856) 256-4521; rowan.edu/artgallery. HALEDON American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark \u201cOutsourced!\u201d Mixed-technique-on-paper images by Robin Holder. Through April 26. $3 to $5 suggested donation; members and children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m., or by appointment. American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street. (973) 595-7953; labormuseum.org. HOPEWELL Gallery 14 Photographs of the human form by Larry Parsons and Martin Schwartz. Through March 9. Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Gallery 14, 14 Mercer Street. (609) 333-8511; photogallery14.com. Image NEWARK Trapeze performers in \u201cLegends,\u201d presented by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, at the Prudential Center, 165 Mulberry Street, March 13 through 16. Tickets are $30 to $75. (973) 757-6000; prucenter.com . Credit Feld Entertainment HOBOKEN Monroe Art Center \u201cLuminescent,\u201d an exhibition of experimental works of ebony, monolith graphite pencil and ink drawings on Mylar by Starr Tucker-Ortega. Through March 30. Monroe Art Center, 720 Monroe Street. (201) 795-5000; monroecenter.com. JERSEY CITY Mana Contemporary \u201cCarole Feuerman: The Golden Mean,\u201d hyperrealist sculpture. Through March 29. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mana Contemporary, 888 Newark Avenue. manafinearts.com; (201) 484-1495, Ext. 672. MADISON Museum of Early Trades and Crafts \u201cThe American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Homefront.\u201d Through Feb. 13, 2015. $3 to $13; free for members. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, 9 Main Street. (973) 377-2982; metc.org. MAHWAH Mahwah Museum \u201cNeighborhoods of Mahwah.\u201d Through June 29. $3 to $5; members and children under 5, free. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Mahwah Museum, 201 Franklin Turnpike. (201) 512-0099; mahwahmuseum.org. MONTCLAIR Montclair Art Museum \u201cRobert Smithson\u2019s New Jersey,\u201d sculptures, works on paper, photographs and other conceptual art by the artist (1938-1973). Through June 22. \u201c100 Works for 100 Years,\u201d centennial exhibition. Through July 31. $12 adults, $10 seniors and students; members and children under 12, free. \u201cSpencer Finch: Yellow,\u201d site-specific installation for the museum\u2019s facade. Through July 31. $12 adults, $10 seniors and students; members and children under 12, free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue. (973) 746-5555; montclairartmuseum.org. MONTCLAIR Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center \u201cHometown Teams,\u201d Smithsonian Institution exhibition about sports. Through March 16. $4 and $6. Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, 8 Yogi Berra Drive. yogiberramuseum.org; (973) 655-2378. MORRIS TOWNSHIP Morris Museum \u201cThe Brick Art of Nathan Sawaya.\u201d Through March 9. $7 to $10. \u201cBeards: The Long and Short of It,\u201d exploring men\u2019s facial hair trends in America. Through March 30. $7 to $10. \u201cEgg-Zibit: The Art, Science and Culture of Eggs.\u201d Through April 20. $7 to $10. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road. (973) 971-3700; morrismuseum.org. MORRIS TOWNSHIP Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth \u201cA Moveable Feast: Art, Food and Migration.\u201d Thirty-two contemporary artists explore the impact of travel and migration on food, cooking and dining. Through May 4. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 2 to 6 p.m. Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road. (973) 290-4315; maloneyartgallery.org. MORRISTOWN Atrium Gallery African-American Art Show and Sale. Through March 14. Mondays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Atrium Gallery, Court Street. (973) 540-0615; artintheatrium.org. MORRISTOWN Macculloch Hall Historical Museum \u201cThomas Nast Brings Down Boss Tweed,\u201d political cartoons. Through Aug. 3. $6 to $8; children 6 to 12, $4; children under 5, free. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, 45 Macculloch Avenue. maccullochhall.org; (973) 538-2404. NEW BRUNSWICK Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum \u201cMaples in the Mist: Chinese Poems for Children, Illustrated by Jean and Mou-sien Tseng.\u201d Through June 22. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. \u201cStriking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture.\u201d Through July 13. General hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street. (848) 932-7237; zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu. NEW BRUNSWICK Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation \u201cEva Zeisel: Life, Design and Beauty,\u201d modern industrial design. Through June 29. Donation: $5. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation, 300 Somerset Street. (732) 846-5777; hstrial-pfazekaz.homestead.com. NEWARK The Newark Museum \u201cPapyraceous: Recent Acquisitions, Contemporary Works on Paper,\u201d printmaking, collaging, drawing and painting. Through June 29. \u201cCity of Silver and Gold From Tiffany to Cartier,\u201d including the original Vince Lombardi Trophy, as well as more than 100 objects documenting the rise of the city\u2019s gold and silver industry. Trophy on view through March 30; the balance of the exhibition through 2015. $7 and $12; members, free. \u201cAmerican Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell.\u201d Through May 26. $7 and $12; members free. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. The Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street. (973) 596-6550; newarkmuseum.org. PRINCETON Morven Museum and Garden \u201cThe Age of Sail: A New Jersey Collection,\u201d the history of American shipbuilding, sailmaking, naval warfare, shipwrecks and rescue, with more than 100 objects. Through March 23. $5 and $6. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Morven Museum and Garden, 55 Stockton Street. (609) 924-8144; morven.org. PRINCETON Princeton University Art Museum \u201cInstallation of Outdoor Sculpture by Alexander Calder.\u201d Through June 15. \u201c500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum,\u201d including more than 90 works. Through May 11. \u201cEdvard Munch: Symbolism in Print,\u201d 26 compositions in an array of printmaking techniques. Through June 8. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University Campus. artmuseum.princeton.edu; (609) 258-3788. PRINCETON Princeton University Library \u201cFrom a Thankful Nation: The Robert L. Ross Collection of Latin American Orders and Medals.\u201d Through Aug. 3. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Princeton University Library, 1 Washington Road. princeton.edu/rbsc/; (609) 258-3184. PRINCETON JUNCTION West Windsor Arts Center \u201cWhat the Fiber!\u201d An exhibition of fiber arts. Through May 2. Reception, March 9, 4 to 6 p.m. West Windsor Arts Center, 952 Alexander Road. (609) 716-1931; westwindsorartscenter.org. SHREWSBURY Guild of Creative Art \u201cEyesights 2014,\u201d juried photography show. Through April 2. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Guild of Creative Art, 620 Broad Street. guildofcreativeart.org; (732) 741-1441. STONE HARBOR William Ris Gallery \u201cFlora, Fauna and Far East,\u201d paintings by Jane Hartley. Through April 30. Sundays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. William Ris Gallery, 9400 Second Avenue. williamris.com; (609) 368-6361. SUMMIT Visual Arts Center of New Jersey \u201cWomen Choose Women Again,\u201d group show. Through April 13. Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 68 Elm Street. artcenternj.org; (908) 273-9121. TRENTON Artworks Trenton First Annual Juried Print Exhibition, group show. Through March 29. Artworks Trenton, 19 Everett Alley. artworkstrenton.org; (609) 394-9436. TRENTON New Jersey State Museum \u201cArtists of Roosevelt,\u201d exploring the community of visual artists in Roosevelt, N.J. Through May 25. Suggested admission, $5. Tuesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street. (609) 292-6464; statemuseum.nj.gov. WEST ORANGE Luna Stage \u201cGoddess on Earth: Women of Essex County,\u201d multimedia installations by Lisa Levart, a photographer. Through May 11. Reception, March 8, 4 to 6 p.m. Free. Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road. (973) 395-5551. lunastage.org. Comedy RAHWAY Union County Performing Arts Center Rob Schneider. March 14 at 8 p.m. $21 to $51.50. Union County Performing Arts Center, 1601 Irving Street. (732) 499-8226; ucpac.org. Film MAHWAH Sharp Theater \u201cThe Black Maria Film and Video Festival,\u201d a screening of 13 short animations. March 11 at 6 p.m. Free. Sharp Theater, 505 Ramapo Valley Road. (201) 684-7844; ramapo.edu/berriecenter.", "keyword": "Art;The arts"}
{"id": "ny0148746", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/09/29", "title": "Savings and Loan Crisis May Be Guide for Bank Bailout", "abstract": "Getting Congress to agree on a $700 billion financial bailout package might have seemed difficult, but the really hard work is only about to start. The federal government will now have to oversee and manage a bailout of enormous magnitude involving complex mortgage-backed securities so byzantine in their structure that even Wall Street experts cannot appraise their value. But former officials of an agency that dealt with an earlier financial mess stemming from a real-estate debacle, the Resolution Trust Corporation , said those managing the new bailout would also have to face nuts-and-bolts matters like policing fraud, overseeing an army of contractors and serving as political scapegoats. The tentative deal reached by Congress over the weekend contains only broad outlines to guide officials managing the bailout, like a provision intended to deal with conflicts of interest. But while the R.T.C., which was created in 1989 to help sort out the savings-and-loan debacle, operated under similar guidelines, it soon found itself dealing with people trying to game the system to their financial advantage in a variety of ways, like steering favorable deals to associates. Also, like any government program, some consultants hired by the R.T.C. presented huge bills, some far in excess of the value of the services they had provided. And while evicting homeowners sounds like anathema in today\u2019s political environment, R.T.C. officials said that is what they did to reach the same goal that the current proposal is supposed to achieve \u2014 getting bailout money back to taxpayers as quickly as possible. \u201cWhat you are looking at is the creation of a giant property management system,\u201d said L. William Seidman, who served as the R.T.C.\u2019s chairman. The central mission of the R.T.C., which closed its doors in 1995, was to sell office buildings, homes, loans and other assets held by failed savings-and-loan institutions. Congressional leaders have indicated that they do not foresee the need to create a new agency like the R.T.C. because the government is now buying mortgage-backed securities rather than taking over real estate. But just getting such a process off the ground will still require a large bureaucratic infrastructure. Joseph E. Robert Jr., whose property management firm was among the first contractors hired by the R.T.C., said the agency\u2019s offices did not even have telephones when he first visited. \u201cThey had one fax machine, a lot of empty offices and maybe three or four people,\u201d Mr. Robert recalled. Once the new regulatory structure is in place, those managing the bailout are likely to find themselves dealing with problems like trying to identify those taking undue advantage of the system. For example, individuals or companies who had caused the government to lose money during the savings-and-loan crisis were barred from buying assets from the R.T.C. But the unscrupulous found ways around that provision by using front companies or \u201cstraw purchasers\u201d to mask their identity, recalled Kenneth M. Donohue, who served as the assistant director of the agency\u2019s office of investigation. \u201cI think you have to have a strong oversight and enforcement program\u201d for the new bailout, said Mr. Donohue, who is currently inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. \u201cThat has to be done proactively, and it has to be done from day one.\u201d Also, while the bailout legislation contains a conflict-of-interest provision, putting it into practice could also prove tricky. Given the interconnected nature of mortgage-backed securities, some of the financial firms hired by the government as contractors might have had a direct or indirect hand in issuing or evaluating those securities of dubious value. Peter H. Monroe, who served for three years as president of the oversight board that set policy for the R.T.C., said that transparency about such tangled relationships would be vital. \u201cOne day, Goldman would buy the assets and the fairness opinion would be issued by Morgan Stanley,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the next day, Morgan Stanley would buy something and the fairness opinion would be issued by Goldman.\u201d Along with such big-picture issues, those running the new bailout will have to oversee its day-to-day activities. In its first years of operation, the R.T.C. hired 10,000 employees as well as hundreds of outside contractors. And with that came waste. For example, one 1991 government report found that the R.T.C. and an affiliated agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars hiring a small army of outside lawyers. Also, other federal investigations found significant cases of overcharging by contractors. There is also the possibility that the new bailout could lead to criminal prosecutions or lawsuits. During the time of the R.T.C., several high-profile executives or directors of failed savings-and-loan institutions, like the businessman Charles Keating, faced fraud charges in connection with their collapse. There were also more mundane scandals: an allegation, for example, that R.T.C. contractors, including the son of then-Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, had failed to disclose dealings that might have barred them from the program. Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Mr. Bentsen\u2019s son, Lan Bentsen, settled the case by agreeing not to do business with the R.T.C. Those managing the current bailout can also expect plenty of second-guessing from Congress. For example, while politicians at the time of the R.T.C. claimed, just as they do today, that taxpayers would quickly recoup the cost of the bailout, it took the agency a year to make its first deal. Over time, Congress had to plow billions more into the agency. Today, the R.T.C., even with all its problems, is remembered as a success. By the time it closed its doors, a year ahead of schedule, it had sold off $459 billion in assets, recouping much of the money that the government had pumped into failed banks. The eventual cost to taxpayers was $120 billion to $140 billion, well below the estimates of $500 billion. Those who served at the agency or worked with it, however, do not expect things to go so easily this time. Executives at J. E. Robert, the real estate management firm headed by Mr. Robert, said it took about 90 days to analyze and evaluate a package of properties held by the R.T.C. But they said that performing a similar analysis on just one of the complex securities that the government planned to buy would be infinitely more complex because each represented a pool containing hundreds of mortgages of dubious value on different kinds of properties. \u201cAt the end, it looks like a restaurant kitchen,\u201d Mr. Robert said. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to eat there if you don\u2019t have to.\u201d Given the uncharted waters ahead, Mr. Seidman, the former R.T.C. chairman, also predicted a rough ride. \u201cThey are going to have to learn by the seat of their pants,\u201d he said. \u201cIf this doesn\u2019t work out without some tremendous snafu down the line, it will be a miracle.\u201d", "keyword": "Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008);Resolution Trust Corp;Subprime Mortgage Crisis;Banks and Banking;Mortgages;Politics and Government;Law and Legislation"}
{"id": "ny0271565", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2016/05/02", "title": "Yankees\u2019 Bats Heat Up, but Pitching Falls Short in Loss at Fenway", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 For more than three weeks, the Yankees had been searching for a breakout offensive performance, the kind with hits and runs stacked up so high that the pitchers would not have to fret over their work, and victory was virtually ensured. During that time, dating back to April 9, the Yankees never scored more than six runs, and they reached that plateau only once. Most of the time, they had to settle for two or three runs, and their record reflected that pitiful production. Sunday was different. On Sunday night, through a steady rain and chilly winds, the Yankees\u2019 offense finally materialized, thanks mostly to Alex Rodriguez. They scored seven runs, a total greater than the sum of their runs in their four previous games, and a confidence-building win seemed within their grasp. But on a night when the Yankees finally hit and scored in volume, the pitching squandered it all. Nathan Eovaldi, the starter, gave up two leads and six runs, and Dellin Betances gave up a two-run home run to Christian Vazquez in the seventh as Boston won, 8-7 , to complete a three-game sweep. Manager Joe Girardi said this loss was harder to accept than previous losses because of how the offense had finally clicked into motion. More pressing, the loss dropped the Yankees to 8-15 as they consolidated their position in last place in the American League East, while the streaking Red Sox vaulted into first in the first game of May. While most in the Yankees clubhouse continue to stress how early it is in the season, some are starting to acknowledge a mounting urgency. The Red Sox moved to five games over .500 for the first time since 2013, when the won they World Series, and the Yankees are seven games under .500 for the first time in Mark Teixeira\u2019s eight-year tenure with them. \u201cIt\u2019s small sample size right now, but it\u2019s getting bigger,\u201d said Teixeira, who had a single and a run batted in. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to keep blaming it on bad luck or \u2018it\u2019s just one month.\u2019 We need to start winning games.\u201d Rodriguez spent time before the game discussing his theory that the Yankees\u2019 offense should strive to score five runs a game, a tactical outlook he notes has served the team well over the years. For example, in 2009, the Yankees averaged 5.64 runs per game in the regular season, and they won the World Series. \u201cI feel like our responsibility is to go out and try to score five runs,\u201d he said. \u201cAnything over that is a bonus; anything under it is just not good enough.\u201d About an hour later, Rodriguez was in the batter\u2019s box trying to prove his theorem single-handedly. He hit a two-run homer and a two-run double, both off Red Sox starter David Price, and scored a run on Teixeira\u2019s single in the Yankees\u2019 three-run fifth. That gave the Yankees a 6-4 lead, but in the bottom of the fifth, Eovaldi surrendered a two-run homer to Travis Shaw, and the score was even again. Eovaldi also gave up a 3-1 lead in the third. \u201cThe most frustrating part for me is that we kept scoring tonight and I wasn\u2019t able to hold the lead,\u201d Eovaldi said. The score remained even until the seventh, when Betances grooved a 97-mile-per-hour fastball straight down the middle to catcher Vazquez with a runner on base. Vazquez put a perfect swing on the ball and sent it screaming clear over the Green Monster and onto Lansdowne Street, giving Boston an 8-6 lead. The Yankees scored a run in the top of the eighth when Starlin Castro doubled off Koji Uehara, took third on a groundout and came home on a wild pitch. But Uehara struck out Carlos Beltran to end the eighth, and Craig Kimbrel locked down the ninth for his eighth save. Vazquez\u2019s blast was the second significant home run that Betances gave up in this series. On Friday, David Ortiz\u2019s two-run homer off Betances in the eighth inning decided the opening game of the series. That one came on a breaking ball that hung up in the strike zone, but the homer by Vazquez was a fastball on a platter. Betances has now given up home runs in his last three outings. \u201cI pretty much lost two of these games,\u201d Betances said. \u201cI\u2019ll take responsibility on myself. I know there\u2019s better days ahead.\u201d Price, who signed a seven-year, $217 million contract with the Red Sox in the off-season, did not have a particularly good outing in his 31st start against the Yankees. Like Eovaldi, he surrendered six runs. But he was the pitcher of record when Vazquez homered, so he improved to 4-0, with an unsightly 6.14 E.R.A. The Yankees had been six games under .500 for the first time since Girardi took over in 2008. The last times they were that far under .500 were in 2005 and 2007, under Manager Joe Torre. They were eight games under .500 in 2007 (21-29), and as in 2005, they still made the playoffs under Torre, then in his last season with them. \u201cOne of the things that Joe Torre always advocated in our clubhouse \u2014 and I think about this often \u2014 is, think small and big things will happen,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cThat\u2019s, I think, where we are today.\u201d Where they really are is last place.", "keyword": "Baseball;Nathan Eovaldi;Alex Rodriguez;Yankees;Red Sox"}
{"id": "ny0058869", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/08/27", "title": "Former Virginia Governor Sorry for Accepting Gifts, but Defends Loan Deals", "abstract": "RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 Five days of grueling, often contentious testimony by Bob McDonnell, the former Virginia governor accused of corruption, ended Tuesday with an apology from Mr. McDonnell for accepting so many gifts and so much money, but an emphatic denial that he had conspired with his wife to sell his office. The federal trial, already 22 days long, could go to the jury as early as Wednesday. Lawyers for the former Virginia first lady, Maureen McDonnell, must present her defense, but her lead lawyer promised that it might take only three hours. After Mr. McDonnell\u2019s testimony in his defense, the jurors were left with a puzzle. The gifts are not in doubt, $177,000 in cash, loans, vacations, Ferrari rides, equipment and rounds of golf, a Rolex watch and even an electric generator, so much that Mr. McDonnell, once considered a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, had to concede that he regretted his actions. What the donor, Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the chief executive of nutritional supplement maker Star Scientific, wanted in return is also little in doubt. Mr. Williams repeatedly made clear in emails, texts, phone calls and conversations aboard his private jet that he hoped the governor would help start clinical trials of his anti-inflammatory product Anatabloc at a prestigious Virginia university. But what Mr. Williams actually received may decide whether Mr. McDonnell goes to prison or walks free from a federal district courthouse a few hundred yards from the Governor\u2019s Mansion he once called home. Virginia\u2019s first couple did organize two events in the mansion that gave Mr. Williams entree to government and university officials. Mr. McDonnell was even photographed with a bottle of Anatabloc, a photo used on Star Scientific\u2019s website. But no clinical trials were started, no state grants were offered and ultimately Anatabloc was pulled from the market by federal regulators. An assistant United States attorney, Michael S. Dry, who questioned Mr. McDonnell for 10 hours over two days, concluded his interrogation by quoting the same Scripture the defendant had uttered at his inauguration as governor in 2010: \u201c \u2018To whom much is given, much will be required,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Dry said. \u201cMr. Williams gave you $177,000 in loans and gifts.\u201d He then turned to Judge James R. Spencer and said, \u201cNo further questions.\u201d Twenty-six days in February 2012 could decide Mr. McDonnell\u2019s fate. Mr. Dry bore down on a stretch of time when Mr. McDonnell was negotiating a favorable loan for his ailing real estate business with Mr. Williams and preparing to hold a \u201chealth care leaders\u201d meeting featuring him. Mr. McDonnell, himself a former prosecutor and former Virginia attorney general, jousted with Mr. Dry over different interpretations of the events. \u201cNo sir, we do not make decisions based on money,\u201d Mr. McDonnell snapped at one point. The loan in question \u2014 a stock transfer that would have ensured that the governor paid back far less than he actually borrowed \u2014 never came through, in large part because Mr. Williams could not pull it off. Mr. McDonnell said that that fact rendered the whole line of questioning irrelevant. But prosecutors used the negotiations to show how earnestly Mr. McDonnell was pursuing financial help at the same time he appeared to be giving his benefactor access to top Virginia public officials. Mr. Dry, who has led the federal investigation for 16 months, began the timeline with Mr. McDonnell\u2019s own notes on a legal pad from Feb. 3, 2012, when he was negotiating a loan from Mr. Williams of Star Scientific. That initial deal was for 50,000 shares of Star Scientific stock, at $3.15 a share, worth more than $150,000, to be paid back with the repurchase of 50,000 shares at $1.90 a share. In other words, Mr. McDonnell would have had to repay a $150,000 loan with $90,000, after he was out of office, according to his own notes. Image Bob McDonnell, center, entering Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., on Tuesday for the last of five days of testimony in his corruption trial. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Five days later, an aide to Mr. McDonnell sent an email saying Ms. McDonnell and the governor \u201cwere going over the list last night for the health care industry event.\u201d The email indicated that both wanted Mr. Williams and his company at the event, where they could mix with university researchers in Virginia. On Feb. 9, Ms. McDonnell emailed her husband about potential clinical trials at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University. \u201cHere\u2019s the info from Jonnie. He has calls into VCU, UVA and no one will return his calls,\u201d she wrote. On Feb. 10, Ms. McDonnell emailed Jasen Eige, the governor\u2019s senior policy adviser and lawyer, saying, \u201cGov wants to know why nothing has developed with studies.\u201d Mr. McDonnell said he wanted no such thing. At 12:02 a.m., Feb. 17, Mr. McDonnell emailed Mr. Eige: \u201cplease see me about Anatabloc issues at VCU and UVA.\u201d Four minutes later, the lawyer responded, \u201cwill do,\u201d and added, \u201cWe need to be careful with this issue.\u201d On Feb. 18, Mr. McDonnell personally emailed Mr. Williams to resume loan negotiations. Then on Feb. 29, Mr. McDonnell and Mr. Williams held a private meeting ostensibly on the health care leaders\u2019 meeting that night. But the subject was the loan, which was growing more favorable. Mr. Williams offered 52,000 shares of Star Scientific, valued that day at $3.75 \u2014 a $187,000 offer, to be repaid with 50,000 shares repurchased at $2.20 a share, or $110,000. That night, less than five hours later, Mr. Williams was back at the Governor\u2019s Mansion for the health care leaders\u2019 meeting. Mr. McDonnell said the terms of the loan were of no consequence, since ultimately the stock loan fell through and he took $50,000 in cash for his real estate company, known as MoBo. \u201cMr. Dry, if you are suggesting I got a $50,000 loan for MoBo in order to get Mr. Williams\u2019 calls returned, you\u2019re completely off base,\u201d a prickly Mr. McDonnell snapped at one point. But the events of that month seemed to sharpen the connections between the governor and Mr. Williams, whom aides called the Tic Tac man after the shape of his pills. Just days after Mr. Williams wrote the $50,000 check, he flew the McDonnells back to Virginia from a vacation in Florida on his corporate jet. Days later, at a meeting on a long-awaited \u201cconsumer-driven health care\u201d plan that was meant to reshape health care delivery in Virginia, the governor conceded he brought up Anatabloc, saying that he was using the product and that it was working well for him. On May 18, 2012, Mr. McDonnell texted Mr. Williams, casually suggesting, \u201cper voice mail, would like to see if you could extend another 20k loan.\u201d Twelve minutes later came the reply: \u201cDone.\u201d That July, Mr. Williams texted back: \u201cJohns Hopkins human clinical trials report on Aug. 8. If you need cash let me know. Let\u2019s go golfing and sailing.\u201d Mr. Dry, his head shaking, his faced puckered in a pained smirk, said to Mr. McDonnell, \u201cDidn\u2019t you know Mr. Williams was lending that money because of you?\u201d A rattled former governor responded defensively, \u201cI\u2019m telling the truth about my view of the loans from Mr. Williams.\u201d", "keyword": "Virginia;Robert F McDonnell;Jonnie R Williams Sr;Bribery and Kickbacks;Maureen Patricia Gardner McDonnell;Gifts to Public Officials;Governors"}
{"id": "ny0037609", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/03/15", "title": "Fed Transferred $79.6 Billion in Earnings to the Treasury Last Year", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Federal Reserve paid $79.6 billion to the Treasury Department in 2013 as the Fed\u2019s enormous investment campaign to stimulate economic growth continued to generate windfall profits for taxpayers. Since 2008, the Fed has expanded its holdings of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities from less than $1 trillion to more than $4 trillion in an effort to suppress interest rates and encourage risk-taking. Its earnings from those holdings have increased apace. The Fed, required by law to put most of its profit in the government\u2019s coffers, has contributed almost $323 billion in the last four years . The Fed invests exclusively in federal government bonds. In returning the money, it is effectively reducing the government\u2019s borrowing costs. Some Republican politicians argue that the Fed, by reducing the short-term cost of borrowing, is enabling the growth of the federal debt. Fed officials respond that Congress itself is responsible for making those decisions \u2014 and that abandoning the policy would be counterproductive, in all likelihood. \u201cI don\u2019t think it would be helpful, either in terms of achieving the objectives that Congress has assigned to us or in terms of Congress\u2019s deficit-reduction efforts, for us to purposely raise interest rates in order to weaken the economy,\u201d the Fed\u2019s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, testified before Congress in February. \u201cThe likely impact of that in a weaker economy would be larger deficits.\u201d Ms. Yellen also expressed confidence that the investments would not impede the Fed\u2019s ability to control inflation as the economy strengthens. The Fed buys bonds from banks by crediting accounts that are kept at the Fed. To keep that money from circulating, the Fed paid the banks $5.2 billion in interest last year. That could become a political liability as the economy grows, because the Fed would have to pay substantially higher rates to persuade the banks to leave the money on deposit. In effect, the Fed would be sending tens of billions of dollars to a handful of large banks rather than to the Treasury. Still, Fed officials insist that this is exactly what they will do. With lawmakers from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party as well as the Tea Party ranks of the Republican Party pressing the Fed on a variety of issues, the resulting image problem could be compounded by a decline in the profits from the Fed\u2019s investments. The central bank has transferred something to the Treasury every year since 1934. But some analysts, and the Fed itself, see a risk that transfers might have to be suspended later this decade as interest rates rise, reducing the value of low-rate bonds like those held by the Fed. The Fed spent about $5.6 billion on its own operations last year. It also provided $563 million in funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which assumed some of the Fed\u2019s regulatory responsibilities after the financial crisis.", "keyword": "Banking and Finance;Debt;Federal Reserve;Treasury Department;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0014914", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/10/05", "title": "Unemployment of Adults Falls in Germany, but Not the Rest of Europe", "abstract": "THE euro zone can be separated into two groups, at least in terms of unemployment: Germany and the rest. In August, 1.9 million German adults \u2014 defined as people at least 25 years old \u2014 were counted as unemployed, meaning they were looking for work but had not found it. That figure is the lowest number since 1991, not long after the country was unified. In the rest of the euro zone, there were 13.9 million unemployed adults. That is the highest number since the euro was created in 1999. Eurostat, the European Union\u2019s statistical agency, reported this week that the overall number of unemployed workers in the euro zone countries declined in August for the third consecutive month. That decline was caused by a reduction in the high level of joblessness among younger workers, those under 25. But unemployment among older workers continued to increase. The accompanying charts show the change in the number of workers classified as unemployed among both age groups, in Germany and in the rest of the euro zone, since December 2007. They also show what has happened in the United States and Britain over that period and the current unemployment rates in each area. While the rates of unemployment among younger workers have skyrocketed, the increase in the number of young unemployed workers since the downturn began has been much less than the increase among older workers \u2014 the ones most likely to have the responsibility to support a family. Among the countries in the European Union, whether or not members of the euro zone, all but Germany now have more adult unemployed workers than at the end of 2007, when the United States went into recession and set off the credit crisis that brought on the Great Recession. The only European Union countries where the current level of unemployment is less than a third higher than the 2007 level are Austria, Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Malta and Romania. In Germany, the number is down 35 percent. Last month, Eurostat reported that the gross domestic product of the euro zone, excluding Germany, rose at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the second quarter. That was the first such increase since the second quarter of 2011, and helped to increase investor confidence. But the jobless figures show that, at least so far, there is little sign of recovery in the job market. In the United States, the number of unemployed adults peaked in 2009 and has since declined, although it remains 57 percent higher than it was at the end of 2007. In Britain, the peak of unemployment came in 2011 and the decline has been slower, but the picture is still better than in most euro zone countries. Germany\u2019s extraordinary job performance can be traced to several factors. Government programs encouraged companies to cut hours rather than fire people during the crisis, preventing the surge in unemployment seen almost everywhere else. Germany has since benefited from the euro zone crisis \u2014 despite the fact that resolving it seems likely to be costly for the country. Poor economic performance in much of the Continent has held down the value of the common currency, and thus helped German exports. There is little doubt that the deutschemark, if it still existed, would be a much stronger currency than the euro.", "keyword": "Jobs;Euro Crisis;Unemployment;EU;Germany;Eurostat"}
{"id": "ny0243204", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/03/08", "title": "Nabucco Pipeline Faces Major Challenges", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 The development of the Nabucco natural gas pipeline, intended to reduce the European Union \u2019s dependence on Russian energy supplies, faces major challenges that threaten its future, according to analysts and members of the consortium backing the ambitious project. The estimated cost of the 3,300-kilometer-long, or 2,050-mile-long, pipeline has ballooned, and the consortium is still struggling to line up suppliers for Nabucco, which is designed to carry 31 billion cubic meters, or 1.1 trillion cubic feet, of natural gas a year from the Middle East and the Caspian region to markets in Europe. E.U. officials say 2011 is the make-or-break year for the project. \u201cEither it is this year or it is not feasible,\u201d said Marlene Holzner, a spokeswoman for the E.U. energy commissioner. Nabucco was originally budgeted at \u20ac7.9 billion, or $11.1 billion. But according to an internal study by the British oil company BP, it may cost \u20ac14 billion to finish the pipeline. That threatens to make the venture unprofitable. Nabucco would carry gas from the Caspian region and the Middle East, through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, to a hub just outside Vienna. From there, the gas would be distributed to customers throughout the European Union. The consortium of energy companies behind the project has two options, according to E.U. officials and analysts. One option is to abandon Nabucco after nearly a decade of planning and development. Were that to happen, it would mean not only a missed opportunity to diversify\u2019s E.U. energy supplies, but a major loss of influence and prestige for the European Union in the increasingly important Caspian region. The other choice is for Nabucco to be merged with another pipeline to make it more attractive to investors, gas suppliers and consumers. \u201cThe attention is now on the economics of Nabucco, not the political aspects of using Nabucco to weaken Europe\u2019s dependence on Russian gas,\u201d said Borut Grgic, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Europe relies on four major suppliers for its natural gas: Russia , which provides 41 percent; Norway, which provides 27 percent; Algeria, 17 percent; and Nigeria, 5 percent. Russia is the European Union\u2019s single most important energy supplier over all, accounting for more than 25 percent of the bloc\u2019s consumption of oil and gas, according to the European Commission, the Union\u2019s executive arm. That dependence was underscored when price disputes led Russia to briefly cut natural gas supplies to Ukraine in 2006 and to Belarus in 2009. That led to serious shortages in parts of Eastern Europe, and spurred the European Union to step up its efforts to secure alternative supplies of energy. The consortium behind Nabucco comprises many of Europe\u2019s largest energy companies: RWE, of Germany; OMV, of Austria; MOL, of Hungary; Botas, of Turkey; Bulgaria Energy Holding, of Bulgaria; and Transgaz, of Romania. With Bulgaria and Romania still grappling with the impact of the global economic crisis, it is far from certain if their state-run energy companies could afford a bigger investment in Nabucco. \u201cI do not know how the Nabucco consortium arrived at the \u20ac7.9 billion figure in the first place. I could never see it costing less than \u20ac12 billion,\u201d said Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. \u201cAnd consider the price of iron ore, which is used for steel pipelines. It has risen by 50 percent over the past year.\u201d In Vienna, where Nabucco is based, a spokesman played down BP\u2019s \u20ac14 billion cost estimate. He also discounted the possibility that the start of construction would be delayed. \u201cThe current figure of \u20ac7.9 billion is based on the Nabucco feasibility study which was completed in 2005,\u201d said Christian Dolezal, the Nabucco spokesman. \u201cThese figures are currently under review. Any other figures released in the meantime are speculations and not accurate. We do not have an investment issue, therefore no delay.\u201d Johannes Vetter, a spokesman for MOL, said there were \u201cno final numbers on the table,\u201d adding, \u201cWe will know in a few weeks if there will be delays.\u201d Even if the pipeline is completed, there is the issue of finding natural gas to fill it. The consortium has been banking on Azerbaijan , which has vast reserves of gas. But those fields have not yet been developed. BP is the project operator of the Shah Deniz II field in Azerbaijan, and holds a 25 percent stake in it. For months, Nabucco has been negotiating to obtain gas from the Shah Deniz II field. But the Azeri government has yet to decide whether it will sell gas to Nabucco or to some other pipeline operator. Elshad Nasirov, vice president of Socar, Azerbaijan\u2019s state-owned oil and natural gas company, said recently that Shah Deniz II could only guarantee 10 billion cubic meters of gas for export, less than one-third of Nabucco\u2019s capacity. \u201cWe do not promise additional gas,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything depends on the price.\u201d RWE has been looking elsewhere for supplies. Last year it signed a cooperation agreement with Iraqi Kurdistan, which has large reserves of gas. The long-term goal of the semiautonomous region is to supply Nabucco with 20 billion cubic meters of gas a year, according to Kurdistan\u2019s natural resources minister, Ashti Hawrami. To accomplish that, however, Nabucco would have to build another pipeline, 550 kilometers long, to bring the gas across Turkey to the main pipeline. That would drive up costs. \u201cThe fact is that there will not be 30 billion cubic meters of gas for Nabucco until well into the next decade,\u201d said Mr. Stern from the Oxford Institute. Moreover, as Socar has made clear, Nabucco is not alone in trying to obtain gas from the Shah Deniz II fields. Two other European energy projects are also in talks with the Azeri government: competing: the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP, and the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy, or I.T.G.I. TAP is backed by Statoil, of Norway; E.ON, of Germany; and EGL, of Switzerland. The 520-kilometer pipeline is to run from Greece to Italy via Albania and cost \u20ac1.6 billion. \u201cThere is as yet no agreement with Azerbaijan,\u201d said Kjetil Tungland, TAP\u2019s managing director. \u201cEverybody is waiting for Azerbaijan\u2019s decision.\u201d The I.T.G.I pipeline is to run from Turkey, across Greece to Italy, have an annual capacity of 12 billion cubic meters and is estimated to cost \u20ac2.5 billion. The shareholders are Edison, of Italy; Depa, of Greece; and Botas, the Turkish company that is also a partner in Nabucco. With all three pipelines chasing after Azeri gas, and with rising costs for Nabucco, the European Union is now lobbying for Nabucco to merge with one of the other projects. Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister and now consultant for RWE, proposed during a meeting of energy experts in Vienna last month that the Southern European pipeline projects should be integrated. \u201cIt would make sense,\u201d Mr. Fischer said. \u201cBusiness interests would be brought together, but above all it would allow Europe to diversify.\u201d Together, the three pipelines would be able to supply Europe with about 53 billion cubic meters of gas a year. Nabucco confirmed that talks were taking place. \u201cWe understand that there is a discussion on a political level,\u201d said Mr. Dolezal, the Nabucco spokesman. But, he added, \u201cNabucco can be realized and stand alone.\u201d The European Union has made clear it is not counting on that. \u201cOur main goal is to have access to the Southern Basin,\u201d said Ms. Holzner, the energy commissioner\u2019s spokeswoman. \u201cThat is why we do not back one project but also TAP and I.T.G.I.\u201d If Nabucco falters but I.T.G.I. succeeds, she added, \u201cthen we will have achieved the same goal: access to the Caspian.\u201d", "keyword": "Natural Gas;Pipelines;European Union;Azerbaijan;Russia"}
{"id": "ny0027100", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/01/29", "title": "In Chicago, Security Shares Spotlight at High School Basketball Game", "abstract": "CHICAGO \u2014 The cars were screened in the parking lots of the stadium on Chicago State University\u2019s South Side campus. The fans walked through metal detectors; their bags were scanned, too. Police lined the arena\u2019s entrance. The teams of teenage boys wore T-shirts during the pregame warm-ups bearing a simple, yet stark message: Shoot Hoops, Not Guns. Such was the backdrop for a highly anticipated high school basketball game in Chicago on Saturday between Simeon Career Academy and Whitney M. Young Magnet High School , where a pall cast by violence threatened to overshadow an athletic showcase. On Jan. 16, after a game involving Simeon at Chicago State, a skirmish between players and coaches broke out on the court. A shooting outside the arena later left a 17-year-old boy dead \u2014 another homicide in a city where 506 were reported in 2012. The game pitted two of the country\u2019s top programs and players, with both teams in USA Today\u2019s top 10 national rankings. According to Rivals.com, Whitney Young boasts the top junior in the nation in Jahlil Okafor, a powerful but lithe center with soft hands and quick feet. Simeon has Jabari Parker, the third-ranked senior. Parker is a 6-foot-8 do-it-all swingman who committed to Duke last month and has been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. \u201cYou could make a case these are the two best high school players in the country,\u201d said Joe Henricksen , a longtime Chicago high school basketball observer and the publisher of a local recruiting newsletter. The hype surrounding the clash, which was televised nationally on ESPNU, was matched by the questions of safety and security. Fans erupted during the game after acrobatic dunks, while the Chicago police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy , sat with his arms folded, wearing a tight-lipped expression. McCarthy described the security as threefold, a perimeter enforced by the Chicago police, the campus patrolled by state officers and the university police, and Chicago Public Schools security monitoring the gym. He stressed that the Jan. 16 shooting was not related to basketball. \u201cThe fact is it had nothing to do with what happened at the game,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cThat was about a gang member seeing another gang member, relaying the information, and somebody showed up and wanted to shoot somebody.\u201d Still, Chicago Public Schools suspended Simeon Coach Robert Smith for four games because of his role in the pushing and shoving after the game, and the security presence inside and outside the arena Saturday was noticeably increased and tightened. One fan said police officers with flashlights peered through his car window and asked him to open his glove compartment when he entered the parking lot. Image Fans attending the game walked through metal detectors and their bags were scanned. Credit Nathan Weber for The New York Times \u201cI\u2019m always concerned about our kids\u2019 safety,\u201d said the Chicago schools chief executive, Barbara Byrd-Bennett , who was also at Saturday\u2019s game. She added: \u201cI think they know we\u2019ve put together a plan to keep them safe.\u201d In Chicago, high school basketball is a way of life. The term March Madness was used to describe the high school basketball postseason tournament in Illinois in 1939, long before the N.C.A.A. adopted it, and Illinois was also among the first states to televise its tournament. More recently, Chicago produced the N.B.A.\u2019s first overall draft picks when Derrick Rose, a Simeon graduate, was selected by the Bulls in 2008, and last year when the New Orleans Hornets chose Anthony Davis. Many in the city hope its latest prodigies follow suit. \u201cBasketball is just what we do in Chicago,\u201d Whitney Young Coach Tyrone Slaughter said. The remarkable run of talent here has brought comparisons to the late 1970s, when Isiah Thomas and Doc Rivers headlined high school tournaments in the area. But as rich as the basketball culture is locally, the sport has also been affected by the reverberations from violent crime. Outside their gym each day they go to practice, Parker and his teammates see Rose\u2019s jersey hanging next to that of Ben Wilson , who was ranked among the top high school basketball stars in the country when he was killed in a shooting outside Simeon in 1984. A report by The Chicago Sun-Times last week highlighted several violent episodes involving public school athletics in the city over the past 10 years, including fights, shootings and an attack on a team bus. \u201cThat\u2019s never on my mind, any of the violence,\u201d the Whitney Young center Okafor said. \u201cI feel safe.\u201d The game, as it turned out, matched the hype, despite ordinary efforts from Parker (7 points) and Okafor (8 points). Simeon sprinted to a lead before holding off Whitney Young, 44-41, in an action-packed finish. Afterward, Parker said just playing the game was an important message. \u201cWe could have played it somewhere else outside the city, but we didn\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cThose T-shirts we wore were good for kids to see.\u201d Fans filing out of the arena were instructed to exit through the side of the building, directly into the parking lot. Police cars sat at the entrance to the arena and in the surrounding lots, their blue lights flashing in the night. No problems were reported.", "keyword": "Basketball;School Sports;Chicago;Murders"}
{"id": "ny0208303", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/06/13", "title": "Consumer Confidence Hits a 9-Month High", "abstract": "Consumer confidence rose to a nine-month high in June but failed again to surpass its level of September 2008, when the failure of Lehman Brothers sent the world economy into a tailspin, a survey showed on Friday. The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its preliminary index of confidence for June rose to 69.0 from May\u2019s 68.7. That was slightly below economists\u2019 expectations of 69.5, according to a Reuters poll. The report\u2019s gauges of inflation expectations rose to their highest in months, creating concern for the Federal Reserve, which has pumped money into the financial system to spur a recovery. For the third month, the overall consumer sentiment reading was at its highest since the Lehman debacle last September, which caused severe strains in financial markets, while not breaking through that month\u2019s level of 70.3. Indeed, the economic damage done by that episode is still being felt and may linger for a long time, consumers worry, overshadowing perceptions of economic recovery. \u201cJob and income uncertainty, however, remained high and constitute a significant barrier for completing planned purchases,\u201d the Surveys of Consumers said in its report. \u201cThe economic recovery was thought to be weaker than originally anticipated, leading consumers to expect a longer period of time before the recovery gets under way.\u201d Reflecting continuing worries, consumers\u2019 assessment of the 12-month economic outlook fell, with that gauge declining to 61 in June from 75 in May. Their one-year inflation expectations rose to 3.1 percent in June \u2014 the highest since October 2008 \u2014 from May\u2019s 2.8 percent. The five-year inflation outlook rose to 3.1 percent in June, from May\u2019s 2.9 percent. That was the highest in the long-term inflation expectations since February this year. In an earlier report, import prices in the United States rose 1.3 percent in May, the Labor Department said on Friday , but the gain was led by petroleum prices and underlying import price pressures were more muted. Analysts had forecast import prices would rise 1.3 percent after a revised 1.1 percent rise in April, previously reported as a 1.6 percent increase. May\u2019s gain was the largest since a 1.4 percent advance in July 2008. Recent declines in the dollar might press import prices higher and contribute to inflation, but year-over-year, import prices declined by 17.6 percent, indicating little threat of this at the moment. Nonpetroleum import prices rose 0.2 percent in May, the first increase since July 2008, and were down a record 5.8 percent over the year. Export prices rose 0.6 percent in May compared with forecasts for a 0.4 percent gain. They rose 0.4 percent in April and are down 6.5 percent over the year. Imported petroleum prices were up 8.3 percent in May, the fourth consecutive gain after bottoming in January, but are 51.4 percent lower over the year.", "keyword": "International Trade and World Market;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline"}
{"id": "ny0029303", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/06/04", "title": "U.S. Manufacturing Gauge Falls to June 2009 Level", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A measure of United States manufacturing fell in May to its lowest level since June 2009 as slumping overseas economies and a pullback in business spending reduced new orders and production. The Institute for Supply Management said on Monday that its index of manufacturing activity fell to 49 last month, from 50.7 in April. That is the lowest level in nearly four years and the first time the index has dipped below 50 since November. A reading under 50 indicates contraction. A gauge of new orders fell to 48.8, its lowest level in nearly a year. Production and employment also declined. Manufacturing has struggled this year as weak economies abroad have slowed exports from the United States. Businesses have also reduced their pace of investment in areas like equipment and computer software. Image Credit The New York Times At the same time, consumers are holding back on spending more for factory-made goods, possibly a reflection of higher Social Security taxes that have reduced paychecks this year. A separate report Monday said a measure of Chinese manufacturing dropped last month to 49.2, from 50.4 in April. As with the institute\u2019s index, a reading below 50 indicates contraction. The figure added to signs that a resurgence of China\u2019s economy, the world\u2019s second-largest after the United States, might be losing momentum. Europe remains mired in recession and is buying fewer American goods. In the first three months of the year, American exports to Europe fell 8 percent compared with the same period a year ago. After a steep fall in March, companies in April stepped up their orders for United States machinery, electronic products and other equipment that reflect their investment plans. Overall orders for so-called durable goods jumped 3.3 percent in April from March. Much of the April gain reflected more orders for commercial aircraft. But excluding the volatile transportation sector, which includes aircraft and autos, orders rose 1.3 percent in April, a big turnaround after a decline in March.", "keyword": "Manufacturing;US Economy;International trade;Institute for Supply Management"}
{"id": "ny0152392", "categories": ["nyregion", "thecity"], "date": "2008/08/24", "title": "Look! There! It\u2019s a \u2018Hot Bird\u2019", "abstract": "IT\u2019S hard to miss the sprinkling of \u201cHot Bird\u201d signs visible from Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Aside from what could be considered the jarring juxtaposition of the words \u201chot\u201d and \u201cbird,\u201d a few of the signs are painted a radiant yellow and are bigger than highway billboards. For more than a decade, the signs have made vegetarians wince and poultry lovers pause. Some people even consider the signs to be landmarks of sorts. Hot Bird is the name of two long-defunct Brooklyn barbecue chicken places. And although the businesses closed in the \u201990s, the signs live on. Four of them have been painted on the sides of apartment buildings in Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Cobble Hill. Over the years, the long-orphaned images have prompted many to wonder, \u201cWhere is Hot Bird?\u201d \u201cHot Bird has gone the way of the dodo,\u201d said Robert Perris, the district manager of Community Board 2, which covers a large part of brownstone Brooklyn. As for the signs, he said, \u201cThey\u2019ve been here so long, they\u2019ve just become part of the landscape.\u201d One Hot Bird was at 665 Vanderbilt Avenue, near Grand Army Plaza, in a building now occupied by an Italian restaurant called Aliseo Osteria del Borgo. Albano Ballerini, the restaurant\u2019s owner and chef, said Hot Bird had gone out of business by the time he bought the space in 1998. In a tip of the hat to his culinary predecessor, he said he briefly considered calling his restaurant Not Bird before better judgment prevailed. Another sign, which occupies nearly the width of a wall of an apartment house at 540 Vanderbilt Avenue \u2014 the Hot Bird Building, as some call it \u2014 sits in the path of the Atlantic Yards project, a planned 22-acre development that will include housing, office space and a basketball arena. A photograph of the building, with demolition equipment in the foreground, titled \u201cHot Bird\u2019s Last Stand,\u201d was featured this summer at the Brooklyn Museum in \u201cClick! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition.\u201d The signs tend to inspire a tongue-in-cheek admiration for Hot Bird\u2019s glory days. \u201cNot a day goes by that I don\u2019t regret missing the era of Hot Bird in Brooklyn,\u201d one contributor to a Prospect Heights Web site confessed. On another Web site, another wrote, \u201cI really wish I had a Hot Bird T-shirt.\u201d The \u201cNot for Tourists\u201d guide designated one of the signs a landmark, based on its \u201cmysterious inscription\u201d and \u201ctantalizing visual.\u201d But not everyone is tantalized. A few of the signs provide a delivery telephone number that now belongs to an unfortunate woman who lives near Jamaica, Queens. \u201cPeople are still calling me for the restaurant,\u201d the woman, who declined to give her name, said the other day. \u201cAll hours of the night, they\u2019re asking me for chicken.\u201d In an effort to solve the Hot Bird mystery, she conducted her own investigation. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the big, yellow sign out there called Hot Bird,\u201d she said, adding that she searched for the establishment, following the directions on the sign. \u201cWell,\u201d she said with a hint of exasperation, \u201cI didn\u2019t see no restaurant.\u201d", "keyword": "Brooklyn (NYC);Chicken;Atlantic Yards (Brooklyn);Clinton Hill (NYC);Cobble Hill (NYC);Prospect Heights (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0215172", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2010/04/03", "title": "West Virginia\u2019s Huggins Is Focused on a Title, Not Redemption", "abstract": "INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 West Virginia Coach Bob Huggins has carried a mottled reputation for having players with off-the-court problems, having had zero percent graduation rates and using profane language. But by virtue of having taken his alma mater to its first Final Four since 1959, against top-seeded Duke on Saturday, the coach known as Huggy Bear has gone from one of college basketball\u2019s most divisive figures to one of its most beloved. Seemingly forgotten are Huggins\u2019s tumultuous 16 seasons at Cincinnati, which included his arrest in 2004 for driving under the influence of alcohol \u2014 which resulted in a video showing him staggering and with vomit on the driver\u2019s side door \u2014 N.C.A.A. sanctions and a resignation in 2005 to avoid being fired. Instead, the focus has become how he survived a heart attack that nearly killed him in 2002 and how he is two wins short of following through on returning home to West Virginia to win a national championship. \u201cI wish Coach Huggins and my father\u2019s home state of West Virginia the best,\u201d Nancy L. Zimpher, the former Cincinnati president and current SUNY chancellor who forced Huggins\u2019s resignation, said in a statement. But talk of the past is lost on the 56-year-old Huggins, who is making his second Final Four appearance (his first came with Cincinnati in 1992). \u201cYou guys keep wanting to do this redemption thing and I don\u2019t buy into it,\u201d Huggins said. \u201cI don\u2019t look backwards.\u201d Huggins has remained true to himself during his team\u2019s impressive run this season, winning the Big East tournament title and advancing to the Final Four dressed in his warm-up suit as he berates referees and players alike. His players have been wearing the team motto \u201cDo What We Do\u201d on their T-shirts this week. The West Virginia junior forward John Flowers said he and his teammates knew when Huggins was entering the locker room at halftime because Huggins would throw a water bottle ahead of his entrance, which Flowers estimated had happened in half of the season\u2019s games. Despite saying he did not think he should comment on some of the incidents, Flowers became emotional when talking about how he much he cared about Huggins. \u201cHe\u2019s a real cool guy,\u201d Flowers said. \u201cHe\u2019s real down-to-earth. He understands life and second chances. He\u2019s not quick to turn his back on someone when they\u2019re in trouble.\u201d The West Virginia junior guard Casey Mitchell also spoke fondly of Huggins, who he said kicked a chair so hard that one of its legs broke at halftime of a game earlier this season. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of motivation profanity,\u201d Mitchell said of Huggins\u2019s language when coaching. \u201cIt\u2019s not like just downing you all the time. It kind of makes you eager to just attack.\u201d Louisville Coach Rick Pitino insists that Huggins\u2019s abrasive reputation was unwarranted. \u201cHuggs could be one of the most misunderstood coaches of our time,\u201d Pitino said by telephone. \u201cHe\u2019s extremely well liked by the members of the coaching profession. He really cares a lot about the kids both athletically as well as academically.\u201d Kansas State Coach Frank Martin, a former assistant for Huggins who was promoted to succeed him, also defended him. He praised Huggins for his loyalty, honesty and work ethic and said it was unfair to criticize him for his past. \u201cThere\u2019s not too many people that are quite the human being that he is in life,\u201d Martin said, \u201clet alone in basketball.\u201d And if Huggins wins a national championship, he just might have a new reputation.", "keyword": "Basketball;Huggins Bob;College Athletics;West Virginia University;NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men);Coaches and Managers"}
{"id": "ny0040058", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/04/30", "title": "For Clippers, Transition in Decision Making Begins", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Soon after N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver handed down a lifetime ban to Donald Sterling on Tuesday, the Clippers\u2019 website, the one still owned but no longer operated under the direction of Sterling, went black. There were no rosters, statistics, news, features, biographical information, promotions, schedules, community event listings or anything else, except a stark message in white letters against the black background: We Are One, with an interlocking L.A.C. logo. The symbolism was equally plain: It was there in black and white, unequivocal. The metaphor of choice, one used by the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, among many others, was a heavy hammer that Silver had brought down on Sterling for racist remarks. Image The Clippers taped up advertisements in the Staples Center prior to Game 5 against the Warriors. Credit Kelvin Kuo/USA Today Sports, via Reuters But this blow immediately felt more transformative. Less than an hour after Silver stepped to the lectern in New York, the Clippers released a statement declaring: \u201cWe wholeheartedly support and embrace the decision by the N.B.A. and Commissioner Adam Silver today. Now the healing process begins.\u201d But just who released the statement? \u201cDoc and I approved that,\u201d said Andy Roeser, the team president, referring to Doc Rivers, the Clippers\u2019 coach and vice president of basketball operations. Roeser declined to answer further questions outside Staples Center. For years, he has run the business operation for Sterling, most prominently negotiating contracts. In a statement issued by the team Saturday, Roeser questioned the legitimacy of the recording and the motives of the woman Sterling directed not to publicly associate with black men. Video The league commissioner, Adam Silver, called remarks by the Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, \u201cdeeply offensive and harmful.\u201d Credit Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Rivers has little attachment to Sterling, arriving from Boston last summer and immediately distancing himself from Sterling on Saturday and refusing to meet with him Monday. Rivers, as he sat down for a news conference nearly two hours before Tuesday\u2019s game against Golden State at Staples Center, exhaled deeply. He said he believed the decision had allowed his players, who were considering a boycott, to do the same. As for what it meant to the organization to operate without an owner in power, Rivers was uncertain. Image Zach Randolph of the Memphis Grizzlies, left, and his teammates warmed up with their shirts inside-out in apparent support of the Clippers before their game Tuesday. Credit /Associated Press \u201cA lifetime ban is a lifetime ban,\u201d Rivers said. \u201cAnd yes, I do think that\u2019s the right decision. The next question is, where do we go? You think about coaching a team, and actually, I don\u2019t know who to call if I need something, so the quicker that this is done, the better for everyone. Having said that, it\u2019s going to take time, and we all have to be patient.\u201d An example of how the Clippers operate came Monday, when they had meetings to address Sterling\u2019s comments and answer questions about the league\u2019s investigation. Rivers directed a meeting at the team\u2019s facility in Playa Vista, Calif., while Roeser and the executives Carl Lahr and Christian Howard met in the team\u2019s business offices at Staples Center. Though the team has improved in recent years, reaching the playoffs the past three seasons, the front office has not often functioned smoothly. The previous three general managers did not leave on good terms. Elgin Baylor and Mike Dunleavy sued Sterling \u2014 one for discrimination, the other for pay that he was owed \u2014 and Neil Olshey worked without a contract for nine months before leaving for a considerable raise in Portland. Image Demonstrators against Donald Sterling outside the Staples Center prior to Game 5 against the Warriors. Credit Annie Tritt for The New York Times Just as Olshey had been promoted to replace Dunleavy, Gary Sacks \u2014 who worked under Olshey \u2014 was promoted to take Olshey\u2019s place. Last season, personnel decisions were shared by Roeser, Sacks and Coach Vinny Del Negro, who was not rehired when his contract ran out despite leading the team to a franchise-record 56 victories. Working under Sacks is Sterling\u2019s son-in-law, the director of basketball administration Eric Miller. Silver, at his news conference, said Sterling\u2019s ban did not apply to anyone else in his family. For now, Sterling\u2019s absence will have little effect. If few owners are as involved as the Dallas Mavericks\u2019 Mark Cuban, who sits behind his team\u2019s bench, hugged Vince Carter after his winning shot Saturday and often works out in the team\u2019s weight room, then Sterling has been particularly distant in recent years. Image Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers speaking to the media before Game 5 of their opening-round playoff series. Credit Associated Press Sterling had an office at the team\u2019s $50 million headquarters, which opened in 2009, but it was left vacant \u2014 used occasionally to conduct interviews until other employees were moved into it several years ago. He also did not have an office at Staples Center. For the most part, Sterling\u2019s only involvement was to sign off on new contracts and trades. The league has told Clippers officials that it is working out how the team can manage ownership-level decisions that arise in the near future. At Staples Center, advertising banners were covered throughout the arena after more than a dozen sponsors cut ties with the team. As for how he will carry on, Rivers was succinct. \u201cI\u2019m going to do my job,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Basketball;Clippers;Donald Sterling;Doc Rivers;Discrimination;Adam Silver;Andy Roeser"}
{"id": "ny0221725", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2010/02/14", "title": "Johnson Focuses on the Road in Nascar, and Soon a Baby on Board", "abstract": "DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. \u2014 After an unprecedented fourth consecutive championship in Nascar \u2019s top series, and all of the prestige and accolades that came with it, Jimmie Johnson finds himself in search of new vistas in 2010. Johnson, a part-time New Yorker, recently sold his Chelsea loft to move to an $8.3 million condominium in Manhattan\u2019s West Village. \u201cI was very happy with where we were,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the chance for the West Village and cobblestone roads and trees and a view over the river. ...\u201d The view atop Nascar is not too shabby, either. Johnson is finally receiving recognition befitting his accomplishments, even as a preternatural corporate correctness, an innate humility and an aversion to flamboyance prevents him from achieving the superstardom of a Dale Earnhardt Jr. or a Danica Patrick. Johnson was named the Associated Press male athlete of the year in 2009 and is the focus of an HBO series that chronicles his preparations for Sunday\u2019s season-opening Daytona 500. Yet far from satisfied with his success, Johnson\u2019s intense regimen has left him 10 pounds lighter and as driven as ever going into 2010. Johnson and his equally unrelenting crew chief, Chad Knaus, remain the immovable force at the front of the field. Johnson is the odds-on favorite to win the Cup series title again. And these days, mention of Johnson alongside Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt no longer seems outlandish. He is three championships away from matching the seven titles won by those two stock-car racing icons. But suddenly, a daunting roadblock stands in the way of that potential destiny: fatherhood. Johnson\u2019s wife, Chandra, is due to give birth to their first child in July. That was why Johnson spent much of the off-season not in New York but burrowed for weeks in his Charlotte, N.C., home, busily cleaning out his closet, baby-proofing the cabinets and racing to the supermarket, sometimes twice a day, to buy food for his wife. \u201cI think it was a function of nesting,\u201d Johnson said. Impending fatherhood could bring joy to the rest of the Cup garage, which is desperate for any distraction that could loosen Johnson\u2019s grip on the championship. \u201cI think the guys look at Jimmie and them and say now, \u2018Hey, there\u2019s no way,\u2019 \u201d said Dale Jarrett, the 1999 season champion who is currently a broadcaster. \u201cHe\u2019s got a lot of things happening. He\u2019s won four straight. You start to get burned out a little bit when somebody works as hard as Chad does all the time. Jimmie\u2019s got a change in his life coming with their first child. \u201cSo I think everybody looks at that and says, \u2018This is the time to pounce on these guys.\u2019 You look at people like Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, even Jeff Gordon, they realize this is probably their chance to jump in there and grab this away.\u201d Johnson insists that will not be the case and sent that message Thursday when he won one of the two qualifying races in advance of the 500. Johnson said he will miss a race if necessary to be at home for the birth, but plans to have fatherhood managed by the start of the 10-race playoffs, the Chase for the Sprint Cup, in September. \u201cI know it\u2019s going to impact my life and change my life and my life will be completely different,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m anticipating it will make me more focused on things that are important to me. \u201cThe one thing I\u2019m happy about, we should have a little bit of time to get our feet up underneath us before the Chase starts.\u201d The meticulous Knaus already has three or four sets of contingencies for Johnson. But if Knaus is obsessing, he is also celebrating. \u201cI\u2019m really excited about it,\u201d he said in January. He added that the challenges of fatherhood lay ahead for Johnson. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be whatever stress,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be when the kid gets his first runny nose, when it falls off the couch and busts its head open, all that stuff\u2019s going to happen. That\u2019s part of being a parent. \u201cFrom our standpoint, all we can do is be as prepared, as receptive as we possibly can. Cover all of our bases, give him the best racecar that we can and support him.\u201d If parenthood does not derail Johnson, Knaus\u2019s contract could. His deal is up at the end of the year. Knaus insisted that would not be an issue this season, although it could hang over the team until a contract is completed. Ultimately, their run at titles could last as long as Johnson and Knaus remain together. But a breakup is coming. Knaus said in January he has perhaps four to six years left as a crew chief before moving on in his career. With Johnson\u2019s success so inextricably connected to Knaus\u2019s cutting-edge, sometimes over-the-edge approach to racing, the dynasty is not likely to survive a parting. But no matter how high Johnson\u2019s perch is atop Nascar, he refuses to look that far into the distance. \u201cI guess I should start thinking about that at some point,\u201d he said. \u201cI think crew chiefs live in dog years, and it\u2019s much easier for Chad to say, \u2018My tank\u2019s running low.\u2019 For me, I haven\u2019t hit that fatigue stage or that burnout stage. I always hammer him with the fact I don\u2019t want to drive anyone else\u2019s racecars. \u2018There\u2019s no way you\u2019re retiring before I do.\u2019 So I will keep banging that drum and try to keep him around as long as I can if he runs out of steam.\u201d", "keyword": "Johnson Jimmie;Automobile Racing;Parenting;Athletics and Sports;Daytona 500 (Auto Race);National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing"}
{"id": "ny0108158", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2012/05/05", "title": "Junior Seau\u2019s Family to Donate Brain for Study of Head Trauma", "abstract": "The family of the former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau will allow his brain to be examined by researchers who study head trauma, according to a chaplain for the San Diego Chargers . Seau, 43, was found dead in his Oceanside, Calif., home Wednesday morning of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. He did not leave a note. Shawn Mitchell, the Chargers\u2019 chaplain and a pastor with New Venture Christian Fellowship, said that he had been in touch with the Seau family and that they decided to allow researchers to examine Seau\u2019s brain for signs of trauma. \u201cJunior was philanthropic,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cAnd he got that from his mom and dad. Their hope is that it can serve athletes down the road.\u201d He added: \u201cThere\u2019s been an incredible amount of emotion. And it\u2019s been a very difficult time for the parents. You don\u2019t expect to outlive your kids and you don\u2019t expect them to take their own lives.\u201d In February 2011, the former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, saying in a note that he wanted his brain donated to the study of football head injuries . Doctors determined that Duerson had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative, progressive brain disease. Duerson\u2019s son, Tregg, is suing the N.F.L., claiming the league did not meaningfully warn players about the potential risks of concussions. Seau was the second former N.F.L. player to commit suicide in the past two weeks. Ray Easterling, a safety for the Atlanta Falcons in the 1970s and a plaintiff in a high-profile lawsuit against the league over its handling of concussion-related injuries, died April 19 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Eighteen of 19 former N.F.L. players whose brains were studied at Boston University\u2019s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy were found to have had C.T.E. It was not clear where Seau\u2019s brain would be studied. \u201cIt is our policy to not discuss any completed, ongoing or potential research cases unless at the specific request of family members,\u201d the center said in a statement. \u201cOur primary goal is to learn more about the long-term effects of repetitive brain trauma by conducting meaningful scientific research. At this time our thoughts and prayers are with Mr. Seau\u2019s family, his many friends and former teammates.\u201d Over his 20-year N.F.L. career, Seau played for three teams, most prominently the Chargers, and made 12 Pro Bowls. He played in two Super Bowls and was named to the 1990s All-Decade Team by the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Larry Coben, a lawyer who is leading a group of nearly 2,000 former N.F.L. players and their wives who say that the league and the helmet maker Riddell deliberately concealed information about the neurological effects of repeated hits to the head, said the suicide of a player as prominent as Seau could spur more former players to join the lawsuit. \u201cTypically it happens because they\u2019re worried about their families,\u201d Coben said of players joining the case. \u201cThese guys are educated, they have business interests. They see the writing on the wall and they\u2019re realizing that organizing to address the issue is the best way to get it done.\u201d", "keyword": "Seau Junior;Football;Brain;San Diego Chargers;Concussions;Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy"}
{"id": "ny0081570", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2015/11/02", "title": "These Competitors Measure Their Times in Years", "abstract": "The trash talking began days before Sunday\u2019s New York City Marathon . Not among the elite runners, though, at least for this story. Among runners in their 60s. David Laurance, a 63-year-old podiatrist from Manhattan, had heard last week from a fellow marathoner that another runner thought Laurance had not run fast enough in recent New York marathons. Basically called him a wimp. \u201cI was told that this one particular person thought I was babying myself too much and that I needed to go harder,\u201d said Laurance, who said he didn\u2019t know the smack-talker\u2019s name but had a feeling it was someone in his age group. \u201cThat particular person said I wasn\u2019t pushing like I used to, and that didn\u2019t make him happy, because to him it wasn\u2019t fair.\u201d Why unfair? Because both men have run more than 30 consecutive New York City Marathons \u2014 and both were near the top of the list of runners who had extended streaks. According to unofficial statistics kept by New York Road Runners, which organizes the race, Laurance was tied for second on the list of most consecutive New York City Marathons. Going into Sunday, he had run 37 straight. Road Runners calls those who have completed at least 15 consecutive New York marathons streakers. All run clothed. \u201cSome people are extremely covetous of their streaks and are jealous of me; I know it,\u201d Laurance said. \u201cBut for the most part, the streakers are a pretty friendly group. When we get together every year, it\u2019s like a group of Marines seeing each other after a long time.\u201d An Early Start Before a Flourish to the Finish 17 Photos View Slide Show \u203a Image Benjamin Norman for The New York Times But there\u2019s a reason Marines are Marines. And it\u2019s not because they like being defeated. They pride themselves on accomplishing goals with drive and intensity. There are about 1,000 people who have run the New York City Marathon again and again and again. And among the roughly 50,000 who crossed the finish line on Sunday, these streakers take marathons to another level. Because they just can\u2019t stop running the New York City Marathon. In the late 1990s, Connie Lyke Brown fell near Mile 2 of the 26.2-mile race, smacking the pavement after doing what she called \u201ca Pete Rose dive\u201d and bloodying her knees and hands. Brown, who will turn 72 this week and is the top female streaker, with 37 in a row, wanted to stop running but simply couldn\u2019t. \u201cI\u2019ve done so many now, I just can\u2019t quit,\u201d she said. Richard Shaver, who is tied for second on the men\u2019s list, with 38 straight finishes after Sunday\u2019s, had had knee surgery since last year\u2019s marathon but didn\u2019t consider skipping this one, even though he hadn\u2019t trained as much as he had planned. He is achingly close to the top of the streakers\u2019 leaderboard, you know. \u201cAm I the one with the longest streak?\u201d Shaver, 63, said. \u201cFrankly I don\u2019t know. But I\u2019m going to be the last one standing.\u201d He then took a shot at a 72-year-old runner named Dave Obelkevich, the current No. 1 streaker, who finished his 39th straight New York City Marathon on Sunday. \u201cI\u2019m sorry; he\u2019s a retired music teacher, a grandfather,\u201d Shaver said. \u201cI\u2019m working every day, and I fit my running in.\u201d Shaver, a lighting specialist, laughed as he spoke because Obelkevich seems invincible, having finished 104 marathons and 185 ultramarathons. But I got the feeling Shaver wasn\u2019t kidding. This is a tough guy we\u2019re talking about, one who passed out from heat exhaustion a half-mile from the finish in 1979 and then said to medical workers, \u201cGive me back my shoes!\u201d so he could finish. (For the record, Shaver finished Sunday\u2019s race in 4 hours 56 minutes 35 seconds. Obelkevich finished in 4:57:01.) A streaker is now even running the Road Runners organization. Michael Capiraso became the president and chief executive of Road Runners in the spring and even then didn\u2019t pull his entry in Sunday\u2019s marathon, which was to be his 24th in a row. After all, there was a guy named Mark Myers who lived two buildings away from him and who started running the race in 1991, just as Capiraso did. Each year, the two of them competed to see which one ran faster. \u201cLet\u2019s just call it a friendly competition,\u201d Capiraso said. So even though Capiraso is one of the people in charge of the whole marathon, he still ran on Sunday. Afterward, he told me it was worth the trouble of squeezing the epic run into a more-than-full workday. On the Queensboro Bridge, about 15 miles in, he saw Myers in the distance and caught up with him. They ran side by side for the next four or five miles, joking, \u201cYou can go first; I don\u2019t want to hold you back.\u201d Then, \u201cNo, you go first.\u201d Capiraso eventually pulled ahead, to finish in 3:54:05, nine minutes faster than Myers. The Queensboro Bridge, however, only brings up painful memories for Laurance. \u201cThese days, when I\u2019m running on that bridge, I have to strike it from my mind that I used to be finished by now,\u201d he told me on the eve of Sunday\u2019s race. He tries to put things in perspective. He is still healthy. Still has his streak going. All of that, even though he finished in the dark, in 6:45:06. For him, what counted most was that he just kept going. \u201cMy father used to tell me about my eating habits, \u2018Even a machine stops sometimes, David,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cBut I always proved him wrong.\u201d", "keyword": "NYC Marathon;New York Road Runners Club;Marathon;Michael Capiraso"}
{"id": "ny0000806", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2013/03/29", "title": "From College to N.B.A., Coaching Approaches Differ", "abstract": "March Madness is typically dominated by head coaches. While 15th-seeded Florida Gulf Coast has grabbed the spotlight, we often emphasize the brains \u2014 not the muscle \u2014 behind successful programs. The puzzling question is, Why have so few outstanding college coaches done well in the N.B.A. \u2014 the highest level of competition? Duke\u2019s Mike Krzyzewski and Syracuse\u2019s Jim Boeheim are institutions. They have listened to pro offers, but neither has ever taken the leap. Carmelo Anthony, who won a national championship with Boeheim, said Boeheim would \u201cabsolutely not\u201d become an N.B.A. coach. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t ever consider it,\u201d Anthony added. \u201cCollege coaches build these little communities which they don\u2019t want to leave.\u201d Other accomplished college coaches like Rick Pitino, John Calipari and Leonard Hamilton have coached in the N.B.A. with mediocre to disastrous results. There have been exceptions. Jack Ramsay had a successful coaching career at St. Joesph\u2019s and later led the Portland Trail Blazers to an N.B.A. championship. Dick Motta enjoyed success at Weber State and won an N.B.A. championship with the Washington Bullets. Larry Brown led Kansas to an N.C.A.A. championship and then led the Detroit Pistons to an N.B.A. title. But highly successful college coaches are often too consumed with control to consider sharing power with players. Others are bullies. \u201cIt\u2019s a different game,\u201d Lionel Hollins, the Memphis Grizzlies\u2019 coach, said. \u201cYou\u2019re in control in college. In colleges, coaches are the face of the university. In the N.B.A., it\u2019s players.\u201d Talented young athletes are aware of the millions of dollars to be made in the N.B.A. Previous generations used to be content simply to be on a college athletic scholarship and play on television. Gary Williams, who has been a head coach at multiple colleges, most notably at the University of Maryland, said: \u201cI\u2019d be the first one to say players should get a stipend. At a big-time program, you\u2019re generating not just the dollars you bring in but the interest of your alumni that will give money to the school, not just to the athletic department. And the applications increase, which is really important to school. \u201cIt used to be if you went into a parent\u2019s home, you\u2019d better have for a pretty good fact that the kid could play basketball and graduate from your school,\u201d he added. \u201cNow the question becomes: \u2018If my kid goes to your school, will he be able to play in the N.B.A.?\u2019 Or, \u2018Would you mind if he left early?\u2019 The questions are different now, but at the same time, my job as a college coach isn\u2019t different \u2014 to prepare the players who won\u2019t reach the N.B.A. for the rest of their lives.\u201d Williams had a volatile coaching style, which would not fly at the N.B.A. level. \u201cI don\u2019t think the pros ever looked at me, because I\u2019d get on players,\u201d he said. \u201cPart of what you get with 18- and 20-year-olds is a chance to instill discipline when, in a lot of cases, they have not had any discipline at all in their lives.\u201d But the mentoring never stops; it merely changes form. The N.B.A. coach must be more diplomatic, more respectful and more mindful of a relationship that is a two-way partnership. J. R. Smith came to the Knicks with a reputation as a talented but undisciplined player. Coach Mike Woodson has tried, with some success, to channel Smith\u2019s talents. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to put him in the right positions, and you\u2019ve got to be demanding of him and not let him off the hook,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cI\u2019m trying not to do that. Sometimes I can get away with things that I saw with him. Sometimes I can\u2019t; he fights it. That\u2019s just a part of coaching \u2014 player relationships. It\u2019s give and take sometimes.\u201d \u201cI had an opportunity to coach a lot of 18-, 19- and 20-year-old players when I first became a head coach,\u201d Woodson said. \u201cYoung players are different than veteran players. You\u2019ve got to be able to coach them, and then you\u2019ve got to pat them too.\u201d Indiana Coach Tom Crean said he learned from his N.F.L. coaching brothers-in-law, John and Jim Harbaugh, to treat players as equals and not solely as business partners. \u201cI think what those two have done and what I\u2019ve continued to take from them is they don\u2019t come in with a business mind-set,\u201d Crean said. \u201cThey don\u2019t treat their players like it\u2019s business. There is a business aspect to it, but they really do try to build one-on-one relationships.\u201d Many of Crean\u2019s colleagues have a \u201cmy way or the highway\u201d approach to coaching. But Crean does not have a problem with relinquishing control when it comes to solving basketball problems. Before his team fell to Syracuse on Thursday, Crean agreed with his players that they needed to change the way they defended a particular play. The players were right, and their solution made sense. \u201cIf they\u2019re locked in and absorbing it, I\u2019m all for it,\u201d Crean said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if college coaches look at it this way, but I don\u2019t care. That\u2019s how I look at it. If you have a player-run program, you can run into an issue, but when it comes to how we\u2019re going to play that pick-and-roll, I\u2019m all for it.\u201d Some successful college coaches shy away from the pros because they relish the role of teacher. As the N.B.A. continues to get younger, there will be a need for talented young college coaches who speak the players\u2019 language. The two must meet on a common ground of mutual respect. \u201cYou treat them like men, but you never forget you\u2019re playing a kids\u2019 game,\u201d Crean said. \u201cTo me, if you turn the game into too much of a business, then I think you\u2019re running into problems. Let\u2019s never get away from the fact that this is a game that they are supposed to enjoy.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness;Jim Boeheim;Mike Krzyzewski;Larry Brown;Dick Motta;Gary Williams;Tom Crean;Rick Pitino"}
{"id": "ny0159613", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/12/13", "title": "4 Killed in Shooting by U.S. at a Bus Carrying Afghans", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) \u2014 United States soldiers opened fire on a bus carrying civilians Friday in central Afghanistan, killing four passengers after the driver refused to stop, military officials said. The bus was heading toward 20 soldiers on foot patrol on a highway in central Wardak Province, a spokesman for NATO\u2019s International Security Assistance Force said. The soldiers first fired warning rounds in the air to stop the vehicle, then shot into the engine block, the spokesman said. The bus kept coming, so they opened fire on the vehicle in self-defense, he said. The provincial governor and local residents confirmed that the soldiers were American forces. At least 10 passengers were wounded, said Halim Fidai, the governor of Wardak Province. The military said the wounded had been evacuated to military hospitals. The shooting occurred about 40 miles south of Kabul, the capital, on the main road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. The episode was one of a series that threatened to undermine Afghan support for foreign troops, just as the United States is preparing to significantly increase its military presence in the country. The United Nations said in September that 577 Afghan civilians had been killed this year by American, NATO and Afghan troops, a 21-percent increase from 2007. Taliban fighters and other insurgents killed an additional 800 civilians this year. The blue bus was moved to the side of the road by Friday afternoon, and American troops cordoned off the area, according to a camera operator on the scene. The windows of the bus were shattered, and one side was pocked with holes. People gathered nearby to try to view the wreckage. Rahmat Ullah, who owns a construction company in Kabul but lives in Wardak, said he heard the shots around 10 a.m. from his house. He said he went outside to watch the wounded being moved into helicopters. Spokesmen for American forces declined to comment, referring all inquiries to NATO\u2019s International Security Assistance Force, because the troops were operating under its auspices. Wardak and the neighboring province of Logar are two of the areas scheduled for an infusion of American combat forces in January, when the first of a total of 20,000 additional soldiers requested by American commanders are expected to arrive.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;United States Armament and Defense;Afghanistan War (2001- )"}
{"id": "ny0064048", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2014/06/03", "title": "Romanian Keeps Elevating Her Game and Her Confidence", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 A year ago at the French Open, Simona Halep was ranked 57th and lost in the first round. Since then, she has won seven tournaments, moved to No. 4 in the rankings and strung together her best consecutive results at Grand Slam tournaments, a fourth-round appearance at the United States Open and a quarterfinal at the Australian Open. Now she can add a quarterfinal berth at Roland Garros to her year on the rise after a 6-4, 6-3 victory Monday over Sloane Stephens of the United States. But Halep, a 22-year-old Romanian, is not done yet. She said she had gained confidence and felt prepared to advance further in a Grand Slam tournament, though she preferred to concentrate only on her next match. \u201cI believe in my chance,\u201d said Halep, the highest remaining seed in the women\u2019s draw. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think too far, so I stay focused for my quarterfinals first.\u201d In the quarterfinals, she will face Svetlana Kuznetsova, the 2009 French Open champion, who has a history of winning majors five years apart. She collected her only other Grand Slam singles trophy at the 2004 United States Open. Going into Monday\u2019s match, Stephens had been more successful than Halep in Grand Slams, reaching at least the fourth round in six straight majors. In 2013, she was a semifinalist in Australia and a Wimbledon quarterfinalist. \u201cA good player is a good player,\u201d Stephens said. \u201cObviously someone playing with a lot of confidence, someone playing consistently over a long period of time, no matter what stage it is, no matter if they have never been there, no matter if they\u2019ve never played on that court or whatever it is, they\u2019re always going to play consistently and play their game. Image No. 23 Ga\u00ebl Monfils of France returning a shot to Guillermo Garc\u00eda-L\u00f3pez of Spain in a 6-0, 6-2, 7-5 win that sent Monfils to the quarterfinals against Andy Murray. Credit Vincent Kessler/Reuters \u201cThat\u2019s what she did today. Just unfortunate that I didn\u2019t play that great.\u201d Stephens, the No. 15 seed, was the last American in the singles draws. And with the loss of top-seeded Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan in the men\u2019s doubles quarterfinals, the only American left at the senior level here is Eric Butorac, who advanced to the mixed doubles semifinals with Timea Babos of Hungary. Francis Tiafoe, the top seed in the junior boys tournament, also lost Monday, to Jan Choinski of Germany, 3-6, 6-2, 6-3, in the second round. Stephens said she took no particular pride in being the last American standing in singles, as she has been in four of the past six Grand Slam events. But Ga\u00ebl Monfils seems to take particular pleasure in being the last darling of the French fans. He thrilled the Philippe Chatrier Court crowd with a 6-0, 6-2, 7-5 victory over Guillermo Garc\u00eda-L\u00f3pez, reaching the quarterfinals of his home major for the first time since 2011. \u201cI grew up here, and I just feel great here,\u201d Monfils said. \u201cIt\u2019s different energy.\u201d Regarding the support from fans, he added: \u201cIt will help me if I have big decision in the match or I feel tired or maybe I\u2019m down. For sure they will help me a lot.\u201d Monfils will next try to channel the crowd\u2019s energy against seventh-seeded Andy Murray, a 6-4, 7-5, 7-6 (3) winner over Fernando Verdasco. Monfils and Murray have played only five times on the ATP Tour, with Monfils winning the two matches in Paris. They have not faced each other in four years, but their friendly rivalry goes back to childhood. They first played each other when Murray was 10 and Monfils 11. \u201cHe was the same as he is now,\u201d Murray, 27, said. \u201cHe was just a great athlete, moved unbelievably well, smiling on the court. Enjoyed playing in front of a crowd, even though it was a small crowd. You know, when you\u2019re 10, 11 years old, playing in front of 40, 50 people feels like it\u2019s loads.\u201d Murray added, \u201cHe\u2019s just always been a great entertainer, and he\u2019s great for the sport.\u201d Murray counts himself among those for whom Monfils is a favorite to watch. And Murray understands what it means to play the last French player in the singles draw with a semifinal berth on the line. He said it would be more like a Davis Cup match. \u201cI don\u2019t care whether no one in the crowd wants me to win or everyone wants me to win,\u201d Murray said. \u201cI will fight just as hard to try to get the right outcome.\u201d", "keyword": "Tennis;French Open;Rafael Nadal;David Ferrer;Dusan Lajovic;Andrea Petkovic;Leonardo Mayer;Simona Halep;Sloane Stephens"}
{"id": "ny0206703", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2009/06/02", "title": "Search Is On for Wreckage of Missing Air France Jet", "abstract": "The disappearance of an Air France jet en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday evening left seasoned crash investigators with a mystery to plumb and very little data to work with. The Airbus A330-200 , carrying 228 passengers and crew members, is believed to have vanished in a towering thunderstorm with no word from its pilots that they were in crisis. The plane had beamed out several signals that its electrical systems had malfunctioned and, according to one report, that it had lost cabin pressure. The signals were sent not as distress calls, however, but as automated reports to Air France\u2019s maintenance system, and were not read for hours, until air traffic controllers realized that the plane\u2019s crew had not radioed in on schedule. As a search for wreckage began over a vast swath of ocean between Brazil and the African coast, experts struggled to offer plausible theories as to how a well-maintained modern jetliner, built to withstand electrical and physical buffeting far greater than nature usually offers, could have gone down so silently and mysteriously. There were no suggestions on Monday that a bomb, a hijacking or sabotage was to blame. Whatever of the plane\u2019s final minutes was recorded in its black box may never be known, because it is presumably at the bottom of the Atlantic. As is common with trans-ocean flights, it was too far out over the sea to be tracked on land-based radar from Brazil or Senegal . Whether its location was captured by satellite or other planes\u2019 radar is not known yet. The plane, Flight AF 447, was scheduled to arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives descended on Terminal 2D, where the airline established a crisis center. A black-robed priest was making his way past hordes of police officers and journalists to comfort relatives of those on the flight. \u201cAir France is extremely distraught, and the whole team of Air France is suffering,\u201d Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive of Air France-KLM, told reporters in Paris. \u201cWe would like to say to the relatives of the victims that we are totally with them and will make every effort to help them.\u201d President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said: \u201cIt\u2019s a tragic accident. The chances of finding survivors are tiny.\u201d There were people of 32 nationalities aboard, including 58 Brazilians, 61 French and 2 Americans, Air France said in a statement based on information from Brazilian authorities. The flight took off from Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was three hours later, at 10:33, according to a statement from Brazil\u2019s civil aviation agency. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling at 520 miles per hour. About a half-hour later, it apparently encountered an electrical storm with \u201cvery heavy turbulence,\u201d Air France said. The last communication from it came at 11:14 \u2014 a series of automatic messages indicating it had suffered an electrical-system malfunction. The Associated Press reported that it also suffered a loss of cabin pressure. Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic somewhere between a point 186 miles northeast of their coastal city Natal and the Cape Verde islands off Africa . The area is known as the intertropical convergence zone, where the tropics of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres mix, sometimes creating violent and unpredictable thunderstorms that can rise to 55,000 feet, higher than commercial jetliners can go. Experts were at a loss to explain fatal damage from lightning or a tropical storm, both of which jetliners face routinely, despite efforts to avoid them \u2014 as much out of concern for passengers\u2019 nerves as for the planes\u2019 safety. Pilots are trained to go over or around thunderstorms rather than through them. Brigitte Barrand, an Air France spokeswoman, said the highly experienced pilot had clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets. \u201cA completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,\u201d Mr. Gourgeon told France\u2019s LCI television. \u201cLightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane,\u201d Julien Gourguechon, a longtime Air France pilot, said. \u201cTurbulence alone is not enough.\u201d \u201cIt is always a combination of factors,\u201d Mr. Gourgeon said. By some estimates, jetliners are typically hit by lightning at least once a year. But the strike normally travels across the plane\u2019s aluminum skin and out the tail or a wingtip. Passengers are insulated in the nonconductive, largely plastic interior, and vital equipment is shielded. A loss of cabin pressure could suggest a break in the fuselage, but planes are built to withstand buffeting from a storm\u2019s updrafts and downdrafts. It could also be a consequence of an electrical failure, if the plane\u2019s air compressors stop working. Large hailstones created by some thunderstorms have been known to break windshields or turbine blades, though pilots would be likely to rapidly report something like that. The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last hangar maintenance check was on April 16, Air France said. No Airbus A330-200 passenger flight ever had a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network . Hans Weber, head of the Tecop aviation consulting firm in San Diego , offered a hypothesis about the episode, based on his knowledge of severe losses of altitude by two Qantas jets last year. The new Airbus 330 was a \u201cfly-by-wire\u201d plane, in which signals to move the aileron, rudder and elevators are sent through electric wires to small motors rather than through cables or hydraulic tubing. Fly-by-wire systems can automatically conduct maneuvers to prevent an impending crash, but some Airbus jets will not allow a pilot to override the self-protection mechanism. On both Qantas flights, the planes\u2019 inertia sensors sent faulty information into the flight computers, making them take emergency measures to correct problems that did not exist, sending the planes into sudden dives. If the inertia sensor told a computer that a plane was stalling, forcing it to drop the nose and dive to pick up airspeed, and there was simultaneously a severe downdraft in the storm turbulence, \u201cthat would be hard to recover from,\u201d Mr. Weber said.", "keyword": "Airlines and Airplanes;Accidents and Safety;Air France-KLM;Rio de Janeiro (Brazil);Paris (France)"}
{"id": "ny0250278", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2011/02/16", "title": "European Finance Ministers Delay Decision on Bailout Fund", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 European finance ministers want their permanent rescue fund to be able to lend more money to struggling countries, but held off Tuesday from making any formal decisions. Ministers ended two days of meetings on Tuesday with conflicting signals, as concrete decisions on short-term steps to deal with future debt crises were postponed despite growing market pressure on Portugal. Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, who leads the euro zone finance group, said late Monday that ministers had reached a consensus on expanding the money available for lending to 500 billion euros ($677 billion) \u2014 double the fund\u2019s current capacity \u2014 beginning in 2013. He added that ministers were discussing several ideas for making the fund more flexible. The increase would be an acknowledgment that the fund\u2019s current lending capacity was inadequate, while also limiting ambitions to enlarge it further. Several ministers emphasized that no final decisions had been made, given that a comprehensive package on the bailout fund and closer economic coordination were still being negotiated. \u201cNothing is agreed until everything is agreed,\u201d the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, said. In the meantime, pressure is growing on Portugal, whose 10-year bond yield rose to 7.42 percent Tuesday, a measure of investor nervousness about the country\u2019s ability to finance its debts. The Portuguese finance minister, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, criticized the slow pace of European decision-making. \u201cThe discussions are taking longer than desirable, and delays and hesitations affect the euro zone and the stabilization of the euro,\u201d he said Tuesday after a meeting of ministers from all 27 European Union countries. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Sch\u00e4uble, said there was no need to change the existing temporary fund. Member states could act with \u201clightning speed\u201d to make changes if necessary, he added. Though the rescue fund now totals 440 billion euros, only about 250 billion euros is available for lending because of the fund\u2019s structure and its requirement for capital buffers. The proposal would effectively double that amount, beginning in 2013, but the ministers have also been debating whether to increase the fund\u2019s capacity to the full 440 billion euros before then. The Dutch finance minister, Jan Kees de Jager, suggested Tuesday that this was not an immediate priority. \u201cThe shape and size of the bailout fund is neither the problem nor the solution for the crisis,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s ultimately about strong fiscal discipline and building healthy economic fundamentals.\u201d Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said the lack of a decision at the two-day meeting did not suggest that support for increasing the temporary fund had waned. He argued that ministers could agree on the details of the post-2013 fund \u201cand then apply sufficient and suitable elements\u201d to change the current fund. On Monday, Mr. Juncker acknowledged the concern over about the Portugal\u2019s position. \u201cThe situation on the sovereign debt markets remains worrying,\u201d Mr. Juncker said. \u201cWe do think that Portugal is broadly on track, but all this has to be observed from our point of view in the coming months and weeks.\u201d The finance ministers also discussed possible concessions to extend the period over which Greece must repay its loans. On Monday, Mr. Rehn said there might be room after this year to adjust the interest rates Ireland paid on the portion of its 85-billion-euro bailout that comes from loans from the European Union. In Ireland, the interest rate charged to the government has been a significant issue in elections scheduled for Feb. 25, with the opposition leader, Enda Kenny, promising to renegotiate the deal. Ireland, which is borrowing from two European Union funds and the International Monetary Fund, pays on average an interest rate of less than 6 percent, a premium of about three percentage points over market rates. Germany has urged terms tough enough to deter countries from straying, and some countries argue that the high profile adopted by Irish politicians makes it difficult to agree to concessions without being seen as rewarding critics of the deal.", "keyword": "European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- );European Union;European Financial Stability Facility"}
{"id": "ny0109960", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/05/01", "title": "Binghamton Fires Men\u2019s Basketball Coach Mark Macon", "abstract": "Binghamton University cut the final coaching tie to the scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era on Monday night, firing Mark Macon as basketball coach. The news came in the aftermath of a 2-29 season, although the late timing of the firing indicates that recent player transfers cost Macon his job as much as his 24-68 record. Macon, a former assistant under Broadus, had two seasons remaining on his contract, and the university will pay him $300,000 to leave. That payment adds to the significant financial toll of the basketball scandal at Binghamton, which paid Broadus $1.2 million to leave and also paid just under $1 million to finance an independent investigation of the university and basketball program. The money for Macon will come exclusively from the athletic department. Macon was surprisingly given a contract extension in February 2011 by the university\u2019s interim athletic director and interim president. The team was 6-18 at the time. It proved just another costly decision in the wake of a scandal that left the university with a new president, provost and athletic director. Broadus led Binghamton to the N.C.A.A. tournament in 2009, but after his star point guard was arrested for selling crack a few months later, the program spiraled to oblivion in amid a flurry of legal, academic and N.C.A.A. issues. The transfer of at least two solid young players, including the star freshman Ben Dickinson, the team\u2019s leading scorer and rebounder, appeared to be the final straw for Macon. Binghamton was considered the worst team in college basketball last season and the departure of Dickinson, who is expected to go to Loyola Marymount, means they could actually be worse next season. \u201cThe decision was about the future,\u201d Binghamton Athletic Director Patrick Elliott said in a telephone interview. \u201cI wanted to position ourselves as good as we can going forward.\u201d Elliott said he would not use a search firm and would prefer a coach who had recruited at the Division I level. The firing came the same day as a report in The Washington Post that Broadus would be elevated to a full-time assistant at Georgetown. (A Georgetown spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report.) Broadus served as a special assistant there last year, and in a prior assistant stint there and at George Washington earned a reputation for his ability to recruit academically at-risk players from so-called diploma mills. Broadus was recruiting for Georgetown in Hampton, Va., on Sunday at a Nike basketball event.", "keyword": "State University of New York at Binghamton;Macon Mark;Broadus Kevin;Coaches and Managers;Basketball (College);Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations"}
{"id": "ny0160175", "categories": ["politics"], "date": "2006/03/28", "title": "For Bush and Press, Informal Talks", "abstract": "President Bush has been holding informal off-the-record sessions with major news organizations over the last several days. Starting Thursday, he began meeting with groups of about a half-dozen reporters from newspapers, television, news agencies and magazines. They have discussed a variety of issues including the war in Iraq, said a reporter who attended a session. The meetings, which the journalists have agreed not to describe publicly, have been in the White House residence. They come as several news organizations have assigned new reporters, who had no relationship with Mr. Bush, to cover the White House. David Bohrman, the Washington bureau chief for CNN, one of whose reporters attended a session, said they were a good idea. \"Most of the time, the environments that our reporters deal with the president in are very structured, very managed, and they rarely get to just kick back and have a conversation,\" he said. \"I think there's a lot of value in it for both sides.\" He also said he did not see the sessions as compromising. \"If something pops up in there that someone wants to follow, they are free to follow up on it,\" he said. The New York Times, which was invited to attend a session today, has declined to participate. Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief for The Times, said in a statement last night: \"The Times has declined this opportunity after weighing the potential benefits to our readers against the prospect of withholding information from them about the discussion with Mr. Bush. As a matter of policy and practice, we would prefer when possible to conduct on-the-record interviews with public officials.\" Times editors and reporters have participated in such unreported sessions with several presidents, including Mr. Bush, over the years. These have involved both social situations and substantive discussions. This appears to be the first time that the Bush administration has systematically brought in members of the White House press corps, although Mr. Bush holds an annual off-the-record barbecue with reporters during his summer vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. One reporter who attended a recent session said Mr. Bush had appeared relaxed and seemed to enjoy showing the group around the residence. They met in the yellow oval room and were taken out on the Truman balcony. A few of Mr. Bush's aides were present as the reporters were served iced tea, water and soda and chatted for about an hour. Mr. Bush does better in such informal sessions than in formal presentations, said Mr. Bohrman, who added that he would like to see more.", "keyword": "NEW YORK TIMES;BUSH GEORGE W;UNITED STATES POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT;NEWS AND NEWS MEDIA"}
{"id": "ny0113764", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2012/11/11", "title": "Knicks and Lakers: Contrast for the Ages", "abstract": "The Knicks have gone so retro this season that they acquired, among various performers long in the proverbial tooth, the Argentine Dick McGuire. That is whom Pablo Prigioni \u2014 at 35 the N.B.A.\u2019s oldest rookie \u2014 stylistically brings to mind for students and scholars of ancient Knicks history. McGuire, the passing wizard of the 1950s, was known for being so reluctant to shoot that he stopped short of filling out a consent slip when he resigned himself to hoisting one up. Even into his 50s, scrimmaging on occasion with all-thumbs sports reporters, McGuire was capable of breaking the prominent nose (mine) of an unprepared teammate rather than taking aim at the rim. \u201cTrust me, Pablo has no idea who that is,\u201d said Kurt Thomas, 40, a seven-year Knick back when McGuire, who died in 2010 after decades of Madison Square Garden employment as a player, coach and scout, was still a most welcome sight upon getting within bounce-pass distance of the team. In the dressing stall next door, Marcus Camby, 38 and another member of the alumni association to return this season, nodded in support of Thomas\u2019s logical assertion. Prigioni, for his part, never made an appearance in the Knicks\u2019 festive locker room after their 104-94 victory over Dallas on Friday night. Presumably he was shamed by his abject selfishness in taking two shots and missing both while generating one assist in his 10-plus minutes of playing time. Otherwise the Knicks\u2019 happy caravan of all-in campers rolled on to a fourth consecutive victory, all by double digits. Optimism has spread so quickly that delirious fans may have set a record for the earliest unveiling of the hackneyed M.V.P. chant for Carmelo Anthony as he shot free throws on the way to pouring in 31 more points Friday. Not even Nate Silver could have forecast such disparate developments on opposite coasts over the season\u2019s first week and a half. In hurricane-ravaged New York, the Anthony-led Knicks have looked indomitable as the league\u2019s last remaining unbeaten team. In sunny Los Angeles, the Lakers were heralded as the newest \u2014 albeit oldest \u2014 N.B.A. superteam, but slogged so much out of the gate that they fired Mike Brown as coach on Friday after four defeats in five games. Like his newest Twitter enemy, Donald Trump, the Mavericks\u2019 owner, Mark Cuban, is not one to gloat \u2014 at least not in his sleep \u2014 but he couldn\u2019t resist poking his Western Conference rival and its high-priced lineup of four likely Hall of Famers. Asked what his thoughts were when the Lakers acquired Dwight Howard to continue their history of luring dominating centers to Hollywood, Cuban said, in so many words, he wasn\u2019t blown away. \u201cI think I said we\u2019ve seen this play before,\u201d he said. \u201cLook, it had nothing to do with the Lakers, just my attitude in general about team building. You\u2019ve got to understand the team culture and you\u2019ve got to have a variety of pieces.\u201d In his trademark snarky way, Cuban also seemed amused by the Lakers\u2019 apparent panic when the dismissal of Brown was inevitably raised. \u201cDon\u2019t you hate when that happens?\u201d he said. \u201cLike I said, nothing surprises me, every team\u2019s different, has their own approach. I just hope it was a huge mistake, and they continue to make them.\u201d For the record, he wasn\u2019t counting on that, or anything. \u201cOnly thing uncertain is uncertainty,\u201d he said before recalling how his Mavericks, in 2006-7, lost their first four games, won 67 of their next 78 and were promptly eviscerated in the first round of the playoffs by Golden State. He added, \u201cI don\u2019t take anything after five games.\u201d Those no doubt were among Brown\u2019s less-profane thoughts after he was made scapegoat with the Lakers about to begin a six-game homestand, all but one against beatable teams. With Bernie Bickerstaff serving as interim coach, the Lakers hammered Golden State, 101-77, on Friday night while Los Angeles contemplated Phil Jackson\u2019s coaching the Lakers for a third time and fulfilling his destiny as Billy Martin West. It is clear that the Lakers are not going to stink, but it\u2019s also quite possible they will not be the second coming of Miami, whose three stars were all under 30 when they assembled two years ago. Before anyone cites Boston\u2019s Big Three, remember that Ray Allen was 32, Kevin Garnett 31 and Paul Pierce 30 when they united to win the title in 2008. In Los Angeles, Steve Nash is 38 and hasn\u2019t been able to guard anyone since the first Bush administration, if ever. Kobe Bryant is 34 but has seemingly been at this since the days of Earl Monroe (if not McGuire, who, like Monroe, has a No. 15 Knicks jersey hanging from the Garden rafters). Gasol, the Spaniard, is only 32 but was playing professionally before he was old enough to drive. Lots of miles on those three key bodies. That is what feels different about these Knicks, about whom we have all made a few geriatric jokes. Their principal players \u2014 Anthony, Tyson Chandler, Raymond Felton, J. R. Smith \u2014 are in their career primes. \u201cI think that\u2019s been overstated in a sense,\u201d said Kidd, 39, of the Knicks\u2019 collective age. \u201cOur core is young. The guys who are the smaller pieces of the puzzle are over 30 but still have a lot in the gas tank.\u201d How much remains to be seen, but Kidd, the American Prigioni, has certainly brought the highest basketball I.Q. to the Knicks in years along with a canny calm to the half-court sets. Experience and wisdom suddenly seem plentiful. Kidd and Chandler were part of Dallas\u2019s 2011 championship run. Camby and Thomas were Knicks when they last made the Finals in 1999. Rasheed Wallace has a ring. \u201cIt\u2019s a great mix of young and old,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cGuys who have been deep in the playoffs can help the guys who haven\u2019t.\u201d It all sounded good and it has looked equally good, but as far as the playoffs go, let\u2019s just say that a team of this vintage should take it one day and game at a time. When dealing with basketball\u2019s elderly, coast to coast, better to pass on the long-term projections.", "keyword": "Basketball;Carmelo Anthony;Kobe Bryant;Mike Brown"}
{"id": "ny0064515", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/06/18", "title": "U.S. Seizure of Suspect in 2012 Benghazi Assault Ends Long Manhunt", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 American commandos operating under the cover of night seized the man suspected of leading the deadly attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, the government announced on Tuesday, ending a manhunt that had dragged on for nearly two years and inflamed domestic and international politics. With drones hovering overhead, about two dozen Delta Force commandos and two or three F.B.I. agents descended on the outskirts of Benghazi just after midnight local time on Monday; grabbed the suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala; stuffed him into a vehicle and raced away, according to officials briefed on the operation. No shots were fired, and the suspect was spirited out of Libya to a United States Navy warship in the Mediterranean. The capture was a breakthrough in finding the perpetrators of an episode that has been politically divisive from the start. President Obama and the State Department have been buffeted by multiple investigations and charges of misleading the public about the circumstances of the attack, which cost the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. The president and administration officials have strongly rebutted the allegations and accused Republicans of politicizing a national tragedy. Through it all, Mr. Abu Khattala has remained free, at times almost taunting the United States to catch him, eliciting more criticism of Mr. Obama for not doing enough to bring him to justice. In recent months, Mr. Abu Khattala had gone underground. But officials said new intelligence obtained last week indicated that he was going to be in a place that was \u201cadvantageous,\u201d as one put it, because there would be few people around and less risk to American commandos. Mr. Obama gave the order on Friday to capture him. \u201cIt\u2019s important for us to send a message to the world that when Americans are attacked, no matter how long it takes, we will find those responsible, and we will bring them to justice,\u201d Mr. Obama said during an unrelated trip to Pittsburgh on Tuesday. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a message I sent the day after it happened, and regardless of how long it takes, we will find you.\u201d Video President Obama said that Ahmed Abu Khattala, suspected of being the ringleader in the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was being transported to the United States. Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times The capture provided a rare piece of good news for Mr. Obama at a time when challenges have mushroomed in places like Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. Yet even a casualty-free raid generated further debate, in this case about what should happen to Mr. Abu Khattala. Officials said he would be brought to the United States in the coming days to face charges in a civilian court. A sealed indictment sworn out secretly last July and made public on Tuesday outlined three counts against him in connection with the deaths of Mr. Stevens, Glen A. Doherty, Sean Smith and Tyrone S. Woods. But some Republicans argued that Mr. Abu Khattala was a terrorist who should be sent to the American military prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, and held as an enemy combatant. Either way, the operation brought relief to relatives who had been eager for some sort of action to find the organizers of the attack. \u201cIt\u2019s about time,\u201d said Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, on Tuesday. \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to be patient, and we\u2019re very happy that this does seem part of the course of justice,\u201d said Greg Doherty, Glen Doherty\u2019s brother. \u201cThey assured us that this is not the end of their efforts, and they have a lot of good people working hard, and they haven\u2019t forgotten us.\u201d Even as they hailed the capture, Obama administration officials were vague in explaining why it took so long to go after Mr. Abu Khattala, who was linked to the attack shortly after it happened and even gave an interview to a New York Times reporter over a strawberry frapp\u00e9 on a hotel patio without apparent fear of being found. Some American officials, who, like others, declined to be identified discussing sensitive operations, said there had been a proposal to capture Mr. Abu Khattala for at least a year. But it was not clear that Mr. Obama had considered such a plan. \u201cIt is not true that the president has had the operation sitting on his desk for a year,\u201d said another official familiar with the White House\u2019s point of view. Image Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was one of four Americans killed in the attack, which has been highly politically divisive. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times Officials said they had been waiting for the right combination of factors that would enable them to know where Mr. Abu Khattala would be at a specific time, in a situation that would minimize the chances of casualties. While Mr. Abu Khattala had kept a fairly high profile in Libya at first, he changed his pattern after American commandos seized the terror suspect Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai in October in a daylight raid in Tripoli, according to a law enforcement official. He became more difficult to track as he moved around quietly to evade detection, the official said. Then, last week, the official said, the United States obtained information about his whereabouts that enabled an operation. \u201cWe had finally worked out a scenario where we felt it was right operationally to be able to pull it off,\u201d another official said. \u201cThe circumstances were right; the environment was right.\u201d Government agencies on Tuesday brushed off critics who asked why the authorities had needed so long to grab a man who met openly with a reporter. \u201cFrankly, it\u2019s not a surprise that an individual like this would show up for an interview,\u201d said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman. \u201cWe don\u2019t think they would show up for a scheduled meeting with the Special Forces.\u201d Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, scoffed at the idea that Mr. Abu Khattala should have been captured earlier. \u201cThe presumption in the question is that, you know, he was going to McDonald\u2019s for milkshakes every Friday night, and we could have just picked him up in a taxicab,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, these people deliberately tried to evade capture.\u201d By the time the president made the decision on Friday, officials said, his national security team was unanimous in supporting both the operation and the decision to bring Mr. Abu Khattala back to the United States for a civilian trial. Image Ahmed Abu Khattala Both the Pentagon and the State Department referred to the operation as a \u201cunilateral U.S. action.\u201d An administration official said the United States had not told the Libyan government until after the operation, a choice that guarded against possible leaks and enabled Libyan officials to deny any involvement in case the capture led to popular protests. The raid proceeded without complication, officials said. \u201cIt was very clean, in and out, with no one hurt,\u201d said one official briefed on the details. \u201cIt was textbook,\u201d said another. The Washington Post first reported Mr. Abu Khattala\u2019s arrest. The Post said it had learned of the operation on Monday but agreed to delay its story after a request from the White House citing security concerns. While the Delta Force soldiers provided the muscle, the raid was carried out under law enforcement authority, not as a military operation under the longstanding congressional authorization of force against Al Qaeda and its associated forces, according to administration officials. The extent of ties between Mr. Abu Khattala\u2019s militia in Libya, Ansar al-Shariah, and Al Qaeda has been a matter of dispute. While the two groups share similar ideologies, the United States government does not believe them to be formally affiliated. The F.B.I. agents who participated in the operation were told to preserve any evidence and to ensure that the suspect was interrogated under criminal justice procedures. \u201cThis entire operation, from start to finish, was law enforcement,\u201d one official said. That does not mean that Mr. Abu Khattala was read a Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have legal counsel. The Obama administration has adopted a policy of delaying that warning for extensive questioning of suspected operational terrorists. Mr. Abu Khattala faces charges of killing a person in the course of an armed attack on a federal facility, providing material support to terrorists and using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. \u201cWe retain the option of adding additional charges in the coming days,\u201d Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. Among those relieved by the capture was former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been broadly criticized for her handling of the Benghazi attack. \u201cIt took, as you know, 10 years to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,\u201d she said on CNN during an event to promote her new book. \u201cIt\u2019s taken more than two years to bring this perpetrator to justice.\u201d But, she added, \u201cKhattala has been very much on the minds of our law enforcement, our military and our intelligence professionals since that night in September of 2012.\u201d Still, others cautioned about celebrating too soon, noting that Mr. Abu Khattala was just one person suspected in the mass attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say we\u2019ve broken the back by any stretch of the imagination,\u201d Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC. \u201cThis was an important activity to happen, to take someone like Khattala off the battlefield,\u201d Mr. Rogers said. \u201cIt sends a very clear message in Libya that we haven\u2019t gone away.\u201d But, he added, \u201cthere\u2019s over a dozen individuals of interest, I think, that the United States needs to gather up.\u201d", "keyword": "Benghazi Attack 2012;Benghazi;Ahmed Abu Khattala;US Military;Barack Obama;Libya;Diplomats Embassies and Consulates"}
{"id": "ny0078631", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/02/04", "title": "In Closing Arguments, Conflicting Accounts of Man\u2019s Role in Silk Road", "abstract": "A prosecutor asked a Manhattan jury on Tuesday to convict a California man, Ross W. Ulbricht, of narcotics trafficking conspiracy and other charges in a trial involving Silk Road, the black-market website for drugs and other illicit goods. The website became Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s passion and secret livelihood, the prosecutor, Serrin Turner, told the jury. Mr. Ulbricht, 30, had been accused of operating the website under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts for more than two years on a hidden part of the Internet, where deals could be made anonymously, away from the scrutiny of law enforcement. The federal government has said there were more than 1.5 million transactions on the site, generating more than $200 million in revenue. Deals were made in Bitcoins. \u201cHe built it. He grew it. He operated it from top to bottom until the very end,\u201d Mr. Turner said. The prosecutor\u2019s comments came as the government and the defense clashed in closing arguments during the fourth week of Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s trial in Federal District Court. The jury is expected to begin deliberations on Wednesday after instructions from Judge Katherine B. Forrest. Mr. Turner said Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s \u201ccriminal turf\u201d had been a \u201cdark corner of the Internet,\u201d and the website \u201cmade it easier for drug dealers to get users hooked, users from all over the world.\u201d \u201cHis conduct was brazenly illegal,\u201d Mr. Turner said. \u201cHe knew perfectly well what he was doing the whole time.\u201d Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel , had earlier told the jury that his client created Silk Road as a kind of \u201ceconomic experiment,\u201d and after a few months handed it off to others \u2014 including the real Dread Pirate Roberts \u2014 before being lured back and made a \u201cfall guy.\u201d Mr. Ulbricht was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in San Francisco in October 2013. On Tuesday, Mr. Dratel pressed the contention that his client had been framed. He suggested the actual Dread Pirate Roberts and confederates had planted or edited the incriminating chats and other evidence that the government had used to tie Mr. Ulbricht to the website\u2019s activities. \u201cThe Internet is not what it seems,\u201d Mr. Dratel said, adding, \u201cYou can create an entire fiction.\u201d He cited the screen names prosecutors have said were used by Mr. Ulbricht\u2019s employees in Silk Road. \u201cWhere is the proof that they are separate people?\u201d Mr. Dratel asked. Mr. Ulbricht did not testify, but the defense called several of his friends, who said that they knew him as a nonviolent person. The government had also accused Mr. Ulbricht of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins to orchestrate the murders of several people he saw as threats to his business. The government has said there is no evidence that anyone was harmed. Mr. Ulbricht, if convicted, could receive a life sentence on the narcotics trafficking conspiracy count. Another charge, that he engaged in a continuing criminal enterprise, carries a maximum of life and a minimum of 20 years. Mr. Turner, in outlining the government\u2019s evidence, cited journal entries that prosecutors have said Mr. Ulbricht kept while running Silk Road. In one, the defendant allegedly wrote: \u201cIn 2011, I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.\u201d The entry, Mr. Turner argued, showed Silk Road was not \u201csome experiment.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s an obsession,\u201d Mr. Turner said. \u201cHe wants power. He wants prosperity. He is relishing the thought, the site becoming a phenomenon with him the secret mastermind behind it.\u201d", "keyword": "Ross William Ulbricht;Black market;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Drug Abuse;Katherine B Forrest;Silk Road"}
{"id": "ny0184335", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/03/04", "title": "Man Accused of Mortgage Fraud Now Indicted on Ponzi Scheme Charges", "abstract": "Sharmon Wade did business out of a Park Avenue office suite, where he ran a company called the Covenant Equity Group. The company solicited investors by promising them astronomical returns in real estate investments \u2014 50 to 100 percent within two months. But Mr. Wade was a con man, Manhattan prosecutors said, and for the second time in two weeks he was charged with real estate fraud. In an indictment announced on Tuesday, District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau accused Mr. Wade of taking investors\u2019 money and spending it at nightclubs, restaurants, hotels and spas, among many other places, rather than on real estate ventures. Even as Mr. Morgenthau was announcing a state indictment, Mr. Wade was in federal court, about two blocks away, for a hearing on charges that he led a conspiracy to obtain more than $10 million in fraudulent home mortgage loans. Mr. Morgenthau also charged Mr. Wade\u2019s business partner, Claudius Hannah, in the real estate investment scheme, which the district attorney said lasted from June 2007 to August 2008. Mr. Wade and Mr. Hannah are accused in the state case of stealing more than $1.3 million from more than a dozen investors. Mr. Wade is still in federal custody and Mr. Hannah, 45, was arrested in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday. Each faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on the state charges, which include grand larceny and fraud. The scheme started after Robert Martin, a municipal clerk in Jersey City, invested money with Covenant, Mr. Morgenthau said. Mr. Wade and Mr. Hannah returned a small amount to Mr. Martin, and he recommended the firm to other investors, Mr. Morgenthau said. On several occasions, the defendants gave a small amount of money, which they described as profits, to investors to entice them to encourage friends and family members to invest, Mr. Morgenthau said \u2014 using the phrase Ponzi scheme . The defendants told investors that they would invest their money in commercial properties obtained at very low prices. They were to be resold or refinanced for large profits, Mr. Morgenthau said, but the defendants never bought real estate. In some instances, Mr. Wade and Mr. Hannah asked investors to invest money directly into their company, and encouraged investors who did not have enough money to do so to borrow, Mr. Morgenthau said. In the federal case, prosecutors accused Mr. Wade and three others of using former prisoners and residents of a housing project to pose as home buyers and obtain subprime mortgages, usually for more than the cost of the property, falsifying information on the straw buyers\u2019 applications. They then kept the difference between the sale price and the amount received from the mortgage, federal authorities said. The loans soon went into foreclosure. The federal charges were brought against Sharmon Howell, but Mr. Morgenthau said that he and Mr. Wade are the same person. \u201cThe important message is there\u2019s no free lunch,\u201d Mr. Morgenthau said at a news conference discussing the state charges in his office. \u201cAnybody who tells you they\u2019re going to double your money in 30 to 60 days, that should be a red flag.\u201d But the defendants were so convincing that Michele Bilotta did not think to question them until it was too late. In an interview, Ms. Bilotta said she learned of the possibility of investing with Covenant through her hairdresser\u2019s brother. After an initial telephone conversation with Mr. Wade, she received several follow-up calls, she said. Eventually, she agreed to meet with him, and he sent a car service to her home in Bayonne, N.J., to bring her to his office in the Helmsley Building in Midtown Manhattan, she said. \u201cIt was beautifully fronted,\u201d said Ms. Bilotta, 39. \u201cThey looked professional.\u201d She agreed to invest with Covenant in November 2007 after it promised to double her money within 30 days. When she did not receive any money after a month, she said, she contacted Mr. Wade, who told her that there was a delay. She continued to contact him but did not receive any of the $110,000 that she said she had given to the defendants. By the end of January 2008, she said she knew something was wrong. She eventually contacted WABC-TV, which ran a report on her situation. Although Ms. Bilotta, who lives with her 17-year-old daughter and is unemployed, said she was pleased to see Mr. Wade and Mr. Hannah arrested, that may not make help her recoup any of her losses: her life savings, her car, a Cadillac Escalade on which she could no longer make payments and her peace of mind. \u201cWe went from having everything in life to living from day to day, thinking our lights are going be turned off,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Ponzi Schemes;Frauds and Swindling;Housing and Real Estate;Wade Sharmon;Morgenthau Robert M"}
{"id": "ny0205600", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/01/30", "title": "Afghan Presidential Election Delayed", "abstract": "KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 Afghan officials said Thursday that they had decided to postpone the country\u2019s presidential election until August, saying they needed more time to prepare. But the decision, which appeared to contravene Afghanistan\u2019s Constitution, raised questions about the legitimacy of what could be President Hamid Karzai \u2019s final months in office. Azizullah Ludin, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, said his office had decided to put off the voting until Aug. 20, which would give election workers more time to register candidates and set up voting machinery, and soldiers more time to bring dozens of chaotic districts under control. Mr. Ludin said the new date would allow the presidential election to take place under more favorable weather. But Afghanistan\u2019s Constitution states that the president\u2019s term expires on the equivalent of May 22 on the Roman calendar. Presidential elections, the Constitution says, must be held 30 to 60 days before the end of the term. Citing the Constitution, leaders of the parliamentary opposition to Mr. Karzai said they would stop recognizing his authority after May 22. They called on the United Nations and Western governments to help them appoint a temporary president after Mr. Karzai\u2019s term formally expires. \u201cAfter May 22, Karzai\u2019s continuation will not be legitimate for either us or the Afghan people,\u201d said Aqa Fazil Sancharki, a spokesman for the United Front, whose members control about a third of the 241 seats in the lower house of Parliament. A spokesman for Mr. Karzai said he would respect the commission\u2019s decision to delay the vote. Mr. Karzai, who was elected to a five-year term in 2004, has led the country since the ouster of the Taliban in November 2001. He has declared his intention to seek re-election, and while a number of prominent Afghans have said they may also run, only three lesser-known candidates have declared so far. The election this year will come at an especially difficult time, with the Taliban insurgency challenging the government\u2019s writ in many areas. A United Nations spokesman said the organization had resigned itself to the delay, given that there did not appear to be enough time to have everything in place by late May. \u201cAt this point, it has become a pragmatic necessity,\u201d said Adrian Edwards, a United Nations spokesman in Kabul. Mr. Ludin, the chairman of the election commission, acknowledged that delaying the election was not ideal. But he said he did not have a choice, given the challenges of the country\u2019s harsh environment and the Taliban insurgency. Of the 364 districts around the country, 84 are not safe enough to hold an election, he said. \u201cWe are not in a normal situation in Afghanistan,\u201d Mr. Ludin said. Anticipating the delay, American and NATO commanders here have set as one of their main goals for 2009 the securing of the country for peaceful elections. About 70,000 foreign troops are now in Afghanistan, nearly half of them American. The Obama administration has promised to send up to 30,000 more troops over the next 18 months.", "keyword": "Afghanistan;Elections;Karzai Hamid"}
{"id": "ny0180463", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/08/24", "title": "Gunman Who Shot Wallace Is to Be Freed", "abstract": "Arthur Bremer, the gunman who tried to kill Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, will be released from prison this year, a Maryland prison official said yesterday. In 1973, Mr. Bremer was sentenced to serve 53 years for shooting Mr. Wallace and wounding three others at a campaign stop in Laurel, Md. The bullet that lodged in Mr. Wallace\u2019s spine paralyzed his legs, and he used a wheelchair until his death in 1998. Mr. Bremer has served 35 years of his original sentence, and managed, through credits for good behavior and steady job performance as a prison clerk, to earn an earlier release date, said Ruth A. Ogle, a program manager at the Maryland Parole Commission. \u201cThe computer says he has never had an infraction,\u201d Ms. Ogle said. \u201cArthur apparently figured out how to stay out of trouble.\u201d Mr. Bremer, 57, is scheduled to be released from the Maryland Correctional Institute in Hagerstown on Dec. 16, but he may be out sooner as he continues to cut time off his sentence. He will continue to be supervised by the Maryland Parole Commission until 2025, the maximum expiration of his sentence, and a special condition of his parole will be that he stay away from political figures and events. \u201cHe can\u2019t be around political candidates or any elected official,\u201d Ms. Ogle said. \u201cHe can\u2019t go to a rally, a public appearance, a political dinner, anything like that.\u201d In 1996, the commission denied Mr. Bremer\u2019s application for parole, saying early release would mean \u201copen hunting season\u201d on politicians. Mr. Bremer has said he had hoped to gain celebrity by assassinating President Richard M. Nixon, but settled for trying to kill Mr. Wallace instead. While Mr. Bremer failed, he became an inspiration for the would-be assassin Travis Bickle in the 1976 film \u201cTaxi Driver.\u201d That film, in turn, is said to have inspired an attempt by John W. Hinckley Jr. on the life of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Mr. Hinckley said he was trying to show his love for Jodie Foster, one of the film\u2019s stars.", "keyword": "Bremer Arthur;Assassinations and Attempted Assassinations;Wallace George C;Alabama;Murders and Attempted Murders;Sentences (Criminal);Prisons and Prisoners"}
{"id": "ny0074699", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/04/01", "title": "FEMA Awards New York City a $3 Billion Grant for Hurricane Sandy Repairs", "abstract": "New York City is set to receive about $3 billion in federal funding to repair and stormproof 33 public housing complexes that were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, a grant that officials said was the largest provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. \u201cWe got the highest award in FEMA history,\u201d said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who announced the funding with Senator Charles E. Schumer on Tuesday at a news conference at the Red Hook East housing development in Brooklyn. \u201cYou can\u2019t ask for anything more than that,\u201d the mayor added. \u201cThat\u2019s as good as it gets.\u201d Half of the $3 billion is expected to fund repairs, including the replacement of heating and electrical equipment and doors, floors, roofs and other architectural elements that were damaged by the storm in 2012. The rest of the money is to be dedicated to resiliency measures, officials said, like the addition of elevated boilers, flood barriers and generators. Work paid for by the grant is set to begin this summer, said Shola Olatoye, chairwoman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the project is expected to take up to three years to complete. The 33 complexes include developments in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Mr. Schumer, viewed as the front-runner to become the new Democratic leader of the United States Senate, described the funding as \u201ca massive shot of adrenaline into New York City\u2019s public housing developments.\u201d But he also cautioned that the Senate\u2019s Republican leadership could be less amenable in the future to big-ticket spending related to climate change. \u201cEven the most fundamental things were called into question by many of our colleagues, such as FEMA being funded at all,\u201d Mr. Schumer said. He added: \u201cIt\u2019ll be a fight, but I think we\u2019ll ultimately prevail.\u201d", "keyword": "Public Housing;Hurricane Sandy;FEMA;NYC"}
{"id": "ny0237478", "categories": ["science", "space"], "date": "2010/06/26", "title": "First Casualties of a Changing Space Program at NASA", "abstract": "In the political battle over the nation\u2019s space program, the first casualties are people like Donny Smith, an engineer who received his layoff notice Monday. \u201cI\u2019ve been preparing, trying to find something else to move to,\u201d said Mr. Smith, who works for Bastion Technologies, one of the companies NASA has hired to help design rockets to return astronauts to the moon as part of its Constellation program. Workers at Bastion and elsewhere are caught in a growing conflict between Congress, which has banned NASA from canceling any part of Constellation, and agency leaders who have directed program managers to scale back their work while preserving the parts that would fit into the new space policy proposed by President Obama. The administration wants to turn to commercial companies for taking future astronauts to orbit while taking a hiatus from any ambitious missions to send astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. Yet Congress has not agreed to the scuttling of Constellation and added a clause in this year\u2019s federal budget that prohibited NASA from canceling the program or starting a new one without Congressional assent. The skirmishing continued in earnest this week. Staff members on the House Committee on Science and Technology are reviewing documents that NASA sent over Friday evening to comply with the committee\u2019s demand for information used in formulating the president\u2019s proposal. In addition, on Tuesday, 62 House members signed a letter sent to President Obama \u201cto express concern\u201d over the direction of NASA. \u201cIt is in the nation\u2019s best interest to leverage the investments made in Constellation over the last five years, into a beyond low-Earth orbit exploration program, today,\u201d said the letter writers, which included representatives of both political parties from states far beyond Texas, Alabama and Florida, which are home to the major NASA centers. The basis for the latest Constellation upheaval is a clause in the contracts of Lockheed Martin, Alliant Techsystems Inc. and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, which states that the companies are responsible for setting aside contract money to pay for termination costs if the Constellation program were canceled. In response to letters from NASA this year, Lockheed Martin and Alliant, more commonly known as ATK, said that for decades the space agency paid for termination costs like severance pay for workers and that the companies had not reserved money to cover that. Lockheed Martin has estimated its cancellation costs at $350 million, ATK at $500 million. Two contracts with Boeing, another of the companies working on Constellation, were modified in late January so that NASA, not Boeing, set aside $81 million to pay for termination costs. Those changes were made less than two weeks before the administration announced its desire to cancel Constellation. In a letter this month to leaders of key Congressional committees, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, cited the Anti-Deficiency Act \u2014 a law that prohibits federal agencies from spending more money than has been allocated by Congress \u2014 in announcing that the agency was scaling back Constellation to cover termination costs. Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion crew capsule that Mr. Obama has proposed turning into a lifeboat for the International Space Station, threatened to shut down the program if it had to set aside the termination costs. NASA has now sped up payment of $80 million to the company and then added $83 million to the contract to help Lockheed Martin manage the termination costs. \u201cWe don\u2019t want these contractors to go out of business if we can,\u201d said Andrew Hunter, a NASA budget official. \u201cThey were going to shut down work on the 27th. We\u2019re keeping them alive.\u201d ATK is still holding to the position that NASA is responsible for termination costs, and it has not aside money or prepared layoffs. As planned, ATK is receiving $160 million for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Despite the infusion of money, Lockheed Martin is still moving 600 jobs off Orion, including 300 among its subcontractors. Boeing has also announced that layoffs are in the works. And with the shifting of money among the prime contractors, NASA is cutting so-called support contracts. The entire layoff brunt so far is landing on people like Mr. Smith and not NASA government employees. In Huntsville, Ala., often called the Rocket City, Mayor Tommy Battle said he had heard that 700 people could be affected in his city. Nationwide, NASA has estimated that 2,500 to 5,000 jobs could be lost. For Bastion Technologies, that means layoff notices went to 86 of the 190 employees working on the company\u2019s NASA contract for analyzing potential safety issues with the Constellation program\u2019s Ares rockets. Bastion\u2019s workers get 60 days\u2019 notice under federal law, but that law does not apply to all of the contractors. That gives Mr. Smith time to look for work somewhere, but he is not optimistic. \u201cGiven the scope of the layoffs and the fact there are more than a thousand people out there now looking,\u201d Mr. Smith said, \u201cI really don\u2019t know.\u201d", "keyword": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration;Space;Rockets and Rocket Propulsion;Layoffs and Job Reductions"}
{"id": "ny0104919", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/03/23", "title": "Fighting Stop-and-Frisk Tactic, but Hitting Racial Divide", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Black and Latino lawmakers, fed up over the frequency with which New York City police officers are stopping and frisking minority men, are battling what they say is a racial divide as they push legislation to rein in the practice. The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police for reasons they believe were related to race. Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when, as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police, patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his destination. Assemblyman Karim Camara , a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said, officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs. And when Senator Adriano Espaillat , a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said, detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his father. The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the practice. \u201cThere is an ethnic divide on who\u2019s being stopped and frisked, and there is an ethnic divide on who\u2019s fighting against the policy,\u201d said State Senator Eric L. Adams , a Democrat and a retired police captain from Brooklyn. The lawmakers\u2019 effort to set off a debate in Albany is taking place with an increased focus on the interplay between race and public safety. It was highlighted in New York by the fatal shooting last month of Ramarley Graham, 18, by a police officer in the Bronx , and nationally by the fatal shooting last month of Trayvon Martin , 17, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida . The young men were unarmed. \u201cBoth illustrate the perils of racial stereotyping when individuals are empowered with the capacity to make life and death decisions,\u201d said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said the shootings had \u201cfurther emboldened legislators to continue to fight to deal with the out-of-control stop-and-frisk practices.\u201d The split among Albany lawmakers over the stop-and-frisk issue reflects a divide among New York City voters: according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on March 13, 59 percent of white voters approve of it, and 27 percent of black voters do. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly , facing increased complaints about the practice, has pushed back hard against critics. Last week, assailed by the City Council over the practice, Mr. Kelly said that the policy was an important policing tool intended to reduce the violence that has victimized blacks and Hispanics, and that, \u201cWhat I haven\u2019t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities.\u201d \u201cPeople are upset about being stopped,\u201d he continued, \u201cyet what is the answer?\u201d According to the Police Department, 96 percent of shooting victims last year, and 90 percent of murder victims, were minorities. \u201cThere\u2019s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a precinct in Riverdale,\u201d said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, \u201cso the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more frequently.\u201d The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights , which has examined police data. But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, \u201cin part because of stop, question and frisk,\u201d Mr. Browne said. Some white elected officials have strongly criticized the stop-and-frisk policy. They included the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer , and the public advocate, Bill de Blasio , both of whom are likely candidates for mayor; and Brad Lander and Daniel Dromm , who are on the Council. Senator Michael Gianaris , a Democrat from Queens , has offered a bill that would make it illegal for the department to set a quota for the number of stops officers must make. Mr. Stringer said it was important for elected officials \u201cwho look like me\u201d to help broaden the coalition of New Yorkers fighting against stop-and-frisk. But race continues to dominate discussion of the issue. Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a black Democrat from Harlem , is still smarting over a legislative debate he had in 2008 with Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., a white Republican from central New York, on a proposal to prohibit racial profiling. Mr. Townsend said part of good police work involved questioning people who seemed out of place in a particular neighborhood, regardless of their race. \u201cIf you were spotted in an affluent section of Oneida County where we don\u2019t have minority people living, and you were driving around through these houses, and I was a law enforcement officer and a highway patrol, I would stop you to say, No. 1: \u2018Are you lost? Is there something we can help you with, or what are you doing here?\u2019 \u201d Mr. Townsend said to Mr. Wright. Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law requiring police officials in New York City to no longer store the names and addresses of people stopped but not charged. Gov. David A. Paterson , the state\u2019s first African-American governor, signed the measure despite objections not only from city officials, but also, he said, from an all-white panel advising him on the issue. In a recent interview, Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said his views of the measure were informed by his own experience, which included being stopped three times by the police. \u201cIt\u2019s a feeling of being degraded,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that\u2019s what people who it hasn\u2019t happened to don\u2019t understand.\u201d Now, Mr. Jeffries is sponsoring a bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess small quantities of marijuana in public view. The bill, he said, would curb the tens of thousands of arrests each year that result when officers stop people and ask them to empty their pockets, leading to the revelation of small amounts of marijuana. Mr. Wright has been urging passage of a bill that would prohibit police officers from stopping people based solely on their race or ethnicity. Mr. Parker is behind legislation to create the post of inspector general for the police. And in the Council, Jumaane D. Williams has introduced bills that would require officers to inform people they stop that they can refuse to be searched and make mandatory and citywide a pilot program in which officers give those stopped a business card with a phone number, in case they want to lodge a complaint. Mr. Williams has had his own run-ins with police. He said he was stopped in Brooklyn last year, after he had bought a BMW , by officers who said, \u201cWe want to make sure it\u2019s yours.\u201d And, in an episode that drew widespread publicity, he was detained by the police last year after an argument with officers over whether he was allowed to use a closed sidewalk during the West Indian American Day Parade. \u201cWe know that the legislation is not going to stop stop-and-frisk,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is provide more accountability with the N.Y.P.D. and their practices and policies.\u201d", "keyword": "Search and seizure;null;Racial profiling;NYPD;New York;Politics"}
{"id": "ny0165786", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/09/01", "title": "Englewood: Owners of Burned Building Cited", "abstract": "A day after a four-alarm basement fire killed two tenants of a three-story house on James Street, its owners have been charged with building-code violations, the police said yesterday. Deputy Chief Arthur O\u2019Keefe of the Englewood Police Department said the owners, Oscar and Nubia Cortes, were charged with violating a municipal ordinance by converting the basement into a dormitory. The fire, which started on a couch near the basement\u2019s only exit, was ruled accidental. Chief O\u2019Keefe identified the dead as Domingo Ortega Flores, 41, of Mexico and Sriwipha Phathan, 27, of Thailand. A third tenant, Augustin Palafox, 22, of Mexico, remained in critical condition yesterday.", "keyword": "Basements and Cellars;New Jersey"}
{"id": "ny0162807", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2006/02/28", "title": "An Unusual Line Dance Greets the Trout Season", "abstract": "At 6:30 a.m. tomorrow, a spectacle will unfold on the streams of Missouri's trout parks. It is a celebration and a fishing adventure in the same event. Anglers standing shoulder to shoulder will, at the sound of a siren, cast as one into the waters before them in the first seconds of Missouri's annual trout season. What drives the anglers to crowd together every year on the first day of March, enduring cold weather, cold water and unbelievable line tangles to catch a trout? Mike Mitchell, the hatchery manager at Bennett Spring State Park, which is near Lebanon, Mo., said tradition was an important aspect of opening day. \"You have people coming here for years, knowing that it's going to be crowded and that it might not be a day for serious fishing,\" he said. \"It's more like opening day of baseball season.\" The spectacle is a major attraction. Mitchell estimated that there would be more than 2,000 anglers at both Bennett Spring and at Roaring River State Park, which is near Cassville in southwestern Missouri. He said there would be slightly smaller crowds at the privately owned but state-assisted Maramec Spring Park, southeast of St. James, and Montauk State Park, near Salem. Mitchell said that Missouri's program of trout stocking and management was unusual because of the opportunities it offered at its four trout parks and its 150 miles of state-managed streams. The concept of harnessing and directing the natural spring water to grow cold-water fish is a benefit resulting from the rare geological history of the land. The Ozark region is one of the most distinctive areas of North America. It features what is called a karst landscape: Dense limestone deposits laid down by ancient inland seas and dissolved by rainwater have created underground rivers that emerge as springs. Millions of gallons of earth-cooled water flow downstream in short branches to surface rivers, creating ideal trout water. Mitchell and his hatchery crew will rear about 420,000 fish to the 12-inch stocking size this year. For opening day, about 100 of these fish will be lunkers of at least 3 pounds, with some weighing as much as 15 pounds. The crew will stock about two fish for each angler for the opener and throughout the trout season. Even though the streams will be crowded on opening day, the improved chance of catching a large trout is attractive. At the sound of the first siren, thousands of lines will be cast into the water, with anglers being careful to drop their marabou jigs or small spinners just downstream of the ones landing above them. The lures drift as they are retrieved, and the trout, now seeing food everywhere, go into a feeding frenzy for a short time. Fish will be caught quickly, lines will be tangled, and mannerly fishermen will reel their offerings out of the way after someone says, \"Big fish on!\" The big one may or may not be caught. Soon, the fish will see that these fakes are not food, but danger, and will become trout again. They will be finicky, wary, and will use their amazing, magnifying eyesight to make catching them more difficult. It is at this point, after the initial fast action, that anglers need to use better techniques. One of the best is to drift a micro jig with a bobber above it just off the bottom at the speed of the current. It cannot drag; it cannot be pulled ahead by the line. It must be a drag-free drift. A small, lead spit shot or two can be placed 8 to 10 inches above the lure to get consistency near the stream bed, where the lure performs. At the slightest hesitation or jiggle of the bobber, the fisherman pulls with catlike quickness and hopefully will be fast to an athletic torpedo trying to use current and its own mass to break the two-pound test line. Other fishermen will sight-fish. They will stalk near a trout and try to drift a food imitation so directly to the fish that it literally only has to open its mouth. So little effort for such easy food -- some cannot resist. Later, fly rods will be brought out to fish areas made sparse by anglers gone to breakfast. With many fishermen still around, however, traditional fly fishing will give way to roll casting, with extreme care in the back cast to make sure that what is hooked is not a fellow angler. The crowds will thin as the day ends, and the final siren at 6 p.m. in the trout parks of Missouri will signal that quieter times are coming. The midweek spring mornings before summer vacation and the calm evenings of mid-July will make the memory of opening day seem far away. That is, until next year.", "keyword": "MISSOURI;MITCHELL MIKE;PARKS AND OTHER RECREATION AREAS;TROUT;FISHING SPORT;FISH AND OTHER MARINE LIFE"}
{"id": "ny0133042", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/12/14", "title": "New York Police, in California, Search Home of Midtown Shooting Victim", "abstract": "No drugs. No weapons. No evidence of any kind was removed by New York City detectives from the California home of the man who was gunned down this week in Midtown Manhattan, the victim\u2019s mother said Thursday. \u201cThey handed me back the key to his condo and said they found nothing,\u201d said Sandra Wellington, 56, the mother of Brandon Lincoln Woodard, 31, who was shot in the back of the head near Columbus Circle on Monday. Despite the seemingly fruitless search of her son\u2019s Playa del Rey condominium on Wednesday evening, two detectives drove to Ms. Wellington\u2019s Los Angeles home and offered her some hope, she said. \u201cOne of the detectives said they are very close,\u201d Ms. Wellington said in a telephone interview. \u201cThe detectives promised me that they will find the people who did this to my son,\u201d she added. Yet a day after what appeared to be a break in the case \u2014 the discovery of the rented getaway vehicle in Queens \u2014 the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said investigators still had no suspects. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly not in the position to identify a suspect here,\u201d he said at an unrelated news conference. However, Mr. Kelly\u2019s statement seemed to contradict reports saying the driver had been identified and citing a law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department\u2019s chief spokesman, later said in a statement \u2014 released to some reporters \u2014 that the police were concerned about reports that the driver had been identified, adding that the gunman, \u201cwho appears to be a professional,\u201d may want to kill the driver. Mr. Kelly said detectives knew who had rented the car, a Lincoln MKZ, from an Avis location in Long Island, but he declined to provide details on what relationship they had, if any, to the calculated killing on 58th Street, a block from Central Park. Detectives on Wednesday questioned a person who they believed may have information on the killing. By Thursday, they had homed in on a name for the driver of the car, according to a person familiar with the case. The driver was characterized as a low-level criminal from Queens, and detectives were operating on the theory that the gunman had a similar background, the person said. The absence of new details fueled the mystery surrounding the killing, which appeared to have been highly planned and carried out with a chilling degree of calm in a busy area. Rumors swirled among friends of Mr. Woodard in Los Angeles. \u201cEveryone is scared,\u201d said one friend. With microphones and cameras pressed in to record his words, Mr. Kelly chastised the news media for publishing what he described as leaked information. \u201cI would also say that leaks in this case are undermining \u2014 or certainly have the potential of undermining \u2014 the investigation,\u201d he said. Detectives had told Ms. Wellington that they would provide her with an inventory sheet listing any items taken from her son\u2019s three-story home. But after about two hours of searching, two detectives from New York drove over to Ms. Wellington\u2019s Los Angeles home at about 9 p.m. on Wednesday and told her there was no need to sign any police paperwork, she said. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t have a piece of paper for me to sign because they didn\u2019t have anything,\u201d she said. She added that investigators already had her son\u2019s laptop because Mr. Woodard had left it with his luggage, which he had dropped with a lobby valet at the hotel where he was staying. The police have said that Mr. Woodard, a University of West Los Angeles Law School student, had been arrested at least 20 times, mostly on drug offenses, but had spent little time in jail. He had a court date next month in Los Angeles on a cocaine possession charge.", "keyword": "Woodard Brandon Lincoln;Murders and Attempted Murders;Columbus Circle (NYC);New York City"}
{"id": "ny0146947", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/07/21", "title": "U.S. Forces Kill Relatives of Iraqi Governor", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 American Special Operations forces shot to death the son and nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province during a raid on Sunday in the northern city of Bayji, the latest in a series of operations that have resulted in the deaths of civilians or close associates of Iraqi government officials. The governor, Hamed al-Qaisi, threatened to resign in protest and said he would suspend cooperation with American officials. The shootings come at a delicate time in negotiations between United States and Iraqi officials over the terms of a new security agreement. The most contentious sticking point has been an Iraqi demand that American troops no longer be immune from Iraqi criminal laws, an ultimatum that Iraqi officials say has been spurred by unwarranted attacks on civilians. A new agreement is needed for American troops to remain in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year. Also on Sunday, Iraq\u2019s Independent Electoral Commission said provincial elections planned for October needed to be delayed by several months. \u201cThe original date of Oct. 1 has become a fantasy, because the Parliament hasn\u2019t passed an election law yet,\u201d a senior election official said Sunday night. \u201cWe still hope to have elections by the end of the year.\u201d The provincial elections have long been seen as a way to rectify electoral distortions that have left Kurds and Shiites with vastly disproportionate power over Sunni Arabs in many parts of the country. But lawmakers have not been able to agree on an election law because of feuding over the future control of Kirkuk, a multiethnic city, and other issues. Once a law is passed, elections officials want one month to review and complete voter registration rolls. Then three months will be needed \u201cfor campaigning and for getting information to people to educate them,\u201d Faraj al-Haideri, the head of the election commission, said last week. \u201cWe have not yet received the election law,\u201d Mr. Haideri said. \u201cThere are some parties who want to delay the election.\u201d Iraqi fury over civilian deaths peaked in late June when American troops shot to death three bank employees on their way to work at Baghdad\u2019s airport. The Americans called the three workers \u2014 two women and a man \u2014 criminals, and said they had fired on troops. But in a rare rebuke of the American military, the Iraqi Armed Forces general command called the shootings cold-blooded murder. Iraqi and American officials offered sharply different accounts of the attack on Sunday in Bayji, 120 miles north of Baghdad, though the deputy provincial governor said American officials had already apologized to both him and Governor Qaisi, who was traveling in Turkey. Aides to the governor said American Special Operations forces broke into a house at 3 a.m. and fatally shot the governor\u2019s 17-year-old son, Hussam. Maj. Muthanna Ibrahim, a spokesman for the governor, said Hussam was shot in his head, stomach and shoulder while he slept. Hussam\u2019s 23-year-old cousin, Uday Khalaf, awoke and tried to push open the door to Hussam\u2019s room, but he was also shot and killed by the American troops, Major Ibrahim said. The house is owned by Hussam\u2019s aunt, who is the mother of one of Hussam\u2019s female cousins; Hussam and the female cousin had planned to marry soon, Major Ibrahim said. The deputy governor of Salahuddin, Abdullah Jabarah, said there had been at least two similar attacks in the area by American troops. \u201cThese troops usually use excessive force when they conduct operations,\u201d he said. The Salahuddin Provincial Council issued a statement saying the attack was an indication of \u201chow the American forces disregard the souls of Iraqi citizens.\u201d The governor\u2019s son and nephew appeared not to have been the targets of the raid. The American military command in Baghdad said that the house had been raided to capture a \u201csuspected Al Qaeda in Iraq operative\u201d and that a man \u201cidentified as the targeted individual charged coalition forces and was injured during the operation.\u201d That suspect, who was not identified, was taken to a military hospital, and another \u201csuspected terrorist\u201d was arrested, according to a military statement. In a separate statement responding to specific questions about the attack, the military said one of the men who was killed had been armed with an AK-47 automatic rifle and the other had had a pistol. \u201cBoth gunmen were armed and presented hostile intent,\u201d the military said in the statement. But the military also acknowledged that \u201cthere are no indications at this time\u201d that the governor\u2019s son and nephew were members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the name for a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that often serves as a catch-all description that the military uses for Sunni gunmen who attack American forces. \u201cCoalition leaders will offer our condolences,\u201d the statement added. The raid followed a military operation south of Karbala last month that resulted in the death of a man identified in some reports as a cousin of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ; he was described by other officials as a close friend and associate of Mr. Maliki\u2019s family, which is from the area. American officials said troops acted in self-defense when they killed the man, a security guard who they said had been holding an automatic rifle as if he was preparing to fire. But the attack was condemned by the Iraqi Armed Forces general command, which described both it and the airport road shootings as \u201ca violation of the law and an encroachment on Iraqi sovereignty.\u201d", "keyword": "Politics and Government;Iraq;United States;United States Armament and Defense;Accidents and Safety;International Relations;United Nations;Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia;Maliki Nuri Kamal al-"}
{"id": "ny0243298", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/03/01", "title": "Obama Backs Easing Health Law Rules for States", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama , who has stood by his landmark health care law through court attacks and legislative efforts to repeal it, told the nation\u2019s governors on Monday that he was willing to amend the measure to give states the ability to opt out of its most controversial requirements right from the start, including the mandate that most people buy insurance . In remarks to the National Governors Association , Mr. Obama said he supported legislation that would allow states to obtain waivers from the mandate as soon as it took effect in 2014, as long as they could find another way to expand coverage without driving up health care costs. Under the current law, states must wait until 2017 to obtain waivers. The announcement is the first time Mr. Obama has called for altering a central component of his signature health care law, although he has backed removing a specific tax provision that both parties regard as onerous on business. But the prospects for the proposal appear dim. Congress would have to approve the change through legislation, and House Republican leaders said Monday that they were committed to repealing the law, not amending it. Even if the change were approved, it could be difficult for states to meet the federal requirements for the waivers. The White House described the proposal, based on a bipartisan bill recently introduced in the Senate, as a common-sense date change that would give states the freedom to innovate and act as laboratories. Mr. Obama called it \u201ca reasonable proposal,\u201d telling the governors, \u201cIt will give you flexibility more quickly while still guaranteeing the American people reform.\u201d Political calculations, as much as policy ones, were at work in the president\u2019s announcement. The shift comes as the health care law \u2014 and the mandate in particular \u2014 is under fierce attack in the courts, where federal judges have issued conflicting opinions on its constitutionality. The mandate is also a rallying cry for conservatives and Tea Party supporters, who regard it as a prime example of overreaching by the federal government. Mr. Obama has been trying to reposition himself in the political center on some issues in the wake of the drubbing his party took in the November midterm elections; dropping his insistence on the mandate is one way to do that. And with governors pressing the administration to allow them to cut Medicaid rolls to ease their fiscal distress \u2014 a step Mr. Obama does not want to take \u2014 the president is trying to look flexible in other ways. But Mr. Obama\u2019s flexibility goes only so far. \u201cI am not open to refighting the battles of the last two years,\u201d he said, \u201cor undoing the progress that we\u2019ve made.\u201d Mr. Obama\u2019s announcement did not appear to appease his Republican critics. The House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia , told reporters that the health law was \u201can impediment to job growth\u201d and that Republicans remained committed to its repeal. And while some Republican governors praised Mr. Obama for reaching out, they said the move did not address their underlying discomfort with the law or the major structural flaws facing state budgets. In meeting with the governors, Mr. Obama also asked them to come up with a bipartisan group to find ways to reduce Medicaid costs. \u201cI was disappointed,\u201d said Gov. Rick Perry of Texas , chairman of the Republican Governors Association. \u201cPretty much all he did was to reset the clock on what many of us consider a ticking time bomb that is absolutely going to crush our state budgets. The states need more than that.\u201d Some Democrats also reacted warily. Many are convinced that it is not possible to expand health care coverage and achieve deficit reductions without the federal mandate, and they worry that amending the law would be tantamount to weakening it. Senator Max Baucus , a Montana Democrat who as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wrote a bill that included an idea similar to the one Mr. Obama proposed, issued a tepid statement saying he would consider it. \u201cWe want to give states as much flexibility as possible,\u201d Mr. Baucus said, \u201cbut that flexibility shouldn\u2019t fail to ensure that Americans in every state have access to quality, affordable health care.\u201d The White House said the proposal was unrelated to the challenges to the constitutionality of the mandate. But encouraging states to pursue alternative ways of expanding coverage could prove useful should the Supreme Court ultimately rule that the mandate is unconstitutional. At the same time, the mandate, and the health care law more generally, is sure to be an issue in the president\u2019s 2012 re-election campaign, which may be a reason he is offering the proposal now. \u201cIt\u2019s to his advantage to show that he wants to be more moderate on this,\u201d said Dan Mendelson, a health policy expert who worked in the Clinton administration, \u201cbecause the mandate is terribly unpopular politically and he doesn\u2019t want to be saddled with that going into the next election.\u201d The bipartisan legislation that Mr. Obama is now embracing was first proposed in November, eight months after the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, by Senators Ron Wyden , Democrat of Oregon , and Scott Brown , Republican of Massachusetts . Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana , a Democrat, is now a co-sponsor. The legislation would allow states to opt out earlier from a range of requirements, including the mandate, if they could demonstrate that other methods would allow them to cover as many people, with insurance that is as comprehensive and affordable, as provided by the new law. The changes must also not increase the federal deficit. If states can meet those standards, they can ask to circumvent minimum benefit levels, structural requirements for insurance exchanges and the mandates that most individuals obtain coverage and that employers provide it. Washington would then help finance a state\u2019s individualized health care system with federal money that would otherwise be spent there on insurance subsidies and tax credits. Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont , has proposed similar legislation in the House, but he said in an interview Monday that his bill had no Republican co-sponsors, making its prospects for passage uncertain at best. Still, Mr. Welch called Mr. Obama\u2019s announcement \u201cextremely significant,\u201d adding that the waivers were \u201can act of empowerment for the states.\u201d In Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, is exploring the idea of using a waiver to create a so-called single-payer system, a government-run health care plan. Such a plan, dubbed the public option in last year\u2019s health care debate, would never have passed Congress. But Mr. Welch said he saw no reason Vermont should not get a waiver to establish one. \u201cMy Republican friends argue that you should drive power and responsibility for implementation to the local level, and they\u2019re right,\u201d Mr. Welch said. Health economists have mixed views on how difficult it would be to expand coverage and hold down costs in the absence of a mandate. Jon Gruber of M.I.T. published a recent analysis arguing that eliminating the mandate would \u201csignificantly erode the gains in public health and insurance affordability\u201d made possible by the health care law. But David Cutler of Harvard said that \u201cgiven the uncertainty generated by the mandate, it was reasonable\u201d to let states experiment with other ways to achieve the law\u2019s broad goals \u201cand let the evidence decide\u201d if the mandate is necessary. When the health measure was moving through Congress last year, its authors set 2017 as the date that such experimentation could begin, based on an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office , which said it would take three years of experience to determine how much a state should receive in unrestricted block grants if it opted out of aspects of the law. Otherwise, the budget analysts advised last year, the legislation\u2019s 10-year cost estimate would be about $4 billion higher because Washington would probably have to make higher than needed payments to states. Senior administration officials said they had not discussed where to find the additional $4 billion, but described it as \u201cnot a lot of money\u201d compared with the estimated $1 trillion, 10-year cost of the law.", "keyword": "Barack Obama;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act;US states"}
{"id": "ny0009986", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2013/02/28", "title": "Knicks\u2019 Rasheed Wallace to Have Season-Ending Surgery", "abstract": "GREENBURGH, N.Y. \u2014 When Rasheed Wallace came out of retirement, he was everything the Knicks expected: a 6-foot-11 savvy defender who provided veteran leadership and helped spread the floor with long 3-pointers. As the season progressed, though, Wallace showed why it was risky to sign a 38-year-old player who had been out of the league for two years. A nagging left foot injury never healed, and on Wednesday the Knicks announced that Wallace, one of the oldest Knicks on a team filled with veterans, would have season-ending surgery later in the week. A new X-ray examination found that Wallace had a fractured fifth metatarsal. He is expected to be out for eight weeks, the rest of the regular season. Although Wallace could return in the playoffs, it is unlikely he will play again after such a long layoff. Wallace sustained what was originally called a stress fracture in a win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Dec. 13, and he has not played since. The Knicks won 11 games in November, and Wallace played in 14 of their 15 games that month. After his last game, the Knicks were 17-5 and in first place in the Eastern Conference. Wallace averaged 7.2 points and 4.2 rebounds in 20 games. \u201cIt\u2019s somewhat of a blow because he\u2019s gone through so much work to try to get back out on the floor, and now this happens,\u201d Coach Mike Woodson said. \u201cThe only thing we can do now is think positive in terms of how the surgery is going to turn out.\u201d Image Rasheed Wallace, during a game against the Bucks on Feb. 1, has a fractured bone in his left foot. Credit Adam Hunger/Reuters JACKSON\u2019S RETURN TO GARDEN Mark Jackson, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, said he did not think a lot about his first game as an N.B.A. coach at Madison Square Garden. But when Jackson entered the Garden before the Warriors\u2019 game against the Knicks, he said he was reminded of how special the arena was and how significant this moment was. Jackson was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens. He played at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High in Brooklyn and went on to have a stellar career at St. John\u2019s. Jackson was the Knicks\u2019 point guard for seven seasons \u2014 and was the rookie of the year in 1988 \u2014 while averaging 11.1 points a game in New York. \u201cI really didn\u2019t know how it was going to hit me,\u201d Jackson said before the game. \u201cThat being said, this is something that I\u2019ve dreamed about, so it\u2019s special.\u201d Jackson was met by plenty of familiar faces at the Garden. He was able to talk to his former teammates Allan Houston and John Starks. He hugged a number of people on the Knicks\u2019 staff and was greeted with smiles from workers who have spent decades at the Garden. Jackson wanted to be the Knicks\u2019 coach in 2008, but he was passed over by the Garden\u2019s chairman, James L. Dolan. The Knicks instead hired Mike D\u2019Antoni. At the time, Jackson was not disappointed. He remained confident that he would get his opportunity for his first head coaching job in the league. \u201cIt was never a side of me that was shaking my head because a lot of times God knows what\u2019s better for you than what you know,\u201d Jackson said. \u201cI truly am thankful an organization and a front office was willing to take a chance on me.\u201d Jackson, named the Warriors\u2019 coach last season, has led them to a 33-25 record this season.", "keyword": "Basketball;Knicks;Rasheed Wallace;Sports injury"}
{"id": "ny0131116", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/12/18", "title": "Task Force Created to Regulate Legalized Marijuana in Colorado", "abstract": "GOLDEN, Colo. \u2014 It has been a little over a month since Coloradans approved a groundbreaking law legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational use. Now that the celebratory haze has settled, state officials and marijuana advocates on Monday began sifting through the thorny regulatory questions that go beyond merely lighting up. Among them: Who can sell marijuana? How should consumer safety be accounted for? How might employers and employees be affected by the new law? At a packed meeting at a state building in this suburb west of Denver, a task force convened by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper began wrestling with some of these questions in an effort to forge a framework for how the law should work. The task force, made up of designees from an array of state offices as well as various marijuana advocates, weighed in on matters including the identification of marijuana revenue sources and the prospect of the federal government cracking down on the drug. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to have a discussion on whether legalizing marijuana was the right thing to do,\u201d said Jack Finlaw, Mr. Hickenlooper\u2019s chief legal counsel and a co-chairman of the task force. \u201cOur job is to find ways of efficiently and effectively implementing it.\u201d Colorado\u2019s Amendment 64 sets the stage for marijuana to be regulated much like alcohol. But the state will have a whole new set of variables to consider, like licensing retail facilities and determining what sort of security measures stores should have. And Mr. Finlaw said he was not sure that alcohol could be used as a model for marijuana, given the inevitable differences in how it would be sold. Aside from the regulatory challenges of moving from a black market to a legitimate one, there are also health issues to be considered. Dr. Chris Urbina, the executive director of Colorado\u2019s Department of Public Health and Environment, raised the prospect that marijuana should be regulated differently depending on whether it is smoked or eaten. \u201cWe expect this to be challenging,\u201d said Mark Couch, a spokesman for Colorado\u2019s Department of Revenue, which will be largely responsible for regulating the sale and use of marijuana. \u201cThe department does have some experience with licensing and regulating products that have certain restrictions,\u201d Mr. Couch said. \u201cObviously, that is complicated by the fact that federal law makes this product illegal.\u201d In an interview last week with Barbara Walters, President Obama assuaged the fears of marijuana proponents, saying the federal government would not pursue marijuana users in states where the drug is now legal. But it was still unclear whether the Justice Department would permit stores in Colorado and Washington, which also legalized marijuana in November , to sell the drug, leaving it in a regulatory netherworld when it comes to federal law. Barbara Brohl, the executive director of the state\u2019s Department of Revenue and a co-chairwoman of the task force, said Colorado was consulting with officials in Washington State as it moved through its own process. Christian Sederberg, a Denver lawyer who is on the task force and whose law firm helped draft Amendment 64, said he thought Colorado was well positioned to settle on new regulations, given that medical marijuana was already legal here. Still, Mr. Sederberg said that medical marijuana rules were undergoing substantial revisions in Colorado and that there was clearly a need for distinct regulations for recreational use. \u201cI\u2019m of the opinion that we have a very good base to work with on the policies Amendment 64 intended to push forward and how those policies fit in with regulations already in place,\u201d he said. The task force has until the end of February to make recommendations to Mr. Hickenlooper; the state attorney general, John W. Suthers; and the General Assembly. The regulations must be completed by July 1.", "keyword": "Marijuana;Medical Marijuana;Colorado;Hickenlooper John W;Justice Department"}
{"id": "ny0120320", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2012/07/09", "title": "LeBron James Embraces Olympic Leadership Role", "abstract": "LAS VEGAS \u2014 LeBron James has entered a new phase in his career as a superstar athlete, a transformation that even James\u2019s teammates on the United States men\u2019s basketball team can see. They watched him go through his biggest professional rite of passage in June, when he won his first N.B.A. championship. Now most of his teammates get to watch James grow as a leader as the national team prepares for the Olympics. James has smiled a lot these past few weeks as he has embraced his newest label: champion. James also knows the spoils that come with an N.B.A. championship. He\u2019s now the leader on a team full of leaders. \u201cI want to be one of the leaders on this team,\u201d James said, \u201cand I feel I am.\u201d Leadership usually falls to a player who is not only accomplished but has also played long enough to share lessons with younger players. James, who is 27 and in his prime, fits both prerequisites. It also helps that this United States team has plenty of young players. James is older than half of his teammates. \u201cI\u2019m trying to lead this team in the right direction,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m going to try to help these guys win the gold medal.\u201d For James and his teammates, that process began in full after Saturday\u2019s announcement of the United States\u2019 Olympic roster. Although James was a member of the 2008 Olympic team that won the gold medal in Beijing, he was learning under players like Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd and Dwyane Wade. Most of James\u2019s older teammates on this 2012 team say that he is not only a different, more talented player than he was four years ago, but also that he is ready to teach others how to win. Tyson Chandler, 29, won an N.B.A. title after the 2010-11 season with the Dallas Mavericks. Since then, he said his confidence \u2014 and level of play \u2014 had risen to a level that earned him defensive player of the year honors this past season and prepared him for his first Olympics. Chandler said he expected James to have the same experience, and added that he realized James had the potential to exceed even the lofty expectations that perpetually accompany him. \u201cLeBron is already an incredible player,\u201d Chandler said. \u201cHe\u2019s going to be a different player now.\u201d Mike Krzyzewski , the national team coach, watched what James accomplished during the N.B.A. finals and is excited about what he will bring to the American team. In Miami\u2019s series-clinching Game 5 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, James finished with 26 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds. He was the 10th player to be named the most valuable player of the regular season and the finals in the same year. \u201cI felt really good for him,\u201d Krzyzewski said. \u201cHe earned it. He\u2019s taken such criticism for so many things. He was a great player in 2008, but he\u2019s exceptional right now.\u201d James has already impressed Krzyzewski in the few practices the United States team had over the weekend. Krzyzewski, who will head his second Olympic team, knows that these highly talented N.B.A. players have great knowledge of how to play. When the players come together for the Olympics, that awareness increases, Krzyzewski said. In practice, Krzyzewski said James made a number of terrific plays, including some extraordinary passes that Krzyzewski said James might not have even attempted with the Heat. James said that he believed the best examples he could set for his Olympic teammates were on defense. James, after all, guarded 3 of the top 15 scorers in the league during the playoffs in the Knicks\u2019 Carmelo Anthony, the Celtics\u2019 Paul Pierce and the Thunder\u2019s Kevin Durant. Expect James to do the same against the best offensive players around the world. \u201cYou can put me on anybody, and I\u2019m going to guard them,\u201d he said. \u201cI love playing defense. I love taking on challenges from the best players of the opposing teams.\u201d Throughout his career, James has used the off-season to add skills to an already long list of abilities. James will use this experience \u2014 scrimmaging against Anthony, Bryant and Durant \u2014 to get better. Bryant knows what the experience of the Olympics can do for a player, a leader. After the 2008 Olympics, Bryant won two N.B.A. titles with the Los Angeles Lakers. Could James do the same with the Heat? Bryant knows it is possible. He has an idea of what James is thinking after winning his first ring. \u201cWhen I and Shaquille O\u2019Neal won one, it was a different kind of feeling,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cIt was like Michael Jordan had six and Magic Johnson had five. Me and Shaq were both like: \u2018We have to get more. One is not going to cut it.\u2019 \u201d James understands this, too. He says he is ready to wear a new label: as a champion of multiple titles. \u201cI want to win again,\u201d he said. \u201cI want that feeling again. I have another goal now.\u201d James could have a similar feeling in early August if the United States wins the gold medal.", "keyword": "Basketball;James LeBron;Krzyzewski Mike;Olympic Games (2012);Chandler Tyson;Olympic Games;London (England)"}
{"id": "ny0178805", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/08/02", "title": "Murdoch and Dow Jones Pick 5 to Safeguard Wall St. Journal", "abstract": "Five people just signed on for what may be the most thankless task in journalism: making sure that Rupert Murdoch plays fair with his new acquisition, The Wall Street Journal. Early yesterday, Mr. Murdoch\u2019s News Corporation and Dow Jones & Company , The Journal\u2019s publisher, named the members of a committee that is intended to prevent the News Corporation from dictating what goes into The Journal, after News Corporation buys Dow Jones. They are Louis D. Boccardi, former executive editor, and then a president and chief executive, of The Associated Press; Thomas Bray, a columnist and former editorial page editor of The Detroit News; Jennifer Dunn, a former Republican congresswoman from Washington State; Jack Fuller, former president of Tribune Publishing and editorial page editor of The Chicago Tribune; and Nicholas Negroponte, former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Media Lab and a founder of Wired magazine. \u201cI think that at least on paper, this is a good step toward building a firewall around the content of The Journal,\u201d said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cI\u2019d have liked to see more experience on the news side, in addition to the editorial side, but we\u2019ll just have to wait and see what its impact will be.\u201d People briefed on the process said that top Journal editors and members of the Bancroft family, who own a controlling stake in Dow Jones, played a significant role in making the choices. They said that four of the five committee members were first proposed by Dow Jones, while Mr. Negroponte was proposed by the News Corporation. The News Corporation has agreed to retain the managing editor and editorial page editors of The Journal, and the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires, and to remove or replace any of them only with the consent of the new committee. The deal also gives the committee the authority to mediate disputes and go to court to enforce the agreement. If they are called on to resolve any disputes, the actions and motives of the committee members are sure to be scrutinized as carefully as those of any cabinet nominee. Mr. Boccardi is the only member with a background primarily in news, rather than opinion. Mr. Bray, a former contributor to The Journal online, is very much in tune with the free-market philosophy of The Journal\u2019s editorial page. Ms. Dunn was considered a moderately conservative member of the Republican caucus. Mr. Fuller won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his editorials on constitutional issues, which included some liberal positions. Mr. Negroponte has gained attention recently for promoting a low-cost computer for the developing world.", "keyword": "Wall Street Journal;Dow Jones & Co;News Corporation Limited;Newspapers;Murdoch Rupert;Negroponte Nicholas;Bancroft Family;Fuller Jack;Dunn Jennifer;Boccardi Louis D"}
{"id": "ny0168516", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2006/06/16", "title": "City's New Small Schools Are Focus of a Bias Inquiry", "abstract": "The federal government is examining whether the New York City school system may have discriminated against special education students and those who are not proficient in English, by denying them spots in the city's new small middle schools and high schools, according to a letter released yesterday. The letter, from the United States Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, was dated June 7. It responded to a complaint against the city lodged three months ago by David C. Bloomfield, a member of the Citywide Council on High Schools, who released the letter. It called the complaint \"appropriate\" for review. Mr. Bloomfield, a lawyer who teaches educational policy at Brooklyn College, told the federal agency that the chief executive of the City Education Department's Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, had described to the council, an elected advisory panel, \"a deliberate policy to exclude otherwise eligible students with disabilities from the small schools, at least during the first three years of each school's existence.\" \"Implied in these remarks,\" Mr. Bloomfield said, \"was similar discrimination against students with limited English proficiency.\" The creation of dozens of small schools has been a hallmark of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's education policy. Proponents say the schools, which will ultimately grow to 500 students at most, permit the sorts of close relationships they hope will improve the city's 53 percent high school graduation rate. Many of the small schools are supplanting the city's largest high schools, where graduation rates were much lower than the citywide average. Mr. Bloomfield has been among critics of the new schools, who often say the initiative hurts the larger schools. Bloomberg administration officials said yesterday that while the schools generally have fewer special education students and so-called English Language Learners in their first two years, they catch up later \u2014 and are more successful with the special needs students they do enroll. The officials said that the situation was temporary and that they were making strides with the numbers. \"Brand-new small schools typically open with only five to six teachers, a limited budget, a new principal and complex organizational and structural challenges,\" said Michele Cahill, who is Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein's senior counselor for education policy. She said the city department expected that all new small schools will serve special education students and students with limited English \"at a level reflective of the citywide average by at least their third year.\" Critics of the small schools say that Mr. Bloomberg created too many schools too quickly, and that even though the vast majority of such schools do not screen students for grades or test scores, they have more subtle ways of \"skimming.\" Many small schools, for example, may filter out the most unruly students, and those whose parents are least involved, by requiring students to wear uniforms and by giving admissions preference to those who attended information sessions. Ms. Cahill said that in the 2004-5 school year, 5.6 percent of students at small schools, and 10.3 percent of students at other city high schools, were eligible for special education services. In 2005-6, she said, 7.5 percent of small-school students, and 10.7 percent of students at other high schools, were eligible for special education services. In 2004-5, Ms. Cahill said, 10.8 percent of small-school students and 12.6 percent of students at other city high schools were considered to have limited English proficiency. This year, 10.4 percent of small-school students and 11.3 percent of students at other high schools fell into that category. Robert Hughes, the president of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit group that has helped shape many of the city's small schools, said that while there was \"no formal exclusionary policy,\" small schools did not have enough resources in their early years to fully serve students with special needs. \"We are working hard to ensure that schools that start with ninth grades and develop ultimately serve a proportionate share\" of students with special needs, Mr. Hughes said. \"I think we have made real progress in closing the gap,\" he said. Once the federal government evaluates a complaint of discrimination, it can seek to resolve it through negotiation, or it can move forward with a formal investigation that can lead to sanctions.", "keyword": "Education and Schools;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0215130", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2010/04/03", "title": "In North Carolina, Obama Talks of Improving Economy", "abstract": "CHARLOTTE, N.C. \u2014 President Obama declared on Friday that \u201cwe are beginning to turn the corner\u201d after a deep recession that nearly threw the economy into another Great Depression. He hailed a new government report showing stronger job growth and credited his policies with helping businesses rebuild. Visiting a plant that received federal money from his economic stimulus package and that is now creating new jobs, Mr. Obama said \u201ctoday is an encouraging day\u201d because the fruits of his programs were becoming visible. But he cautioned that more difficult times were still ahead before the country reclaimed the economic ground lost in the past few years. \u201cThis has been a harrowing time for our country, and it\u2019s easy to grow cynical and wonder whether America\u2019s best days are behind us, especially after such a crisis,\u201d Mr. Obama told a crowd of workers in a hangarlike building, surrounded by racks of battery material. \u201cWhat we can see here at this plant is, the worst of the storm is over, that brighter days are still ahead.\u201d At the same time, Mr. Obama said, \u201cWhile we\u2019ve come a long way, we\u2019ve still got a ways to go.\u201d He added: \u201cGovernment can\u2019t reverse the toll of this recession overnight. And government on its own can\u2019t replace the eight million jobs that have been lost.\u201d Mr. Obama was responding to a Labor Department report indicating that the economy added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in March, the most in three years. He noted that a year ago, the economy was losing as many as 700,000 jobs a month. To an extent, the growth in March was exaggerated by the government\u2019s hiring of 48,000 census workers to conduct the once-a-decade national head count, jobs that will mainly last only a few months. Moreover, the unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent in March, and economists expect it to rise later in the year as discouraged workers resume looking for jobs. Republicans pointed out that though Mr. Obama was emphasizing the payroll numbers, unemployment still remained significantly higher than the White House initially forecast it would be at this point even if Congress had not enacted the $787 billion stimulus package last year. What then, they asked, had the stimulus actually achieved? Still, the new figures provided a political boost for the president less than a week after he signed the final elements of his landmark health care overhaul into law and finished an arms control treaty with Russia. After months on the defensive \u2014 with his poll numbers falling, his legislative program stalled and the economy still fallow \u2014 Mr. Obama now appears to feel reinvigorated. To highlight his economic agenda, he flew to Charlotte to visit Celgard , a firm that produces material for lithium batteries and has received $49 million from the stimulus program. The company is expanding its Charlotte plant and building a new facility in nearby Concord. Mr. Obama said the stimulus money was helping Celgard create 300 new jobs directly and as many as 1,000 new jobs for suppliers and contractors. But The Charlotte Observer, citing the Energy Department, reported that Celgard had not yet begun spending any of the stimulus money. And at least some residents of the area were not satisfied, as they gathered along Mr. Obama\u2019s motorcade route holding up signs like \u201cYou Lie,\u201d \u201cVote Them Out\u201d and \u201cStop Spending My Future.\u201d North Carolina is the fourth swing state Mr. Obama has visited in the past week or so, following Iowa, Virginia and Maine. He won all four of them in 2008, but the White House is carefully tending to all of them given the flight of independents from Mr. Obama recorded in recent polls. Taking questions from Celgard workers, Mr. Obama fielded mostly friendly inquiries. But when a woman asked why he was raising taxes in the health care program, \u201cbecause we\u2019re overtaxed as it is,\u201d Mr. Obama bemoaned what he called \u201ca whole lot of misinformation\u201d and talked for a long time about the virtues of the overhaul before actually addressing taxes. When he did respond to her question, he said that the health care program was financed in part by \u201csome additional taxes that we think are fair,\u201d and he cited a provision imposing Medicare taxes on capital gains and dividend income, which will affect primarily wealthier Americans.", "keyword": "Obama Barack;United States Economy;Labor and Jobs;American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009);Economic Conditions and Trends"}
{"id": "ny0198344", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2009/07/16", "title": "An Inexpensive Digital Edge on the Golf Course", "abstract": "Some people golf in a straight line, with maybe an occasional detour into the sand trap. I, for one, prefer to spray the ball in different directions, or ZIP codes, lest the walk become boring. But this also raises significant challenges, since golf course markers don\u2019t indicate your distance to the green when you\u2019re standing in someone else\u2019s fairway. Now, when I\u2019m in someone else\u2019s fairway, I can just pull out my cellphone. The latest technological boon for golfers involves a device that can inspire more golf rage than a four-minute waggle. Enterprising software developers are furiously pumping out mobile apps that use GPS technology to show your distance to the green, among many other things, for a fraction of what you would pay for traditional range-finder gizmos. The upshot: These apps are far from perfect, but given that they cost about half as much as a good set of balls, they\u2019re well worth the money. I tested View Ti Golf and GreenFinder, which work on smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry, and GPSGolfShot, which works on more old-school Verizon devices like the LG Chocolate and the Motorola Razr , as well as newer smartphones. All three helped speed up my round of golf and gave mostly accurate distance readings. View Ti Golf ($35) offered features the others painfully lacked, but it was a battery hog. GreenFinder ($35 annually) was simple to use but limited in features, and GPSGolfShot ($35 annually, $4 monthly or $2 a round) offered a good option for smartphone holdouts. Each company relies on satellite images to map a course. When you\u2019re on a fairway, for instance, your phone pings the GPS satellite and compares your location with the location of the green, which the software stores in your phone. This bit of wizardry can actually happen faster than on dedicated GPS range finders, because mobile phones use cell towers to quickly get a fix on nearby satellites. Each of these apps gives you big, reader-friendly yardage readings to the front, center and back of the green, so you can quickly choose a club. Well, sometimes. The apps show an as-the-crow-flies distance to the green, so if you have GreenFinder or GPSGolfShot, and the hole is a dogleg, it\u2019s no help. What you need, of course, is a way to determine how far to hit the ball so you can turn the corner. View Ti gives you that, since it shows the image of the hole, and offers a cursor you can control with a fingertip. Drag the cursor where you want to hit the ball on that dogleg, for instance, and it tells you the distance. One drawback is that the image does not rotate, compass-style, in sync with where you happen to be standing on the hole. Last week I played at Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club, in Branford, Conn., with Philip Johnson, a longtime club member with an eight handicap and a tendency to hit the ball in tediously straight lines. As familiar as he is with the course, even he struggled to figure out which way to orient the device. Had I been flying solo, I\u2019d never have figured out which way to point the thing. Michael Phung, a founder of View Ti, said the company would fix that problem in a new version of the app, due out this autumn, along with other improvements. The software works with about 15,000 of the roughly 18,000 courses in the United States, with the weakest coverage in places like Texas, Oklahoma and other locations where satellite images are not yet sharp enough to rely on, Mr. Phung said. View Ti also includes about 2,000 courses in the United Kingdom (including British Open courses), hundreds more in Canada and Australia and dozens scattered in more remote global locations. The company adds new courses each week, in response to user requests. Aside from complaints of users who, because of satellite-image limitations, cannot get their home courses listed, Mr. Phung said users were most often bothered by the application\u2019s tendency to sap battery life from an iPhone. Users should expect to get at least four hours, he said, from a fully charged iPhone. But Mr. Johnson, my playing partner, ran his iPhone into the red zone after three hours of constant use, and the comments on View Ti\u2019s iTunes page suggested that many users had trouble keeping the app running through an entire round of golf. Mr. Phung said part of the problem is relying on the service too much. \u201cWe envisioned people would use it five or six times during a round, for the tough shots,\u201d he said. The problem is, that\u2019s not the way many people want to use it. Between the tee and the green, the app can save time on nearly every club selection, unless your ball lands close to a yardage marker. One solution: Mr. Johnson said he puts his iPhone to sleep after checking for yardage. It takes a few seconds to activate the app again, but it keeps the battery alive longer. Then there\u2019s the bigger philosophical problem of using a cellphone on a golf course. The United States Golf Association\u2019s rules do not ban cellphones, saying only that \u201cplayers should ensure that any electronic device taken onto the course does not distract other players.\u201d But some courses will eject players for using one, so it makes sense to clear it with the club\u2019s pro before investing. GreenFinder\u2019s big advantage is that, unlike most other iPhone apps, it also works on BlackBerrys, some Windows Mobile phones and, within a week, Android phones like T-Mobile\u2019s G1. One of the company\u2019s founders, Trevor Timbeck, said that the application relies on more refined satellite imagery to map distances, but in limited testing, I found no meaningful difference between GreenFinder\u2019s readings and those of the other two apps. Verizon\u2019s GPSGolfShot, meanwhile, will soon get an upgrade, with bird\u2019s-eye images of the hole and even flyover movies. One can imagine a day when someone gives that option a spin while he is waiting patiently for an intruder to get off his fairway. Perhaps the aggrieved player will then pull his cellphone out, too, and measure the distance to the other player\u2019s head. Quick Calls The BlackBerry Tour went on sale last week on Verizon Wireless and Sprint, and Curve fans should take notice, since the device is similar in form but offers more features. Among them are an ultrasharp display, a versatile media player and GSM technology, which allows you to make calls while in other countries. Still no Wi-Fi, however. ($199 after a mail-in rebate and two-year contract.) ... AT&T on Sunday will release its second Nokia smartphone in recent months, the Surge. It features a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, a 2.4-inch screen, GPS function and a two-megapixel camera. ($80 with a two-year contract.) ... Sprint this week also brought out a new device, the LG LX290, a slider phone with a camera, Bluetooth and voice-dialing, but its most notable feature is its $30 price tag (after $50 mail-in rebate and two-year contract) ... The app called Postage ($2) makes it easy to create and send e-cards from the iPhone. Now Hazel Mail lets you design postcards using pictures on your phone. The service prints, stamps and mails the postcards for you, for $1.50 apiece. The iPhone app is free.", "keyword": "Smartphones;Golf;Computers and the Internet;Blackberry (Handheld Device)"}
{"id": "ny0107690", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2012/04/14", "title": "Spain Warns Argentina About YPF Takeover", "abstract": "MADRID \u2014 The Spanish government warned on Friday that it would take unspecified retaliatory measures against Argentina if it proceeded with plans to take back control of YPF, the large oil and gas producer, from Repsol, its Spanish parent. The warning came as Jos\u00e9 Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the Spanish foreign minister, also announced that Spain had called on the European Commission, the United States Treasury and other governments in Latin America to support Spain in its efforts to prevent the nationalization of YPF. Meanwhile, I\u00f1igo Mendez de Vigo, the Spanish secretary of state for European affairs, warned in a radio interview that Argentina could become \u201can international pariah\u201d if such a nationalization went ahead. The dispute with Argentina could not have come at a worse time for Repsol and the government in Madrid, which is already struggling with Spain\u2019s second recession in three years, as well as facing soaring borrowing costs amid concerns among investors about whether Spain will be the next euro economy to require a bailout. For Repsol, meanwhile, YPF has come to account for a third of its profits and 42 percent of its estimated reserves of crude oil. Repsol took control of YPF in 1999 and owns 57 percent of its equity. The YPF takeover was one of several forays by Spain\u2019s largest banks and industrial companies into Latin America. These investments have recently helped soften the blow of crumbling earnings at home. Independent of what measures the Spanish government might take against Argentina, a nationalization would also push Repsol shareholders to start \u201can intense judicial battle in Madrid, Brussels, Buenos Aires and New York to defend themselves against an attack on their property,\u201d said Javier Cremades, who has been a lawyer for Repsol shareholders and has also worked for the company. Mr. Cremades is chairman of Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, a Madrid law firm. Shares of Repsol YPF fell 49 euro cents on Friday, or 2.73 percent, to 17.47 euros. The stock has been tumbling since the start of the year, in large part reflecting concerns among investors about the future of YPF, as the government in Buenos Aires gradually intensified its criticism of Repsol, accusing the company of not investing enough in Argentina and instead paying too much of its profits in dividends. Mr. Garcia-Margallo, the foreign minister, suggested Friday that any nationalization would be seen as \u201can aggression\u201d against the Spanish government as well. Still, he said that Argentina\u2019s ambassador, whom he had summoned for a meeting, had not made clear whether such a nationalization plan would go ahead, amid conflicting reports from Buenos Aires. \u201cWe are in a moment of uncertainty which we want to use to call again for dialogue and negotiation,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Spain;Argentina;Nationalization of Industry;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Politics and Government;YPF S.A;Repsol YPF S.A"}
{"id": "ny0185101", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2009/03/17", "title": "Soldiers in Madagascar Occupy Vacant Palace in a Show of Force", "abstract": "ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar (AP) \u2014 Soldiers broke into an unoccupied presidential palace on Monday and took it over in a symbolic show of force after Madagascar\u2019s opposition leader called on the army to arrest the president. President Marc Ravalomanana has been in a different palace in the capital in recent days, with civilian supporters and presidential guards protecting him. Soldiers told the president\u2019s supporters on Monday to take down barriers they had erected near the palace where he was staying. It was not clear if the troops intended to try to enter the palace. Mr. Ravalomanana has been accused of misspending public money and undermining democracy in Madagascar , a nation on an Indian Ocean island off the African coast known both for its natural beauty and its history of political instability. The opposition leader, Andry Rajoelina, declared himself president of a transitional government on Saturday and promised new presidential elections within two years. President Ravalomanana has accused Mr. Rajoelina of seeking power by unconstitutional means, and he has said he will not surrender power. The breakaway army faction that took over the unoccupied palace on Monday has not explicitly backed Mr. Rajoelina, but the split in the military has greatly weakened the president. Soldiers drove an armored vehicle through the gates of the palace, a 19th-century French mansion used primarily for state ceremonies. The soldiers set off two explosions, fired shots and broke windows and doors. The building, which appeared to be deserted, was the site of deadly clashes between antigovernment protesters and the army this year. The army faction that withdrew its support for Mr. Ravalomanana did so largely because of the deaths of civilians in those clashes. A colonel leading the soldiers said that the operation was not an attack on the president. He said the troops simply wanted to control the building. He did not elaborate, and would not give his name.", "keyword": "Madagascar;Coups D'Etat and Attempted Coups D'Etat;Ravalomanana Marc;Rajoelina Andry"}
{"id": "ny0198198", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/07/11", "title": "\u2018Energy Shots\u2019 Stimulate Power Drink Sales", "abstract": "COLLEGE PARK, Md. \u2014 The power drink of the moment costs 20 times as much per ounce as Coca-Cola , comes in a tiny bottle and tastes so bad that most people hold their noses and down it in a single gulp. Despite all that, sales of \u201cenergy shots\u201d are soaring in the middle of a recession. The two-ounce drinks, which give people a concentrated dose of caffeine, B vitamins and amino acids, were all but unheard-of four years ago. Today they are the hottest drink category in the country, with sales expected to almost double this year from last, to about $700 million. The shots are meant for people who want a jolt of caffeine without having to drink a big cup of coffee or one of the 16-ounce energy drinks that have become ubiquitous. They go down fast, more like medicine than a beverage. That is part of the appeal to their most devoted consumers: students cramming for exams or partying into the night, construction workers looking for a lift and drivers trying to stay awake. Near the University of Maryland the other day, students thought nothing of paying $3 or more for a shot. That is $1.50 an ounce; at that price, a 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola would sell for $30. \u201cIt helps me stay up all night when I have work to do,\u201d said Matt Sporre, 20, a sophomore chemical engineering major who said he drank shots three or four nights a week when school was in session. \u201cThose things are going to be the death of my generation,\u201d he added. \u201cToo much caffeine.\u201d Mr. Sporre and several others students said the shots worked well in combination with Adderall, a prescription drug for attention deficit disorder that is popular on college campuses. The Adderall helps them focus, they said, and the shot keeps them awake. Several students said they sometimes downed an energy shot before going out drinking. Others said the shots helped them stay awake during long drives home from school. Two members of the university\u2019s wrestling team said some of their teammates drank the shots before matches to get an energy lift. A 7-Eleven store on Knox Road, just off the Maryland campus in College Park, has become one of the top sellers of energy shots among the 5,700 United States stores in the 7-Eleven chain. The store\u2019s owner, Million Mekonen, said that sales spiked during finals in May, when the store sold close to 400 shots in a week. But students are not the only users. Steve Cisko, 26, a construction worker renovating a dormitory, stopped in at the 7-Eleven and bought a shot made by AriZona Beverage for $3.99. \u201cI do demolition; it wears you out,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes I\u2019ll take two at a time in the afternoon. Every guy I work with uses them.\u201d Sales of the shots are rising even as sales of traditional energy drinks like Red Bull have flattened out. Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of Consumer Edge Research, estimated that shot sales could reach $700 million this year, nearly double last year\u2019s $370 million, not counting sales by Wal-Mart Stores . The estimate was based on sales data collected by Information Resources, a market research firm. The market is dominated by a tiny company in suburban Detroit called Living Essentials, which began test sales in late 2004 of a product called 5-Hour Energy, packaged in small plastic bottles. Today, 5-Hour Energy accounts for about 80 percent of the rapidly expanding market, according to Mr. Pecoriello. The company\u2019s unlikely success \u2014 it has only one other product, an antihangover pill called Chaser \u2014 has forced the big beverage makers to play catch-up. Last month, Red Bull introduced a two-ounce shot, and Dr Pepper Snapple began test-marketing a three-ounce version of its Venom energy drink, called Venom Bite. Coca-Cola introduced a shot last year based on its NOS energy drink. Many smaller companies have jumped in too, often offering products with similar names, like 6 Hour Power, Fuel 7 Hour Energy and Mr. Energy 8-Hour Energy. Living Essentials has spent heavily on advertising to build the market and hold its position against newcomers. It expects to spend $60 million this year on television advertising for 5-Hour Energy. It has also gone after several of its competitors in court, challenging labels or product names it said were too close to its own. The most vigorous legal battle pits Living Essentials against a Texas company called Custom Nutrition Laboratories and includes accusations of betrayal, stolen secrets and other skullduggery. The two companies worked closely together from 2004 through 2007. At Living Essentials\u2019 request, Custom Nutrition developed the formula for 5-Hour Energy and then manufactured and bottled it. Living Essentials handled the marketing, distribution and sales. Then, in late 2007, Living Essentials fired Custom Nutrition and replaced it with another manufacturer. Now both companies claim ownership of the product\u2019s secret recipe, although only Living Essentials continues to produce it. Last month a federal magistrate judge ordered the two sides to try to mediate their dispute. \u201cWe invented the product,\u201d said Baxter W. Banowsky, a lawyer in Dallas for Custom Nutrition. \u201cWhatever profits they\u2019ve made from the sale of the product encompassing our formula, they should be turned over to us.\u201d Carl F. Sperber, a spokesman for Living Essentials, said the company would not comment on the litigation, which involves cases in state and federal courts in Texas. Unlike older energy drinks, 5-Hour Energy and most other shots do not contain sugar. Their crucial ingredient is caffeine. But Living Essentials and many of its competitors will not reveal exactly how much of it is in the products, saying only that it is about as much caffeine as in a cup of coffee. The caffeine in coffee can vary widely, from about 80 to 175 milligrams in an eight-ounce cup. Living Essentials makes broad claims for 5-Hour Energy, saying that it is \u201cpacked with B vitamins for energy and amino acids for alertness and focus.\u201d Nutritionists were skeptical of such claims, however. Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University , said that while some of the nutrients in 5-Hour Energy were known to play a role in the body\u2019s metabolism, most people got enough of those nutrients in their regular diet and that ingesting elevated amounts had not been shown to have any beneficial effect. \u201cIt sounds like a great placebo to me,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can gulp this down and you feel like you\u2019re doing something. And I\u2019ll bet you ask people and they say they feel better. It\u2019s got caffeine \u2014 why not?\u201d One thing is certain: people are not buying the shots for the taste. \u201cTerrible!\u201d said Barry Ray, a 21-year-old from Hyattsville, Md., as he sampled a Red Bull shot. \u201cBut it\u2019s good. It wakes you up.\u201d Joe Gere, a New Jersey entrepreneur who produces a shot called Xfuel, said there was not enough water in a two-ounce shot to dilute the bitter taste of the caffeine and nutrients. But shot makers concede that a medicinal flavor and the small, pill-bottle size are all part of a shot\u2019s appeal. \u201cFive-Hour Energy\u2019s not supposed to taste fantastic,\u201d said Mr. Sperber, the Living Essentials spokesman. \u201cThis is supposed to be a functional product, not something for flavor or something for refreshment.\u201d", "keyword": "Caffeine;Drink;Advertising Marketing;Coca Cola;Red Bull"}
{"id": "ny0205982", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/01/15", "title": "Amid Illinois Festivities, an Off Note", "abstract": "SPRINGFIELD, Ill. \u2014 Talk about an awkward party guest. Here, surrounded by some of Illinois \u2019s most powerful politicians, many of whom have also been the loudest critics of the state\u2019s beleaguered governor, Rod R. Blagojevich , stood Mr. Blagojevich himself on Wednesday, presiding over a stately swearing-in ceremony for senators as a new legislative session opened. Mr. Blagojevich, who in a normal year might have been escorted from the ornate chambers by a group of lawmakers assigned to that honorary duty, left alone through a back door. And the new Senate quickly moved on to its next piece of business: being sworn in as the jury in Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s imminent impeachment trial. So it went in the Capitol on Wednesday, just another day in the upended world of Illinois politics. Until now, Mr. Blagojevich, a two-term Democrat whose party firmly controls both chambers of the legislature, had not come here since his arrest Dec. 9 on corruption charges, including an accusation that he schemed to sell the United States Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama, who also once worked in these marbled halls. Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s appearance to open the Senate was required by the State Constitution. Still, some had predicted he might not show up. (If the Senate was never convened, that logic went, how could it hold an impeachment trial?) But the governor\u2019s spokesman said Mr. Blagojevich, who says he is innocent of the accusations against him, had always intended to carry out his duty. For much of Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s six years in office, lawmakers grumbled that he never moved from his Chicago home to spend more time here. But none seemed eager to see him here now. \u201cThis is a time usually of great celebration and a new beginning,\u201d said Senator Jeffrey M. Schoenberg, Democrat of Evanston, \u201cbut, unfortunately, it\u2019s also tempered by a feeling and flavor that most members would prefer not to experience.\u201d \u201cThe unprecedented impeachment trial that will begin immediately after the inaugural is sobering to say the least,\u201d Mr. Schoenberg said. People in the packed chamber \u2014 which included a former governor; former Senate presidents; Thomas R. Fitzgerald, the State Supreme Court chief justice who is to preside over the impeachment trial; and Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who will replace Mr. Blagojevich if he is removed \u2014 broke with tradition by failing to stand and cheer the governor\u2019s arrival. No one rushed over to greet him. His name appeared nowhere on the lavish program. It was a day of oddly discordant imagery. Senators\u2019 children dressed in velvet crammed into the bouquet-filled chambers to pose for smiley snapshots at their parents\u2019 desks. Yet there were tense moments, too. Even as the governor stood watching from the lectern, some lawmakers made speeches that touched on the impeachment, the state\u2019s woes, the need to clean things up and start over. At one point, Mr. Blagojevich congratulated the senators, asked that people offer a prayer to Mr. Obama, and noted the coming 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln with roots in this downstate city as an inspiration for solving problems in Illinois. \u201cLet us be inspired by him,\u201d he told the silent group. Much of Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s role here was routine, announcing the Pledge of Allegiance and asking people to note the arriving color guard, but even some perfunctory matters took on a special strangeness given the circumstances. Mr. Blagojevich cheerily handed off the gavel to John J. Cullerton, the new Senate president whose first order of business will be to guide the impeachment trial, and then embraced Mr. Cullerton\u2019s wife. \u201cAwkward would be a word for it,\u201d Mr. Cullerton, a fellow Democrat who lives two block from Mr. Blagojevich on Chicago\u2019s North Side, said of the day\u2019s events. In a unanimous vote, the Senate approved rules (modeled largely on those used in President Bill Clinton\u2019s impeachment) for Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s trial, which is to start on Jan. 26 and could be done as early as Feb. 4, some officials here said. State law gives little guidance for how or what standards should be used, and never before has a governor here faced such a trial. Meanwhile, the new House of Representatives, which was also sworn in on Wednesday, had to take up the question of impeachment once more for technical reasons. The chamber voted last week to impeach the governor, but for the issue to carry over into a new session, the incoming House had to vote on it again. On Wednesday, impeachment was approved 117 to 1, with the lone dissenting vote coming from Deb Mell, a newly elected representative and Mr. Blagojevich\u2019s sister-in-law. By day\u2019s end, the Senate\u2019s sergeant-at-arms and assistant sergeant-at-arms walked down a flight of stairs to the governor\u2019s office. Behind closed doors, they delivered a summons from the Senate to his lawyers, notifying Mr. Blagojevich of the coming trial.", "keyword": "Blagojevich Rod R;Impeachment;Legislatures and Parliaments;Illinois;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0025144", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/08/31", "title": "Last Starter Standing, Mets\u2019 Gee Beats the Nationals", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 To be a Mets starting pitcher this season has been to put oneself into harm\u2019s way. To review: Johan Santana was pictured to be the club\u2019s opening day starter, but a balky shoulder ruled him out for the entire year before he threw a single official pitch in spring training. Three starters who did begin the season as planned \u2014 Shaun Marcum, Jeremy Hefner and Matt Harvey \u2014 succumbed at various times to season-ending injuries, while a fourth \u2014 Jon Niese \u2014 missed two months this summer. Add to them Jenrry Mejia, who started five games before his own elbow problems, and there crystallizes a forbidding job description. But one pitcher has resisted the trend toward fragility. Against long odds, the right-hander Dillon Gee \u2014 knock on wood \u2014 has maintained his place within the Mets\u2019 rotation and avoided the disabled list, week after perilous week. Somehow, he has become the club\u2019s most reliable starter. \u201cHe\u2019s been a huge savior for us,\u201d Manager Terry Collins said on Friday afternoon, a few hours before Gee pitched into the eighth inning to lead the Mets to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Nationals. Gee has become so important that Collins was \u201cgasping for breath,\u201d as he put it after the game, when he saw his pitcher walk off the mound and wince after one seventh-inning pitch. But when Collins ran out to check on him, Gee said he was not hurt at all. Gee thought he had struck out Ian Desmond, even though there were only two strikes, and he turned his back, assuming the infielders were tossing the ball around the diamond. When he realized his mistake, he panicked, and rolled his shoulder. He regretted his poor acting job once he saw his manager, pitching coach and trainer run to the mound looking deeply concerned. \u201cIt was a disaster,\u201d Gee said, sheepishly. Luckily for the Mets, Gee\u2019s dramatic performances have been the only ones lacking these days. The outing improved Gee\u2019s record to 10-9 and dropped his earned run average to 3.63. Before the game, Collins expressed a hope \u2014 albeit a very optimistic one \u2014 that Gee could reach 15 victories this year. Either way, a player who entered this season as a major question mark appears poised to begin the next one as a staff linchpin. Image Ike Davis hit his ninth home run of the year as the Mets beat the Nationals, 3-2. Credit Alex Brandon/Associated Press As the Mets left spring training earlier this year, Gee would not have been anyone\u2019s choice to become the team\u2019s last-standing starter this season. He finished last year on the disabled list after having a blood clot removed from his shoulder, and though he entered the 2013 season healthy, there was work needed to get his touch back. While pitching through the opening months, he developed tendinitis around his forearm, leading his manager to speculate that he, too, might go to the disabled list. But, unlike the others, Gee never did. Instead, he nestled himself into a prosperous groove, producing a 2.48 E.R.A. from May 30 to Aug. 25, baseball\u2019s fifth-lowest mark during that span. \u201cMissing essentially half the year last year, my main goal coming into this was to make every start and try to get to 200 innings,\u201d Gee said. \u201cIf I do that by the end of the year, if I can finish strong, I\u2019ll feel good about the year.\u201d Gee moved closer to the goal on Friday. Before the game, Collins praised Gee\u2019s ability to change speeds and garner ground balls, and he did just that against the Nationals, pitching seven and two-thirds innings, allowing two runs, six hits and one walk while striking out three. Wilson Ramos notched the Nationals\u2019 first hit off Gee midway through the third, and it was a big one: a solo home run into the left-field bullpen. The next half inning, Ike Davis lifted a ball to the same spot, a two-run home run that gave the Mets a 2-1 lead. Andrew Brown\u2019s eighth-inning single scored another Mets run, and it proved important, as Gee allowed a solo home run to Steve Lombardozzi during the bottom of the inning. But that was the only damage Gee incurred, and when the night was done, he further solidified his stature on the Mets\u2019 pitching staff. He has accomplished this through honing his slider command, working aggressively to both sides of the strike zone, and, just as important, staying healthy. \u201cThe best pitching staff is the healthiest pitching staff,\u201d Collins said. \u201cIt\u2019s not always the most talented.\u201d INSIDE PITCH Manager Terry Collins said shortstop Ruben Tejada would play \u201cquite a bit\u201d when he was called back up to the majors next month \u2014 although he did not know when the promotion would occur. Tejada has not played for the Mets since May 30, when he went on the disabled list amid a hugely disappointing start at the plate. On July 7, when he was healthy enough to play, he was optioned to the minor leagues. Collins said, \u201cWe\u2019ve got to find out what\u2019s going on, and we\u2019d like to see how he handles some things right now, too, because I know he\u2019s probably saying to himself, \u2018I\u2019ve got something to prove.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Washington Nationals;Mets;Dillon Gee;Ike Davis;Wilson Ramos"}
{"id": "ny0026010", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/08/13", "title": "Mets Squander Mejia\u2019s Strong Start in Loss to Dodgers", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Jenrry Mejia\u2019s pitches dipped and darted while he defanged the Los Angeles Dodgers \u2014 baseball\u2019s best team the past month and a half \u2014 through the first five innings on Monday night. But like one of Mejia\u2019s cut fastballs, the game took a sharp, swift turn as the Mets\u2019 defense fell apart during a sloppy sixth. The game\u2019s momentum shifted as the Mets\u2019 two-run lead slipped away, and they went on to fall, 4-2 , at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers have now gone 38-8 since June 22 \u2014 the franchise\u2019s best 46-game run during the modern era and baseball\u2019s best since 2001, when the Oakland Athletics produced the same record from early August to late September. The Mets, then, are only the Dodgers\u2019 latest victims. And despite the result, Manager Terry Collins gushed about his starter after the game. \u201cHe threw the ball very well tonight \u2014 very, very well,\u201d Collins said of Mejia (1-2). \u201cNobody really centered the ball too much on him. I thought he threw the ball great, kept the ball down in the zone.\u201d From the start, Mejia breezed through the daunting Dodgers lineup, retiring the first eight batters he faced before giving up a flared single to Ricky Nolasco, the opposing starter. Mejia\u2019s success thus far has been attributable to his varied and lively pitch collection, and his pitches were moving this way and that on Monday night. He lasted six innings, gave up six hits and did not walk a batter. He struck out six batters, using a much-improved changeup to accompany his cutter and slider. His earned run average after four starts sits at 2.22. Image Jenrry Mejia lasted six innings, gave up six hits and did not walk a batter in the Mets' loss on Monday. Credit Harry How/Getty Images \u201cHe\u2019s on the attack,\u201d catcher John Buck said. \u201cHe\u2019s not trying to nibble at the edges.\u201d Mejia kept attacking through the sixth, but his defense could not back him up. The Dodgers opened the inning with two base hits, one on a ground ball that rattled from Daniel Murphy\u2019s glove as he knelt to his backhand side, the other on a soft floater that bounced off Murphy\u2019s glove while he leapt attempting to grab it. They were two makeable outs, missed. \u201cThat\u2019s going to happen,\u201d Mejia said. \u201cIt\u2019s a weird game. Something happens like that, and the only thing I can do is keep doing my job and keep throwing strikes.\u201d The trouble continued, though. Adrian Gonzalez came up next and drilled a ball to center field, and as the lead runner galloped toward home, the Mets\u2019 Juan Lagares fired a throw to try to catch the trailing runner at third base. But the ball bounced well short and skipped to the Dodgers\u2019 dugout for an error. Two runs scored on the play while Gonzalez cruised to third. Yasiel Puig followed with a sacrifice fly to deep left field, giving the Dodgers a 3-2 lead. The next inning, the Mets loaded the bases with two outs. Up to the plate stepped Murphy, with a chance to atone. He ripped a ball into the right-center field gap, but Puig bounded under it, gold chain flopping out of his shirt, to make the inning-ending catch. \u201cThat\u2019s all you can do right there, just try to center it, and I did, and Puig made a great play on it,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cThe whole inning, I was hoping to get an A.B. right there after having a tough defensive go when they got the three-spot. I really wanted to hit.\u201d The Dodgers padded their lead in their half of the seventh, when Nick Punto sent a towering bases-empty home run to right field off Carlos Torres. The Mets afterward rued their inability to produce runs. They went ahead during the second inning off Nolasco, producing four straight singles. But Mejia struck out while trying to bunt, and Nolasco then induced an inning-ending double play from Eric Young. There were some aspects for the Mets to be encouraged about. Ike Davis went 1 for 3 with a walk, and he has now reached base at least twice in each of his last 12 starts, matching a franchise-best run compiled by John Olerud in 1998. Third baseman Wilmer Flores, who is trying to overcome the notion that he is a defensive liability, made a nifty diving stop to his backhand side during the fourth, two innings after he sustained a minor ankle sprain that will be re-evaluated Tuesday.", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Dodgers"}
{"id": "ny0128933", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2012/06/10", "title": "Cathedral Renamed", "abstract": "There is no more Crystal Cathedral. The glass-paned church in Garden Grove, Calif., where the televangelist Rev. Robert H. Schuller, and later his children, preached for decades is now known as Christ Cathedral. The Catholic Diocese of Orange, which acquired the Crystal Cathedral campus in February, renamed the church on Saturday, the first step toward transitioning the church to a Roman Catholic place of worship. Crystal Cathedral Ministries, which sold the building to the Diocese of Orange to emerge from bankruptcy, will remain in Christ Cathedral until next year, when its congregation will move to nearby St. Callistus Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic congregation will then move into Christ Cathedral.", "keyword": "Crystal Cathedral;Roman Catholic Church;Schuller Robert H;Garden Grove (Calif)"}
{"id": "ny0115645", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/11/14", "title": "St. John\u2019s Star Wins Over His Coach on Opening Night", "abstract": "D\u2019Angelo Harrison, who spent two exhibition games in Coach Steve Lavin\u2019s doghouse, broke out in the Red Storm\u2019s season opener, scoring 22 points as St. John\u2019s rallied to beat visiting Detroit, 77-74. In the preseason, Harrison had been kicked out of practice, played limited minutes in the first exhibition game and none in the second for not showing the leadership qualities that Lavin says he needs from the sophomore guard, the most experienced player on the youngest team in Division I. Chris Obekpa, a member of Lavin\u2019s highly regarded recruiting class, had 7 points, 11 rebounds and a team-record 8 blocked shots. It was not a perfect opening day for the Red Storm, who trailed by 37-29 at halftime and by 60-53 with 9 minutes 20 seconds left. The Red Storm finished with a 24-14 run but wavered late as Detroit (1-1) took advantage of a couple of last-minute turnovers to make it a 3-point game. Juwan Howard Jr.\u2019s 3-point try at the buzzer was short. UCONN 67, VERMONT 49 Shabazz Napier scored 13 points and the freshman Omar Calhoun added 12 for No. 23 Connecticut (2-0), which was playing its home opener after returning from Germany and an upset win over Michigan State. The Huskies held Vermont (1-1) to 30 percent shooting and 15 field goals. DUKE 75, KENTUCKY 68 Seth Curry scored 23 points and No. 9 Duke held off a late comeback by No. 3 Kentucky in Atlanta, beating the defending national champions in the first matchup between the programs since 2001. MICHIGAN 77, CLEVELAND ST. 47 Tim Hardaway Jr. had 17 points and 6 rebounds as No. 5 Michigan (3-0) advanced to the semifinals of the N.I.T. Season Tip-Off with its third straight 30-point victory. MICHIGAN ST. 67, KANSAS 64 Keith Appling scored 19 points, including a brilliant drive with 13.5 seconds left, and No. 21 Michigan State rebounded from a season-opening loss by beating No. 7 Kansas in Atlanta. MISSOURI 91, ALCORN ST. 54 Phil Pressey scored 21 points and Laurence Bowers added 14 \u2014 all in the second half \u2014 as No. 14 Missouri cruised at home. CINCINNATI 102, MISS. VALLEY ST. 60 Sean Kilpatrick scored 13 of his 20 points in the second half and Cheikh Mbodj had four of No. 24 Cincinnati\u2019s seven blocks. IN OTHER GAMES Derek Needham scored 14 points as Fairfield edged Pennsylvania, 62-53, in the second round of the N.I.T. Season Tip-Off in Charlottesville, Va. ... Velton Jones led four players in double figures with 18 points and Robert Morris made 26 free throws en route to a 74-58 win over Fordham in Pittsburgh. ... Reggie Spencer\u2019s layup with two seconds to play capped an 8-0 run as Northeastern won at Princeton, 67-66. Women BAYLOR 85, KENTUCKY 51 Brittney Griner scored 27 points as No. 1 Baylor overwhelmed sixth-ranked Kentucky. After unfurling their 2012 national championship banner before the game, the Lady Bears (2-0) built a 46-19 halftime lead against the Wildcats (2-0), who won the Southeastern Conference last season and returned four starters.", "keyword": "University of Detroit Mercy;Harrison D'Angelo;College Athletics;Basketball;Basketball (College);St John's University;Harrison D'Angelo"}
{"id": "ny0276752", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/02/22", "title": "Reporting on Life, Death and Corruption in Southeast Asia", "abstract": "BANGKOK \u2014 The protesters built what looked like medieval ramparts topped with sharpened wooden stakes in the heart of Bangkok. The military was preparing to sweep them out. As the sun was setting, I spotted Maj. Gen. Khattiya Sawatdiphol, a renegade who had defected to the protesters, and asked him what he would do next. His \u201cpeople\u2019s army\u201d would not back down, he said. \u201cThe military cannot get in here.\u201d Then came a loud crack, the sound of a sniper\u2019s bullet breaking the sound barrier. General Khattiya collapsed at my feet . One blink earlier he was answering my questions. Now he was slumped on the ground, his vacant eyes still open, as blood spilled onto his camouflage uniform. The world around me went into slow motion as I watched the general being dragged away by his supporters. I have covered life and death in Southeast Asia for the past decade, a job that has entailed puzzling over a missing Malaysian plane one day (two years later, it\u2019s still missing) and interviewing former C.I.A. mercenaries who were being hunted by the government in the jungles of Laos another. I seemed to spend almost as much time dodging the authorities as interviewing them. Image Maj. Gen. Khattiya Sawatdiphol was carried to an ambulance after being shot in the head in Bangkok on May 13, 2010. Credit Steve Pace/Reuters The bullet that felled General Khattiya in 2010 missed my head by inches. It is hard to speak collectively about a region of so many different languages, ethnicities, religions and political traditions. But as I start a new assignment in a part of the world that may as well be a different cosmos \u2014 Northern California \u2014 I have been trying to make sense of what I have seen in Southeast Asia. I come back to one theme again and again: impunity. In the killing of General Khattiya, who never regained consciousness and died several days later, a report by an independent body concluded that the assassin had probably fired from a building controlled by the military. Yet no one has ever been charged. The general who helped lead the deadly military crackdown that ensued, killing 58 civilians, is now Thailand \u2019s prime minister. \u201cUnfortunately, some people died,\u201d said the prime minister at the time, Abhisit Vejjajiva. A murder case against him was dismissed. It is often no secret who is committing abuses in Southeast Asia, whether they are illegally cutting down forests, trafficking drugs, skimming a percentage from government transactions or shooting protesters. Unusual wealth, the euphemism for suspected graft, is everywhere. The general now running Thailand, Prayuth Chan-ocha, is a career soldier from a modest background. Yet he declared a net worth of $4 million , nearly half of it in cash, soon after seizing power in a coup two years ago. (In an odd remnant of the country\u2019s democratic past, the members of the junta were required to declare their assets.) Image A Thai antigovernment protester taking cover in Bangkok in 2010. The general who helped lead the crackdown is now the prime minister. Credit Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times He has never explained how he amassed this tidy sum on his annual army salary of $40,000. \u201cDo not judge people based on your perceptions,\u201d he said in a television address after he and other top-ranking army officers and police officers revealed their fortunes. Even in countries with tight controls on the news media, like Vietnam or Malaysia , there are brave journalists and armies of bloggers and Facebook commenters who try to expose wrongdoing. But the problem in Southeast Asia seems not so much exposing the truth as doing anything about it. Watching the rise of Asia during my time here, I have wondered whether there can be continued prosperity without justice. Can societies so thoroughly riddled with corruption carry through with the remarkable economic advances made over recent decades? To see wrongdoing here, sometimes all you have to do is knock. Across the Mekong River, in Laos, at the edge of a forest, I found the walled compound of Vixay Keosavang, a Laotian businessman who has been described as the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking. After I banged on the compound\u2019s heavy metal gate, a security guard rolled it open. Yes, the guard said, there were live tigers, bears and many other endangered species inside. Neighbors said trucks regularly left Mr. Vixay\u2019s compound loaded with lizards and pangolins, an anteater-like animal that is rapidly disappearing because it is eaten for supposed medicinal qualities. Mr. Vixay had been so nonchalant in his trafficking business that he used commercial courier services to send rhino horns and ivory tusks directly to his company\u2019s office in Laos. Image General Khattiya, a renegade officer who had allied himself with protesters, was shot minutes after he was photographed talking with supporters in Bangkok. Credit Thomas Fuller/The New York Times Prompted by my article , the United States State Department offered a reward of $1 million for information leading to the dismantling of Mr. Vixay\u2019s business, the first such reward of its kind. No one has come forward to claim it. Mr. Vixay has never been charged. The Laotian authorities say they have no evidence against him. After telling me about the animals inside, the guard called Mr. Vixay on a cellphone and handed it to my interpreter. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing there,\u201d Mr. Vixay said. \u201cWho told you about it?\u201d Laos, ruled by an authoritarian Communist party, has also constructed a wall of silence over the disappearance of Sombath Somphone , a civic leader who had called for more public participation and decision-making in society. Security cameras showed him being stopped at a police checkpoint and led away in December 2012. Yet the government has repeatedly said it has no information on his whereabouts. The authorities in Southeast Asia have access to many of the same tools as their counterparts in wealthier countries. What seems to be lacking is not technology but political will to investigate powerfully connected people. Tony Pua, an opposition leader in Malaysia, calls it a culture of \u201cforget it and move on.\u201d When a boat filled with refugees from Myanmar was abandoned by its crew, adrift in the Andaman Sea without adequate food or fuel last May, I obtained the number of someone on board and asked the phone company to track the phone\u2019s location. Image Rohingya migrants passing food supplies dropped by a Thai Army helicopter to others on a boat drifting in Thai waters last May off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman Sea. Credit Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The phone company balked, so I contacted a friendly naval officer, Lt. Cmdr. Veerapong Nakprasit, who persuaded the company to give me the phone\u2019s location on humanitarian grounds. The navy, aware that the refugees could die without help, presumably could have made the request and found the boat on its own. We rented a speedboat and followed the coordinates until we found the stranded boat . Upon seeing us, several hundred rail-thin refugees, many of them women and children, called out for help. I dictated a story by phone to the newsroom in Hong Kong, and soon readers around the world were aware of the refugees\u2019 plight. We had brought bottles of water, and we tossed them to the grateful passengers. That evening, out of sight of journalists, the Thai Navy pushed the boat back out into the open sea. The refugee crisis in Southeast Asia last year spiraled into a regional embarrassment that forced governments to admit that their own officials were complicit in trafficking desperate migrants from Myanmar. Yet in Thailand, amid a supposed crackdown on trafficking by the military junta, the head of the investigation fled to Australia and applied for political asylum, saying he had been threatened by powerful people. The Thai junta has not set a firm timetable for leaving power, but its members are taking no chances. Soon after the May 2014 coup, they issued a decree that put them above the law for \u201call acts,\u201d including the seizure of power and any \u201cpunishments\u201d they meted out. The last words of the Constitution they wrote for themselves call for blanket immunity. The junta members are \u201centirely discharged\u201d for their acts. Lawyers representing the victims of the crackdown in 2010 say they see little hope for justice now that the military is in power. One of the key witnesses in the crackdown, Nattatida Meewangpla, is a paramedic who says she saw six people shot by soldiers. For the past year, she has been held in detention on the orders of a military court, charged with participating in a social media chat group that opposed the military takeover. Her lawyers say the military is trying to silence her. \u201cPeople were chased and killed,\u201d she wrote to me from prison last month. \u201cI am the only witness still breathing.\u201d My decade here has been a time of intense ambivalence. I was enchanted by people\u2019s warmth, congeniality and politeness. When I interviewed protesters on torrid summer days, they would often fan my face as we spoke. I learned from my Thai friends how to laugh away life\u2019s disappointments and annoyances. I relished the food and marveled at the hospitality. But I despaired at the venality of the elites and the corruption that engulfed the lives of so many people I interviewed. I came to see Southeast Asia as a land of great people and bad governments, of remarkable graciousness but distressing levels of impunity.", "keyword": "Asia;Corruption;Thailand;Myanmar,Burma;Laos;Malaysia;Military;Coups D'Etat;Khattiya Sawatdiphol"}
{"id": "ny0145704", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/10/14", "title": "To Bolster Confidence, Abbott Plans to Buy Back Shares", "abstract": "Abbott Laboratories said Monday that it would buy back as much as $5 billion in shares, helping drive the stock to its biggest gain in more than six years. The purchases by Abbott, the maker of drugs, medical devices and infant formula, will be made \u201cfrom time to time as market conditions warrant,\u201d the company said in a statement. The authorization to repurchase shares \u201chas no time limit and may be discontinued at any time.\u201d The company, based in Abbott Park, Ill., had fallen 12 percent this year before Monday\u2019s surge on the New York Stock Exchange and closed last week at its lowest price since Jan. 3, 2007. Health care stocks rallied the most in at least 19 years on Monday, part of a broader market rebound. Abbott was also helped by favorable studies at a meeting of heart surgeons who implant stents , the mesh sleeves used to prop open clogged arteries. The share repurchases were announced \u201cto instill confidence,\u201d Jan Wald, an analyst at the Stanford Group in Boston, said by telephone. \u201cThe company says: \u2018We believe in our stock even in these troubled times.\u2019 They feel like their stock is trading lower than it should be. We had the same sense.\u201d Abbott had about $5.18 billion in cash and short-term assets at the end of the second quarter and a market value of $76.2 billion at the end of last week. The plan announced on Monday includes the remaining $400 million in authorized share purchases from a $2.5 billion buyback program announced in October 2006. Shares of Abbott rose $4.76, or 9.6 percent, to $54.21.", "keyword": "Abbott Laboratories;Stocks and Bonds"}
{"id": "ny0068166", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2014/12/17", "title": "Slowdown in China Bruises Economy in Latin America", "abstract": "SANTIAGO, Chile \u2014 Few people are as intensely worried about the slowing Chinese economy as Latin Americans. Not only does China buy nearly 40 percent of Chile\u2019s copper, but its once-insatiable demand helped push copper prices from $1 to $4 a pound. Meanwhile, Beijing plowed billions into Peruvian mines and fisheries and spent billions more buying soybeans from Argentina and Brazil. And it propped up the Venezuelan government to the tune of $50 billion in loans, to be paid in shipments of oil. China\u2019s voracious hunger for Latin America\u2019s raw materials fueled the region\u2019s most prosperous decade since the 1970s. It filled government coffers and helped halve the region\u2019s poverty rate. That era is over. For policy makers gathered here last week for the International Monetary Fund\u2019s conference on challenges to Latin America\u2019s prosperity, there seemed to be no more clear and present danger than China\u2019s slowdown. \u201cThe commodity boom allowed governments and companies to avoid hard choices,\u201d Andr\u00e9s Velasco, Chile\u2019s finance minister from 2006 to 2010, told me. \u201cFor goodness\u2019 sake even Argentina grew by 5 to 6 percent per year for almost a decade.\u201d Copper is back under $3. As commodity prices continue to swoon, driven in large part by China\u2019s weaker demand, the going will get much tougher. That\u2019s especially true of the major oil exporters, clobbered by a collapse in oil prices driven by faltering global demand and increased supplies from the United States and elsewhere. Venezuela, notably, is in free fall. The I.M.F. expects the Venezuelan economy to contract both this year and next. And it has been forced to limit its promised oil shipments to China, in effect defaulting on its Chinese debt. But the commodity decline isn\u2019t sparing many. \u201cGrowth in Latin America should move back to pre-commodity boom rates,\u201d said Alejandro Werner, who leads the Western hemisphere division at the I.M.F. Indeed, the fund expects the region to grow barely 1.3 percent in 2014, a third of its pace just three years ago. The bust underlines how Latin American economies have failed to overcome the existential weakness that has plagued them throughout history: a dependence on raw materials that has shackled the region\u2019s development to an incessant sequence of booms and busts. From Brazil and Argentina in the southern tip of the region to Mexico in the north, officials across Latin America fretted for years that China undermined their decades-long efforts to build the manufacturing industries that, they hoped, would provide a ticket into the developed world. Not only did China\u2019s cheap labor outcompete Latin American industry and draw the lion\u2019s share of global manufacturing investment, but its appetite for Latin America\u2019s minerals, oil and agricultural products also raised the value of currencies around the region, making their manufactured goods even less competitive. Manufacturing\u2019s share in Latin America\u2019s economic output has declined steadily for more than a decade, ever since China inserted itself aggressively into the global economy by entering the World Trade Organization. At the same time, the share of raw materials in Latin America\u2019s exports, which had fallen to a low of 27 percent in the late 1990s, from about 52 percent in the early 1980s, surged back to more than 50 percent on the eve of the global financial crisis. China\u2019s footprint on Latin America is contributing to what the Harvard development expert Dani Rodrik would call its \u201c premature de-industrialization ,\u201d shutting off the standard path of economic development followed by pretty much everybody since the industrial revolution. Mr. Velasco, 54, recalled when a 23-year-old student in Antofagasta asked him what the Chilean government would do with the nation\u2019s copper riches. By the time the student was his age, Mr. Velasco responded, Chile would have no more copper. \u201cThe question,\u201d he said, \u201cisn\u2019t what should we do with copper but what will we do without it.\u201d China\u2019s diplomats emphasize that it is a developing country, not an advanced, \u201cimperialist\u201d power like the United States or the European colonial powers who ruled for centuries and served as the first foreign exploiters of Latin America\u2019s mineral wealth. To many in Latin America, the difference hardly seems relevant. Take San Juan de Marcona, a remote village on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the Nazca region of Peru. Built in the 1950s to house workers at the vast open-top American-owned iron mine, the town no longer houses managers from the United States. In the 1970s, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, then Peru\u2019s military dictator, pushed them out. Today, Marcona\u2019s managers come from Shougang, of China, which bought it from the Peruvian government in the 1990s. \u201cA growing China was very important to bring Peru along in the last 10 years,\u201d said Cynthia Sanborn, who leads the Research Center at the Universidad del Pac\u00edfico in Lima. North of Marcona, Chinalco built a town to relocate 5,000 inhabitants of Morococha, where it will blast open a copper mine. This year, China\u2019s MMG, Guoxin International Investment and Citic Metal bought the Las Bambas copper mine from the Anglo-Swiss conglomerate Glencore. Chinese companies are interested not only in raw materials but also in vast public works to transport the raw materials, including rail links across Brazil and a proposed $50 billion, 171-mile canal across Nicaragua. In 2010, Chinese lending to Latin America roughly equaled that of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United States Ex-Im Bank combined. (It has since slowed.) Carmen Reinhart of Harvard forecasts that China could become Latin America\u2019s main source of financing. Perhaps Latin America should just count its blessings. \u201cThe concerns of dependency are there, but if China weren\u2019t there, Peru would be seeking other markets for its minerals,\u201d Ms. Sanborn told me. Mr. Werner of the I.M.F. argues that the case for deindustrialization is overblown. \u201cFrom a medium-term perspective, China is a plus, plus, plus for Latin America,\u201d he said. In agriculture, for instance, exports to China are leading to lots of innovation and efficiency improvements. Demand for Brazil and Argentina\u2019s soy \u2014 a principal source of animal feed \u2014 is unlikely to wane as the Chinese become richer and eat more meat. \u201cDon\u2019t bet against nature,\u201d Mr. Werner urged policy makers in the region. \u201cPlay to your comparative advantage.\u201d In some of the region, however, China has inspired a nostalgic reinterpretation of its economic history and a re-examination of the policy choices of its past. Remember Dependency Theory? The doctrine, which spread across Latin America from the 1950s through the 1970s, proposed that the region, or any developing country, could never advance simply by selling natural resources to the rich North, using the money to import the North\u2019s industrial goods. Import substitution, behind a wall of trade barriers, was the path to prosperity. The theory fell into disrepute during Latin America\u2019s \u201clost decade\u201d of the 1980s \u2014 blamed by a new crop of market-oriented, United States-trained leaders in the 1990s for turning the region into an uncompetitive backwater. Courtesy of China, it\u2019s back, fine-tuned to adapt to a more integrated global economy. \u201cWe\u2019re not calling for more protectionism , but to substitute imports within competitive open economies,\u201d said Alicia B\u00e1rcena, who leads the United Nations\u2019 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. \u201cWe must think of creating regional production chains to serve regional markets.\u201d She suggests that China should still be invited to participate in Latin America\u2019s development, but on different terms: \u201cYou want our commodities? O.K. But also invest in solar panels here,\u201d she proposed. Yet for all the hopes in Latin America that a new kind of deal can be had, the symbiotic relationship between the largest importer of commodities and one of the biggest commodity-exporting regions of the world is unlikely to change in any substantial way. \u201cWithout this complementarity, the Chinese don\u2019t have much to go on,\u201d said Matt Ferchen, who runs the China and the Developing World program at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. \u201cIt\u2019s working out quite well for China.\u201d And the symbiosis could survive for a long time. As Huang Haizhou, the managing director of the China International Capital Corporation, told the nervous Latin Americans at the I.M.F.\u2019s conference here, despite any slowdown in growth, China\u2019s long-term demand for commodities remained voracious. China\u2019s income per person is still only about one-third that of Chile. Every year for the next 30 years, it plans to move 1.3 percent of its population from the countryside to cities. That will require a lot of construction. \u201cChina\u2019s demand for commodities is more important for Latin American growth than exports to the United States,\u201d Mr. Huang said, \u201cand it will be more important for many years to come.\u201d This may come as a relief to the worried finance ministers here, struggling to recrunch their budgets to fit lower growth and scarcer tax revenue. But it also poses a challenge to the region\u2019s leaders: maybe the traditional development strategy based on manufacturing needs to be recast in Latin America for a new era.", "keyword": "Latin America;China;Economy;International trade;Chile;Argentina;Venezuela;Commodity"}
{"id": "ny0124180", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2012/09/25", "title": "Arab Spring Proves a Harsh Test for Obama\u2019s Diplomatic Skill", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Hosni Mubarak did not even wait for President Obama \u2019s words to be translated before he shot back. \u201cYou don\u2019t understand this part of the world,\u201d the Egyptian leader broke in. \u201cYou\u2019re young.\u201d Mr. Obama, during a tense telephone call the evening of Feb. 1, 2011, had just told Mr. Mubarak that his speech, broadcast to hundreds of thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo , had not gone far enough. Mr. Mubarak had to step down, the president said. Minutes later, a grim Mr. Obama appeared before hastily summoned cameras in the Grand Foyer of the White House. The end of Mr. Mubarak\u2019s 30-year rule, Mr. Obama said, \u201cmust begin now.\u201d With those words , Mr. Obama upended three decades of American relations with its most stalwart ally in the Arab world, putting the weight of the United States squarely on the side of the Arab street. It was a risky move by the American president, flying in the face of advice from elders on his staff at the State Department and at the Pentagon, who had spent decades nursing the autocratic \u2014 but staunchly pro-American \u2014 Egyptian government. Nineteen months later, Mr. Obama was at the State Department consoling some of the very officials he had overruled. Anti-American protests broke out in Egypt and Libya . In Libya, they led to the deaths of four Americans, including the United States ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens . A new Egyptian government run by the Muslim Brotherhood was dragging its feet about condemning attacks on the American Embassy in Cairo. Television sets in the United States were filled with images of Arabs, angry over an American-made video that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad, burning American flags and even effigies of Mr. Obama. Speaking privately to grieving State Department workers, the president tried to make sense of the unfolding events. He talked about how he had been a child abroad, taught to appreciate American diplomats who risked their lives for their country. That work, and the outreach to the Arab world, he said, must continue, even in the face of mob violence that called into question what the United States can accomplish in a turbulent region. In many ways, Mr. Obama\u2019s remarks at the State Department two weeks ago \u2014 and the ones he will make before the General Assembly on Tuesday morning, when he addresses the anti-American protests \u2014 reflected hard lessons the president had learned over almost two years of political turmoil in the Arab world: bold words and support for democratic aspirations are not enough to engender good will in this region, especially not when hampered by America\u2019s own national security interests. In fact, Mr. Obama\u2019s staunch defense of democracy protesters in Egypt last year soon drew him into an upheaval that would test his judgment, his nerve and his diplomatic skill. Even as the uprisings spread to Libya, Yemen , Bahrain and Syria , the president\u2019s sympathy for the protesters infuriated America\u2019s allies in the conservative and oil-rich Gulf states. In mid-March, the Saudis moved decisively to crush the democracy protests in Bahrain, sending a convoy of tanks and heavy artillery across the 16-mile King Fahd Causeway between the two countries. That blunt show of force confronted Mr. Obama with the limits of his ability, or his willingness, to midwife democratic change. Despite a global outcry over the shooting and tear-gassing of peaceful protesters in Bahrain, the president largely turned a blind eye. His realism and reluctance to be drawn into foreign quagmires has held sway ever since, notably in Syria, where many critics continue to call for a more aggressive American response to the brutality of Bashar al-Assad \u2019s rule. Mr. Obama\u2019s journey from Cairo to the Causeway took just 44 days. In part, it reflected the different circumstances in the countries where protests broke out, despite their common origins and slogans. But his handling of the uprisings also demonstrates the gap between the two poles of his political persona: his sense of himself as a historic bridge-builder who could redeem America\u2019s image abroad, and his more cautious adherence to long-term American interests in security and cheap oil. To some, the stark difference between the outcomes in Cairo and Bahrain illustrates something else, too: his impatience with old-fashioned back-room diplomacy, and his corresponding failure to build close personal relationships with foreign leaders that can, especially in the Middle East , help the White House to influence decisions made abroad. A Focus on Respect In many ways, Mr. Obama\u2019s decision to throw American support behind change in the Arab world was made well before a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire and ignited the broadest political challenge to the region in decades. Mr. Obama, whose campaign for the presidency was in part set in motion by his early opposition to the Iraq war, came into office in January 2009 determined that he would not repeat what he viewed as the mistakes of his predecessor in pushing a \u201cfreedom agenda\u201d in Iraq and other parts of the Arab world, according to senior administration officials. Instead, he focused on mutual respect and understanding. During a speech to the Arab world in 2009 from Cairo, the president did talk about the importance of governments \u201cthat reflect the will of the people.\u201d But, he added pointedly, \u201cthere is no straight line to realize this promise.\u201d Two weeks later, as large street protests broke out in Iran after disputed presidential elections, Mr. Obama followed a low-key script, criticizing violence but saying he did not want to be seen as meddling in Iranian domestic politics. Months later, administration officials said, Mr. Obama expressed regret about his muted stance on Iran. \u201cThere was a feeling of \u2018we ain\u2019t gonna be behind the curve on this again,\u2019 \u201d one senior administration official said. He, like almost two dozen administration officials and Arab and American diplomats interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity. By the time the Tunisian protests broke out in January 2011 \u2014 an angry Mr. Obama accused his staff of being caught \u201cflat-footed,\u201d officials said \u2014 the president publicly backed the protesters. But the real test of the new muscular posture came 11 days later, when thousands of Egyptians converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo for a \u201cday of rage.\u201d Mr. Obama felt keenly, one aide said, the need for the United States, and for he himself, to stand as a moral example. \u201cHe knows that the protesters want to hear from the American president, but not just any American president,\u201d a senior aide to Mr. Obama said. \u201cThey want to hear from this American president.\u201d In other words, they wanted to hear from the first black president of the United States, a symbol of the possibility of change. If the president felt a kinship with the youthful protesters, he seems to have had little rapport with Egypt\u2019s aging president, or, for that matter, any other Arab leaders. In part, this was a function of time: he was still relatively new to the presidency, and had not built the kind of cozy relationship that the Bush family, for instance, had with the Saudis. But Mr. Obama has struggled with little success to build better relations with key foreign leaders like Hamid Karzai , the Afghan president, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia . In any case, after an awkward phone call between the American and Egyptian presidents on Jan. 28, Mr. Obama sent a senior diplomat with long experience in Egypt, Frank G. Wisner , to make a personal appeal to the Egyptian leader. But Mr. Mubarak balked. Meanwhile, the rising anger in Cairo\u2019s streets led to a new moment of reckoning for Mr. Obama: Feb. 1. That afternoon at the White House, top national security officials were meeting in the Situation Room to decide what to do about the deteriorating situation in Egypt. Thirty minutes into it, the door opened and the president walked in, crashing what was supposed to be a principals\u2019 meeting. Attending were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ; the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen ; and the national security adviser, Tom Donilon. Margaret Scobey, the ambassador in Cairo, appeared on the video conference screen. The question on the table would have been unthinkable just a week before. Should Mr. Obama call for Mr. Mubarak to step down? Midway through the meeting, an aide walked in and handed a note to Mr. Donilon. \u201cMubarak is on,\u201d he read aloud. Every screen in the Situation Room was turned to Al Jazeera , and the Egyptian leader appeared, making a much-anticipated address. He said he would not run again, but did not offer to step down. \u201cThis is my country,\u201d he said. \u201cI will die on its soil.\u201d In the Situation Room, there was silence. Then the president spoke. \u201cThat\u2019s not going to cut it,\u201d he said. Seeing the Inevitable If this were Hollywood, the story of Barack Obama and the Arab Spring would end there, with the young American president standing with the protesters against the counsel of his own advisers, and hastening the end of the entrenched old guard in Egypt. In the Situation Room, Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen, Jeffrey D. Feltman, then an assistant secretary of state, and others balked at the inclusion in Mr. Obama\u2019s planned remarks that Mr. Mubarak\u2019s \u201ctransition must begin now,\u201d arguing that it was too aggressive. Mr. Mubarak had steadfastly stood by the United States in the face of opposition from his own public, they said. The president, officials said, countered swiftly: \u201cIf \u2018now\u2019 is not in my remarks, there\u2019s no point in me going out there and talking.\u201d John O. Brennan , chief counterterrorism adviser to Mr. Obama, said the president saw early on what others did not: that the Arab Spring movement had legs. \u201cA lot of people were in a state of denial that this had an inevitability to it,\u201d Mr. Brennan said in an interview. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s what the president clearly saw, that there was an inevitability to it that would clearly not be turned back, and it would only be delayed by suppression and bloodshed.\u201d So \u201cnow\u201d stayed in Mr. Obama\u2019s statement. Ten days later, Mr. Mubarak was out. Even after the president\u2019s remarks, Mrs. Clinton was still publicly cautioning that removing Mr. Mubarak too hastily could threaten the country\u2019s transition to democracy. In the end, many of the advisers who initially opposed Mr. Obama\u2019s stance now give him credit for prescience. But there were consequences, and they were soon making themselves felt. Angry Reactions On Feb. 14, in the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain, Internet calls for a \u201cday of rage\u201d led to street rallies and bloody clashes with the police. The next day at a news conference in Washington, Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that this revolt was much like the others. His message to Arab allies, he said, was \u201cif you are governing these countries, you\u2019ve got to get out ahead of change.\u201d But in the following weeks, Mr. Obama fell silent. Away from the public eye, he was coming under assault from leaders in Saudi Arabia , the United Arab Emirates , even Israel . Angry at the treatment of Mr. Mubarak, which officials from the Gulf states feared could forecast their own abandonment, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates drew a line in the sand. Some American and Arab diplomats say that response could have been avoided if Mr. Obama had worked quietly to ease Mr. Mubarak out, rather than going public. On March 14, White House officials awoke to a nasty surprise: the Saudis had led a military incursion into Bahrain, followed by a crackdown in which the security forces cleared Pearl Square in the capital, Manama, by force. The moves were widely condemned, but Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton offered only veiled criticisms, calling for \u201ccalm and restraint on all sides\u201d and \u201cpolitical dialogue.\u201d The reasons for Mr. Obama\u2019s reticence were clear: Bahrain sits just off the Saudi coast, and the Saudis were never going to allow a sudden flowering of democracy next door, especially in light of the island\u2019s sectarian makeup. Bahrain\u2019s people are mostly Shiite, and they have long been seen as a cat\u2019s paw for Iranian influence by the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In addition, the United States maintains a naval base in Bahrain that is seen as a bulwark against Iran, crucial for maintaining the flow of oil from the region. \u201cWe realized that the possibility of anything happening in Saudi Arabia was one that couldn\u2019t become a reality,\u201d said William M. Daley , President Obama\u2019s chief of staff at the time. \u201cFor the global economy, this couldn\u2019t happen. Yes, it was treated differently from Egypt. It was a different situation.\u201d Some analysts credit Mr. Obama for recognizing early on that strategic priorities trumped whatever sympathy he had for the protesters. Others say the administration could have more effectively mediated between the Bahraini government and the largely Shiite protesters, and thereby avoided what has become a sectarian standoff in one of the world\u2019s most volatile places. If Mr. Obama had cultivated closer ties to the Saudis, he might have bought time for negotiations between the Bahraini authorities and the chief Shiite opposition party, Al Wefaq, according to one American diplomat who was there at the time. Instead, the Saudis gave virtually no warning when their forces rolled across the causeway linking Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the ensuing crackdown destroyed all hopes for a peaceful resolution. The lingering resentment over Mr. Mubarak\u2019s ouster had another apparent consequence. Mrs. Clinton\u2019s criticism of the military intervention in a Paris television interview angered officials of the United Arab Emirates, whose military was also involved in the Bahrain operation and who shared the Saudis\u2019 concern about the Mubarak episode. The Emiratis promptly threatened to withdraw from the coalition then being assembled to support a NATO -led strike against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi , the Libyan leader. The Emiratis knew they were needed to give the coalition legitimacy. They quickly named their price for staying on board, according to Arab and Western diplomats familiar with the episode: Mrs. Clinton must issue a statement that would pull back from any criticism of the Bahrain operation. The statement, hastily drafted and vetted by Emirati and American officials, appeared soon afterward, in the guise of a communiqu\u00e9 on Libya. The tensions between Mr. Obama and the Gulf states, both American and Arab diplomats say, derive from an Obama character trait: he has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders. \u201cHe\u2019s not good with personal relationships; that\u2019s not what interests him,\u201d said one United States diplomat. \u201cBut in the Middle East, those relationships are essential. The lack of them deprives D.C. of the ability to influence leadership decisions.\u201d A Lack of Chemistry Arab officials echo that sentiment, describing Mr. Obama as a cool, cerebral man who discounts the importance of personal chemistry in politics. \u201cYou can\u2019t fix these problems by remote control,\u201d said one Arab diplomat with long experience in Washington. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t have friends who are world leaders. He doesn\u2019t believe in patting anybody on the back, nicknames. \u201cYou can\u2019t accomplish what you want to accomplish\u201d with such an impersonal style, the diplomat said. Mr. Obama\u2019s advisers argue that when he does reach out, he is more effective \u2014 as in a phone call last week to Mohamed Morsi , the new president of Egypt. After Mr. Morsi\u2019s initial tepid response to the attacks on the embassy in Cairo, a fed-up Mr. Obama demanded a show of support. Within an hour, he had it. \u201cWere he to be calling all the time, it would run counter to our assertion that we won\u2019t dictate the outcome of every decision in every country,\u201d said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a top national security aide. Limiting his outreach, Mr. Rhodes said, \u201cheightens the impact of presidential engagement\u201d when Mr. Obama does get on the phone. Still, there remains concern in the administration that at any moment, events could spiral out of control, leaving the president and his advisers questioning their belief that their early support for the Arab Spring would deflect longstanding public anger toward the United States. For instance, Mr. Feltman, the former assistant secretary of state, said, \u201cthe event I find politically most disturbing is the attack on Embassy Tunis.\u201d Angry protesters breached the grounds of the American diplomatic compound there last week \u2014 in a country previously known for its moderation and secularism \u2014 despite Mr. Obama\u2019s early support for the democracy movement there. \u201cThat really shakes me out of complacency about what I thought I knew.\u201d", "keyword": "Barack Obama;Arab Spring;2012 Presidential Election;US Foreign Policy;Hosni Mubarak;Egypt;Libya;Bahrain;null"}
{"id": "ny0070501", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2015/03/20", "title": "U.C.L.A. Edges S.M.U. With Late Goaltending Call", "abstract": "LOUISVILLE, Ky. \u2014 U.C.L.A.\u2019s Bryce Alford let his 3-pointer fly and immediately knew the ball was off line. It was veering right, he said. He just hoped a teammate might snatch the rebound and put the ball back in the basket with the Bruins trailing Southern Methodist, 59-57, with 13 seconds to play. Indeed, a hand went up in front of the rim, but it belonged to the 6-foot-11 S.M.U. center Yanick Moreira, who tipped Alford\u2019s shot as it came down from its arc. There was a whistle, and an official rushed to the middle of the floor. Moreira, a senior from Angola, stood with his mouth wide open in the middle of the lane. The official called goaltending, and the N.C.A.A. tournament had an instant controversy. \u201cI thought the ball was short,\u201d Moreira said in the S.M.U. locker room. \u201cI was trying to get the rebound so nobody could go get it. If the official say it\u2019s a goaltend, it\u2019s a goaltend; you can\u2019t argue with the referee.\u201d S.M.U. fumed on the bench, then regrouped and ran a play for the junior guard Nic Moore, who missed a 3-pointer from the right wing with four seconds to play. Moore got the ball back and took another 3-pointer that missed as time expired. So, U.C.L.A., the 11th seed and a maligned tournament selection because of its uneven play this season, escaped with a 60-59 victory in the South Region game in the KFC Yum! Center and reached the round of 32. A pool reporter interviewed Antinio Petty, the referees\u2019 crew chief, who said the goaltending call was based on an interpretation of the rule 9.3, parts 1 and 2. Petty said the ball was on a downward flight, which is part 1 of the rule. He said part 2 states that if the ball is above the level of the ring and has a possibility while in flight of entering the basket and is not touching the cylinder, the ruling is goaltending. Image Moreira, center, after the goaltending call. Credit David Stephenson/Associated Press The officials briefly stopped the game to check the video to make sure Alford, the son of U.C.L.A. Coach Steve Alford, was behind the 3-point line. The goaltending call was not reviewable, said Sam Hull, one of the officials. \u201cI\u2019m sad,\u201d Moreira said. \u201cI worked hard all summer to get here. To end up like this, I don\u2019t think we deserved to end up like this. We had our shots to win the game; we let the referee make that call.\u201d U.C.L.A. will meet 14th-seeded U.A.B. on Saturday. Alford was brilliant, finishing with 27 points on 9-of-11 shooting from behind the arc. He staged a terrific duel with the 5-foot-9 Moore, who scored 24 points and played all 40 minutes. The Bruins (21-13) led by 34-30 at the half and then clamped down on sixth-seeded S.M.U. during the second half, holding the Mustangs to 5 points during a stretch of nearly nine minutes. U.C.L.A. led, 44-35, with 9 minutes 42 seconds to play. The Mustangs (27-7) suddenly came to life on a pair of 3-pointers by Moore. As U.C.L.A. went more than eight minutes without a point, S.M.U. roared ahead and led, 59-52, with 1 minute 26 seconds to play. Alford hit a 3-pointer and Norman Powell hit two free throws with 29 seconds to play to give S.M.U. a 59-57 lead. The Mustangs turned the ball over, setting up the decisive shot by Alford. He came around the left wing with Moore trailing him and launched the fateful 3-pointer. \u201cI\u2019m not saying it wasn\u2019t goaltending,\u201d said S.M.U. Coach Larry Brown. \u201cI have no clue. But it was a five-second judgment. I don\u2019t know. I just \u2014 it kind of blew me away. Again, you don\u2019t look at one play. We had our chances to win, and it didn\u2019t happen.\u201d", "keyword": "College basketball;University of California; Los Angeles;Southern Methodist University;NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness"}
{"id": "ny0202346", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/08/02", "title": "At Cracovia, a Homemade Taste of Poland", "abstract": "In an era of short cuts, high-fructose corn syrup and modified this-and-that, an honest restaurant that makes most items from scratch is an increasingly rare and welcome experience. Cracovia, a landmark Polish eatery, is just such a place. Landmarks come in all guises, and Cracovia, having reached the quarter-century mark, shows its age no less than numerous other forlorn-looking shops of downtown New Britain. No matter. The staff of this diner-style restaurant is uniformly welcoming, and the menu features so much stick-to-your-ribs comfort food that a dockworker from Gdansk might feel right at home. \u201cEverything is homemade and prepared fresh daily,\u201d said Gregory Adamski, the owner. That appears to be true of a wholesome chicken soup ($3.50 a bowl) that is loaded with carrots, noodles and nuggets of white meat. And it\u2019s clearly the case with breakfast staples like French toast, omelets, and eggs with kielbasa ($5.50 to $6.25), as well as the pork chop sandwich ($6.95, with sauerkraut) and other luncheon fare. Among the daily dinner specials rotating throughout the week are goulash with dumplings on Tuesdays, potato pancakes in Hungarian sauce on Fridays and roast pork stuffed with plums on Sundays (from $10 to $12). Soups also rotate, although tripe and red beet ($6.50 and $5.50) are available daily. Salisbury steak is on the menu \u2014 along with meatloaf, burgers and hot dogs \u2014 but in a place where Polish is more commonly spoken than English, the strength of the kitchen lies in its native cuisine. The highlights include cheese blintzes, pirogi, golabki (cabbage stuffed with ground meat and rice, covered in tomato sauce) and bigos (sauerkraut saut\u00e9ed with bits of meat and kielbasa). Prices for entrees, averaging $10, are refreshingly Old World, too. Cracovia Restaurant, 60 Broad Street, New Britain, (860) 223-4443. Open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. CHRISTOPHER BROOKS", "keyword": "Restaurants;Cooking and Cookbooks;Connecticut"}
{"id": "ny0216488", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/04/09", "title": "In 3rd Trial, Conviction in Murders From 1985", "abstract": "A soldier acquitted of three murders more than 20 years ago in civilian court was convicted by a military jury on Thursday because of DNA tests that were not available in the earlier trial. The soldier, Master Sgt. Timothy B. Hennis, 52, had been recalled to active service specifically to face the military court at Fort Bragg, N.C. He had initially been convicted of raping and murdering Kathryn Eastburn and killing her two young daughters in 1985 in Fayetteville, N.C. But the North Carolina Supreme Court called for a retrial, saying the testimony had been weak. That second trial, in 1989, ended in acquittal. In the years since then, DNA identification technology improved, and a subsequent test linked Mr. Hennis to Ms. Eastburn\u2019s body. Mr. Hennis could not be tried again in state court under rules of double jeopardy, but could be tried by a military jury for the crime, which occurred while he was stationed at Fort Bragg. The military had taken up the case in 2006 after a cold-case detective at the Cumberland County Sheriff\u2019s Office had materials from Ms. Eastburn\u2019s autopsy tested for DNA and there was a match to Mr. Hennis, The Fayetteville Observer reported. The verdict on Thursday prompted claims of vindication by death penalty advocates, who noted that Mr. Hennis had long appeared on the \u201c innocence list\u201d maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center . The list documents 139 people freed from death row and has been a potent talking point in the death penalty debate. Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation , a group in Sacramento that favors the death penalty, issued a statement after the verdict in which he said that \u201cthe so-called innocence list is nothing of the sort.\u201d In an interview, Mr. Scheidegger said that the Hennis case showed the stark difference between a jury\u2019s not finding guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and actual proof of innocence. In the Hennis case, he said, \u201cwe have proof that he was a guilty murderer who got away with it, and yet he was on the innocence list.\u201d Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in an interview that Mr. Hennis\u2019s name would be removed from the innocence list. But Mr. Dieter defended the list and its name. Being found \u201cnot guilty\u201d is not innocence in the sense of \u201cinnocent as a newborn babe,\u201d he said, and \u201cwe\u2019ve never said that\u2019s what the innocence list is about.\u201d The sentencing hearing for Mr. Hennis will start Friday.", "keyword": "Decisions and Verdicts;Crime and Criminals;Forensic Science;Capital Punishment;Fort Bragg (NC)"}
{"id": "ny0222966", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2010/11/28", "title": "United in Premier League Lead", "abstract": "Dimitar Berbatov scored five goals to lead Manchester United into the Premier League lead with a 7-1 rout of Blackburn. United helped the Premier League set a single-day scoring record with 36 goals, according to Sky Sports.", "keyword": "Soccer;English Premier League;Manchester United"}
{"id": "ny0285520", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/09/21", "title": "China Announces Inquiry Into Company Trading With North Korea", "abstract": "The police in northeastern China have announced a criminal investigation into a Chinese conglomerate that does extensive trade with North Korea, which researchers in South Korea and the United States say included materials that can be used in the production of nuclear weapons. The Public Security Department of Liaoning Province said on a government website last week that the Hongxiang conglomerate, based in Dandong, a major trading center with North Korea, was suspected of \u201cserious economic crimes.\u201d \u201cDuring their work, the Liaoning public security authorities discovered that for a long time the Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Company Ltd. and a relevant responsible individual engaged in suspected grave economic crimes during trading activities,\u201d the department said. The police did not specify whether the company\u2019s prominent chairwoman, Ma Xiaohong, was under investigation, nor did it say whether the company was the object of scrutiny for its North Korean business, which makes up the bulk of its trade. The action was compelled by two recent visits to Beijing by officials from the Justice Department to warn the Chinese of the illegal activities of the Dandong company, according to an American law enforcement official who asked not to be identified before a pending announcement of charges against the company by the United States. The information provided to the Chinese included allegations that the company was helping North Korea\u2019s nuclear weapons program, the official said. The statement by Liaoning Province came just days before a report issued on Tuesday by a South Korean think tank and a Washington research group that singled out the Hongxiang group for dealing in products that can be used to make nuclear weapons. Ms. Ma has avidly supported stronger economic ties with North Korea and has called the Hongxiang group a \u201cgolden bridge\u201d between China and the North. One of the targets of the Chinese investigations appears to be aluminum products that Hongxiang is said to have sold to North Korea. A division of the Hongxiang conglomerate sent two shipments of aluminum oxide worth $253,219 to North Korea last September, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in South Korea and the C4ADS research group in Washington said in their report. According to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, aluminum oxide is used to avert corrosion in gas centrifuges during uranium enrichment. The report listed three other products \u2014 aluminum ingots, ammonium paratungstate and tungsten trioxide \u2014 that Hongxiang sold to North Korea and that the United States Commerce Department considers to have possible civilian and nuclear uses. Aluminum oxide is among a long list of items issued in 2013 by China\u2019s Ministry of Commerce that are banned for sale to North Korea. The unusual action by China follows congressional legislation passed this year aimed at forcing Beijing to penalize its companies that do business with North Korea. And Ms. Ma\u2019s Hongxiang group has been an especially energetic player in such business. \u201cBe thankful that we were born in this great era and were born in Dandong, this beautiful city on the frontier of China and North Korea,\u201d Ms. Ma, 44, wrote in an introduction to herself on the Hongxiang conglomerate\u2019s website . \u201cBe even more thankful that we have chosen this business of doing trade and serving as a shipping agent with North Korea. North Korea\u2019s resumed resurgence and unlimited needs can make all our dreams became possible.\u201d According to the Hongxiang website, where Ms. Ma appears in photographs as a philanthropist with boundless enthusiasm for trade between China and North Korea, the conglomerate\u2019s business interests include chemicals, minerals, metals and coal, the latter one of North Korea\u2019s most valuable exports. After North Korea held its first nuclear test in 2006, Ms. Ma told a Chinese newspaper that she was \u201cnot too surprised.\u201d She said, \u201cI think the groundwork has been prepared for a long time.\u201d The company also owns hotels, travel agencies and a shipping fleet of 10 vessels that link Chinese and North Korean ports and apparently carry coal out of the North, the report said. Washington and Beijing have had mounting difficulty in agreeing on how to deal with North Korea\u2019s expanding nuclear weapons program. The North conducted its fifth underground nuclear test less than two weeks ago, its most powerful so far. The Chinese government criticized the test but has strongly protested the decision by the Obama administration this summer to deploy an advanced missile defense system in South Korea intended to give the country protection against the North\u2019s weapons. During a meeting in Hangzhou, China, this month, China\u2019s leader, Xi Jinping, raised the issue of the missile system with President Obama. The two sides failed to resolve the issue, Mr. Obama said later. The investigation by the Chinese authorities was not surprising, said an expert on North Korea, Cheng Xiaohe, an assistant professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. The action did not suggest a sweeping inquiry into Chinese trade with North Korea, he said. \u201cIf the United States makes concrete allegations, China has to oblige,\u201d he said. The Chinese government may use the inquiry to concentrate on one relatively small company while warning bigger entities like banks of the consequences of continuing to do business with the North, he said. After protracted negotiations with the United States, China agreed this year to tougher United Nations sanctions on the North. But enforcement by the Chinese has been lax, analysts say. Coal is North Korea\u2019s major export and foreign currency earner, and most of North Korea\u2019s coal is shipped through China. Recent figures showed that coal sales were down 12 percent since the sanctions were put into effect, a marginal amount, said Stephan Haggard, a Korea specialist at the University of California, San Diego. Until now, Ms. Ma has enjoyed support from the Chinese authorities, especially the Dandong government. As recently as June, the Ministry of Commerce gave Hongxiang a license to import oil products , something private Chinese businesses can do only with special permission. But a spreading political scandal also implicated Ms. Ma and may have been another sign that she has lost her political protection. Ms. Ma was among 452 delegates of the Liaoning Province People\u2019s Congress who were stripped of their membership this month after investigators found that they had bribed their way onto the legislature. Membership brings little power but creates opportunities to mingle, and make deals with, powerful officials and entrepreneurs. People who answered telephone calls to Ms. Ma\u2019s offices said they could not speak to journalists or did not know where she was. The Liaoning police also declined to comment. In 2006, Ms. Ma told the newspaper Southern Weekly that doing business with North Korea could be perilous. \u201cIf the political winds really change, our business will be smashed to smithereens,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Dandong;Embargoes Sanctions;Nuclear weapon;Nuclear weapons testing;North Korea;Ma Xiaohong;Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Company;South Korea;China"}
{"id": "ny0221786", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2010/02/22", "title": "Brazil\u2019s Navy Defends Its Response to a Capsizing", "abstract": "S\u00c3O PAULO, Brazil (AP) \u2014 The Brazilian Navy on Sunday defended its response to a shipwreck that left dozens of teenage students from around the world adrift on the ocean for two nights. It took about 19 hours for the navy to deploy a search aircraft after it received a distress signal from the S. V. Concordia on Wednesday, but officials said that was in line with standard procedure. All 48 students and 16 crew members were safely rescued Friday, nearly 40 hours after the sailing ship capsized in the Atlantic several hundred miles off the Brazilian coast. The students were participating in the Class Afloat program , based in Canada. A navy spokeswoman, Maria Padilha, said that naval responders received a distress signal about 10 p.m. local time on Wednesday and immediately tried to make radio contact with the vessel. They also communicated with nearby ships and aircraft to see if they could spot anything wrong in the area, Ms. Padilha said. When efforts to communicate with the ship failed, the navy reached out to school officials in Canada, but not until about 10 a.m. Thursday. The naval officials also had no luck getting the ship\u2019s captain and crew members on the radio or through e-mail messages, prompting the navy to ask for an air force search operation in the general location of the distress signal. An aircraft left about 5 p.m. local time and about three hours later spotted the students and crew on rafts 300 miles off the coast.", "keyword": "Brazil;Ships and Shipping"}
{"id": "ny0274491", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2016/02/20", "title": "Signs of Growing Inflation in Consumer Price Survey", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Consumer prices in the United States were unchanged in January as the rising costs of housing and health care were largely offset by cheaper oil. But the annual pace of inflation showed signs of acceleration. The Labor Department said Friday that prices rose 1.4 percent over the last 12 months, compared with a year ago, when annual inflation was close to zero. Consumer prices climbed at the fastest annual rate since October 2014. Core inflation, which excludes the volatile energy and food costs, rose 0.3 percent in January. Over the last 12 months, this category, which is closely watched by the Federal Reserve, has climbed 2.2 percent. The rising tempo for inflation follows a Fed decision in December to raise a crucial short-term interest rate for the first time in nearly a decade. But the turmoil in the stock and bond markets after the rate increase suggested to many investors that inflation might barely budge in a slowing global economy . Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, said January\u2019s report on consumer prices affirmed the Fed\u2019s decision and raised the potential for further rate increases this year. \u201cIn a way, this justifies the December rate hike and keeps the Fed at the rate hike table,\u201d Ms. Lee said. The combination of a strong dollar and cheaper oil has suppressed inflation across much of the economy. Gasoline prices at the pump have dropped 24 percent over the last year to a national average of $1.72 a gallon. At the same time, economic growth struggles worldwide have pushed up the value of the dollar, making imports cheaper. But the rate at which gasoline prices were declining slowed in January. Housing expenses \u2014 which account for a third of the Consumer Price Index \u2014 have risen 3.2 percent from a year ago. Medical services are up 3.3 percent. In January, prices also rose on a monthly basis for airfare, clothing and autos, while food expenses were flat. The Fed is closely following inflation, looking for assurance that it will accelerate to 2 percent in its preferred measure. That particular measure of personal consumption places less emphasis on housing. It posted a modest annual increase of 0.6 percent in December. Policy makers at the Fed have concerns about threats to American economic growth coming from lower oil prices and slowing growth in China and other emerging markets, according to the minutes of their January meeting released Wednesday. The officials said these global pressures made it harder to forecast growth and inflation, two crucial factors for deciding the pace of additional rate increases. \"Most participants indicated that it was difficult to judge at this point whether the outlook for inflation and economic growth had changed materially, but they thought that uncertainty surrounding the outlook had increased as a result of recent financial and economic developments,\u201d the minutes said.", "keyword": "Inflation;Consumer price index;US Economy"}
{"id": "ny0195089", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2009/11/15", "title": "New Zealand, Cameroon and Nigeria Claim World Cup Berths", "abstract": "New Zealand reached the World Cup for the first time since 1982 , and Cameroon and Nigeria also qualified Saturday for next year\u2019s tournament in South Africa. Algeria was seconds from qualifying in Cairo, but Emad Meteab headed in a goal in the fifth minute of second-half injury time to give Egypt a 2-0 victory. The teams will play a tie-breaker playoff on Wednesday in Sudan. Egyptian fans met the Algerian team at the airport on Thursday and pelted its bus with stones ; Algerian officials said two team members were injured. On Saturday, the players, Khaled Lemmouchia and Rafik Halliche, wore head bandages in the game. \u201cWe played under warlike conditions,\u201d the Algerian Football Association president, Mohammad Rawrawa, said. \u201cIt was difficult to perform well, but we will win on Wednesday in Sudan because the atmosphere will be calmer.\u201d In the first leg of European playoffs, France won, 1-0, at Ireland on a deflected goal by Nicolas Anelka; Portugal beat visiting Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1-0, on a goal by Bruno Alves; Russia won, 2-1, at home against Slovenia as Diniyar Bilyaletdinov scored twice; and Greece was held to a 0-0 tie by visiting Ukraine. \u201cWe have seen that the Irish team are a very difficult team to beat,\u201d said the French forward Thierry Henry, who is bidding to play at his fourth World Cup. \u201cThey didn\u2019t lose a game in qualification, so what we did tonight is nice. But it\u2019s still 90 minutes to go, and it\u2019s going to be a tough game for us in Paris.\u201d In the first leg of the South American-North and Central American and Caribbean playoff, Diego Lugano scored in the 23nd minute, to give visiting Uruguay a 1-0 victory over Costa Rica in San Jose. The second leg will be Wednesday in Montevideo. Twenty-six of the 32 World Cup berths are set, with the rest to be settled Wednesday. The draw dividing the teams into eight first-round groups is Dec. 4. In Wellington, Rory Fallon scored on a header off a corner kick in the 44th minute, and New Zealand held on to beat Bahrain, 1-0. The teams had played a scoreless tie Oct. 10 in Manama in the first leg of the home-and-home, total-goals playoff. Bahrain, which has never appeared in the World Cup, lost a playoff to Trinidad and Tobago in 2005. It could have tied the aggregate score in the 50th minute Saturday \u2014 and moved ahead on away goals \u2014 but Sayed Adnan took a weak penalty kick that was saved by Mark Paston. \u201cI basically just guessed which way he\u2019d go, and the ball ended up in my hands,\u201d Paston said. Cameroon qualified for its sixth World Cup, beating host Morocco, 2-0, on goals by Achille Webo in the 18th minute and by Samuel Eto\u2019o in the 52nd. The six World Cup appearances for Cameroon are the most for an African team. Nigeria overtook Tunisia on the final day of its World Cup qualifying campaign by rallying to beat Kenya, 3-2, in Nairobi. Obafemi Martins scored twice for the Super Eagles. SLOVAKIA 1, U.S. 0 Marek Hamsik converted a penalty kick in the 26th minute in a World Cup warm-up in Bratislava. Slovakia, preparing for its first World Cup appearance as an independent nation, was awarded the penalty kick by the Austrian referee Stefan Messner after the American defender Jonathan Bornstein pushed down Vladimir Weiss in the penalty area. Hamsik sent a low shot to the right corner as goalkeeper Brad Guzan dived in the opposite direction. M.L.S. PLAYOFFS Real Salt Lake advanced to its first M.L.S. Cup final by beating the Chicago Fire, 5-4 on penalty kicks, after 120 scoreless minutes in the Eastern Conference final in Bridgeview, Ill. Ned Grabavoy, who entered as a substitute in the final minute of overtime, scored the winning penalty kick in the seventh round as his shot went off the fingertips of Fire goalkeeper Jon Busch. Real Salt Lake will play the Los Angeles Galaxy for the championship on Nov. 22 at Qwest Field in Seattle. The Galaxy reached the title game with a 2-0 overtime win against Houston on Friday. Gregg Berhalter and Landon Donovan scored for the Galaxy. IN OTHER GAMES Brazil beat England, 1-0, in Doha, Qatar, on Nilmar\u2019s headed goal early in the second half. ... Xabi Alonso scored twice to lead Spain, the European champion, over Argentina, 2-1, in Madrid. ... Giampaolo Pazzini had a goal disallowed for a hand ball in the 82nd minute, and Italy played the Netherlands to a scoreless tie in Pescara.", "keyword": "Soccer;World Cup (Soccer);New Zealand;Cameroon;Algeria"}
{"id": "ny0046286", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/02/22", "title": "Germany: Frankfurt Strike Stalls Flights", "abstract": "A strike by the security staff at Frankfurt Airport caused dozens of flight cancellations and delayed thousands of passengers, creating chaos at Europe\u2019s third-largest airport on Friday. Union leaders had called on about 5,000 workers who carry out security checks on passengers, baggage and freight at the airport to strike for a day to demand that their wages be raised to the levels of their counterparts at other German airports. The Frankfurt airport handles 150,000 passengers on a typical Friday. About 90 flights were canceled, with Lufthansa scrapping nearly 40. The strike was called after four rounds of talks between the union, Verdi, and the employers\u2019 association BDSW, which represents about 185,000 workers employed by private companies, ended without agreement. The BDSW is offering a two-stage increase to 14 euros an hour, or $19.24, but Verdi wants hourly pay for its members to be increased to \u20ac16, or $21.99, immediately.", "keyword": "Frankfurt;Strikes Labor;Airport;Airlines,airplanes;Labor Unions;Deutsche Lufthansa;Germany"}
{"id": "ny0249328", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2011/05/14", "title": "Millrose Games to Move From Madison Square Garden", "abstract": "The Millrose Games will be broken into two sessions and held on a Saturday when the meet moves next year to the Armory Track and Field Center in Upper Manhattan. The Armory Foundation, which owns the rights to the meet, said in a statement Friday that it was trying reinvigorate the meet, which has been held for nearly a century at Madison Square Garden. In recent years, the Millrose Games have suffered from declining attendance and growing costs. \u201cWe just want to breathe some fresh air into this,\u201d said Norbert Sander Jr., the executive director of the Armory Foundation. However, USA Track and Field, the sport\u2019s governing body in the United States, opposes the move and said it would not pay for the money-losing event, as it has for years, if the Millrose Games were held at the Armory. Jill Geer, a spokeswoman for USA Track and Field, said that \u201celite professional track and field in New York belongs at the Garden.\u201d Sander said his group was interested in working with USA Track and Field but that the next Millrose Games would be held on Jan. 28 at the Armory. The meet will include a session from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for high school, collegiate and masters runners, and an evening session for the elite runners from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The meet will conclude with the Wanamaker Mile. If the Armory sells out its roughly 4,000 seats for the both sessions, total attendance would approach 9,000, roughly the number of fans who attended the meet at the Garden this year, Sander said. Tickets would cost $20 for high school students and $30 for general admission seats; tickets for reserved seats would cost $50; and a few hundred exclusive seats near the track would be priced at about $100, Sander said. The prices were roughly in line with those at the Garden. The cost of running the event would fall significantly, though, primarily because it costs roughly $400,000 to rent the Garden, which seats about 16,500. Still, to find the money to pay top athletes, the Armory Foundation will have to find additional financial support. Talks are under way with several banks and other companies about potential sponsorships. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the big budget like they do,\u201d Sander said, referring to USA Track and Field, which spent about $1 million a year to put on the Millrose Games. \u201cThe pros are very expensive, but they don\u2019t have many places to go. So if we have reasonable prize money, at least they feel they are getting respect.\u201d Sander said that the Millrose Games, which were first held in 1908 at an armory, would be televised next year. It is possible that USA Track and Field could hold a rival meet at the Garden, which would complicate efforts to recruit top athletes, some of whom ran in the Millrose Games only because they were held in such a famous arena. The Armory\u2019s 200-meter track is considered one of the fastest in the country, something that will appeal to some runners. But the Garden\u2019s quirky 180-yard track gave the meet a unique feeling, not unlike playing baseball in Fenway Park or Wrigley Field. Howard Schmertz, who was the race director for nearly three decades, succeeding his father, who ran the event for more than four decades, said he had \u201cmixed emotions about the event moving.\u201d The track, at 11 laps to the mile, was short, but it had a \u201clong history,\u201d Schmertz said. \u201cI\u2019m going to have pangs not going to the Garden. It won\u2019t be the games as we know it.\u201d", "keyword": "Track and Field;Millrose Games;Madison Square Garden;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0056865", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2014/09/26", "title": "Military Path Opened for Young Immigrants", "abstract": "A small number of young immigrants who grew up in the United States without legal status will be allowed to join the military and have a fast-track pathway to citizenship, Pentagon officials announced Thursday, the first time those young people have been able to enlist. Undocumented young people who have been granted deportation deferrals by the Obama administration will be eligible to apply for the military under a recruitment program for immigrants with special language and medical skills, according to a memo issued Thursday by Jessica L. Wright, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. But administration officials emphasized that the number who would succeed in enlisting would be very small, probably not more than a few dozen. The requirements are stringent and the program is currently limited to 1,500 recruits each year, and already has a huge backlog of applicants. Advocates for the young people, who call themselves Dreamers, have been pressing the administration to allow all of them with deferrals to enlist, and they were both heartened and sharply disappointed by the Pentagon decision. \u201cThis is a first step, and we commend the administration for recognizing the skills and talents a lot of us do have,\u201d said Cesar Vargas, a leader of the Dream Action Coalition, who has said he would like to join the military. \u201cBut it definitely needs to be expanded.\u201d Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, who has urged President Obama to allow far broader enlistment of young people with deferrals, called the decision a \u201cmissed opportunity.\u201d Last spring Pentagon officials were considering whether to open recruitment to the young people with deferrals under a two-year-old program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The deferrals do not confer any resident status, but they do allow the young people to remain in the country legally. More than 580,000 young people have received them. The White House instructed military officials to hold off, saying the president was waiting to see if House Republicans would move forward on immigration overhaul legislation. That legislation died over the summer, and the president is now weighing executive action he could take to halt deportations for more immigrants who are here illegally. But administration officials said the Pentagon\u2019s decision was separate from the president\u2019s deliberations and was not a preview of the measures he might take, which he has said will come after the November midterm elections. Pentagon officials said they acted to change the recruitment rules because the immigrant program, known as Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or Mavni, was set to expire next Wednesday. It was renewed on Thursday for two years. The Pentagon program was created for temporary immigrants who speak one of about three dozen languages including Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Pashto, Nepalese, Russian, Uzbek and Swahili \u2014 but not Spanish, the language of the majority of the undocumented young people. It also accepts licensed doctors and dentists in certain specialties. Immigrants must pass rigorous security checks to be accepted. Those who enter the program can apply for citizenship within months after they enlist. In general, immigrants must be legal permanent residents or American citizens to be eligible to enlist. Jeh C. Johnson, who is now secretary of Homeland Security, made a determination in 2012 when he was legal counsel at the Pentagon that it would be problematic to expand the immigrant recruitment program to large numbers of young people with deferrals. Now, in his new role, Mr. Johnson is charged with figuring out how the president can offer deportation protections to many more illegal immigrants, including perhaps expanding military enlistment for Dreamers.", "keyword": "US Military;Illegal Immigration;Military Recruiting and Draft;Pentagon"}
{"id": "ny0127259", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/01/28", "title": "Ford Posts Third Straight Annual Profit", "abstract": "DEARBORN, Mich. \u2014 The Ford Motor Company reported its third consecutive full-year profit on Friday and its largest in 13 years, ensuring its hourly workers one of the biggest profit-sharing bonuses in the company\u2019s history. Ford said strong sales in North America overshadowed higher commodity costs and losses in other parts of the world. The North American results mean 41,600 hourly workers in the United States will receive $6,200 in profit-sharing bonuses for 2011, up from $5,000 the year before. Ford made an unusual accounting adjustment in the fourth quarter worth $12.4 billion that increased its 2011 earnings to $20.2 billion, the second-highest total ever for the carmaker. But excluding that one-time gain, Ford\u2019s fourth-quarter operating profit declined. The accounting change eliminated most of a tax allowance created when the company was bleeding billions of dollars in 2006 and saw little likelihood of making a profit in the coming years. By making the adjustment, Ford is now signaling that it expects to continue earning substantial profits. \u201cIt\u2019s a very positive signal,\u201d said the company\u2019s chief financial officer, Lewis W. K. Booth. \u201cIn our judgment, we\u2019re going to be profitable enough in the foreseeable future to use up the deferred assets.\u201d The hourly workers received a $3,750 advance on the 2011 bonus after signing a new four-year labor agreement last fall and will receive the remaining $2,450 in March. The largest profit-sharing bonus at Ford came for the year 1999, when workers received an average of $8,000. The accounting gain means that, on paper, Ford has recovered nearly all of the $30.1 billion it lost from 2006 through 2008. In the three years since, the company\u2019s profit totaled $29.5 billion. Ford created the tax allowance in 2006, when Alan R. Mulally, the chief executive, joined the company as its performance was in a downward spiral and it mortgaged most assets to raise money. The losses meant Ford could no longer keep many deferred tax assets on its books, but after posting 11 consecutive profitable quarters, it was able to release nearly all of that allowance. Doing so lets Ford offset taxes on about $35 billion of future profits, said James Hines, a law and economics professor at the University of Michigan. \u201cYou would only do that if you were expecting a lot of pretax profits,\u201d Professor Hines said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a shock, given how well they\u2019ve been doing.\u201d By region, the company earned a pretax operating profit in North America in 2011 of $6.2 billion but lost a total of $119 million in its Europe and Asia-Pacific-Africa regions. Its fourth-quarter loss in Europe nearly quadrupled to $190 million, from $51 million in 2010, and Mr. Booth conceded that Europe \u201cmay stay challenging for some time.\u201d In contrast, North America, the epicenter of Ford\u2019s past troubles, has become \u201cthe engine for supporting our growth worldwide,\u201d Mr. Mulally said. The net profit was equal to $4.94 a share, up from $1.66 a share a year earlier, when Ford earned $6.6 billion . Excluding the accounting change and other special items, Ford earned an operating profit of $8.8 billion for the year, or $1.51 a share, 6 percent more than its 2010 operating profit of $8.3 billion, or $1.91 a share. Revenue increased 13 percent to $136.3 billion, but profit margins declined to 5.4 percent, from 6.1 percent in 2010. In the fourth quarter, Ford reported an operating profit of $1.1 billion, or 20 cents a share, down from $1.3 billion, or 30 cents a share, a year ago. Analysts were expecting earnings of 25 cents a share, and consequently, Ford shares fell 4 percent on Friday to close at $12.21. Including the accounting gain, Ford had net income of $13.6 billion. Revenue for the quarter rose 6 percent to $34.6 billion. Ford ended 2011 with $13.1 billion in automotive debt, $400 million more than at the end of the third quarter but $6 billion less than it had a year earlier. It had $22.9 billion in automotive cash, up $2.4 billion for the year. Mr. Booth said the challenging economy in Europe and flooding in Thailand hurt fourth-quarter earnings. Commodity costs also ended up being higher than expected, he said. With the auto market in the United States improving, Ford said it expected operating profit to increase in 2012 and for profit margins to be equal to or better than in 2011. The company said it planned to contribute $3.5 billion to its underfunded pension plans, including $2 billion in the United States. The projections are \u201cencouraging to us given all the industry headwinds,\u201d Adam Jonas, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients Friday. He added, \u201c2012 may be shaping up to be a very good year for Ford.\u201d Ford sold 17 percent more cars and trucks at American dealerships in 2011, with big gains for its redesigned Explorer sport utility vehicle and year-old Fiesta subcompact car. This year, it is bringing out revamped versions of the Fusion midsize sedan and Escape crossover vehicle, along with several plug-in vehicles and hybrids. Mr. Booth said Ford would be able to improve its performance in the years ahead by increasing sales and by operating more efficiently, which is a central focus of its turnaround plan, known as One Ford. \u201cWe\u2019re really only at the beginning of getting the benefits of One Ford,\u201d Mr. Booth said.", "keyword": "Ford Motor Company;Company Reports;Automobiles"}
{"id": "ny0177497", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2007/09/19", "title": "Gene Savoy, Flamboyant Explorer of Ruins, Dies at 80", "abstract": "Gene Savoy, an amateur archaeologist whose success in finding some 40 Incan and pre-Incan ruins in Peru was matched by a flair for self-promotion that drew on his tales of peril in the jungle, his bandito mustache and Stetson hat, and a retinue of would-be explorers who paid to accompany him, died on Sept. 11 at his home in Reno, Nev. He was 80. His son Sean said that he did not know the cause of death but that Mr. Savoy had suffered from vascular disease. Mr. Savoy, who even founded his own religion, was a larger-than-life character and did not care who knew it. His quests were larger still: He sought the Fountain of Youth, the Treasure of El Dorado, proof that Solomon\u2019s gold had come from South America and what his son called \u201cthe answers to life.\u201d His actual discoveries included Vilcabamba, the Incas\u2019 last refuge from the Spanish, the place Hiram Bingham thought he had found with his discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. He is also credited with finding Gran Pajat\u00e9n, a pre-Incan stone city. And his discovery of Gran Vilaya, an intricate network of 24,000 stone structures covering 100 square miles of dense jungle, helped establish that a high civilization had existed in Peru apart from the coast and the Andes. \u201cHe was a great adventurer and explorer,\u201d Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University, said in an interview Monday. Warren B. Church, an archaeologist at Columbus State University in Georgia, particularly applauded Mr. Savoy\u2019s discovery of Vilcabamba. But as for Gran Pajat\u00e9n, he said, Mr. Savoy\u2019s claim of discovery in 1965 was not the first. He said a local mayor had reported that his townspeople had found the ruins a year earlier but that they had been ignored by the authorities in Lima. That episode became further complicated when a University of Colorado team was given credit for the find in 1985 and Mr. Savoy objected that his own discovery had been widely reported 20 years earlier. (He neglected to mention the claim made by the local villagers still earlier, even though the mayor who had reported it was among those with him at Gran Pajat\u00e9n.) When People magazine reported on the controversy between Mr. Savoy and the University of Colorado team, it likened Mr. Savoy to Indiana Jones, an image he assiduously polished in ensuing years. Scientists have also questioned Mr. Savoy\u2019s tendency to use his explorations to pursue unusual theories, his lack of scientific expertise and his ballyhooing of discoveries. Keith Muscutt, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2004 that finding ruins in the region where Mr. Savoy prowled \u201cis about as hard as finding elephants in a zoo.\u201d Others wondered if Mr. Savoy\u2019s practice of allowing would-be explorers to pay to accompany him might have embellished his characterization of what they found. In 1967, the charge for a 21-day expedition for two was $10,160, The New York Times reported at the time. Douglas Eugene Savoy was born in Bellingham, Wash., on May 11, 1927, and grew up fascinated with local Indians and archaeology. At 17, he joined the Navy and became an aircraft gunner. He attended the University of Portland, a Roman Catholic institution, but dropped out to pursue his broadening captivation with religion. For a decade, he studied subjects including philosophy and folklore, both on his own and with private tutors. Then, in 1959, he founded the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, which claims thousands of followers around the world. Its theology, which is said to emerge from the teachings of the Essenes of Jesus\u2019 time, includes elements of many world religions and holds that the Second Coming is already occurring. Mr. Savoy went on his first archaeological mission in 1957, to Peru. It was canceled for lack of financing, but he stayed on. In addition to pursuing terrestrial archaeology, he organized missions in an effort to prove that ancient civilizations had been connected by sea travel. The first such mission involved a voyage on a raft from northern Peru to Mexico. Another attempted a round-the-world trip intended to prove that the ancient Egyptians, Japanese, Incas and Jews could have been in touch. Mr. Savoy married the former Sylvia Ontaneda in 1971; they divorced in 1992. His other marriages, to Carmel Cervetto and Elvira Clark, also ended in divorce. He is survived by the children of his first marriage, Gene Jr., Sean and Sylvia Jamila Savoy, all of Reno; three brothers, Bill Dailey of Reno, Jack Dailey of Medford, Ore., and Douglas Leon Dailey of Talent, Ore.; and three granddaughters. Sean Savoy said that two additional sons had been born of his father\u2019s marriage to Ms. Cervetto but that the family had lost touch with them. Mr. Savoy wrote 60 books on religion and four on his explorations. His penchant for colorful recollections never abated in interviews, even as his health worsened. He spoke of friends\u2019 being kidnapped by pirates, of a nearly fatal bite of a pit viper, of the utter loneliness of the sea. But he could also be downright practical about the worth of his accomplishments: he said his discoveries, based on hunch and chutzpah, had paved the way for serious scientists. Professor Dillehay agreed, and said the process was not over. \u201cSome of the sites that he discovered and examined have not been fully explored by others,\u201d the professor said. \u201cIn some ways, his heyday has not yet come.\u201d", "keyword": "Savoy Gene;Deaths (Obituaries);Archaeology and Anthropology"}
{"id": "ny0045440", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/02/21", "title": "Worst Spill in 6 Months Is Reported at Fukushima", "abstract": "TOKYO \u2014 About 100 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the hundreds of storage tanks at the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator said Thursday, calling the leak the worst spill at the plant in six months. The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the leak, discovered on Wednesday and stopped on Thursday, happened far enough from the plant\u2019s waterfront that none of the radioactive water was likely to reach the Pacific Ocean, as has happened during some previous spills. Still, the leak was an uncomfortable reminder of the many mishaps that have plagued the containment and cleanup efforts at the plant, as well as the hundreds of tons of contaminated groundwater that still flow unchecked into the Pacific every day. The company, known as Tepco, said it had traced the latest leak to a pair of valves that were left open by mistake. Image The Tokyo Electric Power Company said it had traced the latest leak to a pair of valves that were left open by mistake. Credit Tokyo Electric Power Co., via Associated Press The leaked water was among the most severely contaminated that Tepco has reported in the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, when damage caused by an earthquake and a tsunami led to meltdowns in three of the plant\u2019s reactors. Each liter of the water contained, on average, 230 million becquerels of particles giving off beta radiation, the company said. About half of the particles were likely to be strontium 90, which is readily taken up by the human body in the same way that calcium is, and can cause bone cancer and leukemia. That means the water was about 3.8 million times as contaminated with strontium 90 as the maximum allowed under Japan\u2019s safety standards for drinking water. It also showed levels much more radioactive than a worrisome groundwater reading that Tepco announced earlier this month. That reading \u2014 five million becquerels of strontium 90 per liter \u2014 which was detected at a location closer to the ocean than the latest spill, prompted criticism of Tepco because the company waited five months to report it publicly. Critics have assailed the company since the accident, saying that it has been slow to acknowledge problems at the stricken plant and that it has disclosed too little information about the conditions inside. Even so, the government has left the company largely in charge of the cleanup work there. Tepco has struggled to deal with the hundreds of tons of groundwater seeping each day into the plant\u2019s damaged reactor buildings, where it is contaminated by the melted nuclear reactor cores. To keep the radioactive water from running into the Pacific, the company must pump it out of the reactor buildings and store it in rows of huge tanks it has erected on the plant\u2019s grounds. So far, Tepco said, about 340,000 tons of water have accumulated in the tanks, enough to fill more than 135 Olympic-size swimming pools. A ton of water is equivalent to about 240 gallons.", "keyword": "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster;Water pollution;Japan"}
{"id": "ny0063722", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2014/01/14", "title": "Tide Gauges Needed for Research Are Often Victims of Storms", "abstract": "As the waters of Hurricane Sandy rose higher and higher on Oct. 29, 2012, an instrument on a pier at Sandy Hook, N.J., recorded the ominous tidal surge. The reading hit eight feet above sea level, then nine, then 10 \u2013 and every few minutes, the gauge faithfully transmitted its readings to a satellite flying overhead. The reading was closing in on 11 feet above mean sea level when the transmissions suddenly stopped. The waves of the mighty storm had smashed the government-owned instrument to bits at the moment it was needed most, with the mid-Atlantic shoreline being slammed by a record tidal surge. That was the latest example of a problem that had been plaguing oceanographers and climate scientists for the better part of a decade. Accurate tidal readings are crucial to understanding individual storms, as well as the long-term risks associated with the rise of the sea. Yet in 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, and again in 2012 with Sandy, the tide gauges that are supposed to record storm surges proved vulnerable themselves. Rising Sea, Sinking Land Tide gauges along the East Coast show a long-term increase in relative sea levels. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which maintains the gauges, said that nine were destroyed or severely damaged by Katrina and Rita. An astonishing 73 tide stations were damaged or destroyed as Sandy swept across the North Atlantic basin, including ones in Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. Ten of the 73 needed reconstruction or major repairs, but the one at Sandy Hook, a long spit of land enclosing Lower New York Bay, took the worst hit. \u201cWe were surprised that the station got washed off the face of the earth,\u201d said Stephen K. Gill, senior scientist of the NOAA division that measures tides and currents. \u201cThe wave action tore everything apart.\u201d Climate scientists say they need precise readings from storm surges if they are to predict how much those will worsen with climate change, and to specify risks to nearby coastal areas. They say the vulnerability of the gauges comes in part from the continuing rise of the sea, which is believed to be caused largely by human emissions of greenhouse gases. \u201cWe know our stations are at increasing risk, because the storm surges ride upon sea level,\u201d Mr. Gill said. So the government has embarked on a long-term program of hardening the instruments against future storms. During a recent visit to the tide gauge at the Battery, at the lower tip of Manhattan, Mr. Gill noted that the surge of water from Sandy exceeded the measurement limits of the main instrument there. Fortunately, NOAA had a backup system in place that took accurate readings throughout the storm. It pegged the storm tide at the Battery at about 11\u00bd feet above mean sea level, higher than any other storm tide since record-keeping began at the Battery in the 1850s. Surveys of building damage and the like suggested that the storm tide at Sandy Hook, 15 miles due south of the Battery, was almost exactly the same. But federal scientists would rather have real-time readings, instead of having to rely solely on after-the-fact estimates. A temporary gauge is providing readings at Sandy Hook now, but a permanent, much sturdier tide gauge is in the offing. At the Battery, too, the government plans to abandon the shack behind a Coast Guard building that houses the tide gauge now, driving its own pilings next to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to install an instrument that will be able to withstand stronger storms. And on the Gulf Coast, NOAA has built four superstrong tide stations that it calls Sentinels of the Coast. They are mounted on tough steel pilings driven as much as 80 feet into the seabed, and are designed to stand up to Category 4 hurricanes. But tide stations that strong can cost $500,000 apiece or more, depending on location, which limits how many the agency can build.", "keyword": "Climate Change;Global Warming;Oceans and Seas;Hurricane Sandy;Flood"}
{"id": "ny0031382", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/06/24", "title": "A Test Track for Tuning Up Supreme Court Arguments", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 On a Friday afternoon in April, a lawyer from California took his Supreme Court argument for a test drive, trying out themes and soliciting advice from five lawyers and law professors pretending to be justices. Such moot courts are a crucial feature of modern Supreme Court advocacy. The argument took place in a fake courtroom at Georgetown Law School. It looked like the real one, down to the columns and the big clock looming over the bench. But the participants were dressed informally, and about a dozen students looked on. Lawyers in every case that was argued this term, including the ones on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and voting rights expected to be decided this week, first honed their arguments in the Georgetown courtroom. The proceedings are secret, as most lawyers are not eager to muse on the weaknesses of their cases in public or to preview their arguments for their adversaries. After more than a little negotiation, the law school let me attend the moot court in April on the condition that I not write about it until the case was decided. The moot court program, sponsored by the law school\u2019s Supreme Court Institute , is popular with members of the Supreme Court bar, who scramble to make arrangements as soon as they learn the court has agreed to hear one of their cases. They have to act fast because the institute will help only one lawyer in a case, from whichever side asks first. (There is an exception. A coin toss settles the matter when both sides contact the institute in the first 24 hours. \u201cPetitioner is \u2018heads,\u2019 \u201d the institute\u2019s Web site says, firmly, \u201cand respondent is \u2018tails.\u2019 \u201d) The program is also popular with the justices, who like their cases well presented. Last year, at a reception for the institute attended by four justices, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it provided \u201ca tremendous service to the court.\u201d Image Jeffrey L. Fisher, with his Stanford Law School students, practiced his argument at Georgetown moot court. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times The California lawyer, Jeffrey L. Fisher , was a Stanford law professor with 20 Supreme Court arguments to his credit. He had persuaded the court to resolve an issue that had divided the lower courts: Do criminal suspects have a right to remain silent during police questioning before they are taken into custody? Mr. Fisher\u2019s client, Genovevo Salinas, had answered many questions from the police during a murder investigation but balked when asked about whether shell casings from the lethal bullets would match his shotgun. At his trial, a prosecutor cited that silence as evidence of guilt, and he was convicted. The Fifth Amendment says that no one \u201cshall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.\u201d The Texas courts had said there had been no compulsion in Mr. Salinas\u2019s case and thus no constitutional problem. At the moot court in April, Irving L. Gornstein , the institute\u2019s executive director, acted as chief justice. He has argued 36 cases before the Supreme Court, and his questions were crisp and hard. \u201cThere is nothing compulsive about this situation,\u201d Mr. Gornstein said. \u201cIt\u2019s a voluntary interview.\u201d Mr. Fisher explained that his client had been subjected to an impossible choice. Speaking would be used against him, and silence would be used against him. \u201cNo matter what you do, you are a witness against yourself,\u201d he said. So far, so good. If all Mr. Fisher had to refute was the reasoning of the Texas courts, he would have a fighting chance in the Supreme Court. But he had a second problem. The United States solicitor general\u2019s office had submitted a brief supporting the prosecution , and it proposed a different theory. It acknowledged a right to remain silent even before a suspect is taken into custody, but it said the suspect had to assert it. Image Georgetown Law School's moot court is popular with members of the Supreme Court bar. Credit Christopher Gregory/The New York Times \u201cWhat is the problem with just requiring the person to invoke?\u201d Mr. Gornstein asked. That proved a harder question. Mr. Fisher had answers, but he struggled to compress them into a phrase short enough to survive rapid-fire questioning from the justices. After about 45 minutes of argument, Mr. Fisher and his five questioners conferred about the strengths and pitfalls of his argument. Mr. Gornstein said that \u201cthere is a point to be made on practical administration,\u201d meaning that an invocation requirement may sound fine in theory but would not work in practice. Five days later, Mr. Fisher faced the justices . His presentation was polished, and his answers were clear. Most important, he had boiled down his objections to the solicitor general\u2019s argument to a checklist. Requiring suspects to invoke a constitutional right by mouthing \u201cmagic words,\u201d he said, is \u201cunnecessary, unfair, and a rule like that would be unadministrable.\u201d That part of his argument was important, he told me the next day, because he had come to realize that the solicitor general\u2019s new theory was far more dangerous for his client than the one the lower courts had accepted. \u201cThe Georgetown moot helped me understand that this is now a different case,\u201d he said. Last week in the actual Supreme Court decision, Mr. Fisher lost by a 5-to-4 vote along ideological lines. Three of the justices in the majority accepted the solicitor general\u2019s argument and two said Mr. Salinas had not been compelled to do anything. The four dissenters repeated Mr. Fisher\u2019s arguments. The day after the decision, the first one Mr. Fisher had lost by a 5-to-4 vote, he was mulling the lessons he had learned. He had been beaten, he said, \u201con a theory that wasn\u2019t even scratched at below.\u201d When the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case, he said, the attention it receives, through moot courts and other preparation, can alter its very nature. \u201cOnce you actually put a case under a microscope,\u201d he said, \u201cit shows you how much a case can change.\u201d", "keyword": "Supreme Court;Lawyers;Law school;Supreme Court Institute Georgetown University Law Center;Georgetown University Law Center;College"}
{"id": "ny0181787", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/12/04", "title": "As Scripted Shows Dry Up, Reality Sets In", "abstract": "As original episodes of scripted comedies and dramas dry up because of the Writers Guild of America strike, reality competitions and game shows are likely to reach record prominence on broadcast television in early 2008. Yesterday, two broadcast networks, CBS and NBC, gave the clearest indication to date of how their programming schedules were being affected by the four-week strike. CBS said it would introduce several new reality shows and midseason replacements beginning in January, including the first winter season ever of the reality show \u201cBig Brother.\u201d As the writers\u2019 strike halts much scripted television production \u2014 the last original episode of \u201cDesperate Housewives\u201d on ABC was shown on Sunday and of \u201cHeroes\u201d on NBC last night \u2014 networks are increasingly relying on unscripted fare to fill the programming gaps. \u201cBig Brother,\u201d featuring isolated house guests who compete for a prize of half a million dollars, has served as a reliable summer reality show for eight years, but has never been shown during the traditional September-to-May television season. Casting is already well under way, and it will fill three hours of CBS\u2019s prime-time schedule starting in February. New episodes of the game show \u201cPower of 10,\u201d the reality competition \u201cSurvivor\u201d and the newsmagazine \u201c48 Hours Mystery\u201d will also be shown early next year on CBS. CBS will also present new episodes of two scripted comedies early in the year. Also returning to the schedule are seven episodes of the apocalyptic drama \u201cJericho,\u201d which was canceled and then, amid protests by fans, resurrected last summer. Because the programs were originally intended as midseason replacements, months\u2019 worth of episodes were completed before the strike commenced. Also yesterday, NBC said it would replace two underperforming dramas with episodes of \u201cLaw & Order\u201d and the spinoff series \u201cLaw & Order: Criminal Intent\u201d on Wednesdays beginning Jan. 2. The \u201cCriminal Intent\u201d episodes were originally shown this fall on the cable channel USA. Last week, NBC announced a winter schedule weighted with reality programming, including four unscripted premieres in January: an updated version of the athletic challenge \u201cAmerican Gladiators,\u201d a celebrity version of \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and new seasons of the game show \u201c1 vs. 100\u201d and the weight-loss competition \u201cThe Biggest Loser.\u201d Fox announced a revised spring schedule last month, including the introductions of two reality series and a new season of \u201cAmerican Idol.\u201d ABC has yet to announce any strike-related scheduling moves. The writers\u2019 guild and the alliance of studios are expected to resume negotiations today.", "keyword": "Television;Reality Television;Writers Guild of America;National Broadcasting Co;CBS Corp"}
{"id": "ny0119515", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2012/07/29", "title": "Syrian Forces Strike Rebel Stronghold in Aleppo", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon \u2014 With tanks and artillery, the Syrian Army pounded opposition strongholds in Aleppo on Saturday, stepping up its barrage on a city that for days has been steeling for an assault, residents and activists said. It was not clear whether the attack, which activists said was focused on the Salaheddiin neighborhood, was a limited foray by government troops or the beginning of a broader campaign. Activists and residents said that the opposition had at least partly repelled the assault, killing soldiers and destroying several tanks, but those claims could not be immediately verified. The clashes came after days of warnings from the international community about the human toll in Aleppo, Syria \u2019s largest city and its commercial center, as President Bashar al-Assad \u2019s forces massed on the outskirts of the city. For days, rebel fighters have been pouring into Salaheddiin and other neighborhoods in Aleppo, which had remained quiet for much of the uprising that started in March 2011. On Saturday, Russia , Mr. Assad\u2019s most important ally, joined the chorus, warning of tragedy as it chastised the rebels\u2019 foreign backers for failing to pressure the opposition to end the violence. In Aleppo, a Salaheddiin resident named Mohammed, who did not want to give his last name for fear of retaliation, said that the government\u2019s assault began at dawn as helicopters flew overhead and a warplane circled. The shelling began soon afterward and lasted for hours, far heavier and fired from closer to the city than in recent days. \u201cHuge sounds of explosions,\u201d he said by telephone. \u201cThree or four bombs at once. Those who didn\u2019t leave are hiding in lower floors. Others fled to schools or mosques.\u201d A BBC reporter in Aleppo, Ian Pannell, spoke in a broadcast about skirmishes and explosions and said that Salaheddiin had come under a \u201csustained attack.\u201d Activist groups reported more than 20 deaths in the fighting, including civilians, opposition fighters and government soldiers. A video posted on the Internet by activists showed scenes of chaotic urban combat, with militiamen firing wildly around corners as families fled the other way. Another video purportedly depicting the aftermath of clashes showed bodies in a street and a smoldering tank. A narrator asserted that they were government soldiers, calling them \u201cBashar\u2019s dogs.\u201d A dentist in Aleppo who was supervising an effort to shelter people displaced by the fighting said 900 were crammed into five schools in Salaheddiin and another neighborhood. There was not enough food to feed them all, she said, adding, \u201cThe shelling around us never stops.\u201d On Saturday, diplomatic skirmishing over how to stop the conflict continued outside Syria. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, called on Mr. Assad\u2019s government to \u201cmake the first moves\u201d in ceasing military action. But he also blamed Western countries and some of Syria\u2019s neighbors for not putting enough pressure on the armed opposition to stop fighting. Speaking in Sochi, Russia, Mr. Lavrov said that those countries \u201cencourage, support and direct the armed fight against the regime.\u201d Although he did not name any countries, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been helping the Syrian rebels obtain weapons and American officials say United States intelligence officers are operating in southern Turkey to help decide which groups receive the arms. Russia said this month that it would halt any weapons shipments to the government of Mr. Assad. On Saturday, though, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it would not cooperate with a European Union effort to block such shipments by searching ships suspected of carrying weapons to Syria. A ministry spokesman said Russia considered the plan to inspect ships a violation of other countries\u2019 sovereignty. In comments to the Interfax news service, Mr. Lavrov dismissed the notion that Russia would grant Mr. Assad asylum, saying it was a rumor started to make Russia look bad. \u201cThere is no such agreement, we are not even thinking about this matter,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a provocation by those who want to put all the blame for what\u2019s happening in Syria on us and on China, because supposedly we\u2019re blocking someone there. \u201cWe are blocking only one thing: an attempt to allow people to support one side in an internal conflict through a U.N. Security Council resolution.\u201d", "keyword": "Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- );Aleppo (Syria);Defense and Military Forces;Assad Bashar al-;Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare;Syria;Lebanon;Russia"}
{"id": "ny0037342", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/03/06", "title": "Now Wearing No. 13 for the Mets, Another Mazzilli", "abstract": "PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. \u2014 When L. J. Mazzilli arrived at the Mets\u2019 minor league complex for spring training last week, his blue jersey was already hanging in his locker. Mazzilli, No. 13, it read. He had not known that his name would be on it. And that he would be wearing one of his father\u2019s old numbers, for one of his father\u2019s old teams. And that it would be a real number, not some absurdly high one, like 75 or 63, that rarely shows up in the regular season. Ecstatic, he snapped a photo and sent it to his parents. He imagined wearing the jersey across the way at Tradition Field, where the regular spring training games are played, where David Wright and the other Mets regulars slowly but surely get ready for the regular season. Would he eventually make it over there and pick up where his father, Lee, a Mets hero of the 1986 World Series, left off? All he really knew was that this was his first spring training and that even though he was the son of a former major leaguer, and really, almost Mets royalty, he was not sure what to expect. Last June, the Mets drafted him in the fourth round of the amateur draft, impressed by his play as a second baseman at the University of Connecticut. After signing, he played for Class A Brooklyn for about two and a half months (he hit .278), spent three weeks here at a fall instructional league and started training again in early November. Image Lee Mazzilli scored against the Red Sox in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The Mets won in a comeback and then took Game 7. Credit Susan Ragan/Associated Press For months, he was looking forward to this. At age 23, he was excited and nervous. All he could think about was somehow making it over to the major league camp, even if he was nowhere ready to be a big-leaguer. He had asked his friend J. R. Murphy, a Yankees prospect, for advice. Murphy told him not to focus on it and to avoid comparing himself to everyone else. Mazzilli\u2019s father, a first-round pick by the Mets in 1973 straight out of high school in Brooklyn, told him to be himself, that that was good enough. The Mets brought the younger Mazzilli to Port St. Lucie about a week before the reporting date for minor leaguers as part of their STEP Camp, a program the team has developed to give its higher-ranked prospects a head start on spring training. This year, about 45 players were invited, although few with the cachet that Mazzilli\u2019s last name bestows. For Mazzilli, the program gave him a chance to quickly meet teammates, to develop routines and to perfect his form at second base. On a typical day, he wakes up at about 6:30 a.m. so he can get to the complex at about 7, well before most of the others. He eats breakfast \u2014 maybe egg whites, potatoes and fruit \u2014 then stretches, and then hits in the batting cage. After that, he goes out back and throws a ball against a wall to practice keeping his hands down and ready on ground balls. A Mets coach had told him to work on it. Defensively, Mazzilli is indeed a work in progress, having spent only about four years playing second base. He had played shortstop until he was shifted to second before his sophomore season at Connecticut. The Huskies had Nick Ahmed, a future second-round pick, at shortstop, but still wanted Mazzilli\u2019s bat in the lineup. So he moved over. He did well enough that the Minnesota Twins drafted him in the ninth round after his junior year, but Mazzilli decided to stay in school for his senior year and work on his defense. Focusing in the field has always been challenging for him because he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He can lose his concentration at times just by seeing something in the stands, or noticing a bee buzzing by. His mind-set now is to stay alert for five seconds, for each pitch, and then clear his mind. After Mazzilli takes grounders, he may gather with other minor leaguers for a 20- to 30-minute classroom session with Dickey Scott, the Mets\u2019 director of player development. Scott calls it Baseball 101. His aim is to teach the young players how to develop a routine and be a good teammate. He discusses general baseball etiquette: what to do, and what not to do, when in uniform. Image L. J. Mazzilli usually gets to the Mets\u2019 minor league complex by 7 a.m., well before most of the others. Credit Brett Carlsen for The New York Times After Scott\u2019s tutorial, Mazzilli and the other players do various drills \u2014 fielding, conditioning, base running \u2014 then take batting practice. On the adjacent fields, the major leaguers are working out, just out of reach. When his day is over, Mazzilli relaxes in his hotel room, playing Xbox One or watching something on Netflix. He also has his guitar with him and is thinking about taking lessons while he is here. And most every day, his father calls to see how things are going. Mazzilli mostly hangs out with the people he knows from last summer in Brooklyn or from the instructional league. When he first arrived in Port St. Lucie, he was struck by how diverse the locker room was. Mazzilli figures he will meet everyone in due time, as camp goes on. \u201cI\u2019m not shy,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t want to step on any toes.\u201d Every night, Mazzilli tries to fall asleep by 9:30, to get nine hours of rest. The days have started to blend together. STEP Camp is technically over now, and the first full workout for the entire minor league camp is scheduled for Thursday. But Mazzilli still has about four more weeks of spring training before he reports to whatever team will be his next rung on the minor league ladder. There have been a few highlights so far. One came on the night that Wally Backman, the Mets\u2019 manager at Class AAA Las Vegas and a former teammate of his father\u2019s, took him to dinner. Another came when he did make it to the big-league camp. The major leaguers were doing defensive drills and needed base runners, so Mazzilli was summoned. Wright went over and introduced himself, and told Mazzilli he could still recall his first spring training, and seeing Mike Piazza on the field throwing at 9 a.m. They chatted for a moment or two. It was a moment for Mazzilli to store away, one tiny milestone on the long road to the majors.", "keyword": "Baseball;Lee Mazzilli;Mets;Minor league;L J Mazzilli"}
{"id": "ny0117866", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2012/10/01", "title": "Microsoft Sends Engineers to Schools to Encourage the Next Generation", "abstract": "SEATTLE \u2014 Leandre Nsabi, a senior at Rainier Beach High School here, received some bluntly practical advice from an instructor recently. \u201cMy teacher said there\u2019s a lot of money to be made in computer science,\u201d Leandre said. \u201cIt could be really helpful in the future.\u201d That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft . He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field. In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates \u2014 one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation\u2019s economy. There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook , fewer than 40,000 American students received bachelor\u2019s degrees in computer science during 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates. And the wider job market remains weak. \u201cPeople can\u2019t get jobs, and we have jobs that can\u2019t be filled,\u201d Brad Smith, Microsoft\u2019s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview. Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry. Google , for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities. But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year. Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hourlong classes a week and sometimes as many as five. Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning. The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master\u2019s degree in education from Harvard . In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort \u2014 which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals \u2014 and let Mr. Wang run it full time. The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington , Utah , North Dakota , California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved. This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace. \u201cI think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on,\u201d said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif. While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones. The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken. Leandre, who took Mr. de Halleux\u2019s mobile programming class last year and is in Mr. Edouard\u2019s Advanced Placement computer science class this year, proudly showed off a simple game he had created, Sun Collector, in which players tilt the phone to dodge black balls and hit big yellow ones. \u201cI never really understood what was behind these games,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce you start getting it, it\u2019s pretty easy to understand.\u201d One of the most alarming trends for the technology industry has been students\u2019 declining interest in computer science over the last decade. While the number of bachelor\u2019s degrees granted in computer science has been growing for the last several years, 2010\u2019s figure, the most recent available, was still 33 percent lower than at the peak in 2004, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Student interest in the field began to fade after the dot-com implosion a decade ago. It has picked up again in recent years, but slowly. Most educators believe that for students to be excited about computer science, it is critical to introduce them to it at an early age. Yet support for the subject at cash-short K-12 schools has faded. In almost every state, computer science is taught as an elective, rather than a core requirement. The percentage of graduates who earned credits in high school computer science classes fell to 19 percent in 2009 from 25 percent in 1990, making it the only subject among science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses to experience such a drop, according to a report by the Education Department. Those numbers are all the more surprising considering how attached teenagers are to their smartphones, tablet computers and Facebook accounts. But that fascination in most cases is with social communications and media, rather than the technology itself. Today\u2019s easy-to-use gadgets have also concealed programming tools from users that were once far more prominent in computers. Finding capable computer science teachers is also hard. Few other industries are as good as the technology business in its ability to divert would-be educators into far more lucrative corporate jobs. Mr. Edouard graduated from the University of Florida in 2011 and considered enlisting in Teach for America , but he also had multiple offers from technology employers. \u201cIn today\u2019s day and age, with so many college loans , it\u2019s tough to go into teaching,\u201d he said. One of the biggest concerns about Microsoft\u2019s effort is that most of its volunteers have little teaching experience. To comply with district licensing requirements and to help engineers with classroom challenges like managing unruly teenagers, a professional teacher is also in the room during lessons. One of the program\u2019s tenets is that Microsoft engineers need to teach the teachers, alongside students, so that those instructors can eventually run an engaging computer science class on their own. \u201cWe are taking the kids farther than I could do,\u201d said Michael Braun, a teacher at Rainier Beach High who is working with Microsoft volunteers. There are still hiccups , including tensions between some of the professional teachers and the Microsoft engineers assigned to work with them, according to several people involved in the program, who did not want to be named for fear of seeming critical of Microsoft. Sarah Filman, a program manager at Microsoft, completed the intensive summer training that the company offers volunteers, preparing a lengthy PowerPoint presentation for the class she taught at a Seattle high school last year. \u201cThat\u2019s the Microsoft way,\u201d she said. But as soon as she dimmed the lights in her classroom at the start of the year, her students had trouble focusing on the slide show, forcing Ms. Filman to change her methods. \u201cI had to throw away a lot of what I had done,\u201d she said. For students in the Seattle area, Microsoft tries to drum up excitement in technology by organizing field trips to its campus and discussing the lucrative careers that await them. The students from Rainier Beach High who visited Microsoft last year were buzzing about their trips for days afterward. \u201cTo me, that was an \u2018aha\u2019 moment,\u201d said Dwane Chappelle, the principal of Rainier Beach High. \u201cI said, we\u2019ve got to find a way to get more kids involved.\u201d Mr. Wang, the program\u2019s founder, said a professional from the tech industry who stands at the head of a class for a full year can be a powerful role model. \u201cKids can see themselves in their shoes,\u201d Mr. Wang said. After all, he added, \u201ctheir chances of going to college and majoring in computer science are exponentially better than getting into the N.F.L. \u201d", "keyword": "Microsoft;K-12 Education;Computers and the Internet;Vocational Training;Jobs;Volunteering;Seattle;Technology Education and Literacy in Schools"}
{"id": "ny0242969", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/03/31", "title": "3 Tons of Marijuana Seized in Sullivan County Raid", "abstract": "Federal drug officials have helped break up an upstate drug ring and seized more than 6,000 pounds of marijuana worth nearly $20 million, they announced on Wednesday. The drug ring, based in Sullivan County, was distributing marijuana across the Northeast, including New York City. The authorities said the operation was spread across a number of homes in Mamakating, a town of 11,000 about an hour and a half from Manhattan. On Tuesday night, federal drug enforcement agents and Sullivan County Sheriff\u2019s officers raided the homes, seized more than 6,300 marijuana plants and arrested 16 people, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in court documents. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration called it the largest breakup of an indoor marijuana-growing operation in New York\u2019s history. \u201cHidden in houses located within the suburban communities of Sullivan County, these individuals were responsible for farming the most abused illicit drug in our nation,\u201d John P. Gilbridge, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge, said in a statement. The authorities said they were initially led to the operation after federal agents pulled over a car in the area that smelled of marijuana. Lawyers for the arrested people could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday night. They were all detained without bail. If convicted, each faces a minimum sentence of 10 years, and a maximum of life in prison.", "keyword": "Marijuana;Organized Crime;Drug Enforcement Administration"}
{"id": "ny0180829", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/13", "title": "West Islip: Man Accused of Hitting Woman While Driving Drunk", "abstract": "A Medford man was charged yesterday with driving while intoxicated after he apparently accidentally backed his car into his female companion\u2019s mother, the Suffolk County police said. The man, Kenneth Gonzalez, 30, left a party at his companion\u2019s house in West Islip after fighting with several of her family members, the police said. Several people had surrounded his Chevrolet Lumina, which was in the driveway, and when Mr. Gonzalez backed up, he struck the woman, Denise Stark, 49, the police said. Ms. Stark was taken to Stony Brook University Medical Center, where she was in critical condition yesterday with a broken neck and head injuries.", "keyword": "Accidents and Safety;Alcoholic Beverages;Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0122548", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2012/09/17", "title": "Hakeem Nicks Leaps And Limps To Big Day For Giants", "abstract": "EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 Wide receiver Hakeem Nicks displayed the quickness and speed he is renowned for in making 10 catches for a team-leading 199 yards in the Giants\u2019 dramatic 41-34 come-from-behind victory against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers . Anyone who saw Nicks head toward an exit at MetLife Stadium was given a different view. He clutched a game ball presented to him by Coach Tom Coughlin as he walked with a pronounced limp, a painful reminder of the broken bone he sustained in his right foot in May, the subsequent operation and a period of rehabilitation that limited him to two series in the final preseason game. The injury appeared to slow Nicks when he finished with only 4 catches for 38 yards in the Giants\u2019 season-opening 24-17 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, a subpar performance that perhaps encouraged the Tampa Bay defensive coordinator, Bill Sheridan, to attempt to handle him with one-on-one coverage rather than the double teams Nicks usually commands. Quarterback Eli Manning and Nicks continually exploited that strategy. \u201cGetting single coverage doesn\u2019t come that often for me,\u201d Nicks said. \u201cEli just took advantage of it.\u201d Nicks\u2019s foot was so sore after the Dallas game that Coughlin opted to limit his practice time as a precaution, believing rest was more important than trying to make up for lost time by getting him more repetitions with Manning. The challenging circumstances made Nicks\u2019s huge afternoon that much more compelling. \u201cYou can\u2019t say enough about him,\u201d Coughlin said. \u201cHe goes out there with one day of practice and made an awful lot of plays.\u201d Nicks, selected by the Giants 29th over all out of North Carolina in the opening round of the 2009 draft, has always known how to make plays. With 79 catches for 1,052 yards in 2010 and another 76 for 1,192 last season, he joined Del Shofner and Amani Toomer as the only receivers in team history to produce consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. He played a huge role in the run to the N.F.L. title last postseason, pacing the team in receptions (28), yards (444) and receiving touchdowns (4). Those kinds of numbers don\u2019t come as easily after a broken foot and its lingering effects. The strength and soundness of his feet have everything to do with his ability to alter routes in an instant while providing a constant long-ball threat, critical elements of his game. \u201cTalking to guys who had this injury, they said you\u2019ve got to get back to trusting it,\u201d Nicks said. When asked how his foot felt after the shootout, he did not complain. \u201cIt\u2019s good,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s what I expected after a long game like this.\u201d Nicks credited the team\u2019s medical staff with helping him make it back in time for the regular season. \u201cThey do a good job of taking care of me during the week to get to the games,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen it is game time, I don\u2019t think about it.\u201d Nicks was his old consistent self in the first half against Tampa Bay, making 5 catches for 93 yards and a touchdown, on a 23-yard bullet from Manning that cut the Giants\u2019 deficit to 17-13 with just under two minutes remaining before halftime. He snared another 5 passes for 106 yards in the second half and was clutch in the fourth quarter. With the Giants trailing by 27-16 and facing a third-and-11 at the Buccaneers\u2019 19-yard line early in the fourth quarter, Manning found Nicks breaking free from cornerback Aqib Talib on the left side for a gain of 14, positioning Lawrence Tynes\u2019s 24-yard field goal. A 20-yard strike to Nicks immediately preceded a 33-yard throw deep down the right side to tight end Martellus Bennett, helping the resilient defending champions to a 34-27 advantage with 3 minutes 59 seconds left. When it was over, Nicks\u2019s mind was not on how his foot would respond to the quick turnaround before the Giants visit the Carolina Panthers on Thursday night. His thoughts revolved around his maternal grandmother, Dorchina Urrutia, who played an instrumental role in raising him. She had watched him play here for the first time. The game ball would be hers. \u201cI dedicated the game to her,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Football;New York Giants;Tampa Bay Buccaneers;Nicks Hakeem"}
{"id": "ny0177605", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2007/09/21", "title": "Rollins Caps the Phillies\u2019 Comeback", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (AP) \u2014 Jimmy Rollins\u2019s run-scoring double in the eighth gave Philadelphia the lead an inning after Jayson Werth\u2019s pinch-hit home run helped erase a four-run deficit as the Phillies rallied to beat the Washington Nationals on Thursday night, 7-6. It was the Phillies\u2019 seventh win in eight games, a streak that pushed them a game and a half behind the first-place Mets in the National League East after the Mets lost to the Marlins, 8-7. Philadelphia has not spent a day in first this season, and trailed the Mets by seven games on Sept. 12. \u201cWe\u2019re here now,\u201d Rollins said. \u201cHow? I don\u2019t know. But it\u2019s sweet now, and that\u2019s all that matters.\u201d Philadelphia Manager Charlie Manuel sounded an optimistic note before the opener of this four-game series. \u201cWe\u2019re still looking at the division,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cThings can happen. We could win three in a row, they could lose three in a row.\u201d Philadelphia looked on its way to squandering this game, though, thanks in part to a poor outing by starter Kyle Lohse. When he left after two innings, the Phillies trailed by 6-2. But Werth\u2019s three-run homer in the seventh cut the deficit to 6-5. Rollins then doubled and scored the tying run in that inning before he came through again in the eighth. Jonathan Albaladejo (1-1), Washington\u2019s fourth pitcher, walked Carlos Ruiz, who stole second. With two outs, Rollins lined a shot just inside the first-base bag to drive in the winning run. That made a winner of J. C. Romero (1-2), who got out of a two-on, one-out jam in the seventh by getting pinch-hitter Tony Batista to ground into a double play. Tom Gordon came in to get two outs with a man on second in the eighth, and Brett Myers worked the ninth for his 18th save. This game ended as well as it began for the Phillies: Chase Utley\u2019s two-out triple was followed by Ryan Howard\u2019s 41st homer to make the score 2-0 in the first. But Nationals starter Jason Bergmann settled into a nice groove after that, and did not allow another run. When he left after six, the problems began for Washington. Luis Ayala allowed the only two batters he faced in the seventh to reach base. He was replaced by left-hander Arnie Mu\u00f1oz, brought in to face left-handed pinch-hitter Pete Laforest. Manuel countered with another pinch-hitter, Werth, who homered on Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s fourth pitch. Rollins then doubled off Mu\u00f1oz and eventually scored on a fielder\u2019s choice. Mu\u00f1oz then hit Howard on the right forearm and was replaced by Albaladejo, who got out of the seventh \u2014 but could not stop the Phillies in the eighth.", "keyword": "Philadelphia Phillies;Washington Nationals;Baseball"}
{"id": "ny0278455", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2016/11/08", "title": "Justice Department to Monitor Polls in 28 States on Election Day", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 The Justice Department said on Monday that it would deploy more than 500 people in 28 states on Tuesday to monitor Election Day practices and guard against intimidation and disruptions. The number is a sharp decrease from the 2012 presidential election, when the Justice Department had more than 780 personnel in place on Election Day at the close of what was a much less tumultuous campaign. Officials placed blame for the shrinking federal presence on a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that limited their ability under the Voting Rights Act to deploy observers in jurisdictions \u2014 mainly in the South \u2014 with a history of voting discrimination. In announcing the assignment of monitors and observers, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, \u201cWe will continue to have a robust election monitors program in place on Election Day.\u201d She said the personnel \u201cwill perform these duties impartially, with one goal in mind: to see to it that every eligible voter can participate in our elections to the full extent that federal law provides.\u201d The Justice Department said it would have personnel in 67 jurisdictions to look for signs that anyone is being hindered from voting because of race, ethnicity, language, disability or other criteria. The department\u2019s Civil Rights Division will also have a hotline to field complaints of discrimination or voting problems (1-800-253-3931 or 202-307-2767, or TTY 202-305-0082). The Justice Department is deploying both Election Day observers \u2014 inside polling places \u2014 and monitors, who remain outside the polls unless local voting officials agree to allow them inside. The department did not break down how the more than 500 people would be split between the two groups. Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division, said that \u201cwe work closely and cooperatively with jurisdictions around the country to ensure that trained personnel are able to keep an eye on the proceedings from an immediate vantage point.\u201d Donald J. Trump has repeatedly warned of what he said could be a \u201crigged\u201d election, charging that illegal immigrants and others who are not eligible to vote could turn out in large numbers; he has urged supporters to monitor polls on their own. Democrats say that the divisive climate could intimidate legitimate voters, and that evidence of actual voter fraud is minimal. In a letter last week to Ms. Lynch, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said he was troubled by reports that a white nationalist group planned to monitor polls in Philadelphia with surveillance cameras and other tactics. He said these plans \u201care little more than thinly veiled attempts to suppress and delegitimize the votes of predominantly minority citizens.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;US Politics;Justice Department;Voter registration;Southern US"}
{"id": "ny0256141", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2011/08/11", "title": "Sifteo's Interactive Cubes Recall Games of the Past", "abstract": "Put Sifteo cubes in front of someone who\u2019s never seen them before, and you\u2019ll think somebody is reading the thesaurus. \u201cCool!\u201d \u201cNeat!\u201d \u201cAwesome!\u201d \u201cSerendipitous!\u201d That\u2019s because nobody\u2019s ever seen anything like them. Sifteo is a new \u201cgaming platform,\u201d which is an icky tech industry term for what they really are: a kick in the imagination. If the business brains behind Sifteo could only keep up with the engineering end, the gamers of the world would be trembling in their boots. Sifteo tiles ($150) are white plastic blocks, 1.5 inches square and about a half-inch tall. Each has a color screen on the top. The breakthrough idea, dreamed up by a pair of M.I.T. students, has three parts. First, the cubes communicate with one another wirelessly; they know when they\u2019re next to one another, and which side is against which side. (They don\u2019t have to be touching; they can just be close.) Second, they have very sensitive tilt sensors. Third, the top screen is clickable. These three simple ideas, in combination, permit a huge range of games. In one, you guide a cartoon critter along a path by tipping his cube so that he slides onto the next one. In another, you unscramble words by sliding the tiles into the right order on the table. In another, you can click a screen to advance to the next game level. In many games, you can get back to the main menu by flipping the cubes upside down and back up again. Sometimes you reset or shuffle a game by shaking the cubes in the air. It works. The communication between cubes, the animation and the gravity simulations (when you tilt cubes) are smooth and seamless, creating a perfect illusion. The company asserts that this is more than a new game paradigm. They say it\u2019s a healthy, essential cultural shift. It\u2019s a return, they tell us, to the simpler times when play meant manipulating things \u2014 blocks, checkers, Legos \u2014 with your fingers on a table. A return to the pleasures of interactive, face-to-face, tabletop game playing \u2014 a retreat from the iPod Touch syndrome where everybody\u2019s face is bent down toward a different, isolating screen. Sifteo may well be right about that. But its amazing little cubes must first mount three obstacles that loom before it like the Pyramids. First \u2014 and this is the big one \u2014 the cubes don\u2019t work without a computer nearby. In addition to three Sifteo cubes and a charger (which has slots for six cubes), the set comes with a tiny white transmitter nubbin that you are supposed to insert into the USB jack of a Mac or PC. Then you download a program called SiftRunner. SiftRunner lets you shop the online catalog of games, download them to your computer, read their instructions and transfer them to the cubes (wirelessly, courtesy of that transmitter). Once you\u2019ve sent the games from your computer to the cubes, which can take about a minute, you click a Play button on your computer\u2019s screen. At this point, the computer supplies both the computing horsepower and the music and sound effects, which add a great deal to the experience. That\u2019s a clever arrangement, but the computer requirement puts a huge damper on the portability of Sifteo. These tiny, pocketable, sophisticated tiles, with their four-hour battery life, would be the world\u2019s greatest back-seat-of-the-car activity. They\u2019d be the perfect waiting games: waiting rooms, waiting in line, waiting for dinner. But since you can\u2019t use them at all without a computer a few feet away, they\u2019re impractical as pocketable entertainment. The company is well aware that the computer requirement is keeping its Sifteo cubes grounded. It says that it\u2019s exploring all kinds of solutions \u2014 maybe letting a phone or tablet serve as the computer, for example. At the least, you should be able to load the cubes up with one favorite game and then leave the laptop behind. But for now, even that\u2019s impossible; the computer must always be on and within range. And don\u2019t lose that transmitter, either; it\u2019s about the size of a hydrogen atom. The second huge obstacle is the price: $150 is awfully steep for three cubes. Sifteo\u2019s creators have been demonstrating the cubes for several years \u2014 long enough for Hasbro to borrow the idea and produce a copycat product called Scrabble Flash. The Scrabble screens are black and white, there\u2019s no music or soundtrack beyond beeps, and there is essentially only a single game (rearrange the cubes to spell words). But you do get five cubes for $25, which really puts Sifteo\u2019s deal at a disadvantage. You can buy up to three more Sifteo cubes \u2014 again, steep at $45 a cube \u2014 and you probably should; three seems really bare-bones. More cubes make an enormous difference in the flexibility, challenge and interest of these games. The system can handle as many as six. A few simple games are free, but the better ones cost $5 each. (The company has chosen to emulate Microsoft \u2019s baffling Xbox \u201cpoints\u201d system, where you buy points with cash and then buy games with points. It works out to 500 points for $5, so why not just use currency? The company says that this system \u201ckeeps us from getting dinged by small credit card transaction fees.\u201d But as with Microsoft, the superfluous conversion seems meant instead to confuse your sense of value.) In any case, $5 a game also seems high, especially if you compare their relatively low sophistication to what you would get on, say, an iPod Touch for much less money. The third obstacle is, of course, building a game catalog. Without games, there\u2019s no game platform. Only 13 games are available now. The company says that many more, including some from big-name game designers, are on the way. In demos, some of them look creative and fun. For example, you might stack the cubes on edge instead of keeping them flat on the table. That\u2019s lucky, because the current selection is fairly sparse, and there\u2019s some duplication. For example, three of them are guide-the-animal-from-cube-to-cube games. Two of them involve unscrambling letters to form words. A couple of them are standouts. There\u2019s Chroma Lite, a distant cousin of Tetris, where you tilt the cubes and rearrange them so that matching colored dots align across cubes. Moon Marble is vaguely PacMan-like, except that you tilt a cube to guide your star-eating ball through the mazes. The best app of all, though, may be the Creativity Kit. It\u2019s a simple put-the-cubes-in-order game that you can easily duplicate and edit. In the SiftRunner program on your computer, you prepare the answers. They can be letters that you have to sort into words (\u201cC A T\u201d), words you have to sort into sentences (\u201cwe love dad\u201d), numbers you have to put into sequence (\u201c1/2, 0.875, pi\u201d) elements you have to sort by atomic weight (\u201cHe Ne Ar\u201d), animals you rank by size and so on. You can set a time limit for this task. Sifteo says that its prime target market is 6- to 12-year-olds. Sure enough, my own children, 6 to 14, got a lot out of the cubes, but had the most fun with the Creativity Kit. It\u2019s exciting, then, that Sifteo says it will enhance the kit with challenge types that go beyond sorting: grouping, multiple choice, multiplayer quizzes, flashcards, music and so on. For the moment, Sifteo cubes are fascinating, innovative and different. They may find a niche as educational tools. If the company can find a way to make the prices lower, the cubes more self-sufficient and the game catalog more varied, that will be a happy niche indeed.", "keyword": "Computer and Video Games;Computers and the Internet"}
{"id": "ny0100045", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/12/05", "title": "Worlds Converge in Deadly Crash on New Jersey Highway", "abstract": "In one vehicle there were 13 immigrant workers, men and women commuting home in a van after a long Saturday shift at a Chinese restaurant. In another was a young data analyst heading home after mentoring a teenager. And in another, two farmers hauling a truckload of Kentucky cattle back to Maine. Under normal circumstances they may have never crossed paths, but last weekend they did in the most terrible of ways when the three vehicles crashed on the side of an Interstate highway in New Jersey. The episode ended three lives but ruptured far more, laying bare on the side of the road starkly different worlds that for some that night changed forever. \u201cIt all happened too fast; I don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d said Tao Qing Wu, one of the restaurant workers who was traveling in a passenger van on Interstate 287 when it crashed into a car and a cattle trailer stalled in the northbound shoulder in Bernards Township, N.J., according to the State Police. \u201cI just feel so much pain.\u201d Mr. Wu spoke this week from his hospital bed at Morristown Medical Center, in Morristown, N.J., after undergoing surgery to repair a broken right leg. His right arm was bound in a cast, and his swollen face contorted with pain as he tried to feed himself soup. He had not yet been told of the deaths of two of his co-workers, whom the authorities identified as Jose Gustavo Cruz Cardona, 55, and Jiang Hua Lu, 57. \u201cI\u2019m so seriously injured,\u201d Mr. Wu said, \u201cso I don\u2019t know how other co-workers are doing.\u201d Mr. Wu said he had worked for about 11 years at Ling Ling Riverwalk, a homey sit-down Chinese restaurant in a small shopping complex in Basking Ridge, N.J., where an oversize stuffed version of Ling Ling, the panda given to America by the Chinese government in the 1970s, sits sentry by the door. Nearby are framed newspaper reviews extolling the 13-year-old restaurant\u2019s fare. On the night of the crash, Mr. Wu and his colleagues piled into the worn Ford van owned by the restaurant as they always did to make the short trip to a tattered house in nearby Morristown that served as living quarters for the restaurant\u2019s workers. Image Ravi Naik, 23, was killed. Credit Neel Naik They are part of the small army of people who chop vegetables, bus tables and handle woks around the New York City area but live far from the Chinese restaurants where they work. Mr. Wu sometimes travels to Coney Island to be with his wife and children because he works six days a week at the restaurant, where he said he was paid $1,200 a month to be a line cook. But on Nov. 28, most of Ling Ling\u2019s staff \u2014 11 men and two women \u2014 never made it to Morristown. It began with three Kentucky-bred bulls and a broken axle. Troy L. Chase, a farmer who lives in Pittston, Me., and works occasionally as a truck driver, was hauling three newly bought brown and white Chianina calves from a farm in Kentucky to his barn in Pittston in a trailer hitched to his 2003 Dodge Ram pickup truck. The truck began to have trouble, according to a timeline provided by the State Police as well as a report about the farmer on the news site CentralMaine.com. Mr. Chase, who declined to comment this week, pulled over onto the shoulder. With a passenger, identified by the website as Peter Poland, he began to repair what turned out to be a broken axle, when the trailer was struck from behind by a car driven by Ravi Naik, a 23-year-old data analyst from Hillsborough, N.J. The crash knocked the trailer with the calves onto its side, Mr. Chase told CentralMaine.com. One calf, it was later discovered, had been killed. Mr. Naik was on his way home to Hillsborough around 10:30 p.m. from mentoring a teenager, his cousin Neel Naik said, and stopped his Hyundai Elantra beside the trailer after the crash. Moments later, the van full of restaurant workers drifted across lanes and crashed into the stopped vehicles, the State Police said. Mr. Naik, who was standing outside his car, was killed. The driver was Xu Feng Ma, a longtime worker at Ling Ling. Mr. Ma and his wife, Kathy, are Chinese immigrants who recently became owners of the restaurant, having bought the business in installments over time, said his cousin, Lucy Ma, a certified public accountant, whose husband, Walter Cheng, was an owner of Ling Ling. (Mr. Cheng has stayed on during the ownership transition, she said.) \u201cThey had the American dream, and they are working hard,\u201d Ms. Ma said. \u201cNow I think they don\u2019t think they can, still.\u201d Ling Ling was closed for several days after the crash; a note posted on its glass doors asked for prayers. It opened again on Thursday, a necessity, Ms. Ma said, to pay its workers and bills. Ms. Ma disputes the police account of the accident. She said her cousin, who suffered injuries to his face, including several broken teeth, believes the van may have been hit from behind by another car. Image The address listed for Troy Chase, 43, a trucker from Pittston, Me., who was involved in the crash. Credit Tristan Spinski for The New York Times Sgt. Jeff Flynn, a spokesman for the State Police, said there was no indication this had happened, but Sergeant Flynn added that an investigation was continuing and that no charges had been filed. Mr. Ma could not be reached for comment this week because he was in the hospital. After learning of the crash, Ms. Ma and her husband raced among the hospitals where the injured were taken, some by helicopter, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Somerville, N.J., and the medical center in Morristown, checking on the workers and acting as translators for several who spoke only Chinese. Most of the workers, who ranged in age from 18 to 64, have been released from the hospital. But that night, two workers \u2014 Mr. Cardona and Mr. Lu \u2014 were not among them. \u201cWe had been driving to four different hospitals,\u201d Ms. Ma said. \u201cWe were going nuts.\u201d At 7:30 a.m. the next day, she said, she discovered why they could not be found: They had died on the side of the road. On Wednesday, a funeral was held for Mr. Naik, a devotee of the Hindu philosophy of Swadhyay Pariwar, Neel Naik said. Mr. Naik, whose family is from India, studied statistics and economics at Rutgers University and was a passionate fan of the Dallas Cowboys, his cousin said. During a get-together with friends the weekend he died, he left early despite their protests because he had promised to tutor a younger sister in calculus. His body was cremated, in accordance with his beliefs. \u201cIt just hurts to see your best friend and brother go, and he had so much going for him,\u201d Mr. Naik said. \u201cAt the same time our Indian spiritual belief is that his soul will always move forward in terms of spiritual progress and he will be reincarnated into something that will help him grow.\u201d Others had no such solace. In the strip mall that houses Ling Ling, a Chinese man who works at a nail salon a few doors down stood in the parking lot a few days after the crash, dialing and redialing a number on his cellphone. One of his friends had worked at the restaurant, said the man, who declined to give his name or that of his friend. He had not heard from him since.", "keyword": "Car Crash;New Jersey;Ravi Naik;Xu Feng Ma"}
{"id": "ny0106009", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2012/04/27", "title": "Judge Says Suspect in Brooklyn Rape Case Should Be Released", "abstract": "A State Supreme Court judge on Thursday authorized the release, until his trial, of a Brooklyn man who had been jailed for almost a year on charges of rape and sex trafficking, saying that there appeared to be problems with the credibility of his accuser. The man, Damien Crooks, is one of four arrested last year and accused of committing various sex crimes against a woman from Crown Heights over nearly a decade. The crimes started when she was just 13, prosecutors have said, and included instances in which she was forced to have sex with other men for money. He is the second of the men to be released from jail in the last two weeks, after the Brooklyn district attorney\u2019s office acknowledged that the accuser had recanted part of her story almost immediately after telling the police that she had been raped in 2010. During a hearing before Justice John P. Walsh on Thursday morning, a lawyer for Mr. Crooks, who initially had been held on $1 million bail, commended prosecutors for recently turning over information that could be beneficial to his client. But the lawyer, Elliot S. Kay, also said he believed that some people in the district attorney\u2019s office had known there were discrepancies in accounts provided by the woman before the case was presented to a grand jury. In court, Michael F. Vecchione, the head of the rackets bureau of the district attorney\u2019s office, said the agency was reinvestigating the case. The allegations attracted considerable attention when they were announced last summer, in part because the men were all black and the woman an Orthodox Jew. The two communities have long lived, sometimes uneasily, alongside each another in Crown Heights. Last week, Justice Walsh ordered that another defendant in the case, Darrell Dula, be released from custody after information emerged that the woman who had accused him of rape told the police the next day that her original statement was false. The rape charge against Mr. Dula is expected to be dismissed. A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney said then that a new prosecutor assigned to the case had realized that information was not in the case records and requested a missing file from the Police Department that included the exculpatory statement. That information, recorded in a police report, was then given to defense lawyers. \u201cAs soon as we became aware of the recantation, we took the proper actions,\u201d Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney\u2019s office, said Thursday. \u201cWe are reinvestigating the entire matter.\u201d Mr. Kay said in court that he believed that some officials in the district attorney\u2019s office, including members of the sex trafficking unit who presented the case to the grand jury, had most likely been aware of documents that contradicted some assertions made by prosecutors while announcing indictments. For instance, he said after the proceeding, a batch of material that had recently been turned over by prosecutors included a document that originated with the district attorney\u2019s office and identified dates on which the woman was allegedly victimized. A handwritten note on that document included a reference to a recantation, Mr. Kay said. Certain police reports and medical reports also conflicted with accounts presented to the grand jury, he added. \u201cEvery single incident alleged in the indictment is completely contradicted by documents prepared by police, by the district attorney\u2019s office and by doctors,\u201d he said after the hearing. Mr. Crooks, who was portrayed as a ringleader of the group, still faces four counts of rape and two of sex trafficking. The district attorney\u2019s office said the case would proceed against him and the two other defendants. Mr. Kay said that while Mr. Crooks had been held in $1 million bail connected to the sex case, he had also been held in bail of $1 connected to what he believed to be a marijuana charge, stemming from a separate case. Mr. Crooks would be released, he said, after the dollar had been paid, probably on Thursday.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Brooklyn (NYC);Crooks Damien;New York State;New York City;Walsh John P"}
{"id": "ny0144778", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2008/10/09", "title": "Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize", "abstract": "One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year\u2019s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them. The fluorescent proteins are now routinely used for observing the growth and fate of specific cells like nerve cells damaged during Alzheimer\u2019s disease . The winners are Osamu Shimomura, 80, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School; Martin Chalfie, 61, a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University; and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Each will receive a third of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Shimomura said he received a 5 a.m. phone call informing him he was a Nobelist. \u201cThe reaction was just surprise,\u201d he said. Dr. Tsien was not caught completely unaware. Last week, the Thomson Reuters news service listed him among its predictions for this year\u2019s Nobel Prize winners. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to put any credence in it,\u201d Dr. Tsien said, noting that the predictions for the physics and medicine prizes this week were wrong. Dr. Tsien (pronounced chen) added that his work was \u201conly one little piece\u201d amid the work of many. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t necessarily the case they had to give it to me,\u201d he said. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s pretty nice to hear.\u201d Dr. Chalfie never received the phone call from Sweden. \u201cI slept through it,\u201d he acknowledged at a news conference at Columbia. He said he had inadvertently turned down the ringer on his telephone a couple of days ago. He woke up at 6:10 in the morning and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment. \u201cI was a little bit annoyed that they weren\u2019t answering their phone,\u201d he said. \u201cI then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook.\u201d Biologists have long observed that some sea creatures glow in the dark. In 1962, Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, isolated a specific glowing protein in the Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America. The protein looked greenish under sunlight, yellowish under a light bulb and fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. Dr. Shimomura and Dr. Johnson called it the green protein, but now it is known as green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short. The green fluorescent protein consists of a chain of 238 amino acids bent into a beer can-like cylindrical shape, and for two and a half decades it remained a little-known biological curiosity. Dr. Chalfie first heard about the protein at a seminar in 1988, and thought he might be able to use it in his studies of Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent roundworm. \u201cIt didn\u2019t take much to realize that if I put that fluorescent protein inside this transparent animal, I would be able to see the cells that were making it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we set out to do.\u201d He thought that the fluorescent protein could be made to serve as a biological marker by splicing the gene that makes the protein into an organism\u2019s DNA next to a gene switch or another gene. \u201cThat serves as a lantern,\u201d Dr. Chalfie said, and biologists would be able to see when specific genes turn on or off and where different proteins are produced. He was not able to pursue the idea until Douglas C. Prasher, a scientist then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, found the G.F.P. gene and shared it with Dr. Chalfie in 1992. Dr. Chalfie said that within a month his group was able to insert the gene into E. coli bacteria. In 1994, Dr. Chalfie and his collaborators reported that they had inserted the protein into six cells of the C. elegans worm. When placed under ultraviolet light, those cells shined green, revealing their location. For many biologists, it was a surprise that inserting the G.F.P. gene was all that needed; many had thought that other jellyfish proteins would be needed to help G.F.P. fold into its light-emitting shape. Dr. Tsien was thinking along similar lines as Dr. Chalfie, also contacting Dr. Prasher. But for the biology experiment he wanted to conduct, he needed two colors of fluorescent proteins. Dr. Tsien started mutating the G.F.P gene and looking at the resulting proteins. Some, he found, glowed blue instead of green. \u201cThat was the first evidence you could change the color,\u201d Dr. Tsien said. Other scientists have since expanded the palette, enlisting similar proteins from corals to produce fluorescent reds. The multiple colors allow biologists to track different processes simultaneously. In one experiment, the brain of a mouse was transformed into a kaleidoscope of color by tagging different nerve cells with different fluorescent proteins. The protein has even entered the world of art. In 2000, Eduardo Kac, an artist, displayed a green glowing rabbit named Alba, which he had commissioned a French laboratory to modify genetically with the G.F.P gene. Scientists have also made green-glowing pigs and zebra fish, which they hope will aid research on stem cells and cancer .", "keyword": "Nobel Prizes;Proteins;Genetics and Heredity;Science and Technology"}
{"id": "ny0157801", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2008/12/05", "title": "A Water Wonderland, From an Unlikely Source", "abstract": "BARAY, Cambodia \u2014 The dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an alpine torrent. Children do backflips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles. \u201cIt\u2019s never dry here,\u201d said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of a dike. The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life. By the time the brutal government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was a ruin. But the forced labor of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful \u2014 or that is how the current government here sees it. The Khmer Rouge leaders were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country\u2019s glorious but perhaps mythical past of an agrarian wonderland. \u201cThere has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation,\u201d wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia\u2019s irrigation system. \u201cThe Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals.\u201d Some of the canals were poorly designed \u2014 \u201chydraulic nonsense,\u201d says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable. The Khmer Rouge built around 70 percent of Cambodia\u2019s more than 800 canal networks according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s. Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world\u2019s increasing demand for rice. The Asian Development Bank is helping finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by Japan and South Korea. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of possibility,\u201d Mr. Goffeau said. For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, a 61-year-old rice farmer, think back to the basketfuls of dirt they carried away hour after hour. He recalled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge \u2014 the laborers, hands tied behind their backs, who were \u201cdragged away like cows\u201d and never returned; the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed. Mr. Loh Thoeun said he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a \u201cspeedboat.\u201d Mr. Loh Thoeun had a particularly wide view of the Khmer Rouge earthworks: when he was not digging he was assigned to collect the sweet sap from the tops of towering palm trees. All of the work was done by hand here in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. There was no talking allowed among laborers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. Contemporary photos show huge crowds toiling in the dust. \u201cThe earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part \u2014 the most compact ground,\u201d said Mr. Loh, sitting in a bamboo shelter beside his rice fields. \u201cWe had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree.\u201d For so many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organized in small work units. \u201cI was a slave,\u201d said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and was assigned to haul dirt. Mr. Ang Mongkol is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irrigate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20 percent of Cambodia\u2019s fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half of Vietnam\u2019s yields and one-third of China\u2019s. The irrigation system in Baray, which is fed from water diverted from the nearby Chinit River, functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge were forced out. But in the mid-1980s it fell into disrepair and the canals often went dry. It was only in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it. Today, the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to repair the embankments and keep the water flowing. Mr. Loh Thoeun hopes the canals he built will help double or triple his rice output. \u201cI always recall the past to my children,\u201d Mr. Loh Thoeun said. \u201cI say, \u2018We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died.\u2019 \u201d Among the current workers on Baray\u2019s canal system is Sim Vy, 48. As a teenager she was also enlisted by the Khmer Rouge to help build the canals here, carrying dirt away on baskets tied to bamboo poles. She was told she was working for national glory but received only watery gruel as recompense. Now she is paid $55 a month. \u201cI prefer working this way,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "Khmer Rouge;Cambodia;Canals;Water;Irrigation;Asian Development Bank"}
{"id": "ny0002238", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/03/24", "title": "Larry McGuire Builds Up His Austin Enterprise", "abstract": "Larry McGuire, Austin\u2019s prolific restaurateur, sits down to lunch at his newest restaurant, Josephine House, in the central Clarksville neighborhood. With impeccably clean hands, he straightens his Rag & Bone shawl-collar cardigan and unfolds a crisp napkin, which he places over his lap. Josephine House opened last month, and its dining room, with whitewashed wood-paneled walls and marble counters, is already packed with neighbors and food aficionados. If Mr. McGuire, 30, is anxious about his restaurant\u2019s reception, he does not show it. He glances occasionally at a waiter delivering fresh salads \u2014 red grapefruit, orange and avocado in one hand; roasted pears with Texas honey in the other \u2014 and at the eager diners. But after opening six restaurants in six years, he wholeheartedly trusts his enterprise, McGuire Moorman Hospitality , now a $25 million company with more than 400 employees. Mr. McGuire has wanted to work in the food industry since he was a teenager growing up in the Travis Heights neighborhood of Austin. \u201cHe was determined,\u201d says Lou Lambert, the chef and author of \u201cBig Ranch, Big City.\u201d \u201cAt 16, he walked into Liberty Pie and said: \u2018I want a job. I want to cook.\u2019 \u201d At 24, Mr. McGuire and Mr. Lambert opened Lamberts Downtown Barbecue in the Second Street district of Austin, now a booming area that is also the home of the Moody Theater and a W Hotel. With a concept \u2014 fancy barbecue \u2014 Lamberts was part of a restaurant revolution in Austin, incorporating great design, excellent service and food that joined the city\u2019s music and art scenes in luring visitors from the East and West Coasts. It was there that Mr. McGuire began to develop a team, mostly hip young adults who might look the part at a successful Silicon Valley start-up. Tom Moorman, who was a stagiaire, or intern, at the Montreal restaurant Toqu\u00e9 before becoming a head chef in the Lamberts kitchen, is Mr. McGuire\u2019s partner. (Mr. Moorman is not as well known as Mr. McGuire and likes it that way.) Both Joe Holm, now McGuire Moorman\u2019s project manager and designer, and Ryan Smith, the creative director, started as waiters at Lamberts. Image Larry McGuire, an Austin restaurateur, opened his newest place, Josephine House, last month. Credit Matt Rainwaters The five restaurants that Mr. McGuire subsequently opened throughout central Austin were inspired by their respective neighborhoods and have spurred their growth. Each has a distinct concept, cuisine and atmosphere, but they all share a laid-back sophistication. Elizabeth Street Caf\u00e9 in South Austin, for example, takes everyday French and Vietnamese foods \u2014 pho, banh mi, croissants and macarons \u2014 and elevates them with stylish packaging. The restaurant has turquoise leather stools and playful floral wallpaper. Tables are topped with vintage silverware and colorful Chinese soup spoons. At Clark\u2019s Oyster Bar, an East Coast-influenced seafood restaurant, a clean-lined nautical theme plays out through details like original shiplap walls, waiters in Sperry Top-Siders and a striped yellow awning printed with the restaurant\u2019s geographical coordinates. Mr. McGuire has the last word on every decision. \u201cThe mark of a good restaurateur is someone who understands the individual pieces of a restaurant, from the service to the food, uniforms and music, and appreciates how they interrelate,\u201d Mr. Lambert said. \u201cLarry has that gift.\u201d McGuire Moorman is working on the second part of Josephine House, the restaurant Jeffrey\u2019s, which will open in April. \u201cThis is Larry\u2019s baby,\u201d Mr. Moorman says. \u201cIt has special meaning to him since he grew up here.\u201d Jeffrey\u2019s originally opened in 1975 under Jeffrey Weinberger and Ron and Peggy Weiss (they are still co-owners of the project) and is steeped in Austin history. It has been host to celebrities and politicians, including Laura and George W. Bush. The new Jeffrey\u2019s will not be politically inclined, but it will continue as a fine dining restaurant, updated.It has not always been easy to work on a project that is so close to the city\u2019s heart. \u201cEveryone asks me if we\u2019re bringing back the fried oysters and Johnny Guffey,\u201d Mr. McGuire said, referring to a veteran waiter. \u201cGuffey is coming back, but the oysters are still under consideration.\u201d The new concept will honor the old Jeffrey\u2019s, though substantial changes have been made. The Austin architectural firm Clayton & Little gutted most of the building. The new interior will include polished plaster walls and local sycamore paneling by Vintage Material Supply, an Austin company. Music played on records, beverage carts carrying martinis and waiters dressed in silky smoking jackets and oxford lace-up shoes are also part of the master plan. \u201cThink \u2018The Great Gatsby\u2019 meets \u2018The Royal Tenenbaums,\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Smith, the creative director. Otherwise, d\u00e9cor will be toned down to let plates like wood-grilled lobster thermidor and dry-aged Texas beef shine as brightly as the new neon sign on the building\u2019s exterior. Change may be inevitable, but it can be graceful, something that Mr. McGuire is trying to demonstrate one plate of oysters, one Nakashima chair and one seersucker suit at a time.", "keyword": "Restaurant;Austin;Larry McGuire"}
{"id": "ny0259269", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/01/12", "title": "Doctors in Tucson Say Giffords Will Survive Shooting", "abstract": "TUCSON \u2014 Just three days after a bullet passed through Representative Gabrielle Giffords \u2019s brain, and one day before the president was scheduled to come here to address the shooting rampage in which she was wounded, doctors said Tuesday that Ms. Giffords\u2019s chances of survival were certain. She is able to breathe on her own, although she remains on a ventilator as a precaution. What her recovery will look like, however, and how long it will take remain unclear. \u201cShe has a 101 percent chance of survival,\u201d said Dr. Peter Rhee the director of medical trauma at the University Medical Center, where Ms. Giffords is being treated. \u201cI can\u2019t tell whether she\u2019s going to be in a vegetative state. I hope that she\u2019s not and I don\u2019t think she will be in a vegetative state, but I know that she\u2019s not going to die.\u201d President Obama will deliver a speech here Wednesday evening at a memorial service for the victims of the attack. His aides said he would focus on the theme of service to country and avoid the debate about whether the state\u2019s political climate might have played a role in the tragedy. Instead, Mr. Obama, who was still working with his speechwriters on Tuesday, will call for unity among Americans, while trying to hold up the lives of the victims, including their service to government, as an example to all Americans. He will share some anecdotes about the victims from private phone calls he has made to the families, aides said. Meanwhile, across Tucson, there was a flurry of efforts to address the psychological effects of Saturday morning\u2019s shootings, which left six dead and 14 wounded. Two churches held memorial services Tuesday night, drawing large crowds. In Phoenix, the State Legislature quickly passed an emergency law to block a controversial church that protests outside funerals from getting too close to the services planned in Tucson. The measure, which keeps protesters 300 feet back from funerals, is intended to head off members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who have praised the shooting and plan to picket the funeral on Thursday of Christina Green, a 9-year-old victim, and a service on Friday for Judge John M. Roll of Federal District Court. \u201cI was physically sick when I heard this,\u201d said State Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who sponsored the measure. \u201cThen I decided to do something. Nothing happens in one day in politics, but this did. This tragedy is nonpartisan. It\u2019s human.\u201d Community volunteers were mobilizing to plan their own street-side memorial service to counter the protesters, with some planning to wear angel wings. At the hospital, Ms. Giffords\u2019s doctors said the outcome could have been far worse. They said she had done remarkably well so far. But they cautioned that there was little more they could do medically to help her improve. Over the last several days, Ms. Giffords has repeatedly given nonverbal responses to her doctors\u2019 commands, they said, and CAT scan X-rays have shown that there is no swelling, which continues to be the most serious threat. So far, doctors said, she has shown only slight movement on the right side of her body, raising questions about her functional neurological status. Doctors again declined to give some specific details about Ms. Giffords. \u201cThis is the phase of the care where it\u2019s so much up to her,\u201d said Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., the hospital\u2019s chief of neurosurgery, during a news conference Tuesday morning. \u201cAs long as we don\u2019t backslide and as long as she holds her own, that\u2019s good. That keeps us hopeful. But we have to play this really according to her timeline, not ours.\u201d Dr. Lemole said Ms. Giffords would remain connected to a ventilator as a precaution, to prevent pneumonia or infections in her windpipe. But because she cannot talk it is so far not possible for doctors to assess more complex brain functions. For the last three days, Ms. Giffords has repeatedly gripped hands or flashed a finger after doctors prompted her. Dr. Rhee said Ms. Giffords appeared to be responding without prompts now, repeatedly flashing a thumbs-up at doctors and her husband, Mark Kelly, an astronaut. \u201cShe has no right to look this good, and she does,\u201d Dr. Lemole said. Five other victims remained in the hospital on Tuesday, including Suzi Hileman, who had taken 9-year-old Christina Green to the event Saturday. Ms. Hileman is expected to recover from at least three gunshot wounds and a shattered hip. The most difficult path ahead will be grappling with the emotions, and guilt, over Christina\u2019s death, her husband, Bill Hileman, said Tuesday. Several times in the last three days, Mr. Hileman said, his wife has screamed \u201cChristina! Christina!\u201d as though she were having a flashback. \u201cShe keeps talking about how they had this incredibly tight grip on each other\u201d when the shots began, he said. \u201cShe told me that they were almost breaking each other\u2019s hands.\u201d", "keyword": "Giffords Gabrielle;Murders and Attempted Murders;Tucson Shooting (2011)"}
{"id": "ny0158624", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/12/26", "title": "Broadway\u2019s Marketing Turns Interactive", "abstract": "THE bright lights of Broadway draw millions of people to New York\u2019s theater district every year, but having a celebrity\u2019s name on a marquee does not always guarantee a full house. So to fill more seats, theater producers are turning to MySpace to make a few new friends. Broadway, like every other segment of the entertainment industry, has been using the Internet as a marketing tool for years. The Web sites of Broadway shows typically come with the requisite biographies of the cast and creative team, critics\u2019 blurbs and a link to buy tickets online. Lately, however, producers have been stepping up their online presence in an effort to spread word of mouth among Internet users, a concept known as viral marketing. Broadway productions now offer pages on social networking sites. For example, the MySpace page for \u201cIn the Heights\u201d features a blog with updates about the show, widgets that fans can embed in their own MySpace pages, a jukebox that plays songs from the show and several music videos from the cast. These include a parody of the song \u201cUmbrella\u201d called \u201cAbuela,\u201d and a spoof of \u201cHigh School Musical\u201d that features Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show\u2019s lyricist and star, singing and dancing in Central Park. Mr. Miranda has created several videos for the Web, including a series called \u201cLegally Brown,\u201d which lampooned the MTV reality show that chose a replacement for the lead in \u201cLegally Blonde.\u201d In the series, which is at legallybrownonbroadway.com and on YouTube, Broadway stars like Matthew Morrison of \u201cSouth Pacific,\u201d Allison Janney of the coming \u201c9 to 5: The Musical\u201d and Cheyenne Jackson of \u201cXanadu\u201d competed to become the next piragua vendor on \u201cIn the Heights.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s another creative outlet,\u201d said Mr. Miranda, who has posted 16 videos on YouTube for his show since it opened Off Broadway. Mr. Miranda said he was able to attract such high-profile names to the \u201cLegally Brown\u201d project after \u201cIn the Heights\u201d won the Tony Award for best musical. \u201cI call \u2018Legally Brown\u2019 the most decadent use of post-Tony capital ever,\u201d he said, explaining that he reached out to people he met on the awards show circuit to satirize their celebrity status in his videos. \u201cWe\u2019re surrounded by some of the brightest talents around in the theater community, and it\u2019s a shame not to take advantage of that.\u201d But Broadway is still feeling its way through uncharted territory. \u201cIt\u2019s been more about casting the net and seeing what works,\u201d said Sara Fitzpatrick, the director for the interactive division at SpotCo, an advertising agency based in New York that has worked on campaigns for \u201cIn the Heights,\u201d \u201cShrek the Musical\u201d and \u201cChicago.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re still in the newer stages.\u201d Ms. Fitzpatrick says the trend to use viral marketing techniques in theater has been growing in the last year, and it is becoming an important part of a marketing campaign, which also includes traditional elements like newspaper, television and outdoor advertising. \u201cShrek the Musical\u201d has its own social network at www.shrekster.com , a Web site with profiles of the show\u2019s characters and the latest news from the kingdom of Duloc. Giving theater fans access to a show through the Internet helps generate interest and sell tickets. Paid attendance for the 2007-8 season dipped 0.2 percent, to 12.27 million, from the previous season, according to the Broadway League, an industry trade association. The decline was attributed mainly to a stagehands\u2019 strike that shut down most Broadway productions for 19 days in November 2007. There is anecdotal evidence that viral marketing draws theatergoers from all over the world. Mr. Miranda said that he had met fans at the stage door after a performance who told him that his videos inspired them to come to New York to see his show. Some fans even pay tribute with their own videos. After seeing a video on YouTube of a 10-year-old from New Orleans rapping songs from \u201cIn the Heights,\u201d Mr. Miranda said he was impressed. \u201cHe had never seen the show; he just watched clips online,\u201d Mr. Miranda said. \u201cHe did this on his own, just because he loved the show.\u201d When he found out the boy, Nicholas Dayton, and his mother were coming to New York to see the show, Mr. Miranda invited them backstage after a performance to film a video of Nicholas singing the show\u2019s finale with the cast. Kevin McCollum, a producer of shows like \u201cAvenue Q,\u201d \u201cIn the Heights,\u201d \u201cRent\u201d and \u201c[title of show],\u201d said he was a strong advocate of using the Internet to reach a niche audience that might not be accessible through traditional marketing. His theory is that the more people gravitate toward technology, the more they will hunger for human interaction. \u201cTechnology is the tool, not the destination,\u201d Mr. McCollum said. \u201cThe destination is a live audience.\u201d Marketing agencies are experimenting with ways to benefit from having that live audience gathered to see a show. Situation Interactive, a firm based in New York, used marketing campaigns that incorporated mobile phones for shows like \u201cBlue Man Group\u201d and \u201cMamma Mia!,\u201d offering audience members a chance to win prizes by sending text messages from their cellphones. For \u201cHair,\u201d which is headed to Broadway in March, fans will get the chance to text their reviews to the show\u2019s Web site immediately after a performance. This concept, known as mobile marketing, is a natural fit for live entertainment, said Situation Interactive\u2019s president, Damian Bazadona, because people tend to have cellphones with them at all times. \u201cMobile is entrenched in everything we do,\u201d Mr. Bazadona said. \u201cIt\u2019s happening full swing. It\u2019s becoming part of the overall marketing plan.\u201d Situation Interactive experimented with new technology in other campaigns as well. The firm worked with the producers of \u201cBilly Elliot\u201d to create videos that chronicled the rehearsals of the three boys who rotate as the lead character. For \u201c9 to 5: The Musical,\u201d the firm is working on an online game in which players can upload pictures of their bosses for a shooting gallery. The show\u2019s Web site will feature personalized e-cards, featuring the voice of Dolly Parton greeting recipients. To help the producers of \u201cSunday in the Park With George\u201d build a relationship with theatergoers, Situation Interactive set up a Web site that allowed users to digitally recreate Georges Seurat\u2019s \u201cSunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte\u201d with personalized dots. For \u201cNovember,\u201d the playwright David Mamet contributed a blog, writing as the play\u2019s lead character, the president of the United States. Fans were invited to participate in online karaoke for \u201cHairspray\u201d and a digital ticket rush for \u201cSpring Awakening.\u201d \u201cThe challenge of marketing is how to target people,\u201d said Mr. McCollum, the producer. Of course, viral marketing is not suited to every show. Some Broadway shows still rely on a more traditional campaign. The trick is to find a balance. \u201cIn the theater, there is only one proven marketing technique that works: to generate word of mouth,\u201d Mr. McCollum said. \u201cEverything else is a shot in the dark.\u201d", "keyword": "Theater;Online Advertising;Computers and the Internet;Advertising and Marketing;Social Networking (Internet)"}
{"id": "ny0095661", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2015/01/31", "title": "Vague Job Outline Leads to Defining Role With Seahawks", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 Rocky Seto is the Seattle Seahawks\u2019 defensive passing game coordinator. \u201cAm I actually in charge of the pass game?\u201d Seto said. \u201cNo.\u201d This, then, is what Seto does do: He spearheads the tackling tutorials, oversees the scout-team defense, delivers the most creative presentations at Seattle headquarters, instructs the safeties, teaches the cornerbacks, draws on Bruce Lee and the animal kingdom to inculcate turnover-forcing techniques, executes special projects, analyzes third-down and red-zone and two-minute tendencies, advises Coach Pete Carroll, assists the defensive coordinator Dan Quinn on game days and assists everyone else every other day. Seto approaches his job with the narrow focus of a position coach and the macro view of a coordinator, jotting down notes, thoughts and ideas. If he were to list all his responsibilities on a r\u00e9sum\u00e9, he would need a second page. \u201cOur detail guy,\u201d cornerback Richard Sherman said. Seto, 38, does most of it out of public view, fulfilling similar functions as other assistants around the league, but with a far vaguer title. Much the way Tom Pratt (Cardinals) is the only pass-rush specialist and Jim Bernhardt (Texans) the only director of football research, Seto is the only defensive passing game coordinator in the league. When offered the position in 2012, a promotion from assisting his former Southern California teammate Kris Richard with the defensive backs, Seto said his duties were somewhat nebulous. So he defined them by filling in the voids, by researching intricate projects, watching game tape and coming up with concepts, synthesizing information for the then-defensive coordinator Gus Bradley. \u201cSometimes with those titles, you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re getting, but Rocky was very involved,\u201d Bradley, now the Jaguars\u2019 coach, said in a telephone interview. \u201cNo one ever felt threatened that he was intruding on their responsibilities. Everyone \u2014 players, staff, coaches \u2014 really trusted him.\u201d In the Seahawks\u2019 hierarchy, Seto occupies a spot somewhere below Quinn but on the top tier of Carroll\u2019s cabinet: a close confidant and a trusted resource \u2014 the keeper of all the records, as Carroll put it. \u201cHe\u2019s got all the information,\u201d said Carroll, who retained Seto at U.S.C. after being hired in 2001 and has kept him on staff ever since. \u201cHe knows everything we\u2019ve ever done and how we\u2019ve done it.\u201d Seto prepares his presentations, given in front of the entire team, to fit the day\u2019s theme. On Competition Wednesdays, he focuses on situational football and playing smart, and later, he will have cheat sheets and indicators uploaded to players\u2019 iPads. Those demonstrations, however critical, pale to Turnover Thursdays and Fundamental Fridays, when Seto intersperses football cutups with clips of whatever he can find on YouTube or Animal Planet that advance a teaching point. When players lunge to tackle, they lose their balance and cannot regroup quickly. Seto showed the team footage of a mongoose using its feet to elude an attacking cobra. To show the importance of gaining leverage, he pulled video of rams head-butting one another \u2014 the lower ram always won. To demonstrate different methods of dislodging the ball, he plumbed the Internet for tape of boxing kangaroos and Bruce Lee knocking an adversary out of a chair with a strike from close range. To remind them of tackling principles, he found film of a snake coiling around its prey and yanking it to the ground. \u201cThat\u2019s what we do \u2014 wrap the legs and twist to our leverage side and take our prey down,\u201d cornerback DeShawn Shead said. Seto\u2019s impact is felt throughout a defense that allowed the fewest points and yards in the N.F.L. for the second consecutive season, that again forced 20 fumbles. The Seahawks also rank fourth in the league in fewest yards after contact, according to Pro Football Focus, a statistic that reflects how players have taken to the team\u2019s innovative approach to tackling. Players are taught to track the near hip of the ball carrier, lead with their near shoulder and strike somewhere between the knee and thigh \u2014 a method that allows them to hit just as hard without putting their heads at as much risk. According to the Seahawks\u2019 internal studies, the details of which Seto said he could not share for legal reasons, occurrences of head injuries have decreased sharply. Carroll adopted this manner toward the end of his tenure at U.S.C., his staff refining it every year, but it was not until a football coach at the University of Birmingham, in England, visited the Seahawks\u2019 facility that Seto had a revelation. After listening to Seto explain the team\u2019s tackling philosophy, the coach said, \u201cOh, you mean a rugby tackle?\u201d \u201cWe wondered, can we do the same thing with the face mask on?\u201d Seto said. They could. Seto culled clip upon clip of rugby matches and, during training camp in 2011 \u2014 while still a defensive backs assistant \u2014 started cultivating a relationship with Serevi Rugby, an organization headquartered in Seattle. He became the conduit between the Seahawks and Serevi, applying elements of rugby to football. \u201cThe whole unit is interested in different techniques, in going the three extra inches to do what they do,\u201d said Ross Young, the chief executive at Serevi, \u201cbut Rocky\u2019s been the constant.\u201d This is the Seto ethos, and has been ever since he orchestrated an accidental meeting with John Robinson, then the U.S.C. coach, at Heritage Hall nearly two decades ago, bumping into him in a corridor so he could tell Robinson in person that he hoped to walk on at U.S.C. His plea granted, Seto, an undersize inside linebacker, became the fieriest player his teammate Chad Morton said he had ever played with. \u201cHe went full speed, whether you liked it or not,\u201d said Morton, the Seahawks\u2019 assistant special-teams coach. \u201cIf he was on scout team, he was going to hit you. He didn\u2019t care if it was walk-through or the end of the week. You wanted everybody to go as hard as he does.\u201d With no pro prospects, Seto intended to attend graduate school at U.S.C. for physical therapy \u2014 he even sent in his deposit \u2014 until the coach at the time, Paul Hackett, offered him a job as a volunteer assistant. So began his foray into coaching, 16 seasons of working with safeties and linebackers, of quality control, of running defenses. And of coordinating passing games on defense, a job he never knew existed. But, like the rest of the Seahawks, he is sure glad it does.", "keyword": "Football;Rocky Seto;Coaches;Pete Carroll;Seahawks"}
{"id": "ny0019457", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2013/07/09", "title": "Mets Maintaining a Close Eye on Arms, Injured and Otherwise", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 The durability of starting pitchers remains one of baseball\u2019s most nebulous issues. For the Mets, the topic on Monday arose from all angles, from all parts of the country. In New York, the left-hander Jon Niese, who has been recovering from a rotator cuff injury, was told that he could resume throwing and expect to rejoin the team this season. In St. Louis, the right-hander Shaun Marcum\u2019s status remained in flux after his own medical examination. Marcum will not make his next start, but with a final diagnosis pending on his balky arm, his future otherwise remained murky. The most immediate and compelling discussions, though, involved Matt Harvey, the Mets\u2019 star right-hander, who over the weekend was named to the National League All-Star team. Harvey was scheduled to make two more starts before the All-Star Game \u2014 to be played July 16 at Citi Field \u2014 and questions have lingered about how he might be used. For the most part, Manager Terry Collins deflected questions about Harvey, who started Monday night against the San Francisco Giants, saying that he had not spoken to anyone about possible plans for Harvey and that his readiness for the All-Star Game would be decided after his final scheduled start on Saturday. Collins said he did not usually harbor fears about sending his pitchers to the All-Star Game. Still, pitchers are handled delicately these days \u2014 particularly highly valued ones like Harvey \u2014 and Collins acknowledged a heavy workload Saturday could preclude him from Tuesday\u2019s game. \u201cI\u2019d only have an issue if I don\u2019t think he\u2019s ready to pitch in a game like that,\u201d he said. But he added, \u201cIf there\u2019s a question whether or not he\u2019s going to be used, if Saturday night he throws 115 or 120, he probably won\u2019t pitch Tuesday.\u201d But summing up the premature nature of the conversation, Collins said: \u201cI haven\u2019t had one discussion with anybody. I don\u2019t know where Matt stands.\u201d The discussions, however preliminary, carried additional weight Monday because the Giants\u2019 Bruce Bochy will manage the N.L. team. Bochy revealed that he was already leaning toward a particular pitcher to start the game, but that he was not at liberty to share his thinking. Regarding Harvey, he said: \u201cThis kid\u2019s had a special year. I know he\u2019s from New York. All that\u2019s been discussed. But I\u2019ll just leave it at that right now.\u201d While these hypotheticals were being discussed, Niese was on his way to the Mets\u2019 complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla., to begin a throwing program \u2014 a pleasant surprise in what once seemed a far gloomier situation. Last month, Niese was told he had a partial tear in his rotator cuff. He received a follow-up magnetic resonance imaging test Monday that revealed a less dire prognosis, according to John Ricco, the team\u2019s assistant general manager. The first test showed inflammation and fluid buildup that the doctor believed indicated a tear in the tendon, Ricco said. The second scan, which was easier to read because the inflammation and fluid had subsided, showed something more akin to the \u201cnormal wear and tear\u201d any pitcher might have, he said. \u201cThe other part of it is Jon is asymptomatic on all of his tests, so he\u2019s feeling great and looking forward to getting going again,\u201d Ricco said. The Mets had less to share about Marcum, who saw a specialist in St. Louis to address the tingling in his hand that he felt during his last start and on and off earlier this season. Ricco said the team would be able to share more details about the diagnosis Tuesday, but a stint on the disabled list seemed a possibility, as the right-hander Gonzalez Germen was summoned from Class AAA to join the Mets in San Francisco. Germen, however, has not been officially added to the roster. At the very least, Marcum will not make another start before the All-Star break. His removal from the rotation allowed Harvey to be moved up to Saturday, a game that may be closely watched by Mets fans curious and concerned about the ace. As the ordeals of Niese and Marcum reiterated, a pitcher\u2019s health can be a delicate thing. INSIDE PITCH David Wright, the N.L. captain this year for the Home Run Derby, selected Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals and Carlos Gonzalez and Michael Cuddyer of the Colorado Rockies to complete his team for the July 15 competition. Wright said Monday that he picked Harper because he won baseball\u2019s fan poll and Gonzalez because he was the home run leader when his selection was due. He joked that Cuddyer, a close friend from the same hometown, was his \u201cRyder Cup captain\u2019s pick.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Mets;Matt Harvey;Jon Niese;Shaun Marcum;David Wright;Carlos Gonzalez;Bryce Harper"}
{"id": "ny0154602", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2008/01/08", "title": "No Strangers to the Cold, Voters Now Feel the Heat", "abstract": "HILLSBOROUGH, N.H. \u2014 People here treasure their rugged surroundings and relative isolation in the hills of southwestern New Hampshire . They welcome winter, and consider their distance from urban sprawl a clear advantage. But for many, the benefits of living in rural New Hampshire have also become burdens. Gasoline and home heating oil are no longer comfortably affordable, especially for the roughly 60 percent of residents who commute more than 25 miles to work. Of about two dozen people interviewed here in late December and early January, nearly all said energy policy was a top concern as they looked to the presidential primary on Tuesday. Some said they had bought wood-pellet stoves to supplement oil heat; others said they had looked into installing solar panels or even living off the grid, with no reliance on public utilities. \u201cOil affects everything,\u201d said Paris Wells, who owns the Central Square Ice Cream Shoppe on Main Street. \u201cWe need someone in office who\u2019s going to look seriously at alternative power of some form.\u201d Mr. Wells said he was spending more than $1,000 a month on heating oil in winter, which, judging from the estimates others gave, is within the norm. Because of its old housing stock, New Hampshire is more dependent on oil heat than any state except Maine and Vermont, according to the Energy Information Administration, with 58 percent of homes using it. The average national cost of home heating oil was $3.34 a gallon last month, up from $2.44 a year earlier. But despite what many here consider a rising crisis regarding dependence on foreign oil, most said the presidential candidates had disappointingly vague approaches to energy policy or, worse, little interest in the subject. Some, like Mr. Wells, spoke admiringly of Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat and former energy secretary, who they said seemed more passionate than most candidates about reducing oil prices and consumption. Mr. Richardson is a long shot \u2014 he won only 2 percent of the vote in Iowa\u2019s caucuses last week \u2014 but some of the other candidates have focused more on gas and heating oil prices in the last few days. In the Republican debate on Saturday, most candidates said they wanted to wean the nation from dependence on foreign oil and to expand domestic energy sources, like nuclear power. In the Democratic debate that followed, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said energy costs for families in New Hampshire had tripled during President Bush\u2019s tenure and called for more heating assistance for poor families. Still, voters here said that they doubted the winners would make energy policy a priority if elected, and that polarizing subjects like the war in Iraq and illegal immigration had largely eclipsed the kitchen-table economic issues that affected daily living here. \u201cI remember when the center of a presidential campaign was a promise to take care of people in our country,\u201d said Norma Hubbard, who runs the local food pantry and feeds about 100 families a week. \u201cThat is not there for most of the candidates now.\u201d Christopher Duncklee, a longtime resident who raises sheep and grows vegetables on a small farm, said he liked Mr. Richardson for his energy proposals but could not support him after his poor showing in Iowa. Mr. Duncklee normally votes Republican, he said, but is considering Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democrat, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican. Mr. Duncklee predicted that the Iowa results \u2014 especially the victory of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a favorite of evangelical Christians, on the Republican side \u2014 would not sway many New Hampshire voters. \u201cPeople here do not think religion belongs in politics,\u201d he said. Almost everyone interviewed said they were not only undecided as the primary drew near, but also considering candidates from both parties. Surprisingly few said they liked Mrs. Clinton or former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who were long perceived as front-runners in their respective parties here but face steeper challenges after losing in Iowa. Forty-two percent of the state\u2019s registered voters are independents, and they are famous for waiting until the last minute to choose a candidate. Like other small New Hampshire towns once dominated by families who lived there for generations, Hillsborough, with about 5,700 residents, has seen an influx of people from Massachusetts and other points south. Drawn by lower taxes and housing costs, they came willing to commute to cities with plentiful jobs. But high gas prices are making the tradeoff less worthwhile. \u201cPeople buy houses out here and commute a long way,\u201d said Carl Goodman, who owns a small electrical contracting company in Hillsborough, \u201cbut then they find the cost of the commute and everything else is too much.\u201d Mr. Goodman, an independent, said he would vote for former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a Democrat who placed second in Iowa, after Mr. Obama. \u201cI just think Obama is a little wet behind the ears in the political system,\u201d he said, \u201cand Hillary has as many enemies as supporters. I think Edwards is the most electable nationwide.\u201d Among cities and towns with more than 5,000 people, Hillsborough had New Hampshire\u2019s highest per-capita rate of foreclosure auction notices last year, according to the Warren Group, a real estate research company in Boston. While the state\u2019s overall foreclosure rate trailed the national rate in recent years, it rose sharply in 2007, almost catching up. In November, the number of foreclosures statewide was up 68 percent from a year earlier. Sara Randall, a bartender at Tooky Mills Pub, said pocketbook issues loomed largest for her, especially the cost of health care. A diabetic who spends about $400 a month on health insurance, she is torn between Mrs. Clinton and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian-leaning Republican. \u201cThey both have a lot to say about health care,\u201d Ms. Randall said, \u201cso they are who I\u2019m focusing on.\u201d Glenn Mathison, an apprentice electrician who said he had been out of work for two years, said that he liked Mr. McCain\u2019s position on the Iraq war but that no candidate stood out in terms of improving the economy. For people like Mr. Mathison who want to work in Hillsborough and the immediate surroundings, options are few. A century ago, Contoocook Mills, which made hosiery, provided steady work. Now the biggest employer is Osram Sylvania, a lighting manufacturer that employs about 700. Some residents, like Pete Colbath, drift from job to job. He worked in a real estate office, a video store and a fireworks store before opening a drive-through coffee shop, Java Pete\u2019s, in Hillsborough last year. \u201cBusiness is not growing fast,\u201d said Mr. Colbath, who added that he would probably support Mr. Huckabee in the primary. \u201cThe price of fuel and heating oil, that\u2019s making decisions for a lot of people.\u201d With unleaded gasoline averaging $3.05 a gallon in New Hampshire \u2014 2 cents lower than the national average but up from $2.41 a year ago \u2014 several people here said bringing more shops and other businesses to town was crucial. A Wal-Mart Supercenter was to open in Hillsborough, but the company changed its mind in the fall. \u201cThe people who have to drive to Concord or Keene to buy shoes for their kids are really disappointed,\u201d said Kim Wells, who owns a gift shop here with her husband. Mrs. Wells, the mother of Paris Wells, said she was an independent who liked Mr. Richardson, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain. Her son praised Mr. McCain for realizing \u201cwe need to do something\u201d to curb oil consumption, but he said he was not counting on the next president to make radical changes in energy policy. Instead, Mr. Wells said he intended to cut his own energy costs. \u201cIt\u2019s going to get tougher and tougher,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m buying stuff now so when I retire, I can live totally off the grid.\u201d Mrs. Hubbard, who said she would vote for Mr. Edwards, Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain because they seemed compassionate, wondered aloud why the candidates were not talking more about the need to conserve. \u201cWe need leadership \u2014 someone to say, \u2018This is what we need to be doing, so let\u2019s all pull together,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m just not seeing it.\u201d", "keyword": "New Hampshire;Presidential Election of 2008;Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)"}
{"id": "ny0101116", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2015/12/10", "title": "Video Feature: Apps, Like Elves, Help Make the Season Bright", "abstract": "THE holidays are approaching, meaning gifts, budgeting, parties and other events \u2014 in other words, a hefty dose of stress. Fortunately, there are many apps that may help restore some holiday cheer. One excellent way to entertain friends and get yourself into the holiday mood is to download the ElfYourself app. To use it, snap photos of as many as five faces \u2014 yours and those of friends and family. Then center the faces in a special frame, add a custom text message and press \u201cO.K.\u201d ElfYourself pastes the faces onto animated dancing elves in a short, funny musical cartoon \u2014 for example, a Christmas countdown song that includes kittens popping up in unexpected places. You can share the resulting video on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere. Be prepared for giggles. The app is free on iOS and Android , but comes with just one video \u2014 the kitten one. Unlocking more video themes costs $6, for which you get different music styles like hip-hop or an \u201cOh Hanukkah \u201d video. Next up: Tackling the task of choosing gifts. If you\u2019re like me, you may struggle for great ideas. But one of the planet\u2019s finest digital brains is available to help via the IBM Watson Trend app. IBM has set its intelligent Watson machine scanning through thousands of social media websites, shopping sites, review sites and more to work out what gifts people are talking about buying this year. The app is an interface into Watson\u2019s findings, where you can see top trending gifts or find out more about different categories like toys. Tapping on an item in the list will take you to detailed information, including a graph of how popular Watson thinks the item is, related quotes and images that have been shared online. Watson also tries to show products that are rising as trends. The app is easy to use and is free on iOS . For organizing your gift selection, check out the Santa\u2019s Bag app. Santa\u2019s Bag is my favorite gift organizer app because its design is cheerful, modern and bright, and it\u2019s flexible. When you\u2019ve thought of a gift for someone, you simply enter details into the app including price, the store you\u2019re planning on buying the item in and the recipient\u2019s data. Once all the information is entered, you can view your holiday gift list sorted in different ways, such as by recipient or by store. There\u2019s a useful summary page that details your budget breakdown and tells you how many items on your list you have already purchased. Santa\u2019s Bag is free and is iOS only . While it\u2019s not the most full-featured list-making app available, it does the job for the holiday season. Another iOS-only option with similar functions, plus a few extras like being able to keep track of delivery and order numbers, is Gift Planner by Andrew Milham. This app also has an Apple Watch extension that shows coming events like birthdays. Because Gift Planner is not themed for Christmas, it can be useful throughout the year. The app is free but costs $2 to use all of its features. If you\u2019re an Android user, check out Christmas Gift List by engApps, which is a free gift planning app that has many of the same features that Santa\u2019s Bag offers, along with a similarly cheerful and modern interface. This is also the time of year I fire up the famous NORAD Tracks Santa app, which purportedly uses advanced defense technology to spot and show where Santa is as he speeds round the globe delivering presents. The app is sure to thrill children with its cute \u201creal time\u201d animations on Christmas Eve. It\u2019s also useful before the holidays as a countdown timer. The app is free on iOS , Android and Windows 10 . Google has a similar Santa tracking app for iOS and Android if you\u2019re not a fan of NORAD\u2019s program. Lastly, there are many charity apps through which people can donate money to those less fortunate this holiday season. That includes Google\u2019s One Today, which is a kind of social network for making small charitable gifts. The app is free on Android and iOS , though for Apple devices you will need to set up a payment process through Google\u2019s systems. Quick Call The popular \u201cto-do list\u201d app Wunderlist has undergone a big overhaul on iOS. The app\u2019s interface has been simplified and cleaned up so it\u2019s easier to see what tasks you have planned. The developers have also added support for 3D Touch on the latest iPhones, which makes it easier to control to-do items on your lists. Wunderlist is free .", "keyword": "Mobile Apps;Gifts;Holidays;Christmas;Nexus One;Android"}
{"id": "ny0026084", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/08/14", "title": "Track\u2019s New Power Couple Prove It With Medals", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 One month after their marriage, Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton have two shiny new wedding presents. Eaton, who holds the Olympic title and the world record in the decathlon, won his gold medal in the world track and field championships Sunday night. Early the next morning, he made a dash for the bus from the hotel to Luzhniki Stadium and assumed the role of cheerleader as Theisen-Eaton competed for Canada in the first day of the heptathlon. \u201cI think it\u2019s more nerve-racking to watch, because it\u2019s out of your control,\u201d Eaton said. Theisen-Eaton, just 11th in last year\u2019s Olympic heptathlon, was feeling edgy herself, well aware that with the top five finishers from the London Games missing from this competition, she had a golden opportunity to win her first medal in a global championships. In the end, she settled, with a regret or two, for silver on Tuesday, and the newlyweds were soon embracing on the edge of the track. \u201cI always watched him,\u201d Theisen-Eaton said, \u201cand I watch him get his medals, and I say: \u2018I wonder what it feels like? I can only imagine.\u2019 So I\u2019m getting a little taste of it.\u201d Track and field has not seen anything quite like the Eatons. At the 1952 Olympics, the Czech Emil Zatopek, one of the best distance runners in history, won gold in the 5,000 meters. On the same day, his wife , Dana Zatopkova, took gold in the javelin. Eaton and Theisen-Eaton have yet to manage that sort of golden double. (Ganna Melnichenko of Ukraine won the gold medal in the heptathlon with 6,586 points, with Theisen-Eaton second with 6,530 and Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands third with 6,477.) What makes the couple distinct is that they excel in the same family of events, known as the multis in the track-and-field world. Though they represent different nations \u2014 Eaton competes for the United States \u2014 both attended the University of Oregon and have trained together exclusively under the veteran coach Harry Marra since November 2009. Image Mary Cain, far left, of Bronxville, N.Y., in a 1,500-meter semifinal. She qualified for the final. Credit Christian Petersen/Getty Images Their medals in Moscow were quite a birthday present for Marra, who turned 66 on Tuesday. \u201cIt was an amazing four days; I\u2019m happy for both of them,\u201d Marra said. \u201cThey are 25 and 24, gold and silver. I was pumping gas back then. I wasn\u2019t winning medals.\u201d Eaton and Theisen-Eaton met when he was a freshman at Oregon and she was a high school senior on a recruiting visit. They met again at the 2007 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships in S\u00e3o Paolo, Brazil, where Theisen informed Eaton that she had signed with Oregon. \u201cIt was track and field that brought us together,\u201d Eaton said. Training in Eugene, Ore., brings them together often and sometimes the track-and-field conversation extends well past working hours as they advise and analyze each other. \u201cWe have sat down and watched some YouTube videos and videos of ourselves before and gone back and forth,\u201d Eaton said. \u201cWe tend to disagree a lot on that stuff, so I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s productive or not. It\u2019s just weird because we\u2019re both good at different things.\u201d Marra, who had never coached a couple, ended up being the man who married them on July 13 in Eugene. \u201cThey said, \u2018We think you know us better than anybody else, and we want you to be the guy who marries us,\u2019 \u201d Marra said. \u201cI went, \u2018You\u2019ve got to be kidding me,\u2019 and I said, \u2018If the nuns I went to grade school with ever heard this, they\u2019d be spinning in their graves because I was nothing but a cut-up.\u2019 \u201d But Marra ultimately accepted the offer. \u201cAshton came over one day,\u201d Marra said. \u201cI went online, and we got ordained in 30 minutes. Wham. Did it. It was great.\u201d Plenty of other great work was done on Tuesday at Luzhniki Stadium, the fourth night of competition here and the first night when the crowd was big and boisterous enough to give the impression that these were indeed a world championships. The reason for the enthusiasm? Yelena Isinbayeva, the pole-vaulter who remains the biggest star in Russian track and field. After dominating the discipline for years, setting world record after world record, she has been eclipsed in the major championships since 2008. But in what she said could be her final major competition, she rose to the occasion once more, winning the gold medal with a best effort of 16 feet and then missing on three world-record attempts at 16 feet 8 inches. Her rival Jennifer Suhr, the American who won the Olympic gold medal last year, was second at 15-10. It was the third world outdoor title for Isinbayeva, who also won Olympic gold medals in 2004 and in 2008. But it was her first victory at the world championships since 2007, and she now plans to take a potentially permanent break from the sport to focus on having a family, although she may return for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Image LaShawn Merritt winning the gold medal in the 400 meters in 43.74 seconds, 0.66 of a second ahead of his American teammate Tony McQuay. Credit Cameron Spencer/Getty Images \u201cI\u2019m not retiring for the moment; I just take the break to have a baby,\u201d she said at a news conference that ended after midnight. \u201cI\u2019d like to have a baby next year, and then I will try to come back for Rio.\u201d Other winners on Tuesday included Mohammed Aman of Ethiopia in the men\u2019s 800 in 1 minute 43.31 seconds and La-Shawn Merritt of the United States in the men\u2019s 400 in 43.74 seconds. Mary Cain, a 17-year-old phenomenon from Bronxville, N.Y., qualified for the women\u2019s 1,500 final. With the Kenyan world-record holder David Rudisha missing, the 800 was an opportunity for the rest of the field, and Nick Symmonds of the United States took the silver medal behind Aman. He then spoke out against Russia\u2019s antigay law, which came into force in June. \u201cAs much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them,\u201d he said in remarks reported by R-Sport, a Russian site. \u201cWhether you\u2019re gay, straight, black, white, we all deserve the same rights. If there\u2019s anything I can do to champion the cause and further it, I will, shy of getting arrested.\u201d In the men\u2019s 400, Merritt, beaten by Kirani James of Grenada in the last world championships and Olympics, was an irresistible force. His time, the season\u2019s best, was 0.66 of a second faster than the 44.40 that his American teammate Tony McQuay ran to get the silver medal. James faded to a surprising seventh in 44.99. Despite all of Eaton and Theisen-Eaton\u2019s collective ambition, they nearly did not make it here together. In March, while they were training with Marra in Santa Barbara, Calif., there was a miscommunication, and Ashton walked downfield to retrieve his javelins while his fianc\u00e9e had one javelin left to throw. \u201cI was telling her something, \u2018You\u2019ve got to get your arm up\u2019 or something, and Ashton now has walked ahead,\u201d Marra said. \u201cAnd Brianne never pulls to the left, never. Always if she pulls, it goes off to the right. So she threw and as she threw it\u2019s going right at Ashton.\u201d It was heading, in fact, straight for his upper back. \u201cI panicked, froze like a deer in the headlights and thought, \u2018How are we going to rehab that?\u2019 \u201d Marra said. \u201cIt looked like it was going right through his shoulder. And she screamed bloody murder at the top of her lungs.\u201d Ashton instinctively twisted away, just in time. \u201cI call it the limbo in my generation, but they call it the matrix,\u201d Marra said. The javelin grazed Eaton\u2019s face. \u201cIt skinned the top of his lip and made him bleed,\u201d Theisen-Eaton said. \u201cIt was pretty traumatic.\u201d She added: \u201cI could see him shaking, but I was, like, vibrating. My eyes weren\u2019t even focusing right. He came over and was like, \u2018I\u2019m fine.\u2019 \u201d Recalling the story on Tuesday, the medals safely secured, Marra still looked a little shaky himself.", "keyword": "Track and field;Ashton Eaton;Brianne Theisen-Eaton;US;Canada"}
{"id": "ny0284293", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/07/25", "title": "Democratic Convention Day 1 Takeaways: Michelle Obama Steals the Show", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 The Democratic National Convention began with the ouster of the party\u2019s chairwoman, protests in the streets, disruptions on the convention floor and a torrential thunderstorm. Facing the prospect of chaos, an array of party leaders \u2014 including Michelle Obama , and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren \u2014 moved to heal the breach in the party, seemingly with some success. Our takeaways: It\u2019s Michelle Obama\u2019s party Image Michelle Obama speaking on Monday, the first day of the Democratic convention. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times It\u2019s Hillary Clinton\u2019s convention, and it was Mr. Sanders\u2019s big night. But the unquestioned star of the program on Monday was Mrs. Obama, who used her prime-time speech to describe an optimistic, confident view of American social progress, and to embrace Mrs. Clinton as the natural heir to the Obama presidency. She praised Mrs. Clinton as a big-hearted public servant and as a political survivor, and rebuked Donald J. Trump as a bully without mentioning his name. Most important, Mrs. Obama wrapped her speech in a sunny narrative about what the country has accomplished during her husband\u2019s presidency, celebrating the image of a black family in the White House and casting Mrs. Clinton\u2019s election as a similar milestone. \u201cDon\u2019t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn\u2019t great,\u201d Mrs. Obama said. \u201cThis, right now, is the greatest country on earth.\u201d It was a strikingly positive speech in a bitter election season, and a vivid rendition of the political worldview that lifted the Obamas to the top of the party in the first place. The powerful response Mrs. Obama drew from the crowd showed just how formidable she is likely to be on the campaign trail. The elected left embraces Clinton Mrs. Clinton needed a bear hug from liberal Democrats on Monday night to have any chance of easing tensions with supporters of Mr. Sanders, who entered the convention in a state of rage over the Democratic National Committee\u2019s meddling role in the 2016 primaries. And a bear hug is what Mrs. Clinton got, most crucially from Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. In a speech that celebrated his own victories at length, Mr. Sanders also gave Mrs. Clinton his full-throated backing. \u201cHillary Clinton,\u201d he said, \u201cmust become the next president of the United States.\u201d Ms. Warren delivered a string of sharp attacks on Mr. Trump, while praising Mrs. Clinton\u2019s liberal agenda and urging Democrats to \u201cwork our hearts out to make Hillary Clinton the next president.\u201d Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, reminisced about Sanders rallies in his state, and said it was time to join forces with Mrs. Clinton. Still, those testimonials are unlikely to placate the most agitated demonstrators in the streets of Philadelphia. The question now is how many of Mr. Sanders\u2019s supporters are equally implacable. Democrats have a protester problem At first, the program appeared headed for disaster, as pro-Sanders activists shouted angrily at even liberal Democrats like Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. The party barely averted an evening of unsightly clashes. By the start of the prime-time hours the rowdy heckling had largely abated \u2014 but not entirely. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the Senate\u2019s only black Democrat, was interrupted by chants of \u201cBlack lives matter.\u201d Some attendees taunted Ms. Warren, too, calling out, \u201cWe trusted you!\u201d \u2014 a reproach for supporting Mrs. Clinton. It\u2019s not clear how big a chunk of Mr. Sanders\u2019s coalition these disruptive voices represent. But their willingness to keep jeering at the party\u2019s top leaders promises to keep cramping the proceedings as the week goes on. Trump plays a supporting role The unifying theme at the Republican convention last week was fierce opposition to Mrs. Clinton. Her name was a rallying cry starting on the first night, as a jumbled collection of speakers railed against familiar offenses: her use of a private email server, her handling of the Benghazi, Libya, attack and more. Mr. Trump has not yet taken such a central place in the Democratic convention. He was the target of attacks from a number of speakers, especially Ms. Warren, but anti-Trump riffs from other speakers were not surefire crowd pleasers, and the mere utterance of his name did not seem to electrify the audience. That may change as the week progresses, and the focus of the convention shifts from achieving party unity to winning the general election. But on Monday, Mr. Trump was often relegated to his least favorite place: the background.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Democratic National Convention,DNC;DNC;Democrats;US Politics;Hillary Clinton;Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders;Debbie Wasserman Schultz;Philadelphia"}
{"id": "ny0188429", "categories": ["technology", "start-ups"], "date": "2009/04/23", "title": "A Company Plans to Market Illiquid Assets", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Founders of start-ups and the venture capitalists who finance them have two ways to get their money out of the company: sell it to another company or sell shares to the public. The market for initial public offerings has dried up and companies are not being very acquisitive these days. In the first three months of 2009, only 56 companies were sold, half the number of a year ago, and none went public. What if they had another option? SecondMarket , which operates markets for trading illiquid assets online, is creating a marketplace for trading shares of private companies. It puts investors together with shareholders and collects a fee, which will be 2 percent from each side for the private company market. Typically, venture-backed start-ups are sold or go public within five to seven years, but lately it is taking longer. As the exits are delayed, venture capitalists who are unable to cash out cannot return money to their investors or devote time and money to new companies. Some employees inside the start-ups, being paid low salaries, get impatient for a payday. The exit drought \u201cis one of the greatest tragedies of our time,\u201d said David Weild IV, a former vice chairman of Nasdaq and a senior consultant to SecondMarket. \u201cThe source of U.S. innovation and competitiveness and job creation has been failed by the capital markets.\u201d SecondMarket, originally called Restricted Stock Partners, was founded in 2004 by Barry E. Silbert, 32, a former investment banker who specialized in financial restructurings, including the Enron bankruptcy. He hatched the idea for a marketplace for illiquid assets after creditors awarded shares of debtor companies by bankruptcy courts approached him looking to sell these shares. The company operates seven other markets for illiquid assets, including ones for restricted public equities and bankruptcy claims. This month it started a market for banks to unload troubled assets, including mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations . The founders of SecondMarket say that in the last several months they have been getting an increasing number of calls from shareholders, including employees, founders and investors, who want to sell their stakes in tech start-ups, including Facebook, Twitter, Glam Media, LinkedIn and Tesla Motors. The company believes there is a demand because it has privately brokered about 50 trades. The creation of a vibrant market in unregistered securities of private companies that reveal scant financial information has its doubters. \u201cThis will not be a third exit, not in the near term,\u201d said Roger Ehrenberg, a former investment banker and hedge fund chief executive who now runs IA Capital Partners, his angel investment fund. \u201cJust like we\u2019ve seen a very limited or nonexistent I.P.O. market, it stands to reason that these buyers would be the same kinds of investors, so I\u2019m not at all convinced that the demand side is even there.\u201d For one thing, it could be a thin market, on both sides of the trade. The Securities and Exchange Commission allows the trading of unregistered securities, but only for select investors. The new market will be open only to accredited investors and qualified institutional buyers, which the S.E.C. defines as financially sophisticated enough to invest in high-risk securities about which there is little public information. These include individuals whose net worth exceeds $1 million and institutions that manage at least $100 million in securities. Even if individual shareholders and venture capitalists do trade on the exchange, it will be hard for it to grow, Mr. Ehrenberg said. There is only a small universe of such wealthy, risk-tolerant investors, he said, and companies are limited to 500 shareholders before they have to file with the S.E.C. as if they were public. \u201cFor this market to really develop real liquidity, that rule needs to be changed, but right now, the government needs to do the exact opposite,\u201d Mr. Ehrenberg said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want more people to buy illiquid, unregistered investments \u2014 they want maximum transparency.\u201d As in the public markets, investors will determine how much a company is worth, but with much less information than they have for public companies. SecondMarket will gather public data for buyers and sellers, and companies can choose to submit detailed information that buyers can see. But it is unlikely that many private companies will reveal much data. Although the securities are unregistered, fraud may not be a big worry. SecondMarket says it verifies with the company and its lawyers before any shares change hands. \u201cThere is no risk that investors wire money and don\u2019t own the stock or the company doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d Mr. Silbert said. The public nature of the market may also serve to discourage swindlers. There have been other efforts to create exchanges in which investors can trade shares of private companies, including Nasdaq Portal Alliance and smaller efforts like XChange and Nyppex. SecondMarket thinks it has an advantage because it has successfully created markets in other illiquid asset classes \u2014 it says it has 3,000 investors and has completed $1.5 billion in transactions \u2014 and because it has a staff of 100 that handles research and legal issues. Because of the exit drought, the need has become more acute, they say, and many venture capitalists agree. \u201cEntrepreneurs won\u2019t start companies and investors won\u2019t invest in them if there is no path to liquidity on the company stock,\u201d said Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, which has invested in Twitter and Boxee. \u201cA secondary market for private company stock can fill the gap that the lack of an I.P.O. market has created.\u201d Still, some venture capitalists question whether there is a need for such a market. \u201cAs an exit option for V.C.\u2019s, I have some very healthy skepticism on it,\u201d said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at Accel, which has invested in Facebook and Glam Media. \u201cQuality companies are already going to perceive that they have opportunities for more traditional exits and more traditional I.P.O.\u2019s.\u201d", "keyword": "Venture Capital;Initial Public Offerings;SecondMarket;Start-ups"}
{"id": "ny0172530", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2007/11/01", "title": "It\u2019s Halloween: U.S. Warns on Toxic Teeth", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (AP) \u2014 The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a late recall on Wednesday, warning shoppers that fake Halloween teeth sold by the tens of thousands over the last year contained excessive amounts of lead. The $2 packages, marketed as Ugly Teeth, were the latest in a long line of Chinese-made toys and novelty items recalled because of lead content. The commission announced the recall on Halloween, in a late-morning press release. The agency said that since January 2006, retailers had sold about 43,000 eight-piece packages of the party favors. There were no immediate reports of illness. Amscan of Elmsford, N.Y., imported the fake teeth. A message left with the company was not immediately returned. A spokesman for the commission, Scott Wolfson, declined to say when it learned of the potential risk other than that it took \u201ca matter of days\u201d to negotiate the recall. CBS News reported Monday that a chemistry professor at Ashland University in Ohio had tipped off the consumer agency about the joke teeth after testing a variety of Halloween items for lead content. Paint on the teeth contained 100 times the allowable level of lead, according to CBS. The Consumer Product Safety Commission also announced Wednesday that Toys \u201cR\u201d Us had recalled about 16,000 Chinese-made Elite Operations toys because of lead contamination. The military-style toys are being recalled because their surface paints contain excessive levels of lead, which can be toxic for young children. Under current regulations, children\u2019s products found to have more than 0.06 percent lead accessible to users are subject to recall. Wednesday\u2019s recall included four Elite Operations toy sets: the Command Patrol Center, the Barracuda Helicopter, the Super Rigs set and a three-pack of eight-inch figures. No other Elite Operations toys are included in the recall. The toys were sold at Toys \u201cR\u201d Us stores around the country and on toysrus.com from July to October. This was the second recall of lead-tainted children\u2019s products by Toys \u201cR\u201d Us in October. On Oct. 4, the company recalled about 15,000 room d\u00e9cor sets because surface paint on the back of the decorating kits\u2019 mirrors contained high levels of lead.", "keyword": "Consumer Product Safety Commission;Recalls and Bans of Products;Halloween;Hazardous and Toxic Substances;Consumer Protection;Lead"}
{"id": "ny0135006", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/04/28", "title": "Dysfunction at a Charity That Relies on Council Largess", "abstract": "Hiram Monserrate, a city councilman from Queens, has supplied more than $400,000 in city funds in recent years to a nonprofit agency that has been run by some of his closest aides and whose financial records have devolved into what its current director calls \u201ca mess.\u201d The organization, Libre, which offers a wide array of programs and services for the Latino community, has not filed a tax return for the past two years. It has never registered as a charity with the state attorney general\u2019s office, as required. And its director says unpaid bills and poor record-keeping grew so problematic that he had to all but shutter Libre last year. \u201cLibre is a mess,\u201d said Rodolfo Herrera, the director. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a mess because they were stealing money. I think it\u2019s because they didn\u2019t know what to do with paper.\u201d The millions of dollars that council members dole out to community groups each year rarely received attention until last month, when it was revealed that the Council had been using the names of fictitious groups to park money that it could later spend without going through the normal budget review process. Now a spectrum of analysts, from auditors for the city comptroller to federal investigators to lawyers for the city\u2019s Department of Investigation, are scrutinizing just what kinds of programs City Council members are financing with the discretionary funds they control. Libre, whose name stands for Latino Initiative for Better Resources and Empowerment Inc., has not been identified as the subject of any special review. But it resembles, in its close ties to Mr. Monserrate, other organizations that have drawn scrutiny. Mr. Monserrate, a former city police officer, negotiated the lease for Libre\u2019s former office, according to the building\u2019s superintendent, and one of the group\u2019s former top executives says he was directly recruited for the job by the councilman. In recent years, its four principals included two women who worked as Mr. Monserrate\u2019s chief of staff and his director of constituent services. P. Wayne Mahlke, Mr. Monserrate\u2019s legislative and budget director, said the councilman had no control of Libre and had believed that its finances and tax filings were \u201cin full compliance.\u201d \u201cThe council member knows Libre provided services to the community and has been a strong organization,\u201d Mr. Mahlke said. \u201cYes, they went through some difficulties, but that was all their own internal difficulties.\u201d Libre has told city officials that it provides recreation and education programs, assistance to immigrants and job training for people in Queens. A more detailed picture of the organization\u2019s activities was unavailable because Mr. Herrera said he was not directly involved in program services and other staff members did not return calls. Neighbors of Libre\u2019s former office in Corona, Queens, said that the office was seldom crowded and that staff members generally seemed to be involved in dispensing advice on how to reach government agencies. Libre has also served as something of a clearinghouse for city funds. Mr. Monserrate\u2019s office said Libre dispensed a third of the money it received to other organizations that the councilman had deemed worthy of support, like the Corona Basketball League and the Colombian Parade Committee. City Council officials said Friday that they knew the names of all the organizations that were the ultimate recipients of such \u201cpass-through\u201d appropriations. The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn , and the city\u2019s Law Department made efforts last year to increase the monitoring of pass-through funds, which have been used for more than a decade. But Council officials said they relied primarily on the city agencies that actually expend the money, under contract, to make any background checks on recipient groups. The checks can be cursory, however, as was made clear in an indictment last month. The indictment accused two aides of Councilman Kendall Stewart of Brooklyn of embezzling $145,000 from a nonprofit group they ran. Prosecutors said in the indictment that officials at the city\u2019s Department for the Aging had initially denied Mr. Stewart\u2019s request to give money to the group, the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund, after noticing that it was based at the home of his chief of staff. But a subsequent request was approved by the Department of Youth and Community Development. Until November, Libre operated out of a two-story building on National Street in Corona, where neighbors said the organization sometimes held evening English classes but generally opened for only part of the day and rarely had more than three people working. The building\u2019s superintendent, Ismail Gaiby, said the office grew more crowded when Libre sponsored voter registration drives, which he said were often attended by Mr. Monserrate. \u201cThere were a lot of people coming in and out,\u201d said Mr. Gaiby, who also works at an Islamic book company and meat store on the block. \u201cThey would go out in the street and register the voters.\u201d Mr. Gaiby said Mr. Monserrate, accompanied by another man, personally negotiated Libre\u2019s $1,100-a-month rent in April 2005 and delivered the security deposit, but Mr. Mahlke said the councilman \u201cdoes not recall having any participation\u201d in that process. Libre was incorporated in July 2003, but it has filed only one tax return, which covered the fiscal year ending June 30, 2005. That return showed revenues of $49,750 and expenses of about $25,000, made up mostly of $19,200 in rent and utilities and $3,520 for printing. The return said the group provided \u201cstreet activities, including music and cultural enrichment for youth and adults,\u201d and \u201cback-to-school equipment and activities for young adults.\u201d It listed Yoselin Genao, who was Mr. Monserrate\u2019s director of constituent services, as the contact for Libre. The return listed Julissa Ferreras as chairwoman of Libre\u2019s board of directors, and indicated it was an unpaid position. City records indicate that during the time period covered by the tax return, Ms. Ferreras was also serving as Mr. Monserrate\u2019s chief of staff, a post she did not leave until August 2005. Ms. Ferreras returned to work as Mr. Monserrate\u2019s chief of staff last September. In an interview on April 18, Mr. Monserrate gave an account that differed from what the records indicate. He said Ms. Ferreras had not held positions in his Council office and at Libre at the same time. He said that she took the position with the nonprofit only after ending her first stretch with the Council, and that he had required her to leave Libre last year when she returned to work for his office. Ms. Ferreras, Ms. Genao and Mr. Herrera\u2019s computer services company have also been paid for work on Mr. Monserrate\u2019s political campaigns, records show. The bookkeeping issues with Libre surfaced last fall, according to Mr. Herrera, who said Ms. Ferreras recognized that there was trouble with Libre\u2019s books. Javier Cardenas, who was executive director at the time, left shortly after, and Libre began to search for a new director. Mr. Cardenas could not be reached for comment, and Ms. Ferreras did not return calls. Efforts to find a new leader for the organization last October put Mr. Monserrate in touch with Herman Mendoza, who now runs a community outreach program in Corona, Mr. Mendoza said. \u201cHe offered me the position\u201d of executive director, Mr. Mendoza said. \u201cI was working for an insurance company, and he said, \u2018Hey, there\u2019s an offer if you want to work, since you do a lot of work with the community.\u2019 \u201d But Mr. Mendoza said he found that he was Libre\u2019s only staffer and left after three weeks. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t pay me a salary, so I had to get another job quick,\u201d he said. \u201cI guess there was no funding.\u201d Mr. Herrera, who had been Libre\u2019s treasurer since its inception, said Ms. Ferreras asked him to take over as director in November. He immediately moved Libre into the small office in Jackson Heights where he runs two other firms, a Colombian radio station and a nonprofit organization, Latin Technologies, that offers technology training. Latin Technologies has received $120,000 in city funds since 2004, most of it in discretionary awards from Mr. Monserrate. In a telephone interview on Friday from Colombia, where he was visiting, Mr. Herrera said he planned to file Libre\u2019s delinquent tax returns by the end of May. He said Libre\u2019s only existing city contract called for it to distribute $32,000 of a $40,000 award to other community groups. Mr. Herrera said he was unable to access Libre\u2019s records because he was out of the country. Though he was the treasurer during the years in question, he said he did not monitor the books, a job that he said fell to Mr. Cardenas. \u201cAll we\u2019ve been doing is paying bills from the past,\u201d Mr. Herrera said. \u201cLibre doesn\u2019t have employees. We are just cleaning up Libre debt.\u201d", "keyword": "Monserrate Hiram;City Councils;Nonprofit Organizations;Queens (NYC);Frauds and Swindling;Hispanic-Americans;Quinn Christine C"}
{"id": "ny0155282", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/01/22", "title": "Aviation Industry Offers Ideas to Help Passengers", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Aviation executives are sharing a list of steps they can take to make passengers\u2019 lives a little easier the next time a blizzard, a hurricane or another event strands planes on the ground. Those steps are measures like making sure airports know the location of all available air stairs, the stairs that can be driven up to a plane on the tarmac, and ordering airport shops to stock diapers, baby formula, simple medicines and food. More than 100 officials from airports and airlines met for two days last week in the Washington area to brainstorm, compare techniques and make a list of suggestions that they could send on to a task force being formed by the Transportation Department. The task force is part of a push the Bush administration began last fall to show its concern about flight delays. The group has not yet begun its work. Even so, aviation executives wanted to get out ahead of any strongly worded advice from the task force. Some airports may be able to say they have made the preparations before the task force has done its work, though the effects will not be clear until the next emergency. \u201cIn the old days, when you had very low load factors and bad weather, we could get everybody home that night,\u201d said James M. Crites, executive vice president of operations at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. \u201cYou\u2019d get home late, but you\u2019d get home.\u201d Now, he said, planes are so full that people can be stranded overnight. But, he said, the airlines and the airports can \u201chelp each other, look over each other\u2019s shoulder and provide assistance.\u201d Mr. Crites helped organize the workshop, called \u201cPassenger Care During Irregular Operations.\u201d The group defined \u201cirregular operations\u201d as times when passengers needed help. Passengers have been stuck for hours in planes on the tarmac in many instances in recent years. In late December 2006, a storm forced American Airlines to divert 130 airplanes from Dallas/Fort Worth. Sixty-seven American Airlines flights were stuck on the tarmac for three hours or more. Last February, 21 JetBlue planes were stranded at Kennedy Airport in a snowstorm. But even smaller events now have the potential to make life extremely uncomfortable for passengers because airplanes are so full that if one flight is canceled, there are few or no seats available on later flights. One problem in a crisis is that an airport is likely to have more planes than gates, officials said. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees New York area airports, has made a list of all the lifts that could be used to take handicapped passengers off planes not parked at gates, officials said. Another step is to catalog spots where cargo planes normally park, so that in a pinch passenger planes could use those locations. Airports could also keep an inventory of buses, including the buses that ordinarily shuttle airport employees to remote parking lots, officials said. Dick Marchi, the senior adviser for policy at the Airports Council International\u2019s North American branch, said airports can order shops to stock basic items and help the shops to stay open late if people are stranded. \u201cSenior concession management is very much interested in meeting these needs,\u201d Mr. Marchi said. \u201cBut they\u2019ve been trapped into a routine where the shift person on the floor says, \u2018We close at 10 o\u2019clock.\u2019 \u201d With proper preparation, airport concessions can make money while meeting vital needs, he added. Airports can help the carriers by providing extra chaperones for unaccompanied minors, Mr. Marchi said. The airports may also have to help by providing areas for pets to relieve themselves. The Transportation Security Administration and the consumer affairs office of the Transportation Department joined the sessions last week, along with consumer advocates. The group plans to produce a report for members of the Airports Council International and others in related industries. It appeared that all of the steps it was recommending could be taken without any government permission. Strandings at airports have touched a nerve with the public. A federal government Web site is collecting postings from passengers: \u201cThere is NO reason people should be detained against their will,\u201d even in an airplane, said one, posted under the name Richard Neilsen. It continues: \u201cAt no time should anyone be detained on the tarmac for longer than 15 minutes for any reason.\u201d Passengers are not always left to fend for themselves. Last Aug. 17, the captain of a Delta flight from Phoenix to Kennedy International, diverted to Syracuse by weather, radioed ahead and had pizza delivered to the gate area for the passengers.", "keyword": "Airports;Weather;Executives and Management;Transportation Department;American Airlines;JetBlue Airways"}
{"id": "ny0061221", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2014/01/03", "title": "Banned Substances Claim an Outsize Role in Athletics in India", "abstract": "PATIALA, India \u2014 The crumbling Old Moti Bagh Palace houses the National Institute of Sports, the training ground for India\u2019s best athletes. One sweltering spring afternoon, the sprinter Ashwini Akkunji ran laps around its sprawling grounds, past broken fountains, a murky pool and monkeys that occasionally charged people with bared teeth. She and the palace, once home to Patiala\u2019s royal family, had seen better days. A gold medalist in the 4x400-meter relay and the 400 hurdles at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Akkunji was a national hero and inspired awe in other athletes here. But eight months after those victories, Akkunji and five of her relay teammates tested positive for steroids and were suspended from competition for two years. Athletes around the world have had their careers marred by doping, but Indian athletes, with easy access to legal steroids and limited knowledge about their consequences, lead the world in suspensions for performance-enhancing drug use. Nearly 500 have tested positive for banned substances since 2009, when India\u2019s National Anti-Doping Agency , known as NADA, became fully functional. In 2012 alone, 178 Indians were barred from competition. Russia has had the second-highest number of suspensions, with more than 260 athletes barred since 2009. At the same time, Russia, with a population of 143 million, has had great international athletic success, and India, a nation of 1.2 billion, has underperformed. India has won only 26 medals in the 113 years it has competed in the Olympic Games. Russia has earned 482 Olympic medals since it began competing as the Russian Federation in the 1994 Winter Games. \u201cIndia cannot provide proper nutrition, training or medical care for its national athletes,\u201d said Dr. Mohan Chandran, president of the Indian Federation of Sports Medicine . \u201cSo, of course, we are decades behind in our knowledge on doping.\u201d But John Fahey, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said India had come a long way in its efforts to catch up with international standards. The increase in testing and the enforcement of WADA rules could be one reason so many athletes are caught. They learn to cut corners early, said Rehan Khan, a steroid supplier in New Delhi for more than 20 years. \u201cSome of my biggest clients are the coaches of junior athletes,\u201d Khan said. \u201cMost of my clients understand what they are buying. They know they will get fast results, so it is worth the risks. If they don\u2019t buy from me, they can just as easily order the steroids online.\u201d The salaries of coaches who train junior and national athletes are often dependent on the performance of their charges. Some of these coaches are not familiar with increasingly stringent doping tests; others believe that the drugs\u2019 effect is worth the gamble. \u201cWhether it is a junior meet or university meet, you see syringes all over the track,\u201d said Ashwini Nachappa, a former track star who is the president of Clean Sports India, an organization that fights corruption in athletics. \u201cNobody has given it a thought. The onus lies in the training center to start education programs and start randomly testing the kids so that there is fear.\u201d She said the Indian government should also stop hiring coaches from former Soviet bloc countries that have a long history of using performance-enhancing drugs. A Way Out of Poverty Most Indian athletes do not expect million dollar contracts or lucrative sponsorships. Careers in medicine or engineering are more respected. Yet for the tens of thousands who come from impoverished backgrounds and vie for positions on national teams, successful performances can ensure government jobs that will provide financial security for them and their families. Akhil Kumar, a boxer who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, said he felt like a test animal at the National Institute of Sports. His coaches and doctors, he said, did not have the resources and experience to help him with injuries and often made his situation worse. \u201cI know about doping because I have been in this sport for a long time and have educated myself,\u201d said Kumar, 32, who is aiming for a comeback in the 2016 Olympics and works as a police officer, a common government job for athletes. \u201cThe only way the next generation of athletes is going to have that knowledge is if they take it upon themselves to get educated, and people like me reach back and teach them.\u201d Chandran, who is also a member of NADA\u2019s disciplinary board, said the agency needed to do more to inform athletes about the risks of taking steroids because they are responsible for what they put in their bodies. But many Indians do not have the resources to research the contents of their supplements or to have them tested. \u201cIn India we are taught to never question the authority of our coaches, who are the center of our lives,\u201d the track star Akkunji said. Akkunji, whose suspension ended in July, is competing internationally and aiming for the 2016 Olympics. She and her teammates contended that they never knowingly took steroids. Akkunji said their Ukrainian coach had given them tainted nutritional supplements. Dr. Laxman Singh Ranawat, the executive director of the National Institute of Sports until he retired in October, defended its training methods while acknowledging, \u201cThere may be a few cases of doping in India, but those athletes were given the drugs by their foreign coaches.\u201d Less than a mile from Ranawat\u2019s office, the streets are lined with billboards showing bodybuilders flexing their muscles. They advertise steroids, available at pharmacies across India, where there is virtually no regulation of over-the-counter drugs. The most common drug Indians test positive for is norandrosterone , a steroid that has been prohibited in sports for more than 30 years, according to The British Journal of Sports Medicine. A month\u2019s supply of banned substances can cost as little as $5 to $10, and some pills are only 25 cents, said Raj Makhija, the chief executive of Smart Brands in New Delhi, one of India\u2019s few suppliers of authentic health food supplements. Nutritional supplements from abroad are subject to high import taxes. Makhija said that imported whey protein and recovery drinks could cost $60 to $150 a month, depending on the brand and serving sizes, and that a lack of regulation had led to the rampant sale of counterfeit products. One of the athletes Makhija sponsors is Yogeshwar Dutt, an Olympic bronze medalist in men\u2019s 60-kilogram freestyle wrestling at the 2012 London Games. \u201cYou know if you take steroids, you can put on muscle and get a good performance fast,\u201d Dutt said as other wrestlers crowded into his room to talk with Makhija at a training camp in Haryana. \u201cA lot of young athletes take the easy route. Unless they are sponsored like we are, it would be difficult for them to even afford quality supplements.\u201d Pushing for Change Cheema Palwinder, a former Asian Games champion weight lifter, knows the challenges of being an athlete in India. Now obese with painful joints, he looks a decade older than his 33 years. \u201cIn my day there was not so much testing,\u201d said Palwinder, the superintendent of police in Punjab, where he presides over a dusty agricultural town with fields full of tractors and bullock carts. \u201cWhen I was competing on the international level, I learned about steroids from athletes who came from countries with more sophisticated doping programs. They showed me what drugs would stay in my system and which ones would quickly flush out.\u201d Palwinder said he was trying to educate coaches, athletes and their parents about the effects of performance-enhancing drugs. But given the magnitude of the problem, he said, it is probably a losing battle. Rajkumar Merathia, a boxing coach at the National Institute of Sports, is more hopeful. \u201cSports in India is much better than it was 20 years ago,\u201d Merathia said as he shouted commands to a teenage girl who traded bloody noses with her male opponent on a grass field. \u201cWe are starting athletes out younger, and we are winning more medals than we used to.\u201d The Sports Authority of India, part of a government ministry, supports tens of thousands of athletes with a minimal full-time permanent staff: three sports medicine doctors, six physiotherapists, three physiologists, two psychologists and one nutritionist, Chandran said by email. Even the best athletes feel shortchanged. Om Prakash Singh was dejected and depressed after placing 19th in the shot-put at the London Olympics. He returned to the National Institute of Sports, which offered limited medical care. \u201cIt\u2019s so difficult to adjust to training in India after training in Europe and the United States,\u201d Singh, 26, said after a workout as he folded his 6-foot-7-inch, 304-pound body into a blue plastic barrel filled with ice water. \u201cLook at our facilities. If someone offered you steroids and said you would not get caught, wouldn\u2019t you take them too?\u201d", "keyword": "Doping;India;Steroid;Olympics;Sports"}
{"id": "ny0230582", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/09/10", "title": "Once Again, September Is the Phillies\u2019 Favorite Time of Year", "abstract": "PHILADELPHIA \u2014 It is nice to have options, in your wardrobe and your pitching staff. Just ask Ruben Amaro, the general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies . Amaro has a World Series championship ring from 2008 and a National League ring from last season. These days he wears the N.L. ring , because the Phillies somehow win more often when he does. \u201cI\u2019m very superstitious,\u201d said Amaro, who nonetheless tempted fate with his boldest off-season move. Amaro traded Cliff Lee, who earned the Phillies\u2019 two World Series victories last fall, rankling a fan base that has sold out Citizens Bank Park 114 games in a row. As he shipped out Lee, who has bounced from Seattle to Texas this season, Amaro simultaneously acquired Roy Halladay , the former Toronto All-Star who faces the Mets at Citi Field on Friday. But the deals were bittersweet, because the Phillies could have had two aces and settled for one. \u201cThat was a tough thing,\u201d center fielder Shane Victorino said. \u201cBut everybody\u2019s forgotten. I mean, people remember it, but it\u2019s gone by the wayside because Roy\u2019s done a great job for us \u2014 both Roys.\u201d The Phillies have the best record in the league, at 81-60, and with not one ace, but three \u2014 Halladay, the leading candidate for the N.L. Cy Young Award; Roy Oswalt, who is 5-1 with a 2.30 earned run average in eight starts since being traded from Houston; and Cole Hamels, who has a 25-inning scoreless streak. The three-ace formula does not always lead to a title; the Atlanta Braves won just one with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, and the Oakland Athletics never won a playoff series with Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. But the Phillies, in theory, should be strongest in an area that had been troublesome. \u201cDo I feel vindicated? I never felt that maligned about it,\u201d Amaro said. \u201cYou try to do your business the best you can. You always have reasons to try to do things. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don\u2019t. We were fortunate to be in a position this year to still be hanging around enough to add on.\u201d It has been an unsteady ascent for the Phillies, who have won 11 of 14 but trailed the Braves by seven games on July 22. Six everyday players, three starters and six relievers have been on the disabled list. Shortstop Jimmy Rollins left Wednesday\u2019s game with right hamstring tightness, and closer Brad Lidge was unavailable with a sore elbow. All things considered, though, the Phillies are healthy enough, and appear to have found their annual late-summer groove. Starting in 2007, when they overtook the Mets for the N.L. East title, the Phillies have a .630 winning percentage in September, second only to the Yankees. \u201cI definitely feel like we\u2019ve got a good run in us,\u201d Manager Charlie Manuel said. \u201cI feel like we can play better than we have at any point this year, because we have all our players back. We\u2019re solid. We\u2019re more equipped to do that.\u201d Oswalt, who starts Sunday, has not been to the postseason since 2005, when he teamed with Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte to lift Houston to its only World Series. Approving a trade to the Phillies, for a package led by starter J. A. Happ, was his chance to get back. \u201cI\u2019d match up Halladay against anybody in the big leagues, and you\u2019d have the upper hand most of the time,\u201d Oswalt said. \u201cSame way with Cole. His velocity\u2019s back up this year and he\u2019s throwing the ball really well. I said it from Day 1, they remind me so much of Roger and Andy in \u201905. They kind of feed off each other and push each other even more.\u201d Oswalt is signed for next season with a club option for 2012. Hamels is also under the Phillies\u2019 control through 2012, and Halladay through 2014. Lee, who missed his last start with lower back soreness, has a 4.69 E.R.A. for Texas and will be a free agent after the season. Except right fielder Jayson Werth, the Phillies have signed all of their core position players to long-term contracts. That would seem to be a good thing, though only Victorino is under 30 years old. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s good or bad,\u201d Amaro said. \u201cWe think that they\u2019re talented enough to help us continue the trend of winning baseball here. But at some point, everybody\u2019s replaceable; people get older and less productive. You have to be aware of that, and hopefully guys continue to be productive. While they\u2019re gambles, we hope at least they\u2019re reasonable gambles.\u201d According to Baseball-Reference.com , the Phillies\u2019 hitters have the oldest average age in the league, at nearly 32 years old. Hamels, especially, has been a victim of their unsteady production, with the fourth-lowest run support in the majors before Wednesday\u2019s win. But Hamels, who is 10-10 with a season-low 3.06 E.R.A., said the team seemed to come alive last Thursday in a game at Colorado , erupting for nine runs in the seventh inning of a comeback victory. It showed, essentially, that the Phillies were still the Phillies. \u201cThat\u2019s the confidence you need to have, especially going into the last few weeks, knowing you can put runs on the board whether it\u2019s early or late, if you\u2019re down or if you\u2019re up,\u201d Hamels said. \u201cWe do know how to put it in fifth gear, especially when September rolls around.\u201d They did it again against Florida on Tuesday, losing a lead with a sloppy eighth inning and then immediately rallying to go ahead. Victorino, who had already homered, singled with two outs, stole second and scored on a single by Placido Polanco. In a blowout win the next night, Ryan Howard drove in six and hit his 250th career homer . It came in his 855th career game, the fewest ever needed for a player to reach that milestone. Howard usually takes off at this time of year, with his best production (a career 1.114 OPS) in the last month of the season. \u201cSeptember just happens to be September,\u201d said Howard, who signed a five-year, $125 million contract extension in April. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things you know coming down the stretch that every game counts. I\u2019m just trying to do what I can.\u201d Wednesday\u2019s game was the Phillies\u2019 24th in 23 days, before a day off on Thursday. That gave Rollins and Lidge a chance to rest their injuries, but others had mixed feelings. \u201cI want to keep playing,\u201d Victorino said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to stop now.\u201d But isn\u2019t he tired after all those games without a break? \u201cI feel wonderful, brother,\u201d Victorino said. \u201cWe\u2019re playing baseball. How do you feel?\u201d Most other teams, the Mets included, are probably weary these days. The Phillies, as usual, are just getting started.", "keyword": "Baseball;Philadelphia Phillies;Lee Cliff;Halladay Roy;Victorino Shane"}
{"id": "ny0142014", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2008/11/10", "title": "Impatient Leaders Call on Zimbabwe to Form a Joint Government", "abstract": "JOHANNESBURG \u2014 Southern African leaders called Monday for political rivals in Zimbabwe to share control of the crucial ministry that oversees the police and to form a joint government immediately, but the opposition flatly rejected the proposal as unworkable and unfair. Impatient with a crisis that has dragged on for more than seven months since disputed elections in March, the regional leaders sought to force a resolution of the deadlocked power-sharing talks between Zimbabwe\u2019s president, Robert Mugabe , and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai , in a marathon day of jawboning on Sunday. \u201cWe cannot afford to postpone the formation of an inclusive government because there is a dispute over who gets the Ministry of Home Affairs,\u201d said Tomaz A. Salom\u00e3o, executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community, or S.A.D.C., a 15-nation regional bloc, at a midnight news conference. But if regional leaders had hoped to press Mr. Tsvangirai to settle for shared control of the Home Ministry and a police force that human rights groups say turned a blind eye to vicious attacks on his supporters, it did not work. Mr. Tsvangirai, who surpassed Mr. Mugabe in the March elections and quit a runoff because of state-sponsored attacks on his supporters, accused the regional leaders of lacking the courage to look Mr. Mugabe in the eye and insist on an equitable sharing of ministries. Mr. Tsvangirai, who seemed somber and discouraged, said his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, \u201cis shocked and saddened that the S.A.D.C. summit has failed to tackle these issues.\u201d There is now no obvious next step to end the political crisis in Zimbabwe, a country afflicted by worsening hunger and one of the most extreme cases of hyperinflation in world history. Mr. Tsvangirai said he would turn to the African Union for further help, but it had asked the southern African regional bloc to take the lead in mediation. The southern African leaders sought to resolve the crisis on Sunday in a marathon of talking. After rejecting their unequivocal directive on the crisis, Mr. Tsvangirai is likely to find himself increasingly isolated. Mr. Mugabe left the summit meeting without commenting, but Mr. Salom\u00e3o said he had agreed to the bloc\u2019s proposal. The group\u2019s insistence on the immediate formation of a government, and Mr. Tsvangirai\u2019s refusal to accept its terms, may embolden Mr. Mugabe, who has held power for the past 28 years, to go ahead and form a government on his own. A communiqu\u00e9 released by the group after the meeting directed that an \u201cinclusive government be formed forthwith in Zimbabwe.\u201d But a government that excluded Mr. Tsvangirai would not win the infusion of foreign aid and investment that economists and political analysts say is essential to rebuilding Zimbabwe\u2019s shattered economy. Arthur Mutambara, who leads a small opposition faction that was also part of the talks, said Monday morning at a news conference that the deal S.A.D.C. had offered was the best the opposition would get. He warned, \u201cThis is the end of the road if we\u2019re not careful.\u201d", "keyword": "Zimbabwe;Politics and Government;Southern African Development Community;Mugabe Robert;Tsvangirai Morgan"}
{"id": "ny0091431", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/08/02", "title": "Tiny Birds, Big Drama: Inside the World of the Birdmen of Queens", "abstract": "Ray Harinarain cut the lusty Hellcat engine of his Dodge Challenger and gently lifted his birdcage from the front seat. Mr. Harinarain, a heating and air-conditioner repairman from Brooklyn, joined a procession of middle-aged men in fedoras and flat caps, cradling wood poles and cages the size of large shoe boxes, streaming into a pocket-size park in Richmond Hill, Queens, on a recent Sunday morning. The cages were blanketed in white coverlets, some trimmed with lace. Inside each one was a delicate songbird: a chestnut-bellied seed finch native to the northern parts of South America and the Caribbean. Sundays are race days, though the events are not really races but speed-singing contests. Two cages each containing a male finch, whose fierce calls are triggered by an instinctive desire to woo females and defend turf, are hung on a pole about an inch apart. The birds are judged on the number of songs they sing. The first to reach 50 wins. Ostensibly, it\u2019s a battle of the birds. But there is just as much grandstanding by their male handlers. Many hail from Guyana, with others from Trinidad, Suriname and Brazil, places where amateurs and professionals line grassy roadsides and town squares, vying for trophies, cash prizes and prestige at tournaments or impromptu matches. Owning a champion, which can be worth as much as a car, also has cachet. Even well-known soccer players have acquired them as status symbols. But as the finches migrated with their human wards to North American cities, where it is more common to see someone walking a cat than a bird, the hobby has attracted unwanted attention from federal law enforcement. Although it is much gentler than cockfighting, the sport has a seedy side. Customs agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport began uncovering birds zipped into suitcase linings, sometimes stuffed in toilet paper rolls, or tucked inside socks, pantyhose, or specially tailored pants. The discoveries prompted agents at the United StatesFish and Wildlife Service\u2019s Office of Law Enforcement to start what would become an eight-year investigation, nicknamed Operation G-Bird, that focused on the illegal smuggling of these prized competitors. The chestnut-bellied seed finch ( Oryzoborus angolensis ) is not considered an endangered species. But transporting the birds without proper paperwork and under inhumane conditions violates, among other laws, the Lacey Act, which combats illegal trafficking in fauna and flora. The Guyanese government began issuing permits for the legal export of birds in recent years, but importing birds on the books to the United States is an expensive and time-consuming process that requires approval from multiple federal agencies, hiring licensed bird brokers and paying government fees. A mandatory 30-day quarantine is also stressful on birds and can undermine their training. Video Ray Harinarain has been involved in finch singing competitions since emigrating from Guyana in the 1980s. Today, the sport is flourishing in pockets of New York City. Credit Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times Birds \u201care not the same after they go through quarantine,\u201d said one man, whose name was redacted in a report by the federal investigators. Getting caught can result in a fine of several thousand dollars, as well as criminal charges. But enthusiasts and career smugglers said it was worth the risk. And demand for these featherweight champions has apparently not diminished. For decades, the epicenter of New York\u2019s racing scene has been Phil \u201cScooter\u201d Rizzuto Park , which the men still refer to by its old name, Smokey Oval. In between the handball court and the baseball diamond, the men erect a patchwork of wood and metal cages perched on car tops, benches, hanging on telephone poles or wooden stakes planted in the ground. In recent years, the mood there has become tense with a pervasive fear that undercover agents and informants lurk with binoculars and hidden cameras. MR. HARINARAIN, KNOWN AS \u201cBUSH,\u201d wears a gold, flat-braided chain with a bird charm. He presides as an unofficial spokesman for the birdmen, at times to the chagrin of his peers who are reluctant to expose their passion to criticism. After emigrating from Berbice, Guyana, in 1987, he began tending to the birds belonging to the elder statesmen in the park. When he could afford his own finches, he began organizing competitions, eventually succeeding the older generation. \u201cI control the birds now,\u201d he said. Federal agents have visited Mr. Harinarain\u2019s home in Cypress Hills, where he lives with his wife and 43 birds that chirp from almost every corner, including the bathroom. The more valuable ones are monitored with webcams streamed to his iPhone. And each week, he spends about $100 and about an hour every other day inspecting their feathers and toes, scooping 10 varieties of seed into their trays, dropping liquid vitamins into feeding tubes and filling plastic cups with water so they can \u201ctake a shower.\u201d His garage is crammed with bird trophies and dozens of dangling empty cages. He was among the first in New York City to breed the finches, called \u201ctowa towa\u201d in Guyana. But it was a tedious and difficult process, so now he imports them from Brazil, which has an organized industry of breeders. From a filing cabinet, he pulled out the birth certificate of one of the birds, a blue sheet of paper with a diagram resembling a family tree. Like racehorses, the male songbirds are bred for their pedigrees, he explained. \u201cMost of the guys don\u2019t want to talk because they have illegal birds,\u201d he said. \u201cMine are legit.\u201d Image Top, a birth certificate for one of Mr. Harinarain\u2019s birds; below, hair curlers stuffed with finches that were confiscated by the authorities. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Mr. Harinarain said he understood that the agents were \u201cjust trying to do their job,\u201d especially to catch men \u201cdoing illegal stuff.\u201d But he said, \u201cI hope they\u2019re not trying to prosecute all of us who are trying to do the right thing.\u201d During Operation G-Bird, agents monitored online finch forums and talked to informants in Subway restaurants and McDonald\u2019s parking lots. The investigation, which concluded last year, resulted in a 230-page dossier, which was obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act. The agents reported that smugglers sometimes sedated the finches with rum or kept them awake with spotlights before they were lowered, wings pressed in a straitjacket position, into enclosure devices. These were often improvised from cardboard tubes or plastic hair curlers that would not trigger airport metal detectors. One smuggler camouflaged his avian cargo inside boxes labeled \u201csugar cakes.\u201d The report, which redacted the names of the birds, said that the suspect was \u201cbreathing heavily\u201d and that his \u201ceyes nearly popped out\u201d of his head when his bag went through an X-ray machine. One of his three finches tried to escape when the agent opened it; another was dead. In Guyana, the finches are trapped with sticks coated with a glue-like gum, nets or cages, and are sold at markets or pet stores for as little as $5. But their value skyrockets in the United States, where a male finch might sell for from $500 to $10,000, depending on its pedigree and track record, according to the report. Money is also made on flipping birds after they have been trained. Females, which are used only for breeding, are worth considerably less. Image Sanjay Lalman, who calls himself the \"Bird King of the Bronx,\" with Legend, one of about 30 finches he owns. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times Bribing officials at the airport in Guyana is included in the cost of doing business. In one instance detailed in the report, a constable took a smuggler\u2019s bag while he passed through security and delivered it to the gate 30 minutes before takeoff. While some people are smuggling the birds for themselves, others are bird mules hired for the job. They can sometimes make almost $15,000 for a single flight, transporting as many as 90 birds at a time, depending on how many birds survive the trip, according to the report. Operation G-Bird resulted in multiple arrests and in jail time for at least one of the traffickers . In all, about 150 songbirds were confiscated. It is not known how many eluded the dragnet. Even after Operation G-Bird, Ryan Bessey, a square-jawed special agent with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said his office still handled several cases a year. Smuggling, however, is not the only illegal activity among some of the birdmen. \u201cI liken it to horse racing in our culture,\u201d Special Agent Bessey said. \u201cA lot of money is made both in the sale of the animal and bets and side bets.\u201d WHEN ASKED IF PRIVATE WAGERS were part of the thrill, a few men at the park reluctantly said yes. Most insisted that they competed only for bragging rights and the adrenaline rush. The winner might buy butter rolls and coffee or a case of beer, or might collect a trophy topped with a golden bird. What keeps them coming back, they all said, are the fraternity, tradition and the chance to transcend their workaday lives. In the winter, the men rent space indoors. But as soon as the weather warms, the company of regulars heads to Smokey Oval. \u201cIt\u2019s a macho thing,\u201d Mr. Harinarain said. \u201cOur wives hate this, that we\u2019ve got to wake up early in the morning and leave them.\u201d Image It's not uncommon for men to gather for impromptu roadside races, like this one in Georgetown, Guyana, in 2003. Credit Cullen Hanks At the park, the men swap training tips, vitamins, antibiotics and even birds. They pass along job leads or trade services. The perimeter has become a de facto market. A coconut seller hawks fresh juice from a van, and the men open up their S.U.V.s to sell specially designed splash guards for cages and bird seed imported from Guyana, or plucked from the side of the Van Wyck Expressway. Suresh, a Guyanese man with a tidy mustache who was not comfortable giving his last name for reasons he did not specify, described the race days as a balm for his life. \u201cAll the job stress and all the things you go through, you come here, you talk to the guys,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t talk nothing about the jobs.\u201d Their wives complain that they spend more time and attention on their birds than on their families. One man said he didn\u2019t have room in his life for both a girlfriend and 31 birds. Suresh, who said he kept a finch above the bed, said his wife thought he was a \u201cfanatic,\u201d which he denied. When they married, he said, \u201cshe knew the deal.\u201d \u201cIt takes a lot to get the birds to do what they do,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be with the birds to understand them.\u201d Coaching is a craft. Some men acclimate their tropical pets to the rumble and flash of the city by taking them for evening drives or on their subway commutes. They bring them to the park to breathe fresh air and socialize with other birds. This also inures them to crowds, which can be intimidating or distracting to the high-strung creatures. The men hold warm-up matches, called \u201cramping,\u201d to see which birds are ready to compete. And they play YouTube clips and Bollywood songs from their phones to inspire the short, \u201cjabbing\u201d songs that the Guyanese men prefer. Image Depending on the country, chestnut-bellied seed finches are called towa towa, bullfinches, picolet or curio. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times Hamma Ram, a parking attendant at La Guardia Airport and third-generation birder, described his mornings at the park as his \u201cmost important church.\u201d But he, like others, fears that their meeting spot is in jeopardy. Once last summer, he said, police officers threatened to confiscate their birds if they did not vacate the park. The Irish and Italian complexion of Richmond Hill changed in the 1960s, with an influx of Guyanese immigrants, many of South Asian descent. And now, the middle-class neighborhood is home to one of the world\u2019s largest Sikh populations outside India . But the two groups of diaspora Indians are not ethnic soul mates. One of the birdmen, who like many is of Indo-Caribbean heritage, said the Punjabi Sikhs \"look down at us as slaves\" and lodged complaints at community meetings and to the local precinct about their presence in the park. \u201cLook how we assemble: no smoking, no drinking, no gambling,\u201d Mr. Ram said. \u201cWhy just chase Guyanese people with the birds? Why not chase the people with the cats and dogs?\u201d IT WAS A FRESH 63 DEGREES that Sunday morning for one of the first races of the season. There is no formal league, but Mr. Harinarain has formed the \u201cA Team\u201d with two other men who, combined, have a deep bench of talent. Morris Ramsaywack, a trim, muscular construction worker from Guyana, with thin streaks of facial hair that frame his cheeks like racing stripes, is a member. He brought a 6-year-old Brazilian finch for that day\u2019s race. The birds flitted from wooden perches at the bottom of the cages to the side to the top and back down, making the circuit in about a second, with broad tail feathers and wings flicking the metal bars. Image Preparing for a race at Phil (Scooter) Rizzuto Park. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times \u201cThey\u2019re, like, cursing each other out,\u201d Mr. Harinarain said. \u201cWhen we have them in a cage, they can\u2019t grab each other, so they sing against each other.\u201d Some swear by the practice of keeping a female at home, to juice up champions. But like boxers before a big fight, the birds are kept out of female earshot before a competition so they don\u2019t lose their \u201cvitality.\u201d At 8 a.m., a trilling cacophony drowned out the dull hum of idling Long Island Rail Road trains at the depot across the street. Spectators formed a circle around the cages. In the crowd, one man licked his lips. Another widened his stance and crossed his arms. Another wiped the edges of his mouth with his fingers. Deep creases formed between their brows. Two camera phones were rolling. The din of a bouncing basketball and squeals from a swing set receded as the men homed in on the shrill \u201cpee peow peow.\u201d Without ceremony or even the wave of a hand, the judge counted \u201cone two three\u201d as Mr. Ramsaywack\u2019s bird trilled. The other bird, and judge, were silent. \u201cIt must be the weather,\u201d one man said. The five-and-a-half-minute race was a shutout. Mr. Ramsaywack shook Mr. Harinarain\u2019s hand. \u201cHe told me he was ready,\u201d he said about his bird, \u201cHe come to do his work.\u201d", "keyword": "Birds;Animal Abuse;Richmond Hill Queens;Smuggling;Guyanese-Americans;Guyana;Fish and Wildlife Service;Ray Harinarain"}
{"id": "ny0088549", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/09/20", "title": "Things to Do on Long Island, Sept. 18 to 25, 2015", "abstract": "A guide to cultural and recreational events on Long Island. Items for the calendar should be sent at least three weeks in advance to lical@nytimes.com. Comedy BROOKVILLE Tilles Center for the Performing Arts Whoopi Goldberg. Oct. 3 at 8 p.m. $48 to $111. Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, 720 Northern Boulevard. tillescenter.org; 516-299-3100. LEVITTOWN Governor\u2019s Comedy Club Bonnie McFarlane. Sept. 18 and 19. $17. Nick DiPaolo. Sept. 25 and 26. $25. Lavell Crawford. Oct. 2 and 3. $32.00. Governor\u2019s Comedy Club, 90 Division Avenue. 516-731-3358; govs.com. PORT WASHINGTON Landmark on Main Street Colin Quinn. Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. $35 to $45. Caroline Rhea, with Talia Reese and others. Oct. 3, 8 to 10 p.m. $35 to $55. Landmark on Main Street, 232 Main Street. landmarkonmainstreet.org; 631-839-1942. WESTHAMPTON BEACH Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Craig Ferguson. Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. $85 to $110. Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, 76 Main Street. 631-288-1500; whbpac.org. Film GARDEN CITY Adelphi University Performing Arts Center \u201cL\u2019Elisir d\u2019Amore,\u201d Gaetano Donizetti\u2019s opera, directed by Rolando Villaz\u00f3n. Sept. 27 at 2 p.m. $5 to $20. Adelphi University Performing Arts Center, 1 South Avenue. 516-877-4000; aupac.adelphi.edu. GLEN COVE North Shore Historical Museum \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d (1974), starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. $10 and $15. North Shore Historical Museum, 140 Glen Street. 516-801-1191; northshorehistoricalmuseum.org. HUNTINGTON Cinema Arts Center \u201cNiagara\u201d (1953), starring Marilyn Monroe. Sept. 21 at 7:30 p.m. $10 and $15. Cinema Arts Center, 423 Park Avenue. 631-423-7611; cinemaartscentre.org. PATCHOGUE The Plaza Cinema and Media Arts Center Opera in Cinema: \u201cDon Pasquale,\u201d by Gaetano Donizetti. Sept. 19 at 10:30 a.m. and Sept. 24 at 6:30 p.m. $11 and $15. The Plaza Cinema and Media Arts Center, 20 Terry Street. 631-438-0083. ROSLYN HARBOR Nassau County Museum of Art \u201cEdgar Degas: Of Dandies, Ballerinas and Women Ironing,\u201d half-hour film. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m., noon, 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. and noon. Through Nov. 8. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. 516-484-9337; nassaumuseum.org. For Children BRIDGEHAMPTON South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center The Air We Breathe, hands-on activities exploring molecules. Sept. 19 at 2 p.m. South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center, 377 Bridgehampton/Sag Harbor Turnpike. 631-537-9735; sofo.org. BROOKVILLE Tilles Center for the Performing Arts \u201cSesame Street Live: Make a New Friend.\u201d Sept. 25 through 27. $25 to $106. Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, 720 Northern Boulevard. tillescenter.org; 516-299-3100. GARDEN CITY Long Island Children\u2019s Museum \u201cMusic and Movement,\u201d a singalong with instruments to choose from. Sept. 23, 11:30 a.m. to noon. $3 with museum admission, $12 and $13. \u201cTerrific Textiles,\u201d mini textile patterns to create with felt. Sept. 26, 2 to 4 p.m. Free with museum admission, $12 and $13. Long Island Children\u2019s Museum, 11 Davis Avenue. 516-224-5800; licm.org. ROSLYN HARBOR Nassau County Museum of Art \u201cA Day of Construction: Imagine, Design, Build,\u201d participate in design and construction projects. Sept. 27, 1 to 4 p.m. $8 with museum admission, $4 to $10. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. nassaumuseum.org; 516-484-9337. WESTBURY NYCB Theater at Westbury The Wiggles. Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. $48 to $237. NYCB Theater at Westbury, 960 Brush Hollow Road. livenation.com; 800-745-3000. Music and Dance AMAGANSETT Stephen Talkhouse Elliott Murphy, rock. Sept. 18 at 8 p.m. $25. Revel in Dimes, rock. Sept. 18 at 10 p.m. $10. Stephen Talkhouse, 161 Main Street. stephentalkhouse.com; 631-267-3117. BAY SHORE Y.M.C.A. Boulton Center for the Performing Arts Popa Chubby, blues. Sept. 18 at 8 p.m. $25 and $30. James Maddock, singer and songwriter. Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. $30. Chris Smithe, folk. Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. $30. Y.M.C.A. Boulton Center for the Performing Arts, 37 West Main Street. 631-969-1101; boultoncenter.org. BROOKVILLE Tilles Center for the Performing Arts New York Philharmonic. Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. $57 to $111. Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, 720 Northern Boulevard. 516-299-3100; tillescenter.org. COLD SPRING HARBOR Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Mei Rui, pianist. Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. $20. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road. 516-367-8455; cshl.edu. DIX HILLS Five Towns College Performing Arts Center Letz Zep, Led Zeppelin tribute band. Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m. $25 to $35. \u201cShades of Grey,\u201d tribute to Joel Grey. Sept. 27 at 2 p.m. $30. Five Towns College Performing Arts Center, 305 North Service Road. 631-656-2148; dhpac.org. FREEPORT Freeport Memorial Library Canta Libre Chamber Ensemble, works by Marcel Grandjany, Astor Piazzolla, Alberto Ginastera and others. Sept. 20, 2:30 to 4 p.m. Free. Freeport Memorial Library, 144 West Merrick Road. 516-379-3274; freeportlibrary.info; cantalibre.org. GARDEN CITY Adelphi University Performing Arts Center Kris Allen, singer and songwriter. Sept. 18 at 7:30 p.m. $40 and $45. Adelphi University Performing Arts Center, 1 South Avenue. 516-877-4000; aupac.adelphi.edu. HUNTINGTON The Paramount Almost Queen, Queen tribute band, and Unforgettable Fire, U2 tribute band. Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. $15 to $35. Oogee Wawa, rock. Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. $10 to $25. The Paramount, 370 New York Avenue. 631-673-7300; paramountny.com. MANHASSET The Congregational Church of Manhasset \u201cLet\u2019s Fall in Love,\u201d tribute to Cole Porter by the chancel choir and soloists. Sept. 27 at 3 p.m. $15. The Congregational Church of Manhasset, 1845 Northern Boulevard. uccmanhasset.org; 516-627-4911. PATCHOGUE Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts Bacon Brothers, rock. Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. $45 to $85. Terry Lee Goffee and Josie Waverly, Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline tribute show. Oct. 3 at 8 p.m. $21.58 to $48.08. \u201cMade in America,\u201d the Atlantic Wind Symphony, featuring American composers. Oct. 4 at 3 p.m. $13.10 to $29. Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts, 71 East Main Street. 631-207-1313; patchoguetheatre.com. RIVERHEAD Riverhead Free Library Mambo Loco, Afro-Cuban. Oct. 4, 2 to 4 p.m. Free. Riverhead Free Library, 330 Court Street. river.suffolk.lib.ny.us; 631-727-3228. SAG HARBOR Bay Street Theater Joe Delia and Thieves, blues. Sept. 18 at 8 p.m. $20. Judy Carmichael, pianist. Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. $45 to $75. Bay Street Theater, Main and Bay Streets. baystreet.org; 631-725-9500. STONY BROOK University Cafe, Stony Brook University Parsonsfield, indie roots. Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. $20 and $25. Jon Brooks, folk, and Pat Wictor, blues and folk guitarist. Oct. 4 at 2 p.m. $20 and $25. University Cafe, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Road. 631-632-1093; universitycafe.org. WESTBURY NYCB Theater at Westbury Charlie Daniels Band and the Marshall Tucker Band, country. Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. $86 to $167. NYCB Theater at Westbury, 960 Brush Hollow Road. 800-745-3000; livenation.com. WESTHAMPTON BEACH Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Jonny Lang, blues. Oct. 3 at 8 p.m. $80 to $120. Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, 76 Main Street. 631-288-1500; whbpac.org. Outdoors BRIDGEHAMPTON South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center Fungi and Lichen: A Symbiotic Relationship, with Dr. Tamson Yeh. Sept. 19 at 11 a.m. South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center, 377 Bridgehampton/Sag Harbor Turnpike. 631-537-9735; sofo.org. COLD SPRING HARBOR Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum SeaFaire, celebration of Long Island\u2019s maritime heritage with sea chanteys and traditional crafts. Sept. 27, noon to 3 p.m. $6; children, $5. Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, 301 Main Street. cshwhalingmuseum.org; 631-367-3418. FRANKLIN SQUARE Plattduestche Park \u201cOmpahfest,\u201d German-American festival with live music, German cuisine, beer, dancing, imported goods, raffles and activities for children. Sept. 20 at 11 a.m. $10. Plattduestche Park, 1132 Hempstead Turnpike. Spoken Word BOHEMIA Connetquot Public Library \u201cThe Irish Potato Famine and Immigration to America,\u201d lecture by Tom O\u2019Reilly. Sept. 23, 7 to 8:30 p.m. Free. Connetquot Public Library, 760 Ocean Avenue. 631-567-5079; connetquotlibrary.org. EAST HAMPTON East Hampton Library \u201cTales From the Heart of Our Sea,\u201d discussion with Bruce Collins, co-chairman of the East Hampton Library\u2019s Long Island collection, with new whaling acquisitions. Sept. 19, 4:30 p.m. Free. East Hampton Library, 159 Main Street. easthamptonlibrary.org; 631-324-0222. EAST HAMPTON Guild Hall Panel discussion, \u201cRoy Lichtenstein: Between Sea and Sky,\u201d with Avis Berman, art historian. Sept. 19 at 3 p.m. Free. Guild Hall, 158 Main Street. guildhall.org; 631-324-4050. EAST WILLISTON Community Church of East Williston \u201cThe German Settlements of 19th-Century Long Island,\u201d talk by Dr. Paul D. van Wie of Molloy College. Sept. 20 at 2 p.m. Free. Community Church of East Williston, 45 East Williston Avenue. ccew.org; 516-742-9690. SAG HARBOR Canio\u2019s Books Reading by Jill Bialosky from her novel \u201cThe Prize,\u201d and discussion. Sept. 19 at 5 p.m. Free. Canio\u2019s Books, 290 Main Street. 631-725-4926; caniosbooks.com. Theater EAST ISLIP Bayway Arts Center \u201cFatal Attraction,\u201d 1985 drama by Bernard Slade. Through Sept. 27. $18 and $20. Bayway Arts Center, 265 East Main Street. broadhollow.org; 631-581-2700. Image Sag Harbor \u201cDawning\u201d (2015), acrylic on canvas by Andrea Kowch, is in the solo show \u201cAcross a Rural Skyline\u201d through Sept. 28 at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, 90 Main Street. For further information: 631-725-1161; rjdgallery.com. Credit Gary Mamay ELMONT BroadHollow Theater \u201cI Do! I Do!,\u201d musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. Through Sept. 20. $23 and $25. BroadHollow Theater, 700 Hempstead Turnpike. 516-775-4420; broadhollow.org. LINDENHURST Studio Theater \u201cLie of Omission,\u201d drama by Cheryl Navo. Through Sept. 20. $25. Studio Theater, 141 South Wellwood Avenue. 631-226-8400; studiotheatreli.com. MERRICK Merrick Theater and Center for the Arts \u201cThe Heiress,\u201d drama. Through Sept. 27. $21. Merrick Theater and Center for the Arts, 2222 Hewlett Avenue. 516-868-6400; merrick-theatre.com. NORTHPORT John W. Engeman Theater at Northport \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d musical. Through Nov. 8. $69 to $74. John W. Engeman Theater at Northport, 250 Main Street. 631-261-2900; engemantheater.com. OAKDALE CM Performing Arts Center \u201cBonnie and Clyde,\u201d musical by Frank Wildhorn, Don Black and Ivan Menchell. Through Sept. 27. $20 to $29. CM Performing Arts Center, 931 Montauk Highway. 631-218-2810; cmpac.com. SMITHTOWN Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts \u201cArsenic and Old Lace,\u201d comedy by Joseph Kesserling. Through Oct. 4. $35. Smithtown Center for the Performing Arts, 2 East Main Street. 631-724-3700; smithtownpac.org. Museums and Galleries BRIDGEHAMPTON Silas Marder Gallery Recent work by Mica Marder, including drawings, paintings and sculpture. Through Oct. 17. Thursdays through Mondays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Silas Marder Gallery, 120 Snake Hollow Road. 631-702-2306; silasmarder.com. CUTCHOGUE Alex Ferrone Photography Gallery \u201cCalm Before the Storm,\u201d photographic exhibition of works by Christine Matth\u00e4i and Dalton Portella. Through Sept. 27. Alex Ferrone Photography Gallery, 25425 Main Road. alexferronegallery.com; 631-734-8545. DIX HILLS Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery The Art League of Long Island, instructors\u2019 exhibition. Through Sept. 20. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery, 107 East Deer Park Road. artleagueli.org; 631-462-5400. EAST HAMPTON Ashawagh Hall \u201cMostly Abstract,\u201d group show featuring multimedia abstract works. Sept. 26, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sept. 27, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Ashawagh Hall, 780 Springs Fireplace Road. 631-324-5671; ashawagh-hall.org. EAST HAMPTON Guild Hall \u201cRoy Lichtenstein: Between Sea and Sky,\u201d contemporary works. Through Oct. 12. Suggested donation, $7. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Guild Hall, 158 Main Street. 631-324-4050; guildhall.org. EAST HAMPTON The Drawing Room Works by Costantino Nivola, featuring sculptures and bas reliefs. Through Oct. 26. Free. Works by Antonio Asis, featuring gouaches on paperboard. Through Oct. 26. Free. Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Drawing Room, 66 Newtown Lane. 631-324-5016; drawingroom-gallery.com. GARDEN CITY Ruth S. Harley University Center Gallery, Adelphi University Paintings by Richmond Lewis. Through Sept. 22. Mondays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ruth S. Harley University Center Gallery, Adelphi University, 1 South Avenue. 516-877-3126; adelphi.edu/artmuseum. GLEN COVE Hersh Fine Art at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art Selected works by Cornelia Hernes, Stephen Bauman and Steve Forster. Sept. 19 through Nov. 30. Hersh Fine Art at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art, 14 Glen Street. 516-590-4324; hershfineart.com. GLEN COVE Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center \u201cScenes of Horror: A Photo History of the Armenian Genocide,\u201d film, text and photos. Through Sept. 30. Suggested donation, $10. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, noon to 4 p.m. Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center, 100 Crescent Beach Road. 516-571-8040; holocaust-nassau.org. HEMPSTEAD Hofstra University Museum \u201cEnduring Images,\u201d works from Hofstra University Museum\u2019s collection related to historic events. Through Jan. 31. \u201cDoug Hilson: Urbanscapes,\u201d paintings and drawings. Through Dec. 11. Daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hofstra University Museum, Hofstra University. 516-463-5672; hofstra.edu/museum. HOLBROOK Sachem Public Library \u201cChasing Jazz: The Art of Vincent James Quatroche.\u201d Through Sept. 30. Sachem Public Library, 150 Holbrook Road. 631-588-5024; sachemlibrary.org. HUNTINGTON Fotofoto Gallery \u201cWhat Lies Beneath,\u201d works by Patricia Colombraro. Through Sept. 26. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Fotofoto Gallery, 14 West Carver Street. 631-549-0448; fotofotogallery.org. HUNTINGTON Heckscher Museum of Art \u201cJames Rosenquist: Tripartite Prints.\u201d Through Nov. 22. \u201cGraphic Appeal: Modern Prints From the Collection.\u201d Through Nov. 29. Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue. 631-351-3250; heckscher.org. HUNTINGTON STATION South Huntington Public Library Paintings by R. J. T. Haynes. Through Oct. 7. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. South Huntington Public Library, 145 Pidgeon Hill Road. 631-549-4411; shpl.info. JAMESPORT Jedediah Hawkins Inn Barn Gallery \u201cRain or Shine,\u201d paintings by Max Moran. Through Sept. 20. Fridays, 5 to 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 7 p.m. Jedediah Hawkins Inn Barn Gallery, 400 South Jamesport Avenue. 631-722-2900. JAMESPORT Rosalie Dimon Gallery, Jamesport Manor Inn Paintings by Jerry Schwabe and photographs by Steven Schreiber. Through Oct. 28. Wednesdays through Mondays, noon to 10 p.m. Rosalie Dimon Gallery, Jamesport Manor Inn, 370 Manor Road. jamesportmanorinn.com; 631-722-0500. MANHASSET The Art Guild of Port Washington \u201cOrdinary Made Extraordinary: The Art of Still Life,\u201d group show with works by Alan Richards, Caryn Coville, Piper Lyman, James Lumpp and more. 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Through Sept. 27. The Art Guild of Port Washington, 200 Port Washington Boulevard. theartguild.org; 516-304-5797. NORTHPORT Haven Gallery \u201cCatharsis,\u201d paintings and drawings by Kate Zambrano. Through Sept. 24. Haven Group Show, 16 multidisciplinary artists. Through Sept. 24. Haven Gallery, 155 Main Street. 631-757-0500; havenartgallery.com. OYSTER BAY Collector Car Showcase \u201cThe American Hot Rod,\u201d exhibition. Through Oct. 31. $5 to $10; children under 7, free. Collector Car Showcase, 85 Pine Hollow Road (Route 106). 516-802-5297; collectorcs.com. OYSTER BAY Oyster Bay Historical Society \u201cLight Over Water: Oyster Bay Harbor Scenes,\u201d paintings, watercolors and drawings by Kirk Larsen. Sept. 26 through Dec. 23. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m. Oyster Bay Historical Society, 20 Summit Street. 516-922-5032; oysterbayhistorical.org. QUOGUE Quogue Library Art Gallery \u201cFulvio Massi: On the Wall,\u201d acrylic, pastel, graphite and paper on canvas. Through Sept. 28. Sundays and Mondays, noon to 5 p.m.; Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Quogue Library Art Gallery, 90 Quogue Street. quoguelibrary.org; 631-653-4224. RIVERHEAD Thirty West Main \u201cAugust Abstracts,\u201d group show. Through Oct. 29. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thirty West Main, 30 West Main Street. 631-727-0900; eastendarts.org. RIVERHEAD Suffolk County Historical Society \u201cFrom Shore to Shore Exhibit: Boatbuilders and Boatyards of Long Island.\u201d Through Sept. 19. $5; members, free. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Suffolk County Historical Society, 300 West Main Street. suffolkcountyhistoricalsociety.org; 631-727-2881. ROSLYN HARBOR Nassau County Museum of Art \u201cThe Moderns,\u201d selections from the Saltzman family collection and Long Island Collects Modern Art. \u201cPosters of the Russian Revolution: 1917-1921.\u201d \u201cFrank Olt: New Works.\u201d Through Nov. 8. $4 to $10; children 4 and under and members, free. Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive. 516-484-9337. nassaumuseum.org. SAG HARBOR Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery \u201cAcross a Rural Skyline,\u201d paintings by Andrea Kowch. Through Sept. 28. Sundays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, 90 Main Street. rjdgallery.com; 631-725-1161. SAG HARBOR Dodds & Eder Home \u201cNature\u2019s End,\u201d group show. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dodds & Eder Home, 11 Bridge Street. zeigerarts.com; 917-239-0493. SAG HARBOR Sag Harbor Whaling Museum \u201cBarbara Hadden and Michael Butler: Our Town,\u201d paintings. Through Oct. 15. $2 to $6. Mondays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, 200 Main Street. 631-725-0770; sagharborwhalingmuseum.org. SETAUKET Gallery North \u201cThe Art of Math,\u201d multimedia works inspired by mathematics. Through Sept. 25. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Gallery North, 90 North Country Road. 631-751-2676; gallerynorth.org. SHOREHAM North Shore Public Library \u201cAll Things Sacred,\u201d abstract paintings of wild animals by Christopher. Through Sept. 29. North Shore Public Library, 250 Route 25A. northshorepubliclibrary.org; 631-929-4488. SOUTHAMPTON Southampton Cultural Center Southampton Artist Association Labor Day Member Show. Through Sept. 30. Annual Juried Art Exhibition, with works by John Bell, Sara Douglas, James Slezak and others. Through Oct. 3. Mondays through Saturday, 11 a. m. to 3 p.m. Southampton Cultural Center, 25 Pond Lane. 631-287-4377; southamptonculturalcenter.org. SOUTHAMPTON Southampton Town Hall Abstract works by Mike Meehan, Dave Kornrumpf, Jim Wightman and Jim Witker. Through Sept. 30. Southampton Town Hall, 116 Hampton Road. 631-324-9612. SOUTHOLD Cosden-Price Gallery in the Reichert Family Center \u201cCountry Barns,\u201d paintings by North Fork artists. Thursdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m. Cosden-Price Gallery in the Reichert Family Center, 54127 Main Road. 631-765-5500. ST. JAMES Mills Pond House Gallery \u201cFinely Crafted,\u201d works by members of Long Island Craft Guild. Through Oct. 3. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Mills Pond House Gallery, 660 Route 25A. stacarts.org; 631-862-6575. STONY BROOK Charles B. Wang Center \u201cOrigami Heaven,\u201d works by eight artists. Through Dec. 31. \u201cReality Override,\u201d mixed-media works by Ren Zi. Through Dec. 31. \u201cExplore History: Objects From Asia,\u201d rotating collaborative exhibition examining Asian and Asian-American material culture. Through Dec. 31. Free. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by appointment. Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University. thewangcenter.org; 631-632-4400. STONY BROOK Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages \u201cGilding the Coasts: Art and Design of Long Island\u2019s Great Estates,\u201d group show. Through Oct. 25. $3.50 to $9; members and children under 6, free. \u201cBeth Levine: The First Lady of Shoes,\u201d footwear, photographs, paintings and more. Through Jan. 3. $3.50 to $9; members and children under 6, free. Thursdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, 1200 Route 25A. longislandmuseum.org; 631-751-0066. STONY BROOK Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University \u201cManfred Mohr: Pioneer of Algorithmic Art,\u201d Simons Center Gallery. Through Nov. 12. Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Road. 631-632-2800.", "keyword": "The arts;Long Island"}
{"id": "ny0182016", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2007/12/02", "title": "A Righteous Recipe for Longevity", "abstract": "With bullets whizzing over his head in the Battle of the Bulge, Daniel Bukantz dug his foxhole and hunkered down because, as he freely admits, \u201cI was scared.\u201d At that moment, he had no guarantee he would ever get home, much less become a four-time Olympic fencer and five-time Olympic judge, or that he would live to be 90, which he will reach Tuesday. At the end of World War II, he was an American captain sweeping through Germany, liberating the survivors of the death camps. The woman he would marry had barely survived Auschwitz and was being held in a place known as Goat Town. To this day, Alice Ellenbogen Bukantz maintains: \u201cWhen his division came through, we were in the same place on the same day. I always thank him on Veterans Day and tell him how I saw this handsome captain.\u201d In actuality, they did not meet for a decade, after he had become an Olympian and a dentist, part of what Tom Brokaw has called the greatest generation. What is his recipe for living to 90? \u201cMarry a Hungarian,\u201d Bukantz said the other day while Alice was out of earshot \u2014 his regular suggestion that there has never been a dull moment. \u201cMy son has a lot of his mother,\u201d Bukantz said. \u201cVery determined.\u201d The son, Jeff, was not the fencer his father was, but won two gold medals at the Maccabiah Games, refereed at two Olympics and was captain of the 2004 United States team that produced a gold by Mariel Zagunis, the first in fencing by an American in a century. And Jeff Bukantz remains in awe of his father. \u201cHe was the cream of the crop,\u201d the son said. \u201cAnd I was a jerk.\u201d \u0095 Jeff would do nearly anything to win a match. One day after he had badgered the referee, a reporter called him \u201cthe McEnroe of fencing,\u201d which was fine, except that John McEnroe from Douglaston had that marvelous touch while Jeff Bukantz from Forest Hills did not. A fellow fencer, Stacey Johnson, warned Jeff to wise up or he would never go anywhere in the fencing hierarchy, and for some reason he listened to her. Bukantz, an electric energy broker in Livingston, N.J., wrote a book, \u201cClosing the Distance,\u201d published in 2006, using a fencing term to describe the gap between him and his father\u2019s illustrious career. Daniel Bukantz grew up in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse, playing all the American sports. One day, a couple of friends said they had taken up fencing. \u201cWe kidded them because it had a ladylike reputation,\u201d Bukantz said by telephone from Sarasota, Fla. \u201cWe tried it \u2014 and couldn\u2019t move for four days. But after that, we became adept.\u201d After fencing at City College, Bukantz lost two Olympiads to the war, just as more famous athletes did, knowing things could have turned out much worse. Bukantz was a five-time American champion but never won an Olympic medal. At Melbourne, Australia, in 1956, the entire United States foil team was Jewish, with Bukantz, Albert Axelrod, Harold Goldsmith, Nathaniel Lubell and Byron Krieger. At the world championships in Philadelphia in 1958, that nucleus almost pulled off one of the great upsets, losing to the Soviet Union, 9-7, as Bukantz won all four of his matches and Axelrod three. \u201cAll I could think of on that day was that two Jews from City College almost single-handedly beat the best team in the world,\u201d Bukantz said. Nearly 44, he entered a major international event in 1961 and drew Jean-Claude Magnan of France, exactly half his age and soon to win two world titles. \u201cI figured I was out, so I had a good steak dinner,\u201d Bukantz said, omitting the part about the bottle of good red wine. In the match, he lulled his younger opponent into attacking his middle-aged midsection, producing a gigantic upset. After that, Bukantz concentrated on refereeing. At the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, there was a men\u2019s sabre semifinal between a Soviet and a Pole. \u201cThe Poles hated the Russians,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Russians said the only referee they would accept was Bukantz. I was apprehensive. What if I had to make a close call?\u201d \u0095 He said the Soviets\u2019 demand for the Jewish referee from the United States remains the crowning honor of his career. By then, he was married to Alice, who had lived in a part of Hungary that is now Slovakia. Her parents and 87 other relatives died in the Holocaust, but she got to New York \u2014 sanctuary city, and proud of it \u2014 in 1947, determined to make the most of the life inexplicably gifted to her. They were introduced by another dentist, Mark Grossman \u2014 \u201cmy former friend,\u201d Daniel Bukantz says every time he tells the story. In fact, they get together in Florida, five decades later. Alice Bukantz still describes her husband as the dashing captain who helped liberate an insane world, an image worth more than any Olympic medal.", "keyword": "Bukantz Daniel;Olympic Games"}
{"id": "ny0215998", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2010/04/28", "title": "Bay\u2019s First Homer Helps Extend Mets\u2019 Streak", "abstract": "In the first game of a successful doubleheader Tuesday against the Los Angeles Dodgers , Johan Santana was what he usually has been: a determined, focused competitor who overcame adversity. In the second game, Oliver Perez also was what he often has been: an inconsistent, undependable enigma who unraveled rapidly and left a mess for others to clean up. In the first game at blustery Citi Field, Santana (3-1) struggled early but extended the Mets \u2019 winning streak to five games with six shutout innings in a 4-0 victory. \u201cI battled through it, inning after inning, out after out,\u201d Santana said. In the second game, Perez squandered a three-run lead, was pulled by Manager Jerry Manuel after walking his third batter of the fourth inning and did not figure in the decision as the Mets rallied for a 10-5 victory. \u201cHe made the right decision to take me out,\u201d Perez said. The sweep extended the Mets\u2019 winning streak to six games. The Mets (12-9) have won eight of nine and they quietly moved into first place in the National League East when the Phillies lost, 6-2, in San Francisco. Powering the Mets in the second game was the previously slumping David Wright, who had three hits and drove in four runs, three of them on a bases-loaded triple in the sixth inning. \u201cI\u2019m glad I can finally contribute,\u201d said Wright, who also had a hit in the first game and raised his batting average from .222 to .261. In the fifth inning of Game 2, Wright put the Mets ahead to stay with a single for his 1,000th career hit. The rookie Ike Davis drove home three runs in the second game, two on a double. The winning pitcher was Hisanori Takahashi (2-1), his second consecutive win in his second consecutive appearance in long relief. Last Friday, he got the victory after John Maine left in the fourth inning with an injury. Takahashi, 35, is a rookie in the major leagues but a 10-year veteran in Japan, mostly as a starter. Manuel said Takahashi has earned consideration for a starting assignment, but said he wanted to continue with Perez, at least for the time being. \u201cWe need Ollie to get it right,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cWe need Ollie to figure it out.\u201d Takahashi throws left-handed, as do three other starters in the Mets\u2019 five-man rotation (Santana, Perez and Jon Niese). Maine, a right-hander, will start Wednesday afternoon\u2019s series finale. Takahashi worked three and a third innings and gave up one run and two hits. He struck out five. \u201cYou can\u2019t comprehend how valuable that is,\u201d Wright said. Despite their recent success \u2014 owing mostly to excellent pitching and defense \u2014 the Mets started Tuesday\u2019s doubleheader with the lowest batting average in the National League at .230. They got some encouragement in that area from both Wright and Jason Bay, who hit his first home run in Game 1 and tripled home a run in Game 2. \u201cWe were waiting for this,\u201d Santana said of Bay\u2019s home run. \u201cIt was great to see him smiling.\u201d Both games were played in chilly temperatures and swirling winds. Because the first game began at 4:10 p.m., the stands were almost empty at the start. At the conclusion of the second game, most seats again were empty. Santana compared the atmosphere to that of a spring training game in Florida. \u201cIt felt like we were in Port St. Lucie,\u201d Santana said. \u201cOver all, it was a crazy day. That wasn\u2019t fun at all. That was a weird day.\u201d But he took pleasure in the result and said, as a team, that the Mets \u201care all motivated. \u201cDefinitely, we\u2019re competing for sure,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re having fun.\u201d Wright said the Mets\u2019 70-92 record last season might have helped bond some of the players. \u201cI like the personality we have in here,\u201d Wright said. \u201cI like the attitude. Everybody\u2019s clicked. Everybody\u2019s meshed.\u201d Wright scored what proved to be the winning run in the first game in the second inning on a bases-loaded wild pitch by starter Hiroki Kuroda (2-1). After Bay\u2019s home run made the score 2-0 in the fourth, Luis Castillo added a two-run single with the bases loaded in the seventh. Bay joined the Mets as a free agent from Boston. He started the season poorly but went 5 for 9 last weekend against Atlanta. His average has risen to .267. Santana was wild early, walking the bases loaded in the second inning. He threw 100 pitches in the first five innings and finished with 115 pitches and six strikeouts. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel like I threw that many pitches,\u201d Santana said. He said the wind caused his four-seam fastballs to cut more than he wanted and his two-seamers to sink too much. But he prevailed, unlike Perez. Santana tried to help Perez during spring training, Manuel said. \u201cJohan did all he could do to help Ollie, especially with mechanics and that type of thing,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cIn that sense, he has been some sort of mentor to him.\u201d Between games on Tuesday, Santana said: \u201cOllie knows he has to go out there and try to help our team. That\u2019s what he has been doing lately.\u201d", "keyword": "Santana Johan;Bay Jason;New York Mets;Baseball;Los Angeles Dodgers"}
{"id": "ny0214618", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2010/03/01", "title": "Jimmie Johnson Wins Shelby American at Las Vegas Motor Speedway", "abstract": "LAS VEGAS (AP) \u2014 Jimmie Johnson needed luck to win a week ago at Auto Club Speedway in California. At Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, in a city of chance, he needed no help at all to win the Shelby American Nascar Sprint Cup race. Johnson reeled in his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon, who had dominated the race, to win for the second consecutive week. He took four tires on the final pit stop, chased Gordon for 17 laps, then finally sailed past his Hendrick Motorsports teammate with 17 laps to go to wrap up the win. \u201cNo luck involved in that one, my friend,\u201d his crew chief, Chad Knaus, told Johnson. The victory was the 49th of Johnson\u2019s career and his fourth at the Las Vegas track. Gordon led 218 of the 267 laps while searching for his first victory in almost a year. He was out front when Kevin Conway\u2019s spin brought out the final caution, and he debated his pitting strategy with his crew chief, Steve Letarte. The call was made at the last second for Gordon to come in, and Letarte changed just two tires to get Gordon back on the track before his competition. Knaus called for four tires, a decision that put Johnson fourth for the restart. Clint Bowyer, who did not pit, restarted as the leader with 34 laps to go. Gordon and Johnson immediately split him to move back to the front. Gordon held the top spot for 17 trips around the track, but he fretted several times as Johnson looked both inside and out. \u201cNot much we can do about those four tires,\u201d Gordon told his crew. \u201cWe\u2019ll give it everything we\u2019ve got.\u201d Letarte replied: \u201cI\u2019m with you. Just do the best you can. Make it hard for him either way.\u201d Gordon tried to hold off Johnson, but Johnson scooted past with 17 laps to go. He quickly pulled away, and Gordon faded to third, unable to hold off Kevin Harvick, who finished second to Johnson for the second consecutive week. \u201cIf we won the race, we\u2019d look like geniuses \u2014 Steve would have,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cThe fact that we lost the race, now Chad looks like a genius. I talked to Steve briefly after the race. He\u2019s pretty upset, obviously. I think he just felt like more people were going to take two tires. Shoot, we were thinking for a split second to stay out. \u201cI felt like we needed to come in and get some tires, but I felt like two tires was the right call, too.\u201d Harvick said his Richard Childress Racing team had nothing to prove to Johnson. \u201cWe can run with them, and they know it,\u201d he said. The roles were reversed a week ago in California, when a timely caution put Johnson in the lead. He had Harvick chasing him over the final laps, and Harvick appeared poised to take the win until he brushed the wall late. That victory frustrated some drivers who have grown tired of Johnson\u2019s four-year reign as the Cup champion. \u201cWhen you\u2019re a good team, like last week, people were talking about, \u2018Man, look how lucky they are,\u2019 \u201d Gordon said of Johnson. \u201cThat\u2019s not luck. You do everything you can as a team right, and when everything is clicking, good things happen.\u201d But Gordon, for the first time maybe since his classic 2007 battle with Johnson for the championship, said he thought his team could keep pace with Johnson, his onetime prot\u00e9g\u00e9. \u201cI\u2019m disappointed, but at the same time, you know, we haven\u2019t dominated like this in a very, very long time,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m very really excited about this race team. I think we\u2019ve got more of what we showed today that, that we\u2019re going to show a lot more.\u201d Mark Martin finished fourth to give Hendrick three cars in the top 10. Matt Kenseth was fifth, followed by Joey Logano, Tony Stewart, Bowyer, Kasey Kahne and Greg Biffle.", "keyword": "Johnson Jimmie;Automobile Racing;National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing"}
{"id": "ny0090818", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/09/13", "title": "Donald Trump Gets Rock Star Greeting in Iowa", "abstract": "AMES, Iowa \u2014 It probably made sense on paper: invite presidential candidates to visit the Iowa Republican Party\u2019s tent in the parking lot before the big Iowa vs. Iowa State football game on Saturday. What planners did not anticipate was the portable mob scene that characterizes the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. Arriving more than an hour late, Mr. Trump offered a speech of less than a minute on the state party\u2019s stage. But that was beside the point, as star-struck supporters greeted him like a stadium rocker during a sprawling tailgate party before kickoff. \u201cDonald, you rock!\u201d a young man shouted as Mr. Trump, encircled by a security team, walked through a parking lot. Another man fought his way into the mob and said, \u201cDonald, I\u2019m wearing your hat!\u201d \u201cShook his hand. I shook his hand!\u201d a burly student shouted to two friends, sounding faint with excitement. Three other Republican candidates not named Trump also glad-handed and posed for selfies among the tailgating football fans before the game. But their receptions were of a different order. Rarely has the contrast between a conventional politician and the celebrity candidacy of Mr. Trump seemed clearer. Who\u2019s Winning the Presidential Campaign? History suggests that each party\u2019s eventual nominee will emerge from 2015 in one of the top two or three positions, as measured by endorsements, fund-raising and polling. Many Iowa Republicans expected Mr. Trump\u2019s lead in the primary race to be fleeting. On Friday night, a seasoned party activist compared him to \u201cthe bad boy you date over the summer before returning to college.\u201d Instead, Mr. Trump continues to dominate Iowa polls as summer turns to fall. A Quinnipiac University poll of Iowa last week showed he is the first choice of all age groups of Republicans, including young people, who predominated outside Jack Trice Stadium, where the Iowa State Cyclones hosted the Iowa Hawkeyes. \u201cWe\u2019re killing everybody in the polls,\u201d Mr. Trump said in brief remarks from the stage. He wore a new \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hat, this one in camouflage. He wished people luck with whichever team they supported, stepped down and began the walk back to his S.U.V., a knot of students and others pressing close. Though he said nothing about the issues of the day, the audience seemed satisfied. \u201cIt was pretty cool; we got to see him,\u201d said Braiden Loreno, a sophomore. \u201cI\u2019m definitely voting for him.\u201d The crowd of several hundred had waited more than an hour for Mr. Trump. They had chanted \u201cDon-ald! Don-ald!\u201d Cheers went up several times over false sightings. A sign read: \u201cThe Trump Will Set You Free.\u201d (It was countered by a protester\u2019s sign: \u201cMr. Hate, Leave My State.\u201d) At 2:30, the appointed hour for Mr. Trump to speak, a candidate appeared and the crowd parted to reveal. ... Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, running late. There was no applause for Mr. Walker, who for months had led in the polls in Iowa, but whose popularity in the Quinnipiac poll was measured at 3 percent. In brief remarks, Mr. Walker promised to \u201cwreak havoc on Washington,\u201d as he had in Wisconsin when he faced down thousands of pro-union protesters. Mr. Walker\u2019s abbreviated version of his stump speech also included a veiled swipe at Mr. Trump. \u201cIt takes more than just talk,\u201d he said. \u201cIt takes action. Actions speak louder than words.\u201d Earlier, Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky worked the tailgaters, not all of whom were thrilled to have a presidential candidate and his entourage interfering with their meat grilling, beer drinking and game playing. \u201cCome on, bro, this is a tailgate,\u201d Dionne Harden, an Iowa State fan, protested as Mr. Rubio walked in front of him just as he was about to toss a bean bag. In a tent sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association, Mr. Rubio faced a different kind of challenge when he was pressed on whether he supported federal support for ethanol. \u201cAs I\u2019ve said before, I understand if people made an investment in something, you\u2019re not going to just take it away from them,\u201d Mr. Rubio told a group of farmers. \u201cBut eventually I do believe these energy resources have to be self-sustaining.\u201d Jerry Mohr, a farmer who is chairman of the growers association, called Mr. Rubio\u2019s position disappointing. Image Senator Marco Rubio of Florida at a tailgate party outside Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday. Credit Scott Morgan for The New York Times Mr. Rubio made a better impression on Evan Monson, an Iowa State junior, who praised him for hanging out at the Sigma Pi fraternity tailgate party. \u201cRubio was pretty cool,\u201d he said. Mr. Paul had also spoken free-market truth to the corn industry in Iowa. He visited the growers\u2019 tent and strolled the parking lots with a more manageable level of attention than Mr. Trump. Offered a beer, Mr. Paul pleaded that he had to fly to St. Louis later to present a Homemakers Award to his mother at a gathering of the Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by Phyllis Schlafly. Scott Scheidel, an insurance broker, called out to Mr. Paul. \u201cYou\u2019re my man. Come over to my tailgate, I\u2019ll give you the microphone,\u201d he said. Mr. Paul greeted him but moved on. Another fan, Keven Malec, who had driven from Illinois to visit a daughter at Iowa State, offered Mr. Paul a choice of two sandwiches he was grilling. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a Cyclone and we\u2019ve got a Hawkeye,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to take sides, but the Hawkeye tastes like chicken.\u201d But it was Mr. Trump who dominated the show. At a rally earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had criticized Ben Carson, the retired surgeon who has surged in Iowa polls to claim second place, for being too mild-mannered to occupy the Oval Office. \u201cI don\u2019t think Ben has the energy,\u201d Mr. Trump said. \u201cBen is a nice man, but when you\u2019re negotiating against China and you\u2019re negotiating against these Japanese guys that are going to come against you in waves, and they think we\u2019re all a bunch of jerks because our leaders are so stupid and so incompetent and so inept, we need people that are really smart, that have tremendous deal-making skills and that have great, great energy.\u201d His visit to the Ames tailgate scene, though short, was memorable. After his remarks, he made his way through the parking lot, then climbed into a waiting black Suburban. He rolled down his window, and as he shot out his arm to wave goodbye, a diamond cuff link sparkled in the sun.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Donald Trump;Iowa;Republicans;Marco Rubio;Scott Walker;Rand Paul"}
{"id": "ny0251249", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2011/02/06", "title": "U.C.L.A. Beats St. John\u2019s in Coach Lavin\u2019s Return", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 On Saturday, Steve Lavin returned to the scene of his crime, the same crime committed by seven others who have served as coach of the U.C.L.A. men\u2019s basketball team. They failed to live up to the impossible standard set by John Wooden. The 10 championship banners Wooden\u2019s teams won between 1964 and 1975 hang from the rafters inside Pauley Pavilion, constant reminders of the program\u2019s past glory. Almost eight years after Lavin\u2019s exit from U.C.L.A., he was back here as the coach of St. John\u2019s, and the suspense crested long before the Bruins escaped with a 66-59 victory against the Red Storm. The much-anticipated moment came shortly before tip-off. Lavin stepped onto the court, walked alongside the scorer\u2019s table and stopped to greet a few well-wishers. A handful of others approached from behind the St. John\u2019s bench for handshakes, and one even wanted a hug. But then it was time for the official introductions and a chance for those less enamored of Lavin to be heard. The critics buried him with invective in 2003, when his tenure in Westwood ended with fans wearing paper bags over their heads, students wearing \u201cLose Lavin\u201d T-shirts and his team finishing 10-19, the program\u2019s first losing season since 1948. It was unclear if fans were ready to turn the page Saturday. One by one, St. John\u2019s five starters were introduced and jogged onto the court. Then, in what appeared to be a glaring omission or an act of kindness, the P.A. announcer did not introduce Lavin, denying fans a chance to boo or cheer. Moments later, one of U.C.L.A.\u2019s student yell leaders piped up. \u201cYou all know who\u2019s back,\u201d he shouted into a microphone. \u201cLet\u2019s remind Steve Lavin exactly what it feels like to lose at Pauley Pavilion.\u201d Laughter rippled through the student section. By his admission, Lavin suffered some shame during his seven-year tenure as head coach. He also guided U.C.L.A. to the N.C.A.A. tournament six times \u2014 five times to the Round of 16 and once to the Round of 8 \u2014 and Saturday was no cause for embarrassment. In what Lavin called a slugfest, the Red Storm (13-9) pulled to 62-59 with a chance to tie the score in the final two minutes. Dwight Hardy, who led St. John\u2019s with 32 points, said he and his teammates felt extra motivation to win the game for Lavin. \u201cWe all knew how important this game was,\u201d he said. Hardy sounded more upset than Lavin, who emerged from the losing locker looking sanguine while surrounded by reporters. Returning waves from fans as he conducted interviews, Lavin said it felt \u201ca bit surreal\u201d walking into the visitors\u2019 locker room before the game. He joked that his top assistant, Gene Keady, had to remind him they were sitting on the visitors\u2019 side of the court when Lavin appeared to hesitate in front of the home end. Once the game started, Lavin said, he lost himself in the action. With a grin, he acknowledged hearing good-natured banter from fans behind the St. John\u2019s bench. But nothing approaching the vile and vulgar insults he heard when his then-legion of critics was trying to run him out of a place he still calls home. \u201cThis was home for me for 12 years, and I\u2019ve always felt comfortable at U.C.L.A. and in Pauley Pavilion,\u201d he said. But Lavin said no coach should grow too comfortable here. Wooden died in June at the age of 99, but his legacy looms as large as ever. On Saturday, the Bruins committed 22 turnovers, missed five of six free throws down the stretch and turned in the kind of uneven performance U.C.L.A. fans have become all too accustomed to during the past two years. U.C.L.A. Coach Ben Howland says the four McDonald\u2019s all-Americans on his roster are a sign of promise. But he also acknowledges that the Bruins failed to identify homegrown talent that could have averted a slide that included a 14-18 record last season. The 16-7 start this season has yet to electrify the Bruins fans. Before Saturday\u2019s game, which drew 8,592, the Bruins were averaging 7,313 fans a game this season in an arena that seats almost 13,000. Meanwhile, Pauley Pavilion is undergoing a $200 million renovation, and victories are needed to drive paying fans through the turnstiles to help justify the investment. Though Lavin praised Howland\u2019s accomplishment in eight seasons at U.C.L.A., he also might have foretold the future for Howland, and Howland\u2019s successor, and whoever comes next. \u201cYou understand when you coach U.C.L.A., it\u2019s for the short term,\u201d Lavin said. \u201cThere\u2019s only one pope, and that\u2019s John Wooden. And the rest of us are cardinals coming through, and you have to be grateful to be in the Vatican of college basketball, and that\u2019s U.C.L.A.\u201d", "keyword": "College Athletics;Basketball;University of California Los Angeles;Lavin Steve"}
{"id": "ny0110060", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2012/05/06", "title": "Chelsea Edges Liverpool in F.A. Cup; Di Matteo\u2019s Future Unclear", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Chelsea , the team that rebelled in midseason and got rid of its coach by failing to perform for him, won the English F.A. Cup at Wembley Stadium on Saturday. And it now stands two weeks away from the Champions League final in Munich. The 2-1 victory over Liverpool gives the owners of both clubs huge questions concerning their managers. Chelsea has turned their season around under the interim management of Roberto Di Matteo. Even in triumph, Chelsea\u2019s owner, Roman Abramovich, has given no indication about whether he will stick with Di Matteo, a former player, or do as Abramovich does at least once a year, hire somebody new. The immediate future of Liverpool\u2019s leadership may also be shrouded in doubt. The team\u2019s owners, an American consortium headed by John Henry, answered the clarion call of fans last year by firing the team manager and rehiring an old legend, Kenny Dalglish, in his place. As new owners, the group, which also runs the Boston Red Sox, backed Dalglish by spending every cent they were willing to pump into the club on signing the players he wanted. As tight as the score from Wembley seemed, Liverpool has fallen short of its targets. It has neither qualified for the Champions League nor won the oldest and most significant cup competition in domestic soccer, the F.A. Cup. It isn\u2019t easy competing in English soccer where there are billionaire paymasters from all parts of the world. And it isn\u2019t easy being a referee in a Cup final in which a split second, a line judged in inches, can win or lose the trophy. Make no mistake, Chelsea dominated the first hour of Saturday\u2019s big game. It led through a goal from the Brazilian Ramires on a breakaway in the 11th minute, and doubled that lead shortly after halftime when Didier Drogba did as he always has done in Wembley Cup finals: he scored the second goal. After that, Liverpool changed its lineup and brought on Andy Carroll, the central striker for whom it had spent more than $56 million soon after the new American owners arrived. Carroll is like Drogba, a man of huge physical presence in the goal mouth. Within 10 minutes of taking his place in the attack, Carroll gave Liverpool a lifeline. He swerved away from the cumbersome Chelsea captain, John Terry, turned and ripped the ball into the roof of the net. Carroll\u2019s menace to Chelsea grew. Eight minutes from the end, he rose to a chipped cross from Luis Suarez, met the ball with his head with the power of a sledgehammer, and directed it toward goal from barely 12 feet. Petr Cech produced a reaction save, with his strong right hand deflecting the ball. It was an even better stop because Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic was right in front of the goalkeeper\u2019s eye line, and making a frantic, high-kicking attempt to intercept. But from Cech\u2019s glove, the ball ricocheted off the underside of the crossbar, down, and out. Goal, shouted the Liverpool players. No goal, pleaded the Chelsea defenders. And the linesman and referee gave Chelsea the benefit of the doubt. They ruled no goal, play on. And as usual in these tight calls, television tried to freeze frame the action from every angle, each one failing to determine conclusively whether the whole of the ball had crossed that white goal line. In that event, unless or until FIFA decides to introduce a computer chip on the goal line, we must all live with the oldest rule in the soccer book: that the referee\u2019s decision is final. But we will never know if Liverpool was robbed, or Chelsea earned its moment of fortune. Beyond that, Chelsea won the Cup by taking the initiative early on. The goal by Ramires was born of his great athleticism when Juan Mata had preyed on an error on the halfway line by Jay Spearing. When Mata then released the ball forward, Ramires was sprinting like a greyhound, running past Jose Enrique and threading his shot between goalkeeper Pepe Reina and the near post. Drogba\u2019s goal was proof that Drogba invariably crowns a Wembley appearance with a significant moment. He has scored every time he has represented Chelsea in this 90,000-capacity stadium outside London. And he scored again with just a hint of fortune when his shot went between the legs of defender Martin Skrtel on its way to the net. Chelsea at that point was full value for its lead, albeit in a tense first hour that was far from a distinguished show piece event. Both teams had gone to Wembley to play cat and mouse; caution was their watch word, dullness the consequence for millions of fans watching on TV. Only when Dalglish changed his tactics and brought on Carroll, his big attacking presence, did the final have cut and thrust. And that, by the width of the crossbar, proved too little too late to save the final. Where each team goes from here is uncertain. Dalglish acknowledged that his team appeared somewhat na\u00efve against Chelsea\u2019s know-how until it was too late. Chelsea\u2019s interim manager, Di Matteo, said it was \u201cquite special\u201d to have played and won the Cup for Chelsea in 1997, and now to have coached the team to win it again. His players, he agreed, are feeling some physical strain through playing in domestic and foreign competition at the rate of seven games in 21 days. Di Matteo has no clue whether he will keep the job even if Chelsea carries on this momentum and, against all odds, beats Bayern Munich in Munich in the Champions League final on May 19. \u201cThe players have responded to the adversity,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how many believed outside the club that we could win in the Cups, but we will try do this again in Munich.\u201d", "keyword": "Chelsea (Soccer Team);Liverpool (Soccer Team);Football Association Cup (Soccer);Di Matteo Roberto;Abramovich Roman A;Dalglish Kenny;Drogba Didier;Soccer"}
{"id": "ny0013799", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/11/06", "title": "AARP Sends a Thank-You to Caregivers", "abstract": "AARP and the Advertising Council are beginning a new advertising and social media campaign this week designed to illustrate the many roles caregivers play and to thank them for this assistance. Timed to coincide with November\u2019s National Family Caregivers Month \u2014 an annual commemoration, sponsored by the Caregiver Action Network, to honor the 42 million Americans who care for a loved one with a chronic condition, disability or the frailties of old age \u2014 the campaign is the second time AARP and the Ad Council have collaborated on this issue. In August 2012, they introduced advertising directed at female baby boomer caregivers, aged 40 to 60, that illustrated the physical, emotional and mental strains they experience. The ads, by Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, based in Sausalito, Calif., also directed caregivers to a website, www.aarp.org/caregiving, operated by AARP, that offers tools, advice and other assistance. The campaign reflects research conducted by AARP in June 2013 of people who consider themselves caregivers, which found that although 52 percent said they were \u201cproud\u201d to provide such assistance, almost three in 10 said their lives had changed from caregiving, while more than one in five said their weight, exercise or social life had suffered from it. AARP also found that one in three caregivers surveyed felt sad or depressed and 44 percent said they bottled up these feelings. Almost 40 percent said they slept less since becoming a caregiver, while one-third avoided making decisions or isolated themselves, and almost one-quarter ate more. \u201cFamily, friends and neighbors who support a loved one rarely see themselves as a caregiver, and they almost never ask for help. But at some point in their lives, most people will be a caregiver or need support. Our campaign is here to remind caregivers that they aren\u2019t alone and there is help,\u201d said Debra Whitman, AARP executive vice president for policy, strategy and international affairs. New advertising \u2014 which has been created in television, radio, print, outdoor and digital executions, in English and Spanish \u2014 is meant to \u201cstart a broader cultural conversation about the challenges\u201d caregivers face, said David Jenkins, president of Taxi, a Toronto-based unit of WPP, whose New York office worked on the campaign. Distribution of the advertising will begin Thursday. Caregivers often are not \u201cself-identifying,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to provide a platform that will enable them to see themselves and the roles they play. We are viewing these people as unsung heroes.\u201d Both print and TV ads illustrate a 50-year-old woman and her mother, and describe the many services the former provides for the latter. The print ad depicts the younger woman serving as her mother\u2019s nurse, housekeeper and personal assistant. The ad says, \u201cCaring for a loved one requires playing many roles you never expected. But you\u2019re not alone.\u201d A television spot, in 15- and 30-second versions, shows the younger woman entering a kitchen where her mother sits at a table reading a magazine. As the spot proceeds, the daughter organizes her mother\u2019s pills, folds laundry, chops vegetables and pays bills; in the voice-over, she says, \u201cWhen I started taking care of Mom, I didn\u2019t realize the challenge of playing so many roles. But above all, I\u2019m still her daughter.\u201d Both the print and TV ads refer viewers to aarp.org/caregiving, while the print ad urges them to \u201cconnect with experts and other caregivers,\u201d and also offers a toll-free number, operated by AARP, for assistance. An outdoor ad shows a younger and older woman, their arms entwined around each other. The ad says, \u201cYou\u2019re there for Mom. We\u2019re here for you. Caring for a loved one can be more than you expected. But you\u2019re not alone.\u201d And radio spots discuss the challenges faced by a daughter who has become her father\u2019s caregiver. According to Amy Goyer, AARP\u2019s home and family expert, the new campaign is aimed at the same group as last year\u2019s advertising. Ms. Goyer said research by AARP in 2009 found that the average caregiver in the United States was a 49-year-old woman who worked outside the home and spent nearly 20 hours a week, for nearly five years, providing unpaid care to her mother. This research also estimated that in 2009, the economic value of family caregiving was $450 billion, based on 42.1 million caregivers 18 or older providing an average of 18.4 hours of care per week to care recipients 18 or older, at an average value of $11.16 per hour. Another initiative of the campaign, also created by Taxi, is the \u201cThanks Project,\u201d www.thanksproject.org, that debuted on Tuesday and allows people to post messages of thanks to caregivers and upload related photos and videos; these messages can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Ms. Goyer said this effort would provide a way for family, friends and caregivers to engage, and for caregivers to be acknowledged, \u201cto help them feel they are not alone.\u201d She also said she hoped it would help connect all of these people to AARP\u2019s caregiving resources, including the website, which has been upgraded since last year. Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the Ad Council, said the new advertising conveyed \u201ca very empowering message. There are natural frustrations caregivers experience, but at the end of the day, there\u2019s a reason they do it. It is love for the relative they\u2019re caring for.\u201d Ms. Goyer also called caregiving a \u201cwidespread issue people can connect with on a personal level. If they haven\u2019t been a caregiver, they most likely will be or will receive care. It\u2019s an issue that affects every person.\u201d", "keyword": "advertising,marketing;Old age,elderly,senior citizens;AARP;Advertising Council;Social Media"}
{"id": "ny0024167", "categories": ["sports", "autoracing"], "date": "2013/08/11", "title": "Kesolowski Races to Nationwide Victory", "abstract": "Brad Keselowski passed Joey Logano for the lead with 16 laps to go, then held off Sam Hornish Jr. to win the Nationwide Zippo 200 at Watkins Glen International in upstate New York. Keselowski won for the fourth straight time over five months in Nascar\u2019s second-tier series.", "keyword": "Car Racing;Brad Keselowski;Joey Logano"}
{"id": "ny0155429", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/06/03", "title": "Gym Grunter Not Assaulted by Silencer, a Jury Rules", "abstract": "They are among the irritants who are an unfortunate part of the New York experience: the loud cellphone talker in the elevator, the picture-happy tourist blocking a crowded sidewalk, the testosterone -laced grunter who practically coughs up a parakeet with each biceps curl. For the suffering New Yorkers who have only dreamed of eliminating nuisances like these without having to be polite, Christopher Carter might be a hero. On Monday, a jury acquitted Mr. Carter of assault charges for manhandling the stationary bike of a fellow gym member, Stuart Sugarman, who was shouting and grunting during a spin class. Even though Mr. Carter\u2019s defense lawyer acknowledged in court that his client had grabbed Mr. Sugarman\u2019s bike by the handlebars, tilted it back and then released it, with Mr. Sugarman astride, the jury decided that he was not a criminal for having done so. After nearly 10 hours of deliberations, the six jurors agreed that they could not say beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Carter had caused the back and neck trouble that hospitalized Mr. Sugarman for nearly two weeks. \u201cProbably, most likely, but not definitely,\u201d said one juror, Marybeth Roman. It was hardly a landmark case. It will not be highlighted in lawbooks. But the verdict may provide many a New Yorker with the satisfaction of a \u201cgotcha\u201d moment. The jurors who heard the case in Manhattan Criminal Court, several of whom were interviewed afterward, certainly did not seem to be on the side of Mr. Sugarman, who had described his grunts in testimony as \u201cexpelling air.\u201d \u201cI was like, \u2018Why must he be obnoxious and disrespectful to the others?\u2019 \u201d said Ms. Roman, a 20-year-old sociology student who lives on the Lower East Side. Ms. Roman said she and the other jurors questioned the credibility of Mr. Sugarman, who testified that he had suffered chronic neck and back pain. The altercation occurred at an Equinox fitness club on the Upper East Side in August. Mr. Sugarman, a 49-year-old senior partner at an investment firm, was yelling things like \u201cYou go, girl!\u201d and \u201cGood burn!\u201d in spin class, and Mr. Carter could not take it anymore. He twice asked the instructors to get Mr. Sugarman to quiet down, according to trial testimony. But after Mr. Sugarman continued, harsh words were exchanged. Mr. Carter, 45, a stockbroker, stormed over to Mr. Sugarman\u2019s bike and lifted it, crashing the back of it into a wall, witnesses said. Mr. Sugarman said the force of the bike dropping to the ground caused a herniated disc in his neck. Although Mr. Carter was not proud of his actions, according to his lawyer, Michael C. Farkas, he maintained that he did not cause Mr. Sugarman\u2019s injury. The verdict, Mr. Farkas said, proves what he and his client have been saying all along: Mr. Sugarman is not believable. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to act in a manner that\u2019s going to be completely inconsiderate of others, then great things aren\u2019t going to happen for you,\u201d Mr. Farkas said outside court. Mr. Carter, who was not claiming the mantle of everyday New York hero, was relieved to leave court a free man. \u201cI had some long nights over the last nine and a half months,\u201d he said. But the ordeal is hardly over. Samuel L. Davis, a New Jersey lawyer representing Mr. Sugarman, said his client planned to file a lawsuit Tuesday against Mr. Carter and Equinox. He said he hoped that New Yorkers would not view the verdict as a call to arms of sorts. \u201cI don\u2019t know if there\u2019s going to be an uprising, but the short-term message is sometimes you can get away with assaulting somebody who\u2019s annoying,\u201d he said. Indeed, some of the annoyed sat on the jury. \u201cI probably would\u2019ve helped Carter with telling the instructors, \u2018Look, this guy, he\u2019s being a nuisance,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Roman said. B. J. Tormon, a 21-year-old nursing student whose thick biceps indicate that he has spent some time working out, said confrontations in exercise class were common. \u201cStuff like that happens in the gym,\u201d he said. Even Brigid Harrington, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, painted a less-than-sympathetic portrait of Mr. Sugarman. In her closing arguments on Friday, she told the jurors that Mr. Sugarman was probably not someone \u201cyou would want to hang out with regularly.\u201d But that should not matter, she said. \u201cI don\u2019t want you to think that Stuart Sugarman had it coming,\u201d Ms. Harrington said. \u201cWe know that society and the law does not work that way.\u201d", "keyword": "Health Clubs;Decisions and Verdicts;Exercise;Assaults;Carter Christopher;Sugarman Stuart;Manhattan (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0189778", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2009/05/17", "title": "In Washington, It\u2019s No Time to Stop the Train", "abstract": "CONTRARY to what you may have heard from some doomsayers, 2009 is not 1930 redux. What we must guard against, instead, is 2010 or 2011 becoming another 1936. Realistically, there is little danger that the economy is heading toward a repeat performance of the Great Depression \u2014 when real gross domestic product in the United States declined 27 percent and unemployment soared to 25 percent. What we have is bad enough: our worst recession since the 1930s. But unless our leaders behave unbelievably foolishly, we will not repeat the tragic slide into the abyss of 1930 to 1933 \u2014 for two main reasons. First, our economy has many built-in safeguards that did not exist back then \u2014 like unemployment insurance, Social Security and federal deposit insurance, to name just three. These programs serve as safety nets that cushion the fall. And while they are certainly not strong enough to prevent recessions, they should be enough to prevent another depression. The more important reason is that Barack Obama, Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke are not Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon and Eugene Meyer. (Who\u2019s that? Mr. Meyer was the Federal Reserve chairman from September 1930 to May 1933.) In stark contrast to the laissez-faire crowd that ruled the roost in 1930 and 1931, our current economic leaders are not waiting for the sagging economy to right itself. Rather, they have taken numerous extraordinary steps already \u2014 and stand ready to do more if necessary. That\u2019s the good news. But even if another depression is next to impossible, there is still the danger that next year, or the year after, might turn into 1936. Let me explain. From its bottom in 1933 to 1936, the G.D.P. climbed spectacularly (albeit from a very low base), averaging gains of almost 11 percent a year. But then, both the Fed and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed course. In the summer of 1936, the Fed looked at the large volume of excess reserves piled up in the banking system, concluded that this mountain of liquidity could be fodder for future inflation, and began to withdraw it. This tightening of monetary policy continued into 1937, in a weak economy that was ill-prepared for it. About the same time, President Roosevelt looked at what seemed to be enormous federal budget deficits, concluded that it was time to put the nation\u2019s fiscal house in order and started raising taxes and reducing spending. This tightening of fiscal policy transformed the federal budget from a deficit of 3.8 percent of G.D.P. in 1936 to a surplus of 0.2 percent of G.D.P. in 1937 \u2014 a swing of four percentage points in a single year. (Today, a swing that large would be almost $600 billion.) Thus, both monetary and fiscal policies did an abrupt about-face in 1936 and 1937, and the consequences were as predictable as they were tragic. The United States economy, which had been rapidly climbing out of the cellar from 1933 to 1936, was kicked rudely down the stairs again, and America experienced the so-called recession within the depression. Real G.D.P. contracted 3.4 percent from 1937 to 1938; the total G.D.P. decline during the recession, which lasted from mid-1937 to mid-1938, was even larger. The moral of the story should be clear: Prematurely changing fiscal and monetary policies \u2014 from stepping hard on the accelerator to slamming on the brake \u2014 can be hazardous to the economy\u2019s health. Wow, we\u2019ve learned a lot since the \u201930s, right? Well, maybe not. For the echoes of 1936 are being heard right now, even before the current recession hits bottom. If you\u2019ve been paying attention, you know that a number of critics of the Fed are sounding alarms over the huge stockpile of excess reserves it has created \u2014 more than $775 billion at last count. What these critics are fretting about now is exactly what goaded the Fed into action in 1936: that the vast pool of loose money will ultimately be inflationary. The clear inference is that some of it should be withdrawn before it\u2019s too late. On the fiscal side, many of President Obama\u2019s critics are complaining vociferously about the huge federal budget deficits. Try to ignore, if you can, the sheer hypocrisy of many Congressional Republicans who, having never uttered a peep about the huge deficits under George W. Bush, are suddenly models of budget probity. But whatever the motives, the worries of today\u2019s deficit hawks sound eerily reminiscent of Roosevelt in 1936 and 1937. FORTUNATELY, Mr. Bernanke is a keen student of the Great Depression who will not allow the Fed to repeat the errors of 1936-37. But his critics, both inside and outside the Fed, are already branding his policies as dangerously inflationary, and no Fed chairman wants to be called an inflationist. Similarly, I hope and believe that President Obama will not transform himself from the spendthrift Roosevelt of 1933 to the deficit-hawk Roosevelt of 1936 \u2014 at least not until the economy is back on solid ground. That said, a growing flock of budget hawks are already showing their talons. They will have their day \u2014 but please, not yet. To avoid a replay of the policy disasters of 1936-37, both the Fed and our elected officials must stay the course. Mark Twain once explained that, while history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes. We don\u2019t want any rhymes just now.", "keyword": "United States Economy;Recession and Depression;Economic Conditions and Trends;Gross Domestic Product;Great Depression (1930's)"}
{"id": "ny0265141", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/03/03", "title": "New Doubts About \u2018Too Big to Fail\u2019 Banks Rattle Foundation of Regulations", "abstract": "Governments around the world have built over the last few years a vast new system of rules that would allow banking giants to fail and shield taxpayers from bailouts. Though this new regulatory architecture is eye-numbingly complex, its builders contend that it has made the financial system much safer without having to resort to measures like forcing a breakup of the largest banks. But that reassuring view has taken a beating of late. Recent turmoil in European debt markets pointed to a possible weakness in a crucial part of the new regulatory system. Shares of large banks have been under pressure, trading at valuations that indicate investors have little faith in the companies\u2019 sprawling business models. Some mergers-and-acquisitions bankers on Wall Street are privately beginning to conclude that some of the largest banks may break up in the coming years. Then, last month, a new Federal Reserve official surprised many by declaring in his first speech on the job that the \u201ctoo big to fail problem\u201d had not been solved. The assertion was surprising because the official, Neel Kashkari, was at the Treasury Department in 2008 during the big bailouts. But having had time to survey the overhaul ushered in by the Dodd-Frank Act, he says that he believes more has to be done. \u201cWe need to act while we still remember how painful the crisis was,\u201d Mr. Kashkari said in an interview. Those behind the financial overhaul might be forgiven for being taken aback by the skepticism. They have achieved many important goals, and there are signs that the new regulations are causing the banks to shrink and, over time, they may even break themselves up to satisfy their shareholders. The gradualism of the current overhaul has a steely edge that the banks and their lobbyists have, for the most part, not been able to resist, supporters of the new rules also point out. Still, the largest banks remain huge. For instance, four United States banks have more than $1 trillion of assets, and two have more than $2 trillion. And now, if the fresh doubts about the overhaul grow, and market turbulence continues to weigh on the banks, politicians and regulators may press for much more direct policies to reduce the size and complexity of the largest financial firms. Mr. Kashkari, who in January became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has also started an initiative aimed at developing a plan to address the too-big-to-fail issue. \u201cIt\u2019s a hard question, and I give Neel a lot of credit for wanting to drill down,\u201d said Phillip L. Swagel, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, who was an assistant secretary for economic policy under Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. Officials at regional Fed banks do not write new banking regulations; that is the job of staff members of the Federal Reserve in Washington. Yet Mr. Kashkari\u2019s intervention makes it more likely that the debate over the banks will continue through the presidential election, in which Wall Street may become a prominent issue. \u201cThe regulators should take very seriously the fact that the public is still overwhelmingly skeptical of whether these reforms have fundamentally changed anything,\u201d said Sheila C. Bair, a former prominent banking regulator who is now president of Washington College. Proponents of the current overhaul contend that much has been done. Compared with 2008, the big banks have much higher levels of capital, which in practice means they use less debt to finance their loans and trades \u2014 a change that should make them more resilient to shocks and losses. Banks are also safer because they use far less of a type of borrowing that can evaporate in a crisis, causing a run. At Bank of America, for instance, this short-term borrowing was at the end of last year equivalent to just over 18 percent of the bank\u2019s assets, compared with nearly 36 percent at the end of 2008. And the higher capital requirements \u2014 which rise in line with a bank\u2019s size \u2014 appear to be pressing big banks to shrink. JPMorgan Chase, the nation\u2019s largest bank by assets, trimmed $220 billion of assets last year, done, in part, in response to stiffer capital regulations. When given the leeway under Dodd-Frank, regulators have mostly gone for a stricter approach. The Volcker Rule, which aims to stop a bank\u2019s traders from making risky wagers for its own profit , ended up being quite stringent, for example. And the Fed may not be done. It may, for instance, decide to use its annual regulatory stress tests to make capital rules more onerous. And big banks have to submit plans that would act as a road map for regulators if the banks collapsed. If the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, another bank regulator, conclude that these plans are not credible, they can require remedial actions that include making the bank unload some of its businesses. In the coming weeks, the Fed and the F.D.I.C. will announce the results of their latest assessments. Image Higher capital requirements \u2014 which rise in line with a bank\u2019s size \u2014 appear to be pressing big banks to shrink. Credit Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images One of the most potent criticisms of the overhaul, however, is that it is too clever by half. This point is directed in particular at a very important part of the overhaul that is intended to make it possible to wind down a dying bank without using taxpayer backing. Under this part of the overhaul, banks have to issue debt that can be turned into equity capital when a bank fails. The idea is that the debt would act as a source of new capital for the seized bank, removing the need for taxpayer funds. But some banking experts say this part of the overhaul might spread panic, not contain it. Before the collapse, the price of this debt could start to plunge in the markets. Investors might then flee the ailing bank and stop lending to other banks, even those that are in better shape. Mr. Kashkari asserts that, to reduce the risk of such contagion, it may make sense to not rely on the debt component and instead just have banks hold a lot more equity capital at the outset. \u201cWhy not get rid of all this complexity and ambiguity and make it equity?\u201d he asked. Such concerns gained some credibility after recent movements in the prices of special debt securities issued by large European banks. In a crunch, these securities can be transformed into pure equity capital. Those issued by Deutsche Bank fell steeply in price, prompting selling of similar securities issued by other banks. But making the banks finance themselves with more equity could cause their stock prices to fall even more than they have. To those who favor doing more, however, such a decline may underscore that banks still need to shrink in order to improve their profitability. Mr. Kashkari said he recognized that a stricter overhaul could add new costs to the banks, and he added that taxpayers might still need to bear some of the risks embedded in the banking sector. But he argued that voters had not yet been given a clear choice on that question. \u201cI want to be candid with the American people about which piece we have solved, and which piece we have not solved,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we as a country could decide that we have done enough.\u201d", "keyword": "Banking and Finance;Regulation and Deregulation;Dodd Frank;Neel T Kashkari;Mergers and Acquisitions;Sheila C Bair;Phillip L Swagel;Federal Reserve;FDIC"}
{"id": "ny0013282", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/11/07", "title": "Arkansas: Man Charged in Power Grid Attacks", "abstract": "A 37-year-old man was indicted Wednesday in connection with a series of attacks on the power grid in Central Arkansas earlier this year. A federal grand jury charged Jason Woodring with eight counts, including a terrorist attack against a railroad carrier. Mr. Woodring was arrested last month after the authorities said he repeatedly sabotaged electrical equipment and caused at least $2.1 million in damage. In one instance, Mr. Woodring is alleged to have sought to use a moving train to down a support tower. No one was injured in the attacks, which began in August and led to brief power failures.", "keyword": "Blackouts;Jason Woodring;Arkansas;Terrorism"}
{"id": "ny0027567", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2013/01/19", "title": "Bulls Edge Celtics in Final Seconds of Overtime", "abstract": "Jimmy Butler scored 6 points in overtime and Marco Belinelli made the winning jumper with 3.1 seconds left as Chicago escaped the Boston Celtics, 101-99, and stayed unbeaten in Friday night road games (14-0) since April 2011. SPURS 95, WARRIORS 88 Tim Duncan had 24 points and 10 rebounds as San Antonio extended its home winning streak to 14 games. The Spurs (31-11) are a league-best 18-2 at home GRIZZLIES 85, KINGS 69 Mike Conley scored 19 points and Marc Gasol had 18 as the host Grizzlies snapped a three-game losing streak. PACERS 105, ROCKETS 95 Paul George scored 23 of his 31 points in the first half as Indiana (25-16) took control early and won its 11th straight home game. BOBCATS 106, MAGIC 100 Kemba Walker had 25 points and 8 rebounds as visiting Charlotte ended a five-game losing streak.", "keyword": "Basketball;Chicago Bulls;Celtics;Spurs;Golden State Warriors;Memphis Grizzlies;Los Angeles Kings;Pacers;Houston Rockets;Alvin Gentry"}
{"id": "ny0176565", "categories": ["sports", "othersports"], "date": "2007/07/22", "title": "Morrison Says Error in H.I.V. Test Hurt Career", "abstract": "Tommy Morrison had a seemingly boundless future in 1996. A former heavyweight boxing champion, he had had a starring role in \u201cRocky V\u201d and was in line for his biggest payday, a showdown against Mike Tyson. All that came to an abrupt end, though, when he tested positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. These days, he is back in the ring. He fought in West Virginia in February, and his return has raised questions of just how a fighter whose blood tested positive for H.I.V. in 1996 could test clean today. This year, Morrison took two separate blood tests to support his assertion that he was not infected with H.I.V., West Virginia officials said last week. The test results provide new details on why they licensed him to return to the ring 11 years after he tested positive. Two nationally renowned H.I.V. experts reviewed those and a third blood test for The New York Times, and said they suggested Morrison had been knocked out of the ring by false positive tests \u2014 if, indeed, the new tests are his blood. However, five prominent ringside physicians remained skeptical of the assertion because Morrison tested positive for H.I.V. a number of times in Nevada in 1996. The virus is not curable. Morrison had not publicly challenged the 1996 findings until last year. The doctors all said the only way to resolve the issue was with new testing. \u201cI seriously, seriously doubt he would pass any of this,\u201d Dr. David Watson, the chief ringside physician in Nevada, said in a telephone interview. H.I.V. is of particular risk for boxers because of the wounds and flying blood sometimes associated with the sport. H.I.V. can be transmitted through cuts or mucous membranes in the eyes and nose, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Morrison, 38, who has often derided conventional views on H.I.V. and AIDS, said he was pleased to hear some experts supported his assertion of a false positive. \u201cPeople are starting to wake up,\u201d he said last week in a telephone interview. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of careers destroyed along the way for no reason. Mine\u2019s certainly been one of them.\u201d The Times obtained copies of three documents, not previously made public, that purport to be tests of Morrison\u2019s blood this year. One of them, negative for H.I.V. antibodies, was a report from LabCorp in Phoenix on blood drawn Feb. 6 and was released by Peter McKinn, Morrison\u2019s promoter. The second, which did not detect H.I.V. in DNA, was a LabCorp report on blood drawn Feb. 14 and was released by West Virginia. The state used those tests to license Morrison to box, said Michele Duncan Bishop, general counsel for the West Virginia Department of Revenue, which oversees the athletics commission. A third test, from Specialty Laboratories of Valencia, Calif., on blood drawn Jan. 5, indicates Morrison tested positive for H.I.V. antibodies but negative for H.I.V. in RNA. That report was released by Randy D. Lang, Morrison\u2019s former legal adviser, who said the antibody result showed Morrison was still infected. But the experts said the RNA result in the same report raised the possibility that the antibody result was a false positive, an event that studies say occurs in fewer than 1 in 100,000 cases. The mixed result in the Jan. 5 test makes it \u201clikely that the antibody result is a false positive,\u201d according to Dr. Daniel R. Kuritzkes, a Harvard professor who directs AIDS research at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital in Boston and is chairman of the board of the H.I.V. Medicine Association. Kuritzkes reviewed the test for The Times. Without additional blood work, he added in an e-mail message, \u201cit\u2019s hard to know for sure what\u2019s going on, but I suspect he was never H.I.V.-infected.\u201d Dr. Michael P. Busch, director of the Blood Systems Research Institute and a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said H.I.V. antibody screening was misinterpreted a small percentage of the time. He said the RNA and DNA tests, which measure the virus directly rather than through antibodies, would virtually prove that the person was not harboring even a latent infection. \u201cIf those results are really all from this person, I would tell you there is no way this person is infected, so something is wrong with those earlier results,\u201d Busch said. Busch said there was a biological basis for some false positives on H.I.V. antibody tests, which makes some people repeatedly test false positive, although the reasons are not well understood. Experts agreed that if Morrison was not infected with H.I.V. today, then he never had been. \u201cThere has never been a documented case of an H.I.V.-infected person who clears the virus and is cured,\u201d Dr. Timothy Mastro, deputy director of the C.D.C.\u2019s Division of H.I.V./AIDS Prevention, said in a telephone interview. Mastro added that the quality of H.I.V. diagnosis is \u201cextraordinarily high.\u201d Several ringside physicians questioned whether all the 2007 blood work actually belonged to Morrison because of his multiple tests showing H.I.V. antibodies in 1996. Dr. Margaret Goodman, former chief ringside physician in Nevada, said the pathologist who conducted the 1996 tests for Quest Diagnostics in Las Vegas had told her they were unequivocally positive. That pathologist did not return calls for comment. Dr. William E. Lathan, the former medical director for the New York Athletic Commission, who reviewed the 2007 tests for The Times, said he would exercise extra caution to protect fighters and fans if there were even a question about a fighter\u2019s being positive. \u201cI\u2019m not saying that Tommy is infectious; I\u2019m saying that nobody can prove that he isn\u2019t,\u201d Lathan said. Morrison\u2019s own physician confirmed Nevada\u2019s results in 1996, according to news reports. It immediately halted a career in which Morrison was poised for million-dollar paydays in the ring. Instead, Morrison became a spokesman for AIDS awareness, created the KnockOut AIDS Foundation and spoke publicly about the importance of safe sex. He also spent 14 months in prison on drug and weapons charges in 2000 and 2001; it was there, Morrison said, that he first took H.I.V. medication and first tested negative. He said he remained quiet so he could do further research about the disease. The first time anyone publicly said Morrison did not have H.I.V. was last year. Morrison, who alternates between a raspy scream and a nonchalant monotone in interviews, has come to blame boxing authorities for what he said was an unjust ban from the sport. \u201cThey have no idea what\u2019s going on,\u201d he said. Morrison\u2019s actions earlier this year raised questions about his health. He withdrew an application to fight in Arizona, saying he had hurt his hand in training, 10 days after taking the blood test Jan 5. He withdrew an application to fight in Texas in April after officials said they wanted more medical information. West Virginia, known for its lax medical rules, sanctioned Morrison to fight in February. Bishop, the state attorney, said West Virginia law required only that a boxer be \u201cphysically fit,\u201d but that authorities could require additional tests if they thought someone might be a danger to himself or others. Bishop said Morrison\u2019s promoter gave them the H.I.V.-negative test of antibodies from Feb. 7, but they had not seen the Jan. 5 test showing H.I.V. antibodies but no virus in his RNA. West Virginia required Morrison to take a test for H.I.V. in his cellular DNA. Dr. Michael B. Schwartz, a Connecticut physician and president of the American Association of Professional Ringside Physicians, consulted for West Virginia. In interviews, he said he advised them to have the tests done through Dr. Patricio Reyes, a Phoenix physician, to assure that it was Morrison\u2019s blood. Reyes said that Morrison never showed up for a scheduled appointment. Instead, records show, Morrison went through Request A Test, Ltd., an Ohio company, to draw blood at LabCorp in Phoenix. It remains unclear whether anyone monitored the Feb. 14 blood draw. The lab order form shows Morrison\u2019s driver\u2019s license attached to verify identity. Schwartz said a driver\u2019s license \u201cshould suffice.\u201d Based on that result, Schwartz advised West Virginia on Feb. 20 that Morrison did not have H.I.V. Morrison knocked out John Castle in a sanctioned bout Feb. 22 in Arthur, W. Va. Since then, he has fought once in mixed martial arts. He says he plans to continue a comeback. Morrison said he hoped to vindicate himself with a public blood test in Nevada in the coming weeks. \u201cHave Mr. Morrison visit an infectious disease specialist to perform a complete evaluation,\u201d Schwartz wrote in an e-mail message. \u201cThen you will have the answer as to whether he is positive or negative.\u201d", "keyword": "Morrison Tommy;Boxing;Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome"}
{"id": "ny0214758", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2010/03/24", "title": "At Rio Tinto Trial in China, Door Closes Tighter", "abstract": "SHANGHAI \u2014 Prosecutors argued for a second day in court that four employees from the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto accepted millions of dollars in bribes and stole commercial secrets from Chinese companies, but the closed nature of the trial made it difficult to assess the nature of the evidence they presented in the high-profile case. The trial began Monday with guilty pleas by all four defendants, including Stern Hu, an Australian citizen who served as a high-level executive here for Rio Tinto, according to lawyers in the case. But the pleas \u2014 admitting to accepting bribes \u2014 conflicted with the widely publicized accounts of the case made over the past several months by Chinese officials and the state media. The second day of the trial was scheduled to deal with allegations of the theft of commercial secrets. Under Chinese rules, that meant the trial was even more closed on the second day than the first, and even consular officials from Australia were not permitted to attend. That made it difficult to determine what evidence had been presented, what executives at Rio Tinto knew about acts alleged to be corrupt and why the four employees, three of whom are Chinese citizens, were initially detained last July for espionage and harming the economic interests of China . Later, the charges were downgraded to bribery and theft of commercial secrets. \u201cThere must be a very tight lockdown on any disclosure,\u201d said David Kelly, a China expert who teaches at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. \u201cThis is the way Chinese law has always operated. And they only take a case if they know they\u2019re going to win it, so there\u2019s no room for defense.\u201d The case has alarmed some Western executives operating here because of the appearance that the Chinese authorities were punishing a global company that had found itself at odds with Chinese state-owned steel companies over multibillion-dollar iron-ore contracts. Rio Tinto is one of the leading suppliers of iron ore to Chinese steel mills. The guilty pleas on Monday complicated an already confusing case. \u201cThe charges of receiving bribes are a little puzzling,\u201d said Donald C. Clarke, an expert on Chinese law at George Washington University. \u201cIf they\u2019re stealing secrets normally, they\u2019d be giving bribes. And why aren\u2019t the bribers being charged?\u201d A spokesman for Rio Tinto declined to comment Tuesday. Tom Connor, Australia\u2019s consul general in Shanghai, said there was not much he could report about the trial, given that consular officials were excluded from attending the afternoon hearing on the secrets charge.", "keyword": "Rio Tinto PLC;China;Australia;Shanghai (China)"}
{"id": "ny0027142", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/01/16", "title": "2 Dead in Shooting at Hazard, Ky., College", "abstract": "LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) \u2014 A gunman firing into a vehicle killed two people and wounded a teenager on Tuesday as they sat in the parking lot of an eastern Kentucky community college. The campus was locked down for more than an hour while the police searched the two buildings of Hazard Community and Technical College in Hazard, the police told a news conference broadcast live on WYMT-TV\u2019s Web site. The college\u2019s president, Stephen Greiner, said that at the time of the shooting, about 30 students were on campus, 90 miles southeast of Lexington, Ky. The police recovered a semiautomatic pistol at the scene, and a man who walked into an office of the Kentucky State Police in Hazard and said he knew something about the shooting was being questioned as a suspect, Chief Minor Allen of the Hazard Police Department said. A man and a woman were dead when the police arrived about 6 p.m., Chief Allen said. The teenager, a female, was taken to University of Kentucky Hospital, he said. He said a domestic dispute may have led to the shooting. Wednesday\u2019s classes were called off.", "keyword": "School shooting;Murders;Kentucky;College"}
{"id": "ny0077892", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/05/15", "title": "In California Budget Plan, Brown Wins Deal on Tuition Freeze for In-State Students", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Ending a standoff over whether tuition at the University of California schools would rise, Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday that he would send millions more dollars to the university system than he had proposed earlier this year, in exchange for a tuition freeze for in-state students in the 10-campus system. The proposal, part of the governor\u2019s revised $115.3 billion budget plan, is the end of a monthslong battle between Mr. Brown, who did not want tuition to rise, and Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California, who had threatened to raise tuition unless the state gave more money to the schools. The deal caps tuition for California residents over the next two years, while out-of-state tuition could increase by as much as 8 percent in each of the next two years and 5 percent in the third year. Under the new plan, if approved by the Legislature, the state would provide a 4 percent increase in spending for the system in each of the next four years and provide a $436 million infusion toward paying down the system\u2019s pension obligations. Last fall, the University of California\u2019s regents approved a plan to increase tuition for in-state students by as much as 5 percent over each of the next five years, over intense anger and campus protests. Mr. Brown, who sits on the Board of Regents and voted against the increase, said that the university should look closely for other ways to save money and later proposed a \u201ccommittee of two\u201d \u2014 himself and Ms. Napolitano \u2014 to find such measures. \u201cWe were very, very far apart when we started,\u201d Ms. Napolitano said in a telephone interview Thursday. \u201cThere are already things that we are doing right that the governor and others plain didn\u2019t know about.\u201d Ms. Napolitano proved to be a particularly tenacious opponent, managing to get the governor, who generally gets his way in Sacramento, to back down. Helping her cause was the fact that the state is flooded with unexpected revenue, although Mr. Brown argues that the economy will face another downturn soon and should save money while it can. He is under pressure from fellow Democrats to increase spending in education and social services. Ms. Napolitano said she had made it clear that the system could not use massive online open courses as a way to save large sums of money, as the governor had suggested, but instead would look for ways to create \u201chybrid\u201d classes that combined online work with labs and classroom discussions, particularly for the most popular courses. \u201cWe need to keep producing the kind of students we produce, and you can\u2019t do that on the cheap,\u201d she said. The deal also requires that university employees hired after July 2016 will have to choose between a pension with a defined contribution plan or a defined benefit plan capped at $117,000 per year, down sharply from the current cap of $265,000. California residents currently pay roughly $12,000 a year in tuition and fees, more than three times the rate in 2002. The figure does not including room and board or other additional charges on some campuses. The governor\u2019s new budget proposal also calls for the creation of an earned-income tax credit to help low-income workers, a response to criticism that the original budget plan did not include enough help for the state\u2019s poor. But Mr. Brown indicated that he was reluctant to spend more. \u201cWe have to learn from history,\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cThe idea that when you get a little money, or a lot of money, for a few years that you\u2019ve reached utopia is so demonstrably false by the last 12 years.\u201d", "keyword": "College;Tuition payments;Jerry Brown;California;Janet Napolitano;University of California"}
{"id": "ny0156461", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/06/26", "title": "Extra Work Pays Off for Manuel and Mets", "abstract": "Jerry Manuel , a week into his stint as the Mets \u2019 interim manager, continued searching Wednesday for some trick, some ploy to snap his sluggish team out of its funk. Three hours before the Mets tried to keep the Seattle Mariners , the worst team in baseball, from sweeping them at home, he ordered his players to take stretching exercises as a team. Defensive drills followed. And what followed batting practice were some much-needed signs of life \u2014 including a pair of home runs by David Wright \u2014 in an 8-2 victory for the Mets. \u201cI\u2019m trying to preach team unity as much as possible,\u201d Manuel said. The pregame lesson appeared to carry over into the first inning, when the Mets (38-39) sent eight batters to the plate and did not need a hit to score their first run. Jos\u00e9 Reyes led off with a walk, stole second base, snatched third on a wild pitch by the right-hander Miguel Batista and scored when Luis Castillo grounded out to second. Wright then belted an 0-1 changeup into the left-field bleachers for a 2-0 lead. After Wright circled the bases, Reyes greeted him at the dugout steps with a hug \u2014 a sure sign of team unity. On Tuesday night, Manuel did something else that was unusual for the Mets. He rested Wright, who had played every inning of every game this season, to give him a day of physical and mental rest. If there was any doubt about that move, Wright erased it in the second inning by driving a two-out, 88-mile-an-hour fastball over the left-field fence for two more runs and a 4-0 lead. This time he was greeted by teammates who were even more exuberant, offering forceful high-fives that popped in the air. \u201cI\u2019m always trying to make Jerry look good,\u201d Wright said. He added that his two-homer night would make him less hesitant about resting in the future, although Manuel has all the say in that department. \u201cI have to be cognizant of when he\u2019s getting fatigued,\u201d Manuel said. Wright now has 14 home runs, his second multihomer game in four weeks and the 11th multihomer game of his career. He has hit three home runs in nine career at-bats against Batista. The rout continued in the third as the Mets scored four more runs and knocked Batista from the game. Three of the runs scored when Reyes sent an 84-mile-an-hour slider into the right-field seats with two outs, and suddenly Shea Stadium \u2014 from the field to the dugout to the stands \u2014 was full of good vibes again. A throwing error by third baseman Adri\u00e1n Beltre made the Mets\u2019 runs in the third possible, but Batista (3-10) brought plenty of the damage upon himself. He lasted just two and two-thirds innings, surrendering five hits, eight runs (four earned), five walks, three homers and a wild pitch. He also hit a batter. The Mets\u2019 right-hander John Maine, meanwhile, made the Mariners look like the Mariners. He kept them hitless with a steady diet of well-placed fastballs through the first four innings as the Mets built an 8-0 advantage. Maine (8-5) lasted six innings and allowed five hits and two runs, both earned. \u201cIt makes it easier to pitch,\u201d Maine said of the lead his teammates provided. \u201cIt takes the pressure off you.\u201d Still, the series was a letdown as the Mets lost two of three to the Mariners (28-50) and scored a total of two runs in the losses. It was Manuel\u2019s first series at Shea Stadium as manager and came against a team that fired its manager, John McLaren, last week. Manuel has emphasized his team\u2019s need to improve at home and said that he and his players will be judged by their showings at Shea. Perhaps just as important will be how the Mets stack up against the Yankees. That will play out starting Friday, when the Mets and Yankees get together for four games. INSIDE PITCH Jerry Manuel and the umpire Brian Runge had a sharp dispute Tuesday night that led to Manuel\u2019s ejection, but they shared an extended handshake and spoke before Wednesday\u2019s game. \u201cI talked to Jerry, and that is all I am going to say,\u201d Runge said after Wednesday\u2019s game. \u201cI will let the commissioner\u2019s office do the rest of the talking.\u201d Manuel said that he did not want to see Runge disciplined, and that Runge apologized to him during their conversation. On Tuesday, Runge bumped Manuel with his shoulder. Right fielder Ryan Church, on the disabled list since June 10 with postconcussion syndrome, is scheduled to be in the lineup for the Class A Brooklyn Cylcones on Thursday as a designated hitter and will be re-evaluated from there. ... The left-handed pitcher Oliver P\u00c9rez will remain in the starting rotation and pitch against the Yankees on Sunday despite another poor outing Tuesday against the Mariners. ... The Mets claimed the infielder and former Yankee Andy Phillips off waivers from the Cincinnati Reds on Wednesday.", "keyword": "New York Mets;Seattle Mariners;Manuel Jerry;Wright David;Reyes Jose;Martinez Pedro"}
{"id": "ny0009291", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2013/02/05", "title": "European Union\u2019s Leverage Over Cyprus Is Ephemeral", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 For the first time since Cyprus joined the European Union nearly a decade ago, its partners have the leverage to press for a settlement of the island\u2019s division of almost 40 years. Yet there is no sign that Brussels is preparing to use its advantage to achieve a reunification that eluded negotiators when Cyprus joined the Union in 2004. Indeed, the most powerful member states, Germany and France, may be content to see the Cyprus stalemate continue rather than deal with the potential consequences of a resolution that would bring Turkey closer to E.U. membership. The Republic of Cyprus, with its 800,000 Greek Cypriots, is broke. The country, one of the smallest economies in the euro zone, applied for financial aid from the Union and the International Monetary Fund last June after its banks were badly hurt by an E.U.-sanctioned write-down of Greek debt held by private investors. The government says that without a bailout, it may run out of money in April. It needs about \u20ac17 billion, or $23 billion, from its euro zone partners, equivalent to the economic output of a whole year. That ought to give Brussels leverage to push the Greek Cypriots into cooperating with the Turkish Cypriots in the north of the island to join in a loose federation of the kind proposed in 2004 by Kofi Annan, then the U.N. secretary general. At the time, the Turkish Cypriots voted in favor of the Annan plan, encouraged by Turkey. Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in 1974 in response to a Greek-backed coup in Nicosia by Greek Cypriot hardliners seeking union with Athens. The island has been divided ever since. Turkey has about 30,000 troops in northern Cyprus. Under the Annan plan, most of them would have gone home by 2018. But safe in the knowledge that they would be admitted to the Union no matter what, the Greek Cypriots rejected the Annan plan, and a week later Cyprus became an E.U. state. European officials, and especially G\u00fcnter Verheugen, the E.U. enlargement commissioner at the time, felt betrayed. \u201cThe understanding was quite clear when we gave Turkey candidate status in 1999 and even clearer when we concluded negotiations with Cyprus in 2002: The Greek Cypriots would not allow the peace plan to fail, and if it failed due to the Turkish Cypriots, then Cyprus could join,\u201d Mr. Verheugen said. \u201cWe came very close. The problem was that in the end, we didn\u2019t have any leverage over the Greek Cypriots anymore since they knew they would join anyway,\u201d added Mr. Verheugen, who is now honorary professor of European governance at the European University Viadrina in Germany. The big losers were the Turkish Cypriots, who remain excluded from the Union and economically isolated. At the time, Brussels released some funds that had been pledged to the Turkish Cypriots for economic development and promised to allow them to export their produce directly to the Union. But the Greek Cypriots blocked direct trade with the Union. Turkey, in turn, refused to allow the Greek Cypriots direct access to its ports and airports. At the least, the Union could use a bailout for Nicosia to try to secure direct trade access for the Turkish Cypriots, which might prompt the Turks to lift their own restrictions. Yet some E.U. diplomats say it would be politically dangerous to apply diplomatic pressure by exploiting Cyprus\u2019s economic plight. Any link could backfire and benefit hard-line nationalists on both sides, they warn. And skeptics say it suits Berlin and Paris just fine to keep the Cyprus problem in stalemate, because that prevents Turkey from advancing toward the Union\u2019s door. \u201cEurope itself is divided on the Cyprus issue. There are several countries that have no interest whatsoever in solving the problem because Turkish accession would be moved forward,\u201d said a former mediator on the island, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is still involved in diplomacy. The United States used to be actively engaged in trying to settle the Cyprus dispute, which it saw as a potential flash point for instability in the eastern Mediterranean. But the United States\u2019 interest in twisting arms seems to have waned since Cyprus found large amounts of natural gas beneath its waters and began working with Israel, Washington\u2019s biggest regional ally, to tap the offshore wealth. The seabed bonanza may eventually help Nicosia out of its financial problems. One way of paying off any loans might be to borrow against future revenue from natural gas, which is due to start flowing in 2019. At that point, any incentive to reach a settlement with the Turkish Cypriots may evaporate in a haze of gas. So if European countries want to wield some influence, it is now or never. While Brussels may temporarily have more leverage over the Greek Cypriots, its sway over Turkey has shrunk, and the Turkish Cypriots elected a hard-liner, Dervis Eroglu, as president in 2010. He favors independence for the self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. \u201cTurkey is in no way as willing to compromise as it was in 2004,\u201d the former mediator said. That is partly because few Turks believe the Union will ever admit their country, and hence two-thirds now oppose membership, but also because Ankara has been so economically successful in the last decade that it has much less need to join the bloc. The Turkish deputy prime minister, Ali Babacan, says the E.U. accession process has helped his country implement democratic and economic reforms and strengthen the rule of law, underpinning a decade-long economic boom in which gross domestic product per capita has tripled. \u201cE.U. membership is a strategic target for us,\u201d Mr. Babacan told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month. \u201cWe have been working for this target since 1959. It seems we are still going to take a long time to reach it, if it happens.\u201d In return for a bailout, E.U. officials are demanding that Cyprus shrink its banking sector, privatize state companies and make economic reforms. But so far, no one has linked a rescue to a diplomatic solution of the island\u2019s division. Perhaps the last chance of a settlement may go to waste for lack of European interest. Paul Taylor is a Reuters correspondent.", "keyword": "EU;Cyprus;Turkey;Greece"}
{"id": "ny0227292", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/10/14", "title": "Mexican Investigator of American\u2019s Killing Is Beheaded", "abstract": "HOUSTON \u2014 An investigation into a reported shooting of an American on a border reservoir took a bizarre turn this week when the Mexican police chief overseeing the search was murdered and his head was left in a suitcase outside a military base, the Zapata County Sheriff\u2019s Office said. Mexican officials said it remained unclear on Wednesday whether the killing of Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, commander of the Tamaulipas State police in Ciudad Miguel Alem\u00e1n, was related to the search for David M. Hartley, a manager with an oil well services company who, his wife reported, was fatally shot on Sept. 30 while touring Falcon Lake on a Jet Ski. Just before his death, Commander Flores had given the names of two suspects in Mr. Hartley\u2019s case to a reporter at KRGV-TV in Brownsville, Tex., lending credence to the theory that the police commander\u2019s killing was related to the inquiry. But Rub\u00e9n Dar\u00edo R\u00edos, a spokesman for the Tamaulipas State prosecutor, said Commander Flores was involved in several inquiries that might have given someone a motive to kill him. The chief was one of the senior police officials overseeing about 100 officers searching the lake for a trace of the missing man, Mr. Dario said. The search has proved fruitless so far, and hope has faded of finding Mr. Hartley, who was reportedly wearing a life vest when he was shot in the head, or his missing watercraft. Commander Flores told the Brownsville television station that the Mexican police were searching for two brothers, Juan Pedro Zald\u00edvar Farias and Jos\u00e9 Manuel Zald\u00edvar Far\u00edas, who are reputed members of the Zeta organized crime group. Another police official in Miguel Alem\u00e1n, Juan Carlos Ballesteros, had given the same information to the newspaper El Universal on Saturday. Yet Mr. Dar\u00edo denied Tuesday that state investigators were seeking anyone. \u201cWe have no suspects,\u201d he said. Family members of Mr. Hartley said they met last week with Commander Flores to discuss the search, and for them, his killing appeared to be a message. \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure they are trying to make a statement that you guys better back off or else,\u201d said Bob Young, the missing man\u2019s father-in-law. Mr. Hartley was shot by a group of armed men in fishing boats after he and his wife crossed the lake on Jet Skis to photograph a half-submerged church near the Mexican town of Guerrero Viejo, according to his wife, Tiffany Hartley. She fled after trying unsuccessfully to retrieve her husband\u2019s body. The region has seen years of gangland war between the Gulf cartel, the Zetas and the Sinaloan cartel, all vying for control of lucrative border crossings, among them the lake itself, with the Mexican Army intervening regularly. As the drug violence has dragged into its fourth year, lawlessness has risen generally, and cartel hit men now regularly single out officials who cross them.", "keyword": "Villegas Rolando Armando Flores;Mexico;Texas;Murders and Attempted Murders;Drug Cartels"}
{"id": "ny0231181", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/09/01", "title": "With Aqueduct Casino, More Horse Racing Subsidies", "abstract": "New York City \u2019s first casino may open as soon as next year, and for the state the timing could not be better: it is expected to generate as much as $1.5 million a day for the severely depleted state treasury, as well as an upfront payment to Albany of $380 million. But there will be another beneficiary of the great slot machine payout: the state\u2019s foundering horse racing industry. The new casino authorized at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens , which would feature 4,525 slot machines, will pump an estimated $30 million or more each year into New York\u2019s racetracks and breeding operations. That is on top of $100 million a year the industry gets from the existing eight slot parlors across the state. Since the first parlor opened in 2006, the machines have produced about $400 million for the horses. New York is not the only state that uses one form of gambling to support another. But one of the first, New Jersey , is now considering ending the subsidies for horse racing from Atlantic City . Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts recently rejected a proposal to put slot machines at a track near Boston , saying he preferred stand-alone casinos that sent a greater percentage of the revenues to the state. \u201cFor New York,\u201d said William R. Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling at the University of Nevada , \u201cthe public policy question comes down to this: Should we spend $400 million to save racetracks or to save education and other things that are also in great need?\u201d New York is among 12 states that allow casinos to be installed at racetracks in an effort to revive the struggling sport. Horse owners and breeders in these states, which also include Delaware , Iowa , Maryland and Pennsylvania , say the casinos are vital to the economy: they contribute billions of dollars and, in New York, account for about 35,000 jobs, if the tally includes jockeys, trainers, grooms and the farm workers who produce hay and other food for the horses. The lush rolling hills of the horse farms provide green space and a hedge against overdevelopment, the owners and breeders say. \u201cThe racing industry makes a significant economic contribution to the state,\u201d said Barry R. Ostrager, president of the New York Thoroughbred Breeders and a board member of the New York Racing Association , which would be a beneficiary of the slot machines at Aqueduct. \u201cThe revenue that horsemen and breeders receive from slots will enable them to upgrade facilities, to upgrade racing and to make racing more attractive.\u201d The horse racing industry was a powerful force in Albany even before Joseph L. Bruno , who had close ties to the industry, became the majority leader in the State Senate in the mid-1990s. But Mr. Bruno, a Republican, was regarded as an exceptional ally. He rode his horse Apache in the annual Flag Day Parade in Saratoga Springs and owned a breeding operation, which eventually came under scrutiny by federal investigators and contributed to his stepping down in 2008. \u201cThe most valuable players in the horse racing industry have been their lobbyists,\u201d Bennett Liebman, executive director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School and Gov. David A. Paterson \u2019s appointee to the New York Racing Association, is fond of saying. When the State Legislature approved the creation of limited casinos \u2014 video slot machines were allowed, but not table games \u2014 at racetracks in 2001, it was partly to aid education and partly to help racing by fattening purses, in order to attract better horses and more fans. New York requires the casinos to pay out in winnings 91.5 cents of every dollar gambled. Of what is left, 44 percent is earmarked for education and 10 percent for racing: 8.75 percent for purses and 1.25 percent for breeders. Pennsylvania is more generous, providing 12 percent to horse racing, a total of $647 million since 2006. As slots have expanded in New York, so has the payout, for both education, which received more than $450 million last year, and horse racing, which collected $104 million. But that is not all the industry receives. Slot parlors make a profit after the fees and revenue sharing, and at the eight parlors in New York, the machines are operated by the track owners and now provide most of their income. \u201cThere should be little doubt,\u201d Mr. Liebman said, \u201cthat without the slots every harness track in New York would be out of business.\u201d The Aqueduct slots will be operated not by the track\u2019s owner \u2014 the New York Racing Association, which also owns the Belmont and Saratoga tracks and is nearly insolvent \u2014 but by an independent company, Genting New York. Genting, part of a multinational conglomerate, has received approval from the governor and leaders of the Senate and the Assembly, and is waiting for the state attorney general and comptroller to sign off. Despite the introduction of slots, the revival of horse racing as a spectator sport has not come. The purses are bigger and the horses are considered better, but the cars in the parking lots at most tracks belong to patrons of the slot parlors. Gamblers wagered $2.2 billion on New York horse races last year, 30 percent less than in 2003, when inflation is taken into account, Mr. Liebman said. The slot machines took in $12 billion. \u201cYou\u2019re propping up a dying industry,\u201d said Richard McGowan, a Jesuit priest and an economics professor at Boston College who specializes in gambling. \u201cThe only thing that will revive horse racing is if you banned all other forms of gambling, and that\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d But the lifeline between the horse racing industry and gambling revenues is coming under greater scrutiny. In Massachusetts, Governor Patrick rejected a proposal to allow slots at the struggling Suffolk Downs in East Boston, saying it amounted to a no-bid contract for track owners. He favors full casinos that send a percentage of the revenues to the state coffers and none to racing. With New Jersey\u2019s two state-run horse tracks, Meadowlands and Monmouth Park, set to lose $22 million this year, Gov. Chris Christie sent a shock wave through the industry in July when he proposed cutting off millions of dollars in racing subsidies from Atlantic City\u2019s casinos, which are under siege from new casinos in neighboring states, and shutting down the Meadowlands track. The plan faces opposition in the Legislature from racing supporters, who favor bolstering the industry by adding slots to the gambling menu at the Meadowlands, a move that the governor\u2019s advisers believe would undercut Atlantic City even further. \u201cGovernor Christie is making a decision: If I have to choose between helping casinos and the racing industry, I don\u2019t see any reason to provide subsidies for the racing industry,\u201d Mr. Liebman said. But Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow of Mount Vernon, chairman of the New York Assembly\u2019s Racing and Wagering Committee, said the issue was jobs. \u201cThe sport has lost a lot of its shine,\u201d Mr. Pretlow, a Democrat, said. \u201cBut there are an awful lot of people in the industry, from the tracks to the breeders to the people who grow the food for the horses.\u201d Jeff Gural, who owns horse farms in New York and Pennsylvania, revived two small, defunct harness tracks because of slot revenues, Tioga Downs and Vernon Downs. Under New York\u2019s revenue-sharing program, about $5 million from the $50 million spent by gamblers at Tioga flowed to the horse industry. It was money well spent for the local economy, Mr. Gural said, with as many as 150 trainers and others renting houses and eating in restaurants as they tended to about 400 horses during the five-month racing season. At Yonkers Raceway, the closest casino to New York City, the slots pumped about $55 million last year into the racing industry. Bob Galterio, the general manager, said the revenue-sharing formula helped his track triple the average size of its purses, which in turn attracts better-quality horses. \u201cWhile our on-track attendance and handle have not gone up tremendously,\u201d Mr. Galterio said, \u201cinterest in the Yonkers Raceway product has doubled. The increased purse levels make it more attractive to gamblers.\u201d Critics question the wisdom of a $55 million subsidy at a time when Yonkers is struggling to keep teachers and police officers on the payroll. Indeed, Frank Mauro, director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, said slot revenues might have soared to the point where the Legislature needed to alter the profit-sharing arrangement to cap the industry\u2019s share at high-producing tracks like Yonkers and Aqueduct.", "keyword": "Horse racing;Gambling;null;Queens;Yonkers Raceway"}
{"id": "ny0156297", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2008/06/10", "title": "Saudi Arabia Calls for Summit on Energy Costs", "abstract": "Saudi Arabia, the world\u2019s biggest oil exporter, said on Monday that it wanted to convene an energy summit of producers and consumers to focus on \u201chow to objectively deal\u201d with high prices. After a cabinet meeting led by King Abdullah, the Saudi government said, \u201cthe increase in prices isn\u2019t justified in terms of market fundamentals,\u201d according to a statement from the official Saudi Press Agency. The proposal comes as gasoline prices are surging to record highs and political exasperation in Washington over high oil costs is mounting. No date was given for the energy summit. Iyad Madani, the kingdom\u2019s information minister, said Saudi Arabia would also work with other OPEC members to \u201cguarantee the availability of oil supplies, now and in the future.\u201d Few analysts expect that a concerted effort by producers and consumers will push down prices. Still, the Saudi statement, while vague, helped prick the momentum of last week, when oil prices gained an unprecedented $16 a barrel over two days of trading. Oil futures fell $4.19 on Monday to close at $134.35 a barrel. The surge in fuel prices is turning into a major political issue with Democrats and Republicans competing to take action in Congress. One bill considered in the Senate would allow the Justice Department to bring antitrust lawsuits against members of OPEC, which include Saudi Arabia, for withholding oil supplies and pushing up prices. But even as oil declined, gasoline set a new high. The national average price of a gallon of gas rose 1.8 cents overnight to $4.023, according to AAA. The average gas price rose above $4 a gallon for the first time on Sunday. Saudi Arabia has been sending increasingly mixed signals in recent months, even as the run-up in oil prices has reached levels that would have seemed unimaginable just a few months ago. Earlier this year, the Saudi monarch signaled that the kingdom would slow down oil expansion to preserve its hydrocarbon resources for future generations. President Bush has visited Saudi Arabia twice this year and each time failed to secure a commitment from the Saudis to pump more oil into the market. But some experts say that the Saudis are concerned about the impact of high prices on the American economy, the world\u2019s largest consumer of oil, and the growth in alternative fuels. \u201cThere really is no coincidence in timing, the Saudis are well attuned to what happens here politically,\u201d said Steven A. Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. \u201cThis is a public relations thing to show they care. It is also a real concern that should these prices be sustained in the long haul, this would not be in the interest of Saudi Arabia.\u201d Meanwhile, the president of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Chakib Khelil, said Monday that oil supplies were \u201clargely sufficient.\u201d \u201cThe economic crisis in the U.S. caused the dollar to drop sharply and the threats against Iran heightened geopolitical tensions,\u201d Mr. Khelil said, according to Bloomberg News.", "keyword": "Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline;Prices (Fares Fees and Rates);Saudi Arabia;Summit Conferences"}
{"id": "ny0066042", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/06/01", "title": "Duncan Gives Spurs Another Shot at the Heat", "abstract": "OKLAHOMA CITY \u2014 The ball bounced on the rim once, then kissed off the backboard, trickled off the rim again and fell through the net. When it did, Tim Duncan, who had released it, allowed himself a look to the heavens. Finally, he seemed to be saying. It has been an especially long year in a lengthy career for Duncan, 38, who seemed to harbor the pain of last season\u2019s loss in the N.B.A. finals more than the other San Antonio Spurs. Coach Gregg Popovich had removed Duncan from Game 6 of last year\u2019s finals, leaving him to watch as Miami\u2019s Chris Bosh grabbed a rebound that might have been Duncan\u2019s and found Ray Allen for a game-tying 3-pointer that led to a Heat win. Two nights later, Duncan showed a rare display of emotion as he slammed his palms against the court after missing a shot near the basket \u2014 one he had made so many times \u2014 that all but sealed the defeat as the Heat eventually wrapped up their second straight title. But now Duncan and the Spurs are heading back to the finals in a rematch with the Heat. Duncan\u2019s fadeaway jumper with 19.4 seconds left in overtime provided the distance they needed to turn back the Oklahoma City Thunder, 112-107, on Saturday night in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals. \u201cI just tried to get it up and finally got a roll,\u201d Duncan said of the shot. He added: \u201cWe\u2019re happy that it\u2019s the Heat again. We\u2019ve got that bad taste in our mouths. We\u2019re back now, and we want to get it done.\u201d Image The Spurs\u2019 Manu Ginobili, shooting against Russell Westbrook, had 15 points, 6 rebounds and 5 assists. Credit Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency This victory was also gratifying in the manner in which it was achieved, the Spurs stamping their return to the finals in typical Spurs fashion. Nobody in the N.B.A. is more admired for an adherence to team basketball than the Spurs, and they managed this one by rallying without their offensive spark, Tony Parker, who did not play in the second half because of an injured left ankle. Without Parker, the Spurs, who trailed by 49-42 at halftime, put together one of their best offensive quarters of the playoffs, scoring 37 points in the third and turning a 7-point deficit into a 10-point lead. Boris Diaw, the slow-a-foot forward with the slow paced game, who was picked up in 2012 after being released by Charlotte, was the unexpected star Saturday. He scored 26 points in 36 minutes off the bench. \u201cIt\u2019s the most complete team in the league,\u201d Diaw said. \u201cGuys can come in, step up and play pretty much every way. I scored some points tonight, but it could be somebody else. I was open, and everybody\u2019s ready to pass the ball to the open man.\u201d In recent seasons, the Spurs have made full use of their roster, sometimes to rest their aging core, other times to tinker with different combinations. They had used 30 starting lineups this season, but the one that began the second half \u2014 which included the little-used Cory Joseph and Matt Bonner \u2014 had not played a single minute together all season. When Joseph, who replaced Parker, went to the bench after seven minutes, he received a rare handshake and a pat on the behind from Popovich. The Spurs defense, which seemed helpless to stop Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook at times in this series, soon began stripping the ball from them and deflecting passes. Oklahoma City turned the ball over 19 times, with Westbrook and Durant committing seven turnovers apiece, which helped offset Westbrook\u2019s 34 points and Durant\u2019s 31. Image Tim Duncan embracing Manu Ginobili after Ginobili sank a 3-pointer from the top of the key with 27.1 seconds remaining in the second half. Credit Ronald Martinez/Getty Images \u201cWhatever defense you\u2019re in is fine, but you\u2019ve got to be active, making a play when you feel it, covering for a teammate,\u201d Popovich said. \u201cWe did that really well, creating crowds for them.\u201d In a series that had no shortage of plot twists and intrigue, it finally got the one thing it had been lacking: a tight game. The Thunder provided that when they roared back from a 12-point deficit in the fourth quarter to send the game into overtime. In the end, the Thunder\u2019s reliance on their two stars was not enough. Durant and Westbrook carried the Thunder back, combining for 24 points in the fourth quarter. Durant put the Thunder ahead, 99-97, on a scooping drive with 32 seconds left. After Manu Ginobili erased that with a 3-pointer and added a free throw, Westbrook tied the score at 101-101 with two free throws with 9.3 seconds to play. After Ginobili missed a jumper from near the free-throw line at the buzzer, it seemed as if the younger Thunder would be best equipped to emerge with a win. The Thunder had showed the depth of their survival instincts during the playoffs. They had trailed Memphis, three games to two, in the first round and trailed the Clippers by 7 points with 49.2 seconds left in Game 5 of a conference semifinal series. And it seemed as if San Antonio, even with a Game 7 back on its home court, might rue the missed opportunity because of the uncertain status of Parker. Knowing that, the Spurs turned to Duncan, who scored 7 points in overtime. \u201cToday, we were pretty tired in overtime,\u201d Ginobili said. \u201cThey were very physical and it\u2019s always hard to score against them. We just started to give him the ball and he gave us solutions.\u201d And on this night, something else \u2014 an opportunity for redemption.", "keyword": "Basketball;Spurs;Oklahoma City Thunder;Tim Duncan;Manu Ginobili;Gregg Popovich;Russell Westbrook;Kevin Durant;Serge Ibaka;Playoffs"}
{"id": "ny0178467", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2007/08/03", "title": "A Queens City Councilman Is Indicted in a Rape Case", "abstract": "City Councilman Dennis P. Gallagher has been indicted by a Queens grand jury investigating rape allegations against him, the councilman and his lawyer confirmed yesterday. The indictment remained sealed yesterday and Mr. Gallagher, a Queens Republican, said he did not know what charges were handed up. The Queens district attorney is expected to hold a news conference today to announce the results of the grand jury\u2019s deliberations. The indictment comes one day after Mr. Gallagher appeared before the grand jury, telling the 23-member panel that the sexual encounter at the center of the allegations was consensual, his lawyer said. He continued to assert his innocence yesterday. \u201cThe grand jury did not have all the information, nor did it hear all the witnesses,\u201d he said in a telephone interview from his Middle Village home. \u201cAt the end, after the trial process when all the information can be heard, I strongly feel I will be vindicated of any charges.\u201d The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, would not discuss the indictment yesterday. \u201cAny action that\u2019s taken by the grand jury is sealed as a matter of law,\u201d he said. Criminal charges contained in an indictment are unsealed when a defendant is arraigned. Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn commented on the allegations for the first time yesterday. \u201cThe Council and I take very seriously the deeply troubling allegations against council member Dennis Gallagher,\u201d she said in a statement. \u201cTherefore, the matter is being immediately referred to the City Council\u2019s Standards and Ethics Committee, which will meet at the beginning of next week.\u201d Mr. Gallagher is expected to surrender to the police this morning and then be arraigned. He is expected to plead not guilty to whatever charges are filed, his lawyer, Stephen R. Mahler said. Mr. Mahler was sharply critical of the grand jury proceedings, saying that a majority of the questions asked of his client were designed to prejudice jurors against him. He said he planned to immediately file a motion to dismiss the charges based on what he said was prosecutorial misconduct. \u201cWell, this grand jury presentation was really stark evidence why lawyers almost always advise clients who are targets of an investigation not to testify,\u201d he said. Mr. Gallagher chose to testify despite his advice, Mr. Mahler said, because he \u201cfelt he didn\u2019t want to hide behind legal maneuvering and felt he owed it to his constituents to come forward and say he\u2019d done nothing illegal.\u201d Kevin R. Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney\u2019s office, declined to comment on Mr. Mahler\u2019s allegations. The investigation began after a woman told the police that Mr. Gallagher had raped her at his Council office in Middle Village on July 8, after the two had been drinking at a nearby bar. Mr. Gallagher, 43, is married with two children. Before being elected to the Council in 2001, he was a longtime chief of staff to Thomas V. Ognibene, the former Council minority leader. Mr. Ognibene said he was saddened by news of the indictment. \u201cThere was nothing in my relationship with him to indicate that he was capable of this kind of conduct, so it was shocking to hear of this indictment. But speaking as a lawyer, an indictment is nothing but an accusation, and people ought to allow him the presumption of innocence,\u201d Mr. Ognibene said. The last council member indicted in a crime was Angel Rodriguez, a Brooklyn Democrat who resigned in 2002 before pleading guilty to federal bribery charges, according to Council officials.", "keyword": "Gallagher Dennis P;Sex Crimes;City Councils"}
{"id": "ny0130752", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2012/12/04", "title": "T.S.A. Skips House Panel Hearing on Privatizing Airport Checkpoint Security", "abstract": "Representative Reid Ribble fixed witnesses assembled at a House aviation subcommittee hearing last Thursday with a baleful stare. \u201cI am very disappointed that the T.S.A. was unwilling to come,\u201d said Mr. Ribble, a freshman Republican from Wisconsin. \u201cI understand how uncomfortable these hearings can be for them, especially since we\u2019re talking about a lot of complaints today. But part of their job is to let the American people know what they\u2019re doing.\u201d The director of the Transportation Security Administration , John S. Pistole, had declined to testify before this particular subcommittee on two previous occasions, despite angry criticism from some members who are longtime agency critics. The reason, the agency later explained, is that oversight for the T.S.A. resides in the House Homeland Security Committee \u2014 not the aviation subcommittee, which is a part of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The agency noted that in the 112th Congress alone, officials had testified at 38 hearings and provided 425 individual briefings. So the T.S.A. sat out that one last week \u2014 and got lambasted for it, at both the hearing and in some media accounts. No one would argue that the T.S.A. should not be held closely accountable. There have been too many problems. Since the agency was created in the aftermath of Sept. 11, this column has regularly reported on many of them, like the outrage that began in 2004 over charges that some screeners were groping female travelers. More recently, the agency faced questions about its decision to replace metal detectors with those whole-body image machines, which the T.S.A. still has not adequately defended against claims that they are personally invasive, arguably unsafe and ultimately not as reliable as good old metal detectors. On the other hand, the hearing last Thursday seemed to have an agenda, which was that the T.S.A. should be replaced by private security companies \u2014 you know, like the ones that were accused of hiring poorly trained, underpaid screeners at airports before Sept. 11 brought a somewhat more intense focus to checkpoint security. One of the leaders of that charge is Representative John L. Mica, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Transportation Committee. At Thursday\u2019s subcommittee hearing, Mr. Mica said that the T.S.A. was \u201cout of control.\u201d He said Mr. Pistole was defying the committee to protect \u201cone of the biggest bureaucracies that has ever expanded in the history of our federal government.\u201d Mr. Mica said, \u201cWe need to be closing down T.S.A. as we know it.\u201d Representative Thomas Petri, a Wisconsin Republican who is the subcommittee chairman, was even more harsh in denouncing Mr. Pistole and his agency. \u201cA fish,\u201d Mr. Petri said, \u201crots from the head.\u201d Underlying the issue is a Congressional provision that gives airports the option of replacing T.S.A. screeners with private security companies. Only about 16 of the nation\u2019s 450 airports have done so, and a handful of mostly small airports have requests pending. Five witnesses testified at the sparsely attended hearing on Thursday. Several, including Stephen M. Lord, director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office, offered cogent suggestions and critiques for various T.S.A. initiatives, including the PreCheck program that allows expedited security for selected high-frequency passengers who undergo background checks. PreCheck will operate in 35 airports by the end of the year. Another, Charlie Leocha, the director of the Consumer Travel Alliance, offered some solid recommendations, most of them long familiar to critics of the T.S.A. Among them was rethinking the prohibited items list for carry-ons, which ties up screeners and annoys passengers at checkpoints, in an arguably useless search for small items that could never be used to hijack airplanes. Another was to get rid of those body-scanner machines. Mr. Leocha said that the agency had become the \u201cbutt of countless jokes.\u201d But Mr. Leocha may have gone too far when he suggested that new checkpoint attire was a priority. \u201cDress T.S.A. security screeners in nonthreatening uniforms, perhaps pastel polo shirts,\u201d Mr. Leocha said. To me, the best moments in the hearing belonged to Veda Shook, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants union. Ms. Shook kept going off the message \u2014 if the committee message was to end the T.S.A. as we know it, as Mr. Mica had declared. \u201cToday the skies are absolutely safer than they were before 9/11, before the onset of the T.S.A.,\u201d Ms. Shook insisted. \u201cI\u2019m safer as a crew member. Our passengers are safer. Our country is safer.\u201d Mr. Ribble frowned upon hearing that. \u201cA lot of the changes would have happened anyway as a result of 9/11, outside of federalization,\u201d he said. Given her support of a federal security force, \u201cShould we not then federalize flight attendants?\u201d he asked. Ms. Shook blinked and replied, \u201cThat\u2019s a great question. So thank you for that.\u201d Then, like the no-nonsense flight attendant she is, she calmly repeated herself for clarity. \u201cWe believe that any return to a bottom-line-driven system that puts security second to profits would be a reckless and unjustified regression from T.S.A.\u2019s mission to protect our skies.\u201d", "keyword": "Airport Security;Transportation Security Administration;House Committee on Transportation"}
{"id": "ny0139953", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/02/26", "title": "Gazans Demonstrate at Border Against Israeli Blockade", "abstract": "EREZ CROSSING, Israel \u2014 Several thousand Palestinians , many of them schoolchildren bused in from their classes, joined peaceful protests in the Gaza Strip along sections of the border with Israel for several hours on Monday, forming human chains in some locations as part of a public campaign against the Israeli blockade. But the turnout, estimated at about 5,000, was far smaller than had been expected, and fears in Israel that masses of Gaza residents might try to break through the Israeli-built barrier along the border, as they breached the border with Egypt last month, proved unfounded. Most protesters kept a safe distance from the barrier. The demonstrators dispersed around noon, and shortly after militants in Gaza fired a number of rockets at Israel. One landed outside an apartment block in the Israeli border town of Sderot. A boy, Yossi Yadlin Haimov, 10, was badly wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and underwent surgery at a hospital in Ashkelon. In northern Gaza, some of the protesters started marching toward the Erez crossing, but they were stopped by a line of armed Hamas policemen. The police officers blocked the road about half a mile south of the crossing, seeking to prevent a confrontation with Israel. After the main protest ended, a group of Palestinian youths rioted at the crossing, throwing stones. When they tried to cross, Israeli troops fired shots into the air, an army spokeswoman said, speaking on condition of anonymity under army rules. She said an Israeli officer was slightly wounded in the clash. At least two Palestinians were wounded, according to Palestinian reports. The spokeswoman said 49 Palestinians had been arrested. Palestinian advocates had called for Gaza residents to form a human chain along the roughly 30-mile border with Israel from Rafah in the south to Beit Hanoun in the north to protest Israel\u2019s closure of the main passages into Gaza since the Islamic militant group Hamas took control there last June. Israel recently tightened the blockade in response to intensified rocket fire from the strip. Despite the low numbers, the main organizer of the protest, Jamal el-Khoudary, declared the event a success. \u201cIt was peaceful, and that was what we were aiming for,\u201d said Mr. Khoudary, an independent lawmaker in Gaza with ties to Hamas. Hamas leaders have been encouraged by recent calls by European officials for Israel to reopen the passages to Gaza and ease the conditions of the 1.5 million residents of the strip. On Monday, though, fear kept many Gazans at home: the Israeli Army made it clear that it was taking the threat of a border breach very seriously, and thousands of extra troops and police officers were deployed along the Israeli side of the barrier. A joint statement released by the offices of the Israeli foreign minister and defense minister on Sunday night said, \u201cIsrael does not interfere in demonstrations taking place inside the Gaza Strip, but Israel will protect its borders and will prevent any violations of its sovereign territory.\u201d If the situation did deteriorate into violence, the statement warned, Israel would lay sole responsibility for the consequences on the shoulders of Hamas, which had placed Palestinian civilians \u201con the front lines.\u201d Israel bolstered its artillery units along the border and occasionally fired smoke bombs, either to conceal troop movements or deter the protesters. Soldiers in full camouflage hid in the lush green wheat fields of Israeli farming communities near the border line. As the tension dissipated, the soldiers picnicked on army rations to the sound of a loud chorus of muezzins calling the faithful to midday prayers in mosques on the other side of the barrier. The deputy defense minister of Israel, Matan Vilnai, told Army Radio on Monday evening that the deployment of the security forces, led by the army, was the main factor that led the Palestinians \u201cto rethink whatever they were doing.\u201d But there was also a feeling on both sides that the event on Monday was an exercise or rehearsal for another time. A Hamas lawmaker, Ismail al-Ashqar, said at the protest in northern Gaza on Monday, \u201cIf the world does not respond and end the siege, then what is coming will be worse.\u201d Another Hamas lawmaker, Yihya Musa, threatened that the human chain formed Monday could in the future turn into a series of \u201cbombs ready to explode.\u201d Separately, an American tourist drowned Monday in a flash flood while hiking in a riverbed near the Dead Sea, an Israeli police spokesman said. The spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, identified the tourist as David Tauber, in his mid-30s, from New York. Rescue units searched for a woman who had been hiking with Mr. Tauber and found her alive, Mr. Rosenfeld said.", "keyword": "Gaza Strip;Palestinians;Demonstrations and Riots;Hamas"}
{"id": "ny0057613", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2014/09/24", "title": "The Benefits of Easing Climate Change", "abstract": "On Tuesday, more than 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to open a climate summit meeting that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hopes will provide momentum to a new round of negotiations toward a global environmental agreement to be signed in Paris next year. You\u2019re forgiven if you hold your applause. World leaders have been trying without success to cut such a deal for almost two decades, crashing time and again into the fear that slowing the emissions of carbon that are inexorably changing the climate carries an economic cost that few are willing to bear. This time, though, advocates come armed with a trump card: All things considered, the cost of curbing carbon emissions may be considerably cheaper than earlier estimates had suggested. For all the fears that climate change mitigation would put the brakes on growth, it might actually enhance it. Whether this can tip the balance toward the global grand bargain that has eluded world leaders so many times depends on a couple of things. The first is to what extent it is true. The second is whether this is, in fact, the issue that matters most to the people making the decisions. The most recent salvo came in \u201cThe New Climate Economy,\u201d a report issued last week by an international commission appointed by a handful of rich and poor countries to take a new look at the economics of climate change. \u201cThere is now huge scope for action which can both enhance growth and reduce climate risk,\u201d it reads. Efficient investments could deliver at least half of the emission cuts needed by 2030 to keep global temperatures in check. And they could do so while delivering extra economic gains on the side. At first blush, the proposition that replacing fossil fuel with more expensive energy could produce a net economic gain seems implausible. Until now, even many supporters of tough action accepted the idea that there would be a necessary price to pay initially to achieve the long-term goal of avoiding catastrophic climate change. But the new thinking turns that on its head by taking more careful account of the hidden benefits of mitigating climate change. \u201cThe cost of action is well known,\u201d said Helen Mountford, director of economics at the World Resources Institute, which worked on the \u201cNew Climate Economy\u201d report. \u201cThe co-benefits, like reduced health costs, are less known.\u201d The findings are not isolated. Research published this month by Ian Parry and Chandara Veung of the International Monetary Fund and Dirk Heine of the University of Bologna concluded that almost every one of the top 20 carbon emitters would reap economic gains by imposing a hefty carbon tax , if they deployed the revenue to reduce taxes on income. A tax of $63 per ton of CO 2 , for instance, would not only cut China\u2019s emissions by some 17 percent, it would also cut the number of Chinese sickened or killed by pollution from coal. If Beijing used the money to cut other taxes, it would increase economic efficiency, adding up to a net economic gain \u2014 on top of any climate impact \u2014 of more than 1 percent of China\u2019s gross domestic product. This finding does not depend on any technological breakthroughs. It happens whether solar energy is cheap or expensive. \u201cIt\u2019s only recently that policy makers are beginning to appreciate the power of fiscal instruments like environmental taxes,\u201d Mr. Parry told me. \u201cAnd it\u2019s only fairly recently that we\u2019ve been able to value the health and other environment impacts so we\u2019ve only recently got some sense of the substantial and pervasive undercharging for environmental damages.\u201d Image President Obama with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, right, and General Assembly President Sam Kutesa, after Mr. Obama\u2019s U.N. address. Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press While this is all theory, some empirical research also supports the finding. In 2008, for instance, the Canadian province of British Columbia unilaterally imposed a carbon tax that rose from 10 Canadian dollars per ton of CO 2 in 2010 to 30 dollars in 2012, using the money to reduce personal and corporate income taxes. An assessment of the experience published last year by economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that fuel use declined, but economic growth remained on the same trajectory as the rest of Canada\u2019s. Notably, British Columbia ended up with the lowest income tax in the country. Could this new understanding change the debate over climate change? At the very least, the belief that there is a climate-related free lunch out there might provide welcome harmony to negotiations that usually end in acrimonious finger-pointing. The new research might even help move the debate away from the failed strategy of seeking legally binding emissions targets on every country, providing a blueprint for countries to voluntarily take on ambitious goals because it is in their own self-interest regardless of what other nations do. Not everybody buys the math , though. And even those who do acknowledge that these efficient pathways to a low-carbon future are very narrow indeed. \u201cNot all climate policies are win-win, and some trade-offs are inevitable,\u201d notes \u201cThe New Climate Economy.\u201d For even if every country reaped net benefits from embracing a low-carbon development path, governments still must allocate costs and benefits within individual economies, mediating between winners and losers. \u201cHealth is a social benefit that is not included in the accounts of private investors,\u201d noted Zou Ji, deputy director of China\u2019s National Center for Climate Change Strategy, a research institute affiliated with the government\u2019s National Development and Reform Commission. \u201cBut abatement costs will be felt by private investors.\u201d Navigating these distributional issues will be tricky. Getting it wrong can be expensive. For instance, Mr. Parry and his co-researchers found that if carbon revenue was not used to reduce other income taxes, the net gain from a carbon tax evaporated and became a net cost. Germany \u2014 perhaps the country most committed to developing an economy powered with renewable energy \u2014 has struggled with the trade-offs. First it exempted its export-oriented, energy-intensive industries from the surcharges levied to pay for subsidies to solar and wind generators. More recently, alarmed at the rising cost of power, it has begun reducing its subsidies for renewables, which has led to a drop in the rollout of solar power. So maybe it\u2019s no surprise that few countries have been willing, at least so far, to commit to take the promised high growth/low carbon path. Last July, Australia\u2019s newly installed conservative government repealed the carbon tax introduced by the Labor government before it, and the country\u2019s carbon emissions quickly shot up. \u201cIf the Chinese and the Indians found it much more economically efficient to build out solar, nuclear and wind, why are they still building all these coal plants?\u201d asked Ted Nordhaus, chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank focused on development and the environment. China\u2019s CO 2 emissions increased 4.2 percent last year, according to the Global Carbon Project, helping drive a global increase of 2.3 percent. China now accounts for 28 percent of the world\u2019s total emissions, more than the United States and the European Union combined. \u201cI don\u2019t think the Chinese and the Indians are stupid,\u201d Mr. Nordhaus told me. \u201cThey are looking at their indigenous energy resources and energy demand and making fairly reasonable decisions.\u201d For them, combating climate change does not look at all like a free lunch.", "keyword": "UN;Climate Change;Global Warming;Greenhouse gas;Economy;Carbon dioxide;Renewable energy"}
{"id": "ny0150925", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2008/08/18", "title": "Like Politics? Broadcast Your View for Only $6", "abstract": "Saysme.tv didn\u2019t invent the loudmouth, but, as the company\u2019s logo indicates, it sure hopes to sell him a megaphone. The business plan works like this: Saysme.tv offers a service over the Internet that streamlines the submission process for homemade television advertising and offers cheap slices of cable-TV time \u2014 perhaps as little as $6 for a 25-second spot, assuming you are O.K. with appearing on CNN Headline News sometime next week in parts of Charlotte, N.C., in the wee hours. The hope is to get commissions from the legions of small-time commentators, political bloggers and local advertisers, who may have as strong opinions as T. Boone Pickens on renewable energy, but do not have his millions to bombard the public with them. Instead, the dream goes, there would be millions of individual commentators placing ads a few at time, market by market, either by uploading their own ads YouTube style or choosing from those already hosted at the site. Let the buckshot bombardment begin. The Web site is a new example of an online phenomenon once considered powerful enough to have its own buzz word \u2014 disintermediation \u2014 which has been applied to auctions, entertainment and classified ads. In the cable-TV advertising version, no longer would placing an ad be expensive and time consuming, with its own arcane rituals and legal boilerplate. Instead, the path from computer screen to TV screen could be nearly smooth, efficient if you prefer, and in a generally accessible prices range, though more likely to be around $60 than the occasional $6 slot that one can hunt for on the site. Combined with video hosts like YouTube, large blogging farms like Blogger and homegrown online news sites, perhaps saysme.tv could cause the incisive adage \u2014 freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one \u2014 to lose some of its bite. If it all sounds like the cacophony of the Internet, or a busy commercial street on rush hour, is creeping into offline media outlets, saysme.tv\u2019s chief executive, Lisa Eisenpresser, pleads guilty, only she prefers other words: democracy, marketplace of ideas. \u201cWe are trying to push free speech,\u201d she said, while acknowledging that the ads would still have to conform to the cable companies\u2019 restrictions on content. \u201cI\u2019ll put out the cacophony, and the cream will rise to the top.\u201d Since it is the beginning of the political season, the site, which declines to reveal the number of ads it has handled, has been playing up ads on the strengths and weaknesses of various candidates, and reaching out to the politically committed. But in some ways, the founders say, those groups don\u2019t use the strongest element of the inexpensive advertising: hyperlocality. Morgan Warstler, the company\u2019s chief marketing officer, said he expected that businesses and civic groups would benefit from speaking to neighbors, and only neighbors. A bar, working with a beer company sponsor, could promote a local band that is playing in the next few weeks, he suggested. Or, \u201cYour daughter is in the Girl Scouts and there are not a lot of kids in her group,\u201d he said. \u201cIt should be easy to go to the Girl Scouts Web site and create an ad and put out the message and get other parents to call.\u201d The company, which is based in Los Angeles and has about 20 employees, announced in April that it had received an undisclosed amount of financing led by Intel Capital. Ms. Eisenpresser and members of her team come from other well-known stalls in the marketplace of ideas, including infomercials and direct mail. In essence, Mr. Warstler said, the company was acting as \u201ca very large advertiser\u201d that sells the time it buys to individuals \u2014 a vending machine for TV ads, to use the company\u2019s favorite analogy. The business plan includes paying creators of popular ads each time they are shown and rewarding large issue-oriented sites that drive business to the site. Saysme.tv says it is still working out arrangements with the cable-TV providers to add to the 20 or so cities available on the site. Depending on the cable provider, there can be a minimum of $100 on ad purchases. \u201cWe knew technically we could put it together,\u201d Mr. Warstler said, \u201cbut it took a year\u2019s worth of hand-holding. We had to convince the cable companies that we could handle all the details.\u201d The details he mentioned include complying with Federal Communications Commission rules on tracking who paid for an ad, as well as the more detailed reporting required by the Federal Election Commission for political advertising. So far, saysme.tv ads appear in Comcast and Time Warner markets. Among the first to step into saysme.tv\u2019s world of self-made, small-scale advertising is a coalition of left-wing bloggers who expect to make a $5,000 purchase in the next week or so in communities in states considered up for grabs in the presidential election, like Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. The coalition\u2019s first ad was created by an admitted amateur, Mike Stark, the activist director of BlogPac who has made a reputation by confronting right-wing radio talk show hosts and Republican politicians, and taping those confrontations. It accuses the news media of not paying sufficient attention to John McCain\u2019s divorce decades ago and revels in as many of the particulars of that divorce as 25 seconds will allow. \u201cBloggers will comprehend what saysme can do,\u201d Mr. Stark said. \u201cThis ad, I made at home, with no experience at all. Others will come together to make an ad and people can pay for that ad.\u201d Mr. Stark is also unabashed in trying to use saysme to manipulate cable news outlets by getting \u201cfree advertising\u201d from reports on the coalition\u2019s advertisement \u2014 a common tactic among political campaigns whose most controversial ads often barely appear as paid advertising. \u201cWe are still dependent on the larger media to amplify our message \u2014 to bring what we are trying to say to the rest of the world that doesn\u2019t read our blogs,\u201d he said. Ms. Eisenpresser has sought out bloggers and the politically outspoken \u2014 while stressing that saysme.tv is a neutral platform open to all parts of the spectrum \u2014 as perfect guinea pigs for the business. They represent, she said, the starting point for a \u201cperfect loop.\u201d An ad is conceived by an Internet group and played on TV. It is seen on TV and discussed online, which leads to more TV ads. Politics, however, is a relatively small part of the TV advertising market. \u201cI think it is going to be $3 billion or $4 billion,\u201d Mr. Warstler said. \u201cMore money gets spent on gum.\u201d Charitable giving, he said, was more than $300 billion last year, and it is that area \u2014 as well as religion and advocacy on issues like animal rights and global warming \u2014 that could prove more lucrative and dependable. In the short term, saysme.tv has sought out provocative material to add to its library. It encouraged the makers of the popular online satirical ad \u201cI\u2019m Voting Republican\u201d to cut it into 25-second segments and place them on saysme.tv. Charlie Steak, the director of the video, says his production company, SyntheticHuman Pictures, negotiated a separate royalty agreement with saysme.tv \u201cbecause they came to us.\u201d But he adds: \u201cWe wrote it without any intent of making money. We wanted to make a short film that would become a viral video that would cause as many people to think about whether their vote could make America a better place for other people.\u201d Nonetheless, he said he was pleased with the 25-second versions and happy to be reaching \u201cpeople who will not have found it on the Internet, who may see it on TV.\u201d Saysme.tv also produces its own videos \u2014 most recently, a pro-Barack Obama ad using a professional skateboarder \u2014 that it hopes will break out on the Internet. \u201cWe want to be the place for people to air their grievances, promote their products or beliefs,\u201d Ms. Eisenpresser said. \u201cCome see my kid\u2019s school play, buy my car, protect a women\u2019s right to choose.\u201d Of course, there is still the freedom to cover your ears.", "keyword": "Advertising and Marketing;Online Advertising;Television;Computers and the Internet;Politics and Government;Blogs and Blogging (Internet);Cable Television;Cable News Network;saysme.tv"}
{"id": "ny0274744", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2016/02/27", "title": "Mosquito Screens to Be Used at Rio Games to Curb Zika Virus", "abstract": "Even as athletes grow increasingly concerned about the outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil, the organizing committee for the August Olympics in Rio de Janeiro said it would charge national delegations to have mosquito screens on athletes\u2019 rooms. The screens, one measure Brazilians are using to help ward off the mosquito that is the primary transmitter of Zika, will be installed in communal areas \u201cwhere required,\u201d but affixed to lodging only if national delegations decide to pay for it, said Philip Wilkinson, a spokesman for the Rio 2016 organizing committee.", "keyword": "Zika Virus;2016 Summer Olympics;Mosquito;Rio de Janeiro"}
{"id": "ny0022599", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2013/09/01", "title": "From Example to Excess in Silicon Valley", "abstract": "I CAN remember a time when technology, and the people behind it, routinely filled me with a sense of wonderment \u2014 like the first time I logged into a chat room and, later, the first time I swiped open an iPhone. Another memorable moment for me happened roughly six years ago, when I tried Goog-411, an experimental phone service from Google. At a time when smartphones were far from ubiquitous, the service allowed people to call a toll-free number and obtain business listings by using voice commands. It was partly an effort to improve Google\u2019s own internal software, but it left me marveling at its combination of technological brilliance and public service \u2014 completely in keeping with the company\u2019s motto of \u201cDon\u2019t be evil.\u201d Since then, such technological good will has faded into a kind of disillusionment, and not just for me, it seems. It feels as if the promise of the tech world \u2014 its utopian ideals and democratic aspirations \u2014 has dissolved into much more selfish pursuits of power and wealth. And the promising developments or companies that do emerge are often dimmed by their flashier peers, who tend to get a majority of the attention. Just look at Google\u2019s impressive and much-hyped new product, Google Glass. While undoubtedly representing a technological leap, it has been criticized as a plaything for the geeky elite. And now the September issue of Vogue , in a 12-page spread, is positioning the product as a high-end style accessory. At the same time, Google\u2019s business practices are under intense scrutiny, with critics saying the company unfairly blocks rival search engines and advertisers. Then there is Facebook. Over the last few years, the company has been accused of valuing profits over privacy and the public good. So last month, when its chief, Mark Zuckerberg, announced an effort called Internet.org to expand Web access in the developing world, some contended that the plan was motivated mainly by self-interest. Also last month, it was reported that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook\u2019s chief operating officer, sold 2.37 million shares of company stock for $91 million. Eyes rolled when, shortly thereafter, a listing appeared online calling for an intern to work unpaid at her nonprofit foundation. (The organization has since said it will pay its interns .) If there was a single event this summer that symbolized the perceived excess of Silicon Valley, it was the wedding of Sean Parker , the co-founder of Napster. He threw a multimillion-dollar \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d-themed wedding in the redwoods of Big Sur, complete with a nine-foot-high cake and custom-made costumes for the attendees. Evgeny Morozov, author of \u201c To Save Everything, Click Here : The Folly of Technological Solutionism,\u201d said that events like Mr. Parker\u2019s wedding reflect \u201cthe kind of attitude that people find repelling.\u201d Although it\u2019s easy to find similar behavior in other sectors, like finance and real estate, its appearance within tech companies can be particularly galling, given the industry\u2019s humanitarian rhetoric, he said. \u201cWall Street people don\u2019t claim to be saving the world,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are very cynical about what they do: make money and take nice weekends in the Hamptons.\u201d He also noted that many residents of the Bay Area, where much of the tech world is based, are struggling to find jobs and affordable housing as an influx of highly paid tech workers has pushed housing prices skyward. In May, protesters in San Francisco \u2014 upset about rent increases \u2014 beat a pi\u00f1ata shaped like one of the Google shuttle buses that takes workers to the company\u2019s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Veterans of the technology world who have seen this pattern before \u2014 in the 1990s bubble that preceded the 2000-01 bust \u2014 say the outcry over the industry\u2019s excess seems particularly loud this time around. Maybe that\u2019s at least partly because the tech elite has a much larger platform for bragging, preening and complaining. Popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr did not exist in the \u201990s, after all. Now any ill-advised photographs or posts on those sites are fair game for critics, who can fan the flames of outrage with posts of their own. Peter Shih, co-founder of a payment site called Celery, for example, recently posted a satirical tirade against San Francisco on a blogging site that included complaints about the city\u2019s homeless population. A storm of protest around the Web ensued; Mr. Shih apologized and the post was removed. Mr. Morozov thinks that there may be a hint of a silver lining in recent expressions of displeasure over tech executives\u2019 behavior. Until now, he said, the debate about the role of the modern tech industry has largely been limited to topics like online privacy. \u201cThe virtuality of the debate has made it difficult for us to grapple with the consequences of the proliferation of the world outside of this bubble,\u201d he said. \u201cNow that the effects of the tech world invade the physical environment, we have to figure out the necessary philosophical and intellectual framework to deal with it.\u201d", "keyword": "Silicon Valley;HNWI,Wealth,Billionaires,1 Percent;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Social Media;Facebook;Google"}
{"id": "ny0289250", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/01/05", "title": "Cuomo Misses Point, Homeless on Streets Say", "abstract": "Bundled in blankets and enduring the frigid temperatures that arrived in New York City this week, homeless people said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was missing the point with his executive order directing authorities to pull them off the streets when temperatures fall to 32 degrees or below. Homeless people need housing, \u201cnot someone telling them when to sleep and what to eat,\u201d Sheila Turner, who is in her 50s and has been homeless for 30 years, said on Monday in East Harlem. Ms. Turner and others who would be subject to Mr. Cuomo\u2019s executive order called on the governor and Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, to create more units of permanent, affordable housing. Ms. Turner said she feared the governor\u2019s directive would encourage harassment. The order instructs local governments across the state to remove people, with force if necessary, when the temperature drops to 32 degrees or below and says \u201cinvoluntary placement\u201d is an option. The governor\u2019s chief counsel later said people who are deemed to be mentally ill and a danger to themselves or others could be removed, but such action would not be taken against other homeless people \u2014 a distinction the de Blasio administration said it is already making. Image Charles Anthony Hill Credit Dana Ullman for The New York Times But Mr. Cuomo\u2019s order angered the street homeless community. Charles Anthony Hill, 55, who was pushing his handcart at the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, talked about his time as a foster child, addiction and his stints in every shelter for men in the city. He said he has been homeless since he was 6 years old and was currently staying in a subway station in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he said transit workers have given him food and warnings about approaching police officers. \u201cRight now, I\u2019m not ready to go into a place,\u201d he said. The city estimates that about 3,000 homeless people live on the streets, a small but highly visible share of the city\u2019s homeless population, which totals about 57,000. The accuracy of the counts, particularly of the street homeless population, has been challenged, but the visibility of such people has drawn attention to the near-record levels of homelessness in the city. Most of the homeless people interviewed said they preferred the streets to shelters because of poor conditions and theft. Teri LaRocca, 53, who has multiple sclerosis and spinal arthritis, uses a wheelchair and said there was little accessibility for disabled people in the city\u2019s shelters for women. Ms. LaRocca said she would consider staying in a more welcoming shelter. \u201cThe elevators don\u2019t work,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing that makes it easier.\u201d Ms. Turner, a member of Picture the Homeless , which advocates civil rights for homeless people, said she has watched the city become more unaffordable under past mayors. \u201cThis mayor and this governor aren\u2019t helping,\u201d she said. \u201cYou want to take people, snatch them up, put them somewhere they don\u2019t want to be, like an animal?\u201d", "keyword": "Homelessness;NYC;Andrew Cuomo;Weather"}
{"id": "ny0202816", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2009/08/16", "title": "Left-Handed and Left Out at Catcher in the Majors", "abstract": "The letters keep coming. Every few weeks, Benny Distefano will open his mail and find a letter from a Little Leaguer, or a parent of one, asking for advice. He is the only person they know who understands. Twenty years ago this Tuesday, Distefano, then a hanging-on major leaguer, served as a left-handed catcher in a major league baseball game. No one has done so since. Like Ladies Night and pitchers named Wilbur, left-handed catchers are effectively extinct \u2014 for reasons on which there is bizarrely little consensus. \u201cI have no idea,\u201d said Joe Mauer , the Minnesota Twins\u2019 All-Star catcher (right-handed, naturally). \u201cIs it because there are more right-handed hitters?\u201d offered Atlanta Braves catcher Brian McCann . \u201cThere\u2019s been nobody come into a game for 20 years? Really?\u201d said a nonplussed Joe Torre, an All-Star catcher throughout the 1960s. \u201cWell, first off, left-handed pitchers don\u2019t throw the ball straight.\u201d Major league teams have been panting for more catchers since shinguards, begging for mothers to allow their sons to play there, and yet they cut off an entire stream of talent that happens to throw left-handed. In the last 100 years, Dale Long caught two innings for the Chicago Cubs in 1958, Mike Squires the same for the 1980 White Sox. And since Aug. 18, 1989, when Distefano caught for the last time, baseball has embraced retro uniforms and even revenue sharing \u2014 but not the likes of Distefano. The minor leagues do not have one left-handed catcher right now. \u201cIt\u2019s a slow-changing game,\u201d said Distefano, now the hitting coach of the West Michigan Whitecaps , a Detroit Tigers Class A affiliate. \u201cIt takes a creative manager that\u2019s willing to go with something that might be a little outside the box.\u201d Distefano had that in late 1988, when he asked his Pittsburgh Pirates manager, Jim Leyland, if he could become the team\u2019s emergency catcher. Distefano had adored catching as a boy on Brooklyn ball fields but was moved to the outfield. Leyland recalled how the world did not spin off its axis when his old boss Tony La Russa used Squires that way, so he allowed Distefano to attend instructional league that fall to relearn the position. The next spring, when an experiment with 24-man rosters cost teams flexibility, Distefano stuck as a backup outfielder, first baseman and, yes, catcher. He was brought into three games for six innings. The only runner to attempt to steal on him was the Braves\u2019 Oddibe McDowell on Aug. 18. \u201cCurveball in the dirt,\u201d Distefano said. \u201cFairly close. I had as good a chance of getting him as anybody else.\u201d No lefty has strapped on the gear since. Few people know why. Youth leagues see the occasional left-handed catcher \u2014 gloves for them are readily available in local sporting-goods stores \u2014 but never in pro ball. Distefano understands better than anyone which theories make sense and which do not . None is more specious than the Right-Handed Hitter Conjecture, which holds that on steal attempts left-handers have to throw around righties, who outnumber hitters from the other side. But right-handed catchers do not seem to struggle throwing past lefties; besides, while right-handed hitters made 62 percent of major league plate appearances 50 years ago, it is now almost even, 56 percent to 44. Torre\u2019s Wayward Southpaw Thesis was immediately dismissed by his fellow catcher turned manager Don Wakamatsu of the Seattle Mariners. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of left-handed pitchers who don\u2019t reach the major leagues because their ball is too straight,\u201d Wakamatsu said. To the extent that a left-hander\u2019s throw to second would generally tail away from the runner rather than into him, Distefano countered, \u201cYou can still fade it back into the base with more experience.\u201d Snap pickoff throws to first are less important than throws to third \u2014 as Torre put it, \u201cThe runners only go in one direction\u201d \u2014 and on the latter, right-handed hitters would impede a left-handed-throwing catcher. But Distefano brushed that back, too. \u201cWhen I had to throw to third, I cheated a little bit \u2014 I sat a couple of inches farther back and my left foot was a little open,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t have to shuffle my feet because I had good arm strength. And when guys steal third, 9 of 10 times it\u2019s on the pitcher anyway.\u201d Distefano offered two explanations. Bunts toward third base, he said, cause problems for left-handed catchers. In scampering to grab the ball, transferring it to their left hand and throwing to either first or second base, their bodies get closed and clumsy. Throws for right-handers are far more open and natural. But the primary problem Distefano encountered was with plays at home. Because his glove was on his right hand, every accurate throw to the runner\u2019s side of the plate would have to be reached for backhanded, impeding a quick tag. And on outfielder throws up the first-base line, reaching out with his right hand would leave his throwing shoulder wide open to the runner. \u201cIf there\u2019s going to be a bang-bang play, the left-handed catcher\u2019s going to get hurt,\u201d he said. Distefano did manage to parlay his newfound versatility into a better-paying job in Japan in 1990. He attended the Houston Astros\u2019 spring camp in 1992 \u2014 with the pitchers and catchers \u2014 and made the team in part because he could serve as emergency catcher. He never got into a game behind the plate, but they needed an extra body with Craig Biggio moving to second base. Come to think of it, speaking of second base, why don\u2019t any lefties get to play there, either? And not at shortstop, nor at third? \u201cI guess all the lefties end up as pitchers,\u201d Astros shortstop Miguel Tejada said. Apparently so. About 15 years ago, a left-handed teenager for the Lumps Gas Station summer-league team in Clifton, Tex., played one game at short before, he recalled, \u201cThey said left-handers aren\u2019t supposed to play there\u201d and was moved. That teenager was Zach Duke , now an All-Star left-handed pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Not one left-handed thrower has played an inning at shortstop in the majors in 100 years. As for second base, there have been only three since World War II: George Crowe for the 1958 Cubs (for two outs), Sam McDowell for the 1970 Cleveland Indians (for two right-handed batters before returning to the mound) and Don Mattingly (by an incensed Billy Martin for the last out of the infamous 1983 pine tar game). \u201cSecond basemen can\u2019t do it left-handed \u2014 you can\u2019t turn a double play like that, because you\u2019d accept the ball and have to turn all the way around,\u201d said Texas Rangers third baseman Michael Young, who before this season played exclusively in the middle infield. \u201cShortstops, you\u2019d still have trouble throwing the ball on a D.P. I\u2019ve never seen it. And I don\u2019t expect to, either.\u201d Which brings us to third base and the versatile Squires, who was one of the aforementioned southpaw catchers. A few lefties have briefly filled in at third (including Mattingly in 1986) but Squires played there in 13 games for the 1984 White Sox. Left-handed third basemen have to backhand all plays in the shortstop hole to their left, which restricts their range \u2014 unless their coordination is so spectacular that they would be playing shortstop in the first place. Squires, now a scout for the Reds, said that left-handed third basemen get eaten up on bunts, because flinging the ball quickly to their left while charging is virtually impossible. But left-handed catchers? Squires doesn\u2019t see why not. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about old-timers who don\u2019t want to change,\u201d he said. \u201cI always wanted to be a catcher growing up. But I was not allowed to.\u201d Distefano became a catcher solely to extend his career. Instead, he lengthened his legacy, not only among baseball trivia buffs but within the left-handed catching community, for whom he remains a hero. \u201cI didn\u2019t know the 20th anniversary of my last time out there was coming up,\u201d Distefano said. \u201cI definitely will celebrate now. It\u2019s nice. It\u2019s really rewarding to be remembered in a positive way.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Left-Handedness"}
{"id": "ny0188461", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/04/23", "title": "North Korea Claims Border Marker Was Moved", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 North Korea accused the South of tampering with a border marker on Wednesday and warned of a possible clash along the heavily fortified frontier. The warning comes as South Korea\u2019s relations with the North are at one of their lowest points in years. A day earlier, the two nations held their first official dialogue in more than a year. But the meeting ended in 22 minutes, during which North Korea told the South that if it wanted to continue to run factories in a joint industrial complex in North Korea, it should pay more for the North Korean labor. On Wednesday, North Korea accused the South Korean military of moving one of the 1,292 borderline markers several dozen yards to the north. In the latest bombastic blast, it called the move a \u201cserious military provocation\u201d and said it would take an unspecified \u201cmeasure for self-defense and the South Korean warmongers will be held entirely accountable for all the ensuing consequences\u201d unless the marker was restored. The South Korean military dismissed the North Korean claim and called it part of a tactic to raise tensions. In 1999 and 2002, North Korea used border disputes to launch naval skirmishes with the South. Over the weekend, North Korea warned that South Korea \u201cshould not forget that Seoul is only 50 kilometers,\u201d or about 31 miles, from the border and within the range of what Gen. Walter Sharp, the commander of American forces in South Korea, called on Wednesday \u201cthe world\u2019s largest artillery force.\u201d North Korea has about 8,500 artillery pieces and 5,100 rockets aimed at South Korea, many of them deployed just north of Seoul, according to the Defense Ministry in Seoul. Since President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea took office last year with a pledge not to provide free aid until the North cooperated on its nuclear disarmament, the North has steadily raised tensions along the border. It tried to show the South that Mr. Lee\u2019s tough line on the North had a cost \u2014 a tactic the North demonstrated again during the inter-Korean talks on Tuesday at Kaesong, a North Korean border town that is the site of the joint industrial park. During the meeting, the North spurned a South Korean demand for the release of a South Korean worker who has been held for almost a month in Kaesong on charges of denouncing the North Korean government. Instead, the North called for talks to raise the wages of 39,000 North Koreans working for the South Korean factories there. They are now paid about $70 a month. Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said Wednesday that his government would \u201ccarefully study\u201d the North Korean demand. Rising tensions present a test for Mr. Lee. He wants to do something his predecessors had refrained from out of fear of provoking the North: join an American-led operation to crack down on the North\u2019s suspected illicit arms trade. Mr. Lee said he would join the so-called Proliferation Security Initiative when the United Nations asked for tightened sanctions on North Korea after its recent rocket launching. But he has delayed an announcement as North Korea warned that it would consider such a move a \u201cdeclaration of war.\u201d Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia is to arrive in Pyongyang, the North\u2019s capital, on Thursday. He was expected to discuss the North\u2019s threat to boycott nuclear disarmament talks and restart a plant that made weapons-grade plutonium.", "keyword": "North Korea;South Korea;International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0053887", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2014/07/26", "title": "Before Signing, Big Stars Seek a Prize Beyond Fortune and Glory", "abstract": "After weeks of excitement, rumor and surprise, the N.B.A. free-agency frenzy has cooled. The two-week window around the beginning of July when most transactions occur is a special time for the players, a majority of whom did not have a say in which team drafted them or where they could be traded. Free agency is when players have almost complete control over where they will play and live, and for what price. At the zenith of the period, ESPN and local sports talk shows offer no shortage of people ready to tell athletes what they should do. The opinions focus on where a player can earn the most money or have the best chance at a title. That is the binary: wages or wins. If a player is lucky, he earns well and wins, and does not have to make a trade-off. But the quandary is that often the best teams do not have much to spend, while the worst have deep coffers and shallow talent. This off-season complicated that framework, as the game\u2019s most powerful stars chose their teams based on more nuanced factors. Start with the biggest move: LeBron James\u2019s decision, surprising to many, to take his talents back to Northeast Ohio, as James, an Akron native, characterized his return to his near-hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. James acknowledged that after four straight trips to the N.B.A. finals on rosters laden with veterans, he would need to be patient with his inexperienced new teammates. Any team that includes James is a threat to make a championship run, but the Cavaliers have serious ground to make up, having won just 33 games last year. Had James remained in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, the Heat would have been all but guaranteed a trip to the finals. In a statement published by Sports Illustrated, James cited a number of reasons for returning to the Cavaliers. Conspicuously absent were financial concerns, or a lust for as many championships as possible. His stated goal is to capture just one title, and generally to help revitalize Northeast Ohio: the greatest basketball player in the world professing a calling beyond the game. Nearly as shocking as James\u2019s leaving was Bosh\u2019s decision to remain in Miami. Bosh took the maximum salary available to stay in Miami, but the Houston Rockets, closer to Bosh\u2019s hometown, Dallas, were in hot pursuit and offering only slightly less on an annual basis. Had Bosh gone home as James did, he could have teamed with Dwight Howard and James Harden to anchor the best starting lineup in basketball. But Bosh turned down the opportunity because, simply, he loves the life he has in Miami. As Bosh told ESPN\u2019s Tom Haberstroh: \u201cMy heart was in Miami. I wanted to be there and keep my family there and build relationships and really keep building on something special.\u201d Bosh is unlikely to win a title with the Heat anytime soon if Wade is his top teammate. The future would undeniably have been brighter in Houston. But like just about anyone else lucky enough to have a choice about where he works, Bosh made his decision based on factors beyond how much money he could earn and whether he could be at the pinnacle of his industry. He did what he thought would make him and his family happy. For James, that meant going home. For Bosh, it meant staying. A third major free agent in the 2014 class also spurned the Rockets to stay put. Carmelo Anthony received overtures from two teams that could be in the title hunt next season, but he decided to remain in New York despite knowing that the Knicks would be hard-pressed to pair him with a second star until next year\u2019s free agents become available. Instead of the feisty Chicago Bulls, who signed Pau Gasol, or the Rockets, Anthony chose to stick it out with the first-time coach Derek Fisher and the rest of the Knicks\u2019 misshapen roster. Under the win-or-wage equation, the reason would have to be money. Maybe that is all there was to it, and who could blame someone for seeking the maximum compensation that the market would bear? Ultimately, what motivated Anthony to stay in New York might have been as idiosyncratic as the reasons millions of other people have for living here.", "keyword": "Basketball;Free agent;Carmelo Anthony;LeBron James;Chris Bosh;Wages and salaries;NBA"}
{"id": "ny0197210", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2009/10/23", "title": "Their Numbers Are Dropping: the Cellphone Refuseniks", "abstract": "Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house and we hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got cellphones. Well, not everyone. For a hardy few that choose to ignore cellphones, life is a pocketful of quarters, missed connections and a smug satisfaction of marching to a different ring tone. For Linda Mboya, 32, who lives in Brooklyn and works on arts and education programs at a nonprofit group, it also involves never letting sleeping dogs lie. A friend who lives on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn has a perpetually broken apartment buzzer. So Ms. Mboya makes noise to disturb the dogs who live on the first floor, who then bark and announce her arrival to her friend. \u201cThis system works pretty well,\u201d Ms. Mboya said, though the dogs\u2019 owners might disagree. For many people, cellphones have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver e-mail messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio. After 20 years, 85 percent of adult Americans have cellphones, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project . According to the Federal Communications Commission , cellphones caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers although, by some accounts, broadband Internet service was adopted faster. Those who still do not have them, according to Pew, tend to be older or less educated Americans or those unable to afford phones. \u201cThese are people who have a bunch of other struggles in their lives and the expense of maintaining technology and mastering it is also pretty significant for them,\u201d said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project. But there is also a smaller subset of adults who resist cellphones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way that ring tones, tiny keyboards and screens disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savor their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them. \u201cIt\u2019s a luxury not to be reached when I\u2019m out and about,\u201d said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles . Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone \u2014 or even a landline \u2014 at home. When his mother recently went to the hospital, the family\u2019s communication plan went into action: his mother called his sister, who sent him an instant message on his computer, to which he replied with a call using Skype over the Web. When he travels for work, he prepares his boss with a list of ways to reach him and colleagues to call if he is unreachable, a modern-day version of Tony Roberts \u2019s neurotic character giving minute-by-minute updates of where he would be reachable in the pre-BlackBerry era of Woody Allen \u2019s \u201cPlay It Again, Sam.\u201d Far from being technology-resistant, Mr. Han makes a living blogging about interior design and tech gadgets. He initially got rid of his cellphone to save money, but \u201cI feel I benefit by living in the moment and not having a ring or a buzz or an inclination to always look at the screen.\u201d These cellphone \u201crefuseniks\u201d probably account for less than 5 percent of those who do not have cellphones, said John Horrigan, consumer research director at the National Broadband Task Force. Though many cellphone owners express growing displeasure about cellphones\u2019 intrusions into their lives, according to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist them completely. \u201cAmbivalent networkers bristle at all their gadget-facilitated connectivity, but don\u2019t give it up,\u201d Mr. Horrigan said. \u201cThe cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability.\u201d The painstaking plans that people without cellphones must make to navigate the world show just how dependent the rest of us have become on our phones. Ms. Mboya always picks a time and a landmark to meet friends and carries quarters in case she has to use a payphone. Still, her friends are not used to planning their social lives in advance. A recent brunch date required several three-way planning phone calls among Ms. Mboya and two friends. \u201cI can only do that periodically,\u201d said Sheila Shirazi, one of the friends. \u201cI don\u2019t have the time and energy to coordinate to the extent it takes with somebody who isn\u2019t mobile. It\u2019s just not something I\u2019m used to.\u201d And even the best-laid plans falter. Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is \u201cscary\u201d and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters. While at college in rural Vermont , Ms. Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father for his birthday. Halfway there, her car\u2019s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest gas station and called her parents from the payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home. After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station parking lot for an hour waiting for them to call back. \u201cIt\u2019s situations like that when I would really love to have a phone,\u201d she said. That might happen sooner than she would like, because she will start looking for a new job this winter and stay on friends\u2019 couches for a few weeks, without her own landline. \u201cIt\u2019s really getting impossible not to have one.\u201d", "keyword": "Wireless;Mobile phone"}
{"id": "ny0195271", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/11/14", "title": "Earnings Fall, but J.C. Penney Raises Sales Outlook", "abstract": "J. C. Penney Company, the department store retailer, reported a 78 percent drop in its third-quarter earnings on Friday, in part because of an expense for its pension plan. The company upgraded its profit and sales outlook, however, because it is selling more goods at regular prices and doing less clearance discounting, though sales remain weak. The increases got investors\u2019 attention, driving the stock up $1.51, or 5.1 percent. The retailer, which is based in Plano, Tex., said Friday that it earned $27 million, or 11 cents a share, for the period ended Oct. 31. That compared with $124 million, or 56 cents a share, a year ago. The third-quarter results included a charge of $73 million, or 19 cents a share, to write down the value of the company\u2019s pension plan assets. Excluding that impact, adjusted income from continuing operations was $72 million, or 30 cents a share. That was down from $103 million, or 46 cents a share, in the quarter a year ago, excluding a pension plan benefit. Revenue was down 3.2 percent to $4.18 billion, from $4.32 billion a year ago. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected 12 cents a share on revenue of $4.18 billion. Sales at stores opened at least a year, a crucial indicator, fell 4.6 percent in the quarter. Like other retailers, Penney has been cutting inventory in response to tepid spending. It also has been expanding its assortment of exclusive brands. In other earnings on Friday, the preppy clothing seller Abercrombie & Fitch said that it would add new items at lower prices and continue expanding internationally \u2014 where sales are stronger than the United States \u2014 to combat declining profit. The company reported Friday that its third-quarter profit fell 39 percent, but that was less than expected. Revenue fell 15 percent. Abercrombie & Fitch\u2019s sales have slumped, and it has lost market share to lower-priced competitors like Aeropostale as it kept prices high and invested abroad during the recession. In recent quarters it has bowed to the recession and begun marking down items, but the chief executive, Michael S. Jeffries, said Friday that the company planned to add lower-priced inventory in the first quarter, rather than relying on markdowns that he said might hurt its image. Profit in the quarter fell to $38.8 million, or 44 cents a share, or 30 cents a share excluding one-time items. That beat the average expectation of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters for adjusted earnings of 20 cents a share. Revenue fell to $765.4 million, squeaking past analyst expectations of $764.5 million. Expenses fell 16 percent. Sales in stores open at least a year, a crucial measure of a retailer\u2019s health, dropped 22 percent.", "keyword": "Penney J C Co;Shopping and Retail;Sales;Company Reports"}
{"id": "ny0237680", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/06/09", "title": "Trial Begins in Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale Trading Scandal", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 It took J\u00e9r\u00f4me Kerviel , the celebrity rogue trader who stands accused of losing billions of euros at the French bank Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale , 10 minutes to make it through the scrum of microphones and journalists outside a courtroom Tuesday. The media onslaught on the first day of the opening hearing of his long-awaited trial \u2014 a three-week marathon of cross-examinations and expert hearings \u2014 set the stage for a national event with running commentary on topics as diverse as the body language of the lawyers (celebrities in their own right) to the color of the stripes in Mr. Kerviel\u2019s tie (pink). Mr. Kerviel, 33, is charged with falsifying documents, breach of trust and unauthorized use of computers. He faces up to five years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros (nearly $450,000) for secretly betting more than the entire value of his bank in several risky trades. The unwinding of an estimated 50 billion euros of open trade positions in late January 2008 cost Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale 4.9 billion euros. The bank says it wants to recoup that sum in damages, a symbolic request as Mr. Kerviel has no hope of repaying it. Television vans lined the street outside the stately Palace of Justice, near the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, on Tuesday afternoon. Ninety-one media outlets are accredited to follow the trial. Judge Dominique Pauthe spent more than 90 minutes summarizing the case and defining trading terms like \u201cturbo warrants\u201d and \u201cforwards\u201d \u2014 modern Anglicisms that sounded oddly out of place in this historic French setting. A pale Mr. Kerviel answered a string of questions about his personal and professional history. He told the bench that he was single and now worked as a computer consultant, earning 2,300 euros a month. When asked if he was an ordinary man, Mr. Kerviel answered, \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d He said he \u201chid nothing\u201d from colleagues at Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, in keeping with his primary line of defense that the bank turned a blind eye to his work as long as they made money. Olivier Metzner, Mr. Kerviel\u2019s lead lawyer, described his client as a \u201cpawn \u2014 a pawn that they used and made money with and then they didn\u2019t need him anymore, they dumped him.\u201d Claire Dumas, who was speaking on behalf of the bank Tuesday, described Mr. Kerviel as \u201cextremely uncooperative\u201d after his fraudulent trades were discovered. Mr. Kerviel spent five weeks in pretrial detention and recently published a memoir, depicting himself as a regular guy from a modest background.", "keyword": "Societe Generale;Kerviel Jerome;Suits and Litigation;Stocks and Bonds;Banks and Banking;Subprime Mortgage Crisis"}
{"id": "ny0244221", "categories": ["sports", "golf"], "date": "2011/03/25", "title": "Need a Virtual Swing Coach? Try Tiger Woods", "abstract": "Tiger Woods , who has been battling problems with his swing, unveiled a mobile application Wednesday called \u201cTiger Woods: My Swing\u201d for iPhone and iPod users. The app gives hacks and crackerjacks alike a chance to evaluate their golf games by offering them instruction and an opportunity to compare their swings to Woods\u2019s through video analysis. \u201cI have always enjoyed helping people learn how to play golf,\u201d Woods said Wednesday in a telephone interview. \u201cEverything about this app is based on how I practice. To be able to do something like this, which wasn\u2019t possible 10 or 15 years ago, is a win-win for everyone.\u201d The face that once launched a thousand sponsorships, Woods has been struggling to recapture his game, his earning power and his image since revelations about his extramarital affairs surfaced late in 2009. Perhaps those are some of the reasons Woods, who is now divorced, has embarked on this new venture, which, he said, \u201cwill give me a closer connection to golf fans.\u201d \u201cTiger Woods: My Swing\u201d costs a rather steep $9.99 and is available in 12 languages. Among the application\u2019s features is the ability to capture one\u2019s swing online and evaluate it over time in a side-by-side comparison to Woods\u2019s swing. In the role of virtual coach, Woods also offers analysis, updates, how-to demonstrations and personal tips. Users can also exchange feedback on the Web site Golfshot.com . \u201cI\u2019m excited that through this app I can take this technology on the road with me and that golfers around the world can now do the same to improve their game,\u201d Woods said. Woods said all proceeds from the mobile application would benefit the Tiger Woods Foundation . \u201cFrom the funds raised we can continue to give many more young people a shot at college,\u201d he said. Woods has gone through three major swing changes since becoming a professional in 1996. His early swing, a sound, athletic and upright stroke with a lot of speed, evolved into a more refined, compact swing. Woods\u2019s new swing, the one used in the app, and which he has been working on with the swing coach Sean Foley, emphasizes more ball coverage. \u201cI\u2019ve rebuilt my swing a number of times over the years and use this technology to gauge my development and help with my swing transitions,\u201d Woods said. \u201cI have swings on there using every club and from two different angles, down the line and at 90 degrees. I explain my swings with each club, and anyone watching can compare and contrast my swings with theirs. A lot of times what you\u2019re feeling on a golf swing and what you\u2019re actually doing is not the same thing, so I think this benefits everyone.\u201d Including Tiger Woods? \u201cOh, yes,\u201d Woods said. \u201cI\u2019ll use it on an everyday basis as a way of keeping an eye on my swing.\u201d LEVIN LEADS AT BAY HILL Spencer Levin is atop the leader board after the opening round for the third time this year, so that\u2019s nothing new. It was his score Thursday afternoon at Bay Hill that surprised him and everyone else. In warm, blustery conditions on a course in Orlando, Fla., that allowed only three rounds in the 60s and the most rounds in the 80s in nearly two decades, Levin had a six-under 66 and a three-shot lead over Rickie Fowler and Hunter Mahan in the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Tiger Woods and his power group of Dustin Johnson and Gary Woodland provided the entertainment everyone expected, although not this variety. Woodland hit a tee shot onto another golf course, Johnson wound up 80 yards over a green and onto the next tee, and Woods angrily tossed his wedge. Their scores weren\u2019t impressive. Woods missed a 10-foot par putt on the last hole for a 73, his highest opening round since 1999 at Bay Hill, where he is a six-time winner. Johnson and Woodland, coming off a win last week at Innisbrook, each shot 77. Levin built the largest 18-hole lead of the year on the PGA Tour, but even that doesn\u2019t illustrate how well he played. His 66 was nearly nine shots better than the average score at Bay Hill. Fowler and Mahan played in the morning, as did Phil Mickelson, who opened with a 70. The tough conditions showed themselves more at the bottom of the leader board. The United States Open champion Graeme McDowell had an 80, as did the Bob Hope winner Jhonattan Vegas and Brandt Snedeker. Ricky Barnes shot an 82. (AP)", "keyword": "Golf;Mobile Applications;Woods Tiger;iPhone;iPod"}
{"id": "ny0014766", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/10/03", "title": "A Yellow Light for the Jets, but No Color-Coded System", "abstract": "FLORHAM PARK, N.J. \u2014 At his 2 p.m. news conference Wednesday, Jets Coach Rex Ryan, perhaps thinking aloud, floated the idea of asking the rookie quarterback Geno Smith to wear a color-coded wristband Monday night against Atlanta. It would be a teaching aide to ease Smith\u2019s decision-making burden, with plays coded as red (conservative), yellow (use caution) and green (aggressive). It is a Ryan original but not a first \u2014 he did the same thing with Mark Sanchez in 2009, his rookie season. But if the idea sounded overly simplistic, Ryan might have felt so, too. He rejected the idea several hours later, in his weekly appearance on ESPN Radio New York. Did Ryan see something from Smith in practice Wednesday, without wristwear, that demonstrated better awareness? That could be. Or his flip-flop might underscore the tight-wire act he has to tread to avoid trampling Smith\u2019s confidence. At his news conference, Ryan referred multiple times to the \u201cfine line\u201d between maintaining aggressiveness and stumbling toward carelessness. \u201cWe want to be aggressive, there\u2019s no question,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cBut you don\u2019t want to do something to the detriment of the football team.\u201d Ryan first introduced the color-coded wristband for Sanchez in late November 2009, after he had thrown 17 interceptions in his first 11 games. With the aide, Sanchez did not throw a pass that was intercepted in three of his final four games of the regular season. Smith, who is tied for the N.F.L. lead with 11 turnovers, said he had not discussed the wristband with Ryan but did not sound opposed to the idea. \u201cIf it helps the team, if it helps me get better, then I\u2019m all for it,\u201d Smith said. Thus far, Ryan has stuck by Smith, but his four-turnover performance in Sunday\u2019s 38-13 loss at Tennessee tested Ryan\u2019s patience. Giveaways by Sanchez and Smith have hampered the Jets the past two seasons. \u201cClearly we have some things that we have to fix,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cAnd protecting the football is the No. 1 thing, alongside penalties.\u201d In practice Wednesday, Smith participated in a circuit of drills with the running backs in which defenders tried to strip the ball. He described his performance against the Titans as frustrating but added that he understood there would be growing pains. \u201cAt this point in my career,\u201d Smith said, \u201cI\u2019ve got to look at everything, good or bad, as a learning experience.\u201d Adding to the concern, Smith may be without his top two receivers, Santonio Holmes and Stephen Hill, both of whom did not practice Wednesday. Holmes (hamstring) could miss several weeks, and the status of Hill, who sustained a concussion, is unclear. The Jets signed the veteran wideout David Nelson, who was cut by Cleveland in August, and he practiced for the first time Wednesday. He could be joining Jeremy Kerley, Clyde Gates and Ryan Spadola as the only active receivers for Monday\u2019s game. It is an all-too familiar reminder of the attrition the team went through last season because of injuries to their receiving corps. And Ryan desperately does not want a repeat of the turnover-plagued year that resulted. EXTRA POINTs Coach Rex Ryan said that the backup guard Brian Winters would receive more playing time with the first team this week, replacing Vlad Ducasse, who has struggled. \u201cWe\u2019ll see how that goes,\u201d Ryan said.", "keyword": "Football;Jets;Geno Smith;Rex Ryan"}
{"id": "ny0075341", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2015/04/22", "title": "Cavaliers Extend Lead on Scrappy Celtics", "abstract": "LeBron James scored 30 points, Kyrie Irving added 26, and the Cleveland Cavaliers finally shook off Boston in the fourth quarter, beating the visiting Celtics, 99-91, on Tuesday night to take a two-games-to-none lead in their opening-round playoff series. James scored 15 points in the fourth quarter, moving past the Hall of Famer Jerry West on the career playoff scoring list, and made sure the Cavs did not slip up at home. James and Irving combined for all of Cleveland\u2019s 24 points in the final period. \u201cI\u2019ve been in this moment before, and a lot of our guys haven\u2019t,\u201d James said. \u201cI thought it was important for me to put a stamp on this game.\u201d Timofey Mozgov added 16 points, and Tristan Thompson had 11 rebounds for Cleveland, which has had a tougher time than expected with a young Boston team. Isaiah Thomas scored 22 points for the Celtics, who scrapped and clawed until the final minutes. Boston\u2019s bench outscored Cleveland\u2019s by 51-7. Game 3 of the best-of-seven series is scheduled for Thursday night in Boston, where James\u2019s first stint with Cleveland ended with a playoff loss in 2010. Leading by a point at halftime, and having played as poorly as they had in weeks, the Cavaliers came out energized in the second half and used a 17-4 run to open a 14-point lead. The spurt was capped a lob pass from Irving to James, who dunked and swung on the rim. But the Cavs could not shake the Celtics, who pulled to 79-77 behind on a 3-point play by Thomas. However, James, as he has so often done in his brilliant career, made big shots down the stretch, none bigger than his driving layup with 1 minute 13 seconds left, giving the Cavs a 97-89 lead. WIZARDS 117, RAPTORS 106 John Wall had 26 points and 17 assists, Bradley Beal scored 28 points, and Washington won at Toronto to take a 2-0 lead in the first-round series. Marcin Gortat scored 16 points, Otto Porter had 15, and Paul Pierce added 10 for the Wizards, who host Game 3 on Friday night. Jonas Valanciunas had 15 points and 10 rebounds, and the Sixth Man Award winner Lou Williams scored 20 points for the Raptors, who have lost four straight playoff games over the past two seasons. Washington lost 15 of its final 19 regular-season road games but has won seven of eight away from home in the playoffs over the past two years. ROCKETS 111, MAVERICKS 99 Dwight Howard scored 28 points and James Harden added 24 to help host Houston coast to a 2-0 lead in the Western Conference playoff series. Howard and Josh Smith dominated early in the fourth quarter to help theRocketspull away. The Mavericks scored the first four points of the fourth quarter to take a three-point lead. But with Harden on the bench, Houston scored the next 11 points, powered by three alley-oop passes from Smith to Howard, to take a 92-84 lead with about 8 minutes left. Smith finished with 15 points, nine assists and eight rebounds. Monta Ellis had 24 points for Dallas, which hosts Game 3 on Friday night. Image Mike Budenholzer, right, with his assistants after learning of the coaching award. He led the Hawks to the best record in their history. Credit John Bazemore/Associated Press HAWKS COACH HONORED After leading the Atlanta Hawks to the top seed in the Eastern Conference coming off a tumultuous summer, Mike Budenholzer beat out Golden State\u2019s Steve Kerr for the N.B.A. coach of the year honors on Tuesday. Budenholzer, in his second year as coach, was honored after the Hawks went 60-22 during the regular season, the best mark in franchise history. They won their first division title since 1994, which was also the last time they held a No. 1 seed.", "keyword": "Basketball;LeBron James;Playoffs;Wizards;Raptors;Mike Budenholzer;Atlanta Hawks;Cavaliers;Celtics"}
{"id": "ny0037780", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2014/03/13", "title": "A Landmark Restored, From Mosaic Marble Floor to Grand Dome", "abstract": "As sumptuous as a jewel box suspended 110 feet over the mosaic marble floor, and as radiant as a peacock\u2019s plumage, the great dome of the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank headquarters at Broadway and Driggs Avenue once again inspires awe. And all around the landmark building, intricate \u201cWSB\u201d monograms \u2014 some original, some re-created \u2014 once again inspire astonishment. They are molded into every landing of the grand iron staircase, etched into all 20 oval windows around the drum of the dome, and cast into each ornamental brass doorknob and door hinge. None of this is, however, in the service of depositors. Not those of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, which opened the building in 1875, nor those of its corporate successor, HSBC, which sold the building in 2010 . Instead, like many of the grandest banking quarters in town, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank has been turned into an event space. It is now called Weylin B. Seymour\u2019s, after a fabricated 19th-century character whose initials could compose the bank\u2019s monogram . The $27 million project was begun by Juan Figueroa, developer of the New York Loft Hostel in Brooklyn, and is now directed by Carlos Perez San Martin, his cousin. Mr. Figueroa has sold his shares in the venture. Asked why investors would lavish so much money on an abjectly decrepit building \u2014 even one across Broadway from the celebrated Peter Luger Steak House \u2014 Mr. Perez San Martin said the event space was, in essence, the bridgehead for development on an abutting parcel that he and his partners also own. They are planning a slender but conspicuous hotel, 420 feet high, on what is now a parking lot and vacant parcel where a bank annex once stood. The new building would draw on unused development rights from the bank site. Another incentive for the developers is a credit against federal and state income taxes of an amount equaling up to 40 percent of their qualifying construction costs. This tax policy is intended to encourage substantial rehabilitation of commercial properties, like this one, that are on the National Register of Historic Places . The bank\u2019s 1929 tower near Barclays Center, now a condo known as 1 Hanson Place , is much more prominent on the skyline \u2014 visible even from the smaller neighboring borough of Manhattan. But the older headquarters in Williamsburg is every bit as spectacular. (Its dome inspired the one at the top of the Hanson Place tower.) Image The building's exterior. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times George B. Post was the architect of what the Landmarks Preservation Commission called \u201c a bank building of imposing grandeur \u201d when designating it in 1966. Thirty years later, the commission extended the designation to the main banking hall, on which Post worked with Peter B. Wight, calling it \u201c one of the most monumental public spaces surviving in New York from the post-Civil War era.\u201d What makes the space even more remarkable is that it has a companion rotunda, with a different dome; one crowned by an oculus of stained-glass skylights. This was added in 1908 so that men and women could bank in separate halls. The two halls were divided by Sheetrock when Mr. Figueroa and Mr. Perez San Martin took over. The newer hall had been leased to Williamsburg Family Services in the late 1970s or early \u201980s, but was long abandoned and strewed with debris. The few surviving panels of the skylight had been taken down to the basement. Sandstone walls were painted white. Decorative walnut and mahogany woodwork was painted green. The hand-cut mosaic floors of the two banking halls were badly damaged, as were floors of encaustic tile elsewhere in the building. Most of the decorative hardware was gone. The bird-cage elevator was stilled. Dust had accumulated so exactly along the lines of the framework behind the dome that Mr. Perez San Martin thought the dark spokes were part of the original mural. A cleaning and restoration by Sandra Spannan of See Painting revealed otherwise. New encaustic tiles were ordered from the English firm Craven Dunnill & Company , which still had the molds and colors necessary to match the existing floors, Mr. Perez San Martin said. The walls and woodwork were stripped and restored. It was too expensive to have giallo Siena marble hand cut into mosaics in Italy, so the developers bought large blocks of the stone and shipped it to Lebanon for cutting. Reproductions of the \u201cWSB\u201d doorknobs and hinges were made in India from wax casts taken of the originals in Brooklyn. Even the bird-cage elevator was revived, after the developers agreed to install sprinklers around the open enclosure, at the request of the Buildings Department. Only a few such elevators are still operating in the city, agency officials said. The New York Landmarks Conservancy is so impressed that it not only is giving the project one of its Lucy G. Moses Preservation Awards , but also is holding the May 6 award ceremony under that jewel box of a dome.", "keyword": "Williamsburgh Savings Bank;Restoration and Renovation;Williamsburg Brooklyn;Historic preservation;New York Landmarks Conservancy;Landmarks Preservation Commission;Architecture;Carlos Perez San Martin"}
{"id": "ny0061815", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2014/01/11", "title": "Toiling to Bring Rwanda Genocide Suspects to Justice", "abstract": "REIMS, France \u2014 ABOVE his desk in a peaceful and tidy townhouse with pots of geraniums hanging from the windowsills and walls covered with photos of his children, Alain Gauthier keeps 24 files labeled with the names of some of the men and women accused in one of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Mr. Gauthier and his wife, Dafroza, have been collecting information for 13 years on each of the 24 Rwandan men and women they suspect of having participated in their country\u2019s 1994 genocide. The suspects are members of the Hutu ethnic group who now lead comfortable lives in France and deny any involvement in the slaughter of more than 800,000 people \u2014 most of them Tutsi \u2014 in just 100 days. \u201cHere, the fugitives live in denial,\u201d said Mrs. Gauthier, 59, a chemical engineer and a Tutsi from Rwanda. \u201cThey\u2019ve always denied, they have created another story, they have completely erased that part of their lives. They were obliged to do so, otherwise you end up in a mental institution. You can\u2019t live with a crime like that.\u201d \u201cWhat drives us is that the killers be judged, for history, for the victims,\u201d Mrs. Gauthier said. \u201cIt is our turn, us as alive people, as survivors to claim for justice because if we don\u2019t do it, nobody will, and nobody will make amends for what happened.\u201d But most important, by bringing civil lawsuits against Hutus suspected of being fugitives, the couple has challenged French authorities and the news media over the country\u2019s longstanding protection of Rwandan fugitives. France, which has long been accused of providing weapons and military training to the Hutus before the genocide, has never convicted anyone accused of complicity in the Rwandan genocide. But after restoring diplomatic relations with Rwanda in 2009 \u2014 they were broken in 2006 when a French judge accused a group of Rwandans of having plotted in 1994 to shoot down the plane of Rwanda\u2019s president at the time, touching off the genocide \u2014 Paris appointed five judges to investigate the matter of the Rwandan fugitives and opened a police section specializing in crimes of genocide. Next month, the judges are scheduled to bring their first criminal case against a Rwandan fugitive accused of genocide. For the Gauthiers, these are crimes that cannot be erased. They say that only by bringing the accused to justice can they help the victims and their families to forgive and move on. In France, they are frequently likened to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the couple who pursued Nazi criminals in the 1950s. Mrs. Gauthier, a graceful woman from Butare, one of the largest cities in Rwanda, lost her mother and about 80 relatives in the genocide. Mr. Gauthier, 65, is a retired high school principal who lived in Rwanda as a young man, teaching French at a local junior high school, which is how they met. FOR the Gauthiers, the news that French authorities were prepared to bring their first genocide case was vindication for 13 years of labor. They had found the defendant, Pascal Simbikangwa, five years ago, at his home in the slums of Kaweni, a city on the island of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean. \u201cThey were alone, they fought, and their work is colossal,\u201d said Maria Malagardis, a journalist for the newspaper Lib\u00e9ration, who wrote a book, \u201cOn the Track of the Rwandan Killers,\u201d about the couple. The Gauthiers consider themselves amateur investigators, in that neither studied criminal law and both have spent their working lives in unrelated fields. Born in 1954, Mrs. Gauthier grew up in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, where she met her husband. From 1973 to 1977, she was forced to live as a political refugee in Belgium, where she studied chemistry. In 1974, she went to visit Mr. Gauthier in southern France, where he had moved after his years in Rwanda, and they married in 1977. Some years later, the couple settled in Reims and had three children, Violaine, Emmanuel and Sarah. They were never to live in Rwanda again, although they would go there about once a month for their investigations. In most respects, they were living a typical middle-class life until that day in April 1994, when the calls started coming. \u201cWe were glued to the telephone all day,\u201d Mrs. Gauthier recalled. \u201cPeople would tell us, \u2018At X\u2019s home, they\u2019re all dead. They\u2019ve been killed this morning.\u2019 It didn\u2019t mean anything anymore. I can\u2019t express it with words. We were lost, we wondered whether it was true. Once we were there, we realized the magnitude of things when people we knew weren\u2019t there anymore, and even their houses had disappeared.\u201d Mrs. Gauthier learned that her mother had been shot by a Hutu general who later fled to Cameroon, where he died a free man, she said. She promised herself that even if she had failed to find her mother\u2019s killer, she would seek justice for the thousands of Tutsi victims who were killed because they were \u201cscapegoats, undesirable people.\u201d In 2001, she traveled with her husband to Brussels for the trial of four Rwandans convicted of committing war crimes during the mass killings in 1994. There, the couple met the head of an association that searched for Rwandan fugitives in Belgium. \u201cHe told us, \u2018Why don\u2019t you do this in France? There are hundreds of them there,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Gauthier said. \u201cAnd so we did.\u201d That year, the Gauthiers set up an association, the Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda, to have legal standing to file civil cases against fugitives. The French police detained three of the 24 fugitives in the country at the time, and about a dozen of them were put under formal investigation. Only one was convicted by the United Nations\u2019 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was established in 1994 by the Security Council to prosecute people accused of genocide. Today, Mr. Gauthier says he believes that more than 100 Rwandan fugitives live in France. \u201cBut as long as we don\u2019t have names, it\u2019s hard to know,\u201d he said. HE and his wife have worked feverishly since then, interrogating prosecutors, prisoners and victims of the genocide in Rwanda. They have gathered information online and through archival research and interviews with former prefects, magistrates and doctors \u2014 people with the wealth and connections to flee their homeland. The couple established that many of the fugitives, some of whom were wanted by Rwanda, Interpol and the tribunal, had become respected French citizens. In 2004, the couple unmasked Dominique Ntawukuriryayo, a former prefect who had settled in Carcassonne, in southern France, after the genocide. Mr. Ntawukuriryayo worked in a church there and founded Future Geniuses, a nongovernmental organization to help children in Rwanda. Mr. Ntawukuriryayo, who played a major role in the killing of as many as 25,000 Tutsi refugees in April 1994, was eventually extradited to Tanzania, where the tribunal was sitting and where he was convicted on genocide charges in 2010 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The couple also tracked down Sosth\u00e8ne Munyemana, a respected gynecologist who lives in the southwest of France and has never been convicted. In Rwanda, he is sometimes called the \u201cbutcher of Tumba\u201d (Tumba is a district south of Butare) and is accused by local authorities and Interpol of murder and being involved in his country\u2019s extermination plan against the Tutsis. Mr. Gauthier, who listened carefully to his wife\u2019s dark recollections, has devoted much of his time and energy to the hunt for criminals, often sleeping only a few hours a night. In the last 13 years, he has never missed a court hearing involving a fugitive. On a recent day in Paris, Mr. Gauthier sat at a cafe outside the tribunal where he had attended a hearing for one suspect, Claude Muhayimana , a former driver who is charged with participating in several massacres in 1994. When Mr. Muhayimana, dressed in a white tracksuit, came to sit with his family a few steps from Mr. Gauthier\u2019s table and glanced at him with an air of disdain, Mr. Gauthier looked away, almost untroubled. \u201cI know those looks,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m used to them now.\u201d", "keyword": "War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity;Rwanda;France;Fugitive;Hutu;Tutsi;Alain Gauthier;Dafroza Gauthier"}
{"id": "ny0032141", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/12/03", "title": "At Once-Promising Brooklyn Arts Center, Creative Hopes Are Dashed", "abstract": "Crowding into the tasting room of the Brooklyn Brewery , in Williamsburg, the nearly 200 painters, metalworkers, writers and self-styled entrepreneurs \u2014 all former members of 3rd Ward , the Bushwick arts center, D.I.Y. haven and creative network that collapsed in October \u2014 sounded a little like refugees. Part continuing-education center, part incubator, 3rd Ward , in a 35,000-square-foot former warehouse on Morgan Avenue, was the first, and, it seemed, the most successful of the arts-and-entrepreneurship meccas springing up around the gentrifying parts of Brooklyn. Its co-founder, Jason Goodman, 34, had predicted that within a few years, every big city in America would have one. He told one interviewer that 3rd Ward would be a household name by 2018. And he seemed on track: A Philadelphia 3rd Ward opened in April, a Las Vegas project was germinating, and the organization had received a $1.5 million grant for a \u201c kitchen incubator ,\u201d a program designed to support new food enterprises, elsewhere in Brooklyn. Then, on Oct. 9, Mr. Goodman announced that 3rd Ward was closing, crippled by financial losses. A failed start-up is nothing new. But 3rd Ward was not an app or a website, but a physical space with hundreds of stakeholders \u2014 people who had paid as much as $3,200 for lifetime unlimited memberships, which included free bicycles, free Intelligentsia coffee and unrestricted access to studios, workshops and classes, and who were told by Mr. Goodman that they would not receive refunds. There were also teachers who would not be getting their last paychecks and professionals who had seen it as a kind of creative utopia, now deprived of space to work. Many of them turned their anger at Mr. Goodman, once seen as a visionary who could charm Bushwick woodworkers and wealthy investors alike. Former members speculated online and off about what had driven 3rd Ward under. In an interview immediately after the closing, Mr. Goodman said, \u201cWe really fought down to the wire to preserve everything that we built, everything that we stand for, over the years. Some of us wanted to continue fighting. But at the end of the day, I think this was the right thing to do.\u201d He declined to comment further. Mr. Goodman founded 3rd Ward with a friend, Jeremy Lovitt, in 2006 so artists, craftspeople and other creative types \u2014 \u201cmakers,\u201d in the parlance of 3rd Ward \u2014 could band together, share studio space and equipment that they could not afford on their own. Mr. Lovitt was the less visible of the two, former employees said. Mr. Goodman did most of the talking. With its industrial-chic exposed brick and beams, the building on Morgan Avenue percolated with energy, as professional photographers and amateur carpenters mixed in state-of-the-art workshops. Pickup soccer games broke out in the lobby. People wandered the area carrying cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. At night, 3rd Ward hosted drink-and-draw events, art shows featuring members\u2019 work and parties featuring cocktail blenders powered by bicycle. \u201cYou walked in, and there was an environment that things were happening and things were getting done,\u201d said Robin Grearson, a Brooklyn-based writer and former teacher at 3rd Ward. At first, Mr. Goodman concentrated on attracting more members and students to make 3rd Ward profitable; for a while he busied himself with outside projects, but as they failed or fell away, he focused on helping 3rd Ward grow. People as far away as Chicago had been asking Mr. Goodman how to replicate 3rd Ward\u2019s seeming success in other cities since its first year. He and Mr. Lovitt would often spend all day sitting around a back office, chain-smoking and tossing around ways to expand, recalled Elias Ragues, an early employee who worked at the front desk for five years. Image Jason Goodman founded 3rd Ward with a friend, Jeremy Lovitt. Credit Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times \u201cIf Jason had just been, like, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s just have a cool company in one location in Brooklyn that breaks even and employs 25 people and everyone gets a decent salary and we create a lot of value in the community,\u2019 that could\u2019ve sustained itself for sure,\u201d said one longtime employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was concerned about becoming enmeshed in the company\u2019s legal problems. \u201cThat\u2019s never been his goal. His goal\u2019s always been bigger.\u201d In March 2010, Matthew Blesso, a real estate developer, bought a third of the company for $700,000, becoming its first major investor. The partners embarked on a top-to-bottom renovation of the building and secured a loan from Next Street , a merchant bank that specializes in urban small businesses. Later that year, Mr. Blesso and Mr. Goodman bought out Mr. Lovitt, with Mr. Blesso paying about $400,000 to increase his stake and become half owner. Mr. Lovitt left. Before long, 3rd Ward was beginning to draw notice from other investors and local tech moguls, like Perry Chen, the co-founder of Kickstarter , who introduced Mr. Goodman to Joanne Wilson, the wife of the prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos . Mr. Goodman offered tours of the building, talking animatedly of the \u201cmaker movement.\u201d In 2012, Ms. Wilson led a round of financing, bringing in between 10 and 15 investors, she said. The new investors committed a total of at least $4 million \u2014 $2.5 million to pour into the company, and around $2 million to buy out Mr. Blesso and pay off loans. Mr. Hsieh and a group of investors he led contributed a majority of that money. Mr. Goodman, with 30 percent of the company, was the largest individual shareholder. Another real estate developer, David Belt, offered to help Mr. Goodman build another 3rd Ward in Philadelphia in 2011. Mr. Hsieh was so enamored of Mr. Goodman\u2019s vision that he made plans for a 3rd Ward in Las Vegas, where Zappos is based. And last year, 3rd Ward won the $1.5 million Economic Development Corporation grant for the kitchen incubator . Mr. Goodman, dazzled, kept saying yes. And he did not listen to doubts from within 3rd Ward, even from Mr. Blesso. Mr. Blesso said he made a substantial profit when he was bought out by other investors last year, though he declined to be specific, and said he left because he felt the company was growing too fast. \u201cHe\u2019s a very compelling guy, and very persuasive,\u201d Mr. Blesso said of Mr. Goodman. \u201cBut he had much more aggressive plans for growth than I thought were feasible.\u201d As the company\u2019s expansion accelerated, the original 3rd Ward, never fully stable, fell further into disarray, in part because the Next Street loan materialized later and smaller than promised. (A spokesman for Next Street did not respond to a request for comment.) Barry Pousman, 29, who was hired to oversee classes in Bushwick in the summer of 2012, said that though Mr. Goodman had pressured the staff to devise more classes \u2014 \u201cproduct,\u201d he called them \u2014 to increase revenue, there never seemed to be enough students, a problem made worse by the building\u2019s relatively remote location several blocks from the nearest L subway stop. Image Becky Carter, left, a woodworking teacher at the 3rd Ward center, during a class in June 2010. Credit Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times As former teachers, students and staff members recalled in interviews, the financial strains that had marked the company\u2019s early years became more evident, even as 3rd Ward raised more money. Teachers were often paid late. Machinery went unfixed. Policies were often revised to add fees. Within the past year, 3rd Ward gutted the \u201cunlimited\u201d memberships, charging fees for classes that were formerly free and raising prices, and driving some longtime members away. The company said in its final fund-raising plea that it had had $3.6 million in revenue in 2012, but former employees said that after spending money for renovations and expansions, the Bushwick location had consistently barely broken even or operated at a loss. When Mr. Pousman was hired, along with about 15 other new employees, Mr. Goodman gave a party to introduce them to 3rd Ward\u2019s instructors. Within six months, he and the others were laid off, leaving most jobs to be done by members who worked in exchange for studio time or class credits. As attention and money poured in, Mr. Goodman\u2019s lifestyle edged closer to those of the tech chief executives who had befriended him. Some of the changes were modest: he exchanged his bike for a motorcycle and dressed better. Some were more eye-catching: he began traveling to Art Basel Miami and taking Fridays off to fix up a pair of cottages in Montauk as a weekend home. But he remained popular with employees and members alike, hosting an all-night pig roast and a retreat to Montauk within the last year \u201cWhen I met Jason, he was covered in dust\u201d from building parts of 3rd Ward by hand, said William Etundi, a promoter who helped throw 3rd Ward parties in the early years. \u201cAnd he wasn\u2019t that same guy later. But I think at heart, he\u2019s still that maker guy.\u201d Though his ambitions \u2014 and the company\u2019s financial troubles \u2014 grew, his improvisational management style evolved little: changing his mind from one day to the next, tossing out bold ideas that he could not execute or trivial ones, like knocking down a wall or changing bits of the website, that required disproportionate time, effort or money, according to many involved with 3rd Ward. One particularly unpopular gambit involved compensating teachers based on how many students they were able to recruit, a structure that made several instructors decide to quit, they said. As 3rd Ward hemorrhaged money this summer, Mr. Goodman and the board cast about for ways to save it, approaching several investors, Ms. Wilson said. A crowdsourced investment drive on the website Fundrise received only $375,000 in pledges out of the $1.5 million needed to cover operating costs and was shut down just days before 3rd Ward closed. Even as Ms. Wilson and other board members realized 3rd Ward could not survive, Mr. Goodman believed someone \u2014 Mr. Hsieh or another investor \u2014 would offer more money. Not until the last investor he had asked to step in called to say no did he agree to suspend operations, on Oct. 8. It is unclear what will happen to the studios. The Economic Development Corporation is seeking a new operator for the kitchen incubator, which was scheduled to open in the spring. Applications are due Thursday. A spokesman for the Economic Development Corporation, Patrick Muncie, said 3rd Ward had only received a portion of the $1.5 million grant after reaching progress markers such as signing the lease, with the rest reserved for other milestones. At the Brooklyn Brewery gathering, the talk was not of finding money to reopen 3rd Ward, but of recreating its network elsewhere. One leader of the effort has been Jen Messier, the co-founder of Brooklyn Brainery , which offers one-of-a-kind hobbyist classes. She and her co-founder started the Brainery after taking classes at 3rd Ward. \u201cIt never really occurred to me when I was in college that I could one day learn how to weld just for fun, or bookbinding, or take a six-week painting class,\u201d she said. The 3rd Ward opportunities, she said, \u201chelped us realize that, oh yeah, there are lots of possibilities for ways to learn things and really, do whatever you want.\u201d", "keyword": "Art;3rd Ward;Real Estate; Housing;Bushwick Brooklyn;Closings;The arts"}
{"id": "ny0178095", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2007/09/06", "title": "Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 5 \u2014 Technology evangelists have predicted the emergence of electronic books for as long as they have envisioned flying cars and video phones. It is an idea that has never caught on with mainstream book buyers. Two new offerings this fall are set to test whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book. In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon\u2019s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon\u2019s site. That is a significant advance over older e-book devices, which must be connected to a computer to download books or articles. Also this fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users. Amazon and Google would not comment on their plans, and neither offering is expected to carve out immediately a significant piece of the $35-billion-a-year book business. But these new services, from two Internet heavyweights, may help to answer the question of whether consumers are ready to read books on digital screens instead of on processed wood pulp. \u201cBooks represent a pretty good value for consumers. They can display them and pass them to friends, and they understand the business model,\u201d said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research, who is skeptical that a profitable e-book market will emerge anytime soon. \u201cWe have had dedicated e-book devices on the market for more than a decade, and the payoff always seems to be just a few years away,\u201d he said. That disappointing history goes back to the late 1990s, when Silicon Valley start-ups created the RocketBook and SoftBook Reader, two bulky, battery-challenged devices that suffered from lackluster sales and a limited selection of material. The best selling e-books at the time, tellingly, were \u201cStar Trek\u201d novels. Hopes for e-books began to revive last year with the introduction of the widely marketed Sony Reader. Sony\u2019s $300 gadget, the size of a trade paperback, has a six-inch screen, enough memory to hold 80 books and a battery that lasts for 7,500 page turns, according to the company. It uses screen display technology from E Ink, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that emerged from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creates power-efficient digital screens that uncannily mimic the appearance of paper. Sony will not say how many it has sold, but the Reader has apparently done well enough that Sony recently increased its advertising for the device in several major American cities. \u201cDigital readers are not a replacement for a print book; they are a replacement for a stack of print books,\u201d said Ron Hawkins, vice president for portable reader systems at Sony. \u201cThat is where we see people, on the go, in the subway and in airports, with our device.\u201d Book publishers also seem to be preparing for the kind of disruption that hit the music business when Apple introduced the symbiotic combination of the iPod and its iTunes online service. This year, with Sony\u2019s Reader drawing some attention and Amazon\u2019s imminent e-book device on their radar, most major publishers have accelerated the conversion of their titles into electronic formats. \u201cThere has been an awful lot of energy around e-books in the last six to 12 months, and we are now making a lot more titles available,\u201d said Matt Shatz, vice president for digital at Random House, which plans to have around 6,500 e-books available by 2008. It has had about 3,500 available for the last few years. Amazon has been showing the Kindle to book publishers for the last year and has delayed its introduction several times. Last fall, a photograph of the device, and some of its specifications, leaked onto the Web when the company filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to get approval for its wireless modem, which will operate over a high-speed EVDO network. Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device\u2019s central innovation lies \u2014 in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer. They also say Amazon will pack some free offerings onto the device, like reference books, and offer customers a choice of subscriptions to feeds from major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the French newspaper Le Monde. The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device. People familiar with the Kindle also have a few complaints. The device has a Web browser, but using it is a poor experience, because the Kindle\u2019s screen, also from E Ink, does not display animation or color. Some also complain about the fact that Amazon is using a proprietary e-book format from Mobipocket, a French company that Amazon bought in 2005, instead of supporting the open e-book standard backed by most major publishers and high-tech companies like Adobe. That means owners of other digital book devices, like the Sony Reader, will not be able to use books purchased on Amazon.com . Nevertheless, many publishing executives see Amazon\u2019s entrance into the e-book world as a major test for the long-held notion that books and newspapers may one day be consumed on a digital device. \u201cThis is not your grandfather\u2019s e-book,\u201d said one publishing executive who did not want to be named because Amazon makes its partners sign nondisclosure agreements. \u201cIf these guys can\u2019t make it work, I see no hope.\u201d For its part, Google has no plans to introduce an electronic device for reading books. Its new offering will allow users to pay some portion of a book\u2019s cover price to read its text online. For the last two years, as part of the Google Book Search Partner Program, some publishers have been contributing electronic versions of their books to the Google database, with the promise that the future revenue would be shared. The service could be especially useful to students and researchers who find information they need through a Google search, but it is also likely to include material suited for leisure reading. It will be separate from an effort called the Google Book Search Library Project, which is digitizing the collections of some libraries. That program has angered publishers and led to several pending lawsuits over copyright issues. Both the programs of Google and Amazon are drawing attention, and some skepticism, from traditional book retailers. Barnes & Noble, the largest bookseller in the United States, once invested in early e-book creator NuvoMedia and sold its RocketBook in stores before getting out of the business in 2003. Stephen Riggio, chief executive at Barnes & Noble, argues that for most people the value of traditional paper books will never be replicated in digital form. Nevertheless, he plans to compete with Google and Amazon. Mr. Riggio said in an interview that the full texts of many books will become available on the company\u2019s Web site over the next year to 18 months. He also said that Barnes & Noble was considering introducing its own electronic book reader \u2014 but only when it can sell one at a low price. \u201cIf an affordable device can come to the market, sure we\u2019d love to bring it to our customers, and we will,\u201d Mr. Riggio said. \u201cBut right now we don\u2019t see an affordable device in the immediate future.\u201d", "keyword": "Computers and the Internet;Books and Literature;Amazon.com Inc;Google Inc;Book Trade"}
{"id": "ny0259546", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/01/14", "title": "Frank Robinson Hospitalized for Tests", "abstract": "The Hall of Famer Frank Robinson was taken by ambulance to a Paradise Valley, Ariz., hospital with dizziness and a rapid heartbeat. He had tests and returned to a hotel where baseball owners met. Commissioner Bud Selig said tests on Robinson were negative for any serious problems. Robinson, 75, is senior vice president for baseball operations in the commissioner\u2019s office.", "keyword": "Robinson Frank;Baseball;Baltimore Orioles;Selig Bud"}
{"id": "ny0224451", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2010/11/14", "title": "San Francisco School Administrators Schemed to Take Money, Documents Say", "abstract": "A group of San Francisco Unified School District administrators, including an associate superintendent, engaged in a long-running scheme to funnel district money into their personal bank accounts via nonprofit community organizations, according to internal documents. The administrators worked out of the Student Support Services Department, which partners with community organizations to provide thousands of San Francisco students with health education, substance abuse counseling, violence prevention, after-school activities and other services. The scandal has stunned San Francisco educators and thrown Student Support Services into turmoil at a time when the district faces a $113 million deficit. Some vital student services have been threatened as investigators comb through millions of dollars of transactions dating back at least four years. Documents obtained by The Bay Citizen under a California Public Records Act request show that administrators directed money from community organizations into their own pockets. Some also fabricated overtime reports and falsified signatures on district contracts. The records also include copies of checks and invoices, suspension and termination notices and contracts bearing signatures that the district says were falsified. \u201cIt was a system developed by a small group of individuals operating outside of the budget and finance department,\u201d said Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza, who participated in the district\u2019s investigation. The documents, many redacted, show evidence of transactions totaling tens of thousands of dollars and possibly more. In an interview, Mr. Carranza said the district opened the investigation in June after a community organization raised questions to him about irregular accounting practices. The San Francisco district attorney\u2019s office is conducting a separate investigation, according to Mr. Carranza and others familiar with the inquiry. A spokesman for that office declined to comment. The district\u2019s investigation is focused on Associate Superintendent Trish Bascom, who is the former head of Student Support Services, and four of her co-workers. For years, until she retired in June, Ms. Bascom had primary control over money distributed to community organizations that were hired to provide services for the district. The department\u2019s annual budget is nearly $20 million. The documents show that community organizations under contract to the district made payments directly to individual Student Support Services administrators. Mr. Carranza said such payments violated district regulations. Ms. Bascom\u2019s lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, confirmed that Ms. Bascom had approved the payments, but he said the transactions conformed to district regulations. Mr. Hanlon said the payments were bonuses approved by Ms. Bascom to make up for salary cuts. \u201cIf they want to call it stealing, they can,\u201d he said. \u201cI would call the district incompetent. It wasn\u2019t stealing. It was paying people bonuses for hard work.\u201d Kevin Truitt, who succeeded Ms. Bascom, said investigators seized computers and documents shortly after he arrived at the end of June. The seizures, along with the removal of key department officials, forced Mr. Truitt and his staff to scramble to put programs in place. \u201cI\u2019m not privy to the documents or computer files pertaining to the department I now run,\u201d Mr. Truitt said in an interview. The scandal has made it difficult for Student Support Services administrators to track financing for programs, according to one district official. In an e-mail, Mr. Carranza wrote that Student Support Services programs \u201care being fully funded. We are committed to ensuring that our students are not penalized for the actions of a few individuals.\u201d In addition to Ms. Bascom, other administrators under investigation by the district include Meyla Ruwin, the department\u2019s senior executive director; Betty Wong, Ms. Bascom\u2019s assistant; and two of Ms. Bascom\u2019s administrative analysts, Linda Lovelace and Lilian Capuli, according to Mr. Carranza and documents. Ms. Lovelace was fired in September, documents show, and she declined to comment for this article. Ms. Ruwin and Ms. Wong were placed on administrative leave, Mr. Carranza said. Neither could be reached for comment. Ms. Capuli received a termination notice on Sept. 7 but has requested a hearing to dispute the accusations, Tyler Paetkau, her lawyer, said. Mr. Paetkau, in a letter to the school district, said district officials were using Ms. Capuli as a scapegoat. \u201cMs. Capuli simply followed the directives given by her superiors,\u201d the letter said. In an August letter informing Ms. Lovelace of her dismissal, the district accused her of supplementing her $83,000 salary with $26,126.64 in unauthorized district money during the 2009-10 school year. According to the district and invoices, the money was paid to Ms. Lovelace by Bay Area Community Resources, a Marin County organization that operates after-school programs for San Francisco students. Officials with Bay Area Community Resources could not be reached for comment. It is not known whether the group, or any other community organizations, are under investigation. Ms. Lovelace was in charge of administering contracts between the school district and Bay Area Community Resources. According to her termination letter, she signed contracts on behalf of officials who had not given her authorization and submitted false claims that she had worked 12-hour days during the school year. \u201cYour conduct in intentionally requesting and receiving an additional four hours of compensation every single day is tantamount to stealing,\u201d stated the dismissal notice, which was written by Roger Buschmann, the chief administrative officer. \u201cParticularly at a time when the district faces a multimillion-dollar deficit and forced layoffs of many skilled and diligent professionals, such conduct is appalling.\u201d Last May, documents show, Ms. Lovelace received a check for $40,000 from Edgewood Center for Children and Families, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides mental health, violence prevention and teacher coaching services to the district. The termination letter alleged that Ms. Lovelace had gotten money from Edgewood \u201cfor which you knew you had not provided services.\u201d Jeff Davis, the Edgewood chief executive, declined to discuss details of the transaction except to say that all transactions involving the company had been authorized by the school district. Mr. Davis said Edgewood was cooperating with authorities. \u201cEdgewood could make a payment on full authorization without knowing if the money was later misused,\u201d Mr. Davis said. Mr. Carranza, the deputy superintendent, said the Edgewood payments had \u201cabsolutely not\u201d been authorized by the district. In May, Edgewood issued a $15,000 check to Ms. Capuli, the administrative analysts, according to the documents. In a letter to Ms. Capuli, the district said the $15,000 payment appeared related to her approval of a $1,092.34 expense reimbursement to Ms. Bascom. It said there was no evidence Ms. Bascom had incurred the expense. \u201cAt the very least, your approval of this invoice without making any effort to evaluate the accuracy of the receipts being submitted is negligent,\u201d the letter to Ms. Capuli said. \u201cAt worst, it seems to involve a quid pro quo, in which you were approving payment of district funds to Ms. Bascom on an improper submission in return for her approval of the $15,000 Edgewood payment to you.\u201d Mr. Paetkau, Ms. Capuli\u2019s lawyer, denied the accusation. Mr. Hanlon, Ms. Bascom\u2019s lawyer, called it \u201ctotally false.\u201d", "keyword": "San Francisco (Calif);Frauds and Swindling;Education (K-12);Bay Citizen The"}
{"id": "ny0235346", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/01/31", "title": "Pooling Resources to Create New Dining Experiences", "abstract": "The buildings that line the upper village stretch of Old Post Road South in Croton-on-Hudson are pretty dark at night. The delis, liquor store and offices typically are not open once the daylight disappears. But one evening a month, the street comes to life. That\u2019s the night that Skillet restaurant takes over Grouchy Gabe\u2019s Grill , a deli at 8 Old Post Road South. Temporary signs are put out front, brown paper sheets cover the Formica tables and candles cast a warm glow. The 6 and 8 p.m. seatings are sold out, and the place is packed with customers, many of them moving from table to table, introducing themselves, chatting and sometimes sharing their wine, which they bring themselves. \u201cPeople stop in and ask what\u2019s going on \u2014 they say that the lights and all the fun that people seem to be having drew them in,\u201d said David Leveen, the self-taught chef who dreamed up the idea for Skillet. His first dinner was held on Oct. 24 and he has sold out all the seats at the monthly dinners ever since, purely through word of mouth. Call it an occasional restaurant. Skillet is just one example of the creative resource sharing that Westchester restaurateurs, bakers, caterers and other food entrepreneurs are employing to make it during these hard economic times. For Mr. Leveen, using Grouchy Gabe\u2019s space is not only a way to try out his restaurant idea in a limited, low-cost way, but also to make use of the expertise of Gabriel Boivin, the deli\u2019s owner, who has helped him with things like pacing the meals and buying local ingredients. \u201cHe\u2019s paying me a minimal fee, so we\u2019re both making a bit of money out of the arrangement,\u201d Mr. Boivin said. \u201cBut for me, this is about making Grouchy Gabe\u2019s a hip, charming place to be, about keeping my name out there. It helps keep the momentum going to always be associated with something new.\u201d For Larry Nathanson, a co-owner of Milton Point Sweets , a Rye-based cookie business, sharing is a necessity. He said his business couldn\u2019t survive without the kind of arrangement it has with Antonio Luciano Orza, owner of the Bread Factory in New Rochelle. Mr. Nathanson and his two partners use Mr. Orza\u2019s kitchen on Sunday afternoons and weekdays during slower times. They cannot afford a bakery of their own at this point. The rent they pay is \u201chelpful,\u201d Mr. Orza said. \u201cThese are tough times. Customers are post-dating checks, that type of thing. No one wants to pay the baker. Plus, they\u2019re nice people. It\u2019s important to help each other during times like this.\u201d That was the thinking of Nannette Conners, owner of the Provisions bakery and caf\u00e9 in Pelham, when she allowed Scarborough Fair , a popular local caterer, to share her kitchen. Scarborough\u2019s owner, John Byrne, lost his Bronxville lease after 20 years when the landlord increased his rent by 38 percent last April. He worked out of Provisions for several months, but he and Ms. Conners came up against one of the dangers of these kinds of deals: There just wasn\u2019t enough space, and it was difficult to work out their schedules for using the kitchen. He is ironing out the details of an arrangement with a restaurant that has a second kitchen he can use in early mornings and afternoons. \u201cSmall businesses are not having an easy time in this economy,\u201d Mr. Byrne said. \u201cWe\u2019re getting squeezed by landlords, and we don\u2019t have any recourse or protection.\u201d All this maneuvering can create exciting new experiences for the public. Table Local Market in Bedford Hills was holding occasional music evenings in its 2,000-square-foot storefront for several months until the town made the owners stop because they lacked the appropriate permits. \u201cWe featured local farmers\u2019 goods, and it was like a rave \u2014 a cool, underground kind of experience,\u201d said Jonathan Pratt, who is a partner in Table. Mr. Pratt, the chef and co-owner of Peter Pratt\u2019s Inn in Yorktown Heights and Umami Caf\u00e9 in Croton-on-Hudson, was the chef at a fund-raising dinner in December at the Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester in Mount Kisco. The group, which recently installed a state-of-the-art kitchen, turned the center into a kind of restaurant, using teenage members as waiters. It has been such a huge success that four to six dinners are being planned as part of a Chef\u2019s Series. \u201cWe\u2019re talking to Caf\u00e9 of Love , Crabtree\u2019s Kittle House , Bedford Post Inn and others about participating,\u201d said Brian Skanes, the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club. He said the club had heard from bakers and other start-up food businesses seeking to rent the kitchen space. \u201cPeople can\u2019t afford to go out like they used to, so they\u2019re looking for special experiences when they do.\u201d \u201cSpecial\u201d is how Peter Drexler, a Croton resident, who got hold of the reservations number early on, described the dinners at Skillet. He and his companion, Sherry Lambert, have been to all of them. \u201cIt feels like a big family meal, and the food is fantastic,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve never had an experience like this before \u2014 it\u2019s a restaurant and it isn\u2019t.\u201d Mr. Leveen describes Skillet, which doesn\u2019t advertise, as a kind of club. \u201cPeople like the fact that not everyone knows about it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe first dinner, when I finally came out of the kitchen to say hi to the diners, everyone applauded \u2014 it\u2019s the closest I\u2019m ever going to come to working in a rock \u2019n\u2019 roll band.\u201d Space Sharers SKILLET At Grouchy Gabe\u2019s, 8 Old Post Road South, Croton-on-Hudson; (914) 361-9640. Dinner held once a month; the next one is Feb. 20. MILTON POINT SWEETS (914) 920-6302; miltonpointsweets.com . SCARBOROUGH FAIR (914) 337-2735; scarboroughfaironline.com . BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB OF NORTHERN WESTCHESTER 351 Main Street, Mount Kisco, (914) 666-8069; bgcnw.com .", "keyword": "Restaurants;Westchester County (NY);Cooking and Cookbooks"}
{"id": "ny0187041", "categories": ["world"], "date": "2009/04/20", "title": "Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects", "abstract": "C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding , the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda , far more than had been previously reported. The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah , according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative. A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew. The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed , the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods , causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known. The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture. President Obama plans to visit C.I.A. headquarters Monday and make public remarks to employees, as well as meet privately with officials, an agency spokesman said Sunday night. It will be his first visit to the agency, whose use of harsh interrogation methods he often condemned during the presidential campaign and whose secret prisons he ordered closed on the second full day of his presidency. C.I.A. officials had opposed the release of the interrogation memo, dated May 30, 2005, which was one of four secret legal memos on interrogation that Mr. Obama ordered to be released last Thursday. Mr. Obama said C.I.A. officers who had used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods with the approval of the Justice Department would not be prosecuted. He has repeatedly suggested that he opposes Congressional proposals for a \u201ctruth commission\u201d to examine Bush administration counterterrorism programs, including interrogation and warrantless eavesdropping. The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun a yearlong, closed-door investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program, in part to assess claims of Bush administration officials that brutal treatment, including slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in standing positions for days and confining them in small boxes, was necessary to get information. The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines. A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted. The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel , discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo. The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers. Michael V. Hayden , director of the C.I.A. for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on the program \u201cFox News Sunday\u201d if Mr. Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that that information was still classified. A C.I.A. spokesman, reached Sunday night, also would not comment on the new information. Mr. Hayden said he had opposed the release of the memos, even though President Obama has said the techniques will never be used again, because they would tell Al Qaeda \u201cthe outer limits that any American would ever go in terms of interrogating an Al Qaeda terrorist.\u201d He also disputed an article in The New York Times on Saturday that said Abu Zubaydah had revealed nothing new after being waterboarded, saying that he believed that after unspecified \u201ctechniques\u201d were used, Abu Zubaydah revealed information that led to the capture of another terrorist suspect, Ramzi Binalshibh. The Times article, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah had revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding. He revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been \u201cunnecessary\u201d in his case.", "keyword": "CIA;Interrogation;Waterboarding;Terrorism;Khalid Shaikh Mohammed;Abu Zubaydah;Michael V Hayden;Detainees;US;Torture"}
{"id": "ny0194761", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/01", "title": "Time Line Following Detective Kevin Spellman\u2019s D.W.I. Crash", "abstract": "One day after the arrest of an off-duty police detective on charges he killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, the authorities provided more details about the five-hour gap between the accident and the time the police were able to obtain a sample of the detective\u2019s blood, saying the detective\u2019s case was processed more quickly than is normal in such cases. Prosecutors said the detective, Kevin C. Spellman, 42, a 22-year veteran of the force, was driving a Chevrolet Malibu that struck and killed Drana Nikac, 67, as she crossed Kingsbridge Avenue in the Bronx early on Friday morning. He was charged with second-degree vehicular homicide, criminally negligent homicide and driving while intoxicated. It was the second time in five weeks that an off-duty police officer was charged with killing a civilian when driving drunk. On Sept. 27, Officer Andrew Kelly, 30, was arrested after the sport-utility vehicle he was driving struck Vionique Valnord-Kassime as she tried to flag a cab, the authorities said. In that case, prosecutors said Officer Kelly refused a breath test at the scene, and a blood test seven hours later showed he had no alcohol in his system. He has pleaded not guilty. Police officials said they worked quickly to process Detective Spellman\u2019s case in the hours between the 6:30 a.m. accident, and noon, when they drew the blood sample. Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney, said his office also moved promptly, and he disputed the idea that the time frame of more than five hours represented any kind of delay. \u201cFocusing solely on a time line in a vacuum is an oversimplification of what\u2019s involved,\u201d Mr. Reed said in a statement. \u201cThe mere notification of an incident is not the same as having all of the information that the law requires before a search warrant can be issued.\u201d On Friday morning, a sergeant at the scene told prosecutors that Detective Spellman\u2019s speech was slurred, his eyes were glassy and he smelled of alcohol, according to the text of the criminal complaint. About 7:40 a.m., another officer heard Detective Spellman say that had not seen the victim, who \u201ccame out of nowhere,\u201d the complaint said. At 8 a.m., Detective Spellman refused a breath test at the scene, according to Paul J. Browne, the Police Department\u2019s chief spokesman. Shortly afterward, police officials contacted prosecutors to make them aware of the case, Mr. Browne said. Detective Spellman was taken to the 45th Precinct station house, and by 9:46 a.m., he was videotaped refusing a second, more sophisticated breath test, Mr. Browne said. With that refusal, police officials and prosecutors set about trying to obtain the blood sample. Shortly after 10 a.m., a sergeant who had been at the scene of the accident arrived at the Bronx district attorney\u2019s office to work with prosecutors on an application for a court order. Mr. Reed said that by law, a police officer was required to request such an order in person. In the meantime, officials with the Internal Affairs Bureau ordered Detective Spellman be taken to Jacobi Medical Center to await a blood test. State Supreme Court Justice Harold Adler signed an order to take the detective\u2019s blood at 11:39 a.m. Friday, said Kali Holloway, a spokeswoman for the State Office of Court Administration. By noon, Detective Spellman\u2019s blood was drawn, the authorities said.", "keyword": "Spellman Kevin C;Bronx (NYC);Nikac Drana;Accidents and Safety;Drunken and Reckless Driving;Police Department (NYC)"}
{"id": "ny0250611", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/02/19", "title": "Bighorn Sheep Return to Pike National Forest in Colorado", "abstract": "SEDALIA, Colo. \u2014 The mechanics were simple. A trailer latch popped, a gate swung open and three wild bighorn sheep \u2014 two females, presumably pregnant, and a year-old lamb, definitely frisky \u2014 trotted up the rocky slope of Thunder Butte under a pale afternoon sun. It is the back story of the animals\u2019 release this week by wildlife biologists here in the mountains southwest of Denver that can stagger the mind with its complications of coincidence, historical accident, devastation and hope. A truck breakdown on a highway in February 1946 played a role, believe it or not, as did the biggest Colorado wildfire in memory, the Hayman, in June 2002. The fire roared through the cliffs in the Pike National Forest with flames hundreds of feet high, scouring the land of trees across 138,000 acres. Human intervention, from the mining boom in the late 1800s, when timber was cut by the trainload for fuel and construction, through the bighorn reintroduction program in the Hayman burn area by the Colorado Division of Wildlife, begun last year, completed the circle of natural and wild that brought the bighorns home. They were last seen in this area in the mid-1960s. However the pieces fit, biologists and land managers say a bighorn homecoming to the Hayman is a powerful reaffirmation of hope in the West for a creature that has long symbolized the ideals of sure-footed survival in the high lonesome aeries where they evolved and still persist. Sheep restoration began here last year with the first 12 animals and continued with 12 more this month. \u201cWe\u2019re back,\u201d Janet George, a senior biologist at the Colorado Division of Wildlife, said as the animals peered around at their new home (their eyesight is excellent, which is why they stake out rocky perches, the better to spot approaching predators). \u201cThis was historically bighorn range, and then it couldn\u2019t sustain a sheep herd any more,\u201d Ms. George said. \u201cAnd now nine years after the fire, it can again.\u201d But back to that truck accident. In early 1946, state wildlife managers were hauling 14 bighorns near Colorado Springs, intending to start a herd of transplants near Pikes Peak. When the truck broke down, the animals were instead released right where they were. The 14 pioneers \u2014 10 ewes, 2 rams and 2 lambs \u2014 drifted north and established vibrant herd from which the Hayman group was drawn for release. The accidental but successful herd created the gene pool, and the Hayman fire restored a habitat of treeless rock that bighorns love, and where they seek shelter from predators who cannot match them in cliff-side clambering. Their agility is partly due to unique hooves that have evolved specifically for climbing rocks, with a hard outer wall and a soft inner wall for traction. Combined with iron-lunged endurance, they can even sometimes evade mountain lions, which are fierce and fast but quickly winded. It is a life and a niche in the high rocky places, where \u2014 crucially \u2014 humans usually do not build ranches or mansions, that has allowed the bighorns\u2019 numbers to hold strong along the spine of the Rockies from Colorado through Wyoming, Montana and into Alberta, Canada, each of which has bighorn populations estimated at 7,000 animals or more. But the Hayman burn site is as much a character in this saga as the animals, and the healing from its giant scar has been slow. On June 8, 2002, a United States Forest Service employee named Terry Barton said that she burned a letter from her estranged husband at a campground, and that the fire spread. Ms. Barton ultimately pleaded guilty to arson and spent six years in prison. Hayman was also calamitous for Denver\u2019s water system, which has spent millions of dollars rebuilding and cleaning a reservoir in the burn area that became clogged with sediment from eroding soils that were no longer held in place by grasses and trees. Ms. George, the state biologist, said it would take decades before Thunder Butte became reforested. That is very good news for the sheep, which have survived in part by avoiding forests, where predators like lions can drop from above. But that is also assuming that the historical cycle of rebirth and growth repeat in the same way. With climate change and planetary warming in the decades to come, Ms. George said, the next-generation forest here might be very different from the one that was erased by Hayman. Meanwhile, as the three new residents disappeared up into the rocks, another biologist with the Division of Wildlife, Heather Halbritter, was tracking the nine sheep released earlier this month from that same post-1946 group, using the radio-beacon collars they had been fitted with. \u201cThey\u2019re in those rocks, up along the ridgeline,\u201d she said, waving the tracking device and pointing in the very direction the newcomers were going. A herd reunion might be in the offing. Then the two ewes and their tag-along lamb stopped on a cliff. As if posing for a picture, or assessing the strangely beautiful moonscape of the Hayman, they stood in silhouette. \u201cThat\u2019s what sheep do,\u201d Ms. George said. \u201cThey climb out on a rock and look.\u201d", "keyword": "Sheep;Forests and Forestry;Colorado"}
{"id": "ny0109748", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/05/30", "title": "Vatican: Leak of Documents Is Called a \u2018Brutal\u2019 Personal Attack on the Pope", "abstract": "The Vatican on Tuesday denounced the theft of secret papal documents as a \u201cbrutal\u201d personal attack on Pope Benedict XVI . The Vatican\u2019s deputy secretary of state, Archbishop Angelo Becciu, left, said in the Vatican\u2019s official newspaper, L\u2019Osservatore Romano, that the publication of stolen documents in a recent book by an Italian journalist was a \u201ccriminal\u201d act. The newspaper also said the pope\u2019s butler, Paolo Gabriele, who has been accused of leaking the pope\u2019s confidential correspondence, had been in possession of \u201ca large number\u201d of the pope\u2019s private documents. Mr. Gabriele, 46, was arrested last week and charged with theft. The Vatican said a cardinals commission was investigating whether others were involved.", "keyword": "Benedict XVI;Gabriele Paolo;Classified Information and State Secrets;Roman Catholic Church;Robberies and Thefts"}
{"id": "ny0241694", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/03/20", "title": "Terry Collins Hopes Communication Will Temper Intensity", "abstract": "PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. Next to the lineup card in the Mets \u2019 clubhouse Saturday was a sheet telling 15 players to see the manager. This was not another round of cuts, unless the Mets were axing every veteran on the roster. All of the listed players had one thing in common: at least five years in the major leagues. The manager, Terry Collins , wanted to allow each player to choose a day off before the end of spring training, a reward for enduring the six-week grind. \u201cHe has a pulse for what it\u2019s like to be a player,\u201d starter R. A. Dickey said. \u201cThis is a very hard game to play. It really does send a nice signal to know that the guy that\u2019s leading the ship here hasn\u2019t forgotten what it\u2019s like.\u201d Collins peaked as a player in the minors, as did his mentor, Manager Jim Leyland of the Tigers, who is his inspiration for wearing No. 10 . But while Leyland is known for rapport with his players, Collins joined the Mets with the opposite reputation. After five second-place finishes in Houston and Anaheim, Collins resigned from the Angels in September 1999 when some of his players had turned on him . It was the kind of episode that could end a major league managing career, and Collins thought it had ended his, until the Mets hired him last November. Collins said he realized now that his intensity worked against him, and he will not let it happen again. \u201cI\u2019ve thought about it a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cI took it way too serious. Even though I enjoyed it, I didn\u2019t enjoy it. It was all about the winning, winning, winning, instead of enjoying being around these guys and watching them play, enjoying the experience and the challenge of competing. That\u2019s what I love to do. \u201cThere was that thing that I had to prove something. I still want to prove that we\u2019re good enough, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s the same type of attitude I had in the past. And with that comes the fact that these guys are human beings, and they need communication.\u201d At 61, Collins is the majors\u2019 fourth-oldest manager, behind Leyland, Charlie Manuel and Tony La Russa, but he retains a youthful energy. When David Wright arrived in January, weeks before the reporting date, he was startled to see Collins on the job already, eager to get to work. \u201cHe came down and brought the same intensity, the same energy in January,\u201d Wright said. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a manager come down early, much less months early.\u201d Intensity and energy are words that follow Collins everywhere. They were not applied as often to Jerry Manuel, his cerebral predecessor, and in that way the Mets followed the classic pattern for the hire, replacing low-key with fired-up. Fans will like Collins if he wins, of course; that is by far the most important factor as the Mets try to stop a nearly constant tide of bad news, on and off the field. But even if the team does not contend, fans should at least relate to Collins. They will know he cares, the Mets believe, by the way the team\u2019s effort reflects his personality. \u201cThe manager\u2019s going to have a big impact on how the team is perceived by fans in New York,\u201d General Manager Sandy Alderson said. \u201cI think that\u2019s been apparent down here and will become more apparent as time goes on.\u201d Collins\u2019s first two Angels teams contended for division titles with a daring base-running style exemplified by Darin Erstad , the retired outfielder Collins has tried to hire for the Mets. Erstad and others helped translate Collins\u2019s message to the field, acting as the kind of conduit Wright believes he can be now. \u201cYou want to bring energy and excitement, you want to play with emotion,\u201d Wright said. \u201cThat\u2019s his kind of personality as a manager so far, and that\u2019s a mirror image of the kind of player I think that I am. I don\u2019t think I have to act or do anything differently.\u201d Collins has told players that any mistakes they make should come from playing aggressively. If aggressiveness turns to recklessness, Collins said, that can be fixed. It is much harder, he said, to change the mind-set of a player who is satisfied by simply getting to the next base. Collins has always believed that, but the message was crystallized by the Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, who coached with Collins on the Tampa Bay staff in 2001. Boggs said his father once told him, \u201cFew men dare to be great,\u201d and Collins said he has never forgotten it. \u201cI want those guys that are willing to be great,\u201d Collins said, and he was just getting rolling. He spoke excitedly about focus and preparation and greatness, and seemed to know how it would sound, and how it would reinforce his image. But Collins really believes in it. He listens to players more now, but his essence is the same. \u201cHopefully, the energy \u2014 or whatever people want to say, the intenseness that I have \u2014 may work here,\u201d Collins said. \u201cThis may be the one place where it works out.\u201d", "keyword": "Collins Terry L;New York Mets;Baseball;Coaches and Managers"}
{"id": "ny0146894", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2008/07/26", "title": "Back to Art, Havel Meditates on Power", "abstract": "PRAGUE VACLAV HAVEL \u2019S new absurdist tragicomedy, \u201cLeaving\u201d \u2014 his first play in about 20 years \u2014 depicts a womanizing former political leader who grudgingly confronts the political wilderness. Much has been made of the parallels between the plot and Mr. Havel\u2019s life. The main character, Vilem Rieger, the chancellor of an unnamed country, leaves office and is being pushed from his extravagant government villa by a pompous former deputy, Vlastik Klein. He just happens to share the initials of Vaclav Klaus, Mr. Havel\u2019s archrival, who succeeded him as president of the Czech Republic . Mr. Havel, who stepped down as president five years ago, acknowledged that the play \u2014 which will have its foreign premiere in London in September before going to the United States \u2014 is a semiautobiographical \u201cKing Lear\u201d-like meditation on the seductiveness of power. But he insisted he was happy to have exited the stage \u2014 at least the political one \u2014 and to have escaped a tumultuous life that, he contended, had accidentally thrust him into the spotlight. \u201cI understand, especially when one is looking at me from a distance, that I might seem as some kind of fairy-tale hero who banged his head against the wall until the wall fell, and then reigned,\u201d he said on a recent day, looking more like an aging hippie than an elder statesman in his signature blue jeans, and appearing withdrawn, frail and a little exasperated. The once ever-present pack of cigarettes was conspicuously absent. (Mr. Havel gave up smoking after battling lung cancer.) \u201cIt makes me blush slightly because I know my mistakes,\u201d he continued. \u201cOn the other hand, I do not ridicule it because people need these kinds of stories.\u201d Now 71, with sparkling but sunken eyes and a mere whisper of a voice, Mr. Havel was emphatic that he was ready to disappear after what many critics hoped would not be his last artistic statement. One of the cold war\u2019s most celebrated dissidents could be forgiven for craving invisibility. He has led a revolution that overturned four decades of Communism in his native Czechoslovakia, languished five years in prison, written 19 plays, survived nearly drowning, and served 13 years as president \u2014 all while remaining one of his generation\u2019s most nonconformist writers. \u201cI have had a very adventurous life, but not because I have an adventurous nature or yearned for a life full of adventure,\u201d he said. \u201cFate just wanted it this way.\u201d Yet while the West has lionized him, in his native Czech Republic, 19 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he remains a source of ambivalence, if not sometimes downright resentment. \u201cHavel gets attention in the West by saying banal, kitschy things,\u201d said Bohumil Dolezal, a leading right-wing commentator, who once worked for Mr. Klaus. \u201cOne who tries to be responsible for everything isn\u2019t responsible for anything.\u201d Why such contempt for a figure some have compared with Gandhi? Some have contended that for someone who claimed to be a reluctant president, Mr. Havel held on to power too long. Others, like Erik Tabery, a Czech journalist who is writing a book about the Czech presidency, said some Czechs resented Mr. Havel because he held up an uncomfortable mirror to their own history of chronic passivity. \u201cWhile the Communists ruled for 40 years, most Czechs stayed at home and did nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cHavel did something.\u201d Mr. Havel has his own theory. \u201cIf you look at somebody for a long time and you encounter him over such a long time, on television in the evening, it will eventually begin to annoy you slightly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe person will begin to bore you, especially if he keeps repeating minority views.\u201d In any case, he stressed, he has no desire to be worshiped or, worse, slavishly obeyed. In \u201cLeaving,\u201d Mr. Havel\u2019s voice bellows from offstage, telling the actors how to behave, warning them not to overact, even giving orders on what they should drink \u2014 cinnamon with beer. Rather than reflecting a control-freak who wants to stage-manage life and art, Mr. Havel said, the voice was meant to mock his own authority. \u201cWhen, for example, I said that I did not like a certain dog, there was always some overambitious person ready to shoot that dog,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that bothered me.\u201d BORN into a wealthy bourgeois family in 1936, Mr. Havel first rose to prominence as a chain-smoking rebel intellectual in the 1960s. In 1968, when the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress a democratic blossoming known as the Prague Spring, Mr. Havel denounced the invasion, and his plays were censored. Looking back at the Prague Spring as its 40th anniversary was about to be observed in August, Mr. Havel said the event laid bare Communism\u2019s incompatibility with freedom and \u201crid the Western left of their illusions.\u201d In 1977, he led a group of Czechoslovak intellectuals who wrote and signed Charter 77, a document that called for the government to respect human rights. Refusing to back down, he was labeled an enemy of the state and imprisoned. Mr. Havel is credited with overseeing the smooth transition from Communism to liberal capitalism after leading a 10-day Velvet Revolution in 1989, so velvety that not a single bullet was fired. Once elected the president of a newly democratized Czechoslovakia \u2014 a role he says was more duty than aspiration \u2014 he linked the country firmly to the West. He cleared the way for the Czech Republic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union five years later. His star status drew world leaders and dignitaries to Prague, from the Dalai Lama, with whom Mr. Havel meditated for hours, to Bill Clinton, who serenaded him on his saxophone. Calling on the former dissident became a politically redemptive act. Yet his presidency, which ended in 2003, was marked by a jovial eccentricity that repelled as well as endeared. He invited the Rolling Stones to the imposing Prague Castle, the office of the president; allowed a large neon-red heart to be erected on a side of the castle; hired women as bodyguards; and drove along the castle\u2019s endless corridors in a red pedal scooter. Critics called him a reluctant leader who learned to like power too much. One of his first big political setbacks occurred shortly after he took office, when he stubbornly resigned in 1992 to protest the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The country\u2019s dismemberment into two separate states, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, happened anyway, presaging secessionist movements in other parts of Europe. (Mr. Havel was elected president of the Czech Republic in January 1993.) He also alienated many Czechs by refusing to ban the Communist Party or take to task the system that had allowed neighbors to inform on one another. Some lauded him for avoiding witch hunts, but others demanded justice. Many Czechs were disappointed in 1997 when he married Dagmar Veskrnova, an actress almost 20 years his junior known for her role as a topless vampire, less than a year after the death of his widely revered wife, Olga. MR. HAVEL never joined a political party, preferring to embrace a kind of civic politics in which he could remain \u201ccitizen Havel.\u201d But even his admirers say his attempt to try to remain aloof from the tribal battles of political life was na\u00efve. If he has any failing, it is that he \u201cwas too well brought up to confront the political arrogance of others and can\u2019t cope if he has to tell someone bad news,\u201d said Lubos Dobrovsky, one of his oldest friends, who ran his office when he was president. It is perhaps a sign of Mr. Havel\u2019s mixed legacy that his successor is Vaclav Klaus, a right-wing maverick who has fashioned himself as the anti-Havel by railing against issues Mr. Havel championed, like the European Union and the fight against climate change . In the play, Vlastik Klein, Mr. Klaus\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger, orders a cherry orchard to be cut down and replaced with a casino, shopping mall and brothel \u2014 a barely veiled attack on Mr. Klaus\u2019s brand of unbridled capitalism, which Mr. Havel resists. And what, if anything, disappoints Mr. Havel about the state of contemporary capitalist culture, whose forces he helped unleash as a dissident? \u201cI do not like the ads on the shirts of hockey or football players,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019d think Coca-Cola is playing against Pepsi-Cola.\u201d", "keyword": "Havel Vaclav;Czech Republic;Politics and Government;Writing and Writers"}
{"id": "ny0295763", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2016/12/26", "title": "Chiefs Eliminate the Staggering Broncos From Playoff Contention", "abstract": "KANSAS CITY, Mo. \u2014 With their postseason spot secured, the Kansas City Chiefs turned to Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill to roll past the Denver Broncos, 33-10, on Sunday night and keep their A.F.C. West title hopes alive. Kelce had 11 catches for 160 yards and a touchdown, and Hill took a handoff 70 yards for another score as the Chiefs beat the Broncos for the third straight time and eliminated Denver, the Super Bowl champion, from postseason contention. Kansas City punctuated the win when the 346-pound defensive tackle Dontari Poe, who had lined up at quarterback, threw a jump pass to Demetrius Harris with under two minutes left. The Chiefs had already been assured of a wild-card berth when Pittsburgh beat Baltimore earlier in the day. But a win next weekend in San Diego, coupled with a loss by Oakland in Denver, would give the Chiefs their first division title since 2010, not to mention a first-round bye and a home playoff game. Meanwhile, the Broncos trudged through another inept offensive performance. Trevor Siemian completed 17 of 43 passes for 183 yards and threw a game-ending interception, and the only touchdown drive he led came after a pick had given him the ball at the Kansas City 6. Justin Forsett scored two plays later. The lackluster performance came a week after a dismal showing in a 16-3 loss to New England led to a locker-room shouting match between the Broncos\u2019 offense and defense. The team played down any kind of disharmony this week, but its performance on a sloppy, soggy night at Arrowhead Stadium only seemed to underscore the rift during a most frustrating season. Kansas City took control of the prime-time matchup from the opening bell. Alex Smith capped a 77-yard touchdown march with a 10-yard keeper in the first quarter, and Hill outran the banged-up Broncos a few minutes later to give the Chiefs a 14-0 lead. It was the fourth touchdown Hill had scored against the Broncos this season. Forsett\u2019s touchdown gave the Broncos fleeting hope, but that hope was dashed moments later. Kelce took a screen pass and followed perfectly executed blocking for an 80-yard touchdown and a 21-7 lead. The Chiefs\u2019 defense took care of the rest to make it a festive night for their fans. The biggest hit of the night came when a security guard tackled a fan who had run onto the field. Of course, the tackle occurred after the fan had run about 90 yards untouched, so in that respect the security force was not a whole lot better than the Broncos\u2019 first-half defense. Broncos cornerback Kayvon Webster was taken from the field on a cart after being hit high by Chiefs linebacker Terrance Smith while covering a touchback in the second quarter. Webster\u2019s head was snapped back by the block, and he was being evaluated for a concussion. He did not return. Broncos defensive end Derek Wolfe left in the first half with a neck injury and did not return. Denver was already without leading tackler T. J. Ward and tight ends Virgil Green and A. J. Derby because of concussions and linebacker Brandon Marshall because of a hamstring injury.", "keyword": "Football;Kansas City Chiefs;Broncos;NFL; Super Bowl; Super Bowl 2015;Travis Kelce;Tyreek Hill;Kansas City MO"}
{"id": "ny0154880", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/01/24", "title": "iDesign Kit for Barbie From Mattel", "abstract": "Aspiring fashion designers can now mix and match Barbie\u2019s dresses, shoes and handbags using Barbie iDesign, the information-age equivalent of the paper doll. The iDesign kit, available now at mattel.com and in stores for about $30, includes 50 clear plastic cards, each representing a piece of clothing or an accessory, along with software for Windows and a card reader that connects to a computer via the U.S.B. port. When you swipe a card through the scanner, an outfit appears on an on-screen model, who can then appear on a magazine cover or in a fashion show. The shows can be customized with different themes and music, and the magazines can be printed. You can also design an outfit away from the computer, by simply stacking the cards on top of one another. Four computer games extend the card play, with timed design challenges and a tricky style-guessing game. Additional $5 card sets come in themes like rocker, school, casual, party, sporty, beach bling and princess, making it possible to change the look of your virtual Barbie with the swipe of a card. If only picking real outfits were that easy. WARREN BUCKLEITNER", "keyword": "Barbie (Doll);Computers and the Internet;Apparel"}
{"id": "ny0150342", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2008/09/14", "title": "No. 16 Oregon Holds Off Purdue in Second Overtime", "abstract": "LaGarrette Blount ran 3 yards for a touchdown in the second overtime Saturday to help No. 16 Oregon come from behind for a 32-26 victory at Purdue. Oregon (3-0) trailed, 20-3, early in the second quarter, but the Ducks tied the game late in the third, and Purdue kicker Chris Summers missed a 44-yard field-goal attempt as time expired in regulation. The Ducks gained 469 yards in regulation, but had four turnovers and scored just one offensive touchdown before overtime against Purdue\u2019s bend-but-don\u2019t-break defense. Somehow, the Ducks still managed to win the four-hour game played in near 90-degree heat and humidity. \u201cI think it\u2019s a great test for us,\u201d Oregon Coach Mike Bellotti said. \u201cNot just a tough-weather game, but with the reality of what we did to ourselves, then we came back from that.\u201d On Purdue\u2019s first play of the first overtime, Curtis Painter threw down the sideline for Greg Orton, and Oregon\u2019s Walter Thurmond was called for pass interference to give Purdue the ball at the Oregon 10. Summers made a 22-yard field goal to force a second overtime. 79-Year Low for U.C.L.A. \u00b6Max Hall tied a team record with seven touchdown passes and No. 18 Brigham Young handed U.C.L.A. its worst loss in nearly 80 years, overwhelming the visiting Bruins, 59-0. B.Y.U. (3-0) forced four turnovers and blocked a field-goal attempt. In 1929, U.C.L.A.(1-1) was routed by Southern California, 76-0, and two weeks later by Stanford, 57-0. No, It\u2019s Not a Baseball Score \u00b6Wes Byrum kicked a 36-yard field goal in the second quarter and that was all No. 9 Auburn needed for a 3-2 victory at Mississippi State. Auburn (3-0, 1-0 Southeastern Conference) committed three turnovers and missed two field goals, but allowed only 116 yards to Mississippi State (1-2, 0-1). Mississippi State scored with 7 minutes 5 seconds left in the fourth quarter when Auburn offensive lineman Ryan Pugh was called for holding in the end zone, giving the Bulldogs 2 points. Long Trip for Cal \u00b6After a trip across the country and a noon kickoff, No. 23 California was outplayed until the closing minutes in a stunning 35-27 loss at Maryland. Coming off a 10-point loss to unheralded Middle Tennessee State, the Terrapins (2-1) were given little chance against California (2-1), which had totaled 104 points in disposing of Michigan State and Washington State. California scored three touchdowns in the final seven minutes. No Problem Staying Unbeaten \u00b6Sam Bradford completed 18 of 21 passes for 304 yards, matched his career high with five touchdown passes and ran for a sixth score to lead No. 3 Oklahoma to a 55-14 victory at Washington. Oklahoma (3-0) handed Washington (0-3) its largest margin of defeat at home since 1929, when it lost, 48-0, to Southern California. \u00b6Chase Daniel threw for 405 yards and 4 touchdowns to lead No. 6 Missouri to a 69-17 victory against visiting Nevada. Daniel led Missouri (3-0) to seven touchdowns and a field goal before exiting. Nevada fell to 1-2. \u00b6John Parker Wilson passed for 215 yards and 2 touchdowns and the freshman Mark Ingram ran for two touchdowns, leading No. 11 Alabama to a 41-7 victory against visiting Western Kentucky. The Crimson Tide (3-0) gave Coach Nick Saban a start-to-finish effort against the Hilltoppers (1-2), who began moving up to the Football Bowl Subdivision last season. \u00b6Graham Harrell threw for 418 yards and 5 touchdowns, 3 to Michael Crabtree, to lead No. 12 Texas Tech to a 43-7 rout of visiting Southern Methodist. Texas Tech (2-0) ran for 180 yards. S.M.U. (1-1) turned the ball over on three of its first four possessions. \u00b6Matt Asiata scored three touchdowns rushing and Brian Johnson threw for two more and No. 22 Utah beat host Utah State, 58-10. The Utes (3-0) claimed their 11th consecutive victory in the series against the Aggies (0-3). Big Victory at a Price \u00b6Charles Scott Scott ran for touchdowns of 39 and 43 yards, Trindon Holliday scored on a 92-yard punt return and No. 7 Louisiana State cruised to a 41-3 victory against visiting North Texas. The L.S.U. starting linebacker Darry Beckwith left the game with an apparent right knee injury. Beckwith could not put pressure on his leg as trainers helped him to the sideline, where he was given crutches. L.S.U. officials did not specify the extent of the injury. Closer Than Expected \u00b6Patrick Pinkney threw a 24-yard touchdown pass to Jamar Bryant with 1:41 left to play as No. 14 East Carolina rallied for a 28-24 victory at Tulane. The Pirates (3-0, 1-0 Conference USA) vaulted into the national rankings by upsetting Virginia Tech and West Virginia in consecutive weeks, but barely escaped having Tulane (0-2, 0-1) pull the same trick on them. \u00b6Matt Eller\u2019s 27-yard field goal with 1:40 left helped No. 24 Illinois hold off visiting Louisiana-Lafayette, 20-17. Illinois (2-1) did not put the game away until Garrett Edwards recovered an onside kick by Louisiana-Lafayette (0-2) with less than 20 seconds left.", "keyword": "Purdue University;Football;College Athletics;Oregon State University"}
{"id": "ny0255159", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2011/09/29", "title": "Matt Kemp Has Standout Season Amid Dodgers\u2019 Trying One", "abstract": "PHOENIX \u2014 Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp was running out of time in his quest for the triple crown. It was a sensitive area, and there was an obvious way to manage it, but when Don Mattingly found Kemp in the trainer\u2019s room Tuesday at Chase Field, he opted to do nothing. Mattingly, the Dodgers\u2019 manager, resisted the impulse to move Kemp from third in the lineup to leadoff to perhaps give him an extra plate appearance so he might improve his numbers. The Dodgers were facing playoff-bound Arizona, which was battling for home-field advantage in the first round. Mattingly felt he owed it to the Diamondbacks \u2014 and to baseball \u2014 not to tinker with his best lineup. \u201cI think we should just play it straight,\u201d Mattingly said he told Kemp. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem like we should be trying to play for numbers right now.\u201d The big picture was paramount during Mattingly\u2019s 14-year career as a first baseman with the Yankees, his only major league team. \u201cThat\u2019s the way I was always taught,\u201d he said. Mattingly received no push-back from Kemp, who said, \u201cI told him if it happens, it happens.\u201d Entering the season finale, Kemp 27, had a league-leading 124 runs batted in, was tied for the league lead in home runs with 38 and was third in the batting race at .324. On Wednesday night, he hit his 39th homer and drove in two runs to give him 126 R.B.I. No National League player has won the triple crown since Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1937. The last player to win it was Boston\u2019s Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Kemp got a bonus at-bat Tuesday when the game went into extra innings, and he did not waste it, singling to center to drive in a run. He reached second on an error by outfielder Chris Young and scored on James Loney\u2019s single. The Dodgers scored five runs to go ahead, 6-1, but the Diamondbacks, as they have all season, stormed back. They scored six runs, the last four on a grand slam by Ryan Roberts, for a 7-6 victory. Kemp finished behind the N.L. batting leader, Jose Reyes of the Mets, by 13 percentage points. \u201cThere\u2019s a bunch of times I hit balls right at somebody or somebody made a diving catch or I just missed beating out the throw to first,\u201d Kemp said. \u201cThat\u2019s baseball.\u201d As the triple crown race wound down, Kemp was content to let others do the math. The only player whose numbers he had been following closely, he said, was his friend Prince Fielder. Kemp could not tell you what Fielder\u2019s Milwaukee teammate Ryan Braun, who finished second in the batting race, did Tuesday night. But Kemp did know that Fielder had tied him with 38 homers. \u201cMe and Prince are sending text messages to each other all the time,\u201d Kemp said Tuesday. \u201cI told him at the beginning of the season I was trying to get more R.B.I.\u2019s than him. He had three home runs tonight, so I guess I better get with it.\u201d In the visitors\u2019 dugout during batting practice, a first-aid kit the size of a briefcase was open to reveal a murderers\u2019 row of misery. Tums. Maalox. Pepcid. Imodium. Bufferin. Excedrin. Tylenol. The season has been one long headache for the Dodgers, who started 36-46 and have seen their owner challenge his wife in divorce court and the baseball commissioner in bankruptcy court. On the field, Kemp, pitcher Clayton Kershaw (21-5) and Andre Ethier, who hit safely in 30 consecutive games, have provided the only real relief. \u201cThe season that Matt\u2019s having is taking the team\u2019s mind off of everything else,\u201d said Junior Spivey, a former Diamondbacks infielder who stood with Kemp\u2019s mother in the corridor outside the visitor\u2019s clubhouse after Tuesday\u2019s game, waiting to say hello. Kemp\u2019s season has been so sublime, he has won over more than one person with allegiances to the Arizona franchise. The Diamondbacks fans stopped chanting \u201cBeat L.A.!\u201d long enough to politely applaud when Kemp came to bat. \u201cI get some love when we\u2019re in other teams\u2019 ballparks,\u201d said Kemp, who was booed at Dodger Stadium last season, when he batted .249 with 28 homers and 89 R.B.I. after signing a two-year, $10.95 million contract. Toward the end of that season, Kemp delivered what was generally dismissed as a not-so-funny joke, saying that in 2011 he would hit at least 40 homers and steal 40 bases to join a club with only four members: Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez and Alfonso Soriano. Who\u2019s laughing now? Kemp had 39 homers and 40 stolen bases. Kemp said it was \u201cwhack\u201d \u2014 a slang word for crazy that he uses often \u2014 to imagine his 40-40 goal dying on the warning track and winding up as the league\u2019s most valuable player anyway. \u201cI\u2019ve never been really this individual that\u2019s been greedy, trying to get mine,\u201d Kemp said. The M.V.P. race appears to be a dead heat between Kemp and Braun. The voters will have to decide who is fundamentally more valuable: a star on a talented playoff team or a star who carries a lesser team by himself. \u201cI think it\u2019s easier for the guy in the playoff hunt to put up big numbers because he\u2019s not worrying about himself,\u201d said Mattingly, who was the American League M.V.P. in 1985. \u201cHis focus, and the focus of the guys around him, is all on winning.\u201d Except on the days when Kershaw pitches, Kemp is the bright light around which the news media flutter. The attention might have bothered him if not for his high-profile relationship with the singer Rihanna, which ended in December. They were trailed by paparazzi as they crisscrossed the country and circumnavigated the globe. \u201cThere was more attention paid to me as far as other situations that were going on in my life,\u201d Kemp said. \u201cSo, yeah, I think it did help.\u201d He laughed and added: \u201cThere\u2019s some beastly paparazzi out there, especially in New York and L.A. You all are pretty harmless.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Los Angeles Dodgers;Kemp Matt;Mattingly Don"}
{"id": "ny0279552", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/10/20", "title": "Right-Wing Video Suggests D.N.C. Contractors Schemed to Incite Chaos at Donald Trump Rallies", "abstract": "Two operatives who were working with the Democratic National Committee to help elect Hillary Clinton are no longer working in that role after an undercover video appeared to show them plotting to incite violence at Donald J. Trump\u2019s rallies. The creatively edited video (which contains profane language) was the work of James O\u2019Keefe\u2019s Project Veritas Action , a right-wing organization that sends researchers around the country to spy on the inner workings of Democratic campaigns. The tape showed Robert Creamer , of Democracy Partners, and Scott Foval, formerly of People for the American Way and Americans United for Change, appearing to talk about plans to plant people outside of Trump rallies and instigate fights. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what the friggin\u2019 legal and ethics people say, we need to win this,\u201d Mr. Foval said in one clip of the video that describes how to get Mr. Trump\u2019s supporters to start punching the people that they plant in line at his rallies. Violence at Mr. Trump\u2019s rallies was widespread over the summer , as Mr. Trump was widely blamed for riling up his fans with bombastic language. At one point, he promised to pay the legal fees of supporters who roughed up protesters. The Democratic National Committee said in a statement that it contracted Mr. Creamer in June 2016 to do counterprogramming in cities where the Trump campaign was holding events. While the committee said it opposed the incitement of violence of any kind, it was also investigating any potential illegal activity by Mr. O\u2019Keefe. \u201cThe practices described in the video by this temporary regional subcontractor do not in any way comport with our longstanding policies on organizing events, and those statements and sentiments do not represent the values that the committee holds dear,\u201d Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the D.N.C., said in a statement. \u201cWe do not believe, or have any evidence to suggest, that the activities articulated in the video actually occurred.\u201d Mr. Creamer, who was portrayed by the narrator in the video as the \u201cdiabolical\u201d mastermind of a team of Democratic consultants, said that Mr. Foval was no longer working with him and that he was stepping away from the campaign to avoid being a distraction. \u201cWe regret the unprofessional and careless hypothetical conversations that were captured on hidden cameras of a temporary regional contractor for our firm, and he is no longer working with us,\u201d said Mr. Creamer, who is not seen on tape endorsing the plans to create chaos. \u201cWhile none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place, these conversations do not at all reflect the values of Democracy Partners.\u201d Mr. Foval could not be reached for comment. The Clinton campaign denounced the tactics discussed in the video while expressing doubts about the measures employed by Mr. O\u2019Keefe. \u201cWhile Project Veritas has been known to offer misleading video out of context, some of the language and tactics referenced in the video are troubling even as a theory or proposal never executed,\u201d said Zac Petkanas, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. \u201cWe support the Democratic National Committee\u2019s appropriate action addressing this matter and look forward to continue waging a campaign of ideas worthy of our democratic process.\u201d Mr. O\u2019Keefe\u2019s organization put campaigns on notice last year that his investigators, who he considers to be journalists, would be aggressively working to infiltrate their operations this election cycle. While Mr. O\u2019Keefe has been a thorn in the side of campaigns over the years, he has also had legal problems of his own. In 2010, Mr. O\u2019Keefe pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was fined for posing as a repairman to gain access to the office of former Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Three years ago, Mr. O\u2019Keefe paid $100,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former Acorn member after he posed as a pimp during an investigation of the activist group. In his latest video, Mr. O\u2019Keefe said that he planned to release more damaging evidence of wrongdoing before the election.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Video Recordings; Downloads and Streaming;DNC;James E O'Keefe III;Hillary Clinton;Donald Trump;Civil Unrest"}
{"id": "ny0242670", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2011/03/26", "title": "Ivory Coast Violence Forces Hundreds of Thousands to Flee", "abstract": "DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 At least 700,000 people have fled their homes in Ivory Coast \u2019s main city, Abidjan, to escape the increasing violence and collapsing economy stemming from the nation\u2019s political crisis, the United Nations said Friday. Daily gunfire spurred by Laurent Gbagbo \u2019s efforts to stay in power after losing a presidential election in November has pushed thousands of residents out of neighborhoods surrounding the city\u2019s central districts, while the closing of banks and businesses have led to widespread unemployment. \u201cThe massive displacement in Abidjan and elsewhere is being fueled by fears of all-out war,\u201d a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees told reporters Friday in Geneva, estimating that 700,000 to one million people had already left their homes. \u201cBus terminals are overcrowded with passengers desperate to get seats on vehicles heading to northern, central and eastern parts of the country where there has been no fighting so far,\u201d an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, said. In Abidjan, Mr. Gbagbo\u2019s security forces have waged an armed campaign against neighborhoods loyal to the man recognized by international bodies as the winner of the presidential election, Alassane Ouattara, killing at least 25 people with mortar shells at a market last week, the United Nations said. This month, unarmed demonstrators against his rule were mowed down with machine-gun fire. Guerilla fighters have waged attacks against Mr. Gbagbo\u2019s forces in Abidjan, while civilians, caught in the cross-fire, are now deserting neighborhoods wholesale. The United Nations and African political bodies have been unable to stop the attacks on civilians, despite the presence of a large United Nations peacekeeping force in Abidjan and repeated visits to the city by political leaders from across the continent seeking to mediate a settlement. At the United Nations, France and Nigeria are calling for additional sanctions on Mr. Gbagbo and his inner circle \u2014 to add to those imposed late last year by the European Union and the United States \u2014 as well as a ban on heavy weapons use in Abidjan. The United Nations estimates that nearly 500 people have been killed since the election; Mr. Ouattara puts the figure at nearly double that. The mortar attack last week may amount to \u201ccrimes against humanity,\u201d the United Nations said, but a spokesman for Mr. Gbagbo later riposted with a blast against \u201cWestern media\u201d for spreading \u201cfalse information,\u201d warning that international journalists there would be considered a \u201cmedia extension of prevailing terrorism.\u201d Fighting in the western part of Ivory Coast has also displaced tens of thousands of residents, according to the United Nations and aid agencies, as fighters loyal to Mr. Ouattara skirmish with militias and troops tied to Mr. Gbagbo. Towns near the Liberian border have been deserted by people fleeing to the neighboring country, the United Nations said, and there has been looting, rape and killing of civilians in the region. On Tuesday alone, Ms. Fleming said, 6,000 from Ivory Coast entered Liberia.", "keyword": "Ivory Coast;Gbagbo Laurent;Refugees and Displaced Persons;Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare"}
{"id": "ny0147245", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2008/07/08", "title": "After the Battle, Fighting the Bottle at Home", "abstract": "Most nights when Anthony Klecker, a former marine, finally slept, he found himself back on the battlefields of Iraq . He would awake in a panic, and struggle futilely to return to sleep. Days were scarcely better. Car alarms shattered his nerves. Flashbacks came unexpectedly, at the whiff of certain cleaning chemicals. Bar fights seemed unavoidable; he nearly attacked a man for not washing his hands in the bathroom. Desperate for sleep and relief, Mr. Klecker, 30, drank heavily. One morning, his parents found him in the driveway slumped over the wheel of his car, the door wide open, wipers scraping back and forth. Another time, they found him curled in a fetal position in his closet. Yet only after his drunken driving caused the death of a 16-year-old cheerleader did Mr. Klecker acknowledge the depth of his problem: His eight months at war had profoundly damaged his psyche. \u201cI was trying to be the tough marine I was trained to be \u2014 not to talk about problems, not to cry,\u201d said Mr. Klecker, who has since been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder . \u201cI imprisoned myself in my own mind.\u201d Mr. Klecker\u2019s case is part of a growing body of evidence that alcohol abuse is rising among veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them trying to deaden the repercussions of war and disorientation of home. While the numbers remain relatively small, experts say and studies indicate that the problem is particularly prevalent among those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as it was after Vietnam . Studies indicate that illegal drug use, much less common than heavy drinking in the military, is up slightly, too. Increasingly, these troubled veterans are spilling into the criminal justice system. A small fraction wind up in prison for homicides or other major crimes. Far more, though, are involved in drunken bar fights, reckless driving and alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Whatever the particulars, their stories often spool out in unwitting victims, ruptured families, lost jobs and crushing debt. With the rising awareness of the problem has come mounting concern about the access to treatment and whether enough combat veterans are receiving the help that is available to them. Having cut way back in the 1990s as the population of veterans declined, the Veterans Health Administration says it is expanding its alcohol- and drug-abuse services. But advocacy groups and independent experts \u2014 including members of a Pentagon mental-health task force that issued its report last year \u2014 are concerned that much more needs to be done. In May, the House and Senate passed bills that would require the veterans agency to expand substance-abuse screening and treatment for all veterans. \u201cThe war is now and the problems are now,\u201d said Richard A. McCormick, a senior scholar for public health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who served on the Pentagon task force. \u201cEvery day there is a cohort of men and women being discharged who need services not one or two or five years from now. They need them now.\u201d For active-duty service members, the military faces a shortage of substance-abuse providers on bases across the country, while its health insurance plan, Tricare, makes it difficult for many reservists and their families to get treatment. In the breach, a few states, including California , Connecticut and Minnesota , have passed laws or begun programs to encourage alternative sentences, often including treatment, for veterans with substance-abuse and mental-health problems. In recent years, the military has worked to transform a culture that once indulged heavy drinking as part of its warrior ethos into one that discourages it and encourages service members to seek help. \u201cThe Army takes alcohol and drug abuse very seriously and has tried for decades to deglamorize its use,\u201d said Lt. Col. George Wright, an Army spokesman. \u201cWith the urgency of this war, we continue to tackle the problem with education, prevention and treatment.\u201d That is a tricky mission in time of war. \u201cThe problem in today\u2019s military is soldiers have to be warriors, killers, do war, but we don\u2019t allow them any releases like we used to,\u201d said Bryan Lane, a former special forces sergeant who sustained a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and has post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. \u201cYou can\u2019t go out and drink, you can\u2019t get into a fight. It\u2019s completely unrealistic.\u201d The military, he said, is trying to create a contradiction: \u201ca perfect warrior, and then a perfect gentleman.\u201d Warning Signs Grow Fort Drum, in the North Country of New York just outside Watertown, is home to the Army\u2019s most-deployed brigade \u2014 the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division. Late last year, several thousand soldiers returned after 15 months in Iraq. Some had served three, even four, tours, and they quickly overwhelmed the base\u2019s mental health system. A study by an advocacy group, Veterans for America, found the demand for psychological help was so great, and the system so overburdened, that soldiers often waited a month to be seen. Many also did what generations of homecoming soldiers have done: they salved their wounds in local bars. With drinking off-limits in Iraq, at least openly, they were that much more likely to binge, that much less able to tolerate it. The base\u2019s commander, Maj. Gen. Michael L. Oates, says that since his arrival in early 2007, misconduct related to substance abuse has reached \u201cunacceptable\u201d levels, despite a toughened regimen of education, designated-driver programs and penalties. \u201cThe rate of illegal drug use is slightly up; the rate of alcohol is more than slightly up,\u201d General Oates said. \u201cI\u2019m not a teetotaler. I\u2019m not against people drinking. I\u2019m against misconduct.\u201d By last March, he had seen enough. He ordered the base\u2019s newspaper, The Fort Drum Blizzard, to publish the names and photographs of all soldiers charged with drunken driving. To date, at least 116 have appeared. Half were combat veterans who had returned in the last year, the general said, though others may have deployed earlier. Most returning soldiers readjust after a few months. But the general estimated that at least 20 percent turned to heavy drinking or drugs \u2014 typically \u201cthe first signal that there is something wrong.\u201d Across the military, the precise dimensions of the problem are elusive, especially since the different branches largely keep their own statistics. Many studies do not distinguish between service members who have seen battle and those who have not. What is more, behavior becomes far harder to track when service members leave the military. Even so, a variety of surveys, as well as anecdotal evidence and rising alarm in many military communities, indicate growing substance abuse among recent combat veterans. Of particular concern are members of the National Guard and reserves, as well as recently discharged service members, who can lose their bearings outside the camaraderie and structure of the military. In the Army, which has the bulk of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon\u2019s most recent survey of health-related behavior, conducted in 2005 but released last year, found that for the first time in more than 20 years, roughly a quarter of soldiers surveyed considered themselves regular heavy drinkers \u2014 defined as having five or more drinks at least once a week. The report called the increase \u2014 to 24.5 percent in 2005, from 17.2 percent in 1998 \u2014 \u201can issue of concern.\u201d Perhaps the best monitor of recent combat veterans\u2019 mental health is the Pentagon\u2019s postdeployment survey. Reflecting concern about heavy drinking, the latest report, published last November, introduced a question about drinking habits. Of the 88,235 soldiers surveyed in 2005 and 2006, three to six months after returning from war, 12 percent of active-duty troops and 15 percent of reservists acknowledged having problems with alcohol. While drug use decreased substantially after 1980, when the military cracked down, it has increased slightly in the Army and the Marines since 2002, the behavioral survey said. Experts say that, in some cases, troubled combat veterans are more prone to use drugs after leaving the military. In general, studies find that drinking is more prevalent in the military than in the civilian population; the behavioral survey reported that heavy drinking among 18- to 25-year-old men in the Army and the Marines was almost twice as common as among their civilian counterparts. Heavy drinking or drug use frequently figures in what law enforcement officials and commanders at military bases across the country say is a rising number of crimes and other examples of misconduct involving soldiers, marines and recent veterans. \u201cAlcohol and drug use starts a cascade of worse problems,\u201d said Dr. McCormick, the task force member, who recently retired as director of mental health for the state veterans affairs system in Ohio . \u201cIt\u2019s like throwing gasoline on fire.\u201d Most cases involve low-level misconduct. From 2005 to 2006, for example, \u201calcohol-related incidents\u201d \u2014 mostly drunken or reckless driving and disorderly conduct \u2014 more than tripled at Fort Hood, Tex., according to information released to the Pentagon task force. Other statistics showed a similar pattern throughout the Army, a task force member said. The Marines, filled with young men drawn by the corps\u2019 hard-charging image, have traditionally had the military\u2019s highest drinking rates. While the behavior survey showed a slight decrease in heavy drinking after 2002, it showed an increase in binge drinking. The Marines also reported a rise in alcohol-related incidents. Sometimes, though, substance abuse becomes a factor in major crimes. This year, a New York Times examination of killings in this country by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan found that drinking or drug use was frequently involved in the crimes. Last month, a soldier at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso , was charged with killing a woman in a drunken-driving accident \u2014 the third intoxicated soldier there accused of killing a civilian in six months, said the commander, Maj. Gen. Harold B. Bromberg. Substance abuse frequently figures in suicides , which reached a high in the Army last year; alcohol or drugs were cited in 30 percent of those 115 cases, the Pentagon reported. Running through many of these soldiers\u2019 lives is combat trauma or other mental scars of war. Research has shown that the likelihood of mental health problems rises with the intensity of combat exposure. (In a recent RAND Corporation study, one in five veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of combat stress or major depression .) In turn, service members with such problems more often report heavy drinking or illicit drug use. In part, this dynamic is rooted in the warrior code. Trained to be tough and ignore their fear, many combat veterans are reluctant to acknowledge psychic wounds. Or they worry that getting help will damage their careers. And so, like Mr. Klecker, they treat themselves with the liquor bottle or illegal drugs. Raising Awareness In the last decade, the military has rolled out a number of programs to deal with excessive drinking. Soldiers carry call-a-cab cards. One base hands out portable breathalyzers. A new online campaign pokes fun at \u201cThat Guy,\u201d a military man who drinks too much and ends up embarrassing himself and in trouble. Yet many experts and veterans advocates, as well as some military and government officials, agree that treatment continues to lag behind awareness \u2014 in terms of access, but also in the willingness to use what is there. Studies showing the prevalence of alcohol problems also consistently show how few of those problem drinkers receive treatment. In the Pentagon\u2019s postdeployment survey, for example, fewer than a 10th of those reporting alcohol problems had been referred for treatment; only a small fraction received treatment within 90 days. Similarly, in the Pentagon task force data from Fort Hood, only 41 percent of those involved in alcohol-related incidents were referred to the alcohol program. Mental health experts call these results unsurprising. Just as many combat veterans self-medicate by drinking to quiet their mental storms, so they are loathe to acknowledge their drinking problems and seek treatment. Military policy can also hold them back. Service members are increasingly encouraged to seek treatment, without fear of punishment . Even so, signing up automatically alerts a commander. That certainty can stir fears of reprisal and discourage others, like chaplains or marital counselors, from referring troops for treatment. The Pentagon task force recommended changing this policy for soldiers who seek help early, before the drinking or drug use crosses into addiction. \u201cIt is a very difficult problem,\u201d said Shelley M. MacDermid, a co-chairwoman of the panel and director of the Center for Families at Purdue University . \u201cThe likely result is that there are folks who want and need treatment who are not getting it, about whom commanders know nothing.\u201d For users of hard drugs, treatment within the military is rare. The military generally discharges them, arguing that they can no longer do their jobs, and refers them to veterans clinics. However, some experts argue that the military should treat some who started using drugs after fighting in war. At Fort Drum, General Oates says he sometimes gives second chances to some soldiers who test positive. The Army has increased its substance-abuse budget from $38 million in 2004 to $51 million this year. The Marine Corps says its budget is rising, too. Still, recruiting treatment professionals \u201ccontinues to be a challenge,\u201d said Col. Elspeth C. Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general. Colonel Ritchie said the Army was recruiting overseas and at home for 330 jobs, and had filled slightly more than half. In the veterans health system, the cutbacks of the 1990s left only a small network of programs for the most extreme addicts. Today, veterans service organizations say, the system still needs more modern programs offering intense outpatient treatment, detoxification and stabilization services. Some smaller clinics offer bare-bones treatment or none at all, they say, and veterans in rural areas are hard-pressed to find help near home. At the veterans agency, officials say they share Congress\u2019s goal of expanding programs. Dr. Antonette Zeiss, the deputy chief consultant for mental health, said the agency had \u201crebuilt\u201d its programs in the last three years, adding that it had hired 510 counselors and has programs in 90 to 100 of its larger facilities, with 28 more to be added soon. It is also trying to address what many experts say is a growing need: programs for both substance abuse and combat stress. That need was underscored by a New Jersey study of 292 National Guard members who had returned from Iraq in the last year. The researchers found that 37 percent had experienced \u201cproblem drinking\u201d; for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, the figure rose to 55 percent. Yet among those reporting both, 41 percent received mental health treatment but only 9 percent received help for substance abuse. Substance abuse, though, must often be treated first, experts say, since it is hard to treat someone for combat stress who is drinking or using drugs. Getting help can be difficult for many combat veterans who rely on the military\u2019s Tricare health plan \u2014 reservists and National Guard members living far from veterans clinics or military bases, along with some retirees \u2014 the Pentagon task force found. Finding treatment programs that accept Tricare often ends in frustration, and few residential rehabilitation programs have the accreditation required by the plan. A small but growing number of state and local authorities are trying to bridge the gaps. Last January, a city court judge in Buffalo , Robert T. Russell, noticed a surge of recent veterans with substance-abuse and mental-health problems in the city\u2019s courtrooms. He created the nation\u2019s first Veterans Court, where, instead of jail, veterans arrested for low-level crimes, mostly tied to alcohol or drugs, are enrolled in treatment. Among them is Garry Pettengill. When Mr. Pettengill, 25, was medically discharged from the Army in 2006, he had been drinking heavily to cope with a back injury and insomnia . Back home with his wife and three children, he came further unglued. He could not keep a job. While his drinking abated, he said, he started smoking marijuana every day and then began selling it. Last February, he was arrested; out on bail, he fantasized about jumping out windows or hanging himself. A call to a suicide hot line sent him to a veterans hospital for nine days. Then he landed in Veterans Court. He has been clean for five months. \u201cI get punished, obviously,\u201d he said, \u201cbut they want to make sure I do get a job and don\u2019t sell drugs and get the substance-abuse treatment I need.\u201d A Troubled Return Home Anthony Klecker experienced the brutality of war early, enduring ambushes and firefights as one of the first marines to fight from Kuwait to Baghdad and on to Tikrit. What torments him most, though, is the uncertainty. As the gunner on the rear Humvee in a First Marine Division convoy, Corporal Klecker was charged with making sure that nothing \u2014 no cars, no Iraqis \u2014 came too close. In the distance, he saw a man in farmer\u2019s robes running toward his convoy and fired a warning. Suddenly, a white civilian van came hurtling up the road. Mr. Klecker fired another warning, then let loose several bursts of machine-gun fire at the van and the man. The van stopped. Mr. Klecker said he did not know if he had killed them \u2014 though he assumed he did \u2014 or if they were innocent Iraqis. Still, he says: \u201cI was proud. I had a lot of adrenaline. I did my job.\u201d Later, though, the incident no longer seemed so clear-cut. \u201cI started to feel a sense of shame,\u201d he said, \u201cshame about if I did the right thing or didn\u2019t.\u201d Before joining the Marines, Mr. Klecker drank and smoked marijuana, but not heavily, said his lawyer, Brockton Hunter. He was once stopped for drinking and driving, but the charge was downgraded to careless driving because his blood-alcohol level was just over the limit. After Iraq, he shipped out to Okinawa and did what many marines do there: he drank \u2014 a lot. But it was not until he left the Marines and returned home to suburban St. Paul that his panic attacks , nightmares and insomnia worsened. So did his drinking. He rarely spoke about the war, and only to other veterans. Soon he racked up arrests for drinking and fighting, and Mr. Hunter persuaded him to go to the Veterans Affairs center for help. As often happens, the experience did not take. Mr. Klecker says he was shuttled from one counselor to another. Trying to talk about Iraq threw him into a panic. He hit bottom on Oct. 28, 2006, when he drunkenly drove into a highway divider. It dislodged, trapping another driver, Deanna Casey, 16, of Minneapolis , who was killed when a tractor-trailer rammed her small car. \u201cIf I could switch my life with Deanna\u2019s, I would in a heartbeat,\u201d Mr. Klecker said. \u201cI didn\u2019t ask for help, and I should have.\u201d Afterward, Mr. Klecker received a full veterans disability rating for combat stress. At Mr. Klecker\u2019s trial for vehicular manslaughter, the judge recognized the war\u2019s role in his disintegration and accepted his lawyer\u2019s request for a special deal: After a year in jail, Mr. Klecker moved into an intensive inpatient program at the St. Cloud veterans facility to deal first with his drinking and then his combat stress. Deanna\u2019s mother, Catherine Casey, a Minneapolis police officer, did not welcome the sentence. \u201cThere are a lot of young men and women who saw horrible things and have done terrible things and have to live with that,\u201d she remembered thinking. \u201cI thought, \u2018Suck it up, Mr. Klecker.\u2019 \u201d In time, though, she came to see him as \u201ca good kid\u201d who made \u201cbad choices.\u201d In prison, she said, he would get worse. Counselors say Mr. Klecker was a model patient. But he hit a rough patch during the four-week lull \u2014 a result of scheduling conflicts \u2014 between alcohol treatment and therapy for combat stress. Last November, still untreated for combat trauma, Mr. Klecker twice got into heated arguments with fellow patients, a violation of the program's rules. He was forced to leave the inpatient program and wait for an outpatient slot. In February, the judge ruled that Mr. Klecker could not serve his sentence at home and returned him to prison for 19 months.", "keyword": "Veteran;Alcohol abuse;PTSD;Medicine and Health;Drug Abuse;Mental Health;null;Veteran Affairs;Pentagon"}
{"id": "ny0152242", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2008/08/01", "title": "Citing Stability in Iraq, Bush Sees Troop Cuts", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 President Bush said Thursday that increased stability in Iraq would allow the withdrawal of more American forces there, reflecting an emerging consensus at the White House and the Pentagon, though a cautious one, that the war has turned a corner. Mr. Bush\u2019s remarks, made in an unusual early morning statement outside the Oval Office, came as the month ended with the fewest number of deaths of American troops \u2014 13 \u2014 since the war began in 2003, according to a group that tracks American casualties. Mr. Bush and his aides have been reluctant to declare the sharp drop in ethnic and sectarian violence over the last year as irreversible. Still, he gave the clearest indication yet that conditions in Iraq would allow him to begin reducing the number of American troops there before he leaves office in less than six months. There are now roughly 140,000 American troops in Iraq, as many as there were two years ago, when the conflict peaked. But Mr. Bush said that the turnaround in Iraq would allow \u201cfurther reductions in our combat forces, as conditions permit.\u201d He also said that the United States was \u201cmaking progress\u201d in negotiations with Iraq\u2019s government over the terms for American forces to remain in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year. An informal deadline for reaching an agreement expired on Thursday. Officials said that negotiations were continuing and predicted that there would be a deal, though it could take several more days or weeks. The administration propelled those negotiations after Mr. Bush agreed to a \u201cgeneral time horizon,\u201d which many Iraqis like to view as a timetable for withdrawing American and other foreign troops and turning over security to Iraqi forces. Mr. Bush used his statement to highlight what he described as the success of his decision last year to deploy a \u201csurge\u201d of 30,000 American troops. He noted that violence had reached the lowest levels since spring 2004 and had remained at low levels for three consecutive months, even as the last of the additional forces left Iraq. American deaths have paralleled the ebb. The previous monthly low came in May, according to icasualties.org , which tracks the figures, when 19 soldiers died. Deaths among Iraq\u2019s civilians and security forces fell to 865 in July from 975 in June, the Ministry of Interior reported. Mr. Bush said that Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and the American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, were confident enough to speak of \u201ca degree of durability\u201d to the gains. Mr. Bush also highlighted his decision, first announced in April, to reduce tours in Iraq to 12 months, from the current 15 months. The longer tours, imposed last year with the \u201csurge,\u201d badly strained forces and were widely unpopular in the Army. \u201cWe owe our thanks to all those who wear the uniform and their families, who support them in their vital work,\u201d Mr. Bush said, speaking alone just after 8 a.m. on the Colonnade outside the Oval Office. \u201cAnd the best way to honor them is to support their mission and bring them home with victory.\u201d The issue of American forces has been a contentious one in American politics, and the reductions Mr. Bush foreshadowed could be announced in the thick of the presidential campaign. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, has called for a withdrawal of all combat forces within a timetable of 16 months, a position the Republican contender, Senator John McCain, has ridiculed as defeatist. Mr. Bush praised what he called the growing proficiency of Iraq\u2019s government and its security forces, noting that Iraq now had 192 combat battalions. Yet he appeared eager not to declare victory prematurely, something that has haunted him since he appeared before a \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d banner in 2003. \u201cWe remain a nation at war,\u201d he said. \u201cAl Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, but the terrorists remain dangerous, and they are determined to strike our country and our allies again.\u201d The American military disclosed on Thursday that soldiers had killed three unarmed people during an operation northwest of Samarra on Wednesday, and injured a fourth. Ali Salih Jubarah, a spokesman for Salahuddin Province, the region where the killings occurred, said that Dahia Hussein and her two sons, Ali Jassim and Muhammad Jassim, all civilians, were killed during a raid on a house. He identified the injured person as Ms. Hussein\u2019s daughter, Sabeiha Jassim. The military said that soldiers had been fired on from the area where the people were killed and had arrested a man who \u201cadmitted working with explosives,\u201d in the same area. It said that no weapons had been found with any of the Iraqis. Earlier in July, American soldiers killed the son and nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province, and last week, the American military acknowledged that three Iraqis killed on their way to work near the Baghdad airport in June were civilians. In Mosul, in northern Iraq, a bomb on Thursday killed three policemen, wounding four others.", "keyword": "Iraq;Bush George W;United States Armament and Defense"}
{"id": "ny0088504", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2015/09/02", "title": "Lawyer Who Advised Churches in China Faces Secretive Detention", "abstract": "HONG KONG \u2014 A Chinese lawyer who has opposed a government campaign to tear down churches and church crosses faces up to six months in secretive detention after the police detained him and accused him of threatening state security, his colleague said on Tuesday. The lawyer, Zhang Kai, who is from Beijing, disappeared into custody a week ago while in Wenzhou, a commercial city on the coast of Zhejiang Province, where many members of the large and prosperous Christian community have fought the government\u2019s efforts to reduce the presence of churches . Mr. Zhang was in Wenzhou advising a church when the police took him away last Tuesday, and they have since issued an order that could place him under secretive detention for six months, said Yang Xingquan, a colleague of Mr. Zhang\u2019s from the Xinqiao Law Firm in Beijing. Mr. Yang, who was in Wenzhou looking for Mr. Zhang, cited information from the police and Christians in the city. The police refused to allow Mr. Yang to see Mr. Zhang, and they did not explain why they had charged him with endangering state security and \u201cassembling a crowd to disrupt social order,\u201d Mr. Yang said. Mr. Yang said he believed that Mr. Zhang\u2019s assistant, Liu Peng, and another legal worker, Fang Xiangui, were also in secretive detention in Wenzhou. \u201cWe haven\u2019t been told where Zhang Kai is or really why he\u2019s been detained,\u201d Mr. Yang said. \u201cWe\u2019re still waiting to see whether we\u2019ll be allowed to see him,\u201d he said, citing comments from a police officer involved in the case. \u201cNext, we\u2019ll try to understand the circumstances and speak to people who had contact with him.\u201d Mr. Zhang\u2019s case combines two aspects of tightening restrictions on civic life in China under President Xi Jinping that have alarmed human rights advocates: an intense drive against human rights lawyers and restrictions on religion. Since July, hundreds of lawyers and activists who took on politically contentious causes, like abuse of police power and restrictions on expression, have been detained and questioned by the police , and several in Beijing have been charged with exploiting public grievances to undermine the government and enrich themselves. Their supporters have called the charges a travesty. Amnesty International estimated last month that more than 230 had been detained and that at least 26 were still held by the police. According to Mr. Yang, who said he had spoken to a police officer involved in the case, Mr. Zhang was being held under a form of detention called \u201c residential confinement .\u201d The police, citing national security needs, have used that process to detain dissidents in secret without trial or access to lawyers or family. Mr. Zhang is one of the most energetic legal advisers of churches in Wenzhou who has opposed government efforts to remove crosses, or demolish some churches, which officials have said violate zoning rules. The churches and their supporters say the government\u2019s real intention is to reduce the visibility and influence of the churches. \u201cChristianity teaches us to submit,\u201d Mr. Zhang said in July, according to Initium Media , a Chinese news website based in Hong Kong. \u201cBut what we ought to submit to is the Constitution and morality, not to illegal people and conduct.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Zhang Kai;Lawyers;Political prisoner;church,churches;Christianity;Human Rights"}
{"id": "ny0232623", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/08/28", "title": "Drought in Russia Ripples Beyond the Wheat Fields", "abstract": "MOSCOW \u2014 Early reports from Russia\u2019s harvest indicate that yields of wheat and barley are down sharply, as predicted after a major drought here this summer that has helped send global wheat prices up sharply since June. Despite the implications for Russian consumers and the global market, the crop failures may translate to a relatively minimal financial effect on the country\u2019s agricultural companies, which before the drought were just catching their stride after an overhaul of Soviet-era collective farms. The higher prices, in fact, made one company profitable, according to an earnings report released Friday. Nationally, the harvest has been diminished by more than 30 percent, according to the ministry of agriculture. Russia will certainly produce less grain than it consumes for the first time since 2004, and may import wheat for the first time in a decade. Last year it was the world\u2019s third-largest wheat exporter, behind the United States and Canada. On Friday, wheat for delivery in December was trading on the Chicago Board of Trade for $6.95 a bushel \u2014 up more than 40 percent from its low in June before the drought but down from its high of $8.68 on Aug. 6 after Russian announced an export ban. On Russia\u2019s domestic market it is now selling at about $6.20 a bushel. Expressing anger over the higher bread prices in Russia that have accompanied the rise in grain, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said Friday, \u201cSomeone is simply cashing in on the circumstances.\u201d Prosecutors have recently raided bakeries in Moscow on accusations of price gouging. A bad harvest used to mean heads would roll in the Communist Party. But the spread of corporate farming in Russia in recent years now means investment portfolios are on the line, instead. The drought \u201chas been a watershed event for the industry,\u201d Michael Schneyderman, chief financial officer for Black Earth Farming , an operator of fields in central Russia that is listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, said in a telephone interview Friday, after the company released second-quarter earnings showing a profit of $1.4 million. That profit, coming amid the drought, was in contrast to the company\u2019s persistent losses of the last few years. \u201cIt\u2019s a silver lining,\u201d Mr. Schneyderman said. With the harvest about half over, most investor-financed farming operations that took over from the collective farms over the last decade appear to be poised to lose some money. Mikhail V. Krasnoperov, an analyst at Troika Dialog bank, said Russian farmers would collectively earn about $1 billion less than they expected in the spring, according to a calculation based on the lower harvest forecast and factoring in current wheat prices. Yet, of perhaps longer-term importance for Russian agriculture, several of the largest private companies, including Black Earth, are saying that rising prices will more than make up for their yield losses from the drought. Black Earth Farming reported Friday that yields of winter wheat, usually the most bountiful crop, fell to 1.9 metric tons per hectare, compared with 3.5 tons last year. But other crops, including sunflowers and soybeans, fared better. Over all, Black Earth Farming says wheat prices are up 71 percent since spring, while yields are on average down 30 to 40 percent from forecasts before the drought. \u201cWhatever we\u2019ve lost in the yield, we sincerely hope to compensate by way of rising price,\u201d Mr. Schneyderman, the chief financial officer, said. In fact, shares of Razgulay, a grain producer listed on the Micex stock exchange in Moscow, rose by 23 percent in July. Shares in another Russian producer, Pava, rose 28 percent. Shares in Black Earth did not fare as well, rising 1.8 percent over the month ending Aug. 16, the height of the drought, as the company\u2019s fields are in the hardest-hit regions. The stock activity, analysts say, shows that the market mechanisms that lured investors into the sector are for the most part working, despite efforts at price controls that included a ban on wheat exports announced by Mr. Putin in early August. Analysts say the ban, to remain in effect through Dec. 31, has been largely ineffectual in reducing domestic wheat prices \u2014 pleasing farmers but driving angry officials, including Mr. Putin, to pursue other efforts to control potentially destabilizing food inflation. Bread prices rose 16 percent from the beginning of July through mid-August, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. For Russians, particularly the poor or the elderly who recall the privations of the Soviet era, the price of bread is a deeply emotional issue. But analysts say the high domestic grain prices \u2014 a root cause of the higher food prices \u2014 will have the virtue of keeping the Russian grain producers afloat, and able to invest in next year\u2019s sowing. Black Earth said in its filing Friday that it expected to fetch prices of $176 to $208 a metric ton from wheat from the 2010 harvest. By comparison, Russian domestic wheat prices had been languishing around $116 a metric ton before the drought. Policies pursued here ripple far beyond Russia\u2019s borders, to countries in the Middle East that rely on wheat imports, now more expensive, as well as to American breadbasket states where rising prices are elevating the incomes of farmers. (In the United States and other developed countries, the price of grain is a relatively small cost component of processed foods.) Russia is something of a wild card in global agriculture as it possesses the world\u2019s largest reserves of fertile but fallow fields, with vast potential to raise production. After a series of downgrades this year, the Russian harvest is now forecast at 60 million to 63 million tons, compared with 97 million tons in 2009, according to the ministry of agriculture. So, it is already clear the harvest will fall short of internal demand for food and fodder of 73 million to 75 million tons of grain. What remains uncertain is whether the government will disburse its roughly 9.6 million tons from state grain reserves this year, to largely cover the shortfall and dampen domestic prices, or hold onto some in the event of another bad harvest next year. If state reserves are withheld, Russian millers and livestock farmers would be compelled to import large quantities of grain for the first time since the late 1990s. If the country becomes an importer, domestic grain prices will certainly remain roughly in the range of global prices, despite Mr. Putin\u2019s ban on exports, according to Ulyana O. Lenvalskaya, a consumer sector analyst at Renaissance Capital bank. Domestic producers like Black Earth will be able to match the prices charged by international grain traders. The decision on the reserves, like so much else, is expected to rest on whether enough rain falls in the next few weeks to moisten the soil for winter-wheat sowing in central Russia. Rain would improve chances of a better harvest next year, and allow the government to release reserves over the winter.", "keyword": "Grain;Russia;International Trade and World Market"}
{"id": "ny0217522", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2010/04/25", "title": "Obama Marks Genocide Without Saying the Word", "abstract": "ASHEVILLE, N.C. \u2014 President Obama , who as a candidate vowed to use the term genocide to describe the Ottoman mass slaughter of Armenians nearly a century ago, once again declined to do so on Saturday as he marked the anniversary of the start of the killings. Trying to navigate one of the more emotionally fraught foreign policy challenges, Mr. Obama issued a statement from his weekend getaway here commemorating the victims of the killings but tried to avoid alienating Turkey, a NATO ally, which adamantly rejects the genocide label. \u201cOn this solemn day of remembrance, we pause to recall that 95 years ago one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century began,\u201d Mr. Obama said in the statement, which largely echoed the same language he used on this date a year ago. \u201cIn that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire .\u201d When he was running for president and seeking votes from some of the 1.5 million Armenian-Americans, Mr. Obama had no qualms about using the term genocide and criticized the Bush administration for recalling an ambassador who dared to say the word. As a senator, he supported legislation calling the killings genocide, and in a statement on Jan. 19, 2008, he said that \u201cthe Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact.\u201d Two years later, as president, he used none of that sort of language, though as he did a year ago, he hinted to Armenians that he still felt the same way. \u201cI have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is in all of our interest to see the achievement a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.\u201d His statement came as the issue has grown as a source of tension between the United States and Turkey, and as a reconciliation effort between Turkey and Armenia that Mr. Obama has championed has seemingly stalled. In March, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly to condemn the killings as an act of genocide, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote because it would threaten the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts. Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington in protest. Armenia announced Thursday that it would suspend ratification of peace accords with Turkey, apparently because it was angered that Turkey was making new demands. Armenia insisted that it was not altogether abandoning the peace process, but analysts indicated that the Armenian government believed Turkey was trying to pressure it to reach a separate peace treaty with another neighbor, Azerbaijan, a close Turkish ally. Although the president\u2019s statement did not use the term \u201cgenocide\u201d on Saturday, it was strong enough to provoke a sharp statement from the Turkish Foreign Ministry, which called the language a reflection of a one-sided political perception. \u201cThird countries neither have a right nor authority to judge the history of Turkish-Armenian relations with political motives,\u201d the statement said. Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America, an advocacy group based in Washington, condemned the \u201ceuphemisms and evasive terminology\u201d in Mr. Obama\u2019s statement and called it \u201cyet another disgraceful capitulation to Turkey\u2019s threats.\u201d \u201cToday we join with Armenians in the United States and around the world in voicing our sharp disappointment with the president\u2019s failure to properly condemn and commemorate the Armenian genocide,\u201d said Ken Hachikian, the committee\u2019s chairman. He added that Mr. Obama\u2019s failure to follow through on his campaign pledge was \u201callowing Turkey to tighten its gag rule on American genocide policy.\u201d", "keyword": "Armenians;War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity;Obama Barack;Turkey"}
{"id": "ny0210806", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2017/01/05", "title": "New York City ID Holders Aren\u2019t a Threat, N.Y.P.D. Official Says in Court", "abstract": "The New York Police Department\u2019s highest-ranking counterterrorism official said in court on Thursday that records associated with the city\u2019s municipal ID card program could be destroyed without increasing the risk of terrorism. John Miller, the department\u2019s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, was testifying in the courtroom of Justice Philip G. Minardo of the State Supreme Court on Staten Island in a case brought by two State Assembly members from the borough who are seeking to block the destruction of the records; plans to destroy them were built into the legislation that created the ID program, known as IDNYC . \u201cIn the course of two years, we have not seen New York City IDs surfacing in a rampage of terrorism threats or other matters,\u201d Mr. Miller said. For six hours, Justice Minardo questioned city officials and the Staten Island lawmakers, Ronald Castorina Jr. and Nicole Malliotakis, both Republicans, and then agreed to hear more witnesses for the plaintiffs next week. In the meantime, the city must continue to retain the documents, which were to have been destroyed on Dec. 31. The IDNYC card, which had been given to 1,029,618 New Yorkers as of 2016\u2019s end, has been a boon for undocumented immigrants, as well as homeless or transgender individuals, in gaining access to city services and, in some instances, opening bank accounts. Undocumented immigrants can use a combination of foreign passports or consular documents, which are scanned by the city during the application process, to prove their identity to obtain the cards. Mr. Castorina has said the suit was not about immigration, but after the court session he said undocumented immigrants should not be eligible for the card. \u201cIt\u2019s a violation of law,\u201d he said, adding that they were in the country illegally. When questioned by Justice Minardo, Mr. Castorina was dismissive of Mr. Miller\u2019s testimony. \u201cWhat I heard was political mumbo jumbo,\u201d Mr. Castorina said on the stand. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made IDNYC a signature of his administration, and Mr. Castorina said later that Mr. Miller was beholden to the mayor. Image John Miller, the New York Police Department\u2019s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism, who testified on Thursday in a lawsuit over the IDNYC program. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images Immigrant advocacy groups want the city to go ahead with the document destruction because they fear that the information could be used by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has said he would deport two to three million undocumented people with criminal convictions. Under the law that created the ID program in 2014, records of the documents used to apply were to be kept for two years and made available only through a judicial warrant or subpoena . Applicants were promised privacy. The law was negotiated with the Police Department, and Mr. Miller admitted that the police department had wanted a longer period of document retention, but negotiated the two years. \u201cWe wanted a period of time to establish a baseline \u2014 to take the temperature of the potential criminal implications of what might emanate from the IDs,\u201d he said. On Dec. 7, the city said it would no longer retain the documents submitted with the applications, but would still retain the applications. Mr. Miller said that out of the more than one million applications, there had been only four cases involving identity theft. From January 2015, when the program started, to Dec. 7, 2016, law enforcement officials obtained the personal information of nine applicants. A total of 102 applications were shown to have some evidence of fraud. Mr. Miller said that there was actually a greater risk of \u201cmassive identity fraud\u201d in retaining the scanned documents, leaving them open to hacking. Ravi Batra , a lawyer recently retained by Mr. Castorina and Ms. Malliotakis, argued that the city\u2019s \u201ccompassion\u201d toward the underprivileged came at the expense of the security of all New Yorkers. Both Nisha Agarwal, commissioner of the Mayor\u2019s Office of Immigrant Affairs, and Steven Banks, commissioner of New York City\u2019s Human Resources Administration, whose agency administers the program, testified to the strict security measures in place to ensure documents were authentic, and Mr. Banks cited the work of fraud investigators.", "keyword": "Illegal Immigration;NYC;ID;NYPD;Ronald Castorina Jr.;Nicole Malliotakis;Philip G. Minardo;Terrorism;John J Miller"}
{"id": "ny0145672", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/10/13", "title": "For Moyer, a Slow Build and a Quick Hook", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 It was no surprise that the histrionics in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series started as soon as Jamie Moyer left the mound Sunday night. Moyer is a gentleman, a father of seven, better known for his charity work than for starting bench-clearing brawls. Intimidation is not Moyer\u2019s game anyway. He has the slowest fastball in the majors, and he was hit hard by the Los Angeles Dodgers, allowing six runs and recording just four outs in a 7-2 Phillies loss. \u201cI\u2019ve pitched too many innings and pitched too many years \u2014 one game doesn\u2019t make or break my career,\u201d Moyer said. \u201cObviously it\u2019s the playoffs and it\u2019s magnified now. But we are all professionals and we have to handle it professionally.\u201d The Phillies still lead the series, two games to one, but for Moyer, the timing of his shortest start in more than a decade could not have been worse. He has never pitched in the World Series, and he is trying to help the Phillies make it there for the first time since 1993. Moyer pitched for the Baltimore Orioles that season, having weathered a career crossroads that might have discouraged others. That he was even pitching on Sunday, at age 45, was an achievement in itself. \u201cIt shows a lot of heart, a lot of character, a lot of fight, a lot of will,\u201d said Greg Maddux of the Dodgers. Like Moyer, Maddux was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1984 and made his debut two years later. Maddux quickly vaulted to stardom. Moyer was nearly a has-been. After the Cubs cut him from their minor league camp in March 1992, they made Moyer this offer: batting-practice pitcher and bullpen coach for their Class A team in Peoria, Ill. Moyer was 29 and had not won a major league game in 18 months. He did not win another for 15 more. The Cubs did not think he could help them as a pitcher, but they valued his intellect. \u201cHe would have done a great job,\u201d said Steve Roadcap, the Peoria manager that year. \u201cI\u2019m sure he would have helped me out tremendously, because of the way he studies the game.\u201d But for Moyer, it was easy to reject the offer. He said he knew he could not throw much harder than batting-practice speed, but he also knew pitching was more complex than that. He had a healthy left arm and did not want to waste it. \u201cI wasn\u2019t ready to say, I can\u2019t play anymore,\u201d Moyer said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m still not.\u201d At 45 years 329 days, Moyer was the second-oldest pitcher to start a postseason game, behind Jack Quinn, who was 46 years 103 days in 1929 as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics. Moyer is the oldest active player in the majors. He has more victories after turning 40 than any pitcher in the last 75 years except Phil Niekro, the Hall of Fame knuckleballer. Moyer has 82 wins since his 40th birthday \u2014 and 212 since turning down Peoria to be a starter for the Toledo Mud Hens. That job was only marginally more glamorous, but after a full season there \u2014 and eight starts in the Orioles\u2019 farm system \u2014 he was back in the majors for good. Moyer went 16-7 with a 3.71 earned run average for the Phillies this year, retaining a serious work ethic and boyish enthusiasm. \u201cEverybody\u2019s made differently,\u201d said Cole Hamels, the Phillies\u2019 24-year-old ace. \u201cMaybe he was made to throw 80 miles an hour but have more energy than most people.\u201d Hamels was 2 in 1986, when Moyer made his major league debut for the Cubs and beat his childhood idol, Steve Carlton. Moyer had grown up in the Philadelphia suburb of Souderton, Pa., and cut school to see the Phillies\u2019 victory parade after the 1980 World Series, when he was a high school senior. \u201cI remember saying it would be pretty awesome someday to be sitting on those floats as they go down Broad Street,\u201d Moyer said. \u201cSo to see where we are, each time we win a game we get a step closer to that, that\u2019s still part of a dream.\u201d This is Moyer\u2019s third trip to the championship series; he was with Seattle for the other two, in 2000 and 2001. The first of those he missed after breaking his left kneecap during a simulated game on the eve of the series. Before the injury, Moyer would jog on the warning track for 20 minutes before almost every game, part of a strict workout program. He still works strenuously, arriving six hours before most night games for daily exercise on an underwater treadmill. \u201cI tell you what, there\u2019s not a harder worker in baseball,\u201d said Ruben Amaro Jr., the assistant general manager for the Phillies, who is two years younger than Moyer and has been retired as a player for a decade. \u201cLet me put it this way: He puts all of us to shame.\u201d It was not always that way for Moyer. When his career came to the early crossroads, in 1992, he threw a bullpen session with Roadcap, the Peoria manager, before his tryout with Toledo. Roadcap had been a minor league teammate of Moyer\u2019s, and they talked about his preparation. Moyer still kept meticulous journals on the tendencies of every hitter he faced. But he was not pushing himself between starts the way he had done to reach the majors. \u201cIt\u2019s no different than what I tell my players today,\u201d said Roadcap, now the manager of the Phillies\u2019 Class A team in Lakewood, N.J. \u201cThose little things add up to big things, and I think he got away from that a little bit. Now, he takes care of the little things and he\u2019s still pitching at 45.\u201d Moyer\u2019s example is not lost on Hamels. Hamels said he worked as hard as he could but was embarrassed by how little he did compared with Moyer. Yet the off-field example is only part of Moyer\u2019s influence. On July 20, Hamels\u2019s arm felt stiff as he faced the Florida Marlins. Instead of whistling to the plate, his fastball chugged. He had always thrown an exceptional changeup, as does Moyer. Suddenly, Hamels had Moyer\u2019s fastball, too \u2014 and the feeling was sheer terror. \u201cI was extremely scared,\u201d Hamels said. \u201cI was panicked. I was afraid I was going to give up a home run every pitch.\u201d Moyer kept Hamels calm between innings, telling him to relax and concentrate on hitting his spots. Nobody else could have sounded so credible, Hamels said, but Moyer makes a living doing just what he said. Hamels tossed eight innings that day, allowing two runs. \u201cHe provides a lot of leadership, not only when he pitches but when he\u2019s not playing the game,\u201d said the Phillies\u2019 pitching coach, Rich Dubee. \u201cHe really doesn\u2019t take a day off. He doesn\u2019t take a pitch off. He\u2019s a tremendous student of the game and always trying to help out in some area.\u201d Moyer has never thrown 90 m.p.h. \u2014 \u201cTwo pitches added together, maybe,\u201d he said, \u201cbut not one total pitch.\u201d And as the years have gone by, his fastball has dipped closer to 80. He relies on getting ahead in the count and in expanding the strike zone, a strategy the Dodgers countered by swinging early in the count. With the bases loaded and two out in the first, Moyer threw a 2-2 pitch down the middle to Blake DeWitt, who ripped it into the right-field corner for a three-run triple for a 5-0 Dodgers lead. After Rafael Furcal homered on Moyer\u2019s first pitch in the second, he lasted one more out. Moyer also lost his division series start at Milwaukee, lasting only four innings before leaving for a pinch-hitter. From the dugout, he tipped his cap to the plate umpire, as he does at the end of almost every start. It is part of a decidedly veteran approach, which includes the stirrups he wears and the extensive throwing he does between starts. He is unusual in this era, but he has no plans to stop. Moyer speaks hopefully about pitching until his age matches his uniform number \u2014 50 \u2014 and it has always been foolish to doubt him.", "keyword": "Moyer Jamie;Philadelphia Phillies;Baseball;World Series;Age Chronological"}
{"id": "ny0147512", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2008/07/24", "title": "A Camera With a Whole Lot of Lens Takes Wide Shots in Lower Light", "abstract": "Zoom lenses on digital cameras are intended to zero in on distant faces. Few can also go really wide, though. And fast lenses for shooting in dim light are usually found only on single-lens reflex cameras. The Leica zoom lens on Panasonic\u2019s $500 Lumix DMC-LX3, though, goes as wide as a 24mm lens on a film S.L.R. camera and opens up to f/2.0 \u2014 gathering twice as much light as an f/2.8. Photographers who like to use available light will also appreciate the camera\u2019s high sensitivity, up to ISO 3200 at its full, 10.1-megapixel resolution, and ISO 6400 with 3-megapixel resolution. The camera will be available in late August from Panasonic.com and some retailers. Other toys and tools for creative photographers in this camera include six color and three monochrome film-simulation modes, provisions for double- and triple-exposure shots and a choice of three aspect ratios. It can also shoot widescreen video in high definition. The DMC-LX3\u2019s lens does not retract completely, so it will not fit in your pocket without a noticeable bulge. But it is a lot of lens. IVAN BERGER", "keyword": "Cameras;Panasonic Co;Photography"}
{"id": "ny0156585", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2008/06/07", "title": "Police Say Steroids Dealer Shot Himself", "abstract": "PLANO, Tex. \u2014 A preliminary examination by the Dallas County Medical Examiner\u2019s Office found that David Jacobs, a convicted steroids dealer who had linked several N.F.L. players to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, committed suicide, according to the police. The police said that Jacobs had two self-inflicted gunshot wounds \u2014 one in the abdomen and the other in the head \u2014 and said no suicide note was found at the scene. Jacobs and his girlfriend, Amanda Jo Earhart-Savell, were found shot to death early Thursday morning at his home here. The police said they had not determined the precise circumstances surrounding Earhart-Savell\u2019s death, but said she sustained multiple gunshot wounds. \u201cOur investigation is consistent with murder-suicide,\u201d Andrae Smith, a public information officer for the Plano police, said Friday. According to a report by the Dallas television station WFAA, the Plano police recovered 146 vials of steroids, 10 syringes, scales, bags with steroids and marijuana, several computers, a .22-caliber semiautomatic gun and ammunition from Jacobs\u2019s home. The police also reportedly found 10 expended .40-caliber bullet casings, 6 expended bullet slugs and a bullet fragment. Jacobs, who was convicted on federal steroid distribution charges last year, began cooperating with N.F.L. officials shortly after he was sentenced to probation May 1. At a meeting last month, he provided the N.F.L. with documentary evidence and testimony that tied several players to performance-enhancing drugs. In an interview with The New York Times in April, Jacobs described how he provided two N.F.L. players with steroids and human growth hormone and said they supplied other players with the banned substances. He also said he counseled several players on how to exploit loopholes in the N.F.L.\u2019s drug-testing program. Jacobs\u2019s case received national attention because a Web site for a supplements store that Jacobs owned boasted that he had counseled players on the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons. In April, The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors \u2014 based on information developed from their investigation of Jacobs \u2014 were looking into whether Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, had distributed performance-enhancing drugs. Lehr, who was suspended for testing positive for a banned substance in 2006, played for the Cowboys from 2001 to 2004 and for the Falcons from 2005 to 2006. Lehr\u2019s lawyer has denied that his client sold banned substances and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he had refused to pay Jacobs\u2019s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr for money. Jacobs said he stopped using steroids in April 2007. Depression and suicide are symptoms of steroid withdrawal, but those effects normally last for several months at most, said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an internist and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. \u201cIf he did indeed stop using steroids in April of 2007, then it is highly unlikely he would still have any significant psychiatric side effects of using steroids,\u201d Wadler said in a telephone interview. \u201cBecause of the fact that he committed suicide, it raises the question, do we really know what the period of drug usage was?\u201d Don Hooton, whose 17-year-old son, Taylor, a high school pitcher in Plano, committed suicide in 2003 after he had used steroids, said Jacobs\u2019s death further draws attention to the problem of steroid use in Plano. \u201cThere\u2019s just this tendency to want to deny that this problem is going on in a community,\u201d Hooton, who started the Taylor Hooton Foundation to fight steroid abuse, said in a telephone interview.", "keyword": "Jacobs David;Steroids;Football;Drug Abuse and Traffic"}
{"id": "ny0005232", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/04/24", "title": "Boston Marathon Deaths Reinforce Community Bonds", "abstract": "BOSTON \u2014 In the days after the marathon bombings, the slogan \u201cWe are one Boston\u201d became a rallying cry for this bleeding city. It flashes on L.E.D. signs that display route numbers on the front of city buses. It is echoed in the name of the One Fund Boston , a charity set up to aid victims of the attack, which killed three people and injured, at last count, 264. It is a fortifying call, unifying varied neighborhoods and groups around a theme of recovery, including two distinct communities that are now, in parallel, grappling with the death of one of their own: the Ashmont section of the city\u2019s Dorchester neighborhood and the thousands of Chinese citizens who flock to Boston to study. For a week, the historic clock in the center of Ashmont was stopped at 2:50 p.m., the time the bombs went off on April 15 near the Boston Marathon\u2019s finish line. \u201cThat was sort of the point where no one knew what was going on,\u201d said Jeffrey Gonyeau, the only person with keys to the clock, who made the decision to halt it. \u201cTime sort of stopped, not only for us but also for the Richard family.\u201d By the next morning, residents knew that one of the victims was from Ashmont: Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy who was at the finish line with his family. His mother, Denise, and his sister, Jane, were grievously injured. The clock sits at the center of Peabody Square, the main intersection in Ashmont, a neighborhood that has undergone a rejuvenation \u2014 thanks in part to Martin\u2019s father, Bill Richard, one of its dedicated civic activists. As a former president of St. Mark\u2019s Area Main Street , a civic group, he played key roles in a renovation of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority train station here and the development of the Carruth Building, whose shops and condominiums brought a much-needed economic boost. Parts of Ashmont are known for near-constant social activity, and the Richards play a central role in that, too. \u201cFrom feeding hot dogs to the volunteers after our annual neighborhood cleanup day in April to hosting a summer ice cream social for kids, the Richards are the go-to people,\u201d said Pat O\u2019Neill, who is the president of the neighborhood association for the Ashmont-Adams enclave, where the Richards live. Martin\u2019s death, and the injuries of his mother and sister, left the community wondering how and where to direct its ample energy to give back to the family, which also includes another son. \u201cThey\u2019re super type-A personalities,\u201d said Chris Douglass, the owner and executive chef of two Ashmont restaurants \u2014 one of which, Tavolo, has become an informal meeting place for people to grieve and find ways to help the family. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a blood drive and fund-raiser, and they want to break the record for the biggest blood drive in the history of the state.\u201d Mr. Gonyeau said, \u201cThis is a neighborhood of planners and doers,\u201d adding, \u201cEverybody is just getting ready, laying groundwork for when the family needs our help.\u201d Image The service for Lu Lingzi at Boston University, where she was a student. Credit Pool photo by Dina Rudick On Monday, with the two suspects in the bombings accounted for and plans to help the Richards beginning to percolate \u2014 for instance, a group of neighbors intends to provide the family with as many meals as possible \u2014 Mr. Gonyeau restarted the clock. But in some ways, it is difficult to imagine moving forward here with some aspects of the community\u2019s life \u2014 especially those in which the Richards would normally play a role. Like the float that they and others had planned to create for the Dorchester Day parade on June 2 out of the colorful Ashmont booth that had been built for Dorchester\u2019s annual chili cook-off. \u201cThose plans are on hold now,\u201d Mr. Douglass said. \u201cI just don\u2019t think that we have the spirit right now to sort of do what our plan was. It was kind of, I don\u2019t know, silly, and we\u2019re just not ready to be silly, I guess.\u201d As Ashmont began to reckon with the Richards\u2019 loss last week, a group of Chinese students studying at Boston University, 20 minutes north, was frantically trying to find Lu Lingzi, 23, a graduate student in statistics who had gone to the marathon with friends. Shuang Guo, a senior, learned that Ms. Lu could not be found after the blasts, so she dispatched members of the club she runs, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, to look for her. \u201cWe sent out a group to search at all of the hospitals in Boston,\u201d Ms. Guo said. Eventually, they heard from the dean\u2019s office, which had a message from Boston University\u2019s Police Department. \u201cB.U.P.D. has found a girl that might have been Lingzi Lu,\u201d Ms. Guo said, describing the message, \u201cbut they found her at the examiner\u2019s office.\u201d Many of the students in the association, including Ms. Guo, had never met Ms. Lu. But she was also among 2,065 Chinese students at Boston University. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge Chinese community in Boston. Whatever happens, we stick together, even though we don\u2019t know this girl,\u201d Ms. Guo said. \u201cWe understand because we all have families waiting for us at home. We\u2019re so alike.\u201d China sends more students to study in the United States than any other country. They are drawn by the prestige of the American education system and, for some, the possibility of long-term work. According to the International Institute of Education, there were 194,029 in the United States in the 2011-12 academic year, a 23 percent increase over the previous year. Ms. Lu had long wanted to be one of those students, her father, Lu Jun, said at a memorial held for her at Boston University on Monday night. \u201cLingzi used every opportunity and made every effort to learn about international acceptance requirements,\u201d he said in Chinese in a tearful eulogy. The memorial drew more than 850 people, many of them Chinese citizens who said they saw their own stories in her. \u201cI\u2019m also am an only child, and my parents are back in China,\u201d said Boayuan Tian, 28, of Cambridge. \u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine if that happened to me, how my parents would react.\u201d", "keyword": "Boston Marathon Bombings;Fatalities,casualties;Grief;BU;Martin Richard;Lu Lingzi;China;Boston;College"}
{"id": "ny0184258", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/03/03", "title": "Helping the M.T.A., Ravitch Takes a 3rd Turn as Fiscal Savior", "abstract": "Richard Ravitch insists that the fight has not been as lonely as it often looked. Public transit advocates, environmentalists, labor unions, regional planners, building contractors, editorial writers, chambers of commerce and civic groups, he says, have also gotten on board. But if the Legislature finally agrees this month to spare New York City\u2019s subway and bus systems from draconian service cuts and fare increases \u2014 by imposing a regional payroll tax and levying tolls on bridges over the East and Harlem Rivers \u2014 most of those involved in the issue agree that the single-minded Mr. Ravitch would be entitled to much of the credit. \u201cHe has been a force of nature throughout this process,\u201d said Kevin Sheekey, New York City\u2019s deputy mayor for government affairs. About nine months ago, Gov. David A. Paterson enlisted the 75-year-old Mr. Ravitch, a successful builder and businessman, to help rescue the Metropolitan Transportation Authority . There may be few second acts in American lives, but Mr. Ravitch gamely agreed to reprise the mission he successfully undertook three decades ago for the state\u2019s bankrupt Urban Development Corporation and shortly thereafter for the transportation authority as its chairman. In December, after public hearings, Mr. Ravitch\u2019s commission concluded that the tax and tolls, coupled with a much more modest fare hike than the transportation authority was proposing, represented the most equitable long-term fix. He faced a dauntingly heavy political lift, but nonetheless believed his assignment would be finished by now, well before Albany confronted the state\u2019s own gaping deficit for the fiscal year that begins April 1. The political climate he has encountered, however, is very different from the one he found in the 1970s when he helped Gov. Hugh L. Carey deliver the state from an even worse fiscal crisis. These days, the consensus is that Albany has been hobbled by less bipartisanship and weaker leadership. Until recently, Mr. Paterson, an unelected governor, appeared to be more consumed by filling Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s Senate seat. As for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, his political capital seemed depleted by his fight to extend term limits, and by the legacy of losing a battle in Albany last year to impose congestion pricing , a fee on drivers entering Manhattan. And though Democrats control the Legislature for the first time in decades, they hold a bare majority in the Senate. In the Assembly, Speaker Sheldon Silver had been reluctant to corral recalcitrant Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx legislators; he depends on them for his leadership post, and many of their constituents object to the tolls on bridges into Manhattan that are now toll-free. Last week, Mr. Silver offered a compromise . He suggested that all the new tolls equal the base subway fare of $2. In the first few years, the lower tolls might not raise as much as Mr. Ravitch had envisioned, but an agreement to impose tolls would offer the potential for more revenue for the transportation authority in the future. As Mr. Silver explained it: \u201cThis plan is partially in response to hours and hours of hearing objections to prior plans and is an attempt to bring about a compromise. That\u2019s the role of leadership.\u201d On Friday, the Senate majority leader, Malcolm L. Smith, said his fellow Democrats would seriously consider Mr. Silver\u2019s compromise. But on Monday, he called for a full accounting of the transportation authority\u2019s finances to ensure that the latest plan would indeed result in a smaller fare increase and minimal service cuts. Since issuing the commission\u2019s recommendations, Mr. Ravitch has relentlessly wooed individual legislators, attended town meetings in their districts, conferred with them in person and made repeated trips to Albany. \u201cDick\u2019s put a lot of time into this and has a lot of street cred up there,\u201d said Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a mass transit advocacy group that supports the Ravitch Commission proposals. \u201cThere\u2019s a night-and-day difference between this and congestion pricing. The reaction of the political class to Bloomberg and to Dick is 180 degrees.\u201d As he headed to Albany last week on another lobbying mission, Mr. Ravitch said, \u201cI do have a good personal relationship with the Legislature, and I\u2019ve known these people a long time. Shelly has given me every opportunity I could have to make this case,\u201d Mr. Ravitch added. Mr. Silver hinted at a comparison to Mr. Bloomberg, with whom he has often clashed, when he described Mr. Ravitch\u2019s approach. \u201cHis style is not confrontational,\u201d Mr. Silver said. \u201cHe recognizes, more than most people, the importance of the members of the Legislature and speaks with the appropriate tone to them. \u201cOne of the big difficulties with the M.T.A. is a credibility gap \u2014 a history of two sets of books, of hiding surpluses,\u201d said Mr. Silver, who became close to Mr. Ravitch during his chairmanship of the transportation authority and through their involvement in Jewish civic affairs. \u201cI\u2019ve known Dick for over 30 years. It\u2019s not a big leap for me when I can have confidence that these are the numbers that are necessary, when someone with Dick\u2019s credibility talks about a very simple equation here: fare hikes and service cuts or more revenue.\u201d To help the authority close a projected $3.4 billion deficit through next year and avoid sharp service cutbacks and a 23 percent increase in fare revenues, the Ravitch commission proposed a long-term solution: a payroll tax, coupled with charging the same tolls on the East River bridges as drivers pay at the authority\u2019s major crossings, like the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly Triborough) Bridge. Tolls on the Harlem River bridges would match the subway fare. The tolls would take at least 18 months to implement. Meanwhile, any fare increases and reductions in service would be much smaller than those that the authority initially proposed. At Mr. Ravitch\u2019s urging, the governor issued a statement last week urging legislators to reach agreement this week and warning that \u201cthe fare increases and service cuts that will happen without this legislation will do further damage to our fragile economy.\u201d On Friday, Mr. Sheekey, the deputy mayor, credited Mr. Ravitch and Mr. Silver for advancing the proposal this far. Mr. Silver expressed doubt that the proposal would have survived even this long without Mr. Ravitch\u2019s lobbying. \u201cI don\u2019t believe so, not from my perspective,\u201d he said. For his part, Mr. Ravitch was self-effacing. \u201cIt isn\u2019t about me,\u201d he said, listing others who have supported the commission\u2019s recommendations. \u201cIf it were just me, it wouldn\u2019t make one whit of difference.\u201d", "keyword": "Ravitch Richard;Metropolitan Transportation Authority;Transit Systems;Finances;Tolls;Politics and Government;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0191255", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2009/02/03", "title": "Theory and Experiment Meet, and a New Form of Boron Is Found", "abstract": "Boron is a simple atom: five protons, five or six neutrons, five electrons. It is not as ubiquitous as hydrogen. It does not, as helium does, make your voice sound like Donald Duck. It is not as famous as carbon, its neighbor to the right on the periodic table. Perhaps it is held back by its name \u2014 sounds like boring. Yet it remains an element of mystery. For more than two centuries, boron has confounded scientists, resulting in what Artem R. Oganov, a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University, calls \u201ca stream of discoveries and misdiscoveries.\u201d Now researchers led by Dr. Oganov have added to the actual discoveries. They have found a form of boron that is nearly as hard as diamond. This discovery even illustrates the power of the idea of evolution, using a so-called genetic algorithm to decipher the structure of the new boron crystal. \u201cThis work is a beautiful example of cooperation between theory and experiment,\u201d said Aitor Bergara, a physicist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. Dr. Bergara was not involved with the research, which was published online by the journal Nature. Boron has a long history. Mentions of boron compounds like borax date back millennia. In 1808, within a week and a half of each other, two research efforts, led by the great chemists Sir Humphrey Davy in London and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Th\u00e9nard in Paris, announced that they had isolated boron. They had not. Another great chemist, Henri Moissan, later showed that the two earlier groups had made a compound consisting of 60 percent boron. Moissan also claimed to have isolated boron. He too was wrong, although he did do better: a compound with 90 percent boron. Not until 1909 was a sample of 99 percent pure boron produced. Just as pure carbon can come as diamond or graphite, boron comes in multiple forms \u2014 as many as 16 have been reported. But even tiny amounts of impurities can alter the structure, and it seems that the element has only four pure forms, Dr. Oganov said. One, known as alpha boron, is a dark but transparent red. Beta boron is black and looks like coal. Even today, scientists do not definitively know which of these two forms is the stable form. (It is probably beta boron.) The third form is a horrendously complicated structure known as T-192. The fourth form is the newly discovered one. Boron\u2019s unusual properties come from the three electrons in its outer electronic layer. For similar elements like aluminum, one row down on the periodic table, the three outer electrons are easily torn away, and the element behaves as a metal. But boron is smaller, and so its nucleus holds on to the electrons tighter, more like an insulator. \u201cBoron is a truly schizophrenic element,\u201d Dr. Oganov said. \u201cIt\u2019s an element of complete frustration. It doesn\u2019t know what it wants to do. The outcome is something horribly complicated.\u201d Two of the collaborators on the Nature paper , Jiuhua Chen of Florida International University and Vladimir L. Solozhenko of the National Council for Scientific Research in France, independently produced the new boron phase in high-temperature, high-pressure experiments in 2004. But they were not able to deduce what exactly they had produced. For that, they turned to Dr. Oganov, who employed a computational technique that encodes parameters of the crystal structure in a string of data. Starting with a number of trial crystal structures, the program calculates the energy needed to hold each together, and discards the versions that do not pack together comfortably. Then, as occurs in biological evolution, the crystal parameters are tweaked (the equivalent of mutation) and portions of the structure swapped (the equivalent of recombination). After generations of calculation, the answer converges on the stable form. This algorithm had previously revealed new phases of iron sulfide, calcium carbonate, sulfur and even a superconducting form of oxygen, subsequently confirmed by experiment. The form of boron is stable at super-high pressures \u2014 more than 100,000 times the normal atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch \u2014 and consists of two substructures. One is a spherical shape of 12 boron atoms. The other is a dumbbell shape of a pair of boron atoms. These two sub-substructures stack together in the same way that table salt (sodium chloride) does. When the high pressures were eased, the boron remained in the new configuration. Subsequent experiments confirmed that the material had the properties predicted by the algorithm. Although gamma boron is not quite as hard as diamond, it is more heat-resistant, which could make it attractive for certain industrial uses.", "keyword": "Chemistry;Science and Technology;Diamonds;Boron"}
{"id": "ny0255957", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/08/05", "title": "Panetta Pleads for No More Cuts in Defense Spending", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta effectively told Congress on Thursday to raise taxes and cut Social Security and Medicare before taking another swipe at the Pentagon budget beyond defense cuts already called for in the debt-ceiling deal. In his first Pentagon news conference, Mr. Panetta, a former budget director in the Clinton White House, lent his voice to the Obama administration\u2019s strategy of putting pressure on Congress to consider raising revenues when a special committee meets this fall to recommend $1.5 trillion in additional deficit-reduction measures. Mr. Obama signed a debt-ceiling deal on Tuesday calling for an initial $1 trillion in cuts. Mr. Panetta\u2019s argument was that defense had given up enough \u2014 about $350 billion of that $1 trillion over 10 years \u2014 and that further cuts would have dire consequences. He then segued into a brief discourse on \u201cdiscretionary\u201d federal spending, like defense, and \u201cmandatory\u201d federal spending, like Social Security and other entitlements. \u201cLet me for a moment put a budget hat on,\u201d said Mr. Panetta, who is a month into his job as defense secretary. \u201cYou cannot deal with the size deficits that this country is confronting by simply cutting the discretionary side of the budget. That represents less than a third of the overall federal budget . \u201cYou\u2019ve got to, as the president\u2019s made clear, if you\u2019re going to look at those size deficits, you\u2019ve got to look at the mandatory side of the budget, which is two-thirds of the federal budget. And you also have to look at revenues as part of that answer.\u201d Mr. Panetta made his comments on the second straight day of a Pentagon pushback to hundreds of billions of dollars of budget cuts potentially coming its way, the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that it has faced shrinking spending. Both Mr. Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, who joined Mr. Panetta at the news conference, used words like \u201cdisastrous\u201d and \u201cunacceptable\u201d to describe across-the-board cuts that would automatically kick in if the new committee failed to agree on reductions this fall. Mr. Panetta also took the position that the committee should make no further defense cuts, either. The White House, however, has not ruled out further defense reductions. The committee, to be composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, would also be unlikely to take them off the table. At one point Mr. Panetta was asked, given the intensity of his language, if he would resign if the across-the-board cuts, called a \u201csequestration\u201d of government spending, kicked in. Mr. Panetta chortled and replied, \u201cI didn\u2019t think it was going to sequester me.\u201d Then he added, \u201cI didn\u2019t come into this job to quit, I came into this job to fight.\u201d Mr. Panetta declined to say where about $350 billion in defense budget cuts over the next 10 years would come from. But defense officials say there could be reductions in major weapons programs, cuts in the size of the armed forces, and increased premiums for the military\u2019s health care system, Tricare.", "keyword": "Defense Department;Federal Budget (US);Panetta Leon E;United States Defense and Military Forces"}
{"id": "ny0247411", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/05/11", "title": "A Farewell to Jimmy McElroy, Gangster of a Lost Era", "abstract": "The man and woman unfolded themselves from a cab at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 42nd Street, then stood blinking in the sunlight for a few seconds, searching for a familiar piece of ground, a bearing. So there: the bus terminal across the street. But their gazes lingered on tall buildings that had risen in the last two decades or so. It was nearly 10:30 on Tuesday morning. They shuffled down the street and melted into a small crowd on the sidewalk outside the Church of the Holy Cross. These were delegates from the five-story-tenement past, gathered for the funeral of a gangster who had been gone from the streets of the West Side for nearly 25 years. Jimmy McElroy, 66, died in California last week, where he had been sent to serve a federal sentence of forever and a day as the third-ranking person in the Westies . They were an Irish-American gang that ruled and ran the rackets in Hell\u2019s Kitchen from the 1960s through the 1980s. For kicks, they butchered the bodies of people they had killed over debts or insults. Mr. McElroy was not known to have wielded the knife, but drove what the group called the \u201cmeat wagon,\u201d a red van used to deliver body parts for disposal on Wards Island. A bagpiper in a kilt, waiting on the top step of the church, warmed up by sending a few test wails that somehow managed to pierce the midmorning din of 42nd Street. You could tell that \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d would soon be unleashed. There was, however, a slight delay. The funeral could not begin promptly because the church already was filled with students from the parish elementary school, a small army of fresh-faced boys and girls, who were at a Mass to celebrate the distribution of graduation rings to the eighth-grade class. They sang popular songs, like \u201cThis Little Light of Mine,\u201d adapted for the occasion with religious lyrics. Some of the younger children held up posters from a pew toward the back of the church: \u201cCongratulations 8th Graders!\u201d There was no trace of an Irish-American past in the names of the students \u2014 Arce and Baizar, Ramirez and Ruiz. The past had to wait its turn. There were pictures to be taken on the steps of the church. At last, the way was cleared, and a silver coffin was slid out of the back of the hearse. The church\u2019s pastor, the Rev. Peter Colapietro, shifted his attention from the merry schoolchildren to the promise of a merciful God, always a subject of interest at funerals. Jimmy McElroy himself had once been an eighth grader, but not a ninth grader. He dropped out of school to work with a friend, Jimmy Coonan. Their first jobs were as administrators of a beating. \u2014 Mr. McElroy would say that they had punched someone in the face and broken his jaw, and received $50 for their work. He was a pretty good boxer, and could be intimidating, said T. J. English, author of \u201cThe Westies,\u201d a definitive history of the gang. \u201cMcElroy was more on the brawn side than the brains,\u201d Mr. English said. Mr. McElroy got a job as a doorman at the Plaza. As he would tell the story, two very wealthy \u201cArab sheiks\u201d heard that he was a boxer, and invited him up to their suite on the promise of $100. His assignment was to beat up one of the men, both of whom viewed it as a bargain-basement thrill. The regular working life was not for Mr. McElroy. He could not get enough cocaine and pills. He worked as a principal enforcer for Mr. Coonan. After an argument with a friend named Billy Walker, Mr. McElroy took him to the 79th Street boat basin and shot him in the mouth. On another occasion, a man who was thought to be skimming money from a union, without properly sharing it with the Westies overlords, was driven by Mr. McElroy to New Jersey. Someone in the back of the car shot the accused thief five or six times \u2014 but failed to use a silencer or open the windows, causing Mr. McElroy to complain that his ears were ringing for days. They were clumsy and resorted to working as an outsourcing operation for the Gambino crime family, but before long they were all rounded up, and the betrayals began. They went away to prison, with the exception of the leading informer, Francis Featherstone, who transferred into the witness protection program. After Mr. McElroy was sent away for racketeering, he took a shot at being a stool pigeon but was no good at it; a jury did not believe him when he testified that John Gotti had sent him to shoot a carpenter\u2019s union official. He got no break on his sentence of 60 years. Halfway through the Mass, the \u201cAve Maria\u201d was sung; the truck traffic heading for the Lincoln Tunnel chimed in with a blaring chorus. \u201cMy father was no saint,\u201d Ryan McElroy, one of Mr. McElroy\u2019s three children, said in a eulogy. \u201cBut people said he could light up a room. He\u2019s been away 15, 20 years, and you still felt protected by him.\u201d As he stepped down from the altar, the congregation burst into applause. The coffin was carried out the front of the church. The family got into cars, the friends drifted off, a lost world dissolved.", "keyword": "Westies;McElroy Jimmy;Hell's Kitchen (NYC);Organized Crime;Funerals;Irish-Americans"}
{"id": "ny0276817", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2016/02/25", "title": "\u2018Deadpool\u2019 Technology Lands in Patent Fight", "abstract": "The patent wars have come to the cinemaplex. If you marveled at the facial animations of the current hit movie \u201cDeadpool\u201d or last year\u2019s \u201cAvengers: Age of Ultron,\u201d you probably didn\u2019t realize you were watching technology called Mova. Mova captures every facial tick and motion of a human actor and places it on an animated figure. And it won an Academy Award last year. Now the technology we can assume helped the Hulk have a berserk twinkle in his eye as he smashed his way through the Avengers film is the center of a nasty fight between a San Francisco company called Rearden and a Chinese company called the Shenzhenshi Haitiecheng Science and Technology Company. Shenzhenshi, which is affiliated with the Hollywood visual effects company Digital Domain , sued Rearden last February. The tangle over animation technology comes at a relatively quiet period in the tech industry\u2019s patent battles. Over the years, big tech companies have collected stock piles of patents and copyrights, both to protect their assets and sue other companies. Oracle sued Google. Apple sued Samsung. So-called patent trolls \u2014 companies that own patents, but don\u2019t actually build products based on them \u2014 have sued scores of little and big companies. Industry complaints that lawsuits were sucking innovation out of tech \u2014 and scaring people away from creating start-ups \u2014 led to calls in Washington for patent reform. But so far those efforts have gone nowhere. Rearden has asked a judge to award it financial damages and block the distribution of movies and other entertainment that it claims have been made using infringing Mova patents and trademarks. Lawyers say the suit could be a longshot. As for \u201cDeadpool,\u201d its box-office receipts are hovering somewhere around $500 million.", "keyword": "Digital Domain;Inventions and Patents;Movies;Lawsuits"}
{"id": "ny0130236", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2012/06/12", "title": "Ex-Premier Brown Disputes Murdoch\u2019s Testimony", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Starting four days of testimony by political leaders about the sway of Rupert Murdoch \u2019s newspapers over public life here, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday denied Mr. Murdoch\u2019s depiction of some of their most contentious exchanges and accused a leading Murdoch newspaper, The Sun, of undermining Britain \u2019s war effort in Afghanistan. He also rejected assertions by a former editor of The Sun that Mr. Brown\u2019s wife, Sarah, had approved a story in 2006 on the medical condition of the Browns\u2019 infant son, whose cystic fibrosis was diagnosed at 4 months. Mr. Brown said The Sun had caused \u201chuge damage to the war effort\u201d in Afghanistan, where British troops have been the main allies of American forces in the international coalition, by publishing articles suggesting that his government, in office from 2007 to 2010, \u201cdidn\u2019t care about our troops.\u201d He referred specifically to an article in 2009 that disclosed that Mr. Brown had misspelled the name of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan and aspects of what he called a \u201ccampaign\u201d by The Sun over Afghanistan. \u201cThe whole focus of their coverage was not what we had done,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that I personally did not care about our troops.\u201d Mr. Brown said Mr. Murdoch had told him in a private letter that he disagreed with Britain\u2019s \u201cmanagement of the war effort.\u201d In response to Mr. Brown\u2019s allegations, a spokeswoman for Mr. Murdoch\u2019s News Corporation, based in New York, said Mr. Murdoch \u201cstands by his testimony.\u201d The former prime minister was the first in a series of past and present political heavyweights to appear this week before the judicial inquiry led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson into the phone hacking scandal that engulfed Mr. Murdoch\u2019s British tabloids last summer. As the inquiry has inched forward, so, too, has a parallel police investigation in which around 50 people have been arrested and released on bail in connection with phone intercepts; bribery of public officials, mainly the police; and e-mail hacking. Britain\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service said Monday that it had received files from the police relating to five unidentified journalists in the phone hacking investigation to assess whether they should face criminal charges. The prosecution service declined to provide further details. Mr. Brown\u2019s testimony, delivered in his hallmark Scottish burr, seemed among the most emphatic in contradicting sworn testimony by Mr. Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of The Sun who became chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation. She resigned as the hacking scandal escalated last July. Ms. Brooks has testified to the Leveson inquiry that Mr. Brown\u2019s wife, Sarah, gave permission for the article on their son to be published, but the former prime minister denied that. \u201cI don\u2019t think any child\u2019s medical information should be broadcast,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was no question ever of implicit or explicit permission.\u201d Rather, he said, he and his wife had been presented with a \u201cfait accompli\u201d that the story was to be published. In messages on Twitter, journalists at The Sun rejected Mr. Brown\u2019s version of events relating to the newspaper\u2019s Afghanistan coverage and to its source for the article about his son. In her own testimony to the inquiry in May, Ms. Brooks said the information for the article had come from the father of another child with cystic fibrosis. Scottish health authorities who dealt with the case said in a statement on Monday that although there had been \u201cno inappropriate access to the child\u2019s medical records,\u201d it was \u201chighly likely\u201d that a local employee \u201cspoke, without authorization, about the medical condition of Mr. Brown\u2019s son, Fraser.\u201d In a statement, News International said it welcomed the Scottish authorities\u2019 statement that \u201csaid that they believe there was \u2018no inappropriate access\u2019 to the medical records of Gordon Brown\u2019s son.\u201d The Sun stood by its previous rejection of Mr. Brown\u2019s complaints, the statement said. Robert Jay, the inquiry\u2019s lead counsel, pressed Mr. Brown about a conversation that Mr. Murdoch testified had taken place between them in which the former prime minister had threatened to \u201cmake war\u201d on Mr. Murdoch\u2019s company after its tabloids had switched their support to the Conservatives in late 2009. In April, Mr. Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry that Mr. Brown had said, \u201cWell, your company has declared war on my government, and we have no alternative but to make war on your company.\u201d Mr. Murdoch also said that Mr. Brown did not seem to be in \u201ca very balanced state of mind.\u201d \u201cThis conversation never took place,\u201d Mr. Brown said. \u201cI\u2019m shocked, surprised, that it should be suggested.\u201d He also said, \u201cI couldn\u2019t be unbalanced on a call that I didn\u2019t have.\u201d Mr. Brown said that although he respected Mr. Murdoch\u2019s business acumen, he rejected suggestions that the tycoon had influenced his thinking. \u201cThe idea that I followed his views is absolute nonsense,\u201d Mr. Brown said. The concentration of high-ranking figures at the inquiry this week has provoked speculation that the testimony could be among the most significant so far in the investigation, which began last year. George Osborne \u2014 the chancellor of the Exchequer and a close ally of David Cameron , the current prime minister \u2014 appeared at the inquiry after Mr. Brown. Much questioning centered on Mr. Osborne\u2019s role in the Conservatives\u2019 decision to hire Andy Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World, a Murdoch-owned Sunday tabloid that is now defunct, as director of communications. The Conservatives hired Mr. Coulson after he was forced to resign as editor of The News of the World in 2007. At the time, the full extent of the hacking scandal was not widely known. His association with The News of the World later cost him his job as Mr. Cameron\u2019s director of communications after the Conservative victory in the 2010 election. Like Ms. Brooks, Mr. Coulson has been charged in recent weeks with criminal offenses. They have both denied any wrongdoing. \u201cIt was an issue that he had resigned at The News of the World,\u201d Mr. Osborne said, acknowledging that he had been aware of the hacking controversy. But he said Mr. Coulson had assured him that the issue was resolved. Mr. Murdoch\u2019s tabloids supported the Conservatives for many years, but switched to Labour before the 1997 election that brought Tony Blair to power. Mr. Blair testified before the inquiry in late May. Shortly before the 2010 election, which produced a coalition led by Mr. Cameron and Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat, as junior partner, the Murdoch tabloids switched back to the Conservatives. Mr. Osborne said the Conservatives had sought the endorsement of The Sun as \u201cone of a range of things.\u201d But, he added, \u201cI certainly think you can win an election without the endorsement of The Sun.\u201d Mr. Osborne rejected any suggestion that he the government, or the Conservative Party had supported News Corporation\u2019s $12 billion bid to take over the 60.9 percent of British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, the British satellite broadcaster, that it did not already own. The company withdrew the bid last summer at the height of the phone hacking furor. Far from wanting to help News Corporation secure approval for the takeover, Mr. Osborne said, he regarded the bid as \u201cpolitically inconvenient\u201d in that however it was resolved, someone would be angry. The four days of hearings will culminate on Thursday with a daylong appearance by Mr. Cameron.", "keyword": "News International Ltd;Sun The (British Newspaper);Labour Party (Great Britain);Murdoch James R;Murdoch Rupert;Brown Gordon;Cameron David;Great Britain"}
{"id": "ny0026887", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2013/01/27", "title": "Manuel Stars in Senior Bowl", "abstract": "Florida State\u2019s E. J. Manuel passed for a touchdown and rushed for another on the South\u2019s first two drives in a 21-16 victory over the North in the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala.", "keyword": "E J Manuel;College football;Florida State University"}
{"id": "ny0086802", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2015/07/09", "title": "The Stock Market Bell Rings, Computers Fail, Wall Street Cringes", "abstract": "Problems with technology have at times roiled global financial markets, but the 223-year-old New York Stock Exchange has held itself up as an oasis of humans ready to step in when the computers go haywire. On Wednesday, however, those working on the trading floor were left helpless when the computer systems at the exchange went down for nearly four hours in the middle of the day, bringing an icon of capitalism\u2019s ceaseless energy to a costly halt. The exchange ultimately returned to action shortly before the closing bell, and stocks continued trading throughout the day on other exchanges, like the Nasdaq and BATS Global Markets. The disruption nonetheless rattled investors, who already had reason to be on edge, considering the Greek debt crisis and an overnight market rout in China. The benchmark Standard & Poor\u2019s index of 500 stocks ended the day down 1.7 percent. Wednesday provided other reminders of the fragility of automated systems that are doing jobs people once handled. An apparently unrelated technical problem grounded United Airlines flights for nearly two hours on Wednesday morning. The homepage of The Wall Street Journal was also down for part of Wednesday. \u201cWhen we traded physically we didn\u2019t have these problems, but this is the world that we live in,\u201d said Ted Weisberg, a trader with Seaport Securities who has been on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for nearly 50 years. A History of Stock Exchange Failures Stray squirrels, security breaches and, more commonly, technical glitches have caused exchanges around the world to halt. Computer technology has revolutionized the trading of stocks in recent decades, making it faster and more efficient. New powers have emerged, including the Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, a commodities and derivatives trading platform based in Atlanta that acquired the New York Stock Exchange for $8.2 billion in 2013. But there have been hiccups along the way. The Nasdaq stock market went down for three hours in 2013 because of a software bug. The year before, software at Knight Capital Group went awry, leading to errant trades that resulted in losses of $440 million. The problem Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange is likely to revive a debate about how regulators can make the markets more resistant to computer failings. At the same time, technology has created alternatives that allow trading in the United States to go on, even when its most prominent exchange does not. Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange were traded on Wednesday in the New Jersey and Chicago data centers of upstart exchanges like BATS, which is based in Lenexa, Kan. \u201cThere are 11 exchanges in the U.S. and one of them went down \u2014 I had 10 other places to go,\u201d said Ryan Larson, the head of stock trading at RBC Global Asset Management. \u201cThe fragmentation of the market helped us today.\u201d Indeed, the overall volume of stock trading on Wednesday appeared to be largely consistent with the amount of daily trading earlier in the week. Other exchanges owned by the New York Stock Exchange, like its options exchange, operated normally on Wednesday throughout the shutdown. The problems at the New York exchange emerged soon after the opening bell rang at 9:30 Wednesday morning, when orders for several smaller stocks failed to go through, traders on the floor said. The initial malfunctions affected only a small number of stocks, and the exchange appeared to get the problem under control, but the difficulties reappeared, on a more widespread basis, later that morning, traders said. On a call with other members of the industry, as the problem grew worse, N.Y.S.E. employees expressed \u201cpanic\u201d and a recognition that they had \u201clost control of the system,\u201d according to a person on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Not long after that call, at 11:32 a.m., the exchange announced that it was shutting down all trading, and said on its website that \u201cadditional information will follow as soon as possible.\u201d On the floor, traders said the exchange gave them no warning before making the move. \u201cI was about to order my lunch and when I turned around the screens all went blank,\u201d said Peter P. Costa, a trader on the floor with Empire Executions. In the silence that followed, traders on the floor, looking for information, flocked to a ramped area of the huge complex on Wall Street where employees of the exchange are located. The traders were told that the exchange had been updating software before the trading day began, and that the software had contained a bug that could not be fixed without shutting down the system. The exchange\u2019s employees on the floor proceeded to manually cancel around 700,000 trades that were in the system when it was shut down, according to Mr. Costa. Once they had finished, the exchange rebooted its system, a process that took around 45 minutes, Mr. Costa said. Trading ultimately resumed around 3:10 p.m., less than an hour before the closing bell. Several hours later, the exchange put out a statement with few details on what happened, other than to attribute blame to a \u201cconfiguration issue.\u201d Image Traders wait on a nearly empty floor at the New York Stock Exchange during the shutdown. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America Throughout the day, federal regulators and law enforcement agencies monitored the situation for any sign of an outside attack and ultimately saw nothing indicating anything other than an internal software error. President Obama was briefed on the exchange shutdown, a White House aide said, adding that officials there and at the Treasury Department were monitoring the situation. Mary Jo White, the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission , which oversees the nation\u2019s securities markets, said in a statement, \u201cWe are in contact with N.Y.S.E. and are closely monitoring the situation and trading in N.Y.S.E.-listed stocks.\u201d The New York Stock Exchange and its new Atlanta owner, the Intercontinental Exchange, are likely to face questions after the shutdown. ICE, which makes most of its money from automated derivatives trading, has been reducing staff at the New York exchange after stating a goal of cutting $450 million in expenses from the joint company. Recent cuts have hit the exchange\u2019s technology and communications teams, which came under pressure on Wednesday. After the failure began, it took over half an hour for the exchange to broadcast even basic information about the shutdown, to allay concerns that it might have been caused by a malicious attack. An ICE spokeswoman, Sara Rich, denied any suggestion the cuts had an effect. \u201cSince the acquisition, we have been investing to build new systems and technology expertise, and the new trading platform will begin rolling out later this year,\u201d she said.", "keyword": "NYSE;Computers and the Internet;Tech Industry;Network Outages;Stocks,Bonds"}
{"id": "ny0032738", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2013/12/18", "title": "Islanders Fall to Lightning", "abstract": "Valtteri Filppula scored twice in the final three minutes of regulation and then converted in the shootout to rally the visiting Tampa Bay Lightning past the Islanders, 3-2. Kyle Okposo and Frans Nielsen scored for the Islanders. \u25a0 Joe Pavelski scored the first of three straight goals by San Jose to lead the Sharks to a 4-2 road win over the St. Louis Blues. \u25a0 Kevin Dineen became the coach of Canada\u2019s women\u2019s hockey team for the Sochi Olympics, a month after his firing by the Florida Panthers.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Islanders;Tampa Bay Lightning"}
{"id": "ny0009608", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/02/18", "title": "Chelsea, Manchester City and Wigan Knock Out Opponents", "abstract": "Chelsea, Manchester City and Wigan scored four times each to knock out lower-league opponents in England\u2019s F.A. Cup. Held to a 2-2 tie by third-tier Brentford three weeks ago, Chelsea got goals from Juan Mata, Oscar, Frank Lampard and John Terry to win the replay, 4-0. (AP)", "keyword": "Soccer;Wigan Athletic Soccer Team;Manchester City Soccer Team;Chelsea Soccer Team;Juan Mata;Frank Lampard"}
{"id": "ny0265301", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/03/05", "title": "Republicans Pick Wendy Long to Challenge Chuck Schumer in Senate Race", "abstract": "BUFFALO \u2014 New York Republicans on Friday nominated Wendy E. Long to challenge Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat. It will be the second Senate bid for Ms. Long, 55, a New York City lawyer who was chosen at the Republican\u2019s nominating convention here. She was beaten decisively by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a Democrat, in 2012. Ms. Long, who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court, was a press secretary to two senators, William L. Armstrong of Colorado and Gordon J. Humphrey of New Hampshire, both Republicans. On Monday, New York Democrats nominated Mr. Schumer to run for a fourth term. He has $24 million in his campaign account and is heavily favored in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.", "keyword": "New York;Wendy E Long;Chuck Schumer;Senate races;Republicans"}
{"id": "ny0013372", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2013/11/09", "title": "Detective Admits Spying on Colleagues", "abstract": "A New York City police detective pleaded guilty on Friday to arranging to hack into dozens of email accounts and gaining access to a federal law enforcement database to gather information on his colleagues, said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. The detective, Edwin Vargas, gained access to at least 43 email accounts and one cellphone, belonging to 30 people, including 20 current or former police officers and a Police Department administrator, Mr. Bharara said in a statement . Mr. Vargas, 42, a 20-year veteran of the department, was prompted by a \u201cbad relationship,\u201d his lawyer, Peter E. Brill said. Those familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Vargas had sought information on colleagues whom he considered romantic rivals. Between April 2010 and October 2012, Mr. Vargas hired hacking services to pry into the email accounts, at a cost of over $4,000, Mr. Bharara said. Mr. Vargas, who has been suspended, pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and one of conspiracy. He faces a one-year sentence for each count and is scheduled to be sentenced in March. \u201cThis is an isolated incident in an otherwise good career,\u201d Mr. Brill said. \u201cI think he\u2019d like to move on, and help raise his family.\u201d", "keyword": "Hacker (computer security);NYPD;Edwin Vargas;Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings"}
{"id": "ny0093575", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/08/13", "title": "DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding\u2019s Love Life", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 She was denounced as a \u201cdegenerate\u201d and a \u201cpervert,\u201d accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a \u201cdiabolical\u201d campaign of falsehoods against the president\u2019s family that tore away at his legacy. Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding. Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton\u2019s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding\u2019s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America\u2019s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation\u2019s history books. The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president\u2019s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of Shakespearean and operatic,\u201d said Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president and one of those who instigated the DNA testing that confirmed the relationship to Ms. Britton\u2019s offspring. \u201cThis story hangs over the whole presidential history because it was an unsolved mystery.\u201d Image President Warren G. Harding Credit Library of Congress, via Reuters The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country. While some historians dismissed Ms. Britton\u2019s account, it remained part of popular lore. Pundits raised it as an analog after revelations of President Bill Clinton\u2019s affair with Ms. Lewinsky. HBO\u2019s \u201cBoardwalk Empire\u201d made it a subplot a few years ago. The Library of Congress effectively recalled it last year when it released Harding\u2019s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips. Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile. As a boy growing up, Peter Harding said he believed the family line. \u201cMy father said this couldn\u2019t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton,\u201d said Dr. Harding, now 72 and a physician in Big Sur, Calif. After finding Ms. Britton\u2019s book, \u201cThe President\u2019s Daughter,\u201d among his father\u2019s belongings, though, he concluded that the man described in it resembled the writer of the letters to Ms. Phillips, an expressive romantic who doted on women. Dr. Harding and his cousin, Abigail Harding, decided to pursue the matter and made contact with James Blaesing, a grandson of Ms. Britton and son of the daughter she claimed to have conceived with the president. Testing by AncestryDNA, a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website, found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding\u2019s daughter. Image Abigail Harding, the grandniece of President Warren G. Harding, at her home in Worthington, Ohio, on Wednesday. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times \u201cWe\u2019re looking at the genetic scene to see if Warren Harding and Nan Britton had a baby together and all these signs are pointing to yes,\u201d said Stephen Baloglu, an executive at Ancestry. \u201cThe technology that we\u2019re using is at a level of specificity that there\u2019s no need to do more DNA testing. This is the definitive answer.\u201d The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had \u201cblack blood.\u201d Abigail Harding, 72, a retired high school biology teacher in Worthington, Ohio, said the Nan Britton question is resolved. \u201cI have no doubts left,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen he\u2019s related to me, he\u2019s related to Peter, he\u2019s related to a third cousin \u2014 there\u2019s too many nails in the coffin, so to speak. I\u2019m completely convinced.\u201d Still, other relatives withheld judgment. \u201cI\u2019m not questioning the accuracy of anybody\u2019s tests or anything,\u201d said Dr. Richard Harding, 69, another grandnephew and a child psychiatrist in Columbia, S.C. \u201cBut it\u2019s still in my mind still to be proven.\u201d If the tests are valid, he added, he welcomed the new family members. \u201cI hope they\u2019ll find their new place in history is meaningful and productive for them.\u201d James Robenalt, who wrote a book on Harding\u2019s affair with Carrie Phillips that was skeptical of Ms. Britton\u2019s claims, said he accepts the new evidence. \u201cI\u2019m very pleased that that\u2019s the result just because that family deserves to be recognized,\u201d he said. Warren Gamaliel Harding was a newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, who won a Senate seat in 1914 and captured the presidency in 1920 promising to restore \u201cnormalcy\u201d after World War I. He is often ranked low among American presidents because of the Teapot Dome corruption scandal that ensnared top advisers. But advocates argue he is underrated, noting that he advocated equal rights for African-Americans, created the Bureau of the Budget and led international disarmament efforts. Image A photo provided by the family of Nan Britton and her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1927. Nan Britton grew up in Marion, where her father knew Harding and Harding\u2019s sister was her schoolteacher. She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she \u201cbecame Mr. Harding\u2019s bride,\u201d as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation. For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding\u2019s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to \u201ca small closet in the anteroom\u201d in the West Wing where, she wrote, they \u201cmade love.\u201d Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding\u2019s family, she wrote \u201cThe President\u2019s Daughter\u201d in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters. James Blaesing, her grandson, said Ms. Britton\u2019s relationship with Harding was a love story and her family always believed her. \u201cShe loved him until the day she died,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.\u201d Mr. Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie. \u201cI went through this growing up in school,\u201d said Mr. Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Ore. \u201cThey belittled him and her.\u201d The tests, he said, finally vindicate his grandmother. \u201cI wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Warren Harding;Adultery;Nan Britton;Elizabeth Ann Blaesing;DNA;Carrie Phillips;Ancestry.com;Genealogy;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0100279", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2015/12/20", "title": "In Democratic Debate, Hillary Clinton\u2019s Focus Is on G.O.P.", "abstract": "Hillary Clinton largely looked past her Democratic rivals in Saturday night\u2019s debate, instead repeatedly assailing the Republican field, led by Donald J. Trump. She called Mr. Trump a threat to the nation\u2019s safety, saying he was fast \u201cbecoming ISIS\u2019 best recruiter.\u201d Deflecting persistent attacks from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O\u2019Malley of Maryland over gun control, Wall Street and foreign military entanglements, she accused Mr. Trump of undermining the fight against terrorism. Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, sought to frame next year\u2019s election as a choice between her cleareyed approach to national security and the recklessness of Republicans who have demonized Muslims since the recent attacks on Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. \u201cI worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here in the United States, and literally around the world, that there is a clash of civilizations,\u201d she said, \u201cthat there is some kind of Western plot or even war against Islam, which then, I believe, fans the flames of radicalization.\u201d Mrs. Clinton defended herself forcefully when she came under assault from Mr. Sanders and Mr. O\u2019Malley. But from her opening statement on, she took every opportunity \u2014 and even created some \u2014 to ignore her adversaries onstage and go after what she suggested was the true opposition. Her above-the-fray posture in the debate, held at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., signaled Mrs. Clinton\u2019s confidence, just weeks before the first votes in Iowa, that neither of her Democratic rivals would prove a significant obstacle on her march to the nomination. \u201cBringing Donald Trump back into it,\u201d she said at one point, \u201cyou don\u2019t want to alienate the very countries and people you need to be part of the coalition\u201d \u2014 referring to the Muslim nations that would be sought as military allies in fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Sanders and Mr. O\u2019Malley both did their best to anger Mrs. Clinton. Mr. O\u2019Malley claimed that she changed her views on guns \u201cevery election year,\u201d and Mr. Sanders reminded viewers of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. \u201cOur differences are fairly deep on this issue; we disagreed on the war in Iraq,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, accusing Mrs. Clinton of being overly hawkish in embroiling the United States in overseas conflicts. \u201cSecretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.\u201d Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for his previous opposition to bills backed by supporters of gun control, but was at her fiercest after he challenged her on national security. Fact Checks of the 2016 Election The New York Times will be checking assertions made throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. \u201cWith all due respect, senator, you voted for regime change with respect to Libya,\u201d she said, before mentioning the former Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. \u201cYou joined the Senate in voting to get rid of Qaddafi, and you asked that there be a Security Council validation of that with a resolution.\u201d Both her rivals argued that the United States needed to fight the Islamic State, but not necessarily to depose President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. \u201cIt is not Assad who is attacking the United States,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. Mr. O\u2019Malley agreed. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be the ones declaring Assad must go,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a role to play, but it is not the role of traveling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.\u201d Mrs. Clinton all but accused her rivals of na\u00efvet\u00e9. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians,\u201d she said, adding that she had wanted to arm the moderate Syrian opposition years ago to avoid the creation of a dangerous power vacuum. \u201cI wish it could be either-or,\u201d she said. Mr. O\u2019Malley, who has been lagging badly behind both of his rivals, proved an irritant to Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. He faulted them both for being insufficiently courageous on gun control and made a point of noting his relative youth next to Mr. Sanders, 74, and Mrs. Clinton, 68. \u201cMay I offer a different generation\u2019s perspective on this?\u201d Mr. O\u2019Malley, 52, interjected at one point. Later, in an exchange about assault weapons, he said, \u201cISIL training videos are telling lone wolves the easiest way to buy a combat assault weapon in America is at a gun show, and it\u2019s because of the flip-flopping political approach of Washington that both of my two colleagues on the stage have represented there for the last 40 years.\u201d Mrs. Clinton has spent much of this year repositioning herself to appeal to her party\u2019s progressive base, but she bypassed the best chance she had Saturday to embrace the sort of populism that is Mr. Sanders\u2019s calling card. When she was asked, \u201cShould corporate America love Hillary Clinton?\u201d \u2014 a reference to a magazine article during her 2008 presidential campaign \u2014 she spread her arms. \u201cEverybody should,\u201d she said, grinning. \u201cI have said I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful.\u201d She spoke at length about wanting to strengthen the economy and offered praise for responsible employers, noting that her father had been a small-business man. Mr. Sanders, finally stepping in after Mrs. Clinton was finished, was blunt about his views but only glancingly criticized her ties to corporate interests. Image With just six weeks until the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton\u2019s two rivals are running out of time to blunt her momentum. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times \u201cThey ain\u2019t going to like me,\u201d Mr. Sanders said of the business community. \u201cAnd Wall Street is going to like me even less.\u201d Mr. O\u2019Malley did criticize Mrs. Clinton for her Wall Street connections, recalling that at the Democratic debate last month in Iowa, she defended her fund-raising from the financial industry by suggesting those donors supported her efforts to rebuild Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mrs. Clinton said again on Saturday that donations from Wall Street made up a small percentage of her contributions, then turned the question around by noting that Mr. O\u2019Malley had gladly raised money from Wall Street as head of the Democratic Governors Association. There were a few such tense moments, but the disputes were tamer than those that have become routine on the Republican debate stage, and were entirely on policy grounds. Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for proposing expensive government programs without providing details of how to fund them. She estimated that his proposals to make health care and college free would require a 40 percent increase in federal spending, or $18 trillion to $20 trillion. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got to be really thoughtful about how we\u2019re going to afford what we propose,\u201d she said. \u201cWhich is why everything I propose, I explain exactly how I\u2019m going to pay for it.\u201d Mr. Sanders said his plans would help middle- and working-class families and likened them to Social Security and the New Deal. Pressed repeatedly on how he would pay for them, Mr. Sanders cracked a wry smile and said, \u201cNow, this is getting to be fun.\u201d Mr. Sanders said his plans would require an increase in taxes but would ultimately save working Americans money. He said a three-month family leave for working families would amount to only $1.61 a week in higher taxes. Mr. O\u2019Malley also would not rule out potentially raising taxes. Mrs. Clinton, casting an eye toward tax-averse general election voters, made a firm pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year. At another point, Mr. Sanders attacked Mrs. Clinton\u2019s ties to Wall Street. But he also pointed to the policies of the presidential administration of her husband, Bill Clinton, including the dismantling of part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, leading to the commingling of commercial and investment banks. \u201cI led the effort,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, \u201cagainst Alan Greenspan, against a guy named Bill Clinton \u2014 maybe you know him, maybe you don\u2019t.\u201d But Mrs. Clinton scarcely wanted to engage her rivals, except when sharply attacked, and the three Democrats found much to agree on. Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton both, for example, proposed building a coalition of Muslim countries to help fight the Islamic State. \u201cTell Yemen, go to war against ISIS,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. \u201cI would tell Qatar, instead of paying $200 billion on the World Cup, spend it on fighting ISIS, which is at your doorstep.\u201d Where the Candidates Stand on 2016\u2019s Biggest Issues See what the candidates are saying about gun control, immigration and more, and how their positions align with the American people. There were even moments when undiluted comity broke out. Asked whether it was time for the role of the presidential spouse to be redefined, Mrs. Clinton said that her husband would not, as first gentleman, pick out the china or flowers for state dinners, but would offer advice on policy issues, particularly \u201chow we\u2019re going to get the economy working for everybody, which he knows a little bit about.\u201d Mr. Sanders used the question to heap praise on Mrs. Clinton, saying she \u201cnot only did an outstanding job as our first lady but redefined what that role could be.\u201d At the outset, Mr. Sanders was asked about the revelation that at least one of his aides had gained access to and copied information about Mrs. Clinton\u2019s supporters from the Democratic Party\u2019s voter database. But neither he nor Mrs. Clinton showed any appetite to relitigate it. Asked by the ABC News moderators whether Mrs. Clinton, who looked on icily as Mr. Sanders explained the data breach, deserved an apology, Mr. Sanders said, \u201cYes, I apologize.\u201d \u201cI very much appreciate that comment, Bernie,\u201d Mrs. Clinton said. \u201cIt really is important that we go forward on this.\u201d Mr. Sanders called for an independent investigation of the breach, which prompted the Democratic National Committee to bar his campaign temporarily from the party\u2019s voter file. He noted that one campaign worker had already been fired and said he would fire any other aide found to have acted improperly. (After the debate, his spokesman, Michael Briggs, said two other aides had been suspended Saturday in connection with the data breach.) But Mr. Sanders said that his aides might not have been the only ones viewing information they should not have seen. \u201cI am not convinced that information from our campaign may not have ended up in her campaign,\u201d Mr. Sanders added. Yet even the unsubstantiated suggestion of impropriety by Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign was not enough to lure her into a back-and-forth on the subject. As in the first two debates, Mrs. Clinton was the focal point throughout \u2014 even when she was not actually on stage. As the moderators resumed after a long commercial break, both her opponents returned to their places to answer questions about the economy, but Mrs. Clinton\u2019s podium stood empty. \u201cSorry,\u201d she said with a grin as she returned. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. O\u2019Malley used their closing statements to compare the Democratic trio favorably with the Republican field. \u201cI think we have a lot more to offer the American people than the right-wing extremists,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. But Mrs. Clinton, emerging from another debate unscathed, seemed to acknowledge that much of the American public was probably more absorbed, on the Saturday night before Christmas, by the return of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise. \u201cThank you, good night, and may the force be with you,\u201d she said, beaming.", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders;Martin J O'Malley;Political Debates;Democrats;New Hampshire"}
{"id": "ny0062502", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2014/01/26", "title": "Mortar Bombs Kill Six in Shiite Village in Iraq", "abstract": "BAGHDAD \u2014 At least 17 people were killed in violence across Iraq on Saturday, including in car bombings and a mortar attack on a Shiite Muslim village, police and medical officials said. The deadliest attack took place in a village near Baquba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, where three mortar bombs killed six people, the police said. A woman and a child were among the victims, five of whom belonged to the same family, the police said, adding that the assailants might have been aiming at a nearby police station. Violence in Iraq climbed to its highest level in five years in 2013, when nearly 9,000 people were killed, mostly civilians, according to the United Nations. No group immediately claimed responsibility for any of the latest attacks, but Sunni Islamist militants, some linked to Al Qaeda, have been regaining momentum in Iraq, emboldened by the conflict in neighboring Syria.", "keyword": "Terrorism;Arab Spring;Baqubah;Iraq"}
{"id": "ny0022218", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2013/09/07", "title": "Judge Sets Restrictions for Apple on E-Books", "abstract": "As punishment for engaging in an e-book price-fixing conspiracy, Apple will be forced to abide by new restrictions on its agreements with publishers and be evaluated by an external \u201ccompliance officer\u201d for two years, a federal judge has ruled. But the judge, Denise L. Cote of Federal District Court in Manhattan, rejected some of the measures sought by the Justice Department, including extensive government oversight over Apple\u2019s App Store. In a filing this week, Judge Cote issued her final ruling on the penalties to be imposed on Apple after the long-running lawsuit against the technology giant filed by the Justice Department in April 2012. The government accused Apple, along with five major book publishers, of illegally colluding to raise the price of e-books and of trying to curb Amazon\u2019s influence in the publishing industry as Apple prepared to introduce its iPad in 2010. All five publishers, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Group USA, have since settled, while saying that they did nothing wrong. Random House, which was not named in the lawsuit, merged with Penguin earlier this year. But Apple, confident of its innocence and with the financial resources to fight in court, went to trial this summer. It defended itself with testimony from a string of high-ranking Apple executives, including Eddy Cue, the company\u2019s senior vice president for Internet software and services, who led the negotiations with publishers . Image A federal judge found that Apple colluded with publishers to thwart Amazon.com on e-books before the iPad\u2019s introduction. Credit Monica M. Davey/European Pressphoto Agency In July, Judge Cote ruled against Apple in a nonjury trial, saying there was compelling evidence it had violated antitrust laws by conspiring with the publishers. In her ruling this week, Judge Cote said that Apple may not enter into any agreement with the five settling publishers that \u201crestricts, limits or impedes Apple\u2019s ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price of any e-book.\u201d The ruling also said that Apple would be prohibited from discussing with any publisher its contractual negotiations with another publisher. In addition, Judge Cote ordered that Apple cooperate with an external monitor who will evaluate and report on the company\u2019s training reforms and antitrust compliance. William J. Baer, the assistant attorney general, said in a statement on Friday that the Justice Department was pleased by the court\u2019s ruling. \u201cConsumers will continue to benefit from lower e-books prices as a result of the department\u2019s enforcement action to restore competition in this important industry,\u201d he said. \u201cBy appointing an external monitor to ensure future compliance with the antitrust laws, the court has helped protect consumers from further misconduct by Apple. The court\u2019s ruling reinforces the victory the department has won for consumers.\u201d Apple has said that it will appeal Judge Cote\u2019s July ruling. \u201cApple did not conspire to fix e-book pricing,\u201d Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, said in an e-mail on Friday. \u201cThe iBook- store gave customers more choice and injected much-needed innovation and competition into the market.\u201d At a hearing in United States District Court in Manhattan last week, Judge Cote said that she wished to \u201cintrude as little as possible\u201d on Apple\u2019s business.", "keyword": "Competition law;EBooks EReaders;Apple;Denise Cote;Publishing"}
{"id": "ny0168457", "categories": ["nyregion", "nyregionspecial2"], "date": "2006/06/18", "title": "Displays of Hispanic Talent, From the Folkloric to the Contemporary", "abstract": "Several exhibitions of Hispanic art and artists are on display across Long Island, flickering softly in the shadows of the continuing political debate on immigration policy. \"Baile y M\u00fasica: Preserving Hispanic Culture on Long Island,\" at the Hofstra Museum through Aug. 18, is the most substantial of these quietly opportune displays of talent and heritage. Part of a university-sponsored research project, the exhibition, though large, with more than 85 items, is more like a sampler than an exhaustive survey. Its predominant focus is the activities of several important Hispanic musical and dance groups that reside on Long Island. Since music is an art form that elicits first and foremost an emotional response, its parameters are not visible artifacts but ways of feeling \u2014 sometimes tender, sometimes disquieting. It is the same with the displays in this exhibition, which are often less remarkable as aesthetic objects than as starters for thought. Grouped mostly by country, the material includes traditional musical instruments, folkloric costumes, body adornment, sheet music, photographs and music-related books, fliers, posters and other bric-a-brac. The most eye-catching items are the folkloric costumes and the musical instruments. A tall wooden harp from Colombia, its construction radically improvised, has a base and soundboard made of soft rainforest timber while a bit of old balustrade forms the pillar (mounted onto the soundboard) and legs. Pavelid Castaneda from La Familia Castaneda, one of the more celebrated Hispanic musical groups based on Long Island, brought the harp with him from Colombia in 1992. A traditional Paraguayan skirt and blouse were lent to the exhibition by Berta Gauto, founder of the Paraguayan dance troupe Panambi Vera. These days she runs a beauty salon in Mineola, but her dance troupe has given more than 125 performances across the United States since 1995, including several at the United Nations. Ms. Gauto no longer performs, but her two daughters are part of the troupe. Nearby, photographs show members of Panambi Vera performing traditional Paraguayan dances, like La Galopera, in which a woman dances while balancing several bottles on her head. Hispanic people have been migrating to Long Island in large numbers since the 1930's and 40's, establishing themselves in communities like Brentwood, Long Beach, Bay Shore and Glen Cove. They came initially for the cheap land and steady work at places like Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer, and Pilgrim State Hospital. There are still many Hispanics in these places, although the population has since fanned out all over the Island. The earliest material in the exhibition comes from the 1970's. It is a series of photographs of the Long Island-based group Los Macondos de Colombia performing at a television studio in New Jersey, circa 1971, and, from the same era, at the Plaza Theater in Queens. While much of the material in the exhibition embodies values and traditions inherited from the past, honoring and celebrating that heritage, several new gallery exhibitions are dedicated to the work of contemporary Hispanic artists. The latest architectural paintings of the Brazilian artist Fernando Vignoli will be on display at the Vignoli Gallery in Sag Harbor throughout the summer, but there are only a few days left to catch the delightful exhibition at Gallery Solar in East Hampton, where three artists of Hispanic descent have made art from stones. Gustavo Souto paints forms and figures composed of sensual arrangements of stones. Jessica Cuni-Applebee transforms her stone subjects into bubbling, cell-like organisms, and Miquel Salom invests stones with sacredness by wrapping them in bright orange cloth, recalling the color of Buddhist robes. Solar is an intimate cavelike space in the basement of a private residence on a suburban street. It is run by Esperanza Leon, a Venezuelan who moved to the United States with her family when she was 4. Her gallery specializes in showing artists of Hispanic descent, as well as traditional Latin American jewelry, pottery and textiles. The stone exhibit ends on Thursday and will be followed by a show by Maria Schon, a Venezuelan painter who now resides in Sagaponack. At the Boltax Gallery on Shelter Island, photographs by Juan Doffo, a well-regarded Argentine painter and photographer, will be on display through Monday. The photographs document performances with fire undertaken in fields around the small, rural Argentine town of Mechita. The townsfolk also play a part in the artwork, helping the artist to light fires and posing in ritualistic arrangements for photographs \u2014 a collaboration that, Mr. Doffo has said, is as important as the photographic outcome.", "keyword": "Hispanic-Americans;Long Island (NY)"}
{"id": "ny0263710", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2011/12/26", "title": "Holding Howard in Check, Thunder Open With a Win", "abstract": "Kevin Durant scored 30 points to help the Oklahoma City Thunder to 97-89 season-opening victory over the visiting Orlando Magic on Sunday night. Durant led the league in scoring the past two seasons, including last season, when he averaged 27.7 points a game. On Sunday, he shot 11 of 19 from the field and added 5 rebounds and 6 assists. James Harden added 19 points, and the Thunder held the Orlando star Dwight Howard to 11 points. The Thunder lost to Dallas last season in the Western Conference finals, but they are expected to be one of the league\u2019s top teams this season. They led throughout, were ahead by 18 at the end of the third quarter and really were never in danger of losing. Meanwhile, the Magic looked like a team that was still dealing with the distraction of Howard and his trade demands, which have dominated the headlines in Orlando since the lockout ended. N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern weighed in on the Howard situation Sunday, saying before the game: \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of the soap opera. How it plays out, we\u2019ll wait and see.\u201d Oklahoma City center Kendrick Perkins did a good job on Howard, an All-Star who averaged more than 22 points a game last year and shot 59 percent for the season. And though Howard struggled to score, he did have 15 rebounds. A 13-2 run in the second quarter, after Durant and Russell Westbrook checked back in following a brief rest, helped the Thunder open a 17-point lead. They led, 55-41, at halftime behind 14 points from Durant. Ryan Anderson scored 25 points and Jameer Nelson added 18 for the Magic, who shot 37 percent from the field and had 18 turnovers. CLIPPERS 105, WARRIORS 86 The prize acquisition Chris Paul had 20 points and 9 assists in his much-anticipated Clippers debut, Blake Griffin added 22 points and 7 rebounds and visiting Los Angeles beat the Golden State Warriors to spoil Mark Jackson\u2019s opener as a first-time coach. Monta Ellis had 15 points and 8 assists after his grandmother\u2019s death earlier in the day in Mississippi, and David Lee added 21 points and 12 rebounds for the Warriors, who cut the Clippers\u2019 lead to 78-77 with 9:35 left on Brandon Rush\u2019s 3-pointer before Los Angeles pulled away. It was hardly a spectacular opener for Paul and Company, though Coach Vinny Del Negro certainly will take a methodical win any day. These new-look Clippers hope to shine in Los Angeles, perhaps no longer as second fiddle to the Lakers. JACKSON-MULLIN REUNION The friendship of Chris Mullin and Mark Jackson began in their days as high school stars in Brooklyn, and endured through their time as teammates at St. John\u2019s and then through lengthy N.B.A. careers that included a three-season stint together in Indiana. That was why it meant so much to both men that Mullin worked with the ESPN broadcasting crew for Jackson\u2019s coaching debut with the Golden State Warriors on Sunday night. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s fun for that reason to watch Mark coach his first game,\u201d Mullin said. \u201cI would have been watching, anyway. So to come and do it here and get a closer look, it\u2019s even better.\u201d Mullin\u2019s ESPN colleagues, Jeff Van Gundy and Mike Breen, pulled off a remarkable doubleheader. They began their day in Dallas calling Miami\u2019s 105-94 win over the Mavericks. They then hopped a charter flight to the Bay Area for Jackson\u2019s first game, the fifth game of the league\u2019s marathon opening day schedule.", "keyword": "Oklahoma City Thunder;Orlando Magic;Basketball;Howard Dwight;Durant Kevin;National Basketball Assn"}
{"id": "ny0290416", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2016/01/19", "title": "A Polish E.U. Leader Seeks Middle Ground in a Dispute With Poland", "abstract": "BRUSSELS \u2014 As president of the European Council \u2014 the group representing the European Union\u2019s often-clashing 28 leaders \u2014 Donald Tusk is forever promoting a balance between national sovereignty on one hand and common values and goals on the other. On Monday, his challenge was especially personal. Mr. Tusk is a former prime minister of Poland and a former leader of the center-right Civic Platform party, which was voted out of power last year and replaced by the right-wing Law and Justice party. Visiting him in Brussels was President Andrzej Duda of Poland, who was there to discuss issues that included a European Commission investigation begun last week into whether Mr. Duda\u2019s new government in Warsaw poses a threat to free expression and an independent judiciary. Speaking at a news conference with Mr. Duda, Mr. Tusk tried to find middle ground. He suggested that the commission, the European Union\u2019s executive agency in Brussels, may have been too quick to begin the investigation in the wake of a controversy over moves by the Polish government to pack the judiciary with its appointees and take control of the state broadcasting system. He reassured Mr. Duda that there was no conspiracy against Warsaw by officials in Brussels. He said some of the criticism of Poland had been overdone, and that Standard & Poor\u2019s, the ratings agency, had miscalculated in downgrading the country\u2019s long-term foreign currency credit rating. The \u201cbad narrative\u201d about Poland had gone too far, he said. \u201cIf somebody uses too-strong words or takes actions that do not entirely match the Western European community of values,\u201d that person \u201chas to be ready for a strong reaction,\u201d Mr. Tusk said. \u201cHowever, this reaction cannot be hysterical.\u201d At the same time, Mr. Tusk invoked \u201cStar Wars\u201d imagery to warn Mr. Duda about allowing Poland to go too far down a path toward authoritarian rule . \u201cWe were talking about going back to the light side of Europe and going out of this dark politics imposed on us by a foreign state,\u201d said Mr. Tusk, recalling a campaign by Polish trade unions three decades ago that helped weaken the Soviet Union. \u201cWe need to protect this historical event that was us joining the light side,\u201d said Mr. Tusk, adding in an aside to Mr. Duda that he was alluding to \u201cscience fiction\u201d movies both had probably seen. \u201cI want to tell you in this context that there is always time to move to the light side of the Force,\u201d said Mr. Tusk, again apparently addressing Mr. Duda. That, Mr. Tusk said, had been the pattern of \u201cPolish history in recent decades.\u201d Mr. Duda, who took office in November, reiterated that \u201cmedia creations\u201d had misrepresented his government\u2019s intentions, and he warned against \u201cunnecessary\u201d criticism. The changes in Poland were part of a normal sequence of events after an election and change of government, Mr. Duda said. Treading a fine line between criticizing the government in Warsaw while protecting the country from more scrutiny, Mr. Tusk said that no formal debate on the state of democracy was needed at the level of European Union leaders at their next summit meeting in Brussels, where the main topic would be reaching a deal with Prime Minister David Cameron on Britain\u2019s future in the bloc. Aleksander Smolar, president of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, which promotes civic issues, said that the tension was tempered by the otherwise conciliatory tone taken by Mr. Tusk and Mr. Duda. \u201cPresident Duda said that Poland has greatly benefited from being a member of the E.U. \u2014 quite an unusual statement for a politician from Law and Justice \u2014 whereas Mr. Tusk distanced himself from the decision of the European Commission to check if Poland violates the union\u2019s laws,\u201d Mr. Smolar said. On the other hand, Mr. Smolar said, Mr. Tusk did stress that concerns in Brussels about Poland are justified. \u201cWith his reference to \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 he suggested that Poland has crossed over to the dark side,\u201d Mr. Smolar said. \u201cBut his ironic comments were not confrontational. They were rather little digs at President Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, designed to let everyone know that despite Mr. Tusk\u2019s conciliatory tone, he is still very much aware of the real problems with the current government.\u201d Mr. Kaczynski is the leader of Law and Justice. Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador and the founder of the Center for International Relations in Warsaw, said Law and Justice and Mr. Duda had started a campaign to ease the tension between Poland and the European Commission. In the last couple of days, Mr. Duda and other Law and Justice officials in Brussels have written articles in which they have argued that democracy in Poland is not in any danger. Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, who, like Mr. Duda, is a member of Law and Justice, will go to Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday to defend her government\u2019s recent actions before the European Parliament. \u201cIt\u2019s an attempt at de-escalation of this conflict after some matters have been blown out of proportions,\u201d Mr. Reiter said. \u201cIt\u2019s not the beginning of love but rather a realization that, as things stand today, it will not be possible to resolve this conflict in a way that would benefit anyone.\u201d Both of the biggest television channels in Poland \u2014 one government-controlled, the other private \u2014 mostly stressed the positive and conciliatory outcome of the meeting, though Mr. Tusk\u2019s pointed, ironic comments did not go unnoticed. In its coverage of the meeting, Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the country\u2019s leading newspapers and a supporter of the previous government, said Mr. Tusk had done as much as he could under the circumstances to telegraph his disapproval of some of the new government\u2019s early moves. \u201cDuring the press conference, the president of the European Council was as harsh as the convention and his office allowed him,\u201d the paper said. However, the bulk of the story concentrated on how Mr. Tusk and Mr. Duda seemed eager to cool tensions and find some middle ground, appealing to officials in both Warsaw and Brussels to avoid further confrontation.", "keyword": "European Commission;EU;Donald Tusk;Poland;Andrzej Duda;Law and Justice Poland"}
{"id": "ny0167351", "categories": ["politics"], "date": "2006/01/19", "title": "West Tells Russia It Won't Press to Penalize Iran Now", "abstract": "WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 - The United States and Europe, seeking Russia's help in bringing Iran's nuclear activities before the United Nations Security Council for review, have assured Russian officials that they are not pressing for sanctions against Iran right now, American and European diplomats said Wednesday. The diplomats said that instead they were pursuing a limited effort to convene a Security Council debate and send the matter back to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear monitor, for further efforts to get Iran to suspend uranium activities that the West suspects are part of a nuclear weapons program. \"We are not seeking a sanction mechanism at this moment,\" a European diplomat said. \"We are pursuing a gradual approach. We are trying to tell Iran that what the I.A.E.A. is telling them is exactly what the Security Council thinks. It's an empowering process for the I.A.E.A.\" European diplomats said the Council could act either by passing a resolution or by allowing its president to issue a declaration in its name. The West's incremental approach is a response to Russian and Chinese reluctance to press for immediate sanctions, despite their concern that Iran has broken its commitment to suspend uranium enrichment activities. The Russians and Chinese say they do not want Iran to retaliate by breaking off talks and forcing international inspectors to leave the country. On the other hand, some diplomats eager to press Iran on nuclear matters said they were concerned that the steps being contemplated might be too small to be taken seriously in Tehran. The diplomats who described the situation, from several nations, spoke on the condition of anonymity so that they could speak more freely while the negotiations continue. The Bush administration has said for two years that its ultimate objective is to bring Iran before the Security Council for possible censure or sanctions. But it has proceeded slowly, deferring to European efforts to negotiate. That deference is still part of the American approach despite Iran's recent actions. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after meeting with Javier Solana, the chief European Union envoy, said Wednesday that \"it is now important for the I.A.E.A. board of governors to act so that Iran knows that the international community will not tolerate its continued acting with impunity against the interests of the international community.\" Afterward, Mr. Solana said the Europeans and the United States were considering a Russian proposal presented as an alternative to the possible referral of Iran's case to the Security Council by the atomic energy agency. The Russian proposal was to have the Security Council take up Iran, but without a formal \"referral\" from the agency. Whether or not there is a formal referral from the agency is technical but significant, Mr. Solana said. Without a referral, the Security Council could debate the matter but not consider sanctions. \"A referral to the Security Council is in itself a very important decision,\" Mr. Solana said, suggesting that the Russian idea did not go far enough. He said that there was \"nothing fundamentally wrong\" with the Russian idea but that it implied too much of a delay. \"Referral means something which has legal consequences for the relationship of this dossier to the Security Council,\" he said. The European and American approach has been codified in a draft resolution to be presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency for possible adoption at an emergency meeting on Feb. 2. The Western timetable is for Iran to be \"referred\" at that meeting and then considered at the Security Council and then referred back to the atomic agency. The Russian proposal, by contrast, calls for no formal action by the atomic agency on Feb. 2, but some kind of debate at the Security Council in February, possibly with the agency director, Mohamed ElBaradei, taking part. Then the agency could take up the subject of Iran in March. American and European officials said they did not feel comfortable putting off the entire matter until March. Iran, many Western experts say, is perhaps only a year or two away from developing the capacity to operate centrifuges that enrich uranium and take other steps enabling it to make a nuclear weapon. Mr. Solana and Ms. Rice also reiterated Wednesday that they would not accept Iran's latest offer to talk about its nuclear program unless it returned to a full suspension of its uranium enrichment activities. It was Iran that effectively cut off negotiations by breaking the moratorium on enrichment, Ms. Rice said, adding, \"As that condition exists, I am sensing from the Europeans that there's not much to talk about.\" Britain, France and Germany, also representing Europe, have engaged in talks for a year with the objective of persuading Iran to suspend and then shut down its uranium processing and suspected weapons-making activities in return for economic, political and security benefits from the West.", "keyword": "RUSSIA;IRAN;UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS;ATOMIC ENERGY"}
{"id": "ny0010458", "categories": ["sports", "cycling"], "date": "2013/02/21", "title": "American Cyclist Sarah Hammer Wins Her Fifth Gold", "abstract": "Sarah Hammer of the United States won her fifth career gold medal in the 3,000-meter individual pursuit at the track cycling world championships in Minsk, Belarus. Hammer had won consecutive titles in the women\u2019s individual pursuit twice, in 2006-7 and in 2010-11.", "keyword": "Track Cycling;Belarus;Biking;Sarah Hammer"}
{"id": "ny0104654", "categories": ["sports", "ncaabasketball"], "date": "2012/03/08", "title": "Jim Boeheim\u2019s Best and Worst Season at Syracuse", "abstract": "SYRACUSE \u2014 Jim Boeheim has been at Syracuse long enough to have played in the Orange backcourt with Dave Bing, Detroit\u2019s mayor, and served as a resident adviser in Sadler Hall for Tom Coughlin, the Giants\u2019 Super Bowl -winning coach. In 1962, Boeheim came to Syracuse University and essentially never left, going from invited walk-on to assistant to head coach. Along the way, he has won nearly 900 games and experienced the ecstasy-to-agony pendulum that has ranged from winning the national championship in 2003 to dealing with N.C.A.A. probation and a postseason ban in the early 1990s. When Boeheim leads top-seeded Syracuse into the Big East tournament quarterfinals against Connecticut on Thursday, he does so with what may be the best team in his 36-year tenure. But this sun-kissed 30-1 record, the best in Syracuse history and one that has produced a No. 2 national ranking, has been achieved against the backdrop of perhaps Boeheim\u2019s most difficult season off the court. In November, Syracuse fired the associate head coach Bernie Fine , Boeheim\u2019s lifelong friend and longtime assistant, after multiple accusations of child molesting surfaced, igniting perhaps the biggest sports scandal in Syracuse history. Boeheim initially had harsh words for Fine\u2019s accusers, which became part of a lawsuit against Boeheim and the university, and he later delivered a long apology. The university also admitted this week, in the wake of a Yahoo Sports report , that it was under N.C.A.A. investigation for its handling of drug-testing issues. Boeheim, 67, made it clear in an interview two weeks ago that his future does not depend on the way this season ends \u2014 be it an N.C.A.A. tournament upset or another national title. \u201cIt would have no effect on it,\u201d Boeheim said when asked if he would retire if the Orange won the national title this year. \u201cNo effect. Nothing that happens like that will have any effect on what I decide.\u201d While he has evolved and adapted, Boeheim has done his best to keep things simple \u2014 from his team\u2019s running just a handful of plays to his not having a computer and having never sent an e-mail. The Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins, the Orange\u2019s coach in waiting, said Boeheim had never discussed retirement with him. With four children, including three in junior high school, numerous charitable ventures and years of service to USA Basketball, Boeheim said he would not lack for activities when he does leave the bench. \u201cIf I retired, I\u2019d have plenty to do,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019m not worried about retirement. If I did retire, I know I\u2019d have a lot to do. I just don\u2019t think about it. It\u2019s been there for 10 years, who knows how long.\u201d With federal officials scrutinizing the program in the Fine investigation, a high-profile lawyer releasing unflattering information in the defamation lawsuit against him and the N.C.A.A. looking into how the university handled its drug tests, there is a juxtaposition between Syracuse\u2019s juggernaut on the court and the uncertainty off it. When asked if the downfall of Joe Paterno\u2019s coaching career or the problems that Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun has endured this season had made him consider his own legacy, Boeheim soundly dismissed the notion. \u201cNot at all,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t worry about any of that. I don\u2019t care what you think or anyone else thinks. When I leave, I\u2019ll leave, and I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s good reviews or bad reviews. I think legacy and tainted and all that is a bunch of bull. All that matters is what you affected when you were there.\u201d Boeheim said that Bobby Bowden having a bad final season, Willie Mays sputtering at the end of his career or Joe Montana playing a season in Kansas City should not affect how they are viewed. \u201cThat\u2019s all media nonsense,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter. You do the best you can for as long as you can. Whenever it ends, it ends. If it ends on a high note, that\u2019s nice. If it ends on a medium note or a bad note, so be it. That\u2019s the way that it is. I don\u2019t even think about it.\u201d The USA Basketball chairman, Jerry Colangelo , said he admired how Boeheim, one of that program\u2019s most \u201cloyal and consistent supporters,\u201d handled this season. Hopkins said that in the midst of the allegations about Fine in November, Boeheim called an emotional 10-minute meeting in which he laid out what the team wanted and needed to do. Hopkins said that Boeheim was clear and concise, as if his message were \u201citalicized, bold printed and underlined.\u201d Hopkins said Boeheim\u2019s message centered on sticking together: \u201cAll we have to do is bond together, play, and this isn\u2019t about you guys.\u201d Louisville Coach Rick Pitino said the result was what he saw as the best team in Boeheim\u2019s career, calling it comparable to the 1986-87 national finalist that defeated Pitino\u2019s Providence team three times. That Syracuse team included Derrick Coleman, Sherman Douglas and Rony Seikaly. \u201cI think this is his best team,\u201d Pitino said. \u201cHe\u2019s never had such a great bench and never had a guy coming off the bench like Dion Waiters. He\u2019s got great defense and shot-blocking and terrific guard play.\u201d Boeheim is always hesitant to compare teams, saying that they are simply not as good as they were in the 1980s, when they could have three or four future N.B.A. players. What Boeheim did say was that this team, with Waiters, C. J. Fair, Brandon Triche, Scoop Jardine, Kris Joseph and Fab Melo, had a rare element of depth. \u201cI think that we have six guys capable of scoring 20,\u201d Boeheim said. \u201cI don\u2019t think many teams have that.\u201d The Orange\u2019s defense, an aggressive 2-3 zone, may be its strength. Syracuse ranks No. 10 nationally in field-goal defense (38.4 percent) and No. 22 in 3-point field goal defense (30.2 percent). Hopkins said that those numbers were on par with those of Syracuse\u2019s title team in 2003 and that Boeheim does not get credit for how his zone has evolved. Boeheim said: \u201cThings change every year. It may look simple, but it\u2019s not.\u201d As his 36th and perhaps most tumultuous season enters its final stretch, Boeheim said he was focused on only his team. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing else,\u201d Boeheim said, alluding to the Fine controversy. \u201cThis is the only thing that I\u2019m thinking about. I haven\u2019t thought about anything. That was a week. That\u2019s it. It will play itself out.\u201d", "keyword": "Basketball (College);Boeheim Jim;Syracuse University;Coaches and Managers;Basketball;College Athletics"}
{"id": "ny0070034", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2015/03/03", "title": "Vitamin-Packed With Promises", "abstract": "In the late 1800s a disfiguring and often fatal disease became epidemic in the South. Called pellagra (Italian for \u201crough skin\u201d), it caused diarrhea, mental confusion, and severe scaling and flaking of the skin. By 1911, pellagra had become the leading cause of death in asylums. Eventually, the Public Health Service dispatched the physician Joseph Goldberger to determine its cause. At the time, a \u201cpellagra germ\u201d was the leading suspect, but Goldberger dismissed this hypothesis after observing that the cases didn\u2019t fit an infectious disease pattern. Pellagra was prevalent among people who depended on corn as a staple, and he proposed a dietary cause. Goldberger became so sure of his theory that he hosted \u201cfilth parties\u201d where he and a few of his medical colleagues downed pills filled with urine, feces and dried skin flakes taken from people with pellagra to prove that the disease was not contagious. Despite such experiments (which sickened none of the participants), scientists and politicians remained unconvinced. It wasn\u2019t until 1937 \u2014 eight years after Goldberger\u2019s death \u2014 that niacin, or vitamin B3, was isolated and identified as the cure. Diets reliant on corn make people susceptible to a deficiency of niacin. Catherine Price recounts the story of how science cracked the pellagra mystery in \u201cVitamania,\u201d her absorbing and meticulously researched history of the beginnings and causes of our obsession with vitamins and nutrition. After more than a century of research, \u201cscientists still don\u2019t fully understand all the nuances of what vitamins do in our bodies, how they do it, or what the long-term effects of moderate deficiencies might be,\u201d she writes. One thing is certain: No matter how poor your diet, it is virtually impossible to become truly vitamin-deficient in the United States these days, Ms. Price says, because our processed foods are so universally enriched and fortified with synthetic vitamins. The majority of these additives are manufactured in China, and without them, much of our food would be devoid of nutritional value. Vitamins are typically flavorless and invisible, so we depend on experts and product labels to tell us which ones are contained in an item and which foods we should consider healthy. Our dependence on labels \u201chas primed us to accept the amazing array of health claims, advertisements and advice that we encounter each day,\u201d Ms. Price writes. We eagerly gobble up foods claiming that added vitamins and dietary chemicals will \u201csupport a healthy metabolism,\u201d but few stop to ask what that means or how it has been proved: \u201cAs long as advertisements employ the magic word science, we are willing to accept claims that otherwise might crack under the pressure of common sense.\u201d Image Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection By Catherine Price. Penguin Press. 318 pages. $27.95 Credit Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times On a trip to her local GNC store, Ms. Price finds Natural Curves, a product that promises to deliver \u201cnatural bust enhancement\u201d with a \u201c100% natural\u201d \u201cbalanced formula for maximum results.\u201d A search of the medical literature turns up no evidence that the proprietary blend of herbs listed on the bottle could make good on the product\u2019s promises. Nor are there rigorous studies to support claims made by a sea buckthorn product to soothe the author\u2019s sensitive skin. Despite the paucity of evidence, even medical experts can fall into marketing traps. Ms. Price\u2019s physical therapist is flabbergasted when she tells him that his favorite supplement pills aren\u2019t approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and he is not alone. A study in 2007 found that a third of doctors didn\u2019t know that dietary supplements aren\u2019t subject to F.D.A. approval or safety testing. Given the lack of oversight, it is not terribly surprising that a recent investigation by the New York attorney general\u2019s office found that a large number of the herbal supplements on store shelves did not contain the ingredients listed on the label. Several incidents have highlighted a need for greater oversight: In the 1990s, contaminated L-tryptophan supplements killed 40 people and harmed more than 1,550 others. But even toothless regulatory proposals have met fierce pushback from the supplements industry. An amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1976 prohibits the F.D.A. from limiting the potency of vitamins and minerals or regulating them as drugs. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 helped ensure that supplement makers would not be required to demonstrate that their products were safe or effective. When the F.D.A. attempted to ban unsubstantiated claims from supplement labels, a trade group called the National Health Alliance organized a huge \u2014 and, Ms. Price argues, deceptive \u2014 letter-writing campaign, despite the fact that the proposed rules would have regulated only the labels, not the products themselves. The campaign enlisted employees and customers of 10,000 or so health food stores to write Congress. An estimated two million letters were sent. Ms. Price understands why. Doctors she had seen for her skin problem couldn\u2019t agree on a diagnosis, \u201clet alone a treatment,\u201d she writes. The promises made on the sea buckthorn packaging, by contrast, were confident and comforting. What supplement peddlers are really selling is hope, Ms. Price argues \u2014 a counter to the uncertainty that so often accompanies real science.", "keyword": "Diet and Herbal Supplements;Vitamin;Joseph Goldberger;Niacin;Books;Catherine Price;Vitamania"}
{"id": "ny0186367", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2009/03/13", "title": "Eastern Skiing Benefits From Tight Times and Plenty of Snow", "abstract": "LINCOLN, N.H. \u2014 The economy may be in the doldrums, but New England ski resorts are having a great year, buoyed by plenty of snow and proximity to major metropolitan areas. \u201cWith the financial crunch, I think we\u2019re actually benefiting in that people aren\u2019t going on longer vacations or getting on an airplane,\u201d said Karl Stone, a spokesman for Ski New Hampshire, which represents the state\u2019s ski areas. \u201cBecause the snow has been so good, people are saying, \u2018Why should I fly out West when we just got 17 inches of snow in New Hampshire.\u2019 \u201d Most ski areas in the East are reporting near-record skier visits and hotel bookings well above average. But in the West, many resorts are reporting a drop in visitors. Snowfall in the Northeast was above average this year, including a large storm in early March, conditions that historically drive up skier traffic. Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, and Eastern ski-area operators say that New England ski country\u2019s proximity to major metropolitan areas \u2014 two hours by car from Boston, four hours from New York and six hours from Philadelphia \u2014 coupled with ski and stay deals, have also made skiing an attractive, less expensive winter getaway. \u201cWhat\u2019s been most surprising is how strong the season has been,\u201d said Patrick Corso, president of the Mount Washington resort in Bretton Woods , N.H. During the third week in February the resort was up 14 percent in skier visits and 9 percent in revenue over last year, which set records thanks to ample snow. At Cannon Mountain in Franconia, N.H., sales of season passes were up 100 percent before the ski season started \u2014 and while gas prices were still high. The resort is enticing budget-conscious skiers with a deal offering two lift tickets for the price of one that is valid Tuesdays and Thursdays. At Sugarbush in Warren, Vt., revenue is up 15 percent this year, a \u201cshocking\u201d figure, said J. J. Toland, a resort spokesman. Sales of season passes are up 11 percent, and traffic to the resort\u2019s Web site jumped 28 percent during a week in which the mountain received two feet of snow. \u201cFor some,\u201d Mr. Toland said, skiing and snowboarding \u201care a passion, versus an amenity or an indulgency.\u201d \u201cPeople will go out one night less, or they won\u2019t go out to dinner or they won\u2019t go to the movies so they can go skiing for a day,\u201d he said. \u201cI think people are tightening their belt in that regard.\u201d Skiers staying closer to home is having an adverse affect on some resorts in the West. In Colorado, Vail Resorts reported this week that skier visits were down 5.1 percent for the year, and lodging occupancy dropped by 13.9 percent. Rob Katz, the chief executive of Vail Resorts, is forgoing a salary next year and will take a 15 percent pay cut the following year. Skier visits are down about 7.5 percent at Colorado resorts, said Ari Stiller-Shulman, a spokesman for Colorado Ski Country USA, which represents 22 of the state\u2019s resorts. Not all Eastern resorts are without a few trouble spots. Here at Loon Mountain, even though the lift lines were jammed on a recent Saturday, overall skier visits are down, but a strong February vacation week helped save the season. Mr. Corso said he expected to end the season on a positive note, as the resort received new snow in the first week in March. \u201cI don\u2019t think any of us predicted this,\u201d he said. \u201cThe season isn\u2019t over, but, boy, has it been a surprise.\u201d", "keyword": "Skiing;Travel and Vacations;New England Patriots;Recession and Depression"}
{"id": "ny0181521", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2007/06/06", "title": "On Avandia, a Niche Strategy Now Under Stress", "abstract": "Could a widely praised approach to drug marketing now be at risk of backfiring? That is a question confronting GlaxoSmithKline and its diabetes treatment Avandia, which is now clouded by concerns over the drug\u2019s safety. Della Reese, the jazz singer and actress, seemed a natural choice to star in ads for Avandia, when Glaxo signed her on in 2004. Not only does Ms. Reese have broad appeal, known most recently for her role in the television series \u201cTouched by an Angel,\u201d but she has Type 2 diabetes. And while she was Avandia\u2019s main spokeswoman, from 2004 to 2006, Ms. Reese represented an important target in Avandia\u2019s marketing: African-American consumers. Because Type 2 diabetes is a disease twice as likely to affect black Americans as non-Hispanic white people in this country, Avandia\u2019s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, has long placed a marketing focus on African-Americans \u2014 much more so than any other maker of diabetes drugs, according to industry executives. In the eight years that Avandia has been for sale, becoming a $3-billion-a-year worldwide best seller, Glaxo\u2019s African-American focus in the United States has won the company praise in the advertising industry and from some black doctors. They credit the campaigns for putting a friendly face on a drug for a disease that too often goes untreated, particularly among minority groups. But now that Avandia is dogged by safety questions \u2014 a Congressional hearing today will address concerns that the drug may increase the risk of heart attacks \u2014 some black advertising executives wonder if Glaxo\u2019s advertising strategy could end up working against the company. \u201cAvandia has such a large African-American niche, I\u2019d expect competitors now to step up their outreach to African-Americans,\u201d said Howard Buford, the founder and chief executive of Prime Access, a multicultural advertising agency in New York. Alternatives to Avandia include Byetta, which is marketed by Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly. It and others could benefit if doctors started encouraging patients to drop Avandia. So far, though, many doctors seem to be playing wait and see. Avandia\u2019s main competitor in this country is a drug called Actos, which had a comparable number of total prescriptions written last year, about 11.3 million, according to Verispan, a health care information company based in Yardley, Pa. Actos is made by Takeda Pharmaceuticals of Japan, which does not conduct significant consumer advertising in the United States. A spokesman for Takeda said the company had no plans to increase its advertising to consumers in light of safety concerns about Avandia. So, the competitive issue raised by Mr. Buford could be largely theoretical. Still, Mr. Buford said it would be incongruous if Glaxo\u2019s black outreach did come back to haunt the company, because Glaxo had worked to overcome what he described as a deep distrust of the drug industry among many African-Americans, particularly older people. He said the skepticism traces in part to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the 1930\u2019s to 1970\u2019s in which the federal government allowed black sharecroppers to go untreated in order to study the disease\u2019s physical effects. \u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of distrust,\u201d Mr. Buford said. And yet, some other ad industry executives said that because Glaxo had helped raise diabetes awareness in recent years among African-Americans, the company might now have a reservoir of good will that it could draw upon. \u201cFor them to advertise a drug to African-Americans that could help save lives and provide information, that is important,\u201d said Jo Muse, the chairman and chief creative officer of Muse Communications, a multicultural agency in Hollywood. \u201cThousands of African-American men, in particular, have been affected in a positive way by direct-to-patient advertising.\u201d A spokeswoman for Glaxo said she could not comment on the company\u2019s marketing strategy. Ahead of today\u2019s hearing by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform where Moncef Slaoui, Glaxo\u2019s chairman of research and development, is scheduled to testify, the company has been scrambling to address safety questions about Avandia that were raised on May 21 in a New England Journal of Medicine article. The company has posted a video on its Web site featuring an executive, Dr. Anne Phillips, addressing the health concerns. And on Tuesday, the company ran a full-page ad in more than a dozen newspapers, including The New York Times, with an open letter to patients from Dr. Ronald L. Krall, its chief medical officer. \u201cAs leaders in diabetes, we understand that managing your Type 2 diabetes is not easy,\u201d the letter said, in part. \u201cWe also understand the confusion and concern you may have experienced following recent press coverage about the safety of Avandia. GlaxoSmithKline stands firmly behind Avandia.\u201d Glaxo, which spent a total of $25.7 million on Avandia advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, has by no means ignored potential white customers. After all, black Americans represent only about 13 percent of the population. And although they are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, the number of non-Hispanic white Americans in this country with the disease outnumbers African-American patients, 13.1 million to 3.2 million, according to the American Diabetes Association. Latinos have been another important group for diabetes drugs, and an audience that Glaxo has also made a target with some of its Avandia advertising. The American Diabetes Association does not have national figures on the percentage of Type 2 diabetes patients in this country who are Hispanic. Caucasians featured in Avandia ads have included the actress Jane Seymour, who was in a 2001 television spot, just a few years after she starred in the TV series \u201cDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.\u201d And currently, a Glaxo-sponsored Web site about health, www.stepitupdiabetes.com , features the white fitness coach Bob Harper, who is the exercise guru on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Biggest Loser.\u201d Various Avandia advertisements depicting everyday people feature Caucasians. But there is no disputing that Glaxo has made a special effort to reach African-Americans with its Avandia advertising, ad executives say. \u201cYou see in the broad diabetes category an acknowledgment or nod toward the African-American community, but GlaxoSmithKline was definitely a leader and one of the first groups to really use a more targeted effort,\u201d said Croom Lawrence, the vice president for strategy and insight at RTC Relationship Marketing, a direct marketing advertising agency in the WPP Group. \u201cThat was really the face of this brand.\u201d And it was a brand-building effort that at least until now had been considered generally effective, as evident in the awards for multicultural marketing in 2001 and 2002 that Glaxo won at the DTC National Conference, an annual conference about marketing drugs to consumers. Generally among marketers, efforts to reach black audiences often include ads featuring African-Americans that run in magazines like Ebony, Essence and Jet or on the Black Entertainment Television network. But those ads do not always run in mainstream media. With Avandia, however, ads featuring a black couple or a black grandfather with his grandson also ran in mass-market magazines like Sports Illustrated, Reader\u2019s Digest and Ladies\u2019 Home Journal. Direct mail and outdoor advertising have also promoted Avandia to potential black patients. And African-Americans appear as prominently, if not more so, than any other group on Avandia\u2019s Web site. Whenever safety questions start clouding a drug, pharmaceutical companies tend to expend most of their crisis-control effort trying to persuade current customers to keep refilling their prescriptions. Any thought of acquiring new patients tends to be deferred until the controversy is resolved. And so, for Glaxo, maintaining Avandia customers will probably involve continuing its strategy of mainstream ads, with an African-American emphasis, outside ad executives said. And some advertising industry executives say Glaxo may now be able to build on a reputation with Avandia for having provided important information to black consumers. \u201cThis is an audience that has not had the benefit of advertising in the past,\u201d said Byron E. Lewis, chairman and chief executive of the Uniworld Group, an agency in New York that created the multicultural ads for Avandia from 2001 to 2004. Pharmaceutical companies in general have been seeing a higher return on direct-to-consumer advertising for minority groups, because many of the people in those audiences might not otherwise go to a doctor about a problem, said Mr. Muse of Muse Communications. Dr. Gerald L. DeVaughn, president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, said he was awaiting more evidence before deciding whether to advise his patients to stop taking Avandia in light of the concerns about potential cardiac risks. Patients have not been asking him about the news reports about the suspected risks, Dr. DeVaughn said. While some ad executives said the new concerns about Avandia\u2019s level of cardiac risk may cause Glaxo to lose customers, others said that the company could hold onto many of its black customers if Glaxo is now seen as having effectively communicated the pros and cons of Avandia over the years \u2014 and having encouraged people to seek out medical help in their decisions. \u201cNone of this exists in a vacuum,\u201d said Mark A. Robertson, the director of business development for UniWorld, the former Avandia agency. \u201cGlaxo has always promoted and motivated people to see their doctors to ask what is best for them.\u201d", "keyword": "Avandia (Drug);Advertising and Marketing;Blacks;GlaxoSmithKline;Diabetes;Drugs (Pharmaceuticals);Medicine and Health"}
{"id": "ny0207837", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2009/06/08", "title": "Shootout in Acapulco Leaves 18 Dead", "abstract": "ACAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) \u2014 Eighteen people were killed in a shootout between drug gangs and soldiers in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco, the army said Sunday. The gun battle, near tourist hotels in the Pacific Ocean resort, was a further blow to Mexico\u2019s tourism industry, already reeling from cancellations by foreigners scared away by the swine flu epidemic. Gunmen battled troops from a cartel safe house, throwing hand grenades at soldiers who had surrounded them and spraying gunfire into military vehicles and nearby homes. The shooting began late Saturday and ended after midnight. \u201cThere were grenade and rocket explosions, and weapons like AK-47s,\u201d said an employee of a nearby hotel. \u201cThe fight lasted almost two hours.\u201d Sixteen people suspected of being members of the Beltr\u00e1n Leyva drug gang were killed, as were two soldiers, including a captain. President Felipe Calder\u00f3n has staked his presidency on crushing drug gangs, whose turf wars have killed about 2,300 people this year. Some 45,000 troops and federal police officers have been deployed across Mexico. While the clash was several miles away from the main area of high-rise hotels, a resurgence of violence in Acapulco is bad news for the tourism industry. Several years ago rival gangs fought over territory in Acapulco, home to about a million people, but the resort has been relatively free of drug violence in recent years.", "keyword": "Mexico;Drug Abuse and Traffic;Defense and Military Forces;Calderon Felipe;Acapulco (Mexico);Violence"}
{"id": "ny0247299", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/05/27", "title": "Elaine's Restaurant Jammed on Its Closing Night", "abstract": "Alec Baldwin ate dinner in a packed corner, one table over from the actress Linda Fiorentino, a few steps from the author Gay Talese and dozens of bent elbows away from producers, journalists and others lucky enough to get inside. So it went on Thursday, on the last night at Elaine\u2019s . Elaine Kaufman scraped together $5,000 to buy an Austro-Hungarian bar on Second Avenue that nobody had ever heard of, and transformed the restaurant she opened there in April 1963 into one of the most famous night spots in America, a saloon salon that once attracted the likes of Woody Allen (Table 8), Jacqueline Kennedy (Table 10) and William Styron (Table 4). Forty-eight years later \u2014 and nearly six months after Ms. Kaufman\u2019s death at the age of 81 in December \u2014 Elaine\u2019s prepared to shut its doors early Friday morning, following a final farewell on Thursday evening that might have felt like a wake, were so many people not having such a good time. The closing of Elaine\u2019s represented the end of not just a restaurant but of something more \u2014 an era of the city when writers were as famous as movie stars, when the goings-on at a little spot at 1703 Second Avenue just north of 88th Street became the stuff of legend, or at least headlines. Elaine\u2019s was a place for writers who liked to drink with people who had actually read their books, for actors who liked to drink with writers and for drinkers who liked to drink with writers and actors. Mr. Talese, a longtime regular, once saw gangsters, police commissioners and clergymen order dinner on the same night, though at separate tables. \u201cThis is not about Elaine\u2019s,\u201d Mr. Talese said on Thursday, seated at a table with friends. \u201cWe\u2019ve said goodbye to Elaine\u2019s. That\u2019s over. This is saying goodbye to one another. The circles of New York, of which there are numerous \u2014 one of those circles was Elaine\u2019s, and it brought together people who had next to nothing in common except that they came to Elaine\u2019s.\u201d Elaine\u2019s had struggled in recent years \u2014 both in the years before Ms. Kaufman\u2019s death and in the months after it \u2014 and there was a bitterness among many on Thursday that the restaurant was bustling on its final night. \u201cFor the first 10 days after Elaine\u2019s death, the place was extremely busy,\u201d said the manager who inherited the restaurant, Diane Becker. \u201cThen we went back to the struggle. Customers were gone. As soon as we announced that Elaine\u2019s would close, the restaurant was filled again for the next 10 days, with people joyfully mourning and questioning why, when in reality, it was because they hadn\u2019t been around.\u201d One Saturday night in April, there were fewer than 10 dinners served. This month, Ms. Becker announced that Elaine\u2019s was closing because it was no longer a \u201cviable business,\u201d and that its last night would be Thursday. The two five-story buildings that the restaurant occupies are on the market for $9.5 million. Several offers are being considered, said Neal Sroka, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is handling the sale of the buildings. Ms. Becker said that if Elaine\u2019s were to continue, it would have to be in a licensing deal for the trademarked name that would be separate from the purchase of the two buildings. Elaine\u2019s had been the site of weddings (David Black, the novelist and screenwriter), wedding receptions (George Plimpton) and wrestling matches (Norman Mailer and Jerry Leiber, who co-wrote early hits of Elvis Presley). For decades, what happened in Elaine\u2019s not only never stayed in Elaine\u2019s, but often found its way onto the pages of newspapers, magazines and books. At Elaine\u2019s, Frank Sinatra refused to shake the hand of Mario Puzo, the author of \u201cThe Godfather.\u201d The New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy punched Phil Spector, the music producer, in the nose. But much of what made Elaine\u2019s special never made the gossip columns. One night in 2005, Carmine Izzi, a business executive and regular, met Jenine Lepera at Table 1. They married two years later, became close friends of Ms. Kaufman\u2019s and were at Elaine\u2019s on Thursday. By about 11:30 p.m., the mood had shifted. No one was being allowed inside. An angry employee stood on a chair behind the bar, announced that he was quitting and berated Ms. Becker for refusing to allow him to hand out T-shirts he had made. The shirts read: \u201cI closed Elaine\u2019s, 1963 \u2014 2011.\u201d He passed them out anyway, to applause. Early in the evening, two people finished their dinner at a table near Mr. Talese\u2019s and walked past the crowd gathering outside the doors. They were Penny McCool, 48, and Susan Borsellino, 50. Some in the line wondered who they were, or whom they knew. They knew no one: they were tourists from Fort Worth and had never been to Elaine\u2019s before. They just had a reservation.", "keyword": "Elaine's;Kaufman Elaine;Restaurants"}
{"id": "ny0201722", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2009/09/15", "title": "Union Supports Decision to Impose Tire Tariffs", "abstract": "PITTSBURGH \u2014 As China and some American companies denounce President Obama \u2019s decision to impose tariffs on Chinese tires, the Obama administration can take solace that at least one important Democratic constituency is enthusiastically applauding the move. At the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in this city haunted by the ghosts of shuttered steel mills, Thea Lee, the labor federation\u2019s chief economist, praised Mr. Obama\u2019s decision, saying it would help preserve American manufacturing. She said a surge in Chinese tire exports had contributed to the shutdown of several American tire factories and the loss of thousands of jobs. \u201cThe trade decision was the president\u2019s first down payment on his promise to more effectively enforce trade laws, and it\u2019s very much appreciated,\u201d Ms. Lee said on Monday, a day before Mr. Obama is to speak here at the convention of the nation\u2019s main labor federation. But while union leaders are hailing Mr. Obama for, as they see it, finally standing up to China, he is having to navigate pressures from China, corporate America and the labor movement that are likely to recur in coming trade issues. Mr. Obama\u2019s balancing act will be especially delicate as some of the most vocal unions, like the steelworkers and auto workers, are politically powerful in Midwestern swing states. Last Friday night, Mr. Obama, responding to a complaint by the United Steelworkers , imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires for cars and light trucks. China quickly responded by threatening to retaliate against American auto products and chicken meat, raising fears of a possible trade war, an especially unwelcome prospect just as the global economy is struggling to recover. But organized labor, having tasted success in this case, is pressing Mr. Obama to take tougher stances on a number of upcoming trade issues. Manufacturing unions, in particular, are pushing for penalties on China\u2019s steel exports, for strong Buy America provisions in future green jobs legislation and for rejecting trade pacts with Colombia and South Korea. The prospect that labor might succeed scares many American companies. For one thing, any of these policies \u2014 bound to vex America\u2019s trading partners \u2014 could increase chances of a trade war. \u201cRetaliation is definitely a concern,\u201d Jeremie Waterman, senior director for China at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said of Mr. Obama\u2019s tires decision. \u201cOur view is that there are many more American jobs at stake if the United States fails to adopt forward-looking policies on free trade agreements and fails to resist policies like Buy America.\u201d China has deplored the administration\u2019s decision, suggesting it caved to domestic support for protectionism . The Tire Industry Association, which represents American tire retailers, said the decision was ill-advised and would lead to higher prices for consumers. Asserting that the decision would hurt tire retailers, the association said it \u201cbelieves this was a politically motivated decision that will end up costing more jobs than it saves. These tariffs will not bring back the jobs that the union claims have been lost.\u201d In a speech he gave Monday on Wall Street, Mr. Obama took a nuanced view of trade, saying a healthy economy \u201cdepends upon our ability to buy and sell goods in markets across the globe. And make no mistake, this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements.\u201d He added, \u201cWhen, as happened this weekend, we invoke provisions of existing agreements, we do so not to be provocative or to promote self-defeating protectionism. We do so because enforcing trade agreements is part and parcel of maintaining an open and free trading system.\u201d Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, which filed the trade action over Chinese tires, asserted that trade policy helped the nation lose 5.6 million manufacturing jobs this decade, or nearly a third of the total. His union, which represents steel, tire, paper and chemical workers, has brought repeated trade actions. The steelworkers union got 78,000 workers to write letters to the White House on the China tires issue and more than 50 members of Congress to speak out on it. \u201cWe\u2019ve watched almost every major sector we\u2019re privileged to represent get decimated by unfair trade,\u201d Mr. Gerard said. \u201cI hope this position that President Obama took reflects his view that we need to go back to redesign an overall trade policy that works for American workers and not just for American multinationals and Wall Street.\u201d Mr. Obama ordered the tire tariffs after the United States International Trade Commission, an independent government agency, determined that a more than tripling of Chinese tire imports had disrupted the $1.7 billion tire market. It called for imposing tariffs on Chinese tires for three years. President George W. Bush had rejected four similar recommendations from the trade commission, angering organized labor. Last week the Commerce Department, concurring with a commission finding of improper subsidies, said it was imposing duties ranging from 10.9 percent to 30.6 percent on imports of Chinese pipes used to transport oil. The department is also investigating a complaint that Chinese steel manufacturers are selling pipe in the United States at unfairly low prices, with a decision due in November. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, an independent think tank, criticized Mr. Obama\u2019s tires decision, partly because he said it came when the administration had taken few steps to expand trade. Even so, he said China had violated trade rules by requiring some foreign-owned tire factories to export a high percentage of their output. \u201cThe administration has not really enunciated a trade policy,\u201d Mr. Bergstein said. While noting that \u201cthey have indicated rhetorically their opposition to protection,\u201d he added, \u201cI don\u2019t think you can resist backsliding on trade unless you\u2019re moving forward.\u201d", "keyword": "American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations;International Trade and World Market;Protectionism (Trade);Obama Barack;United Steelworkers of America"}
{"id": "ny0245965", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/04/06", "title": "Testimony Begins in Police Rape Trial", "abstract": "By the time Kofi Owusu pulled his yellow cab up to the front of an East Village apartment building early one December morning in 2008, the passenger in the back seat had already vomited twice \u2014 once inside the taxi, he said in court on Tuesday. The passenger, a 27-year-old woman, asked for help getting out of the car. Mr. Owusu told her he could not help. Instead, Mr. Owusu called 911, leading two police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, to cross paths with the woman. Prosecutors say Officer Moreno, 43, raped the woman in her apartment while Officer Mata, 28, stood guard. How the woman came to be seemingly incapacitated in the back of Mr. Owusu\u2019s taxi, and in need of assistance to get out of the car, was described Tuesday on the first day of testimony in the officers\u2019 trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Prosecutors said surveillance footage showed that after the officers initially helped the woman into her apartment, they returned three more times that night. Among the first prosecution witnesses to testify were two friends of the woman who were at the party she held at Southpaw, a club in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on the evening of Dec. 6, 2008, to celebrate her promotion at The Gap, where she was a fabric researcher and designer. The promotion required the woman to relocate to San Francisco, said Kendra Taylor, a former co-worker who was at the party. The woman and her friends danced and drank at the bar, witnesses said. \u201cEverybody was happy,\u201d said Laure Simi, another friend who was at the party and testified Tuesday. \u201cIt was a celebration. She was going away. She\u2019s getting a new job. It\u2019s good energy.\u201d The festive mood was memorialized in photographs shown in court. In one, the woman, in a bright fuchsia top, is dipping to the right, holding a glass with a yellow liquid in her left hand, with her mouth open and two friends dancing behind her. The joy, however, quickly subsided, Ms. Taylor explained, when the woman said she was feeling sick at about 11:45 p.m. and wanted to go home. Ms. Taylor said she escorted the woman, arm in arm, to the top of a staircase near the coat check and told her to wait there while she recovered the woman\u2019s coat. \u201cI didn\u2019t find that she was intoxicated to the point where she was not coherent,\u201d Ms. Taylor said. In the meantime, Ms. Simi said, she saw the woman leaning against a wall while someone tried to hold her up. \u201cYou could definitely tell she was intoxicated,\u201d Ms. Simi said. The woman asked Ms. Simi to put her in a taxi, she said, so she escorted the woman outside, flagged down Mr. Owusu\u2019s taxi and, not knowing the woman\u2019s exact address, told him to take her to the Lower East Side. Ms. Simi said the woman left without her coat. Mr. Owusu testified that one of the woman\u2019s friends told him her address as she helped her into the taxi. But defense lawyers brought up Mr. Owusu\u2019s grand jury testimony, in which he indicated that the woman directed him to her apartment and told him where to stop. The defense was trying to establish that even though the woman may have been intoxicated, she was coherent enough to think and have normal conversations. Officer Moreno\u2019s lawyer has said that his client, a former alcoholic, was counseling the woman about her drinking problem that morning and that he had returned to her apartment at her request to check on her. They did not have sex, the defense has argued. Mr. Owusu testified that as he turned the taxi onto Flatbush Avenue, the woman asked if he had a plastic bag she could vomit in. He did not, so he pulled over so she could stick her head out of the door to vomit, he said. A short time later, as they went over the Manhattan Bridge, Mr. Owusu said, the woman vomited in the car. When they arrived at her apartment, Mr. Owusu said, she asked him to help her out of the car, but Taxi and Limousine Commission rules prohibited him from doing so. He called 911 instead and said, \u201cI have somebody in my cab that is so drunk that I need assistance,\u201d according to a recording of the call played in court. When the operator asked if the woman was passed out, he responded, \u201cYeah, something like that.\u201d About five minutes later, Officer Moreno and Officer Mata showed up, Mr. Owusu testified, and they helped her into the apartment. One of them brought out a $20 bill to pay him for the $17.40 fare, he said.", "keyword": "Sex Crimes;Police;Taxicabs and Taxicab Drivers;Moreno Kenneth;Mata Franklin L"}
{"id": "ny0216984", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/04/23", "title": "Dead Victim\u2019s Brother Testifies in Hate-Crime Trial", "abstract": "On the witness stand, Romel Sucuzha\u00f1ay sat up straight and calmly answered the prosecutor\u2019s questions, one after the other. He wore only one expression on his face, a determined scowl that hinted at rage. But then, after a half-hour, he stumbled, over just two words. \u201cI go to see my brother,\u201d Mr. Sucuzha\u00f1ay began, as his head bowed and his shoulders sank. \u201cMy brother,\u201d he tried again. He stopped and stumbled some more, finally managing to put together a complete sentence. \u201cI only saw blood,\u201d he said. A few moments later, his head dropped again. It has been 16 months since Romel Sucuzha\u00f1ay and the brother he was referring to, Jos\u00e9 O. Sucuzha\u00f1ay, were attacked on a street near Jos\u00e9 Sucuzha\u00f1ay\u2019s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Romel Sucuzha\u00f1ay suffered relatively minor injuries from shattered glass, but Jos\u00e9 Sucuzha\u00f1ay, 31, who was repeatedly beaten with an aluminum baseball bat, died less than a week later. Two Bronx men have been charged with murder as a hate crime ; prosecutors say the suspects assaulted the brothers because they were Hispanic and because the suspects mistakenly believed that the brothers were gay. Since the attack, Romel testified, he has been under the care of psychologists. He left New York to return to his native Ecuador because of \u201cwhat happened to my brother,\u201d he said. \u201cI have problems.\u201d About two weeks ago, he returned to Brooklyn, and on Thursday, he testified against the murder suspects, Keith Phoenix, 30, and Hakim Scott, 26, in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn . Prosecutors said Mr. Phoenix and Mr. Scott shouted anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs at the Sucuzha\u00f1ay brothers, whom they saw walking arm in arm early in the morning of Dec. 7, 2008. Romel\u2019s bracing testimony on Thursday added few details to the emerging account of what happened that night. Speaking Spanish translated by an interpreter, Mr. Sucuzha\u00f1ay said he remembered only parts of what happened, and at times, he gave conflicting information. But the pain his few memories caused him hushed the courtroom, leaving defense lawyers little to do but apologize for questioning him or offer him condolences. The testimony caused several jurors to become emotional as well. The trial is expected to last three weeks. Two separate juries are hearing the case, and on previous days, they heard from three witnesses, including a relative of one of the defendants, a livery-cab driver who was passing by, and an emergency medical technician who lived at Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place , where the attack occurred. On Thursday, Mr. Sucuzha\u00f1ay said he lives with his mother in Ecuador. He and a few of his brothers \u2014 there are 12 siblings in all \u2014 became well known to New Yorkers in the days after Jos\u00e9 was attacked, mostly for the sad vigil they kept at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. As their mother made the journey from Ecuador to see Jos\u00e9, who was on life-support machines, his heart stopped. At the time, Romel had been visiting from Ecuador. Jos\u00e9, who was younger, owned a real estate firm and several buildings. Romel worked with him, and testified that on the day of the attack, they collected rent from the buildings and finished work about 10:30 p.m. Then they went out drinking, at a church party and later at a bar. Romel testified that he had three beers and a Long Island iced tea. His brother drank 10 or 11 beers, and half of the same cocktail. As they walked home from the bar, Jos\u00e9 was \u201cshaking from the cold,\u201d he said. Romel gave him his jacket. Then they saw a sport utility vehicle at the corner of Bushwick and Kossuth. In Romel\u2019s account, the altercation started with a look: The driver of the S.U.V., who prosecutors said was Mr. Phoenix, stared at him. \u201cWe did not stop,\u201d Romel said. Then two men got out of the vehicle, and Romel said he heard one or both of them \u2014 he could not say for sure \u2014 yelling insults about Hispanics. It all happened \u201cin a second, like a flash,\u201d Mr. Sucuzha\u00f1ay testified. A few minutes later, he shifted his attention from the interpreter, stared at Mr. Phoenix and pointed his finger at him. Just then, a prosecutor, Josh Hanshaft, handed Mr. Sucuzha\u00f1ay a photograph, and asked him to identify the man in the picture. \u201cMy brother,\u201d he said confidently. \u201cMy brother Jos\u00e9.\u201d", "keyword": "Hate Crimes;Sucuzhanay Jose O;Sucuzhanay Romel;Phoenix Keith;Scott Hakim"}
{"id": "ny0287814", "categories": ["business", "dealbook"], "date": "2016/08/19", "title": "Italian Banks Continue to Lend to Stagnant Companies as Debt Pile Mounts", "abstract": "In Italy, where two decades of economic stagnation have created a long line of barely breathing companies, Feltrinelli, one of the country\u2019s largest booksellers, stands out. Since 2012, the company has chalked up three consecutive years of losses totaling nearly 11 million euros ($12.4 million). Even so, late last year, Feltrinelli was able to secure a fresh \u20ac50 million line of credit from a syndicate that included two of Italy\u2019s largest banks, UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, at an interest rate below what top-rated companies in Europe were paying. As Italy and Europe more broadly struggle to come to grips with an escalating problem with bad loans, a new paper by economists connected to the Center for Economic Policy Research, a European policy shop, highlights the extent to which Italy\u2019s main banks \u2014 known to be the weakest in the eurozone in terms of cash reserves \u2014 have stepped up their lending to the country\u2019s most troubled companies. In recent weeks, Italian bank stocks, down 70 percent for the year, have rallied, buoyed by recent stress-test results and, for some, earnings that were better than expected. But with the International Monetary Fund estimating the size of Italy\u2019s bad loan pile to be \u20ac360 billion \u2014 or about a third of the total amount in the eurozone \u2014 economists contend that any improvement in the debt situation will be short-lived. At the heart of the problem, the research paper concludes, is a nexus of inert banks lending to inert companies that has kept a lid on the recovery of Italy\u2019s economy, the third largest among countries that use the euro. The bank-driven slowdown recalls the zombie lending cycle that Japan entered in the 1990s, leading to its own lost economic decade. Then, instead of biting the bullet and taking losses, large Japanese banks kept credit lines open to borrowers even when they had slight chance of making good on the loans. \u201cEurope has not learned anything from Japan \u2014 it has just repeated the same mistakes,\u201d said Tim Eisert, a German economist at Erasmus University in the Netherlands who participated in the study. \u201cMario Draghi may have saved the euro, but we still have undercapitalized banks in Europe.\u201d In their report, the economists calculate that if European banks were subjected to a scrubbing similar to what United States banks experienced, they would need to raise \u20ac125 billion in new capital. At a time when investors across Europe have become deeply skeptical of investing in banks, and governments are loath to offer bailouts, achieving such a number borders on the impossible. Moreover, since the onset of the debt crisis, Europe\u2019s leaders have been slow to address their banking problems. In the regulators\u2019 latest stress test, only one European bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena of Italy, came out as needing more capital. Feltrinelli is just one example of a number of highly indebted Italian companies receiving loans at below-market interest rates over the last three years, a period when aggressive policies by the European Central Bank freed extra cash for European banks to dole out credit. Other companies cited in the paper include the clothing retailer Benetton, which has lost \u20ac240 million since 2012, yet also received a below-market-rate loan in that year, according to data collected by the economists. Massimiliano Tarantino, a public relations executive at Feltrinelli, said that the company had suffered during the recent crisis and was now shifting its strategy, making new investments in television, electronic publishing and book sales over the internet. In their paper, the researchers found that of the \u20ac540 billion in syndicated European Union loans that they tracked, 8 percent went to companies that they classified as zombie institutions. In Italy, however, the proportion of new loans that have gone to struggling companies like Feltrinelli over the last three years is much higher at 17 percent. Italy is not the only country in Europe plagued by dud loans. In Greece, Yannis Stournaras, head of the country\u2019s central bank, said recently that nonperforming loans were still on the rise and had reached a level of \u20ac108 billion \u2014 roughly one half the size of the overall economy. In his speech, Mr. Stournaras said that 67 percent of the loans made to small and medium-size companies, the life blood of the Greek economy, were nonperforming, a statistic that explains in blunt terms why the Greek economy continues to stagnate. As with Greek banks, Italian banks are similarly exposed to small private companies, many of which have been hit hard by the sluggish economy. According to a paper on troubled Italian loans put out by the I.M.F. last month, three-quarters of the \u20ac360 billion bad loan figure are owed by Italian companies \u2014 most of which are small or medium-sized. While such an amount, about 18 percent of total Italian loans outstanding, is certainly arresting, Italian government officials argue that sufficient steps have been taken to address the problem. They say that banks have set aside cash to cover nearly half of the loans and that all of the exposures are backed by sufficient collateral. They also point to the recent formation of a \u20ac4 billion fund that will buy some of the bad loans from the banks. Still, \u20ac4 billion does not rise to the level of a bazooka that would give the markets confidence. And as the I.M.F. report lays out, Italian banks are among the least profitable in Europe, which gives them little incentive to write off their loans, especially when there are tax incentives for bankers to not take such a step. Banks also have little incentive to pursue debtors in Italy\u2019s courts. The I.M.F. study says that liquidations of troubled Italian companies last, on average, eight years, with preferred creditors likely to claw back just 29 percent of their claim. So, instead of taking a hit, many Italian banks have decided to keep the liquidity flowing in the hope that a company might turn its fortunes around. But with growth averaging about 0.3 percent for the last two decades and now threatening to dip back into negative territory, a spate of corporate recoveries seems unlikely. And the lesson for global regulators is a powerful one, the economists involved in the study argue. Before using unconventional measures to inject cash into lending markets, central bankers must ensure that their large banks are sufficiently capitalized \u2014 as was the case in the United States, when one of the first steps regulators took was to force banks to increase their capital cushions. Without this extra layer of security, banks have little incentive to write down bad loans and focus on healthier companies. \u201cThese zombie loans are just bad for the economy,\u201d said Viral V. Acharya, one of the report\u2019s authors and a specialist in European debt at New York University\u2019s Stern School of Business. \u201cThe problem is that Europe never injected capital into its banks like TARP in the U.S.\u201d", "keyword": "Italy;Euro Crisis;Banking and Finance;Center for Economic and Policy Research;IMF;Monte dei Paschi di Siena;EU"}
{"id": "ny0026346", "categories": ["sports", "football"], "date": "2013/01/03", "title": "Jets to Hold Season-Ending News Conference a Little Late", "abstract": "The Jets will hold their season-ending news conference with Coach Rex Ryan and their owner, Woody Johnson, on Tuesday \u2014 nine days after the end of their season. Much has happened since Ryan last spoke, on Sunday after a 28-9 defeat at Buffalo that secured a 6-10 record for a team that spoke of 16-0 perfection. The Jets fired their general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, but have maintained silence about the status of their embattled offensive coordinator, Tony Sparano. Also continuing is the search for Tannenbaum\u2019s replacement, who will inherit both a coach and a quarterback, Mark Sanchez, he might not want but will probably have little choice but to retain. The Jets have been lampooned for demonstrating a lack of accountability since Tannenbaum\u2019s dismissal. The revelation that Ryan is recharging for a few days in the Bahamas has only fed that perception. Only players available in a one-hour period of locker-room access Monday could speak to the chaos surrounding the team. Many did, with running back Joe McKnight saying, \u201cIt kind of messed with us a little bit.\u201d By delaying Ryan\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s availability until Tuesday, the Jets are violating N.F.L. policy, which requires every team to conduct a news conference during the week after the season \u201cwith its head coach, and/or owner, and/or club president and/or general manager\u201d to \u201crespond to fan interest.\u201d None of the other 19 teams that failed to make the playoffs violated the policy, according to the N.F.L. spokesman Greg Aiello, who said the league was investigating the matter. THE CARDINALS\u2019 SEARCH The Arizona Cardinals have completed an extensive interview that spread over two days with their defensive coordinator, Ray Horton, in the search for a replacement for the team\u2019s fired coach, Ken Whisenhunt. Next up is Andy Reid, the longtime Philadelphia Eagles coach, who was among seven N.F.L. head coaches who were fired on Monday. Reid\u2019s interview, while not formally scheduled, could come on Thursday. Michael Bidwill, the Cardinals\u2019 president, has identified Horton, Reid and Mike McCoy, the Denver Broncos\u2019 offensive coordinator, as candidates to replace Whisenhunt, who was dismissed after six seasons. The Cardinals plan to interview McCoy in Denver this weekend. (AP) COORDINATOR SIGNS CONTRACT Atlanta Falcons Coach Mike Smith said that Dirk Koetter, the team\u2019s offensive coordinator, had signed a contract extension to stay with the franchise through next season. Koetter\u2019s name surfaced this week as a head coaching candidate in Cleveland, Kansas City and Philadelphia. Koetter has overseen an offense that ranks second in third-down efficiency; seventh in scoring and fewest sacks allowed; and eighth in total yards. (AP) LIONS STANDING PAT Detroit Lions General Manager Martin Mayhew said at a 45-minute news conference that as far as he knew, both he and Coach Jim Schwartz would be back next season. Mayhew added that he had spoken with ownership and discussed his plans. The Lions lost their final eight games and finished 4-12. (AP)", "keyword": "Football;Jets;News media,journalism"}
{"id": "ny0189202", "categories": ["world", "middleeast"], "date": "2009/05/02", "title": "Ex-Spy Sits Down With Islamists and the West", "abstract": "BEIRUT, Lebanon TALKING to Islamists is the new order of the day in Washington and London. The Obama administration wants a dialogue with Iran, and the British Foreign Office has decided to reopen diplomatic contacts with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here. But for several years, small groups of Western diplomats have made quiet trips to Beirut for confidential sessions with members of Hamas , Hezbollah and other Islamist groups they did not want to be seen talking to. In hotel conference rooms, they would warily shake hands, then spend hours listening and hashing out accusations of terrorism on one side and imperial arrogance on the other. The organizer of these back-door encounters is Alastair Crooke, a quiet, sandy-haired man of 59 who spent three decades working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He now runs an organization here called Conflicts Forum , with an unusual board of advisers that includes former spies, diplomats and peace activists. Mr. Crooke has spent much of his career talking to Islamists. In the 1980s, as a young undercover agent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he helped funnel weapons to jihadists fighting the Soviets. Later, he spent years working with Hamas and Fatah as a negotiator for the European Union , and helped broker a number of cease-fires with Israel between 2001 and 2003. He earned a reputation for courage and tenacity, but in person he is disarmingly polite and mild-mannered, a slight-figured man with a beaky, impish smile. The mission of Conflicts Forum, which he founded in 2004, resembles a kind of blueprint for the Obama administration\u2019s current outreach efforts: to \u201copen a new relationship between the West and Muslim world\u201d through dialogue and better mutual understanding. Yet Mr. Crooke, who is legendary for his deep network of contacts among Islamist groups across the Middle East, is not sanguine about the prospects for mere dialogue, especially with Iran. \u201cI think there is a real fear there will be a process of talking past each other,\u201d Mr. Crooke said. \u201cThe Iranians will say, \u2018we want to talk about justice and respect.\u2019 The U.S. will say, \u2018are you willing to give up enrichment or not?\u2019 \u201d To get past that impasse with Iran, and with Islamist groups generally, the West will need to change its diplomatic language of threats and rewards, Mr. Crooke said, and show more respect for their adversaries\u2019 point of view. Mr. Crooke has spent the past few years trying to explain that to suspicious Westerners, in a stream of articles, speeches and conferences. Although not an Arabist by training, he has developed a deep knowledge of modern Islamist movements, and launches easily into analyses of Palestinian politics, or even of medieval Islamic philosophy. Recently, he has taken his explanatory efforts a bit further. In a new book, \u201cResistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution,\u201d he deliberately avoids the most controversial subjects, like Israel and the status of women in the Islamic world. Instead, he focuses on what he calls the core of the Islamist revolution, which he defines as a metaphysical resistance to the West\u2019s market-based definition of the individual and society. He invokes European social critics like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, endorsing their critiques of Western thinking and arguing that Islamism offers a more holistic model. NOT surprisingly, the book has received some stinging reviews, and renewed accusations that Mr. Crooke has gone native. Even some of his fellow board members at Conflicts Forum say they are a little baffled \u2014 not by his sympathy for Islamists, but by the book\u2019s broad philosophical themes. Mr. Crooke says the book grew out of his own efforts to find common ground with Islamists, and to look beyond the usual stumbling blocks. \u201cIt seemed to me there was a real need to understand what was happening inside Islamism better, and to valorize what they were saying in ways that could be understood in the West,\u201d he said. That project seems inseparable from his broader argument about dialogue. To illustrate it, Mr. Crooke describes an episode from the conflict in Northern Ireland in which the British put two opposing factions into a room for talks, \u201cna\u00efvely imagining that talking would help.\u201d It did the opposite, reinforcing their anger. So the negotiators tried another approach: they asked both sides to write down their history and vision for the future on a piece of paper. After three more years of talks, the factions finally reached the point at which they acknowledged the legitimacy of the other side\u2019s piece of paper. \u201cGeorge Mitchell once said to me, \u2018you don\u2019t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell\u2019s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran. \u201cDoes America have the will and the patience for that?\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not sure we\u2019re there yet.\u201d Patience, by all accounts, is something Mr. Crooke possesses. Mark Perry, the co-director of Conflicts Forum, describes an episode in Gaza in 2002 when the two men tried to establish a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian factions. After weeks of negotiations, Israel dropped a bomb on the Hamas leader whose signature they needed, shattering their efforts. \u201cWe were exhausted,\u201d Mr. Perry recalled. \u201cThe next day in the hotel room, I looked at Alastair and said \u2018what do we do now?\u2019 He just said, \u2018We try again.\u2019 \u201d It is not entirely clear where that steadfastness comes from. He is a little evasive about his own life and career, perhaps by training. Born in Ireland, he grew up mostly in Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, and was educated at a Swiss boarding school and at St. Andrew\u2019s in Scotland, obtaining a degree in economics. Before joining MI6, he worked in finance in London. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous area to work in,\u201d he said of his years as a banker, without apparent irony, \u201cbecause it\u2019s so easy to get caught up in enrichment.\u201d He is barred by law from discussing his service with MI6, which included years of diplomatic work on the Israel-Palestine issue. As a negotiator in the Palestinian territories, he is said to have traveled alone, by taxi, eschewing the armed security convoys of many Western diplomats. Colleagues who worked with him say Yasir Arafat and the leaders of Hamas trusted Mr. Crooke completely, as did some high-level Israeli officials. SOME Israelis, however, apparently complained that he was too close to Hamas. In late 2003, he was recalled to London \u2014 he had reached retirement age \u2014 and quietly ushered out of government service, with a commendation. He says he has no regrets, but some of his colleagues in Conflicts Forum say he retains some bitterness about the way he was treated. In 2005, he moved to Beirut, where he lives with his partner, Aisling Byrne, and their 1-year-old child, Amistis, in an elegant, old French mandate-era apartment, working out of a home office. Mr. Crooke smiles at the suggestion that Conflicts Forum may offer him a back-door route back to diplomacy, but does not entirely deny it. \u201cWe\u2019re not implementers,\" he said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is catalyze and create ideas. The second part is, how do you multiply something done by a small number of people in one room into something larger?\u201d", "keyword": "Islam;International Relations;Crooke Alastair;Conflicts Forum;European Union;Hamas;Fatah Al;United States International Relations"}
{"id": "ny0134356", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/04/05", "title": "Backer of City Hall Openness Trips on a Budget Maneuver", "abstract": "In her evolution from a campus activist nicknamed Mad Dog to the first female speaker of the City Council and a likely candidate for mayor, Christine C. Quinn has taken care to project an image of reform and an openness about the workings of government. Since taking office in 2006, Ms. Quinn has devised a more public system for reporting pork-barrel spending and has muscled tough new restrictions on lobbyists through a resistant Council. But Ms. Quinn, facing her first significant embarrassment as speaker, has spent much of the last 48 hours trying to explain how the Council ran what many government experts have called a strange and even disturbing system for stashing away taxpayer dollars. For years, the Council budgeted millions of dollars for dozens of fictitious community organizations and used the money later for grants to favored neighborhood groups. The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog organization, was bluntly critical of the practice on Friday: \u201cThere is no excuse for fictional items in a budget,\u201d the commission said in a statement. \u201cAll elected officials bear responsibility for the budgets that they adopt, and Speaker Quinn, in particular, should be held accountable for the City Council\u2019s fiscal practices.\u201d Ms. Quinn, despite her reputation as a focused manager with an understanding of the levers of city government, has said she knew nothing of the unorthodox budgeting practice. She and her staff have gone to great lengths to show that she had tried to put an end to it but was stymied by staffers she forced out. For the moment, no one has stepped forward to contradict her account, and there is no evidence that anything about the system was illegal or that any money was misspent. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed confidence in her, calling her \u201cthe most honest person I know.\u201d But Ms. Quinn\u2019s defense hinges largely on her assertion that when she learned about the practice she immediately ordered it to cease, only to learn that her staff disobeyed her and carried it on for several more months. \u201cThere were meetings, there were oral conversations,\u201d Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, said Thursday. \u201cThere were many people in the numerous meetings with myself and the finance staff during the budget process, with many people in the room who can confirm that.\u201d On Friday, however, when Ms. Quinn\u2019s office was asked to produce some of the \u201cmany people\u201d who could confirm it, only her chief of staff stepped forward, saying he had remembered her noting in one meeting that they would no longer use the reserve system. And numerous former and current City Council officials said Ms. Quinn had during her tenure taken an unusually active role in overseeing the budget, leaving them wondering how she could not have known or, if she had truly objected to the practice, authoritatively ended it. \u201cIt\u2019s an off-line extra budget slush fund within the city\u2019s budget, and it\u2019s used at the discretion of the speaker,\u201d said Dick Dadey, executive director of the Citizens Union, who joined Ms. Quinn to overhaul the lobbying rules and is now calling for all future Council appropriations to be monitored by an outside agency. \u201cGiven the speaker\u2019s drive to create more transparency about the Council\u2019s own budget and member items, it would have been appropriate to go public with this bad practice even if it did shine a bad light on the Council.\u201d Indeed, the revelations have been particularly troubling for Ms. Quinn, consultants said, in part because she has made open government a mantra of her tenure as speaker. \u201cShe\u2019s no Eliot Spitzer,\u201d said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant, \u201cbut we have a very recent example in the governor\u2019s precipitous fall from grace that the more you crusade as someone having a transparent budget, open to the public, governing according to ethics, then the higher those accountability standards will be.\u201d Councilman Tony Avella, who has pushed for more disclosure in Council spending practices and is also planning a run for mayor, asked Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo in a letter sent Friday to investigate the practice. Ms. Quinn declined to comment on the matter Friday. Whether she will be able to survive and pursue higher office, analysts said, will depend on the results of the current investigations into Council finances by the United States attorney\u2019s office and the City Department of Investigation. But already, she has suffered some damage. \u201cIt\u2019s a lose-lose situation,\u201d said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs who once worked for the Council. \u201cEither she knew what was going on and condoned it or she thought she had taken care of it but didn\u2019t. If I\u2019m running against her, I\u2019m saying, she can\u2019t keep track of her office, how can she keep track of a $60 billion budget?\u201d Ms. Quinn, who worked for five years as chief of staff to Thomas K. Duane, a former councilman, before winning a Council seat in 1999, said she had been vaguely aware that money was put aside in some sort of reserve accounts before becoming speaker in January 2006. But she maintained that it was not until the spring of 2007, well into her second budget cycle as speaker, that she learned that money was being parked in reserve accounts known as holding codes. She said she made it clear in a series of budget meetings and conversations with her staff that the practice was to stop. But last fall, she said, she learned that not only was the practice continuing but that the money was being parked in accounts named for fictitious groups. On Friday, Ms. Quinn\u2019s staff was pressed to produce people who were in the meetings and who could corroborate the speaker\u2019s account. By late afternoon, however, only Charles Meara, the chief of staff, came forward, saying in a statement that he had \u201cattended several meetings with Council Speaker Quinn, members of the City Council Finance Division and other senior staff regarding the city budget.\u201d \u201cAt one of those meetings,\u201d the statement continued, \u201cI clearly recall Speaker Quinn stating that we will no longer use holding codes to keep reserve funds.\u201d James McShane, Ms. Quinn\u2019s communications director, said late Friday they could not provide other people to confirm the speaker\u2019s account at this time. It would be inappropriate \u201cto comment further on who attended the meetings,\u201d he said, given the ongoing investigation. A person close to the speaker who said they were not authorized to speak about the matter, said Thursday that Ms. Quinn forced out two of her top finance staffers, Michael Keogh and Staci Emanuel, after the discovery of the problems. Attempts to reach Ms. Emanuel were unsuccessful, and Mr. Keogh, now with Bolton-St. Johns, a lobbying and consulting firm, has not responded to several requests for comment. But Norman Adler, president of Bolton-St. Johns, sharply denied accounts that Mr. Keogh was pushed out. He had been pressing Mr. Keogh to join his firm for a year and half, he said, but was told that he was committed to stay with Ms. Quinn through the end of the budget cycle, and then had some unrelated issues that prevented him from moving over sooner. Mr. Keogh submitted his resignation letter on Jan. 3 \u2014 about six months after the budget for the 2008 fiscal year was completed. \u201cI aggressively recruited this guy,\u201d Mr. Adler said. \u201cHe\u2019s one of the most talented people in government.\u201d Ms. Quinn has also stressed in her defense that the use of fictitious groups to hold money in reserve dates back to her predecessors, Peter F. Vallone Sr. and Gifford Miller, a claim that records and former staff members under those speakers confirmed.", "keyword": "Quinn Christine C;Frauds and Swindling;City Councils;New York City;Budgets and Budgeting"}
{"id": "ny0022138", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/09/21", "title": "Amid Violence, Returning to Elections in Sri Lanka After a Void", "abstract": "JAFFNA, Sri Lanka \u2014 The thugs first appeared around 11:20 on Thursday night, a dozen or so men lurking outside her house. Two wore army uniforms. Ananthi Sasitharan \u2014 a Tamil candidate in the first provincial elections to be held in 25 years in the former insurgent stronghold here \u2014 said she had woken up her three daughters and prepared for the worst. She called a few friends, who soon appeared and persuaded her and her daughters to sneak out the back. It was a good thing they left. Ten of her supporters stayed behind to watch the house. A few started playing a Sri Lankan card game called Monkeys and Donkeys, but before they could finish even a few hands, four trucks pulled up outside and disgorged more than 100 men. Most of them were wearing army uniforms and carrying guns and wooden clubs, according to the accounts of several witnesses. \u201cWhere\u2019s Ananthi?\u201d the thugs started shouting. \u201cWhere\u2019s Ananthi?\u201d And then they attacked. Four years after Sri Lanka\u2019s long civil war came to a bloody end, the first provincial council elections since 1988 are being held Saturday in the country\u2019s Tamil-dominated north amid sporadic reports of violence and intimidation. There are many Tamil parties vying for seats under the flag of the Tamil National Alliance, competing with candidates from the governing coalition, the United People\u2019s Freedom Alliance, which controls more than two-thirds of the national Parliament. The council is fairly toothless, because President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has centralized much of the government\u2019s powers in his and his family\u2019s hands. But the election has become an important symbol to the Tamil people as well as to international monitors about whether the Rajapaksas are willing to countenance even cosmetic steps toward reconciliation with the Tamils. \u201cThe military has been visiting houses all over the area and telling people not to vote for the Tamil National Alliance,\u201d Mavai S. Senathirajah, deputy leader of the Tamil alliance, said in an interview. \u201cWe will not be intimidated.\u201d The war\u2019s end has been beneficial to Sri Lanka, an island of about 20 million people split between the dominant Singhalese and the minority Tamil. Roads have been rebuilt, tourists have returned to its crystalline beaches and tea estates, and the pervading sense of unease that gripped the country for decades has largely evaporated. New train tracks have nearly reached Jaffna, at the northern tip of the island. Yet, signs of the violent past remain. Destroyed houses, burned-out churches and the broken carcass of a water tower still litter the landscape in once war-torn areas. There is growing evidence that in the course of war the Sri Lankan government may have killed as many as 40,000 people \u2014 many of them innocent civilians \u2014 particularly at the close of the war. The United Nations Human Rights Council has voted repeatedly to condemn the government\u2019s failure to investigate potential war crimes even as a string of shocking videos that appear to show the murders of innocents leaks out of the country. The Rajapaksa government, meanwhile, has undermined the independence of both the judiciary and the news media. Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, accused the government last month of \u201cheading in an increasingly authoritarian direction.\u201d On Friday, Ms. Pillay accused the Sri Lankan government of waging a disinformation campaign against her. For the Rajapaksa government, the international criticism is worrisome. The Sri Lankan economy depends on tourism and foreign investment, and in November the country will host a summit meeting of Commonwealth leaders, a diplomatic coup. Many of the top hotels in the capital, Colombo, are undergoing renovations to ready themselves for the delegations. An election in the northern province that is judged as free and fair could help improve the country\u2019s international reputation. But it is far from clear that election monitors will bless the effort. Image More than a hundred men, most wearing army uniforms, on Thursday attacked the home of Ananthi Sasitharan, above, a Tamil candidate, according to the accounts of several witnesses. Credit Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times On Friday, Rohana Hettiarachchie, the executive director of the People\u2019s Action for Free and Fair Elections, a domestic independent monitoring group, confirmed in a telephone interview that those who had attacked Ms. Sasitharan\u2019s house had been wearing uniforms \u201csimilar to those worn by the army.\u201d But Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya, a military spokesman, said by telephone that \u201cthere was no involvement on the part of the army.\u201d He said the army was cooperating in an investigation of the matter. Ms. Sasitharan is contesting the elections in part to pressure the government to release her husband, a political officer for the Tamil Tigers who she believes has been in government custody for four years, a charge the government has denied. \u201cEarlier this month, there were several others who were released, and they told me that they have seen my husband in custody and that I needed to keep pressing for his release,\u201d she said in an interview. But she keeps being attacked, Ms. Sasitharan said, in an intimidation campaign aimed at getting her to drop out. Two weeks ago, army officers stoned her car while she was still in it, and she barely escaped injury, she said. And then there was the attack Thursday. Pakeerathan Sriskantharajah, 22, was among those who stayed behind to watch Ms. Sasitharan\u2019s house. When the mob struck, he raced upstairs and hid in a passageway between the roof and ceiling. But he put his foot through the ceiling just as the intruders entered the house, and they beat him badly. \u201cThey kept asking where Ananthi was,\u201d he said in an interview, his hands and head bandaged. \u201cWe didn\u2019t tell them, so they beat me on my legs, back, head and hands. They broke my fingers.\u201d The Tamil National Alliance is expected to win control of the northern provincial council, but the margin of victory could prove crucial to the alliance\u2019s efforts to push for greater autonomy over police and land decisions. President Rajapaksa remains popular in much of the country, where he is still given credit for ending the war successfully. Two other provinces are also holding elections Saturday, and in those the governing coalition is expected to win. At the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, the holiest place in Sri Lanka, Nanda, 80, who has one name, said Thursday that she would give her vote to the governing alliance. \u201cI feel the president has brought stability to the country, and that\u2019s what we need,\u201d Nanda said. In 1998, the Tamil Tigers attacked the temple, which is said to hold one of Lord Buddha\u2019s teeth, and killed 16 people. The attack shocked the nation, and Nanda said she could still remember being horrified by it. But just outside the temple, W. J. Wijeratne, owner of P & A Jewelers, said he planned to vote for the United National Party, the principal opposition, even though he suspected that the government would steal the results. \u201cEverything in this country is being given to the president\u2019s family,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Sri Lanka;Election;Tamils;United National Party Sri Lanka;Tamil National Alliance;Navi Pillay;Mahinda Rajapaksa;Ananthi Sasitharan"}
{"id": "ny0144402", "categories": ["nyregion", "long-island"], "date": "2008/10/19", "title": "Suffolk County Angles to Attract Film Crews", "abstract": "WESTHAMPTON BEACH STEVE LEVY is standing on top of a pile of boards in the slanting late-day light and looking out over an overgrown field, and he is thinking big. All around him are weeds, scrub and battered outbuildings, but he is conjuring up a vision. It\u2019s a 53-acre industrial park of biotech and environmental-technology companies, a hotel, conference center and \u2014 why stop there? \u2014 a film studio, or maybe two or even three, that would lure filmmakers past Manhattan and Queens to a place where movie and TV people have holiday and summer homes anyway. A new junior mecca for New York\u2019s film and television industry: Suffolk County. \u201cThe producers will see that we have the services and facilities that they need,\u201d said Mr. Levy, the Suffolk County executive. \u201cThey\u2019ll come to us.\u201d A year ago that might have seemed highly unrealistic: why would any big movie company send its studio work to Suffolk County when New York City is swimming in sound stages, crew and a full-service media industry? But early this year the landscape shifted. Facing tax-break competition from states like Connecticut, New York State tripled its film tax credit to 30 percent, coaxing television and film productions back like hungry pigeons. And in February a veteran television producer reopened a moribund production studio in East Hampton, quickly drawing an HBO pilot with a big-ticket director, Barry Sonnenfeld, because of the tax break and trailing the prospect of more business to come. At the same time, several county initiatives kicked in. Suffolk announced a developer for the Hampton Business and Technology Park at Gabreski Airport here, with a quarter of the site set aside for film production. It introduced incentives, including a $25,000 grant for independent filmmakers who shoot in the county. And Mr. Levy put before the County Legislature a proposal to have the county handle film requests, to spare producers the hassle of getting separate permits from villages and towns (although municipalities may opt out of the arrangement). It would be a first for New York, said Patricia Swinney Kaufman, executive director of the Governor\u2019s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, who said fragmented permit practices in New York have hindered the industry. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a model,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople are going to be watching it.\u201d All this, Mr. Levy says, puts his vision well within reach. \u201cFilm and TV production should be one of the mainstays of the economy in Suffolk County,\u201d he said, bringing all sorts of industry-related jobs but also sending a cascade of business to hotels, restaurants, delis, hardware stores and lumber yards. How much is a matter of debate. Mr. Levy said he had no hard projections, but in New York City the mayor\u2019s office estimated that the new tax credit led to an additional $500 million in spending from city-based shoots between April 23 and Sept. 23 compared with that period last year. Long Island has been a destination for location shooting since the earliest days of film, and most recently for films like \u201cFunny Games\u201d (2007) and television shows like \u201cThe Apprentice.\u201d But Nassau County gets a lot more of the action, with its Gold Coast estates and proximity to the city. Nassau had 547 film-production days last year to Suffolk\u2019s 94, said Lisa Willner, a spokeswoman for the Governor\u2019s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development. \u201cWe actually have people fighting over locations,\u201d said Debra Markowitz, director of Nassau\u2019s film commission. \u201cI can\u2019t even say we\u2019re trying to attract them because they come anyway.\u201d Mr. Levy wants their attention. When he took office in 2004, he revived the dormant film commission, appointing a new director and commissioners. His film office director, Michelle Isabelle-Stark, was charged with creating a one-stop Web site and coordinating with municipalities to make shooting in Suffolk easy for filmmakers. \u201cWe\u2019ll bend over backward and roll out a red carpet,\u201d Mr. Levy said. \u201cIt\u2019s a clean industry that gets a major infusion into the economy.\u201d Some things are standing in his way. There is the gantlet of wary villages, towns and local business groups, particularly in magnet locations like the Hamptons with long experience handling film shoots. In East Hampton Village, Larry Cantwell, who as assistant to the mayor issues 25 to 30 film and photography permits a year, is leery of a centralized permit system. \u201cWe want to deal directly with the production companies that are doing the work, we\u2019ve got 30 years of experience doing this, we have a law that regulates it and we think we do it cooperatively and we do it effectively,\u201d he said. But Mr. Levy has been chipping away at resistance from town and village leaders, and, he says, most towns and a handful of villages have signed on for a uniform county film application. He may have more trouble with skeptics who say the economic advantages to film tax breaks are overstated, depriving states of revenue for a return that is hard to calculate reliably. Ms. Swinney Kaufman disagrees. \u201cWe\u2019re bursting with film in the city,\u201d she said, adding that productions lured by the tax credit were already scouting for studio space beyond the boroughs. She called the credit \u201ca great economic engine for New York,\u201d generating not just money from film productions but also incubating related industries and skilled jobs \u2014 gaffers, grips, lighting technicians \u2014 for local residents. That would be good news to Mitchell Kriegman, a television producer and the writer and creator of the children\u2019s programs \u201cIt\u2019s a Big Big World,\u201d \u201cBear in the Big Blue House\u201d and \u201cClarissa Explains It All.\u201d Mr. Kriegman, who owns Wainscott Studios, bought the adjacent East Hampton Studios in December with Michael Wudyka and within months landed a big job: \u201cSuburban Shootout,\u201d the HBO pilot directed by Mr. Sonnenfeld with a crew of 125 that was housed and fed locally for two months. He hopes to be a tenant in the new Westhampton Beach complex and said he was already looking at a third location in Suffolk for additional space. He envisions a time when his crews could be called up from the surrounding community, not shipped in from the city, working and keeping the local economy humming even in the off-season. \u201cIt\u2019s not \u2018If you build it they will come,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Kriegman said. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018They\u2019re coming so you better build it before they get here.\u2019 \u201d", "keyword": "Hamptons (NY);Motion Pictures;Taxation;Tax Credits"}
{"id": "ny0260298", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2011/06/27", "title": "Thousands Cheer Same-Sex Marriage Law in Euphoric Pride Parade", "abstract": "Two days after New York became the sixth and largest state to legalize same-sex marriage , participants in the 42nd annual gay pride parade on Sunday used the occasion to reflect somberly on the gains and losses of the past year. Kidding! They came to shout, dance, cheer, strut, hug and shed tears of joy, knowing that on July 24, when the law takes effect, the season for tears will begin in earnest. The focus of much of the cheering was Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo , a Democrat, who made legalization of same-sex marriage part of his election campaign and visibly led the fight for its approval in the Republican-led State Senate. Mr. Cuomo marched with several local politicians, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the New York City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who is gay. But there was little question that the governor was the parade\u2019s rock star, eliciting shrieks as he made his way down Fifth Avenue. The roar became almost deafening as the parade turned onto Christopher Street in the West Village. People leaned over police barriers to get a glimpse of the governor or to catch the attention of the cameras following him. \u201cFinally we got someone who does what he believes in,\u201d said Chuck Sawyer, 49, a fund-raiser for the American Lung Association, who added that he and his partner would probably get married in late summer. \u201cHe\u2019s been doing what he said he\u2019d do. A lot of past governors and even the president haven\u2019t come through. He did.\u201d Revelers held up thousands of printed signs reading \u201cPromise Kept!\u201d and \u201cThank You Gov. Cuomo,\u201d and Mayor Bloomberg waved a rainbow flag. The signs were from New Yorkers United for Marriage, a coalition of previously squabbling organizations that Mr. Cuomo helped forge. But it was Mr. Cuomo who basked in the crowd\u2019s attention, beaming and pointing at individuals along the route. \u201cI\u2019ve been to the parade many times, and there\u2019s always a lot of energy and it\u2019s always been a ball, but this was special,\u201d the governor said as he stepped out of the parade on Christopher Street. \u201cI think you\u2019re going to see this message resonate all across the country now. If New York can do it, it\u2019s O.K. for every other place to do it.\u201d After a legislative session in which Mr. Cuomo drove through several measures opposed by liberals, including a cap on property tax increases, the governor said, \u201cNew York is the progressive capital of the nation. And it\u2019s that once again, and it\u2019s a pleasure to be part of it today.\u201d In a rare public appearance with the governor, Mr. Cuomo\u2019s girlfriend, Sandra Lee, a celebrity chef who has a gay brother, marched by his side. Ms. Lee figured into Mr. Cuomo\u2019s deliberations over same-sex marriage, according to those who know the couple: she repeatedly reminded him that she wanted the law changed. Other officials in the parade included State Senator Thomas K. Duane and Assemblyman Daniel J. O\u2019Donnell, both Manhattan Democrats; the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman; and Congresswoman Nydia M. Vel\u00e1zquez, whose district includes parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Several people carried hand-lettered signs thanking by name the four Republican senators who voted for the bill. Former Gov. David A. Paterson, who unsuccessfully pushed for a same-sex-marriage bill in a Democrat-led Senate in 2009, marched a few blocks behind Mr. Cuomo. He held a blue sign that read, \u201cThank you Gov. Cuomo.\u201d Earlier in the day, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, rejected the notion that acceptance of same-sex marriage would spread to his state. \u201cI believe marriage should be between one man and one woman,\u201d Mr. Christie said on the NBC News program \u201cMeet the Press .\u201d \u201cI wouldn\u2019t sign a bill like the one that was in New York.\u201d But many people in the parade crowd were grateful that Mr. Cuomo, who was not considered an early champion of gay marriage, became one of its strongest advocates, and some said they hoped his successes in Albany would propel him toward the White House. \u201cI predict a presidential run for Cuomo in 2016,\u201d said Pati Scott, who attended the parade with her husband, Bruce. Another man along the route held a sign declaring himself a \u201cHomo for Cuomo 2016.\u201d Debbie Strom, 56, a Christian minister, and her girlfriend, Cathy Kahl, 63, a retired soldier whose 30 years of service included time in the Vietnam War, traveled to Greenwich Village from their home in Syracuse to celebrate. \u201cIt means we are able to be called human beings with all the rights of everyone else,\u201d Ms. Strom said. She and Ms. Kahl have been together for two years and said they planned to get married. For Lisa Guadalupe and Lissette Conti, who marched with their three children, the parade on Sunday capped a week of highs and lows as they watched lawmakers labor over the marriage bill. \u201cI\u2019d get happy, then sad, then I didn\u2019t want to get too happy because I was afraid it wouldn\u2019t pass,\u201d said Ms. Conti, a home health aide. \u201cI held my breath for the longest time, then I screamed.\u201d For now, though, the couple said they had no immediate plans to marry. \u201cThat costs money,\u201d Ms. Conti said. \u201cI want a nice big church wedding.\u201d Their son Justin, 18, was happy to have time. \u201cDo I have to wear a bridesmaid dress?\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got to do some shopping.\u201d", "keyword": "Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships;Homosexuality;Parades;Cuomo Andrew M;New York City"}
{"id": "ny0049371", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2014/11/25", "title": "A Place Where Lost Luggage Gets Another Shot", "abstract": "SCOTTSBORO, Ala. \u2014 It is a secondhand store, one of a kind. Its name, Unclaimed Baggage Center , doesn\u2019t quite say it all. Its shelves are stocked not only with luggage lost, forgotten or ditched by airline passengers; the store also carries all the contents of that stray luggage deemed suitable for purchase. In the G.P.S. generation, when the whereabouts of things as diverse as smartphones, house pets and children\u2019s backpacks are traceable, airline passengers and their possessions still permanently part ways. While the number of \u201cmishandled\u201d items, as the aviation industry describes checked luggage that disappears or is damaged on its watch, is declining, the boom in carry-on belongings left in seat-back compartments and overhead bins \u2014 think iPads \u2014 has helped keep this repository of orphaned property thriving. And there is the promise of continued good times as more travelers take to the skies for the holiday season. \u201cBusiness is great,\u201d said Brenda Cantrell, whose title of brand ambassador at Unclaimed Baggage translates to tourism overseer and spokeswoman. How great a business is unclear, given the family-owned company\u2019s reluctance to disclose what it considers proprietary information, other than to insist that the sign that stands outside this nondescript strip mall \u2014 \u201c7,000 new items daily\u201d \u2014 represents truth in advertising. She did estimate the annual traffic count at nearly a million, drawn from every state and at least 40 countries \u2014 including a commercial pilot based in Qatar who drops by regularly with his wife. Buses are welcome. Little can surprise Mrs. Cantrell anymore after seeing wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, full suits of armor and rare musical instruments wander in. Some items are so unusual that they are stashed in the company \u201cmuseum,\u201d or exhibited on the store walls, unavailable for any price. On exhibit last week was a tribal breastplate and an African djembe, or drum. Amazon it is not. There is no online shopping component. The boldest claim from Unclaimed, as it is known to local residents: There is no other place like it. Exclusive contracts are locked in with major United States-based airlines to load suitcases and other stuff from primary airports in trucks and haul them back to this northeast Alabama town of about 15,000 that, if not in the middle of nowhere, is in the vicinity. Recent ramped-up promotional efforts, largely through social media, have generated news coverage. A spot on local TV lured three residents from northern Georgia last Thursday. Sandi Grimm, though impressed, found nothing that she said \u201cfloated my boat,\u201d but the shopping cart of her friends Pam Aiken and Ed Lyon was laden with a typically odd assortment of goods seen here: a mattress and an 11-piece cooking set, both new, along with two iPads, cleansed of data from the previous owners. The price was $625 for the pair. Behind them, the glass display case containing digital cameras could have been replicated from most any department store. On the other side was an article that distinguishes Unclaimed: a saddle mounted on a faux horseback, for the right price. Nearby was an especially incongruous scene: skis and snowboards for sale in a rural Deep South store. In fact, the first Saturday of each November is Unclaimed\u2019s version of Black Friday . Hundreds of customers with powdered slopes on their minds queue up overnight to burst through the doors for bargains on skiing gear and garb. The special last week was on jewelry and wristwatches, marked down further from the usual reduction storewide of 20 to 80 percent below retail. David Chafin, an Alabamian visiting the area for work, had bought four timepieces earlier in the day and had circled back for more, with his wife and a colleague, Taz Tillery, in tow. As \u201cLittle Drummer Boy\u201d drifted out over the public address system, Mr. Chafin, who said he once ran a clothing and jewelry store, expressed delight with the higher-end apparel, much of which carries designer labels. He eventually toted out seven jackets. Image Guitars, electric and acoustic, now for sale. The store also keeps a museum of unusual items. Credit Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times The store \u201cholds up to its legend,\u201d said Mr. Tillery, a first-timer, who poked fun at his co-worker\u2019s binge-shopping. \u201cMy expectations were lower coming in.\u201d Standing out among the mostly affordable watches was an 18-karat piece with a $15,000 price tag, which amounts to half of the most expensive Unclaimed transaction ever \u2014 for a Rolex. A modest purchase of earrings was made by Zoe Polk, whose father, James, had grabbed artificial fishing baits for a friend. Mr. Polk, who swings by periodically, likens the experience to a treasure hunt. \u201cYou never know what you\u2019ll find,\u201d he said. For example, curious about the contents of a stuffed animal acquired there eight years ago, he cut it open, he recalled, and pharmaceutical drugs spilled out. For every 1,000 fliers in the United States in the first six months of this year, 3.86 dealt with mishandled bags, according to the Department of Transportation. The rate is about half the peak in 2007, but it is enough to keep Unclaimed\u2019s trucks rolling. The trend toward carry-ons has partly offset the decline. Unclaimed must wait 90 days to obtain checked luggage while airlines hunt for the owner. Some airlines hold onto the more valuable property for a while longer, but are not required to. Laptops and cellphones are pouring in so much that Mrs. Cantrell said, \u201cWe\u2019ve become quite the Apple Store in our own way.\u201d The section offering headphones and earbuds seemed disproportionately large. Mr. Tillery eventually piled a stack of garments on the checkout counter. \u201cNo telling what you\u2019re going to find,\u201d he said, echoing Mr. Polk\u2019s comment, before his credit card was tapped for $277.65. Most of the store\u2019s 40,000 square feet is occupied by clothes of all sorts, including wedding dresses and mink furs. Challenging laptops for the steepest hike in incoming items are coats. \u201cI think everybody who travels carries two jackets and leaves one behind,\u201d said Mrs. Cantrell after detailing her own head-to-toe ensemble, including watch and necklace, that she said was acquired at the store. Significant competition from similar businesses has been closed off by what Mrs. Cantrell said were exclusive deals and strong relationships with airlines. Several who were contacted about Unclaimed declined to comment, explaining they do not identify vendors or confirm contracts with them. Unclaimed could not have started smaller, with goods procured from bus lines sold off card tables in a two-bedroom house in 1970. The founder\u2019s son took over a quarter-century later, and inventory today \u2014 also supplied by buses and trains \u2014 spills over into a second building that serves as the children\u2019s department. The growth of technology that will allow for more effective tracking of luggage could become a threat, Mrs. Cantrell acknowledged. Radio frequency identification devices are deployed by at least one major airport and could someday be attached to all checked baggage by airlines as the cost of such tracking devices continues to shrink. \u201cWe\u2019ve got some interest in examining RFID technology,\u201d a Delta spokesman, Morgan Durrant, said.", "keyword": "Unclaimed Baggage Center;Luggage;Travel,Tourism;Retail;Airlines,airplanes;Scottsboro AL"}
{"id": "ny0258007", "categories": ["business", "media"], "date": "2011/01/17", "title": "Brands Create Media Outlets Online, Bypassing Magazines", "abstract": "In the not-so-distant past, a luxury brand like Richemont , the Swiss company that owns Piaget, Dunhill and Montblanc, would have killed for even the slightest attention from Jeremy Langmead, the editor of British Esquire. Now, he works for them, building a menswear e-commerce site. Luxury brands have always advertised in the likes of Vogue, Esquire and Architectural Digest and tried to impress their editors enough to get mentioned in the editorial pages, as well. But now companies like Richemont are reaching out directly to consumers \u2014 and cutting out the middlemen. Last year, Richemont acquired control of Net-A-Porter , the 10-year-old online luxury fashion retailer founded by the British magazine editor Natalie Massenet. When it first began, people in the industry sniffed at Net-A-Porter, suggesting it was just a tatty e-commerce site masquerading as digital fashion magazine. They\u2019re not sniffing anymore. Net-A-Porter sold for over half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive purchases of a consumer publisher \u2014 if that\u2019s what it is \u2014 in many years. Net-A-Porter now employs more than 900 people (more than a vast majority of newsrooms and magazines), features products from 3,000 high-end designers and has four million visitors a month \u2014 far more than InStyle.com from Time Inc., Style.com from Cond\u00e9 Nast or the Harper\u2019s Bazaar Web site . \u201cBrands, especially those centered around lifestyle interests or luxury, are increasingly becoming media companies,\u201d said Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, a digital communications and consulting firm. Anna Wintour may still turn heads every time she\u2019s near a runway, but frankly commercial products like Net-A-Porter are pointing the way forward not only for fashion, but for publishing as well. The mainstream media have lamented, then celebrated, the digital revolution, but the fact that creating and distributing content is getting cheaper \u2014 \u201cLook, Ma, no trucks, no printing presses!\u201d \u2014 has not been lost on the brands themselves. On Saturday, Burberry live-streamed its menswear show from Milan. Consumers who tuned in could not only watch the fancy model boys come down the runway in a variety of outerwear, but also click and buy anything they coveted and have it delivered to their door in six to eight weeks. The luxury brand LVMH has a Web site called Nowness that features all manner of daily specials. In the United States, the Gilt Groupe, a bargain hunter\u2019s paradise for the luxury-minded, is now adding editorial elements every day and watching visitors spend more and more time there. And it\u2019s not just fashion: Best Buy has been watching its in-store sales shrink under pressure from the Web and has responded with On, a digital mag-a-log with editorial content and advertisements from other brands. Thrillist sends out e-mails to subscribers with a curated list of local entertainment and retail options. One Kings Lane , an e-commerce company that sells designer home d\u00e9cor and furnishings, just acquired Helicopter, the hotshot design firm that helped start the well-crafted and much-missed Domino magazine, as well as doing work for mainstream publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Hachette, Time Inc. and Hearst. Apart from its burgeoning Web site, Net-A-Porter\u2019s iPad app takes commerce and content not only mobile, but one step further. The magazine (if that\u2019s what it is) offers a pleasing editorial narrative in the horizontal format with a parade of models and various frocks, but when the user turns the device to portrait mode, individual items pop in a retail environment, ready to buy with the swipe of a finger. And the twin revenue streams of advertising from other brands and transactions make it a promising proposition. Lucky, Cond\u00e9 Nast\u2019s shopping magazine, neatly foresaw this future of editorial and advertising elements blending into a single reader experience, but the company did not take the last step of making it a place that people could buy from. Adam Lavelle, the chief strategy office of iCrossing, the digital marketing agency owned by Hearst, believes that those old lines are fast disappearing. \u201cThe days when you only had someone put together a television or a magazine ad out there and then waited three months to see if it worked are over,\u201d he said. \u201cThe old line separating church and state is not gone, but is definitely a more blurry one. And brands that are authentic, not shameless or opportunistic, have a chance to create content that people will pay attention to.\u201d With the acquisition of iCrossing, Hearst is working quickly to build out consumer experiences that go beyond the traditional dyad of editorial girded by advertising, in part because advertisers expect more and will go elsewhere \u2014 or do it themselves \u2014 to get it. Editorial credibility, once the sole province of old-line publishing houses, is now being bought and paid for by the brands themselves. Mr. Langmead, the former Esquire editor, will oversee Mr. Porter, a male-oriented online retail site that will serve as a companion to Net-A-Porter. Andrea Linett, the former creative director of Lucky, has gone on to become eBay\u2019s fashion creative director, while Melissa Biggs Bradley, the founding editor of Town and Country Travel for Hearst, is now the chief executive at the travel site Indagare. And many journalists who were pushed aside as publishing withered are now finding that brands in search of an audience are still interested in what they do. \u201cFor us, this is nothing new,\u201d said Claudia Plant, editorial director of Net-A-Porter. \u201cFor 10 years, we have been giving people information they want in a compelling, entertaining format while they shop. We fuse content with commerce and fashion.\u201d Susan Lyne, the former chief executive of Martha Stewart Living, is now head of the Gilt Groupe . As it has added more and more editorial elements, consumers are coming not only to shop, but to browse, read and investigate, which used to be the province of magazines. \u201cWe are not in the publishing business; we are in the editing business,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if I were in the media business, I would be concerned because it used to be that in order to reach a certain kind of consumer, brands used to have to buy ads in relevant magazines or with a certain kind of television programming. That\u2019s clearly not the case anymore.\u201d", "keyword": "Net-A-Porter;Conde Nast Publications Inc;Hearst Corp;E-Commerce;Fashion and Apparel"}
{"id": "ny0049919", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2014/10/20", "title": "Manchester City Over Tottenham Hotspur, Ag\u00fcero Scores Four", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Who travels best in international soccer, attackers or defenders? It is a fair question, because strikers often live on their wits and their individual talents, whereas defenders generally rely upon coaching and cohesion. So maybe that explained how Sergio Ag\u00fcero returned from a trip to Beijing and Hong Kong with the Argentine national team to score four times in Manchester City\u2019s 4-1 home romp over Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday. And maybe, just maybe, the travails of Sunderland can be put down in part to the recent travels of its players, as the club from England\u2019s northeast imploded and was routed, 8-0, down on the coast at Southampton. If Sunderland\u2019s defeat was inept and seemingly uncaring, Manchester\u2019s victory was cavalier. It owed much to the artful way that Ag\u00fcero darted into spaces and how David Silva found him with quick, intuitive passes. \u201cAg\u00fcero is the Mozart of football,\u201d the Tottenham coach, Mauricio Pochettino, had said in the buildup to Saturday\u2019s game. It\u2019s an old line, previously used in the 1970s by Argentina Coach Cesar Menotti to describe the genius of Diego Maradona. And, yes, there are moments when Ag\u00fcero, with his low center of gravity and his quick, impulsive moves, reminds viewers of Maradona. There is a similar end product, too: Ag\u00fcero, no taller than 5-foot-8, has accumulated 61 goals in 95 appearances in the Premier league. The drawback with the quick Argentine is that he has needed to be nursed along in his career. He frequently suffers muscle strains and has been substituted in more than of half his games. That said, and even with the foresight of Pochettino, Tottenham\u2019s defense was so wide open that it appeared that both sides had opted for all-out attack. And the referee, generous in his awarding of four penalties during the game, joined in the spirit of abandon. Two penalty kicks were netted after unerring right-to-left low shots by Ag\u00fcero. A third was hit so tamely that the Tottenham goalkeeper Hugo Lloris saved it. Spurs also squandered a penalty, one hit so meekly by Roberto Soldado that it was easily stopped. City, however, outplayed Spurs throughout the game. Ag\u00fcero took home the match ball for his four goals, two of which were wonderful examples of his ability to deceive defenders with a matador\u2019s sway of the hips and then finish with low, perfect-to-the-inch shots with either foot. It seems the miles spent in the air did nothing to tire him. Once he was back on the ground, Argentina used its Mozart so sparingly that he took part for just one hour in its match in Beijing and was a bystander in Hong Kong. City might need more from him in Moscow on Tuesday, when it plays CSKA in the Champions League. More frequent flier miles, more time in the air than on the training fields, and less preparation all around. Sunderland, meanwhile, can only dream of such lofty distractions. Its coach, Gus Poyet, seemed to carry the weight of the eight-goal thrashing on his own back. His face looked hollowed, his eyes staring on in disbelief as the team capsized and allowed more goals in this encounter than it had in the previous seven combined. The Southampton coach, Ronald Koeman, had publicly warned his players via the club\u2019s Twitter account to expect a hard game simply because Sunderland was built around a good defense and solid organization. Koeman, who has virtually rebuilt the Saints in his few months in charge, may never be taken at his word again. Koeman has re-created the team around the meticulous passes of his new Serbian midfielder, Dusan Tadic, and the attacking leadership of another new Saint, the Italian Graziano Pell\u00e8, and the club now occupies third place in the Premier League. Poyet said after Saturday\u2019s game that he would take responsibility for his side after it was left in shambles, but players had to look at themselves. \u201cThat was probably the most embarrassing game I have been involved in as a player or a manager,\u201d said the 46-year-old Uruguayan. \u201cI have to say sorry for the fans. I learned a lot today about which players you can count on when things don\u2019t go your way.\u201d Some of his players gave up, he admitted. \u201cI know who they are,\u201d Puyet repeated on television in postgame interviews. \u201cIt\u2019s important for the future. The second half was unacceptable. Some people don\u2019t seem to understand that there is no place to hide on the pitch.\u201d The coach had a long trip home during which he could start an inquest and possibly figure which of his players should be culled. The fans of Sunderland \u2014 one of England\u2019s oldest and proudest clubs, dating back to the 19th century \u2014 will travel anywhere and everywhere in support of their \u201cBlack Cats\u201d as the team is affectionately known. But every game has its turning point, and both coaches agreed that a penalty kick that was not awarded to Sunderland possibly triggered its downward spiral Saturday. Sunderland had started brightly but fell behind to a bizarre own goal by another Argentine, Santiago Vergini. His kick turned into a calamity of beautiful mishap. He tried to volley the ball away, mistimed his kick, and looped the ball over his own keeper. There were other comedies of errors, another own goal, and much plundering by Saints forwards. But at 2-0, the referee decided to give neither a penalty nor a red card to the Southampton goalkeeper, Fraser Forster, who rushed off his line and clattered into Sunderland striker Steven Fletcher with such force that Fletcher was sent pirouetting over the keeper in the goalmouth. No penalty, no reward, and ultimately no fight from the Black Cats.", "keyword": "Soccer;Tottenham Hotspur Soccer Team;Manchester City Soccer Team;Sergio Aguero;Premier League;UEFA Champions League"}
{"id": "ny0094979", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/01/17", "title": "Repsol Abandons Oil and Gas Exploration Off Canary Islands", "abstract": "MADRID \u2014 The Spanish energy company Repsol said on Friday that it was abandoning oil and gas exploration off the Canary Islands after an initial survey yielded insufficient results to merit extraction. The project, which started in November , had faced stiff opposition from local politicians and environmental groups. It also coincided with a plunge in oil prices that has put into question the viability of planned exploration projects around the world. Repsol is the lead operator of a consortium that earmarked $350 million for an exploration phase that was expected to last four months. It had teamed up with Woodside Petroleum of Australia and RWE of Germany. The deepwater survey was about 40 miles from Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, part of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. The archipelago, which belongs to Spain, is also a major destination for tourists. The project\u2019s oil exploration vessel, the Rowan Renaissance, will return to Angola, where Repsol has another venture. Repsol had forecast long-term yields of 110,000 barrels of oil a day from the project, enough to cover about one tenth of Spain\u2019s oil consumption. The company initially put the chances of finding oil for exploration there at between 15 percent and 20 percent. The survey \u201cconfirmed that oil and gas have been generated in the basin,\u201d Repsol said in a statement, but \"the deposits found have been saturated with water, and the hydrocarbons present are in very thin, nonexploitable layers.\u201d Kristian Rix, a spokesman for Repsol, said the decision to withdraw from the project had not been influenced by the recent drop in oil prices. \u201cAngola is an interesting project for us, and it seems more promising at this stage,\u201d Mr. Rix said. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of where you best allocate your capital.\u201d Pedro San Gin\u00e9s, the head of the local authority of Lanzarote, welcomed the decision and called for the Spanish authorities to promote renewable energy projects around the Canary Islands. Mr. San Gin\u00e9s also said that he would travel to the European Parliament in Brussels next week to push for the creation of an international wildlife sanctuary in the waters near Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. A major oil and gas discovery near the islands could have reduced Spain\u2019s reliance on energy imports, as it imports more than 99 percent of its hydrocarbons. But the project faced fierce opposition from environmental groups. They argued that the project would endanger local flora and wildlife, including dolphins, not only because of the risk of an oil spill, but also because of tremors linked to exploration. The project also turned into a political dispute between the Spanish government in Madrid and the regional government of the islands, which tried unsuccessfully to hold a referendum on the issue last year.", "keyword": "Repsol;Oil and Gasoline;Offshore drilling;Canary Islands;Woodside Petroleum;RWE"}
{"id": "ny0105395", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2012/03/22", "title": "Myanmar Invites Westerners to Monitor Elections", "abstract": "The United States said on Wednesday that it was \u201cencouraged\u201d that Myanmar had invited American and European representatives to monitor elections on April 1, a milestone for Myanmar as it emerges from decades of military dictatorship. The invitation is the latest in a series of steps taken by Myanmar\u2019s president, U Thein Sein, to pry open the country to the outside world and move toward democracy. Earlier this month, Mr. Thein Sein said that the country was seeking international recognition through \u201ccontinuous efforts to win further trust.\u201d Voting in recent years has been witnessed by a handful of foreign diplomats, including a delegation from North Korea, but the announcement on Wednesday was the first time in recent memory that Western countries were invited as observers. At stake for Myanmar is the possible lifting of sanctions. United States officials have said the handling of the elections will help determine whether Washington will rescind a raft of punitive economic measures. On Tuesday, the head office of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is a member, announced that observers from each of the nine other Asean countries had been invited to witness the elections. Adrienne Nutzman, a spokeswoman for the United States Mission in Myanmar, said by e-mail that Washington was encouraged by the invitation but \u201cconcerned by reports of irregularities, local intimidation and a recent attack\u201d on opposition supporters. \u201cThe Burmese authorities should take the necessary steps to ensure that the election process is free and fair, and to ensure that all political parties understand there is no place for violent attacks and intimidation,\u201d she said. The United States did not immediately respond to the invitation. The election is a watershed for Myanmar because it signals the beginnings of the political reconciliation of the military-backed establishment and the long-suppressed democracy movement. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi , the leader of the opposition, who was kept under house arrest for the better part of two decades, is running for Parliament. The last time her party, the National League for Democracy, participated in elections was more than two decades ago, and the result was canceled by a military junta. Significantly, however, the elections do not threaten the ruling party\u2019s hold on power. Only 48 seats out of more than 600 are being contested. The next general election is not scheduled until late in 2015. But analysts say that the military establishment is turning out to be less monolithic than often perceived. \u201cOn many key issues in Parliament, people aren\u2019t necessarily voting along party lines,\u201d said Thant Myint-U, a historian and former United Nations official who is one of the leading experts on the country. \u201cParty organizations are still relatively weak, and few have clear-cut ideologies or detailed policy positions.\u201d A recent bill in Parliament dealing with land rights was passed by one house but rejected by the other \u2014 although both are controlled by the Union Solidarity and Development Party. Mr. Thein Sein, a former general who was elected president last March, has led the changes in Myanmar, including the release of hundreds of political prisoners, peace overtures to minority ethnic groups and reconciliation with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.", "keyword": "Myanmar;Elections;Thein Sein;Aung San Suu Kyi Daw"}
{"id": "ny0260387", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2011/06/11", "title": "Stir in Virginia Over Rainbow Flag at a Federal Reserve Bank", "abstract": "RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond ran a rainbow flag up its flagpole last week and has been hearing about it ever since. From conservative groups who are outraged. From gay rights groups who are pleased. And from state lawmakers on both sides who just cannot seem to stop talking about it. The bank unfurled the flag on June 1, at the request of a group of gay and lesbian employees in honor of gay pride month. One day later, Bob Marshall, a Republican in the House of Delegates and an outspoken opponent on gay rights issues, was moved to write a letter to the bank\u2019s president, saying that the flag was inappropriate for a quasi-governmental entity. Gay and lesbian \u201cbehavior,\u201d he wrote, \u201cundermines the American economy, shortens lives, adds significantly to illness, increases health costs, promotes venereal diseases,\u201d among other things. That prompted a series of outraged rejoinders from gay rights advocates, including Adam Ebbin, a gay lawmaker from Northern Virginia who said that despite Mr. Marshall\u2019s views, things had \u201cgotten better for L.G.B.T. Virginians.\u201d In many ways, the controversy mirrors the changing demographics of this fast-growing state, whose traditions and habits are mixing with an influx of immigrants and young professionals in the northern part of the state. Jim Strader, a spokesman for the bank, said the bank had fielded hundreds of phone calls and as many e-mails about the flag. The flag, he said, symbolizes \u201cvalues of being open and inclusive,\u201d and shows that the bank is \u201ca place that doesn\u2019t discriminate.\u201d That is important in Virginia, said James Parrish, executive director of Equality Virginia, because House Republicans have twice blocked a bill that would protect state employees from discrimination by sexual orientation. Rainbows, which festoon entire neighborhoods in some cities during gay pride month, are hard to spot in Richmond, and Mr. Parrish said the flag outside the bank was \u201cnoticeable.\u201d \u201cThis is not Greenwich Village or Hell\u2019s Kitchen,\u201d he said. One of the most popular arguments by the flag\u2019s opponents was that the bank is a government institution and so should not be displaying a flag that promotes a cause. And now that they are, the argument goes, they have an obligation to other causes. \u201cWe hope there would be an even hand played when a Christian requests the Christian flag in September during Christian Heritage month,\u201d said Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. Mr. Strader\u2019s response is that the bank is in fact privately owned, as are all regional Federal Reserves, and that it considers requests by employees \u2014 this was the first one \u2014 but not the general public. Mr. Marshall, 67, has been vocal on gay issues. He told The Washington Post last year that he was concerned gay troops would spread venereal disease. He was also a sponsor of Virginia\u2019s ban on gay marriage. Mr. Strader said the bank \u201canticipates\u201d that it will respond to Mr. Marshall\u2019s letter. Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall has written an opinion article that he said is scheduled to run on Sunday in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. \u201cI am sure this flag and or Fed story will not end here,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Homosexuality;Flags Emblems and Insignia;Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond;Richmond (Va)"}
{"id": "ny0095535", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2015/01/09", "title": "Police Hunt for Suspects in Paris Attack as Nation Mourns", "abstract": "PARIS \u2014 As France mourned, thousands of law enforcement agents mobilized on Thursday in an extensive manhunt for two brothers suspected of killing 12 people, including two police officers, at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The police were focusing their search on northern France, where the suspects were reported to have stolen food from a gasoline station. One of the cars they used in their getaway from Paris on Wednesday was found abandoned in the area. Television channels carried live coverage of the search for the brothers, Sa\u00efd and Ch\u00e9rif Kouachi, 34 and 32. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, 18, turned himself in early Thursday at a police station in Charleville-M\u00e9zi\u00e8res, about 145 miles northeast of Paris. Image Journalists at Agence France-Presse in Paris held signs Thursday reading \u201cJe suis Charlie\u201d (I am Charlie) during a moment of silence for the victims of the attack at the newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Credit Francois Xavier Marit/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images The sighting of the brothers and the discovery of the car in the town of Villers-Cotter\u00eats, in Picardy, captivated a nation that seemed to draw together on Thursday, at least for a moment of silence at noon on a rare official day of national mourning, to defend French values like freedom of the press and religious tolerance. French police officers were also guarding railway and subway stations, department stores and other potential targets like news media offices on Thursday. Officials in Britain said they were stepping up screening at ferry ports in case the two men tried to head that way. In London, the head of Britain\u2019s MI5 Security Service, roughly equivalent to the F.B.I., warned on Thursday that Qaeda militants in Syria were plotting attacks to inflict mass casualties in the West, possibly against transport systems or \u201ciconic targets.\u201d Image French police questioned a motorist in Longpont, France, on Thursday. 1 / 15 Andrew Parker, in a speech prepared before the Paris attack but delivered afterward, called an attack on Britain highly likely. About the Paris attack, he said, \u201cit is too early for us to come to judgments about the precise details or origin of the attack, but it is a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm.\u201d In Washington, President Obama visited the French Embassy on Thursday evening, where he signed a book of condolences and paused for a minute of silence alongside Ambassador Gerard Araud, according to the White House pool report. The moment of silence in France was widely respected, but the national mood encompassed fear, anger, unity and, ultimately, defiance. Isolated events helped fan anxiety. On Thursday morning, a police officer was killed and a city employee was wounded by gunfire near a subway station just south of Paris. Video Ch\u00e9rif Kouachi, one of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, appeared in a 2005 investigative documentary about jihadism that aired on French television. Credit Credit Pi\u00e8ces \u00e0 Conviction, France3 The police said the shooting appeared unrelated to the attack on the newspaper or the subsequent manhunt, and they announced two arrests. There was also an explosion at a kebab shop in eastern France, with no casualties reported, and two mosques were fired at, prosecutors said. The government moved quickly to try to capture the fugitive brothers and reassure the nation. The police said they had detained several people for questioning in the case and had arrested some of them. They also announced that at least five planned terrorist attacks had been thwarted in France over the last 18 months. The alert level in northern France and in Paris, the capital, was raised to the highest level. The police had their first big break in the case when they discovered that one of the brothers, Sa\u00efd, had left his identity card in the first car used by the gunmen, which was found abandoned Wednesday evening after a crash. The police reportedly found Molotov cocktails and jihadist banners in the car as well. Tracking the Aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo Attack A visual timeline of the attack and the events that followed. The authorities seemed to catch another break when the men robbed the gas station. The manager of the station said they were wearing masks and waving Kalashnikov assault rifles, like the ones used in the attack on the newspaper office. Xavier Castaing, a spokesman for the Paris police, said that two men fitting the description of the suspects were spotted in Villers-Cotter\u00eats driving a gray Renault Clio, the same kind of car that the two fleeing suspects had hijacked late Wednesday. In the evening, a police search appeared to be scouring a stretch of forest just to the west of Longpont, a small town on the N2 highway between Villers-Cotter\u00eats and Soissons. Officers blocked off a road leading into Longpont, and at least 50 journalists from as far away as Japan and Russia huddled in the cold and damp. At noon, in a sign of mourning for the worst terrorist attack in France since the Algerian war, bells rang, schools stopped classes, and corporate meetings were cut short. At mosques, people bowed their heads. Some electronic road signs displayed the words, \u201cJe suis Charlie\u201d \u2014 I am Charlie. At Notre Dame Cathedral, pedestrians wept as hundreds stood silent on a gray and rainy day to pay tribute to the victims. Dozens placed flowers in front of Charlie Hebdo\u2019s headquarters. Through the vigils and tributes, some people held pencils, a symbol of support for freedom of the press. There was a palpable sense of determination that France and its vaunted Republican values of free speech and freedom of expression would not be subverted by religious extremism. Charlie Hebdo announced that despite the loss of so many of its people \u2014 including cartoonists who have been well known for a generation \u2014 it would publish as scheduled next Wednesday, and would print 1 million copies, rather than the usual 60,000. Many Muslim clerics and spokesmen added their voices to the sense of outrage, decrying the killings as antithetical to legitimate Islam. Abdennour Bidar, a French Muslim and professor of philosophy, said on Arte television that the killers \u201cdo not deserve the name of Muslims.\u201d In the name of Islam, he said, he would not allow Islam to be \u201cinstrumentalized, stolen by these people who say that they are avenging the Prophet.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace, an infamy, a lie,\u201d he said. But in a sign of how the attack was already spilling over into French politics, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, called on Thursday for a national referendum on whether to reinstitute the death penalty. \u201cThe Islamists have declared war against France,\u201d she told a French broadcaster. Ms. Le Pen said that she had not been invited to join a \u201cunity rally\u201d on Sunday. \u201cThings are clear from now on \u2014 the masks fall off,\u201d she told Le Monde newspaper. \u201cNational unity is a pathetic political maneuver.\u201d", "keyword": "Charlie Hebdo;Paris France;Terrorism;Cherif Kouachi;Said Kouachi;Hamyd Mourad;Manuel Valls"}
{"id": "ny0011352", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/02/12", "title": "A Turbulent Tenure for a Quiet Scholar", "abstract": "When Benedict XVI became pope eight years ago at the age of 78, many Roman Catholic scholars predicted that he would be a caretaker. He would keep the ship sailing in the same direction as his beloved predecessor, John Paul II. And as the rare theologian who knew how to write for a broad audience, Benedict would keep the crew inspired and the sails billowing. If written words alone could keep the church on course, Benedict would likely be viewed as a solid success. His encyclicals on love and charity and his three books on the life of Jesus were widely praised for their clarity and contribution to Catholic teaching. But when it came to the major challenges facing the church in the real world, Benedict often appeared to carom from one crisis to the next. He inadvertently insulted Muslims on an early trip to Germany, which resulted in riots across the Islamic world and the murder of an Italian nun in Somalia. He welcomed back a breakaway bishop who had just recorded an interview denying the facts of the Holocaust. He told reporters on the papal plane winging toward Africa that condoms had helped spread AIDS. When the clerical sexual abuse scandal spread across Europe and exploded at Benedict\u2019s door in 2010, Benedict met with abuse survivors and oversaw the development of new church policies to prevent abuse. But he was denounced by survivors and their advocates for never moving to discipline bishops who were caught in the cover-up. Among the cardinals expected to vote in the conclave to elect the next pope is Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, whose decades of mishandling sexual abusers in the priesthood was recently exposed by the court-ordered release of thousands of internal church documents. Even Pope Benedict\u2019s attempt to reach out with a pastoral letter to the church in Ireland, worn down by revelations of widespread clergy sexual abuse, left many there infuriated when he appeared to blame the nation\u2019s spiritual disillusionment on the Irish Catholics themselves. \u201cIt\u2019s been the tin-ear papacy,\u201d said Christopher M. Bellitto, chairman and associate professor of history at Kean University in Union, N.J., who studies the papacy. \u201cIt\u2019s been a very small, introverted papacy because that\u2019s who he is. The pope is an introvert.\u201d One of the defining moments, Dr. Bellitto said, was the speech Pope Benedict gave in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany, in which he quoted the words of a medieval Byzantine emperor speaking of Islam: \u201cShow me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.\u201d Dr. Bellitto said: \u201cEvery professor in the universe knew exactly what he was doing, which was to start a lecture with something provocative and work off of that. But it didn\u2019t play out that way.\u201d Pope Benedict later apologized for the reaction, explaining that the totality of his address was intended as \u201can invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect,\u201d with the Muslim world. He followed that up by coming out in favor of admitting Turkey to the European Union, a reversal of his previous position. He later visited Turkey and prayed at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul alongside the head mufti, a significant gesture that helped to calm the waters. Video Pope Benedict XVI is likely to be remembered for his work as a scholar, including his writings on love, charity and capitalism. Benedict\u2019s biggest challenge was to set a course for a church that is still divided over the meaning and legacy of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which opened the door to modern reforms. The council resulted in changes like empowering lay people in parish life, celebrating the Mass in the local vernacular language rather than in Latin, and allowing nuns to expand their mission beyond working in church schools and hospitals. To many Catholic traditionalists, Benedict is a hero who has reeled in the excesses of Vatican II, by promoting \u201cthe reform of the reform.\u201d He expanded the use of the Latin Mass used before Vatican II. And he pushed the English-speaking Catholic churches to adopt a liturgy translation more faithful to the original Latin \u2014 a change that many priests protested was awkward and alienating, but which has gradually taken hold. In keeping with his previous post as head of the church\u2019s doctrinal office, Benedict used his papacy to discipline those who questioned church teaching. He presided over two investigations of American nuns. He oversaw the censure of theologians and the removal of Bishop William Morris in Australia, who had written a pastoral letter raising the possibility of women and married priests. In 2012, he excommunicated the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest who blessed a woman in what the church considered an illicit ordination ceremony. Monsignor Kevin W. Irwin, a professor of liturgy and former dean of the school of theology at the Catholic University of America, who is currently teaching in Rome, said: \u201cThis is a theologian who wants to be clear about what the church teaches. Some would regard that as being less open to change, and less open to other possible ways of knowing theology, but this is a highly trained German professor who brought that skill of clarity to all of his writing.\u201d But liberal Catholics from the church\u2019s social justice wing could not help but feel that Benedict was intolerant of the church\u2019s left wing and overly solicitous of the right. That criticism peaked after the pope lifted the excommunication of four schismatic ultraconservative bishops from the breakaway Society of St. Pius X, who reject the reforms of Vatican II. It became one of the low points of Benedict\u2019s papacy when it was discovered that one of the schismatic bishops had denied the scope of the Holocaust in an interview available on the Internet. Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet , a Catholic weekly published in London, said of Benedict: \u201cHe leaves the church even further divided. He\u2019s alienated the majority of Catholics, maybe not the bishops and cardinals who, because they\u2019re in the hierarchy, support and reinforce what the pope says. But run-of-the-mill Catholics feel that the church is probably not going in the right direction, and they feel the division more now than they did eight years ago.\u201d In the last year, the Vatican became entangled in a scandal that led to the arrest of the pope\u2019s personal butler for leaking documents to a journalist who then published an expos\u00e9. Many church analysts said the Vatican bureaucracy was paralyzed, the church\u2019s ship was adrift. So when the pope shocked the world on Monday with his resignation announcement, his supporters and detractors alike almost universally hailed the move as a moment of grace, sounding almost relieved to see the end of what has been a very turbulent journey.", "keyword": "Pope Benedict;Pope;Catholic Church"}
{"id": "ny0026936", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/01/11", "title": "Geithner\u2019s Treasury Tenure Defined by Financial Crisis", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 In a matter of days, the nation\u2019s Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, will leave the department he first joined more than two decades ago and re-enter private life for the first time since he was in his 20s. Looking forward, Mr. Geithner has no plans. A regulator of Wall Street but not a creature of it, he will probably be the least likely former Treasury secretary to land there. \u201cI\u2019m going to take a long time,\u201d he said in the second of two exit interviews, one conducted in the midst of the recent fiscal fight and one just after the news conference on Thursday at which President Obama formally nominated his successor, Jacob J. Lew. Looking back, he is remarkably sanguine. He is comfortable with his decisions: the policy choices available to him were far from ideal, he said, but his team did the best it could within the realm of the politically possible. \u201cIt was a very bad crisis. No playbook. No road map. No clear precedent,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we had a different set of constraints, particularly in fiscal policy, then I think that the economic outcome could have been modestly better.\u201d A sense of the weight of those constraints emerged in the brief speech Mr. Geithner gave at the White House news conference on Thursday, as Mr. Obama thanked him for his service. While describing the \u201ccompelling and rewarding work\u201d of government, he mentioned the \u201cdivisive state of our political system.\u201d In the interviews, Mr. Geithner, 51, returned to the idea that the Treasury and the Obama administration might have done more if they had been given more latitude by Congress. Image From left, President Obama, Jacob Lew and Timothy Geithner, whom Mr. Lew has been nominated to replace as Treasury secretary. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times \u201cThe way our country is structured, by design, the founders left the Congress with all the meaningful authorities to determine the path of the economy and what you could do in a crisis,\u201d he said, mentioning how hard the White House had pushed for more authority. \u201cThe scale of the fiscal response in particular was dependent\u201d on what Congress would allow. Mr. Geithner ran the Treasury during the tumultuous years of the financial crisis and a recession that slowly gave way to a recovery, albeit an unsteady one. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before he joined Mr. Obama\u2019s cabinet in 2009, he was at the center of the most nerve-racking moments of the banking crisis. And his low-key but forceful insistence kept the Treasury at the center of every major economic policy decision of Mr. Obama\u2019s first term, aside from the health care overhaul. By a combination of historical accident and his own design, Mr. Geithner will go down as one of the most influential Treasury secretaries, alongside figures like Robert E. Rubin, who served under President Bill Clinton, and Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served under Roosevelt. But he has not always been a popular one. Both Republicans and Democrats have accused him of subverting capitalism and dedicating taxpayer money to \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d institutions in perpetuity. The left has criticized him for helping \u201cfat cat\u201d bankers instead of regular people, especially underwater homeowners. \u201cIs the system safer today?\u201d said Dennis M. Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates stricter financial regulations. \u201cThe collapse turned an implicit public guarantee into an explicit public guarantee. It is one of the most dramatic changes of federal policy in history and puts too much at stake.\u201d Still, Mr. Geithner has attained something like a first-among-equals stature at the White House. He is one of the only top-level staff members to have remained throughout Mr. Obama\u2019s first term, and his word and policy judgments have prevailed in fight after fight and negotiation after negotiation. Image The German finance minister, Wolfgang Sch\u00e4uble, left, and Mr. Geithner in Germany in July. Credit Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images \u201cHe went from someone who people were unsure of in the first six months to achieving the elevated status of being the guy who made the toughest and loneliest calls at the most politically perilous moments \u2014 and turned out to be right,\u201d said Gene B. Sperling, director of the National Economic Council. In many ways, his colleagues said, Mr. Geithner\u2019s job seemed at times to be that of a firefighter or, at its worst moments, a glorified janitor. His four years were filled with a series of crises: the collapse of the financial system, spiraling unemployment, the cratering housing market, the financial reform bill, the ailing auto industry, the European debt crisis, a debt ceiling standoff and two protracted budget negotiations. \u201cHe is so serene in good times and in bad,\u201d said Michael Froman, a deputy national security adviser who has known Mr. Geithner for two decades and helped introduce him to Mr. Obama. Given Mr. Geithner\u2019s background fighting financial disasters abroad as a Treasury aide, Mr. Froman said, \u201cI think he was better prepared than anyone to deal with these crises.\u201d The decisions Mr. Geithner made during the financial crisis remain among his most controversial. For instance, he quashed proposals to seize bonuses, impose new taxes or otherwise punish bankers, whose pay rebounded quickly after the collapse. Mr. Geithner refers to such proposals as the \u201cOld Testament\u201d part of the rescue and reform effort. \u201cWe just didn\u2019t see a more effective response,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re governing, your responsibility is to do what you think is going to be best for the welfare of the country.\u201d More punitive measures might have been emotionally satisfying, administration aides said, but they might also have put taxpayer dollars at risk by destabilizing the banks. Housing is another area in which Mr. Geithner\u2019s leadership has been criticized. The Obama administration estimated at first that it could reach three million to four million homeowners with its mortgage plans, but it has aided less than half that number and left billions of dollars unspent. Image From left, Henry Paulson, then secretary of the Treasury, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Timothy Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in 2008. Credit Hyungwon Kang/Reuters \u201cOur authority on housing was very, very limited,\u201d Mr. Geithner said. \u201cWe were able to use a significant amount of the authority in the Troubled Asset Relief Program to design a program for modifying the loans of a pretty substantial fraction of Americans facing foreclosure. But we had no legal authority to compel banks to provide mortgage relief. All we could do was find incentives.\u201d He added, \u201cIt\u2019s not clear with greater authority we would have been able to achieve a significantly faster pace of improvement.\u201d Such technocratic responses are typical of Mr. Geithner. His aides say that empathizing with the public and communicating his anger or disappointment with the slow pace of the recovery have always been among his weak points. He has struggled at times with the outward-facing role of the Treasury secretary. He dislikes speaking with the press and bristles at being a \u201cpotted plant\u201d trotted out at news conferences, for instance. Aides said they prepared him for media appearances as if playing the game Taboo, banning him from using phrases like \u201ccredit-default spreads.\u201d But within the White House, Mr. Geithner\u2019s technocratic skills and no-drama attitude, as well as his calls on how to deal with the crisis, made him one of Mr. Obama\u2019s most trusted aides. Though he is mostly known for his work on the financial crisis, he was also the White House\u2019s main emissary to Europe on its debt crisis and spent hundreds of hours working on fiscal negotiations with Congress. During his tenure, he made 61 domestic trips and 37 international ones, and testified 67 times to Congressional committees. Looking back, he said, more authority or financing from Congress might have helped the administration promote the recovery. But he said he felt comfortable otherwise. Asked directly how he viewed his tenure, however, Mr. Geithner shied away. \u201cI kind of think that\u2019s better for history to answer,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Timothy F Geithner;Treasury Department;Appointments and Executive Changes;US Politics"}
{"id": "ny0058127", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2014/09/14", "title": "Bracing for Change on Scotland\u2019s Border, Whatever the Referendum Result", "abstract": "BERWICK-UPON-TWEED, England \u2014 This is England\u2019s northernmost town, and it has changed hands between the Scots and the English more than a dozen times in the last 1,400 years. It hasn\u2019t been a true border outpost since the unification of the two countries more than 300 years ago, but it may soon become one again. And the people of Berwick, many of them of Scottish origin, are not too happy about it, fearing that the uncertainty and instability could disrupt a feeble economic recovery. The opinion polls are close, the debate is exhausting and the mood is anxious. \u201cPeople feel and fear that however it goes, the relationship between Scotland and England will never be the same,\u201d said Tom Forrester, a town councilor. \u201cMy heart tells me that most right-minded people will see that it is safer and better for us to stay in this relationship with each other,\u201d said Liz Murray, who owns a shop that sells cookware in Berwick but lives across the border in Scotland. \u201cBut I\u2019ve seen enough of the passion of the Scots to see that that might carry the day.\u201d A Scottish vote for independence on Thursday would create huge waves on both sides of the border, shaking the British government of Prime Minister David Cameron, undermining the electoral future of the British Labour Party and making it more likely that Britain will have a referendum on its own continued membership in the European Union. An independent Scotland would raise questions about currency and finance, about where to base Britain\u2019s fleet of nuclear submarines, about border security in a period of terrorism, about whether Scotland would still get BBC television and about whether members of Parliament from Scotland, the vast majority of them from the Labour Party, would lose their seats. And then, of course, there is the question of whether the United Kingdom would need to replace the Union Jack, and with what. It would be an enormous victory for the Scottish National Party and its leader, Alex Salmond, and would kick off a difficult 18 months of negotiations with the British government about the terms of the divorce, which would become official in March 2016. Image Berwick-upon-Tweed, in northern England. Across the border, Scots will vote on Thursday in an independence referendum. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times But should the Scots vote against independence on Thursday, said Dougie Watkin, a farmer with land and sheep on both sides of the border, \u201chalf the population will be very disappointed.\u201d The leaders of the three main British parties have promised all kinds of new powers for Scotland if the Scots do vote no. Even so, if the margin proves to be narrow, the issue of independence, as in Quebec, is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Even in Berwick, with a population of 15,000, the questions range from the effects on trade and immigration to whether small businesses would have to fill out two sets of tax forms and deal with two currencies. \u201cIf there\u2019s independence, will I be paying income tax in one country and business tax in the other?\u201d Ms. Murray asked. \u201cI can\u2019t afford an accountant, and there\u2019s already so much paperwork now, that would put us out of business.\u201d What about pensions and university education, when Scotland offers free tuition and England does not? What if Scotland has a different corporate or personal income tax rate? \u201cWhat are the plans in place for all these issues?\u201d Ms. Murray asked. \u201cThey\u2019re not there.\u201d Keith Siseman, who runs an art gallery with a liquor license called Pier Red, said that Scottish independence would turn things \u201cupside down.\u201d The power and influence of Britain in the world would be diminished, he said, with new questions about whether Britain could afford to keep its nuclear missiles, which are submarine-based, in a Scotland that says it wants to be nuclear-free. Berwick is two miles from the border and is the only English town with a soccer team, the Rangers, that plays in the Scottish league, a legacy of the days when a poor railway network made the rest of England difficult to reach. That feeling of remoteness carries on. Many people in Northumberland say they feel much the same alienation from the Westminster Parliament as the people of Scotland do. Video On Sept. 18, Scotland is scheduled to vote on seceding from Britain. We take a look at the issues at stake for the Scottish people. Credit Credit Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency \u201cWhen the Scots say these posh boys from southern England are very far away and don\u2019t care about them, I know just what it\u2019s like, here in the northern end of Northumberland,\u201d said Simon Heald, who runs a used-book shop. The no campaign has tried to frighten the Scots on pocketbook issues, which patronizes and infuriates them, when Mr. Cameron and his colleagues \u201cshould have been pouring love up north, and not fear,\u201d Mr. Heald said. \u201cYou can\u2019t put the fear of God into a nation like Scotland that\u2019s up for a fight,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t send the Scottish battalions into war first for no reason.\u201d The no campaign \u201chas been more like picking a fight,\u201d Ms. Murray said. \u201cDo that to a Glaswegian and he\u2019ll head-butt you.\u201d Mr. Cameron and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, have been fiercely criticized for leaving their campaign to preserve the union until too late, assuming that the no vote would win easily. And Mr. Cameron, by insisting on only one question \u2014 independence or not \u2014 has made this vote into a great gamble. Even Mr. Salmond had wanted another option on the ballot, one of further devolution of power over Scotland\u2019s affairs to the Scottish Parliament, which already has substantial autonomy from the central government in London. \u201cWe want to control our own country,\u201d said Roddy Low, 47. \u201cA lot of people are fed up with being told what to do by Westminster, and not just by the Tories. This has been growing for 30, 40 years.\u201d He was speaking across the River Tweed in Coldstream, Scotland, the original home of the Coldstream Guards, one of the few British regiments that now help to guard Queen Elizabeth II, and from where, in 1660, soldiers marched to London to restore Charles II to the throne. Video As Scotland prepares for its referendum on independence, many English and Scots that live in border towns feel an acute uncertainty that could remain no matter which way the vote goes. Credit Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times John Dickson, who was buying lamb in the local butcher shop in Coldstream, said he had no doubts. \u201cIt\u2019s the only chance we\u2019ve had in 300 years, and if we miss it, there\u2019ll never be another,\u201d he said. \u201cIf people want to go to bed with the English, I\u2019ll help them carry the mattress south.\u201d Malcolm Campbell, 53, a pro-independence Scot who was fishing for salmon in the Tweed, said that of course there would be problems to solve if Scotland voted for independence, but that Scotland could work them out. \u201cThey try to scare us about the pound,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we\u2019ll have a currency and it will work, and we won\u2019t go back to the barter system of a kilo of tomatoes for a pound of salt. If people want it to work, it will work.\u201d His son, Grant, 22, also said he would vote yes. He went to Abertay University in Dundee at no cost, under legislation passed by the Scottish National Party that distinguishes Scotland from England, where college students typically have to pay thousands of pounds in tuition. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a thank you to the S.N.P.,\u201d he said. \u201cWithout them, I wouldn\u2019t have been able to go to university.\u201d In Scotland, which is largely left-leaning, \u201cwe have a completely different set of political principles from England,\u201d the younger Mr. Campbell said. \u201cWe can still have a social union with the English, so I see no sadness in it.\u201d But in Coldstream, too, there is anxiety and a sizable number of people, like Malcolm Bolam, the owner of the butcher shop, who say they will vote no but who are keeping their heads down given the deep passions of the campaign. \u201cThere are far too many questions unanswered for me to say yes,\u201d Mr. Bolam said. He has two young girls, and he worries about big companies and banks moving to England, about jobs disappearing and taxes then going up in a Scotland where North Sea oil and gas are slowly being depleted. \u201cI\u2019ve got a lot of customers from the other side\u201d for his pure Scottish meat, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to lose them.\u201d Back in Berwick, Mr. Siseman predicted further dissolution. \u201cThis is a happy family that could be getting divorced for no real reason,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s scary, because it won\u2019t end here. Because if the Scots get it, the Shetland Islanders will want it, and we\u2019ll end up with the United Nothing.\u201d", "keyword": "Scotland;Great Britain;Referendum;England"}
{"id": "ny0077769", "categories": ["sports", "tennis"], "date": "2015/05/24", "title": "Beyond French Open Favorites, Some Who Could Surprise", "abstract": "Here is a look at some players to watch in the men\u2019s and the women\u2019s fields at the French Open, which begins on Sunday: Men KEI NISHIKORI Nishikori, who shocked Novak Djokovic in the semifinals of the United States Open last year, is a legitimate threat to win a Grand Slam. He is comfortable on red clay, where his stunning ball striking pushes opponents deep behind the baseline. Like Djokovic, Nishikori can transform a baseline rally off either side with breathtaking pace and accuracy. He has had a solid clay-court season, reaching the semifinals of Madrid with wins over David Goffin, Roberto Bautista-Agut and David Ferrer \u2014 all stellar clay-court players \u2014 before losing to a red-hot Andy Murray. Nishikori\u2019s two-handed backhand, which he loves to take on the rise, is one of the game\u2019s best. ROBERTO BAUTISTA-AGUT Bautista-Agut was voted the ATP Tour\u2019s most improved player in 2014 after cracking the top 20 for the first time. A superb clay-court player, Bautista-Agut has transformed himself from a tireless baseline retriever into a more offensive player with an uncanny sense of when to change tactics. The best-of-five format favors Bautista-Agut, whose mental toughness and physical conditioning make him one of the toughest outs in tennis. He beat Thomaz Bellucci and Pablo Cuevas to reach the quarterfinals in Madrid. He has the game to make a deep run on the red clay of Roland Garros. Image Carla Su\u00e1rez Navarro of Spain, who made the final in Rome, has a deft drop shot. Credit Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press THANASI KOKKINAKIS When you think of the next great star in men\u2019s tennis, the lithe and powerful young Australian Nick Kyrgios comes to mind. But there is another player from Down Under, Kokkinakis, a 19-year-old from Adelaide who last week won the clay-court title in Bordeaux, battling through qualifying and then winning five matches to boost his ranking to 83rd in the world. Kokkinakis shares more than Greek ancestry with Kyrgios. At 6 feet 5 inches, he, too, possesses a booming serve and a powerful forehand. A dangerous floater in the draw, Kokkinakis has the game to pull off a few upsets and go deep into the second week. Women CARLA SU\u00c1REZ NAVARRO One of the few women on tour with one-handed backhands, Su\u00e1rez Navarro arrives in Paris full of confidence. She reached the final in Rome, defeating Eugenie Bouchard, Petra Kvitova and Simona Halep before falling in three sets to Maria Sharapova. Su\u00e1rez Navarro has an exceptional feel for the ball and a deft drop shot, an important weapon on red clay. She mixes spin, height and pace to upset her opponents\u2019 rhythm, and her unique game style is a refreshing contrast to the ubiquitous power game. DARIA GAVRILOVA Gavrilova began 2015 ranked No. 233 in the world and in just five months has climbed to 45 in the WTA rankings. She upset Ana Ivanovic, 7-6, in the third set of a spellbinding match at the Fioro Italico in Rome before falling to Sharapova in the semifinals. She wins with a genius-level tennis I.Q., outstanding movement and the ability to compete at a high level from the first point to the last. Her meteoric rise is remarkable, and she looks like a future top-10 player. VICTORIA AZARENKA After being sidelined with injuries last year, Azarenka is regaining championship form. She had triple match point against Serena Williams in Madrid but lost, 7-6, in the third set when her nerves got the better of her. But Azarenka\u2019s fearless ball striking, punctuated by her trademark high-pitched shriek, makes her a looming threat in the draw. Azarenka plays to win, and if she can survive the first week, look for her level of play to rise.", "keyword": "Tennis;Kei Nishikori;Carla Suarez Navarro;Thanasi Kokkinakis;Victoria Azarenka;French Open"}
{"id": "ny0140654", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2008/02/15", "title": "State to Preserve Heart of Adirondacks", "abstract": "State environmental officials agreed on Thursday to preserve a vast swath of wild acreage in the northern part of Adirondack Park, using a combination of outright purchase and conservation easements meant to protect both wilderness and jobs. The deal was praised by environmental groups, which had urged the state to act quickly to gain control of most of the 161,000 acres that the Nature Conservancy acquired from a paper company last year. The land is considered crucial to protecting the heart of the Adirondacks. Local leaders in the Adirondacks, who have been concerned about land conservation crowding out economic opportunity, will have several months to approve or reject the plan. As laid out by state officials in meetings with local officials and environmental groups on Thursday, New York State will buy more than 57,000 acres that had been owned by Finch, Pruyn & Company since the Civil War and add it to the existing forest preserve, which is off limits to development or timber cutting but open for public recreation. In addition, the state will buy conservation easements on 74,000 more acres of woodlands formerly owned by Finch, Pruyn (pronounced PRINE) and now controlled by the conservancy. The easements prohibit development but allow recreation and logging under strict sustainable forestry standards. The conservancy expects to sell the land with the easements attached to private timber management companies, which would provide wood pulp to the paper mill in Glens Falls, formerly owned by Finch, Pruyn. \u201cWe were hoping a little more land would go into the forest preserve, but it appears that they have protected the most environmentally sensitive areas, namely Boreas Ponds, the Essex chain of lakes and the Hudson River Gorge,\u201d said John Sheehan, a spokesman for the Adirondack Council, a private group. Pete Grannis, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said he felt confident that the agreement would safeguard \u201call the truly precious pieces of property\u201d that were available in the huge tract. In all, the state is committing to protect about 130,000 of the 161,000 acres of Finch, Pruyn land that was acquired in a complex $110 million deal last July by the Nature Conservancy with the help of the Open Space Institute. Mr. Grannis said the state was having the property appraised to determine how much it should pay for it, probably using money from the state\u2019s Environmental Protection Fund. The Nature Conservancy has begun a $35 million fund-raising drive, suggesting that it expects the state to provide $70 million to $80 million for its purchases and easements. The conservancy would pay taxes on the land until the deal with the state was complete. The state would then pay the taxes. One sticky issue in the transaction is what to do with hundreds of private hunting and fishing clubs that have leased their land \u2014 sometimes covering thousands of rural acres \u2014 from Finch, Pruyn for generations. Eleven clubs that lease nearly 40,000 acres where the state intends to buy conservation easements would be permitted to continue leasing their properties, said Michael T. Carr, executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy. Twenty other clubs, whose land is entirely within the proposed forest preserve, would have a 10-year transition period during which they would gradually have to share their land with the public. At the end of 10 years, they would have to give up their leases, and their land would revert to public ownership and use. Another controversial aspect of the plan would connect existing snowmobile trails to create a network linking North Hudson, Newcomb, Long Lake, Minerva and Indian Lake, the five towns where most of the 134,000 acres of the northern holdings are situated. Mr. Grannis said that some environmental groups have already expressed opposition to the expanded trail network, but that the project would benefit the five rural towns. \u201cThese trails and the network of support services and businesses that go along with having lots and lots of people visiting us have a huge potential for building and sustaining economic interest in the area,\u201d Mr. Grannis said. The plan would also make available 1,000 acres for ball fields and other public recreational use, along with affordable housing. In the southern part of the park, 27,000 acres of undeveloped land are scattered through 22 towns. The land was previously owned by Finch, Pruyn, but it is not included in the present proposal. Mr. Carr said he intended to continue negotiating with the towns to determine the best way to handle the additional tracts of land.", "keyword": "Environment;Adirondack Mountains (NY);New York State;Wilderness Areas;Forests and Forestry"}
{"id": "ny0118745", "categories": ["world", "africa"], "date": "2012/10/25", "title": "U.S. E-Mails Reveal Early Views of Libya Attack", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 A series of three leaked e-mails sent by State Department officials beginning shortly after the fatal attack began on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya , last month \u2014 including one that alerted the White House Situation Room that a militant group had claimed responsibility for it \u2014 stirred new debate on Wednesday about the Obama administration\u2019s shifting positions on the cause of the attack. The first e-mail, sent about a half-hour after the assault began, said the State Department\u2019s regional security officer in Tripoli, Libya, had reported that the mission in Benghazi was under attack, and that \u201c20 armed people fired shots.\u201d An e-mail 49 minutes later said the firing at the mission \u201chas stopped and the compound has been cleared,\u201d while a response team was trying to find people. In the next message, 1 hour 13 minutes after the second, the embassy in Tripoli reported that a local militant group, Ansar al-Shariah, had claimed responsibility through postings on Facebook and Twitter. In the hours after the Benghazi attack, American spy agencies intercepted electronic communications from Ansar al-Shariah fighters bragging to an operative with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda\u2019s North African arm. But Ansar al-Shariah has publicly denied having anything to do with the attack. A White House spokesman, Jay Carney, with President Obama on Air Force One on Wednesday, said the e-mails, reported by Reuters, were unclassified and among \u201call sorts of information that was becoming available in the aftermath of the attack.\u201d The e-mails surfaced as the Tunisian government confirmed it had arrested a Tunisian man reportedly linked to the attack, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11. A spokesman for the Tunisian Interior Ministry, Tarrouch Khaled, told The Associated Press that the suspect, Ali Harzi, 28, was in custody in Tunis. Mr. Khaled did not provide details. Some Republicans have criticized the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, for stating five days after the attack that it had resulted from a spontaneous mob that was angry about an anti-Islamic video, even though some intelligence reports and witness accounts indicated a terrorist attack. Ms. Rice said she had based her comments on unclassified talking points prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency. The issue seemed to die down after Mitt Romney did not press Mr. Obama on the matter in their debate on Monday night. On Wednesday, three Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, criticized Mr. Obama in a letter , saying the series of e-mails \u201conly adds to the confusion surrounding what you and your administration knew about the attacks in Benghazi, when you knew it, and why you responded to those tragic events in the ways you did.\u201d Intelligence officials say the gap between the talking points and the contemporaneous field reports illustrates the lag between turning often contradictory and incomplete field reporting into a finished assessment. Administration and intelligence officials made that point again on Wednesday in trying to put into context the e-mails sent by the State Department operations center to scores of officials at the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House. \u201cYou know, posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence, and I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued some time to be,\u201d Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Washington.", "keyword": "Diplomatic Service Embassies and Consulates;Presidential Election of 2012;Stevens J Christopher;Benghazi (Libya);Libya;State Department;Benghazi Attack (2012)"}
{"id": "ny0221862", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/02/25", "title": "Toyota\u2019s President Offers \u2018Full Responsibility\u2019", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota , was billed as the main attraction at a House hearing Wednesday into the company\u2019s recalls of millions of cars \u2014 recalls for which he profusely apologized and took personal responsibility. But the transportation secretary, Raymond LaHood, offered more surprises in testimony that was sometimes heated, including many occasions when he was unable or declined to answer detailed questions about his department\u2019s dealings with the auto company. Both men spent hours before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, one of three Congressional panels investigating the recall of more than six million vehicles and the delay in responding to problems of sudden acceleration. Mr. Toyoda, with a translator to his right and the company\u2019s chief operating officer for North America , Yoshimi Inaba, on his left, spoke in a calm, detached manner. He was criticized by a representative on the committee for failing to show adequate remorse for those who had been killed in accidents involving acceleration problems. \u201cI extend my condolences from the deepest part of my heart,\u201d Mr. Toyoda said. Mr. LaHood, however, seemed defensive throughout the hearing. He initially was supposed to be joined by David Strickland, the newly confirmed head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration . Although Mr. Strickland and other officials of his agency were at the hearing, Mr. LaHood insisted on appearing alone, saying he bore full responsibility for his department\u2019s actions. As questioning of Mr. LaHood continued into its third hour, he grew testy when asked by Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican of Utah , whether Toyota was being treated in the same way as General Motors , which received a government bailout, and other carmakers. \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d Mr. LaHood said. Asked whether the safety agency had become too close to the industry, Mr. LaHood replied in an exasperated tone, \u201cThere is not a cozy relationship. In the past three years, we\u2019ve recalled 23 million cars.\u201d In his testimony, Mr. LaHood caused a stir in the committee room by declaring that the millions of recalled Toyotas \u201cwere not safe,\u201d echoing a public comment he made a few weeks ago that owners should not drive their recalled cars. As he did with those earlier comments, he later amended his declaration before the committee, saying that cars recalled by any auto company needed to be repaired, and he urged their owners to visit dealerships. The hearing also shed new light on ways in which Toyota in Japan was disconnected from its global operations. Under questioning, Mr. Inaba, Toyota\u2019s highest-ranking executive in the United States , acknowledged that Toyota was aware of issues with sticking pedals in Europe for a year before accidents in the United States. That has been a crucial issue, because Toyota executives in the United States have said they found out about sticking pedal issues only last October. The first reports of sticking pedals surfaced in Britain and Ireland in late 2008. By August 2009, Toyota began a production change on cars sold in Europe that was completed by January, weeks before it recalled millions of vehicles in the United States. \u201cWe did not hide it,\u201d Mr. Inaba said. \u201cBut it was not properly shared. We need to do a much better job sharing what we knew in Europe with the United States to see if there is any danger to American consumers.\u201d Mr. Inaba said the American side of Toyota \u201cwas not aware or not informed of\u201d the European situation until January, when he learned of it. Mr. Inaba said the information was contained in a company database, but he indicated that it could be found only if a staff member knew where to look. Representative Mark E. Souder, a Republican of Indiana , said he was \u201cvery concerned\u201d about suggestions that the company addressed the problem in Europe before the United States. Mr. Inaba responded, \u201cThere is no way we can differentiate American drivers from any of the rest.\u201d In his testimony, Mr. Toyoda tried to reassure lawmakers that the company was addressing problems that led to the recalls. In addition, he said, the company was moving to repair its damaged reputation. \u201cI have personally placed the highest priority on improving quality over quantity,\u201d Mr. Toyoda said. \u201cAnd I have shared that direction with our stakeholders.\u201d But in one blunt exchange, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland , asked Mr. Toyoda, \u201cWhy should we believe that things are going to get better?\u201d Later, Mr. Toyoda concluded his day at a meeting with company employees and dealers at the National Press Club. His voice broke momentarily when he thanked them for their support and again expressed his apologies. Asked what he would tell President Obama , Mr. Toyoda said, \u201cToyota cars are safe.\u201d It was the second time in two days that Toyota executives testified at Congressional hearings. The latest appearances came amid questions about whether the electronic system of the vehicles, and not simply the floor mats and gas pedals, contributed to the unintended acceleration. On Tuesday, James E. Lentz III, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the prescribed repairs might \u201cnot totally\u201d solve the problem. In response to a question, Mr. Lentz said that Toyota was still examining the sudden acceleration problem, including the possibility that the electronics system might be at fault. Mr. Toyoda and Mr. Inaba both said, however, that they were confident that the computer system was not at fault. Representative John L. Mica, a Republican of Florida , was critical of a company presentation obtained by the committee that listed \u201cToyota safety wins,\u201d including $100 million in savings because the safety agency permitted the company to recall the floor mats on 55,000 Toyota Camry and Lexus ES 350 sedans, rather than the cars themselves. The July 6 presentation bore Mr. Inaba\u2019s name. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the most embarrassing documents I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Mr. Mica said. In response, Mr. Inaba said the presentation had been made to him shortly after he rejoined the company after a two-year absence. He said he did not have an in-depth recollection of it, but added, \u201cIt is so inconsistent with the guiding principles of Toyota.\u201d Mr. Toyoda said the presentation did not reflect \u201cthe drifting of the entire company.\u201d The Toyota executives assured lawmakers that the cars involved in its recalls were safe, and agreed, under questioning from Representative Edolphus Towns , Democrat of New York, to look at extending to drivers in all states a settlement reached earlier in the day with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo . In that settlement, Toyota agreed that it would pick up cars and trucks at the homes of drivers, pay for out-of-pocket transportation costs and offer drivers free rental cars during repairs.", "keyword": "Akio Toyoda;Toyota Motor;House of Representatives;Accidents and Safety;Brake;Customer service;Recalls and Bans"}
{"id": "ny0295089", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2016/12/02", "title": "Peng Chang-kuei, Chef Behind General Tso\u2019s Chicken, Dies at 98", "abstract": "Peng Chang-kuei, the Taiwanese chef who invented General Tso\u2019s chicken, a dish nearly universal in Chinese restaurants in the United States, died on Wednesday in Taipei. He was 98. The death was reported by The Associated Press. The British food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop has called General Tso\u2019s chicken \u2014 lightly battered pieces of dark chicken fried in a chili-accented sweet-and-sour sauce \u2014 \u201cthe most famous Hunanese dish in the world.\u201d But like many Chinese dishes that have found favor with Americans, General Tso\u2019s chicken was unknown in China until recently. Nor was it, in the version known to most Americans, Hunanese, a cuisine defined by salty, hot and sour flavors. Mr. Peng, an official chef for the Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan after the 1949 revolution in China, said he created the dish during a four-day visit by Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955. On the spur of the moment, he assigned it the name of a Hunanese general, Zuo Zongtang, who had helped put down a series of rebellions in the 19th century. \u201cOriginally the flavors of the dish were typically Hunanese \u2014 heavy, sour, hot and salty,\u201d Mr. Peng told Ms. Dunlop, the author of \u201cRevolutionary Chinese Cookbook\u201d (2007), which is devoted to the cuisine of Hunan. \u201cThe original General Tso\u2019s chicken was Hunanese in taste and made without sugar.\u201d The dish made its way to New York in the early 1970s after Chinese chefs in New York, preparing to open the city\u2019s first Hunanese restaurants \u2014 Uncle Tai\u2019s Hunan Yuan and Hunam \u2014 visited a restaurant that Mr. Peng had opened in Taipei. They adapted the recipe to suit American tastes. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to copy chef Peng exactly,\u201d Ed Schoenfeld, an assistant to the restaurant\u2019s owner, David Keh , told the website Salon in 2010. \u201cWe added our own spin to dishes. And so our General Tso\u2019s chicken was cut differently, into small dice, and we served it with water chestnuts, black mushrooms, hoisin sauce and vinegar.\u201d The chef was Wen Dah Tai. At Hunam, the chef Tsung Ting Wang \u2014 who was also a partner with Michael Tong in another prominent Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Shun Lee Palace \u2014 put a Sichuan spin on the dish. He crisped up the batter and sweetened the sauce, producing a taste combination that millions of Americans came to love. He called it General Ching\u2019s chicken. But as the dish traveled, the General Tso name adhered. Both restaurants were awarded four stars, the highest rating, by Raymond Sokolov, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. In 1973, with Hunan fever raging, Mr. Peng came to New York and, with Mr. Keh, opened Uncle Peng\u2019s Hunan Yuan on East 44th Street, near the United Nations. Mr. Peng discovered, to his consternation, that his creation had preceded him, and that the child was almost unrecognizable. Image Peng Chang-kuei in an image from the 2014 documentary \u201cThe Search for General Tso.\u201d Credit Wicked Delicate Films \u201cNew Yorkers didn\u2019t realize he was the real thing, and some treated him like he was copying,\u201d Mr. Schoenfeld said. The tangled history of the dish was explored in 2014 in a documentary, \u201cThe Search for General Tso,\u201d directed by Ian Cheney. Peng Chang-kuei was born in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, in 1918. His family was poor. At 13, after running away from home, he began serving an apprenticeship under the celebrated Hunanese chef Cao Jing-shen. Formerly a family chef to Tan Yan-kai, prime minister of the Nationalist government in the late 1920s, Mr. Cao had opened the restaurant Jianleyuan in Changsha. In the 1930s, after the Japanese invasion, Mr. Peng moved to Chungking, the temporary Nationalist capital, where he began to gain renown. After World War II, he was installed as the government\u2019s head banquet chef. He emigrated to Taiwan in 1949, leaving his wife and two sons behind, and continued to cater official functions. He is survived by a son, Peng Tie-Cheng. Complete information on other survivors was not available. New York proved to be a fraught experiment, as Mr. Peng\u2019s restaurant soon closed. \u201cDoom trailed Uncle Peng,\u201d the food critic Gael Greene wrote in New York magazine in 1973. \u201cThe pressures of Manhattan restaurant reality were too much for the brilliant teacher.\u201d Undaunted, Mr. Peng borrowed money from friends and opened Yunnan Yuan on East 52nd Street, near Lexington Avenue, where Henry A. Kissinger, then the secretary of state, became a faithful customer. \u201cKissinger visited us every time he was in New York, and we became great friends,\u201d Mr. Peng told Ms. Dunlop. \u201cIt was he who brought Hunanese food to public notice.\u201d General Tso\u2019s chicken began to assume celebrity status when Bob Lape, a restaurant critic, showed Mr. Peng making the dish in a segment for ABC News. The station received some 1,500 requests for the recipe. Encouraged, Mr. Peng reopened his old restaurant as Peng\u2019s, bringing his signature dish with him. Reviewing the restaurant in the The Times in 1977, Mimi Sheraton wrote, \u201cGeneral Tso\u2019s chicken was a stir-fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature.\u201d He left the restaurant in 1981 and opened Peng\u2019s Garden in Yonkers, then returned to Taiwan in the late \u201980s and opened the first in a chain of Peng Yuan restaurants there. The menu featured General Tso\u2019s chicken. It was listed on the menu in Mandarin as Zuo Zongtang\u2019s farmyard chicken, and in English as chicken \u00e0 la viceroy. In 1990 he opened a branch of his restaurant in the Great Wall Hotel in Changsha, but it was not a success. As Hunanese chefs adopted General Tso\u2019s chicken, the dish entered a strange second career. In a sweeping act of historical revisionism, it came to be seen as a traditional Hunan dish. Several Hunanese chefs have described it in their cookbooks as a favorite of the 19th-century general\u2019s.", "keyword": "Peng Chang-kuei;Obituary;Cooking;Chef;Restaurant;Chinese Food;Taiwan"}
{"id": "ny0276714", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/02/22", "title": "Ticket Sellers Promise Marquee Names, but the Comics Rarely Show", "abstract": "Paige Kaden, who is new to town, stood on a frigid block in Times Square on Thursday afternoon, looking for a man named John. She was angry. John, she said, had sold her and her parents tickets to Stand Up NY , an Upper West Side comedy club, two days before at this very spot. He had shown them pictures of Amy Schumer and Tracy Morgan performing there, Ms. Kaden said, and he gave them a tip about that night\u2019s surprise guest. \u201cHe told us Tina Fey would be there,\u201d Ms. Kaden, 24, said. Thrilled, the family bought three tickets for $20 each, only to arrive at the club to find a two-drink minimum and a lineup of comics they had never heard of. \u201cWe didn\u2019t stay,\u201d Ms. Kaden said. She found two other men selling Stand Up NY tickets on Thursday, but they said John wasn\u2019t around. The comedy hawkers of Times Square do not get as many headlines as the topless women or aggressive costumed panhandlers \u2014 Chewbacca and a Stormtrooper were arrested last week \u2014 with whom they share the crossroads. But the peddlers are out in greater numbers, with 15 or 20 people selling tickets to at least three clubs every day, greeting passers-by with a smile and a question: Do you like comedy? Image Sherif Hamoda, 32, told people in Times Square on Thursday that he was selling tickets to a Comedy Central taping, though no taping was planned. \u201cThat\u2019s how I get them to stop,\u201d he said. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times The sellers are facing new scrutiny. Last year, a task force announced a series of recommendations to improve Times Square, and among them were calls to regulate vendors. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Times Square Alliance , a nonprofit organization, 40 percent of respondents, mostly New Yorkers, experienced \u201can unpleasant interaction\u201d with solicitors. The percentage of those who felt unsafe during those interactions doubled from the year before. \u201cThey\u2019re nasty and mean and say derogatory things to women,\u201d said Caroline Hirsch, the owner of Carolines on Broadway , who said sellers sometimes hawk tickets to other clubs outside her own. In general, the ticket sellers do not work directly for the clubs. Most show up when they want to work and sign out stacks of tickets from middlemen who run the street teams, as they are known. Many clubs have similar arrangements with the street teams, whereby the sellers keep whatever they make from the ticket sales, while the clubs make their money from drink minimums. \u201cI love this job,\u201d said Stuart Titelbaum, 57, who said he started selling tickets in 2007 after an unpleasant career in accounting. He likes meeting tourists from overseas and cracking jokes. He doesn\u2019t lie, he said, but it is common practice. By the time visitors realize they have been duped, there is little recourse beyond ranting on Yelp. (\u201cHe said that Tina Fey was going to be there,\u201d one person wrote last year. Another wrote , \u201cLIES, LIES, LIES.\u201d) On Thursday afternoon, a man selling tickets to the Broadway Comedy Club could be overheard saying Ms. Fey and Chris Rock would be there that night. A couple visiting from Ireland, Declan and Sandra Halligan, listened patiently, brightening up when the seller said Lee Evans, the English comic, would also be there. When the seller dropped the price for two tickets to $30 from $60, the Halligans handed over the cash. When a reporter stopped them and broke the bad news that those comics were not likely to appear, Mr. Halligan said they wouldn\u2019t have bought the tickets had they known. Image Paige Kaden, 24, returned to Times Square on Thursday after she bought tickets for a comedy show because she was told Tina Fey would be performing. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times Al Martin, the owner of the Broadway Comedy Club, said one or two customers complain every night, most having been promised Ms. Fey or Louis C.K. \u201cBelieve me, we hate this,\u201d Mr. Martin said. He said his street team members write their initials on tickets, but that \u201cthree or four or 10 of these guys who do this\u201d buy tickets from the legitimate sellers and \u201cgo rogue.\u201d Sherif Hamoda, 32, who sells tickets for Stand Up NY, which is on West 78th Street, works in a sort of gray area. He says he doesn\u2019t lie about Ms. Fey. But that does not mean he doesn\u2019t lie at all. \u201cComedy Central taping!\u201d he shouted to passers-by on Thursday. No such taping was planned. \u201cThat\u2019s how I get them to stop,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s not dishonest.\u201d Mr. Hamoda told a couple from London on Thursday that Caroline Rhea, the comedian and former host of \u201cThe Biggest Loser,\u201d would appear that night. When asked about this claim, he said that while she was not on the schedule, he couldn\u2019t say for sure that she would not be there: \u201cA lot of times she shows up last minute.\u201d Another seller, who gave only the name Lorenzo, said he was not above shouting out Ms. Fey\u2019s name. \u201cYou say it to make them stop,\u201d he said. \u201cThen you start your pitch.\u201d", "keyword": "Times Square and 42nd Street Manhattan;Fraud;Comedy"}
{"id": "ny0164707", "categories": ["science"], "date": "2006/10/10", "title": "Flyweights, Yes, but Fighters Nonetheless: Fruit Flies Bred for Aggressiveness", "abstract": "What can stand on its hind legs and duke it out with its front feet, boxing and tussling like a four-armed pugilist? The answer: a strain of laboratory fruit flies bred for shameless aggressiveness toward their own kind. These miniature gladiators flail at each other with a zeal and tempo that make professional boxers look like milquetoasts. A video, available here , shows a Drosophilan version of Mike Tyson forcing an opponent to fly the court. The fighting flies have been bred by Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, two biologists at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. Their goal is to discover the neural circuits that are genetically modified when flies develop aggressive behavior. Fruit flies in the wild are quite hostile toward one another. Males will fight off other males from prize real estate, like a rotten peach, where females like to congregate. But when kept in the laboratory, subsequent generations soon become domesticated. Dr. Dierick and Dr. Greenspan figured that since this behavior was easily lost, it should be easy enough to regain if the right selective pressure were applied. So they took a laboratory strain of tame fruit flies and set up pots of food that could be protected by single males. The males that fought the hardest in these encounters were sucked off their little arenas with a pipette and rewarded by becoming the fathers of the next generation. More aggressive males started to appear after only 5 generations, and by the 21st generation, Dr. Dierick found that the aggressiveness of male fruit flies had increased more than 30-fold, according to a scoring system he developed. At this point he was able to perform an experiment that would have been quite messy had he been working with larger animals. He chopped off the heads of 100 aggressive individuals, ground them up and ran a test to measure changes in the activity of their brain genes. About 80 genes \u2014 the fruit fly has about 14,000 \u2014 were either more or less active in the brains of the aggressive flies, compared with flies of the original population from which they were selected. Two of the most changed genes were ones involved in the detection of pheromones, the hormonelike scents with which fruit flies signal their activities. One of these genes seems to make the aggressive flies unusually sensitive to the pheromones emitted by other males. Another, which is repressed in the aggressive flies, mediates sensitivity to the pheromone with which male flies mark their territory. The aggressive flies seem less able to recognize others\u2019 boundaries. Dr. Dierick hopes to identify the neural circuit in the fly\u2019s brain that mediates aggressive behavior and that is modulated up or down by inputs from pheromones and other sources. Dr. Greenspan said an understanding of how genes set up circuits to govern behavior would be of broad significance in understanding what makes either flies or people tick.", "keyword": "Insects;Aggression;Genetics and Heredity"}
{"id": "ny0131667", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2012/12/10", "title": "Robotic Gadgets Are Becoming Within Reach of Average Consumer", "abstract": "BERLIN \u2014 Joseph Schlesinger, an engineer living near Boston, thinks robotic toys are too expensive, the result of extravagant designs, expensive components and a poor understanding of consumer tastes. So this year, Mr. Schlesinger, 23, began to manufacture an affordable robot, one he is selling for $250 to holiday shoppers. His creation, the Hexy, is a six-legged, crablike creature that can navigate its own environment and respond to humans with a hand wave or other programmable gesture. Mr. Schlesinger said he had been able to lower production costs by using free software and by molding a lot of the plastic parts locally in Massachusetts, not in China. Since setting up his company, ArcBotics, in suburban Somerville, Massachusetts, Mr. Schlesinger has built a backlog of more than 1,000 orders. His goal, he said, was to become \u201cthe Ikea of robotics.\u201d \u201cI think the market for consumer robotics is poised to explode,\u201d said Mr. Schlesinger, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. \u201cWe are only at the beginning.\u201d Since the 1960s, robots have assumed major roles in industrial manufacturing and assembly, the remote detonation of explosives, search and rescue, and academic research. But the devices have remained out of reach, in affordability and practicality, to most consumers. That, according to Professor Andrew Ng, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in California, is about to change. One big reason, Mr. Ng said, is the mass production of smartphones and game consoles, which has driven down the size and price of robotic building blocks like accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors. On the edges of consumer consciousness, the first generation of devices with rudimentary artificial intelligence are beginning to appear: entertainment and educational robots like the Hexy, and a line of tireless household drones that can mow lawns, sweep floors, clean swimming pools and even enhance golf games. \u201cI\u2019m seeing a huge explosion of robotic toys and believe that there will be one soon in industry,\u201d said Mr. Ng, an associated professor of computer science at Stanford. The most advanced robots remain exotic workhorses like NASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity Rover, which cost $2.5 billion, and the LS3, a doglike robot being developed for the U.S. military that can carry a 400-pound, or 180-kilogram load more than 20 miles, or about 30 kilometers. The mechanical beast of burden, whose price is not public, is being made by a consortium led by Boston Dynamics. In Menlo Park, California, engineers at Willow Garage, a robotics firm, are selling the two-armed, 5-foot-4 inch (1.63-meter) rolling robot called the PR2 for $400,000. A video on Willow Garage\u2019s Web site shows the PR2 fetching beer from a refrigerator, which while an engineering and programming feat, is an expensive way to get beer. \u201cI think we\u2019re still some years away from useful personal robots making pervasive appearances in our homes,\u201d Mr. Ng said. Right now, for the masses, there is the CaddyTrek, a robotic golf club carrier that follows a player from tee to fairway to green through tall grass, up 30-degree slopes and in snow, for as many as 27 holes on a single charge. Players wear a remote control on their belts, which acts as a homing beacon for the self-propelled cart, which trails six paces behind the player. Golfers can also navigate the robotic cart, which is made by FTR Systems, to the next tee while they finish putting. \u201cSomeone ran up to me last week and said that my golf cart had broken free and was rolling through the parking lot,\u201d said Richard Nagle, the sales manager for CaddyTrek in North America and Europe. \u201cMost people just stop and stare. They\u2019re not used to this.\u201d FTR Systems does not disclose the proprietary technology it uses to power the CaddyTrek, which sells for $1,595, but Mr. Nagle said sales of the robot carriers had been strong, and the company had been rushing to meet orders in the United States and Europe. While one robot totes your golf clubs, another, the Polaris 9300xi, could be cleaning your swimming pool. The blue, four-wheel drone submerges in a swimming pool and pushes itself along the bottom and walls to dislodge and filter sediment. The device, which is made by Zodiac Pool Systems of San Diego, cleans pools as much as 60 feet long. Users can program the robot to clean a swimming pool at regular intervals or use a remote control to steer it by hand. The Polaris 9300xi sells for $1,379. A silent, four-wheeled grass cutter called the Automower, made by Husqvarna, a Swedish power tool and lawn care company that also owns the McCulloch and Gardena brands, can care for lawns as large as 6,000 square meters, or 64,000 square feet. The Automower cuts grass by staying within a boundary wire drawn around the perimeter, sensing and avoiding trees, flower beds and other obstacles. The mower, which is sold in Europe and Asia but not in the United States, cuts rain or shine and returns to recharge itself when its batteries get low. Advanced models use GPS and can recognize and return to narrow, hard-to-reach parts of lawns and gardens, ensuring that no areas are missed. The least expensive garden drone, the Automower 305, costs \u20ac1,500, or $1,965, and can mow 500 square meters on one charge. The top-end Automower 265AX sells for about \u20ac4,600 in Europe and is designed for hospitals, hotels and commercial properties. The Swedish company sold its first robotic mower, which was solar-powered, in 1995. But the device was too expensive and too unreliable in climates like that of northern Europe, where sunny summers are not guaranteed. About five years ago, the Husqvarna switched to battery power, which lowered the cost and eliminated weather as a factor. Henric Andersson, the director of product development at Husqvarna in Stockholm, said the company\u2019s robotic mowers were getting extensive use in Scandinavia and Europe. \u201cAfter being around for years, sales really began taking off about five years ago,\u201d said Mr. Andersson. \u201cThe graph of sales looks like a hockey stick. The robotic mower has reached a tipping point. More people are now incorporating the device into their lives.\u201d Other basic robots are beginning to work inside the home. iRobot, a firm founded by three former employees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, makes robots that vacuum, sweep and mop floors. The iRobot Roomba 790, which costs \u20ac900 in Europe, is a self-propelling vacuum cleaner that can sense and navigate interior spaces, adjusting by itself from carpets to hard floors, and wielding side brushes for corners and walls. The iRobot Scooba 390 cleans sealed hardwood, tile and linoleum floors, no pre-sweeping required. The device looks like a hovering bathroom scale and can hug walls and avoid staircases and other dangerous drops as it cleans, vacuums, wet mops and dries as much as 850 square feet of floor on a single charge. The Scooba 390 sells for \u20ac500. Theoretically, a house full of robotic gadgets can lead to more free time, which is where the AR Drone 2.0 quadricopter, a flying, smartphone-controlled helicopter, may come in. The AR Drone 2.0 is equipped with two onboard video cameras: one conventional and one high-definition, which can stream and store video of its flights. The AR Drone 2.0, which the user steers over the helicopter\u2019s own Wi-Fi network, can be guided through looping maneuvers and fly as far away as 50 meters at speeds as high as 18 kilometers per hour. The craft can fly about 12 minutes before needing a recharge. The device, made by Parrot, based in Paris, costs \u20ac300 in Europe. Parrot has sold more than 250,000 of the drones since it was introduced in 2010.", "keyword": "Robots and Robotics;Gifts;Entrepreneurship;Artificial Intelligence;Remote Control Systems"}
{"id": "ny0001006", "categories": ["sports"], "date": "2013/03/28", "title": "The Barkley Marathons: Few Know How to Enter; Fewer Finish", "abstract": "WARTBURG, Tenn. \u2014 On Friday night, in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee, 28 men and 7 women will lie in tents half asleep in anticipation of hearing a conch shell being blown at Big Cove Campground in Frozen Head State Park. When they hear the call, which will arrive sometime between 11 p.m. that night and 11 a.m. Saturday, they will know they are 60 minutes from the start of an ordeal once referred to as a \u201csatanic running adventure.\u201d It is a 100-mile footrace that some say is actually 130 miles or more, through unmarked trails that have names like Meth Lab Hill, Bad Thing and Leonard\u2019s Buttslide and that are choked with prickly saw briers. Temperatures often range from freezing to blistering on the same day, and there is a cumulative elevation gain of more than 60,000 feet, or the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest twice from sea level. A 60-hour time limit forces competitors to run, climb and bushwhack for three days with little or no sleep. They endure taunts from the race director, who deliberately keeps the competition\u2019s entry procedure a mystery. It is a race in which there are no comfort stations, and runners cannot use a GPS device or a cellphone. Less than 2 percent of the nearly 800 ultrarunners who have subjected themselves to this punishment \u2014 12 men, the same number as have walked on the moon \u2014 have finished the race in its current iteration. The only prize is that after 100 miles, they get to stop. This is the Barkley Marathons, the world\u2019s toughest and most secretive trail race. \u201cThe Barkley is a problem,\u201d Gary Cantrell, 59, the race\u2019s director and creator, said recently. \u201cAll the other big races are set up for you to succeed. The Barkley is set up for you to fail.\u201d As ultrarunning has increased in popularity, many of its signature races have evolved from low-key affairs to big-time events with corporate sponsors and entry fees of $1,000 or more. The Barkley costs just $1.60 to enter and has not grown because Tennessee park officials will not allow more than 35 runners a year. But with the sport\u2019s popularity on the rise and the Barkley about to be featured in a documentary, many connected to it hope the competition known as the Race That Eats Its Young can maintain its eccentric, counterculture charm. Cantrell got the idea to create the Barkley in 1985 after learning that James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., had managed to cover only eight miles in 54 hours after escaping from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. The prison, closed in 2009, is now part of the Barkley course. Runners wade into a stream that passes through a tunnel under the prison, and come out the other side, near the wall where Ray escaped. The derelict prison sits on the eastern edge of Frozen Head State Park, where Cantrell liked to hike with his friend Karl Henn, known as Raw Dog. Cantrell and Henn, who became a race co-director, thought they could fare better than Ray, who was found lying face down in a pile of leaves, cold, hungry, scratched to pieces and utterly defeated by the terrain. The next year, the Barkley, which Cantrell named after a friend and longtime supporter, Barry Barkley, was held for the first time. The course covered 50 miles, and there was a 24-hour time limit. None of the 13 runners came close to finishing. \u201cA rousing success all around,\u201d Cantrell said of that first race in a story for UltraRunning magazine. Ed Furtaw, a man known as Frozen Ed, became the first person to finish what was then a 55-mile race in 1988. The next year, Cantrell decided to make the Barkley more difficult by creating a 100-mile race, currently consisting of five 20-mile loops, while retaining a 60-mile Fun Run. Mark Williams, a Briton, became the first person to complete the 100-mile race, finishing in 59 hours 28 minutes in 1995. Only 11 others have completed the 100-mile race since. (There was no race in 2002.) Don\u2019t Apply Early or Often Figuring out how to enter the race is an achievement in itself. \u201cThere is no Web site, and I don\u2019t publish the race date or explain how to enter,\u201d said Cantrell, an accomplished ultrarunner who has never come close to completing his own race. \u201cAnything that makes it more mentally stressful for the runners is good.\u201d (The start of the race involves a curious tradition in which participants try to refrain from letting Cantrell see them run. They will walk the first few hundred meters, until they turn a bend and begin running once they are out of his sight.) Because so few participants are allowed, the details of how to apply are a closely guarded secret. The first step is to figure out where and when to send a required essay on why one should be allowed to compete. \u201cIf you send it in five minutes early, he\u2019ll delete it,\u201d said Beverly Abbs, a 48-year-old environmental scientist from Red Bluff, Calif., who completed three loops in last year\u2019s race. \u201cWe had to send the application at midnight on Christmas Day in Gary\u2019s time zone, and you have to figure out which one it is on your own.\u201d Image Runners in 2012 heading up an incline called Rat Jaw. Runners are required to complete a bizarre entry form with questions like, \u201cWhat is the most important vegetable group?\u201d Credit Geoffrey S. Baker Abbs submitted a poem reminiscent of \u201c \u2019Twas the Night Before Christmas\u201d as her essay at 12:01 a.m. She feared her application had been denied after her husband, Alan, received, but she did not, the traditional \u201ccondolences letter\u201d that warns accepted runners that they have a \u201cvery bad thing waiting.\u201d It was signed by Lazarus Lake, Cantrell\u2019s nom de guerre. A day and a half later, she received the letter and realized that the delay was an attempt by Cantrell to inflict \u201cpsychological torture\u201d on her. This year\u2019s application said that women were \u201ctoo soft\u201d to conquer the Barkley, but Abbs, who has completed 11 other 100-mile races, said she was confident in her ability to prove him wrong. \u201cI will either be pulled off the course, or I will finish the race,\u201d she said. The field is made up of those who have completed the race, athletes with impressive ultrarunning credentials and veterans like Leonard Martin, a dentist from Knoxville known as Buttslide. He has failed to finish in 17 attempts. Others are plucked randomly. And Cantrell selects at least one \u201csacrificial virgin\u201d whom he believes has no chance of completing the race. (This year, it is Ryan Brazell of Rhode Island.) Runners are also required to complete a bizarre entry form with questions like, \u201cWhat is the most important vegetable group?\u201d In addition to the $1.60 entry fee, first-time entrants must bring a license plate for Cantrell\u2019s collection, which he displays next to the race\u2019s starting gate. Veterans who have never finished are required to bring him a specific article of clothing \u2014 this year it is a size 18 flannel shirt \u2014 while those who have finished need only bring a pack of Camel cigarettes, which Cantrell calls his \u201cretirement plan.\u201d Only after they have completed the entry form are runners given the date of the race. With a total elevation change of 121,560 feet this year, there are only a few flat sections on the course. To confirm that no one is cheating, Cantrell hides 10 books at various points, often ones with titles appropriate to a given section of the course: \u201cDeath Walks the Woods,\u201d \u201cHeart of Darkness,\u201d \u201cA Time to Die.\u201d Runners have to rip out the page that matches their race number. If the page is lost, the runner is disqualified. Last year, 22 of 35 runners gave up on or after the first loop. Everyone who fails to finish experiences the indignity of listening to Cantrell play \u201cTaps\u201d on his bugle in a gleeful homage to the triumph of nature over man. \u201c \u2018Taps\u2019 rings out all night long on the first night,\u201d said Cantrell, who sits by the starting gate with his dogs, Little and Big, smoking Camels and drinking cans of soda, often staying up all night. They Went That Way Six hours before the race starts, Cantrell posts a course map that runners must copy onto maps they purchase, and he gives runners a printed set of directions, which can often be hard to follow, even with a compass. (Runners are split up if they make it to the final loop, with alternating racers running in opposite directions.) Dan Baglione, a retired computer scientist and experienced ultrarunner, set a record for futility in 2006 at age 75 when he became hopelessly lost, eventually wandering into a different county on a 32-hour odyssey in which he was credited with covering just two miles of the actual course. \u201cThere is no trail,\u201d said Baglione, who insisted he would try the Barkley again if he had not been barred from returning. \u201cAnd the instructions are hopeless.\u201d A documentary film crew was recording last year\u2019s race when a camera operator became lost for 16 hours before a search party was dispatched to find him. \u201cThat experience endeared them to everyone,\u201d Cantrell said. Brett Maune, a 34-year-old physicist from the Bay Area, finished the Barkley in 2011, then beat the course record by nearly four hours last year, when the Barkley had an unprecedented three finishers. No other runner has finished the Barkley twice. Brian Robinson, a 51-year-old from California who became the first person to hike the Appalachian, Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails in a calendar year, in 2001, failed in his first two attempts at the Barkley, in 2006 and 2007, years when no one finished. But he completed it in 2008. \u201cI wanted to test my limits,\u201d Robinson said when asked to explain why he kept returning. \u201cThe Barkley is good for that because pretty much no one can finish it.\u201d Cantrell said most Barkley finishers had a background in science or engineering and all but one had an advanced degree. Sleep-deprived runners who make it deep into the race tend to hallucinate, and the few who make it to the finish line are shattered when they arrive. Maune said he was incoherent after his first finish. Image Gary Cantrell, the Barkley Marathons creator, displaying license plates collected from first-time entrants. Credit Geoffrey S. Baker John Fegyveresi, a 35-year-old Ph.D. candidate in geoscience at Penn State who finished the race just minutes before the deadline last year, was told that he devoured an entire pint of Ben & Jerry\u2019s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream at the finish line. He has no recollection of that. \u201cI couldn\u2019t walk the next day, so I stayed in the campground for a day and a half,\u201d he said. \u201cThen I tried to drive home, but after 20 miles I was falling asleep, so I had to check into a hotel. I slept for 16 hours and then missed the checkout time.\u201d Fegyveresi has also completed the Badwater in California, a 135-mile Death Valley marathon that bills itself as the world\u2019s toughest footrace. He said the Barkley was considerably harder. \u201cIt was 120 degrees at Badwater, but it\u2019s a flat road and you have a crew following you, so you don\u2019t have to carry anything and you can\u2019t get lost,\u201d said Fegyveresi, who needed 21 fewer hours to finish Badwater. Cantrell claims, somewhat improbably, that he wants runners to finish his race. \u201cHumans are made to endure physical challenges,\u201d he said. \u201cThe real joy is seeing people who find something in themselves that they didn\u2019t know was there.\u201d Few would dispute the difficulty of the race, but some renowned ultrarunners avoid it, saying that because it involves navigation and an unmarked trail, it\u2019s more of an adventure race than a true ultramarathon. Others, like Charlie Engle, who once ran 4,500 miles across the Sahara, have tried but failed to complete even the Fun Run portion. Running in Silence The top performers at the Barkley are far from household names and seem content to keep it that way. \u201cI hope the race remains more of a secret,\u201d said Maune, who will not compete this year because of a back injury, when asked if he hoped the running world would recognize his Barkley achievements. Fegyveresi said that older Barkley veterans wanted the race to remain obscure and were worried about the effect of the documentary, but some of the younger athletes want the race to receive more recognition. When this reporter announced his intention on the Barkley e-mail group list to write about this year\u2019s race, some race veterans did not seem pleased. \u201cPlease don\u2019t send us spectators, troublemakers or yuppies,\u201d wrote one. \u201cDon\u2019t write about us. There is already too much information out there,\u201d another said. Few would consider divulging the race date, and even among themselves, many runners, including Fegyveresi, would not confirm if they were competing this year. \u201cYou never know who\u2019s going to be there until you show up,\u201d said Martin, who was at Frozen Head training for this year\u2019s race recently. Cantrell insisted that as long as he was alive, the race would stay as it is. But he too faces pressures. Two years ago, he lost his job as the treasurer of Shelbyville, Tenn., and has been out of work since. He has kept the race\u2019s original entry fee, which represents a penny a mile for the 60-mile Fun Run and the 100-mile race. Cantrell said he had declined offers of up to $1,000 from those who want to get into the race, and maintains that the Barkley means too much to him and to others to sell entries. \u201cYou can\u2019t buy the Barkley,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Running;Documentaries;Gary Cantrell;Tennessee;Marathon"}
{"id": "ny0140958", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2008/02/14", "title": "Witness in Absentia Appears in Words", "abstract": "Well before the Congressional hearing Wednesday, Andy Pettitte was viewed as being the most critical witness because he had acknowledged that the Mitchell report was correct about him, that Brian McNamee had injected him with human growth hormone in 2002. If Pettitte had validated McNamee\u2019s truthfulness, how were we to believe Roger Clemens when he denied that McNamee had injected him with H.G.H. and steroids, as the former trainer told the Mitchell commission? Pettitte indeed was a critical witness Wednesday, but he was a witness in absentia. He and another former Yankees teammate, Chuck Knoblauch, who had not disputed McNamee\u2019s assertion about injecting him with H.G.H., had been excused from appearing before the House oversight committee. That decision was unfortunate. Pettitte should have been there. He would have made a compelling witness and given the public, for whose favor Clemens is waging a fierce public fight, a convincing reason to believe that Clemens was lying. Pettitte, in effect, was there. At least his words were. He had sat for a two-and-a-half-hour, 101-page deposition Feb. 4, and it was placed in the record and was available for the committee members to read. But it didn\u2019t have the same effect. Pettitte\u2019s presence would have made a significant impact. The importance of what Pettitte told the committee was evident from the start of the hearing. Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, was the first committee member to question the witnesses who were there, and he slashed away at Clemens about what Pettitte had told committee staff members. Cummings zeroed in on the two conversations Pettitte said in his deposition that he had with Clemens about Clemens\u2019s use of H.G.H. Clemens, Pettitte said, told him in late 1999 or early 2000 that he had used H.G.H. After securing Clemens\u2019s agreement that Pettitte \u2014 his friend, former teammate and fellow Texan \u2014 was one of the most respected and honest players in the game, Cummings asked about the conversation. \u201cIs this true?\u201d Cummings asked. \u201cIt is not,\u201d Clemens said. \u201cYou did not tell Mr. Pettitte you used H.G.H.?\u201d \u201cI did not.\u201d Each time Cummings asked about the conversation, Clemens said that Pettitte had \u201cmisheard\u201d or \u201cmisremembered.\u201d But in a subsequent affidavit, Pettitte held to his stance that Clemens told him he had used H.G.H. The committee asked Laura Pettitte, Andy\u2019s wife, to submit an affidavit because Pettitte said he had told her about that conversation and a subsequent one. In the second conversation, Pettitte said, he reminded Clemens that he had told him about his use of H.G.H. and \u201cRoger responded that I must have misunderstood him; he claimed that it was his wife, Debbie, who used H.G.H.\u201d In Laura Pettitte\u2019s affidavit, Cummings read, she said, \u201cAndy told me in a 2005 conversation Roger denied using H.G.H. and told Andy that Andy was mistaken about the earlier conversation. According to Andy, Roger said that it was his wife, Debbie, who used H.G.H.\u201d \u201cThe time line is very important here,\u201d Cummings said, noting that Pettitte said the first conversation occurred in 1999 or 2000. \u201cBut you told us that your wife did not use H.G.H. until 2003. That makes it impossible that you could have been referring to your wife\u2019s use of H.G.H. in the first conversation.\u201d Cummings used Pettittes\u2019s words well, but hearing Andy\u2019s words live at the hearing would have provided far more drama and substance. However, Phil Schiliro, the committee\u2019s Democratic chief of staff, said the committee decided Pettitte\u2019s sworn words were sufficient. Schiliro said the hearing was held because Clemens raised questions about the Mitchell report. \u201cKnoblauch and Pettitte said the report was accurate,\u201d Schiliro said in a telephone interview. \u201cThere was really no purpose having Pettitte there since he had done a sworn deposition. I\u2019m not sure it would have made a difference.\u201d Pettitte, who was given a few extra days by the Yankees to report for spring training, apparently didn\u2019t want to appear at the hearing and have to testify against Clemens. The committee seemed to understand his position. All anyone had known was that McNamee said he injected Pettitte two to four times in 2002. In his deposition, Pettitte disclosed that he had injected himself with H.G.H. in 2004, when he was on the disabled list. He said he got that H.G.H. from his father, who had been using it himself. \u201cMy dad\u2019s had a world of health problems,\u201d Pettitte said. \u201cIn 1998, he had open-heart surgery. At this day, he has nine stents in his heart. He\u2019s been on disability since he was 48 years old. Since he\u2019s had heart surgery, he\u2019s never been back. He\u2019s had all kinds of different treatments and stuff like that. \u201cHe did a treatment called kelation therapy that I paid for to have him get it done for about eight months. And he had a couple different shoulder surgeries.\u201d For about a year and a half, Pettitte added, \u201conce a month it seemed like an ambulance was coming to the house to get him and take him to the emergency room.\u201d Soon after, Pettitte was having his own physical problems. \u201cI had asked my dad if he had had any of the H.G.H. that he had had before,\u201d Pettitte said. \u201cHe ended up bringing me two syringes over to my house. And you know I injected myself once in the morning and once at night.\u201d", "keyword": "Steroids;Pettitte Andy;Clemens Roger;Human Growth Hormone"}
{"id": "ny0010561", "categories": ["sports", "hockey"], "date": "2013/02/07", "title": "Bruins Seize First Place", "abstract": "Tyler Seguin and David Krejci scored early in the third period, lifting the visiting Boston Bruins to a 2-1 win over the Montreal Canadiens. The Bruins (7-1-1) moved into first place in the Northeast Division.", "keyword": "Ice hockey;Bruins;Montreal Canadiens"}
{"id": "ny0171295", "categories": ["science", "earth"], "date": "2007/11/18", "title": "U.N. Chief Seeks More Climate Change Leadership", "abstract": "VALENCIA, Spain, Nov. 17 \u2014 Secretary General Ban Ki-moon , describing climate change as \u201cthe defining challenge of our age,\u201d released the final report of a United Nations panel on climate change here on Saturday and called on the United States and China to play \u201ca more constructive role.\u201d His challenge to the world\u2019s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters came just two weeks before the world\u2019s energy ministers meet in Bali, Indonesia, to begin talks on creating a global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The United States and China are signatories to Kyoto, but Washington has not ratified the treaty, and China, along with other developing countries, is not bound by its mandatory emissions caps. \u201cToday the world\u2019s scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice,\u201d Mr. Ban said of the report, the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. \u201cIn Bali, I expect the world\u2019s policymakers to do the same.\u201d He added, \u201cThe breakthrough needed in Bali is for a comprehensive climate change deal that all nations can embrace.\u201d Although Mr. Ban has no power to enforce members of the United Nations to act, his statements on Saturday increased the pressure on the United States and China, participants here said. Members of the panel said their review of the data led them to conclude as a group and individually that reductions in greenhouse gases had to start immediately to avert a global climate disaster, which could leave island nations submerged and abandoned, reduce African crop yields by 50 percent, and cause a 5 percent decrease in global gross domestic product. The panel\u2019s fourth and final report summarized and integrated the most significant findings of three sections of a climate-science review that were released between January and April. Because the data had not previously been reviewed as a whole, scientists said the synthesized report was more explicit, creating new emphasis and alarm. The first section of the review had covered climate trends; the second, the world\u2019s ability to adapt to a warming planet; the third, strategies for reducing carbon emissions. With their mission concluded, the hundreds of IPCC scientists spoke more freely than they had previously. \u201cThe sense of urgency when you put these pieces together is new and striking,\u201d said Martin Parry, a British climate expert who was co-chairman of the delegation that wrote the second report. \u201cI\u2019ve come out of this process more pessimistic about the possibilities than I thought I would.\u201d The panel, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, said the world would have to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 to prevent serious climate disruptions. \u201cIf there\u2019s no action before 2012, that\u2019s too late,\u201d said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. \u201cWhat we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.\u201d He said that since the IPCC began its work five years ago, scientists had recorded \u201cmuch stronger trends in climate change,\u201d like a recent melting of Arctic ice that had not been predicted. \u201cThat means you better start with intervention much earlier.\u201d Saturday\u2019s synthesis report was reviewed and approved by delegates from 130 nations gathered here this week. But unlike the earlier reviews, in which governments had insisted on changes that diluted the reports\u2019 impact, this time scientists and environmental groups said there had been no major dilution of the data. For example, this report\u2019s summary was the first to acknowledge that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from rising temperatures could result in a substantive sea-level rise over centuries rather than millennia. \u201cMany of my colleagues would consider that kind of melt a catastrophe\u201d so rapid that mankind would not be able to adapt, said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University who contributed to the IPCC. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely clear and is very explicit that the cost of inaction will be huge compared to the cost of action,\u201d said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of Columbia University\u2019s Earth Institute. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to wait for some perfect accord to replace Kyoto, for some grand agreement. We can\u2019t afford to spend years bickering about it. We need to start acting now.\u201d He said that delegates in Bali should take action immediately where they agree, for example, on public financing for new technologies like capturing emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, and pumping it underground. He said energy ministers should start a global fund to help poor countries avoid deforestation, which releases greenhouse gases and reduces the uptake of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. United Nations officials pointed out that strong policies were needed, like increasing the energy efficiency of cars and setting up carbon markets, a system that essentially forces companies and countries to pay for the cost of the greenhouse gases they emit. The European Union already has such a carbon trading system in place for many industries, and is fighting to bring airlines into the plan. \u201cStabilization of emissions can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that exist or are already under development,\u201d said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program. But he noted that developed countries would have to help poorer ones adapt to climate shifts and adopt cleaner energy choices, which are often expensive. Mr. Steiner emphasized that the report sent a message to individuals as well as world leaders: \u201cWhat we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior.\u201d Meanwhile, the Bush administration\u2019s reaction to the report was muted. At a news conference Friday night after the report was approved, James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the president\u2019s Council on Environmental Quality, said President Bush had agreed with leaders of the other major industrialized nations that \u201cthe issue warrants urgent action, and we need to bring forward in a more accelerated way the technologies that will make a lasting solution possible.\u201d He declined to say how much warming the administration considered acceptable, saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t have a view on that.\u201d Mr. Connaughton acknowledged that the United States, like other nations, had tried to make some changes to the draft. Dr. Sharon L. Hays, the leader of the American delegation here, said the goal was not political but \u201cto make sure the final report matches the science.\u201d She noted that the United States had invested $12 billion in climate research since 2001. Stephanie Tunmore, a member of Greenpeace International who had observer status as the countries debated the text, questioned that explanation. She said, for example, that the United States had tried to remove a section of the report titled \u201cReasons for Concern,\u201d which listed consequences of climate change that are either likely or possible. One was the melting of ice sheets, which the panel said could take place more rapidly than previously thought. The Americans argued that there was no reason to include the section, because all of it was contained somewhere in the previous IPCC technical documents, she said. But the section remained in the report.", "keyword": "Global Warming;United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;Environment;Carbon Dioxide;United Nations;Ban Ki-moon;Air Pollution"}
{"id": "ny0092382", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2015/08/26", "title": "Estate of Heiress Loses Fight to Recover Millions in Donations From Hospital", "abstract": "The estate of the copper heiress Huguette Clark has lost a battle to recover more than $4 million worth of donations, including an Edouard Manet painting, that she gave the Manhattan hospital where she lived for the last two decades of her life. A Manhattan Surrogate Court judge, Nora S. Anderson, ruled last week that the statute of limitations had expired for the estate to argue that officials at the hospital, Beth Israel Medical Center, had manipulated Ms. Clark into donating. \u201cWe are gratified by the dismissal of the meritless claims against the hospital,\u201d said Marvin Wexler, the lawyer for the hospital, which has been renamed Mount Sinai Beth Israel after merging with Mount Sinai Health System. Ms. Clark, who died at age 104 in May 2011, had no close relatives. The lawsuit was brought by New York City\u2019s public administrator, which controls the estate, and lawyers for it. The ruling is the latest twist in a long-running conflict over Ms. Clark\u2019s nine-figure estate. Her father, Senator William A. Clark of Montana, made his fortune with copper mines in his home state and real estate deals in Las Vegas. She was his youngest daughter. She spent the last 19 years of her life at the hospital, with round-the-clock private nursing, after she recovered from skin cancer, rather than returning to her Fifth Avenue apartment or her sprawling homes in California and Connecticut. While Judge Anderson dismissed the estate\u2019s claims against the hospital, she said last week that a separate lawsuit could proceed against two physicians and a nurse who took care of Ms. Clark in her declining years and received about $3.6 million in gifts from her. The judge said she had been presented with two starkly different accounts of Ms. Clark\u2019s mental state in her dotage. In court papers, the city\u2019s public administrator portrayed Ms. Clark as weak-minded woman who suffered from mental illness and was easily influenced to write checks. But her doctors and hospital officials have asserted she was mentally sharp and intelligent and capable of deciding what to do with her money. They note she refused at least four requests for large donations from hospital administrators, including as late as 2007. \u201cWhen she arrived at Beth Israel Medical Center, she needed hospitalization and received excellent care,\u201d said Gregory Williams, a hospital spokesman, in an email. \u201cShe was subsequently cleared for discharge, but refused to leave and stayed of her own volition. Beth Israel\u2019s practice was not to forcefully remove a patient from the hospital who refused to leave.\u201d Judge Anderson said the trial against the physicians and nurse was needed to settle \u201cthe sharp factual dispute\u201d between the parties. She wrote that the success of the lawsuit would turn on \u201cwhether or not the decedent possessed the higher level of mental capacity to support the ability to make valid gifts.\u201d She added that \u201cthese disputes cannot be resolved on papers.\u201d After Ms. Clark\u2019s death, a bitter legal feud arose over her estate. She made two wills within six weeks. One left most of the money to distant relatives, and the second cut out her relatives and made bequests to arts foundations, the hospital and people around her, including her doctors and nurses. Ms. Clark donated $940,000 to the hospital between 1992 and 2002, giving large sums nearly every year in response to requests from hospital administrators. In 2002, she transferred to the hospital Edouard Manet\u2019s \u201cPivoines dans une bouteille,\u201d which later sold at auction for $3.5 million. That suit was settled out of court on the eve of trial in September 2013, creating a new $100 million arts foundation, donating $1 million to the hospital and leaving $10 million to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, where her father\u2019s collection fills a wing. Ms. Clark\u2019s distant relatives received about $34.5 million after taxes. The settlement allowed the estate to pursue the claims to recover gifts she made outside the will. However, Judge Anderson said last week that the law required the claims to have been made within three years of the last donation, in October 2002.", "keyword": "Wills and Estates;Huguette M Clark;Beth Israel Medical Center;Manhattan;Lawsuits"}
{"id": "ny0288644", "categories": ["sports", "olympics"], "date": "2016/08/23", "title": "For Those Keeping Score, American Women Dominated in Rio", "abstract": "RIO DE JANEIRO \u2014 The very idea of a medal count might seem contrary to the spirit of the Olympics, which are supposed to bring the world together for a couple of weeks and suspend the nationalism that keeps us apart. Yet keeping score is the essence of sport. And measured by the haul of gold, silver and bronze, the United States had an extraordinary Olympics in Rio, winning 121 medals, the most by an American team in a Summer Games free of boycotts. The size and depth of the United States team resulted in the most gold (46), silver (37) and bronze (38) medals of any nation. Only five countries have topped each medal category at the same Games. The Americans were the first to do it in 40 years, enabled in part by the barring of nearly a third of Russia\u2019s team after revelations of state-sponsored doping. (Another reliable powerhouse, China, underperformed.) Image Katie Ledecky of the United States showed off her gold medal in the women\u2019s 200-meter freestyle. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times \u201cThis has been an incredible Games for Team U.S.A. by any measure,\u201d Alan Ashley, the chief of sport performance for the United States Olympic Committee, said Sunday at a news conference. Most striking was the performance by the American women. The American men won 18 gold medals, the same as Britain. But the American women were dominant with 27 (not including a gold in mixed doubles tennis). Had the women competed as a separate country, they would have ranked third in the overall medal chart (61), behind China (70) and Britain (67) and just ahead of the American men (60). There are two primary reasons for this pre-eminence. The United States is one of the few countries to embed sports within the public education system. And equal access to sports for women comes with legal protections, gained with the education amendment known as Title IX in 1972 and the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act in 1978. About one of every two American girls participates in sports in high school. Of the 213 American medalists in individual and team sports in Rio, according to the U.S.O.C., nearly 85 percent participated in university-funded sports. Video The Olympics coverage has been criticized for sexism on almost a daily basis. Female Olympians are described as \u201cmarried\u201d or \u201cunmarried,\u201d while men are called the \u201cfastest\u201d or the \u201cstrongest.\u201d Credit Credit Matt Slocum/Associated Press.. \u201cThose things don\u2019t exist elsewhere in the world,\u201d said Donna Lopiano, a former executive director of the Women\u2019s Sports Foundation. \u201cWe have the largest base of athletic development. Our women are going to dominate, not only because of their legal rights but because women in other parts of the world are discriminated against.\u201d In the United States, more women than men watch the Summer Olympics on television. Girls see role models to emulate, and success perpetuates success. The champion performances by three African-American athletes \u2014 Simone Biles, who won four gold medals in gymnastics; Simone Manuel, the first black woman to win Olympic gold in an individual swimming event; and Ashleigh Johnson, the goalie for the gold-medal-winning women\u2019s water polo team \u2014 are certain to broaden participation in sports that have historically been white. Ibtihaj Muhammad, who won a bronze medal in saber team fencing, became the first Olympic athlete to compete for the United States while wearing a hijab. And it was a women\u2019s team, in the 400-meter medley relay in swimming, that won the 1,000th gold medal for the Americans since the modern Games began, in 1896. Image The Olympic success of the United States women\u2019s water polo team, which was led by a black goalie, Ashleigh Johnson, could broaden participation in the sport. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times \u201cYou get on a roll,\u201d said David Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. \u201cGirls are looking and saying, \u2018Wow, I can do that,\u2019 whereas 30 years ago, not so many American girls thought that. It builds and builds.\u201d A country of 320 million, the United States ranked only 43rd in medals per capita, well behind small countries that won multiple medals, like Jamaica, New Zealand, Denmark, Croatia, Azerbaijan and Hungary, according to medalspercapita.com. Sixty-five of the medals won by the United States, more than half of its total, came in swimming and track and field, the two sports offering the most chances to win medals. It also surely helped that American athletes competed in a time zone only one hour ahead of Eastern Daylight Time and did not have to risk jet lag by traveling to an Olympics in Europe or Asia. Image From left, Ryan Held, Nathan Adrian, Caeleb Dressel and Michael Phelps won the men\u2019s 4x100-meter freestyle relay. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times And some American success can be attributed to underperformance by other nations. Because of the doping controversy, Russia\u2019s entire weight lifting team was barred, and so was all but one athlete on its track and field team. Australia won its fewest Olympic medals (29) since the 1992 Barcelona Games. With 70 medals, China finished second over all, but that was 30 fewer than it won at the 2008 Beijing Games. This fits a pattern of host countries\u2019 ebbing two Olympics later, Wallechinsky said. \u201cYou have seven years to prepare for an Olympics, everybody gets pumped up, you put money into different sports, you do well at home, and you develop a bunch of role models,\u201d Wallechinsky said. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t necessarily carry over twice. There\u2019s a consistent pattern of the host doing well, then pretty well at the next Olympics, then back to normal.\u201d Brazil won 19 medals, its highest total ever, but not as many as recent host nations like Britain (65) in 2012, China (100) in 2008 and Australia (58) in 2000. Home teams generally receive increased financial support in preparation for a Summer Olympics, but Brazil lacks an organized funding system for sports, and the Rio Games arrived with the country in an economic and political crisis. Image Brazil won 19 medals at the Rio Games, its highest Olympic total ever, including gold in the sport it prizes most, soccer. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Still, Brazil won the gold medal it prized most \u2014 its first in men\u2019s soccer. More ambitious drug testing may have also affected the makeup of the Chinese team and others in Rio, Wallechinsky said. Several experts said that although enhanced international antidoping measures are far from perfect and have ensnared Americans, they might have particularly aided the success of the United States\u2019 track and field team in Rio, as enhanced funding and training camps supported by shoe companies and U.S.A. Track & Field did. Michelle Carter became the first American woman to win the Olympic shot-put. And the United States, long a sprint power, won medals in middle- and long-distance running from 800 meters to the marathon, highlighted by Matt Centrowitz\u2019s victory at 1,500 meters, the metric mile. He was the first American to win the event since 1908. \u201cA level playing field benefits all athletes and helps our medal chances,\u201d said Jill Geer, a spokeswoman for U.S.A. Track & Field. The ruthless nature of selecting a team at the Olympic trials, instead of by past performances, also appeared to be an important factor, Centrowitz said. Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin of the United States swept the 100-meter hurdles in Rio while the world-record holder, an American named Kendra Harrison, did not make the team. \u201cIt\u2019s not the three fastest people on paper; it\u2019s the best three people on a given day,\u201d Centrowitz said, describing team selection per event at the Olympic trials. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what you had to do here, perform on that specific day.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Summer Olympics;Women and Girls;US;Simone Biles;Simone Manuel;Ashleigh Johnson;Ibtihaj Muhammad;Matthew Centrowitz"}
{"id": "ny0279398", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2016/10/05", "title": "Hillary Clinton to Girl\u2019s Question on Body Image: \u2018Let\u2019s Be Proud of Who We Are.\u2019", "abstract": "HAVERFORD, Pa. \u2014 The teenager leaned into the microphone, pausing for a beat. She had a question for Hillary Clinton, about her high school and Donald J. Trump. \u201cAt my school, body image is a really big issue for girls my age,\u201d began the girl, Brennan Leach, 15, who had a red bow in her hair. \u201cI see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look.\u201d How, she asked, could Mrs. Clinton help girls understand \u201cthat they are so much more than just what they look like?\u201d Briefly, Mrs. Clinton appeared ready to rocket out of her seat. \u201cThank you!\u201d the candidate shouted, as the crowd cheered Brennan. \u201cThank you!\u201d Mrs. Clinton had been holding forth on Tuesday in a Haverford community center gymnasium, beside her daughter, Chelsea, and the actress Elizabeth Banks, for a town hall \u2014 a \u201cFAMILY TOWN HALL,\u201d according to the blue block letters behind her onstage \u2014 speaking to a largely female crowd in the kind of Philadelphia suburb that could decide this critical state. Brennan\u2019s question was the first of the day and, for Mrs. Clinton, the most potent. Since last week\u2019s debate, Mrs. Clinton has brought attention to Mr. Trump\u2019s history of making disparaging remarks about the appearance of women, particularly his comments about the weight of the 1996 Miss Universe, Alicia Machado . Even before the debate, Mrs. Clinton\u2019s team had released an evocative ad that featured girls looking anxiously in their mirrors, scored to a selection of Trump insults. On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton said she was \u201cso proud\u201d of Brennan for asking the question. Mr. Trump, she agreed, \u201chas taken this concern to a new level of difficulty and meanness.\u201d She reminded the room that \u201cyoung women begin to get influenced at earlier and earlier ages\u201d by social expectations of body image. Image Brennan Leach (in red bow) at a campaign event for Hillary Clinton in Haverford, Pa., on Tuesday. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times \u201cMy opponent insulted Miss Universe!\u201d she said, to laughs. \u201cHow do you get more acclaimed than that? But it wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d She went on. \u201cWe can\u2019t take any of this seriously anymore,\u201d she said, her voice building. \u201cWe need to laugh at it. We need to refute it. We need to ignore it. And we need to stand up to it.\u201d She spoke of the \u201cmany young women online who are being bullied.\u201d Some were hurting themselves, she said. It had to stop. \u201cWe\u2019re not all going to end up being Miss Universe, I hate to tell you,\u201d she continued, wrapping up. \u201cSo let\u2019s be the best we can be. Let\u2019s be proud of who we are.\u201d Throughout the afternoon, the forum, which included many parents and their children, seemed to play to Mrs. Clinton\u2019s strengths. While she can at times appear less comfortable at rollicking rallies, her campaign has long believed that more intimate interactions with voters suit her well. Fielding sympathetic questions from supporters, Mrs. Clinton brandished her range. She was wonky, true to form, engaging attendees in a less than catchy call-and-response exercise: \u201cDo you have an interest rate on your student debt that is 8 percent or higher?\u201d she said, asking for a show of hands. She was sympathetic, responding to a mother who said she had lost a son to gun violence, and then another to suicide after his sibling\u2019s death. \u201cThank you for being so brave,\u201d Mrs. Clinton said. And she was playful, smiling as a middle school questioner said she had won a recent mock presidential debate while arguing Mrs. Clinton\u2019s side. \u201cThanks for winning,\u201d Mrs. Clinton replied. \u201cThat makes us 2 and 0.\u201d All the while, Chelsea Clinton sat at the ready, eager to chime in to trumpet her mother\u2019s credentials. \u201cI wish that people really understood that \u2018Stronger Together,\u2019 that putting families and children first, isn\u2019t rhetorical for my mom,\u201d Ms. Clinton said at one point, reciting her mother\u2019s campaign slogan. \u201cIt\u2019s what I\u2019ve watched her do my whole life.\u201d She was not the only daughter in the room talking up a parent. After the event, Brennan said that her father, a state senator, had helped her form the question that had so excited Mrs. Clinton. (The Clinton campaign said questions had not been vetted.) Brennan said she had lost a friend to suicide last year. Mr. Trump\u2019s candidacy, Brennan said, has heightened her concerns at school. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard for me throughout school to see the pain Donald Trump inflicts on my friends,\u201d she said, citing examples of bullying, \u201cespecially at such an insecure time as middle school and high school.\u201d", "keyword": "2016 Presidential Election;Hillary Clinton;Donald Trump;Women and Girls;Alicia Machado;Haverford PA"}
{"id": "ny0207717", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/06/30", "title": "On a Mission to Mark Places of Long-Forgotten Historic Moments", "abstract": "Forlornly unidentified and altogether forgotten, these sites have been literally lost to history. On Avenue of the Americas, there is a block where the first cellphone call was completed in 1973; on West 125th Street, where the old Blumstein\u2019s department store stood, nothing marks the place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in 1958. Then there is the spot on Fifth Avenue where Winston Churchill , crossing against the light, was struck by a car in 1931 and nearly killed. And what about the old Winter Garden Theater at 671 Broadway? In 1864, on the very night that Confederate sympathizers singled out the Lafarge Hotel next door in their plot to burn down New York, the Booth brothers \u2014 John Wilkes, Junius Brutus Jr. and Edwin \u2014 starred in \u201cJulius Caesar.\u201d The benefit performance, which was billed as the brothers\u2019 sole joint engagement, raised $3,500 for the Shakespeare statue that still stands in Central Park. Andrew Carroll, 39, an amateur historian, is embarking this week on a 50-state journey to uncover, memorialize and preserve these and other sites where history happened serendipitously, and which, for one reason or another, have been relegated to anonymity. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of a reverse scavenger hunt,\u201d he said. \u201cTrying to find things that aren\u2019t there.\u201d His Here Is Where campaign, in collaboration with National Geographic Traveler, might seem quixotic, but so did two of his earlier efforts that proved to be immensely popular. In 1993, when he was an English major at Columbia, he founded the American Poetry and Literacy Project with Joseph Brodsky, the nation\u2019s poet laureate. They distributed free poetry books across the country. Five years later, he launched the Legacy Project ( warletters.com ), a repository for soldiers\u2019 wartime letters and e-mail messages home. Mr. Carroll\u2019s latest crusade ( www.HereIsWhere.org ) was inspired by a story he read 15 years ago about a dramatic rescue that occurred during Abraham Lincoln \u2019s first term as president. The president\u2019s son Robert Todd Lincoln was about to board a sleeping car at Exchange Place in Jersey City one night when he fell between the platform and the train as it started to pull out of the station. \u201cMy coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform,\u201d Lincoln recalled years later. \u201cUpon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.\u201d Mr. Carroll hopes to install a marker at the site, now a PATH station. \u201cWe\u2019re all attracted to great stories, and in that way history sells itself,\u201d he said. If history is taught by rote, though, students will tune out, he said. \u201cThe more we make history about memorizing names and places and dates we\u2019re going to lose the next generation.\u201d Those great stories, he said, reveal some of the eternal truths about human nature, humanity\u2019s brutality, heroism, resilience. \u201cFor every John Wilkes Booth,\u201d he said, \u201cthere was an Edwin.\u201d New York is rich in historic sites that have escaped the lore of the city. Kalustyan\u2019s, the Middle Eastern and Indian food market at 123 Lexington Avenue, at 28th Street, is the only building in the city still standing where a president of the United States was sworn in. (On Sept. 20, 1881, Vice President Chester A. Arthur took the oath at his home there after President James A. Garfield died of gunshot wounds.) A small plaque in the locked vestibule for the apartments upstairs is the only hint of anything historic. In 1908, baseball\u2019s greatest hit, \u201cTake Me Out to the Ball Game,\u201d was published by the composer\u2019s company on West 28th Street and made its debut with a performance at the Amphion, an opera house on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. No marker identifies either site. Mr. Carroll\u2019s exploration will take him to Fairfield, Conn., the home of Ely Parker, an American Indian lawyer who worked with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and was credited with drafting the articles of surrender that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox. In Baltimore, he plans to visit the site of the shop where Mary Katherine Goddard printed the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that includes all of the signatories. Mr. Carroll discovered that hotels often have rich histories. He learned, for example, that Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X once worked at the Parker House in Boston. The Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, Mr. Carroll\u2019s hometown, has agreed to install a marker that commemorates a moment on Nov. 27, 1925, when the poet Vachel Lindsay was timidly approached at dinner by a busboy who placed three poems he had written next to Lindsay\u2019s plate. Lindsay was so impressed that he shared them with his audience at a poetry reading that night, prompting journalists to report on the \u201cbusboy poet.\u201d His name was Langston Hughes. \u201cWhat Andy\u2019s doing is sensational,\u201d said Keith Bellows, the editor of National Geographic Traveler, \u201cin that he\u2019s peeling back a layer of history to expose Americans where they live and where they travel to things they otherwise might not have been aware of.\u201d Mr. Carroll begins his 50-state expedition with a trip to Maine to explore the sites of the 1855 Portland Rum Riot against Neal S. Dow, the prohibitionist mayor. \u201cThis trip is just the kickoff,\u201d said Mr. Carroll, who is paying for his tour with a book advance. \u201cI\u2019m going to be doing this for life.\u201d", "keyword": "Historic Buildings and Sites;History;Churchill Winston Leonard Spencer;King Martin Luther Jr;New York City;Lincoln Abraham;Carroll Andrew"}
{"id": "ny0040878", "categories": ["sports", "baseball"], "date": "2014/04/13", "title": "A Rapidly Shifting Philosophy of Infield Play", "abstract": "Chris Tillman pitches for the Baltimore Orioles, which means he can never assume the location of the infielders behind him. \u201cI learned the hard way on a pop-up last year near the third-base line,\u201d Tillman said. \u201cI let the ball fall because I thought the third baseman was going to catch it \u2014 and there was nobody over there. It\u2019s on me, but I\u2019ve learned my lesson. I take a peek and see where my infielders are at.\u201d The Orioles used 595 shifts on balls in play last season, the most in the five seasons tracked by Baseball Info Solutions . Teams shifted about 2,400 times in 2010 and 2011, said Ben Jedlovec, a vice president for the company, and about 4,500 times in 2012. Last season, the total jumped to about 8,100, and teams are on pace for 13,000 shifts in 2014. \u201cClint Hurdle said nine of 10 balls up the middle used to be hits \u2014 and now, two of 10 are,\u201d said Detroit Tigers General Manager Dave Dombrowski, referring to the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. \u201cIt just shows how different it is.\u201d Dombrowski\u2019s Tigers are using more shifts under their new manager, Brad Ausmus, but they are not alone. Entering the weekend, data showed that 23 of the 30 teams were on pace to deploy more shifts than they did last year. As teams compile more and more information on hitters\u2019 trends, managers can predict more accurately than ever where ground balls are most likely to go. \u201cAs I told Brad when he joined us, we can supply you any statistical information you like, and it\u2019s up to you to do what you want with it,\u201d Dombrowski said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t want to force it down players\u2019 throats, but he wants to show them why it\u2019s important.\u201d The Houston Astros entered the weekend on pace to use the most shifts this season, followed by the Yankees, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox, who ranked 27th last year. Image Tampa Bay\u2019s Matt Moore, center, is the latest pitcher who may face Tommy John surgery. Credit Orlin Wagner/Associated Press Bryan Price, the new manager of the Cincinnati Reds, said he watched a recent Yankees-Astros game and noticed the infielders shifting within the same at-bat. Price said that strategy seemed to disrupt the flow of the game, but he also acknowledged it could be smart. In the new frontier of defensive positioning, teams are learning as they go. \u201cWe\u2019re getting a lot of data, and we\u2019ve got some very creative minds out there that are looking at every aspect to enhance the quality of baseball,\u201d Price said. \u201cManagers are putting it in motion. There are some real pioneers out there that have taken the data and utilized it. \u201cBut it\u2019s that age-old thing: Every time you\u2019re burned by it, you remember that as opposed to the 10 other times it worked for you. And if you\u2019re talking about percentages, you\u2019re going to get beat. You\u2019re going to have Matt Adams cue one right down the left-field line on a squibber.\u201d Sure enough, just as Adams, of the St. Louis Cardinals, had beaten the Reds\u2019 shift, the Mets\u2019 Ike Davis did so last Sunday a couple of hours after Price spoke. The Reds won that game, though, and were ranked 10th in the majors in shifts, up from 13th last season. Price, who was promoted from pitching coach to replace Dusty Baker, said the Reds made sure their pitchers agreed with the strategy before using it behind them. If a pitcher is more comfortable with a traditional infield alignment, he said, the Reds will go with that, no matter what the numbers suggest. \u201cIn the end, this game\u2019s such a mental game,\u201d Price said. \u201cIf your heart\u2019s not in it, chances are performance is going to suffer.\u201d A stray pop-up aside, Tillman said he had no problems pitching with the exaggerated shift behind him. The job of the pitcher, he said, is the same as always. \u201cIt\u2019s part of the game now,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you make your pitches and execute the way you\u2019re supposed to, then I think it works out in your favor.\u201d Elbow Trouble Starts Early Matt Moore, an All-Star left-hander for the Tampa Bay Rays, last week became the latest pitcher to seriously injure his elbow, with reports indicating that he might have torn his ulnar collateral ligament . Moore may face Tommy John surgery, which would add him to the list of more than a dozen pitchers to have the procedure already this season. Image Milwaukee\u2019s Scooter Gennett (2) came up with his nickname based on his favorite Muppets character. Credit Jared Wickerham/Getty Images Dr. James Andrews, the noted orthopedic surgeon, said the problem was not an anomaly but a troubling trend, mainly because of the popularity of youth travel teams and summer showcases. Last week, on MLB Network Radio, Andrews told Mike Ferrin and Jim Duquette that he had been \u201cinundated\u201d with high school and college pitchers needing elbow reconstruction. \u201cThe big risk factor is year-round baseball,\u201d said Andrews, who saw Moore last week. \u201cThese kids are not just throwing year round, they\u2019re competing year round, and they don\u2019t have any time for recovery. More is better. So year-round baseball is No. 1. \u201cNo. 2 is playing in more than one league at the same time, where rules don\u2019t count. And, of course, in showcases, where they\u2019re pitching for scouts, they try to overpitch and they get hurt.\u201d Andrews also cited poor mechanics and pitchers throwing breaking balls at a young age. But the main problem, he emphasized, was that youngsters were throwing too hard too soon. Anything beyond 80 to 85 miles per hour, Andrews said, is more than a developing elbow ligament can handle. \u201cThe radar gun\u2019s a problem,\u201d he said. Muppet in the Infield The Milwaukee Brewers returned home Friday after a 6-0 trip to Boston and Philadelphia. The Brewers feasted on the Red Sox and the Phillies for 42 runs and 78 hits, with some familiar names \u2014 Ryan Braun, Carlos Gomez and Aramis Ramirez \u2014 leading the way. Their second baseman is not as well known, but he might have the most fun name to say in baseball (at least, besides the mellifluous Arquimedes Caminero, who pitches for the Miami Marlins). He is Ryan Joseph Gennett, but everyone calls him Scooter. Gennett got the nickname when he was about 5, growing up in Cincinnati. As you might expect, there is a story behind it. \u201cOne day, I was in the car with my mom; she would always put on my seatbelt, and I would click it off,\u201d Gennett said recently. \u201cI was just a defiant kid, I always wanted attention, never really did what I was asked to do, just to see what would happen. So my mom actually took me to the police station to scare me a little bit. \u201cThe police officer, I remember he asked me what my name was, and I thought if I told him my real name, I\u2019d get arrested. I was so young and scared. So I made up a name and said, \u2018Scooter.\u2019 That was the only name I really knew at the time. That was my favorite character. And I didn\u2019t answer to Ryan for about a year because I thought I\u2019d get in trouble and get arrested.\u201d Scooter is a character from \u201cThe Muppet Show\u201d \u2014 round glasses, orange skin, no nose and a mop of orange hair. He is not a headliner like Kermit the Frog, but Gennett \u2014 himself more a complementary player than a superstar \u2014 connected with him while watching reruns after school. Gennett is not the first middle infielder to go by Scooter; Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop and longtime Yankees broadcaster, was perhaps the original. Gennett said it sounded good as a baseball name, but he uses it everywhere. \u201cSome of the teachers were like: \u2018What? I\u2019m not calling you that,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cBut eventually, they did. It started off as Ryan, but they ended up calling me Scooter. It just stuck.\u201d", "keyword": "Baseball;Orioles;Matt Moore"}
{"id": "ny0033457", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/12/19", "title": "U.S. Prosecutor Defends Arrest of Indian Diplomat", "abstract": "The federal prosecutor whose decision to charge an Indian diplomat in New York City last week touched off a furor in India made an unusual and robust public defense of that decision on Wednesday night, saying \u201cthere can be no plausible claim that this case was somehow unexpected or an injustice.\u201d The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the diplomat\u2019s conduct showed that \u201cshe clearly tried to evade U.S. law designed to protect from exploitation the domestic employees of diplomats and consular officers.\u201d The diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, 39, the deputy consul general in New York, had been accused of submitting false documents to obtain a work visa for a housekeeper. Indian officials have been quoted as saying she was arrested and handcuffed as she was leaving her daughter at school, and there had been accounts that she was strip-searched and then held with drug addicts before being released on $250,000 bail. The Indian government has complained bitterly about Ms. Khobragade\u2019s treatment. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the arrest deplorable, newspaper editorials expressed outrage and the police removed barriers meant to protect the United States Embassy. But Mr. Bharara, in his statement, said there had been \u201cmuch misinformation and factual inaccuracy in the reporting\u201d about the case, and the inaccuracies were \u201cmisleading people and creating an inflammatory atmosphere on an unfounded basis.\u201d \u201cIs it for U.S. prosecutors to look the other way, ignore the law and the civil rights of victims,\u201d Mr. Bharara asked, \u201cor is it the responsibility of the diplomats and consular officers and their government to make sure the law is observed?\u201d \u201cAnd one wonders,\u201d Mr. Bharara added, \u201cwhy there is so much outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian national accused of perpetrating these acts, but precious little outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian victim and her spouse?\u201d Mr. Bharara noted that the diplomat had underpaid the housekeeper and made her work more hours than her contract called for. Image Devyani Khobragade, the deputy consul general in New York. Her arrest on charges of visa fraud has enraged Indian officials. Credit Mohammed Jaffer/SnapsIndia, via Associated Press Although his office did not take Ms. Khobragade into custody, Mr. Bharara said she had been \u201caccorded courtesies well beyond what other defendants, most of whom are American citizens, are accorded.\u201d He said that State Department agents had arrested her \u201cin the most discreet way possible,\u201d and that unlike most defendants, she \u201cwas not then handcuffed or restrained.\u201d The arresting authorities had not seized her telephone as they normally would have, Mr. Bharara said, and allowed her to make calls for about two hours, including to arrange for child care. Because it was cold outside, Mr. Bharara added, the agents \u201clet her make those calls from their car and even brought her coffee and offered to get her food.\u201d It was true, Mr. Bharara added, that Ms. Khobragade was \u201cfully searched\u201d in a private setting by a female deputy marshal when she was taken into the custody of the United States Marshals Service, which handled her detention. But, he said, \u201cthis is standard practice for every defendant, rich or poor, American or not, in order to make sure that no prisoner keeps anything on his person that could harm anyone, including himself.\u201d The tone of Mr. Bharara\u2019s statement, issued in the evening in New York, seemed in marked contrast to an expression of \u201cregret\u201d made earlier in the day by Secretary of State John Kerry in a call to a senior Indian official, as Mr. Kerry sought to ease tensions with India over the episode. Mr. Kerry\u2019s call to the official, Shivshankar Menon, India\u2019s national security adviser, was disclosed by the State Department in a statement. \u201cAs a father of two daughters about the same age as Devyani Khobragade, the secretary empathizes with the sensitivities we are hearing from India about the events that unfolded after Ms. Khobragade\u2019s arrest,\u201d the State Department said in its statement. \u201cHe expressed his regret as well as his concern that we not allow this unfortunate public issue to hurt our close and vital relationship with India,\u201d it added. Ms. Khobragade\u2019s lawyer, Daniel N. Arshack, said Wednesday that his client would be pleading not guilty, that the allegations against her were \u201cfalse and baseless\u201d and that her diplomatic status protected her from prosecution.", "keyword": "India;John Kerry;New Delhi;Shivshankar Menon;US Foreign Policy;Preet Bharara;Devyani Khobragade;NYC;Diplomats Embassies and Consulates"}
{"id": "ny0081032", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2015/02/25", "title": "U.S. Won\u2019t File Charges in Trayvon Martin Killing", "abstract": "MIAMI \u2014 The Justice Department on Tuesday closed its investigation into the shooting death three years ago of Trayvon Martin , the unarmed black teenager in a hoodie who became a symbol of racial profiling and the face of a protest movement, without filing hate-crime charges against the gunman, George Zimmerman. The department began its civil rights investigation shortly after a national furor erupted over Mr. Martin\u2019s death in Sanford, Fla., which set off protests, demands for justice and an emotional response from President Obama. The shooting was the first in a string of racially tinged cases involving the deaths of young black men that have prompted a rethinking of the nation\u2019s criminal justice system. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder in a state court in 2013; some jurors said they believed that he had shot Mr. Martin, 17, in self-defense. The conclusion of the investigation came as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. neared the end of his tenure. The shooting was one of several racially fraught cases that Mr. Holder said the department would finish investigating before he stepped down. The Justice Department is also conducting two civil rights investigations into the shooting death of Michael Brown, another unarmed black teenager, who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August. In that case, violent protests erupted after the shooting. A grand jury declined to indict the officer. Other police-involved deaths, including the choking of an unarmed man in Staten Island and the shooting of a Cleveland boy holding a realistic, airsoft-style gun, have fueled concerns about police conduct and racial profiling. The lawyer for Mr. Martin\u2019s family, Benjamin L. Crump, said the parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, were badly shaken by the news that the federal government would not bring charges. The family met with Justice Department officials in Miami on Tuesday. \u201cThis is very painful for them; they are heartbroken,\u201d Mr. Crump said. \u201cBut they have renewed energy to say that we are going to fight harder to make sure that this doesn\u2019t happen to anybody else\u2019s child.\u201d Ms. Fulton and Mr. Martin have become national figures and, through their foundation , are trying to help reduce violence in black and Hispanic communities and expand educational opportunities for minority students. Since his acquittal, Mr. Zimmerman has had numerous run-ins with the law. Last month, he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, accused of throwing a wine bottle at his girlfriend. In 2013, shortly after his acquittal, he was arrested after a heated fight with another girlfriend, but the woman asked prosecutors not to press charges. And in 2014, the police in Lake Mary, Fla., said a driver had told officers that Mr. Zimmerman threatened him during what was described as a road rage incident. The federal inquiry was started to pursue \u201can independent investigation\u201d into the shooting after local police officials and prosecutors were slow to arrest and charge Mr. Zimmerman; they argued that Florida\u2019s self-defense laws would make it difficult to prove a criminal case. Gov. Rick Scott then appointed a special prosecutor who eventually charged Mr. Zimmerman. Federal investigators interviewed 75 witnesses, reviewed all the material gathered by the State of Florida and examined evidence relating to Mr. Zimmerman\u2019s encounters with law enforcement after his acquittal, according to a statement. But none of that was enough to prove that Mr. Zimmerman, who is part Peruvian, killed Mr. Martin because of his race. The bar for prosecuting hate crimes is high \u2014 proving negligence or recklessness is not enough \u2014 and Mr. Holder said the \u201cstandard for a federal hate crime prosecution cannot be met under the circumstances here.\u201d Mr. Zimmerman\u2019s former lawyer, Mark O\u2019Mara, has said his client is not a racist, saying he has black friends and mentored two black youths. The Justice Department\u2019s investigation into the Ferguson case is no less difficult, and is perhaps even tougher, because it focuses on a police officer who fired his weapon in the line of duty. Mr. Zimmerman\u2019s case also swirled, to a large extent, around issues of race. Prosecutors said Mr. Zimmerman forced a confrontation with Mr. Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, because Mr. Martin was an unfamiliar tall black teenager in a hoodie walking around Mr. Zimmerman\u2019s gated community one rainy night. Mr. Martin was in Sanford with his father, visiting his father\u2019s fianc\u00e9e. A rash of burglaries in the area had heightened Mr. Zimmerman\u2019s concerns, and as the neighborhood watch leader, he said, he was suspicious of Mr. Martin. He got out of his car \u2014 ignoring the advice of a police dispatcher \u2014 and followed Mr. Martin, setting off a confrontation that led to Mr. Martin\u2019s death, prosecutors said. Angry at Mr. Zimmerman and feeling threatened, Mr. Martin pushed him to the ground, punched him and slammed his head into the pavement, leaving visible wounds, defense lawyers said. Mr. Zimmerman, flat on his back, took out a gun and killed Mr. Martin. He told the police it was self-defense.", "keyword": "George Zimmerman;Trayvon Martin;Murders and Homicides;Black People,African-Americans;Justice Department;Self-defense;Sanford FL"}
{"id": "ny0188474", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2009/04/23", "title": "Iran Asks Iranian-American to Salvage Its World Cup Bid", "abstract": "Afshin Ghotbi is a man of the world in the world\u2019s game. On Wednesday, news reports out of Tehran said Ghotbi, 45, was named coach of Iran\u2019s national soccer team , the third person to be named to the post in a month. Iran is a team in turmoil, struggling to advance from the Asian confederation to next summer\u2019s World Cup in South Africa. Ghotbi, who was born in Iran and moved to the United States at 13, earned a degree in engineering from U.C.L.A. He was the chief scout for the United States national team during the 1998 World Cup, in which the Americans lost to Iran. He served as an assistant for the South Korea national team under Guus Hiddink for the 2002 World Cup and was the former United States coach Steve Sampson\u2019s assistant with the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer. Most recently, Ghotbi returned to his homeland to coach one of the most fervently supported club teams, Persepolis, leading the club to a championship last May. He resigned that position in November and has been seeking a new job while living in Dubai. As incongruous as it seems, a theocratic nation whose government has been at loggerheads with the United States since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 has hired as the coach of its most coveted sports team a man who honed his skills as a soccer coach in the United States. \u201cI am thrilled for an opportunity to guide Iran to the World Cup 2010,\u201d Ghotbi said in an e-mail message Wednesday. \u201cA life dream, a longtime ambition and a journey written in the stars is about to be realized. I have to thank all the people around the world who have cheered, supported and inspired me to have this opportunity. Iran is in a difficult situation in the qualification round, but with the quality of the Iranian players, the support of all 70 million Iranian fans around the world and a little football fortune, everything is possible.\u201d Ghotbi said he thought he had a shot at the job after Iran lost at home to Saudi Arabia, 2-1, in a qualifier March 28 and Ali Daei, a former international star for Iran, was dismissed as the coach. \u201cAfter the loss to Saudi and after Ali Daei was fired, I was by far the most popular pick by the public to become the national team coach,\u201d Ghotbi said in a telephone interview from Dubai on Sunday. \u201cIn polls in newspapers, SMS messages, 85 percent of the people wanted me to become the national team coach. I\u2019ve worked with some of the best coaches in the world, in the World Cup. I\u2019ve had success with Persepolis. I know the players. I think I\u2019m the best candidate. That I\u2019m an Iranian-American, maybe at times that is not very interesting. \u201cFor Iranians, it really is only about the football. It plays a huge role in the society. When we played, there were 100,000 in stadium, the TV audience is 20 million watching each match. It brings happiness to the people and the love goes across generations.\u201d Daei was replaced by Mohammad Mayelikohan , whose tenure lasted only two weeks. He resigned Tuesday. Iran, which is fourth in Asian Group B with 6 points from five games with three games remaining (including difficult matches in North and South Korea), turned to Ghotbi. Ghotbi was the subject of a recent video profile by the BBC. Salvaging Iran\u2019s World Cup bid will not be easy, and it is clear that nothing short of 9 points from three victories will do it. \u201cI think it is going to be very difficult,\u201d Ghotbi said in the interview. \u201cFirst of all, we only have 6 points, and to have a chance we need victories on the road in Korea. The environment around the team and whole psychology around the team has not been positive. It is all about synergy and creating a positive environment around the team from the fans and for the players.\u201d At the 1998 World Cup, Ghotbi served on Coach Steve Sampson\u2019s support staff, preparing tactical models and analysis for the United States, which played poorly and was eliminated in the first round. One of the opponents for the American team in the first round was Ghotbi\u2019s native Iran. \u201cThe U.S.A. vs. Iran match was a special game for all involved,\u201d Ghotbi said in an e-mail message. \u201cIt truly showed again the influence and magic of football, bringing nations and people together regardless of the political circumstances. Personally, to be part of a World Cup match involving two countries I care the most about was truly special. It brought emotions impossible to describe in English or Farsi.\u201d", "keyword": "Ghotbi Afshin;Soccer;Iran"}
{"id": "ny0227230", "categories": ["business", "global"], "date": "2010/10/13", "title": "Exports Surge in China, and Imports Hit a Record Value", "abstract": "China posted a $16.9 billion trade surplus for September, capping the largest quarterly excess since the financial crisis in 2008 as pressure mounts for a stronger renminbi. Exports rose 25.1 percent compared with a year earlier and imports climbed 24.1 percent, the customs bureau said on its Web site Wednesday. In August, the excess was $20 billion. Imports rose to a record value of $128.1 billion, limiting the surplus to the smallest in five months, while exports were $145 billion. The quarterly trade excess was about $65.6 billion. European and United States officials argue that a stronger Chinese currency would aid the global recovery by stoking demand within the nation and reducing international economic imbalances. Currency forwards surged to the highest level in more than two years this week on speculation that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao\u2019s government will yield to foreign pressure.", "keyword": "International Trade and World Market;China"}
{"id": "ny0039163", "categories": ["technology"], "date": "2014/04/16", "title": "Yahoo Profit Is a Footnote to Alibaba\u2019s Huge Gains", "abstract": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Investors were already salivating over the initial stock offering of Alibaba Group, the giant Chinese e-commerce company. On Tuesday, they got a glimpse of Alibaba\u2019s tremendous growth that is sure to whet their appetite even more. Alibaba made $1.4 billion in profit for its fourth quarter, more than double the amount it made during the same period a year earlier. Revenue jumped 66 percent, to nearly $3.1 billion. The peek inside the private Chinese company came courtesy of Yahoo , which owns 24 percent of Alibaba and must disclose some of its financial data as part of its own quarterly reports. But Alibaba will soon provide much more information about its business, which dominates consumer online commerce in China in a way that Amazon and eBay could only dream of in the United States. It plans to file paperwork as early as next week for an initial public offering of stock on an American exchange. The sale could be the largest I.P.O. in American history if the company\u2019s valuation reaches $200 billion, which some of the most optimistic analysts are suggesting. The offering is not expected to occur for at least a couple of months after the filing. For years, the only way to buy a piece of Alibaba\u2019s growth story has been to buy Yahoo stock, which investors were snapping up on Tuesday. Yahoo\u2019s shares rose to $36.50, up 6.7 percent, in after-hours trading after it released the Alibaba numbers along with its own results. Yahoo, which was reporting its first-quarter results, said that revenue and profit growth were flat, a slight improvement from previous quarters. However, from the perspective of investors, those figures were basically a footnote to the Internet portal\u2019s investments in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. \u201cYou can be a relative optimist like me about the core business and attribute $7 or $8 to it,\u201d said Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research. \u201cBut you can make an argument that the entirety of the value is Alibaba.\u201d Despite turnaround efforts by its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was appointed nearly two years ago, Yahoo has continued to report lackluster financial results for its main business, which is selling search and display advertising to brands eager to reach visitors to the company\u2019s sports, news, mail and other content pages. Ms. Mayer initially focused on creating new products and regaining lost user traffic, but largely ignored advertising, the company\u2019s principal source of revenue. She has vowed to make advertising a priority this year, however, and the company showed some modest progress on that front in the first quarter. Revenue from display advertising grew 2 percent from the year-ago quarter, halting a long downward slide. Search ad revenue grew 9 percent. But in the hottest areas of Internet advertising \u2014 mobile, video and in-stream ads \u2014 Yahoo\u2019s efforts so far are still nascent. \u201cThey are not material to our overall results,\u201d Ms. Mayer said. Still, the stock has more than doubled since she was named to the job in July 2012, a rise that has been tempered only slightly in recent weeks as investors have widely pulled back from Internet stocks. Most analysts attribute those gains to Alibaba\u2019s sizzling performance. Under terms of its investment agreement with the Chinese company, Yahoo must sell about 40 percent of its stake if Alibaba goes public. Depending on the valuation of Alibaba, which many analysts predict could range from $100 billion to $200 billion, Yahoo would reap at least $10 billion before taxes. Alibaba\u2019s fourth-quarter results might push the valuation toward the higher end of the range. Some on Wall Street had worried that its enormous growth had begun to slow when it reported only a 51 percent gain in third-quarter revenue compared with figures in the period a year earlier. But Alibaba\u2019s fourth-quarter earnings were helped by a few big shopping days, particularly Nov. 11 \u2014 known as Singles Day, China\u2019s twist on Valentine\u2019s Day and one of the busiest days for online shopping. Alibaba disclosed last year that its two main e-commerce platforms, Taobao and Tmall, sold roughly $5.75 billion worth of merchandise on Singles Day last year, an 80 percent gain from 2012. \u201cThese were pretty spectacular results, and they should assuage any fears around a slowdown,\u201d said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities who says he expects Alibaba\u2019s valuation to be at least $160 billion. \u201cIt\u2019s a reminder of what kind of growth story this is.\u201d That growth has offered Ms. Mayer some necessary cover for her turnaround project, which remains a work in progress. For the first quarter, Yahoo reported net income of $312 million, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of $1.13 billion. In the same quarter a year ago, it reported net income of $390 million, or 35 cents a share, on $1.14 billion in revenue. Excluding one-time items and expenses for stock compensation, the company reported a profit of 38 cents a share in the first quarter, the same as a year ago. That essentially matched analysts\u2019 expectations for 37 cents a share in profits on revenue of $1.08 billion. Eventually, though, Yahoo\u2019s core business will matter to investors once again. To return the company to its former heights, Ms. Mayer has begun a series of initiatives to rebuild the company\u2019s advertising business. In January, the company revamped its technology and food sites, abandoning Yahoo\u2019s traditional hodgepodge of text and links in favor of large, visually rich panels reminiscent of magazines. Ms. Mayer is expected to announce similar digital magazines in categories like travel, entertainment and beauty in the coming weeks. Yahoo is also trying to become a bigger player in online video, developing new shows for its digital magazines and talking to Hollywood about original entertainment content. Advertisers welcome that spirit of experimentation, said Bob Rupczynski, vice president for media, data and customer relationship management at Kraft Foods Group. In March, Kraft Singles cheese was the first brand to use Yahoo\u2019s new motion ad format, in which the image in the ad appears to be moving. When Yahoo users went to their login page, they saw an image of a grilled-cheese sandwich with steam wafting from it. Mr. Rupczynski said that the motion helped the ad stand out, and that Kraft intended to try other new Yahoo ad formats, such as sponsored articles on Yahoo Food . \u201cWe\u2019re excited about the platforms we\u2019re testing out with them,\u201d he said.", "keyword": "Yahoo!;Earnings Reports;Alibaba.com;Marissa Mayer;IPO;E Commerce"}
{"id": "ny0056879", "categories": ["technology", "personaltech"], "date": "2014/09/26", "title": "Video: Testing the Camera on the iPhone 6", "abstract": "The new iPhones have gotten almost as much attention for their cameras as for their larger screens and software updates- Both the devices, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, have a new sensor on the camera with something called Focus Pixels, an addition that enables significantly faster auto-focusing and more accurate colors. Other features include manual exposure controls, slower and crisper slow motion shooting, video stabilization and higher-resolution panoramas. The iPhone 6 Plus, the bigger of the two phones, also has optical image stabilization for reducing blur and allowing longer exposures in lowlight situations. As many an amateur photographer has discovered, however, simply owning a better camera doesn\u2019t always produce better shots. So to determine whether the iPhone 6 cameras are a true improvement over their already good predecessors, I shipped my review units to Todd Heisler, a staff photographer at The New York Times. Mr. Heisler said the size of the iPhone 6 Plus made it too unwieldy to use on a daily basis, so he stuck to testing the iPhone 6. He said he didn\u2019t miss the added features. Mr. Heisler said the camera on the iPhone 6 was closer to his professional gear than ever before, because of the slider that lets you fine-tune exposure even when you\u2019re rolling video and built-in tools for fine-tuning light, exposure, contrast and color. And he said that because of those controls, there\u2019s no need to turn to third-party camera apps that can be more complicated to use. Professional photographers like Mr. Heisler probably won\u2019t be shelving their pro cameras for iPhones yet. But don\u2019t be surprised if they pull one out on the job.", "keyword": "Photography;iPhone;Apple;Camera"}
{"id": "ny0295955", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2016/12/09", "title": "Operator Is at Fault for Fatal Crane Accident, City Finds", "abstract": "The operator of a crane that collapsed and killed one person in Lower Manhattan in February failed to properly lower the boom and was responsible for the accident, New York City officials said on Friday. After an investigation by the city\u2019s Buildings Department, officials suspended the license of the crane\u2019s operator, Kevin Reilly, and moved to revoke it permanently. The giant crane collapsed on a gusty morning , leading the city to tighten rules for cranes operating in high winds. A man walking on the street, David Wichs , was killed, and three other people were injured. Mr. Reilly had failed to secure the crane the night before the crash and lowered the boom of the crane at an improper angle, causing the crane to become unstable, officials said. The department said it would work with the City Council on rules to improve safety, including tougher licensing requirements for crane operators. \u201cThe crane operator involved in this incident acted recklessly, with tragic results,\u201d Rick D. Chandler, the city\u2019s buildings commissioner, said in a statement. \u201cThe actions we\u2019re taking should send the message to everyone in the construction industry that safety must come first.\u201d A lawyer for Mr. Reilly, Stacey Richman, declined to comment on the findings, and said she had not finished reviewing the city\u2019s report. Last month, a crane operator and a construction worker were killed in Queens when a steel beam fell from a crane on a windy day. Officials are investigating the accident and said it appeared there was a problem with the crane\u2019s rigging, unrelated to the wind. In the February accident, a video captured the red crane falling and crashing on to the street below. The crane\u2019s boom was 565 feet long, leaving debris scattered across roughly two blocks of Worth Street in TriBeCa. The city\u2019s investigation found that the crane did not have any structural or mechanical failures, officials said. Mr. Wichs, 38, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia when he was a teenager, was heading to his job at a trading firm in Lower Manhattan when he was killed. He was married and had a degree in mathematics from Harvard.", "keyword": "Accidents and Safety;Derricks and Cranes;David Wichs;Manhattan;TriBeCa Manhattan;Kevin Reilly"}
{"id": "ny0206608", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2009/06/05", "title": "English-Language Chinese Newspaper Breaks Silence on Tiananmen Crackdown", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 \u201cProsperity Tangible along Chang\u2019an Ave\u201d was the innocuous headline in Global Times, China \u2019s newest English-language newspaper. The text that followed was only slightly more engaging. But the front-page article on Thursday was in one sense a major exclusive: In it, a state-run media outlet in China officially broke the silence on the June 4, 1989, crackdown on China\u2019s pro-democracy movement. The coverage \u2014 actually a pair of articles appearing on Monday and Thursday \u2014 was more notable for having appeared than for what it revealed. The article on Thursday began and ended by contrasting benign scenes of children and tourists around Tiananmen Square this week with what it called the turmoil of the \u201cJune 4th Tiananmen incident.\u201d The articles never expressly said what happened in and around the square 20 years ago. They implicitly endorsed the official verdict that suppression of the protests was necessary to pave the way for China\u2019s recent prosperity. Even so, the newspaper\u2019s chief editor, Hu Xijin, broke the taboo on discussing the crackdown that has prevailed for two decades in China\u2019s state-run media. And in doing so, he seemed to show that some media outlets in China \u2014 at least a new, politically well-protected one in English \u2014 could risk bending serious rules. Editors at the paper said in recent interviews that they were acting alone, at unknown levels of professional risk. Still, critics were suspect. The central government is putting added political and financial weight behind its own key media brands. Officials hope to project China\u2019s own vision of its development to a global audience rather than rely on overseas media to present China to the world. An important component of that mandate, journalists at official news outlets say, is to press China\u2019s own foreign-language media to work faster and more openly on highly delicate matters of global concern, like Tibet. \u201cThis is a part of what the people in power think of as a soft power push,\u201d said David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong\u2019s China Media Project . One major stumbling block, he said, is, \u201cYou still have this big silhouette of the party in the background, bestowing space on this or that trusted media.\u201d Mr. Hu, like many top editors in the state-run media, is a Communist Party appointee. But he comes off as a populist newspaperman as well. In an interview in early May, he described the impetus to create the English edition of Global Times, a Chinese-language tabloid known for vociferously defending Chinese interests. It is part of the People\u2019s Daily media group. He said the English edition was created in part to compete with The China Daily, the country\u2019s official English-language paper, which has recently added a version in Chinese and proven a financial success. Global Times is seeking its share of the buzz created by taking on controversial topics, Mr. Hu said. Since starting on April 20, Global Times has investigated the grievances of parents whose children died last year in schools that crumbled in the Sichuan earthquake . It also has written critically of China\u2019s ties to North Korea, which recently conducted its second nuclear test. \u201cYou can tell that we have bigger dimensions to report\u201d than China Daily, said Ding Gang, deputy director of the People\u2019s Daily international news department, and a senior adviser at Global Times. That appears to be true, as far as it goes. But the Global Times article on Thursday did not go that far. In assessing the crackdown, it quoted a scholar as concluding that the government \u201cmade a sober and sensible decision to overcome hard times, restore social stability and enhance economic reform in the 1990s. Thus, China didn\u2019t miss a valuable historic development opportunity once again.\u201d", "keyword": "China;Newspapers;Politics and Government;Tiananmen Square (Beijing)"}
{"id": "ny0067878", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2014/12/29", "title": "Indonesian Agency Says Missing AirAsia Jet Probably Sank", "abstract": "JAKARTA, Indonesia \u2014 The head of the Indonesian agency searching for a missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people said Monday that he believed the aircraft was \u201cat the bottom of the sea\u201d and warned that the country lacked adequate equipment to conduct an underwater search. \u201cThe capability of our equipment is not optimum,\u201d Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia\u2019s National Search and Rescue Agency, said at a news conference. Malaysia, Singapore and Australia joined the search, an effort that evoked a distressingly familiar mix of grief and mystery nine months after a Malaysia Airlines jetliner disappeared over the Indian Ocean. The Airbus A320-200, operated by the Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia, a regional budget carrier based in Malaysia, lost contact with ground controllers off the coast of Borneo early Sunday. And while it seemed premature to make comparisons to the Malaysian jetliner that disappeared in March, the Indonesian authorities could not explain why the AirAsia jet, Flight 8501, vanished from radar screens about 40 minutes after leaving the Indonesian city of Surabaya around 5:30 a.m. Image Relatives of passengers on AirAsia Flight 8501 waiting for news Sunday at Juanda International Airport in Surabaya, Indonesia. Credit Beawiharta/Reuters The authorities said they had found no sign of the wreckage by midmorning Monday. The weather along the path of Flight 8501 to Singapore on Sunday was cloudy, and a weather monitoring service based in the United States reported a number of lightning strikes along the way. But the monsoon conditions did not seem insurmountable for a modern airliner. The route was a well-traveled part of the Indonesian archipelago; six other aircraft were in the vicinity of Flight 8501 when it disappeared, according to data by Flightradar24.com, an organization that tracks aircraft. The search was being conducted in a 100-mile stretch of the Java Sea near the island of Belitung, between the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the plane\u2019s last known location. Shortly before contact was lost, the cockpit crew informed air traffic controllers in Jakarta that it was planning to raise the plane to 38,000 feet from 32,000 feet to avoid a cloud, Djoko Murjatmodjo, the acting director general of air transport at Indonesia\u2019s Ministry of Transportation, said at a news conference in Jakarta. \u201cWe don\u2019t know where the exact location is, except that this morning at 6:17, we lost contact,\u201d Mr. Djoko said. The Singapore authorities said contact was lost at 6:24 a.m. Jakarta time; the discrepancy was not explained. Image Loved ones awaited word on Sunday about Air Asia Flight 8501, which had 162 people on board. Credit Fully Handoko/European Pressphoto Agency The newspaper Kompas in Indonesia quoted Mr. Djoko as saying that the plane\u2019s request to divert from its flight path had been approved but that air traffic controllers had denied the request to ascend to 38,000 feet \u201cbecause of traffic.\u201d He did not elaborate. Mr. Djoko said the authorities had not detected any emergency distress beacons that would normally be triggered by an accident. Earth Networks, a company that tracks weather conditions across the globe, said it recorded a number of lightning strikes \u201cnear the path\u201d of Flight 8501 on Sunday morning. While it is rare for a lightning strike to cause serious structural damage that threatens the safety of an aircraft, it can disrupt navigation systems, such as magnetic compasses. A lightning flash, particularly at night, can also momentarily disorient the pilots. The turbulence associated with a big storm can sometimes be severe, and sudden shifts in wind direction could disrupt the airflow through a jet engine, potentially causing it to shut down. However, a shutdown of both engines in such a situation would be highly unlikely, and the Airbus A320 is certified to fly up to three hours on a single engine, in compliance with global aviation safety regulations. AirAsia\u2019s chief executive, Tony Fernandes, said Sunday in a Twitter message that he was traveling to Surabaya, where most of the plane\u2019s 155 passengers were from. On Monday, Mr. Fernandes, who is Malaysian, wrote: \u201cKeeping positive and staying strong. My heart bleeds for all the relatives of my crew and our passangers.\u201d Indonesia sent at least three warships and five aircraft to search for the plane, Malaysia deployed three boats and three aircraft, and Singapore said it had sent a C-130 plane to assist in the search. Australia also offered to lend ships and aircraft to the effort. AirAsia said in its statement that the passengers included 16 children and one infant. A crew of two pilots and five cabin crew members were also on board. The passengers and crew were listed as 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one Briton and a French citizen, AirAsia said. More than 100 people, believed to be mostly relatives of the passengers, were sequestered Monday in a small room at the Surabaya airport. A woman wandered by, looking stunned and bereft, holding a framed photograph of a family of five. \u201cThey were on their way to Singapore to visit their 12-year-old daughter,\u201d said the woman, Nani, who said she was the family\u2019s maid. \u201cThat girl is now an orphan.\u201d The captain of the flight was identified as Iriyanto, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. France\u2019s Foreign Ministry said the French citizen was the co-pilot. Indonesian news media quoted friends and relatives of Captain Iriyanto saying he took his family last week to visit the grave of his younger brother, who died recently. Media reports also described the pilot as a fan of motorcycles and a devoted member of his local mosque. He had previously worked as a pilot at Adam Air, a troubled Indonesian airline with a poor safety record. The Kompas newspaper quoted the pilot\u2019s cousin as saying Captain Iriyanto moved to AirAsia after Adam Air shut down in 2008. Airbus said in a statement Sunday that the aircraft was delivered to the airline in 2008, and that it had flown around 13,600 flights. The missing plane capped a disastrous year for Malaysian airlines. In addition to the Malaysia Airlines jet lost over the Indian Ocean in March, which has yet to be found, an Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July. Both of those planes were Boeing 777-200ERs. But the AirAsia plane\u2019s disappearance was perhaps even more rattling for Indonesia, which has seen explosive growth in air travel despite a troublesome safety record and a string of plane accidents over the years. While many accidents have not caused fatalities, the recurring headlines and images of dazed passengers swimming ashore have raised concerns abroad that Indonesia\u2019s air safety regulations have failed to keep pace with the industry\u2019s growth. Image An information board at Changi Airport in Singapore. Credit Edgar Su/Reuters Since 2007, the European Union has barred dozens of carriers from Indonesia from its skies, in an effort to pressure local regulators to shore up air safety standards. The majority of airlines that appear on the European Union\u2019s so-called aviation blacklist \u2014 which includes airlines from several African countries \u2014 do not operate flights to Europe. However, travel agencies across the 28-member bloc are required to inform all European passengers who have plans to travel on a carrier listed on the aviation blacklist. AirAsia, one of the world\u2019s fastest-growing airlines, has an excellent safety record. Its Indonesian subsidiary is not included on the European safety list, which was most recently updated this month. However, a budget long-haul affiliate, Indonesia AirAsia X, is among the airlines listed. The missing aircraft last underwent scheduled maintenance on Nov. 16, AirAsia said. AirAsia waited more than four hours to announce on its Facebook page that the aircraft was missing. The airline did not explain the delay. In the hours after the plane was reported missing, American law enforcement agents and intelligence analysts began combing through recent collections of phone intercepts, Internet postings and other communications but found no indications of a terrorist threat or other foul play, officials said. On Sunday, Malaysia Airlines posted a message on its Twitter account: \u201c#staystrong @AirAsia \u2014 Our thoughts and prayers are with all family and friends of those onboard QZ8501.\u201d", "keyword": "Indonesia;AirAsia Flight 8501;Plane Crash;AirAsia;Surabaya Indonesia"}
{"id": "ny0177290", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2007/09/16", "title": "Vocal on Iraq, McCain Keeps Quiet on Bush", "abstract": "Defiant and energetic, Senator John McCain has taken his \u201cNo Surrender\u201d tour to V.F.W. halls, parades and barbecues in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He talks about his support for a renewed effort to win the Iraq war. He pays tribute to Gen. David H. Petraeus and the report he issued about progress in Iraq. The one thing that Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, does not talk about is President Bush. Mr. McCain has entered a pivotal period in what he now sardonically describes as his \u201clean and mean\u201d campaign, faced with unexpected opportunities but also huge obstacles, two months after many of his supporters had all but written off his campaign, riven with debt and staff dissension. At stop after stop, he has seized on General Petraeus\u2019s report as a validation not only of the so-called surge strategy in Iraq but also of his argument, made long before the White House came to the same conclusion, that victory in Iraq required many more troops there. But even as he lashes his presidential campaign that much tighter to the war in Iraq, Mr. McCain is seeking to decouple his fortunes from those of Mr. Bush, in the latest chapter of a 10-year relationship that has been at times tortured, at times cordial, at times symbiotic. So it is that Mr. McCain sprinkles his speeches not with references to Mr. Bush but to General Petraeus, a shift that not only mirrors the White House strategy of putting the military out front but also symbolically encapsulates a recognition of what many Republicans consider to have been a fundamental mistake of Mr. McCain in his candidacy: trying to present himself as Mr. Bush\u2019s anointed successor and ideological heir. The situation demands that Mr. McCain maintain a balance between continuing to embrace a defining characteristic of Mr. Bush\u2019s presidency, his dogged insistence on fighting on in Iraq, even as he distances himself from the administration. He lauds General Petraeus, portraying him as a hero to cheering crowds \u2014 \u201cthank God America is blessed with that kind of leadership,\u201d he said in Sioux City \u2014 but also excoriates Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, for the way he led the war. The goal seems to be to acknowledge both public distress over the war and concerns even among Republicans about the White House\u2019s competence without directly assailing Mr. Bush himself, a step that could still alienate the most loyal of the party\u2019s voters, those who tend to turn out in primaries. When Mr. McCain, standing outside a V.F.W. hall in Rock Hill, S.C., was asked on Saturday if he and Mr. Bush were now on the same page on the war, he responded in markedly measured tones. \u201cAt this moment,\u201d Mr. McCain said. \u201cFor nearly four years we were on opposite sides, because I believed and knew the Rumsfeld strategy was failing.\u201d At the very least, the confluence of two campaigns \u2014 one by Mr. Bush and his supporters to rally public support for the war, and the other by Mr. McCain to effectively jump-start his candidacy \u2014 has won Mr. McCain a burst of new attention in the early primary states. And Mr. McCain, who had been all but written off two months ago when he fired many of his campaign staff members in response to a collapse in fund-raising and poll numbers, has responded with new energy and cheer. As he campaigned across New Hampshire and Iowa, Mr. McCain was met with sizable and often enthusiastic crowds, though many of them said in interviews that they were on the fence or supporting other candidates. The New Hampshire Union Leader was not alone in proclaiming him the winner of a Republican candidates\u2019 debate in New Hampshire last week. And Mr. McCain, in an interview, said he thought he could win New Hampshire as he did in 2000, while expressing less hope about Iowa; his description of his chances was much the same as those offered by independent analysts. \u201cWe really have taken some lumps,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m guardedly optimistic about New Hampshire. In Iowa, we have a lot of work to do, and I think we have to understand that this is a very significant challenge.\u201d In proclaiming support for the war while distancing himself from Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain is embarking on another chapter in a relationship that has shaped his career and image in ways he is still grappling with. With just months to prove that he is still a viable candidate, Mr. McCain is trying to undo the effects of a decision in recent years to put the bitterness of his early relationship with Mr. Bush aside in favor of a close association that went well beyond the war. That decision raised questions among Republicans about whether Mr. McCain had abandoned his independence to win favor with the White House and the conservative base of the party. Last year, Mr. McCain appeared at Liberty University, next to its founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the conservative religious leader whom he had once described as an agent of intolerance and a threat to the party. \u201cFrom a political standpoint, the most important thing any candidate has is their authentic brand: That is why he was always so popular, always drew such big crowds,\u201d said Matthew Dowd, who was Mr. Bush\u2019s chief strategist in 2004 before having a falling out with the White House. \u201cBut when he became, \u2018I want to try to get the popularity of Bush among Republicans,\u2019 his brand dropped. He didn\u2019t gain anything in getting closer to Bush. And he diminished his brand.\u201d Mr. McCain indeed was a constant figure at Mr. Bush\u2019s side, famously pictured giving him a bearhug in the 2004 campaign. And he came to Mr. Bush\u2019s defense on many issues, including the war, in the last four years, as he methodically shed his image of the maverick unafraid to attack the White House. That said, the relationship has been alternately poisonous and unctuous since the 2000 South Carolina primary in which Mr. Bush defeated Mr. McCain. At one point, an aide said, Mr. McCain barked an obscenity upon watching Mr. Bush stand silent as a voter questioned Mr. McCain\u2019s commitment to veterans. When Mr. McCain lost South Carolina, he at first refused to place the obligatory telephone call of congratulations to Mr. Bush, instructing a senior adviser, John Weaver, to do it, before finally taking the telephone and speaking to Mr. Bush, witnesses said. Mr. McCain at the time blamed the Bush campaign for spreading rumors that he had an illegitimate child; Bush aides have always denied doing so. The two repaired their relationship, after Mr. Bush won the nomination, at a private meeting. \u201cIt was one of those conversations where you sit down and it\u2019s sort of stilted at first and we talked about sports and we talked about some of the things that we both like,\u201d Mr. McCain said. \u201cAnd then the conversation became more comfortable.\u201d Mr. Bush had warned aides that Mr. McCain was a \u201cloose cannon\u201d during their fight in South Carolina. Since then, Mr. Bush\u2019s friends said, the president has warmed somewhat to Mr. McCain, even though they said he never quite understood or completely trusted him. Mr. McCain said that he and his wife, Cindy, have had dinner with Mr. Bush and Laura Bush only once \u2014 and that the meal lasted about 45 minutes. \u201cIt was rather brief,\u201d Mr. McCain said with a chuckle. Mr. McCain did not dispute the observation that his brand, as Mr. Dowd put it, had been diminished. He jumped in to finish the question when asked if coming to Mr. Bush\u2019s defense had tarnished his image. \u201cAs a maverick and independent and all that?\u201d Mr. McCain said. \u201cWell, maybe the perception did change because, you know, MoveOn.Org ran all those ads showing me and Bush embracing. I understand that. But on any specific issues there was no change. Again, life isn\u2019t fair. I went from being the greatest critic of the failed Rumsfeld strategy to now being tied to the war as Bush\u2019s guy on the war.\u201d Politics is cyclical; people who are down tend to rise up, and Americans tend to embrace comeback stories, no matter how implausible. Which is to say that none of this means Mr. McCain is back: His obstacles remain huge, and advisers to all his major rivals say they see little or no chance of his re-emergence. The first reason is financial; Mr. McCain, in a bus in New Hampshire and Iowa, could be heard on his cellphone raising money in anticipation of a fund-raising report next month. Several McCain advisers said it would be tough to continue if he did not break this year\u2019s pattern and raise enough money to at least pay for a campaign. The second is the political calendar, which is problematic for anyone trying to run an underdog campaign. If Mr. McCain wins New Hampshire, he still has to deal with what is in effect a national primary on Feb. 5, when as many as 20 states hold contests, a scenario that seems tailor-made for a candidate with money. And should he really begin taking off, his opponents would no doubt come after him with advertisements reminding voters of the issue that caused him trouble before: his support for measures allowing some illegal immigrants to become citizens. One reason for Mr. McCain\u2019s resurgence is that time and passions on immigration have since cooled. And whatever happens in Iraq, the war could pose an obstacle to Mr. McCain in New Hampshire, where independents are permitted to vote in either party\u2019s primary. Mr. McCain won the state in 2000 in large part because independents flocked to him; Mr. McCain acknowledged that antiwar sentiment was high in New Hampshire this time around, suggesting that independents might turn to a Democrat.", "keyword": "Presidential Election of 2008;McCain John;Iraq;Petraeus David H;Bush George W;United States Armament and Defense;United States Politics and Government"}
{"id": "ny0077012", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2015/05/07", "title": "China Appoints New Chair of State-Owned Automaker", "abstract": "BEIJING \u2014 One of China\u2019s biggest state-owned automakers, Dongfeng Motor, said on Wednesday that a provincial Communist Party official would become its new chairman. Dongfeng Motor, which has joint ventures with Nissan Motor and Honda Motor in China, said Zhu Yanfeng, the vice party secretary of Jilin Province, would replace the current chairman, Xu Ping. In its statement, Dongfeng said Mr. Xu would be appointed to another position. Mr. Zhu is a former president at another automaker, China FAW, which has joint ventures with Volkswagen and Toyota Motor. News of Mr. Zhu\u2019s appointment comes a day after Dongfeng and FAW temporarily suspended trading in the shares of their listed units because of market rumors of their merger. Dongfeng Motor resumed trading on Tuesday, saying it had not received any information from the authorities about a merger, but Dongfeng Automobile, FAW Car and Tianjin FAW Xiali Automobile remained halted. An FAW spokesman declined to comment. The central government generally directs leadership changes and restructuring at major state-controlled companies.", "keyword": "China;Dongfeng Motor;Cars;Appointments and Executive Changes"}
{"id": "ny0195309", "categories": ["sports", "ncaafootball"], "date": "2009/11/14", "title": "T.C.U. Fans Are Singing Football Coach\u2019s Praises", "abstract": "FORT WORTH \u2014 In seventh grade, Texas Christian Coach Gary Patterson was the lead singer and guitarist in a band named Walk On Easy. The band played everything from polka music to Three Dog Night at high school dances and in Veterans of Foreign Wars halls for $200 a gig. While playing football as a walk-on at Kansas State, Patterson and a harmony singing group serenaded female students with songs by The Oak Ridge Boys. Back then, Patterson\u2019s fraternity would even pay him not to go home on weekends so he could perform sing-alongs in front of crowds after the bars closed. Patterson acknowledges that many at Kansas State probably remember him more as a musician than as a football player or coach. When he married in 2004, he sang at the reception. Patterson sometimes plays guitar in hospitality rooms at bowl games. \u201cIf he hadn\u2019t gone the football route, he might be in Nashville,\u201d said Al Simmons, who played in Walk On Easy. The fiery, defensive-minded Patterson has become a figure of rock-star proportions in this cattle-drive city of 650,000, and on Saturday, fourth-ranked T.C.U. (9-0, 5-0 Mountain West Conference) could be on the verge of crashing the Bowl Championship Series for the first time if it beats No. 16 Utah (8-1, 5-0). After each game, Patterson has returned home to find his yard filled with small T.C.U. flags. He is so popular that his wife, Kelsey, did a double-take when fans dressed as him for a game on Halloween . But Patterson is plenty grounded. A few weeks ago, he was outside his house at 11 p.m. pulling in his garbage cans when a passerby yelled, \u201cYou mean you still have to take in your own trash cans?\u201d \u201cYep,\u201d Patterson answered matter of factly. Patterson talks about T.C.U.\u2019s teaching him to be as comfortable in a tuxedo as he is in blue jeans. He has learned to raise money and is active in the community through his Gary Patterson Foundation. Patterson said he had interviewed for coaching jobs at Auburn, Tennessee, Minnesota and Iowa State. Now, he does not know if he will ever leave T.C.U. \u201cIt would have to be very special for me and have more advantages,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cTo be honest with you, I think it\u2019s really hard to find more advantages than what we have at T.C.U.\u201d He even has grand dreams of T.C.U. becoming like another prestigious private university known for its football success. \u201cWe want to be the U.S.C. of Texas,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cWe want to be the private school of Texas.\u201d But that dream once seemed improbable for Patterson. He was raised in Rozel, Kan., a no-stop light, agricultural town of 175 in the west-central part of the state. In high school, Patterson was an all-state linebacker and fullback at Pawnee Heights High School before playing at Dodge City Community College and walking on at Kansas State. \u201cHe was a bulldog,\u201d Dennis Franchione, an assistant coach while Patterson played at Kansas State, said in a telephone interview. \u201cHe played and worked out hard just like he does everything else. He wasn\u2019t the most talented guy, but he always knew what he was doing and how he was supposed to do it.\u201d Before his redshirt senior season, a then 5-foot-11, 220-pound Patterson looked at the team\u2019s other linebackers, several of whom were 6-4 and 240 pounds, and knew that his playing days were over. So he joined the coaching staff in 1982 as a graduate assistant. \u201cI realized that\u2019s what I wanted to do,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cI could make more of a difference.\u201d Patterson expected to be a high school coach but went to work as a linebackers coach at Tennessee Tech in 1983, the start of a vagabond coaching journey of 10 jobs before he arrived at T.C.U.. He came to T.C.U. as a defensive coordinator in 1998 with Franchione, and was hired as head coach when Franchione left for Alabama three seasons later. He has posted a record of 82-27 in nine seasons. \u201cGary is as fine a defensive coach as I have ever been around and ever worked with,\u201d Franchione said. \u201cHe knows his scheme. He preaches his concepts very well.\u201d For the first four games of his first season, Patterson tried to be stoic like Franchione on the sidelines, but after a 2-2 start, he decided to coach his way. \u201cI started getting in people\u2019s faces,\u201d Patterson said. Patterson\u2019s intensity is legendary, as are his sideline quirks. He frequently yells at players and officials with such passion that he usually has to change his shirt at halftime because he has sweated through it. He also hitches his pants constantly and frequently ties his shoes. During practice, Patterson has been known to yell at a player for 10 straight minutes. He also does a shimmy dance to celebrate plays. \u201cThat\u2019s his signature move,\u201d cornerback Rafael Priest said in a telephone interview. \u201cHe\u2019s perfecting it.\u201d But Patterson is also reflective. During his second season, he made a list of those who had been influential in his life and started contacting old coaches and friends to reconnect. \u201cIt was just people who hung with me and made a difference,\u201d he said. It included Keith Froelich and Jim Buttson, both former high school coaches in Michigan, who worked camps in California with Patterson in the early 1980s. Both will attend Saturday\u2019s game. \u201cI was one of the new guys on the block,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cThey kind of took me in.\u201d When Froelich and Buttson visited T.C.U.\u2019s spring practice earlier this year, Patterson asked both several times, \u201cSo what do you think?\u201d Patterson has never been afraid to ask questions. Those camps that he worked were run by Tom Moore, the Indianapolis Colts\u2019 senior offensive coordinator. Moore recalled that Patterson had \u201cunbelievable\u201d preparation. He said Patterson used to quiz him about football until he went to sleep. \u201cIt\u2019s no surprise to me that he\u2019s where he is right now based on his passion,\u201d Moore said in a telephone interview. But that devotion took its toll on Patterson\u2019s first marriage. Kelsey has helped him find a balance. The couple scuba dives, and last summer they took a vacation to Paris and London, which Patterson said was the most rest that he had had in five years. These days, Patterson does not sing and play guitar as much as he would like to. His wife bought him four hours of studio time for him as a Christmas gift six years ago, and he has still not used it. \u201cAfter 20 years of yelling, you don\u2019t sing quite as well,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit more raspy than what it used to be.\u201d But Patterson keeps his iPod loaded with songs of his favorite musicians like Pat Green, Brad Paisley, Willie Nelson, George Strait and Tom Petty. T.C.U.\u2019s motto this year is \u201cDon\u2019t back down,\u201d which was inspired by a Tom Petty song. When Patterson explained the slogan, most of his team had never heard of Petty. So Patterson has had the song played at every practice this season. And after a recent practice, the team sang, \u201cHey baby, there ain\u2019t no easy way out\u201d a part of the song, much to the delight of Patterson. \u201cIt\u2019s caught on,\u201d he said. And it could be the soundtrack to a B.C.S. berth.", "keyword": "College Athletics;Football;Texas Christian University;Patterson Gary;Bowl Championship Series"}
{"id": "ny0022982", "categories": ["business"], "date": "2013/09/15", "title": "The Chatter for Sunday, September 15", "abstract": "\u201cWe\u2019ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.\u201d Twitter\u2019s tweet on Thursday, saying it had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. \u201cWe don\u2019t want it to be repealed. We want it to be fixed, fixed, fixed.\u201d Terence M. O\u2019Sullivan, president of the Laborers\u2019 International Union of North America, talking about President Obama\u2019s Affordable Care Act. Labor leaders are concerned about the postponement of an employer mandate to ensure coverage for workers and the potential effects of the coming health insurance exchanges on existing plans. \u201cI like my work so much that I can\u2019t think of not doing it.\u201d Raymond A. Raskin, who still works four days a week as a psychoanalyst in Manhattan though he is well past 80. A growing number of retirees are continuing to do some type of paid work, for either their old employers or new ones.", "keyword": "IPO;Retirement;Labor Unions;Health Insurance;Obamacare,Affordable Care Act"}
{"id": "ny0001305", "categories": ["world", "europe"], "date": "2013/03/19", "title": "Defiant Strategy in Spanish Scandal Makes Diego Torres a Prisoner in His Home", "abstract": "BARCELONA, Spain \u2014 Diego Torres, a onetime marketing guru, built a $2 million dream home outside Barcelona, but it has become a luxury bunker since he challenged the Spanish royal family by revealing its private e-mails as part of his legal defense in a corruption investigation. Mr. Torres rarely ventures out now, fearing that he is being watched \u2014 the consequence of his brash strategy in an embezzlement scandal that has ensnared him and his former business partner, I\u00f1aki Urdangarin, the duke of Palma and the son-in-law of King Juan Carlos. Mr. Torres\u2019s lawyer has alerted the authorities that his office has been broken into three times. Other people connected to the case complain, privately for fear of reprisals, that they have received visits from men who they believe are associated with Spain\u2019s secret services, the CNI. Mr. Torres\u2019s dread is real enough that just weeks ago, a prosecutor opened an investigation to determine whether there was an intimidation campaign against him, adding a new element of spy craft to a corruption investigation that has riveted Spain. But the royal palace and Spanish security officials insist that they are not behind any surveillance, with one royal aide saying that they would never indulge in \u201ckindergarten\u201d antics. \u201cWhat possibility does a knight have without a sword in the face of a machine with unlimited resources that is on the counterattack?\u201d asked Mr. Torres\u2019s lawyer, Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez Peeters. The only weapon, he said, is \u201cthe truth.\u201d Mr. Torres, 47, and the duke, 45 \u2014 a former Olympic handball athlete married to Princess Cristina since 1997 \u2014 are accused of exploiting blue-blood connections to reap more than $7.8 million in regional government contracts by vastly inflating their bills through a nonprofit sports foundation, Instituto N\u00f3os, and then diverting money to offshore companies. To defend himself, Mr. Torres salvaged a computer hard drive from the foundation that contained more than 200 e-mails from the duke. Some of them are notes copied to palace advisers and the king. So far, most are banal, including many that involve the duke\u2019s search for a new job and efforts to seek sponsors for sports events, like a plea from the duke to the king to ask the head of LVMH, the French luxury goods giant, to donate about $261,000 to pay for a sports meeting organized by his foundation. Image Diego Torres Credit Enrique Calvo/Reuters But Mr. Torres is using the e-mails to attack the duke, who has testified to an investigating judge that the royal family had nothing at all to do with his foundation. Mr. Torres contends that the palace and its advisers monitored Mr. Urdangarin and the foundation\u2019s dealings closely and offered advice on everything, including car rentals and the purchase of an office printer. The king has not been accused of any wrongdoing and is constitutionally immune from prosecution. But the stakes remain high because Princess Cristina was one of five officers in N\u00f3os, but is the only one who has not testified despite Mr. Torres\u2019s accusation that she was active in running the institute\u2019s affairs. Mr. Torres\u2019s defiant stance \u2014 in a nation that has long revered the royal family because of the monarch\u2019s efforts to safeguard democracy \u2014 has come at a steep price. In 2011 he was dismissed from a university teaching post at an elite Barcelona business school after he was first implicated in the investigation. \u201cHe lost all his jobs immediately,\u201d Mr. Gonz\u00e1lez Peeters said. \u201cThe royal palace thought that converting my client into an outcast was the solution. With no money there was no good lawyer. But they don\u2019t know me.\u201d New questions have emerged about the CNI\u2019s involvement on the fringes of the case. F\u00e9lix Sanz Rold\u00e1n, the director of the Spanish secret services who is close to the king, faces questioning by lawmakers on Tuesday. He is likely to be asked why some 30,000 e-mails about Instituto N\u00f3os turned up in the possession of an Argentine hacker, Mat\u00edas Bevilacqua Trobado, who has done work for the CNI. Mr. Bevilacqua told the authorities he had the e-mails because he was hired by the duke\u2019s lawyer, Manuel Pascual Vives. Mr. Pascual Vives said he had used Mr. Bevilacqua to sort e-mails already submitted as part of the case, unaware of his CNI history. The case has drawn interest because for decades, the royal family has been a stable pillar that united Spain. But lately the scandal has emboldened some politicians, including the leader of the Catalan Socialist party, to call for the abdication of the 75-year-old king. Mr. Torres has himself been accused of royal blackmail. But he testified that the duke\u2019s lawyer offered him a deal to take the blame for the embezzlement scandal in return for money and a job in South America. He refused, telling a judge: \u201cNo way, no matter how desperate this is. I am not going to say something that isn\u2019t the truth.\u201d", "keyword": "King of Spain Juan Carlos I;Embezzlement;Email;Diego Torres;Inaki Urdangarin;Spain"}
{"id": "ny0258072", "categories": ["us", "politics"], "date": "2011/01/10", "title": "After Arizona Shooting, Political Bickering Goes On", "abstract": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Aides to Sarah Palin angrily rejected suggestions that she had some responsibility for the angry political climate that served as a backdrop to the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords . Some Democrats said Ms. Palin should at a minimum apologize for political tactics like putting out a map that placed cross hairs on Ms. Giffords\u2019 district. They said she should think about what contribution she might have made to fomenting antigovernment sentiment. A day after the shooting of Ms. Giffords and 19 other people in Arizona focused the nation\u2019s attention on the heat of its political culture, Republicans and Democrats began the delicate task of navigating a tragedy that has the potential to alter the political landscape. Leaders in both parties sought Sunday to project a nonpartisan civility, with President Obama , whose advisers were weighing the possibility of a national address, calling for a national moment of silence and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, replacing a contentious health care debate on Wednesday with a bipartisan security briefing for lawmakers. Yet beneath that public sense of comity was a subtle round of jockeying \u2014 on cable news, blogs, Twitter and even Ms. Palin\u2019s Facebook page \u2014 as both sides sought to gain the high ground and deal with the risks and challenges presented by the shootings. Some Democrats and liberal activists wondered aloud whether heated Republican and conservative attacks against Democrats and the government over the past two years had contributed to a climate in which the gunman found a target in a member of Congress. Republicans, at times indignant, focused blame on the apparent psychological problems of the suspect, Jared L. Loughner, and suggested that liberals were trying to politicize a personal tragedy. As much as anyone, Ms. Palin emerged as a fulcrum for the debate, once again personifying a broader cultural and ideological divide. Former Representative Chris Carney of Pennsylvania, whose district, like Ms. Giffords\u2019s, was on list of 20 Congressional districts that Ms. Palin\u2019s political operation marked with cross hairs, was quoted in The Times Tribune of Scranton as saying, \u201cIt would be very useful if she came out and, if not apologize, say that she was wrong in putting that sort of logo on people\u2019s districts.\u201d He was echoing Ms. Giffords\u2019s own comments from around the time the list came out, when she said there could be \u201cconsequences\u201d to political appeals that use symbolism like gun sights. \u201cI don\u2019t understand how anybody can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this,\u201d an adviser to Ms. Palin, Rebecca Mansour, said in an interview with a conservative radio host, Tammy Bruce. Responding to accusatory messages on the Web, Ms. Mansour added: \u201cPeople actually accuse Governor Palin of this. It\u2019s appalling \u2014 appalling. I can\u2019t actually express how disgusting that is.\u201d Ms. Mansour said that the cross hairs, in fact, were not meant to be an allusion to guns, and agreed with her interviewer\u2019s reference to them as \u201csurveyors symbols.\u201d Aides to Ms. Palin did not respond to interview requests on Sunday. The Arizona rampage upended the opening agenda for the 112th Congress, particularly efforts by the new Republican majority to repeal the new health care law. \u201cThis inhuman act should not, and will not, deter us from our calling to represent our constituents and to fulfill our oaths of office,\u201d said Mr. Boehner, who presided over a unity conference call with hundreds of Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Sunday. \u201cNo act, no matter how heinous, must be allowed to stop us from our duties.\u201d The president ordered that flags be flown at half-staff and called for a national moment of silence at 11 a.m. Monday, which aides said he would observe from the White House South Lawn. He canceled an economic trip to New York on Tuesday. Mr. Obama was considering delivering a speech about the greater context surrounding the shooting, but advisers said it was premature to do so until Ms. Giffords\u2019s condition stabilized and more became known about the gunman\u2019s motives. The shooting could also become a theme of the State of the Union address . The subtext for the political discussion was the new balance of power in Washington, and how the shootings might play into Democratic efforts to regain initiative \u2014 and Republican efforts to keep it \u2014 after their losses in November. Both sides emerged from the weekend cognizant of the ways in which a politically charged act of violence, whatever the actual motives or mental state of the gunman, can recalibrate the national dialogue. Mr. Obama did not speak about the shootings on Sunday, but the attack offered a moment for the president to rise above partisan politics. Some Democrats were urging him to look back to recent history, when President Bill Clinton seized the political high ground after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, placing blame on the growing antigovernment sentiment. (Marking the 15th anniversary of those attacks this past April, Mr. Clinton said the return of the sentiment in recent years, combined with the ability to spread it faster via the Internet, was threatening to set the stage for a new round of violence.) Yet openly seeking political advantage in tragedy is a delicate business and can backfire, as some of Mr. Clinton\u2019s aides suggested. \u201cThe only way you gain political advantage is by doing absolutely nothing to take advantage \u2014 and not have a lot of people backgrounding about how clever your political strategy is,\u201d said Michael D. McCurry, who was Mr. Clinton\u2019s press secretary at the time of the Oklahoma bombing.", "keyword": "Tucson Shooting (2011);United States Politics and Government;Republican Party;Democratic Party;Giffords Gabrielle;Murders and Attempted Murders;Palin Sarah;Obama Barack;Tucson (Ariz);Loughner Jared Lee"}
{"id": "ny0241045", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2010/12/22", "title": "Harold C. Turner Gets 33-Month Sentence for Radio Threats", "abstract": "A right-wing Internet radio host was sentenced on Tuesday to 33 months in prison for threatening the lives of three federal judges in Chicago after they upheld a local gun control law. The host, Harold C. Turner, 48, was convicted in August in United States District Court in Brooklyn. He had been charged with one count of threatening to assault or murder the three judges. Mr. Turner, known as Hal, used his radio broadcasts to attack Judges Frank H. Easterbrook, Richard A. Posner and William J. Bauer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, who had upheld a local handgun law. He said they had acted in \u201ca manner so sleazy and cunning as to deserve the ultimate punishment.\u201d He called for their murder and published their photographs and work addresses online. Mr. Turner, of North Bergen, N.J., worked as an F.B.I. source between 2003 and 2007, prosecutors said, because of his \u201cpopularity with and access to white supremacist groups.\u201d", "keyword": "Turner Harold C;Easterbrook Frank H;Posner Richard A;Bauer William J;Threats and Threatening Messages;Sentences (Criminal);Radio"}
{"id": "ny0005003", "categories": ["world", "asia"], "date": "2013/04/08", "title": "South Korea Expects Missile Launch by North", "abstract": "SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 The South Korean government warned on Sunday that the North might launch a missile later this week, while a top military leader postponed a scheduled trip to Washington, citing escalating tensions on the peninsula. The warning by Kim Jang-soo, director of national security for President Park Geun-hye, came three days after the South Korea\u2019s defense minister said that the North had moved to its east coast a missile with a \u201cconsiderable range\u201d but not capable of reaching the mainland United States. The missile was widely believed to be the Musudan, which the South Korean military says can travel \u201cmore than\u201d 3,000 kilometers or 1,864 miles. But South Korean media and analysts say the missile can extend its range to 4,000 kilometers or 2,490 miles, which would put American bases in Guam within its reach. Mr. Kim said that the North Korean authorities had told foreign embassies in Pyongyang to inform them by Wednesday whether they needed assistance in evacuating should they wish to because of rising tensions on the peninsula. The North gave a similar warning to some of the 123 South Korean factories in the joint industry park in the North Korean city of Kaesong, Mr. Kim said. For a fifth consecutive day, North Korea blocked South Korean workers and supplies from entering the factory park, forcing 13 plants to stop production as of Sunday. The Kaesong complex is the last remaining major project of inter-Korean cooperation and a crucial test of whether North Korea was willing to sacrifice a lucrative source of hard current to push its political and military priorities. \u201cWe believe this is a calculated move by the North,\u201d Mr. Kim said during a meeting of security-related officials on Sunday. The North, he said, \u201cmay launch a provocation, such as missile launch,\u201d around Wednesday, he said. His comments were relayed by Kim Haing, a presidential spokeswoman. \u201cNorth Korea has been engaged in a so-called headline strategy,\u201d Mr. Kim, the national security director, said, referring to an almost daily drumbeat of North Korean threats that has made newspaper headlines since early March. North Korea was raising tensions in an effort to frighten and force the United States and South Korea to return to dialogue with possible concessions, Mr. Kim said. The pressure was also aimed at China and Russia to mediate on North Korea\u2019s behalf. \u201cWe see through their motive,\" he said. Although North Korea shows no signs of attempting a full-scale war, it will suffer damage many times more than we do if it launches even a localized provocation.\u201d South Korea \u201chas no intention of attempting premature dialogue just because of a crisis,\u201d Mr. Kim said, urging the North to ease tensions so dialogue can start. Foreign embassies told to consider evacuating Pyongyang have dismissed the advisory. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Sunday that the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang was operating normally, and urged the North to \"thoroughly ensure the safety of Chinese embassy and consular personnel resident in North Korea.\" The Xinhua News Agency on Saturday quoted Foreign Minister Wang Yi as telling United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Beijing would \u201cnot allow trouble on China\u2019s doorstep.\u201d Also on Sunday, Gen. Jung Seung-jo, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean military, postponed plans to meet with his American counterpart, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, in Washington on April 16, military officials said. General Jung could not be away from South Korea amid the rising tension, the officials said. South Korea\u2019s military is on heightened alert after North Korean threats to strike the United States and its allies. North Korea has been angry over United Nations sanctions imposed on it for its February nuclear test and joint American-South Korean military drills. Washington responded by flying nuclear-capable bombers over South Korea in training missions and moving two of the Navy\u2019s missile-defense ships closer to the Korean Peninsula. It also planned to deploy a land-based missile-defense system to Guam later this month.", "keyword": "Military;South Korea;North Korea;International relations"}
{"id": "ny0217948", "categories": ["sports", "basketball"], "date": "2010/05/20", "title": "Suns\u2019 Defense Is No Match for the Lakers", "abstract": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 Provident. Divine. Blessed. Whatever the Lakers are \u2014 and no doubt, Amar\u2019e Stoudemire is home at night thumbing through his thesaurus \u2014 this much is clear through the first two games of the Western Conference finals: there is no stopping them. The Lakers jumped to a 2-0 series lead Wednesday night with a 124-112 romp over the Suns , who have provided as much resistance as a collection of Saguaro cactuses. The decisiveness of the Lakers\u2019 victories has already begun to set Los Angeles fans\u2019 sights past Games 3 and 4 in Phoenix, and on toward their nemesis Boston, which opened the Eastern Conference finals by winning the first two games in Orlando. Parts of the last 90 seconds were played with fans in the upper reaches of Staples Center serenading their team\u2019s eighth consecutive playoff victory with chants of \u201cWe want Boston.\u201d \u201cWell, what can you say?\u201d Phoenix Coach Alvin Gentry said as he sat down in the interview room. \u201cWe can\u2019t slow them down. I thought we played well offensively, but every time we tried to make an adjustment to slow them down, they go somewhere else.\u201d A little while later, as he was standing outside the locker room, he tapped into a familiar feeling from the days when he coached the Clippers. \u201cAs I said, we\u2019re open for suggestions,\u201d Gentry said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to grow in the next three days.\u201d The first task will be figuring out a way to limit Kobe Bryant. Bryant, rejuvenated since having his swollen left knee drained late in the first-round series against Oklahoma City, torched the Suns for 40 points in the opener, when he made Hill look like he was in danger of needing another ankle operation with a crossover dribble that sent the 37-year-old stumbling backward to the floor. In Game 2, Bryant was Kobe the Facilitator. He managed 21 points, but when Phoenix sent double teams at him, Bryant eagerly moved the ball. He finished with 13 assists, the most by a Laker in the playoffs since Magic Johnson\u2019s 13 in 1996. With the ball in his hands as the first-quarter clock ran down, Bryant started toward the basket, then passed the ball to a wide-open Ron Artest in the corner. Artest, with the crowd on its feet, made the shot as the buzzer sounded and Bryant celebrated a 36-24 lead by pointing both his index fingers at Artest. It was a point well made \u2014 if you leave the other Lakers wide open, Bryant was more than happy to put the ball in their hands. In the fourth quarter, after Phoenix had clawed back from a 14-point deficit to tie the score at 90, that meant delivering the ball to Pau Gasol, who scored 14 of his game-high 29 points in the final period \u2014 most of the time being single-covered by Stoudemire. \u201cIt\u2019s my responsibility and Pau\u2019s responsibility to make the defense have to do something,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cIf they play straight up single coverage, then we\u2019ve got to go to work. And then once the defense adjusts, it\u2019s our responsibility to make the right play.\u201d In the fourth quarter, that meant delivering the ball to Jordan Farmar, who hit a 3-pointer from the corner to start the period and another that boosted Los Angeles\u2019 lead to 104-95. It came during a stretch in which the Suns turned the ball over on three consecutive possessions \u2014 including two by Steve Nash. They never got closer than 8 points after that. No matter how slick the Suns\u2019 offense looked at times \u2014 Nash was effective in creating dunks for Stoudemire or open 3-pointers for Jared Dudley, who made five, and Jason Richardson, who had 27 points \u2014 they only rarely stopped the Lakers. In the two games of the series, the Lakers have shot 58 percent from the field. It is a familiar problem for Phoenix. When the Suns knocked the Lakers out of the playoffs in 2006 and 2007, it prompted the Lakers to retool, and they have repeatedly hammered the Suns. It was the Lakers\u2019 ninth victory in 11 meetings since they acquired Gasol in January 2008. \u201cWe have to figure it out,\u201d said Hill, who scored 23 points and helped lead the Suns\u2019 third-quarter charge. \u201cWe\u2019ve scored enough points, but they\u2019re scoring at will. I don\u2019t really know what the answer is.\u201d And if the Suns were grasping for answers, they also did not have the right words. Stoudemire, who called Lamar Odom\u2019s 19-point, 19-rebound performance in Game 1 lucky, said he did not have any regrets. Odom managed 17 points, 11 rebounds and 4 assists, and did his best to take the high road. But when asked if anyone had called him lucky before, Odom could not suppress a smile. \u201cYeah but I don\u2019t think this is the time or place to go over that,\u201d Odom said, netting the last uncontested point of the evening at the Suns\u2019 expense.", "keyword": "Los Angeles Lakers;Phoenix Suns;Basketball;Playoff Games"}
{"id": "ny0034794", "categories": ["us"], "date": "2013/12/14", "title": "Michigan: Worker Fired After Helping Put Out Fire", "abstract": "A retiree said he had been fired from a job as a greeter at a store in northern Michigan after rushing to the parking lot last month to put out a vehicle fire. The man, David Bowers, 62, said he grabbed a fire extinguisher when a customer entered a Meijer store in Gaylord last month pleading for help. \u201cThe one supervisor told me that my heart was in the right place but my brain wasn\u2019t,\u201d Mr. Bowers told the TV station WPBN-WTOM. The company released a statement saying, \u201cWe have well-established safety procedures,\u201d and adding, \u201cour team members know there are consequences when they don\u2019t follow them.\u201d", "keyword": "Michigan;Fires;David Bowers"}
{"id": "ny0189067", "categories": ["world", "americas"], "date": "2009/05/04", "title": "To Deter Crime, Brazilians Choose Armored Cars", "abstract": "S\u00c3O PAULO, Brazil \u2014 After being robbed twice in traffic, once at gunpoint, Jo\u00e3o Neves cast aside whatever concerns he had about the global economic crisis and bought himself an armored car two months ago. \u201cEven though the crisis does exist, I consider my well-being and my security a priority,\u201d said Mr. Neves, the owner of a small marketing agency. \u201cI am afraid of being shot dead.\u201d Rather than buy a new car, though, Mr. Neves opted for a 2005 Volkswagen Passat capable of withstanding bullets fired from a .44 Magnum revolver or a 9-millimeter submachine gun. Brazilians have already trimmed their appetites for appliances and electronics in the recession, but bulletproofing is one expense they are not giving up easily. Once the domain of the very rich, armored cars have become a middle- and upper-middle-class obsession, especially in this huge city notorious for roadside assaults and kidnappings. Officially, crime is on the wane. But as the economy slides and the country sheds jobs, there is a palpable dread that street crime will get worse as well, economists here say. Many Paulistanos, as S\u00e3o Paulo residents are called, say the interminable stop-and-go traffic and the wide gap between haves and have-nots are recipes for assaults and carjackings, especially now that Brazil\u2019s boom times have come to a halt. \u201cIt is not a question of if you are going to be assaulted, it is when it is going to happen,\u201d said Craig Bavington, who runs a tourist agency based here. After being assaulted twice, he decided to buy a used armored car two years ago when his wife became pregnant with their first child. More than 7,000 vehicles were armored for civilian use in Brazil in 2008, up from 1,782 a decade earlier, and the pace has continued in 2009 despite the economy\u2019s dispiriting first quarter, according to the Brazilian Association of Bulletproof Manufacturers . A decade ago, there were just a handful of armoring companies in Brazil. Today there are about 120. S\u00e3o Paulo leads the country \u2014 and the world \u2014 in making and selling armored cars. Rio de Janeiro , a city with legitimate concerns about stray bullets from gang warfare in the favelas, or shantytowns, overhanging the city, is Brazil\u2019s second-largest market. The government, perhaps unwittingly, has helped perpetuate the bulletproofing wave. With industrial production slowing last year, President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva \u2019s administration removed a tax on the car industry, saving buyers from 5 to 7.5 percent. The change was so popular that the government recently took similar action for electronics and appliances, hoping to stop the bleeding in those industries as well. So while car sales have suffered in other parts of the world, they have surged here in the past four months, the longest streak of monthly sales increases since 2002, according to the National Association of Car Manufacturers. And when car sales are strong, industry officials say, bulletproofing invariably follows. With so many companies now in the field, the cost of armoring a car has fallen in Brazil in the past decade, to about $22,000 from $55,000, opening the business to a new category of consumer. A decade ago, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Jeep Cherokees were the models most sought after for armoring; today, Toyota , Volkswagen and Chevrolet are in the top five. Ultimately, however, crime is the force behind it all. Economic contagion in the late 1990s spread from Asia to Brazil, sinking the currency\u2019s value here and leading to record unemployment and high poverty. In 1999, the city of S\u00e3o Paulo recorded a murder rate of nearly 53 per 100,000 people, according to the state\u2019s Department of Public Safety \u2014 much worse than New York City has ever recorded. In the late 1990s, the United Nations ranked Jardim \u00c2ngela, in S\u00e3o Paulo, as the most violent neighborhood in the world. Since then, the murder rate in S\u00e3o Paulo has fallen by 78 percent and vehicle thefts by 38 percent, though armed robberies have dropped by only 6 percent. More police officers are on the streets, especially on big, congested avenues, said Tulio Kahn, the S\u00e3o Paulo state coordinator of planning and analysis. Global positioning systems and coded locking devices have helped many owners track and retrieve their stolen cars. And yet, Mr. Kahn said the drop in the crime statistics \u201chas not kept people from continuing to feel insecure.\u201d A new wave of \u201cflash\u201d or \u201cexpress\u201d kidnappings, unplanned assaults in which robbers take their captives to cash machines and then free them after a few hours, has not helped matters. \u201cThis type of crime has really scared people,\u201d Mr. Kahn said. A commodity-led boom in Brazil in the past several years gave many Paulistanos the money to fight back. More stable inflation set off an unprecedented expansion in consumer credit . Car sales surged to record levels, topping 2.8 million in 2008, up from 1.9 million in 2006; according to government statistics, there are about 6.4 million cars on the roads in S\u00e3o Paulo, a city with a population of 11 million. The ability to buy cars in multiple payments also helped make armored cars more affordable to middle- and upper-middle-class professionals like Mr. Neves. Today, dentists, children of small businessmen, even shoe store owners are buying armored cars, many of them used, said Jo\u00e3o Jorge Chamlian, owner of Auto Miami , a dealership here for armored cars. On the city\u2019s outskirts, at the hangar-size assembly plant for Truffi, one of Brazil\u2019s largest armoring companies, some 100 workers installed yellow Kevlar and thick glass windows one recent morning. The bulletproof armor adds about 400 pounds to a car\u2019s weight, which reduces gas mileage and increases wear and tear. For Mr. Neves, who spends more than two and a half hours a day commuting, the more protection the better. He was shaken, he said, when a client of his was shot dead by a robber who took only the man\u2019s watch. \u201cWhen you are inside an armored car,\u201d Mr. Neves said, \u201cyou feel as if you are inside a fortress.\u201d For Alessandra Amara, a bulletproof car became a necessary expense three years ago, she said, after she was robbed for the 11th time in little more than 10 years. \u201cHaving an armored car in this city is essential,\u201d said Ms. Amara, 34, who works in the financial department of a car dealership. \u201cI have been robbed every way imaginable.\u201d Once, thieves abducted her in her car at gunpoint and made her pull money from two bank machines before freeing her. Another night, as she waited in her car at a red light, a gunman stole her wallet as witnesses silently stood by. The last straw came when she was leaving work in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Suddenly, a boy slammed a stone through her window and grabbed for her purse. She took her foot off the clutch and crashed into the car ahead of hers. She clung to the purse and the thief ran away. She arrived home, trembling with fear. Soon after, she became pregnant, and she and her husband decided to buy a used armored car. \u201cIf the government can\u2019t keep me safe,\u201d Ms. Amara said, \u201cthen I have to go out and look for that security on my own.\u201d", "keyword": "Sao Paulo Brazil;Armored cars;Brazil;Recession and Depression"}
{"id": "ny0194903", "categories": ["nyregion"], "date": "2009/11/24", "title": "In Closing Arguments, Bruno as Bully or Honest Worker", "abstract": "ALBANY \u2014 Joseph L. Bruno : Tiny the Bully, or just Uncle Joe? Two vastly different portraits of Mr. Bruno, the former New York State Senate leader, emerged on Monday as prosecutors and defense lawyers presented closing arguments in his corruption trial. Prosecutors called him Tiny, describing Mr. Bruno as a schoolyard bully whose political muscle in Albany was quietly deployed on behalf of his clients, including investment firms seeking union pension fund money and companies seeking state grants. \u201cSome people give their lunch money to Tiny. Some people fight for it. Some people run away,\u201d said William C. Pericak, one of the two assistant United States attorneys prosecuting the case. \u201cHe\u2019s the weight of Albany. That\u2019s what he\u2019s there for.\u201d But defense lawyers presented a character far more befitting the nickname Uncle Joe, as many in the capital region fondly referred to Mr. Bruno during his years as one of the most powerful elected officials in the state. Mr. Bruno, the defense said, was a hardworking part-time lawmaker legally entitled to earn a living in the private sector and determined to follow the rules as best he understood them. His lead lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, asked jurors to set aside whatever qualms they might have about Mr. Bruno\u2019s dual roles, the unseemly side of which prosecutors placed on vivid display over the last three weeks. \u201cPerhaps it\u2019s not a good idea for New York State, or any other state, to have a part-time Legislature,\u201d Mr. Lowell told the jury, which was to begin deliberating Tuesday morning. \u201cBut indicting and convicting a legislator is not the way to change the law. The Legislature must do that.\u201d Both sides delivered summations to a courtroom packed not only with Mr. Bruno\u2019s family and supporters, but also with elected officials, advocates for good government and others with a professional interest in the outcome of what could be the most significant corruption trial in Albany\u2019s recent history. Much of the case against Mr. Bruno hinges on the degree to which he disclosed potential conflicts of interest between his private business and his official duties, like soliciting pension fund investments from labor unions with interests before the Legislature. To find Mr. Bruno guilty, the jurors would have to conclude not only that his business activities conflicted with his public duties, but also that he intentionally took steps to conceal those conflicts. Time after time, Mr. Pericak said, Mr. Bruno failed to disclose his myriad business interests to his associates, other lawmakers, members of his staff, and the public, in part by filing what prosecutors have said were financial disclosure forms that deliberately disguised his sources of income. But Mr. Lowell emphasized evidence that Mr. Bruno repeatedly consulted with his ethics lawyers before filing disclosure forms or entering into contracts with clients. \u201cThere is not one document, witness, check, e-mail that said anything about \u2018Let\u2019s conceal, don\u2019t disclose, let\u2019s do a scheme, let\u2019s do something that isn\u2019t right,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Lowell said. \u201cThis is an indictment that seems to be in search of a crime,\u201d he added later. If convicted, Mr. Bruno would face up to 20 years in prison. Addressing the jury for two and a half hours, Mr. Lowell noted Mr. Bruno\u2019s age, 80, and the approaching Thanksgiving holiday. Early in his argument, Mr. Lowell sought to unravel the prosecution\u2019s assertions that Mr. Bruno\u2019s official acts were linked with private business dealings. Mr. Lowell said that in some cases Mr. Bruno was given consulting contracts months or years after clients benefited from help he had delivered in the Senate, like grants or legislation. At times appearing outraged, the normally mild Mr. Lowell dismissed the government\u2019s case as a mishmash of innuendo and trivia, \u201clike throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall, hoping one strand will stick.\u201d Mr. Bruno merely opened doors for his clients through actions like introducing them to officials in unions and state agencies, Mr. Lowell argued. He noted that all the unions that invested pension money with Wright Investors\u2019 Service, a firm that paid Mr. Bruno $1.37 million to solicit business, first consulted independent investment advisers who signed off on Wright. \u201cTiny was in the playground,\u201d Mr. Lowell told the jury, taking up the prosecution\u2019s conceit. \u201cBut Tiny wasn\u2019t alone. The principal was there. The teachers were there. The hall monitor was there. The school superintendent was there.\u201d", "keyword": "Bruno Joseph L;Ethics;Politics and Government;New York State;State Legislatures"}
{"id": "ny0070013", "categories": ["business", "economy"], "date": "2015/03/03", "title": "Saving Big on Energy Bills, People Take It to the Bank", "abstract": "Sometimes, even the supposed experts can lose track of a billion dollars or two. Or, in this case, $100 billion. While few outside of Texas and North Dakota are complaining about this huge savings that consumers have enjoyed since energy prices began falling last summer, economists have been stumped recently trying to figure out exactly what consumers are doing with the windfall. They have not gone on a shopping spree at the mall or online. Results at many retail chains have been mixed, and some stores that are middle-class fixtures, like Sears and J.C. Penney, continue to struggle. One hint at what consumers might be thinking came Monday, when new government data on the economy showed a healthy gain for wages and salaries in January, even as spending by consumers inched lower for the second month in a row. As a result, the savings rate ticked upward to 5.5 percent, the highest level in just over two years. The yardsticks for retail activity have been surprisingly lackluster lately. Even when the effect of lower gas prices and therefore less spending at service stations is stripped out, core retail sales were flat last month and actually dipped 0.2 percent in December. \u201cThere is a little head-scratching going on,\u201d said Michael Hanson, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. \u201cYou can\u2019t deny that everyone on Wall Street has been looking for better data. The pickup in the savings rate is a little bit of a surprise and it is an indication that people are still cautious.\u201d Still, no one disputes the benefits of lower energy prices, especially for less affluent Americans who pay a larger share of their income to fuel their cars and heat their homes. With gas prices having dropped to $2.50 at the end of 2014 from a high of $3.78 in June, American drivers saved an estimated $76 billion last year, according to Douglas P. Handler, chief United States economist at IHS, a research firm. A further drop in gas prices in January created billions more in savings. And despite a recent rebound to $2.33 a gallon as of last week, consumers are still receiving a huge windfall compared with a year ago. In the Northeast, where the weather has been frigid and many people depend on heating oil , the extra savings has also been substantial. \u201cThe big question is, where did it go?\u201d said Mr. Handler, who estimates the typical household will have an extra $1,100 to $1,200 to spend this year if energy prices remain steady. As with many big questions in macroeconomics, there are a multitude of explanations, and a final answer will not be available for a while until more data arrives. One theory is that people are banking the savings, as the higher savings rate in December and January suggests. Video As the price of crude oil fluctuates, why some countries are faring much better than others. Credit Credit Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Another possibility is that consumers are spending more on services like dining, travel, housing and health care, instead of actual goods like appliances, clothing, cars and other items captured in the monthly retail sales figures. Data for purchases of services will not be available until March. Jeff Bryant, a scrapyard worker in Canton, Ohio, said that while the saving on gas is nice, it\u2019s no substitute for higher hourly pay or more hours on the job. He earns $19 to $20 an hour, but that has barely increased in recent years, and now his employer is trying to cut back on overtime and reduce workweeks to 32 hours from 40 hours. For now, though, he\u2019s happy for what relief he can find at the pump, even if he does not plan to hit the mall anytime soon. \u201cEvery little bit helps, and it makes me feel a bit more comfortable,\u201d Mr. Bryant said. \u201cI might buy a new pair of shoes for the summer.\u201d A more fundamental explanation for Mr. Bryant\u2019s reluctance to spend now is what\u2019s known in economics as the permanent income hypothesis, developed by Milton Friedman when he was at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. His theory suggests that consumer spending is determined by what people expect to earn over the long term. So temporary gains like savings on gas or a one-time tax cut don\u2019t alter underlying patterns of consumption. \u201cPeople tend to save windfalls and in this case there\u2019s also a lag in terms of spending because people aren\u2019t convinced gas prices will stay low,\u201d said Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS. In a few cases, consumer behavior has changed. With gas prices on the downswing, Americans are buying higher-priced light trucks and S.U.V.s, rather than smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. In January, light trucks and S.U.V.s accounted for 56 percent of total auto sales, the highest proportion since 2005, said Joseph G. Carson, global chief economist for AllianceBernstein. \u201cWhen you drive down the cost of owning the car, people buy bigger vehicles with more options,\u201d said Mr. Carson, noting that light trucks on average cost $10,000 more than regular cars. Although Mr. Bryant has yet to see any evidence of it, the good news now is that wages may finally be poised to rise at a more robust pace as the labor market tightens, along with energy savings accumulating further. Employers added workers last year at the fastest rate since 1999, and the unemployment rate now stands at 5.7 percent, down from 8 percent two years ago. Economists expect the unemployment rate to fall again when the government reports data Friday on how the job market performed in February. And they will be watching closely to see if January\u2019s healthy 0.5 percentage point increase in average hourly earnings was a fluke or a sign of things to come. In particular, if economic growth is to be sustainable, it is critical that the vast middle and lower tiers of the American work force enjoy better wage growth, as these groups have seen paltry gains during the recovery. Walmart, the nation\u2019s largest private employer, said in February that it would raise its minimum hourly pay to $9, affecting about half a million workers, and lift it to $10 in early 2016. Last week, the TJX Companies, owner of the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls retail chains, announced a similar move. While the hourly gains might seem small, they are significant economically since the bottom half of earners \u201ceffectively have no savings so they will spend any additional earnings,\u201d Mr. Hanson said. What\u2019s more, Mr. Hanson said, the rebound in purchasing power during the recovery has largely been limited to higher-income workers with more education and specialized skills. The wage increases by Walmart and TJX are benefiting the opposite end of the wage and skill spectrum, he said, and could be a turning point in the recovery. In Canton, Mr. Bryant, 56, hopes the raises these big retailers are giving their workers will encourage nearby blue-collar employers to do likewise. \u201cIt seems like everybody else is doing well and getting paid a bit more,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still waiting.\u201d", "keyword": "US Economy;Saving;Consumer behaviour;Oil and Gasoline;Retail;Jobs"}
{"id": "ny0014220", "categories": ["business", "international"], "date": "2013/11/12", "title": "Skeptics See Euro Eroding European Unity", "abstract": "LONDON \u2014 Europe\u2019s slow emergence from its second recession in the last five years is raising new questions about whether the euro currency is doing more harm than good. Five years of crisis have laid bare deep differences in national policies, politics and priorities across the European Union. The 28-member bloc is increasingly confronting a more fundamental problem: whether it is too unwieldy to address the multiplying array of challenges it faces. And in many ways, the most divisive issues involve the 17-member subset of the union that was supposed to give them something in common \u2014 the euro currency. The notion that the European Union has structural deficiencies has been debated almost since its founding. The tension between economic integration and political harmonization is nothing new. But as the global financial crisis is beginning to fade, Europe\u2019s troubles persist, exacerbated by the fissures of the currency union that have impeded the region\u2019s economic recovery. \u201cMy worst fears are confirmed,\u201d George Soros, the Hungarian-born former hedge fund titan, said in an interview. \u201cThis is what I was afraid of, that the euro would be preserved and it would pervert the venture and destroy the European Union,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead of the solidarity that was supposed to be embodied, it became every country by itself.\u201d The strains are evident at many levels. Hopes for greater political cooperation are falling victim to domestic economic stress in many countries and the rise of populist politics heading into European parliamentary elections next spring. An interest-rate cut by the European Central Bank last week reportedly came over the objections of the German members of the bank\u2019s governing council. And there are deep divisions within the European Union over a plan to unify the process for identifying and closing down troubled banks \u2014 and paying the costs of doing so. Those disagreements could get a further airing this week when euro zone finance ministers meet in Brussels. The core of the trouble, critics say, stems from the structure of the euro currency union. Unlike a single-currency country like the United States or Britain, it lacks a common treasury and the ability to issue common debt. That has created a poisonous dynamic between creditor nations, like Germany, and debtor nations, like Greece. True, there have been glimmers of good news lately. Consumer confidence among Europeans has improved, and recession has ended in countries like France and Spain. European stock indexes are up for the year. And yes, the euro in recent months has risen in value against other main currencies \u2014 although that is more curse than blessing, because it makes exports relatively more expensive outside the euro zone. But the big worry lately is the specter of deflation, a doom loop of falling prices, wages and profits that, once underway, is a tailspin hard to pull out of. The fear of years of stagnation was the main impetus for the European Central Bank\u2019s decision to reduce interest rates, over the objections of Germany, which worries that looser money will only encourage profligacy by its weaker euro neighbors. It is not evident, though, that anything has been gained by the austerity policies that Germany long preached, which have been a drag on economic growth; government debt in the euro zone has risen sharply over the last half decade. Perhaps worst of all, the various economic afflictions have reinforced the kind of nationalism and xenophobia that the broader European Union project was supposed to chase away. Image Nicholas Spiro, founder of a London economic consultancy, said that Europe was \u201cstuck in a halfway house between a shaky and ill-managed monetary union and a more secure economic and political one.\u201d The risks are increasing of \u201cone of these countries\u2019 politically imploding,\u201d Mr. Spiro said. Fabrizio Saccomanni, the Italian finance minister, said in a speech last week that the European Union needed to have a philosophical reckoning of sorts, as his country prepares for a stint next year holding the six-month revolving presidency of the union. \u201cThe time has come for a frank discussion of what we want to do with the European construction in the future,\u201d he said in a speech at the London School of Economics. \u201cWhat went wrong was not the fact that the project was imperfect, it was that it was not carried out to its full realization.\u201d \u201cPeople want to know,\u201d he said, \u201cwhether what we\u2019re building is a common market with no rules, except perhaps general principles about fair trade, whether we want to build a confederation of states, whether we want to build a federal state, or a superstate, or just a monster bureaucracy that has no legitimacy whatsoever.\u201d A few numbers shed some light on the euro zone\u2019s struggles. In the United States, gross domestic product is forecast to be up 5.9 percent this year from its level in 2008, using data provided by the European statistical agency, Eurostat. It will be down 2.1 percent in the euro zone over the same period. At the same time, overall government debt has increased in the euro zone from 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008 to about 90 percent last year. There are still voices of optimism, to be sure. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, brushed off suggestions last week that Europe was sinking into the kind of long-term stagnation that plagued Japan for decades. \u201cIf you look at the euro area from a distance, you see that the fundamentals in this area are probably the strongest in the world,\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cThis is the area that has the lowest budget deficit in the world,\u201d he said, as well as the highest trade surplus. An assessment last week from Olli Rehn, the European Union\u2019s commissioner for economics and monetary affairs, was bleak. He said economic output would shrink slightly this year in the euro zone, and while he forecast growth of 1.1 percent next year, he said unemployment would remain high at 12.2 percent. Mr. Rehn, who is under pressure to do more to push Germany to reduce its trade surplus with other member states, will issue annual report cards on the national budgets of euro zone members on Friday. He is expected to chide France once again for not doing more to meet key deficit-reduction targets. Fran\u00e7ois Heisbourg, a military expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said the currency union\u2019s problems have been a debilitating distraction from the broader European project. \u201cWe have been paying too much attention to the euro and not enough attention to the European Union,\u201d he said. Mr. Heisbourg is author of a recent book, \u201cThe End of the European Dream.\u201d While he is pro-European, he said the euro was not viable without a major shift toward a more federal structure. But that, he said, is not politically feasible. As a result, Mr. Heisbourg said, European officials should begin to \u201clook actively at the possibility of unraveling the euro in an orderly manner,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a great option. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s easy to do and it\u2019s not traumatic. And I do say it\u2019s dangerous, but what are the other options? The federal option is not on the table, and what is currently occurring, the transfer of major liabilities to the creditor countries like Germany, is economically and politically corrosive.\u201d Mr. Soros largely agrees. He said that an orderly division of the currency zone into northern and southern parts \u201ccould cure the disparity in competitiveness much faster than sticking together.\u201d \u201cBut Germany does not support that,\u201d Mr. Soros said, \u201cand the other countries can\u2019t impose it. Therefore it is not going to happen.\u201d", "keyword": "European Monetary Union;Euro;EU;Recession and Depression;Euro Crisis;GDP"}
{"id": "ny0024780", "categories": ["sports", "soccer"], "date": "2013/08/26", "title": "Cardiff Stuns Manchester City", "abstract": "Fraizer Campbell scored twice, and Cardiff won for the first time in more than 50 years in the top tier of English soccer, jolting visiting Manchester City, 3-2. \u25a0 Missing Lionel Messi, Barcelona needed Adriano\u2019s long strike to beat M\u00e1laga, 1-0, in the Spanish league.", "keyword": "Soccer;Cardiff City Soccer Team;Manchester City Soccer Team"}